Protestant England

...If Henry admired Catholic humanism, the trail of corpses suggests he had not really got the hang of it...

...To the statesmen and churchmen of 16th-century Europe, on both sides of the confessional divide, there would have been little doubt that Elizabeth's England was firmly anchored in the Protestant tradition...

...The maintenance of bishops and a diocesan church structure was criticized by English admirers of the major continental reformers, but never by John Calvin and Heinrich Bullinger themselves: They understood that national Protestant churches would build a church organization consonant with the needs of the local church community...

...There is always a danger in reading back modern hopes and expectations into an analysis of historical events, and our understanding of the 16th-century English church is certainly the poorer for it...

...These two features have encouraged commentators from the Anglo-American church tradition to place repeated emphasis on the distinctive-ness of the English model of church-manship...

...When bonfires were lit to celebrate the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and to commemorate the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot, these marked not only deliverance from national peril, but also the emergence of a communal Protestant identity...

...Those who opposed Henry are considered by Bernard in exhaustive detail, and much attention is given to English monasticism...

...Some parts of this reinterpretation have found more favor than others, but in general it is fair to say that the revisionist narrative is fast becoming the new orthodoxy...

...Faced with the intricacies of these debates, the detached reader can sometimes feel like the embarrassed house-guest caught in the middle of a family quarrel...

...This is bold and ingenious, and it is sustained in a robust and densely argued text that requires all of the book's 672 pages...

...It was only the disastrous outcome of this latter venture that forced Elizabeth's advisers to take stock and forswear perilous and expensive foreign ventures of this nature...

...It is possible to believe that Henry thought of himself as both a sincere Catholic and a talented theologian (but then so did Martin Luther...

...The much-vaunted uniformity of the Calvinist churches of continental Europe crumbles when these churches are examined with the care we devote to the English church...

...George Bernard's work is an admirably painstaking reconstruction of the process by which Henry VIII imposed his sometimes baffling views of religion on the nation...

...From these bibliographies and library lists we can now demonstrate the extraordinary dominance of Calvin and his followers in the English church...

...In recent years, remarkable progress has been made by specialists in reconstructing book production and book ownership in the 16th century...

...Yet the myth of the via media persists...

...Elizabeth and her advisers wished to give no flagrant cause for offense, and this explains her shameless bamboozling of ambassadors with expressions of religious equivocation and praise, in particular, of the Lutheran Confession of Augsburg...

...But it is hard to deny that, by destroying so much of what was cherished in the Catholic tradition, the Henrician Reformation laid the foundations for the emergence of Protestant England...

...The guiding theological influence was the Genevan church leader, Calvin...

...the other, the liturgy, one of the great glories of Anglican and Episcopalian worship through to the present day...

...This was partly because the English church before the Reformation offered a richly textured experience of religion that Andrew Pettegree is professor of modern history at the University of St...

...This is the view of English Anglicanism as a via media, a middle way between Protestantism and the resurgent Catholicism of the Council of Trent...

...The myth of the via media has been persistent, and does have respectable contemporary roots, not least in the deliberate obfuscations of Elizabeth herself...

...According to the revisionist school, so far from the accession of Elizabeth representing the final step, the task of creating English Protestantism had hardly begun...

...Along the way there were inevitable casualties...

...All had their distinctive peculiarities...

...How were they induced to endorse patterns of living and worship utterly at variance with what they had known before...

...England certainly found distinctive solutions to the problems of church organization presented by the inheritance of a complex Catholic heritage...

...Yet at no time, in Bernard's view, did Henry deviate from the principles of what was essentially a Catholic reform...

...He has also read and digested the work of every scholar active in the field, many of whom are taken to task for divergent interpretations of issues large and small...

...This would result in the largest redistribution of landed wealth in English history...

...Her personal grip on power was uncertain, and Europe's Catholic powers were ready to take advantage of any sign of weakness...

...To this conundrum, George Bernard's new book offers a deceptively simple answer: The Henrician Reformation was a triumph of intended consequences...

...For this reader, at least, the answer is no...

...The short reign of Edward VI witnessed the creation of an unambiguously Protestant church...

...but so, too, did Scotland, the Netherlands, France, and the churches of Scandinavia...

...He seems to have read every document, and absorbed the nuance of every letter...

...Elton, saw the Reformation as an act of state...

...But nothing came of this, or indeed of any of the other occasions in this decade when the Confession of Augsburg was promoted as a potential ecumenical solution to religious discord...

...This was because, in the words of one leading revisionist, "English men and women did not want the Reformation, and most of them were slow to accept it when it came...

...Andrews, and the author, most recently, of Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion...

...Only when the monasteries were implicated in the Pilgrimage of Grace, the largest act of opposition to Henry's policies, did the king decide on their final destruction...

...What resulted was that unique creation, the Anglican via media...

...And despite the restoration of Catholicism under Mary, it was the Edwardian, rather than the Henrician, heritage to which Elizabeth would be heir when she ascended the throne in 1558...

...most people found wholly satisfying (the theme of Eamon Duffy's brilliant The Stripping of the Altars) and partly because so few leading figures in the English church actively embraced Protestantism...

...The sole victim of this bizarre law was a hapless servant in the household of Henry's most obdurate opponent, Bishop John Fisher...

...Certainly, no area of scholarship has been so hotly contested among British historians in the last two generations...

...And he comes up with a remarkable theory to explain one of the most grisly episodes of the period, a statute hurried through parliament to prescribe death by boiling alive for attempted poisoning...

...Indeed, even this is somewhat deceptive, because Bernard devotes very little of this space to the last years of the reign, after Thomas Cromwell's fall in 1540...

...This is a crucial omission, since it is hard to see the coherence for which Bernard argues being sustained through the king's declining years, which paved the way for the much more explicitly Protestant rule of his son, the boy-king Edward VI...

...But for the two decades preceding this, Bernard's mastery of the minutiae of government policy is quite astonishing...

...Henry designed the strategy for divorce, which, pursued through Parliament, also laid out in incremental stages plans for a church separated from Rome, obedient to the English crown, and leaner and more responsive to the needs of parish religion...

...But it is hard to agree that what emerged was what the king intended...

...All this is good fun, but the real question is whether this massive and learned book offers a coherent and convincing explanation of Henry's Reformation...

...In recent times this has converged with the drive towards ecumenism, with the Anglican tradition seen as a natural partner in bridgebuilding between more austerely reformed churches and Catholicism...

...Nor can the savage brutality with which Henry defended his policy really be made part of an Erasmian agenda...

...The destruction of traditional Catholic devotion makes a mockery of attempts to remake the twists and turns of English religious policy as a coherent act of policy...

...And its principal architect was the king himself...

...Far from being the instigators of change, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell, his first minister, were obedient instruments of his will...

...Young men at Oxford and Cambridge imbibed a steady diet of Calvinist theology...

...Could it be, Bernard muses, that the law was a result of Henry's guilty conscience, an attempt to cover his tracks after a botched assassination plot...

...Bernard sees the initial dissolution of the smaller religious houses as consistent with Henry's original vision of reformed Catholicism...

...Elizabeth came to the throne at a moment of extreme peril...

...Not all of the nuances of predesti-narian theology filtered down to the parishes, but English men and women clearly identified with their own church enough to know that Catholicism was the religion of their enemies abroad...

...Gradually, the ritual year was remade to reflect this new communal allegiance...

...According to Bernard, Henry was the driving force, the dominant mind behind the introduction of a reformed Catholic worship that drew both on his own deeply felt attachment to orthodox doctrine and an awareness of contemporary humanist reform programs...

...Looking back over 400 years, we may regret the savage partisanship of those violent times...

...What Lutheran prince could have done more...

...Most of all, Henry created a legacy in which continued progress towards a Protestant state was virtually inevitable...

...This was the King's Reformation...

...This, too, is controversial territory, for despite overwhelming evidence that England was fully anchored in a continental Protestant tradition by the end of Elizabeth's reign, revisionists have seized on the dying embers of an earlier tradition to cast this in doubt...

...Shrines destroyed, the cult of saints abolished, pilgrimages discontinued, purgatory denied, not to mention the dissolution of the monasteries and the introduction of an English Bible...

...Bernard has a pugilist's zest for controversy, and few of the leading practitioners of Tudor history walk away unscathed...

...Even the destruction wrought on the Catholic Church by reformers was not, it is now suggested, part of an attempt to introduce continental Protestantism, but consonant with a Catholic reform agenda...

...Yet problems remain...

...In fact, once secure on her throne, and freed from immediate anxieties of foreign intervention in English affairs, Elizabeth pursued an aggressively Protestant foreign policy: Sending troops to Scotland to assist the Protestant insurgency against Catholic rule, and even intervening in the French Wars of Religion on the side of the Huguenot rebels...

...But none denied that the remaking of England as a Protestant country had essentially been achieved by the time Elizabeth succeeded her Catholic half-sister Mary...

...Until the latter part of the 20th century it was broadly assumed that, since England became a Protestant country, this must have reflected the natural inclination of its people...

...One was the persistence of bishops and cathedrals...

...There were more editions of Calvin's works published in English in the 16th century than in French, his native tongue...

...But looking back on two decades of turbulent change from the last years of Henry's reign, who could believe that what had been created was consonant with a vision of Catholic renewal...

...This, I think, may be put down to two enduring features of the emerging English pattern of worship...

...It was not always so...

...For, in fact, there was nothing of the via media about the 16th-century English church—as European contemporaries understood only too well...

...All of this changed with a barrage of scholarship that challenged just about every part of this interpretative scheme...

...If the English church was so popular, how were people so easily persuaded to abandon much-loved beliefs...

...He turns on its head the usual assumption that Anne Boleyn withheld her sexual favors until she had the king's commitment to marriage: According to Bernard, it was the king who delayed consummating the relationship...

...True, some differences emerged between those who saw a groundswell of popular support for Protestantism, and those who, like the great constitutional historian G.R...

...And though severe on others, Bernard is not afraid to add a mischievous dash of speculation on his own account...