The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (9 page)

After Henry’s death, the chroniclers, remembering his many politic virtues, remembered too the avarice that undermined them. Avarice was no venial failing, but one of the seven deadly sins. Sinning Christians must be penitent and make restitution. Where penitence and restitution failed, kings too might become subject to a tyrant – the Devil in Hell.

RELIGION AND SOCIETY IN EARLY TUDOR ENGLAND

At midsummer in many English towns and villages in the later middle ages, pageant wagons rolled through the narrow streets, stopping along the procession way. On these wagons actors played God, Christ, the Virgin Mary, Noah and his wife, and, dressed as demons, they danced among the people. The mystery plays, put on by the craft guilds of the towns, were the most popular drama ever staged in England. Most towns played only a single biblical scene, but in some, like York, Chester and Wakefield, the greatest cycles of the mystery plays told the whole of salvation history from the Creation to the Last Judgement. Play by play, all day long, the divine plan was revealed, the events of the Old Testament prefiguring the New. This was a society in which devotion to God and belief in the elements of the Christian faith were assumed; in which there were sanctions, worldly and otherworldly, against those who did not give visible witness of their faith; in which membership of the Church and obedience to its teachings were profound social duties. These plays spoke to the unlettered, the unlearned, and to all Christians, and taught them what they must believe.

The mystery plays begin and end in heaven. First, God the Father appears and defines Himself: first and last, without beginning or end, maker unmade, Three in One, Almighty. He creates heaven. Enter Satan, the fallen angel who, in his pride, has rebelled against God and is cast out of heaven. Creating the world by His Word, God sets in an earthly paradise the first man and the first woman, Adam and Eve, formed in the divine likeness. In the Garden of Eden, Eve is tempted by the serpent and eats the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge and she tempts Adam to do the same. For their disobedience, the original sin, they are cast out of Paradise and from the divine presence, and their first sin is transferred to their descendants forever. The Fall of Man is complete when Cain kills his brother Abel. From this abyss of evil, mankind can
be saved only by God’s intervention and mercy. He sends the Flood to drown the sinful world, and then from the destruction saves some. Noah, his wife and family, and two animals of each kind, board an ark as the waters rise. Noah is a man who walks with God, obedient to His command. So is Abraham who agonizingly, unquestioningly, prepares to kill his innocent son, Isaac, a willing sacrifice and prophetic of the greatest sacrifice in the world.

In the East Anglian ‘play called Corpus Christi’, which was written down sometime after 1468, a debate is staged in the parliament of heaven. It enshrines the understanding of man’s salvation and redemption prevailing at the end of the middle ages. According to the figure of Justice, man’s offence against God is endless and so must be the punishment. Should man be saved? ‘Nay, nay, nay!’ Yet according to Mercy, ‘Endless sin God endless may restore.’ Man cannot be restored to divine favour until satisfaction has been made, but in his wretchedness he has nothing to offer to compensate for so great an offence, and all that he has is God’s anyway. Only God has the power to satisfy the debt, but it is mankind that owes it. In the play a council is held among the Trinity, and Christ offers Himself, willing self-sacrifice, to atone to His Father for mankind’s offence and redeem mankind: ‘Father, he that shall do this must be both God and man… I am ready to do this deed’. Archangel Gabriel is sent to tell Mary, blessed among women, that she, although a virgin, will bear God’s son – mother and maiden. His salutation – ‘Hail Mary, full of grace’ – is the one that all Catholics will use to her forever after. The Christ-child is born in a stable, poor and lowly, and shepherds and kings come to adore Him, their joy suffused with sorrow as they contemplate His suffering to come.

The late medieval preoccupation with Christ’s human nature led to a devotion to His mother, the Virgin Mary. The plays tell in parallel the story of her life, and that of the cousins and aunts, family and friends whom Christ gained when He was made man. All the mystery plays lead to ‘such a sorrow’ that will pierce ‘even through his mother’s heart’; to a mother grieving at the foot of the Cross. At the heart of the mystery plays was the Passion Play, for it was above all Christ’s Passion which was the focus of late medieval spirituality: not Christ in majesty, but Christ in His vulnerable humanity suffering on the Cross, His body broken, bleeding, dying. The plays depicted the extremity of Christ’s suffering, and showed Him tempted, betrayed, mocked and tortured; hanging on a cross, crowned with thorns, His arms outstretched in
compassionate self-immolation. Since Christ has taken upon Himself a human nature, He suffers human doubt and desolation; feels Himself forsaken. Without sin Himself, he has come to take mankind’s sin upon Him and to redeem the human race. He tells His mother from the Cross:

He dies to save those who torment and crucify Him, the sublime example of loving one’s enemies. From the tragedy of His Passion comes mankind’s salvation.

The cycle of plays enacted, scene by scene, and brought to life the events narrated in the Apostles’ Creed, which all the faithful were taught from an early age. In church windows, on rood screens, on altars the twelve Apostles were portrayed, each carrying a banner with the article of the Creed attributed to him. St Peter bore the first: ‘
Credo in Deum, Patrem Omnipotentem
[I believe in God, Father Almighty].’ The text was made available in English to assist the devout to a fuller understanding. In the fourteenth-century
Lay Folks Mass Book
the Creed was written in verse:

Moving from the past to the future, the play cycle ends in heaven, with God in judgement. At the Last Judgement, the collective end of time, men and women will be judged not by what they have promised, but what they have done. The saved will be those who have obeyed Christ’s great commandments – to love God and one’s neighbour as oneself – and seen Him in the poor and wretched. The rejected, the damned, will be those who have disobeyed. The plays end with the vision of hell’s mouth gaping and the sound of the interminable lamentation of the damned.

In the plays the audience saw the profane amidst the holy, and witnessed the real world intruding into the Gospel story. Alongside the figures of Christ and His Apostles were shepherds portrayed as turbulent adolescents; unjust judges; Noah’s shrewish wife; a jealous Joseph in a May to December marriage; raging tyrants – figures, in their frailties,
closer by far to the audience’s own lives than were the Holy Family. There were quarrels among the players about who should take each part, and who should pay for the production. The plays were staged by the craft guilds of the towns, often with particular appropriateness to their calling: at York the shipwrights presented the building of the ark; the fishermen the scene of the Flood; the bakers the Last Supper. The rich mercers put on the most expensive and last play: the Last Judgement.

The plays, written in English, probably by the clergy, were intended to teach, to inspire, to admonish, so that the audience might remember that they were subject to the same human frailty, the spiritual blindness and lack of charity which made Peter deny Christ, or Thomas doubt the Resurrection, or even made Judas betray and the soldiers crucify Christ. They were left with a vision of judgement. But compellingly, through pity and grief and love for the Virgin and her divine Son, the audience could understand the price of salvation, the depth of divine love, the sublimity of Christ’s sacrificial death for mankind, the need for sorrow and repentance of sin, the joyful possibility of heaven at last. Before Christ’s Incarnation and Passion all men were judged guilty of Adam’s sin and had lost heaven. Thereafter, there was hope of salvation. Eden would be restored, but not in this world.

Why was the ‘play called Corpus Christi’, the body of Christ? Because this narrative of salvation through grace was originally performed at the great liturgical feast of the later middle ages, Corpus Christi. With Corpus Christi, in May or June, the great cycle of feasts of the Church commemorating the Redemption was brought to a close. Yet it stood apart from the liturgical sequence which narrated the events in Christ’s life – from Christmas, which celebrated His nativity and the mystery of the Incarnation; His presentation in the Temple at Candlemas; through Easter which celebrated the Resurrection; to the feasts of His Ascension and Whitsun or Pentecost, which recalled the descent of the Holy Spirit and the foundation of the Church. Corpus Christi was the time to celebrate the whole work of God, the redeeming power of Christ, rather than to sorrow for His Passion, which was particularly remembered, in deepest mourning, on Good Friday. The feast of Corpus Christi had been instituted to celebrate the sacrament of the altar, the Mass, which was divine miracle and mystery, God among men, the focus of the hopes and longings of all Christians.

The Mass was offered by and to God, for the living and the dead. In every church and chapel, on every altar at every celebration, Christ’s redemptive sacrifice was re-enacted, and the blood of forgiveness made endlessly available to Christians. At the words of the consecration, Christ’s own words to His disciples at the Last Supper, the elements of bread and wine were transformed, transubstantiated, by Christ’s own working, through a priest as channel of divine grace, into the very body and blood of Christ. To the eyes of faith, God had transcended the laws of nature. Bread was no longer bread, wine no longer wine; the consecrated Host elevated above the priest’s head was not what the eyes saw, but Christ returned to earth. The believer gazing upon the Host, thinking of Christ’s Passion, was transported to Calvary. Now bread, now God, the host was the promise of satisfaction for sin, deliverance from evil, safety from danger, the promise of reconciliation with God. As the body of Christ, it represented the Church itself, and was the centre of the entire religious system, the focus of popular allegiance and devotion: Corpus Christi.

The full public sung Mass included these events: an account of the predicament of fallen man and confession of sin; the declaration of redemption in the hymn
Gloria
; readings from the Epistles and Gospels and the Creed; the offertory, during which the priest prepared the bread and wine for sacrifice, and the congregation prepared itself by prayer; the canon, the consecration of the bread and wine; the elevation of the Host; the communion by the priest and – very occasionally – by the people; the post communion, and priestly blessing of the people which imparted salutary protection. All the while, the priest celebrated apart, at the high altar, separated from the people by the rood screen, whispering low and in Latin the words of the rite which were too sacred for the laity to know. Yet they, praying their own prayers, knew that a miracle took place before their eyes and, seeing, believed. As the sacring bell rang and candles were lit, they knelt, hands raised, as the priest elevated the Host. At that moment grace was imparted and special blessings flowed: they would not go blind or suffer sudden death that day, angels would count the steps they took to the Mass towards their merit. This was a moment of intense private devotion, the way to individual forgiveness and sanctification, but it was also the bond of human charity, the source of Christian fellowship. Communion was common union; the unity of Christ and His Church. Corpus Christi.

The faithful made sure that they witnessed the miracle of the Mass
often. The parish Mass, celebrated on Sundays and holy days at the high altar, following the order specified in missal, breviary and processional, was not the only Mass which the faithful experienced. There were daily celebrations besides: dawn or ‘morrow Mass’, ‘low’ Masses, votive or requiem Masses, Masses in honour of Our Lady, or of the name of Jesus, or of special saints. These were celebrated at side altars, by guild or chantry priests, and here the people could worship close, even very close, to their priests, and to their ‘Maker’. Henry VIII heard three Masses daily on hunting days and sometimes five on other days. But although the laity attended Mass frequently, they received communion rarely, perhaps only once a year, at Easter, after confession in Holy Week. Christ had commanded His followers to love one another, to love even their enemies. The institutions of the Church as well as the teachings of Christ demanded that Christians be ‘in charity’. The priest warned all communicants not to come to ‘God’s board, but if ye be in perfect love and charity, and be clean shriven, and in full purpose to leave your sin’. Loving one’s enemies was always a counsel of perfection, but there were powerful imperatives to Christian unity. Within the Mass there was a ceremony of peace (although sometimes distinctly uncharitable disputes arose over who should kiss the
pax
board first). There were sanctions against asking for divine forgiveness without giving or deserving human forgiveness. Enmity was an obstacle to the reception of the Mass. Some did have scruples about receiving the Easter sacrament while out of charity with neighbours and refusing to be reconciled. The Mass was the symbol of peace, and as a symbol of awesome power, could bring peace. In April 1459 there was a great riot in Fleet Street in London during which, it was said, many might have died had not bishops processed with crosses and ‘Our Lord’s body’ to restore peace.