The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (36 page)

Yet Catholics feared for the future. Mary’s regime was fatally undermined, not so much by failings in policy, but by disasters beyond human control. The revocation of Pole’s legatine commission by a pope who distrusted and disowned him demoralized not only the Cardinal but the Queen. The fall of Calais in January 1558 to the Duke of Guise was a
momentous loss. But neither of these setbacks could compare with a devastating mortality crisis. The year 1558–9 experienced by far the worst mortality in the whole period 1541–1871. Mary’s own death in November 1558 brought the quietus of the Catholic restoration, at least for a time, because the Lady Elizabeth was her heir.

The persecution for religion was conducted against a background of misery and despair; of famine and plague and war. Through the winter of 1555 it had rained as though without end. The harvest failed in the following year, leaving food in short supply and prohibitively expensive. Torrential rains came again in the autumn of 1556 and by the winter the situation was desperate. For want of corn, the poorest ate acorns. Unless wheat were cheaper by Easter, so William Cecil’s agent wrote, ‘many will die of hunger’. The poor did die ‘for hunger in many places’ in 1556, but demand for food fell, and for terrible reasons. According to grim natural precedent, dearth was followed by pestilence, and now disease not dearth was the killer. ‘Hot burning fevers and other strange diseases’ became epidemic. The agency which lay behind such agonies was no longer seen as mere policy, or the greed of a few: this was ‘scarcity by the direct plague of God’. This affliction, worse than any known in the lifetime of those who suffered, was seen as divine punishment. The reasons for it only He knew, but Mary’s enemies, especially those whose anger was inflamed by exile, discerned them. ‘When were ever things so dear in England as in this time of the popish mass?’ asked John Ponet, quondam Bishop of Winchester. Compounding the misery was the war with France which England had entered as a consequence of Mary’s binding it to Spain, and which brought only huge expense and disgrace. One recourse in a time of such adversity was Christian resignation, but there was another.

In 1554 John Knox had sought the Swiss reformer Heinrich Bullinger’s advice on the deeply troubling question: ‘Whether obedience is to be rendered to a magistrate who enforces idolatry and condemns true religion?’ By 1556 Knox had concluded that it was lawful for a true witness (not only the magistrate but also the people) to punish idolaters with death. There was, for the radicals, no greater idolater than Mary, the Jezebel of England. As they considered the limits of political obedience, other exiles concluded that the faithful, oppressed by a tyrant, an ungodly ruler whom they had brought upon themselves, had not only
the right but the duty to resist, to depose. Asking ‘Whether it be lawful to depose an evil governor and kill a tyrant?’ John Ponet answered that it was. When a ruler ‘goes about to betray and make away his country to foreigners’ tyrannicide may be justified. Knox argued that the people must ‘avoid that monster in nature and disorder amongst men which is the empire and government of a woman’. Mary and her Council had had cause for alarm. But not only was Mary a woman; so was her heir, Elizabeth. The voices of militant Protestantism would fall silent if the new queen proved to be an Old Testament heroine, like Deborah, who inspired the Israelites to defeat their enemy. Their arguments waited to be used if ever the same threats of tyranny and persecution overwhelmed England again, and could be adopted, too, in the wars between religions, by Catholic enemies of a Protestant queen.

THE CHALLENGE OF SECURING PEACE
, 1558–70

The reign of Elizabeth I began with a sense of uncertainty and danger which would rarely leave it. The fears which assailed her new subjects at the end of 1558 were shared by many of their European neighbours, for England did not stand alone. ‘Invasion of strangers, civil dissensions, the doubtful disposition of the succeeding prince, were cast in every man’s conceit as present peril,’ wrote John Hayward, an early historian of the reign. Memories of Mary’s rule cast a long shadow. People read fearfully the prognostications of Nostradamus for 1559. They chiefly concerned religion: ‘There shall be difference of sects, alteration, murmuring against ceremonies, contentions, debate, process, feuds, noise, discord…’ Anyone in Europe could have been thus prescient, and have applied those prophecies just as well to Scotland, France or the Low Countries, as to England. The world of the spirit and the world of politics were more dangerously entangled, and contention over incompatible doctrines of salvation engendered no less than a state of incipient war in Europe, from which England could only by supreme vigilance remain free.

Elizabeth gained her kingdom without having to fight for it, but never forgot the dangers which had lain in the way. In January 1559, leaving the Tower which once, as a prisoner in Mary’s reign, she had thought never to leave except in her coffin, she thanked God for saving her as He had Daniel from the lions’ den. By this Old Testament analogy she offered a deliberate promise to all those who waited for a Protestant princess to bring their own deliverance. As even her enemies admitted, Elizabeth had ‘powers of enchantment’, and as she passed through her capital to her coronation she displayed them. Mary had made no response to the pageants which had greeted her, but Elizabeth promised her new subjects a reign of mutual love and undying royal self-sacrifice. Londoners were jubilant. Just as they cast down the idols in their
churches in iconoclastic riots and set up the knave of clubs instead of the reserved sacrament, they prepared to worship the secular cult of a painted queen. But London was not all England.

‘Remember old King Henry VIII,’ called out a man in the welcoming crowd. Elizabeth smiled. Her people waited to see in which ways she was her father’s daughter. The new Queen promised to ‘direct all my actions by good advice and counsel’. Would she keep that promise? Her high view of her own regality was soon apparent. ‘I am but one body, naturally considered,’ so she declared in her accession speech, ‘though by [God’s] permission a Body Politic to govern’; both a woman and the undying embodiment of the law and symbol of royal power. The ‘politic life’ of all her subjects rested in the life and authority of one woman. Some, like John Aylmer in 1559, assumed that the rule of a woman was tolerable because, in England, it would not be so much government by the Queen as government in her name, on her behalf. Yet this was to reckon without Elizabeth’s vision of her imperial power and her determination to rule. Through more than forty years there would be a contest – sometimes dormant, often undeclared – between prerogative and counsel. The duty of her counsellors was to offer advice; the Queen did not necessarily see it as her duty to follow it. Counsellors were bound to preserve Queen and commonwealth, but the Queen could challenge their opinion of the best course for her people, and sometimes they had to risk upsetting her. In 1567 Elizabeth herself contrasted the authority of the prince with ‘pleasing persuasions of common good’. The Queen, unlike her father, was not easily led.

With a new monarch came a new court and Council. Elizabeth swiftly dispatched many of Mary’s Council. Even Paget was dispensable. Mary had chosen her bishops too well for them to serve, even to obey, a Protestant queen. Elizabeth’s Privy Council was composed, at first, of laymen. A few great magnates, even those of suspect loyalty, stayed, a prince’s ‘natural counsellors’, but her Council was far from baronial. Most were men trained to public life at the universities and Inns of Court. The veterans who remained from her sister’s, her brother’s, even her father’s Councils, had deep political experience and, having had the politic wisdom to bow with every religious wind, they now urged caution. At Elizabeth’s right hand from the first days of her reign until his own last days was William Cecil, her Principal Secretary. Evading prosecution for treason in 1549 and 1553, he had kept his head down during Mary’s reign, even learning Spanish. Now, impelled not only by
a deep sense of duty to the commonwealth but also by a commitment to advance godly religion, he devoted himself to counselling the young Queen, who did not share his providential view of politics.

Elizabeth determined to rule by love rather than by fear. Later, her godson, Sir John Harington, remembered that she used to say that ‘her state did require her to command, what she knew her people would willingly do from their own love to her’. (Though he acknowledged also that ‘where obedience lacked she left no doubtings whose daughter she was’.) A queen who wished to impose a kind of amorous servitude was reluctant to constrain her subjects’ affection by making them pay fully the costs of government; even at war. The consequence would be a system of government undermined by financial expedients and fiscal weaknesses. Elizabeth and Cecil presided over a system of taxation which plunged into a decline which they, through inertia and neglect, did not arrest. The value of parliamentary taxation not only failed to keep up with inflation, because tax assessments remained static as government expenditure grew hugely in real terms; its money value depreciated because of tax evasion. A nationwide complicity among taxpayers to under-assess the value of their lands and goods and a failure in vigilance of local subsidy commissioners and assessors was lamented by Cecil, who was Lord Treasurer from 1572, even while he assessed his own income, unchangingly, at £133 6s 8d; a fraction of his real income of £4,000 per annum. Elsewhere in Europe, rulers were inventing new taxes to pay for war. Elizabeth resisted fiscal innovation, or even proper supervision. Major reform was needed, but the Queen preferred to survive by calculated parsimony, by economies in royal patronage and expenditure at court, and by the sale of royal offices and Crown lands. In these ways she lived in the short term and mortgaged the future.

Elizabeth’s own history, her birth as the symbol of her father’s great refusal of papal power, her survival of Protestant plots for her and Catholic plots against her, her commanding sense of her imperial monarchy and Royal Supremacy, led her away from Rome. Yet to lead her subjects with her was to risk papal anathema, rebellion at home, war in Ireland, even a French conquest. Whether she would take that risk was the first test of her new reign and one of profound consequence for, if England became Protestant again, she would stand alone against the great Catholic powers of Europe. Elizabeth had vitality, intelligence, a power to overawe and to command. Mary Tudor, lacking all those qualities but driven by devotion to the Church of Rome and to the
Habsburgs, had led unwaveringly where they led. Elizabeth had no such lodestars. Her very ability to perceive the myriad possible consequences of every course of action would often lead her to take none. Her reaction in moments of crisis would often be silent, or not so silent, prevarication and indecision. Her instinctive caution was at times a political virtue, but it frustrated her councillors, who were often overwhelmed by a sense of emergency and of the urgency of action.

In the first months of her reign, however, she took a huge and uncharacteristic gamble. As the reign began, religion must be settled before anything else could be. ‘Wary consideration’ was necessary, so the Lord Keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon, declared in his opening speech to the Parliament which must effect a uniform order in religion, for the contrary dangers of ‘idolatry, superstition, contempt and irreligion’ threatened the commonwealth. Although the Queen’s will to recover the Royal Supremacy was always clear, nothing else was. Would she restore the Protestant uniformity of Edward’s reign; if so, according to which Prayer Book? Peering into the mysteries of the Queen’s own religious preferences provided little guidance. On Christmas Day 1558 she had walked out of the royal chapel when the celebrant, against her commandment, elevated the Host. This was a cause of celebration for watchful Protestants, and of alarm for others. But what kind of Protestant kept a crucifix in her own chapel, against the Second Commandment, as the Queen did? Elizabeth defiantly kept this ‘little silver cross of ill-omened origin’, to the despair of the reformers, and replaced it even when Patch, her fool, inveigled by courtiers, destroyed it.

The inner counsels of the Queen and her advisers as her first Parliament met remain mysterious, but it seems as though Cecil, whose views were more radical than Elizabeth’s, introduced bills to restore the Supremacy and to reintroduce Reformed worship according to the 1552 Book of Common Prayer. If that was Cecil’s scheme, the House of Lords, dominated still by Mary’s Catholic bishops and by conservative peers, crippled it. By Easter the reformers were suffering torments. Another way was devised. The third bill, which became the Act of Supremacy, named Elizabeth Supreme Governor, not Supreme Head, which placated both those who doubted whether a woman could lead the Church, and all those who believed that that honour was owed to Christ alone. The Act of Uniformity did return Edward’s Prayer Book of 1552, little changed. That Prayer Book enshrined Protestant doctrines of faith, grace, works and the sacraments and, if it pleased many, it was anathema
to uncompromising Protestants now returning from exile, for whom it made too many concessions to a popish past. And, of course, it horrified good Catholics.