Remembering the English Reformation: Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715)

The Restoration Church of England saw its position as unstable. Even though the Church of England was re-established by Charles II in 1660, Anglican clergy had to engage in continuous disputes over its legitimacy with Catholic polemicists. In a broader degree, Anglican churchmen had claimed that the Reformation in the sixteenth century was an inevitable moment, and the Church of England had justified their separation from the Catholic Church by arguing that the Protestant church was the true instrument which God set up to lead England to salvation.

The dispute over the legitimation of the Reformation between Catholics and Anglicans could not be pursued without the discourse of the history of the Reformation. The post-Reformation period saw the practice of history legitimating social practices and institutions such as the Church of England. Theologians and clergymen were convinced that scholarly research on church history could give sufficient proof about the true model of Church government and discipline. At the same time, Protestant apologetics were able to connect the prophetic designation of the Reformed Church with the long history of Christianity. For that purpose, many scholarly Anglican churchmen had started looking into religious matters through historiographical lenses.

During the Restoration one of the most famous advocates of the apocalyptic interpretation of the history of the Reformation was Gilbert Burnet. Burnet’s two-volume book, the History of the Reformation of the Church of England, published first in 1679, mainly aimed to defend the Reformation and depict the Henry’s break with Roman Church as a providential plan.

Burnet’s main argument in History of the Reformation was based upon a sense that the investigation of human history elucidated divine providence at work. Burnet assured that there was God’s manipulation of civil rulers behind the scene of the Reformation which Tudor monarchs’ role in the establishment of the Church of England exemplified. Burnet acknowledged that there was ‘a signal providence of God, in raising up a King of his temper, for clearing the way to that blessed Work.’ In his description of the first phase of the Reformation, the king was metaphorically ‘the Postilion of Reformation’ in the light of his deeds for Protestantism(Burnet, The History of the Reformation, I, sig. c1v).

Yet it is insufficient to simplify that Burnet’s assessment of Henry VIII went so far as to admit that Henry’s direction of the Reformation was solely pious. Burnet claimed that the monarch was not indefective. It was important, for him, to note that the prince was designed to play a leading role in the eradication of errors and corruptions in the Roman Church by God. Despite of Henry’s faults, Burnet thought that the employment of the prince who ‘had great mixtures of very gross faults’ was not unusual in the way in which divine providence had accomplished its purpose. Burnet thought there had been many historical examples of God’s use of princes whose defects in their lives had been condemned: for example, David, Solomon, Constantine, and so on.

Biblical examples supported Burnet’s idea that God’s providence made up for human’s fault in ushering in true religion. In Burnet’s vindication of the monarchical role in the Reformation, the belief in God’s providential dealing with the actions of the prince was formed in defence of the Reformation when attacks on its spiritual authenticity raised his concern.