I. INTRODUCTION#
The sight of German merchant ships docked in English port cities, buoyed on the ebb and flow of the tide, virtually guaranteed that Reformation ideas would infiltrate the English Church.
German merchants brought more than goods to sell in the English market; they brought books and enthusiasm for the bold Augustinian Martin Luther. These new ideas found receptivity among the early reform-minded humanists, clandestine Lollards, and a long-standing lay mistrust for a corrupt clergy and church.
The English had endured the bloody War of the Roses (1455–1485) between the Houses of York (whose emblem was the white rose) and Lancaster (whose emblem was the red rose), with the final victory going to the Lancastrian King Henry VII (1457–1509) at the famous battle at Bosworth Field. Henry defeated and killed the Yorkist King Richard III in August 1485, thus creating the Tudor dynasty.
In an effort to quell further conflict, Henry married Elizabeth, the daughter of the previous Yorkist king, Edward IV, thus uniting the red and white roses. To strengthen international ties, he used strategic matrimonial diplomacy
His oldest son, Arthur, to Catherine, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain
His daughter Margaret to James IV of Scotland
His daughter Mary to Louis XII of France
The dynastic conflict of the War of Roses was set against the complex background of economic depression, financial woes of the government, and the decline of the feudal system. But with the Tudor victory came economic growth, driven significantly by the wool trade.
Throughout Europe the Catholic Church was under a cloud of anticlericalism, that is, a jaded cynicism that it was populated by men of low character. This was true also in England.
In their striving for advancement, bishops were all too often absent from their dioceses, leaving poor uneducated curates to care for parish souls.
English clergy were, on the whole, royal servants chosen for their usefulness to the crown.
Wealth and power became strong intoxicants to higher clergy.
The river of anticlericalism was fed by the tributary of the indigenous reform movement known as Lollardy, deriving from the Oxford theologian John Wycliffe. After Wycliffe died, the Lollards became a shadowy underground church that had a special affinity for the vernacular Bible, especially in London, Kent, and York. They held unorthodox views: denying or questioning veneration of saints, transubstantiation, pilgrimages, and confession to a priest. This underground movement managed to survive more than a century of persecution and seems to have been on the rise in the reign of Henry VIII.
English laypeople were scandalized by the heavy hand of the church, but there was also a contingent of scholars within the church who sought reform. The fusion of Erasmian humanism and Pauline theology in a single person can be seen in the work of the Oxford theologian John Colet. He lectured on Paul’s epistles at Oxford (1496–97) and then became dean of St. Paul’s London in 1504. He was an earnest church reformer; he even challenged Erasmus to engage more seriously the Bible.
Through the good auspices of German merchants, the religious pamphlets of Luther began to infiltrate English universities, especially Oxford and Cambridge, as early as 1519. Archbishop Warham warned Cardinal Wolsey of Lutheran heresy at Oxford. The White Horse Inn in Cambridge was the first meeting place of the first English Protestants: Robert Barnes, Thomas Bilney, Hugh Latimer (c. 1485–1555), John Frith, Miles Coverdale (1488–1568), Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556), Nicholas Ridley (c. 1500–1555), and Matthew Parker (1504–75). Some scholars believe William Tyndale (1495? – 1536) may have participated as well.
Five of these early Protestant sympathizers became bishops, and all but Coverdale and Parker suffered martyrdom for their faith.
Perhaps Tyndale was the most significant of these early Protestants.
After studies at Oxford and then Cambridge, young Tyndale served as a tutor to Sir John Welsh. It was during this time that Tyndale became convinced of the necessity of translating the Bible into the vernacular. In 1522 he proposed an English translation to the bishop of London, Cuthbart Tunstall, who declined, saying, “We must root out printing or printing will root out us.”
In 1524 Tyndale went to Wittenberg, where he began his translation of the New Testament, with Luther’s German translation as his model. Beginning in March 1526, copies of Tyndale’s English New Testament as well as the Pentateuch and other parts of the Old Testament began to flood into England. Bishop Tunstall was greatly alarmed and decided the best way to stem the flow was to purchase as many copies of the translation as possible, but this strategy was flawed, since Tunstall’s money unwittingly financed Tyndale’s second edition.
Tyndale’s translations were very influential for the next century. Indeed, even though his translations were banned, others clandestinely incorporated much of his translation into subsequent editions such as the Matthew Bible and the Coverdale Bible.
In his later years Tyndale found refuge in the community of English merchants in Antwerp, where he enjoyed legal immunity from King Henry VIII, from Tunstall, and from the emperor Charles V. But in May 1535 he was betrayed by a friend, Henry Phillips, and was arrested and imprisoned in the Castle of Vilvorde near Brussels, where he languished for sixteenth months before being brought to trial. He was found guilty, and on October 6, 1536, he was strangled to death, and his body was burned at the stake.
II. HENRY VIII’S REFORMATION#
With Lutheran subcurrents pulsating through English universities and villages, Henry VIII inadvertently found allies in his effort to restructure church and state. Although he remained convinced of the verity of Catholic theology, he decided to throw off the shackles of Rome in order to establish his own supreme ecclesiastical authority.
The journey that led Henry to break from Rome began when his brother Arthur married Catherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain in 1502. Arthur, always sickly, died five months later, leaving his young bride a widow. Henry became the heir apparent, taking the crown in 1509, and almost immediately thereafter he took his brother’s widow as his wife. According to church law, such a marriage was forbidden, but Pope Julius II granted a special dispensation permitting the marriage.
Catherine always maintained that the brief marriage had never been consummated and therefore she was free to marry Henry. Although Catherine was nearly seven years older than Henry, the marriage began well. Six children were born to the couple, but only their daughter Mary survived.
A. A Male Heir#
By 1526, when Catherine was forty-one, it dawned on Henry that a male heir was probably no longer a realistic possibility.
This was an important dynastic issue, because never before in its history did England have an undisputed queen.
Matilda claimed the title of queen in the thirteenth century, but royal legitimacy was successfully challenged by Stephen, thus plunging England into a nasty civil war.
With the War of the Roses still a recent memory, there was a nagging fear that should Henry die without a male heir, it could incite another bloody civil war.
Besides the driving force of dynastic succession, two other factors seemed to have propelled Henry.
- First, he seems to have developed some theological scruples about the validity of his marriage.
After all, Leviticus 20:21 explicitly forbade marriage to a brother’s widow with the promise that if such a marriage took place, they would be childless. Henry began to wonder if God was punishing him by not giving him a son.
- Second, Henry had developed a royal passion for one of Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting, the dark-eyed Anne Boleyn.
Henry tasked his well-connected Cardinal Wolsey to approach Pope Clement VII for an annulment. Normally, popes were willing to accommodate powerful kings in overcoming such inconveniences.
In a remarkable turn of events, the troops of the King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, fresh from victory over Francis I of France, mutinied and rampaged through Rome in 1527, leaving Pope Clement little more than a captive. It just so happened that Charles V was the nephew of Catherine of Aragon, and he was none too pleased with Henry’s plans for annulling marriage to his aunt.
To complicate matters further, granting Henry’s request would pit one pope against another, thus undermining the notion of infallibility. In the final analysis, Cardinal Wolsey’s protracted backroom maneuverings failed, and the pope was unwilling or unable to grant the annulment.
Henry’s disappointment turned to wrath. He signaled his rejection of papal authority by vindictively charging Cardinal Wolsey — papal legate and one of the church’s most powerful figures — with treason. Wolsey was spared a humiliating trial and horrible death by conveniently dying on his way to his trial on November 29, 1529.
By the early 1530s Henry had concluded that he must break free of Rome if he was to secure a male heir.
Outraged by papal refusal to grant an annulment, Henry initiated a series of defiant ecclesio-legal gestures in England that led inevitably to the break from Rome. In May 1532 a convocation (leading clergy representing the two provinces of the English Church: York and Canterbury) reluctantly agreed to make an exorbitant financial contribution to the king’s coffers and to the so-called Submission of the Clergy by which they accepted Henry as “Protector and Supreme Head of the English Church and Clergy.” The clergy did manage a modicum of dignity by adding the phrase “as far as Christ’s law allows.”
This piece of legislation proved too much for Sir Thomas More, who had succeeded Wolsey as Henry’s Lord Chancellor. More resigned his office, was imprisoned for resisting the king, and was beheaded three years later, in 1535.
From this political maelstrom Thomas Cromwell emerged as the most prominent of those who suggested to Henry VIII that the king should be the head of the English Church.
By 1532 he had shaken off his association with Wolsey and had become a trusted member of Henry’s inner circle.
In 1535 Henry appointed Cromwell as his Vicegerent in Spirituals, giving him enormous power over all ecclesiastical affairs.
As Henry VIII’s vicar-general, he presided over the dissolution of the monasteries. As reward, he was created Baron Cromwell in 1536 and Earl of Essex in 1540.
Besides his determination to secure a male heir, it is clear that Henry’s break from Roman authority had another motivation: wealth. Cromwell enticed Henry with an opportunity he could not refuse — bilking the wealth of the church. By severing the link to Rome, Henry acquired an enormous amount of property and assets.
By the end of 1532 Anne Boleyn was pregnant with the king’s heir, and the die was cast. All of Henry’s energies were galvanized to secure the legitimacy of the child in Anne’s womb.
His first step was secretly to marry Anne Boleyn in January 1533.
The second step was to pass the Act in Restraint of Appeals in February 1533, which forbade all appeals to Rome in temporal or spiritual matters.
This act effectively ended papal authority in England.
- The third step was to ensure that the new archbishop of Canterbury (Archbishop Warham having died in August 1532) was sympathetic to the king’s desire for a marriage annulment.
Henry’s man was the Cambridge theologian Thomas Cranmer — who just happened to be closely associated with the Boleyn family, who had recommended him to the king. With Cranmer consecrated in March 1533, Henry was now in position to deal once and for all with the so-called “King’s Great Matter”—the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.
Archbishop Cranmer presided over a church commission that officially declared the marriage to Catherine annulled on May 23, 1533, based on the Act in Restraint of Appeals. Five days later, Cranmer declared Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn lawful, albeit ex post facto.
Finally, the break with Rome was formalized with the passage of the Act of Supremacy in November 1534, declaring the king to be the “only supreme head in earth of the Church of England” without any qualifiers, as had been the case in the Convocation of 1532.
Now all that remained was to crown Anne Boleyn queen in June 1533 and await the birth of a male heir. As it turned out, Henry was sorely disappointed at the birth of Princess Elizabeth in September 1533.
The acrimony between pope and king led to Henry’s excommunication in 1538.
B. Reform Triumvirate in the King’s Court#
The Act of Supremacy represented a decisive break from papal authority, but it was not a conscious effort to introduce Protestantism to the English Church. Even so, it inevitably opened the door. Those most willing to risk supporting Henry’s defiance of Rome were, as it turns out, all too often inclined toward Luther’s new teaching.
Cromwell#
Cromwell, the first great executive of the state reformation, “displayed a cool but unmistakable affinity with the Lutherans.” He gained the favor of King Henry, not only because of his competence but also because he was as committed to the break with Rome as was Henry, although for different reasons. He was especially interested in seeing the Bible in the vernacular. Whether by conviction or compliance, it was Cromwell who seems to have promoted policies congenial to Protestants.
Cromwell proved a brilliant parliamentary strategist working through the House of Commons to achieve his aims. He urged a view of church-state relations in which the king would be head of both the state and the church.
Cromwell was the “mastermind” who spearheaded the passage of the so-called “reformation statutes” in Parliament from 1532 to 1536. The effect of this multiple legislation was to exclude the authority of the pope from the realm and grant full authority over the church and state to the king.
Archbishop Cranmer#
Archbishop Cranmer also did his fair share to promote the cause of Protestantism in England. Although taciturn and cautious by nature, the archbishop was supportive of Henry’s willingness to break from Rome.
Cranmer may very well have embraced Lutheranism even before his appointment as archbishop, since he already had secretly married the niece of Andreas Osiander, the Lutheran Reformer of Nuremberg, in 1532.
Cranmer had first come to Henry’s attention when he suggested that the king should solicit the opinions of the great European universities on the validity of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon — convinced the scholars would uphold traditional canon law.
It was during his diplomatic travels that Cranmer met and married (despite his vow of celibacy) Margaret Osiander in Nuremburg, at least a year before he was made archbishop. As an ordained priest, Cranmer discreetly kept his wife hidden from view.
The political climate allowed Cromwell and Cranmer to promote vernacular translations of the Bible. Remarkably, they persuaded Henry to allow an official English translation of the Bible — this after Henry relentlessly pursued and finally orchestrated the execution of William Tyndale because of his translation of the Bible. Cromwell used his own funds to support translation work and presided over a series of official translations of the Bible into English.
Tyndale’s translation covered only the New Testament, but his colleague Coverdale produced the first complete English Bible in 1535
Another colleague, John Rogers, produced the second complete English Bible, known as the Matthew Bible (Rogers’s pseudonym).
Cranmer and Cromwell secured Henry’s permission to publish the Matthew Bible in 1537. Soon thereafter the Coverdale Bible was licensed for publication and, with the authority of the king, all parish churches were required to have an English Bible.
- Not satisfied with these translations, Cromwell commissioned yet another new translation and entrusted the task to Coverdale.
The result was the publication in April 1539 of the Great Bible, to which Cranmer contributed his famous preface in the 1540 edition.
The efforts of Cromwell and Cranmer to make the Bible available in English found support from the new queen, Anne Boleyn. Scholars have speculated that Anne Boleyn may have acquired a taste for reform ideas while in France at the Court of Margaret of Navarre — sister to King Francis I of France.
The queen not only read the dangerous books of Simon Fish (A Supplication for the Beggars) and William Tyndale (Obedience of a Christian Man), but also gave them to King Henry. Further, she supported the appointment of several reform clerics, including Thomas Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury and Huge Latimer as Bishop of Worcester.
For these reasons, Anne is believed to have belonged to a secret triumvirate with Cromwell and Cranmer that conspired to promote church reform, if not outright Protestantism, in the realm. She and the Boleyn family had a long-standing relationship with Cranmer.
C. The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn#
For her continued refusal to acknowledge the new queen, Henry banished Catherine of Aragon to the decaying and remote Kimbolton Castle in 1535 and forbade her to see or communicate with her daughter, Mary. In late December 1535, sensing death was near, Catherine made her will and wrote a final letter to Henry.
Had Catherine lived longer, it would have been some small consolation to her that Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, whom Catherine considered the “king’s whore,” turned sour.
Anne had birthed three children, but only Elizabeth survived. Some scholars believe Anne miscarried a deformed male child in January 1536 and that Henry fell prey to the common superstition that a deformed fetus was an indication of sorcery.
Even before she recovered from her miscarriage, Henry declared that he had been seduced into the marriage by means of “sortilege” — a French term connoting a magical spell.
Cranmer, upon hearing the charges against Anne, wrote in her defense to Henry, but when pressed by the king, Cranmer presided over the annulment of the marriage. On May 16 he heard Anne’s confession, and the next day he pronounced the marriage null and void. Three days later, Anne was beheaded at the Tower of London.
With surprising speed even for the king, Henry married his pregnant mistress Jane Seymour eleven days after Anne was executed. Jane had the privilege of producing the male heir (Edward VI) Henry longed for, but she did not get to enjoy the celebration. She died twelve days later, on October 12, 1537, from complications of the birth.
Where there are progressives, there inevitably are conservatives, and Henry’s court was divided into two main factions. Henry always retained his conservative theology, but from 1532 to 1540, he was caught between these two rival factions:
the progressives headed by Cromwell and Cranmer
the conservatives led by Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, and Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk.
The progressives supported Henry’s annulment and thus held sway, and even after Anne’s execution, Cromwell and Cranmer managed to keep the conservative faction at bay for the time being.
D. Dalliance with Lutherans#
International politics of the period played into the hands of Cromwell and Cranmer.
Henry was officially excommunicated in 1538
When Francis I and Charles V agreed to a peace treaty in June 1538, the pope seized the opportunity to urge these two most powerful Catholic monarchs to mount a joint crusade against Henry.
Fearful of an invasion, Henry felt compelled to seek new alliances among the German Protestants, which made it politically necessary to make some gestures indicating he was moving in a Protestant direction.
Cromwell sent emissaries to Wittenberg for doctrinal discussions to explore the possibility of joining the German defensive alliance, the Schmalkald League.
The Lutherans insisted that membership depended on subscription to the Augsburg Confession. Henry’s own Catholic convictions could not abide such an overt affirmation, but he did make an important gesture by passing the Ten Articles.
These articles mentioned only three of the seven sacraments — Henry neither affirmed nor denied the other four — and actually rejected the notion that the pope could deliver a soul from purgatory. The document did contain some ambiguous statements about justification by faith in Christ and softened, but did not renounce, the physical presence of Christ in the Eucharist, confession, images, or masses for the dead.
Cromwell continued to push Henry toward the German Protestants. Knowing that Henry was on the prowl for another queen, he arranged Henry’s fourth marriage, to Anne of Cleves, the second daughter of John III, Duke of Cleves, and Maria, Duchess of Julich-Berg. Her father followed a moderate path within the Reformation.
Hans Holbein was commissioned to paint a portrait of Anne that later proved overly flattering. Based on the portrait and the political benefits, Henry formally agreed to the marriage, but Cromwell did not anticipate Henry’s physical repulsion upon meeting Anne. The marriage was quickly annulled, and Anne was given a generous settlement, including Richmond Palace and Hever Castle.
Ironically, Henry and Anne became good friends, and she was referred to as “the King’s Beloved Sister.” She died in 1557.
E. Conservative Retaliation#
Cromwell’s failure became an opportunity for his political and religious enemies.
Duke Howard realigned the religious orientation of the crown toward traditional theology by putting forward his niece, Catherine Howard, and orchestrated events to capture the king’s passions. Secretly the conservatives persuaded Henry that Cromwell was a traitor and heretic as evidenced by his advocacy for an alliance with the German Protestants.
Cromwell’s fall was sudden. In June 1540 he was condemned without trial for treason and heresy and was beheaded on July 28 at the Tower of London. Henry married Catherine Howard the same day.
After his execution, Cromwell’s head was boiled and then set on a spike on London Bridge. Within months of Cromwell’s execution, Henry regretted his decision, saying that Cromwell was “the most faithful servant he ever had.” Cranmer remained in the shadows and somehow managed to survive plots against him.
Negotiations with the German Lutherans dragged on, but eventually the threat of a joint invasion of France and the Holy Roman Empire diminished, and Henry defaulted to his own theological proclivities.
In June 1539, under royal pressure, Parliament passed the Six Articles Act, or as Protestants called them, “the bloody whip with six strings.” The Six Articles signaled that the tide had turned yet again, this time in favor of the Catholic conservatives.
These articles unequivocally affirmed transubstantiation, clerical celibacy, Communion of one kind, sanctity of priestly vows, private masses, and auricular confession with the added threat that denial of any of these was heresy and justly warranted death.
Then there came another turn. Henry’s nineteen-year-old queen was repulsed by his obesity; he weighed about three hundred pounds and had a foul-smelling, festering ulcer on his thigh. Catherine Howard proved to be a reckless young lady, and soon after her marriage, she began a romance with one of Henry’s courtiers. Her indiscretions rapidly became known. She was charged with adultery and beheaded in February 1542.
F. Progressives Regaining the King’s Favor#
Henry was growing too old for all the palace intrigue, and he decided to settle down with a more mature sixth wife, Catherine Parr, whom he married on July 12, 1543, at Hampton Court Palace.
As queen, Catherine was less an object of sexual passion and more nursemaid to the ailing king and mother to his children.
She was largely responsible for reconciling Henry with his daughters Mary and Elizabeth.
She also developed a warm relationship with Henry’s son Edward.
When King Henry set out in 1544 to undertake the invasion of France, he named his wife as regent during his absence, a sign of his great respect for her, as well as of implicit trust.
Perhaps emboldened by her successful regency on behalf of Henry, she felt free to discuss theology with him, and, as with Anne Boleyn, the king eventually became irritated. Sometime later, after a particularly intense discussion, Henry complained to his conservative Bishop Gardiner, of the unseemliness of being lectured by his wife. Gardiner seized the opportunity and was granted permission to investigate the queen.
Catherine had reason to fear such an investigation into her religious views. Of all Henry’s queens, Catherine Parr was the most inclined to Protestant ideas. The newly appointed Lord Chancellor Thomas Wriothesley accused the queen of having some association with the Yorkshire noblewoman and outspoken Protestant Anne Askew.
On May 24, 1546, the Reformist was arrested and horribly tortured, yet she refused to implicate the queen despite repeated questioning.
She was tortured and actually managed to smuggle to Protestant friends an account of the torture, which was later published.
On July 16 Anne Askew was burnt at the stake for heresy.
The queen was to be next in line. The conservative faction led by Wriothesley had persuaded the king to sign an arrest warrant for Catherine. The conspiracy was in full swing when a copy of the signed warrant was mysteriously brought to Catherine’s attention, perhaps by the king’s own doctor, Thomas Wendy.
Fearing for her life, Catherine immediately went to the king and made it abundantly clear that she humbly submitted to his religious authority. She apologized for her assertiveness in their theological discussions and explained that she had done so only to distract him from the pain of his ulcerous leg. Henry relented and said, “Then Kate, we are friends again.”
The following day, Wriothesley arrived to arrest the queen, only to find her strolling with the king, who unleashed a royal dressing-down to his lord chancellor. From that point on, the conservative faction lost favor.
Henry did not have much longer to rule his realm and died on January 28, 1547, holding Archbishop Cranmer’s hand. There was no extreme unction, no last rights, only a whispered affirmation of faith in Christ. And so it was that in the religious ebb and flow of the Henrician reign, the progressives had regained the upper hand at the final months and thus were positioned to guide the new king and direct religious change in England.
III. EDWARD VI’S REFORMATION#
A. Protestantism Restored#
When his son Edward was born in 1537, Henry finally had the male heir he so longed for. Edward’s birth triggered a reconfigured order of succession: Henry’s only son, followed by Elizabeth and then Mary.
Henry intended that a sixteen-member council constitute the regency, but there is little doubt that as Henry lay dying, his advisers were clandestinely plotting their way to wealth and power. Most prominent was Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, who dispensed significant titles and landholdings confiscated from the disgraced Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Howard.
One of the more intriguing developments of Henry’s reign was the decision to entrust the education of his young son to humanist-inspired Cambridge dons, who as it turned out, were largely sympathetic to Protestantism and all of whom later became noted Protestant leaders, among them Richard Cox, John Cheke, and Roger Ascham. Edward proved to be a gifted student.
By the age of thirteen, he was able to read Aristotle’s Ethics in Greek, translate Cicero’s Latin treatise De philosophia into Greek, and interact theologically with Peter Martyr Vermigli’s De sacramento eucharistiae. It is noteworthy that after he became king, Edward wrote an essay in which he described the pope as the “Antichrist.”
One can only assume this was a deeply held conviction from early on.
B. The Ascent of Edward Seymour#
Recent research has revealed that Seymour was rather dictatorial, more politically ambitious, and less devoted to the principles of Protestantism than tradition would have us believe. Nevertheless, Protestantism advanced considerably during his two-year protectorate (1547–49).
Henry’s Catholic Six Articles were revoked
All restrictions on the publishing and reading of Scripture were repealed
The Eucharist was administered in both kinds
Marriages of priests were made legal
Perhaps Seymour was simply bending to Protestant winds, but the theological and ecclesiastical trajectory was unmistakable. For such an autocratic leader, he at least passively supported these changes.
Seymour’s status was undone by revolts in 1549, growing French presence in Scotland, government corruption, and betrayal by his own brother, Thomas Seymour. His brother attempted to usurp power by kidnapping the young king. Whether there was a real kidnapping plot or not, in January 1549 the protector signed the death warrant for his own brother, and Thomas Seymour was executed on March 17.
All of this upheaval surrounding the protector prompted a coup d’etat by the regency council in October 1549, from which John Dudley, the Earl of Warwick, emerged as the new regent with the title “Lord President” of the council from 1549 to 1553 (and was named Duke of Northumberland in 1551).
He is often portrayed as a politico and convenient Protestant, but whatever Dudley’s personal religious convictions were, Protestantism continued to grow during his regency.
His three years of rule witnessed the transformation of the English Church into a more distinctively Reformed Protestantism.
C. Thomas Cranmer’s Reformation#
As important as Seymour and Dudley were to furthering the cause of Protestantism, the true architect of the Protestantization of England was Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury.
Edward’s Protestant-inspired education led to a natural affinity with Cranmer; it was a good match for bringing decisive religious change to the English Church.
With Cranmer as his religious guide, Edward strongly supported the efforts to redefine Anglicanism as a Protestant church.
Edward wanted Cranmer to start bringing the Reformed view into the English faith.
Cranmer laid out a careful, cautious, yet deliberate plan for bringing the Church of England fully into the Protestant fold. The three benchmarks of this plan included:
Revisions of the Book of Common Prayer
A new doctrinal statement
A reworking of English canon law
Cranmer’s revision of the prayer book was incremental. The first revision in 1549 was a cautious and somewhat ambiguous move toward Protestantism. The central element in the Catholic mass was missing; nothing was mentioned about the sacrifice of the mass, and reference to the corporeal presence of Christ was ambiguous.
Generally, it was a significant simplification of the Catholic forms of worship: it was written in English; ceremonies, feasts, and festivals were severely reduced; and the elevation of the Host was forbidden.
Despite this ambiguity and simplification, Bishop Gardiner, the leader of the opposition, ironically declared he found the revision acceptable.
The 1552 prayer book was distinctively Protestant. It removed all prayers for the dead, all praise for Mary and the saints, and moreover embraced a Reformed view of the Eucharist.
Cranmer did not stop with the double revision of the prayer book.
He reworked the Thirty-nine Articles.
He produced the Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum (1552), which was designed to replace the medieval Catholic basis of society with a Reformed view.
Furthermore, Cranmer’s plan would have been meaningless without trained clergy to implement the new forms. So he reinforced his reformation by securing leading Reformed theologians from the Continent to prepare clergy for the English Church. He appointed:
The Italian Reformer Peter Martyr Vermigli as the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford (1547–53)
The Alsatian Reformer Martin Bucer as Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge (1549–52).
These two Reformers were charged with training up an army of Protestant priests to bring the Reformation to the people.
To consolidate further English reforms with continental reform, Cranmer sought to hold an international council to produce a united response to Trent. Calvin agreed to attend, and Melanchthon was invited, although he declined. The council never took place because the young king became ill. But it does suggest that Cranmer wanted English Protestantism to take its place at the forefront of the movement.
D. Death of the Boy King#
Young Edward succumbed to pneumonia at sixteen, and the reformation of Anglicanism was cut short.
As Edward lay dying in July 1553, and the prospect of Mary’s succession to the throne loomed large, Dudley made a desperate and risky attempt to circumvent the Succession Act of 1544. According to this document, the throne was to descend to Mary if Edward died childless, and if Mary died childless, Elizabeth was to succeed to the throne. In the months before his death, Edward, under the influence of Dudley, excluded both of his half sisters and vested the succession on Lady Jane Grey, the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister Mary.
It is worth noting that in May 1553 Lady Jane became the new wife of John Dudley’s son, Lord Guildford Dudley. John pressed hard to secure approval for the new succession by the Privy Council, many of whom received titles and significant gifts of land.
Alas, his gambit failed.
IV. MARY I’S RESTORATION#
A. John Dudley’s Folly#
It is difficult to know whether John Dudley’s plan ever had any real chance of success. But his fatal mistake was his failure to arrest Mary before Edward’s death on July 6, 1553. Somehow Mary learned that Edward was near death on July 4 and fled to the protection of Catholic nobles in East Anglia.
Although Lady Jane Grey was officially proclaimed queen on July 1, the next day a letter was delivered to the Privy Council from Mary claiming the throne as her rightful inheritance. By July 19 everything had changed, and Mary was acknowledged as the rightful heir by the Privy Council.
The hapless Lady Jane was queen for all of nine days before she and her consort, Lord Guildford, were taken to the Tower along with John Dudley. Even Protestant London supported Mary. The English people had linked lawful succession to peace and security.
Dudley’s attempt to circumvent the established succession plan was doomed to failure.
Despite his abjuration of Protestantism, he was convicted of treason and executed shortly thereafter, on August 22.
Lady Jane and Guildford Dudley faced their own execution six months later, in February 1554.
Like a house of cards, the plot to have Lady Jane succeed Edward collapsed.
B. The Return of Catholicism#
When Queen Mary I (also known as Mary Tudor) came to the throne, one thing was absolutely clear: she was a devout Catholic and determined to restore England to the Roman fold.
Immediately, Bishop Gardiner, Catholic leader of the opposition, was released from the Tower and soon became lord chancellor.
Parliament declared her mother’s marriage to Henry VIII valid
Public worship was restored to the forms established in the last year of Henry’s reign.
But one of the most important decisions Mary made early in her reign was to marry Philip II, the son of Emperor Charles V.
This marriage on July 1554 failed on at least two counts.
It against the advice of her closest Catholic advisers, who feared the foreign influence of the emperor
Mary failed to realize it was a political marriage intended to recall England from the Protestants
Mary had fallen head over heels for Philip, but he was merely doing his dynastic duty. This marriage made Mary deeply unhappy, and it profoundly discouraged her advisers. Above all, it cast a dark shadow over the English people.
Those Protestant leaders who thrived in the reign of Edward VI expressed their reaction to Mary with their feet. Eight hundred bishops and other leaders fled to the Continent — mainly to centers of Protestantism such as Geneva, Zürich, Basel, Strasbourg, Emden, and Frankfurt. The English Protestants kept the fires burning by producing in April 1560 one of the most enduring translations in the history of the English language: the Geneva Bible.
C. Marian Persecution#
While the English Reformation preserved itself by flight, the Marian restoration of Catholicism became official with the return of Cardinal Reginald Pole (1500–1558).
As papal legate, Pole formally absolved the nation of heresy and restored England to Roman obedience in November 1554.
A year later, Pole himself was made archbishop of Canterbury, thus consolidating the restoration.
With the official restoration came official persecution.
The first victim was the Bible translator John Rogers, who was burned at London on February 4, 1555. As he was led to execution, the people cheered him.
Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, and Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London, bravely faced the fire when they were burned to death in Oxford on October 16.
Mary could change the laws of England, but she could not change the hearts of the people.
But the primary object of persecution was Thomas Cranmer. He was, after all, the man who declared her mother’s marriage invalid, thus making Mary a bastard child. To add insult to injury, it was Cranmer who legitimized her father’s marriage to Anne Bolyen. It was payback time.
D. Cranmer’s Last Stand#
Cranmer refused to flee with the other bishops and boldly offered to debate Mary’s Catholic theologians. Mary responded by banishing Peter Martyr and putting Cranmer on trial.
The trial took place at St. Mary the Virgin, the university church of the University of Oxford. Cranmer was found guilty of heresy, stripped of his insignia of ecclesial office in a humiliating ceremony, and officially condemned to death. He was remanded to the Oxford gaol, where he waited for nearly a year. Repeated efforts were made to get him to recant, to which he finally succumbed. He was a broken man who eventually signed six recantations, each more incriminating than the previous one. Historically, such recantations resulted in a stay of execution, but Mary would not have it. Cranmer had to die.
On March 21, 1556, Cranmer was placed on a platform opposite the pulpit of St. Mary’s, where he was supposed to make a final recantation before his death. With tears streaming down his face Cranmer surprised everyone by recanting his recantations.
In a rage, Cranmer’s detractors pulled the old man (nearly seventy years old) from the platform, and he was dragged to the ditch outside the city wall, where his friends Latimer and Ridley had been burned the previous year.
Mary and Pole gravely miscalculated. Cranmer’s death did more for the cause of Protestantism than if they had let him die in prison. Word spread of Cranmer’s heroic death, and John Foxe immortalized his death in his Book of Martyrs, thus ensuring the ultimate victory of Protestantism in England.
The celebrations that greeted Mary on her ascension to the throne turned sour.
Mary’s restoration of Catholicism had a backward, almost medieval cast to it.
Her marriage to the son of the Spanish king was a marriage with England’s historic enemy and resulted in a disastrous alliance with Spain that entangled England in a war with France for which it was not prepared.
This political failure resulted in England’s loss of Calais, its last stronghold on the Continent.
At nearly every point, whether politically or spiritually, Mary was deemed a failure by her people.
When Mary Tudor — now known as “Bloody Mary”—died the morning of November 17, 1558, the succession of the new young Queen Elizabeth was greeted with celebration throughout the realm.
V. ELIZABETH I’S REFORMATION#
Elizabeth came to her throne facing harsh realities. The majority of England’s citizens were Catholic, but with the return of the Marian exiles, most of the church leaders were dedicated Protestants; many were Calvinistic. The challenge, put bluntly: could Elizabeth prevent a religious civil war in her realm?
Having spent her teenage years in the warm and genial household of Queen Catherine Parr, Elizabeth soaked up Protestant piety. During Mary’s reign Elizabeth wisely worshiped as a Catholic and reassured her sister of her intention to remain obedient to Rome.
However, in the wake of Thomas Wyatt’s Rebellion in 1554, led largely by Protestants, the Spanish ambassador pressed Queen Mary to execute Elizabeth, fearing she was and would continue to be a rallying point for rebel Protestants. Remarkably, Elizabeth survived.
A. The Elizabethan Settlement#
One modern historian describes the twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth as a woman who could “speak French, Latin and Italian … [and] was also skilled at double talk.” This ability at “double-talk” served Elizabeth well in both religion and politics.
It was expected that she would follow the cultural protocol of making a swift and suitable marriage. But she understood that her virginity could be a political tool in support of English interests, so she coyly entertained marriage proposals from Catholic and Protestant princes alike. All the while she and her chief adviser, Sir William Cecil, ushered a religious settlement through Parliament.
Elizabeth’s Catholic brother-in-law, Philip II of Spain, offered to marry her, as did the Lutheran Eric XIV of Sweden. Her dalliances with prospective marriage partners effectively kept papal condemnation at bay and Protestant hopes alive.
The Elizabethan Religious Settlement was set forth in two acts of Parliament.
The first was the Act of Supremacy of 1559, which reestablished independence from Rome and conferred on Elizabeth the title “Supreme Governor” of the Church of England.
The second was the Act of Uniformity of 1559, which set out the form the English Church would now take, including a return to the 1552 Book of Common Prayer.
As Elizabeth anticipated, virtually all the sitting Catholic bishops refused to abide by the Act of Supremacy, and they were thus removed. The queen then turned to Protestants who had been forced to flee from Mary’s reign. The former exiles now appointed to the bishops’ bench included such Protestant notables as Edmund Grindal (Bishop of London), Richard Cox (Bishop of Ely), John Jewel (Bishop of Salisbury), and Edwin Sandys (Archbishop of York).
The Royal Injunctions (1559) directed the implementation of the Act of Uniformity, opting for a blended worship.
On the one hand, all clerics were required to affirm royal supremacy and renounce papal claims to rule over the Church of England. Clergy were permitted to marry upon approval of their bishop.
On the other hand, kneeling at prayer, bowing at the name of Jesus, and clerical vestments were retained.
It has become commonplace to characterize Elizabeth’s religious settlement as a via media (a middle way) between a Catholic liturgy and Protestant doctrine.
For all the talk of a via media, it must be remembered that the religious settlement was at its core a Protestant movement. Continental Reformed theologians such as Peter Martyr Vermigli and Heinrich Bullinger supported Elizabeth’s efforts. What the average English person wanted was political and religious stability, and more than anything else, that is what Elizabeth gave them.
Her chief advisers throughout her long reign, William Cecil and Francis Walsingham, were Protestants, as were her archbishops of Canterbury: Matthew Parker, Edmund Grindal, and John Whitgift.
Her Privy Council was composed of Protestants.
It was at her direction that Cranmer’s Protestant 1552 Book of Common Prayer, with minor modifications, was made normative in the church
The Protestant Forty-two Articles were slightly modified as the Thirty-nine Articles, with its express rejection of transubstantiation.
Elizabeth did not wish to antagonize Rome or Catholic Spain, so she and her advisers made some practical decisions, such as retaining clerical vestments and removing from the prayer book the insulting remarks about the papacy.
It is perhaps suggestive that it was John Jewel, the devoted disciple of Peter Martyr Vermigli and a committed Calvinist, who composed the Apology for the Anglican Church in 1562.
B. English Catholicism#
With the anger of a jilted lover, the papacy also became active in trying to bring Elizabeth down. After twelve years, Elizabeth’s Protestantism was too obvious to ignore.
Pope Pius V issued the papal bull of excommunication Regnans in excelsis (“ruling from on high”) on February 25, 1570, which declared “Elizabeth, the pretended Queen of England … [who] monstrously usurped the place of the supreme head of the Church of England … to be a heretic … and to have incurred the sentence of excommunication.”
Pius released all the queen’s subjects from any loyalty to her and threatened excommunication to any who obeyed her orders.
This amounted to an ecclesiastical declaration of war.
Rumors abounded that later popes sanctioned assassination plots against Elizabeth. In 1580 a kind of papal fatwa was issued, stating that anyone who assassinated Elizabeth with the “pious intention of doing God service not only does not sin, but gains merit.” The assassination of William of Orange in 1584 was rather compelling evidence that Protestant monarchs were in real danger of Catholic assassins.
Elizabeth responded to her excommunication in two ways.
First, she made a statesmanlike proclamation to her subjects that “as long as they shall openly continue in the observation of her laws” no one will be “molested” by any inquisition or examination of their consciences in causes of religion.
Second, she made it clear that she would not tolerate dissent, and in 1571 the Treason Act was published, making it a capital offense to deny she was the lawful queen.
From the outset of her reign Elizabeth desired good relations with her Catholic subjects, but the favor was not always returned. Many Catholics supported her as queen but opposed her Protestantism. Other Catholics took a more radical approach.
There were several plots against Elizabeth, but only one actual Catholic rebellion. The so-called “Revolt of the Northern Earls” in 1569 was led by Charles Neville, Earl of Westmorland, and Thomas Percy, Earl of Northumberland. Its ostensible aim was to depose Elizabeth and place Mary I of Scotland (Mary Queen of Scots) on the English throne, thus reestablishing Catholicism in England. The rebel earls raised a small army and occupied Durham, but hearing of a large force being raised by the Earl of Essex and finding little popular support, the rebels retreated and eventually dispersed.
The Earl of Westmorland managed to escape to Flanders and died impoverished in Spain.
The Earl of Northumberland fled into Scotland, but was repatriated to the English and was summarily beheaded in York.
There were a number of assassination plots against Elizabeth that sought to replace her with her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots. While under the protective custody of Elizabeth in England, Mary became embroiled in a conspiracy with the Italian merchant Roberti di Ridolfi to overthrow Elizabeth. The plot was discovered, and the participating Duke of Northumberland was executed in June 1572.
Another infamous scheme to overthrow Elizabeth was the so-called “Throckmorton Plot”. A devout Catholic, Sir Francis Throckmorton had developed a network of recusant Catholics in England as well as various continental Catholics, Mary Stuart, and the Spanish ambassador Bernardino de Mendoza. The conspiracy was uncovered by Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s spymaster, and Throckmorton was apprehended and tortured on the rack. Convicted of high treason, Throckmorton was executed in 1584.
William ALlen#
The papacy also fostered a new corps of militant missionaries who were sent to England clandestinely to foster a renewal of Catholicism, if not outright insurgency. William Allen became the prime inspiration for this incentive.
After refusing the Oath of Supremacy, he was eventually forced out of the University of Oxford in 1561. In 1567 Allen went to Rome, where he first developed his plan for establishing a missionary college, or seminary, to supply priests to England as long as the country remained separated from Rome.
His missionary college was established in 1568 in the Spanish Netherlands as the English College of Douai.
The first missionary priests began to arrive in England in 1574.
Eventually Allen moved the college to Rheims in northeast France under the protection of the Duke of Guise.
Allen’s success prompted Pope Gregory XIII to invite him to establish a similar college in Rome in 1575.
One of the chief accomplishments in the early years of the Douai College was the preparation of the Douai Bible. The Douay-Rheims Bible, as it was known, was a translation of the Bible from the Latin Vulgate into English. The New Testament was published in 1582, and the Old Testament followed in 1609–10, both with extensive polemical commentary upholding the Catholic faith.
By 1577 Allen had come under Jesuit influence, the most militant of the Catholic orders. He formed a close association with one of the more zealous Jesuits, Robert Parsons. Together they inaugurated a scheme to send Jesuits to England.
- Parsons and Edmund Campion in 1580 were the first Jesuits to infiltrate England.
Both Jesuits traveled around England, staying with Roman Catholic families, preaching sermons, and publishing attacks on Protestant ideas on a secret press.
- In 1581 Campion was captured, tortured, and executed. Parsons fled to Spain, where he sought to persuade Philip II to invade England and restore Catholicism. Campion’s capture and execution was portrayed as
Alarmed by so many missionary priests, Elizabeth banned the Jesuits from England in 1585.
Angered by the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, Allen wrote to King Philip II, encouraging him to undertake an invasion of England, stating that the Roman Catholics there were clamoring for the king to come and punish “this woman, hated by God and man.” He was so deeply involved with the invasion that he was to have been made the archbishop of Canterbury and lord chancellor if it met with success. His adamant support to the planned invasion led to his elevation as cardinal by Pope Sixtus V in August 1587.
In concert with the planned invasion of England, Cardinal Allen attempted to rally English Catholics with his pamphlet An Admonition to the Nobility and People of England. Allen then strongly discouraged English Catholics from defending England against the invasion
Allen misjudged English loyalty to the queen. As it turned out, the large majority of English Roman Catholics sided with their own nation against the Spanish, and the defeat of the Armada, in 1588, was a subject of rejoicing to them no less than to their Anglican countrymen.
Allen was deeply disappointed at the defeat of the Armada, but to the end of his life he remained fully convinced that England would be Roman Catholic again. He died at the English College in Rome in October 1594.
C. The Puritans#
While the Elizabethan Settlement proved acceptable to the vast majority of the English nation, there remained small minorities at either extreme who were dissatisfied with the state of the Church of England.
On one end were the deeply committed Catholics who complained that the Church of England had strayed too far from the Church of Rome.
On the other end were the deeply committed Protestants who grumbled that the church retained too many remnants of Roman Catholicism and was therefore in need of “purification.”
During Elizabeth’s reign, Puritan ministers outwardly conformed, although there were telltale signs that Puritans had not gone away, just underground. While the majority of Puritans remained “nonseparating Puritans,” they nevertheless came to constitute a distinct social group within the Church of England by the turn of the seventeenth century.
Since the Church of England under Elizabeth was broadly Reformed, theology was not the primary difference between mainstream Anglicans and Puritan Anglicans. It was only well into the seventeenth century that doctrinal Calvinism came to be particularly associated with Puritanism.
At the first Convocation of the English Clergy of Elizabeth’s reign, held in 1563, some Puritan clergy set forth their desires for further reforms, including the elimination of vestments — which they associated with Catholicism (even though the Reformers Vermigli and Calvin did not feel that way).
The queen’s Archbishop Parker reasserted that vestments were the required clerical dress.
The Puritan faction appealed to the continental Reformers for support, but were disappointed to be turned down on the grounds that they were “overreacting.”
In the early 1570s Rome began to take a much more aggressive stance and sought to undermine Elizabeth — through excommunication, the Northern Earls Revolt, and the Ridolfi plot. She responded in kind and began to clamp down on Catholicism.
164 Catholic missionary priests were executed from 1580 to 1588.
The queen would brook no disobedience from Catholics or Protestants. When Archbishop of Canterbury Edmund Grindal had the audacity to defy the queen in 1575, she trampled him underfoot.
Elizabeth became aware of Puritan conventicles, modeled on the Zürich Prophezei, where ministers met weekly to discuss “profitable questions.” The queen objected to these conventicles or “prophesyings,” fearing they could stir up opposition, and she ordered the archbishop to suppress the movement. He refused and consequently was disgraced, thus undermining the rest of his tenure.
At Cambridge, Thomas Cartwright, a longtime opponent of vestments, called for the abolition of episcopacy and the creation of a presbyterian system in England.
Two London clergymen, Thomas Wilcox and John Field, followed in Cartwright’s footsteps by advocating that the English Church should be remodeled according to the Presbyterian Church of Scotland.
Elizabeth moved decisively, and Wilcox and Field were imprisoned for a year, while Cartwright fled to exile on the Continent.
Presbyterianism reared up again in the so-called “Marprelate tracts,” which circulated illegally in 1588 and 1589. Under the pseudonym of Martin Marprelate, the tracts unleashed virulent attacks on episcopacy, describing bishops as “vile servile dunghill ministers of damnation.” Archbishop of Canterbury John Whitgift swiftly and successfully suppressed the Puritan faction.
VI. FOREIGN AFFAIRS#
William Paget, 1st Baron Paget of Beaudesert, managed to survive the Tudor storms and served as a counselor to Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary I. When Elizabeth came to the throne, Lord Paget retired from public service, but left the new queen with some parting advice on foreign affairs.
Paget asserted that one of the guiding principles was that there was a “natural enmity” between England and France.
The other basic tenet, with which Elizabeth was already familiar, was the need to maintain good relations with Spain, the most powerful nation in Europe.
In the early years of her reign, Elizabeth shrewdly used the possibility of marriage as a tool of foreign policy. As a young queen, Elizabeth was expected to marry, and accordingly the offers rolled in.
King Philip II of Spain — even though he was her brother-in-law, having been married to Mary Tudor — proffered a marriage proposal soon after her coronation.
She negotiated for several years to marry Archduke Charles of Austria.
Elizabeth then considered marriage to two French Valois princes: Henri, Duke of Anjou, and later, his brother François, Duke of Anjou.
Whether she ever intended to marry or not is unknown, but the mere prospect of marriage to the queen of England inclined Catholic foes to proceed with caution with regard to the Protestant queen.
A. France#
Lord Paget’s missive about the natural enmity between England and France had much to do with England’s northern neighbor, Scotland. There had been a long-standing alliance between the French and the Scots, which was an ongoing source of English concern.
Matters came to a head in 1560 when a Protestant rebellion broke out in Scotland. Fearing the French would send an occupying army to subdue the rebels and thus extend their influence in the aftermath, her adviser William Cecil persuaded a reluctant Elizabeth to send troops in support of the Protestant revolt.
The resultant standoff produced the Treaty of Edinburgh, which ensured the withdrawal of both English and French troops from Scotland. The French threat on England’s northern border was thus removed.
In 1562 the English again found themselves drawn into a confrontation with France. On March 1, the Duke of Guise attacked Huguenot worshipers at Vassy and slaughtered them. The massacre of Vassy provoked the so-called French Wars of Religion between the Protestant Bourbons and the Catholic Guise. From a political perspective, it appeared the Huguenots would likely fail without outside help.
Elizabeth decided to intervene on the side of the Huguenot rebels, and English troops landed at the French port city of Le Havre in 1562 (in part to try to recover Calais, the last English possession on the Continent, which had been lost under Mary I). But all came to naught when Huguenot and Catholic factions temporarily resolved their differences and turned unilaterally against the English.
By 1563 the English forces withdrew, leaving Le Havre and Calais to the French. Elizabeth had succeeded in Scotland but failed in France.
Elizabeth made one last venture into France to support the Protestant Henry IV when he inherited the French throne in 1589.
Elizabeth sent 20,000 troops and £300,000 when Henry’s succession was contested by the Catholic League and Philip II of Spain.
Elizabeth continued to support Henry IV in various military campaigns, but all were very disorganized and militarily ineffective.
Elizabeth feared that Spanish involvement in France could lead to control of the English Channel, thus posing a real threat to English sea power.
To secure the French crown, Henry IV famously converted to Catholicism in 1593. Although Henry’s conversion was disappointing to Elizabeth, the Franco-English alliance survived, because the new French king would provide a check on Spanish power.
France’s war with Spain was a boon for England because it drew Philip’s resources away from the Netherlands, where a Protestant revolt was under way.
B. Spain#
Elizabeth was quite fortunate that Philip II of Spain, the most powerful monarch in Europe, had expressed interest in marriage. Although Elizabeth declined Philip’s marriage proposal, a positive atmosphere remained. But Philip’s good favor diminished after Elizabeth provided military support for Protestant rebels in Scotland, France, and the Spanish Netherlands.
As was the case in much of Europe, Protestantism already had gained a foothold in the Netherlands by the time the crown passed to Philip II. Tensions flared in the Netherlands over heavy taxation and suppression of Protestantism.
By 1566 Protestant frustrations boiled over in widespread iconoclastic upheaval — churches were stormed, statues destroyed, and images of Catholic saints desecrated.
In August 1567 the “Iron Duke,” Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alba, marched into Brussels at the head of 10,000 Spanish troops. With backing from Philip, the Iron Duke used an iron fist to bring order in the Netherlands.
Prominent leaders were charged with high treason, condemned, and decapitated at the Grand Place in Brussels.
Alba went on to execute more than a thousand people in the so-called “Blood Court.”
Rather than pacifying the Dutch, Alva only fueled more unrest.
It was under these harsh circumstances that William of Orange led a revolt in 1568.
Initially the revolt centered on reduced taxation and freedom of worship rather than rejection of Spanish authority, but by 1581 the rebels produced the Act of Abjuration, in which they renounced loyalty to Spain. The abjuration riled Philip II, and he redoubled his efforts to subdue the Protestant rebels.
Sir Francis Drake, with the apparent compliance of Elizabeth, seized five Spanish ships that were sailing to the Netherlands with £85,000 in gold bullion to pay the Spanish Army. This act of piracy so enraged Philip that all English merchants in the Netherlands were arrested, and trade between England and Spain/Netherlands broke down completely for five years.
The assassination of William of Orange on July 10, 1584, was a decisive reality check and marked a pivotal change of perspective for English policy regarding Spain.
In 1585 Elizabeth signed the Treaty of Nonsuch, which obliged her to send an army to assist the Protestant rebels.
The Dutch governing body, the States General, turned to William’s son Maurice of Orange to lead the Dutch rebels in 1587.
When Spain found itself distracted by a more challenging conflict with France, Spain signed a truce with the Dutch that lasted for twelve years (1609–21).
The seven northern Dutch provinces were securely under Protestant control, while the ten southern provinces remained under Spanish rule.
The Dutch had achieved independence de facto from Spain even though the final resolution did not come until 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia.
C. The Armada#
In the thirty years since ascending the English throne in 1558, Elizabeth’s relationship with Spain had steadily deteriorated from Philip’s marriage proposal to an attempted invasion of England. The Treaty of Nonsuch was the final straw for Philip, and he decided to invade England. On July 12, 1588, the Spanish Armada set sail for the Netherlands. The English were outnumbered and outgunned.
However, fortune smiled on the English when they caught the Armada anchored in close formation near Calais. At midnight on July 28, the English sent fireships loaded with pitch, brimstone, and gunpowder directly into the heart of the Armada. The English defeated the Armada, which suffered even more destruction due to fierce storms occurring on its way back home.
The war with Spain did not end immediately. In 1596 and 1597 Spain sent more ships, but these were wrecked in storms before they even reached England. The defeat of the Armada was a potent propaganda victory, both for Elizabeth and for Protestant England. The English saw themselves as the object of God’s special favor and of the divine blessing on the Virgin Queen.
This victory signaled that England had come of age and was a force to be reckoned with.
D. Ireland#
Although Elizabeth was the titular ruler of Ireland, the Gaelic chieftains proved to be very independent-minded. Between 1594 and 1603, Elizabeth faced her most severe challenge in Ireland.
There had been Irish revolts against the English before. But when Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, began a revolt in 1595, known as “Tyrone’s Rebellion”, it grabbed Elizabeth’s attention because it had Spanish sponsorship. She knew that to avoid a Spanish invasion, she had to nip this in the bud.
It took several years to quash the rebellion, in part because the Spanish did in fact send troops, and they had to be defeated as well. O’Neill finally surrendered in 1603, a few days after Elizabeth’s death.
E. Mary Queen of Scots#
Mary Stuart was born on December 8, 1542, to King James V of Scotland and his French wife, Mary of Guise.
Six days later she became the “infant queen” of Scotland after her father died suddenly from cholera.
The French king, Henry II, proposed to unite France and Scotland by arranging the marriage of the little queen to his three-year old son, Francis.
With her marriage agreement in place, at age five Mary was sent to France, where she spent the next thirteen years at the French court of Henry II.
On April 24, 1558, Mary was married to Francis at the cathedral of Notre Dame. When Mary Tudor died later that year, Henry II immediately proclaimed Francis and Mary to be the rightful king and queen of England. But those proved to be words only.
When Henry II died in July 1559, Mary’s young husband became Francis II, and she became queen of France. Mary’s reign was short-lived, however, when Francis II died on December 5, 1560, of an ear infection that led to an abscess in his brain. Mary returned to Scotland soon after her husband’s death, but there was no rejoicing in England.
Mary not only was a devout Catholic, but also believed she had a legitimate claim to Elizabeth’s crown. Under the English laws of succession, Mary Stuart was next in line to the English throne if Elizabeth remained childless. Yet, in the eyes of many Catholics, Elizabeth was illegitimate and therefore not a viable successor to the English throne anyway, thus making Mary the true queen of England.
Mary shared this conviction, as evidenced by her repeated refusal to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh of 1560 between England and Scotland, which acknowledged Elizabeth as the rightful heir to the English throne.
Marriage to Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, in July 1565 proved to be Mary’s undoing. Elizabeth felt threatened because both Mary and Darnley were claimants to the English throne, being direct descendants of Margaret Tudor, the elder sister of Henry VIII.
The marriage soured because Darnley was jealous of Mary’s friendship with her private secretary, David Rizzio. In a bloody scene Darnley murdered Rizzio in front of the pregnant Mary on March 9, 1566. Darnley fled to Glasgow, and a few months later their son, James, was born.
Early in the new year, Mary persuaded Darnley to return to Edinburgh. Darnley had become ill and was recuperating at the former abbey of Kirk O’Field. In February 1567 there was a violent explosion at the abbey, and Darnley was found dead in the garden. The odd thing was that Darnley was found to have died of strangulation. Suspicion immediately turned to Mary and James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell. Suspicions grew after Bothwell was quickly acquitted of Darnley’s murder, and a month later he and Mary were married — twelve days after Bothwell divorced his wife.
The Protestant nobility turned against Mary and Bothwell. He fled to Denmark, and she was imprisoned in Loch Leven Castle. There she miscarried twins in July 1567. That same month she was also forced to abdicate the Scottish throne in favor of her one-year-old son, James.
In May 1568 Mary escaped and fled to England, where she expected Elizabeth to help her regain her throne. Instead, Elizabeth put her in prison and ordered an inquiry into Darnley’s murder. The inquiry ended with no finding of guilt, but she remained in Elizabeth’s protective custody — for the next eighteen years.
Elizabeth considered Mary’s designs on the English throne to be a serious threat, so she instructed her adviser Walsingham to keep a vigilant eye on her Scottish cousin. Several plots swirled around Mary, but when Walsingham intercepted Mary’s own letters, it was clear that Mary had sanctioned the attempted assassination of Elizabeth. Mary vehemently denied the accusation, but was ultimately convicted of treason and sentenced to death.
Although Mary had been found guilty, Elizabeth hesitated to order her execution. She was fearful that Mary’s son, James of Scotland, might seek his revenge by forming an alliance with one of the Catholic powers and invading England. Seeking to avoid direct responsibility, Elizabeth asked the jailer to contrive some accident to remove Mary. He refused on the grounds that he would not allow such “a stain on his posterity.”
Elizabeth did eventually sign Mary’s death warrant, and after that, the Privy Council met secretly and decided to carry out the sentence at once before the queen could change her mind.
At Fotheringhay Castle, Northamptonshire, Mary ascended the scaffold on February 8, 1587. Mary was forty-four years old.
When the news of the execution reached Elizabeth, she was indignant, claiming she had not authorized it to proceed. Not long after Mary’s death, the Spanish Armada sailed for England with the intention of dethroning Elizabeth.
F. The Final Days of the Virgin Queen#
In 1603, after forty-four years on the English throne, Queen Elizabeth was very ill, indeed dying. She was a royal tigress to the end.
In her later years she endured personal disappointments, none more painful than her tragic affair with the charming but petulant young Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex.
She unwisely appointed him to military posts despite his record of irresponsibility.
His misconduct at one point put him under house arrest, and later on the queen had to send him to the chopping block.
Devastated by this turn of events, it was reported that the queen would “sit in the dark, and sometimes with shedding tears to bewail Essex.”
The queen’s health steadily declined, accompanied by severe depression. She died on the morning of March 24, 1603. A few hours later, Robert Cecil and the Privy Council proclaimed James VI of Scotland as King of England. At her funeral on April 28, the coffin was taken to Westminster Abbey on a hearse drawn by four horses hung with black velvet.
The Virgin Queen was no more.
VII. REFLECTIONS ON THE ENGLISH REFORMATION#
Pope Sixtus V gave Elizabeth a backhanded compliment, but a compliment nevertheless.
By the standards of her day, it was counterintuitive for a queen to remain unmarried. Yet Queen Elizabeth not only forged her own royal path, but also turned her virginity and childlessness to her advantage.
She kept Rome and Catholic adversaries at bay by coyly entertaining marriage proposals from European royals — stringing them along as it served her political purposes.
When her marriage eligibility declined with age, she managed to create the myth of the Virgin Queen who was married only to the English people.
In the popular imagination, the Virgin Queen became fused with the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Elizabeth, it was believed, was divinely appointed to rule a chosen people who had a divine mandate to extend the kingdom of God via the kingdom of England. The extraordinary longevity of her reign, surviving the myriad of assassination plots and revolts, and especially the victory over the Spanish Armada gave wings to the Elizabethan myth.