In some of the blog posts related to the reaction that English Catholics had to the birth of the Anglican church and the break with Rome, we left open the question of whether the Anglican schism was something that was born overnight and by Henry VIII's whim of divorcing Catherine of Aragon and marrying Anne Boleyn. In some of these entries, such as the one dedicated to the man known as Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536, we already noted a negative answer to that question. Today we are going to develop this answer in more detail.
Surely the names of Martin Luther and Calvin are familiar to everyone, men who opposed the church of Rome and gave birth to the Protestant religions. One of the essential elements for the spread of these movements was the decision to translate the Bible from Latin so that everyone could read it and understand and interpret its message without necessarily being subjected to the orthodoxy of the Roman clergy regarding its content. On the other hand, the invention of the printing press was fundamental, which meant that many more people than before could access the translated sacred text and the works of Luther and Calvin.
In England there were two key figures for ideas contrary to Roman Catholic orthodoxy to spread.
The first of them, almost a century before, had defended the same ideas against the Church of Rome as Luther and Calvin; this man was called John Wycliffe and he not only attacked the situation of the church of Rome, its riches and the moral and sexual corruption of the clergy. Wycliffe challenged the papacy, which argued that the Bible should only be published in Latin because only members of the clergy were trained to interpret it. In 1381 he published a translation of the Bible into English, understanding that everyone could know and interpret the word of God. Wycliffe's teachings permeated the English people, generating a movement known as the Lollards, which was persecuted by the English monarchy and declared heresy by the Church of Rome at the Council of Constance in 1415.
The second of these was William Tyndale, a contemporary of Luther's Protestant schism. His ideas contrary to Roman orthodoxy and in favor of the translation of the Bible into English, caused him to be persecuted and had to go into exile in Hamburg in 1525. There he came into contact with Luther and continued with his task of translating the Bible. to English. Unlike Wycliffe, Tyndale had the formidable weapon of the printing press to spread and smuggle hundreds of copies of the translated Bible into England, which were passed on to the ideological heirs of the embers that the Lollard movement had left in the world. country.
Persecuted his ideas by the until then fervent defender of the Church of Rome Henry VIII and his main advisers, Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas More, he ended his days burned at the stake for heresy.
But the seed planted by Wycliffe and Tyndale went deep into two important characters such as Thomas Cromwell (main adviser to Henry VIII after the fall from grace of Cardinal Wolsey due to his inability to convince the pope to grant the divorce of the king and Catherine of Aragon) and Thomas Cramner (confessor of Anne Boleyn and later Archbishop of Canterbury. Both were decisive in convincing Henry VIII to depart from the Church of Rome and, as head of the Church of England, to be able to marry Anne Boleyn.
It may be that the king only had his interests in mind, but his advisers had something else in mind, something that had been cooking in the Anglo-Saxon country for more than a hundred years:definitively separate England from the discipline of Rome and apply the doctrines of Wycliffe. and Tyndale, as Luther and Calvin had done on the Continent. We would still have to wait a while for the reforms to sink in, both in legislation and especially in the English people... but that's another story.