Reformation Reaches England

In 1528 the excitement which followed on this rapid diffusion of Tyndale’s works forced Wolsey to more vigorous action.

Continuing The English Reformation and Wolsey’s Fall,
our selection from A Short History of the English People by John Richard Green published in 1874. The selection is presented in seven easy 5-minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in The English Reformation and Wolsey’s Fall.

Time: 1529

From Hamburg, where he took refuge in 1524, he probably soon found his way to the little town which had suddenly become the sacred city of the Reformation. Students of all nations were flocking there with an enthusiasm which resembled that of the crusades. “As they came in sight of the town,” a contemporary tells us, “they returned thanks to God with clasped hands, for from Wittenberg, as heretofore from Jerusalem, the light of evangelical truth had spread to the utmost parts of the earth.”

Such a visit could only fire Tyndale to face the “poverty, exile, bitter absence from friends, hunger and thirst and cold, great dangers, and innumerable other hard and sharp fightings,” which the work he had set himself was to bring with it. In 1525 his version of the New Testament was completed, and means were furnished by English merchants for printing it at Cologne. But Tyndale had soon to fly with his sheets to Worms, a city whose Lutheran tendencies made it a safer refuge, and it was from Worms that six thousand copies of the New Testament were sent in 1526 to English shores. The King was keenly opposed to a book which he looked on as made “at the solicitation and instance of Luther”; and even the men of the New Learning from whom it might have hoped for welcome were estranged from it by its Lutheran origin. We can only fairly judge their action by viewing it in the light of the time. What Warham and More saw over sea might well have turned them from a movement which seemed breaking down the very foundations of religion and society. Not only was the fabric of the Church rent asunder and the center of Christian unity denounced as “Babylon,” but the reform itself seemed passing into anarchy.

Luther was steadily moving onward from the denial of one Catholic dogma to that of another; and what Luther still clung to, his followers were ready to fling away. Carlstadt was denouncing the reformer of Wittenberg as fiercely as Luther himself had denounced the Pope, and meanwhile the religious excitement was kindling wild dreams of social revolution, and men stood aghast at the horrors of a peasant war which broke out in Southern Germany. It was not therefore as a mere translation of the Bible that Tyndale’s work reached England. It came as a part of the Lutheran movement, and it bore the Lutheran stamp in its version of ecclesiastical words. “Church” became “congregation,” “priest” was changed into “elder.” It came too in company with Luther’s bitter invectives and reprints of the tracts of Wycliffe, which the German traders of the Steelyard were importing in large numbers. We can hardly wonder that More denounced the book as heretical, or that Warham ordered it to be given up by all who possessed it.

Wolsey took little heed of religious matters, but his policy was one of political adhesion to Rome, and he presided over a solemn penance to which some Steelyard men submitted in St. Paul’s. “With six-and-thirty abbots, mitred priors, and bishops, and he in his whole pomp mitered,” the Cardinal looked on while “great baskets full of books were commanded; after the great fire was made before the Rood of Northen (the crucifix by the great north door of the cathedral), thus to be burned, and those heretics to go thrice about the fire and to cast in their fagots.”

But scenes and denunciations such as these were vain in the presence of an enthusiasm which grew every hour. “Englishmen,” says a scholar of the time, “were so eager for the Gospel as to affirm that they would buy a New Testament even if they had to give a hundred thousand pieces of money for it.” Bibles and pamphlets were smuggled over to England and circulated among the poorer and trading classes through the agency of an association of “Christian Brethren,” consisting principally of London tradesmen and citizens, but whose missionaries spread over the country at large. They found their way at once to the universities, where the intellectual impulse given by the New Learning was quickening religious speculation.

Cambridge had already won a name for heresy; Barnes, one of its foremost scholars, had to carry his fagot before Wolsey at St. Paul’s; two other Cambridge teachers, Bilney and Latimer, were already known as “Lutherans.” The Cambridge scholars whom Wolsey introduced into Cardinal College, which he was founding, spread the contagion through Oxford. A group of “brethren” was formed in Cardinal College for the secret reading and discussion of the Epistles; and this soon included the more intelligent and learned scholars of the university. It was in vain that Clark, the center of this group, strove to dissuade fresh members from joining it by warnings of the impending dangers. “I fell down on my knees at his feet,” says one of them, Anthony Dalaber, “and with tears and sighs besought him that for the tender mercy of God he should not refuse me, saying that I trusted verily that he who had begun this on me would not forsake me, but would give me grace to continue therein to the end. When he heard me say so, he came to me, took me in his arms, and kissed me, saying, ‘The Lord God Almighty grant you so to do, and from henceforth ever take me for your father, and I will take you for my son in Christ.'”

In 1528 the excitement which followed on this rapid diffusion of Tyndale’s works forced Wolsey to more vigorous action; many of the Oxford Brethren were thrown into prison and their books seized. But in spite of the panic of the Protestants, some of whom fled over sea, little severity was really exercised. Henry’s chief anxiety, indeed, was lest in the outburst against heresy the interest of the New Learning should suffer harm. This was remarkably shown in the protection he extended to one who was destined to eclipse even the fame of Colet as a popular preacher. Hugh Latimer was the son of a Leicestershire yeoman, whose armor the boy had buckled on in the days of Henry VII, ere he set out to meet the Cornish insurgents at Blackheath Field. Latimer has himself described the soldierly training of his youth.

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