The Tudors for Dummies (AvaxHome Download) (23 page)

A woman could sue in a court of law and was answerable to the courts.

A woman could have titles and her own land, but she couldn't carry out

the military bits that went with all that, so she had to find a man to take

charge of the military side for her.

When a woman married, all her property became her husband's and she

couldn't testify against him in court.

When a woman died, her husband kept all her property and only when

he died would it go to her heirs. (Are you with us so far?)

So technically, if Mary died before Philip (she did, by 40 years!) he'd be king

of England in his own right and the title wouldn't pass to any child they

may have until Philip died. But if Mary died before Philip, English law said

he wouldn't be allowed to keep England! Nobody had ever had to face this

technical problem at this high level before, and in the event of Mary's death,

Philip would be bound to insist on his legal rights. Chapter 9: Changing with the Times: Edward, John, Jane and Mary 165 The only solution to all this was an act of Parliament. In April 1554 the law was changed, making Mary an honorary man so that Philip couldn't inherit England. So far, so peculiar, but it didn't help Mary cope with what was bound to be a difficult relationship.

Philip crossed the Channel in an appalling storm and reached Southampton on 20 July 1554. Five days later, with bells ringing and bonfires burning into the night, the couple were married in a full Catholic ceremony in the cathe- dral in Winchester (it must have made Bishop Stephen Gardiner's day). The slight snag was one of communication (see Chapter 10) � Mary understood but spoke no Spanish and Philip didn't speak or understand English. On the wedding night he must have rehearsed the line `Good night, my lords all' to clear everybody but Mary out of the bedroom.

The new bride now faced the greatest test of her life; restoring the Catholic faith. 166 Part III: Remembering the Forgotten Tudors: Edward VI and Mary

Returning to the Old Faith: Mary I In This Chapter

Reuniting with Rome

Burning the heretics

Planting Englishmen in Ireland

Trying for a successor with Philip of Spain

Getting caught up in Philip's plans

W hen Mary became queen it was party time. In London people held

street banquets, built bonfires, rang bells, threw money out of the

window and hurled caps in the air. You couldn't hear what anybody was

saying for the noise.

Five years later Mary died a monarch so hated that history has called her

Bloody Mary. In this chapter, we look at the first years of Mary's reign, and

just what she did to become so reviled.

Reviving the Old Faith

When Mary became queen in 1553, what were her religious options?

She could restore the Church to what it was when Henry VIII left it, basi-

cally his Six Articles plus an English Bible and the old mass but no mon-

asteries (see Chapter 6).

She could return completely to the old faith, kow-towing to the pope

again and giving land back to the monasteries; incense, carvings of

saints, pilgrimages, the whole nine yards of the medieval Catholic

Church.

Pope Julius III sent Cardinal Pole to England as his right-hand man, hoping

(rightly as it turned out) that he'd advise Mary closely. 168 Part III: Remembering the Forgotten Tudors: Edward VI and Mary

The Council were in a cleft stick. No diehard Catholics were left and most of

the Council had been Dudley's men, but they did like being in power and were

anxious not to get chopped, either metaphorically or for real. So they proba-

bly advised Mary to proceed a step at a time and to always use Parliament.

Contrary to popular belief, Mary didn't start out bloody. She should have

detested Elizabeth because she was a Protestant and a threat as long as

Mary remained childless, but in fact she was very fond of her, treating her

sometimes as the daughter she never had. She agonised long and hard over

whether to have the ex-queen Jane Grey executed (see Chapter 9), always

worked within Parliament and the law and even delayed her own wedding to

sort out Christian names for a godchild.

Making changes

Mary's first step was to bring the mass back to the Chapel Royal and other

churches. The mass was popular and many people must have been happy,

probably assuming the Government had gone mad over the last few years.

But ardent Protestants were less impressed:

Protestants and Catholics clashed at Paul's Cross in London when they

heard the Catholic bishop Bonner had been reinstated.

When Archbishop Cranmer complained about the mass, he was thrown

into prison.

Peter Martyr and other leading Protestants got out of the country or

went into hiding. Stephen Gardiner, as lord chancellor, promised to hunt

them down.

There's something about Mary

The portraits of Mary as queen don't do her clothes and children. She was honest � unusu-

justice. By then she was 40, her eyebrows had ally for a Tudor � and kind.

gone and her lack of teeth gave her face a hard,

But Mary had been treated appallingly � her

frosty look. But as a girl Mary had been pretty.

father, Henry VIII, had dumped her mother, and

When she was 11, she danced at a pageant

she'd been made a bastard and sidelined at

at Greenwich and her father took off her cap

every turn (see Chapters 5 and 9). She'd even

to show the ambassadors her lovely hair � the

had her darling religion � Catholicism � kicked

`silver tresses as beautiful as ever seen on human

out of the country. If it was to be payback time,

head', according to the Venetian secretary.

nobody could be too surprised.

Mary loved dancing, spoke Greek, Latin and

French and all her life she was fond of jewels, Chapter 10: Returning to the Old Faith: Mary I 169

Riding the whirlwind Try to imagine an ordinary 40-year-old man, the Through his 30s, the man would see his own same age as the queen, coming to terms with church change. The mass would now always the changes in religion in England. When he be in English, the wall paintings would be white- was born, in 1514, the country was Catholic, the washed, the carvings of saints would disappear. mass and the Bible were in Latin, the monaster-

Now, suddenly, it was all change again � back ies were all-powerful and the head guy, spiritu-

to the Latin mass, the wall paintings and the ally, was the pope.

saints' carvings, and the bread and wine was Then, when he was 20, came Henry VIII's `great once again the flesh and blood of Christ. Was matter' and the country broke with Rome. An the pope coming back again too? English Bible appeared in the man's church and

Result? The average man in the English street his priest may or may not have carried out the

must have encountered chaos, bewilderment mass in English. If the man lived near a monas-

and fear. Heaven and hell were still real, but how tery, he'd watch the monks go to see their lands

on earth did you get to one and avoid the other? sold off and their buildings left to rot.

The bottom line was that most people were in the dark about what was going

on and very few of them were literate enough to write their confused thoughts

down. See the sidebar `Riding the whirlwind' for how an average man may

have felt.

Mary was crowned on 1 October 1553. She used `uncontaminated' holy oil

imported from the Low Countries (today's Netherlands), rather than the old

stuff left lying about from Edward's coronation. Several bishops jumped ship

and became Catholic again, just to keep their jobs, so we have to ask how

committed they'd been to the new faith in the first place. Anybody who did

have a conscience, like Bishop Hooper at Gloucester, lost his job � and in

Hooper's case, his life.

Lord Chancellor Gardiner was keen to get England back under the pope's

control before Mary's wedding to Philip (see Chapter 9) so that it would all

look like Mary's achievement, not Philip's. Gardiner couldn't do this alone

and the Council wouldn't back him. Lord Paget led the lords in revolt, Mary

was furious and nothing was sorted out by the time the wedding took place.

Getting Parliament on side

Mary used her common sense and didn't take Cardinal Pole's advice to

ignore Parliament. The pope's man had been out of England for years and

had lost touch with what was going on. 170 Part III: Remembering the Forgotten Tudors: Edward VI and Mary

So Mary's first Parliament repealed all the acts brought in under Edward (see

Chapter 8 for details of Edward's reformation):

The 1552 Book of Common Prayer was withdrawn.

The Sarum Use (the old Latin mass) was brought back officially.

The pope would now appoint bishops, not the monarch.

Priests couldn't marry.

Various visitations were carried out and many bishops were sacked. If they

wouldn't give up their `concubines', bishops lost their jobs. The human cost

was huge � families broken up, women suddenly left destitute.

The Catholic Church was very old, and Edward's reforms had only been

around for a few years. So most people probably accepted Mary's changes.

The English Bible stayed and for the moment the Royal Supremacy stayed.

Things were more or less back to the state of play that King Henry had left.

Furthering the faith

If Mary had left it at her first reforms, fine, but neither she nor Lord

Chancellor Gardiner were prepared to do that. And with Philip now on the

scene (see Chapter 9 for details of Mary's marriage), they could open the

Catholic door still wider because Philip was the son of the Holy Roman

Emperor Charles V, and he ruled a country � Spain � where the Inquisition

was all-powerful (see the sidebar, `The Holy Inquisition').

The Holy Inquisition

The Catholic Church set up the Holy Inquisition the finger at somebody, and arrests and torture

in 1248 to stamp out heresy. With the rise of var- would follow.

ious Protestant sects in the 16th century, things

The Inquisition dealt with all sorts of sins �

got pretty heavy and the Inquisition began to

infidelity, seduction, sorcery, witchcraft, blas-

use torture against its opponents. The nasti-

phemy, heresy and even being a Jew. Punish-

est Grand Inquisitor was probably Torquemada

ments carried out after secret trials included

(1483�98) but they were all prepared to use

burning alive, loss of property, banishment and

barbarous methods to keep people loyal to the

a life sentence in the galleys (oared warships).

faith. All it needed was for one informer to point Chapter 10: Returning to the Old Faith: Mary I 171 Charles V was easily the most powerful ruler in Europe and his son Philip was very close behind him. Now that Philip could claim to be king of England by virtue of being Mary's husband, he could bring all the authority of the Catholic church to England, backed if necessary by serious money and lots of soldiers, and of course the full terror of the Inquisition.

Pope Julius III wanted to get England back under his control � that would be a huge feather in the papal mitre. So the pope was persuaded to lift Church sanctions against people who'd bought ex-monastic lands (including, of course, the queen herself).

Meanwhile, Charles V let Cardinal Pole return to England (even though he held him up for a while to let Philip get the credit for the big Catholic comeback). In England Pole was a bit of a problem because he was actually a traitor for his part in the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 (see Chapter 6). So Parliament rushed through a bill to clear him of his treason and Pole talked to both Houses, telling them that all they had to do was to beg the pope's for- giveness and all would be well. So they did.

But that was the easy bit! Now the Council had to work towards legal docu- ments, scrapping the Act of Supremacy and getting the pope to put some- thing on paper in case he changed his mind.

Parliament overturned the Royal Supremacy on 16 January 1555, but Mary had left a loophole. The repeal of the Act of Supremacy could also be repealed (in other words, back to Henry VIII's final Church). This wasn't likely to happen while Mary was alive, but who knew what the upshot would be after that?

Mary agreed that Parliament had the right to decide what the religion of the country was going to be, but she couldn't give up her control of the Church completely, even with the Act of Supremacy gone. So she tried to have her cake and eat it:

She didn't call herself Supreme Head (because she wasn't!).

She didn't carry out royal visitations.

She did set up commissions to censor heretical writings and sermons

(not her job).

She did encourage persecution of heretics and the final decision on

whether to burn people or not came from her (see the following section

`Beginning the burning'). 172 Part III: Remembering the Forgotten Tudors: Edward VI and Mary

Polarising Pole and Paul

Sod's Law of History is that events that ought his people out of Philip's territory � hence he

to run smoothly somehow don't. So it was with recalled Pole from England.

Mary and the pope. The new man in Rome in

Twenty years earlier, when Martin Luther was

1555 was Paul IV, so terrifying that it was said

making waves against the Catholic Church

that sparks flew from his feet as he strode

(see Chapter 6), Pole had been one of those

through the Vatican. He was the most hated

who was looking for some sort of compromise

pope of the century and people held street par-

with the man. But Paul IV was a hard-liner � if

ties in Rome when he died. Pope Paul IV hated

you so much as glanced at a Protestant with-

Cardinal Reginald Pole and any kind of Catholic

out a lighted match in your hand, you must be

comeback while these two were involved was

a heretic.

going to be difficult.

Paul demanded that Pole come to Rome to

Pole was concerned about churchmen's edu-

explain why he hadn't acted harshly enough,

cation. Half a generation of laymen had already

but Mary had already given the Cardinal

grown up reading their English Bibles and were

Cranmer's job as archbishop of Canterbury and

in some cases better read than their priests.

didn't let him go. The result was Anglo�papal

Universities, Oxford and Cambridge, turned out

relations going into deep freeze.

competent clerics, but below that (and these

universities were tiny) only a sort of apprentice- A furious Mary refused to accept Paul's new

ship scheme that wasn't very good existed. So appointment as ambassador, the friar William

Pole saw an urgent need to upgrade the educa- Peto. So what, we have to ask, was the point of

tion of curates. it all? England's return to the Church of Rome

caused huge emotional upheaval, but the return

But before Pole could achieve much he lost

hadn't quite happened.

his status as the pope's ambassador (Legate

a Latere). Why was this? Well, when Philip II When Mary died in November 1558 the pope

attacked the papal states (see `Squabbling with was delighted, but even more so by the news

the pope', later in this chapter), Paul IV pulled that Cardinal Pole followed her 12 hours later.

Beginning the burning

Mary believed that the punishment of heretics was a duty. God had put