CH1-07 The English Reformation

The England Reformation was very different from the Reformation in most other countries because it was from the top down rather than from the bottom up. Martin Luther started a popular movement which gained the support of some of the secular rulers of Germany at the time, but they were not the initiators. I mean, they were followers, really, of Luther and his group. It then spread, of course, to France and Calvin, and the history of the French Reformation was that it never managed to acquire the levers of power in Paris, or something like that, so in the end, it was defeated, you might say. But in England, the curious situation is that the Reformation started as an act of state at the very top. I mean, King Henry VIII broke with Rome over the question of his marriage and potential successor to the throne. And so, what you had in England was a country which was Protestant in name, but a kingdom that had no Protestants in it, or very few. And, he had to appoint people who were themselves, at the time, learning what Protestantism was. And one of the curiosities you see, the leaders of the English Reformation were themselves finding out what it was as they went along; it was a gradual thing in that way. But it made a difference in the end because they realized that if the Reformation was ever to take root in England it had to be taught. And so, the English Reformation actually took root by being planned from the top in terms of the pattern of worship, the pattern of preaching. The English reformers wrote sermons which they then wanted the clergy to preach in the pulpit. They wrote prayers. They organized everything from the top down. They wrote school textbooks for children to learn. And so, it was something that people were taught, that people learned and studied, and it was in that way that it really sank in.

Now it was, I suppose, under Queen Mary, when she started persecuting people for Protestant belief, and the general population realized, they saw for the first time, that there were martyrs, people who were actually prepared to go to their deaths because of this belief that they held. I mean, some people would say that Mary did more for the Protestant cause than any of the actual Reformers by stirring up feeling in this way so that people who might not have understood the complexities of the doctrine nevertheless thought, well, this is something important because people are prepared to die for it. And so that really had a tremendous impact. But that’s the way it spread and took root. And we see the results, because after two or three generations of this in this 16th century, when it was called into question, there really was no large movement away from it. When the Church of England split up in the 17th century because of the Puritans and so on, there were very few Catholics left. That would have been a great opportunity for them to come out of the woodwork, and attempt to take over the state as well, but there just weren’t enough of them around because, by then, the arguments were between different kinds of Protestants, and the Catholics really had been marginalized. And we can say, well, the Reformation had taken root. It might not have been agreed by everybody what root it had taken, but nevertheless, you know, in principle England had become a Protestant country.