Sacred Kingship in the English Reformation
Richard C. McCoy
Kings were sacred figures for centuries in Europe, perceived as the Lord’s anointed deputies on earth. The Church and its sacraments were considered holier than the monarchy, but medieval rulers were still thought to have sacerdotal, spiritual, and even miraculous powers. Coronation was seen by some as a sacrament, akin to ordination; the royal touch was thought to have healing effects; and the mystical conception of the king’s two bodies implied that kingship never died. Moreover, rulers from Charlemagne to the Hapsburgs had claimed imperial autonomy from the papacy, causing tension between kings and clerics. The Reformation intensified this conflict while vastly expanding older notions of sacred kingship, making them simultaneously more grandiose and more problematic. In England, Henry VIII’s break with Rome was justified by new theories of royal supremacy that made the king the head of the church and clergy as well as the spiritual embodiment of the realm.
As the Reformation advanced, even the sacraments themselves were diminished and the Mass suppressed. These developments caused what John Bossy calls “a migration of the holy” in which “the socially integrative powers of the host” were transferred “to the rituals of monarchy and secular community.” Under the Tudors, the royal presence acquired some of the awesome sanctity of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist and at times even threatened to replace it.Rood screens were dismantled and sometimes replaced with the royal coat of arms under Edward, and the feast of Corpus Christi was eventually suppressed and superseded by a cult of Elizabeth and its annual royal processions. Both old and new ideas of sacred kingship still provoked increasing ambivalence and even hostility, and challenges and conflicts intensified throughout the Reformation. “Because Protestantism rejected physical holiness,” as Paul Kléber Monod says in The Power of Kings, “. . . it could easily clash with a kingship that made the body sacred.” More zealous Protestants found veneration of the monarchy as idolatrous as adoration of the host and repeatedly criticized the shortcomings of godly rule under the Tudors. Under the Stuarts, Puritan opposition increased, helping to fuel the Civil War and leading to the execution of Charles I in 1649. The English Reformation’s struggle over sacred kingship was hardly resolved by regicide and republican rule. To John Milton’s horror, the blood shed by Charles I only increased England’s tendency toward “a civil kinde of Idolatry in idolizing thir Kings.” The king proved more popular in death and defeat than he ever had in life, inspiring support for the restoration of Charles II in 1660. Nevertheless, the Stuarts’ papist sympathies became increasingly unpalatable, and James II was deposed in 1688. By challenging hereditary divine right, the Glorious Revolution seriously damaged more traditional ideas of sacred kingship and inaugurated a new era of constitutional monarchy.
As this brief summary indicates, conflicts over the English monarchy grew more tumultuous throughout the early modern period. It was a time, in the words of different contemporary accounts, of “many great changes, and terrible alterations,” marked by “days of shaking.” Even a relatively smooth transition could arouse dire fears.In his chronicle of 1603, ironically entitled The Wonderful Year, Thomas Dekker conveys the anxieties surrounding the death of Elizabeth and the succession of James by exclaiming “What an EarthQuake is the Alteration of a State!” Any change of regime could arouse acute anxieties because, throughout the English Reformation, political change often entailed religious changes as well. King James understood these fears and tried to assure his new subjects that such drastic alterations were behind them when he spoke at Hampton Court in 1604: “in this land, King Henry VIII towards the end of his reign altered much, King Edward VI more, Queen Mary reversed all, and lastly Queen Elizabeth (of famous memory) settled religion as it now standeth. Herein I am happier than they, because they were fain to alter all things they found established, whereas I see yet no such cause to change as confirm what I find settled already.” However, James’s own hostility to Puritans aggravated sectarian conflicts throughout his reign, and his heirs only further inflamed them.
Charles I’s religious policies helped provoke the Civil War that cost him his head, and James II’s conversion to Catholicism caused the Glorious Revolution that cost him and eventually the Stuart dynasty the throne. For many in England, these alterations must have felt like earthquakes indeed.
