The Troubled History of Catholicism in England (Part II)
By Grzegorz Kucharczyk,
Love One Another! 11/2008 → History
The martyrdoms of Sir Thomas More, Bishop John Fisher, and the
London Carthusians were a powerful individual witness to the Catholic
faith. However, 16th-century England did not lack equally poignant
collective manifestations of loyalty to the faith of the fathers.
The two most important of these were the Pilgrimage of Grace of
1536 and the great Western Rebellion of 1549. While Anti-Catholicism
was the work of the State, the defence of Catholicism in 16th-century
England was quite literally the work of the common people.
The Pilgrimage of Grace
The rising in the North, in 1536, was the first collective response
of the Catholic population to Henry VIII’s destruction of
monastic life in Britain. The insurgents, most of them commoners,
called their movement the “Pilgrimage of Grace,” thereby
stressing that their main purpose was the defence of the Catholic
faith. This could be seen in their petition to the King, known as
the York Articles. The first article read: “The suppression
of so many religious houses as are at this instant time suppressed,
whereby the service of our God is not well performed but also the
commons of your realm be unrelieved, the which as we think is a
great hurt to the common wealth and many sisters be put from their
livings and left at large – we believe this to be to a great
detriment of common good.”
The oath taken by thousands of insurgents on October 17, 1536 also
had the character of collective witness. It went as follows: “Ye
shall not enter into this our Pilgrimage of Grace for the commonwealth,
but only for the love that ye do bear unto Almighty God his faith,
and to Holy Church militant and the maintenance thereof; to the
preservation of the King’s person and his issue, to the purifying
of the nobility, and to expulse all villain blood and evil councillors
against the commonwealth from his Grace and his Privy Council of
the same. And that ye shall not enter into our said Pilgrimage for
no particular profit to yourself, nor to do any displeasure to any
private person, but by counsel of the commonwealth, nor slay nor
murder for no envy, but in your hearts put away all fear and dread,
and take afore you the Cross of Christ, and in your hearts His faith,
the restitution of the Church, the suppression of these heretics
and their opinions.”
The insurgents’ banners bore the image of the Five Wounds
of Christ, and the first stanza of their song proclaimed: “Christ
crucified! / For thy wounds wide, / Us commons guide! / Which pilgrims
be, / Through God’s grace, / For to purchase / Old wealth
and peace / Of the spirituality”
By early December 1536, almost all of northern England was engulfed
by the rebellion. As can be seen from the proclamation, the insurgents
naively believed that all the blame for the top-down anti-Catholic
revolution could be imputed to the baneful influence of the royal
advisers. They believed that the King, upon hearing the voice of
the people and not of his flatterers, would accede to their demands
and restore the freedom of the Catholic religion in his realm. It
was in this spirit that, on December 4, 1536 the insurgents drafted
a petition to the King at York. It comprised twenty-four articles,
with the central issues being set out in the preamble:
• “Firstly, to have the heresies of Luther, Wycliffe,
Hus, Melanchthon, Bucer, Tyndall, Anabaptists, Confessio Germaniae,
etc. annulled and destroyed within this realm.
• “To have the care of souls due to the Supreme Head
of the Church restored to the See of Rome as before. Also, to
have bishop consecrations come thence as well.
• “We humbly beseech our most Sovereign King to have
Princess Mary [the daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon,
whose marriage was the only one recognized by the Church — author’s
parenthesis] recognized as the legitimate heiress to the throne.
• “To have the monasteries’ houses, lands, and
goods restored to them….
• “To have heretic bishops as well as laymen and the
whole sect consigned to fire, and if not — let them face us
in battle.
• To have Lord Cromwell and Sir Richard Richie punished
as destroyers of the good laws of this realm and as followers
of a false, heretic sect….”
The Pilgrimage of Grace eventually disbanded without taking up
armed struggle. Henry VIII promised to consider the demands of the
pilgrims. In reality, he wished to buy time and discourage them
from continuing the uprising. The ploy proved effective. The only
positive upshot of the Pilgrimage was that it was not drowned in
blood.
The Western Rebellion
Henry VIII’s reckless experiment at preserving the purity
of the Catholic faith apart from Rome did not survive him. After
his death, the throne of England devolved on his ten-year-old son,
Edward VI (from Henry’s third marriage to Jane Seymour). The
young King’s advisers, including the Lord Protector Edward
Seymour (Edward’s uncle), did not hide their pro-Protestant
leanings. The main force behind the introduction of Protestantism
to England after the death of Henry VIII was the Anglican archbishop,
Thomas Cranmer.
In 1549, by royal assent, Cranmer oversaw the publication of The
Book of Common Prayer. Cranmer himself was its principal author.
His chief purpose in promulgating the Book was to replace the Roman
missals, which Henry VIII had not banned, and which still conveyed
the traditional Catholic teaching on the Holy Mass (stressing its
sacrificial character and the Real Presence of Christ under the
appearances of bread and wine).
The introduction of The Book of Common Prayer was followed by other
reforms spearheaded by Archbishop Cranmer, including the banning
of Latin from the liturgy of the Anglican Church. His next measure
was to remove the altars from the churches and replace them with
wooden tables. Next, the Blessed Sacrament ceased to be kept in
the churches. Holy Communion was distributed under both species,
and the celibacy of priests was abolished.
Just as the people had opposed Henry’s innovations in 1536,
so did they reject Cranmer’s reforms. In 1549, England’s
western counties (Cornwall, Devon, and Essex) mounted a popular
insurrection. The immediate cause was the publishing of The Book
of Common Prayer. The major force behind the Western Rebellion was
the rural population. Although members of the gentry and the clergy
who still professed the Catholic religion also took part in it,
the Rebellion was above all a popular manifestation in defence of
the traditional Catholic religion, which the reformers were so mercilessly
dismantling.
The insurgents formulated sixteen articles and addressed them to
Edward VI. The following are some of the key demands:
• “We will have all the general counsels and holy
decrees of our forefathers observed, kept, and performed, and
whosoever shall gainsay them, we hold them as heretics.
• “We will have the Mass in Latin, as was before,
and celebrated by the priest without any man or woman communicating
with them.
• “We will have the Sacrament hang over the high altar,
and there to be worshiped, as it was wont to be.
• “We will have the Sacrament of the Altar, but at
Easter delivered to the laypeople; and then but in one kind.
• “We will have our priests administer the Sacrament
of Baptism without cease, on days of the week as well as on feast
days.
• “We will have wafers and holy water distributed
on every Sunday, and palms and ashes at the times set aside for
this. We will have images of saints placed again in every church
and have all the ancient ceremonies of our Holy Mother Church
restored.
• “We will not receive the new service because it
is but like a Christmas game [i.e. nativity play]; but we will
have our old service of matins, Mass, evensong, and procession
in Latin, as it was before.
• “We will have every preacher in his sermon and priest
during Mass make mention of, and pray for by name, the souls suffering
in Purgatory, as our fathers were wont to do.”
The State’s response to these demands was to quell the rebellion
by force. At the battle of Sampford Courtenay in Devon, the Western
Rebellion stood no chance. The insurgents suffered a crushing defeat,
and about 4000 of them perished.
The price of fidelity
The reign of Henry VIII’s younger daughter, Elizabeth I (1558-1603),
began a new chapter in the martyrology of English Catholics. Merely
to profess and practise the Catholic religion now became a capital
offence. Death also awaited those who celebrated Mass or took part
in it. Hundreds of English priests and laymen paid with their lives
for remaining loyal to the Church. One of these, Jesuit Father Edmund
Campion, would be canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1970. Born in 1540,
Campion was one of the leading intellectual lights of the Elizabethan
Era. (He began his studies at the ancient College of St. John’s
in Oxford at the age of seventeen). He was a loyal subject of Queen
Elizabeth I and a member of the Anglican Church, where he was ordained
deacon in 1568. To his dying day, he would profess allegiance to
his Queen. However, under the influence of a close friend, Gregory
Martin, who had gone to France to enrol in the English Catholic
seminary at Douai, Campion began to question whether he as an Anglican
indeed belonged to the One Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.
Intensive theological study and above all prayer led him to the
conclusion that to swear the Oath of Supremacy to Elizabeth as Head
of the Church in England would be to embark on the wrong path.
Campion executed an abrupt about-turn. After making a Catholic
profession of faith at the English Seminary at Douai, he was ordained
subdeacon in 1573. During a subsequent pilgrimage to Rome, he became
acquainted with the Society of Jesus. There he joined the Order
of St. Ignatius of Loyola and was ordained to the priesthood at
the Jesuit Seminary in Prague in 1579.
Soon afterwards, the Order dispatched Campion and his confrere,
Robert Persons to England to work for the catacomb Church. Before
leaving the Continent, as if sensing what awaited him in England,
he wrote: “As far as I am concerned, everything is over. I
have made a voluntary sacrifice of myself for the glory of God’s
Majesty — both in life and death. For this is all that I desire.”
Father Campion reached Dover on June 25, 1580. For a year, he celebrated
Mass for English Catholics living in hiding. He wrote his Decem
Rationes in defence of the Catholic faith against the usurpations
of the English state authorities. He was arrested in 1581, after
saying his last Mass in Leford Grange near Oxford. For his act of
treason, he could expect but one punishment — torture and death.
Before the sentence was passed, the English Jesuit addressed the
judges and the public in words that spoke for all the English Martyrs:
“In condemning us, you condemn all of your own ancestors — all
the priests and bishops of old, and all that was once the glory
of England, the island of Saints. God lives; his posterity will
live. Their judgment is not liable to corruption as is the judgment
of those who are going to condemn us to death.”
The sentence was carried out on December 1, 1581, at Tyburn, the
place of martyrdom of so many English witnesses for the Faith. Before
commencing with the butchery, the executioner gave the prisoner
one last chance to beg forgiveness of the Queen. Edmund Campion
replied, “Wherein have I offended her? In this I am innocent.
This is my last speech; in this give me credit — I have and
do pray for her.”
Grzegorz Kucharczyk
The article was published with the permission from "Love One Another!"
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