by Derek Wilson
It was largely because of William Cecil’s impeccable Protestant– humanist credentials that Dudley advanced his career and used him as his eyes and ears in the Council. In his correspondence with the secretary his frustration with conciliar procedures sometimes broke through. He found it tiresome that his colleagues thought it necessary to have his endorsement of all their decisions: ‘[I] marvel not a little that . . . my said Lord Chancellor hath sought me and travelled the streets on foot only to speak with me who can show him no more than others that were first privy before me.’15 He sometimes found oppressive and even unnecessary the sheer volume of letters reaching him every day, ‘a mass of matters which I return without having gathered much fruit.’ He was cross when people approached him directly on government business: ‘Let him and others know that those weighty offices are ruled by the whole board.’16 Beyond strict conciliar affairs there were always at his doorstep supplicants wanting his help in disputes with neighbours, complaints against local officials, finding a place at court for a son or daughter. Then there were the ambassadors. They always gravitated towards the most influential member of the government, so it was not unusual for Dudley to receive confidential messages from diplomats who had been instructed to speak with him rather than the whole Council. Reporting such a visit from a member of the French embassy, Dudley passed on a dinner invitation issued to all the Council and added wearily, ‘I answered that I was so ill that I could not promise to come.’17 Far from enjoying his pre-eminence, he often felt like a beast of burden, thanklessly carrying the cares of the nation on his aching back.
I am reminded of the Italian proverb that a faithful servant will become a perpetual ass . . . It is time for me to live of that which God and the King have given me and keep [away] the multitude of crawlers from his court that hang daily at my gate for money . . . What comfort may I have after my long and troublesome life? So long as health gave me leave I as seldom failed my attendance as any others. When they went to their suppers and pastimes after their travail I went to bed, careful and weary. Yet no man scarcely had any good opinion of me. Now by extreme sickness and otherwise constrained to seek health and quiet, I am not without a new evil imagination of men. Why should I wish longer life – but for my few children?18
Yet such self-pity was mingled with teeth-gritting determination. Dudley did not court unpopularity. He did not like it. But he did not show it. He was a conviction politician who recognized, as did every other member of the establishment, that authority had to be centred in one individual. In English political life there was no place for cabinet government. Theoretically all decisions were taken by the king in Council and Dudley was assiduous in asserting that he acted as the servant of both but everyone knew that this was a polite fiction. The Lord President might complain when he was pestered with trivia his colleagues could easily have dealt with but he knew that they would not dare sanction any important action without obtaining his approval and he would have been outraged if they had. He might grumble about his large, unwieldy postbag but he knew that he had to direct the nation’s affairs and impose on them coherence and consistency. He might admire the intellectual capacity of Council members who could argue the minutiae of complex issues but he was a man of action with little patience for debates that rambled round the shire. His mental equipment was that of the soldier: in politics, as in warfare, one had to identify the problem, take stock of one’s resources, and then deploy them with as much efficiency and as little delay as possible. John Dudley shouldered the governance of England for three and a half years and, because he brought to the task a combination of cool calculation and focused energy he ruled extremely effectively. ‘Given the circumstances which he inherited in 1549, [Dudley] appears to have been one of the most remarkably able governors of any European state during the sixteenth century.’19
The primary ‘circumstance’ that Dudley inherited was a nation caught up in the greatest revolution it had ever experienced. The Reformation was a religious earthquake whose violent social, political and economic aftershocks vibrated through every urban and rural community in the land. The official dismantling of the old church had made a dramatic start under Cromwell, had faltered in the 1540s and accelerated again during Somerset’s protectorate, with the attendant confusion and violence we have already noted. The victor of Mousehold Heath was committed to the restoration of order and we might suppose that the best way to achieve that would have been to allow England a period of calm in which to assimilate the new doctrines, church services and devotional practices imposed by statute and royal proclamation. That would have been a purely political solution and it was not the one Dudley chose to adopt. During the 1549 coup he had made clear that the deposition of Somerset did not imply a reversal of religious policy. Now he encouraged Cranmer and other reformist divines to press on urgently with the establishment of evangelical teaching and worship in every parish. More than that, as the months passed he veered further and further towards the radical end of the theological spectrum.
Dudley’s adoption of extreme, aggressive evangelicalism has puzzled many historians. Why should a man whose understanding of the main issues of religious debate was so limited and who, in the last days of his life, recanted his former opinions have hustled his country along the Protestant path so rapidly that it would never be able to retrace its steps? The conventional answer is that Dudley was an unprincipled opportunist who backed the Reformation because it happened to be the best show in town. This simplistic view is not only cynical, it is also anachronistic. The detached, amoral tergiversation which it posits was not only alien to John Dudley, but to most members of mid-sixteenth century ruling élites. Religious beliefs were passionately adhered to by men and women at all levels of society and Dudley was no exception.
To explore the new ruler’s relationship to religious change we might start with an event that took place on the morning of 3 August 1550. At St Andrew’s, Holborn, a stone’s throw from the gateway to Dudley’s London residence, Thomas Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, was laid to rest. The sworn enemy of Seymour, Dudley and religious reform had gone into a rapid decline since being deprived of office in February. A contemporary reported,
my lord Wriothesley, seeing all his heart was opened against him . . . and [thinking] this act could never be forgiven, and [because] his ambitious mind could take no [lower] place, he killed himself with sorrow in so much as he said he would not live in such misery . . .20
Wriothesley went to his grave believing that he and much that he held dear had been defeated. We may assume that his loathing for his enemies remained undiminished. And that makes one aspect of his funeral seem rather strange to modern observers. Wriothesley instructed that the sermon should be preached by John Hooper, probably the greatest Protestant extremist in London and certainly its most controversial celebrity. For over a year Hooper, hot from a long sojourn among the radical evangelicals of Switzerland, had been drawing crowds by his inflammatory preaching. But it was not just the City enthusiasts to whom he appealed. Somerset appointed Hooper as his personal chaplain and the king invited him to preach at court. Dudley also approved of the Protestant firebrand and had just secured his appointment as Bishop of Gloucester.
Some historians have assumed that Wriothesley must have been among those won over in his final months to the cause of radical reform. Why else would he have chosen Hooper to speak at his obsequies? If he had still been an arch-conservative would he not have wanted to use the funeral to launch a final defiance at the regime? The answer is ‘No’. It was the custom for the dying, whether facing their end on the scaffold or in their own beds, to make their peace with all men. This was important for their posterity if not for themselves. A man in Wriothesley’s position would not want his heir to inherit the enmity of those in a position to blight his career. Wriothesley left his title and extensive lands to a five-year-old son, who became a royal ward. Life could have been made very difficult for the boy if he had been obliged to grow up in the shadow
of his father’s unpopularity. There was also the principle of cuius regio eius religio, the ruler’s religion determining the religion of his people. For over twenty years this pragmatic solution to religious conflict had been gaining wider and wider acceptance throughout Europe. Since national unity ruled out the possibility of rival brands of Christianity co-existing within one realm, it made practical sense for the government to decree which one should be followed. There were always some devotees whose consciences were deeply offended by the state religion. For them the choice was exile or the risk of persecution. However, the vast majority, and particularly those with a major stake in their own country, accepted the fait accompli and prayed for better times.
Dudley’s basic attitude to life would have been much the same as Wriothesley’s, a carefully balanced relationship between his devotion to God, to the king and to his own dynasty. Had he been pressed to explain his faith he might have been disposed to answer as Cromwell had once answered: he believed as the king’s majesty believed. There was no doubt about Edward’s faith. The young Josiah had been too well brought up by his mentors to be anything other than a committed evangelical and one with the ardour of a zealous adolescent. His father had had a pulpit erected in the privy garden at Whitehall so that all the court could listen to edifying sermons during Lent. Edward extended the practice. The pulpit was occupied every Sunday and those who wanted to remain in the king’s good books were careful to be seen there taking notes and discussing the salient points afterwards.
This predilection of the king and the Lord President for radical Christianity (the fiery Scot, John Knox, was one of Dudley’s chaplains) has to be seen against the background of a ‘leftward’ thrust in the nation’s official religion. The Edwardian establishment had a sense of a task unfinished. The doctrine and liturgy of the Church of England, they believed, both stood in need of further reformation. The usually cautious Cranmer sounded a clarion call in 1550:
. . . many corrupt weeds be plucked up . . . But what availeth it to take away beads, pardons, pilgrimages and such other like popery, so long as two chief roots remain unpulled up? . . . the roots of the weeds is the popish doctrine of transubstantiation, of the real presence of Christ’s flesh and blood in the sacrament of the altar (as they call it), and of the sacrifice and oblation of Christ made by the priest for the salvation of the quick and the dead. Which roots, if they be suffered to grow in the Lord’s vineyard, they will spread all the ground again with their old errors and superstition.21
Since the beginning of the reign England’s sense of solidarity with the radical reform movements on the continent had been growing. A steady stream of Protestant leaders came to England, some fleeing from persecution in their own lands, others invited by Cranmer and his friends from sister churches to discuss the burning issues of the day or to take up preaching or teaching posts. Until this point the main foreign influences upon native religion had come from Lutheran or humanist centres. Now Calvinist and Zwinglian theologians were welcomed. They entered into earnest debate with Cranmer and his episcopal colleagues, while their less restrained co-religionists pelted priests in the streets with offal and stirred up iconoclastic gangs to go ‘purifying’ churches. Cranmer, who had come to reject the miracle of the mass and the Roman concept of sacerdotal priesthood, set about entrenching reformed teaching in a second prayer book and a new ordinal. He was now advocating sacramentarian beliefs such as those for which people like Anne Askew had gone to the stake less than four years before.
Dudley was fully in tune with this re-identifying of English religion. When a disputation on transubstantiation had been held in the Lord’s chamber of parliament in December 1548 he had been among the eager participants, though his contribution seems to have largely consisted of heckling the defenders of the Catholic position. One of the first pieces of legislation his government steered through parliament was a new Act against objects of superstition. Hitherto it had been sufficient for churchwardens to see that offending articles were removed from places of worship. Now they were to ensure that all such items were utterly ‘defaced and destroyed’. The object was to ferret out statues, roods, reliquaries, stained glass and other superfluous ornaments that had simply been hidden away by church authorities. It was a part of the practice Cranmer referred to of rooting up idolatrous weeds so thoroughly that none was left to sprout again into the Lord’s vineyard. The next move by the reforming government was to order bishops to have all altars removed from churches. Since the sacrifice of the mass had been replaced by the ‘supper of the Lord’ what was required was not a stone altar but a wooden table set lengthwise in the chancel so that Christ’s people could gather round Christ’s board.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the visual impact of this revolution. Dim church interiors where candlelight had once been reflected from polychrome frescoes and gilded statues were now awash with light through plain glass windows bouncing back off whitewashed walls. The empty spaces where subsidiary altars and shrines had stood were being replaced by pews so that people could listen to long sermons. The ‘holy of holies’ at the east end where the priest had performed his mysteries in semi-obscurity was now thrown open by the removal of the rood screen, and worshippers were bidden to take their seats to watch a plain-robed minister break bread. The momentum of change, urged on by the king, the Archbishop of Canterbury, a growing number of diocesan bishops, the intelligentsia, dour members of the mercantile community, hotheaded young activists and foreign well-wishers, proceeded at a gallop.
Dudley led the charge, the champion of purified Christianity. Hooper apostrophized him as an ‘intrepid soldier of Christ’. Knox lauded him from the pulpit. John Bale, another evangelical firebrand (known to his enemies as ‘Bilious Bale’ because of his down-to-earth style in religious controversy), dedicated to Dudley his Expostulation or Complaynte Agaynste the Blasphemyes of a Franticke Papyst of Hamshyre in which he inveighed against traditionalists who dug their heels in against change. Dudley continued and intensified the evangelical publishing offensive launched by Somerset and Cranmer, encouraging authors and pamphleteers to write in support of the Reformation. The printing/publishing industry expanded so rapidly that experts had to be brought over from the Low Countries to run printshops and instruct English workmen in the necessary techniques. He took every opportunity to replace hostile and lukewarm bishops by zealous radicals. The 1549 Prayer Book was out of date almost before it hit the bookshops and Cranmer soon began work on a revised edition that would reflect the latest theological thinking and, hopefully, unite as many English Christians as possible in support of a common liturgy. As he acknowledged in the preface, this was no easy task:
. . . the minds of men are so diverse, that some think it a great matter of conscience to depart from a piece of the least of their ceremonies, they be so addicted to their old customs; and again on the other side, some be so new-fangled, that they would innovate all things, and so despise the old, that nothing can like them, but that is new . . .22
John Dudley became all too aware of the problem. As he tried to steer the church in the direction he believed it should go he found other hands grabbing for the wheel, hands belonging to men who could not agree among themselves. Not only did they squabble about what seemed to him to be insignificant theological trivia, they opposed his understanding of the relationship between church and state and some of them stood in moral judgement on his own actions. The honeymoon period soon passed and the ‘intrepid soldier of Christ’ found himself coming under fire from those he had considered his allies.
In mid-1550 a conflict with Cranmer over what Hooper should be allowed to wear at his consecreation as a bishop led to Dudley backing down. After a great deal of argument and a spell in the Fleet prison, Hooper dutifully wore the prescribed garments. But the beginnings of a rift had appeared between Dudley and the leadership of the church. What widened the gulf dramatically was his final and bloody solution of the Somerset problem.
11
Desperate Measures
By the late summer of 1551 it was clear that Somerset was quite unchastened. He opposed Dudley’s policies in Council and it must have particularly rankled when the man who had given such an impetus to evangelical reform now extended friendship and support to such enemies of change as Gardiner of Winchester, Tunstall of Durham and Arundel. When Seymour sided with Princess Mary over her refusal to use the new Prayer Book in her household Dudley was furious and launched into a diatribe against the evil of the Mass. Added to this was the perpetual irritation of Somerset’s vaunting behaviour round the court. He continually stressed his superior rank and his relationship to the king. And he did not restrict his disruptive activities to the household, but extended his criticisms to a wider audience. All the country’s ills, he indicated to friends and sympathizers, stemmed from Dudley’s seizure of power. This provoked understandable but petty responses from Dudley. When Somerset’s mother (the king’s grandmother) died, in October 1550, a ‘royal’ order was issued that she was to be buried quietly without undue pomp. Six months later Dudley removed from his rival the privilege of having his own meal table at court and in the records of the Order of the Garter he added the words ‘on his mother’s side’ to the statement of Somerset’s relation to the king. It was clear to all that friendship had turned into something akin to hatred. It was also clear that the issue of Dudley–Seymour rivalry would have to be resolved soon, if for no other reason than that the government could not put off the recall of parliament indefinitely. What was not clear was how things could be brought to a final resolution. Somerset’s support in the country was still strong. Even if he did not talk about the possibility of a counter-coup some less restrained supporters did.