Read Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth Online
Authors: Alice Hunt,Anna Whitelock
Tags: #Royalty, #Tudors, #England/Great Britain, #Nonfiction, #Biography & Autobiography
Thomas Cornwallis, writing in February 1560, understood that Yaxley, though still at court, did not forget his old friends in the country. He believed Yaxley to be “moch attendant vpon my L. Robert, who[,] being a gentleman of verie good nature, and in place to do them good that honor and serve hym,” would, Cornwallis assured himself, willingly prefer any convenient suit that Yaxley should attempt. Passages of this sort led Wallace MacCaffrey to conclude that Yaxley was the prime intermediary between Dudley and the English Catholics.
46
The precise significance of the letters is hard to assess. Some of Yaxley’s correspondents, such as Cornwallis, had favors to seek or suits to press. In other cases, Yaxley seems to have written without much encouragement, possibly in hope of news. Viscount Montague, for example, wrote to him on February 6, 1561 in somewhat apologetic vein that “My longe sylence good Mr. Yaxlee hathe nothinge deservyd your gentill & frequent advertisment & remembraunce.” He went on to explain that it was due to the want of matter worthy to requite Yaxley for the news he had sent.
47
When the former secretary of state John Bourne wrote to Yaxley from what he described as the “dead world” of Worcestershire in February 1560 he specifically asked to be remembered to several friends, including the ex-privy councilors John Boxall, Sir Thomas Cornwallis, Sir Thomas Wharton, and Sir William Cordell, whose recent favor he mentioned particularly warmly.
48
Cordell reported on July 31 that the countess of Bath and Lord Windsor, another early supporter of Mary’s, though not a councilor, together with his wife, had been with him hunting and making merry. Cornwallis had joined them when sent for by the countess.
49
In February 1561 Sir Thomas Wharton asked Yaxley to further his efforts to secure through Robert Dudley’s good offices the Whartons’ occupancy of New Hall, their Essex residence, on which his wife had set her heart.
50
Later the same month, Sir Richard Southwell, ex-councilor and Mary’s master of the ordnance, let Yaxley know that a letter delivered at any time to his good neighbor and friend John Appleyard would reach him swiftly. (Appleyard was to be the ringleader of an attempted conservative rising in Norfolk in 1570.) If his cousin Sir William Petre were in the court, Southwell prayed Yaxley to deliver his commendations to him, as to such other of his old acquaintance as should seem pleased to hear of him. (As we have seen, Elizabeth had retained Petre, another former councilor of Mary’s.)
51
Nearly half the former councilors resided for part or most of the time in the three counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex. Wills provide evidence of continuing links between some of these men in the form of bequests or nominations as overseers or executors. Sir Thomas Cornwallis was named by Sir Richard Southwell, Sir Henry Jerningham, and, conditionally, by Sir Edward Waldegrave; Sir Henry Bedingfeld by Southwell and Jerningham. Sir Clement Heigham left a remembrance ring to his fellow lawyer Sir William Cordell, whom Sir Richard Rich made one of his executors. Waldegrave also named Sir Francis Englefield among his reserve executors and trustees.
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Waldegrave’s widow married Winchester’s third son Chidiock, his eldest daughter Petre’s son and heir.
53
VI
Elizabeth excluded the majority of Mary’s councilors, especially her personal followers, from her own privy council. Elizabeth could have kept even fewer Marian councilors. This would have cost her their expertise and experience and made her council less useful as a “point of contact” with the conservative majority of the nation.
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As in most royal councils, including Mary’s, her key advisers constituted a small inner ring. William Cecil and a few others played a crucial part in the most distinctive early Elizabethan initiatives. The inclusion of several men of conservative inclinations nevertheless contributed to Cecil’s intermittent sense of beleaguerment in his efforts to push his cautious mistress toward taking unpalatable decisions. Some of them harbored misgivings about the risky policies espoused by the vigorously Protestant inner ring. Outside her privy council, some other former Marian councilors continued to act as justices of the peace, and a few held more important offices. Men who had served Mary as privy councilors associated personally with their former colleagues in and outside Elizabeth’s council in various ways.
It is clear that the great majority of Mary’s councilors were confirmed religious conservatives. “Catholic” is a notoriously slippery term to apply to most individuals at this stage of Elizabeth’s reign. There has been no consensus among historians about usage, and practice has tended to oscillate between strictly limited and liberally inclusive applications of the term. By 1559, nearly all the surviving bishops had become convinced that the pope’s authority was essential to Catholic unity and orthodoxy. They could not in conscience accept the royal supremacy. The Spanish ambassador could regard the marquess of Winchester, the lord treasurer of England, as a “Catholic,” but it is impossible to say precisely what this meant in terms of belief and practice. At that early stage of the reign many gentlemen may have been much less attached to the pope than to the mass. Some tried to avoid attendance at their parish church or participation in communion at it. One of them was Sir Thomas Cornwallis, who was nevertheless prepared to admit that there were many things he disliked in the Church of Rome. Sir Clement Heigham, as a Suffolk justice of the peace, could in 1569 promise to participate in all services at his parish church, yet he would show in his will that he retained a Catholic understanding of Holy Communion. By a variety of fudges and mental reservations, most conservative gentlemen achieved some sort of accommodation with the regime. Sir Francis Englefield probably recognized more explicitly than any other layman that he could not reconcile his conscience with obedience to the queen’s laws. He nevertheless claimed that he was a faithful subject. All Mary’s former councilors would probably have made the same claim. Early in the reign it was still possible to hope for a change in policy, perhaps as a result of the queen’s marriage. Englefield had allegedly pressed for the early dispatch of a papal emissary to England, attributing the religious changes to certain ministers rather than the queen herself.
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Others—Winchester and Montague—although not explicitly resorting to the time-honored strategy of blaming the crown’s policies on evil advisers, wrote darkly of certain privy councilors as “these people.”
Mary’s former councilors were never an alternative government in waiting. Few of them even plotted against the regime, and there is no evidence that Elizabeth’s advisers imagined that they posed a collective threat to the status quo. Their connections and associations were nevertheless of sufficient interest to ensure the preservation of the letters that several of them sent to Francis Yaxley, trivial though the contents of those letters were. All religious nonconformity was in principle unacceptable, but in practice some “Catholics” were regarded as much more dangerous than others, and there were times when Catholic practices were particularly risky. The main participants in the Essex masses of 1561 suffered imprisonment and close interrogation partly because so many individuals were involved, partly because they were setting a potentially dangerous example, and partly because of the perceived need to crush the hopes raised by the prospect of the nuncio’s reception in England. Sir Francis Englefield was treated with what he felt to be unjust severity because of his outright disobedience in refusing to return from exile, his known hopes for a change of religious policy, and his suspected dealings with Rome. It was Sir Thomas Cornwallis’s misfortune in being in the wrong place at the wrong time that led to the discovery of his recusancy and provoked sustained efforts to gain his conformity. However, the privy council was slow to deal with John Bourne, despite his outrageous behavior, perhaps because he was seen as an isolated nuisance. The benefits of using the services of Lord Montague, the most important Catholic nobleman in southern England, evidently seemed to outweigh any benefits to be gained by trying to enforce his strict conformity. Robert Peckham appears not to have aroused suspicion and to have spent his exile unmolested. If at times the Elizabethan government was possibly somewhat heavy-handed in its treatment of individual Catholics among the Marian councilors, on the whole it seems to have behaved toward them with good sense and well-judged pragmatism.
Notes