Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXVIX

Coronation Portrait of
Elizabeth I

One of the first challenges Elizabeth had to meet was what to do with the Church.  She could not keep it in the Catholic communion—as far as the Pope was concerned she was illegitimate and therefore had no legal right to the throne.  Moreover, while far less religious than either her brother Edward (Protestant) or her sister Mary (Catholic), Elizabeth was by far the best educated theologically of the three.  She was also the most open minded and inclined to tolerance.  Elizabeth was both natively intelligent (which her sister and  brother were not) and had the open and critical mind of the serious student.  Her education had been overseen by Archbishop Cranmer and he made sure to indoctrinate her in Protestant thought, but she was no narrow evangelical like her brother. 

Elizabeth proceeded with caution.  She made guarantees that she did not want to trouble the consciences of any of her subjects.  Mary was buried in Westminster Abbey with full Catholic rites on December 14.  Just eleven days later, however, she instructed  Owen Oglethorpe. the Bishop of Carlisle who was offering Christmas Mass in the Chapel Royal at Saint James Palace that he was not to elevate the Host or Chalice at the consecration.  She had yet demanded no other changes in the Latin Mass, but the Elevation of the Host and Chalice, which emphasizes Transubstantiation, was more than the Protestant Elizabeth would suffer even in the short run.  Elizabeth stormed out of the chapel.  Nevertheless, as Oglethorpe was the only bishop who would agree to officiate at her coronation on January 15^th following the Queen gave him a second chance.  Again the Queen instructed him not to elevate the Host and Chalice; again he did; again the Queen stormed out—of her own coronation Mass.  Little by little that year of 1559 Elizabeth moved to re-introduce Protestantism.  Oglethorpe and the other Marian bishops were deprived of their sees for their unwillingness to support the Queen’s religious policies.  The monks were evicted from Westminster Abbey and other religious establishments were closed down, becoming “collegiate” churches with a college of canons and a dean.  In April Parliament passed a new Act of Uniformity which abolished the Mass and replaced the Catholic Liturgy with a new Book of Common Prayer. The 1559 Prayer Book was a slightly—but significantly—revised version of Cranmer’s 1552  book.  Clergy who would not implement the rite were removed from their benefices.  Fourteen Bishops in England and Wales were deprived of their sees.  Most were arrested for a period of time but then allowed to retire to house arrest in private life where they privately practiced the Catholic faith without interference.  An exception was Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London who refused the oath of supremacy and was confined to the Marshalsea Prison until this death ten years later.  The Extreme Protestant Party clamored for the execution of Bonner and the other bishops, but Elizabeth was not inclined to make martyrs.  Nicholas Heath, deposed Archbishop of York, also refused both the Act of Uniformity and the Act of Supremacy but assured Elizabeth of his loyalty in matters secular.  He was allowed to retire to his estates in Surrey where Elizabeth visited him several times.  Cuthbert Tunstall, deposed bishop of Durham, was put under the custody of the New Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, at Lambeth Palace.  He died there eleven weeks later.

Just about six weeks after Elizabeth’s accession to the throne, Giovanni Angelo Medici was elected Pope as Pius IV.  The papacy had been vacant from the death of Paul IV four months earlier.  Pius did not want to aggravate the plight of English Catholics and so he was silent in the face of Elizabeth’s return of the Church of England to Protestant doctrine and liturgy.  Pius also was not unlike the present Pope as he eschewed much of the pomp and splendor that had traditionally gone with the Papal Court.  He was characterized by Giorgio Vasari for his “stinginess of living, dullness of dress, and simplicity in so many things.”  In the sixteenth century Pope were not admired for toning down the Renaissance excess.  He also made some serious concessions to preserve the unity of the Church in the face of the Reformation.  He permitted the restoration of the chalice to the faithful in Austria and Bohemia where there had long been agitation for this reform.  There are those historians who admire Pius for his policies; and there are those who do not.  His English strategy worked in so far as there were no Catholic executed in England for their faith until after Pius’s successor, Saint Pius V, excommunicated Elizabeth and declared her subjects both free from her authority and duty-bound to overthrow her reign.  But that is for another time. 

Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXVII

The Young Elizabeth 

Well, back to our little exercise on the Church of England.  There is a lot of stuff I want to pursue--especially with the idea of Evangelical Catholicism--but I don't want to drop this Anglican thing along the way.  There are some important lessons we Catholics can learn from the history and experience of the Church of England--and some things which that history may require us to rethink about our own Church.  

With Mary’s death on November 17, 1558 Elizabeth Tudor came to the throne. She was a woman of 25 at the time of her accession.  Ironically her father had feared a woman monarch would be unable to rule England and this woman would turn out to be the greatest monarch in England’s history. Her accession speech demonstrates just how savvy this woman was. When the Accession Council assembled at her residence at Hatfield, the home given her by Mary, she declared. 

My lords, the law of nature moves me to sorrow for my sister; the burden that is fallen upon me makes me amazed, and yet, considering I am God's creature, ordained to obey His appointment, I will thereto yield, desiring from the bottom of my heart that I may have assistance of His grace to be the minister of His heavenly will in this office now committed to me. And as I am but one body naturally considered, though by His permission a body politic to govern, so shall I desire you all ... to be assistant to me, that I with my ruling and you with your service may make a good account to Almighty God and leave some comfort to our posterity on earth. I mean to direct all my actions by good advice and counsel

Elizabeth clearly states here the “doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies,” a principle that evolved in the Common Law and the unwritten English Constitution, but also which flows over into American Law.  This is a difficult concept for most people to understand and it is more an exercise in arcane trivia than the exploration of a useful topic, but I love arcane trivia.  So here we go.

The King (in Elizabeth’s case, Queen; by extension the Chief Executive—a President, Governor) has two bodies—the “natural body” and the “political body.”  Today, for examples, in and under the Law, Elizabeth Windsor and Queen Elizabeth II are two distinct persons.  Elizabeth Windsor, when driving her Land Rover through the mountains around Balmoral, is a private person subject to the same traffic laws as any other driver in Scotland.  Queen Elizabeth, opening Parliament or performing any of her other constitutionally defined duties, is a symbol of the nation in a way that the lady behind the wheel of the Land Rover is not.  As Queen she is subject to the Constitution but not to the law.  The natural body dies; the political body does not—it simply passes into another as it passed into her on the morning her father died.  The King is dead; long live the King.  The King never dies.  In the same way there is Barack Obama and there is the President of the United States.  Barack Obama has to pay income tax and otherwise obey the law of the land.  The President, however, in the performance of his Constitutionally defined duties, is shielded by the obligations and consequent prerogatives of the office, from personal responsibility for decisions which may not accord with the law.  It is unfortunate, but the President—any President—may need to order someone to be killed for the sake of national security.  He may need—as President Bush did—to order people abducted and held without charges for the sake of counter-terrorism.  This not make the actions morally justifiable, but such actions are difficult—if not impossible—to prosecute as long as they are to fulfill the constitutional duties mandated by the office.  Similarly, while presidents come and go, the Presidency remains.  Whether by the death of a President in office or by the end of one’s term, the man goes but the President remains.   And like the British Monarch, for good or for shame, the President is a symbol of the political structure of the nation.  This is important as the vitriol that one faction or another of Americans tends to spew at whomever is in the White House is an indication only of their ignorance.  Criticism, of course.  Evaluation, a civic duty.  But respect goes to the office and the man who holds it, whether or not it belongs to the man personally. 

Of course, I am well aware that a significant number of readers will not agree with me on this, but I am just stating how the principle of the King’s Two Bodies, distinguishing between the Person in Office and the person in the office, has become part of the political heritage.   Of course, in American law it is not as settled a principle as it is in English Law.  People do try—even Congress tries—to bring suits against the President (as opposed to the individual in the office) but generally without much success as the judiciary sees the need to maintain the checks and balances.  Whether or not this changes is an indication of the unsettled aspects of our Constitution, which though written, is always being re-interpreted by the judiciary. 

Notice too that Elizabeth begins by declaring that “I am God’s creature, ordained to obey His appointment …desiring from the bottom of my heart that I may have the assistance of His grace to be the Minister of His heavenly will in this office now committed to me….” And that she continues “by His permission a Body Politic to govern …may make a good account to Almighty God.”  Elizabeth clearly understands that she, in her “Body Politic” as differentiated from her private person and relationships,  receives her authority from God.  This is very different from our American principle where authority to govern is received from the consent of the governed, though the American principle will evolve from the British Constitutional tradition but only after many twists and turns—motivated by the radical Protestantism that was to be introduced into England under Elizabeth—but that is for postings down the line—considerably down the line.  Elizabeth understood her authority was from God and she was his vice-regent.

This gives an interesting insight into Elizabeth’s religious consciousness.  We will see in the next several postings that Elizabeth had some very definite ideas for the Church during her reign.  But there was a religious dimension to Elizabeth that ran much more deeply than her ecclesiastical polity.  I don’t mean to say that she was devout.  I honestly don’t think she was.  But she was theologically minded.   She had been well schooled in Theology—certainly better than either her sister or her brother—and had a much more open mind than either Edward of Mary.  I think for Elizabeth Theology was primarily political more than doctrinal, devotional, or liturgical.  She wanted, as we will see, to use the Church and its liturgy to advance and impress on the consciousness of her subjects, a certain political theory.  In this she will have to fight Parliament—and will be more often than not blocked by Parliament and its counter-vision.  I don’t see much evidence that Elizabeth had a personal piety as did Mary and as did Edward—or even as much piety as had her father.  Faith, for Elizabeth, was all cerebral and political but then I think this attitude will to a great extent stamp the Anglicanism of the next two centuries and also foment the rebellion against it. 

Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXVI

Tomb of Cardinal Pole in

Canterbury Cathedral

Well, let’s wrap up the reign of Queen Mary (aka “Bloody Mary”) and the Catholic Restoration.  I am anxious to get on to Elizabeth because it is in her Reformation of the English Church we see some of the ticklish questions that remain for us today, in particular the issue of Anglican Orders.
Mary had promised when she ascended the Throne that she would allow her subject to practice religion according to their consciences unimpeded.  In her first year or two, while the churches of her realm were restored to Catholic practice, altars rebuilt, roods re-erected, vestments and sacred vessels restored, she allowed her Protestant subjects to live in peace as long as they were discreet about their dissent.  As we have seen, however, she had some scores she wanted to settle—in particular with Archbishop Cranmer whom she was determined to put to death in the most cruel way imaginable even though—given his renunciation of heresy—canon law forbad his being executed.  She had also—and even before the martyrdom of Cranmer—executed several prominent Protestant bishops under the heresy laws which she directed Parliament to revive in 1554.  Unfortunately, this seems to have given the Queen a taste for blood and as her reign progressed more and more Protestants were arrested, tried for heresy, and burned at the stake.  All in all there were just less than 300 Protestant martyrs in her five year reign.  Another 800 prominent Protestants fled England for the continent where they were introduced to the far more radical religious ideas found in the Reformed Churches of Strasbourg, Geneva, Zurich and other Protestant capitals.  This was a huge mistake for Mary’s agenda of keeping England Catholic as it ultimately would have the dandelion effect of scattering the seeds of radical Protestantism throughout the realm.
Mary’s hope was to secure a Catholic succession.  Her marriage to Philip of Spain produced two false pregnancies, one in the autumn of 1554 and the other in the spring of 1558.  This second false pregnancy may have been the missed sign of something far more serious—perhaps uterine or ovarian cancer.  In any event, by the summer of 1558 Mary was clearly dying.  The heir to the throne but one was a Catholic—Mary, Queen of Scots.  The problem was how to bypass Elizabeth, Mary’s Protestant half-sister, the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, the woman who had cause so much pain to Mary and her mother, Katherine of Aragon.
In the end, Mary was her father’s daughter, a Tudor through and through, and made the decision that better a Protestant Tudor on the throne than a Catholic Stuart.  Mary died in London on November 17^th 1558.  She was buried four weeks later in Westminster Abbey according to Catholic Rites.  Elizabeth did not attend the funeral, but—as I have stated in other postings—it was not the custom for the Sovereign to attend funerals, even of close family members.  Mary had not attended the funerals of either her brother or her father. 
Mary’s Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Reginald Pole, died of influenza in his residence at Lambeth later the same day as the Queen.  (There was an epidemic in London at the time.)  His body was taken to Canterbury Cathedral for burial in the Corona—the chapel immediately behind the spot where Becket’s tomb had once stood.  Elizabeth came to the throne with a clean slate—an opportunity to pick her own Archbishop and shape the Church to her tastes.  But she would find in Parliament some real challenges to her power over the Church.  More on that down the line. 

Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXIV

Martyrs Memorial, 

marking the site in 

Oxford where Thomas

Cranmer had been put

to death

I had mentioned in the previous post that Mary was savoring her revenge on Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer.  Cranmer had not only supported Henry in his divorce from Mary’s mother, Katherine of Aragon, but he had, as Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of England, annulled the marriage which brought disgrace on both Katherine and Mary.  Mary was no longer Princess of Wales, nor even princess, but no more than a bastard daughter of the King, the Lady Mary.  For twenty years she was without rightful title, honors, or prospects for a royal marriage.  For twenty years she was harassed because of her loyalty to her mother and to her Catholic faith.  And while Henry was responsible, it was at Cranmer’s doing.  She not only would have her revenge, she would make him pay, toying with him as a cat might toy with a rabbit before killing it.

Mary came to the throne on July 19, 1553—twenty years and two months after Cranmer had annulled her parents’ marriage and changed the course of her life.  On September 14, of that year Cranmer was ordered to appear in Star Chamber where he was accused of treason for having supported Lady Jane Grey as Queen against Mary’s claims. He was remanded to the Tower of London as a prisoner.  When Mary came to the throne, Cranmer had advised other Protestant leaders to flee England but he himself determined to stay and fight for his reformation.  Cranmer was tried at the London Guildhall for treason—along with Lady Jane Grey, her husband, Lord Guildford Dudley and two of Dudley’s brothers.  He—and they—were found guilty and sentenced to death.  But Mary had other plans for her one-time nemesis than a traitor’s beheading.   In March 1554 Cranmer, along with Protestant bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, both of whom refused to conform to the old religion, were confined in the Bocardo Prison in Oxford where they were to be tried for heresy.  The punishment for heresy was far more dreadful than treason: being burned alive rather than being beheaded.  Cranmer and the others were allowed to sit and ponder their destiny in the Bocardo for seventeen months before being brought to trial.  All this time, Cranmer was still Archbishop of Canterbury—Mary not having deprived him of his See, though having entrusted the primate’s normal duties (such as her coronation) to Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester and her Lord Chancellor.  The trials of the three accused heretics began in September 1555 and all three were found guilty.  Ridley and Latimer were executed almost immediately after their trials—on October 16^th 1555.  Cranmer was brought to the site of the judicial murders and forced to watch as his two faithful collaborators were burned alive at the stake for their Protestant faith.  It was only the following month, November 1555, that he was officially deprived of his See. But Mary did not act quickly.  Indeed she toyed with him—he was moved from the Bocardo to the home of the Dean of Christchurch, the Oxford Cathedral and College.  Here he was treated not as prisoner but as a guest.  A variety of Catholic academics visited him and debated with him over issues of papal authority, Eucharistic doctrines, and purgatory.  Cranmer submitted to the authority of the Queen and accepted Catholic doctrine.  He attended Mass and asked for sacramental absolution.  But then on February 14, 1556 he was defrocked from the clergy and sent back to prison.  Being defrocked left him vulnerable to capital punishment and ten days later a royal writ for his execution on March 7^th was sent to the Mayor of Oxford.  Cranmer issued a recantation of his Protestant faith, accepting papal supremacy, purgatory, transubstantiation, Eucharistic Sacrifice and the doctrine that outside the Catholic Church there is no salvation.  He fully repudiated any Lutheran or Zwinglian doctrine.  The writ for his execution was put in abeyance.  By Canon Law, having recanted his heresy, he was to be spared.  But that would not satisfy Mary’s jealousy to make him suffer.  He was to die and it was to be by burning.   He was told to prepare a final statement affirming his Catholic faith that he was to proclaim from the pyre before it was set alight.  He did so.  But on March 21^st when he was taken to the same site where Ridley and Latimer had been burned five months earlier, he departed from the prepared text, repented of his recantation of Protestantism, and cast his right hand into the fire first—his penance for having signed the recantation with that hand.  As the flames rose around him he called “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit…I see the heavens open and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.”  This second phrase is taken from the martyrdom of Stephen in Acts 7.

It is unfair to try to sum up a life as complex as Thomas Cranmer but there are certain themes that emerge.  He was an ambitious man and while one aspect that that ambition was to advance the faith in which he believed, religious zealotry does not explain it all.   There was a certain duplicity in him.  He concealed both his having a wife and his Protestant leanings from King Henry knowing that his ideas would lead him, under Henry, at least to removal from office and possibly to the stake for his understanding of the Eucharist, of Masses for the Dead, of purgatory, and of the intercession of the saints.  Indeed, despite his personal beliefs, he had supported the Six Articles in 1539—articles that articulated a very Catholic understanding of the Sacrifice of the Mass as well as confession, clerical celibacy, and other Catholic perspectives.  Moreover, in addition to the duplicity there was certain instability to Cranmer’s faith.  He was no original thinker or even a critical thinker; he began with Luther’s theological position but over the years moved towards a more radical Swiss Protestantism without ever really understanding either position in depth.  Faith to Cranmer was more a matter of intellectual stimulation, or even titillation, than inner experience.   When Edward came to the throne, he could express his Protestant views and indeed create a magnificent liturgy that celebrated that theology, but he also was disloyal to Henry’s wishes regarding the regency and broke his oath to the old King regarding as to how the Kingdom was to be administered and how the succession to the Throne was to be arranged during the minority of the new King.    When Mary came to the throne he did not flee even though he advised others to do so, but his recantation of all he had worked for and done for twenty-three years in a desperate hope to save his life, shows a certain lack of spine.  Only when he realized that he was damned either way did he stand up for his Protestant principles.  I don’t think he was insincere, but I think for Cranmer faith was more a matter of intellectual assent than personal commitment.  He has been made a hero, the closest thing they can manage for a saint, by the evangelical wing of the Church of England but in fact I think there was less to Cranmer than meets the eye.  He was too vacillating to be a hero; a martyr yes, but a most reluctant one.  It cannot be denied however that he was a master of the English language, second only to Shakespeare in the ability to create elegant and pithy phrases that draw from the depths of the human heart and can make the soul soar.  All in all, while he was most talented he was no better a man than many—most—of the bishops of his day, Protestant or Catholic, a climber, a theoretician, a man of ideas more than deeds, a disappointment.  He was not a bad man but he lacked a certain compass that a man of faith would have.  When you think about it, a self-indulgent narcissist wearing the crown and a sycophantic dilatant wearing the miter was no way to begin a Church.  But then they didn’t begin the Church of England—it was an ancient Church going back into mists of early Romano-Britain—and its rich heritage would sustain it even through the troubled times of Henry and Edward and Mary.  And to be fair, Thomas Cranmer contributed to that rich heritage by the magnificent Prayer Book that he created to replace the beautiful but archaic rites that had preceded it.  All in all then I think we have a man whose moral compass kept pointing towards power rather than towards true north and who was more articulate than intellectual, a man of his time rather than a man for the ages, but no worse than many of his contemporaries and better than most.  

Foundations of the Church of England, LXXIII

The "cathedra" of Saint
Augustine, the seat of
the Archbishop of
Canterbury in his
cathedral. 

Reginald Pole was the grandnephew of Edward IV and Richard III, the great-great-great-great grandson of Edward III and one of the few Plantagenets to survive the War of the Roses.  His mother, Margaret Pole—through whom he had the royal blood—was the 8^th Countess of Salisbury and one of only two women in 16^th century England who were peers in their own right (as opposed to sharing their husband’s titles.)   He was born at Stourton Castle on March 12, 1500.  He was educated by the Carthusians at Sheen and matriculated at Magdalene College, Oxford where he received his BA in 1518.  Although not yet ordained a priest (he would not be ordained for many years to come) he was given a number of prelacies by Henry VIII, including the Deanery of Exeter Cathedral and a canonry at York.  He studied Law at Padua where he fell in with a group of ecclesiastical reformers including Peter Martyr Vermilgi who would be one of the chief advisors to Cranmer in the English Reformation.  Henry VIII financed his studies and in return Pole represented the King’s cause for divorce from Queen Katherine to the faculty of the Sorbonne. 

While Pole was willing to argue in favor of the required annulment of the King’s marriage to Katherine, he saw early on where the royal policy was headed.  When Wolsey fell, Henry offered Pole the choice between the Archbishopric of York (the number 2 Churchman in England) or the Bishopric of Winchester (the richest bishopric), but Pole declined and went abroad for more studies.  He did return briefly but in 1536, realizing that he was going to be required to foreswear his loyalty to the Pope, he left England into voluntary exile.  Pole saw the problem—and saw it correctly—as the King’s fracturing the Unity of the Church and while he might support the royal divorce and other policies of Henry, he could not go against the unity of the Body of Christ.  Henry took revenge on Pole whom he regarded as ungrateful for all the King had done for him.  His older brother Henry, Baron Montagu, and his mother, Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, were both executed for treason, their only “treason” being Reginald’s refusal to accede to the King’s claim to be Head of the Church.  The Spanish Ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, tried to arrange for a marriage between Henry’s daughter, Mary (the grand-daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella and niece of Chapuys’ master, Charles V) and Pole which—given Pole’s royal descent and Plantagenet blood—would have had great dynastic legitimacy: more than any other child of Henry’s could claim.  Pole was not interested however as he saw his future in the Church.  Moreover, it was all theory as Henry would not allow Pole to return to England and he would not permit Mary to go abroad.

Paul III made Pole a Cardinal in 1537, though he was only in deacon’s orders.  He was commissioned to try to organize support for the “Pilgrimage of Grace,” a popular uprising against Henry’s suppression of the monasteries and break with Rome.  The “Pilgrimage” was a desperate failure and this was probably the cause for Henry’s vengeance on Henry Pole and the Lady Margaret.  Henry tried, unsuccessfully, to have Pole assassinated.

Reginald Pole, meanwhile, was appointed one of the three papal legates for the Council of Trent.  His support for the doctrine of justification by faith led to accusations of heresy, but nothing came of the charges.  Indeed in the conclave of November 1549-February 1550, Pole was almost elected Pope, being only two votes short of the required 2/3 majority.  As it turned out, the opposition of the French King and his cardinals, moved the election in another direction, but Pole maintained his influence and reputation—especially given the scandalous behavior of Cardinal Giovanni del Monte who had been elected as Julius III. 

Pole had been appointed Papal Legate to England as early as 1537 but was unable to take up the post as Henry had broken communion with the See of Rome and was not interested in having a legate.  Moreover, Pole’s role in supporting the Pilgrimage of Grace had left him attainted for treason as well as costing his mother and brother their lives as we have seen.  However with the death of Edward in 1553 and Mary’s accession to the Throne, Pole was now welcome in his native land to reconcile it to the Church.

Well, actually, welcome but not quite yet.  Mary and the Emperor Charles V both feared that Pole would oppose—and try to block—the marriage of Mary to Charles’ son, Philip, which, as we saw in an earlier post, was part of Mary’s strategy to provide a Catholic heir in place of her Protestant half-sister, Elizabeth.   Mary and Charles were correct in their estimation and Pole was opposed to the marriage, but the Queen was successful—with Charles’ help—in delaying Pole’s ability to reach England until November 20, 1554: sixteen months after Mary’s accession and four months after the marriage. 

As Legate Pole had extraordinary authority.  He was no mere nuncio but had quasi-papal powers, a sort of vice-Pope for England.  The major roadblock to reconciling the Church of England to the Roman Communion involved the extensive properties Henry had confiscated from the Church, especially in the suppression of the monasteries.  These lands had been handed out to the King’s political allies and the powerful magnates who now held these lands did not want to loose them.   They would never support a return to Rome if the price came at the loss of their estates.  Pole knew he had to cut his losses and accept the fact that the great wealth of the Church had been severely reduced.  He also believed that in time the Church would regain land and wealth as new bequests were made.  Had Catholicism taken root in England again that may have been the case, but the Marian restoration was all too short. 

On November 30, 1554, ten days after his arrival back in England, the papal legate lifted the excommunications and restored the Church of England to the Roman Communion.  It would last less than five years. 

Mary, for her part, was savoring her revenge on Archbishop Cranmer who was imprisoned but whom had not been deprived of his See of Canterbury.  In November Mary had him deprived of his bishopric and named Pole as his successor.  Pole, though a Cardinal, was not yet a priest.  He was ordained on March 20, 1556 and on the 22^nd was consecrated as Archbishop of Canterbury.

Mary was ramping up her persecution of Protestants by this time and Pole cautioned her to moderation, but without much success.  Pole himself tended to be very lenient with those accused of heresy, pardoning those whose appeals reached him but Pole’s health was failing and his tenure as Archbishop was not marked by an aggressive approach to Catholic restoration.