The Piety of The Catholic Restoration in England, 1553–1558

Abstract

There was very little in Reginald Pole’s previous record as a scholar, confessor, or ecclesiastical statesman to suggest that he attached great importance to the externals of traditional worship. However, in his task of restoring the Church in England to the Catholic fold, he felt constrained to use whatever methods and materials were available to his hands. Ceremonies, as Miles Huggarde rightly observed, were ‘curious toyes’, not only to the Protestants, but also to those semi-evangelical Reformers of the 1530s whose exact doctrinal’standpoints are so hard to determine. Along with the papal jurisdiction had gone the great pilgrimage shrines, not only St Thomas of Canterbury—that monument to the triumph of the sacerdotium over the regnum—but also Our Lady of Walsingham and a host of others. Down, too, had gone the religious houses, lesser and greater, with their elaborate liturgical practices, and many familiar saints’ days had disappeared from the calendar before the austere simplifications of 1552. Such changes had provoked much opposition and disquiet, but they had left intact die ceremonial core of the old faith, the Mass in all its multitude of forms, and the innumerable little sacramental and liturgical pieties which constituted the faith of ordinary people. The recent researches of Professor Scarisbrick, Dr Haigh, Dr Susan Brigden, and others have reminded us just how lively these pieties were before—and during—the Reformation, even in places heavily infiltrated by the New Learning, such as London. It was at this level that traditional religion seems to have been at its most flourishing; in the small fraternities and guilds attached to parish churches; in the ornamentation and equipment of the churches themselves; and in the provision of gifts and bequests for obits, lights, and charitable doles.