King Charles III meets Pope

King Charles III

The last monarch to meet a pope was King Charles III, who met with Pope Leo XIV during a state visit to the Vatican. This historic event marks the first time a British monarch has prayed publicly with the pope since the Reformation in 1534. The meeting took place in the Sistine Chapel, symbolizing a significant moment in the ongoing dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Church of England, where King Charles serves as the Supreme Governor of the Church of England.

The historiography of the English Reformation has seen vigorous clashes among dedicated protagonists and scholars for five centuries. The main factual details at the national level have been clear since 1900, as laid out for example by James Anthony Froude^[222] and Albert Pollard.^[223]

Reformation historiography has seen many schools of interpretation with Catholic, Anglican and Nonconformist historians using their own religious perspectives.^{[224][page needed]} In addition there has been a highly influential Whig interpretation, based on liberal secularised Protestantism, that depicted the Reformation in England, in the words of Ian Hazlett, as "the midwife delivering England from the Dark Ages to the threshold of modernity, and so a turning point of progress". Finally among the older schools was a neo-Marxist interpretation that stressed the economic decline of the old elites in the rise of the landed gentry and middle classes. All these approaches still have representatives, but the main thrust of scholarly historiography since the 1970s falls into four groupings or schools, according to Hazlett.^{[225][page needed]}

Geoffrey Elton leads the first faction with an agenda rooted in political historiography. It concentrates on the top of the early modern church-state looking at it at the mechanics of policymaking and the organs of its implementation and enforcement. The key player for Elton was not Henry VIII, but rather his principal Secretary of State Thomas Cromwell. Elton downplays the prophetic spirit of the religious reformers in the theology of keen conviction, dismissing them as the meddlesome intrusions from fanatics and bigots.^[226][227]

Secondly, A. G. Dickens and others were motivated by a primarily religious perspective. They prioritise the religious and subjective side of the movement. While recognising the Reformation was imposed from the top, just as it was everywhere else in Europe, it also responded to aspirations from below. Dickens has been criticised for underestimating the strength of residual and revived Catholicism, but has been praised for his demonstration of the close ties to European influences. In the Dickens school, David Loades has stressed the theological importance of the Reformation for Anglo-British development.^[228]

Revisionists comprise a third school, led by Christopher Haigh, Jack Scarisbrick, Eamon Duffy and numerous other scholars. Their main achievement was the discovery of an entirely new corpus of primary sources at the local level, leading them to the emphasis on Reformation as it played out on a daily and local basis, with much less emphasis on the control from the top. They emphasise turning away from elite sources, and instead rely on local parish records, diocesan files, guild records, data from boroughs, the courts, and especially telltale individual wills.^[229] The revisions picture pre-Reformation parish Catholicism as a "vibrant church that provided spiritual succour to the English people."^[230]

Finally, Patrick Collinson and others have brought much more precision to the theological landscape, with Calvinist Puritans who were impatient with the Anglican caution sent compromises. Indeed, the Puritans were a distinct subgroup who did not comprise all of Calvinism. The Church of England thus emerged as a coalition of factions, all of them Protestant inspiration.^[231]