Church of England - Early History (2024)

The history of the Church of England dates from the mission of Augustine in 597 A.d. This mission was the direct action of the Church of Rome, but almost from the beginning there were other elements. A large part of England was as a matter of fact converted by missionaries from Scotland and Ireland, representatives of the old Celtic Church. Although the organization introduced by Augustine and Theodore ultimately prevailed through the whole island, yet the Church contained elements and traditions derived from Celtic sources.

The history of the Reformation is a complicated story. The final result was produced by various influences. There was the old national feeling as opposed to the claims of the papal curia expressed in the Reformation Acts by the statement that the realm of England was and always had been an Empire; there was the influence of the Humanism of Colet, More and Erasmus, which demanded a Conservative Reformation; there was the popular objection to the rights and privileges of the clergy; there was the strong conservative element which has always been characteristic of the English people and which checked any great tendency to change ; and especially during the reign of Elizabeth there was the influence of the foreign reformers. The result was a Conservative Reformation.

The first, and historically most important distinction between the English Reformation and its European contemporary, was that it was started and led throughout all its successive vicissitudes by politicians, whereas on the continent it was professional theologians like Luther, Calvin and Zwingli who initially made the running. At Worms (1507) and Geneva (1536 et seq) Luther and Calvin led a theological revolution against the whole Roman system; a revolution which began by denying the divine right of the Papacy to govern, or even to exist at all. Nothing analogous to this ever took place in England, where Henry Tudor (Henry VIII, 1509-47) was, and remained to the end of his days, a devout Catholic. He firmly believed the whole medieval system of theology and whilst hanging Catholics wholesale as traitors, yet impartially burned Protestants alive as heretics, just as the Spanish Inquisition was doing on the continent, or as his own medieval predecessors had done in England.

What the men who originated the English Reformation initially aimed at, seems to have been merely the substitution of the royal authority in the Tudor state for the alien jurisdiction of the Papacy. When once the autocratic monarchy of the totalitarian Tudor state had made good its claim to supercede the alien jurisdiction of Rome as supreme head of the English Church, the Reformation had achieved its purpose from the point of view of the king and his ministers who had actually started it.

For Henry, who had earned his title of Defender of the (Roman!) Faith from the Pope as a reward for "refuting" Martin Luther, never appears to have had the least sympathy with the iconoclastic heresies of the continental reformers. As a learned Catholic historian of the English Reformation has observed, all that "the mighty Lord who broke the bounds of Rome" (Henry), really desired, was to become entirely independent of the Papacy: in short, to be his own (secular) pope, just as the Byzantine emperors of Constantinople had been.

While Henry VIII lived, there was no question of any specifically Protestant Reformation in England in any way analogous to the contemporary upheaval on the continent. The Catholic historian M. Louis Constant gives Henry Tudor an explicit testimonial as regards his bona fide Catholic orthodoxy. Circ*mstances had made Henry anti-Roman but not anti-Catholic.

The Protestant Reformation after the king's death came on two successive waves separated by nearly a century. The first wave broke immediately after Henry's death, under the titular reign of his son Edward VI, (1547-53) and under the real leadership of the young king's two successive Lord Protectors, the Dukes of Somerset and Northumberland, both Protestants in the continental revolutionary sense. For Somerset, perhaps the most farsighted statesman of the Tudor era, actually repealed the laws against heresy in accordance with the Reformation's cardinal teaching of "private judgment". He introduced religious toleration in England for the very first time, a revolutionary development that must surely have made Henry Tudor turn in his grave.

As it was, the ensuing Catholic counter-revolution under Mary, who succeeded Edward in 1553, had to convene a special parliament in order to reinstate the laws against heresy previously repealed by Somerset, before they could again get the fires of Smithfield blazing merrily with Protestant fuel. It should be noted in passing that neither the Roman nor the Spanish Inquisition ever had any jurisdiction in medieval (Catholic) England. All the laws against heresy were constitutionally enacted by English parliaments. The most important was the De Haeretico Comburendo (For the incineration of heretics) enacted in 1401 primarily against the Lollards by the fanatical ex-Teutonic Knight Henry IV (1399-1413). The Marian persecution proceeded under this statute.

The excesses of the Marian counter-revolution produced a corresponding reaction. Whoever acknowledged the authority of the pope was obliged to suffer the penalty of high treason. Nearly one-half of the nation was still Catholic. In 1559, Elizabeth could obtain a majority of only three votes in parliament, for measures against the Church, yet no violent resistance was made to the decrees of the queen, although they were equivalent to a religious persecution. Her severity increased, after she had gotten the unfortunate Mary Stuart in her power (1568), and still more after she herself had been excommunicated by Pope St. Pius V (1570).

Catholic worship was strictly forbidden. The Court of High Commission, an inquisitorial tribunal without judicial forms, possessed absolute power over Catholics. To refuse to be present at a Protestant service was punishable by a fine of twenty pounds a month, corporal chastisem*nt and imprisonment. Priests exercising their functions, as well as people assisting or sheltering them, were punished with death. Communication with Rome was regarded as high treason. Spies and decoys were employed to discover and denounce Catholics who might be breaking the new laws.

This was the form of the Elizabethan compromise. Elizabeth Tudor (1558-1603) in essence restored the regime set up by her father, Henry VIII, a Byzantine Catholic Church orthodox in doctrine (though with some medieval accretions offensive to Renaissance scholarship removed) with a Catholic hierarchy of bishops but with the monarch substituted for the pope as the supreme head of the church as well as the state. Most important of all, Elizabeth did not repeal the laws against heresy, and heretics continued to be burned under her and her successor James I (1603-25) - the last in 1612.

However, militant Protestantism got another opportunity later in the century when, during the Civil War (1640-51), the Calvinist minority again seized power under the dynamic military leadership of Oliver Cromwell. For eleven years (1649-60) the Protestant Revolution continued, and England for the first time since Edward VI (or rather, of his Protectors) became a really Protestant country. And the Radical "Barebones Parliament" 1652-3, again repealed the laws against heresy exactly a century after Somerset had first done so. However, reaction again triumphed, this time permanently. For since the Revolution of the Stuarts in 1660, England retained the Tudor set-up of a Byzantine Catholic regime substantially unaltered.