Victor R. Claveau, MJ
Let us take a brief look at how the Protestant Reformation affected Ireland.[1] The one tie which might have bound Ireland to England was severed by the same stroke which cut England off from Rome. King Henry appointed an apostate Augustinian monk name George Brown (? – 1556) as Archbishop of Dublin. Brown became the king’s main instrument in his desire to establish the state church in the Kingdom of Ireland. Brown failed to beguile or force the Irish to accept Henry’s brand of religion and he called upon the king to help him. A parliament was convened with members from each diocese. These men forbid Catholics to submit to the supremacy of the King in matters of religion, for this reason they lost their votes. Henry’s minions passed the acts, which made, as in England, the violation of which was high treason.
It soon became apparent that the true motivation of Henry’s so-called Reformation in Ireland was the spoils which result from his war against Catholics. The Church was rich in lands and other possessions as well as things spiritual. Henry, willing to do without the spiritual necessities did not intend to let the temporal possessions of the Church to escape his grasp. He confiscated the lands of the monks and nuns, just as he had done in England; robbing sanctuaries and stripping convents and monasteries of their valuables, while he pretended that he was only destroying articles of Catholic veneration. Among the relics destroyed by his apostate followers were those of Sts. Patrick, Brigid, and Columba.[2]
When Thomas Grey, Lord Grey of Groby (c. 1623–1657), was appointed Lord-justice of Ireland he immediately began to ravage the country. In January 1643, during the First English Civil War, he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the forces of the Parliament in the Midland Counties and Governor of Leicester. The Irish chieftains were not in a position to offer any serious resistance to Henry; and some of them, weary of struggling against great odds, began to submit.
In 1540, Sir Anthony St Leger (c. 1496 – 1559), who succeeded Grey, was appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland and tasked with the repression of disorder. He gained the submission of a number of these men. These chiefs, renounced the religion of their forefathers and their allegiances to their clansmen, acknowledged Henry as King of Ireland and head of the Church. For this traitorous act they received titles and patents to lands which were their own and their clan’s possessions by right of inheritance; lands which neither these apostate chief’s nor the English could lawfully and justly claim, for they were the lands belonging to the Irish people.
For twelve years following the death of Henry VIII, Ireland suffered gradual degradation. Queen Mary gave respite to the sufferings of Catholics in both countries. However, the war of extermination continued as Mary’s council overruled her attempts to alleviate the troubles of the Irish.
Upon the death of Mary, her cruel, avaricious, cunning and wicked, Protestant sister, Elizabeth vented her animosity particularly on the Irish. In 1560, Ireland fell victim to her bigotry. Thomas Radclyffe, the 3rd Earl of Sussex (c. 1525 –1583), was lord-lieutenant during Mary’s reign. He issued a proclamation forbidding all priests, secular and regular, to officiate or reside in Dublin. Under penalty of a fine, every person was required to attend Protestant services and listen to sermons preached in a foreign language. The rape of the Irish Catholic Church continued along the same line as the rest of the Church in England. Many wars, battles and massacres continued over the years, but the might of England was too great to overcome.
King Edward VI
With all the razing, disaster and ruin, still it took Edward VI, and his advisors, to turn England into a truly Protestant country. During the six years of his reign (1547-1553) the king instated a number of changes, under the leadership of Cranmer. The following is a brief list of some of the documents by which these changes were authorized: the bishops petitions to the new Supreme Head for the renewal of their episcopal jurisdiction—this having lapsed, like to the powers of all officials, at the death of Henry VIII; the various Injunctions, issued by one bishop or another of the clergy, and also by the king himself to the whole of his church; the imposition of an official Book of Homilies meant, in the first place, for the use of clergy too ignorant to compose their own, but constituting an official statement of the belief of Edward’s church; an Act of Parliament Against the Revilers of the Sacrament,[3] imposing a new rite for Holy Communion, under the Order of Communion, henceforward to be administered under both species, and in English; the statute providing that bishops be appointed by letters patent; the First Prayer Book of 1549; the new rite for conferring Holy Orders;[4] the law authorizing priests to marry; the Second Prayer Book of 1552 with a complete liturgy for the English Church; the Forty-two Articles of 1553;[5] the catechism published at the same time; the new corpus of canon law[6], which although completed, had not yet been sanctioned when the death of Edward VI brought all this activity to an abrupt end.
Protestant reformer, Sir John Cheke,[7] summed up this period when he stated:
“He [Edward VI] has repealed the act of the Six Articles; he has removed the images from the churches; he has overthrown idolatry; he has abolished the mass and destroyed almost every kind of superstition. He has put forth by his authority an excellent form of common prayer; he has published good and pious homilies to lessen the ignorance of uneducated ministers. He has invited the most learned [Protestants from the continent] men to teach at the universities.”[8]
Father Philip Hughes, in his masterful three volume work, The Reformation in England, provides insight into the fact that no Catholic doctrine can be changed without affecting all other doctrines as everything is interrelated:
“’The majority of Englishmen’, it has been said, ‘probably had no keen desire for doctrinal change’: a real feat of understatement in a specialist historian.[9] What was now about to happen, however, and what in the intentions of Cranmer had been happening for years already, was not a mere cutting away of accidental superfluities of certain ceremonies and practices—use of holy water, ashes, palms, lights before statues, prayers in a dead language—but the substitution of religion considered to be true and primitive in place of one considered false and therefore blasphemous. The Catholicism over which the pope presided was a system where a mass of doctrines and practices were knit together systematically, all most intimately intertwined, so that to attack any one point involved, usually, an attack on all. This organic interrelation was no less true of the opinions and practices of the various Reformed bodies. New dogmatic theory about the fall of man, original sin, justification, predestination—remote abstractions, ‘mere theory’, as the saying goes, to the educated mind of later ages—was in the closest organic contact with the new practical forgiveness of any of them; that in the Holy Eucharist there is no sacrifice, nor any transubstantiation; that the Mass is idolatry, the cult of the saints superstition, and the whole fabric of that hierarchical authority whose summit is the papacy, a gigantic clerical fraud. That the one system, was in its entirety, now to go and another—wholly different—system was to take its place, none realized more clearly than these men in whose own lives the two had met. At whatever point in his personal experience the changes began, the Reformer, sooner or later, must be prepared to change all; and very soon, wherever he had his way, he had changed most things.”[10]
Although Jesus was referring to marriage when he said, “What therefore God has joined together, let not man put sunder,”[11] the quote can be utilized symbolically in this case, as Jesus and His Church are also one.”
Queen Mary I, 1553 – 1558
Queen Mary, the daughter of King Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon became queen of England by parliamentary decree and by the general consent of the populace. But from the first, she was under attack. Her one purpose, during her short five-year reign was to restore Catholicism and return the English people to Catholic unity. Her strength was in her single-mindedness. She had the courage of her convictions, but her difficulties were formidable. She was embarrassed by the title of head of the Church of England, and she asked parliament to remove the title in order that she could be reconciled to the headship of the pope. London was seething with the anti-Catholic sentiment of Protestants who had flooded back into England from France during the reign of her predecessor, Edward VI, but who now had to flee yet again in order to stave off execution at Mary’s hand.
Queen Mary, in turn, was possessed in her quest to return England to the Roman Church, burning or chopping off heads of Protestants, an act which led to the posthumous sobriquet “Bloody Mary”. In 1555, Thomas Cranmer was burned at the stake. Mary went on to burn reformers by the score for the “crime” of being Protestant.
Cambridge historian C. H. Smyth believed that, “At least two-thirds of the martyrs who were burnt by Queen Mary would almost undoubtedly, had Edward VI survived, have been burnt in the normal course by the Church of England.”[12]
Though Mary issued proclamations enjoining peace, mutual forbearance, and requiring complete toleration for Protestant services; the violent language of Protestant preachers incited disorder. Cranmer, overestimating his strength, published a manifesto denouncing the Mass as “the devil’s own invention, and offering to debate the Edwardian religion with all comers. For this, he ended up in the Tower.
On November 13, 1553, Cranmer and four others were brought to trial for treason, found guilty, and condemned to death. On March 8, 1554, the Privy Council ordered Cranmer, transferred to Bocardo prison[13] in Oxford to await a second trial for heresy. Cranmer remained isolated in Bocardo prison for seventeen months before the trial started on September 12, 1555. Although it took place in England, the trial was under papal jurisdiction and the final verdict would come from Rome. Under interrogation, Cranmer admitted to every fact that was placed before him, but he denied any treachery, disobedience, or heresy. On December 4th, Rome decided Cranmer’s fate by depriving him of the archbishopric and giving permission to the secular authorities to carry out their sentence.[14]
After two years in prison, Cranmer repudiated all Protestant heresy, fully accepted Catholic theology including papal supremacy and Transubstantiation. He stated that there was no salvation outside the Catholic Church and announced his joy at returning to the Catholic Church. He asked for, and received, sacramental absolution, and he participated in the Mass. Cranmer’s burning was postponed and, under normal practice of canon law, he should have been absolved.
Mary, however, decided that no further postponement was possible. His last recantation was issued on March 18th. It was a sign of a broken man, a sweeping confession of sin.[15] Despite the stipulation in Canon Law that recanting heretics be reprieved, Mary was determined to make an example of Cranmer, arguing that “his iniquity and obstinacy was so great against God and your Grace that your clemency and mercy could have no place with him”, and she pressed ahead with his execution.[16]
Cranmer was told that he would be able to make a final recantation but this time it was to be in public during a service at the University Church. He wrote and submitted the recantation in advance, and it was published after his death. At the pulpit on the day of his execution, he opened with a prayer and an exhortation to obey the king and queen, but he ended his sermon totally unexpectedly, deviating from the prepared script. He renounced the recantations that he had written or signed with his own hand since his degradation and as such he stated that his hand would be punished by being burnt first. He then said, “And as for the pope, I refuse him, as Christ’s enemy and Antichrist with all his false doctrine.”[17] He was pulled from the pulpit and taken to the execution site and burnt.
Protestant leaders in Switzerland, Germany, and Scotland forbade religious liberty and the Mass to all Catholics. Mary was convinced that if she allowed Protestant ministers to preach, it would encourage civil strife and disorder. She believed that a show of weakness to heretics would only encourage them further. However, the revival of heresy laws and the burnings of heretics which followed did not deliver England from conspiracies against the crown—for these continued until Mary’s death—nor did it strengthen the Catholic cause. The queen sanctioned the burnings and the council insisted on them.
During her last three years as queen, three hundred people were sent to the flames. This large number shocked the populous and provoked revulsion. Burning by fire was the common and accepted punishment for heresy in the sixteenth century, just as capital punishment for first-degree murder is allowed under most civil governments today. Cranmer had argued for this same punishment for Catholics. Mary did all she could to bring back the old religion to her country. Many Catholic priests and nuns were once again serving the populace.
With the intervention of foreign politics, Mary’s reign ended in defeat. To assist her husband, King Philip of Spain, and at war with France, Mary sent English troops abroad. It resulted in the loss of Calais, England’s last foothold in France. One year later, Mary was dead. Between six and seven o’clock in the morning on November 17, 1588, soon after the Mass was celebrated in her sickroom at St. James’s Palace, Queen Mary, died at age 42, the result of an influenza epidemic. With her death, the incipient counter-reformation of the Catholic Church in England expired as well. The late queen was buried with all of the solemn rites of the Catholic Church.
Queen Elizabeth I, 1558 – 1603
On the accession of Queen Elizabeth I, England was once again a Catholic country; however, Elizabeth’s aim was the complete suppression of the Catholic religion. In 1563, came the profession of faith of the English-state church. All members of the House of Commons, and all others who were suspected of loyalty to the “old religion” were required to take the Oath of Supremacy. Any person who twice refused was threatened with death.
At first the penalties were restricted to confiscation of property and imprisonment, and these penalties were inflicted with undue cruelty. When Pope Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth in 1570, and released Catholics from their obligation to be subject to her obedience, new and more severe penalties ensued, and the anguish of the scaffold was put to use. It was an agonizing time for the Catholic faithful who were charged with treason and made enemies of the state.
During the years 1577 and 1603, “Good Queen Bess” had put to death 183 of her Catholic subjects. Of these, 123 were priests, one was a friar not yet ordained, and 59 were lay folk, three of them, women.[18] Many men and women languished for years in vile prisons, and “recusants,” (those who refused to attend Anglican Church services) were obliged to pay enormous fines.
The arrests of priests in England under Elizabeth I and her successors were all the more frequent not only because they were branded as traitors by the government, but also because a bounty was placed on their heads. A statute
enacted in 1606 offered rewards to anyone who would provide information that would lead to the arrest of a priest who celebrated holy Mass or engaged in sacramental work, such as baptizing or hearing confessions.[19]
Under the four Tudor monarchs, eighty–three priests and twenty-six laymen died for their faith in Ireland.[20] With Elizabeth’s death, the House of Tudor came to an end and the English throne passed to the Stuarts.
James VI and I (1566 – 1625)
James was King of Scotland as James VI from July 24, 1567, and he was also King of England and Ireland as James I from the union of the Scottish and English crowns on March 24, 1603, until his death.
His education, although thorough, was weighted with Presbyterian and Calvinist political doctrine, and his character – highly intelligent and sensitive, but also fundamentally shallow, vain, and exhibitionist – reacted violently to this. His political philosophy turned to the theory of the divine right of kings, in striking contrast to the practical experiences of his childhood.
Upon his accession to the English throne on the death of Elizabeth I, James acted mainly upon the advice of Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, but on the latter’s death all restraint vanished. His religious policy consisted of asserting the supreme authority of the crown and suppressing both Puritans and Catholics who objected.
His modern-day claim to fame is that he sponsored the translation of the Bible that was named after him: the Authorized King James Version.
[1] Catholic Ireland occupies twenty-six of the thirty-two counties in Ireland. Predominantly Protestant Northern Island, or Ulster, which accounts for the remaining six counties, has half the population of the Republic and a way of life which has become more British than Irish.
[2] Nolan, Anna M., A History of Ireland for Parochial Schools, (Chicago: J.S. Hyland & CO. 1905), p. 121.
[3] The November 1547 convocation agreed the Communion should thenceforth be received in both kinds, and the following Act whose official title is An Act against Revilers, and for Receiving in Both Kinds was passed by Parliament. The inclusion of two separate sections help to secure passage of the Act without difficulty, since those who might have objected to receiving in both kinds could not easily oppose sanctions against blasphemers. This Act was repealed by Mary I in December 1553, but reinstated by Elizabeth I in 1559.
[4] The Anglican churches hold their bishops to be in apostolic succession, although there is some difference of opinion with regard to whether ordination is to be regarded as a sacrament. In the sixteenth century the doctrine of a priesthood endowed with mystical powers was pronounced superstitious by most of the Protestant Reformers, who, accordingly, rejected Holy Order from among the number of their sacraments.
The question of validity of Anglican Orders was reopened by Leo XIII, and an adverse decision was handed down in the encyclical Apostolicae Curae. The sole point at issue was the validity of the new formula of ordination introduced by Thomas Cranmer and his associates at the time of Edward VI. It was the pontiff’s contention that Cranmer deliberately changed the meaning of the rite of orders by eliminating from it all reference to sacrifice, which alone gives significance to the Christian priesthood; that in so doing, he gave the rite a new meaning, namely, to make “ministers of the word,” and not Catholic priests; and in consequence, that those who use this rite express externally—whatever their subjective intention or belief—the intention of doing, not “what the Church does,” but what the Reformers were doing in fact, that is ordaining “ministers of the word and sacraments.” The distinction between subjective and objective intention is indeed delicate, but it stresses the Church’s traditional teaching that the “form” or formula of the sacrament approved by the Church must be used to guarantee “the intention of doing what the Church does.”
[5] Thomas Cranmer drew up the Forty-Two Articles Act, which became the first truly Protestant confession of faith for the Church of England. They reflected the position of the Augsburg Confession in their statement of the doctrines of the Trinity and justification, but in their position on predestination and the Lord’s Supper they were clearly Calvinistic. They were revised in 1562 by the Convocation of the Anglican clergy, and in 1563 they were promulgated by Elizabeth I as the Thirty-Nine Articles Act.
[6] The actual title of this corpus is: Reformatio Legum Ecclesticarum.
[7] On 10 July 1544, Sir John Cheke was confirmed as tutor to the future King Edward VI of England, to teach him “of toungues, of the scripture, of philosophie and all liberal sciences”. After his pupil’s accession to the throne, he continued in this role. As a result of his support of Edward VI, Queen Mary threw had him arrested and incarcerated in the Tower of London (27 July 1553), and confiscated his property. He was, however, released on 3 September 1554, and again in May 1556, and again imprisoned in the Tower. Cheke was visited by two priests, whom he had formerly tried to convert to Protestantism. Terrified by the prospect of being burned at the stake, he agreed to be received into the Church of Rome. He did not long survive and died in London on September 13, 1557.
[8] Greenwich, June 7, 1553; Original Letters Relative to The English Reformation, Written During the Reign of King Henry VIII., King Edward VI, and Queen Mary, Chiefly from the Archives of Zurich. (Cambridge: The University Press), The First Portion, 1847, pp. 141-142
[9] Martin Bucer, a Protestant Reformer, stated: “The work is carried on for the most part be edicts, which the majority obey very grudgingly”; letter to John Brenz, Original Letters., II, p. 543.
[10] Hughes, The Reformation in England, p. 83.
[11] Matthew 19:6.
[12] Smyth, C. H., Cranmer the Reformation Under Edward VI, (Cambridge: The University Press), 1926.
[13] The Bocardo Prison in Oxford, England existed until 1771. Its origins were medieval, and the most celebrated prisoners were the Protestant Oxford martyrs, Thomas Cranmer, Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley
[14] Rudolph W. Heinze, “‘I pray God to grant that I may endure to the end’: A New Look at the Martyrdom of Thomas Cranmer”. (1993).
[15] Ibid. pp. 273–276; Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life. (London: Yale University Press). 1996, pp. 584–599. Heinze and MacCulloch note that Cranmer’s recantations can be deduced from two primary sources that had opposite polemical aims, Bishop Cranmer’s Recantacyons by an unknown author and Acts and Monuments by John Foxe also known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.
[16] MacCulloch, p. 597.
[17]Ibid. 279.
[18] Hughes, The Reformation in England, Vol. III, p. 338.
[19] Caraman, Philip, Henry Morse: Priest of the Plague. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1957), p. 115.
[20] Bihlmeyer, Karl, Church History, (Westminster: Newman Press, 1966), vol. three, p. 188.