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by
G.J. Meyer
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December 3, 2021 - August 1, 2022
Someone, or some group, was going to have to manage the kingdom in Edward’s name, probably for almost a decade. Finding such a person would not be as simple as it had been in similar situations in the past. The royal family was small: Henry had no brother or uncle entitled by blood to rule on the boy-king’s behalf, and his only adult child, Mary, the former princess, remained illegitimate in consequence of the annulment of her parents’ marriage. Mary’s legal status would have made her an unsuitable candidate to serve as regent during her half-brother’s minority even if Henry had trusted her on
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When a royalist force made up largely of Somerset’s German and Italian mercenaries arrived on the scene at last, the rebels were forced to break off their siege and then were crushed in a series of increasingly lopsided battles. In the end nothing remained but a panicky mass of fleeing peasants. As many as four thousand men were dead by the time it was all over, most of them killed in combat but the last executed. A striking feature of the whole episode was the extent to which the Crown had to use foreign mercenaries to save itself from its own subjects.
Somerset had no choice but to call off his Scottish campaign and summon to center stage the next great figure in the Tudor saga, John Dudley, Earl of Warwick.
Dudley, in probably the noblest act of his life, rode forward to tell the rebels face-to-face that if they would lay down their arms he would personally guarantee their safety. They decided to believe him, and Dudley was as good as his word. Kett was executed, inevitably, and so were ten other rebel leaders, but that was the end of the killing. When the landowning gentlemen of the neighborhood said they wanted revenge, Dudley asked if they intended to do their own planting after their tenants had been exterminated. When Dudley returned to London, he was the hero of the governing class, the one
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Religious tolerance remained inconceivable: in sixteenth-century Europe almost no one could imagine a kingdom surviving while its people were separated into camps with incompatible beliefs.
And if it all depended on the goodwill of the king, he had every reason to expect that the king, if properly handled, would continue indefinitely to be Dudley’s fine and faithful instrument. It was all perfect. And from the point in the spring of 1552 when the king was briefly bedridden with measles and smallpox, it was all doomed.
WHEN EDWARD VI BECAME KING, MARTIN LUTHER HAD been dead for thirteen months and the Lutheran part of the Reformation had largely run its course. After changing the world, the former Friar Martin had withdrawn into a relatively quiet life as the father of a growing family and a writer of biblical commentaries. In the last decade of his life he was tortured by constipation, hemorrhoids, and kidney stones, plagued by the scandal that had erupted when he endorsed bigamy, and increasingly consumed by a virulent anti-Semitism.
Edward became king, therefore, at the point where a second generation of evangelical thinkers, based in Switzerland rather than Germany, was making itself heard. Its increasingly dominant member was a Frenchman living in Switzerland, John Calvin, one of history’s most paradoxical figures.
In assuming the leadership of a revolt against the authority of the Roman church, Calvin came to claim for himself more power than any Renaissance pope had ever dared to do.
In the little city of Geneva, a place not particularly friendly to reform, he constructed a regime that came about as close as anything in Europe ever had to an enduring totalitarian theocracy.
places as remote from his home base as Scotland (where his disciples transformed not only the church but the culture) and England (where his teachings triggered the Puritan movement), it was Calvin more than Luther who defined what it was to be Protestant. The reach of his ideas is evident in the fact that from 1550 to 1650, a century that encompassed the careers of Shakespeare and other writers of gigantic stature, Calvin was England’s most published author.
Thus he agreed with Luther’s view that original sin had so damaged the human soul as to make it impossible for anyone to merit salvation and that man was therefore entirely dependent upon a divine grace that cannot be earned. Like Luther, he repudiated most of the traditional sacraments (all, in fact, except baptism and the Eucharist) along with the practices (celibacy, fasting, pilgrimages, and indulgences, for example) that the Catholic Church had long offered as ways of winning divine favor.
Though they can be recognized by their acceptance of divine truth, their love of the Eucharist, and their upright conduct, these are not the means by which they achieve salvation but rather a sign of election. Calvin’s notion of “double predestination”—of some being marked for damnation just as surely as others are fated for salvation—has too often been regarded as the centerpiece of his theology. It is said to have made his God a kind of insanely cruel monster and to explain the severity of the regimen that Calvin imposed upon Geneva. In fact, however, Calvin regarded predestination as
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Calvin’s own view was that the idea of predestination should make it possible for believers to set aside their anxieties about earning salvation and put their trust in the mercy of a gentle, compassionate divine father (who was also, Calvin suggested, a loving mother).
He finessed one of the most contentious of issues, for example, by declaring that Christ was really present in the Eucharist but only in a “spiritual” sense, and letting it go at that.
What separated Calvin from the Lutherans most radically, at least in terms of practical consequences, was his approach to the governance of the church as well as—church and state being inextricably connected in his system—the civil society. Luther, in renouncing the traditional church, had discarded Catholic belief in a priesthood endowed with special authority and unique sacramental faculties. In its place he offered a “priesthood of all believers,” and while acknowledging the church as a legitimately distinct element of society, he emphatically subordinated it (especially after the Peasants’
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For Calvin, by contrast, the church and its clergy retained a unique authority, with not only the right but the duty to reshape the world in such a way as to make it a fit habitation for the elect. Hence one of the defining characteristics of Calvinism (and the Puritanism to which it gave rise in England): a zealous commitment to making the world a fully realized part of Christ’s kingdom. Curiously, people who believed they could do nothing to alter their eternal destinies nevertheless dedicated themselves to making everyone in the world conduct themselves in a holy manner as Calvin defined
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Geneva he published the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, which as it evolved would become arguably the most important single work in the history of Protestantism.
In 1541 Calvin was invited to return. He did so on very nearly his own terms, demanding that the council enact and enforce his Ecclesiastical Ordinances, and from that point until the end of his life twenty-three years later he outmaneuvered one after another of his adversaries until Geneva became the Sparta of Protestant Europe.
The regime that he imposed was democratic in the sense that church members chose their pastors, but once chosen, those pastors, working with and through lay elders, were able to rule virtually unchallenged.
Not only drunkenness, gambling, and sexual promiscuity but dancing, singing outside church, swearing, and failing to attend sermons became crimes. Catholic practice, of course, was absolutely forbidden. Punishments ranged from reprimands and public confession to beatings, banishment, even execution.
Many of the evangelicals who could not accept Henry VIII’s quasi-Catholic Church had taken up exile in Geneva, where Calvin’s mind and personality powerfully affected their beliefs. When they flooded back into England after Edward VI’s accession, they carried a white-hot Calvinist fervor with them. They formed the nucleus of what would become a potent new element in English national life.
But she had been raised and educated to be not a ruler but a consort to some male monarch. And now, contrary to everyone’s expectations including her own, she found herself an unmarried female monarch in a world that scarcely knew what to make of such an anomaly. Her situation seemed unnatural to almost everyone—certainly to Mary herself. It seemed contrary to nature that any woman, even a queen, should not be subordinate to some man. The universal question, virtually from the first day of her reign, was not whether she should marry but whom.
But what was truly essential was that her husband be a religious conservative—certainly a Catholic, preferably a Roman Catholic.
The list of possible foreign husbands was extensive and included the king of Denmark and the heir to the throne of Portugal. When Mary sought the advice of her cousin the emperor Charles—she had been taught by her mother to trust her Hapsburg kin, and all her life looked to them for guidance and support—he briefly considered offering to marry her himself.
Many of the people alive in England in 1553 had been taught from childhood that Spain was the handmaiden of the Antichrist.
The Hapsburgs had for centuries been masters of the advantageous marriage; it was how they had extended their empire into the Netherlands, Spain, and elsewhere.
Courtenay, whose good looks and aristocratic bearing had made a favorable initial impression in the days just after his release, was soon showing that fifteen years in prison had left him desperately eager for the pleasures of the flesh. Arrogance and dissolute behavior soon cost him all but his most indulgent supporters, mainly his mother and Gardiner.
Beyond that he already possessed more of Europe and the Americas than he and his son together could properly manage even with the help of various kin, and the England of the 1550s seemed to Charles and Philip alike (not entirely without reason) a poor, half-civilized island of distinctly secondary importance perched off one of Europe’s less attractive coasts.
After three consecutive crop failures and widespread hunger, a weakened population was being ravaged by an influenza epidemic that would in a few years claim hundreds of thousands of lives.
January 1558 brought the crowning calamity of Mary’s reign: the loss of Calais, the last of England’s once-vast holdings on the European mainland.
Mary was ill that month, and again in August, and yet again in October. In September Charles V died, removing whatever small hope Mary might still have had of Philip’s return to England.
On the morning of November 18, Mary quietly expired while hearing mass from her bed. Pole died hours later. The English Counter-Reformation was dead too. Mary at the end was worn out and thoroughly defeated. She seemed somehow to have lived for a long time, and her reign, too, seemed to have lasted too long and to have grown sterile. It is startling to realize that at the time of her death she was all of forty-two years old, and had ruled for only five years.
Tudor medicine being the tangle of butchery and superstition and sterile tradition that it is, not even the doctors have any real idea of why the queen is dying. A bronchial infection that has turned into pneumonia, perhaps.
Whatever the root cause, it appears to have been aggravated by depression; one thing even her physicians can see is that Elizabeth has been seriously depressed for months.
For forty years, ever since smallpox nearly took her life and ravaged her fine fair skin, she has refused to leave her privy chamber without first having her face, neck, and breast caked with the most prized cosmetic of her day, a mixture of white lead and vinegar known as ceruse or spirits of Saturn. Even painters who use brushes...
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Elizabeth herself, next to Henry VII the Tudor who overcame the longest odds in coming to the throne, has reigned for four and a half decades. This is nearly twice as long as the first Henry Tudor, nearly a decade longer than the second, nine times as long as either her brother or her sister. Her next birthday would be her seventieth.
As for hygiene, suffice it to recall that bathing is considered unhealthful in the sixteenth century, that it is scarcely practical even for royalty during the dark chill months of an English winter innocent of central heating, and that winter was not over when the queen began refusing to have herself attended to even in accordance with the minimal standards of the time.
drained the treasury of £160,000 and would never have been necessary if Elizabeth had not persisted in goading her onetime protector and brother-in-law King Philip of Spain until finally his forbearance was exhausted. The effects on the people of England have been very real and painful. Nearly two decades of war have seriously disrupted trade, especially with the crucial Low Countries markets, and thereby given rise to serious unemployment.
To a remarkable extent—one all the more striking in light of how deeply the two sisters always differed, and the determination of the younger to set herself apart from the elder—Elizabeth’s reign has followed much the same trajectory as Mary’s. Both, upon becoming queen, were welcomed enthusiastically by most of their subjects, England being quite as weary of Mary and her Spanish connection in 1558 as it had been of Edward’s evangelical regime in 1553. Both went on to enjoy a middle period of popularity and success (Mary’s was measured in months, Elizabeth’s in decades), and both ended in
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This is not to say, of course, that Elizabeth accomplished nothing. She achieved two very big things that had eluded her father, brother, and sister: a settlement of the question of what England’s established church should be and do and believe, and a degree of internal stability not seen in a very long time. From the end of the 1560s until the end of Elizabeth’s life, and then for decades beyond that, not a single armed rebellion of even marginal seriousness occurred in England or Wales. Such a protracted period of peace had not been seen since before the Wars of the Roses,
She declined to address virtually any question of religion that could be passed along to posterity, and to avoid trouble in the near term she ignored growing pressure for adjustments of the religious arrangements put in place at the start of her reign. The bill would come due two generations on, with an explosion that not only permanently weakened the monarchy but actually, for a time, obliterated it. If that was at least partly Elizabeth’s doing, however, she took pains to keep it from being her problem.
Quite aside from her own convictions, she had compelling reasons, from the day of Mary’s death, to undertake the fourth religious revolution (or counterrevolution) to be visited upon England in the space of three decades. Practically all of her active political support lay on the Protestant side, and she had been careful to maintain contact with the evangelical community all through the years when many of its members were pretending, for the sake of their positions and possibly their lives, to be orthodox Catholics.
The new legislation had been softened to avoid extinguishing the last hopes of the Catholics, however, and so it served the queen’s chief purpose: it avoided a crisis.
As angrily as they could contend among themselves, the Protestants rarely had difficulty in uniting to expunge from the kingdom their despised common enemy: the Catholic Church and those of their countrymen who persisted in its beliefs and practices.
Nothing in this should be taken as suggesting that Elizabeth was in some way a crypto-Catholic, or that she entertained any thought of establishing a new kind of country in which fundamentally different belief systems would be permitted to coexist. She was not only Protestant but militantly Protestant, and no more capable than her contemporaries of imagining that any nation could tolerate multiple faiths without weakening itself fatally. But her highest objective remained her own security, not the pursuit of any agenda religious or otherwise.
They drew him into a scheme in the execution of which he and a little gang of retainers burst in on Mary and Riccio while they, in company with a court functionary, were innocently having supper. Riccio was dragged out of the room, stabbed dozens of times, and thrown down a flight of stairs. Mary was six months pregnant, and the conspirators may have hoped to shock her into premature labor so that the child would die and she with it. That didn’t happen, and early that summer she gave birth to a healthy boy who was given the name of a long line of his royal forebears: James.
Attention turned all the more intensely back to Mary Stuart, now almost the only living member of the royal family aside from Elizabeth herself and the mother of a son, albeit a son in the custody of his mother’s enemies in Scotland. Even as a prisoner Mary was strongly supported—not as a rival to Elizabeth necessarily, but as her rightful heir—by two factions. One was headed by the leaders of the most powerful ancient families of the north of England, Thomas
Before that happened, however, they dispatched to Rome a request that Pope Pius bless their undertaking, send support, and declare Elizabeth excommunicated.
Pius issued a bull expelling Elizabeth from the church, absolving her subjects of the obligation of loyalty, and providing grounds in canon law for her fellow rulers to attack and dethrone her.
