Catholic-Protestant-Catholic-Protestant

 Third Thursday of Lent

Lectionary Texts:

OT: Exodus 20:15-16

NT: John 4:4-26

 

We left off yesterday with Henry VIII married to Anne Boleyn and their having a daughter, Elizabeth. There are scores of historical fiction novels, histories, and movies about Henry and his six wives. I'm just going to provide some salient (but not salacious) details. 

 

Henry heard and believed that his new queen, Anne, had been having at least one affair. He had her arrested, imprisoned, and beheaded in the Tower of London,which is not a tower but an enclosed prison compound, now a tourist attraction. If you take the tour, a charming Beefeater in full costume will show you the block where Anne had her head removed. For some reason some women tourists like to have their pictures taken with their head down on that block.

 

There is no separation of church and state, a totally inconceivable idea until the American revolutionaries come along a couple of centuries later. Whatever the religion of the ruler, that is the religion of the country. There is also no freedom of religion, not at this point. In establishing the Church of England in 1534, Henry demanded that all Catholic priests in England convert to the Church of England. Many did. Many fled to continental Europe. Many, like Anne Boleyn, lost their heads. The Catholic Church owned hundreds of monasteries with vast amounts of land. Henry confiscated all the monastic lands. Many of the monasteries would be burned.

Henry marries again shortly Anne's end, this time to Jane Seymour. They do have a son, Edward VI. Jane dies of an infection contracted in childbirth. I'll skip the remaining wives. There will be no more children. Henry dies in 1547. Like me, he was overweight and suffered from gout. Edward VI becomes king at age 9. Regent advisors and Parliament do the actual ruling. Edward was a very sickly child. He died in 1553, too young to have married or fathered a child.

Edward's death created the situation that Henry had dreaded. There was no male heir to the Tudor dynasty. There will be, for the first time, a ruling queen, Henry's oldest daughter, Mary. Her gender is not the real problem, though. The real problem, the big, huge, overwhelming problem, is that Mary, like her mother Catherine of Aragon, has remained Catholic. As the ruler goes, so goes the country. Mary makes the whole country Catholic again. She brings back the priests who have fled to Europe. She has hundreds of now Anglican priests executed. The bullseye on her target list was Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, and author of the first BCP. She had him imprisoned in the Tower for two years. Then he got the axe, both literally and figuratively. Queen Mary, would long after her death have two things named after her, an Ocean Liner and a Cocktail. Yes, by the end of her reign she was being called Bloody Mary.

 

Mary died of natural causes in 1558, married but childless. Who's left? Another woman. Mary's half-sister Elizabeth. Elizabeth, like her father, was Anglican. As the ruler goes, so goes the country. The Catholic priests flee back to Europe. The Anglican priests return. Elizabeth will have a fair number of heads lopped off, in her own right. The nation will never be Catholic again, though a couple of times it will come close. There will also be one brief and terrible period of neither Catholic nor Anglican, but Puritan. Elizabeth will have a long and stable rule, 1558-1603. The problem of succession will rise again. Elizabeth never married, had no children. Aargh! What's a monarchy to do!

Faithfully,

Christian