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Episcopacy and Reform in Mid-Tudor England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Barrett L. Beer
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Extract

In Tudor Prelates and Politics, Lacey Baldwin Smith wrote sympathetically of the dilemma faced by the conservative bishops who saw control over the Church of England slip from their grasp after the accession of Edward VI in 1547, but he gave less attention to the reforming bishops who worked to advance the Protestant cause. At the beginning of the new reign the episcopal bench, according to Smith's calculations, included twelve conservatives, seven reformers, and seven whose religious orientation could not be determined (see Table 1). The ranks of the conservatives were thinned as a consequence of the deprivation of Stephen Gardiner of Winchester, Edmund Bonner of London, Nicholas Heath of Worcester, George Day of Chichester, and Cuthbert Tunstall of Durham. On the other hand, eight new bishops were appointed between 1547 and 1553. These new men together with the Henrician reformers, of whom Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, was most important, had responsibility for leading the church during the period which saw the most extensive changes of the Reformation era. This essay examines the careers of the newly-appointed reforming bishops and attempts to assess their achievements and failures as they worked to create a reformed church in England.

The first of the eight new bishops appointed during the reign of Edward VI was Nicholas Ridley, who was named Bishop of Rochester in 1547 and translated to London in 1550. In 1548 Robert Ferrar became Bishop of St. David's in Wales. No new episcopal appointments occurred in 1549, but during the following year John Ponet succeeded Ridley at Rochester while John Hooper took the see of Gloucester.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , Summer 1991 , pp. 231 - 252
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1991

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References

1 Smith, Lacey Baldwin, Tudor Prelates and Politics, 1536–1558 (Princeton, N.J., 1953), pp. 106–31, 305–07Google Scholar. More recent works that deal with the Mid-Tudor bishops include Dickens, A. G., The English Reformation (London, 1964)Google Scholar, Heal, Felicity, Of Prelates and Princes: A Study of the Economic and Social Position of the Tudor Episcopate (Cambridge, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Houlbrooke, Ralph, “The Protestant Episcopate, 1547–1603: The Pastoral Contribution,” in Church and Society in England: Henry VIII to James I, ed. Heal, F. and O'Day, R. (Hamden, Conn., 1977), pp. 78–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hughes, Philip, The Reformation in England (New York, 1963)Google Scholar. Many of the bishops listed by Smith as having no definite religious orientation were Henrician conservatives who continued to serve under Queen Mary after 1553. Biographical accounts of each of the eight reformers appear in the Dictionary of National Biography.

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