The Historical Journal, 38, 1 (1995), pp- 151—153
Copyright © 1995 Cambridge University Press
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THE IMPACT OF THE ENGLISH
REFORMATION
The early Tudor church and society, 1485-1529. By John A. F. Thomson. London and New
York: Longman, 1993. Pp. xi + 399. £36.00 cloth, £16.99 P a per.
The early Stuart church, 1603-1642. Edited by Kenneth Fincham. Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1993, Problems in Focus. Pp. viii + 301. £11.99 P a P e r The secularization of early modern England: from religious culture to religious faith. By C . J o h n
Sommerville. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. 227. £32.50,
cloth.
Twenty years ago it would have been difficult to predict that religious history would
emerge at the cutting edge of early modern studies: one might have expected the
history of ideas to occupy centre stage, but not that some of the most bitter scholarly
debates would be about the nature of justification in the thought of the Reformers, or
the layout of English parish churches. This is a tribute to the realism of historians, who
have recognized that what clearly interested the best minds of the period cannot have
been that marginal after all.
Least obviously controversial in this crop of books is J. A. F. Thomson's. Thomson
knows the administrative records of late medieval ecclesiastics as well as anyone, and
his wealth of illustrative material drawn from them provides a marvellous resource for
those less diligent. It is not Thomson's fault that his work will now be compared with
Eamon Duffy's Stripping of the altars. It has to be said that Duffy succeeds better in
conveying the vibrance of late medieval piety; symptomatic is that Duffy plunges the
reader into the everyday life generated by the liturgical year, while Thomson begins
with an intricate archival discussion of episcopal and capitular registers, and ends with
questions of personal belief. Thomson's church is seen through the eyes of a
conscientious and hard-working official: a perfectly valid and indeed illuminating
perspective, but perhaps not one to grip sensation-seeking undergraduates.
In fact, Thomson's conclusion is not dissimilar to Duffy's or other revisionist
historians. The church was doing a good job according to its lights, and at the time,
the vast majority of people agreed: Thomson has an engaging modesty about the
impact of the Lollards, after telling us so much about them in his previous work. For
him, the English Reformation was therefore essentially an act of state which made
possible the growth of popular protestantism.
As with other revisionist works, an essential element seems lacking in this conclusion
- the experience most famously Martin Luther's, not so much that the old system did
not work, but rather that when compared with its supposed foundation documents in
Scripture, it should not work. One might term this realization cognitive dissonance; in
the jargon of another age, it was called conversion. Thomson rather tepidly ends with
the suggestion that' perhaps the greatest failure of the pre-Reformation church was in
not providing adequate outlets' for lay piety. We may conclude that the opposite was
true: the pre-Reformation church provided abundant outlets for lay piety, indeed
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152
HISTORICAL JOURNAL
fostered intense devotion. The problem may have been the devastating result for the
intensely devout who suddenly felt that the church itself had played a confidence trick
on them by diverting their devotion to the performance of ritual and charitable works.
White-hot protestants had generally been white-hot catholics, rather than springing
fully-formed from the ranks of the religiously neuter. When told that the old system did
not work, they desperately needed to find a structured alternative; the governments of
late Tudor England certainly helped, but the process was well-launched already in the
Kenneth Fincham's captaincy of a splendid crew of essayists shows the Reformation
end result, making the point that cannot be repeated too often to revisionists: in the
end, the English Reformation was a howling success in achieving its aim of making
England a protestant country. The fierce debates lying behind the Fincham collection
cannot obscure the fact that when civil war broke out in England in 1642, it was fought
overwhelmingly between protestants, with the future shape of English protestantism
one of the biggest issues at stake. William Laud and his colleagues failed to persuade
more than a sizeable selection of clergy and a fairly small minority of laity that this
protestant church should have a sacramentalist catholic face, and the similar if less
bloody conflict fought in the nineteenth century between evangelicals and the Oxford
Movement cannot be seen as much better than a draw. Some may think that the
modern Church of England is better off because neither side won.
Fincham's introduction is a model for Problems in focus editors. He suggests a fourfold
analysis (p. 6) of religious perspectives in the early Stuart church: radical puritans,
moderate puritans, conformist Calvinists and anti-Calvinists. This seems eminently
sensible when confronting the spectrum of belief before 1640. One after another until
the last moment, Fincham's team produces evidence for the new and destabilizing
impact of the fourth of his groupings: the anti-Calvinists, although variously
contributors prefer to call them Laudian or Arminian. One of the continuing problems
of the period is indeed to find a suitable label for this group who nevertheless remain
instandy recognizable, usually because of their aggression towards the other three and
their increasing claim to represent the only true face of the Church of England.
After the emphasis on research into puritanism, much is still to be done on the
opposite pole; it may well be that instead of Richard Hooker's originating role
(especially stressed here in Peter Lake's stimulating essay), we will find that Lancelot
Andrewes emerges as the most significant figure in launching the catholic sacramentalist adventure in the Reformation Church of England. Fincham's only
contributor to contradict the general picture, Peter White, is confined (Mrs Rochesterlike) to the back of the book, and one can see why after reading his essay: an illtempered piece, considering that its theme is the essential moderation, good nature and
lack of division among English Reformation theologians. However, Fincham is to be
congratulated on having managed to cage White and Nicholas Tyacke between the
same covers, and to have provided students with so much material in a very tricky field.
C.John Sommerville argues that the English Reformation was responsible for the
secularization which has become such a feature of western Europe. The charitable
would describe his thesis as drawn with broad brush-strokes; the less charitable would
call it careless. The text abounds with small errors; most of them relate to the sixteenth
century outside Sommerville's previous area of publication, but it is alarming on p. 15
to read the Sellar-and-Yeatmanish phrase ' the unattractive James' [I], who apparently
achieved the remarkable posthumous feat of encouraging Archbishop Laud in his
activities. There is much to ponder, and many points are well made; yet the relentless
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I53
argument, sniffing out secularization in a series of categories such as language,
technology and work and art, begs many questions, and constructs a case from
anthropological or sociological generalities of dubious value. Significantly, Sommerville
has picked up and indeed twice repeated one of Paul Tillich's more fatuous remarks,
that monotheism promotes secularization and rationalist scepticism. Tell that to the
Ayatollah Khomeini, or indeed to a Hasidic Jewish family in north London.
The strong part of Sommerville's argument lies in his identification of secularizing
trends in post-1660 English society: here he engages quite effectively with J. C. D.
Clark's picture of a confessional state. Yet it is much more arguable whether the preCivil War phenomena which he defines as secularizing should really be so described.
Sommerville makes much of Henry VIII's unique role (p. 181), but some Scandinavian
monarchs might be seen in much the same light, and the Lutheran culture which they
created made a poor showing in secularization until much later. The trauma which
made the England of Charles II so different in outlook from that of Charles I surely
resulted from the realization that a bitter series of conflicts about religion had ended
in futility; this affected the conflicts about religion which followed, and suggested to
some that a religious framework to life, society and culture was not perhaps so
functional as it had seemed before. This was at best an indirect result of the English
Reformation. One fruitful comparison to make is with the other European society
which has at least as good a claim as England to begin the long process of
secularization: the northern Netherlands. It too suffered destructive confessional war
in gaining independence, and it too disappointed Calvinist ideologues by its subsequent
sloth in imposing the religious uniformity which protestants desired at least as ardently
as Tridentine catholics. Perhaps human beings can learn from their mistakes after all.
TOTTERDOWN, BRISTOL
DIARMAID M A C C U L L O C H
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