The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

The duties of friends were analogous to the duties of true counsel: telling the truth and constancy;
virtues which were at once public and private. Constancy in friendship - or more evidently, its loss
and betrayal - was a pervasive theme in the lives and writings of those who served at Henry VIII's
court. At the Christmas festivities at Greenwich in 1524 a captain and fifteen gentlemen offered to
defend Castle Loyal and its attendant ladies against all comers. Among the defenders were the poet
Thomas Wyatt, and with him Francis Bryan, whom Henry called his 'Vicar of Hell', and John Poyntz,
both of whom inspired Wyatt's mordant reflections upon the courtier's life. They shared the Renaissance conception of an ideal courtier who told his prince the truth, but their own experience
was of the mendacity and malignity of life at court. People were reading Castiglione's The Courtier -
in April 1530 Edmund Bonner reminded Thomas Cromwell of his promise to lend him Il Cortegiano
and make him a good Italian - but it was harder to learn its lessons. Flattery - feigned friendship -
was the enemy of both friendship and true counsel, and the besetting sin of courts. 'One unhappy
thing is in the court', wrote Bryan: many who will doff their cap to you 'gladly would see your head
off by the shoulders.' Flattery posed the greatest danger to monarchy, for only honest counsel preserved it from descending towards tyranny. Yet at court plain speaking was rare. Courts always
had a dark reputation for intrigue and danger: the collective noun for courtiers was a 'threat'.
'Your ladyship knoweth,' wrote John Husee to Lady Lisle in July 1537, 'the court is full of pride,
envy, indignation, and mocking, scorning and derision.' Cardinal Pole, Henry's cousin, asked:
'Who will tell the prince his fault? And if one such be found, where is the prince that will hear him?'
The normal way at courts, so Wyatt told his friend Poyntz, was to call the crow a swan, and the lion
a coward; to praise flattery as eloquence and cruelty as justice. Many at Henry's court were masters
of these silken arts. 'I played the jolly courtier, faith,' Thomas Wriothesley told his friend Wyatt, whom
he would betray.
In 1519 Henry declared that 'for our pleasure . . . one we will favour now and another such time as we
shall like'. That fluctuating royal pleasure invited competition. The King boasted that he could tell
his good servants from flatterers, but he deceived himself in this as in much else. With time he grew
restless, insecure, capricious and, captive in the court he had created, he could be played upon by
the men he had advanced and had constantly about him. The contradictory nature of this king, the unstill centre around whom everything at court turned, had consequences for its life. Any king might
be susceptible to persuasion, but Henry became exceptionally so. 'King Henry, according as his counsel was about him, so was he led,' wrote John Foxe, the Church historian and martyrologist,
and he had spoken to those who knew. Men and women had always come to the royal household,
and still did, to further the interests of their family and kin. The court was not a male preserve, save
in its heart, the Privy Chamber, for women of high birth and high ambition came also, seeking more
or less the same things: influence, connection and the advancement of their kin. They, too, were 
drawn into the plots and counter-plots which became characteristic of life there. Family honour and
advancement remained at the centre of the competitiveness at court, but where once no principle
more abstract than 'good governance' had been adduced, times were changing.
To guide the king was the part of a loyal counsellor, but to challenge the royal will, or to seek to
subvert or overrule it, was conspiracy and treason. This was the problem for those in the court who
opposed royal policy; they must work by devious means. In such political circumstances faction
flourished. In England, as in ancient Rome, faction had malign connotations: the enemies of a group
would call it a faction while those within it thought in terms of friendship. What factions sought
was the ear of the king and thereby his favour; to persuade him to one course or another, or to give
patronage to their clients. They waited for an occasion to insinuate themselves or to oust their rivals.
In the personal polity of the court factions, too, were personal. Fleeting, welded together more by
promise of mutual service than by unity of principle, they lasted only so long as friendship and common interest lasted.
Away from the court, in the country, there were suspicions that the King was a prisoner of its tiny
world. In 1536 the vicar of Eastbourne, walking in his churchyard, declared, 'They that rule about
the King make him great banquets and give him sweet wines and make him drunk, and then they bring
him bills and he putteth his sign to them.' In these ways his subjects were pleased to explain changes
they hated. But they were wrong. This was a king who was determined too rule. Princes cannot err,
of course, and Henry's vaunting self-righteousness always led him to blame others for events for
which he was responsible, or might have prevented. He knew what he wanted, if not always how to
get it, and was seldom thwarted. Although the King was often kept in the dark, and often deceived,
the truth could not be kept from him indefinitely, and, once he knew it, he would act. He came to understand well enough that perpetual intrigue surrounded him and that his counsellors and courtiers
maligned their rivals. If, and when, he chose, he could protect the vulnerable and those who had been
sequestered from his presence. In 1543 he rescued Archbishop Cranmer from the best-laid schemes
of Bishop Gardiner, warning Cranmer that, if he were once in prison, his enemies would procure false
witnesses against him. But by that time the nature of court politics had been fundamentally transformed.
In November 1527 ambassadors from France had been entertained at court by a Latin play. The dramatis personae included Religion, the Church and Truth, dressed as religious novices; Heresy,
False Interpretation and Corruption of Scripture appeared as ladies of Bohemia. Players took the
parts of the 'heretic Luther' and his forbidden wife (a former priest, he had married a former nun).
The play's main theme was of the Cardinal rescuing the Pope from captivity, saving the Church from
falling, and defending orthodoxy from heresy. This was almost the last time that so Catholic an interlude could be played to general approbation, for the new religion had invaded the court and had
profoundly changed life there. Now men and women might contend, not for power alone, but for a
cause. Also in November a yeoman usher of the court did penance for heresy. But there was now another at court, more influential by far than any yeoman usher, who had been touched by evangelical
reform, and whose power over the King was unrivalled: Anne Boleyn.
Anne had returned early in 1522 from long years away at the most glittering courts of Europe, a
grand court lady. She arrived at Henry VIII's court to become maid-of-honour to Queen Catherine,
and to break hearts. Anne had charm, style and wit, and a will and savagery which made her a match
for this king. In her music book, sent to please her, there was an illustration of a falcon pecking at
a pomegranate. The falcon was Anne's badge; the pomegranate of Granada, Catherine's. The pomegranate was itself the symbol of a fecundity which had brought Catherine many children, but
no living prince. By Easter 1527 the King was imploring Anne to become his mistress (as her sister
Mary had been), but she consented only to be his queen. In an illuminated book of hours Henry
scrawled, below an image of Christ as Man of Sorrows:

                                                                                I am yours
                                                                              Henry R forever.

And Anne replied:

                                                          By daily proof you shall me find
                                                          To be to you both loving and kind.

With evident promise, she wrote this under a picture of Archangel Gabriel announcing to the Virgin
that she would bear a son. Neither promise was fulfilled, but from 1527 Anne's influence over the
infatuated King seemed secure. Her enemies became the King's enemies; her friends, his friends.
The reign of Henry VIII, like that of Solomon, had begun well. An exquisite portrait miniature drawn
by Holbein in about 1534 depicted Henry as Solomon, receiving th homage of the Queen of Sheba,
representing the Church of England. Above the throne was the text: 'Blessed by the Lord thy God,
who delighted in thee, to set thee upon His throne, to be king elected by the Lord thy God.' Henry delighted to see himself as a godly prince, and to compare himself with Solomon in his justice and wisdom. He forgot that Solomon's reign degenerated, but soon he was reminded, when his own reign did also. Erasmus had written in his The Education of a Christian Prince, 'these expressions of a tyrant ''Such is my will'', ''This is my bidding'' . . . should be far removed from the mind of the prince'.
Wolsey remembered kneeling before the King in his Privy Chamber for hours at a time, trying to
'persuade him from his will and appetite', but rather than abandon any part of it Henry 'will put one
half of his realm in danger'. This was a king with the power and will to advance his private conscience
as a principle to bind not only the bodies but the souls of his subjects, and to set that private conscience against the whole of Christendom.

The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

 He determined to emulate Henry V's victories of a century before; his goal was glory before commercial advantage. At his accession Henry was seventeen -  not even of age. He was, for a while,
governed by his father's councillors, his father's policies. The doves in the Council opposed his plans;
the humanists, who had hoped for a pacific king and universal peace, lamented. No matter. The French King Louis XII's support for a schismatic General Council of the Church against the Pope provided
the cause for war, and by the end of 1511 Henry, horrified by Louis' rebellion against papal authority,
had persuaded his Council that the truce with a perfidious France must be broken, and an invasion
prepared. This was his first venture as papal champion, and one which would look strange thereafter.
Henry wanted freedom from an obstructive Council, he wanted fredom from the infinite boredom of
administration, and he wanted conquest in France. His liberator, and the mastermind of a policy designed to be glorious in peace and war was Thomas Wolsey, royal almoner from 1509, Bishop of
Lincoln, and successively Archbishop of York, Cardinal, Lord Chancellor, and papal legate. In 1513
Wolsey planned Henry's invasion of northern France. The small episcopal city of Thérouanne, and
Tournai, a French enclave within the Burgundian-Habsburg Netherlands, were besieged and occupied
between July and September. According to Thomas Cromwell, speaking in Parliament a decade later,
these were 'ungracious dog-holes'. But any English visitor to the Netherlands was more likely to report
that English towns were dog-holes by comparison. For Henry, the importance of capturing these towns
lay in their status as part of his dominion as 'King of France'. His standing among European princes
was enhanced by this conquest, and by his simultaneous victory in Scotland. In September, the Earl
of Surrey inflicted desperate defeat upon the Scots with whom Louis XII of France had concluded a
league. The King of Scotland, three bishops, eleven earls, fifteen lords and 10,000 men lay dead in
the mud of Flodden Field. When the old guard among his councillors complained that the new king
was too wedded to pleasure and urged that he attend Council meetings more often, Wolsey councelled
the contrary. Here, for him, was the way to exceptional favour and power. Wolsey determined, according to his gentleman-usher George Cavendish, to show himself keenest 'to advance the King's
only will and pleasure without any respect to the case'. From 1514 or so Wolsey came to hold a seemingly unassailable supremacy in the counsels of the King; he was 'the beginning, middle and
end'. He might be challenged, but for fifteen years he was not overthrown. As long as he could find
the means to advance the King's will and pleasure - whatever it may be; Wolsey minded little - the
rest of the Council was almost redundant; its corporate political role usurped. The Council was still
consulted, but only after Wolsey and the King, in a kind of partnership, had determined policy.
Wolsey would first 'move' Henry towards some idea; the King 'dreamed' of it more and more'; and
only then would the Council be informed. Wolsey's influence seemed supreme, and his household,
in its magnificence, looked a rival to the royal court. So completely did he see himself as alter rex,
it was alleged, that he would say: 'The King and I would ye should do thus: the King and I do give
you our hearty thanks.' His pride and splendour were legendary: crosses, pillars and poleaxes, hated
symbols of his authority, were carried before him; earls and lords served him. He held authority only
so long as he held royal favour, and he knew how precarious that was. It was the King's will that
was implemented, not Wolsey's. Otherwise Wolsey, whose own aspiration was for peace in Europe,
would not have had to prosecute war. Wolsey's Anglo-French peace of 1514 was evanescent, for it
died with the French King Louis XII in 1515.
The happy prospect of perpetual peace would have seemed more likely of achievement had Henry
been content to leave England withdrawn from the Continent. But he was not. Henry's determination,
supported by Wolsey, to play a part in Continental power politics and win international renown,
led ineluctably to entanglement in the European war which always threatened, especially once
Francis I had come to the French throne in 1515. Francis was a king, according to Henry, more dangerous to Christendom than the Great Turk (with whom, indeed, Francis, 'the most Christian king', was intermittenly allied). Henry's relations with Francis, whose appetite for glory and whose tastes
he shared (although without the means to emulate them), reained ambivalent through three decades.
Wolsey constantly sought ways to win for England a leading part in European affairs without recourse
to war. In 1516 he schemed with the Swiss and the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian against French
domination in North Italy, thinking, like More Utopia's, that if fighting were necessary to secure
peace, it were better that others did the fighting. In 1518 he seemed to achieve his ambition to be seen
as arbiter of Europe when, in the Treaty of London, he united all Christendom. It was a precarious
peace, and one that England played the leading part in securing. When in 1519 the Habsburg Charles
V added the Holy Roman Empire to his estates in the Netherlands and Spain, the configuration of
power in Europe shifted: the houses of Habsburg and Valois were more nearly balanced, and their
dynastic rivalry grew accordingly. Henry earnestly proclaimed friendship to both these rivals, as
the Treaty of London bound him to do, but would become their enemy if either of them broke the
peace. England's alliance with either power would give it dominance over the other: her neutrality
might guarantee peace. Henry gained unwonted power in Europe, and a new freedom to allege the
ancient claims to France without the likelihood of imminent retaliation. But France could, and did
in 1513 and 1521-4, reinstate her 'auld alliance' with Scotland and thereby threaten England on her
northern border. The ambivalence of English relations with France was never so apparent as at the
Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520 where the two kings, attended by their courts in all their splendour,
met to proclaim their friendship, while all the while the magnificence covered their enmity and the
betrayal of the peace which Henry was already negoiating with the Emperor. By May 1522 England
was at war with France again, and being urged by her imperial ally to invade. Henry's freedom to
intervene on the Continent was constrained by the perpetual prospect of war on his borders at home.
The great lords of Ireland - not only his 'Irish enemies', the Gaelic chiefs like O'Neill and O'Donnell,
but also the Anglo-Irish feudatories, such as the Earl of Desmond - intrigued perpetually with England's foreign enemies and, as sovereign princes, from time to time made alliances with the kings
of France and Scotland and with the Emperor.
Though Wolsey wanted peace, he countenanced war - despite opposition in the Council - rather than
lose England's new-found prominence in European affairs, and, compellingly, because Henry still
hankered after it. In August 1523 a new invasion of France was mounted, English troops were soon
within fifty miles of Paris, and Henry believed, mistakenly, that the French crown was within his
grasp. In February 1525 that inheritance seemed even closer when Francis I was defeated and captured by Imperial forces at Pavia. At that battle too Richard de la Pole, the White Rose of York, who was
the French candidate for the English throne, was killed. Henry urged Charles V to seize the moment
and partition France between them, but - to Henry's disappointment and humiliation - Charles held
back, and at the end of August 1525 England was at peace with France once more. The Cardinal
then helped to create a league against the Emperor, which England sponsored but would not join:
another attempt to engineer peace by force. That peace was traumatically broken when in May 1527
Imperial troops sacked Rome, desecrated the Eternal City and took Christ's Vicar into captivity.
Wolsey ordered processions and fastings for the Pope's release, but the lack of popular response was
telling. The common people 'little mourned for it', wrote Edward Hall, the chronicler. England was
a Catholic country, but not a papalist one, and now the resentment which grew, in London particularly,
against the Cardinal Legate was transferred from servant to master.
Wolsey ruled outside the court, against the court, from his own great household which became its
rival. Around the King his friends and favourites exerted a crucial political influence. To the inner
sanctum, his Privy Chamber, Henry had introduced not the nonentities who had served his father,
but a new generation of young gentlemen. Highborn and high-spirited, they were dashing enough
to amuse him, confident enough to be 'homely and familiar' and to play 'light touches with him'.
They 'forgot themselves' and the awe-inspiring distinctions of rank which should have set them
apart from their monarch. In emulation of Francis I's court, these young gentlemen were elevated
in 1518 to Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, a new rank, with new pretensions. Between Wolsey,
with his uniquely privileged position as pre-eminent councillor, and the King's arrogant young
favourites, a state of hostility - sometimes latent often open - prevailed. Their battles were always
for royal favour, patronage and influence. In 1519 Wolsey succeeded in exiling them to darkest
Calais, for a while; in 1526 he purged the Privy Chamber, for a time. Soon they returned, to greater
favour than before. As men 'near about the King', they were respected, even feared. They were
empowered to represent the King beyond the court. As special messengers embodying the royal
will, they were sent to summon or arrest the King's greatest subjects; as diplomats they went on
missions to 'decipher' the secrets of 'outward princes' at other courts; they were given high military
command against the King's enemies, foreign or domestic; they were entrusted with positions of influence throughout the country as leading members of the Tudor affinity. As royal representatives
and royal retainers, they were part of the new world of Renaissance courts and an older one of bastard-feudal affinities. These men were the nearest friends that a king could have. Educated, well versed
in scripture and the writings of classical antiquity, bound by the chivalric ideal of fidelity, Henry's
courtiers thought about the virtue of friendship. One of the first classical works to be translated into
English and printed was Cicero's Of Friendship (1481).

The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

Next to Whitehall on the river, but a world apart, lay Westminster. Westminster was the old palace of
the medieval kings, built beside the Benedictine Abbey. Here were the law courts of the King's Bench,
Chancery and Common Pleas; here was the Exchequer. The Lords of Parliament met at Westminster
in the White Chamber. This was an official world of laws, precedents, parchment rolls and tallies,
ordered by men robed in black. It was not Westminster which Henry VIII inhabited, but the world
of the royal court, which had its being wherever the king was. The court was the royal household
where the king's servants served him; the scene of public ceremonial and of private life. It was also
the centre of policy and of politics. All power rested in the rested in the will and person of the king
and was quintessentially personal. Access was all. Courtiers, circling and crowding, constantly in
competition, sought always to penetrate the private world of power, to gain access to the king and
influence over him. The most private affairs of a king were also inescapably matters of state.
Letters tell of 'privy' communications in the inner spaces and private recesses of the court, of whispering at windows. Leaning against a window, his hand over his mouth, Thomas Cromwell explained, disingenuously, to Eustace Chapuys, the ambassador for the Holy Roman Emperor in
April 1536 that it was only recently that he had learnt the frailty of human affairs, especially those of
the court, 'of which he had before his eyes several examples that might be called domestic'.
The king never had privacy; he was never alone; he did not sleep alone, nor wake alone, nor dress,
eat, bathe, or attend the garderobe alone. Courtiers were always, endlessly, in attendance. When Sir Francis Bryan addressed Sir Thomas Heneage as 'bedfellow', he meant it literally for, as Gentlemen
of the Privy Chamber, they slept together at the foot of the royal bed.
The succession of each new monarch brought a new world, for the character of a king determined
not only policy but also the style of government, the nature of his court and of those he had about him.
A king so secret and distant as Henry VII had sought secrecy and distance at his court also.
He devised ways to live and rule apart. Traditionally, the later medieval royal household had been
divided into the service side of hall and kitchens, served by ranks of yeomen of the larder and buttery,
pastry chefs and scullery boys, presided over by the Lord Steward; and the king's private apartment
or chamber, under the Lord Chamberlain. But even the division of the chamber into the Great or
Guard Chamber, Presence Chamber and Privy Chamber was not separation enough for Henry VII.
In about 1495 he made an institutional change at his court, an innovation little remarked at the time,
but of great political consequence: he set the Secret or Privy Chamber apart from the others, establishing a frontier for access, and gave it its own tiny staff of grooms and pages. Only they could
enter. From this Secret Chamber Henry VII excluded all those whom he did not regard as essential
for his service; he especially excluded those who regarded themselves as essential: his nobles.
Fearing, and with reason, conspiracy within as well as conspiracy without; wishing to devote himself
uninterruptedly to dispatches, accounts and high policy, and to be free of the insidious counsels and
tiresome ceremonial which attended his greater subjects, he chose, unusually, to have menial servants instead of lordly pages to perform menial service. So he guarded himself and his secrets. Henry VIII
believed that he could keep his own secrets - 'If I thought my cap knew my counsel, I would cast it
into the fire and burn it', he said. But he was often deceived and he deceived himself. Kings were
prisoners of the courts they made, and Henry VIII created a court in his own image, quite different
from his father's. The accession of a new prince is often welcomed with jubilant expectation - especially when the passing of the old prince is a relief - but the joy which greeted the second Henry Tudor in April 1509 was unusual. 'Heaven and earth rejoice . . . Our King is not after gold or gems . . .
but virtue, glory, immortality': such was the promise. Thomas More celebrated the new King's
accession as the ending of a tyranny. When he wrote that his new prince had 'a character which deserves to rule' it was true, or partly true. Henry had a powerful, if unoriginal mind; he was educated
and cultivated; he had courage, charm, even humour. He was well versed in theology and pious.
Qualities of mind and character, his splendid physical presence, and his chivalry seemed to make
him the ideal Christian knight, and would have impressed, and maybe captivated, even if he had not
been king. But he was king, of commanding will. Thomas More warned, even as the reign began,
that unlimited power tended to weaken good minds.
Henry VIII's reign began, as it would end, with a comprehensive deception practised for high political
purposes, as a courtier with a 'smiling countenance' concealed the news of the old King's death.
This courtier was a Groom of the Privy Chamber, and courtiers colluded with some of the Henry VII's
councillors to secure the succession and organize a coup. Two days after his fatherd died the new King
was being served as though he were still Prince of Wales and Henry VII still alive. On the first day
of the new reign, Henry VII's hated councillors Edmund Dudley and Sir Richard Empson were sent
to the Tower, to the delight of the people, who saw them as agents of Henry VII's oppression rather
than as victims of his son's. (They died traitors' deaths at Tower Hill in August 1510). Already the
ruthlessness of the young King seemed apparent, but it was, and always would be, uncertain how far
Henry directed what was done in his name. At one moment he claimed that his dying father had urged
him to marry Catherine of Aragon, and so he must obey; at another, he expressed doubts about the
propriety of marrying his brother Arthur's widow. He did marry her in June 1509, and they were jointly crowned on Midsummer Day.
The young and chivalrous King - whose accession day was, fittingly, the eve of St George, England's
martial patron - sought to be king in the image of the great kings of the English past and to rival foreign princes of far greater kingdoms. At home, he aspired to lead a noble order of chivalry; abroad,
to pursue honour. Reading chivalric romance, especially Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, Henry saw his court as a chivalric fellowship united in a quest for honour and loyal service to their prince.
The mottoes of courtiers vaunted their loyalty: 'Loyaulte me oblige', promised Charles Brandon.
Henry VII, too, had seen the political necessity of magnificence; had followed Edward IV in emulating the chivalric courtly culture of the dukes of Burgundy; had encouraged his courtiers to
joust; had judged their tournaments. But he had been spectator, not participant. Henry VIII was the
glittering champion of the tournament. He ran in the tilt-yard, despite all the dangers, and the courtiers with whom he jousted became his closest companions, recipients of his confidence and favour.
Valour in the tilt-yard became a way to high military position, to wealth and ennoblement, as Charles
Brandon, created Duke of Suffolk, found. Here chivalry and politics met. But chivalric values did
not easily accord with the competitiveness of life at this court.
Chivalry was the training for war. Henry's guiding ambition, as his reign began and still as it ended,
was to assert the ancient claim to dominion of France, to regain a lost kingdom and a lost throne.
War against France was half a chivalric crusade.

The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

                                                                            Imperium
                                                           HENRY VIII AND THE REFORMATION
                                                                        IN ENGLAND, 1509-47

                                                                      
                                                                       COURTS AND KINGS

                                                            The bell tower showed me such a sight
                                                             That in my head sticks day and night;
                                                                There did I learn out of a grate,
                                                                 For all favour, glory or might,
                                                                   That yet circa Regna tonat
                                                                   [It thunders around thrones].
                                                                             Thomas Wyatt, c. 1536

At Christmas 1529 Henry VIII was at Greenwich, designing a royal palace to be built at Whitehall;
a palace vast in scale and novel in conception, a display of his magnificence and an emanation of his
power. That October, two days after the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, Henry had taken Anne Boleyn to
survey York Palace. The seizure of this palace of Wolsey's and the eviction of hundreds of hapless
lesser subjects from a whole Westminster suburb made way for Henry's grand design, which was
built at great cost. At its centre was the Privy Gallery, where the King would live and rule apart in
his privy lodging, his bedchamber and closets. At its west end the Gallery joined the Great Hall, the
Great Chamber, and the Presence Chamber, which was dominated by the throne and its canopy.
Here Henry's subjects were symbolically - but not actually - in the royal presence. The King himself
was guarded and watched behind a series of doors locked by master keys. No one who entered this
painted palace and passed through two great courtyards and three outer chambers on to the Privy
Gallery could doubt the power of this king. On the walls of the chambers hung splendid tapestries,
including a series acquired in 1528 of the Story of David, the godly king of Zion, with whom this
king of England so strongly identified. In the Privy Chamber, the most intimate inner sanctum of
royal rule, Hans Holbein would in 1537 paint a great mural in which Henry VIII dominated the foreground, with his father behind. This was a manifesto in art of the power of the Tudor kings.
Intended to awe, it did. Yet very few were allowed into the royal presence, the source of all 'favour,
glory or might'.

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?

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.

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.

The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

Lollardy was first inspired by the ideas and ideals of John Wyclif at the end of the fourteenth century,
but the movement was the creation of Wyclif's early disciples as much as of Wyclif himself. Those ideas had been transmuted in the dissemination of them: Wyclif's more subtle teachings upon the
theology of the Eucharist were simplified as they were promulgated beyond the Oxford Schools to
the wider community, and his more philosophical ideas upon predestination and dominion were gradually diluted. Wyclif's argument that no one - priest or layman, king or peasant - whilst in a state
of mortal sin had true dominion over anything, either inanimate object or animate nature, had radical
implications: the clergy, if not in a state of grace, could lawfully be deprived of their endowments.
Wyclif had looked to the Crown and nobility to reform the Church, but the spectacular ambition
and failure of the Lollard armies under Sir John Oldcastle in 1414 had cost them any chance of support from the political orders or of conciliation with Church or Crown. Throughout the fifteenth
century, the 'known men and women' had sustained their faith in secret, guarding their treasured manuscript copies of the Bible in John Purvey's translation and of Wycliffe texts, but they were
leaderless, and without theological guidance to ensure spiritual orthodoxy and regeneration. By the
mid fifteenth century the Church was pleased to believe that the heresy had almost disappeared.
But it had not. There were sufficient signs of Lollardy's revival by the early sixteenth century for
the prelates to begin to hunt for it again, and to find it. They discovered remarkable continuities in
the Lollard communities and their beliefs.
Lollardy was a faith practised in households, not in churches. Lollards believed that theirs was the
true Church, they God's 'children of salvation', and the Catholic Church was the Church of Antichrist,
the Devil's Church. Usually, they conformed superficially within their communities, often attending
their parish churches in order to evade suspicion. Salisbury heretics admitted in 1499 that they
received the holy sacrament, not because of their belief in it, but because of 'dread of the people'
and of the danger if they did not do 'as other Christian people did'. Yet they saw themselves as set
apart from 'other Christians'. Was it true, asked Church officials in 1521, who were in the dark about
this closed world, that Lollards only married other Lollards? Sometimes it was. Bound as well by
ties of kinship and friendship as by their common faith, the Lollards sustained each other, a fraternity
of an heretical kind. Lollard masters took Lollard apprentices and servants; Lollard children were
brought up in the faith; Lollard widows remarried other Lollards. Lollard families protected the
missionaries who travelled between the communities, and sheltered fugitives from the authorities.
Radical sectaries of the later middle ages were usually of artisan status, and so most Lollards were.
In 1523 a disgruntled curate complained, 'These weavers and millers be naughty fellows and heretics
many of you'. Yet not all were artisans, nor were they poor. The discovery of Lollards in higher ranks
of society made the revival of the heresy the more alarming. In 1514 the Bishop of London's summoner claimed that he could take his master to heretics in London who were each worth a
thousand pounds. Fellowship in the faith might transcend the usual barriers between rich and poor.
Robert Benet, an illiterate Lollard water-carrier, found shelter during the battle at Blackheath in
1497 at the house of John Barret, a goldsmith of Cheapside and Merchant of the Staple at Calais,
one of the richest men in the City. In the Lollard enclave in the Childrens 'known men' held respected
positions within their communities. When the bishops began to look for them once more, the Lollards still congregated where they had always been before: in London, Essex, Kent, Coventry, Bristol,
in the Chilterns, and through the Thames Valley from Newbury in Berkshire to Burford in the Cotswolds. Lollards met together in order to read the scriptures. The Gospels and Epistles of the New Testament, in English, were their inspiration and the fount of their faith. It was the Lollard preoccupation with vernacular scripture which had outlawed the English Bible, not only to them,
but to all others, since Archbishop Arundel's Constitutions of 1409. Reading the Bible aloud and evagelizing the Christian message was the purpose of any Lollard assembly, and if some, perhaps most, were illiterate, it hardly mattered, for those who could not read could listen. This was a society
used to committing words to memory. Lollards became deeply versed in the texts. Thirteen-year-old
Elizabeth Blake, the daughter of a Lollard living by St Anthony's school in London, knew by heart
and could recite the Epistles and Gospels. Wyclif's belief in the priesthood of all believers was made
reality as they expounded the Word without priests to enlighten them.
Knowledge of scripture was the rule of faith. Their texts sustained their movement. Robert Benet,
the poor water-carrier, had already been detected for his heresy in 1496, but in 1504 he sold his looms
and shears in order to by a copy of the Four Evangelists. He could not read it, but kept it safe in his
belts, and Thomas Capon, the stationer who sold it to him, taught him its truths. Joan Austy brought
a copy of Wyclif's Wicket with her when she remarried, as a Lollard dowry. Her first husband had
entrusted this treasure to her on his deathbed. The texts were passed around, and read secretly,
by night. Possessing them was dangerous. The disciples of Thomas Denys, a Lollard teacher, were
forced to watch his burning in 1513, and to throw their spiritual heirs, the puritans, to hear the Word
of the God was a kind of sacrament. John Whitehorn, rector of Letcombe Basset, who was burnt at
Abingdon in 1508 for his heretical ministry, taught that 'whosoever receive devoutly God's Word, he
receiveth the very body of Christ'. Asking, did not St John's Gospel begin: 'The word is God, and
God is the Word'? he echoed Wyclif's identification of Christ with scripture. John Pykas, a Colchester
baker, converted by his Lollard mother, avowed in 1527 that 'God is in the Word and the Word is
God'. A theological chasm opened between committed Lollards and their Catholic neighbours.
Lollards thought Catholic devotion was superstition; Catholic veneration, idolatry. What Catholics
held holiest, they denied, even derided. For their views on the Mass, above all, Lollards were persecuted, for here many of them were guilty of the gravest heresy of all: they doubted the miracle
of transubstantiation. Though Wyclif himself had believed in the Real Presence in the Eucharist,
many of his later followers, ignoring or misunderstanding his subleties, rejected the central mystery.
They asked how Christ, one and indivisible, could be at once on earth with mankind and in heaven
with His Father; how Our Lord's body could be made by corrupt priests. They maintained that the
Eucharist was a memorial, commemorative event; that the bread and wine were only figures of
Christ; that priests could not make their Maker.

The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

                                                                      Ways to Reform
                                                                 The Challenge To The Church

Anyone who wilfully denied cardinal doctrines of the Catholic faith, and presisted in error, might be
burnt at the stake as a heretic. This was the punishment for society's worst enemy. People bringing
faggots to the heretic's fire were promised forty days of pardon from the otherworldly fires of purgatory. The burnings were terrible, but they were very rare: so they were meant to be, and had
been, at least during the century since the penalty of burning for heresy had been instituted in 1401,
and after heretics and rebels in Sir John Oldcastle's abortive rising of 1414 had attempted no less
than the dispossession of the Church and the capture of the King. As the darkest sins, heresy threatened to call down the vengeance of God not only on heretics but also upon the society which
harboured them. Long before, in the the reign the of King John, when England had fallen under the
papal interdict, it was said that the corn had failed and neither grass nor fruit would grow. If England
were ever cut off from Catholic Christendom again because of the will of a king, or if heretics became
too many to be cast out, natural disorder would return. In 1532 Sie Thomas More thought that that
time had come, and prophesied that God would withdraw His grace and let all run to ruin.

There were heretics within the community when Henry VII's reign began, but they were few and,
for the most part, hidden. The history of heresy is often inseparable from the history of persecution.
Heretical enclaves were discovered only when the authorities sought and found them; the nature of
their dissent revealed only in the light of the questions which the persecutors asked. Only the Church,
which had been disobeyed, could define what was heresy, judge and condemn it. The heretics who
were discovered were usually those who scandalized their neighbours and offended against the ethics
of the society in which they lived; those who held their heresies in private and lived obscure were
likely to remain safe, unknown to the persecutors and to posterity. No single and adamantine code
of heretical belief existed in England at the end of the middle ages. There were individual dissidents,
with beliefs so deviant that they alone held them. There were also distinct heretical communities of
men and women with their own creed, tradition, martyrs and code of behaviour; a sect which recognized itself as marked by special providences. To their enemies they were the Lollards; to
themselves, the 'privy' or 'known' men and women; known, that is, to themselves, but, they hoped,
not to others, for they kept their faith in secret, hiding from persecution.

The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

In England, the Observant Fransiscans revitalized the religious life of their order by reinstating the
Rule from which it had fallen. There were six houses for Observants in the early sixteenth century.
In Ireland, the spirit of reform touched three of the four mendicant orders and the friars' fervour
and moral authority gave them a powerful influence among the laity. True, the reform movement in
Irish religious orders was partly an assertion of their freedom from being controlled from the English
province, and a protest of Gaelic communities against Anglo-Irish ownership, but the spiritual inspiration was plain. That many of the religious orders were exempt from the hierarchial jurisdiction
of the Church, and directly under papal authority, came to threaten them.

The Lay Folks' Mass Book urged each attender at Mass to pray:

My heart to be in peace and rest,
And ready to love all manner of men:
My sib men namely, then
Neighbours, servants and subjects,
Friends and foes and foryectes [outcasts].

Loving enemies and outcasts was hardest of all. All the communities of household, religious fraternity,
craft fellowship, neighbourhood and parish still left some, perhaps many, excluded. Brotherhood,
it has been well said, implies otherhood. Personal disasters and social stresses left many stranded and
outcast. For some, the rejection was of choice. Christendom might be spurned not only by infidels,
but by those who doubted the faith of their 'even christen' and thought their own faith invalidated
theirs. These were the heretics. The poor are with us always, but at some times more evidently than
at others. The Tudor century saw a terrible growth of impoverishment. A huge population rise from
the early century; agricultural transformations; and the operation of the land market in favour of
the aggrandizing, left many homeless, landless, destitute. Even in what passed for good times there
was never enough work to go around; what work there was was seasonal and increasingly badly paid,
and the poor were often driven on to the road to look for it. In bad times those who lived on the edge
of subsistence were especially vulnerable. Failing harvests drove up prices beyond the ability of the
poor to buy, and destitution followed. At times the desperation of the poor cried out. At a dole of
bread in Southwark in 1533 there was such a press of people that four men, two women and a boy
were crushed to death. Some in their terrible poverty abandoned their children in the doorways of
the rich. In the 1550s Londoners remembered foundlings in their wills, and sometimes bequeathed
them in turn: 'My little child William, whom I keep of alms, I give as freely as he was given me.'
Time was when the poor had been seen as somehow blessed, as Christ's own image. But when the
poor became so many that they confronted the rich on every street corner, covered with sores and
begging with menaces, it became harder to see them as beatified. The destitute in towns, especially
in London, did not keep a decent distance in ghettoes and out-parishes: rich and poor lived side by
side, the rich in great houses on main thoroughfares, the poor in side alleys and lanes behind.
A harsher doctrine began to prevail towards charity and the poor, and some recalled St Paul's warning
to the Thessalonians: 'If there were any that would not work, that the same should not eat.'
There was increasing discrimination, in law and popular attitude, between the 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor, the 'able-bodied' and the 'impotent'; between those who wished to work but
could not, and those who could work but would not. It was a long time before the authorities acknowledged that there was insufficient work to go around. The 'sturdy [and] mighty vagabond'
was increasingly seen as a threat to the commonwealth rather than part of it.
A society which sought stability and order, which believed that every man must have a master, found
a danger in the increasing number of utterly transient, rootless human flotsam; a danger which
lay in their mutability and masterless. Parliament had first made masterlessness a crime in the fourteenth century, and by the sixteenth century the vagrant poor could be arrested not because of
any action, not because they had committed any crime, but simply for being masterless and adrift
from their family, members of no settled household, nor likely to be. Very many of the vagrant poor
were young, not only because most of the population was young, but because this time of life was
most insecure. Orphans and abandoned children were often left to wander the streets, unmarried
servants who became pregnant (often enough by their masters) were cast out of the household, and
passed from one parish to the next which did not wish to shelter them. Derelicts gave their last
trouble to society by dying in streets. The authorities feared that there were 'fraternities' of vagabonds,
conspiring to cause trouble. No so; a few vagrants might band together for safety and mutual support,
but companies of travellers were rare.
The worst desolation was not poverty or the recourses it led to - begging, prostitution, and crime -
but the mental desolation of despair. Suicide was a kind of murder, a felony in criminal law and a
desperate sin in the eyes of the Church. Suicides were tried posthumously by a coroner's jury and,
if convicted of self-murder their goods were forfeit and they were denied Christian burial, instead
being buried with macabre and profane ceremonies. For these reasons, evidence of suicide must
often have been covered up. Yet in May 1532 there were fourteen suicides in London, by hanging
or drowning, at the time that a traumatic assault on the liberties of the Church caused Thomas More
to resign his office. Thomas More thought often upon suicide, and wrote in one of his last works
of the 'very special holy man' tempted by the Devil to imagine that it was God's will that he should
destroy himself, and thereby go straight to heaven. But suicide was the ultimate act of religious
defiance, a sin for which there could be no penitence, for the sinner would be dead. Those who committed terrible sins and were impertinent were excommunicated, cast out from the Church and
the communion of the faithful. 'First we accurse all them that break the peace of Holy Church';
so went the curse of major excommunication pronounced quarterly by the parish priest. People who were cursed were denied sacramental grace, and the solemnity of the anathema was marked by the ringing of the bells and the extinction of candles. In 1535 a curse was pronounced against Thomas Fitzgerald and his adherents for a terrible sin: the murder of John Alen, Archbishop of Dublin. It called on God to strike them with fire and sulphur, hunger, thirst, leprosy, madness.

As ye see candles lit and the light quenched, so be the said cursed murderers . . . excluded and separated from the light of heaven, the fellowship of angels, and all Christian people, and shall be sent to the low darkness of fiends and damned creatures, among whom everlasting pains doth endure.

And yet, divine forgiveness and salvation at last awaited even the worst sinners, if penitent. The curse
ended with the hope that 'Jesu Christ, of His infinite mercy, may call them to the grace of repentance.'

The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

The great household was also a religious community which must work for its own salvation and that
of its lord. The domestic chapels of great nobles were served by chaplains, morrow mass priests,
family confessors and riding priests (who rode with their lord on his journeys). The daily office, Mass
and prayers for the dead marked the household's day; they were a way of inducing order in his check
roll of 1519 that all household members attend Mass daily, because 'no good governance nor politic
rule may be had without service to God as well'. The nobility could use religious festivals and
processions to vaunt the extent of their following as well as their piety. When Buckingham visited
the tomb of Edward, son of Henry VI, in 1508 he was demonstrating to a doubtful Henry VII his
loyalty to the House of Lancaster. Reverence was owed to the 'worship' of a great family itself; to
its chivalric past and the immortality that virtuous deeds had conferred on the family arms. The family
badge - the Percy crescent or the Stafford swan - was a badge of virtue. It drew loyalty and must be
 defended, even if that loyalty was often expressed among the nobles' community of honour by acts
of violence. Positions of honour around great lords were taken by the sons of the nobility and gentry
who were sent, as young as seven, to another lord's household to be his pages of honour, his 'henchmen'. Since personal service was offered by social equals, a duke's son would be page to a
prince. Household officials, chaplains and schoolmasters may have been more important in bringing
up a nobleman than his own family. In great households boys learnt not only what it was to be lordly
and to 'keep countenance', but also the deference and duty to superiors upon which Tudor society
was founded. They learnt what it was to be gentleman; to possess not only wealth (though that was
important) but chivalry, courtliness, generosity and martial honour. The chivalric code, the highest
secular ideal, was instilled from an early age to discipline the knightly class by its emphasis on service, honour and loyalty. Chivalry was taught in theory through heraldry, history and romance,
and in practice through swordplay, riding, jousting and hunting. The nobility had an obligation to
lead in war. Fighting was not a distance, but hand-to-hand, usually on horseback; mortally dangerous
if the noble was skilled, lethal if not. In England, the custom of sending children away to be trained
in another lord's household was prevalent in the early sixteenth century, but dying out by the end.
In Ireland, the custom of fostering, where lords committed the upbringing of their young children
to others, endured and created intense and lasting loyalties. The death of two of his foster brothers
in 1597 preyed on the mind of the Earl of Kildare. Fostering had political consequences. In 1540 complaints reached the Privy Council that because of fostering 'all our secrets are discovered to the
Irishmen', and at the end of the century fostering between the Anglo-Irish and Gaelic-Irish was seen
as the 'bud of our bane', the cause of the English destruction. In humbler households, too, children
came to serve and to be trained. Leaving their family home, seldom to return to it, most children
found service in another household and spent their adolescense with a family which was not their
own. Servants were employed in agriculture, in trade crafts, and as domestic helpers, a group distinct
from wage labourers, who lived in their own homes. They comprised by far the largest occupational
group; perhaps one-third to half of all hired labour in agriculture. Servants, away from their family,
exchanged duties to parents for duties to masters and mistresses, and learnt that the world was organized by authority; that masters, like fathers, disciplined them, and taught deference along with a
craft. As in the great household, the servant owed duty and obedience; the master care and protection.
Servants lived as part of the family, eating and sleeping with them. Although some masters often bequeathed the responsibility of looking after widows and children to their servants, and servants might choose to stay on after the master's death. Close ties were formed not only between master and
servant but also among those in service together, as servants shared their work, rooms, beds and lives.
Service brought stability, yet youthful servants moved on, and since the contract of service was only
for a year, could be casual members of the household and community. Although the household was
the basic unit of society, it was mutable. The relationship between an apprentice and his master was
closer, more enduring. An apprentice was formally bound by oath and indenture to his master for a
term of ten years; to learn a trade, to live within his household, and to obey him. The master was bound also; to teach and to discipline his charge at this unruly stage of life. A master had a duty to chastise a disobedient apprentice, and a boy who wished to protest against ill-treatment had to prove
that he had been beaten more constantly than was considered reasonable. Apprentices were sent into
the adult world but were still utterly dependent; with prospect of wealth but with none yet.
About 1,250 youths arrived in London every year from all over England in the mid-century, and found a home and initiation into the ways of the great and growing metropolis. In Tudor London two-thirds
of all men had served as apprentices from the age of eighteen or so, and usually for terms of seven years. Apprentices formed a large element in London society; a disruptive element if ever they banded together, so curfews for apprentices were always ordered at times of political unrest. Yet they lived
under close supervision - for a master governed only one or two apprentices - and learnt what it was
to be a master of a trade and a household, a member of a company, and a citizen.
By apprenticeship a youth was initiated into the 'secrets' of a mystery or trade and promised mastership and membership of his craft fellowship in time. The craft guilds - a hierarchy of apprentices, journeymen (wage labourers), householders (or master craftsmen), liverymen and assistants - were enduring institutions in late medieval and early modern towns. Through their craft
fellowship a master and mistress and their household found a place in their town. The guilds, whose powers stemmed from the solidarity of their members, claimed the right to regulate the establishment
of businesses in the crafts and trades which they controlled, and to settle disputes among members
who were, after all, economic competitors. Membership of a guild was, in most towns, the only way
to citizenship, the possession of the prized 'freedom' which alone allowed full participation in economic, social and political life. In many towns only a citizen enjoyed urban privileges, including
the essential right to engage independently in economic activity, to set up shop as a master craftsmen
or retailer. In early sixteenth-century Coventry four of every five male householders were free of the
city; only they could take part in ceremonial processions or in the Corpus Christi plays. In Norwich
and York about half of the male population were citizens; in London three-quarters. The guilds were
essential in the ordering and defending of a town. It was through the guilds that marching watches
were arrayed at midsummer, when men paraded through the streets in military equipment; and through
the guilds that a town showed itself in ceremonial array - as at the entry of a monarch.
The fellowship in the craft was real. Spiritual brotherhood had been the first reason for the existence of the guilds, and in the sixteenth century the first reason still mattered. Guild members processed
and worshipped together on the day of their patronal feast and maintained lights in churches.
They attended the marriages and funerals of their fellows and the 'drinkings' afterwards: such was the action of a friend, the mark of respect of a colleague, but also sworn duty of a company member.
The duty extended to dead members, who anniversary masses were attended by their fellows. Charity
was given to members who were ill and old. Writing his will, a citizen of any town would describe himself first as citizen, then name his craft and lastly his parish. These were the fellowships which justified and sustained him.

Their families dispersed, their own kin distant and incidental, most people looked to other fellowships,
other communities, to assume the traditional obligations of kinship. From their neighbours, whom
they chose as 'trusty friends' and 'gossips' (godsibb), they might find the support and loyalty which kin had once provided in some lost world. Neighbours were chosen as godparents, attended childbirths,
baptisms, weddings, sickbeds and deathbeds; celebrated or commiserated at the rites of passage;
were witnesses to wills, and trusted to look after widows and orphans. They lent each other implements and money, and acted as guarantors and sworn witnesses before the courts. In the 'play called Corpus Christi', at the trial of Mary and Joseph the summoner calls Mary's neighbours to appear: Malkyn Milkduck, Lucy Liar, Fair Jane, Robin Red, Lettice Littletrust - the familiar world
of late medieval neighbourhood. True, it was neighbours who usually brought the charges in the first
place, for neighbourly relations often descended into quarrels and recriminations. Neighbours who were offended might - like the Wicked Fairy at the christening - curse. It was for violation of the duties owed by neighbours and in retaliation for some breach of charity that alleged witches performed acts of maleficence, the darkest example of malign neighbourly relations.
Even in the supposed anonymity of a great neighbourly obligations were taken seriously. In London
neighbourhoods loyalties could trascend the divisions between rich and poor and sustain friendships
between families who otherwise moved in different social spheres. People remembered poor neighbours in their own parishes in their wills; paupers whom they knew by name, like 'John with the sore arm'. John Stow, London's chronicler, recalled the great summer festivals of the 1530s, of his
youth, when wealthy citizens set out tables with food and drink and invited their neighbours to 'be merry with them in great familiarity'. Bonfires were lit; 'bon fires', according to Stow, because of the
'good amity amongst neighbours' they engendered. But Stow remembered this social unity half a
century later with the nostalgia of one who thought it lost and hardly to be recovered.
Neighbourliness and fellowship were Christian ideals; the amity in Christ created by one faith and
communion. In the course of the sixteenth century the fellowship of the neighbourhood was subject to
strains which eroded concord. Population increase and subsequent impoverishment undermined
the obligations of the rich to the poor, whom they were less and less likely to know personally.
Religious divisions fractured the community of faith. Yet the bonds of religious and social obligation
were strong and often held people together during this century when divergences in faith and economic exigencies threatened to drive them apart. That 'perfect love and charity' necessary before
anyone could receive the sacrament was not forgotten, however hard that amity was to achieve; neighbours might insist upon it, and priests exclude the rancorous and unforgiving until they were
reconciled with the community. That community was not only the neighbourhood, but also, more
formally, the parish. England's parishes, more than 8,000 of them, had been formed by 1300, as a
result of people's wish to worship together in small congregations close to their priest. This wish
remained in the early sixteenth century, and people worshipped in their parishes by custom, by desire
and by ecclesiastical sanction. Everyone was necessarily a member of a parish, with attendant duties
to attend and maintain the church and to support the priest; and rights to spiritual consolation through
the sacraments. Parishioners not only worshipped but celebrated together. At St Margaret Pattens in
London there was a bowl used, not for sacred, but for festive occasions: it was inscribed on the outside, 'Of God's hand blessed be he that taketh this cup and drinketh to me,' and on the inside,
'God that sitteth in Trinity, send us peace and unity.' Where there were disputes within a parish they
were put into arbritation, or 'daying'. Churchwardens' accounts everwhere tell of the determination of
parishioners to beautify their churches; of the church ales, plays and shooting matches organized to
finance the continuing rebuilding and adornment. This was a great period of church building; perhaps
a sign of devotional vitality, but not necessarily. In Renaissance Rome a high point of building
corresponded with a time of spiritual inanition.
In an ideal world mutual concern and charity among fellow parishioners, living and dying, would have been guaranteed. But the world was not ideal, and the community of the parishh was formal, compulsory, its boundaries fixed - no longer the voluntary association of fellow Christians it had been
at its origin. Seeking closer fellowship, people chose to join religious guilds both withint and beyond
their parishes. Brothers and sisters in these lay confraternaties swore oaths to support their living fellows through friendship and charity, and their dead members through their prayers. Brothers and sisters could be incorporated after death in the guilds' immemorial membership. Sisters in the guilds had - as almost nowhere else - more or less the same status as brothers. Religious guilds existed in
their thousands in England, and were still being founded, a vital expression of late medieval religious
life. In the early sixteenth century Londoners remembered over eighty guilds in half the parishes of
the City in their wills. In Dublin at the same period there were at least eleven religious fraternaties
flourishing in the City and the county. The guild dedicated to St Anne in the parish of St Audoen,
with its own chapel and chaplains, who celebrated daily at St Anne's altar, and six singing-men, was
the most important. This guild survived into the seventeenth century, a focus of intense Catholic
devotion. In Gaelic Ireland, where the bonds of kinship were so strong, there were no religious guilds,
no invented brotherhood. What marked the confraternities as religious? In which ways were the lay
brotherhoods spiritual? All the guilds maintained lights before the image of their patron saint upon
their own altars; their members attended mass on their patronal festivals; some supported their own
priest. The Christian imperatives of preventing sin and fostering virtue were paramount, and the guilds
insisted upon moral probity in commercial relations between the brethren. In their rules the first avowed purpose was to live in charity; in some guilds this ideal was symbolized by the kiss of peace.
Their duty was also to offer charity of another kind: the seven works of mercy towards their fellows,
especially burial of the dead. Some sought fraternity in a religious life more intense by far. The monastic way of life, to which all religious orders were in some way assimilated, had been in existence for almost a millennium by the early sixteenth century. Men and women still chose to live
as brothers and sisters in communities of witness, dedicated to God's service. At his profession, a
monk to vows of lifelong poverty, chastity and obedience to his abbot and his Rule. Regular canons
lived by a Rule like monks, but one step less divorced from the rest of the world. The mendicant
orders of friars - so called because they were originally meant to live by begging - followed Christ
in their preaching and apostolic poverty. The formal commitment of the religious orders to a shared
and regulated life forever separated them from both the laity and the secular clergy (priests). They were, above all, celebrants of divine service, and their penances and prayers might inspire the laity living beyond their walls. Their houses also offered alms to the poor and sheltered pilgrims and
travellers. In England in 1500 there were perhaps 10,000 monks and 2,000 nuns, living in 900 religious communities. In Ireland, a generation later, there were about 140 monastic foundations
and 200 mendicant communities. Most of these communities had fallen far from the pursuit of Christian perfection which was the ideal of their founders. Few truly religious houses remained.
Spiritual corporations had, over the centuries, become economic corporations. The religious houses were an integral part of society not only - or even - because of their penances and prayers, but because of their immense power as landlords. The religious had come to hold more wealth than they could easily control without prejudicing their spiritual life, and a pervasive secularism had entered the cloisters. In Ireland, the hereditary principle often prevailed in the succession to abbacies, in violation of the vow of chastity. The extravagant projects of building and adornment in Irish Cistercian houses cast some doubt upon their austere following of a Rule which insisted upon simplicity, though they
suggest vitality of a kind. Great and flaunted wealth attracted envy and detraction. In England, their
critics accused the 'monkery' of degeneracy, even of depravity, and suspected that their every vow
was travistied and broken. When the testing time came it was a matter of record that many of the
religious thought too much of the flesh they should have subdued; that their spiritual aspirations
were lost to the claims of the world. For the most part, if they did no good, they at least did little
harm, though that was shame enough. Some in the religious houses did seek Christ and provided
an inspiring example to the very end. In the Charterhouses, the monks followed their Rule of cold
austerity, silence, prayer. The Bridgettine foundation at Syon Abbey, established at Isleworth on the
Thames in 1415, manifested a spirit of renewal.