Protestant Radicalism and Political Thought in the Reign of Henry VIII

Henry VIII's assertion of the Royal Supremacy over the Church was an epochal event in early modern English history, abolishing papal authority and in the process creating many of the tensions which would drive English political and religious developments through the Glorious Revolution. As historians of Henrician Catholicism have reminded us, however, the Royal Supremacy did not have a single meaning or a single set of implications for what the post-Roman polity would be like.¹ Rather, the king himself, court humanists, Oxbridge dons, amateur theologians, parish priests and precocious peasants all argued over the implications of the English Reformation by debating the meaning of the king's authority. Support for the Royal Supremacy became, in other words, not an ideology in itself but a site where ideological differences of many sorts were canvassed. The Supremacy was uniquely situated to stimulate such debate, because in a society where religious authority underlay almost every institution, relationship and practice, a shift in the basis of that authority created nearly infinite possibilities for change.

Within this framework, then, it was not so obvious to contemporaries as it has seemed with hindsight that the English Reformation would not fundamentally reorder the State and its political institutions along with the Church. Indeed, given the king's promiscuous mixing of civil and religious authority, it was not even clear where the line lay between the respectable Reformation of the Christian faith and the far more dangerous Reformation of the human world. And on this crucial issue of political thought, we would suggest that the 'myth of the English Reformation', as Diarmaid MacCulloch has called it, continues to cast a long shadow over modern scholarship.² The later 'Anglicanism' of the Church of England has led historians to assume that the Royal Supremacy imparted to early English Protestantism a moderate, Erastian view of the State and its relationship to religion.³ Early English Protestants chose to work within the guidelines set by Henry VIII, we are told, promoting moderate reforms (like English Bibles) that appealed to a king who ostentatiously flaunted his humanist credentials. By contrast, the more controversial issues that had splintered the continental Reformations—including the demands of the gospel to remake the State and redefine the boundaries of the Christian community — were treated hesitantly or not at all.⁴ Our overall view is thus that, unlike on the Continent where Lutherans, Zwinglians and Anabaptists developed quite different understandings of the powers of the Magistrate, in Henrician England the political thought of the Reformation remained within an extremely narrow spectrum until the experience of exile and the development of puritanism shattered this consensus. In general, scholars who have discussed English political thought in Henry VIII's reign have focused on the (presumed) conservatism of 'obedience' doctrine,⁵ while scholars who have traced the political implications of radical Protestant thought in England have begun with the monarchomachs of the Marian exile.⁶

This issue is due for reconsideration. In this article, we examine a series of Henrician evangelicals who believed that the gospel required sweeping transformations of the English polity, overriding tradition, law and the ancient constitution in favour of a post-Reformation State built along biblical lines. In making these arguments, they often redrew the boundaries of the Christian community and its relationship to political authority in ways that were antithetical to the ideals of the mainstream, magisterial Reformations. Yet these writers were not 'radical reformers' in the continental sense, not only because they chose not to advocate prototypical 'radical' practices like rebaptism, but also because they generally pursued their various agendas by praising Caesar rather than burying him. We offer evidence of Henrician evangelicals who made gospel-based arguments for, among other things, religious toleration, proto-Presbyterianism and even separatism, a restructuring or elimination of parliament, and a complete annihilation of ecclesiastical law, all ostensibly within the framework of the king's moderate, Erastian settlement. This was, by and large, royalist radicalism⁷—combining appeals to Christian liberty, biblicism and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit...