Sorry is an easy word

Dear readers,

I want to be serious for a minute. Well, a bit longer than a minute. It depends how quickly you read. Fear not, I’m sure the mood will pass. But anyway. The two primates of the Church of England, Archbishop Welby of Canterbury and Archbishop Sentamu of York, have issued a statement urging Anglicans (and, who knows, perhaps others) to repent for the divisions and the violence of the Reformation. It is, of course, 500 years this October since Martin Luther published his famous 95 theses which would be the catalyst for a reform movement that split the Catholic Church apart. Here is not the place to discuss the fact that there had been reform movements before, from the Cathars to the Lollards to the Hussites, and that Luther was building on their work as much as he was innovating. In any event, it is a year of considerable commemoration, and as good an anniversary as any.

(In parentheses: I find something rather admirable about the Archbishop of York, if only because he has removed his dog collar and refused to put it back on until Robert Mugabe no longer holds Zimbabwe in his thrall. As an action of protest, it’s not exactly Jan Palach, I admit, but he’s stuck to it, and it hopefully does some tiny good in reassuring the people of Zimbabwe that they are not totally forgotten as they endure the devil Mugabe’s vile dictatorship.)

I should say here and now that in general I don’t like apologies for historical events. I think they are gesture politics and virtue-signalling at their worst, and they are un-historical too, because they imply, or perhaps I infer, that we should judge the past by the standards of the present, which is an abnegation of the empathy that any decent historian must have. There are exceptions: when David Cameron apologized for the events of Bloody Sunday in 2010, in the wake of the publication of the Saville Report, it made a real difference to peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland, and, of course, it was within living memory. On the other hand, I think apologising for the Potato Famine, say, or the Zulu Wars (and I’ve heard calls for both) would be worthless and stupid. The past, as LP Hartley said, is a foreign country, and they do things differently there. And that, really, is the point I want to make.

What I find so stupid and wrong-headed, as well as historically illiterate, is the ecumenicalism which has driven the Archbishops’ statement: “Such repentance needs to be linked to action aimed at reaching out to other churches and strengthening relationships with them.” Their message is that we should all just get along and realise that, in the words of Mahatma Gandhi, all religions are really just different roads converging on the same point. Well, that may be the mood of the early 21^st century, and perhaps it is an enlightened and liberal view to take as we contemplate the divine. I am not religious, so I don’t have a dog in that particular fight. It would, however, be utter anathema (if I can use that word) to the 16^th century mind.

Back in the day, when I was trying to teach Tudor history to young moppets, one of the great barriers I had to help them overcome, before they could really reach any understanding of the period beyond knowing dates and names, was grasping that men and women of the 16^th century were simultaneously people just like you and me, and also utterly different. What Luther was proposing in his Wittenberg outburst was not a matter of abstruse academic and theological debate. It struck at the heart of how the world worked. As someone said of football, it wasn’t life and death, it was much more important than that. When Protestants came to say that man was granted salvation solely through faith rather than, as the Catholic Church maintained, good works, this was a chasm between them, and it mattered. If you were religiously confused in the 16^th century (and I suspect many, if not most, people were), you had choices to make. Pick the wrong side, and, for as far as you knew, you were going to Hell. And for them, Hell was real. This was eternal damnation, fires and torments for the rest of all time. This wasn’t a matter of which football shirt you wear or what kind of hat your priest has. The stakes literally could have not been higher. Salvation versus damnation. Not a choice you wanted to get wrong.

Stakes, punningly, bring me to the inevitable subject of religious violence. The Pope has said of the Reformation that the division between Catholic and Protestant “has been an immense source of suffering”, and he is, of course, in a mechanistic way, right. Each side killed the other in horrifying numbers and in horrifying ways for most of the 16^th century before the bloodbath culminated in the dreadful violence of the Thirty Years War. It was not an edifying time for religion: I think particularly of the scene in Cambridge in 1557 when the bones of Martin Bucer and Paul Fagius, two eminent Protestant theologians, were disinterred and publicly burned while the Bishop of Lincoln preached a two-hour sermon on the dead men’s errors. But I could equally think of Prior John Houghton, of the London Charterhouse, who was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn in 1535 and who, according to tradition, prayed to God as the executioner cut his chest open to pull out his heart.

The idea of killing in the name of religion is very topical as Syria burns and European cities wait anxiously for the next attack by Islamic extremists. The important thing to understand about the atrocities of the 16^th century is that, however abhorrent they seem to us, however alien, however gruesome (remember that public executions drew large crowds of spectators until the 19^th century), they were not, in the main, done out of spite, but out of religious conviction and even, in a way which seems perverted to the modern mind, out of charity: charity in its proper sense of caritas, that is, love.

I return, as I often do, to my beloved Queen, Mary Tudor, forever labeled by history as “Bloody Mary” (or more wittily by Sellars and Yeatman as “Broody Mary”; for me, the best line in 1066 And All That is that “Broody Mary's reign was, however, a Bad Thing, since England is bound to be C. of E., so all the executions were wasted”). It is undeniable that the persecution of Protestants under Mary was harsh and, with 280 men and women burned at the stake in under four years, it was the most intense campaign of its kind in 16^th century Europe. To modern eyes, it is unimaginable to put so many people to death, and in public too, simply for their theological leanings. But we cannot judge the past by our own standards, or, at least, if we do, we miss the point. The martyrs who would go on to be immortalised by John Foxe in his Actes and Monuments were not killed out of spite, or from a psychopathic bloodlust. They were killed because they were, so far as the Church was concerned, wrong, and destined for Hell unless something was done about their doctrinal errors. Many repented, no doubt some from fear of punishment as well as from religious revelation, including, famously, Thomas Cranmer, who recanted six times before deciding to go to his death after all. For those who would not, however, the only path to salvation was through the fires of the stake. In the eyes of the Marian Church, it was a matter of being cruel to be kind. Earthly torture was bad, but eternal torture was worse.

Now, before any of you stage an intervention and worry that I’m filling out my application form for the Spanish Inquisition, I am not endorsing the burnings of Mary’s reign. (I would quite like a cardinal’s outfit, though. That’s for another day.) I am not saying they are right. But historians have to understand the why as well as the what, otherwise the whole discipline is pointless. Those who ordered and carried the executions were not blood-soaked monsters. They were, in their own way, doing what they thought was not only right but necessary.

How does this take us back to Justin Welby, one of the greatest milquetoasts in a Church which is not short of the bland and platitudinous? It is his desire to impose the modern Church on the Church of the past. It is to say that the differences over which people argued, fought, and ultimately killed each other did not matter. But they did to them. Fail to grasp that, or try to sweep it under the carpet, and you may as well abolish every history department in every university.