My weekly Lenten reflections will be on a wife of Henry VIII each week – although not in order
These seek to not retell their stories, but to look at them with a spiritual eye
How would you react if you found a warrant for your own arrest? This lady of the week put it back, but her voluble distress after reading it drew her husband to her. She did not reveal the source of her sobs.
Catherine Parr did not go to the Tower. Perhaps she had learned from Anne of Cleves and Jane Seymour how to at least appear docile and say what the king wanted to hear. Pretending that she did not mean to instruct her husband in faith, only seem to oppose him to draw out his great and superior learning was a very Neck Turns The Head strategy – and one that saved hers. When the warrant she’d no doubt dreaded was served, writhing Wriothesley come to arrest her was turned away by the king.
Catherine Parr’s warrant – which Henry had agreed to – was not for alleged adultery like the other two wives, nor witchcraft, but heresy. Heresy and witchcraft are not far apart – both are beliefs and practices not sanctioned by, and perceived as a threat to, the church and its authority. By authority, it really means the hegemony and solo privilege of that institution.
Catherine may not have begun married life as a heretic – to Henry that is – she was married 4 times. Some historians claim that she was conservatively Catholic when the ever rounder and more irascible king pulled her away from the one she loved – an ambitious man who would try to be de facto king himself, and suffer the fate that she avoided. My interest in Catherine isn’t the relationship that resumed after Henry’s death almost as quickly as his own new spouses. The epithet ‘survived’ – I am bored of that crude rhyme – isn’t just about Catherine 3 outliving Henry VIII – although not for long; it’s that the warrant was not executed. It’s what Catherine believed and was trying to achieve with her reluctant queenship that interests me.
Like next week’s queen and the lens through whom we will view Easter this year, Catherine saw herself as an Esther, alongside the man she called Moses, letting the people go from the oppressive yoke of a man titled P. Catherine felt directed to accept the king – not that it would have been easy to decline (hardly meaningful consent) – because she prayed and felt God reply that this role was divine service to England. Catherine had admired Henry (!) but thought he who had begun so positively in removing the grip of Rome from this country was slipping. Henry didn’t leave the Catholic form of Christianity, just the rule of Rome, which of course, he’d replaced with himself. His 1539 act reiterated Catholicism in all but papacy, creating all other belief as criminal.
I admire Catherine’s courage and the principle of using her queenship – a sacrifice and a risk for her – to further reform, and especially as a spiritual mission. I am not sure that I agree with the content of that mission. Catherine Parr, a published author of theology, is the darling of the conservative reformed modern Christian, such as Lutheran pastor Don Matzat. His synopsis of Henry’s reign is telling: Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard are guilty of adultery; Anne’s faith and mission are conspicuously absent: the break from Rome was because of Henry’s unassailable wish to marry her. Who actually did the reforming of this new independent national church isn’t stated but it’s implied that it was left to others…such as Henry’s final wife.
On discovery of Catherine’s last book, “Lamentations of a Sinner”, Don speaks in delighted terms of Catherine’s abasing herself to gain Christ, echoing Luther’s belief in self-accusation to come to a state of grace. The abasement was controversial for a queen – hence it was not published in Henry’s lifetime. It was an early spiritual autobiography of the new kind: where the author shows their journey from guilty to justified, from wicked to redeemed. It’s a genre which I grew up with.
I sympathise with spiritual epiphanies and honesty about one’s own journey but I reject the Worm Theology inherent in this work and Don’s glee in it. Why is finding God a see-saw of egoes? Why is accusing yourself of sin the first step in beginning a relationship with Jesus?
Catherine was concerned with the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone, as well as his teaching that all spiritual knowledge and authority comes from scripture alone. They were tenets which I was raised with, and kept with…until relatively recently.
Justification is a legal term – reformed theology, as with the apostle Paul’s, is peppered with it. But I do not agree with basing your understanding of God on the flawed and worldly precepts of a broken and ironic system of justice. It came from an ex-Pharisee early on in Christianity, who was still very influenced by the old religion – that of right practice and rules. Paul began developing radical thought away from traditional Judaism, seeing God’s grace as the means of justification. Crudely in my evangelical upbringing we were told this word meant that we are made ‘just as if we’d never sinned’. It is different to expunged, which means blot out (so a record of wrong is gone) but justify goes a step further: it is almost as if time is reversed and the sin wasn’t committed. Actually, legally today, justification is closer to its normal English usage (often legal terms aren’t): it means that an acceptable excuse is given which prevents the guilty party from being punished.
Theological sources tell me that justification is a once and for all rendering of Not Guilty, effected in Jesus’ death. So Jesus’s overcoming death says: we all did do a capital crime that offends God, but a declaration rather than explanation is made which removes from us, the offender, the liability for that offence, and makes us righteous? How very Job.
And what is this crime we all do that earns us the forever fiery pit in God’s eyes – the judge in a courtroom (these terms require courts) to which we are not invited to defend or explain ourselves? Is it the things we could have done different and need to put right? Does it cover the more grievous acts which we may commit? Or is it missing the mark and falling short, like a weak misshot arrow, of a target that can never be reached by humans? What is perfection? And who is an angry, jealous, vengeful god, behaving like Henry VIII, to hold us to a standard that he misses?
Or is our crime not keeping all the many rules in the Pentateuch?
The reformed understanding is and I think was that those lists of Leviticus no longer applied after Jesus. Protestants preach that they no longer need to keep The Law – just the Ten Commandments, and Jesus’ Double Commandment. Oh, and a few exhortations by Paul (these can vary over time and your exact denomination’s beliefs). One of those which hung around in Catherine’s day, and in my background, still may, is that of women not teaching men. Henry levelled this at Catherine. But as anyone who really knows the Bible can tell you – Catherine was likely one; her contemporary who we’ll meet in July was certainly another – Paul doesn’t exactly say that. I’ll give you a full exposition of what I think he does say in July.
I have started something big here that I’ll continue over the year. My issue with Catherine’s doctrine is not to downgrade faith and to have to work one’s way into Heaven and God’s favour, but that she relies on corrupt, patriarchal legalism for her tenet. It is not that church tradition and law is greater than the Bible, but that text is misused, and that God speaks to us with an inner knowing. I’ll say more about that on here, and in my next novel. I stand with Catherine against Rome, but not against the freedom for Catholics to express their faith, nor for an alternative political institution – especially one with the same hierarchy and tyranny at its heart.
Catherine’s radical friends included the fourth wife of someone in last Sunday’s sermon – Catherine Willoughby, who became Mrs Brandon, duchess of Suffolk, and Marguerite of Navarre who influenced next week and Easter’s subject. What these women believed and fought for, and whether we would or should now, we will continue to explore.
We’ll have Tudor themed Maundy Thursday and Easter online services, at 930pm and 8pm BST.
Both will be about 45 mins. The first will be quite and reflective. Both will feature music
Please email me, Elspeth, on betweenthestools@hotmail.co.uk if you’re interested in coming
I shall also be performing a reading of my novella The Jury In My Mind for the 111th anniversary of the Titanic the following week – stay tuned for more information
Elspeth R - A skewed world view 