Mary Tudor (45 page)

Read Mary Tudor Online

Authors: Linda Porter

 
For Mary personally, however, an equally pressing concern was religion. The queen heard the advice that was being given from all sides, that she should be circumspect in her approach to undoing the changes of her brother’s reign, particularly as Protestant opinion in London itself was strong and there were outbreaks of violence when the mass was reintroduced. But family matters intruded and played on her conscience. Edward’s funeral had not yet taken place and she was swayed from her plans to bury her brother using Catholic rites only with considerable difficulty. The part of her that had always thought of him as her godson and a little boy was hard to suppress. He might be dead, but she knew what was best for him, what his soul needed. In life, she was convinced that he had been the tool of schemers who wanted to use religion for their own ends. She could never accept that his beliefs were as deeply held as hers, and she wanted his funeral to be her final gift to him, the expression of her love and desire to return him to the religion in which he had been born. It was what propriety and her father’s will demanded, she told the dismayed Simon Renard. ‘It would too sorely violate her conscience to allow the late king, her brother, to be buried otherwise than as religion dictated, for she was bound by the late King Henry’s will, in which he left instructions for masses and prayers to be said.’ If she had got her way it would, of course, have also been a very public, stinging blow to the Protestant cause, and her own words show how much she understood that aspect.‘If she appeared to be afraid, her subjects, particularly the Lutherans, would only become more audacious, and would proclaim that she had not dared to do her own will. She was determined to tell the council that she was going to have a mass said at the funeral’.
But others demurred and eventually prevailed on the queen to think again. At a time when there was still concern about her hold on the crown, those around her thought it was a step too far. She had already been compelled, before she even reached London, to issue a proclamation for the suppression of false rumours, the ‘light, seditious or naughty talk’ that was still circulating.
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So a compromise was reached, whereby Edward was buried in Westminster Abbey following Protestant liturgy. The service, on 8 August, was presided over by Cranmer and the bishop of Chichester. With the marquess of Winchester as his chief mourner, Edward was laid to rest, while his sister salvaged her troubled conscience by hearing a requiem mass in St Peter’s chapel, in the Tower of London.
In other respects, her first pronouncements on religion indicated moderation.While arguing for Edward to be buried in the observances of the old religion, she also told Renard ‘she wished to force no one to go to mass, but meant to see that those who wished to should be free to do so’. She went on to tell him that she would soon issue a public proclamation to that effect, though he noted her emotional attachment to the Holy Sacrament that was kept on an altar in her chamber. Nor did she hide it in the wording of the proclamation itself.
This was issued from Richmond on 18 August and, as Mary’s first official pronouncement on religion, it was carefully scrutinised. The wording, which was probably drafted by Gardiner, combines the queen’s personal affirmation of her faith with a more pragmatic and - for the 16th century—surprisingly tolerant outlook towards those whose views differed from her own:
… Her majesty, being presently by the only goodness of God settled in the just possession of this realm … cannot now hide that religion which God and the world knoweth she hath ever professed from her infancy hitherto, which as her majesty is minded to observe and maintain for herself by God’s grace during her times, so doth her highness much desire and would be glad the same were of all her subjects quietly and charitably embraced.
 
Though some, she realised, would not follow her example: ‘And yet she doth signify unto all her majesty’s said loving subjects that of her most gracious disposition and clemency her highness mindeth not to compel any her said subjects thereunto until such time as further order by common assent may be taken therein’. She closed by commanding everyone ‘to live in quiet sort and Christian charity’.
The sting of this proclamation was in its tail. Mary had signalled the direction in which she would go by leaving open the door for further, more direct steps to be taken in the restoration of Catholicism. There was to be no sweeping change imposed just yet, but the impression remained that this was an interim measure, not the end of the story. Other measures spelled out the likely direction. A crackdown on ‘those without sufficient authority to preach and to interpret the word of God’ was reinforced by a ban on the ‘playing of interludes and printing of false fond books, ballads, hymns and other lewd treatises in the English tongue’. The wording may sound quaint, but the intention was clear. Protestantism was equated with sedition.This link was established early and continued throughout Mary’s reign.
Nor was this all. The queen had already gone one step further than anyone, even the imperial ambassadors who clung to her so closely, knew. She was already in correspondence with the pope, asking him to lift the edicts that had been imposed when her father broke away from Rome, as a precursor to the full restoration of papal authority. At the beginning of August, a rather startled Julius III received her announcement of her accession, and the first notification that Mary intended to give up her title as head of the Church of England. In fact, he was so taken aback by this personal contact that for a while he did very little about it, beyond sending a cardinal to London with instructions to find out what was actually happening there.The pope’s response was cautious but the reaction of Mary’s cousin, Reginald Pole, the son of her old lady governess, was one of boundless joy. He wrote to Julius III at the beginning of August: ‘I cannot delay congratulating your Holiness until the receipt of further intelligence, the nature of the event appearing to me such that since many years nothing has occurred in Christendom on which one could more reasonably congratulate a Christian mind … and God of his goodness … has chosen to annihilate all these long cherished projects by means of a woman who for so many years has suffered contrary to all justice’.
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He had been away many years himself, and scarcely knew the country he left behind in 1532. Margaret Pole’s third, cleverest son was now more Italian than English, both in outlook and appearance.Yet though he had spent such a long time in the service of Rome, he signally failed to seize the chance of the papacy which so nearly became his in 1549, following the death of Pope Paul III.Whether through too much complacency or a lack of political skill, he was outfoxed by the Italian cardinal Giovanni del Monte, who became pope as Julius III. Disliked and distrusted by both the French and the Habsburgs, Pole found his career seemingly going nowhere until his distant cousin, Mary Tudor, achieved the apparently impossible and became queen of England. Suddenly, an entirely different prospect opened up, and he hastened to remind the new queen of the sufferings of his family, the Poles, which her father had sought to exterminate. ‘Her majesty will perceive’, he wrote to Mary, ‘that the beginning and cause of all the evil … placed in the heart of the king her father [was] the perverse desire to make the divorce from the queen her mother.’ No doubt Mary did perceive it that way, but she may not have known that Reginald Pole had certainly not stood out against the divorce initially and had actually undertaken missions on Henry’s behalf to facilitate it. So his subsequent assertion that he had risked his life in Katherine and Mary’s defence was a convenient rewriting of his past, a talent that he possessed in considerable measure. He exhorted her to obedience to the Church, something in which she needed little encouragement, and closed by expressing his wish to come at once to England. But he was to be thwarted in this desire by the emperor and by English politicians, who were not keen to see him back on English soil. Eighteen months would pass before he returned as Mary’s archbishop of Canterbury, by which time she had put in place most of the central pillars of her religious policy without him.
The evidence suggests that Mary’s own view of religion in England when she came to the throne was in the course of development. Her anxiety to be rid of the title of head of the Church may have been as much psychological as devotional. Its connotations with the outcome of the divorce, with her own troubles in the 1530s and, above all, with her father were very uncomfortable. As with the declaration of her own bastardy, something that troubled her greatly and could not be undone except through Parliament, Mary wanted to cleanse her past. But this does not mean that she wanted to turn back the clock to the way religion had been practised in 1529. She had been educated by those who believed in the need for reform in Catholicism and seems to have been perfectly comfortable with many aspects of the Henrician settlement. It was the attempt to impose the much more radical ideas of the reformers under her brother that she had opposed, not the religious framework Henry VIII bequeathed in 1547. The mass satisfied the core of her own spiritual needs, enveloping her in its central mystery of the real presence of Christ.To deny that miracle was to her the greatest heresy of all. She could not understand those who believed otherwise. She cared nothing for what they called themselves: sacramentarians, Lutherans, Calvinists, Zwinglians, any of the still-splintering sects that were bundled together under the catch-all term of Protestant, they were simply unbelievers to Mary and to countless other Englishmen. Hundreds of years would pass before the notion of respecting those who held different ideas became accepted or admired. Mary was a 16th—century woman. She did not think as we do.
Her policies on religion were still evolving in the autumn of 1553. There had been little time to develop a detailed template and she could not ignore the pressing needs of establishing herself as queen. Shortly after her coronation, she wrote to her cousin Cardinal Pole, dashing his hopes of immediate, wholesale change. Acknowledging their kinship (he was, she wrote, ‘joined to her by nature’), she nevertheless realised the need to proceed with care, describing ‘what pain the queen feels from being as yet unable by any fitting means to manifest the whole intent of her heart in this matter’.
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But some of the policies she would pursue were already well formed in her mind. She wanted a more literate clergy, who could inspire the people through good sermons. This had long been felt to be a notable weakness of the Catholic Church in England. At parish level priests were often ill educated and they were not trained to engage their congregations through the power of preaching.The success of the Protestants in this respect was plainly seen.To compete, Mary’s clergy must be supplied with material that they could use in the preparation of their own sermons.The printing press, that tool of the seditious, could also be used to propound effectively the ideas of an English Catholicism. Time was taken in preparation, but the Marian period produced a substantial body of homilies and reference material, much of it from the pen of Edmund Bonner, the bishop of London. It was printed by the queen’s printer, Robert Caly, from his press in St Paul’s churchyard.
Mary also felt strongly about married priests. Her disapproval has been equated with sexual prudery, but this seems too modern an interpretation. It was a distaste that her sister Elizabeth shared, but she has not been criticised for it in such highly coloured terms. Marriage to Mary was an institution blessed by God, and one for which she had great reverence, like all people of her time. But it was not appropriate for priests because it destroyed the uniqueness of their relationship with God. In that sense, perhaps, she did consider that married priests were defiled, but this does not mean that she nursed lurid fantasies of what went on in priestly bedrooms.The importance she attached to the mass in her daily life meant that she expected complete moral purity in those who administered it. No action was taken in the first nine months of the reign, but in March 1554 Mary issued an instruction ordering every bishop ‘to deprive or declare deprived, and remove according to their learning and discretion, all such persons from their benefices or ecclesiastical promotions, who contrary to the … laudable custom of the church, have married and used women as their wives’.
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Among those affected by this pronouncement was the 67—year—old archbishop of York, who wrote in bewilderment asking what he should do with his wife, whom he had married only a few years earlier because, he claimed, of pressure from the Edwardian authorities.
But Mary accepted reluctantly, as she informed Reginald Pole, that she could not move too fast. Her advisers were even more concerned about the implications of swift religious change. Some Protestants might wait and see what she would do but others were eager to make their opposition apparent from the first days of her rule. Simon Renard believed that much of this disaffection stemmed from foreign radicals who lived in London: ‘Frenchmen, Germans and Flemings exiled and thrust out of their own countries for heresy and other crimes’. Such troublemakers evidently feared that they would now be compelled to leave the country and ‘would do nothing except seek opportunities for troubling the queen’s reign’.
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When he gave Mary this opinion, she may well have wondered how someone so recently arrived in England could really know about the frame of mind of its overseas inhabitants. Her own account of the situation was more detailed and accurate than Renard’s. She was, she said, well aware of the situation in London and even that one of her own guard had cursed Bishop Gardiner. Security was the responsibility of the appropriate authorities. She had left the mayor and aldermen of London to deal with ‘the administration of justice, the police and the maintenance of peace among her subjects’. Until Parliament was called, she would not constrain any of her subjects on matters of religion.This was certainly what the anxious imperialists, afraid that a bombastic approach to religious change might jeopardise a fragile monarchy, wanted to hear. It was not by any means a statement of personal belief. Mary could be pragmatic when the situation demanded it.

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