Chapter 66. Crown, Conscience and the Sword: the English Reformation, the Wars of Religion and the Puritan Revolution

Within a generation of Luther, the Reformation had become a matter of state policy and of war. Kings decided the confession of their realms, confiscated church property, and fought one another and their own subjects for faith and for power together. This chapter follows that fusion of confession and sovereignty through four episodes: Henry VIII’s break with Rome, the French Wars of Religion and the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, the Thirty Years’ War and Westphalia, and the English Puritan revolution and Restoration. The sources include partisans of every side: William Cobbett (radical Catholic sympathiser), Ralph Woodrow (Protestant polemicist) and Eric Jon Phelps (conspiracist anti-Jesuit), beside Michael Kerrigan’s survey, the reference shelf, and the modern readings of Mitchell Heisman and Mehran Keshe.

Henry VIII: supremacy, dissolution and the “plunder of the poor”

The Encyclopedia of World History gives the bare sequence. After Rome refused the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and excommunicated him for marrying Anne Boleyn, Henry broke with Rome in 1534 and “has the parliament pass the Act of Supremacy, which states that the king is the supreme head of the English Church, and he is the one to appoint all clergy” [Social, Encyclopedia of World History, #5204, “1534 England Breaks with Church in Rome”]. In Kerrigan’s account Henry’s “Church of England” remained “Catholic in everything but its fealty to Rome”, and the Dissolution of the Monasteries, begun in 1536, served the king’s two priorities, “the centralization of his rule and the satisfaction of his ongoing need for funds”. Kerrigan counts some 60 Catholic martyrs under Henry and more than 20 people burned for Protestant preaching. [Kerrigan, Dark History of the Catholic Church, #71131, ch. 8].

William Cobbett’s History of the Protestant Reformation (1824-27) is far harsher. Its summary verdict reads: “the thing called the ‘Reformation’ was engendered in lust, and brought forth in hypocrisy and perfidy, and cherished and fed by plunder, devastation, and by rivers of innocent English and Irish blood” [Cobbett, A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, #38623]. For Cobbett the first act suppressing the monasteries was “in reality, for robbing the proprietors of estates and also the poor and the stranger”, carried out by “the remorseless tyrant Henry VIII”. Papal power, he argues, had checked kings: without it “every king might have been a Nero, if he would. We shall soon see a worse than Nero in Henry VIII.” [Cobbett, #38623]. The preface to the library’s edition takes up the social argument. It calls the seizure of the guilds’ property “a grave injustice” whose deliberateness “few writers have yet realised”, and says the poor lost “even their share” in the endowments of colleges and halls “chiefly intended for the poorer portions of the population” [Cobbett, #38623, Preface].

Cobbett’s chapter on the supremacy lists among its contents the “Death of Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher” and “Horrible murders of Catholics”. He calls More’s execution a murder that “gave a shock to all Europe” and says Fisher was “equally eminent in point of learning, piety, and integrity” [Cobbett, #38623]. Kerrigan supplies the other side of More’s record. More was canonised and died a martyr in 1535, “But he wasn’t to be mourned by England’s Protestants, of whom he’d proven a cruel persecutor” [Kerrigan, #71131, ch. 8].

M. Donnelly’s history of punishment places the Henrician state within penal history. Henry VIII denied “benefit of clergy” to those accused of murder on a public highway or in church, and then extended the exclusion to “all murder, piracy, rape, abduction and sacril[ege]”, which made the accused liable to death [Donnelly, The Big Book of Pain, #33280, “Church Authority and Punitive Measures (1509-1534)”]. “When an army of somewhere between 50,000 and 75,000 common people rose in revolt against the dissolution of the monasteries, Henry became convinced that the Roman Church was out to” get him. He concluded that “the only way to get to the bottom of it was to torture the truth out of everyone who even looked like they might be a closet Catholic or a private Protestant” [Donnelly, #33280, “Henry VIII’s Paranoia and Torture”]. Steven Sora’s Rosicrucian America gives an esoteric reading of the reign (“Occult England: Henry VIII takes on the Church”), taken up in Part 11 [Sora, Rosicrucian America, #64376].

France: the wedding of 1572 and St Bartholomew’s Day

The reference shelf frames the French Wars of Religion as a series of civil wars between Catholics and Huguenots from 1562 to 1598, with “between two and four million” deaths from violence, famine and disease. They ended when Henry of Navarre, a convert to Catholicism in 1593, issued the Edict of Nantes in 1598 [Wikipedia: French Wars of Religion]. Kerrigan argues that the contest between the houses of Guise and Bourbon “was clearly as much a dynastic as it was a religious one”. He describes the occasion of the massacre: “The marriage of Henri III of Navarre to Charles IX’s sister, Marguerite of Valois, in 1572 was meant to bring the two religious camps together: Henri was a Huguenot, Marguerite a Catholic.” The Duke of Guise “was positively enraged”. Admiral de Coligny, whom Guise blamed for his father’s assassination, was shot at, and then killed in his house by Guise and his men. “In the three days that followed, Catholic mobs ran amok in a spree of slaughter that eventually left over 30,000 dead” [Kerrigan, #71131, ch. 8, “The St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre”]. McCabe’s Pictorial History of the World gives the sequence: “Marriage of Henry of Navarre to Marguerite of Valois—Massacre of St. Bartholomew—The Civil War Renewed—Siege of Rochelle—Death of Charles IX.—Henry III” [McCabe, The Pictorial History of the World, #66127].

The Protestant polemicist Ralph Woodrow gives a much smaller death toll and stresses the papal reaction:

“Ten thousand Huguenots (French Protestants) were killed in the bloody massacre in Paris on ‘St Bartholomew’s day’, 1572. The French king went to Mass to give solemn thanks that so many heretics had been killed. The papal court received the news with great joy, and Pope Gregory XIII, in a grand procession, went to the church of St Louis to give thanks!” He adds that the pope ordered the mint to strike a commemorative medal [Woodrow, Religia tainică a Babilonului, #20525, translated from the Romanian].

Helen Ellerbe also gives 10,000 and quotes Gregory XIII to Charles IX: “We rejoice with you that with the help of God you have relieved the world of these wretched heretics” [Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History, #6699, ch. 7, n. 1]. The sources therefore range from 10,000 (Woodrow, Ellerbe) to over 30,000 (Kerrigan). Kerrigan concludes that the massacre “hardened attitudes”: in Britain “Protestantism and patriotism went together” [Kerrigan, #71131, ch. 8].

The Thirty Years’ War and Westphalia

Adrian Niculescu’s Romanian university course on modern political history explains the slow Catholic counter-attack in political terms. “Catholicism’s response to the Reformation was surprisingly slow.” The papacy was badly weakened, and “a council that would have mediated between Catholics and the reformed would have taken from Charles V the pretext for continuing the struggle against the German princes,” so the Emperor temporised. [Niculescu, Istoria Politică Modernă și Contemporană, #9439, translated]. Kerrigan describes how the settlement of 1555 broke down in 1618 into “a real meat-grinder of a conflict”, fought by mercenary armies “having no local loyalties”. At Magdeburg some 25,000 people were slaughtered, and “more than a fifth of Germany’s population was killed”. The churches’ direct responsibility “in what was essentially a war between rulers” is, he writes, “debatable” [Kerrigan, #71131, ch. 8].

Eric Jon Phelps’s Vatican Assassins gives a conspiracist account. His chapter “The Jesuits – 1618-1648, The Thirty Years’ War” presents the war as a Jesuit project. It opens with a sermon he attributes to German Jesuits of 1610: “Why do we hesitate, then, in commencing to eradicate and root out heresy, root and branch, and especially this Calvinistic abomination? Kill them, then, the hounds, strike them down” [Phelps, Vatican Assassins, #87949, ch. 7]. He quotes a historian on “a desolating war of thirty years, which, from the interior of Bohemia to the mouth of Scheldt, and from the banks of the Po to the coasts of the Baltic, devastated whole countries”. He argues that “the Jesuits became masters of Germany through their agent and tool, Emperor Ferdinand II,” who was “as clay in the hands of his confessor-advisor”, the Jesuit Martin Becan and later the Jesuit William Lamormaini [Phelps, #87949, ch. 7, pp. 139-141]. This is Phelps’s interpretation, and the other sources here do not share it. The reference shelf records the outcome. The treaties of Osnabrück and Münster (October 1648) ended a war that killed “between 4.5 and 8 million people”. The Peace of Prague (1635) had already ended most of its religious aspects. Westphalia is often taken as the origin of “Westphalian sovereignty”, though some historians dispute that reading [Wikipedia: Peace of Westphalia].

Puritans, Parliament and the Restoration

Bernstein describes the English Civil War as a conflict that “mainly revolved around fiscal issues”, with Charles I’s support for a High Anglicanism that “struck dissenters as near-Catholic”. It produced the Levellers and the apocalyptic Fifth Monarchists [Bernstein, The Delusions of Crowds, #73904, ch. 2]. Heisman reads it as an ethnic conflict, asking how the abolition of the House of Lords can be explained if the “Puritan Revolution” was only about “the behavior of one tyrannical king”, and calls this “the central question” of the war [Heisman, suicide note, #38252, part 329]. For Heisman, Anglo-Saxon Puritans saw “the Norman-based nobility overthrown in 1649” as foreign, unlike Luther’s German nobles [Heisman, #38252, part 673]. “Liberalism, then, represents the assimilation of these major internal social fault lines; the internalization of what are normally considered external national borders” [Heisman, #38252, part 537]. Locke, “raised as a Puritan”, whose father “served against the Royalists”, is in Heisman’s account the bridge from this conflict to modern liberal theory [Heisman, #38252, part 569].

The Restoration reversed the direction of enforcement. Martensen’s history of early neurology describes how, after the Act of Uniformity, Gilbert Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1663, enforced Anglican orthodoxy by “demanding strict adherence to the liturgy” and suppressing dissenting sects. High-Church piety aimed to establish “an episcopally controlled piety excluding dissent” [Martensen, The Brain Takes Shape, #33312, “Sheldon’s Control and Intellectual Networks”; “High-Church Millenarianism”].

A modern reverberation: Keshe on the Vatican and the Church of England

Mehran Keshe, in the 422nd Knowledge Seekers Workshop of 3 March 2022, a week after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, treats the Church as a business: “You have to understand Church business is a financial business, has nothing to do with religion. It has to make profit.” He presents the Henrician break as a struggle that has continued into the present. Keshe claims (KSW 422, #378134) that the Vatican “warred with England for 300 years, they won the Church of England, the Queen is a servant of the Vatican at the moment”. He also claims that “The British Monarchy took revenge on loosing the Church of England to Vatican, by taking 140 billion dollars of gold from the vaults of Libya” into the Bank of Scotland, and that because Britain would not share the gold, “that’s why they got kicked out of the EU (through Brexit). You don’t pay, we kick you out” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 422, #378134, transcript at c. 1:54-2:04]. He adds that “House of God, never looses in the world of religion, because it is a house of money, not God” [Keshe, #378134]. These are Keshe’s claims as transcribed. No other source in this chapter supports them.

Key points

• The Encyclopedia of World History dates England’s break to the Act of Supremacy of 1534. Kerrigan describes Henry’s church as “Catholic in everything but its fealty to Rome” and explains the 1536 Dissolution by centralisation and the king’s need for funds.
• Cobbett’s verdict is that the Reformation was “engendered in lust, and brought forth in hypocrisy and perfidy”. He reads the Dissolution as robbing “the poor and the stranger”, and his edition’s preface calls the seizure of guild property a deliberate injustice to the poor.
• More and Fisher are martyrs to Cobbett. Kerrigan adds that More had been “a cruel persecutor” of Protestants. Donnelly records Henry’s use of torture against suspected dissenters.
• Death tolls for St Bartholomew’s Day (1572) range from 10,000 (Woodrow, Ellerbe) to over 30,000 (Kerrigan). Woodrow and Ellerbe stress Gregory XIII’s thanksgiving and his letter to Charles IX.
• Kerrigan and Niculescu treat the wars of religion as largely dynastic and political. Phelps casts the Thirty Years’ War as a Jesuit war against the “Calvinistic abomination”.
• Westphalia (1648) closed a war of 4.5 to 8 million dead and is traditionally, though disputedly, taken as the origin of the sovereign-state system.
• Heisman reads the Puritan revolution as Saxon against Norman and liberalism as “the internalization of… external national borders”. Martensen describes Sheldon’s Restoration enforcement of uniformity.
• Keshe claims that the Henrician rivalry continues today, linking the Church of England, the seizure of Libyan gold and Brexit to Vatican finance.