by Susan Ronald
For Edward VI, “soul saving” meant the nation’s conversion to a Lutheran style of Protestantism. Mary, naturally, had to set this to rights. Within three months of Cardinal Pole’s arrival in London, Mary and Philip wrote to the saber-rattling Pope Julius III that they had repealed all Henry VIII’s and Edward VI’s laws and had returned her people to the true faith.1 Recognizing the danger of disobeying Mary’s zealous Roman Catholic—called “popish”—religious reform, even Elizabeth had been forced to conceal her Protestant convictions. As queen, she was well versed in the traumas and trials of someone who had to dissemble, and she would soon avow that she wished to spare her people a similar fate.
For Elizabeth, who had also known life as a political prisoner suspected of treason, the issue of religion needed to be resolved in a way that would unite her people behind her while allowing them freedom of conscience. Part of the problem was that tolerance was a revolutionary concept and an adventurous and uncomfortable step into the unknown, and the more Elizabeth displayed tolerance, the less it was understood. Some would conclude that Elizabeth had little religion; others that her flexible attitudes meant she had little conviction. Both were far from the truth.
Their confusion was understandable. In her sister’s time, Cardinal Pole and Bishop Bonner had enforced the papal will with iron fists, under the guiding influence of Philip’s bishop, Bartolomé Carranza.2 It had been Carranza who infused Mary Tudor’s reign with the blood of her fellow Englishmen and -women, and Carranza who had insisted on executing Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer for heresy.3 England, under the sure Spanish hand of Carranza—nicknamed “the black monk”—had donned the mantle of Roman Catholicism uncomfortably.
Yet Elizabeth felt that regardless of the individual will of her people in matters of religion and worship, the English had been cowed into compliance. The sway held by Philip’s Spanish clerics over English affairs had been bitterly resented. Hundreds of Tudor “new men” and their families had exiled themselves in the Low Countries, Germany, or Switzerland rather than conform to Mary’s Catholic vision. Others, like Sir William Cecil, conformed outwardly but refused to make themselves available to the crown as ministers of state. Had Cardinal Pole persuaded the monarchy to recover church lands from those who had benefited from the Dissolution of the Monasteries, surely they “would rather get themselves massacred than let go [of their properties],” the imperial ambassador affirmed to Philip.4
Now these very men were returning to Elizabeth’s England in droves. In the time they had been away, poverty had risen sharply, and with it, so had crime and vagrancy. The “sturdy beggar” had become a common feature of urban and rural life. Poor harvests and recurrent bouts of plague and the “sweating sickness” had decimated the country.5
For the largely illiterate rural population, the worlds of the “new” religion and the “old” had become confused. The country customs of maypoling, wise women, the alehouse, the cunning-man, ballads and broadsides, dancing, Sunday sports, tabling and dicing, bowling and cards, and cakes and ale stood to be lost to Protestant ministers of the Good Book with their solemn Sabbath observance, sermon-gadding and repetition, sobriety, chastity, respectability, and thrift. In effect, magic, the supernatural, and the “old” Catholic religion had become intertwined with these essential country pastimes.
If Elizabeth’s England were to move forward with the new religion again, the queen would have to ensure that her people appreciated that being Protestant did not mean that they would lose their cherished touchstones.6 What Elizabeth understood all too well was that the rhythm of life had become dependent not only upon the seasons and weather but also on the vagaries of a weakened economy, the social inversion brought about by the Tudor new men, confusion and lawlessness, a dread of change, and a realm divided by religious schism.
The other bogey of English life, xenophobia—always a concern for peace at home and trade abroad—was rife. With most of the returning English having adopted Continental ways in their worship, these loyal subjects of Elizabeth’s seemed foreign to those who had stayed at home. While England had just shed its Spanish king, albeit as Mary’s consort, the wounds were still raw.
Yet England was heavily reliant on overseas trade for the sale of its number-one finished exported product: broadcloth. France had overrun Calais in the recent war, and Elizabeth needed to find a new staple town quickly. With no peace agreed, the French king’s claim of friendship to Elizabeth on December 30, 1558, might have been welcomed, if it had been heartfelt:
She knows how sincere and perfect is the amity and affection which he always felt towards her, of which she has already had sufficient proof and security. This friendship and esteem which he has had during his whole life has been nothing diminished by the war which to his great regret had sprung up between the late Queen of England, her sister, and himself, and by the great and incredible damages he had received from her.7
However, it was a sham. While begging pity and understanding from Elizabeth, Henry II made an official plea to his friend Pope Paul IV to recognize his daughter-in-law Mary Queen of Scots as queen of England, too. Paul IV, who was always willing to strike a blow against Philip II for trying to block his election, was sanguine.8 He wrote in the papal diary that same December: “The French in view of the Queen of England’s death [Mary Tudor] grew lukewarm about the peace and hopeful of detaching that kingdom from King Philip or uniting it with that of Scotland, and (among other means to that end) were instant [sic] with the Pope that he should declare Queen Elizabeth illegitimate, and as it were, of incestuous birth, and consequently incapable of succeeding to the throne, whereby they pretend that the crown would belong to the Queen of Scotland.”9
Clearly, Henry II was playing a double game. He hoped that if he could get the pope to agree to Elizabeth’s “illegitimacy” and put forward his daughter-in-law as the only surviving legitimate Tudor heir to the throne, he could gain suzerainty of England without bloodshed.10 In fact, his machinations were hardly necessary. Henry VIII’s 1544 statute declaring Elizabeth illegitimate still stood. Naturally, Mary Tudor had left this section of the act active, since she had always maintained that Elizabeth was the offspring of a marriage the Catholic Church regarded as incestuous. Until and unless Elizabeth called her first Parliament and had the act struck off the statute books, Mary Queen of Scots already had the best legal claim to England’s throne as the great-granddaughter of Henry VII.11 Both Elizabeth and Philip II of Spain were acutely aware of this.
From Philip’s perspective England’s monarch was a matter of utmost significance. He, of course, was no longer king consort of England. He had had a long and bloody rivalry for French territories in northern France and a prior history over Naples with Henry II and the Vatican. Pope Paul IV had excommunicated him in 1556 over the Naples debacle. By the end of 1557, the war with France had caused Philip’s first bankruptcy, compelling him to come to the bargaining table with Henry II for peace talks at Cateau-Cambrésis. Despite their mutual Catholic affinity—for Philip had been endowed with the title of “His Most Catholic Majesty” and Henry “His Most Christian Majesty” by the Vatican—neither monarch had much cause to trust the other.
For Philip, any official union between Scotland and England, in conjunction with Mary Stuart’s undoubted role as France’s future queen, was an absolute anathema. Elizabeth had become, as a result, his most important potential ally in northern Europe. Without her friendship and protection, and England’s, the sea route to his tremendously wealthy colonies of the Low Countries could be cut off. Inevitably, with this at the forefront of his political thinking, Philip had cast himself in the role of Elizabeth’s—and England’s—protector from the moment he realized that his wife, Queen Mary, would never conceive. Somehow, Philip would have to reconcile his vision for the Spanish Empire with his title of “His Most Catholic Majesty” and make Elizabeth his de facto ally. Simon Renard’s warning to Philip four years earlier, in 1554, “secure, caute et lente festinare”�
��security, caution, and hasten slowly—remained his watchwords.
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Renard’s cautionary words also applied to Elizabeth. Death had fortuitously silenced English Catholicism’s most eloquent spokesman, Cardinal Pole, and his queen, Mary Tudor, on the same day. Furthermore, the hated Spanish influence on English religious affairs in the previous reign had done much to muddy the religious and political pictures in the people’s minds, making Mary Tudor less popular with each passing day. Notwithstanding this, Elizabeth knew that the people loathed change and was cognizant of the many dangers in making any dramatic changes in the religious practices of her realm. Besides, that was what both France and Spain had anticipated, and Elizabeth meant to confound their expectations.
The queen saw herself as the monarch of all her people and equally knew that fully satisfying the extreme right or left in the religious spectrum—a kaleidoscope of Christian beliefs, which now included not only the broader terms of Roman Catholic and Protestant but also Zwinglian, Calvinist, and Lutheran, among others—would alienate the majority of Englishmen, who placed their beliefs in the Christian middle. Though she would never have used the word “tolerance,” preferring the less controversial term “compromise,” tolerance was at the outset the cornerstone of her decision to walk a middle road.
To implement her vision, Elizabeth needed to carefully select her ministers who could carry the day for her in the Commons and the Lords. The most enduring and important of these was Sir William Cecil. Like the queen, Cecil was a moderate Protestant; and, like Elizabeth, he was against forcing England’s Catholic population into an unpalatable solution. As her principal secretary, and later Lord Treasurer as Lord Burghley from 1572, Cecil would become Elizabeth’s “significant other” in politics throughout her long reign. Their remarkable relationship would last, if not always flourish, until Cecil’s death in 1598.
Sir Nicholas Bacon, Cecil’s brother-in-law, a great believer in mass education, became the queen’s Lord Privy Seal in January 1559. Sir William Paulet, Marquis of Winchester and Lord High Treasurer, and Lord William Howard, first Baron Howard of Effingham—both good Catholics—remained privy councillors as they had been in Mary Tudor’s reign. In maintaining some of her sister’s more gifted advisers, Elizabeth had intimated how she wished to govern: There would be no new brooms to sweep Mary’s Catholic advisers from power. Talent and loyalty alone would bring advancement.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth sought other learned opinions with regard to the religious settlement she knew she would have to impose as soon as practicable. Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, an old hand at Tudor politics who was also held prisoner in the Tower after the Wyatt Rebellion, wrote to the queen that she must “succeed happily through a discreet beginning … to have a good eye that there be no innovations, no tumults or breach of orders.”12 Throckmorton’s advice was echoed by Armagil Waad—a Tudor diplomat who had served both Henry VIII and Edward VI—in his paper The Distresses of the Commonwealth, with the Means to Remedy Them. Waad began with the most succinct assessment of Elizabeth’s position when he wrote, “The Queen poor; the realm exhausted;… division among ourselves; wars with France and Scotland; the French King bestriding the realm, having one foot in Calais and the other in Scotland; steadfast enmity but no steadfast friendship abroad.” Elizabeth, he warned, would need great powers of dissimulation and cunning if she were to succeed in religious reform while maintaining unity among her people. Waad recommended “that you would proceed to the reformation having respect to quiet at home, the affairs you have in hand with foreign princes, the greatness of the Pope, and how dangerous it is to make alteration in religion, specially in the beginning of a prince’s reign.”13
Others advised a revolutionary blow to the Marian religious solution: to call Parliament forthwith and set up a national church complete with its own Protestant prayer book, admonishing that “the sooner that religion is restored, God is the more glorified, and … will be more merciful to us and better save and defend her Highness from all dangers.”14
Elizabeth had already given her people a clear sign of her Protestant intentions on Christmas Day when she ordered Archbishop Oglethorpe not to elevate the host at Mass in accordance with the Catholic rite. His refusal to obey his queen resulted in Elizabeth storming out of the service immediately. Two days later, though she hadn’t had the authority to do so, she issued a proclamation permitting certain parts of the service in English after the Protestant fashion but forbidding all preaching and teaching as a restraint on the most vocal of the “ministers of Lucifer”—as the Catholic bishops called the Protestant Marian exiles.15
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So, while Sir William Cecil gathered up all advices from both Protestants and Catholics, privy councillors and burgesses, and port towns and the City of London and compiled the first of his many “memoranda of lists” of pros and cons, Elizabeth ordered him to issue the writs summoning Parliament for its first session on January 23, 1559. On February 9, the “Bill to restore the supremacy of the Church of England &c. to the Crown of the realm” had its first reading in the Commons. Where Mary had bulldozed through her “Act of Repeal in restoring Papal Authority in England to the House of Lords,” Elizabeth had to be more circumspect, channeling her proposals through the Commons. Despite those ten seats left vacant by bishops who had died in the autumn of 1558, a large minority of the upper house still wore the purple gowns of Catholic bishops. If the bishops opposed the anointed monarch, Elizabeth preferred that the confrontation take place between the Commons and the Lords, not the monarchy and the Lords. In the event, it was the Commons that would prove to be the trickier of the two houses.
A second bill was drafted for “Royal Supremacy over the Church,” with the queen as its head. At the same time, Elizabeth tried to calm the Spanish Ambassador, Count de Feria, over any perceived changes away from Mary’s religious settlement. He wrote to the Vatican pretending to know that Elizabeth was “resolved to restore religion as her father left it,” meaning effectively as an Anglican form of Catholicism albeit with the monarch as head of the church.16 Whether this was cunning political maneuvering to bring the more moderate Catholic bishops to her side in the struggle ahead is rather difficult to say, but it would have been a masterstroke of both political and religious unity if she could have engineered it. The Catholic bishops could have preserved Elizabeth from a heavy reliance on the Protestant hard-liners, or “hot gospellers,” allowing the queen to tread her middle way. Instead, England and Elizabeth came a poor second for the bishops.
With a core of around a quarter of the members of Parliament being Marian exiles, men clothed in what would become known as “Puritan gray,” Elizabeth found that the House of Commons would represent a formidable force for reform, despite her wishes. The radical leaders—men like Sir Anthony Cooke, Cecil’s father-in-law, and Sir Francis Knollys, Elizabeth’s cousin by marriage—apparently swept aside the weakened Catholic opposition in the Commons and added another bill “for the order of service and ministers in the church.” The following day, yet another bill, “The book for the common prayer and ministration of the sacraments,” put forward by both Cooke and Knollys, was entered in the Commons Journal.17 The Protestant “ministers of Lucifer” were in firm control of the Commons, aiming to put forward an extreme solution to the religious question with their own radical bill and prayer book. Cooke and Knollys led the Commons in the prolonged debate that ensued, aimed at tagging on these two bills to the Supremacy Bill that had already gone up to the Lords.18 Their action was tantamount to bringing the religious settlement back to the days of Edward VI and the 1552 prayer book that had been such an abomination to Catholics.
This was a most unwelcomed maneuver from the “ministers of Lucifer,” hateful to Elizabeth and absolutely contrary to her policy at this most sensitive moment. Naturally the amended Supremacy Bill was in trouble in the Lords. Catholic voices were raised to a fever pitch against it. Bishop Scot of Chester delivered a long-winded speech, effective
ly saying he was opposed to the queen as head of the church. The archbishop of York, Nicholas Heath, gave a rather more succinct account of why the queen could not be “Supreme Head of the Church of England, immediate and next unto God.” Parliament had no right, he believed, to grant any spiritual role to her, particularly as she was a woman and incapable of fulfilling Christ’s injunction to Peter to feed his flock. St. Paul, he quoted, had placed an obligation on women to be silent in church and not to “lord it” over men. Paradoxically, this was the same argument used by the Presbyterian “hot gospeller” John Knox in his tirade against the “monstrous regiment of women” that had so offended Elizabeth. Common ground had been struck by extremists on both sides.
The Commons at last understood that they would never get their amended bill through the House of Lords. With Easter looming on the calendar—Sunday, March 26—a compromise needed to be made for the holiday or the Catholic order of service would stand, with the pope as head of the Church of England. Either the Commons would accept the Lords’ amendments and lose the Protestant prayer book or reject them and retain the pope. The compromise—which pleased none—was that Elizabeth would become Supreme Head of the Church of England. On March 22, the queen made it known that she intended to give her assent to the Act of Supremacy “in the present last session of Parliament” reviving the statute of Edward VI for Communion in both kinds—meaning both Protestant and Catholic.19 The “ministers of Lucifer” glowered with rage at the compromise. In the words of the Spanish ambassador two days later, “I see that the heretics are very downcast in the last few days.”
