Wednesday, May 14, 2014

The Truth About the English Reformation

Interesting history of the English Reformation from a Catholic perspective.

Once upon a time, England was a very Catholic country . . .

How a Protestant spin machine hid the truth about the English Reformation

Today, May 23, is the anniversary of King Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon —­ the event which started the English Reformation.

In 2003, Charles Clarke, Tony Blair’s Secretary of State for Education and Skills, expressed strong views on the teaching of British history.

I don’t mind there being some medievalists around for ornamental purposes, but there is no reason for the state to pay for them.

In response, Michael Biddiss, professor of medieval history at Reading University, suggested that Mr Clarke’s view may have been informed by Khrushchev’s notion that historians are dangerous people, capable of upsetting everything.­­­­­

In many ways, Khrushchev was correct. Historians can be a distinct threat —­ both those who create “official” history, and those who work quietly to unpick it, filling in the irksome and unhelpful details.
Rulers in all ages have tried to control how history sees them, and have gone to great lengths to have events recorded the way they want. The process is as old as authority itself.

The result is that generations of people learn something at school, only to find out later that it was not so. For instance, children brought up in the communist countries of the 20th century have little idea of the indiscriminately murderous mechanics at the heart of their founding revolutions. More recently, in the United States, anyone young enough not to have lived through the two recent Iraq wars might, if they only read political memoirs, actually believe that the wars were fought to root out al Qaeda.
So what about England? Has our constitutional monarchy and ancient tradition of parliamentary democracy protected our history from political manipulation? Can we rely on what we are taught and told, or are there myths we, too, have swallowed hook, line, and sinker?

Where better to start than with that most quintessentially English of events ­— the break with Rome that signalled the birth of modern England?

For centuries, the English have been taught that the late medieval Church was superstitious, corrupt, exploitative, and alien. Above all, we were told that King Henry VIII and the people of England despised its popish flummery and primitive rites. England was fed up to the back teeth with the ignorant mumbo-jumbo magicians of the foreign Church, and up and down the country Tudor people preferred plain-speaking, rational men like Wycliffe, Luther, and Calvin. Henry VIII achieved what all sane English and Welsh people had long desired ­– an excuse to break away from an anachronistic subjugation to the ridiculous medieval strictures of the Church.

For many in England, the subject of whether or not this was true was not even up for debate. Even now, the historical English disdain for all things Catholic is often regarded as irrefutable and objective fact. Otherwise why would we have been taught it for four and a half centuries? And anyway, the English are quite clearly not an emotional race like some of our continental cousins. We like our churches bright and clean and practical and full of common sense. For this reason, we are brought up to believe that Catholicism is just fundamentally, well … un-English.

But the last 30 years have seen a revolution in Reformation research. Leading scholars have started looking behind the pronouncements of the religious revolution’s leaders – Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Cranmer, Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley – and beyond the parliamentary pronouncements and the great sermons. Instead, they have begun focusing on the records left by ordinary English people. This “bottom up” approach to history has undoubtedly been the most exciting development in historical research in the last 50 years. It has taken us away from what the rulers want us to know, and steered us closer towards what actually happened.

When this approach is applied to the Reformation, what emerges is a very different picture to the one we were taught in school.

It seems that in 1533, the year of Henry’s break from Rome, traditional Catholicism was the religion of the vast majority of the country. And in most places it was absolutely thriving. . .



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