The Commons Supplication against the Ordinaries in the Light of some Archidiaconal Acta: The Alexander Prize Essay

1971 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 61-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Bowker
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Legislative Power ◽  
Ecclesiastical Courts ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Royal Supremacy ◽  
A Charge ◽  
The Church ◽  
Prize Essay

In the first three decades of the sixteenth century the ecclesiastical courts were harshly criticized.1 This criticism had had a long history, but it was sharply focused (at least in London) by the case of Richard Hunne.2 The unpopularity was used by Henry VIII, with great skill, to bring Convocation into subjection, and ultimately to force its acceptance of the royal supremacy. Convocation was intimidated in 1531 by a charge of praemunire for their exercise of ecclesiastical jurisdiction,3 and in 1532 by the Commons Supplication against the Ordinaries.s But why was this Supplication submitted? Apparently it was not a diplomatic move to reinforce Henry’s papal negotiations; nor can it be seen simply as a means devised by Cromwell to deprive the clergy of their legislative rights. As Dr Kelly has shown, most of the Supplication was not about these rights. The fact that they subsequently proved crucial should not lead us into confusing intention and result. The intention of the document is to attack the ecclesiastical courts quite as much as the legislative power of the Church. Clauses 2–7 deal directly with judicial problems. What exactly lies behind this intention? Why were the courts so unpopular and felt to be so threatening?

‘The healthe of my soule’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Clark
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Family ◽  
Kinship Relations ◽  
Royal Supremacy ◽  
The Church

Throughout the sixteenth century and beyond, the Howards are usually described as religiously ‘conservative’, resisting the reformist impulse of the Reformation while conforming to the royal supremacy over the Church. The women of the family have played little part in this characterization, yet they too lived through the earliest stages of the Reformation. This chapter shows that what we see is not a family following the lead of its patriarch in religious matters at this early stage of the Reformation, but that this did not stop them maintaining strong kinship relations across the shifting religious spectrum.

County Politics and a Puritan Cause Célèbre: Somerset Churchales, 1633(The Alexander Prize Essay)

1959 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 103-122
Author(s):  
Thomas G. Barnes
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Common Knowledge ◽  
Religious Issues ◽  
Religious Issue ◽  
The Commons ◽  
The One ◽  
Personal Rule ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church ◽  
Prize Essay

The origins of that strange amalgam of constitutional and religious issues which provoked England's civil war have not yet been fathomed. The painstaking researches of the historians of parliament have established that from early in Elizabeth's reign, the Commons assumed an increasingly Puritan complexion; from the 1621 Parliament until the last stormy session before the Personal Rule, the constitutional crisis came forward to meet and merge with the religious in the first of the three stirring resolutions voted by an expiring Commons in defiance of Mr. Speaker. Yet, the identification of sacred concerns with secular by the few hundred who sat in St. Stephen's was not the norm for the greater England beyond Westminster. Parliament had moved further and faster in the 1620's than had the country, the constitutional questions alone having been bruited about the countryside. The religious issue—the growing divergence in faith and practice within the Church—had not been generally perceived by a nation largely unaware of Laud and his adherents on the one hand and the ‘Preciser sort’ of Puritans on the other. During the Personal Rule, however, the religious issue became a matter of common knowledge, concern, rumour, and controversy. Under the impact of Laudianism, Puritanism grew more extremist. The inexorable destruction of the Elizabethan settlement, ground between an ever more rigid orthodoxy and an increasingly radical heterodoxy, forced the countryman to choose sides in matters religious. Once the identification of religious heterodoxy with political opposition was accomplished, the necessary ingredients for civil war were mixed, awaiting only the loosening of royal and episcopal authority in the Long Parliament in order to work their destructive ends.

The Submission of the Clergy

1965 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 97-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
The Commons ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Church ◽  
Uniform Treatment

The concessions presented by Archbishop Warham and representatives of Convocation to Henry VIII on 16 May 1532 have been the subject of endless controversy, while the background and circumstances of the enactment have received remarkably uniform treatment from later generations. Despite the proliferation of Reformation and Convocation histories since the eighteenth century, historians have, by and large, been content to repeat or elaborate an outline of the event first found in Wake's The State of the Church (1703). According to this interpretation, the King and Cromwell employed the Commons Supplication against the Ordinaries presented in March 1532 to compel the clergy's approval of the articles of 16 May.

English Reformation

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stella Fletcher
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Royal Supremacy ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Church ◽  
Political Decisions

Fifteenth-century England was solidly Catholic, 17th-century England predominantly Protestant: the difference between them constituted the English Reformation. Scholarly opinion is divided about the nature of the changes that happened in the 16th century, the rate at which they occurred in town and country and from region to region, and whether they came about because of a series of political decisions imposed “from above” by the Tudor monarchs from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I or as the expression of popular religious fervor welling up “from below.” Henry’s reign (1509–1547) witnessed the formal break with Rome, the declaration of royal supremacy over the church in England, and the plundering of the nation’s monastic wealth, but official promotion of more overt expressions of Protestantism had to wait for the brief reign of Edward VI (1547–1553). Mary I (reigned 1553–1558) reversed the policies of her father and brother, thereby placing England at the forefront of Catholic attempts to stem the Protestant tide. The long reign of Elizabeth (1558–1603) witnessed the emergence of an Anglican via media between the Catholic and Puritan extremes on the English ecclesiastical spectrum.

Chasing the Lady

2019 ◽  
pp. 422-441
Author(s):  
Paul Williams
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Prayer Book ◽  
Anglican Theology ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

Responding to intellectual, devotional and liturgical changes in the rest of Europe, the place of the Virgin Mary was reappraised in England during the Reformations of the sixteenth century. It was during a seventeen year period between the publication of the Litany in English under Henry VIII in 1544 and the revised Calendar of the 1559 Prayer Book under Elizabeth in 1561 that a liturgical ‘shape’ to a reformed understanding of the Virgin Mary’s place within worship of the established church was formed. It provided a basis for an ‘Anglican’ theology of Mary, subsequent devotion and liturgical developments in the Church of England and the Anglican Communion.

The Supremacy and the Episcopate: The Struggle for Control, 1534–1540

1975 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Bowker
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Small Group ◽  
Central Government ◽  
New Order ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Practical Reality ◽  
Royal Supremacy ◽  
The Government ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Way

The assumption by Henry VIII of an effective supremacy over the English church and the enforcement of the legislation which accompanied it has received considerable attention in recent years. Yet, though the main themes of the story are clear, the obstacles which the central government met in the dioceses of England, and the way in which policy emerged as a response to them, has not been examined so meticulously. The problems confronting the government in 1534 are obvious enough: the bishops, as well as many others, who had been brought up in the first three decades of the sixteenth century, and who had administered the affairs of church or state in the period before the divorce, were left in a state of suspense in 1534. What tangible effect would the royal supremacy have? If it was to bring in a new order, what would that order be? And what part should bishop, priest or layman take in promoting or hindering it? For the bishops who had obtained their sees by papal bull before 1534, the dilemmas posed in the years to come were great. For Fisher of Rochester, the way forward was to the scaffold. Others, like Warham of Canterbury, Sher-burne of Chichester, Nix of Norwich, West of Ely, Blythe of Lichfield and Coventry, died during the crucial period 1533–8, thereby making room for those who had not been bishops before the assumption of the supremacy. But, for a small group of bishops, there was no escaping the problems of comparison which these years brought. Between 1534 and 1538, the translation of the royal supremacy into a practical reality in the dioceses and parishes of England was attempted.

Heretics and Believers

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Individual Experience ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Profound Change ◽  
Catholic Culture ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Church

Centuries on, what the Reformation was and what it accomplished remain deeply contentious. This new history argues that sixteenth-century England was a society neither desperate for nor allergic to change, but one open to ideas of reform in various competing guises. King Henry VIII wanted an orderly, uniform Reformation, but his actions opened a Pandora's Box from which pluralism and diversity flowed and rooted themselves in English life. With sensitivity to individual experience as well as masterfully synthesizing historical and institutional developments, the book frames the perceptions and actions of people great and small, from monarchs and bishops to ordinary families and ecclesiastics, against a backdrop of profound change that altered the meanings of religion itself. This engaging history reveals what was really at stake in the overthrow of Catholic culture and the reshaping of the Church of England.

The Two Regiments: the Continental Setting of William Tyndale’s Political Thought

1979 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 17-33
Author(s):  
W.D.J. Cargill Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Royal Supremacy ◽  
Political Thinker

Strype tells the story of how Henry VIII is said to have remarked, on being given a copy of Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man by Anne Boleyn, ‘For this book is for me, and all kings to read.’ Whether or not the story is true—and it is perhaps safest to regard it as apocryphal—it has generally been held to be ben trovato in the sense that Tyndale’s teaching on authority and obedience was such as would have had an obvious appeal to Henry VIII, and it has frequently been assumed that Tyndale’s doctrine anticipated the legislation of the reformation parliament. But what precisely was Tyndale’s political teaching and where does he stand in the history of sixteenth-century political thought? It is a curious fact that although Tyndale’s importance as the first English protestam political thinker of the sixteenth century has been widely recognised, there has been little detailed investigation of his political thought and no attempt to set it in the context of contemporary continental protestam thinking. By and large, Tyndale has been accepted simply as an extreme exponent of Luther’s teaching on non-resistance and the divine right of authority, or as a precursor of the royal supremacy, without any effort being made to analyse the precise character of his views.

The Canons of the Church of England

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Hill QC
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Church Of Christ ◽  
Book Of Common Prayer ◽  
Ecclesiastical Courts ◽  
Royal Supremacy ◽  
Common Prayer ◽  
The Church

This section presents the canons of the Church of England. It begins with a background on the Church of England, focusing on the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, The Book of Common Prayer, and the form and manner of making, ordaining, and consecrating of bishops, priests, and deacons, along with the doctrine and government of the Church, the royal supremacy, and schisms within the Church of Christ. The chapter proceeds by discussing the Church's divine service and administration of the sacraments; church ministers, their irdination, functions, and charge; the order of deaconesses; the lay officers of the Church; things appertaining to churches; the ecclesiastical courts; and the synods of the Church. Finally, it explains how any canon to the repealed enactment may be interpreted.

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