by G. J. Meyer
Theologically, Calvin soon went beyond Luther. He is best known for making explicit something that had remained implicit in Luther: the conclusion that, because fallen man has no free will and can do nothing to win salvation or escape damnation, some are predestined to be saved while others are predestined for hell. The saved are the elect, in Calvin’s system. Though they can be recognized by their acceptance of divine truth, their love of the Eucharist, and their upright conduct, these are not the means by which they achieve salvation but rather a sign of election. Calvin’s notion of “double predestination”—of some being marked for damnation just as surely as others are fated for salvation—has too often been regarded as the centerpiece of his theology. It is said to have made his God a kind of insanely cruel monster and to explain the severity of the regimen that Calvin imposed upon Geneva. In fact, however, Calvin regarded predestination as logically inescapable but otherwise beyond human understanding and in practical terms not of great importance. It was his followers who, after his death, moved predestination closer to the center of “Calvinist” belief. Calvin’s own view was that the idea of predestination should make it possible for believers to set aside their anxieties about earning salvation and put their trust in the mercy of a gentle, compassionate divine father (who was also, Calvin suggested, a loving mother). Calvin was generally disinclined to take a passionate interest in theological questions that consumed many of his contemporaries but seemed to him to have little practical value in addressing the needs of the elect. He finessed one of the most contentious of issues, for example, by declaring that Christ was really present in the Eucharist but only in a “spiritual” sense, and letting it go at that. He regarded the heart as more important than the intellect in establishing a right relationship with God.
What separated Calvin from the Lutherans most radically, at least in terms of practical consequences, was his approach to the governance of the church as well as—church and state being inextricably connected in his system—the civil society. Luther, in renouncing the traditional church, had discarded Catholic belief in a priesthood endowed with special authority and unique sacramental faculties. In its place he offered a “priesthood of all believers,” and while acknowledging the church as a legitimately distinct element of society, he emphatically subordinated it (especially after the Peasants’ War) to civil authority. For Calvin, by contrast, the church and its clergy retained a unique authority, with not only the right but the duty to reshape the world in such a way as to make it a fit habitation for the elect. Hence one of the defining characteristics of Calvinism (and the Puritanism to which it gave rise in England): a zealous commitment to making the world a fully realized part of Christ’s kingdom. Curiously, people who believed they could do nothing to alter their eternal destinies nevertheless dedicated themselves to making everyone in the world conduct themselves in a holy manner as Calvin defined holiness. This was a matter of duty, and its aim was not to save souls but to protect the elect from the doomed.
Calvin’s whole career was an expression of commitment to a Christian reordering of society. He came early to be certain not only that Catholicism was a gross perversion of the gospel—his contempt for the old religion appears at times to border on the pathological—but that he himself, by reading Scripture correctly, had found in it truths that European Christianity had either intentionally suppressed or, more charitably, remained blind to for more than a thousand years. Among his recovered truths were highly specific instructions as to how the church and the community of believers should be organized and managed. It was of course extraordinary, his conviction that virtually all of Christendom had been grievously in error almost from the beginning and that he alone was free of error. On its face it was outlandish. But in the theological confusion of the sixteenth century, Calvin’s impregnable self-confidence and the clarity of his ideas brought him an eager audience.
Most of his core ideas were already in place when, in 1536, Calvin happened to make an overnight stop in Geneva and was persuaded to remain there and join the embattled local forces of reform. He quickly showed himself to be the most unhesitating and uncompromising of crusaders, answering disagreement with scorn and demanding that everyone in the city either assent to his beliefs or face excommunication and expulsion. During his first months in Geneva he published the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, which as it evolved would become arguably the most important single work in the history of Protestantism. When after two years he insisted that the city council submit to the authority of the clergy—to his authority, in effect—he found that he had overreached. Now it was he who was sent into exile.
Geneva remained a religious cockpit, however, and the most ambitious of its reformers soon were yearning once again for strong leadership. In 1541 Calvin was invited to return. He did so on very nearly his own terms, demanding that the council enact and enforce his Ecclesiastical Ordinances, and from that point until the end of his life twenty-three years later he outmaneuvered one after another of his adversaries until Geneva became the Sparta of Protestant Europe. His rules were not only given the force of law but declared “holy doctrine”—infallible, or something not easily distinguished from it. The regime that he imposed was democratic in the sense that church members chose their pastors, but once chosen, those pastors, working with and through lay elders, were able to rule virtually unchallenged. Eventually Calvin’s consistory, an ecclesiastical court presided over by the pastors, was empowered to investigate and discipline anyone in the city. Not only drunkenness, gambling, and sexual promiscuity but dancing, singing outside church, swearing, and failing to attend sermons became crimes. Catholic practice, of course, was absolutely forbidden. Punishments ranged from reprimands and public confession to beatings, banishment, even execution. In a five-year period toward the end of Calvin’s career, fifty-eight Genevans were sentenced to death, seventy-six exiled.
Calvin became a major force in England’s religious evolution without really trying to do so. Many of the evangelicals who could not accept Henry VIII’s quasi-Catholic Church had taken up exile in Geneva, where Calvin’s mind and personality powerfully affected their beliefs. When they flooded back into England after Edward VI’s accession, they carried a white-hot Calvinist fervor with them. They formed the nucleus of what would become a potent new element in English national life. They sparked a movement that knew what it wanted, knew that it was right, knew that its opposition was damnably wrong in the most literal sense, and was not inclined to compromise.
19
A Revolution and a Coup
Edward Tudor was fifteen and a half years old when, on the second day of April 1552, he suddenly fell ill. His physicians were of course concerned, especially when it became clear that he had not only measles (a dangerous disease into the twentieth century) but smallpox to boot. The men who were ruling in the young king’s name had reason to be more worried than the doctors. If Edward died, everything they had achieved, both for themselves and for their faith, would be at risk. If he were followed on the throne by his half-sister Mary, next in line under Henry VIII’s final arrangements, they could expect little better than disaster. However, the boy’s recovery was swift and soon seemed complete, and in short order everyone was breathing easier.
On the brink of manhood now, Edward was taking an increasingly conspicuous part in the management of the kingdom. Under the indulgent tutelage of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland and lord president of the Privy Council, he gave every evidence of developing into a formidable monarch. He had the Tudor intelligence, and like his father and sisters he was being given the rigorous training in languages, the classics, and theology that Renaissance Europe deemed appropriate to royalty. From early childhood he had been schooled in a very particular view of the world and his place in it, and he embraced everything he was taught: that his authority came directly from God, so that he was accountable to no living person; that God had given him dominion over the English church no less than over the sta
te; that as God’s vicar he had a solemn responsibility to establish true Christianity throughout his realm; and that the only true Christianity was the evangelical faith of his godfather Cranmer and his tutors. Having been raised and educated by passionate anti-Catholics who scorned tradition—even his stepmother Catherine Parr believed that God had chosen her to be Henry’s sixth queen so that she could do her part in fending off the dark forces of superstition—he was a firm believer in justification by faith, in predestination, and in other things that his father had never ceased to abominate. Things that Henry had never stopped believing, on the other hand, were now Edward’s abominations. And he displayed the eager combativeness of the incipient Puritan—a determination to engage the world and transform it into God’s kingdom. Francis van der Delft, the Catholic ambassador of the doggedly Catholic Charles V, reported dryly that “in the court there is no man of learning so ready to argue in support of the new doctrine as the king, according to what his masters tell him and he learns from his preachers.”
In fact, however, by 1552 Edward was no one’s mere puppet. As early as 1550, barely in adolescence, he had delighted his mentors and horrified the court’s remaining conservatives by demanding the removal of any invocation of the saints (veneration of saints having become an obnoxious vestige of the old religion) from the consecration oath taken by new bishops. By that time, too, Edward was objecting to the masses being said in his sister Mary’s household, refusing to agree when his advisers suggested that it would be better to turn a blind eye to such practices than to provoke the wrath of her cousin the emperor. The mass was sinful, Edward insisted, and if he tolerated sinfulness he himself would sin. England’s second Reformation was thus now fully under way, and it had no advocate more enthusiastic than the young king himself. It was in every respect a revolution from above, driven by a council whose conservative members had been either purged or politically neutered. With the power of the Crown at its back, it was gathering momentum in spite of having feeble support in the population or even the clergy at large. The narrowness of its base is suggested by the fact that the Canterbury and York convocations of the clergy were never asked to approve or even express an opinion about the changes being made. They were not regarded as trustworthy.
The revolution’s main driver was Cranmer, whose changing beliefs had by this time carried him beyond the Lutheranism of his earlier years and to the more radical austerities of Swiss, and specifically Calvinist, reform. He achieved perhaps the greatest triumph of his career in 1552, when Parliament passed the Second Act of Uniformity and thereby mandated the use of his reworked (by himself) Prayer Book. If the earlier 1549 edition, issued before the evangelicals were sufficiently entrenched to disregard conservative opposition, had been an equivocal thing, a stopgap that satisfied no one and that exasperated the most ambitious of the reformers, the revision, or rather its adoption by Parliament, signaled the all-but-total victory of what now could be called the English Protestant church. Services cleansed of all vestiges of tradition—prayers for the dead, any mention of saints, the old familiar music and clerical vestments—became compulsory for laity and clergy alike. Harsh penalties were imposed: six months imprisonment for being present at any service not in conformity with the new law, a year for a second offense, life for a third. In other ways, too, Parliament brought to an end the liberality that had marked the beginning of the new regime (a pro forma liberality that in practice had been extended to the evangelicals only). Once again it was made treason to deny not only the royal supremacy but any prescribed article of faith. More positively, the provisions by which Henry VIII had permitted treason convictions on the basis of testimony from a single witness, prevented defendants from facing their accusers, and prescribed the death sentence for any first offense were expunged by Parliament. Henceforth the death penalty could be imposed for a first offense only if the treasonous statements were expressed in “writing, printing, carving or graving.” Treason by spoken word was punishable by imprisonment and loss of possessions for first and second offenses, with a third conviction required for execution. Edward’s regime, if not exactly a national liberation, continued to be not nearly as bloody as his father’s.
The revolution proceeded apace, receiving fresh impetus from the many reformers who had come hurrying from the continent after the death of Henry (who would have had many of them killed for their beliefs). Seven of Henry’s bishops were replaced with men of solidly evangelical credentials—men who impressed king and council with their zeal to make England a fitting home for the elect. The Dudley administration launched yet another assault on what remained of the church’s wealth, confiscating most of the endowments of the dioceses and destroying the last of the guilds and chantries. Such raids served an array of purposes. The government’s financial state remained dizzyingly precarious, and Dudley and his cohorts welcomed opportunities to funnel fresh revenues into the treasury while skimming off a share for themselves. The most radical of the reformers would have been pleased not merely to reduce the bishops to penury but to rid the church entirely of its traditional structures, bishops and dioceses included. These, too, were regarded as vestiges of the old Roman decadence.
The religious landscape was growing more complicated by the year. Cranmer’s difficulties were compounded by the fact that the uniformity he hoped to establish at any given time was always based on what he himself happened to believe at that time, and his beliefs were endlessly developing. Thus he repeatedly found himself demanding that everyone believe what he himself had previously denied, and forbidding beliefs that he had previously held to be compulsory. There were of course no longer any avowed Roman Catholics in positions of importance in the central government or the national church, and anyone conservative enough to try to retain the old forms without the old connection to Rome was rendered voiceless when not purged. It was the radicals, therefore, who now presented the most serious challenge to consensus. Their beliefs differed bewilderingly; the innovations with which Martin Luther had rocked Europe just three decades before could seem conservative if not reactionary when compared with the ideas more recently imported from Geneva and Zurich. Confusion was inescapable, and discord followed inevitably in its wake. When Cranmer introduced his revised Prayer Book, the fiery Scottish preacher John Knox (trained in Geneva and a protégé of Dudley, who had given him employment as a royal chaplain) complained loudly because it did not ban the old practice of kneeling to receive communion. Though Cranmer was archbishop of Canterbury and Knox by comparison was scarcely more than a nonentity, there followed a struggle for royal approval during which Edward himself intervened to postpone the issuance of the new service. Cranmer finally prevailed, at least to the extent that worshippers were instructed to kneel, but he was obliged to insert into the Prayer Book a so-called Black Rubric explaining that the practice was a gesture of respect, not a worshipping of bread and wine.
It is hardly surprising if many men and women, faced with endless surprises and reversals and disagreements, witnessing the abandonment of one aspect after another of the church in which they had been raised, simply lost interest in religion. That this was happening is suggested by the Second Act of Uniformity, which deplored the emptiness of pews and compelled regular attendance at approved services. But it was too late for Parliament, or any archbishop or king, to restore uniformity on any basis. England had become a religiously divided nation and would remain one until, after four more centuries, it became essentially postChristian.
John Dudley, soon after Somerset’s fall, had made himself a kind of father figure for Edward, coaching him and encouraging his involvement in governance of church and state. At first Edward was most active in religious matters—delaying, as we have seen, issuance of the 1552 Prayer Book—and always his aim was the acceleration of evangelical reform. Always he acted in the conviction that he was charged by God to lead the people to the truth, and always he was applauded for this by Dudley and Cranmer in spite of the fact that those two worthies were ofte
n at odds with each other. In affairs of state, too, Edward gradually became not only active but important. By 1553 he was signing the Crown’s financial warrants not only with but in place of the council. Though it would be saying too much to claim that he was actually ruling, certainly he was receiving a thorough preparation for the responsibilities of kingship. His apprenticeship, reinforced by his intelligence and immense self-assurance and an education probably more rigorous than that received by any English king before or since, suggested that a remarkable career lay ahead.
The soldier Dudley broadened Edward’s daily regimen to include the kinds of martial exercises in which his own sons were being trained, skills needed to make him a warrior-king in the ancient tradition. The boy underwent instruction in horsemanship, jousting, archery, hunting, and the latest weaponry, and though he had inherited little of his father’s strength and vitality he appears to have responded with enthusiasm. If it is idle to wonder about what sort of man Edward might have become, it is nonetheless irresistibly interesting. What he revealed of himself suggests that he would have ruled as flamboyantly as his father: while still little more than a child he showed a passion for gambling, lavish dress, and other extravagances. In true Henrician fashion he spent outlandish sums to acquire some of the costliest gems to be found on the continent even as his government struggled to stave off insolvency. He appears to have been like his father, too, in taking no interest in whatever misfortunes—hunger resulting from failed harvests, outbreaks of plague or the sweat—might be afflicting his subjects. Perhaps his least attractive characteristic was his apparent conviction, which could easily look like priggishness anchored in arrogance, that he possessed not only the authority but the wisdom to manage the lives of his elders. He not only attempted to prevent his sister Mary from hearing mass but admonished her to refrain from dancing, an innocent pleasure that that thwarted and unhappy spinster must have badly needed. When his schoolmate Barnaby Fitzpatrick went off to study in Paris, Edward sent him hectoring letters cautioning him to avoid not only Catholic observances but the company of women. On the other hand, he displayed no thirst for blood; so far as is known, the fact that neither Somerset nor Dudley killed a single conservative for resistance to reform was perfectly acceptable to the king.
