The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (62 page)

As the Queen died, political and military conquest had not brought spiritual conquest. There were two contending Churches within the island: the Church of Ireland – official and Protestant – was taking over
and stripping the parish churches, but not winning hearts and minds; the Church of Rome, whose priests celebrated unofficially in ‘massing houses’, held the people’s allegiance. In Ireland, almost alone in Europe, the religion of the prince was not the religion of the people. The supremacy of the Queen was resisted; the primacy of the Pope upheld. The English language, which was, so the Speaker of the Irish Parliament had urged in 1569, the means whereby children could be taught in time to forget the ‘affinity of their unbroken borderers’, had not spread. And it was mainly in English that the new faith was evangelized. The Catholic faith was shared by both historic communities of the island, the Gaelic Irish and the Anglo-Irish, and their resistance to the Reformation came to temper their old animosity. While Elizabeth had not persecuted in matters of religion, the traditionally loyal Anglo-Irish community could reconcile compliance and obedience to the Crown with faith and conscience, but once aggressive attempts at reform began that loyalty would falter. It was the failure of the political orders to implement the official religion of the Queen of Ireland that had enabled the people to flout the laws and ignore her supremacy; it was their protection of priests and friars which allowed the sacraments to be celebrated. In Dublin a few patrician families had adopted the reformed religion, but this small Protestant coterie became isolated, alienated from the Catholic majority. Deeply attached to old ways and traditions, in religion as in civic life, Dublin’s leading families turned to recusancy from the later 1580s and 1590s. Since chantries and religious guilds had never been suppressed in Ireland, older traditional practices were sustained. People worshipped still at the holy wells outside Dublin. The arrival of a small number of seminary-trained Catholic clergy confirmed the resolution of the citizens in their recusancy. It was the women of the city who were staunchest in their defence of the Catholic faith; they who protected the priests who celebrated Mass. The children of leading Anglo-Irish families were sent to study abroad; not only to English universities and the Inns of Court, but to the Irish Colleges founded in the 1590s at Douai and Salamanca. In 1593 Ralegh told the Commons that he believed that there were not six gentlemen in Ireland who were loyal in religion. A decade later, upon news of Elizabeth’s death, the towns of Munster expelled the established clergy, tore up the service books, and installed outlawed Catholic priests to provide public celebration of the Mass. They demanded a religious freedom and toleration which no secular ruler, whose authority depended upon religious unity and a stable Church, could officially countenance.

A new world of reformed Tridentine Catholicism had brought religious revival to Ireland. Seminary priests, Jesuits and ‘massing priests’ said Mass, baptized children, ministered the sacraments in private houses, and played their part in animating the war in Ireland. From the 1560s onwards the papacy appointed bishops, establishing an alternative diocesan system, and sent to Ireland papal nuncios who were inspired by the ideals of the militant Catholic mission. Owen MacEgan, papal nuncio to Munster in the 1590s, had ‘absolute power’ and practised ‘religious tyranny’, according to Sir George Carew. Although Essex had told O’Neill, ‘Thou carest for religion as much as my horse,’ O’Neill, under the influence of the Jesuit James Archer, was increasingly committed to the principles and practices of the Catholic Reformation. The orders of friars who had brought spiritual renewal in the fifteenth century continued to inspire the people’s devotion. In Connacht in 1574 there were twenty-one mendicant communities in Mayo, eleven in Sligo and twenty in Galway; and in 1594 there were still twenty monasteries and friaries in Ulster. These survived under the protection of the local lords who had always been their patrons. When in August 1601 Niall Garve O’Donnell betrayed his clan and his faith by garrisoning Donegal Abbey for the English, Hugh O’Donnell, outraged by the usurpation of the Franciscan ‘sons of life’, besieged it. As God willed to take ‘revenge and satisfaction of the English’ for the profanation, wrote the Four Masters, He caused their gunpowder to blow the garrison and the Abbey to pieces. This providence occurred on Michaelmas Day. In the moral distemper brought by rebellion and war God’s hand was especially seen to intervene in the world to reveal His purposes. Ghostly armies were seen fighting battles in the sky. Even English soldiers were daunted by the faith of their Irish opponents. Sir John Harington wrote from Athlone in 1599: ‘I verily think the idle faith which possesses the Irishry concerning magic and witchcraft seized our men and lost the victory.’

An older world of wonders and miracles lived on in Ireland. The traditional religion of saints’ cults and pilgrimages, relics and images, continued. Sacred places, holy wells and high crosses stirred particular reverence. This was a world of devotion as far away from Tridentine Catholicism as from Protestantism. English attempts to destroy what they saw as idolatry failed. When O’Neill went on his ‘holy journey’ to Munster, he first visited the Cistercian Abbey of the Holy Cross, and its relic of the true cross was brought out to protect his army. In 1608 that relic was taken by the abbot to cure the infertility of fields in Kilkenny.
Catholic reformers determined to confine the miraculous to the Church, and to control the excesses of popular devotion. Edmund Campion, the Jesuit, devoted a chapter of his
Two Books of the Histories of Ireland
(written in 1571) to St Patrick’s Purgatory at Lough Derg. People went to this supposed entrance of the nether world for penance, and reported on their return – if they returned – ‘strange visions of pain and bliss’, a ‘sight of hell and heaven’. The Council of Trent had in 1563 disavowed the sensational apparitions associated with the doctrine of purgatory, and Campion insisted that the claims of miracles ‘I neither believe nor wish to be regarded’. Yet the older world had a stronger hold on the popular imagination. Every section of Irish society – peasants or lords – believed that ghosts walked and diabolic spirits might appear.

In England, Catholics would talk of the return of their faith: ‘We should have a new world shortly,’ promised Babington and his fellow conspirators. Yet as the reformed faith slowly gained the victory, a world was lost which could not be restored. The adherents of the new faith had believed that they could, by bringing the Word to the people, transform religion and society. They had succeeded, at great cost. Reform brought physical destruction: the altars and shrines, dooms and roods of the parish churches were torn down; religious houses lay in ruins or were converted into gentry mansions. More traumatic than the desecration of treasures was the loss of the beliefs which they had symbolized; of mediation by holy helpers, of intercession by family and friends, of ‘good works’ which could make satisfaction for sin, if performed in state of grace. The community of the dead and of the living had been parted as the doctrine of purgatory was undermined. And if there was no intermediary world in the hereafter, no way of propitiation after death, then a starker judgement awaited Christians; of election or reprobation, heaven or hell. The world of shared faith was broken, and the Christian community divided. At the Reformation, the Christian was forced to choose between two Churches, each claiming to be the true Church, and sometimes to choose between private faith and public conformity. Most people did their public duty by conforming through all the Tudor reformations and, believing that the conscience of their prince was in God’s hands, obeyed the royal will. In the way of things, most people, in most places, chose the anonymity of their households, the peaceful obscurity of their fields and workshops, the comforts of neighbourliness, to the lonely sacrifice that conscience and resistance to authority demanded. The claims of family life and the exigencies of
making a living usually prevailed. There were many who, in lives of penury and drudgery, had little time and less energy to make a stand. Nevertheless, no one was left untouched by the great transformations which Reformation brought.

Time, the passing of generations, the gradual influence of education and evangelical preaching, and the entrenchment of vested interests had led to the retreat of traditional religion before the new. In some places, by 1600, the coming generation could look back upon the Catholic past as a lost world. In some places, but far from all. William Perkins, writing in about 1590, thought that most of the common people were still papist at heart. In the ‘dark corners of the land’, remote from the centre, the Gospel had hardly penetrated, and perennial reports came of unregenerate papistry, lingering idolatry and, above all, of benighted ignorance. Even the Prayer Book, the touchstone of conformity, was still haunted by remnants of medieval Catholicism; saints’ days, kneeling, signing with the cross, and the language of priesthood remained to outrage the godly. Loyalty to the Prayer Book might even be taken as a sign of papistry.

Puritan evangelists despaired of Wales, that other Celtic borderland of the Tudor dominions, where the people were ‘much given to superstition and papistry’, they said. Certainly Wales was slow in true conversion to the Protestant faith. But the old faith’s survival there was not a sign of political disloyalty. The people were in ‘peace and good quiet’, and their loyalty to the Queen was never in doubt. Reformation was not seen in Wales, as it was in Ireland, as an alien faith forced upon a reluctant nation. In Wales, unlike Cornwall and Ireland, the new faith was not imposed in English. A prudential decision was taken in Elizabeth’s reign to present the new faith to the people of Wales in their own language, and once the scripture and service books had been translated into Welsh there were cultural and patriotic reasons for the faith to spread. Gradually, the reformed religion became associated in Wales with a double allegiance: to the Tudors (whose Welsh descent was not forgotten) and to Wales.

In Wales, as in England, the political orders had understood that order and stability, peace and prosperity, rested upon obedience to the Crown, the supreme head of a Church to which, whatever its failings, allegiance was also due. The Queen’s duty was, under God, to maintain true religion, and her people were under a religious as well as a political obligation of obedience to her. For the gentry of Wales, as of England,
their self-interest as well as their duty lay in conformity, for they had invested in the transformation in ecclesiastical authority; their lands included former Church lands, their patronage was once Church patronage. They had rallied in defence against the threat from international Catholicism. Steeped in the habits of obedience, the great majority dreaded the prospect of rebellion, in however good a cause. Allegiance to traditional religion could not extend to allegiance to Spain or to Rome. Indeed, resistance was countenanced, even urged against foreign tyrants, other nation’s monarchs.

A wise prince understood, as Elizabeth had understood, that time, not coercion, was likely to bring conformity. She had, as Fulke Greville put it, ‘let devout conscience live quietly in her realms’. With Elizabeth’s death imminent, the 9th Earl of Northumberland wrote to the King of Scots: ‘It were pity to lose so good a kingdom [England] for the not tolerating a Mass in a corner.’ That a Percy, scion of so great a noble family, whose ancestors had in 1536 and 1569 led revolts in defence of the old ways, offered such politic advice marked another great transformation, another lost world. By the late sixteenth century the ancient nobility had been tamed, its power undermined. Martial honour and chivalry had been civilized. George Clifford, 3rd Earl of Cumberland, whose ancestor the 10th Lord Clifford (d.1523) and his knights had still performed the feudal ceremony of homage, was the Queen’s champion of the tiltyard, and heroically spendthrift. In 1600 he appeared at the tilt as the Discontented Knight; discontented because the Queen had not given him the governorship of the Isle of Wight. This was a world away from the Cliffords’ former integrity and independence in the far North. Clifford sold off his ancestral estates, although in the North, he knew, they measured ‘honour by the acre’, and the Clifford fortunes were only salvaged by the Queen’s grant of a lucrative cloth-export licence.

The gentry, who had a century before followed their local lords and worn their livery, now held their offices and bought up their lands: such was the perception of those who considered the nature of royal power at the end of the century. The Tudors had succeeded in their ambition that loyalty to the Crown replace loyalty to the old nobility. The ancient nobility had yielded power – though very far from all their power – to a service nobility which owed its advancement to royal favour and employment at court. Essex was almost the last noble to dream of a throne. ‘Well… he wore the crown of England in his heart these many years,’ wrote his intimate, the Earl of Northumberland. But even Essex
was a creature of the court, however unwillingly, and owed all to the Queen’s favour.

The new world of the court had become the centre of power, patronage and stability, and everyone who mattered in the realm was drawn to it. It could be the fount of civility and courtesy. ‘A virtuous court a world to virtue draws,’ wrote Ben Jonson in
Cynthia’s Revels
(1600), as though he hoped it were true. Yet the court was not the place to look for virtue. As John Donne wrote in
Satire 4
, the sort of satire which was banned in June 1599:

The court was increasingly seen as a place of lies and spies, of ‘privy whispering’, where intrigue and treachery flourished, and where the truth was not to be found. The Queen, who had herself portrayed in gowns embroidered with eyes and ears, as symbols of her ceaseless vigilance over her people, might not know what happened around her. ‘Greatest and fairest empress, know you this?’ asked Donne in
Satire 5
: did she know of the corruption which surrounded her? The excesses of foreign courts and the extension of monarchical power in Europe was observed with alarm. Tyranny, which had threatened in England a century before, might come again if a prince fell from virtue, was misled by evil counsellors, or corrupted by a court, and now there were fewer curbs on royal power. As Elizabeth’s reign drew to its natural close, there were reasons for unease. At this moment, not only of the Queen’s ‘declining age’ but of what Greville called ‘this crafty world’s declining age’, William Shakespeare wrote a play whose hero lamented that ‘the time is out of joint’.