CHAPTER SIX

REFORMATION CONFLICT BETWEEN STEPHEN GARDINER AND ROBERT BARNES, LENT 15401

Ralph S. Werrell

Introduction

According to Robert Barnes, Paul’s Cross was a cockpit in which the Henrician religious traditionalists and the evangelical avant-garde fought their battles. The cock fight between Barnes and Stephen Gardiner during the Lenten season of 1540 is the subject of this paper. Assessments of Henry VIII’s attitude towards the Reformation have frequently been sim- plistic. After his break with Rome in the 1530s, England was set on a course leading to the full-scale Reformation of Edward VI’s reign. But Henry had to lead the English into the direction he wanted them to go. There were areas where he could force his will, as he did in getting the clergy to yield to him, and to remove the pope from supremacy in England. But there were many occasions where he had to tread carefully. The memory of the Wars of the Roses was alive, and there were families that had a better claim to the English crown than Henry VII had. Henry VIII still had to keep the balance of power, and following his break with Rome, the balance was still delicate between two major parties, which now became not so much political as religious, between the Catholics and the reformers. Henry had to secure a balance between those who wanted a return to some form of traditional Catholicism—even, for some, a restoration of the power of the papacy and, on the other hand, those who wanted a move towards a Reformed Church. The motives of some were probably less towards their religious beliefs but more to gain from the dismantling of the Church, which possessed great wealth. It is not likely that Henry VIII’s personal religious beliefs fluctuated between catholic and reformed extremes. Rather, Henry embraced a hybrid religion that tried to hit a mean between the traditionalist and evangelical

1 I thank Dr Jonathan Willis, of Birmingham University, for his most helpful comments on this paper.

130 ralph s. werrell poles.2 Politically this approach made sense, but religiously it was full of tensions. The balance of the evidence suggests that Henry would have liked to move, in many ways, towards further reformation of the English Church of which he was ‘the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England.’3 Otherwise he would have been more balanced in the choice of tutors for his son, Edward. We also get a glimpse of this in the aftermath of the Paul’s Cross sermons. In 1539, the passing of the Six Articles Act is often consid- ered as indicative of Henry’s move towards a more traditional Catholic the- ology: the event of Lent 1540, however, raise certain questions about such an inference. Apart from Barnes’s thinking that it was safe to preach justifi- cation by faith only, by 1540 Henry showed he was even-handed by balanc- ing the execution of three reformers with the deaths of three Catholics. Henry’s message to the Catholic faction was that even though they had managed to get rid of Cromwell and three reformers they were not to read too much into it—the Catholic party also was vulnerable. The Lenten Sermons at Paul’s Cross in 1540 had further repercussions. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer used that pulpit to preach against the Bishop of Winchester; and also Henry’s subsequent protection of Thomas Cranmer. George Joye confuted Stephen Gardiner, and refuted the Bishop of Winchester’s false articles. Stephen Gardiner’s reply to Joye followed, justifying what had happened. We will only be able to consider these as they have bearing on the sermons of Lent, 1540.

Paul’s Cross Sermons, Lent 1540

Robert Barnes was not a likely choice as a preacher at Paul’s Cross that Lent, even though he had recently been in the service of Henry VIII in

2 See Peter Marshall, ‘Mumpsimus and Sumpsimus: The Intellectual Origins of a Henrician Bon Mot’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 52.3 (2001), 512. ‘Henry VIII’s appearance before the assembled houses of parliament on Christmas Eve 1545 was perhaps his finest hour. In what has been called a ‘pioneer royal Christmas broadcast. … Henry illustrated the breakdown of fraternal love among his people: ‘the one calleth the other Hereticke and Anabaptist, and he calleth hym again, Papist, Ypocrite and Pharisey’; rival preachers inveigh against each other ‘without charity or discrecion’. To the king’s mind, the blame for this deserved to be apportioned to all sides, and to reinforce the point, Henry brought forward one of the more curious metaphors of contemporary religious discourse: ‘some be to styff in their old Mumpsimus, other be too busy and curious in their newe Sumpsimus’ … What the king was invoking appears to represent the rhetoric of reformist Christian humanism, decisively appropriated into more overtly evangelical discourses, though still to an extent countenanced by the anticlerical and antipapal attitudes of con- servative lay elites.’ 3 H. Gee and W.J. Hardy, eds., Document Illustrative of English Church History (London: MacMillan and Co., 1896; repr. 1921), 244.