ALTERATION
A Glass with a Small Neck
THE REIGN OF Elizabeth began with a declaration that nothing had changed. On the morning of Mary’s death, a proclamation announcing the Queen’s succession was read at Westminster, and at the Great Cross at Cheapside, and despatched to sheriffs in every county. It commanded Elizabeth’s new subjects not to attempt ‘breach, alteration, or change of any order or usage presently established within this our realm’.
William Cecil, who drafted the proclamation, had long been planning this moment. He was determined for nothing to go wrong, and no one to rock the boat. Cecil was confirmed as the new Queen’s principal secretary at a meeting of the Privy Council at Hatfield on Sunday 20 November. Most of the old members were politely dismissed. ‘A multitude’, Elizabeth declared, ‘doth rather make discord and confusion than good counsel.’ The new Council was a smaller, more coherent group than the old, many of its members ‘Edwardians’, and friends and allies of Cecil. Paget’s services were not required. The Lord Chancellor, Archbishop Heath, continued for a short while, but the Council then became, unprecedentedly, an entirely lay body of advisors.
While the Council met for the first time, Elizabeth’s almoner, William Bill, preached at Paul’s Cross on the theme of the hour: quiet and orderliness. The Catholic chronicler Henry Machyn considered it ‘a godly sermon’, but others were unpersuaded. The following Sunday, the bishop of Chichester, John Christopherson, managed to slip through the government net, and denounce Bill from the same pulpit: ‘Believe not this new doctrine; it is not the gospel, but a new invention of new men and heretics.’ Christopherson was placed under arrest: an early portent of trouble with the bishops.1
Once again, it took about a week for news of a royal death to percolate through to the parishes. Thomas Butler of Much Wenlock heard it on St Catherine’s Day, 25 November, direct from the sheriff of Shropshire, Richard Newport. Butler was on his way to say mass, and at the offertory came down from the altar to say, ‘friends, ye shall pray for the prosperous estate of our most noble Queen Elizabeth’. He repeated the message at mass the following Sunday, ‘having upon me the best cope, called St Milburga’s cope’.
The old service of the mass, and the old vestments of the priests, seemed under no immediate threat. Christopher d’Assonleville, envoy of the Netherlands government, reported on 25 November that Elizabeth ‘has so far continued to hear mass and vespers, as she used formerly to do’. D’Assonleville was told by a person ‘in a position to know’ that the Queen’s intention was to settle religion where it had been in 1539, ‘when the forms of the ancient religion were followed, except as regards the power of the Pope’. Someone was spinning him a line. An ambiguity about precise intentions, and a care not to alarm foreign Catholic observers, were hallmarks of the new government’s public statements. Edward VI’s pronouncements, as well as the first proclamation of Mary, designated the monarch ‘supreme head’. Elizabeth, in her accession statement, called herself ‘Defender of the faith, etc.’ – an evasively tactful formula first used by her father in 1543 for securing a treaty of alliance with Charles V.2 Charles had died, in secluded retirement in a Spanish monastery, two months before Elizabeth’s accession. But his son Philip, King of Spain and former King of England, was watching developments with intense interest.
Through to the end of December, the Mantuan envoy signing himself Il Schifanoya cheerfully believed that ‘matters of religion would continue in the accustomed manner’. The bishops were less sanguine. On 14 December, Mary was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey, with the full liturgical resources of Abbot Feckenham’s Benedictine community. The funeral sermon was preached by the bishop of Winchester, John White. His panegyric involved pious reflections on two, apparently contradictory, passages from the Book of Ecclesiastes: ‘I can commend the state of the dead above the state of the living’, and ‘a living dog is better than a dead lion’.
Elizabeth’s affronted suspicion that these incongruous beasts were symbols for herself and Mary landed White under temporary house arrest. There was nothing ambiguous, however, about White’s praise of the late Queen for asking herself, ‘How can I, a woman, be Head of the Church, who by scripture am forbidden to speak in the church?’ – and for recognizing she could not. Nor about his dark prognostications for the immediate future: ‘I warn you, the wolves be coming out of Geneva, and other places in Germany.’3
They were. On the day after Mary’s funeral, eleven of the leading Genevan exiles, including Knox, Goodman, Coverdale and Whittingham, wrote to their estranged brethren in Frankfurt, hoping that ‘whatsoever offence hath been heretofore either taken or given, it may so cease and be forgotten’. There was a catch: unity would come when arguments ceased over ‘superfluous ceremonies, or other like trifles from which God of his mercy hath delivered us’. For their part, the Frankfurters fully intended to submit themselves to ‘such orders as shall be established by authority’, and urged the Geneva congregation to do the same. But the visions for the future were not so very different. The Frankfurt congregation likewise hoped that true religion would not be ‘burdened with unprofitable ceremonies’. If so it proved, they would ‘brotherly join with you to be suitors for the reformation and abolishing of the same’.4 The returning exiles, practical experts in doctrine and worship, had firm opinions about the forms the religious settlement should take.
Yet the exiles, trickling home over the winter of 1558–9, were not the ones running the government, or co-ordinating plans for the Parliament scheduled to meet in January. At home, Protestant voices were more cautious. Nicholas Throckmorton advised the Queen that while her authority took root, ‘it shall not be meet that either the old or the new shall fully understand what you mean’ – a strategy in which the Nicodemite Elizabeth needed little coaching. ‘Dissimulation’ was also the tactic suggested by Richard Goodrich, a leading Protestant lawyer, in a memorial submitted at Cecil’s request in early December. Mindful of the fate of King John, Goodrich advised that nothing rash be attempted against the Pope, even at the coming Parliament. It would for now be enough to stop heresy prosecutions, and permit use of the Henrician Litany. Meanwhile, at her private masses, Elizabeth could, if she wished, discreetly introduce communion in two kinds, and omit the elevation.
Another memorial-writer, the former Edwardian clerk to the council, Armagil Waad, pointed to the dangers of ‘alteration in religion, especially in the beginning of a prince’s reign’. In a deeply divided country, too much change, too quickly, could prove disastrous:
[G]lasses with small necks, if you pour into them any liquor suddenly or violently, will not be so filled, but refuse to receive that same that you would pour into them. Howbeit, if you instil water into them by a little and little, they are soon replenished.5
William Cecil contemplated this advice – to soft-pedal, to compromise, to delay – and at an early stage decided boldly to ignore it. The proof is in a document, drawn up around the end of 1558, and almost certainly Cecil’s work. It was titled, unambiguously, ‘The Device for the Alteration of Religion’, and was a manifesto for swift and decisive change, though tempered by careful weighing of threats and opportunities. It began in question and answer: ‘When the alteration shall first be attempted? At the next Parliament … for the sooner that religion is restored, God is the more glorified, and, as we trust, will be more merciful unto us, and better save and defend her Highness from all dangers.’
The dangers were many, and, in the short term at least, so the ‘Device’ suggested, likely to increase. The Pope might excommunicate the Queen, thus encouraging foreign powers such as France (with whom England was still at war) ‘to fight against us not only as enemies but as heretics’. Scotland was the potential gateway for French invasion, while Ireland, where priests were ‘addicted to Rome’, would prove harder than ever to govern. In England, many would be ‘very much discontented’. Opposition was expected, not just from Catholics, but from zealots objecting to any retention of old ceremonies, and scorning the alteration as ‘cloaked papistry, or a mingle-mangle’.
‘What remedy for these matters?’ The Device’s high idealism was underpinned by low Machiavellian cunning. Peace should be pursued with Scotland and France, while efforts were made to undermine the stability of both states by encouraging dissident Protestants there. Remedies for Ireland were less specific: ‘some expense of money’. Domestically, it was a time to purge. In both central and local government, anyone promoted ‘only or chiefly for being of the Popes’ religion’ must go. Leaving them in place would confirm ‘wavering papists’ in error, and discourage people who were ‘but half inclined to that alteration’. Power at all levels must rest in the hands of men ‘known to be sure in religion’. If that meant promoting justices of the peace ‘meaner in substance and younger in years’, then so be it.
Bishops and popish clergy should be charged with praemunire – by this means ‘her Majesty’s necessity of money may be somewhat relieved’. None were to be pardoned till they ‘abjure the Pope of Rome, and conform themselves to the new alteration’. For the sake of order, there should be a few sharp, exemplary punishments for those that ‘could be content to have religion altered, but would have it go too far’.
The chief substance of alteration must be a Book of Common Prayer to displace the mass. A text, prepared by committee, was to be cleared with the Queen and brought before Parliament. Some of the names proposed were men, like Cecil himself, who spent Mary’s reign in some condition of outward conformity: Sir Thomas Smith, William Bill, William May, former dean of St Paul’s, and a one-time chaplain of Anne Boleyn, Matthew Parker, like Bill, a former vice-chancellor of Cambridge. The others were former exiles of the Strassburg–Frankfurt axis: Richard Cox, Edmund Grindal, David Whitehead, James Pilkington.6
It is not certain the committee convened in precisely this form, but its suggested membership is an indication of how the new regime regarded itself. Everyone on the list was a convinced Protestant, nearly all with strong links to Cambridge. It was here that the evangelical faith of Cecil and others had been forged in the later years of Henry, before being brought in Edward’s reign to a mature self-understanding under the influence of Cranmer and Bucer. There were no Henrician Catholics, and no ‘Genevans’.
Elizabeth herself gave the first clear signal of alteration, at mass on Christmas Day. The celebrant was the bishop of Carlisle, Owen Oglethorpe, and before the service started, Elizabeth sent for him, and told him to omit the elevation of the host. Oglethorpe replied, according to Feria, ‘that Her Majesty was mistress of his body and life, but not of his conscience’. The version told to the Venetian ambassador was less confrontational: ‘thus had he learnt the mass, and she must pardon him as he could not do otherwise’. Either way, it is hard to imagine any bishop (Fisher excepted) speaking to Henry VIII like this. But Elizabeth had her conscience too, and finally she could afford to air it in public. After the reading of the Gospel, and before the start of the consecration, the Queen rose and walked out of the chapel.
This was more than a matter of aesthetic liturgical preference. Elevation and adoration of the host was the visible face of transubstantiation; the Queen was openly declaring she did not believe in the doctrine. In Mary’s reign, her action would have instigated proceedings for heresy. Within weeks, it was being reported right across Europe. On 28 December, Feast of the Holy Innocents, Elizabeth heard mass again, with a different celebrant, and this time the elevation was left out.7
Evangelicals responded to the accession of Elizabeth just as Catholics did to that of Mary: with jubilant performance of still forbidden forms of worship. But, unlike her sister, Elizabeth was not prepared to countenance any pre-emptive popular Reformation during a period of tense transition. A proclamation of 27 December forbad preaching by persons ‘having in times past the office of ministry in the Church’ – code for the returning exiles. The proclamation also prohibited celebration of forms of worship other than that ‘already used and by law received’ – i.e. the Latin mass – though an exception was made for the English Litany, already in use in the Chapel Royal. To permit otherwise would encourage ‘unfruitful dispute in matters of religion’.
The preaching ban was bad enough. But for evangelicals who saw in the mass only idolatry and abomination, even its temporary retention was an intolerable burden. Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk, still abroad in the early part of 1559, let Cecil know exactly how unimpressed she was by reports that the Queen ‘tarried but the Gospel’. When it came to the mass, ‘there is no part of it good’. The underground London congregation emerged into the open in November 1558, but as a result of the December proclamation it went back to meeting in private houses as a church-within-a-church. When communion was celebrated – so Thomas Lever reported to Bullinger – ‘no strangers were admitted, except such as had been kept pure from popery’. Backsliders were accepted, but only after humble acknowledgement of their offence before the entire assembly. Lever witnessed ‘many returning with tears’.
Working out how to acknowledge, and to expiate, the sins of Mary’s reign was to be a painful problem for the victorious but wounded Protestant community. The distinctly conditional obedience Elizabeth received from Bishop Oglethorpe was mirrored in the attitudes of some of the returning exiles. Deciding the proclamation ‘was not agreeable to the command and earnest injunction of Paul, to preach the Word of God in season and out’, Lever and other ministers began delivering sermons in various London churches, unlawful gatherings to which ‘a numerous audience eagerly flocked’.8
There was both mass and sermon at Elizabeth’s coronation on 15 January 1559. It was preceded, on 14 January, by a ceremonial procession into the City, with all the accustomed street pageants. At the Little Conduit in Cheapside, just as at Philip and Mary’s entry of 1554, a figure of Truth stepped forward carrying a bible; this time, ‘Word of Truth’ rather than ‘Verbum Dei’. Elizabeth ostentatiously called for the book, ‘at the receipt whereof, how reverently did she with both hands take it, kiss it, and lay it upon her breast’.9 It was a signal of good faith to Protestant subjects, and a pointed riposte to the objections Gardiner made to the presence of her father’s vernacular bible in the pageant of 1554 (see p. 378).
The coronation itself, in the still monastic church of Westminster Abbey, was a messier affair. There were difficulties about who should crown the Queen. The archbishop of Canterbury was dead, and the local bishop, Bonner of London, was politically unacceptable. The government hoped the other archbishop, the emollient Nicholas Heath of York, might be willing to do it, but he declined. Responsibility devolved, once again, to the relatively junior Oglethorpe of Carlisle.
Contemporary accounts of the ceremony are confused and contradictory. Oglethorpe probably performed the coronation ritual but not the accompanying mass. Elizabeth was determined there should be no elevation, and the dean of the Chapel Royal, George Carew, an Edwardian and Marian conformist, was happy to oblige. There was a further departure from precedent, planned or accidental. Oglethorpe did not have the text of the coronation oath to administer to the Queen, and William Cecil, layman and known heretic, stepped forward to hand it to the bishop. Ambassador Feria, fearing heterodox innovations, stayed away from the coronation; he must have felt he made the right decision.10
Parliamentary Problems
Ten days later, Elizabeth returned to Westminster Abbey for the state opening of Parliament. It was 25 January, Feast of the Conversion of St Paul. Three years earlier, this was the occasion for public celebrations of England’s union with Rome. No one now doubted the aim of the Parliament was to bring about a divorce.
Parliamentary proceedings conventionally began with a mass of the Holy Ghost, an appropriate invocation of a hoped-for spirit of wisdom. But in 1559, the mass was said early in the morning, without elevation, and when parliamentarians convened in the Abbey, it was to hear a sermon. Elizabeth was greeted at the door by Abbot Feckenham and his robed brethren, bearing their processional candles. In what was surely a pre-meditated snub, a token of her disdain for ‘superstition’, the Queen called out, ‘Away with those torches, for we see very well.’ She had brought her own choristers, who sang that token of her discreet Marian defiance, the Litany in English, as she processed into the Abbey.
Further humiliation for the Benedictine community followed, in a sermon, preached over the course of a vehement hour and a half, by the recently returned Richard Cox. The monks deserved punishment for their impious role in the burning of poor innocents ‘under pretext of heresy’. This was perhaps a jab at Feckenham, active, and effective, in campaigns to persuade heresy suspects to recant. Elizabeth herself, Cox declared, was providentially chosen to repudiate past iniquities, to destroy images, and cleanse the churches of idolatry.11
Parliamentary business got under way with the opening speech of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Cecil’s brother-in-law. Bacon was successor to Nicholas Heath, though, with a sense of social propriety exceeding her father’s, Elizabeth decided the common-born lawyer should be only Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, rather than Lord Chancellor. Bacon announced what all knew already: that the first and chief matter before Parliament was making of laws for the ‘uniting of the people of this realm into a uniform order of religion’.12
It was as much the throwing down of a challenge as the announcement of a legislative programme. The Lords, where twenty bishops sat, along with Abbot Feckenham, was known to be opposed to religious change. The mood of the Commons was harder to read. Some Marian exiles managed to get home in time to be elected, but their numbers were small, fewer than a dozen in an assembly of around 400. There were rock-hard Catholics too, such as the heretic-hunter John Story, chosen for a borough, Downton in Wiltshire, controlled by the redoubtable Bishop White of Winchester. Mary’s last Parliament was automatically dissolved on her death in November 1558, and only about a quarter of the former MPs were returned again in January. There is little evidence the government sought systematically to ‘fix’ the election, yet local patrons and electors may have felt it was sensible to choose representatives who were not blatantly at odds with the new government’s thinking.13
One item of business was firmly on the Commons’ agenda, if not on the Queen’s. Very early in the session, Parliament petitioned Elizabeth, as it had Mary, to marry and settle the succession. Candidates were already lining up. The brother of the King of Denmark was spoken of, though Feria deviously tried to spoil his chances by spreading the rumour among councillors he was in fact ‘a very good Catholic’, rather than a heretic. It was another, and genuinely good Catholic, his master Philip II, whose suit Feria advocated. The attraction of this marriage to the Spanish was evident – it would keep England in the Habsburg orbit, and out of the French one. Feria reminded Elizabeth of the ominous claims of ‘the Queen Dauphine’, her cousin, Mary of Scotland.
The Queen, mindful of Throckmorton’s advice to keep her cards close to her chest, was not exactly saying no, though a repeat performance of the Spanish Match would have horrified MPs, and Elizabeth surely did not seriously consider it. Replying in person to the parliamentary petition, Elizabeth was guarded: she had no inclination to marry, but, if that were to change, she assured them she would do nothing ‘wherewith the realm may or shall have just cause to be discontented’. That she referred to a coronation pledge to be married only to one husband, England, and held out a ring as a token of her fidelity to the kingdom, is likely a fanciful later version of the words Elizabeth actually used. The Queen was not ruling marriage out, either as a diplomatic strategy or as a matter of private inclinations. Those inclinations, about which gossip was starting to spread, leaned towards her Master of the Horse, Robert Dudley, a younger son of the late Duke of Northumberland. Here, the principal problem was not so much that Dudley was the son (and grandson) of an unpopular convicted traitor; rather that he had a wife already.14
Anthony Cooke – MP for Essex, former exile in Strassburg, and father of five remarkable daughters, one married to William Cecil, another to Nicholas Bacon – wrote on 12 February to Peter Martyr: ‘We are now busy in Parliament about expelling the tyranny of the Pope, and restoring the royal authority, and re-establishing true religion. But we are moving far too slowly.’15 It was to be a recurrent refrain.
A bill to restore royal supremacy was given its first reading in the Commons on 9 February, and vehemently opposed by some Catholic MPs. John Story reportedly said it was a pity Elizabeth had not been executed, as he recommended to Queen Mary. Two other bills, one for ‘order of service and ministers’ and one for ‘the book of common prayer and ministration of the sacraments’, were introduced on 15 and 16 February. The exact content of these bills is unknown, but almost certainly they were intended to restore the Edwardian Ordinal and a slightly revised version of the 1552 Prayer Book. The committee envisaged in the ‘Device for the Alteration’ had evidently completed its work, and the survival of a printed copy of a new prayer book, bearing signatures of privy councillors probably added in January 1559, suggests that from the outset a restoration of the 1552 liturgy, not of the more conservative 1549 one, was what the Queen and her ministers had set their minds on.16
In parallel with these steps, the government sponsored a lively propaganda campaign in favour of ‘alteration’. The Privy Council ordered arrests of unlicensed preachers, Catholic and Protestant, in the early months of 1559, but the traditional course of Lenten sermons at court was preached by a distinguished company of officially approved former exiles and prominent Edwardians: Cox, Parker, Scory, Whitehead, Grindal, Sandys. Ash Wednesday in 1559 fell on 8 February, and on the day before the introduction of the supremacy bill, Parliament was adjourned so that all could attend Cox’s sermon in the Whitehall Palace courtyard. Il Schifanoya was there, along with, he reckoned, more than 5,000 others. But the Italian heard ‘so much evil of the Pope, of the bishops, of the prelates, of the regulars, of the Church, of the mass, and finally of our entire faith’ that he resolved to stop attending court sermons.17
By 21 February, the three reform measures had been rolled together into a single bill for Supremacy and Uniformity. This passed in the Commons, but encountered difficulties on being sent to the Lords. At its second reading on 13 March, a succession of Lords Spiritual lined up to offer impassioned arguments for papal supremacy. Their resolve was bolstered by articles drawn up by both houses of Convocation. In addition to affirming papal supremacy, Convocation asserted the real presence of Christ’s natural body in the eucharist; transubstantiation as the means of this; and the mass as a sacrificial offering. These were the very articles Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley were required to respond to at the Oxford disputation of April 1554 – further evidence that the Prayer Book just approved by the Commons was substantially that of 1552, which the framers of the Marian debate set their sights against.
In the Lords, Cuthbert Scott, bishop of Chester, argued that faith ‘is maintained and continued by no one thing so much as by unity’. Christ himself made provision for this in the papacy, praying ‘there shall be one pastor and one sheepfold’. It was not a matter of loyalty to any individual, for, as Archbishop Heath ruefully conceded, Paul IV had proved ‘a very austere, stern father unto us’. But forsaking communion with Rome meant forsaking all General Councils, all ecclesiastical laws, all agreement with other princes, all unity of Christ’s Church: ‘By leaping out of Peter’s ship, we hazard ourselves to be overwhelmed and drowned in the waters of schism, sects and divisions.’
Scott and Heath, like other bishops opposing the measure, were old Henricians, one-time advocates of the royal supremacy. Their defiance of the wishes of the crown, in support of so uncongenial a pastor as Paul IV, underlines a profound shift in Catholic thinking, under the pressures of the Edwardian schism, and the influence of Cardinal Pole. It now seemed quite obvious to Heath that Henry VIII was the first ‘that ever took upon him the title of supremacy’, an innovation rejected by European Protestants and Catholics alike. If Henry was right, then Herod must have been supreme head of the Church at Jerusalem, and Nero supreme head at Rome – most likely this was an allusion to the confusions and concessions of the incarcerated Cranmer (see p. 397).18
A lay lord, and former Marian councillor, Lord Montagu, likewise spoke fervently against the bill. He agreed with the bishops, he said, not on their simple say-so, ‘but because they teach me the ancient faith of the Fathers, delivered and received from hand to hand by continual succession of all bishops in the Church of Christ’. Montagu, a practical man, saw concrete dangers in severing ties with Rome: the risk of domestic instability, and the proximity of two ‘potent enemies’ (Scotland and France) – concerns ironically similar to those of Cecil’s ‘Device’. A couple of notable conservatives, the Earls of Arundel and Derby, were absent from the debates, on account of (possibly feigned) illness, but some other noblemen – the Earl of Pembroke, the Earl of Shrewsbury, Lord Hastings – stood firmly with the bishops.19
Most nobles did vote for the supremacy bill, which the Lords passed on 18 March and sent back to the Commons. But over the preceding days they had amended it out of recognition. Reform of worship was stripped out; the mass remained, with addition, as in 1547, of provision for communion in two kinds. Papal authority was removed, but rather than granting the title of supreme head to the Queen, the revised bill merely said she could adopt it if she chose to.20
For a flagship legislative programme, it was a crash onto the rocks without any recent precedent – exceeding even the difficulties Mary encountered in 1554. The government scrambled to rescue what it could from the wreckage. On 22 March a proclamation was printed, making clear that communion in two kinds would be allowed at Easter, even though no other change to the form of service ‘can presently be established by any law’. Another casualty of the Lords’ massacring of the bill was the repeal of the Marian heresy laws. The Council had ordered prosecutions to cease, but evangelicals remained legally exposed, and the Commons hurriedly voted for a protective measure declaring ‘no person shall be punished for using the religion used in King Edward’s last year’.21
Observers expected Elizabeth would come to Westminster on 24 March, give her royal assent to the supremacy act and other legislation, and dissolve Parliament. Instead, she conspicuously withheld assent, and instructed Parliament to reconvene after Easter, on 3 April.
Supremacy and Uniformity
Feria thought this was a last-minute change of plan, and perhaps it was. But reasons had been accumulating for Elizabeth and her ministers to hold their nerve, and not to settle for, in effect, a return to the religious settlement of Henry VIII. In part, it was due to confirmation that there was to be peace with France (and Scotland): the settlement formalized at the start of April 1559 as the twin Anglo-French and Franco-Spanish Treaties of Cateau-Cambrésis. Elizabeth was anxious not to upset the Spanish while the complex three-way discussions were under way. But she had steeled herself to make the necessary major concession – Calais, at least temporarily, must remain in French hands.
Anticipating imminent news of a successful conclusion to the negotiations, Elizabeth met with Feria on the evening of Tuesday 14 March in a decidedly skittish mood. She announced, finally, that she could not marry Philip: it was because ‘she was a heretic’. This was a word only ever directed towards other people, and Feria was astonished to hear Elizabeth apply it to herself. Almost as much from gallantry as diplomatic politesse, he found himself saying he ‘did not consider she was heretical’, though adding, pointedly, that he could not bring himself to believe she would sanction what was being discussed in Parliament. Elizabeth, however, ‘kept repeating to me that she was heretical and so consequently could not marry your majesty’ – an ironic compliment to Philip’s supposedly immutable religious principles. Elizabeth, it seemed, was committed to breaking with Rome and to defying the ‘poltroon’ bishops. She assured Feria, however, that ‘she would not take the title of Head of the Church’; a pledge which, it would shortly become clear, was not exactly an outright lie.22
The other reason for prolonging the Parliament was a government decision to tackle the poltroon bishops head on. The method was a tried and tested one, almost a cliché: a formal religious disputation. It was clearly decided upon before 20 March, when John Jewel wrote to Peter Martyr with details of the agenda and participants, including himself. Perhaps because he had just endured a gruelling fifty-seven-day journey home from Zürich, Jewel was in truculent mood, complaining that in the Lords, with no Protestant divines to expose their errors, the bishops ‘reign as sole monarchs in the midst of ignorant and weak men’. He was appreciative of Elizabeth’s support for ‘our cause’, yet complained she was ‘wonderfully afraid of allowing any innovations’, in part due to the influence of Feria. Things were moving, ‘though somewhat more slowly than we could wish’.
Jewel was disarmingly frank about the reason for the disputation: so ‘our bishops may have no ground of complaint that they are put down only by power and authority of law’. The Catholic disputants – Bishops White, Baines, Scott, Oglethorpe and Watson, along with William Chedsey, Henry Cole, Lord Montagu’s chaplain Alban Langdale, and the prolocutor of an intransigent lower house of Convocation, Nicholas Harpsfield – had no chance of emerging victorious from the contest staged in Westminster Abbey on 31 March, under the presidency of Lord Keeper Bacon. Ranged against them was a phalanx of former exiles: Cox, Scory, Whitehead, Grindal, Sandys (all fresh from the Lent pulpit at Whitehall), John Aylmer, Robert Horne and Jewel, with one non-exile, Edmund Guest, a veteran of the disputations of Edwardian Cambridge. It was to be a grand public spectacle: along with privy councillors and Members of Parliament, ‘a great number of all sorts of people attended’.
Three propositions were tabled: that it was against the Word of God, and the practice of the early Church, to use any language but the vernacular for public worship; that every national Church possessed authority to order its own rites and ceremonies; that the sacrificial character of the mass was unprovable by scripture. These were the fundamental issues under consideration in Parliament, but the debate soon collapsed into acrimonious procedural argument.
The bishops’ requests to conduct discussion in Latin, and in writing, were turned down, and at close of debate on the first day they were denied the chance to offer rebuttal to the Protestants’ statement on vernacular prayers. They expected an opportunity to do so at the start of the second day, and when Bacon insisted on moving straight to the next proposition, Bishop White refused to concede, and proceedings ended in confusion. Later that day, the Privy Council ordered White and Watson arrested. They were sent to the Tower, and their houses and papers were searched – probably for evidence the bishops were planning to excommunicate the Queen.
The government rapidly got its own version of events into print: a pamphlet which claimed that Elizabeth arranged the disputation for a free exchange of opinions intended to lead to ‘some good and charitable agreement’, and which explained ‘the breaking up of the said conference by default and contempt of certain bishops’.23
New bills of supremacy and uniformity were now brought before the reconvened Parliament. The supremacy bill contained one small but significant alteration. The Queen was to be ‘Supreme Governor’ of the Church, rather than supreme head, and all clergy and royal office-holders were to swear an oath recognizing her as such. The change of name was a careful study in ambiguity, hinting that the monarch would not interfere with spiritual matters while not actually inhibiting her from exercising the exact same authority as her father and brother. Catholics may have found it marginally less offensive than the Henrician title, which holy martyrs died resisting, but since the act explicitly repudiated the authority of Rome, it is doubtful the formula was designed principally with their hurt feelings in mind.
It was, in fact, a necessary concession to the Queen’s more fervent Protestant supporters. Some were mindful that Calvin had described Henry VIII’s supreme headship as ‘blasphemy’. But a vein of English Protestant unease about the title can be traced back to Tyndale, and the experience of exile and self-governance had weakened the emotional connection to it that was felt by evangelicals of Cranmer’s generation. ‘All scripture,’ Thomas Sampson stated to Peter Martyr in December 1558, nervous about the required terms of membership for the restored English Church, ‘seems to assign the title of head of the Church to Christ alone.’ Anthony Gilby, preparing his return from Geneva, was less circuitous: Henry VIII, ‘this monstrous boar’, committed treason in ‘displacing Christ, our only Head’. Five months later, Jewel reassured Bullinger that the Queen was unwilling to be called ‘head’ because she seriously believed this honour ‘cannot belong to any human being soever’. Edwin Sandys told Parker at the end of April 1559 that it was Thomas Lever who ‘wisely put such a scruple in the Queen’s head’.24
There was another consideration: the Queen’s sex. Bishop White, in his funeral sermon for Mary, openly denounced a woman’s claim to be head of the Church and the smell of Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet, condemning female rule as inherently ungodly, hung heavily in the air. It was not a moment to give further ammunition to critics of queenship, particularly when some of its supposed champions seemed to lack the courage of their own convictions. John Aylmer, one of the Westminster disputants, and a former exile in numerous European locales, composed a riposte to Knox, published in the crucial month of April 1559. Its gist was that Elizabeth was a providential exception to the generality of women, who were ‘weak in nature, feeble in body, soft in courage, unskilful in practise, not terrible to the enemy’. God, ‘for some secret purpose’, had simply broken his own rules. In any case, in England it was not ‘so dangerous a matter to have a woman ruler as men take it to be’: her power was constrained by laws, by Parliament, and by a generous buffer-zone of dependable male counsel.25
Yet the Queen’s cautious respect for legal forms was precisely what some leading Protestants were finding intensely frustrating. On 14 April, the day the supremacy bill returned to the Lords, Jewel complained to Peter Martyr of Elizabeth’s reluctance to abolish the mass ‘without the sanction of law’. If she ‘would but banish it from her private chapel, the whole thing might be easily got rid of’.
Protestant impatience was stretched to breaking point by Easter of 1559. At the end of March, the Privy Council ordered a search for perpetrators of ‘an outrageous disorder’ at Bow Church, London: ‘the pulling down of images and the sacrament, and defacing the vestments and books’. In the first week of April, Henry Machyn reported, with mingled fascination and distaste, the details of a funeral at St Thomas of Acre in Cheapside: ‘a great company of people’; ‘neither singing nor saying till they came to the grave’; ‘a collect in English’; ‘the new preachers in their gowns like laymen’.
Conservative religion in London was far from cowed. On 25 April, St Mark’s Day, Machyn noted various places where the people ‘went with their banners abroad in their parish, singing in Latin Kyrie Eleison after the old fashion’. But such demonstrations of traditional piety were an invitation to violent evangelical counter-measures. At St Paul’s, on Ascension Day, an apprentice seized the processional cross from its bearer, and smashed it to pieces on the ground in front of the large company of participants. He picked up and took off with him the detached figure of Christ, telling them ‘he was carrying away the devil’s guts’.26
The supremacy bill cleared both houses of Parliament by the end of April. There were some amendments at committee stage in the Lords. Most significant was a proviso that no ecclesiastical commissioners appointed by the crown could categorize as heresy anything not judged to be so by scripture, the first four General Councils, any other General Council, or any future Parliament. It was a broad remit, and what was, or was not, condemned by scripture was a perennially moot point. But conservatives were being reassured that their belief in the mass and sacraments, or even in the power of the Pope, could not easily be construed as heresy under the law.
The supremacy bill also included repeal of the Marian heresy laws, and kept the concession for communion in two kinds. That belonged more naturally in the uniformity bill, and its retention suggests that the government anticipated a hard fight over worship and ceremony: there would be a sliver of meaningful reform, even if the uniformity bill failed to pass.27
That almost happened. Once more, the Lords Spiritual stirred themselves to flights of impassioned oratory. At the bill’s third reading, on 28 April, Bishop Scott argued that the doctrine and religion the bill proposed to abolish were ones ‘which our fathers were born, brought up and lived in, and have professed here in this realm without any alteration and change by the space of ten hundred years and more’. Against this, one Act of Parliament was ‘but a weak staff to lean unto’.
Contrasts between immemorial faith and flighty innovation equally coloured the arguments of Abbot Feckenham. Truth was discernible by a three-fold test: antiquity of usage, of all men, in all places; internal coherence; ability to breed quiet and obedience. The religion set forth in the Prayer Book was a triple failure. It was hitherto observed only in England, only in Edward’s reign, and only for that reign’s last two years. It was also ‘changeable and variable’. Feckenham pointed to contrasts between the first and second Prayer Books of Edward, to broader disagreements between followers of Luther and Zwingli, and to the fact that both Cranmer and Ridley seemed at various times to be upholders of real presence. He also invited his audience to contemplate ‘the sudden mutation of the subjects of this realm since the death of good Queen Mary’. Before, there had been obedience to the law, and respect for images and places of worship. Now, under the influence of ‘preachers and scaffold players of this new religion, all things are changed and turned upside down, notwithstanding the Queen’s Highness’s most godly proclamation made to the contrary’.28
When votes were taken, the bill passed: twenty-one to eighteen. It might easily have been different. White and Watson were in the Tower. The now ancient Tunstall of Durham was excused from attending Parliament, and for some reason Gilbert Bourne of Bath and Wells chose not to. Much to his chagrin, no summons was sent to Pole’s protégé, Thomas Goldwell of St Asaph. Feckenham, despite his eloquence in the debate, was mysteriously absent from the vote. Several conservative lay lords were in the localities on official duties, and the devoutly Catholic Thomas Percy, Earl of Northumberland, was explicitly ordered to remain in the north. It was decidedly touch-and-go. But from the government’s relieved perspective, barely enough was more than sufficient.
For the second time in a generation, England had broken away from Rome. Yet this time around, as Feria explained it to Philip II, it was a different kind of rupture:
[I]n the time of King Henry VIII, the whole Parliament consented without any contradiction whatever, except from the bishop of Rochester and Thomas More; whereas now, not a single ecclesiastic has agreed to what the Queen has done, and of the laymen in the lower chamber and in the upper, some opposed on the question of schism, and a great many opposed the heresies.29
Dissent, by definition, was not catered for in an ‘Act of Uniformity’. Everyone was to attend church, on Sundays and holy days, under penalty of 12d. fines for each absence. Books for ‘one uniform order of common services and prayers’ were to be bought by all parish churches and cathedrals before the Feast of the Birth of John the Baptist (24 June), and to be in use within three weeks of purchase. The clocks had all been stopped, and reset to 1552.
Or perhaps not quite. The new Prayer Book declared itself to be the one in use at the death of Edward VI, but with certain ‘alterations and additions’. One of these was the removal from the Litany of the provocative denunciation of ‘the bishop of Rome, and all his detestable enormities’; another was the omission of the Black Rubric, explaining how kneeling at communion did not imply adoration. For administration of the communion itself, the words used by the minister in 1549 were coupled to those from 1552, producing a wordy, ambivalent alternative to the Catholic clarity of ‘Corpus Christi’:
The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life, and take and eat this, in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving.
The precise eucharistic doctrine of the Church of England was, once again, destined to be a matter of informed guesswork.
It was certainly no surrender to the notion of real presence as Roman Catholics understood it. The 1552 rubric for the curate to take home and dine on leftover bread remained – a reason to think there was no permanent change in the nature of the elements. But the revised wording nonetheless stepped back from the stark memorialism of the second Edwardian Prayer Book. There was a suggestion that something ‘happened’ at the moment of communion, and an encouragement to reverential reception.
What the celebrant should wear while reciting these words was a critical question, addressed both in the act itself, and in a rubric of the Prayer Book. For communion and other services, ‘until other order shall be therein taken by the Queen’s majesty’, ministers were to ‘use such ornaments as were in use by the authority of Parliament in the second year of the reign of King Edward VI’.30 That too was ambiguous: for the whole of Edward’s second ‘regnal year’ (28 January 1548 to 27 January 1549) priests said the Latin mass in traditional Catholic vestments. But since the first Uniformity Act passed in January 1549, it seems very likely the order of the 1549 Prayer Book was intended, with cope rather than chasuble for communion.
For the returning exiles, and many Protestants who endured the crisis of Mary’s reign at home, even that was bad enough. Sandys offered Parker a decidedly optimistic reading: ‘Our gloss upon this text is that we shall not be forced to use them, but that others in the meantime shall not convey them away.’31
The ‘alterations and additions’ were not in themselves particularly drastic ones, and in spring 1559 Parliament largely resuscitated the still warm corpse of the Edwardian Church. This was underlined by measures restoring first fruits and tenths to the crown, and dissolving once again the fledgling Marian monasteries and chantries. Nonetheless, for those with eyes to see, a significant watershed had been reached.
For thirty years and more, reformers had striven to bring Church and society to a restored condition of apostolic purity by stages and degrees. The second Prayer Book was, reformers agreed, an improvement on the first, and – had King Edward lived to adulthood, or Queen Jane’s backers succeeded – Cranmer would likely have drafted a third Prayer Book, and perhaps a fourth. The Stranger churches lighted the path to further liturgical and disciplinary reform, and its intoxicating possibilities were experienced by exiles in the free air of Frankfurt, Strassburg, Zürich and Geneva. ‘Reformation’ was a journey; a continual striving after elusive perfection, in the world and in oneself. The latest measures of 1559 were a staging-post, not a final destination; earnest reformers like Jewel would not long rest content with any ‘leaden mediocrity’.32 What was not yet obvious was that the new Supreme Governor simply did not see things this way. Barring some tying up of loose ends, and the necessary measures of implementation and enforcement, the Reformation, Queen Elizabeth believed, was over.
Old Bishops, New Bishops
Enforcement of the parliamentary settlement of 1559 was at the same time a matter of discovering who was prepared to enforce it. Parliament was dissolved on 8 May, and a fortnight later, members of the Privy Council were constituted as ‘ecclesiastical commissioners’, to administer the Oath of Supremacy to clerics and office-holders. First in the queue were the bishops.
Their numbers were sadly depleted. In addition to Pole, several had died in the disease year of 1558 and were not replaced: James Brooks of Gloucester, John Christopherson of Chichester, William Glyn of Bangor, Maurice Griffith of Rochester, John Holyman of Bristol, John Hopton of Norwich. Feelings against the survivors were running high. John Aylmer snarled that some were gone already to taste their posthumous reward, ‘and those that remain must follow, unless they wash away the spots of blood that hang upon their rochets with floods of tears of repentance’. The bishops deserved suspension, John Parkhurst told Bullinger, ‘not only from office, but from a halter’.33
Alvaro de Quadra, the Spanish prelate replacing Feria as Philip’s ambassador in May 1559, expected the oath to be put to the bishops and for all to be ‘deprived at one blow’. It did not happen like that. Cecil’s ‘Device’ envisaged the bishops being put in their place, but also remaining in their place. The tenacity of episcopal resistance in Parliament dented the expectation that they would continue to serve, but did not entirely remove it.
One deprivation, at least, was inevitable. The oath was put to Bonner first, on 29 May, and on refusal he was immediately deprived, amidst concerns for his safety at the hands of a vengeful London populace. Other likely recalcitrants were preceded against next: White, Watson, Scott, Oglethorpe, Richard Pate of Worcester and Ralph Baines of Coventry and Lichfield. Thomas Goldwell, the companion of Pole’s Italian exile, fled once more to the continent before he could join these brethren in refusing the oath.34
All of these men (bar Bonner) were Queen Mary’s appointments, new-breed bishops of the Pole era. But there were others with records of faithful episcopal and governmental service stretching back to the early 1540s: Thomas Thirlby of Ely, for example, and the former Lord Chancellor, Nicholas Heath of York, who continued to attend meetings of the Privy Council through to the start of 1559. Thirlby, unusually among Marian bishops, had been gainfully employed on ambassadorial work by the regime of Edward VI. The diplomat Sir John Mason reminded Cecil in March 1559 how Thirlby ‘did great service. And so do I assuredly think he will in this time.’
Mason was proved wrong. ‘I confess,’ sighed Elizabeth, ‘I am grieved for York and Ely.’ The remark was made to a royal servant of even longer standing, Cuthbert Tunstall of Durham, who came south in July 1559 to seek audience with the Queen. She and her councillors sincerely hoped to win Tunstall round, but it was the octogenarian bishop who made the running in their encounter, telling Elizabeth that she could have all of them serving in her Council, if only she were a Catholic. Tunstall brought with him handwritten documents by Henry VIII against sacramentarian heresy, ‘and begged her, at least, to respect the will of her father’.
In the end, only two of Queen Mary’s bishops agreed to remain in office in 1559: the aged and undistinguished Anthony Kitchin of Llandaff, and the still less distinguished Thomas Stanley, absentee bishop of Sodor and Man, who a couple of years later was reported to be living away from his island diocese at Durham, ‘at ease, and as merry as Pope Joan’.35
Except for these scrapings at the bottom, the episcopal barrel had to be completely refilled. Elizabeth’s choice for Canterbury was Matthew Parker, a distinguished scholar, though not possessed of much high-level administrative experience. There was a filial connection. Elizabeth spoke relatively little about her mother, but Parker was Anne Boleyn’s chaplain, and before her execution in 1536 she commended her infant daughter to Parker’s spiritual care. Just as important was the fact that Parker, like Cecil, stayed in England through Mary’s reign. It is striking that the two men Elizabeth chose to play leading roles in the making of her religious settlement were, like her, former Nicodemites. Whether Parker, like Cecil and Elizabeth, actually attended mass is tantalizingly unclear. In a letter to Nicholas Bacon, Parker referred to an injury sustained falling from his horse while fleeing from ‘such as sought for me to my peril’, and it was later said that Parker ‘lurked secretly’ at a friend’s house, perhaps in the vicinity of Cambridge.36 But no one who remained in England through all the days of ‘idolatry’, and who did not seek the crown of martyrdom, could easily boast of their spotlessness.
While episcopal subscriptions were being demanded in the spring and summer of 1559, Cecil drew up lists of potential or actual replacements. One identified twenty-six ‘spiritual men without promotion at this present’. Around half of these were exiles, but the others were stay-at-homes, and a few had even held office in the Marian Church. For the Nicodemite Cecil, as for his mistress, a record of aversion to compromise of any sort was not in itself a powerful recommendation. In the end, exiles did supply the largest pool of qualified candidates for office, and twelve of eighteen nominations to bishoprics in the first two years of the reign went to émigrés. The earliest choices were confirmed, along with Parker, in June and July of 1559: Edmund Grindal for the key diocese of London, Richard Cox for Ely, John Jewel for Salisbury, William Barlow for Chichester and John Scory for Hereford.37
These were well-travelled men, but one destination was missing from their résumés: Geneva. A few successful candidates for bishoprics had links to Zürich; most belonged to the Strassburg-Frankfurt group, and to Cox’s ‘Prayer Book’ party in the strife over ceremonies. ‘Genevans’ were often slower than other émigrés to return, some, like William Whittingham and Anthony Gilby, remaining to see to conclusion a major scholarly project of their exile – a new version of the complete bible in English, with extensive (and sometimes polemical) notes and commentary. A handful of talented, high-profile ministers with Genevan connections, like Thomas Lever, John Pedder and Miles Coverdale (a former bishop), were considered for highest office, but in the end passed over. Elizabeth never forgave John Knox for his First Blast. From the outset she associated Geneva with seditious notions of resistance.
Calvin himself wrote to Elizabeth in January 1559, enclosing a copy of a new edition of his commentary on Isaiah, dedicated to the Queen, but his gift was coldly received. Cecil was also in all likelihood less than delighted with the letter he received at the same time, urging him to use his influence with Elizabeth to advance the Gospel, while reminding him of his own silence while God’s children were being slaughtered: ‘if hitherto you have been timid, you may now make up for your deficiency by the ardour of your zeal’. Once the depth of Elizabeth’s resentment became clear, Calvin tried to distance himself from Knox, denying knowledge of the publication of his work, but the damage was done.
By May of 1559, Knox himself was back in Scotland – Elizabeth refused permission for him to pass through England on the way. His preaching added fuel to iconoclastic rioting, which had broken out in several towns; the start of a Protestant uprising against the pro-French government of Mary of Guise. The leading Protestant nobles who banded together as ‘the Lords of the Congregation’ begged for English assistance, and Knox wrote to Cecil with effusive promises of ‘perpetual concord betwixt these two realms’. Cecil made some efforts to effect a reconciliation, but Knox did himself few favours in a justificatory letter sent to the Queen in July. He stuck unapologetically by the arguments of the First Blast, instructing Elizabeth to acknowledge her complete dependence on God’s special providence, while tactlessly reminding her how, in Mary’s reign, ‘for fear of your life, you did decline from God, and bow in idolatry’. Annotations on a copy of the letter, which may be Elizabeth’s own, observed that the ‘apology’ was worse than the original offence; Knox’s views ‘put a firebrand to the state’.38
The Queen suspected Genevan exiles of lacking respect for royal authority; they in return suspected her and her ministers of lacking serious commitment to the cause of reform. Zealous exiles from places other than Geneva were also sometimes reluctant or cautious about accepting high office: Thomas Sampson, David Whitehead and Alexander Nowell, a critic of the Prayer Book who remained in Frankfurt, all seem to have turned down offers of bishoprics. Others, like John Parkhurst, nominated to Norwich, were slow to accept. In late 1559, Parkhurst, who evidently had a thing for hanging metaphors, boasted he had so far ‘kept my neck out of that halter’.
There were few principled theological objections to episcopacy as such, though persecution had given the office of bishop a bad name in Protestant circles, despite the heroic witness of Cranmer, Ferrar, Hooper and Ridley. Jewel reassured a Zürich friend that the new bishops would be consecrated without ‘superstitious and offensive ceremonies’. To remove temptations of ‘royal pomp and courtly bustle’, episcopal wealth was ‘now diminished and reduced to a reasonable amount’. This was putting a brave face on an unpalatable parliamentary measure. The Exchange Act allowed the crown, during vacancy of a see, to trade impropriated tithes and rectories for episcopal estates. Some godly reformers detected here echoes of the cynical exploitation of the Church by the government of Northumberland. James Pilkington (later appointed to Durham) refused nomination to Winchester in 1559 on the terms being offered. After depriving the Marian bishops, Elizabeth kept sees vacant to maximize revenues. Most replacements, Parker included, were not consecrated till December 1559, or early the following year.39 In the meantime, the business of restoring the Gospel to England had got underway without them.
Visitation and Resistance
Preparations for a nationwide royal visitation began in May 1559, with the drawing up of lists of visitors to tour the country in six circuits, on the pattern of 1547. Lords Lieutenant and prominent county gentry were appointed to the commissions, but the actual work was undertaken by small clusters of clerical commissioners and lay lawyers. In each circuit, the lead cleric was a former exile: Robert Horne for London, Ely and Norwich; Thomas Becon for Canterbury, Rochester, Chichester and Winchester; Thomas Bentham for the midland dioceses; Jewel for the West Country; Sandys for York, and Richard Davies for Wales. And just as in 1547, the visitors interpreted their remit in the most Protestant way possible.
The visitation started in London on 19 July, as Cuthbert Tunstall – last of the Catholic bishops to hold out, and the only one to have his authority formally inhibited for the visitation – was arriving to make his doomed plea to the Queen. Tunstall was appalled by what he witnessed in the capital over the following weeks, protesting impotently to Cecil that he would not allow in Durham what ‘I do plainly see to be set forth here in London, as pulling down of altars, defacing of churches by taking away of crucifixes’. The rood of St Paul’s, that barometer of the religious weather, came down on 12 August, and eleven days later, there were bonfires of roods and images in St Paul’s churchyard, outside St Thomas of Acre in Cheapside, and at other places in the city. Charles Wriothesley recorded conflagrations of copes, vestments, altar cloths, books, banners and ‘other ornaments of the churches’. These were not ancient treasures, but expensive recent purchases: the chronicler took care to note that all this ‘cost above £2000 renewing again in Queen Mary’s time’. Machyn observed ruefully that the Marys, Johns and other images ‘were burned with great wonder’.40
Nationwide, the visitation followed a regular pattern. The visitors arrived at a conveniently located church, to which churchwardens from the vicinity had been summoned. Proceedings began with a sermon, explaining and justifying what was to come, and the commission was read out, along with the articles and injunctions: it was, like previous royal visitations, a profoundly didactic public process. Churchwardens were sworn to make diligent enquiry, and to return at a future date with reports on the state of their parish. Clergy were summoned to attend at a specified time, to exhibit letters of ordination, and to subscribe to the royal supremacy, Prayer Book and Injunctions.
The subsequent work of burning and destruction was carried out most thoroughly in London, though there were conflagrations in other towns, in answer to the article inquiring whether images, ‘and all other monuments of feigned and false miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry, and superstition’, were ‘removed, abolished and destroyed’. At Grantham in Lincolnshire, ‘the rood, Mary and John, and all the other idols and pictures’, along with liturgical and other Catholic books, were burned at the market cross. In Exeter, the townsfolk who venerated the images were forced to throw them into the fire. At York, Edwin Sandys preached on Jesus evicting the money-changers from the Temple, and on the duty of reformers to destroy as well as build, uproot as well as plant. The English, said Sandys, were blessed with a sovereign who, following Christ’s example, had ‘overthrown all polluted and defiled altars’. Entering his new episcopal seat of Worcester in the wake of the visitation, Sandys organized a burning of ‘the cross and the image of Our Lady’ in the cathedral churchyard. An account of the incident by the chronicler John Steynor perhaps points to the rood and an accompanying statue of Mary, but his lack of reference to the complementary ‘John’ might imply a new shrine image, erected in Mary’s reign, a replacement for ‘Our Lady of Worcester’ destroyed in 1538.41
Most of the articles were based on ones used by Cranmer for his Canterbury visitation of 1548, though churchwardens were now asked ‘whether you know any that keep in their houses undefaced any images, tables, pictures, paintings … and especially such as have been set up in churches, chapels or oratories’. There was a determination not to allow any repetition of what had happened in Edward’s reign, the smuggling away of superstitious (and costly) objects, in hope or expectation of change. In the northern circuit – the only part of the visitation for which detailed records survive – some parishioners were caught in the act of furtive removals. At St Peter’s in Chester, the visitors learned that Mistress Dutton ‘keepeth secretly a rood, two pictures and a mass book’; at St Mary’s, Peter Fletcher ‘hath certain images which he keepeth secretly’. But at Bridlington on the Yorkshire coast, the wardens could report only that ‘the images be secretly kept’, and at Osmotherley, on the remote western edge of the Moors, the word was ‘that their images be conveyed away, but by whom they know not’. A few months later, Thomas Bentham, freshly installed bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, would complain of images ‘reserved and conveyed away’ across his large diocese by those ‘hoping and looking for a new day’.42
Returning to London from his native West Country, and ‘a long and troublesome commission for the establishment of religion’, John Jewel described for Peter Martyr a veritable ‘wilderness of superstition sprung up in the darkness of the Marian times’. Churches were full of votive relics of saints, and cathedrals – he visited Gloucester, Bristol, Bath, Wells, Exeter and Salisbury – were ‘nothing else but dens of thieves’. Nonetheless, people seemed ‘sufficiently well disposed towards religion’, with most of the opposition coming from priests, especially those ‘who had once been on our side’.43
The northern visitors reported no cases of mass being said openly after midsummer 1559. As in 1553–4, the public face of worship was rapidly and comprehensively transformed. There was no space for negotiated dissent. Rather pathetically, the churchwardens of Yatton in Somerset recorded in early 1559 an outlay of 4d., ‘at the visitation, for the continuance of Mary and John’ – seemingly, the cost of a formal written petition to be allowed to keep their rood. Yet within a few months they found themselves shelling out the slightly larger sum of 5d. for ‘taking down the rood’, and another 6d. ‘in expenses at taking down the images’. Churchwardens’ accounts from across the country once again constitute a tableau of broad compliance with the wishes of authority: roods, images and tabernacles removed; Prayer Books, bibles and Paraphrases purchased.44
At St Andrew Hubbard in London, the switch-over from mass to Lord’s Supper, with communion now in two kinds for the laity, was marked by the wardens paying out a substantial sum for the melting down and exchanging of ‘two chalices with covers, weighing 32½ ounces, for a communion cup weighing 30½ ounces’.45 Chalices were designed for use of the priest only; a ‘communion cup’ was a larger vessel, for the congregation as a whole to sip from. Here, it seems, was a literal recasting of priorities – a metallic metaphor for the swift, complete and purposeful transformation of parish liturgical and devotional life the visitors set out to oversee.
Time would have another story to tell. Twice before, in 1547 and 1553, the start of a new reign signalled a dramatic reversal of religious policy. Yet 1559 was not quite a moment of déjà vu. On both sides of a widening religious divide, local people had acquired a greater understanding of what was at stake, of what the changes meant, and of where they might lead. They were, in consequence, considerably less complacent and noticeably less compliant.
Lay Protestants, particularly in London, wanted not simply to follow, but to lead. An innovation, chronicled with absorbed disapprobation by Henry Machyn, was congregational singing of psalms. ‘Metrification’ of the psalms, so they could be sung by laypeople in unison, was a French-Genevan innovation, taken up in Edward’s reign by the evangelical courtier Thomas Sternhold, whose first collection of metrical psalms, published in 1549, was expanded in multiple editions by the clergyman John Hopkins. The habit never really took off among Protestants under Edward, perhaps because of the Edwardian Church’s closeness to Bullinger’s Zürich, hostile to the use in worship of music of any kind. But exile communities – in Strassburg and Frankfurt, as well as in Geneva – made psalm-singing a regular part of their liturgy, despite lack of provision for it in the Prayer Book of 1552.
Absence of prescription in the Prayer Book of 1559, or in the visitation articles, did little to discourage a burgeoning fashion. The Injunctions stated that ‘modest and distinct’ singing, during or after service, was permissible, but said nothing specifically about psalms. In September 1559, at St Antholin’s, Budge Row, morning prayer began ‘after Geneva fashion … men and women all do sing, and boys’. This was a ‘godly’ parish, where Elizabeth’s accession was followed by rapid re-establishment of provision begun in Edward’s reign for a ‘lectureship’ – a salaried minister’s position dedicated solely to preaching. Londoners’ psalm-singing was encouraged by a minister of French extraction, Jean Veron. There was singing to ‘the tune of Geneva ways’ in early 1560 at his induction to the parish of St Martin Ludgate, and at a sermon he delivered at Paul’s Cross: all joined in, ‘young and old’.
Singing is a powerful agent of social cohesion, binding people collectively familiar with words and melody into tighter knots of solidarity and resolution. The psalms were texts well suited to this purpose, replete with references to suffering, persecution and God’s judgements on the wicked. Jewel reported in March 1560 that the habit was already spreading beyond London, and it was now possible to find 6,000 people singing together at Paul’s Cross after services: ‘this sadly annoys the mass priests, and the devil’.46
The arrival of royal visitors was sometimes a spur to direct action. At Bures, Suffolk, in September 1559, local activists were inspired to hack down the rood and other screens in the church, in the process damaging tombs belonging to the Waldegrave family, powerful local conservatives. The Waldegraves not only indicted the iconoclasts at the Bury St Edmunds sessions, they complained about them to the Privy Council; this at a time when zealots were attacking old tombs and funeral monuments in London and elsewhere, convinced – with some justification – that these were testaments in brass or stone to the ancient belief in purgatory.
The Queen responded in September 1560 with a proclamation condemning any damage to tombs as a ‘barbarous disorder’. It insisted that monuments to the dead in churches were ‘set up only to the memory of them to their posterity … and not for any religious honour’ – a curious claim when countless old memorials were embellished with requests for onlookers to say prayers for the deceased’s soul. Interference with the family monuments of the nobility or gentry, however, was a threat to their social power, nested as it was in lineage and inheritance. It was a line Elizabeth was not prepared to see crossed. Protestants liked to compare Elizabeth to Deborah, the (sole) female judge of biblical Israel; here was a sign she was no zealous Josiah.47
Most of the time, the Elizabethan authorities, including the newly appointed bishops, worried less about people going too fast, and more about them not going fast enough. Despite the zeal and energy of the visitors, implementation of the 1559 settlement was patchy and often sluggish, with churchwardens frequently proving less than fully reliable agents of enforcement. Articles and injunctions for follow-up episcopal visitations in 1560 and 1561 enquired endlessly about the retention of altars, images and Catholic service books; about priests celebrating communions for the dead; about private use of Latin primers and rosary beads.
Episcopal anxieties were not misplaced: altars were still standing in many parishes in 1561, not only in traditionalist Yorkshire, Cheshire and Staffordshire, but in Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Hampshire, Oxfordshire and Essex. Roods came down relatively swiftly in most places, but there was a noticeable parochial reluctance to remove the frequently elaborate lofts on which they stood. Bishop Grindal launched a campaign to sweep rood lofts out of London churches in 1560, but there was resistance elsewhere, even after a royal order of 1561 commanded them cut down ‘for avoiding of much strife and contention’.48
The recalcitrance of local communities was no doubt partly prudential. Elizabeth was a young, unmarried queen without heirs of her body. Parishes had recently undergone one round of expensive liturgical refurbishment, and had no desire to dig deeply into pockets again if the Protestant restoration turned out to be impermanent. It seems improbable, however, that the financial investment in Catholic paraphernalia can be separated neatly or easily from investment of an emotional kind. People were often slow to comply with orders against ‘idolatry’ and ‘superstition’ precisely because they understood them all too well, and disagreed with them. And there was another crucial factor in play: the attitudes of the clergy.
Conventional wisdom holds that, barring a handful of Marian zealots, the parish priests gave very little trouble to the new regime. They had learned the habit of dutiful conformity, and few were inspired to follow the lead of the hierarchy. This was not, however, the perception of the incoming bishops. In May 1559, Grindal anticipated that not only the episcopate, but ‘many other beneficed persons’ would reject the changes:
[W]e are labouring under a great dearth of godly ministers, for many who have fallen off in this persecution are now become papists in heart; and those who had been heretofore, so to speak, moderate papists, are now the most obstinate.
Grindal recognized how the Marian years had stiffened the resolve of the Catholic clergy. The perception was shared by John Jewel: ‘Now that religion is everywhere changed, the mass-priests absent themselves altogether from public worship, as if it were the greatest impiety to have anything in common with the people of God.’49
It is hard to say exactly how many rectors and vicars conformed to the Elizabethan Settlement, and harder still to judge how they ‘conformed’ to it. It is certainly the case that most parochial clergy remained in post, and adapted themselves to the changes. Thomas Butler did so in Much Wenlock, as Christopher Trychay did in Morebath and Robert Parkyn in Adwick-le-Street. All three were articulate Catholic conservatives, if not ones cut from the cloth of exiles or martyrs. Their cultural cousins filled parish livings throughout the land.
Nonetheless, an often-quoted figure of only about 300 clergy deprived, or removing themselves, from ministry for reasons of conscience is certainly too low. The true figure, through to the mid-1560s, is likely to be closer to 800: this at a time when the influenza epidemic, and an acute shortage of candidates for ordination, left many parishes short of pastoral care, and the Church struggling to fill vacancies. In the diocese of Chichester, at least seventy-four parishes lost their priest due to death between November 1558 and 1561. Almost as many (sixty-one, from a total of 287 in the diocese) saw their incumbent deprived in the same period. In the diocese of Rochester, around a quarter of priests resigned or were deprived, and a fifth of the parishes in Grindal’s London were similarly affected. Interestingly, the percentage was markedly lower in more ‘conservative’ regions, such as the Welsh dioceses. The most persuasive inference is that where attitudes and identities were forged in closer encounter with the Protestant ‘other’, Catholic consciences were more finely tuned.
Turnover would have been greater still had the authorities shown any real determination to weed out all the unreliables from the ranks of a now officially Protestant ministry. That would have meant a purge on a massive, unmanageable scale. Of ninety senior clergy summoned before the visitation commissioners for the northern circuit in 1559, only twenty-one appeared and subscribed, while thirty-six openly refused. Among the lower clergy, the names of 312 subscribers were recorded in 1559, probably only a third of the priests active in the province of York at the time.
Significantly, what the authorities sought was ‘subscription’ – a generalized acknowledgement of assent – rather than what was actually specified in the Supremacy Act, the swearing of a solemn oath on the Gospels. That might have piled more pressure on the consciences of conservative clergy than those consciences were capable of bearing. Former exiles fulminated against Nicodemites, but the Injunctions themselves drew a discreet line under the past. They admitted that there were many ministers who ‘have of long time favoured fond phantasies rather than God’s truth’. People, however, were not to attack or abuse them; instead, ‘use them charitably and reverently for their office and ministration sake’. Even with this willingness to let bygones be bygones, the Church struggled to meet its pastoral obligations: Richard Cox of Ely reckoned in 1561 that of 152 cures in his diocese ‘there are duly served but only 52’. Jewel of Salisbury reflected ruefully that ‘it is no easy matter to drag the chariot without horses, especially uphill’.50
As bishops like Cox and Jewel came in, many of their senior clergy went out. The rate of resignation and deprivation among diocesan office-holders (chancellors, archdeacons, deans) and cathedral prebendaries was significantly higher than among ordinary parish clergy. Of such dignitaries not felled by epidemic disease in 1559–60, fewer than half were prepared to continue in office, and of those, many were regarded by their new bishops as alarmingly undependable. The result, in many places, was administrative turmoil. When Archbishop Parker sent letters to all bishops and archdeacons in 1560 and 1561, asking to be supplied with the names of cathedral clergy and of ‘all and singular parsons and vicars’ within their jurisdictions, along with details of residential, educational and marital status, he was not so much setting a firm hand to the ecclesiastical tiller as sending out a message in a bottle. His circulars were a confession of frank ignorance about the state of the Church’s depleted resources.51
In circumstances of acute shortage of clergy, standards were inevitably relaxed. In London, Grindal ordained no fewer than 104 candidates to the priesthood in the year from March 1560 to March 1561. James Calfhill, himself one of this batch of quick-bake clerics, conceded a couple of years later that the shortage of good preachers was deeply regrettable, and that ‘the inferior sort … came from the shop, from the forge, from the wherry, from the loom’ – though he still stoutly maintained they were better men than the Sir Johns of popish days.52
Church and faith were in a state of flux and confusion at the start of Elizabeth’s second year. Yet the prevailing thought in the Queen’s mind was that, after her own years of uncertainty and danger, matters of religion had now been brought to a satisfactory conclusion. Unusually, the 1559 Injunctions were from the outset intended, not simply as an administrative instrument for the visitation, but as a permanent set of rules for the orderly running of the Church, to be read out to parishioners four times in the year.
The Injunctions supplied the promised ‘further order’ for clerical attire. This was to follow the rule of the last year of Edward VI: the surplice (rather than cope or chasuble) for services, and for off-duty wear, a seemly gown and the ‘square cap’ that many reformers associated with the persecuting Catholic clergy. A supplementary ‘Interpretation’, issued by the bishops in 1560, specified ‘the cope in the ministration of the Lord’s Supper, and the surplice at all other ministrations’.
This was clear (if to some, unwelcome) enough. But in other respects the Injunctions worked to obfuscate rather than elucidate what expected practice should be. The scope and character of royal power over the Church were addressed, but hardly definitively settled. Elizabeth denounced false ‘scruples’ about the Supremacy Oath. It was simply a malicious misinterpretation that the Queen would ‘challenge authority and power of ministry of divine offices in the Church’. That was, perhaps, a dependable pledge that she was not about to start ministering sacraments on her own account. But if it sounded to anyone like a more general promise to leave spiritual matters firmly in the hands of the bishops, then the added assurance that she would never push further than those ‘noble kings of famous memory, King Henry VIII and King Edward VI’ should have given them pause for reflection.
Other injunctions were not so much obscure as inconsistent. There was contradictory advice about sermons: one injunction said parsons and vicars should preach in their own churches at least once a month; another, that only licensed preachers could deliver sermons (others would read from the homilies), and preach at least once a quarter. Either way, in the view of many Protestants, it was not enough preaching. As to sacraments, the Prayer Book stipulated ordinary bread for the communion, but the Injunctions, ‘for the more reverence to be given to these holy mysteries’, were unabashed in requiring parishes to get hold of the kind of wafers ‘which served for the use of the private mass’, if a little thicker, and without any embossed pictures.
Another jarring mismatch was over the placement of the communion table itself. The expectation of the Prayer Book was that it would stand permanently in the chancel, oriented east–west, and only at communion time have ‘a fair white linen cloth upon it’. The Injunctions directed otherwise. The table would be carried into the chancel for communion services, but at other times should be ‘set in the place where the altar stood, and there commonly covered’. The ‘table’ of the Prayer Book was the ‘holy table’ in the Injunctions, where its default alignment was the north–south one suggestive of a sacrificial altar.
All of these were steps backward from the logic and momentum of Edwardian reform. So too was an injunction commanding people in church to uncover their heads and bow whenever the name of Jesus was mentioned, and another allowing processions to take place at Rogationtide for purposes of ‘beating the bounds’ of the parish. The Injunctions contained little of much comfort for Catholics, robbed of their mass and images, but plenty to give irritation and offence to fervent Protestants. These included a grudging concession that clerical marriage was lawful, but that due to many ministers’ ‘lack of discreet and sober behaviour’, approval for any match must be secured from the bishop and two justices of the peace.
In this, as in virtually all else, the Injunctions were an exposition of the new order in religion to satisfy the preferences and prejudices of the Queen. Elizabeth’s true religious convictions – a studied mystery in Mary’s reign – were in 1559 unknown to most of her subjects and even to her bishops and leading clergymen. She had made various public, and politically expedient, gestures of commitment to the ‘gospel’, and she had shown herself willing enough to agree to her councillors’ preference for the restoration of the 1552 Prayer Book. But the Injunctions were an early indication that Elizabeth’s Protestantism was of a distinctly wilful and wayward kind. Further, deeply disconcerting, evidence of this was shortly to be forthcoming. For the moment, the Injunctions simply declared the alteration of religion to be completed; case closed. The Queen ordered her subjects henceforth ‘to forbear all vain and contentious disputations in matters of religion’.53 It was a little too late for that.