Tudors (History of England Vol 2) (35 page)

These were nervous times. Fears of another popular rebellion could not be allayed, and the dearth of resources rendered the government weak. Since the treasury was empty, it was necessary to make peace with France; Northumberland promptly managed this by returning Boulogne to the French king, receiving only half of the promised compensation. Henry VIII’s one conquest had been a costly mistake. The decision was fiercely criticized at the time, as a sign that England was no longer pre-eminent in the affairs of Europe, but it did bring an end to an expensive policy of aggression. As Paget put it in a letter to Northumberland, ‘then was then and now is now’. Calais was the last vestige of what had once been great English possessions in France; that, too, would soon be lost. Northumberland also brought back the English forces from Scotland, thus reversing another of Somerset’s favourite policies. The mercenaries who had helped to put down the rebellions, in west and east, were paid off. The period may perhaps be viewed as one in which for the first time English insularity came to the fore.

The impact of the rebellions can also be recognized in a further parliamentary Act ‘for the punishment of unlawful assemblies and
raising of the king’s subjects’. Northumberland also started work on removing other causes of discontent. He began the complex and difficult task of reversing the debasement of the coinage that had occurred in the previous reign and in the protectorate. In this respect he and his fellow councillors achieved only a small measure of success. Under his leadership the privy council was re-established as the governing forum of the realm.

Lady Mary had once described Northumberland as ‘the most unstable man in England’. He returned the compliment in his belief that she was a serious threat both to him and to the new religious settlement. She was next in line to the throne and, if Edward were to die, Northumberland would be cast into the wilderness or worse. She was also the single most prominent supporter of the old faith. It would perhaps be convenient to kill her, yet the popular outcry would threaten the unity of the kingdom itself. She was also the cousin of the most powerful monarch in Europe, the emperor Charles V, and Northumberland knew that it would be unwise and dangerous to incur his wrath; the emperor had just subdued the rebellious provinces of Germany, and knew precisely how ill-prepared England was for war. In the spring of 1550, however, her privilege of observing the rites of the old religion was denied to her, and she was asked to submit to the Act of Uniformity. The imperial ambassador at once objected to this privation.

From this time forward Mary felt that she was in danger; she told the ambassador that the councillors were ‘wicked and wily in their actions and particularly malevolent towards me’. She believed that they were indeed now planning to murder her. By the summer, therefore, she had drawn up plans to flee by boat to the European mainland, where she might retreat to her cousin’s court in Flanders. At the end of June four imperial warships and four smaller ships approached the English coast near Maldon on the coast of Essex but, at this point, it seems that Mary’s nerve failed her. She repeated, over and over again, ‘What shall I do? What shall become of me?’ The ships retreated, and the princess became ever more closely watched by the council. Her chaplains were ordered to refrain from saying Mass, to which she replied that they were covered by her own immunity.

Edward himself then sent her a letter, partly written in his own hand, in which he condemned her misplaced piety and warned her that ‘in our state it shall miscontent us to permit you, so great a subject, not to keep our laws. Your nearness to us in blood, your greatness in estate and the condition of this time, maketh your fault the greater.’ An implied threat of discipline, or punishment, may be discerned here. In her reply Mary told her brother that his letter had caused her ‘more suffering than any illness, even unto death’. The bad blood between them was a source of much grief and suspicion.

When she was summoned to London to account for herself, she was accompanied by fifty knights wearing velvet coats and chains of gold; an entourage of eighty retainers followed her, each of them displaying a set of rosary beads. The message could not be clearer. But apart from proclaiming her attachment to the old faith, the display was also designed to manifest Mary’s power. If it should come to a fight, there was every chance that she would be the victor. She had the strength of the old faith with her. Two days later she went in procession to Westminster, where thousands of people came out to greet her. Omens and portents were in the air. It was reported that the earth shook as ‘men in harness came down to the ground and faded away’. It was also recorded that ‘three suns appeared, so that men could not discern which was the true sun’.

Edward had just begun keeping a journal, and in his entry for March 1551 he notes that ‘the lady Mary, my sister, came to me at Westminster’. She was called into a meeting with him and his council where it was made plain that he ‘could not bear’ her attendance at Mass.

‘My soul is God’s,’ she replied. ‘I will not change my faith nor dissemble my opinions with contrary doings.’

‘I do not constrain your faith,’ the young king replied. ‘You cannot rule as a king. You must obey as a subject. Your example may breed too much inconvenience.’

A further exchange is reported:

‘Riper age and experience,’ she said, ‘will teach Your Majesty much more yet.’

‘You also may have somewhat to learn. None are too old for that.’

Soon after this a message came from the emperor, Charles V, threatening war if Edward did not allow his sister to hear Mass. He noted that ‘to this no answer was given at this time’. Eventually the reply came that Mary was the king’s subject and was obliged to obey his laws.

Yet much of Northumberland’s time and attention was given to internal dissension and resistance to his own rule. The paramount threat once more was Somerset himself, who, on his return to the council after a brief spell of imprisonment, was devoted to undermining his successor. Somerset had survived the Tower but he had lost most of his authority and significance. For a proud man, this was too much to bear. He began a whispering campaign, or ‘popular murmuring’, against the lord president’s policy.

He established a faction against Northumberland, primarily among his supporters in London, and it is certainly possible that in the last resort he planned some kind of coup against him in parliament; it was said that he had hired an assassin to cut off Northumberland’s head, and that he had incited the citizens of London with drums and trumpets and cries of ‘Liberty!’ The lord president did not wait for him to strike, however, but ordered his arrest in the autumn of 1551. At his subsequent trial he was accused of spreading sedition, by stating, for example, that ‘the covetousness of the gentlemen had given the people reason to rise’. The charge of attempted assassination, however, seems to have been fabricated by Northumberland himself. He in fact admitted the manufacture of evidence on the eve of his own execution, and asked pardon from Somerset’s son.

Great crowds attended Somerset’s execution on Tower Hill. He addressed them from the scaffold, beginning with the words ‘Masters and good fellows . . .’ As he spoke there was a noise ‘as of gunpowder set on fire in a close house bursting out’ and at the same time a sound of galloping horses as of ‘a great number of great horses running on the people to overrun them’. Panic seized the spectators who fled in bewilderment, crying out ‘Jesus save us, Jesus save us’ or ‘This way they come, that way they come, away, away’. There were no horses, and no gunpowder. One lone horse and rider did approach the scaffold, at which point the people cried out ‘Pardon, pardon, pardon. God save the king. God save the
king.’ Somerset, with his cap in his hand, waited for the cries to subside. ‘There is no such thing, good people,’ he said, ‘there is no such thing. It is the ordinance of God thus for to die.’ After a few more words he composed himself and, murmuring ‘Lord Jesus save me’ three times, he gave his rings to the executioner and laid his head on the block for the axe. After the event many rushed to the scaffold to dip their handkerchiefs in the dead man’s blood.

It is reported that the court provided many sports and entertainments for the young king during this period, to ward off any ‘dampy thoughts’. Yet Edward himself seems to have been largely indifferent to his uncle’s fate. He records, in his entry for 22 January 1552, ‘the duke of Somerset had his head cut off upon Towerhill, between eight and nine o’clock in the morning’. Nineteen months later Northumberland would stand on the same spot.

The affairs of the realm, too, were in a state of disarray. The debasement of the currency in the protector’s regime had had the natural consequence of inflating the prices of the basic and most necessary foodstuffs. The harvest of 1551 was poor, the third such harvest in a row; and the European market for English woollens had diminished, with a glut of cloth reported at Antwerp. Money had lost half of its value since the last days of Henry. The cost of flour had doubled, for example, so that the standard halfpenny loaf was half the size; the governors of St Bartholomew’s were obliged to increase the rations to those in their care. There was very little Northumberland and his colleagues could do about these matters; they were effectively helpless in the face of overwhelming misery.

In the summer of that year, compounding all the distress and woe, an epidemic illness known as ‘the great sweat’ or ‘the sweating sickness’ spread through the country. It was also known as ‘Stop, gallant’ on account of the fact that some people who were dancing at court at nine o’clock were dead by eleven. It came at night accompanied by chills and tremors; these were followed by a fever and vomiting. The sweat was manifest soon after the onset of the attack; stupor, and death, followed. In the course of the first few days 1,000 Londoners died, and it claimed 2–3,000 in subsequent weeks. It was said in one London chronicle that ‘if they were suffered to sleep but half a quarter of an hour, they never spake
after, nor had any knowledge, but when they wakened fell into pangs of death’. It was a year of horrors.

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.