In one of the few more positive initiatives of the Edwardian Reformation, Archbishop Cranmer replaced the Latin liturgy with the first vernacular book of common prayer in 1549. Yet this too proved deeply unpopular in some quarters, provoking major uprisings in Devon and Cornwall that required German and Italian mercenaries and much killing to suppress. Undeterred, Cranmer brought out an even more uncompromisingly Protestant prayer book in 1552. The theology of many leading evangelicals was also moving further away from Catholicism – breaking with Lutheranism as it did so – in embracing the idea of the Eucharist as a service of commemoration, a symbol of Christ’s sacrifice for sinful mankind and of the true believer’s membership of the community of the faithful. This radicalisation was accelerated by the arrival in England in the late 1540s and early 1550s of eminent Protestant theologians, fleeing Catholic victories on the Continent.
Edward’s death from tuberculosis in June 1553 came as a double blow to England’s Protestants, depriving them of a godly prince, and bringing his 37-year-old and devoutly Catholic half-sister Mary (1516–58) to the throne. An attempt by Edward’s leading councillors to divert the succession to his Protestant cousin, Lady Jane Grey, which occasioned a sermon by Bishop Ridley of London denouncing Mary and her half-sister Elizabeth as bastards, quickly collapsed in the face of strong popular resistance. Mary’s courage in rallying the people against the Edwardian Protestant establishment demonstrated that England’s first female ruler in her own right was also every bit Katherine of Aragon’s daughter. Her callous treatment by Henry during the break with Rome had weakened her health, but had strengthened her attachment to the old religion. Indeed, she saw herself as an instrument of God’s will to restore Catholicism in her realm, and she duly returned England and Ireland to papal obedience and had the act of royal supremacy repealed by Parliament. She accepted, if reluctantly, that any attempt to recover the church property that had been sold into private hands since the 1520s would be successfully resisted by the landed elite. But her concern was not so much to turn back the clock to the days before the Henrician Reformation as to reform Catholicism along broadly Erasmian lines. With her support, the new archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Reginald Pole, set about trying to raise standards of education among the clergy, and to use sermons and printed works of religious instruction to improve the laity’s grasp of Christian fundamentals.
Mary’s Catholic restoration was welcomed by the majority of her subjects, despite the fact that Henry VIII’s propaganda had generated widespread disdain for papal authority both among Catholics and Protestants. Nevertheless, she committed two major errors that undermined her popularity and that of her religious programme. The first, and most serious, was in marrying Charles V’s eldest son, the future Philip II of Spain (1527–98), who would shortly inherit his father’s Spanish crown and empire (which, besides Spain and its possessions in the Americas, included the Netherlands, Milan and Naples), while his Habsburg uncle, Ferdinand, would succeed Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor. Mary had a duty to her faith and to her realm to produce an heir, and was obliged by the lack of a suitable English candidate to select a foreign consort. Nevertheless, Philip was a particularly unpopular choice with the English public. Although the marriage treaty denied him regal authority, in private he repudiated its terms, and it was widely anticipated, and feared, that he would turn England into another Habsburg dependency. In marrying Philip, therefore, the queen coloured perceptions of her religious settlement by linking it with the threat of foreign subjugation.
The mere prospect of Mary marrying Philip had provoked a major rebellion early in 1554, its leader Sir Thomas Wyatt claiming that his ‘hole intent and styrre was agaynst the comyng in of strangers [foreigners] and Spanyerds and to abolyshe theym out of this realme’.17 There was no substantial linkage as yet between Protestantism and English national identity. Anti-Spanish xenophobia was felt across the religious divide. Nevertheless, Protestants played a leading role in the reaction against England’s Spanish ‘captivity’, publishing anti-Habsburg pamphlets and helping to widen participation in debates on foreign policy. It was in Mary’s reign that the seeds of the ‘Black Legend’ were sown. Hatred of all things Spanish intensified after Mary committed England to the Habsburgs’ long-running struggle against Valois France. She had been warned by her privy council that the English economy could not sustain another major war, and that ‘the common people [were] … many ways grieved and some pinched with famine … some miscontented for matters of Religion and generally all yet tasting of the smart of the last wars [of the 1540s]’.18 But Mary allowed herself to be overruled by Philip, only to see Calais fall to a surprise attack by 27,000 French troops early in 1558. The first line of England’s defences against French aggression, the last outpost of its Plantagenet empire in continental Europe, had gone. The English had regarded the town as so thoroughly theirs that it had been given seats in Parliament. Its sudden loss shocked the whole country, and dealt a huge blow to national pride. Overlooked in the gloom of losing Calais was the Marian government’s refurbishment of the fleet and overhaul of naval administration. Without these reforms the navy would not have been equal to its many and formidable challenges in the years ahead.
Mary’s second major mistake was countenancing a high-profile campaign of persecution against Protestant heretics. Although conventional wisdom decreed that heresy was a social cancer that must be excised, the Marian burnings aroused more revulsion than rejoicing. About 285 men and women refused to recant their Protestantism and were burned at Smithfield in London, and other sites. Most of these ‘martyrs’ were relatively obscure figures, but they also included three of Edward’s reforming bishops: Cranmer, Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley. Latimer and Ridley were burned together – Latimer with the rousing exhortation: ‘Be of good comfort Master Ridley, and play the man: we shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England, as (I trust) shall never be put out.’19 Yet had Mary reigned as long as her father had done, and continued to burn Protestants at the rate she was doing, England would have remained Catholic. Her death, childless, in November 1558 did not alter the fact that the candle of Tudor Protestantism flickered in a very dark place. The new religion had yet to win hearts and minds in Ireland and Wales, and even where Protestantism had proved most popular – in London and southern England – its adherents remained a minority.
England’s new monarch, Elizabeth I, was as much her mother’s daughter as Mary had been, possessing all of Anne Boleyn’s quick intelligence and imperious nature, her petulance and sharp tongue, and her talent for music and languages. Like her half-brother Edward VI, Elizabeth had been educated by humanist evangelicals, and was a Protestant too, of sorts. Her piety was based upon the Bible and, probably, the foundational Protestant doctrine of salvation by faith alone. But in style it was closer to that of the Henrician evangelicals than to the more dogmatic Protestants of Edward’s reign. Her decision to establish some form of Protestantism in her realm was consistent with her conscience, many of her friendships, and the desire of the landed elite for security in its title to former church property. Nevertheless, it threatened to leave her kingdoms a prey to the Catholic powers, or as one government adviser put it, ‘a bone thrown between two dogs’.20
Peace with France, and between the houses of Habsburg and Valois, was concluded at the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in April 1559, which ended almost seventy years of Franco-Spanish warfare for control of northern Italy. With the great powers now free to turn their attention elsewhere, the treaty looked ominously like the prelude to a pan-Catholic onslaught against the rapidly growing Protestant communities in England, Scotland, France and the Netherlands. The threat to England was particularly acute, for the Catholic powers had never recognised the marriage between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. As far as they were concerned Elizabeth was illegitimate, and Mary Queen of Scots was the rightful heir to the throne. Soon after Elizabeth’s accession, Henri II and his heir Francis II suggested to Philip II that they join forces to invade England. But the heretical and illegitimate Elizabeth looked less alarming to Philip than the prospect of his Valois rivals gaining control of both sides of the Channel and cutting the sea route between Spain and the Netherlands, and he therefore offered to assist Elizabeth against French aggression.
Elizabeth inherited essentially the same predicament that had faced Edward VI ten years earlier: a weakened economy,