Great Tales from English History, Book 2 (14 page)

On the death of Henry VIII, Edward’s uncle Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, had taken charge of the boy king as‘Protector
of the Realm’. Seymour was the elder
brother of Henry’s beloved third wife Jane, and it was under his auspices that the new Prayer Book of 1549 was introduced.
But the risings of that year had marked the end of the Protector’s power and provided an opening for John Dudley, son of Edmund
Dudley, the overzealous fundraiser that Henry VIII had executed at the beginning of his reign.

His father’s fate had not deterred John Dudley from the perilous path of Tudor royal service. In the autumn of 1549 his contribution
to the crushing defeat of the Norfolk rebels at the Battle of Dussindale opened the way to him becoming Lord President of
Edward’s Council, and two years later he awarded himself the dukedom of Northumberland. With a boy king on the throne, the
new duke was the effective ruler of England.

Yet Northumberland’s power rested entirely on the fragile health of the real King, and as Edward sickened, the duke resorted
to desperate measures. He persuaded the fevered young monarch to keep the throne from his Catholic sister by altering the
succession in favour of Lady Jane Grey, Edward’s cousin and great-granddaughter of Henry VII (see Tudor family tree, p. xi).
Jane was intelligent and well educated, versed in Greek, Latin and Hebrew — and reliably Protestant. Born in October 1537,
the same month as Edward, she had been brought up with him in the reform-minded household of Henry VIII’s last Queen, Catherine
Parr — Jane and Edward often attended the same lessons.

But the young woman’s greatest attraction, from the Lord President’s point of view, was that she offered a way of entrenching
the Northumberlands in the royal succession. On 26 May 1553 the sixteen-year-old Lady Jane was married, against her will,
to Northumberland’s fourth son Guildford Dudley — her protests overruled by her father Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk, who owed
his elevated title to his old crony Northumberland.

Most of Northumberland’s fellow-councillors were aghast at his naked grab for power. Archbishop Cranmer said he could not
agree to the change until he had spoken personally with the King — but Edward, though drifting in and out of consciousness,
was still set on denying England to Rome. He ordered Cranmer to endorse his Protestant cousin, and the archbishop reluctantly
obeyed. The rest of the Council went along with him.

As letters patent were hastily drawn up declaring that Edward’s two elder sisters Mary and Elizabeth were illegitimate, writs
went out to summon a Parliament that would confirm the new succession. But the royal health was fast failing. By now Edward’s
digestion had ceased to function, and his hair and nails were dropping out. When he coughed he brought up foul-smelling black
sputum. Death came, on 6 July, as a merciful release.

Two days earlier, Northumberland had summoned Princesses Mary and Elizabeth to their brother’s deathbed. But Elizabeth declined
the trap and Mary would move only cautiously. The moment the news of Edward’s death reached her, she retired to Framlingham
Castle in East Anglia and defiantly proclaimed her right to the throne. Down in London, meanwhile, Northumberland was proclaiming
the new
Queen Jane. But as two heralds and a trumpeter made their way through the city, they met with a cold and indifferent response.

’No one present showed any sign of rejoicing,’ reported one diplomat. When one herald cried,Long live the Queen’, the only
response came from the few archers who joined the sad trio.

In East Anglia it was equally clear where people’s sympathies lay. Local gentlemen flocked to Framlingham with horsemen and
retainers to pledge their loyalty to Mary. People who were unable to fight sent money or carts full of beer, bread and freshly
slaughtered meat for the volunteer army, which by 19 July numbered nearly twenty thousand. When Mary rode out to thank them,
she was greeted with‘shouts and acclamations’ as men threw their helmets in the air. The noise frightened her horse so much
she had to dismount and continue on foot through the mile-long encampment, greeting the soldiers personally and thanking them
for their goodwill. Across the country there were enthusiastic demonstrations of support for Henry VIII’s firstborn child,
and local forces were quickly mustered.

It did not take long for the Council in London to get the message. Northumberland had headed north to arrest Mary, but his
venture was clearly doomed. To save their own skins the colleagues he left in London, in a deft about-turn, offered a reward
for his capture and proclaimed Mary’s accession. In an explosion of popular joy people ran wild, crying out the news and dancing
in the streets. As darkness fell, bonfires were lit.’I am unable to describe to you,’wrote one visiting Italian,
nor would you believe the exultation of all men. From a distance the earth must have looked like Mount Etna.’

When Mary entered London on 3 August 1553, the celebrations knew no bounds. By then Northumberland had surrendered and had
been sent to the Tower, where he was executed before the month was out. Lady Jane Grey was also imprisoned, but spared by
Mary — she had clearly been only a pawn in the game.

Unfortunately for Jane, however, one of Mary’s first decisions as Queen was to arrange a marriage for herself to the Catholic
Philip of Spain. Early in 1554 the unpopularity of this’Spanish match’ prompted an uprising by Kentish rebels who reached
the walls of London, and it became clear that the nine-day Queen, who embodied the hope for a Protestant succession, was too
dangerous to be kept alive.

On 12 February 1554, Lady Jane Grey was led out to the block. It was some sort of poetic justice that along with her went
Guildford Dudley, the husband she had not wished to marry, and Henry Grey, the father who had forced her into it.

T
HE SPONTANEOUS REVOLT THAT PUT MARY
Tudor on the throne of England was the only popular uprising to succeed in the 118 years of her dynasty’s rule.’Vox
Populi, Vox Der’,
read the banners that welcomed the daughter of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon to London in the summer of 1553 —‘The voice
of the people is the voice of God.’

England had always felt sympathy, and perhaps a little guilt, over the way that both Mary and her mother had been treated
during the break from Rome. Both women had stayed true to their faith, and now the old religion was back. The altars
and vestments came out of hiding, and once again on feast days people could process and chant in church.

Mary believed in putting her intense personal piety into practice. She took the ceremonies of Maundy Thursday particularly
seriously, covering her finery with a long linen apron to kneel in front of poor women, humbly washing, drying and kissing
their feet. She would turn up at the door of needy households and of poor widows, in particular, dressed not as a queen but
as a gentlewoman with offers of help. She liked to mingle with ordinary villagers, asking if they had enough to live on and,
if they lived on royal estates, whether they were being fairly treated by the officers of the Crown. To judge by the folk
tales told of Mary Tudor’s charitable exploits, the Catholic Queen was a sixteenth-century combination of Mother Teresa and
Diana, Princess of Wales.

But that is not, of course, how‘Bloody Mary’ has been remembered by history, for there was a fanatical and unforgiving core
to her faith. On 30 November 1554, the long and complicated legal process of reuniting the English Church with Rome was finally
completed, with Parliament reinstating the medieval heresy statutes. If condemned by the church courts, heretics would now
be handed over to the civil authorities to endure the grim penalty of burning to death at the stake. Less than three months
later, the executions began.

Before the Reformation the public burning of heretics, which horrifies us today, was generally accepted — even popular. Since
1401, when the activities of the Lollards put burning on the Statute Book, the orthodox Catholic majority
had felt strengthened in their own prospects for salvation by the sight of dissidents being reduced to ashes. Even as Henry
VIII was breaking with Rome in the 1530s, his burning of especially vocal Protestants could be taken as demonstrating a sensible
middle way. But by the 1550s the Protestants were no longer a crazy fringe. They made up a solid and respected minority of
believers, and it was on them that Mary’s zeal now focused.

From an early date, Mary’s fervour worried those around her. In July 1554 she had provoked Protestant sensibilities by her
marriage to the Catholic Philip of Spain — the Kent uprising that cost Lady Jane Grey her life only made Mary more determined
— and even Philip’s Spanish advisers counselled her against inflaming feelings further. But Mary felt she had compromised
enough. Under pressure from her English councillors, many of them inherited from her brother Edward, she had reluctantly agreed
to leave the monastery lands with those who had purchased them. But when it came to dogma, she had God’s work to do. The burnings
started in February 1555 with a selection of heretics both humble and mighty, among them the puritanical former Bishop of
Gloucester, John Hooper.

Hooper was a victim of the local authorities’ inexperience at the practicalities of this rare and specialised form of execution.
They had supplied only two saddle-loads of reeds and faggots — and because the wood was green it burned slowly. Hooper desperately
clasped bundles of reeds to his chest in a vain attempt to hasten the process, but only the bottom half of his body was burning.‘For
God’s love, good people,’ he cried out,‘let me have more fire!’

In these early days the burnings were well attended. For the citizens of Gloucester there was a novelty value, and perhaps
even a ghoulish attraction, in watching their once high-and-mighty bishop agonise in front of their eyes. But the very suffering
began to alter opinion — the smell of burning human flesh turns even the strongest stomach — and the executions of Bishops
Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley at Oxford on 16 October that same year came to symbolise the tragedy of good men being tortured
for their sincere beliefs.

Ridley had been Bishop of London and had played a major role in drafting the Book of Common Prayer of 1549. Latimer was a
populist preacher well known for his sympathy for the poor. Famous for blending theology with everyday social concerns in
open-air sermons that he delivered to large crowds, he had proudly refused the escape route that many radicals took to the
German states and Swiss cities where Protestants were safe. As he and Ridley were being trussed to the same stake, he uttered
the words that would forever evoke Mary’s martyrs:‘Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day,
by God’s grace, light such a candle in England as I trust shall never be put out.’

Though Latimer died quite quickly, suffocated by the smoke and losing consciousness, the fire burned more slowly on Ridley’s
side. As was becoming the custom, his family had bribed the executioner to tie a bag of gunpowder around his neck, but the
flames were not reaching high enough to trigger this ghastly if merciful release.’I cannot burn,’ Ridley cried, screaming
in pain until a guard pulled away some of the damp faggots. Immediately the flames leapt upwards,
and as Ridley swung his head down towards them the gunpowder exploded.

Watching this excruciating agony was the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer. The Catholic authorities were trying
to terrify him into recanting his faith — and they succeeded. Under the pressures of prison life, constant hectoring and sheer
fear, Cranmer signed no less than six recantations, each more abject than the one before. The great architect of England’s
Protestant Reformation was even driven to accept the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation and the authority of the Pope.

But Cranmer still was not spared. Mary’s determination to punish the archbishop who had annulled her mother’s marriage and
proclaimed her a bastard was unassailable. His burning was set for 21 March 1556, on the same spot in Oxford where Ridley
and Latimer had died, and he was led into the university church to pronounce his final, public recantation.

But having embarked on the preamble that the authorities were expecting, Cranmer suddenly changed course. He wished to address,
he said,‘the great thing which so much troubleth my conscience’, and he began to explain that the recantations he had signed
were‘contrary to the truth which I thought in my heart’. As uproar broke out in the church, he raised his voice to a shout:
As for the Pope, I refuse him, as Christ’s enemy and Antichrist!’

The white-bearded ex-archbishop was dragged out and hurried to the stake, where fire was put to the wood without delay. As
the flames licked around him, he extended towards
them the‘unworthy right hand’ with which he had signed his recantations.

Cranmer’s death was a propaganda disaster for Mary’s government. Even loyal Catholics could see the unfairness in someone
who had repeatedly recanted being punished just the same. In the forty-five killing months between 4 February 1555 and 10
November 1558, 283 martyrs — 227 men and 56 women — were burned alive for their faith. By June of that final year Londoners
were reacting with anger and distaste: the burnings, hitherto held in front of St Bartholomew’s Hospital in Smithfield, had
to be shifted to secret places of execution. And elsewhere, things were looking no better for Henry VIII’s eldest child. Earlier
in 1558 her armies had been driven out of the fortified port of Calais, the last vestige of England’s empire across the Channel;
and she herself was mortally ill, dying of a stomach tumour that she had imagined to be a baby that would keep the Catholic
cause alive.