While European nations are rejecting Catholicism far and wide on the grounds of theological disagreements, England finds fault with the mother church for political reasons. British succession to the throne draws the king of England into conflict with the papacy, forcing Henry VIII to split with the dominant religion and stand at the head of yet another branch of it. But opposition from Puritans further shapes the denomination.

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Shalom, and welcome to our history podcast. This is a production of Kingdom Preppers.org. I’m your host, Kingdom Prepper, and you’re listening to: Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. We continue with our history.

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Part 28: The Church of England

While Lutheranism was conceived in a monastery by a disillusioned Catholic monk, Anabaptist notions at a prayer meeting, and Calvinism at the desk of a traveling scholar, the Church of England was born largely out of political affairs. The crux of the problem was that of royal succession to the throne. Well, that was the first English Reformation at any rate, the constitutional one under Henry VIII, who would simply reject the authority of Rome and leave the nation’s doctrines virtually unchanged. Of course, this move became the standard and course of many nations. The second, theological reformation of England would come with the Puritans nearly a century later.

Unlike in other Protestant lands of the day, which had rejected Catholicism on the grounds of theology, England was not presently concerned with such things. The church of Rome and its repressive power over kings was at issue. The sixteenth-century state of affairs saw Scotland and France in close alliance, while England was an ally of Spain. Great Britain itself though existed as two British kingdoms at the time, divided between the Stuart kingdom in Scotland and England’s house of Tudor. Strong bloodlines ran between the two houses, but the intent was to unite the crowns at some point, though that would come during the reign of King James. During the sixteenth century, however, the British kingdoms were bitter enemies that were often at war. We discussed the reformation in Scotland at the end of the previous podcast, now we turn to the English reformation, which followed an entirely different course.

“Catherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, came to England in 1501, aged sixteen, and married, on November 14, Arthur, aged fifteen, oldest son of Henry VII.”

Writes Will Durant in his book The Reformation.

“Arthur died on April 2, 1502. It was generally assumed that the marriage had been consummated; the Spanish ambassador dutifully sent ‘proofs’ thereof to Ferdinand; and Arthur’s title, Prince of Wales, was not officially transferred to his younger brother Henry till two months after Arthur’s death. But Catherine denied the consummation. She had brought with her a dowry of 200,000 ducats (around $5,000,000). Loath to let Catherine go back to Spain with these ducats, and anxious to renew a marital alliance with the powerful Ferdinand, Henry VII proposed that Catherine should marry Prince Henry, though she was the lad’s elder by six years.”

Then came the gross misinterpretation of Scripture by Catholic officials.

“A Biblical passage (Lev. 20:21) forbade such a marriage: ‘If a man shall take his brother’s wife it is an unclean thing… they shall be childless.’ ”

This of course refers to the case of representatives on all fronts, both brothers and the wife in question, being alive at the same time. A brother was in fact lawfully allowed to marry a deceased brother’s widow and raise up seed unto him, prolonging his name. The Catholics mistakenly thought that the first law was contradicted by this one:

“ ‘If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no child... her husband’s brother… shall take her to him to wife’ (Deut. 25:5).”

Needless to say, this was all Israelite business anyway and had nothing to do with English kings or Catholic authorities. Regardless…

“Archbishop Warham condemned the proposed union; Bishop Fox of Winchester defended it if a papal dispensation could be obtained from the impediment of affinity. Henry VII applied for the dispensation; Pope Julius II granted it in 1503. Some canonists questioned, some affirmed, the papal power to dispense from a Biblical precept, and Julius himself had some doubts. The betrothal—in effect a legal marriage—was made formal in 1503, but as the bridegroom was still only twelve, cohabitation was postponed. In 1505 Prince Henry asked to have the marriage annulled as having been forced upon him by his father, but he was prevailed upon to confirm the union as in the interest of England; and in 1509, six weeks after his accession, the marriage was publicly celebrated.”

Seven months after this, Catherine would bear a child, which resulted in stillbirth. In another year, Henry rejoiced at the birth of a son, a promising male heir to the Tudor throne, but in a few short weeks the child died. Two more sons would suffer the same fate in 1513 and 1514, which urged Henry to consider annulling his marriage to Catherine. Not to be outdone, Catherine tried once more, this time giving birth to a girl in 1516. They named her Mary, and she would be a future queen. Henry was consoled by her birth and saw it as the promise of the sons he longed for, which would surely come now that one child had survived. But those heirs never came. The people of England were not thrilled with Mary’s birth either, since the previous queen stained her reign with bloody wars over royal succession.

In 1525, Catherine was well past her prime at 40 years of age, and the lack of male heirs caused Henry to believe that a curse had befallen him for marrying his brother’s widow—the aforementioned misapplication of Leviticus 20:21. He even questioned whether Pope Julius was in error for approving the wedding. And if the marriage was cursed, the sitting pope was to put it to an end. In 1527, Henry approached Clement VII to do just that. He wanted the dispensation for the marriage—which had lasted some eighteen years now—revoked, and declared invalid from the start via a new dispensation. Popes had granted such requests for kings in the past. The problem with Henry’s present situation, however, was Catherine’s family ties. She was the aunt of Charles V, the king of Spain and current head of the so-called Holy Roman Empire.

“Clement VII was in no position to defy the emperor Charles V.”

Says Professor Brad S. Gregory, who teaches history at Stanford University.

“In 1527, the emperor’s army had sacked and looted the city of Rome. And the pope became a virtual prisoner for the time being of the emperor, right at the time that Henry decides he needs his dispensation. Moreover, Charles V was the nephew of the English queen—of Catherine of Aragon. And a sudden invalidation of her longstanding marriage would have been a gross dishonor wrought on the family of Europe’s most powerful ruler. You can’t simply say that after almost twenty years this wasn’t a marriage after all, not to the house of Aragon, not to anything that touches the house of Hapsburg. It would have invited in other words retaliation against Henry VIII, and against the pope, from Charles V. So a political knot in addition to trying to overturn a previous papal dispensation stand in the way of the king and thwarts his wishes. Henry, however, like most kings—and in his case, even more than most kings—was not used to not getting his own way; to having his wishes frustrated.”

To complicate matters further, Henry had fallen for a woman named Anne Boleyn, the sister of a former mistress. A court advisor named Thomas Cranmer encouraged Henry to break with Rome by detaching the English church from papal control and folding it into the government as a new branch, which, as monarch, he would head. Henry heeded that advice and began to take matters into his own hands. He secretly married Anne Boleyn in January 1533 and had the English church court dissolve his marriage to Catherine in May. By September, he was the father of his first child from Anne, but it was another girl—to his dismay—who they named Elizabeth.

In retaliation, the pope excommunicated King Henry, which moved Henry to orchestrate a plan to fully overthrow the papacy. He was aware of the anti-Catholic notions that were stirring in England—many were embracing Lutheran principles for instance. With that in mind, Henry decided to strip away papal authority in his country via an obscure fourteenth-century law that banned dealings with foreign powers, which the papacy certainly was. On the strength of this recently-discovered old law Henry insisted that the clergy of the English church cease its dealings with the pope altogether. In another year, that being 1534, the Act of Supremacy was passed, naming King Henry, “The king’s majesty justly and rightly is and ought to be and shall be reputed the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England called Anglicana Ecclesia,” or the Anglican Church. From this denomination sprang the Episcopalian arm, which is in full communion with the See of Canterbury and the Archbishop of Canterbury, the so-called first among equals within the Anglican movement.

With the 1534 Act of Supremacy, the break with Rome was complete. King Henry was supreme head of his own church, his English subjects were to swear an oath of loyalty to him, and his marriage to Anne Boleyn was officially recognized. As head of his own church, however, he was not priest, thus, while he could appoint bishops, he could not consecrate them. Neither could he defend or formulate the faith of the church. Those tasks were directly overseen by the archbishop of Canterbury, a post that fell to Henry’s former court advisor, Thomas Cranmer.

“Henry was at best a reluctant Protestant.”

Writes Glenn S. Sunshine in his book The Reformation for Armchair Theologians.

“He took advantage of the change to close the monasteries and confiscate their property in the kingdom, yet in general his preference was to stay Catholic in every way possible, except with himself as head of the church. He savagely prosecuted and executed for treason anyone who expressed any doubts about his divorce, but at the same time he also executed mainstream Protestants as heretics. When he was in a reforming mood, he tended toward Lutheranism as less extreme than Reformed Protestantism, but he would inevitably lurch toward Catholicism pretty quickly, turning his back on reforms he had only recently instituted. His heart just wasn’t in it. But it wasn’t his heart that was driving his religious policy. This resulted in a wave of Protestants, known as the Henrician exiles, leaving the kingdom, typically heading toward Reformed territories on the Continent.”

Prior to closing the smaller monasteries (those earning less than two hundred pounds per year), Henry gave the unpopular monks a chance to relocate to other cloisters or enter secular life. Nearly half opted for worldly society over another monastery. By 1539, the crown was in possession of all monastic properties and monasticism was formally ended in England. The former holdings of monks, therefore, were absorbed by the realm and accounted for one-tenth of Britain’s wealth. With this move, Henry was suddenly supported by powerful barons and citizens of the highest social standing who were either gifted or otherwise purchased the properties.

With the banishment of Catholicism from the realm, a new translation of Scripture was needed for use in English churches. Upon Henry’s order, an English bible soon emerged. When Rome held sway over nations, they were not against Scripture translations based on a country’s native tongue, as long as those translations were not derived from the original Hebrew or Greek texts. The reason for this is that Rome had long used questionable Latin sources for its bible translations, which rendered certain words according to Catholic doctrine, rather than the original Hebrew concept.

One important example of this is the word metanoia, which in Greek means “repentance,” and signifies a deep transformation of one’s heart or mind, and a spiritual conversion wrought by their conformity to the Creator. This has as its Latin equivalent, agite paenitentiam, which translates to “do penance” in Catholic translations of Scripture based on Latin texts. For instance, the Catholic Douay-Rheims Bible, based on the Latin Vulgate, still translates the Greek term metanoia as the Latin “do penance” in Luke 13:3.

“No, I say to you: but unless you shall do penance, you shall all likewise perish.”

An English translation of Scripture that ignored the age-old Latin sources did not bode well for Rome or Catholicism. After Erasmus’s Greek New Testament was published in 1516, which featured a preface encouraging other translations in the common tongue of nations, new bible translations began to emerge in other languages, such as French, German, and English. Protestantism was fueled largely by these efforts.

We’ll be back with more exciting scriptural history . . . in a moment.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

We now continue with our podcast.

“While King Henry had broken with the Roman Catholic Church—and had been duly excommunicated—nothing at all had changed yet in the Church of England.”

Writes Carlos M. N. Eire in his book Reformations.

“Its theology, rituals, and ethics remained exactly as before. Among the Protestant sympathizers who hoped to bring about change, the most highly placed were none other than the new queen, Anne Boleyn, and the archbishop of Canterbury himself, Thomas Cranmer. In addition, Anne Boleyn surrounded herself with chaplains deeply affected by evangelical ideas, one of whom, Matthew Parker (1504–1575), would become archbishop of Canterbury during her daughter Elizabeth’s reign. But none of Anne’s efforts mattered much to Henry. In a fit of jealous rage, the king accused her of adultery, and, after being tried and found guilty, Anne Boleyn was beheaded on May 19, 1536, two days after Thomas Cranmer had annulled her marriage to Henry.”

But since he still needed a male heir, the search continued, thus Henry married a third wife two weeks later.

“The bride this time was Jane Seymour, a former lady-in-waiting to the recently executed Anne Boleyn. And this time, Henry VIII finally got the male heir that he needed. In September 1536, four months into their marriage, Jane Seymour gave birth to a frail boy, Edward, but she died as a result of complications during the birth. Henry VIII had an heir to the throne, at last, but he was a widower once again.”

Failed marriages and the problem of royal succession continued to plague Henry’s reign. His son, Prince Edward, was a frail, sickly heir, and his two sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, were legally prohibited from inheriting the throne for a time—though both would later be crowned queens. Henry married three more times following the death of Jane Seymour, but not a single heir was produced from those unions. With his own death, in January of 1547, Edward, a mere nine years of age, inherited the crown of his father. Of course, this meant that true rulership lay with others, such as Edward’s uncle, Edward Seymour, the Duke of Somerset, who was named Protector of the Realm. The Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, whose hands were no longer tied by Henry in a religious sense, pushed a Protestant agenda. Several of Henry’s legislations were repealed, and Reformed preaching was promoted. Influential reformers were also granted professorships at prominent universities, like Oxford and Cambridge. By 1549, church ritual too was revised with the formation of the Book of Common Prayer. All churches in England were forced to do away with Latin and adopt English as their formal language.

But the sudden rise of Protestantism in England was put to an end with the death of the frail King Edward in 1553. He was succeeded by his sister Mary, the daughter of Catherine. Mary was extremely Catholic, and she attempted to shift England back toward Rome in every way. Hers was a bloody reign, and close to three hundred Protestants were killed as a result of her intolerance, including the powerful archbishop Thomas Cranmer, who was burned at the stake.

“Although Mary did not begin her reign by slaughtering her political rivals, she was less reluctant about executing other people.”

Writes Glenn S. Sunshine.

“Given that Henry had split with Rome so he could divorce Mary’s mother, Mary didn’t exactly have warm feelings toward Protestantism. So she began to arrest, prosecute, and burn alive any Protestants she found, particularly clergy and other leaders. This earned her the nickname “Bloody Mary,” making her the only English monarch with a mixed drink named after her. The renewed persecution caused a new wave of exiles to leave the country, known as the Marian exiles. Many of these made their way to Geneva and learned Calvin's more radical approach to Reformed theology and practice.”

It was this persecution that John Knox fled, as discussed in our previous podcast. He later founded the Church of Scotland, the Presbyterian branch of Christianity. Despite her bloodthirsty nature, no other English monarch of the sixteenth century aspired to the level of piety that Mary Tudor did. That bloodthirstiness, however, would be her undoing. By the middle of the sixteenth century, England had been free of Rome for nearly a generation, but the Catholic reign of Mary, and her subsequent marriage to Philip of Spain, another devout Catholic, was considered a betrayal by the people of England. Mary ended her reign in disappointment and died an agonizing death at age 42. Being childless, she was succeeded by her half-sister, who reigned as Queen Elizabeth I.

Daughter of the deceased Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth inherited the monarchy, and with it, control of the Church of England, which, during her reign, took on its distinctive Anglican characteristic. That said, the church still had Catholic leanings, with its apostolic succession of bishops, its adoption of the eucharist, its Catholic infused liturgy, etc. In 1563, Elizabeth’s doctrinal statement, the Thirty-Nine Articles, which were agreed upon by the Archbishops, Bishops, and the entire clergy within the Provinces of Canterbury, York, and London, held language that accepted both Roman Catholics and Protestants alike. The articles, which form the summary of the beliefs of the Church of England, were an obvious compromise, which later English churchmen would regard as the best of both worlds, calling it the via media, or middle way between Protestantism and Catholicism. This was also the culmination of the so-called Elizabethan Settlement, which was a response to the religious differences that threatened the stability of England during her ascension.

Elizabeth, who was skilled at avoiding open religious conflict, initially saw great success with the enforcement of the articles, which mixed Catholic traditions and Protestant thinking. But while much of England was happy with the outcome, those at the extreme ends of the spectrum were not pleased. Among the disgruntled were the Marian exiles who had been forced out of England during the reign of the previous queen. They returned to England when Elizabeth was on the throne and were not comfortable with the compromise, against which they cried out, seeking another reformation. These particular Reformers came to be known as Puritans, and they were largely Presbyterian.

“For many Puritans, episcopacy was now revealing itself as part of the problem, not the solution.”

Writes Diarmaid MacCulloch in his book The Reformation.

“[T]he obvious goal was to replace it with a Presbyterian system like Geneva.”

However:

“It is important not to fall into the trap of thinking that every Puritan was a Presbyterian (although there is no problem in identifying all Presbyterians as Puritans).”

Rebecca Fraser, in her book The Mayflower: The Families, the Voyage, and the Founding of America, adds:

“Puritans were Protestants who believed the English Reformation had not gone far enough. The Elizabethan religious settlement returned the Church in England from Roman Catholicism to the Anglicanism established by Henry VIII. Anxious not to offend the population—many of whom had been disturbed by the Reformation in the first place—Elizabeth’s government did not wish to make the new religious settlement too Protestant. But many of the English Protestant clergy who had been driven out by the Catholic queen Mary Tudor now returned from Geneva imbued with the ideas of important theologians of the sixteenth century, including Jean Calvin. Many of Elizabeth’s chief ministers were Calvinists in points of doctrine such as predestination. However, they took the position that the state must dictate the form of the church. Bishops were an essential part of that.”

The problem is, Calvin taught his followers the exact opposite, that the church was to be governed by church elders, or presbyters to use the Greek designation.

“How the church should be governed and how much it should be reformed became a running battle between the Elizabethan government and Puritan clergy.”

The Puritans also argued that bishops were not mentioned in the Messianic Writings, nor were traditions like making the sign of the cross, observing saints’ days, or (perhaps the greatest bone of contention among them) the wearing of priestly vestments. Carlos M. N. Eire confirms this in his book Reformations:

“It all began with vestments, and more specifically, with one piece of liturgical garb that Elizabeth’s Act of Uniformity required all clerics to wear during church services: the surplice (a white wide-sleeved gown). Reformed Protestants made an issue out of this requirement not just because surplices were unbiblical ‘popish’ remnants, but because they were an indifferent item, that is, totally unnecessary and unrelated to salvation.… Opponents of the surplice objected most strenuously to the way in which consciences were being forced, for requiring any Christian to observe some trivial ordinance was tantamount to raising human laws over divine commands.”

In short, Puritans wanted a church that did not include what they considered to be the unrighteous, which was pretty much all non-Puritans. Queen Elizabeth, her court ministers, and the church hierarchy rebuffed their efforts, and those with Puritan sympathies had to meet in secret. Despite their future expulsion, Puritans were patriotic Protestants. They merely wanted more church reform. Following Elizabeth’s death in 1603, James, son of Mary Queen of Scots, and great-great-grandson of Henry VII, acceded the thrones of Scotland, Ireland, and England, since Elizabeth died childless. King James, being born in Scotland, was a Presbyterian monarch, thus the Puritans felt he would surely support their Protestant cause, and their aim to rid the church of Elizabethan compromises. James actually became their antagonist. While a Presbyterian, James actually shored up the Church of England, which he inherited control of.

“A whole new set of ecclesiastical laws forced the more committed Puritans out of the Church of England and made them separatists.”

Writes Rebecca Fraser.

“James made it clear he would ‘make them conform, or I shall harry them out of the land, or do worse.’ ”

In all of this, note that the Anglican (and therefore the Episcopal) church did not emerge as a result of some noble spiritual ideal, but rather it sprang from the acts of an obstinate king—that being Henry VIII—bent on pursuing his overpowering lust. And successive monarchs did their best to protect the institution that grew out of that lust. Rebecca Fraser goes on to say:

“Canons of 1604 enforced conformity. All those who rejected the faith and practices of the established church were automatically excommunicated. Puritan clergy must go before the Courts of High Commission to swear to these new canons or they would have to leave their parishes ‘as being men unfit, for their obstinacy and contempt to occupy such places.’ And in the end, if you were a Puritan passionate about your religion, you left England. Otherwise you faced imprisonment or death.”

This led to their withdrawal from England in 1607, wherein the Puritans sailed across the English Channel and settled in the Netherlands, joining other separatists who had left in 1593. But the Netherlands soon grew too overcrowded and was rife with corruption. Hence the 1620 voyage of many Puritans to the new world to establish a new colony.

That wraps it up for this episode of Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. A production of Kingdom Preppers.org, this episode was written, produced, and hosted by yours truly, Kingdom Prepper. All praise, honor, and glory are due to my boss, Yah Elohim, and to his right hand, Yahushua HaMashiach. You can access the transcript for this episode on our website. Yah willing, our history will continue in the next podcast. Shalom.

Keywords: Henry VIII, Catherine of Aragon, theological reformation, constitutional reformation, church of England, house of Tudor, Stuart kingdom, marrying a deceased brother’s widow, Thomas Cranmer, Anglican, Episcopalian, first among equals, Mary Tudor, Elizabeth I, surplice, via media, Elizabethan settlement, churchianity, two thousand years of leaven, history of Christianity, church history, Hebrew history, kp, kingdom preppers