The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (18 page)

Lollards despised the crosses which were universally venerated. Why should the cross be worshipped which had brought Christ such suffering? A crucifix carried by a priest to a Lollard’s deathbed was spurned as a false god. Lollards would taunt images, and sometimes attack them, challenging them to defend themselves if they could. It was, they thought, not only idolatrous but socially iniquitous to devote time and money to serving saints’ images by pilgrimage and other acts of devotion, while the poor, Christ’s own image, suffered; true pilgrimage, they believed, was to go barefoot to visit the poor, weak and hungry. The other sort was, at best, folly, and profited only the priests who took the offerings of the deluded faithful. As a woman implored Our Lady to help Joan Sampson in her labour, Joan spat on her and sent her away. Prayer should be directed to God alone, and not to saints, because only God could answer it, and surely the prayer of a good life was more meritorious than the repetition of words, ‘lip labour’. Why confess to a priest, when God alone can forgive sin? Views like these put the Lollards outside conventional society.

For every Lollard who died at the stake there were fifty who recanted, but recantation itself left a fearsome stigma, for ostracism awaited those who bore the badge of the abjured heretic, the mark of the faggot. People would pour ashes on a heretic’s grave, so that grass should never grow there. So it was at the beginning of the sixteenth century, but not for much longer, for soon a society which had been fundamentally united in religion became divided, and there were too many heretics to be cast out. Lollardy was one of the more coherent heretical creeds in Western Christendom. The Hussites in Bohemia had effected a
Reformation there in the early fifteenth century which was premature, and which remained as a spectre to haunt the imaginations of those in England who feared a similar enormity. Believing that pestilential heresy was on the increase in England, the bishops began looking for it more assiduously, and what they discovered alarmed them. In 1518–21 Bishop Longland’s inquisition found over 400 ‘known’ men and women in his great Lincoln diocese. Still Lollards were few. Without political or spiritual leadership, Lollardy offered no prospect of inspiring a national reforming movement; not in England, and certainly not in Wales or Ireland. There had been no new Lollard text written since about 1440. Nevertheless, part of the Lollard creed anticipated the beliefs which made the English Reformation.

The Lollard challenge lay principally in the understanding among some within the Church that Lollard arguments were not always easy to refute; that some of their criticisms were just; that some of their principles were ones which all Christians should acknowledge. John Colet, the reforming Dean of St Paul’s, had warned the clergy in 1511 that heretics were not so dangerous to the faith as the evil and wicked lives of priests. Lollards could claim – although it was heresy to do so – that the sacraments were vitiated by the corruption of the clergy. Even the Mass could be portrayed as an invention of priests to beguile the faithful into supporting their indolent, venal lives. This was the true anticlericalism; the anti-sacerdotalism of heresy, which denied the essential place and function of the clergy. Richard Hunne, a wealthy Londoner, mounted a sustained challenge to the clergy and was murdered for it – martyred – or so the Church’s critics alleged. Defending a fellow parishioner who abjured the most shocking heresies, he said that her beliefs accorded with the laws of God. He inveighed against priestly power; against prelates ‘all things taking and nothing ministering’. But above all, he was charged with reading the Apocalypse, the Epistles and Gospels in English. He defended the right of the laity to read the English Bible. In the prologue of his own Bible was written, ‘Poor men and idiots have the truth of Holy scriptures, more than a thousand prelates.’ He left a Bible in the church of St Margaret in Bridge Street, for the edification of all who would read it. Yet the desire to have the scripture in English need not have been heretical, and criticism of the Church was far from being simply a negative spirit.

There was at the end of the middle ages a pious and fervently orthodox desire among influential laity and clergy for renewal in Christian life. The Church was
semper reformanda
, always in need of reform, but at some times more urgently than at others. Although the papacy itself, preoccupied with war and money, seemed to have forgotten Christ’s warning about gaining the whole world and losing the soul, and the Church as an institution seemed mired in worldly concerns, careless of spiritual ones, still there was an impassioned search to rediscover the redemptive presence of Christ within this Church. There were hopes that Renaissance might come in the Church also; that it might move closer to an apostolic ideal. Christianity could be revived by a return
ad fontes
– to the Bible and the Church Fathers. Scripture was rediscovered by applying the new humanist studies of the ancient biblical languages, Hebrew and Greek, to uncover meanings long lost among the distortions and muddles in the Vulgate, St Jerome’s fourth-century translation.

The most brilliant exponent of this new spiritual message was Desiderius Erasmus, who captured the imagination of an elite in England and in Europe in the first decades of the sixteenth century. In 1504 he published his
Enchiridion militis Christiani (The Handbook of a Christian Soldier)
, a manifesto of the new Christianity. Inspired by scripture, especially by the teachings of St Paul, his writings aspired to bring regeneration and collective renewal in Christian life. The ambition was to educate not only those who were educated already, but the simple and unlearned. Every ploughboy at his plough, every woman at her loom, the weaver, the traveller, should know the Epistles of St Paul and the Gospels. The philosophy of Christian humanism bred impatience and scepticism with the pursuit of salvation by ritual observance, or its supposed purchase by good works performed without charity. The
Enchiridion
inveighed against all the distractions from the true ‘philosophy of Christ’, and this was no mild admonishment. While the poor, Christ’s own image, groaned with hunger, ‘thou spewest up partridges’; while the supposed Christian lost a thousand pieces of gold in a night’s gaming, some wretched girl in her desperation sold her chastity, ‘and thus perisheth the soul for whom Christ hath bestowed his life’. True religion lay in righteous conduct, not in fatuous ceremonies. For Erasmus and his followers, all those prayers and penances, fasts and vigils, the mechanical good works of late medieval devotion, made a mockery of Christ’s death and of what He had come to do.

Erasmus found kindred spirits in England. Listening to Colet, so he
wrote in 1499, was like listening to Plato himself. John Colet came to London from Oxford in 1505, and gave a series of sermons inspired by humanist evangelism. He did not, in the way of the schoolmen, take a discrete text and preach a detailed discourse to prove a particular point of faith; rather he preached ‘Gospel history’, upon Christ Himself. When he founded St Paul’s School, die-hard conservatives feared, so Thomas More wrote, that a crowd of Christians would spring like Greeks from the Trojan horse. A generation of evangelicals did spring from this academy. In his urgency to reform, Colet began to touch upon matters which were politically controversial and seen as doctrinally unsafe. An impassioned poem of the time, ‘The Ruin of a Realm’, lamented moral decadence: it saw one cause – ‘spiritual men undoubtedly/Doth rule the realm brought to misery’ – and saw one cleric who stood apart from the self-seeking of the rest. This paragon might have been John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, the leading theologian and humanist scholar. It might also have been Colet, who warned the clergy against their worldliness, who preached against war just as Henry VIII launched grandiose campaigns, who inveighed against the sin of pride before the magnificent Cardinal Wolsey. And Colet believed that the heretics had something to teach the Church about reform. He read heretical works, and Lollards came to hear him preach. His translation of the paternoster (the Lord’s Prayer) into English seemed to confirm suspicions of his orthodoxy, which were all unfounded. A good Catholic should have hoped for renovation within the Church, have deplored its current state, and yearned for a purity which had once existed in an apostolic golden age. Reform was needed, and urgently.

From where would reform come? Perhaps from a General Council of the Church. Erasmus in his
Sileni of Alcibiades
(1515) reminded his readers that although priests, bishops and popes were called ‘the Church’, they were only its servants. ‘The Christian people is the Church.’ A century before, General Councils, representing the congregation of the faithful, had challenged unworthy popes, and might do so again. But Councils could become toys of secular rulers. In 1511 Louis XII of France convoked a schismatic Council to force the papal hand, and in turn Julius II, the worldly, warrior pope, responded by calling the Fifth Lateran Council. But these rival Councils, preoccupied with politics, did very little to effect reform, to the despair of Catholic reformers.

Another way to reform would be by education. Education in virtue
was the best preparation for civic life. Cicero and classical authors taught the first lesson for the commonwealth: that man is not born for himself, but for the public. A humanist education provided a training in rhetoric, the classical art of eloquence. Christ Himself had been the sublime exponent of this art, the perfect teacher while on earth. Rhetoric was, for the sixteenth century, anything but empty. It had the practical purpose of persuading and providing counsel to those with power in the spiritual and secular realms. Yet, as More’s character Hythloday observed, princes might not listen, true counsel might be stifled and flattery prevail.

Satire was a powerful means of persuasion to reform. In the
Julius Exclusus
– anonymous, but written by an Englishman – the irredeemable Julius II arrived at the locked gates of heaven which he could not unlock with the keys to the treasury of the Church. Denied entry by St Peter, he was consigned to hell. In Erasmus’s audacious
Praise of Folly
, Folly presented unpalatable truths about the grotesqueries of society and mounted a scathing attack upon the failings of contemporary Christianity; upon monks and theologians; and upon a papacy which was dedicated to war and subversive of law, religion and peace.
Praise of Folly (Moriae Encomium)
was written for More, to More, the title a pun on his name. In 1515 More replied, writing his own satire,
Utopia
. Its rhetorical purpose was to advance reform by contrasting an ideal with the lamentable reality. Readers were invited to judge whether the fool or the friar at Cardinal Morton’s table was truly the fool. Yet, if the friar was the fool, he was a dangerous one: ‘We have a papal bull by which all who mock at us are excommunicated.’ These satires were immensely popular:
Praise of Folly
was reprinted fifteen times before 1517. Yet as the satires passed beyond the humanist audiences for whom they were written, the dangers as well as the exciting possibilities of print became apparent.

The best way to restore religion would be to reveal ‘pure Christ’ in scripture; scripture freely available and translated according to the best humanist principles. Erasmus translated the entire New Testament from Greek, and published the Greek text in 1516, with a parallel Latin translation. This translation was received with huge optimism by many, but criticized by conservatives who thought that to meddle with the Vulgate at all was doubtful and dangerous. Thomas Cromwell, a London lawyer, took Erasmus’s New Testament with him on a journey to Rome in 1517–18, and learnt it by heart. It marked him, and the Reformation
in England that he helped to make. A decade later, Stephen Vaughan wrote telling Cromwell, his friend and former master, of his search through London to recover a debt from the evasive Mr Mundy; of how he found him at evensong, not inclined to discuss money. But Vaughan told Mundy that if he wished to serve God he could not do so better than by making restitution. Here was a joke about hypocrisy, but behind it lay the essential humanist belief that true piety lay in right action not conventional obsequies.

In 1516, the year when Erasmus published his New Testament and More his
Utopia
, everything seemed possible. This was a liminal moment. Reformers, within the Church but deeply critical of its practices, still hoped for renewal, through scripture. Christian humanism laid the foundations for all that was to come: while its spirit was essentially orthodox, it prepared the way for a more radical vision. Yet Erasmus’s learned translation still left the Bible only for the educated. The term associated with Erasmus,
philosophia Christi
(the philosophy of Christ), suggests the limit of its popular appeal. There came demands that scripture no longer be locked up in Latin, mediated by priests, but available in English to give the faithful an infallible rule whereby to judge the Church and its claims to absolute authority in matters of faith. For William Tyndale, the great reformer and biblical translator, Christians should believe nothing without the authority of God’s Word. Erasmus had, in his insistence upon inner conviction rather than outward ritual and his demand that Christians focus their hearts inwardly on grace given by God, prefigured the great debates on faith and salvation which would soon divide the Church. In Wittenberg, Martin Luther was reading Erasmus’s New Testament, and in 1517, on All Saints’ Eve, he posted his ninety-five theses, and challenged the papacy and the Church.