Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXVIX

Coronation Portrait of
Elizabeth I

One of the first challenges Elizabeth had to meet was what to do with the Church.  She could not keep it in the Catholic communion—as far as the Pope was concerned she was illegitimate and therefore had no legal right to the throne.  Moreover, while far less religious than either her brother Edward (Protestant) or her sister Mary (Catholic), Elizabeth was by far the best educated theologically of the three.  She was also the most open minded and inclined to tolerance.  Elizabeth was both natively intelligent (which her sister and  brother were not) and had the open and critical mind of the serious student.  Her education had been overseen by Archbishop Cranmer and he made sure to indoctrinate her in Protestant thought, but she was no narrow evangelical like her brother. 

Elizabeth proceeded with caution.  She made guarantees that she did not want to trouble the consciences of any of her subjects.  Mary was buried in Westminster Abbey with full Catholic rites on December 14.  Just eleven days later, however, she instructed  Owen Oglethorpe. the Bishop of Carlisle who was offering Christmas Mass in the Chapel Royal at Saint James Palace that he was not to elevate the Host or Chalice at the consecration.  She had yet demanded no other changes in the Latin Mass, but the Elevation of the Host and Chalice, which emphasizes Transubstantiation, was more than the Protestant Elizabeth would suffer even in the short run.  Elizabeth stormed out of the chapel.  Nevertheless, as Oglethorpe was the only bishop who would agree to officiate at her coronation on January 15^th following the Queen gave him a second chance.  Again the Queen instructed him not to elevate the Host and Chalice; again he did; again the Queen stormed out—of her own coronation Mass.  Little by little that year of 1559 Elizabeth moved to re-introduce Protestantism.  Oglethorpe and the other Marian bishops were deprived of their sees for their unwillingness to support the Queen’s religious policies.  The monks were evicted from Westminster Abbey and other religious establishments were closed down, becoming “collegiate” churches with a college of canons and a dean.  In April Parliament passed a new Act of Uniformity which abolished the Mass and replaced the Catholic Liturgy with a new Book of Common Prayer. The 1559 Prayer Book was a slightly—but significantly—revised version of Cranmer’s 1552  book.  Clergy who would not implement the rite were removed from their benefices.  Fourteen Bishops in England and Wales were deprived of their sees.  Most were arrested for a period of time but then allowed to retire to house arrest in private life where they privately practiced the Catholic faith without interference.  An exception was Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London who refused the oath of supremacy and was confined to the Marshalsea Prison until this death ten years later.  The Extreme Protestant Party clamored for the execution of Bonner and the other bishops, but Elizabeth was not inclined to make martyrs.  Nicholas Heath, deposed Archbishop of York, also refused both the Act of Uniformity and the Act of Supremacy but assured Elizabeth of his loyalty in matters secular.  He was allowed to retire to his estates in Surrey where Elizabeth visited him several times.  Cuthbert Tunstall, deposed bishop of Durham, was put under the custody of the New Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, at Lambeth Palace.  He died there eleven weeks later.

Just about six weeks after Elizabeth’s accession to the throne, Giovanni Angelo Medici was elected Pope as Pius IV.  The papacy had been vacant from the death of Paul IV four months earlier.  Pius did not want to aggravate the plight of English Catholics and so he was silent in the face of Elizabeth’s return of the Church of England to Protestant doctrine and liturgy.  Pius also was not unlike the present Pope as he eschewed much of the pomp and splendor that had traditionally gone with the Papal Court.  He was characterized by Giorgio Vasari for his “stinginess of living, dullness of dress, and simplicity in so many things.”  In the sixteenth century Pope were not admired for toning down the Renaissance excess.  He also made some serious concessions to preserve the unity of the Church in the face of the Reformation.  He permitted the restoration of the chalice to the faithful in Austria and Bohemia where there had long been agitation for this reform.  There are those historians who admire Pius for his policies; and there are those who do not.  His English strategy worked in so far as there were no Catholic executed in England for their faith until after Pius’s successor, Saint Pius V, excommunicated Elizabeth and declared her subjects both free from her authority and duty-bound to overthrow her reign.  But that is for another time. 

Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXIX

Bonner's Cathedral of Saint Paul's

London--this cathedral was 

destroyed in the Great Fire of 

London in 1666 and replaced by 

Christopher Wren's masterpiece.

Another bishop on whom Mary depended in her program to restore England to the Catholic faith was Edmund Bonner.  Bonner had pretty humble beginnings.  His father was a woodsman or a lumberman in Worcestershire.  He studied law—not at the Inns of Court, which was common for a person who intended to follow a career in law, but at Oxford, earning degrees in both the Civil and Canon Law.  He was ordained quite young—perhaps as young as 22.  He was in the employ of Cardinal Wolsey and loyally stayed with him when he was arrested and accompanied the Cardinal on his trip to London to face the wrath of Henry (a wrath fanned into fury by Anne Boleyn who resented Wolsey’s attempts to break her ambitious relationship with the King.) It was a dangerous thing to do—to stay with the Cardinal in his time of disfavor.  Wolsey was fortunate enough not to make London but to die on the way—at Leicester Abbey, an Augustinian foundation just about halfway from Wolsey’s See at York to London where Henry—and the Tower—awaited him.  Bonner was with the Cardinal when he died. 

Cromwell scavenged the remnants of Wolsey’s service for what talent could go for the King’s work and Bonner found himself in the royal employ.   He was sent to Rome in 1532 to try to forestall action against Henry in the Roman Curia and in a 1533 meeting with Clement VII at Marseilles (where the Pope was conferring with Henry’s current foe, Francis I of France) Bonner threated the Pope with appealing over the Pope to a General Council for an annulment for Henry.  Clement was furious and Henry never got around to the appeal, choosing schism instead.  Bonner served Henry on embassies both to Charles V and to the French court and he made contact with the German Lutherans with whom he showed some doctrinal sympathy.  As an ambassador, Bonner could be quite abrasive and his tendency to get in altercations with his hosts did not help him achieve his diplomatic goals.  Yet this didn’t displease Henry who had a particular antipathy for the French.  Bonner also went out of his way to alienate Stephen Gardiner who had preceded him as ambassador in Paris and about whom he, Bonner, filed a highly critical report. 

Bonner oversaw the printing of “The King’s Great Bible” at Paris while ambassador to the French Court.  Myles Coverdale, later Bishop of Exeter and strong proponent of Protestant doctrine and worship in the reign of Edward VI, had provided this English translation under the sponsorship of Henry for use in the services of the Church of England.  (Henry had retained the Latin Mass throughout his reign, but much like the first introduction of the vernacular in the Catholic Church at the time of the Second Vatican Council, the custom of reading the Epistle and Gospel in English—after they had been read in Latin—was to pave the way for greater changes yet to come.)  Henry (and his Protestant-leaning minion, Thomas Cromwell) were quite impressed at Bonner’s performance with getting the Bible printed and rewarded him with the Bishopric of Hereford.  As he was still in France, however, he could neither be consecrated or take possession of his see and Henry moved him to London in 1540 where he was consecrated according to the old rites which would remain unaltered in the time of King Henry. 

Bonner had been trained in law, not theology, and he had never shown much interested in the finer points of doctrine. Indeed, if anything he seemed to lean towards a version of Lutheranism.  Yet once in his diocese he became an implacable religious conservative.  When the wind blew in a more traditionalist direction after the execution of Thomas Cromwell, and Parliament passed the Six Articles, Bonner began an earnest persecution of all those in his diocese who did not adhere strictly to Catholic Doctrine on Transubstantiation, on purgatory, and on the cult of the saints. 

The death of Henry and the accession of King Edward changed everything.  Within a few months of the new King’s accession a set of injunctions had been drawn up for reform in the Church and the bishops were entrusted with the task of seeing that they were carried out in their cathedrals as well as in the parishes of their diocese.  The injunctions required

1.    all images were to be taken down

2.    stained glass, statutes, and shrines were to be dismantled

3.    rood screens, their lofts, and the rood beam with its cross and figures of John the Apostle and the Virgin Mary were to be destroyed

4.    vestments were abolished and were to be burned or sold

5.    sacred vessels were to be melted down and replaced by pewter or silver cups and tankards

6.    processions were banned

7.    the use of ashes on Ash Wednesday, Palms on Palm Sunday, and candles on Candlemas was done away with

8.    chantries (mortuary chapels) with endowed masses for those buried there were abolished

9.    masses for the dead were abolished.   

The bishops were responsible to see that these directives were carried out in their respective dioceses, but the Council appointed visitators to go around the kingdom to make sure the changes had been carried out.  Bonner refused to implement the changes and resisted the idea of visitors coming to his diocese.  As London was the national capital, the Council could not afford dissent there. He was arrested and imprisoned in the notorious Fleet Prison.  There he changed his strategy and gave in to the visitation so as to be released and take his seat in Parliament where he could fight the new laws.  His resistance to the Prayer Book of 1549, however,  led to his being deprived of his see and imprisoned for the remained of King Edward’s reign.

Mary, on her accession, freed him and restored him to this See.  Bonner vigorously sought to restore Catholic doctrine and practice but had a rough time of it.  During his imprisonment, Edward’s Bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley, had pretty thoroughly destroyed what elements of Catholicism were left.  Not only had the stone altars been smashed in the London churches, the crosses and crucifixes torn down, the images of the saints ripped from their niches, but more important, Londoners had been well catechized in the Reformed Religion. 

Protestantism appealed to the merchant class and London was a merchant citu.  Protestantism was a religion that showed an appreciation for critical thinking and intellectual pursuits.  It was not a matter of blind authority and ancient traditions that no longer made sense.  Protestantism was rational, a thinking man’s religion.  There was no room for superstition.  Moreover it was economically rational. One didn’t put good money into silk vestments or silver crosses or gold chalices.  One gave to the poor.  One endowed schools.  And one re-invested one’s money for greater profit.  This was a religion for Londoners.  And when Bonner came back to his diocese after an absence of six years, the damage had been done.  Bonner did what he could do to repair the churches for Catholic worship again but he never won the confidence of the Londoners.  Even worse, he undertook a fierce persecution of Protestants, searching them out, trying them in ecclesiastical courts, and subjecting them to torture and being burned at the stake.  He was responsible for some of the worst excesses of “Bloody Mary’s” reign. 

Unlike Gardiner who predeceased Mary, Bonner lived well into Elizabeth’s reign.  He refused to swear to her supremacy over the Church.  Although he sat in her first Parliament where he spoke against her policy of reintroducing Protestantism, he was deprived of his See and imprisoned by the end of her first year on the throne.  Although many called for his death in retaliation for those martyred under his authority for their Protestant faith, he was never executed.  He remained imprisoned under somewhat genteel terms and every four months was given a new opportunity—which he always refused—to swear to the royal supremacy.  He died eleven years into Elizabeth reign. 

I notice that I have quite often used the term “Protestant” here and I need to clarify that term as I am not using it in the somewhat generic sense that we use to cover everything from a Swedish Lutheran to a Pennsylvania Dutch Mennonite.  The problem is that the other-than-Catholic movement in the Church of England was not stable through this period.  Phase I which might be thought to be 1520-1540 leaned towards Lutheran thought.  Phase II, which we shall mark as 1540 to the accession of Elizabeth in 1558 leaned more to the Swiss model but I wouldn’t say “Calvinist.”  It was sort of a generic Swiss/Strasbourg variety influenced heavily by Martin Bucer, the Strasbourg reformer who had taken refuge in England between 1549 and 1551, but also drawing on Bucer’s friends among the Swiss, especially Zwingli.  Phase III which will be the reign of Elizabeth will see a real struggle between the Puritan party who are definitely Calvinist and the more moderate party which would have favored the more middle of the road sort of theology typified in the reign of Edward VI.  The Puritan party was to win out, though Elizabeth herself was definitely a theological moderate.  But all that is still away off in our entries. 

Foundations of the Anglican Church LVI

Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London 

In our last entry on the Church of England we looked at Cuthbert Tunstall, the Bishop of Durham who, though a friend of Queen Katherine and supportive of her marriage to the King, when the chips were down sided with Henry in the break from Rome.  When Henry died and England began to move towards a more Protestant—Calvinist—position in matters religious, Tunstall objected and lost his diocese.  Restored to his bishopric under Queen Mary and reconciled to Rome, he stood fast in the Catholic camp when Elizabeth I reversed her half-sister’s Catholic policy in favor of a return to Protestantism.  We will look at these various twists and turns as England Protestantizes under Edward, reverts to Catholicism under Mary, and then goes Protestant again under Elizabeth, but today I want to look at another of Henry’s compliant churchmen who would later regret his choices, 

Edmund Bonner was born in or about 1500—possibly illegitimately—in circumstances of relative poverty in Worcestershire.  Despite his lower-class background he was admitted to Broadgates Hall, a hostel for law students, at Oxford. (Broadgates Hall was re-constituted as Pembroke College in the 17^th century and is still a constituent college of the University.)  Actually, before the gentrification of England—one of the fruits of the English Reformation—it was not at all unusual for even the poorest of young men to be able to find a place at Oxford or Cambridge and use that as a propellant into political, ecclesiastical, and economic advancement.  It was Calvinism, with its tying of material prosperity to the idea of God’s predestination, which contributed to the rigid stratification of English society, but that topic  is for another day.  Bonner earned his doctorate in Canon Law and became a chaplain to Cardinal Wolsey.  To Bonner’s credit, he remained loyal to Wolsey when the Cardinal fell in disgrace and was with him when Wolsey died at Leicester Abbey in the late autumn of 1530.  Taken into the King’s service as a protégé of Thomas Cromwell, Bonner went to Rome in 1532 to try to win Henry’s case for annulment, or at least to prevent the Pope and Curia from taking any action against Henry for his divorcing Katherine.  He suggested to Pope Clement that the Pope should allow Henry to appeal to a General Council for an annulment—a route that would let the Pope off the hook with the Emperor, Queen Katherine’s nephew, who opposed the annulment.

Of course, what Bonner—and back in England, Henry and Cromwell—did not understand was Clement’s policy of allying himself to the Emperor to further Medici policy in central Italy.  That policy opposed any annulment be it from the Pope or a Council.  But it was all in vain anyway as events were moving faster than Bonner’s diplomacy and Anne Boleyn’s 1533 pregnancy made it imperative that Henry marry her in time for the expected child—a hoped for son—to be a legitimate heir to the throne.  Of course the child was a daughter, but Henry was married and excommunicate and Bonner summoned home as Henry was losing interest in the papacy anyway.  Bonner was rewarded by Henry for his efforts with a number of well-salaried Church positions and entrusted with further diplomatic duties in embassies to the Emperor and to the King of France.  His rabid anti-papal tirades annoyed the French King but delighted Henry who in 1540 named him bishop of Hereford.  (By this time, of course, Henry had broken completely with the papacy and thus was naming bishops himself.)  Before he could be consecrated, however, Henry decided to name him to the far more prestigious see of London.  He was consecrated bishop in April 1540. 

Now Henry had broken with Rome but he was not inclined to introduce Protestant ideas into his Church.  The Church was Catholic—it just wasn’t papal anymore.  (It had never been “Roman,” from antiquity having its own Rites and peculiarities as outlined in previous postings.) Mass remained unchanged (except that the prayer for the Pope was dropped) and in Latin, clergy remained unmarried, prayers to the saints continued to be said, holy water and incense to be used.  As Bishop of London, Bonner was always vigilant against any Protestant ideas seeping into his diocese.  He was not a theologian—as he himself admitted—but a canon lawyer and he was very distrustful of any theological novelties.  London and Norwich, because of their being the primary ports, were always the first point where new ideas would come in and take root.  Londoners had long been disgusted with the Church and its clergy (as we saw in the entries about Richard Hunne) and consequently very open to the new Protestant ideas coming from Germany.  When Henry died and the new King, Edward VI—acting under the tutelage of his guardians, Thomas Cranmer and the Duke of Somerset—began to introduce Protestant practices, Bonner ardently resisted, but by then it was too late.  He was deprived of his see and thrown into the Marshalsea prison.  Upon the accession of Mary and the restoration of Catholicism, he was returned to his see where he was vigorous in searching out Protestants and handing them over for prosecution and execution.  His most famous prisoner was Thomas Cranmer, the deposed Archbishop of Canterbury, who was executed at Oxford in March 1556. 

With the Accession of Elizabeth, Catholicism was out and Protestantism back in.  Bonner was again deprived of his see and imprisoned.  Despite calls for his execution by the radical Protestant party, he remained in prison until his death in 1569.  Four times each year he was called out and given the opportunity to adjure his Catholic faith in favor of the Reformed Church of England with a promise of release, and each time he refused. 

Bonner, like Tunstall, and like Stephen Gardiner (with whom we have yet to deal) was very typical of the Churchmen of Henry’s time.  Only one bishop in England went to his death rather than give in to Henry’s demands to be recognized as head of the Church of England.  Most priests likewise acquiesced.  They were naïve in failing to see where the Church would go once it got mixed into the political machinations of rabid nationalists.  Thomas More and John Fisher, on the other hand, stood firm not so much because they believed in the papacy per se but because they knew that the Church by its very nature needs to transcend the political, cultural, and geographic limits that would otherwise divide it.  Catholics must always have an international outlook that sees the good of the entire human family as trumping the interests of any particular nation or society.