The Tudors (69 page)

The Protestants could have found no reason to object to the favors that Elizabeth began showering on her few living relatives, mainly the remnants of her mother’s family, the Boleyns. Among the first to benefit was her cousin Henry Carey, son of Anne Boleyn’s sister Mary and her husband, William Carey. (Actually Henry may have been Elizabeth’s half-brother; the uncertain date of his birth makes it possible, though not probable, that he had been conceived when Mary Boleyn was Henry VIII’s mistress.) He was raised to the peerage as Baron Hunsdon and
granted lands that, by generating some £4,000 annually, vaulted him into the ranks of the richest men in England. This was an extraordinary gesture on Elizabeth’s part; throughout her life she would remain deeply reluctant to create new peerages, and the wealth bestowed on Carey was badly needed by her government. Carey’s older sister Catherine (more likely than her brother to have been King Henry’s child) was made a lady of the queen’s bedchamber, a high honor that Elizabeth would bestow on only about two dozen women in the course of her long reign. Catherine’s husband, Francis Knollys, upon returning from exile on the continent, was given a comparable honor: a seat on the Privy Council. Still another Boleyn cousin, Sir Richard Sackville, also joined the council. Though Knollys and Sackville were not ennobled, both would use the queen’s favor to put their families on courses that would lead to the former’s son becoming a baron and the latter’s an earl. With appointments like these the queen was able to surround herself with people who were entirely dependent on her for their positions, had impeccable Protestant credentials but no plausible claim to the throne, and so could be counted upon to remain absolutely loyal.

One other of the queen’s first appointments must be noted here: the selection of the dashing young Robert Dudley as master of horse. Though he was not put on the council—not yet—Dudley’s new position was highly visible and rather glamorous, and his selection was clear and early evidence of the unique place he held in Elizabeth’s affections. He was the younger of the only two surviving sons of the John Dudley who as Duke of Northumberland had destroyed himself by attempting to put Jane Grey on the throne, and so he was also the grandson of the Edmund Dudley who lost his head at the start of Henry VIII’s reign. Thus for the third time in as many generations a young member of this irrepressible clan won a place close to the throne, and for the second time it was happening in spite of the previous generation’s failure and deep disgrace.

Dudley, like almost everyone singled out for preferment, was allied with the evangelical camp. With his four brothers he had spent the first months of Mary’s reign as a prisoner in the Tower. (Elizabeth was confined there at the same time, though there is no evidence of their having been in contact.) After his release he had withdrawn to a life of obscurity on his father-in-law’s estates in East Anglia. His sudden emergence
as a highly visible member of the new regime formed part of a pattern that must have seemed to ensure a swift and thorough triumph for the Protestant cause. But then January 25 arrived, Elizabeth’s first Parliament assembled at Westminster with the convocation of the clergy in session as well, and it became obvious that the way ahead was not in fact going to be easy.

The new House of Commons, many of its members chosen as usual for their willingness to accept the guidance of the Crown, showed itself from the start to be a potent engine of religious reform. Under Cecil’s direction, and in collaboration with Protestant divines newly returned from the continent, it raised questions about whether the late Queen Mary’s religious legislation could be considered valid in light of her repudiation of the royal supremacy. It began pushing for a restoration of all the powers that Henry VIII had taken for himself, and of King Edward’s Protestant church. But it met with resistance from a surprising number of directions. A struggle developed in which the Crown, the bishops and clergy, the Protestants of the Commons, and conservative and reform factions in the House of Lords all tried to advance their own agendas. Over a period of months the terms of the conflict remained in flux, with the advantage appearing to shift from party to party. Elizabeth and Cecil, as they threaded their way through endless complexities, had to face the possibility that moving too emphatically in an anti-Roman position could bring papal condemnation down upon their heads, and with it the danger of a Spanish-French crusade. Likewise the queen’s Catholic subjects, if pushed too hard, might be driven—might even be led by disgruntled conservative nobles—into armed rebellion. Elizabeth’s relations with Parliament at this early stage are best understood not in terms of any attempt on her part to achieve some specific set of religious objectives but rather as one aspect of her broader struggle to maintain a balance between two contending parties: a fearful conservative majority that the queen and her ministers neither liked nor trusted, and an energized Protestant minority bent on domination. The government’s goal, if only for the time being, was to win acceptance of a purposely ambiguous status quo.

The Privy Council opened the legislative bidding early in February by introducing bills with an aggressively Protestant slant: if enacted they would officially recognize the queen as supreme head, require all members
of the clergy to swear an oath acknowledging her supremacy, and abolish Catholic worship in favor of the Edwardian Prayer Book. Commons not only approved these proposals but toughened them, but the Lords (with a conservative core consisting mainly of the Marian bishops) deleted restoration of the Prayer Book and merely authorized Elizabeth to take the title of supreme head
if
she chose to do so. Archbishop Heath objected even to this, taking the line (which even few women would have challenged in the sixteenth century) that the very idea of a female being head of the church was preposterous. Convocation, meanwhile, was putting itself at odds with queen, council, and Commons by voting to uphold a fully orthodox set of Catholic beliefs, including the bishop of Rome’s supremacy. While all this was transpiring, word arrived that England’s emissaries to a peace conference at Cateau-Cambrésis in France had succeeded in ending Mary’s and Philip’s war on the continent. This was important news. It stopped up a painful drain on the royal treasury. At least as significantly, by demonstrating the willingness of France and Spain to enter into a treaty with England, it eased concerns that both countries might refuse to acknowledge Elizabeth’s legitimacy as queen. International recognition of the new regime, by immediately lessening the danger of a Catholic crusade, strengthened Elizabeth’s domestic situation. She took the opportunity to pause and reconsider her options, adjourning Parliament with nothing resolved.

Her willingness to do as much for the Protestants as she could without putting herself at risk became obvious. What was called an official “discussion” was arranged, ostensibly to give representatives of the conservative and evangelical camps an opportunity to air their views on the future of the church, and any doubts about which side the government favored were put to rest when the leading spokesmen for the Catholic side, the bishops of Winchester and Lincoln, were immediately afterward thrown into prison. This had the considerable advantage, from the Protestant perspective, of removing two staunchly conservative votes from a closely divided House of Lords as the climax of the legislative dispute drew near. When Parliament reconvened on April 3, both houses took up a revision of a supremacy bill that recognized the queen as supreme
governor
rather than
head
of the church, once again separated England from Rome, and re-repealed the heresy laws that Mary’s Parliaments had restored. This bill encountered serious opposition in
the Lords and might have been defeated there if the old bugbear having to do with possible restitution of church lands had not been resurrected to alarm the lay majority one last time. A uniformity bill outlawing the mass in favor of a somewhat watered-down version of the Edwardian Prayer Book (verbal abuse of the pope was deleted from the worship service) passed even more narrowly after being opposed not only by all the bishops but by eleven lay lords including, rather embarrassingly for the Crown, two members of the Privy Council. Thus yet another new English church was born. It was unmistakably a Protestant church, possibly more emphatically Protestant than Elizabeth herself thought prudent. The new legislation had been softened to avoid extinguishing the last hopes of the Catholics, however, and so it served the queen’s chief purpose: it avoided a crisis. Before going further, the government was going to have to weaken the Catholics.

One way to undermine the Catholic party was to eliminate the Marian bishops, and the legislation of 1559 made that possible. Thanks to the breakdown in relations between Mary and Philip and Pope Paul IV, ten of the kingdom’s twenty-seven bishoprics were now vacant. A remarkable number of the remaining bishops were aged and infirm, and with Pole dead and Heath of York wanting to avoid conflict the hierarchy was essentially leaderless. Moreover several of its members—including Cuthbert Tunstal of Durham, who had been bullied into submission by Henry VIII early in the divorce dispute and was now in his mid-eighties—had lived through all the turmoil of the past thirty years and survived by bending under pressure. Elizabeth, not unreasonably, expected that some and possibly all of these men would do the sensible thing and once again repudiate the connection with Rome. She found, however, that almost to a man they were unwilling to make Cranmers of themselves by changing their allegiance yet again. Only Anthony Kitchen of Llandaff in Wales took the uniformity oath. Every one of the others, even those who in the past had shown themselves willing to go wherever the winds of fortune blew, stood fast. One resigned, two died in the months following the passage of the new Uniformity Act, and by the end of the year all the others had been expelled from their offices and either imprisoned or placed under house arrest. This time, however, there would be no executions. Elizabeth was not burdened with her father’s terrible need for capitulation or his willingness
to kill anyone who failed to capitulate abjectly. Determined to put her regime in the sharpest possible contrast to her sister’s, she understood that a resumption of executions would have been entirely counterproductive.

Having decapitated the Marian church, the queen found herself at liberty to fill twenty-six bishoprics with men of her own choosing. This proved to be no simple matter. The most impressive candidates, the men who had departed for the continent rather than conform during Mary’s reign and thereby achieved heroic stature in the eyes of the English Protestant community, had during their years of exile broken up into quarreling factions. The most important factions were the one centered at Frankfurt under Richard Cox, who had been tutor to Prince Edward before Henry VIII’s death and chancellor of Oxford University afterward, and the one at Geneva under the Scotsman John Knox, who had declined a bishopric when Edward was king. Though they had become enemies while in exile, both Cox and Knox were rich in the kinds of credentials that should have brought success under the Elizabethan settlement.

Unfortunately for himself and his followers, however, during the closing months of Mary’s reign Knox had written and published a document with an eye-catchingly dramatic title:
The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women
. This was, in essence, a vitriolic attack on three Catholic rulers: Queen Mary of England; the Frenchwoman Marie of Guise, who was ruling Scotland in the name of her daughter Mary Stuart; and Margaret of Hapsburg, Philip of Spain’s half-sister and his regent in the Netherlands. Knox’s tract excoriated the three for everything he found loathsome about their regimes—their “regiments,” in the diction of the time. He had, however, couched his argument in such broad terms that it easily could be understood as (because in fact it was) a condemnation of rule by women as contrary to nature and therefore “monstrous.” Elizabeth, who in a fantastically bad stroke of timing for Knox became queen just months after its publication, interpreted it in exactly this way. Not only Knox but those associated with him, even that most seminal of Protestant theologians John Calvin, became personae non gratae in England precisely at the moment when their version of Christianity was once again finding acceptance there. Luckily for Knox, a political-religious coup soon gave the Scots evangelicals
control of the government and church in Edinburgh, enabling him to return home and proceed to the next stage of his momentous career as a crusading Puritan and anti-Catholic polemicist. From there he would try without success to persuade Elizabeth that
The First Blast
had never had anything to do with someone as obviously favored by God as she was. Cox meanwhile returned to England, secured for himself the lucrative see of Ely, and resumed his interrupted campaign to purge Oxford of conservative theology; he had the satisfaction of seeing one member after another of his old Frankfurt circle appointed to positions of importance. If not as radical as the Genevan Calvinists, the Coxians, too, were strongly inclined to the austerity that would soon be given the name Puritan. They were just as disposed to look on the old church with horror and only somewhat more willing to enter into alliances of convenience with Protestants less uncompromising than themselves.

The stage seemed set for the triumph of Cox’s party. Elizabeth, however, showed herself to be unwilling to let that happen. Whatever her innermost motives—fear of the consequences of going too far, perhaps, or a personal theology capacious enough to make room for her father’s kind of conservatism—she was soon obstructing her own new bishops. The nominee for Canterbury, Matthew Parker, was the choice not of the queen herself but of Secretary Cecil and Chancellor Bacon, and he was not one of the evangelical heroes returning from exile, having spent the Marian years staying as inconspicuous as possible at home. He had only the narrowest base of support, therefore, and even before his consecration (an honor, it must be acknowledged, that he tried to escape) he found himself at odds with Crown and Parliament. The point of conflict was a piece of legislation called the Act of Exchange, an attempt to allow the government to enrich itself at church expense (yet again) by taking possession of property belonging to the many vacant bishoprics and promising revenues from tithes in return. The Protestant clergy had as much reason as their Catholic predecessors to object to this latest plundering of their resources, and Parker, to the queen’s indignation and the discomfiture of Cecil and Bacon, put himself at the head of the objectors. There ensued a long series of conflicts between Crown and church, and increasingly between different groups of Protestants, that made a misery of Parker’s tenure as archbishop and a confusion of the council’s efforts to manage the church. The queen went to sometimes
outlandish lengths to extract money from the dioceses while staying within the letter of the law. She allowed the Diocese of Ely to remain without a bishop for nineteen years after Cox’s death. Bristol remained vacant for fourteen years, Chichester for seven. There were arcane but bitter conflicts over such questions as what churchmen should be required or permitted or forbidden to wear in the performance of their ceremonial duties.