The Story of Britain

by Rebecca Fraser

  Stephen Gardiner, who had been Bishop of Winchester since 1531, though imprisoned for two years under Edward VI, became Mary’s lord chancellor and chief religious adviser. The first act of the new government’s Parliament was to return religion to the state it had been in after Henry’s Reformation: the Six Articles were brought back; Mass was celebrated; those members of the clergy who, like Cranmer, had married were forced to renounce their wives; Edward’s bishops were imprisoned and Protestants were expelled from the country. But the queen had no plans to rest there. By the second year of her reign in November 1554, though she had at first taken the title Supreme Head of the Church, she had repealed the Reformation statutes and returned England to the Church of Rome.

  The dissolution of the monasteries had secured the gentry’s and the nobility’s loyalty to the Henrician Reformation. Property also explained the ease with which Mary returned England to Rome. For she was enough of a Tudor pragmatist to agree that the restoration of monastery lands to the Church could be no part of the new settlement. As a result, the transformation of the country back to Roman Catholicism was achieved without incident–the roots of Protestantism in England did not lie deep at mid-century. Later that year Mary’s cousin Cardinal Pole, the papal legate who had been exiled in Rome for so long, returned to England to preside over the dismantling of the Henrician Reformation. He became Archbishop of Canterbury.

  Meanwhile Mary’s decision in 1559 to marry her princely cousin, Charles V’s son, who was to become Philip II of Spain, aroused the most vehement opposition in Parliament, Council and the country at large. But she was determined, for everything Spanish aroused her unquestioning reverence. When Ambassador Renard had suggested marriage between herself and Philip she fell into transports of excitement without ever having met her intended, and immediately gave her sacred promise that she would marry none other. There were riots and a rebellion led by Sir Thomas Wyatt, the son of the poet, whose intention was to place Princess Elizabeth on the throne.

  Only Mary’s prompt action in riding to the Guildhall in London and telling the crowds that she would postpone the Spanish marriage until it had been agreed by Parliament re-enlisted public support. Though Wyatt proclaimed Elizabeth’s ignorance from the scaffold, Mary did not believe him. Lady Jane and Northumberland were executed and an outraged and terrified Elizabeth was taken by river to the Tower of London, from whence her mother had never returned alive. Here she famously refused to go in through the entrance known as Traitor’s Gate and, sitting down on the flagstones, declined to move. ‘Here landeth as true a subject, being prisoner, as landed at these stairs,’ she said imperiously. And until the sun set and she at last consented to go in, no one dared move her.

  But no evidence could be found to convict Elizabeth. She would not have been so foolish to plot openly. Her early life had made her a most circumspect and cautious personality and she had already had to throw herself on her knees and beg for her freedom when Mary’s advisers, such as Bishop Gardiner, had suggested she be arrested because she might form the focus of a Protestant plot. Though Elizabeth spent a couple of grim months in prison convinced that each day would be her last–the scaffold erected to execute Lady Jane Grey remained in place–eventually she was released. She went to live quietly at Woodstock in Oxfordshire and then at Hatfield, north of London. The arrival in London of the grave Philip of Spain, with his flaxen beard and cold eyes, saw not only the return of England to the old religion but the persecution as heretics of those who refused to conform. Cardinal Pole set up a commission to inquire into heresy and soon began burning all the Edwardian bishops. First to go was John Rogers, the Canon of St Paul’s, well known for helping with the translation of the Bible that Cranmer had sponsored. He was followed by Bishop Hooper of Gloucester, whose conscience had stopped him wearing vestments because St Peter would not have worn them. Taken to Smithfield in his long white shift, he was tied to a stake and logs were piled round him until only the upper half of his body could be seen. As the fire slowly consumed him, he never uttered a sound.

  The three other most celebrated personalities of the early English Reformation, Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley were all taken to Oxford to be examined in their faith by the new Catholic bishops. Cranmer’s trial was postponed because, having been made archbishop by the pope, his case had to be transferred to Rome. But Latimer and Ridley were condemned to death for denying Transubstantiation, the transforming of the bread and wine at Communion into the Real Body and Blood of Christ. They were trussed back to back at a stake in the town ditch at Oxford. As the flames rose and their agony began, the ever courageous Latimer said to his trembling fellow martyr Ridley, ‘Play the man, brother Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s Grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’

  And he was right. Until the Marian martyrs, of whom 300 were burned in the next three years, Protestantism had really been confined to a tiny percentage of the country. But, influenced by the civilizing spirit of the Renaissance, the people of England were more horrified by the burnings under Mary because of the visible human anguish it caused than they would have been in the middle ages. Moreover, the persecution of heretics was all part of the unwelcome Spanish influence under which the country had fallen since the queen’s marriage. The methods of the Spanish Inquisition, which gave Spain a bad name and was soon to be described in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, did more to convert England to Protestantism than all the efforts of the Protestant divines. The queen herself became known as Bloody Mary.

  Cranmer too soon met his death by burning. For all his great literary gifts, the former archbishop had never been a very strong character and he was now an old man. After five months of imprisonment, his spirit was broken. He agreed to recant and at Cardinal Pole’s suggestion put his name to papers describing himself as the author of all the evils which had fallen on the nation since Henry VIII. But as one of the chief architects of the Protestant Reformation Cranmer was such a major figure that Cardinal Pole and Queen Mary required a very public renunciation from him. It was arranged that this would take place before a large audience in St Mary’s Church at Oxford.

  To everyone’s surprise, at the pulpit Cranmer suddenly showed a courage no one had known he possessed. In a firm voice he denounced the pope as anti-Christ and his doctrine as false. Angry Catholics removed him before he could finish speaking and hurried him to the stake outside. But even then he outwitted them. For Cranmer thrust his right hand into the fire saying loudly, ‘It was that unworthy hand which offended by writing lies and recanting, therefore it must burn first.’

  Although it was popularly believed that it was her Spanish advisers who were chiefly responsible for the burnings, in fact Mary herself derived enormous satisfaction from them. Never in rude health, and usually having a poor appetite, she would eat a heartier dinner after a burning had taken place. The emotional gratification that she took from persecuting heretics was one of the few she obtained. Quite soon after the marriage Philip removed himself back to his own kingdom and visited his English wife only periodically when he needed money for the war against France.

  The struggle of Valois versus Habsburg, of Henry II of France against Charles V and then Philip II took many surprising shapes and forms. Not the least of these was when Philip forced Mary to declare war on France, and English troops took part in the assault which won the Battle of St Quentin. But like everything to do with Mary the affair ended in disaster. In 1558 in a tit-for-tat action the French high command attacked England’s last possession in France, the port and staple town of Calais. Though its governor had repeatedly warned that he did not possess enough food or soldiers to defend his position Mary’s government misunderstood how urgent the situation was.

  When reinforcements finally arrived, it was too late. The war was extremely unpopular and the antipathy towards Philip and Mary herself meant that Parliament was no longer the obedient tool of the crown. It refused to vote supplies. The government could raise money only by for
ced loans and illegal customs duties. News of the fall of Calais burst upon England like a thunderclap; it was the coup de grâce for Mary’s already poor health. She had miscarried one child. Now she lay dying of a stomach tumour which for many months she had pitifully believed to be a pregnancy. Loathed by her people, her husband far from her side, shortly before she passed away the unhappy queen uttered the immortal words: ‘When I die the word “Calais” will be found engraved on my heart.’ A few hours later on that same day, 17 November, died the other great defender of the ancient faith, Cardinal Pole.

  Meanwhile messengers had galloped to Hatfield, where the twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth was living, conscious that with her sister dying childless she was the future queen. The learned Elizabeth was reading the classics under an oak tree when the messengers arrived and hailed her as their sovereign. Then she said very slowly in Latin, ‘This is the Lord’s doing and it is marvellous in our eyes.’ As was remarked at the time, it was a good sign for a queen to be reading books instead of burning them, and so it proved.

  Elizabeth I (1558–1603)

  The clever, slender young woman who took over the English throne in 1558 had not kept her head on her shoulders through all her vicissitudes without it having a deep effect on her character. When at the London pageant for her coronation the figure of Old Father Time passed by, she was heard by people standing near her to murmur with wonder, ‘And Time has brought me hither.’ Elizabeth’s insecure and troubled early life had created a consummate pragmatist, who had a great deal in common with her grandfather Henry VII. Like him she was thrifty to the point of miserliness when it came to spending money. This was fortunate as the country she inherited had been almost bankrupted by Philip’s war. Unlike her father she was reluctant to go to war partly because of the expense, partly because she was so cautious that she was reluctant to commit herself to one side or the other. She rarely moved in a straightforward fashion but dilly-dallied on foreign policy–to the despair of her ministers.

  The new queen’s experience of religious extremism in her brother’s and sister’s reigns had left her with a great dislike of such emotions and a natural tolerance. Soon after her accession she announced she ‘would make no windows in men’s souls’, and for the first decade or so of her life she was content for a secret Catholicism to go on as long as the outward forms of Protestantism were observed.

  Queen Elizabeth inherited the Tudor common touch and charm that her brother and sister had so signally lacked, as well as the strong personality which had kept England at the feet of her father. She had his formidable intellect, his warmth and his striking wit. She had none of her mother’s dark colouring, having pale Tudor skin, red hair and an imperious hooked nose. Like Henry VIII she believed in showing herself to the country and staying with the gentry and nobility who upheld the Tudor state, hence the very many houses whose grandest bedrooms bear the legend ‘Queen Elizabeth slept here’. Like Henry VIII too she held a very splendid court, full of balls, masques and intrigues, at which the most dazzlingly dressed figure and the most spirited dancer was herself.

  She was just as capable as her father at bending Parliament to her will and she never failed to get the supplies she asked for. Though constantly urged by her Council and Parliament to marry and ensure a Protestant succession she never did. She was perhaps finally wedded to her country. As she said in her Golden Speech when she had been forty-three years on the throne, ‘Though God has raised me high, yet this I count the glory of my crown, that I have reigned with your loves. And though you have had, and may have, many mightier and wiser princes sitting in this seat; yet you never had, nor shall have, any that will love you better.’

  Queen Elizabeth the Great presided over a unique moment in English history. Her seamen sailed round the world and kept the seas free for Protestantism by defeating the Spanish Armada. Her playhouses saw productions of some of the greatest drama the world has ever known, the plays of William Shakespeare. And at a time when the wars of religion were creating bitter civil conflicts all over Europe, the middle way she followed helped Protestantism to take peaceful root. While so many monarchs met deaths by assassination, Elizabeth survived.

  The queen was extremely vain, a characteristic she inherited from her coquettish mother; from her father she got a love of regal splendour. To the end of her life she delighted in court revels and fabulously expensive dresses, whose fashions became more and more exaggerated as the century wore on. Frilled ruffs, vast hairdos, jewels by the yard, banquets and male favourites were the hallmarks of her reign, and she soon acquired the nickname Gloriana. Ambassadors who did not know her regarded as frivolous her obsession with dancing and with young men–favourites like Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Sir Christopher Hatton and finally the Earl of Essex. They did not see the dedicated and Machiavellian stateswoman closeted with master strategists like Sir Francis Walsingham and plotting how to keep Philip of Spain at bay. They failed to take seriously a woman whose criteria for selecting civil servants was so disinterested that she chose the great statesman William Cecil as her chief minister or principal secretary of state because she believed ‘that you will not be corrupted with any manner of gift, and that you will be faithful to the state, and that without respect of my private will you will give me that counsel you think best’. Unlike those of her father, her ministers left her service only if death removed them. Cecil was at her side for forty years.

  The new queen’s most pressing problem was the English Church, now rejoined to Rome. As a highly accomplished daughter of the New Learning who spoke fluent Latin and French and read Greek, Elizabeth possessed religious sympathies that were advanced Protestant, those of the second Edwardian prayer book. She did not believe in the Real Presence, as she made clear soon after her accession by leaving Mass when the Communion wafer was elevated. But her intention was to return the Church to that of her father’s less controversial Reformation, which did not offend Catholics. But a huge problem faced her, namely personnel. The old Henrician Protestants were dead, the clergy in charge were Catholic and the men required to run the Elizabethan Church could only be the Protestants who had fled abroad, the Marian exiles.

  The Marian exiles were just the sort of religious extremists towards whom the queen felt a natural antipathy. Far from being the polished courtiers her feminine nature delighted in, they were rough and ready, deliberately eschewing good manners in favour of sincerity. Many of them had been profoundly influenced by Jean Calvin in Geneva, one of the main centres for Protestant refugees. Calvin’s study of the Bible had convinced him that hierarchy was wrong and he rejected much of the Church’s supervision of religion: there should be no official prayer book, and churches should be run by small groups of ministers or presbyters. He rejected even the few sacraments Luther had accepted, for he had worked out a theory of predestination–men and women were either damned or saved. What mattered was the moral purity of the elect (as the saved were known). Rather than in acts of worship their religion was to be expressed in the moral purity of their daily life, in conduct and clothing (from this would derive their name of Puritans). With the new queen a Protestant, the Marian exiles had returned to England full of high hopes of significantly reforming the Church of England along Calvinist lines.

  But this autonomous and democratic kind of religion could not have appealed less to Elizabeth. As her father’s daughter she believed that the state control of religion was necessary for an orderly country and she spent much of her reign combating Puritanism, with only moderately successful results. She was personally affronted by their leading spokesman, the savage propagandist John Knox, whose notorious pamphlet First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women attacked women rulers. She banned him from London, so he found his way to Scotland and founded the Calvinist Reformation in Scotland. Like most Puritans the strength of Knox’s religious convictions meant he was no respecter of persons, even of royalty. Elizabeth found this intolerable.

  Nevertheless the Mari
an exiles were all the clergy the queen had to work with. Fortunately the Dean of Lincoln, Matthew Parker, whom Elizabeth made Archbishop of Canterbury, was a man after her own heart. The scholarly Parker, who had also been her mother Anne Boleyn’s personal chaplain, had managed to remain in England during Mary’s reign and so had not come under any extremist influences abroad. Like the queen he believed in the Church’s regulation of religion. He thought it more important to please the majority of English people who were still attached to old forms, whether in rituals of worship or vestments. Thanks to Parker and the queen’s genius for compromise and harmonization, the 1559 Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, whereby the English Church once more cut its links with the papacy, appeared to be all things to all men. Although the Elizabethan settlement really took for its essentials the second prayer book of Edward VI, its Communion seemed both to celebrate a Real Presence and to be a commemorative act. The new Church thus offended as few Catholics as possible, in order to unite England behind the queen. Elizabeth declared herself more modestly to be the Church’s supreme governor instead of supreme head, in order to leave her ecclesiastics free to determine affairs of the Church. And to make sure the Puritan clergy toed the line, Archbishop Parker set up the Court of Ecclesiastical Commission to enforce the Elizabethan settlement in every parish.