I’ve been reading Diarmaid MacCulloch’s big, fat, excellent history, The Reformation. Near the end of the book, discussing divorce, he says that “Alone among Reformed Protestant polities, England did not introduce a divorce law, and that stemmed from a sheer series of accidents.” According to MacCulloch, Archbishop Cranmer had a divorce law all ready to go way back in 1553, but things were put on hold because King Edward VI was feeling poorly. Naturally, the Protestant-friendly Eddie died, to be replaced by that ravin’ Catholic, Bloody Mary, which put things further on hold. Elizabeth I took over in 1558, and lasted until 1603. According to MacCulloch, “the proposed canon law reform was the one major aspect [of the Protestant program developed during the reign of Edward VI] that she did not activate.”
Since Good Queen Bess had forty-five years to think about it, I’m guessing that she didn’t activate it because she didn’t want to, not because of any “accident.” It’s no secret that Elizabeth had a fondness for the Old Church. She didn’t trust the Papists because they listened to Rome, and she didn’t trust the Protestants because they listened to “God”—that is, to themselves. She wanted a Church that would listen to her.
After Elizabeth, as MacCulloch discusses in detail, the Anglican Church swung strongly away from Protestant enthusiasm, much to the rage of the Puritans, resulting in the English Civil War, if that’s what they call it these days. After the dust settled, some fifty years later, the Anglican Church wanted nothing to do with annulments, which stank of Jesuitical wire-pulling, but also wanted nothing to do “sensible” divorce, which stank of John Milton and republicanism (that is, no king).
“I have a pumpkin in each hand. Now I can ride!” exclaimed Abraham Lincoln, once he had maneuvered two rivals into his administration. The Anglican Church, with a pumpkin in each hand, could not afford to drop either, and so for hundreds of years Anglican marriage was for many a dungeon with no exit. But in the early days of the Twentieth Century it did allow a certain class of men to make a living as a “correspondent”—that is, a fake adulterous lover, immortalized, more or less, by Fred and Ginger in The Gay Divorcee. Correspondents supposedly wore “correspondent” shoes—flashy, two-toned jobs that were favored by Fred himself because they focused attention on his feet. So maybe Liz knew what she was doing after all.
