The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

Thomas Denys died for saying that the Eucharist was not 'The very body of Christ, but a commemoration of Christ's passion, and Christ's body in a figure and not the very body'. Denying
the sanctity of the Mass themselves, they would impugn its power to others. As he came from Mass
at the Grey Friars in 1520, Rivelay, a Londoner, said that he had just seen his Lord God in form of
bread and wine over the priest's head. But John Southwick protested that it was only a figure of
Christ. Lollards believed that to worship the consecrated Host was idolatry, as was the veneration of
images and crucifixes, for the Commandments forbade the making of graven images. The Lollards
were the first, but not the last, of English reformers to insist that God did not dwell in temples built
with hands. Lollards despised the crosses which were universally venerated. Why should the cross
be worshipped which had brought Christ such suffering? A crucifix by a priest to a Lollard's deathbed
was spurned as a false god. Lollards would taunt images, and sometimes attack them, challenging
them to defend themselves if they could. It was, they thought, not only idolatrous but socially iniquitous to devote time and money to serving saints' images by pilgrimage and other acts of devotion, while the poor, Christ's own image, suffered; true pilgrimage, they believed, was to go barefoot to visit the poor, weak and hungry. The other sort was, at best, folly, and profited only the
priests who took the offerings of the deluded faithful. As a woman implored Our Lady to help Joan
Sampson in her labour, Joan spat on her and sent her away. Prayer should be directed to God alone,
and not to saints, because only God could answer it, and surely the prayer of a good life was more
meritorious than the repetition of words, 'lip labour'. Why confess to a priest, when God alone can
forgive sin? Views like these put the Lollards outside conventional society.
For every Lollard who died at the stake there were fifty who recanted, but recantation itself left a
fearsome stigma, for ostracism awaited those who bore the badge of the abjured heretic, the mark
of the faggot. People would pour ashes on a heretic's grave, so that grass should never grow there.
So it was at the beginning of the sixteenth century, but not for much longer, for soon a society which
had been fundamentally united in religion became divided, and there were too many heretics to be
cast out. Lollardy was one of the more coherent heretical creeds in Western Christendom. The Hussites in Bohemia had effected a Reformation there in the early fifteenth century which was premature, and which remained as a spectre to haunt the imaginations of those in England who feared a similar enormity. Believing that pestilential heresy was on the increase in England, the bishops
began looking for it more assiduously, and what they discovered alarmed them. In 1518-21 Bishop




Still Lollards were few. Without political or spiritual leadership, Lollardy offered no prospect of
inspiring a national reforming movement; not in England, and certainly not in Wales or Ireland.
There had been no new Lollard text written since about 1440. Nevertheless, part of the Lollard creed
anticipated the beliefs which made the English Reformation.
The Lollard challenge lay principally in the understanding among some within the Church that Lollard
arguments were not always easy to refute; that some of their criticisms were just; that some of their
principles were ones which all Christians should acknowledge. John Colet, the reforming Dean of
St Paul's, had warned the clergy in 1511 that heretics were not so dangerous to the faith as the evil
and wicked lives of priests. Lollards could claim - although it was heresy to do so - that the sacraments
were vitiated by the corruption of the clergy. Even the Mass could be portrayed as an invention of
priests to beguile the faithful into supporting their indolent, venal lives. This was the true anticlericalism; the anti-sacerdotalism of heresy, which denied the essential place and function of
the clergy. Richard Humme, a wealthy Londoner, mounted a sustained challenge to the clergy and
was murdered for it - martyred - or so the Church's critics alleged. Defending a fellow parishioner
who abjured the most shocking heresies, he said that her beliefs accorded with the laws of God.
He inveighed against priestly power; against prelates 'all things taking and nothing ministering'.
But above all, he was charged with reading the Apocalypse, the Epistles and Gospels in English.
He defended the right of the laity to read the English Bible. In the prologue of his own Bible was
written, 'Poor men and idiots have the truth of Holy scriptures, more than a thousand prelates.'
He left a Bible in the church of St Margaret in Bridge Street, for the edification of all who would
rread it. Yet the desire to have the scripture in English need not have been heretical, and criticism of
the Church was far from being simply a negative spirit. There was at the end of the middle ages a
pious and fervently orthodox desire among influential laity and clergy for a renewal in Christian life.
The Church was semper reformanda, always in need of reform, but at some times more urgently
than at others. Although the papacy itself, preoccupied with war and money, seemed to have forgotten
Christ's warning about gaining the whole world and losing the soul, and the Church as an institution
seemed mired in worldly concerns, careless of spiritual ones, still there was an impassioned search
to rediscover the redemptive presence of Christ within this Church. There were hopes that Renaissance
might come in the Church also; that it might move closer to an apostolic ideal. Christianity could be
revived by a return ad fontes - to the Bible and the Church Fathers. Scripture was rediscovered by applying the new humanist studies of the ancient biblical languages, Hebrew and Greek, to uncover
meanings long lost among the distortions and muddles in the Vulgate, St Jerome's fourth-century
translation. The most brilliant exponent of this new spiritual message was Desiderius Erasmus, who
captured the imagination of an elite in England and in Europe in the first decades of the Enchiridion militis Christiani (The Handbook of a Christian Soldier), a manifesto of the new Christianity.

Inspired by scripture, especially by the teachings of St Paul, his writings aspired to bring regeneration
and collective renewal in Christian life. The ambition was to educate not only those who were educated already, but the simple and unlearned. Every ploughboy at his plough, every woman at her
loom, the weaver, the traveller, should know the Epistles of St Paul and the Gospels. The philosophy
of Christian humanism bred impatience and scepticism with the pursuit of good works performed
without charity. The Enchiridion inveighed against all the distractions from the true 'philosophy of
Christ', groaned with hunger, 'thou spewest up partridges'; while the supposed Christian lost a
thousand pieces of gold in a night's gaming, some wretched girl in her desperation sold her chastity,
'and thus perisheth the soul for whom Christ hath bestowed his life'. True religion lay in righteous
conduct, not in fatuous ceremonies. For Erasmus and his followers, all those prayers and penances,
fast and vigils, the mechanical good works of late medieval devotion, made a mockery of Christ's
death and of what He had come to do. Erasmus found kindred spirits in England. Listening to Colet,
so he wrote in 1499, was like listening to Plato himself. John Colet came to London from Oxford
in 1505, and gave a series of sermons inspired by humanist evangelism. He did not, in the way of
the schoolmen, take a discrete text and preach a detailed discourse to prove a particular point of
faith; rather he preached 'Gospel history', upon Christ Himself. When he founded St Paul's School,
die-hard conservatives feared, so Thomas More wrote, that a crowd of Christians would spring like
Greeks from the Trojan horse. A generation of evangelicals did spring from this academy. In his
urgency to reform, Colet began to touch upon matters which were politically controversial and seen
as doctrinally unsafe. An impassioned poem of the time, 'The Ruin of a Realm', lamented moral decadence: it saw one cause - 'spiritual men and undoubtedly/Doth rule the realm brought to misery'
- and saw one cleric who stood apart from the self-seeking of the rest. This paragon might have been
John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, the leading theologian and humanist scholar. It might also have
been Colet, who warned the clergy against their worldliness, who preached against war was just as
Henry VIII launched grandiose campaigns, who inveighed against the sin of pride before the magnificent Cardinal Wolsey. And Colet believed that the heretics had something to teach the Church
about reform. He read heretical works, and Lollards came to hear him preach. His translation of the
paternoster (the Lord's Prayer) into English seemed to confirm suspicions of his orthodoxy, which
were all unfounded. A good Catholic should have hoped for renovation withint the Church, have
deplored its current state, and yearned for a purity which had once existed in an apostolic golden age.
Reform was needed, and urgently. From where would reform come? Perhaps from a General Council
of the Church. Erasmus in his Sileni of Alcibiades (1515) reminded his readers that although priests,
bishops and popes were called 'the Church', they were only its servants. 'The Christian people is the
Church.' A century before, General Councils, representing the congregation of the faithful, had
challenged unworthy popes, and might do so again. But Councils could become toys of secular rulers.
In 1511 Louis XII of France convoked a schismatic Council to force the papal hand, and in turn Julius II, the worldly, warrior pope, responded by calling the Fifth Lateran Council. But these rival Councils,
preoccupied with politics, did very little to effect reform, to the despair of Catholic reformers.
Another way to reform would be by education. Education in virtue was the best preparation for civic
life. Cicero and classical authors taught the first lesson for the commonwealth: that man is not born
for himself, but for the public. A humanist education provided a training in rhetoric, the classical art
of eloquence. Christ Himself had been the sublime exponent of this art, the perfect teacher while on
earth. Rhetoric was, for the sixteenth century, anything but empty. It had the practical purpose of
persuading and providing counsel to those with power in the spiritual and secular realms. Yet, as
More's character Hythloday observed, princes might not listen, true counsel might be stifled and flattery prevail. Satire was a powerful means of persuasion to reform. In the Julius Exclusus - anonymous, but written by an Englishman - the irredeemable Julius II arrived at the locked gates of
heaven which he could not unlock with the keys to the treasury of the Church. Denied entry by St Peter, he was consigned to hell. In Erasmus's audacious Praise of Folly, Folly presented unpalatable
truths about the grotesqueries of society and mounted a scathing attack upon the failings of contemporary Christianity; upon monks and theologians; and upon a papacy which was dedicated to
war and subversive of law, religion and peace. Praise of Folly (Moriae Encomium) was written for
More, to More, the title a pun on his name. In 1515 More replied, writing his own satire, Utopia.
Its rhetorical purpose was to advance reform by contrasting an ideal with the lamentable reality.
Readers were invited to judge whether the fool or the friar at Cardinal Morton's table was truly the
fool. Yet, if the friar was the fool, he was a dangerous one: 'We have a papal bull by which all who
mock at us are excommunicated.' These satires were immensely popular: Praise of Folly was reprinted
fifteent times before 1517. Yet as the satires passed beyond the humanist audiences for whom they
were written, the dangers as well as the exciting possibilities of print became apparent. The best way
to restore religion would be to reveal 'pure Christ' in scripture; scripture freely available and translated
according to the best humanist principles. Erasmus translated the entire New Testament from Greek,
and published the Greek text in 1516, with a parallel Latin translation. This translation was received
with huge optimism by many, but criticized by conservatives who thought that to meddle with the
Vulgate at all was doubtful and dangerous. Thomas Cromwell, a London lawyer, took Erasmus's New
Testament with him on a journey to Rome in 1517-18, and learnt it by heart. It marked him, and the
Reformation in England that he helped to make. A decade later, Stephen Vaughan wrote telling Cromwell, his friend and former master, of his search through London to recover a debt from the evasive Mr Mundy; of how he found him at evensong, not inclined to discuss money. But Vaughan
told Mundy that if he wished to serve God he could not do so better than by making restitution.
Here was a joke about hypocrisy, but behind it lay the essential humanist belief that true piety lay in
right action not conventional obsequies. In 1516, the year when Erasmus published his New Testament and More his Utopia, everything seemed possible. This was a liminal moment. Reformers, within
the Church but deeply critical of its practices, still hoped for renewal, through scripture. Christian
humanism laid the foundations for all that was to come: while its spirit was essentially orthodox,
it prepared the way for a more radical vision. Yet Erasmus's learned translation still left the Bible
only for the educated. The term associated with Erasmus, philosophia Christi (the philosophy of Christ), suggests the limit of its popular appeal. There came demands that scripture no longer be
locked up in Latin, mediated by priests, but available in English to give the faithful an infalliable
rule whereby to judge the Church and its claims to absolute authority in matters of faith.
For William Tyndale, the great reformer and biblical translator, Christians should believe nothing
without the authority of God's Word. Erasmus had, in his insistence upon inner conviction rather
than outward ritual and his demand that Christians focus their hearts inwardly on grace given by
God, prefigured the great debates on faith and salvation which would soon divide the Church.
In Wittenberg, Martin Luther was reading Erasmus's New Testament, and in 1517, on All Saints' Eve,
he posted his ninety-five theses, and challenged the papacy and the Church.

Luther, monk and theologian, had been wrestling with the deepest metaphysical questions concerning
the nature of man's will and divine grace, of God's mercy and His justice, and of man's sin and redemption through Christ. As he sought the answer to the quintessential question for every Christian
- 'what must one do to be saved?' - between 1514 and 1519 he came gradually to a new understanding.
Thinking upon the teaching in St Paul, 'the righteous shall live by faith', he had come close to despair.
Who could love a God, he asked, who wished to deal with sinners according to justice? For Luther
was convinced that the fallen human race, eternally damned by original sin, could never be free from
its dominion. He came to believe that human will, bound and captive to sin, had no capacity to attain
righteousness. But he found a 'wonderful new definition of righteousness', whereby 'we are righteous
only by the reckoning of a merciful God, through faith in His Word'. Sinners are made righteous -
justified - through faith alone, by God's grace freely given and received in a state of unstriving trust
in His mercy. God alone moved man to repentance, Luther believed, and faith itself was a divine work.
He rejected any belief that salvation is dependent upon any decision of the human will.
In 1520, in a tract entitled The Liberty of a Christian, Luther described simply the nature of the relationship between Christ and the sinner:

Christ is full of grace, life, and salvation. The human soul is full of sin, death, and damnation. Now
let faith come between them. Sin, death, and damnation will be Christ's. And grace, life, salvation will
be the believer's.

For those Catholics who, like Luther, had despaired, doubting that their own striving, their own works,
could ever bring their sinful souls to God, these writings brought profound hope and a joyful certainty
of salvation. William Roper, a young lawyer at the Inns of Court, assailed by that spiritual doubt which the Church called scrupulosity, was 'bewitched' by The Liberty of a Christian. But for Roper,
and for all others led into the strong light of justifying faith, there were cosequences destructive of the
whole sacramental and penitential system of the Church. 'Then thought he that all the ceremonies and
sacraments in Christ's Church were very vain.'
Luther came to believe that sinners cannot expiate their sins. Once he understood that man was justified by faith alone, atonement and satisfaction for sin was irrelevant to his reconciliation with God. 'Good works' - including the obligations of prayer, fasting and pardons - which the Church taught could make satisfaction for sin, if performed in a state of grace, were for Luther and his followers
unnecessary for salvation, although they were its consequences. For Luther, if the sinner attains
faith, he will be saved without the Church; if he does not, the Church can do nothing to help.
As Luther developed his new theology, he came gradually to attack not so much the Church's abuse
of its power, but its right to claim any such power in Christian society at all. For him, the reformation
of its moral life was far less urgent than a reformation of doctrine. This central conviction that Christians need not, indeed cannot, do anything to merit salvation, only believe, was the inspiration
for those converted to the new faith.