Church History II - Lesson 10

The life and thought of the Christian church from the Reformation to modern times. Designed as an orientation to the shape of the whole tradition with special focus on the history of Christian doctrine and spirituality.

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Is everybody more or less ready? Let's pray together, shall I? Father? Thank you for all the many things that you give us. Bless us. Now we pray as we work and as we study together. Help us in all that we do to learn, to love and to serve you more. What keep as we pay very close this afternoon and guide us each step of the way that we might truly become more like our Lord Jesus Christ in all that we think, in all that we say and in all that we do. Man. Okay, everybody, have a good week. Good. I'm sorry I was away on Thursday, but I don't suppose you are. I'm always nice to have an unexpected little break in the middle of the semester, But I'm back now, and I don't think I'm going away again. So that's the bad news. I should be here now. Right the way through. Through thick and through thin. Right. Last time we. I was talking about Henry the eighth, and I think we were like two wives down. And for it to go something like that, you know, and just to refresh your memory, I had a little thing on the board where I had King, and then I had over here Parliament and the House of Lords and the House of Commons. And then over here, the convocations and the Upper House, which was bishops and the Lower house, which were the clergy. And I also pointed out that the bishops, the Upper house of Convocation of the complications were represented in the House of Lords, and that the convocations reported to the Pope as well as to the King.

This was the set up when the Parliament was convened in 1529. One of the factors, as I pointed out a few lectures ago that prompted this, I mean, apart from the the annulment proceedings, you know, that the king was trying to put forward and he was trying to get parliament to support him in. The other factor was the corruption in the church, which had been revealed when the king's chief minister, Cardinal Wolsey, had been stripped of his offices. That took place earlier in 1529. The parliament didn't meet until November the 5th of November. That was the sort of standard time for the meeting of the Parliament, and it was earlier that year that Wolsey was actually dismissed. And then when that happened, that took the lid off all kinds of corruption because suddenly it was realized that he who had been the king's chief minister for about 15 years, had used his position in order to place all his relatives and friends and supporters and, you know, you name it in key positions here, there and everywhere, not least in the church. That was a you know, an important thing that has to be borne in mind. Now, just to give you some idea, I'd better tell you how the church actually functioned at this time, because otherwise you won't understand what you know, what's going on and you won't understand books when you read them. The basic unit in a church and in the church was what was called the benefice. Well, what is called the Benefice. It's still that they still exist. But this was a system of of church appointments which was devised in the Middle Ages. Now, a benefice was normally what we would or what you would call a pastorate.

That is to say that if you were to plant, you know, put it down in Birmingham and you would say, well, you know, the chief pastor of Shade's Mountain Baptist Church would have a bench. It would be the holder of the benefits. And, you know, the chief pastor of First Baptist Church or some Dallas and no United Methodist, whoever, whatever it is, whoever is the head person, would be the person that we would think of today as the person holding the benefits. All right. Now, appointment to a benefice could be in the hands of different people. It wasn't necessarily the, you know, the bishop or the pope or anybody like that who appointed to Benefice. It depended very much on the nature of the church because the churches had been built over the centuries by different people. I mean, sometimes they had been built by monasteries, sometimes they had been built by local lords of the manor or, you know, wealthy people of one kind or another. Sometimes they had been built. You know, just by the locals, sometimes by the bishop. It just varied. Every every individual church was different. But what happened was that if you built a church, whoever built it had the right to appoint a priest to the benefice now. This, of course, meant the congregation had absolutely no say whatsoever. I mean, forget that, you know, in some cases there might not have been a congregation or much of a congregation that was completely irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was that the owner of the church, whoever it was, would have the right to appoint. Now, this person is known as the patron, the patron of the benefits. And as I say, different people could exercise this depending on the exercise of the patronage, depending on who built it originally.

All right. Now, if. The church was built by a monastery and owned by a monastery then. Usually what would happen is that the abbot of the monastery would be declared the rector of the parish, the rector or the incumbent. These words get thrown around of the benefits. However, this person would not reside there, of course, because he is the abbot of the monastery. So he would live in the monastery and what he would do was appoint a substitute, somebody else, you know, somebody we would call a teaching assistant or something like that to do the duty for him to go and take the services, bury the dead. You know, and that sort of thing. And he would pay this person a stipend and, you know, out of his own pocket. So you see, he would he would say, well, I get so-and-so to go. And, you know, and types of services in that particular church and so on, and I'll pay him. You see. And that is the way it was out of the revenue of the benefits. This person, the person who was sent to do it, you know, sent to take the place of the rector is called the vicar or was called the vicar. This is very confusing in modern England, because in modern England, directors and vicars are the same thing. And people wonder why and how and how, you know, what does this mean and all the rest of it. But this is because of the abolition of the monasteries, the dissolution of the monasteries. If you go to England and you come across a church which has a vicar, this means that at one time this church belonged to some monastery or other, and the rector was in the monastery at that time and the incumbent of the benefits.

Now, where did the money come from? The money came from ties and ties in the Middle Ages. And this was true everywhere in Europe was compulsory. It was a tax like any other tax and everybody had to pay. And there are very complicated rules of tithe tithe laws. It's a very interesting study because it's one of the very few ways that we can tell how rich the country was at any given time because there was no taxation, as we understand it. I mean, there was no civil taxation. Just occasionally, if the king needed money for warfare or something like that, I mean, he would slap a special tax on, you know, on salt or or some sort of basic commodity in order to raise money for warfare. But state taxes, secular taxes were haphazard. I mean, they didn't they didn't know it didn't happen all that much. But church taxes, the tithe was universal and imposed on absolutely everybody. And so everyone had to pay the tide, whether you wanted to or not. That was a you know, you didn't have a choice in this. Now, in return for your tithe money, you got quite a lot. I mean, you know, it's not this wasn't just a case of, you know, funding somebody to paint frescoes in your chapel or something like this. I mean, there were sort of real returns for your tithe money because the churches were expected to provide whatever schooling there was. The churches provided whatever medical care there might be in most cases. They provided free accommodation, hospitality, and basically they looked after the poor as well. So the poor people of the parish, you know, relied on handouts from the church, in effect. So the church was a vast social welfare organization as well as, you know, a religious body.

So the tithe money, you mustn't as I say, don't get me wrong, I mean, this this money went or was felt to go on the whole to reasonably useful purposes. However, the primary purpose of tithe was to fund clergy, to fund somebody, to be there to take the services. And you see, I mean, that was the that was the first thing. And whoever was the rector, whoever was the incumbent of the Benefice got the tithe money. That's who it went to. Now. There, of course, were rich parishes and there were poor parishes. But let us say, for example, that you are in a parish where the tithes revenue is annual tithe revenue is something like £300. That was not unusual. You know, by the time you took a 10th off all the farmland and everything else. So you got £300 in tithe. All right. To pay a substitute to take the services for you would cost about 30 or £40 because that was all you needed to spend. So it's impossible to put this money this into modern terms because, you know, prices have changed so dramatically that somebody who had £30 or £40 a year to live on had enough. You know, that was fine, particularly, of course, as they would be single. Don't forget, I mean, at least while they weren't married, even if they weren't necessarily altogether single, but still that was their problem, not something the church needed to sort out. So you got 30 or £40 like that, but you still and then you would have to spend a certain amount on repairs and on, you know, feeding the poor and all that kind of thing. But allowing for that, you would still have a large amount of money left over.

And if you were, for example, a student in the university. Studying theology, you know, training in order to go into the pastorate later on. You were allowed to have anything up to four of these benefits. To pay for your theological education. So you see, you didn't have to work at McDonald's. I don't know where they got people for that. But you didn't have to do that in your spare time. The church would pay you by giving you the revenue of four benefits, as, let's say, up to four. Most people had probably about two, and this would pay all your university expenses. But you, of course, in ten would have to find somebody to take the services in the church, you know, I mean, that would pay somebody to do that and so on while you studied at the university. But this was you know, this was done. I mean, people it was a very good arrangement for those people, for that in that sort of way. But you can see with a system like this how it was susceptible to corruption, because once you could accumulate benefits and as long as you could find enough people, you know, to sort of do the duty for you, I mean, take things on. And there were always and you say, well, how did they manage that? Well, of course, you could always go around ordaining, you know, anybody who could basically walk. And they didn't have to know very much or be very well-educated as long as they could, you know, mumble their way through a service. You could more or less, you know, have them. It was quite possible to to hire people like this. And there were all kinds of so-called mass priests. They were actually called nice priests going around because that's all they did was say mass.

You know, they learned to do it sort of by rote as a kind of performance. And they would go from place to place and they would earn a living that way. You see in this kind of in this in this method, by this method. Meanwhile, while the rector of the benefits would be off doing something different, you know, could be anywhere, doing anything and raking in the money. Because if you got £200 from a parish, you were doing very well. When you think that the, you know, the average person was living on 30 or 40 a year, I mean, to get 200 from one and to have, say, ten. I mean, you could become quite wealthy in this way. And this is what Cardinal Wellesley did for his for his relatives. Of course, he didn't leave himself out. I mean, he had umpteen benefits himself, you say, where he just farmed off the revenue and and did it in this way. In fact, I've just used a word there. The English word farm comes from this system because the word farm, the English word farm comes from the Latin word ferma, which means signature. And it was the signature that you put on a lease that you were you were at. You could lease the the what's called the Glebe Glebe, which was the land reserved for the church because in addition to the tithe you see 1/10 of the land in the parish would be set aside for the use of the exclusive use of the church. But the priest wouldn't necessarily farm this this land. He would let it out to somebody else and the somebody else would, you know, would farm it. And this bit from this use of the word ferma comes the English word farm.

I mean, that's where the word farm comes. And then he would have to pay, of course, you know, a huge percentage of his income from what he formed to the church. That was the kind of deal, you know, it's like renting, renting of a property and then paying paying rent on it to the church. So they got money in this sort of way as well. And there was a vast enterprise, a vast business, you know, set up like this. So Wolsey played this to the hilt. He used it to the full to buy influence and positions for his family and friends. And when he fell, suddenly the books were opened, you know, and and people saw what was going on. And so this was a tremendous cry for reform. Now, Wolsey was replaced by two people. One of them was Thomas Moore, and the other was Thomas Cromwell. Sir Thomas Moore replaced Wolsey in his secular functions. He became chancellor, which is equivalent to Prime Minister, head of the government. Today, Thomas Cromwell had a different office also carved out of Wells's little empire, and he became what is known as the Vicar general. This is a special title. And the vicar general was somebody who. He was the king's substitute. The word vicar in this case does not refer to Rector, but rather to the king. He was the King's general handyman and substitute in spiritual affairs, ecclesiastical affairs. And so Cromwell looked after the day to day running of the church, and it was up to him to sort out the corruption as far as he could. Now, Sir Thomas more was like Cromwell. Both of them were sympathetic to this kind of cleanup. Both of them were very upright, honest, you know, sensible, civilized people.

Thomas Cromwell, incidentally, while we're on this subject, was a distant relative of Oliver Cromwell in the next century. I mean, I think he was Oliver Cromwell's great grandfather's cousin or something like that. So it's the same family, but not the same person. I'd be very careful about this anyhow. And they cooperated. And the two of them in the parliament of 1529 to get a series of bills passed into law, which would insist that you could not hold a benefice without being resident. This, in effect, of course, meant that you couldn't hold more than one because how could you be resident and live in two places at once? And the idea of this was to cut down on corruption, to get people back into their churches, and to make sure that the money which was being collected was used for the purpose for which it was originally intended. This was a major reform. They also attempted to sort out the collection of fees because if you got married, you had to pay a fee. If you died, you had to pay a funeral fee, all this kind of thing. And during the Middle Ages, this this was not regularized. You know, there was no fixed table of fees that that you if you were charged, you would just charge whatever the rector thought you could get away with. And there were scandals over this because occasionally the rector would say, well, you're a wealthy businessman. You know, you can pay more than than than than I normally charge. And so he would double or triple or quadruple the fee for this. And there was a famous case in 15, 12, I think it was, of a London merchant whose baby son died. And this man was called Richard Hunt.

You and he hand and his baby son died. And he was charged for the for the funeral, some exorbitant fee, and he refused to pay, whereupon the rector had him arrested and charged for heresy of all things. You know, some people are more honest than others, aren't they? I mean, I'm sure in most churches if you denied the Trinity, no one would notice. But if you refuse to pay your tithe, they would just love to arrest you for heresy and burn you at the stake, provided didn't cost anything. But anyhow, you know they could do it cheap. This is what happened and the poor man was thrown into jail, you see, for this. And before he could appeal, I mean, he appealed the case, but before the appeal could be heard, because everybody realized that as soon as the appeal was heard, he would be released. I mean, you know, there was no there was no reason for charging him like this. He was mysteriously found dead in his cell. You know, and as we all know, with these things, nobody did it and no one saw it being done and so on. But this caused a furious scandal and people were convinced that the church authorities had had him silenced in order to avoid having to own up to the fact that he had been wrongly accused. So this was this was cited as a famous case of abuse of the of the power of this kind of thing. And in 1529, the parliament put an end to this by fixing fees for this kind of thing, again, as an attempt to root out corruption. So they were doing this. And as I say, both Sir Thomas Moore and Thomas Cromwell were all behind this.

However, the king had other ideas, of course. I mean, he wasn't against cleaning up the corruption in the church, but that wasn't the reason he was interested in calling Parliament together in the first place, as we know. And when it came to the question of disposing of his wife and finding somewhere else. So Thomas, someone else, I mean, so Thomas Moore and Thomas Cromwell differed dramatically more was, in this respect, a traditionalist. He did not think the king had very good grounds for the annulment of his marriage, and he was not prepared to play ball with what he regarded as open dishonesty. And in 1532, because of this, he resigned his offices and went into retirement thinking that he could, you know, sort of lie low and so on. Of course, that didn't work out that way. He was too prominent in in public life, too much a possible source of opposition. And after Henry finally broke with Rome, Law was arrested, tried for treason and executed. Obviously an unfair thing to have happened, but that's what happened. Serving Henry the eighth was never an easy, you know, sort of guaranteed career. PATTON Well, you did have a job for life, but you didn't always have much life. And that was the problem. So this was this was a Thomas more. Now, he was, of course, a very well-educated person, and he is well known as an author of various things. It is more who wrote the book Utopia? Who invented the concept? Utopia? An ideal society, you know, where everything runs perfectly and which, of course, does not exist. The word utopia. Incidentally, for those of you who study Greek, it is ou topia from the Greek negative ou plus topos meaning place. So utopia means no place, so it doesn't exist as a utopia.

More of us also extremely against. Anything to do with Protestantism. He was all for persecuting Protestants as much as possible, again for his because of his basically traditionalist outlook. And this has left rather a stain on his memory because, among other things, he wrote a book of terrible invective against William Tyndale for translating the Bible into English. And more has been romanticized in the 20th century by Hollywood. You know, a man for all seasons and this kind of thing. And this is a pity because the real life Thomas Moore was not such a wonderful person. And I think one has to realize this. He could be very nasty indeed to his enemies. What was the name of the book he wrote in there? Oh, it's something like that. It's a it's a sort of, you know, an attack. It's not it's not called an attack on William Tyndale, but it's something of this kind. It's got really? Yeah. In the title of the book, a Reply to the Monstrous Heresies of William or something like that. I don't know what it's actually called, but it wouldn't you won't have any difficulty finding it if that's what you're after. Bible Translation He was against Bible translation. Yes. Yes. Because he didn't think that any good could come from letting the average person read the Bible. You know, he was a real medieval traditionalist type, you know, very well-educated himself. But basically, he he thought it was better to tell other people what to do, you know, rather than let them do it. I mean, he would be about as much in favor of letting the average person. You have to compare him, I suppose, with something like a plantation owner in the old South and his attitude towards his slaves.

I mean, he might be a reasonably nice person in a way, but if you suggested, you know, providing a school and educating these slaves so that they could make something of themselves in life and this kind of thing, he wouldn't have found that very. You see what I mean? That just wouldn't have been in his sights at all. And so Thomas Moore was like that. I mean, he came from a certain class of the society. He was a knight, of course, hereditary knight. And so, therefore, you know, he wanted to keep the traditional class pattern and letting the peasants get above themselves was not his idea, you know, of the way forward. You see what I mean? So he was very much against that sort of thing. And he's been canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. He's now Saint Thomas more as far as they're concerned. But as far as we're concerned, no, you know, I'm willing to say it was Saint Thomas more. Right? Well, they I say so anyway. He was yes, he was particularly down on Protestants. Thomas Cromwell. Here was a sharp contrast. Quite what religion Thomas Cromwell actually believed in is not all that clear. I mean, he was a government official and so and in charge of the church. So you can imagine, I mean, anyone who's ever had to deal with a board of deacons will know that you don't inquire too deeply into the faith of those who sit around the table. But, you know, it could be rather disappointing anyhow. But they know all about the drains and things like that, you know? And so you just kind of let it be. And Thomas Cromwell was perhaps a little bit like that. However, he was, relatively speaking, much more open to Protestant ideas.

Now, the difficulty is knowing whether his openness to Protestant ideas came from a genuine belief that there might be something right about Protestantism, which maybe, maybe not. That's that's hard to say. Or whether it was just because he felt it was anti-clerical and anything, you know, to kick the pastor in the butt is a good idea. You know those people, you've met them. And so, you know, that was probably the kind of line that he he took. Never mind. It meant in practice. That ideas of a more reforming kind, you know, had a sympathetic ear, at least in Cromwell. And it is noticeable that as Cromwell became more influential in appointments, which of course was the case after Moore's resignation, because more was replaced by people who really didn't take much interest. And so Cromwell had the field more or less to himself. And it is it is he who is largely responsible for appointing people of a basically Protestant tendency. It was Cromwell, for example, who appointed Thomas Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury in late 1532. And indeed, it was Cromwell who discovered Cranmer in the first place. So there's definitely, you know, a tendency in that direction, as I say, how sincere it was and how deep it went. This is very difficult to say. Nevertheless, as the king's annulment proceedings got stalled, so things began to hot up the clergy realizing that they weren't getting very far. You know, in 1529 set about their own reform program. They figured, well, if the king is going to clean up our house or, you know, the parliament is going to clean up the church, we'd better get our act together as well. And they did what they could to clean up their act. For example, they insisted that in future, no one should be ordained unless they had, you know, had some kind of education and they were to be examined on this.

This had never been done before, but they were going to be, you know, examinations that you would have to undergo, which in effect meant that only people who had had a university background would be considered for ordination. So that was a major reform. But the clergy's main interest, it turned out, was in persecuting heretics, in other words, Protestants and in particular in rooting out heretical books. And they had made long lists of books that had been seized in London, you know, somehow or other and banned them officially, the banning of Protestant books. Now, these lists are extremely interesting because, of course, they tell us what people had available, what they could get hold of. And we find that within a very short time of their publication in Germany, books by Luther and Busa and even Zwingli and so on were making their way to England. And so even in 15, 29, 1530, this sort of time, there were a lot of books being seized, you know, in the ports. And of course, as you know, those of you who are into drugs for every book seized, you know, there were ten others that got away, you know that. Well, I mean, I I'm I'm a realist. You see, I don't I don't pretend that you're sitting there praying all day long. I mean, I know. I know better than that. So, you know, you you you know about this. So but the lists are very interesting because they tell us they give us some idea of how far Protestantism had spread and what kind of Protestantism was spreading at this time. Now, this is very important because finding a Protestant in England in 1529 was not an easy thing. There was, of course, William Tyndale, but he was in Germany having been forced to leave the country.

There were a few people at Cambridge who sat around discussing theology and possibly one or two of them, you know, after their fifth pint of beer or something, might have conceivably been regarded as somehow Protestant. But basically there were no such people. And this was in sharp contrast to what you would find in France. Now, Germany, you can't compare because in Germany, of course, it was a different thing. Protestantism had become official in a lot of places. And so therefore, asking who was or who wasn't a Protestant is a different question when you come to Germany. But France is a is a reasonable comparison, because in France it was a similar situation to that of England. But in France, the university, the Sorbonne was was divided into two over Protestant ideas. There were Protestant books floating around all over the place. There were people like Calvin, you know, who were deeply implicated in this kind of thing. You had bishops who ran Bible studies and, you know, sort of circles dedicated to reform. The king's sister was a supporter of all this kind of thing. I mean, it was very much. More advanced in every way. Whereas in England, as I say at this time, you would have had to go a very long way to find anybody who was even remotely Protestant. In 1530, there was a man called Thomas Bill named B.L., any Y who was arrested and burned at the stake. He is generally regarded as the first Protestant martyr in England, and the reason he was burned at the stake was because he preached justification by faith alone. But if you ask whether Bilney was a Protestant or not, this is a bit difficult to say because although he preached justification by faith alone, he also believed in transubstantiation.

For instance, you say, I mean his attraction to Luther or Luther and Lutheranism was very partial and very imperfect. And as I say, to regard him as a as a genuine Protestant is really pushing things a little bit far. These people were not very thick on the ground. All right. And this has to be borne in mind because the Reformation was going to have to face this reality. There just was not a lot of grassroots support for it, for whatever reason at this particular stage. Right. Well, going through 1531, 1532 at the beginning of 1532, the House of Commons, which up until this time had not done very much, suddenly produced what it's called a supplication, in other words, a petition which they addressed to the king, asking the king to reform the church in certain very clear particulars. What they wanted was a great reduction in church authority over their everyday lives. In other words, they wanted tithes to be reduced, if not abolished. They wanted the church courts, which were very active, to become a lot less active and a lot more efficient in the work that they actually did. They wanted revenues from the church to be much more carefully supervised and a lot of it creamed off, you know, for more useful purposes and so on. And they said that the clergy were just basically getting fat off the backs of the poor. This was their line. The bishops undertook to answer this supplication, produced a very interesting thing called the reply of the ordinary. And ordinary is just another name for Bishop because he is the person who who orders, you know, the church who sets the order. And so he's called the ordinary or so ordinary. Anyhow, this reply basically took the line, If you can prove your case and if you can find an example of where we have been unfair, unjust or corrupt or whatever, tell us we'll put it right.

But you mustn't make these general accusations because, you know, although there is corruption around, most people are just doing their job and getting on with life very happily. Anyhow, the king's response to this in May of 1532 was to tell the church that in future it would no longer have any legislative independence. That if the convocations were going to pass laws, make regulations for the church, they could not be enforced without the king's prior approval. And this was the end of. Church independence. The independence of the church, which had been won in the time of William the Conqueror, was brought to an end by Henry the eighth, who reintegrated church and state, at least to that extent. He took over the church again in this particular way, and from there on, of course, it was but a short step to total control of the entire mechanism. This took place this finally culminated in 1534 when the king ordered the convocations to vote on a resolution. And the resolution was that the king was to be regarded as supreme head of the Church of the Church of England. Do you accept this or do you not? And the two convocations, Canterbury and York both voted overwhelmingly that the king and not the pope was head of the church. That was in the Canterbury convocation, voted in March and the York convocation in May of 1534. Henry then went to Parliament and said, basically, what can I do? The convocations have demanded that I be made head of the church. You know, ha ha ha. And therefore, we have to pass a law saying that I am now a supreme head of the church. And so in November of 1534, Henry did that. And that sealed the break with Rome.

From this time on, the Church of England was no longer in communion with Rome. However. Did this make it Protestant? Answer No. Unless you think that being out of communion with Rome is enough to make you Protestant, that was the only thing you say. Everything else was left as it had always been. There was no change of any kind. There was certainly no suggestion that anybody might introduce what we would call Protestant doctrine. That was just unthinkable and unheard of. But of course, the situation had its own dynamic. Because by that time, the king had already got the archbishop to annul his marriage with Catherine of Aragon. He married Anne Boleyn. He had a daughter and everything else. And the only people who were willing to support him in this, where people like Cromwell, people like Cranmer, people who were open to new Protestantism ideas. Now, curiously enough, Henry's greatest opponent in all of this was not the Pope. Nor was he any of the Catholic princes of Europe. Most of the Catholic princes of Europe were secretly sympathetic to Henry and his predicament, and probably the Pope would have given him what he wanted if he had been free to do so. But does anybody know? Can anyone tell me who was the most violently opposed to Henry's annulment program? Apart from Sir Thomas more? Forget him. So who? Charles The fifth. Well, that was for family reasons. That was, again, diplomatic, but somebody who really had strong theological objections and let them be known now. Now, Luther. Martin Luther stood up very firmly and said, you know, this business of claiming an annulment from Catherine of Aragon, when you've been happily married for over 20 years and you have a daughter and so on.

This reeks of hypocrisy and you should be ashamed of yourself. Mrs. Luther to Henry the Eighth, you say. And it's important to realize this because most people in the popular imagination think, you know, Henry was sort of going through male menopause and midlife crisis and decided he wanted to get rid of his baggy wife and run off with, you know, some sort of 20 year old. And in order to do that, he became a Protestant because only Protestants would allow this kind of thing. You know, and this is totally false. I mean, Luther was his strongest opponent in this and the greatest supporter of Catherine of Aragon, which is very remarkable. It, of course, is not all that surprising, if you remember that Henry the Eighth and Luther did not hit it off. They were not they never met physically, which is perhaps just as well, but they were temperamentally not well suited to each other. It reminds me of a something that happened once when I was teaching in London. I had a student who was extremely gifted. You know, he could do all kinds of things and knew it. And a colleague in teaching with me who also was extremely gifted in different ways and knew it. And this student came to see me want it. He didn't get along with this colleague of mine, and he came and asked me if I knew why. And I said, Of course I know. And he said, Well, so what's the problem? So the problem is you both have the same religion. And I said, What do you mean? I said, Well, when you get up in the morning and look in the mirror, you fall down in worship because and because you both do this, you don't hit it off with each other and say, well, he had a good sense of humor, laughed it off.

And I thought that was the last I'd ever heard of it. But we used to have these these sketches in our skits every Christmas. And that year they did Snow White and the Seven Spiritual Dwarves as a kind of satire on college life. And this colleague of mine was the big head, you know, was portrayed as the wicked queen. Sort of mirror, mirror on the wall, you know, who's the soundest of them all. And you are a wicked queen. And I just said that. And I really I realized where my remark had led me into this. But anyhow, fortunately, this chap never found out who the source of the inspiration. Anyway, this was the problem between Henry and Luther, basically, because Henry and Luther knew that they were right, that they were both right and that they were both right about absolutely everything. And no one was going to tell either of them otherwise. And as far as Luther was concerned, I mean, Henry was just a hooligan who managed to get made. KING You know, and Luther, as far as Henry was concerned, was just a dirty old monk who thought he knew theology. And so there was no way that those two were going to come to any kind of agreement. And this was a major problem, of course, in their relationship. And it went right back to 1521 when Henry wrote his assertion of the seven Sacraments against Luther. And Luther denounced him, he basically called him an upper class twit. You know, and who do you think you are? Just because you're a king doesn't mean you know any theology. And Henry, unfortunately, did know quite a bit of theology. It might not have been Luther's theology, but he did know some.

And so he took offense and they just sort of fought each other back and forth for years. All right. Now, none of this really mattered very much until the break with Rome occurred, because once the break with Rome occurred, Henry needed allies. Who was going to support him? Where could he turn? And, of course, unfortunately, the person most likely to support him or to ally with him was Luther. And this dreadful prospect now sort of loomed up before them. Now, Luther himself, left to his own devices, would never have gone anywhere near him. That is quite clear. We know that the Luther was not a free agent. Luther was always very much in debt to the German princes who supported him and who protected him. And these German princes thought of Henry the eighth in a completely different way from the way in which Luther thought this. I thought in theological terms, the German princes thought in military terms. And if you can imagine, you see all these petty German princes with their tiny little armies and so on. Suddenly there's a prospect of a major power because England was a major European power led by somebody with a lot of money, you know, who could fund who could bankroll the army. I mean, they weren't going to worry too much about the finer details of the theology and the fact that Henry the Eighth and Luther had a personality clash of major proportions didn't really bother them either. What they were concerned about was that they should get money for the army and get backing so that they could fight off Charles the fifth. And so the pressure came from the princes and said, look, you have simply got to make some kind of alliance with Henry.

And Henry, of course, needed whatever support he could get. And so in the course of 1535 and 1536, negotiations were undertaken to see whether it would be possible to enter into an alliance between England and the Protestant powers of Germany, Northern Germany. Well, they did have negotiations and they tried to sort of come to some kind of agreement. It just so happened that the person who was sent from Germany to England to set things going was an Englishman called Robert Barnes, who, like Tindale, had escaped from England, had become a student of Luther's at Wittenberg, and then had sort of wandered around. Don't know quite what he did, but he wandered around here and there and he turned up in Hamburg or something like that. And he was sent as the ambassador of Hamburg to the city of Hamburg to London in order to open negotiations with the king And the king, who was totally ignorant of all this, of course, had no idea what was going on. Suddenly saw this ambassador from Hamburg and said, Hey, you're English, you know. And so Bonn said, Well, yes, actually I am. You know, I'm an Englishman, but I've been living over there for a while, you know, and but I don't do step terribly well. I mean, he must have given himself away, you know, he wasn't terribly German. And so the king said, well, you know, you're not we can't have this. You're not going to be ambassador for Hamburg to my court. I mean, this is absurd. You're going to be my ambassador in Germany. I need someone to go over there and start negotiations in Wittenberg. So no sooner had Burns arrived in London as the Hamburg ambassador, then he was stripped of this position by Henry the eighth and said, You are now my ambassador.

Get back over there and start negotiating. Well, this suited bond's, and that's basically what he wanted to do anyway. So he went back to Germany and began negotiating with Luther, who was, of course, his former professor. Well, needless to say, Bonds and CO, he took a few friends with him and got along very well with the theologians in Wittenberg. They didn't have any problem coming to an agreement except for Luther personally, because Luther said, well, you know, we can agree on the theology and all this, but what chance do you think that this is ever going to have of being applied in England? And so Barnes would say, well, we have to go and persuade the king to sort of accept this and say, well, this is what you have to do. And I said, Well, yes, but is the king prepared to become a Protestant, you know, to accept the Augsburg confession as a confession of faith? Well, no, we can't do that, you know. But then they said nobody in England is ever going to accept a German made theology. I mean, forget that for a start, made in Germany means wrong, and they're not going to read any further. Things don't still like that today. I mean, you know, forget that again with So we have to produce something a little bit different. We can't just take the Ellsberg confession as it stands, but we'll slip in the theology, take it back, and get the king to approve, or at least get the parliament to approve. And then the king will probably approve in due course as well. So this was the strategy. Luther, however. Are. Because Lisa did not accept the annulment of Henry's marriage. And he said, I am not going to enter into an agreement with an adulterer.

Say, no way. Well, Catherine of Aragon at this point, obliged everybody by dying in January of 1536, and this removed that obstacle. So now Luther could accept that the marriage to Anne Boleyn was was permissible. You know, because Henry was no longer a bigamist or an adulterer or anything like that, because his his wife, his true wife was dead. And so Luther was just about to agree very much. You can see very much against his deeper beliefs. But still, necessity sometimes dictates this kind of thing. When word reached Wittenberg that Anne Boleyn had been arrested, charged with treason and put to death, executed. And they turned around and said, Well, that does it. Divorce is one thing. Bigamy is one thing, but a murderer. This is just too much. And so that was his excuse for breaking off. Anything to do with Henry? With Henry the eighth. So Luther's. The relationship between Luther and Henry never really got anywhere. That's an important point to remember. Back at the ranch. Meanwhile, back in London, of course, Barnes and Co return whether they ever presented their agreement to Henry or not is unknown. No copy of this text survives in England. A copy survived in Germany. It was rediscovered in 1905, but it was lost for a long time. So we know it existed and we know what it contained. I mean, we have this document, but we don't know whether Henry ever saw it. However, in 1536, he was persuaded to allow a confession of faith to be drawn up and presented to the parliament for approval. And this was the so-called ten articles of religion. Now, the ten articles basically present a very modified a modified form of Catholicism. The only one of the articles, which is really clearly, unambiguously Protestant, is the number five, which is the one on justification by faith.

All the others are doubtful. You could argue back and forth, You know, for example, there's one which talks about the real presence of Christ in the in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, but it avoids using the word transubstantiation. So some people will say, well, look, there you are. It doesn't say transubstantiation. This is a sign of Protestant influence. And maybe that maybe that's true. But on the other hand, a Protestant would find it very difficult to sign the ten articles with a clear conscience, because a lot of the things that were in there really were typical of a kind of layman's Catholicism in a sort of ordinary person's attitude towards this kind of thing. In other words, technical theological terminology was avoided on the whole, but the substance of Catholic teaching was definitely there, you know, between the lines for those who knew how to read. All right. So this cannot be regarded as a Protestant tithing measure. However, by this time, things were moving along in other ways. Henry was now two wives down and was heading fast for number three. In fact, not. I forget how long it was after Anne Boleyn's execution that he married, but it was either seven days or ten days or something like that. I mean, the body was scarcely cold before he was off, but I suppose he didn't want to spend a whole lot of time and money on official mourning or anything like that. And he married his third wife, Lady Jane Seymour. And Lady Jane is an important figure because she came from a noble family in England, which was also open to Protestant ideas are open to reformed ideas. She was Cromwell's choice. I mean, basically, Cromwell went out and found somebody whom he could live with and made the king live with her instead.

I always very cleverly say in this way, but we're moving now in a circle of people who basically are in favor of reform in the church. So Henry is gradually becoming surrounded with these types, perhaps not fully aware of what is going on. Jane, within a few weeks was pregnant and miraculously, in the spring of 1537, she produced a son, a son who was later to become King Edward the sixth. And this, of course, guaranteed Jane a place in Henry's heart, which none of his other wives ever possessed. Unfortunately and tragically, she died in childbirth. Not the minute the baby was born, but she never recovered. I mean, she died, I think, about ten days later or something like that. However, Henry, the eighth is buried in Windsor Castle. And the wife who is buried with him is this one, Jane. Number three, Because Henry swore that he would never have another. He would never love another woman the way he loved Jane. Of course he loved her for her son. Needless to say, that was the great thing about Jane, but it was nevertheless a tragedy that she happened to die in that particular way. This left him, of course, a widower on the on the hunt yet again, looking for number four. But he thought, as Cromwell had done such a good job with number three, he would entrust number four to him as well. And so in 1538, Thomas Cromwell set about finding Henry, wife number four, and this time he hit on a princess, we call her, and of Cleves. Cleves is a city in Germany. If you want to find it on the map nowadays you have to look for it's German from clever like that. It's a city in northwest Germany, really, on the Dutch border up here.

And strategically it's extremely important because it's where the Rhine River and the road from the east, from Wittenberg and so on Intersect. And this small principality of Cleves was a kind of hotbed of the Reformation. It was a it was a Protestant principality, you know, and very important strategically for the developing Protestant movement because of its geographical position. So Anne of Cleves was a good Protestant woman and coming from from outside the country, she could get away with things like that. If she'd been English, Henry would have said, Where did you get those ideas from? I didn't authorize them. But he couldn't very well say that about Anne of Cleves. And so Thomas Cromwell got Anne's portrait painted and had the portrait shipped to Henry. And Henry said, Well, yeah, you know, she looks all right and so on. And she was duly married by proxy. Well, of course. And of Cleves is the classic case of, you know, don't commit yourself to anything you haven't seen. Because when she finally turned up in in England, Henry took one look and said, No way, you know, am I going to have anything further to do with her? And he dissolved the marriage there. And then on the spot, it was it had never been consummated. Of course, it was an entirely proxy affair. But he simply said, I'm not going through with it finished. But, you know, Anne of Cleves was the lucky one because she wasn't put to death or anything like that. She was pensioned off. And as far as we know, she was very happy with this and she lived happily ever after. I mean, she that lived all the others. So the portrait was with more than adequate representation. Well, you know what portraits are like.

I mean, no doubt she was recognizable in the portrait, but I don't know. I mean, different people tell different thing, different stories. You know, when she when Henry actually met her in the flesh, they just didn't hit it off. You know, who knows? These things happened, but not a very good idea. You know, it's rather like sort of, you know, dating someone through a newspaper ad or something like that. I mean, you know, the chances of death, you know what I mean? It sounds good. I mean, I love reading these newspaper ads, you know, sort of, you know, 29 year old Romeo in search of, you know, perfect woman, you know, sort of thing. And of course, everybody feels that's them so that, you know, you know what I mean? But reality is slightly different. This is and this was the Anne of Cleves kind of kind of thing. So, anyway, who was going to pay for this disaster? Well, of course, Cromwell. He organized it. He should have known better. And Henry in rage. You see that? That he'd been put out like this. Took it out on Cromwell, had Cromwell arrested and executed. Also Bonds. Who not been involved in this. And all of a sudden, the the sort of Protestant sympathizers at the court and what have you were wiped out. They just lost you know, they fell out of favor and they were gone. Henry then turned around and realized that while he'd been looking the other way or entrusting the government to people like Cromwell, Protestantism had crept in behind his back. In 1537, the Archbishop of Canterbury and a few of his friends. Had published a commentary on the ten articles, which we now call the Bishop's book. Which gave them the most Protestant interpretation imaginable.

In 1538, they had managed to persuade Henry to authorize the printing of an English language Bible for the first time, and this Bible was set up in churches. A law was passed to say that every church must obtain a copy of this Bible and put it in the church so that people would go and read it. There was another sort of Protestantism measure. And slowly, slowly, slowly, Henry felt things were creeping in. So in 15 the end of 1538, the beginning of 1539, he had another act passed. This is called the act of the six articles reaffirming his faith. The six articles insisted on transubstantiation. The word was mentioned. This time it is. They insisted on priestly celibacy. They insisted on the need of works for salvation and so on. And the act of six articles became the basis. On which people of Protestant sympathy were persecuted. During the final years of Henry's reign. He didn't go back on the English language Bible, but printing of it ceased. I mean, he never withdrew it, but you just couldn't buy it anymore. You know, they ran out and that was it. Now, Mark, all contact, of course, with the Lutherans was broken off. Anybody suspected of any sympathy of that kind was put out of office or worse. And a whole new reactionary government set in. The king even went to the point of writing his own commentary on the ten articles which he published as the so called King's book, The Bishop's Book and The King's Book, giving a much more traditional interpretation of a of the theology of the church. So the any attempt to Protestant ties the Church of England at this point under Henry the eighth was squashed. Cranmer, the archbishop just about saved his life.

I mean, he was very lucky indeed to have escaped this, but he managed to survive the fall by keeping his mouth shut and, you know, just doing what the king said. And he lived to see another day. But a lot of these other people did not anyhow. Of course, Henry's mind was soon on other things, as you can imagine. Wife number five very quickly came along. She was a bouncy 19 year old from a noble family. Catherine Howard and the Howards were famous. They are famous. Families still exists for rejecting the Reformation. I mean, they they were Papists. They remained Catholic through thick and thin. And so Catherine was theologically acceptable. And Henry married her because. Well, partly because of that. He also fell in love with her and married her. The trouble was, as you can imagine, Henry was by now, you know, a man of 50 and incredibly obese and what have you to Henry the eighth that you picture you see in pictures. And Catherine was a 19 year old, very pretty, you know, and they had rather different interests and different people were interested in her as well. And before very long, she was having affairs with the young men at court. And she really was. Anne Boleyn wasn't probably that was an Anne's case. It was probably a lie. But in Catherine's case, it was the truth. Henry found out, hit the roof and said, Off with your head. And that was the end of her. Why is number six clearly realized that she had an uphill struggle? This was Catherine Parr, a part of LA, and she was the last of Henry's six wives. She outlived him. And in many ways, she was the best wife that Henry had because she was the kind of woman who knew what sort of man she was dealing with and knew how to deal with him.

And what is interesting is that Catherine Parr was a Protestant in belief. I mean, she would have been persuaded, are genuinely persuaded of this. So although she kept the king happy, you know, sort of there that here your slippers and yes, of course, you can still, you know, ride to hounds and jump over hurdles and really win the marathon and all that and just go to sleep. And while Henry was doing this kind of thing, Catherine's historical importance is that she took over the education of the children, both Elizabeth and Edward, and she ensured that those two children, Mary, was already grown up, couldn't do much about her. But Edward and Elizabeth were brought up as Protestants. And that was the key to the future. You see. I mean, Catherine looked ahead in that way. She was very clever in this particular respect so that when Henry finally died in January of 1547, 28th of January 1547, and was succeeded by his nine year old son, Edward the sixth. Edward was a young man who had already had a Protestant upbringing. He his sympathies, as far as we can tell, were very much with that side of things. And this was the the key for Cranmer, the archbishop, whose basic theology up until this point had been. Yes, sir. You know anything you say, sir? Yes. And please don't cut my head off, sir. Know, why would I do a thing like that? And, you know, this kind of thing now came into his own because Cranmer, during the King's youth, the king's minority, was, in effect, in complete control of the church. And it was from that moment that the Reformation, as we understand it, in other words, the introduction of Protestantism began and that we will look at when we meet again next time.

Okay, good. We're not in control of the 28th of January 1547.