2nd Sunday of Epiphany
John Morrison, Reader: Maynard and Cotton Hospital, Canterbury, Evensong, 15th January 2012
The Book of Common Prayer
The day that I want you to remember this evening is St Bartholomew's Day, 24th August. This year, it falls on a Friday. On that day 350 years ago, in 1662, a new prayer book was enforced by the Act of Uniformity and on that day in English history around a thousand Presbyterian and Nonconformist ministers refused to use the revised Prayer Book. They claimed that it was too close to Rome and by refusing they ended up losing their livings. Well, what was it about this new 1662 Prayer Book and the Prayer Book that we hold in front of this evening that has excited worshippers over the ages and prompted so much interest?
A man was born in Aslockton in Nottinghamshire in 1489. The village is some twelve miles east of Nottingham and the cottage in which he grew up still exists. His name was Thomas Cranmer and he was to have an indelible effect on the newly created Church of England during the reign of the first of his kings, Henry VIII who appointed him Archbishop of Canterbury in 1532. Thomas became well-known for his assistance to the King to put Catherine of Aragon aside, allowing him to marry Anne Boleyn. Cranmer crowned her Queen in 1533 and we are told that he cried when he heard of her execution in May 1536. When Henry died, Edward VI came to the throne in 1547 as a boy and asked Cranmer to remain as a reforming Archbishop. By 1549 Cranmer had created the Book of Common Prayer and it was adopted by parliament in that year.
Peter Martyr, a contemporary of Cranmer, wrote about the challenge faced by the Archbishop as he set about directing the right ordering a public worship.
“I see that there is nothing more difficult in the world than to found a church. The stones are generally rough and very unpolished; hence, unless they are rendered plane and smooth by the spirit, the word, and examples of early life, they cannot easily be made to fit each other. May the Lord, grant that among us there may be rightly planted a vine which in due time may produce fruit delicious both to men and to God.”
It has often been thought the Cranmer was the original author of the 1549 prayer book but this is not so. He was skilled in translation, liturgy and using the best of other men's words. He consulted over 600 of his own printed books and we are pretty certain that he had another 60 relevant manuscripts. He had been influenced by the European religious protestant reformers, particularly those in Germany and Switzerland and, despite vows of celibacy, had married the niece of Andreas Osiander, the leading Nuremburg Lutheran reforming theologian.
Edward VI was 15 years old when he died of pulmonary tuberculosis. As he lay dying, he pronounced his cousin, Lady Jane Grey as Queen and his successor and that is how it remained for a few days until the Privy Council change their minds and brought in Mary Tudor, a Roman Catholic, as Queen. Mary Tudor immediately imprisoned Cranmer for a two year period and although he recanted his beliefs during his trial for heresy in Oxford he withdrew his recantation and was burned at the stake in Oxford in 1556.
Although during Mary's reign an attempt was made to repeal the Prayer Book replacing it with a new book based on the Sarum Mass in 1554, the Book of Common Prayer and its users went into exile to Frankfurt and Geneva. But when the new queen, Elizabeth I came to the throne, she reversed religious policy once more, and in 1559 introduced a moderately revised book of common prayer based on the 1552 version. The Queen would have probably favoured a conservative former liturgy along the lines of something that had been produced in 1549 but amongst her advisers including William Cecil there was a move to urge her that the 1552 version as the least worst of the political choices. The words of the administration of the elements of communion were restored in the 1549 version and the revisers brought back a reference to the real presence, which had been rigorously excised by Cranmer in 1552. The rubrics, which made considerable references to kneeling, were removed. There were considerable anxieties over ceremonies and ornaments in the church services, especially in respect of the vestments used by the clergy and there are were calls to use the order to prescribe them made in the second year of the reign of Edward VI but this only fudged the issue and merely presented a framework for the tensions, which vexed the English Church for the next 400 years. In a sense of 1559 Book of Common Prayer can be seen as an attempt to represent the idea of religious settlement, which was generally attributed to the Elizabethan period.
In the period 1645 to 1660, the Book of Common Prayer was targeted as a liturgy for the most part framed out of the ‘Roman rituals of mass’ by those who were fighting the King during the English Civil Wars and it is during this period that some priests memorised the Prayer Book so that they could attend to the letter of the law but retain the spirit of the old ways.
When Charles II came to the throne he promised to respect ‘tender consciences’ particularly those of the Presbyterians had been so helpful in restoring his throne. In 1661, at the Savoy Palace on the banks of the River Thames, Charles summoned 12 Anglican bishops and 12 Presbyterians ministers with nine assistants on each side, to a meeting but it is alleged that the leader of the Presbyterians, Richard Baxter prevented any compromise being made and the Presbyterians left, leaving the bishops free to produce a prayer book with relatively few changes in 1662. I understand that the word ‘minister’ was replaced by ‘priest’ and the ‘congregation’ replaced by ‘church.’ Additions to the baptism service for those of riper years as well as prayers for those at sea were also included. The Bishop of Durham John Cosi was responsible for maintaining the core of Cranmer's work but was thought to have been responsible for the lovely translation of the ‘Veni Creator’ or ‘Come Holy Ghost.’
And so we come to some Bartholomew's Day. This was when Cosi’s work and that of his associate William Sancroft, who eventually became Archbishop of Canterbury, was produced to be used as a new universal prayer book. The bishops did better than they knew, because the book we now have in our hands is a largely unchanged version of that 1662 prayer book.
It must be said that forty years ago there were those who would have the swept the prayer book away and were it not for the active defence of a group of people, many of whom formed the antecedents of the Prayer Book Society. Strongly influence by this lobby, the legislative body of the Church of England prevented the Book of Common Prayer being made optional or outlawed altogether. Fortunately, the Book of Common Prayer remains in daily use in most of our cathedrals and is used weekly in many parish churches. The Prayer Book Society, however, does make a point that because of the negative situation forty years ago many key clergy in the Church of England who went through training during the dispute period, graduated without fully understanding the importance of the Book of Common Prayer and this the Prayer Book Society is working to overcome.
“We should not be surprised,” Prudence Dailey, the chairman of the Prayer Book Society says “that the book, which has already withstood the test of so many centuries of continued use, has proved its continued relevance. When used in worship today, the Book of Common Prayer is just as modern as those who are using it, no less contemporary than a modern dress performance of Shakespeare. It is a living liturgy for the 21st-century.”
Prudence, I couldn't have put it better myself.
Amen