Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (106 page)

And the woman saw that it was a good tree to eat of and lusty unto the eyes and a pleasant tree for to make wise. And took of the fruit of it and ate, and gave unto her husband also with her, and he ate. And the eyes of both of them were opened, that they understood how that they were naked.
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Or we can sample of Tyndale's own vigorous words introducing his translation of Deuteronomy (it is noticeable that when he started translating the Books of the Law in the Tanakh, he abandoned his previous practice of filching the individual prefaces of books from Martin Luther's Bible to translate or paraphrase in his English prefaces, and instead expressed his own thoughts):

This is a book worthy to be read in day and night and never to be out of hands. For it is the most excellent of all the books of Moses. It is easy also and light and a very pure gospel that is to wete, a preaching of faith and love: deducing the love to God out of faith, and the love of a man's neighbour out of the love of God.

The New Testament which Tyndale prepared first had an immediate impact when clandestine copies arrived in England in 1526-7: nothing else was so important in creating a popular English Reformation which was independent of King Henry's whims. By the time of Tyndale's martyrdom in 1536, perhaps sixteen thousand copies of his translation had passed into a country of no more than two and a half million people, with a very poorly developed market for books.
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And in one of the religious ironies with which Henry's reign was replete, the King came to authorize the translation made by the man whose murder he had in effect arranged. Only a year after Tyndale's death Thomas Cromwell secured a royal order for every parish in England to buy a complete Bible, most of whose text was in fact Tyndale's translation (Henry VIII never seems to have realized this). It is the ancestor of all Bibles in the English language, especially the 'Authorized' or 'King James' version of 1611 (see pp. 649- 50); Tyndale's biographer David Daniell has bluntly pointed out that 'Nine-tenths of the Authorized Version's New Testament is Tyndale's.'
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By the time King Henry died in 1547, England's traditional religion was under severe attack. The Bible was now available to Henry's subjects in a complete version created by English evangelicals building on Tyndale's achievement, although with a characteristically unpredictable swing of policy in 1543, the King sought to ban his less well-educated subjects from reading it, deeply troubled at the possibility that they might have radical thoughts as a result of irresponsible thumbing through its pages. Despite this major setback for evangelicals, a terrible blow had been delivered to the old faith by the closure of all monasteries, nunneries and friaries in England and Wales (1532-40). This was the swiftest and most thoroughgoing such campaign in Europe, against one of the continent's best-administered groupings of religious communities, whose place in English life stretched back for a thousand years. The dissolution had been masterminded by Thomas Cromwell during his years of power, but even after Cromwell's execution, the King and his advisers extended the attack on traditional centres of intercession for the dead by a systematic dissolution of chantry foundations, although they did not give ideological reasons for what they were doing, simply announcing that King Henry needed the money.
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The way lay open in 1547 to a more coherently ideological Reformation for England, presided over enthusiastically by Henry's young son, Edward VI.
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Magisterial Reformations in the city-states of mainland Europe took their cue from Zurich. They also took note of the disaster which rewarded Zwingli's ambitious aim of steering the city into becoming a militant new Israel, leading a Reformation through Switzerland and perhaps even further. The Catholic cantons of Switzerland defeated Zurich's armies on its border at Kappel in 1531, and among those who died there was Zwingli himself, cut down in full armour on the hillside battlefield, in a drastic consequence of abandoning his pacifist principles (Luther showed rather distasteful
Schadenfreude
about this). Zurich never again took up such an aggressive programme, but the young cleric hastily chosen to take over leadership from Zwingli, Heinrich Bullinger, proved a most effective and wise ecclesiastical statesman over more than four decades. One of the Reformation's most prolific letter-writers in the face of formidable competition for that title, he revealed a talent for sustaining friendships and intervening helpfully in the troubles of Reformed Churches right across the continent. He was one of the sixteenth century's most successful communicators, both through his collected and systematized sermons, the
Decades
, and because of his sensible little book on marriage, which had the advantage of forming the perfect wedding gift in serious-minded households throughout Protestant Europe.
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STRASSBURG, ENGLAND AND GENEVA (1540-60)

One of the most apparently promising solutions to the relationship of Church and temporal power in the first three decades of the Reformation was developed in the city-state of Strasbourg (then the overwhelmingly German-speaking Strassburg), led by a former Dominican friar, Martin Bucer. Until the middle of the century, it looked as if Strassburg would become the centre of the future Reformation, for Bucer was a self-proclaimed (though fatally verbose) broker of consensus amid the Reformers' disagreements, and the city lay at the heart of European trade and culture. It attracted a good many radical enthusiasts, but thanks to Bucer's unwearying powers of argument and obvious concern for the purity of the Church, it was rather better at persuading radicals back into the mainstream than most Protestant states and generally more humane in its reaction to them.
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Nevertheless, Strassburg was soon to fall away from European leadership because of military defeat, and then there would be other contenders: first England, followed by Geneva.

Prospects for a civilized religious settlement and the reunion of the Western Church were high around 1541-2, but they ended in disappointment. This was the time when Hermann von Wied, Archbishop of Cologne, the only prince-bishop in Germany to try meeting the Reformation halfway, was attempting to lead his archdiocese in a Reformation whose planning involved not just his own clergy but also Martin Bucer. In the next few years, however, he failed, defeated by fierce opposition from traditionalists in his own Cathedral Chapter and by firm intervention from Charles V which eventually saw him ejected from his see. If von Wied's plans had worked, Cologne might have been an example to other Catholic prelates of how to find a middle path of change within the old structures.
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With the failure of discussions between Protestants and Catholics around the imperial Diet at Regensburg in 1541 (see pp. 662-3), the time for humanist moderation was evidently past; against this background, in 1545 a council of the Western Church convened by the Pope at last began meeting at Trent, in a mood of aggressive confidence, to take new initiatives in the papal Church. By the late 1540s, it looked as if the Reformation's opponents were triumphing. Luther died in 1546, by which point Zwingli was long dead. The Holy Roman Emperor confronted the military alliance formed by his Lutheran princes, the 'Schmalkaldic League', and in 1547 roundly defeated them (see Plate 55): as part of his victory, he ended the independent career of the Reformation in Strassburg, which had with uncharacteristic rashness committed itself to the Schmalkaldic alliance.
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Martin Bucer hastily left Strassburg for England, where the group of politicians ruling in the name of Henry VIII's young son, Edward VI, after Henry's death in 1547 now had the chance to propel England into the leadership of the Reformation throughout Europe. Archbishop Cranmer, one of their number and now a hardened political operator, led a thoroughgoing destruction of the traditional devotional world in England. His Reformation owed most to the example of Strassburg and the Swiss, though in his vernacular liturgy for the English Church, the
Book of Common Prayer
of 1549, revised in more uncompromisingly Reformed style in 1552, Cranmer was ready to draw on any useful precedent. Those included the more conservative Lutheran forms of worship recently devised in Germany (he had married a German theologian's niece in the conservatively Lutheran city of Nuremberg when on embassy there for Henry VIII in 1532).
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Consequently the English Prayer Book, only lightly revised in 1559 and finally given a slightly more Catholic-leaning makeover in 1662, has remained an extraordinarily flexible vehicle for a form of Western Christianity which, in its development as 'Anglicanism', has sometimes looked with some distaste on its Reformation inheritance from the Cranmer years.

One incomparable aspect of the book is the language in which it was written, which even those who distrust its theological content can unreservedly admire. The processes of the Prayer Book's original construction will probably always remain obscure, but it is evident that a single powerful voice lies behind its phrasing and that can only be Cranmer's. The unity of the book, and the subtle way in which it draws on and transforms an astonishing variety of earlier texts in Latin, German and English, indicate that Cranmer was very much more than simply the chairman of a drafting committee. His particular literary genius was narrowly for formal prose, without the range of conversational or dramatic tones of which Tyndale was capable, but prose which can be spoken generation on generation without seeming trite or tired - words now worn as smooth and strong as a pebble on a beach. The Archbishop bequeathed first England and then the whole world a liturgical drama which he wished to be enacted by all those present in an act of worship; and so it has proved. The words of his Prayer Book have been recited by English-speakers far more frequently than the speeches and soliloquies of Shakespeare. Fragments remain even with the unchurched: 'for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part', or from another resonant moment in human experience, 'earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust'.
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Cranmer's words are the common inheritance of all those who use English, that language which in his age was so marginal to European cultural life, yet is now so universal.

Besides its prose, Cranmer's Prayer Book has left one liturgical legacy to all Western Christendom: an evening service or 'office' called Evensong. Evensong is the part of the Prayer Book now most regularly performed in Anglicanism, and so it is there that Cranmer's superbly dignified prose is still most frequently appreciated in its proper context. Cranmer had a particular aptitude for creating the short prayers known as 'collects', of which he wrote a set for the changing weeks of his new English liturgical year (considerably simplified from the pre-Reformation yearly kalendar of holy days). These small jewels of prayers are rarely simply his own work, but their expression and the delicately precise choice of language are his. One of the briefest of all, second of the Evensong collects used throughout the year, is also one of the most memorable. It was a translation of an existing eighth-century collect from the Latin West, but Cranmer tweaked the text in his own way. Taking its controlling metaphor from the setting of the service in the fading evening light, the collect is a perfectly balanced threefold structure: a petition of two thoughts is followed by an appeal to the Trinitarian relationship of Father and Son. Cranmer has characteristically added a pairing of words, 'perils and dangers', in place of the Latin
insidias
for 'snares' - and crucially, at the end, he has enriched the Trinitarian idea with the word 'love':

Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ.
Amen
.
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Anglican Evensong has proved such a dignified and compelling approach to the divine that it has brought spiritual consolation way beyond the borders of the Anglican Communion, to Protestant and Roman Catholic alike. There is some paradox in its use today, because Cranmer did little to hide his contempt for both cathedrals and elaborate church music, yet nowadays Evensong is most characteristically encountered sung by the choirs of Anglican cathedrals, and draws on a rich five-centuries-old inheritance of specially composed anthems and settings. It is possible that Cranmer's quiet sense of humour might make him appreciate this strange outcrop of his attempt to provide England with a decently Reformed vehicle for the worship of God.

Yet this English experimentation abruptly ended when Edward, after a healthy and assertive childhood in which he bade fair to be as over-life-size as his formidable father, died young in 1553.
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With dramatic speed, England rejected Edward's chosen Protestant successor, his cousin Jane Grey. Against the expectations of English politicians and foreign ambassadors alike, widespread popular fury challenged the deal done in Westminster, more decisively than at any other moment in the Tudor age. Armed demonstrations across south-eastern England forced the kingdom's leaders to accept the claim to the throne made by the dead king's Catholic half-sister, the Lady Mary.
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Although Mary's status as King Henry's daughter probably mattered to the kingdom more than her religion, once she had thrust aside Queen Jane, she embarked on as great an experiment as that of Edward, but in mirror-image. She returned an entire kingdom to Roman obedience and the possibility of innovations in Catholic reform. In the process she burned at the stake some of the leading English Protestant reformers, Thomas Cranmer included. She also overcame the objections of English politicians to her marriage plans to King Philip II of Spain, which promised to bind the future of her kingdom to the most powerful Catholic monarchy in Europe (see pp. 671-5). The hopes for asserting God's word seemed doomed through most of Europe. The Last Days had not arrived; many had rejected the message. What could be done?