Comfortable Words: Polity, Piety and the Book of common Prayer

Comfortable Words

Also in the SCM Studies in Worship and Liturgy series

The Collect in the Churches of the Reformation

Edited by Bridget Nichols

Rethinking the Origins of the Eucharist

Martin D. Stringer

Liturgy and Interpretation

Kenneth Stevenson

SCM STUDIES IN WORSHIP AND LITURGY

Comfortable Words

Polity and Piety and the Book of Common Prayer

Edited by

Stephen Platten and Christopher Woods

© The Editors and Contributors

Published in 2012 by SCM Press

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

978-0-334-04670-7

Kindle 978-0-334-04671-4

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Printed and bound by Lightning Source UK

Contents

Preface, Stephen Platten

Foreword, Diarmaid MacCulloch

1. All Such Good Works: The Book of Common Prayer and the Fashioning of English Society

Stephen Platten

2. The Tudor Prayer Books: That ‘the whole realme shall have but one use’

Gordon Jeanes

3. The Prayer Book in Early Stuart Society

Hannah Cleugh

4. Absent Presence: Lancelot Andrewes and 1662

Peter McCullough

5. The 1662 Prayer Book

Brian Cummings

6. Common Prayer in the Eighteenth Century

William Jacob

7. The Transition from ‘Excellent Liturgy’ to being ‘Too Narrow for the Religious Life of the Present Generation’: The Book of Common Prayer in the Nineteenth Century

Bryan D. Spinks

8. Liturgical Development: From Common Prayer to Uncommon Worship

Paul Bradshaw

9. The Book of Common Prayer and Anglicanism: Worship and Belief

Paul Avis

Epilogue: A place for the 1662 Book of Common Prayer in the twenty-first-century Church?

Christopher Woods

Preface

Hensley Henson, when Bishop of Durham, was asked by a priest in his diocese if he would come to preach at Evensong for a particularly innocuous anniversary. Henson replied, in a recognizably irascible tone, to say that fortunately he had a previously booked engagement on that Sunday evening, and anyway, ‘I don’t think anniversaries are a very worthy cause, do you?’ Now nostalgia has become almost a disease, if not an industry, at the same time that our national historical consciousness is receding or at the very least underplayed.

That is probably a good reason for showing a certain reticence in embracing every anniversary with alacrity. There are some, however, that it would be irresponsible to forget. The 350th anniversary of the Book of Common Prayer is one such case. As Chair of the Church of England’s Liturgical Commission, I was clear that this milestone should be acknowledged and honoured not only with a great service of thanksgiving, but also with a proper scholarly observance of the occasion, allowing new research and reflection to be focused on this book that has had such wide influence not only in England but across the world.

To this end, we offer this collection of essays. Six of them were first offered as contributions to a symposium at the British Academy in March 2012. The essays have been revised and are accompanied in this volume by another four so that a comprehensive reflection may be made on the Book of Common Prayer of 1662, its use over the past three and a half centuries, and its impact upon both the Church and wider culture. We are enormously grateful to the British Academy and to its Chief Executive, Professor Robin Jackson. We owe still greater thanks to Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch, who first mooted the possibility that the symposium might take place there. I would also here like to thank my co-editor, Christopher Woods, for all his work on this book and for his encouragement and assistance as Secretary to the Liturgical Commission. We hope that these essays may both prosper further scholarship and also greater appreciation of a truly remarkable book.

Stephen Platten

Wakefield

Easter 2012

Foreword

DIARMAID MACCULLOCH

Let me sound a characteristically diffident Anglican note in saluting this fine collection of essays. The commemoration of 350 years since Parliament authorized the final version of the Prayer Book in 1662 cannot compete as a tidy number with the quatercentenary celebrations during 2011 for another milestone of Stuart English prose composition, the King James Bible. Moreover, there will be many who will regard this simply as a tribal occasion for a particular Christian denomination, and so they will choose, like the Priest and the Levite in the Gospel for the Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity, to pass by on the other side.

That would be a mistake. The modern Church of England might look like and often behave like a ‘denomination’, but from the sixteenth century to at least 1800, it was not: it was the national Church, enjoying the allegiance of the great majority of the population in both England and Wales. Its liturgy was not a denominational artefact; it was the literary text most thoroughly known by most people in this country, and one should include the Bible among its lesser rivals. This was because the English and the Welsh were active participants in the BCP, as they made their liturgical replies to the person leading worship in the thousands of churches throughout the realm: they were actors week by week in a drama whose cast included and united most of the nation, and that therefore was a much more significant play, and more culturally central, than anything by Shakespeare.

The year 1662 is a decisive date in the history of the BCP, as it was then that a century of argument about its form and content was settled, and indeed that form remained unchallenged until 1927–28, when proposals to alter it engendered a nationwide controversy played out in Parliament, which, to the astonishment and fury of the Church’s bishops, rejected the innovations. The year 1662 was also significant because the freezing of the BCP at that moment prompted the departure of 2,000 clergy from the parishes, refusing to sign up to the new book, and forming what became Old Dissent, whereas before the mid-century civil wars, most of them would have served in the Church of England with reasonable good grace. This was a major reformulation of national life, ensuring that thereafter the Established Church was never so overwhelmingly hegemonic in England as were Scandinavian Lutheranism or Mediterranean Catholicism in their respective cultural spheres. English and Welsh Protestantism remained divided between church and chapel, with the vital consequence that religious and then political pluralism became embedded in national identity. All this was the fault of the Prayer Book’s return in 1662.

Even so, if the BCP had remained what it was to begin with, a vehicle for national worship in a marginal and second-rank kingdom in Europe, then its significance would have remained limited. But instead, the English created two successive world empires beyond the archipelago they inhabit, the second of which is still with us in the ghostly form of the Commonwealth. Where Anglicans went, so did their Prayer Book. A heroic work of chronological listings published by Archdeacon David Griffiths in 2002 rounded up about 4,800 editions of the Prayer Book or of liturgies stemming from its Scottish and American derivatives; around 1,200 of these are in 199 other languages, ranging from the Acholi of Uganda to Zulu. Griffiths demonstrated that the peak year for production of versions of the Prayer Book was at the height of the second British Empire’s vigour and self-confidence, 1850, and despite predictable subsequent decline, around 1,000 editions still appeared in the twentieth century.

What a babble of voices those translations represented across the globe. Archbishop Cranmer’s work in presiding over the creation of the first English BCP in 1549 had been designed to replace the Latin liturgy of the Western Church, because he and his fellow Protestants felt that Latin excluded uneducated laity from the proper praise of God. Yet Cranmer had absolutely no objection to Latin as such; it was the international language of his era, and in the right circumstances, it might be just as much a vehicle for godly Protestant worship as it had been an ally of popery. Such was the prospect in Ireland, the other realm of the Tudor monarchs. In 1560, Cranmer’s former publisher and posthumous relative by marriage, the Dutch printer Reyner Wolfe, brought out the first proper Latin version of the BCP, specifically for use in the Gaelic-speaking parts of Ireland, which were then far more extensive than the embattled Anglophone zone around Dublin called the Pale. The fact that the English church authorities thought this Latin translation to be worth the effort is a tribute to the scale and sophistication of Irish Gaelic culture at the time. By contrast no one had listened in 1549 to the plea of Cornish rebels protesting against the introduction of the first English Prayer Book, that some of them spoke no English: that was probably hardly true even then, and the government of Edward VI had no hesitation in massacring them for their linguistic obduracy. Early translations into major modern European languages followed, for diplomatic purposes, to demonstrate to potential Roman Catholic royal brides or their anxious advisers that the English Protestant liturgy was a respectable route to God: a French translation in 1616 and one in Spanish in 1623 were both connected to proposed Catholic royal marriages. An Italian version had already been commissioned in 1607 by the scholarly diplomat Sir Henry Wotton as English ambassador in Venice, in an optimistic bid to cash in on a bitter stand-off between the Serene Republic and the Pope, by converting the Venetians to the Church of England. Portuguese came later, in 1695, and that translation was significantly sponsored by the East India Company, as the British Empire was beginning to make inroads on the decaying Iberian overseas possessions in Asia and elsewhere. In 1821, the Wesleyan Methodists were still close enough to their Anglican roots to feel it worthwhile to translate the Prayer Book into Portuguese pidgin-Creole for their work in what is now Sri Lanka. The Polish BCP had to wait until 1836, in an effort at Anglican mission among Jews in Eastern Europe even more quixotic than Sir Henry Wotton’s wooing of Venice. This translation was suppressed by the Russian authorities, predictably without any signs of regret in the Polish Roman Catholic Church; interesting questions arise as to how different history would have been if the shtetls had come to resound to Stanford in B flat. And who would have expected the King of the Sandwich Islands personally to have undertaken the translation of the Prayer Book into Hawaiian?

The first essays in translating parts of the Latin liturgy into English were done during the 1530s by a variety of enthusiasts for Reformation, in the teeth of murderous disapproval from Henry VIII, a fierce conservative in liturgical matters, despite his own break with the Bishop of Rome. His watchful and scholarly chaplain, Thomas Cranmer, did not share the King’s prejudices. On Cranmer’s first encounter with Protestantism in mainland Europe, on embassy in Lutheran Nuremberg, he took a keen interest in the innovative liturgy he saw there, but also in Margarete, niece of the pastor presiding at worship in the church of St Lorenz; he married the lady just before Henry VIII chose him as Archbishop of Canterbury, and she eventually joined him in his archiepiscopal palaces. That gesture by itself showed that Cranmer had embraced the Reformation in more than one sense; medieval priests might commonly take mistresses, but Protestant clergy were quick to show their contempt for compulsory clerical celibacy by making respectable and public marriages. When Cranmer came to compose a new version of the marriage service, which has stood the test of centuries remarkably well, this first married Archbishop of Canterbury said for the first time in Christian liturgical history that one of the reasons for getting married was that it was good for you, and also quite fun: ‘for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other’.

While Henry’s religious moods and diplomatic priorities continued to sway between old mumpsimus and new sumpsimus, Cranmer squirrelled away in his luxuriously large library at Croydon Palace the many liturgical experiments both of English evangelicals and the emerging Reformations of the mainland. He began his own efforts to meld them with the main tradition of medieval Western liturgy popular in the English Church, which took its cue from practices devised for Salisbury Cathedral in previous centuries – the Sarum Use. Various initiatives in Henry’s lifetime produced nothing more than a vernacular processional rite (a litany) pestering God to back the King in his last major war against the French, but matters changed rapidly from 1547, once Henry’s young son Edward was on the throne and his advisors were determined on a real religious revolution. By 1549, Cranmer’s first English vernacular liturgy was in place, authorized by Parliament to be universally observed on Whitsunday, an appropriate festival, since it celebrated the occasion on which the apostles had been heard to speak in many languages. No one, not just the Cornish rebels, much liked this book at the time; it was a compromise with one eye on the formidable phalanx of traditionalists among Cranmer’s episcopal colleagues, and few among his evangelical soul-mates appreciated its nuanced presentation of Protestant theology under traditional forms. Once some of the less co-operative English bishops were safely locked up for various demonstrations of opposition to the accelerating religious changes, Cranmer got something more like what he actually wanted, a liturgy whose sole use came into force in autumn 1552. There was less than a year for it to bed down (and in Ireland, virtually no time) before Edward VI was dead and Catholic Mary on the throne, but in 1559 the BCP was brought back virtually unaltered by a Protestant government much less disposed to compromise with Catholics than Edward’s government had been ten years earlier.

It was this production of Cranmer’s unbuttoned Protestant Indian Summer that remained in place until the wars of the 1640s, and then in 1662, after the unexpected return of both monarchy and episcopally governed Church in Charles II’s Restoration, the Book took on its final form. By then, its significance and symbolism had greatly changed since Cranmer’s time. In 1552, it embodied Protestant religious revolution, but less than nine decades later, it provoked Protestant religious revolution in its turn in Scotland, and by domino effect, then in England too. Because of that, the historical logic of its recall and revision in 1662 signalled an end to revolution in the kingdom. That tangled story embodied a great argument about what English Protestantism was. The C of E has become ‘Anglican’, a word that only came into common use in the nineteenth century, and originally the property of a faction within the Church that also self-consciously saw itself as ‘Catholic’. Cranmer would also of course have called the Church of England ‘Catholic’, but in the sense that John Calvin of Geneva or Heinrich Bullinger of Zürich would likewise have called their churches Catholic: they were all parts of the Universal Church that had rejected the medieval corruptions of the Church of Rome, in order to regain an authentic Catholicity. Many Anglicans, however, have come to see Anglicanism as a ‘middle way’ between Rome and Protestantism, a position that would have bewildered Cranmer: how can one have a ‘middle way’ between Antichrist and truth? How might this have happened, he would have asked?

The answer lies in the Prayer Book that he himself had created. Probably Cranmer would have revised and simplified it further, had his time as Primate of All England been prolonged for another ten or twenty years; certainly that was what people who had known him said he had intended. Instead, his effort of 1552 was fossilized in its revival in 1559, and it remained the most elaborate liturgy of any Reformed Protestant Church in Europe, its observance of the traditional festival shape of the Church’s year more conservative than any other. Even the Lutherans of mainland Europe did not go on observing Lent with the punctiliousness demanded both by the English Prayer Book and by English legislation enforcing fasting during those 40 days. Reformed Scotland went so far as to abolish Christmas; by contrast, Cranmer gave the day a special little prayer or Collect which he specified should be used in services every day till New Year’s Eve. And his four-score Collects for particular days of the Church’s year are one of the glories of his liturgical work, sometimes composed brand new, but more often a sparkling brooch of tiny verbal gems culled from the worship of the Universal Church as far back as the fifth century and crafted together in his own sonorous English. Even those who are not natural fans of set liturgy (or of brief prayers) can grudgingly concede the worth of Cranmer’s Collects.

The liturgical peculiarity of the English Church coincided with its other unique feature: its great cathedral churches survived as institutions with virtually all their medieval infrastructure. It is a puzzle: no other Protestant Church in Europe was like this. Chantries and all the apparatus of purgatory were abolished, certainly, but an Elizabethan cathedral still had its surrounding close like a miniature town, populated not just by a dean and chapter as might survive in attenuated legal form in Lutheran Germany or Scandinavia, but also by minor canons, choristers, organists, vergers: a formidable machine for worship. The worship could only be that of Cranmer’s BCP, but cathedrals performed it with benefit of choir and organ, even some vestments – a totally different approach from the way the Prayer Book was used in England’s thousands of parish churches, with their services largely said, and the only music the psalms sung metrically in the fashion of Geneva. In Cranmer’s last months of power, cathedral organs were being demolished and the choirs set to singing metrical psalms, but when Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne, she ignored that trajectory, and her own Chapel Royal set a standard of musical elaboration and beauty which the Church of England has never forgotten. Westminster Abbey, across the road from the Palace of Whitehall, was frequently infuriated when Elizabeth’s Chapel Royal hijacked its best singers, but the dean and chapter might have been consoled if they had known that these royal kidnappings were safeguarding the future of the English choral tradition.

There was more to this unexpected turn in the English Reformation than good music. The cathedrals and the Chapel Royal fostered an attitude to the sacred that strayed far from the normal Protestant emphasis on communal praise by the people and the Word of God interpreted by the minister from the pulpit. English cathedrals preserved a sense that regular prayer and the contemplation of the divine through beauty constituted an equally valid road to divinity. In counterpoint to Cranmer’s evangelicalism, they erected a fabric of sacramental – yes, catholic – devotion. This made the Church of England theologically Janus-faced, and in the time of Queen Elizabeth’s Stuart successors, the tension tore the nation apart. That was how Thomas Cranmer’s attempt to turn Reformation truths into set liturgy ended up being seen by many of the English as a symbol of popery, an insult to God’s pure service. Worse still, in 1637 the English Court tried imposing a version of the BCP on the proudly Reformed Church of Scotland, and even more seriously than that, theirs was a version revised away from the English Book and ‘backwards’ towards 1549. It was hardly an advertisement for the beauty of holiness when the Bishop of Brechin led worship from the new service book in Brechin Cathedral glaring at his mutinous congregation over a pair of loaded pistols, just in case they tried to drag him out of his prayer-desk. Such was the trigger of the Scottish revolt against the government of Charles I which led to the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. And when the episcopally governed Church of England was set up again in 1660, it did very little to conciliate the party that had so objected to the Prayer Book: one or two small concessions, and otherwise a book that sorted out a few angularities in Cranmer’s old