Thomas Betteridge - Tudor Histories of the English Reformations, 1530-83

Thomas Betteridge

First published 1999 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright 1999 Thomas Betteridge

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Betteridge, Thomas
Tudor Histories of the English Reformations, 153083
(St Andrews Studies in Reformation History) 1. ReformationEnglandSources.
I. Title.
274.1'6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Betteridge, Thomas.
Tudor histories of the English Reformations, 153083/Thomas Betteridge.
(St Andrews Studies in Reformation History)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. ReformationEnglandHistoriography. 2. Great Britain HistoryTudors, 1485-1603Historiography. 3. EnglandChurch History16th centuryHistoriography. I. Title. II. Series.
BR377.B48 1999
274.2'06'072dc21

98-54195
CIP

ISBN 9781840142815 (hbk)

St Andrews Studies in Reformation History

Editorial Board: Bruce Gordon, Andrew Pettegree and John Guy, St Andrews Reformation Studies Institute, Amy Nelson Burnett, University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Euan Cameron, University of Newcastle upon Tyne and Kaspar von Greyerz, University of Basel

The Shaping of a Community: The Rise and Reformation of the English Parish c. 1400-1560
Beat Kmin

Seminary or University? The Genevan Academy and Reformed Higher Education, 1560-1620
Karin Maag

Marian Protestantism: Six Studies
Andrew Pettegree

Protestant History and Identity in Sixteenth-Century Europe
(2 volumes) edited by Bruce Gordon

Antifraternalism and Anticlericalism in the German Reformation: Johann Eberlin von Gnzburg and the Campaign against the Friars
Geoffrey Dipple

Reformations Old and New: Essays on the Socio-Economic Impact of Religious Change c. 1470-1630
edited by Beat Kmin

Piety and the People: Religious Printing in French, 1511-1551
Francis M. Higman

The Reformation in Eastern and Central Europe
edited by Karin Maag

John Foxe and the English Reformation
edited by David Loades

The Reformation and the Book
Jean-Franois Gilmont, edited and translated by Karin Maag

The Magnificent Ride: The First Reformation in Hussite Bohemia
Thomas A. Fudge

Kepler's Tbingen: Stimulus to a Theological Mathematics
Charlotte Methuen

'Practical Divinity': The Works and Life of Revd Richard Greenham
Kenneth L. Parker and Eric J. Carlson

Belief and Practice in Reformation England: A Tribute to Patrick Collinson by his Students
edited by Susan Wabuda and Caroline Litzenberger

Frontiers of the Reformation: Dissidence and Orthodoxy in Sixteenth-Century Europe
Auke Jelsma

The Jacobean Kirk, 1567-1625: Sovereignty, Polity and Liturgy
Alan R. MacDonald

John Knox and the British Reformations
edited by Roger A. Mason

The Education of a Christian Society: Humanism and the Reformation in Britain and the Netherlands

edited by N. Scott Amos, Andrew Pettegree and Henk van Nierop

This study started life as a doctoral dissertation at the University of East Anglia. During the course of its completion I have incurred numerous debts, intellectual and personal, from friends and colleagues. With Tom Webster I have had many long and informative discussions on early modern religion. I am extremely grateful to Tom Freeman for his generosity in sharing with me his unrivalled knowledge of John Foxe and Acts and Monuments. I have gained a great deal from the suggestions and comments made by a large number of people who have read parts of this study or listened to my ideas. I would therefore like to thank the following for their generous support: David Aers, Janice Allan, John Arnold, Justine Ashby, Patrick Collinson, Colin Davis, John Guy, David Scott Kastan, John N. King, David Lawton, Kate Lyon, Damien Nussbaum, Andrew Pettegree, Diane Purkiss, Mark Perrott, Val Purton, Emma Rees, Sarah Salih, Greg Walker and Peter Womack. I would like to thank the library staff at UEA for their tolerance and professionalism. This study would not have been completed without the funding I received from the British Academy in the form of a post-graduate studentship.

This book is dedicated to my father.

In 1551 Robert Crowley published an allegorical history of the Henrician and Edwardian Reformations, Philargyrie of Greate Britayne. It is the act of responding to this cry of supplication, and defeating Philargyrie, that is reformation in this text. This process of reform is instigated, however, not by the monarch but by Truth who mediates between the people and the king.

But then toke trueth
Pitie and ruth
And to the kynge he went
And sayd syr kynge
Amende this thynge
Thy realme else wylbe shent

Having listened to Truth's lecture, the king

For feare gan sprynge
Unto the Bible boke
And by and by.
Ryght reuerntly
That swerde in hand he toke
No wyght, quoth he
Shall spared be
That doth my flocke oppresse

Despite this image of royal action, however, the final lines of Crowley's poem depict the actual enactment of reformation as being in the hands of figures like Truth, who take the king's commands out into the commonwealth and put them into action. In this text reformation is produced by the voice of Truth speaking within a public arena and making the king respond. Indeed, it is only the advent of Truth that enables the appearance of royal power within the world of the poem. The space in which Philargyrie operates, the commonwealth or country, has no place for the king who seems to have no knowledge of what is happening in his realm until informed by a voice, Truth, speaking from a position between the people and the monarch. This space, between royal power and the people, is the public sphere in mid-Tudor histories of the English Reformations. It is the reform and ordering of this space that is reformation in these texts. Indeed it is often the claim to be the voice of the public, to be able to play the role of Truth, that provides the textual motivation and authority of Tudor histories and historians of the English Reformations.