1. The Zurich Influence
Rev K M Watkins
John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester, was burned at the stake within sight of his own cathedral in Gloucester on 9 February 1555. Thus was silenced one of England’s foremost witnesses to the truth as it is in Jesus. Along with other English Reformers, Hooper’s light shone brightly, not only as a Protestant martyr, but also for eminent godliness, faithful preaching and profitable writing. Where he far surpassed his brethren was in contending,
1This article is based on the first part of a paper given at the 2016 Theological Conference.
not only for Reformed doctrine, but also for more thoroughly Reformed worship and practice in the Church of England. When we think of the English Reformation, the names of Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley spring immediately to mind. The name of Hooper ought to be more widely known.
We are calling Hooper a Puritan, even though that term was not coined until the 1560s, after his death. It was used originally to castigate those in the Church of England who resisted the compromises in the 1559 Elizabethan Settlement, because they desired scriptural reform, including Presbyterian rather than Episcopalian church government. Puritan thus became a pejorative label for those whose Christianity was considered to be overly precise and too strict. The truth is that it is always right to follow the Lord speaking in His Word as closely as possible. In the best sense, John Hooper was a Puritan at heart. Through the teaching of the Lord, he was a man ahead of his time.
Hooper would have been more at home in the Scottish Reformation of Knox than the English Reformation of Cranmer. Hooper was one of those that “were a ‘hotter sort of Protestant’, concerned not only, like Luther, about the reformation of doctrine, but also, like Calvin and Zwingli, about the reformation of the Church”.2 He certainly had “the essential and most characteristic note of Puritanism – the feeling that the Reformation had not gone far enough”.3
The first four decades of Hooper’s life can be pieced together only tentatively. Born no earlier than 1495, in England’s West Country, probably in the county of Somerset, his family was relatively wealthy through the burgeoning cloth trade. That his father was a man of some means is implied by what Hooper wrote later: “After I had arrived at manhood, and by the kindness of my father enjoyed the means of living more unrestrainedly”. The same letter shows that he was his father’s “only son and heir”.4 Other letters make frequent and sometimes detailed mention of cloth trading. One example will suffice: “You will receive with this letter a piece of cloth for hose, of a better quality than that which you bought of me before, but yet at the same or a lower price”.5 Religiously, Hooper’s father was tied to the old Roman Catholic ways, and this was to cost Hooper dearly.6
2Andrew Davies, “The Nature of Puritanism”, in Perfecting the Church Below, 1990 Westminster Conference Papers, p 2.
3D Martyn Lloyd-Jones, “Puritanism and its Origins”, in The Good Fight of Faith, 1971 Westminster Conference Papers, p 76.
4Letter to Henry Bullinger, written from Strasbourg on 27 January 1546, Original Letters Relative to the English Reformation, vol 1, The Parker Society, ed Hastings Robinson, Cambridge, 1846, p 34.
5Letter to Bullinger, written from Antwerp on 3 May 1549, Original Letters, vol 1, p 62.
6“My father, of whom I am the only son and heir, is so opposed to me on account of
After obtaining a Bachelor of Arts degree from Oxford University in 1519, Hooper spent some years as a Cistercian monk in Cleeve Abbey, Somerset. When King Henry VIII began the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536, Hooper moved to London and became steward to a nobleman called Sir Thomas Arundel, one of Henry’s courtiers. Hooper’s escape from the abbey served only to catapult him into the temptations of the world, for later he would bemoan that period of his life as “living too much of a court life in the palace of our king”.7
The time appointed for Hooper’s conversion was not far off. It was effected through the writings of Ulrich Zwingli, the Swiss Reformer of Zurich, and of Henry Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor. In his first letter to Bullinger, written years later, Hooper explained: “There most happily and auspiciously came under my notice certain writings of master Huldreich Zuinglius [Ulrich Zwingli] . . . and also some commentaries upon the epistles of St Paul, which your reverence had published for the general benefit. . . . I perceived them seriously to affect the eternal salvation and happiness of my soul; so that I thought it worth my while, night and day, with earnest study . . . to devote my entire attention to your writings. Nor was my labour in this respect ever wearisome to me.”8
Hooper described with sorrow his unconverted days: “I had begun to blaspheme God by impious worship and all manner of idolatry, following the evil ways of my forefathers, before I rightly understood what God was”. Again: “I am indeed ashamed beyond measure . . . that like a brute beast . . . I have been a slave to my own lusts”. Eventually conversion came. He could speak of “being at length delivered by the goodness of God, for which I am solely indebted to Him and to yourselves”. He explained that his “hope for eternal life [was] obtained, not by my merits, but by the blood of Christ”.
It was through writings from Zurich, then, that Hooper became a man who “rightly understood what God was”. After this, it was always the reformation of Zurich, of Zwingli and Bullinger – not of Luther’s Germany, nor of Calvin’s Geneva, and certainly not of Cranmer’s England – that was the dominant influence on Hooper. Zurich would fuel the earlier Puritanism in England; the influence of Geneva and Calvin would not come until later.
Christ’s religion, that should I refuse to act according to his wishes, I shall be sure to find him for the future, not a father, but a cruel tyrant.” Letter to Bullinger, written from Strasbourg on 27 January 1546, Original Letters, vol 1, p 34.
7Letter to Bullinger, written from Strasbourg on 27 January 1546, Original Letters, vol 1, p 33.
8The quotations in this and the following paragraph are taken from Hooper’s letter to Bullinger, written from Strasbourg on 27 January 1546, Original Letters, vol 1, pp 33-35.
The transformation in Hooper was all too evident. Arundel, his employer, was concerned at the change in his steward, and sent him to Stephen Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester. Gardiner was a diehard Romanist, and Arundel expected that Hooper would be talked out of his Protestant views. Gardiner’s attempts ended in failure, and that marked the beginning of contentions between him and Hooper that were to culminate years later in Hooper’s death. John Foxe wrote that from that time Gardiner was “bearing in his breast a grudging stomach against master Hooper”.9
In 1539, King Henry VIII passed the Six Articles Act. Among other pernicious provisions designed to reassert Romanism, this Act made denial of transubstantiation a capital offence. Realising his danger, Hooper spent most of the 1540s on the Continent. He was not deceived by Henry’s “reformation”. Perceptively, he wrote: “Our king has destroyed the pope, but not popery. . . . The impious mass, the most shameful celibacy of the clergy, the invocation of saints, auricular confession,10 superstitious abstinence from meats, and purgatory, were never before held by the people in greater esteem than at the present moment.”11
In Strasbourg, Hooper met Martin Bucer, the peace-loving Reformer who had tried to reconcile Luther and Zwingli on their views of the Lord’s Supper. Bucer’s readiness to compromise for the sake of unity among the Reformed was not always appreciated by Hooper, who aimed for biblical purity at any cost. Bucer and Hooper would later be in England together, when Hooper would view Bucer as a less-than-helpful influence on the English Reformation.
Hooper sent a second letter to Bullinger, stating his view on attending the mass. He wrote: “I certainly do not consider it lawful for a godly man to be present at the mass and impious observances of the like kind among the papists”.12 Bullinger was clearly not slow to confirm Hooper’s views, for in a later letter Hooper gratefully acknowledged his spiritual father’s counsel that it was “more advisable and consistent with godliness, that I should rather endure the loss of home and fortune for Christ’s sake, than participate in the ungodly worship of the mass”.13 Hooper’s opposition was so clear that he would rather be exiled from his country than attend a mass!
Hooper’s returns to England at this time were brief, and involved per-
9The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed S R Cattley, London, 1838, vol 6, p 637.
10That is, confessing into the ear of the priest.
11Letter to Bullinger written from Strasbourg on 27 January 1546, Original Letters, vol 1, p 36.
12Letter to Bullinger, undated, but probably written early in 1546 from Strasbourg, Original Letters, vol 1, p 38.
13Letter to Bullinger, undated, but probably written at the end of 1546 from Basel, Original Letters, vol 1, p 40.
secution. Telling Bullinger of his “most dangerous journey to England” in 1546, he wrote: “I suffered many things by land; twice I suffered bonds and imprisonment; whence being marvellously delivered by the mercy of God, though with the heavy loss of my fortune, I was wretchedly harassed by sea for three months both by enemies and storms”.14
In Basel, Switzerland, Hooper married Anne de Tserclas from Antwerp. Something they had in common was family opposition to the Reformation. Hooper wrote of a letter Anne had sent to her mother, who “gave it my wife’s brother to read, who immediately threw it into the fire without reading it”.15
By early 1547, Hooper and his wife were themselves in Zurich, staying at first in Bullinger’s own house. “I received him willingly and heartily”, wrote Bullinger, “because one can see that he is sincere”.16 Thus began a close and lasting friendship between the two men. Bullinger, a most thorough Reformer, had a profound influence on Hooper during the two years he was in Zurich. John à Lasco, the zealous Polish Reformer, was also in Zurich at the time. Hooper imbibed deeply the sentiments of the Zurich reformation, the theology of Bullinger, and the practice of the Zurich Church. This contributed to Hooper’s abiding desire for thorough biblical reformation, for “Zwingli was a very radical Reformer. He had made a clean sweep in the matter of ceremonies and the dress of the clergy.”17
Ludwig Lavater, Bullinger’s son-in-law, summed it up perfectly: “Nothing is done in the Zurich church except that which was the practice in the church at the time of the apostles”.18 This of course is what has come to be called the regulative principle. It is the controlling idea of Puritanism regarding church worship and practice. It certainly controlled Hooper. “The importance of this basic principle cannot be overemphasised. It was the principle which Hooper made his own and which he tried to enforce the other English reformers to accept.”19 It meant unadorned simplicity in worship.
John Knox spoke of Calvin’s Geneva as being “that most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the Apostles”,20 and John Hooper felt similarly about Zurich. For example, he would later write
14Letter to Bullinger, undated, but probably written at the end of 1546 from Basel, Original Letters, vol 1, p 41.
15Letter to Bullinger, written on 3 May 1549 from Antwerp, Original Letters, vol 1, p 63.
16Quoted by W Morris S West, “John Hooper and the Origins of Puritanism”, in The Baptist Quarterly, vol 15, issue 8 (October 1954), p 351.
17D Martyn Lloyd-Jones, “Puritanism and its Origins”, in The Good Fight of Faith, 1971 Westminster Conference Papers, p 76.
18Quoted by W Morris S West, The Baptist Quarterly, vol 15, issue 8, (October 1954), p 354.
19W Morris S West, The Baptist Quarterly, vol 15, issue 8, (October 1954), pp 354,355.
20The Works of John Knox, ed David Laing, Edinburgh, 1895, vol 4, p 240.
to Bullinger that the Zurich “mode of administering the Lord’s Supper . . . as it is most simple among you, so it is most pure”.21 The influence of Zurich would never leave him.