Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History

by Bucholz, Robert

  Cecil vs. Dudley

  We see this prudence and mastery in her handling of her advisers and the factions which grew up around them. Historians have tended to divide her court and Privy Council into two broad groups. The first was led by William Cecil, created Lord Burghley in 1571. Cecil had been trained as a lawyer, was associated with the Commonwealthmen, and had served as secretary to Lord Protector Somerset. He had proved himself an able and industrious administrator and diplomat under Elizabeth’s brother and sister. Upon her accession she named him secretary of state and, in 1572, lord treasurer of England. Early in the reign he advocated foreign intervention in support of Protestant causes; but as he grew in age, experience, and responsibility, he became, like the queen herself, more prudent and cautious. From about 1570, he tended to favor diplomacy as less dangerous and more frugal than war. Consequently, he saw the need to work with, or at least avoid offending, the Catholic powers of Spain and France. His vast circle tended to attract equally cautious men interested in bureaucratic careers, like Sir Nicholas Bacon (1510–79), Elizabeth’s keeper of the Great Seal; Sir Francis Knollys (1511/12–96), vice-chamberlain, then treasurer of her household; and Thomas Radcliffe, earl of Sussex (1526/7–83), lord president of the North.

  Very different was the court circle which assembled around Robert Dudley, from 1564 earl of Leicester (ca. 1532–88). A younger son of the late duke of Northumberland, Dudley was more of a courtier and a soldier than Cecil, so Elizabeth made him her master of the Horse (keeper of her stables and coaches). This was a much more elevated position than it sounds, for it not only paid extremely well but gave Dudley the excuse to attend the queen on horseback when she went outdoors. This was not inconvenient for Elizabeth, for she found Dudley handsome and charming. Where Cecil was sober and careful, surrounded by clerks and accountants, Dudley was fun and exciting and brought with him a circle of soldiers and poets, including the courtly Sir Christopher Hatton (ca. 1540–91), who served her as lord chancellor and parliamentary “mouthpiece”; and the cunning Sir Francis Walsingham (ca. 1532–90), who, as secretary of state from 1573, oversaw her spies and espionage. These men tended to favor an aggressive foreign policy in support of Protestant causes abroad.

  Because many of the men in both Cecil’s and Dudley’s circles also held local offices ranging from lord lieutenant down to JP, theirs were truly national networks of patronage, Elizabethan counterparts to medieval affinities. Each circle tended to be linked by ties of blood and marriage as well as temperament and religious orientation, and sons succeeded fathers in their service. Usually, these two groups agreed on general aims and they got along well with each other socially. But at times of crisis, they tended to divide. Where Cecil and his allies increasingly urged caution, pacifism, and thrift, Dudley and his followers advocated bold military intervention against what they saw as a growing threat to English interests and the Protestant cause from the Catholic powers. Where Cecil and his circle appealed to the queen’s head, Dudley and his group appealed to her heart. The latter attraction produced a crisis almost as soon as the reign began.

  Marital Diplomacy I

  The first major issue facing the new queen was that of her own single state. Because contemporary society was uncomfortable with the idea of a woman who was not under the control of a man, because the succession was uncertain as long as the queen had no heir, and because England was desperate for friends, most of Elizabeth’s subjects assumed that she would, as Mary had done, take a husband as soon as possible. Like Mary, she had had few prospects prior to her accession, but once she assumed the throne she became the most eligible single woman in Europe. There was no shortage of potential bridegrooms, foreign and domestic, Catholic and Protestant. Among the contestants were the Habsburg Archduke Charles of Styria (1540?–90?), the boy-king Charles IX of France (1550–74; reigned 1560–74), and King Erik XIV of Sweden (1533–77; reigned 1560–8). Closer to home, there were the earl of Arundel and Sir William Pickering (1516/7–75). Nor was the widower Philip II out of the running. After a decent interval following Mary’s death, he too proposed. After all, the last thing he wanted was a breakup of the old Tudor-Habsburg alliance, leaving England free to cultivate a friendship with France. But Elizabeth, characteristically, hesitated. She probably did so for two reasons: she had seen what Mary’s loveless and unpopular marriage had done to her sister and her country, and she was attracted to someone else.

  That someone was the dashing Lord Robert Dudley. As master of the Horse, he had every opportunity to attend Elizabeth and he often did so, contemporaries observed, alone. When they were not alone, it became clear that the queen had great affection for her “sweet Robin,” despite the fact that he was already married to Amy née Robsart, Lady Dudley (b. 1532). Speculation that Lord Robert would find some way out of his first marriage turned to scandal when, in September 1560, Lady Dudley was found dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs in Cumnor Hall, Oxfordshire. Rejected by her husband and suffering from breast cancer, she probably died by accident or, possibly, suicide. But many contemporaries suspected foul play on Dudley’s part in order to make himself available to marry the queen. Cecil and his followers in the council argued vehemently against the marriage. Eventually, Elizabeth came to her senses. In 1566 she finally repudiated any notion of marrying Dudley with the comment, “I will have but one mistress, and no master!”5

  Nevertheless, Lord Robert, who was promoted to be earl of Leicester in 1564, remained a favorite of the queen until his death in 1588. In the meantime, Elizabeth’s Privy Council, Parliament, and people urged her repeatedly to get herself married. Elizabeth, again like her father, learned to use the possibility of matrimony as a diplomatic trump card or, more crudely, as bait: after all, marriage to the queen of England would be a peaceful and inexpensive way for Spain or France to win that country into an alliance and, perhaps, even back to Catholicism. Throughout the first half of the reign, and especially during foreign policy crises, she entertained a steady stream of French princes and German dukes, all of whom offered undying love – and diplomatic alliance. Unlike her father, however, she knew that marriage was a card that she could play only once. Once played, her freedom of maneuver and, with it, that of her country, would be virtually eliminated. Instead, she preferred to play potential suitors against each other in a brilliant game of amorous, albeit duplicitous, diplomacy.

  In the end, Elizabeth never played the marriage card. Instead, she made a virtue of her single state. By the 1580s she would embrace the image of a “Virgin Queen,” wedded not to some foreign prince or courtly fop but to her first and greater love, the people of England. In 1599 she would refer to her subjects as “all my husbands, my good people.”6 Elizabeth, unlike Mary born of both an English mother and an English father, seems to have felt real affection for her people. Certainly, she had the common touch, frequently going out amongst them on summer-long cross-country progresses, or being carried in an open chair through the streets of London. At such moments Elizabeth played to the crowd, ordered “her carriage … to be taken where the crowd seemed thickest, and stood up and thanked the people.”7

  Back at court, she encouraged artists, poets, and playwrights – for example, Edmund Spenser (1552?–99) in his Faerie Queene (1596) – to celebrate her as Diana, Belphoebe, Astraea, or Gloriana, not only her people’s bride, but a sort of benevolent goddess to them as well. Indeed, in a country which had largely given up the Catholic devotion to the Virgin Mary, the Virgin Queen came to represent a Protestant alternative: a softer, gentler, more feminine face of power. Above all, the image of Gloriana allowed Elizabeth to portray herself as above faction, an impartial symbol of love and veneration for the entire country. But this image developed slowly and came to fruition only in the 1580s. In the meantime, she had to rely on other means to compose disagreements between Cecil and Dudley and between Catholics and Protestants.

  The Religious Settlement

  As we have seen, English men and women were divided about religion
in 1558. They looked anxiously to the new queen and her advisers to settle these difficulties. Whatever solution they chose would have tremendous implications beyond the walls of England’s churches. For many people in England, Roman Catholicism was too closely associated with Mary’s cruelty and a domineering Spanish Empire to be acceptable. But the embrace of full-blown Protestantism would jeopardize Spain’s friendship, invite the hostility of the other great Catholic power, France, and prove equally unacceptable to the queen’s more conservative subjects. In the first years of her reign, Queen Elizabeth and her advisers had to walk a tightrope in the area of religion.

  Fortunately, the new queen’s personality and experience fitted her well for balancing acts. Unlike Edward or Mary, she had not yet publicly committed to one religious view or the other. Rather, as princess she had been careful to keep her own religious devotions secret. With hindsight, it is pretty clear that she considered herself a Protestant in theology but loved hierarchy and ritual in a way that seems Catholic. Above all, she was, by contemporary standards, practical, tolerant, and even somewhat secular. For example, her Privy Council contained fewer churchmen than had her predecessors’. More importantly, Queen Elizabeth, “not liking to make windows into men’s hearts and secret thoughts,” was not particularly concerned that every English man and woman accept fully the doctrines and practices of one perfectly consistent religion.8 What she wanted was obedience and loyalty. What she needed was a religious settlement that most people could mostly accept. To get it, she would have to find a compromise between her Protestant beliefs and Catholic structures and practices.

  That compromise was found, but not without struggle. When Parliament met in the spring of 1559, the queen and her advisers proposed an Act of Supremacy undoing Mary’s restoration of papal power, but the Catholic bishops in the House of Lords opposed and almost defeated it. In the end, they had to be neutralized by detention in the Tower, with the result that no churchman voted for the new religious settlement. Even then, passage was only secured by making concessions to conservatives: for example, the Act named Elizabeth Supreme Governor of the Church, not Supreme Head as Henry VIII and Edward VI had been. It further required the clergy and government officials to swear an oath of allegiance to the Supreme Governor, but, in a second accommodation to religious conservatives, it placed no such obligation on the laity. Elizabeth wanted to avoid anything that forced her people to choose between their queen and their beliefs. After much infighting, Parliament also passed another Act of Uniformity which required all of the queen’s subjects to attend church on Sundays and holy days on pain of a 12 pence fine. Services were to follow a revised version of the second (1552), more Protestant, Book of Common Prayer introduced under Edward VI, but with the reinsertion of an ambiguous sentence from the 1549 Prayer Book leaving room for the Catholic belief in transubstantiation. In 1563, Parliament passed a new Treason Act making it a capital crime to express support for papal jurisdiction or (in another attempt to ease pressure on Catholics) to twice refuse to swear the Oath of Allegiance. Finally, that same year produced a new statement of doctrine, the Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith, adopted by Convocation and enshrined in statute in 1571. These, too, were essentially Protestant, even Calvinist. They embraced justification by faith and predestination and denounced Catholic beliefs such as Purgatory and the sacrificial nature of the mass. But the new Protestant beliefs were to be enforced by an episcopal hierarchy that was structured much like the old Catholic one (minus the pope, of course); and the new services were to be conducted by clergy wearing colorful vestments that were also reminiscent of the Old Faith.

  So the Church of England as established in 1559 was a compromise: Protestant privy councilors and those sympathetic to reformation got their way on doctrine; religious conservatives got theirs, apart from the actual texts of the Book of Common Prayer, on ceremony and hierarchy. Put more simply, to paraphrase the historian Conrad Russell, the genius of the Church of England was and is that it thinks Protestant, but looks Catholic.9 This juxtaposition was, in fact, perfectly designed to win over the vast majority of the English people. Protestants loved the Word as contained in Scripture. For many of them, the new Church doctrine outlined in the Thirty-Nine Articles was sufficiently consistent with the Word to be acceptable, despite the wearing of vestments and other rituals they found scripturally suspect. Catholics loved those rituals and the sense of paternalistic community provided by a hierarchical framework. For many of them, the new liturgical practices and Church structure as laid out in parliamentary legislation and the Book of Common Prayer were close enough to the old, despite the abandonment of Latin for English, to be inoffensive. A few kept up a low-grade protest, mumbling during the reading from the Book of Common Prayer, for example. But such “Church papists” were a declining bunch and most Englishmen and women were probably tired of religious controversy and violence by the 1560s. Finally, the generally low level of religious literacy and enthusiasm that some historians have detected in the late sixteenth century may also have contributed to the widespread acquiescence in the new settlement. Many people may not have understood or cared.

  Admittedly, there are no surviving census records for early modern England in which its inhabitants checked off their religious beliefs. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to assert that, by the 1580s, the vast majority of the population had accommodated itself without much difficulty to the Church of England as established in 1559–63. Still, the tension between Protestant theology and Catholic ceremony rankled. There were two groups, one nominally within the Church, the other outside of it, who resisted the new settlement. As we shall see, their discontents and the tensions generated by and between them would dominate not only the religious history of England, but its political and social history as well, for over a century.

  The Puritan Challenge

  Though a compromise, the religious settlement of 1559–63 was, by and large, one that leaned in a Protestant direction: after all, there was no pope, no mass, no monasteries, no Purgatory or indulgences. But that is not to say that committed Protestants were entirely happy with the new dispensation. Marian exiles, in particular, chafed at its accommodations with Catholicism. The Marian exiles were staunch Protestants who had fled to the continent during Mary’s reign to preserve their faith and their lives. These men and women had nearly lost everything for Protestantism and they cherished the memory of the martyrs who had, in fact, made the ultimate sacrifice. They spent Mary’s reign studying, translating, and listening to continental preachers – imbibing the latest Protestant thought at the very well-springs of the Reformation. Many tended to be strict Calvinists. At Mary’s death, the exiles returned to England expecting to establish a “godly” settlement of Church and State, by which they meant one consistent with their interpretation of Scripture. They could only agree to the settlement of 1559–63 as a temporary half-measure. In their view, the serious business of godly reformation should continue, purging or purifying the English Church of the last vestiges of Catholic practice. By the 1570s their opponents were beginning to label anyone so inclined a “Puritan.”

  Unfortunately, the term “Puritan” is highly controversial. While many contemporaries may have thought that they knew a Puritan when they saw one, the fact is that there never was a specific religious organization with a uniform code of beliefs called “Puritanism.” Because the beliefs of those labeled Puritans varied from individual to individual and over time and place, some historians have abandoned the term in favor of “reforming Christians” or “the more enthusiastic sort of Protestants” or something similar. For simplicity’s sake, and because the term did have a meaning, however imprecise, to contemporaries, we will continue to use it.

  Early Puritans did not want to form a church separate from the Church of England. Rather, they sought to “purify” that Church from within, to make it less Catholic and more Protestant, less of “a mingle-mangle” of the two faiths. Specifically, and perhaps the one goal to which all those labeled Pu
ritan would agree, they wanted their Church to conform to Biblical beliefs and practices. Anything not found in Scripture was to be abandoned. Indeed, the more extreme Puritans, opposed to any distinction between Church and State, convinced that the last days foretold in revelation were coming sooner rather than later, sought to apply Biblical law and practice to every aspect of English government and society: thus in 1563 one former Marian exile urged the House of Commons to make adultery and Sabbath-breaking capital offenses. But most controversies between Puritans and mainstream churchmen took place over religious doctrine, government, and ritual.