Tudor Brexit: from Ecclesia Anglicana to Anglicanism

Abstract

Studies • volume 106 • number 424 425 Tudor Brexit: from Ecclesia Anglicana to Anglicanism Alec Ryrie All the German Reformation has this year is an anniversary; the English Reformation has gone one better: we have a full-scale reenactment. A piece of massive political performance art. Because, of course, one central feature of the English Reformation, which then resonated across other realms, was a bitterly contested, far-reaching, almost unimaginable but, as it turned out, unstoppable act of unilateral separation from an international network of laws, norms, bureaucracies, frustrations and profound fraternal connections of which England had been an enthusiastic and disproportionately significant member for, in this case, almost a millenium. But even the hardest of Brexits is never a clean break, and even England’s Reformation story can’t be told in isolation. In these brief remarks, I’ll be suggesting that England’s Protestant Brexit was, at least to begin with, much more European than it looks; but that it contained within it the seeds of the much more radical separation that followed. So, first, I think we have to recognise that Henry VIII’s schism could not have happened without the context of the Reformation that was unfolding in Germany. Although the English Reformation looks at first glance like an act of state driven by the English King’s marital problems, it was profoundly linked to the unfolding Lutheran crisis in three ways. First, diplomatic. Taking England into open-ended schism was an insanely disproportionate and risky thing to do under any circumstances, but it was only conceivable because England was not going into schism alone. The Schmalkaldic League was formed in 1531; Denmark was already plainly moving in the same direction; Sweden had gone into schism in 1527. From at least 1528, the English were warning Rome that they might emulate the German schism. Henry VIII repeatedly explored the possibility of an alliance with the Lutherans and, when in 1541 it briefly seemed possible that the Germans might be reconciled with Rome, Henry was ready to submit to papal authority rather than be left out in the cold. However fond he was of Tudor Brexit: from Ecclesia Anglicana to Anglicanism 426 Studies • volume 106 • number 424 his schism, he would not take the risk of maintaining it unilaterally. Like the British government actively pursuing new trade links post-Brexit, he was painfully aware of the dangers of isolation. Second, domestic politics. The schism was intensely politically controversial, and strongly opposed. If Henry was going to push this through, he needed allies. Political opportunists and careerists might support him but that would only get him so far. There weren’t many English evangelicals at this point, and they didn’t agree with Henry about very much, but they did agree about the papacy, and neither they nor Henry could afford to be too picky about their allies. He needed them as much as they needed him. Plainest demonstration of this: the rising churchman of the moment in 1530 and 1531, the man who seemed set to succeed to Canterbury when the elderly Archbishop Warham finally died, was Stephen Gardiner, whom Henry made bishop of Winchester when he was still in his thirties, and who had cut his teeth on the divorce. But as the crisis morphed into serious threats of schism, Gardiner began to show alarming signs of having a conscience. When Warham finally died in 1532, Henry needed not an opportunistic careerist, but a true believer, to replace him: someone genuinely convinced that papal authority was false, who would not go rogue once in office. And so he whisked Thomas Cranmer out of obscurity. Cranmer swiftly did what he’d been appointed to do and annulled the king’s first marriage. One of the many prices Henry paid for this victory was the installation of a serious evangelical reformer as the primate of all England. Third,ideology.Henrywasnoevangelical,butitdoesseemoverwhelmingly likely that the one belief he truly clung to from 1530 onwards – that he himself was divinely appointed head of the Church of England – was derived from or at least crystallised by evangelical writings. He may have reviled William Tyndale, but he also said that Tyndale’s Obedience...