All the Queen's Men (23 page)

More than one hundred Catholic martyrs were to die for their cause in the second half of Elizabeth's reign, by which time religion had become hopelessly embroiled with politics. The hostilities with Spain had caused all Catholics in England to be regarded as potential traitors to their country, rather than merely individuals with a different religious persuasion. The fact that they did not turn against England during the Spanish invasion was most worthy and that they continued to flourish in such numbers in the face of continual persecution was truly remarkable. The traditional doctrine of Roman Catholicism remains largely unchanged to the present day.

The efforts of the seminary priests and the Jesuits to keep the flickering flame of Catholicism burning in England was a brave feat, yet because circumstances led them to concentrate their efforts in the more welcoming North Country and to conduct Mass in the private chapels of the landed gentry, meant that the grass roots of the population became neglected along with most of southern England. This was particularly true of London, which had a significant bearing on Catholicism in England in the due course of time and was only restored by Irish immigration many years later.

The essential ethos of Elizabethan religion is embodied in the writing of two outstanding religious personalities: John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, and Richard Hooker, a leading theologian of the day, who like Jewel had studied at Oxford University. Jewel was an early champion of Protestant reform and was particularly anti-Catholic, branding clerical vestments as ‘theatrical habits' and composing a long diatribe against the perils of idolatry which he considered to be ‘spiritual fornification'. Jewel combined deep piety with profound learning, and was so dedicated to the service of God that he exhausted himself by continually preaching around his diocese.
An Apology of the Church of England
, written by Jewel in Latin in 1562 and translated two years later into English by Lady Bacon, mother of Francis Bacon, was a detailed justification of the Anglican faith, setting out the religious agenda in the early part of Elizabeth's reign. ‘Questionless, there can nothing be more spitefully spoken against the religion of God than to accuse it of novelty, as a new-come-up matter: for, as there can be no change in God himself, so ought there to be no change in his religion,'
¹⁰
declaimed Jewel.

There was a heartfelt desire for the Church of England to reflect the early days of Christianity, in essence a religious renaissance which returned Elizabeth's Church to the spirit of the first centuries following the teaching of Christ and His apostles, before the purity of their message had been corrupted by dogma and irrelevant ritual: ‘The call was for a return to the sources of the Christian religion, the Bible, the apostolic teaching and the writing of the early fathers.'
¹¹

John Jewel had been born the son of a yeoman farmer in North Devon in the early summer of 1522; at the age of thirteen, he went to Merton College, Oxford, completing his education at the adjacent Corpus Christi College. Because he was skilful at shorthand, in 1554 Jewel was employed as a notary at the trials of Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley, the three Oxford martyrs later burnt at the stake. Jewel fled into exile abroad, initially to Frankfurt and then Strasbourg, where he lived at the home of the Italian reformer Peter Martyr. Following the accession of Elizabeth, Jewel returned to England and was appointed Bishop of Salisbury in 1560 by the new Queen; at thirty-eight years of age, he was her youngest bishop.

Jewel had accepted the appointment with some misgivings, being uncertain as to the precise nature of the Queen's reformation programme for her Church. He subsequently became a fearless and vocal critic of her progress whenever he felt that her reform was not going in the direction he desired. Jewel was the conscience of Elizabeth's Church – on one occasion when preaching before the Queen, ‘Jewel pointedly but respectfully informed the Queen that he and his fellow ministers had hoped for changes on her accession, but the problem remained “as miserable as it did before”. He reminded her that she was the governor and “nurse of God's church”, and only she could redress the calamitous state of the clergy.'
¹²
This was not the only time that the bishop publicly upbraided the sovereign but fortunately for Jewel and the developing Church of England the Queen did not take umbrage in the manner she was to do when chastised by Archbishop Grindal. Therefore, Bishop Jewel survived to write his definitive
Apology
during 1562:

It was not only a defence (which is the meaning of ‘apology') of the doctrines and practices of the English Church, but it was a scathing attack on the Church of Rome. It received the approval of the Queen and Archbishop Parker and was to become the official definitive work on the beliefs of the Elizabethan Church influencing the development of the Church for at least the next fifty years.
¹³

The dedicated Jewel literally wore himself out in pursuit of his calling – arriving at the exquisite St Cyrica's Church in the pretty Wiltshire village of Lacock, the church wardens advised him that he was not well enough to preach. ‘It well became a bishop to die preaching,' replied Jewel.
¹⁴
A few days later, he was dead. Jewel was not yet fifty years of age. He is buried within Salisbury Cathedral. The Bishop of Salisbury in the last years of the twentieth century commented, ‘It is for his
Apology
that he is best known. This classic defence of the “catholic” Church – catholic in the sense of deriving from the years of the early undivided Church – became a foundation document for the Elizabethan church.'
¹⁵

Towards the end of the Queen's lifetime, the first volumes of Richard Hooker's masterly
The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity
were published, an eloquent, deceptively simple, yet highly persuasive work. His was a quiet voice of reason to silence the strident sound of Puritanism and firmly establish the Anglican faith beyond doubt or debate:

He that goeth about to persuade a multitude that they are not so well governed as they ought to be shall never want attentive and favourable hearers, because they know the manifold defects whereunto every kind of regiment is subject, but the secret lets and difficulties which in public proceedings are innumerable and inevitable, they have not ordinarily the judgement to consider. . . .
¹⁶

Richard Hooker was also born in Devon, in 1554, and like Jewel went to Corpus Christi, Oxford, where he became a Fellow and then ordained in 1582. He was befriended by Jewel and became Rector of Boscombe in the diocese of Salisbury. It was at this small Wiltshire village that Hooker began his great religious masterpiece,
The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity
, firmly mapping out the territory which the Church of England was destined to occupy until the present day, claiming that the Church is an organic, living institution, not to be governed by its past, but to thrive and grow in response to continual changing circumstances. The majestic tones of the initial statement also place Hooker among the masters of Elizabethan literature: ‘Under this fair and plausible cover whatsoever they utter passes for good and current, that which wanteth in the weight of their speech is supplied by the atlas of men's minds to accept and believe it. . . .'
¹⁷

The permanent foundation of the Church of England was conceivably Elizabeth's finest and most enduring achievement, one for which the entire Anglican world should be profoundly grateful. In turn, Elizabeth owed a considerable debt of gratitude to Whitgift, Hooker, Coverdale, Jewel, Parker and the other great men of God throughout her reign.

E
lizabeth's reverence for scholarship had been inherited from her father and, like Henry VIII, she had acquired a thorough education, especially in the field of languages for which she displayed a ready aptitude, being possessed with a particularly retentive memory. She was fluent in French and Spanish and had a good knowledge of Flemish and Italian, with an excellent grounding in Latin and Greek. The great Tudor antiquary, John Leland, had been much impressed with Elizabeth's knowledge of Latin when he met her as a young girl in the company of her half-brother Edward. Elizabeth could even speak some Welsh, presumably acquired from her long-serving Welsh attendant Blanche Parry. The young princess's enthusiasm for learning was so intense that her one-time tutor, the eminent Cambridge scholar Roger Ascham, became alarmed that she might be overdoing her studies.

Elizabeth had cause to be grateful for all these attributes, first to her father, and then to Henry's sixth wife, Katherine Parr. Henry VIII had founded Trinity College at Cambridge in 1546 by the simple expedient of combining two far older colleges, Michaelhouse and King's Hall, both originally established in the fourteenth century, the latter by Edward III. His statue still stands on the clock tower above one of the entrances to Trinity, while Henry's statue graces the Great Gate, clasping an orb in one hand, the sceptre from the other replaced by a chair leg as a result of some long-forgotten student prank. Both the clock tower and the Great Gate are remains of the original King's Hall, as is the range of buildings which front onto the Fellow's Lawn behind the college chapel, which was created by Elizabeth's half-sister Queen Mary when she inherited the throne after Henry VIII had died in 1547.

Displaying uncharacteristic modesty, Henry did not name the college after himself but dedicated it to ‘The Holy and Undivided Trinity', at the same time endowing it with considerable revenues that had flowed from the dissolution of the monasteries. He died the year after he had founded Trinity College. Hans Eworth's magnificent full-length portrait of the King is today displayed at the far end of the Great Hall; the painting is a sixteenth-century copy of the work by Hans Holbein, which was lost when most of Whitehall Palace was destroyed by fire in the late seventeenth century.

Henry's last wife, Katherine Parr, was also very well educated, uncharacteristically so in an age when a daughter's education was usually considered far less important than a son's. Katherine was one of the few women in her time to have published a book,
The Lamentation or Complaint of a Sinner
. More importantly, Katherine was able to persuade Henry not to allow the universities to suffer a similar fate to that of the monasteries, after Thomas Cromwell had begun to cast a covetous glance at the huge amount of property and land owned by the colleges.

Under Katherine's supervision, Princess Elizabeth's schooling was undertaken by some of the nation's most gifted scholars, commencing with William Grindal, a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. Grindal was an outstanding Latin scholar who was equally proficient in ancient Greek, a language enjoying a considerable revival of interest as a result of the Renaissance placing a renewed emphasis on classical studies. When Grindal was suddenly struck down by bubonic plague in the year after Henry VIII's death, his place as tutor to the young princess was taken by another brilliant young scholar, Roger Ascham, a former pupil of Sir John Cheke, a Fellow of St John's College. Cheke had taught Elizabeth's most prominent Privy Councillor, William Cecil, while he was at Cambridge, Cecil later marrying his tutor's sister Mary, much against his father's wishes. Cheke had held strong Protestant views and had therefore fled abroad when Mary became Queen and restored Catholicism to England. However, he had been kidnapped on the orders of Prince Philip of Spain and brought back to England where he had been forced to publicly and ignominiously renounce his faith, an act of weakness of which Cheke was greatly ashamed and he died shortly afterwards.

Ascham read both the Greek testament and Sophocles with Elizabeth each morning, and during the initial two years as her tutor the pair completed virtually all the works of Cicero, together with most of those by Livy. Ascham subsequently boasted that the princess spoke more Latin than most of the clergy at the time. After Elizabeth had become queen, he continued to read Greek regularly with her up to the time of his death in 1568.

Roger Ascham was an extraordinary man and a first-class scholar, who displayed many other talents together with an eclectic range of interests not normally associated with the academic mind. He was a compulsive gambler with a lifetime enthusiasm for playing dice and the delights of cockfighting, thereby ensuring he always remained poor. He was equally keen on archery and wrote a book entitled
Toxophilus
which explained the theory and practice of a sport in which he indulged virtually every day. He had also firmly intended to write a definitive work on cockfighting, but it was Ascham's authoritative work on the principles of education entitled
The School Master
, which fully established his reputation as an author. This enlightened work had arisen out of a discussion over dinner with William Cecil, which had also involved the Privy Councillors Sir Walter Mildmay, Sir Richard Sackville, Sir John Mason and Sir William Petre, the latter pair being Fellows of All Soul's College, Oxford. After dinner, Sir Richard visited the Queen's private quarters where she was reading Greek with Ascham in order to urge him to write
The School Master
.

Like so many Cambridge scholars of the day, Roger Ascham held extremist Protestant views, deploring anyone who was even contemplating taking the ‘Grand Tour' to Italy, worried about its seductive powers and uttering dire warnings that ‘More Papists be made by your merry books of Italy than your earnest books of Louvain.'
¹
Previously Ascham had warned, ‘Those enchantments of sirens brought out of Italy mar most men's attitudes in England.'
²
It was this sort of bigoted stance that had considerably hindered the introduction of the Renaissance into England and reflected a growing Puritan distaste for the visual arts which was eventually to lead to the closures of theatres throughout the nation after Cromwell had established a republic in England. Religious extremism can indeed inhibit cultural progress.