History of the Anglican Church LXXXIX

Anglican Evensong

Pardon for the hiatus but I had some unscheduled travelling that interrupted my normal routine.  And I realized that in my history of the Anglican Church, while I dealt with the Ordinal and its rites, I overlooked the development of the Daily Office in the Book of Common Prayer.  So before proceeding to Anglicanism in the reign of King James VI and I, let’s go back a bit to Thomas Cranmer and his Prayer Book.  Well—actually to see what Cranmer did, we need to go to a reform of the Breviary ordered by Clement VII—the same Pope who refused Henry VIII his annulment. 

Francisco de Quiñones was a Franciscan friar from Spain and a distant relative of and close advisor to the Emperor Charles V.  He belonged to the Reformed Franciscans—today’s O.F.M. group—and served as Minister General of the Observant Franciscans from 1523-27. In 1528 Quiñones was created Cardinal with the titular Church of Santa Croce in Gerusalamme.  About this time, Pope Clement VII commissioned Quiñones to reform the Roman Breviary and his very popular revision of the breviary was published in 1535 after several years of careful research of the ancient liturgies.   It was widely used but it also had its critics who were alarmed at Quiñones’ simplification of the rubrics and elimination of many of the accretions that had been added to the liturgy over the centuries.  The Cardinal did not design his breviary for the formal liturgical celebration of the daily offices, but to be used for private recitation and, much like the liturgical reforms that followed Vatican II, the Cardinal wanted to avoid the redundancies that made the Divine Office burdensome and detracted from its prayerfulness.  He expanded the scripture readings, ordered the psalms to avoid repetition, and eliminated unhistorical legends about the saints.  In his first edition, he also eliminated the antiphons, but this caused such a strong objection they were re-inserted the following year in a second edition and it was this second edition that enjoyed the greatest popularity. Despite its design for private prayer, it was often used in monasteries and collegiate churches for the public liturgical celebration of the daily prayers. Quiñones’ breviary  was banned by Paul IV in 1558 but continued to be used by many until it was replaced by the more traditional breviary of Pius V in 1568.  While it had no lasting influence among Catholics, Quiñones’ breviary reforms would be used by both Lutheran and Anglican reformers in their liturgical reforms. 

Herman von Wied was the Prince-Archbishop of Cologne who embraced Lutheranism in the 1540’s.  He also, with the help of the Reformed theologians Martin Bucer and Philip Melancthon, revised the daily liturgical offices in his diocese along the lines set out by Quiñones of avoiding repetition of the psalms and ordering sequential use of the lectionary.  Given the influence of Bucer it was an even more radical revision than Quiñones had proffered, removing any emphasis on the saints and eliminating any non scriptural readings.     

Thomas Cranmer had also tinkered with the Divine Office and his first proposal—still in the reign of the conservative King Henry VIII—retained the traditional order of Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, Nones, Vespers, and Compline, but by the time he was ready to publish a definitive Prayer Book in the reign of Edward VI, Cranmer had conflated Matins and Lauds into a Morning Prayer and Vespers and Compline into a single Evening Prayer, all but eliminating the “Little Hours.” Cranmer was familiar with the work of  both Quiñones and von Wied and drew on their reforms in producing his liturgy.  Bucer had moved from Germany by this point and was staying with Cranmer, pushing him ever more and more in a truly Protestant direction, and so Cranmer retained only the Te Deum from among the non-scriptural canticles, though he did make provision for a hymn to be sung at the Office. 

Cranmer’s structure seems a bit complex by our standards today—hardly “reformed” compared to the post-Vatican II Liturgy of the Hours.  It can be divided into several sections

Borrowed from the Private Prayers said to prepare one for the Morning Office.

A sentence of scripture with a penitential theme

An exhortation to repentance

A prayer of general confession of sin

A general confession.

A prayer of absolution by the priest

The Lord’s Prayer (first time)

A set of versicles and responses known as the preces

Borrowed from Matins

The Domine, labia mea versicle and response

The Deus in adjutorium versicle and response

The Gloria Patri

The invitatory psalm—psam 95

The psalmody (usually only one psalm unless in a Cathedral or Collegiate Church)

The Old Testament Lesson

A Canticle

Borrowed From Lauds

A New Testament Lesson

The Benedictus

The Apostles Creed

The Kyrie

The Lord’s Prayer—a second time

The suffrages

The Collects—the Collect of the Day, of Lent or Advent in those seasons, Collect for Peace, the Collect for Grace,

The Anthem or hymn

The Collect for the Sovereign and other State Prayers

The Prayer of Saint Chrysostom

The Benediction. 

Cranmer’s evening Prayer, drawn from Vespers and Compline, was somewhat more simple. 

The Lord’s Prayer

The Domine, labia mea versicle and response

The Deus in adjutorium versicle and response

The Gloria Patri

The Psalms 

The Old Testament Lesson

The Magnificat (Vespers)

The New Testament Lesson

The Nunc Dimitis  (Compline)

The Creed

The Collects

Of the day

For peace

Against peril

Overall, this reform of the Divine Office has been very successful.  My own experience is that while I prefer the Roman Breviary (current rite) for private prayer as it seems more conducive for a reflective personal recitation, the Anglican Liturgy with its expanded readings and reduced psalmody and with some cutting back on the number of collects and extraneous prayers works better for liturgical celebration.  I am not inclined to think that was always the case as for most of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries it was simply a read service that droned on in a clerical monotone.  Cathedrals and the Oxbridge College Chapels most often had choirs to sing the services, but the average parish was mostly devoid of the musical talent to make these services the things of beauty they often are today.  Moreover, the Puritan disdain for organs and for music in general meant that most churches had no choice but to have a read service.  In many parishes, both in the Church of England and in the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States, read Morning Prayer was the standard Sunday Service with Holy Communion being celebrated only once or twice a month.  Combined with the long and too often dark sermons of the times, this just made Sundays an exercise in a relentless and turgid verbosity.  Sung Solemn Sunday Vespers, common in Catholic Churches of the larger European cities, by contrast was a riot of sound, color, and the smell of incense.  The Catholic service, being in Latin, was unintelligible to most of its congregation, of course, but remained relatively popular while the Anglican services drew only the most devout, leading over the centuries to an ever-steadingy decline in church attendance.  The Romantic revival and Oxford Movement of the nineteenth century would remedy this lack of the aesthetic aspect of Anglican Worship but that story is still a long way off.  We have a lot of Puritan ground to cover first.   

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.