The Beginnings of the Anglican Church
By Rev. H. E. G. Rope., M.A.
International Catholic Truth Society No.ctsa011 (1912)
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Chapter I: Henry Sets Up a New Schismatical Church
The Witness of Anglican Historians
A pamphlet has come to my hands entitled 'The Anglican Church and Henry VIII' by the Rev. S. C. Hughson (West Park, N. Y., Holy Cross Press, 1926), with a commendatory letter by the Right Rev. Thomas F. Gailor, President of the National Council, containing the words: "we have been waiting long for just such a clear and irrefutable presentation of the facts as you have made", which is as good an example of a definition by contraries as could be wished.
The thesis of the author is that "the Roman Catholic gibe that Henry VIII founded the Anglican Church... involves the Roman Church herself in a deliberate policy of maintaining communion for more than a generation with a Church which she now holds to be man-made." This is also a fair sample of the author's method, to which it would need a Cobbett to do justice. In the first place the "Roman Catholic gibe" was a familiar Anglican boast before the forgery of "continuity" became fashionable; in the second the Roman Church did not maintain communion with a 'Church' which she always held to be man-made, and the writer's assertion is an impudent fiction. I cannot use any milder term.
That the Henrician Church of England was a new Church is admitted by those who have no Anglican axe to grind. An Anglican historian of Oxford tells us "the University was used as an instrument to advance the political or ecclesiastical aims of the Sovereign. Henry VIII had obtained its sanction to his divorce and to his revolt against Rome; the Protector Somerset and Cranmer determined to reform it in the interests of the new Anglican Church" (G. C. Brodrick Hist. Univ. Oxf. (1886) vii. 80). That is explicit. Another Oxford Anglican scholar insists upon the discontinuity which Catholics have always maintained between the Church of England and the post-Reformation Church in England.
"It is difficult to study the actual facts of sixteenth-century history, putting apart preconceived ecclesiastical theories, without arriving at the conclusion that the English National Church was as completely the creation of Henry VIII., Edward's Council, and Elizabeth, as Saxon Protestantism was of Luther or Swiss of Calvin or of Zwingle. Obviously no man who sets forth a distinctive form of Christianity can proclaim himself the founder of a new religion or a new Church as such. So long as the new organization claims to be Christian at all, it must go for its foundation to Jesus Christ and His Apostles, and he himself can appear only as a reformer, a restorer of what professes, and must profess, to be the religion which they delivered to mankind." (G. W. Child, Ch. & State under the Tudors, 1890, p. 272.)
Again, "the history of the Church in England was continuous from the Mission of Augustine — or, if we prefer it, from the Synod of Whitby — to the time when Henry VIII, upon a disagreement with the Pope about his divorce, cast off his allegiance to the Papacy. From that time to the present, with the short interval between the reconciliation under Mary, and Elizabeth's first Parliament, it had been severed and excommunicated by the great body of the Catholic Church: and as the latter was before precisely that which it has continued since, it is clear that the former must have been something not the same; and it is not the retention of a few names and titles, used in a kind of 'second intention', and a few more or less amputated rites, which will ever make persons intelligently instructed believe that an establishment which obviously is the mere creature of the State, is the legitimate and adequate representative of that imposing and magnificent Western Church, which is older than any existing State in Europe, and grander than anything that the world has ever seen." (Ibid. 273.)
And thus in his summing up. "A fair consideration of the actual facts of the Tudor history serves further to show that a theory like that which prevails so widely at present — which represents the English Church in any other light than that of one (though it may, perhaps, be admitted, the greatest and most dignified) of the many Protestant Churches which arose in the sixteenth century — is a novelty which took its very earliest rise some half-century or more after the separation from Rome, as a direct consequence of Elizabeth's determination to give no quarter to the earlier Puritans, and which made little or no progress for another half-century still. The evidence is simply overwhelming which shows, that during the whole period from 1552 onwards the English Church was considered, by friends and foes alike, to be for all intents and purposes one with the Swiss Churches of Zurich and Geneva. The divines of the Church of England during the period in question, differed, no doubt, among themselves on those minor points which, as we have seen, were so nearly carried in favor of the Puritans in the convocation of 1562; but their great anxieties were two only, viz; to shake themselves free from 'the tyranny of the Bishop of Rome and all his detestable enormities' — to use words which were sounded forth in all the churches of the land as one of the petitions in the Litany — and secondly, to claim brotherhood and sympathy with the Protestant leaders in Switzerland and on the Upper Rhine. This remains true notwithstanding the fact that Henry VIII, who gave the first impulse to the Reformation in England, was no Protestant, and no friend to Protestants." (p.p. 273-4).
"The Roman Catholic gibe" began pretty early! In their proclamation heralding the Northern rising of 1569 the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland denounce "new-set-up nobles... who have also set up and maintained a new-found religion and heresy, contrary to God's word," and at the scaffold the former declared: "Know, therefore, that from my earliest years down to this present day, I have held the Faith of that Church which, throughout the whole Christian world, is knit and bound together; and that in this same Faith I am about to end this unhappy life. But as for this new Church of England, I do not acknowledge it." Palmer, the Anglican minister, interrupted him, "I see that you are dying an obstinate Papist, a member, not of the Catholic, but of the Roman Church." And the Earl answered: "that which you call the Roman Church is the Catholic Church, which has been founded on the teachings of the Apostles, Jesus Christ Himself being its corner-stone, strengthened by the blood of Martyrs, honored by the recognition of the Holy Fathers; and it continues always the same, being the Church against which, as Christ our Saviour said, the gates of Hell shall not prevail". (Lives of the English Martyrs, ed. Camm, 1914, vol. 2, p.p. 178-9, quoting the martyr's contemporary, Sander.)
True, the martyr's repudiation is directly aimed at the Elizabethan, not the Henrician Church of England, but the Rev. Mr. Hughson, though wrongly, identifies these, and the general repudiation of all bodies separated from Rome is clear and emphatic.
Papal Authority in England Before 1534
"The study of the case shows that the English Church repudiated the Pope's claim to universal authority in 1534" (page 3). This is a masterpiece of false suggestion.
In the first place, there was no such thing as an English Church, but merely two provinces of the universal Catholic Church. This has been set forth with ample proof by a non-Catholic authority of the first standing, the late Professor F. W. Maitland:
"You wish to sue as co-defendants a man who lives at Lincoln and another who lives at York. What are you going to do? No English prelate has power over both these men. In the judicial system Canterbury is a unit and York is a unit; but England is no unit. Too often we speak of 'the Church of England' and forget that there was no ecclesiastically organised body that answered to that name. No tie of an ecclesiastical or spiritual kind bound the bishop of Chichester to the bishop of Carlisle, except that which bound them both to French and Spanish bishops." (Roman Canon Law in the Church of England p.p. 113-114.)
Mr. Gilbert W. Child, in his valuable work on Church and State under the Tudors (1890) is no less explicit. "The result then, of our review of the history of the Church in England before the reign of Henry VIII, is, that up to that time there was not, and indeed could not be, a National Church in any intelligible sense of the words. Positively the only historical facts which tend to support the now prevalent theory of the national character of the Church in England during the Middle Ages, are to be found in the series of antipapal statutes enacted under the Plantagenet and later kings. The true explanation of these is that quoted above from Bishop Stubbs, and amounts to the fact that they were intended to prevent the encroachment of the popes into the region of temporal government. Even in this, as we have seen, they were not remarkably successful. They were continually infringed by the kings themselves, and sometimes by their subjects; they had an incurable tendency to fall into abeyance; and moreover they were all passed at a time in which the Papacy was in a state of depression, and as soon as it revived, under Martin V., they were almost forgotten — to such an extent, at least, that when Henry VIII suddenly revived the Statue of Praemunire, no one knew what it meant, and he was able to attach to it just what value pleased him. Under Henry VIII, all this was completely changed. On the fall of Wolsey, he undertook on his own account a reform of the Church, which ended in nothing short of a revolution. By an ingenious application of the Statute of Praemunire, he drove the clergy into a submission to himself which was practically unconditional, and he induced Parliament, by a series of measures culminating in the Act of Appeals and the Act of Supremacy, to simply transfer the whole of the papal power from the Pope to himself and his successors." (xii. 261-2).
Three years ago, Dr. Goudge, Canon of Christ Church and Professor of Divinity at Oxford, who is Anglican enough, I should hope, asked: "What are we to say of the English Reformation?... Let us tell the truth about it. It was largely inspired by the kind of nationalism which is inconsistent with Christianity." (quoted in the Catholic Times, 1 Aug. 1925).
The notion of a national established Church before Henry VIII is one of the many fairy-tales with which modern Anglicans strive to deceive themselves and their readers in their conspiracy against history, it is indeed "such stuff as dreams are made of". English nationalism or an English nation can hardly be said to exist before the fourteenth century, to which may be added, in a very modified sense, the later Anglo-Saxon period. But the Church existed in England and was quite specially papal.
Another non-Catholic writer, T. Kirkup declares: "With such events as the abolition of the papal power in England and the dissolution of the monasteries, modern England begins, they inaugurate a fundamental change in the national policy and in the structure and habits of society. While the purpose, real or ostensible, of Henry had been merely to marry a younger woman and provide for the succession, he had effected the greatest revolution which England has undergone." (Encyl. Brit. ed. 9. xi. 664).
The Clergy Dragooned
This work was the work of the King, aided by Cromwell and Cranmer, worthy pair! but not of the Church. Gardiner was the most conservative of those who (for the time) yielded, and the most resolute in opposing the heresies openly avowed by Cranmer as soon as it was safe for Henry's slave to do so. Again, I quote an Anglican historian:
"Yet there was no doubt of one thing which indeed was fully testified by Bishop Thirlby, even in bearing witness to his obedience. Gardiner personally disliked the religious changes that had taken place, not only in the present but during the last reign. He had always disliked innovations, and had been 'earnest against alterations, as well concerning the Bishop of Rome as other orders in religion' (Foxe vi. 190." (Gairdner's Lollardy &c. III. VI. i. 237).
To the same effect writes his latest Anglican biographer, the American Professor J. A. Muller, Stephen Gardiner & the Tudor Reaction, 1926. In connection with the Ratisbon incident, Gardiner took the grave risk of correspondence with the Pope, when "but for Gardiner's astuteness Henry's throne at that time might really have been a little insecure." (Gairdner ut supra. 237-8.)
In the second place, it was only through repeated menace that the English Herod gradually extorted from a cowed episcopate a reluctant surrender to his sacriligeous supremacy which they tried in vain to limit "as far as the law of Christ permits". Either the author of the pamphlet knows this perfectly well, and knows too that in Cobbett's words this enterprise "was engendered in beastly lust, brought forth in hypocrisy and perfidy, and cherished and fed by plunder, devastation and by rivers of innocent English and Irish blood". (Hist. Prot. Reformation, i. § 4.) or else he has no business to write on a subject of which he is ignorant. In either case he is grossly wronging his readers.
Cranmer of course was a willing tool in the schism of 1534, already a notorious married heretic protected by royal connivance, — as ardent a Catholic as ever Lenin and Calles were! Of the rest, as Bishop Scott said in Elizabeth's first Parliament: "of the learned men that were the doers thereof, so many as were dead, before they died, were penitent, and cried God mercy for their act; and those that do live, as all your Lordships do know, hath openly revoked the same, acknowledging their error". (Quoted in Bridgett & Knox, Q. Elizabeth and the Catholic Hierarchy ii. 21).
The Rev. Mr. Hughson romances as though the enforced submission of the clergy were their stoutly achieved emancipation! In point of fact they were degraded into state officials by the Royal Supremacy. The historian Gilbert Child scorns "the pretence that the clergy were in any sense free agents in the ecclesiastical legislation of Henry VIII. That legislation became, notwithstanding, the law of the land, and remains in a very great measure the law of the land still; and by it, as we shall see more and more clearly as we advance, the Church surrendered or was driven from every rag of independence of the State". (Ch. & State, pp. 67-68).
Again, "the whole history of the years in question, as it is read in the State papers and drawn out in Appendix IV to the Report of the Ecclesiastical Courts Commission, shows plainly that the great changes brought about in the position of the English Church were entirely the work of Henry and of Cromwell, with the willing co-operation of Parliament, but that the clergy were helpless tools in their hands throughout — they were either not consulted or else dragooned." (Ibid. p. 99).
Once more: "By the help of his Parliament he coerced the clergy into joining him in repudiating the Pope, and he punished the Pope not only by annulling his authority but by depriving him of his revenue; and then he proceeded to transfer both authority and revenue to his own person, while all the time he maintained the Church in appearance very much as it was before, and made it, in fact, far more subservient to himself than it ever had been to the Pope." (Ibid. 101-102.)
Henry's Qualifications as an Orthodox Reformer
With regard to Henry, whose work of revolution so gratified the Rev. S. C. Hughson, a few Anglican testimonies as to his motives and character may here be given. His qualification to act as a reformer and author of spiritual changes is thus glanced at by the Elizabethan Archbishop of Canterbury, Whitgift, who writes to Queen Elizabeth: "and, though I shall forbear to speak reproachfully of your father... I consider that, after the violation of those laws, to which he had sworn in Magna Charta, God did so far deny him his restraining grace, that, as king Saul after he was forsaken of God fell from one sin to another, so he, till at last he fell into greater sins than I am willing to mention." (in Wks. 1853, III. Biog. Memoir, p. XV.)
This is the company which the Rev. S. C. Hughson, whose own reference to Henry is not complimentary, prefers to that of St. Gregory or St. Augustine, St. Bede, St. Aldhelm, St. Dunstan, St. Edward, St. Anselm, St. Thomas of Canterbury, St. Thomas of Hereford, St. Richard of Chichester, Henry VI, Blessed Thomas More, Blessed John Fisher, and the other martyrs of Henry's reign! A significant choice, and a worthy patron! "Anglo-Catholic" Protestants may be known by the company they force themselves to keep rather than acknowledge the obvious truth.
But what about Henry's sincerity in revolting from the Church and in professing such zeal for all Catholic doctrines excepting the now inconvenient papal supremacy? Let an honest Anglican historian inform us:
"Henry VIII, with a view to getting married to Anne Boleyn, was secretly encouraging heresy while quietly putting forth proclamations against it." (J. Gairdner Lollardy & the Eng. Reformation. II. IV. i. 235).
"Henry's orthodoxy — not in theory, it is true, but in practice — was governed not a little by the political barometer. When there was any serious danger of the Emperor and the Protestants coming to an agreement he was not unwilling that powerful friends should intercede for him with the Pope himself; and so long as the Emperor stood by him he was quite ready to listen to complaints against innovations not expressly authorized by himself." (Ibid. II. IV. iii. 412-413).
"Henry, even after his breach with Rome, was always seeking to preserve a Catholic face towards Europe, while encouraging at home and in his own Court the grossest contempt of the doctrines that he himself had so specially upheld by penal laws." (Ibid. III. V. iii. 128).
Even in the case of gross heresies against the Blessed Sacrament, Henry was not always the uncompromising champion he wished to appear before Christendom. Regarding Testwood, Filmer and Pierson, burnt at Windsor on 28 July 1543, he exclaimed privately: "'Alas, poor innocents!' So much pity His Majesty could afford them. Their offence had been merely this, that they had flagrantly violated a severe law passed, with the general approbation, only four years before, to protect from insult the Sacrament as it was then venerated by honest men, and some of the ordinances of the Church. The King himself had taken a marked interest in the enactment of that law, which he had manifestly urged; but the respect for things, sacred, alike by King and Court, was perfectly hollow, and when there was no particular object in putting on extra virtue, the law was treated with contempt by men of the most exalted station." (Ibid II. IV. iii. 404).
The following passage gives us a glimpse as it were behind the scenes, of the King's restraining Cranmer's Anti-Catholic zeal for political, not religious reasons. "Perhaps, in conference with the King — for they had certainly been discussing the matter together at Hampton Court beforehand — he (Cranmer) may also have found out that there were prudential reasons for keeping reform within some limits; for, according to Foxe, the King had already been persuaded to go still further than the Archbishop's letters suggest, — that is to say, 'to pull down the roods in every church', whereas the Archbishop's letters clearly contemplate that they should remain there. Nevertheless, even the more moderate programme had to be set aside. Cranmer sent the letters for the King's signature to the care of Sir Anthony Denny, but the King made answer: —
'I am now otherwise resolved, you shall send my lord of Canterbury word that, since I spake with him about these matters, I have received letters from my lord of Winchester, now being on the other side of the sea, about the conclusion of a league between us, the Emperor and the French King, and he writeth plainly unto us that the league will not prosper nor go forward if we make any other innovation, change or alteration, either in religion or ceremonies, than heretofore hath been already commenced and done. Wherefore my lord of Canterbury must take patience herein, and forbear until we may espy a more apt and convenient time for that purpose. (Foxe, V. 362)" (ibid. II. IV. iii 433-4.)
"This contemporary diplomatist (Marillac, French Ambassador to Henry VIII) understood thoroughly the real aim of the Act (of the 6 articles). Henry was not really half so much bent on putting down heretical opinions as the title of the Act would suggest: but sacramental heresies he had always opposed, and at this time he was very much concerned to make it appear to all the world that he was dead against them. He must have been perfectly aware, however, of the fact... that his most outspoken champions among the clergy against papal authority were the men most liable to indictment; and he had no more notion now than ever of allowing Papal authority again." (Ibid II. iii. IV. 205).
Again, Marillac wrote to the Constable Montmorency on 13 July 1540:
"And, certainly, Monseigneur, the principal matter put forward by this King was to complain of the Pope, who endeavored to recall his friends, the Emperor and the King (Francis) from alliance with him and get them to make war upon him on the pretext that they were all heretics and infidels here; to show the contrary of which he desired that the opinions which one ought to hold in religion should be determined, in order that everyone should know what to hold by, and that Christian princes might perceive that what the Holy Father put forth against him was untrue." (Ibid. II. III. IV. 204-5.)
Like master like man. If Cranmer blasphemed with impunity it could only be by royal connivance:
"(Early in 1543). Henry had been running riot till then in spite of the Six Articles, for 'the whip with six strings', as the heretics called it, was not very frequently laid on; and, if report spoke truly, Cranmer himself once 'booted and spurred, read a lecture on the Sacrament of the Altar, saying it was but a similitude.' We can well imagine that such a declaration 'troubled the hearers' hearts much', and we almost wonder whether they had heard him truly, seeing that the legal penalty for such an utterance was, at that time, nothing less than death. But such we know were Cranmer's avowed opinions at a later date, when the Act was repealed, and the incident was put on record four years before its repeal. What are we to think? It seems as if the Primate might take liberties with the law which another man would not dare to venture upon." (Ibid. II. IV. iii. 374-375).
Better still is Henry's own judgment upon his own work of reform and 'independence' in his harangue in Parliament on 24th Dec. 1545. He said: "And although you be permitted to read Holy Scripture," he added, "and to have the Word of God in your mother tongue, you must understand that it is licensed you so to do only to inform your own consciences and to instruct your children and family, and not to dispute and make Scripture a railing and a taunting stock against priests and teachers, as many light persons do. I am very sorry to know and hear how unreverently that most precious jewel, the Word of God, is disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every alehouse and tavern, contrary to the true meaning and doctrine of the same. And yet I am even as much sorry that the readers of the same follow it in doing so faintly and coldly; for of this I am sure that charity was never so faint against you, and virtuous and godly living never less used, nor God himself, amongst Christians, was never less reverenced, honored, or served." (In Gairdner Lollardy &c. II. iv. iii. 425-6).
Repudiation of Henry's Work
To return to the pamphlet, on pp. 4-5, we read:
"Clement VII, who was Pope at the time, did not make the slightest effort to withdraw Catholics from the Church of England. If he believed that Henry had established a new Church in which grace could not be found, surely he must have initiated instantly an effort to secure the Sacraments for England, or else stand convicted of the crime of allowing his spiritual children to go on receiving the false Sacraments of this Church." In other words he must have been guilty of lunatic folly in order to save the face of certain Anglican contortionists of 400 years later! The whole sentence is stark nonsense. No Catholic ever doubted that the Henrican church had a valid priesthood and valid sacraments, valid but not licit, exactly as in Russia. The faithful in case of necessity can receive the sacraments from such priests where no other is available. All priests can give faculties to absolve in the hour of death. Latimer could have absolved Blessed John Forest had he so willed, In England as in Rome it was thought — even by a King's man like the Duke of Norfolk — that the storm would be short-lived and vanish with the craze for Anne Boleyn.
Moreover, multitudes did not realize what had happened, many of the clergy even were at worst in material sin, and to precipitate all these into formal schism would have been not merely imprudent but insane. How was the Pope to improvise "instantly" a new English-speaking hierarchy and priesthood? How was he to land a single one of them in England? And if by a miracle any escaped swift extermination the obvious result would have been to harden the King, intensify the persecution and divide the faithful by fierce quarrels over jurisdiction. The author should have more respect for the intelligence of his readers.
The Rising in Lincolnshire, the Pilgrimage of Grace, and the fearful but glorious martyrdoms were to show that vast multitudes, including one Bishop, were clear of all assent to the schism.
The very anti-papal Canon Dixon admits that "In the very year that Barlow attained episcopal rank, 1536, which was the year of the Pilgrimage of Grace, this point, consecration, was brought forward in the Doncaster Articles of the Pilgrims of Grace; that 'the power of the Supreme head, touching cura animarum and the consecrations of bishops, should be reserved to the see of Rome as before." (Hist. Ch. of Eng. vol. 5, ch. xxxiii. p. 216).
Again, the northern clergy met at Pomfret on 2 December 1536, where "the grievances generally felt were, first, the Act of Royal Supremacy which seemed to cut off England from the Church Catholic; ...the convocation proceeded to pass resolutions in favor of papal supremacy and papal dispensations, condemning the punishment of clergymen by the civil power, and other recent innovations; demanding also, the restoration of all clergymen who had opposed the royal supremacy." (Ibid. x. 181-2).
On p. 5 the pamphlet states: "He made no protest whatever." This is simply contrary to historical truth. "He did not send a single priest to England to rescue the sheep from the false shepherds." In the first place it was impossible, in the second place the shepherds who had bent before the storm were charitably deemed to be guilty of passing weakness and not deliberate treachery. He excommunicated no-one." Then Henry VIII was no one! This is interesting. Clement VII pronounced Henry excommunicated on July 11 1533, "but still allowed him till the end of September to make his peace... before the sentence should be openly declared."* This was indeed a new way of making "no protest whatever"!
I do not understand how the author dares to flout such plain facts with such effrontery. "He went calmly on, neglecting to the uttermost the flock which he claimed God had committed to his pastoral care." This is simply fiction. He did what he could to bring back the unworthy shepherds to their, allegiance and duty and to bring the Terror to an end. If he failed, that failure does not spell neglect.
Of Paul III this romancing pamphlet declares that "for fifteen years he ruled serene on the Vatican Hill, and allowed English Catholics to make their communions at the altars of the 'new' church, and not only did not lift a finger to help them but never suggested that they needed help." That is what is palmed off upon the unwary reader for "history". On the contrary Paul III made Blessed John Fisher a Cardinal, and further in answer to the King, whose Acts "had made Henry, as we have seen, Pope of England" the pope "had retaliated by a bull of excommunication and deposition against Henry and all his abettors, thus making the separation as complete as possible on both sides." (Child Ch. & State, p. 92.) This, if less picturesque than continuitarian fiction, is historical fact. Nor is this all. Even so late as in 1546, a non-Catholic expert tells us, "Gurone Bertano was employed by Paul III on a mysterious mission which had as its object the reconciliation of England with Rome." (C. G. Bayne. Anglo-Roman Relations. 209).
It is characteristic of modern Anglo-Protestants to abuse their great exemplar and leader, to whom they owe everything, including their hatred of historical verities.
In 1547 King Henry came to the end of his career of murder, lust and cruelty. According to our modern Roman friends he had founded a new Church, and set it up against that ancient Church which had made England the glorious 'Isle of the Saints'. But in spite of all this, the English Church, under the head of Henry's Primate, Thomas Cranmer, went on in full communion with the Church of Rome. Rome did nothing to separate herself from the 'new' Church. She was content to be in communion with it." This is audacity indeed, not to say buffoonery, as much as if one should pretend that the eleven apostles went on in full communion with Judas and did nothing to separate themselves from him; Calvin and Luther went on in full communion with Rome, Rome did nothing to separate herself from them; or Von Bissing's government in Belgium went on in full communion with King Albert who did nothing to separate himself from him! In itself this deserves no answer but contempt, but unhappily the ignorance of history it reckons upon is now all too common. The assumption that Rome is in full communion with everybody from whom she does not expressly proclaim her separation is frivolous.
*J. Gairdner Hist. Eng. Ch. in 16th Cent. viii. 142.)
Chapter II: From Schism to Heresy Under Edward VI - The Marian Restoration
The New Ordinal, Doctrines, and Prayer-Book
Rome gave no recognition at all to the Edwardian Church, a grotesque hotchpotch of validly ordained but schismatic bishops, in the case of Cranmer and Latimer also violently heretical, and new Protestant superintendents consecrated by the Cranmerian or Edwardian ordinal which Rome has always treated as null and void. When Queen Mary restored the Catholic religion, the orders conferred by the Edwardian Ordinal (1550) were treated as non-existent, and only those conferred by the old Catholic Ordinal were taken into account. Could non-recognition, could separation go further than this 'Nescio vos'? To be tolerable pseudo-history should at least be witty, mere dull fiction is unpardonable.
To say that "the English Church, under the head of Henry's Primate Thomas Cranmer, went on in full communion with the Church of Rome" is nothing short of buffoonery. Cranmer was not its head, but Edward VI, and Cranmer began his episcopal career by perjury, protesting beforehand that he intended to violate that sworn obedience to the Holy See without which he could not then gain the pall or climb into the seat of Warham, who had died in manly and outspoken protest against all the anti-papal legislation he had, at first, too compliantly witnessed, Cranmer who spent his life in warfare against the pope, and, as soon as Henry was safely out of the way, in war against the Holy Sacrifice (which a minority of Anglicans now pretend "to have always retained although they reviled it for three centuries), and persecuted all who said or heard mass. Cranmer whose words when sentenced to die were "As for the Pope, I refuse him, as Christ's enemy and Anti-Christ, with all his false doctrines", Cranmer, who held that no consecration was necessary to make a bishop, but only royal appointment, Cranmer, who wrote "but in no wise let them worship Him (Christ), as being corporally in the bread. For he is not in it, neither spiritually, as He is in man, nor corporally, as He is in heaven, but only sacramentally, as a thing may be said to be in the figure, whereby it is signified." (Of the Eating and Drinking, iv. xi. Wks. Parker Soc., 238.)
"As far as Cranmer himself was concerned he was always receding in his writings further and further and further from both Catholic and Lutheran doctrines, and, as he himself confessed, had only allowed a few Catholic expressions still to appear in the first compilation of the Book of Common Prayers, in order not to arouse too great excitement among the people." (See Pastor's Hist, of Popes. XIII. IX. 239-240.)
Of Cranmer's second (1552) Prayer Book, "Peter Martyr wrote on June 14th, 1552, to Bullinger that all the traces which might still have nourished superstition were expurgated from it. Bullinger and Calvin, who were begged to give their opinion on it by the English refugees in 1554, considered that fault could only be found with it in points of no great importance." (Ibid. 243).
Bishop Heath was imprisoned for refusing to act when appointed to help in drawing up and approving the new Ordinal of 1550.
"In view of this I fear that, as to a recent controversy with Rome, truth compels us to confess that the sufficiency of Anglican Orders was by no means generally admitted when the new form of consecration was composed. The new ordinal was thrust upon the church much as the Great Bible was thrust upon the church, not because it was approved by the bishops, but because it suited the higher powers to have it so. Whether what was done was fatal to Anglican Orders, as the Romanists contend, I do not feel called upon to discuss. Those who think so, of course may transfer their allegiance to Rome. My humble part is only to declare what actually was done." (Gairdner Lollardy &c. III. VI. i. 180.)
Their Repudiation
On p. 7 the pamphlet gives us a portrait of Julius III, "who for six years thought the Anglican church good enough for Catholics". Julius III became Pope on 7 Feb. 1550, and died on 23 March 1555, (which does not give a reign of "six years" by any but "Anglo-Catholic" reckoning). The year before his accession had seen the First Cranmerian Prayer Book imposed by law, and a general rising against it, especially in the West of England, where the motive was purely religious. Already in 1548 there were troubles in Cornwall and the killing of an official and church-plunderer, William Body, is thus referred to by the Protestant Speed: "which fact was so favored among the rural commons of Cornwall, and Devonshire (who ever gave voice for the papal continuance) that in rebellious manner they combined against the King." (Chronicle (1611) 805 in Rose Troup The Western Rebellion of 1549, p. 94).
Sir William Paget, at this time an Anglican, wrote to the Protector on 7 July, 1549, when the boy Edward VI was supreme noddle: "The use of the Old Religion is forbidden by a law, and the use of the new is not yet printed in the stomachs of eleven or twelve parts of the realm, what countenance soever men make outwardly to please them in whom they see the power resteth."
But the Rev. S. C. Hughson, 377 years later knows better than this remarkably shrewd, well-informed politician giving evidence at the time against his own cause!
During Edward's reign, the old religion, the Catholic, was persecuted as in Mexico to-day. Many priests, still true to the old Faith, suffered martyrdom, many ministered to the Faithful in secret as best they might. To say that the Pope, unable to communicate with England, thought Anglican sacraments good enough for the faithful is as foolish as to say that Pius XI unable to provide most Scandinavian districts with church or priest thinks Lutheran sacraments good enough for them. It is childish sophistry. What Rome did think of the Edwardian Church is clear from Cardinal Pole's words and deeds.
"The Oxfordshire Papists are at last reduced to order, many of them having been apprehended and some gibbetted and their heads fastened to the walls," writes John at Ulmis to Bullinger from Oxford, on Aug. 7. 1549.
The heroic rising in the West of the same year has been told in detail by an Anglican lady, Miss Frances Rose-Troup in The Western Rebellion of 1549, (London. Smith, Elder & Co. 1913) who lays stress upon "the distinctly religious character of the Western rising" (p. 347). Among "the Articles of the Commoners of Devonshyre and Cornwall in divers Campes by East and West of Excettor" is one which gives the lie direct to the continuity-mongers: "Item we will not receyve the newe servyce because it is but lyke a Christmas game, but we wyll have our olde service of Mattins, masse, Evensong and procession in Latten as it was before." (p. 493)
"The news of Mary's accession to the throne was received with extreme joy by Pope Julius the Third; and in a consistory at Rome on the 5th of August, it was resolved to select Cardinal Pole as the Legate to be sent to England." Meanwhile the Legate in Flanders sent over Francis Commendone to report. Announcing Mary's victory and Northumberland's execution, "Commendone... arrived in Rome on the ninth day after quitting London... Julius, according to Graziani's account, was much overcome, burst into tears, and thanked God that his Pontificate should be marked by the restoration of so beautiful a country as England to the Obedience of the church. (Vie de Commendon,' pp. 53, 54, 56)" (Thus the Protestant historian, Patrick Fraser Tytler, England under the Reign of Edward VI and Mary, 1839, vol. 2, pp. 237, 239.)
Mary's reign occupied nearly two years of the Pontificate of Julius III. For the rest it was the selfish calculating policy of the Emperor, not the Pope, that imposed delays and hindrances to Pole's mission, so that the schism was not formally abrogated till the Feast of St. Andrew in 1554.
But the Rev. S. C. Hughson tells us that "for six years" he "thought the Anglican church good enough for Anglicans". During nearly two years of these "six", really five, the Anglican Church to which he had given no shadow of recognition, was not there at all, for the hierarchy was regularised early in Mary's reign, long before public reconciliation became possible. I trust, for his credit's sake, the author does not dare to suggest that the restored Catholic church was "Anglican"!
In Queen Mary's reign the old Faith of Christendom was restored, the schismatics returned gladly to the Catholic Church, the validly ordained bishops were given mission and jurisdiction, while of the Anglicans many fled abroad, for which facilities were given; others like Parker kept quiet and awaited better times, others again took to violence, sacrilege and rebellion. The new church, as an organization, simply disappeared. Even such a special pleader as Canon T. A. Lacey declares that the Henrican schism was finally closed in 1554. (The Anglo-Catholic Faith, 1926, p. 18).
Chapter III: The Revolution of 1559
Elizabeth Sets Up a New Body With Sham Bishops
Rome's Attitude
And here we come to a very important fact studiously ignored by the pamphlet, namely that the Elizabethan Establishment was a new body, endowed with the stolen titles, buildings and revenues of the Catholic Church, a new body whose nucleus certainly was the remnant of those who had been schismatics and Protestants in the days of Henry and Edward, set up by a new revolution in 1559 with a brand-new Protestant hierarchy to which Kitchin of Llandaff, the solitary apostate from the Catholic one, and no great acquisition to his new friends, gave a tardy adhesion, of which the motive deceived no one; and even he had the grace to hold aloof from ordinations under the Cranmerian rite. Cranmer indeed had drawn up the plans of the new edifice but did not live to construct it. Had Edward's reign been prolonged, it is, humanly speaking, most probable that the work of Elizabeth would have been anticipated, the old validly ordained bishops of Catholic leaning like Heath, Bonner, Gardiner, Thirlby, got rid of by death or final deprivation, and the succession of bishops, valid but irregular, handed on from 1534, extinguished. But wishes, however vehement, cannot bribe the recording Angel. What happened, and what modern High Anglicans would like to have happened, are polar contraries.
Marcellus II did not live long enough to deal with English affairs. Paul IV was nearing his end when Elizabeth began to strip off her mask, and was exceedingly slow to believe that she really meant to revolt from the Church. To Elizabeth this impetuous Pope, who had quarrelled with the Emperor and the King of Spain, showed a patience that was amazing. To construe this patient waiting for further information and for expected repentance into a connivance at Anglican heresy is outrageous. The new revolution only came into force on St. John the Baptist's Nativity, 1559, and Paul died on Aug. 18, which alone would dispose of the vile suggestion that he winked at an outburst of sacrilege seldom paralleled in history. News travelled slowly, and Rome is not given to acting upon first and hasty reports from distant countries. If "Anglo-Catholics" understood what Faith means, they would reflect that the Church of God is indwelt and guided by the Holy Spirit.
Tidings of Elizabeth's first steps in innovation would not reach Rome till well after mid-January. On Jan. 22, 1559, "in a conversation with Babou (the French Ambassador) he deplored the lamentable condition of England and the peril to which English souls were exposed (C. G. Bayne Anglo-Roman Relations, 1558-1565, Oxford Un. Press, 1913, p. 28). In March "he was 'sore moved' at events in England and described the Queen as being revolted from his obedience and this see, as he was informed." (Ibid. 29 citing Foreign Cal., 1558-9, No. 474).
"Who could tell in the year 1559 that Elizabeth was specially destined to mould things into their permanent shape? Many persons might provisionally comply with the law while waiting for a change in the immediate future, and, when no such change came about, what began by being provisional would end by being permanent." (A. O. Meyer. Engl. & the Cath. Ch. under Elis., Eng. transl., 1916, I. 30.)
No Recognition
With regard to Pius IV, we may again summon a great non-Catholic (and after-Christian) authority upon this subject to refute an ignorant slander. When it suited Elizabeth to make a feint of negotiating with the Holy See she sent Lord Sackville on an informal mission to Rome. Of his conversation with Pius IV Abbot Parpaglia has preserved an account, upon which F. W. Maitland thus comments: "It would hardly, I think, be too much to say that Elizabeth was once more told that if she would enter the Catholic fold, she might be as legitimate as the pope could make her, and that there would be no trouble about the spoils of the monasteries. On the other hand, no hint is given of any approval of her prayer book or any compromise in matters of faith or worship." (Elizabethan Gleanings, Collected Papers, vol. 3, p. 183.)
Another non-Catholic author, C. G. Bayne, C.S.I., in his monograph, Anglo-Roman Relations 1558-1565, details the repeated and persistent efforts made by Pius IV to restore the old Faith; and the missions of Parpaglia and Martinengo, the conversation with Sackville, and the correspondence of Bertano and Bruschetto witness to his activity.
"In 1563 he initiated proposals for excommunicating Elizabeth at the council of Trent." (Bayne, xii. 219). "According to a well-known story Pius actually made the attempt by offering through the Cardinal of Lorraine to confirm the Anglican prayer-book. But the story is a fiction; supported by insufficient evidence and contradicted by the whole tenor of Papal relations with England." (Ibid. xii. 220.)
"In the early days of Elizabeth's reign the number of those who remained attached to the old faith was large. These men were confronted with the question whether they could without mortal sin be present at the services prescribed by the act of uniformity. Strict Catholics answered that they could not, because the canons forbad all participation in heretical worship. But the force of custom, the fear of persecution, and the habit of blind submission to constituted authority were more powerful counsellors. The great majority of Englishmen continued to attend their parish churches under Elizabeth as they had done under Edward and Mary. A minority probably, not large, were more scrupulous. They absented themselves in spite of the law and of the persecution to which their resistance exposed them." (Bayne viii, 159-160).
I think a good case could be made out for reducing "the great majority", but at all events this is certainly not under-stating the case on the side of conformity. Next we come to the church papists. "Between these two classes there was a third, which submitted to attend morning and evening prayers but scrupled at the communion. To the earnest Catholic the protestant communion was the cup of devils and various devices were invented for evading the hated ceremony," such as absence from home at Easter, or being out of charity with a neighbour and so unfit to receive, while "another expedient to which the conscientious objector resorted was a celebration in his private chapel, where a compliant priest ministered in the orthodox way." (Bayne viii, 160-161, who gives interesting examples).
Of course a considerable part of the Anglican ministers in the early years of Elizabeth consisted of fallen-away priests, of whose valid ordination there was no doubt, nor of their grave sin in conforming. Besides these there were many 'lurking' Marian or 'old priests' as they were later called, (even so late as 1596 close upon 50 were reckoned to remain),* and these ministered to the faithful in secret. Among these also some were for tolerating external presence at Protestant sermons.
*Records of Eng. Catholics App. Vo. I, iv. in Birt Eliz. Relig. Settlement (1907) 191. The prayer book story is refuted by Fr. Pullen, S.J. in the Month, vol 100 p. 274 and Dixon's History, V, 287.
St. Pius V
"Pius V, with eager hope, now began negotiations with Henry's daughter to bring England once more beneath the papal yoke". How readily High Anglican writers fall back upon the tawdriest of Protestant cant! "the papal yoke". Much better, of course, that happy England should continue to watch the new "bishops" smashing altars and putting them in pigtroughs and privies and hunting down mass-priests and mass-hearers! "The papal yoke" — no wonder the author applauds the triumph of armed sacrilege, robbery and secularism on September 29, 1870, and the invasion of a small state in time of peace. Had it been Belgium! — but Anglo-Protestants seldom deviate into consistency or respect for inconvenient facts.
I do not know what authority there may be for "eager negotiations." For sober fact may be cited a Lutheran historian of high standing. "As soon as Pius V learnt through his English informant that the moment was propitious, he 'with exceeding joy', ordered the process against Elizabeth to be opened". (A. O. Meyer, England and the Cath. Ch. under Q. Eliz. Eng. transl. 1916, i. §v. p. 76.) St. Pius at all events did not tremble before the virago.
The English Catholics did NOT "receive all ministrations from the hands of the clergy who they now say had not even valid orders". There was no question of receiving ministrations from those whom the they never even imagined to possess valid orders; what happened was that many who did not otherwise deny the Faith saved their lands but wounded their consciences by occasional presence in the parish churches during the prayers and pulpit-rantings.
Sometimes, as Cardinal Allen tells us (Letters and Memorials, p. 56), compromise took a truly appalling form and the conforming priests would say Mass privately and house the faithful before performing the new service publicly in the Church, drugging their consciences with the plea that the latter, even the communion, was an act of civil obedience. "Others fancied they satisfied their conscience by going to service but abstaining from communion; others again, considered even the protestant communion harmless so long as it was received without inward participation — they ate "Calvin's profaned bread" with the heretics that they might secretly receive "the Lord's body" when opportunity offered", says Professor A. O. Meyer (Eng. and the Cath. under Q. Elizabeth, Eng. transl. 1916, p. 69. citing contemporary reports). Not a participation of which Anglicans need be proud, and one for which Catholic must indeed blush. As for Walsingham, he was as practised a liar as Elizabeth or Burghley or Foxe or Titus Oates, to come down no later or lower.
Non-Catholic Testimony to a Radical Change
Not only was the Elizabethan hierarchy a new thing boastfully separate from the old order, but was also a revolution in doctrine, utterly refused by the Catholic hierarchy and emphatically repudiated by convocation.
A radical change in doctrine, worship and discipline has been made by Queen and Parliament against the will of prelates and ecclesiastical Councils. The legislative power of convocations is once more subjected to royal control. The derivation of episcopal from royal jurisdiction has been once more asserted in the words of Henry VIII." (F. W. Maitland in Camb. Mod. Hist. 11, 570.)
We may also listen to Froude when he is bearing witness against his own cause:
The clergy with remarkable unanimity, had pronounced against all change; and decency required that for a religious reformation there should be some semblance or shadow of spiritual sanction. On the 31st (March 1559) therefore there was held in Westminster Abbey a theological tournament... The Protestants were returned refugees... with sufficient valor for the sham fight in which they were required only to walk with decorum over the course... it had been contrived that throughout the controversy the Protestants should have the last word... the Catholics... did not and would not understand that they were but actors in a play, of which the finale was already arranged, that they were spoiling the symmetry by altering the plan... From the first the Tower had been the destined resting place for the Catholic prelates." (Hist. Eng. Vol. 6. pp. 183-188).
Other non-Catholic witnesses are many.
"One point was clear. The Henrician Anglo-Catholicism was dead and buried." (F. W. Maitland in Camb. Mod. Hist. ii. xvi. 563.)
"But Elizabeth did not undertake to rehabilitate the Anglo-Catholicism of her father's time. There was obviously nothing to be gained by such a course. It would merely have alienated her Roman Catholic subjects without enlisting the support of her Protestant ones. These last were probably in a minority, but they included many of the richest, most progressive and most influential men in England, and their religious ideas were of a character not to be satisfied with a mere breach from Rome. They demanded concessions to the reformed theology. These concessions Elizabeth was quite willing to make, possibly because she was herself of their way of thinking, more likely because she was an indifferent theologian and attached small importance to the fine points of dogma. The result was a religious establishment which looked for its government and its ritual towards Rome and for its dogma towards Zurich and Geneva. But Elizabeth intended it to be distinct from both. In religion as in all other matters her point of view was essentially insular. Her Church was to be neither Protestant nor Roman Catholic, but, as she on one occasion declared herself to be, 'mere English'.' (Conyers Read, Mr. Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Q. Elis. I. p. 31).
Another authority of acknowledged standing, states the matter with refreshing frankness, and further agrees with Judge O'Hagan's conclusion that the defection of England was not owing to general cowardice but to the fact that her heart was set upon this world (or rather, the heart of those who had influence), and not sufficiently in earnest about the things of God to suffer and die for them.
Wholly Erastian
"Such a compromise would have had no chance of establishing itself if all men in England had been religious, and if those who were religious had thought of nothing but religion. In point of fact, there were many men who cared for the greatness of the State and for the independence of the nation far more than they cared for the prevalence of one doctrine rather than another, and a far larger number of men who were willing that a government should allow what doctrines it pleased to be taught, provided that it secured peace and plenty to the community." (Introd. to the study of Eng. Hist, by S. R. Gardiner and J. Bass Mullinger, 1882, vi. 115).
A verdict anticipated by Newman in 1851 (in his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics), and lately endorsed by one who gave up the Anglican episcopacy to become a Catholic, "Henry VIII forced the Church of England to separate itself from Catholic Christendom because he wanted to marry Anne Boleyn; the Privy Council persisted in separation because they wanted excuses for plunder; Elizabeth made the breach final to ensure her own possession of the throne: eventually the English people accepted the religion, adopted from royal policy and enforced by parliamentary forms, as their own and believed in it on the assumption of the superiority of everything English. It is impossible not be concede that insular complacence is the genius of Anglicanism." (F. J. Kinsman Salve Mater, 1920, 131).
It came eventually to be accepted, or rather acquiesced in "In this way an ecclesiastical system, weak in ecclesiastical support, was strengthened by all the forces of a government which was popular upon other grounds than its religious views, and held its ground till it had lasted long enough to avail itself of the strength given by the respect which surrounds all institutions to which men have been long accustomed." (S. R. Gardiner & J. B. Mullinger, Intro. Study Eng. Hist. 115-116).
Exaggerated nationalism has ever been schismatic in tendency, and very often heretical. The crowds who became Nestorians in Antioch or Monophysites in Egypt did not consist of learned theologians, but were full of zeal for what they supposed to be the national cause. It is not the study of Cranmer and Jewel that has kept the people of England Protestant. Exaggerated nationalism becomes itself a religion, or rather an idolatry.
"To those who were neither Catholics nor Calvinists, the predominance of the Commonwealth over every other form of association formed an ideal which was almost a religion, and of this Commonwealth, the queen herself became the embodiment. The homage, absurd as it came to be, which was paid to the imaginary beauties of the royal person was in the main only an expression of consciousness that peace and justice, the punishment of wickedness and vice, and the maintenance of good order and virtue, came primarily from the queen and secondarily from the church. (Ibid. vi. 16)
With this agrees the Catholic judgment of Raupert:
"It always seems to me that the really thoughful Englishman, had he never heard of the system of the Established Church, and were it suddenly presented to him, would smile at the absurdity of its character and constitution... His native common sense alone would cause him to look upon it with disdainful indifference... But the thing exists. It has somehow come into being, and has managed to permeate every phase of his national and personal life, and so he defends it. He defends it because it is there, and because it is an English institution. All time-worn English institutions must be good, or must at least be made to appear to be good." (J. G. Raupert Back to Rome (ed. 2.) (i. 14).
Writing in the Dublin Review of April 1927, Mr. H. O. Evennett says, p. 228: "The settlement of 1559 was a secular governmental piece of work — even if later confirmed by its ecclesiastical creation — and its best defence against the claims of Rome and Trent is, perhaps, this theory of monarchical power. Jewel's attempt to base it on lines less exclusively Erastian by representing the Parliament of 1559, not so much as the expression of the State and the Prince as a National Synod or Provincial Council of the English Church, is one to which the facts are singularly ill-suited."
Contemporary Anglican Witness
The Rev. Mr. Hughson knows better than the contemporary Anglicans who glorified in their self-separation from Rome, and testify that the Catholics refused them recognition.
On Feb. 7, 1562 Jewel tells Peter Martyr: "The Marian bishops are still confined in the tower, and are going on in their old way. If the laws were but as vigorous now as in the time of Henry, they would submit themselves without difficulty. They are an obstinate and untamed set of men, but are nevertheless subdued by terror and the sword.
We have lately published an apology for the change of religion among us, and our departure from the Church of Rome. I send you the book, though it is hardly worth sending to such in distance. It is faulty in many places, as is almost everything that is printed in this country: such is the negligence of our printers." (Zurich Letters, 1st series, No. xliii.)
Parkhurst wrote on May 21st, 1559, to Bullinger: "The Queen will not, it is true, be named the Head of the Church, although this title was offered to her; she, however, willingly accepts the title of a Ruler of the Church, which comes to the same thing. The Pope is once more driven out of England, to the great sorrow of the bishops, and the whole gang of shaven priests." (Zurich Letters, I. v 12).
In 1565, "Despising doctrinal Protestantism too keenly to do justice to its professors, Elizabeth had been long growing impatient of excesses like that which had shocked her at Cambridge, and had many times expressed her determination to bring the Church to order. Her own creed was a perplexity to herself and to the world. With no tinge of the meaner forms of superstition, she clung to practices which exasperated the Reformers, while the Catholics laughed at their inconsistency; her crucifixes and candles, if adopted partly from a political motive of conciliation, were in part also an expression of that half belief with which she regarded the symbols of the faith; and while ruling the clergy with a rod of iron, and refusing as sternly as her father to tolerate their pretensions to independence, she desired to force upon them a special and semi-mysterious character; to dress them up as counterfeits of the Catholic hierarchy, and half in reverence, half in contempt, compel them to assume the name and character of a priesthood, which both she and they in their hearts of hearts knew to be an illusion and a dream.
... in the first establishment of the English church, and especially when Elizabeth attempted to insist on conditions which overstrained the position, she tired the patience of the most enduring clergy in the world." (Froude Hist. Eng. VI. 7.p. 249. ch. 43.)
Castelnau de la Mauvissiere, who was French ambassador in England from 1575 to 1583, in his memoirs has a shrewd glance at the new hierarchy.
The New "Bishops"
"Castelnau also speaks of the skill with which Elizabeth 'avoit change la religion trois mois apres son advenement. ce qu'elle pratiqua fort subtilement sans aucum renuement ny alteration.'* Finally, all ecclesiastical property was confiscated, 'excepte seulesment les evechez qui sont encore entre les mains de personnes qui se disent evesques ou pour le moins en ont l'habit et gouissent du revenu.'† That is explicit. Castlenau enjoyed the particular favor of Elizabeth. We can imagine the two chuckling over this passage." (Maurice Wilkinson in Catholic Gazette, April, 1927, p. 120).
*had changed the religion three months after her accession, a thing she accomplished very subtly without any revolution or altering (of the framework).
†except the bishoprics which are still in the hands of persons who call themselves bishops or at least wear their dress and enjoy their revenues.
The point is an interesting one, since the Bishops were challenged by the deposed Bishop of London, when prosecuted by the Anglican invader of Winchester, Horne, on the ground that Horne was in reality no bishop at all. In vain, too, did Harding challenge Jewel about the manner of their consecration. And so little confidence had the bishops or their masters in their episcopal orders that a special act of Parliament was thought necessary in 1566 to make these challenged orders good by the royal power. The Rev. S. C. Hughson's readers may possibly be interested in this remarkable enactment which says: "Her Highness, by her supreme power and authority, hath dispensed with all causes or doubts of any imperfections, or disability, that can or may in anywise be objected against the same (consecrations) as by her Majesty's said Letters Patents remaining of record more plainly will appear, so that to all those that will well consider the effect and true intent of the said laws and statutes, and of the supreme and absolute authority of the Queen's Highness, and which she, by Her Majesty's said Letters Patents, hath, used, and put into use, in and about the making and consecrating of the said archbishops and bishops, it is, and may be, very evident and apparent that no cause of scruple, ambiguity, or doubt can or may justly be objected against the said elections, confirmations, or consecrations, or any other material thing meet to be used, or had, in or about the same." To this wordy explanation it might be not inaptly answered it does protest too much, and Qui s'excusa s'accuse!*
The proceedings against Bishop Bonner were quietly dropped. To crown all we have the jubilant disavowal of continuity by James Pilkington, whom Elizabeth foisted into the See of Cuthbert Tunstall.
"In Durham, I grant, the bishop that now is, and his predecessor, were not of one religion in divers points, nor made bishops after one fashion. This hath neither cruche,† nor mitre, never swore against his Prince his allegiance to the Pope; this hath neither power to christen bells, nor hallow chalices and superaltars, as the other had, and with gladness praises God that keeps him from such filthiness." (Burning of St. Paul's Wks. Parker Soc. 586).
*'He who makes excuses is his own accuser!'
†crutch, crozier.
The Anglican Archdeacon Taylor of Liverpool wrote thus in the English Churchman about the Anglican Archbishops, "Reply" to Pope Leo XIII.
"With all due respect for the eminent prelates who have sent it forth, I cannot but regard it as altogether unsatisfactory and unworthy of the occasion. Far better to have left the Bull unanswered altogether... The lengthy document contains a great amount of theological and liturgical research, but simply omits altogether the real point at issue. That question is plainly stated in the words of the Papal Bull (p. 30), but it is passed over by proving what no one denies, that the Reformers (p. 12) intended to continue the three orders of bishops, priests, and deacons in the church. That is not the question but whether they intended that the priest should discharge precisely the same function as before. The argument of the Bull is simple, intelligible, and on the premisses laid down, conclusive... and we owe him a debt of gratitude for so clearly proving the thoroughly Protestant character of our Church." (Quoted in Fr. S. M. Brandi (S.J.) A Last Word on Anglican Ordinations. (1897) pp. 31-42.)
Of this we find an echo in the words of that detached observer Mr. Birrell upon Mgr. Barnes book on the Anglican ordinal, "what was the intention of the Consecration Service? What was in the minds of Barlow, Scory, Hodgkins, and Coverdale, when they laid hands on Parker, and what was in Parker's mind when he felt the pressure of those hands? All of them thought they were making an archbishop, but what sort of an archbishop?" (The Secret of Barlow, Essays, 1925, Harrap, p. 55).
Their Repudiation of the Mass
With regard to the Mass, on May 21st, 1559, Parkhurst, afterwards Anglican Bishop of Norwich, writes from London to Bullinger: "The Mass is abolished".
"Not the simplest and most ignorant papist, says Whitgift to the Puritans, could mistake the Communion for the Mass: the Mass has been banished from England as from Scotland: we are full as well Reformed as are the Scots." (F. W. Maitland in Camb. Mod. Hist. II. xvi. 592).
I don't know whether any "Anglo-Catholics" go so far as to call Knox a Catholic bishop. Maitland's own declaration, especially valuable as that of a witness from outside Christendom, is no less plain and decisive, and as less studiously shirked by the falsifiers of history and forgers of the continuity myth. "As to 'the sacrifices of masses' there could be no doubt. The anathema of Trent was frankly encountered by 'blasphemous fable'. Elizabeth knew that her French ambassador remained ostentatiously seated when the Host was elevated, for 'reverencing the sacrament was contrary to the usages established by law in England'." (Ibid. 589).
The chief activity of the new 'bishops' and ministers was to destroy every vestige of Catholicism and persecute those who practised it, to blaspheme the Mass and smash and desecrate altars, hunt out and destroy rosary beads, missals and all Catholic books, crosses, pyxes, chalices, roods, images, vestments, "and all other idols". In 1560 there was an inquisition in the Eastern counties to find "if any man is known to have said or heard Mass since it was abrogated by law." And in 1562 the parishes of East Kent were searched for any "who had forsaken the ministry... and in corners say Mass". (Month, May 1926, p. 427 and authorities there cited). Or take a Welsh example. From May 28th, 1561, "the government kept Sir Thomas Stradling in the Tower until October 1563, when he was released on giving a bond for 1,000 Marks (£666: 13: 4d) to appear when called on. (In a list of prisoners drawn up in 1561, he is entered by Cecil as a prisoner 'for mass')". (C. G. Bayne, Anglo-Roman Relations, V. 105).
Again, Elizabeth's Archbishop of Canterbury, Whitgift, asks in his Answer to the Admonition. "Hath there been no reformation in this Church of England since the queen's majesty's reign? What say you to the abolishing of the usurped power of the bishop of Rome? What say you to the banishing of the mass? Nay, what say you to the purity of doctrine in all points pertaining to salvation? Is this no reformation with you? O intolerable unthankfulness!" (Wks., 1853, HI. 314).
And further: "The doctrine of free-will, of purgatory, of praying to saints, of the sacrifice of mass &c., are not contained in the Scriptures, and therefore they be not doctrines to be believed, nor necessary to salvation, but damnable doctrines of themselves, and repugnant to salvation." (Defence of the Answer to the Admonition, Wks. 1851, i. 189, italics mine). Whitgift is at all events explicit and lucid. No one except the "Anglo-Catholic" conspirators against historical verity (I am sorry to be obliged to use such terms, but justice demands it) denies that war was made upon the Mass. Those conforming clergy who hated the new changes said Mass only in private, the churchwarden inquisitors made public Mass impossible, even if the altar had not yet been destroyed.
"25th Dec. (1558) — Elizabeth refuses to witness the elevation of the Host, and thus chooses a great festival of the church for an act which must, at this moment, be regarded as a display of unequivocal protestantism." (F. W. Maitland. Elis. Gleanings 1900 in his Collected Papers (1911 III. 170).
It may interest the Rev. S. G. Hughson's readers to learn in what way were those Catholics, who were weak enough to go to the new services occasionally, really regarded the Anglican Ministrations. I will cite an Anglican historian's testimony regarding 1561-2. "Many Romanensians* who complied took the oath, and used the English Service; but retained their former opinions, with the good will of many of their parishioners, and pulled against the alteration of religion as much as they could. This was to be expected. The Mass, it was suspected, was said secretly in London and in the country. A priest was taken at a lady's house in London about to sing Mass; he was carried in his vestments through London to the Counter, and thence to the Marshalsea (Strype Ann. i. 365) A congregation assembled in Durham Place, and another at St. Mary's Spital, on Candlemas Day, in devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary; many of them were seized by the guard, probably by the vigilance of the High Commission, and committed to the Counter. A priest and others were apprehended for the Mass celebrated in Essex in the houses of Sir Thomas Wharton and Sir Edward Waldegrave, and in a house in Westminster (Cal. Dom. pp. 152, 173)." (Dixon Hist. Ch. of Eng. V. xxxiv. 304-6).
*An absurd term invented, it would seem, to avoid saying Catholics!
A list of prisoners was officially endorsed 'the names of the prisoners for the Mass'.* Cecil added opposite many of the names the one word 'Mass'. This was in 1561, when certain Anglicans try to believe, or to believe that they believe, that the blaspheming Bolsheviks whom Elizabeth had intruded into the pulpits were themselves massing-priests! Could attitudinizing make-believe go further?
"In the year of our Lord 1562, the 8 day of September was a priest, whose name was Sir — Havard, taken by certain promoters and my lord of Ely's men for saying of Mass in Fetter lane at my Lady Cary's house: which priest was violently taken and led as ten times worse than a traitor, through Holborn, Newgate market, and Cheapside to the Counter, with all his ornaments on him as he was ravished to Mass, with his Mass-book and his portus borne before him, and the chalice with the pax and all other things, such as might make rude people to wonder upon him. And the number of people was exceeding great that followed him, mocking, deriding, cursing, and wishing evil to him,' &c. — Stow's Memoranda in Gairdner's Three Chronicles, p, 121 (Camden Soc.) He and Lady Cary and several other ladies were taken before the Bishop of Ely, as one of the High Commission, and imprisoned." (Dixon Hist. Ch. of Eng. V. xxxiv. p. 305).
*Birt. Eliz. Relig. Settlement, 1907, p. 529.
The New "Church" Repudiated by Catholics
Grindal and his new Lordship of Ely, already notorious as "cancellor" of the University of Oxford in Edward Vi's reign describe the case and gave an account of their experience to the Lords of the Privy Council on Aug. 5. of the same year 1562.
The desire of the priests and laity to break with the Pope is not very apparent. It had to be manufactured by the strong hand! "Neither the Prieste nor anye of his Auditours, nott so moche as the Kitchin Mayde, will receive any othe before us, to answer to Articles, butt stoutlie saye they will not sweare; and saye also that they will neyther accuse themselves nor none other... Some thinke that if this Prieste Havard might be put to some kynde of Torment, and so driuen to confesse what he knowethe, he mighte gayne the Quene's Majestie a good Masse of Monye by the Masses that he hath sayd." (1562 Grindal and Cox to the Lds. of Privy Council in Haynes Burghley State Papers, pp. 395-6 quoted in Month, Sept. 1909. p. 310).
Cox writes to Peter Martyr (No. XIX 1st ser. Zurich Letters).
"If you wish for any information respecting our affairs, — when we consider the temper and fickleness of mankind, when we regard the contempt of the word or the neglect of a religious life, we can hardly dare to expect a long continuance of the gospel in these parts. There is every where an immense number of papists, though for the most part concealed; they have been quiet hitherto, except that they are cherishing their errors in their secret assemblies, and willingly shut their ears against this hearing of the word... the heads of our popish clergy are still kept in confinement. They are treated indeed with kindness, but relax nothing of their popery. Others are living at large, scattered about in different parts of the kingdom, but without any function unless perhaps where they may be sowing the seeds of impiety in secret. Our neighbours the Scots, thank God, are happily furthering the Gospel, The papists are wonderfully raising their spirits, since the disorders in France."
"Religion is Everywhere Changed"
But "the true doctrine of sacrifice has always been held by a faithful remnant", we are often told. Now Hooker expressly declares: "the Fathers of the Church of Christ with like security of speech call usually the ministry of the Gospel Priesthood in regard of that which the Gospel hath proportionable to ancient sacrifices, namely the Communion of the blessed Body and Blood of Christ, although it have properly now no sacrifice. As for the people when they hear the name it draweth no more their minds to any cogitation of sacrifice, than the name of a senator or of an alderman causeth them to think upon old age or to imagine that every one so termed must needs be ancient because years were respected in the first nomination of both." (Bed. Pol. V. 78. Wks. ed. Keble. vol. 2, pp. 471-2).
It seems strange to stake one's eternity upon the potential or merely wished-for evidence that is to overthrow the abundant evidence actually in existence! If Anglicans will not read the documents they cannot expect us to copy them out. I subjoin a few relevant passages from the first official apologist of the Anglican Church, John Jewel, who made such rhetorical appeal to the first six centuries. To Peter Martyr he writes, probably in May 1559, "Our papists oppose us more spitefully, and none more obstinately than those who have abandoned us. Think it is to have once tasted of the mass! He who drinks of it is made mad by it. They perceive that when that palladium is removed, every thing also will be endangered." (Zurich Letters, ix). On returning to England he now found "the country was still everywhere desecrated with the Mass (eadam erat ubique missarum proluvies)". (Zur. Lett. iv. 20 March 1559). "If the queen herself would but banish it from her private chapel, the whole thing might easily be got rid of... She has, however, so regulated etc." (Zur. Lett. 14 April 1559). Again he tells his friend in the plainest possible words:
"NOW THAT RELIGION IS EVERYWHERE CHANGED, THE MASS-PRIESTS ABSENT THEMSELVES ALTOGETHER FROM PUBLIC WORSHIP" (1. Aug. 1559). In the same letter he rejoiced over the 'restoring' of religion in Scotland, "the theatrical dresses, the sacriligeous chalices, the idols, the altars, are consigned to the flames; not a vestige of the ancient superstition and idolatry is left". (Zur. Lett. xvi). I could fill pages, if need were, with the blasphemies of the first Anglican apologist.
Canon Dixon's verdict is that "The Sacramental question passed into a second phase in which it was resolved no longer to debate the nature or the manner of the Presence, save in the denial of Transubstantiation." (Hist. Ch. of Eng. V. xxxv. 405).
"The service book is not such as will satisfy all ardent Reformers; but their foreign fathers in the faith think it not intolerable; and the glad news goes out that the Mass is abolished. The word 'Protestant' which is rapidly spreading from Germany, comes as a welcome name. In the view of an officially inspired apologist of the Elizabethan settlement, those who are not Papists are Protestants". (F. W. Maitland in Camb. Mod. Hist. II. xvi. 571).
Towards the middle of Elizabeth's reign, an 'Anglo-Catholic' champion admits that "the Sacraments had dropped almost out of sight, the churches were profaned and closed, piety was decayed and a gloom of spiritual dryness had settled over the land, which was duly relieved by the wearisomeness of Puritan preachers or the droning of Genevan psalms and mumbling of homilies" (Frere English Church 1558-1625, p. 129).
And another Anglican historian witnesses that "In the first years of Elizabeth the visitors destroyed the altars at the churches where they attended, and apparently gave directions for universal demolition of altars to churchwardens and incumbents." (Gee Eliz. Prayer Book, 176.)
"The entry for the demolition of altars and erection of Holy Table is pretty constant through the Elizabethan churchwarden's accounts. The amounts varied... The old altar stones were put to various uses. They were used as paving-stones, or hearth-stones, as grave-stones, as stepping stones, as 'bridges for sheep', troughs, stairs, sinks, fences, and so forth. As a rule they were broken or defaced. If still unbroken they were to be destroyed. Cf. Church Furniture 46 and 149". (Ibid. 177 Note).
An odd way, this, of preserving the Mass and the priesthood, while ceaselessly reviling both!
"There have always been Anglicans who felt that the Visitation rubric and Absolution prove the retention of the Sacrament of Penance; the majority, with a Protestant horror of the confessional, have held that the Church of England wholly abolished it. If the Church's mind as to Penance be sought in the Prayer Book, it must be said that on all ordinary occasions there is no recognition of it; in an exceptional case, it is, so far as words go, provided for. But a rubric giving permission for private confession by an invalid cannot train clergy as confessors". (F. J. Kinsman Salve Mater, vii. (1920) 150.)
Church Papists and Peasants: Facts Versus Anglican Fiction
Walsingham's statement "that in the earlier years of Elizabeth all Catholics attended the services of the Anglican Church, 'without any contradiction or show of misliking'... made by Elizabeth's own government, might be open to suspicion, but when we find it corroborated in 1595 by Father Parsons, the most distinguished Jesuit propagandist in Europe, and again in 1605 by Father Garnett of the same order, when on trial for his life, there can be no further question." (pp. 10-11).
But when do we find the corroboration? As for Father Parsons, I have been unable to lay my hand upon the passage read by me many years ago, to which the pamphlet seems to refer, but I remember that he reflects very severely upon those Catholics who were guilty of the 'mingle-mangle' of participation in Catholic sacraments in which they believed and Protestant rites in which they did not and could not believe, a shameful compromise to avoid temporal penalties. As for Father Garnett, the author of the pamphlet has been culpably careless. The assertion was made by the Attorney General, Sir Edward Coke, and was expressly denied by Father Garnett. I quote from Father Gerard's Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot (The condition of Catholics under James I, edited by Rev. John Morris S.J. 1872). "Neither is it true, that Mr. Attorney so constantly avoucheth, that till the eleventh year of Queen Elizabeth's all Catholics did resort to their churches. For I knew many Catholics at that time living, that I am certain never went to Protestants' churches in their lives. And Sir Thomas Fitzherbert of my knowledge did not only refuse it before that time himself, but also had written a treatise to prove that it could not be tolerated in any Catholic; and it is apparent to all the world that before that time many Catholic Bishops and Priests were imprisoned for their refusal. Whereby it is evident that their recusancy is not founded upon any excommunication; but only upon mere matter of conscience, judging it unlawful to communicate in their service with such as have separated themselves from the Church. Which doctrine is as ancient as the condemnation of the Arian heresy; for even then the Catholics refused in divinis to communicate with the Arians, albeit they had Priests, Masses, Altars and their whole service, the same both in substance and ceremony. Which doctrine hath also been taught by the most learned of the Protestants, Calvin, Luther, Beza and others, who all teach it to be unlawful to be present at our service, not only at Mass, which they count idolatry, but at Evensong also. Yet I grant this point was not so clearly understood by Catholics here until the Council of Trent, where twelve most grave and learned men were appointed to consult and conclude of this matter, who without controversy determined, that it was in no case lawful to communicate with the heretics in their service, no, not to avoid any torment whatsoever. And their decision was by the whole Council approved; although the same was also concluded of by the Council of Nice above 1,300 years ago," (pp. 247-8).
If all Catholics willingly participated in Anglican rites from 1559 to 1570, the Anglican authorities showed remarkable ingratitude in their farcical 'excommunication' (from a sect to which he never belonged) of Archbishop Heath in February 1560. (see Strype Annals Ref. I. 212.)
Facts are often disturbing. It is pleasanter to scatter jaunty Anglican fables in every paragraph. To refute these adequately would require pages, even were the fabulists open to conviction. For my part I fear that even if one rose from the dead, "Anglo-Catholic" fabulists would not believe what they wish to deny. I have only space for a brief quotation from G. Philips Extinction of the Anc. Hierachy. In 1583, "Watson of Lincoln had already spent four and twenty years in confinement; Thirlby of Ely neverly eleven, Bonner of London, ten; Bourne of Bath and Wells, Turberville of Exeter, Scott of Chester, Pate of Worcester, and Heath of York — more than three... White of Winchester was kept in the Tower till he contracted a deadly sickness, and was then sent to his brother's house to die... Tunstall of Durham... was confined in Parker's house till his death... the liberty of Poole of Peterborough consisted in ranging within three miles in London." (pp. 4-5). The Lambeth Register, failing to foresee the continuity fable, blurts out that Bishop Thirlby "died the Queen's Majesty's prisoner within my Lord Grace's house," having "continued in the same Papistry to his end." (quoted in Phillips, p. 354).
The shorter terms of imprisonment do not spell release but death in prison; Heath to whom Elizabeth in great measure owed her peaceful succession was not free from restraint and espionage and died in the Tower. It was precisely for their utter refusal to countenance Anglican services that they were kept in prison. (Phillips 199-202). Again it is for Anglican romancers to explain how ordinations were possible under such close confinement, even if the material requirements were attainable. How were the candidates to be trained when all Catholic schools were abolished? Extreme difficulties about jurisdiction, too, would be obvious to any but "Anglo-Catholics." Even to administer confirmation, with the utmost secrecy, was very rarely possible. Referring to Heath and Watson (who died in 1578 and 1584 respectively) a Report quoted in the Douai Diaries tells us: "both of them were always detained either in prison or in custody, as long as they lived, and could no more help the Catholics than simple priests, excepting as regards a very few, whom they stealthily anointed with the Holy Chrism in the very prison"* In 1578 the Brief of Gregory XV to the archpriest Blackwell mentions that "at the present moment, there exist only two Catholic Bishops, one of whom is an Archbishop, and the other a Bishop, and that they are kept so closely imprisoned as to be unable to supply the wants of the Catholics by performing any episcopal function."†
*apud Phillips, 382.
†Ibid. 405.
Ordination and Seminaries
"Nor was it because there was no opportunity in England for continuing a strictly Roman Catholic ministry for those who wished to adhere to the Pope. Watson, the deprived Bishop of Lincoln, lived on until 1584, and six others survived for many years, free to come and go on parole within wide territorial limits without interference or espionage. So far as it is known, none of these Bishops protested against attendance on the Anglican Church and none of them made any effort to ordain priests for the shepherding of their people. In fact it was this definite determination of these Bishops not to ordain clergy which decided Cardinal Allen, and others, to establish seminaries on the Continent at Douai and other places to train clergy for work among the English Romanists." (p. 11).
This is a very pretty romance but insufferably impudent 'history'. To Peter Martyr at Zurich Jewel writes on 22 May 1560, "Bonner, the monk Feckenham, Pate, Story the civilian and Watson, are sent to prison for having obstinately refused attendance on public worship, and everywhere declaiming and railing against that religion which we now possess. For the queen, a most discreet and excellent woman, manfully declared that she would not allow any of her subjects to dissent from this religion with impunity." (Zurich Letters xxxiii). Writing to the Northern Earls on Feb. 22, 1570, St. Pius V declares: "no one can praise the constancy of these men as much as it deserves." (quoted in Phillips Extinction of Anc. Hierarchy, p. 392. "So far as it is known," the Rev. Mr. Hughson prefers Anglican wishes to historic facts.
Tunstall writes to Cecil on Aug. 19, 1559, "if the same visitation shall proceed to such end in my diocese of Durham as I do plainly see to be set forth here in London; as pulling down of altars, defacing of churches by taking away of the crucifixes, I cannot in any conscience consent to it, being a pastor there, because I cannot myself agree to be a sacramentary nor to have any new doctrine taught in my diocese... my conscience will not suffer me receive and allow any doctrine in my diocese other than Catholic." (in Gee Elis. Prayer Bk., 1902, pp. 145-6).
Equally anti-historical are the words, "free to come and go on parole within wide territorial limits, without interference or espionage." Two monographs of Catholic scholars on this subject, Queen Elisabeth and the Catholic Hierarchy by Frs. Bridgett and Knox and The Extinction of the Ancient Hierarchy by Fr. George Phillips (St. Louis, Mo. Herder, 19905) have proved the exact contrary with an overwhelming mass of evidence drawn from contemporary sources, Protestant as well as Catholic. But of course Catholica sunt, non leguntur*
*They are Catholic works, they are not read.
Historical Fact Against Anglican Effrontery
"At last in 1570 thirty six years after Henry VIII had, according to the present papal claim, founded the Church of England, despairing of inducing the English ever again to bow their necks to the yoke of Rome, Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth and all who adhered to the Church of England. Now for the first time those who adhered to Rome were told that it would be sin to communicate at, English altars." (pp. 12-13). The sentence I have italicised is, objectively speaking, sheer unmitigated falsehood, intolerantly impudent. No doubt the author has somehow contrived to persuade himself that his fairy tale is true, but in his eagerness to hinder those that were entering the Fold, he writes with most culpable and extravagant ignorance.
A non-Catholic historian of the highest authority shall give evidence. In 1562, certain lay English Catholics contrived to submit a question to the fathers at Trent, through the Spanish and Portuguese ambassadors. "All they want to know is whether church-going is deadly sin. And again, Quadra makes it quite plain that there is no talk of any participation in the Lord's Supper — the devilish supper, as even moderate English Churches could call it (see English Historical Review vii. 85). — and in favor of 'the common prayers' he seems to say all that could fairly be said by a prelate who was in communion with Rome. But no, Pius, the conciliatory Pius, will have none of it. If the choice lies between church and gallows the gallows must be chosen." (F. W. Maitland, Elizabethan Gleanings, Collected Papers, vol. iii. p. 180. italics mine). Here indeed is a plain answer to a transparent falsehood.
The same author testifies, as, I have shown, that by Pius IV, "no hint is given of any approval of her (Elizabeth's) prayer book or any compromise in matters of faith or worship." (Ibid. 183).
The English Catholics had sent a most carefully drawn up question as to the lawfulness of mere presence at Anglican services. By their request the matter was dealt with by a committee, not by the Council as a whole, to avoid publicity and consequent increase of persecution. The reply was a decided negative and this was used by Dr. Allen (afterwards Cardinal) in reclaiming great numbers of church papists in Lancashire between 1562 and 1565 (see Bayne ch. viii). The same answer was given in a very decisive form by the Inquisition at Rome, presided over by the future Pope Pius V. (Ibid. p. 577).
Regarding the question submitted the conformity in question was simply, "to attend church during the singing of psalms and reading of the Bible in English and while sermons were preached", and no further. No allusion was made to the communion, which was evidently regarded as outside the pale of any possible concession" (Bayne via. p. 164). This is the answer of an honest and competent historian, to an insolent fiction.
The rodomontade on pp. 13-14 is beneath contempt, and has already been answered by anticipation. There is no dilemma at all and the whole tract is built on a foundation of blustering nonsense. Neither is there any parity between the revolutions effected by Henry and Photius (who both stopped short at schism, though Henry's descendants did not) and the occasional disobedience of princes and republics or the frequent disputes over temporal issues, which did not involve denial of papal jurisdiction and were by no means peculiar to England. And I hope there is no ground for supposing "any high-school student of medieval history" unintelligent enough to bracket things so widely diverse.
It is noteworthy that the author stoops to praise the triumph of Caesarism, the sacrilege, invasion and looting of Sept. 20, 1870. Anglicans have always had a strange tenderness for Italian Anti-Christians.
"Anne, the mother of Francis Bacon... also translated a series of sermons on fate and free-will from the Tuscan of Bernardo Ochino. This fact is the more curious, because Ochino was one of that small and audacious band of Italian reformers, anathemized alike by Wittenberg, by Geneva, by Zurich, and by Rome, from which the Socinian sect deduces its origin." (Macaulay Ld. Bacon, Essays (1896) 352).
Giordano Bruno was welcomed — until closer acquaintance brought about a revulsion — by Elizabeth's great men; Redshirt Garibaldi was knelt to by English nobility and Protestant bishops when he visited England as 'the apostle of freedom', albeit a hardened and notorious blasphemer, who now receives the plaudits of the "Anglo-Catholic" Rev. S. C. Hughson, whose qualifications to deal with history I remit to the reader's judgment.
Chapter IV: Previous Anti-Papal Outbreaks
No Parity With the Anglican Reformation
"Henry's break with Rome was the counterpart of what had happened in Europe a hundred times in the middle ages, but no Pope was ever insane enough to think that the enemy prince had created a new Church because he repudiated the Papal jurisdiction, and carried the bishops of his kingdom with him. And the Popes of the Reformation period were not so foolish as to think this was the case with England", (p. 16) Again utterly false, as false as if one said that the French or the Russian revolution was the counterpart of such affairs as the Barons' revolt in England under Henry III. Momentary resistance does not imply denial of the rights of authority. Once more an honest Anglican shall be called to answer this disingenuous sophistry.
"No one then doubted the authority of that great office which they believed to be held in succession from the Prince of the Apostles. They might doubt between the claims of this or that pope or anti-pope; they might question the wisdom of the pope's decisions, or disobey his orders, or defy his excommunications, or bribe his advisers, or imprison his person; but the general belief in this authority was no more impaired by such things than resistance and disobedience affected the general persuasion of the authority of kings. The see of St. Peter was the acknowledged constitutional centre of spiritual law in the West to all that 'diversity of nations who were united in the confession of the name of Christ'; it was looked upon as the guide and regulator of teaching, the tribunal and court from which issued the oracles of right and discipline, the judgment-seat to which an appeal lay open to all, and which gave sentence on wrong and vice without fear or favour, without respect of persons, even the highest and mightiest. The ideal was imperfectly realized" etc. (R. W. Church, St. Anselm (1870) xii, 252).
"But if ever there was a time when the popes honestly endeavored to carry out the idea of their office, it was just at this period of the Middle Ages. They attempted to erect an independent throne of truth and justice above the passions and the force which reigned in the world around. It is the grandest and most magnificent failure in human history. But it had not then been proved to be a failure." (Ibid. xii. 253).
Of St. Anselm's struggle against Caesarism he writes: "if anyone wishes to see the modern counterpart of the quarrel on a still vaster and more eventful scale, let him read the detailed history of the conflict between the Emperor Napoleon and Pope Pius VII". (Ibid. X. 225) A significant comparison.
Medieval England Specially Papal
There is no greater authority in English scholarship upon this matter than the after-Christian Maitland, who long since demolished the Anglican fabrication of medieval anti-papalism. England was not less but more papal than some other countries.
"If we were to speculate about what might have happened, and were to compare England with France, we should have to remember once more than the one great work of an English canonist of the fifteenth century shows no liberal tendencies, no interest in the conciliar movement, nothing but a conservative curialism." (F. W. Maitland, Roman Canon Law in Ch. of England, p. 90).
Valuable also is the admission of so hostile a writer as Mr. L. F. Salzman, the author of Medieval Byways, that "until the middle of the fourteenth century [Wycliff], no one in this country doubted the truth of the religion of their ancestors — except such evil livers as scoffed at all religion — or the position of the Pope as head of the Church... The English people continued to hold the Catholic faith and to look to Rome for guidance, until Henry VIII, for purely personal reasons, severed the English Church from the control of the Pope (whereat many rejoiced) and, more or less accidentally, let loose the flood of reforming Protestantism (whereat a few exulted)", pp. 109-110) That 'many rejoiced' at the schism is denied by the Anglican historian Gairdner and Brewer before him.
To Maitland's may be added another name eminent among historians. We read in the valuable and instructive Memories and Opinions of Mgr. Canon Barry how he met the late Dr. Stubbs, who "agreed with Professor Maitland of Cambridge that never at any time previous to Henry VIII did the Convocation of the English Clergy refuse obedience to a Papal rescript. What might have been attempted by King and Parliament was another matter. But even they did not dream of calling in question St. Peter's prerogatives." (p. 258).
Another Anglican Legend
On p. 16, we have the oft-repeated fairy-tale that "On the accession of Elizabeth out of 9,400 priests, the majority of whom had served under papal authority in Queen Mary's reign, only 192 were found who refused to take the oath of allegiance and serve the reformed Church of England."
Once more, let a non-Catholic bear testimony to the contrary.
"What is commonly affirmed, that all the clergy conformed to the new order with the exception of 200, cannot possibly be true. This estimate represents very nearly the bishops and other dignitaries who are known to have refused the oath. The great number of ordinations held in the early years of Elizabeth's reign, at most of which as many as 150 priests and deacons were admitted to holy orders, and the large proportion of churches which still remained unserved for lack of ministers prove the inaccuracy of the assertion. In the year 1565, in some dioceses a third part, in others half of the parishes were still without rectors or vicars, though the want was in some supplied by a curate. Moreover, we find at a later period the number of Roman priests who were still living in seclusion is spoken of as considerable." (S. O. Cock in The Guardian, 23rd Nov. 1892 quoted in Cath. Times 20 April, 1928).
On May 20, 1559, Richard Cox writes from London to Wolfgang Weidner: "At length many of the nobility, and vast numbers of the people, began by degrees to return to their sense; but of the clergy none at all. For the whole body remained unmoved, 'tanquam dura silex, aut stet Marpessia cautes', as the poet sings. (Zurich Letters, 1st series, No. x).
On 2 Nov. 1559, Jewel writes to his equally "Catholic" crony, Peter Martyr, on returning to London after a visitation: "the cathedral churches were nothing else but dens of thieves, or worse, if any thing worse or more foul can be mentioned. If inveterate obstinacy was found anywhere, it was altogether among the priests, those especially who had once been on our side. They are now throwing all things into confusion, in order, I suppose, that they may not seem to have changed their opinions without due consideration. But let them make what disturbance they please, we have in the mean time disturbed them from rank and office." (Zurich Letters, 1st ser. No. xix).
"One Fold and One Shepherd"
If I succeed in convincing anyone who may have been hindered or delayed on his way homeward by The Anglican Church and Henry VIII how unworthy that flimsy fiction is of any confidence, my pains will have been amply rewarded. May they all speedily, please God, reach the harbor, and may the author of the pamphlet join them and labor to bring men into the One Fold with yet greater zeal than he has labored to keep them outside.