Great Tales from English History, Book 2

by Robert Lacey

  Except for rejecting the authority of the Pope, Henry VIII had gone to his grave a pretty traditional Catholic. But he seems to have accepted that change must come: the two tutors he engaged for his son were prominent evangelicals, and he was well aware of the radical sympathies of his Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, who had been secretly preparing a programme of Protestant reform. For nearly twenty years Cranmer had hidden from his master the fact that he was married — Henry did not approve of married priests — but with Henry’s death the archbishop’s wife became public, and so did his programme of reform.

  Out went the candles, the stained-glass windows, the statues of the Virgin and the colourful tableaux that had embellished the walls of the churches, which were now slapped over with a virtuous coat of whitewash. No more ashes on Ash Wednesday, no palms on Palm Sunday, and no creeping to the cross on Good Friday. Bells were pulled down from belfries, altar hangings and vestments were cut up to be used as saddle-cloths — and doves no longer flew from the tower of St Paul’s on Whit Sunday. In just six years the changes were remarkable.

  Today we delight in the beautiful and sonorous phrases of the Book of Common Prayer, first framed by Thomas Cranmer in 1548-9, then revised in 1552. But this was a strange, discordant new language to the people of the time. While reformers obviously welcomed the change, they were in the minority. Most people felt themselves deprived of something they had known and loved all their lives.

  Times were already unsettling enough. Inflation was rampant. By 1550, a silver penny contained a fifth of the silver content of 1500, having been so debased by the addition of red copper that, as Bishop Latimer put it, the coin literally‘blushed in shame’. Farming, the mainstay of the economy, was being transformed by rich landowners fencing in the common land. Large flocks of sheep, tended by a single shepherd boy, now grazed on pasture that had once supported half a dozen families ploughing their own strips.

  These new fields, or‘enclosures’, were helping enrich the Tudor squirearchy, but less affluent country-dwellers — the vast majority of the population — felt dispossessed. In the summer of 1549, villagers in East Anglia started uprooting hedges and seizing sheep by the thousand. They gathered on Mousehold Heath, outside Norwich, around a massive oak tree they called the Reformation Oak. Since Christ had died to make men free, they reasoned, they were demanding an end to bondage. In the West Country, the Cornish-speaking men of Cornwall had already risen in revolt, calling for the restoration of the mass in Latin, since they spoke little English. They had marched eastwards, besieging Exeter for thirty-five days.

  Edward’s tough councillors dealt with these and other risings in the traditional way — promising to listen to grievanees, then meting out mortal punishment as soon as they had mustered their military strength. But inside his own family, Edward found a nut that could not be cracked. His elder sister Mary, thirty-two years old in January 1549, was an unashamed champion of the old faith, and she refused to prohibit the reading of the mass in her household as her brother requested. Death shall be more welcome to me,’ she declared, than life with a troubled conscience.’

  Edward’s councillors tried for a compromise, but the boy king refused to give in on the matter.’He would spend his life,’ he said,‘and all he had, rather than agree and grant to what he knew certainly to be against the truth.’

  His sister tried a mixture of flattery and condescension. Although your Majesty hath far more knowledge and greater gifts than others of your years, yet it is not possible that your Highness can at these years be a judge in matters of religion.’

  Edward confirmed what a child he still was by breaking down in a fit of sobbing,‘his tender heart bursting out. All the same, he refused to budge, as did Mary, who responded to his tears by repeating her willingness to be a martyr.’Take away my life,’ she said,‘rather than the old religion.’

  This bitter clash between brother and sister showed that the obstinacy of Henry VIII lived on in both of them — as it did, for that matter, in their Strong-willed half-sister Elizabeth, in 1553 approaching her twentieth birthday. It also suggested that the religious differences in their respective parentings might, in the future, cause turbulence and division. When Edward came down with a feverish cold in the spring of that year and could not shake it off, the whole programme of evangelical reform was suddenly in jeopardy. Edward’s Protestant advisers had no doubt that if the boy were to die and Mary succeed him, she would immediately set about dismantling all the changes they had put in place. England would once again be subject to the Bishop of Rome. So what was to be done?

  LADY JANE GREY -THE NINE-DAY QUEEN

  1553

  AS THE FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD EDWARD VI LAY sick at Greenwich in April and May 1553, his doctors were baffled by his‘weakness and faintness of spirit’. They noted a‘tough, strong, straining cough’ — a possible sign of tuberculosis. Edward was coughing up blood; his body was covered with ulcers. In addition, there had been rumours that he was a victim of poison, so to protect themselves the doctors formally notified the Council that they feared the King had less than nine months to live.

  On the death of Henry VIII, Edward’s uncle Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, had taken charge of the boy king as‘Protector of the Realm’. Seymour was the elder brother of Henry’s beloved third wife Jane, and it was under his auspices that the new Prayer Book of 1549 was introduced. But the risings of that year had marked the end of the Protector’s power and provided an opening for John Dudley, son of Edmund Dudley, the overzealous fundraiser that Henry VIII had executed at the beginning of his reign.

  His father’s fate had not deterred John Dudley from the perilous path of Tudor royal service. In the autumn of 1549 his contribution to the crushing defeat of the Norfolk rebels at the Battle of Dussindale opened the way to him becoming Lord President of Edward’s Council, and two years later he awarded himself the dukedom of Northumberland. With a boy king on the throne, the new duke was the effective ruler of England.

  Yet Northumberland’s power rested entirely on the fragile health of the real King, and as Edward sickened, the duke resorted to desperate measures. He persuaded the fevered young monarch to keep the throne from his Catholic sister by altering the succession in favour of Lady Jane Grey, Edward’s cousin and great-granddaughter of Henry VII (see Tudor family tree, p. xi). Jane was intelligent and well educated, versed in Greek, Latin and Hebrew — and reliably Protestant. Born in October 1537, the same month as Edward, she had been brought up with him in the reform-minded household of Henry VIII’s last Queen, Catherine Parr — Jane and Edward often attended the same lessons.

  But the young woman’s greatest attraction, from the Lord President’s point of view, was that she offered a way of entrenching the Northumberlands in the royal succession. On 26 May 1553 the sixteen-year-old Lady Jane was married, against her will, to Northumberland’s fourth son Guildford Dudley — her protests overruled by her father Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk, who owed his elevated title to his old crony Northumberland.

  Most of Northumberland’s fellow-councillors were aghast at his naked grab for power. Archbishop Cranmer said he could not agree to the change until he had spoken personally with the King — but Edward, though drifting in and out of consciousness, was still set on denying England to Rome. He ordered Cranmer to endorse his Protestant cousin, and the archbishop reluctantly obeyed. The rest of the Council went along with him.

  As letters patent were hastily drawn up declaring that Edward’s two elder sisters Mary and Elizabeth were illegitimate, writs went out to summon a Parliament that would confirm the new succession. But the royal health was fast failing. By now Edward’s digestion had ceased to function, and his hair and nails were dropping out. When he coughed he brought up foul-smelling black sputum. Death came, on 6 July, as a merciful release.

  Two days earlier, Northumberland had summoned Princesses Mary and Elizabeth to their brother’s deathbed. But Elizabeth declined the trap and Mary would move only cautiously. The m
oment the news of Edward’s death reached her, she retired to Framlingham Castle in East Anglia and defiantly proclaimed her right to the throne. Down in London, meanwhile, Northumberland was proclaiming the new Queen Jane. But as two heralds and a trumpeter made their way through the city, they met with a cold and indifferent response.

  ’No one present showed any sign of rejoicing,’ reported one diplomat. When one herald cried,Long live the Queen’, the only response came from the few archers who joined the sad trio.

  In East Anglia it was equally clear where people’s sympathies lay. Local gentlemen flocked to Framlingham with horsemen and retainers to pledge their loyalty to Mary. People who were unable to fight sent money or carts full of beer, bread and freshly slaughtered meat for the volunteer army, which by 19 July numbered nearly twenty thousand. When Mary rode out to thank them, she was greeted with‘shouts and acclamations’ as men threw their helmets in the air. The noise frightened her horse so much she had to dismount and continue on foot through the mile-long encampment, greeting the soldiers personally and thanking them for their goodwill. Across the country there were enthusiastic demonstrations of support for Henry VIII’s firstborn child, and local forces were quickly mustered.

  It did not take long for the Council in London to get the message. Northumberland had headed north to arrest Mary, but his venture was clearly doomed. To save their own skins the colleagues he left in London, in a deft about-turn, offered a reward for his capture and proclaimed Mary’s accession. In an explosion of popular joy people ran wild, crying out the news and dancing in the streets. As darkness fell, bonfires were lit.’I am unable to describe to you,’wrote one visiting Italian, nor would you believe the exultation of all men. From a distance the earth must have looked like Mount Etna.’

  When Mary entered London on 3 August 1553, the celebrations knew no bounds. By then Northumberland had surrendered and had been sent to the Tower, where he was executed before the month was out. Lady Jane Grey was also imprisoned, but spared by Mary — she had clearly been only a pawn in the game.

  Unfortunately for Jane, however, one of Mary’s first decisions as Queen was to arrange a marriage for herself to the Catholic Philip of Spain. Early in 1554 the unpopularity of this’Spanish match’ prompted an uprising by Kentish rebels who reached the walls of London, and it became clear that the nine-day Queen, who embodied the hope for a Protestant succession, was too dangerous to be kept alive.

  On 12 February 1554, Lady Jane Grey was led out to the block. It was some sort of poetic justice that along with her went Guildford Dudley, the husband she had not wished to marry, and Henry Grey, the father who had forced her into it.

  BLOODY MARY AND THE FIRES OF SMITHFIELD

  1553-S

  THE SPONTANEOUS REVOLT THAT PUT MARY Tudor on the throne of England was the only popular uprising to succeed in the 118 years of her dynasty’s rule.’Vox Populi, Vox Der’, read the banners that welcomed the daughter of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon to London in the summer of 1553 —‘The voice of the people is the voice of God.’

  England had always felt sympathy, and perhaps a little guilt, over the way that both Mary and her mother had been treated during the break from Rome. Both women had stayed true to their faith, and now the old religion was back. The altars and vestments came out of hiding, and once again on feast days people could process and chant in church.

  Mary believed in putting her intense personal piety into practice. She took the ceremonies of Maundy Thursday particularly seriously, covering her finery with a long linen apron to kneel in front of poor women, humbly washing, drying and kissing their feet. She would turn up at the door of needy households and of poor widows, in particular, dressed not as a queen but as a gentlewoman with offers of help. She liked to mingle with ordinary villagers, asking if they had enough to live on and, if they lived on royal estates, whether they were being fairly treated by the officers of the Crown. To judge by the folk tales told of Mary Tudor’s charitable exploits, the Catholic Queen was a sixteenth-century combination of Mother Teresa and Diana, Princess of Wales.

  But that is not, of course, how‘Bloody Mary’ has been remembered by history, for there was a fanatical and unforgiving core to her faith. On 30 November 1554, the long and complicated legal process of reuniting the English Church with Rome was finally completed, with Parliament reinstating the medieval heresy statutes. If condemned by the church courts, heretics would now be handed over to the civil authorities to endure the grim penalty of burning to death at the stake. Less than three months later, the executions began.

  Before the Reformation the public burning of heretics, which horrifies us today, was generally accepted — even popular. Since 1401, when the activities of the Lollards put burning on the Statute Book, the orthodox Catholic majority had felt strengthened in their own prospects for salvation by the sight of dissidents being reduced to ashes. Even as Henry VIII was breaking with Rome in the 1530s, his burning of especially vocal Protestants could be taken as demonstrating a sensible middle way. But by the 1550s the Protestants were no longer a crazy fringe. They made up a solid and respected minority of believers, and it was on them that Mary’s zeal now focused.

  From an early date, Mary’s fervour worried those around her. In July 1554 she had provoked Protestant sensibilities by her marriage to the Catholic Philip of Spain — the Kent uprising that cost Lady Jane Grey her life only made Mary more determined — and even Philip’s Spanish advisers counselled her against inflaming feelings further. But Mary felt she had compromised enough. Under pressure from her English councillors, many of them inherited from her brother Edward, she had reluctantly agreed to leave the monastery lands with those who had purchased them. But when it came to dogma, she had God’s work to do. The burnings started in February 1555 with a selection of heretics both humble and mighty, among them the puritanical former Bishop of Gloucester, John Hooper.

  Hooper was a victim of the local authorities’ inexperience at the practicalities of this rare and specialised form of execution. They had supplied only two saddle-loads of reeds and faggots — and because the wood was green it burned slowly. Hooper desperately clasped bundles of reeds to his chest in a vain attempt to hasten the process, but only the bottom half of his body was burning.‘For God’s love, good people,’ he cried out,‘let me have more fire!’

  In these early days the burnings were well attended. For the citizens of Gloucester there was a novelty value, and perhaps even a ghoulish attraction, in watching their once high-and-mighty bishop agonise in front of their eyes. But the very suffering began to alter opinion — the smell of burning human flesh turns even the strongest stomach — and the executions of Bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley at Oxford on 16 October that same year came to symbolise the tragedy of good men being tortured for their sincere beliefs.

  Ridley had been Bishop of London and had played a major role in drafting the Book of Common Prayer of 1549. Latimer was a populist preacher well known for his sympathy for the poor. Famous for blending theology with everyday social concerns in open-air sermons that he delivered to large crowds, he had proudly refused the escape route that many radicals took to the German states and Swiss cities where Protestants were safe. As he and Ridley were being trussed to the same stake, he uttered the words that would forever evoke Mary’s martyrs:‘Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day, by God’s grace, light such a candle in England as I trust shall never be put out.’

  Though Latimer died quite quickly, suffocated by the smoke and losing consciousness, the fire burned more slowly on Ridley’s side. As was becoming the custom, his family had bribed the executioner to tie a bag of gunpowder around his neck, but the flames were not reaching high enough to trigger this ghastly if merciful release.’I cannot burn,’ Ridley cried, screaming in pain until a guard pulled away some of the damp faggots. Immediately the flames leapt upwards, and as Ridley swung his head down towards them the gunpowder exploded.

  Watching
this excruciating agony was the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer. The Catholic authorities were trying to terrify him into recanting his faith — and they succeeded. Under the pressures of prison life, constant hectoring and sheer fear, Cranmer signed no less than six recantations, each more abject than the one before. The great architect of England’s Protestant Reformation was even driven to accept the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation and the authority of the Pope.

  But Cranmer still was not spared. Mary’s determination to punish the archbishop who had annulled her mother’s marriage and proclaimed her a bastard was unassailable. His burning was set for 21 March 1556, on the same spot in Oxford where Ridley and Latimer had died, and he was led into the university church to pronounce his final, public recantation.

  But having embarked on the preamble that the authorities were expecting, Cranmer suddenly changed course. He wished to address, he said,‘the great thing which so much troubleth my conscience’, and he began to explain that the recantations he had signed were‘contrary to the truth which I thought in my heart’. As uproar broke out in the church, he raised his voice to a shout: As for the Pope, I refuse him, as Christ’s enemy and Antichrist!’

  The white-bearded ex-archbishop was dragged out and hurried to the stake, where fire was put to the wood without delay. As the flames licked around him, he extended towards them the‘unworthy right hand’ with which he had signed his recantations.