Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (110 page)

Arminians defined all who disagreed with them, all the way up to bishops and noblemen, as 'Puritans', the implication being that such people were disloyal to the English Church (actually a version of the Church which existed beyond the cathedrals largely in the sacramentalists' own imaginations). Notably for James, the Arminians were a good deal more respectful to monarchs than the ministers of the Scottish Kirk. The King favoured leading spokesmen of this group, but he judiciously balanced them with more conventional Reformed clergy. In one of the most statesmanlike actions in the career of a man who much esteemed himself as an international Reformed Protestant statesman, he persuaded both sides to cooperate in a new venture of biblical translation, an 'Authorized Version' which was issued in 1611 and which remains his happiest lasting achievement.
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Basing itself on the hierarchy of translations back to the time of William Tyndale ninety years before, even taking notice of the Roman Catholic 'Douai' version, which had scored some palpable hits against previous Protestant English translations, it has remained vital for anglophone culture worldwide: the 'King James' version beloved of conservative Christians professing their faith in Churches of whose nature the original King James would profoundly disapprove.
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By contrast with James, his son Charles I, discreetly encouraged by Andrewes (now a powerful bishop), was not noted for judiciousness when he came to the throne in 1625. He was authoritarian by nature, and his reaction to opposition was to become not merely more authoritarian, but distinctly devious in his attempts to get his way. The new king had a soulmate in one particularly busy, conscientious and tidy-minded sacramentalist who was a former Oxford academic, William Laud, to the extent that in 1633 Charles promoted Laud to be Archbishop of Canterbury. Archbishop Laud used his talents to disastrous effect. He vigorously promoted his sympathizers in the Church. Taking a lead from more cautious and tactful moves by the late King James, he increasingly cast himself as a patriarch for an archipelago-wide British Church.
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He made matters worse by genuinely believing that anyone in the Church who disagreed with him was part of a single 'Puritan' conspiracy; his high-handed reactions against this imaginary network infuriated enough Protestants in England for the label 'Puritan' to be worn for the first time as a badge of pride, rather than an insult to be repudiated with indignation.
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Many of these angry people sailed for the hitherto languishing English colonies in North America, rather than stay in an increasingly tainted English Church, with hugely significant results for the future of Protestant Christianity worldwide (see Chapter 20).

Laud's interference in the affairs of the Church of Ireland, aided by Charles's high-handed Lord Deputy in Ireland, Thomas Wentworth, Lord Strafford, likewise angered the Irish primate, James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh. Ussher was a rare figure as a member of an old Irish family which had become firmly Protestant, for the established Church had failed to carry more than a minority of the people of Ireland with it away from Catholicism. He is now unfairly remembered only for the misguided humanist historical precision of his calculation that God created the world on the night preceding 23 October 4004 BCE, but he was a formidable scholar who wanted to defend the independence of his Protestant Church. Ussher knew the Irish Church's weakness was the result of a badly funded and badly administered Reformation, in a country in which English colonial interference produced a state of permanent crisis, but nevertheless he saw it as a potential vehicle of proper Reformation in Ireland. He was very consciously part of an international Reformed Protestant world, but in his discreet efforts to maintain his position against Archbishop Laud, Ussher might also be seen as the first senior churchman to have a vision of episcopally governed sister Churches which might cooperate in a common identity across national boundaries, without any single leader to tell them what to do. Without knowing the later phrase, he was envisioning the worldwide Anglican Communion.
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That was for the future. In the short term, Charles and Laud alienated leaders in the three kingdoms to such an extent that rebellions broke out, first in Scotland in 1638 against a typically heavy-handed royal attempt to introduce a version of the English Prayer Book without consultation; then in 1641 in Ireland, where Catholics determined to throw off English rule saw their chance in the Protestant disarray. Finally in 1642 came civil war in England, between forces led by a majority of the English Parliament in Westminster and supporters of the King, who felt that such opposition was a fight against God's anointed, whatever Charles's faults. In England the trigger for war was stark disagreement as to whether Charles could be trusted to lead armies against Irish Catholics, after his support for the deeply unpopular ecclesiastical policies of Laud and his friends, and his blatant attempts to double-cross his opponents. Although some Catholics fought for Charles, and the majority of Irish Catholics eventually tactically allied with him against the Westminster Parliament, the wars and civil wars of England and Scotland up to 1660 were overwhelmingly fought by Protestants against Protestants, to decide the future shape of British religion.
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In the course of the war, episcopacy in Scotland and England was abolished, along with the
Book of Common Prayer
. The question was now whether a strict version of Scottish presbyterianism would be set up in England, or some looser system of Church government. Calvinist theories of resistance to tyranny reached the ultimate conclusion when, after Charles's defeat by Westminster's armies, a radical group among the victorious Puritans forced the King's trial and then his beheading in 1649: this was no arbitrary lynching, but an attempt to punish the King for his crimes against his people, in the name of a Protestant God. In Cromwell's eyes, Charles deserved the name which the furious prophet Shimei had bestowed on King David at a particularly low moment in that charismatic but murderous and usurping monarch's career: 'you man of blood, you worthless fellow'.
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The Old Testament had in that moment revealed its not infrequent low opinion of kings, and English Puritans hearkened: Charles deserved to die. They created an English Republic, or 'Commonwealth', though angry Royalists looking back after the Commonwealth's destruction were inclined among more abusive names to style it the Interregnum, period between two reigns. The Republic's armies were so successful that, in the decade after 1650, they united the Atlantic archipelago in a single political unit for the first time in its history. Having defeated the Scots, the regime was not inclined to set up presbyterianism in England, and was content for the English Church to become little more than a nationwide federation of Protestant parishes.

Nevertheless in the end the victorious Puritans were defeated and thrust aside because they were as tidy-minded as poor Archbishop Laud (executed for his High Church tidy-mindedness in 1645, even though he had been a helpless prisoner of the Westminster Parliament for the previous four years). The successive Puritan regimes were too straitlaced for the people of England and they could find no popular political substitute for the monarchy. The de facto ruler through most of the 1650s, Oliver Cromwell, former military commander turned reluctant dictator in the name of godly Reformation (and a distant cousin of Henry VIII's minister Thomas Cromwell), eventually authorized the abolition of Christmas and tore down the maypoles around which the English had danced on their spring holidays. Worse still for the population was one respect in which the regime was not tidy-minded: it tolerated with different degrees of reluctance a variety of radical sects who were widely seen as offending against all convention. There were English Baptists, who took up the principle of adult or believers' baptism like the Anabaptists of mainland Europe in the previous century; Baptists had been a tiny group before the civil wars began, but their numbers swelled in the Parliamentary army and in the country at large in its aftermath, causing huge offence to the vast majority who took it for granted that a Christian society depended on all its members being baptized in infancy.

Most shocking were those whom scandalized respectable folk called 'Ranters': they were a group like some of the sixteenth-century radicals of mainland Europe who believed that God had sent them a particular revelation, an 'inner light', surpassing that in the printed pages of the Bible. Yet they shared and drew extreme conclusions from Martin Luther's central scriptural affirmation that God's free grace was the only source of salvation. That freed all the saved from any law, human or divine, or (if God were truly to be glorified) from good behaviour at all. This was the 'antinomian' conclusion (
nomos
is a Greek word for 'law' - hence antinomianism is 'against law') which had haunted the respectable magisterial Reformation from its earliest days. God-given antinomian freedom might be expressed by such gestures as ecstatic blasphemy, joyous tobacco-smoking and running naked down the street. Such tales lost nothing in the telling, especially in the burgeoning sensationalist journalism of those years.
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More closely associated with the Ranters than they liked to admit in later years were the 'Friends', whom their enemies called Quakers. Their conviction of their special role in God's purposes and of their 'inner light' led them to disrupt public worship and refuse to doff their hats to social superiors, among many signs of contempt for the norms of ordinary society.

The bulk of the English people applauded the beating up of Quakers - and the bulk of the English people also refused to open their shops on Christmas Day, as the regime demanded. Cromwell's morose authority postponed any greater reversal until his death in 1658, but after two years of increasing disorder, maypoles, Christmas and King Charles II were all summoned back from exile.
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The Church of England which Charles restored, episcopal and ceremonial, complete with expensively refurbished cathedrals, had gained new martyrs for its cause, for the first time since the reign of Queen Mary Tudor. Newly aggressive against Puritanism after their sufferings, the clergy who dominated it were much more obviously out of step with the continent-wide Reformed ethos than they had been before the war, and the Church Settlement of 1662, with a revamped version of Cranmer's
Book of Common Prayer
, excluded many Protestants who before the civil wars would have found a home within the national Church; now they were labelled Dissenters, whether they liked it or not.

So, in the twenty-year civil wars of the Atlantic Isles, a new identity was born for the Churches of England and Ireland, which was occasionally at the time called Anglican, a term which came to be much more widely used in the nineteenth century. Alongside Anglicanism was a strong and irrepressible Protestant Dissent.
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Anglicanism is a religious outlook which has kept its distance from the rest of the Reformation, but also from Rome, and is prepared to live with the ambiguous consequences. It took time for this conscious middle ground to develop; those in charge in the Church to begin with after 1660 tended to remember their sufferings and emphasize what made their new Church exclusive in its identity. Those who regretted that outlook, while also deploring the extremes of 'Puritanism' which were its mirror-opposite, were soon abusively known as 'Latitudinarians'; and their hour had not come.
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Between Anglicanism and Dissent, in concert with the allied but contrasting story of Scottish Protestantism, anglophone Protestantism gained a religious profile which has reproduced its peculiarity across the world, as we will discover in tracing the fortunes of British imperial adventures in Chapters 19 and 20.

In tracing the fortunes of Protestantism, we have been neglecting half a Reformation: that which remained loyal to Rome. There is still much argument about what to call this other movement: 'Counter-Reformation' has long been popular, but narrowly ties it to a reaction to the Protestant Reformation, particularly that within the Holy Roman Empire, about which the expression (in German,
Gegenreformation
) was first used. One distinguished modern scholar of the subject has suggested a broader usage, 'Early Modern Catholicism', but that seems too wide and shapeless.
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Probably the best formulation, which suggests the internal dynamism of what happened, is 'Catholic Reformation'. That is a reminder that if Luther was the heir of the reformist neuroses of 1500, so were popes, and that it was also popes who oversaw an expansion of Western Christianity over two centuries from 1500 which took it to every continent of the world except Australasia - at a time when Protestantism was hardly looking beyond European horizons. It is to that remarkable transformation in the fortunes of the Latin Western Church, and the formation of world Christianity, that we now turn.

18

Rome's Renewal (1500-1700)

CROSS-CURRENTS IN SPAIN AND ITALY: VALDESIANS AND JESUITS (1500-1540)

As the fifteenth century came to a close, two brothers were born in the Spanish city of Cuenca - they may have been twins. Alfonso and Juan de Valdes became respectively an emperor's servant and a heretic. Alfonso was in his early thirties at his death in 1532, but already he was in the inner counsels of the most powerful Christian ruler of the century, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, through service to the apocalyptically minded Imperial Chancellor Cardinal Gattinara (see pp. 593-4). Alfonso wrote Erasmian-style dialogues on Church reform and (like Gattinara) promoted his master's destiny in God's plan; when he met Philipp Melanchthon at the Imperial Diet discussing the Augsburg Confession in 1530 (see p. 621), he was pleased to find much in common with the Wittenberg humanist. Juan had time to develop further than his brother: he became much more of a heretic than Melanchthon. These two independently minded Spaniards, alert to the crisis in the Church and themselves players in it, are testimony that there was nothing monolithic about Spanish Catholicism in their generation. They came from an 'Old Christian' gentry family on their father's side, but the Spanish Inquisition had burned their mother's brother in 1491 for secret Jewish practices, and their mixture of
alumbrado
sympathies and refined Erasmian culture was liable to arouse equal paranoia in a new generation of inquisitors. The year before Alfonso befriended Melanchthon at Augsburg, Juan had judged that a voyage to Italy might enhance his likelihood of avoiding a fiery death, and he never returned to Spain. Instead, he had a remarkable if diffused effect on Western Christianity, not just in Italy but beyond. His story sheds an unexpected light on the Catholic Reformation.
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