The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

Thomas More warned good Catholics, complacent in their ancient faith, that the new heretics were
few but formidable; as different from them as fire from frost. For him, this was an evangelical conspiracy, and it was true that a few prime movers led a revolutionary movement.
Among whom did the evangelicals make converts to their cause? Who would read the books which
the brethren ran such risks to distribute? Luther's ideas spread first among his compatriots, the German
merchants, and beyond them to their associates in the English merchant communities, especially in
London. Lutheran works were not translated into English until later, but they were read in Latin by
the educated. Heretical movements often began with trahison des clercs, and so it was in England.
The staunchest opponents of the new theology were scholars in the universities, at Oxford and
especially at Cambridge, but so also were the most fervent converts. Bishop Longland feared 'the corruption of youth' at Cardinal College, Oxford. Some of the establishment were won over also.
The Master of Queens' College, Cambridge, Dr Forman, was the mastermind behind a contraband
book trade between London and Oxford, and avowed the quintessential evangelical belief 'that all
our salvation came of faith . . . And that if our good works should be the cause of our salvation then,
as St Paul saith, Christ died for nought'. Hugh Latimer, who had at first combated the 'new sect' and
the 'new learning', and wrote a dissertation against Luther's fellow evangelical Philipp Melanchthon,
was converted at Cambridge by Thomas Bilney, who had himself been won to the new theology by
reading St Paul in Erasmus's translation. But Bilney also held more traditional dissenting views.
When a Lollard went to hear Bilney preach at Ipswich - that pilgrimages were folly, that prayers
should be addressed to God alone, that prayers to saints impugned the sovereignty of Christ, that
St Mary Magdalene was a whore - he heard nothing that he had not heard already in his Lollard
conventicles. Among the first enthusiasts for the new heresy were the adherents of an older one,
the Lollards. The 'known men' and the 'brethren' had much in common. Both held that Scripture
enshrined all religious truth, and that to every layman belonged the right to find that truth. They believed that from the freedom to read the Word followed another: the liberation from priestly
authority. When the Lollard Thomas Man asserted that all holy men of his sect were priests he
anticipated the Lutheran doctrine of the priesthood of all believers; a personal faith, in which 'every
layman is priest'. Pardons, confession, penance, 'purgatory pinfold' - the whole penitential system
whereby the clergy held the laity in thrall - could be discarded.
Why abandon an old faith and an old obedience for a new and persecuted dotrine? There were many
individual rebellions against the Church and its doctrine; each conversion was private, made in
conscience, for reasons now, and perhaps then, unknown to others. But for the Catholic opponents
of the 'new learning' the reasons were clear: evangelicals looked for liberty; not only Luther's Christian
liberty, but license - 'carnal', 'parasite' liberty. Catholic writers - of whom More was the most indefatigable - saw the evangelical offer of the certainty of grace, the conviction that the will was
bound, as leading people to deny their own responsibility for doing good and avoiding evil. For, as
More wrote later in his Supplication for Souls (1529), if the passion of Christ sufficed for remission
of sin without any 'recompense' or 'pain' on the part of the sinner, then this was encouragement to
'bold courage to sin'. He caricatured the evangelical belief: however sinful, all they had to do was
'cry Him mercy', as a woman would as she stepped on another's train.
Soon those who had adopted a purer form of Lutheranism would be yesterday's men. On the great
metaphysical question of the Real Presence in the Eucharist - the central issue in Reformation debates
- it would not be the moderate Lutheran position that prevailed. Luther taught that in the Eucharist,
after the consecration, the substances both of the Body and Blood of Christ and of the bread and wine
co-exist in union with each other: this is consubstantiation. More radical teachings on the Mass,
stemming from Strasbourg and Switzerland, and close to the memorialist, materialist beliefs of the Lollards, were soon spreading. The 'Christian brethren', an advance guard among evangelicals, held
the sacramentarian belief that the 'sacrament of the altar after the consecration was neither body nor
blood', but remained bread and wine as before. This was the deepest heresy, and one which very few
had yet adopted, despite Thomas More's fears. But when More charged William Tyndale with being
more radical than Luther concerning confession, purgatory, prayers to saints and honour to images,
he was right. Erasmus's dream that every ploughboy at his plough and every woman at her loom
should read the Bible could only be realized in England if it were translated. William Tyndale triumphantly accomplished that task. Exiled from England for fear of persecution, and often in hiding
on the Continent, he worked on his English translation. In the prologue to his English New Testament
he declared, 'By faith we are saved only', and in the marginal notes the new Christianity was expounded. In the greatest danger, on the run from the bishops' agents, the 'brethren' ran a contraband
book trade, smuggling Tyndale's forbidden Testaments and the works of Continental reformers into
England. In the Low Countries, France and Germany, English exiles provided inspiration for their
fellows at home and writings to sustain the cause. Sure that there was an eager audience waiting for
the English Bible, Tyndale and his supporters printed 3,000 copies, maybe more, of his first edition
of the New Testament in Worms in 1526. 'Behold the signs of the world be wondrous,' the evangelicals
promised. An underworld of evangelical brethren had emerged under persecution in the 1520s.
'Brethren', 'for so did we not only call one another,' wrote Anthony Delaber, an Oxford undergraduate,
'but were in deed one to the other.' Loyal to each other, and united in their mission, they sheltered
and sustained each other, converts bound together lastingly in a common cause. This was a conspiracy
to convert. Once their books were in the people's hands, their ideas in their heads, their mission would be fulfilled, the brethren said. The new faith in its heroic early years was a religion of revolutionary
aspirations and methods. So dangerous was the mission, because of persecution, that some of the
'brethren' adopted desperate measures and came to be marked by their enemies as rebels as well as
heretics. Destroying images, posting bills, singing seditious ballads, spreading forbidden books,
hiding those on the run, planning vigilante rescues of their fellows in prison, preaching despite the
dangers, they created a protest movement. The bishops, who did not know who and where the evangelicals were, were constantly thwarted and duped. Into Bishop Tunstall's own palace in London
the reformers tossed a bill, promising 'There will come a day'.
Yet, for all their zeal, the 'brethren' were still so few and so beleaguered that the chances of their
a whole nation might have seemed hopeless to anyone but them. They were winning converts - in
London, at the Inns of Court, at the universities, among the old Lollard communities, in towns in
East Anglia and the South-East - and the evangelicals were now a fifth column. But their numbers
were tiny. The vast majority of the people were devoted to their traditional ways and hostile to the
'new learning', if they had even heard of it. The Word might pass by people who, tied to their work
and the land, had no time for it. The 'brethren' were still a church under the cross; persecuted and on
the run. Soon there were martyrs. The 'brethren' in exile looked always for the time when they could
return; 'when the King's pleasure is that the New Testament in English should go forth'.
That that day would come they were certain. In the account book which he was binding for the Pewterers' Company, John Gough wrote on an endpaper the defining evangelical text, Mark 13:31:
'Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my Word will remain for ever.' They seemed to hope against
hope. The new faith needed protection to survive and grow. The Lollards had failed utterly to win
over secular rulers to their cause. Humanists looked to Henry VIII as the model of a godly prince,
and hoped that he would listen to their aspiration for renewal in the Church. Surely the evangelicals
could expect nothing but persecution from the Defender of the Faith and papal champion? Yet in
1536, when a new conception of what was necessary for salvation had invaded England against the
wishes of the great majority of its people, the monks of St Albans Abbey looked upon the desolation
of their religion and way of life, and asked how it had come about. Their answer was simple, and
treasonable: 'The King hath done it on his high power.' Was the King so powerful?