George V, second son of Edward VII 1910-1936 Edward VIII, eldest son of George V 1936-1936 (abdicated) George VI, second son of George V 1936?1952 Elizabeth II, daughter of George VI 1952
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Reli gions in England
In the sixth century C.E., missionaries from Ireland and the Continent introduced Christianity to the Anglo- Saxons?actually, reintroduced it, since it had briefly flourished in the southern parts of the British Isles during the Roman occupation, and even after the Roman withdrawal had persisted in the Celtic regions of Scotland and Wales. By the time the earliest poems included in the Norton Anthology were composed, therefore, the English people had been Christians for hundreds of years; such Anglo-Saxon poems as 'The Dream of the Rood' bear witness to their faith. Our knowledge of the religion of pre-Christian Britain is sketchy, but it is likely that vestiges of paganism assimilated into, or coexisted with, the practice of Christianity: fertility rites were incorporated into the celebration of Easter resurrection, rituals commemorating the dead into All-Hallows Eve and All Saints Day, and elements of winter solstice festivals into the celebration of Christmas. In English literature such 'folkloric' elements often elicit romantic nostalgia. Geoffrey Chaucer's Wife of Bath looks back to a magical time before the arrival of Christianity in which the land was 'fulfilled of fairye.' Hundreds of years later, the seventeenth-century writer Bobert Herrick honors the amalgamation of Christian and pagan elements in agrarian British culture in such poems as 'Corinna's Gone A-Maying' and 'The Hock Cart.'
Medieval Christianity was fairly uniform across Western Europe?hence called 'catholic,' or universally shared?and its rituals and expectations, common to the whole community, permeated everyday life. The Catholic Church was also an international power structure. In its hierarchy of pope, cardinals, archbishops, and bishops, it resembled the feudal state, but the church power structure coexisted alongside a separate hierarchy of lay authorities with a theoretically different sphere of social responsibilities. The sharing out of lay and ecclesiastical authority in medieval England was sometimes a source of conflict. Chaucer's pilgrims are on their way to visit the memorial shrine to one victim of such struggle: Thomas a Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, who opposed the policies of King Henry III, was assassinated on the king's orders in 1120 and later made a saint. As an international organization, the church conducted its business in the universal language of Latin, and thus although statistically in the period the largest segment of literate persons were monks and priests, the clerical contribution to great writing in English was relatively modest. Yet the lay writers of the period reflect the importance of the church as an institution and the pervasiveness of religion in everyday life.
Beginning in 1517 the German monk Martin Luther, in Wittenberg, Germany, openly challenged many aspects of Catholic practice and by 1520 had completely repudiated the authority of the Pope, setting in train the Protestant Reformation. Luther argued that the Roman Catholic Church had strayed far from the pattern of Christianity laid out in scripture. He rejected Catholic doctrines for which no biblical authority was to be found, such as the belief in Purgatory, and translated the Bible into German, on the grounds that the importance of scripture for all Christians made its translation into the vernacular tongue essential. Luther was not the first to advance such views?followers of the Englishman John Wycliffe had translated the Bible in the fourteenth century. But Luther, protected by powerful German rulers, was able to speak out with impunity and convert others to his views, rather than suffer the persecution usually meted out to heretics. Soon other reformers were following in Luther's footsteps: of these, the Swiss Ulrich Zwingli and the French Jean Calvin would be especially influential for English religious thought.
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At first England remained staunchly Catholic. Its lung, Henry VIII, was so severe to heretics that the Pope awarded him the title 'Defender of the Faith,' which British monarchs have retained to this day. In 1534, however, Henry rejected the authority of the Pope to prevent his divorce from his queen, Catherine of Aragon, and his marriage to his mistress, Ann Boleyn. In doing so, Henry appropriated to himself ecclesiastical as well as secular authority. Thomas More, author of Utopia, was executed for refusing to endorse Henry's right to govern the English church. Over the following six years, Henry consolidated his grip on the ecclesiastical establishment by dissolving the powerful, populous Catholic monasteries and redistributing their massive landholdings to his own lay followers. Yet Henry's church largely retained Catholic doctrine and liturgy. Whe n Henry died and his young son, Edward, came to the throne in 1547, the English church embarked on a more Protestant path, a direction abruptly reversed when Edward died and his older sister Mary, the daughter of Catherine of Aragon, took the throne in 1553 and attempted to reintroduce Roman Catholicism. Mary's reign was also short, however, and her successor, Elizabeth I, the daughter of An n Boleyn, was a Protestant. Elizabeth attempted to establish a 'middle way' Christianity, compromising between Roman Catholic practices and beliefs and reformed ones.
The Church of England, though it laid claim to a national rather than pan- European authority, aspired like its predecessor to be the universal church of all English subjects. It retained the Catholic structure of parishes and dioceses and the Catholic hierarchy of bishops, though the ecclesiastical authority was now the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Church's 'Supreme Governor' was the monarch. Yet disagreement and controversy persisted. Some members of the Church of England wanted to retain many of the ritual and liturgical elements of Catholicism. Others, the Puritans, advocated a more thoroughgoing reformation. Most Puritans remained within the Church of England, but a minority, the 'Separatists' or 'Congregationalists,' split from the established church altogether. These dissenters no longer thought of the ideal church as an organization to which everybody belonged; instead, they conceived it as a more exclusive group of likeminded people, one not necessarily attached to a larger body of believers.
In the seventeenth century, the succession of the Scottish king James to the English
throne produced another problem. England and Scotland were separate nations, and
in the sixteenth century Scotland had developed its own national Presbyterian church,
or 'kirk,' under the leadership of the reformer John Knox. The kirk retained fewer
Catholic liturgical elements than did the Churc h of England, and its authorities, or
'presbyters,' were elected by assemblies of their fellow clerics, rather than appointed
by the king. James I and his son Charles I, especially the latter, wanted to bring the
Scottish kirk into conformity with Church of England practices. The Scots violently
resisted these efforts, with the collaboration of many English Puritans, in a conflict
that eventually developed into the English Civil Wa r in the mid-seventeenth century.
The effect of these disputes is visible in the poetry of such writers as John Milton,
Robert Herrick, Henry Vaughan, and Thomas Traherne, and in the prose of Thomas
