way to the Church of England, nor did the performance of the Latin liturgy. Except for its repudiation of
the pope’s authority, the newly established national church did not at first differ much, doctrinally or
liturgically, from the “universal” one.
It was during the reign of Henry’s son, Edward VI, who became king at the age of nine and died six
years later, that the Church of England began to show real signs of doctrinal Protestantism. Henry’s loyal
Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, now asserted his own half-Lutheran, half-Calvinist
objections to the Catholic liturgy, chief among them being his widely shared antagonism toward the
idolatrous worship of the Virgin Mary, the very aspect of Catholic worship that, as we know, had
produced some of the greatest glories of fifteenth-and sixteenth-century polyphony, and especially in
England. It was at Cranmer’s instigation, in conjunction with Henry’s suppression of the monasteries, that
the notorious search-and-destroy missions against books of “Popish ditties”—particularly Marian votive
antiphons—took place, thanks to which so little early English polyphony survives. Under Edward, organs
were destroyed as well; English organ-building did not resume until the seventeenth century.
Cranmer also shared the hostility of many Catholic churchmen toward the impious overelaboration of
polyphonic music at the expense of the holy word, no doubt sharing Erasmus’s sarcastic view that the
attention of English monks was entirely taken up with music. He collaborated with a zealously anti-
Catholic composer named John Merbecke (d. ca. 1585) on a new English liturgy, with texts translated into
the vernacular and with strict limits placed on the style of the music. The Anglican ideal was an ascetic
polyphonic style more radically stripped down than anything ever imagined by the Council of Trent.
“Anglican chant” consists of chordal harmonizations of traditional chant, but a traditional chant that had
itself been rigorously purged of all melismas.
Cranmer and Merbecke’s first strike against the so-called Sarum (or Salisbury Cathedral) rite, the
gorgeous Catholic repertoire of the English church that Henry took such delight in showing off, came in
1544, with a book of stripped-down litanies in English. This was truly drab stuff, and Henry wouldn’t buy
it. Under Henry’s weak successor, the real development and stabilization of the Anglican liturgy got under
way.
The first collection of metrical psalms in English appeared in 1548, but no music attended it. The
need for new music became urgent that same year, though, when Edward VI, or rather Cranmer acting in
the boy-king’s name, issued an injunction finally abolishing the Sarum rite. English choirs, the statute
read, “shall from henceforth sing or say no Anthems of our lady or other saints but only of our lord, and
them not in Latin but choosing out the best and most sounding to Christian religion they shall turn the same
into English setting thereunto a plain and distinct note, for every syllable one.”^16
In 1549, Cranmer published the first Book of Common Prayer, a comprehensive translation of the
liturgy. It was accompanied by the Act of Uniformity, making its use mandatory, and consequently making
the celebration of the traditional Latin Mass a criminal act, grounds for persecution. Merbecke finally
followed up in 1550 with The Booke of Common Praier Noted, providing the only legal liturgical music
for the Church of England. These publications, while quickly superseded, set the tone for the Anglican
musical reform.