September 2008
Parish
History Episode 89 - The New
Queen
Mary Tudor, the
new Queen of England, was the daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine
of Aragon. Her mother had been divorced, so that King Henry could
marry Anne Boleyn. That had been the original cause of the schism
with Rome. That schism had enabled English Protestantism to grow from
a select band of persecuted sectaries, the Lollards, into a national
Church, holding, actively or passively, the support of the majority
of the nation. That national, but schismatic, Church had been firmly
rejected by Catherine and her daughter Mary, the first victims of
King Henry’s marital eccentricities.
For that reason,
if no other, Catherine remained, and Mary became a Roman Catholic.
Mother and daughter rejected the Church of England (as an independent
body, separate from Rome). This was known. Those who considered themselves
to be Catholic naturally looked forward to better times in the new
reign, though they may well have been apprehensive of a woman’s
ability to govern such an uneasy realm as England. Those who considered
themselves Protestants may have been a lot more apprehensive, but,
after the experience of rule by Seymour and Dudley on behalf of the
sickly King Edward, and the fiasco of Dudley’s brief attempt
to install his daughter-in-law on the English Throne, they were for
the most part willing to allow this Princess of royal blood a chance
to prove herself.
Their apprehensions
were natural. Never before had England been ruled by a Queen Regnant
- never before, with two disastrous exceptions : the much-interrupted
reign of Matilda, four centuries ago, which had brought nothing but
civil strife to the Kingdom; and the thirteen-day reign of Queen Jane,
so swiftly and so easily overturned by the uprising of the present
Queen’s supporters. (Gilford and Jane Dudley were now lodged
securely in the prisons of the Tower of London. John Dudley had been
executed for his attempt to prevent Mary’s accession to the
Throne, but as yet hardly anybody else).
When she rode
into London, to the cheers of, perhaps, the great majority of that
city’s population, Mary knew that she had a heavy programme
of work ahead of her. She wished to return the Church of England to
the Roman obedience; to bring back the Latin Mass, abandoning all
Cranmer’s liturgical experiments; and to re·introduce
the religious orders (of monks, nuns and friars) to England.
Almost the last
public duty performed by Archbishop Cranmer was to preside at the
funeral of Mary’s brother, King Edward. Shortly afterwards Cranmer
was accused of treason, taken to the Tower of London, tried, found
guilty, and sentenced to death.
But the sentence
was not immediately carried out. Queen Mary hated the man, and wanted
to make sure of his damnation by having him found guilty of heresy,
and then sent to the stake. Cranmer, after all, was the man who had
supplied King Henry with the arguments he had used to obtain a divorce
from her mother, casting both of them - Queen Catherine and Princess
Mary - adrift from the Royal Court. It had been Cranmer who had then
solemnised the marriage between King Henry and Anne Boleyn, one of
her mother’s former maids-of honour. Now Mary had him within
her power, and she intended him to suffer and to die.
There was no immediate
appointment of a successor to the See of Canterbury. But Stephen Gardiner,
Bishop of Winchester, who had been imprisoned in the Tower during
the previous reign, was allowed in practice to take over the leadership
of the English Church. He presided at Mary’s coronation, as
neither Archbishop Cranmer of Canterbury nor Holgate of York could
officiate, both men being imprisoned in the Tower of London. Mary
also appointed Gardiner to the office of Lord Chancellor, a position
somewhat like that of a modern prime minister. In this office, he
worked steadily to try and “put the clock back”, and to
restore the Church to the situation it had been in at the beginning
of the reign of King Henry VIII.
In many ways,
however, Gardiner was a moderating influence on the Queen. He had,
we may recall (from “the Signpost” of May, this year),
been willing to accept Cranmer’s 1549 liturgy, providing he
was allowed to interpret it “in a Catholic manner”. It
was Gardiner who pointed out to Mary that she would need to summon
a parliament, and have all the changes she proposed to introduce go
through the regular parliamentary procedures. King Henry and King
Edward, he reminded her, had always regularised their actions through
Acts of Parliament. It was not particularly difficult, he claimed,
to get the necessary legislation through the House. It was very easy
(in those days : this does not necessarily apply to modern parliaments)
for the monarch to bribe Members of Parliament with all sorts of titles,
honours, privileges, or plain cash; or, alternatively, to threaten
Members with all sorts of dire consequences, if they failed to vote
as required.
By such means
Gardiner was able to steer through Parliament a series of bills for
the repeal of almost all the ecclesiastical legislation of King Edward’s
reign. Ominous amongst the legislative changes which now occurred
was the repeal of Seymour’s act for the abolition of all forms
of religious persecution. It now became possible to send to the stake
all those accused of heresy. It was over a year before anyone would
be executed under the provisions of this Act, but the latent threat
of a heresy trial existed from almost the beginning of Queen Mary’s
reign.
The Queen also
wished to bring back the orders of monks and other “religious”,
and to establish them back on the sites from which they had been ejected
during her father’s reign. However Bishop Gardiner pointed out
that most of the lands of the ancient religious foundations of England
were now firmly in the hands of a wealthy laity, enriched by the generosity
of King Henry, and that any attempt to get them back would almost
certainly lead to rebellion. He believed (wrongly, as it turned out)
that few men would die for religious principles, but many would be
willing to fight to save their property, their ill-gotten gains from
the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
There were a few
former abbeys (Westminster Abbey was a notable example) which had
remained under royal control, and a few abbeys (Glastonbury was one)
which had been closed, but which had not yet found a buyer, and Benedictine
monks could be re·introduced into such establishments. But
otherwise, Mary had to use the expedient of creating a fund to buy
back the former monastic lands; unfortunately, she was almost the
only person who put any money into the fund. By the end of her reign
little had been achieved, except for re·opening a few small
convents for nuns.
Nor was there
any enthusiasm for restoring the endowments of the former chantry
guilds. Most of these had been seized in the early years of King Edward’s
reign, after King Henry’s death, when Seymour was Lord Protector.
Though some of the wealth appropriated by these confiscations had
been pocketed by corrupt administrators (including Seymour himself),
the greater part of it had been used to endow grammar schools all
over England and Wales. The many schools in many towns bearing the
title “King Edward VI Grammar School” bear testimony that
much of the confiscated wealth did find its way into furthering education.
In attempting to reverse all the ecclesiastical legislation passed
during King Edward’s reign, Mary perhaps did herself most harm
in trying to deal with the question of clerical marriage. Seymour
had, by Act of Parliament in 1548, freed the clergy from the (presumed)
burden of celibacy, and by 1553 it would seem that most of them had
married. Now another Acct of Parliament ordered them either to put
away their wives or resign their livings and their orders. Some priests
were no doubt still single, but the great majority were affected by
this legislation, and they could re·act in one of three ways.
Some did divorce their wives, and sent them packing. Some simply returned
to what their situation had been prior to 1548, and the woman continued
to live in the parsonage, but she was now officially referred to as
the priest’s house-keeper, not his wife. But a large number
of priests - about fifteen hundred of them - resigned or abandoned
their vocations, and walked out.
“Putting
the clock back” was not quite as simple as Mary and Gardiner
had first thought when they embarked on their ambitious plans for
what could be called a counter-reformation. The difficulties experienced
by distant parishes such as ours in implementing these “counter-reforms”
will be described in next month’s article. But there was an
additional problem, which Mary herself would have to solve. She realised
that she would have to bear children, and to bring them up in the
Catholic Faith, if her policies were to have any chance of proving
permanent. For that, she would need a husband. And, being over thirty-seven
years of age, she knew that she would have to start looking soon,
and could not afford any delay. She needed a male heir, together,
if possible, with additional sons, in case of an accident to the first-born
(as happened to Henry VII’s eldest son, the luckless Prince
Arthur), and perhaps a few daughters, to be given away in dynastic
marriages.
Thus she had to
find a husband quickly. And he had to be a Catholic, so the children
would grow up within the Faith. And it would help if she found a man
of much the same rank as herself.
The man she chose
was Felipe, the son of the Kaiser Karl V. He was not yet a king, but
it was well known that his father, the old Kaiser, was planning to
abdicate, and to divide his possessions between his brother Ferdinand
and his son Felipe; and Felipe, who had been brought up as a Spaniard,
was to inherit the Kingdom of Spain, together with the Netherlands,
much of Burgundy and Italy, and “the Indies” (the New
World). Thus the man she had set her cap at was, potentially at least,
one of the most powerful men in the world. He was also known to be
a staunch Catholic. And, to judge by his portraits, he was good-looking,
with a swarthy, Spanish appearance : tall, dark and handsome, in fact.
Mary could not
afford to wait for him to propose to her. She therefore took up her
pen, and wrote to Felipe, in Spanish, her mother’s native language,
suggesting they wed. A messenger carried the proposal to Spain where
Felipe was busy about his father’s business, dealing with concerns
which would soon be his, once his father got round to abdicating.
He was travelling around, speaking to men of influence in Church and
State, trying to get them to work together for the better government
of Spain. For most of a century, since the marriage of Fernando of
Aragon with Isabella of Castille, Spain had been a united kingdom,
but it was far from being a unified kingdom. Each province had its
own customs, its own laws, its own peculiarities, its own cortes (parliament).
When he received Mary’s letter, he was at a small town called
Madrid, almost exactly in the centre of Spain. Felipe wished to turn
it into a new capital city, which he hoped would imbue the several
provinces of Spain with a new sense of national identity.
He read the letter,
and, just as Mary had hoped, he was delighted. He was a good catch.
He was over ten years younger than Mary, but was already a widower.
His former wife had died, like Jane Seymour, of a fever, from an infection
caught after delivery of a child. The child, a boy, called Carlos,
had survived.
Felipe wrote a
reply, to be carried back by the same messenger. In effect, he wrote,
“Yes, please. Si, Señorita”, and enclosed an engagement
ring. He didn’t even ask to see the customary royal portrait
which usually accompanied such proposals. News of the engagement became
public in November, 1553. The Marriage Contract provided that Felipe
would be crowned King of England (though no coronation ever took place),
and that the Kingdom would be ruled jointly by both monarchs. Laws
would be passed in the names of “King Philip and Queen Mary.”
On the other hand, Mary, if she visited Spain, would only be Queen
Consort. If either died, the Union would only continue if the Estates
(Parliament, Cortes) of both Kingdoms agreed. In the event of dissolution,
Prince Carlos would become King of Spain and her Italian and American
dependencies, while the eldest son of Felipe and Mary would become
King of England and the Netherlands.
(If this had ever
come about, one wonders what the consequences would have been. Judging
by later developments in both countries, it would seem that the hypothetical
son of Felipe and Mary would have been overthrown by religious rebels,
who would probably have created a Calvinist Commonwealth. Would that
state, uniting English enterprise with Dutch stolidity, have become
a leading influence on the rest of Europe?)
The whole arrangement
became unpopular in both kingdoms, but more so in England than in
Spain. Although a clause in the Contract declared that if one Kingdom
became engaged in war, the other was not bound to join in, people
found it difficult to understand how Felipe, as King of Spain, could
be engaged in war with France (as he was), but would not, as King
of England, be engaged in the same war. Presumably, the whole point
of the arrangement was, from Spain’s point of view, to surround
and defeat France.
France is roughly
pentagonal in shape. Spanish power already faced France along three
sides of the pentagon : along the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean in
the South; along “the Spanish Road” through Savoy, Burgundy
and Lorraine in the East; and in Belgium in the North-East. If Felipe
were to be King of England (France’s ancient foe) as well, he
would face France in the North-West, along the Channel Coast, the
fourth side of the pentagon. Only on the fifth side, the West, the
Bay of Biscay, where France faced the open ocean, would she not see
King Felipe’s encircling ships and armies.
Four months
earlier, in July, Mary, accompanied by her half-sister, Elizabeth,
had entered London as a conqueror, to be greeted by cheering crowds.
Now, when the terms of the Marriage Contract became known, she found
hostility everywhere, from those same crowds. Well, she had enjoyed
the favour of the crowds for four whole months. Jesus experienced
scarce four days’ popularity, from His Triumphal Entry into
Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, until His trial before Pilate on Thursday
evening, when the mob shouted “Crucify Him !”
Dick
Toy
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