A History of Britain - Volume 1: At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC-AD 1603

by Simon Schama

  Mary’s colossal martyr-complex was, of course, the result of her mother’s ordeal and her own humiliation in the years that followed, when she was demoted from Princess Mary to the illegitimate ‘Lady Mary’. But by the time of her brother’s reign she was not as helpless as she made out. In 1543 Catherine Parr had persuaded Henry VIII to reinstate both Mary and Elizabeth in the line of succession and had brought the girls to her own household. A portrait painted around 1544 on a precious azurite blue ground shows Mary not as the dowdy, nun-like creature of myth, but as a Renaissance princess, covered in jewels and brilliantly coloured French velvets. Thanks to her father’s guilty generosity, which showered her with palaces and castles in East Anglia, Mary had become a power in her own right. And she had a powerful ally in her cousin, the Emperor Charles V, who threatened war if she were denied her masses and to whose hospitality Mary attempted to flee from the evangelical regime of Cranmer.

  So when Edward’s lingering feverish cold degenerated into a respiratory infection in the spring and summer of 1552, it was obvious to the guardians of the evangelion that, unless something drastic were done, Mary would take England back to its pre-Reformation past. The ailing, fifteen-year-old king conspired with John Dudley, now Earl of Northumberland, to pre-empt this disaster. Acting with dire haste, Northumberland married his son, Guildford Dudley, to Lady Jane Grey, the dependably Protestant granddaughter of the famous elopers, Charles Brandon and Mary Tudor. With Edward’s pulmonary infection (which was not tuberculosis) steadily deteriorating, producing ulcers on his lungs and subjecting him to long coughing fits, Jane Grey and Guildford Dudley were ordered to get on with producing an heir as quickly as possible. It was not quickly enough, for Edward died on 13 April 1553. Northumberland summoned Jane to tell her that she was now queen and had a royal canopy placed over her head. As the architect of the pre-emptive strike, however, he had made one very serious mistake: failing to make sure that he first had Mary under lock and key.

  Northumberland had fatally misjudged both the national mood and Mary herself. Far from being intimidated by his coup, now that her moment of redemption had arrived she was determined to fight like a crusader. Moving quickly north from her house at Hunsdon in Hertfordshire, she travelled through Cambridgeshire and raised her standard at Framlingham Castle in Suffolk on the ancestral estate of the Duke of Norfolk, who had been in prison since 1547. Thousands upon thousands immediately rallied to her, for the truth was that Mary had long been popular among the largely Catholic county gentry and knights of the shires. There were those who remembered how shabbily her mother had been treated; there were those who thought she would rescue them from the alien ways of the Reformation; and there were those – perhaps the majority – who, even though they may have been estranged from the Roman Church, still believed that Mary ought to succeed to the throne because the will of her father had clearly said she should. All of these were good reasons to take up her cause. Sailors in Queen Jane’s navy at Ipswich mutinied; soldiers from Northumberland’s own army deserted and flocked to her banner. In Cambridge Northumberland pathetically attempted to save his neck by throwing his cap in the air and crying ‘God save Queen Mary’. Mary herself reviewed 15,000 troops on a white horse with tears in her eyes. She spoke of this as God’s miracle – and who can blame her?

  In September 1553 Mary entered London in a triumphal chariot. The streets were deep in flowers. For a moment it seemed as if she would turn back the clock to the last, conservative years of Henry VIII’s reign. She received her sister Elizabeth, who arrived to pay her respects (prudently attended by a small army of 2000 horsemen); released bishops Bonner and Gardiner from captivity; and had parliament quickly repeal the entire religious legislation of Edward’s reign. But Mary’s mission was, in fact, more radically reactionary. She wanted to restore the Church not as it had been in 1546 but as it had been in 1526: obedient to Rome. And once she had made it clear that the land sold during the dissolution of the monasteries would not be restored, there was little resistance to her campaign. The papal legate, Cardinal Pole, returned from exile, and in 1554 both houses of parliament knelt in tearful atonement for all the sins they had committed since the 1530s. Cranmer, the man the queen blamed most for the schism, was arrested and sent to the Tower along with other offending evangelical bishops. Orders went out for the repainting of churches, the carving of roods, the restoration of stone altars and the Latin mass. On 30 November 1554 Mary officially proclaimed the return of England to Rome and ordered that that day (St Andrew’s Day, as it happened) should be celebrated henceforth as the greatest of all national holidays.

  Only one anxiety cast a shadow over Mary’s exultation: the ticking of her biological clock. She was thirty-eight, by sixteenth-century standards an advanced age for conception. Nonetheless, it was her sacred duty to produce the heir who would keep England in faithful obedience to Rome. She had always looked to the Emperor Charles for guidance, and so a logical choice for husband was his son, Philip of Spain. Parliament was appalled by the choice, imploring her to choose someone from within the realm instead. Even the ultra-conservative Bishop Gardiner attempted to dissuade her. Adamant, the queen threw a little tantrum, protesting that if she was forced to marry someone she disliked it would be the death of her within weeks and the end of any possibility of an heir. The best was done to protect England. Philip was to be made king in title only and was to be sworn to protect and preserve English institutions. If the queen died before him, he was still to be excluded from the line of succession. Philip himself was not, in fact, interested in importing autos-da-fé to the streets of London. But despite all these cautions, there is no doubt that the Spanish marriage caused irreversible damage to the queen’s popularity. ‘The queen is a Spaniard at heart,’ it was said, ‘and loves another realm better than this.’

  The forebodings of the pessimists seemed vindicated when Thomas Wyatt, the son of Anne Boleyn’s old poet-admirer, led an army of about 3000 gentlemen and commoners all the way from Kent to the gates of London. Words that had become popular and significant in the reign of Edward – commonwealth and liberty – featured prominently in Wyatt’s propaganda, in which he cast himself as the defender of the nation’s freedom, pledged to the ‘avoidance of Strangers’. In the minds of some at least, Protestantism and patriotism were beginning to become linked.

  But Mary rose to the occasion, going to the Guildhall in her crown and state robes and declaring (a little disingenuously) that she was marrying because her council had implored her to. If there was discontent, the matter would be discussed in parliament, but for the moment the people must stand with her against rebellion. And so they did. More than 20,000 Londoners volunteered to defend the city. Wyatt’s army failed to penetrate Ludgate, then rapidly crumbled away. His cause and his life were forfeit. Mary naturally assumed that this, too, had been God’s work: a sign that he approved her marriage. The marriage duly took place at Winchester Cathedral in July 1554. Philip was gallantly affable to his older bride, unlike the Venetian ambassador, who described Mary at this time as having ‘no eyebrows. She is a saint. She dresses badly.’ The Spanish entourage found the English ‘white, pink and quarrelsome’, and when they left the cathedral they stepped into the classic summertime weather of a steady downpour. Nothing, however, could dampen Mary’s ecstasy. For the first time in her lonely life she believed she had someone she could depend on. She even believed that Philip was a paragon of princely chastity. (It was just as well she never knew that within months of the wedding he was off with two mistresses in the Netherlands.) Now, with the help of God and Philip, she could set about cleansing the realm of the pollution of heresy.

  The burnings began in 1555. In three years 220 men and 60 women died on Mary’s bonfires. At first, they alarmed, then they horrified people, and not just Protestants or moderate Catholics. Before he died in November 1555, old Bishop Gardiner, Cranmer’s arch-enemy, spoke strongly against them. Philip and some of his closest advisers were dismayed by Mary’s increa
singly fanatical ardour and predicted it would alienate the Crown from the people. They were right.

  Early on there was an emphasis on show trials, payback for the Edwardian years (in which, however, not a single Catholic had gone to the stake). One of the first to be burned was John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester, who died a lingering death when the gunpowder thrown on the faggots refused to explode. He was followed by Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London, and Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, who were brought to Oxford for a farcical examination of their opinions, in which their views were decreed to have been formally confounded. On 14 February 1556, they went to the stake in Broad Street, but not before Latimer had told his fellow-martyr: ‘Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’ At Thomas Cranmer’s trial, also in Oxford, where he was made to stand up high in Christ Church Cathedral rood loft (the kind of place he had been eager to destroy), Cranmer listened to a litany of the evils it was said he had brought on England. For a while he resisted, then when the writ for his burning was issued, he crumbled, signing a recantation. If he had hoped to save his life, he was wrong. Instead, the queen demanded that he make a formal statement of contrition in St Mary’s, the university church, and then be burned anyway. But instead of the expected words of atonement and remorse, Cranmer defiantly reiterated his Protestant beliefs. Uproar broke out. Shouting ‘As for the pope I refuse him as anti-Christ,’ Cranmer was dragged from the pulpit and to the stake. With the fire set, he thrust the hand that had signed the false recantation into the flames, punishing it for its insincerity.

  Most of the Marian martyrs were much simpler people – cloth-workers, chandlers, cutlers – and many of them were young, members of the generation who had felt the excitement of finding truth through their own reading of the English Bible. Some were even illiterate, like Rawlings White, a fisherman who paid for his son to go to school and learn to read so that the boy might read the Bible to him each night after supper, or Joan Waist of Derby, a poor blind woman who saved up for a New Testament and paid people to read it to her. The vivid details of the simple, powerful faith of White, Waist and others are recorded in the book that, more than any other, would come to define Protestant England or rather rewrite history so that England’s destiny was always somehow meant by God to be separate from Rome. This was John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, more usually known as his ‘Book of Martyrs’. First published in 1563, in the reign of Elizabeth, and using a powerful mix of texts and woodcut images, the book turned the Marian burnings into a national epic of sacrifice and redemption. Just as Christ had sacrificed himself to redeem humanity, so the Marian martyrs had died so that England might be saved from foreign tyranny and the rule of the anti-Christ.

  Foxe’s book had most impact in the abridged form created by Timothy Bright, a physician turned ordained clergyman, who published it in a convenient quarto format in 1589, just a year after England’s narrow escape from the Spanish Armada. By that time, there was no question but that the nation’s destiny and history had been linked to Protestantism, and Foxe’s treatment of the ordeal of the martyrs seemed yet more evidence that they had, somehow, been patriotic, as well as spiritual victims. But propaganda though it undoubtedly was, Foxe’s book still contained an essential kernel of moral truth. Unspeakable cruelties were committed in Mary’s reign, and neither the fact that her father had burned heretics, nor the fact they were being burned in even greater numbers elsewhere, nor the quiescence of the majority of the population, nor historical impatience with stereotypes about ‘Bloody Mary’, in any way dilutes the enormity of the crime.

  To an increasing number of people there was, in fact, something wrong with both Mary and her government. Twice she was pronounced pregnant and twice nothing came of it. Twice Philip departed, deeply uncomfortable with his role both as husband and consort. The queen was suffering not only from delusions but from ovarian or cervical cancer. In 1557 the humiliating loss of Calais, the last remnant of the Plantagenet empire – which coincided with galloping inflation and severe unemployment in the towns – seemed just another of the plagues that had been laid on suffering England. Said one ardent Elizabethan, Thomas Smith: ‘I never saw England weaker in money, men and riches . . . nothing but fining, hanging, quartering and burning, levying and beggaring and losing our strongholds abroad. A few priests ruled all who, with setting up of six foot roods, thought to make all cocksure.’ On 17 November 1558, the day Mary died in great pain and mortification that her theologically unsound sister Elizabeth would succeed her, she managed to issue a warrant for two more burnings.

  From the very beginning, Elizabeth made it clear that she would undo the excesses of Mary’s counter-Reformation. When priests in the royal chapel lit a candle, they were told to put it out ‘for we see very clearly’. But it was much less clear whether Elizabeth would restore the reformed Church of her conservative father or her evangelical brother. In 1559 the Act of Uniformity attempted to find a middle way that would allow both Catholics and Protestants to practise their religion. The mass was abolished and the Book of Common Prayer re-imposed, but priests were encouraged to remain celibate and saints’ days remained in the calendar. Much latitude was left to the parishes.

  Styling herself ‘Supreme Governor’, rather than ‘Supreme Head’ like her father, Elizabeth wanted, above all, to end the religious war that had opened up such a deep wound in the body politic of the country. But during the reigns of her half-brother and half-sister the country had become more, not less, polarized between camps whose versions of truth, faith and obedience were mutually exclusive. For Catholics in the 1560s there was still some possibility of remaining faithful to both their Church and queen, but only if they grasped what Elizabeth had offered them and attempted to work within the Church of England. For most of them, unhappily, this was not enough. For Rome it was nothing at all, for in the 1560s the Counter-Reformation took on the character of an implacable war, centrally directed and militantly disciplined. The faithful, marooned in pariah England, were ordered to stay away from heretical churches. If they were forced to conform outwardly to spare themselves persecution, they had to find secret churches to continue the old obedience. And their duty now was to look beyond England for help – from Spain, from the Catholic queen of Scotland, from the pope. In 1570 the pope promised the blessings of a martyr’s reception in heaven to anyone who would assassinate Elizabeth I.

  To be cut off from the priesthood was, of course, a lingering death sentence for a Church whose liturgy depended on priests. To be deprived of public ceremonies was to destroy the entire sense of shared community on which the old Church had thrived. What was left? An underground existence, a portable Church existing in things that could be easily smuggled and concealed: tracts, miniature images, jewels and rosaries. Faith and nation parted company in these years. English Catholic priests trained in foreign seminaries would be smuggled into the country and end up dead or in hiding with Catholic families rich and powerful enough to protect them. So this is what happened to Catholic England: it ended up down a priest-hole, the ceremonious grandeur of a Long Melford reduced to a faith on the run.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE BODY OF THE QUEEN

  GODFREY GOODMAN FELL for Elizabeth I when he was five years old and she was fifty-three. Much later, when he was Bishop of Gloucester in the reign of Charles I, he could still remember the evening in the tense Armada year of 1588 when he was living ‘at the upper end of the Strand near St Clements Church, when suddenly there came a report unto us (it was December much about five o’ clock at night and very dark), that the Queen was come to Council and if you will see the Queen you must come quickly’. Godfrey and his friends scampered as fast as their little legs could take them through the streets of London to Whitehall Palace, where the gates of the courtyard stood wide open. The space was packed with people and lit by a blaze of torches. After an hour Elizabeth emerged ‘in great state. Then we c
ried “God Save Your Majesty”. Then the Queen turned to us and said “God bless you all my good people.” Then we cried again “God Save Your Majesty”. Then the Queen said “You may well have a greater prince but you shall never have a more loving prince” . . . This wrought such an impression . . . on us that all the day long we did nothing but talk what an admirable queen she was and how we’d adventure our lives to do her service.’

  She had that effect on all kinds of people, especially men, even when they got older and should have known better. John Selwyn of Walton-on-Thames was so determined to impress Elizabeth with his virile devotion that during a hunt in the royal park at Oatlands he leapt from his horse on to the back of a stag and rode it towards the queen before killing it with a sword thrust to the animal’s throat. She was, after all, supposed to be Diana (not to mention Belphoebe, Cynthia, Astraea and Sirinx). But although the poets and balladeers sang her praises as if she were a goddess, Elizabeth I was only too obviously made of flesh and blood. She was vain, arrogant, spiteful, bloody-minded, frequently unjust and even more frequently maddeningly indecisive: an authentic Tudor, in other words. But she was also brave, intelligent, startlingly articulate, an eyeful to behold and, on occasions, genuinely wise. She had charisma in bucketfuls, and she understood people, high and low, with uncommon shrewdness. She was, in fact, the first true woman politician in British history. Although she seldom flinched from intimidation, she also knew that, in the end, allegiance was strongest when it sprang from devotion. In the end it doesn’t matter that much of this devotion was cranked up through the manipulation of her public image. Which political regime in our history has not attempted to do the same? Elizabeth succeeded in making the English happy to be who they were (no small achievement) and to feel that she cared for nothing so much as them. The Faerie had warts all right, but she was, nonetheless, the case for the monarchy. The only problem – and it was a big one – was that she made herself, literally, unreproducible.