by John Guy
On 14 October he was sent to the Tower and the Protectorate was dissolved. Henry’s attempt to build a consensus government for his young son from the grave had been a failure. His will had been subverted, but the Protectorate had failed largely because the ambition of Thomas Seymour had thrown the political system into crisis. Now the architects of the coup claimed that they would govern through the agreement of the Privy Council and with the support of the wider governing elite.
The wheel had turned full circle.
CHAPTER 7
Faith and Exclusion
THE cool intelligence behind the coup against Protector Somerset belonged to John Dudley, Earl of Warwick. A pragmatic realist who had risen to a dominant position in the Privy Council as a naval commander in Henry VIII’s last wars, he wisely shunned the title of Protector, taking instead that of Lord President of the Council. His ally Thomas Wriothesley, once Thomas Cromwell’s secretary and who had dipped a toe into the evangelical reform movement in the 1530s, led a faction of traditionalists staunchly opposed to the Protestants. But Wriothesley’s appetite for intrigue made him dangerously unstable—Warwick did not trust him an inch. Nor did Mary, since when the conspirators against Somerset attempted to win her support by offering her the regency in his place, she brushed them aside, saying that she ‘was sad to see the realm going to perdition so fast’ and that ‘no good will come of this move’.1
The thirty or so months after Somerset was sent to the Tower in October 1549 were among the most fraught and fragile since Henry VII had won the crown at the battle of Bosworth. Warwick’s own faith and interest firmly aligned him with the religious reformers, and early in February 1550 he was forced to purge Wriothesley from the Privy Council and banish him from Court for plotting against him.2 His dilemma was that to do so, he had to free Somerset and allow him to return to the Council under stringent conditions, because if he was to marginalize and exclude Wriothesley’s faction, he needed Somerset back on his side.
Wasting no time, Warwick made a largely successful effort to reverse the destabilization permitted, or left unchecked, by Somerset. He suppressed the ‘stirs’ and revolts of 1549 using a cohort of crack troops assisted by Italian and German mercenaries. Above all, he speedily began peace negotiations with France and Scotland to end Somerset’s disastrous wars and put England’s finances back on the slow road to recovery.
Warwick’s fixer in conjuring a political consensus was Cranmer, Edward’s godfather. As the man closest to the young king apart from John Cheke, the archbishop was in a position where he could pack the boy’s Privy Chamber with Warwick’s nominees. Cranmer’s beliefs had by now moved well beyond Lutheranism and come closer to those of the mainstream of the Swiss reformers. And it was to this more radical version of the Reformation that Cranmer meant to convert the king.
Just as Henry VIII had been said to be a second King David or King Solomon or a second Emperor Constantine or Justinian, Edward was to be a second King Josiah. No more than a child of eight when he had succeeded to the throne, the Old Testament Josiah had purged Judah and Jerusalem of the ‘carved images, and the molten images. And they brake down the altars of Baal in his presence’ (2 Kings 22–23). It was in his reign that ‘the book of the law’ had been rediscovered by the high priest of the temple at Jerusalem. But significantly, Josiah’s attack on idolatry had been less the work of the boy himself than of his ‘godly councillors’ acting in his name. This was a lesson that Warwick and Cranmer would set out to replicate, casting themselves and their fellow privy councillors in the role.
FIGURE 11 A woodcut specially designed in 1570 for an enlarged edition of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (or ‘Book of Martyrs’) to illustrate the swing to Protestantism in the reign of Edward VI, whom the Protestants hailed as a second ‘King Josiah’.
Warwick and Cranmer did not begin entirely from scratch. Somerset in 1547–8 had already revived Cromwell’s iconoclasm, authorizing the stripping of rood lofts and related statuary from the parish churches and repealing Henry VIII’s Act of Six Articles. To Protestant acclaim, he also abolished the restrictions on who was allowed to read the English Bible. But his attempt in 1549 to impose, with Parliament’s assent, ‘one convenient and meet order, rite and fashion of Common Prayer’ in the English language to replace the Latin mass was botched and proved extraordinarily divisive.
Lacking an officially defined theology of the Eucharist, Somerset’s new liturgy was ambiguously traditional and failed to satisfy anyone. Its single achievement from the reformist perspective was to allow communion in both the bread and the wine. The Protector claimed that his approach was bipartisan, but in reality he sought to appease Mary’s cousin, Charles V, whose neutrality towards England he wished to guarantee whilst the country was at war with Scotland and France.3
When, early in 1550, Wriothesley had begun plotting against Warwick, he aimed to reverse the Reformation if he could. After that brush with danger, Warwick meant to exclude the traditionalists from power by placing as many Protestants as possible in influential positions. Soon he would even risk antagonizing Cranmer by appointing the aggressively advanced reformer John Hooper to the bishopric of Gloucester and the fiery Scottish preacher John Knox to be one of Edward’s chaplains. Both attacked what they believed to be Cranmer’s timidity and moderation, especially over reforming the ceremonies of the Church and the dress of the clergy.
Warwick, meanwhile, unleashed Cranmer to overhaul the liturgy that Somerset had botched. A large number of Protestant refugees were arriving in London during Edward’s reign after Charles’s victory over the forces of the Schmalkaldic League at the battle of Mühlberg in 1547. For the very first time, England was regarded as a safe haven for the reformers, several of whom such as Peter Martyr Vermigli and Martin Bucer were Cranmer’s friends and to whom he gave important preaching or teaching positions in the Church and universities.4
FIGURE 12 A woodcut illustrating a government-sponsored Protestant sermon delivered by Hugh Latimer from the ‘preaching place’ at Whitehall Palace. The young king and his councillors can be seen listening through open windows on the upper left-hand side of the image.
In this volatile, intoxicating atmosphere, Cranmer and his continental friends in 1551 began discussing a template for a fully reformed theology of the Eucharist. The debate, rooted in a theological compromise reached in 1549 between the church leaders of Zürich and Geneva known as the Consensus Tigurinus, broadened out to include reformist courtiers and their opponents. In October and November 1551, they thrashed out their differences at the London houses of William Cecil and Richard Moryson, leading in 1552 to a second Book of Common Prayer. Cutting to the quick of the theological debates, this version affirmed Christ’s spiritual presence in the Eucharist only to the elect believer, so was unambiguously Protestant. Despite some inevitable qualms and hesitations, Parliament then declared this revision to be the only permissible liturgy in the realm.5
Mary put up a barrage of resistance to these religions innovations, holding multiple masses daily in her household and saying she would rather give up her life than her Catholic faith.6 Acting in ways seen as deliberately subversive, she repeatedly challenged the Privy Council’s authority, seeking advice from Charles V’s ambassador and writing to entreat her cousin to help her to flee abroad or at the very least to intervene on her behalf so that she could continue to ‘live in the ancient faith and in peace with my conscience.’7
Even before Warwick’s coup against Somerset, Mary was holding up to four masses daily in her household to make her point and allowing passers-by to attend.8 The Privy Council, divided over how to react, offered her a licence to hear mass daily without interference, provided it was done unobtrusively with only a few servants present. But she kept on insisting that the licence be put in writing, which the councillors refused.9
After the coup, Mary increased the number of chaplains she employed to six.10 She was determined to flaunt her nonconformity. Now she celebrated her masses with ‘
greater show’ than before and provocatively invited as many visitors as wished to attend, even when she was not at home.11
Challenged by the Privy Council, Mary appealed to her conscience, including arguments similar to those she had tried before when her father demanded that she recognize his marriage to Anne Boleyn and the Acts of Supremacy and Succession. It was ‘no small grief’ to her, one of her more defiant letters to the Council began, to see how men whom her father had raised up from nothing ‘and at his last end put in trust to see his will performed’ had so casually broken it. She was, she said, most heinously affronted by the ‘usurped power’ these councillors had arrogated to themselves ‘in making (as they call it) laws both clean contrary to his [Henry’s] proceedings and will, and also against the custom of all Christendom and (in my conscience) against the law of God and his Church.’
Faced by such flagrant apostasy, she would, she said, remain ‘an obedient child’ to her father and his laws, at least until her brother was old enough ‘to be a judge in these matters himself.’
‘I do not a little marvel’, she concluded, ‘that you can find fault with me for observing of that law which was allowed by him that was a king not only of power, but also of knowledge how to order his power.’12
In a futile effort to intimidate her, the Council summoned the head officers of her household, demanding that she should be compelled to conform.13 She indignantly protested, retorting that she was ‘mistress in her own house’. No longer a child under a governess, she was a grown-up woman with a substantial landed estate in her own right. The councillors were ‘not to meddle with religion or her conscience’.14
Already Warwick had misgivings about the lands Somerset had given her in May 1548 on discovering that the £3,000 a year she had been left in her father’s will was unaffordable in cash. Warwick feared that Mary was using her estates to build up an East Anglian power base that drew its strength from regional and family connections and was united by its Catholic allegiance. He was convinced that she meant to create a bastion of resistance to Protestantism.15
Keeping a close watch on these events, Mary’s cousin Charles feared the consequences if she decided to launch a one-woman crusade against the regime. In a confidential memo dictated at Augsburg in Bavaria and dated 17 March 1551, he urged his English ambassador to tell her straight that if the Council allowed her to ‘hear mass privately in her own house, without admitting any strangers’, she should ‘be satisfied with that’. Charles saw the danger of a spectacular collision with a ruthless regime determined to stay in power. For that reason, Mary should avoid hectoring language ‘and not push her arguments.’ She should know when to speak, and when to keep silent.16
Charles, a ruler possessed of a wealth of experience in the ways of the world, foresaw that before long Warwick would succeed in drawing Mary into a showdown with her half-brother that would be staged to make it appear that she was set on defying the king and so was a traitor, a move that would turn her rhetoric of ‘obedience’ to her father’s will on its head.
An attempt to do exactly that the previous January had misfired. While putting her case for her right to hear mass to Edward, Mary had burst into tears, causing him to do the same. Then, when their tears were dry, Edward (as Mary reported) said ‘he thought no harm of me’. On hearing this, one of Warwick’s henchmen had brought the conversation to an abrupt close. The carefully scripted lines that Edward had been coached in beforehand had to be sent to Mary afterwards in a letter.17
At a second interview at Whitehall on 17 March, as chance would have it even as Charles was dictating his memo, Warwick was better prepared. Mary, for her part, set out to be as combative as possible. Riding into London on the 15th in readiness for the meeting, she clattered through the streets with a retinue of fifty knights and gentlemen wearing velvet coats and gold livery chains, followed by eighty gentlemen and ladies, every one of whom sported a black rosary as they rode down Cheapside and past Smithfield on their way to lodge at Mary’s London home in Clerkenwell.18
When the interview began, Edward—according to Mary’s version—delivered a halting speech reminding her of the Council’s instructions, to which she responded by acknowledging that she had defied them. At this, an unnamed councillor stepped forward. The king’s will, he informed her, was that she should no longer practise the old religion. The argument went furiously to and fro, until Mary suddenly snapped and turned to Edward, saying ‘Riper age and experience will teach you much more yet.’
He sharply rejoined, ‘You also might have something to learn, for no one is too old for that.’
When the councillors ordered Mary to cease her defiance, she icily replied that she had carefully read her father’s will and was bound to obedience only on the issue of her marriage on which she had not been disobedient. Once more the debate raged over the terms of the will and the duties of her father’s executors and councillors, until Warwick, puce in the face, said, ‘How now, my lady, it seems that your grace is trying to show us in a hateful light to the king, our master, without any cause whatsoever.’
The stand-off ended with a direct appeal from Mary to her half-brother, once again echoing what she had said to their father at the height of their quarrel in 1536. ‘There are only two things, body and soul. My soul I offer to God, and my body to Your Majesty’s service, and may it please you to take away my life rather than the old religion, in which I desire to live and die.’19
Edward gave his own, less melodramatic version of the confrontation in his journal. ‘The lady Mary my sister’, he wrote, ‘came to me at Westminster, where after salutations she was called with my Council into a chamber, where was declared how long I had suffered her mass.’ At first, he had written, ‘how long I had suffered her mass against my will’, but then crossed out the last three words. ‘She answered’, he resumed, ‘that her soul was God’s and her faith she would not change, nor dissemble her opinion with contrary doings. It was said [by the councillors] I constrained not her faith, but willed her not as a king to rule, but as a subject to obey. And that her example might breed too much inconvenience.’20
If Mary’s account is a true record, she had put on a theatrical performance worthy of her mother. If Edward’s is accurate, Warwick and Cranmer still had some way to go in converting the young Josiah to their way of proceeding, because his relationship with Mary was too strong. She was, for all their differences over religion, still his own flesh and blood.21
For Elizabeth and Kat Ashley, now settled mainly at Hatfield but with regular stays at Enfield and Ashridge, Warwick’s coup in 1549 brought welcome relief from the imposition by Somerset of Sir Robert Tyrwhit, his wife and fellow officials on their household.
The exact moment when the Tyrwhits left is clouded by a miasma. There is little direct evidence of Sir Robert directing and controlling Elizabeth’s affairs after February 1549, but both he and Sir Walter Buckler were still being addressed as ‘councillors to the most excellent princess the Lady Elizabeth her grace’ until the spring of 1552 and Buckler was countersigning all of Elizabeth’s household accounts until the end of September that year.22 But the end of the Protectorate broadly marked the moment that the 16-year-old Elizabeth became the head of her own large household, with around twenty-five people at its core and another hundred or so officials and servants over whom Kat and Thomas Parry exercised everyday control.23
To score off Mary, Warwick also gave Elizabeth the whole of the £3,000 a year her father had left her in his will in the form of a landed estate. As long as Somerset was in power, her income had been paid irregularly, and rarely in full.24 Many of the lands she now received had been in her hands informally by the time Thomas Seymour made his suit to marry her, but Somerset would never grant them to her officially.25 On 17 February 1550, Warwick ordered that she should have ‘the supplement of the lands assigned to her’, and a month later an estate worth £3,106 a year was granted to her, concentrated in Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Huntingdonshire, Northampto
nshire, Lincolnshire and Berkshire.26
What clearly made the difference was Elizabeth’s willingness to conform to Cranmer’s religious innovations. When she arrived at Court shortly after Warwick’s coup, she was greeted ‘with great pomp and triumph’ and spent several days closeted with Edward.27 Of the three siblings, it was always Edward and Elizabeth who felt the strongest ties for one another.
Some four months after their next lengthy reunion at Epiphany 1551, when they dined with the French ambassador and attended a bear-baiting together, Elizabeth sent her half-brother her portrait, painted by William Scrots (see Plate 6), a Flemish artist first introduced to the Court by Katherine Parr.28 With the portrait, in which she wore a gown of crimson cloth of gold, came a letter in which Elizabeth wrote affectionately, ‘I shall most humbly beseech Your Majesty that when you shall look on my picture you will vouchsafe to think that as you have but the outward shadow of the body before you, so my inward mind wisheth that the body itself were oftener in your presence.’29
Elizabeth’s star rose higher still in and after October 1551, when Warwick gained enough support in the Privy Council to destroy Somerset. On the 16th, the former Protector was rearrested and tried on 1 December on charges of conspiracy to ‘seize’ and ‘rule’ Edward, to which ends it was said he had attempted to obtain the great seal and capture the Tower with its munitions and treasure. A jury of his peers acquitted him of high treason, but found him guilty on a secondary charge of felony. He was beheaded at sunrise on 22 January 1552 on Tower Hill.30
