History of England 1-6

Parliament assembled for its fourth session on 23 January 1552, the day after the execution of the quondam protector, with the urgent task of once more considering religion. Its most notable achievement was the second, and revised, Book of Common Prayer in which further measures of reform were introduced. The Virgin Mary and the saints were not to be invoked. The Mass was not mentioned, since it had been replaced by a service known as the ‘Lord’s supper’. Vestments were reduced and simplified. Any prayer or act that did not have the warrant of the Scriptures was to be abandoned. Thus was the reformed faith firmly revealed to the English, in a liturgy that has remained essentially unchanged to the present day.

The question of kneeling, while receiving communion, was a matter of strenuous and fierce debate. Did it imply adoration of the bread and the wine? Or was it a simple gesture of piety? The bishops could not agree on the matter, and eventually an addition was made to the text which explained that the act of kneeling had no traces of superstition. Prayers for the dead were not to be said during the funeral service, and the corpse was no longer to be addressed by the priest; the dead were sealed off from the living. In a more general sense it might be said that the past no longer had any claim upon the present, a condition of liberation or forgetfulness that had enormous consequences for the direction of English life.

The new liturgy, established in the Book of Common Prayer, was then protected by a second Act of Uniformity. This was the Act that enforced the general expropriation of church plate and other valuable movables; now that the Mass had been abolished, the instruments of worship were no longer needed. The chalices and candlesticks, the monstrances and chrismatories, the pyxes and the cruets, were swept away. The chasubles and the copes, the carpets and tapestries and cushions, were all removed. Cloth of gold and cloth of silver, anything wrought in iron or embossed in copper, were confiscated. This was the furthest point reached by the English reformation. It can in fact be argued that most of the defining elements of Protestant creed and practice were formulated during the reign of Edward VI; Elizabeth I merely tinkered with them.

Compulsory attendance at church, on Sunday, was also decreed; the first offence merited six months’ imprisonment, while the third relegated the offender to perpetual confinement. Yet some were disenchanted with the new service and disobeyed the order; it is likely that most received only a ministerial rebuke. Others were simply bored by the preachings and exhortations, the homilies and sermons. ‘Surely it is an ill misorder,’ Hugh Latimer wrote, ‘that folk should be walking up and down in the sermon-time … and there shall be such huzzing and buzzing in the preacher’s ear that it maketh him oftentimes to forget his matter.’

A new Treason Act was passed specifically to protect the changes in religion; it was now considered a serious offence to question the royal supremacy or to dissent from the articles of faith that the English Church now enjoined. The conservative bishops, who had preached against the new dispensation, were already in the Tower or under house arrest.

Cranmer had just completed two works that consolidated the cause of reform, A Collection of the Articles of Religion and A Code of Ecclesiastical Constitutions. The forty-two articles which he compiled were in fact never ratified by parliament or convocation but, as they became the model for the Thirty-Nine Articles promulgated by Elizabeth in 1563, they are still the foundation of the English Church; they reflected Cranmer’s mature theology, and were of a strongly Calvinist temper. Justification by faith alone, and ‘predestination unto life’, were affirmed. The twenty-ninth article denounced transubstantiation as ‘repugnant to the plain words of Scripture’ which ‘has given occasion to many superstitions’, and the rites of the Mass were described as ‘fables and dangerous deceits’.

The code of ecclesiastical laws was drawn up by Cranmer and his colleagues as a substitute for the canon law of Rome. To deny the Christian faith is to merit death. Adultery is to be punished with imprisonment or transportation for life. The seducer of a single woman will be compelled to marry her or, if he is already married, to give her one third of his worldly goods. The code was never in fact given the force of law, and the ecclesiastical courts continued their confused course without a compass.

Yet the Edwardian reformers had completed their work. Henry’s accomplishment in politics was now repeated in religion; the pope had been removed for ever. Justification by faith alone removed the intercessionary role of the Church, just as the demotion of the sacraments reduced the power of the priesthood. The denial of transubstantiation effectively destroyed the Mass. The rituals of Rome had been discarded.

In the autumn of the year Northumberland once more contemplated the menace of rebellion. In December he ‘instantly and earnestly required the Lords of the Council to be vigilant for the preventing of these treasons so far as in them was possible to be foreseen’. Three months later martial law was declared in some regions of the country. The murmurings came to nothing but the danger of rebellion posed an acute threat to Edward’s councillors who were never much liked by the general populace.

One of those councillors was of especial significance. William Cecil, who was to play a pre-eminent role in the reign of Elizabeth, became, at the age of thirty, a privy councillor and secretary to the king; his outstanding gifts as an administrator and ‘confidential clerk’ had already been recognized. He had served Somerset and, after a brief spell in the Tower in the wake of his patron’s fall, he had been plucked into government by Northumberland. He wrote a state paper in the winter of 1550 in which he outlined in stark terms the prospects for the country. ‘The emperor’, he wrote, ‘is aiming at the sovereignty of Europe, which he cannot obtain without the suppression of the reformed religion; and unless he crushes the English nation, he cannot crush the reformation. Besides religion, he has a further quarrel with England, and the Catholic party will leave no stone unturned to bring about our overthrow. We are not agreed among ourselves. The majority of our people will be with our adversaries …’

The last sentence is a significant admission that the acts of the reformers had not been appreciated by the larger part of the population. Cecil said that in the event of war between England and Charles V, the majority would obey the pope rather than the king. The greater body of the peers, most of the bishops, almost all of the judges and lawyers, as well as the priests and the justices of the peace, would follow the same guide. For those who consider the Edwardian reformation to be in large part popular, this is a corrective. The people may have acquiesced in the changes, but, according to Cecil’s testimony, they by no means approved of them. The habit of deference, and obedience, was combined with impotence and fear.

21

The nine-day queen

In the first days of 1552 the young king drafted ‘certain points of weighty matters to be immediately concluded on by my council’. It was no longer the council, but my council. He was now in his fourteenth year, and he began to exercise the reality of power. At the age of fourteen Richard II had been obliged to deal with the effects of the Peasants’ Revolt.

At the beginning of April, Edward fell ill of a disease that has been variously described as smallpox and the measles; yet he recovered easily enough. He told a childhood friend that ‘we have a little been troubled with the smallpox, which hath letted [prevented] us to write thereto; but now we have shaken that quite away’. He had not been well enough to attend parliament but he noted in his journal for 15 April that ‘I signed a bill containing the names of the acts which I would have pass, which bill was read in the House’.

After his recovery he began to sign royal warrants in his own hand rather than relying upon the signatures of his councillors. He engaged himself in foreign affairs, and in such subtle matters as the debasement of the currency. There survives a document, written in his own hand, concerning the method of proceedings in the council. Whether this was suggested to him, or was of his own devising, is not apparent. Yet he seems to have had all the makings of a good administrator. He wrote some of his notes in Greek, so that his attendants could not read them. And in the summer of the year he went on a progress, with 4,000 horse in attendance. It was the best way of displaying his power and authority to his subjects; the vast train visited Portsmouth and Southampton, among other places, before moving on through Wiltshire and Dorset.

Yet the disease and mortality of the age soon swirled around its principal figure. By the autumn of the year he seemed weaker than before, and he consulted an Italian physician who, like most doctors, also practised astrology. Hieronymus Cardano recorded that the king was ‘of a stature somewhat below the middle height, pale-faced with grey eyes’; he was rather ‘of a bad habit of body than a sufferer from fixed diseases. He had a somewhat projecting shoulder-blade.’ Cardano also reported that he ‘carried himself like an old man’.

In February 1553 Edward contracted a cold or chill that was accompanied by a fever; in the following month he was still looking ‘very weak and thin’. In the spring he moved to the palace at Greenwich, and in this period the imperial ambassador reported that the young king was ‘becoming weaker as time passes and wasting away’. His sputum was sometimes green and sometimes black. He was still capable of a Tudor outburst. When his will was obstructed in one matter he exclaimed to his councillors, ‘You pluck out my feathers as I were but a tame falcon – the day will come when I shall pluck out yours!’

On 12 May the imperial ambassador wrote that Edward ‘is suffering from a suppurating tumour on the lung’. He added that ‘he is beginning to break out in ulcers; he is vexed by a harsh, continuous cough, his body is dry and burning, his belly is swollen, he has a slow fever upon him that never leaves him’. Two weeks later it was reported that ‘he does not sleep except when he be stuffed with drugs, which doctors call opiates … The sputum which he brings up is black, fetid and full of carbon; it smells beyond measure.’ On 12 June he signed the Forty-Two Articles; but it was too late. They were never enforced. By the summer ‘the king himself has given up hope and says he feels so weak that he can resist no longer’. He was in his sixteenth year, a dangerous period for the Tudor male. Prince Arthur, his uncle, had expired at the age of fifteen; his half-brother, the duke of Richmond, had died at seventeen.

The nature of his illness has been variously described, but it is likely to have been a pulmonary infection that led to pneumonia. Rumours at the time that he had been the victim of a poisoner are most unlikely to have been true. Cui bono? In the face of the growing weakness of the king, Northumberland was thrown into panic fear. The next person in line to the throne, according to Henry VIII’s will, was Lady Mary, who reviled and hated him as the destroyer of the old faith. If she succeeded to the throne all the work of the reformation would be undone. It was unthinkable.

So in the early summer of the year a change in the order of succession was planned by Northumberland and the king. It has been suggested that the plot was devised by the duke alone, but there is no reason to suppose that the ‘godly imp’ would have calmly anticipated the reversal of religious reform. The salvation of the country depended on its survival. Northumberland himself seems to have grown tired and weary of governance. ‘I have’, he wrote, ‘entered into the bottom of my care.’

In the early stages of the king’s disease Mary was informed of his condition by Northumberland himself. In February, when her brother was kept in bed by the feverish chill, she was invited to court where she was ‘more honourably received and entertained with greater magnificence’ than ever before; Northumberland and a hundred horsemen welcomed her on the outskirts of the city and, when she arrived at Whitehall, the assembled council bowed their heads as if she were already on the throne of England. Yet as the death of Edward seemed to draw ever closer it became desperately important to remove Mary from the succession. There was no possibility of a Catholic queen. But who should be the beneficiary?

Jane Grey was the great-granddaughter of Henry VII by his younger daughter, Mary, and stood third in line to the throne after Mary and Elizabeth; for Northumberland, she also had the inestimable benefit of being his daughter-in-law. She was of impeccable religious credentials, as an ardent reformer. She had asked one of Mary’s ladies why she curtsied to the sacrament. ‘ “I curtsy to Him that made me.” “Nay, but did not the baker make him?” ’ She told her tutor that it ‘were a shame to follow my lady Mary against God’s word’. So she was stridently of the new faith. She was also learned. When Elizabeth’s tutor, Roger Ascham, visited her he found her reading Plato’s Phaedo. He asked her why she was not with her family hunting stag in the park. ‘I think,’ she replied, ‘all their sport in the park is but a shade to the pleasure I find in Plato.’ She would be the ideal queen, especially under the paternal eye of the duke himself.

So Edward and Northumberland, presumably working in concert, now devised a new will. Mary and Elizabeth were once more declared illegitimate, thus barring them from the throne of England. At the end of May the young king prepared what he called ‘his device for the succession’. He had at first written that his crown should pass to the ‘Lady Jane’s heirs male’ in the hope that he would live long enough to see the fruits of her marriage; he could at this stage not envisage the rule of a queen. Then, approximately three weeks later, he erased those words and inserted ‘the Lady Jane and her heirs male’. He may have suffered a relapse. In any case it must have been made clear to him that he might not live.

Many of the councillors were opposed to this device, considering it illegal for an underage king to set aside an Act of Parliament. The judges were summoned to the palace at Greenwich where, on listening to Edward’s proposal, they unanimously declared that it was contrary to the law. The king was defiant and dismissive. The judges asked for more time. They returned to meet the council two days later, when they declared that to permit the alteration of the succession would incur the charge of treason.

Northumberland was absent on their arrival but, on hearing their verdict, ‘he came into the council chamber, being in great rage and fury, trembling for anger … and said that he would fight in his shirt with any man in the quarrel’. The judges left the room. They came back on the following day, after an urgent summons, and were taken to the king’s bedside. He met them ‘with sharp words and angry countenance’. ‘Why is my will disobeyed? There must be no delay!’ The royal councillors remained silent. The judges were cowed. They asked only that their instructions should be put in writing, and that they should be pardoned if their consent was later deemed to be criminal. They argued to each other that there could be no treason in obeying the commands of their sovereign. And so it passed. The great ones of the realm eventually subscribed to the document dethroning Lady Mary.

These were the last days of the young king. On 1 July he was shown at a window of the palace, presumably to counter a rumour that he was already dead; yet he looked ‘so thin and wasted’ that few of the spectators were reassured. A crowd gathered on the following day, in the belief that he would appear again, but a courtier came out to declare that ‘the air was too chill’.

A professor of medicine from Oxford was summoned to the palace, together with a ‘wise woman’ who recommended the healing powers of a mysterious liquid. Both of them were admitted to the sickroom on the strict understanding that they would reveal the king’s true condition to nobody. The guard at the Tower was doubled, and wild rumours flew around the city of imminent perils. The imperial ambassador had been told that a force of 500 men had been sent to surround Lady Mary’s manor house, Hunsdon, in Hertfordshire, in order to seize her person; he reported further that the princess was to be taken to the Tower, ostensibly to prepare herself for her coronation, but would then be detained indefinitely. Northumberland and his friends were purchasing all the available arms in London, and the ships upon the Thames were being prepared for the sea. It was proposed that the evangelical preachers, under the supervision of Northumberland, would declare the illegitimacy of Mary from their pulpits. It was whispered that the duke was willing to surrender England into French hands for the support of the French king. That was, perhaps, a rumour too far. He may have come to an understanding, however, about the use of French troops in case of an English revolt. Henry II, the French king, would not in any case wish the cousin of his rival, Charles V, to become the queen of England.

On 6 July the end of Edward came. Between eight and nine in the evening, according to one popular newssheet or ‘broadside’, he whispered his last prayer. ‘Lord God, deliver me out of this miserable and wretched life, and take me among thy chosen …’ This is no doubt a pious fantasy of the writer purporting to witness Edward’s death as a Calvinist. Another account must also be treated warily. In this version the dying king sensed, rather than saw, his attendant doctors and gentlemen of the privy chamber. ‘Are you so near?’ he asked them. ‘I thought you had been further off.’

‘We heard you speak to yourself, but what you said we know not.’

‘I was praying to God.’

One of his attendants took him in his arms. ‘I am faint,’ he said. ‘Lord, have mercy upon me and take my spirit.’ The day of his death was, according to the Grey Friars’ Chronicle, greeted by signs and wonders in the heavens. A storm broke over London and the summer afternoon became dark; great trees were uprooted, the streets turned into rivers, and the hail lay in the city’s gardens as red as blood. It was said that the grave of Henry VIII had opened and that the old king had risen in protest at the defiance of his will.

Mary, alerted to all possible dangers, had fled from her manor house two days before to the relative safety of her estate at Kenninghall in Norfolk, where she was among friends and allies. The death of Edward was kept secret for three days, in order that all Northumberland’s preparations could be completed. Northumberland spoke of him as if he were still alive.

Lady Jane Grey was brought to London, and on 9 July was told that the king wished to speak to her. She was taken to Northumberland’s manor, Sion House, where she was greeted by the duke and certain other lords. ‘The king’, Northumberland told her, ‘is no more.’ He then explained the conditions of the new will, making Lady Jane the sovereign. Having spoken, he and the other lords fell to their knees in front of her. She received the news with alarm. The Crown could not be for her. She was unfit. But then she recovered. She raised her hands in prayer and asked God for grace to govern well.

On the same day Mary learned the fate of her younger brother. She sat down and wrote a letter to the most prominent noblemen of the kingdom. ‘My lords,’ she wrote, ‘we greet you well and have received sure advertisement that our deceased brother the king, our late sovereign lord, is departed to God’s mercy.’ She went on to say that ‘it seemeth strange that the dying of our said brother upon Thursday at night last past, we hitherto had no knowledge from you thereof’ before demanding that ‘our right and title to the crown and government of this realm to be proclaimed in our city of London’. It is reported that the lords looked into one another’s faces uneasily, and that their wives sobbed. A reply was sent ordering Mary not to ‘vex and molest’ the people of England with her false claim.

On 10 July the heralds-at arms announced the accession of Queen Jane in Cheapside, Paul’s Cross and Fleet. There is no evidence of rejoicing, or even of general acceptance. The crowds responded with silence, if not with open discontent, their faces ‘sorrowful and averted’. One chronicler reports that a vintner’s boy, Gilbert Potter, cried out that ‘the Lady Mary has the better title’; he was seized and led away. His ears were severed at the root on the following morning.

It might have been thought that Northumberland was in a pre-eminent position. He had control of the fleet as well as the treasury; he commanded the fortresses and garrisons of the land. Mary had as yet no army at her disposal; she had only the members of her household. But all Northumberland’s power was not enough in the face of her determined opposition and the evident fury of her supporters. The lawful succession to the throne of England could not be compromised by double-dealing. The crisis, of Northumberland’s own making, had broken over them all. Some of the councillors secretly doubted him. Others were confused and uncertain. William Cecil armed himself and made plans to flee the realm.

Northumberland had decided to detain Mary, by force, and bring her to London. If he had acted sooner, even before Edward’s death, he might have succeeded in destroying her. It was first believed that the armed party against her would be led by Jane Grey’s father, the duke of Suffolk, but the new queen’s protestations prevented the move. Instead Northumberland himself would march from London, by way of Shoreditch, with a retinue of 600 armed men. The citizens watched them leave. ‘The people press to see us,’ he remarked, ‘but not one sayeth God speed us.’ He had asked his colleagues to remain faithful to him, but he could not be entirely sure of their loyalty.

Mary stood her ground. She was resolute and defiant on the model of her father; she had a stern Tudor sense of majesty, allied with an awareness of her religious mission to save England from heresy. It had been thought that she might flee to the emperor in Brussels, but why should a queen abandon her realm? Supporters flocked to her, with the earl of Sussex and the earl of Bath among the first of them. The people from the towns and villages of the region took up their weapons. It seemed that the whole of East Anglia had risen for her. The city of Norwich proclaimed her as rightful sovereign. A small navy of six ships, sent out by Northumberland to guard the seaways off the Norfolk coast, defected to Mary’s camp. When she went out to review her new troops the cry went up ‘Long live our good Queen Mary!’ She removed from Kenninghall to Framlingham Castle, in Suffolk, where she might repel any armed force. Yet she was still in the utmost danger. If she had been defeated and come to trial, she would have been declared guilty of treason. The fate of the nation, and of her religion, was now at stake.

Northumberland had taken his men to Cambridgeshire, where Newmarket had been chosen as the rendezvous for the army made up of tenants from various noble estates. But when the report of the navy’s defection to Mary reached that place, the men began to mutiny; they declared that they refused to serve their lords against Queen Mary. Northumberland sent an express message to the council demanding reinforcements and was given ‘but a slender answer’. The members of the council, in the absence of their presiding genius, began to entertain doubts about the wisdom of the entire enterprise. As a contemporary chronicler put it, ‘each man then begun to pluck in his horns’.

As the radical preachers continued their pulpit campaign against Mary, William Cecil and others began to organize a coup d’état. They had been gathered in the Tower, close to Queen Jane herself, where they remained under the observation of a garrison loyal to Northumberland. On Wednesday 19 July, with Northumberland’s forces in open rebellion, the councillors managed to leave the Tower and gather at Baynard’s Castle on the north shore of the Thames about three-quarters of a mile above London Bridge.

They were joined here by the Lord Mayor, the aldermen and other prominent citizens. The earl of Arundel spoke first. If they continued to support the claims of Lady Jane Grey, civil war was unavoidable, with the distinct possibility that foreign powers would also intervene. No fate would be more unhappy for England and its people. The earl of Pembroke then rose and, taking his sword out of his scabbard, announced that ‘this blade shall make Mary queen, or I will lose my life’. Not one voice was heard on behalf of Northumberland or of Jane. A body of 150 men were then marched to the gates of the Tower, where the keys were demanded in the name of Queen Mary. Lady Jane’s father realized that the end had come; he rushed to his daughter’s chamber and tore down the canopy of state under which she sat. Her reign had lasted for just nine days.

The lords of the council then proceeded to the cross at Cheapside, where in due state they declared Mary to be the queen of England. The crowd of spectators cried out ‘God save the queen’, and Pembroke tossed his purse and embroidered cap into the throng. The bells of St Paul’s rang out, to be joined by all the other bells in the city. The lords then went in procession to the cathedral where, for the first time in almost seven years, the hymn of praise known as the Te Deum was sung by the choir. The apprentices gathered wood to light bonfires at the major crossroads. That evening the council wrote to Northumberland, asking him to lay down his arms.

The duke himself, now all but trapped in Cambridge, hurried to the market cross. He informed the crowds of angry spectators that he had followed the council’s orders in proclaiming Jane and proceeding against Mary; now that the council had changed its opinion, he would also change his. He threw up his cap and called out ‘God save Queen Mary’. He told a colleague that Mary was a merciful woman and would declare a general pardon. To which came the reply that ‘you can hope nothing from those that now rule’.

Arundel came to Cambridge with orders to arrest him. ‘I obey, my lord,’ Northumberland said, ‘yet show me mercy, knowing the case as it is.’

‘My lord, you should have sought for mercy sooner. I must do according to my commandment.’

At seven in the evening of 3 August Queen Mary entered her capital in triumph accompanied by a retinue of 500 attendants; her horse was trapped with cloth of gold, and her gown of purple velvet was embroidered with gold. She wore a chain of gold, and jewels, about her neck and her headdress was similarly covered in precious stones. She was greeted by the civic dignitaries at Aldgate and then through cheering crowds rode in procession to the Tower of London. Here, the prisoners of the old regime were waiting to greet her, among them the duke of Norfolk and the conservative bishops. She raised them from their knees, and kissed each one upon the cheek. ‘You are my prisoners!’ she exclaimed before returning to them their liberty. The cannons sounded ‘like great thunder, so that it had been like to an earthquake’.

Less than three weeks later Northumberland was led to the scaffold at Tower Hill. He confessed to the crowds around him that he had ‘been an evil liver and have done wickedly all the days of my life’. Then, perhaps to the surprise of those who watched him, he denounced radical preachers for turning him away from the true religion. ‘I beseech you all,’ he declared, ‘to believe that I die in the Catholic faith.’ The day before he had heard Mass in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula in the Tower. It was said that he had made his conversion in a desperate attempt to avert death or, perhaps, to save his family from further punishment. Yet his return to Catholicism may have been entirely genuine.

As the end came he recited a prayer and the psalm De Profundis. The executioner, according to custom, now begged his pardon; the man wore a white apron, like a butcher. ‘I have deserved a thousand deaths,’ Northumberland told him. He made the sign of the cross in the sawdust around him and laid his head upon the block. One stroke of the axe was enough. Some little children mopped up the blood that had fallen through the slits of the scaffold.

22

In the ascendant

The imperial ambassador declared that Mary’s triumphant reclamation of the crown had been a miracle of God and a token of the divine will. The new queen herself saw her accession as part of a sacred dispensation. It was her destiny, and duty, to bring her country back to the old faith. On the secular level it could also be said that a popular rebellion had overthrown an established regime. She had, in addition, gained the throne largely as a result of the loyalty of the Catholic nobility; no overtly Protestant lord had supported her. As soon as she heard that she had been proclaimed queen in London, she ordered that the crucifix be once more set up in her chapel at Framlingham.

When Mary first rode into the capital, after her triumph, many households placed images of the Virgin and of the saints in their windows as a token of the change. News of her accession reached the congregation gathered in Exeter Cathedral to hear a sermon by the reformer Miles Coverdale; the report was whispered around the assembly and, one by one, the people stood up and walked out. Only a few of the ‘godly’ remained. All over the country the Mass was once more chanted in Latin. Without any statutes or proclamations, the images and altars of the old faith were quickly restored. The crucifixes were set up, and the statues of the Virgin and the saints were put in their familiar places. When a justice tried to prosecute some priests in Kent for saying Mass, he himself was imprisoned. Six or seven Masses were, in any case, now being sung every day in the royal chapel at Whitehall. It had once again become the centrepiece of true faith.

On the matter of her brother’s funeral Mary was hesitant. She did not want to use the reformed burial service. ‘She could not’, she said, ‘have her brother committed to the ground like a dog.’ She was advised that it were best for a heretic king to have a heretic funeral, thus avoiding public controversy. So she compromised. Reluctantly she agreed that he could be buried according to the rite that he had favoured during his reign, but she tried to safeguard his soul and her principles by having a Latin Mass for the dead sung the night before his funeral and a solemn requiem a few days later.

On 18 August 1553 Mary issued a Proclamation Concerning Religion in which she forbade the use of opprobrious terms such as ‘papist’; she also commanded that no one ‘shall henceforth under pretext of sermons or lessons either in Church, publicly or privately, interpret the Scriptures, or teach anything pertaining to religion, except it be in the Schools of the university’. She had, in other words, banned all radical or reformed preachers. She had asserted that she had no thought of religious compulsion, but with the ominous proviso ‘until such time as further order by common consent may be taken’.

Yet, in certain quarters, resistance to the reintroduction of the old faith could be fierce. Some preachers, righteous in their generation, proclaimed the true doctrine of King Edward’s reign. London was as ever the centre of religious radicalism. When one Catholic chaplain preached at Paul’s Cross, a large crowd cried out ‘Thou liest!’ and ‘Pull him out! Pull him out!’ A dagger was thrown at the pulpit, and he had to be hurried away through the schoolhouse close by. Nevertheless, the European reformers, who had made the capital their home, now quickly made their way back to Zurich or Geneva or Strasburg. The colony of Walloon weavers, settled in Glastonbury, was happy to go home.

Other incidents of insurrection took place. A church in Suffolk was set on fire as Mass was being said. One radical, Thomas Flower, pulled out a wooden knife from his belt at the time of communion and repeatedly stabbed at the officiating priest. The reformers were soon obliged to meet in secret; they went into fields, or ships moored on the Thames, under cover of darkness. The bishop of London, Edmund Bonner, was determined to root out the heretics. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said to one of them, ‘there is a brotherhood of you, but I will break it, I warrant you.’ He had been condemned to perpetual imprisonment in the Marshalsea by Northumberland’s council; soon enough he became known as ‘Bloody Bonner’ for his determined persecution of reformers.

Another restored bishop, Stephen Gardiner, was fresh from the Tower when he confronted another heretic. ‘My lord,’ the man said, ‘I am none heretic, for that way that you count heresy, so worship we the living God.’

‘God’s Passion!’ bellowed the bishop. ‘Did I not tell you, my lord deputy, how you should know an heretic? He is up with the “living God” as though there were a dead God. They have nothing in their mouths, these heretics, but “the Lord liveth, the living God ruleth, the Lord Lord” and nothing but “the Lord” ’. At this point he took off his cap, and rubbed to and fro, and up and down, ‘the fore part of his head, where a lock of hair was always standing up’. His final words were ‘Away with him! It is the stubbornest knave that ever I talked with.’ He dispatched another radical preacher with the words ‘carry away this frenzy-fool to prison’. His archdeacon at Westminster was equally vehement; when disputing with a disciple of Arianism, whereby the Son of God is inferior to God the Father, he spat in the man’s face. Just as ‘Catholic’ now became used as a term of triumph, so ‘Protestant’ entered the language in the course of this reign as a mark of opprobrium.

To gauge the true faith of the English is impossible. It is clear enough that only a minority of the people were committed to the new faith, and that a slightly larger number now espoused full Catholicism. The changes in direction of religious policy, the attack upon the rituals of the old faith, the stripping of the churches, must have had devastating consequences for the piety of the people. The bonds of the sacred had been loosened. It is possible, then, that there was no drift from Catholicism to Protestantism (or vice versa) but rather a movement from the fervent or instinctive piety of the medieval period to bland conformism and even indifference. This would be entirely consistent with a reformation that was less about the assertion of faith and principle than about the redistribution of power and wealth. Habit and custom, rather than faith or piety, were the determinants of English religion.

Mary was the first woman, apart from the ill-starred Jane Grey, to be proclaimed queen regnant of England. Her one possible predecessor, Matilda, had never been crowned and was known only as domina, or lady. But Mary had one precedent; her grandmother, Isabella, had ruled as queen of Castile and had maintained all the panoply of a royal court. No doubt Katherine of Aragon had discoursed with her daughter on the rituals and splendours of a reigning queen. Mary’s great-grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, had been the power behind the throne of her son Henry VII. And her cousin, Margaret, had been ruling as queen-regent of Flanders for the last twenty years. As a child she had been brought up to be a queen; no subject could kiss her, except on the hand, and in formal rituals those about her knelt. There was a tradition of female power upon which she could draw.

She employed the members of her own household as her first advisers, but she could not wholly dispense with the councillors of the previous reign; only they had the knowledge, and skill, to maintain the system of government. Two days before her coronation she had summoned them; when they assembled she sank to her knees before them and spoke to them of the duties that, as a sovereign, God had imposed upon her. ‘I have entrusted my affairs and person to you, and wish to adjure you to do your duty as you are bound to your oaths.’ According to the Spanish ambassador, who became her principal confidant, they were deeply moved and did not know how to reply. But hers was a politic move. She knew that many of them had been hostile to her in the past, having signed the device barring her from the succession, and she distrusted them. She declared to the ambassador that ‘she would use their dissimulation for a great end, and would make their consent prevent them from plotting against her’.

It was a large and in some ways unwieldy council, composed of some fifty members. Mary herself was infuriated by the divisions among them; they were continually ‘chopping and changing’, blaming one another and exculpating themselves. Some had always been loyal to her, while others had been disloyal to the last possible minute; some were conservative bishops, newly released from prison, while others were great magnates who had done well out of the confiscation of monastic lands. She said, on a later occasion, that she spent most of her time shouting at them. Yet from this council a small inner circle of six or seven men was soon formed. Most notable among them was the old bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner; the bishop, previously confined to the Tower, was appointed to be lord chancellor. Most of the others were professional administrators who had served under the old regime.

Mary set about the business of governing with a will. She rose at dawn, when she prayed and heard a private Mass; she then went to her desk where she stayed until one or two in the afternoon. She took a light meal and then returned to her desk where she worked until midnight. She wrote letters; she granted audiences to her subjects; she conferred with her council. Yet it was still commonly believed that she needed a husband. A female monarch was considered to be unnatural, an aberration that could be countered only by a male figure of authority at her side.

When parliament assembled on 5 October, in the first year of her reign, the question of her marriage was a pressing issue. The vast majority, of both Lords and Commons, wished her to take an Englishman as her consort. At her formal coronation, four days before, she had worn her hair loose as a symbol that she was a virgin.

Matters of a more general purport were also debated. Parliament passed a bill affirming the validity of Henry VIII’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon, legitimizing Mary’s claim to the throne. An Act was also passed to enforce the religious settlement as it had stood in the last year of Henry VIII, thus abolishing all the Edwardian innovations; the matter caused protracted deliberation, over a period of four days, and was eventually agreed by 270 over 80 votes. A significant minority, therefore, still supported the Edwardian reforms. The members of parliament, however, let it be known that there were two topics on which they were united. There was to be no restitution of Church property, and no restoration of papal authority.

In the following month the Speaker of the House of Commons came before the queen and her council. He presented her with a petition on the question of her marriage and then, in a long and prolix speech, he urged the queen to choose one of her own subjects as her spouse. It would not be fitting to choose someone from abroad, since a foreign prince would have other interests and other priorities. She started to her feet and in the course of a hasty and improvised reply she stated that ‘if you, our Commons, force upon us a husband whom we dislike, it may occasion the inconvenience of our death; if we marry where we do not love, we shall be in our grave in three months …’

Yet others were already involved in the matter of marriage. Just nine days after her proclamation as queen the Spanish ambassador raised the question with her. Mary replied that she would willingly follow the advice of her cousin, Charles V, which meant that in practice she would have no hesitation in marrying a member of the Spanish royal family of which she was already a part. She was, indeed, half-Spanish. The most suitable of the male candidates was inevitably Philip, the eldest son of the king. This is what the Lords and Commons feared.

Mary summoned the ambassador to her private chapel in the autumn of 1553, just as parliament was meeting; this was the sanctuary where she kept the Holy Sacrament and where she told the ambassador that ‘she had continually wept and prayed God to inspire her with an answer to the question of marriage’. She went down upon her knees and began to recite ‘Veni Creator’, a hymn from the Gregorian chant. It seems to have been at this point that she resolved to marry Philip. He was, in a sense, the natural choice. How could the queen marry an English subject?

One possible English candidate had emerged. Edward Courtenay, great-grandson of Edward IV and heir to the House of York, had been imprisoned for the last fifteen years on trumped-up charges of treason; his Plantagenet blood was always a threat to the Tudor dynasty. Mary had released him, as a matter of honour, but had no intention of marrying him. ‘I will never, never marry him,’ she had told her council, ‘that I promise you, and I am a woman of my word. What I say, I do.’ He was not to her taste. Long imprisonment had rendered him feeble and supine. She had irrevocably turned to Spain.

One evening the Spanish ambassador was received at court and, as he bowed to her, he whispered in her ear that he had credentials from the emperor to deliver to her. At the same time he passed her a letter that she quickly concealed. On the following evening he was brought in state by barge to the palace, bearing the official proposal for Mary to wed Philip. Some days later, as the queen was being led towards the royal chapel for Vespers, someone in the court shouted out ‘Treason!’ to general alarm. Mary was unperturbed but her younger sister was seized with fear and trembling.

Princess Elizabeth had largely been a spectator in these marital proceedings. She had followed Mary in her sister’s triumphant entry into London, as a way of advertising their accord in rebutting the claims of a rival family, but the two were not united in any other way. Elizabeth was seen tacitly to represent the Protestant influence, and as such she soon came under suspicion. The French ambassador reported that ‘Elizabeth will not hear Mass, nor accompany her sister to the chapel’. She was considered to be of a proud and fiery spirit, like the other members of her family. The imperial ambassador, another conduit of news and rumour, decided that ‘the princess Elizabeth is greatly to be feared; she has a spirit full of incantation’.

But she knew when to bend. On hearing that her refusal to hear Mass was being treated as insurrection, she fell upon her knees before the queen and begged to be given instruction in the Catholic faith. Yet her sincerity was doubted; it was said that she was too ready to consort with heretics. When she attended her first Mass, in the autumn of the year, she complained all the way to the chapel that she was tormented by a stomach ache, ‘wearing a suffering air’. She never wore the gorgeous rosary that her sister had given her. Mary let it be known that she did not want Elizabeth to succeed to the throne, but her only remedy was of course to bear her own children. The queen was now thirty-seven years old, spare and lean, with a thin mouth and commanding gaze; Elizabeth was twenty, with youth and beauty on her side. She might be a threat.

That threat seemed to emerge in a rebellion at the beginning of 1554. When the envoys from Spain had arrived in January to seal the terms of the marriage treaty with Philip, the Londoners ‘nothing rejoicing, held their heads down sorrowfully’. Schoolboys pelted the Spanish delegation with snowballs. The terms of the treaty were announced on 14 January and, although they restricted Philip’s role in the determination of policy, a chronicler reported that ‘almost each man was abashed, looking daily for worse matters to grow shortly after’. Religious, as well as political, discontent was in the air. By the end of 1553 the Mass and the Latin offices were decreed to be the only legal forms of worship. In December, at the close of parliamentary proceedings, a dead dog was thrown through the window of a royal chamber; it had been shaved with a tonsure like a monk. On another occasion a dead cat was found hanging in Friday Street, wearing Romish vestments; it had between its paws a piece of bread like a ‘singing cake’ or sacramental host.

The leaders of the Protestant cause now began to act in concert; among them was Sir Thomas Wyatt, the son of the poet, and the duke of Suffolk together with his three brothers. Suffolk himself was of course the father of Jane Grey, the queen of nine days. Edward Courtenay, perhaps angry at his rejection by Mary, joined them. They were in league with the French ambassador, whose country was much affronted by the queen’s decision to marry the heir of the Spanish crown. Some insurgents were simply opposed to the Spanish presence, while others were convinced reformers who were dismayed at the return to Catholicism. A party of the rebels had in fact been members of the military establishment under Northumberland and Edward VI. Cornwall and Devonshire were supposed to be the first regions to rise; Wyatt would carry his native county of Kent, and Suffolk would stir the Midlands. All of the armies would then converge upon London, where they hoped for a happy welcome.

The conspirators remained in London for the first two weeks of the year, but in that period Edward Courtenay gave signs of indecision. He professed to believe that the queen was about to marry him, after all, and he lingered in the purlieus of the court; then he ordered a lavish costume of state, and spoke unwisely about what he knew. The chancellor, Stephen Gardiner, interviewed him and discovered much about the plot. Gardiner summoned one of the insurgents, Sir Peter Carew, to London. Carew fell into a panic and tried to incite his native city of Exeter; Exeter did not rise, and Carew fled to France.

Wyatt, thrown into confusion by this unanticipated and unwelcome news, called the people of Kent to rebellion. On 25 January the church bells of the county rang with the signal for alarm, and a proclamation was issued to the effect that the Spanish army was crossing the seas to conquer England. Wyatt seized the cannon from the ships moored in the Medway and brought them into his stronghold at Rochester. The queen had professed no unease in the first days of the revolt. ‘Let the prince come,’ she said, ‘and all will be well.’ But her position was not safe. She had no army, and she feared that many of her council were secretly eager that the rebellion might succeed. The city agreed to give her 500 men from their trained bands, as much to preserve the capital as to safeguard the queen.

The king of France had promised to send eighty vessels to assist the insurgents, and the news somehow reached the English court. The French ambassador was closely watched and one of his couriers was arrested. He was carrying some coded messages from the ambassador himself, and a copy of a letter from Lady Elizabeth to her sister. There was no treason here, but it was nonetheless suspicious. Why should the French king be interested in one of the princess’s letters?

The duke of Norfolk led the trained bands of London against Rochester but, as he approached the bridge, he saw to his horror that his men were deserting to Wyatt’s side. They cried out ‘A Wyatt! A Wyatt!’ This was the familiar phrase of acclamation. ‘We are all Englishmen!’ Norfolk and a few commanders galloped off in fear of their lives. Wyatt then appeared on the bridge. ‘As many as will tarry with us,’ he said, ‘shall be welcome. As many as will depart, let them go.’ So he gained 300–400 men, together with their weapons. The rebellion seemed set to succeed. If Wyatt had marched to London immediately, the gates might have been opened to him.

The queen, in her defenceless position, remained resolute and defiant. She rode through the streets of the city to the Guildhall, where she met an assembly of citizens. She had a deep voice, often compared with that of a man, and piercing eyes that could command respect as well as fear. She spoke to them from the steps of the hall. She was the lawful queen of England. She appealed to the love and loyalty of Londoners against a presumptuous rebel who intended ‘to subdue the laws to his will and to give scope to rascals and forlorn persons to make general havoc and spoil’. She also promised to call a parliament that would consider the suitability of Philip as her consort; if the Lords and Commons rejected him, then she would think of him no more.

Her courage and her bearing impressed the Londoners. On the following day 25,000 armed citizens came to her defence against the encroachments of Wyatt and his men. He had come up to Greenwich from Rochester but, on arriving on the south bank by London Bridge, he found the gates closed against him. He was declared to be a traitor and a ransom of £100 was placed on his head. In response he wore his name, in large letters, upon his cap.

He could derive no comfort from the position of his confederate, the duke of Suffolk, whose attempt to raise the Midlands had ended in failure; he had fled to one of his estates, but his hiding-place was betrayed by his gamekeeper. His ally in the Midlands rebellion had been Lord John Grey, uncle of the unfortunate Jane Grey; he had concealed himself for two days, without food or drink, in the hollowed trunk of an ancient tree. He, too, was discovered. The Greys were undone.

Wyatt stood irresolute before London Bridge, now barred, while the guns on the Tower were trained against him. There was no way to cross the river. After much hesitation and diversity of counsel Wyatt determined to ride with his host to Kingston Bridge, from where he could then march back on London; his friends in the city had promised him a welcome. So on the following morning he rode out with 1,500 men, together with some cannon from the Medway ships, and at four in the afternoon he reached Kingston. He found the bridge to be in part broken down, with a small guard on the opposite bank; the guard fled, and Wyatt caused the bridge to be repaired with moored barges. Then he marched once more upon London.

The queen was woken at two or three in the morning, and told that her barge was waiting to take her to the safety of Windsor Castle. ‘Shall I go or stay?’ she asked those closest to her. The Spanish ambassador offered the best advice. ‘If you go,’ he told her, ‘your flight will be known, the city will rise, seize the Tower and release the prisoners. The heretics will massacre the priests, and Elizabeth be proclaimed queen.’ Mary saw the force of his argument.

At nine in the morning Wyatt led his now exhausted men up the hill at Knightsbridge, but a force of the queen’s cavalry divided them near Hyde Park Corner. Wyatt had lost his rearguard but he pushed forward along the road that is now Pall Mall; some citizens were gathered to watch him, and made no sign. They parted to let the insurgents through their midst. Some of the courtiers were alarmed at this acquiescence, and cries of ‘Treason!’ were soon ringing through the palace at Whitehall. ‘Lost! Lost! All is lost!’ The queen replied that, if some would not fight for her, she would go out and fight for herself. She would be happy to die with those who served her.

It did not come to that. Wyatt and the remnant of his forces made their slow way along the Strand and Fleet Street towards the old city. Yet the gates of Ludgate had been closed against him. ‘I have kept touch,’ he said in his despair. He sat down upon a bench outside Belle Sauvage Yard (now known simply as Bell Yard) while his companions scattered in the side streets and alleys off Ludgate Hill. When a part of the queen’s cavalry galloped towards him, he surrendered his sword and was taken into custody.

In the days after the rebellion, gallows were erected in all the principal sites of London from Smithfield to Tower Hill. Some of the rebellious soldiers were hanged outside their doors. ‘There has never been such hanging,’ the French ambassador wrote, ‘as has been going on here every day.’ Yet mercy sometimes prevailed amid the slaughter. On 22 February some 400 men were brought before the queen with halters around their necks, whereupon she pardoned them all.

Lady Jane Grey had remained in the Tower ever since the accession of Mary and in other circumstances could no doubt also have been spared. The treachery of her father changed her situation with dramatic effect. The queen had hardened her heart against her and all her family. The old abbot of Westminster tried to convert the young woman to the Roman communion, but she withstood all of his appeals. She was taken to Tower Green, quietly praying until she reached the scaffold; she calmly ascended the steps and told the spectators that she had broken the law by accepting the crown but that she was innocent of any evil intention. She recited the Miserere psalm, ‘Have mercy upon me, O God’, and then let down her hair, while making sure that her neck was uncovered. ‘I pray you, dispatch me quickly,’ she said to the executioner. And as she knelt she asked him, ‘Will you take it off before I lay me down?’

‘No, madam.’

She tied a handkerchief about her eyes, and then began feeling for the block. ‘What shall I do? Where is it?’ One of the bystanders guided her to it, and she laid down her head. Her husband, her father and her uncles were also beheaded.

There was one who had invited suspicion but had as yet escaped punishment. Princess Elizabeth had remained out of harm’s way at Ashridge House, in Hertfordshire, where she awaited events. It had become clear that Wyatt’s rebellion had been intended to set her upon the throne in the place of her sister, but there was no clear evidence of her involvement in the plot. Her confidential servants were interrogated in the Tower with the threat of the rack hanging over them. She herself was summoned to London, after pleading illness, and on 18 February she was carried in a litter to the capital. She passed through the streets of London dressed entirely in white, as a token of her innocence, and her pale face was described by the Spanish ambassador as ‘proud, lofty and superbly disdainful’. He, as well as his master, was pressing for her execution. Sensational news spread of a miraculous voice in a London wall. When anyone called ‘God save the queen’ there came no response; but if the cry of ‘God save the Lady Elizabeth’ was made, a voice replied ‘So be it’. The credulity of crowds is never-ending. Of course it was a hoax concocted by a serving girl.

The queen refused to see her sister, and Elizabeth was given a suite of closely guarded rooms in the palace at Whitehall. She remained in this state of confinement for some weeks, but at the beginning of April she was interviewed by the royal council. The councillors accused her of complicity in the rebellion, to which charge she made an indignant denial; in this defiance she never once wavered. It was finally agreed that she should be removed from Whitehall to the Tower and, when the news was broached to her, she fell ‘in heavy mood’. It is not hard to understand the reasons for her desolation. Her mother had been taken to the Tower as a prelude to execution, and it seemed more than likely that Elizabeth would share her fate. She begged time to compose a letter to the queen in which she lamented that she should be ‘condemned without answer and due proof, which it seems that I now am: for that without cause proved, I am by your council from you commanded to go unto the Tower, a place more wonted for a false traitor than a true subject’. She went on to declare that ‘I never practised, counselled, nor consented to anything that might be prejudicial to your person any way’.

Mary did not reply. ‘Very well then,’ Elizabeth is reported to have said. ‘If there be no remedy I must be contented.’ She was taken by barge to the Tower and came ashore by the drawbridge. ‘Here landeth as true a subject,’ she declared to her guards and her gaolers, ‘as true a subject, being prisoner, as ever landed at these stairs.’ It was a day of heavy rain and in her dejection she sat down upon a stone.

‘Madame,’ the lieutenant of the Tower said, ‘you were best to come out of the rain; for you sit unwholesomely.’

‘It is better sitting here than in a worse place, for God knoweth, I know not whither you will bring me.’

She was escorted within the fortress, as all the doors were locked and barred behind her. She could not be sure that she would ever see the outer world again. At a later date she told the French ambassador that she was in such despair that she considered writing to her sister with the request that she should be beheaded with a sword, like her mother, rather than an axe. The rigours of her confinement were soon relaxed a little; by the middle of April she was allowed to walk on the ‘leads’ of her prison house and enjoy the Tower garden. Two guards always walked behind her, and two before her. The other prisoners were enjoined ‘not so much as to look in that direction while her grace remained therein’.

She was interrogated five days after her confinement. What was her connection with Wyatt and the other rebels? Had she received letters or messages from them? She denied all knowledge of them and of their activities. She proclaimed her innocence and demanded to see proof of her treason. There was none. ‘My lords,’ she said, ‘you do sift me very narrowly.’ She preserved her calm and authoritative demeanour; danger had taught her to dissemble and prevaricate.

On 18 May she was released from the Tower and removed to Woodstock in Oxfordshire, where she came under the custody of Sir Henry Bedingfield. She is reputed to have carved, with one of her diamonds, some lines on a glass window pane of the mansion:

Much suspected by me,

Nothing proved can be.

Quod Elizabeth the prisoner.

And she was still a prisoner. A force of soldiers was encamped on a hill overlooking the house, and no one could enter without Bedingfield’s permission.

On 20 July Philip landed at Southampton. When he set foot on English ground he drew his sword and carried it in his hand; this was not considered to be a good omen. He was accustomed to the sunshine of his native land, and was greeted in England by thunderous rain that lasted several days; many of his entourage caught colds. Three days after his arrival he was received at the door of Winchester Cathedral and in the bishop’s palace, after supper, he was first received by the queen, ‘each of them merrily smiling on other, to the great comfort and rejoicing of the beholders’. She could understand Spanish, but could not speak it; the first and last time Philip ever used English was on that same evening to the assembled courtiers. He was supposed to say ‘Good night, my lords all’, but he only managed ‘God ni hit’. It is most likely that they spoke French with each other. The Spanish were not necessarily impressed by the queen, who was described by one of them as ‘rather older than we were led to believe’; she was of relatively modest height, and slender to the point of thinness. At the age of twenty-seven Philip was eleven years younger than Mary.

On 25 July they were married in Winchester Cathedral, where the heralds proclaimed them to be king and queen of England, France, Naples, Jerusalem and Ireland. Philip had been given the crown of Naples by his father the night before, so that the English queen could be sure of marrying an equal. During the Mass of celebration it was noticed that the queen entirely fixed her gaze upon the jewelled crucifix. At the wedding feast, to the dismay of the Spanish entourage, Mary was served on gold plates while Philip deserved only silver. In the various royal palaces Mary used the chambers reserved for a king, while Philip stayed in those of a queen consort. He was in a most ambiguous position. He was never crowned and could not be a source of patronage in England; he was not permitted to fill English offices with his own men, and the queen never delegated authority to him.

On 18 August the royal couple made their way through London, to respectful if muted rejoicing. In a sermon at Paul’s Cross Stephen Gardiner exhorted the citizens ‘to behave themselves’ so that Philip ‘might tarry still with us’. Soon after this, twenty cartloads of Spanish gold were drawn through the streets of the city.

Yet all the treasure in the world would not allay the fears and suspicions of the citizens. It was rumoured that a great Spanish army would invade the country and that Spanish friars would take over the churches. It was feared that England would no longer be an independent country. One chronicler reported that ‘the English are so bad, and fear God so little that they handle the friars shamefully, and the poor men do not dare to leave their quarters … the crowd tried to tear the cloaks off the backs of Don Pedro and Don Antonio his nephew asking what they meant by wearing crosses and jeering at them’. Religion and xenophobia were a potent mixture.

The Spanish in turn treated the English with disdain. It will be profitable here to examine the general reputation of the nation, described by the French ambassador as ‘this nasty island’. The women were deemed to be beautiful, while the men were handsome and of ruddy complexion. The language was considered to be uncouth, but what could you expect from people living at the extremity of the world? They were, essentially, barbarians. Englishmen swore with a vehemence that shocked foreigners; even the children swore great oaths. All the people drank too much with the favoured ‘double beer’, as strong as whisky, leaving them ‘stark staring mad like March Hares’. It may have been the beer that encouraged the belching, in which sport all the English participated; every meal ended with a belching contest. Dinner was eaten at any time between ten and twelve, with supper at six in the evening.

And what did these barbarians eat? The Spanish noblemen with Philip were astonished by the variety of the food. ‘These English have their houses made of sticks and dirt, but they fare commonly so well as the king.’ They feasted on great shins of beef, on mutton and veal, on lamb and pork; they ate brawn, bacon, fruit pies, fowls of every sort. This could not have been a universal diet, however, and the poorer sort would have eaten the ‘white meats’ of the dairy, such as butter and cheese, as well as beans, peas, onions and garlic.

The Spanish courtiers described their hosts as ‘white, pink and quarrelsome’. It was a violent world, where every man went armed. The English were quick to take offence. They were fit for nothing except eating and drinking; their dances were all ‘strutting or trotting about’; their women were ‘of evil conversation’; they were all thieves. The courtiers moved among the local people ‘as if they were animals, trying not to notice them’. Fights and brawls erupted in the streets, and even broke out in the halls of the palace at Whitehall. In one battle 500 Englishmen were involved; it ended with six dead and three dozen badly wounded. More innocent misunderstandings also took place. When the duchess of Alva visited the queen neither lady would allow the other to take a lower seat; the elaborate courtesies ended with both of them sitting on the floor.

In the autumn of the year it seemed possible, even likely, that the fruit of the royal marriage would soon be ripe. The queen believed that she had conceived, and in this belief she was supported by her doctors. If that were indeed the case then her immediate problems, among them the popular reception of her husband, would be resolved. The Te Deum was sung in the churches of the realm, where prayers were also offered for the safe birth of an heir to the throne. Some of course were horrified at the prospect of a Catholic succession. A sheet of writing was nailed to the gate of the palace at Whitehall. ‘Will you be such fools, oh noble Englishmen, as to believe that our queen is pregnant? And of what should she be, but of a monkey or a dog?’ The nation waited.

23

Faith of our fathers

The failure of Wyatt’s rebellion, and the subsequent arrival of Philip, lent confidence to the queen. The pace of religious reform, or perhaps of religious reversal, now intensified. The Mass was celebrated throughout the kingdom. On Palm Sunday of 1554 palms were once more held aloft in procession, and the ceremony of ‘creeping to the cross’ was renewed on Good Friday; the old rite of resurrection was performed on Easter Sunday. The quotations from Scripture, which had taken the place of images and pictures, were wiped away or whitewashed. At St Paul’s Cathedral the choir went up to the steeple to sing the anthems, reviving a custom that had long been in disuse. Edmund Bonner, bishop of London, decreed that every church in the city must have among other instruments of devotion ‘a cross for procession with candlesticks, a cross for the dead, an incenser, a ship or vessel for frankincense, a little sanctus bell …’ There must be a high altar, with all its cloths and hangings. He asked if, at the time the host was raised, any of the congregation hung their heads or hid behind the pillars or even left the church. Church music was in due course restored.

Certain individuals suffered from these changes. Married priests were deprived of their livings. The vicar of Whenby, in Yorkshire, proceeded in front of his congregation wearing a surplice and carrying a lighted candle. ‘Masters,’ he began, ‘I have been seduced and deceived, thinking that I might lawfully marry …’ He then proceeded to beg pardon. Of the twenty-two bishops in the Edwardian regime, only seven retained their sees. The old reformers – Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer – were sent to Oxford where they were to be interrogated by the bishops and clergy of the convocation. They were taken from the Tower, where they had been detained, to the Bocardo; this was Oxford’s prison, in a watchtower by the north gate of the town. The queen had a particular dislike for Archbishop Cranmer, who had been instrumental in the degradation of her mother. Bonner used to call him in derision ‘Mr Canterbury’.

They were given what might be called a show trial before a committee of the convocation. On being questioned about transubstantiation Cranmer was often hissed down, so that he could not be heard at all; he was described as ‘unlearned’, ‘unskilful’ and ‘impudent’.

Ridley was called on the following day for his interrogation. ‘You see the obstinate, vainglorious, crafty and inconstant mind of this man,’ his inquisitor concluded, ‘but you see also the force of truth cannot be shaken. Therefore cry out with me, truth has the victory!’ The clergy responded as if with one voice. Throughout his appearance ‘there was great disorder, perpetual shoutings, tauntings and reproaches’ so that the school of divines resembled a beargarden.

When Latimer came in, old and frail, he was permitted to sit; a pair of spectacles was hanging by a string at his breast, and he carried a staff. He was finally judged to be a heretic and accepted his fate as a means of glorifying God. ‘If you go to heaven with this faith,’ one of his interrogators told him, ‘then I will never come thither.’

Some 800 reformers fled to the Protestant centres of Europe, among them many clerics and scholars from the universities. The dowager duchess of Suffolk departed with many servants, among them her laundress and her fool. Eight English communities were established, in cities such as Frankfurt and Zurich, from where a stream of pamphlets was issued in general condemnation of Mary and the Marian settlement. The exiles were hoping, naturally enough, for the assassination of the idolatress. She was the queen of all evil. In the meantime they thought of themselves as an embattled minority, a little flock of the faithful under the perpetual shadow of persecution. This image had a long life and helped to shape the discourse of the stricter sort of Calvinism. The anonymous author of Humble Supplication unto God blamed England’s ‘unthankfulness and wicked living’ for the return of popery. The religious refugees left a more enduring legacy with their Geneva Bible, the text for which Shakespeare had an abiding affection. A bishop in the more accommodating reign of Elizabeth remembered with fondness his years of exile. ‘Oh Zurich, Zurich, I think more of Zurich in England than ever I thought of England when I was in Zurich.’

A cleric of quite another stamp was coming to England in the winter of 1554. Reginald Pole, cardinal and papal legate, was returning home after an exile of twenty-two years. He came back eagerly, with the pious intention of bringing his country once more into the fold of Rome. England was still under papal interdict, perhaps consigning all its inhabitants to the peril of damnation. It was he whose family had been executed on the orders of Henry VIII; his mother, Margaret Pole, had been beheaded in a botched and painful death. He considered himself to be the son of a martyr. He was a solemn and pious man, grave and earnest.

On a day in late November his barge, with a great silver cross upon its bow, passed under London Bridge on its way to Whitehall. On his arrival at the palace Philip embraced him, while the queen waited at the head of the grand staircase. When Cardinal Pole came up to her she threw herself upon his breast. ‘Your coming’, she said, ‘causes me as much joy as the possession of my kingdom.’ He replied in Latin with the words that Gabriel had uttered to the Virgin. ‘Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum, benedicta tu in mulieribus’ – ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you, blessed are you among women.’ At this point the queen felt her baby leap in her womb. It was a moment of benediction.

Four days later the Lords and Commons assembled in the Great Chamber at Whitehall where the cardinal, at the right hand of the queen, addressed them. It was noted that the queen tried to make her supposed pregnancy very clear. Pole told parliament that he had come to return the keys to the kingdom of heaven, on condition that all acts directed against the papacy were repealed. ‘I come to reconcile,’ he said, ‘not to condemn. I come not to compel but to call again.’ Some of the members were observed to weep. When the Lords and Commons met at Westminster on the following day they all agreed – with only two dissentient voices – to make their submission. The schism of two reigns was thereby ended.

On 30 November, St Andrew’s Day, the cardinal sat on a raised platform at the upper end of Westminster Hall. As he rose to his feet Mary and Philip fell to their knees, as did the whole of the assembly. With the authority of Jesus Christ and the most holy lord Pope Julius III, he then proceeded to absolve ‘this whole realm and the dominions thereof from all heresy and schism, and from all and every judgement, censure and pain for that cause incurred; and we do restore you again into the unity of our Mother the Holy Church, in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Ghost’.

The queen could be heard to sob; the most solemn and sacred intention of her life had been fulfilled. Many in the hall called out ‘amen, amen’ before also breaking into tears. Some members threw themselves weeping into one another’s arms. Slowly they processed into the chapel where the choir sang the Te Deum. When the news reached Rome the cannon of Castel Sant’Angelo were fired. In a portrait of the queen, painted in this year, she is wearing a large Tau cross upon a choker of pearls around her neck; from her waist hangs an enamel reliquary adorned with the emblems of the four evangelists. She loved jewellery, but it was jewellery with a message.

Pole’s central purpose was to restore order and direction to a battered faith. He tried to refurbish the finances of the Church; he appointed twenty bishops; he established seminaries where young priests could be trained. He had long been a resident in Rome and was therefore eager to embrace papal supremacy; but the Lords and Commons had gone beyond that point. It was not practical. He had also wanted to take back the monastic lands that had been expropriated in Henry’s reign, but there were too many vested interests to make that course feasible. What lord or gentleman would surrender what they had owned for thirty years? The imperial ambassador remarked that in any case ‘the Catholics hold more church property than the heretics’.

After the solemn ceremony of absolution, parliament then proceeded to deal with the matter of church lands. A bill declared such land had always been subject to statute law, and that no other authority could meddle with the matter. A supplication was addressed to the pope, requesting that church property should be allowed to remain in lay hands. In the same parliament Stephen Gardiner fought successfully to pass his Revival of the Heresy Acts; the medieval statute de heretico comburendo, on the burning of heretics, was thereby restored.

Other elements of Catholic practice also returned to life. The Carthusian monks were sent to Sheen and the Benedictines were returned to Westminster; the Dominicans were reunited at St Bartholomew’s in Smithfield and the Franciscans at Greenwich. The Bridgettine nuns, many of whom had crossed the Channel in Henry’s time, flocked back to Syon.

Yet the revived Catholicism of Mary’s reign did not restore the old faith in its entirety. The sacrifice of the Mass was for the queen the single most important element of the faith to which all else was subject. The only shrine to be restored was that of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey, and in her reign Mary never went on pilgrimage. St Thomas of Canterbury and Our Lady of Walsingham remained unhonoured. Some of the familiar customs were also quietly ignored. There was scant interest in saints or in the Virgin. Little was said of purgatory. Mary remained the supreme head of the Church in England, and only lip service was paid to the doctrine of papal supremacy. It was pointed out at the time that almost half of the population was under the age of twenty and thus had never experienced papal domination. It simply could not be imposed once more.

The importance of Scripture was also reaffirmed in a marked departure from the practice of medieval Catholicism; the cardinal, for example, ordered an English translation of the New Testament. The power of preaching was also recognized, and an array of preachers were brought out to refute the errors of the reformed faith. A crowd of 20,000 gathered to hear the Spital sermons, held at the pulpit cross in Spitalfields during Easter week. Bishop Bonner aided the preachers in their task by supervising a set of instructions entitled A Profitable and Necessary Doctrine as well as a collection of thirteen model sermons. Everything was done to reacquaint the English people with their old religion, shorn now of its more superstitious features. It may be said in general that Mary tried to recreate the Catholic faith that had existed at the end of the reign of Henry VIII, and that in a real sense she was continuing her father’s work.

In a similar spirit the festivities and ceremonies associated with his rule were also revived. Church-ales, Plough Monday collections and Hocktide gatherings once more became popular; lavish church processions made their way through London on many sacred occasions. On the feast of Corpus Christi 1555, Bishop Bonner raised the sacrament in his hands at the head of a procession along Whitehall with many people ‘kneeling on their knees, weeping, and giving thanks to God’. The May games of the same year in Westminster were devoted to ‘giants, morris pikes, guns and drums and devils, and three morris dances, and bagpipes and viols, and many disguised, and the lady of the May rode gorgeously with minstrels’. The Lord of Misrule also returned ‘with his councillors and divers other officers, and there was a devil shouting of fire, and one was like Death, with a dart in hand’. So a Londoner, Henry Machyn, recorded in his diary.

Yet not all were merry. Two weeks after the Heresy Act was passed by parliament in the early days of 1555, a secret assembly of men and women was broken up; they were gathered, in a house in Bow Churchyard, for a service in English with prayers such as ‘God turn the heart of Queen Mary from idolatry, or else shorten her days’. The hunt was on.

The first to die in the course of the Marian campaign was John Rogers, a canon of St Paul’s who had preached against the Catholic reaction at the cross in the churchyard. It was he who was chosen, as it was put, to ‘break the ice’. He was taken the short distance from Newgate to Smithfield, and on his last journey was met by his wife and ten children, who welcomed him with cries of happiness as if he were on his way to a banquet. The spectators along his route also cheered him. As he was being tied to the stake he was offered a pardon if he recanted, but he refused. The fire was lit. He did not seem to suffer but bathed his hands in the flame ‘as if it was cold water’. The burning time had come.

The bishop of Gloucester, John Hooper, was an early sacrifice. He was led from Newgate, his face muffled in a hood, and taken by his guards to his diocese where on 9 February he was tied to the stake. He suffered very badly since the green faggots were slow to burn; the fire reached only his legs and the lower part of his body; when it expired, the bishop called out ‘For God’s love, good people, let me have more fire!’, so a fiercer flame was kindled. A bystander wrote that ‘he smote his breast with his hands till one of his arms fell off; he continued knocking with the other, while the fat, water and blood dropped out at his fingers’ ends …’ He suffered torment for another three-quarters of an hour, eventually ‘dying as quietly as a child in his bed’.

On the same day a weaver, a butcher, a barber, a priest, a gentleman and an apprentice were condemned to the fire by Bishop Bonner on the charge of denying the doctrine of transubstantiation. Soon enough the prisons of London were filled with other candidates for martyrdom. The legs of the priest had been crushed by irons after his conviction for heresy and so he was placed at the stake in a chair. It is reported by Foxe, in his account of the Marian fires, that ‘at his burning, he sitting in the fire, the young children came about and cried, as well as young children could speak, Lord strengthen thy servant and keep thy promise – Lord strengthen thy servant and keep thy promise’.

A young farmer was burned outside the north gate of Chester. A jar of tar and pitch was put on top of his head and, as the flames reached it, the combustible material poured down his face. At Stratford-le-Bow eleven men and two women died together in a single blaze; at Lewes ten were burned at the same time. Thomas Haukes, about to die, told his friends that if the flames were endurable he would show it by lifting up his hands. He clapped his hands three times in the fire before he expired. When a fire was lit on Jesus Green, Cambridge, books were thrown in to bolster the flames. One of them happened to be a communion book in English, and the suffering man picked it up and began to read from it until the smoke and flame obscured the page. Another victim was said to ‘sleep sweetly’ in the fire. When a doctor of divinity proceeded on his walk to the stake he began to dance.

‘Why, master doctor,’ the sheriff asked him, ‘how do you now?’

‘Well, master sheriff, never better for I am now almost home. I lack not past two stiles to go over, and am even now at my Father’s house.’

The manner of the execution may be described. A large stake or post was fixed in the ground with a step or ledge leading up to it. The victim was placed upon that ledge so that he or she might be visible to the crowd; the men were stripped to their shirts, and the women to their smocks. The victim was fastened to the stake with chains, but the arms were left free. Faggots of wood, and bundles of reed, were then piled about the stake. It was sometimes difficult to kindle or to control the fire. The wood might be too green, or the winds contrary. The friends of the victims sometimes tied little bags of gunpowder around the necks of those about to die, but on occasions they made too small an explosion and only increased the suffering.

It was customary for the victims to pray or sing before their execution. They knelt and prostrated themselves before the stake. Many of them then kissed the post or the wood piled about it. The spectators were not always or necessarily sympathetic to those who were about to die. On many occasions the victim was pelted with pieces of wood or rocks. When one dying man began to sing a psalm he was silenced by a blow to his head. ‘Truly,’ a religious commissioner amiably told the assailant, ‘you have marred a good old song.’ Street-sellers abounded and at a burning in Dartford ‘came diverse fruiterers with horse-loads of cherries, and sold them’. Anyone who brought a faggot to the fire was granted forty days’ ‘indulgence’ from the pains of purgatory; as a result parents instructed their children to bring wood for the flames.

Stephen Gardiner had believed that a few early burnings would suffice and that the terrible example would warn other heretics to be wary and remain silent. But his optimism was premature. The steadfast reaction of the martyrs, and the open sympathy of many who came to watch the proceedings, were enough to alarm him. It was said that one burning was worth more than a hundred sermons against popery. He seems to have made some effort to call a halt, but it was already too late. In truth the campaign of terror may have worked; it is sometimes supposed that it was gradually curtailed because of mounting public opposition. It is more likely that there were in the end fewer heretics to burn.

The queen and Cardinal Pole, in particular, did not see any need to reverse their policy. Heretics were the breath of hell, a noxious danger to the health of the body politic. Anyone whom they corrupted would be damned eternally. In a pastoral letter to London, Pole wrote that ‘there is no kind of men so pernicious to the commonwealth as they be’. The queen herself considered them to be guilty of treason and of sedition, two of the greatest crimes imaginable to her. The tainted wether may infect the whole flock. She was, with this belief, in good company. The great reformer, Calvin, had declared that it was a Christian duty to destroy the preachers of false gods; he did indeed burn the Spanish theologian Servetus for his views concerning the Trinity. Cranmer had celebrated the burning of the Anabaptist Joan Bocher. Nobody really doubted the merit of burning, therefore, only its convenience in an already unsettled society.

In the four years of the stake almost 300 men and women perished, the preponderance coming from the southeast of England where religious reform had been most welcome. Under the auspices of Bishop Bonner 112 Londoners were killed, but only one man was burned in Yorkshire. This may be a sign of the incidence of the new faith in the north of England, but it may also reflect the unwillingness of the authorities there to persecute unto death. The majority of those who suffered were artisans and tradesmen, the independent workers of the community.

The great question put to them by their interrogators was ‘How say you to the sacrament of the altar?’ If they did not believe that Christ’s body and blood were physically as well as spiritually present in the bread and the wine, they were condemned for heresy. Bishop Bonner came to a judgment with the phrase, ‘for thou must needs be one of them’. To which the prisoner replied, ‘Yea, my lord, I am one of them.’ Another man spoke out with defiance: ‘Thought is free, my lord,’ he said. It was ordained that the more recalcitrant of them could be put to the torture. Three months before her death the queen sent a letter of complaint to the sheriff of Hampshire; his offence was to cancel the burning of a man who had recanted at the first lick of the flame. It was thus that she earned the soubriquet of ‘Bloody Mary’.

John Foxe, in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, created a narrative of suffering that for centuries acted as a Protestant folk legend after its publication in 1563; he evoked a series of tableaux in which wicked priests and dissemblers destroyed the practitioners of the true religion. Yet these martyrs were not all of the same faith; among them were those who denied the divinity of Christ or who condemned the practice of infant baptism or who questioned the doctrine of the Trinity. When they were incarcerated in the same prison they often refused to pray together. It should be noted, in passing, that in the succeeding reign of Elizabeth some 200 Catholics were strangled or disembowelled. Many of those who died would also have been burned under the religious policy of Henry VIII.

Yet Foxe’s book effectively demonized Catholicism in England in the latter part of the sixteenth century; it would always after that date be fringed with fire.

24

An age of anxiety

Mary had not at the moment of the cardinal’s benediction. There was to be no blessed fruit. In April 1555, Elizabeth had been summoned under close guard from Woodstock to Whitehall, so that the heir presumptive might be present at the birth of the heir apparent. It was also a sensible precaution if the queen should die in the course of childbirth. Philip visited the princess two or three days after her arrival, and it was reported that subsequently he asked his wife to show forgiveness to her sister. The king also gave Elizabeth a diamond valued at 4,000 ducats. She claimed in later life that Philip had fallen in love with her, but it is more probable that he feared for his own safety in the event of his wife’s death. The people might rise up in revolt against him.

Mary was not in good health. The Venetian envoy reported that ‘she is not of strong constitution, and of late she suffers from headache and serious affection of the heart, so that she is often obliged to take medicine and also to be blooded. She is of very spare diet.’ He also reported that a young man had proclaimed himself to be the true Edward VI and thus ‘raised a tumult among the populace’; he was whipped through the streets and his ears cropped, but the incident could have done little for the queen’s serenity. Unrest was in the air. Any crowd that gathered in the streets of London was dispersed. The summer of the year was bleak and wet; the crops failed and the fields were turned to mud. In the sixteenth century this was a natural disaster. The prices of staple commodities doubled and even tripled. There was the genuine prospect of death by starvation.

The happy moment of royal birth was supposed to arrive at the end of April. Mary retired to the relative peace of Hampton Court. The bells rang, and the Te Deum was sung in St Paul’s Cathedral; nothing transpired. Mary still professed herself to be confident, however, and said that she felt the motions of the child. The priests and choirboys continued to process through the streets of London, at the head of the poor men and women from the almshouses who were telling their beads on behalf of their sovereign. The Holy Sacrament was paraded along Cheapside in a blaze of candlelight. Yet all the prayers were in vain. There was to be no child. She remained in seclusion throughout the month of May; she sat upon the floor, her knees drawn up to her face, in an agony of despair.

She wept and prayed. She believed that God had punished her. And her sin? She had failed in her duty to extirpate all the heretics in the realm; the beast of schism still endured. She came to believe that she would not safely be delivered of a child until all the heretics in prison were burned. On 24 May she directed a circular to her bishops urging them to show more speed and diligence in their pursuit of ‘disordered persons’. A holocaust of burnt offerings might bring fertility to her.

The affairs of the realm were in suspense. The imperial ambassador wrote to his emperor that ‘I foresee convulsions and disturbances such as no pen can describe’. He also repeated the rumours that Mary had never been pregnant or, more damagingly, that a convenient newborn male child would be conveyed to her bed. There were also fears that the queen was in fact barren, and would never produce an heir. It was possible that a cyst or tumour had provoked this phantom pregnancy, in which case her condition might prove fatal.

Elizabeth was summoned to Hampton Court from Woodstock, where much to the displeasure of the queen the courtiers knelt and kissed her hand. She was pressed to ask for pardon from her sister, but she acknowledged no offence. A week later the two women met for the first time in almost two years. Two chroniclers, Foxe and Holinshed, have left reports of this encounter. ‘You will not confess,’ the queen told her, ‘you stand to your truth. I pray God it may so fall out.’

‘If it does not,’ Elizabeth replied, ‘I desire neither favour nor pardon at your hands.’

The queen asked her if she would spread reports that she had been wrongfully punished by her imprisonment at the Tower and at Woodstock. Elizabeth denied any intention of so doing. ‘I have borne the burden,’ she said, ‘and I must bear it.’

The queen merely muttered, in Spanish, ‘Dios sabe ’ – ‘God knows’. Her sister then withdrew from her presence. Yet Elizabeth now remained at liberty.

Philip could not endure a longer stay in England; his anxious and disheartened wife was for him a dead failure. No son of his would now ascend to the throne. ‘Let me know,’ he wrote to an adviser, ‘what line I am to take with the queen about leaving her and about religion. I see I must say something, but God help me!’ His departure was made all the more urgent by the decision of his father, Charles V, to abdicate and to seek solace in a monastery. Philip informed his wife that he would leave her for only two or three weeks, but he was dissembling. At the end of August they parted at Greenwich, since the long journey to Dover would trouble the queen’s health.

The Venetian ambassador was, as always, in attendance. The queen was entirely composed as she accompanied her husband through all the halls and chambers of the palace just before his departure; she stood at the head of the staircase clothed ‘in royal state and dignity’ as he went out of the door towards the water. She then retired to her private chambers overlooking the Thames where ‘thinking she was not observed, she gave scope to her grief in floods of tears’. She watched as the barge slowly disappeared from sight, Philip raising his hat in farewell.

The weeks passed. The queen spent her evenings, after the work of government was done, writing long epistles to her absent husband. He tended to reply with short letters on matters of business. She even went to the trouble of writing to the emperor himself, expressing her ‘unspeakable sadness which I experience because of the absence of the king’. She may also have been receiving news of his dissipations at the imperial court of Brussels; he was feasting and dancing with a joy he had never shown in London. He was also visiting Madame d’Aler, a beautiful woman of whom he was much enamoured. He had other companions. He relished eating lumps of bacon fat, and it was said that his taste in courtesans was not much higher.

In the autumn of 1555 he assumed the leadership of the Spanish territory of the Netherlands and, when Mary wrote asking him to return to her, he replied that he could only come back to England if he were given some role in its governance. It was essentially a polite refusal. England had become for him an expensive distraction. Mary is reported to have told her ladies that she would now revert to the life she had led before her marriage. According to reports she looked ten years older.

The parlous situation of the queen of course encouraged the ambitions of others. Parliament was divided and obstinate, with the queen herself complaining of ‘many violent opposition members’; her advice, in the election of the autumn of 1555, for the return ‘of the wise, grave and Catholic sort’ had not necessarily been followed. No parliamentary parties or groups existed in the modern sense, only a shifting aggregate of discontented individuals. Mary’s administration suffered another blow with the death in November of the chancellor, Stephen Gardiner, from ‘suppression of urine’. The archdeacon of Winchester wrote, from his prison cell, that ‘although the cockatrice be dead, yet his pestilent chickens, with the whore of Babylon, still live’.

An armed conspiracy against the queen was detected at the end of 1555. ‘I am sure you hear,’ Sir Henry Dudley told a friend in confidence, ‘they go about a coronation.’ He was referring to the rumour that Mary was about to crown Philip as king, which would be an intolerable threat to the safety and independence of England. It was enough to stir the ‘western gentlemen’ who now, in secret conspiracy, proposed to march on London and give the crown to Elizabeth; Mary would be sent packing to Brussels and the arms of her husband.

A further refinement came from Sir Henry Dudley himself, who intended to bring in the French. The French king had promised to supply ships and money, with the crews made up of western privateers. The captain of the Isle of Wight was prepared to surrender his island and Dudley undertook to attack Portsmouth, where he would find the cannon out of action. At a midnight audience the French king, Henry II, handed a large sum of money to Dudley and advised him to reconnoitre the coast of Normandy in preparation for an invasion.

The walls of a royal court have ears and eyes. The English ambassador in Paris had been informed of the interview immediately after it had taken place, and he passed on the information to Mary in the form of a cipher. One of the conspirators, in panic fear, betrayed the names of his colleagues to the council. They were arrested and imprisoned; some of them were tortured.

Yet even after their execution Mary could not rest. The French ambassador, recalled at this time of tension, described her ‘dreading every moment that her life might be attempted by her own attendants’. She was ‘deeply troubled’ and saw conspiracies in every corner. The palaces at Whitehall and Greenwich were filled with armed men. She did not appear in public, and slept no more than three hours each night.

The name of Elizabeth had been invoked by the Dudley conspirators, but there was no clear evidence that she was involved in the rebellion; nevertheless, the suspicion was there. The constable of France had written to the French ambassador ordering him to ‘restrain Madame Elizabeth from stirring at all in the affair of which you have written to me, for that would be to ruin everything’. Five of her household servants were arrested, and one of them was found guilty of treason; he was later pardoned. The princess was now heir apparent, and had to be treated with circumspection. Mary tried to dissemble her real feelings but in private she was said always to talk of Elizabeth with scorn and hatred. The atmosphere was further clouded by the persistent rumours that Philip was about to invade the country with an imperial army.

At the beginning of May 1556, a blazing comet appeared in the London sky; it was half the size of the moon and was ‘shooting out fire to great wonder and marvel to the people’. It could be seen flaring for the next seven days and seven nights, thus signifying great changes in the affairs in the world. A gang of twelve men went about the streets predicting the end of the world, but the tumult they caused was a screen for their robberies. More generally the rumours of riot and rebellion grew ever more numerous.

In this age of anxiety Mary now relied primarily upon the counsels of Reginald Pole. At his behest the most celebrated burnings of Mary’s reign were performed at Oxford. The three great bishops of reform – Ridley, Latimer and Cranmer – had been stripped of their rank and solemnly degraded. The worst disgrace was reserved for the archbishop of Canterbury. He had been clothed in his full pontifical robes – except that they were made of rough canvas. As each strip of clothing was pulled from him Bishop Bonner made a speech. ‘This is the man’, he said, ‘that despised the pope, and is now judged by him. This is the man that pulled down churches, and is now judged in a church. This is the man that condemned the sacrament, and is now condemned before it.’ One of those presiding pulled Bonner by the sleeve several times, begging him to stop the abuse of this grave old man. Bonner paid no heed. A barber clipped the hair around the old man’s head and then Cranmer was forced to kneel before Bonner, who began to scrape the tips of the archbishop’s fingers to desecrate the hand that had administered extreme unction. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘are you lord no longer.’ Cranmer was then given a threadbare gown and a townsman’s greasy cap before being surrendered to the secular authorities.

The stake was raised in a ditch outside Balliol College. Ridley and Latimer were the first to die. ‘Oh, be ye there?’ Ridley called out on seeing his colleague.

‘Yea, have after as fast as I can follow.’

When they reached the stake they both knelt down and kissed it. To his friends Ridley gave the small gifts in his possession – some pieces of ginger and nutmeg, his watch. Latimer had nothing to give, but stood meekly as he was stripped to the shroud he wore as a mark of his fate. Ridley was given a small bag of gunpowder to tie around his neck. ‘Have you any for my brother?’

‘Yes, sir, that I have.’

‘Then give it unto him betime, lest you come too late.’

They were tied on opposite sides and, when the lighted faggot was placed at Ridley’s feet, Latimer called out to him: ‘Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’ These words have become perhaps the most celebrated in the entire history of Reformation but they may be the invention of John Foxe in the second edition of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. The truth of the matter cannot be determined.

As the flames leapt up Ridley cried: ‘In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum’ – ‘Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit.’ Latimer cried: ‘Oh Father of heaven receive my soul!’ Latimer seemed to embrace the fire and ‘after that he had stroked his face with his hands, and as it were bathed them a little in the fire, he soon died …’ Ridley was less fortunate. The fire stalled and proceeded only slowly. In his agony he cried out ‘I cannot burn! I cannot burn! Lord have mercy upon me! Let the fire come unto me! I cannot burn!’ The flames were stoked and as they rose higher the bag of gunpowder around his neck exploded. His time had come.

Thomas Cranmer, quondam archbishop of Canterbury, had witnessed the burning of his colleagues from the tower of Bocardo and was of course much moved by the sight. It is reported that he fell to his knees in tears. Some of the tears may have been for himself. He had always given his allegiance to the established state; for him it represented the divine rule. Should he not now obey the monarch and the supreme head of the Church even if she wished to bring back the jurisdiction of Rome? In his conscience he denied papal supremacy. In his conscience, too, he was obliged to obey his sovereign.

Soon after the burning of his colleagues he was removed from Bocardo to the house of the dean of Christ Church, where he was more at ease. He was visited there by a Spanish friar who tried to persuade him of the merits of the Catholic faith. He did indeed issue a series of recantations; whether out of deference to the arguments of the friar, or from fear of a painful death, was soon to be ascertained. He wrote a declaration in which he acknowledged the pope to be supreme head of the Church in England; this was his duty to queen and parliament. In another submission he stated that he believed in all the articles of faith promulgated by the Catholic Church; in particular he accepted the power of the sacraments. On 18 March 1556, in a sixth submission, he confessed himself to be an unworthy sinner who had persecuted the holy Church and stripped the realm of true faith. His was the most significant religious statement in the realm. It was said that one salmon was worth a thousand frogs.

These six statements of belief might have been considered enough to earn him a pardon, or at least a respite from the fire. Yet Cranmer had been the father of schism in England, the most energetic promoter of reform. Mary could not forgive him as the master of heresy any more than she could forget his role in the persecution of her mother. On 20 March he was told that he would be tied to the stake on the following day.

On that last morning he was brought to St Mary’s Church, where he stood on a platform as a sermon was directed against him. He looked ‘the very image of sorrow’. He sometimes raised his face to heaven, and sometimes stared at the ground; he was in tears. He was then expected to deliver a short address in which he would repeat his acceptance of the truths of the Catholic Church. He began by declaring himself to be a miserable penitent who had set forth many sinful writings. It was now believed that he would repeat his belief in the sacraments. But instead he proceeded to recant his recantations and deny the six statements he had previously made. The audience murmured and called out. He had written them, he said, ‘for fear of death’. The university church was now in commotion, and Cranmer had to shout to be heard. ‘And as for the pope. I refuse him, as Christ’s enemy, and Antichrist, with all his false doctrine.’

An attendant lord called out to him ‘Remember yourself, and play the Christian.’

But Cranmer could not be restrained: ‘And as for the sacrament, I believe as I have taught in my book against the bishop of Winchester!’ He did not, in other words, accept the Catholic doctrine on transubstantiation.

The officials pulled him down from the platform and, amid the noise and confusion, hustled him into the rain; he was led towards the stake as the Spanish friar repeated over and over again ‘Non fecisti?’ – ‘You didn’t do it? You didn’t do it?’

He knelt before the stake where he prayed; after he was bound the flames came up quickly, and he put his right hand into the middle of them, saying ‘my unworthy right hand’ for composing the recantations. In the heat he wiped his forehead with his unburnt hand. He died quietly enough, praying ‘Lord Jesus receive my spirit’ as the fire rose around him. On that day Cardinal Pole became archbishop of Canterbury.

25

Nunc Dimittis

On 20 March 1557 Philip returned to England. He was met at Greenwich with a thirty-two-gun salute; the fire of arms was a suitable greeting for a man who had come to talk of war. He had already declared war against Henry II, in defence of imperial interests in France and the Low Countries. Now he wanted the support of his adopted nation. He claimed only that he had come to discuss fresh supplies of grain, but he was in fact looking for arms and men. The queen’s council was not disposed to help him. The country was impoverished, and the people of England were not directly involved in maintaining the interests of the Habsburgs.

Yet the queen was naturally eager to support her husband and actively promoted the cause of war against the larger part of the council who did not wish to intervene in the affairs of Europe. In the presence of Philip she told her councillors that it was her duty to obey her husband in the prosecution of war against a country ‘which was already menacing the whole world’. She summoned the councillors individually to her, and threatened them with deprivation or even death if they did not consent. As the French ambassador commented at the time, Mary would oblige ‘not only men, but also the elements themselves, to consent to her will’. She was as wilful and as imperious as her father or her sister.

Her case was in fact made for her by an attack on Scarborough by two French ships towards the end of April; under the command of an errant nobleman, Sir Thomas Stafford, a small force of men landed and seized the garrison of the castle there. Stafford then declared that the defences of the country were about to be ‘delivered to 12,000 Spaniards before the king’s coronation’.

The invasion was not a success. Stafford and his men were surrounded and captured within three days, but the damage to French interests had been done. It has since been speculated that Stafford had in fact been lured to the English shore by a ‘double agent’ who desired a confrontation with France. Certainly it was a highly convenient attack for those who favoured conflict. War was thereupon declared in June: 7,000 men were to be transported across the Channel to fight the French in the Low Countries. Philip left England in the following month to assume command of his forces.

All seemed to be set fair. The Spanish achieved a remarkable victory outside St Quentin and the English forces arrived two days later to assist in the storming of the city itself; they had not been victorious in battle but at least they had been on the winning side. Bonfires were lit in London and the churches rang with hymns of celebration.

Yet soon enough the fortunes of war changed. A Scottish army came down to the border in a campaign of fire and destruction in support of their traditional ally, and an English force had to be dispatched against them. By the middle of December, the French were also gathering about the neighbourhood of Calais, the last English garrison town in their country. A council of war in the town sent an urgent letter to London for reinforcements; they had few supplies and could not withstand a siege. The queen commanded men to be raised but two days later, on 31 December, countermanded the order on the grounds that ‘she had intelligence that no enterprise was intended against Calais or the Pale’. The Pale was the immediate neighbourhood under English control, covering 120 square miles of territory.

The intelligence given to the queen had been wrong. A French army under the duke of Guise gradually broke down the defences of the English territory and proceeded to besiege Calais itself. Its governor sent a message that he was ‘clean cut off from all relief and aid which he looked to have’. In the first week of the new year, 1558, the town was taken. Its 5,000 inhabitants were shipped back to England. Calais had once been called ‘the brightest jewel in the English crown’. It had been a centre of commerce between England and Europe; a reminder of the Plantagenet empire, it had been held for 211 years. The catastrophe was complete.

It can be argued in hindsight that the French recapture of Calais was in fact a benefit. It had required constant finance for its garrison. At a later date the English historian Thomas Fuller wrote that ‘now it is gone, let it go. It was a beggarly town, which cost England ten times yearly more than it was worth.’ Its loss deterred the English from any further needless meddling in French affairs, and national attention was slowly turned towards the west and the New World. Only a year before, Sebastian Cabot became the director of a new company formally sanctioned by Philip and Mary under the title of ‘Merchant Adventurers of England for the Discoveries of Lands, Territories, Isles and Signories unknown’.

Yet at the time the surrender of Calais was considered to be a calamity. The queen was prostrate with grief and anger. She was used to finding divine providence at work in her affairs and, after this dishonour, it seemed that God had deserted her. One of her household reported later to John Foxe that he had found her sighing. ‘When I am dead and opened,’ she told him, ‘you shall find Calais lying in my heart.’

It was widely believed that the French, now emboldened, would launch an invasion. Parliament voted that a large subsidy should be imposed upon an impoverished and unwilling nation for the purpose of improving the defences. Philip himself proposed to lead a joint army of English and Spanish forces to recapture the town. The council declined the offer on the grounds that there was only ‘a wan hope of recovering Calais’ and that ‘inconveniences might follow’ if the campaign failed. The Spanish connection had in any case proved to be a disaster.

Could it still bear fruit by other means? At the time of the loss of Calais, the queen had persuaded herself that she was pregnant at last. She delayed telling her husband until she was absolutely certain. At the end of March she made her will, ‘foreseeing the great danger which by God’s ordinance remain to all women in their travail of children’. Yet once more it was a delusion born out of hope and fear. By the beginning of May it was clear enough that there was no child. The last hope had gone. Indeed the false signs of an impending birth may have been a symptom of the illness that soon enough would destroy her. From this time forward reports and rumours of her ‘malady’ became ever more common.

Illness was one of the defining features of her reign. In the early months of 1558 an epidemic disease, called the ‘new ague’, descended upon the people; it seems to have been a virulent form of influenza and combined with the prevailing incidence of plague and sweating sickness it cut a vast swathe through the people. The year witnessed the highest mortality rates of the century. This is the vast setting of suffering, from what were called ‘hot burning fevers’, behind the last troubled period of Mary’s rule.

It was still a time for burning in more than one sense. Fewer were left to bring to the stake but the queen still clamoured for their deaths. A congregation of radicals was discovered at a prayer meeting in a field outside London, and thirteen were promptly detained. Seven of them were burned together at Smithfield, on 28 June, while the other six were burned on Bishop Bonner’s orders at dead of night in Brentford. Mary had sent out a proclamation forbidding anyone to approach, touch, comfort, or speak to a heretic on the path to the stake; the penalty for doing so was death.

In the summer of the year Mary removed from Hampton Court to Whitehall, where she was reported to be in a state of profound depression. ‘The truth is,’ one ambassador related, ‘that her malady is evidently incurable, and will end her life sooner or later, according to the increase or decrease of her mental anxieties, which harass her more than the disease, however dangerous it may be.’ Those anxieties must have been exacerbated by her realization that she was slowly losing the love and trust of her subjects. The loss of Calais had emphasized the fact that she was an unlucky queen; in the sixteenth century fortune, or providence, was seen as the evidence of divine judgment. Philip was told that, after Calais, only a third of the previous number of worshippers went to Mass. The religious exiles vented their anger and malice from the cities of Europe, none more vituperative than John Knox in The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. ‘I fear not to say,’ he stated, ‘that the day of vengeance which shall apprehend that horrible monster Jezebel of England, and such as maintain her monstrous cruelty, is already appointed in the council of the eternal.’

By the beginning of September it was clear that she was mortally ill. There were times when she lay in a state of torpor. She contracted a fever, perhaps part of the epidemic that was passing across the country. In the following month Philip was informed that his wife was about to die.

The attention of the realm and its councillors now turned towards Elizabeth. She knew that the crown would soon be hers. When an envoy from Philip called upon her, to remind her of the favour shown to her by his master, she was noticeably cool. She would inherit the kingdom without any help from him, and went on to inform the ambassador that her sister had lost the loyalty of the country when she married a foreigner. In that supposition, she may have been correct. In any event she did not intend to make the same mistake. The envoy concluded that ‘she is a very vain and clever woman’.

On 5 November Parliament had sent an urgent request to the council that its members should persuade the queen to ‘accept Madam Elizabeth as her sister and heiress, and to inform her of this in loving terms’. The queen assented to the statement and asked only that her successor should pay her debts and make no changes in the national religion. Elizabeth of course chose to ignore this, just as she ignored all the provisions of Mary’s formal will. By the time the message was conveyed to her at Hatfield House she was already assembling her court. She had also taken the precaution of soliciting military help, if and when it should prove necessary.

When a Spanish envoy arrived on 9 November, it was clear that Mary could not recover. According to her closest household servant, Jane Dormer, she comforted those who attended her; she told them that she had dreamed of ‘seeing little children like angels play before her singing pleasing notes, giving her more than earthly comfort’. She must have hoped, too, that she would soon be received by angels. She died at six o’clock on the morning of 17 November during the celebration of Mass.

Cardinal Pole received the news at Lambeth; he himself was close to death, as a consequence of the epidemic of fever, and it must be assumed that this further blow was enough to destroy him. He died twelve hours later, at seven o’clock in the evening. When the message of her sister’s death reached Elizabeth she sank to her knees and called out ‘O domino factum est istud, et est mirabile in oculis nostris ’ – ‘It is the work of the Lord, and it is marvellous in our eyes’.

At eight o’clock, two hours after Mary’s death, parliament was summoned with an announcement that Elizabeth was now ‘queen of this realm’. The Commons answered with ‘God save Queen Elizabeth, long may she reign over us’. The bells rang out and the bonfires blazed; tables were set outside the houses of the richer citizens, where ale and wine were distributed.

Yet some mourned Mary’s passing. In his funeral sermon the bishop of Winchester praised the dead queen for her many virtues and her piety, mentioning the fact that her knees had hardened with her incessant kneeling. Yet the new queen was ‘a lady of great virtue whom we are bound to obey, for you know, “a living dog is better than a dead lion” ’. For that injudicious remark he was deprived of his see. Meanwhile the English court was buying up all the cloths of silk at Antwerp in readiness for the coronation.

26

A virgin queen

Elizabeth began her progress to London in the last week of November, attended by a grand concourse of lords and ladies and gentlemen. A procession of bishops met her at Highgate and knelt in homage; she gave each one of them her hand to kiss, with the notable exception of Bishop Bonner. The reputation of ‘Bloody Bonner’ had preceded him. The queen had given an early sign of her true religious allegiances.

She remained at the Charterhouse for five days before taking formal possession of the Tower as the preliminary to her coronation. She rode in state along the streets of the city, where she was greeted by choirs of children and the salutations of scholars. As she entered the Tower itself she remarked to those standing about her that ‘some have fallen from princes of this land to be prisoners in this place. I am raised from being prisoner in this place to be prince of this land.’ It is reported that she went immediately to the apartment in which she had been confined, and fell to her knees in prayer.

The great scholar and magus John Dee was asked to cast a horoscope for the most propitious day of coronation. He hit upon Sunday 15 January 1559, and so the preceding day was chosen for her grand procession through the streets of London from the Tower towards Westminster. Accompanied by 1,000 horsemen she was carried in an open litter covered with gold brocade; she wore a rich robe of state, made out of cloth of gold and lined with ermine.

It was a day of high ceremony in which the queen performed her part with great skill and relish. She waved at the spectators and called out greetings to them. ‘God bless you, my people!’ She raised her hands in surprise and delight; she listened with great seriousness as a child prattled a short oration, ‘with a perpetual attentiveness in her face and a marvellous change of look, as if the child’s words touched her person’. She accepted with grace the little nosegays and branches of rosemary that the poor women of London pressed upon her. Her expressions of joy and amusement were marked by everyone. ‘God save you all!’ ‘I thank you with all my heart!’ When passing through Cheapside she was observed to smile broadly. ‘I have just overheard one say in the crowd,’ she confided to an attendant, ‘I remember old King Harry the eighth.’ She had retained her father’s ability to embody the national spirit. When an English Bible was lowered into her chariot on a silken string she received it with both her hands, kissed it and clasped it to her chest. ‘I thank the city for this present, and esteem it above all others.’ When prayers were said for the return of true religion she raised her eyes to heaven and cried ‘Amen!’

Many pageants were set up on stages along her path. The allegory of Time and Truth had been erected at the Little Conduit in Cheapside. She asked for the identity of an old man holding a scythe and an hourglass, but of course she already knew the answer. ‘Time,’ she was told. ‘Time!’ she declared. ‘And time has brought me here!’ As she passed through Temple Bar, she called out to the populace ‘Be ye well assured, I will stand your good queen.’

There was, however, a problem concerning the coronation. The archbishop of Canterbury was dead. The archbishop of York refused to crown her as supreme head of the Church, and the surviving Catholic bishops followed his example. The bishop of Carlisle was eventually persuaded to play the part at the abbey, however, on the understanding that the queen would take the ancient oath used by her Catholic predecessors. The controversies in matters of faith were only just beginning.

Another obstacle could have been found. According to canon law Elizabeth was illegitimate and therefore barred from the throne. The most considerable candidate for the throne therefore became Mary Stuart, the queen of the Scots, who was the great-granddaughter of Henry VII and who conveniently enough happened to be a Catholic. Mary was married to the dauphin of France, soon to become crowned as Francis II; it was at this time that the young couple began to quarter the English arms with those of France as a token of proprietorship. Elizabeth and Mary would ever after be engaged in a duel that would end in death.

On the day of Elizabeth’s coronation she made the journey from Westminster Hall to the abbey on foot. She trod upon a rich crimson carpet and, as soon as she had passed, it was cut away by the spectators. Her hair hung loose as a token of her virginity. As she arrived at the portals of the church all the bells of London rang out in unison. When the members of the congregation were asked if they wished Elizabeth to be their queen, they cried out ‘Yes!’ Then the organs and the fifes, the drums and the trumpets, resounded. The coronation banquet in Westminster Hall began at three o’clock in the afternoon and ended at one o’clock of the following morning.

She had met her privy council at Hatfield even before her entry into London. Twenty-nine of Mary’s appointed men soon withdrew or were asked to resign; only six powerful nobles remained at the table, among them the earls of Arundel and Bedford, together with certain bureaucrats whose experience was invaluable. The clerics and the Catholics had gone. The members of the council represented a lay body, drawn from the nobility and from the elite trained at Cambridge and the Inns of Court; they were also largely interrelated and, at a slightly later date, eighteen out of twentyfive were related to each other and to Elizabeth herself.

One of her most important appointments was that of Robert Dudley, later earl of Leicester, as her master of the horse. He came from a great, if tainted, family. He was the son of the duke of Northumberland, who had tried to place Lady Jane Grey on the throne, and became a childhood friend of Elizabeth at the age of seven or eight; they may subsequently have met in the Tower, where both were for a while incarcerated. ‘I only show him favour,’ she is reported to have said, ‘because of his goodness to me when I was in trouble during the reign of my sister.’ In any event they established an enduring and affectionate relationship that subsequently became the source of much scandal.

The women about the queen were her distant relatives from suitably noble families. She was always accompanied by seven ladies of the bedchamber and by six maids of honour, all of them dressed in black or white or a medley of the two. She did not wish any of her attendants to mar the effect of her brightly coloured gowns. Strict rules were imposed upon them. They were never to speak to her about affairs of state and they were never, ever, to be betrothed or to marry without her permission. Some of them were consigned to prison for their disobedience in the matter. She herself naturally stood out. She had a somewhat swarthy complexion, like that of her mother, but she plastered her face with egg-white, alum and other agents so that it attained in time a luminous whiteness; she had a face considered too long to be entirely beautiful, but her eyes were large and expressive. She had the reddish-golden hair of her father, and the high cheekbones of her mother. Her nose was slightly hooked, lending her an eagle-like appearance.

She had appointed Sir William Cecil as her principal secretary of state, telling him that ‘without respect to my private will, you will give me that council which you think best’. On that account she was not to be disappointed. Cecil remained by her side until the end of his life. She called him her ‘spirit’ and addressed him as ‘Sir Spirit’. He had first served in the reign of Edward VI and had managed to retain the favour even of Mary as the most able and industrious administrator of the day. It was his habit to draw up elaborate analyses of a particular problem, with the arguments for and against a policy summarized in two columns. He favoured a middle course in affairs of state and religion, and in this respect he was closely attuned to the wishes of his mistress. The Elizabethan historian William Camden wrote that ‘of all men of genius he was most a drudge; of all men of business the most a genius’. He was also, in every sense, a survivor.

He knew well enough that the problems and dangers facing the queen were severe. A former clerk of the council under Edward VI sent an address to the new council with his own summary of the nation’s affairs. ‘The queen poor; the realm exhausted; the nobility poor and decayed; good captains and soldiers wanting; the people out of order; justice not executed; all things dear; excesses in meat, diet and apparel; divisions among ourselves; war with France; the French king bestriding the realm, having one foot in Calais and the other in Scotland; steadfast enemies, but no steadfast friends.’

That is why the new ministers about her urged for caution above all else – caution in religious policy and caution in foreign affairs. One of Cecil’s aphorisms was to the effect that the realm gains more from one year of peace than from ten years of war. Elizabeth shared his belief, knowing well that war was an expense she could not afford; the treasury was bare. It was necessary to accept the loss of Calais, therefore, and come to peace with France. It was also wise to reach some agreement with Scotland for the safety of the northern border. Some said that there was not a wall in England strong enough to stand a cannon shot.

Yet in some matters she was quick. When the Fellows of King’s College Cambridge wrote to her asking for advice on the election of a new provost, she replied with a name by return of post.

In the winter of 1558, even before Elizabeth’s coronation, a paper was drawn up with the title ‘Device for the Alteration of Religion’. It is likely to have been the work of William Cecil; he was himself a supporter of the reformed faith. In the document he urges a full restoration of the ‘true religion’ as it existed in the reign of Edward VI, with all the risks this ‘alteration’ implied. The pope would excommunicate the queen, and the French would be able to attack the English as heretics as well as enemies. The Catholic power of Scotland might also be levied against the realm. Internal rebels would be no less dangerous than external foes; the bishops, and many of the judges, would be against the change. A majority of the people might also become discontented and rebellious. Yet the cause of God had to be maintained. Only then would Elizabeth and her nation be secured and glorified. At the end of the year, in this spirit, it was proclaimed that the litany and the Lord’s Prayer might be recited in English.

In practice the ‘alteration’ would prove difficult to implement. Parliament met eleven days after her coronation. When the royal procession entered Westminster Abbey, for the customary Mass before the parliamentary session, the queen was met by a group of monks bearing lighted candles. ‘Away with these torches,’ she called out, ‘we see very well.’ In the succeeding sermon the preacher denounced monks in particular for their part in the Marian persecution of heretics, and he urged the queen not to countenance ‘idolatry’ in her country. It was also well understood that the service in the royal chapel was predominantly Protestant in spirit, doing away with the elevation of the host. She would never countenance the demands of Rome. How could Elizabeth have embraced a faith that had denounced her mother as a prostitute and herself as a bastard? And she abhorred the smell of incense.

She had no affection for theological niceties. Although she once stated that she had studied divinity from childhood, she believed that controversies over religion were ‘as ropes of sand or sea-slime leading to the moon’. ‘There is only one Jesus Christ,’ she told the French ambassador, ‘the rest is a dispute over trifles.’ Her own religious opinions are difficult to discern; she had a liking for elaborate choral music and appreciated much of the ritual of the Roman communion; she called herself a Protestant, but kept a small crucifix in the royal chapel which the more radical members of the new faith deemed to be idolatry. She also had a strong dislike for married priests.

A succession of bills was passed in the early months of 1559. The religious laws of the time of Edward VI were reintroduced and the English service was resumed. Private bills were passed returning to lay owners certain lands that had been seized by the Marian bishops. The second Edwardian prayer book was once more deemed to be the key to public worship, but it was subtly altered to avoid offending Catholic sensibilities. A reference to the ‘detestable enormities’ of the pope was removed, for example, and the real presence of Christ in the sacrament was tacitly allowed. In practice the priest would be allowed to wear the same vestments, and stand in the same position, as he had in the previous reign. Elizabeth was content to style herself ‘supreme governor’ rather than ‘supreme head’ of the Church in England. Christ was the head.

The Elizabethan ‘settlement’, as it later became known, was designed to pursue a middle course. Yet it was by no means wholly popular. The Catholic bishops in the Lords were opposed to the measures and eventually the Act of Uniformity, designed to reinforce the Book of Common Prayer, was passed by only three votes. A debate between Catholics and Protestants in Westminster Hall settled nothing. One of the disputants was described as ‘turning himself towards all quarters, and into every possible attitude, stamping with his feet, throwing his arms, bending his sides, snapping his fingers, alternately elevating and depressing his eyebrows’. After the debate Elizabeth was obliged to imprison two Catholic bishops, in order to prevent them from excommunicating her in public. This was also a means of diminishing the opposition to her proposals in the Lords. The Commons were committed to the measures, but many of the Lords were defiantly hostile. In the end it was a close-run thing.

The queen wished to calm any form of disputation; she set herself the task of creating a broad consensus with which both the reformers and the orthodox could live in peace. The settlement, if such it was, did not in fact please either party. The Catholics lamented the reversal of Mary’s policies, while the reformers were inclined to believe that the English Church was still papistical. A Puritan broadside described the Book of Common Prayer as ‘an unperfect book, culled and picked out of that popish dunghill, the Mass book full of all abominations’. This was in fact a mixed religious polity that relied upon compromise and accommodation. The constitution of the Church remained largely unchanged while the liturgy contained ancient, medieval, Lutheran and Calvinist aspects; it was Protestant in regard to preaching but Catholic in its attention to ritual. It was perhaps the least reformed of all the reformed faiths and promulgated no uniform theology. This ramshackle contraption was designed to hold as many passengers as before. So Elizabeth had remained cautious. Towards the end of her reign Francis Bacon, the philosopher and statesman, declared that she had no wish to peer into any subject’s soul. She required only outward conformity to the English Church for the sake of order. All the English were obliged to attend their parish churches every Sunday and holy day; the fine for absence was one shilling. The nation had changed its faith four times in twenty years, and the time had come for an end to innovation.

She never allowed anyone to meddle with the order she had established and, with a brief period of interregnum in the seventeenth century, it has remained largely unchanged ever since. One of her advisers remarked that she had ‘placed her Reformation as upon a sure stone to remain constant’. It was a very English settlement; it was practical rather than speculative; it brought together materials that might otherwise have been considered incompatible; it introduced compromise and toleration as well as a fair amount of ambiguity. Its very lack of clarity saved it. In London the reformers preached predestination and justification by faith alone while in York the faithful prayed still on their strings of beads. ‘The difference between Catholics and Lutherans’, the queen told the Spanish ambassador, ‘is not of much importance in substance.’ She required only a settlement that would maintain order and would bring unity to her subjects. More politic reasons for her caution can also be found. She did not wish to lose the support of the Lutheran princes in Germany, nor did she wish to antagonize the Catholic kings of Europe. The religion of the people had a significant foreign context.

Just before the end of the parliamentary session the Speaker of the House of Commons asked permission to present a petition to the queen that was of vital importance to the realm; it contained the wish, or entreaty, that she should marry and bear an heir to the throne. Only then could the peace and stability of the realm be maintained, and the throne itself protected from foreign enemies. She paused before making a long reply in which she expressed her wish to remain in ‘this virgin’s estate wherein you see me’. She alluded mysteriously to the danger that any issue might ‘grow out of kind and become ungracious’. A male heir, in other words, might try to supplant her; this was always the danger for a female sovereign.

She then drew from her finger the coronation ring. She said that she had received the ring on the solemn condition that she was bound in marriage to the realm and would take no other as a partner. It would be quite sufficient if, on her tomb, were inscribed the words ‘Here lieth Elizabeth, which reigned a virgin, and died a virgin’. In that supposition she was to prove correct. The experiences of her mother and of her sister would have warned her of the dangers of the married state, and it was suggested by one of her doctors that her body might not be able to withstand the strain of childbirth. And of course, as she said, she may have feared a male heir. The Spanish king, Philip, her brother-in-law, had in fact proposed marriage to her already; the offer was for a while graciously evaded rather than denied. The direct refusal came later, when she declared that she could not marry him because she was a Protestant.

When parliament finally rose in the second week of May a Spanish bishop summarized the nature of the change. ‘The Holy Sacrament was taken away yesterday from the royal chapel, and Mass was said in English. The bishops who will not swear [the oath of supremacy] will lose their sees; and when they have been deprived the queen will go on progress and institute their successors.’ All except one were indeed deprived of their bishoprics and replaced with more convenient men. The monks and nuns had been scattered to the winds, and the statues of the Virgin and the saints were once more removed from their niches just as the crucifix was banished from the rood loft. The new liturgy was slowly, if grudgingly, accepted; yet within a generation it became the heart of English religion. The heretics of Mary’s realm had been long since freed from their prison cells. Yet not all was peace and light. The people of the north did not care for the new Book of Common Prayer, and whispers of rebellion could once more be heard.

The queen herself had managed her parliament well. With the help of Cecil and other councillors she had successfully manoeuvred between the papists and the more radical clergy newly returned from exile under Mary. In a sense she had already become a symbol of the emerging nation. Her private experiences had directly reflected the travails of the nation. She had been in peril during the reign of Mary and Philip; she had suffered privation and had lived among manifest dangers. She had been a prisoner. Now she had triumphed.

She had gained her ascendancy despite her sex. At court she presided over a largely masculine community of some 1,500 persons, and she had to learn how to dominate her wholly male council. She was a natural diplomat, in turn serpentine and obstinate. She had no need for an army of translators since she herself spoke Latin, Italian, French, Spanish and German. Her intelligence and her quick wit were invaluable; her wilfulness and imperiousness also assisted her in the never-ending battle with the world. The Spanish envoy remarked that she was infinitely more feared than her sister, and gave her orders with as much authority as her father. She once said that she had a great desire ‘to do some act that would make her fame spread abroad in her lifetime and, after, occasion memorial for ever’. No specific act was necessary. It was enough, and more than enough, to be herself.

We may trace from this date, in fact, the beginning of the cult of Elizabeth. She would eventually be hailed as Deborah of fiery spirit from the book of Judges; she was Judith and she was Hester. She was Gloriana and Pandora. She was Astraea, the Greek virgin-goddess of justice who had in the age of gold dwelt among mortals upon the earth; Astraea retired into the sky as the constellation Virgo. The days of the queen’s birthday and accession were treated as national celebrations marked by parades and banquets and music.

Many signs of providence could be found in her destiny. Her birthday, 7 September, was also the feast day of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary. On that day her champion at the tilt, Henry Lee, erected a pavilion ‘like unto a church, wherein were many lamps burning’. The paintings and miniatures and woodcuts portrayed her as an allegorical figure in circumstances of glory. Whether the people of England were wholly dazzled and deceived by these fabrications is another matter. Deep reserves of apathy, and even of cynicism, must have resisted many of the blandishments. It is impossible to gauge the sensibilities and opinions of the English people in the middle of the sixteenth century, but no doubt they were as unruly and as disaffected as every other generation.

Yet Elizabeth came to be defined as the virgin queen (with connotations of another Virgin), whose motto was ‘semper eadem’ or ‘always the same’. That would in time become the truism, and perhaps the tragedy, of her reign.

27

Two queens

In the summer of 1559 Elizabeth issued a series of injunctions in matters concerning religion. The liturgy was to be recited in English, and an English translation of the Bible be placed in every church. Images and monuments ‘of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry, and superstition’ were to be removed from walls and windows, but the fabric of the church was to be repaired or restored. No more wholesale iconoclasm was permitted. The cult of the saints, and prayers for the dead, were abolished.

The processions of Rogationtide, when the people beat the bounds of their parish and invoked blessings on the fields and the folk, were still to be performed. The congregation was ordered to uncover and bow on the pronunciation of the name of Jesus, and to kneel during the reading of the litany. Clergy were to continue to wear their traditional habits, complete with square hats. Wafers, rather than portions of ordinary bread, were to be provided for the time of communion. ‘Modest and distinct’ songs were permitted. All opprobrious names, such as ‘heretic’ or ‘papist’, were forbidden. The injunctions were, in other words, an attempt to compose differences and to soften the acrimony and recrimination attendant on the further change in religion.

Yet the differences were evident at the consecration of the archbishop of Canterbury. Matthew Parker had not wanted to become archbishop. He considered the burden to be too great to bear, and he wrote to inform Cecil that he wished to remain in a private station ‘more meet for my decayed voice, and small quality, than in theatrical and great audience’; he wished to be ‘quite forgotten’. Yet the queen insisted; he had, after all, been her mother’s chaplain. He was told that ‘her pleasure is, that you should repair up hither [to London] with such speed, as you conveniently may’. At the consecration itself only one bishop wore the legally stipulated vestment of the cope; two bishops refused to put on the Romish attire and wore surplices; a fourth believed the surplice to be going too far and wore only the black gown of Geneva. The disagreement did not augur well. All of the fourteen surviving bishops of Mary’s reign had, in the interim, been deprived; some of them spent the rest of their lives in prison for refusing to take the oath of supremacy. Bishop Bonner, for example, was taken to the Marshalsea. He tried to befriend some of the criminals incarcerated there, calling them ‘friends’ and ‘neighbours’. But one of them answered, ‘Go, you beast, into hell, and find your friends there.’

And then there was the matter of the queen’s silver crucifix. For those of reformed faith the crucifix was a papistical idol, in which reverence for an object had been substituted in place of reverence for God. Yet one stood in the queen’s private chapel, with candles burning before it. It was, in the words of one reformer, ‘a foul idol’ placed on ‘the altar of abomination’. Such was the dismay among the clergy that a debate among four bishops was held before the council but, despite their best endeavours, it remained. When the dean of St Paul’s preached to her on the iniquity of crosses, she became very angry. ‘Do not talk about that,’ she called to him. When he returned to the theme she remonstrated with him. ‘Leave that! Leave that! It has nothing to do with your subject and the matter is threadbare.’ He brought his sermon to an abrupt close, and she walked out of the chapel.

On two later occasions the crucifix was attacked and broken up, much to the delight of the bishop of Norwich. ‘A good riddance of such a cross as that! It has continued there too long already, to the great grief of the godly.’ On both occasions a crucifix was restored to the same position. For Elizabeth it was a token of her belief in ritual and order, as well as a way of maintaining her relations with Spain and the Vatican. She told the Spanish ambassador that ‘many people think we are Moors or Turks here, whereas we only differ from the Catholics in things of small importance’. It was also of course a benevolent gesture towards her more orthodox subjects. Soon enough the Catholic requiem for the dead came back in altered guise, with ‘the celebration of the Lord’s supper at funerals’.

In the same spirit of religious conciliation the queen went in the spring of this year on procession to St Mary Spital, in the east of the city, to hear a sermon. She was attended by 1,000 men in full armour, but she was also accompanied by morris dancers and two white bears in a cart. Religion was no longer to be removed from festival. The animals were baited to death after the sermon. Elsewhere in London psalms were being sung in English for the first time since the reign of Edward VI; it was reported that, at Paul’s Cross, some 6,000 people sang together.

He shall be like the tree that groweth fast by the river side:

Which bringeth forth most pleasant fruit in her due time and tide.

The new injunctions were followed by a series of visitations in the late summer to make sure that they had been given practical effect. Some 125 inspectors were chosen, to travel on six separate ‘circuits’ of the country, but the peers and gentry nominated for this task were unable or unwilling to perform it. So the more eager lawyers and clerics were given the job; naturally enough they were keen reformers who anticipated a general cleansing of the churches. All the evidence suggests that in most regions the arrival of the visitors was quickly followed by the removal of altars and images. The bonfires of the Catholic vanities could be seen in London, Exeter, York and other cities. Vestments, statues, banners and ornaments were thrown into the flames. The archbishop of York hailed the destruction of the ‘vessels that were made for Baal’ and the ‘polluted and defiled altars’. It seems that the visitors were more rigorous in the pursuit of superstition than the queen herself would have liked. That is why Elizabeth soon issued a proclamation denouncing the ‘negligence and lack of convenient reverence’ in the maintenance of the churches, citing ‘unmeet and unseemly tables with foul cloths for the communion of the sacraments, and generally leaving the place of prayers desolate of all cleanliness and of meet ornaments for such a place’. It was no doubt left to the clergy to decide of what a ‘meet ornament’ might consist.

In some parts of the country resistance to the changes was still strong, albeit in disguised form. Pictures and images were sometimes merely covered, and the other vestiges of the old faith concealed. Various reasons, apart from piety, can be adduced for this. The most pressing and practical of them concerned the succession. If Elizabeth died without an heir, the Catholic Mary Stuart might become queen and reverse all the previous changes.

The presence of Mary Stuart in the French court emphasized the larger diplomatic problem with which Elizabeth and her council had to deal. Mary was now queen of France, her husband having ascended to the throne as Francis II in 1559, and she also styled herself queen of England. In her absence Scotland was ruled by her mother, Mary of Guise, who had asked for more troops from her home country to defy the Protestant lords of Scotland. French troops had been assembled in Normandy, while the French forts on the north bank of the Tweed were in offensive or defensive array. Invasion was to be feared.

The French court was supposed to be alive with plots to assassinate the English queen. It was claimed that Mary’s uncles, the brothers Guise, had devised a scheme ‘to poison her by means of an Italian named Stephano, a burly man with a black beard, about forty-five years of age, who will offer his services to the queen as an engineer’. Stephano did not arrive. She was in any case surrounded by precautions. No dish arrived at her table untasted, no glove or handkerchief could be presented to her without being carefully examined. She was dosed every week with antidotes against poison.

Another Scottish complication presented itself. The Protestant lords had sent an envoy to the court of Elizabeth, asking for an army to help them remove the French from their country. Elizabeth did not like war. Since the rebellion would effectively injure the status of Mary Stuart, queen of Scotland, it was not necessarily to be assisted or even welcomed. Elizabeth, naturally enough, supported very strongly the claims of a rightful queen. It was not proper to renounce an anointed sovereign. She also had no real affection for the Protestantism of the Scots. The people of that faith were led by John Knox, the reformer who had aimed a cannon of vituperation and malice against the idea of a female sovereign.

William Cecil was a more ardent Protestant and a bolder statesman. He set out a policy that included the invasion of Scotland by an English army and, if necessary, the removal of Mary Stuart from the throne. ‘Anywise kindle the fire,’ he wrote, ‘for, if quenched, the opportunity will not come in our lives.’ It was clear to him that the forces of European Catholicism might now be confronted and defied. He feared a French conspiracy to subvert the English state and the English religion.

The queen hesitated and resisted. She told her council that ‘it was a dangerous matter to enter into war’. Cecil, declaring that the faint hearts and the flatterers were supporting her policy of prevarication, threatened to resign. The leading faint heart, Sir Nicholas Bacon, had asserted ‘safety in moderation’. Secretly she sent money; then she sent a fleet into the Firth of Forth. Eventually, by the end of the year, she was persuaded to send a force of troops into the territory of her northern neighbour; much to the fury and resentment of the queen it failed in its attack upon the French fortress of Leith. The scaling ladders had been too short. The English settled down to a siege, a most unsatisfactory state of affairs. ‘I have had herein such a torment with the Queen’s Majesty,’ Cecil wrote, ‘as an ague hath not in five fits so much abated.’

It was Cecil who had supported the war; it was Cecil who would be obliged to conclude it. The queen ordered him to arrange a peace with the Scots and the French. Much to his dismay he was obliged to obey. The eventual Treaty of Edinburgh, signed in the summer of 1560, was an honourable truce. Both sides agreed to withdraw their troops from the country, with the additional promise that Mary and Francis would surrender their claim to the English throne. England had confronted France and survived the ordeal. This was the lesson which all parties adduced from the affair. Such was the rivalry between Spain and France, also, that Philip was in a certain sense obliged to support the heretic Elizabeth in any rivalry with her neighbour. It could be said that his benign inaction helped to ensure the triumph of the Protestant cause in England.

The treaty was perhaps more than Cecil and Elizabeth had expected, but it had one serious imperfection; Mary herself never signed the document. Mary of Guise had died in that same summer and, with the removal of the French troops, the parliament of Scotland professed the Protestant faith; again the decision was not ratified by the queen, and the dispute between doctrines continued as before. Mary Stuart might have been forgiven for thinking that the rival queen, by means of the treaty, had tried to rob her of the allegiance and loyalty of her subjects. Yet her ushers at the court in Paris still called out, as she passed, ‘Make way for the queen of England!’ Her claim to the throne of England would become the single source of the calamities that would one day descend upon her.

The question of Elizabeth’s marriage remained the most important matter of the realm. The pursuit of Philip II for her hand was copied by other great men of Europe. It was always an advantage to marry a queen. By the autumn of the year ten or twelve eminent suitors were in contention. Two kings, two archdukes, five dukes and two earls vied for mastery. Principal among them were archdukes Charles and Ferdinand of Austria; gambolling up in the rear was Eric of Sweden, the Swedish king’s eldest son. Elizabeth did not disguise the fact that she enjoyed the attention, but she always fell back upon coquetry and dissembling. She had never said that she would never marry but, still, she proposed to remain a virgin. What she said she wanted, she did not want; her stated intentions were always at odds with her real designs. Her settled policy was that of delay and prevarication. The Spanish ambassador wrote that ‘you will see what a pretty business it is to have to treat with this woman, who I think must have a hundred thousand devils in her body, notwithstanding that she is forever telling me that she yearns to be a nun and to pass her time in a cell praying’. It was of course always useful, in an uncertain and dangerous world, to have the grandees of several nations competing for her charms.

In the autumn of the year a Scottish theologian sent to her an account of the fall of her mother, including the scene where Anne Boleyn held up the infant Elizabeth in supplication to her irate husband: a timely reminder of the perils of matrimony. It is likely that it was always her desire to remain single. Had she not already said that she was married to her parliament and to her nation? This was the mystical marriage of state, in which she was made whole by incorporating the male world. It might be termed the body politic. Yet in the circumstances of the age it was a brave and even astonishing decision. It was inconceivable that a woman, let alone a queen, would not choose to marry. Great social prejudice was directed against unmarried females. It flouted the divine, as well as the human, order. An unmarried queen would be subject to ‘dolours and infirmities’ attendant upon the celibate condition. At a later date the archbishop of Canterbury, together with the bishops of London and York, sent her a pastoral letter in which they feared ‘this continued sterility in your Highness’s person to be a token of God’s displeasure towards us’. It imperilled the safety and even the existence of the nation.

There was another player in the pack. Robert Dudley, master of the horse, was part of her close entourage. He was handsome and flamboyant; it was clear that the queen had a great liking and affection for him. In the spring of 1560 it was rumoured that she was visiting his chamber both by day and by night, and the rumours were soon fashioned into a scandal that was even being reported by the foreign envoys at the court. It was whispered that if Dudley’s wife were to die, Elizabeth would marry him. A woman from Brentford was arraigned for claiming that the queen was pregnant with his child. On a progress in the summer of that year, just after the success in Scotland, she travelled along the southern bank of the Thames. Dudley was her constant companion, riding and hunting with her every day. Cecil, seeing that his influence had declined, was considering his position. He told the Spanish ambassador that ‘the queen was conducting herself in such a way that he was about to withdraw from her service. It was a bad sailor who did not make for a port when he saw the storm coming …’

Then, on 8 September 1560, Amy Dudley died in a mysterious manner. She had broken her neck after falling down a staircase. The convenient death of Dudley’s wife provoked ‘grievous and dangerous suspicion and muttering’. Had she been pushed? Had she, perhaps, committed suicide? The queen sent Dudley to his house in Kew, where he seems to have lingered in a state of shock and anxiety. He told one of his servants, Sir Thomas Blount, that ‘the greatness and suddenness of the misfortune doth so perplex me … as I can take no rest’. He knew well enough what ‘the malicious world’ would make of the affair.

When a coroner’s jury was convened to consider the evidence, the verdict was one of death by misadventure. The judgment did not of course silence the rumours of conspiracy, and even of the queen’s participation in a plot to murder Amy Dudley. The rumours were most unlikely. It would have been politically impossible for the queen to have married Dudley after such an event. Those who favour conspiracies might even speculate that Cecil arranged for Amy Dudley to be killed, thus wrecking any chance of marriage and damaging the reputation of Dudley himself.

The nature of the relationship between the favourite and the queen is unknown. Elizabeth had been formed by experience and adversity; she was always cautious and ever watchful. Would she have courted disaster by engaging in a love affair with one of her subjects? The queen was rarely, if ever, alone. She was surrounded by the ladies of her bedchamber and her maids of honour even as she slept; any departure from the rigid ceremonial of her life would have been instantly observed. ‘My life is in the open and I have so many witnesses,’ she said, ‘I cannot understand how so bad a judgement can have been formed of me.’

At this juncture Cecil drew up a memorandum for his own use, in which he summarized the relative attractions of Archduke Charles of Austria, still the favourite candidate for Elizabeth’s hand, and Robert Dudley, master of the horse. The balance sheet is all on the archduke’s side. He reports that ‘in wealth’ Charles had ‘by report three thousand ducats by the year’ whereas Dudley has ‘all of the queen, and in debt’. In ‘friendship’ the archduke had the emperor and the king of Spain as well as various dukes; Dudley had ‘none but such as shall have of the queen’. In reputation Charles was ‘honoured of all men’ whereas Dudley was ‘hated of many. His wife’s death.’ As far as Cecil was concerned, the case was closed. But, as he said, ‘what the queen will determine to do, God only knows’.

At the beginning of 1561 a close companion of Dudley approached the Spanish ambassador with a proposal. He suggested that if Philip II were to approve and assist the marriage of Dudley and the queen, Elizabeth herself might look more favourably on reunion with Rome. On hearing of this manoeuvre Cecil reacted swiftly by discovering a popish conspiracy; he arrested and imprisoned several Catholic priests and gentry on suspicion of attending Mass. The public enthusiasm for his measures was so great that it sent an unmistakable message to Dudley that any proposals for a papal reconciliation would be rejected. ‘I thought it necessary,’ Cecil wrote, ‘to dull the papists’ expectations by discovering of certain Mass-mongers and punishing them.’ A projected visit from the papal nuncio was refused.

It seems most unlikely that Elizabeth herself was party to Dudley’s plan; she had more than enough wit and common sense to know that such a course would be foolish in the extreme. It was in fact in this period that she expressed her most vehement comments about the married state. The archbishop of Canterbury told Cecil that the queen had spoken with such ‘bitterness of the holy estate of matrimony that I was in a horror to hear her’. The context may have been a proposal for the possibility of married clergy, but her wider purport is clear enough. ‘I will have here but one mistress,’ she declared, ‘and no master!’ In her married state she would be a queen; unmarried, she was both king and queen. When an ambassador from one of the German states referred to marriage as a ‘desirable evil’, she laughed. ‘Desirable?’ she asked him. She would rather be a beggar-woman and single than a queen and married.

A further complication had arisen over the succession. Lady Katherine Grey was a younger sister of the unfortunate Jane Grey; as such she could be considered a legitimate heir to the throne if her cousin, Mary Stuart, was denied any claim. But in November 1560 she entered a clandestine marriage with Edward Seymour, son of the late Lord Protector Somerset. As possible heiress and lady of the privy chamber, she had a double duty to ask permission from the queen before any wedding could take place. In fact she had concealed her affair with Seymour, no doubt fearing that Elizabeth would prohibit any further contact. The queen was harsh in matters of the heart, let alone of the succession.

Her reaction, when the news inevitably reached her, was predictably furious. She consigned the young husband and wife to the Tower, to be detained indefinitely. When Katherine Grey gave birth to a son while in confinement, her anxieties increased; the possibility of a male heir materially weakened Elizabeth’s position. She was determined to declare the infant as illegitimate, thus debarring him from the crown. In a display of alarming incompetence, Katherine Grey had in fact lost the marriage documents and had forgotten the name of the cleric who had married them; the one witness to the ceremony had recently died. Fate, or providence, was against her. The child was declared to be a bastard, and Katherine was taken from the Tower and placed under house arrest until her death seven years later. The queen herself believed that ‘there had been great practices and purposes’ behind this dynastic marriage, and it was rumoured by some that Katherine Grey and Edward Seymour were being set up as a possible alternative to her rule.

When Katherine Grey’s younger sister, Mary, also married without official permission she was placed under house arrest; her husband was incarcerated for some years in the Fleet. The marriage was at the time a subject of ribaldry as well as consternation. Mary Grey was a dwarf who was ‘crookbacked and very ugly’ while her husband was 6 feet 8 inches in height and a commoner. They posed no true threat to the queen. Yet it was said at the time that she resented those natural pleasures of others which she denied to herself.

The Crown was indeed surrounded by cares, for once more Mary Stuart came back as a cause of alarm and anxiety. The death of Francis II in December 1560 left her a childless widow in a country which might not welcome her presence among rival factions at the court; her formidable mother-in-law Catherine de Medici, who had become regent of France during the minority of the ten-year-old Charles IX, had ‘a great misliking’ for Mary. Mary Stuart in turn dismissed the lady as no more than the daughter of a merchant. Yet the death of her husband had left the Scottish queen with little status and less authority. It was time to consider a return to her own realm where her position would be more assured.

The Catholic and Protestant parties of Scotland sent envoys to her, asking her to come again into her inheritance. The Catholics urged her to land on the north-east coast of the country where the house of Gordon, a family of ardent Catholics, would welcome her and accompany her to Edinburgh in triumph; the Protestants also wished her to return and come to some accommodation with their religion as a safeguard for the throne. It was clear, in any event, that she would receive an enthusiastic reception.

She sent her own envoy to the court of Elizabeth, asking her cousin for permission to land at an English port on her way to Scotland. The queen of England addressed him in a loud voice in a crowded assembly. She refused the request, adding that Mary should ask for no favours until she had signed the Treaty of Edinburgh in which her claim to the English throne was removed. ‘Let your queen ratify the treaty,’ she said, ‘and she shall experience on my part, either by sea or by land, whatever can be expected from a queen, a relation and a neighbour.’

The English ambassador at Paris was then summoned for an audience with Mary. ‘It will be thought strange,’ she said, ‘among all princes and countries, that she should first animate my subjects against me; and now that I am a widow, hinder my return to my own country.’ She then made an indirect threat. ‘I do not trouble her state or practise with her subjects; yet I know there be in her realm [some] that be inclined enough to hear offers.’ The threat was followed by an insult. ‘Your queen says I am young, and lack experience. I confess I am younger than she is.’ Mary was then only nineteen, but already a practised exponent of sarcasm and innuendo. It was clear that there would be two queens in Albion. John Knox had occasion to meet Mary Stuart. ‘If there be not in her’, he said afterwards, ‘a proud mind, a crafty wit, and an indurate heart against God and his truth, my judgement faileth me.’

She began her journey to Scotland on 15 August 1561. As her ship left the harbour at Calais, another vessel had fallen foul of the soundings and currents of the sea; it began to sink, with the loss of its passengers and crew. ‘Good God!’ Mary cried. ‘What an omen for a voyage!’ What an omen for a reign. On landing at Leith she and her party were dismayed by the poor state of the horses on which they were obliged to ride. Already she lamented the passing of the pomp and splendour of the French court. When she rested that night at the palace of Holyrood a crowd of some 500 Calvinists sang psalms outside her window. On the following morning they threatened her Catholic chaplain, whom they regarded as little more than a priest of Baal. ‘Such’, said the queen, ‘is the beginning of welcome and allegiance from my subjects: what may be the end I know not, but I venture to foretell that it will be very bad.’ These are the words, at least, that she is supposed to have used. There may be an element of hindsight, however, in even the best-conducted histories.

In the summer of 1561, just before Mary returned home, a great prodigy startled London. The medieval spire of St Paul’s Cathedral stood 520 feet from the ground, and 260 feet from the tower; it was constructed out of wood and cased with lead, rising, as it might seem at the time, into the empyrean. On 4 June a thunder cloud descended over the city, rendering it as dark as night. At about two in the afternoon a lightning flash broke out from the depths of the cloud, and a streak of light touched the highest point of the cathedral. It seemed to pass but, early in the evening, a blue mist or smoke was seen to be curling around the ball. Within a minute the cross and the eagle at the summit of the spire crashed down through the roof and onto the floor of the south transept; the lead casing melted and ran down the tower, and soon enough the whole structure was in flames.

It was said that ‘all London rushed to the churchyard’ in consternation. The queen had seen the fire from the windows of her palace at Greenwich. Some sailors moored on the Thames and set up an impromptu line of water-buckets from the river; they then climbed onto the roof with damp hides to suppress the flames. By midnight the fire was extinguished, leaving the cathedral as a blackened and roofless ruin. It was widely considered to be an omen, portending great changes in the affairs of men, but as ever it remained unclear. As for the cathedral itself, the tower was repaired but the spire was never rebuilt.

Some believed that conflagration was caused by papists, using gunpowder or employing the more elusive methods of magic. A commission of inquiry had already been set up in the spring of the year to investigate ‘Mass-mongers and conjurors’, and certain Catholic gentry were arrested for necromancy; various conjurors confessed to using black arts against the queen before they were paraded through the streets of London and placed in the pillory. So the isle was full of rumours. The prophecies of Nostradamus were invoked, and in 1562 twenty booksellers were fined for selling one of his prognostications. In that year, too, various other marvels were announced. The body of a child born with a ruff around its neck, and with hands ‘like a toad’s foot’, was carried to the court. Pigs were born with the noses of men:

The calves and pigs so strange

With other more of such misshape,

Declareth this world’s change.

It was an unfortunate time, perhaps, for Elizabeth to fall sick. In the autumn of 1562, at the end of a letter, she added a postscript. ‘My hot fever prevents me writing more.’ She was at the time resting at the palace of Hampton Court. She took a bath to alleviate the effects of the fever, but instead she caught a chill and quickly succumbed to illness. She was in fact afflicted by the smallpox, from which it was likely that she might die. At a later date she recalled that ‘death possessed almost every joint of me, so as I wished then that the feeble thread of life, which lasted (methought) too long, all too long, might by Clotho’s hand have quietly been cut off ’. (Clotho was one of the Fates who presided over human destiny.) Elizabeth lapsed into unconsciousness, ‘without speech’.

Cecil had been summoned as soon as the queen fell ill, and was told that she might have only a few days to live. The members of the council were called down from London and met at all times of night and day to consider the calamity that was facing them. All the doubts and divisions of the nation now came to a head as they debated the matter of the succession. Mary Stuart was not to be thought of. There could be no second Catholic queen. Of all the candidates Lady Katherine Grey, still in disgrace after her clandestine marriage, was the most favoured. She was, at least, of the reformed faith.

When the fever had cooled sufficiently, the queen returned to consciousness. She believed that she was dying and, as the council crowded around her bed, she asked them to make Dudley the protector of the realm. She told them that she loved him dearly but, invoking God as her witness, declared that ‘nothing unseemly’ had ever taken place between them. Yet the crisis had passed; her native good health reasserted itself, and she remained among the living. The fact of her mortality, however, was now evident to all the nation and to the lady herself. In later years the queen never wished to be reminded of her illness.

28

The thirty-nine steps

The religion of England had always possessed a vital European aspect. At the beginning of the 1560s, for example, it bore a part in the wars of religion that divided France. In matters of faith no nation was an island. In the regency of Catherine de Medici the Catholics and the Huguenots vied for mastery, with the Guise family supporting the Catholics and the house of Bourbon allied with the Protestants. Catherine herself was obliged to maintain some kind of balance between them to preserve the unity of the kingdom. Into this uneasy struggle were in turn drawn the rulers of the other European states, Catholic and Protestant alike; among the former were the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand I, and Philip II of Spain. Elizabeth could not stand apart. To have done so would look like weakness. The balance of the members of her council, who favoured the reformed religion, were also likely to support the Protestant cause.

Elizabeth, as always, vacillated. She never made a decision when one could be avoided. Procrastination was her policy in all the affairs of state. She was no friend to the Calvinist Huguenots, having hated the doctrines of Calvin in the shape of John Knox and The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women; she had an aversion to spending her much needed money in European wars; she had far more cause to watch the affairs of Mary Stuart in Scotland. In any case the prospect of a general religious war in Europe promised manifold perils. It could draw England itself into senseless slaughter. Rich prizes, on the other hand, might be won. One of her advisers wrote to her that ‘it may chance in these garboyls [broils] some occasion may be offered as that again you may be brought into possession of Calais’. Still she remained irresolute. She sent an envoy to Catherine de Medici, promising her help in any mediation.

At the same time Mary Stuart was pressing for a meeting with her English cousin, in which she hoped that Elizabeth would recognize her claim to the throne. Elizabeth herself welcomed the opportunity of seeing her close relative and neighbouring queen. It might also help to pacify the House of Guise, to which Mary was allied through her marriage to the former French king, and promote a truce in France. Yet here, too, infinite dangers threatened. The council voted, without one dissenting voice, against any such interview between the two queens. They believed Mary to be a secret enemy, still pursuing the interests of the Catholic cause on behalf of France. The prospect of another Catholic queen of England was in any case too dreadful to consider.

Elizabeth persisted in her wish to meet the queen of Scots, and promised that she would receive her in Nottingham at the beginning of September 1562. Letters were sent to the authorities of that city, ordering them to prepare for the retinues of two sovereigns amounting to some 4,000 people. News now came, however, that Spanish troops were advancing towards the French border in order to assist the pretensions of the House of Guise. The Protestants might be overwhelmed; Elizabeth’s offers of mediation were now worthless, and any meeting tactless in the extreme. So she cancelled the proposed encounter with Mary. On receiving this news the queen of Scots took to her bed for the whole day.

In desperation the leader of the Huguenot cause, the prince of Condé, appealed to Elizabeth for men and for money. He still controlled Normandy and, in return for her assistance, he promised her Le Havre and Dieppe as securities for the eventual restoration of Calais into English hands. She could no longer hesitate; her reluctance to help the Protestants was ruining her credit on the bourse at Antwerp. On 22 September a treaty was concluded with Condé’s legation at Hampton Court. The queen agreed to send 6,000 troops into France, while also granting a large loan. She wrote to Mary arguing that it was necessary ‘to protect our own houses from destruction when those of our neighbours are on fire’. Need knows no law.

On 2 October an English force left Portsmouth for France and, two days later, had taken possession of Le Havre. This was to be the first step in the repossession of Calais. It is likely that the queen was more interested in that town than in the Protestant cause. Against her express orders a smaller force of English troops had also joined the Protestants in defence of Rouen. The affairs of war are, as she knew well enough, uncertain. Rouen was taken by the Catholic forces of the Guises, and its defenders put to the sword. A bloody battle at Dreux in northwest France, in which thousands were slain on either side, led to an uneasy interval. Catherine de Medici then arranged a truce between Catholics and Protestants, in which the prince of Condé was offered a moderate form of religious toleration. It seemed likely then that, in the saying of the time, the English interest was ‘to be left out at the cart’s tail’.

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 beggars’ 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 southeast 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 bearbaiting 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 Catholic 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.

Foxe also created a new history of the Reformation in which the English Church had restored the ‘old ancient church of Christ’ that had been all the time concealed within the Roman communion. ‘The time of Antichrist’, beginning in approximately ad 1100, had at last been purged. He declared that ‘because God hath so placed us Englishmen here in one commonwealth, also in one church, as in one ship together, let us not mangle or divide the ship’. In this period the commonwealth had connotations of the body politic and the general good; it was the vision of a community that transcended self-interest and the bitterness of faction, with an idealized and productive union between all of the estates of the realm. The aim was a ‘godly commonwealth’.

The English were once more an elect nation. By creating a Protestant historiography Fox had effectively given form and meaning to the newly established religion. The book went through five editions in the reign of Elizabeth and became, after the Bible, the most popular and indispensable of all books of faith. Eventually the order came that it should be placed in every parish church alongside the Paraphrases of Erasmus.

Many of the more avid reformers were dissatisfied with the settlement of religion and waited for a day when further reforms were implemented. One of them, the dean of Wells Cathedral, trained his dog to snatch off the papistical square caps from any conforming clerics who chose to wear them. In the 1560s these radicals still formed part of the restless and dissatisfied Elizabethan Church, but they were already beginning to assert their identity. It was in this period, for example, that the Puritan movement began to be distinguished from the broader Church. One hundred London clergymen had been convoked at Lambeth where a clergyman was paraded before them in the orthodox dress of four-cornered cap, tippet and scholar’s gown. When asked if they would wear the same dress, they were dismayed. ‘Great’, says one observer, ‘was the anguish and distress of those ministers.’ They exclaimed: ‘We shall be killed in our souls for this pollution!’ Eventually sixty-one agreed to don the vestments, and the other thirty-nine were suspended from their duties and given three months to conform.

Other measures were now taken, at the queen’s command, against the stricter Protestants. No licence to perform divine service would be given to anyone who refused to sign a declaration of conformity. As a result many godly preachers retired into private life as lawyers or even doctors; some migrated to the more welcoming air of Scotland, or travelled once more overseas to Zurich or to Geneva. A number of pamphlets and books of sermons espousing the Puritan cause prompted an injunction from the Star Chamber forbidding, on pain of three months’ imprisonment, the publication of any treatise ‘against the queen’s injunctions’.