Mary Tudor, Henry VIII’s oldest surviving child, was second in the line of succession which her father had set out before he died. That was a tacit admission that his marriage to Catherine of Aragon had been lawful. But opposition to Mary succeeding to the throne was less concerned with her legitimacy than with her upbringing. Like her mother, she was a devout Roman Catholic and was, therefore, anathema to both genuine and counterfeit Protestants who – for reasons both religious and political – lived in dread of a Counter-Reformation. But Mary had inherited her father’s iron will, as well as her mother’s piety. She did not intend to be denied her destiny.
Northumberland’s preparations for the coup, which he had planned would follow Edward’s death, had included the fortification of the Tower of London and Windsor Castle. So Mary had no doubt that her throne, and possibly her life, were in danger. The suggestion that she should keep a vigil by her brother’s deathbed was rejected as a ruse to ensure that she could be kept under surveillance. Most of her entourage thought that the best for which she could hope would be a life under the suspicious supervision of Queen Jane’s henchmen. And even that would require Mary to make an early act of submission and take an oath of fidelity. Mary remained – despite the auguries of doom – convinced that she would become Queen. It was God’s will.
Edward’s death had been kept secret for three days, but on July 10th 1553, Lady Jane Grey was brought, in majesty, to the capital. Thousands of Protestants lined the street to welcome her – a small proportion of London’s population, but enough to make her seem to be the people’s choice. On the following day, Mary Tudor wrote to the Privy Council belatedly asserting her claim to the throne. The Council’s reply was almost apologetic in its implication that it was too late to prevent Jane’s succession because a challenge to her authority had been overtaken by events. Queen Jane had been ‘invested and possessed the just right and title to the imperial crown of the realm … We must therefore assent to the said queen … except which we fall into grievous and unspeakable enormities.’1 Northumberland’s message to the Lord Lieutenants, sent at the same time, combined brutality towards Mary with a show of respect for the House of Tudor. He rejected the claim of ‘the bastard daughter of our dearest cousin and progenitor uncle, Henry VIII of famous memory’.2 Mary’s determination to inherit what was rightfully hers was in no way diminished. The throne was not only hers by right. It was her divine destiny to lead England back to the true faith. Who could prevail against her?
Mary fled from London and made for East Anglia. Her entourage was stoned in Cambridge and she was refused entry into Norwich. But when she reached Framlingham the tide began to turn. An army of supporters – according to a Spanish adherent, ‘few of them persons of distinction’ – began to rally to her cause. In London, Northumberland – normally a decisive soldier – was torn between reinforcing his stronghold and challenging Mary in the field. His indecision was regarded by Mary as more evidence that God was on her side. He eventually decided to march north with only 3,000 soldiers, and guns from the Tower of London, at his back. From the start of the forced march it was clear that the boroughs through which he passed supported Mary and that Cambridge and Norwich did not speak for England. Then he received news that Oxfordshire, Middlesex and Berkshire had declared against Jane.
Mary eventually recruited a force of almost 30,000 men – many of them volunteer civilians who had enlisted to fight for the ‘old religion’. The nine-day reign of Queen Jane was over. Among the nobles who rapidly changed sides was the Duke of Suffolk, Jane’s father. He went to Tower Hill to proclaim Mary queen and then abandoned his daughter to the Tower itself, there to await whatever punishment the new Queen thought appropriate. Northumberland – retreating from East Anglia – issued a similar proclamation in Cambridge. All that was left for Mary to do was make a victorious entry into London through the cheering throng.
Support for Mary’s return owed as much to fear and hatred of Northumberland – who was held responsible for the arbitrary imposition of the new Prayer Book – as to the popularity of the rightful Queen. But Mary had her own explanation of the rejoicing. The defeat of the would-be usurpers had been so swift, and her own victory so complete, because God wanted her to send a sign to the people. Let them have no doubt that Divine Providence had chosen her to return England to the Church of Rome. The Pope agreed and struck a medal to commemorate not Mary’s, but God’s, victory.
The Catholics of England greeted Mary’s return with open rejoicing – and an immediate return to the old ways. At Melton Mowbray they rebuilt the altar, and in York chalices were brought out of hiding. Even while the Act of Uniformity was still in force, and the celebration of the Roman Mass remained illegal, recusant Catholic priests returned to the Roman forms of celebration and worship – much to the delight of their faithful parishioners who were angrily described by Knox as marking the restoration with ‘fires of joy and riotous banqueting’.3 He so forgot his duty to respect the civil power that he openly boasted about preaching incitement to rebellion, a claim which was substantiated by the Emperor’s ambassador who wrote that ‘several preachers, certain Scotsmen in particular, have preached scandalous things to rouse up the people, going as far as to say that men should see Antichrist come again to life’.4
The Antichrist began God’s work with admirable moderation. Edward’s prisoners were released. Among them were Edmund Bonner, who was restored to the See of London, and Stephen Gardiner, the deposed Bishop of Winchester, who was to become Lord Chancellor of England. Neither men had been unequivocally opposed to every aspect of Henry’s Reformation. But both had been unwilling to endorse the excesses which followed during Edward’s reign. Mary’s willingness to reprieve and reappoint two agents of her father’s attenuated schism reflected the policy of her first Parliament. The validity of Henry’s marriage to Catherine was confirmed and the ceremonies of worship – particularly those which were traditional parts of the Mass – were restored. But the rule of caution and respect prevented the repeal of her father’s declaration of independence. So the Pope remained no more than Bishop of Rome without authority over the Catholic Church in England.
Initially Mary seemed, by the standards of Tudor England, to be unreasonably merciful. Only three of the conspirators were immediately executed. Northumberland was the first, despite announcing from the scaffold that he was a true Catholic who had been led into error by the hope of reward from the Protestant kings and by the arguments of ‘seditious preachers and teachers of new doctrine’. Jane and her immediate family were imprisoned and condemned to death, but the sentences were not carried out. Cranmer – who had signed the letter which denied Mary’s claim to the throne – could not have expected to be spared for long. He was, according to any definition of the term, guilty of high treason as well as continual heresy. So he was a candidate both for burning and beheading, fates it seemed that he still might escape. For Mary began her reign with proclamations which were as benign as they were unexpected and appeared to demonstrate a degree of religious tolerance that was wholly untypical of the age.
Queen Mary’s Declaration to Council on August 12th 1553 was emphatic. ‘She meaneth graciously not to compel or constreyne other mennes consciences otherwise than God shall [as she trusteth] put in their hearts a persuasion of the truth.’5 Her First Proclamation, made on August 15th, began equally emolliently. Despite her devotion to ‘that religion which she had professed from her infancy’ and the hope that the ‘same was of all her subjects, quietly and charitably embraced’ she ‘mindeth not to compel any [of] her said subjects thereunto’. But there was a caveat. As well as denouncing ‘evil-disposed’ preachers, forbidding the preaching of sermons without permission and proscribing biblical analysis, she warned that the promise of tolerance would only hold good until a ‘further order by common consent’ was made. England was on probation.
The first official, Roman Catholic sermon of Mary’s reign was preached at St Paul’s Cross on August 13th – three days after King Edward’s funeral – by Gilbert Bourne, chaplain to Queen Mary and future Bishop of Bath and Wells. There were mutterings of disagreement when he reasserted the obligation to ‘pray for souls departed’; and when he criticised the late King, not yet cold in his grave, for imprisoning the recently released Edmund Bonner, the dissent was so great that his safety was in doubt. ‘There was a great uproar and shouting … as it were like mad people, what young people and women had ever heard, as hurly burley and casting up of caps.’6 Two Protestant clergymen – John Bradford and John Rogers – rescued Bourne from the mob and were then accused of inciting the violence and of going to the chaplain’s aid only to cover their complicity in a riot that got out of hand. The Mayor and Aldermen of London were instructed to keep better order and a week later, when Bourne preached a second time, two hundred pike-men were in attendance to ensure that his sermon was received in silence.
The violence was either the cause of or pretext for action to prevent a general uprising. Hooper, Latimer and Cranmer were arrested and all foreign nationals expelled from England. Knox therefore had to choose between the risk of imprisonment and leaving the country. After some public agonising about the pain of abandoning his wife and his followers, he fled to Dieppe, from where he wrote (the unconsciously ironically entitled letter) ‘A Comfortable Epistle to the Afflicted Church of Christ’, exhorting them to bear His Cross with Patience. It included a warning against attempts to assassinate Queen Mary.
During the autumn of 1553 the Lower House of Convocation reaffirmed the English Church’s belief in transubstantiation. The Mass was reinstated as the central and crucial act of worship – required by law in all churches – and the Book of Common Prayer was proscribed.. In February 1554 the obligation to hear and make auricular confessions was renewed, in preparation for Lent. It was clear that the religion of Rome, if not Roman supremacy, had returned to England. Yet there were only occasional and sporadic demonstrations of Protestant protest. The most violent was a shot fired at a preacher at St Paul’s Cross. The most sacrilegious was the theft of the host from St Mary’s in Hull. The most significant was the unsuccessful opposition of eighty Members of Parliament to the repeal of Edward’s Protestant legislations. There were disturbances in some churches when priests criticised Protestant habits and practices which, within a quarter of a century, had become familiar and therefore indispensable, but the agitation was certainly no more than Queen Mary should have expected. It is now estimated that about eight hundred devout Protestants chose to emigrate to countries where they could openly follow their faith. The Wyatt Rebellion, in 1557, hoped to rally support in the name of Queen Jane and the need to protect England from Spanish domination. It achieved only the execution of its heroine and her family. Sir Thomas Wyatt recruited to his cause less than one-tenth of the number of rebels who had followed the Pilgrimage of Grace. Not even his own tenants rallied behind him.
Priests had been allowed to marry since the Act of 1549. A Royal Injunction of March 1554 allowed married priests to choose between their incumbencies and their wives. In May 1554 Thomas Martin, a pamphleteer, wrote in support of a return to celibacy on the spurious grounds that the sins of a lecherous king were somehow connected to the laxity of a married priesthood. Some priests resisted, but more acquiesced. A few simply abandoned their wives to lives of poverty as well as shame. A parish priest in the City of London sold his wife to a butcher – an act so heartless that his parishioners dragged him through the streets in a dung cart. Being in obedience to the recently amended law of God, he was rescued by the Church and a parish was found for him in rural Kent.7 At the other extreme of uxorious devotion, a priest in St Keye, in the West Country, simply ignored the injunction. He and his wife were taken from their beds by scandalised parishioners and set in the stocks.8
Mary believed that the reception of her Catholic edicts confirmed that her subjects had never, in their hearts, rejected the true faith. In fact it was proof of many less clear-cut characteristics. One of them was the religious complacency of most English men and women. Another was England’s natural instinct to conform. The Reformation had been accepted by many Catholics because it became enshrined in the law of the land and the chosen faith of their sovereign. Most Protestants had accepted the Counter-Reformation for much the same reason. Some were bewildered by the sudden change in the injunctions they received from on high. In an essentially deferential society, simple men and women followed the lead of their betters – hence the pockets of Catholicism which survived every stage of the Reformation under the patronage of great families in great houses. Most men and women did what they were told and, when a change came about, were punished, sometimes by death, for earlier obedience or for being slow to change their allegiance. The leaders of both the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation were constantly misled, by the devotion of their hard core of support, into the belief that they spoke for all of England.
The seven heretics burned at Smithfield on January 27th 1556 were executed for doing what they thought was expected of them. ‘During the time of King Edward VI, hearing the gospel preached and the truth opened, [we] followed the order of the religion and doctrine as then set forth.’9 Isobel Foster, the fifty-five-year-old wife of a cutler, was a Catholic, ‘as other common people [were] … till the reign of King Edward, at which time, hearing the gospel truly preached … received thereupon the faith and religion as we were taught it’.10 The unrepentant Henry Aldington had been ‘truly taught in the days of that good king Edward of the goodly preachers sent by God’.11 Their sin was constancy.
The Heresy Laws had been revived by a bill which was promoted in the House of Lords by Stephen Gardiner. Initially their Lordships refused to discuss it. They were not overcome by a sudden passion for tolerance, but by a determination not to stir up unnecessary trouble before the Queen embarked on a highly unpopular marriage with Philip of Spain. The pretext, by which they sort to justify their timidity, was the claim that no new legislation should be introduced until the crown and Rome had come to an agreement about the restoration of Church property. The bill was passed in a week, at the second attempt, in the same year and came into force on January 20th 1555.
Mary – who was so sure that she lived in God’s grace that she felt no need to dissemble – was probably honest in her insistence that she wanted converts, not martyrs, and therefore proposed to use her providential powers lightly, ‘sparing punishment for heretics’. But – confident that she was now sufficiently secure on the throne to follow her uncompromising instincts – she was determined that the false prophets would not escape so lightly. The reconversion of England was to be ‘done without rashness, not leaving in the meantime to do justice to such as learning would seek to deceive the simple’.12 However, the pace was still set by a minority of zealots. Thinking that their hour had come, they were not satisfied with merely rooting out the false prophets. Those who were seduced by the heretics had also sinned. The righteous anger was infective. Mary decided that it was God’s will that Protestants be burned at the stake.
On January 28th 1555, a week after the bill became an Act, a panel of bishops – under the instruction of the rehabilitated Stephen Gardiner – began to examine the imprisoned Protestants. The first victim to die was Bishop John Hooper. He was sent to Gloucester, his own diocese, for burning, in the mistaken belief that the people who had followed him would be chastened by the sight of their hero at the stake. It was a major miscalculation. When he was led out from prison on the morning of February 4th, a crowd of 7,000 sympathisers greeted him and escorted him to the pyre. During the forty-six months between the reinstatement of the heresy laws and Mary’s death in 1558, at least 280 Protestants were burned. The burnings went on until the last two weeks of the Queen’s life. Among the victims were five Suffolk farm labourers; Joan Waste, a young and blind Derby woman; and Agnes Prest, an Exeter widow.13
During the years which followed, and in history, the burnings did both Mary and her Catholic cause immense harm. An anonymous letter to the restored Edmund Bonner – Bishop of London and a committed burner – warned him, no doubt correctly, that in death John Philpot, a Protestant evangelist, had done more damage to the Catholic cause than the martyr had achieved in life.14 But at the time the public reaction to the Marian burnings was much the same as it had been to the burnings which had taken place during the previous two reigns. Crowds assembled to watch. Among them, men and women who either supported or opposed the execution were far outnumbered by sensation-seekers who were attracted by the excitement of public death. There were executions to which spectators brought fruit and pastries to sustain them while they enjoyed the spectacle. And there were executions at which, in an excess of righteous brutality, the victim’s last words were shouted down while the dying man was pelted with stones and clods of earth.
To the modern mind, the uninhibited brutality of the burnings seems to illustrate some terrible psychological disorder in those who perpetrated then. William Fowler was said to have struck a priest. He was condemned to death by burning. But ‘first, his hand, having been held up against the stake, was struck off’.15 The heroic stoicism of some victims is equally incomprehensible. John Rodgers was told that a recantation would be followed by a reprieve. ‘His wife and children, being eleven in number (one suckling at the breast) met him on the way to Smithfield. The sight of his own flesh and blood could not move him, but that he constantly and cheerfully took his death with wonderful patience.’16 Some persecutions were as bizarre as they were brutal. John Warne, an upholsterer, was already under suspicion when he was accused of having his ‘great rough water spaniel’17 tonsured like a priest. It was later discovered that Warne had not cut the dog’s hair himself but, almost as bad, ‘did laugh at it and like it.’18 That was enough to begin a course of events that ended, for Warne and his wife, at the stake.
There were occasional acts of Christian charity. The people of Laxfield in Suffolk provided a rare example of opposition to the burnings by civil disobedience. John Noyes, a shoemaker, was condemned for responding to a question about transubstantiation with an answer which was bound, because of its dismissive style as well as its Protestant content, to secure his conviction of heresy: ‘I thought the natural body of Christ to be in heaven not in the sacrament.’19 On the day of his burning – April 19th 1557 – his neighbours, knowing that the executioner would need glowing coals for kindling, doused the fires in their cottage grates. But ‘smoke [was] espied from the top of a chimney’. The executioner ‘went and broke down the door’.20 Hot coals were carried from the cottage. The fire was lit. John Noyes burned.
Demonstrations in support of the martyrs were denounced by officiating priests. John Day, a curate in Maidstone, was shouted down as he preached before the pyre that was to burn seven Kentish men and their wives. He told the angry crowd, ‘Good people, ye ought not in any way to pray for these obstinate heretykes, for loke how ye shall see their bodies burn here with material fyre. So shall ther damnable soules burne in the unquenchable fyre of hell everlasting.’21 Despite the righteous joy with which some priests sent heretics to eternity, the claim was and remains that the interrogators – who examined the suspects before sending them on to Consistory Court – did all they could to persuade them to repent and be saved. Thomas Tomkins, the first layman to be burned, had his hand held over a candle in order to illustrate the pain he would suffer in the fire. He nevertheless chose burning rather than apostasy. John Williams, the Chancellor of Gloucester Cathedral, asked Thomas Drowry, a blind boy whom he was cross-examining, where he had learned to be a heretic. Drowry replied that his teacher was Williams himself. Unabashed, the Chancellor replied. ‘Then do as I have done and thou shalt lyve as I do and escape burning.’22 Drowry refused and Williams pronounced him guilty and sentenced him to death.
The enthusiasm for burning, which some restored priests displayed, was not shared with equal indiscrimination by the Queen. Her reservation was tactical rather than conscientious. Martyrdom was a display of faith which encouraged the fearful to be brave and the weak to be strong. Mary and her ministers wanted public recantations, which could be exploited to reduce the morale and undermine the faith of other heretics. They were obtained by a mixture of argument, entreaty and torture, which was known by the official euphemism ‘examination’. John Philpot endured fourteen examinations before he swore that he had never spoken against ‘the sacrifice of the mass and the sacrament of the altar’, but he would not recant his denunciation of ‘the usurped power of the Bishop of Rome’. So he burned.23 Richard Woodman underwent six examinations, ‘wearing sometimes bolts, sometimes shackles, sometimes lying on the bare ground, sometimes sitting in the stocks, sometimes bound with cords and all my body be swollen much like to be overcome by the pain that has been in these things.’ He too burned.24
Thomas Cranmer – theologian of the English Reformation, architect of its Edwardian consolidation and traitorous supporter of Jane Grey – could not be allowed to escape the fire, however complete, obsequious and even sincere his recantation. But he might be persuaded to repent before he died. In the spring of 1554, Cranmer, Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer were moved from their London prisons to Oxford where, for several weeks, they endured continual cross-examination by a team of scholars. The exercise ended with the examiners announcing that they had won the theological argument, but their adversaries had refused to accept God’s law. They were returned to prison and remained there for over a year. On October 26, 1555, Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley – being of no further use alive – were burned with more ceremonial than usually accompanied executions. Richard Smith, Regius Professor of Divinity, preached a sermon – more to the attendant crowd than to the condemned men. It compared the defrocked bishops to Judas and warned against showing sympathy towards anyone who chose to die outside the Church. They were prevented from making a statement to the crowd, but repeated the last words of Jesus. According to the 1570 edition of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs – a catalogue of Mary’s crimes, real and fictitious – Latimer then cried out, ‘Be of good comfort Master Ridley and play the man. We shall, by God’s Grace, light such a candle as shall never be put out.’ The story is an invention, based on the dying valediction of Polycarp, a martyred Roman soldier.
Thomas Cranmer was forced to sit in the window of a house that overlooked the pyre and watch Latimer and Ridley burn. The whole event was thought to have passed off sufficiently peacefully to suggest that, even in Oxford, there was no great opposition to the burnings or great enthusiasm for them, despite the mob oratory of Thomas Martin, the prosecutor, at Cranmer’s trial. He had compared Cranmer’s conduct with the devil’s temptation of Christ in the wilderness, and his final remarks – both threat and warning – had been addressed to the public gallery. ‘Do you se how he looketh about for help? … If any of you bid God strengthen him, or take him by the hand or embrace him, or show him a cheerful countenance you shall be excommunicated.’25 That stern injunction could not have encouraged the defendant’s expectation of mercy. But his continued imprisonment after the execution of the two bishops may have given him a flicker of hope. By then he had been driven half-crazy by the continual interrogation, which was suddenly abandoned. It was renewed after two months and Cranmer at last recanted. But there was to be no reprieve. On February 14th 1556 the reason for delay was revealed. The prisoner had been created Bishop by the Pope. So the ritual of removal of all his clerical orders had to await receipt of permission from Rome. During the twelve days after it was received, Cranmer signed his four further recantations. Although each one was more comprehensive than its predecessor, the sentence remained death by burning.
The execution took place on March 21st 1556. The proceedings began with a public service conducted on a platform which had been erected in the nave of St Mary’s church. The scene was set by James Brooks, Bishop of Gloucester. ‘Remember from whence you have fallen. You have fallen from the universal and Catholic Church of Christ, from the very true and received faith of Christianity and that by open heresy. You have fallen from your promise to God, from your fidelity and your allegiance by openly preaching marriage and adultery. You have fallen from your sovereign prince and queen by open treason.’26 Dr Brooks continued to identify the depths to which Cranmer had descended for another ten minutes. His address ended in bathos: ‘… and after that you fell lower and lower’. Henry Cole, Provost of Eton College, preached the sermon. Then came the planned grand climax – a carefully constructed confession of guilt read out by the condemned man. It was not the confession which Cranmer had agreed with his captors. Nor was the guilt to which he confessed the guilt for which he was to be executed. Cranmer recanted his recantation.
The first few words of his valediction were the opening lines of the agreed text. He believed in ‘every article of faith of the Catholic faith, every word and sentence taught by our Saviour Jesus Christ, his apostles and prophets in the Old and New Testaments’. That made the deviation which followed all the more dramatic. He was expected to beg for forgiveness for the sins of supporting false doctrine and promoting the Reformation. Instead he renounced:
all such bills and papers which I have written or signed with my hand since my degradation, wherein I have written many things untrue. And forasmuch as my hand offended, writing contrary to my heart, my hand shall be the first punished thereafter; for may I come to the fire it shall be first burned.27
The final flourish – a denunciation of the sacraments, as recently redefined by Stephen Gardiner – was lost in the explosion of noise, some triumphant, some horrified, but all astounded, which followed. Cranmer was hustled off the platform and out of the church, but he brushed his captors aside and ran ahead of them to the waiting pyre. He was as good as his word. ‘When the wood was kindled and the fire began to burn near him, he stretched out his right hand which had signed the recantation into the flames and there held it steadfast that all the people might see it burned to a coal before his body was touched.’28
Cranmer’s valedictory coup was not the only example of the inevitable failure of Mary’s policy for cleansing England of heretics. Her strategy – conversion and recantation whenever possible, with burning as the last resort – was based on the mistaken belief that England was still a Catholic country in which a minority of men and women had been persuaded to become little more than Protestants in name alone. But even the Catholics whose Catholicism had survived King Edward’s reign were reluctant to be caught up in another upheaval and, whatever their doctrinal position, had developed a sturdy belief in English independence from foreign influence. Mary was wise – not a characteristic with which she is usually associated – to move slowly towards her undoubted intention of restoring relations with the Pope and Rome.
Immediately that he heard of Edward’s death, Cardinal Reginald Pole – Mary’s constant and true, but exiled, adviser – wrote to the Pope, Julius III, to assure him that England would soon restore ‘the justice, piety and true religion which have hitherto been utterly crushed’.29 The Pope replied in the most fulsome language. But it was clear, from the tentative verbs, that the rehabilitation had only begun:
If ever at any time it were permissible, certainly now most appropriately it may now be said that ‘the right hand of the Lord has wrought strength’ … the most flourishing Realm of England, having been led away into separation and secession by Henry the Eighth and thereafter by the succession of Edward his son strengthened and confirmed in that hereditary error should now be suddenly brought back again into that state whereby it seems that it may most easily be recalled to the holy flock and to the fold of the Catholic Church, indeed this is nothing other than the change of the right hand of the Most High.30
Reginald Pole, ‘appointed as Legate a latere of Ourselves and the Holy See’, was intended by the Pope to assist in the work of national redemption. Mary Tudor, a woman with a mind of her own, was not so ready to receive the Pope’s emissary. She welcomed Pole’s advice. But at the start of her reign she preferred to receive it in writing rather than in person. It would, in all probability, have been difficult for Pole to reach England. The forces of the Holy Roman Empire may well have barred his way. The Emperor Charles was planning for his son Philip to marry Mary and feared that Pole – whose ordination as priest had been inexplicably delayed – might be a rival for the Queen’s hand. The notion was not as fanciful as it now seems. There had been a time, in Mary’s girlhood, when a match with Pole – a Plantagenet – was seriously contemplated. But by 1553 the Emperor’s suspicions were groundless. Mary, on the other hand, had serious reasons for wanting Pole’s visitation to be delayed.
The day after Pole had sent the good news of Edward’s death to the Pope, he had written to Mary a letter which concluded with a quotation from the Magnificat: ‘He hath put down the mighty from their seats and hath exalted the humble and meek.’ The identity of the humble and meek he had in mind for exaltation was not clear. But there was no doubt about the mighty whom he wanted to put down from their seats. The list included the sovereigns who had challenged the authority of the Pope. Mary had no doubt about the Pope’s supremacy. But she did not intend to acknowledge it until she felt more secure. It was her view that England would gladly accept the theology and liturgy of Rome but not the elevation of its bishop to head of the worldwide Church. And Pole’s immediate arrival would have been regarded as a sign that the Pope was once more to have authority in England.
Pole was deeply offended by Mary’s suggestion that he should postpone his arrival in England, and sent her a rebuke which a less pious monarch would have regarded as near treason: ‘I do not know if your councillors who urge you to set your kingdom’s affairs in order first and then restore religion believe the words of the gospel, saying that God watches over and governs even the smallest things and that without him no good can be accomplished … The establishment of Kingdoms is not founded on mighty armies or even on human foresight. Their strength lies in God.’31 Mary was unmoved. She knew that the reconversion of England had already begun – in the way, and at the speed, she judged to be right.
The Imperial Ambassador and Pole both underestimated Mary’s cunning. The Ambassador described Mary’s policy as the determination to ‘return to the conditions as they were at the time of King Henry’s death’,32 and Pole – who also believed that the Queen’s reluctance to acknowledge the Pope’s authority was prompted by respect for her father’s memory – regarded her reluctance to renounce Henry’s policy as misplaced loyalty. Even the decision of Mary’s first Parliament to recognise as valid Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon was seen by Pole as the daughter doing her duty, not a Queen edging her way towards the repeal of the Act of Uniformity. Having denounced Henry in life, Pole felt no obligation to treat him more gently in death. Henry was ‘knoweth of all men as the author of the holy schism’. Defending him and his heresy was, in itself, an ‘impietie’.33 He added that it was Mary’s duty to welcome him to England as an ally in the holy war.
Mary’s response was affectionate and frank. She would gladly give half her kingdom to have Pole by her side.34 However, she must proceed at a pace which did not give comfort to heretics. At the beginning of her reign she would rather correct errors of doctrine than reassert her duty to obey Rome. She began that process in March 1554. A Royal Injunction required ‘the suppression of corrupt and naughty opinions, unlawful books and other unlawful devices’.35 It was followed, a year later, by an edict that forbade ‘seditious and unlawful publications’ and what amounted to an index of proscribed writing. Protestant printers were put out of business and their presses handed over to reliable Catholics.
The paradox of Pole’s position was that although (unlike Mary) he did not understand England’s antagonism towards the Pope, he did (again unlike the Queen) recognise that England would be violently opposed to her marriage to Philip of Spain. Mary was not prepared to take advice or, on the subject of marriage, proceed with caution. In her Catholic piety, she was determined to do her duty as a woman as well as a queen. That required her to marry and have children.
Mary and Philip were married in July 1554. In September Pole wrote to the Holy Roman Emperor – the Queen’s new father-in-law – comparing his exclusion from England to St Peter’s imprisonment in Herod’s gaol. The quotation from the Acts of the Apostles probably did less to influence the old man’s judgement than the fact that, Mary’s marriage being contracted and consummated, there was nothing Pole could do to prevent it. Another year passed before Pole was able to fulfil his destiny. In a letter of August 13th 1555 he reminded Mary that she had ascended the throne of England without the help of any human agency and had triumphed because her victory was God’s will. It was now her duty to respond to that benevolence by recognising and re-establishing, in England, the authority of the Pope, God’s Vicar on earth – a return to grace which should have been accomplished in her first Parliament. Mary still feared that some of Pole’s views would provoke rebellion.
The argument over the status of property which had been confiscated from the Church had still to be resolved. The dispute was so bitter that one suggestion for its solution was a ruling that its confiscation had been God’s vengeance on the unworthy clergy and therefore there could be no recompense or return. The need to resolve the disagreement before Pole’s return was used, for several months, as justification for the Legate’s continued exclusion. But Mary either relented or felt the need of one counsellor at court whom she could trust. Whatever the reason, she agreed that Pole should make his way to England, and on November 13th Pole began his journey across Europe. On November 19th 1555, he arrived in Calais – before Mary’s reckless involvement in the ruinous war with the French, still English territory. At Dover he was welcomed by a personal letter from the Queen. It heralded a triumphant progress to London which – like Mary’s own reception in the capital two years earlier – was interpreted, by easily convinced Catholics, as proof that all England was impatient for a return to the old faith.
From the start to the finish of the journey to Gravesend, Pole was accompanied by five hundred horsemen. At Gravesend he was officially notified that the Act of Attainder, initiated by Henry VIII as a preliminary to his trial and execution, had been formally revoked by Parliament. In anticipation of his arrival, it had been in session since November 12th. The rest of the journey to London was made along the Thames in a boat which bore the silver cross of a Papal Legate on its prow. Pole landed at Westminster pier on November 24th and went at once to Whitehall, where he was greeted by Philip and Mary. According to a broadsheet, published in Milan, the Queen ‘embraced him with the affection of a son who she had long given up for lost’.36 Pole presented his credentials and hurried away to Lambeth Palace. He had work to do.
The following day he refused an invitation to a banquet designed to celebrate his arrival, but could not avoid a discussion with Philip about the restoration of papal property. The agreement was reached, subject only to papal endorsement, that Pole would issue a blanket absolution for all of England’s schismatic sins, save for the continued retention of property held as a result of the assault on the monasteries. That problem was overcome by a combination of expediency and corruption. First Philip accepted that, with the passage of time, all land that could not be held ‘in good conscience’ would be returned to its rightful owners. Then the Pope issued a Dispensation which absolved from blame or restitution the great families who lived in what once were monasteries and owned what once was monastic land. The stage was set for Pole to address Parliament on November 28th.
Pole’s speech, though apparently delivered extempore, was based on De Unitate, his treatise written to denounce Henry VIII’s apostasy after the executions of More and Fisher. He thanked Parliament for ending his exile, but said that he was not able to end a far worse forced separation – ‘you being cutt of from the Church through your own wilful defection and schismatical revolting from the unity of the same … All holy rites and observances neglected and held for superstition and abomination.’37 It was then that he attributed the whole of the English Reformation to Henry’s ‘fleshy will, full of carnal concupiscence’, although he must have known that the royal divorce was the occasion rather than the cause of the breach with Rome. It was not the moment to remind England that it had once asserted its independent sovereignty.
Pole then added a passage on a subject that was to become a major theme of the texts which supported the English Counter-Reformation – the civil upheaval which inevitably followed schism. ‘Neither was any man so sure of his goods and possessions, but he stood in abject danger and hazard of his life too.’38 Praise for Philip, Mary and the Emperor was followed by an assurance – calculated to appeal more to Parliament than to historians – that England enjoyed a special place in God’s affection. Because it was the first kingdom to accept Christianity, it possessed ‘a great prerogative of nobility’.39
On St Andrew’s Day, forty-eight hours later, Parliament reassembled to hear Pole’s response to a petition, presented to him by Philip and Mary, asking that the nation be absolved from the sins of heresy and schism. The whole assembly, including the royal couple, knelt while absolution was pronounced. Fortunately, on the previous day, the document setting out general terms for the restoration of Church property had been agreed. So the absolution was complete. As is so often the case with agreements arrived at in haste, the various signatories had different interpretations of its meaning. The issue remained contentious during five hundred years of argument about the extent of the restitution. In the spring of 1912, David Lloyd George – the Chancellor of the Exchequer and an active Nonconformist – responded to attacks on the Welsh Disestablishment Bill with his analysis of how two dukes, who had been particularly critical of the proposal, and their noble ancestors, had acquired the foundations of their family fortunes. ‘They robbed the Catholic Church. They robbed the monasteries. They robbed the altars. They robbed the poor. They robbed the dead. Then they come here … hands dripping with the fat of sacrilege.’40
Despite their long association and protestations of affection, Pole’s and the Queen’s hopes for the future of Catholicism in England were incompatible. The problem was not the status of the Pope. When she felt secure on her Catholic throne, Mary was happy, indeed enthusiastic, to abandon her claim to be head of the English Church and gradually, despite the respect she owed her father, she agreed to restore the Pope’s authority over the English Church. But her long-term objective was the restoration of the Church to the state it had enjoyed before the Reformation. Her instinct was to look back. Pole’s intellect convinced him of the need to look forward. He was the advocate of institutional change – the obligation of bishops to live within their dioceses, the establishment of seminaries and an improvement in the quality and conduct of the priesthood. Absentee clergy with no knowledge of the scriptures had been one of the pre-Reformation complaints against the Catholic Church. Mary was gradually persuaded at least to attempt the reforms which Pole – although under pressure from Rome to return – was determined to impose on the dormant Catholic Church in England.
Pope Julius III had died in March 1555 and his successor, Marcellus II, died three weeks later. For the second time in his life, Pole himself might have been a realistic contender for the papal throne. But he had turned his back on personal ambition, a sin to which he claimed ‘God has granted me the grace to show myself very averse during the whole course of my life’.41 God had given him to England.
The new Pontiff was seventy-nine-year-old Pietro Carafa, Paul IV, a Neapolitan who, true to his origins, hated the Spanish Hapsburgs. A year after his enthronement, Charles V abdicated, and Philip – husband to Mary Tudor – became the King of Spain, the Netherlands and Naples. The Pope withdrew all his legates from Philip’s dominions and ordered Pole home. Queen Mary asked for a revocation of the order and, so as to avoid open defiance of the Pope, refused permission for the messenger – who carried the rejection of her request – to land in England. Pole simply ignored the papal injunction. Disobedience was heresy. The Pope denounced ‘the whole apostate household of the Cardinal of England’.42 Pole wrote, but did not send, a letter which was both an apology and a justification. His obligation, he made clear, was to the country of his birth.
Pole’s work of reforming the English Church had begun before Pope Paul deprived him of the status of Legate. In November 1555 he had issued notice of a joint synod of both English archdioceses. When it met a month later, Pole resumed his assault on the English clergy who, he claimed, were ignorant and covetous. The instructions which he issued, in the name of the Pope, were a replication of the rules of conduct which he, and a group of reformers, had unsuccessfully proposed to the Council of Trent, in Consilium de Emendanda Ecclesia.
The Council of Trent, which had begun before Mary’s accession, continued for so long that it was still in session after her death. It was convened by Pope Paul III and continued by Julius III and Pius IV – none of whom attended – with a basic purpose of providing a response to the Reformation. Because it chose to advocate retrenchment rather than reform, its conclusions were more to Mary’s way of thinking than to Pole’s. The leadership of the Catholic Church concluded that the only way to confound the Protestant threat was by a reaffirmation of all the basic dogma which had sustained it since its creation. The Church faced the same dilemma – compromise with the demand for change or resist it – time after time during the next five hundred years. At Trento the balance between conservatives and reformers changed from session to session. Sometimes there were as many as seven hundred bishops present. Sometimes there were as few as thirty. The conservatives won most of the votes, though two institutional reforms were agreed. The sale of indulgences was forbidden and schemes for improved clerical education were put in place.
Pole revived, in the English synod, the reforms which Trent had rejected. All priests were obliged to preach as well as pray, avoid ostentation, give part of their earnings to charity and remain celibate. Seminaries must be set up to train the clergy. The Church’s property must be restored. The synod reaffirmed that simony – selling indulgences – was designated a mortal sin; prepared a new book of homilies; composed a new catechism; and, in a remarkable volte-face, agreed to promote an English translation of the New Testament to complement the English Prayer Book, which had been used for private devotions since 1555. It was silent on the subject of papal authority. Even allowing for that omission, it moved appreciably closer to the position at which Catholic reformers and moderate Protestants met. Pole placated Rome by persuading Mary – without much difficulty – to surrender her rights to tithes and first fruits. But he was developing an essentially English brand of Catholicism. Offers from the Jesuits to help in the work of reconversion were declined. England would save itself.
Before the synod’s work was finished, the Pope had stripped Pole of his legatine powers. Pole responded with a rebuke which was majestic in its disdain. He was particularly offended to hear rumours of his dismissal before he had received official notification from the Pope and was sceptical about the notion that it was the result of the hostilities between the Pope and Mary’s father-in-law:
You said not just once, but first to the Ambassador of England and then to my messenger … that whatever you did in this cause you did not do on account of the fact that something in me gave offence but on account of the fact, there being a state of war between Your Holiness and King Philip, you did not deem it appropriate that whilst you had recalled from other kingdoms and jurisdictions all your nuncios and legates, you should have a legate in the kingdom of England … Yet shortly thereafter, although Your Holiness being reconciled with the King has restored your nuncios to the rest of his dominions … you had been besought concerning the restitution of the legation to me you have still deferred doing so [and] have allowed the rumour to go forth that a legal process has been taken against me.43
The Pope was unmoved, but Pole’s authority in England was restored by the device of arranging for his ordination as priest and, two days later, his appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury. The principles of reform were reiterated at a specially assembled convocation and Pole set out – in a series of visitations – to reinvigorate and educate the slothful and often ignorant clergy. The Reformatio Angliae had begun. It was Pole’s intention to carry out God’s work in the spirit that he had described to Parliament when he absolved England of the sin of heresy: ‘I am come not to destroy but to build: to reconcile not to condemn.’44
Pole’s apologists absolve him from responsibility for the persecutions, which gradually took the place of attempts to bring sheep and shepherds closer together. The burnings, they claim, were the eventual result of decisions taken before Pole returned to England. As early as 1553, the Lower House of Convocation had asserted that the doctrine of transubstantiation was part of the true faith and called for action against the heretics who refused to accept it. The Wyatt Rebellion had convinced some – and allowed others to claim – that Protestants were a threat to the security of the realm. The idea had been encouraged by the speech from the scaffold by the Duke of Northumberland, a convicted traitor who combined sins spiritual and temporal by denouncing the ‘seditious preachers and teachers of the new doctrine’ who had persuaded him to deny the authority of both the Pope and the Queen.45
Pole was not as opposed to the new severity as his apologists claim. In 1554, the heresy laws had been re-enacted to become a weapon against supposed treason as well as the denial of the true faith. That was wholly consistent with Pole’s prescription for purifying England. It was Pole, in correspondence with the Queen during the years of exile, who had advised Mary that God had restored her to the throne of England ‘for no other reason than that ribaldry and disobedience to the holy laws may be punished and the seditious receive their reward’. Having accepted the relationship between Protestantism and rebellion, he had left no doubt about Mary’s obligation to suppress the twin evils. She had a duty both to follow the true faith and to ‘compel her subjects to do likewise’.46 Foxe, uncharacteristically, gave a balanced description of Pole’s position. ‘Although it cannot be denied by his acts and writings, that he was a professed enemy [of Protestants and Protestantism] and not otherwise to be reputed but for a Papist: yet again it is to be supposed that he was non of the bloody and cruel sort of Papist.’47 He regarded burnings as an occasional necessity, not a continual obligation.
Initially Pole was more interested in preaching than in burning. For the two years beginning in March 1556 he gave sermons with three constant themes: the authority of the Church, the bodily presence of Christ during the Eucharist, and England as the land of which Jacob dreamed. The ladder, which stretched back though St Augustine to Peter himself, had only one rotten rung, Thomas Cranmer. The importance of the sermons lay less in their content than in the fact that they were given. Pole’s new Catholicism required priests to teach their followers rather than expect them to accept – without understanding – the authority of the priesthood. He expected the sermons to be more than ‘shallow entertainment’ – a difficult task for those priests who could barely understand the scriptures themselves.
Pole’s sermons challenged, head-on, the precepts of the Reformation and were supported by innumerable other publications which, over the next half-dozen years, sought to compete with the volume of Protestant tracts and broadsheets that were being printed in continental Europe. Bishop Edmund Bonner explained their purpose in the introduction to A Profitable and Necessarye Doctryne – a statement of Catholic theology. The new enthusiasm for the dissemination of Christian knowledge was the result of a determination ‘both that errors, heresies and naughty opinions may be weeded, purged and expelled … and also that a very pure, sincere and true doctrine of the faith and religion of Christ … may faithfully, plainly and profitably be set forth’.48 In July 1555, Bonner’s London diocese published An Honest Godly Instruction for the Bringing up of Children. It included both the letters of the alphabet and a simplified statement of faith. It was not the only publication that was designed to reach out to the poor and dispossessed. A companion volume, Homilies Set Forth, was a collection of thirteen sermons which were said to be suitable for reading to congregations of the uneducated. In 1556, Pole authorised its use in parishes throughout England. The most important of the homilies, A Plaine and Godlye Treatise Concerning the Masse for Instructyon of the Simple and Unlearned, advocated the burning of heretics. Nicholas Harpsfield, the Archdeacon of Canterbury and a More memorialist, wrote the Treatise on the Pretended Divorce in a style that echoed language which the subject of his panegyric would have found familiar. Henry’s life of sin had transformed him into a ‘monstrous shape’, and mad dogs drank the diseased blood which dripped from his split coffin.49
It would be wrong to attribute the acceleration in burnings, which characterised the later years of Mary’s reign, to the Plaine and Godlye Treatise. They began before its publication and varied from diocese to diocese, according to the assiduity of the presiding bishop and the severity thought appropriate. And as early as February 1554, Bishop Bonner – ‘Bloody Bonner’ as he came to be called – had begun to seek out heretics by requiring every adult within his London diocese to make a confession in preparation for Lent, and every parish priest to report those who failed to do so. But at first, public prosecution was largely limited to the publicly obdurate figures whose Protestant beliefs might plausibly be associated with treason. In the end, the burnings were greater in number than the total of heretics burned during roughly the same period in the Spanish Netherlands. Marian England even out-burned the Spanish Inquisition. Indeed, the Emperor Charles II abandoned religious executions completely, and Philip II warned Mary that her burnings were harming, not promoting, her cause. His judgement was endorsed by two anonymous laymen who wrote to Bonner demanding to know ‘where prove you that Christ and his Apostles killed any man for his faith?’50 There is no record of his reply, but it seems that – despite his reputation – in early 1555, Bonner slowed down the pace of examinations, convictions and executions.
On May 24th 1554, Queen Mary complained to Bonner and his fellow bishops that heretics were being allowed ‘to continue in their errors, to the dishonor of Almighty God and a dangerous example to others’.51 The reproof was the result of her discovery that only one martyr had been burned in the London diocese during April. Bonner reacted sufficiently swiftly to guarantee his place at the top of the year’s burnings’ league table: 113 in London as compared with 52 in Canterbury. His performance might have been even better, had it not been for his initial habit of burning heretics one at a time rather than exploiting the economies of scale. In 1555, after the rebuke, he changed his ways. Thirteen men were martyred together at Stratford-le-Bow in June 1556. Other dioceses were less diligent. There were no burnings in the Durham diocese. Archdeacon Bernard Gilpin reported that he could find no one who did not believe in the Real Presence. His uncle, Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall, had not lived, and died, in vain.
In Canterbury where – Pole having been made Archbishop – activity should have been particularly intense, the Archdeacon, the assiduous Nicholas Harpsfield, devised a system that would encompass every man and woman in the diocese. Churchwardens were to identify everyone who did not take Easter Communion. Absentees were to be cross-examined about their beliefs and – assuming the answers did not suggest heresy – required to give assurances of future good conduct. Canterbury (having in its care fewer souls than London) could claim to be the more diligent in rooting out heresy. Canon Dixon, in 1557, described it as ‘the hottest diocese in England’. He did not mean the description as a compliment. He also claimed that Pole was vicariously responsible for the burnings. Concerned with reforms to the whole Catholic Church, he left the management of his diocese to ‘reckless subalterns, shutting his eyes to their rigours, willingly not knowing what was done by them, though feeling himself bound not to forbid it’.52
In February 1557 a National Heresy Commission was established to ‘enquyre and search out all such persons as obstinately do refuse to receive the blessed sacrament’.53 The powers that were intended to allow it to perform those duties were draconian, even by the standards of the sixteenth century. They included the power to ‘inquire into all singular and heretical opinions, Lollardies, heretical and seditious books, concealments, contempts, conspiracies and all false rumours’ and the right to ‘search out such persons as obstinately do refuse to receive the blessed sacrament of the altar, to hear mass or come to their parish churches’.54 Mary was attempting by force to make England a unified Catholic country in which no other faiths were tolerated. The attempt failed.
Mary decided to demonstrate her determination to convert even the most hardened heretic by making an example of Sir John Cheke, the one-time tutor to Edward VI, who had left the country under a dispensation that allowed notable Protestants to escape the fires of home. He was lured from Strasbourg to Brussels by a bogus invitation to meet members of the Privy Council in order to discuss his return, was kidnapped and subjected to the torture which was regularly employed on recalcitrant heretics. Cheke cracked and recanted. The deception and brutality caused no great outrage. Such behaviour was common in Tudor England. But now, if not at the time, the pointless attempt to catch and condemn a Protestant who could do no harm seems like the conduct of a queen who, knowing her cause was lost, struck out blindly at any adversary, no matter how unthreatening.
Mary’s error was the mirror-image of the mistake her brother had made. He thought that the genuine Catholics in his kingdom were a perverse and recalcitrant minority who were wholly unrepresentative of a nation of people who were natural Protestants and longed for the suppression or expulsion of all things Roman. Mary believed England to be a Catholic country which had, temporarily, endured the tyranny of a Protestant dictatorship that was only supported by a morally and spiritually corrupt minority. They were both justified in claiming that the faith they despised was not the overwhelming choice of the English people. But that was because most of their subjects chose to float along with the religious tide. It was an attitude which zealots, like Edward and Mary, could not understand. But their other misjudgement was less explicable. They should have realised that, in both cases, devout followers of the faiths they abhorred – although minorities – were too strong in their convictions for their beliefs to be consumed by fire or washed away in blood.
Mary Tudor died on November 17th 1558. Cardinal Pole, her friend, adviser and confidant, died twelve hours later. Pole knew that his life’s work – the reconversion of England – was left unfinished. Mary, who retained hope that her reign had killed the virus of the Reformation, nevertheless ended her days a broken woman – crushed not by the burdens of state and the demands of religion, but by the disappointments of her private life. Philip, who had always regarded their marriage as a political convenience, had returned to Spain. The much-wanted and long-awaited baby had not been born. That meant she had not done her duty as a Catholic wife and she had failed in her duty as a queen, by lending England’s support to Philip in wars from which England had nothing to gain. Mary was not to know that her personal life was to have a greater influence than her edicts and proclamation on the future pattern of English religion. It was not an influence of which she would have been proud. Her conduct associated Catholicism, in the public mind, with Spanish aspirations to dominate, perhaps even annex, England. The association awoke England’s sleeping patriotism. For the next three hundred years Catholicism was regarded as an agent of foreign interference. The English Catholic Church, and its members, paid a far heavier price for Mary’s multiple follies – religious, political and matrimonial – than for the fires of Smithfield.
Ten years after her death, Francis Godwin of Hereford, a Protestant bishop, composed a requiem for Mary Tudor which provides a moving example of Christian charity. She was, he wrote, ‘a lady very godly, full of mercy, chaste and in every way praiseworthy’. The encomium falters when its author deals with her zealotry. But Bishop Godwin did his best. ‘And what wonder is it for a heretic to condemn her for matters of religion who ever remained zealous in the profession of the Catholic faith? They contradict themselves and profanely enter into God’s judgement who dare pronounce that, for her cruelty, God cut off half her days.’55 Perhaps. But the sobriquet remains. She will always be ‘Bloody Mary’.