ABSTRACT
When Henry VIII made himself Head of the Church, some schools became in title the King’s Schools, and were established by letters patent from the Crown. The Anglican Church took up the position of the Roman Church and asserted the old right of control either directly or indirectly— particularly as we have seen through the retention of licensing of teachers by the Bishop of the diocese, and by visitation of the schools by the Bishop. Accordingly, even in the schools established by private munificence, the provision is invariably made for direct instruction in the recognised national religion, and the Reformation politicians and ecclesiastics naturally used the schools for the training of future citizens as recruits in the service of the Reformed Church in its warfare against the old Church. Religious instruction therefore became as much a part of the curriculum after the Reformation as it was before, and the great fires of persecution under the Bloody Mary only intensified the strenuousness of the insistence on religious, not to say theological, instruction, especially in the direction of Calvinism, the theology which had permeated the thoughts of the English refugees at Geneva (during the Marian Persecution). On their return the refugees largely controlled the religious movements of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Modern Europe is said to have been begun by the splitting up of the spirit of individual nationality against the universal sway of a single Empire, and to have objectified itself in the power of the state as against the Church. But it is to be remembered that in the view of Calvin a religious system, with a definite theological cast, was a constituent part of his idea of a state. For generations, therefore, in the countries which came under his influence, the idea of a separate state was, in short, a separate theocracy. This view held a strong hold over England, at any rate up to the fall of the Commonwealth in England, and it is impossible to understand the history of the schools and their curricula unless it is fully recognised.
