The Reformation Revised? The Contested Reception

of the English Reformation in Nineteenth-Century

Protestantism.

‘The Reformation is now entering upon a new phase.

The movement of the sixteenth century had died away during the

seventeenth and eighteenth’, but the ‘faith of the sixteenth century

lives again in the nineteenth’.1

The great nineteenth-century Swiss Calvinist

Merle d’Aubigne of Geneva, Professor of Theology

at the University of Geneva, was not alone in

asserting a direct link between the sixteenth and

nineteenth centuries in terms of the history of

the Reformation.2 For those inspired by the

‘religious regeneration’ of the early and mid-

nineteenth century in whichever form it took

(Reformed, evangelical, High Church or 1 J.H. Merle D’Aubigne, History of the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century. Volume Fifth (Edinburgh, Oliver & Boyd, 1953), p. 2. D’Aubigne’s History soon won an English Evangelical imprimatur. A five-volume edition of the work was first published in translation in England by the Religious Tract Society in 1843, the translation being corrected word for word by D’Aubigne himself. By the end of 1844, as many as 75,000 copies ofhis History had been into circulation by various American publishers. J.H. Merle D’Aubigne, History of the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, 5 vols, (London, Religious Tract Society, n.d.), ‘Preface’.

2 J.B. Ronay, The Inside of History. Jean Henri Merle d’Aubigne and Romantic Historiography (Westport, Conn., Greenwood Press, 1996), p. 168.

1

Tractarian), it was as if the eighteenth century,

portrayed as an era of rationalism and spiritual

aridity, had hardly existed. In the case of those

within the Reformed (i.e. Calvinist) and

evangelical traditions such as D’Aubigne, a

decline of ‘the movement of the sixteenth

century’ in the subsequent two centuries had been

reversed in the nineteenth with a renewed

historical sense of indebtedness towards that

great event. As D’Aubigne observed,

‘it was often to churches which had lost every spark of life that the

historian had then to resort for the narratives of this great revival.

This is the case no longer.’3

As D’Aubigne envisaged it, the nineteenth-

century rediscovery of the Reformation was no

mere piece of arcane antiquarianism but rather,

the climax of a continuing process of religious

fulfilment. It was also predicated on a long

assumption among continental Protestants (an 3 D’Aubigne, History of the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century. Volume Fifth, p. 2. The great Victorian essayist, Sir James Stephen in 1849 commented that D’Aubigne’s History was ‘the most elaborate of a long series of works on the reformation, recently published on the Continent, by thepresent inheritors of the principles and passions which first agitated Europe in the beginning of the sixteenth century’. Sir J. Stephen, Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography (London, Longman, Brown, Green andLongmans, 1849), p. 294.

2

assumption shared by English Protestant

Dissenters) that the Reformation had not then

been brought to the completion that many had

hoped.4 Thus, while for D’Aubigne, ‘the faith of

the sixteenth century lives again in the

nineteenth’, it was ‘more emancipated from the

temporal power, more spiritual, more general’. If

sixteenth-century Germany had been the home of

its birth, the Reformation’s culmination, ‘its

crowning stone’, was providentially designed to

be in nineteenth-century Britain and her

burgeoning Empire.5 D’Aubigne went so far as to

assign a Providential role for Britain and her

Empire to transmit to the wider world the Gospel

as proclaimed at the Reformation, claiming that,

‘England owes her all to the Reformation’ and that ‘God has given

the empire of the seas to nations who bear with them to every

clime the Gospel of his Son’.6 4 For the ubiquity of this view among many later-17th and early-18th century Protestants, see E. Duffy, ‘Correspondence Fraternelle; the SPCK, the SPG, and the Churches of Switzerland in the War of the Spanish Succession’, Reform and Reformation: England and the Continent c. 1500-c. 1750, Studies in Church History, Subsidia 2, ed. D. Baker (Oxford, Basil Blackwell,1979), pp. 251-80, at p. 252.

5 D’Aubigne, History of the Reformation, p. 2.

6 J.H. Merle D’Aubigne, Geneva and Oxford. An Address to the Professors and students of the Theological School, Geneva, at the opening of the session, October 3, 1842

3

It was a sentiment with which generations of

Victorian British Evangelicals and Protestant

churchmen would enthusiastically concur, and it

coloured their attitude to nineteenth-century

Catholic Europe as the seat of Antichrist and

Britain’s deliverance at the Reformation as a

direct gift of divine Providence,7 though this

was a view also widely shared by eighteenth-

century British Protestants.

Reflecting on D’Aubigne’s insistence that

the nineteenth century had a unique insight into

the great Reformation upheavals of the sixteenth

to the extent that its ‘spirit’ could be

rekindled, this essay will focus on the complex

and contested nature of the legacy of that

seismic event. We will be concerned primarily

with the English Reformation and D’Aubigne’s

(Edinburgh, John Johnstone, 1843), pp. 22-3.

7 G. Croly, The Reformation a direct gift of Divine Providence (London, Hatchards,1839). For a characteristic expression of this viewpoint, see Charles Golightly’s hyperbolic comment: ‘But for these despised Reformers, where would have been the religion of this land?...We had been as Sodom, we had been like unto Gomorrah. The condition of France and Spain present to our view a fearful counterpart of that fate that awaited us!’ [C.P. Golightly], Strictures on No. 90 of the Tracts for the Times. By a Member of the University of Oxford (2 parts, Oxford, J. Vincent, 1841), part 2, p. 85.

4

commentary is thus of interest primarily in this

context. While mindful that ‘English’ and

‘British’ are not interchangeable terms, Irish

and Scottish examples will be cited and it will

be necessary sometimes to look beyond the Church

of England to a wider British context. The legacy

of the English Reformation at least in British

historiography has had a long pedigree and its

religious celebration was no mere creation or

rediscovery of the nineteenth century. In spite

of D’Aubigne’s comment, the Reformation was far

from being neglected in eighteenth-century

England. Moreover, there were good reasons why

the narratives of the Reformation – Catholics

would call it the ‘black legend’ - first

popularised in the sixteenth century, had not

lost their hold in Britain in the intervening

period, as D’Aubigne assumed that they had on the

continent. One of the key elements highlighted by

recent historians of the so-called ‘Long

Eighteenth Century’, notably Linda Colley in her

ground-breaking Britons: Forging the Nation (1992) and

Colin Haydon in his Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century

England (1995), has been that of the potent

5

influence of a Protestantism grounded on the

Reformation which demonised Catholicism as an

unacceptable ‘Other’ in shaping an evolving

British national identity8. Haydon has

emphasised the part played in the eighteenth

century in keeping alive a popular anti-Catholic

historical memory and English ‘Protestant’ self-

image by the seminal influence of the gruesome

accounts, visual as well as textual, given in

John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, commonly known as

his ‘Book of Martyrs’.9 Foxe helped link

Catholicism in the minds of subsequent

generations of English people with religious

persecution, foreign interference, and arbitrary

government.10 No less important for the building

up a legacy of broad Protestant consensus on the

defining merits of the English Reformation was

the influence of Gilbert Burnet’s History of the

Reformation, (4 volumes, 1679-1714). For over a 8 L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (London, Yale U.P., 1992), esp. pp. 11-54.

9 For discussion of the ever larger eighteenth-century popular abridgements of Foxe, see E. Evenden & T. Freeman, Religion and the Book inearly Modern England: the Making of John Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 320-47.

10 E. Duffy, Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition: Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations (London, Bloomsbury, 2011), pp. 35-6.

6

century Burnet’s History remained the standard

reference work on the subject, with several

editions and abridgements, including a new

edition being published by Oxford University’s

Clarendon Press in 1816.

There were forces, however, which militated

against a Protestant consensus on the

Reformation. Many eighteenth-century Protestant

Dissenters regarded contemporary Anglican high

churchmanship as a form of ‘Popery’, a term

symbolising not merely papal tyranny but any

rigorous imposition of clerical or episcopal

authority in religious matters which could be

perceived as infringing the right of private

judgment.11 It was an attitude shared by some

latitudinarian Anglicans, notably Francis

Blackburne12 and had a long Protestant lineage.

Many Protestants, firstly Puritans within the

Elizabethan church establishment, then Dissenters

or separatists outside it, argued that the Church11 A. Thompson, ‘Popery, Politics, and Private Judgment in early Hanoverian Britain’, Historical Journal, 45:2 (June, 2002), pp. 333-56, esp. 343-4.

12 B.W. Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 48-51.

7

of England retained ‘rags of popery’, was not

sufficiently Protestant and needed further

‘reformation’. Eighteenth-century Dissenting

historians, such as Edmund Calamy, Daniel Neal,

Samuel Chandler and Caleb Fleming, looked to Foxe

for a sanction for Protestant Dissent, citing

Foxe’s siding with a ‘Genevan’ party among the

Marian exiles in Frankfort in the 1550s. Calamy’s

An Abridgement of Mr Baxter’s History of his Life and Times

(1702), the first Protestant Dissenting history

to recover the Dissenting experience of ‘the

great ejection’ of 1662 and its aftermath and

sought to link later Dissenting sufferings with

the Protestant victims of the Marian persecutions

of the 1550s.13 Chandler’s History of Persecution (1736),

though professedly inspired by Foxe, gave no

space to the Marian martyrs and instead focused

on persecutions of Puritans under the Elizabethan

as well as the Laudian regime, with Elizabethan

bishops such as Parker, Aylmer, and Whitgift, 13 J. Seed, Dissenting Histories: Religious Division and the Politics of Memory in Eighteenth-Century England (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2008), p. 19; D.J. Appleby, Black Bartholomew’s Day: Preaching, Polemic and Restoration Nonconformity (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 98, 113, 222; B.W. Griggs, ‘Remembering the Puritan Past: John Walker andAnglican memories of the English Civil War’, M.C. McClendon, J.P. Ward, M. MacDonald, eds. Protestant Identities: Religion, Society, and Self-Fashioning in Post-Reformation England (Stanford, 1999), p. 160.

8

charged with having ‘entered their sees with

persecuting principles’.14 It reflected an anti-

Anglican as much as an anti-Catholic agenda.

Foxe’s legacy was already becoming problematic

and denominationally contested.

Nineteenth century Britain witnessed that

‘rediscovery of the Reformation’ among

Protestants which D’Aubigne observed in Europe

more generally. Partly for reasons of proclaiming

their self-identity, Protestant Dissenters were

in the vanguard of this movement. They remained

as keen to justify their direct historical

lineage from the Reformation in the foreign

settler churches in London under Edward VI and

Mary Tudor and in the first separatists from the

church establishment. More broadly, they harked

back to late-medieval Lollardy and in particular

the fourteenth-century John Wycliffe as ‘the

morning star of the Reformation’.15 In the

14 S. Chandler, The History of Persecution in Four Parts (London, J. Gray, 1736), p. 344.

15 Joseph Fletcher, The Protestant Reformation Vindicated. A Sermon delivered at Lune-Street Chapel, Preston (Blackburn, Joseph Westley, 1822), p. 13. For the appeal to a Lollard tradition in nineteenth-century Protestant readings of the Reformation, see Introduction to this volume.

9

historical rhetoric of Protestant Dissent, early

separatists from the established church (dating

from as early as 1568), were only following out

the logical principles of the Reformation in

pursuit of a ‘pure’ and fully reformed church.16

Protestant Dissenters claimed they had separated

from the Church of England on precisely the same

principles as the Church of England had dissented

from the Church of Rome. They maintained that

they merely wanted to ‘carry forward the

principles of the Reformation to their scriptural

and legitimate extent’, the Church of England

having settled for only a ‘partial Reformation’,17

but sensitive to Anglican charges of subversion,

they also repudiated extremist excess. As John

Pye Smith (1774-1851), a prominent

Congregationalist minister and theologian put it:

‘Protestant Dissent is nothing more than the PROTESTANT

REFORMATION from Popery, carried out, not to the extravagant

16 W. Wilson, The History and Antiquities of the dissenting churches and meeting housesin London, Westminster and Southwark, 4 vols, (London, 1808-14), i, esp. pp. 3-36.

17 H.F. Burden, The Reformation Commemorated: A Discourse delivered at the Meeting-House, St Thomas’s Square, Hackney, December 28th, 1817 (London, T. Rutt & Son, 1818), pp. 28-9.

10

lengths by which hot and weak minds often degrade true

principles, but only so far as is required by consistency and

sincerity in obedience to the holy scriptures’.18

The Reformation of which Protestant Dissenters

claimed ownership was one shorn of its contingent

or problematic political or monarchical

dimensions and potentially embarrassing secular

entanglements.19

Given the history of their persecution at the

hands of Protestant magistrates and in their

emphasis on religious liberty, some nineteenth-

century Baptists, Congregationalists and

especially Unitarians continued to be ambivalent

about aspects of the Reformation. The Unitarians

in particular, following Joseph Priestley, tended

to be distinctive in their depiction of the

actual theological shortcomings, if not doctrinal

errors, of the Reformation itself. For them, ‘the

theology of the Reformers’ on such fundamental 18 John Pye Smith, Protestant Dissent Vindicated from the charge of being ‘unscriptural and unjustifiable’; in a letter to the Rev. Samuel Lee, D.D. in reply to that gentleman’s Letter tothe author, entitled ‘Dissent unscriptural and unjustifiable’ 2nd edition. (London, Jackson & Walford, 1855), p. 5.

19 Fletcher, The Protestant Reformation Vindicated, pp. 20-1.

11

Christian doctrines such as original sin, the

Divinity of Christ, human depravity, the

Atonement, and above all the Trinity, was as

antagonistic to ‘rational Christianity’ as was

the theology of the Council of Trent. From a

Unitarian perspective, the fact that such ‘great

errors’ of doctrine were ‘often distinguished by

the appellation of the doctrines of the reformation’ and

the authority among Protestants ‘of the names of

those reformers’ who upheld such ‘errors’ had

only served ‘to strengthen and confirm them’.20 It

was argued that ‘excepting the doctrine of

atonement’ (portrayed as an over-reaction to ‘the

popish doctrine’), these were all ‘the doctrines

of the church of Rome, which Luther and Calvin

left as they found’.21 Nineteenth-century

Unitarians tended to be more circumspect in their

characterisation of the teaching of the Reformers

in this respect, explaining, if somewhat

patronisingly, that it was not surprising that

‘the great Reformers of the sixteenth century 20 Joseph Priestley, The Importance and Extent of free Inquiry in Matters of Religion: ASermon preached before the Congregations of the Old and New Meeting of Protestant Dissenters at Birmingham, November 5, 1785. (Birmingham, J. Johnson, 1785), pp. 11-12.

21 Ibid, p. 12.

12

should not, at once, detect all the errors of the

antichristian church from which they separated’.22

For example, for the Unitarian Thomas Belsham, it

was rather ‘the occasion of regret, than of

surprise’, that the Reformers having rejected

‘the monstrous fables’ of Roman Catholic

doctrines of transubstantiation, purgatory, and

‘saint worship’, yet,

‘should continue to retain the extravagant doctrine of a plurality

of persons in the unity of the divine essence, the worship of Jesus

Christ the holy servant of God, the absurd notion of vicarious

sufferings, the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, and other

similar corruptions of the simplicity of evangelical truth’.23

Trinitarian Dissenters did not share the

particular misgivings voiced by Unitarians, but

nonetheless faulted the ecclesiastical as well as

political principles of the Reformers. When it

came to church government, Congregationalists in

particular had to admit and explain away the

failure of the first Reformers to ‘settle on the 22 T. Belsham, The Sufferings of Unitarians in former times, urged as a ground of thankfulness for their recovered liberties. A Discourse preached at Essex Street Chapel (London, J. Johnson & Co., 1813), p. 7.23 Ibidem.

13

true principles of church organisation’, meaning

‘the great principles of individual and

congregational Independency’. In this respect,

the experience of the Marian exiles in Frankfort

in the mid-1550s was regarded as formative as

well as that of the foreign ‘settler churches’ in

Edwardian and (clandestine) Marian London.24 The

celebration of the bicentenary of the ‘Great

Ejection’ of 1662 from which many claimed their

origins proved to be a particularly opportune

time for Protestant Dissenters to reflect on

their relationship with the Reformation of the

sixteenth century. In particular, it was another

chance for Congregationalists to reiterate their

by-now standard refrain that it was not

surprising that the Reformers, Continental as

well as English, in their necessary and epic

conflict with the power of the papacy, should

have overlooked the ‘principles of church polity

contained in the New Testament’.25 In short, the

Reformers then had had other priorities – tearing24 Joseph Fletcher, The History of the Revival and Progress of Independency in England, since the period of the Reformation, 2 vols, (London, John Snow, 1847),ii, pp. 79-80.

25 J. Waddington, Bicentenary Prize Essay. Congregational Church History from the Reformation to 1662 (London, Ward & Co., 1862), pp. 1-2.

14

down the popish Babylon before they could set

about the work of reconstruction. However, Bishop

Hooper, the Edwardian Bishop of Gloucester who

refused to be consecrated in canonical vestments,

was one Reformer who could be hailed by Victorian

Nonconformists as ‘the father of English

Nonconformity’.26

Whereas D’Aubigne and other Evangelical

commentators preferred not to dwell on the

political and constitutional side and legacy of

the Reformation and regarded it as a distraction

and even detraction from its intrinsic religious

message, the self-image of nineteenth-century

Protestant Dissenters as guardians of civil and

political liberty ensured that they were only too

willing to fault not only a tyrannical Henry VIII

but the Reformers themselves on this ground.

Thus, for Thomas Price in his History of Protestant

Nonconformity (1836-38),

‘the first Reformers were as ignorant of the true principles of

religious liberty, as the most bigoted of the Catholics. Though 26 E.B. Underhill, The First Protest: or, The Father of English Nonconformity (London, Wifert & Co. [1862]), p. 14.

15

rebels themselves, they refused to allow rebellion in others;

impugning the authority of Rome, they established their own; and

whilst denying the infallibility of the pope, they practically asserted

that of their own creeds’.27

In contrast to much Anglican apologetic for the

Reformation, for Protestant Dissenters the work

of the Reformers in breaking from Rome could only

be justified on the right of private judgment,28

though a rejection of what was seen as a Catholic

shackling of individual conscience remained a

unifying principle among Protestants of all

stripes. However, while the Reformers were

applauded for breaking with Rome on grounds of

liberty of conscience,29 Protestant Dissenters

berated them for ‘inconsistency’ in not adhering

to the principle once they were in control.

Luther was singled out as the malign force here –

it being lamented that a great opportunity for

27 T. Price, The History of Protestant Nonconformity in England, from the Reformation under Henry VIII, 2 vols (London, William Ball, 1836, 1838), i, p. 43.

28 Ibid, p. 96.

29 J. Kentish, The Connection between the Simplicity of the Gospel and the leading principle of the Protestant cause: A Sermon, Preached July 10, 1811, at St George’s Meeting House in Exeter, before the Society of Unitarian Christians, established in the West of England(Birmingham, J. Belcher & Son, 1811), pp. 11-13.

16

the triumph of religious liberty was ‘thrown away

through the influence of the great Reformer

himself’.30 The Anglican Reformers themselves were

not spared in this judgment. Elizabeth’s first

Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker was

censured for attempting ‘to establish the

supremacy of his Church, though he denied that of

the pope’.31 Significantly, John Foxe appears as a

hero in Price’s account, being distinguished from

the intolerance of the Elizabethan church

establishment for his reluctance to meet the

terms of Parker’s demands for subscription,32 the

very point on which Foxe was to become an

embarrassment for his nineteenth-century Anglican

apologists.33

30 Joseph Fletcher, History of the Rise and Progress of Independency, ii, p. 36.

31 Price, History of Protestant Nonconformity, i, p. 143.

32 Ibid, p. 187.

33 On this and for further discussion of the contested nature of Foxe’s martyrology within the nineteenth-century Church of England, see my ‘The Changing Legacy and Reception of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs in the Long Eighteenth Century: Varieties of Anglican, Protestant and Catholic Response, c. 1760-c. 1850’, R.D. Cornwall andW. Gibson, eds, Religion, Politics and Dissent, 1660-1832: Essays in Honour of James E. Bradley (Farnham, Ashgate, 2010), pp. 219-47.

17

As Anglican hegemony waned and the political

expectations and demands of Protestant Dissent

rose, so the Reformation as viewed through the

lens of Foxe, became denominationally more

contested – not merely between Catholics and

Protestants as hitherto but now increasingly

between different stripes of Protestant. When

faced with a renewed round of what they regarded

as Anglican ‘persecution’ in the run up to Lord

Sidmouth’s bill restricting itinerancy in 1811,

Protestant Dissenters and also Methodists looked

to Foxe’s martyrology for inspiration. As the

Methodist Philip Oliver noted in the preface to

his Short Account of the Reformers and Martyrs of the Church of

England…Compiled from Foxe and other writers (1812): ‘I

confess, I found the imputation of being a

Methodist once the greatest misfortune; I now

rejoice in it…One means of strengthening me was

the lives of the martyrs’.34 It was in this

context that a new edition of Samuel Chandler’s

History of Persecution (originally published in 1736) by

34 P. Oliver, A Short Account of the Reformers and Martyrs of the Church of England, and of the various cruelties, and persecutions in Germany, France, and Ireland. Compiled from Fox and other writers (Bala, R. Saunderson, 1812), p. iv.

18

the Methodist Charles Atmore appeared in 1813.35

The Protestant Dissenting appropriation of Foxe’s

martyrology continued to link the Marian

persecutions with the later persecutions of

Puritans and Dissenters in the seventeenth

century, claiming that ‘our principles are as old

as the English Reformation’.36 For nineteenth-

century Protestant Dissenters, it was the

‘popular’ and ‘religious’ rather than state or

‘magisterial’ Reformation with which they

identified. They felt free to criticise the

latter in a way which might match criticisms from

a Roman Catholic quarter.37 Above all, it was the

legacy of ‘suffering’ and persecution as a core

competent of Protestant Dissenting identity that

made Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ so richly amenable

for appropriation.38 35 C. Atmore (ed), The History of Persecution, from the Patriarchal Age, to the Reign of George II (Hull, J. Craggs, 1813).

36 R. Vaughan, Protestant Nonconformity in its relation to learning and piety. An Inaugural Discourse delivered at the opening of the Lancashire Independent College (London, Jackson & Walford, 1839), p. 9.

37 Vaughan, Protestant Nonconformity, p. 10; British Quarterly Review, II, ‘German Philosophy and Christian Theology’, (November, 1845), p. 299.

38 In this context, it is perhaps significant that there are several 17th as well as later editions of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs in the library of the Northern Congregational College, currently in the custody of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester.

19

The most strident attack on the Protestant

celebration of the Reformation emanated from the

non-Catholic radical pamphleteer William

Cobbett's History of the Protestant Reformation (1824-

27). The Acts and Monuments was described as ‘lying

Fox’s lying book of Protestant Martyrs!’39

Although intended to be a popular work which came

out in cheap monthly instalments and sold over

700,000 copies, it sent shock waves through the

higher echelons of the established church,

causing consternation in Anglican high church as

well as Anglican Evangelical and Protestant

Dissenting circles.40 Cobbett’s charge that

plundering was the major motivation of the

Reformers was a sensitive charge for Anglicans.

Their outraged response to Cobbett’s work

demonstrates the extent to which early

nineteenth-century Anglicans and Dissenters still39 W. Cobbett, A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland (1st edn, London, Published by the Author, 1824), Letter VIII.

40 Cobbett almost went beyond Catholic critiques of Foxe, asserting: ‘The real truth about these “Martyrs”, is, that they were, generally,a set of most wicked wretches, who sought to destroy the Queen and her government, and under the pretence of superior piety, to obtain the means of again preying upon the people’. W. Cobbett, A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, 2 vols. 1st edn. 1824 (London, 1829), i, p. 249.

20

regarded themselves as heirs to a common

Reformation heritage. Far from making common

cause with Cobbett to attack the Church of

England on this point, many Protestant Dissenting

critics maintained the line that the ‘Reformation

at home and abroad was first undertaken and

chiefly promoted by men who had nothing to gain,

and everything to lose’.41 A few latitudinarian

Anglicans conceded that Cobbett made some telling

points but the animus of his work made it

unpalatable even in this circle.42

Merle D’Aubigne may have hoped that the

principles of the Reformation would find their

ultimate fulfilment in nineteenth-century

Protestant Britain with its burgeoning Empire and

sense of ‘Bible and the Flag’ missionary purpose

(an identification, in fact, dateable from the

41 R. Oxlad, The Protestant Vindicator; or a refutation of the calumnies contained in Cobbett’s History of the Reformation; including remarks on the principal topics of the Popish Controversy (London, 1826), p. 9.

42 See Thomas Arnold’s ambivalent comment on Cobbett’s History: ‘It is a queer compound of wickedness and ignorance with strong sense and the mention of divers truths which have been too much disguised or kept in the back ground, but which ought to be generally known’. T. Arnold to J. Turner, 6 April 1825, A.P. Stanley, The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D. 2 vols (3rd edition, London, R. Fellowes, 1844), i, p. 74.

21

previous century). However, the kind of

Reformation which he and his English Evangelical

allies espoused would be an increasingly

contested one. Arthur Burns has argued that

‘before 1833 the Reformation was not a

contentious issue among English churchmen’.43

Burns is right of course in the sense that there

till then a consensus that the Reformation per se

was ‘a good thing’ and a blessing. The Protestant

evangelistic campaign aimed at Roman Catholics in

Ireland in the 1820s earned initial support from

Evangelicals and high churchmen alike and

significantly was characterised as a ‘Second

Reformation’.44 Nonetheless, cracks in the

consensus had already appeared. Anglican

Evangelicals and high churchmen had long since

disputed over who could best lay claim to be the

true spiritual heirs of the English Reformers45 -

a dispute which came to a head between the 43 A. Burns, ‘English “Church Reform” Revisited, 1780-1840’, A. Burns & J. Innes, eds, Rethinking the Age of Reform (Cambridge, U.P., 2003), pp. 136-62 at pp. 154-7.

44 See John Wolfe’s essay ‘The Commemoration of the Reformation and Mid Nineteenth Century Evangelical Identity’ in this volume.45 On this, see my ‘A disputed legacy: Anglican historiographies of the Reformation from the era of the Caroline Divines to that of the Oxford Movement’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 83, no. 1 (Spring, 2001), pp.121-67, esp. pp. 124-8.

22

Evangelical John Overton and high church Charles

Daubeny in the 1800s46 - and on the respective

merits of either an Arminian or a Calvinist

soteriology. For example, Foxe’s printing of

accounts of discussions on the subject of

Predestination among imprisoned Reformers in the

reign of Queen Mary was cited as proof of the

apparently Arminian and anti-Calvinist position

of Ridley, Latimer, and John Bradford.47

Combatants on each side of this particular intra-

Anglican debate were conscious as to how far

their differences rested on rival interpretations

of Reformation formularies and articles of faith

and even the private opinions of the Reformers

themselves. On the other hand, the status of the

Reformation-era formularies and the basic

teaching of the Reformers themselves were not in

dispute. Thus while Leigh Richmond’s 1807 edition

of the works of the Reformers was undoubtedly

46 Overton claimed that the so-called ‘Gospel clergy’ were the ‘true churchmen’ and true heirs of Cranmer, Jewel and other Reformers, and loyal to the reformation formularies, whereas Charles Daubeny and other high churchmen were the ‘true Dissenters’. See J. Overton, The True Churchman Ascertained (York, 1801), pp. iv, xi, 397.

47 R. Laurence, Authentic Documents relating to the Predestinarian Controversy which took place among those who were imprisoned for their adherence to the doctrines of the Reformation (Oxford, W. Baxter, 1819), esp. pp. iii-iv.

23

supportive of an Evangelical agenda, the editor

was very alive to potential charges of

partisanship, protesting, albeit perhaps too

much:

‘Nothing can be more remote from the fixed determination of the

editors, than that the selection should be intentionally so compiled

and arranged as to favour the particular views of any description

of systematists and controversialists whatsoever, either within or

without the pale of the established church’.48

In the new theological climate of the 1830s

and 1840s such sensitivities were forgotten. The

championing of Foxe within the Church of England

increasingly became a mark of party spirit and

formed part of the Protestant backlash against an

Oxford Movement whose leaders, notably Hurrell

Froude, turned their back on the English

Reformation and Reformers. Meanwhile, Anglicans

and Dissenters continued to cooperate: for

example, in 1828 the prominent Congregationalist

Robert Vaughan had acknowledged the support he

48 [L. Richmond, ed], The Fathers of the English Church, or, a selection from the writings of the reformers and early Protestant Divines, of the Church of England, 8 vols, (London, Rivingtons, 1807), i, p. vi.

24

had received from the Archdeacon of Richmond in

his biography of that ‘morning star’ of the

Reformation, John Wycliffe.49 As John Wolfe

persuasively shows in his contribution in this

volume, the tercentenary of the first printing of

the entire Bible in English by the Reformers

commemorated on 4 October 1835 appealed to

Anglicans of all shades as well as Nonconformists

and provided for pan-Protestant unity against a

resurgent Roman Catholicism.50 Moreover, the

steady publication flow of Reformation histories

and collections of Reformation texts, many of

them in cheap popular editions such as ‘The

Christian’s Family Library’ was fed by an

Evangelical concern that Popery was in the

ascendant and Protestantism ‘sadly degenerated’.51

Nonetheless, the 1835 tercentenary also witnessed

Anglicans, Methodists and Dissenters scoring

theological points off each other.52 As with the 49 R. Vaughan, The Life and Opinions of John de Wycliffe, D.D. illustrated mainly from his unpublished manuscripts, 2 vols (London, 1828), p. xi.

50 See John Wolfe’s essay, ‘The Commemoration of the Reformation and Mid Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Identity’ in this volume.

51 J. Scott, Luther and the Lutheran Reformation, 2 vols (London, R.S. Seeley& W. Burnside, 1837), i, p. iii.

52 For a high church Anglican example, see R. Parkinson, The Church of England, a bulwark between superstition and schism: Two Sermons preached in the

25

tercentenary of Luther’s revolt in 1817,

Protestant Dissenters welcomed an opportunity to

‘showcase’ the historical legitimacy of

Protestant Dissent as carrying ‘forward the

principles of the Reformation to their scriptural

and legitimate extent’. However, in the wake of

the debates over Catholic Emancipation in the

1820s, some Protestant Dissenters now felt the

need to defend themselves from the charge of

Anglican critics that they were not

insufficiently anti-Catholic.53 The readiness of

the more ‘Rational’ element among Protestant

Dissenters to criticise the English Reformers for

not understanding the true principles of

religious liberty, and their consequent emphasis

on the ‘incompleteness’ of the English

Reformation allowed Anglican churchmen to

criticise them for impugning ‘the character of

Collegiate Church of Christ, in Manchester, on Sunday the Fourth Day of October 1835, being the Third Centenary of the Reformation (London, 1835), esp. pp. 20-1, 24, 27-28. Cf. R. Masoon, The Reformation, the result of a knowledge of the Holy Scriptures: being the substance of a Sermon, preached in the Wesleyan Chapel, Lower Abbey Street, Dublin, on the Tercentenary of the printing of the entire Bible in the English language, SundayOctober 4, 1835 (Dublin, 1835).

53 W. Jay, General Remarks on the Reformation. A Sermon preached in Argyle Chapel, October 4th, 1835, being the three hundredth year of that very day of publishing the first complete Version of the Bible in English (2nd edition, London, 1835), pp. iv, 11.

26

the Reformers themselves’54 and to make good the

charge that Dissenters were ‘less averse to

Popery than many of their brethren of the

Establishment’.55 The continuing preoccupation of

many nineteenth-century Dissenters with issues of

religious liberty and equality in the face of

residual Anglican establishmentarian hegemony

made them inclined to view the Reformation

primarily in terms of liberation of conscience

rather than in evangelical theological terms.56

Both might extol the Reformation in terms of the

triumph of private judgment but for Evangelicals,

especially when combating Tractarianism, this was

interpreted as carrying the ‘liberty of the

gospel’57 rather than liberty of conscience per se.

On the other hand, in complete contrast, high

church Anglican commemorators of the tercentenary

54 [T. Lathbury], A Review of a Sermon by the Rev. W. Jay on the English Reformation: with an appendix, containing strictures on the Dissenters’ catechism, and on some recent numbers of the “Eclectic Review” and on an article in the CXXIXth number of the “Edinburgh Review” (London, Longman etc, 1836), p. 11.

55 Ibid, p. 14.

56 H.F. Burder, The Reformation Commemorated: A Discourse delivered at the meeting-house, st Thomas’s square, Hackney, December 28th, 1817 (London, T. Rolt & Sons, 1818), p. 29.

57 J. Scholefield, The Christian Altar. A Sermon preached before the University of Cambridge, on Sunday morning, October 23, 1842 (Cambridge, 1842), p. 14.

27

while acknowledging the significance of the

commemoration of ‘the first translation of the

whole Bible in the English tongue’, made clear

that the commemoration was not about the Church

of England then becoming ‘a new Church’ but an

old one which took upon itself its right to

restore itself to ‘its original purity’.58

Anglican Evangelicals from the 1830s onwards

increasingly took up Foxe as a useful polemical

weapon to employ against not only a revived

English Catholicism but the real ‘enemy’ -

‘crypto-papists’ within the Church of England

itself. Anglican Evangelicals, who regarded

themselves as spiritual heirs of the Reformers,

and for whom the bounds of Anglican spirituality

and doctrine had been set by the Reformation

‘moment’,59 accused the Tractarians of undermining

58 I.E.N. Molesworth, The Reformation not the establishment of a new religion, but theChristian liberty and doctrines of the British Church, vindicated from Romish usurpation. A Sermon preached October 4, 1835, the third centenary of the Bible in the English tongue (Canterbury, 1835), p. 11; T. Hartwell Horne, A Protestant Memorial for the Commemoration on the 4th Day of October, 1835, of the Third Centenary of the Reformation (London, T. Cadell, 1835).

59 G. Atkins, ‘Reformation, Revival and Rebirth in Anglican Evangelical Thought, c. 1780- . 1830’, Revival and Resurgence in Christian History, Studies in Church History, vol. 44, eds. K. Cooper & J. Gregory, (Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2008), p. 172.

28

the Church’s Reformation inheritance. The

Reformation became a weapon with which to

embarrass the Tractarians.60 One pamphleteer even

complained graphically that Newman’s Tract 90

trampled over ‘the charred ashes of Latimer and

Ridley’.61 The proposal to erect a memorial to

Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley, in Oxford in 1838-

39, and foundation in 1840 of the Parker Society

instituted specifically ‘for the publication of

the Works of the Fathers and Early Writers of the

reformed English Church’ were both responses to

Tractarianism.62

From the mid-1830s onwards, the reception

of Foxe’s martyrology became more than a

60 For a classic example, see C.P. Miles, The Voice of the Glorious Reformation; or, an Apology for Evangelical Doctrines in the Anglican Church (London, W.H. Dalton, 1844).

61 C.E. Tonna, A Peep into Number Ninety (London, 1841), p. 32.

62 On the other hand, Andrew Atherstone emphasises the anti-Catholic rather than merely anti-Tractarian impetus behind plans for the Martyrs Memorial. A. Atherstone, Oxford’s Protestant Spy. The controversial careerof Charles Golightly (Milton Keynes, 2007), pp. 58-61.On the Parker Society, see Plan of the Parker Society for the Publication of the works of the Fathers, and Early writers of the Reformed English Church (London, 1844); P. Toon, Evangelical Theology 1833-1856: A Response to Tractarianism (London, Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1979), pp. 43-4; P. Toon, ‘The Parker Society’, Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, xlvi, (1977), pp. 323-332; A. Cinnamond, ‘The Reformed treasures of the Parker Society’, Churchman, cxxi (2008), pp. 221-42.

29

denominational battle between Protestant and

Catholic controversialists. Foxe’s text was now

used to support the Anglican Evangelical claim to

be the mouthpiece of the theology of the English

Reformers.63 Anglican Evangelicals were keen to

promote Foxe as an icon of not only anti-

Catholicism but as a symbol of the Protestant

identity of the Church of England threatened by a

resurgent Anglican high churchmanship. What was

new here was that the tensions and conflict over

Foxe’s status emanated as much from within the

Church of England itself as from external

threats. On the other hand an older pan-

Protestant allegiance to Foxe and the tradition

of Reformation martyrology survived and later

Victorian illustrated editions of Foxe continued

to attract a wide readership.64 The Wesleyan

Methodists can be singled out as significant

here. One of the most militantly anti-Catholic

nineteenth-century histories of the Reformation

was by the Wesleyan Methodist William Rule and

63 See John Wolfe, ‘The Commemoration of the Reformation’ in this volume.

64 See Elizabeth Evenden, ‘John Foxe, Samuel Potter and the Illustration of the Book of Martyrs’, in this volume.

30

published in 1862. For Rule, as much as it had

been for Foxe himself, ‘the single object pursued

in its preparation’ was ‘to exhibit a struggle

between the adverse powers of Christ and

Antichrist’ with victory accorded ‘to those who

have washed their robes, and made them white in

the blood of the Lamb’.65 However, Rule made clear

that the catalyst for his almost apocalyptic

rendering of Reformation history in the spirit of

the sixteenth century was the need to challenge

the progress of a ‘Counter Reformation’ that had

emanated from Oxford and which had spawned ‘a

hundred Oxonian perverts’.66

Nineteenth-century high church Anglicans

increasingly insisted that the ‘Anglican

Reformation’ was something distinct from and

superior to the continental Reformation, being

more guided by ‘ancient precedent’.67 As number 15

of the Tracts for the Times put it: ‘There was no new 65 W.H. Rule, Martyrs of the Reformation. A History of the Martyrdoms, Confessions, and Sufferings, from the Dawn of the Reformation until the former part of the Nineteenth Century(London, John Mason, 1862), p. vii.

66 Ibid, p. x.

67 W. Ince, The Luther Commemoration and the Church of England. A Sermon preached before the University of Oxford, November 11, 1883 (London, 1883), p. 25.

31

Church founded among us, but the rites and true

doctrines of the Ancient existing Church were

asserted and established’.68 This line of argument

rendered it unnecessary for the early Tractarians

to disavow the orthodoxy of the English

Reformers. It was enough to put the Reformers in

their place as flawed individuals while

proclaiming the Church of England to be part of

the Catholic Church and adhering to the Catholic

faith as believed and upheld by the ancient

Church. As Newman put it when challenged by an

anti-Tractarian opponent, ‘we are not

Cranmerites, nor Jewellists, but Catholics,

members not of a sect or party, but of the

Catholic and Apostolic Church’.69

The idea of the Reformation as a ‘restoration’

rather than ‘revolution’ was of course not

entirely confined to high church Anglicans in the

nineteenth century but was something of a trope

of moderate and even Evangelical Protestantism as

68 Tracts for the Times by members of the University of Oxford (1834-41) I. No. xv, p. 4.

69 J.H. Newman, A Letter to the Rev. Godfrey Faussett…on Certain Points of Faith and Practice (Oxford, 1838), p. 27.

32

our opening testimony from Merle D’Aubigne

illustrated. The aim here was to oppose

‘rationalising’ and political interpretations of

the Reformation’s ‘glorious’ legacy by a clear

avowal of what ‘the principles of the Reformation

were not as well as what they were. As one Irish

Protestant churchman put it in 1859,

‘They were not, as they are sometimes falsely represented both by

friends and foes, principles of perpetual progress; that errors were

laid aside and new opinions adopted in accordance with the

advanced enlightenment of the age, so that a farther stage of

advance on the same principles may yet be looked for. This is

utterly contrary to fact. The Reformation was not a modifying of

religious truth in accordance with known enlightenment; but it

was a returning to religious truth once divinely recorded, and then

on the same principles it remains fixed for ever’.70

An Anglican polemic which insisted on the lineal

continuity of the church of England with the

ancient Church united Tractarians and old high

churchmen such as Thomas Burgess, Bishop of St

70 M.F. Day, The Reformation and its Agents. A lecture delivered to the Young Men’s Christian Association, Dublin, and the Church of England and Ireland’s Young Men’s Society, Belfast, in November 1858 (Dublin, 1859), p. 32.

33

David’s. Far from having broken away from the

ancient Church of these islands, it was

ingeniously maintained by Burgess that at the

Reformation it was the Church of Rome which had

broken away from the Church of England, and that

English Christianity owed its origins not to Rome

but to St Paul.71

The assumption of a clear distinction

between the English and Continental Reformations

and portrayal of Calvinist Puritanism as an

Edwardian ‘intrusion’ that was expelled in 1662,

characteristic of Tractarian and Victorian Anglo-

Catholic rhetoric had also found expression in

the pre-Tractarian era,72 but the Oxford Movement

embellished it. In numbers 38 and 81 of the Tracts

for the Times, Newman and Pusey respectively had

blamed Cranmer’s revisions of the first Edwardian

Book of Common Prayer (1549) and introduction of

the 1552 rite on the influence of foreign

71 E. Jones, The English Nation. The Great Myth (Stroud, Sutton, 2003), pp. 87-8; Duffy, Saints, Sacrilege Sedition, p. 38.

72 R. Gray, Sermons on the Principles upon which the Reformation of the Church of England was established, preached before the University of Oxford, in the Year 1796 at the Lecture founded by the late Rev. John Bampton (London, Rivingtons, 1796), p. 23.

34

Protestants such as Henry Bullinger, John a

Lasco, Martin Bucer and Peter Martyr.73 They

argued that, while damaging, this foreign

influence did not substantially affect the

doctrine of the English Liturgy. On the contrary,

it was argued, these ‘foreign Reformers’ were so

unsuccessful that their Protestant spiritual

descendents found the Book of Common Prayer to

savour too much of Popery.74 Newman and other

Tractarians, under Hurrell Froude’s influence,

soon outgrew this convenient distinction as

unreal in historical terms. However, it continued

to underpin standard high church Anglican

apologetic in its claims for the conservatism and

national superiority of the English Reformation

over all continental rivals, as in W.F. Hook’s

Call to Union on the Principles of the English Reformation (1839)

and The Three Reformations – Lutheran – Roman – Anglican

(1847)75 and reached its apogee in J.H. Blunt’s 73 Tracts for the Times, no. 38, ‘Via Media No. I’, p. 5 in Tracts for the Times. By Members of the University of Oxford. Vol. I for 1833-4 (London, Rivingtons, 1840).

74 A. Haerdelin, The Tractarian Understanding of the Eucharist (Uppsala, 1965), p. 53.

75 Hook contrasted the principles of the English Reformation as grounded on the ‘primitive church’ with that of the Continental Reformation marred by an ‘Ultra-Protestant’ violation of antiquity and a Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation which ‘made antiquity defer to modern innovations’. W.F. Hook, The Three Reformations – Lutheran – Roman –

35

The Reformation of the Church of England (1868), H. O.

Wakeman’s History of the Church of England (1896) and

William Clark’s Anglican Reformation (1897). It was

argued that what was called our ‘national

Reformers’ had had only limited objects that were

‘simple, intelligible, and practical’,76 and that

they had acted with discretion in carrying

through a ‘gradual purification of the Church’

until they themselves took fright at ‘the sudden

turn of events’ with foreign influences under

Edward VI. In some cases, according to this

narrative, this caused some to retreat into the

arms of Rome, thereby triggering a conflict of

opinion within the Church of England which had

continued to the present.77 Discountenancing this

‘foreign’ influence as extraneous to the English

Church, the analogy was made that the ‘English

Reformation’ differed from the continental

‘Protestant Reformations about as much as the

Anglican (London, John Murray, 1847), p. 47.

76 W.F. Hook, A Call to Union on the Principles of the English Reformation. A Sermon Preached at the Primary Visitation of Charles Thomas, Lord Bishop of Ripon (3rd edition,London, George and Francis Rivington, 1839), p. 10.

77 A Review of ‘The Reformation of the Church of England; its History, Principles and Results. By John Henry Blunt’ Reprinted from ‘The Times of February 27th and March 1st 1869 (London, Rivingtons, 1869), p. 10.

36

English Revolution of 1688 differed from the

French Revolution of 1789’.78 The former, it was

alleged, was more concerned with asserting the

jurisdictional independence of the English Church

from Rome and merely correcting ‘abuses’ rather

than claiming to set up ‘a new system’ based on

private judgement of scripture.79 Some Anglican

high churchmen remained sensitive about and clung

on to the reputations of the English Reformers,

reluctant to concede them to Evangelical

appropriation. For example, when in the first

volume of his History of England (1848) Macaulay not

unfairly portrayed Cranmer as utterly Erastian in

his notions of church government, there were high

churchmen who countered with carefully selective

scraps of evidence and special pleading that, on

the contrary, he ‘defended the Divine Institution

of Episcopacy’ and supported ‘the doctrine of

Apostolical Succession’80 – thus making Cranmer 78 W. Clark, The Anglican Reformation (Edinburgh, 1897), p. 1.

79 Call to Union on the Principles of the English Reformation, p. 7.

80 E.C. Harrington, The Reformers of the Anglican Church and Mr Macaulay’s History ofEngland. Second edition, with large additions, and the postscript (London, Francis andJohn Rivington, 1850), pp. 7-8. Macaulay’s detached and somewhat nonchalent view of the Reformers of course particularly offended Evangelicals. See M. Wheeler, The Old Enemies. Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 96.

37

acceptable to Victorian upholders of Anglican

notions of ‘church principles’. To avoid relying

on the flawed characters of the English

Reformers, a refinement of the traditional high

church argument emphasised that it was only the

‘canonical’ formulations and ‘official’

Reformation Church settlement that mattered. As

Hook put it,

‘our formularies, as we have them at present are not the work of

the first Reformers, but of reforming convocations down to the

reign of Charles II’.81

The idea of a ‘long Reformation’ only completed

and perfected with the Caroline divinity and

canonical revisions of the seventeenth century

was an act of revisionism paralleled by long-

standing Anglican Evangelical complaints that the

Church of England in that same later seventeenth-

century era had then turned its back on the

original purity of the Reformation, leaving it to

the Evangelical revivalists to redeem ‘the

81 Hook, Three Reformations, p. 48.

38

Reformation of Elizabeth’,82 and even to

nineteenth-century Evangelicals to recover what

they regarded as the forgotten Reformation

inheritance of apocalyptic readings of the Papacy

as the Anti-Christ.83

A notable difference or divergence between

this essentially mainstream high church Anglican

apologetic from that of more advanced Tractarians

(to be carried over into more extreme Anglo-

Catholicism) had already emerged by the late-

1830s. It was not long into the history of the

Oxford Movement, that under Hurrell Froude’s

influence,84 Newman and others abandoned the

Reformation altogether as a mainstay of their

82 H.E. Pearson, Tercentenary of the reformation, November 17 1858. A Sermon Preached in St Stephen’s Church, Norwich. (Norwich, Henry W. Stacey, 1858), p.13.

83 It was lamented that ever since the reign of Charles II, ‘the greatbody of our Divines have formally laid aside the great and powerful lever, in the use of which our martyrs and Reformers were unanimous, namely, an open and constant appeal to the fulfilled prophecies of Scripture, not only as to the Roman church being the predicted apostasy and Babylon, but especially as to the Pope, and no other, being the great Antichrist’. J.R. Cotter, Views of the English & Irish Reformers & Martyrs, as to ‘Antichrist’. (London, Westheim, MacIntosh & Hunt, 1864), p. 3.

84 Hurrell Froude had famously declared the Reformation to have been ‘a limb badly set’. The Remains of the Late Reverend Richard Hurrell Froude, [J. Keble & J.H. Newman, eds] (4 vols, London and Derby, Rivingtons, 1838-9), i, p. 251.

39

allegiance to the Church of England, initially

largely on the ground of the Reformers’ defective

moral ethos.85 As early as 1836, Newman was

privately distinguishing between the two,

declaring on the one hand, ‘I do not like the

Church of the Reformation’, while expressing his

love for ‘our Church as a portion and realising

of the Church Catholic among us’.86 However, most

Victorian high churchmen did not go down this

path and took comfort in the view that it was

later Protestants rather than they who had

abandoned the ‘catholic principles’ of the

English Reformation: - interpreted as the appeal

to Antiquity as the Rule of Faith and a

repudiation of Private Judgment in religious

matters.87

85 Hurrell Froude, commenting on Bishop Jewel and others, declared that ‘he would most have despised and hated if he had known them’. Froude, Remains, i, pp. 434-5, cited in W.J. Baker, ‘Hurrell Froude and the Reformers, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 21 (1970), pp. 243-69 at p. 248.

86 J.H. Newman to H.J. Rose, 23 May 1836, Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, v, p. 302.

87 John Keble, Letters of Spiritual Counsel and Guidance , R.F. Wilson, ed. (3rd edn, Oxford, 1875), ‘Preface to the Third Edition’, pp. xx-xxiv.

40

All this appears to support what Diarmaid

MacCulloch has called the ‘Myth of the English

Reformation’ constructed by Anglo-Catholic

historiography.88 However, that historiography

could be nuanced, sophisticated and complex. For

one thing, the Tractarians, from Hurrell Froude

onwards, in abandoning any defence of the English

as well as Continental Reformers and Reformation

were as alive as anyone to the ‘myth’ of squaring

their ‘Catholic’ understanding of the Church of

England with the Reformation settlement. They had

no interest or need for peddling such ‘myths’.89

Pusey’s disciple, Alexander Forbes even likened

the English Reformation to a ‘carious tooth’

whereby ‘purification’ of abuses or extraction

was necessary but in the process caused longer-

term damage:

‘The removal causes the pain to cease, but the natural arch of the

mouth is destroyed, and the gradual destruction of all the rest

proceeds from that very removal’.90

88 D. MacCulloch, ‘The Myth of the English Reformation’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 30, no. 1 (1991), pp. 1-19; D. MacCulloch, ‘Putting the English Reformation on the Map’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 15 (2005), pp. 76-95 at p. 76.

89 See my ‘A disputed legacy’, pp.128-31.

90 A.P. Forbes, The Church of England and the Doctrine of Papal Infallibility (Oxford,Parker, 1871), pp. 23-4.

41

On the other hand, even for Anglo-Catholics,

contemporary events might shed new light on what

happened at the Reformation and even induce a

certain re-evaluation. In the wake of the

reassertion of an absolutist and dogmatic

Catholicism at the First Vatican Council (1870),

Bishop Forbes was led to opine that the actions

of Pius IX almost appeared to have vindicated the

Reformers. In a surprising admission, Forbes

confessed to feeling with them that here was ‘an

intolerable abuse which must be got rid of at any

price’.91

It was the traditional high churchmen, such

as Hook and his successors, not the Tractarians,

who were, if anybody was, adherents of the ‘Myth

of the English Reformation’.92 Current scholarly

analysis of the historiography of the Reformation

by a representative late-nineteenth and early-

91 Ibid, p. 27.

92 See my ‘Survivals or New Arrivals? The Oxford Movement and the Nineteenth Century Historical Construction of Anglicanism’, S. Platten, ed. Anglicanism and the Western Christian Tradition (Norwich, CanterburyPress, 2003), pp. 144-91 at p.159.

42

twentieth Anglo-Catholic scholar, Walter Frere,

reveals the extent to which Anglo-Catholic

historicism could transcend narrow partisanship.93

It was not that Frere, with his sweeping judgment

on the Edwardian Church as ‘the lowest depth to

which English Christianity ever sank’94 and

depiction of Archbishop Grindal as an example of

‘Puritan crankiness’,95 was immune from the often

discredited Anglo-Catholic condescension towards

the English Reformation which sought to explain

away, if not overlook, the extent of Continental

Reformed influences on Cranmer and his

associates.96 What marked out Frere though was his

meticulous attention to the surviving records and

his open-minded readiness both to use and

appreciate even such ‘tainted’ sources as Foxe

and Strype as well as the volumes of the Parker

Society.97 The historian R.W. Dixon in his 93 A. Faludy, ‘A Son of the Reformation? Walter Frere’s historical scholarship reviewed’, eds, B. Gordon-Taylor & N. Stebbing, Walter Frere. Scholar, Monk, Bishop (Canterbury Press, Norwich, 2011), pp. 119-42.

94 W. Frere, ed. Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Period of the Reformation, 3 vols, (London, Longmans, Green, 1910), i, p. 143.

95 W. Frere, The English Church in the Reigns of Elizabeth and James I (London, Macmillan, 1904), p. 192.

96 Faludy, ‘A Son of the Reformation?’, p. 131.

97 Ibid, p. 130.

43

monumental six volume History of the Church of England

from the abolition of the Roman jurisdiction

represented another Anglo-Catholic clerical voice

that was highly critical of Protestant

interpretations of the Reformation that saw it as

a triumph of ‘new ideas’ over an ‘old system’.98

For Dixon, the timing of the English Reformation

was an ‘accident’ and lacked deep rooted causes.

Anglo-Catholic authors welcomed the

apparent demolition of partisan Protestant and

Whig interpretations of the Reformation

undertaken by the contemporary academic

historians Bishop William Stubbs and Professor

John Sherron Brewer based as it was on apparently

impeccable archival research and evidence. In

particular, Newman’s one-time disciple, Richard

Church, Dean of St Paul’s, hailed the way in

which ‘the judicial temper of Bishop Stubbs and

Dr Brewer’ had overturned the ‘traditional

98 See R.W. Dixon, History of the Church of England from the Abolition of the Roman Jurisdiction, 1529-62, 6 vols, vol. 1, (London, Smith, Elder & Co., 1878), pp. 3-4. For discussion of Dixon’s Reformation historiography, see E.G. Rupp, ‘The Victorian Churchman as historian:a reconsideration of R.W. Dixon’s History of the Church of England’, G.V. Bennett & J.D. Walsh, eds, Essays in Modern English Church History in Memory of Norman Sykes (London, A & C. Black, 1966), pp. 209-16.

44

judgments’ which ‘have been taken from biased and

untrustworthy sources – ill-informed and

uncritical chronicles like Foxe and Tyndale’.99 In

short, later nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholics

felt vindicated by the latest academic

scholarship in separating the cause of the Church

of England from unquestioning allegiance to its

Reformation inheritance. As Dean Church put it,

‘We feel at liberty to judge the Reformation as we might judge the

French Revolution…or the proceedings of the Long Parliament. We

do not feel ourselves bound to take it en bloc, as pure in its origin

and unmixed in its blessings’.100

The Reformation might remain a key epoch in

Britain’s ‘national story’ but its previous

defining theological purchase had long waned.101

On the other hand, the Oxford Movement project

itself was later presented as ‘the English

99 R.W. Church, ‘Brewer’s Henry VIII’, Occasional Papers selected from the Guardian, the Times, and the Saturday Review 1846-90, 2 vols, (London, 1897), i, p. 387.

100 Church, ‘Moore’s Lectures on the Reformation’, Occasional Papers, i, p. 394.

101 See Gareth Atkins’s chapter ‘Truth at Stake? Archbishop Cranmer’s nineteenth-century reputation’ in this volume.

45

Reformation of the Nineteenth Century’102 and as a

‘Counter-Reformation’, while in number 41 of the

Tracts for the Times the need for a ‘Second

Reformation’ had been avowed.103 From a late

nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholic perspective,

the Tractarians appeared in retrospect as ‘our

Reformers’.104 This was ‘reinvention’ carried to

new lengths.

Far from displaying an ideal of religious and

moral unity to which D’Aubigne’s advocacy might

have aspired, the reception and ‘reinvention’ of

the Reformation in nineteenth-century Britain can

be viewed mainly in terms of the self-identity of

various competing denominational and intra-

denominational groups. ‘Reformation principles’

could be variously interpreted - ‘the simplicity

of the Gospel’, the Atonement and Justification

by Faith as expounded by Luther, the Calvinist

dogmas of Election and Predestination, a Via Media

102 See B. Compton, The Fiftieth Year of the Reformation of the Nineteenth Century. A Sermon in three parts preached in the church of All Saints, Margaret Street, on the first three Sundays of November 1883 (London, 1883).

103 Tracts for the Times, no. 41, ‘Via Media No. II’, p. 1.

104 Compton, Fiftieth Year of the Reformation of the Nineteenth Century, pp. 3-4.

46

between Rome and Geneva. The ‘take’ of the later

Oxford Movement on the English as well as

Continental Reformation,105 helped reopen old

divisions within the Church of England which had

lain dormant for much of the ‘long eighteenth

century’. However, nineteenth-century Anglican

Broad Churchmen were not immune from the tendency

to extract and highlight elements of the

Reformation inheritance in support of their own

self-identity. It has been shown that the

Victorian Broad Church F.D. Maurice reconstructed

the Lutheran Reformation in terms which directly

served to buttress his own Anglican apologetic

and which was ‘driven, at least in part, by

nineteenth-century assumptions’.106

The nineteenth century was unfavourably

contrasted in contemporary polemical Evangelical

and anti-Catholic literature with the sixteenth

105 The strictures on the English Reformers and as ‘a set of miscreants; by the Ritualist apologist, R.F. Littledale, drew down onhim particular Evangelical condemnation. See C.H. Collette, Luther Vindicated (London, Bernard Quaritch, 1884), esp. p. 5.

106 J. Morris, ‘Reconstructing the Reformation. F.D. Maurice, Luther, and Justification’, The Church in Retrospect. R.W. Swanson, ed. Studies in Church History, vol. 33, ed. R.N. Swanson (Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 1997), p. 489.

47

century, the message of anti-Ritualists being

that the former was undoing the work of the

latter epoch,107 and that by the second of the

nineteenth century a clear need ‘for a re-

reformation’ had become apparent’.108 This

Evangelical message of the nineteenth century’s

betrayal of a sixteenth-century inheritance was

one from which the more ‘rational’ element among

Protestant Dissenters, notably Unitarians, with

their known practical eirenicism towards English

Roman Catholics,109 stood aside. In fact, some

nineteenth-century Unitarians not only eschewed

criticism of Catholicism but actually supported

Catholic attacks on the Church of England for

107 Reformers and Performers; or, the Reformation men of the Sixteenth Century and the Ritualistic priests of the Nineteenth Century contrasted. By an old ex-churchman (London, Hamilton & Wright, [c. 1865]), pp. 15-16; The Candle Lighted in the middle of the Sixteenth Century in the Town Ditch at Oxford, by Latimer and Ridley snuffed in the Nineteenth Century for the benefit of short-sighted Protestants. By a Graduate of Cambridge (London, Simkin, Marshall & Co., 1871).

108 The Reformation of the Nineteenth Century. A combined work on ecclesiastical topics, chiefly setting forth the present crisis. By a Layman of the Church of England (London, William Wileman, 1884), p. 103. One anti-Ritualist polemical point made was that if, according to Ritualists, ‘the Reformation has effected so much evil where it has taken place, how is it to be accounted for that morality is at its very lowest where the Reformation has not been accepted?’. Colette, Luther Vindicated, p. 153.

109 For earlier 19th century examples of this Unitarian attitude, see G.M. Ditchfield, ‘”Incompatible with the very name of Christian”: English Catholics and Unitarians in the Age of Milner’, Recusant History, vol. 25, no. 1 (May, 2000), pp. 52-73.

48

alleged inconsistency in advancing Reformation

principles while at the same time maintaining

institutions (bishops, tithes, and an endowed

church) that they deemed were antipathetic to

such principles.110 Antipathy to persecution and a

persecuting spirit on grounds of religion could

only have sharpened Unitarian solidarity with

Catholics when they had been the victims or

object of persecution.111 This could mean strong

repudiation of Reformation Protestants when they

were themselves the persecutors. Evangelical

Protestantism itself was also sometimes the

object of Unitarian censure on theological

grounds. Thus, late in the century the Unitarian

Charles Beard lamented the way in which the

‘great body of Evangelical religion’ had become

‘in an especial way affiliated upon the theology

of the Reformation. It is all directly or

indirectly of Genevan origin’.112 Unitarians 110 The young Unitarian Harriet Martineau apparently took this line inher 1830 Prize Essay, ‘The Essential Faith of the Universal Church’, for the Unitarian Central Association. J. Warren, ‘Harriet Martineau and Anti-Catholicism’, Recusant History, vol. 29, no. 2 (October, 2008),p. 206.

111 Ibid, p. 207.

112 C. Beard, The Hibbert Lectures of 1883. The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century in itsRelation to Modern Thought and Knowledge. Lectures delivered at Oxford and in London, in April, May and June, 1883 (London, 1883), p. 413.

49

appeared to have given up the attempt, noticeable

in the works of Priestley and Belsham, to claim

ownership of the Reformation inheritance. Luther

himself was not spared in such a line of

critique. Thus, the Broad Church Anglican Julius

Hare found himself defending Luther’s reputation

in mid-century against not only Newman and

Tractarian criticism but from those whom he

claimed ‘espouse the negative side of the

Reformation, but object to its positive side’.

Hare clearly had the Reformation’s Victorian

secularist and rationalist exponents in mind,

when railed against those,

‘who regard it as the first act in the emancipation of the human

mind from all authority, as the prelude to that ideal Elysium in

which every body is to do as he pleases, and to think as he

chooses’.

Such eulogisers of the Reformation as the well-

spring of modernity could find, Hare concluded,

‘no sympathy with Luther’s strong positive

faith’.113

113 J.C. Hare, Vindication of Luther against his recent English Assailants. Second edition, reprinted and enlarged from the notes on the Mission of the Comforter (London, John W.

50

Evangelical Dissenters, on the other hand,

much to the embarrassment of Anglican

Evangelicals, tended to argue that the excesses

of Tractarianism only revealed the Church of

England in its inherent ‘unreformed’ and ‘popish’

colours. Far from being an aberration, the Oxford

Movement could claim legitimacy from the fact

that the Church of England had only ever been

half-reformed. Therefore, as a Scottish Free

Churchman argued, even ‘Puseyism’ had its

providential uses by serving, ‘to show the amount

of error still lurking in what are called

Reformed Churches; to prove that the reformation

was but partial and incomplete’. ‘Puseyism’, he

argued, was ‘salutary, as some skin eruptions by

showing previously latent disease, indicate the

extent of the malady and point to the cure’,114

with Tractarian writings revealing once and for

all that the Church of England was but a ‘half-

Parker and Son, 1855), p. 3. Hare (p. 96) had complained that Luther’s Tractarian assailants, ascribed opinions which they found inEvangelical writers to Luther himself.

114 G. Dawson, The Signs of the Times. Free Church of Scotland. A Lecture, delivered at Mount Zion Chapel, Graham-Street, Birmingham, on Sunday evening, December 22nd, 1844 (Birmingham, J. Tonks, n.d.), p. 3.

51

reformed Church’ whose Reformation had been

circumscribed by the Tudor monarchs.115 The moral

here was that only Presbyterianism was true to

Reformation principles.

There were a few other Protestant voices

besides that of the ‘rational’ Unitarians who

sought to view the Reformation positively but in

terms that sought to transcend narrow

denominational or church party partisanship

though sometimes in the direction of celebrating

its history primarily in terms of British

national identity and the moral ‘genius’ of

Protestantism. James Anthony Froude, Hurrell’s

younger brother, is famous for his classic

Protestant histories of the Reformation but while

anti-Catholic in ‘national’ terms, he consciously

eschewed more narrowly theological partisanship

and his strictures fell upon Evangelical

Protestant and Roman Catholic alike. As he later

complained,

115 Edinburgh Christian Instructor, NS 2, ‘The Church of England: a Half-Reformed Church’ (February, 1839), pp. 54-66. Cited in S.J. Brown, The National Churches of England, Ireland and Scotland 1801-46 (Oxford, O.U.P., 2001), pp. 316-17.

52

‘Each side tells the story as it prefers to have it; facts, characters,

circumstances, are melted in the theological crucible, and cast in

moulds diametrically opposite. Nothing remains the same except

the names and dates. Each side chooses its own witnesses.

Everything is credible which makes for what it calls the truth.

Everything is made false which will not fit into its place’.116

For J.A. Froude, the Reformation was an immense

blessing not in an Evangelical Protestant sense

as the theological triumph over Antichrist or an

Anglican sense as enshrining the establishment

and future dominance of the Church of England. On

the contrary, the latter was deemed the greatest

disaster of the history which he surveyed but

also a falling away from the true spirit of the

Reformation. For Froude, the Reformation was to

be celebrated for laying the foundations for the

ultimate triumph and vindication of English

liberty and English nationalism but above all as

a reaffirmation of the truth of all religions –

‘the obligation of obedience to the law of moral

116 J.A. Froude, ‘Times of Erasmus and Luther. Three Lectures at Newcastle, 1867’, Short Studies on Great Subjects (London, Longman, Green & Co., 1867), p. 43.

53

duty’.117 As such, all the accompanying

oppressions inflicted by Henry VIII were

legitimated by this final outcome. Yet in the

final analysis, for Froude, with his debt to

Thomas Carlyle, the Reformation was less the

result of any historical laws of development

according to the canons of Whig historiography,

but as a vehicle of moral regeneration and

vindication of the role of the action of heroic

individuals such as Luther or John Knox. In

short, Froude sought in his magisterial History to

revitalise the moral fibre of contemporary

Protestant Englishmen,118 regardless of the

niceties of doctrine or ecclesiology for which he

showed little concern. For Froude, Protestantism,

born as a protest against the corruptions of

Rome, had in its own turn since the Reformation

era become decayed and corrupted. It was now in

need of revitalisation and renewal, but not by a

return to outmoded theological or doctrinal

shibboleths as advocated by Evangelicals but by

117 C. Brady, James Anthony Froude. An Intellectual Biography of a Victorian Prophet (Oxford, OUP, 2013), p. 248, pp. 204-6. Duffy, Saints, Sacrilege Sedition, p. 39.

118 Brady, James Anthony Froude, p. 206.

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undergoing rejuvenation as a moral and spiritual

force in society.

The trend towards polarisation between

Anglican Evangelicals and high churchmen on the

issue of the Reformation was offset by continued

attempts to forge Protestant unity against a

perceived ‘Romanising’ threat. The Parker Society

was not a narrowly Evangelical party effort. The

Society’s very use of Parker’s name (Parker being

one of the most moderate among the Reformers) and

the Episcopal paraphernalia of mitres which

adorned the covers of its publications might be

interpreted as indicative of an attempt to

conciliate moderate high churchmen.119 Although

dominated by Evangelicals, the Council also

included moderate high churchmen such as John

Jackson, later Bishop of Lincoln, and Alfred

Ollivant, Bihop of Llandaff.120 Moreover, the

Tractarian threat to Anglican Evangelical

119 The Cambridge Evangelical and Regius Professor of Divinity, James Scholefield, had fewer qualms and wished to include reprints of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. See Memoirs of the late Rev. James Scholefield. By his Widow (London, 1855), p. 317; H. Gough, A General Index to the Publications of the Parker Society (Cambridge, CUP, 1855), p. iv.

120 Toon, Evangelical Theology, 1833-1856, p. 43.

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identity sharpened by the rise of Ritualism from

the 1860s led to a wider use of Protestant

polemical weapons: George Elwes Corrie (1793-

1885), a Cambridge Regius Professor of Greek,

college head and respected Anglican Evangelical,

planned a history of the Reformation to meet the

challenge, though the work never appears to have

got beyond the planning stage. Although as he

explained in a letter of 1869, his motivation was

‘the line taken by Ritualism of late’ as giving

him a clearer idea of ‘the kind of book which is

wanted for the rising generation’, Corrie was

anxious to separate glorification of the

Reformation itself from the (sometimes) flawed

characters of its authors and actors,

‘On both sides of the question men and writers have been

accustomed (not unreasonably) to mix up the facts connected with

the Reformation, and the eminent and wicked persons who were

instrumental to that great event’.121

It was a view shared by one of the most prominent

late-Victorian Anglican Evangelical churchmen,

121 Memorials of the life of George Elwes Corrie, p. 302.

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J.C. Ryle, the first protestant bishop of

Liverpool. For Ryle, God used imperfect tools to

act as his instruments, thereby explaining away

some of the Reformation’s more unsavoury agents,

notably Henry VIII.122

As Eamon Duffy has recently reminded us,

‘the polemical constructions of the sixteenth

century’ with its invented history of the non-

papal origins of English Christianity and

subsequent independence from the papacy,

continued to colour Protestant perceptions – both

Evangelical and high church Anglican – of what

happened at the Reformation, well into the

nineteenth century.123 However, alongside this

broad historical truth, something else was

happening in our period. An Anglican consensus

over the meaning of the Reformation, always

vulnerable to challenge from rival Protestant

Dissenting and Roman Catholic readings, was

eroded. In short, as the nineteenth century

progressed the Reformation became as contested an122 J.C. Ryle, What do we owe to the Reformation? (London, John F. Shaw & Co., 1877), p. 4.

123 Duffy, Saints, Sacrilege and sedition, p. 38.

57

issue between and among Anglicans as it was

between Protestants and Roman Catholics.

Moreover, across this period there was no single

Protestant Dissenting rhetoric on the

Reformation, with Unitarians and Methodists

adding a distinctive voice from that of

mainstream orthodox Protestant Dissent. Unlike

commemorations of the Reformation on the

Continent, commemorations of the Reformation in

Britain, as in 1835 and 1858, could prove to be

less than unifying events. A recognition of the

gradual and halting nature of the Reformation in

Britain and consequent difficulty of fixing upon

a precise date for commemorating it, encouraged

the tendency towards competition and division in

invoking or celebrating its ‘religious and civil

blessings’.124 In particular, the commemoration of

the tercentenary of the accession of Queen

Elizabeth on 17 November 1558 as a tercentenary

of the Reformation, an occasion enthusiastically

celebrated by Evangelical Anglicans,125 was one 124 T.H. Horne, A Protestant Memorial for the commemoration of the fourth day of October, MDCCCXXXV, of the third centenary of the Reformation (London, T. Cadell, 1835), p. 3.

125 See for example, H.E. Pearson, Tercentenary of the Reformation, November 17 1858.

58

which Protestant Dissenters as well as extreme

high churchmen, albeit for different reasons,

would have been uncomfortable. Moreover, high

church and Anglo-Catholic critiques over the

Continental Reformation and Reformers translated

into an apparent decline in official Church of

England participation in German and Swiss

Reformation commemorations as the century

progressed, leaving the 1883 celebration in

Britain of the four hundredth anniversary of

Luther’s birth to be dominated by Protestant

Dissenting societies.126

Attitudes to Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ were a

litmus test of evolving Protestant receptions of

the English Reformation. By forcing Foxe to

‘wear’ an anachronistic ‘Anglican dress’ and by

downplaying the sectarian or ‘nonconformist’

aspects of his career, some of Foxe’s

nineteenth-century Church of England apologists

aimed to ‘sanitise’ him.127 They were

126 W. Ince, Luther Commemoration and the Church of England. A Sermon preached before the University of Oxford, on Sunday, November 11, 1883 (London, Rivingtons, 1883), esp. p. 4.127 See my ‘The Changing Legacy and Reception of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, p. 247.

59

uncomfortable with Foxe’s Protestant

internationalist perspective, kept alive by

Burnet and Strype and early eighteenth-century

pan-Protestant relief schemes of the SPCK and

SPG,128 cherished by Protestant Dissenters and

still represented by Anglican Evangelical links

with Swiss Protestants such as D’Aubigne whose

‘Romantic historiography’ did much to revive

it.129 In direct opposition to this pan-European

Protestant tradition, high church Anglican

polemicists redefined the catholicity of the

English church in terms of external visibility

and episcopal succession. In the nineteenth

century intra-Protestant contests to claim

ownership of the Reformation inheritance,

mainstream Protestant Dissenters might have felt

that their own ‘reading’ had been vindicated.

However, the claims of James Anthony Froude,

Thomas Carlyle,130 and above all of Victorian

Unitarians such as Charles Beard that the 128 Duffy, Correspondence Fraternelle’, esp. pp. 252-80.

129 D’Aubigne emphasised the international and trans-national character of the sixteenth-century Reformation and of its nineteenth-century apparent renewal. D’Aubigne, History of the Reformation of the SixteenthCentury, 5 vols, ‘Preface’.

130 See John Morrow’s essay in this volume.

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Reformation should not be seen in confessional

terms or as the watchword of party131 but rather,

as a great historical fact,132 the source of

modern progress and moral evolution, gained wider

acceptance. As Beard put it, ‘one Reformation

always carries in it the seeds of another’.133 The

Reformation and Protestantism were still elements

in late nineteenth-century British national

identity134 but the religious and doctrinal

aspects had waned in relation to constitutional

and ethnic considerations. Secular or

secularising Protestant rather than Evangelical

Protestant readings of the Reformation appeared

to have triumphed. The opposing forces in the

Reformation struggle were increasingly presented

as not so much between Christ and Antichrist but

as Priestcraft and supernaturalism pitted against131 James Anthony Froude complained that Justification by Faith alone which as proclaimed by Luther ‘contained the deepest of moral truths’, had in the hands of modern Evangelicals ‘become barren as the soil of a trodden footpath’. J.A. Froude, ‘Times of Erasmus and Luther’, Short Studies on Great Subjects, p. 131.

132 J. Coleman, Froude Today 2nd edition (Exeter, Societas, 2008), p. 42.

133 The Reformation of the 16th Century in its Relation to Modern Thought and Knowledge. By the Rev. Charles Beard…Introduction by Ernest Barker (Reprint ed. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1968), p. xx.

134 R. Mitchell, Picturing the Past. English History in Text and Image, 1830-1870 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 11.

61

rationalism and modernity. This was hardly the

message or outcome which Merle D’Aubigne foresaw

or of which he would have approved.

62