'[Who] Hath Covered the Naked with a Garment': The Homespun Origins of the English Reformation

Abstract

Faced with overwhelming evidence that Protestantism was embraced in England first in ports and cloth-making towns, scholars influenced by A. G. Dickens have adopted a logistical view of the English Reformation, hypothesizing that interior sections of England did not convert until the Elizabethan period because they lacked access to Protestant ideas imported from the Continent. This hypothesis does not explain, however, why Roman Catholicism remained a problem in the hinterland until well after 1592. A better theory is that Englishmen and women in cloth-making towns and ports understood that the papally sanctioned Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 prohibited Englishmen from exploiting potentially lucrative cloth-markets in the New World and the northern coasts of Asia and therefore they embraced Protestant defiance of papal authority because it was in their financial best interest to do so. As early as Amerigo Vespucci and John Verazzano, European travellers reported that the natives of the New World needed manufactured clothing, while English cloth -merchants from the time of Henry. VIII through the time of Elizabeth advertised how profitable it might be to trade cloth to the Tartar shores. Scholarly opinion to the contrary, the Protestant worldview could claim no greater accuracy than the Roman Catholic one. Indeed, letters and maps describing the existence of the Northwest Passage were propaganda pieces designed not simply to encourage New World exploration but to nurture anti-papal sentiment at home.