OUR LADY OF WALSINGHAM - Legacy of the Reformation; FEAST DAY 24 SEPTEMBER
OUR LADY OF WALSINGHAM
Legacy of the Reformation
FEAST DAY 24 SEPTEMBER
A priory was built which passed into the care of the Canons Regular of St Augustine. By the time of its destruction in 1538, the shrine had become the site of one of the greatest pilgrimages in Europe, together with Glastonbury and Canterbury. It was a major pilgrim path in Medieval times when, because of war, pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela was excluded.
In desiring his divorce from Catherine of Aragon, in 1533, Henry seceded England from the unity of the Catholic Church, appointing Thomas Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury, and thereby establishing the English Church as subject to Henry’s personal authority.
Thomas Cromwell planned and directed the king’s campaign to subdue the Church. In 1535 he drew up a scheme to suppress the monasteries. His agents began visitation of the religious houses, taking inventory of the worth of the individual houses.
By the end of 1536, Henry faced armed popular rebellion. The Pilgrimage of Grace, led by Robert Aske, was the protest of the people of England against the religious changes imposed by Henry– 30,000 armed rebels demanded, amongst other things, the suppression of heresies, the return of the liturgy and the restoration of the Pope.
The rising was defeated but it enabled accusations to be made of complicity by the clergy in the revolt. The abbots of Jervaulx and Fountains and the prior of Bridlington were executed at Tyburn. The abbots of Sawley and Whalley were hanged in chains in the neighbourhood of their own monasteries. The 80 year old prior of Glastonbury Abbey was hanged and quartered with two of his monks at Glastonbury Tor.
Gerard Culkin, The English Reformation, at p. 32
In 1537 choristers at Walsingham organized “’the most serious plot hatched anywhere south of Trent’, intended to resist what they feared, rightly as it turned out, would happen to their foundation. Eleven men were executed as a result. The sub-prior, Nicholas Milcham, was charged with conspiring to rebel against the suppression of the lesser monasteries, and on flimsy evidence, was convicted of high treason and hanged outside the priory walls.”
In 1538 the shrine at Walsingham and the Abbey were destroyed by Henry VIII. By an Act of 1539 the property of the monasteries was vested in the king and his heirs. These properties were “soon disposed of for cash; sold, for the most part, to the nobles, the gentry, the merchants and citizens who made up the wealthier classes of England.”
Gerard Culkin, ibid.
“Within 14 years the crown had raised over a million pounds in what was the largest transfer of land since the Norman conquest…. the effect of this huge transfer of ecclesiastical property was to give to those classes in the nation which alone had any share in the political life of the country a vested interest in maintaining at least this part of Henry’s “reform” of the Church.”
Lawrence James, The Aristocrats, at pp. 93-94.
The site and grounds of the Priory at Walsingham were granted by the Crown to Sir Thomas Sydney. All that remained of the Priory and Shrine was the Gatehouse, the chancel arch and a few outbuildings.
By the year 1540, when Waltham Abbey was surrendered, there was not a single religious house left in England: Gerard Culkin, ibid.
The statue of Our Lady of Walsingham was said locally to have been burned. However, the image of Our Lady’s protection subsisted in the faith of the local people. In 1564, Sir Roger Townsend wrote to Cromwell that a woman had declared that a miracle had been done by the statue after it had been carried away to London. He had the woman put in stocks on market day to be abused by the village folk, but declared, “I cannot perceive but the said image is not yet out of their heads.”
In 1896, Charlotte Pearson Boyd purchased the Slipper Chapel, (so called because it was here that the pilgrims would remove their shoes to walk the final “Holy Mile” to the Shrine barefoot). It had survived but in secular use. She sought to restore the Chapel in a religious capacity, (made possible by the Catholic Emancipation legislation of 1829 and subsequent legislation allowing Catholic churches to subsist in England). In 1897, Pope Leo XIII re-established the restored 14th century Slipper Chapel as a Catholic shrine, now the centre shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.
The first modern statue was commissioned in 1922 by an Anglican minister Alfred Hope Patten from Oberammergau, Bavaria, based on a design found on the medieval seal of Walsingham Priory.
An article in Living Church, by Mark Michael (9 August 2019), * proffers an interesting theory put forward by English historians Father Michael Rear and Frances Young and published in the Catholic Herald. The Langham Madonna, “a battered 13th century English statue in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum”, they claim, is actually the original statue of Our Lady of Walsingham.
The theory posited is that assumptions as to the destruction of the statue in 1539, when the Priory Church at Walsingham was torn down and the community dispersed by order of the king, were vague and completely lacking eyewitness accounts. There were also inconsistencies as to the location of the claimed burning – one account at the Heretics Pyre at Smithfield and the other at the court of Thomas Cromwell’s house at Chelsea. There were no eyewitness accounts of the event.
Rear and Young, however, propose that the statue was hidden by Catholic loyalists (a frequent occurrence, as documented by Eamon Duffy) and suggest that the perpetrator, (or saver) may have been the Rev. John Grigby, Vicar of Langham, Norfolk, a small village six miles from Walsingham. Grigby was one of those who had been arrested as part of the “Walsingham conspiracy” mentioned above, which is described in the article as:
“a plot to defend the shrine’s pending destruction with arms, that had been hatched among the peasants of the surrounding villages by Ralph Rogerson, a yeoman farmer who doubled as a lay chorister in the priory church. Unlike the principal conspirators, who were hanged drawn and quartered, Grigby had been allowed to return to his ministry...
“Grigby’s most prominent parishioners at Langham were the Calthorpes of Langham Hall, who resisted pressure to adopt the new Anglican faith, remaining recusants, (or secret Catholics). Another recusant family, the Rookwoods of Euston, Suffolk, inherited Langham Hall in 1555. The family was known to have attempted to hide at least one other image of Our Lady …In 1578, while hosting a visit by Queen Elizabeth, Edward Rookwood was arrested when an image of Our Lady of Euston was found in his possession, hidden in a hayrick. The statue was burned and Rookwood was imprisoned…”
The authors speculate, however, that “perhaps the authorities failed to notice an even more famous image also secreted in Langham Hall”…
The Elizabethan ballad “A Lament for Walsingham” expressed the desolation of the faithful of England at the destruction of the Shrine, (see post hereunder on this page for a reading of the poem);
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