List of Illustrations and Maps - Introduction - PART 1: HISTORICAL BACKGROUND - Dark Age Christianity: Miracles in the Missionary Epoch -The Holy Dead and their Relics - Pilgrims' Progress and Wonder Tales - PART 2: ENGLISH SHRINES AND PILGRIMS - Faith-Healing: Medicine and Miracle - Saintly Therapy in Action: Shrine-cures and Home-cures - Recording and Sorting Posthumous Miracles - Murders and Miracle-cults in Twelfth-century England - Saints, Sickness and Snobbery: Shrines and their Clientele - Maps and Miracles: The Geography of Pilgrimage -The Changing Fortunes of a Curative Shrine: St. Thomas Cantilupe - PART 3: THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES AND THE REFORMATION - Shifting Loyalties: New Shrines and Old Saints at the end of the Middle Ages - The Destruction of the Shrines - Conclusion - Abbreviations - Notes - Select Bibliography - Index

Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England

This book is a study of popular responses to the English Reformation. It takes as its subject not the conversion of English subjects to a new religion but rather their political responses to a Reformation perceived as an act of state and hence, like all early modern acts of state, negotiated between government and people. These responses included not only resistance but also significant levels of accommodation, co-operation and collaboration as people attempted to co-opt state power for their own purposes. This study argues, then, that the English Reformation was not done to people, it was done with them in a dynamic process of engagement between government and people. As such, it answers the twenty-year-old scholarly dilemma of how the English Reformation could have succeeded despite the inherent conservatism of the English people, and it presents a genuinely post-revisionist account of one of the central events of English history.

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Popular politics and the English Reformation

Why were so many religious images and objects broken and damaged in the course of the Reformation? Margaret Aston's magisterial new book charts the conflicting imperatives of destruction and rebuilding throughout the English Reformation from the desecration of images, rails and screens to bells, organs and stained glass windows. She explores the motivations of those who smashed images of the crucifixion in stained glass windows and who pulled down crosses and defaced symbols of the Trinity. She shows that destruction was part of a methodology of religious revolution designed to change people as well as places and to forge in the long term new generations of new believers. Beyond blanked walls and whited windows were beliefs and minds impregnated by new modes of religious learning. Idol-breaking with its emphasis on the treacheries of images fundamentally transformed not only Anglican ways of worship but also of seeing, hearing and remembering.

Broken Idols of the English Reformation

This article takes issue with the influential recent interpretation of Henry VIII's religious position as consistently ‘Erasmian’. Bringing to the discussion not only a re-evaluation of much familiar evidence but also a considerable quantity of hitherto unknown or little-known material, it proposes instead that Henry's religious position, until the 1530s, sat squarely within the parameters of ‘traditional religion’ and that the subsequent changes in his attitudes to the cult of the saints, monasticism, and papal primacy were so significant as to be understood and described by Henry himself in terms of a veritable religious ‘conversion’. This conversion, which was very much sui generis, is not easily to be fitted within the confessional frameworks of other sixteenth-century religious movements (though it was by no means unaffected by them). It hinged upon Henry's new understanding of kingship as a supreme spiritual responsibility entrusted to kings by the Word of God, but long hidden from them by the machinations of the papacy. His own providential deliverance from blindness was, he believed, but the beginning of a more general spiritual enlightenment.

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The religion of henry viii

The introduction to the thesis gives an overview of the life and career of Thomas
Wriothesley and considers the primary and secondary sources which provide the
material upon which the thesis is based. It is followed by a detailed consideration of
Wriothesley's sixteen years in the service of Wolsey. and Cromwell, recording his
growing competence and authority in the administrative machinery of mid-Tudor
government and in his influence in the day to day management of state affairs as
Cromwell's secretary.
The third section concentrates on Wriothesley's four years as the king's
secretary, referring to his work in the financial field in obtaining funds to finance the
king's wars. It examines his growing status in the court and privy council, and reviews
his work as an ambassador for Henry after 1530. Henry's confidence in him ensured
his occasional employment as a special, rather than resident ambassador to the imperial
court, and his work in this specialist field is investigated.
Wriothesley held the office of lord chancellor for only three years and in that
period made a limited impact in a judicial sense, in part due to his restricted
professional expertise. His principal function over those years, of finding means to
financing the high costs of Henry's military campaigns, and putting in order the chaotic
condition of the monetary system, is closely examined. Wriothesley's growing
involvement as lord chancellor in the developing factional struggles that encompassed
the privy chamber and the council mostly, but not only, in religious matters is also
assessed. His role in other aspects of the office of lord chancellor, in parliament, in
framing proclamations and as the senior member of the government dealing with
foreign ambassadors,is considered in detail.
Perhaps the most important feature of the last years of Wriothesley's career
was his deep involvement in the political and religious turmoils of the latter years of
Henry's reign and the first two years of Edward's. In the period between 1544 and
1550, perhaps for the only occasions in his life, serious misjudgement of events put him
in real peril of his life and property, lost him the office of lord chancellor and
effectively sidelined him for most of the last two years of his life. In his efforts to ruin
Queen Catherine Parr, his harassment of reformers, and in his mistaken view during the
last three months of the Protectorate that Warwick was really a Henrician catholic in
disguise, Thomas Wriothesley showed a surprising degree of self-deception. His
actions suggest that his political instinct failed him at the most crucial points in his
career.
Substantial rewards, which usually followed a period of valuable royal service
or successful military achievement, were in Wriothesley's case gathered in a relatively
short lifetime of determined endeavour. We examine in Appendix 1, the many financial
benefits and landed property he secured and retained successfully, the offices he
gathered and consider the extent of his authority and influence in his home county of
Hampshire. In Appendices 2 and 3 we look briefly at Titchfield Place, Wriothesley's
home in Hampshire and the detailed provisions of his Will.
The thesis concludes with an assessment of the life, administrative and political
career of Thomas Wriothesley, in the context of the mid-Tudor period.

The political career of Thomas Wriothesley, First Earl of Southampton, 1505-1550

Recent research has rendered untenable the glib characterisation of the Henrician Reformation as 'Catholicism without the Pope', but the essential nature of the motives and achievements of Henry VIII and his ministers in the 1530s and 1540s remains a controversial issue. To J. K. McConica, the polity created in the 1530s was an 'Erasmian' one, with the views of the great humanist on such matters as vernacular Scripture, superstitious pilgrimage and religious instruction providing a consensual nexus to bind together all but the most extreme shades of religious opinion.(1) More recently, Glyn Redworth has similarly argued that the Henrician Reform was from the first 'an intellectually coherent and satisfying movement', and that it had positive and distinctive religious aspirations, seeking to use the techniques of 'Protestant' evangelism to transmit a purged but none the less essentially Catholic doctrine.(2) G. W. Bernard has, by contrast, characterised the direction of religious policy after the break with Rome as 'deliberately ambiguous', and sees Henry as a ruler who held together an unwieldy coalition of interests by employing the rhetoric of continental Protestantism while inhibiting the implementation of any fundamental change.(3) Eamon Duffy's poignant description of the destruction wrought upon late medieval Catholicism points to a king who was 'on the whole committed to the reform of the saints and of images', but in other respects fundamentally conservative, and whose policy was erratically steered by his reliance on advisors sympathetic or hostile to the evangelical cause.(4) Richard Rex's recent survey of the Reformation under Henry VIII concludes that the 'Word of God' rhetoric and the model of Old Testament kingship employed by Henry and his propagandists to justify his assumption of the royal supremacy led inevitably to an assault on many aspects of popular religion, reclassified as unscriptural and superstitious.(5) Taking up some of the suggestions of these works, the following brief examination of a cause celebre of 1538 and its repercussions will attempt to demonstrate the way in which the detection by royal agents of ostensibly fraudulent superstition, rooted in the religious houses, was exploited to justify both to a domestic and an international audience the king's assumption of the Royal Supremacy. The assertion and defence of this supremacy was, to the king's mind at least, the central and continuing preoccupation of the Henrician Reformation, and to that end evidence of religious trickery perpetrated under the auspices of the papacy could be of service both to evangelicals and conservatives within the Henrician establishment, supplying a discourse of respectability and purpose which helped to orientate the English Church amidst the competing directions in which it was being pulled.

Peter Marshall

Papers

The rood of Boxley, the blood of Hailes and the defence of the Henrician church.(Henry VIII and religious controversies)