Destruction: Iconoclasm and the Reformation in Northern Europe

CHAPTER 2 Destruction: Iconoclasm and the Reformation in Northern Europe May God will that our lords be like the pious secular kings and lords of the Jews whom the Holy Spirit praises. In sacred Scripture they have always had the power to take action in churches and abolish what offends and hinders the faithful. —Andreas Karlstadt, “On the Removal of Images”1 Unfortunately such examples of iconoclastic mayhem, Byzantinestyle, did not quietly disappear into history. Europe experienced another outbreak of destructive religious zeal during the late medieval and early modern period. As Reformation ideas spread across Europe, one of the first outbreaks occurred in Basel in 1529 when angry mobs took over the town. The day after the destruction, the scene was like a battlefield after war: “The images lay everywhere in and about the churches, some with heads missing, others with hands, arms, or legs lopped off. There remained little that the authorities could do beyond attempting to legitimize and regularize what had already transpired. City workmen were dispatched to the cathedral and other churches, where they systematically removed and demolished all the remaining cult objects overlooked by the iconoclastic mob, and whitewashed the walls.”2 Similar scenes were repeated in France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and England before Reformation frenzy came to an end. In England, after Henry VIII ordered the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536–39, eight hundred abbeys were destroyed, literally overnight. Among the oldest buildings in England, the eight hundred included Saint Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury, dating to the conversion of England in 597; Lindisfarne Priory, founded on Holy Island by Saint Aiden in 635 as a center of early Anglo-Saxon Christianity and where Saint Cuthbert was prior; Pershore, dating to 681–89; and 40 Heritage or Heresy Shaftesbury, founded by Alfred the Great, whose sister was its abbess in 888. The abbeys had provided medical care, works of charity, craft patronage, education, and social services that would not be replaced for centuries. What early modern iconoclasm shares with the ancient and medieval examples is how the ruler asserts civic, political, and religious power to police pious practices and to impose change, while applying harsh measures to overthrow any opposition to these revolutionary changes in religious practice. Ominous and dangerous were the simultaneous emergence of secular policing powers that invaded the privacy of the home and monitored personal devotional practices. Cleansing the remains of other cultures or what were deemed corruptions of Christianity that challenged purity became common in the early modern period. Spain, where Arabs had invaded in 711 and eventually came to occupy and rule two thirds of the country, offers a good example. When the “Reconquista” of the peninsula began with the sack of Toledo in 1085, Castile advanced its gradual control of the peninsula and as Arab cities fell, mosques in conquered areas were cleansed or destroyed, and the cultural artifacts of non-Christians were destroyed or reused. After the final conquest of Granada in 1492 and the expulsion of Jews and Muslims, all remaining mosques and synagogues were appropriated and reused or destroyed. In Italy, the Dominican reformer Savonarola (1452–98), a Catholic zealot predating the northern Reformation, who built on calls for religious reform going back to Dante, Petrarch, and Catherine of Siena, among others, was chiding Florentines to abandon their wanton ways in the 1490s. By the end of the decade, inspired by Savonarola’s charismatic preaching power at two famous carnivals—Fat Tuesdays (brucciamenti delle vanità [burning of vanities]), one on February 7, 1497, and another the following year on February 27, 1498—Florentines seemed to go mad as they burned or mutilated books, artifacts, and art works. This new religious custom ended only when Savonarola himself was hanged and burned.3 Similar outbursts of iconoclasm also occurred in the Netherlands, France, and Switzerland.4 Like the Byzantine crisis, England, where a major state-sponsored iconoclastic movement developed, also had two phases: the first during the reign of the Tudors (from the 1530s during Henry VIII’s reign to the death of Elizabeth in 1603), and the second during the Puritan Revolution (1625– 60). England’s Reformation witnessed both state-sponsored (instrumental) and spontaneous (expressive) outbursts of “group solidarity” burnings and destructive rampages.5 The focus here is the Tudor crisis and the political circumstances under which it became state policy to destroy artifacts and buildings. The Cromwellian Revolution will play a role in the discussion of how York Cathedral was spared during the Puritan Revolution. Reformation iconoclasts actually looked back to the Byzantine world to support their assault on religious images. In reaction, no doubt, to what Destruction: Iconoclasm and Reformation in Northern Europe 41 was perceived as widespread abuse of images, John Calvin (1509–64), one of Europe’s most ardent iconoclasts, sharply attacked the defense of images advanced during the Byzantine crisis at the Second Council of Nicaea (787). In fact, Calvin turned back to another ancient document to support his case. He found the Libri Carolini, produced around 790 in France, to question the legitimacy of the 787 Nicene Council. The Libri Carolini argued against the orthodox Byzantine acceptance of images as settled at the council on the following grounds: The Word is the guide to salvation, and images are ultimately just material objects made by human hands. They are merely for decoration or commemoration. (The council had used the word adoratio for both veneration and adoration, which overlooked the distinction between veneration and adoration.) The Libri Carolini’s argument permitted art for devotional practices, but rejected what it perceived as the excessive “veneration” adopted at the Byzantine Council.6 The Libri Carolini never had official ecclesiastical sanction, and in fact, in response to its reservations about images, Pope Hadrian (d. December 25, 795) had invoked Gregory the Great’s middle way and supported the Second Nicene Council’s settlement. The Libri Carolini disappeared from official view.7 Calvin’s interpretation of the image issue ignored the whole tradition defending images, while he resurrected anti-image sentiments from the Carolingian (i.e., Germanic) past as good ammunition for the iconoclasts.8 Iconoclasm in the European Reformation confronts us with a legacy of prejudices that stem from the triumph of Protestantism in Northern Europe, creating a still evident though muted religious rift between Catholic and Protestant Europe. In contrast to the Byzantine case, where the iconoclasts eventually lost, Protestant Europe prevailed in terms of its desired reforms and in forming the dominant viewpoint about the history of the period. This version of history extols a superior form of religion, the formation of the “modern” nation—and justifies the destruction of traditional forms of Christian religious practice, including the use of paintings, statues, and other religious artifacts—and adopts a polemic of the triumph of “true” religion over what it labels as superstition, magic, and paganism. This stance is expressed as strongly today as it was in Calvin’s era. For example, in a recently republished collection of three Reformation treatises on “sacred images,” the editors state in their introduction that “The widespread iconoclasm of the Reformation represented a necessary step for the development of modern Christianity, and one could say also of Western culture, is an unquestioned and unquestionable assumption.”9 This opening quote that embraces a division of Protestant versus Catholic Europe claims the northern European form of Reformation Christianity as the “modern Christianity,” and adopts a teleological view of Christian history linked with Western hegemony is a prejudice so widespread that it has become a tacitly accepted assumption, recited repeatedly in text books 42 Heritage or Heresy and school matriculation exams, taught in university history classes, used in scholarly books about the period, and regularly inserted into daily newspapers and television patter. With a nod to the unfortunate destruction of a symbol system developed over 1,500 years that sustained a communal life, many defenders of the Reformation argue that iconoclasm was historically necessary.10 This scorn for pre-Reformation Christianity (or the medieval period in general) is enshrined in The Actes and Monuments of these Latter Perilous Days (1563)11 of John Foxe (1516–87). A major sixteenth-century Protestant historian of the events, Foxe may not always have his facts correct, but he nonetheless reveals the vitriolic anti-Roman (and anti-medieval) polemic of the times. The first edition of Actes and Monuments appeared in 1563, and its views represent an anti-Roman sentiment common until very recent times. It continues to inform popular belief and is taught by professors in elite institutions. Indeed, the popular vision of brutality and superstition about the Middle Ages carries prejudices as violent as those directed at the Orient or the Middle East that have been rightly attacked by Edward Said, who was the first to systematically show how scholars, artists, and writers have promoted and upheld such views.12 Recently, however, efforts to redress this reigning historical prejudice have emerged as scholars are now recognizing how statepromoted violence led to the dismantling of the medieval world, its religious practices, and the artifacts it had created and patronized.13 Not all Protestantism was uniformly anti-iconic. Martin Luther (1483– 1546) had rejected the iconoclastic doctrines being advanced by the radical reformers Andreas Karlstadt (1486–1541), Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531), and Calvin, all leaders of the “removal” movement during the Reformation.14 Showing a more traditional understanding of the role of images in a sermon in 1522, Luther spoke about the threat to images, saying, “[Misunderstanding of images] is no reason to remove all images. . . . We must permit them. . . . But you are to preach that images are nothing.”15 Image-breaking created civic disorder, as was immediately shown by the rioters at Wittenberg who, while Luther was out of town, overturned statues and altars and burned images and paintings in a parish church. This first case led to a rift between Luther and Karlstadt.16 Nürenberg, the imperial city, was able to preserve its altars and statues because of the adoption of Lutheran principles, whereas in Zurich, where Zwingli triumphed, a 1524 edict led to the destruction of all “material accessories” to worship. Many Southern German and Swiss towns that followed the Reformation adopted Zwinglian rather than Lutheran ideas about religious images, so churches were cleansed of paintings and statues.17 But both reformers and traditionalists in Wittenberg in the 1520s had resisted the idea of removing images from churches despite the polemics of Karlstadt. Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560), biblical theologian and Luther’s colleague, developed a doctrine that separated God’s law, which was unchanging, and Destruction: Iconoclasm and Reformation in Northern Europe 43 human customs that were subject to change. Images and relics in this system were allowable because they supported religious practices, but they are supplementary and not essential.18 Like the Catholics who argued against the radicals, Melanchthon shared the opinion of two traditionalists, Hieronymus Emser (1478–1527) and Johannes Eck (1486–1543), who argued that images are not idols, as will be discussed in the next chapter. Iconoclastic ideas, on the other hand, circulated widely in Switzerland, and one of the worst episodes of art destruction took place in Basel in 1529 when angry mobs attacked the churches. The burning of the remains, like the bonfire of vanities under Savonarola in Florence, took place on Ash Wednesday, and the pyres smoldered for two days and nights, according to witnesses. Erasmus, who was living in Basel at the time, saw the destruction, but he certainly did not approve of it, as we know from several of his letters that refer to the riotous destruction.19 He was appalled when he witnessed all the statues—whether in churches, vestibules, porticoes, or monasteries—thrown into fires if they could burn, and the rest broken. Neither value nor handicraft spared them, he wrote.20 After witnessing the destruction in Basel, Erasmus left as quickly as possible for Catholic Freiberg, writing in a letter to a friend how soothing it was to arrive to this well-mannered city where he did not hear such destructive talk.21 An inspirer of the reforming movement and a Christian humanist like his friend Thomas More, Erasmus was aware that images had limits as devotional aids (which is completely consistent with Catholic tradition, as we will see in the next chapter), but he was no iconoclast.22 Again, there is an obvious difference between criticizing the spiritual efficacy of devotional images or even questioning devotional practices themselves and actually destroying the images. A chasm separates these two possibilities. Andreas Karlstadt’s treatise, “On the Removal of Images” (“Von Abtuhung der Bylder”), published in Wittenberg in January 1522, played an important role in this episode because it had circulated widely in Basel and had strong adherents among the city’s Protestants. It represents the radical position against images espoused during the Reformation. Karlstadt begins with the following premises: 1. That we have images in churches and houses of God is wrong and contrary to the first commandment, Thou shalt not have other gods. 2. That to have carved and painted idols set up on the altars is even more injurious and diabolical. 3. Therefore, it is good, necessary, praiseworthy, and pious that we remove them and give Scripture its due and in so doing accept its judgment. (Karlstadt, 21) Taking the Hebrew Scriptures literally, ignoring the nuances that allegory and other hermeneutical methods had allowed for the previous 1,500 years, or even Melanchthon’s historical argument, Karlstadt uses a number of 44 Heritage or Heresy biblical proof-texts to justify the removal of images. Of course, Exodus 20:4– 5, the Decalogue prohibition of idols, gains new importance, as does the King Josiah story of the model of righteous kings (2 Kings 23:4ff.). For Karlstadt, the significance of the Josiah story is simple; secular policing powers must trump religious authority, or more directly, the secular police should assume the religious function: “From this everyone should observe how in accord with divine justice priests should be subordinate to kings. For this reason our magistrates should not wait for the priests of Baal to begin to remove their vessels, wooden blocks, and impediments, because they will never begin. The highest secular authority should command it and bring it about” (Karlstadt, 41, italics mine). Karlstadt pits the written word against images and undertakes to dismantle Pope Gregory I’s defense of images by arguing that as a papist, Gregory “offers to a likeness the veneration which God has given to his Word” when he “says that pictures are the books of the laity” (Karlstadt, 26). In a rhetorical address, he asks Gregory to defend how people can learn from the image of the crucified Christ and concludes that this is impossible and therefore it cannot be true that images are the books of the laity.23 In a further assault on Gregory, he insists that pictures cannot instruct—only books can (36–37). Even more provocative than his assault against long-held Western acceptance of religious imagery in churches, with his attack on Gregory, Karlstadt argues for the intervention of rulers, who by “divine right” may “force priests to expel deceitful and damaging things” (41). Taking as his models the iconoclast rulers Hezekiah and Josiah, who crossed the line between ruler and priest, Karlstadt recalls how as a pious king, Josiah had ordered the priests to destroy all cult sites outside Jerusalem: Had, however, our rulers accepted divine counsel and fulfilled its command and driven the knavish and seductive blocks of wood from the church under pain of appropriate punishment, we would have to praise them as the Holy Spirit praised Hezekiah, who ripped down images, hacked down groves and broke up the image which God had given, as is described in 2 Kings 18[:3ff.]. May God will that our lords be like the pious secular kings and lords of the Jews whom the Holy Spirit praises. In sacred Scripture they have always had the power to take action in churches and abolish what offends and hinders the faithful. (By divine right they may force and compel priests to expel deceitful and damaging things.) Anyone can see this in 2 Kings 23[:4ff.], where it is written that King Josiah ordered the high priest and the other priests to throw out all the vessels, pillars, and the like which were made for Baal; and he burnt them outside the city of Jerusalem. (40–41) While Karlstadt’s treatise may not have been the particular intellectual instrument that spurred the English movement, it testifies to the political-religious climate that had led to the iconoclastic outbreaks throughout Destruction: Iconoclasm and Reformation in Northern Europe 45 Europe and to the situation in areas where reformation ideas had taken hold in the decade prior to England’s Reformation. Reflecting the imminence of the crisis, Henry VIII’s proclamation of 1530 or thereabouts, under Thomas More’s guidance, banned a number of continental books, mostly by Luther and Zwingli, but also by Melanchthon and Bugenhagen and English books written by the reformers (Foxe, 4.667–70).24 Luther’s lectures on Deuteronomy, Zwingli’s Commentary on True and False Religion, and Bugenhagen’s Commentary on Kings, all banned, all deal with religious imagery. Events on the continent and the iconoclastic ideas that had inspired them were now roaming the land in England.25 Thomas More had written Responsio ad Lutherum (Response to Luther) in 1523, and his Dialogue Concerning Heresies written in English with a lay audience in mind appeared in 1529.26 He identifies his opposition in this dialogue specifically, naming Luther, Bugenhagen, Tyndale, and Karlstadt, among others. Karlstadt made a number of proposals that became essential to the unfolding political situation in England. These included his argument for the absolute authority of the monarch over the realm in all matters, including those of conscience, and also the narrowing of the biblical canon, both necessary preconditions for the religious reform in images in England. While it can be argued that tensions about religious images had been a recurrent concern in Western and Eastern Christianity from the patristic period through the Cistercian reform movement, and that these worries were current in preReformation Europe in general as well as in England,27 nonetheless, there is a monumental difference between complaint and diatribe against idolatrous image making and image adoring and the periodic violent outbursts that characterize iconoclastic movements. The former represents a corrective stance, the latter an attempt to obliterate. In this moment of English history, a new importance given to the Decalogue and the absolute authority of the ruler over all matters within the realm, both religious and secular, combined to unleash the impulses that led to destroying England’s “medieval” artistic heritage. The Tudor Reformation Henry VIII (1491–1547), the second Tudor ruler of England (1509–47), had initially supported orthodoxy (i.e., traditional religion and loyalty to Rome) when the Reformation began to stir in Germany. Henry earned the title “Defender of the Faith” (Fidei Defensor) in 1521 from the pope, for a treatise against Martin Luther (Assertio septem sacramentorum) that was likely written by John Fisher (1459–1535), bishop of Rochester and chancellor of Cambridge University. In addition, Henry had added his personal voice to the academic, ecclesiastical, and secular authorities’ polemic against Luther in the 1520s.28 Indeed, as noted, as late as 1530, he had promulgated a royal 46 Heritage or Heresy proclamation that as sovereign lord in the “true Catholic faith of Christ’s religion,” he must preserve his people from the “sedition of Martin Luther and other heretics”; and to protect his realm from “pestiferous, cursed, and seditious errors,” he ordered that no books or preaching should support these heresies in his realm. Among a number of books he cited as a danger to the realm, we find William Tyndale’s (1494–1536) translation of Genesis and of Deuteronomy.29 However, this commitment to orthodoxy declined when Henry’s pressing need for a divorce came to the forefront of English politics by the end of the decade.30 Nonetheless, when attacks on traditional religion swept over England during the 1530s, Henry had a number of reasons for resisting the cleansing of images and ending established customs that had spread on the continent. Most prominent of these was the civil disorder prompted by efforts to eliminate feast days and other religious celebrations, which were, of course, linked to religious art. This reluctance to adopt wholesale the iconoclastic programs witnessed on the continent characterizes both his reign and that of his daughter Elizabeth. It explains the often-contradictory royal proclamations about the role of religious images that we see in both of their reigns.31 In 1532 Thomas Cromwell (1489–1540) became Henry’s chief minister. Whether or not because of his religious convictions, he became the author of England’s Reformation, with the very specific goal of strengthening the king as the supreme head of the church, leader of a sovereign realm, answering to no one.32 Cromwell was the architect and engineer of the dissolution of the monasteries, the appropriation of their wealth and possessions to the crown, and the simultaneous dismantling of shrines across the country.33 Despite Henry’s reservations, iconoclasm rose to prominence in 1533 when Hugh Latimer (1470–1555), a controversial and polemical preacher and early supporter of Henry’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon (1485–1536), was invited to public debates in Bristol. Latimer gained notoriety and favor with Thomas Cromwell in 1533 to become the prime propagandist for the reformist policies after he began preaching against images, the veneration of saints, and the doctrine of purgatory.34 Purgatory, the middle space between heaven and hell, a place from whence the dead could escape if enough people prayed for their release, came to prominence—according to Jacques Le Goff, a major French historian of the Middle Ages—in the second half of the twelfth century. Dante’s Purgatory is the most sustained literary-theological exploration of the meaning and function of this middle realm in the other world.35 The potential for abuse because of the economic element became one of the chief concerns of the reformers because besides paying monks and priests to pray for the dead, people gave money to have churches built, decorated, and painted to facilitate the passage of the dead from purgatory to heaven. Destruction: Iconoclasm and Reformation in Northern Europe 47 Shakespeare’s Hamlet shows that the belief was still vibrant even after the Reformation, if we can believe the ghost of Hamlet’s father.36 However, although the abuses were ostensibly the issue, as Eamon Duffy makes clear, “the most decisive outcome of the Bristol debates was the ominous association of traditional piety with disaffection to the Crown and loyalty to the Papacy”37 making loyalty to traditional practice tantamount to treason to the realm. With the passage of the Act of Supremacy in November 1534, the act that led to Thomas More’s execution for treason the following year, Cromwell had legally assured Henry’s position as head of both church and realm. Thus, as in the Byzantine case, the new orthodoxy was adherence to royal supremacy.38 When Cromwell was executed as a traitor in 1540, some believed the reform would stall, but Latimer lived on to inspire the iconoclasm in the reign of Edward VI, Henry’s son. With the proclamation of 1534 establishing the king as supreme head of both church and realm, the traditional distinction between temporal and spiritual powers (a division often compromised but nonetheless an ideal) was officially overthrown: “Forasmuch as our said nobles and commons both spiritual and temporal, assembled in our said court of parliament, have upon good, lawful and virtuous grounds, and for the public weal of our realm, by one whole assent granted, annexed, knit, and united to the crown imperial of the same the title, dignity, and style of supreme head in earth immediately under God of the Church of England, as we be and undoubtedly have hitherto been” (Foxe, 5.69, italics mine). Installing the king as supreme religious authority was the beginning of England’s revolution against papal authority and a unified Western Christianity. Without a separation of powers (ecclesiastical and temporal), loyalty to the realm and loyalty to its religion superseded traditional separations of public, secular law, and cult practice. In fact, the authority that replaced the priest was the king. In 1535, a royal proclamation abolished papal authority in England and admonished all clergy and teachers to eradicate, abolish, and erase the pope’s name and memory.39 While this may appear to be strictly political, in fact, in unraveling a thousand years of tradition, it was simultaneously an assault against the “collective memory” of practicing Christians.40 John Foxe writes that two years later in 1536, with papal power overthrown, the king ordered the monasteries ruined and their artifacts destroyed or confiscated. Foxe’s account emphasizes the role of divine providence, as he presents the dissolution as “true Reformation” of the church following the suppression of the pope’s authority: Shortly after the overthrow of the pope, consequently began by little and little to follow the ruin of abbeys and religious houses in England, in a right order and method by God’s divine providence. For neither could the fall of monasteries have followed after, unless that suppression of the pope had gone before; neither could any true Reformation of the church have been 48 Heritage or Heresy attempted, unless the subversion of those superstitious houses had been joined withal. Whereupon the same year, in the month of October, the king, having then Thomas Cromwell of his council, sent Dr. Lee to visit the abbeys, priories, and nunneries in all England, and to set at liberty all such religious persons as desired to be free . . . at which time also, from the said abbeys and monasteries were taken their chief jewels and relics. (Foxe, 5.102, italics mine) Like the actions of Constantine V in the Byzantine crisis, a precursor to the order for the wholesale robbery and pillaging of monastic communities, was the emperor/ruler’s assumption of spiritual power. To get a sense of this loss, we should recall that Benedictine abbeys and cathedral priories had the largest libraries in England at the time. Furthermore, the buildings, artifact holdings, and collections comprised immense wealth, accumulated over many hundreds of years sometimes. The government appropriated or destroyed buildings and lands. Manuscripts and books, once stripped of bindings (sometimes with gold, jewels, brass, or other metals) and sometimes sorted for written materials that could build an English history, also became victims of iconoclasm. Acquisition of the wealth of these holdings was clearly one of the goals of the government and is corroborated by the fact that besides the monastic collections, books in university and private libraries, including the king’s were purged and their bindings sent to the king’s Jewel-house.41 Cromwell was specifically involved with Lewes Priory, a Cluniac monastery and one of the greatest Romanesque churches in Europe, because he hired an Italian engineer, Giovanni Portinari, to dismantle it so his son could build a grand house in its place.42 Because they leave no trace, the loss of books, manuscripts, artifacts, and statuary is irreversible, Ruined buildings often leave their skeletons behind thus reminding us of their former existence and their loss. The destructive actions did not occur without reaction. In 1537 in Lincolnshire, twenty thousand people rebelled and in Yorkshire, forty thousand. Many monks, abbots, nobles, and local citizenry were executed as traitors for this insurrection. This, of course, does not address famous resisters, like John Fisher and Thomas More, and others less renowned, who were executed for treason because it was not clear where they stood on the Act of Supremacy that had made Henry the head of the English church.43 By 1536, and after Anne Boleyn’s demise, conservatives hoped that traditional religion might be restored, and when Parliament was called, Henry—through his mouthpiece, Cromwell—asked that the religious differences that were causing so much unrest be settled. This convocation produced the Ten Articles, “articles devised by the kinges highnes majestie, to stablyshe Christen quietnes and unitie amonge us, and to avoyde contentious opinions, which articles be also approved by the consent and determinations of the hole clergie of this Destruction: Iconoclasm and Reformation in Northern Europe 49 realme.”44 The conciliation unveiled in the articles reveals just how powerful traditional religious practice remained. The articles, the “Formularies of Faith,” covered baptism, penance, Eucharist (the sacrament of the altar), justification (or remission of sins), images, honoring the saints, praying to saints, rites and ceremonies, and purgatory. Although the sacraments were reduced to three, the last five articles appeared to reenforce traditional religious practice following the essential/nonessential distinction of Melanchthon. With advice against the danger of idolatry, saints and saints’ days could be honored; images (as long as they were not worshiped) could stand in churches; and customs such as eating the Eucharistic bread, bearing candles, giving of ashes on Ash Wednesday, bearing of palms on Palm Sunday, creeping to the cross on Good Friday, and other “like exorcisms and benedictions . . . and all other like laudable customs, rites, and ceremonies be not to be contemned and cast away.” 45 In another amazing reversal of policy, the approach to images adopted here in many respects is not radically different from the advice that Gregory I gave to Bishop Serenus or that John of Damascus (as will be discussed in the next chapter). In fact it appears to adopt the conventional teachings on images, or as Margaret Aston puts it, the Sixth Article “‘Of Images’ allowed for doubts about their use.” It both argued for image-breaking and yet acknowledged the usefulness of images.46 Another radical change of the period was a new model of ecclesiastical Visitation (traditional annual visits to churches by church officials) that had been instituted in 1535. With the Visitations coming under royal jurisdiction, royal authority replaced Episcopal responsibility.47 A series of Royal Injunctions under the Visitation Articles further strengthened the king’s supreme authority over all religious matters. Because Cromwell was functioning as the king’s deputy in spiritual concerns, the Royal Injunctions of 1536 came under his decisive power. For example, in the first injunction in 1536, usurping the Pope’s power, the ecclesiastical functionaries were enjoined to uphold the laws of the land and particularly the king’s authority as supreme head of the church of England (VAI, 2.3). Moving quickly from this primary recognition, the fourth injunction required the dean, parsons, vicars, and so on to abolish superstition and hypocrisy, that is, all traditional forms of religion, including images: “That all superstition and hypocrisy, crept into divers men’s hearts, may vanish away, they shall not set forth or extol any images, relics, or miracles for any superstition or lucre, nor allure the people by any enticements to the pilgrimage of any saint, otherwise than is permitted in the Articles lately put forth by the authority of the King’s majesty” (VAI, 2.5–6). The Second Royal Injunctions (1538) that later formed the basis for both Edward’s and Elizabeth’s injunctions seemed to accord a special privilege for reading the Bible, the Our Father, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments, all in English; and while extolling scripture, they abhorred candles, images, 50 Heritage or Heresy relics, and all items “tending to idolatry” and ordered them taken down (VAI, 2: 37, 36–38), thus overriding the earlier injunctions. Despite the ten articles with their apparent conciliatory attitude, the later injunctions initiated a wave of destruction with the order to raze the monasteries and abbeys, no doubt a ploy to enrich the king while eliminating a powerful opposition to the reform and the king’s authority. The injunctions, the destruction, and a series of high-profile state-sanctioned murders rendered Henry’s reign what some have called a “reign of terror.”48 One hundred years later, Peter Heylyn in Ecclesia Restaurata, a history of the Reformation, wrote ruefully of these years: And being further doubtful in himself what course to steer, he [Henry] marries at the same time with the Lady Ann . . . whom not long after he divorceth; advanceth his great minister, Cromwell, (by whom he had made so much havoc of religious houses in all parts of the realm), to the Earldom of Essex, and sends him headless to his grave within three months . . . takes to his bed the Lady Katharine Howard . . . and in a short time found cause enough to cut off her head; not being either the richer in children by so many wives, nor much improved in his revenue by such horrible rapines. In the midst of which confusions he sets the wheel of Reformation once more going.49 But Henry’s reign was comparatively benign in contrast to what was to follow. The iconoclastic movement found new opportunities in England when Edward VI (1547–53), Henry’s nine-year old son, was crowned on February 20, 1547. At the coronation, the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556), intent on destroying any remnants of the influence of Rome in England, spoke these now infamous words: “Your majesty is God’s Vice-gerent and Christ’s vicar within your own dominions, and to see, with your predecessor Josiah, God truly worshipped, and idolatry destroyed, the tyranny of the bishops of Rome banished from your subjects, and images removed. These acts be signs of a second Josiah, who reformed the Church of God in his days.”50 Henry had appointed Thomas Cranmer archbishop of Canterbury, and from this cathedra Cranmer had acquiesced and indeed lent religious support to Henry’s ruthless infidelities and personal desires. When Henry died, leaving the crown to his sickly son, Cranmer began to enact his reformist convictions. Thus, linking Edward with King Josiah, Cranmer invoked the second commandment that forbids “graven images.” As in the Byzantine crisis, Deuteronomy takes on greater importance, and the Decalogue becomes its central message.51 Making Edward Josiah redivivus appears to have been commonplace because John Foxe’s narrative for Edward’s reign also emphasizes the parallels with King Josiah: Destruction: Iconoclasm and Reformation in Northern Europe 51 If I should seek with whom to match this noble Edward, I find not with whom to make my match more aptly, than with good Josias: for, as one began his reign at eight years of his age, so the other began at nine. Neither were their acts and zealous proceedings in God’s cause much discrepant: for as mild Josias plucked down the hill altars, cut down the groves and destroyed all monuments of idolatry in the temple, the like corruptions, dross, and deformities of popish idolatry (crept into the church of Christ of long time), this evangelical Josias, King Edward, removed and purged out of the true temple of the Lord. Josias restored the true worship and service of God in Jerusalem, and destroyed the idolatrous priests! King Edward likewise in England abolishing idolatrous masses and false invocation, reduced again religion to right sincerity. (Foxe. 5.698) For John Foxe, the iconoclastic monarch had restored the “true temple of the Lord.” Like Constantine V following in his father’s footsteps, Edward VI vigorously attacked the cult of images under the aegis of upholding God’s law. Among his 1547 proclamations, Edward announced his Injunctions for Religious Reform that, among other reforms, forbade images in churches while parishioners were enjoined to do the same in their own houses.52 The Visitation Articles based on the proclamation enjoin the visitors to check to see whether anyone obstinately was extolling the bishop of Rome or keeping holy days. To this, he added the following: “Whether there do remain not taken down in your churches, chapels, or elsewhere, any misused images, with pilgrimages, clothes, stones, shoes, offerings, kissings, candlesticks, trindles of wax, and such other like: and whether there do remain not delayed and destroyed any shrines, covering of shrines, or any other monument of idolatry, superstition and hypocrisy” (VAI, 2.105). Again in 1547, reaffirming the king’s supreme authority over religious matters and desire to eradicate the former practices, the Visitation Articles repeated the same injunctions (2.115–16). To eliminate idolatry, visitors/inspectors were to “take away, utterly extinct and destroy all shrines, covering of shrines, all tables, candlesticks, trindles or rolls of wax, pictures, paintings, and all other monuments of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry, and superstition: so that there remain no memory of the same in walls, glass-windows, or elsewhere within their churches or houses” (VAI, 2.126). Interestingly, under Henry, because replacing windows was costly, many remained, but here windows were also included. Many windows were finally smashed during Cromwell’s Commonwealth (2.126n1). The lists of proscribed items had not included glass before, so its appearance on the list testifies to the rigor of this new cleansing. Another feature to this proclamation includes an even more ominous suggestion. When the edict included “houses” in the list of places where devotional imagery was proscribed, the royal realm had invaded the household, legislating behavior within. In 1547, essentially initiating the tenor of Edward’s reign, the King’s Council sent a letter to the archbishop of Canterbury for 52 Heritage or Heresy the abolishing of images on the grounds that despite the abolition, some common people persisted in their idolatry and superstition (Foxe, 5.717–18). This amounted to a declaration of war against images anywhere within the realm. Edward died in 1553, and when Mary (1553–56), the Roman Catholic daughter of Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII, came to the throne while still maintaining (initially) supreme authority, she returned church practices (holy days, fast days, and all ceremonies) to what they had been under her father Henry in 1529. Her third royal proclamation, right after she became queen, offered freedom of conscience and forbade religious controversy. She reminded her realm that she could not “hide that religion which God and the world knoweth she hath ever professed from her infancy hitherto.” Though she recommended her subjects follow her model, she would not “compel any her [sic] said subjects” to do so.53 In 1553 she annulled Edward’s 1550 statute for abolishing images and other aids to devotion, eventually repealing all nine Edwardine statutes. At the same time, she reinstalled traditional religion, citing the disorder, hatred among people, and discord that had characterized the previous years.54 In the Visitation Articles sent to the ordinary in 1554, she specifically recalled the practices of her father: “Put in execution all such canons and ecclesiastical laws, heretofore in the time of King Henry the Eighth used within this realm of England” (VAI, 2.324–25). By the time she married Philip of Spain, she had returned the English church to Roman authority. But when Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558, she reinstalled the Reform of Images and once again eliminated traditional practices of veneration. She also reinstated the Act of Supremacy that Mary had rescinded in 1554 after her marriage to Philip of Spain. Interestingly, John Foxe’s anti-Catholic narrative about Mary’s demise and Elizabeth’s rise invokes the same providential explanation deployed by the second wave of Byzantine iconoclast emperors. When the reign of Mary, “a vehement adversary and persecutor against the sincere professors of Christ Jesus and his gospel” came swiftly to an end, this demonstrated “God’s great wrath and displeasure” (Foxe, 8.625). Thus, according to Foxe, God favors iconoclastic monarchs and punishes their opponents. When Foxe turns to discussing the reign of Elizabeth, he links God’s design, good kings (i.e., those who subvert the monuments of idolatry), and successful reigns. As with the Deuteronomic writer, good kings attack idolatry: Of good kings we read in the Scripture, in showing mercy and pity, in seeking God’s will in his word, and subverting the monuments of idolatry, how God blessed their ways, increased their honours, and mightily prospered all their proceedings; as we see in king David, Solomon, Jehoshaphat, Hezekiah, with such others. Manasseh made the streets of Jerusalem to swim with the blood of his subjects; but what came of it the text doth testify. Destruction: Iconoclasm and Reformation in Northern Europe 53 Of queen Elizabeth, who now reigneth among us . . . it is hard to say, whether the realm of England felt more of God’s wrath in queen Mary’s time, or of God’s favour and mercy in these blessed and peaceable days of queen Elizabeth. (Foxe, 8.626) Elizabeth’s reign returned the authority over religious matters to the monarch. Her Royal Injunctions adopt the same kind of language and specific instructions that had characterized visitations during her brother’s time, although she is clearly wary about the dangers of disorder. In the Royal Injunctions of 1559, Queen Elizabeth states her absolute authority over her realms, by God’s law: 1. And that the Queen’s power within her realms and dominions is the highest power under God, to whom all men, within the same realms and dominions, by God’s law, owe most loyalty and obedience afore and above all other powers and potentates on earth. 2. Besides this, to the intent that all superstition and hypocrisy crept into divers men’s hearts may vanish away, they shall not set forth or extol the dignity of any images, relics, or miracles but declaring the abuse of the same, they shall teach that all goodness, health and grace ought to be both asked and looked for only of God, as of the very author and giver of the same, and of none other. (VAI 3.9, italics show Elizabeth’s change of Edward’s article) But she did not go as far as her brother had to eliminate images. She reworked Edward’s injunction, so as to discourage the destruction of images and to encourage preaching and teaching against them.55 However, this subtlety eluded the agents charged with the Visitations in 1559 because they took it upon themselves to remove the remaining carved images from the churches.56 Furthermore, the 1559 proclamation included a provision that again reached into the privacy of the household: “Also, that they shall take away, utterly extinct, and destroy all shrines, covering of shrines, all tables, candlesticks, trindles, and rolls of wax, pictures, paintings, and all other monuments of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry, and superstition, so that there remain no memory of the same in walls, glasses, window, or elsewhere within their churches and houses; preserving, nevertheless, or repairing, both the walls and glass windows. And they shall exhort all their parishioners to do the like within their several houses”57 (italics mine). The Ecclesia Restaurata reports that when Elizabeth came to the throne, the Protestants believed, as the Catholics had when Mary ascended, that she would definitively settle the religious conflicts in favor of the reformers. So, just as the Catholics had restored altars and returned to traditional religion under Mary, now “before they were required so to do by any public authority; so fared it now with many unadvised zealots amongst the Protestants, who, measuring the Queen’s affections by their own, or else presuming that their 54 Heritage or Heresy errors would be taken for an honest zeal, employed themselves as busily in the demolishing of altars and defacing of images, as if they had been licensed and commanded to it by some legal warrant.”58 One can have an idea about how serious this destruction was because the following year, 1560, the queen made a proclamation “[p]rohibiting [d]estruction of [c]hurch [m]onuments” because “one means of sundry people, partly ignorant, partly malicious, or covetous, there hath been of late years spoiled and broken certain ancient monuments, some of metal, some of stone, which were erected up as well in churches as in other public places.” Thus, she mandates the arrest of the perpetrators and orders the clergy to arrange for the repairs.59 There is something even more insidious in these proclamations than just the legislation of religious images in public places, recalling that in pre-Reformation times, it was common for religious images of many different designs to be found on the exterior of churches, on church property, but also generally on streets, in public squares, in fields, and in homes. Elizabeth’s edicts, as Edward’s had earlier, required their destruction. The Tudors promulgated a host of other edicts to legislate how one was to practice religion, including topics like fasting, reading, appropriate behavior in and outside of churches, and suppressing rumors about religion, for example.60 Furthermore, the middle of Elizabeth’s reign witnessed an increase in municipal policing of moral behavior (including behavior at weddings, public drinking, dancing, and many other types of ritual-related conduct).61 With a policing capacity of judges, sheriffs, justices of the peace, mayors, bailiffs, and other ministers, as well as most importantly the ecclesiastical courts, all under the monarch’s ultimate authority, the realm now emerged to dominate both the public and private world of the household and to legislate family religious practices, and in so doing to encourage local spying. The royal proclamations and statutes about religion had one central political purpose: to impose religious uniformity on the English people and to suppress differences. People who spoke against the sacrament of the mass could be hauled before a court on the witness of two others; those who failed to attend church could be fined.62 The overlap between public and private devotion came to the forefront when even the queen herself had her private chapel scrutinized and condemned. Foreign visitors attest to the fact that Elizabeth kept a crucifix in her private chapel. A queen’s private chapel was in many ways both a public chapel and a model for her subjects and for foreign visitors.63 Letters between the exiles in Switzerland, who had left England when Mary came to the throne, and people, mainly clergy who remained in England, testify to a heated controversy over both public and private crucifixes, occasioned by the queen’s insistence on keeping hers. A letter from John Jewel to Peter Martyr in Switzerland in November 1559 reveals just how seriously the English clergy were taking the issue of private and public devotional images when he Destruction: Iconoclasm and Reformation in Northern Europe 55 writes, “That little silver cross, of ill-omened origin, still maintains its place in the queen’s chapel. Wretched me! This thing will soon be drawn into a precedent. There was at one time some hope of its being removed; and we all of us diligently exerted ourselves . . . [But] it is now a hopeless case.”64 Three months later, Jewel returns to the topic, telling Peter Martyr that “this controversy about the crucifix is now at its height” and that the judges will decide the future of all those “crosses of silver and tin, which we have every where broken in pieces” (Zurich, 67–68; Latin, 39). The issue did not go away. Thomas Sampson wrote to Peter Martyr in January, 1560, “What can I hope for, when the ministry of the word is banished from the court? while the crucifix is allowed, with lights burning before it? The altars indeed are removed, and images also throughout the kingdom; the crucifix and candles are retained at court alone. And the wretched multitude are not only rejoicing at this, but will imitate it of their own accord” (Zurich, 63; Latin, 36). By April 1560, Bishop Sandy’s reported to Peter Martyr that “the queen’s majesty considered it not contrary to the word of God, nay, rather for the advantage of the church, that the image of Christ crucified, together with [those of the Virgin] Mary and [Saint] John, should be placed, as heretofore, in some conspicuous part of the Church.” Arguing vehemently against this development to the point of the queen’s displeasure, he persuaded the queen to his position, especially since after all, at his last visitation he had removed and burned “all images of every kind” (Zurich, 73–74; Latin, 42–43). Concern over Elizabeth’s crucifix refused to evaporate, and indeed someone, or several persons, in 1562 entered her chapel, and as John Parkhurst, bishop of Norwich, reports it, “Good news was brought me, namely, that the crucifix and candlesticks in the queen’s chapel are broken in pieces, and, as some one has brought word, reduced to ashes” (Zurich, 122; Latin, 73). A crucifix was back again by 1563, to Parkhurst’s consternation: “The lukewarmness of some persons very much retards the progress of the gospel,” he wrote to Henry Bullinger the following April (Zurich, 129, Latin, 77). This whole story of Elizabeth’s crucifix highlights the unhealthy religious zeal of the times. Whatever her motives for having the crucifix, and some have argued it was her way of appeasing foreign Catholic realms while mollifying traditionalists at home,65 it is entirely possible that she was sincerely attached to the image, even though we have no word from her to that effect. The furious opposition to the crucifix represents a radical invasion of private devotional space by church authorities. If these purists were willing to invade a queen’s private chapel, one can only imagine the kind of spying on neighbors this climate of state-sanctioned religious zeal had unleashed. 56 Heritage or Heresy Conclusion Starting with a divorce and a need for a male heir to ascend to the throne, the Tudor chapter in England’s Reformation gives us a process of how iconoclastic movements flourish, particularly in the early modern period when the realm emerged as the policing instrument for religious matters. A flurry of government or royal proclamations, visitation articles, edicts, “legal warrants,” destruction of religious buildings and artifacts, and book banning and burning all testify to a realm searching to control and direct the religious life of its population. The absolute authority of the ruler over all matters pertaining to the religious life of the people, even though Elizabeth rejected this role, drove a wedge between loyalty to conscience and tradition and loyalty to the realm, in which to choose conscience could endanger one’s life. To choose tradition softly, as in the case of Elizabeth’s crucifix, endangered the image itself. One tantalizing aspect of these two European outbreaks of destructive zeal against cultural artifacts in the guise of reform evokes the old observation that history tells stories according to who wins and who loses. The iconoclasts in the Byzantine Empire lost out to the venerators of icons, and as orthodox religion prevailed and religious art continued to play a central role, iconoclasm came to be regarded as a nasty chapter in Byzantine history. In contrast, the adherents of traditional religious practice lost in the English Reformation, and its historians continue to tell the story of the triumph of “true religion” and the “modern state” over superstition and idolatry. In the triumphal history of England, the story of the Roman Catholic “Bloody Mary” obscures all the blood spilled spying on private devotions, smashing buildings, and mutilating art works during the reigns of Henry, Edward, and Elizabeth in the cause of “true religion.” One of the most shameful chapters in the history of both religion and art, the ruin of the monasteries and the stripping of the altars in England (along with all the martyrdoms that accompanied these radical actions) has yet to be acknowledged as a national crime. Ironically today even finding the fragments of religious art that evaded the destroying hands of the time remains an urgent task for English art historians and restorers.