A History of the Episcopal Church (Third Revised Edition). Robert W. Prichard
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The monarch at the time, Elizabeth I’s father, King Henry VIII (1509–47), was involved in a religious program of his own. Anxious to gain access to church wealth, to select his own candidates for church positions, and to secure an annulment from his spouse, he bullied the Parliament in the early 1530s to nationalize the Church of England, claiming for his monarchy the oversight and leadership at that time exercised by the Pope. Struggles between nations and Popes had been common in Europe since the eleventh century and generally did not lead to permanent breaks or to major reformations of the church. Personnel decisions made by Henry laid the groundwork for both, however. Henry chose two men with sympathy for the Cambridge Protestants—Cambridge graduate Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556) and merchant Thomas Cromwell (1485?–1540)—as his Archbishop of Canterbury and his secretary to the royal Council. He chose one of the Cambridge Protestants (Hugh Latimer) as a bishop and another (Richard Cox) as the tutor of his son Edward VI. He approved the publication of an English Bible translated by two other members of the group (Tyndale and Coverdale).
Henry never entirely trusted the members of the Protestant circle from Cambridge and limited their authority and influence by also appointing religious conservatives such as Stephen Gardiner (c. 1490–1555) to positions of importance (Bishop of Winchester, 1531–55). When displeased, he proved willing to execute both conservatives (such as Thomas More, 1478–1535) and advocates of Protestant reform (such as Thomas Cromwell).
The members of the Protestant circle, for their part, reserved judgment about the king, accepting him as a possible instrument of reform without forgetting the dangers that political leaders could present for the church. In periods of cooperation, they were able to take the first rudimentary steps toward the reformation of the English church. They issued an English Bible based on the work of Tyndale and Coverdale (the Great Bible, 1538) and a form of public prayer in English (the Great Litany, 1544); began to dissolve the monastic orders that, as the custodians of the primary relics and pilgrimage sites, were the strongest supporters of the medieval penitential system; and raised questions about the medieval doctrine of purgatory. The alliance proved an unstable one, with Henry turning more conservative in the 1540s. Yet the decade of cooperation gave the English Reformation a character that distinguished it from that on the continent. In Germany, Martin Luther moved within three years from mild criticism to total rejection of the episcopal hierarchy of the church. In England, in contrast, some members of the circle of Protestants at Cambridge were able to move into positions of importance, including the episcopate. That they were able to do so gave the English Christians a sense that many continental Christians could not share—that reform and the church’s episcopal hierarchy need not be incompatible.
The reigns of Henry’s children—Edward VI (1547–53), Mary I (1553–58), and Elizabeth I—strengthened this perception for the English people. During the short reign of Edward, the Protestant circle quickened the rate of reform; they prepared two editions of the Book of Common Prayer (1549 and 1552), published a series of sermons for use in English churches (the Homilies), introduced legislation to allow for clerical marriage, and drafted a reformed statement of faith (Edward’s Forty-two Articles, which would form the basis for the later Thirty-nine Articles of Religion). During Mary’s Roman Catholic reaction, the Protestants lost their church positions but discovered a leadership of another kind—that of martyrdom. (Together Henry and Mary burned twenty-five members of the Cambridge circle. Many other less prominent Protestants were executed during Mary’s reign as well, with a total of roughly three hundred executed for heresy.) When Elizabeth came to the throne, she chose bishops for the church who had studied with the Cambridge Protestants or otherwise shared a conviction about the compatibility of tradition and reform. It was this evolving English Christianity that provided the religious backdrop to the founding of colonies in Roanoke and Jamestown.
The Religious Character of the Virginia Colonyunder Elizabeth and James
During the years that Elizabeth I and James I occupied the throne, the primary focus of English colonial efforts was Virginia. The records of that effort bear out the central role that religion played in their lives. The Virginia martial law provisions of 1610, for example, specified that members of the colony should gather to give thanks and to seek God’s assistance at daily Morning and Evening Prayer, Sunday morning worship, and Sunday afternoon instruction in the catechism. Clergy were to preside at daily worship and preach each Sunday and Wednesday.8 The settlers at Jamestown initially met for prayer in a temporary worship tent (constructed of sailcloth) which was replaced with a wooden structure in 1608. The community at Jamestown grew, and in 1617 the chapel was relocated to a position that was near the center of the expanded settlement. This building was in turn replaced with a brick structure that was begun in 1639.9
The colonists believed that their day-to-day struggle to found a settlement was religiously significant for three important reasons. First, they could preach the gospel to an Indian population that they believed had not yet heard the good news of Jesus Christ. Thus, W. Thomas Harriot attempted to preach to the Indians at Roanoke, and Governor John White’s account of the Roanoke colony, which English clergyman and geographer Richard Hakluyt (1552?–1616) included in his Principal Navigations (1589), recorded with pride the baptism of Manteo (the first Native American baptized by a clergyman of the Church of England).10 William Crashaw, a clerical supporter of colonization, preached in 1610 that conversion of the Native Americans was “plainly a necessary duty.”11 The first Virginia legislature (1619) declared its commitment to the “conversion of the Savages.”12
A second motive for colonization was closely related to the first. By spreading the gospel, colonists helped to unfold God’s plan for the world, thereby hastening the coming of the kingdom. In a November 1622 sermon to the members of the Virginia Company (the new name adopted by the London Company in 1609), poet and clergyman John Donne (1573– 1631) used the Acts 1:8 promise that the Holy Spirit would assist the disciples to preach “to the end of the earth’’ to make the point. He noted that the members of his congregation had an advantage over the first-century Christians, who knew nothing about such places as the West Indies and, therefore, could not reach the ends of the earth. Colonists of the Virginia Company could, in contrast, create a “bridge … to that world that shall never grow old, the Kingdom of heaven.” By adding the names of new colonists, the members of the Company could “add names … to the Booke of Life.”13
A third reason for colonization was an awareness of the geo-political importance of expanding the frontiers of Protestantism. The first half of the seventeenth century was dominated by wars of religion that often pitted Roman Catholics against Protestants. The leading colonial powers of the age were also Roman Catholic nations. By founding colonies of its own in the new world, England was able to join other Protestant nations in what historian Norman Sykes has dubbed the “anti-Roman Grand Alliance,” and historian John Woolverton has explained as “an imperial strategy whose potent unifying theme was anti-Roman Catholicism.”14 The religious element of English strategy was evident to Roman Catholics at the time. The Spanish ambassador in England complained in 1609 that the members of the mercantile company responsible for the colony at Jamestown “have actually made their ministers in their sermons dwell upon the importance of filling the world with their religion.”15
Such prospects attracted serious-minded young clergy. Indeed, at a time when many clergy of the Church of England were not university trained, most of those who volunteered for service in Virginia were university graduates. Alumni of Magdalen College, Oxford and King’s,