Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy

by Starkey, David

  The thought of Mary as his Catholic successor was intolerable to the hotly Protestant Edward. So, with a confidence that was breathtaking in a dying fifteen-year-old boy, he decided unilaterally to change the rules.

  He set down his commands in an extraordinary document. It is headed in his bold schoolboy hand ‘My Device for the Succession’. It was against statute law and drawn up without parliamentary consent. But the sickly king believed that his God-given authority would extend beyond the grave. First, he excluded Elizabeth as well as Mary from the succession on the grounds that both his half-sisters were bastards. Second, he transferred the throne to the family of his cousins the Greys; and third, he decided that women were unfit to rule in their own right, though they could transmit their claim to their sons, or, in legal jargon, their ‘heirs male’.

  The problem was that all his Grey cousins were women, and though they had been married off at breakneck speed, none of them had yet had children. In the course of time, no doubt, the problem would have solved itself, but in view of Edward’s rapidly declining health there wasn’t time. Instead Edward swallowed his misogyny and called for his ‘Device’. With two or three deft strokes of the pen he altered the rules one last time. Originally he had left the crown to the sons of the eldest Grey sister, the Lady Jane: ‘the Lady Jane’s heirs male’. One crossing out and two words inserted over a caret changed this to: ‘the Lady Jane and her heirs male’. If Edward could make his choice stick, the impeccably Protestant and deeply learned Lady Jane Grey would be his successor as queen.

  On 6 July 1553, Edward died. On the 10th the sixteen-year-old Lady Jane Grey was brought to the Tower to be proclaimed queen. The Tower was the traditional location for such a declaration. The difference in this case was that Jane Grey would never leave its precincts again.

  II

  By leaving the throne to Lady Jane Grey, Edward had flouted both his father King Henry VIII’s will and the Act of Succession. This flagrant disregard for the law was unacceptable even to many Protestants. It would have given the crown even greater powers, putting it above Parliament and the law. Moreover, Lady Jane’s supporters had made a fatal mistake – they had failed to arrest Edward’s Catholic sister Mary, who was, according to Henry’s will, the legitimate heir to the throne.

  Instead, forewarned by friends at court, Mary fled out of reach to the depths of East Anglia, were she had vast estates and a loyal following. On 10 July, she proclaimed herself rightful queen of England, and two days later she took up residence at the great castle of Framlingham, which she made her headquarters for armed assault on the throne of England. Troops flooded in and Mary inspected her army in front of the castle in true royal style.

  But no blow needed to be struck. Faced with Mary’s overwhelming strength the Grey faction threw in the towel and Queen Jane was deposed after reigning for less than a fortnight. It was legality, legitimacy and the sense that she was Henry VIII’s daughter which had won the day for Mary, but she herself didn’t see it like that. ‘In thee O Lord I trust, that I be not confounded forever,’ Mary said; ‘if God be for us; who can be against us?’ She was convinced that her accession against all the odds was a miracle brought about by God for His own purposes; it was a sign, and she was now a woman with a mission to restore England to the Catholic faith.

  In public, Mary promised to return to something like the consensus of her father’s last years: there would be no forced conversions, her propaganda implied. In private she was more candid: ‘she boasted herself a virgin sent of God to ride and tame the people of England’. The contrast was reflected in the hesitant start to reconversion: to begin with people were ‘encouraged’ to return to the old faith after nearly twenty years of Protestant reforms, and Edward’s policies were assaulted only slowly. But it would not be long before Mary increased the pace of bringing England back to true religion.

  First, however, to prevent the country ever returning to the heresy of Protestantism, Mary must marry and produce an heir. For otherwise her father’s will left the throne to her Protestant half-sister, Elizabeth. Long ago in her youth, Mary had been briefly betrothed to the Emperor Charles V. Now Charles offered her his own son and heir, Philip, who had been brought up in Spain and was imbued with that country’s passionate Catholicism. More importantly, his father had dedicated the empire’s resources to stamping out Protestantism throughout Europe. Now England would be brought back to due obedience to the pope. But the idea of a Spanish king ruling in England was wildly unpopular. Even though a yearning for Catholicism remained widespread in England, decades of anti-papal, nationalistic propaganda had also done their work. The papacy was looked upon as foreign and un-English. Thus, when the Spanish embassy arrived, boys threw snowballs at them, and the rest of the crowd, ‘nothing rejoicing, held down their heads sorrowfully’. More seriously, an uprising in Kent in 1554, led by Sir Thomas Wyatt, fought its way to London, and for a while Mary’s throne was in jeopardy.

  Mary rose to the occasion, won over Londoners with a magnificent speech in Guildhall and crushed the revolt. She then exacted a terrible revenge, executing all the leaders of the conspiracy, and Lady Jane Grey herself, whom she had hitherto spared. Elizabeth was implicated in the rebellion and sent to the Tower. With the rebellion defeated, and with Parliament’s reluctant acquiescence, there was now no barrier to Mary’s marriage to Philip.

  Philip landed in Southampton on 20 July 1554. It was close to the first anniversary of Mary’s accession. Five days later Philip and Mary were married at Winchester Cathedral. The couple processed through the west doors along an elevated walkway to a high platform in the centre of the nave, where the ceremony took place. It deliberately invoked an older and better world. Mary used an old-fashioned wedding ring made of a band of plain gold, and she swore the woman’s old oath, to be ‘Bonny and buxom in bed and at board’. If the couple were able to have children, that older, better Catholic world would live again.

  Mary was thirty-seven and prematurely aged. But she sincerely believed that God would once again favour her and England with a miracle. A few months later, Mary, like her namesake the Blessed Virgin, declared that the ‘babe had stirred in her womb’. The prospect of a Catholic heir greatly strengthened Mary’s hand, and Parliament voted to return the Church of England to the obedience of the pope. The Royal Supremacy, which Henry VIII had forced on the English people, seemed to be over.

  In early April 1555, Mary moved to Hampton Court for the birth of the child that would crown her life and reign, and guarantee the future of Catholic England. Her confinement, as customary, began with the ceremony of ‘taking to her chamber’, in which she bade farewell to the male-dominated world of the court and withdrew instead to the purely female realm of her birthing chamber. There, etiquette required she remain secluded and invisible until the birth. But Mary couldn’t keep her joy to herself. Instead, on St George’s Day, she appeared at a window to watch her husband Philip lead the Garter celebrations, and she turned side-on to show off her big belly to the crowd below.

  Good Catholics rejoiced with the queen, as they did when the serious business of enforcing Catholicism began. Part of the return to Rome was the restoration of heresy laws that punished those who denied the Catholic faith with the terrible death of burning alive.

  The burnings began in February 1555. Over the following three years more than three hundred men and women died in agony at the stake. Faced with such persecution, many other leading Protestants fled into exile. One of the exiles was the Protestant cleric John Foxe, who decided to write a history of the persecution. Using the trial records, eyewitness accounts and the writings of the martyrs themselves, he compiled his Acts and Monuments. Soon known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, it became, after the Bible, the second-most widely read book in English, and it damned Mary’s reputation for ever as Bloody Mary, especially the gruesome woodcuts.

  But Foxe’s propaganda would have amounted to very little if it hadn’t quickly become obvious that Mary’s condition was a
phantom pregnancy. By early summer she was a public laughing stock, with stories circulating that she was pregnant with a lapdog or a monkey. By August even Mary herself had abandoned hope. Moreover, at thirty-nine, it seemed unlikely she would ever conceive again.

  With her pregnancy exposed as a delusion, power started to ebb away from the queen. Philip, now with no long-term interest in England, abandoned his wife to return to his Continental possessions. Still worse, her failure to produce an heir, and with it the guarantee of a Catholic future, broke Mary’s hold on Parliament.

  Crucial to the government’s plans for the final suppression of Protestantism was a Bill to confiscate the landed estates of the Protestant exiles. If the Bill passed, the economic foundations of their resistance would be destroyed. The government strained every nerve, but so too did the opposition, led by Sir Anthony Kingston. With the connivance of the sergeant-at-arms, the doors of the House were locked from the inside. Kingston thundered his protests and the Bill was defeated. Such scenes would not be seen again in Parliament until the seventeenth century.

  Despite the loss of the political initiative, Mary grimly persisted with the persecution of Protestants. Her most illustrious victim was Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. But Cranmer was caught on the horns of a dilemma. In creating the Royal Supremacy, he had argued that monarchs were God’s agents on Earth and were owed obedience as an absolute religious duty.

  But what to do when the monarch was of the wrong religion? Obey the queen? Or Christ? Cranmer’s prosecutors at his trial for heresy probed the dilemma ruthlessly, and Cranmer, old, worn out and terrified of the fire, recanted his Protestantism. It was a huge propaganda coup for Mary. But foolishly, she wasn’t satisfied. She bore Cranmer a deep and personal grudge for divorcing her mother and, even though Church law said that a repentant heretic should be pardoned, she was determined that he would burn.

  Cranmer’s execution was to take place in Oxford, preceded by a public repetition of his recantation. After a good supper, Cranmer slept well, and early on a rainy morning he was brought to the University Church. It is still possible to see where sections of the pillars of the church were cut away to build a high platform to give maximum publicity to what the authorities were confident would be a repetition of his recantation and confession.

  Instead, in an astonishing theatrical coup, Cranmer repudiated his recantation, and as the hubbub rose through the church he managed to shout out a final denunciation of the pope as Antichrist. He was pulled down from the scaffold and hurried to the stake.

  But Cranmer hadn’t finished. As the flames rose he stuck out his right hand, which had signed his recantation, and pushed it deep into the heart of the fire. It had sinned, he said, so it should be punished first. It was a magnificent gesture which vindicated Cranmer’s personal integrity, and saved the good faith of Protestantism. Mary’s vengefulness had turned the propaganda coup of Cranmer’s recantation into a PR disaster, which fired her opponents with a new zeal to resist Bloody Mary.

  Among them was John Ponet, a Protestant bishop who’d fled into exile in Strasbourg when the burnings began. He was an old friend of Cranmer’s. But Ponet’s experience of Mary’s tyranny led him, unlike Cranmer, to question the intellectual foundations of the Supremacy, and reject outright the idea that the king was God’s anointed, ordained by Him to rule His church on Earth.

  In 1556 he published a revolutionary book, A Shorte Treatise of Politike Power. Its title page, with the motto taken from Psalm 118, says it all: ‘it is better to trust in the Lord than to trust in princes’. This meant that kings, far from being the God-like figures of Cranmer’s and Henry VIII’s imaginations, were human at best and subhuman at their all-too-frequent worst. And this meant in turn that kings were human creations and had to be subject to human control.

  If, therefore, Ponet went on to argue, a king or queen broke human or divine law they should be reproved or even deposed. And if, like Mary, they were cruel and persecuting idolaters then it was a virtuous act to assassinate them as a tyrant. Henry VIII had realized that the Royal Supremacy could survive only if the monarchy kept to a middle way in religion. But Edward and Mary had ignored his warnings, and now, in Ponet’s groundbreaking work, had provoked a head-on challenge to the authority and legitimacy of kingship itself.

  Mary was soon beyond the reach of Ponet’s seditious theorizing. In 1558 she became seriously ill, although she fondly imagined she was pregnant again. She even wrote her will, leaving the throne to her unborn Catholic child.

  But six months later, with her health rapidly fading, even Mary had to face reality, and she added a codicil to her will. In it, she finally acknowledged that it was likely that she would have ‘no issue or heir of her body’, and that she would be succeeded instead ‘by her next heir and successor, by the laws and statutes of this realm’. That of course was her half-sister Elizabeth, though Mary couldn’t even bring herself to write her name. Seeing visions of heavenly children to the last, she died on the night of 16 November 1558. She was forty-two.

  Two of Henry’s three children had succeeded to the throne and, by their contrasting religious extremism, had imperilled both the Supremacy and the crown. Would his last surviving heir, Elizabeth, do any better?

  III

  After years of danger and uncertainty, Henry VIII’s last heir, his daughter Elizabeth, stood on the verge of becoming queen of England.

  A portrait of Elizabeth aged fourteen, painted in the last weeks of her father’s life, shows her as the very model of a religious, learned princess. But the reality of Elizabeth’s life under the reigns of her brother and sister was to be very different from the studious calm suggested by this picture, especially under her sister Mary.

  During Mary’s reign, Elizabeth occupied the impossible position that she would later call ‘second person’. By their father’s will, she was Mary’s heir presumptive; she was also, as a covert Protestant, guaranteed to undo everything that Mary held dear. This made her both the focus of every conspiracy against Mary, and the target of her sister’s fear and rage.

  Mary had sent her to the Tower after the Wyatt rebellion in 1554 on charges of treason, and would certainly have had her beheaded if she had been able to scrape enough evidence together. Such experiences left Elizabeth with a set of indelible memories, which meant she took a very different view of policy from either her brother or her sister.

  News of Mary’s death was brought to Elizabeth at Hatfield. The story has it that she fell on her knees, impulsively exclaiming with the psalmist: ‘This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvellous in our eyes.’ Actually, Elizabeth had been preparing herself for this moment for weeks. Her right-hand man in her preparations for power had been Sir William Cecil. It was to be the beginning of a lifelong partnership.

  Cecil, born the son of a Tudor courtier some thirteen years before Elizabeth, had shared many of her experiences and, as a Protestant, suffered the same fears under Mary when he too had saved his skin by conforming to Catholicism. But there was a difference. Cecil, unlike Elizabeth, responded to the fears he had experienced under Mary by hardening his opinions: never again must there be a Catholic monarch or heir, and if by mischance one appeared then people, council and Parliament together could and should remove them.

  These were Ponet’s arguments, though Cecil was a moderate in comparison. Nevertheless, it would make for an interesting relationship between Cecil and his imperious, headstrong young queen, with her high view of royal power and her moderate line in religion. And indeed, establishing a new religious settlement was Elizabeth’s first task as queen. Mary’s parliament had made Catholicism once more the religion of England and only another parliament could change it. But to what?

  Elizabeth’s first parliament met in January 1559. It was opened with a speech by the acting Lord Chancellor. He spoke in Elizabeth’s name but his phraseology deliberately invoked her father’s great speech on religion to the parliament of 1545. Since then, England had been to the extremes of religion. It
had been, as Henry predicted, bloody and destructive. Most had tried to avoid being caught up in the conflict between Protestants and Catholics. The people, clergy, many of the council and Elizabeth herself had compromised with Mary and outwardly conformed to Catholicism. Elizabeth herself had heard mass in Latin and professed loyalty to her sister’s faith. She, like the majority, had dissembled her true religious views. For she was never a Protestant in the mould of Edward. Like her father, she appreciated religious ceremony and deplored the name-calling of bigots from both sides of the divide. And so, like Henry, Elizabeth wanted the middle way in religion, partly because she believed in it, and partly because she too saw it as the best defence of the Royal Supremacy, which she was determined to revive as her God-given right. Only once the explosive passions of religion were contained would the throne and Elizabeth’s life be secure.

  But Elizabeth’s plans for a moderate religious settlement came under fire from both extremes, from Catholics in the Lords and Protestants in the Commons and council. Which group offered the best chance of pacifying England with a workable religious settlement? Extreme Protestantism was a danger for Elizabeth. It had gained a new, radical way of thinking during the dark days of Mary’s reign. It saw those who had hidden their beliefs as enemies of true religion. It had its martyrs, Cranmer foremost among them. And there were many who thought that even the Edwardian Reformation had not gone far enough and that Cranmer had been cut down before the Church had become fully reformed, leaving it stranded midway between mild, watered-down Protestantism and Catholicism. Moreover, these enthusiastic Protestants did not like female rule and had worked out a theory of justifiable resistance to monarchs during Mary’s reign. They were politically and personally offensive to Elizabeth. But, just the same, they were a bulwark against the Catholics, who opposed the Supremacy.