was absolutely forbidden, as well as the application to the
bishop of Rome for dispensations. The bishops were
thereafter to be elected by the deans and chapters upon
receiving the king’s congé d’eslire (q.v.). The Act of Succession
provided that, should the king have no sons, Elizabeth,
Anne’s daughter, should succeed to the crown. The brief Act
of Supremacy confirmed the king’s claim to be reputed the
“only supreme head in earth of the Church of England”;
he was to enjoy all the honours, dignities, jurisdictions
and profits thereunto appertaining, and to have full power
and authority to reform and amend all such errors, heresies
and abuses, as by any manner of spiritual authority might
lawfully be reformed, or amended, most to the pleasure of
Almighty God, and the increase of virtue in Christ’s religion,
“foreign authority, prescription, or any other thing or things
to the contrary hereof, notwithstanding.” The Treasons Act,
terrible in its operation, included among capital offences that
of declaring in words or writing the king to be “a heretic,
schismatic, tyrant, infidel or usurper.” The convocations were
required to abjure the papal supremacy by declaring “that
the bishop of Rome has not in Scripture any greater
jurisdiction in the kingdom of England than any other
foreign bishop.” The king had now clarified the ancient
laws of the realm to his satisfaction, and could proceed to
abolish superstitious rites, remedy abuses, and seize such portions
of the Church’s possessions, especially pious and monastic
foundations, as he deemed superfluous for the maintenance of
religion.
In spite of the fact that the separation from Rome had been carried out during the sessions of a single parliament, and that there had been no opportunity for a general expression of opinion on the part of the nation, there is no reason to suppose that the majority of the people, thoughtful or thoughtless, were not ready to The reform of the English Church under Henry VIII. reconcile themselves to the abolition of the papal supremacy. It seems just as clear that there was no strong evangelical movement, and that Henry’s pretty consistent adherence to the fundamental doctrines of the medieval Church was agreeable to the great mass of his subjects. The ten “Articles devised by the Kyng’s Highnes Majestic to stablysh Christen quietness” (1536), together with the “injunctions” of 1536 and 1538, are chiefly noteworthy for their affirmation of almost all the current doctrines of the Catholic Church, except those relating to the papal supremacy, purgatory, images, relics and pilgrimages, and the old rooted distrust of the Bible in the vernacular. The clergy were bidden to exhort their hearers to the “works of charity, mercy and faith, specially prescribed and commanded in Scripture, and not to repose their trust or affiance in any other works devised by men’s phantasies beside Scripture; as in wandering to pilgrimages, offering of money, candles or tapers to images or relics, or kissing or licking the same, saying over a number of beads, not understood or minded on, or in such-like superstition.” To this end a copy of the whole English Bible was to be set up in each parish church where the people could read it. During the same years the monasteries, lesser and greater, were dissolved, and the chief shrines were despoiled, notably that of St Thomas of Canterbury. Thus one of the most important of all medieval ecclesiastical institutions, monasticism, came to an end in England. Doubtless the king’s sore financial needs had much to do with the dissolution of the abbeys and the plundering of the shrines, but there is no reason to suppose that he was not fully convinced that the monks had long outlived their usefulness and that the shrines were centres of abject superstition and ecclesiastical deceit. Henry, however, stoutly refused to go further in the direction of German Protestantism, even with the prospect of forwarding the proposed union between him and the princes of the Schmalkaldic League. An insurrection of the Yorkshire peasants, which is to be ascribed in part to the distress caused by the enclosure of the commons on which they had been wont to pasture their cattle, and in part to the destruction of popular shrines, may have caused the king to defend his orthodoxy by introducing into parliament in 1539 the six questions. These parliament enacted into the terrible statute of “The Six Articles,” in which a felon’s death was prescribed for those who obstinately denied transubstantiation, demanded the communion under both kinds, questioned the binding character of vows of chastity, or the lawfulness of private Masses or the expediency of auricular confession. On the 3oth of July 1540 three Lutheran clergymen were burned and three Roman Catholics beheaded, the latter for denying the king’s spiritual supremacy. The king’s ardent desire that diversities of minds and opinions should be done away with and unity be “charitably established” was further promoted by publishing in 1543 A Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for any Christian Man, set forth by the King’s Majesty of England, in which the tenets of medieval theology, except for denial of the supremacy of the bishop of Rome and the unmistakable assertion of the supremacy of the king, were once more restated.
Henry VIII. died in January 1547, having chosen a council
of regency for his nine-year-old son Edward, the members
of which were favourable to further religious innovations.
Somerset, the new Protector, strove to govern
on the basis of civil liberty and religious tolerance.
The first parliament of the reign swept away almost
England becomes Protestant under
Edward VI.,
1547–1553.
all the species of treasons created during the previous
two centuries, the heresy acts, including the Six
Articles, all limitations on printing the Scriptures in
English and reading and expounding the same—indeed “all
and every act or acts of parliament concerning doctrine
or matters of religion.” These measures gave a great impetus
to religious discussion and local innovations. Representatives
of all the new creeds hastened from the Continent to
England, where they hoped to find a safe and fertile field
for the particular seed they had to plant. It is impossible
exactly to estimate the influence which these teachers
exerted on the general trend of religious opinion in England;
in any case, however, it was not unimportant, and the
Articles of Religion and official homilies of the Church of
England show unmistakably the influence of Calvin’s doctrine.
There was, however, no such sudden breach with the traditions
of the past as characterized the Reformation in some continental
countries. Under Edward VI. the changes were
continued on the lines laid down by Henry VIII. The old
hierarchy continued, but service books in English were substituted
for those in Latin, and preaching was encouraged.
A royal visitation, beginning in 1547, discovered, however, such
a degree of ignorance and illiteracy among the parish clergy
that it became clear that preaching could only be gradually
given its due place in the services of the Church. Communion
under both kinds and the marriage of the clergy were
sanctioned, thus gravely modifying two of the fundamental
institutions of the medieval Church. A conservative Book
of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and
other Rites and Ceremonies after the Use of the Church of England—commonly
called the First Prayer Book of Edward VI. was—issued
in 1549. This was based upon ancient “uses,”
and represented no revolutionary change in the traditions of
the “old religion.” It was followed, however, in 1552 by the
second Prayer Book, which was destined to be, with some
modifications, the permanent basis of the English service.
This made it clear that the communion was no longer to
be regarded as a propitiatory sacrifice, the names “Holy
Communion” and “Lord’s Supper” being definitively substituted
for “Mass” (q.v.), while the word “altar” was
replaced by “table.” In the Forty-two Articles we have
the basis of Queen Elizabeth’s Thirty-nine Articles. Thus
during the reign of Edward we have not only the. foundations
of the Anglican Church laid, but there appears
the beginning of those evangelical and puritanical sects
which were to become the “dissenters” of the following
centuries.
