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Persecution and Toleration in the English Reformation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

G. R. Elton
G. R. Elton*
Affiliation:
Clare College, Cambridge
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Extract

The century of the Reformation, in England as elsewhere, sharpened all conflicts and augmented persecution. As the unity of Christendom broke up, the rival parties acquired that sort of confidence in their own righteousness that encourages men to put one another to death for conscience sake; an era of moderation and tolerance gave way to one of ever more savage repression. To the openminded willingness which characterized the humanism of Erasmus and More as well as the Rome of Leo X there succeeded the bigotry typical of Carafa, Calvin, Knox and the English puritans; only the gradual evaporation of such passions, produced by each side’s inability to triumph totally, produced a weariness with religious strife which made the return of mutual sufferance possible. That, at least, is the received story. Historians of toleration, as for instance Jordan and Lecler, firmly described the history of persecution in this way. Jordan identified six developments which led to its decline in sixteenth-century England: a growing political strength among dissident sects, the impossibility of preventing splintering and preserving uniformity, the needs of trade which overrode religious hostility, experience of travel, the failure to suppress dissident publications, and finally a growing scepticism which denied the claims to exclusive truth advanced by this or that faction. In other words, only two things moved men, once they had fallen away from the generosity of the pre-Reformation era, to substitute an uneasy toleration for a vigorous persecution: the external pressures of experience and the decline of religious fervour. By implication, men of power called for repression and only those who could not hope to win favoured toleration, until general exhaustion set in. It is a convincing enough picture, and much evidence no doubt supports it. But it is a picture—a general and rather schematic panorama which makes little allowance for the real opinions of individuals. On this occasion I should like to test it by looking at the attitudes of two highly articulate sixteenth-century Englishmen—Thomas More, humanist and loyal son of the universal Church, and John Foxe, humanist and faithful protestant. Both, we know, were men of sensitivity and sense. How did they stand to the problem of persecution?

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 21: Persecution and Toleration , 1984 , pp. 163 - 187
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1984

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References

1 Jordan, [W. K.], [The Development of Religious] Toleration [in Englandfrom the Beginning of the English Reformation to the Death of Queen Elizabeth (London 1932)Google Scholar]; Lecler, J., Toleration and the Reformation (2 vols. London 1960)Google Scholar.

2 Jordan, Toleration pp 20–3.

3 Erasmi Epistolae, ed. P. S. Allen X p 137: ‘Odit ille seditiosa dogmata, quibus nunc misere concutitur orbis. Hoc ille non dissimulat, nee cupit esse clam; sic addictus pietati vt, si in alterutram partem aliquantulum inclinet momentum, superstitioni quam impietati viciniox esse videatur.’

4 Chambers, R. W., Thomas More, (London 1935) pp 252–3.Google Scholar

5 Leland Miles, ‘Persecution and the Dialogue of Comfort: a fresh look at the charges against Thomas More,’ Journal of British Studies 5 (1965) pp 19–30.

6 Utopia p 218/29-30: ‘Siquidem hoc inter antiquissima instituta numerant, ne sua cuiquam religio fraudi sit.’ All citations from More’s works are from the Yale edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More. Quotations for Utopia are given in my own translation, and where necessary I have repunctuated the Latin; throughout this paper I have modernized the spelling of English quotations.

7 Ibid p 220 7–12: ‘Haec Vtopus instituit non respectu pads modo, quam assiduo certamine atque inexpiabili odiofunditus uidet euerti, sed quod arbitratus est, uti sic decerneretur, ipsius etiam religionis interesse, de qua nihil est ausus temere definire, uelut incertum habens, an uarium ac multiplicem expetens cultum deus aluid inspiret alij [sic: ?alios].’

8 Lupset, Thomas, The Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, ed. Burton, K. (London 1948) pp 34–5.Google Scholar

9 Utopia p 522.

10 Ibid p 220/3-7.

11 Ibid p 218/21-9.

12 Dialogue against Heresies pp 406–10.

13 Ibidpp 370–2; Confutation of Tyndale pp 482–3.

14 Apology p 94.

15 Confutation pp 13–17; John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, ed S. R. Cattley/Josiah Pratt VIII 712–15 [hereafter cited as AM].

16 Confutation pp 10–11; 17–18; Dialogue against Heresies p 410; Apology pp 92—4.

17 Confutation p 21.

18 Ibid p 359.

19 E.g., Dialogue against Heresies pp 255–8; Confutation pp 23–5.

20 Davis, J. F., ‘The Trials of Thomas Bylney and the English Reformation’, Historical Journal 24 (1981) pp 775–90.Google Scholar

21 Harpsfield appears in AM under the pseudonym of Mr Cope.

22 AM IV pp 643–52.

23 [J. F.] Mozley, [John] Foxe [and his Book (London 1940)] pp 35–6, 54–5, 86–9; [V. N.] Olsen, [John] Foxe [and the Elizabethan Church (Berkeley 1973)] ch. VI.

24 Foxe’s introduction to Special and Chosen Sermons o/D. Martin Luther (London 1578: STC 16993).

25 Olsen, Foxe p 203.

26 Foxe’s introduction to Luther’s Commentary on Galatians (London 1575: STC 16965).

27 British Library, Harl. MS 416, fo 70.

28 Mozley, Foxe, 90–1; Olsen, Foxe, 212.

29 Foxe, John, De Oliua Euangelica: Sermon Preached at the Baptism of a Certain Jew (London, 1578:Google Scholar STC 11236), sigs. B.iiiv, C.vij.

30 The letter to the queen is printed as App. X to Townsend’s ‘Life of Foxe’ prefaced to the standard edition of AM (I, pp [27-8]); for the letter to the council see British Library, Harl. MS 417, fo 101v.

31 For Foxe’s research cf. AM III p 400. In the statute of 2 Henry IV none of the chapters stated an authority for this legislation; as was the custom, this was given at the head of the statute and covered all the acts contained in it. According to the formula used, the king had ordained the laws following at the prayer of the Commons and with the assent of the magnates and other lords. However, as Foxe discovered, with respect to c. 15 (the heresy act) the formula somewhat misstated the case, though no papistical malice was involved and legal validity remained unaffected. This chapter was in fact enacted in response to a request from the English clergy who begged the lay power to assist in the extermination of heresy; in reply the king ‘de consensu Magnatum et aliorum Procerum Regni’ ordained certain heads of measures (including the duty of the secular arm to burn a relapsed heretic handed over by the Church) which were duly drawn up (probably by thejudges) as an act and thus incorporated in the statute engrossed at the end of the session and in due course included in the printed volumes (Rotuli Parliamentorum, III pp 466–7).

32 Confutation pp 789–91. The passage offers a fair example of More’s polemical methods. First he constructs an imaginative and very tendentious case out of Tyndale’s lament that the elect have always been persecuted, in such a way that Tyndale is made to appear ready to endorse persecution when it suits him. Next he speaks of thieves, heretics and murderers (a carefully arranged threesome) persecuting the Catholics in Switzerland and Saxony, calling up visions of killings for which he has no evidence: even the well biased modern commentary (ibid 1663) can speak only of severe restrictions on Catholic worship—and even that is an exaggeration at this point. More then clinches his case with one of his merry tales: about a lady who would have a man who committed adultery with his wife’s maid ‘hanged by the neck upon the nearest bough’, but when asked what should happen to a woman who did likewise with her husband’s man-servant answered that yes, the lady did wrong and should have a good talking-to. Neatly done, and in this case clever enough controversy, but a long way from being honest.

33 Cf. my ‘The Real Thomas More?’ in Reformation Principles and Practice, ed. P. N. Brooks (London 1980) pp 21–31.

34 Narratives of the Days of the Reformation, ed. J. G. Nichols (Camden Society 1859) pp 25–7. Foxe did not use the story in AM, but its truth was vouched for by Petyt’s wife, herself involved in it.

35 This is the message of More’s Dialogue of Comfort.

36 The works in question are most readily available in Robert Kingdon’s edition in the series ‘Folger Documents of Tudor and Stuart Civilization’ (Ithaca, N. Y. 1965); 1 shall use it here.

37 Ed. Kingdon pp 7–8.

38 [Robert Parsons,] Memoriall [for the Intended Reformation of England, ed. Edward Gee (London 1690) p 105.

39 The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More, ed. E. F. Rogers (Princeton 1947) pp 557–8.

40 Ed. Kingdon pp 9–12.

41 Ibid p 94.

42 Ibid pp 261–2.

43 Ibid p 265.

44 For all this cf. T. H. Clanchy, Papist Pamphleteers (Chicago 1964) ch 6 ‘Persecution and Toleration’.

45 Ibid pp 145–6.

46 Ibid p 143.

47 Ibid pp 148–51.

48 A Treatise Tending to Mitigation towards Catholic Subjects in England … (St Omer 1607: S TC 19417).

49 Memoriall esp pp 29–34.

50 Allen, J. W., Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (London 1928) pp 231–46.Google Scholar

51 C. H., and George, K., The Protestant Mind of the English Reformation (Princeton 1961) pp 376–7, 380–1.Google Scholar