Value judgements in history are notoriously difficult. There is always the old objection of “autre temps, autres moeurs”, Englished by L.P.Hartley‘s famous dictum: “The past is another country; they do things differently there.” One wonders, then, where this cut-off point lies. Will it one day look vulgar or illegitimate to criticise Lady Thatcher or Wedgwood Benn? Is it wrong to do so now? After After all, many of the assumptions and judgements of their heyday are, apparently, so alien to our world that it could be presented as a realm unto itself, beyond the scope of current adjudication. This is perhaps why the BBC decided to call its eighties police drama, “Life on Mars”. Paradoxically, then, it may be when a period looks (to some) unambiguously “wrong” in its general moral posture, that moralising becomes redundant and the effort shifts from the duty to condemn to the effort to “sympathise“. An unspoken hope, lurking at the back of any such shift, is that the values of such a period are safely deceased, never to rise again, so the moral judgement lives, but in the scarcely visible form of complacency.
One such period is the Reformation. Religious belief, specifically Christian belief, has evolved into something almost vehemently at variance with an array of sixteenth century ecclesiastical orthodoxies - from either side of the divide. Who now would advocate the burning of an Archbishop of Canterbury? Certainly not the Pope. Even the Reverend Dr Paisley would surely baulk at the disembowelling of Jesuits. This means that the various acts of repression and enforcement with which Catholic or Protestant polities sustained their church settlements must look “Martian” to even the most devout Christian of today. Yet can we not go further? Can we not frankly admit that in fact they look disgusting? And once we allow that the spectacle of Cranmer’s immolation or Campion’s evisceration is as nauseating as anything perpetrated by Nazis or Bolsheviks, History as Judge is back - rightly.
How, then, does History the Judge evaluate the English Reformation as a whole? Was it “a good thing”? In brief, I want to demonstrate that it was not.
In the first instance, as recent research has shown, it was initially deeply unpopular and not just for four or five years but for almost fifty. According to many historians, “Protestant England” arose not with the tendentiously named “Reformation Parliament” of 1529 but only by the 1580s. How did this come about? Through suasion and debate? No. The most cursory glance at the record will make it clear that our old friends Blood and Iron managed her debut. The Pilgrimage of Grace, the Prayer book rebellion and the Rising of the Northern Earls were prompted by popular Catholic nostalgia and crushed by elite Protestant tyranny. Without a Reformation, much life and suffering would have variously been “spared”.
The second obvious objection is clear to anybody with an eye for beauty, let alone artistic interests or aesthetic tastes. The sad remnant of our once glorious gothic heritage - roofless aisles, glassless windows, emptied niches, white washed chambers which once glowed with colour and light - must surely give us pause. Our capacities as painters and musicians were deeply compromised. The evergreen tradition which had offered us Tallis and Byrd was being hacked down even as it reached the finest flowering. And who can say, hand on heart, that England’s art was not merely lost but rendered crotchety, amateurish, eccentric and all but sterile by the loss of the church as patron and the backing of an in tact medieval portfolio? This is to say nothing of the libraries of illuminated manuscript which were blown to the four winds by Henrician greed and vandalism.
The third objection is social. The church supplied care, medicine and education to pre-Reformation England on an extraordinary scale. It surely still has the power to shock that when Henry VIII’s fat hands closed on the throat of Saint Bartholomew’s hospital, in London, the poor to whom its denizens had once so graciously tended were abandoned to fester in the streets. It was six years before that famous royal “conscience” could be prodded into remedy, when he refounded the hospital on half the income it had enjoyed before his “reforms”. The many schools which Protestant propaganda attributed to the prim prig, Edward VI, were in fact abortive derivations from superior Benedictine arrangements, such as at Westminster or Abingdon. The decay of hospitality which followed the Reformation is well known and who can read John Stowe’s “Survey of London” without catching the note of regret for a more friendly world, in which poverty was treated with the charity that flows from a theology of “works”, rather than the disdain which arises from notions of “predestination”?
The protestant propaganda to which I alluded reached its culminating point in the school of Macaulay - the Whigs - whose subtlest representatives today would doubtless assert that even if my objections to the Reformation can be sustained it brought much benefit in the long run. They would speak of the culture of the word, rather than the image; they would adduce commerce, capital and trade as the beauteous children of Protestant liberty.
Well, these may well be benefits, but I am not aware that Catholic polities were wholly incapable of engaging in them. One only has to look at the Republic of Venice. Secondly, I dispute that liberty was Protestant. Liberty is a sceptic, who slipped without Rome, Geneva or Canterbury noticing, through the cracks in the unity of Christendom. By the time they turned to face her, she had established herself and grown whilst they were too disunited and exhausted to do anything about it. The first protestants did not aim at any such outcome. Theirs would have been a Taliban Europe - no pictures, no bright clothes, no song, no dance. It was only the failure of their enterprise to convince the whole church which saved us from so joyless a future.
But was the Reformation then at least a happy accident - in the long run? Leaving aside the question of “happy for whom?”, the answer is again, no. The Renaissance was doing the job very nicely, thank you. The gradual spread of whole systems of thought which the church itself had only lately woken up to would surely have brought about the goods so beloved of Liberalism - and perhaps done so with a greater admixture of humanity and caution in such matters as the treatment of the working class. Then we might have avoided the horrors of communism altogether, but that’s another story.
By SD
Further Reading:
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars
Dr Christopher Haigh, English Reformations
J.J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People
Susan Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds
Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation
Robert Whiting, The Reformation of the English Parish Church
