Their Catholic opponents wrote a great deal about the wicked and presumptuous Protestant women. One of the points at issue between Catholics and Protestants was that the Protestants believed that priests should be entitled to marry. The Catholics thought that the Protestant priests had only become Protestants in order to gratify their lust by marrying women. As the Catholics did not recognize the validity of a priest’s marriage, they called the wives of the Protestant priests their ‘harlots’. From here it was only a step to asserting that all Protestant women were immoral. This became one of the main themes of Catholic propaganda. Sir Thomas More, in one of his scurrilous books against the Lutherans, wrote that Protestant men and women copulated in their churches during their religious services. The London shoemaker, Miles Huggarde, who wrote poetry, and in Mary’s reign was granted a licence by the authorities to write and publish vitriolic tracts against the Protestants, repeated all the old libels about the immorality of Protestant women, and thought out a new one of his own: Protestant women encouraged their husbands to become martyrs so that they could be free to fornicate with their lovers and marry again as soon as their husbands had been burned at the stake.
One of the most prominent Protestant women was the Lincolnshire gentlewoman, Anne Askew. She had married a gentleman named Kyme, but showed her rebellious disposition by leaving her husband and calling herself by her maiden name of Askew as she went around London distributing Protestant tracts. She was suspected of secretly giving the tracts to various ladies in the household of Queen Katherine Parr, including Katherine’s sister, Lady Herbert (afterwards the Countess of Pembroke), and the Queen herself; but she refused to incriminate them when she was tortured on the rack, though her legs were so badly injured that she had to be carried in a chair to her execution when she was burned at Smithfield in July 1546. The simple and moving account of her torture, which she wrote and smuggled out of the Tower, was published by John Bale when England became a Protestant state under Edward VI less than a year after her execution.
It was about this time, according to Foxe, that Katherine Parr defended some aspect of Protestant theology in an argument with Henry VIII, and so enraged Henry that he angrily left the room, lamenting the day when women had become clerks, and gave orders for Katherine to be arrested and sent to the Tower. But Katherine was warned about this by Henry’s pro-Protestant physician, Dr Butts. She went to Henry, acknowledged her fault in presuming to argue with him, and obtained his forgiveness.
There were a few individuals in the Tudor Age who had ideas which were far in advance of their contemporaries’. In 1516 Sir Thomas More wrote a book in Latin, The Best State of a Commonwealth and the Island of Utopia; it was an account of an imaginary island off the coast of America which he called Utopia, a word derived from the Greek word meaning ‘nowhere’. He thereby introduced a new word into every language in the world. The system of government which he described as existing in Utopia was even more regimented and authoritarian than life in Tudor England; but everything was based on strict logic and equality, and no one was exempted from the regimentation because he was above the rank of a lord or owned land which brought him rents of more than £100 a year.
In his book, More made some passing comments on the attitude of Englishmen at the time. He thought that the vice which most flourished in England in 1516 was pride.
Pride measures prosperity not by her own advantages but by others’ disadvantages. Pride would not consent to be made even a goddess if no poor wretches were left for her to domineer over and scoff at, if her good fortune might not dazzle by comparison with their miseries, if the display of her riches did not torment and intensify their poverty.
A few months after writing Utopia, More entered the service of Henry VIII, and soon he was being employed to write abusive books attacking Luther and the Protestants. He seems to have believed that the criticisms and witticisms, which he and his friend Erasmus had levelled at the corruptions of the established Church, had been responsible for the seditious doctrines and mob violence which had spread in Germany after Luther launched his attacks on the Papacy; and after he became Lord Chancellor he became a savage persecutor of heretics. It was at this time that he wrote, in one of his polemics against the Protestants, that he thought that some of his earlier books – he meant Utopia – should never be translated into English for the common people to read, and that if anyone translated them he would have the copies burned.
The humanitarian ideals, so far in advance of his time, in which More had believed in the days when he wrote Utopia, were being nurtured a few years after his death by a very small group of Protestants in London whom More would have burned if he had known about them. Richard Hilles was a London merchant who kept his opinions very secret in the years of the Catholic reaction which followed the Act of the Six Articles and the fall of Cromwell in 1540. His religious beliefs can roughly be called Zwinglian, probably because these were the most unorthodox and libertarian doctrines, apart from the extreme of Anabaptism, which it was possible to hold at the time. As a merchant, Hilles went every year to the Frankfurt fair, and from there he could safely write letters to the Zwinglian theologian, Bullinger, in Zürich, in which he told him what was happening in England. Hilles did not adopt the usual Protestant line of blaming Gardiner for persuading the King to persecute Protestants; he placed the blame fairly and squarely on Henry himself. Although he was particularly indignant about the torturing and burning of the Protestants, he also disapproved of the cruelty with which Henry executed Papists whom he accused of high treason; and unlike the Scottish Protestants, he did not believe that Henry was advancing the Protestant cause when he sent his armies to burn Edinburgh and all the abbeys, houses and farms in the Border regions of Scotland.
It was one of Hilles’s Protestant friends, Henry Brinkelow, who in 1545 published, anonymously and illegally, The Complaint of Roderick Mors. In his book, he refrained from attacking the King; instead, like other Protestants, he denounced the bishops, especially Gardiner, for allowing images in churches and burning Protestants, and accused Gardiner of having mistresses; but he also put forward some original ideas. He was opposed to burning any heretic, and approved of those cities in Germany where even Anabaptists were only banished and not put to death. He also condemned enclosures, and the new landlords who had taken the lands of the suppressed abbeys and had ejected their poor tenants ‘to beg and steal and be hanged for it’; the judges, aldermen of London, and the rich who oppressed the poor; the injustice of the law by which the lands of convicted traitors were forfeited to the King, thus unfairly punishing the traitor’s wife and children for his offence; and the system of making prisoners pay for their food and lodging in jail, where jailers sometimes charged four times the price that was paid for accommodation in the most expensive inns, and where poor prisoners could only obtain money to pay for their food by working as servants for the wealthier prisoners. But Brinkelow did not believe that these wrongs would ever be righted until there was a change in the manner of electing MPs, for under the existing system ‘be he never so very a fool, drunkard, extortioner, adulterer, never so covetous and crafty a person, yet if he be rich, bear any office, if he be a jolly croaker and bragger in the county, he must be a burgess of the Parliament’.
John Foxe, though he believed that a man who swore blasphemously on a night ride in Cornwall was immediately struck dead by God when his horse plunged into a river, was in many ways in advance of his time. When he returned from exile in Switzerland after Elizabeth’s accession, he published his Book of Martyrs in 1563, and followed it up with a second and much enlarged edition in 1570. It was a powerful piece of Protestant propaganda. Elizabeth’s government ordered that copies of the book should be placed in every cathedral, and that sea-captains should take a copy in their ships and read it to their crews to teach them the nature of the Papist enemies against whom they were serving. In 1558, the Catholics were a majority of the population everywhere in England except in London and Kent; when Foxe
died in 1587, a substantial majority of the people in nearly every county were probably Protestants. This was at least partly due to Foxe’s book.
Although nearly every Protestant who indignantly denounced the burning of Protestants by Catholics believed that it was right for Protestants to burn Anabaptists, Foxe had grave doubts about this. In 1575 a number of Anabaptists were arrested in London, and two of them were sentenced to be burned. Foxe unsuccessfully interceded with the Queen to spare their lives and subject them to some lesser punishment. He apologized for his attitude by explaining to Elizabeth that he was so soft-hearted that he could not bear to walk past a slaughter yard where animals were killed.
These views had made no impact on the population as a whole when the Tudor Age ended with Elizabeth’s death at Richmond Palace at 2 a.m. on Thursday 24 March 1603; by the calendar then in force in England, it was the last day of the old year, 1602. The new year brought a new dynasty to the throne, and a new century and a new age had begun. It would be the century of John Elyot, John Hampden, Oliver Cromwell and the Levellers; of the revolution of 1688 and the introduction of the system of constitutional monarchy; of the last thirteen plays of Shakespeare, of the tragedies of Webster and Middleton, of Milton, Marvell, Dryden, Wycherley and Congreve, of the music of Purcell, the medical discoveries of William Harvey, the scientific work of Isaac Newton, the philosophy of Hobbes and Locke, and the beginning of modern England which emerged from the foundations laid during the Tudor Age.
SOURCES
Chapter 1 – THE TUDOR FAMILY
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Chapter 2 – LONDON
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Chapter 3 – THE KING’S HIGHWAY
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Chapter 4 – THE ESTATES OF THE REALM
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Chapter 5 – HERETICS AND TRAITORS
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A Brief History of the Tudor Age Page 32