THE REIGNS OF EDWARD VI (1547–53) AND MARY I (1553–8)
The accession of a baby queen, Mary, and a boy king, Edward, to the thrones of Scotland and England offered the chance to solve an ancient problem: how should two alien powers share the same island? This seeming coincidence was taken by England’s governors as a sign of divine providence, of God’s plan that the heir and heiress should marry and unite their two kingdoms as ‘Great Britain’. By the Treaty of Greenwich of 1543, Mary, who had ascended the Scottish throne in 1542, one week old, was promised to marry the young Prince Edward. Yet the Scots saw the advantage as all on England’s side. As Sir Adam Otterburn sagely asked, ‘If your lad were a lass and our lass were a lad, would you then be so earnest in this matter?’ Rather than have an Englishman as king of Scotland, ‘our common people and the stones in the street would rise and rebel against it’. The Scots soon broke their treaty, and when they jilted the English a terrible retribution followed. The English ‘Rough Wooing’ of 1544 and 1545 left the Scottish Lowlands a smoking waste and the Borderers condemned to live wretchedly in the ruins of their countryside. The Scots grew ever more determined to remain free from the ‘thraldom of England’, while the English still asserted their putative sovereignty, increasingly regarding the Scots not so much as foreign enemies but as domestic rebels. Scotland did not stand alone. While England was at war with Scotland the King of France, Henry II, bound to the ‘auld alliance’, would never be at peace with England. Both England and Scotland faced long and dangerous minorities of their rulers.
In Scotland, as in England, divisions in religion transformed the nature of politics, as the factions struggling for ascendancy fought also for the advance or the destruction of reform. Henry VIII, having broken papal power in England, sought to subvert it in Scotland too. As Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford laid waste the Borders, he despoiled the great religious houses also. He met stalwart resistance at Kelso Abbey in September 1545, where twelve monks, with about one hundred supporters, made their last stand. Those who held out in the steeple were slaughtered, and the Abbey was destroyed lest it be used as fortress against the English. The leader of Scottish resistance to English aggression, and the chief French partisan, was David Beaton. As Cardinal, he was leader too of the Catholic cause in Scotland. The death of the Cardinal was devoutly hoped for by his political enemies; not least by Henry VIII, who countenanced the assassination of Beaton as he had once before of Cardinal Pole. In the spring of 1547 Beaton was murdered by a group of Fife lairds. As his desecrated body swung from the castle walls at St Andrews the Catholic people were invited to ‘see there their god’. Beaton’s assassins and other opponents of the regency of James Hamilton, Earl of Arran held out in St Andrews, with English support, until in July 1547 the French arrived to break the siege. Among those conveyed to France in the galleys was John Knox, who would return to lead the Scottish Reformation. Mary, Queen of Scots was brought up and remained a Catholic. Not so her Tudor cousin and spurned bridegroom.
Edward VI was a king not only born but educated to rule. Even Erasmus would have approved so perfect an education for a Christian prince. The celebrated humanists Richard Cox and John Cheke became tutors to the ‘godly imp’, and from them he learnt not only languages but a profound biblical piety. Other princes received ideal educations and learnt nothing, but here was a prince who prepared himself with great discipline for what he saw as the divine obligation of his kingship. He studied history. Its lessons must be put into practice; so he took notes upon English rule in France in Henry VI’s reign. He studied geography. He knew all the ports and havens in England, France and Scotland, and the favourable winds and tides for entering them, for a king needed strategic information. He learnt the names and religion of every magistrate, the better to govern. He studied moral philosophy from Cicero and Aristotle. He studied rhetoric. But above all, he knew the scriptures; at the age of twelve he read twelve chapters daily. Edward’s youthful passion was to hear sermons, and as he listened he took notes, especially when the preachers touched upon the duties of kings.
When the preachers urged not only spiritual but moral regeneration, Edward took heed. He had a commanding sense that true religion must be introduced and the abuses in society redressed. From Bishop Latimer he heard that ‘to take away the right of the poor is against the honour of a king’, and that kings must show the way to their covetous subjects. Not for him a worldly court like his father’s, where courtiers had gambled for Church booty, throwing dice to win Jesus bell tower in St Paul’s churchyard, and where courtly – and less courtly – love had flourished. Did not Latimer urge the death penalty for adultery? Edward was intent upon emulating Josiah, the young king of the Old Testament who had destroyed the idols of Baal. To his ‘dear and beloved uncle’, Edward Seymour, Edward dedicated his own collection of Old Testament texts against the veneration of images. Sometime before 1550 Edward had been won to a ‘pious understanding of the doctrine of the Eucharist’; that is, to the evangelical faith.
Here was a king with an iron sense of duty and justice. His own chronicle records with apparent lack of regret the fate of malefactors, even or especially those close to him. Edward had inherited the sovereign will and implacability of his father. Also his suspicion. ‘A great noter of things that pertained to princely affairs’, Edward ciphered those notes into Greek letters, safe from the prying eyes of his attendants. He had reason for suspicion, for he was anxiously guarded, ‘not half a quarter of an hour alone’, with no one to trust at his court except his dog. He was guarded against kidnap by those who would use him as the most powerful political pawn, and soon became aware of his own vulnerability. For July 1549 he recorded dispassionately in his chronicle that ‘because there was a rumour that I was dead, I passed through London’. Although he was king, he was still, as his reign began, a little boy (aged nine), without the power, even if he had the will, to govern in his minority. The evangelicals had their reasons to urge him to use his regal power before the end of his minority to implement religious change; conservatives, like Bishops Bonner and Gardiner, argued otherwise, denying the legality of such precipitate use of the Royal Supremacy.
When Henry VIII was dying, those around him conspired to subvert his plan for the rule of the realm during Edward’s minority. The King’s death was kept secret, while behind locked doors in the Privy Gallery councillors and courtiers bound each other to overturn the royal provisions for a Regency Council of sixteen equal members. Together, they all agreed – save one – that Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, the brother of Henry’s third queen and the new king’s uncle, should be elevated above them all as Lord Protector, ‘thinking it the surest form of government and most fit for that commonwealth’. By doctoring the royal will to reward themselves with lands, offices and titles – gifts unfulfilled in the King’s life, but intended by him, so they claimed – the loyalty of some and the silence of others was bought, for a time. These secret moves left a dangerous political legacy. The conspirators always looked for further favours and for a share in the power which they had handed over. ‘Remember what you promised me in the gallery at Westminster, before the breath was out of the body of the king that dead is,’ William Paget, the prime mover, reminded Hertford. That promise was to listen to Paget’s advice above all others’, and Hertford soon broke it. He also broke his promise to the others that he would do nothing ‘without the advice of us, the rest of the Council’. Within days of Edward’s accession Hertford, who was now created Duke of Somerset, had effectively assumed the royal prerogative of forming a Privy Council, and began to call it, and not to call it, at will. The policies of the Protectorate were soon exclusively Somerset’s own. When Paget wrote to him offering advice to which Somerset did not listen, he wrote of ‘your matters of policy’, ‘your determinations for the year to come’, ‘your debt’, ‘your navy’, ‘your foreign affairs’. Since Somerset had taken the devising of policy to himself, his would be the blame if, and when, it failed.
The precedents for a Protectorate were hardly propitious. No one could forget Richard III. Like the boy king Henry VI, Edward had two feuding uncles. The Protector’s brother, Thomas Seymour, was convinced that the Governorship of the King and the Protectorship of the realm should be two different offices and that one of these must be his. The treacherous John Dudley, Lord Lisle, urged Thomas Seymour to bid for the Governorship, and by fomenting the quarrel between the two brothers led them to play into his hands. Over the dead body of Henry VIII, who had in his last days tried to exclude him, Thomas Seymour was admitted to the Council. Failing to gain control of his nephew officially, Seymour sought it by stealth; by suborning members of the Privy Chamber, leaving notes under the carpet for the susceptible Edward, sending him pocket money (which the King gave to Latimer), and urging him to ‘bear rule as other kings do’. Possession of the King’s person gave the essential resource of power – legitimacy – and over him the two uncles fought. Only the barking of the royal dog which guarded the doors of the Privy Chamber saved the King from kidnap by Thomas Seymour in February 1549, and nothing could save Seymour, who was executed for treason in the following month.
Somerset ruled alone. He was, first and last, a military commander and his guiding obsession was the conquest of Scotland; not, as before, by fire and sword, but by permanent garrisoning. This was a policy with consequences for all his others. As the reign began, England was at peace with France and with Emperor Charles V, and ‘in an indifferent concord with the rest of the world (except Rome)’. But war with Scotland also came to mean war with France, for Henry II vowed that he would rather lose his realm than abandon the Scots. When Mary, Queen of Scots left for France in August 1548 to marry the Dauphin, England’s primary reason for waging the war was gone. By Christmas 1548 Paget was inviting Somerset to consider ‘whether at your first setting forward you took not a wrong way’. The defence of Boulogne and of the Scottish garrisons was dragging England towards catastrophe. Only the most desperate financial expedients could meet the prodigious war expenditure, which ran to £200,000 annually in Scotland alone. The great debasement of the coinage, which had begun in Henry VIII’s last years, continued recklessly under Somerset, racking an economy which was suffering enough without such sabotage. Latimer in his Lenten sermon of 1549 spoke of the debased silver coin so reddened with copper that it ‘blushed for shame’. Extraordinary inflation followed the currency manipulations. Between 1544 and 1551 prices in London – where food could not be grown, only bought – rose by almost 90 per cent. Observing the suffering and social misery, Somerset never admitted that war expenditure and debasement might be the causes. Debasement could not end until the war did but, having embarked upon the conquest of Scotland, Somerset, the proud victor of the Battle of Pinkie in 1547, could not end the haemorrhage of money and men, nor abandon his policy. Nor could he countenance defeat, except, so he confessed upon the walls of Berwick, in his dreams. He could not even admit the massive military superiority of the French and the folly of being drawn into war with them from August 1549. Unable to blame his own policies, Somerset and those advisers to whom he listened placed the cause of society’s ills elsewhere.
Somerset saw himself as the champion of the oppressed, hearing complacently the benisons of the poor: ‘There was never man had the hearts of the poor as you have. Oh, the commons pray for you, sir, they say, “God save your life”.’ Such paternalism may have seemed incompatible with Somerset’s military brutality, his cruel arrogance and his startling cupidity. As the soldier who had left the poor in the Borders to live like animals in their ruined homes; as rack-renter, sheep-master and encloser; as the ruler who presided over the Vagrancy Act which imposed slavery upon those who, willingly or not, left their homes, he was ostensibly an unlikely social reformer. Yet to that role he aspired. Here was a man as ambitious of virtue, the badge of nobility, as of riches. And there was more to it. Evangelicals harped upon the compelling Christian imperative to relieve the distress of the poor, ‘for those injuries we do unto the poor members of Christ we do unto Him, saith He’, and the Protector heard them. Somerset and his redoubtable duchess had long sustained the evangelical cause. In the dark days of 1539, after the repressive Act of Six Articles had inaugurated a new wave of persecution, they had welcomed leading evangelicals to their London house. The Duchess had supported the heretic Anne Askew in Newgate in 1546. Now ‘hotlings’ returned from exile to kneel at their feet and ‘devise commonwealths’. In power, Somerset listened to those who looked for the advent of a Christian commonwealth and told him how to achieve it, especially to those who blamed social distress not upon ruinous wars but upon the greed of landowners, and who laid the sins which were the Government’s at the door of the sheep-master.
As prices rose ever higher under the Protectorate, people looked for the cause and were puzzled. How was the dearth to be explained when the harvests between 1547 and 1549 had been so good? What could explain the disparity between the price of grain and other foodstuffs? Surely this was a ‘marvellous’ dearth, a ‘monstrous and portentous’ dearth, and man-made, the product of covetousness? Though there was uncertainty whether the raising of rents was the cause or the consequence of inflation, there was no doubt that the rentier gentry prospered while the poor suffered. Did the cause of dearth lie in failures and malpractices of the market? Certainly, the Council issued regulations to control prices; exports were restricted; and compulsory purveyance (the king’s right to buy provisions at fixed low prices) to provide goods for the army was abolished. The cause and the remedy came to be sought in the way in which the land was used. The agrarian problems to which solutions must be found were those that had exercised Wolsey and More a generation before: the conversion of land from arable to pasture, the victory of sheep over plough, the eviction of labourers from their cottages, rural depopulation, vagrancy. These problems were not new, but they were now believed to be intractable. Whether arable had, in fact, employed more people than wool production is doubtful. The great rise in population undermined all old certainties. But there is no doubt that most Tudor thinkers blamed economic ills upon the sheep flocks. Who would bother to employ twelve people to keep cows and milk them, to make cheese and take it to market, when one shepherd could make a greater profit? Why raise pigs, poultry and beef when the money lay in sheep? While the rich made such judgements the poor could hardly have a living. Latimer foresaw the day when a pig would cost as much as a pound. Where would remedy be found?
Somerset, with the approval of some of the Council, set up a commission on 1 June 1548 to discover how much land had been turned from tillage to pasture, for ‘Christian people’ were ‘by the greedy covetousness of some men eaten up and devoured of brute beasts’. John Hales, to whom the commission was entrusted, presented their charges to the commissioners as a godly duty, ‘as acceptable sacrifice to God as may be’, but soon found his commission opposed by the landlords whose excesses the commission was meant to discover and into whose lands and private interests it trespassed. But, in spite of ‘the Devil, private profit, self-love, money and such like the Devil’s instruments’, Somerset insisted that it should go forward. While the gentry thought of the commission as a storm which would pass over, it had raised expectations among the commons which could hardly be fulfilled. Rumours spread that if the commons were not satisfied they would attempt reform themselves. Against the will of the whole Council, Somerset, on his own authority, issued a proclamation in April 1549 enforcing legislation against enclosure, and in July ordered a second enclosure commission, with novel and unconstitutional powers to hear and determine cases. The rest of the Council feared that the commissions were an incitement to riot. So it proved.
In the late spring and summer of 1549 there were commons’ risings in Somerset, Wiltshire, Hampshire, Lincolnshire, Kent, Essex, Sussex, Devon, Cornwall, Bedfordshire, Rutland, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Yorkshire and East Anglia. So sudden and so widespread were the revolts that there was uncertainty about how and where they began. Not since 1381 had there been such widespread rebellion. So long were the delays in sending troops against the rebels and so profligate were Somerset’s pardons offering redress of grievances, that sinister suspicions of his populism were voiced: ‘that you have some greater enterprise in your head that lean so much to the multitude’. But the failure was not the Protector’s alone. The gentry, who by their pursuit of self-interest had abdicated their duty to the commons, seemed powerless to act, and ‘looked one upon another’. Unable to raise their tenants against the rebels, they fled. The commons seemed to hold their governors to ransom. ‘Commons is become a king’, appointing terms and conditions to their rulers. ‘Grant us this and that, and we will go home,’ they were said to demand. Somerset now wrote with patrician horror of ‘a plague and a fury among the vilest and worst sort of men’, who had all ‘conceived a marvellous hate against gentlemen, and take them all as their enemies’.
To the mortification of the evangelical establishment there were revolts both in the name of the ‘commonwealth’, which the commons had appropriated for themselves, and against it by conservatives determined to halt and to reverse reform. How should the governing orders react? All rebellion was sin. Archbishop Cranmer rebuked the rebels: even if their magistrates were ‘very tyrants against the commonwealth’, subjects must obey. The risings took many forms, as was likely ‘of people without head and rule’, and there was little cohesion in motive and organization between the different areas. Some cried ‘Pluck down enclosures and parks; some for the commons; others pretend religion’. Most of the riots were pacified easily enough, especially where the local lord acted expeditiously, as the Earl of Arundel did in Sussex, and deference prevailed. By 10 July the Council could assure Lord Russell in the West that everywhere was ‘thoroughly quieted’, except Buckinghamshire, but even as they wrote thousands of rebels were marching on Norwich. Far distant from each other in motive and action as in place, the rebels in the South-West and East Anglia held out and held out.
When the commons of Attleborough in Norfolk tore down hedges on 20 June it had seemed a spontaneous local protest, little different from many another. Yet at the celebration of the feast of St Thomas the Martyr at Wymondham a fortnight later many came prepared for more concerted action. Finding their leader in Robert Kett, on 10 July thousands marched upon Norwich in a protest against the exploitation and venality of local governors who governed in no interests but their own. Leading figures in the city, including the mayor and perhaps the bishop, colluded with the rebels. Above Norwich on Mousehold Heath a rebel camp was set up, with its own laws, discipline and daily service. The rebels summoned captive gentlemen before a popular tribunal, at the Tree of Reformation, crying either ‘a good man’, or ‘hang him’, but this vigilante justice was prevented and a certain decorum prevailed. In the King’s name Kett ordered purveyance on a grand scale, seizing tens of thousands of the sheep which had dispossessed them in order to provision a camp 16,000 strong. Four times Kett was offered pardon, and four times he refused it: he denied any offence. The Norfolk men had mounted a grand demonstration, not against central government but in support of it, and they waited in their camp for the Council to fulfil its promises of reform and justice. And they waited. Kett’s Mousehold camp was one among many in the summer of 1549. In Kent and Sussex, Norfolk and Suffolk, the ‘camp men’ ‘enkennelled’ themselves; new words for new forms of alternative government by the commons, a form of self-assertion by the lower orders which bewildered and alarmed their social superiors. In their camps they dispensed justice themselves.
Kett’s rebels held out at Mousehold until the end of August, encouraged by a prophecy that
The country knaves, Hob, Dick and Hick,
With clubs and clouted shoon
Shall fill up Dussindale
With slaughtered bodies soon.
But, after a bloody confrontation with the Earl of Warwick’s troops, the slaughtered bodies which made Dussindale a graveyard were the rebels’ own. Later, there were those who regretted the quiescence of the camps, promising that next time they would have not a ‘lying camp but a running camp’. In the South-West the rebels had never believed that the government was for them, rather against them, and they had planned not to camp in protest but, as once before in 1497, to march upon London. Their actions were different from those rebels in East Anglia but so was their cause. They, too, harboured resentments against their gentry, but their animus was principally shown against the evangelical gentry in their midst. Religion was the cause which had first driven them to rise, and it was for religion that thousands died from the remote counties of Devon and Cornwall. The Council had swept away ceremonies and practices which lay at the heart of the traditional religion to which they were devoted. Their rebellion was a direct challenge to the evangelical revolution which was beginning.
The accession of a new king and the rule of a Council known to contain evangelicals had occasioned high and urgent hopes of reform among reforming zealots. Under the new Josiah, they expected the temple of Baal would be cast down, idolatry overthrown, the primitive Church restored. Zealots rushed to effect reformation, without government sanction. This was a time of unprecedented freedom and prosperity for reformist printers. In evangelical strongholds, down went the roods, the images of saints; in their places were whitewashed walls, the royal arms and scriptural messages, including, ‘Thou shalt make no graven images, lest thou worship them’. ‘Hot gospellers’ preached a crusade against false worship. For some of the radicals the idolatry of worshipping images of wood and stone was as nothing compared to the idolatry of the Mass. Many hoped that the Mass was ‘yesterday’s bird’, and sang ballads against that ‘blasphemous monster’ which promised remission of sins by offering Christ’s body and blood: ‘Farewell to Mistress Missa’. But the sacrilege and zealotry of the iconoclasts appalled their Catholic neighbours, who threatened violence against them. The authorities insisted that it was not for the people ‘of their preposterous zeal’ to ‘run before they be sent’.
Yet every move of the Protector’s government signalled its intent to lead the infant Church of England under its juvenile king further towards reform. The homilies that were ordered to be read in every parish from July 1547 asserted justification by faith alone, leading Bishop Gardiner to prefer prison to compliance. The injunctions issued on the same day intended the ‘suppression of idolatry and superstition’. Not only were images themselves to be destroyed but even the ‘memory’ of them was to be obliterated. Could memories be erased as easily as walls could be whitewashed? Now praying upon rosaries was forbidden, and no candles were to be lit before images, but only upon the high altar, before the sacrament. It was an altercation between a Devon gentleman and an old woman whom he found praying still upon her rosary which provoked the rising of the parishioners in St Mary Clyst in Devon in June 1549. In December 1547 chantries and religious guilds had finally been outlawed, not, as under Henry VIII’s legislation of 7 December 1545, upon grounds of economic exigency but through religious principle. If purgatory was not a place, if it was not found in scripture, if the dead were beyond the power of prayer, then what need was there for chantries? Yet the institutions were cast away before the belief that had sustained them was lost, and people lamented the loss of spiritual solace. The armies of morrow mass priests, Jesus mass priests and chantry priests, who had played a vital part in the life of the parishes, were now redundant. No one who suffered the trauma of the religious changes could doubt the reforming drive behind them.
It was characteristic of this regime to bring in starker changes under cover of moderation and traditionalism, and then, having offered reform, to attempt to suppress the diversity and licence which that reform had encouraged. So the very first Act of Edward’s first Parliament was against revilers of the sacrament of the altar, and for communion to be received by all, laity as well as clergy, in the two kinds, of bread and wine. For lay people to receive the consecrated wine was a radical change. Such a change was likely to encourage the ‘human and corrupt curiosity’, speculation of the grossest kind, into the nature of Christ’s presence in the sacrament, which the first part of that Act condemned. All the while Archbishop Cranmer was working towards presenting the people with a new understanding of the way in which they should worship their God.
Human corruption and mutability had perverted divine service, as it did every creation of man, observed Cranmer. The task he now set himself was to create, by drawing upon the great variety of rites and uses through England and from the Catholic tradition of Western Christendom, a single, uniform liturgy, in English. Following St Paul, Cranmer asked how the people could ‘say Amen to that they understand not?’ And Cranmer’s intent was more ambitious still. The people must be brought to a proper understanding of their relationship with God in the central, most mysterious, sacrament: the Eucharist. Cranmer’s private belief had been changing; not always in concert with the official orthodoxy which he, as Archbishop, must uphold. His conservative opponents taunted him for this ambiguity: ‘What believe you, and how do you believe, my lord?’ Bishop Bonner asked him. Cranmer would insist at his trial in 1555 that he had only ever held two beliefs regarding the Eucharist. He had moved away from the strict doctrine of transubstantiation during the 1530s and, after 1546, believed in the spiritual presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Now he intended to enshrine that belief in the new Order of Communion which was to be universally imposed from Whitsun 1549. Believing firmly that a propitiatory sacrifice had been offered once, and once only, by Christ on the Cross, Cranmer in his new rite sought to remove any implication that the priest was offering a propitiatory sacrifice of the body and blood of Christ, here really present in the form of bread and wine. The Mass was not now to be understood as a good work to remit the sins of those for whom it was offered, living and dead. Instead of a sacrifice, the Communion was a celebration, according to Gospel precept, ‘a perpetual memory of that His precious death until His coming again’; a sacrifice instead of praise and thanksgiving. No one should doubt Christ’s presence in spirit in the sacrament. To all who believe:
He hath left in those holy mysteries, as a pledge of His love, and a continual remembrance of the same, His own blessed body, and precious blood, for us to feed upon spiritually, to our endless comfort and consolation.
But the loss of the elevation at the sacring (the moment of greatest power and benediction), of the pax, of the sharing of holy bread; the obliteration of the great cycle of feast days dedicated to the celestial army of saints; the use of English instead of Latin; and the clear reforming impulse which lay behind the new rite, made the Book of Common Prayer an abomination to all of conservative mind. How many were of conservative mind is uncertain, but perhaps most of the population were, as Cranmer well knew. That the language of the services was so direct, so beautiful, so perfectly suited to the expression of things mysterious that it would last for centuries, could mean nothing at all to parishioners whom it left bereft and bewildered. In Yorkshire, Robert Parkyn, a conservative priest, angrily lamented the loss of the elevation of the elements, of ‘adoration, or reservation in the pyx’. The pyx, containing the blessed sacrament reserved, hanging above the altar, had been the focus of popular eucharistic devotion. To many, the new service was blasphemous and absurd; ‘a Yule lark’, a ‘Christmas game’, and in various communities its imposition precipitated revolt. The Western rebels’ tone was peremptory and vengeful:
We will have the sacrament hang over the high altar and there to be worshipped as it was wont to be, and they which will not thereto consent we will have them die like heretics against the holy Catholic faith.
Yet their rebellious energies were dissipated by a long and fruitless siege at Exeter, and their rising was brutally put down. Their priestly leaders were hanged in chains from the steeples of their churches. The spirit of revolt may have died in the South-West but not, surely, the spirit of inward resistance to the religious changes. The rising’s overthrow could not be credited to the Protector’s adept intervention, so his opponents in the Privy Council judged.
In the aftermath of the risings ‘a most dangerous conspiracy’ formed against the Protector. At Hampton Court at the beginning of October 1549, Somerset waited with the King, the Archbishop, a few counsellors, and an army of ‘peasants’ with pitch forks who had answered the call for a general array. In London the rival lords of the Council, led by the Earl of Warwick, waited with the City fathers. In Andover, Lord Russell and Sir William Herbert waited with the army which had suppressed the Western rebellion, fearing ‘an universal calamity and thraldom’ and hoping that ‘no effusion of blood may follow’. Everyone was waiting to see which side would win the greater support, fearing reprisals against the losers.
War among the nobility, not seen since the Wars of the Roses a century before, seemed likely. On 6 October the London Lords, Somerset’s rivals in Council, had ridden armed through the City with liveried bands of retainers. A year before Thomas Seymour had dreamed of raising 10,000 men, had imagined England divided into power blocks of ‘noble men to countervail such other noble men’, and had boasted of his own ‘goodly manred’ in the Marches of Wales. Now Somerset’s tenants might have rallied to him from his estates in Wiltshire had not Russell and Herbert delayed in Hampshire with their troops to prevent them. At this moment of great insecurity an older world of lordship surfaced.
New forces in politics also now appeared. During the conspiracy to bring down the Protector, popular support was rallied in the name of the new religion. Somerset’s cause was proclaimed by those who feared that his downfall would end both patronage for the poor and evangelical reform. Yet his supposed championship of the estate of poverty and of the Gospel might lose him as much support as it gained. Proclamations were issued accusing the Protector’s enemies both of conservatism in religion and of oppressive social policies, but such was the confusion that rumours spread too that Somerset would restore the Mass. His ruthlessness in pursuit of power made anything seem possible. Hearing that the Lords sought ‘his blood and his death’, Somerset moved with the King to Windsor to be better defended. ‘Me thinks I am in prison,’ wrote Edward. So he was, for possession of his person was the key to power. By 9 October, when London’s governors and Russell and Herbert declared for the London Lords, the prospect of civil war was averted. The King was safely handed over. Offered his life, though not his liberty, Somerset surrendered.
Who would rule instead? Behind the conspiracy there lay a group of politicians, conservative in religion, led by Thomas Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, whom Somerset had ousted in 1547. Originally, the conspirators had planned to make the Lady Mary regent, with or without her collusion. But some evangelicals – among whom John Dudley, Earl of Warwick was one – had moved against Somerset partly to save their cause from his reckless egoism, and they were alarmed by any prospect of a conservative revanche with the Lady Mary as its figurehead. Any alliance between such subtle and deadly politicians as Dudley and Wriothesley would be fraught, and conspiracy did not end with Somerset’s fall. Now Wriothesley, allied with the Earl of Arundel, conspired against the evangelicals. They determined that Somerset should die, and with him Warwick, whom they would implicate in Somerset’s designs: they were ‘traitors both and both worthy to die’. Early in January 1550 Warwick, knowing that his fate and Somerset’s were bound together, struck before he was struck down. Laying his hand on his sword, he told Wriothesley: ‘My lord, you seek his blood, and he that seeketh his blood would have mine also.’ Wriothesley and Arundel were evicted from court.
Warwick’s control of the court, his ‘great friends around the King’, placed there in mid October through Cranmer’s influence, allowed him to prevent another conservative coup or any future attempt to abduct the King, and to save himself. Now he moved to purge his erstwhile conservative allies and to add his own supporters to the Council. Since it was safer to have enemies within, and to be vigilant, than to have enemies without, Somerset was allowed to return. Bishop Hooper had preached to Somerset in prison at Christmas 1549, urging him not to seek revenge, but in vain. Somerset’s evident ambition to return to the principal place remained one of the gravest dangers to the new regime. Acute social distress was reason enough to fear insurrection, but more alarming still was the knowledge that the loyalty of the poor was to Somerset, and if they rose again it would be in his name. As 1550 began, a court observer warned that ‘by the divisions of the great the mad rage of the idle commoners is much provoked… so that this year to come is like to be worse than any was yet’.
One who knew John Dudley, Earl of Warwick well said that ‘he had such a head that he seldom went about anything but he conceived first three or four purposes beforehand’. Past master of the double-cross and double bluff, he had learnt in the hard school of Henry’s last years, but not even he could have foreseen the dangers of alliance with Wriothesley, nor his own subsequent betrayal of Wriothesley and its consequences. Having purged the conservatives in Council and repudiated Mary’s regency, Warwick needed new allies and a way to prevent any Catholic resurgence which would threaten him. His new allies would be evangelicals, principally Archbishop Cranmer, whose influence over his royal godson was high. Warwick’s source of power was the Council, of which he became Lord President, and the court, which from February 1550 he controlled as Great Master of the Royal Household, staffing the Privy Chamber with his own men, who guarded access and patrolled the precincts. He needed also the support of the King, who became more attached to the evangelical cause and more imperious as he grew older. Soon Warwick advanced evangelical reform with such commitment that he confounded contemporaries.
While the councillors fought for primacy during that winter of 1549 to 1550 the imprisoned Catholic Bishops Bonner and Gardiner had eagerly awaited their release. The reformers despaired, thinking that Christ had abandoned England. But on Christmas Day 1549 orders came for the destruction of all Catholic service books and for the enforcement of the Book of Common Prayer. The Lady Mary, thinking Warwick ‘the most unstable man in England’ and alarmed by the Council’s moves to force her to renounce her religion, sought sanctuary with her Habsburg cousins. In May 1550 she prepared for escape by boat down an Essex creek to the Emperor’s waiting ships on the coast. Mary’s flight was foiled by a general watch for disorder in Essex. There were watches everywhere that spring, for this government lived in permanent terror of popular disturbance.
Tudor government rested upon consent and popular support, and Warwick’s regime possessed neither. A general hostility grew against Warwick and his followers. By January 1551 it was said that he governed ‘absolutely’ (which was not true), and that he was ‘hated by the commons and more feared than loved by the rest’ (which was). The social distress was palpable. As the effects of the debasement of the coinage bit more deeply, inflation compounded the penury caused by the appalling harvests of 1550 and 1551. The annual rate of inflation in London for 1549–51 was 21 per cent. The price of flour doubled, and the size of a halfpenny loaf of bread, the staple diet of the poor, shrank. In February 1551 the governors of St Bartholomew’s hospital, seeing that the halfpenny loaf would no longer feed two men at a meal, increased the ration by half. The suffering looked for scapegoats. Though the Council was concerned with social justice, and sent out commissions to ensure the equitable provision of wheat, it won no credit for it. The attempts in the spring and summer to restore the coinage were sadly mismanaged and only brought rumours that the rich were profiting from the misery of the poor and that Warwick, in his greed and pride, was creating his own coinage, bearing the stamp of his own badge, the bear and ragged staff. Spring was the ‘stirring time’ when the people might rise. In the springs of 1549, 1550, 1552 and 1553 Parliament was dissolved and the lords and gentry were sent back to their localities to keep order. Warwick began to elevate powerful nobles to the Council: not only to secure their support but to keep their ‘countries’ quiet. These men, chosen as experienced military leaders, were licensed to retain fifty or a hundred horsemen and given strategic defensive commands.
So long as Warwick’s regime remained so unpopular, Somerset’s restoration to primacy was always looked for. Everyone murmured about it; Warwick dreaded it; but was Somerset working towards it? From the moment of his release he began to gather adherents and they laid plans to raise support in Parliament. Somerset saw his best hopes now in leading the leaderless conservatives. Rumour followed rumour: that Somerset would reverse the Edwardian reforms; that he would free Bishop Gardiner; that the Catholic Earls of Derby and Shrewsbury would raise the North. Rumour turned to reality when Somerset and Arundel conceived a plot to assassinate the Earls of Warwick and Northampton at the St George’s Day feast on 23 April. The plot was uncovered, but so uncertain were the times that Warwick could not yet risk arresting his enemies.
The spring and summer of 1551 was a time of grave political instability and economic distress, of portents and prodigies. Most devastating of all was an epidemic of sweating sickness in July, an illness as sudden as it was deadly. Not until October did Warwick arrest Somerset. The treason charges against Somerset were framed, so Warwick confessed later, but Warwick’s guilt does not exculpate Somerset, who was not innocent. Arundel’s insistence that the plan to arrest Warwick and Northampton intended ‘by the passion of God… no harm to your bodies’ was never credible. Somerset was brought before his fellow peers in December 1551 and condemned for felony, though not for treason. He went to the block on 22 January 1552. At Somerset’s final fall the Council rewarded themselves with greater lands and grander titles. Warwick created the dukedom of Northumberland upon the confiscated Percy earldom and estates, and took it for himself; he planned the dismemberment of the palatinate bishopric of Durham; he assumed the Border office of Warden General. A territorial power base in the North-East was now his. The new resolution in November 1551 that the King could sign all bills passed under the Signet, for his personal commands, without counter-signature by a member of the Council was a way for Dudley, the new Duke of Northumberland, to use his influence over Edward to increase his own authority. Yet the King, bereft of two uncles, began to claim greater power. ‘Many talked that the young King was now to be feared.’ The most radical reformation yet in religion began, in part because Edward willed it.
The divine hand was seen to punish a faithless people in the spring of 1551; the faithlessness construed differently by conservatives and evangelicals. Those who lamented the loss of traditional ways of worship blamed the disasters upon heresy. That March Princess Mary defied her half-brother and his religious laws – ‘her soul was God’s and her faith she would not change’ – and marked her defiance by riding to Westminster with a great retinue, each servant wearing a forbidden rosary. Her stand encouraged all those of like mind. But most who held to the old faith held it more covertly. In the first English novel, Beware the Cat (1553), Mouseslayer the cat tells of her adventures among flawed humans, of how her blind mistress recovered her lost sight as she gazed sightlessly upon the elevated Host at a secret Mass performed in her chamber by an outlawed priest. So should all cats summon that priest to say Mass for their blind kittens, said the feline councillor Pol-noir. Evangelicals, especially in London, enjoyed the joke, but not the reality, as they witnessed Catholics coming to worship the sacrament, even at St Paul’s.
At the trial of the evangelical London preacher John Bradford in 1555, he remembered that ‘the doctrine taught in King Edward’s days was God’s pure religion…’ ‘What religion mean you,’ asked the Bishop of Durham, ‘in King Edward’s days? What year of his reign?’ As the leaders of the new Church tried to make real their vision of a truly evangelical Church, they struggled to carry with them a whole people, most of whom were still hostile to it, and at the same time to defend it against their fellow reformers who, by setting their individual and unassailable consciences against the institutional Church, threatened to split English Protestantism. Archbishop Cranmer, with Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London as his lieutenant, insisted that their evangelical revolution must proceed at a uniform pace, with order and discipline, with the authority of the Crown and the consent of Parliament. More restless spirits, like John Hooper and John Knox, came to see Cranmer’s cautious policy of making haste slowly as a betrayal of the evangelical cause. In its theological intent, the Book of Common Prayer of 1549 had been radical: the offering of the eucharistic elements of the bread and wine to God in the Mass, their adoration and reservation, were no longer part of the rite of the English Church. Yet ambiguities remained which allowed priests still to counterfeit the Mass. In June 1550 Bishop Gardiner, Cranmer’s adversary through two decades, succeeded in subverting Cranmer’s masterpiece by saying that it would not offend his conscience to use the Book, and this because ‘touching the truth of the very presence of Christ’s body and blood in the sacrament, there was as much spoken in that book as might be desired’.
In the winter and spring of 1551–2 Cranmer advanced a triple programme of reform: the revision of canon law, the formulation of a doctrinal statement, and the rewriting of the Book of Common Prayer to save it from conservative sabotage and evangelical criticism. A new Act of Uniformity passed in April 1552 authorized a substantially revised Prayer Book in which the dramatic shape of the rite was altered in order to mark a break with the Church’s tainted past. When the faithful received the elements of the bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper they were now directed to think on Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, and the words of administration were profoundly changed: ‘Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith, with thanksgiving…’ Bread was still bread, wine still wine, and Christ’s presence was spiritual. This Prayer Book brought to an end any possibility of officially praying for the dead, so destroying in the rite the old sense of communion between the dead and the living. Had all of Cranmer’s schemes for reform been implemented, the new Church of England would have had parity with the Reformed Churches of Europe. But Northumberland, who had advanced the evangelical cause, now moved to wreck it.
In the spring of 1553 rumours spread that Edward was dying. There had been rumours before, but this time they were true. The Lady Mary was his heir. The prospect of her accession appalled Edward, who believed that she would restore the tyranny of Rome; it was more alarming still for Northumberland, who expected not only his own overthrow but also retribution. Together they determined to overturn Henry VIII’s will and the Succession Act of 1544 and to disinherit Mary and Elizabeth. By a ‘device’ they perverted the succession; it was now to pass to the male descendants of Henry VIII’s younger sister, Mary. But neither Mary’s daughter, Frances, Duchess of Suffolk, nor her daughters had borne sons. At the very end of Edward’s life, the succession was diverted further to the Duchess’s daughter, Lady Jane Grey, who had in May married Northumberland’s son, Guildford Dudley. Northumberland was kingmaker. When Edward died on 6 July his death was kept secret while the succession was secured. When a ‘marvellous strange monster’ was born that summer – girl twins joined at the waist, looking east and west – it seemed to many that this signified the two Queens Jane and Mary proclaimed at Edward’s death. Which one would succeed? For any queen to rule was against nature, for women were to be governed, not to govern.
On 10 July 1553 Queen Jane was proclaimed in London, as the citizens looked on, grim and silent. The Duke of Northumberland seemed to hold all the resources of power. The Council had signed the letters patent which bestowed the crown on Lady Jane, who was married to his son; he had the dying King’s blessing; the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor, many of the court, the mayor and aldermen of London, and leading judges had, however unwillingly, given assent to Edward’s ‘device’; he controlled the capital, the Tower, the Great Seal, the navy and many troops. Yet, despite all this, Lady Mary was proclaimed queen in London on 19 July. Mary believed her triumph, the triumph of one excluded from the succession, the clearest sign of divine favour, and that belief marked all her purposes thereafter. What of the secondary causes?
A conciliar conspiracy had put Queen Jane on the throne; a popular rising deprived her of it. The revolt of the common people, usually condemned as the work of the Devil, was here believed to be divinely inspired for the preservation of the right: Vox populi, vox Dei, the voice of the people is the voice of God. Northumberland held power, but he lacked legitimacy. He also, crucially and inexplicably for so astute a politician, had allowed Mary her freedom. When warning reached Mary of Edward’s imminent death she had fled Hunsdon in Hertfordshire for Kenninghall in Norfolk, where the local strength of her household lay, and then proceeded to Framlingham in Suffolk. The leading gentry and nobility of East Anglia, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and the Thames Valley rallied to Mary. On 14 July Northumberland set out from London to arrest Mary, leaving behind a Council which was sworn to him, but whose loyalty faltered with its courage. The news that reached the councillors in their refuge and stronghold of the Tower terrified them. The people were rising for Mary. It was the ‘country folk’ who flocked to their ‘rightful queen’ at Kenninghall, and who protested against Lady Jane’s proclamation at Ipswich; mariners mutinied against their captains and tenants refused to rise with their lords for Jane. Both Mary’s supporters and Jane’s prepared for battle. But by 19 July the Council in London, hearing of the universal desertions to Mary’s cause, realized that the game was up. This was the only successful popular rising of the century.
Why did the people rise for Mary? Hatred of Northumberland and old suspicion of his motives were enough to discredit Jane, who was queen only by his ‘enticement’. Outrage at the perversion of the true succession and fears of divine punishment against those who were cheating Mary of her right led many to oppose that injustice. But there was another cause. Queen Jane stood for reformed religion. On 12 July conciliar orders had come to sheriffs to gather troops against the bastard Mary who threatened the ‘utter subversion of God’s holy word’. Northumberland claimed that preservation of true religion was the first reason for altering the succession; ‘God’s cause… hath been the original ground.’ Mary’s defiant attachment to the old faith was common knowledge. In July 1553, as partisans for both queens armed, people were faced with disturbing choices. Did conscience dictate a higher loyalty to a divine than to a secular power, a duty to a Catholic rather than a Protestant queen, and what did prudence direct? It was the Catholic gentry who rallied first to Mary’s cause. Evangelicals joined her too, far less enthusiastically, motivated principally by legitimism, and bowing to the divine punishment they deserved for not living according to the Gospel when it had been freely given to them. The consequences for the gospellers should Mary succeed were hardly considered at the time, though even amid the loyalist rejoicings at her proclamation there were other voices which cried in the wilderness. Those consequences soon became clear. Upon hearing the news that the turncoat councillors had proclaimed her, Mary’s first act was to order a crucifix to be set up in the chapel at Framlingham.
How should the new queen, triumphant yet precarious, rule? Whom should she trust? Mary was, as she ascended the throne at the age of thirty-seven, without any experience of government and innocent of formal political education, but years of deprivation and despair had taught her the first essential lesson: to trust no one at court. Her father had kept her away from her mother, Catherine of Aragon, and had even, in his fury, tried to have her condemned for treason when she refused, for a time, to submit to the Royal Supremacy and acknowledge her own bastardy. From her mother Mary had inherited her stubbornness, courage and Catholic piety; from her father – it waited to be seen. Like her half-brother Edward and half-sister Elizabeth, Mary had received the best humanist education: they had the intelligence and astuteness to benefit fully from it; whether Mary was similarly gifted was far less certain.
At her accession Mary pardoned her opponents, who were too many to condemn, except Northumberland and his closest adherents. Those whose loyalty had been most doubtful – like Sir William Paget, the ‘master of practices’, and the Earl of Pembroke – now made the greatest show of it, and returned to the Council, for their experience was needed. Into her household and Council Mary took also those East Anglian nobles and gentry who had brought her to the throne, whose devotion was as conspicuous as their inability to offer her politic advice. So inclusive was her Council that Paget sourly judged the government of England to be ‘more like a republic’ than a monarchy, but soon business was conducted by an inner circle consisting of Paget, Sir William Petre, Bishops Gardiner, Heath and Thirlby, the Earls of Arundel and Pembroke, the Marquess of Winchester and Sir Robert Rochester. Divisions among the councillors were bitter as they blamed each other for the past, resented the promotion of the loyal over the disloyal, envied each other’s influence, and remembered old betrayals. How could Gardiner forget that Pembroke and Petre had interrogated him in prison only three years earlier? And there were seismic divisions over policy.
With the accession of a queen came a transformation in the nature of politics. At court, access to the monarch, in her private apartments, was allowed only to her ladies, whose influence with her was great. The queen’s intimates, like Gertrude, Marchioness of Exeter and Susan Clarencius, had been trusted by her since the dark days of the 1530s. Men seeking influence with the queen, and information, now tried to ‘fall a-talking’ to them. And women, too, besought them: ‘remember me’, ‘forget me not’. The Duchess of Northumberland made a desperate appeal to Lady Paget that she intercede with her husband and with Mistress Clarencius and the Marchioness ‘in speaking for my husband’s life’. Nothing could save Northumberland, who went to the block on 22 August, but they did their best for her sons. In the most secret conferences with Mary, Susan Clarencius was present, and Simon Renard wondered whether ‘she knew the meaning of all this’. Renard, the Imperial ambassador, Mary trusted as ‘her second father confessor’. She now looked for counsel where she had always looked before, to her cousin, Emperor Charles V, and would not act without his advice. From Cardinal Pole came uncompromising admonitions. Mary’s first wish was to restore the Catholic religion of her childhood, to dismantle the Supremacy with which she was so unwillingly burdened, and to restore England to Rome. Each of her advisers offered different advice about when and how this should be achieved. But above all Mary sought divine guidance. She looked always towards the Holy Sacrament reserved in her chamber, and ‘invoked it as her protector, guide and counsellor and still prayed with all her heart that it would come to her help’.
The Queen needed an heir, a Catholic heir, so she must marry. For herself, she said, she had embraced chastity, ‘had never felt that which was called love’, but she knew her duty. Whom to choose? Some urged an English husband, and chose Edward Courtenay, a victim of Henry VIII’s rage against the Marquess of Exeter and his family, freed at last from the Tower but personally unstable. Yet how, asked Mary, could a queen marry a subject, and why should she be forced to marry a man because Gardiner had been his friend in prison? She listened now to Charles V. Since the first days of her reign, and before, he had planned for her to marry Prince Philip, his son. This would be Habsburg conquest of England by marriage.
No foreigner had been king of England since William the Conqueror, and ‘the very name of stranger was odious’, so the opponents of the Spanish marriage insisted. Marriage to a ‘stranger’ would outrage the people. England would by this marriage be ‘marrying everlasting strife and danger from the French’, who were already intriguing with the Scots and Irish. Since Philip was Mary’s kinsman a papal dispensation was necessary: a prospect so objectionable that it must be kept secret, and secrecy brought its own dangers. Philip might promise to adapt to English ways, but no one would believe him, and the Spanish would be as hated in England as they were in Flanders. But Mary was adamant: she would die if she married Courtenay. She now loved Philip, she confessed, before ever she met him. To Gardiner’s objection: ‘And what will the people say?’ she replied that it was not for him to prefer the people’s will to hers. When the Speaker led a deputation from Parliament on 16 November to rehearse arguments against the Spanish marriage ‘learnt in the school of the Bishop of Winchester [Gardiner]’, she roundly rejected their petition. Gardiner’s objections may have represented less a narrow patriotism than a politic way of securing the best terms for the marriage treaty; terms so favourable to England that Philip forswore them three times before witnesses, even while he swore them. The fears that ‘heretics’ would use the marriage as proof that the restoration of the old religion meant foreign domination, that papal tyranny and Spanish tyranny were all one, would not go away.
Conspirators, assassins and rebels were plotting against the Queen, so Renard warned. At the end of November in a nobleman’s house in London, a salon des refusés of men once advanced by Edward but now out of favour, plans were laid for spring risings from four quarters of England. The Council got wind of the conspiracy. On 21 January Gardiner confronted Courtenay, whom the conspirators intended to play a part in their schemes, and he told all. The rumours which reached London that day that there was rebellion in Devon were false. Two days later a gentleman of Kent, waiting while his horse was shod, told the farrier that ‘the Spaniards were coming into the realm with harness and hand-guns, and would make us Englishmen worse than enemies and viler’. And he urged him: ‘If thou beest a good fellow, stir… all thy neighbours to rise against these strangers.’ Only Kent rose. Under Sir Thomas Wyatt, the son of the late poet, and a coterie of Kentish gentry, rebel forces 3,000 strong marched upon London which, they believed, ‘longed sore for their coming’. At Rochester Bridge a band of London Whitecoats sent to attack the rebels defected to their cause, and Wyatt’s rebels entered Southwark peaceably. The Queen and the capital were beleaguered, threatened by rebels over the river but even more by the fear of an unknown number of rebel supporters within. Such was the terror that on 31 January Wyatt’s partisans in the City were given free passage to join him before London Bridge was cut down. While the Queen’s commanders played a waiting game, no one knew whether Wyatt would be resisted. ‘By God’s mother,’ said Sir John Bridges to the Tower watch, ‘I fear that there is some traitor abroad that they be suffered all this while.’ Mary, showing a bravery and resolution lacking in her advisers, rallied the citizens at the Guildhall. The City’s gates remained locked against Wyatt, his rising failed, and the quartered bodies of the rebels were hung from London’s walls.
The conspirators had, so it seemed, intended no less than to assassinate Mary, enthrone the Lady Elizabeth, whom they would marry to Courtenay, and restore the evangelical religion. Conspiracies are by nature secret, but none more so than this one, for the rank and file of the rebels never knew the deeper schemes of the leaders. ‘You may not so much as name religion,’ said Wyatt; ‘that will withdraw from us the hearts of many.’ Had not Mary been enthroned six months before by a rising which had been, in part, in defence of the old faith? The rebels’ declared purpose was to withstand the Spaniards. And yet, Wyatt allegedly admitted, ‘we mind only the restitution of God’s word’. Mary’s judgement that the rebels’ quarrel against strangers was ‘but a Spanish cloak to cover their pretended purpose against our religion’ was partly true. The conspirators were men who were excluded from influence, and thwarted, but they were excluded because they were evangelicals. Rebel actions reveal rebel motives. Wyatt offered freedom to all those who were imprisoned for religion. The prisoners chose to wait upon Providence, as did many others of the new faith who remained loyal to Mary while hating her religion, but later events would suggest that there were some who regretted not joining Wyatt when the chance was offered.
The revolt left an ominous legacy. This was a rebellion with an assassination plot at its heart; tyrannicide in the name of religion. No longer would ‘evil counsellors’ bear all the blame for a monarch’s actions. Mary forgot the loyalty of her evangelical subjects, and concluded that all heresy was sedition; that all sedition came from heretics. By thinking that all of the new faith were her opponents, she risked making them so. An effusion of rebel blood followed. First to die were Lady Jane Grey and her husband, Lord Guildford Dudley on 12 February; Lady Jane penitent for her unwilling treachery but resolute in her faith. The Queen never lost her suspicions of Elizabeth, whose complicity in the plots was hard to deny but harder to prove. Elizabeth was imprisoned first, ominously, in the Tower, and then kept under house arrest at Woodstock, where she scratched in a window with a diamond:
Much suspected of me:
Nothing proved can be.
Quoth Elizabeth, prisoner.
In Winchester on 25 July 1554 Gardiner celebrated the marriage of Mary to Philip, which he had been unable to prevent. He now presented himself as Philip’s principal English counsellor, but it was Paget, Gardiner’s rival, whom Philip most trusted. Where the Spaniards’ presence was felt they were as unpopular as had been expected. Not a day passed without some ‘knife work’ at court between the English and Philip’s Spanish entourage. The worst fears of the Spanish coming – that it augured the Inquisition – seemed to be realized that September when Bishop Bonner of London began a quest for heresy through his diocese. The attacks upon the Spanish, opposition to Philip’s coronation, and continuing support for Elizabeth were the more bitter for Mary while she hoped against hope for a child. At the end of November 1554 came news of her pregnancy. ‘How goeth my daughter’s belly forward?’ asked the anxious Emperor. But by March 1555 rumours were spreading that the baby was a phantom. As months passed, Mary bore no child, nor ever would. Mary’s childlessness was a disaster not just for her, but for the Catholic future.
The Mass lay at the heart of the Catholic religion, Mary’s religion. Forced for so long to hear Mass in secret herself, her first purpose as queen was to restore it. She wanted freedom for others to attend, not to force anyone: so she said, at first. The purpose of the papal legate, Cardinal Pole, was ‘not to compel’ but to ‘call again’: so he said, at first. But the world had changed. Now the Mass, instead of binding Christian society, threatened to divide it. For the gospellers, Christ spoke through His Word, not through a painted image or a white wafer; for them the Mass was ‘the idol of the altar’, the papist ‘god of bread’. In that spirit they had cast down the altars, the idols had fallen. Each religious side saw the other as sacrilegious, and the dogmatism of each drove the other to obduracy. Peace seemed impossible. The Queen ‘felt so strongly on this matter of religion’, she said, that ‘she was hardly to be moved’.
To strengthen her conviction, there was the popular rejoicing at the restoration of the old faith. London women had rushed to kiss their newly-freed bishop in August 1553 and placed their treasured images in their windows as the Queen first passed through her capital. Out of hiding came all the sequestered votive relics of saints, the nails which had pierced Christ, splinters of the Holy Cross. Processions began again. ‘To see it is to be in a new world.’ The Latin Mass was sung in many places; not by royal command but spontaneously, ‘of the people’s devotion’. Not by royal command because the restoration of the Mass awaited the sanction of Parliament, for what Parliament had made only Parliament could unmake. Robert Parkyn, in Yorkshire, reported with approval the restoration of Catholic sacraments and ceremonies in the North in September, but noted the irregularity, and remembered that those of heretical opinions ‘spake evil’ of it. The legal form of service for the first months of Mary’s reign remained the Edwardian Prayer Book. The bravest of the evangelical clergy and their parishioners continued to celebrate according to the new rite, while the conservatives watched and waited.
The Edwardian laws were repealed in October 1553, during the first session of Mary’s first Parliament. Nearly a quarter of the Lower House voted against the change: a comfortingly small minority for pessimists expecting worse, but still alarming. The English Church now stood officially as it had in 1547: Catholic but schismatic. The Queen was shackled with the Supremacy of a schismatic Church. Could the English Church be reconciled to the universal Church? The Pope’s appointment of Cardinal Pole as his legate in August 1553 signalled his commitment to absolve the errant nation, ‘fled forth of Peter’s ship’. Pole yearned to return home after twenty years of exile, and could forgive no equivocation or delay. Yet England was not as he had left it. The great lands and treasures of the Church which had been alienated to the laity stood in the way of papal absolution, for this was sacrilege. Pole warned of the divine judgement against Belshazzar, who had profaned the holy vessels of the Temple, but few listened. The despoliation had gone so far: the lands had been sold and sold again, the chalices turned into drinking cups, the vestments into worldly finery, and the new owners (mainly Catholics themselves) were markedly reluctant to cede them. The more politic – including Mary and the Pope – saw that there could be no restoration of papal authority without a dispensation to the possessors; without a bargain. The Pope conceded, to Pole’s dismay. On 30 November 1554, amidst tears of joy, Pole solemnly absolved the realm. Finally, after many obstructions and delays, the Royal Supremacy was repealed on 3 January 1555. England was restored to Catholic Christendom.
Yet the old world of religious unity and obedience was broken. The converts to the new faith in the first revolutionary generation of reform had believed that they could transform religion and society. They had failed to create the godly commonwealth they sought – every hill was not yet Zion – but the Catholic doctrines they despised had been profoundly undermined. With each acquiescence to ideas and practices they resented, with every purchase of Church property, however small, every parishioner was gradually compromised, even contaminated, by the new religion, even if not converted to it. The habit of obedience to Rome, often faltering among the ambivalent English, was lost. The chains of prayers which bound the living to the waiting dead in purgatory had been broken; the supplications of the faithful to the saints in heaven for their intercession had been officially denied. If belief in purgatory and in the power to influence the fate of souls there had been lost, if the holy helpers had been forgotten, the consequences of the years of schism would be hard to negate. Traditional forms of Catholic worship – holy bread and holy water, palms on Palm Sunday, processions, creeping to the cross in deepest penitence on Good Friday, the ‘burial’ of the Host in the Easter sepulchre – might be revived; books could be reprinted and images restored; but could the beliefs which underlay them return?
Pole and the bishops moved to restore the churches preparatory to the proper celebration of the sacraments, and, in their turn, they destroyed. Scriptural texts painted by ‘children of iniquity’ were whitewashed, for they misled the faithful. Altars, windows and vestments were to be repaired and replaced. Resplendent roods, images of the crucified Saviour, must be erected in every parish – not makeshift paintings but proper sculptures – as a defiant affirmation to image-denying Protestants of the power of images as ‘good books for the layman’. The Blessed Sacrament was reserved again in pyxes and tabernacles. Backsliding parishes were fined. Yet so thoroughgoing had been the previous seizure of treasures from the Catholic past, and so venal the politicians in expropriating them for their own gain rather than for the commonwealth, that there was deep disillusion about the future security of any parish possessions. Enemies of the Marian Church accused its leaders of believing that physical restoration sufficed; ‘setting up of six-foot roods’ would ‘make all cock-sure’. Yet they were mistaken.
Pole had been one of the most challenging reformers of the Catholic Church, and his vision of a regenerate Church in England was still that of an evangelical Catholic reformer. He carried others with him. Pole and the Marian bishops had deeper designs for Catholic reform than the recovery of what was past. They restored only in order to move forward. Pole’s insistence was upon scripture, teaching and education, and upon improving the moral standards of the clergy. He had understood that there could be accommodation, charity, between the Catholic and Protestant reformers, who shared an evangelical emphasis upon scripture and a disapproval of the excesses of Catholic devotion. The leaders of the Marian Church laid far less stress upon priestly power and divinely ordained papal authority, and upon the cult of the Blessed Virgin and the saints, or pilgrimages, which had sustained Catholics in earlier times. Yet upon the seven sacraments they held firm, and upon the doctrine of transubstantiation, they were adamant. And Catholic writers, sharing a humanist background with evangelical Protestants, founded their understanding upon the literal interpretation of scripture.
Catholic renewal would come by reconciliation and education, they hoped. Their emphasis was upon unity, universalism, consensus and upon the charity within the community which had been so undermined. Without preaching there might be no doctrine, but there had been so much preaching, too much preaching. Pole distrusted the demagoguery of the Protestant evangelists, which he blamed for the breach of charity and for misleading the simple, and did not seek to emulate it. The first Jesuits had come to Ireland in 1542, but Pole was suspicious of these emissaries of the Pope. The religious renewal was entrusted to the parish clergy of England, yet they were often unworthy of their charge. The Marian clergy were tainted by their conformity – however unwilling – under Edward, and neither Catholics nor the gospellers could respect worldling priests who had changed religion with the regime. Lady Jane Grey condemned the mutability of her chaplain, who had seemed a ‘lively member of Christ’ but proved himself, by conforming, ‘the deformed imp of the Devil’. And many others with him. In March 1554 priests, who had been permitted to marry by legislation passed in Edward’s reign, were ordered to leave their wives. So they did, some seemingly without a backward glance, moving to serve in other parishes, wifeless but hardly celibate. People taught by their clergy to renounce Rome were now adjured by the same clergy to be obedient to it. Disrespect for the clergy was so manifest that, in the judgement of the Queen’s chaplain, priests would fare better ‘among the Turks and Saracens’ than among heretics who mocked and despised them.
Pole thought that by patient pastoral teaching the schismatic past could be buried and forgotten; that heresy was an aberration which would pass. Yet he had not been in England to experience the evangelism and conversion, and he was wrong. Once the medieval heresy laws had been restored by Mary’s third Parliament (12 December 1554–16 January 1555), after strenuous opposition and anxious delay, Pole, the bishops and the lay commissioners began to test the strength of evangelical conviction. What they discovered alarmed and depressed them. Maybe half the population was aged under twenty, and so had never known papal authority, only schism; anyone reaching the age of confirmation after the Edwardian changes had never received the Mass, only Communion according to the Book of Common Prayer. They had known no other religion than the one which they were first adjured, then forced to renounce. Innocent of heresy, for they had never fallen away from the Catholic faith, they might now be condemned for it.
As soon as the Mass was restored in December 1553 evangelicals were faced with agonizing choices. To receive was damnable, to ‘drink of the whore’s cup’; not to receive was to draw the attention of the persecutors, constantly vigilant for heresy. The letters which the evangelicals wrote to their ministers, now exiled or imprisoned, reveal the soul-searching. Could a faithful Christian worship outwardly one way, while believing inwardly another, and remain undefiled? Never. They must remember the endless suffering of the hypocrites in hell’s fiery lake. Cranmer reminded Jane Wilkinson, an evangelical laywoman, that Christ had departed Samaria to avoid the malice of the scribes and Pharisees, and advised her to leave ‘with speed, lest by your own folly you fall into the persecutors’ hands’. She left, but Cranmer determined to stay behind to await trial for treason. Exile for conscience’s sake was the only way to worship freely and keep the faith inviolate in Mary’s reign, and over 800 left England. This was a ‘painful peregrination’, for the worldly risks and losses were great, even if the spiritual ones were greater for those who remained. From the Reformed cities of Germany and Switzerland, the exiles sent money and tracts to their brethren, and quarrelled among themselves. They thought always of home and the new Jerusalem they would build if ever they returned.
Evangelicals who could not conform and bear with the times chose to profess the Gospel in secret conventicles, always watched and always in danger. Spies were abroad to report their movements. Under persecution, they met by night in taverns and back rooms, in ships and barges, in the houses of powerful protectors. At the Saracen’s Head in Islington, under cover of seeing a play, gospellers celebrated the Protestant Communion. The prospect of attending popish services, especially with neighbours jubilant because the old faith had been restored, was intolerable to them. Conscience prevented many receiving the Mass or participating in Catholic rites and processions. Even when they did attend, evangelicals marked their dissidence and disrespect by looking away at the elevation, keeping their hats on at the sacring, refusing to sing, and rejecting the pax, the sign of that peace within the Christian community which was now so manifestly lacking. All these evasions were taken as signs of heresy when the inquisitions began. In such dangerous times, while the ‘prince of darkness… rageth against God’s elect’, many known gospellers quailed. In the way of things most chose domestic quiet and the peaceful obscurity of their farms and shops rather than the great sacrifices which resistance to the Marian Church required. In darker moments their leaders despaired: ‘not a tenth part’ remained constant, lamented John Bradford; the rest becoming ‘mangy mongrels’, ‘popish Protestants’ in order to save their skins. Yet Bishop Latimer was certain that though ‘the wise men of the world can find shifts to avoid the cross… the simple servant of Christ doth look for no other but oppression in the world’. Christ had called the faithful to take up the cross of adversity and follow Him, and he had called some to special glory. These were the martyrs.
On 4 February 1555 John Rogers died at the stake, with heroic fortitude. His was the triumph of hope over fear, of the spirit over the flesh, for which the gospellers longed and which the Marian authorities dreaded. Nearly 300 followed him in the next three years to that point of absolute faith, never doubting the horror of the death, but never doubting God’s promise either. Others died for their faith not in the fires, but in prison, chained, wretched, cold and starving. The burnings drew large crowds, some so inured to pain and barbarity that they bought cherries from the Kent fruiterers to eat as they watched. These crowds were divided and partisan. Catholics came to celebrate the deaths of heretics in the flames which prefigured eternal hellfire; the godly came to sing psalms, to offer consolation, to try – not always successfully – to shorten the agonies of the martyrs, and ‘to learn the way’, for some hoped for the courage to follow.
The martyrs died because Mary, Pole and the bishops believed that heresy must be extirpated lest it ‘infect’ more; because ‘there is no kind of treason to be compared with theirs’. They died because some among the lay governors and the common people, hating their heresy, reported them, knowing the consequences. Above all they died because they would never recant. Their heresy was their adamant denial of the sacrifice of the Mass and of transubstantiation; their refusal to accept Christ’s corporeal presence in the sacrament. Each martyr’s death was a failure for the persecutors, who wanted them not to die but to be reconciled. Every way to win back the errant was tried: argument, persuasion, torture. The gospellers were examined again and again; adjured to remember their mother’s tears, to think of their bereft children. As if they could forget them: ‘Bring up my children and yours in the fear of God,’ wrote Robert Smith to his wife, for then they would all be sure to meet at last ‘in the everlasting kingdom of God, which I go unto’. The regime hoped for recantations, but knew that there was always the danger that some who had recanted, who had ‘played Peter’ and denied Christ might, like the Apostle, return to Him. When Cranmer, broken by solitude and doubt, recanted not once but six times, the authorities rejoiced, but at the last, at his martyrdom in Oxford in March 1556, he retracted his recantation, and thrust first into the flames the hand that had signed it.
The persecution was a waiting game: to try whether the zeal of the persecutors or the martyrs would fail first. So many were the martyrs’ supporters at the burnings that curfews were ordered, and the burnings came to be secret, not public. The persecution would fail if it chose the wrong victims. The Queen had insisted that the people see ‘them not to be condemned without just occasion’, but the persecutors had hunted down those – like the young – who knew only heresy; or the simple and ignorant who hardly knew what was heresy and what was not. The time was past when Gardiner ‘bent his bow to strike down the head deer’, the leaders in Church and polity, for now they let the ‘arch heretics’ go, and left the most important Protestants alone. This moved the ‘rude multitude to mutter’. An aversion developed to the persecution, less because of sympathy with the beliefs of the gospellers than because of the way it was conducted. The burnings at Smithfield were halted after June 1558, and the officers went less willingly about their dreadful work.
As Bishop Ridley prepared for martyrdom, he wrote bidding farewell to the citizens of London: ‘I do doubt not but that in that great City there be many privy mourners’, evangelicals who lamented the religious changes, but had nevertheless conformed. With time, the evangelicals’ reconciliation with the Marian Church which they intended to be only outward and temporary, might have become genuine and permanent. Half a century later, Fulke Greville wrote slightingly of ‘those cobwebs of reconversion in Queen Mary’s days’, but he had the advantage of hindsight. Many, perhaps most, in England had never wanted evangelical change, and had rejoiced at the Catholic restoration. People devoutly remembered the Virgin and the saints in their wills, trusting to their intercession. But not all the old ways returned. The belief that the living had a ceaseless duty towards the dead in purgatory was not easily abandoned, nor quickly, but by Mary’s reign it had been profoundly undermined. The religious guilds which had linked dead and living brethren and been so enduring a part of religious and community life did not return to many parishes. Fear of future sequestration doubtless dissuaded many, but the reluctance went deeper. There had been changes, and there were signs that the evangelical understanding touched Catholics too. Some insisted, more overtly than before, that the Mass was an essential application of the merits of Christ’s Passion: the symbol of that Passion here on earth. Wills written in the last years of Mary’s reign reveal a spirit which helps to answer the perplexing question of how Christians of opposed convictions could worship together ‘in charity’, for some began to make religious bequests and to avow beliefs which juxtaposed the conventions and the spirit of Protestant and Catholic faiths. Awareness that those of the old faith and the new shared a common Saviour urged some peace between them.
Yet Catholics feared for the future. Mary’s regime was fatally undermined, not so much by failings in policy, but by disasters beyond human control. The revocation of Pole’s legatine commission by a pope who distrusted and disowned him demoralized not only the Cardinal but the Queen. The fall of Calais in January 1558 to the Duke of Guise was a momentous loss. But neither of these setbacks could compare with a devastating mortality crisis. The year 1558–9 experienced by far the worst mortality in the whole period 1541–1871. Mary’s own death in November 1558 brought the quietus of the Catholic restoration, at least for a time, because the Lady Elizabeth was her heir.
The persecution for religion was conducted against a background of misery and despair; of famine and plague and war. Through the winter of 1555 it had rained as though without end. The harvest failed in the following year, leaving food in short supply and prohibitively expensive. Torrential rains came again in the autumn of 1556 and by the winter the situation was desperate. For want of corn, the poorest ate acorns. Unless wheat were cheaper by Easter, so William Cecil’s agent wrote, ‘many will die of hunger’. The poor did die ‘for hunger in many places’ in 1556, but demand for food fell, and for terrible reasons. According to grim natural precedent, dearth was followed by pestilence, and now disease not dearth was the killer. ‘Hot burning fevers and other strange diseases’ became epidemic. The agency which lay behind such agonies was no longer seen as mere policy, or the greed of a few: this was ‘scarcity by the direct plague of God’. This affliction, worse than any known in the lifetime of those who suffered, was seen as divine punishment. The reasons for it only He knew, but Mary’s enemies, especially those whose anger was inflamed by exile, discerned them. ‘When were ever things so dear in England as in this time of the popish mass?’ asked John Ponet, quondam Bishop of Winchester. Compounding the misery was the war with France which England had entered as a consequence of Mary’s binding it to Spain, and which brought only huge expense and disgrace. One recourse in a time of such adversity was Christian resignation, but there was another.
In 1554 John Knox had sought the Swiss reformer Heinrich Bullinger’s advice on the deeply troubling question: ‘Whether obedience is to be rendered to a magistrate who enforces idolatry and condemns true religion?’ By 1556 Knox had concluded that it was lawful for a true witness (not only the magistrate but also the people) to punish idolaters with death. There was, for the radicals, no greater idolater than Mary, the Jezebel of England. As they considered the limits of political obedience, other exiles concluded that the faithful, oppressed by a tyrant, an ungodly ruler whom they had brought upon themselves, had not only the right but the duty to resist, to depose. Asking ‘Whether it be lawful to depose an evil governor and kill a tyrant?’ John Ponet answered that it was. When a ruler ‘goes about to betray and make away his country to foreigners’ tyrannicide may be justified. Knox argued that the people must ‘avoid that monster in nature and disorder amongst men which is the empire and government of a woman’. Mary and her Council had had cause for alarm. But not only was Mary a woman; so was her heir, Elizabeth. The voices of militant Protestantism would fall silent if the new queen proved to be an Old Testament heroine, like Deborah, who inspired the Israelites to defeat their enemy. Their arguments waited to be used if ever the same threats of tyranny and persecution overwhelmed England again, and could be adopted, too, in the wars between religions, by Catholic enemies of a Protestant queen.