The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (33 page)

So long as Warwick’s regime remained so unpopular, Somerset’s restoration to primacy was always looked for. Everyone murmured about it; Warwick dreaded it; but was Somerset working towards it? From the moment of his release he began to gather adherents and they laid plans to raise support in Parliament. Somerset saw his best hopes now in leading the leaderless conservatives. Rumour followed rumour: that Somerset would reverse the Edwardian reforms; that he would free Bishop Gardiner; that the Catholic Earls of Derby and Shrewsbury would raise the North. Rumour turned to reality when Somerset and Arundel conceived a plot to assassinate the Earls of Warwick and Northampton at the St George’s Day feast on 23 April. The plot was uncovered, but so uncertain were the times that Warwick could not yet risk arresting his enemies.

The spring and summer of 1551 was a time of grave political instability and economic distress, of portents and prodigies. Most devastating of
all was an epidemic of sweating sickness in July, an illness as sudden as it was deadly. Not until October did Warwick arrest Somerset. The treason charges against Somerset were framed, so Warwick confessed later, but Warwick’s guilt does not exculpate Somerset, who was not innocent. Arundel’s insistence that the plan to arrest Warwick and Northampton intended ‘by the passion of God… no harm to your bodies’ was never credible. Somerset was brought before his fellow peers in December 1551 and condemned for felony, though not for treason. He went to the block on 22 January 1552. At Somerset’s final fall the Council rewarded themselves with greater lands and grander titles. Warwick created the dukedom of Northumberland upon the confiscated Percy earldom and estates, and took it for himself; he planned the dismemberment of the palatinate bishopric of Durham; he assumed the Border office of Warden General. A territorial power base in the North-East was now his. The new resolution in November 1551 that the King could sign all bills passed under the Signet, for his personal commands, without counter-signature by a member of the Council was a way for Dudley, the new Duke of Northumberland, to use his influence over Edward to increase his own authority. Yet the King, bereft of two uncles, began to claim greater power. ‘Many talked that the young King was now to be feared.’ The most radical reformation yet in religion began, in part because Edward willed it.

The divine hand was seen to punish a faithless people in the spring of 1551; the faithlessness construed differently by conservatives and evangelicals. Those who lamented the loss of traditional ways of worship blamed the disasters upon heresy. That March Princess Mary defied her half-brother and his religious laws – ‘her soul was God’s and her faith she would not change’ – and marked her defiance by riding to Westminster with a great retinue, each servant wearing a forbidden rosary. Her stand encouraged all those of like mind. But most who held to the old faith held it more covertly. In the first English novel,
Beware the Cat
(1553), Mouseslayer the cat tells of her adventures among flawed humans, of how her blind mistress recovered her lost sight as she gazed sightlessly upon the elevated Host at a secret Mass performed in her chamber by an outlawed priest. So should all cats summon that priest to say Mass for their blind kittens, said the feline councillor Pol-noir. Evangelicals, especially in London, enjoyed the joke, but not the reality, as they witnessed Catholics coming to worship the sacrament, even at St Paul’s.

At the trial of the evangelical London preacher John Bradford in 1555, he remembered that ‘the doctrine taught in King Edward’s days was God’s pure religion…’ ‘What religion mean you,’ asked the Bishop of Durham, ‘in King Edward’s days? What year of his reign?’ As the leaders of the new Church tried to make real their vision of a truly evangelical Church, they struggled to carry with them a whole people, most of whom were still hostile to it, and at the same time to defend it against their fellow reformers who, by setting their individual and unassailable consciences against the institutional Church, threatened to split English Protestantism. Archbishop Cranmer, with Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London as his lieutenant, insisted that their evangelical revolution must proceed at a uniform pace, with order and discipline, with the authority of the Crown and the consent of Parliament. More restless spirits, like John Hooper and John Knox, came to see Cranmer’s cautious policy of making haste slowly as a betrayal of the evangelical cause. In its theological intent, the Book of Common Prayer of 1549 had been radical: the offering of the eucharistic elements of the bread and wine to God in the Mass, their adoration and reservation, were no longer part of the rite of the English Church. Yet ambiguities remained which allowed priests still to counterfeit the Mass. In June 1550 Bishop Gardiner, Cranmer’s adversary through two decades, succeeded in subverting Cranmer’s masterpiece by saying that it would not offend his conscience to use the Book, and this because ‘touching the truth of the very presence of Christ’s body and blood in the sacrament, there was as much spoken in that book as might be desired’.

In the winter and spring of 1551–2 Cranmer advanced a triple programme of reform: the revision of canon law, the formulation of a doctrinal statement, and the rewriting of the Book of Common Prayer to save it from conservative sabotage and evangelical criticism. A new Act of Uniformity passed in April 1552 authorized a substantially revised Prayer Book in which the dramatic shape of the rite was altered in order to mark a break with the Church’s tainted past. When the faithful received the elements of the bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper they were now directed to think on Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, and the words of administration were profoundly changed: ‘Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith, with thanksgiving…’ Bread was still bread, wine still wine, and Christ’s presence was spiritual. This Prayer Book brought to an end any possibility of officially praying for the dead, so destroying in the rite
the old sense of communion between the dead and the living. Had all of Cranmer’s schemes for reform been implemented, the new Church of England would have had parity with the Reformed Churches of Europe. But Northumberland, who had advanced the evangelical cause, now moved to wreck it.

In the spring of 1553 rumours spread that Edward was dying. There had been rumours before, but this time they were true. The Lady Mary was his heir. The prospect of her accession appalled Edward, who believed that she would restore the tyranny of Rome; it was more alarming still for Northumberland, who expected not only his own overthrow but also retribution. Together they determined to overturn Henry VIII’s will and the Succession Act of 1544 and to disinherit Mary and Elizabeth. By a ‘device’ they perverted the succession; it was now to pass to the male descendants of Henry VIII’s younger sister, Mary. But neither Mary’s daughter, Frances, Duchess of Suffolk, nor her daughters had borne sons. At the very end of Edward’s life, the succession was diverted further to the Duchess’s daughter, Lady Jane Grey, who had in May married Northumberland’s son, Guildford Dudley. Northumberland was kingmaker. When Edward died on 6 July his death was kept secret while the succession was secured. When a ‘marvellous strange monster’ was born that summer – girl twins joined at the waist, looking east and west – it seemed to many that this signified the two Queens Jane and Mary proclaimed at Edward’s death. Which one would succeed? For any queen to rule was against nature, for women were to be governed, not to govern.

On 10 July 1553 Queen Jane was proclaimed in London, as the citizens looked on, grim and silent. The Duke of Northumberland seemed to hold all the resources of power. The Council had signed the letters patent which bestowed the crown on Lady Jane, who was married to his son; he had the dying King’s blessing; the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor, many of the court, the mayor and aldermen of London, and leading judges had, however unwillingly, given assent to Edward’s ‘device’; he controlled the capital, the Tower, the Great Seal, the navy and many troops. Yet, despite all this, Lady Mary was proclaimed queen in London on 19 July. Mary believed her triumph, the triumph of one excluded from the succession, the clearest sign of divine favour, and that belief marked all her purposes thereafter. What of the secondary causes?

A conciliar conspiracy had put Queen Jane on the throne; a popular rising deprived her of it. The revolt of the common people, usually condemned as the work of the Devil, was here believed to be divinely inspired for the preservation of the right:
Vox populi, vox Dei
, the voice of the people is the voice of God. Northumberland held power, but he lacked legitimacy. He also, crucially and inexplicably for so astute a politician, had allowed Mary her freedom. When warning reached Mary of Edward’s imminent death she had fled Hunsdon in Hertfordshire for Kenninghall in Norfolk, where the local strength of her household lay, and then proceeded to Framlingham in Suffolk. The leading gentry and nobility of East Anglia, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and the Thames Valley rallied to Mary. On 14 July Northumberland set out from London to arrest Mary, leaving behind a Council which was sworn to him, but whose loyalty faltered with its courage. The news that reached the councillors in their refuge and stronghold of the Tower terrified them. The people were rising for Mary. It was the ‘country folk’ who flocked to their ‘rightful queen’ at Kenninghall, and who protested against Lady Jane’s proclamation at Ipswich; mariners mutinied against their captains and tenants refused to rise with their lords for Jane. Both Mary’s supporters and Jane’s prepared for battle. But by 19 July the Council in London, hearing of the universal desertions to Mary’s cause, realized that the game was up. This was the only successful popular rising of the century.

Why did the people rise for Mary? Hatred of Northumberland and old suspicion of his motives were enough to discredit Jane, who was queen only by his ‘enticement’. Outrage at the perversion of the true succession and fears of divine punishment against those who were cheating Mary of her right led many to oppose that injustice. But there was another cause. Queen Jane stood for reformed religion. On 12 July conciliar orders had come to sheriffs to gather troops against the bastard Mary who threatened the ‘utter subversion of God’s holy word’. Northumberland claimed that preservation of true religion was the first reason for altering the succession; ‘God’s cause… hath been the original ground.’ Mary’s defiant attachment to the old faith was common knowledge. In July 1553, as partisans for both queens armed, people were faced with disturbing choices. Did conscience dictate a higher loyalty to a divine than to a secular power, a duty to a Catholic rather than a Protestant queen, and what did prudence direct? It was the Catholic gentry who rallied first to Mary’s cause. Evangelicals joined her too, far
less enthusiastically, motivated principally by legitimism, and bowing to the divine punishment they deserved for not living according to the Gospel when it had been freely given to them. The consequences for the gospellers should Mary succeed were hardly considered at the time, though even amid the loyalist rejoicings at her proclamation there were other voices which cried in the wilderness. Those consequences soon became clear. Upon hearing the news that the turncoat councillors had proclaimed her, Mary’s first act was to order a crucifix to be set up in the chapel at Framlingham.

How should the new queen, triumphant yet precarious, rule? Whom should she trust? Mary was, as she ascended the throne at the age of thirty-seven, without any experience of government and innocent of formal political education, but years of deprivation and despair had taught her the first essential lesson: to trust no one at court. Her father had kept her away from her mother, Catherine of Aragon, and had even, in his fury, tried to have her condemned for treason when she refused, for a time, to submit to the Royal Supremacy and acknowledge her own bastardy. From her mother Mary had inherited her stubbornness, courage and Catholic piety; from her father – it waited to be seen. Like her half-brother Edward and half-sister Elizabeth, Mary had received the best humanist education: they had the intelligence and astuteness to benefit fully from it; whether Mary was similarly gifted was far less certain.

At her accession Mary pardoned her opponents, who were too many to condemn, except Northumberland and his closest adherents. Those whose loyalty had been most doubtful – like Sir William Paget, the ‘master of practices’, and the Earl of Pembroke – now made the greatest show of it, and returned to the Council, for their experience was needed. Into her household and Council Mary took also those East Anglian nobles and gentry who had brought her to the throne, whose devotion was as conspicuous as their inability to offer her politic advice. So inclusive was her Council that Paget sourly judged the government of England to be ‘more like a republic’ than a monarchy, but soon business was conducted by an inner circle consisting of Paget, Sir William Petre, Bishops Gardiner, Heath and Thirlby, the Earls of Arundel and Pembroke, the Marquess of Winchester and Sir Robert Rochester. Divisions among the councillors were bitter as they blamed each other for the past, resented the promotion of the loyal over the disloyal, envied each other’s influence, and remembered old betrayals. How could Gardiner
forget that Pembroke and Petre had interrogated him in prison only three years earlier? And there were seismic divisions over policy.