Tudors (History of England Vol 2) (49 page)

That is why the reformed services were rendered elastic, if not ambiguous, by openly proposing only what all Christians agreed in believing; the rubric and ceremonial could be subtly changed to match the inclinations of the congregation. Thus Cecil was informed of the multiplicity of worship in 1564 so that ‘some perform divine service and prayers in the chancel; others in the body of the church . . . some keep precisely to the order of the book, some intermix psalms in metre . . . some receive the communion kneeling, others standing; some baptize in a font, some in a basin; some sign with the sign of the cross, others not’.

Confusion also reigned in the wardrobe, with ‘some ministers in a surplice, some without; some with a square cap, some with a round cap, some in a button cap, and some in a round hat; some in scholar’s clothes, and some in others’. Many complaints were made about inattention, and token worship, in the churches. With the interiors stripped bare of their former ornamentation, there was nothing to look at. The alehouses were reported to be full on Sundays, and the people would prefer to go to a bear-baiting than to attend divine service. With the great rituals gone there were many who, in the words of one cleric, ‘love a pot of ale better than a pulpit and a corn-rick better than a church door; who, coming to divine service more for fashion than devotion, are contented after a little capping and kneeling, coughing and spitting’ to sing a psalm or slumber during the sermon. There was also a shortage of reformed ministers, with only 7,000 ordained clergy for 9,000 livings.

It would be unwise, however, to exaggerate the fervency of the Catholic cause. The Venetian ambassador, some eighteen months even before the accession of Elizabeth, had suspected that very few of those under the age of thirty-five were truly Catholic. They did not espouse the new faith but they had lost interest in the old. They had become what one Benedictine called ‘neutrals in religion’. We must suspect, therefore, a very high level of indifference. A man or woman of that age would hardly remember a time when the monarch was not head of the Church, yet such a fact was not likely to inspire devotion.

To indifference might be added uncertainty and confusion. The bishop of Salisbury, preaching before the queen herself, lamented that ‘the poor people lieth forsaken, and left as it were sheep without a guide . . . they are commanded to change their religion, and for lack of instruction they know not whither to turn them: they know not neither what they leave nor what they should receive’. Many were simply ignorant. When an old man was told that he would be saved through Christ he replied, ‘I think I heard of that man you spake of once in a play at Kendal called Corpus Christi play, where there was a man on a tree and blood ran down.’

Some, however, knew precisely what they were supposed to believe. As late as 1572 an anonymous chronicler stated that, outside London, fewer than one in forty were ‘good and devout gospellers’. This small and fervent minority, however, was greatly encouraged by the publication of
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs
in the spring of 1563. It offered a vivid and in many respects horrifying account of those who had burned for their new faith in the previous reign of Mary. Foxe described the plight of a woman, for example, who gave birth while being consumed by flame in Guernsey; the newborn babe was tossed into the fire with its mother. This was once widely dismissed as a fabrication, but other contemporary documents suggest that it did take place as Foxe described. The book’s woodcuts were in themselves a tour de force of hagiography. The work furnished a new litany of saints for a nation that was bereft of them.

Foxe also created a new history of the Reformation in which the English Church had restored the ‘old ancient church of Christ’ that had been all the time concealed within the Roman communion. ‘The time of Antichrist’, beginning in approximately ad 1100, had at last been purged. He declared that ‘because God hath so placed us Englishmen here in one commonwealth, also in one church, as in one ship together, let us not mangle or divide the ship’. In this period the commonwealth had connotations of the body politic and the general good; it was the vision of a community that transcended self-interest and the bitterness of faction, with an idealized and productive union between all of the estates of the realm. The aim was a ‘godly commonwealth’.

The English were once more an elect nation. By creating a
Protestant historiography Fox had effectively given form and meaning to the newly established religion. The book went through five editions in the reign of Elizabeth and became, after the Bible, the most popular and indispensable of all books of faith. Eventually the order came that it should be placed in every parish church alongside the
Paraphrases
of Erasmus.

Many of the more avid reformers were dissatisfied with the settlement of religion and waited for a day when further reforms were implemented. One of them, the dean of Wells Cathedral, trained his dog to snatch off the papistical square caps from any conforming clerics who chose to wear them. In the 1560s these radicals still formed part of the restless and dissatisfied Elizabethan Church, but they were already beginning to assert their identity. It was in this period, for example, that the Puritan movement began to be distinguished from the broader Church. One hundred London clergymen had been convoked at Lambeth where a clergyman was paraded before them in the orthodox dress of four-cornered cap, tippet and scholar’s gown. When asked if they would wear the same dress, they were dismayed. ‘Great’, says one observer, ‘was the anguish and distress of those ministers.’ They exclaimed: ‘We shall be killed in our souls for this pollution!’ Eventually sixty-one agreed to don the vestments, and the other thirty-nine were suspended from their duties and given three months to conform.

Other measures were now taken, at the queen’s command, against the stricter Protestants. No licence to perform divine service would be given to anyone who refused to sign a declaration of conformity. As a result many godly preachers retired into private life as lawyers or even doctors; some migrated to the more welcoming air of Scotland, or travelled once more overseas to Zurich or to Geneva. A number of pamphlets and books of sermons espousing the Puritan cause prompted an injunction from the Star Chamber forbidding, on pain of three months’ imprisonment, the publication of any treatise ‘against the queen’s injunctions’.

The radical sectarians, believing themselves to be persecuted, clung more tightly together. They adopted the book of service used by the Calvinists at Geneva as their model, discarding the conventional English liturgy used by what they called ‘the traditioners’. They were especially active in London. John Stow wrote, in 1567,
that ‘a group who called themselves puritans or unspotted lambs of the lord . . . kept their church in the Minories without Aldgate’. At various times the godly met on a lighter in St Katherine’s Pool, in Pudding Lane, and in a goldsmith’s house along the Strand.

They entertained various opinions on such matters as baptism and predestination but they were united in their fervour for preaching and for the propagation of the Word; they stressed the paramount importance of Scripture; they detested the relics of popery still present within the established religion, and pressed hard for the sanctity of the Sabbath while denouncing the general licentiousness of the age. The essence lay in individual faith mediated by grace and not by any priest. It might be said that the godly emphasized a spiritual, while the traditionalists preferred a visible, Church.

In June 1567 a group of the godly hired Plumbers’ Hall in Chequer Yard, London, ostensibly to celebrate a wedding; in reality they wished to enjoy a day of sermons and of prayers. Word of their plans had reached the city authorities; they were surrounded and some of them were arrested by the sheriffs and taken before the bishop of London. Twenty-four were committed to prison, where they remained for some time. Here perhaps we may glimpse the origin of those religious quarrels that were eventually to divide the nation.

The godly had supporters among the highest in the land. Many of the bishops were naturally sympathetic to their cause. The earl of Leicester was only the most prominent among the nobles who supported the radical reformers; William Cecil was believed to be of the same party, together with other of the queen’s councillors. At the university of Cambridge, too, a prominent group of Puritans began to gather. The queen herself was unmoved. She did not intend to impose orthodoxy, but she demanded conformity. In this, she believed, the peace of the realm consisted. She would not be pushed into doctrinal reform. She did not relish religious change of any kind.

Others were equally sanguine. In
The Apology of the Church of England
John Jewel, bishop of Salisbury, declared in 1562 that ‘we are come as near as we possibly could to the ancient apostolic faith’. He rested this trust upon the fact that ‘we have searched
out of the Holy Bible, which we are sure cannot deceive, our sure form of religion’. These modest reformers believed that they had recovered an ancient truth long lost in the quagmire of popery. Slowly, in the course of this reign, Protestantism became the acquired faith of the majority of the people; they may have conformed out of fear or indifference, but that conformity became by degrees the traditional religion of England. Within a few years none had known any other form of worship. This uniquely monarchical Church was at the turn of the century given the name of Anglican, the product of England.

There was a further reformation for which the queen and her council can claim a certain credit, the reformation of money. Elizabeth called in the debased coin and reduced the quantity of cheap metal used in minting it; for the first time in many years the worth of the coin was now equivalent to its face value. The queen had reversed the decline that had begun in her father’s reign, and such was the achievement that it was commemorated on her tomb. In her epitaph it is listed as her third greatest success after the religious settlement and the maintenance of peace. Piety, peace and prosperity were not to be separated.

The queens of Scotland and of England were still single, and that unusual state presented complications to both women. Mary Stuart was now actively seeking a French or Spanish match; it was rumoured that she might marry Don Carlos, the son of the Spanish king, or even her brother-in-law, Charles IX of France. The power of her country would thereby be redoubled and the threat to her neighbour increased. In an extraordinary act of audacity Elizabeth suggested to the Scottish commissioners at her court that their queen might consider marriage to her own earlier suitor, Robert Dudley; it was even proposed that the two queens might then share a household, with Elizabeth providing the funds. Mary considered the offer for a moment, as another way to the English throne, but she was never really prepared to take up that which Elizabeth had cast off. She was happy to appease her rival with vague promises, but in reality she was looking for a foreign prince.

This led Elizabeth in turn to revisit the question of her own marriage. Once more the prospects of Archduke Charles of Austria were revived, and at the beginning of 1564 she wrote to the Habsburg court that ‘she was ever in courtesy bound to make that choice so as should be for the best of her state and subjects’. She had taken the words of parliament to heart. The great difficulty lay, however, with the archduke’s religion; he was a devout Roman
Catholic who would brook no impediment to the practice of his faith. Robert Dudley was created earl of Leicester in the autumn of 1564 but his new status did not materially assist his suit. He was still the great favourite of the queen, her true knight ‘without fear and without reproach’. At the ceremony itself, in which Dudley received the honour, it was noted by the Scottish ambassador that ‘she could not refrain from putting her hand in his neck to tickle him’. If the queen should take a husband, however, this intimacy would of course be severely curtailed.

So he seems to have determined to thwart the queen’s possible alliance with the archduke. He intrigued with the French to put forward the young Charles IX, but the disparity in age between the fourteen-year-old boy and the thirty-one-year-old woman would have caused only ridicule and disquiet. She said that it would take only a few years for him to desert her, leaving her a discontented old woman. When the Spanish ambassador asked her if she was about to marry the French king, she ‘half hid her face and laughed’.

On the failure of this plan Leicester objected to the archduke on the grounds of his religion, and it is perhaps no coincidence that in this period he emerged as the protector of the true Protestant faith; he supported ‘godly’ ministers, for example, in their remonstrance against the papistical elements of the Book of Common Prayer. In his stance against the marriage he was opposed by Cecil as well as the duke of Norfolk and the earl of Sussex; Sussex himself had travelled to Vienna in order to expedite the union. So there was a division at the heart of the court and of the queen’s council. The retainers of Sussex and of Leicester carried arms ‘as if to try their utmost’; the Sussex party wore yellow ribbons while the supporters of Leicester sported purple. The queen ordered them ‘not to meddle with’ one another and to lay down their weapons. Nevertheless, Leicester continued to gather ‘great bands of men with swords and bucklers’. There came a point when the two great nobles exchanged ‘hard words and challenges to fight’, at which point the queen ordered them to ride together through the streets of London in a show of amity. Sussex was eventually created lord president of the council of the north, thus removing him to York. The fracas is a reminder, however, of the tensions between the great nobles that had been so prominent in previous centuries.
The court was still in part a medieval institution. It is probable, too, that the presence of a female queen encouraged the greater nobles around her to assert their masculine power; they were still warlords but they were also in a sense putative lovers competing for her favour.