Diarmaid MacCulloch. The Boy King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. xviii + 284 pp. $27.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-312-23830-8.
Reviewed by Sarah Covington (Department of History, Elizabethtown College)
Published on H-Albion (March, 2002)
The Six-Year Revolution
The Six-Year Revolution
Precocious, opinionated, and infused with the spirit of a new Josiah, Edward VI was nevertheless a cipher-king, important not for his own contributions but rather for the energies and ambitions he unleashed around him. Standing at the enigmatic center of a theological revolution and dead at the age of fifteen, Edward embodied promise both fulfilled and unfulfilled, and anyone who wishes to come to terms with the English reformation(s) must pass through him, or rather the characters who claimed to represent him. In his two-volume biography of the reign completed in 1970, W.K. Jordan once claimed a greatness for the boy-king that was second only to his half-sister Elizabeth; a more realistic biographical assessment was taken by the gifted historian Jennifer Loach, whose work was left incomplete, though it was ultimately published after her untimely death, in 1996. A full redressing of Edward and his reformation has thus long been due, which makes Diarmaid MacCulloch's The Boy King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation all the more notable and exciting in its arrival.
As the author of the definitive Thomas Cranmer: A Life (1996), MacCulloch is one of the most important reformation historians of the last two decades, and the knowledge he brought to the Cranmer biography serves him well here, not only because of Cranmer's own centrality in Edward's reign, but because of the complex theological issues which were brought forward under the policies of what is emphatically presented as a reformation from above. Based on a series of Birkbeck lectures delivered in 1998 at the University of Cambridge, The Boy King is above all a work of synthesis, incorporating not only MacCulloch's own work, but also a rich body of the most recent scholarship in the field; as such, it is also sure to provoke further debate among historians on the nature of the reformation as it was disseminated, received, or experienced by men and women across the realm.
For MacCulloch, Edward's reformation was a liberating affair, a kind of six-year reformation summer of love or--in his words--a "glasnost" which also constituted "a dynamic assault on the past, a struggle to the death between Christ and Antichrist" (p. 9). "It was a movement of hope and moral fervour, capable of generating a mood of intense excitement," he writes; indeed, it "was a time of apparently infinite possibilities, when ordinary people believed that they could themselves influence the future, and when the government appeared to agree" (p. 126). Despite the subsequent refutations of Edward's revolution by Mary and--from a more subtle perspective--Elizabeth, the changes unleashed in those six years would remain, deeply influencing not only on the Church of England but "the culture which the union of the English, Scots and Irish crowns later exported to the rest of the world" (p. 11).
These are large claims to make for a period which has been treated, at the other extreme, as one of confusion at best--an aberration between the theologically ambiguous last years of Henry and Mary's Catholic restoration. Nevertheless, while MacCulloch may sometimes go too far in his sympathy for the changes wrought by Edward--who was not only identified as the idol-purging Josiah but also the temple-building Solomon--his assessments are never rose-tinted, and certainly they capture the spirit of optimism which prevailed among the leading participants from the evangelical leadership on down. Claims made for the regents are somewhat more questionable, as Somerset, according to MacCulloch, "uneasily combined the reforming zeal of Thomas Cromwell, the chutzpah of Cardinal Wolsey and the flashy populism of Queen Elizabeth's doomed Earl of Essex" to oversee a "hyperactive and gloried" regime (pp. 50-1); even Northumberland, with his pursuit of peace abroad and his programs of administrative and religious reform, displayed "idealism of a sort...much as it may seem strange to attribute idealism to a nobleman who undoubtedly feathered his own nest" (p. 55).
It is Cranmer, however, who proved almost breathtakingly efficient in pushing the revolution through from above, according to MacCulloch, though the young king himself was hardly himself a pawn; in 1550, for example, Edward unilaterally and without parliamentary approval struck the mention of saints out of the oath of supremacy, thus "alter[ing] the theology of the English Church and...show[ing] more emphatically than Henry VIII or Elizabeth ever did what Tudor royal supremacy was about" (p. 36). But Cranmer, working in conjunction with Latimer and Ridley, did the most in providing Edward's religious policy with its "driving, unrelenting energy" as he displayed "an inflexible determination to further the evangelical goal by fair means or foul" (pp. 102 and 104). The revolution was ostensibly gradualist and, as far as the 1549 Prayer Book was concerned, calculatedly vague on matters concerning the eucharistic presence. Still, it proceeded almost inexorably and according to plan, as heresy laws and the conservative Act of Six Articles were abolished, new homilies were published that emphasized justification by faith alone, and visitation programs were embarked upon that unleashed the energies of wholesale (and quasi-official) iconoclastic destruction onto a population that "found what was happening bewildering and distasteful" (presumably when that same population wasn't feeling the aforementioned "infinite possibilities," pp. 74, 125-7).
The ambitions of the Edwardian establishment were also internationalist in scope, and MacCulloch is especially interesting in detailing not only the arrival in England of figures such as Peter Martyr Vermigli, but also the debates in 1548 and 1549 between Heinrich Bullinger and John Calvin--or between Zurich and Geneva--concerning the Eucharist. The result of the negotiations was the Consensus Tigurinus, a joint statement that brought the two factions together and ultimately became the symbol "of an evangelical group identity which was non-Lutheran, even anti-Lutheran, and which would soon be labeled Reformed" (p. 169). Such a detente would become momentous for England, as it allowed a new understanding of the Eucharist to prevail, and with it an emerging "creative relationship" between the Swiss Reformation and the English Church (p. 170). At the same time, MacCulloch writes that the labels "Calvinist" and "Zwinglian" that are often hurled derogatorily at the reformation in Edward's time are the legacies of hostile Laudian Anglicans or Catholics such as Robert Parsons, who tended to simplify Cranmer's developing eucharistic thought or overstate the role of Calvin, whose full international influence would emerge after 1553.
"Bliss" it may have been "to be alive in 1547," MacCulloch writes, but by the end of the reign the edifice of the "evangelical society" was showing strains, as internecine squabbling prevailed among magistrates, commons, clergy, and factions, and the abortive Jane Grey episode cast a final disastrous cloud over it all (p. 156). Ironically, it was Mary who "[saved] the Edwardian Reformation from itself by burning a wide range of evangelicals" (p. 179); MacCulloch explains that such a "holocaust" helped neutralize tensions between evangelicals and their more radical opponents, but a less charitable perspective might also view the creation of martyrs under Mary as bolstering a cause that had been shaky in its footing from the beginning. MacCulloch does not take such a view, and in fact he makes an excellent case for the manner in which Edward's reformation lived on in the Elizabethan Settlement and after, albeit in heavily truncated and almost unrecognizable form. Still, try as some might to resurrect its spirit, the world of 1550 was irrevocably over, as the original revolutionaries were martyred, to be replaced by those such as William Cecil, who achieved prominence under Edward and later chose a more Nicodemite path under Mary. The queen herself--who in MacCulloch's view was an evangelical albeit of "an extremely old-fashioned variety" (p. 194)--represented this shift over to a new compromising mood, which was in turn conveyed by Tacitean historians such as William Camden, for whom "the high-temperature religion of the mid-century revolution was now an embarrassment" (p. 206). Hardcore idealism--the stuff by which martyrs were made--thus gave way to calculated ambiguities and power politics: it is a familiar story with revolutions.
While he may at times place too high an assessment on the positive qualities of Edward's reformation and their long-term influence, MacCulloch has written an engrossing and vivid account of the Edwardian period, and one which must be read by all who are interested in early modern England and the subsequent development of its church. His is a correction of sorts--and a necessary one--to the subsequent historiography which viewed the revolution unleashed over the course of six years as "negative, destructive, and cynical." Much of this assessment, as mentioned, has come from Anglicans, whose sacramentalist and clericalist/episcopalist elements would in turn have been "deplored" by Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley. But Anglicans nevertheless owe those six years of revolution a debt, MacCulloch writes, for the "genuine idealism, the righteous anger, and the excitement" which infused a movement and pointed the way, however chaotically, to a different world (pp. 221-2).
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Citation:
Sarah Covington. Review of MacCulloch, Diarmaid, The Boy King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2002.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=6025
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