Reformation As Brexit: No, No, No

Reformation as Brexit: No, No, No

Diarmaid MacCulloch

On 5 May my old friend Giles Fraser used his regular Guardian column to assert that ‘Brexit recycles the defiant spirit of the Reformation’.Oh dear, Giles, how wrong can you be?The European Reformation of the sixteenth century was a completely international movement, transcending and breaking down national boundaries, and the lesser Reformations of England and Scotland (distinct from each other, remember, Giles) were just part of this greater whole.There was no idea of little Englandism in such Protestant reformers as the main author of England’s Book of Common Prayer, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer: he was aiming for the English Reformation to resemble as closely as possible his favourite Reformation in Europe, which happened at the time to be in a city called Strasbourg (though German Reformers, and this English Archbishop with a German wife, would have thought of it as Strassburg).The language of the Reformation was an international language: Latin.Otherwise Protestantism simply couldn’t have spread across local boundaries.How else would such star Protestant refugees in King Edward VI’s England as Strasbourg’s Martin Bucer or Poland’s Johannes a Lasco have talked to their English hosts or indeed to each other, if not in Latin?

So it is the Remain camp which represents the European and British Reformations, not Brexiteers.Remainers are the people who want not to break the wider natural ties.True, they know the system needs radical reform – and that was the starting point of many Protestants attacking the old Church – but once the corruption and the mistakes have been remedied, the idea then as now was to look to a new continent-wide unity, not a muddle of division and weakness.And the Church of England and the Church of Scotland were part of this movement: Reformed Protestant Churches, who saw the Reformed Churches of Europe – in the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and as far east in Europe as Transylvania – as their partners in a great Reformed Protestant international.

Giles, you might have a slight point in characterising King Henry VIII as a Brexiteer.He broke with the Pope in 1533, and by force of personality and quite a lot of threats and bluster, bullied his Parliament into pretending that his Church’s independence had actually always been there in English history, just hidden from sight by Romish cunning.But do remember that Henry VIII was emphatically not a Protestant; in fact he burned some of them for heresy.The Reformation here flourished in spite of him, not because of him.Henry VIII is definitely not my idea of an acceptable leader, either for the Reformation, the Church of England or modern Britain in general.Giles, do you really want the image of Brexit to be that of Horrible Harry – Donald Trump with a bit more style and a Holbein bonnet?

Diarmaid MacCulloch is Professor of the History of the Church in the University of Oxford.His All Things Made New: Writings on the Reformation is being published in July.