The Legacy of the Reformation

Versions of events

History is edited. Imagine you've just had an argument with your mother and you're telling a friend about it. Do you include the whole story? No, you make a judgement and you edit the details.

Now go back 500 years. The argument is between Henry VIII and Mother Rome. As a historian, you have the same problems, and more. What have the contemporary accounts forgotten, hidden or ignored? Some of the documents may be in Latin, French or Spanish, but Linguaphone won't be much use - this is official language with idioms long since lost. Are you reading a good translation or translating correctly yourself. To make life even more challenging, do you have all the documents? Are they all there? Some you know have been lost in the intervening centuries, but maybe others are lost that you never knew existed.

So before you turn up, history has already been edited, both by design and by accident. But there's still a huge amount of material, so you make priorities, you make judgements: some sources are more valuable than others. It's like reading a whodunnit when the pages aren't numbered, they're out of order, and some are missing. Then you write your thesis, article or book. You have reams of notes to analyse and not enough space for everything. Again you make professional judgements regarding their relative value. You edit.

So when the history we read is the product of a series of value judgements, some of which we know, some of which we don't, is it surprising that those judgements are questioned by others? Maybe they have their own agenda, maybe they have seen documents you have not. Either way, they disagree with your interpretation. No wonder historians disagree when there is so much to disagree on. The history of historical disagreements is so established that it even has its own word - historiography. This is about the historiography of the Reformation.

A new approach

It was a quiet world until the sixties. The conventional view was that Henry wanted to break from Rome and so, after some time figuring out how, he broke. It was decided, enforced, and finished. Mary tried to change it all but didn't have much chance as England was, by that stage, Protestant. This all changed in 1964 with the publication of The English Reformation by A.G. Dickens. He took this familiar story but broke new ground by using local archives - originally those of York - to highlight both the independent contribution of specific reformers and the power of Protestantism to convert people before and against official government policy. The Reformation was sought after and well-received by an England ready and willing to embrace the new religion.

This view prompted the debate that has yet to be fully resolved: how did a Catholic country become Protestant? Using the same methods as Dickens, the 1970s saw the birth of the "revisionist" case. In 1975 Christopher Haigh, studying Tudor Lancashire, found much support for pre-Reformation Catholicism there, as well as considerable resistance to Protestantism that lasted well into Elizabeth's reign.

More controversially, he developed a national analysis from his regional research. There was not one Reformation, but several. All had short-term political causes, not longer term social and economic ones. Despite some murmurs in the wings, the Catholic Church in England was alive and well and the Reformation was forced onto the country from above, by Henry and Parliament. This fitted with the pioneering work of Sir Geoffrey Elton, who studied Thomas Cromwell and his use of Parliament and statute. He had concluded that, in executing the Reformation in the country, Thomas Cromwell modernised government to a quite revolutionary extent.

Personal perspectives

Yet still more argument. Later revisionists like J.J. Scarisbrick and Eamon Duffy confirmed Haigh's view that Catholicism was alive and kicking in 1530: 'on the whole, English men and women did not want the Reformation and most of them were slow to accept it when it came' (The Reformation and the English People, J.J. Scarisbrick). Despite later work on early Protestantism in London, for the period before 1530 the revisionist case has become orthodoxy: beyond that it attracts more dispute. Yet Scarisbrick also challenged Elton's assumptions, claiming that there was nothing new in Cromwell's ideas and methods, and blaming the delay in breaking from Rome on a cautious Henry.

This in turn prompted the question: how much was Henry his own man? How much did he follow advice that appeared to achieve his aims, blind to the consequences? David Starkey's arguments that Elton's perspective was too limited and that the privy chamber, Royal Household and Court all played a central part in Henry's government have been broadly accepted by historians. Debate has consequently focused on what John Guy and Patrick Collinson call New Political History: 'one which is social [and cultural] history with the politics put back in, or an account of political processes which is also social' (Elizabethan Essays by P. Collinson). Who was influential in court and what was their story, their context?

But the revisionists themselves have been attacked. Links have been made between their promotion of the pre-Reformation Catholic Church and the fact that several are themselves practising Catholics. Diarmid MacCulloch has shown more sympathy with the reformers. Likewise, Keith Thomas argued in his fascinating Religion and the Decline of Magic that religion then filled a gap, addressed a need. When the Reformation opened new gaps, magic stepped in until society changed to make magic no longer necessary or desirable. Does his own lack of professed religious faith have any bearing on this purely functional view of religion? To what degree are historical judgements made consciously, or are they a product of personality? Ultimately, a twentieth century historian can never understand fully the workings of a sixteenth century mind or conscience: everyone brings their own perspective and carries their own baggage.

Yet revisionist historians are by no means united. They continue to disagree about the resilience of the Catholic Church to official attack. It has always been difficult to square the circle of such minimal popular protest at the removal of a popular church. However, new work into parish accounts and Tudor wills has uncovered evidence of some sly manoeuvring. Some communities were very successful at concealing material threatened with seizure, some conservative religious beliefs could be hidden by reformist statements in wills, and religious change was often negotiated with local grandees rather than arbitrarily imposed by government.

Public opinion

The revisionist victory regarding the pre-Reformation church has also assisted in pushing more recent research towards the end of the century, to investigate the way in which England became Protestant after the Elizabethan settlement of 1559. Dickens treated the settlement as the end of the Reformation story: others have treated it as a new beginning, and few believe that Protestantism had taken any meaningful hold on the country until at least the 1580s. Haigh has concluded that, even by the end of the century, prolonged clerical efforts had succeeded in creating 'a Protestant nation, but not a nation of Protestants' (English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors by C. Haigh), defined by its enemy, Catholicism.

This has prompted new work both into Foxe's Book of Martyrs and other anti-Catholic tracts, and the means by which England became more Protestant. With continuing confusion over the degree that godly reform was taken up and the amount of generational cleansing required, when did the Reformation end? Enormous regional disparities remain in the 1580s and Patrick Collinson maintains that the process cannot be neatly concluded at the turn of the century. Many argue that popular Protestantism was not evident until the 1620s, or later. With major seventeenth century historians like John Morrill and Conrad Russell taking an increasing interest in the rise of religious radicalism in the sixteenth century, is it realistic or even possible to treat the Civil War as another subject with different experts and new debates?

Clearly some level of consensus exists. There does appear to have been general public support for Catholicism before the break from Rome. The 1559 Settlement is not the end of the story. Henry and Cromwell did not govern independently of court and household. Compromise and cunning all played their part in the delivery of the reformed religion. But much remains.

Arguments continue over the Lollards: were they a serious threat or all mouth and no trousers? Mary also remains a controversial figure and while 'what-if' wondering is very entertaining, such counter-factual questioning can distract from the realities of her reign. MacCulloch's new work on Edward VI will hopefully shed new light on this complicated period, and foreign dimensions are gaining increasing prominence. Tudor history has often been seen through English blinkers but how and how far did events in Ireland, Scotland and Europe influence the English Reformation? In the 35 years since Dickens' book first appeared, so many questions remain. Yet history is about humans, and humans are curious and complicated. Little surprise, then, that the history is as well.

Find out more

Books

The Religion of Protestants: the Church in English Society, 1559-1625 by P. Collinson (1982)

The English Reformation (2nd Edition) by A.G. Dickens (1989)

The Stripping of the Altars - Traditional Religion in England, c.1400 - c.1580 by Eamon Duffy (1992)

English Reformations - Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors by C. Haigh (1993)

The Impact of the English Reformation 1500-1640 ed. Peter Marshall (1997)

Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas (1991)

What is History? by E. H. Carr (Penguin)

New Perspectives on Historical Writing ed. Peter Burke (Polity Press)

In Defence of History by Richard J. Evans (Granta Books, 1997)

About the author

Bruce Robinson is a professional journalist who graduated with a first class degree in History from Cambridge University, specialising in English Social, Political and Economic History from 1300 to 1600.