Mary I (1553–1558)
Mary ruled for five short years before she succumbed to stomach cancer. Though dumpy and plain, the new queen combined the steely Tudor willpower with a profound Catholicism inherited from her Spanish mother. Despite all the pressures brought to bear by her father and brother, she had refused to abandon her faith, believing that it was her mission to return England to her ancient religion. In this she was actively abetted by the Spanish ambassador, who became one of her most important advisers. Directly she became queen all the Protestant bishops, Hooper, Ridley and Cranmer, were replaced by the ‘Catholic’ bishops of Henry VIII’s reign who had meanwhile been languishing in prison.
Stephen Gardiner, who had been Bishop of Winchester since 1531, though imprisoned for two years under Edward VI, became Mary’s lord chancellor and chief religious adviser. The first act of the new government’s Parliament was to return religion to the state it had been in after Henry’s Reformation: the Six Articles were brought back; Mass was celebrated; those members of the clergy who, like Cranmer, had married were forced to renounce their wives; Edward’s bishops were imprisoned and Protestants were expelled from the country. But the queen had no plans to rest there. By the second year of her reign in November 1554, though she had at first taken the title Supreme Head of the Church, she had repealed the Reformation statutes and returned England to the Church of Rome.
The dissolution of the monasteries had secured the gentry’s and the nobility’s loyalty to the Henrician Reformation. Property also explained the ease with which Mary returned England to Rome. For she was enough of a Tudor pragmatist to agree that the restoration of monastery lands to the Church could be no part of the new settlement. As a result, the transformation of the country back to Roman Catholicism was achieved without incident–the roots of Protestantism in England did not lie deep at mid-century. Later that year Mary’s cousin Cardinal Pole, the papal legate who had been exiled in Rome for so long, returned to England to preside over the dismantling of the Henrician Reformation. He became Archbishop of Canterbury.
Meanwhile Mary’s decision in 1559 to marry her princely cousin, Charles V’s son, who was to become Philip II of Spain, aroused the most vehement opposition in Parliament, Council and the country at large. But she was determined, for everything Spanish aroused her unquestioning reverence. When Ambassador Renard had suggested marriage between herself and Philip she fell into transports of excitement without ever having met her intended, and immediately gave her sacred promise that she would marry none other. There were riots and a rebellion led by Sir Thomas Wyatt, the son of the poet, whose intention was to place Princess Elizabeth on the throne.
Only Mary’s prompt action in riding to the Guildhall in London and telling the crowds that she would postpone the Spanish marriage until it had been agreed by Parliament re-enlisted public support. Though Wyatt proclaimed Elizabeth’s ignorance from the scaffold, Mary did not believe him. Lady Jane and Northumberland were executed and an outraged and terrified Elizabeth was taken by river to the Tower of London, from whence her mother had never returned alive. Here she famously refused to go in through the entrance known as Traitor’s Gate and, sitting down on the flagstones, declined to move. ‘Here landeth as true a subject, being prisoner, as landed at these stairs,’ she said imperiously. And until the sun set and she at last consented to go in, no one dared move her.
But no evidence could be found to convict Elizabeth. She would not have been so foolish to plot openly. Her early life had made her a most circumspect and cautious personality and she had already had to throw herself on her knees and beg for her freedom when Mary’s advisers, such as Bishop Gardiner, had suggested she be arrested because she might form the focus of a Protestant plot. Though Elizabeth spent a couple of grim months in prison convinced that each day would be her last–the scaffold erected to execute Lady Jane Grey remained in place–eventually she was released. She went to live quietly at Woodstock in Oxfordshire and then at Hatfield, north of London. The arrival in London of the grave Philip of Spain, with his flaxen beard and cold eyes, saw not only the return of England to the old religion but the persecution as heretics of those who refused to conform. Cardinal Pole set up a commission to inquire into heresy and soon began burning all the Edwardian bishops. First to go was John Rogers, the Canon of St Paul’s, well known for helping with the translation of the Bible that Cranmer had sponsored. He was followed by Bishop Hooper of Gloucester, whose conscience had stopped him wearing vestments because St Peter would not have worn them. Taken to Smithfield in his long white shift, he was tied to a stake and logs were piled round him until only the upper half of his body could be seen. As the fire slowly consumed him, he never uttered a sound.
The three other most celebrated personalities of the early English Reformation, Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley were all taken to Oxford to be examined in their faith by the new Catholic bishops. Cranmer’s trial was postponed because, having been made archbishop by the pope, his case had to be transferred to Rome. But Latimer and Ridley were condemned to death for denying Transubstantiation, the transforming of the bread and wine at Communion into the Real Body and Blood of Christ. They were trussed back to back at a stake in the town ditch at Oxford. As the flames rose and their agony began, the ever courageous Latimer said to his trembling fellow martyr Ridley, ‘Play the man, brother Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s Grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’
And he was right. Until the Marian martyrs, of whom 300 were burned in the next three years, Protestantism had really been confined to a tiny percentage of the country. But, influenced by the civilizing spirit of the Renaissance, the people of England were more horrified by the burnings under Mary because of the visible human anguish it caused than they would have been in the middle ages. Moreover, the persecution of heretics was all part of the unwelcome Spanish influence under which the country had fallen since the queen’s marriage. The methods of the Spanish Inquisition, which gave Spain a bad name and was soon to be described in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, did more to convert England to Protestantism than all the efforts of the Protestant divines. The queen herself became known as Bloody Mary.
Cranmer too soon met his death by burning. For all his great literary gifts, the former archbishop had never been a very strong character and he was now an old man. After five months of imprisonment, his spirit was broken. He agreed to recant and at Cardinal Pole’s suggestion put his name to papers describing himself as the author of all the evils which had fallen on the nation since Henry VIII. But as one of the chief architects of the Protestant Reformation Cranmer was such a major figure that Cardinal Pole and Queen Mary required a very public renunciation from him. It was arranged that this would take place before a large audience in St Mary’s Church at Oxford.
To everyone’s surprise, at the pulpit Cranmer suddenly showed a courage no one had known he possessed. In a firm voice he denounced the pope as anti-Christ and his doctrine as false. Angry Catholics removed him before he could finish speaking and hurried him to the stake outside. But even then he outwitted them. For Cranmer thrust his right hand into the fire saying loudly, ‘It was that unworthy hand which offended by writing lies and recanting, therefore it must burn first.’
Although it was popularly believed that it was her Spanish advisers who were chiefly responsible for the burnings, in fact Mary herself derived enormous satisfaction from them. Never in rude health, and usually having a poor appetite, she would eat a heartier dinner after a burning had taken place. The emotional gratification that she took from persecuting heretics was one of the few she obtained. Quite soon after the marriage Philip removed himself back to his own kingdom and visited his English wife only periodically when he needed money for the war against France.
The struggle of Valois versus Habsburg, of Henry II of France against Charles V and then Philip II took many surprising shapes and forms. Not the least of these was when Philip forced Mary to declare war on France, and English troops took part in the assault which won the Battle of St Quentin. But like everything to do with Mary the affair ended in disaster. In 1558 in a tit-for-tat action the French high command attacked England’s last possession in France, the port and staple town of Calais. Though its governor had repeatedly warned that he did not possess enough food or soldiers to defend his position Mary’s government misunderstood how urgent the situation was.
When reinforcements finally arrived, it was too late. The war was extremely unpopular and the antipathy towards Philip and Mary herself meant that Parliament was no longer the obedient tool of the crown. It refused to vote supplies. The government could raise money only by forced loans and illegal customs duties. News of the fall of Calais burst upon England like a thunderclap; it was the coup de grâce for Mary’s already poor health. She had miscarried one child. Now she lay dying of a stomach tumour which for many months she had pitifully believed to be a pregnancy. Loathed by her people, her husband far from her side, shortly before she passed away the unhappy queen uttered the immortal words: ‘When I die the word “Calais” will be found engraved on my heart.’ A few hours later on that same day, 17 November, died the other great defender of the ancient faith, Cardinal Pole.
Meanwhile messengers had galloped to Hatfield, where the twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth was living, conscious that with her sister dying childless she was the future queen. The learned Elizabeth was reading the classics under an oak tree when the messengers arrived and hailed her as their sovereign. Then she said very slowly in Latin, ‘This is the Lord’s doing and it is marvellous in our eyes.’ As was remarked at the time, it was a good sign for a queen to be reading books instead of burning them, and so it proved.