by G. J. Meyer
Latin was emphasized so heavily because it was the language of the universities and therefore synonymous with academic achievement, and because it was what the teachers knew. Because in most schools all age groups were together in a single large room (most had only a single master plus, sometimes, an assistant or “usher”), all the chanted recitations must have created a constant racket. Even the exercises in English would present special challenges for today’s students. The alphabet in use in England in the sixteenth century had only twenty-four letters: u and v were the same letter (the first was used in the middle of a word, the second at the beginning), as were i and j (j being used as the capital form of i). Though other letters were used exactly as we use them today, in the handwritten form of four and a half centuries ago they would be indecipherable to the modern reader. A long-since-forgotten symbol that was almost but not exactly the letter y represented the same sound as th (as in “ye olde chandlery” or whatever). Roman numerals were much more commonly used then than now, and the last in a series of Roman i’s was written as a j: thus “King Henry viij.” Spelling was freely improvised and would remain so until someone presumed to publish a guide to the subject in 1558.
From about the mid-fourteenth century on, families of means showed increasing willingness not only to subject their sons to the grammar school regimen but to make significant financial sacrifices in order to do so. Their reasons were perfectly rational: in a developing economy where subsistence farming was no longer an inescapable fate for nearly everyone, opportunities were opening up in commerce, government, and other fields but were available only to the educated. And though the use of English for official purposes was no longer as unusual as it once had been, being properly educated still meant being at least somewhat proficient in Latin. Grammar schools were therefore portals to advancement, increasingly in demand and increasingly common, and some were even operated under secular auspices with lay rather than clerical teachers. Seventeen such schools are known to have been in operation in the county of Gloucestershire at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, and there is no reason to think that an untypical number. London, where there had been only three in 1440, would have fifteen by 1660, each able to accommodate a hundred pupils on average. This two-hundred-year emergence of a national educational system was not accelerated but temporarily reversed by the two decades that began with Henry VIII’s attack on the monasteries and ended with the death of his son. Where schools were allowed to survive, they did so less often as a result of increased support from the Crown than because patrons of particular institutions had enough wealth or influence, either at court or in their own home districts, to save them from destruction.
The universities began a profound process of change during those same decades, in large measure because the most privileged families started wanting their sons to become “gentlemen” according to the emerging fashion. Gentlemen were still expected to have basic military skills—swords and daggers continued to be essential elements of their attire and were not always left sheathed—but under the new code it was no longer enough to be able to fight and hunt and hawk. No doubt in part because of the example set by the Tudors in providing even their daughters with superb educations, any young man hoping to make his mark at court knew that he was going to need more than a passing acquaintance with Latin if not other ancient languages and with subjects ranging from rhetoric to theology, from philosophy to astronomy. Boys from the best families continued almost without exception to be educated by private tutors rather than at grammar schools, but in increasing numbers they were entering Oxford or Cambridge at the customary age of fourteen or fifteen. In the fifteenth century Oxford’s Magdalen College became the first to open its doors to the sons of “noble and powerful personages” even if they were not preparing for careers in the church—so long as their fathers paid well for the privilege. By the middle of the sixteenth century a few years at Oxford and Cambridge were a familiar rite of passage for the well-born young. Problems arose, inevitably, as the quasi-monastic serenity of the universities was invaded by rich young aristocrats whose interest in the life of the mind was easily overwhelmed by the opportunities for mischief that their new freedom put in their way. Some of the fun-seekers went, no doubt wisely, to London’s Inns of Court instead, the inner sanctum of the English legal profession. There they could find an education recognized as fully equal to that available at the universities, along with the advantages of being situated in the capital with all of its bawdy temptations.
21
And Another Early End
Within weeks of the collapse of the Wyatt Rebellion, Parliament approved the treaty that laid out the terms under which Mary was to become the wife of Philip of the House of Hapsburg. On July 19 the bridegroom arrived. Aware of the extent to which the marriage was disliked by Mary’s subjects high and low, he conducted himself with care. He made a great display of bringing with him chests supposedly loaded with treasure, was ostentatiously generous with Mary’s council and court, and let it be known that the costs of supporting his princely household would be paid out of his coffers and not the queen’s. Though he spoke no English he used his considerable charm, brought to a high polish in some of the most elegant courts in Europe, to ingratiate himself with England’s elite. “His way with the lords is so winning,” one of the Spanish grandees who had accompanied him to England reported in words that may have been a better reflection of his hopes than of reality, “that they themselves say they have never had a king to whom they so quickly grew attached.”
At the same time Philip was making a dazzling impression upon his wife-to-be. But how much of his bonhomie was a facade? And what might it have cost him to appear more delighted with his situation than he possibly could have been? He had been compelled by duty to move to a damp and chilly northern island, not many of whose inhabitants were at all happy to see him, and now he was obliged to conduct himself impeccably night and day while making preparations to marry an older cousin. He had left behind on the continent an aging father who was sinking into a morbid depression, perhaps even the mental illness that had caused Philip’s grandmother, Catherine of Aragon’s sister Joanna the Mad, to be kept in confinement most of her long life. He had put the Channel between himself and the various nerve centers of the sprawling Hapsburg family business, an empire that was beset with enemies, stumbling endlessly from crisis to crisis, and desperately in need of careful management. England must have felt like exile to Philip, like a distraction from more important matters. Even his displays of generosity—his lavishing of gifts on English courtiers and his pointed refusal to use a penny of Mary’s funds for his own purposes—were a painful pretense. In fact Philip was the financially hard-pressed junior partner in an insolvent international enterprise, and every gold coin that he bestowed on England was needed elsewhere. “If the English find out how hard up we are,” one of his retainers wrote, “I doubt whether we shall escape with our lives.”
Philip did his duty, however, and six days after his arrival he and Mary were wed in a grand public ceremony in which both were robed in cloth of gold. There was no coronation for Philip—Parliament refused to consent to that—but henceforth he was to be addressed as king. The marriage treaty granted him that dignity, and to remove any doubts about his entitlement to it, his father had had him declared king not only of Naples but, rather absurdly, of Jerusalem as well. And in fact he soon found himself functioning as something very like a king. From the start of their life together, Mary gratefully relied on Philip for guidance, support, and even leadership. Members of the council, even those opposed to a foreign marriage, found their dislike for the interloper overridden by their preference for dealing with a male rather than a female monarch. It seemed more natural.
With the wedding celebrated and the marriage presumably consummated, the Crown no longer had any need to keep Reginald Pole out of England. At the urging of the Hapsburgs, Pope Julius signed a bull relinquishing all claim to the English church’s al
ienated lands, at the same time instructing Pole, in his capacity as legate, to issue a general dispensation to all the current holders of those lands. Pole also absolved of schism a number of the conservative bishops who had accepted the royal supremacy under Henry VIII but lost their posts under Edward VI, so that they could now be restored to the good graces of their Catholic queen. Late in November he set foot on his native ground for the first time in two decades and was escorted from Dover to a barge waiting at Gravesend by eighteen hundred mounted men including court officials, bishops, and representatives of the nobility. These worthies presented him with an act of Parliament that repealed the attainder passed against him in the time of Henry VIII. His arrival at Westminster was made a great occasion, one that in pomp and solemnity almost rivaled Mary’s coronation and wedding. The cardinal was met by Chancellor Gardiner upon disembarking from his barge, by Philip at the gate of the palace, and finally, at the top of the stairs, by the queen. The four of them then set about accomplishing what Mary and Philip had already declared to be the purpose for which the new Parliament had been summoned: reconciliation with Rome.
Pole was at least as burdened as Mary by the religious struggles of the past quarter century, most of his family having been obliterated by Henry VIII, and he brought to his new duties a weighty array of assets and liabilities. On the positive side he was a man of high moral character, blameless in his personal life, a leader in ecclesiastical reform. He had long been a major figure at the papal court, serving (among many other assignments) as one of the pope’s representatives at the first meeting of the reformist Council of Trent in 1545. He probably would have been elected pope in 1549 had he condescended to show any real interest in the office. (He took the lofty view that no one should become pope who actively wished to do so.) Instead he declined an opportunity to be chosen by acclamation, and when the matter came to a vote he fell short by the thinnest of margins. He was committed to correcting the abuses of the Renaissance church generally and in England in particular, and in his pursuit of change he emphasized education for the laity and high standards of conduct and learning for the clergy at all levels.
He would have been a superb leader of the national church in more settled times, but in some ways he was ill suited to the England of the 1550s. He no longer understood his homeland (not appreciating, for example, the extent to which Protestantism had taken root in London), and he misjudged his cousin the queen. Not having been on hand to observe Mary as she faced down Dudley’s attempted coup and then Wyatt’s Rebellion, he underestimated her strength and courage. He looked not to Mary but to her husband for support, counsel, and leadership. In so doing he made it easier for skeptics to regard him less as an Englishman than as part of Philip’s Spanish faction. The effects would be profoundly negative where Pole’s (and Mary’s) aspirations were concerned: many in England and Rome alike would come to think that opposition to Philip, and to Spain, required opposition to Pole as well. Nor would the Catholic cause be helped, in the long term, by the mild-mannered Pole’s increasing determination to find and root out heresy as he and his church defined it. In this he was no different from an overwhelming majority of his contemporaries, his evangelical adversaries included, but he would have been more effective if he had differed.
During Mary’s reign as in the time of her father and brother, much of the population retained its attachment to the old church and was prepared to welcome its return. Thus Mary and her husband and advisers had little difficulty in seeing to it that the House of Commons was dominated by members who supported their agenda. The Parliament that convened in August 1554, two months before Pole’s return, showed no hesitation in cooperating with the new regime—and with the cardinal, too, once he was on the scene. In a great flurry of activity that began at the end of November and continued into 1555, Parliament turned back the calendar to the days when Henry VIII was still a favorite of the pope’s. Its two houses (and the convocation of the clergy as well) asked the Crown to petition Pole for a restoration of the ancient connection to Rome. Yet again great care was taken, first by Parliament in its entreaty and then by the queen and Pole in their response, to make clear that there could be no question of restoring the church’s lost property; obviously this remained an issue of the most extreme sensitivity. Thereafter a committee representing both houses drafted, and the Lords and Commons approved, a kind of omnibus bill reversing every piece of legislation passed since the end of the 1520s for the purpose of destroying the authority of the pope in England. At the same time Parliament restored heresy laws that dated back to the reigns of Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V and had been nullified by the Edwardian reformers. This would be momentous in its consequences. It opened the way to an attack on Cranmer and other evangelicals that would end by blackening Mary’s name forever.
It was all quite astonishing. The schism, the Reformation, had been reversed with almost no resistance and no shedding of blood. The old faith had been restored, and because people on all sides of the question regarded this as either a profoundly joyous or a profoundly deplorable development, it is worthwhile to recall what, exactly, it entailed. It meant that the bishop of Rome, the pope, once again had the authority to correct heresy; implicit in this was the acknowledgment that the pope (or the papal administrative machinery), rather than the queen, had the right to decide what constituted heresy and who was or was not a heretic. It meant also that the pope had the authority not to choose England’s bishops, but to confirm the Crown’s choices and veto nominees it deemed unacceptable. It meant that the pope could dispense clergymen from the prohibitions against nonresidence and multiple benefices, set aside the canon law’s proscription of certain kinds of marriage, and hear appeals of the decisions of the English ecclesiastical courts. Even when taken together, these powers do not add up to a great deal unless one subscribes to the distinctly modern idea that no one has the right to impose religious uniformity. Certainly the pope’s authority infringed very little on the prerogatives of any monarch who did not claim, as Henry VIII and Edward VI did, to be the highest arbiter of divine truth. Nor did it have much to do with the everyday lives of ordinary people. For Mary, however, the restoration of the old ways was the greatest achievement imaginable. It appeared to justify all her sufferings and losses, to have made everything worthwhile. That her husband and the churchmen he had brought with him from Spain had participated actively in making it happen added to the sweetness of what she had accomplished.
The culmination came that same autumn with the discovery, confirmed by her physicians, that Mary was pregnant. This was announced to the people and publicly celebrated, and when the queen first felt the child move in her womb she ordered Te Deums to be sung in thanksgiving. Every dream she could ever have had for herself or for England had come to pass. She sat on the throne; she had a husband whom she admired, trusted, and loved; the faith that she had struggled so long to maintain was once again the faith of her countrymen; and now—climactic miracle—there was going to be an heir. Surely God had saved her for this transcendent destiny, and surely it was incumbent on Mary to behave magnanimously in response to so much divine bounty. Already in October John Dudley’s widow, after months of begging, cajoling, and bribing anyone who would listen to her and had access to Mary and Philip, had won the release from the Tower of her four surviving sons (one of whom died soon after being freed). Mary even allowed herself, or so it was said, to be dissuaded by Philip from sending Elizabeth to a convent in Spain. The queen continued to look skeptically on her sister’s demonstrations of fidelity to the old religion, and time would show that she was right to do so even if she was acting less on the basis of hard evidence than in response to intuition. Philip, on the other hand, had good reason to want Elizabeth to remain in England and succeed to the throne if Mary died without issue. The most obvious alternative to Elizabeth was the other Mary, the young queen of the Scots, who soon would be marrying the heir to the French throne. The thought that a queen of Scotland and France might also inh
erit the throne of England was at least as intolerable from the Hapsburg perspective as Mary’s choice of Philip had been to the French.
The period of her pregnancy was the pinnacle of Mary Tudor’s life. It did not last long, and the drumbeat of discord, frustration, disappointment, and loss soon resumed. The first thing that went wrong was that the evangelicals proved far more persistent than the conservatives had ever supposed they would dare to be. Protestant preachers who had not fled to the continent when Mary became queen not only publicly condemned transubstantiation, free will, the restored Latin liturgy, and the sacraments but mocked the Crown and challenged the legitimacy of everything it was doing. There were physical assaults on conservative clergy, and pamphlets attacking Mary and her husband and their church poured into England from Europe, often with the assistance of the king of France. Though the dissenters were a diverse lot, divided among themselves on sometimes arcane points of doctrine and practice, to the queen and council they had the appearance of a monolithic threat. Some of the priests who had come with Philip from Spain, including the friar who was now Mary’s confessor, urged the necessity of suppressing these heretics and stopping the spread of their sedition.
