The Tudors

by G. J. Meyer

  For two decades and more, as the reform movement sprouted more and more branches under the leadership of Zwingli, Martin Bucer, Calvin, and others, multiplying the ways in which tradition was being rejected, Rome failed to respond in anything resembling a systematic fashion. Even within the old church, there was more than a little doctrinal ambiguity—uncertainty about questions that the theologians had never attempted to answer definitively because they had never before seen a compelling need to do so. By the time Henry VIII embarked upon making himself head of his own church, it was generally the Catholics more than their enemies who thought a council desirable and even necessary. They were driven, at the start, by three impulses: to effect a reconciliation by which Christian Europe could be made whole once again, to clarify disputed doctrines, and to address the abuses that even the most conservative churchmen were no longer able to ignore. When it became clear that there could be no reconciliation, that rebellion was hardening into an array of alternative churches that were never going to be defeated or won over, the other two reasons came to seem more urgent than ever. The Roman church was not going to be able to defend itself until it became definitive about what it stood for, and it was not going to be able to command respect until it dealt with (which meant acknowledging) its own failings. The papacy having become so controversial, only a council could confer sufficient legitimacy on whatever the church decided to do. But every specific proposal for the holding of a council was met by objections from one quarter or another.

  The political difficulties long seemed insurmountable. In 1523, at the Diet of Nuremberg, the rulers of Germany’s newly Lutheran states issued a demand for a “free Christian council”—insisting also that it be held in Germany. Rome rejected the idea on the grounds that such a council would be national rather than ecumenical and therefore could not represent the entire church. Charles V not only supported Rome’s position but forbade the holding of a council anywhere within his domains. By 1530, however, conditions had changed and both sides seemed ready: Charles and Pope Clement VII were agreed that a council should be called, and the Lutheran princes were repeating their demand for one. But when the pope sent invitations, it became obvious that although everyone professed to like the idea of a council, there was insufficient agreement on practicalities for any real progress to be made. The Germans found Clement’s conditions insulting—understandably so, as he had insisted that the Protestants return to the old communion pending the results of the proposed council—and rejected his summons in scornful terms. Henry of England responded equivocally, neither agreeing to participate nor refusing outright. Francis I did likewise, complaining that his bishops could not possibly travel in safety while his country and the empire were at war but actually fearing that a council, if somehow successful in healing Germany’s divisions, would make the emperor stronger. The situation drifted until 1534, when Clement died and Alessandro Farnese became Pope Paul III.

  The new pope declared almost immediately that he, too, wanted a council—that he regarded a council as the only way of dealing with the crisis facing the church—but at first he seemed just as blocked as his predecessor. Paul was a paradoxical figure, one who gave the Protestants many reasons to remember what they had long found despicable about Rome. In many ways he was a classic Renaissance pontiff—a member of the high Roman aristocracy, extravagant in his spending, scandalously devoted to the advancement of the children whom he had produced early in his career and those children’s children (among whom were two grandsons elevated to the College of Cardinals while still in their teens). He was also a ferocious hunter of heretics, the founder, in fact, of the Roman Inquisition. But with all this he was absolutely convinced of the need to reform the church. When in 1536 he called for all patriarchs, archbishops, bishops, and abbots to gather at Mantua the following year, the negative responses of the Lutherans, the king of France, and others—even the Duke of Mantua objected—did not deter him. His proposal, like those of Clement VII, became entangled in the conflict between France and the Holy Roman Empire, England’s defection, and the fears of many cardinals that a council could only lead to further trouble. But he continued to push, and the emperor continued to support his efforts in general terms while often disagreeing on the details. After a good many more years of frustration and intrigue, a council finally opened in December 1545 in the city of Trent, an Alpine site that is now Italian but at the time lay within the borders of the Hapsburg empire.

  It was, in the beginning, an unimpressive affair. Presided over not by the pope but by three cardinals serving as his legates (one of them was Reginald Pole), its opening session was attended by only one additional cardinal (who was also the bishop of Trent), four archbishops, twenty-one bishops, five heads of religious orders, forty-two theologians, and nine canon law scholars. This was scarcely enough for the council to claim to be representative of the church as a whole; France, England, and virtually all of Protestant Europe had declined to take part. Those present required three sessions and a good deal of acrimonious debate to get past preliminary questions of procedure. Finally in March 1546, having decided who would be allowed to vote (the religious orders were given a single vote each) and that questions of reform and of doctrine would be addressed simultaneously, they were ready to turn their attention to substantive issues. Over the next year, in the course of seven more sessions separated by intermissions during which the theologians and lawyers prepared reports on the matters to be considered next, the number of participants gradually increased and the amount of business completed went far beyond what anyone could have expected at the start.

  The initial focus, naturally, was on those points where the German and Swiss Protestants had mounted their most damaging attacks on the old doctrines. Luther’s assertion of justification by faith was debated on fully one hundred occasions, at the end of which council members approved an immensely detailed decree (it included sixteen chapters) to the effect that justification (salvation) is achieved not regardless of the individual’s actions or beliefs but when man actively cooperates with divine grace. Thus free will was affirmed and predestination condemned. This set the pattern by which the council would proceed from then on, rejecting beliefs that made Protestant theology distinctly Protestant, upholding doctrines that the Protestants had repudiated, and drawing upon Scripture, tradition, and the writings of the church fathers to explain why. In its first months the council also affirmed—with sometimes laboriously detailed explanations—that both the Bible and tradition are sources of revelation; that all seven of the original sacraments are valid; and that the so-called Latin Vulgate version of the Bible (largely developed by Saint Jerome in the fourth century from Greek and Hebrew sources) is an authoritative text. The council’s first major action with regard to practice and discipline was to declare that bishops must reside in their sees, thereby ending the “pluralities” long enjoyed by (for example) Cardinal Wolsey.

  Perhaps because it was coming to grips with issues of the greatest sensitivity and highest importance, the council continued to grow in size and in credibility. By its ninth session the number of voting participants had more than doubled to include nine archbishops and forty-nine bishops along with the heads, or generals, of an increased number of orders. At the same time, however, the political divisions that had originally made it impossible to convene a council remained a formidable obstacle. After two years the pope found it necessary to shift the meetings to Bologna, where progress slowed to a crawl and finally stopped altogether with his death in 1549.

  The council entered its second major period in 1551 under Pope Julius III, who as a cardinal had been its first president. This phase lasted only one year, during which the members met in six sessions. In that time they issued a comprehensive decree of eight chapters on the Eucharist or communion, once again affirming and systematizing traditional doctrine including the real presence. By now the council was giving substantial attention to the correction of abuses, issuing far-reaching rules on clerical discipline a
nd the powers and responsibilities of bishops. This work was barely completed when, in 1552, the Protestant Maurice of Saxony launched a military attack on Charles V that made Trent so unsafe that once again the proceedings had to be adjourned. They remained in abeyance not only until Julius’s death in 1555 but through the subsequent reign of Paul IV, who used his office to push an ambitious program of administrative reforms but (possibly because of his hatred of the Hapsburgs, very nearly the only royal supporters of the council) had absolutely no interest in seeing work resume at Trent or elsewhere.

  The next pope, Pius IV, announced his intention to reconvene the council almost as soon as he was elected but quickly ran up against complications old and new. Many German states repeated their refusal to participate and their condemnation of what had been done thus far; the new Holy Roman emperor Ferdinand I demanded that an entirely new council be assembled in some city other than Trent; the French continued to complain and to stay away; and there was no possibility of involving Elizabeth’s new regime. When Pius went ahead anyway and the council’s members gathered in Trent early in 1562, the problems persisted. Bishops from France arrived for the first time that November, but their presence was very much a mixed blessing: they tried, though without success, to get the council to reconsider its earlier prohibition of pluralities. Despite much turmoil and intrigue, the nine sessions of this last of Trent’s three periods led to a grand culmination. New decrees laid out rules of conduct for religious men and women of all types and at all levels from cardinals to lay brothers, and it was agreed that every diocese must establish seminaries for the education of its priests. Church doctrine was set forth in detail on subjects ranging from matrimony to the veneration of saints, from purgatory to the necessity of an ordained priesthood. The council even dealt, finally, with the issue that had triggered the Lutheran explosion: indulgences. To the scorn of Protestants, it affirmed the pope’s authority to issue indulgences but ruled that they must never be sold or made conditional on the giving of alms. The council’s last decrees were approved by 215 participants, among whom were six cardinals, three patriarchs (leaders of non-Roman rites that accepted the pope as head of the universal church), twenty-five archbishops, 167 bishops, seven abbots, seven generals of orders, and nineteen absent dignitaries voting by proxy. They closed the council on a note of jubilation, confident that their church had been put on a new course. Through their work that church had repudiated the Reformation conclusively, had explained its doctrines more systematically and comprehensively than ever before, and had made a repetition of the lapses and abuses of recent history all but impossible. Pius IV confirmed the council’s decisions in the year of life that remained to him, put sanctions in place to enforce compliance, and introduced further reforms of his own that would be carried still further by his successors.

  From start to finish the council had taken eighteen years and spanned the reigns of five popes. Its members had spent more than four years actively engaged in their deliberations, with much work ongoing between the twenty-five formal sessions. Those who rejected the very idea of a universal church headed by the bishop of Rome naturally dismissed the results as flawed and exclusive at best, as yet another abomination perpetrated by the Whore of Babylon at worst. Even some within the Catholic community saw the council as an overreaction, one that went too far in giving conclusive answers to difficult questions and made the church too rigidly triumphalist in its claim to be the sole source of religious truth and salvation.

  What cannot be doubted is that the council contributed mightily to stopping the unraveling of what remained of Catholic Europe. From the point at which its work was concluded, Protestantism made few geographic gains of any significance. In the four and a half centuries since then, except with limited and short-lived exceptions, the kind of internal disorder that had made the council necessary never recurred. There has never been another pope whom any reasonable person could accuse of moral corruption in the mode of the Renaissance papacy. Almost certainly, Trent made the transformation of England into a thoroughly Protestant nation a more difficult challenge, a bloodier process, than it otherwise would have been.

  23

  The Succession, Again

  Religion was not the only great question pressing in on the new queen. Another, just as thorny in its very different way, cried out for an answer almost from the first day of Elizabeth’s reign. It was a question that, like the future of the church, was resurfacing with undiminished force every time one Tudor monarch died and was succeeded by another. It was the matter of the succession.

  At the start of Elizabeth’s reign, as for a long time thereafter, the solution appeared to be matrimony. In the main line of Tudor descent, now that Henry VIII’s only son and elder daughter were in their tombs, no one remained but this one young woman. There were cousins of royal blood, the few living descendants of Henry VIII’s two sisters. But the most senior of these cousins had been born in Scotland and absorbed into the French royal family and was a Roman Catholic, making her suspect in the eyes of many Englishmen and absolutely unacceptable to the evangelicals. The others were the Protestant younger sisters of the late Lady Jane Grey and therefore objectionable, although no more so than Elizabeth herself, to the Catholics. The Tudor family tree remained a worrisomely thin organism, and if Elizabeth were to die childless the result was sure to be confusion and could be civil war. If on the other hand Elizabeth married and had children—at least one son, preferably, to end this awkward business of female rulers—the problem would disappear.

  That the queen would follow her sister’s example and take a husband seemed inevitable. To the extent that Mary’s decision had become a source of trouble, the problem lay in her choice of the Spanish Philip. His status as ruler of Spain and the Netherlands and so much else made him an alien in the eyes of many of his wife’s subjects, and not the evangelicals alone. But if Mary had not married Philip, those same subjects would have expected her to marry someone. The five years between Mary’s accession and Elizabeth’s did nothing to alter the universal conviction that it was unnatural for any woman not to be subordinate to some man (even nuns were “brides of Christ”), or for a queen to rule alone. Elizabeth herself, though she never forgave John Knox for his attack on The Monstrous Regiment of Women, never challenged this belief. She took the position, rather, that though her reign was a departure from the natural order of things, God had permitted it as a necessary means of restoring the gospel in England and preserving the kingdom’s autonomy.

  When Elizabeth took the throne she was an attractive young woman, with the fair skin and red-blond hair of the Tudors, her mother’s dark eyes and slim body, and more than a dash of the Boleyn sexual magnetism. The men who dominated her first Privy Council thought themselves to have been blessed by God with a Protestant monarch, and naturally they hoped that she would become the progenitor of a long line of rulers of her religious persuasion. All this focused them on finding a marital answer to the succession question. For Elizabeth, the prospect of marriage was nothing new. As a king’s daughter and the sister of a king and a queen, she had occasionally been in play on the market for royal brides, though in her case even more than in Mary’s, illegitimacy had had a dampening effect on her value. We have seen Philip II, from the time of his arrival in England, protecting Elizabeth as a counterweight to Mary, Queen of Scots. He tried at one point, during his time in England, to marry her to his kinsman Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy. Elizabeth herself could see no advantage in such a match: the duke was little better than a displaced person of high distinction, having lost his ancestral lands to France, and he labored under the additional disadvantages of being Catholic and related to the Hapsburgs. Her lack of enthusiasm contributed to keeping the negotiations from getting serious, and shortly after she became queen Philip offered to marry her himself. She gave him no answer while consolidating her position—getting a new administration up and running, making preparations for her first Parliament. Rather than pressing the issue, Ph
ilip betrothed himself to a continental Elisabeth, a fourteen-year-old daughter of the king of France.

  In February 1559, just two weeks after Elizabeth’s coronation, a select committee of the House of Commons (it was “select” in the sense of being essentially a creature of the Privy Council) presented her with a formal request that she marry without undue delay. That such a step was taken so early in the reign is a good measure of how important the issue seemed to senior members of the new government. Elizabeth’s not-unfriendly response to this intrusion into an otherwise intensely personal matter demonstrates that she, too, understood the question to be one in which her council, the Parliament, and indeed the nation had a legitimate stake. New candidates for her hand, meanwhile, were soon sending emissaries (and rich gifts) to explore the queen’s availability. Among the suitors were King Erik XIV of Sweden and two young princes of the House of Hapsburg, sons of the emperor Ferdinand I and cousins of Philip of Spain. Efforts were made to arrange for one of the Hapsburg candidates, the archduke Charles, to travel to England, but when Elizabeth would not commit to the betrothal in advance of his visit the project collapsed. The fact that any Hapsburg would be a Catholic was a difficulty but obviously not an insuperable one. What mattered was finding a husband who could save England from being threatened, as seemed possible at this juncture, by an alliance of France and Scotland, or even Spain and France and Scotland.