Married Clergy?
It had been a centuries-old practice for ordained clergy to take vows of celibacy. For a sixteenth century priest to break his vow and take a wife was a major act of rebellion. And so it was for women who married clergymen.
On June 13, 1525 a 42-year old defrocked Roman Catholic priest scandalously married a 26-year old nun. Martin Luther married Katharina von Bora. Katie reportedly had escaped from her convent with 11 other nuns in fish barrels. By all accounts, what started out as a marriage of convenience, grew into a very happy and affectionate union. Katie was a strong, graceful, and patient woman who drew out the best in her strong-headed German reformer husband. She bore six children, ran the household, organized the family finances, and grew much of what they ate and drank. She brewed their own beer (a practice that I personally would like to see revived!). Luther admired his wife's intellect, calling her "Doctora Lutherin." Luther came to love the book of Galatians, the Magna Carta of Christian liberty, which he called "my Katie von Bora."
Clergy in England began to marry in the 1530s even though official church policy prohibited it throughout Henry VIII’s reign. The 1539 Act of Six Articles declared that all existing clergy marriages were void, and announced that future marriages would be penalized as felonies.
Thomas Cranmer married a woman known only as “Joan” while he was a student at Cambridge University. Even though he wasn’t then ordained, because of his marriage he was required to stop his studies. He was able to return to the university only after Joan’s untimely death in childbirth. Cranmer was ordained sometime before 1520 and he held an important position in the king’s service when he met and secretly married Margaret in Germany in 1532. It was dangerous and a crime against canon law, and he would learn just how dangerous when he was chosen a few months later to be the Archbishop of Canterbury. Diarmaid MacCulloch describes Thomas Cranmer’s marriage to Margaret as a “watershed” moment in his thinking and a “drastic step” because of the risks involved in marriage for clergy. Margaret was living in Nuremberg in the household of her uncle Andreas Osiander, a Lutheran reformer, when she met Thomas. She would have been very familiar with Lutheran doctrine and the practice of clerical marriage. We do not know what influence Osiander or Margaret had on Cranmer, but we do know that he came to the conviction of justification by faith alone sometime in the 1530s, and no later than 1547-1548 he was settled in his understanding of how this central doctrine of Scripture was worked out in the sacraments. What we don’t know is just how much Osiander and his niece influenced Cranmer’s thinking. Margaret’s decision to marry Thomas, at the very least, meant that she was closely connected to the cause of Reformation. Church historian Rachel Basch points out that “there was little convenience in her choice, which meant leaving the freedom and safety of Lutheran Nuremberg to join Cranmer for an uncertain future in England, where the religious situation was much more volatile.” The awkward situation meant that Margaret had to stay in Germany when Cranmer returned to England to take up his new job, only to join him later to resume their strictly secret marriage. It is thought that she lived in the village of Hoath just about six miles from Canterbury. Cranmer did not openly acknowledge his marriage to Margaret until Henry died and Edward ascended to the throne.
When Edward VI became King, many people expected that the prohibition of clergy marriages would be ended, but the change in laws took two years to get through the House of Lords, passing with a slim majority in February 1549. There was a lot of hostility lobbed at married clergy, and when Mary Tudor succeeded Edward on the throne, she completely reversed Edward’s Protestant ways and viciously punished those who refused to cede to the Roman Catholic Church and the pope.
When the locus of authority changed from man-made traditions to the primacy of Holy Scripture, clergy were permitted to marry because the Bible describes marriage as an honorable estate to live out ones Christian vocation. The legalization of clergy marriage in England has been described as one of the most revolutionary aspects of the Reformation. It was certainly an act and picture of rebellion for the reformers, but also an enormously costly decision for their wives. “Their extraordinary decisions to marry a clergyman in such turbulent times, and their responses to the crisis posed by Mary I’s accession and reintroduction of Roman Catholicism, these women all made unique contributions to the early English Reformation, and must be regarded as ‘agents of the Reformation’ in their own right” (Basch). Protestant conviction played an important role in the sacrifices that were required of the reformers, and no less for their wives. “In marrying evangelical ministers, they tied themselves to the fate of the reformist cause, simultaneously becoming living embodiments of it” (Basch).
References used:
“Agents of Reformation: Margaret Cranmer, Anne Hooper and Elizabeth Coverdale,” Rachel Basch (Reformation Reputations: The Power of the Individual in English History, Ed. David J. Crankshaw and George W.C. Gross)
Thomas Cranmer, Diarmaid MacCulloch
“Sanctified by the believing spouse: women, men and the marital yoke in the early Reformation,” Susan Wabuda (The Beginnings of English Protestantism, Ed. Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie)