Was Elizabeth’s choice of religion ever really in doubt then? She was the daughter of the ‘concubine Anne Boleyn’, the woman for whom Henry VIII had broken with Rome in the first place. Her parents’ marriage had never been recognized by the Catholic Church and her own legitimacy of birth had long been a subject for parliamentary enactment. Just days before her mother’s execution Thomas Cranmer had annulled her parents’ marriage and Elizabeth, at a stroke, was both bastardized and disinherited. Her present claim to the throne rested on her father’s will and the Succession Act of 1543, which reinstated her as Henry’s heir, and the French, in particular, were quick to cast doubts on Parliament’s right to tamper with these sacred laws of inheritance—by Christmas 1558 they ‘did not let to say and talk openly that Her Highness is not lawful Queen of England and that they have already sent to Rome to disprove her right’, wrote Lord Cobham, Elizabeth’s envoy in Paris.18
The French had indeed sent to Rome. By the New Year Sir Edward Carne was reporting back from the Holy City that ‘the ambassador of the French laboreth the Pope to declare the Queen illegitimate and the Scottish Queen successor to Queen Mary’. That the French chose to object to Elizabeth’s claim out of political self-interest rather than religious scruple was not in question: they had raised similar doubts about the legitimacy of Elizabeth’s sister Mary when Henry VIII tried to engineer an overly advantageous marriage treaty between her and the Duc d’Orléans. But their challenge to her title underlined Elizabeth’s quandary. If she wished to retain papal supremacy in England she would need to throw herself on the mercy of the Pope. Paul IV had intimated that he was quite ready to consider her claim to her title, but could she really stomach the indignity of going cap in hand to Rome, begging to be excused her bastardy? And could she afford to begin her reign from a position of such weakness? Surely England’s throne was her birthright and no Pope could grant her dispensation to wear the crown? So ‘the wolves of Geneva’ packing to return home to England knew from the start that the odds on Elizabeth seeking a national religion, independent of Rome, were short enough for them to stake their lives on. Now they came back in readiness for that outcome.19
They did not have long to wait. On 8 May 1559 Elizabeth dissolved the first Parliament of her reign, giving royal assent to those acts from which her new Church would take its shape: the Act of Supremacy, which settled on Elizabeth the title of Supreme Governor of that Church, and the Act of Uniformity, which agreed the doctrine it should follow.
The reactions followed swiftly. ‘A leaden mediocrity,’ wrote the newly returned Protestant, John Jewel. ‘The Papacy was never abolished…but rather transferred to the sovereign,’ wrote Theodore Béza in Geneva to Heinrich Bullinger in Zurich. From the first, Elizabeth’s was a Protestant settlement that failed to please the Protestants. But neither did it please the Catholics. ‘Religion here now is simply a question of policy’, wrote the Bishop of Aquila from London, ‘and in a hundred thousand ways they let us see that they neither love us nor fear us.’ John Jewel expressed his surprise that ‘the ranks of the papists have fallen almost of their own accord’, and Count de Feria wrote sadly home to Spain to explain why: ‘The Catholics are in a great majority in the country, and if the leading men in it were not of so small account things would have turned out differently.’* And in London a zealous mob went on the rampage, stripping the capital’s churches of their statues and stained-glass windows ‘as if it had been the sacking of some hostile city’.20
From the start Elizabeth’s religious settlement was a compromise. Like all compromises it failed to satisfy anyone and like all compromises it would be subjected to stresses and strains as each dissatisfied party tried, in turn, to wrest back the advantage. But it is the fact that there was need for a compromise that is of significance to this story, because it suggests a country divided into pressure groups of equal fighting weight.
The religious changes of the English Reformation, so decisive and so devastating for a select few in key positions of authority, had filtered slowly through the rest of the country, dependent upon the efficiency and willingness of those officers charged with their enforcement. By 1558 England’s religious spectrum was a kaleidoscope of colours ranging all the way from the most Roman of purples to Puritan grey. It is impossible to estimate the precise number of confirmed Catholics and Protestants, together with the number of relative indifferents, in England at Elizabeth’s succession. It is equally impossible to arrive at a precise and consistent definition for English Catholicism or English Protestantism at this time: these were not hermetic terms upon which everyone could agree and with which everyone could identify. Indeed it is unlikely that everyone could have told you what they were, Catholic or Protestant, if questioned. It is highly probable that in reaching a compromise settlement the Government paid close attention to the predictable response of the powerful and predatory Catholic nations of Europe. But it is certain that such a compromise would not have been necessary had England not been divided, top to bottom, on this matter of religion. The England Elizabeth inherited was definitely not a Protestant country.
For every Londoner in the largely pro-Protestant capital who went on a spree of vandalism, there was someone else in the shires and villages quietly secreting away the statues, crucifixes and church plate for happier times. For anyone in the south of England—and close to the seat of government—prepared to toe the party line if it led to promotion, there was someone else in the north of the country and far from influence, stubbornly doing as he pleased. For anyone whose heart belonged to Geneva and who felt they had been betrayed by the Queen, there was another whose heart belonged to Rome, who was smarting just as badly. And for Elizabeth, whose heart belonged firmly to England, the challenge lay in holding these two opposing forces in their precarious balance long enough to allow civil divisions to heal over and to effect the urgently needed overhaul of the country’s economy and the repair of its diplomatic relations with the rest of Europe. Because the twenty-five-year-old Queen can have been in little doubt that, as far as Europe was concerned, she and England were in for a turbulent future.
And for the ordinary man and woman in the street, the challenge lay in working out precisely what was required of them by this latest change to the national religion.
On the face of it these requirements were simple. The new Act of Uniformity demanded each subject’s presence at their parish church every Sunday and holy day. Failure to do so, without reasonable excuse, would result in a twelve pence fine for each offence, or the ‘censure of the church’ and possible excommunication, with the consequent loss of civil rights.
Going to church on a Sunday had long been a tradition inspired by faith but enforced by the ecclesiastical courts and over the centuries the machinery of that enforcement had become powerfully efficient: the long arm of the Church’s law reached the full length and breadth of England. It was this machinery, in place, fully operational and re-greased with parliamentary drive in place of holy oil, that Elizabeth’s ministers now used to unseat the religion that had devised it: the Catholic Church in England was hoist with its own petard.
There were