Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (39 page)

V

LOYALTY AND SERVICE

CHAPTER 13

WHAT HAPPENED TO MARY’S COUNCILORS?

Ralph Houlbrooke

I

England experienced between 1547 and 1559 an exceptional series of changes of regime and religious policy. Each reign saw the dismantling of an existing religious settlement, the removal of senior clergy who could not accept the new order, and extensive changes to privy council personnel. No-one at the time could have predicted that Elizabeth’s settlement would endure (albeit with one major interruption and subsequent major modifications) until the twenty-first century. English Catholics continued to hope, not unreasonably, for further changes following Elizabeth’s marriage or the accession of a new monarch.

The refusal of all save one of Mary’s surviving bishops to accept the restored royal supremacy in 1559 and the exile of many higher clergy and academics following the Elizabethan settlement are well known.
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This essay will focus on Catholic beliefs and practices among Mary’s former privy councilors. Some two-thirds of them were not reappointed by Elizabeth. This majority included Mary’s personal followers and others who had rallied to her cause in July 1553. The core of Mary’s support during the 1553 succession crisis came from religious conservatives for whom her accession represented the best hope of a restoration of Catholicism.
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It is hardly surprising to find that some survivors from the ranks of Mary’s 1553 supporters were also among the earliest Catholic lay nonconformists after 1559. The continuity of Catholic loyalty and the extent of early recusancy among Mary’s ex-councilors have been insufficiently recognized or emphasized. Circumstances were, of course, very different after 1559. Above all, religious conservatives lacked the focus for their hopes and loyalties provided by the Lady Mary during Edward’s reign.

None of the Marian privy councilors whom Elizabeth reappointed had been closely associated with Mary before her accession. They were men with long experience of service under different monarchs. However, most of them were conservatives in religion. Their participation in government is an important part of the context of early Elizabethan Catholic survival. The Catholic sympathies of some magnates appointed to Elizabeth’s council largely because of their local importance helped to prevent any concerted early attempt to root out Catholic practices. Facing a predominantly conservative nation, Elizabeth followed a far more gradual approach than had Mary and her leading ecclesiastical advisers, with their hopes of vigorous Catholic revival and a speedy extinction of “erroneous” religious opinions.
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Her advisers aimed to remove Catholics from the local commissions of the peace, but in practice this objective was implemented in a very uneven fashion, and several conservatives survived in place.
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Its treatment of Catholic ex-councilors depended on the circumstances of particular acts of recusancy and the threat they were believed to pose. The Northern Rising of 1569 and Elizabeth’s excommunication by Pius V in 1570 led to the passage of harsher anti-Catholic legislation.

When Elizabeth I came to the throne in November 1558, she sharply reduced the overall size of her privy council. She immediately dropped twenty-two of Mary’s councilors, and another, Nicholas Heath, by the end of 1558. The importance of these actions has long been appreciated. Wallace MacCaffrey described Elizabeth as “ruthless in her excisions from the Council list.” Mary’s cull of Edwardian councilors had, in fact, been almost as heavy as Elizabeth’s of Mary’s. Mary “dropped” twenty-two members of Edward’s council, of whom she restored only two. The chief difference between Mary’s appointments and Elizabeth’s lay in Mary’s inclusion of several men whose prime qualification was the support they had given to her bid for the crown in 1553. This resulted in a privy council far larger than Elizabeth’s.
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Of the twenty Edwardian councilors whom Mary never reappointed, fourteen were dead by November 1558. By contrast over half of the Marian councilors dropped were still alive at the end of 1570, a dozen years after Elizabeth’s accession. Two-thirds of them were dead by the end of 1572, but the last survivor, Sir Thomas Cornwallis, did not die until 1604.
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When Elizabeth addressed Mary’s councilors shortly after her sister’s death, she told them, “I do consider a multitude doth make rather discord and confusion than good counsel.” She divided the councilors into three categories: first, ancient nobility, deriving their origins from her progenitors; second, those of long experience in governance; and third, “the rest,” “being upon special trust lately called to [Mary’s] service only.”
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None of the men in this last category who had outlived their mistress were reappointed by Elizabeth. However, even after her drastic excisions, ten of Elizabeth’s councilors in 1559, half the total, were survivors from Mary’s council—or “hold-overs,” as Wallace MacCaffrey dubbed them.

II

Seven of the councilors whom Elizabeth retained were members of the nobility, including the earls of Shrewsbury, Derby, Pembroke, and Arundel, who were all substantial regional magnates. Shrewsbury dissented from the bill for religious uniformity on March 18, 1559 and was absent when a revised bill was read four days later. Before he died in 1560 he requested that a communion service be celebrated for him in lieu of a requiem mass. Derby had dissented from nearly all the important Edwardian measures but in March 1559 left parliament early. He survived until 1572, holding various important local offices, but nevertheless sheltered a papal agent in 1569. Pembroke, though near the heart of the regime during the early 1550s, readily gave his support to each succeeding government as the best means of safeguarding his own interests. The earl of Arundel was widely believed to have accepted the religious measures of 1559 in the hope of marrying Elizabeth. Foreign observers regarded him as a political lightweight, and his inept political maneuvers, including his involvement in the duke of Norfolk’s plan to marry Mary Stuart, repeatedly got him into trouble. Historians have tended to regard him as a religious conservative, albeit a far from consistent one; the Spanish ambassador de Spes thought him “Not entirely Catholic.”
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Most of the other hold-overs were chosen primarily for their military, administrative, or diplomatic skills or experience. Lord Howard of Effingham, Lord Admiral under Mary, conservative in his religious inclinations, probably owed his reappointment above all to his staunch support for Elizabeth’s right of succession during her sister’s reign. In February 1558 he had been replaced as admiral by his more competent predecessor, Lord Clinton, the only Marian hold-over whom it seems fair to describe as a convinced Protestant.
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Clinton’s advocacy of a stern line toward English Catholics reportedly led in 1560 to an altercation with Arundel in the royal presence chamber so vehement that the two noblemen ended up pulling each other’s beards.
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William Paulet, marquess of Winchester, already over eighty on Elizabeth’s accession, had an exceptional appetite for administrative work and a mastery of detail that seemed to make him indispensable. His political caution enabled him to survive unscathed every change of regime during his long life.
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Of the four commoners, Sir William Petre had had long and varied administrative and diplomatic experience. His boldest move had been to resign from his post as principal secretary in March 1557, on the eve of Mary’s war with France. His religious preferences were undoubtedly conservative. His heir married in 1570 the daughter of the Catholic Sir Edward Waldegrave, an old friend of Petre’s, and his widow was listed as a recusant in 1577.
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Both Nicholas Wotton and Sir John Mason were experienced diplomats and cautious men of conservative outlook who carefully complied with successive religious changes.
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Sir Thomas Cheyne, already over seventy on Elizabeth’s accession, died in December 1558, having made abundant provision for intercessory masses in his will.
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Not surprisingly, few of the “hold-overs” helped to promote any of the most distinctive initiatives of the new reign: the religious settlement or the interventions in Scotland or France. Although the men with military experience, particularly Clinton, favored open intervention in Scotland, Winchester, Petre, Mason, and Wotton were reportedly doubtful about the wisdom of this policy. Arundel opposed it.
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Of all the Marian councilors retained by Elizabeth, Winchester as Lord Treasurer occupied the most important office. On December 29, 1558 the Spanish ambassador Feria reported to Philip II his belief that “this old man is a good servant of your Majesty.” Winchester, or sources close to him, ensured that opinions of a sort likely to be welcome to Philip were relayed to his ambassadors. During Elizabeth’s attack of smallpox in October 1562 he was allegedly in favor of settling the succession by consulting senior lawyers, which the majority understood to be “a move in favour of the Catholic religion.” In December he was said to be about to resign both his treasurership and his office as councilor, “as he says that on two subjects of grave importance they have rejected his advice, and he is not willing that they should reject it a third time.” He and others were deeply dissatisfied. Ambassador de Quadra believed that “these Catholic gentlemen” were planning to defeat certain proposals to be made in parliament. In January 1564, Winchester, who disapproved of England’s intervention in France, allegedly spoke to his secretary, “a good Catholic,” and told him that “these people were in great trouble and that public affairs are in such a state that he...can see no way out of it.” The war would now certainly develop into a civil war because of intestinal rancor in England. If Philip were in Flanders at that juncture he could do whatever he liked and redeem Christendom.
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Reporting on Hampshire the same year Bishop Horne of Winchester described three members of the Paulet family, headed by Winchester’s heir Lord St John as “Mislikers or not favorers” of the established religion among the county’s justices. In this notoriously conservative county, some members of the Paulet faction presented an obstacle to Horne’s vigorous efforts for Protestant reform.
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III

Of the twenty-three Marian privy councilors whom Elizabeth chose not to retain, men experienced in governance before Mary’s accession were, most obviously, Lords Paget and Rich, Sir John Baker, Sir Richard Southwell, Sir Edmund Peckham, and the churchmen Cuthbert Tunstall and Thomas Thirlby. All of them had been privy councilors to Henry VIII or Edward VI, most of them to both kings, though all save Rich and Baker had been removed by 1552.
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The rest of Mary’s privy councilors had been “lately called to her service only and trust.” They included John Bourchier, earl of Bath, a peer whose title antedated 1547, and Sir Thomas Wharton, the heir to such a title, but neither of these men was a great magnate, and they owed their places in Mary’s privy council to the fact that they had been among her early supporters in July 1553, as had Sir Henry Jerningham, Sir Edward Waldegrave, John Bourne, Sir Robert Peckham, Sir Henry Bedingfield, Sir John Mor daunt, Sir Clement Heigham, Sir Thomas Cornwallis, Sir Edward Hastings, and the more experienced Rich, Southwell, and Peckham. According to Robert Wingfield’s account of Mary’s bid for the throne, Sir Francis Englefield and the young Sir Anthony Browne, soon to be viscount Montague, had been imprisoned beforehand on account of their loyalty to her
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 The other three councilors new to government under Mary were Nicholas Heath, lord chancellor in succession to Stephen Gardiner, Dr. John Boxall, secretary of state from March 1557 in succession to Sir William Petre, and William Cordell, master of the rolls.
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The flexible and politique William Paget had an exceptionally long and varied experience at the heart of government. He had been neither one of Mary’s earliest supporters nor a strong Catholic. He had some reason for disappointment at being left out of Elizabeth’s council. He was, however, in poor health; the Spanish envoy Feria reported with characteristic sardonic humor on December 14, 1558 that he was dying as fast as he could. More importantly, he was more closely associated than any other councilor with the disastrous war from which England was now trying to extricate herself. Paget had also been a busy and proactive adviser with a reputation for scheming. Cecil would have found him a difficult colleague.
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Non-appointment to the new council did not entail exclusion from a role as occasional counselor: Elizabeth, as Natalie Mears has demonstrated, never accepted that she was bound to take advice from privy councilors alone. Paget was keen to offer it. His counsel nevertheless caused some resentment both outside and within the privy council. In April 1560 Lord Grey of Pirgo wrote to Cecil vehemently condemning “all pagetyans deuyses with masun and all his fellowes” and their desire to bring in a foreign prince. This probably referred to Paget’s and Mason’s advocacy of Elizabeth’s marriage with the archduke Charles.
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Councilors were allegedly annoyed by the fact that Paget had advised Elizabeth against the devaluation of the coinage in 1562 and told her that it was “but a folley, for them to debate thinges yf she followed others counsel.” Rich too offered to give advice, requesting an audience in February 1563, though privy councilors do not seem to have regarded him as either influential or dangerous.
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Apart from Paget, all the ex-councilors considered here left evidence of their Catholic outlook or practice. Elizabeth employed some of them. Anthony Browne Viscount Montague voted, along with the bishops, against the supremacy and uniformity bills in 1559, seeking in particularly trenchant fashion to dissuade his fellow peers from changing their religion. He was the only temporal peer to oppose the final version of the supremacy bill. Montague ultimately became the leading Catholic peer in England and though he occasionally attended church services, his Sussex house, Cowdray, became a center of Catholic worship. Despite his opposition in 1559, Montague was named special ambassador to Spain in 1560 and included in a delegation sent to the Netherlands in 1565–66. The trust shown in him is remarkable given his stalwart opposition to the religious settlement.
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“I cannot understand these people,” he reportedly told the Spanish ambassador Guzman de Silva in March 1565, “they cannot endure me and yet they send me to do their business for them.” Philip II’s ambassador de Spes reported in December 1569 that Montague had attempted to flee to the Netherlands, but that he was thwarted by contrary winds. Yet only the previous month he had been appointed joint lieutenant in Sussex.
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