“The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this realm of England”

There are many myths about the origins of the Church of England, and most of them coalesce around the middle years of the sixteenth century: roughly from the time when Henry VIII began to worry whether he would ever get an air in the 1520s to when his daughter finally saw off the challenge of Presbyterianism to her new “Elizabethan Settlement” of the Church in the 1570s.

Curiously, there are two, almost entirely contradictory myths about this period.

The first you will often hear in the more “protestant” churches of the Church of England: the English Reformation was the inevitable, popular uprising of the yeomen of England, overthrowing the Roman yoke, and connecting with the good old faith of the Apostles and the Fathers of the Church. This is the history which you were taught at school: the “reformation from below”, and instances of shepherds reading the New Testament and ploughboys preaching would have been produced to support it.

The best example of this form of history was produced by A.G. Dickens, whose The English Reformation first published in 1964 was for many years the last word in Reformation studies. The Reformation was “from below”: it was the product of an increasing literate “working-class” religious involvement. The Lollards of the fourteenth century were the precursors of the Reformation (which is why the Protestant theological colleges in both Oxford and Toronto are both named after John Wycliffe († 1384)). By the 1510s the old church was both corrupt and unpopular, characterised by:

its effort to attain salvation through devout observances, its fantastic emphasis on saints, relics and pilgrimages, its tendency to allow the personality and teaching of Jesus to recede from the focus of the picture. That [its] connection with the Christianity of the Gospel is rather tenuous could be demonstrated with almost mathematical precision.¹

That the church was wrong is a matter of opinion. That it was unpopular is demonstrably incorrect: recent historians such as Christopher Haigh and Eamon Duffy have shown that up to and beyond the beginning of the religious changes imposed by the crown, the old ways continued to be supported and loved. People paid for chantry chapels to be built, masses to be said for the dead, rood screens and images of saints to be installed, rich vestments and vessels to be used in the services of the church. The history of Dickens and his followers says more about the battles within the twentieth century church than it does about the attitudes of the sixteenth century. As Christopher Haigh puts it:

The Reformation had been rescued from the Anglo-Catholics, and made properly Protestant –(It sometimes seems to me that Reformation history is just a convenient battlefield in the struggle for the soul of the Church of England – but that is a wicked thought.)²

The second you will often hear in the more “catholic” churches of the Church of England: the English reformation never happened, at least in the way it happened on the continent. All that happened was a minimal reform of corrupt church practices (which our dear, but slower, brethren in the Roman Catholic church finally caught up with in the 1960s!). The Church of England in the 1570s was exactly the same as it had been in the 1070s and exactly the same as it was in the 1870s/1970s.

The myth of the English Reformation is that it did not happen, or that it happened by accident rather than design, or that it was halfhearted and sought a middle way between Catholicism and Protestantism; the point at issue is the identity of the Church of England.³

The truth is, of course, somewhere between the two. The English Reformation was immeasurably more complex than the convenient, party-line, myths allow. It was the product of political expediency, imposed from above, from the highest positions in the realm, and it stuck a chord with (at first a tiny number) of the ordinary people of England. There was nothing inevitable about it, and even by the 1570s the reforming movements in the Church might have gone one of three different ways: Presbyterian, Catholic or some strange third way, which eventually became the <irony>best of all possible solutions</irony>, Anglicanism.

1. A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation, (1989), p. 17. [↩]
2. Christopher Haigh, ‘A. G. Dickens and the English Reformation’ in Historical Research, vol. 77, no. 195 (February 2004), p. 31. [↩]
3. Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘The Myth of the English Reformation’, The Journal of British Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1. (Jan., 1991), pp. 1-19. [↩]