England's Bloody Reformation

Peter Marshall writes for the BBC History Magazine (May 2017 issue):

. . . Recent scholarship on the changes taking place after Henry VIII’s break with the papacy tends to assert their relatively peaceful character, and points to continuities across the Reformation divide. Certainly, some important things didn’t change – most folk carried on worshipping in the same church, for example. It’s also true that England witnessed no slaughter on the 
scale of the German Peasants’ Rebellion of 1524–25 (when as many as 100,000 people were butchered), or the Wars of Religion breaking out in France after 1562 (in which as many as 4 million may have lost their lives).

But only by such selective comparisons does England’s experience of the Reformation look ‘peaceful’. Thousands died in the convulsions of 1549, and blood was spilled in encounters between armies fighting for religious causes in every decade between the 1530s and 1570s: after the Pilgrimage of Grace (a rising in the north of England against Henry VIII’s break with Rome in 1536–37); during Wyatt’s Rebellion (against Mary I in 1554); and in the Rising of the Northern Earls (a Catholic attempt to overthrow Elizabeth I in 1569–70). Over the same period and beyond, hundreds more were put to death for opposing the state’s religious policies. People were willing to die, and to kill, because they rightly believed that momentous, unprecedented, and perhaps irreversible transformations were taking place. For good or ill, England’s first exit from a European union, anchored on the church, rather than the Treaty of Rome, was a hard, 
not a soft one.

He analyses the divisions between Catholics and "Protestant" Evangelicals throughout the reigns of Henry VIII and his children. Marshall discusses the central positions of both the Catholic Mass--for which the BBC insists on using the lowercase ("mass") and the Evangelical Bible and describes various instances of violence and bloodshed. He concludes:

The Reformation in England ‘succeeded’, 
in the sense that people born after Elizabeth’s accession, and coming to adulthood before the turn of the 17th century, usually identified as Protestants. Their cultural outlook was shaped by the Prayer Book, the English Bible and a sense – long to endure in the English 
psyche – that Catholic foreigners were 
not to be trusted. [nor native-born Catholics!]

Yet to see the story of the English Reformation solely as the transformation of a Catholic country into a Protestant one minimises the extent to which its most vital result was an entrenched religious and cultural pluralism. [a pluralism the government constantly wanted to suppress] It is also to misconstrue the significance of the process itself. Through decades of incessant public debate, punctuated by episodes of intense suffering and violence, the very meaning of ‘religion’ changed. Before the Reformation, the word meant an attitude of mind, devoted service of God. Afterwards, it came to signify a programme, party or identity: ‘my religion’, ‘the true religion’.

The realisation, by significant numbers of English people, that their monarch was not 
on the side of ‘true religion’ had momentous, long-lasting effects for political authority. That kinsfolk or neighbours might also be wrong-believers was equally novel and troubling. Five centuries on, the challenge 
of how to live non-violently with difference remains a very real one.

Those sentences, "Through decades of incessant public debate, punctuated by episodes of intense suffering and violence, the very meaning of ‘religion’ changed. Before the Reformation, the word meant an attitude of mind, devoted service of God. Afterwards, it came to signify a programme, party or identity: ‘my religion’, ‘the true religion’." demonstrate the influence of John Bossy's view of religion before and after the Protestant Reformation. Eamon Duffy cited that thesis often in his book, Reformation Divided. Marshall's article was written to promote his book, Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation. As he notes in the preface to that book--and in this artcle--whatever victory Protestants achieved in England over Catholics, it was Pyrrhic: it weakened the Monarchy, destroyed the bonds of community, and drastically changed religion from focusing on God to focusing on the self. That was not what Henry, Cromwell, or Cranmer wanted to accomplish.

Supremacy Without Unity

From The Economist, a review of Heretics and Believers by Peter Marshall:

Mr Marshall provides convincing evidence that Catholicism survived well into Elizabeth’s reign. At least 800 clergymen were deprived or removed themselves for reasons of conscience, including as many as a quarter of the clergy in one diocese, Rochester, that is not far from Canterbury. Only 21 out of 90 senior clergy in northern England assented to the settlement, and 36 openly disagreed. Dissent among middle-ranking clergy was even higher. Of those not removed by the 1559 flu epidemic, fewer than half wished to continue.

A rebellion reckoned to be 7,000-strong in favour of the pope in 1569 was brutally suppressed. Many followers of the old religion simply conformed and dissembled. It is hard to understand how the people coped through these years. Tombs were vandalised; vicars protested at funerals. One village curate was known to shave his Protestant beard every time a change in religion was rumoured. However the English survived the Reformation, they did so as a nation divided.

Whig histories typically focus on the progress that the state and evangelicals made in forging a Church of England: a history of the winners. Mr Marshall’s contribution is a riveting account of the losers as well, the English zealots and cynics who wanted a better world or an unchanging one. The resulting story is of a Henrician supremacy that failed and an Elizabethan unity that never was.

Please read the rest there.

"The Overthrow of Catholic Culture"

Looks intriguing: From Yale this June:

A sumptuously written people’s history and a major retelling and reinterpretation of the story of the English Reformation

Centuries on, what the Reformation was and what it accomplished remain deeply contentious. Peter Marshall’s sweeping new history—the first major overview for general readers in a generation—argues that sixteenth-century England was a society neither desperate for nor allergic to change, but one open to ideas of “reform” in various competing guises. King Henry VIII wanted an orderly, uniform Reformation, but his actions opened a Pandora’s Box from which pluralism and diversity flowed and rooted themselves in English life.

With sensitivity to individual experience as well as masterfully synthesizing historical and institutional developments, Marshall frames the perceptions and actions of people great and small, from monarchs and bishops to ordinary families and ecclesiastics, against a backdrop of profound change that altered the meanings of “religion” itself. This engaging history reveals what was really at stake in the overthrow of Catholic culture and the reshaping of the English Church.

In the meantime, I've received a review copy of Gareth Russell's latest: Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII:

Written with an exciting combination of narrative flair and historical authority, this interpretation of the tragic life of Catherine Howard, fifth wife of Henry VIII, breaks new ground in our understanding of the very young woman who became queen at a time of unprecedented social and political tension and whose terrible errors in judgment quickly led her to the executioner’s block.

On the morning of July 28, 1540, as King Henry’s VIII’s former confidante Thomas Cromwell was being led to his execution, a teenager named Catherine Howard began her reign as queen of a country simmering with rebellion and terrifying uncertainty. Sixteen months later, the king’s fifth wife would follow her cousin Anne Boleyn to the scaffold, having been convicted of adultery and high treason.

The broad outlines of Catherine’s career might be familiar, but her story up until now has been incomplete. Unlike previous accounts of her life, which portray her as a naïve victim of an ambitious family, this compelling and authoritative biography will shed new light on Catherine Howard’s rise and downfall by reexamining her motives and showing her in her context, a milieu that goes beyond her family and the influential men of the court to include the aristocrats and, most critically, the servants who surrounded her and who, in the end, conspired against her. By illuminating Catherine's entwined upstairs/downstairs worlds as well as societal tensions beyond the palace walls, the author offers a fascinating portrayal of court life in the sixteenth century and a fresh analysis of the forces beyond Catherine’s control that led to her execution—from diplomatic pressure and international politics to the long-festering resentments against the queen’s household at court.

Including a forgotten text of Catherine’s confession in her own words, color illustrations, family tree, map, and extensive notes, Young and Damned and Fair changes our understanding of one of history’s most famous women while telling the compelling and very human story of complex individuals attempting to survive in a dangerous age.

I'll be intrigued to follow the author's thesis throughout the book:

Putting her household, and her grandmother's, at the center of a biography of Catherine makes her story a grand tale of the Henrician court at its twilight, a glittering but pernicious sunset, in which the King's unstable behavior and his courtiers' labyrinthine deceptions ensured that fortune's wheel  was moving more rapidly than at any previous point at his vicious but fascinating reign. Accounts of the gorgeous ceremonies held to celebrate the resubmission of the north to royal control [after the Pilgrimage of Grace and the imposition of martial law] saw Catherine, the girl in the silver dress, gleaming, Daisy Buchanan-like, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor--the perfect medieval royal consort. Until, like a bolt out of the heavens, a scandal resulted in an investigation in which nearly everyone close to Catherine was questioned and which ultimately wrapped itself in ever more intricate coils around the young Queen until, to her utter bewilderment, it choked life from her entirely. (from the Introduction, p. xxi)

"Mumpsimus" and "Sumpsimus": Henry VIII on Christmas Eve, 1545

Henry VIII made his last speech to Parliament on December 24, 1545. He was concerned about religious discord in his empire and the effect it was having on the people. Edward Hall (author of Hall's Chronicle) wrote down the speech as he heard it:

Now, since I find such kindness on your part towards me, I cannot choose but to love and favor you, affirming that no prince in the world more favors his subjects than I do you, and no subjects or commons more love and obey their sovereign lord than I see you do me, for whose defense my treasure shall not be hidden, nor if necessity requires it will my person be not risked. But although I with you and you with me are in this perfect love and concord, this friendly amity cannot continue unless both you, my lords temporal, and you, my lords spiritual, and you, my loving subjects, study and take pains to amend one thing which is surely amiss and far out of order, which I most heartily require you to do, which is that charity and concord is not amongst you, but discord and dissension bears rule in every place. St Paul wrote to the Corinthians, in the 12th chapter: ‘Charity is gentle, Charity is not envious, Charity is not proud,’ and so on in that chapter. Behold then what love and charity is amongst you when one calls another heretic and anabaptist and he calls him back papist, hypocrite, and pharisee. Are these tokens of charity amongst you? No, no, I assure you that this lack of charity amongst yourselves will be the hindrance and assuaging of the fervent love between us, as I said before, unless this is healed and clearly made whole. I must judge the fault and occasion of this discord to be partly the negligence of you, the fathers and preachers of the spirituality. For if I know a man who lives in adultery I must judge him to be a lecherous and carnal person; if I see a man boast and brag about himself I cannot but deem him a proud man. I see and hear daily that you of the clergy preach against each other without charity or discretion. Some are too stiff in their old ‘Mumpsimus’, others are are too busy and curious in their new ‘Sumpsimus’. Thus almost all men are in variety and discord, and few or none truly and sincerely preach the word of God as they ought to do. Shall I now judge you to be charitable persons who do this? No, no, I cannot do so. Alas, how can the poor souls live in concord when you preachers sow amongst them in your sermons debate and discord? They look to you for light and you bring them darkness. Amend these crimes, I exhort you, and set forth God’s word truly, both by true preaching and giving a good example, or else, I, whom God has appointed his vicar and high minister here, will see these divisions extinct, and these enormities corrected, according to my true duty, or else I am an unprofitable servant and an untrue officer’. . . 

Peter Marshall traces the history of the phrase Henry VIII uses: "Some are too stiff in their old ‘Mumpsimus’, others are are too busy and curious in their new ‘Sumpsimus’." and finds that Desiderius Erasmus was the source. In 1516, Erasmus referred in a letter to an anecdote about "a certain priest" who refused to change the words he prayed when he offered Mass, even though he was told there was a misprint. Where his Missal read "mumpsimus" it should have read "sumpsimus". Erasmus was reacting against those who rejected his corrections of the Vulgate text of the Holy Bible, his Novum Instrumentum. Reformers in England particularly liked the metaphor, using it to attack not just "a certain priest" but all Catholic priests as ignorant and lazy--even though Bishop John Fisher, with the aid of Henry VIII's grandmother Margaret Beaufort--had been working to educate priests better. 

But when Henry VIII added to the intrepration of the  metaphor, as Marshall calls it, was the attack against those who insist on their "sumpsimus" as being "too busy and curious". Nevertheless, Marshall concludes: "As informed contemporaries would have recognised, the king’s bon mot was not quite so even-handed as it would first appear: sumpsimus is, at worst, pedantry, while mumpsimus is just plain wrong." 

What was included in Henry VIII's "mumpsimus"? Certainly not the belief in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist. Some forms of "sumpsimus" rejected that, but Henry VIII always defended it. Probably not "the priesthood of all believers"--Henry VIII knew that the Sacrifice of the Mass required a sacramental priesthood, ordained and anointed just as he thought he was as king. Probably not some of crucial Lutheran theories of salvation and authority: sola scriptura, sola fidei, sola gratia. Certainly the spiritual and ecclesiastical authority and supremacy of the Holy Roman Pontiff. Henry VIII clearly rejected that part of the old "mumpsimus"! 

As Peter Marshall concludes, Henry VIII's last parliamentary speech and its bon mot illustrate the problem:  "It would perhaps be difficult to find a more perfect encapsulation of the idiosyncratic religious outlook of Henry VIII and of the complexities and ambiguities of the reforming processes he initiated; processes which, in 1545,he was trying, and failing, to bring under control."

How about this for a summation: "Happy Christmas and try to read my mind on what I believe!"

Illustration credit. This portrait from 1545 depicts Henry VIII, his heir Prince Edward, and Edward's late mother, Jane Seymour. Henry VIII was married to Katherine Parr at the time.

Crime, Torture and Punishment in the 16th Century

Peter Marshall reviews this new book on torture and execution as practiced in Nuremburg, Germany for the Literary Review:

This is a marvellous book about a fascinating subject. It is, in a sense, a portrait of a serial killer. Frantz Schmidt was employed between 1578 and 1618 as the official executioner (and torturer) of the prosperous German city of Nuremberg. Over the course of his career he personally despatched 394 people, and flogged, branded or otherwise maimed many hundreds more. His life is also a tale of honour, duty and a lasting quest for meaning and redemption.

The penal regimes of pre-modern European states were harsh and violent, heavy on deterrence and the symbolism of retribution. Towns such as Nuremberg needed professional executioners to deal with an ever-present threat of criminality through the public infliction of capital and corporal sentences. Punishing malefactors with lengthy periods of incarceration was an idea for the future, and would probably have struck 16th-century people as unnecessarily cruel. Methods ranged from execution with the sword (the most honourable) to hanging (the least), and from the relatively quick and merciful to the dreadful penalty of staking a person to the ground and breaking their limbs one after the other with a heavy cartwheel. This was not a world of mindless violence: the punishments Schmidt imposed were carefully prescribed by the city authorities, down to the number of 'nips' (pieces of flesh torn from the limbs with red-hot tongs) convicts were to receive on their way to the gallows.

This gruesome regimen can be reconstructed because, over the course of 45 years, Schmidt kept a personal journal - not a diary in anything like the modern sense, but a usually terse and impersonal chronological record of all the punishments he had inflicted, including some details of the crimes behind them. The journal is not a new discovery (a version of it was printed as long ago as 1801), but Joel Harrington, drawing on a previously unused, near-contemporary copy, is the first historian to realise its full potential. The source lends itself to a social history of crime and punishment, but Harrington also attempts something more interesting and ambitious: to enter imaginatively into the world-view of its compiler and construct a rounded portrait of a personality and a life. Cleverly, he weaves Schmidt's own words wherever possible into his historical narrative, placing them in italics to let us identify what he has reported and what the author has conjectured or imaginatively inferred (invariably pitched pleasingly between excessive caution and undue presumption). It is a virtuoso performance. Harrington is able to draw on a range of ancillary documents, but this is the best example of making a single, apparently unpromising historical source sing since Eamon Duffy breathed life into a set of dusty English churchwardens' accounts in The Voices of Morebath.

Macmillan, the U.S. publisher, provides some excerpts and other material here. A couple of years ago, I corresponded with Professor Frank W. Barlow of Mount Holyoke College, who is at work on a biography of Richard Topcliffe. I really doubt that Topcliffe would have kept such an impersonal journal of his work of pursuing and torturing Catholic priests. From all that I've read of Topcliffe he took personal satisfaction in capturing priests like St. Robert Southwell and may have even enjoyed inflicting pain.

From Conference to Collected Essays

In October of 2010, Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois held a conference titled "Reforming the Reformation". Augustana College is a Lutheran, liberal arts college. The conference description:

Augustana will host the conference "Reforming Reformation" on October 17-19, 2010, organized by Thomas F. Mayer (History). The object is to undertake a fundamental rethinking of all the possible meanings of the term reformation, concept and label. In order to stimulate such thought, the conferees will be divided into four vaguely "national" panels, emphasizing places that either did not have a "real" reformation or had an odd one. This will serve to put in perspective what far too many people still count as the only true reformation, the Protestant one especially in its Lutheran and Calvinist guises. Those four panels will treat Italy, England (emphasizing the Marian interlude since it has almost always been considered a bump on the way to seeing God's will done), the Empire and Spain. Needless to say, the conference will be strongly interdisciplinary, with participants from literature, art history, theology and history.

The conference will be spent mainly in discussion, rather than sitting through papers one after another. Participants will submit their talks at least a month in advance and they will then be circulated to all and sundry. They will also be posted on the Web in such a way that folk at Augustana can get access to them. Sessions will consist of ten-minute summaries followed by discussion and audience interventions. We want to involve students and members of the community as much as possible. The sessions will mix papers up geographically to see what extra comparative sparks that can strike. The conference will open with a plenary session on Sunday evening, mainly to introduce the participants and the themes. The working sessions will be spread through the day on Monday (various history faculty have generously given up their rooms and periods) before we end with one more plenary session, probably at 8:30 on Tuesday morning.

The participants have been urged to think as much as possible about big questions and broader implications. The final versions of their papers will go into a volume to be edited by Mayer and published in his series, "Catholic Christendom, 1300-1700," which will also include a ruminative essay based on the discussions.

List of participants

I. Italy
Daniel Bornstein (history), Washington University
Marcia Hall (art history), Temple University
Abigail Brundin (literature), St Catherine's College, University of Cambridge

II. England
Peter Marshall (history), University of Warwick, England
Anne Overell (history), The Open University, Leeds, England

III. The Empire
John Frymire (history), University of Missouri
Brad Gregory (history), University of Notre Dame Ronald Thiemann (theology), Harvard Divinity School

IV. Spain
LuAnn Homza (history), College of William and Mary
John Edwards (history), Queen's College, University of Oxford Jodi Bilnikoff (history), UNC­-Greensboro

Sponsored by the Office of the President, the Institute for Leadership and Service and the Center for the Study of the Christian Millennium, with the support of the Humanities Fund and the Department of History

The result of this conference was indeed a book from Ashgate, which publishes some of the most interesting books at the highest prices imaginable, especially in their Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700 series. The book has the same title as the conference, and Ashgate describes it thus:

The Reformation used to be singular: a unique event that happened within a tidily circumscribed period of time, in a tightly constrained area and largely because of a single individual. Few students of early modern Europe would now accept this view. Offering a broad overview of current scholarly thinking, this collection undertakes a fundamental rethinking of the many and varied meanings of the term concept and label 'reformation', particularly with regard to the Catholic Church.

Accepting the idea of the Reformation as a process or set of processes that cropped up just about anywhere Europeans might be found, the volume explores the consequences of this through an interdisciplinary approach, with contributions from literature, art history, theology and history. By examining a single topic from multiple interdisciplinary perspectives, the volume avoids inadvertently reinforcing disciplinary logic, a common result of the way knowledge has been institutionalized and compartmentalized in research universities over the last century.

The result of this is a much more nuanced view of Catholic Reformation, and once that extends consideration much further - both chronologically, geographically and politically - than is often accepted. As such the volume will prove essential reading to anyone interested in early modern religious history.

Ashgate provides a sample from the book, the Introduction by Thomas Mayer, and Augustana provides as least two of the presentations on-line, by Peter Marshall and by Brad S. Gregory.

Of the Making of Books about the English Reformation

There seems to be no end: here is another new title about the English Reformation in the 16th century, by Derek Wilson: The English Reformation: Religion, Politics and Fear: How England was Transformed by the Tudors, from Running Press. It's part of their BHO series--A "Brief History Of". It's 288 pages and seems to have a different view of the Reformation:

Religion, politics and fear: how England was transformed by the Tudors. The English Reformation was a unique turning point in English history. Derek Wilson retells the story of how the Tudor monarchs transformed English religion and why it still matters today. Recent scholarly research has undermined the traditional view of the Reformation as an event that occurred solely amongst the elite. Wilson now shows that, although the transformation was political and had a huge impact on English identity, on England's relationships with its European neighbours and on the foundations of its empire, it was essentially a revolution from the ground up. By 1600, in just eighty years, England had become a radically different nation in which family, work and politics, as well as religion, were dramatically altered.

Looks like Wilson is going back to A.G. Dickens and G.R. Elton's views. I'll be on the look-out for reviews of this BHO. In the meantime, here is a BE (brief essay) on the state of the history of the history of the English Reformation or English Reformations, by Peter Marshall, author of Religious Identities in Henry VIII's England, Reformation England 1480-1642, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England, and The Reformation: A Very Short Introduction (only 168 pages!).

It's interesting to note that Peter Milward, SJ (the historian who has written a couple of the better books on Shakespeare and Catholicism) had a book published with the same illustration on the cover: The English Reformation: From Tragic Reality to Dramatic Representation which was published by Family Publications, based near Oxford, which sadly went out of business a couple of years ago.

The 2012 Southwell Lecture

Earlier this year, Professor Peter Marshall of the University of Warwick, presented the annual Southwell lecture at Fordham University:

The St. Robert Southwell, S.J., Lecture Series is devoted to exploring the history and theology of the Christian Church in the early modern period. The series targets the scholarship of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation in Europe and the Americas from 1500 to 1750.

Fordham provides a summary of the lecture, given on March 28, 2012:

Historians who study the Protestant Reformation tend to focus on what factors led to the creation of the Protestant Church. However, a slightly different question is often overlooked: What factors caused devoted Catholics to abandon their faith and become reformers?

Peter Marshall, D.Phil., professor of history at the University of Warwick, presented the English Reformation from this alternative standpoint at the latest installment of the St. Robert Southwell, S.J., Lecture Series, held March 28 at Fordham.

Taking a “forward” look at the Reformation, Marshall told the audience to keep in mind that the first generations of reformers were not “early Protestants,” as scholars retrospectively call them, but, rather, late medieval Catholic Christians.

“There were no ‘Protestants’ in early Tudor England,” said Marshall, author of The Catholic Priesthood and the English Reformation (Oxford University Press, 1994). “The word was not used at all to refer to English people before the 1550s, and it was not widely adopted by adherents of the Reformation themselves until well into the reign of Elizabeth.”

According to Marshall, the subtle difference between these angles is important when considering the origins of the Reformation.

Read the rest of this summary here.

On my radio show, The English Reformation Today, last Saturday, I mentioned this mystery of how the majority of Catholics in England eventually left the Church and conformed to the established Church of England. I would like to see more of Professor Marshall's article and his proposed solution of that mystery.