Mary Tudor (68 page)
Authors: Linda Porter
Yet there was a positive programme of religious reconstruction, in all aspects of the word. Mary and her bishops knew that there was a great task ahead. It went far beyond the restoration of damaged, deserted churches and religious institutions. The reintroduction of the mass was straightforward, on one level; it had been, since time out of mind, the centrepiece of life for everyone, rich and poor, educated or ignorant. Daily mass was probably not observed by the majority, but the Sunday service was the focal point of the week. It is easy to assume that the sudden reversion to the Latin mass left people adrift in incomprehension. This was not so. Parts of the service, prayers both public and private, for the monarch, for the pope, even for pregnant women, had been spoken in English since its widespread adoption as the language of the ruling classes in the mid—14th century. Primers, such as
The Lay Folks Mass Book
, a rhyming work in Chaucerian English, were long-established sources for guiding the faithful as they worshipped. Most of the population shared with Mary the view that the mass was not something alien and distant, arbitrarily imposed on them. Rather, it was easily accepted because of its familiarity.
The Lay Folks Mass Book
, a rhyming work in Chaucerian English, were long-established sources for guiding the faithful as they worshipped. Most of the population shared with Mary the view that the mass was not something alien and distant, arbitrarily imposed on them. Rather, it was easily accepted because of its familiarity.
For many, the silent majority, perhaps, this was so. But by no means all. Mary accepted that a battle needed to be waged for the hearts and minds of those deluded or bewildered by the changes of the preceding 20 years. As reprehensible as the content of Protestant literature was, its potential for further damage was never underestimated. Cranmer had demurred on matters of belief, but acknowledged Mary’s earthly authority. The exiles in Europe were not afraid to challenge her throne and to condone attacks on her life. This threat must be addressed. A complete programme of education, both of people and priesthood, was needed. And it was not to be a rarefied, academic exercise.The populace needed to engage with Catholicism - and their queen - in ways that ordinary people, in a pre-literate age, could understand. Only recently has the effectiveness of Mary’s policy in this respect re-emerged.
The truth was that the return of Catholicism enjoyed widespread popular support, even in London. John Foxe’s lurid accounts of a country suffering religious repression find no echo in the account of the Marian period given by London cloth merchant Henry Machyn.This is generally referred to as a ‘diary’ but it is, more accurately, a chronicle of events written by a London businessman. As such, it provides fascinating insights into the religious culture of Mary’s reign. There is nothing here that fits with preconceptions of a dismayed, cowed populace ruled by a dour monarch unfit (as many historians have claimed) to bear the name of Tudor. Machyn did, indeed, chronicle, in his succinct and matter-of-fact way, a number of burnings in London, but he also listed many other judgements against criminals. On his pages are catalogued the full range of miscreants: murderers, pirates, young ladies who have committed ‘shameful deeds’. Hangings and nailings to the pillory are frequently mentioned, the witness of a violent age where summary justice was the norm.
Machyn was a devout Catholic with great reverence for Tudor monarchy. The thing he seems to have appreciated most about Mary’s religious policy is the way that it included him and other citizens in communal activities which allowed them to demonstrate their devotion to their sovereign. He loved the religious celebrations and processions, which embraced everyone. There were about sixty of these in Mary’s reign, though they petered out in the last year of her rule, perhaps because of the widespread outbreak of viral illness that year.
The use of ritual and spectacle allowed Mary to establish a bond between herself and her subjects which was a strong force for unity of purpose. Although Mary was not really comfortable with public appearances, she realised that the message she wished to get across would be strengthened by her personal participation in some of these ceremonies. Machyn records that for Rogation Week in the spring of 1554 (before her marriage), when the court was at St James’s Palace,‘the queen’s grace went in procession … with heralds and serjeants of arms and four bishops’.The procession went round the queen’s chapel and moved on the next day to St Giles, ‘and there sung mass … and the next day, Tuesday, to Saint Martin’s in the Fields … and the third day to Westminster, and there a sermon and then mass and made good cheer and after about the park and so to St James court there’.
20
Earlier in the same year, Mary used public spectacle to reinforce her victory over Wyatt’s rebels and to ensure that the people saw their ritual humiliation when they were released: ‘… all the Kent men went to the court with halters about their necks and bound with cords two and two together through London to Westminster … and the poor prisoners knelt down in the mire and the queen’s grace looked out over the gate and gave them all pardon and they cried out God save the queen’.
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Earlier in the same year, Mary used public spectacle to reinforce her victory over Wyatt’s rebels and to ensure that the people saw their ritual humiliation when they were released: ‘… all the Kent men went to the court with halters about their necks and bound with cords two and two together through London to Westminster … and the poor prisoners knelt down in the mire and the queen’s grace looked out over the gate and gave them all pardon and they cried out God save the queen’.
21
No doubt the men of Kent did not enjoy this treatment, but it reminded the onlookers of the queen’s power and majesty, as well as her capacity to forgive political opponents. Machyn also recorded the celebrations surrounding Mary’s supposed quickening with child in November 1554 and the enraptured response to rumours of her delivery the following spring.The disappointment of her false pregnancy he does not mention, but the joyful reaction to the victory of Philip’s combined Anglo-Imperial force against the French after the battle of St Quentin in 1557 is chronicled. The Te Deum was sung in all the parishes, bells rung, bonfires lit, and there was much drinking in the streets.This hardly suggests a virulent hatred of the queen and her Spanish husband, even if the response was encouraged by the authorities.
The views of ordinary people on Mary’s religious programme and their judgements on the queen herself at the time have seldom been scrutinised. It is not easy to do so, given the vociferousness of her opponents and the general silence of the majority.Yet Machyn’s account indicates that she did touch a chord. Respect for monarchy and the rule of law was deeply embedded in Mary’s subjects, both great and small. It is impossible to say whether Mary consciously applied what today would be called a communications strategy or not. But her approach reflected not just her own priorities, which had nothing to do with doctrinal niceties, but also her own experiences. She had seen for herself how the faithful yearned for the mass during her brother’s time, when her house was a magnet for those who opposed the Edwardian religious legislation. She also knew the political power of symbolism when she entered London in March 1551 with all her retinue provocatively wearing rosaries. And she was keen to maintain the mysterious practice of touching victims of scrofula, the skin disease known as ‘the king’s evil’, which emphasised the sovereign’s mysterious and divine powers of healing.
Queen Mary’s Manual for the blessing of cramp rings and touching for the evil
, beautifully illuminated, is one of the loveliest artefacts to survive from her reign.
22
Queen Mary’s Manual for the blessing of cramp rings and touching for the evil
, beautifully illuminated, is one of the loveliest artefacts to survive from her reign.
22
Machyn approved of his queen, but he had acquiesced quietly in the changes of her brother’s reign and adapted readily under Elizabeth. He was a devout man, but no extremist. Already in his fifties when Mary came to the throne, he had seen most of his children die before him, but he did not question the ways of God, any more than Mary did. He himself seems to have been a victim of the plague when he died in 1563, the same year that John Foxe published the first edition of his
Acts and Monuments
.
Acts and Monuments
.
Machyn’s picture of the public face of Catholic culture during Mary’s reign tells only one part of the story of the Marian Church. Its agenda was not to turn the clock back, but to adapt the best of reforming Catholicism to the situation of England. Pole and Mary’s bishops recognised the need for education, and they shared the queen’s belief in the benefits that would come from good preaching. Instructing the young would be key. As bishop of London, Bonner produced ‘An honest godlye instruction and information for the … bringinge up of Children’. It was intended for use by all the schoolmasters in the diocese who had responsibility for the first instruction of children. ‘All the youth’, according to Bonner, ‘must have some honest introduction and entry in things convenient for them to learn, that is to say, both to know the letters, with joining of them together, and thereby the sooner made apt to go further, both in reading and also in writing.’ And they should also learn how to bless themselves morning and evening and ‘to say also the Paternoster, the Ave Maria, the Creed, the Confiteor [the confession], with the rest to answer the priest at mass, to say grace at dinner and supper’. In his little book was printed the alphabet, in both lower and upper case, and the main prayers and devotions the child must learn. These were given in both English and Latin, and the English versions of the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed are almost word for word the same as in the 1552 Book of Common Prayer.
23
Marian Catholicism did not seek to obliterate the changes under EdwardVI. Rather, it used what was thought acceptable and proper to underpin its own messages.
23
Marian Catholicism did not seek to obliterate the changes under EdwardVI. Rather, it used what was thought acceptable and proper to underpin its own messages.
One of the difficulties was how to get these messages across. It was one thing for Mary to demand a step-change in the quality and output of pulpit utterances, another to bring it about. And the written word would also be needed to overcome the onslaught of material from the exiles in Europe. Pole was well aware of the power of preaching and of books, though also wary of them as tools in the hands of Protestants. The misuse of the spoken word to seduce the gullible troubled him, as did exposure to unguided reliance on the scriptures. Here were all sorts of pitfalls, whatever the merits of the underlying intention:‘The which only desire of itself being good, yet not taking the right way to the accomplishing of the same, maketh many to fall into heresies, thinking no better nor speedier way … for to come to the knowledge of God and his law, than by reading of books, wherein they be sore deceived. And yet, so it be done in his place, and with right order and circumstance, it helpeth much.’
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He was not hostile to the idea of giving preaching and Bible study a prominence they never enjoyed in the earlier part of the Tudor century, so long as there was no indiscriminate recourse to them. What was sorely needed was appropriate material. It was easier to produce primers for the laity in fairly short order than it was to produce guidance to the priesthood on the topics that were to be encouraged for sermons.
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He was not hostile to the idea of giving preaching and Bible study a prominence they never enjoyed in the earlier part of the Tudor century, so long as there was no indiscriminate recourse to them. What was sorely needed was appropriate material. It was easier to produce primers for the laity in fairly short order than it was to produce guidance to the priesthood on the topics that were to be encouraged for sermons.
Here, the diligent Bonner was of help again. In 1555, a very busy year for him, he produced a book called
A profitable and necessary doctrine, with certain homilies adjoined
. It drew on the King’s Book of the 1540s, a stalwart of the last years of Henry VIII, and, much more remarkably, on Cranmer’s homilies, to provide an invaluable source for propounding the major elements of Christian belief. Lively and full of useful examples for the clergy to draw upon, the
Profitable and necessary doctrine
was the work of an able and active mind. It showed that there was nothing sterile about the direction of the Marian Church. At the beginning of 1558,Thomas Watson, the bishop of Lincoln, published a further contribution, in a series of 30 sermons, which could be used directly by priests too busy (or ill educated) to prepare their own. This ‘wholesome Catholic doctrine concerning the seven sacraments of Christ’s church’ was described as ‘expedient to be known of all men, set forth in manner of short sermons to be made to the people’.
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A profitable and necessary doctrine, with certain homilies adjoined
. It drew on the King’s Book of the 1540s, a stalwart of the last years of Henry VIII, and, much more remarkably, on Cranmer’s homilies, to provide an invaluable source for propounding the major elements of Christian belief. Lively and full of useful examples for the clergy to draw upon, the
Profitable and necessary doctrine
was the work of an able and active mind. It showed that there was nothing sterile about the direction of the Marian Church. At the beginning of 1558,Thomas Watson, the bishop of Lincoln, published a further contribution, in a series of 30 sermons, which could be used directly by priests too busy (or ill educated) to prepare their own. This ‘wholesome Catholic doctrine concerning the seven sacraments of Christ’s church’ was described as ‘expedient to be known of all men, set forth in manner of short sermons to be made to the people’.
25
So the Catholic hierarchy and its printers took very much to heart the queen’s exhortations to support better preaching and counter Protestant literature. But this was only part of the drive necessary to make Catholicism healthy. The universities, particularly Cambridge, were purged of suspect academics, after visitations carried out on the orders of Cardinal Pole. Many scholars who supported new religious ideas fled abroad, as the authorities began to reintroduce the ideas of Christian humanism that had been flourishing on the Continent for years. Both institutions received the support of new benefactors. St John’s College, Oxford, was established in 1555 by Sir Thomas White, a former Lord Mayor of London, and in 1557, Dr John Caius refounded Gonville Hall, Cambridge, as Gonville and Caius College.
Another, very visible beneficiary of the positive religious changes under Mary was Westminster Abbey, refounded as a Benedictine house in 1555 and restored to its independence outside the diocese of London. The shrine of Edward the Confessor, so central to the identity of English monarchy, had escaped the worst depredations of HenryVIII and his son, but it needed attention. Its present form we owe to the man who was to be the last abbot of Westminster, John Feckenham, Mary’s own confessor when she first ascended the throne.
Westminster Abbey may have been something of a showpiece but Mary and Pole knew that real progress needed to be made at parish level. Here the amount of work to be done was daunting. The state of the churches themselves was often pitiful and it could not suddenly be rectified. EdwardVI had reigned for only six years, but the removal of the trappings of the old religion had been comprehensive.Their loss was by no means welcome.The images that were taken away had literally been part of the fabric of church life for hundreds of years.They were familiar to parishioners and were a source of local pride, as well as local employment. Ironically, the beginning of the 16th century had seen an upsurge in work on churches and their decorations, the money for all of this coming from individual bequests and donations. Half a century later, the results were ruthlessly despoiled. The Edwardian religious leaders would have none of this dangerously misleading frippery.They considered images of jewel-bedecked saints, the gleam of chalice and cup, the splendour of the priest’s vestments, the depiction of saints on the rood-screen that separated the nave from the altar, as idolatrous and divisive. These trappings hindered religious devotion and distracted the faithful from the simple beauty of God’s word.The commissioners who visited churches in the early 1550s were under instructions to leave behind only the bare essentials: a cup, a bell, a covering for the table and a surplice for the priest.
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