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The Tudor Reformation
What do think of when you hear the term Reformation? Most would think of the process by which parts of Catholic Europe became Protestant. Professor Alec Ryrie writes that we shouldn't be distracted by this and instead tells us that the English Reformation was more of a political event rather than a religious one. Find out more in this extract from his new book The English Reformation.
Tudor Reformation
‘The Reformation’, conventionally, means the process by which parts of Catholic Europe became Protestant. That process happened in England, but we should not be too distracted by it. From the point of view of law and of the sinews of the English state, the doctrinal, devotional and cultural transformations were so much froth: a by-product, or even a useful distraction. The English Reformation was a political event more than a religious one. It brought the English state, in the sense we now know it, into being; and it fixed the relationships between the nations of Britain and Ireland that we still enjoy or endure today.
Medieval politics was marked by a long dance between ‘church’ and ‘state’ – or better, between the ‘spiritual’ power wielded by the pope, bishops and great abbots, and the ‘temporal’ power wielded by princes, noblemen and cities. Sometimes these two spheres of power collided spectacularly; sometimes one of them fell into crisis, and the other took the chance to press its advantage; but in general they worked together, recognizing that this was in everyone’s interest. Instead of rivals, the spiritual and temporal powers were generally collaborators: staffed by members of the same great families, sharing the same ambitions for godly good order. The temporal powers were the Church’s indispensable guardians and patrons. The spiritual power was the monarchs’ indispensable reservoir of legitimacy and of bureaucratic expertise.
If pressed, both sides could be persuaded to make dramatic claims. The popes had, since the eleventh century and certainly since the fourteenth, claimed that it was ‘absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff’; and that this allowed them, if necessary, unilaterally to eject kings from their thrones. Periodically kings pushed back against these claims, whether by defying individual popes or promulgating laws which contradicted papal privileges. In England, most famously, since 1353 the statute of praemunire had criminalized attempts by English subjects to appeal to Rome over their king’s head.
Beneath this posturing, however, the papacy’s political and legal power was ebbing away. It had never truly recovered from the catastrophic schism of 1378–1417, when Europe had been split between two, and eventually three, rival popes. By the early sixteenth century, there was a tacit understanding that the papacy would continue to claim out- landish powers; that monarchs would acknowledge them in theory; and that no pope would risk the embarrassment of trying to exercise them. The papacy’s real powers were of a more prosaic kind. Rome’s bureaucratic and legal reach was pervasive. The church courts were parallel to, independent of and largely separate from the secular courts of the temporal powers. All Christian rulers had to take into account a body of international law that was beyond their control.
This pattern suited England’s first two Tudor kings very well. Like many of their predecessors, Henry VII and Henry VIII loudly proclaimed their loyalty to Rome, quietly defended their own sovereignty, and steadily chipped away at the legal privileges of the English Church. The most controversial issue was whether English churchmen should be subject to the normal criminal law, rather than, as had traditionally been the case, to the rather more lenient church courts. Both kings pared away the Church’s privileges. In 1514–15 the leading bishops pushed back against such infringements on their rights. It was a very traditional spat: what is revealing is how it was resolved. The English Church’s rapidly rising star, Thomas Wolsey, brokered a deal whereby the king and his secular lawyers conceded the Church’s theoretical independence, and the pope then granted the English state legal powers which amounted to those they had been trying to seize. The fiction of spiritual authority was preserved. Real power shifted another notch.
‘A mould-breaking little book. Ryrie persuades us that how we describe and interpret the English Reformation can owe almost as much to who is telling the story and what we want to hear as to the facts. It’s a message that’s long overdue, a wake-up call to anyone interested in the topic.’
John Guy, Fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge, and author of Thomas More: A very brief history
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