The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (37 page)

However, Henry’s heirs also had a great many problems on hand. The government’s way of raising money during lean times had been to clip the coinage or mix copper into the gold and silver. Edward Seymour, or the Duke of Somerset as he immediately became, who had duly become the lord protector, faced a country in revolt against a very debased coinage, for in order to counteract the devalued coinage shopkeepers put up their prices. The dissolution of the monasteries might have enhanced the fortunes and secured the loyalty of thousands of well-to-do English families, but it had also created pressing social problems. The new owners of monastic lands had none of the kindliness of the old monks, nor their sense of community. The hospitals and almshouses for the poor vanished, and rents became much higher.

Above all, the enclosure system took even more ferocious root. Land which previously had been allowed for the use of the community was hedged round for the new owners’ private use. At the same time the high price of wool meant unemployment for thousands as arable farming was abandoned in favour of sheep farming. Skilled men found themselves without homes, as that most profitable of animals, the sheep, required only one shepherd for a large flock. As early as 1516, with the publication of
Utopia
, Sir Thomas More had warned of sheep eating men. Now it was a situation raging out of control and creating landless yeomen who wandered from parish to parish desperate for work.

In contrast to the dead king, Somerset was a convinced radical Protestant–as was the severe young king himself. Henry VIII’s Reformation had been carried out in a very gingerly fashion by a monarch conscious of the tightrope he was walking between Catholic powers abroad and natural conservatism at home. The new rulers had none of the old king’s instincts.

Despite his dislike of extreme Protestants, Henry VIII had so respected their learning that he had left the upbringing of his precious son and heir in the hands of distinguished Protestant divines such as Roger Ascham. The result was a solemn little boy who had inherited a good deal of his father’s willpower and who was dedicated to taking the new religion many steps past where his father had intended it to end. One of Edward VI’s favourite preachers was the former Bishop of Worcester, Hugh Latimer, the friend of Protestant martyrs under Henry VIII, whom Henry had deprived of his see for holding views that were too radical. Under the influence of Protector Somerset and the boy-king, the court became a quieter, more solemn place than it had been under the late king. Instead of the gaudy colours and slashed velvet doublets of Henry VIII’s reign, most Protestant men and women dressed in the dark colours which would soon be identified with the Puritans.

Court life was dominated by the struggle between the protector himself and members of the royal Council to control the ferociously intellectual but sickly young king. But it was also a struggle between the protector and his brother Thomas Seymour. The sheer force of Thomas Seymour’s magnetic personality had thrust him to the heart of the royal establishment. Six months into the new reign Seymour swept the late king’s widow Catherine Parr off her feet and married her, living much of the time at Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire. Seymour, who was by now an admiral, thus instantly had control over a possible heiress to the throne, the Lady Elizabeth, who had continued to live with her stepmother after her father’s death.

Thomas Seymour was a rumbustious adventurer whose swashbuckling manner and over-familiar treatment of the young Elizabeth led to rumours that he even had plans to marry her himself and thereby seize the throne. His reputation was not good. He was said to have made money by clipping the coinage and even to have benefited from piracy by abusing his position as an admiral. Wild stories proliferated about him. Servants claimed to have seen him romping in Elizabeth’s bed in the early morning when both were wearing only nightshirts. He was said to have cut one of her dresses off her on the grounds that black did not suit her, and to have been seen kissing her. When Catherine Parr died in childbirth in 1548, there were even rumours that he had deliberately poisoned her in order to marry Elizabeth.

In fact Seymour had bigger fish to fry: he hoped to persuade his nephew the king to make him protector instead of his elder brother. Whatever his intentions, he began to muster men for a rebellion. When Somerset got wind of it Seymour was executed. On hearing of his execution the thirteen-year-old Elizabeth remarked coolly to her governess Kate Ashley, ‘This day died a man with much wit and very little judgement.’

But Somerset’s position was not shored up by the execution of his brother. Trouble was brewing, stirred up by the wholesale changes of the previous ten years. Not only was the enclosure system beginning to bite, but under Edward the Church of England moved dramatically away from its old rituals, which Henry VIII had been keen to preserve for the sake of continuity. It took on a severely logical new shape which satisfied purist intellectuals, but took no account of popular sentiment.

Cromwell had begun the process of stripping shrines and churches, mainly to benefit the Treasury. But the Edwardian government took the spoliation of churches to extremes–its aim not so much pecuniary as to rid the Church of the superstition which polluted Roman Catholicism. Thus it was that government agents rushed into churches and whitewashed the stained-glass windows depicting saints and miracles–many old English churches still bear traces of this whitewash. They also dragged out elaborate altars, rood screens and statues and attacked them with hammers. This process, known as iconoclasm, was made lawful by an act against books and images. Longstanding ceremonies and holidays which were an enjoyable part of the village year, such as Candlemas on 2 February, being smeared with ashes on Ash Wednesday, and carrying palms in memory of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, were abolished by law as papal inventions. And once again priests were allowed to marry.

In 1549 the enforced use of the first new prayer book (commissioned by Henry VIII and in preparation for several years under Cranmer) triggered uprisings all over the south-west and in the eastern counties of England. Though the two protests were quite distinct–the south-west calling for the restoration of the Mass in Latin and the area round Norwich under Jack Ket for the pulling down of the enclosures–they both signalled the great unpopularity of the government. Managing them proved to be the downfall of Protector Somerset. He was a kindly man and had too much sympathy with Ket’s grievances to suppress his rebellion with the severity the rest of the King’s Council felt it merited.

While Somerset hesitated, his rivals in the Council struck. John Dudley, son of Henry VII’s executed minister, disposed of the eastern counties rebellion with great despatch, hanging Jack Ket from the parapet of Norwich Castle while his followers dangled from what they had called the Oak of Reformation. A formidable soldier, Dudley was the coming man. He had distinguished himself at the recent Battle of Pinkie, Somerset’s attempt to aid the new Protestant Reformation in Scotland and at the same time to marry Edward VI to the infant heiress, Mary of Scotland. But if Dudley had emerged as the hero of the hour, Somerset had been humiliated. For the Scots did not like what was complained of as a ‘rough wooing’, and Mary was smuggled over to France to marry the dauphin instead.

Somerset not only looked foolish, he was also visibly corrupt. Although all of the Council enjoyed the proceeds from a further suppression of the chantries, the protector’s share was large enough to begin building the first Italianate mansion in England, Somerset House in the Strand, which until recently was the national repository of our records of births, deaths and marriages. But it was an excuse for dismissing the protector. That same year, Somerset was ousted from the Council, and Dudley, or the Duke of Northumberland as he became, took control.

Northumberland, even more than Somerset, was the champion of the radical wing of the Church. England became a haven for the more advanced Protestant divines like Martin Bucer and Peter Martyr fleeing from the wrath of the Emperor Charles V, whose armies seemed to be on the point of suppressing the German Reformation altogether. Despite the popular reaction to the first prayer book, the English Church took an even sharper turn away from Henrician Catholicism by publishing the second prayer book in 1552 and the Forty-Two Articles of Faith a year later. In fact, for all the outrage it had caused, the first prayer book was as Catholic as its progenitor Henry VIII. But the second, though also written by Cranmer, showed just how fast Protestant intellectual thought was moving in England. The Church had swung towards the Zwinglian idea of Communion being a ceremony of commemoration rather than a Real Presence, and many important Protestants of a strongly radical tendency were appointed to key bishoprics: Nicholas Ridley, who was a convinced Zwinglian, became Bishop of London and John Hooper became Bishop of Gloucester and soon attracted attention by refusing to wear the vestments of a bishop because the ancient Church would not have insisted on them.

In July 1553 Northumberland was alarmed to see that the sixteen-year-old king’s always fragile health was going downhill rapidly. He would have to act fast if he wished to preserve his power. By Henry VIII’s will and by parliamentary statute the succession had been fixed on Catherine of Aragon’s daughter Princess Mary and then on Princess Elizabeth. Yet if Edward was succeeded by Princess Mary, who was well known for having the Catholic Mass celebrated in her own apartments, she would endanger the whole English Protestant Reformation. Instead, with the backing of the Archbishop of Canterbury Cranmer and the Bishop of London Nicholas Ridley, Northumberland persuaded Edward that the throne should go to the strenuously Protestant Lady Jane Grey, who as the eldest granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister Mary had the next claim to the throne. Princess Elizabeth had no Catholic leanings either, but she lacked the unique qualification that Lady Jane possessed, as far as Northumberland was concerned: Lady Jane was married to his son.

In his own hand, Edward VI sketched out a new will bypassing Mary and Elizabeth. The crown was to go to Lady Jane Grey. Two days later, on the evening of 7 July, the pale young king’s consumptive lungs gave out. The palace guard was doubled to make sure the news did not leak out before Northumberland could arrest Princess Mary. But somehow a messenger galloped from London to warn Mary at Hunsdon in Hertfordshire that her brother was dead and she must flee. Before the sun rose the thirty-seven-year-old Mary, with a few retainers, had reached Kenninghall in Norfolk.

In London a furious Northumberland proclaimed the gentle Lady Jane Grey queen. But her reception was less than rapturous, and she was anyway unwilling to be Northumberland’s puppet. After a reign of only ten days, while men swarmed to Princess Mary’s army in the eastern counties, Mary was welcomed by the rest of the Council into London. She entered the city without resistance on 3 August, riding side by side with Princess Elizabeth, and after imprisoning Lady Jane and Northumberland, became queen.

Mary ruled for five short years before she succumbed to stomach cancer. Though dumpy and plain, the new queen combined the steely Tudor willpower with a profound Catholicism inherited from her Spanish mother. Despite all the pressures brought to bear by her father and brother, she had refused to abandon her faith, believing that it was her mission to return England to her ancient religion. In this she was actively abetted by the Spanish ambassador, who became one of her most important advisers. Directly she became queen all the Protestant bishops, Hooper, Ridley and Cranmer, were replaced by the ‘Catholic’ bishops of Henry VIII’s reign who had meanwhile been languishing in prison.

Stephen Gardiner, who had been Bishop of Winchester since 1531, though imprisoned for two years under Edward VI, became Mary’s lord chancellor and chief religious adviser. The first act of the new government’s Parliament was to return religion to the state it had been in after Henry’s Reformation: the Six Articles were brought back; Mass was celebrated; those members of the clergy who, like Cranmer, had married were forced to renounce their wives; Edward’s bishops were imprisoned and Protestants were expelled from the country. But the queen had no plans to rest there. By the second year of her reign in November 1554, though she had at first taken the title Supreme Head of the Church, she had repealed the Reformation statutes and returned England to the Church of Rome.

The dissolution of the monasteries had secured the gentry’s and the nobility’s loyalty to the Henrician Reformation. Property also explained the ease with which Mary returned England to Rome. For she was enough of a Tudor pragmatist to agree that the restoration of monastery lands to the Church could be no part of the new settlement. As a result, the transformation of the country back to Roman Catholicism was achieved without incident–the roots of Protestantism in England did not lie deep at mid-century. Later that year Mary’s cousin Cardinal Pole, the papal legate who had been exiled in Rome for so long, returned to England to preside over the dismantling of the Henrician Reformation. He became Archbishop of Canterbury.

Meanwhile Mary’s decision in 1559 to marry her princely cousin, Charles V’s son, who was to become Philip II of Spain, aroused the most vehement opposition in Parliament, Council and the country at large. But she was determined, for everything Spanish aroused her unquestioning reverence. When Ambassador Renard had suggested marriage between herself and Philip she fell into transports of excitement without ever having met her intended, and immediately gave her sacred promise that she would marry none other. There were riots and a rebellion led by Sir Thomas Wyatt, the son of the poet, whose intention was to place Princess Elizabeth on the throne.

Only Mary’s prompt action in riding to the Guildhall in London and telling the crowds that she would postpone the Spanish marriage until it had been agreed by Parliament re-enlisted public support. Though Wyatt proclaimed Elizabeth’s ignorance from the scaffold, Mary did not believe him. Lady Jane and Northumberland were executed and an outraged and terrified Elizabeth was taken by river to the Tower of London, from whence her mother had never returned alive. Here she famously refused to go in through the entrance known as Traitor’s Gate and, sitting down on the flagstones, declined to move. ‘Here landeth as true a subject, being prisoner, as landed at these stairs,’ she said imperiously. And until the sun set and she at last consented to go in, no one dared move her.

But no evidence could be found to convict Elizabeth. She would not have been so foolish to plot openly. Her early life had made her a most circumspect and cautious personality and she had already had to throw herself on her knees and beg for her freedom when Mary’s advisers, such as Bishop Gardiner, had suggested she be arrested because she might form the focus of a Protestant plot. Though Elizabeth spent a couple of grim months in prison convinced that each day would be her last–the scaffold erected to execute Lady Jane Grey remained in place–eventually she was released. She went to live quietly at Woodstock in Oxfordshire and then at Hatfield, north of London. The arrival in London of the grave Philip of Spain, with his flaxen beard and cold eyes, saw not only the return of England to the old religion but the persecution as heretics of those who refused to conform. Cardinal Pole set up a commission to inquire into heresy and soon began burning all the Edwardian bishops. First to go was John Rogers, the Canon of St Paul’s, well known for helping with the translation of the Bible that Cranmer had sponsored. He was followed by Bishop Hooper of Gloucester, whose conscience had stopped him wearing vestments because St Peter would not have worn them. Taken to Smithfield in his long white shift, he was tied to a stake and logs were piled round him until only the upper half of his body could be seen. As the fire slowly consumed him, he never uttered a sound.

The three other most celebrated personalities of the early English Reformation, Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley were all taken to Oxford to be examined in their faith by the new Catholic bishops. Cranmer’s trial was postponed because, having been made archbishop by the pope, his case had to be transferred to Rome. But Latimer and Ridley were condemned to death for denying Transubstantiation, the transforming of the bread and wine at Communion into the Real Body and Blood of Christ. They were trussed back to back at a stake in the town ditch at Oxford. As the flames rose and their agony began, the ever courageous Latimer said to his trembling fellow martyr Ridley, ‘Play the man, brother Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s Grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’

And he was right. Until the Marian martyrs, of whom 300 were burned in the next three years, Protestantism had really been confined to a tiny percentage of the country. But, influenced by the civilizing spirit of the Renaissance, the people of England were more horrified by the burnings under Mary because of the visible human anguish it caused than they would have been in the middle ages. Moreover, the persecution of heretics was all part of the unwelcome Spanish influence under which the country had fallen since the queen’s marriage. The methods of the Spanish Inquisition, which gave Spain a bad name and was soon to be described in
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs
, did more to convert England to Protestantism than all the efforts of the Protestant divines. The queen herself became known as Bloody Mary.

Cranmer too soon met his death by burning. For all his great literary gifts, the former archbishop had never been a very strong character and he was now an old man. After five months of imprisonment, his spirit was broken. He agreed to recant and at Cardinal Pole’s suggestion put his name to papers describing himself as the author of all the evils which had fallen on the nation since Henry VIII. But as one of the chief architects of the Protestant Reformation Cranmer was such a major figure that Cardinal Pole and Queen Mary required a very public renunciation from him. It was arranged that this would take place before a large audience in St Mary’s Church at Oxford.

To everyone’s surprise, at the pulpit Cranmer suddenly showed a courage no one had known he possessed. In a firm voice he denounced the pope as anti-Christ and his doctrine as false. Angry Catholics removed him before he could finish speaking and hurried him to the stake outside. But even then he outwitted them. For Cranmer thrust his right hand into the fire saying loudly, ‘It was that unworthy hand which offended by writing lies and recanting, therefore it must burn first.’

Although it was popularly believed that it was her Spanish advisers who were chiefly responsible for the burnings, in fact Mary herself derived enormous satisfaction from them. Never in rude health, and usually having a poor appetite, she would eat a heartier dinner after a burning had taken place. The emotional gratification that she took from persecuting heretics was one of the few she obtained. Quite soon after the marriage Philip removed himself back to his own kingdom and visited his English wife only periodically when he needed money for the war against France.

The struggle of Valois versus Habsburg, of Henry II of France against Charles V and then Philip II took many surprising shapes and forms. Not the least of these was when Philip forced Mary to declare war on France, and English troops took part in the assault which won the Battle of St Quentin. But like everything to do with Mary the affair ended in disaster. In 1558 in a tit-for-tat action the French high command attacked England’s last possession in France, the port and staple town of Calais. Though its governor had repeatedly warned that he did not possess enough food or soldiers to defend his position Mary’s government misunderstood how urgent the situation was.

When reinforcements finally arrived, it was too late. The war was extremely unpopular and the antipathy towards Philip and Mary herself meant that Parliament was no longer the obedient tool of the crown. It refused to vote supplies. The government could raise money only by forced loans and illegal customs duties. News of the fall of Calais burst upon England like a thunderclap; it was the
coup de grâce
for Mary’s already poor health. She had miscarried one child. Now she lay dying of a stomach tumour which for many months she had pitifully believed to be a pregnancy. Loathed by her people, her husband far from her side, shortly before she passed away the unhappy queen uttered the immortal words: ‘When I die the word “Calais” will be found engraved on my heart.’ A few hours later on that same day, 17 November, died the other great defender of the ancient faith, Cardinal Pole.

Meanwhile messengers had galloped to Hatfield, where the twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth was living, conscious that with her sister dying childless she was the future queen. The learned Elizabeth was reading the classics under an oak tree when the messengers arrived and hailed her as their sovereign. Then she said very slowly in Latin, ‘This is the Lord’s doing and it is marvellous in our eyes.’ As was remarked at the time, it was a good sign for a queen to be reading books instead of burning them, and so it proved.