The Pros And Cons Of Protestantism

By King Edward VI’s death in 1553, it is undeniable that England had, in a strictly legal context, become fully Protestant. The Royal Injunctions instituted by Edward left no uncertainty regarding the State’s religious stance. These attacks on processions, Catholic imagery, and chantries established England as firmly legally Protestant. Analyzing the extent to which England had turned towards Protestantism strictly through this legal lens, however, fails to account for the value of lay compliance, or lack thereof, as well as actual Protestant belief. Despite propagated myths of anti-clerical attitude and faulty reliance on will preambles, England's populous was, in fact, majorly non-compliant and disbelieving towards the prospect of Protestantism

The first provided example of anticlerical sentiment, Colet’s convocation sermon, exemplifies this. It is Colet's aforementioned reference towards St. Bernard of Clairvaux that provides this sermon the appropriate context to analyze just how fruitless Colet’s words are in indicating a decline in the influence of the Clergy. The “marked similarity between St. Bernard’s condemnation of the venality of the church courts of his day and Colet’s assault on the judicial profiteering and litigiousness of early sixteenth-century England” makes it difficult to assert then that the Convocation sermon indicates “any sudden decline in the state of the church in the early Tudor period” (Harper-Bill

In the same vein as attempted studies of individual testimonies, reliability concerns emerge with the methodology of preamble analyses. For one, the population represented by these wills is not considered a fair representation of the average layman, as the will-makers were generally “older, wealthier, and overwhelmingly more male than the average subject of King Edward” (Marshall 86). Furthermore, it was common practice to allow local clergymen or experienced scribes to write the preambles meaning “the testator’s religious views underwent some form of censorship, or were distorted by the personal preference of the scribe” (“The Later Reformation in England” 109). Finally, Eamon Duffy offers a contention on the practice of preamble analysis, calling into question the existence of any clear distinction between supposedly “Catholic” or “Protestant” wills. Duffy claims that the classification of preambles that “simply declare trust in the merits or Passion of Christ cannot be assumed to be Protestant or even ‘reformist’” (Duffy 506). Ambiguity persists throughout these wills, as it was not uncommon “to find wills where a stridently evangelical preamble is followed by a request for masses” (Marshall 86). We encounter, on the topic of wills, another instance of faulty criteria being used to paint a picture of a dominant Protestant force emerging by the end of