Heretic Queen

by Susan Ronald

  With this message foremost in her mind, councillors were selected to report back from Smithfield on the public reaction—whether the outcry would be favorable to the heretic or to her. The most trusted comptroller of the queen’s household, Sir Robert Rochester, along with Sir Richard Southwell, both of whom were also sheriffs, fit the bill.

  * * *

  So, on the wintry morning of February 4, 1555, under heavily laden clouds, the rick-cart dragging the ten bundles of fagots was taken from the nearby warehouse by two unnamed men and wheeled to the site of execution. They were surrounded by the queen’s men on horseback to guard against the threat a spontaneous riot. The pyre was built on a bed of straw and dried twigs, to help it catch fire more readily, with the fagots stacked upright around the oak stake at a ninety-degree angle. Men on horseback wearing the queen’s livery policed the crowd, while the queen’s guard, armed with pikes, lined the avenue through which the sinner would walk to the stake. When the condemned man appeared, the crowd’s whispers rose in a groundswell of incredulity: So the rumors were true, they muttered to one another. See how thin this man of the cloth, this “sinner,” had become, others lamented. Surely he had been tortured … surely there must be some mistake?

  None the less, there was no mistake. The unrepentant priest walked calmly in his long, soiled shirt to the stake, chanting the Miserere. Mary’s bishop of London began his short sermon while the sinner was tied to the oak post. The queen’s guard formed a tight circle around them to prevent any members of the public interfering with the execution. When the sermon was finished, the bishop nodded to the executioner to set the fagots alight. The queen’s mounted men closed in to control the crowd. Rushing around the pyre, the poor executioner touched his torch to the straw, to ensure that when the flames reached the condemned man, they would consume him evenly. Then, as the fire spread, he poked at the burning straw with his pike, so that the fagots would catch fire quickly. It was the only act of mercy the executioner would be permitted to give. Yet when the flames licked at the sinner’s feet, the condemned priest smiled. Minutes later, he was dead, burned at the stake for his belief in the Protestant faith.

  * * *

  The root cause of the priest’s execution could be traced back to the beginning of Mary’s reign. In the seventeen months since Mary had become queen, she had had to wrest her throne away from the teenaged usurper Lady Jane Grey; then, within five months, in February 1554, shortly after Mary’s Spanish marriage had been proclaimed, the queen was forced to subdue a southern rebellion led by Sir Thomas Wyatt and his Kentish followers. Both her half sister the Lady Elizabeth and the young usurper Lady Jane Grey were implicated as the Protestant heirs to Mary’s throne. Still, Mary proved herself worthy of the Tudor name, winning the hearts and minds of Londoners with her stirring speech, described as a miracle of “good kingship.” As a result Wyatt failed to penetrate London beyond a tavern at Ludgate Bar.

  The first casualty of the Wyatt Rebellion, as the insurgency later became known, was Lady Jane Grey. Blindfolded, the poor, innocent pawn tragically sought the block upon which to lay her head for the executioner to sever. She was only seventeen.

  Lady Elizabeth, only three years older than her cousin Jane Grey, was no innocent and quite rightly feared the same end. When Gardiner questioned her during her virtual imprisonment at Whitehall, she held her nerve, claiming she knew nothing. Mary, naturally, didn’t believe her. Elizabeth was ordered to the Tower, charged with treason for her alleged part in the rebellion. Hoping she could make Mary see reason, she wrote a long pleading letter to the queen. Yet despite all her efforts to avoid the infamous “one way” journey taken by so many others in the reigns of her ancestors, Elizabeth entered the Tower precincts by water the following day from Tower Wharf, amid the terrifying screams of the castle’s exotic menagerie of beasts and the roar of its lions. In a streak of wickedness, Mary had insisted that Elizabeth be placed in the generous accommodation that their father had renovated for Anne Boleyn’s coronation.

  Though Mary was never called the “queen of tempests,” hers was a reign that would be recalled by many as a veritable storm of discontent and mayhem. Wyatt was beheaded on the morning of April 11, 1554. Hours later, his body had been quartered, its bowel and private parts burned. His head was parboiled and nailed to the top of the gibbet at St. James’s. Within the week Wyatt’s head had been spirited away by one of his loyal followers.7

  Three weeks later, on May 4, Sir Henry Bedingfield was appointed constable of the Tower. His first act was to raise one hundred troops, making Lady Elizabeth fear that she would play her part on the same block as Lady Jane Grey. Instead, on May 19, 1554, Elizabeth was removed to house arrest a safe distance from London, arriving some days later at the Palace of Woodstock in Oxfordshire. Bedingfield wrote to the queen that “men betwixt London and these parts be not good and whole in matters of religion … be[ing] fully fixed to stand to the late abolishing of the Bishop of Rome’s authority.”8 Equally, he was tormented by Elizabeth’s evident popularity on their progress to Woodstock. People lined the streets in villages and towns, giving her flowers, herbs, and expensive spices and wishing her “God speed” and good health. It was not a good sign for Mary’s fruitful reign.

  Worse was yet to come.

  * * *

  Seven months later, the endgame for the unrepentant vicar John Rogers had just begun. On December 2, 1554, the bells of St. Paul’s Cathedral rejoiced for England’s long-awaited spiritual peace. Queen Mary—the first anointed Tudor queen of England, France, and Ireland—was presiding over the reconciliation of the Church of England to Rome. Already Mary could have been forgiven for thinking that she had been a mere “queen of tempests” and not the queen of a wealthy, green, heavily forested and pleasant land.

  It was on this especially wintry December day that John Rogers also listened to the bells of St. Paul’s peal in celebration of England’s spiritual return to Rome. He was at home, as he had been for the past five months, under house arrest. Rogers had become the vicar of St. Sepulchre Church in London in May 1550, only four and a half years earlier, during the reign of Mary’s little brother, Edward VI. The following August, Rogers received the prebend (stipend) of St. Pancras in St. Paul’s Cathedral. He could be forgiven if he reflected that in the reigns of Edward VI and his sister Mary I, his much-admired career some four years distant was now an unrecognizable foreign world.

  His personal descent into his private hell had begun on the very day Mary Tudor had grabbed back her throne from the Duke of Northumberland’s puppet, Queen Jane.9 Rogers was unceremoniously attacked as a seditious preacher by Mary’s religious examiners and stripped of his livelihood.10 Undaunted, he remained steadfast to his beliefs. Yet the moment the papal legate had been welcomed back to London a few weeks earlier, John Rogers had known that all his years of devotion, sacrifice, and religious study were at an end.

  Of course, he knew that he had broken no laws and that the queen had acted prematurely against him. In Mary’s eyes, in July 1553, she was merely consolidating her hold on her troubled country. She had not yet been able to convene Parliament, much less change the laws reconciling England to Roman Catholicism. So while the hapless vicar had committed no offense other than to preach the official religion of the realm, an Anglicized version of Lutheranism, Queen Mary could not stomach sanctioning such preaching, albeit temporarily, during her rule.

  As Mary swept to power in July 1553 on a wave of popularity thanks to the wrongs she had been made to endure, foremost in her mind was her solemn quest, bordering on delusion, that as the granddaughter of Queen Isabella of Spain, who had driven the Jews and Moors out of the Iberian Peninsula, she would drive the Protestant specter from England. She had been deeply scarred by the battle of wills with her father and Thomas Cromwell, who had forced her to sign the Oath of Succession renouncing her obedience to Rome in 1535. Within the year, she had applied to the pope for absolution for what she felt had been her most heinous sin.11 The estab
lishment of the Church of England had been, to her mind, solely for the purpose of setting aside the marriage of her mother to her father. Now that she was England’s queen, Mary was determined that it would be her vision for England’s collective soul and conscience that would prevail.

  * * *

  Knowing this to be true, seventeen months later, in December 1554, there was little doubt in John Rogers’s mind that he would become a martyr to his religious beliefs. Despite claims that would be made by his inquisitors to the contrary, Rogers’s real crime was not in preaching the new religion so much as in saving William Tyndale’s religious work from destruction by Roman Catholic interests in Antwerp. His crime was translating the Bible into English as the “Thomas Matthews” edition of the holy book, preserving much of Tyndale’s exceptional language.12 Miles Coverdale, who had also been at the English factory in Antwerp when Tyndale was betrayed and seized, had taken the “Thomas Matthews” edition and revised it several times thereafter, until it had become the Great Bible that had been put into every church in the country. Rogers would never know that his masterpiece would become the foundation of the 1611 version of the King James Bible that would endure for over three and a half centuries.

  Within a month of that December 2 morn in 1554, the Holy Roman Emperor’s envoy wrote home that “another bill has been brought forward, a measure for the punishment of heretics that had already been through Parliament under Henry IV and Richard II,” as a means of expediting the return to Catholicism and punishment of its black sheep.13 The reinstatement of laws dating from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries smacked of a messianic desperation to brand heretics by the tried and tested definitions of yore, long before Martin Luther had pinned his ninety-five theses to the door of Wittenberg’s church a hundred or so years later.

  There were other controversial bills brought before Parliament at that same session as well. The most notorious of these provided for Philip’s sovereignty during Mary’s confinement for childbirth. Another provided for who would have the right to act on Philip’s behalf should the queen be incommoded while he was absent from the kingdom. Given the dangers of childbirth, a bill was also tabled to agree that Philip could remain king even in the event of Queen Mary’s death. It was hoped the measure would be regarded as a precaution to ensure the succession. The Holy Roman Emperor’s envoy, Simon Renard, believed that the bill regarding the heretics would be passed but doubted that the upper house of Parliament would accept Philip as king in his own right, any more than it would vote in favor of the bill of “bastardy” against Elizabeth Tudor in the current session.

  * * *

  Nevertheless, with the legalities of the return to Rome finally resolved in the queen’s mind, and the ancient laws regarding heresy back on the statute books, an intelligent and pious man like John Rogers knew that his end was near if he did not conform. His wife, Adriana, had long been “more richly endowed with virtue and soberness of life than with worldly treasures,” as were their eleven children. He had been incarcerated for over a year without trial, deprived of his stipend illegally, and his family was literally starving. It was for them that he, along with other political prisoners, wrote to the queen, to protest the illegality of their imprisonment and to demand their release or their right to trial.14

  Yet release had never been an option. On January 22, 1555, the queen’s elder statesman, the overwhelming bishop of Winchester and chancellor, Stephen Gardiner, ordered the trials for heresy to begin in the presence of the Privy Council.15 Rogers was brought before the royal commission to face his inquisitors. Chief among them was Edmund Bonner, bishop of London, who would be remembered by history as “bloody Bonner”—the man who ordered the burnings of 232 “heretics” of the total of 282 burned at the stake during Queen Mary’s reign.

  Though weakened by a long term of imprisonment without trial, miserable living conditions, and lack of proper sanitation and hygiene, Rogers stood tall before the council declaring, “That which I have preached I will seal with my blood!” The Lord Chancellor then asked, “Wilt thou return to the Catholic Church and unite and knit thyself with us, as all the Parliament House has done?” Rogers replied, “I have never did nor will dissent from the Catholic Church.” It was an irate Lord Chancellor who fired the next salvo at Rogers, “But I speak of receiving the Pope to be Supreme Head.” Rogers’s response was eloquent: “I know of no other head of the Catholic Church but Christ. Neither will I acknowledge the Bishop of Rome to have any more authority than any other Bishop has either by the word of God or the doctrine of the Church.”16

  Despite the constant harangue from his inquisitors, Rogers remained steadfast and declined to recant. It was too late to turn the clock back; too late to reinsert a supreme head of the church between a bishop and Christ. At the end of his interrogation, Rogers even prayed for the pope and his cardinals, as well as the souls living in purgatory, begging the Lord to pardon them for their sins. Of course, a guilty verdict of the court had been a foregone conclusion.

  So John Rogers was brought on Monday, February 4, 1555, to his place of execution, the market at Smithfield in London. The disbelieving crowds gathered around, some to enjoy the ghoulish spectacle, others wondering what evil omen the execution of a vicar portended, still others horrified and knowing that there would be worse to come. As John Rogers passed through the onlookers, a groundswell of cheers rose from the people, reaching a crescendo when he walked calmly onto his pyre and was tied to its stake by his ankles and chest.

  As the fagots of wood were set alight around his feet, Rogers seemed renewed, almost free. He murmured his prayers until the fire had taken hold of his legs and shoulders. Then, as if to mock his tormentors, Rogers committed the ultimate insult. He washed his hands in the flames as if they had been cold water and he was purifying his soul, then lifted his blazing hands up to heaven. Rogers had vanquished his captors with this final act of simple defiance. He yielded up his spirit into the hands of his Heavenly Father and showed the way for the 281 Protestant martyrs to follow him in the remaining three years of “bloody” Mary’s reign.

  * * *

  The next day, the panicked Holy Roman envoy, Simon Renard, wrote to Philip, “I do not think it well that your Majesty should allow further executions to take place unless the reasons are so overwhelmingly strong and the offences committed have been so scandalous as to render this course justifiable in the eyes of the people … The watchword should be secure, caute et lente festinare.”17

  Security, caution, and hasten slowly.

  PART I

  A Wounded and Divided Land, 1558–1566

  They would secretly seek to inflame

  our realm with firebrands.

  —ELIZABETH I TO THE SPANISH AMBASSADOR DE SPES

  ONE

  The New Deborah

  A princess who can act any part she pleases.

  —Lord Burghley, of Elizabeth

  The reign of Mary I ended on November 17, 1558, and that of Lady Elizabeth began. No longer disinherited and demoted, Elizabeth had miraculously survived to become queen. By the time of Elizabeth’s coronation in January 1559, life in Mary’s reign was decidedly another country.

  As the procession for Elizabeth’s coronation began, snowflakes danced on the air, bowing and sweeping as if upon a stage in deference to the earsplitting cheers from their adoring audience. The cries of joy were not for the flakes or their thin white blanket that spread itself like a gossamer veil over the city. All those who huddled together by the quayside rejoiced for the tall, slender woman with red-gold hair.

  Queen Elizabeth had suddenly appeared on the privy stairs of Whitehall Palace in a flurry of activity, cocooned by her entire court of barons, knights, and ladies. As she stepped forward, she nodded slowly, perhaps knowingly, at her people in the distance. To all eyes, the new queen made her way down to the awaiting barges with a regal grace not seen since the times of her father, King Harry. To all fluttering hearts, the rekindled joy was palpable.r />
  It was two o’clock in the afternoon, and the flood tide had turned. The River Thames waited for no one, not even kings or queens. Still, Elizabeth paused before taking the boatman’s outstretched hand. She raised her chin skyward, allowing the snowflakes to fall upon her upturned face, and smiled. Did she silently rehearse the prayer she would utter aloud two days later, “O Lord, Almighty and Everlasting God, I give Thee most hearty thanks that Thou has been so merciful unto me as to spare me to behold this joyful day”?

  Perhaps not. Still, she was evidently savoring the moment, as she would each of the unfettered moments in the days to come. The years since her mother’s execution had been fraught with hardship, disillusionment, and downright abuse from those closest to her. In the twelve years since Henry VIII’s death, Elizabeth had danced on many a high wire, with countless onlookers praying she would fall and break that handsome neck of hers. Though she had come close on two occasions, Elizabeth had survived.

  Perhaps that was in part due to her father’s last queen, Catherine Parr, who had made certain that Elizabeth received a first-rate education. This, along with the friendship of key individuals, the instincts of a survivor, and the genetic makeup of the daughter of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII, had ensured that she would reach this day. Yet Elizabeth, as a fervent follower of the new religion, took no credit for “God’s work.”

  On this day—Thursday, January 12, 1559—she would reenter the Tower of London precinct as England’s queen. More than any other royal palace, the Tower held terrible memories for the last of the Tudors. Of course, it was there that her mother, Anne Boleyn, and her cousin Catherine Howard were beheaded for their “treason” against her father, the king. It was at the Tower, too, that only four years earlier she had been held prisoner by Mary, fearing for her very life. Yet it was the way of the kings of England that they would sojourn at the Tower for two nights before their coronations, and Elizabeth Tudor was not about to break with tradition.