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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