Foundations of the Anglican Church XCIV

Philip II, say what you 

will, a snappy dresser

Another follow-up on the saga of Mary, Queen of Scots.  I am grateful to all who sent me messages that they do like the postings that deal with more distant history and in particular for those who like the series on the history of the Anglican Church.  I must admit that I have found it very beneficial myself to work on this series as my own understanding of the history of Anglicanism and, in particular the issue of continuity in the Church of England before and after the various reformations of the sixteenth century, has helped me think more clearly about complex issues such as the Apostolic Succession and the “validity” of sacraments.   And we have a long way to go in the history of the Church of England as we still have the Jacobean Church, the Civil War and the Dissenters, the Restoration, the Enlightenment, the Hanoverians, the Oxford Movement and a long string of complicated and at times contradictory histories. 

Be that as it may.  Let’s look at the impact that the execution of Mary Stuart, the Catholic Queen of Scots, had on England and English Society—Society, of course, including the Church of England. 

The Spanish monarch, Philip II, was deeply involved with the plots to overthrow Elizabeth and put Mary on the throne—plots that led to Mary’s 1587 execution.  Elizabeth’s England—Protestant of the Calvinist variation, though Episcopal in structure—supported the Dutch rebels—Protestant of the Calvinist variation, though Presbyterian in structure—in their revolt against Philip who, in addition to being King of Spain, was the ruler of the Netherlands.  Philip needed to remove the English support for the rebels if he was to secure his authority in the Netherlands and so wanted to replace Protestant Elizabeth with Catholic Mary.  It was not unreasonable.  The old nobility (pre-Tudor) was still overwhelmingly Catholic (and resentful of the loss of power and influence to the new nobility created by the Tudors and overwhelmingly Protestant) and were anxious to support Mary’s ascendency to the throne.  In addition to the nobility, Catholicism survived strongly—even perhaps a majority among the gentry and peasantry—in the North and the West. These Catholics were anxious to see the old religion restored and they were encouraged in their rebellion by the Papal Bull, Regnans in Excelcis, of Pius V that absolved them of any loyalty to Elizabeth.   This Catholic commitment to regime change led to a number of plots, most especially the Ridolfi and Babington Plots, all of which failed and which ultimately led to Mary’s execution to put down the threat of a Catholic rebellion that would put Mary on the throne in place of Elizabeth.  When Mary’s death put her out of the way, Philip had no choice in his campaign to end England’s aid to the Dutch rebels but to invade England and get rid of Elizabeth and her Protestant government.

As if the execution of  Mary were not sufficient grounds in and of itself for Philip to want to strike against England, the English privateer, Sir Francis Drake, raided the Spanish port of Cadiz only two months after Mary’s death, burning ships and seizing supplies. 

Philip drew up bold plans for the retaliatory invasion of England but some of his advisors had strong reservations about their likelihood to be successful.  Anti-English courtiers prevented the critiques from reaching Philip, however, confident that this Catholic mission against Protestant England was God-ordained.   This was a crusade.  In fact, Pope Sixtus V permitted Philip to levy crusade-taxes to finance the expedition and the expedition’s banner was consecrated in a ceremony modeled on the blessing of the banner of the Christian forces against the Turks in the 1571 Battle of Lepanto.  Regardless of the political issues of English support for the Dutch rebels, this was a religious war. 

The Spanish fleet consisted of 130 ships, 8,000 sailors, 18,000 soldiers, and 2,500 canon.  They were to be joined by the Duke of Parma’s armies from the Netherlands for the invasion.  This was a serious threat to England. 

In the event, the English bested the much larger and better-equipped Spanish fleet in a series of initial battles.  On August 2, 1588, Elizabeth herself rode out to Tilbury to encourage her army preparing to resist Spanish attempts at invasion and, wearing a somewhat ridiculous breastplate of silver and equally ridiculous, with a page holding her silver helmet, gave her famous speech. 

My loving people, we have been persuaded by some that are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit ourselves to armed multitudes for fear of treachery; but, I do assure you, I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. Let tyrants fear, I have always so behaved myself, that under God I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and goodwill of my subjects; and, therefore, I am come amongst you as you see at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of battle, to live or die amongst you all – to lay down for my God, and for my kingdoms, and for my people, my honour and my blood even in the dust. I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king – and of a King of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which, rather than any dishonour should grow by me, I myself will take up arms – I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field. I know already, for your forwardness, you have deserved rewards and crowns, and, we do assure you, on the word of a prince, they shall be duly paid you. In the mean time, my lieutenant general shall be in my stead, than whom never prince commanded a more noble or worthy subject; not doubting but by your obedience to my general, by your concord in the camp, and your valour in the field, we shall shortly have a famous victory over those enemies of my God, of my kingdom, and of my people.

 This is considered one of the best speeches in the English language.  It certainly served its purpose and rallied the English people.  But note her: to lay down for my God, and for my kingdoms, and for my people, my honour and my blood even in the dust.

And we shall shortly have a famous victory over those enemies of my God, of my kingdom, and of my people.

This was for Elizabeth, and for the English, a battle of religion.  To be English was to be Protestant; to be Catholic was to be Spanish.  This marks a turning point in English religious history where not only by law, but in the English political imagination, to be Catholic was to be something other than English.  And so Lord Grantham would say in season 4 of Downton Abbey: "There seems to be something of the Johnny Foreigner about Catholics."  Yes, there does—ever since the Armada.  In many ways the Armada was the deathblow to English Catholicism as the surviving faithful in the rural areas of the North and the West gradually shifted from their foreign religion to the far more English Church of England.
 

Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXXII

The Choir of Winchester

Cathedral--site of the

marriage of Mary and

Philip   July 1554 

Mary’s first challenge was to secure a Catholic succession to the throne as the heir apparent was her half-sister, Elizabeth, a convinced Protestant.  Elizabeth did conform to Catholicism during her sister’s reign, but Mary knew it was a charade: after all, in Catholic eyes, Elizabeth was a bastard and as such could not inherit the Crown.  Indeed, this was to be the conflict for Mary because she was not only a thorough Catholic, but she was every bit her father’s daughter and wanted the Tudor Dynasty to survive.  So she needed a child of her own to displace Elizabeth and keep the Crown Catholic.  Mary was 37 when she came to the throne—in the 16^th century an age at which many women no longer ovulated.   Several English husbands (including Reginald Pole, of whom we will hear more in the future) were suggested, but Mary’s cousin, the Emperor Charles V, suggested she marry his only son, Philip. 
Philip was nine-years younger than Mary.  He was King of Naples and Duke of Milan and he stood to inherit the vast domains of his father, the Emperor.  (In fact, Charles would divide his realms between the Holy Roman Empire which went to his brother, Ferdinand,  and the Spanish Empire which he would give to Philip.) 
The Lord Chancellor, Bishop Gardiner, and the House of Lords petitioned Mary to marry English and not seek a foreign husband, but Mary was distrustful of her countrymen. She had seen their collective lack of integrity in how they failed to champion her mother’s cause against King Henry and she saw how fickle was their faith as they first went pacifically along with Henry’s break with Rome and then just as nonchalantly threw away fourteen centuries of Catholic doctrine and practice in favor of the Reformed Religion of her brother and Cranmer.   Moreover Mary felt she owed Charles for his support of her mother and herself during their long suffering and humiliation under Henry and his shabby treatment of them.   Philip was to receive the Crown Matrimonial which meant he would be King of England, but only by right of his marriage to Mary.  They would reign jointly but should she pre-decease him, all titles and rights would end.  He was to “aid her Highness in the happy administration of her Grace’s realms and dominions.”  In other words, his role was mostly ceremonial and the power remained with Mary.  Even so, the marriage grated the English people and Mary’s popularity began to sink.  England felt threatened on every side—Spain, France, the Empire—and no foreign prince would be a welcome King for their Queen, but the Spaniards were seen as particularly arrogant and thus even more offensive to the understated English personality.  In fact this was the beginning of an English-Spanish conflict that would last three and a half centuries.    
The proposed Spanish marriage triggered a rebellion in the winter of 1554.  The rebels, under Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir James Croft, Sir Peter Carew, and Henry Grey, 1^st Duke of Suffolk planned to overthrow Mary and put Elizabeth on the throne.  Grey was the Father of Lady Jane Grey and all the rebellion did was to bring down the axe on the rebels, including Lady Jane and her husband, Guildford Dudley.  It also built up the paranoia Mary was feeling as she became more and more alienated from her subjects and planted a fear of the Protestant faction in her heart. 
Her husband arrived in England on July 23, 1554 and Mary and Philip were married in Winchester Cathedral two days later by Bishop Gardiner, the Lord Chancellor.    For Mary this was a love match.  For Philip, nine years her junior, the marriage was a political duty.  Political duty does not always make a prime stimulant for the husband “to be ready” to perform his husbandly duties.  To the contrary, it can take a normally pleasant activity and make it a burdensome chore.  Nevertheless, by September—two months after the wedding—Mary stopped menstruating and showed other signs of pregnancy.  This was followed by a set of bizarre circumstances that are difficult for us to interpret today, but apparently the Queen experienced a hysteric (false) pregnancy brought on by her desperate wish to be pregnant.  She didn’t menstruate, her abdomen expanded as if she were pregnant, she gained weight, experienced morning sickness, and even lactation.  The Court was convinced she was pregnant.  Her doctors were convinced she was pregnant.  Rumors spread of the birth of a son and Thanksgiving Services were held in several cathedrals, but no child was ever produced.  When by June 1555 she had not yet delivered, there was huge confusion in the Court.  And in July her abdomen receded and other signs of pregnancy disappeared.  Philip left England in August on a military expedition and though Mary did not know at the time he would not return for two years—and then only for a short visit—she was disconsolate and felt abandoned.   Whatever chances that Mary might have had to bear a healthy child also disappeared after her hysterical pregnancy, the effects of which may have led eventually to her death of uterine cancer.  But that is still several years off. 

Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXVII

Mary I

Mary was not able to reconcile England to the papacy as quickly as one might suppose.  First she needed clergy on whom she could rely to bring back the ancient rites.  As mentioned in previous entries, she did not have a single bishop who had been Catholic before Henry’s renunciation of papal authority and who had stood firm in their loyalty to the Roman Pontiff.  The best she could do was rely on bishops like Stephen Gardiner, Edmund Bonner, Nicholas Heath, and Cuthbert Tunstall who had been consecrated according to the rites found in the old ordinal, who had not married, and who had seen—and resisted—the slippery slope from schism into Protestant doctrine and practice.  She also needed to retain a number of bishops such as Goodrich, Aldrich, King, and Chambers who had been properly consecrated according to the old ordinal and who, although they had gone along with Cranmer’s Protestant policies, were now willing to return to the ancient rites.  This was a huge compromise as Mary had to wonder whether their orthodoxy could be trusted, but she had little choice given the number of Sees she had to fill.  The convinced Protestant bishops—Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, Hooper, Coverdale, Ferrer, Bush, Scory, Harley, Taylor, Barlow, and Holgate—all had to be removed and replaced.  Mary was able to find a few priests who had not gone along with her father’s schism and her brother’s Protestantization to fill the vacated sees, but for the most part she had to rely on men who had become Protestant but were now willing to return to the old faith.  And again—could they be trusted to be truly Catholic?

In Richard Pate she found a candidate for the Diocese of Worcester who had remained true to the old Church.  Pate had been on the continent the whole time of her father’s schism and her brother’s reign in the service of Mary’s cousin, the Emperor Charles V.  When Mary came to the throne, he returned to England and she made him bishop of  Worcester.  Likewise, Thomas Goldwell had been in Rome throughout the reigns of Henry and Edward and Mary named him to St. Asaph in Wales.  The other sees were not so easy.  James Brooks was named to Gloucester to replace Hooper. Brooks at been at Oxford during the reigns of Henry and Edward and supposedly had conformed but was now ready to return to Catholic practice.  Robert Parfew, whom Mary had named to replace Harley at Hereford had not only conformed but even served on Cranmer’s commission to compose the 1549 Prayer Book. Henry Morgan of St. David’s in Wales, was another who had conformed to the reformed rites under Edward but whom Mary named as a bishop.  Mary restored Tunstall to his see of Durham and named Nicholas Heath, whom her brother had deprived of Worcester, to replace Holgate at York.

Mary’s most important ally in bringing the Church of England back to Catholic practice was Stephen Gardiner whom her father had named bishop of Winchester and who had been deposed by Edward VI for resisting the Protestant policies of his reign.  Mary restored Gardiner to his see—the wealthiest in the realm—and made him Lord Chancellor.  He repaid the favor by officiating at her coronation on October 1, 1553 in Westminster Abbey.

For Canterbury—the primatial see—Mary had a plan but chose to proceed slowly.  It would not be until November 1555—almost a year and a half after her accession—that Cranmer would be deposed and a new Archbishop named. Mary had a score to settle with Cranmer for declaring her parents’ marriage annulled and this leaving him in suspension of duties without being canonically deprived was very much like a cat playing with a mouse.  Cranmer was imprisoned during this time at Oxford along with Bishops Ridley and Latimer.  He was forced to watch them burned at the stake for their heresies.  We will look at his fate in a future posting. 

Mary had her bishops lined up and they proved to be a better lot than might have been supposed.  When Mary died and Elizabeth succeeded to throne, only one bishop who had served under Mary (and who had, in fact, served continuously under Henry and Edward before her), Anthony Kitchin of Llandaff in Wales, would renounce the Catholic faith to remain in office.  The remainder of her bishops—most of whom had gone into schism under Henry and even embraced the Protestant reforms in the reign of King Edward—stood firm in Catholic faith even though it meant the loss of their sees and for some imprisonment.  But there was much more to do than just get reliable bishops. 

Mary needed priests as well.  Unlike the Bishops of King Edward’s time, many of the English priests were not enthusiastic about the Protestant liturgies contained in the Book of Common Prayer—and particularly the 1552 edition which was far more Protestant than the original compromise book of 1549.  Edward had been on the throne only six years and five months.  Most English priests had been ordained before he came to the throne.  Granted some had married under his dispensation but for those who were willing to give up their wives—and many were—Mary was only to happy to have them resume their parishes.  How many actually left their wives and how many maintained a discreet relationship with them would be an interesting study.   Clerical concubinage, or more accurately, clerical common-law marriage had been common enough in and before the reign of King Henry.  It was not difficult to go back to the old ways. 

Yet even with priests and bishops in place for the restored rites, the Queen had much to do to turn England back to the Catholic side.  Mary first required Parliament to repeal the religious legislation passed under her brother that authorized the Protestant liturgy.  Those same rites Parliament had insisted on a few years earlier were now proscribed.  But that does not mean that the Mass could be restored at once.  Altars had been demolished and replaced by plain wooden tables, missals and other service books used as fishwrap, vestments destroyed, and church plate (sacred vessels and such altar furnishings as candelabra and crucifixes) melted down.  It took time—and money—to reequip the churches for the Catholic liturgy. 

In November 1554—more than a year and four months after Mary’s accession Cardinal Reginald Pole arrived in England as Papal Legate with the authority to readmit the Church of England into the Catholic Communion.  Meanwhile, Catholic liturgy and doctrine had been reintroduced.  Pole’s arrival had been delayed by Mary and by the emperor Charles V because they feared that the Papal Legate might oppose their plan to marry the emperor’s son, Philip, to Mary.  There was some tension at this time between the Papacy and the Empire and in fact, Paul IV would recall Pole to Rome because of his displeasure with Mary’s alliance to her husband’s politics, but the Cardinal remained in England—some sources say at Mary’s orders; others due to his failing health.  We will do a posting on Pole in the near future as well as his is a very complex story and key to Mary’s program. 

Henry VIII had confiscated an immense about of Church lands—both from the monasteries and from individual dioceses—during his reign.  This land had been parceled out as rewards for those who supported Henry’s new policies.  Henry had stacked the House of Lords by creating many new peers and he used Church lands to provide income for his allies among the Lords. He also sold property—and much of the Church treasure he had confiscated as well—to provide the income he needed for both is personal luxury but also his political goals such as creating the English Navy.  Many of the newly ennobled families were afraid that they would loose their property to have it restored to the Church with a Catholic Queen.  Mary was anxious to restore the monasteries as far as she could, but in the end was unable to do much.  Monks were brought back to Westminster, nuns to Syon, friars to Smithfield and Greenwich, and the Carthusians to Sheen but vocations were not many and benefactors even more scarce.  Some former monks of Glastonbury petitioned for the restoration of their abbey but I don’t believe monastic life was restored there.  Mary and the Papacy had to settle for the fact that most of this property that had once belonged to the Church was now lost to it.  If Mary wanted to achieve her larger goals of restoring England to the Church—and indeed to reach her various political goals as well—she could not afford to alienate the important families in the realm that now occupied the lands that had once belonged to the monks.  She would have to rebuild the religious life from the ground up but unfortunately history was not to allow her the time needed to achieve this goal.