Wabuda on Carleton, 'Bishops and Reform in the English Church, 1520-1559'

H-Albion Wabuda on Carleton, 'Bishops and Reform in the English Church, 1520-1559'

Review published on Monday, April 1, 2002

Kenneth Carleton. Bishops and Reform in the English Church, 1520-1559. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2001. x + 226 pp. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-85115-816-7.

Reviewed by Susan Wabuda (Department of History, Fordham University) Published on H-Albion (April, 2002)

Benched Bishops

The apostle Paul "was no sitting bishop, but a walking and a preaching bishop," according to Hugh Latimer, who was speaking from his own uncomfortable vantage place as thequondam bishop of Worcester. "A bishop hath his office"; he had "a flock to teach" and "to look unto," Latimer warned his listeners when he delivered his Sermon on the Plough in early 1548, less than a year after Edward VI had succeeded his father Henry VIII as King of England and Supreme Governor of its Church.

Historians of the early modern English Church and State have long been fascinated with bishops, and the changes that the Reformation brought to their duties and station in society. A selection of standard works on the sixteenth and seventeenth-century episcopate would include Patrick Collinson's Religion of Protestants (1982) for Elizabethan and early Stuart England; Kenneth Fincham's Prelate as Pastor (1990) for the reign of James I; and Felicity Heal'sOf Prelates and Princes (1980) on the problems the episcopate faced in the changing Tudor polity. There are also numerous studies of individual bishops, including Margaret Bowker's work on John Longland of Lincoln in The Henrician Reformation (1981); Collinson's biography of Archbishop Edmund Grindal (1980); Maria Dowling's recent study of John Fisher of Rochester inFisher of Men (1999); and Diarmaid MacCulloch's comprehensive Life of Thomas Cranmer (1996).

Although this reading list is already long and formidable, historians and theologians have an almost insatiable craving for additional studies. One would hope to welcome Kenneth Carleton's Bishops and Reform in the English Church to the regular roster of standard readings. Given the nature of Henry's rupture from the Roman Catholic Church and the confusing doctrinal developments that followed, scholars need to know how the episcopate was changed and constrained under the heavy demands made by the royal supremacy. Indeed Carleton recognizes that bishops had a crucial role during the Reformation. He has examined the bishops' registers of more than a dozen dioceses. Among the subjects that his book addresses include the vexing question of how often bishops preached (not enough, even under Edward, according to Latimer); the problems that surrounded how they dealt with the challenges of heresy; and even the smaller, intriguing matter of how often sixteenth-century bishops confirmed children. These topics are of perennial interest in the field.

But the problems which underlie this book ultimately lead the reader to disappointments. Important ideas and definitions are not developed. In Chapter 7, on the eradication of false doctrine, Carleton

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Wabuda on Carleton, 'Bishops and Reform in the English Church, 1520-1559'. H-Albion. 03-26-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/16749/reviews/17679/wabuda-carleton-bishops-and-reform-english-church-1520-1559 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Albion does not define what he means by heresy. I was left wondering who the real subjects of his inquiries in this chapter were: the men and women that a bishop should "look unto," or those famous martyr- bishops (Latimer, Ridley, Cranmer, Hooper, and Ferrar) who suffered under Queen Mary.

Important new directions for the English Church and its teachings are addressed from the standpoint of the almost complete lack of policy, and thus the author is led into some avoidable culs-de-sac. Early in the book, Carleton writes that "Henry VIII never exercised the right of deprivation" of the bishops who thwarted him (p. 29). More "by chance, rather than by design" was the king able to promote those men who could support his supremacy (p. 61). Yet what happened to Bishops Geronimo de' Ghinnucci of Worcester and Lorenzo Campeggio of Salisbury? Certainly they were deprived in 1535 in order to make room for Latimer and Nicholas Shaxton. And could one also argue that Latimer and Shaxton were pushed aside in their turn only four years later, when they refused to support the passage of the Act of the Six Articles through Parliament. What were their resignations, if not deprivations, in fact if not in name? It may be true, as MacCulloch and other scholars have established, that Henry's policies were not always coherent or well-thought through, particularly after Thomas Cromwell, Henry's Vice-Gerent for Spirituals, was executed in 1540. Not until Cranmer had a freer hand under Edward, could a more thorough effort to bring about a Protestant England go forward, especially along the lines of the Swiss Reformation under Heinrich Bullinger's guidance. But it is not helpful to ascribe major shifts in Henrician policy mainly to the king's choice of wife or solely to chance. The State Papers collection in the Public Record Office must be consulted in addition to the bishops' registers. If the Supreme Head could sweep whole bishoprics into being (like Peterborough, calved off from the almost unmanageably-large diocese of Lincoln in 1541), perhaps substantive planning was at work more often than Carelton can descry.

While the Bibliography is fairly full, the author did not draw frequently enough from some of the most recent literature that would have clarified some of the issues. Eric Josef Carlson has written recently on clerical marriage (1994). Peter Marshall has published his fully-developed study onThe Catholic Priesthood and the English Reformation (1994). Andrew Pettegree's essays in Marian Protestantism (1996) would have illuminated the career of John Hooper, that most problematic of Edwardine bishops. How were the role and duties of bishops really transformed as a result of the Reformation? Without really incorporating the ideas of these and other scholars,Bishops and Reform has, as a consequence, a surprising old-fashioned air. Carleton's book hardly brings us to a closer understanding of the changing patterns of what it meant to wear the miter and wield the crozier during the Reformation.

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Citation: Susan Wabuda. Review of Carleton, Kenneth, Bishops and Reform in the English Church, 1520-1559. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. April,URL: 2002. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=6164

Copyright © 2002 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at [email protected].