IN 1544 KING HENRY VIII, now in the third decade of his reign, bestrode England like an ageing colossus. By making himself Supreme Head of the Church of England he had taken the monarchy to the peak of its power. But at a huge personal cost.
For the supremacy had been born out of Henry’s desperate search for an heir and love. The turmoil of six marriages, two divorces, two executions and a tragic bereavement had produced three children by these different and mutually hostile mothers. It was a fractured and unhappy royal family. Now the king felt it was time for reconciliation.
Henry’s reunion with his family is commemorated in a famous painting, known as ‘The Family of Henry VIII’. The painting shows Henry enthroned between his son and heir, the seven-year-old Edward, and, to emphasize the line of dynastic succession, Edward’s long-dead mother Jane Seymour. Standing farther off to the right is Henry’s elder daughter Mary, whom he bastardized when he divorced her mother, and to the left his younger daughter Elizabeth, whom he also bastardized when he had her mother beheaded.
But this is more than a family portrait. It also symbolizes the political settlement by which Henry hoped to preserve and prolong his legacy.
To secure the Tudor succession, he decided that all three of his children would be named as his heirs. His son Edward would, of course, succeed him. But if Edward died childless, the throne would pass to his elder daughter, Mary. If she had no heir then her half-sister Elizabeth would become queen. The arrangement was embodied both in the king’s own will and in an Act of Parliament.
Henry’s provisions for the succession held, and, through the rule of a minor and two women, gave England a sort of stability. But they also ushered in profound political turmoil as well, since – it turned out – each of Henry’s three children was determined to use the Royal Supremacy to impose a radically different form of religion on England.
First, there would be the zealous Protestantism of Edward; then the passionate Catholicism of Mary. Finally, it would be left to Elizabeth to try to reconcile the opposing forces unleashed by her siblings.
The divisions within Henry’s family reflected the religious confusion in the country as a whole. The Reformation of the Church had been radical at times, cautiously conservative at others. In some parts of the country, people had embraced Protestantism and stripped their local churches of icons and Catholic ceremonies. In others, the people cleaved to the old ways, afraid of the radical change that had been unleashed. Like the royal family, Henry’s subjects were divided among themselves, unsure of the full implications of the Supremacy.
Containing this combustible situation was Henry VIII, with all his indomitable personality. On Christmas Eve 1545, Henry made his last speech to Parliament. It was an emotional appeal for reconciliation between conservatives who hankered after a return to Rome and radical Protestants who wished to press on to a complete reform of the Church. Henry sought a middle way which would both preserve the Royal Supremacy and prevent their quarrel from tearing England apart. It was also an expression of his personal views: he held on to the old ceremonies of the religion he had known from his youth; at the same time, he had repudiated the papacy that was their bedrock. And, as he was determined that his people should continue to tread the same narrow path, he made no secret of his contempt for the extremes in the religious disputes. Both were unyielding and zealous. Both were in some way flouting royal spiritual authority. Radicals and conservatives alike were under notice that unseemly disputes in the religious life of the country would not be tolerated.
I
Just over a year later, on 28 January 1547, Henry was dead, aged fifty-five, and with him died any prospect that the Royal Supremacy would be used to save England from religious conflict. Three weeks later, Henry’s nine-year-old son was crowned King Edward VI at Westminster Abbey. The ceremony was conducted by Thomas Cranmer, England’s first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury, who, sixteen years earlier, had helped Henry VIII to achieve supreme authority over Church and state. But the Supremacy had not taken the Church as far as he had wanted down the road of reform. Now Cranmer used Edward’s coronation to spell out fully the Supremacy’s awe-inspiring claims.
During the ceremony no fewer than three crowns were placed successively on the boy king’s head. The second was the Imperial Crown itself – the symbol of the imperial monarchy to which Edward’s grandfather Henry VII had aspired and which his father, Henry VIII, had achieved.
And it wasn’t only the crown. Instead, Cranmer turned the whole ceremony into a parable of the limitless power of the new imperial monarchy. First, he administered the coronation oath to the king. But then, in a moment that was unique in the thousand-year history of the coronation, he turned directly to the king and congregation to explain, or rather to explain away, what he had done. He had just administered the oath to the king, he said, but, he continued, it was a mere ceremony. God had conferred the crown on Edward and no human could prescribe conditions or make him abide by an oath. Neither he nor any other earthly man had the right to hold Edward to account during his reign. Instead, the chosen of God, the king, was answerable only to God. ‘Your Majesty is God’s Vice-regent, and Christ’s Vicar within your own dominions,’ Cranmer told the little boy, ‘and to see, with your predecessor Josiah, God truly worshipped, and idolatry destroyed, the tyranny of the Bishops of Rome banished from your subjects, and images removed.’
The full nakedness of the absolutism established by Henry VIII now stood revealed. And both those who ruled in Edward’s name – and in the fullness of time Edward himself – were determined to use its powers to the uttermost.
For Edward was being tutored by thoroughgoing Protestants, and he learnt his lessons well, writing in an essay at the age of twelve that the Pope was ‘the true son of the devil, a bad man, an Antichrist’. Edward and his councillors now determined to use the Supremacy to force religious reform, and make England a fully Protestant, godly nation. It was a resort to one of the extremes that Henry had warned against in his last speech.
And there was much to reform. For, as part of Henry’s cautious middle way, most English churches and much ceremony had remained unchanged. But thanks to Edward’s education in advanced Protestantism, he believed that his father’s reign had been marred by undue caution in religious reform. So now Edward and his council ordered the culmination of the Reformation, or, in other words, a revolution in the spiritual life of the country. Stained-glass windows, the crosses over the choir screens and the crucifixes on the altars were torn down and burnt. The pictures of saints were whitewashed, and the Latin mass replaced by the English of the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, written by Cranmer himself. England had had a Reformation; now, many said as bonfires raged through the country and statues were vandalized, it was going through a ‘Deformation’. Where once the crucifix hung high above the heads of the congregation for veneration, there was now just one image: the royal coat of arms.
A highly emotional religion of ritual and imagery gave way to an austere one of words, as Protestantism, for the first time, definitively replaced Catholicism. And it was not just a cosmetic reform. The old Easter processionals, saints’ days and pilgrimages of the unreformed religion allowed lay people to participate in religious life. But Protestants saw them as blasphemous ceremonies that took the mind away from true devotion, and they were abolished. The new religion was one where the people should receive the word of God intellectually, not take an active, passionate part in the colourful rituals of Catholic worship.
And with the icons and processions also went charitable institutions like hospitals, colleges and schools, town guilds and chantries, which had been part of the old religion. These institutions were paid for by people who believed that good works on Earth would speed their souls to Paradise when they died. But Protestants didn’t believe in Purgatory; therefore there was no need for these charitable institutions designed to help the soul through the intermediary stage of the afterlife. They also believed that the soul would be saved by faith alone, not good works. And so a way of life was brought to an abrupt end. The effect was devastating. The fabric of religious life was torn to pieces, and many were left fearing that they would be condemned to hellfire. The popular reaction was riots and uprisings, especially in the South-West, protesting against the Act of Uniformity and the introduction of the Book of Common Prayer.
In 1549, in their camp outside Exeter, the rebels drew up their list of demands for concessions from Edward’s government. It survives in the government’s printed counter-propaganda, and it is remarkable both for the bluntness of its language – ‘we will’, the rebels state repeatedly – and for the picture that it presents of their religious beliefs.
For what the rebels wanted was the restoration of a whole series of religious ceremonies: ‘We will’, the seventh article reads, ‘have holy bread and holy water made every Sunday, psalms and ashes at the times accustomed, images to be set up again in every church, and all other ancient, old ceremonies used heretofore by our Holy Mother Church.’
Religion, in other words, was a matter of belief made real by ritual. And it was the abolition of these time-honoured and well-loved rituals which had so outraged the common man and common woman and driven them to rebel. They believed that if the artefacts and practices of their religious life – the candles and rosaries, holy water and Easter processions, relics and icons, pilgrimages and prayers – were taken away, their souls would be damned. But Cranmer disregarded the sincerity of their rebellion and responded in the language of self-confident nationalism. It was not, he said, an issue of traditional forms of worship. The rebels’ demands amounted to a treacherous call for the country to submit to the laws of the Pope and ‘to make our most undoubted and natural king his vile subject and slave!’. The protesters were a fifth column – they had demanded the mass to be said in Latin: ‘And be you such enemies to your own country, that you will not suffer us to laud God, to thank Him, to use His sacraments in our own tongue?’ Protestantism was England’s national religion. Moreover, Edward was God’s Vice-regent. To oppose his reforms was heresy and treason combined.
In fact, the rebellion was easily defeated. But Edward soon found a more dangerous opponent in his own half-sister Mary. It was to divorce her mother, Catherine of Aragon, and marry Anne Boleyn, that Henry had broken with Rome, and so for Mary the Supremacy had always been a personal as well as a religious affront. Now, faced with the radical reforms of her brother and his council, she discovered her true vocation – to be the beacon of the old, true religion in England. In defiance of the law, therefore, she openly continued to hear mass in the traditional Latin liturgy.
The clash between Mary and Edward, who was as stridently Protestant as Mary was Catholic, began at Christmas 1550. It was a family reunion, with Mary, Edward and Elizabeth all gathered together under one roof for the festivities. But, as so often, Christmas turned into a time for family quarrels, as the thirteen-year-old Edward upbraided his thirty-four-year-old sister for daring to break his laws and hear mass. Humiliated, Mary burst into tears. She replied: ‘I have offended no law, unless it be a late law of your own making for the altering of matters in religion, which, in my conscience, is not worthy to have the name of law.’ The law that she recognized was that which had been laid down by Henry VIII. He had retained at least the outward essentials of the old religion. She would not accept that Edward, a child, could have any kind of authority, especially not spiritual authority, to change the religion of the country. She believed instead that the country should be preserved as it was in 1547. But Edward was capable of holding his own opinion, and defend it he would. He truly believed what he had been told at his coronation. He was God’s anointed, and he would purge Catholic blasphemy from his realm.
When she was next summoned to court a few weeks later, Mary came with a large retinue, all of them conspicuously carrying officially banned rosaries as a badge of their Catholicism.
Mary had arrived in force for what she knew would be a confrontation with the full weight of Edward’s government. But when she was summoned before the king and council and taxed with disobedience, she played her trump card. Her cousin on her mother’s side was the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, the most powerful ruler in Europe. Mary now invoked his mighty protection, and the imperial ambassador hurried to court to threaten war if Mary were not given freedom of religion. Faced with the combination of foreign war and Catholic insurrection at home, the council backed off. It was Edward’s turn to weep tears of frustration.
And there was worse to come. In the winter of 1552, Edward started to cough blood, and by the following spring it was obvious to everyone that the young king was dying.
In the same year the Reformation reached its high point. What little there remained of Henry’s moderation was abandoned as Protestant reform reached its climax. The real presence of Christ in the sacrifice of Eucharist during mass was rejected by Cranmer’s second Book of Common Prayer. Altars – which symbolized the sacrifice of Christ during the Eucharistic rites – were stripped from churches throughout the country and replaced with rough communion tables. It was a complete rejection of the old faith and the end of the compromise between Catholicism and Protestantism that Henry had advocated. Reform was hurtling in one direction. But Mary’s intransigent Catholicism now became more than an obstacle to the progress of reform – it threatened the very survival of Protestantism itself. For Mary, her father had declared, was Edward’s heir. She would succeed as queen and Supreme Head of the Church, and like her father and brother before her, she would be able to remake the religion of England according to her own lights. It was clear to everyone, even Edward, that this was only a matter of time.
The thought of Mary as his Catholic successor was intolerable to the hotly Protestant Edward. So, with a confidence that was breathtaking in a dying fifteen-year-old boy, he decided unilaterally to change the rules.
He set down his commands in an extraordinary document. It is headed in his bold schoolboy hand ‘My Device for the succession’. It was against statute law and drawn up without parliamentary consent. But the sickly king believed that his God-given authority would extend beyond the grave. First, he excluded Elizabeth as well as Mary from the succession on the grounds that both his half-sisters were bastards. Second, he transferred the throne to the family of his cousins the Greys; and third, he decided that women were unfit to rule in their own right, though they could transmit their claim to their sons, or, in legal jargon, their ‘heirs male’.
The problem was that all his Grey cousins were women, and though they had been married off at breakneck speed, none of them had yet had children. In the course of time, no doubt, the problem would have solved itself, but in view of Edward’s rapidly declining health there wasn’t time. Instead Edward swallowed his misogyny and called for his ‘Device’. With two or three deft strokes of the pen he altered the rules one last time. Originally he had left the crown to the sons of the eldest Grey sister, the Lady Jane: ‘the Lady Jane’s heirs male’. One crossing out and two words inserted over a caret changed this to: ‘the Lady Jane and her heirs male’. If Edward could make his choice stick, the impeccably Protestant and deeply learned Lady Jane Grey would be his successor as queen.
On 6 July 1553 Edward died. On the tenth the sixteen-year-old Lady Jane Grey was brought to the Tower to be proclaimed queen. The Tower was the traditional location for such a declaration. The difference in this case was that Jane Grey would never leave its precincts again.
II
By leaving the throne to Lady Jane Grey, Edward had flouted both his father King Henry VIII’s will and the Act of Succession. This flagrant disregard for the law was unacceptable even to many Protestants. It would have given the Crown even greater powers, putting it above Parliament and the law. Moreover, Lady Grey’s supporters had made a fatal mistake – they had failed to arrest Edward’s Catholic sister Mary, who was, according to Henry’s will, the legitimate heir to the throne.
Instead, forewarned by friends at court, Mary fled out of reach to the depths of East Anglia, were she had vast estates and a loyal following. On 10 July she proclaimed herself rightful Queen of England, and two days later she took up residence at the great castle of Framlingham, which she made her headquarters for armed assault on the throne of England. Troops flooded in and Mary inspected her army in front of the castle in true royal style.
But no blow needed to be struck. Faced with Mary’s overwhelming strength the Grey faction threw in the towel and Queen Jane was deposed after reigning for less than a fortnight. It was legality, legitimacy and the sense that she was Henry VIII’s daughter which had won the day for Mary, but she herself didn’t see it like that. ‘In thee O Lord I trust, that I be not confounded forever,’ Mary said; ‘if God be for us; who can be against us?’ She was convinced that her accession against all the odds was a miracle brought about by God for His own purposes; it was a sign, and she was now a woman with a mission to restore England to the Catholic faith.
In public, Mary promised to return to something like the consensus of her father’s last years: there would be no forced conversions, her propaganda implied. In private she was more candid: ‘she boasted herself a virgin sent of God to ride and tame the people of England.’ The contrast was reflected in the hesitant start to reconversion: to begin with people were ‘encouraged’ to return to the old faith after nearly twenty years of Protestant reforms and Edward’s policies were assaulted only slowly. But it would not be long before Mary increased the pace of bringing England back to true religion.
First, however, to prevent the country ever returning to the heresy of Protestantism, Mary must marry and produce an heir. For otherwise her father’s will left the throne to her Protestant half-sister, Elizabeth. Long ago in her youth, Mary had been briefly betrothed to the Emperor Charles V. Now Charles offered her his own son and heir, Philip, who had been brought up in Spain and was imbued with that country’s passionate Catholicism. More importantly, his father had dedicated the empire’s resources to stamping out Protestantism throughout Europe. Now England would be brought back to due obedience to the Pope. But the idea of a Spanish king ruling in England was wildly unpopular. Even though a yearning for Catholicism remained wiedespread in England, decades of anti-papal, nationalistic propaganda had also done their work. The papacy was looked upon as foreign and unEnglish. Thus, when the Spanish embassy arrived, boys threw snowballs at them, and the rest of the crowd, ‘nothing rejoicing, held down their heads sorrowfully’. More seriously, an uprising in Kent in 1554, led by Sir Thomas Wyatt, fought its way to London, and for a while Mary’s throne was in jeopardy.
Mary rose to the occasion, won over Londoners with a magnificent speech in Guildhall and crushed the revolt. She then exacted a terrible revenge, executing all the leaders of the conspiracy, and Lady Jane Grey herself, whom she had hitherto spared. Elizabeth was implicated in the rebellion and sent to the Tower. With the rebellion defeated, and with Parliament’s reluctant acquiescence, there was now no barrier to Mary’s marriage to Philip.
Philip landed in Southampton on 20 July 1554. It was close to the first anniversary of Mary’s accession. Five days later Philip and Mary were married at Winchester Cathedral. The couple processed through the west doors along an elevated walkway to a high platform in the centre of the nave where the ceremony took place. It deliberately invoked an older and better world. Mary used an old-fashioned wedding ring made of a band of plain gold, and she swore the woman’s old oath, to be ‘Bonny and buxom in bed and at board’. If the couple were able to have children, that older, better Catholic world would live again.
Mary was thirty-seven and prematurely aged. But she sincerely believed that God would once again favour her and England with a miracle. A few months later, Mary, like her namesake the Blessed Virgin, declared that the ‘babe had stirred in her womb’. The prospect of a Catholic heir greatly strengthened Mary’s hand, and Parliament voted to return the Church of England to the obedience of the Pope. The Royal Supremacy, which Henry VIII had forced on the English people, seemed to be over.
In early April 1555, Mary moved to Hampton Court for the birth of the child that would crown her life and reign, and guarantee the future of Catholic England. Her confinement, as customary, began with the ceremony of ‘taking to her chamber’, in which she bade farewell to the male-dominated world of the court and withdrew instead to the purely female realm of her birthing chamber. There, etiquette required she remain secluded and invisible until the birth. But Mary couldn’t keep her joy to herself. Instead, on St George’s Day, she appeared at a window to watch her husband Philip lead the Garter celebrations, and she turned side-on to show off her big belly to the crowd below.
Good Catholics rejoiced with the queen, as they did when the serious business of enforcing Catholicism began. Part of the return to Rome was the restoration of heresy laws that punished those who denied the Catholic faith with the terrible death of burning alive.
The burnings began in February 1555. Over the following three years more than three hundred men and women died in agony at the stake. Faced with such persecution, many other leading Protestants fled into exile. One of the exiles was the Protestant cleric John Foxe, who decided to write a history of the persecution. Using the trial records, eyewitness accounts and the writing of the martyrs themselves, he compiled his Acts and Monuments. Soon known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, it became, after the Bible, the second-most widely read book in English and it damned Mary’s reputation for ever as Bloody Mary – especially the gruesome woodcuts (see first plate section, page 7).
But Foxe’s propaganda would have amounted to very little if it hadn’t quickly become obvious that Mary’s condition was a phantom pregnancy. By early summer she was a public laughing stock, with stories circulating that she was pregnant with a lapdog or a monkey. By August even Mary herself had abandoned hope. Moreover, at thirty-nine, it seemed unlikely she would ever conceive again.
With her pregnancy exposed as a delusion, power started to ebb away from the queen. Philip, now with no long-term interest in England, abandoned his wife to return to his Continental possessions. Still worse, her failure to produce an heir, and with it the guarantee of a Catholic future, broke Mary’s hold on Parliament.
Crucial to the government’s plans for the final suppression of Protestantism was a Bill to confiscate the landed estates of the Protestant exiles. If the Bill passed, the economic foundations of their resistance would be destroyed. The government strained every nerve, but so too did the opposition, led by Sir Anthony Kingston. With the connivance of the sergeant-at-arms the doors of the House were locked from the inside. Kingston thundered his protests and the Bill was defeated. Such scenes would not be seen again in Parliament until the seventeenth century.
Despite the loss of the political initiative, Mary grimly persisted with the persecution of Protestants. Her most illustrious victim was Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. But Cranmer was caught on the horns of a dilemma. In creating the Royal Supremacy, he had argued that monarchs were God’s agents on Earth and were owed obedience as an absolute religious duty.
But what to do when the monarch was of the wrong religion? Obey the queen? Or Christ? Cranmer’s prosecutors at his trial for heresy probed the dilemma ruthlessly, and Cranmer, old, worn out and terrified of the fire, recanted his Protestantism. It was a huge propaganda coup for Mary. But foolishly, she wasn’t satisfied. She bore Cranmer a deep and personal grudge for divorcing her mother and, even though Church law said that a repentant heretic should be pardoned, she was determined that he would burn.
Cranmer’s execution was to take place in Oxford, preceded by a public repetition of his recantation. After a good supper, Cranmer slept well and early on a rainy morning he was brought to the University Church. It is still possible to see where sections of the pillars of the church were cut away to build a high platform to give maximum publicity to what the authorities were confident would be a repetition of his recantation and confession.
Instead, in an astonishing theatrical coup, Cranmer repudiated his recantation, and as the hubbub rose through the church he managed to shout out a final denunciation of the Pope as Antichrist. He was pulled down from the scaffold and hurried to the stake.
But Cranmer hadn’t finished. As the flame rose he stuck out his right hand, which had signed his recantation, and pushed it deep into the heart of the fire. It had sinned, he said, so it should first be punished. It was a magnificent gesture which vindicated Cranmer’s personal integrity, and saved the good faith of Protestantism. Mary’s vengefulness had turned the propaganda coup of Cranmer’s recantation into a PR disaster, which fired her opponents with a new zeal to resist Bloody Mary.
Among them was John Ponet, a Protestant bishop who’d fled into exile in Strasbourg when the burnings began. He was an old friend of Cranmer’s. But, unlike Cranmer, Ponet’s experience of Mary’s tyranny led him to question the intellectual foundations of the Supremacy, and reject outright the idea that the king was God’s anointed, ordained by Him to rule His church on Earth.
In 1556 he published a revolutionary book – A Shorte Treatise of Politike Power. Its title page, with the motto taken from Psalm 118, says it all: ‘it is better to trust in the Lord than to trust in princes.’ This meant that kings, far from being the God-like figures of Cranmer’s and Henry VIII’s imaginations, were human at best and subhuman at their all-too-frequent worst. And this meant in turn that kings were human creations and had to be subject to human control.
If, therefore, Ponet went on to argue, a king or queen broke human or divine law they should be reproved or even deposed. And if, like Mary, they were cruel and persecuting idolaters then it was a virtuous act to assassinate them as a tyrant. Henry VIII had realized that the Royal Supremacy could survive only if the monarchy kept to a middle way in religion. But Edward and Mary had ignored his warnings, and now, in Ponet’s groundbreaking work, had provoked a head-on challenge to the authority and legitimacy of kingship itself.
Mary was soon beyond the reach of Ponet’s seditious theorizing. In 1558 she became seriously ill, although she fondly imagined she was pregnant again. She even wrote her will, leaving the throne to her unborn Catholic child.
But six months later, with her health rapidly fading, even Mary had to face reality, and she added a codicil to her will. In it, she finally acknowledged that it was likely that she would have ‘no issue or heir of her body’, and that she would be succeeded instead ‘by her next heir and successor, by the laws and statutes of this realm’. That of course was her half-sister Elizabeth, though Mary couldn’t even bring herself to write her name. Seeing visions of heavenly children to the last, she died on the night of 16 November 1558. She was forty-two.
Two of Henry’s three children had succeeded to the throne and, by their contrasting religious extremism, had imperilled both the Supremacy and the Crown. Would his last surviving heir, Elizabeth, do any better?
III
After years of danger and uncertainty, Henry VIII’s last heir, his daughter Elizabeth, stood on the verge of becoming Queen of England.
A portrait of Elizabeth aged fourteen, painted in the last weeks of her father’s life, shows her as the very model of a religious, learned princess. But the reality of Elizabeth’s life under the reigns of her brother and sister was to be very different from the studious calm suggested by this picture – especially under her sister Mary.
During Mary’s reign, Elizabeth occupied the impossible position that she would later call ‘second person’. By their father’s will, she was Mary’s heir presumptive; she was also, as a covert Protestant, guaranteed to undo everything that Mary held dear. This made her both the focus of every conspiracy against Mary, and the target of her sister’s fear and rage.
Mary had sent her to the Tower after the Wyatt rebellion in 1554 on charges of treason, and would certainly have had her beheaded if she had been able to scrape enough evidence together. Such experiences left Elizabeth with a set of indelible memories, which meant she took a very different view of policy from either her brother or her sister.
News of Mary’s death was brought to Elizabeth at Hatfield. The story has it that she fell on her knees, impulsively exclaiming with the psalmist: ‘This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvellous in our eyes.’ Actually, Elizabeth had been preparing herself for this moment for weeks. Her right-hand man in her preparations for power had been Sir William Cecil. It was to be the beginning of a lifelong partnership.
Cecil, born the son of a Tudor courtier some thirteen years before Elizabeth, had shared many of her experiences and, as a Protestant, suffered the same fears under Mary when he too had saved his skin by conforming to Catholicism. But there was a difference. Cecil, unlike Elizabeth, responded to the fears he had experienced under Mary by hardening his opinions: never again must there be a Catholic monarch or heir, and if by mischance one appeared then people, council and Parliament together could – and should – remove them.
These were Ponet’s arguments, though Cecil was a moderate in comparison. Nevertheless, it would make for an interesting relationship between Cecil and his imperious, headstrong young queen, with her high view of royal power and her moderate line in religion. And indeed, establishing a new religious settlement was Elizabeth’s first task as queen. Mary’s parliament had made Catholicism once more the religion of England and only another parliament could change it. But to what?
Elizabeth’s first parliament met in January 1559. It was opened with a speech by the acting Lord Chancellor. He spoke in Elizabeth’s name but his phraseology deliberately invoked her father’s great speech on religion to the parliament of 1545. Since then, England had been to the extremes of religion. It had been, as Henry predicted, bloody and destructive. Most had tried to avoid being caught up in the conflict between Protestants and Catholics. The people, clergy, many of the council and Elizabeth herself had compromised with Mary and outwardly conformed to Catholicism. Elizabeth herself had heard mass in Latin and professed loyalty to her sister’s faith. She, like the majority, had dissembled her true religious views. For she was never a Protestant in the mould of Edward. Like her father, she appreciated religious ceremony and deplored the name-calling of bigots from both sides of the divide. And so, like Henry, Elizabeth wanted the middle way in religion – partly because she believed in it, and partly because she too saw it as the best defence of the Royal Supremacy, which she was determined to revive as her God-given right. Only once the explosive passions of religion were contained would the throne and Elizabeth’s life be secure.
But Elizabeth’s plans for a moderate religious settlement came under fire from both extremes – from Catholics in the Lords and Protestants in the Commons and council. Which group offered the best chance of pacifying England with a workable religious settlement? Extreme Protestantism was a danger for Elizabeth. It had gained a new, radical way of thinking during the dark days of Mary’s reign. It saw those who had hidden their beliefs as enemies of true religion. It had its martyrs, Cranmer foremost among them. And there were many who thought that even the Edwardian Reformation had not gone far enough and that Cranmer had been cut down before the Church had become fully reformed, leaving it stranded midway between mild, watered-down Protestantism and Catholicism. Moreover, these enthusiastic Protestants did not like female rule and had worked out a theory of justifiable resistance to monarchs during Mary’s reign. They were politically and personally offensive to Elizabeth. But, just the same, they were a bulwark against the Catholics, who opposed the Supremacy.
Finally, to overcome her Catholic peers and bishops, Elizabeth had to join forces with her Protestant Commons and councillors. She duly got the settlement and the Supremacy, though with the narrowest of majorities in the Lords of three votes. The price, however, was her acceptance of Cranmer’s second, much more radically Protestant Book of Common Prayer of 1552. In the infighting between the religious extremes, it seemed that Elizabeth’s hope for moderate settlement had been lost.
The outcome of the parliament of 1559 had been a triumph for Cecil. He had outmanoeuvred and strong-armed the Catholics to restore the Royal Supremacy, and he had, so it seemed, outmanoeuvred Elizabeth as well, to bring back the full-bloodied Protestantism of her brother Edward. Elizabeth was equal to the challenge, however. She insisted, against fierce opposition, on inserting the so-called Ornaments Rubric into the legislation. This empowered her, on her sole authority, as Supreme Governor of the Church, to retain traditional ceremonies, such as making the sign of the Cross in baptism, and to require the clergy to wear traditional vestments, like the surplice and the cope. These vestiges of Catholicism were offensive to radical Protestants. If they had had their own way, they would have sped the Church of England on the road to extreme Protestantism of the kind that existed in Europe and Scotland – a Church without bishops and ceremonies. It was only the queen’s personal supremacy which prevented this. Far from hurtling along the road of reform in the way that Edward and his supporters had envisioned, the Church of England was frozen in time. The result was a Church that was Protestant in doctrine, Catholic in appearance and which would, Elizabeth hoped, satisfy all but a handful of extremists on both sides.
And Elizabeth’s hopes would almost certainly have been fulfilled but for the issue of the succession. It was the succession which had driven the giddy switch back course from Protestantism to Catholicism and back again, and it had the potential to do it again. It was clear to Cecil that the best way to secure the succession was for the queen to marry and produce an heir. But Elizabeth was less sure. She had seen how her half-sister’s choice of a husband had sparked dissent and rebellion. Elizabeth determined that England would ‘have one mistress and no master’.
But if Elizabeth could not and would not marry, who should succeed her? Her father’s will had an answer for that too, for, if Elizabeth died childless, a clause prescribed that she should be succeeded by the descendants of her Aunt Mary, Henry’s younger sister, the Greys.
But Elizabeth hated the Grey family, because they had helped put Jane Grey on the throne. Then Elizabeth had been publicly branded a bastard and barred from the succession. In revenge, she would never allow the throne to pass to a Grey. But what to do about her father’s will? Her brother and her sister, to whom its terms were equally unacceptable, had challenged it head-on and failed. Elizabeth was subtler. The will was given one last public outing in the second parliament of the reign and then it was returned to the safe deposit of the treasury and put in an iron chest. And the key to the chest in effect was thrown away. It was a case of out of sight, out of mind.
With the lightest of touches Elizabeth had nudged her father’s will into oblivion. This left as her most obvious heir her cousin Mary, the granddaughter of Henry’s eldest sister Margaret. Mary was Queen Consort of France and Queen of Scots in her own right. She was also a Catholic.
In August 1561, after the death of her husband, the French king, Mary, having spent most of her young life on the other side of the Channel, returned to Scotland as queen. Brought up among the splendours of the French court, Mary was far more interested in her claim to the English throne than her paltry Scottish inheritance, and in September she sent her personal emissary, Sir William Maitland, to negotiate directly with Elizabeth. His mission was to secure formal recognition of Mary’s status as Elizabeth’s heir.
Elizabeth was all graciousness in her private, face-to-face interviews with Maitland. She acknowledged that Mary was of the blood royal of England, was her cousin and her nearest living kinswoman, and that she loved her dearly. And she also, under Maitland’s subtle prodding, went farther. She knew, she said, no one with a better claim to be her successor than Mary, nor any that she preferred to her. She even swore that she would do nothing to impede Mary’s claim. But the final step – declaring Mary her heir – Elizabeth told a crestfallen Maitland plainly, she would never, ever take. But Elizabeth had already gone far too far for Cecil. He had lived through the reign of one Mary and her attempt to re-Catholicize England, and he was determined never to suffer another one.
Matters came to a head in the parliament of 1566, which attempted to force Elizabeth to name a successor, and by implication to exclude the claim of Mary Queen of Scots. Furious, Elizabeth summoned thirty members of each House to her palace in Whitehall, where she delivered an extraordinary speech.
Elizabeth was at her fiery, brilliant best. She would never name an heir, she said, because he or she would become ‘second person’. And Elizabeth, better than anyone else, knew the danger of that position, since, as Mary’s legally appointed heir, she had been ‘second person’ herself. As such, her own life had been in constant danger and she had been the focus of plots and treason. At this point Elizabeth became sharply personal. Many of the MPs, she said, turning to the Commons delegation, had been among the plotters, and only her own honour prevented her from naming names. Similarly, turning now to the Lords, she proclaimed that many of the bishops, under Jane Grey, had preached treasonably that she, Elizabeth, was a bastard. ‘Well, I wish not for the death of any man,’ she said, not altogether convincingly. No head can have felt too secure on its shoulders by the time the queen had finished.
The issue of the succession would bedevil Elizabeth’s entire reign. Parliament was terrified that they would be faced withan interregnum on the queen’s death. As history made clear, a throne with no known heir guaranteed civil war and bloodshed when the monarch died. What would become of the monarchy? Would the absence of a known heir turn England into an elective monarchy? Would the religion of the country have to change once more depending on who emerged as the successor? But Elizabeth knew equally well that the ‘second person’, however convenient for Parliament and the country, would be her worst enemy. If Mary was named as successor, her accession was a knife blow away – a tempting prospect for a foreign power or a Catholic.
But however much it was ignored or passed over as too dangerous to discuss openly, the problem of the succession wouldn’t go away, and it was brought into sharp focus when a rebellion brought about by disgust at her scandalous personal life forced Mary to flee Scotland in May 1568 and seek Elizabeth’s protection in England. The presence of Mary Queen of Scots in England would force Elizabeth into the very actions that she had tried so hard to avoid.
IV
Mary Queen of Scots’ flight to England was a disaster for Elizabeth. In Scotland, Mary, despite her Catholicism, had been lukewarm to religion. She had lived with a Protestant government, and she had even taken a Protestant as her third husband. But in England it was a different story. Here Mary played up her Catholicism, and Catholics in turn identified with her.
The issue for both Mary and the English Catholics was the succession. Mary was Elizabeth’s obvious heir because she was her closest relation, but Elizabeth steadfastly refused to recognize her as such. The implications for the monarchy were vast. If not Mary, then who would inherit the crown? For if the succession was not determined by unalterable descent of blood, what gave the monarchy its legitimacy and divine right to rule? Mary played on this sensitive issue. By bidding for Catholic support, she was hoping to force Elizabeth’s hand, and, in turn, the prospect of an heir of their own faith gave English Catholics, who had almost lost hope, stomach for the fight once more. The spectre, which Elizabeth had striven so hard to lay to rest, of a ‘second person’ who differed in religion from the monarch was about to rise once more. And its baleful effects were to be quickly felt.
For the next twenty years Elizabeth was to keep Mary prisoner, moving her from one secure castle to another. In all that time the two queens never met. And as Elizabeth had foreseen, the plots soon began. Catholics saw Mary as a means back to power, and used her as a focus for rebellion. Despite her precarious position, Mary was naive enough to allow herself to be implicated in several of these plots. But Elizabeth refused to take action against Mary. Her instinct was to try to defuse the conflict, and above all she did not want Mary to become a martyr.
But Elizabeth’s hopes of avoiding conflict were dashed when her middle way came under attack from both extremes. First to move was Rome with a papal edict or Bull, issued by the Pope in 1570. Known by its opening words as Regnans in Excelsis, ‘reigning on high’, it sets out the most extreme version of the papal claim to rule ‘all people and all kingdoms’. Then, for her defiance of this claim, it condemns Elizabeth; deposes and excommunicates her, and absolves all her subjects from their oath of allegiance.
The Bull was the Catholic version of the arguments of the Protestant Ponet, and, as with Ponet, its logical outcome was tyrannicide, the assassination or murder of the errant ruler. The Pope had, in effect, declared war on Elizabeth by calling for her death. But two could play at that game, and Elizabeth’s council responded in kind.
Violent times breed violent measures and few have been more violent than the Bond of Association. Drawn up by the Privy Council in 1584, the bond is a kind of licensed lynch law. If Elizabeth were to be assassinated in favour of any possible claimant to the throne, then those who took the bond swore to band together to ‘prosecute such person or persons to the death’ and ‘to take the uttermost revenge upon them by any possible means’. Furthermore, the bond would forbid anyone on whose behalf such an assassination took place from succeeding to the English throne. Finally for any Catholic rebel or foreign power that thought that Mary would automatically succeed if Elizabeth met an untimely end, the bond made clear that the right of nominating an heir belonged to ‘Elizabeth, the Queen’s Majesty that now is, with and by the authority of the Parliament of England’. The Protestant nobility and gentry flocked to subscribe to the bond in their hundreds, as the masses of signed and sealed copies that survive at the Public Record Office show.
Mary wasn’t mentioned by name in the bond but everybody knew she was the target. The bond was subsequently legalized by an Act of Parliament, which also set up a tribunal to determine her guilt or innocence. But Cecil had wanted to go much, much farther and establish a Great Council to rule England in the event of an assassination and the inevitable interregnum that would follow. The Great Council would exercise all the royal powers and together with a recalled Parliament would choose the next monarch. This was a radical constitutional innovation. If a council in alliance with Parliament had the authority to choose monarchs, it would also have the authority to set conditions on them and challenge their subsequent actions. This was Ponet translated into a parliamentary statute, and Elizabeth was having none of it.
For Elizabeth saw the bond as being as offensive as Regnans in Excelsis, since it too set religion above the Crown, and permitted subjects to judge a sovereign and elect a new one. But not even Elizabeth could protect Mary from her own folly or Cecil’s vendetta. In 1586, Mary was lured into giving her explicit endorsement to a plot to assassinate Elizabeth. Faced with incontrovertible evidence of her guilt, Elizabeth was forced to agree to her trial and condemnation. She even signed the death warrant. But she gave instructions that the execution wasn’t to be carried out without her further command. For once, Cecil did not obey his queen.
Instead, a secret meeting of the council was convened in his private rooms at court and, acting on their own authority, and in defiance of the queen’s express command, the councillors dispatched the death warrant to Mary’s prison at Fotheringhay castle. There, in the Great Hall, Mary was publicly beheaded. She died magnificently, clutching the crucifix and wearing a scarlet petticoat as a martyr to her Catholic faith.
But the removal of a threat to the monarchy and the Church of England had serious implications. Queen Regnant anointed by God though she was, Mary had been publicly executed like any other common criminal. The ‘divinity that doth hedge a King’, which Elizabeth had fought so hard to preserve, had evaporated, never to return.
The execution of Mary was a watershed. Henry and his three children had sought to reshape the religion of England according to their own preferences. But as a fierce, nationalistic Protestantism took root in England, it was becoming clear that a monarch – or an heir – who fell too far out of step with the religious prejudices of the nation would do so at their peril. The dangerous liaison between monarchy and religion had claimed its first royal victim in Mary Queen of Scots. She would not be the last.