"Crosse Keys and the Sword of Romulus": The Western Schism in English Protestant Polemic c. 1530-1603

In the fifth book of the final edition of his Actes and Monuments, John Foxe diverges from his life of John Wycliffe to discuss the “schismaticall wars” which raged between rival claimants to the papacy in Rome, Avignon and Pisa. This “pestilent & most miserable schisme", which lasted from 1378 to 1417, would serve in Foxe’s telling as a means by which Christian readers could “see and understand what difference is betweene these popes, and Christ and his Apostles”.  The former, seeing that their “crosse keyes could doe no good”, opted to take up “the sword of Romulus” and fight bloody wars for supremacy, while the latter, although they “did strive which shuld be the greater”, were “sharpely rebuked of our Saviour Christ, & were taught by him” a lesson in humility. Foxe was far from the only English Protestant author to assay an interpretation of these events.

Probably the most significant ecclesiastical crisis of the later Middle Ages, the Western Schism occupies a noteworthy, if relatively-little studied, place in the voluminous English Protestant polemical literature of the sixteenth century. Protestant partisans of various stripes sought to utilise accounts of this period of chaos and conflict within the Roman Catholic Church in a number of different ways to undermine contemporary Catholic cases for the legitimacy of the papal office, and to vitiate the Roman Church’s all-important claims of historic catholicity and harmony with the teachings of the Apostles and Church Fathers.

This paper seeks to detail the most prominent of the efforts by Protestant authors in the period 1530–1603 to use the Schism as a rhetorical weapon in interconfessional polemic, and to parse the literary strategies deployed by these writers to shape Protestant perceptions of the crisis. From this, broader conclusions will be drawn about how scholarship can better understand the broader English Protestant historiographies of the Middle Ages which emerged during the nation’s "Long Reformation".

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