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Prior to the Reformation most English men and women accepted a late medieval Catholicism according to which individuals acknowledged their sinfulness and then sought to make themselves acceptable to God by means of good works, pilgrimages, indulgences, and memorial celebrations of the Mass.3 Theologians explained that these disciplines were effective only because of God’s grace but that distinction was often lost on ordinary believers, who had limited understanding of the Bible or the words of the mass (both of which were in Latin) and heard homilies only infrequently (since many parish priests were not licensed by their bishops to preach).
Beginning in 1519, however, a group of theologians at Cambridge University began to question this theology, both as a result of reading work by German reformer Martin Luther (1483–1546) and as a result of their own study of scripture. An early member of that group, Thomas Bilney (1495?–1531), later described his understanding of faith in a letter to the Bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall (1474–1559). Bilney compared himself to the woman with the flow of blood in Mark 5:25–34 who spent all she had on physicians without getting any better. He said that he used up his strength, his money, and his wit following the advice of “unlearned hearers of confession” who “appointed … fasting, watching, buying of pardons, and masses.” He concluded that they did so more for “their own gain, than the salvation of [his] sick and languishing soul.”4 It was at that point that Bilney read of 1 Timothy 1 in a new Latin translation of the Bible by humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1496?–1536):
At the first reading (as I well remember) I chanced upon this sentence of St. Paul (O most sweet and comfortable sentence to my soul!) in 1 Tim. i., “It is a true saying and worthy of all men to be embraced, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am the chief and principal.” This one sentence through God’s instruction and inward working, which I did not then perceive did so exhilarate my heart, being wounded with the guilt of my sins, and being almost in despair, that immediately I felt a marvelous comfort and quietness, insomuch “that my bruised bones leaped for joy.”5
Bilney understood on a personal level that which Martin Luther had understood several years earlier. God did not despise Bilney because he was a sinner who could not make himself righteous. On the contrary, it was precisely because Bilney was mired in sin that God had sent his only Son. The verse from 1 Timothy that had moved Bilney would later find a place in the Book of Common Prayer as one of the “comfortable words” following the absolution in the Eucharist.6
Bilney was soon joined by a circle of early English Protestants who existed more or less openly in Cambridge during the 1520s.7 Their number came also to include Robert Barnes (1495–1540), John Frith (ca. 1503–33), William Tyndale (1495–1536), Miles Coverdale (1488–1568), Hugh Latimer (ca. 1490–1555), and Richard Cox (ca. 1500–81). At first only mild voices of protest, these early English Protestants made themselves increasingly heard. Barnes warned that the pomp and ceremony of the church could obscure the simple meaning of the gospel. Frith rejected the popular depiction of the Eucharist as a re-sacrifice of the natural body of Christ that produced merit for those who paid the priest for the celebration. Tyndale and Coverdale worked on a translation of the Bible into English.
The monarch at the time, Elizabeth I’s father, King Henry VIII (1509–47), was involved in a religious program of his own. Anxious to gain access to church wealth, to select his own candidates for church positions, and to secure an annulment from his spouse, he bullied the Parliament in the early 1530s to nationalize the Church of England, claiming for his monarchy the oversight and leadership at that time exercised by the Pope. Struggles between nations and Popes had been common in Europe since the eleventh century and generally did not lead to permanent breaks or to major reformations of the church. Personnel decisions made by Henry laid the groundwork for both, however. Henry chose two men with sympathy for the Cambridge Protestants—Cambridge graduate Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556) and merchant Thomas Cromwell (1485?–1540)—as his Archbishop of Canterbury and his secretary to the royal Council. He chose one of the Cambridge Protestants (Hugh Latimer) as a bishop and another (Richard Cox) as the tutor of his son Edward VI. He approved the publication of an English Bible translated by two other members of the group (Tyndale and Coverdale).
Henry never entirely trusted the members of the Protestant circle from Cambridge and limited their authority and influence by also appointing religious conservatives such as Stephen Gardiner (c. 1490–1555) to positions of importance (Bishop of Winchester, 1531–55). When displeased, he proved willing to execute both conservatives (such as Thomas More, 1478–1535) and advocates of Protestant reform (such as Thomas Cromwell).
The members of the Protestant circle, for their part, reserved judgment about the king, accepting him as a possible instrument of reform without forgetting the dangers that political leaders could present for the church. In periods of cooperation, they were able to take the first rudimentary steps toward the reformation of the English church. They issued an English Bible based on the work of Tyndale and Coverdale (the Great Bible, 1538) and a form of public prayer in English (the Great Litany, 1544); began to dissolve the monastic orders that, as the custodians of the primary relics and pilgrimage sites, were the strongest supporters of the medieval penitential system; and raised questions about the medieval doctrine of purgatory. The alliance proved an unstable one, with Henry turning more conservative in the 1540s. Yet the decade of cooperation gave the English Reformation a character that distinguished it from that on the continent. In Germany, Martin Luther moved within three years from mild criticism to total rejection of the episcopal hierarchy of the church. In England, in contrast, some members of the circle of Protestants at Cambridge were able to move into positions of importance, including the episcopate. That they were able to do so gave the English Christians a sense that many continental Christians could not share—that reform and the church’s episcopal hierarchy need not be incompatible.
The reigns of Henry’s children—Edward VI (1547–53), Mary I (1553–58), and Elizabeth I—strengthened this perception for the English people. During the short reign of Edward, the Protestant circle quickened the rate of reform; they prepared two editions of the Book of Common Prayer (1549 and 1552), published a series of sermons for use in English churches (the Homilies), introduced legislation to allow for clerical marriage, and drafted a reformed statement of faith (Edward’s Forty-two Articles, which would form the basis for the later Thirty-nine Articles of Religion). During Mary’s Roman Catholic reaction, the Protestants lost their church positions but discovered a leadership of another kind—that of martyrdom. (Together Henry and Mary burned twenty-five members of the Cambridge circle. Many other less prominent Protestants were executed during Mary’s reign as well, with a total of roughly three hundred executed for heresy.) When Elizabeth came to the throne, she chose bishops for the church who had studied with the Cambridge Protestants or otherwise shared a conviction about the compatibility of tradition and reform. It was this evolving English Christianity that provided the religious backdrop to the founding of colonies in Roanoke and Jamestown.
The Religious Character of the Virginia Colonyunder Elizabeth and James
During the years that Elizabeth I and James I occupied the throne, the primary focus of English colonial efforts was Virginia. The records of that effort bear out the central role that religion played in their lives. The Virginia martial law provisions of 1610, for example, specified that members of the colony should gather to give thanks and to seek God’s assistance at daily Morning and Evening Prayer, Sunday morning worship, and Sunday afternoon instruction in the catechism. Clergy were to preside at daily worship and preach each Sunday and Wednesday.
