3 - The new diocese of Gloucester (1540–1546)

Summary

Wherefore, considering that the Scite of the said late Monastery of St Peter of Gloucester, in which many famous Monuments of our renowned Ancestors, Kings of England, are erected, is a very fit and proper Place for erecting, instituting, and establishing an Episcopal See … We have decreed, and by these Presents We do decree the Scite of the said Monastery to be an Episcopal See, and to be created, erected, and established a Cathedral Church … And We also Will and Ordain … that our whole Town of Gloucester be from henceforth and for ever a City … And We do by these Presents make and ordain the said City and County [of Gloucester] to be the Diocese of Gloucester.

By the time the new diocese of Gloucester was created, official religious policy, so definitively Protestant in the county in the late 1530s, had begun to move toward a modified form of traditional doctrine. The last monastery had been dissolved in March 1540, and Thomas Cromwell, a leading force for the Protestantisation of England in the 1530s, had been beheaded in July of that same year. Furthermore, ‘The Act of Six Articles’ had been approved by Parliament in June 1539. All of this signified a swing back toward the old religion. However, the conservative trend was not unequivocal, as was demonstrated by the continued attempts to enforce ‘The Act for the Abrogation of Certain Holy Days’, and the injunctions and proclamations which ordered every parish church to obtain a vernacular Bible. The efforts to place English Bibles in every parish church began in 1536, with slightly modified orders being issued in 1538 and 1541.