The last years of Henry VIII’s, reign from 1539 to his death in January 1547, have generally been seen as a time of resurgence by supporters of traditional religion.  Christopher Haigh has even ventured to call this episode a “Counter-Reformation” and asserts that the Reformation was halted.  It is also widely maintained that evangelical Eucharistic beliefs similar to Martin Luther’s had little support in England, except for a few individuals like Thomas Cromwell, Robert Barnes, and temporarily Thomas Cranmer.  These views have always sat somewhat uneasily with the fact that evangelicals operated openly and frequently in the Henrician court and in the countryside during the king’s last years.  Evangelicals were engaged in a Reformation in progress and Henry VIII, a man with a ferocious and deadly hatred of sacramentarianism, tolerated them and even patronized them.  Alec Ryrie’s The Gospel and Henry VIII explains how this situation could be and does so in an extremely well-documented and convincing manner.

Ryrie begins by looking at the religious politics of the late Henrician years.  The title of his first chapter asks “A Counter-Reformation?” and answers with a definite, no!  The Act of Six Articles is shown to be a far less serious defeat for evangelicals than is normally portrayed.  Its most important clause outlawed sacramentarianism, an especial bugbear of Henry VIII, but most evangelicals found that prohibition congenial as they were not sacramentarians.  Other conservative attacks on Evangelicals occurred, most notably during 1543, but ultimately these hostile policies and laws against evangelicals were not enforced with any vigor, if at all.  Henry VIII’s main concern during his last ten years of life was to secure the royal supremacy. Otherwise, he reserved the punishment of potentially heretical courtiers to himself and his whim.

Late Henrician evangelicals had to balance obedience to true religion and to their king, who sometimes sided with them and sometimes against them.  Frequently evangelicals followed the old Lollard strategy of dissimulation.  Such Nicodemism was widely condemned by many Reformers both English and Continental, but the ambiguous religious policies of Henry VIII made it a viable, easy, and necessary strategy for survival.  Most of the evangelicals who went into religious exile during Henry VIII’s reign were not so ready to compromise. They were more radical and more inclined to sacramentarianism than evangelicals who stayed in England.  Ryrie
argues that the importance of the Henrician exiles has been exagerated and that they were an insignificant sideshow. In contrast, evangelicals who stayed in England took an eirenic approach to religious controversy that focused on persuasion and compromise.  They did, however, promote justification by faith alone, in spite of Henry VIII’s dislike of the doctrine while also supporting a Lutheran understanding of the real presence in the Eucharist. Ryrie characterizes Henry VIII’s last years as the Lutheran moment of the English Reformation. Evangelicals saw the Reformation as an intellectual event – education and conversion went hand in hand.  Their hope was that Henry VIII would use confiscated monastic property to support education but he bitterly disappointed them.  Ryrie shows that Cambridge University was a heartland for evangelicalism. Furthermore the seemingly trivial dispute over pronunciation of Greek is shown to be a microcosm of the reformers’ desire to return the Church to its apostolic roots.

At the Henrician court, evangelicals belonged to three categories: those there by social status, scholars, and the proteges of Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell. Royal service and the court were heavily infiltrated by evangelicals in the early 1540s and that made it hard for conservatives to combat heresy.  Only a mass purge could have eliminated heterodoxy and, given Henry VIII’s ambiguous religious policies, that was not going to happen. At the same time, certain reformist bishops returned to traditional religion with Edmund Bonner and Nicholas Heath being the foremost examples.  Ryrie shows that grass-roots evangelicalism was radical, iconoclastic and possessed links to Lollardy.  As Henry VIII’s reign drew to a close, the real divide between evangelicals was between those willing to defy Henry VIII for the sake of true religion and those who were not.  In this uncertain situation, religious conflict with the traditionalists came to focus on the Mass, which gave the radicals an advantage over the moderate evangelicals.  By the beginning of 1547 events had caused evangelicals to assume a more radical and aggressive stance.

Ryrie’s study presents a coherent picture of the religious situation during the last years of Henry VIII.  It is based on wide research in various archives including private, ecclesiastical, and government papers as well as contemporary printed books.   Thanks to The Gospel and Henry VIII, the idea of a late Henrician Counter-Reformation is no longer tenable while the dramatic surge of evangelical activity, much of it radical, in the reign of Edward VI becomes more understandable.  This well-written study along with Ethan Shagan’s Popular Politics and the English Reformation (2003) are probably the two most important monographs concerning the early English Reformation to appear in recent years.