The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.' This text, which
opens St John's Gospel, was at the heart of the Reformation. Reading Erasmus's New Testament,
Luther became convinced that the Church had compromised Christ's teachings. The Church had never
denied that all truths necessary to salvation were contained in scripture, but in arbitrating questions
of faith, it appealed not to scripture alone, but to tradition as found in the writings and decrees of the
Fathers, Doctors and Councils of the Church. For evangelicals - all those who determined to proclaim
the Gospel as glad tidings, and to reform religion according to scriptural precept - this appeal to
tradition and hierarchy was the blasphemous ususurpation of divine by human authority. They asserted
that scripture alone, in its literal sense, was sufficient authority, and that scripture was its own interpreter. Evangelical reformers now distinguished between the canonical books of the Hebrew Old Testament, which were authoritative for establishing doctrine, and those which were apocryphal,
outside the Hebrew canon. One such apocryphal book was Maccabees, which contained what was
held to be scriptural warrant for the doctrines of purgatory and of the efficacy of prayers and Masses
for the dead. Now the evangelicals could claim that purgatory was nowhere in scripture, was the
Church's invention, and that, as Henry Brinklow (a London mercer and pampleteer) put it, to pray
for souls 'availeth the dead no more than pissing of a wren helpeth to cause the sea to flow at an
extreme ebb'.
In 1521 Luther stood before the Diet of Worms and recounted his discovery of the Gospel, claiming
that he stood with the Prophets, the Evangelists, Apostles and Fathers of the Church. Yet soon he stood
against the Church, under the ban of pope and emperor. From Worms Bishop Turnstall wrote warning that Luther's tract On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520) must be kept out of England.
In this work Luther attacked the sacramental system of the Church, reducing the seven sacraments to
three - baptism, penance and the Eucharist - and repudiating the sacrifice of the Mass. Soon he would
deny that penance was a sacrament. Erasmus now pronounced the malady beyond cure.
Luther's works, still in Latin, had reached England by 1519, and were being read by those of influence. In a spectacular ceremony in London on 12 May 1521 the papal anathema was pronounced
against Luther, and the English Church thereby declared its orthodoxy and obedience to the papacy.
But on the night after the ceremony an outrage occurred which was ominous: on the papal bull posted
on the door of St Paul's scribbled a mocking rhyme.
In the years following 1521 Lutheranism seemed to present little threat in England. Secular and ecclesiastical authorities rallied in force to the defence of orthodoxy. In July 1521 a defence of the
sacraments was published: Assertio Septem Sacramentorum. 'It is well known for mine, and I for
mine avow it,' Henry VIII told Luther. Henry did write it, or part of it, with the help of it, with the
help of a committee of theologians, and a grateful Pope gave the King the title Defender of the Faith.
The work gave the clearest sign of Henry's keen theological interest, and of his determination to
lead the English Church; but it was also a sign of the capricious lead he would give, for later he
disowned the work, and blamed others for making him write what he had so proudly claimed.
Thomas More and Bishop Fisher were commissioned by royal command to write against Luther:
Fisher wrote a measured and theologically brilliant confutation; More a vituperative onslaught.
In his Responsio ad Lutherum (1524) More - under the pseudonym Guillelmus Rosseus - parodied
Luther's evangelical certainty and spiritual pride:

'How do you know that God has seized you?'
'Because I am certain . . . that my teaching is from God.'
'How do you know that?'
'Because I am certain.'
'How are you certain?'
'Because I know.'
'But how do you know?'
'Because I am certain.'

True faith was, for evangelicals, an absolute assurance of their acceptability to God. Thomas More,
who had witnessed this evangelical certainty when his son-in-law William Roper became one of
the first converts to the new faith in England, took Roper as his model for the messenger in the
Dialogue concerning Heresies (1529). Not content to whisper Luther's teachings in 'hugger mugger',
Roper and his fellows must evangelize them. Those in spiritual bondage must be brought the liberating message; the Word, hidden from the faithful for a thousand years, must go forth by whatever means
and whatever the risk. (I shall refer to the first generation of English reformers as evangelicals; not
'Protestants', because this was a term invented in a foreign country to describe a particular protest,
at Speyer in 1529; nor 'Lutherans', because this suggests a precise confession, and Luther's ideas were
soon transmuted in English circumstances. Only reformers of later generations will be called 'Protestant'.) The 'evangelical brethren' or 'Christian-brethren', as they called themselves - 'newfangled', 'new-broached brethren', as their enemies called them - were fired and organized to
proselytize. Preaching was the way the people would hear the Gospel and, though the risk was acute,
they preached urgently and often. The Renaissance art of eloquence would be deployed by evangelicals. Thomas Arthur, 'preaching the true Gospel of Christ' in London in 1527, tearfully made this plea:

If I should suffer persecution for preaching of the Gospel of God, yet there is seven thousand more that shall preach . . . therefore, good people, good people  . . . think not you that if these tyrants and
persecutors put a man to death . . . that he is an heretic therefore, but rather a martyr.