Ryrie, A. (2016) - The Reformation in Anglicanism. Oxford Handbooks Online

The Reformation in Anglicanism
Oxford Handbooks Online

Alec Ryrie
The Oxford Handbook of Anglican Studies
Edited by Mark Chapman, Sathianathan Clarke, and Martyn Percy
Print Publication Date: Oct 2015

Subject: Religion, Christianity, Theology and Philosophy of Religion, Protestant Christianity
Online Publication Date: Jul 2016 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199218561.013.3
Abstract and Keywords
The outline of the English Reformation under Henry VIII and the later Tudors is no longer
heavily contested. While politically led and slow to take root, it eventually took shape as a
decisively Reformed Protestant, even Calvinist, Reformation with a stress on the doctrine
of predestination, even though Cranmer retained some traditional trappings in his Prayer
Books. Terms such as ‘Anglican’ and ‘via media’ ought not to be applied to the Church of
England before 1662. However, that church’s subjugation to the state and the central
position it acquired in English national identity helped to sow the seeds of later Anglican
distinctiveness. The Reformation’s legacy for modern Anglicans is divisive, and it is used
dishonestly, as a weapon, by all sides. This is in part because the true extent of its
popularity in its own time remains open to dispute.
Keywords: Reformation, Protestant, Calvinist, Cranmer, Tudor, predestination, Henry VIII, Prayer Book
ANGLICANISM’S relationship with the Reformation is that of an adult with his or her own
adolescent rebellions. According to taste, the Reformation either shows Anglicanism at its
forthright best, or at its chaotic and destructive worst. It is either a period of lost honesty
to be rediscovered, or an embarrassing episode to be passed over with discretion and
regret. Regardless, it is a formative period whose insistent questions cannot easily be
escaped.
The questions are on two levels. The one which now appears more straightforward is
historical: what actually happened? The more problematic is theological and political:
what does it mean for Anglicanism? Yet of course these two cannot be disentangled.
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The Course of the Reformation

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, there has been a surprising degree of
agreement amongst historians as to the broad outline of the English Reformation. Bitter
controversies continue—academics have to earn a living, after all—but on the core
narrative, a broad ‘post-revisionist’ consensus has formed, which commands grudging
and qualified assent from historians of all religious stripes and of none. (For recent
examples of such syntheses, see Jones 2002; Marshall 2002; Heal 2003; Ryrie 2009.) This
tells of a Reformation which was a drama in five acts.
That five-act structure is itself perhaps the single most important fact, for it is determined
by politics, and in particular by the accidents of royal birth, death, and succession. The
heart of the English Reformation may have been religion, but its backbone was politics.
The enduring and unequal relationship between the English Church and the English state
which was crystallized during the sixteenth century remains perhaps (p. 35) the single
most powerful legacy of the Reformation for Anglicanism, whether for good or ill.
The first act is a late medieval prelude, in which the Catholic Church in England was in
decent health. Some historians see this period as an almost prelapsarian paradise of
deeply felt piety; others prefer to concentrate on the undoubted problems and frictions;
but there is no doubt that by European standards the English Church was in tolerably
good shape in about 1500. Its fiercest critics were the reformers to be found amongst its
senior clergy, whose concern was to tighten its discipline and ensure it lived up to the
standards it preached: perennial concerns for earnest Christians. There were certainly
some changes afoot, some of them connected to the rapid spread of literacy amongst the
laity, but hindsight struggles to summon up any signs of imminent revolution or
catastrophe.
Act II was set in train by King Henry VIII in the late 1520s, when his sudden desire to
have his first marriage annulled, on very shaky legal grounds, led him into an extended
confrontation with the pope. After a seven-year crisis, during which this quarrel
ballooned into a wider conflict about jurisdiction, in 1534 the king wrenched the entire
English Church into schism. He was conscious of the precedents set by the Lutheran
principalities of Germany and Scandinavia, which had themselves recently severed their
ties with the papacy; but this was not a Lutheran Reformation. Henry had himself
declared Supreme Head, immediately under Christ, of the English Church. The
‘Reformation’—if we must call it that—which followed during the remainder of his life
defies any easy theological categorization. ‘Catholicism without the pope’, it is sometimes
called, as if replacing the pope’s headship with that of a tyrannical and theologically
adventurous layman was a mere formality. There is no agreement as to how popular or
how coherent Henry’s Reformation was, but some pieces of the puzzle are fairly well
locked into place. This was a Reformation whose keystone was the subjugation of church
to state—a subjugation which Anglicanism now scarcely remembers but whose influence
remains pervasive. The legal principle underpinning it was the sovereignty of statute law:
the startlingly novel assertion that Parliament could legislate for the church, determining
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not merely polity and practice but liturgy and doctrine. This was underpinned by a very
high doctrine of royal authority, exemplified by the king’s new title of Supreme Head.
Both the papacy and Luther thought the title was blasphemous, but almost all Henry’s
subjects accepted it, some of them apparently with a certain enthusiasm. The novelties
were eased into place by the king’s constant assertion that he sought a middle way
between ‘papistry’ and ‘heresy’, a disingenuous claim which, bizarrely, endured when
almost every other part of his Reformation was gone. And the whole was cemented by the
brutal use of force. Those who refused to accept Henry’s supremacy, cleaving instead to
the papacy, were hanged, drawn, and quartered as traitors. Those who converted to the
emerging doctrines of European Protestantism were liable to be burned as heretics. On
one gruesomely memorable occasion in 1540, Henry executed three offenders of each
kind in the same place on the same day, in order to make his point unmistakable.
Henry’s Reformation died with him in 1547, although some at least of his subjects
(p. 36)
mourned its passing. This was in part because Act III took England in a dramatically new
direction. Henry’s successor, his only surviving son, was a nine-year-old boy, King Edward
VI. This boy’s regency government was from the beginning dominated by a clique of
committed Protestants, and it quickly became clear that the precocious king himself
shared their views. How this Protestant coup was accomplished remains contested: the
fact of it is unmistakable. Between 1547 and 1553, the new regime imposed a full-scale
Protestant Reformation on England, drawing openly on European models. In particular,
the Edwardian regime bypassed Lutheranism and followed instead the emerging
Reformed Protestant tradition, the tradition which first took shape in Huldrych Zwingli’s
Zurich, Johannes Oecolampadius’ Basel, and Martin Bucer’s Strassburg, and which later
generations would call Calvinism. Some of its leading exponents—notably Bucer himself—
came to England, welcomed by the theological and liturgical master-strategist of
England’s Reformation, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer.
Edward VI’s Reformation lasted only six years, but its legacy for Anglicanism was
profound. Cranmer produced two editions of the English Book of Common Prayer during
the reign, in 1549 and 1552: two superficially similar books, yet the profound differences
between them have troubled Anglicans ever since. While outraged traditionalists saw the
first, 1549 book as merely a ‘Christmas game’ (Fletcher and MacCulloch 2004: 152),
some of the more eirenic reformers (notably Bucer) were enthusiastic for it, and many
later Anglicans have regretted its passing. However, Cranmer’s decision to revise it was
not a frivolous one. It was probably only ever intended as an interim text, and the 1552
book must be seen as a clearer, more mature, and more unambiguous expression of his
theology and his ecclesiology.
Yet while the Reformed Protestantism of Edward’s reign was unambiguous, the legacy of
Henry VIII’s peculiar Reformation still hung about it. In particular, this was once again a
political Reformation, imposed by parliamentary means in the name of a king who kept
his father’s title of Supreme Head. There was some genuine popular support (and much
hostility), but the Edwardine Reformation was first and last an act of state. This shaped
its outcomes. Theologians might preach, but Cranmer and his allies also had to govern. In
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leading their unruly and largely unwilling flock from the Egyptian fleshpots of popery to
the promised land of the Protestant gospel, they had to ensure that the laggards kept up
with the main body; and they also had to prevent enthusiasts from running on too far
ahead. In this twin task—spurring on the reluctant and bridling the zealous—the regime
continued to use Henry VIII’s language of moderation, although the journey it had
embarked upon was anything but.
Act IV of the drama has received considerable attention from recent historians, but is of
less immediate interest to us here, for it is a tantalizing might-have-been. The young
Edward VI died in 1553, and after an attempt to rig the succession failed, he was
succeeded by his elder half-sister Mary, who executed a screeching U-turn in England’s
religious politics. The primacy of politics over religion has never been clearer. Henry
VIII’s and Edward VI’s Reformations were undone and the kingdom was reconciled to
(p. 37) the papacy. How successful Mary’s Catholic restoration might have been remains
controversial, although the consensus has shifted markedly in its favour in recent years.
What is not controversial is that it did not in fact succeed, because she died childless in
1558. The reign’s lasting legacy for Anglicanism is a bitter one, for Mary’s regime
decided (indeed, was compelled) to deal firmly with the hard core of Protestant
ideologues she inherited. Some eight hundred were driven into exile, where they
cemented their relationships with their Reformed Protestant brethren in Switzerland,
southern Germany, and Geneva (and where some of them fell out bitterly with one
another). Nearly three hundred were executed by the regime, including Cranmer and
four other bishops. This policy may or may not have been politically wise under the
circumstances, and it may or may not have been working: but when the queen’s sudden
death restored the Protestants to power, they brought a legacy of bitterness with them.
And so Act V of this switchback Reformation was a Protestant restoration, under Henry
VIII’s last surviving child, Elizabeth I. Elizabeth was a Protestant, but of an idiosyncratic
kind: she retained an old-fashioned affection for liturgical ceremony, choral music and
even the crucifix. But as the country’s religious battle-lines had hardened, there was less
scope for royal idiosyncrasy than before. The only politically viable choices were
Edward’s Reformation and Mary’s Restoration, and Elizabeth chose the former. But she
put her own stamp on it when the independent English Church was refloated on a raft of
new legislation in 1559. A few changes were made to the 1552 Prayer Book, not to
appease Catholics—that was scarcely possible—but to leave a diplomatic door open to
Lutheranism and to suit the queen’s own nonconfessional mood. The royal title of
Supreme Head was altered to Supreme Governor—on one level a cosmetic change, since
it did not affect her powers, but it is true that neither she nor her successors ever
interfered as crudely with the English Church’s doctrine as Henry VIII had done. More
important than such changes introduced in 1559, however, was what happened
afterwards. To the surprise of Catholics and Protestants alike, Elizabeth absolutely
refused to permit any significant alterations to the 1559 settlement—so much so that it
now appears as a ‘settlement’ of religion, rather than the temporary and shifting
compromise which contemporaries expected it to be. Having restored Edward VI’s
Reformation, Elizabeth froze it. The final act of the English Reformation lasted from her
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accession until after the death of her successor James I in 1625, a long ‘Jacobethan’
period of stasis in religious politics following a generation of bewildering upheaval.
What was the nature of this post-Reformation English Church? It was, first and last, a
Protestant church. This has been an inconvenient truth for many later Anglicans, but it is
inescapable. The Calvinist doctrine of predestination was the firm consensus in the
Elizabethan church. Archbishop Whitgift (1583–1604), a hammer of Protestant dissidents,
was also a firm defender of that doctrine and an outspoken advocate of the Zurich
theologians. When the Dutch Reformed Church was split over the issue of predestination
in the 1610s, an English delegation attended the synod which was called to resolve the
issue, and they helped their Dutch brethren come down on the side of firm Calvinist
orthodoxy (Milton 2005). And it was indeed as brethren that they were seen and that they
saw themselves: part of an international Reformed Protestant family, a family on (p. 38)
whose behalf Elizabethan England had fought in France and the Netherlands, and into
which James I married his daughter, much to his subjects’ delight.
The doctrine of the English Church was laid down in a set of Thirty-Nine Articles
approved by Parliament in 1571, based closely on a similar set issued under Edward VI.
The Elizabethan articles were shorn of a few sections which were seen to offer
unnecessary offence to Lutherans, but only the most perverse reading can make them
anything other than a Reformed Protestant confession of faith. The English Church’s
liturgical practice—heavy with preaching and psalm-singing, with worship entirely in the
vernacular and the Mass replaced by a Protestant communion service—was unmistakably
Reformed. The great Reformed theologians were widely read and respected. More of
Calvin’s works were published in English than in any other European vernacular,
including his native French. England contributed to this conversation, too: William
Perkins, Thomas Cartwright, and other English theologians were widely read across
Reformed Europe.
And yet this was not simply a Reformed Protestant utopia. All Reformed Protestant
churches had their idiosyncrasies, but the English one was more idiosyncratic than most.
This is largely because of the queen’s adamantine refusal to allow any significant reforms
after 1559. Protestant activists became increasingly frustrated by this, and from the
mid-1560s to the early 1590s there was a series of confrontations between the regime
and those who were labelled ‘Puritans’. These people wished to complete what they saw
as an unfinished Reformation. The Prayer Book still seemed too popish to them,
traditional in its patterning and many of its texts. Ceremonial remnants—the use of
vestments, the use of pipe organs, the churching of women, the sign of the cross in
baptism—troubled Puritan consciences, hypersensitized to possible idolatry.
Beyond this lay more strategic issues, such as the status and powers of bishops. Some
Puritans wished to replace episcopacy altogether. At its root, the argument about
episcopacy was about power. Bishops were appointed by the Crown, and so were the
principal guarantee of royal control over the church, while the presbyteries after which
some Puritans hankered would be elected by the clergy and be politically independent.
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This is why it took a civil war, and the defeat of the king, for presbyterianism to be
implemented in England (although when this happened, in the 1640s, the presbyterians
were outflanked by others yet more radical). From a modern perspective, however, the
more interesting party are the defenders of episcopacy, a structure which has become the
defining feature of Anglicanism. For the first thirty years of Elizabeth’s reign, the
regime’s defence of episcopacy was a limited and pragmatic one. It was a permissible and
expedient form of church government, useful for maintaining good order; but it was no
more than that. Other Reformed churches had turned bishops into superintendents,
officials who had a similar function without any of the status claims which hang about
episcopacy. Edward VI’s church had been moving in this direction, but that movement
was, in this as in most other areas, arrested by Elizabeth. Yet even the most conservative
and conformist of the early Elizabethan bishops did not believe episcopacy was divinely
instituted, nor that bishops derived their authority from apostolic succession. It was the
presbyterians’ attacks which, in the late 1580s, provoked some of the more (p. 39)
combative conformists into formulating such doctrines: notably Richard Bancroft, later
Archbishop of Canterbury (1604–10), who in 1589 famously preached that episcopacy
was necessary by God’s law. It was a provocative and controversial claim, and even
amongst the conformists, few were willing to go that far. Richard Hooker, later a giant of
Anglicanism, was not willing to unchurch his Reformed brethren in other countries in this
way. Yet the very idea is a sign that the conformity and political caution of the Elizabethan
church was in genuine tension with its Reformed Protestant doctrines.
In the seventeenth century, those implicit tensions would emerge into the open and lead
to the development of something called Anglicanism. But if there is one clear consensus
in recent studies of the English Reformation, it is this. The English Reformation was a
Reformation, indeed a Reformed Protestant, a Calvinist Reformation. True, the word
‘Protestant’ does not appear in any of the English Church’s formularies, but this is an
omission of as little (or less) significance than the omission of the word ‘Trinity’ from
scripture. The Elizabethan and Jacobean Puritans were not dissidents from the English
Church; they were reformers within it, and were fiercely loyal to it, often at grave cost to
themselves. The English Reformation did carry the seeds of a later and distinctive
Anglican identity within it, but those seeds lay dormant for the best part of a century
before they began to germinate, and when they did so they took the English Church in a
markedly different direction from that which its sixteenth-century reformers had
intended. That direction is what we now call Anglicanism.
The Slow Germination of ‘Anglicanism’

‘Anglican’ is not a term that was in common use before the Restoration of 1662, and most
historians now try to avoid using it to refer to the English Church before that date. Henry
VIII had called himself Supreme Head of the Church of England, of the ecclesia
anglicana, but he and his contemporaries understood that term in the way that
Metternich understood the word ‘Italy’, as merely a geographical expression. The English
Church was Anglican in the same sense that the French Church was Gallican—an identity
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which asserted a distinctively national character but also assumed that it belonged to the
wider catholic church (however defined), one member of the family of Christian nations.
In this context, ‘Anglicanism’ could scarcely be a meaningful doctrine, unless perhaps it
was an assertion of royal or national control over the church. During the seventeenth
century, this patriotic assertion of a distinctive Englishness within the wider church
shaded insensibly into a claim that to be Anglican was to be materially different from, and
superior to, other Christians.
Cranmer did not use the word; Bishop Jewel did not use it; Hooker did not use it. One of
the first to do so, or nearly to do so, was a hostile Catholic commentator, Thomas Harrab,
in a polemic of 1616. One of his purposes was to portray the Protestant world as a
hornets’ nest of mutual disagreement, and so he contrasted Lutheranism, Calvinism, and
Anabaptism with a fourth Protestant variant, which he called ‘Anglianism’. This was
(p. 40) a word which he self-consciously coined: ‘I call the religion of England Anglianism,
because it among the rest hath no one especial Author, but is set forth by the Prince, and
Parliament’. He described it as a kind of hybrid, not between Catholicism and
Protestantism, but between Lutheranism and Calvinism: because it ‘retaineth yet some
ceremonies of ancient Religion, although daily decreasing’ (Harrab 1616: sigs. A1r, A2r–
v).
Harrab’s ingenious coinage did not catch on, but his characterization of what made
‘Anglianism’ distinctive was as perceptive as it was uncharitable. Its retention of some
ceremonial—a retention which was soon to grow more enthusiastic, against his
predictions—was both important and rooted in politics. Queen Elizabeth, Harrab wrote,
had believed ‘that Calvin’s Religion was too lean, and the Catholic Religion too fat,
because the one had many ceremonies, the other none’ (Harrab 1616: sig. E2v). This
claim is both true and misleading in an important way. True, because Elizabeth and some
of those about her did retain a stubborn affection for certain old-fashioned practices
which many others saw as popery. Misleading, because neither Elizabeth nor her clergy
ever tried to position themselves as a via media between Protestantism and Catholicism.
They were unambiguously Protestant. It was a common conviction in Elizabethan England
that the pope was Antichrist. The notion of compromising with or accommodating to
Antichrist was logically absurd and morally repulsive. There is no via media between
truth and falsehood.
But Harrab’s claim is also importantly misleading, because the English state and church
did, from Henry VIII’s time on, relentlessly make rhetorical claims to moderation and to
be taking a middle path. Henry did it; Elizabeth did it; Hooker did it with enormous
sophistication. Such claims are to be treated with care. They derived from Aristotelian
philosophy, whose concept of the golden mean argued that all virtues were positioned
midway between two opposing vices. However, any half-competent ethicist can portray
almost any position as a virtuous middle way; it is simply a matter of choosing the two
extremes with care. The English Reformation’s ‘moderation’ was largely a rhetorical
smokescreen, to conceal the breathtaking radicalism of what was being done from a
conservative and doubtful population. It was, in fact, ‘moderation’ in the sense of
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discipline: the English state moderated its people’s religion (Shagan 2011). Yet
smokescreens have a way of blowing back into the faces of those who create them. By
making the claim to be moderate a central part of the post-Reformation church’s identity,
the English reformers left that identity malleable and invited others to use the same claim
against them. It is in 1624 that we first find an English churchman, Richard Montague,
explicitly arguing that the English Church should ‘stand in the gap against Puritanism
and Popery, the Scilla and Charybdis of ancient piety’ (Brautigam 2003: 51). If we want to
identify a point when ‘Anglicanism’ swam into being, though as yet unnamed, we could do
worse than this daring attempt at triangulation.
If ‘moderation’ is a misleading characterization of the English Church, Harrab had also

hit on something far more fundamental: its subservience to the Crown. It is this, more
than any of the liturgical idiosyncrasies, which sets the English Church of 1600 apart
from its Reformed Protestant brethren elsewhere. This was a church whose (p. 41)
doctrine and liturgy were determined by statute law, whose key officials were royal
appointees, and whose figurehead was the monarch. Not all English Protestants liked this
arrangement, but almost all of them could stomach it. Some Lutheran churches were
subject to nearly the same degree of state control, even if other Reformed churches were
not. The English Crown’s exceedingly high view of its own authority was widely shared by
its subjects in general (in England, if not in Ireland). A theological tradition which
stressed the duty of obedience to higher powers could stretch itself to a doctrine of royal
supremacy without too much risk of injury. And pragmatically it made excellent sense.
The Crown was offering the Protestants an alliance. This was worth a few compromises,
especially since they might reasonably hope that future monarchs could be educated to
respect delicate Protestant consciences more than Elizabeth did.
But in fact, the subjugation of a Protestant church to the English state stored up more
serious problems for the future: three in particular. First, it left the church at the mercy
of its monarchs’ whims. There is no necessary reason why this should have proved
inimical to the Protestant cause, but in the event, Elizabeth I was hostile to Puritan
aspirations, James I was intrigued by the ceremonial revival, and Charles I was entranced
by it. As the Presbyterians had foreseen, the church’s subjection to the Crown meant that
its doctrinal stability could never be assured. Secondly, and more systemically, that
subjection implied a dangerous answer to an important question: when was the Church of
England, the ecclesia anglicana, founded? For Protestants, the Reformation was a clean
break with the past, or a return to a long-lost pure British Christianity remembered in
ancient legend. But the Crown, itself a medieval institution, could not afford to regard
1534, or 1559, as Year Zero in this way. Its legitimacy depended on its ancient heritage.
Technically, Parliament did not bestow the royal supremacy on Henry VIII in 1534: it
recognized a title which (it was now said) he and his predecessors had always had, as of
right. The structure of the English Church—its parishes, dioceses, cathedrals, courts,
colleges, patronage, and much else—sailed through the Reformation largely unchanged,
deriving its authority and even its legal force from medieval precedents. The theologians
might revile the medieval church; the politicians and the lawyers could not do so.
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The third ingredient of this slow-cooking Anglican stew was English national identity.
Everywhere in Europe (in Catholic as well as Protestant lands), the Reformations
cemented emerging national identities. A shift to vernacular languages, the eclipse of
papal power, the wars of religion, and an overarching set of apocalyptic fears and hopes
would already have assured this; the identification of the church with the Crown only
reinforced it. English Protestantism was both idealistically internationalist and pungently
nationalist. The best-known example of this remains John Aylmer, later bishop of London,
who in 1559 wrote a defence of his new queen’s authority. Aylmer, who was still in exile,
wrote movingly of international Christian solidarity and stressed that ‘the household of
faith’ is a tie deeper than any bond of nation or family. And yet he also addressed the
English as a nation, saying, ‘you have God, and all his army of angels on your side’
against their foes—a view he summed up in a notorious marginal note: ‘God is
English’ (Aylmer 1559: sigs. L4v, P4v).
It seems that this Protestant nationalism was one of the main means by which
(p. 42)
England became a Protestant nation—while, as one historian observes, never quite

becoming a nation of Protestants (Haigh 1993: 280). The wars of the 1580s and 1590s
helped to make Catholicism something foreign: Spanish, or French, or Irish. The memory
of the persecution under Queen Mary in the 1550s reinforced this too. Those persecutions
were lovingly memorialized in a vast ecclesiastical history assembled by a former exile,
John Foxe, in successive editions from 1563 onwards. This book (properly titled the Acts
and Monuments but universally known, then and since, as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs) was
not a nationalistic text. Foxe was an idealistic internationalist whose natural habitat was
the cosmopolitan world of European scholarship and who would have preferred to publish
his book in the universal language of Latin. But despite him, the stories he told helped to
cement the identity between Englishness and Protestantism (see Collinson 2002).
The success of this alliance is too easily forgotten. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
English people were not merely united in their loathing of Catholicism, but understood
that this meant that they were Protestants. There was no third option: an understanding
which remains the view in Ireland and in Germany, where Anglican squeamishness about
claiming Protestant status appears quixotic. It was this alliance which produced the only
formal statement that the English Church is Protestant. Appropriately enough, this came
not in a doctrinal formulary but in parliamentary legislation. The 1701 Act of Settlement
(which continues to govern the succession to the British throne) provides a coronation
oath in which new monarchs swear to uphold the Protestant church.
And yet, by then the English Church’s Protestantism was already becoming something
rather odd. The English Church was losing its international connections, and eliding
Christianity with Englishness. With the Crown as the glue to hold the two together, and
mixed in with the wish to downplay the rupture at the Reformation, this took post-
Reformation English Christianity in a distinct direction. The resulting view was
caricatured with typical precision by England’s greatest historical satirists, W. C. Sellar
and R. J. Yeatman, in 1930. In Henry VIII’s reign, they observed, ‘the Pope . . . seceded
with all his followers from the Church of England’. Mary’s Catholic restoration, they
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observed, was doomed because the English are ‘bound to be C of E’: Anglicanism as
national destiny, bred in the bone, much as Catholicism was long said to be for the Irish.
Most pointedly of all, Sellar and Yeatman reverse the terms ‘Reformation’ and
‘Restoration’: a play on schoolroom confusion, but one which leaves Henry VIII ‘restoring’
the true church, while the creation of the 1662 Prayer Book, and of the Anglican identity
that went with it, become the true moment of the Reformation (Sellar and Yeatman 1930:
54, 56, 69).
The Battle for the Reformation

So much for the history. What has, and does, this mean for Anglicanism?
The history of the Reformation era has been much fought over by Anglicans. It is worth
pointing out that all sides in these arguments tend to use the history dishonestly, (p. 43)
as a club with which to beat their opponents. The most notorious, and now evidently
ridiculous, example of this is the attempt by some of the nineteenth-century Tractarians
to argue that the English Reformation was not actually a Protestant Reformation at all.
Yet their opponents are not obviously free of the same errors.
The unapologetic, unambiguous Reformed Protestantism of the sixteenth-century church

is a history that many later Anglicans have been uneasy with, and have tried to efface.
Elizabethan figures who were marginal at the time—notably Richard Hooker, an
idiosyncratic theologian who died in obscurity in 1600 (MacCulloch 2002)—have
retrospectively been elevated into giants, a status which they doubtless deserve, but
which they did not enjoy in their own times. As one historian has put it, this has become
part of ‘the myth of the English Reformation’, the myth being ‘that it did not
happen’ (MacCulloch 1991: 1). The genuine giants of the Elizabethan and Jacobean
church—men such as Perkins and Cartwright—have largely been written out of Anglican
history, apparently on the grounds that Puritanism later developed into Nonconformity.
Yet the Elizabethan and Jacobean Puritans, with a very few exceptions, remained
passionately committed to a single, national church, and spent generations trying to
reform it from within, despite the hostility of many of their superiors. The apparent view
that such people are unAnglican, especially from a tradition which is happy to elide
Anglicanism with Englishness when it is convenient to do so, is both unattractive and
ahistorical.
Another, more honest approach is openly to criticize the Reformation, as producing little
of value for Anglicans. Some Anglicans have used the Catholic jibe ‘Deformation’ to
describe the events of the sixteenth century. Even those who do not go so far find much to
regret, and indeed there are precious few Anglicans with strong enough stomachs to
swallow the Elizabethan church whole. The difficulty for even the most ultramontane
Anglo-Catholic is that there remains a baby in the midst of that sixteenth-century
bathwater. Most of the ‘historic formularies’ to which Anglicanism still sometimes pays
lip-service can be widely disregarded. The martyrs of the Reformation may still be
honoured, cautiously, but it has become common to bracket them with the Catholics
Page 10 of 14

executed by the Tudors (a queasy act of symbolic historical parallelism which is

reminiscent of Henry VIII himself). Yet the Prayer Book—the text which, more than
anything else, defines Anglicanism—cannot be so easily discarded. Those who wish to
stand in the Anglican liturgical tradition are tied to the Reformation willy-nilly.
On the face of it, the Reformation period has more to offer Evangelicals, and indeed
Evangelical Anglicans across the world have been enthusiastic to claim the Reformers’
mantle for themselves. But they, too, have a myth of the English Reformation, a myth
which holds that it was a simple Protestant Reformation from the beginning, and that its
later subversion betrays what the Anglican Church is and ought to be. As we have seen,
the English Reformation was far from pure and scarcely simple. Whatever the aspirations
of the theologians may have been, the state’s grubby fingermarks were all over the
process, and shaped the outcome decisively. The sometimes brutal coercion involved
remains Anglicanism’s original sin, of which it has never yet fully repented and for which
it has never yet fully atoned. And as well as forcing consciences, the alliance with the
state shaped Anglicanism’s own theology. Cranmer was as keen to bridle enthusiasts
(p. 44) as to spur on the laggards. This was a church which always retained a
conservatively coloured liturgy, which retained cathedrals, and which never formally
abolished monasticism (it simply dissolved all the actual monasteries). And the Puritans,
while genuinely a part of it, were always profoundly unhappy with much of its order and
polity. So, as one of England’s most distinguished historians mischievously asks, did the
English Reformation happen? (Collinson 1994: 91).
This is one of the remaining areas of real disagreement in the history of the English
Reformation: what it meant for the people. In the absence of any reliable or
comprehensive statistics, we are reduced to more impressionistic assessments. Puritans
tended to believe that they were a regenerate remnant in a godless nation, and had a dim
view of most of their fellow-countrymen. But those fellow-countrymen rarely tell us their
own views. Some scholars would emphasize the impact of Puritanism in shaping the
country’s wider religious culture and in ministering effectively to the people (e.g. Watt
1991; Walsham 1999; Carlson 2003; Ryrie 2013). Others stress the scepticism,
rejectionism, and pragmatism of the wider population, who made the minimum
adaptations necessary to survive in the new world but who shrugged off Puritan
aspirations as much as they could (Marsh 1998; Haigh 2001, 2007).
The matter cannot be resolved conclusively, but some observations can be made. Certain
aspects of the post-Reformation English Church’s uses and worship were more popular
than others. Two stand out: the Prayer Book and the metrical psalms. A strong case has
been made that many English people, including those who quailed at the diet of
preaching which Puritans prescribed, came quickly to place great value on the Prayer
Book. When its abolition was attempted in the 1640s, it became apparent that it had won
the affection of millions (Maltby 1998). Score one to the Anglicans, then. Yet at the same
time, the single most popular devotional practice in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-
century England was the singing of metrical psalms, in the ‘Old Version’ ascribed to
Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins. This psalter dominated English usage unshakably
Page 11 of 14

until the 1690s, and outsold the Prayer Book itself. Learned opinion increasingly poured
contempt on its verse, and Laudian and high-church divines loathed it; yet they all
admitted that it was too popular to challenge (Quitslund 2008; Ryrie 2010). This matters
because metrical psalmody was a trademark of Calvinist worship, indeed the most openly
Calvinist liturgical practice adopted in the English Church. Which was it that shows us
the true spirit of the Church of England, and of the English Reformation: the Prayer Book
or the psalter? You pays your money and you takes your choice.
References
Aylmer, John (1559). An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subiectes. Revised Short-Title
Catalogue (RSTC) 1005. London: John Day.
Brautigam, Dwight (2003). ‘Prelates and Politics: Uses of “Puritan,” 1625–40’. In Laura
Lunger Knoppers (ed.), Puritanism and its Discontents. Newark, DE: University of
Delaware Press: 49–66.
(p. 45) Carlson, Eric Josef (2003). ‘Good Pastors or Careless Shepherds? Parish Ministers
and the English Reformation’. History 88: 423–36.
Collinson, Patrick (1994). ‘England’. In Bob Scribner, Roy Porter, and Mikuláš Teich (eds),
The Reformation in National Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 80–94.
Collinson, Patrick (2002). ‘John Foxe and National Consciousness’. In Christopher Highley
and John N. King (eds), John Foxe and His World. Aldershot: Ashgate: 10–34.
Fletcher, Anthony and MacCulloch, Diarmaid (2004). Tudor Rebellions. 5th edn. Harlow:
Pearson.
Haigh, Christopher (1993). English Reformations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Haigh, Christopher (2001). ‘Success and Failure in the English Reformation’. Past and
Present 173: 28–49.
Haigh, Christopher (2007). The Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven: Kinds of Christianity in
Post-Reformation England, 1570–1640. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harrab, Thomas (1616). Tessaradelphus, or The foure brothers. RSTC 12797. Lancashire:
Birchley Hall Press.
Heal, Felicity (2003). Reformation in Britain and Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jones, Norman (2002). The English Reformation: Religion and Cultural Adaptation.
Oxford: Blackwell.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid (1991). ‘The Myth of the English Reformation’. Journal of British
Studies 30: 1–19.
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MacCulloch, Diarmaid (2002). ‘Richard Hooker’s Reputation’. English Historical Review

117 (473): 773–812.
Maltby, Judith (1998). Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marsh, Christopher (1998). Popular Religion in Sixteenth-Century England: Holding their

Peace. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Marshall, Peter (2002). Reformation England, 1480–1642. London: Arnold.
Milton, Anthony (ed.) (2005). The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort (1618–19).
Woodbridge: Church of England Record Society, vol. 13.
Quitslund, Beth (2008). The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English
Metrical Psalter, 1547–1603. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Ryrie, Alec (2009). The Age of Reformation. Harlow: Pearson.
Ryrie, Alec (2010). ‘The Psalms and Confrontation in English and Scottish Protestantism’.
Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 101: 114–37.
Ryrie, Alec (2013). Being Protestant in Reformation Britain. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Sellar, W. C. and Yeatman, R. J. (1930). 1066 and All That. London: Methuen.
Shagan, Ethan (2011). The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion and the Politics of
Restraint in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Walsham, Alexandra (1999). Providence in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.
Watt, Tessa (1991). Cheap Print and Popular Piety. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Alec Ryrie
Alec Ryrie is Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University, England,

and editor of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History.
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The Reformation in Anglicanism

Oxford Handbooks Online

Print Publication Date: Oct 2015

Abstract and Keywords

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 15 March 2019

The Course of the Reformation

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 15 March 2019

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 15 March 2019

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 15 March 2019

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 15 March 2019

The Slow Germination of ‘Anglicanism’

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 15 March 2019

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 15 March 2019

If ‘moderation’ is a misleading characterization of the English Church, Harrab had also

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 15 March 2019

England became a Protestant nation—while, as one historian observes, never quite

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 15 March 2019

The Battle for the Reformation

The unapologetic, unambiguous Reformed Protestantism of the sixteenth-century church

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 15 March 2019

executed by the Tudors (a queasy act of symbolic historical parallelism which is

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 15 March 2019

Haigh, Christopher (1993). English Reformations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 15 March 2019

MacCulloch, Diarmaid (2002). ‘Richard Hooker’s Reputation’. English Historical Review

Marsh, Christopher (1998). Popular Religion in Sixteenth-Century England: Holding their

Marshall, Peter (2002). Reformation England, 1480–1642. London: Arnold.

Ryrie, Alec (2009). The Age of Reformation. Harlow: Pearson.

Walsham, Alexandra (1999). Providence in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford

Alec Ryrie is Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University, England,

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 15 March 2019

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 15 March 2019

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