Mary Tudor (44 page)
By Christmas 1558 it was becoming clear that those who feared for the future of Mary’s Church were fully justified. By then it was too late to argue about Elizabeth’s right to the throne, and in any case they had no plausible alternative. The best that they could hope to do was to muster sufficient strength in Parliament to deter the queen from whatever changes she may have had in mind. Had Cardinal Pole still been alive he might have orchestrated a more coherent resistance, although given the ambiguous nature of his own relations with Rome that cannot be assumed. As it was, the leadership of the Church fell to Archbishop Heath of York, a conciliatory man who was as convinced of Elizabeth’s right to the throne as the most militant Protestant. Elizabeth, however, was a pragmatist, and what mattered most to her was the securing of a broad popular base for her authority. Whatever her intentions, and however strong her personal faith, she would not seek to impose a settlement in defiance of the wishes of Parliament – and therein lay the Catholic hope.
Elizabeth, it soon transpired, had a taste for political theatre. Her coronation was fixed for 15 January 1559, and the
joyeuse entrée
into London that traditionally preceded a coronation was a splendid opportunity. All the pageants had been carefully designed in consultation with the revels office, so the appearance of presentations of ‘The seat of worthy governance’, a ‘Decayed commonwealth’, and ‘Deborah taking council with the judges of Israel’ were not coincidental.
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Elizabeth milked the situation hard:
To all that wished her Grace well she gave Hearty Thanks, and to such as bade God save her Grace, she said again God save them all, and thanked with all her heart. So that, on either side there was nothing but gladness, nothing but prayer, nothing but comfort …
Admittedly this account comes from Richard Mulcaster’s official narrative, but it was the kind of interactive performance of which Mary would have been quite incapable. A little later in the proceedings she was presented with an English bible, and ‘as soon as she had received the book, kissed it, and with both her hands held up the same, and so laid it upon her breast’. The Protestant iconography was plain for all to see. The pageant of Deborah was even more explicit. The child who presented it started with:
Jabin, of Canaan king, had long by force of arms,
Oppressed the Israelites; which for God’s people went;
But GOD minding at last, for to redress their harms
The worthy DEBORAH as judge among them sent.
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The implication could hardly have been clearer. The City, with the queen’s connivance and approval, was petitioning for a new start, no less than a revolution in Church and State. ‘Time,’ she said at the presentation of one pageant, ‘hath brought me hither.’ The reference to Mary’s motto, that Truth is the daughter of Time, was also quite explicit. When, at a solemn High Mass, the queen walked out at the rite of Elevation, the gesture was both clear and characteristic. At the coronation mass itself there was no Elevation, on the queen’s instructions, and Elizabeth herself communicated in both kinds. The mass was permitted because it was in accordance with the existing law – but its core symbolism was rejected.
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No one who had witnessed any part of this ceremonial can therefore have been surprised by the bills that were introduced into the Parliament that met on 23 January. Two of these are relevant in this context: one restoring the royal supremacy over the Church, and the second restoring the Protestant Church order of Edward VI. The first of these passed the House of Commons without any controversy. In the House of Lords it was solidly opposed by the bench of bishops, led by Archbishop Heath, who spoke strongly and cogently against it.
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However, the bishops numbered only fifteen in a House of about fifty peers, and although they attracted some lay support, it was nothing like enough to defeat the bill. The uniformity bill also passed the Commons with only a few dissenting voices, but this time it was a different story in the Lords. The bishops were again solidly opposed, as was to be expected, and they attracted considerable lay support. Deadlock or a government defeat seemed likely when the assembly adjourned for Easter. There was considerable speculation about what would happen next. Some believed that the queen had achieved her real objective with the passage of the supremacy bill, and would be content with that – at least for the time being. Others, who knew her commitment better, looked forward to a renewed struggle after the recess. Meanwhile, the convocations, the clerical assemblies that met alongside Parliament, had in a sense cut off her retreat. They had unanimously and unequivocally reasserted a full Catholic position.
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This had no force in law as against the decisions of the Parliament proper, but it did mean that there was no prospect of being able to find a bench of bishops for a restored Henrician Church. Consequently, although the laity would probably have been happy with such a solution, from the queen’s point of view there was no point in settling for supremacy without uniformity.
What actually happened savours of sharp practice. On the initiative of the council (which probably means Cecil), a disputation was arranged between the existing establishment and the challenging reformers. This was a common tactic, which had been used all over Europe when issues of the faith were in question. Heath was perfectly willing to accept such a trial of strength, probably thinking that he and his colleagues held the trump cards. However, for reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained, two of the Catholic disputants, both of them bishops, ignored the procedural rules that had been laid down and agreed by both sides. When they persisted in their refusal to conform, they were imprisoned for contempt.
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The disputation ended inconclusively, but when Parliament reconvened, two of the fifteen bishops were missing. Seizing the opportunity, Bacon pushed the uniformity bill to a division in the Lords, and won by a single vote. So when Parliament was dissolved on 8 May, a new religious settlement came into force. The heresy laws disappeared, and with them both the papal authority and the Catholic faith. Within six months all but one of the surviving bishops of Mary’s reign had been deprived of their sees, and a new Protestant bench was in place, of whom fourteen had been in exile under Mary.
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This was Mary’s most critical defeat: worse than her childlessness; worse even than her failure to prevent Elizabeth’s accession. John Foxe hailed it as the providential vindication of all that the persecuted Protestants had stood for, and in a sense he was right. Mary’s ecclesiastical restoration, although it appeared to be so popular, had yet failed to win hearts and minds where it actually mattered most, among the political elite that represented the realm in Parliament. In the House of Commons, which was the more truly representative body, although not the more powerful, only a handful of voices were raised in defence of the status quo; and in the House of Lords no more than a dozen lay peers stood with the bishops on the strongest part of their agenda.
Why did the restored Catholic Church fail to strike root where it mattered most? One reason, which particularly affected the peers, was that the new settlement was clearly Elizabeth’s will, just as the old one had been Mary’s will. It required both courage and conviction to stand against that will in so public a forum. The Protestant settlement had gone by default partly for that reason in 1553, although Mary had been forced to bargain hard for the return of the papacy. The persecution had also been widely unpopular. Too often it gave the impression of being selectively vindictive and amenable to private agendas. Englishmen were not necessarily heretics at heart, but they did not hate heresy, nor associate it with political subversion in the way that the council sought to persuade them. Sixteenth-century men and women were not squeamish about public executions, and often cheered the demise of felons and traitors, but they did not see heresy as a threat in the same way. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Catholic Church became associated with ‘foreign tyranny’. Henrician propaganda against the papacy had been more effective than anyone realised, and if anyone had asked the man in the street for his religious preference at any time between 1547 and 1560 he would have said ‘religion as King Henry left it’. This was the Old Faith with an English face, and had a resonance that neither the Roman nor the Protestant regimes had. Those who wrote in defence of the Catholic restoration were (for the most part) dutiful or even enthusiastic about the pope,
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but that did not represent general opinion. Most English people – and that included the governing elite – thought of the pope as an interfering foreigner who took money out of the country and did very little in return.
Worse still for Mary’s popularity was the Spanish connection. Why Spaniards should have been so unpopular is a difficult question, bearing in mind that 90 per cent of Englishmen had never met one, and the French, not the Spanish, were the ‘ancient enemy’. London was a special case, because it was so open to influences from Germany and the Low Countries. In spite of the formal courtesies that had greeted his visit there in 1549, Philip had not gone down well with the northern Netherlanders, who contrasted his insular Spanishness with his father’s cosmopolitanism. In Holland and Zeeland Spaniards were regarded as aloof, arrogant – and tyrannical if they were given a chance. These attitudes travelled readily across the North Sea. There were also old resentments over how English merchants had been treated in Spain after Henry had repudiated Catherine of Aragon – what Renard called ‘merchants’ quarrels’.
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However, London was not England, and it may well be that foreign observers (upon whom we are so heavily dependent for our information) were too strongly influenced by attitudes in the capital. Philip’s favourable reception at Winchester would suggest that. Here it is probable that the elite were more fearful than the population at large: fearful of losing lands and offices to intrusive foreigners; fearful of losing places and influence at court; fearful (quite unrealistically) of being coerced by a Spanish Inquisition; and perhaps above all, fearful of seeing the common law subverted. These fears, picked up and amplified by a few strident propagandists, must have filtered down through society in the course of the reign, strengthened no doubt by powerful – although extremely vague – fears of a foreign king on principle.
So Philip got the blame for an unpopular persecution, which was quite unfair; for an unpopular war, which was fair enough; for the loss of Calais; and for everything else that had gone wrong. The fact that he was at daggers drawn with the pope after 1555 made no difference at all, and his bad relations with the merchants of London (who had a lot of contacts) undoubtedly made the situation worse. As a result of feelings so generated, which were often inarticulate but none the less strong for all that, the Old Religion lost something of its Englishness – it became contaminated by both Rome and Spain. As a result Protestantism, which had appeared to be a German or Swiss intrusion under Edward VI, began to acquire patriotic credentials. It would be wrong to exaggerate this tendency, and it could easily have been irrelevant if things had worked out differently in 1559. But as it was, it not only helped to get Elizabeth’s Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity through their critical stages in Parliament, but it also helped to make them enforceable afterwards.
The true legacy of Mary’s major project, therefore, the restored Catholic Church, was not a long-term Catholic establishment, but rather an energetic Catholic opposition and lingering hatred, bitterness and suspicion. It is often said that Mary’s only mistake was to die relatively young. Had she survived even a few more years, the shadows of influenza and of war would have retreated, the Church would have settled down, and Elizabeth would have become so accustomed to dissembling that she would have forgotten where her real faith lay.
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Philip, despairing of offspring, would have contrived to annul his marriage and the realm would have been freed from his contaminating presence. Mary, returned to the status of
femme seule
, would have been the main beneficiary.
Like all such historical speculations, however, this makes a number of assumptions. If Philip had succeeded in annulling his marriage, which is by no means certain, could Mary have survived the trauma and humiliation? Emotionally she never ceased to be dependent upon her husband, and the strains that that induced were never resolved. Even if her health had been more robust than it was, could she have lived with the thought that she had loved, and slept with, a man who was not really her husband? Similarly, there is an assumption that the Protestant opposition would simply have withered away in time. There is absolutely no sign of that happening. The active leadership within England had been largely eliminated by 1558, but the constant stream of ordinary men and women who were prepared to die for their faith showed no sign of drying up. The leadership abroad was also becoming increasingly radical. Men such as Cranmer and Ridley had been loyal upholders of the royal supremacy, and advocates of non-resistance – that had been part of their problem in facing a royal commission – but the likes of Christopher Goodman and John Ponet had no time for non-resistance. If a ruler was ‘ungodly’ (that is, Catholic) he or she should be overthrown, by force if necessary.
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Given the powerful suspicions that lingered on among the lay peers and gentry about the return of ‘sacerdotalism’, priestly power – suspicions that were reflected in the parliamentary votes of 1559 – it is by no means certain that the Church could have gone on enjoying its restored authority and prestige unchallenged. If Philip had remained king, there could well have been another Elizabethan rebellion, which might have succeeded. If Philip had ceased to be king, and Mary had survived, there could well have been religious civil war on the French model. We do not know; but it is not safe to argue that if Mary had lived another twenty years England would have enjoyed a comfortable and safe Catholic future, at least into the following century, and perhaps longer.