The Tudors

by G. J. Meyer

  One other of the queen’s first appointments must be noted here: the selection of the dashing young Robert Dudley as master of horse. Though he was not put on the council—not yet—Dudley’s new position was highly visible and rather glamorous, and his selection was clear and early evidence of the unique place he held in Elizabeth’s affections. He was the younger of the only two surviving sons of the John Dudley who as Duke of Northumberland had destroyed himself by attempting to put Jane Grey on the throne, and so he was also the grandson of the Edmund Dudley who lost his head at the start of Henry VIII’s reign. Thus for the third time in as many generations a young member of this irrepressible clan won a place close to the throne, and for the second time it was happening in spite of the previous generation’s failure and deep disgrace.

  Dudley, like almost everyone singled out for preferment, was allied with the evangelical camp. With his four brothers he had spent the first months of Mary’s reign as a prisoner in the Tower. (Elizabeth was confined there at the same time, though there is no evidence of their having been in contact.) After his release he had withdrawn to a life of obscurity on his father-in-law’s estates in East Anglia. His sudden emergence as a highly visible member of the new regime formed part of a pattern that must have seemed to ensure a swift and thorough triumph for the Protestant cause. But then January 25 arrived, Elizabeth’s first Parliament assembled at Westminster with the convocation of the clergy in session as well, and it became obvious that the way ahead was not in fact going to be easy.

  The new House of Commons, many of its members chosen as usual for their willingness to accept the guidance of the Crown, showed itself from the start to be a potent engine of religious reform. Under Cecil’s direction, and in collaboration with Protestant divines newly returned from the continent, it raised questions about whether the late Queen Mary’s religious legislation could be considered valid in light of her repudiation of the royal supremacy. It began pushing for a restoration of all the powers that Henry VIII had taken for himself, and of King Edward’s Protestant church. But it met with resistance from a surprising number of directions. A struggle developed in which the Crown, the bishops and clergy, the Protestants of the Commons, and conservative and reform factions in the House of Lords all tried to advance their own agendas. Over a period of months the terms of the conflict remained in flux, with the advantage appearing to shift from party to party. Elizabeth and Cecil, as they threaded their way through endless complexities, had to face the possibility that moving too emphatically in an anti-Roman position could bring papal condemnation down upon their heads, and with it the danger of a Spanish-French crusade. Likewise the queen’s Catholic subjects, if pushed too hard, might be driven—might even be led by disgruntled conservative nobles—into armed rebellion. Elizabeth’s relations with Parliament at this early stage are best understood not in terms of any attempt on her part to achieve some specific set of religious objectives but rather as one aspect of her broader struggle to maintain a balance between two contending parties: a fearful conservative majority that the queen and her ministers neither liked nor trusted, and an energized Protestant minority bent on domination. The government’s goal, if only for the time being, was to win acceptance of a purposely ambiguous status quo.

  The Privy Council opened the legislative bidding early in February by introducing bills with an aggressively Protestant slant: if enacted they would officially recognize the queen as supreme head, require all members of the clergy to swear an oath acknowledging her supremacy, and abolish Catholic worship in favor of the Edwardian Prayer Book. Commons not only approved these proposals but toughened them, but the Lords (with a conservative core consisting mainly of the Marian bishops) deleted restoration of the Prayer Book and merely authorized Elizabeth to take the title of supreme head if she chose to do so. Archbishop Heath objected even to this, taking the line (which even few women would have challenged in the sixteenth century) that the very idea of a female being head of the church was preposterous. Convocation, meanwhile, was putting itself at odds with queen, council, and Commons by voting to uphold a fully orthodox set of Catholic beliefs, including the bishop of Rome’s supremacy. While all this was transpiring, word arrived that England’s emissaries to a peace conference at Cateau-Cambrésis in France had succeeded in ending Mary’s and Philip’s war on the continent. This was important news. It stopped up a painful drain on the royal treasury. At least as significantly, by demonstrating the willingness of France and Spain to enter into a treaty with England, it eased concerns that both countries might refuse to acknowledge Elizabeth’s legitimacy as queen. International recognition of the new regime, by immediately lessening the danger of a Catholic crusade, strengthened Elizabeth’s domestic situation. She took the opportunity to pause and reconsider her options, adjourning Parliament with nothing resolved.

  Her willingness to do as much for the Protestants as she could without putting herself at risk became obvious. What was called an official “discussion” was arranged, ostensibly to give representatives of the conservative and evangelical camps an opportunity to air their views on the future of the church, and any doubts about which side the government favored were put to rest when the leading spokesmen for the Catholic side, the bishops of Winchester and Lincoln, were immediately afterward thrown into prison. This had the considerable advantage, from the Protestant perspective, of removing two staunchly conservative votes from a closely divided House of Lords as the climax of the legislative dispute drew near. When Parliament reconvened on April 3, both houses took up a revision of a supremacy bill that recognized the queen as supreme governor rather than head of the church, once again separated England from Rome, and re-repealed the heresy laws that Mary’s Parliaments had restored. This bill encountered serious opposition in the Lords and might have been defeated there if the old bugbear having to do with possible restitution of church lands had not been resurrected to alarm the lay majority one last time. A uniformity bill outlawing the mass in favor of a somewhat watered-down version of the Edwardian Prayer Book (verbal abuse of the pope was deleted from the worship service) passed even more narrowly after being opposed not only by all the bishops but by eleven lay lords including, rather embarrassingly for the Crown, two members of the Privy Council. Thus yet another new English church was born. It was unmistakably a Protestant church, possibly more emphatically Protestant than Elizabeth herself thought prudent. The new legislation had been softened to avoid extinguishing the last hopes of the Catholics, however, and so it served the queen’s chief purpose: it avoided a crisis. Before going further, the government was going to have to weaken the Catholics.

  One way to undermine the Catholic party was to eliminate the Marian bishops, and the legislation of 1559 made that possible. Thanks to the breakdown in relations between Mary and Philip and Pope Paul IV, ten of the kingdom’s twenty-seven bishoprics were now vacant. A remarkable number of the remaining bishops were aged and infirm, and with Pole dead and Heath of York wanting to avoid conflict the hierarchy was essentially leaderless. Moreover several of its members—including Cuthbert Tunstal of Durham, who had been bullied into submission by Henry VIII early in the divorce dispute and was now in his mid-eighties—had lived through all the turmoil of the past thirty years and survived by bending under pressure. Elizabeth, not unreasonably, expected that some and possibly all of these men would do the sensible thing and once again repudiate the connection with Rome. She found, however, that almost to a man they were unwilling to make Cranmers of themselves by changing their allegiance yet again. Only Anthony Kitchen of Llandaff in Wales took the uniformity oath. Every one of the others, even those who in the past had shown themselves willing to go wherever the winds of fortune blew, stood fast. One resigned, two died in the months following the passage of the new Uniformity Act, and by the end of the year all the others had been expelled from their offices and either imprisoned or placed under house arrest. This time, however, there would be no executions. Elizabeth was not burdened with her fa
ther’s terrible need for capitulation or his willingness to kill anyone who failed to capitulate abjectly. Determined to put her regime in the sharpest possible contrast to her sister’s, she understood that a resumption of executions would have been entirely counterproductive.

  Having decapitated the Marian church, the queen found herself at liberty to fill twenty-six bishoprics with men of her own choosing. This proved to be no simple matter. The most impressive candidates, the men who had departed for the continent rather than conform during Mary’s reign and thereby achieved heroic stature in the eyes of the English Protestant community, had during their years of exile broken up into quarreling factions. The most important factions were the one centered at Frankfurt under Richard Cox, who had been tutor to Prince Edward before Henry VIII’s death and chancellor of Oxford University afterward, and the one at Geneva under the Scotsman John Knox, who had declined a bishopric when Edward was king. Though they had become enemies while in exile, both Cox and Knox were rich in the kinds of credentials that should have brought success under the Elizabethan settlement.

  Unfortunately for himself and his followers, however, during the closing months of Mary’s reign Knox had written and published a document with an eye-catchingly dramatic title: The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. This was, in essence, a vitriolic attack on three Catholic rulers: Queen Mary of England; the Frenchwoman Marie of Guise, who was ruling Scotland in the name of her daughter Mary Stuart; and Margaret of Hapsburg, Philip of Spain’s half-sister and his regent in the Netherlands. Knox’s tract excoriated the three for everything he found loathsome about their regimes—their “regiments,” in the diction of the time. He had, however, couched his argument in such broad terms that it easily could be understood as (because in fact it was) a condemnation of rule by women as contrary to nature and therefore “monstrous.” Elizabeth, who in a fantastically bad stroke of timing for Knox became queen just months after its publication, interpreted it in exactly this way. Not only Knox but those associated with him, even that most seminal of Protestant theologians John Calvin, became personae non gratae in England precisely at the moment when their version of Christianity was once again finding acceptance there. Luckily for Knox, a political-religious coup soon gave the Scots evangelicals control of the government and church in Edinburgh, enabling him to return home and proceed to the next stage of his momentous career as a crusading Puritan and anti-Catholic polemicist. From there he would try without success to persuade Elizabeth that The First Blast had never had anything to do with someone as obviously favored by God as she was. Cox meanwhile returned to England, secured for himself the lucrative see of Ely, and resumed his interrupted campaign to purge Oxford of conservative theology; he had the satisfaction of seeing one member after another of his old Frankfurt circle appointed to positions of importance. If not as radical as the Genevan Calvinists, the Coxians, too, were strongly inclined to the austerity that would soon be given the name Puritan. They were just as disposed to look on the old church with horror and only somewhat more willing to enter into alliances of convenience with Protestants less uncompromising than themselves.

  The stage seemed set for the triumph of Cox’s party. Elizabeth, however, showed herself to be unwilling to let that happen. Whatever her innermost motives—fear of the consequences of going too far, perhaps, or a personal theology capacious enough to make room for her father’s kind of conservatism—she was soon obstructing her own new bishops. The nominee for Canterbury, Matthew Parker, was the choice not of the queen herself but of Secretary Cecil and Chancellor Bacon, and he was not one of the evangelical heroes returning from exile, having spent the Marian years staying as inconspicuous as possible at home. He had only the narrowest base of support, therefore, and even before his consecration (an honor, it must be acknowledged, that he tried to escape) he found himself at odds with Crown and Parliament. The point of conflict was a piece of legislation called the Act of Exchange, an attempt to allow the government to enrich itself at church expense (yet again) by taking possession of property belonging to the many vacant bishoprics and promising revenues from tithes in return. The Protestant clergy had as much reason as their Catholic predecessors to object to this latest plundering of their resources, and Parker, to the queen’s indignation and the discomfiture of Cecil and Bacon, put himself at the head of the objectors. There ensued a long series of conflicts between Crown and church, and increasingly between different groups of Protestants, that made a misery of Parker’s tenure as archbishop and a confusion of the council’s efforts to manage the church. The queen went to sometimes outlandish lengths to extract money from the dioceses while staying within the letter of the law. She allowed the Diocese of Ely to remain without a bishop for nineteen years after Cox’s death. Bristol remained vacant for fourteen years, Chichester for seven. There were arcane but bitter conflicts over such questions as what churchmen should be required or permitted or forbidden to wear in the performance of their ceremonial duties.

  As angrily as they could contend among themselves, the Protestants rarely had difficulty in uniting to expunge from the kingdom their despised common enemy: the Catholic Church and those of their countrymen who persisted in its beliefs and practices. Here again, however, with what must have been baffling frequency, they found themselves unable to get the expected level of cooperation from the queen. Out of the eight thousand priests in England, no more than three hundred were removed from their positions between 1560 and 1566 for failing to confirm to the Act of Uniformity. This number, certainly a small fraction of the conservative clergy, can reasonably be taken as a measure less of concord than of Elizabeth’s unwillingness to press the issue. In 1561, after the recently elected Pope Pius IV called the Council of Trent back into session after a years-long adjournment and invited England to send representatives, an alarmed Cecil, horrified by the thought of intercourse between Canterbury and Rome, ginned up enough supposed evidence of Catholic sedition to persuade Elizabeth not only to spurn the invitation but to intensify the harassment of practicing Catholics. The persecution was relaxed as soon as the danger of English participation in the council was past, and two years later, when an increasingly aggressive Parliament made it a capital offense to refuse twice to take the supremacy oath, the queen quietly ordered Parker to see to it that no one was asked a second time. When convocation adopted the Thirty-Nine Articles as a definition of current English orthodoxy, she saw to it that the language was kept general enough that Catholics would not have to repudiate either it or their beliefs. Repeatedly over the first decade of her reign she vetoed legislation intended to increase the difficulties of being Catholic while functioning more or less normally as a member of the English nation.

  Nothing in this should be taken as suggesting that Elizabeth was in some way a crypto-Catholic, or that she entertained any thought of establishing a new kind of country in which fundamentally different belief systems would be permitted to coexist. She was not only Protestant but militantly Protestant, and no more capable than her contemporaries of imagining that any nation could tolerate multiple faiths without weakening itself fatally. But her highest objective remained her own security, not the pursuit of any agenda religious or otherwise. For more than ten years she remained content just to inconvenience her Catholic subjects, trying to make them gradually decline in numbers and finally—or so it was hoped—disappear. She was likewise content to keep in place a national church whose doctrines and practices were thoroughly acceptable to very few people except herself, a Protestant church from which increasing numbers of her most passionately Protestant subjects felt utterly alienated.

  Background

  THE COUNCIL OF TRENT

  THE RELIGIOUS AGENDA WITH WHICH ELIZABETH BEGAN her reign, her hope of slowly extinguishing the old church by a process of neglect that was far from benign but also stopped short of lethal persecution, was complicated by an improbable development: the emergence of the Roman Catholic Church, even before Elizabeth
became queen, as the most ambitiously reformist element in the whole expanding universe of Christian sects. The energy with which Rome began to address the problems, failures, and doctrinal questions that lay at the root of the Reformation had become a challenge for Protestants of all stripes even before Henry VIII’s death. As the resulting changes made themselves felt in England, they decreased the likelihood that Elizabeth’s government was going to be able to win over its Catholic subjects simply by making their attachment to Rome an embarrassment and an inconvenience.

  What made the difference was the Council of Trent, itself one of the most remarkable developments in the history of Christianity. Its results, for better or worse, were nothing less than momentous. That it happened at all, considering the obstacles that stood in its path from beginning to end, struck many of its participants as little short of miraculous.

  Councils had been a central element in the development of Christianity almost from its origins, a way of settling disputed questions by referring them to conclaves of church leaders from every part of the believing world. The eighteen councils that had been convened before Trent, more than one per century on average, had played an essential role in deciding what was required for church membership, which texts were and were not authoritative, what was doctrine and what heresy. Though conflicts had arisen over whether councils or popes had primacy, and though the part played by councils in causing schism in the fourteenth century had caused them to be viewed with deep skepticism thereafter, the fundamental idea of councils as a means by which God could reveal himself to the faithful continued to exert a strong pull. Luther himself, at the start of his rebellion, had demanded that a council be called to pass judgment on what he was teaching. Though scarcely a year later he was declaring that councils had no power to decide questions of faith, by then some of his followers and some defenders of the old orthodoxy were looking to a council as possibly the only hope of preserving unity.