All the Queen's Men by Peter Brimacombe

Author:Peter Brimacombe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: All the Queen’s Men
ISBN: 9780752474045
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2012-02-03T21:00:00+00:00

8

MEN OF GOD

At the time when Elizabeth became Queen, England was still essentially a Catholic kingdom, practising the same faith which had existed within the nation for many centuries, except for a short period of Protestantism under her half-brother, Edward VI, before this process was swiftly reversed by Elizabeth’s half-sister Mary. This rapid swing of the religious pendulum may well have gone largely unheeded by the majority of England’s population, particularly those outside the towns and in northern England. Out in the country, the ordinary folk continued to worship in much the same manner as they had throughout the Middle Ages. Elizabeth had inherited a predominately Catholic country, albeit a very divided one, and she may well have been inclined to keep it that way, for it would have been easier to continue a religious practice that was reassuringly familiar to the majority of her citizens. It was also the official faith of both Spain and France, the two most significant nations in western Europe, at the time of her succession to the throne in 1558.

Even when her father Henry VIII had ceased to recognize the Pope in Rome as head of the English Church, the King was still regarded as ‘His Most Catholic Majesty’. The bidding prayer of 1544 declares Henry VIII as, ‘being only immediately next unto God, the only and supreme head of this Catholic Church, of England’. Elizabeth may have been tempted to re-establish the official religion in England precisely as it had been in the land of her father – it would have suited her conservative inclinations, been much simpler, and avoided a potential confrontation early in her reign with either France or Spain, respectively controlled by the Catholic Catherine de Medici and Philip II. On her northern frontier, her Catholic cousin, Mary, ruled Scotland which was at that time at war with England. Retaining the religious status quo was at first sight the easy option.

However, when Elizabeth became Queen, most of Europe was in religious turmoil as the old Catholic order was threatened by new religious doctrines; radical concepts questioned established theological values, challenging fundamental thinking which had existed almost since the dawn of Christianity. Men such as Martin Luther, Jean Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli had vigorously pioneered a new theology that was to have a profound impact on the traditional way in which the Christian faith had been practised for so many centuries. This trio of eminent theologians were active in the first half of the sixteenth century, the French-born Calvin in Geneva and Zwingli in Switzerland, while the German Luther, originally an Augustinian monk, lived in the university town of Wittenberg, where he had become both teacher and preacher. Luther was largely instrumental as the founder of Protestantism while Calvin’s concepts led to Presbyterianism, which in turn exercised a lasting impression on the Scottish reformer John Knox, who was to found the Church of Scotland in the early part of Elizabeth’s reign.

These new religious philosophies were to have an equally significant impact

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.