LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW - Brock University

80 LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW XV
It also happened that, being Protestant, they had their own difficulties with
both Pope and Emperor, and therefore wondered if they and England might
be of some mutual benefit to one another. To discuss the terms of a possible
alliance, they dispatched an embassy to London in 1534. Among the
ambassadors from Hamburg was, fortuitously as it would turn out, Robert
Barnes. 16
Barnes remained in England with this delegation into the next year,
meeting almost daily with prominent English bishops as terms of a possible
alliance were discussed. The negotiations eventually broke off without
success, in part because the Lutheran delegates insisted that any alliance be
built upon specifically theological agreement. Particularly troublesome to
traditionalist English bishops were an insistence upon the doctrine of
justification by faith alone and questions regarding sacramental theology,
two points to which we will have to return in a short while. Despite the
failure of these negotiations, Barnes seems at least to have proved his worth
as an effective middle-man for any future Anglo-Lutheran politics. Even
while the doctrinal conversations were still taking place, Henry asked Barnes
to stand ready for a mission to Denmark as his own ambassador to the
Danish King. This request marks the beginning of a sea change in Barnes’s
fortunes. No longer considered a renegade friar or a lapsed heretic, from
1535 to 1540 he was an employee of the English crown.
There is a great deal of available information concerning Barnes’s
activities in the next few years. Most of it concerns the more mundane
matters of international diplomacy, but a few highlights are worthy of
mention. In 1535 he returned to Wittenberg, this time with letters of
commendation that designate him as the King’s personal chaplain. 17 At the
end of the year he, Melanchthon, and others drew up a series of articles
known as the “Christmas Articles”, which outlined German conditions for
England’s entrance into the League of Smalcald, an alliance of Lutheran
states preparing for the possibility of armed conflict with the Emperor. 18
Early in the next year Barnes, Luther, Melanchthon, and others also
formulated what are now called the “Wittenberg Articles”. 19 In contrast to
the more political considerations of the Christmas Articles, these were a
series of specifically doctrinal statements upon which, it was hoped, England
and the Lutheran states could reach agreement. In 1538 Barnes is again
engaged in theological negotiations between England and the Lutherans, this
16 LP 7:871; 7:873; 7:874; 7:957; 7:1064; 8:121.
17 Ecclesiastical Memorials Relating Chiefly to Religion and the Reformation of it under
King Henry VIII, 3 vols, ed. J. Strype (London, 1721), 1/1:357.
18 For the articles in translation see LP 9:1016.
19 Documents of the English Reformation [hereinafter cited as Documents], ed. G. Bray
(Cambridge, 1994), 118-61.