The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (35 page)

Yet the old world of religious unity and obedience was broken. The converts to the new faith in the first revolutionary generation of reform had believed that they could transform religion and society. They had failed to create the godly commonwealth they sought – every hill was not yet Zion – but the Catholic doctrines they despised had been profoundly undermined. With each acquiescence to ideas and practices they resented, with every purchase of Church property, however small, every parishioner was gradually compromised, even contaminated, by the new religion, even if not converted to it. The habit of obedience to Rome, often faltering among the ambivalent English, was lost. The chains of prayers which bound the living to the waiting dead in purgatory had been broken; the supplications of the faithful to the saints in heaven for their intercession had been officially denied. If belief in purgatory and in the power to influence the fate of souls there had been lost, if the holy helpers had been forgotten, the consequences of the years of schism would be hard to negate. Traditional forms of Catholic worship – holy bread and holy water, palms on Palm Sunday, processions, creeping to the cross in deepest penitence on Good Friday, the ‘burial’ of the Host in the Easter sepulchre – might be revived; books could be reprinted and images restored; but could the beliefs which underlay them return?

Pole and the bishops moved to restore the churches preparatory to the proper celebration of the sacraments, and, in their turn, they destroyed. Scriptural texts painted by ‘children of iniquity’ were whitewashed, for they misled the faithful. Altars, windows and vestments were to be repaired and replaced. Resplendent roods, images of the crucified Saviour, must be erected in every parish – not makeshift paintings but proper sculptures – as a defiant affirmation to image-denying Protestants of the power of images as ‘good books for the layman’. The Blessed Sacrament was reserved again in pyxes and tabernacles. Backsliding parishes were fined. Yet so thoroughgoing had been the previous seizure
of treasures from the Catholic past, and so venal the politicians in expropriating them for their own gain rather than for the commonwealth, that there was deep disillusion about the future security of any parish possessions. Enemies of the Marian Church accused its leaders of believing that physical restoration sufficed; ‘setting up of six-foot roods’ would ‘make all cock-sure’. Yet they were mistaken.

Pole had been one of the most challenging reformers of the Catholic Church, and his vision of a regenerate Church in England was still that of an evangelical Catholic reformer. He carried others with him. Pole and the Marian bishops had deeper designs for Catholic reform than the recovery of what was past. They restored only in order to move forward. Pole’s insistence was upon scripture, teaching and education, and upon improving the moral standards of the clergy. He had understood that there could be accommodation, charity, between the Catholic and Protestant reformers, who shared an evangelical emphasis upon scripture and a disapproval of the excesses of Catholic devotion. The leaders of the Marian Church laid far less stress upon priestly power and divinely ordained papal authority, and upon the cult of the Blessed Virgin and the saints, or pilgrimages, which had sustained Catholics in earlier times. Yet upon the seven sacraments they held firm, and upon the doctrine of transubstantiation, they were adamant. And Catholic writers, sharing a humanist background with evangelical Protestants, founded their understanding upon the literal interpretation of scripture.

Catholic renewal would come by reconciliation and education, they hoped. Their emphasis was upon unity, universalism, consensus and upon the charity within the community which had been so undermined. Without preaching there might be no doctrine, but there had been so much preaching, too much preaching. Pole distrusted the demagoguery of the Protestant evangelists, which he blamed for the breach of charity and for misleading the simple, and did not seek to emulate it. The first Jesuits had come to Ireland in 1542, but Pole was suspicious of these emissaries of the Pope. The religious renewal was entrusted to the parish clergy of England, yet they were often unworthy of their charge. The Marian clergy were tainted by their conformity – however unwilling – under Edward, and neither Catholics nor the gospellers could respect worldling priests who had changed religion with the regime. Lady Jane Grey condemned the mutability of her chaplain, who had seemed a ‘lively member of Christ’ but proved himself, by conforming, ‘the deformed imp of the Devil’. And many others with him. In March 1554 priests, who
had been permitted to marry by legislation passed in Edward’s reign, were ordered to leave their wives. So they did, some seemingly without a backward glance, moving to serve in other parishes, wifeless but hardly celibate. People taught by their clergy to renounce Rome were now adjured by the same clergy to be obedient to it. Disrespect for the clergy was so manifest that, in the judgement of the Queen’s chaplain, priests would fare better ‘among the Turks and Saracens’ than among heretics who mocked and despised them.

Pole thought that by patient pastoral teaching the schismatic past could be buried and forgotten; that heresy was an aberration which would pass. Yet he had not been in England to experience the evangelism and conversion, and he was wrong. Once the medieval heresy laws had been restored by Mary’s third Parliament (12 December 1554–16 January 1555), after strenuous opposition and anxious delay, Pole, the bishops and the lay commissioners began to test the strength of evangelical conviction. What they discovered alarmed and depressed them. Maybe half the population was aged under twenty, and so had never known papal authority, only schism; anyone reaching the age of confirmation after the Edwardian changes had never received the Mass, only Communion according to the Book of Common Prayer. They had known no other religion than the one which they were first adjured, then forced to renounce. Innocent of heresy, for they had never fallen away from the Catholic faith, they might now be condemned for it.

As soon as the Mass was restored in December 1553 evangelicals were faced with agonizing choices. To receive was damnable, to ‘drink of the whore’s cup’; not to receive was to draw the attention of the persecutors, constantly vigilant for heresy. The letters which the evangelicals wrote to their ministers, now exiled or imprisoned, reveal the soul-searching. Could a faithful Christian worship outwardly one way, while believing inwardly another, and remain undefiled? Never. They must remember the endless suffering of the hypocrites in hell’s fiery lake. Cranmer reminded Jane Wilkinson, an evangelical laywoman, that Christ had departed Samaria to avoid the malice of the scribes and Pharisees, and advised her to leave ‘with speed, lest by your own folly you fall into the persecutors’ hands’. She left, but Cranmer determined to stay behind to await trial for treason. Exile for conscience’s sake was the only way to worship freely and keep the faith inviolate in Mary’s reign, and over
800 left England. This was a ‘painful peregrination’, for the worldly risks and losses were great, even if the spiritual ones were greater for those who remained. From the Reformed cities of Germany and Switzerland, the exiles sent money and tracts to their brethren, and quarrelled among themselves. They thought always of home and the new Jerusalem they would build if ever they returned.

Evangelicals who could not conform and bear with the times chose to profess the Gospel in secret conventicles, always watched and always in danger. Spies were abroad to report their movements. Under persecution, they met by night in taverns and back rooms, in ships and barges, in the houses of powerful protectors. At the Saracen’s Head in Islington, under cover of seeing a play, gospellers celebrated the Protestant Communion. The prospect of attending popish services, especially with neighbours jubilant because the old faith had been restored, was intolerable to them. Conscience prevented many receiving the Mass or participating in Catholic rites and processions. Even when they did attend, evangelicals marked their dissidence and disrespect by looking away at the elevation, keeping their hats on at the sacring, refusing to sing, and rejecting the
pax
, the sign of that peace within the Christian community which was now so manifestly lacking. All these evasions were taken as signs of heresy when the inquisitions began. In such dangerous times, while the ‘prince of darkness… rageth against God’s elect’, many known gospellers quailed. In the way of things most chose domestic quiet and the peaceful obscurity of their farms and shops rather than the great sacrifices which resistance to the Marian Church required. In darker moments their leaders despaired: ‘not a tenth part’ remained constant, lamented John Bradford; the rest becoming ‘mangy mongrels’, ‘popish Protestants’ in order to save their skins. Yet Bishop Latimer was certain that though ‘the wise men of the world can find shifts to avoid the cross… the simple servant of Christ doth look for no other but oppression in the world’. Christ had called the faithful to take up the cross of adversity and follow Him, and he had called some to special glory. These were the martyrs.

On 4 February 1555 John Rogers died at the stake, with heroic fortitude. His was the triumph of hope over fear, of the spirit over the flesh, for which the gospellers longed and which the Marian authorities dreaded. Nearly 300 followed him in the next three years to that point of absolute faith, never doubting the horror of the death, but never doubting God’s promise either. Others died for their faith not in the
fires, but in prison, chained, wretched, cold and starving. The burnings drew large crowds, some so inured to pain and barbarity that they bought cherries from the Kent fruiterers to eat as they watched. These crowds were divided and partisan. Catholics came to celebrate the deaths of heretics in the flames which prefigured eternal hellfire; the godly came to sing psalms, to offer consolation, to try – not always successfully – to shorten the agonies of the martyrs, and ‘to learn the way’, for some hoped for the courage to follow.

The martyrs died because Mary, Pole and the bishops believed that heresy must be extirpated lest it ‘infect’ more; because ‘there is no kind of treason to be compared with theirs’. They died because some among the lay governors and the common people, hating their heresy, reported them, knowing the consequences. Above all they died because they would never recant. Their heresy was their adamant denial of the sacrifice of the Mass and of transubstantiation; their refusal to accept Christ’s corporeal presence in the sacrament. Each martyr’s death was a failure for the persecutors, who wanted them not to die but to be reconciled. Every way to win back the errant was tried: argument, persuasion, torture. The gospellers were examined again and again; adjured to remember their mother’s tears, to think of their bereft children. As if they could forget them: ‘Bring up my children and yours in the fear of God,’ wrote Robert Smith to his wife, for then they would all be sure to meet at last ‘in the everlasting kingdom of God, which I go unto’. The regime hoped for recantations, but knew that there was always the danger that some who had recanted, who had ‘played Peter’ and denied Christ might, like the Apostle, return to Him. When Cranmer, broken by solitude and doubt, recanted not once but six times, the authorities rejoiced, but at the last, at his martyrdom in Oxford in March 1556, he retracted his recantation, and thrust first into the flames the hand that had signed it.

The persecution was a waiting game: to try whether the zeal of the persecutors or the martyrs would fail first. So many were the martyrs’ supporters at the burnings that curfews were ordered, and the burnings came to be secret, not public. The persecution would fail if it chose the wrong victims. The Queen had insisted that the people see ‘them not to be condemned without just occasion’, but the persecutors had hunted down those – like the young – who knew only heresy; or the simple and ignorant who hardly knew what was heresy and what was not. The time was past when Gardiner ‘bent his bow to strike down the head deer’,
the leaders in Church and polity, for now they let the ‘arch heretics’ go, and left the most important Protestants alone. This moved the ‘rude multitude to mutter’. An aversion developed to the persecution, less because of sympathy with the beliefs of the gospellers than because of the way it was conducted. The burnings at Smithfield were halted after June 1558, and the officers went less willingly about their dreadful work.

As Bishop Ridley prepared for martyrdom, he wrote bidding farewell to the citizens of London: ‘I do doubt not but that in that great City there be many privy mourners’, evangelicals who lamented the religious changes, but had nevertheless conformed. With time, the evangelicals’ reconciliation with the Marian Church which they intended to be only outward and temporary, might have become genuine and permanent. Half a century later, Fulke Greville wrote slightingly of ‘those cobwebs of reconversion in Queen Mary’s days’, but he had the advantage of hindsight. Many, perhaps most, in England had never wanted evangelical change, and had rejoiced at the Catholic restoration. People devoutly remembered the Virgin and the saints in their wills, trusting to their intercession. But not all the old ways returned. The belief that the living had a ceaseless duty towards the dead in purgatory was not easily abandoned, nor quickly, but by Mary’s reign it had been profoundly undermined. The religious guilds which had linked dead and living brethren and been so enduring a part of religious and community life did not return to many parishes. Fear of future sequestration doubtless dissuaded many, but the reluctance went deeper. There had been changes, and there were signs that the evangelical understanding touched Catholics too. Some insisted, more overtly than before, that the Mass was an essential application of the merits of Christ’s Passion: the symbol of that Passion here on earth. Wills written in the last years of Mary’s reign reveal a spirit which helps to answer the perplexing question of how Christians of opposed convictions could worship together ‘in charity’, for some began to make religious bequests and to avow beliefs which juxtaposed the conventions and the spirit of Protestant and Catholic faiths. Awareness that those of the old faith and the new shared a common Saviour urged some peace between them.