The Age of Reformation: The Tudor and Stewart Realms 1485-1603 by Alec Ryrie

Author:Alec Ryrie [Ryrie, Alec]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion
ISBN: 9781405835572
Goodreads: 6635181
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

Lent: The duke of Northumberland’s Reformation

Consolidation and division: The official Reformation

John Dudley is traditionally cast as the bad duke to Edward Seymour’s good duke – or, sometimes, vice versa – but the two men are not easily comparable. Dudley had himself created duke of Northumberland in 1551, but he never became Lord Protector, nor did he rule as absolutely as Seymour had. He was merely Lord President of the Council, and to some extent maintained conciliar government. Moreover, the king was no longer merely a name. He took an increasingly active interest in government, making a considerable nuisance of himself at times. Although Edward was still legally under his councillors’ tutelage, Dudley was temperamentally inclined to yield to his royal master.

Dudley patiently extracted England from the worst of the messes he had inherited from Seymour. Peace with Scotland and France was concluded in March 1550, on abject terms. England was left with nothing in Scotland, save its long-standing foothold in Berwick-upon-Tweed; the precise location of the long-contested Border at its western end was also finally agreed. Likewise, England had to yield up Henry VIII’s last French conquest of 1544, the city of Boulogne, for a modest ransom. It was a humiliating end to Henry VIII’s and Seymour’s adventures, but it was at least an end to them. The royal finances began to stabilise. Dudley also attempted to revalue the debased coinage in 1551: somewhat ineffectually, but there was at least no further debasement. Domestically, something like normality returned. More systematic censorship of printing returned, albeit with Protestant print still strongly encouraged. The populist ‘commonwealth’ agenda faded, although Latimer and other preachers continued to worry at it.

Meanwhile, Cranmer’s reforms proceeded apace. In 1550 came a new Ordinal, a form for the ordination of priests and consecration of bishops, which ran much more plainly counter to Catholic doctrine than anything in the Prayer Book. (Gardiner, who had swallowed the Prayer Book, could not accept the Ordinal.) As the conservative bishops were prised out of office, they began to be replaced with genuinely radical figures. Cranmer’s young chaplain Nicholas Ridley became bishop of London. The returned exile John Hooper, a keeper of the pure flame of Zürich’s Reformation, became bishop of Gloucester (not without trouble: pp. 169–70).

Cranmer’s sights, however, were now set towards the next great wave of reforms, which surfaced in 1552–53 in three forms. The last, and most important, was a statement of the Reformed English Church’s faith, which after long delay appeared as the Forty-Two Articles in June 1553. Despite some intense infighting over the details of the Articles, it was always plain that they would be a Reformed Protestant statement; in their final form, they owed much to Martin Bucer, Peter Martyr Vermigli and the other Protestant refugees. By then, those doctrines had already been given tangible form in another great reform, the 1552 Book of Common Prayer. This completed – or at least advanced – the project which Cranmer had started in 1549. Much of the book was

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