Divorced, Beheaded, Died: The History of Britain's Kings and Queens in Bite-Sized Chunks (9 page)

M
ARY
I

Reigned 1553–1558

Mary was born in 1516 at Greenwich Palace, the only surviving child of Henry VIII and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. She was made illegitimate when Henry divorced Catherine, but she was restored to the succession towards the end of her father’s life when he named her next in line to the throne after her half-brother Edward. Edward tried hard to persuade her to abandon her faith, but to no avail – she remained a dedicated Catholic all her life. When Edward died and the Duke of Northumberland raised the Protestant Lady Jane Grey to the throne, she was in grave danger, but she managed to evade arrest. Most of the English people, commoners and nobles alike, were behind her, and after a few uncertain days she was able to march triumphantly into London to claim her rightful throne. Jane was imprisoned and the Duke of Northumberland was executed.

Mary was thirty-eight when she came to the throne, so it was vital that she marry quickly and produce an heir. She chose her cousin Philip of Spain, the Catholic son of the mighty Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, from a shortlist of eligible princes. Philip was ten years younger and the marriage was not successful. Nor was it popular. In 1554, Sir Thomas Wyatt led an unsuccessful revolt against the marriage in Kent, which forced Mary to act decisively. Lady Jane Grey and her husband, Guilford Dudley, were executed and Mary’s Protestant half-sister, Princess Elizabeth, was imprisoned in the Tower for a time.

Mary was committed to the restoration of the Catholic faith, and Parliament set to dismantling the Protestant reforms. Monasteries were reopened and Mass was celebrated again. But the question was whether Mary would revert to Henry’s rather watered-down version of Catholicism or go for full-scale Roman Catholicism. She opted for the latter. The laws of heresy were reinstated and Mary’s regime became more repressive. First, leading Protestant bishops were burnt at the stake and then over 250 English Protestants, many of them ordinary citizens, earning her the nickname ‘Bloody Mary’. The deaths did much to turn the English away from Mary and the Catholic Church. As Catholic exiles returned to England, Protestant exiles fled to Geneva, where a vibrant opposition was set up. Protestant plots abounded.

After a false pregnancy early on in Mary’s marriage, an unhappy Philip had departed for Spain. He became King of Spain in 1556, making Mary Queen of Spain as well as England. Mary joined Philip in a disastrous war against France which led to the loss of Calais, the only surviving English territory there. Philip returned to England only once, in 1557. A second false pregnancy ensued, and Mary died in 1558, possibly of stomach cancer. She died a disappointed woman, knowing that the crown would pass to her non-Catholic sister, Elizabeth. Mary’s husband did not return to say his goodbyes – he had already turned his attention to marrying Elizabeth.

E
LIZABETH
I

Reigned 1558–1603

English Protestants rejoiced when Queen Elizabeth came to power, and Catholics returned to exile on the other side of the English Channel. Before she took the throne, Elizabeth had seen unprecedented religious upheaval, with the country swinging from Catholicism to Protestantism and back again. Her genius was that she found a settlement that reconciled the country to the new religion without wholesale violence, creating a myth of the Virgin Queen, nicknamed ‘Gloriana’ or ‘Good Queen Bess’, that still has power today.

Elizabeth was born in 1533 in Greenwich Palace, the only surviving child of Anne Boleyn, who had Protestant leanings. Despite the execution of her mother, Elizabeth adored and looked up to her father, Henry VIII. She was very intelligent and well educated, being particularly skilled in foreign languages. With the death of Henry, she entered a dangerous period, as others sought to involve her in dynastic plots and intrigues. As a teenager she was sent to live with her father’s sixth wife, the kindly Catherine Parr. When Henry died, Catherine married Thomas Seymour. Seymour would steal kisses from his stepdaughter and was even found to have visited her bedroom. After Catherine’s death, Seymour planned to marry Elizabeth as a possible route to power, but his plot was discovered and he was executed. Elizabeth considered him ‘a man of much wit and very little judgement’; some have claimed that the ‘Seymour affair’ left her emotionally scarred for life.

With the accession of Mary to power, the situation became even more dangerous, as Elizabeth was now the heir apparent and a figurehead for those Protestants who hated the Catholic Queen. After Thomas Wyatt’s rebellion in 1554, Queen Mary had Elizabeth taken to the Tower and questioned, but she was given the benefit of the doubt and was sent into closely guarded exile in the country.

So, when news came to her of Mary’s death in 1558, Elizabeth felt that her survival was ‘the Lord’s doing’. England was a nation in danger of tearing itself apart over the religious controversy. Elizabeth acted cautiously and established the Church of England, retaining some Catholic traditions, such as a hierarchy of bishops, but reinstating the monarchy as head of the Church and reintroducing the
Book of Common Prayer
. She declared herself against religious persecution, saying that she did not want to make ‘windows into men’s souls’ – she was happy as long as her subjects attended Church of England services. But if they didn’t they were heavily fined, and after 1570, when the Pope declared Elizabeth deposed, being an active Catholic became tantamount to being a traitor, and executions – particularly of priests – became more common.

Elizabeth knew how to control Parliament and keep the affection of her people. She was often considered to be very indecisive, wavering particularly over marriage plans, the succession and waging war. But often her prevarication prevented worse problems arising from hasty or wrong decisions. She chose superb and loyal advisors, such as William Cecil (Lord Burghley) and Francis Walsingham, who served her well throughout her reign.

Despite a long procession of eager suitors, Elizabeth never married, although she surrounded herself with handsome courtiers. Her favourite, Robert Dudley, took on the role of consort, and she was enormously fond of him, nicknaming him ‘Sweet Robin’, though whether there was a sexual element to their relationship will never be known.

With no heir to the throne, Elizabeth’s cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, a Catholic descended from Henry VIII’s older sister Margaret, was a serious threat. Mary was forced to abdicate from Scotland and fled to England, where she was imprisoned and became the centre of a series of Catholic plots. Finally, it was discovered that a Catholic nobleman called Anthony Babington was planning a coup to kill Elizabeth and put Mary on the throne. In 1587, Mary was beheaded, although Elizabeth agonized over the decision.

Elizabeth hated the waste of war, but in the 1580s war broke out between England and Spain and she approved piratical raids by Francis Drake and others on the Spanish Main. In 1588, the English triumphed over Spain by defeating the Spanish Armada, a formidable invading force. The Queen rallied her troops at Tilbury with her famous and dramatic speech: ‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king.’

With many of her trusted friends and advisors now dead, Elizabeth found a new favourite in the handsome young Earl of Essex, Robert Devereux. He was shown great favour until he returned without permission from an unsuccessful campaign to put down a rebellion in Ireland in 1599. He was found guilty of dereliction of duty and put under house arrest, whereupon he attempted a farcically unsuccessful coup and was executed in 1601.

After this betrayal, an aging and tired Elizabeth lost much of her former spark. She had trouble sleeping, fell into a depression and died on 24 March 1603.

The Stuarts and the Commonwealth

The Stuarts were Scottish kings, descended from Robert II, the grandson of Robert the Bruce. Bruce’s daughter Marjorie married Walter Stewart (originally Steward) and gave his name to the dynasty.  In the sixteenth century, Mary Queen of Scots, herself a Stewart, married Henry Stuart (Lord Darnley), and their son, James I, was the first of the renamed Stuart dynasty. Apart from James I, who was Protestant, the dynasty had a predilection for High Church forms of Christianity. This led to their downfall at the hands of the Puritan Oliver Cromwell, and the monarchy’s replacement with England’s first republic, known as the Commonwealth. The Stuarts had a slight revival after the Commonwealth ended, withstanding an abdication crisis, but the dynasty petered out when none of Queen Anne’s nineteen children from eighteen pregnancies survived childhood.

J
AMES
I
OF
E
NGLAND;
J
AMES
VI
OF
S
COTLAND

Reigned 1603–1625

James was not a regal king, being considered rather uncouth, but he was shrewd and well-educated, and though he always looked for peaceful solutions, he was not perceived as weak.

He was born in 1566 at Edinburgh Castle, the son of Queen Elizabeth’s cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, and Lord Darnley. Less than a year later, his father had been murdered, his Catholic mother forced to abdicate and he had become James VI of Scotland. Although born a Catholic, James was brought up as a Protestant and a series of Protestant regents ruled Scotland during his youth. From an early age he had a preference for handsome men and he was heavily influenced by his favourites at court.

To increase his chance of succeeding the childless Elizabeth as King of England, James established a policy of peace with England. He gave no support to the Spanish or French, and his response to the execution of his mother in England in 1587 was subdued.

Like Elizabeth in England, James sought to keep the peace between Protestants and Catholics in Scotland by treading a middle ground. Given his sexual inclinations, James’s marriage to Anne of Denmark in 1589 was surprisingly successful – she became pregnant no fewer than twelve times, although only three of their children survived beyond infancy. James accepted her conversion to Catholicism, despite the fact that it could have had disastrous consequences. Instead, he used her faith to his advantage. Once the English throne was his when Elizabeth died in 1603, the Catholics had hopes of toleration, while Protestants believed that he would bring Calvinism to England. He was well received by the English people, but this initial enthusiasm was soon compromised by the preferment James gave to his Scottish favourites. His middle-ground policy also lost him the support of extreme Catholics and Protestants, and his policy of peace with Spain was unpopular with Parliament and the merchants and Protestants.

James commissioned a new version of the Bible in English to ensure that revolutionary and anti-monarchical references in Puritan translations were removed. His
King James Bible
endured for centuries. Another lasting legacy was the Union ‘Jack’ flag, introduced in 1606, which James hoped would signify the union of Scotland and England under one king.

In 1605 a group of Catholic hotheads plotted to blow up the King and Parliament when Parliament was opened on 5 November. A warning letter sent to a leading Catholic peer was disclosed to the government and a search of the cellars below the chamber of the House of Lords revealed Guy Fawkes guarding enough barrels of gunpowder to have killed the royal family and both Houses of Parliament. The other plotters were killed or captured after a siege and the survivors were tortured and then hanged, drawn and quartered. The discovery of the Gunpowder Plot encouraged James in his belief in the divine right of kings – namely, that the king had a God-given right to rule and must therefore be obeyed without question.

Towards the end of this life, the ailing King was increasingly under the influence of his new favourite, George Villiers, whom he had made Duke of Buckingham and who was deeply unpopular. He died in 1625, at his palace at Theobalds Park, with Buckingham at his bedside.

C
HARLES
I

Reigned 1625–1649

Charles had all the attributes of a great king – he was a pious, family man, capable of decisive action as well as compromise. But he combined this with an arrogance and lack of judgement that proved fatal.

He was born in Dunfermline in 1600, the son of James VI of Scotland and Anne of Denmark, and he was just two years old when his father became James I of England. A sickly child, he suffered from rickets which contributed to his small stature. Not expected to inherit the throne, he was thrust into the limelight when his older brother Henry suddenly died. He soon fell under the spell of his father’s favourite, the charismatic but unpopular Duke of Buckingham. In 1623 the two of them went on a harebrained and disastrous expedition to Spain to find Charles a bride, which was such an embarrassment that the Spanish ambassador called for Buckingham’s execution. Soon after he came to the throne, Charles then antagonized Puritan critics by marrying a French Catholic princess, Henrietta Maria, with whom he went on to have nine children.

At the beginning of his reign, Charles decided to take an active role in the draining Thirty Years War in Europe, undoing his father’s policy of peace. The war went badly, directed as it was by the incompetent Buckingham, who also embroiled England in an attack on the French Protestants at La Rochelle. These failures led to an attempt by Parliament to impeach Buckingham, who was assassinated in 1628; Charles then adjourned Parliament in 1629, ruling alone for the next eleven years.

Without the income of parliamentary taxes, Charles used a variety of unconstitutional methods to raise money, which included the sale of trade monopolies, forced loans, payment for knighthoods, the enlargement of the royal forests and the auctioning of orphan heiresses to the highest bidder. Like his father before him, Charles believed in his divine right to rule and that he must be obeyed without question, which did not sit well with the public. In addition, Charles supported an unpopular High Church vision of the Church of England.

In 1640 Charles was forced to call on Parliament in order to raise money after he was defeated by the Scots in an unnecessary war, caused by his attempt to impose an Anglican prayer book on Scotland. Known as the Short Parliament, it achieved little and was dissolved after a month. A second military defeat forced the calling of a second Parliament, the Long Parliament. This time the Puritan opposition was very well organized and the King was forced to accept laws that turned England into what amounted to a constitutional monarchy. In 1642 Charles attempted a coup and led troops into the House of Commons to arrest the parliamentary leadership. But they had been forewarned and had fled to the City of London, where they were protected by a vociferous mob.

Soon afterwards Charles raised the royal standard in Nottingham and the Civil War began. The initial success of the Royalists soon ebbed away as the New Model Army, led by Oliver Cromwell, swept all before it, and in 1647 Charles was imprisoned. At this point, Parliament still hoped to reinstate the King, albeit as a pliant constitutional monarch, but Charles continued to negotiate secretly with potential allies. He fled to the Isle of Wight, and in 1648 the short-lived Second Civil War took place. The Royalists were again defeated and Charles was recaptured. This time there were no plans to restore the monarchy. Charles was tried by a special tribunal, the authority of which he refused to recognize, and was beheaded at Whitehall on 30 January 1649. To many he was a martyr but others believe he brought about his own downfall. Either way, he remains the only English king to be tried for treason and executed.

O
LIVER
C
ROMWELL AND THE
C
OMMONWEALTH

Ruled 1649–1660

Oliver Cromwell was born in Huntingdon in 1599, a member of the gentry. He became a Member of Parliament in 1628, a short-lived role, as Charles I dissolved this Parliament in 1629 and ruled without it for eleven years. He returned as an MP when Parliament was recalled in 1640.

Cromwell had been converted in his thirties to a radical Puritan philosophy, a form of Protestantism which believed the Reformation had not gone far enough, and opposed the supremacy of the monarch in the Church. He was a member of a tightly knit network of Puritans, many of them cousins, who led the opposition to Charles I leading up to the Civil War. But it was the Civil War that brought Cromwell to prominence. When war was declared in 1642, Cromwell raised a regiment to fight against the King, despite initially having little military experience. He described his recruitment techniques thus: ‘I had rather have a plain, russet-coated Captain, that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a Gentle-man and is nothing else.’

In 1645 Cromwell was able to force through reforms that led to the formation of the New Model Army, against which the King’s hierarchical and poorly funded army could not compete. Through decisive action, Cromwell was able to control his army while defeating opposition from all sides – Royalists, Scots and Irish, and Presbyterians, as well as Levellers, Diggers, Ranters and other radicals who sought power for the ordinary citizen.

At the end of the Civil War, Cromwell led negotiations for a possible restoration of the monarchy, but army leaders became convinced that the negotiations were fruitless. In December 1648 Colonel Pride forcibly purged Parliament of members that supported an agreement with the King, and the remaining MPs of the Rump Parliament, as it became known, agreed that Charles should be tried for treason.

When Charles was executed in 1649, Parliament passed an act that abolished the monarchy and set up the Commonwealth, the only time that England was ever a republic. Cromwell was the leading figure in the Council of State, which ruled the new Commonwealth along with the Rump Parliament. He continued to seek a solution to the constitutional crisis, but the existing electorate would have voted for a new Royalist Parliament, and Cromwell would not countenance extending the electorate as he believed only the propertied classes should be given the vote. Military dictatorship thus seemed the only way forward.

Between 1649 and 1650 Cromwell led a successful but bloody campaign against Irish Catholics who had allied themselves with the defeated Royalists. An equally successful campaign against the Scots, who had given their support to the executed King’s son, also called Charles, followed in 1650–51. On his return to England, Cromwell was faced with a troublesome, quarrelling Rump Parliament, who could not agree what form the new constitution should take. The Rump Parliament was dissolved and replaced in 1653 by the Barebone’s Parliament, or Nominated Assembly (as its members were not properly elected); this included Scottish and Irish members but was also dissolved after a short time. In 1653 the Commonwealth was replaced by the Protectorate, in which Cromwell’s overwhelming power was recognized in his election for life as Protector. He refused the crown when he was offered it, but he was king in all but name, even being addressed as ‘Your Highness’.

Cromwell’s successes as a general and as Protector are undoubted. Britain gained a new prestige abroad because of its efficient military forces; opposition in England, Scotland and Ireland was decisively defeated; and religious freedom was successfully extended. But there was no constitutional settlement and the massacre of Catholics in the siege of Drogheda and Wexford in Ireland stain Cromwell’s memory. He died in Westminster in 1658 and his son, Richard, briefly took over as Protector. But Richard could not control the army. The Rump Parliament was recalled and Generals Fleetwood and Lambert attempted to continue the Puritan control, but the country had lost faith in the army. Richard resigned in 1659 and Charles I’s son was invited to take the throne.