13

TIME OF TRIAL

Reconciliation

ON 20 NOVEMBER 1554, Reginald Pole, cardinal legate and Plantagenet prince, came ashore at Dover. It was nearly twenty-three years since he had last stood on the soil of his native land. Now he returned, on a ‘greater and more praiseworthy enterprise than if one should recapture Jerusalem from the infidels’. The log-jam over church property had been broken in October 1554. Julius III agreed to enlarge Pole’s powers to grant dispensations to holders of monastic estates, while Philip and Mary promised to return what property they could to the Church. A party of notables went to Brussels to escort the cardinal home: their number included William Cecil, ever outwardly loyal. Once again, law struggled to keep up with politics. Pole arrived in England still a convicted traitor. A bill reversing his attainder was quickly introduced into the Parliament convened on 12 November, and on 22 November received royal assent.1

Six days later, as orders went out for Te Deum to be sung in all parishes in thanksgiving for the Queen’s presumed pregnancy, the cardinal addressed Members of Parliament summoned to the court at Westminster. It was the speech Pole had been waiting two decades to deliver, a hymn of patriotism from a man ‘exiled my native country without just cause’.

England was a chosen nation, the first kingdom freely to accept the faith of Christ, as a gift from the papacy. Pole’s emphasis on the ‘manifold benefits that this realm hath received from the Apostolic See’ was the antithesis to the antagonistic Anglo-papal history devised by William Tyndale and funnelled into the ear of Henry VIII. Pole rehearsed the disasters, ‘the tumults and effusion of blood’, afflicting Germany since its departure from Roman obedience, as well as the violence against the conscience raging in England since all good laws gave way to ‘the lust and carnal affection of one man’.

Still, when all seemed lost and hopeless, the light of true religion burned in a few hearts. Mary, ‘a virgin helpless, naked and unarmed’, secured victory over tyrants and was now happily joined to ‘a prince of like religion’. Pole had high hopes for Philip. Charles V was like David, who began work on the Temple of ‘appeasing of controversies in religion’. His son was the Solomon who would bring it to completion. It was precisely what evangelicals said about Henry and Edward (see p. 304); Catholics and Protestants habituated the same world of biblical metaphor.

At the close of an oration of great rhetorical force, Pole begged Parliament to remove impediments standing in the way of England taking its rightful place at the heart of a united Christendom: ‘I come not to destroy, but to build. I come to reconcile, not to condemn. I come not to compel, but to call again.’2

On 29 November, representatives of the Lords and Commons jointly prepared a petition to the crown, asking that ‘this realm and dominions might be again united to the Church of Rome by the means of the Lord Cardinal Pole’. The following day, in a moving ceremony, Pole absolved the realm from the sin of schism, and reconciled England with Rome.³ It was 30 November, the Feast of St Andrew. In a world of perfect symbolism, the event might have fallen elsewhen: St Andrew was Scotland’s, not England’s, patron. But in Scotland too, Protestantism was on the defensive in 1554, its English support withered since the death of Edward VI. A few months earlier, the temporizing Earl of Arran was replaced as regent by the Catholic Mary of Guise, French-born widow of James V, and mother to the young Mary Queen of Scots, now safely in France and betrothed to the Dauphin Francis. There was cause for Catholic rejoicing across Britain, yet Valois France, the dominant power in Scotland, was the sworn rival to Habsburg Spain, the dynastic partner of England.

A bill repealing no fewer than nineteen Henrician acts, and nullifying the royal supremacy, was introduced into Parliament in late December and passed on 3 January. Unusually, it contained the text of a parliamentary supplication requesting that monastic lands might remain in lay hands ‘clear from all dangers of censures of the Church’, as well as Pole’s consequent dispensation, which was thereby given the status of statute law – an indication of the continuing nervousness around the church lands question, and a concession that Pole very grudgingly accepted. But with this question settled, the Lords who blocked the revival of medieval heresy legislation earlier in the year now cheerfully voted it through.⁴

Reconciliation with Rome was a return, but also a departure. As it transpired, the first major saint’s day following passage of the legislation was 25 January, Feast of the Conversion of St Paul. It was a fitting focus for public thanksgiving, with processions and bonfires. No one could miss the symbolic point of celebrations, as Wriothesley put it, ‘to give God laud and praise for the conversion of this realm to the Catholic faith’. The Grey Friars chronicler observed the ‘joy of the people that were converted, likewise as St Paul was converted’.5 There was a real flavour of evangelical fervour to the re-Romanizing of English Catholicism.

Conversion implied conscious, individual commitment, rather than just going with the flow. This was an ideal the bishops, Bonner of London once more in the lead, were eager to convert into reality. On 19 February 1555, Bonner ordered all parishioners in the forthcoming Lent to be individually absolved in confession of the sins of schism and heresy. He empowered the parochial clergy, once they themselves were reconciled, to act as his deputies for this. It was a more than merely formal exercise. Bonner anticipated that ordinary curates might not be able to ‘satisfy the minds, and to appease the consciences of some of their parishioners’, and so instructed his archdeacons to produce lists of the ‘best learned’ priests in each deanery. Those with troubled consciences could choose an expert spiritual guide to have their doubts resolved. Instructions printed that Lent for use of confessors in the diocese of York directed that, before reconciling penitents, they should examine them on their faith in the real presence, and on whether they believed ‘our Holy Father the Pope … is and ought to be head of the universal Catholic Church’.⁶

Across England in 1555, ordinary men and women were required to identify as, and perhaps even to become, something they had never quite been before: Roman Catholics. To affirm the spiritual supremacy of the Pope in 1555 was a different matter from doing so – piously, conventionally or unthinkingly – in 1515. It was another of the regular conjunctions in the English Reformation at which official changes of policy served, not so much to confuse people, as to educate and, within limits, to empower them. As with Henry VIII’s mass oath-swearing of twenty years before, the effects were equivocal. Many people (more perhaps than in 1535) were confirmed in their acknowledged allegiance to the religious and political objectives of the authorities; others internalized their doubts and said and did outwardly as they were bidden; a smaller group was encouraged and energized in conscientious opposition. A little later, Bonner would be told by Ralph Allerton, a suspect he was interrogating, that ‘there are in England three religions’. The first was ‘that which you hold; the second is clean contrary to the same; and the third is a neuter, being indifferent, that is to say, observing all things that are commanded outwardly, as though he were of your part, his heart being set wholly against the same’.⁷ The restoration of capital punishment for heresy would soon test the categories into which people fell.

Welcome the Cross of Christ

First to burn, at Smithfield on 4 February, was John Rogers, Tyndale’s one-time collaborator on the English bible and, more recently, a prebendary of St Paul’s and well-known London preacher. At an interrogation by the Privy Council in January, Gardiner said he hoped Rogers would follow the recent example of the whole Parliament and be ‘content to unite and knit yourself to the faith of the Catholic Church’. Rogers affirmed his belief in the Catholic, but ‘not the Romish Church’. The Pope was not a Catholic. Tyndale and More’s stark argument over the identity of the Catholic Church, diverted down some complex paths by Henry’s break with Rome, was back in clear view. While the churchmen traded scriptural texts, the lay councillor Sir Richard Southwell had his own cynical take: ‘Thou wilt not burn in this gear when it commeth to the purpose, I know well that.’8

He was wrong. Rogers went courageously to the stake amidst shows of support from the crowd. Renard reported to Philip that some of those present ‘gathered the ashes and bones and wrapped them up in paper to preserve them’ – the instinct to venerate relics was deep-rooted, even among those who rejected the cult of the saints. Renard was a realist. To avoid a popular backlash he advised the King against further public burnings, and thought the bishops should instead consider the merits of ‘secret executions, banishment and imprisonment’. The watchword should be ‘lente festinare’ (make haste slowly).⁹

Another three followed within a week. The London rector Lawrence Saunders was executed at Coventry on 8 February – he had been an active evangelist in the Midlands under Edward – and on the following day two other clergymen were burned in the localities where they made an impact: Rowland Taylor at Hadleigh in Suffolk, and John Hooper in his episcopal seat of Gloucester – his death agonizingly prolonged by green wood on his pyre which at first failed to catch.¹⁰

All were prominent figures of the Edwardian regime – people, as Mary put it to the Council, ‘as by learning would seem to deceive the simple’.¹¹ It was hoped, even expected, that they would ‘turn’, as other leading Protestants had done in the months following Mary’s accession. A recantation was of greater value politically, and spiritually too, than an unrepentant death. But if the hope was for a domino effect of high-profile submissions, demoralizing the rank-and-file, it turned out to be misplaced. The eighteen months since the collapse of the evangelical regime had given its former leaders time to reflect and prepare. And in an intellectual world increasingly shaped by absolute opposition of Bale’s ‘two churches’, those of Antichrist and Christ, of idolatry and true worship, the merits of martyrdom could seem startlingly clear.

‘Now is the time of trial,’ Hooper wrote in one of his last letters from prison, ‘to see whether we fear more God or man.’ In the weeks preceding his execution, Lawrence Saunders was imprisoned alongside the leading preacher and St Paul’s lecturer, John Cardmaker, arrested in November 1554 while attempting to flee abroad. Cardmaker discovered he feared man more than God, and was waiting to subscribe articles of recantation, when Saunders managed to persuade him back onto the narrower path.¹² Martyrdom was a solitary vocation, but it was usually anticipated and embraced with the advice and example of others.

It was also a spectacle and a performance. The symbolism of judicial burning was of a terrible yet just punishment for the worst of imaginable crimes. The flames consumed a body that had no claim to rise in glory on the Last Day, and mimicked the hellfire that was an inexorable fate for the unrepentant heretic’s soul. But the authorities could never control entirely how the meanings of the event would be perceived and understood, and the condemned thought hard about ways to make the show their own. At his burning outside Coventry, Saunders appeared ‘in an old gown and a shirt, barefooted’, and as he was led to the stake he ‘oft times fell flat on the ground and prayed’. All Christians were called to the imitation of Christ, but execution was an opportunity to invoke comparisons with the passion in particularly intense and memorable ways. When he reached the stake, Saunders took it in his arms, kissed it and said ‘welcome the cross of Christ’.13

Lay victims soon followed. Thomas Tomkins, a weaver, may have been first, at Smithfield on 16 March. During his interrogation, in an incident that rapidly became notorious, Bonner held Tomkins’s hand over a lighted candle. It may have been the cruelty of imagined kindness, a last effort to get Tomkins to understand the implications of his refusal to recant. Prior to this, in a seemingly petty and spiteful gesture, Bonner had Tomkins’ beard removed. It is a small but revealing sign of how distinctions of faith were starting to manifest in outward appearances. The evangelical preachers, to distinguish themselves from tonsured and clean-shaven popish priests, and to assert the masculinity giving them the right to marry, often sported full beards in the manner of Old Testament patriarchs. Some lay evangelicals evidently followed the fashion. Bonner sent Tomkins to the barber ‘so he would look like a Catholic’.¹⁴

Around the same time as Tomkins, another bearded layman went to the stake, at Cardiff. Rawlins White was an illiterate fisherman, aged about sixty, who memorized scripture from the readings of his son, and who on Mary’s accession placed himself at the head of an evangelizing conventicle. The background was unusual, but White’s case exhibited several features characterizing the executions through that first spring and beyond. There was a vigorous and prolonged effort to induce him to recant, Bishop Kitchen of Llandaff employing both ‘threatening words’ and ‘flattering promises’ during a year of imprisonment, first in Cardiff Castle and latterly in the bishop’s house at Chepstow. White’s commitment to a cause he first espoused in late middle age was fervent and uncompromising. When Kitchen caused a mass to be said for his conversion, White appeared at the moment of the elevation to announce ‘I bow not to this idol’. The burning was a contested, fractious event: a priest preached in favour of the real presence and the Pope, while White shouted for the crowd to give no credence to this ‘false prophet’. The crowd itself was divided. White’s friends grasped his hand at the stake for comfort, but others called out, ‘Put fire, set to fire!’15

Fourteen heretics died at the stake, half of them in Essex, before Easter of 1555. They included a second bishop, Robert Ferrar of St David’s, burned at Carmarthen on 30 March. On Easter Sunday itself, 14 April, a scandalous event took place in St Margaret’s church by Westminster Abbey. During distribution of communion, a man came into the church and repeatedly stabbed the priest, John Cheltham, with a wood-knife. Cheltham was badly injured, and blood was splashed onto the consecrated hosts. The assailant, William Flower, was a former monk of Ely, who later admitted his actions had been wrong, and, as he claimed, unpremeditated. Yet coming into the church, ‘and there seeing the people falling down before a most shameful and detestable idol’, zeal for God’s honour overcame him.¹⁶

It was a uniquely shocking case. But demonstrations of dramatic dissent during the celebration of mass, such as those made by both Taylor and White, often precipitated arrests. Heretics were punished for crimes of thought and belief, yet those who suffered were seldom, if ever, quietly minding their own business. The ‘frantic’ man who hanged two puddings – perhaps in mockery of the host – around the neck of one of the prebends of St Paul’s going on procession on 25 March, Annunciation Day, was lucky to escape with a whipping.¹⁷

Flower was burned as a heretic, not hanged as a felonious assailant, on 24 April. Two days later, a properly convicted felon, John Tooley, was hanged at Charing Cross. His crime was robbing a Spaniard, yet with the connivance of evangelical fellow-inmates in the Marshalsea, his death was choreographed as a religious martyrdom. Tooley read from prayers on prepared slips of paper, including an extract from the Litany of the Edwardian Prayer Book: ‘From the tyranny of the Bishop of Rome, and all his detestable enormities … good Lord deliver us.’ Knox and Whittingham wanted to abolish the Litany, but it was a potent instrument of spiritual bonding. Three hundred in the crowd responded in unison, ‘Amen, Amen, Amen.’

Linking the patriotic anti-Spanish cause with the godly anti-popish one was a conscious, and effective, strategy. A Warnyng for Englande, published at Emden in 1555, reported in lurid terms alleged Spanish atrocities in the Kingdom of Naples, soon to be visited on England – and what was almost worse, extortionate levels of taxation there. It pressed hard on a raw nerve: ‘no man is so ignorant but he knoweth right well the desire of the bishops is to have the abbey lands restored’. No one, yet, had been burned for opposing this, but ‘faggots be already prepared’.¹⁸

On 13 May, a fortnight after false rumours of the birth of a royal son prompted premature celebrations, the Venetian ambassador reported the confiscation in London of a thousand copies of a Dialogue, ‘full of seditious and scandalous things … against their Majesties’ persons’. Later that month, there was a serious outbreak of violence near the court, a crowd of 500 armed Englishmen confronting Spaniards, with five or six killed. Another incident took place on Corpus Christi Day, 13 June, with a mob assembling outside the church where the Spanish, ‘including the most noble and illustrious of that nation’, were attending mass, and preparing to go on procession. Only with difficulty were they persuaded to disperse. Most likely this refers to the Corpus Christi procession which Philip’s Spanish Dominican chaplain, Bartolomé Carranza, organized that year in Kingston-upon-Thames, in an attempt to restart the ancient custom across the nation.19

In the meantime, the anti-Spanish cause had gained a surprising new recruit. The death of Julius III on 23 March was followed by the brief pontificate of Marcellus II, who died on 1 May. His successor, elected on 23 May, was the zealous inquisitor Cardinal Gianpietro Carafa. It was a blow for Reginald Pole, whose orthodoxy Carafa was known to mistrust. Also for Philip and Mary: Carafa was a patriotic Neapolitan, who might well have shared some perspectives with the Warnyng for Englande about the malignity of Spanish rule over his homeland. Nonetheless, the new Pope wrote swiftly to assure Philip and Mary of ‘paternal goodwill’, and Pole’s letter of congratulation hailed their shared interest in reform of the Church.²⁰

Reform and repression were two sides of a coin. On the day of the revived Corpus Christi procession, the government issued a proclamation against possession of seditious books, cataloguing a long list of forbidden authors, back to Tyndale, Frith and Barnes. It also targeted the growing literary output of the exiles: Knox’s Admonition; Vermigli’s Treatise of the Cohabitation; Thomas Sampson’s Letter to the Trew Professors of Christes Gospell; John Scory’s Epistle unto all the faythfull that be in pryson, a work already celebrating ‘the most valiant, blessed and noble martyrs of our age’. Scory’s tract breathes almost an air of joy and relief at the passing of an age of ascendancy and murky compromise: ‘O most happy time, wherein poverty, need, pining in prison, fetters, chains, stocks, rebukes, revilings, the dens and caves of the wilderness, banishments, gallows, fires, and the cruelty of tyrants, are again restored to the Church!’²¹

Fire was restored with a generous hand through the summer months of 1555, as the Queen came to terms with the painful realization that she was not, after all, expecting a child, and Philip departed for the Netherlands.²² Between 30 May and the end of September, fifty-one English people died at the stake, as many as were burned for heresy between the break with Rome in 1535 and the end of Henry’s reign. There were a few celebrities among them – John Cardmaker on 30 May, John Bradford on 1 July, John Bland of Adisham on 12 July – and a handful were socially distinguished. Thomas Hawkes, burned in Essex on 10 June, was a gentleman, as was John Denley, dying at Uxbridge, Middlesex, on 8 August, and Robert Glover at Coventry on 19 September.

The others were humble figures – husbandmen, weavers, a sprinkling of parish clergy. There were two women, Margery Polley, burned at Dartford in Kent in July, and Elizabeth Warne, burned at Stratford le Bow in Essex in August. Where we can identify a reason for the arrest, refusals to receive the sacrament and denunciations of the mass seem to predominate. Essex’s position as the main location of executions in this period was overtaken by Kent, where Richard Thornden, suffragan bishop of Dover, and another former Edwardian suffused with born-again Catholic fervour, took a leading role in prosecutions. The pattern in Canterbury, untypically at this stage, was of execution in batches: four together on 12 July, five on 23 August, and another five on 6 September.

The drive against heresy was a collective and somewhat unco-ordinated effort. Some arrests were directly instigated by the Privy Council, some by bishops, some by enthusiastic lay magistrates. Among these, there were a few zealously committed Catholics, like the cousins Edmund and Sir John Tyrell in Essex. But there were also laymen keen to attest their political loyalty by the sufferings of others. Richard, Lord Rich, prince of opportunists and time-servers, was the most active heresy-hunter in Essex. One of those he denounced was a Billericay linen draper, Thomas Watts. At his burning in Chelmsford on 10 June, Watts called out to the former Lord Chancellor, ‘beware, beware, for you do against your own conscience herein, and without you repent, the Lord will revenge it’.23

Condemned layfolk were seldom, at their deaths, passive and silent victims. Patterns of symbolic behaviour, learned from the godly preachers, were much in evidence. Long white shirts of the kind worn by Saunders were widely favoured: light clothing facilitated a quicker death, but the garb was also designed to call to mind the white robes given to those in the Book of Revelation ‘slain for the Word of God’, and calling on the Lord to ‘judge and avenge our blood’. Kissing or embracing the stake was another signifier of martyrdom, as was vocal prayer or singing of psalms: John Denley sang a psalm in the flames at Uxbridge on 8 August. Presiding at his execution was the lay lawyer John Story, who returned from Louvain exile on Mary’s accession and served as Bonner’s commissary-general. He commanded a guard to silence Denley by flinging a heavy faggot at his head. ‘Truly,’ he quipped, ‘thou hast marred a good old song.’ The burnings were legal, but also brutal and unruly events.²⁴

The undoubted showcase burning of 1555 took place on 16 October, outside the city gate of Oxford, when two former bishops, Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, went together to the stake. They were finally put on trial at the end of September, before a trio of bishops: Brooks, Holyman and White. The accused maintained a defiant stand, though not without moments of unintentional comedy. Ridley, who removed his hat on entering the court, insisted on replacing it when the Pope’s name was mentioned. When the commissioners demanded respectful treatment, as representatives of the cardinal legate, Ridley knelt, to show he reverenced Pole for his royal blood, but sprang up again to demonstrate his lack of esteem for Pole as the agent of a usurping power.

Latimer, predictably, interrupted White’s opening oration to challenge his definition of the Catholic Church: ‘Christ gave knowledge that the disciples should have persecution and trouble. How think you then, my lords, is it most like that the see of Rome, which hath been a continual persecutor, is rather the Church, or that small flock which hath been continually persecuted of it, even unto death?’ Once more, we see the evangelicals’ sense of rediscovered purpose, almost of relief, at knowing who they were again through the validation supplied by suffering and oppression.25

‘Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’ Latimer’s words, as the pyre was lit beneath them, have resounded down the centuries. Did he say them? They are an echo of a heavenly voice (‘play the man’) heard in the Roman arena by the second-century martyr St Polycarp, as recorded by the early church historian Eusebius. The words appear in the second (1570) edition of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, but not in the first of 1563, and without any evidence of new eye-witnesses being consulted. Whether he said them or not, Latimer undoubtedly saw himself and Ridley as links in a chain of true disciples of Christ, persecuted by the ungodly down the ages.²⁶

From his prison window, Cranmer watched his friends go to their fate – a poignant echo of Thomas More’s witnessing the last journey of the Carthusians, just over twenty years before. Cranmer’s trial opened on 12 September, and because, unlike Ridley and Latimer, he was a bishop properly consecrated and installed under Roman rites, it was a more elaborate and formal affair. Earlier disputations covered Cranmer’s favoured ground of eucharistic doctrine, but now the questioning – relentlessly pursued by Brooks, and the hard-nosed civil lawyers Thomas Martin and John Story – focused on the actions of Cranmer’s own career and on the royal supremacy to which he had fatefully hitched his fortunes.

At one point, Cranmer fell headlong into a well-prepared trap. ‘Was it ever so in Christ’s Church?’ Martin demanded – in response to Cranmer’s assertion that every king was rightfully supreme head in his own dominions. ‘It was so.’ Then what, Martin asked, about the Emperor Nero? He was assuredly the world’s mightiest ruler in the years following Christ’s resurrection (and a notorious byword for tyranny and persecution). Reluctantly, Cranmer conceded that Nero, no less than Henry VIII, had been supreme head of Christ’s Church on earth.

Conviction was a foregone conclusion. A succession of enemies from Cranmer’s past (including Robert Serles and Richard Smyth) popped up to give evidence that the archbishop was a promoter of heretics and the author of heretical works. Cranmer himself insisted he acted ‘to improve the corrupt ways of the Church’ – perhaps an echo of his 1533 consecration oath to bring about changes ‘wheresoever they seem to me to be for the reform of the English Church’. Paul IV’s mandate for Cranmer’s trial included the formal – and impractical – requirement for him to appear personally at Rome within eighty days to answer the charges against him. It served as a stay of execution, and for now, Cranmer was returned, a condemned man, to his cell.27

Profitable and Necessary Doctrine

On 8 October 1555, a week before his predecessor Ridley perished in Oxford, Bishop Bonner completed his epic visitation of London, and issued clergy and laity with new injunctions. The visitation diagnosed the sickness; it was time to prescribe the remedies. The first was that all clergy with cure of souls read diligently a book ‘lately made and set forth by the said Bishop of London, for the instruction and information of the people’ entitled A Profitable and Necessary Doctrine, and expound one chapter of it to their parishioners every Sunday and Holy Day.²⁸

The book was issued along with thirteen Homilies, compiled by Bonner’s chaplains John Harpsfield and Henry Pendleton, and first published in July. The idea of a set of officially approved sermons, for ordinary clergy to work systematically through, was a blatant stealing of the evangelicals’ clothes, and indeed two of the Homilies – on Charity and on the Misery of All Mankind – were recycled with light revisions from Cranmer’s 1547 collection. The main text also had a familiar feel: it was modelled closely on an earlier Necessary Doctrine – the King’s Book of 1543. In both title and contents, the book was a marker of stability and continuity, a nod of acknowledgement to the conservatives who, like Bonner himself, rode out the Edwardian years in stoic loyalty to the religious settlement of Henry VIII.²⁹

Despite this, there was little sense of normal service being complacently resumed, after temporary intrusions of schism and heresy. Bonner’s preface frankly admitted the deep and lasting damage produced by years of heretical teaching, ‘sugared all over with loose liberty’. Devout religion was ‘accounted and taken for superstition, and hypocrisy’. Catholic doctrines of the Church were ‘with a new, envious and odious term, called and named papistry’. Bonner’s aim was a fresh start, to set forth ‘a very pure, sincere, and true doctrine of the faith, and religion of Christ’, with errors ‘weeded, purged and expelled’. In this, he praised as ‘a great help’ the recent proclamation banning importation of heretical books – an acknowledgement of the continuing danger posed by the writings of the exiles.

Bonner’s was a compendious survey, based around the Creed, Ten Commandments, Seven Deadly Sins, Sacraments, Lord’s Prayer and Hail Mary. These were Christian basics, but the intention was to accentuate the distinctiveness and exclusiveness of Catholic teaching. His exposition underlined the key role of the Church in securing salvation, and in expounding the Second Article of the Creed (‘And in Jesus Christ, his only son, Our Lord’), Bonner seized an opportunity to tackle a familiar bugbear: ‘these new-fangled wits, who for a singularity, or for a glorious badge of a Protestant … use this peculiar fashion of speaking, “the Lord, the Lorde”’.

There was some caution in the presentation of controversial doctrines. The book devoted much attention to proofs for prayer for the dead and purgatory, for example, without ever using the name itself. Even before the accession of Edward, ‘purgatory’ had become a toxic term, a one-word summary of an imagined world of clerical corruption and credulous devotion. But if Bonner remained in some ways a ‘Henrician’, his fastidiousness on this was not shared by other Marian writers, especially returning exiles like Peryn and Smyth.30

‘Pope’ was an even more toxic linguistic legacy, and Bonner did use the term, though sparingly. But the Homilies and Necessary Doctrine can scarcely be accused of walking on doctrinal egg-shells. Of the thirteen homilies, three concerned the mass and the real presence, two were on the nature and authority of the Church, and two specifically on the supremacy. These were the calling-cards of the new Catholicism – centralizing, Roman, emotionally and doctrinally anchored on the mass.

Bonner followed the Necessary Doctrine in January 1556 with a catechism for children, An Honest Godlye Instruction, to be used in place of all other primers and catechisms in his diocese. The minds of the young were a key battleground, and it was regrettable that ‘of late days, the youth of this realm hath been nouseled with ungodly catechisms, and pernicious evil doctrine’. Pole strongly endorsed Bonner’s efforts, and in legatine visitations of 1556, repeated the order for weekly readings from the Necessary Doctrine.³¹

Yet Pole had his own, still more ambitious plans for the implanting of pure Catholic doctrine in a country recovering from schism. On 4 November 1555, a mass of the Holy Spirit, celebrated by Bonner in the Chapel Royal, marked the opening of a clerical assembly at Westminster. It was a national legatine synod, covering both provinces, rather than a meeting of Canterbury Convocation. Pole wished to tackle ‘reform of the English Church’ as a unified whole, and – while the process with Cranmer ran its course – he was still not installed as archbishop of Canterbury.³²

The synod began with a grand gesture, negotiated in advance with Philip and Mary. The crown restored to the Church ‘First Fruits and Tenths’ – the initial year’s income from a clerical benefice, and a tithe of the revenue thereafter – a much-inflated replacement for papal annates, which Henry VIII had imposed as a tax on the clergy in 1534. Upon legal advice, the measure was presented for approval of the new Parliament, which convened on 21 October. There it encountered real difficulties, despite Pole’s suave assurances that since pensions to the ex-religious would now be paid from this source directly by the Church, the effect on royal revenue would be neutral. Any talk of lay income being returned to the Church made parliamentarians nervous, and perhaps rightly so – Pole and Mary hoped this signal of royal renunciation would inspire individual acts of pious restoration.

The bill, in the end, passed. But another, allowing the crown to confiscate the property of exiles who refused to return to England, was on 6 December defeated in the Commons amidst dramatic scenes. Realizing a majority of those present were against the bill, the Gloucestershire MP Anthony Kingston led a party in blockading the doors, and forcing the Speaker to put the issue to a vote. Some MPs were sympathizers with the exiles’ stance, but a gut instinct for the sacrosanctity of gentlemen’s property was the more powerful factor.33

Proceedings in the synod were more sedate, albeit they began with a momentous departure. On the night of 12 November, Stephen Gardiner passed away at Whitehall in what had once been the palace of his old master, Wolsey. Conflicting accounts circulated concerning his last moments. One was that Bishop Day tried to comfort him with talk of justification by faith; another was that Gardiner was read the gospel passage on how Peter left the courtyard weeping after his denial of Christ, and commented tearfully ‘Ego exivi, sed non dum flevi amare’ (I have gone out, but as yet I have not wept bitterly).

As Gardiner lay dying, Pole mourned for him, and worried that ‘the impious’ would be emboldened. He was right. On 19 November, John Philpot wrote to a sympathizer from prison that ‘I cannot but joy with you, my heartily beloved in Christ, of the fall of Sennacherib’. Why invoke this obscure Old Testament Assyrian king? Perhaps because he besieged and imprisoned the godly King Hezekiah – just as evangelicals liked to persuade themselves the limitations of Henry were imposed on him by wicked papistical councillors.³⁴

Gardiner’s association with Henry defined him to the end. Another old Henrician, Nicholas Heath, replaced him as Lord Chancellor, but he never wielded anything like the same influence. Gardiner’s passing, and the rise of the cardinal as unrivalled ecclesiastical councillor to the crown, seemed to mark a sea change in the character of English Catholicism.

By 10 February 1556, the synod had completed its business and produced a set of decrees for ‘Reformatio Angliae’, the Reformation of England – a reminder that, in the sixteenth century, this word was not the exclusive property of Rome’s enemies. The tone was set by the first decree: henceforth, throughout the realm, the Feast of St Andrew was to be kept as a day of solemn commemoration, with procession and a sermon, to give thanks for ‘the return of this kingdom to the unity of the Church’. The relationship with Rome was a thread to be woven into the calendrical fabric of English parish life.³⁵

Other decrees held a mirror up to the leaders of the Church. Prelates were to live ‘soberly, chastely and piously’, eschewing pomp, pride and superfluity in dress, retinue and diet: the ghost of Wolsey was to be exorcized from the Catholic episcopate. The ‘great abuse’ of bishops and heads of colleges failing to reside in their places of duty was to end. Absenteeism among lower clergy too was condemned, along with the pluralism giving rise to it. All clergy with cure of souls, including bishops, were required to provide sermons to the people. Pastoral office, it was noted, ‘chiefly consists in the preaching of the divine word’ – an assessment evangelicals could scarcely have disputed.

For decades, Catholic reformers had viewed the quality of the parish clergy as foundational to the renewal of society. Pole’s decrees moved beyond ritual exhortations. Bishops were to examine ordinands with scrupulous care, and all priests presented to benefices must swear oaths they did not acquire them through simony. Most significant was the order for every diocese to establish a school, or seminary (‘seed-bed’), to educate boys, especially sons of the poor, whose disposition gave ‘certain hope that they will become priests’. Four such seminaries began to establish themselves over the following two years.36 It was the beginning of a long-term solution to the haphazard training and selection of priests that for centuries was the vaguely unsatisfactory norm across the Catholic world. The Council of Trent would later take up and impose this initiative, in what is widely considered its most significant reforming measure, though the seminary system would bring with it problems of its own.

Other matters were discussed, yet did not make it into the final canons. One was vernacular scripture – in December, the New Testament was parcelled up among delegates in preparation for a new English translation. It is unclear whether the project was abandoned, or postponed for later implementation. Some supporters of the regime persisted in the old view that vernacular scripture was intrinsically divisive, practicable only when unity and obedience were universally re-established. John Standish – another Edwardian evangelical turned fervent Marian evangelist – published a treatise in 1554, Whether it be Expedient that the Scripture should be in English, and answered firmly, no. Other Marian churchmen included in their writings large chunks of translation from the Vulgate. Pole’s initiative suggests a dawning sense that control over the meaning of vernacular scripture could no longer be ceded by default to the evangelicals; that it was time to take the fight to the enemy. To assist with the correct understanding of scripture, Pole asked Carranza to compose a new catechism.³⁷

All this constituted a programme of serious-minded Catholic reform. It was a response to the rise of Protestantism, but it was not merely ‘reaction’, and it is wrong to see Pole as somehow stuck in or belonging to the past.³⁸ Much has been made of his apparently cool response to an offer of assistance, in early 1555, from Ignatius Loyola, head of the recently established Jesuit order. There were virtually no English Jesuits in 1555, and Loyola suggested Pole might send a few talented students to be trained in the Jesuit-run German College in Rome. But Pole had his own plans for an English seminary in the city, and was keeping his powder dry.

Pole, a leading light of the early sessions of the Council of Trent, was scarcely insulated from the currents of reform jolting through the wider Catholic Church in the 1550s. He was – unlike numerous other Catholics – in no way an opponent of the Jesuits, writing a supportive letter of condolence on Ignatius’s death in July 1556. And he actively supported other reformed religious movements: the Italian Cassinese Congregation, which was seeking to reinvigorate the Benedictines from within, and the Theatines – an austere order of priests (founded 1524) who dressed as secular clergy in an effort to lead by example. Carafa had been their first general, and another recruit was Thomas Goldwell, an Englishman who had shared Pole’s long exile in Italy, and was consecrated bishop of St Asaph in 1555. The spirit, at least, of the Jesuits was brought to England by another returning exile, the Dominican William Peryn. In Louvain, Peryn was influenced by the mystical writer Nicholas van Ess, a priest closely linked to the early followers of Ignatius, and the author of a set of meditations much indebted to Ignatius’s famous Spiritual Exercises. In 1557, Peryn published his own Spirituall Exercyses, an adaption of van Ess’s work.39

In the summer of 1555, Peryn became prior of a restored house of Dominican friars at St Bartholomew, Smithfield. The diarist Henry Machyn thought this ‘the first house that was set up again by Queen Mary’s time’, though in fact at Easter that year the Observant Franciscans had already returned to Greenwich, by the Queen’s invitation. Some of the twenty-five brothers were ‘strangers’ (Spaniards), but most were indigenous former friars, led by the most venerable veterans of the English papalist cause, Henry Elstow and William Peto, exiles in the Low Countries since the early 1530s.

The appearance of monks and friars, clad in their distinctive habits, was one of the most dramatic symbols of the repudiation of Henry’s, as well as Edward’s, works of reformation. It was also one of the most visible pointers to the limits of restoration. There was little prospect of hundreds of dissolved religious houses springing back to life, and a line under the past was drawn by Rome itself. In a bull of June 1555, Paul IV formally dissolved all houses suppressed by Henry VIII. Any restorations would technically be new foundations. This was some further reassurance to anxious lay proprietors of ex-monastic estates, but it did not inspire in them any impulse of self-abnegating generosity. Some laypeople gave piously in their wills to refounded monasteries, but endowments for refoundation came almost entirely from the crown. Only seven religious houses were re-established nationwide between 1555 and 1558, with plans in the works for a half-dozen or so more. The most significant refoundation was that of the monastery which was never really dissolved: the royal showcase church of Westminster Abbey. On 21 November, John Feckenham, already in position as dean of Westminster, was installed as abbot, along with fourteen monks, whose numbers had grown to nearly thirty by the time of the St Andrew’s Day celebrations the following year.40

Only around a hundred of perhaps 1,500 surviving ex-religious again took up the habit, though what monastic life lacked in quantity it made up for in quality: prestigious refoundations included the return of a resilient core of Carthusians to Sheen in November 1555, and of the Bridgettine nuns to Syon in August 1557. Others might have returned if given the chance. In Yorkshire, the former Cistercians Roland Blythe and Thomas Condall were in 1555 styling themselves ‘Abbot of Rufford’ and ‘Abbot of Roche’, in apparent expectation of restoration. After the 1538 suppression of Monk Bretton Priory, near Barnsley, a small group of monks continued living together. In Mary’s reign they set about reassembling their monastic library, buying back well over a hundred volumes, in an ultimately vain hope of return to full communal life.⁴¹

The non-return of the monasteries, and associated non-re-establishment of a nationwide network of shrines and pilgrimage sites, along with a distinctly limited number of chantry refoundations, was a measure of the achievement, for good or ill, of the reformers under Henry and Edward. But it was also a sign of ecclesiastical priorities changing, in ways of which early sixteenth-century Catholic humanists might have approved. There was a move, supported by Peto and Peryn, to restore the house of London Conventual Franciscans. Its buildings were occupied by Christ’s Hospital, a school for orphaned children, and one of five city hospitals established in Edward’s reign from former monastic institutions to meet various social needs. Bonner and Gardiner disliked these showboats of unorthodox charity. When an evangelical provocatively asked of him, ‘Are not all these good works, my Lord?’, Gardiner scoffed that the heretics had expelled ‘godly, learned and devout men’, and thrust in their place ‘a sort of scurvy and lousy boys’.

The scheme to restore the Grey Friars was scotched by the intervention of two Spanish mendicants: Philip’s Franciscan chaplain, Alfonso de Castro, and the Dominican Juan de Villagarcía. Invited to dine in the hall at Christ’s, Villagarcía was reportedly so moved by the sight of the orphans setting and serving the tables that he began to weep, declaring he ‘had rather been a scullion in their kitchen than steward to the King’.⁴² Common humanity, and the practical needs of a burgeoning urban population, occasionally took precedence over the scoring of confessional points.

The Hand in the Fire

Humanity of a different sort was called for in dealing with unabashed heretics, and in 1556 Castro and Villagarcía were deeply implicated in an ongoing struggle. In February the previous year, Castro preached a remarkable court sermon, criticizing the burnings that had just started, and saying it was better for heretics to ‘live and be converted’. Very likely, he spoke at the orders of Philip or Renard, at a moment of Spanish nervousness about the politically unsettling effects of the fledgling campaign. Castro was no precocious tolerationist, but the author of a treatise De Iusta Haereticorum Punitione (On the Just Punishment of Heretics), and in May 1556 he dedicated to Philip a second edition of another lengthy work justifying the death sentence for heresy.43

The punishment was just, of course, only for those refusing to recant. In December 1555, Villagarcía was at the forefront of efforts to secure the most spectacular recantation of all. In a succession of earnest, learned discussions with Cranmer, now being held in more comfortable conditions in Christ Church, the Spanish friar succeeded in planting doubts about the respective roles of popes and General Councils. In the New Year, encouraged by a friendly but zealously Catholic gaoler, Cranmer began attending mass. On 28 January, he put his name to a statement recognizing the authority of the Pope ‘so far as God’s laws and the laws and customs of this realm will permit’ – an elastic formula uncannily recalling Bishop Fisher’s efforts to interpret creatively the newly proclaimed royal supremacy in 1531.

Under intense psychological and emotional pressure, Cranmer made further ambiguous recantations on 15 and 16 February, but news that the date of his execution was set for 7 March precipitated a total collapse. On 26 February, he signed a comprehensive surrender, probably drafted for him by Villagarcía, affirming papal primacy, purgatory and transubstantiation.

It was a stunning reversal, and a potential propaganda triumph to place Northumberland’s capitulation firmly in the shade. Yet from the start, it was oddly mishandled. A rapidly printed text of Cranmer’s recantation was recalled by the Council, probably because of adverse reaction in London to the signatures on it of the Spanish friars Villagarcía and Pedro de Soto (who debated with Cranmer in October). Government anxiety was heightened by the discovery of a wild conspiracy, concocted by Northumberland’s kinsman Henry Dudley, to raid the royal mint, support a French invasion and place Elizabeth on the throne. Cranmer’s execution was postponed, and a further recantation deemed necessary.

Fatefully, Cranmer was not reprieved, as by all due processes of canon law he ought to have been. The decision to insist on the death penalty was Mary’s own: Cranmer was the prime architect of twenty years of schism and heresy, as well as the dark destroyer of her parents’ once-happy marriage. Mary’s vengefulness was emotionally explicable, but it was not politically astute.

Even upon learning there was no way out, Cranmer signed yet another abject recantation, and on the day of his rescheduled execution, 20 March, the authorities expected a smooth reading from the penitential script. But something unclicked in the elderly archbishop’s mind. In the pulpit of the University Church he unexpectedly revoked all his previous statements, and reaffirmed his writings against Gardiner on the eucharist. ‘And as for the Pope, I refuse him, as Christ’s enemy and Antichrist!’ Bustled quickly to the place of execution, Cranmer dramatically thrust into the heart of the fire the hand with which he had signed the recantations – a gesture that erased the value of his vacillations, and underscored persecution’s perverse capacity to make of victory defeat, and of defeat, victory.44

Some compensation for the Cranmer debacle ensued in a triumph over a lesser figure. In May 1556, Sir John Cheke, a mainstay of the exiles at Strassburg, was lured by Paget into visiting the Low Countries, and seized by Philip’s agents on the road between Brussels and Antwerp. With him was the former rebel Sir Peter Carew, who betrayed Cheke in exchange for an offer of pardon. John Ponet reassured an evidently anxious Bullinger about Cheke: ‘I doubt not but that he will seal his testimony to the gospel with his blood.’

Bullinger was right to be apprehensive. Cheke was worked on by an old friend and adversary, John Feckenham. They had debated eucharistic doctrine together in 1551, when Feckenham was the prisoner in the Tower, and now the favour was returned. Cheke’s recantation shocked fellow Protestants: ‘it is vain to place our confidence in man,’ lamented Robert Horne, minister of the congregation in Frankfurt. Other prisoners were trooped in front of Cheke, to be persuaded to follow his example. The Venetian ambassador heard of ‘well-nigh thirty persons, who were in prison in danger of being burned, having lately by the grace of God and through the efficacy of his language been converted’.⁴⁵

Heresy as a whole, however, showed little sign of being demoralized into submission: 1556 was a burning-year still hotter than 1555, with eighty-five executions and a further eleven Protestants dying in prison. Of these victims, most were humble artisans, and twenty-two were women.

The suffering was not distributed evenly. There were burnings in thirteen English counties in 1556, as well as in Guernsey in the Channel Islands. But the executions were heavily concentrated in London/Middlesex, Essex, Kent and Sussex, with only a single victim each in Cambridgeshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire (Cranmer). In the remaining twenty-six English counties there were no burnings, and none at all in Wales.⁴⁶ This was in part a topography of hatred: executions took place where bishops and lay officials were more likely to want to prosecute, and neighbours more willing to denounce. But it undoubtedly reflected the unevenness of the advance of Protestantism itself, and the thinness of support for it across much of the Midlands, north and west. In more than one sense, England was becoming increasingly divided.

Executions usually passed off without any recorded protest, though a revealing, and moving, incident took place at Laxfield in Suffolk in September 1556, at the execution of John Noyes. When the sherriff sent his men to find hot coals to start the blaze, ‘the fire in most places of the street was put out’, and the officers had to break down the door of the only house where smoke was seen billowing from the chimney.47 It seems implausible Laxfield’s inhabitants were making a collective evangelical protest; rather, a forlorn gesture of neighbourly solidarity with a local shoemaker, burnt in his own town.

The authorities belatedly realized that killing people in their home parishes might be unpopular: from 1556, executions increasingly shifted to selected regional centres, and victims were consumed in batches, rather than individually: thirteen heretics, men and women, from a variety of locations were burned together at Stratford le Bow outside London on 27 June.⁴⁸

Sympathy for the victims was countered by assurances that they deserved to die; that they were not martyrs but malignants. With the support of Pole, now installed in Cranmer’s place as archbishop of Canterbury, writers like James Cancellar, chorister of the Chapel Royal, contrasted the heretics ‘that lately have been justly burned’ with true martyrs ‘which have suffered for the unity of the Catholic Church’ – More, Fisher and the Carthusians. Pole’s conviction that devotion to these holy men would undermine evangelical ‘pseudo-martyrs’ expressed itself in encouragement to his archdeacon of Canterbury, Nicholas Harpsfield, to compose a biography of More, and to More’s nephew, William Rastell, to produce a folio edition of his uncle’s English Works.

The lay Catholic writer Miles Huggarde, silenced under Edward, found his voice again in 1556 with a rollicking propaganda piece, The Displaying of the Protestants. Huggarde likewise praised the Henrician martyrs, and mocked the condemned evangelicals and their supporters. In an inversion of usual stereotypes, it was the heretics who were credulous and superstitious, rooting around ‘like pigs in a sty’ to collect ashes and bones, and mistaking flights of frightened pigeons for manifestations of the Holy Spirit. Their deaths consigned them to deserved oblivion, their only memorial to be ‘enrolled in a few threehalfpenny books which steal out of Germany’. Huggarde’s insouciance fails entirely to conceal a distinct nervousness about the exiles’ propaganda, and a perceived need to counter it.

Huggarde was a self-proclaimed expert in heresy. He even, during Lent of 1555, managed to attend a secret evangelical conventicle, meeting at a tavern in Islington. There he listened to a sermon by the group’s leader, ‘Old Father Browne’. Like Ralph Allerton, Browne believed there were three religions in England, but his categories were rather different. There was ‘my Lord Chancellor’s [Gardiner’s] religion’, ‘Cranmer’s, Latimer’s and Ridley’s religion’, and also ‘God’s religion’. The first was certainly ‘nought’, but the second was ‘not good’.⁴⁹

Radical Protestantism and anabaptism, bane of the Edwardian establishment, might have been expected to thrive when that enforcing hand was removed, to be replaced by an officialdom that did not much care to distinguish between different strains of heresy. In fact, Huggarde’s experience notwithstanding, most underground congregations remained faithful to the 1552 Prayer Book and communion. In part, this was because the displaced Edwardian preachers launched a vigorous, and remarkably successful, campaign to maintain orthodoxy within the anti-Roman ranks. From their places of imprisonment in the King’s Bench and elsewhere, they sent out letters condemning the ‘freewillers’ who attacked predestination, and addressing individuals’ doubts about the doctrine. A number of radical conventiclers converted, bowing to the superior learning and biblical knowledge of the clerical leaders. Where Edwardian evangelicals were incarcerated alongside radicals, they did all they could to silence and confound them. Included with an account of John Philpot’s prison examinations, published at Emden in 1556, was his ‘Apology for Spitting upon an Arian’ – ‘apology’, of course, meant justification.50

Persecution pared, but also purified English Protestantism. In its heart, and in its heartlands, it steeled itself to resist the onslaught of Antichrist. In May 1556, heresy commissioners in East Anglia received an alarming dossier from a small group of beleaguered Catholic citizens in Ipswich. Some forty inhabitants had fled the town, and ‘lurked in secret places’. Another twenty refused to receive the sacrament, and a dozen (an interestingly smaller number) came to church, but refused the pax or looked away at the elevation. There were also a half-dozen ‘priests’ wives, that have access to their husbands’. Things were worse still in the Essex town of Colchester, according to a letter from the priest Thomas Tye, sent to Bonner in December 1556:

The detestable sort of schismatics were never so bold since the King and Queen’s Majesties’ reigns as they are now at this present … They assemble together upon the Sabbath day in the time of divine service, sometimes in one house, sometime in another, and there keep their privy conventicles and schools of heresy … The ministers of the Church are hemmed at in the open streets, and called knaves. The blessed Sacrament of the altar is blasphemed and railed upon in every alehouse and tavern. Prayer and fasting is not regarded. Seditious talks and news are rife, both in town and country.

All this was in spite of a spate of exemplary burnings in the town (six at once on 28 April 1556) and a recent visit from the bishop’s commissary.⁵¹

Colchester was very likely the most Protestant place in England. Yet even – or especially – here, religious rivalries shaped everyday social divisions. Protestants drank at The King’s Head; Catholics at The White Hart. As Agnes Silverside, the elderly widow of a priest, awaited execution in Colchester in 1557, Ralph Allerton wrote to remind her of ‘the old law, where the people of God were most straitly commanded that they should not mingle themselves with the ungodly heathen’.⁵²

The inspirational – or guilt-inducing – witness of the martyrs, along with the insistent finger-wagging of exiled preachers and writers, tempered the temptations of Nicodemism. Gertrude Crokehay, a London merchant’s widow, was denounced as a heretic in Antwerp, on her late husband’s business, and on her return was induced by Bonner’s chancellor, Thomas Derbyshire, to attend evensong. She experienced ‘such trouble in her conscience thereby, that she thought verily God had cast her off, and that she should be damned and never saved’. Crokehay sought the counsel of John Rough, a Scots preacher in northern England in Edward’s reign, who returned from Emden in 1557 to take charge of the London underground congregation. Rough’s directive to her was to confess her fault in front of the conventicle, ‘and so to be received into their fellowship again’.53

There was no slackening in the pace of persecution in 1557. In February, Philip and Mary established a national commission to search out ‘heretical opinions, Lollardies, heretical and seditious books’, and before the end of the year another eighty-one burnings took place. Of these, a noticeably greater number than before were of people relapsing after earlier recantations – recantations that the authorities had sometimes gone to remarkable lengths to allow them to make. Though the commission referred to ‘Lollardies’ (a loose colloquialism for heresies of all kinds), this did not resemble the Lollard pattern of simply getting caught a second time. In numerous poignant cases, conscience-stricken gospellers made public declarations effectively sealing their own fate. Elizabeth Cooper, a Norwich pewterer’s wife, came to St Andrew’s church at service time in July 1557 to announce that ‘she revoked her recantation before made in that place, and was heartily sorry that ever she did it’. A couple of months earlier, the Bristol weaver Richard Sharp came to the choir door of Temple Church during high mass, pointed to the altar and called out, ‘Neighbours, bear me record that yonder idol is the greatest and most abominable that ever was, and I am sorry that ever I denied my Lord God!’⁵⁴

Salvation lay in separation, in spurning participation with the practices of the ungodly. Rose Hickman, reluctantly, brought her child to a popish priest for baptism in 1555 (see pp. 384–5), but at Whitsun 1557, Gertrude Crockhay stood as godmother at a private baptism, using the Edwardian Prayer Book, in a midwife’s house on Mincing Lane. The beleaguered Ipswich Catholics wanted the orthodoxy of midwives looked into, ‘because of evil counsel at such times as the necessity of women’s travail shall require a number of women assembled’. The unsupervised sociability of women was a vortex of male anxiety.

As coming into the world, so in leaving it. When, early the following year, Crockhay lay mortally ill, she was warned she would be denied Christian burial if she refused the last rites of the Church. Her reply spoke chillingly of a resolve for separation maintained through death and on into eternity: ‘How happy am I, that I shall not rise with them, but against them.’⁵⁵

Enmity was not ended by death, and nor were the dead safe from punishment. On 13 January 1557, a meeting of heads of colleges in Cambridge, convened by Vice-Chancellor Andrew Perne, determined that the former professor of Divinity, Martin Bucer, was a heretic, as was another German, the Reader in Hebrew, Paul Fagius, who died shortly after his appointment in 1549. On 6 February, the bodies of the two men were exhumed from their graves and taken to the marketplace. There, in front of a large crowd, their coffins were chained to a stake and burned, together with piles of their heretical books. In Oxford, the corpse of Catherine Dammartin, partner of Peter Martyr, was likewise disinterred. She was a priest’s wife, a former nun, and a heretic buried in Christ Church near the former shrine of St Frideswide: a triple sacrilege in Catholic eyes. Her remains were reinterred in a dung-heap.

Prior to his return to England, Pole seriously considered whether the bodies of all heretics should be disinterred from churches and churchyards. A strict interpretation of canon law suggested that they should, though awareness of the outrage likely to ensue sensibly headed off this drastic course of action. Nonetheless, Spanish clergy who came over with Philip were reportedly uneasy about celebrating mass in churches ‘polluted’ by the presence of the heretic dead, a scruple shared by the Queen herself. Nearly forty years later, one of Mary’s privy councillors, Francis Englefield, then an exile in Spain, would tell an extraordinary story. The Queen, urged on by Pole, commanded him and other courtiers secretly to exhume the body of her father, which they then burned to ashes. It would be unwise to insist it could not have happened.56 Across the spectrum of belief, the business of existing alongside the other, in life or in death, even within the unchosen bonds of kinship, was becoming ever more freighted and fraught.

Legacies

The exhumation of Bucer and Fagius was more than an act of petty vindictiveness: it was the symbolic face of a serious and successful campaign to reclaim the universities for Catholicism, culminating in legatine visitations of Oxford in 1556 and Cambridge in 1557. This was a particular priority of Pole, who became chancellor of Cambridge upon the death of Gardiner in 1555, and of Oxford just under a year later. New statutes, curriculum changes, including restoration of the faculties of canon law, and a thorough purge of heretical books from college libraries did much to restore official confidence in the universities’ essential orthodoxy.

To a considerable extent, the universities purged themselves. A wave of exiles washed over to Germany and Switzerland, particularly from Cambridge, where, within six months of Mary’s accession, only three former heads of house remained in place. The others were replaced by reliable Catholics. In a backhanded compliment to the Edwardian habit of bringing in foreign theological expertise, Carranza assisted the visitation commissioners at Oxford, where a second Spanish Dominican, Pedro de Soto, became professor of Hebrew. A third, Cranmer’s nemesis Juan de Villagarcía, occupied Peter Martyr’s old place as professor of Divinity. A couple of years later, Martyr himself would be told, by the returning John Jewel, that at Oxford, ‘religion and all hope of good learning and talent is altogether abandoned’. ‘You would scarcely believe,’ Jewel told Bullinger, ‘so much desolation could have been effected in so short a time.’57

The Catholic bishops did not know they were short of time, and neither did layfolk in the parishes. Within the churches, steady programmes of restoration and refurbishment rolled on through 1557. Only half the parishes in Bath and Wells met all the requirements about books and altars in 1554; by 1557, 86 per cent did so. In Chester, nine-tenths of parishes had a rood and necessary ornaments, and the position was still better in Lincoln diocese. In the late summer, Nicholas Harpsfield, Pole’s archdeacon in Canterbury, launched a thorough visitation of the diocese. He found evidence of heresy, and some lamentable gaps in provision of statues – orders for setting up images of patron saints were issued in 1556, and in most places nationally were rapidly complied with, and often piously pre-empted. But even in Cranmer’s Kent, the churches now looked and smelled Catholic again. Nearly every parish had an altar, vestments and the core set of liturgical books.⁵⁸

Slowly and cautiously, old habits crept back. Churchwardens’ accounts show that in the latter 1550s as many parishes as in the 1520s were paying for the bells to be rung at Halloween, to call for prayer for the dead. The tailors’ guild of Salisbury reinstituted its obit mass in 1556, and obits and requiems started up again in Doncaster the same year. In heretic-infested Essex, the percentage of will-makers requesting masses and prayers more than doubled between 1554 and 1558, and there was a four-fold increase in East Sussex over the same period. Still, the fact that the Queen had not yet conceived an heir was a cloud on the horizon. Alan Wood, a yeoman of Snodland in Kent, established an annual obit in the parish church on his death in 1556, but took care to specify the money should go to the poor ‘if the same obit by order of law be abrogated hereafter’.⁵⁹ The mutability of princes was a lesson everyone in the realm had learned.

In the absence of a direct heir, hopes and fears continued to meet in the person of Elizabeth. Philip, who had better insight than most into the likelihood of Mary’s conceiving, began to think the enigmatic princess might be a better prospect than the Francophile Queen of Scots, and from a distance protected her interests. Released from confinement at Woodstock, Elizabeth, like her sister in Edward’s reign, made the necessary business of travel into a public statement of confidence and expectation. In December 1556, she rode from London to her house at Hatfield ‘with a great company, and her servants all in red, guarded with velvet’.60

In 1557, the ship of Catholic restoration was caught in the cross-winds of European politics. Early the previous year, a brief truce in the long-running Habsburg-Valois conflict broke down, and Paul IV threw the papacy’s weight behind France. In September 1556, Philip – King of Spain since his father’s abdication at the start of the year – sent an army to invade the Papal States. A second Sack of Rome was only narrowly averted.

Defeated by the Habsburgs in the field, the Pope flexed his spiritual muscles. On 10 April, he revoked Pole’s legacy, and seemed to want to remove even the residual legatine powers adhering to the office of archbishop of Canterbury. William Peto, elderly superior of the Greenwich Observants, was implausibly made legate in Pole’s place, and appointed a cardinal, though Peto tried to reject the appointment, and Mary refused to allow the courier bearing the nomination into the country.

In a further blow, Pole’s friend and ally, and Philip’s most obliging contact at the Roman curia, Cardinal Giovanni Morone, was arrested on 13 May and charged with Lutheran heresy. As part of the process against him, the Inquisition began to investigate Pole too. Mary flatly refused to allow him to travel to Rome. In July 1557, in tones her father might have recognized, she instructed the English ambassador there to tell the Pope any heresy trial could take place only within England.⁶¹

In the meantime, England was drawn directly into the Franco-Spanish conflict, initially as the result of a bizarre attempt to re-enact Wyatt’s Rebellion in Yorkshire. Still more bizarrely, its leader was a nephew of Cardinal Pole, though an evangelical one: Thomas Stafford, a son of Pole’s sister, Ursula. Sailing from Dieppe with a small company, on 25 April he seized Scarborough Castle, and sought (unsuccessfully) to rouse the local population against the Spanish Marriage. There was no pretence this time of rebellion as an extreme form of counsel: Mary was ‘unrightful Queen’, and must be deposed in favour of ‘the true English blood of our own natural country’ (by which Stafford seems to have meant himself). He was taken prisoner within days, and executed at Tyburn on 28 May 1557.⁶²

Mary chose to believe that Henry II was directly behind the attempt. She was egged on by her husband, back in England since March to solicit military help. On 7 June, in a proclamation issued under the Queen’s name alone, England declared war on France and Scotland. It began promisingly. On 10 August, English troops shared in the glory of a Spanish victory over the French at San Quentin in Picardy. But another, more deadly enemy struck closer to home. ‘This summer,’ wrote the chronicler Wriothesley, ‘reigned in England divers strange and new sicknesses.’ It was a virulent strain of influenza, the worst epidemic of the entire century, which would linger over the next two years and push mortality levels 60 per cent higher than usual. Pressures on the poor were unprecedented.63

Perhaps no wonder, then, if there was something of a defensive note to the sermon Cardinal Pole preached before the Queen and court on 30 November, ‘Reconciliation Day’, on the appropriately sombre theme of repentance. Evangelicals might glory in the contribution of the five London hospitals, but in Catholic Italy – in Rome, Venice, Florence, Bologna, Milan – there were hundreds of hospitals and religious houses, and ‘in two cities only’, more given to monasteries and the poor in a month, than in England in a year. Pole admitted, grudgingly, he did not expect spontaneous re-endowment of religious houses. But people who had robbed the Church, and stripped both wealth and authority from the clergy – in which England ‘had gone further than any schismatical nation’ – should make recompense with alms-giving.

Greed, immorality, disobedience: all were legacies of the Schism. Pole traced an inexorable logic of decline, from Henry’s first assumption of his ‘strange title’, to the heresy and iconoclasm of recent years. Once again, More and Fisher, true martyrs who put recent false ones to shame, were his primary witnesses. Pole shared with his audience an anecdote told him by More’s friend, the Italian merchant Antonio Buonvisi, now an old man. Just before the break with Rome, Buonvisi asked More what he thought of papal primacy, and he answered that he regarded it ‘not a matter of so great a moment and importance, but rather as invented of men for a political order’. Having said this, More felt immediately stricken in conscience, and he asked Buonvisi to call again when he had reflected on the matter properly. Ten days later, More retracted his earlier opinion. He had come to see the primacy of the Pope as the thing ‘that holdeth up all’.⁶⁴

Rome, and a cohesive, charitable society, or schism, heresy and the collapse of all order; there was no third option. This was the theme of numerous sermons – by bishops and others at Paul’s Cross, by preachers licensed by Pole for various dioceses, and by clerical officiants at the burning of unrepentant heretics. The Marian regime was as eager to proclaim its message from the pulpit as its Edwardian predecessor had been, and to emerge triumphant from an intensifying battle of ideas.⁶⁵ It was, to say the least, ironic that at the turn of 1557–8 England was embroiled in bitter conflict with a pope who considered Cardinal Pole himself to be a flagrant heretic.

The new year began badly. A surprise French attack in early January succeeded in capturing Calais, last remnant of the once-mighty English empire in France. People could hardly believe it: ‘it is supposed it could not be so won without treason’ was chronicler Wriothesley’s pained comment.⁶⁶

The campaign against heresy slowed down in 1558 as a result of disruption caused by the influenza epidemic, though a far from negligible forty-three people were burned over the course of the year, bringing the total for the reign to 284, with a further twenty-eight accused heretics dying in prison. Though still heavily concentrated in the south-east, the victims of 1558 were executed across eleven counties. The single burnings taking place in Exeter, and in Richmond, Yorkshire, were unusual spectacles for residents.

Almost half of those burned in 1558 were not lone dissidents, but people convicted for their membership of an illegal conventicle. John Rough’s London congregation was discovered, shortly before Christmas 1557, at the Saracen’s Head, Islington, under cover of watching a play. This may mean that the authorities were becoming more successful at cracking open networks, and paring away at the hard core of heretics.67 But it may also suggest that heretics themselves were becoming more organized and determined. There is in fact little sign that the authorities thought they were close to winning the battle against heresy. A royal proclamation, issued in June 1558, was decidedly twitchy about the wave of books ‘filled both with heresy, sedition and treason’ continuing to be smuggled in from abroad. Any person found possessing one could immediately be executed as a rebel, ‘according to the order of martial law’.⁶⁸

Rough’s congregation soon reformed itself under the leadership of Thomas Bentham, a one-time fellow of Oxford and an exile returning from Frankfurt. In a letter of 17 July 1558 to Thomas Lever, currently pastor to the exiles at Aarau near Zürich, Bentham made a surprising and revealing confession. Safe in exile in Germany, he suffered ‘great grief of mind’, but now – under constant threat of death – he felt ‘most quiet and joyful’. A growing habit of deference to the Swiss Protestant authorities was reflected in Bentham’s request for Lever to walk over to Zürich to seek advice on several thorny questions. These included whether believers could pursue lawsuits in papistical courts, and whether professors of the gospel, ‘not communicating with papists’, should still pay tithes to them, as well as other taxes demanded by ‘evil rulers and wicked magistrates’.⁶⁹ The obligations of faith were prompting reconsideration of the most basic social and political duties.

It was certain that believers should refuse patently ungodly orders, such as to attend mass. But was it ever lawful for them to pass beyond passive disobedience into active resistance, as Wyatt and Stafford had done? Lutheran theologians had already given limited sanction for the princes of the Schmalkaldic League to oppose Charles V. They were properly constituted authorities, jointly responsible with Charles for the good order of the Empire, and could correctively step in when he failed to uphold true religion: it was hardly a charter for revolution. Calvin was almost equally guarded.⁷⁰

Some exiles from England, faced with what they saw as a uniquely perverse and persecuting regime, went much further. In Strassburg in 1556, John Ponet published a Short Treatise of Politike Power, arguing that monarchs derived their sovereignty from the people, and that tyrannical rulers could legitimately be put on trial. In Geneva, in January 1558, Christopher Goodman posed the question of How Superior Powers Ought to be Obeyed. In terms that would have appalled Cranmer and other Henrician evangelicals, he urged readers ‘to repent our former ignorance’. Obedience to God’s Word meant not a stoic willingness to suffer martyrdom, but a duty ‘to resist idolatry by force’. Ponet only hinted at it, but Goodman openly advocated the slaying of tyrants. Mary deserved to be ‘punished with death’.

A couple of months later, Goodman’s friend John Knox published a scarcely less inflammatory tract, a First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. Its purpose – as the title not so subtly suggested – was to argue for the unlawfulness of female rule: ‘repugnant to nature, contumely [insult] to God … the subversion of good order’. Knox had in mind a trio of popish Marys – of England, of Scotland and of Guise – and pronounced that ‘women may and ought to be deposed from authority’. If this were not enough, Knox published in July 1558 the outline for an envisioned Second Blast. In it he argued that monarchs should be elected, rather than succeed by inheritance; that Catholics and notorious sinners must be barred from bearing rule; that oaths of allegiance to such rulers were null; and that unfit rulers might legitimately be deposed.71

These were not universal, or even majority views among the exiles, let alone the more prudent evangelicals keeping their heads down at home. But in the late 1550s it was becoming more widely accepted – by Catholics as well as evangelicals – that the duty of political obedience was contingent rather than absolute, that obligations to the laws of God, or of his Church, always took precedence over merely human regulations.

Christians had always known and believed this. But for thirty years and more, the English people had been party to, and participants in, an unrelenting series of arguments, concocted in print and pulpit, and continued in homes and taverns, about what God’s laws actually were. The difficulties of identifying God’s laws accurately shook to the core any residual assumption that kings, Parliaments or bishops could automatically be relied on to implement them correctly.

Henry VIII’s pitch to his people was simple: to trust and obey him. ‘My king is not the guardian of religion,’ Robert Barnes once confided to Martin Luther, ‘he is the religion.’⁷² It was a strategy not even Henry’s excessive personal and regal charisma could prevent from misfiring, and one still less likely to succeed when the old King was replaced by, first, a child, and then a woman. Edward and Mary claimed to be followers, rather than embodiments, of the true religion, and they commanded their people to worship as they did. Their policies and propaganda, though diametrically opposed, had the similar effect of emboldening some in their support for official religion and confirming others in their opposition to it. A third group – perhaps the majority – were eager to obey, but had been left with an uneasy, unshakeable sense that political loyalty and religious conviction now seemed to be inherently separable things, for combining or uncoupling as circumstances demanded.

Historians have often tussled over which side was ‘winning’ and which ‘losing’ the religious struggle of Mary’s reign.73 The truth is that both sides were at once transformed and in different ways strengthened by it. On the one hand, out of the cocoon of a numerically dominant body of traditionalist lay and clerical opinion, divided and confused by the events of Henry’s reign, and battered and demoralized by those of Edward’s, there was emerging a more articulate, combative and committed Roman Catholicism. On the other, the networks of reformers and evangelicals, who unexpectedly gained control of the kingdom in 1547, and unexpectedly lost it in 1553, were evolving into a more determined and doctrinaire Protestant movement, and weaning themselves from dependence on the royal supremacy. The intensification of religious persecution was a crucial development. The taking of lives divided communities, but it strengthened other bonds and solidarities – among the ranks of those suffering violence, and also of those meting it out.

In January 1558 Mary informed her husband, absent from England since July the preceding year, that she believed herself to be pregnant. That she was not, and never had been, was a cruel blow of personal fortune, but it was also the decisive political fact of the reign. By April Mary once more had to admit she was mistaken, but for the moment would make no changes to a will referring to the ‘heir of my body’. In the late summer, Mary developed a fever, and took to her apartments. There was no immediate cause for concern, but in late October, the Queen’s health took a sharp turn for the worse. It was, perhaps, ovarian cancer.

Philip, his own claims ruled out by treaty and statute, was concerned for a smooth and stable succession, with the French left out in the cold. That meant acknowledging Elizabeth, whose trump card, like Mary’s in 1553, was their father’s last Act of Succession. Philip sent the Count of Feria, Renard’s replacement as ambassador to England, to reason with the dying Queen. In fact, Mary herself, in a codicil to her will dated 28 October, had already added a reluctant reference to ‘my next heir and successor’. Parliament reassembled on 5 November, and two days later Mary was lucid enough to receive the Speaker, and agree that a delegation be sent to Hatfield to inform Elizabeth she had been named as heir.

Mary, according to the later recollections of her lady-in-waiting, Jane Dormer, also asked for assurances that her sister was a true Catholic. Elizabeth earnestly, effortlessly provided them. Feria visited Elizabeth on 9 November, bristling with assurances of his master’s goodwill towards her. He found her to be ‘a very vain and clever woman’, and surprisingly open with him. She joked with the envoy about Philip’s attempts to wed her off to Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy, with a barbed comment about her sister losing the people’s affection by marrying a foreigner. ‘She puts great store by the people, and is very confident that they are all on her side.’ And she made no secret of her resentment at her treatment in her sister’s reign. As to religion, Feria’s assessment was pessimistic: ‘I am very much afraid that she will not be well disposed.’ He had heard that the women around her were all heretics, and feared that the men through whom she planned to govern would prove so too. One thing was certain: her secretary would be William Cecil, ‘an able and virtuous man, but a heretic’.74

The Queen received extreme unction on the night of 13 November. She rallied a little the next day, and died early in the morning of 17 November. Reginald Pole, in failing health since September, outlived her by twelve hours. He too, as the end approached, reconciled himself unwillingly to Elizabeth’s succession, writing to her on 14 November to say that his last hope was ‘to leave all persons satisfied of me, and especially your Grace, being of that honour and dignity that the providence of God hath called you unto’.⁷⁵

God’s providence was a mysterious thing. For both Catholics and Protestants, heretics and believers, it gave and it took away. One response was fatalistic acceptance. Another was to heed the signs of the times, and throw everything into arduous efforts to bring God’s will to fruition. For English Protestants in 1558, hiding at home or cast into exile, the chief instrument of God’s providence was now a twenty-five-year-old unmarried woman, as once it had been a nine-year-old boy. The very unlikeliness of it was part of the wonder, a sign that God still had great things in store for England.