Silence by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Author:Diarmaid MacCulloch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-08-15T16:00:00+00:00

ENGLAND: A VARIETY OF NICODEMITES

Bucer’s opinions were not altered by the failure of the Church reunion negotiations in which he enthusiastically participated at Regensburg that same year, for there are copies of his treatise made after 1541; some carry dates up to 1544. Though he never put it into print, it is extremely interesting that two manuscript copies are to be found in England, one of them in the library of a future Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, a friend and admirer of the Strassburg reformer.31 Bucer did not live to see the restoration of Protestantism by Queen Elizabeth I in 1558, which reversed the restoration of papal authority in England by her half-sister Mary, but with his sensitivity to the English political scene, he would have instantly recognized in Elizabeth’s religious Settlement of 1559 something unprecedented among the official Reformations of sixteenth-century Europe. It was planned and executed entirely by former Nicodemites, Protestants who had nevertheless conformed outwardly to the Roman Church from the moment Mary had secured her throne.

Foremost in this group was the Queen herself, ably assisted by two secular politicians, the brothers-in-law William Cecil and Nicholas Bacon (whose emphatically Protestant wife had been among Queen Mary’s ladies-in-waiting). Their counterparts among the leading clergy were Matthew Parker, Elizabeth’s first Archbishop of Canterbury; William May, her first nominee for Archbishop of York; the new Dean of Westminster Abbey, Gabriel Goodman; and the new Dean of the Chapel Royal, her former chaplain George Carew: all those clergy had served actively in the Church of Mary Tudor, though they now did their best to cover their tracks for the benefit of later historians. To a man, they were undoubtedly convinced Protestants, but they had also all been, in practical terms, Nicodemites. If William May had not died prematurely in 1560, that Nicodemite team would have entirely kept at bay from the very top of the Elizabethan political and religious scene all those Edwardian Protestants who had gone into exile under Mary for their faith.

Elizabeth’s notorious detestation of all things Genevan is often attributed to the political ineptitude of John Calvin’s Scottish admirer John Knox, but the fact that her Primate of All England was the custodian of one copy of Bucer’s aggressive tract against Calvin’s arguments raises the possibility that she may have been angrily conscious that Calvin would see her as the object of his principled contempt.32 Her affirmation of her English Messieurs les Nicodémites in her plans for her Church also tells us much about her conduct as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, whose original parliamentary Settlement she preserved with fierce determination against all attempts to change it over the next forty-four years.

Continuously from the 1570s, Elizabethan England was clandestinely or openly at war with Catholic Europe. As a result, it judicially murdered more Roman Catholics than any other country in the continent – over forty-five years, nearly two hundred, all on charges of treason – producing tales of religious heroism and fortitude to equal

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.