Charles IX was succeeded by his brother, Henry III, two years later (1574). Such was the revulsion against the massacre that the king could rule only by forming an alliance with the Huguenot Henry of Navarre. A fanatical Catholic was thereby so outraged that he assassinated the king. Both sides had abandoned the fiction of the inferior magistrate and had gone in unabashedly for popular revolution. Henry of Navarre became Henry IV, but he was unable to take Paris and rule France so long as he was a Protestant. In order to pacify the land he made his submission to Rome and promulgated an edict of toleration for the Huguenots, the Edict of Nantes, in 1598. It gave them liberty of worship again in limited areas but full rights of participation in public life. The edict remained in force until the revocation in 1685. The Reformation in England and Scotland Henry VIII and the separation from Rome
In the meantime the Reformation had taken hold in England. The beginning there was political rather than religious, a quarrel between the king and the pope of the sort that had occurred in the Middle Ages without resulting in a permanent schism and might not have in this instance save for the overall European situation. The dispute had its root in the assumption that the king was a national stallion expected to provide an heir to the throne. England did not have the Salic law, which in France forbade female succession, but England had just emerged from a prolonged civil war, the Wars of the Roses, and the new dynasty needed a male heir to maintain its hold on the throne and to prevent the resumption of civil war. Catherine of Aragon, the queen of Henry VIII, had borne him numerous children of whom only one survived, the princess Mary, and more were not to be expected. The ordinary procedure in such a case was to discover some flaw in the marriage that would allow an annulment or a divorce. In this instance the flaw was not difficult to find, because Catherine had been married to Henry’s brother Arthur, and canon law, following the prohibition in the book of Leviticus (20:21), forbade the marriage of a man with his deceased brother’s widow. At the time of the marriage the pope, Julius II, had given a dispensation to cover this infraction of the rule. The question now was whether the pope had the authority to dispense from the divine law. Catherine said there had been no need for a dispensation because her marriage to Arthur had not been consummated and there had been no impediment to her marriage to Henry. The knot would have been cut by some casuistry had Catherine not been the aunt of Emperor Charles V, who was not prepared to see her cast aside in favour of another wife. Clement VII, wishing neither to provoke the emperor nor to alienate the king, dallied so long that Henry took the matter into his own hands, repudiated papal authority, and in 1534 set up the independent Church of England, with the king as the supreme head. The spiritual head was the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, who married Henry to Anne Boleyn. She bore the princess Elizabeth, and still another wife, Jane Seymour, bore the future Edward VI.
Henry’s basic concern was political, but the alterations in the structure of the church gave scope for a reformation that was religious in character. Part of the impulse came from the survivals of Lollardy, part from the Lutheran movement on the Continent, and even more from the Christian humanism represented by Erasmus. Although Henry retained much Catholic doctrine, especially transubstantiation, and ecclesiastical organization, he did introduce important changes, including the suppression of the monasteries, the introduction of the Bible in the vernacular in the parish churches, and permission to the clergy to marry, though this last reform was later revoked. The resistance to Henry’s program was not formidable, and the executions resulting were not numerous. Henry was impartial in burning some Lutherans who would not submit to his later reactionary legislation and toward some Catholics who would not accept the royal supremacy over the church, notably John Fisher and Thomas More.
On his ascent to the throne in 1547, young Edward VI was hailed as England’s Josiah, the young 7th-century-bce king of Judah who enforced the Deuteronomic reform. Edward, it was held, would rid the land of idolatry so that England might be blessed. Protestantism advanced rapidly during his reign through the systematic reformation of doctrine, worship, and discipline—the three external marks of the true church. A reformed confession of faith and a prayer book were adopted, but the reformation of the ecclesiastical laws that would have defined the basis of discipline was blocked by the nobility in Parliament.
The death of Edward and England’s return to Roman Catholicism in 1553 under Queen Mary was interpreted by Protestants as God’s judgment that England had not taken the Reformation seriously enough. Many, including Cranmer, died as martyrs to the Protestant cause, and others fled to the European continent. Those in exile experimented with more radical forms of worship and discipline, and published material justifying rebellion against an idolatrous ruler. Exiles also produced two large volumes of incalculable consequence for English religious thought, John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, popularly known as The Book of Martyrs, and the Geneva Bible. The most popular books in England for many years after their publication, they provided a view of the country as an elect nation chosen by God to bring the power of the Antichrist (understood to be the pope) to an end.
Foxe, John: The Book of MartyrsPage from the eighth edition of The Book of Martyrs, by John Foxe, woodcut depicting (top) zealous reformers stripping a church of its Roman Catholic furnishings and (bottom) a Protestant church interior with a baptismal font and a communion table set with a cup and paten, published in London, 1641; in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.Photograph by Veronika Brazdova. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Museum no. CLE.W9
Elizabeth I, assumed the throne in 1558 and was hailed as the glorious Deborah (a 12th-century-bce Israelite leader), the “restorer of Israel.” She did not, however, restore it far enough for some English Protestants, particularly the Puritans. Indeed, she distrusted the challenge to authority and feared the disorder that either extreme evangelical zeal or extreme Catholic zeal could cause. Two statutes promulgated in her first year—the Act of Supremacy, stating that the queen was “supreme governor” of the Church of England, and the Act of Uniformity, ensuring that English worship should follow The Book of Common Prayer—defined the nature of the English religious establishment. In 1571 the Convocation of Canterbury, one of the church’s two primary legislative bodies (along with the Convocation of York), defined standard doctrine in the Thirty-nine Articles, but attempts to reform the prayer book further and to produce a reformed discipline failed. Defeated in the convocation, the reformers came to rely more on Parliament, where they could always depend on strong support. The role of John Knox
In Scotland the Reformation is associated with the name of John Knox, who declared that one celebration of the mass is worse than a cup of poison. He faced the very real threat that Mary, Queen of Scots, would do for Scotland what Mary Tudor had done for England. Therefore, Knox defied her in person on matters of religion and, though a commoner, addressed her as if he were all Scotland. He very nearly was, because in the period prior to 1560 many an obscure evangelist had converted much of the Lowlands to the religion of John Calvin. The church had been given a Presbyterian structure, culminating in a General Assembly, which had actually as great and perhaps a greater influence than the Parliament. Because of her follies, and very probably her crimes (complicity in the murder of her husband), Mary had to seek asylum in England. There she became the focus of plots on the life of Elizabeth until Parliament decreed her execution. Presbyterianism was established in Scotland, making possible the union of Scotland with England.