Mary Tudor (46 page)

Financially, the reign ended on a low note because of the war, but the English debt never went out of control (as Philip’s did), and, thanks to the efficiency of Thomas Gresham, English credit in Antwerp remained sound. At the time of her death, and after eighteen months of war, Mary owed about £300,000, mostly in Antwerp. This cost more than £40,000 a year to service, but because credit was sound and because repayments could be recycled through the Merchant Adventurers that was bearable.
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Whether this would have continued, given the rising levels of discontent in the City, we do not know, but it lasted Mary’s lifetime and was quickly picked up by her sister – whose relations with London were much more positive. One of the grouses that Elizabeth’s council had against her predecessor was that she had returned much-needed revenue to the Church. This was true up to a point. The traditional Church dues of ‘first fruits’ had been returned, or rather set off against the remaining monastic pensions, but in fact Mary never carried out her expressed intention of returning all ecclesiastical lands still in the hands of the crown. She went on selling them for her own benefit, as her predecessors had done, and as Elizabeth was to continue to do. The new queen ignored her predecessor’s will, so the only crown revenues that remained in Church hands had been the endowments of the half dozen or so religious houses that had been founded, a matter of some £3,500 a year. As we have seen, the early months of the new reign were full of rumours of financial impropriety and extravagance, involving Philip, Feria, Cardinal Pole and the Church in general. There was hardly any fire to justify all this smoke. Philip had put far more money into England than he had taken out of it, and the re-endowment of the Church had been at a very modest level.

In a way the Church had been another success story. This fact has been concealed partly by high-profile stories of the persecution, and partly by the fact that its achievement was largely dismantled after Mary’s death. There was insufficient time for Pole to do much about improving the quality of the existing clergy, but the universities were overhauled, seminaries decreed (although never established), and several effective manuals of pastoral guidance published.
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There was strong emphasis upon discipline and the sacraments, but neither preaching nor instruction were neglected. Traditional lay piety recovered strongly, but allegiance to the papacy remained weak, and restored English Catholicism continued to show several idiosyncratic traits derived from its Henrician and Edwardian past rather than the Counter-Reformation. Pole and his Spanish helpers were keenly aware of the new devotional fashions and theological emphases that were sweeping the Continent, but transmitted these ideas to the English Church only very incompletely.
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What English Catholics yearned for was an ‘English face’ to the Church, but circumstances largely conspired to deprive them of this. As a result, the majority slipped easily into the new conformity when it was offered to them after 1559, and the main legacy of Pole’s strenuous efforts lay in the large number of dedicated Catholic intellectuals who abandoned Oxford and Cambridge for the Continent in the early 1560s. For many years Catholic survivalism continued to haunt the Elizabethan Church, as conservative clergy and laity conspired to circumvent the law, but it was not from that quarter that the dangerous challenge began to come after 1570. The seminary and Jesuit missions that then began were theologically sophisticated, pastorally committed, and politically subversive. They were also the result of the intellectual exodus, and hence of Pole’s rigorous policies. At the end of the day, their political nature brought about their failure because most Englishmen, however conservative their views, preferred to give their allegiance to their own crown rather than to a distant Italian, even if he did claim to be the Vicar of Christ.

If Mary’s failure can be attributed to a single factor, it was that she and her regime were seen as insufficiently English. This was ironic, as she had never set foot outside England, but the combination of a Spanish mother, a Spanish husband, a cardinal archbishop who had spent twenty years in Italy, the allegiance to a foreign pope and dependence upon an Imperial protector was all simply too much for her insular subjects. They were accustomed to rulers who had defied Europe, in arms or in faith, and had no desire for the safety of a Habsburg embrace and a Universal Church. Elizabeth, it soon transpired, was much more to their taste, and she was so concerned to distance herself from Mary that there has been a general failure to recognise how much she owed to her predecessor. It is time that England’s first queen was better appreciated.

PICTURE SECTION

46. Henry VII, Mary’s grandfather, from the cartoon by Holbein in the National Portrait Gallery.

47. Henry VIII. A statue in the great gate at Trinity College, Cambridge (a royal foundation), showing a mature Henry. About 1541.

48. Catherine of Aragon, Mary’s mother, showing her as a mature woman, about 1520. By an unknown artist.

49. Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife and Mary’s
bête noire
. She was reckoned to be ‘no great beauty’. By an unknown artist.

50. Jane Seymour, Henry’s third wife and the mother of his son, Edward. Painted in 1537 by an unknown artist.

51. Funeral effigy of Elizabeth Blount, Lady Tailboys, Henry’s mistress and the mother of his son Henry Fitzroy.

52. A lady, supposed to be Mary at the age of about seventeen. By Hans Holbein, in the Royal Collection.

53. Henry VIII’s will, dated 30 December 1546. It was signed with stamp rather than the sign manual, which was to cause problems in the future.