The English forces in Le Havre were defiant. They wanted ‘to make the French cock cry cuck’, and they promised the queen that ‘the least molehill should not be lost without many bloody blows’. Condé and Guise now marched together against the ancient enemy, while Elizabeth railed against the prince as ‘a treacherous inconstant perjured villain’. She insisted that Calais was given over to her before she would think of leaving Le Havre. She ordered her ships to sea, and a force was raised from the prisons of London; the thieves and highwaymen were enrolled as soldiers as a means of escaping the gallows.
Yet death came in other forms. A ‘strange disease’ broke out among the English garrison at Le Havre. In the heat of June it was soon known to be the plague. By the end of the month sixty men fell each day. The French besiegers had cut off water from the town; no fresh meat, or vegetables, could be obtained. By the beginning of July only 1,500 men were left, and French cannon were devastating the streets. The queen and council sent more and more men across the water, but they were wasted; the polluted and pestilential air was more lethal than the weaponry of the French. The commander of the garrison, the earl of Warwick, came to terms with the enemy. Effectively he surrendered. Le Havre was returned to the French, and the remainder of the English were allowed to embark upon their ships.
It had been a disaster, but it was prelude to another calamity. The returning soldiers brought the plague to England with them. Throughout the rest of the summer ‘the death’ raged in the towns and villages through which they passed. The symptoms were those of fever; fits of shivering were followed by violent headaches, which in turn were succeeded by a great desire to sleep. The languor commonly resulted in death. In August the mortalities in London rose from 700 to 2,000 a week. Only when the heavy rains of November and December cleansed the streets was the epidemic eventually stilled.
The queen had learnt two harsh lessons from the disaster of Le Havre. It was not wise to rely upon the promises of princes. It was dangerous to meddle in wars not of her own choosing. In a subsequent treaty Elizabeth gave up all claim to Calais.
A parliament had been summoned at the beginning of 1563 to consider these great matters of state and, in particular, to finance what was then the ongoing French war. But the members of both Lords and Commons were more exercised over the problem of the succession; the recent illness of the queen only emphasized the precarious state of the nation in the event of her death. The debate was considered to be so important that Mary Stuart sent her own ambassador to observe the proceedings and to press her interests.
The Commons dilated on the perils of the single life. If no marriage was contemplated, or if no heir was chosen, the entire country was in a sense barren; this increased the risk of infinite mischiefs, among them civic conflict and foreign invasion. The queen answered their petition in a direct but not unambiguous speech in which she declared that she understood the dangers as well as, if not better than, they did. She had read of a philosopher whose custom was to recite the alphabet before applying his mind to a delicate problem (the same story was told of the emperor Augustus); in similar fashion she would wait and pray before making her deliberation. Yet ‘I assure you all that though after my death you may have many step-dames, yet you shall never have a more natural mother than I mean to be unto you all’. This might be interpreted as the reply courteous.
To the petition sent by the Lords a few days later, she was more blunt. She had hoped that they would show more foresight than their colleagues in the Commons, where there were ‘restless heads in whose brains the needless hammers beat with vain judgment’. She asserted that to declare a successor would lead to civil unrest and bloodshed. The marks on her face were not the wrinkles of old age but the scars of smallpox. In any case, like the mother of the Baptist, she might bear fruit in her advanced years. She was in fact only twenty-nine years old.
In a final address to both the Lords and Commons, read out by the lord chancellor, she admitted that she had not resolved not to marry. ‘And if I can bend my liking to your need, I will not resist such a mind.’ ‘If’ might prove only a very slender undertaking. She promised to consult the learned of the land, ‘so shall I more gladly procure your good after my days than with my prayers whilst I live be mean to linger my living thread’. As a masterwork of obfuscation, this could mean anything or nothing.
She had also been asserting herself on another front. It is likely that William Cecil, and certain other members of the council, had been helping to promote the petitions of parliament. They could not be seen directly to intervene in its argument with the queen, but indirectly they could bring pressure to bear upon her. ‘The matter is so deep,’ Cecil wrote, ‘I cannot reach into it. God send it a good issue!’ Yet it was clearly his belief that parliament should consider and advise on the matter of the succession, even at the cost of diminishing the queen’s prerogative.
It was also his belief that she should be guided, if not ruled, by the members of her council. She required wise, male advice in order to forward the godly rule of the nation. One of her councillors, Sir Francis Knollys, explained to her that she should set aside ‘such affections and passions of your mind as happen to have dominion over you. So yet the resolutions digested by the deliberate consultations of your most faithful counsellors ought ever to be had in most price.’ The council were the ‘watchmen’ or ‘the fathers of the country’. Elizabeth could not have become a tyrant.
Yet she remained the mistress of her parliament. Her immediate predecessor had called five parliaments in four years, but in the first thirty years of her reign she summoned it only seven times. ‘It is in me and my power,’ she once told the Speaker, ‘to call parliaments: it is my power to end and determine the same: it is in my power to assent or dissent to anything done in parliaments.’ The legislation came from the council, or was introduced into parliament at the express wish or with the connivance of the council. Her ministers, such as Knollys and Hatton, sat among the Commons. The Speaker himself was chosen by the sovereign as an instrument of her rule. Occasions of restlessness and discontent of course emerged in the course of the long reign, but in general she managed to curb them with gracious speeches, politic negotiations, or the selective imprisonment of recalcitrant members. In the battle of wits she was never defeated.
The question of ‘free speech’ was raised but never resolved, and the confusions attendant upon it were resurrected in the next reign. In general parliament was considered to be an extension of royal government, on the supposition that the source of all law, according to one political philosopher, ‘standeth in diverse statutes made by the king, the Lords and the Commons’.
In 1563 Cecil also drafted a succession bill in which he advised that, in the event of the queen’s death without an heir, the authority of government would pass for the immediate future to the privy council. For a time England would become an oligarchy or aristocratic republic not unlike that of Venice. Cecil proposed that it would then become the responsibility of parliament to elect a new monarch. The idea of an hereditary elected monarchy was new and startling; it was a denial of the whole structure and spirit of the Tudor dynasty. It was of course a measure of Cecil’s anxiety and frustration that he was forced to this expedient. Yet the bill itself was never put forward for discussion. If Elizabeth had seen it she would undoubtedly have quashed it; Cecil may have realized that he had overreached himself.
Parliament passed two bills of more than usual significance. Among the measures proposed by the Statute of Artificers was the concept of a minimum wage to be assessed by the local justices of the peace. Workmen were to be hired on a yearly contract. Apprentices were to follow the custom of London and serve for seven years. All able-bodied men could be compelled to work in the fields at the time of harvest. It may have been a provisional device, designed to meet the needs of the moment, but this adventitious and only loosely coherent statute remained in force for the next 250 years.
Another Act considered the problem of ‘sturdy b
eggars’ and of the unemployed. It was further decreed that each parish must support the ‘impotent, aged and needy’ out of communal funds. The relief of the poor was no longer the preserve of the Church, as had been the custom of many centuries, but had become a local and secular matter. Gifts to the poor had been called ‘donations’ and the food spared from the rich man’s table had been known as ‘Our Lady’s bread’; they had of course disappeared. The dissolution of the religious houses, in the reign of Henry VIII, may also have prompted the search for fresh remedies.
We might say in general that the Reformation created a wider space in which the lay authorities could regulate and control the nation at large. The first workhouse in England, Bridewell, was established in 1553; a workhouse was set up in Exeter in 1579. The authorities of London had already established five ‘hospitals’ that took over from their medieval spiritual equivalents. The hospitals of St Thomas and St Bartholomew were designed for the sick and for the old; they exist still. Christ’s Hospital sheltered orphan children, while Bedlam served the insane. An Act of 1572 instituted the first local Poor Law tax. Other Acts and statutes followed. Not until the close of the sixteenth century, however, did the term ‘state’ emerge with its modern connotations.
It can be said with some confidence, therefore, that these two Acts were signal measures in the social and economic construction of English society. Yet the measures of parliament were not meant to be benevolent but were, rather, strict and authoritarian. The penalties for vagabondage, for example, were increased. The ordinary vagrants were to be whipped and then imprisoned until a master could be found for them; the dangerous among them were to be banished from the realm and, if ever they returned, consigned to the gallows or the galleys.
In 1563 the convocation of the bishops and senior clergy met, as usual, in conjunction with parliament. Since this was the first convocation called since the re-establishment of the reformed faith, it was considered important to frame suitable legislation on behalf of the Church. A document entitled ‘General Notes of Matters to be Moved by the Clergy in the Next Parliament and Synod’ expressed the desire for a ‘certain form of doctrine to be conceived in articles’. The grounds of the English faith were to be defined.
So, by a process of consultation and debate, the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion were compiled. Some of them were not drawn up in time for parliament to pass the necessary legislation, and had to wait for the assembly called three years later; the document itself only became the official doctrine of faith in 1571. But the essential work had now been done. The convocation of 1563 established the most important doctrinal statement in the history of the Church of England and, in its essential form, it remains in force to this day. The language of the liturgy must be in the vernacular; the Mass is not to be allowed, and adoration of the Eucharist is blasphemy; the papist doctrines of transubstantiation and purgatory are denied; there is to be no invocation of the saints. The monarch’s role, as the supreme head of the Church, is emphasized.
The full measure of the Thirty-Nine Articles has been deemed to be moderately Calvinist in tone, but there is not one article that is incompatible either with Lutheranism or with Calvinism. The articles represent as wide a definition of the reformed faith as was possible in the sixteenth century. They were believed to be the thirty-nine steps towards broad domestic agreement. The more precise reformers were not necessarily happy with the outcome, and in the course of time they would become identified as the ‘Puritan’ tendency. ‘I confess,’ the bishop of Durham wrote, ‘we suffer many things against our hearts; but we cannot take them away, though we were ever so much set upon it. We are under authority; and we can innovate nothing without the queen; nor can we alter the laws; the only thing left to our choice is whether we will bear these things, or break the peace of the Church.’ These words can be seen as a harbinger of later divisions.
The religion of the vast majority of people must have been mixed and variable, neither wholly old nor completely new. The reformed faith was a recent development, while the Catholic religion was a long time dying. It was estimated by two contemporaries that at the time of the queen’s accession only 1 per cent of the population was actively and determinedly Protestant in inclination. In 1561 a professor of divinity at Oxford, Nicholas Sander, drew up a document entitled ‘How the Common People of England are disposed, with regard to the Catholic faith’ in which he declared that ‘the farmers and shepherds are Catholic’; they of course represented a large proportion of the people. He said that the artisans did not accept the reformed faith ‘except those engaged in sedentary tasks, weavers, for example, and cobblers’. Of the overwhelmingly Catholic areas he named Wales, Devon, Cumberland, Northumberland and Westmorland. In time, over the next few decades, the doctrines of Protestantism were better received in Kent, Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Sussex and of course London.
In the summer of 1561 the bishop of Carlisle reported that in many of the churches of his diocese the Mass was still being said with the connivance of the local lord. In the same summer the justices of Hereford commanded the observance of St Lawrence’s Day as a holy day or holiday; no butcher sold meat, and no trader dared open his shop, on that day. A party of recusant priests was welcomed in Devonshire and they were so ‘feasted and magnified, as Christ himself could not have been more reverentially entertained’. The bishop of Winchester complained that his people were ‘obstinately grovelled in superstition and popery, lacking not priests to inculcate the same daily in their heads’. Among the city council of Hereford there was ‘not one favourable to this [reformed] religion’. Only six practised it in Ludlow. As late as 1567, seventeen churches in East Yorkshire still possessed Catholic fittings, while seven years later more than a dozen churches in Northamptonshire contained the rood lofts that had been forbidden. In the course of this reign seventy-five recusant priests were active in Lancashire, and one hundred more in Yorkshire.
Yet if the majority of the population were still inclined to the old faith, few of them were willing to disobey the authorities by openly practising it, at least in London and the south-east of England. Some averred that if by going to Protestant worship they sinned, then the sin would redound upon the queen. As long as they attended church once a week and followed the newly proclaimed rites of the reformed faith, they were free to believe what they wished. They may have believed anything or nothing. It was easier, and safer, to serve and obey rather than to rebel.
That is why the reformed services were rendered elastic, if not ambiguous, by openly proposing only what all Christians agreed in believing; the rubric and ceremonial could be subtly changed to match the inclinations of the congregation. Thus Cecil was informed of the multiplicity of worship in 1564 so that ‘some perform divine service and prayers in the chancel; others in the body of the church . . . some keep precisely to the order of the book, some intermix psalms in metre . . . some receive the communion kneeling, others standing; some baptize in a font, some in a basin; some sign with the sign of the cross, others not’.
Confusion also reigned in the wardrobe, with ‘some ministers in a surplice, some without; some with a square cap, some with a round cap, some in a button cap, and some in a round hat; some in scholar’s clothes, and some in others’. Many complaints were made about inattention, and token worship, in the churches. With the interiors stripped bare of their former ornamentation, there was nothing to look at. The alehouses were reported to be full on Sundays, and the people would prefer to go to a bear-baiting than to attend divine service. With the great rituals gone there were many who, in the words of one cleric, ‘love a pot of ale better than a pulpit and a corn-rick better than a church door; who, coming to divine service more for fashion than devotion, are contented after a little capping and kneeling, coughing and spitting’ to sing a psalm or slumber during the sermon. There was also a shortage of reformed ministers, with only 7,000 ordained clergy for 9,000 livings.
It would be unwise, however, to exaggerate the fervency of the Catholi
c cause. The Venetian ambassador, some eighteen months even before the accession of Elizabeth, had suspected that very few of those under the age of thirty-five were truly Catholic. They did not espouse the new faith but they had lost interest in the old. They had become what one Benedictine called ‘neutrals in religion’. We must suspect, therefore, a very high level of indifference. A man or woman of that age would hardly remember a time when the monarch was not head of the Church, yet such a fact was not likely to inspire devotion.
To indifference might be added uncertainty and confusion. The bishop of Salisbury, preaching before the queen herself, lamented that ‘the poor people lieth forsaken, and left as it were sheep without a guide . . . they are commanded to change their religion, and for lack of instruction they know not whither to turn them: they know not neither what they leave nor what they should receive’. Many were simply ignorant. When an old man was told that he would be saved through Christ he replied, ‘I think I heard of that man you spake of once in a play at Kendal called Corpus Christi play, where there was a man on a tree and blood ran down.’
Some, however, knew precisely what they were supposed to believe. As late as 1572 an anonymous chronicler stated that, outside London, fewer than one in forty were ‘good and devout gospellers’. This small and fervent minority, however, was greatly encouraged by the publication of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs in the spring of 1563. It offered a vivid and in many respects horrifying account of those who had burned for their new faith in the previous reign of Mary. Foxe described the plight of a woman, for example, who gave birth while being consumed by flame in Guernsey; the newborn babe was tossed into the fire with its mother. This was once widely dismissed as a fabrication, but other contemporary documents suggest that it did take place as Foxe described. The book’s woodcuts were in themselves a tour de force of hagiography. The work furnished a new litany of saints for a nation that was bereft of them.
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