Reform in France and England

Church History — Steve Gregg

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Reform in France and England

Church HistorySteve Gregg

In this historical overview, Steve Gregg discusses the Protestant Reformation in France and England. While Calvin's influence on French Protestantism was profound, Catholicism ultimately prevailed and French Protestants, known as Huguenots, were eventually driven out of the country. In England, the Reformation was led by figures such as William Tyndale and Thomas Cranmer and came about as a result of social factors and the upsurge of Renaissance humanism. Through a series of power shifts and conflict, the religious landscape of both countries changed drastically in the centuries that followed.

Transcript

Tonight, the handout I've given you is called Reformation in France and England. We have been talking about the area of the Reformation for several sessions in a row now. I don't know if this is the sixth or more session that we have been talking about the Reformation.

We're still really talking about the 16th century, which was the century in which the Reformation began. The reason it takes so long to get through that particular century, and probably every century afterward too, is because different things began to happen in different parts of the world about that time. For the longest time in the Middle Ages, for about a thousand years, everything was pretty much standardized throughout Christendom.

The Roman Catholic Church was standardized. There were various individual unique things happening in some parts of the world, interesting people arising here or there or somewhere else, and we've studied a lot of that. But when you get to the Reformation time, there was a virtual explosion of activity of a wide variety of kinds in different countries.

And so, of course, when you study the Reformation, you have to begin in Germany, where Luther really was the first successful reformer, and he had tremendous success compared to what we find happened in France, for example. Then we turned to Switzerland, and we talked about Zwingli and the Anabaptists who arose out of Zwingli's circle in Switzerland. Then we went off on to a discussion of the Anabaptists for a few weeks.

And then we talked about later on in Switzerland, in French-speaking Switzerland, the movement of John Calvin in Geneva, and that was what we talked about last time. Now, Calvinism was introduced in Geneva, but it was introduced from Geneva to many other parts of Europe, among them France, England, Netherlands, Scotland. These are the principal places where significant incursions of Calvinist influence were made.

And this is partly because John Calvin started the University of Geneva, and ministers and would-be ministers from all over Europe came to Geneva, especially Protestants who were fleeing from persecution in their own lands. And Geneva was a place where Protestants ruled, and therefore those who were Protestants hoped not to be persecuted. And so many people with aspirations to become Protestant ministers came to Geneva, and they were trained under John Calvin.

And when they went back to their places, especially those that I mentioned, England, Scotland, France, and Netherlands, they took with them not only the Reformation, but the Calvinistic slant on the Reformation. And by the way, church historians and theologians are well aware there's a very grave difference in the Lutheran Reformation and the Calvinist Reformation. In fact, so much so that in Germany, where Lutheranism had carved out a niche for itself, and where the Peace of Augsburg had been officially decided that the prince of any locality, his religion would determine the religion of that locality, of the people in it, that only applied to Catholicism and Lutheranism.

When Calvinists came to Germany, or Anabaptists, they were very often persecuted even by the Lutherans, because only Lutheranism and Catholicism were recognized as alternatives. By the way, as recently as our own lifetime, when I've been to Germany four or five times ministering, and I'm given to understand, although I've spoken in churches of many denominations, usually Pentecostal, Baptist, sometimes in Catholic charismatic groups and some others, I have been told that all groups in Germany, apart from Lutheran and Catholic, are still considered to be cults. Even Baptists, Pentecostals, Methodists, and some of these others.

Mennonites, because I'm sure a lot has changed since the Peace of Augsburg when those two religions, Lutheranism and Catholicism, became the established option. Today, of course, you can be a Baptist in Germany, but there might be, I don't know how many Baptists there are, hundreds of thousands of Baptists in Germany, but they're still considered a cult, because they're not Lutheran or Catholic. Well, Calvinism and Lutheranism had various differences, which we discussed earlier, but the Calvinistic type of reform spread especially to the countries we've mentioned.

I want to, this week and next, to talk about those four countries, because very different things happened in each of those. In France, for example, where John Calvin had originated, he was a Frenchman, and his Reformation in Switzerland was in French-speaking Switzerland, whereas Zwingli's Reformation in Switzerland was in German-speaking Switzerland. Calvin's influence upon the French was fairly profound.

He was a Frenchman. His writings were in Latin and then into French. He translated his own writings from Latin into French, and they were circulated in France.

So the Reformers who were in France were largely Calvinists. Many of them had been trained by Calvin himself and gone back and tried to introduce the Reformation there. However, France never really reformed.

We shall see that for a period of time, there is tremendous conflict between the forces of Reformation and the Catholic conservative forces, including many wars. Unlike the Anabaptists, generally, the Calvinists believed in fighting, as did the Catholics, and therefore there were at least eight civil wars in France between the French Calvinists and the Roman Catholics. And there were times when the sides seemed to be almost equally matched in strength.

But in the end, Catholicism prevailed, and the French Protestants were eventually driven out of France for the most part. And France has to this day remained a strongly Roman Catholic country, never did really experience Reformation in the sense that Germany and England and some other countries did. Some similar things happened in the Netherlands, as we'll see next time.

But what happened in France and what happened in England are very different things, and we're going to talk about both of those tonight quite briefly, because there's a lot of information that could be discussed and we have only limits on our time. So let me begin. The French Calvinists were called the Huguenots, spelled H-U-G-U-E-N-O-T.

No one knows for sure what the word Huguenot means, but it is suspected to be a corruption of the German word for Protestant. Whatever the origin of the word, that name seemed to stick, and so the French Protestants were and are to this day, many of them, called Huguenots. Now, the Huguenot movement had its beginnings in France, like in most countries, because there were already elements at work that seemed to welcome this.

First of all, the Roman Catholic Church in France was extremely corrupt. There was a very low degree of literacy, even among the clergy, which means they couldn't read the Bible. They couldn't read anything.

And therefore, of course, the priests as well as the people were steeped in superstition and immorality, and I mean, they didn't even know their own religious documents. They couldn't read. You see, King Francis I appointed many church officials, and many of them were not spiritual leaders at all.

They were political appointees. And only, I think, as I understand it, only the minority of them, or maybe as much as half of them, were actually literate men who could read. So with this kind of spiritual leadership in the country in the Roman Catholic period, the church and its religious influence was of a very corrupt sort, and a great deal of dissatisfaction existed among the more spiritually oriented people in France with the Roman Catholic system.

Reform in France came from Geneva, where, of course, Geneva's in Switzerland, but that's where John Calvin the Frenchman was. And it was largely through the printed page, although there were preachers who came also, but because of Calvin's Institutes being published in French and the French Bible coming along, it was possible for the literate classes of the French to become aware both of the Bible's contents and of the theology of John Calvin, which are not to be mistaken for one another. But anyway, the conversions to the Protestant cause occurred largely among the literate classes for this reason, because it was a reformation depending very largely on the printed page.

And that meant that the peasant classes, the superstitious, illiterate, uneducated people typically just stuck with the religion that was comfortable and familiar to them, which was Roman Catholicism. In addition to the true converts from among the literate classes to Protestantism, there were many who were not really interested in religion, but who joined forces with the Protestants for political reasons. There were many merchants and financiers, lawyers and other professional types, nobles, and other types of people joined with the Protestant cause simply because they were discontented with the prevailing system under the Roman Catholic Church and King.

So the movement swelled considerably. As soon as there were some true Protestants, there was an alternative to Roman Catholicism, and those who were discontented with the Catholic system tended to gravitate toward the support of the Protestant cause, since it was an alternative to Roman Catholicism. The French Calvinists came to be called Huguenots, and they were severely persecuted from the beginning, since they were in the minority, but the minority, they became a larger and larger minority, even in spite of persecution, they grew in number, until by the end of the reign of King Henry II, which was 1559, it is estimated that perhaps as much as 10% of the population of France had already become Protestant.

Now that doesn't sound like a very big percentage, that's still nine-tenths Roman Catholic, but in a very short period of time, a few decades, for the number of Protestants to go from 0% to 10% was something that was alarming to the French power, and the kings, and all the kings of France were pretty much Roman Catholic, as a Roman Catholic country, so they persecuted the Huguenots. In those times, there were three political factions, really families, that were mutually jealous of power, and tended to have influence in various parts of France. The most important family for our consideration was the family called the Bourbons.

They were the ones who would be the heirs of the throne if the current royalty line would die out. The Valois were in power at the time, but the Bourbon family, according to the genealogies, if the Valois would die out, the Bourbons would then come to the throne, and of course, that's what eventually did happen. The Bourbons eventually ruled.

Now, these Bourbons were, as a clan, as a group, they tended toward Protestantism, and they were largely Huguenots, and that becomes an important factor in the fate of the Huguenot church later on, but not right away. Another faction in France that were nobility and had power and political influences were the Guises, the Guise family, which had much control in eastern France. The Bourbons largely controlled western France, and the Guises controlled eastern France, for the most part, and they were staunchly Roman Catholic.

So you've got the Protestant-oriented Bourbons in the west in France, you've got the Roman Catholic Guise family in the east, and these were not Canadian Guise, these were French Guise. And in the central part of France, much of the power was held among another family called the Montmorencies, and their leadership were not altogether Protestant or Catholic, there was some division among them. So there were kind of, you know, France was sort of split down the middle over this issue.

Between 1562 and 1594, the Huguenots engaged in armed conflict fighting eight civil wars in France against the Roman Catholics. And these wars were so evenly matched, for the most part, that neither side really totally won over the other side completely. The leader of the Huguenots in the early days was Admiral Gaspard de Colligny, and he was the original military organizer and leader of the Huguenots against the Roman Catholic forces.

But he came to his end along with many, many other Huguenots at a tragedy which is remembered as the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day. This is August 24th, 1572. To give you background on this, it was the wedding of Henry of Navarre, who happened to be a Bourbon, and a man with Huguenot roots, and she was a very important person in this story, Catherine de' Medici.

Her daughter, Marguerite, was marrying Henry of Navarre. Now, Catherine de' Medici was the mother of the king. She was the queen mother.

The king at that time was ten-year-old King Charles IX, and his sister was marrying Henry of Navarre, who happened to be a Bourbon, and a man with Huguenot leanings. At this wedding, it would be clear that a Catholic woman, because Catherine and the king and the king's sister were Catholics, marrying a Bourbon who had Huguenot leanings would draw all over France, both Protestants and Catholics, to attend the wedding and to celebrate the wedding. So Catherine had this plot.

She told the palace guards that at a certain signal, which was the ringing of the church bells, they should unleash themselves and slaughter every Huguenot they could find. And this was a surprise ambush. The Huguenots had no idea there was going to be a fight at the wedding.

And so at Catherine's daughter's wedding, she plotted and executed the massacre of, as it turned out, about 15,000 to 20,000 Huguenots in Paris alone. And this anti-Huguenot furor spread more throughout France, and it is estimated that as many as 100,000 Huguenots met their end this way. And this was pretty much the end of Huguenot power as any kind of a balanced alternative to Roman Catholicism, because it was just a massacre, a wipeout of the Huguenot forces.

The early leader of the Huguenots that I mentioned earlier, Admiral Caligna, he was the first to be killed in the slaughter, and then there were thousands of others afterwards. But afterwards, Henry, who was the groom at that wedding and a Bourbon, became the leader of the Huguenot movement that was left and rallied them again, and they continued to fight against Roman Catholicism for some time. And eventually, because of the death of others in the Valois line, Henry became the heir to the throne.

But he could not be confirmed to the throne without being a Roman Catholic, but he was a Huguenot. And it just wouldn't be that a Catholic nation like France would allow a Protestant, with whom this Protestant-Catholic controversy was so volatile, they would never approve of a Protestant king. And the Roman Pope, of course, would never anoint a Catholic king.

And so Henry converted to Catholicism, at least outwardly. He said, Paris is worth a mass, meaning it's worth it to him to go ahead and practice the Roman Catholic mass in order to control Paris. And he became the king of France.

He became King Henry IV. And he did so only as the result of at least faking a conversion to Roman Catholicism. I say faking.

I don't really know. He remained a Catholic to his death. He continued to worship in the Catholic manner in the Roman Catholic Church.

But I don't think his heart was ever Roman Catholic. And after a while, see, the Huguenots were concerned about this. Their leader had become a Catholic and king.

But actually, he did good for them as king. And that makes me think his heart was really not with the Roman Catholic Church, even though he did convert. If he ever had declared himself a Huguenot after he became king, he probably would have been overthrown by the people.

Because, again, France was still 90 percent Roman Catholic. But from the position of being a Catholic king, he issued an edict called the Edict of Nantes, which granted toleration to the Huguenots and allowed them to hold public office, to worship and educate their children as non-Roman Catholics, and giving them free access to hospitals and universities. And this created a very unique situation in Europe.

And that was that a nation that had a ruling religion, Roman Catholicism, actually granted official toleration to Protestants. You see, until this time, nations generally either had a Protestant ruler, and everyone was required to be Protestant, or a Catholic ruler, and everyone had to be Roman Catholic. But this was one of the very early instances of some religious toleration, where the dominant religion actually tolerated the minority religion.

So under this situation of tolerance, the Protestants remained a minority in France, but they did prosper, they did flourish under the effects of this freedom. And that basically is, as far as we can go in the 16th century, there was toleration of the Huguenots, but Roman Catholicism still retained power, and France never really reformed. However, after that century, almost into the 18th century, in 1685, Louis XIV of France revoked the Edict of Nantes, and he did not grant toleration to the Protestants, and there was severe persecution of the Protestants under Louis XIV, and most Huguenots fled from France, because they were being killed for their faith, and some of them, actually quite a lot of them, apostatized.

This was a couple hundred years after the beginning of the movement, or 150 years after the beginning of the movement, so a lot of these people had just been raised Protestant, and probably like most nominal churchgoers, didn't really have strong convictions. Those that did have strong convictions either were killed or fled, or hid, and managed to survive the purge. But the places they fled to were England, Holland, Prussia, and America, and they carried with them the Calvinist faith to these places.

And so, Huguenot religion, French Protestantism, French Calvinism, spread to other parts of Europe and America as well. Those that remained in France, they stuck it out, and eventually, as history progressed, the Huguenots in France did receive more respectability. The state didn't recognize marriages that were performed by Huguenot ministers until 1787, and the Huguenot church did not receive legal standing in France until 1802.

So it was a long road for them, from the time of Louis XIV to the time when they actually received legal status again, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. In more recent history, in 1907, the National Union of Reformed Churches of France, which is Calvinist, was formed and combined with the non-Calvinist churches of France to form the Protestant Federation of France, which exists to this day, but France is still largely a Roman Catholic country officially. And so we see that the reform in France didn't really take hold and succeed.

It did get some ground, it got a toehold, and it never was entirely driven out, and eventually those that roughed it and toughed it out, they received official toleration and official standing, and they're able to be Protestants in France today because of that, even though it's still Roman Catholic. Now where a country that broke more fully and permanently away from Roman Catholicism, at the time of the Reformation, was England. But its reformation is very, very different than any of the others, because it was largely not a reformation caused by religious conviction, but one of political expediency.

The things that led to the Reformation in England, some of them are a bit depressing. When we studied how the Anglican Church, which is the Church of England, was formed, let's just say its beginnings are subject to tremendous suspicion as to its legitimacy. Although it did break away from the Roman Papacy, which in my mind also its legitimacy is more than suspect, yet the way in which it broke off was not anywhere near as clean or as pure or as commendable from an evangelical point of view as say those that broke off in Switzerland or in Germany or some other places, because it was the King of France who had a gripe against the Pope and declared himself to be the head of the Church instead of the Pope that caused England to be separated.

And in the course of a century or so, a series of monarchs, kings and queens in England, largely for political reasons, sponsored either Roman Catholicism or Protestantism, and I'll tell you that story in just a moment. But first I'd like to, as before in talking about France, give you some idea of the background in England that led to the Reformation. First of all, as far as the public sentiments were concerned and all that, the English never really were very pleased with Roman Catholicism.

It's not so much that the religion was displeasing to them, but just being under the domination of the Roman bishop, a foreigner. I guess it offended British nationalistic sensitivities, and they were very nationalistic people, and they resented being under the control of a foreign Pope. But for a long time there was no choice.

The Pope's religion was the only religion on the planet if you wanted to be a Christian. And if you didn't want to be a Christian, you could look forward to the Inquisition to help persuade you that Christianity of that particular variety was the way you ought to go. And so people in England had an uneasy alliance with the Pope of Rome for a long time because they resented his rulership over the Church, but they really didn't have any options open to them otherwise until events in the Reformation period began to change that fact.

There was a general and growing sentiment among the people of anti-clericism, which means against the clerics, against the clergy, because the clergy, even the monks in the monasteries in England, were corrupt and immoral people. And in particular, the most influential Roman Catholic clergyman in England at the time was Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, and he was just a puppet of the King really, and he was just kind of the one that did whatever the King wanted him to do, corrupt or otherwise. And the people did not like or appreciate Cardinal Wolsey.

Eventually the King didn't either, and he deposed him and gave his position to another. But there was a growing dislike for the Roman Catholic clergy in England at that time as well as for the Pope himself. In 1525, William Tyndale introduced the English translation of the New Testament to England.

He was the pioneer of translation of the English Bible. Now Wycliffe had earlier done Bible translation, but as I understand, he translated from the Latin into English from the Vulgate, whereas Tyndale translated from the original Greek and later Hebrew, the New Testament and the Old Testament, and he was the pioneer of actual English translation of the Bible from the original languages. This was not a popular thing.

The clergy in his day were very, very ignorant of the Bible, and in one discussion it is reported in early in his life, William Tyndale was having a conversation with a priest or a clergyman and was so disgusted with the man's biblical illiteracy that Tyndale said, and this when he was a young man or a boy, he said, if God permits me in my lifetime, I will make it so that the average boy who pushes a plow will know more about the Bible than you do. And actually, Tyndale had a lot to do with making that dream come true. Although the process was not appreciated by the system, Tyndale's life was in danger and he fled to the continent where he completed his translation work.

Eventually, though, he was hunted down and betrayed into the hands of the British clergy, and he was executed, burned at the stake by King Henry VIII, and we'll talk about Henry VIII in a moment because he was a major factor in England turning away from Roman Catholicism. Another social factor that led to the ripeness of England for the Reformation was that Erasmus, who was of course not a reformer in the sense of Protestantism, but was a Catholic humanist scholar who had influence on many of the reformers before they were saved. He had come and taught both in Oxford and in Cambridge universities, and there was a real upsurge of Renaissance humanism of the Erasmian type in those universities so that the intelligentsia of the country were becoming more humanist and more, I guess, independent thinkers, independent of the Church of Rome and its thinking.

And one other influence we need to mention is that there were still Lawlords in England. Now, the Lawlords were the followers of the teachings of John Wycliffe, who had died in the 1300s, back in 1384, but his movement and those who followed him were called Lawlords, and they were persecuted badly in England, but had survived. And they were people of the Bible, too.

They advocated anti-Catholic doctrines, and they advocated reading the Scripture and so forth, and their influence had never really been exterminated from England from the time of Wycliffe on. And there were Lutherans that had come over to England. Now, Lutheranism really never took hold in England as it did on the continent, especially in Germany, of course.

Maybe because Luther was German-speaking and the English didn't, you know, the English were English-speaking, I don't know. But Lutheranism was introduced in England, and there were some Lutherans. In fact, William Tyndale, who I mentioned earlier, who did the translation of the Bible in English, he was a Lutheran.

He was teaching Lutheran doctrines. But he was burned at the stake, and Lutherans and Lawlords were persecuted there, but their influence was never fully eradicated. So there were the seeds of Reformation in various forms, just in the intellectual world, in the non-conformist religious world, and just the general sentiments of the whole nation that the Pope was an intruder into their land from a foreign country.

Now, to understand the Reformation, we need to know something about the succession of monarchs in England during this period of time, because the Reformation in England did not occur in England the way it occurred in the other countries we've considered. In the other countries we've considered, the Reformation occurred because of religious leaders rising up and gaining tremendous followings and influence, and eventually the popularity of Reformed movements simply carved a place for itself out in those countries, sometimes even winning over monarchs, or at least winning toleration from them. The Reformation in England started out with unspiritual men who were political only, with kings, who had political agendas for breaking with the Church in Rome.

And it wasn't until a whole century after England was broken from Rome, in this respect, that there was actually a spiritual Reformation in England, which came up through people like the Quakers and the Baptists and the Puritans and the Separatists and the Anabaptists in England. There were these dissenting movements in England, but they never really gained much ground in England during the century of Reformed, that is, the 16th century. It was in the next century that they typically arose and had tremendous influence on the spiritual state of England.

So when we studied the Reformation in England, we're not really going to study anything very edifying, because it was all political. It wasn't spiritual. But it did bring about the separation of England from Rome, and with only a... after King Henry VIII broke from Rome, there was only a period of about five years there under Mary, Bloody Mary, as she's remembered, Mary Tudor, that England came back under Roman Catholicism for a short period of time, but at her death it returned to Protestantism, never to return to Roman Catholicism, and England has never been Catholic ever since.

However, the Anglican Church that grew out of this is more Catholic than Protestant. Anyone who's familiar with the Episcopal Church or the Anglican Church, they're the same thing, knows that if you participate in the worship of the Church like that, you're going to feel like you're kind of somewhere between a Roman Catholic Church and a Protestant Church. And for the most part, the early Anglican Church wasn't any different from the Roman Catholic Church, except that the king was its head instead of the Pope, but all the doctrines and liturgy and everything were just the same as the Roman Catholic.

Well, let me give you some background of this. In the notes I've given you, I've given you a list of monarchs of England during this time. Henry VII, the father of Henry VIII, is the first one during this period that we need to consider, and I just want to run through these quickly before I give you details about some of this.

Henry VII was King of England from 1485 to 1509, succeeded by his son Henry VIII from 1509 to 1547. These are not the years of the men's lives, but of their reign in England. Henry was succeeded briefly by his son, his only surviving son, Edward VI, who became king at age nine and died at age 15.

And then Mary Tudor, also known as Bloody Mary, for reasons we will discuss, was Queen from 1553 to 1558, and then her younger stepsister, Elizabeth I, became Queen from 1558 to 1603. Now, it is that period of time, basically the whole 16th century, that we will discuss in this lecture tonight, but the Reformation up to the point, up until Elizabeth's time, was merely political. I mean, it had, there were some spiritual people of the Protestants there, but the Reformation took place because of political designs, not because of a religious spiritual movement that was taking place.

The spiritual side of this began to happen later on, and that was when the Stuart monarchs took control from the Tudor monarchs, the House of Stuart, and the first of those monarchs was James I, known as King James, whose name graces the covers of, or at least the title pages of many of our Bibles. He is the King James of the King James Bible fame. He was king of England, the first Stuart monarch from 1603 to 1625.

Then came Charles I from 1625 to 1649, then there was a brief period where England did not have a king. During that time, Oliver Cromwell was called Lord Protector of the Realm, and he was not king, and then he was followed by King Charles II, who reigned from 1660 to 1685. Then there was James II from 1685 to 1688, followed by William and Mary in 1688 to 1702.

So the reigns of these kings that we've mentioned, and queens, ten of them in all, not including Oliver Cromwell, covers the period of the 16th and the 17th century, essentially. And it was during these centuries that reform, first the political side, then the spiritual side, occurred in England. It's the first half of that we'll talk about tonight.

The Church of England began because of Henry VIII. Now, when Henry VIII was a boy, his older brother, who was 14 years old, named Arthur, who never became King Arthur since he never became king, but would have been King Arthur. Arthur, the older brother of Henry, and both of them were sons of Henry VII, was made to marry a princess of Spain.

She was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, whom you remember from your studies in grammar school about Columbus. She was the daughter of that king and that queen of Spain, and this was a political alliance, as were so common in those days. There was no love between these two.

In fact, as I recall, Arthur was 14 years old, and I think that Catherine of Aragon, the princess of Spain, she was a couple years older than he was, 16. And as I am informed, she was not a very attractive or pleasant woman. It was an entirely political arrangement for some kind of a military alliance and political alliance between the nations of England and Spain.

Now, because Arthur was so young, though the wedding was arranged and she became officially his wife I guess they were betrothed, they never married, and the marriage was never consummated, I should say, because he died very young. And when he died, of course, that left Catherine no longer his wife. Now, rather than send her back to Spain, the father, King Henry VII, still wanting there to be an alliance between England and France, Spain, excuse me, sought to persuade his other son, younger son, Henry, who became Henry VIII, to marry this woman, his brother's widow.

Henry did not find the woman attractive. She was seven years older than he was, and he didn't want to marry her, but his father prevailed upon him, and against his preferences, he went ahead and married Catherine of Aragon, something that he regretted forever afterward. Now, Catherine and Henry VIII, of course, Henry became king after his father's death and became Henry VIII, they had six children together, but only one survived.

All the male children died, and the only child that survived was a girl whose name was Mary, who, when she grew up and became queen, she was bloody married. We'll talk about her later on. Henry VIII was not open to the possibility of leaving a female heir to the throne.

England had only had one female monarch in all of its long history, and that had been back in the 12th century, and that was a fiasco leading to many bloody wars, civil wars, and so forth, and I don't say that as any kind of a comment about female leadership, but England was simply not open to that. Henry also was starting to fall in love with one of the ladies-in-waiting in his court. Her name was Anne of Boleyn.

All that I've been, all the historians record one thing about her, and she had dark eyes. I guess he liked dark eyes, that must be a thing he commented on, or that everyone commented on. She had beautiful dark eyes.

I don't know what she looked like other than that, but apparently we know that Jacob liked Rachel more than Leah, and the only thing that's said about Rachel is that she had, the only thing said against Leah is that her eyes had some kind of defect as far as Jacob was concerned. I guess something about those eyes really gets to certain guys, and Henry VIII wanted to marry Anne of Boleyn. Trouble is, he was already married to Catherine of Oregon.

Now, as Catherine got to be about 40 years old, and it had six children, and all had died except one, and that was a girl, and Henry therefore only had a female heir to the throne and not a male, he began to be very concerned. He began to wonder whether there was even a curse on his family. He actually began to say there was, because it says in Leviticus chapter 20 and verse 21 that if a man has his brother's wife, it is uncleanness, and they shall be childless, and Catherine had been his brother's wife, and they were at least without a male child surviving, and as each child was born and then died, and then another child was born and died, you know, Henry began to wonder is he under the curse of this scripture in Leviticus, and he began to inquire of the clergy and so forth, and he really began to take this seriously.

He was a religious man, a very corrupt man, not a spiritual man, but he was a man who was devoted to Roman Catholic religion, and he thought perhaps he could persuade the Pope to grant him an annulment of his marriage to Catherine, so that he could marry the woman he was really attracted to, which was Anna Boleyn, and the Pope would have granted it to him, because the argument was that the wedding, the marriage was never right, because Leviticus would forbid that kind of marriage. Now let me just say this, clarifying Leviticus, I understand the passage in Leviticus to forbid a man marrying his brother's wife while the brother's still living. The law actually required a man in many cases to marry his brother's wife if his brother had died childless.

There was the law of levirate marriage, which required the next youngest brother or whoever was the nearest brother to marry the woman and to raise up seed for the brother, so I don't personally believe that that scripture applied to Henry's case, because he married the widow of his brother, but he tried to persuade the Pope that because of that scripture his marriage to Catherine was never legitimate and should be annulled by the church. Now Pope Clement, I think was Clement II, was very concerned to keep the King of England on his side. The relations between the Roman Catholic Church and the nation of England were tenuous already, and England was a strong power, and the church could not really afford to have problems between them, and so the Pope was somewhat inclined to grant the annulment, but there was one problem, and that is that the Vatican had been overrun by the Spanish, and the Pope had been taken captive by the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, who was the Spanish King, who happened to be the nephew of Catherine, and therefore for the Pope to annul the marriage of Catherine from Henry VIII would have brought the Pope into disfavor with her nephew, the King of Spain, and while the Pope did not want to alienate the King of England, he didn't want to alienate the King of Spain either, and so for about four years he kind of dragged his feet and gave excuses for not making a decision about this, and King Henry got impatient, during which time he began to have an affair with Anna Boleyn, and she was pregnant eventually when he finally married her, but anyway Catherine's argument was that she never really was Arthur's wife since the marriage was never consummated, and that she did deserve to be the Queen of England, so Catherine didn't want the divorce, Henry did, and the Pope was ambivalent as to whether to grant it or not, and while the Pope dragged his feet on this matter, Henry consulted a religious leader whom he respected and who had somewhat reformer kind of leanings.

The man was still a Roman Catholic, and he was not a Catholic, and the church needed some reform. This man, Thomas Cranmer, eventually became a full-on reformer, but at this early stage he was still pretty much locked into the Roman Catholic fold, but making appeals for some kind of reform. Well Cranmer was an influential churchman, and Henry was encouraged by Thomas Cranmer to consult the scholars at the universities, these were of course religious universities, Cambridge and Oxford, to consult the theological experts, the theologians about this, and to find out whether his marriage to Catherine should be annulled or not, because the Pope wasn't making a decision, he decided to get the scholars in on this, and the scholars sided with him for the most part, said yeah, yeah, it should be annulled.

The Pope however was not convinced, and therefore there was this tension between Henry wanting a divorce so he could marry Anne Boleyn, his mistress, and get rid of this woman that he was married to that he never wanted to be married to, on the one hand, and the Pope on the other hand is trying to do a balancing act between the power of the Spanish crown and the English crown. Well, how this washed out, in 1534 the Parliament passed what was called the Act of Supremacy, by which Henry VIII was declared to be the head of the Church of England. Instead of the Pope.

Now up until this time all Roman, all Catholic churches were Roman Catholic, the Bishop of Rome was the head of all Catholic churches. England became a Catholic church under a different head than Rome, not Roman Catholic but English Catholic, or Anglican, and so Henry was declared to be the head of the Church of England. The Pope excommunicated Henry for this and put England under the interdict, which means that no, the mass would not be served in England, that was a punishment that the Pope could put a country under, but the influence of the Pope was very weak in England and sentiments of the people were more on the side of Henry and so the interdict and the excommunication of Henry had very little effect and Henry stuck by his position.

Now Henry, apart from his conflict with the Pope, was very much a Roman Catholic. In fact earlier in his life, before this particular conflict with the Pope arose, he had written a rebuttal against Luther. He had referred to Luther as an evil wolf and as a wicked destroyer and apostate.

He had burned the Lutheran William Pindale and other Lutherans, in fact in one day he had burned 25 Anabaptists in the year 1535. In one day he was fond of burning Reformers and he had even written a major treatise against Luther called the Defense of the Seven Sacraments and for this the Pope had earlier given Henry VIII the title Defender of the Faith, meaning the Roman Catholic faith. In fact the kings of England have borne this title ever since.

The kings and queens of England are still known as the Defenders of the Faith. It's just that the faith now is interpreted in terms of the English Catholic rather than the Roman Catholic because by getting this divorce, actually Cranmer, Thomas Cranmer is the one who granted the divorce and the marriage to Anne Boleyn, King Henry alienated the Roman Pope and was excommunicated but that didn't bother him too much. He just went on and did what he wanted to do.

Some of the changes that he brought about were, though he was still Catholic, he did allow the Coverdale Bible to become legal. Not the Tyndale Bible but another fellow named Coverdale had come up with a translation of the Bible and the king of England allowed these Bibles to be put in all the churches and this, although he was a Catholic in theology, was sort of a Protestant kind of a thing to do because the Roman Catholic Church allowed this. The Bible in the vernacular of the people to be made available to them.

Thomas Cranmer was made the Archbishop of Canterbury which is the highest position, highest religious position in the church in England and Henry wrote in 1536 the ten articles which were to be the articles defining the policy of the English Church. These ten articles were largely Roman Catholic but they had certain leanings, certain elements in them that showed that King Henry might have been leaning a little at this time toward reformed ideas. For one thing, he in his ten articles he only acknowledged three sacraments instead of seven.

He had earlier written a defense of the seven sacraments and now when he wrote the ten articles he thought there were only three sacraments which were baptism and penance and the Eucharist. Well, that comes very close to the reformed idea that there's only two and that would be baptism and the Eucharist. Reformed people don't believe in penance but Henry leaned for a little while, it looks like, from the content of the ten articles that he wrote like he might have some reformed leanings although he very clearly was anti-papal but later on he moved more solely back in the direction of Roman Catholicism, not Roman but English Catholicism, the Catholic doctrines.

In 1539, three years after he'd written the ten articles, he wrote another thing called the six articles and these six articles enforced certain Roman Catholic doctrines and practices including transubstantiation and many other typically Catholic doctrines and these were made mandatory observances by law and people who didn't keep them were persecuted and often burned at the stake. There were many people burned by Henry at the stake for not agreeing with the doctrine of transubstantiation. Now I might say something about his wives since this whole thing had an awful lot to do with Henry's wives.

He didn't only have two wives, Catherine and Anne Boleyn, eventually he had six. Anne Boleyn gave him a child also but it was also a daughter. So by Catherine whom he had divorced, he had a daughter named Mary, Mary Tudor, and by Anne Boleyn he had a daughter named Elizabeth who became Queen Elizabeth I. But Anne Boleyn was later accused by the king of adultery and executed so he married again and of his six wives, two of them he had executed on the accusation of adultery whether they were guilty or not I suppose no one will ever know.

But Anne Boleyn and also another of his wives Catherine Howard were executed. Two of his wives he divorced. One was of course Catherine of Oregon but also he married another Anne besides Anne Boleyn he married a woman named Anne of Cleves and he divorced her later on.

He married two other Catherines besides Catherine of Oregon. Of his six wives, three of them were named Catherine and two were named Anne. There was one who was named Jane Seymour and she was the mother of the only male surviving heir of Henry and that was Edward VI who was the king who ruled from the time he was nine years old to his 15 when he died.

But Jane Seymour who's not to be confused with any modern person by that name, there is an actress by that name as I understand it, she died in childbirth and the only wife he had that survived him after his death was another Catherine named Catherine Parr. So he had two wives that he divorced, two wives that he executed, one that died in childbirth and one that was fortunate enough to live longer than he did. Now when Henry VIII died of course the Church of England was officially severed from the control of the Roman Pope but theologically was officially Catholic.

Now all this time Thomas Cranmer had held the office of Archbishop of Canterbury, a very influential office in the church, but he was you know he had political savvy. He didn't go against the king too much and so he did influence the king sometimes in the direction of Protestantism but when the king insists on being Catholic, Cranmer kind of held his peace pretty much. I mean when the king Henry VIII had written the ten articles which had some Protestant lenience, Cranmer congratulated him for that.

About three years later when he wrote the six articles which reinforced Catholic orthodoxy, Cranmer didn't like that but the king and he still got along reasonably well. But when King Henry died, his son Edward VI was the only male heir. There were two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, but Edward had made, I mean Henry had made it very clear he wanted a male heir on the throne and so his only male heir, Edward VI, son of James Seymour, succeeded him at age nine years old.

And during the six years of his reign, England became very solidly Protestant, not because of Edward, he was just a kid, but because he was under the influence of counselors, not the least of which was Thomas Cranmer himself. And so under Thomas Cranmer's influence and the rule of Edward VI, the laws that had made Lollards illegal, the followers of Whitcliffe, were repealed. So Lollardy became a legal religion in England, which isn't quite the same thing as having a reformation in England, but at least just as the Huguenots became legal under the reign of Henry of Navarre, so the Lollards, which were similar, became legal in England under the reign of Edward VI.

Also during that short reign of that king, under Cranmer's influence, there were two documents of importance that were written affecting the church. One was the Book of Common Prayer, which was liturgically very close to Roman Catholicism, but then there was also the 42 articles written by Cranmer and Ridley, and the 42 articles were the articles of the church which were fairly Protestant, the theology was Protestant and evangelical. And the church was governed by these two documents primarily, the 42 articles and the Book of Common Prayer.

So the liturgy of the church from the Book of Common Prayer was Catholic in nature, but the theology was Protestant in nature. And so Protestantism became more or less an official characteristic of the Church of England at this time, and King Edward died at age 15 in the year 1553. Now because he was 15 years old when he died, he too had no heir, and so it remained to find an heir to King Henry VIII, since the only male heir that had succeeded him had died without an heir.

It fell to the remaining heirs of Henry to take the throne, unless some other family was to do so. Now that of course usually would be a bloody transition, and so it was decided that Mary, the daughter of Catherine of Aragon, the first child of Henry VIII, the oldest, and one of only two surviving children, Elizabeth was younger and Mary older, that Mary would be made the Queen. Now she was I believe 37 years old when she became Queen.

She was very loyal to her mother Catherine, who was of course a Roman Catholic, and when Catherine was divorced, Mary had gone with her mother and fled back to Spain for their own safety, and she had been raised in Spain under Roman Catholicism and was herself a flaming Roman Catholic, and she came back to England determined to bring the nation of England back under the Pope. Now for the reign of Henry VIII and his son Edward VI, England had been free from the papacy, but for the five years that Mary Tudor, daughter of Henry, reigned, England was made Catholic again, and though it was a very short time, it was a very bloody time. Mary killed over 300 people that were not Roman Catholics.

It was during her time, or shortly thereafter, that John Fox wrote the book known as Fox's Book of Martyrs. John Fox lived at the time when Mary was ruling and persecuting. Altogether, she killed only about 300, and yet for that, John Fox dubbed her Bloody Mary, and that's what she's been remembered as ever since.

Of course, Fox was a Calvinist. He never mentioned that the Calvinists, or at least Protestants in Europe, maybe not Calvinists, but Protestants in Europe killed thousands of Anabaptists without dubbing them bloody leaders, but Mary killed about 300 Protestants, and she is forever remembered as Bloody Mary, Mary Tudor of England. Her reign was short.

She was sickly, as was her brother Edward. By the way, there must have been something genetic in that line, because Henry VIII's five of his six kids by Catherine die at infancy, and he definitely thought he had a curse on because of this, but even the ones who survived were sickly. Some of them survived to be adults, like Mary did, and Elizabeth, but both Edward and Mary were very sickly, and they didn't reign for very long, but when they did, it was times of great change.

In Edward's short reign, everything became Protestant. In Mary's short reign, everything became Catholic again. She led Parliament to repeal all the anti-Catholic laws that had been made during the reign of her brother Edward, and so all the anti-Catholic laws in place were now gone, and Protestantism became the persecuted religion.

The Roman Pope sent over a cardinal from Rome named Cardinal Pole to help Mary bring the nation back under the Roman Catholic influence, and he was made Archbishop of Canterbury instead of Thomas Cranmer. Whatever happened to Thomas Cranmer? Well, that's an interesting story. He became one of the casualties of Bloody Mary.

He and a couple of his friends, Hugh Latimer and Coverdale and Ridley, they became victims of a purge. They were all Reformed-type people and anti-Roman Catholic, and all of them ended up burned at the stake. It is said that Thomas Cranmer was in prison, and his friends Ridley and Latimer and Coverdale were burned at the stake, and he was able to watch out the window of the tower and see his friends burned.

He was afraid, and so he recanted his Reformed position in order to please the Roman Catholic powers, and he signed a recantation. However, that didn't save his life. He was still condemned to death, and so when he was put at the stake, he asked that his right hand be left unbound, and when the flames were lit around him, he held his right hand out in the flames to burn it first because he recanted his recantation, and he wanted to burn the hand first that had signed the recantation.

He considered that to be his sinful hand, and so he was kind of a weakling, apparently. I mean, he never showed himself to be a man of great spiritual strength, even under Henry VIII, but he was a man at least who helped England move a little in the right direction, but he was burned at the stake. So were, apparently, Hugh Latimer and Ridley were burned at the same stake together, at stakes right next to each other, and it is reported that Latimer, just before the flames were lit, before the pile of twigs and so forth were lit around him, made this statement.

He said, Be of good comfort, Master Ridley. We shall this day light such a candle as, by God's grace in England, I trust shall never be put out. In other words, he said that as we are ignited and burned, we will be lighting a lamp in England that no one will be able to put out.

That's a very optimistic way of looking at it, when you're about to be burned alive, but it turned out to be rather prophetic because Mary's killing of all these Protestants sparked such a disgust for Roman Catholicism in England that when she died at a reasonably young age, age 42, the notes say 23, that's a typo. She died in 1558 and she was 42 years old. When she died, the nation of England was disgusted with Roman Catholicism, went back to Protestantism, and Catholicism never returned as a significant movement in England.

When Mary died, there was still no male heir for the throne. In England, there had been Edward and he died without an heir. Mary had no children and therefore the only surviving heir of Henry VIII was his younger daughter Elizabeth, who had been the daughter of Anne Boleyn.

And just as Henry VIII had considered Mary to be illegitimate because he considered his marriage to her mother Catherine to be not valid, Anne Boleyn was considered not to be a valid wife of Henry by the Pope and therefore the Pope considered Elizabeth illegitimate. Now that made Elizabeth not prone to be a Roman Catholic because the Roman Catholic Church viewed her as an illegitimate child. It is said that her personal religious leanings were more or less neutral, but that she looked as though she might move in the direction of Roman Catholicism, but she ended up not doing so probably because of the stigma that was upon her in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Pope did send a legate over to England to try to persuade Elizabeth to embrace the Catholic faith, even if she was a bastard or whatever the female version of that is in his mind, but she did not convert to Roman Catholicism. She instituted Protestantism again. So England was kind of English Catholic under Henry VIII, then Protestant under Edward VI, then fully Roman Catholic again under Mary, and then fully Protestant under Elizabeth.

This is Elizabeth I. She was declared by Parliament the Supreme Head of the Anglican Church by a second act of supremacy, like the one that had been made about her father, Henry VIII, the first act of supremacy declared the King of England the Supreme Head of the Church of England. Parliament declared her by a second act of supremacy in 1559 the Supreme Head of the Anglican Church, but apparently she preferred to take a more modest title and was called the Supreme Governor of the Anglican Church rather than the Supreme Head. I'm not sure why she was inclined that way.

Perhaps she was just more modest. In 1559, Parliament, under her leadership, passed the Act of Uniformity, making the Book of Common Prayer mandatory for use in all the churches. She took the 42 articles that Cranmer had written and she revised them to 39 articles in the year 1563, and that defined the practice of the Anglican Church along Protestant lines.

She burned Catholics at the stake as well as Puritans and Separatists. Now, these Puritans and Separatists we haven't talked about yet, but we shall, and it was the Puritans that really, when they arose in England, were the beginning of a real spiritual reform in the Church of England. The Puritans were Anglicans.

They were Church of Englandmen for the most part. Some of them were Presbyterian, but most of them were Anglicans, and they were godly, good men. And the real spiritual reformation in England happened through the Puritans, but we haven't had a chance to speak about the rise of that movement yet.

We will in a later lecture. But during her reign, Elizabeth burned Puritans at the stake and Separatists and Roman Catholics. The Roman Catholics particularly were angry at Elizabeth, partly because under Mary's reign, they really thought they'd gotten England back into the fold, and now Elizabeth was taking it the other direction.

So there were many plots on her life. The Jesuit order, which we haven't discussed yet either, we will next week or the following. The Jesuit order was part of what we call the Counter-Reformation.

In the 16th century, when there was the Reformation taking place, the Roman Catholic Church was doing some things too. So far, we've only really talked about what the Protestants were doing and only mentioned the Roman Catholics in terms of their response to a little bit. But the Roman Catholic Church experienced something within its organization too, which is usually called the Counter-Reformation.

One of those things was the formation of the Jesuit order, also known as the Society of Jesus. And they were fanatically committed to obedience to the Pope, to do whatever he said, whether it went against scripture, against conscience or anything, they would do whatever the Pope said. That's what the Jesuit order was all about.

And they became the most missionary arm of the Roman Catholic Church to the New World, to North and South America and other places. And they were just fanatical enforcers of Roman Catholicism. Well, the Jesuits in England actually plotted to assassinate Elizabeth.

There was something called the Gunpowder Plot. And there were other... I wish... The name of it makes me want to give you details, but I've read five or six church history books this week on this period of time, and none of them explained what the Gunpowder Plot was. So I have to leave it to the imagination.

I was looking for Kenneth Laderet's book, and it's been misplaced, and I couldn't find it. But I figured that he'd have details on it. But I couldn't find his book to find him.

Anyway, there were plots, more than a few plots, on the life of Elizabeth by Roman Catholics, trying to kill her and replace her with a Roman Catholic ruler. The last attempt to retake England by the Roman Catholic power was when Spain decided to attack England using the so-called Invincible Armada. The Invincible Armada was about as invincible as the Titanic.

But it was 132 Spanish ships of a superior design, warships, which were able to go out and conquer just about any naval fleet they encountered. And Spain, the King of Spain, decided he wanted to gain power over England. And the Pope decided to help finance that for him, because the Pope wanted to bring England back under Roman Catholic power.

So the dreaded Invincible Armada was launched against England to conquer England. Well, Elizabeth called upon the English and their sense of patriotism to come to the aid of their country. And they sent out a fleet of smaller ships, 200 smaller but faster ships, under Sir Francis Drake's command.

And they defeated the Spanish Armada. However, lest you think that the English fleet was superior to the Armada, we can't say for sure, because about half of the Armada was destroyed in a storm. And therefore, the English had a much smaller force to deal with.

And it's not known whether England would have come under Roman Catholic and Spanish control, maybe permanently, had there not been a storm to destroy half of the Spanish Armada. And it makes one wonder, you know, whether maybe God might have had something to do with it. Because the fact that England never became Roman Catholic again, had significant implications on the religious complexion of the whole world at a later date, and on the decline of Roman Catholicism as a power in the world.

Not that it's, by any means, declined completely even today. In fact, it's having a resurgence. So, in the reign of Elizabeth, and especially with the defeat of the Spanish Armada, Protestantism became established and permanent as the official religion of England.

But it was a strange sort of Catholic sort of Protestantism. It was Anglicanism, English Catholicism. But much of the theology was Protestant, and Anglicanism is generally speaking considered kind of halfway between Protestant and Catholic in its theology and liturgy.

It's still a very highly liturgical church. Now, there were two religious movements in Protestant England, and they had their centers of influence in the two universities, Oxford and Cambridge. Oxford University was pretty much the center of high church Anglican Catholic liturgical kind of religion in England.

Whereas Cambridge eventually came more under the sway of the Puritan movement, and much less liturgical, much more what we call low church. So, there's low church Anglicanism with its center in Cambridge University, and there's high church Anglicanism with its center in Oxford University. Now, up to that point, as I've said earlier, no significant spiritual reformation had occurred in England, which is not to say there weren't individuals who had significant spiritual experiences and had become Christians and true Protestants.

But England itself, the Church of England, had only been reformed in the sense that politically the rulers had declared what the religion would be. It did not reflect necessarily the sentiments of the people in every case as the other countries that were reformed did. It was not a groundswell of Protestantism in England.

It was a top-down kind of a movement. However, the Church of England, which was now officially Protestant, had much reformation still to undergo in the spiritual sense, and that would come about through the Separatists and Puritans and Baptists and Quakers and Anabaptists about a century later. And so, we won't talk about them now.

We'll save that discussion for a later time, and you'll find out who the Puritans were that you've heard so many bad things about in our society. They were actually pretty good folks, although they were Calvinists, but they can still be saved. Are there any questions about this period of time?