The formation of the Anglican Church in England was not just about King Henry VIII obtaining a divorce from Catherine of Aragon in order to marry Anne Boleyn, it was a much wider movement about reforming the church according to new theology and insights into what it is to be human.
Its governing articles of faith are contained in the Thirty-nine Articles (1571) and the Book of Homilies which are two books of 33 sermons developing and clearly outlining reformed doctrines.
Anglican Liberals and Puritans
The Reformation came to England in 1534 during the reign of Henry VIII, but it only took shape as the Church of England during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603) and the reign of James I (1603-1625) as mentioned in the previous section.
As time went on, tensions quickly grew within the newly set up Church of England. One faction was liberal and progressive in its outlook. The other faction wanted reformation to go further, and to return to Biblical principles in a purer way. This faction became known as the Puritans.
Mainstream Anglicans had soon had enough of intolerant Puritans who wanted to change everything in the church, purifying it of Catholicism. Liberal Anglicans persecuted Puritan Anglicans until many Puritans decided to emigrate. They set sail from Plymouth and Southampton to find a ‘promised land’ where they could practice their faith as they saw fit. They named their ‘promised land’ New England when they arrived in America.
The first Puritans to depart boarded the Mayflower in 1620. In the 1630s many more sailed across the Atlantic and became pioneers in North America.
English Civil War and Religion
Charles I came to the throne in 1625. The absolute right of kings to rule, as ordained by God was challenged at this time. It led to the English Civil War in 1642 fought between Royalists who supported King Charles and his heir, and Parliamentarians who tended to be Puritans as well as republicans.
The Parliamentarians started to win decisive victories at the Battle of Naseby in 1645 and the final Battle of Worcester in 1651. The outcome was the trial and execution of King Charles I in 1649 and the exile of his son Charles II. English monarchy was replaced by the personal rule of Oliver Cromwell as a republic. The republican Protectorate called the Commonwealth of England lasted for a brief spell of years in England, but the idea of the ‘divine right of kings’ was ended, and no English monarch would ever again rule without the consent of Parliament.
During the English Civil War Royalist Cavaliers were generally liberal Anglicans, while Parliamentarian Roundheads were Anglican Puritans. It was easy to tell them apart as the former wore frills, bows, hats with feathers and swashbuckler boots, while the latter wore dark, sobre attire and sensible footwear.
Moral right was always on the side of the Puritans, but royalists finally won the day with the restoration of the monarchy. In 1660 Charles II (1630-1685) returned from exile and was crowned with a new crown. He couldn’t use the old one because Cromwell had had it melted down for coin along with all the rest of the regalia to fund the Parliamentarians.
The biggest maypole ever was erected at St Mary-le-Strand in London to celebrate the ‘Merry Monarch’. Puritans had decried maypole dancing as a pagan custom and had banned maypoles in 1644. With restoration maypole dancing and Morris men were back. The people did not take kindly to the joyless years of the Puritan Oliver Cromwell.
As far as the church was concerned, restoration of the monarchy restored Anglican bishops to Parliament and reaffirmed the establishment of the Church of England as part of state.
Protestant Royalty Imported
England became established as a Protestant country, however, in the subsequent history there were more twists and turns. There was a determination in parliament to keep England Protestant in the face of various attempts to return it to Catholicism.
Guy Fawkes and Bonfire Night
In 1605 Guy Fawkes, an English Catholic decided to blow up the Houses of Parliament and the King, James I. He rented out the cellar below Westminster Palace and started amassing barrels of gunpowder there. The night before parliament met, the plot was discovered and stopped. When all the plotters had been caught, King James I decreed the 5th November to become a day of celebration. It is celebrated now as Bonfire Night when an effigy of a guy is burnt on the bonfire (this happened when I was a child, but it is no longer done now).]
The attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament with the parliament in it did not help the Catholic cause. Anti-Catholic sentiment ran high. Decisions were made to prevent Catholics from having any power in Britain.
James II Replaced by William of Orange
England put many laws in place to prevent the practice of Catholicism. There had been six or so Protestant kings and queens when James II of the House of Stuart came to power in 1685. He converted to Catholicism before acceding to the throne. This threatened to return the whole country back to Catholicism. Prominent Protestants in government decided that they would not let this happen. They resolved the problem by conspiring to have James II overthrown and removed after a three year reign.
James II did not officially abdicate, but he dropped the Great Seal of England into the Thames and fled to France, so this was deemed as the same thing. Instead the Protestant parliament brought in replacement Protestant royalty from the Continent.
NB The Great Seal of the Realm is pressed into wax and attached by a ribbon to documents that parliament proposes and the monarch approves.
James II’s daughter Mary had married the Dutch Protestant, William Prince of Orange. (Orange was a principality in southern France held by the Netherlands). They were brought in and set in place as co-regents William and Mary who reigned from 1689 to 1694. It was called the Glorious Revolution.
Jacobites
In 1690 the deposed Catholic King James II landed in Ireland and gathered an army made up of French and Irish Catholics to try to regain the throne. The army of William III met him at the Battle of the Boyne. Jacobites who were the Catholic supporters of James II fought with Protestant Orange Order supporters of King William. It was a Protestant victory. James II fled to France and never returned.
Jacobites who believed in the divine right of kings to rule as absolute monarchs continued to have strong bases in Ireland and Scotland. They were backed by France. The Stuart claim to the throne again came to the fore with James II’s son Charles – Bonnie Prince Charlie. After the Jacobite Rising of 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie rode south from Scotland with a band of kilted supporters. They were stopped in their tracks at Derby where re-enactments still take place of the battle that caused them to turn round and go back home.
Queen Anne
William and Mary did not have children, so when they died the throne was passed to Mary’s sister Anne. Queen Anne reigned from 1702 to 1714 uniting England and Scotland as Great Britain. She was married to Prince George of Denmark, a Lutheran. Anne had 17 pregnancies, but no surviving children.
House of Hanover
With no heir to the throne, more Protestant royalty had to be brought in to keep England Protestant. The German House of Hanover supplied George I and his descendants George II, III and IV and Queen Victoria (1837-1901).
Saxe-Coberg-Gotha become the House of Windsor
Queen Victoria married her cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coberg and Gotha (1819-1861). This German royal household lived in Coberg in the summer and Gotha in the winter. It came into existence in 1826 and descendants of this lineage sat on the thrones of Belgium, Portugal, Bulgaria and Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Prince Albert was baptised a Lutheran Evangelical, however, some of his relatives had become Roman Catholics which raised controversy in England. He was finally given the title Prince Consort of Queen Victoria. They were happily married with nine children.
When Britain went to war with Germany in the First World War, the British king was called King George V of Saxe-Coberg-Gotha, the name of the royal domains in Germany. The Saxe-Coberg-Gothas declared themselves to be English in 1917 to counteract anti-German feeling from the First World War. They took on the name Windsor, after the castle they lived in.
Thus, while royalty in France were guillotined for their decadence and aristocratic ways and France became a republic, royalty in Britain survived because they were carefully chosen and brought in by Parliamentarians. British royalty were chosen as the right sort of royalty: the Protestant sort who would govern with parliament and increasingly have no power.
Anglican Communion
The Church of England belongs to the Anglican Communion. The English monarch is the head of the Church of England, according to Acts of Supremacy revoked by Mary I but reinstated by Elizabeth I. The authority of the Pope is replaced by the authority of the reigning monarch in England and its crown dependencies.
Church of England bishops sit in the House of Lords as this is an established church.
The Archbishop of Canterbury is head of the General Synod of the Anglican Communion, but he does not exercise authority outside England. Episcopal churches are each led by a primate with authority over their jurisdiction. Other churches in the Anglican Communion are the Church of Ireland (Northern Ireland now), Church in Wales and the Scottish Episcopal Church in the British Isles. There is also the American Episcopal Church taken there by British people.
The Church of Scotland is a Presbyterian Church that arose independently from the Reformation in Scotland in 1560. Presbyterianism came from Calvinism. This is the church called The Kirk. It is different to the Scottish Episcopal Church.
Many other churches belong to the Anglican Communion mainly in former British territories. For example, the Anglican Church of Southern Africa. Anglican churches spread globally with the British Empire, which under Queen Victoria was the empire of greatest extent in history. The legacy of the British Empire is the British Commonwealth where the goal has been to bring independent nations together for the common good. The British Commonwealth has been governed on Christian principles.
The Anglican Communion has always been seeking a middle way between Lutheranism and Calvinism. It is also both Catholic and Reformed.
The Church of England, from its inception, thought of itself as a reformed continuation of the ancient English church that was in place long before Roman Catholicism came here. The Protestant Church of England takes its roots back to the Saxon Church and a new interest in Celtic Spirituality takes it back further to the Celtic Church.
Evangelical Churches
Over the years Evangelical Christians tended to leave the established church and set up independent churches, of which there are quite a large number now. In Britain the oldest and best known denominations dating from the 17th century are the Baptists, Congregationalists and Quakers. The Methodists broke away by the end of the 18th century. These four churches have English roots.
The Baptist Church that practices adult baptism by full immersion was founded in 1607. Puritan Dissenters in the Church of England led by John Smyth of Gainsborough, Lincolnshire broke away to form the Baptist Church, but were exiled for a while in Amsterdam.
Congregationalists where governance was by the congregation was another Puritan movement that broke away from the Anglicans in 1648. They joined the Presbyterian Church of England to become the United Reformed Church in 1972. The Presbyterians are governed by elders.
The Quakers, otherwise known as the Society of Friends broke away from the Church of England in Cumbria in the mid 17th century. They chose not to have liturgy and only go with direct inspiration from God. Facing persecution many Quakers from different parts of England and Wales emigrated to Pennsylvania which offered them a safe place. Welsh Quakers emigrated to Pennsylvania to avoid persecution in 1686.
Quakers campaigned for the abolition of slavery, equal rights between men and women and as pacifists. Today it is not necessary to believe in the Christian God or the Bible to be a Quaker.
Methodists
Methodism started out as a renewal movement within the Church of England led by the Wesley brothers. John Wesley (1703-1791) an Anglican priest took to open-air preaching to farm hands, miners and industrial labourers. Impassioned sermons went with rousing hymns composed by Charles Wesley. Doctrines of salvation were communicated in the hymns.
John Wesley was teetotal. The policy of not drinking alcohol was important to the movement he founded – many of his followers were poor and had been impoverished by the consumption of excessive alcohol.
John Wesley set up a movement of itinerant preachers which included some women preachers. By the time this very pious man died there were 541 itinerant preachers who, finding themselves not welcome in Anglican churches, built Methodist chapels all over England and Wales.
American Methodists started to split from the Church of England in 1784. Methodists were still Anglicans during the lifetime of John Wesley, but total separation came shortly after he died.
In Wales Methodist missions led by George Whitfield starting in the 1730s gained a huge following over the course of 80 years. Separation of Methodists from the Anglican Church in 1811 led to the formation of the Presbyterian Church of Wales in 1823. Presbyterianism and going to ‘chapel’ rather than church became very strong in Wales.
Cornwall also went from being Catholic to Anglican to becoming mainly Methodist in the 19th century.
Therefore, the Anglican Church which in England is the Church of England took over Catholic parish churches in England and reformed them at the Reformation in 1534, while the Presbyterian Church of Scotland took over from the Catholic Church there with the Scottish Reformation in 1560. Puritan factions of the Church of England broke away and formed Evangelical churches independent from the Anglican Communion in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Catholic Emancipation
From the 16th century, post-Reformation, Catholics in England labelled as ‘Recusants’ had their civil rights curtailed and were heavily fined and impoverished. By 1800 they represented only 1% of the population. But Catholic emancipation came in 1829 in the United Kingdom. Catholic dioceses were re-established in 1850, with new Catholic churches built and Catholic schools set up with great success. Catholics came to represent a high proportion of actual church-goers in England.
The current Palace of Westminster or Houses of Parliament interior and Big Ben clock tower were designed by Augustus Pugin, a convert to Catholicism. The Gothic Revival style reconstruction of the buildings commenced in 1840.
Membership of Churches Worldwide
The Anglican Communion is the third largest church on earth in terms of the baptized. Its members number 85-110 million worldwide. The Roman Catholic Church has 1270-1410 million baptized, while the Eastern Orthodox Church has 230 million. Lutheran churches have about 77 million members. These are traditional churches. The Evangelical Alliance representing all sorts of Evangelical churches estimated its members to number 600 million in 2015. Evangelical churches are growing rapidly, overtaking the traditional churches. It means that about one third of people on earth are still Christian in some way.
Merry and True 