A The Changeless and the Changing Prayer Book
B The Prayer Book Society’s Post-Convention Effort
My advice is that you should make a careful selection of anything that you have found either in the Roman, or the Gallic, or any other Church, which may be more acceptable to Almighty God, and diligently teach the Church of the English. . .
Choosetherefore, from each Church those things that are pious, religious, and seemly; and when you have, as it were, incorporated them, let the minds of the English be accustomed thereto.
–Gregory the Great to
Augustine of Canterbury, A.D. 601.1
I hope you will never hear from me any such phrase as our “excellent or incomparable Liturgy” . . . 1 do not think we are to praise the Liturgy, but to use it.
–Frederick Denison Maurice
THE PRAYER-BOOK, Sennon I.2
CHAPTER I
AN EXTRAORDINARY BOOK
When you put pen to paper, you expect your written word to endure long enough to carry out its intended purpose. That may be only a matter of minutes or hours for some minor note or message. It may be a matter of days or years for something more permanent. Thomas Cranmer who was Archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI never dreamed that the fruit of his pen would differ from that pattern. He certainly did not foresee that the Book of Common Prayer which he and a few colleagues compiled and which first appeared in March 1549 would still be in use over 400 years later. He could not have imagined that its phrases and services would become so embedded in the minds of English-speaking folk around the globe that the celebration of life’s milestone events—baptism, marriage, burial—would naturally be expressed in his venerable words.
This extraordinary piece of liturgical history deserves to be rehearsed and known for it belongs to all of us regardless of our ecclesiastical affiliation.
Here, then, is the story of that 440 years in the life of the Book of Common Prayer. There have been eight times through the centuries when this venerable book of worship and devotion might have been retired to a dusty shelf and forgotten. But instead, it was revised, updated, and with renewed vitality leads a new generation of worshippers into God’s presence.
CHAPTER II
THE FIRST ENGLISH PRAYER BOOKS, 1549 AND 1552
The first Book of Common Prayer was published in March, 1549, and has come to be known as the First Book of Edward VI, the King of England at the time. It was not the work of one man, although Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry VIII and Edward VI, is certainly the mastermind behind it.
There were several conditions which interacted and resulted in the creation of that 1549 Book. The first of these was the fact that the Roman Church of Cranmer’s day functioned with at least six different liturgical books which had been in regular use in the West since the eleventh, possibly the ninth century—the Missale which contained the Canon of the Mass; the Breviarium, which contained the Daily Offices or Hour Services; the Processionale, litanies which were used in procession; the Manuale, containing the occasional offices needed by a presbyter (Baptism through Burial); the Pontyicale, rites conducted by a bishop; and the Ordinale, rules for the conduct of rites. These books were not universally the same; local usage dictated their contents. And there was widespread discontent with the medieval services.
There was also the renewal of scholarship in the Renaissance and a rediscovery of the Bible. These were the parents of an attitude of mind called “the New Learning.” One indication of this “New Learning” which contributed toward subsequent liturgical reform was William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament in 1524.
In England two political events accelerated the momentum of liturgical reform. The first was that the attitude toward Lutheranism on the continent began to change, starting about 1532-34, the time when Henry VIII decided to break with Rome. The momentum of this changing attitude toward liturgical reform is reflected in the cascade of publications during the decade and a half between 1534 and the Act of Uniformity of 1549. Marion Hatchett lists 18 documents of various kinds which influenced the creation of that Prayer Book.1
During those same years the Bible was also caught up in the vortex of liturgical change. One of the ironies and also one of the indications of how fast events were moving is seen in what happened to Tyndale and his New Testament. When copies of his work, which was printed in Cologne in 1525, reached England, Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII sent messengers to track him down and capture him, but he escaped to the continent, where in 1535 he was arrested. In 1536, he was executed at the stake. Only one year after Tyndale had died for translating the New Testament into English, editions of the Sarum Primer appeared by order of Edward Lee, Archbishop of York, with the liturgical Epistles and Gospels in English. The translation was Tyndale’s.
Epistles and Gospels in English were just a beginning. Within a year—1538—English Bibles were placed in every church by order of Cromwell, the King’s Vicar-General. The order cautioned that they “might be read, only without noise, or disturbance of any public service, and without any disputation or exposition” In 1539, the Crown issued the Great Bible. It was the work of Miles Coverdale, who leaned heavily on the martyred Tyndale’s translation. By 1543, the Convocation of Canterbury, the assembly of bishops and clergy,2 had authorized the reading of “one chapter in English without exposition” after the Te Deum and Magnificat. This increasingly widespread substitution of English for Latin Scriptures opened the way for a similar change in the prayers.
So, as Percy Dearmer observes, the lectern from which the Bible is read reminds us of the first stage of reform which ultimately produced the Prayer Book.
The second political event which accelerated momentum toward liturgical reform occurred in 1544, Emperor Charles V of Spain sought the help of Henry VIII in forcing France to make peace. This gave new impetus to liturgical change in two ways. The first was that Henry ordered processions to be said or sung throughout the province of Canterbury—a normal practice in times of emergency. This occasioned the first Litany in English, and it was full of phrases which later appeared in the Prayer Book. (So the Litany desk reminds us of the next stage of liturgical reform.) The second was that the determination of Catholic Charles V to subdue the Protestants on the continent caused a number of prominent continental divines to flee to England from persecution at home. Notable among these scholars were Peter Martyr (in December, 1547) and Martin Bucer (in April, 1549). Cranmer, the liturgical scholar, encouraged this influx of learned men. They arrived too late to influence the 1549 Book, but they certainly contributed toward the revision in 1552.
Although all of these factors and pressures were moving the church closer to significant liturgical change, nothing further happened during the closing years of Henry’s reign. There was some experimentation with services in English but that was all.
Henry