As a boy in the Bronx, I was taught this quatrain by an ancient Irishman:
Oh, trouble me not with your clergy,
Nor speak to me of your faith.
For the Church of England was founded
On the ballocks of Henry the Eighth.
There are several folkloric versions of this ditty, one of them occasionally attributed to Brendan Behan, though the rhymed thought must predate him by generations. The lines are of course intended as insult and provocation. Don’t count on the Irish for peacemaking.
The first two lines may be haughtily dismissive, but there is undeniable truth in the last two. Careful scholarship7 in recent decades has established rather conclusively that the English Church in the reign of Henry VIII was not in desperate need of a reformation; rather, it may have been the most devout, serious, and well-functioning branch of European Catholicism. Henry’s willfulness was an expression of his own personal needs—for a male heir, for a younger wife, for congress with Anne Boleyn—not a reflection of the desires or needs of the English people.
Henry was not much interested in the particulars of reformation, certainly not in applying them to his own realms. He loathed Luther—which loathing was entirely mutual—and he had no higher opinion of the subsequent continental reformers. He loved the Latin mass and the Latin Bible and was suspicious of ordinary people reading the Bible by themselves in the crude tongue of English. He simply wanted to do what he wanted to do, and if that entailed cutting England off from the larger church, so be it. He and his people were ill served by the pope, who, because Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, was aunt to the Emperor, did not see fit to annul Henry and Catherine’s marriage, having earlier provided the necessary dispensation for it to take place. Henry was right to assume that the pope normally had no problem bestowing royal annulments. Too bad that Henry was wed to Charles’s aunt and that the pope was at the time Charles’s prisoner in all but name.
It was such complicating political considerations, rubbing raw the massive ego of the king, that brought about the English Reformation. When Henry married for the sixth time, Luther summed it up thus: “Squire Harry means to be God and do as he pleases.” The German professor would have enjoyed the Irish quatrain.
The story of the permanent separation of England from Catholic unity hardly ends with Henry. His three children were the paltry result of so much marrying (though as a progenitor the king almost certainly labored under the impediment of a royal case of syphilis). Each child in turn occupied the throne after Henry, each loyal to the religious preferences of his or her dead mother (or maternal family of origin). First came Henry’s only son, Edward VI, a frail nine-year-old whose mother, Jane Seymour, had expired weeks after his birth. Edward favored a Calvinistic Reformation and introduced the eloquent Book of Common Prayer, edited and mostly written by Thomas Cranmer, appointed archbishop of Canterbury by Henry (who knew little of Cranmer’s Calvinistic theology—and nothing of Cranmer’s hidden wife—and was simply satisfied with the careful Cranmer’s political inventiveness).
Edward died of consumption at fifteen and was succeeded (after some bizarre high jinks)8 by his half sister, Mary, in accordance with Henry’s will. Loyal to her mother, Catherine, Mary brought the realm back to the Catholic fold and burned Cranmer and a number of others who refused to resume their Catholicism, thus winning for herself the appellation Bloody Mary, though this tragic woman, a humiliated pawn for most of her life, was relatively pacific, even kind, by the standards of her day. But her reign was slightly shorter than her brother’s.
As a child, Mary, whose very existence had been a continuing embarrassment to her father, had been hidden away in various country castles and deprived of her mother’s loving presence. Whatever she may have been taught in these years of being shunned, she possessed scant sense of statecraft. She made the great mistake of marrying her cousin Charles’s son, the king of Spain. The last thing the English people wanted was a Spaniard in the works, a man who could eventually claim the English throne. So, by this marriage—not by her Catholicism—Mary forfeited the previously warm allegiance of her subjects. Her inattentive Spanish consort, eleven years her junior, could hardly wait to get away to more agreeable realms once the marriage ceremony had taken place. Mary, thinking she was pregnant, soon discovered she had stomach cancer. The continuing bonfires of heretics eventually erased all her subjects’ previous love for her. Why should men be incinerated for adhering to beliefs that so recently had been required of them?
Mary’s death in November 1558 brought her half sister, Elizabeth, the last of the Tudors, to the throne. Elizabeth was the daughter of Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife, who had been decapitated on trumped-up charges of adultery and witchcraft, as Henry had tired of her charms and was disappointed that she had not presented him with a male heir. He who was so sure that God disapproved of his marriage to Catherine (why else had she not provided the male heir?) now understood that God disapproved of Anne, as well. As she was a slut and a witch, they had not had a real marriage—and Elizabeth, like Mary before her, was declared a bastard.
Unlike Mary, Elizabeth was a natural politician. She knew she was expected to be Protestant. What else could possibly be in prospect from the only child of the very Protestant Anne? And in any case, Elizabeth had been viewed as a bastard, not only by her own father, but by the pope, who could hardly have sanctioned Henry’s second union as a lawful marriage after militantly refusing to allow it altogether. In Rome’s view, Mary had been a queen; Elizabeth was an imposter.
These things being so, Elizabeth returned England to Protestantism in a series of moves that revealed not only keen intelligence but skill in political and diplomatic maneuvering that few women—or men—have ever equaled, or even approached, in the long history of the Western world. Henry had ascended the throne in 1509 as an eighteen-year-old. Between his declaration in 1534 that he himself was “Protector and only Supreme Head of the Church” of England and the day of his daughter Elizabeth’s ascent, thirty-four years had passed. In that time, the English populace had been jerked hither and yon, first to a Catholicism without the pope, then to a Calvinism that kept the un-Calvinistic office of bishop in place and an order of service that looked very like the mass, if in English. Under Edward, the Calvinistic and un-Catholic elements became even more pronounced. Under Mary, all this was swept aside and the churches were returned to Catholicism, and statues and icons, so recently jeered at, defaced, and removed, were put back in place.
Elizabeth drove a middle course, establishing a form of Christianity that would one day be called Anglicanism, somewhere between a factionless Catholicism and the less fanatical forms of Protestantism. Henceforth, fanaticism would be frowned upon; and even untempered displays of enthusiasm would be discouraged. Individual conscience would be respected, so long as it in no way threatened the security of the state. The queen did not seek to make windows into men’s souls, as Francis Bacon would say of her. She could certainly be impatient with theological arguments. “There is only one Jesus Christ,” she declared, “and all the rest is a dispute over trifles.”
She was hardly encouraged to sign herself in to either camp. In 1570, Pope Pius V excommunicated her and absolved her subjects from all obedience. This bald papal attempt to alter the government of England (and Ireland), though it caused an awful lot of trouble, casting a suspicion of treason over all of Elizabeth’s many Catholic subjects, did not succeed. Nor did the gratuitous insults of Calvin and his Scottish disciple John Knox warm her heart toward their form of Christianity. Calvin presumed to send her advice as if she were an inexperienced girl who could not possibly understand the great male world. Knox lost her attention even before her accession when, during her sister’s reign, he published The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women,his attack on women rulers, a phenomenon Knox considered not only unfortunate but unnatural.
Elizabeth could be wittily dismissive of theological earnestness. Asked her opinion about the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, she replied:
’Twas God the Word that spake it,
He took the Bread and brake it;
And what the Word did make it
That I believe, and take it.
In moments like these she seems almost a figure in a play by Shakespeare. Indeed, she loved his plays, she loved art and music, both sacred and profane, she loved courtly dancing, and she made fun of Calvin’s simple little psalm tunes. Her preferences and her patronage helped to set England on a course to cultural greatness.
Even more than for her promotion of the arts, however, it is for her political intelligence and her steely resolve that she is remembered. She appointed as her secretary of state William Cecil, just about the best royal appointment ever made in the history of the English monarchy, with these words: “This judgment I have of you that you will not be corrupted with any manner of gifts and that you will be faithful to the State.” When Mary’s widower, the king of Spain, decided that he should rule England, he sent off his supposedly unbeatable armada to conquer her realm. Elizabeth addressed her troops before the great battle with these words: “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England, too; and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm.”
She knew who she was. As she put it, “I am your anointed queen. I will never be by violence constrained to do anything. I thank God I am endued with such qualities that if I were turned out of the realm in my petticoat, I were able to live in any place in Christendom.” Her motto was Semper eadem (“Always the same” or “Always herself”). Her vaunted virginity may, however, have had dark origins in unwanted attentions suffered as a teenager at the greedy hands of the second husband of Catherine Parr, who had been her father’s last wife and in whose household she lived after Catherine’s second marriage. (Nor could Mary’s example have encouraged Elizabeth to consider a dynastic marriage.)
She asked that her epitaph be brief, recording only “my name, my virginity, the years of my reign, the reformation of religion under it, and my preservation of peace.” The last item was rightly the most important. But she was hardly perfect, as she herself knew and as any ancient Irishman would be happy to remind you.
The unhappy consequences of the Tudors’ presumptuousness toward Ireland would endure for many poisonous centuries, even into our present.9 Nor should we fantasize that English life during Elizabeth’s reign was a sort of Shakespearean frolic. The visible wounds opened everywhere by the ravenous policies of Henry and his children would take centuries to heal. Evelyn Waugh in his biography of Edmund Campion, one of several Jesuit priests who operated illegally within Elizabeth’s realms and were brutally executed as traitors, describes the proximate consequences of the spoliation of the monasteries, which had served for centuries as refuges of peace and civilization. Though the justification of the Tudors for the plunder of wealthy monastic foundations throughout their realms was Reformation, the real motives were greed and the needs of a chronically cash-strapped monarchy. Waugh refers to scenes that could be seen everywhere that the Tutor crown held sway: “the buildings of the old monasteries, their roofs stripped of lead and their walls a quarry for the new contractors. The ruins were not yet picturesque; moss and ivy had barely begun their work, and age had not softened the stark lines of change. Many generations of orderly living, much gentle association, were needed before, under another Queen, the State Church should assume the venerable style of Barchester Towers.”
The Virgin Queen lived almost to her seventieth birthday, a great age for her time. Her last days were sad and lonely, for all her friends, including Cecil, had preceded her in death. But though her physical weakness was becoming ever more apparent, she refused to take to her bed. When Cecil’s son visited her, he tried to coax her, saying, “Your Majesty, to content the people, you must go to bed.” Elizabeth, showing some of her old spirit, replied, “Little man, little man, must is not a word to be used to princes. If your late father were here he would never dare utter such a word.”
Long after her pitiable demise, Anglicanism would become a global phenomenon (at least in those many lands where the English have at one time or another planted their flag), and its outward appearance would put it much closer to liturgically serious, bishop-led Catholicism than to any form of Protestantism; but it would be Catholicism without a pope and with a grave appreciation for bishops as representatives of their people—and, more recently, Catholicism with female priests and (at least in some provinces) even female bishops, Catholicism with (at least in some provinces) welcome, even ordination, for gays and lesbians, even marital blessing on single-sex couples.10 It would not be entirely unwarranted to speculate that a noncelibate priesthood may have eventually enabled Anglicanism to address sexual issues with more realism and wisdom than the formally celibate Catholic hierarchy has been able to achieve.