The Awful, Awful Tudors

William Warham by Hans Holbein

IT SEEMS AN EXCEEDlNGLY STRANGE COINCIDENCE THAT

the greatest turning point in the history of the church in England, the cri-

sis after which nothing would ever be the same, occurred at almost pre-

cisely the same time that the religious life of central Europe was also

being violently transformed. What is strange is that these two simultane-

ous revolutions happened independently of each other, rose out of radi-

cally different circumstances and causes, and ultimately unfolded in

distinctly different ways.

Certainly at some deep level having to do with the spirit of the age,

this wasn't a coincidence at all. Be that as it may, when Martin Luther

fastened his ninety-five theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral in

1517 he set off a powder keg of a kind that simply did not exist in En-

gland. His revolt was neither the cause of nor the inspiration for the up-

heaval that Henry Vlll put in motion a decade and a half later. Henry in

fact loathed what he knew of Luther, and loathed many of the defining

ideas of Luther's theology. Long before declaring war on the pope, Henry

made himself the avowed enemy of Friar Luther and his war on the

pope. For the book in which he responded to Luther's heresies (he had

help in writing it, especially from Thomas More and John Fisher), he was

rewarded with the title Defender of the Faith by—it would become the

ultimate irony—the pope in Rome himself. .

Luther'repaid the king in full. First he declared in a book of his own

that Henry was a villain and fool and tool of the Antichrist, a ”damnable

rottenness and worm.” Later he denied that Henry had any right to di-

vorce Catherine of Aragon, suggesting instead that he commit bigamy.

And yet, though both would have been pained to think so, Henry and

Luther were intimately linked. Such intellectual support as Henry found

for his revolution came largely from Englishmen whose thinking had

been strongly influenced by Luther's. And Luther's impact could never

have been as widespread as it finally proved to be if not for the resources

that Henry's revolt made available to the Protestant cause.

There is irony in all this. From the beginning of his reign to the end,

Henry thought of himself as not only a good Catholic but literally the

best and most orthodox of Catholics—better than the pope, in the end,

because better connected to God. Hence his revulsion toward the

books, written in Latin mainly and reproduced in great numbers thanks

to the recent invention of movable type, that Luther was turning out with,

dazzling speed and spreading to every corner of Europe as his dispute

with the papacy escalated into schism. His beliefs as they matured—that

man is so corrupted by original sin as to be incapable of acting freely,

that therefore he can do nothing to merit salvation, that therefore faith

alone can "justify" him or free him from the consequences of sin, and fi-

nally that acts of charity and self-denial and prayers for the dead must all

be without effect—added up to a blunt repudiation of Henry’s very

Catholic views. Luther insisted that the Bible is the sole source of truth,

that baptism and the Eucharist are the only valid sacraments and priests

have no more power than any layman, that people are predestined to

salvation or damnation and can do nothing to alter their fate—ideas no

less offensive to the English king than to Rome. They were no more con-

sistent with Henry's expanding view of his own role than with the most

ambitious assertions of the popes.

Luther's first moves onto radical theological ground were viewed with

enthusiasm, even with excitement, in a Germany where many people

had long regarded Rome as an alien force, remote, exploitive, and cor-

rupt. The accusations that he leveled against the institutional church re-

ceived so much support and encouragement, even from powerful nobles

and influential members of the clergy, that Luther himself must have

been taken by surprise. Certainly he was emboldened to carry his attack

further. When the emperor Charles tried and failed to silence him and

even had him outlawed without effect, Luther found himself free to fol-

low his ideas wherever they led. What he found, in developing them,

was release from agonies experienced during years of struggle with an

intense sense of his own sinfulness. The resolution at which he arrived,

the conviction that neither he nor anyone could do anything to merit sal-

vation but salvation was possible all the same as an undeserved gift from

God, persuaded him that his struggle had always been not only futile but

unnecessary. He thereby brought that struggle to an end. But this answer

also reduced to futility his monastic vocation, which he had always pur-

sued so rigorously, so self-punishingly, that his Augustinian superiors had

warned him against excessive scruples. In fact it rendered the church it-

self futile—-left no place for the church as it then existed. Thus it left no

place for a pope. The gulf that opened between Luther and Henry VIII

never narrowed even as Henry changed from one of the pope's most

dutiful sons into one of his most implacable enemies. Luther, having

crossed swords with Rome and emerged not only unharmed but a Ger-

man national hero, became contemptuous of the very idea of ecclesias-

tical hierarchy. He decided that the papacy must be the shadowy enemy

of Christ that the New Testament's Book of Revelation calls the Whore of

Babylon. This took him down paths where the king of England had no in-

tention of following.

One trait that Henry and Luther shared was a conviction that the

whole world should agree with them, reinforced by an expectation that

it would. The resistance that both encountered should not have surprised

them but did. What was worst for Luther, what enraged him because it

made a mockery of his determination to construct a new religious unity

on the ruins of the old, was the way the reform movement itself began

to fragment and fragment again as men who had begun by rejecting

Catholic doctrine went on to reject Lutheran doctrine as well.

The first aberration was the most dangerous, and the most horrible in

its consequences. By 1524, only seven years after Luther had first chal-

lenged Rome's practice of selling ”indulgences” (which were rather like

get-out-of-Purgatory-free cards), common people across Germany were

inspired by his example to mount challenges of their own not only to the

ecclesiastical authorities (hated in Germany to a degree unimaginable in

England), but to the secular rulers as well. The result was the Peasants’

War, as large an uprising by an underclass as Europe had ever seen. The

aims of the rebellion were more secular than religious—an end to enclo-

sures of farmland long held in common, for example, and a restoration

of the feudal rights of the peasantry—but the rebels looked to Luther as

their natural leader. This put him in a severely awkward position. The

peasants were doing what he himself had done: not only questioning but

defying traditional authority. But if he endorsed their rebellion he would

alienate the many princes who, by separating their domains from Rome

and confiscating church lands, had helped to make his revolt a world-

changing event. He took the safer course, condemning the rebels in the

most hateful terms imaginable and urging their rulers not only to sup-

press but to exterminate them. What followed was the butchering of an

estimated one hundred thousand people, many of them armed only,

where they were armed at all, with farm implements. The idea that Chris-

tians owe unqualified obedience to the state became at that point deeply

implanted in Lutheranism and therefore in the psyche of Protestant

northern Germany. What was implanted in southern and western Ger-

many and Austria, where the rebellion had been most widespread and

the reprisals most savage, was a deep popular antipathy for the whole

Lutheran phenomenon. In Switzerland, too, where the reformist leader

Huldrych Zwingli had supported the rebels, the Peasants’ War opened

up new divisions.

Zwingli would have been lost to Luther in any case, because in

Luther’s eyes he went too far in his rejection of established dogma and

practice. Luther believed, in almost the same way as Catholics, that the

living Jesus really was present in the Eucharist, holy communion;

Zwingli believed that the Eucharist was merely symbolic. Luther be-

lieved that religious art—paintings, statues, crucifixes, stained-glass win-

dows—fostered piety and should be encouraged; to Zwingli such things

were idolatrous. Zwingli separated himself from Luther on the question

of free will, arguing that with the help of God people are capable of

choosing to live in accordance with the commandments. Luther be-

lieved no such thing: in his view, Scripture offers its admonitions to do

good and avoid evil only to impress upon believers how impossible it is

for them to do either, so that they will put all their faith in God's unde-

served mercy and attach no value to the actions of their unworthy selves.

Thus did reform separate first into two main branches, German

Lutheranism and a more austere, puritanical Swiss variant, and then,

after surprisingly few years, into a multitude of sects. The most notorious

were the Anabaptists, so named because they rejected the ancient prac-

tice, which Luther had retained, of infant baptism. Some of the Anabap-

tists were radical to the point of lunacy. In 1534 they seized control of

the German city of Munster from the Lutherans who had recently ex-

pelled the local Catholic bishop. Under the leadership of a man named -

Jan Beuckelson, who declared himself king of the new Jerusalem and

said he was following the example of the Old Testament patriarchs in

taking sixteen wives, they announced that the second coming of Jesus

was imminent and that it was the duty of believers to make war on their

oppressors. They were considered such a threat that Catholics and

Lutherans joined forces to take Munster back from them, after which

Anabaptists everywhere were ferociously suppressed. Those who fled to

England were rounded up and jailed, and those who refused to recant,

Henry had burned.

As it broke into divergent and even warring factions, the evangelical

movement—a name signifying elevation of the Bible over other author-

ity—lost the momentum of its rapid early growth. The violent rise and

fall of the Munster Anabaptists worsened the fear of innovation to which

the Peasants’ War had given rise. Even in England, as early as 1531, a

king already at loggerheads with Rome was putting evangelicals to

death. Thomas Bilney, a popular young preacher who attached more im-

portance to Scripture than Henry found acceptable, was burned at the

stake at Smithfield. John Frith, another young evangelical with many ad-

mirers, met the same fate for his Zwinglian views on the Eucharist.

Luther and his followers had long entertained hopes of winning over

Europe's leading humanist and scriptural scholar, Erasmus of Rotterdam.

They had reason to do so: like Luther a disaffected Augustinian friar,

Erasmus was for years a vocal and influential critic of a church that he

saw as badly in need of reform. But he had not left the church, and for

years he did not respond to appeals from evangelicals and traditionalists

alike that he enter the fray on their side. When he finally did so, it was in

a way that gave Luther fresh cause to be furious. In an austerely scholarly

treatise, carefully limiting himself to only one of the issues separating

Luther from Rome and to evidence taken from Scripture because he

knew that Luther would accept no other authority, Erasmus argued that

the father of the Reformation was wrong- that man does have free will.

It was a restrained testament to say the least, but it put an end to any

thought that the greatest humanist of the age would be joining forces

with the greatest reformer. Protestantism continued to split into so many

factions over so many issues that it seemed, in- Luther's words, to have

"nearly as many sects as there are heads.”

As for England, from where Luther sat it must have been a very hard

place to understand. The church of HenryVlll was not evangelical and it

was not Roman Catholic. No one in either camp could have imagined 

that in the next three decades it would become first the former, then the

latter and finally go off in a third direction of its own devising-

from The Tudors by G.J Meyer

also:

WHEN EDWARD VI BECAME KING, MARTIN LUTHER HAD

been dead for thirteen months and the Lutheran part of the Reformation

had largely run its course. After changing the world, the former Friar

Martin had withdrawn into a relatively quiet life as the father of a grow-

ing family and a writer of biblical commentaries. In the last decade of his

life he was tortured by constipation, hemorrhoids, and kidney stones,

plagued by the scandal that had erupted when he endorsed bigamy, and

increasingly consumed by a virulent anti-Semitism. (Three days before

his death he preached a sermon urging the expulsion of the Jews from

Germany.) His theology, having conquered half of Germany and all of

‘Scandinavia, had been overtaken on the cutting edge of the religious

revolution by newer varieties of Protestant belief.

Edward became king, therefore, at the point where a second genera-

tion of evangelical thinkers, based in Switzerland rather than Germany,

was making itself heard. Its increasingly dominant member was a

Frenchman living in Switzerland, John Calvin, one of history's most

paradoxical figures. In assuming the leadership of a revolt against the

authority of the Roman church, Calvin came to claim for himself more

power than any Renaissance pope had ever dared to do. He not only de-

clared himself to be something very like the infallible head of a one true

church of his own devising——any lunatic might have done that, and one

or two of the sixteenth century’s more interesting lunatics did—-but

through willpower, sheer force of intellect, and unshakable integrity he

largely made good on that claim. In the little city of Geneva, a place not

particularly friendly to reform, he constructed a regime that came about

as close as anything in Europe ever had to an enduring totalitarian theoc-

racy. In laying down the rules by which the people of Geneva (and, by

implication, the whole Christian world) were to live, and more impor-

tant by articulating a rationale for the validity of those rules, he made

mote from his home base as Scotland (where his disciples transformed

not only the church but the culture) and England (where his teachings

triggered the Puritan movement), it was Calvin more than Luther who

defined what it was to be Protestant. The reach of his ideas is evident

in the fact that from 1550 to 1650, a century that encompassed the ca-

reers of Shakespeare and other writers of gigantic stature, Calvin was En-

gland’s most published author. This happened although Calvin never set

foot in England, rarely showed more than passing interest in its affairs,

and was reviled by an Anglican church that persecuted his followers and

attempted to suppress his teachings.

Both in background and in temperament, Calvin was profoundly dif-

ferent from Luther. He was trained in the law rather than in theology, and

much of his impact was rooted in a lawyerly impulse to systematize, to

impose order on what can sometimes seem the disorder, the emotional

excess, of Luther’s attacks first on the abuses of the church and then on

some of its doctrines. Born in 1509 (the family name was Cauvin, Latin-

ized as ”Calvinus” when young Jean began putting his ideas in writing),

he was raised by a devoutly Catholic mother but came of age in a France

that was being shaken apart by the disputes that Luther had ignited. He

was drawn to the cause of reform while still a student in Paris, where he

began acquiring the mastery of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew that woyld

make him one of Europe’s most formidable Scripture scholars. The be-

liefs that he adopted at this early stage were, not surprisingly, almost

identical to what Luther was then preaching. Thus he agreed with

Luther’s view that original sin had so damaged the human soul as to

make it impossible for anyone to merit salvation and that man was there-

fore entirely dependent upon a divine grace that cannot be earned. Like

Luther, he repudiated most of the traditional sacraments (all, in fact,

except baptism and the Eucharist) along with the practices (celibacy,

fasting, pilgrimages, and indulgences, for example) that the Catholic

Church had long offered as ways of winning divine favor. Throughout hiS

public life Calvin displayed a hatred of Rome at least as intense as

Luther’s, but he never descended to the kind of childishly scatological

rhetoric with which the German reformer defaced so much of his own

writing. (Thomas More and others, to their own everlasting shame, an-

swered him in kind)

Theologically, Calvin soon went beyond Luther. He is best known for

making explicit something that had remained implicit in Luther: the con-

clusion that, because fallen man has no free will and can do nothing to

win salvation or escape damnation, some are predestined to be saved

while others are predestined for hell. The saved are the elect, in Calvin’s

system. Though they can be recognized by their acceptance of divine

truth, their love of the Eucharist, and their upright conduct, these are not

the means by which they achieve salvation but rather a sign of election.

Calvin’s notion of "double predestination”—of some being marked for

damnation just as surely as others are fated for salvation—has too often

been regarded as the centerpiece of his theology. It is said to have made

his God a kind of insanely cruel monster and to explain the severity of

the regimen that Calvin imposed upon Geneva. ln fact, however, Calvin

regarded predestination as logically inescapable but otherwise beyond

human understanding and in practical terms not of great importance. It

was his followers who, after his death, moved predestination closer to

the center of ”Calvinist” belief. Calvin’s own view was that the idea of

predestination should make it possible for believers to set aside their

anxieties about earning salvation and put their trust in the mercy of a

gentle, compassionate divine father (who was also, Calvin suggested, a

loving mother). Calvin was generally disinclined to take a passionate in-

terest in theological questions that consumed many of his contempo-

raries but seemed to him to have little practical value in addressing the

needs of the elect. He finessed one of the most contentious of issues, for

example, by declaring that Christ was really present in the Eucharist but

only in a “spiritual” sense, and letting it go at that. He regarded the heart

as more important than the intellect in establishing a right relationship

with God.

What separated Calvin from the Lutherans most radically, at least in

terms of practical consequences, was his approach to the governance of

the church as well as—church and state being inextricably connected in

his system—the civil society. Luther, in renouncing the traditional

Church, had discarded Catholic belief in a priesthood endowed with

special authority and unique sacramental faculties. In its place he of-

fered a ”priesthood of all believers,” and while acknowledging the

Church as a legitimately distinct element of society, he emphatically sub-

ordinated it (especially after the Peasants’ War) to civil authority For

Calvin, by contrast, the church and its clergy retained a unique author-

ity, with not only the right but the duty to reshape the world in such a

way as to make it a fit habitation for the elect. Hence one of the defining

characteristics of Calvinism (and the Puritanism to which it gave rise in

England): a zealous commitment to making the world a fully realized

part of Christ's kingdom. Curiously, people who believed they could do

nothing to alter their eternal destinies nevertheless dedicated themselves

to making everyone in the world conduct themselves in a holy manner

as Calvin defined holiness. This was a matter of duty, and its aim was not

to save souls but to protect the elect from the doomed.

Calvin’s whole career was an expression of commitment to a Chris-

tian reordering of society. He came early to be certain not only that

Catholicism was a gross perversion of the gospel- his contempt for the

old religion appears at times to border on the pathological- but that he

himself, by reading Scripture correctly, had found in it truths that Euro-

pean Christianity had either intentionally suppressed or, more charita-

bly, remained blind to for more than a thousand years. Among his

recovered truths were highly specific instructions as to how the church

and the community of believers should be organized and managed. It

was of course extraordinary, his conviction that virtually all of Christen-

dom had been grievously in error almost from the beginning and that he

alone was free of error. On its face it was outlandish. But in the theolog-

ical confusion of the sixteenth century, Calvin’s impregnable self:

confidence and the clarity of his ideas brought him an eager audience.

Most of his core ideas were already in place when, in 1536, Calvin

happened to make an overnight stop in Geneva and was persuaded to

' remain there and join the embattled local forces of reform. He quickly

showed himselfto be the most unhesitating and uncompromising of cru-

saders, answering disagreement with scorn and demanding that every-

one in the city either assent to his beliefs or face excommunication and

expulsion. During his first months in Geneva he published the first edi-

tion of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, which as it evolved would

become arguably the most important single work in the history of Protes-

tantism. When after two years he insisted that the city council submit t0

the authority of the clergy—to his authority, in effect-—he found that he

had overreached. Now it was he who was sent into exile.

c Geneva remained a religious cockpit, however, and the most ambi-

Background - CALVIN 361

tious of its reformers soon were yearning once again for strong leader-

ship. In 1541 Calvin was invited to return. He did so on very nearly his

own terms, demanding that the council enact and enforce his Ecclesias-

tical Ordinances, and from that point until the end of his life twenty-three

years later he outmaneuvered one after another of his adversaries until

Geneva became the Sparta of Protestant Europe. His rules were not only

given the force of law but declared "holy doctrine”—infallible, or some-

thing not easily distinguished from it. The regime that he imposed was

democratic in the sense that church members chose their pastors, but

once chosen, those pastors, working with and through lay elders, were

able to rule virtually unchallenged. Eventually Calvin’s consistory, an ec-

clesiastical court presided over by the pastors, was empowered to inves-

tigate and discipline anyone in the city. Not only drunkenness, gambling,

and sexual promiscuity but dancing, singing outside church, swearing,

and failing to attend sermons became crimes. Catholic practice, of

course, was absolutely forbidden. Punishments ranged from reprimands

and public confession to beatings, banishment, even execution. In a five-

year period toward the end of Calvin’s career, fifty-eight Genevans were

sentenced to death, seventy-six exiled.

 Calvin became a major force in England’s religious evolution without

really trying to do so. Many of the evangelicals who could not accept

Henry VIII's quasi Catholic church had taken up exile in Geneva, where

Calvin's mind and personality powerfully affected their beliefs. When

they flooded back into England after Edward VI's accession, they carried

a white-hot Calvinist fervor with them. They formed the nucleus of what 

would become a potent new element in English national life. They

sparked a movement that knew what it wanted, knew that it was right,

knew that its opposition was damnably wrong in the most literal sense,

and was not inclined to compromise.