Tag Archives: Henry VIII

A Church in Bondage

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Parliament 300x220 A Church in Bondage "A lot of people in the house [of Commons] fear the measure will fall and we are determined not to stand on the sidelines if this happens".

Curious that it is Frank Field who is determined to force the Church of England into the acceptance of women as Bishops.  Last time round (when Synod decided to ordain women as Priests) he was one of the Ecclesiastical Committee in Parliament most instrumental in ensuring proper treatment of those being forced out of the church.  Will he do the same if his Bill becomes law, and Anglicans are forced to accept women bishops?  Or will he simply say, "But it's only fair"?

If his Bill succeeds, it may show many at present holding back from the Ordinariate that the Church of England is indeed in thrall to the State.  Whatever measure Parliament puts in place for "equality", whether for women or those in civil partnerships, I believe the Catholic Church will continue to exercise its divine calling to be responsible for deciding who may and who may not be ordained to the Sacred Ministry.  The Church of England cannot do this; it is established by law, and if the law changes the Church of England must change with it.  We used to argue, "No, no, the Cof E was not founded by Henry VIII; it is continuous with the Church founded upon the Apostles".  The more Parliament goes down the path of Political Correctness and forces the church to follow, the more Erastian that church becomes, and the more impossible it will be for anyone still to make that claim.  So, dear Frank Field, do your worst; your Bill for bringing the Church of England to heel over equality for women might in the end turn out to be its death warrant.

(Thanks to Br Stephen for publishing the news of this.)

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A Superior Bunfight

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Since 'bunfight' caused some interest, you might like to see another such event; this time in Birmingham (my third visit this year).  The Parish is St Cuthbert's, and in Castle Vale they were celebrating their Patronal Festival on Saturday.

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Fr James at the Bunfight

Sept 4 marks  St Cuthbert's translation; his mortal remains got moved about a good deal when Lindisfarne was threatened by the Danes, but they ended up in a great shrine in Durham Cathedral.  The Estate which comprises the parish of Castle Vale, built on the site of a World War II Royal Air Force station, was begun in the 1960s.  The church dates from the '70s, the Vicarage is more recent still since the local authority wanted to exchange the site of the former house for the present smaller site next to the Church.  They built flats where the former Vicarage had been.

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Oddly modern Vicarage

The result is a very chic house with some very strange angles.  Nothing is quite square, and there are stairs and steps  everywhere.  But as ever Fr James and Phaea his wife made us wonderfully welcome.  We met them when Fr James was Vicar of St John 's Watford.  Now he is in an equally multi-cultural area, but he seems to fit it exceptionally well.

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Phaea among the folks

Several of the congregation spoke to me after the celebrations about the Ordinariate, so I am glad I said something about it in my sermon.  I shall append it here in case you're interested.  If not, just enjoy the pictures.

He rejoices more over the one sheep…

You will know that Cuthbert, your patron, had a very different career set out for him at the start.  He was to have been a shepherd; but the Lord had other ideas.  His shepherding was carried out on the hills above Melrose, which is now in Scotland but was then part of Northumbria; and the priory of Melrose was the place which called him, and where eventually he became a monk.  Not at once, though; before joining the religious life he was a soldier.  It is likely that this was in the army of the Christian king of Northumbria, fighting against the pagan Penda, king of Mercia.  The treasure hoard which made the news recently, discovered not so far from here in the West Midlands, possibly was a battle-prize from one of those wars.  Certainly there was a gold processional cross, bent out of shape, in that hoard.

Now St Paul, when he was trying to spread the Gospel, said “I have become all things to all men, so that by all means I may win some".  If you were looking for a Patron Saint who fulfilled that description, you could not do better than Cuthbert.  A Shepherd and a soldier; a monk and a bishop.  Oh, and a conservationist — more about that in a minute.  Most people could find something to admire in Cuthbert, and something about him to inspire and encourage them — which is partly what a patron saint is for.  The people who knew him, though, were not attracted by any of these incidental things.

What won people over to Cuthbert was his sheer goodness, and the gentleness with which he led his monks and the priests and people of his diocese.  It was not only people with whom he was gentle; when he was living in his cell in the Farne islands, he ordered that special protection should be given to the iconic birds of that place, the eider ducks.  As a result they became knows as Cuthbert ducks; or in the shorthand on the Northeast, Cuddy Ducks.  So you could say Cuthbert might also serve as patron of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

Now in those days, the Seventh Century, that is, there were some very contentious issues in the Church.  Does that sound familiar?  Cuthbert’s tradition was Celtic, the form of Christianity which came from the earliest missionaries from Rome.  Local customs had grown up over the years, and in particular the Celtic church used a different method for dating Easter from the Roman church.  Around the year 600 the Pope, Gregory, decided to send Augustine on a mission to convert, or reconvert, the English.  Where the Celtic church was strong, in the North and West, there was resistance to these new Roman ideas, as they were thought.

At this time, Cuthbert was ruling the new foundation in Ripon.  Many of the monks of Ripon, though, wanted to follow the Roman rite, so Cuthbert and those who had originally come with him from Melrose returned North.

On the death of the old Prior, Cuthbert took over as head of that monastery of Melrose.   He did not stay there long.  Just three years later, in 664, there was perhaps the greatest Church Synod ever held in England — certainly  far greater than any of those argumentative tin-pot little talking shops which call themselves meetings of the General Synod of the Church of England.  At Whitby, it was the entire Christian Church in England seeking to find a way of living together peaceably — and unlike the General  Synod, they succeeded.

The Venerable Bede wrote about all this at length in his History of the English Church and People — England’s first ever history book.  In the end, it was the King who settled the matter.  Whose tradition is the Celtic Church following?  St John, came the answer.  And whose the Roman Church?  St Peter.  Then, said the King, because Peter was given authority over the other disciples, it is Peter’s rule we must choose.  Thus the whole Church in England followed the traditions of Rome.  So it remained for nine more centuries; until another king decided that he, not the successor of Peter, should be supreme head of the Church of England.  So Henry VIII began the breach with Rome and the English Reformation.

Cuthbert, seeking above all the peace of the church, decided he must abide by the decision of the Whitby Synod.  So he was sent to Lindisfarne to help them come to terms in that monastery with the Roman tradition.  So Cuthbert is more than we have even said up to now, shepherd, soldier, monk and bishop.  He is above all a peace-maker.  We need the inspiration, and the humble leadership, of Cuthbert today.  He sought above all the unity and peace of the Church.  Many are thinking in the Church of England just now that the offer from the Pope is giving us all those things which were causes of offence to us five centuries ago in the time of the Reformation.  We wanted the prayers of the Church to be in a language we understood, not in Latin.  That we shall have in the Ordinariate.  We wanted our priests to be able to be married; and so it will be, by an exceptional dispensation, in the Ordinariate.  Almost all the reasons (or perhaps excuses) for our church splitting from our original foundation have been answered.

There have been people asking who should be the patron saint of the Ordinariate; some have argued for John Henry Newman, that great convert from Anglicanism.  Some have thought St Alban might be a good choice.  Whoever is decided as the right person, I hope that somewhere in the list of those we acclaim as our fathers in the faith there will be the name of Cuthbert.

At the Reformation, Henry VIII ordered the destruction of all the saints’ shrines in England.  When his commissioners set about the shrine of Cuthbert, in Durham Cathedral, they found his body still intact after nine centuries.  What should they do, they asked?  Bury the saint's body in the place where the shrine stood; demolish the shrine, but do not scatter Cuthbert’s bones.

So whereas in Winchester the tomb chests of many English kings were broken and the bones thrown out, including even the famous King Canute, Cuthbert remains where he was.  The Victorians exhumed him out of curiosity, and took some of the grave goods, his stole, his pectoral cross, his chalice, and placed them on display in the Cathedral.  But still Holy Cuthbert’s earthly remains are there, and there they are honoured and treasured.

More important than caring for his mortal remains is for us to treasure and honour his memory.  I said earlier that it was his example which is important; but better still, we can ask his prayers.  As patron of this Church we have a special claim on him; may his pleading lead us to peace, and a unity in the church such as we can scarcely imagine.

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Dean's Court

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Today was a Bank Holiday; these secular days off have replaced most Holy Days, and this one marks the ends of summer.  So we went, Jane and I, to a National Garden Scheme open garden.  These are very diverse gardens, opened for charity on a few days each year.

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Dean's Court is a great surprise.  It is in the heart of the lovely market town of Wimborne, just over the border from us in Dorset.  Sir William Hanham is the thirteenth Baronet, and the family have owned the house since the Dissolution in the sixteenth century.  One of the earlier Hanhams rebuilt the original house in the 1720's, and much of it still appears as it was then, though there are Victorian and other additions to one side of the house.

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It is Dean's Court because Wimborne Minster, at the time of the Dissolution, was a Collegiate Church whose boss was the Dean of Wimborne.  In earlier centuries (before the Norman Conquest) there had been a convent of nuns in Wimborne, and the fishpond which survives in the garden of Deanery Court may date back to that time.

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Minster Tower viewed over the Garden Wall

Last weekend one of the many Newspaper Property supplements was again extolling the virtues of former Rectories.  It seems if your house can be called the Old Rectory you will add hugely to its value.  The Church of England used to be custodian of thousands of wonderful old houses.  Instead of treating them imaginatively, leasing part of them and retaining the rest for the priest, they have gradually flogged almost all of them to the highest bidders.  Unfortunately although they now change hands for millions, the church mostly disposed of them for peanuts.  Our church is now proposing to do the same with Bishops' Palaces.  Indeed, the former See House for Portsmouth was sold a few years back for £500k ("we could not get planning permission," said the Church Commissioners).  Now there are many very expensive houses built in the grounds, each one worth more than that £500k – so someone obtained planning permission after obtaining such a snip.  The Church, meanwhile, spent more on a new Bishop's House than it originally obtained for the old one, and then spent even more adding offices, chapel and all the other essentials of episcopal living.

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Rowan

Yet there are bishops saying of the Ordinariate that the Church of England could not possibly part with any buildings because they are "inalienable"!  Tell that to Henry VIII.  The Church of England has more churches than it knows what to do with, yet some of the bishops at least appear determined to hang on to every last one of them at all costs rather than letting any go to the Ordinariate.  I hope charity, and sanity, may yet prevail.  How much better that a building consecrated to the Glory of God should continue in the Church's use, rather than being turned into a coffee shop or an antiques market.

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Enough carping.  Enjoy the pictures.

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Walled Kitchen Garden

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A Spiritual Pre-eminence by the Mouth of Our Saviour Himself

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Today, at least according the Old Calendar, in all dioceses of England and Wales, is the Feast of SS. John Fisher, B. & Thomas More, MM.  Both are accounted special patrons of The Anglo-Catholic, and we appeal to them on this special day, that they may look kindly upon the work in which are engaged.  May it be to the profit of souls and to their glory!

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Holbein Sir Thomas More sketch 1527 767x1024 A Spiritual Pre eminence by the Mouth of Our Saviour Himself"Forasmuch as, my Lord" (quoth he), "this indictment is grounded upon an Act of Parliament, directly oppugnant to the laws of God and his holy Church, the supreme government of which, or of any part thereof, may no temporal prince presume by any law to take upon him, as rightfully belonging to the See of Rome, a spiritual pre-eminence by the mouth of our Saviour himself, personally present upon the earth, to St. Peter and his successors, bishops of the same see, by special prerogative, granted, it is therefore in law amongst Christian men insufficient to charge any Christian." And for proof thereof like as amongst divers other reasons and authorities he declared that this Realm, being but one member and small part of the Church, might not make a particular law dischargeable with the general law of Christ's holy Catholic Church, no more than the City of London, being but one poor member in respect of the whole Realm, might make a law against an Act of Parliament to bind the whole Realm unto: so further showed he, that it was contrary both to the laws and statutes of this land, yet unrepealed, as they might evidently perceive in Magna charta, Quod Ecclesia Anglicana libera sit et habeat omnia jura sua integra, at libertates suas illaesas , [That the Church of England shall be free, and shall have her whole rights and liberties inviolable.] and contrary to that sacred oath which the King's Highness himself, and every other Christian prince always at their coronations received, alleging moreover, that no more might this Realm of England refuse obedience to the See of Rome, than might the child refuse obedience to his natural father.

The Life of Sir Thomas More
William Roper

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Divorce and Remarriage in "Historic Anglicanism" (Part I)

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*** UPDATED 06/08/10 9:18 PM EST ***

Marital indiscipline seems to afflict all Western Christian churches and bodies to some degree or other, and even to an extent those in the East (the theory and practice of the Eastern Churches, which rested originally on a basis quite distinct form that of Western Catholics and Protestants, I will not discuss here) as well.  Suffice it to say that, on a theoretical level at least, no Christian church or “denomination,” Eastern or Western ever accepted the practice of “divorce” in the modern sense of the term (that is, the dissolution of a valid marriage with one or both of the parties to that dissolved marriage being free to marry again), however much “pastoral compassion” (or “overlooking, deliberately or otherwise, irregular marital unions”) may, especially in the East, have allowed for the toleration of “marriages” of individuals whose spouses had disappeared some considerable time in the past.  At the Reformation, however, all of the leading Protestant Reformers embraced the view of Erasmus that there were circumstances in which a valid marriage might be dissolved and the parties to it, or at least the “innocent” party, be allowed to remarry, which meant remarry in church, as in Catholic and Protestant countries alike there was no other form of marriage (beyond “common-law marriage” in a few countries such as Scotland — but this was a form of “marriage” of which the offspring were technically illegitimate, and so lacked clear inheritance rights).  Moreover, Protestant church bodies, both Lutheran and Reformed, quickly came to permit divorce, and remarriage after divorce (hereafter termed DaR for short), in a variety of circumstances, among them, for instance, Scotland, where divorce in the modern sense became legally available in 1560, and has remained so ever since.

In England, however, the position was different, despite some initial irregularities, and the Church of England adopted what can be described as the most severe position on DaR of any Western Christian tradition whatsoever. The historic Anglican position on "divorce and remarriage" is clear enough — a resolute “no, never.”

King Henry VIII was firmly and explicitly opposed to DaR; he never in his life had a "divorce" in the modern sense as defined above (although in the 16th Century the term was used to denote any separation of the parties to a marriage during the lifetimes of them both) as all of his four "divorces" were "annulments" (granted by his complaisant Archbishop Cranmer).  Cranmer himself, as a firm Protestant, came to favor DaR in a wide variety of circumstances, and shortly after Henry VIII's death in 1547 he granted a divorce (in the modern sense) to William Parr, then Earl of Essex, later Marquess of Northampton, who subsequently "remarried." (He also granted Sir Ralph Sadler permission to remain married to a woman whom he had married over a decade previously, some years after her husband had disappeared, when that first husband reappeared and tried to extort money from Sadler.)  Provision for DaR was embodied in Cranmer's proposed reformed Code of Canon Law, but that proposal was rejected by the House of Commons in 1553 (as it was again in 1571 when reform-minded MPs tried to pass it despite Elizabeth I's objections).  Under the Catholic Queen Mary, Parr was forced to separate from his wife under threat of excommunication and prosecution for bigamy — and while after Mary’s death in 1558 and the succession of her ambiguously Protestant half-sister Queen Elizabeth I he resumed living with his second wife, one of Elizabeth I's "Ladies in Waiting," the Queen more than once publicly reproached him for "bigamy" — and when he wished to marry again after his second wife died in 1565, she forbade the marriage and refused to permit it until after Parr's original wife died in 1571 (Parr survived his third marriage by only a couple of months).

Under Elizabeth DaR was non-existent and illegal in England under both Common and Canon Law.  Church courts continued to grant "separations from bed and board" to incompatible couples, but these did not allow, and in fact specifically and explicitly forbade, remarriage of either party during the life of the other.  Sometimes it happened regardless: John Thornborough, a clergyman, was granted such a separation from his wife in the 1580s, but went on to contract a remarriage shortly thereafter.  In 1592, when he was appointed Bishop of Limerick (in Ireland), seemingly as a reward for his Catholic-hunting activities, the (Calvinist) Archbishop of York, Matthew Hutton, objected violently to Thornborough's appointment, on the grounds that he was an open bigamist — another Elizabethan bishop, Marmaduke Middleton of St. David's, bishop there from 1582, was deprived of his bishopric for such bigamy just a year later in 1593 — but his letters of protest to the Queen seemingly did not reach her, and the consecration went forward (Thornborough died as Bishop of Worcester in 1641, a firm Calvinist and one of the most stalwart opponents of "Laudianism").

In 1604 new canons promulgated in the Church of England ruled out DaR in all circumstances whatsoever, making provision for "separation" and (in very restricted circumstances) "annulments."  This remained the formal position of the CofE down to (I think) the 1980s — although in Scotland, by contrast, DaR was available in a wide variety of circumstances from 1560 onwards.  From 1670 onwards there was in England there was the phenomenon of "Parliamentary divorce:" an Act of Parliament would grant a couple a divorce, give one (or sometimes both) of them legal permission to remarry, and exempt any clergyman performing the remarriage full exemption from the penalties of the law, both Common and Canon/Civil (the study of Canon Law in England had been abolished in the 1530s, and most of the officials who staffed English church courts thereafter were trained in Roman, or “Civil,” Law): almost 300 such divorces were granted between 1670 (Lord Roos's case) and 1821 (when the farcical public fiasco of George IV's attempt to get such a divorce from his estranged wife ended in failure).  Modern-style divorce became available in England only in 1857, and although after that date no legal penalties could be levied upon clergymen who performed such "remarriages," right down to the 1960s clergymen who did so were effectively "blacklisted" by just about every diocesan bishop, and denied all further preferment within the CofE.

Generally, "low church" or "evangelical" clergy tended to favor DaR in this period (in some circumstances), not least because all foreign Protestant churches, both Lutheran and Reformed, allowed it, and "high-church" (later "Anglo-Catholic") clergy to oppose it in almost all circumstances — but in 1670 it was the strenuous support of "Lord Roos's Bill" by the "Laudian" Bishop of Durham, John Cosin, in the face of the opposition of most of the other bishops, that persuaded the House of Lords to pass it.

I am, however, totally ignorant of the practice of PECUSA from 1785 onwards on this matter, although right down to the 1940s/50s divorce was strongly disapproved of in that church, especially for clergy, for whom , with rare exceptions like the notorious Bishop Pike, divorce alone, with or without remarriage, generally ended all hope of a “successful clerical career.”

We are not finished with this subject yet, but already certain implications have begun to emerge.  Above all, it is clear that a loose marital discipline, whether tricked out in the robes of alleged "pastoral care" or "meeting people where they are," is no part at all of that "Anglican patrimony" which is seeking to be resituated in and restored to Catholic communion.  Rather the contrary: the "Anglican patrimony" is one that has upheld the traditional marital discipline of the pre-Reformation Western Church to a degree that is unparalled among Reformation bodies, and one which was profoundly uncongenial to the Erastian powers-that-be in post-Reformation England — as witness the phenomenon of "Parliamentary divorce."  Another is that in the context of this resituated "Anglican patrimony" one of its functions will be to witness to and uphold the longaeval marriage discipline of the Church, as a counterpoint to those sad failings of Henry VIII that led to the original breach between England and Rome, and thus in a way vindicating the stand of Clement VII, Paul III and Cardinal Pole in opposition to that monarch.  And finally, although there is the hopeful possibility of the ordination of suitable married men to the diaconate and presbyterate in the soon-to-be-erected ordinariats, it has to be emphasized that there is little or no possibility of those in irregular marital situations, and certainly not in DaR situations, to be ordained or to serve in any clerical capacity in them.

(to be continued…)

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Fidei Defensor

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To the Reader from Assertio Septem Sacramentorum, or Defense of the Seven Sacraments, published by King Henry VIII of England in 1521.

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va09 Fidei DefensorALTHOUGH I do not rank myself amongst the most Learned and Eloquent; yet (shunning the Stain of Ingratitude, and moved by Fidelity and Piety; ) I cannot but think myself obliged, (would to God my Ability to do it, were equal to my good Will!) to defend my Mother, the Spouse of Christ: Which, though it be a Subject more copiously handled by others; nevertheless I account it as much my own Duty, as his who is the most learned, by my utmost Endeavours, to defend the Church, and to oppose myself to the poisonous Shafts of the Enemy that fights against her: Which this Juncture of Time, and the present State of Things, require at my Hand. For before, when none did assault, it was not necessary to resist; but now when the Enemy, (and the most wicked Enemy imaginable,) is risen up, who, by the Instigation of the Devil, under Pretext of Charity, and stimulated by Anger and Hatred, spews out the Poison of Vipers against the Church, and Catholic Faith; it is necessary that every Servant of Christ, of what Age, Sex, or Order soever, should rise against this common Enemy of the Christian Faith; that those, whose Power avails, not, yet may testify their good Will by their cheerful Endeavours.

We need not seek any foreign Testimonies for proving what we have said; for Luther (fearing that any one should go up and down in Search of such,) discovers himself, and his Mind, of his own Accord, in his very Beginning. For who should doubt of what he aimed at, when he reads this one Sentence of his?

It is now therefore convenient, that we arm ourselves with a two-fold Armour: the one Celestial, and the other Terrestrial. With a celestial Armour; That he, who, by a feigned and dissembled Charity, destroys others, and perishes himself, being gained by true Charity, may also gain others; and that he who fights by a false Doctrine, may be conquered by true Doctrine: With a terrestrial; that, if he be so obstinately malicious, as to neglect holy Councils, and despise God's Reproofs, he may be constrained by due Punishments; that he who will not do Good, may leave off doing Mischief; and he that did Harm by the Word of Malice, may do Good by the Example, of his Punishments. What Plague so pernicious did ever invade the Flock of Christ? What Serpent so venemous has crept in, as he who writ of the Babylonian Captivity of the Church; who wrests Holy Scripture by his own Sense, against the Sacraments of Christ; abolishes the ecclesiastical Rites and Ceremonies left by the Fathers; undervalues the holy and antient Interpreters of Scripture, unless they concur with his Sentiments; calls the most Holy See of Rome, Babylon, and the Pope's Authority, Tyranny; esteems the most wholesome Decrees of the Universal Church to be Captivity; and turns the Name of the most Holy Bishop of Rome, to that of Antichrist! O that detestable Trumpeter of Pride, Calumnies and Schisms! What an infernal Wolf is be, who seeks to disperse the Flock of Christ! What a great Member of the Devil is he, who endeavours to tear the Christian Members of Christ from their Head!

How infectious is his Soul, who revives these detestable Opinions and buried Schisms; adds new ones to the old, brings to Light (Cerberus-like, from Hell) the Heresies which ought to lie in eternal Darkness; and esteems himself worthy to govern all Things by his own Word, opposed against the Judgments of all the Antients; nay also to ruin the Church of God! Of whose Malice I know not what to say. For I think neither Tongue nor Pen can express the Greatness of it. Wherefore, before I exhort, pray, and beseech, through the Name of Christ (which we will profess) all Christians, who are willing to look upon, and read Luther's Works, especially the Babylonian Captivity, (if he be Author of it) to do it warily, and very judicially; that, as Virgil said, he gathered Gold out of the Dross of Ennius; so they may also gather good Things out of Evil: And if any Thing please them, let them not be so taken with it, as to suck the Poison with the Honey; for it is better to want both, than to swallow both. To hinder which, I wish the Author may Repent, be converted, and live; and, in Imitation of St. Augustine, (whose Rule he professed) correct his Books, filled with Malice, and revoke his Errors. If Luther refuses this, it will shortly come to pass, if Christian Princes do their Duty, that these Errors, and himself, if he perseveres therein, may be burned in the Fire. In the mean while, we thought it fit to discover to the Readers some chief Heads or Chapters in the Babylonian Captivity, which have the most Venom in them, by which it will appear, very clearly, with what exulcerated Mind he began this Work; pretending the public Good, but writing Nothing but malicious Inventions.

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The Relics of St. Cuthbert

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The relics of St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne have a particularly colorful and well-documented history beginning with the story of the initial discovery of the saint's incorrupt remains as related by the Venerable Bede:

CHAPTER XLII

HOW HIS BODY AFTER NINE YEARS WAS FOUND UNDECAYED

Now Divine Providence, wishing to show to what glory this holy man was exalted after death, who even before death had been distinguished by so many signs and miracles, inspired the minds of the brethren with a wish to remove his bones, which they expected to find dry and free from his decayed flesh, and to put them in a small coffer, on the same spot, above the ground, as objects of veneration to the people. This wish they communicated to the holy Bishop Eadbert about the middle of Quadragesima; and he ordered them to execute this on the 20th of April, which was the anniversary of the day of his burial. They accordingly did so; and opening the tomb, found his body entire, as if he were still alive, and his joints were still flexible, as if he were not dead, but sleeping. His clothes, also, were still undecayed, and seemed to retain their original freshness and colour. When the brethren saw this, they were so astonished, that they could scarcely speak, or look on the miracle which lay before them, and they hardly knew what they were doing. As a proof of the uncorrupted state of the clothes, they took a portion of them from one of the extremities,-for they did not dare to take any from the body itself,-and hastened to tell what they had found to the bishop, who was then walking alone at a spot remote from the monastery, and closed in by the flowing waves of the sea. Here it was his custom to pass the Quadragesima; and here he occupied himself forty days before the birthday of our Lord in the utmost devotion, accompanied with abstinence, prayer, and tears. Here, also, his venerable predecessor, Cuthbert, before he went to Farne, as we have related, Spent a portion of his spiritual warfare in the service of the Lord. The brethren brought with them, also, the piece of cloth in which the body of the saint had been wrapped. The bishop thanked them for the gift, and heard their report with eagerness, and with great earnestness kissed the cloth as if it were still on the saint's body. "Fold up the body," said he, " in new cloth instead of this, and place it in the chest which you have prepared. But I know of a certainty that the place which has been consecrated by the virtue of this heavenly miracle will not long remain empty; and happy is he to whom the Lord, who is the giver of true happiness, shall grant to rest therein." To these words he added what I have elsewhere expressed in verse, and said,

" What man the wondrous gifts of God shall tell?
What ear the joys of paradise shall hear?
Triumphant o'er the gates of death and hell,
The just shall live amid the starry sphere," &c.

When the bishop had said much more to this effect, with many tears and much contrition, the brethren did as he ordered them; and having folded up the body in some new cloth, and placed it in a chest, laid it on the pavement of the sanctuary.

In 875, after the second Viking raid on Lindisfarne, the monks fled, carrying with them the relics of St. Cuthbert.  His body was carried to several places, including Melrose Abbey, until after seven years' wandering, it came to rest at Chester-le-Street where it (and the seat of the itinerant Diocese of Lindisfarne) remained until 995, when another Danish invasion necessitated its evacuation to Ripon.  According to local legend, the monks followed two milk maids who were searching for a dun cow and were led into a peninsula formed by a loop in the River Wear.  At this point St. Cuthbert's coffin became immovable and this was taken as sign that the new shrine should be built here.  After being housed in a succession of ever-sturdier structures, a stone building — the so-called White Church — was built to contain the relics and they were enshrined there on September 4, 999.  King Canute was an early pilgrim.  King William the Conqueror also visited St. Cuthbert's shrine in 1069.  Ultimately, St. Cuthbert's body was enshrined in Durham Cathedral, which was designed and built under William of Calais, who was appointed the first prince-bishop by William the Conqueror.  In 1104, after St. Cuthbert had been dead for 418 years, his casket was opened and the body was found to be incorrupt and possessed of a sweet odor; it was translated to a new shrine positioned in the eastern apse of the new Cathedral, behind the High Altar.  When the casket was opened, a small (3 1/2" x 5") pocket book of the Gospel of St. John, now known as the Stonyhurst Gospel, was found.  St. Cuthbert's vestment was crafted from fine Byzantine "Nature Goddess" silk (pointing to Anglo-Saxon England's connections to the wider world).  An unknown monk wrote of this shrine in 1593:

[The shrine] was estimated to be one of the most sumptuous in all England, so great were the offerings and jewells bestowed upon it, and endless the miracles that were wrought at it, even in these last days.  —Rites of Durham

At the Dissolution, the commissioners of King Henry VIII violated the relics of St. Cuthbert and despoiled his shrine.  At this time (1537 according to Archdeacon Harpsfield), the saint's body "was found whole, sound, sweet, odoriferous, and flexible."  From the Rites of Durham, from MS. Hunter, No. 44, copied about 1650 from the original of A.D. 1593, p. 85:

The sacred shrine of holy St. Cuthbert, before mentioned, was defaced in the visitation that Dr. Ley (Lee H. 45), Dr. Henley, and Mr. Blythman, held at Durham, for the subverting of such monuments, in the time of King Henry VIII., in his suppression of the abbeys, where they found many worthy and goodly jewels; but especially one precious stone (belonging to the said shrine, H. 45), which, by the estimate of those three visitors and other skilful lapidaries, was of value sufficient to redeem a prince.

" After the spoil of his ornaments and jewels, coming nearer to his sacred body, thinking to have found nothing but dust and bones, and finding the chest that he did lie in very strongly bound with iron, then the goldsmith did take a great fore-hammer of a smith, and did break the said chest; and when they had opened the chest, they found him lying whole, uncorrupt, with his face bare, and his beard as if it had been a fortnight's growth, and all his vestments upon him, as he was accustomed to say Mass, and his met-wand of gold lying beside him. Then when the goldsmith did perceive that he had broken one of his legs, when he did break open the chest, he was very sorry for it, and did cry, 'Alas, I have broken one of his legs!' Then Dr. Henley, hearing him say so, did call upon him, and did bid him cast down his bones. Then he made him answer again, that he could not get it (them, H. 45) asunder, for the sinews and skin held it that it would not come asunder. Then Dr. Ley did step up, to see if it were so or not, and did turn himself about, and did speak Latin to Dr. Henley, that he was lying whole. Yet Dr. Henley would give no credit to his words, but still did cry, 'Cast down his bones'. Then Dr. Ley made answer, 'If you will not believe me, come up yourself and see him'. Then did Dr. Henley step up to him and did handle him, and did see that he laid whole (was whole and uncorrupt, H. 45). Then he did command them to take him down: and so it happened, contrary to their expectation, that not only his body was whole and incorrupted, but the vestments wherein his body lay, and in which he was accustomed to say Mass, were fresh, safe, and not consumed. Whereupon the visitors commanded that he should be carried into the vestry, where he was close and safely kept in the inner part of the vestry till such time as they did further know the king's pleasure what to do with him; and upon notice of the king's pleasure therein (and after, H. 45), the prior and the monks buried him in the ground, under the same place where his shrine was exalted (under a fair marble stone, which remains to this day, where his shrine was exalted, H. 45).

King Henry VIII allowed the monks to reinter St. Cuthbert's remains under a plain stone slab, beneath the very spot over which the former shrine had been elevated.  This was opened again on May 17, 1827 (though there is evidence that the grave was disturbed between 1542 and 1827), at which time, the body had been reduced to a skeleton swathed in decayed vestments.  The designs of the robes matched those described in the accounts of his translation in 1104.  A Saxon square cross of gold embellished with garnets was found with the body.  This cross, with its characteristic splayed ends, has come to be used as an heraldic device representing St. Cuthbert.  According to one tradition, however, the bones unearthed in 1827 were not those of St. Cuthbert, his actual remains having been hidden elsewhere in the Cathedral between 1542 and 1558.

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A Royal Conquest of the Church

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THE REFORMATION AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND: NOT “A DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE” BUT “A ROYAL CONQUEST OF THE CHURCH”

For some time I have been alternately bemused, puzzled and annoyed by the arguments and assertions of those Anglican writers and bloggers who try to defend one or other modern “official Anglican” innovations such as the ordination of women to the diaconate, priesthood, or episcopate. Some of the commentators are often generally "conservative" but somehow they seem compelled to dismiss the lack of any early church precedent for these innovations with remarks along the lines of, "the Church of England rejected papal jurisdiction in the Sixteenth Century, and so is free today to do what it will on its own authority." They usually also contend that the English Church "broke away from Rome" or "freed itself from papal control" or "declared itself independent" at that time. The purpose of these claims seems to be to assert that this act of 450 years ago was indeed a declaration of independence on the part of the "Anglican Church" and one which gives some degree of "historical precedent" for these modern innovations, if only by establishing the "authority" of Anglican churches to depart on their own initiative from Catholic belief and precedent hitherto held to be binding as constitutive of "catholicity."

There are interesting theological and ecclesiological questions underlying such an assertion, but my purpose here is not to discuss those, but, rather, what it was (if anything) that the Church of England "did" between the early 1530s and the mid 1560s to see if these assertions can be justified, or, indeed, whether they have any clear meaning at all.

At the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, and for a long time previously, the Church of England consisted of two church provinces: Canterbury, with nineteen dioceses, and York, with three. To be precise, the English church also included the four Welsh dioceses, in addition to fifteen English ones. Although the English bishops had gathered together in "synods" beginning in the Seventh Century, such synods had ceased to meet by the Fourteenth Century, because of the development of two ecclesiastical assemblies, the Convocation of Canterbury and the Convocation of York.

The Upper House of each convocation consisted of prelates (bishops and abbots) while the Lower House consisted of archdeacons, deans of cathedrals and representatives of the parochial clergy. The convocations' origins were connected with those of the English Parliament. As is well known, the English Parliament is a two-house body, consisting of the House of Lords, in which sat until only a decade ago the "Lords Spiritual" (the bishops of the original 26 dioceses of the Church of England and, until the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s some 31 abbots) and the "Lords Temporal" (the hereditary peers, to which were added the life peers in 1964).  The membership of the House of Commons, by contrast, was elected each time the monarch summoned a Parliament. What is not so well known is that at the beginnings of Parliament in the late Thirteenth and early Fourteenth Centuries, "the Commons" included elected representatives of the lower clergy as well as of the laity, but in the 1330s these "proctors of the clergy" began to refuse to participate in parliamentary deliberations, considering them both time-consuming and unsuitably "secular" in nature. Consequently, they began to meet separately under the presidency of a Prolocutor (Speaker) of their own choosing, and at the summons of their respective province's archbishop. This was the origin of the convocations, and the reason why meetings of the convocations took place in tandem with meetings of Parliament, and not otherwise. [1]

The convocations were effectively the "church parliament" for the two provinces of the Church of England. They had two principal functions:

  • to make ecclesiastical laws (canons) which bound both clergy and laity; and,
  • to vote clerical tax grants to the Crown, analogous to those secular taxes voted by Parliament.

However, while Acts of Parliament required the monarch's approval to become legally valid, those of the convocations did not: they came into force when approved by both houses and promulgated by the archbishop of their respective province. While both convocations were in theory of equal authority, in practice the Convocation of York was a small-scale affair as compared with the Convocation of Canterbury, and normally followed the lead of the latter body.

In 1216 King John signed Magna Carta. The first clause of Magna Carta granted "that the Church of England may be free" meant originally free from royal interference concerning episcopal elections and church finances. There had been a number of clashes between the Crown and the Church in the Middle Ages both before and after the grant of Magna Carta but after 1341 there were no major clashes. There continued to be jurisdictional quarrels between the king's courts and the church courts. Some churchmen resented the various Fourteenth-Century parliamentary statutes that sought to limit papal interference with ecclesiastical appointments within the Church of England, but for the most part Church and Crown coexisted in relative harmony until the reign of Henry VIII. Frustrated by the failure of his attempt in 1529 to secure a papal annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon or, otherwise, papal acquiescence in an annulment to be granted by a specially-arranged papal legatine court meeting in England in June/July of that year, Henry began to browbeat the English Church in order to secure its institutional support for his "divorce." He wanted the support of the church to place pressure on the papacy to grant the annulment.

By June 1530 it was becoming clear that any Roman judgment on Henry's marriage was likely to uphold its validity, and from that point onwards the goal of Henry's diplomacy was to prevent or delay a resolution of the case in Rome, while casting about for some means of resolving the matter in England. At the time, most of the bishops had willingly or otherwise proclaimed their support for Henry's annulment petition as had the convocations (academic assemblies of masters and doctors) of Cambridge and Oxford universities. Nonetheless, when Henry suggested in October 1530 to a group of bishops, clergy, judges and lawyers that perhaps the Archbishop of Canterbury might proceed in the case in defiance of the pope, the meeting reacted with consternation, informing Henry that this was impossible. Likewise, the aged Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham (d. 1532), who was an unenthusiastic supporter of the king's cause, refused to have any to do with the suggestion.

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