Between the 1530s and 1600, the national religion of English was changed back and forth a startling number of times, in a period that represented the greatest level of religious change ever experienced in the country. After Henry VIII's split with the Pope in the 1530s, an entirely new religion, the Church of England, was established (Protestantism). As part of this religious upheaval, Henry sacked monasteries and destroyed much of what people had always known and believed, gutting churches and insisting they forget what they had previously believed about Papal infallibility. For a religious people who could not read the Bible for themselves, for the most part, and who had been taught to believe in priests as keepers of God's word, to be told that this was no longer the case was extremely confusing. In 1536, people revolted in the North of England against this behavior, the largest peacetime revolt ever seen in England.
Henry's son, Edward, was a committed Protestant and made still more changes to the churches, stripping them of their treasures, but he was in weak health and did not live long. His sister Mary proceeded to change the national religion back to Roman Catholicism again. By this time, many people had converted to Protestantism and were staunch in their beliefs. Mary set about a period of burnings, attempting to terrorize the converted into a return to the old religion. Shortly afterwards, when Elizabeth I ascended to the throne, Mary's changes were reversed again.
It is difficult for the modern person, especially in largely secular England, to understand how radically changes to the country's religion affected the ordinary person. But in this period, religion was a huge part of people's lives, and the constant changing back and forth of the established order left people baffled, confused, and sometimes in fear for their lives. The violence enacted upon Catholics and Protestants alike by various Tudor monarchs was very real indeed.
https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/learn/story-of-england/tudors/religion/
Sunday, February 17, 2019
How do you think the religious changes in England would have affected ordinary people in the 1500s?
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