Yet nothing could withstand the force of popular protest that emerged in the early days of June. It has become known as the Western Rising or the Prayer Book Rebellion, attesting to the fact that religious and social ills were not easily to be distinguished. At the beginning of 1549 the second session of Edward’s parliament had approved the publication of the Book of Common Prayer. It was authorized as part of the Act of Uniformity ‘for the uniformity of service and administration of the sacraments throughout the realm’; it was one of the most important and permanent of parliamentary Acts, effectively prescribing the doctrine and liturgy of the Church of England for future generations.
The Act was largely the work of Thomas Cranmer in consultation with the bishops, and the freedom of debate among the senior clergy in the House of Lords meant that it did not pass without strenuous opposition. One contemporary wrote that there was ‘great sticking touching the blessed body and blood of Jesus Christ. I trust they will conclude well in it, by the help of the Holy Ghost.’ The Holy Ghost did not intervene and, although the Act was passed, eight out of the eighteen bishops present voted against it.
Cranmer insisted in the course of the great debate that ‘our faith is not to believe Him to be in the bread and wine, but that He is in heaven’. He denied the doctrine of transubstantiation, therefore, and insisted that Christ had only a spiritual presence determined by the faith of the recipient. Neither the Bible nor the holy fathers ever mention the doctrine; Cranmer believed it to be the invention of the Antichrist and his heir, Pope Gregory VII, in whose reign at the end of the eleventh century it had been introduced. Yet the more conservative bishops denounced this in turn as heresy. One reformer, Peter Martyr, wrote at the time that ‘there is so much contention about the Eucharist that every corner is full of it; every day the question is discussed among the Lords, with such disputing of bishops as was never heard; the commons thronging the lords’ galleries to hear the arguments’. These were days when the principles of religion were debated with the same eagerness as the tenets of politics and economics are now discussed.
The Book of Common Prayer, in revised form, is still in use. It is a breviary, a missal and a ritual liturgy. In time it lent strength and unity to the English Church but, like all great agents of revolution, it was fiercely controversial at the moment of its publication. It was a book of worship, written in solemn and subtle English, of which we may take one example. In the medieval marriage service the wife had pledged to be ‘bonner and buxom in bed and in board’. This has the nice alliteration of an older language. Now both partners were asked to ‘love and to cherish’ ‘for better, for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health’.
Another fundamental alteration became evident in the newly anglicized text. ‘Wherefore O Lord and heavenly Father, according to the institution of Thy dearly beloved Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ, we Thy humble servants, do celebrate and make here before Thy divine Majesty with these Thy holy gifts the memorial which Thy Son wished us to make: having in remembrance His blessed passion, mighty resurrection and glorious ascension.’ What had previously been deemed a ‘holy sacrifice’ was now a ‘memorial’. The sacrifice of Christ upon the cross was remembered but not repeated or reproduced.
As a result all the more arcane rites of the Mass were removed. There was to be no more ‘shifting of the book from one place to another; laying down and licking of the chalice … holding up his fingers, hands, or thumbs joined towards his temples; breathing upon the bread or chalice’; no more secret whisperings and sudden turnings of the body. The theatre of piety was being deconstructed. The host and the chalice were not to be elevated at the climax of the drama; the adoration of the sacrament was curtailed as a symptom of idolatry. There were to be no more intimations of sacrifice and the minister, no longer called priest, was ordered simply to place the bread and wine upon the altar. The Mass was therefore stripped of its mystery.
In the old service the priest had at the moment of the elevation of the host turned symbolically to the east as the site of Golgotha, with his back turned towards the congregation as if he were communing with sacred rites; it was from the east that Christ would come on the Day of Judgment. It was now stipulated that the minister should stand at the north side of the communion table and face the people. The rich vestments of the past were forbidden, and he could don only a white surplice. The traditional calendar of the saints’ days was also omitted from the Prayer Book as arrant superstition.
Most importantly, however, the sacred service would now be performed in English rather than in Latin. One layman repeated what would become a familiar complaint that the English language could not comprehend the mystery of the Mass; it was better for it to be rendered in a language that the congregation did not understand. It was thereby filled with magic, like the ritual pronunciation of a spell. The old service had been chanted and memorized for ten centuries. The words of the hymns and psalms, the very order of the Mass itself, were part of folk memory. Now, in one parliamentary Act, they were all swept away. All these changes represented the decisive rupture with the world of medieval Catholicism.
Any minister who refused to use the new book would be imprisoned for six months and deprived of his position; on any third offence he would be consigned to life imprisonment. This was indeed an Act for ‘uniformity’. Yet if Somerset and Cranmer therefore hoped to stifle dissent, they were soon disabused. A storm of protest arose in the western counties at this break with traditional practice. The new prayer book and service were to be introduced on Whit Sunday 9 June 1549. So they were in the parish of Sampford Courtenay in Devon, where they were greeted with dismay. On the following day the parishioners approached their priest, and asked him what service he intended to use, the new or the old. The new one, he told them. But they informed him that they would have nothing but ‘the old and ancient religion’.
The priest himself was not unwilling to accede to their request. He went with them to the church, where he put on his traditional vestments and proceeded to say the Mass, in Latin, with all the now forbidden rites. The news of this development spread from Sampford Courtenay to all parts of Devon and Cornwall. The bells were rung to spread the good news. It was demanded that the old sacrament be ‘hung over the altar and worshipped and those who would not consent thereto, to die like heretics’. It was added that ‘we will not have the new service, nor the Bible, in English’. This marked the beginning of the Prayer Book Rebellion. The religious discontent turned into social discontent, exacerbated by the general climate of economic hardship. The world was being turned upside down:
When wrens wear woodknives, cranes for to kill
And sparrows build churches on a green hill
And cats unto mice do swear obedience …
The rebellion was perhaps only to be expected; one reformer had told a continental colleague that ‘a great part of the country is popish’. Another reformer, Martin Bucer, wrote to his home town of Strasburg that ‘things are for the most part carried on by means of ordinances, which the majority obey very grudgingly’. This was indeed a major cause of the rebellion; the changes were imposed on the people by parliament in London. At a slightly later date Bucer wrote that ‘of those devoted to the service of religion only a small number have as yet addicted themselves entirely to the kingdom of Christ’.