Review: Diarmaid MacCulloch 'Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation'

But not everyone felt the same way as the villagers of Morebath (p.105).

Diarmaid MacCulloch's Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (1999 - this review is of the 2001 edition) is the other side to the story told by Eamon Duffy in The Stripping of the Altars (1992) and The Voices of Morebath (2001).  If Duffy tells of an unpopular religious revolution imposed from above on the old religion of merrie, Catholic England, MacCulloch tells of "a coherent and exciting alternative" (p.116), "a movement of hope and moral fervour, capable of generating intense excitement" (p.126).

He identifies a number of characteristics of popular support for Reformed religion.  There were "connections between the cause of the Reformation and the cause of wider social reform" (p.124), with the idea and rhetoric of the commonwealth deeply rooted in Reformed discourse.  The rallying cry of evangelical liberty - "a primary theme of the European Reformation" (p.127) - was "symbolic" of the wider excitement provoked by the movement.  There was also a "general atmosphere of hope and renewal" attached to the Reformed religion, caught up with a humanist ethos around Edward's reign, retaining:

Edward headed a young evangelical elite, a generation of notably clever aristocrats and gentry receiving the same sort of de luxe education as himself: the Lady Elizabeth, Henry Brandon Duke of Suffolk and his brother, Somerset's three daughter, the formidably bright daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke, two of whom married the cultured Edwardian bureaucrats William Cecil and Nicholas Bacon (p.127).

The humanism was evident in the regime retaining "some of the reasonableness of Erasmian humanism when it argued with its opponents" (p.133), in the peaceable set-piece debate on eucharistic doctrine in Oxford in 1549, and in the fact that "much of the discussion encouraged in Edwardian England involved laity as well as clergy" (ibid).

MacCulloch's description of these characteristics of the Reformed religion certainly capture the excitement of the movement, a sense of freshness and renewal associated with it.  That said, there are aspects of the popular appeal of Reformed religion that his account does not fully grasp.  His discussions of Edwardine iconoclasm do not explore how its discourse was caught up with a renewed concern for the poor, as the Homily against Peril of Idolatry reveals:

Now in the mean season, whilst the dumb and dead idols stand thus decked and clothed, contrary to God's law and commandment, the poor Christian people, the lively images of God, commended to us so tenderly by our Saviour Christ as most dear to him, stand naked, shivering for cold.

MacCulloch does state that "one of the excitements of the Edwardian Reformation was that it spoke to the most basic of human instincts, offering a reassessment of the institution of marriage for clergy and laity alike" (p.129).  This, however, leads to the distraction of a discussion of divorce and remarriage, rather than a focus on the affirmation of the ordinary seen in Latimer's Fifth Sermon upon the Lord's Prayer (1552):

It is a common speech amongst the people, and much used, that they say, "All religious houses are pulled down": which is a very peevish saying, and not true, for they are not pulled down. That man and that woman that live together godly and quietly, doing the works of their vocation, and fear God, hear his word and keep it ... that same is a religious house.

Also absent is any discussion of one of the most characteristic and popular signs of Reformed religion, communion in both kinds, a powerful symbolic affirmation of the dignity of the laity.

Despite these criticisms, there can be little doubt that MacCulloch's account does convey the exciting sense of renewal associated with the Reformed movement, explaining why it did take root and gain popular support.  Related to this is "the independent effect of Lollardy" (p.112), with the persistence of the late 14th century movement of dissent ensuring a basis for reception of and support for Reformation:

The presence of absence of Lollardy was thus one fundamental element in the regional shape of popular reformation (p.114).

The high politics of the Edwardine Reformation is expertly recounted and analysed in the first chapter of the book.  Two characters stand at the heart of this high politics.  Firstly, Edward himself, the English Josiah and Solomon, whose "exceptional" talents (p.20) and definitively Reformed convictions ensured that he was not merely a figurehead but a driving force in the religious revolution of his reign.  MacCulloch, perhaps with a degree of exaggeration, declares that Edward "had shown more emphatically than Henry VIII or Elizabeth ever did what Tudor royal supremacy was about" (p.36).  Secondly, there was Thomas Cranmer, "always to be found at the centre of government action" (p.104):

His instinct for self-preservation has often been mocked, but the story of supple adaptation in his public career had more to it than that: Cranmer displayed that inflexible determination to further the evangelical goal by fair means or foul which I have identified as the keynote of Edwardian policy.  If anyone ensured that King Edward could play the role of King Josiah successfully and comprehensively, it was his godfather, the Primate of All England (ibid).

It was the centrality of these two characters which ensured that for all of the differences between the administrations of Somerset and Northumberland, there was profound continuity: "more of the same evangelical revolution" (p.56).

If one event was to be chosen as defining both Edward's reign and his Reformation, we might point to the 1549 Oxford debate on eucharistic doctrine.  As MacCulloch emphasises, up to this point there was "no officially defined eucharistic theology" (p.91), the regime mindful of both internal divisions within the realm between traditionalists and reformers, and the wider European context:

In 1548-9 it would have been fatal for England, the most important surviving evangelical power in Europe, to make any official pronouncement on the eucharist while delicate efforts were being made abroad to heal the twenty-year-old wounds of the eucharistic quarrel between Luther and Zwingli (p.87).

But then came the Consensus Tigurinis in May 1549, signalling a shared eucharistic theology between Geneva and Zurich.  The Oxford debate signalled that England was a part of this consensus, with Peter Martyr's presentation implicitly but clearly endorsed by the regime, followed the next year by Cranmer's Defence of the True and Catholic doctrine of the Sacrament.  MacCulloch continues:

The next step was the creation of a liturgy which was a more obvious fit than the 1549 book for the theology [articulated by Cranmer].  This was done by 1552 ... The third and final stage was the eucharistic discussion in the long-delayed doctrinal statement of the Edwardian Church, the Forty-Two Articles, published only a few weeks before the king's death (p.92f).

Thus was the Edwardine Reformation defined.

It is this, however, which raises rather significant questions concerning MacCulloch's final chapter, 'The Afterlife of the Edwardian Reformation'.  MacCulloch's portrayal of the Elizabethan Settlement is, quite frankly, puzzling, if not contradictory.  The Elizabethan Church was the triumph of the Edwardine Reformation: Edward's 1552 Prayer Book and Articles of Religion were de facto restored, there was no return to the perceived ambiguities of 1549, and the crucial definition of eucharistic doctrine was unchanged.  Despite what he admits to be "the formal near-identity of its church polity, liturgy and doctrinal statement" (p.191), MacCulloch confusingly and unconvincingly presents the 'godly' as the legitimate heirs of the Edwardine Reformation.   Quite how Genevan liturgy and presbyterianism was to be regarded as a more authentic heir to the Edwardine Church than the Elizabethan Settlement is not explained.  There is also the odd statement that the "heirs of the Edwardian Church, it cannot be too often stressed, had no notion of Anglican episcopacy" and that it "had secular and not sacred overtones" (p.183).  This, however, entirely overlooks the Preface to the Ordinal in the 1552 BCP:

It is evident unto all men, diligently readinge holye scripture, and auncient aucthours, that from the Apostles tyme, there hathe bene these orders of Ministers in Christes church, Bisshoppes, Priestes, and Deacons.

The same confusing and unconvincing approach is found in MacCulloch's description of avant-garde Conformists and Laudians.  The statement is made "We have already heard the opinions of ... John Cosin and Augustine Lindsell, on Edwardian bishops and their 'Deformation'" (p.210).  Actually, no.  The earlier reference in the book (p.173) is to Cosin and Lindsell being "accused" by Puritan opponents of such a view of the Reformation.  This is the same Cosin who in his 'Paper Concerning the Differences in the Chief Points of Religion Betwixt the Church of Rome and the Church of England' emphasised the agreements between the English Church and the continental Reformed Churches:

They do most willingly receive us into their churches and frequently repair to ours joining with us both in prayers and sacraments.

The paper was written in 1658 as Cosin was a refugee in France, receiving the Sacrament in the French Reformed Church.  To portray Cosin as upholding a notion of the Reformation as 'Deformation' is, quite frankly, ridiculous.

Similarly we are told that Peter Heylyn was critical of Edward's reign (p.210) - the same Heylyn who heaped praise on the Edwardine Reformation in his history of the English Reformation, and quoted Hooker on "Edward the Saint".  On the issue of the Eucharist, MacCulloch declares that "Andrewes and his fellows affirmed a view of eucharistic real presence which Thomas Cranmer would have strenuously opposed" (p.209) and that for Laud "the 'spiritual presence' eucharistic theology of the 1552 communion rite was a particular embarrassment" (p.218).  Such statements are - to be put it very charitably - very difficult to reconcile with the classically Reformed eucharistic understanding of the avant-garde and the Laudians.  To give one brief example, Laud himself quotes Calvin, Cranmer, and Ridely against Bellarmine in defence of a Reformed eucharistic teaching:

And the Church of England is Protestant too. So Protestants of all sorts maintain a true and Real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

At the heart of this final chapter is a weirdly Anglo-Catholic reading of history.  I say weirdly because MacCulloch has been a consistent and vocal opponent of Anglo-Catholic interpretations of history (as he is this very book, p.157f).  Here, however, he compares the avant-garde and Laudians to the Tractarians:

They saw what they were doing as recovering the Catholic character of the Church ... Just as the nineteenth-century Church of England experienced the Oxford Movement (p.209 & 211).

This is a nonsense.  Avant-garde and Laudians had absolutely no notion that the Church of England's Catholic character needed to be 'recovered': they were robust and vocal apologists for its enduring Catholic character not despite but because of the Reformation.  Put simply, this final chapter of MacCulloch's book is utterly unconvincing, offering little sense of serious reflection on avant-garde and Laudian works and their understanding that they were defending the fruits of the Edwardine Reformation secured by Elizabeth.

The final chapter does, therefore, detract from an otherwise excellent book, a necessary riposte to the Duffy interpretation.  Mindful of how Duffy's vision of the Reformation has proven (somewhat ironically) to be influential in some Anglican circles, The Tudor Church Militant is necessary reading for an Anglicanism squeamish about its Reformation roots, overlooking how our tradition was fundamentally shaped by the Reformation, and how this is a cause of spiritual enrichment.  That being so, MacCulloch's closing appeal for Anglicans to have "some remembrance and understanding" of the Edwardine Reformation should be heeded.  To read The Tudor Church Militant is to read a defining chapter in our story - a chapter for which we should be grateful.