- Welcome to this second
in my lecture series on England's reformations
and their legacies. The idea of the series is
that an event as complicated and as contentious as
the English reformation can't be reduced to a
single master narrative. Instead, what I'm aiming
to do is to show it to you from six different perspectives, six different accounts of
how the story played out. All of them are, I hope, truthful, or at least factually accurate. Which one you or I might
think is the most truthful is a question for another day. Today's story though, is one of the bleaker versions of events, England's unwanted reformation. We might even use the term that was coined for it at the time. In some countries, the Protestant Reformation
was a mass movement. Protestantism in much
of Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Poland, Hungary, Scotland as you can see here, even France. In these countries. the Protestant Reformation may not have been popular and everywhere. A great many people
loathed the new religion. But it was a mass movement. Townspeople, aristocrats, sometimes even peasants mobilized to create new religious worlds
in the teeth of opposition from their rulers. But in a few territories,
the story was reversed. In Sweden, in some German territories, in Ireland, and in England, the initiative came from the top. Populations that had shown
at best little interest in religious innovations were suddenly compelled to embrace them. The tale of how England's
Protestant Reformation was rammed down the
country's unwilling throat isn't the whole truth, but it's a part of the truth which most English people
have been too ready to forget, except that is for England's
persistent Catholic minority who've made that narrative their own. We apparently are the most
compelling one word summary of this story to a man named John Proctor. He was a schoolmaster, who
like great many others, found an unheroic but sincere path through the dangerous confusion
of mid 16th century England. Proctor was born in 1521. So he was still only a
boy when Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1534. From 1537 to '46, Procter was a student at
Oxford, the more traditionalist, religiously traditionalist of
England's two universities. And at that time he persuaded himself that the man whom he called that noble Henry King of Kings was simply stamping out
superstition and abuses. He let himself go along with
Henry VIII's reformation. And once he left Oxford, he went to become a schoolmaster in Kent. But in 1547, the boy King Edward VI came to the throne and England's reformation entered a phase of accelerating radicalism. And Proctor watched this with dismay, trying to hold onto a disappearing
religious center ground, holding on to the faith
he had once expressed in Henry VIII's reformation,
but watching it curdle. His nightmare lasted until
1553 when King Edward died and was succeeded by
his elder sister, Mary, who set about returning
her wayward subjects to Catholic obedience. A sorrier and wiser Proctor now celebrated the end of England's
experiment with heresy and rude his own previous
flirtation with it. "The nation had learned
the hard way," he wrote, "that the Protestants offered not as they made you believe, faithful religion, but deceitful delusion, not truthful preaching, but ruthful braking of
all Christian orders, not right reformation of things amiss, but devilish defamation
of things that were well." What he couldn't know was
that within five years, both he and his queen would be dead, and that Catholic England's defamation had only just begun. The story of the English defamation is one of religious change
successfully imposed on an unwilling population. So modern sensibilities reared as we are on the democratic notion that the will of the people
ought to naturally to prevail. This sounds as if it should
have been impossible. But Tudor England was
in no sense a democracy. The normal place of its common people was to endure and to obey. But very little about what happened to England's religious life in
the 16th century was normal. As the time-honored rules of religious politics were torn up, the people who deplored what was happening sometimes simply acquiesced, but sometimes also held
the changes at bay, negotiated with, or in some
cases openly resisted them. Occasionally they even succeeded. And that's our story today. So let's begin in the late 1520s as the people of England became aware that their King was
proposing to throw over his longstanding faithful and
pious wife Queen Catherine in favor of a scheming,
younger French educated rival, and to declare his daughter
a bastard in the process. Now this proposal could
be and was defended in terms of Canon law or reason of state, but it could not really be defended in terms of common morality. You might, say who cares? Subjects' opinions about
their monarchs' marriages didn't usually matter very much. But once it became clear
that the Henry VIII was planning to throw out
not just his lawful wife, but also the vicar of Christ, the Pope, popular distaste acquired a harder edge. In 1532, an MP from Warwickshire, Sir George Throckmorton
accused the King to his face of having meddled with
both Ann Boleyn's sister and also her mother, a double accusation. So shocking that the
King caught off balance, effectively conceded the first part in his eagerness to deny the second. The fact that Throckmorton could get away with this kind of insolence shows how fragile politics had become, and he wasn't just speaking for himself. Throckmorton's warning or perhaps threat to the King was that if Henry persisted, such feuds and intestine divisions would result there from
as to completely destroy and subvert the whole kingdom. This was not an idle threat. England had had dynastic civil
wars within living memory. As Henry's battle with his wife turned into a wider war with the church, his subjects began to choose sides. It was all too obvious that
many of the King's supporters at court were self-serving careerists, while most of his opponents
were taking their stands on principle and had nothing to gain and everything to lose from doing so, the moral authority that they thereby
acquired was considerable. John Fisher, the elderly
pious Bishop of Rochester, was England's most internationally
eminent theologian. He also became Queen Katharine's earliest and most consistent defender. And as the stakes became plaintiff, other more politically
cautious churchmen began to find their consciences too. Stephen Gardner, the young, ambitious Bishop
of Winchester derailed his own heather to effortless
political ascent in 1532 when he discovered that he
could no longer bring himself to collaborate with his king's schemes. Even Archbishop William
Wareham of Canterbury, a long serving, generally
rather pliable palette, was finding it impossible
to ignore his conscience. In early 1532, he prepared what would have
been a blistering speech to be delivered in the House of Lords, citing Magna Carta and the ominous example
of St. Thomas Beckett to argue that the king must not trespass on the liberties of what he
called Ecclesia Anglicana. He used the Latin, so as to avoid uttering the phrase, "The Church of England", words that Henry VIII was rapidly turning into a nationalistic totem. Bishop Fisher and Archbishop Wareham were both connected to a maybe
more dangerous figure still. Elizabeth Barton, the Holy made of Kent, a servant girl turns
nun whose pious visions were acquiring a
dangerously political edge. She claimed that God had told her that if the king remarried, he would forfeit his throne
and be deposed within a month. For a brief moment, Barton looked like a new Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who a century before had helped to drive another English King from one of his thrones. The fact that these
threats never came to ahead was chiefly due to the man who apt that disastrous royal interview with George Throckmorton
intervened to limit the damage, Thomas Cromwell, Henry
VIII's chief advisor and man of business by the 1520s, the strategic mastermind who pushed the royal supremacy through. He sidelined the conscience
stricken bishops, paralyzed as they were
by their twin loyalties to God's church and to
their anointed king. Wareham wrote his blistering
speech, but never delivered it. And he had the decency
to die in August, 1532, just in time to be replaced at Canterbury by a surprise candidate. Thomas Cranmer was a young,
relatively obscure scholar, who'd become a confidant of the Kings, and he was chosen for
this dizzying promotion for one and only one reason. He genuinely supported
the king's twin grievances with his wife and with the pope. There was no danger that
his conscience might tug him in an inconvenient direction. Gardner and others were
frozen out of favor until one by one they gave
in and reconciled themselves to the new world. Only two prominent
naysayers refused to backup, Bishop Fisher and his friend Thomas More. The Pope tried to save Fisher
by making him a Cardinal, which enraged rather
than deterred the King. More tried to save himself
by shrewd legal tactics, which only compelled Cromwell to concoct evidence against him. By the time both men were
beheaded in the summer of 1535, they were almost alone. The threat of popular resistance had already been headed
off, at least temporarily. Elizabeth Barton may not have shared Joan of Arc's achievement but she shared her fate. She and her supporters were
rounded up in late 1533. She was forced publicly to
denounce her own prophecies as having been faked and was
then judicially murdered. In the meantime, Cromwell developed an unprecedented and in its own quiet way,
revolutionary policy. Every adult male in
England was required by law to swear an oath recognizing the King's marriage to Ann Boleyn, and also by implication, his newly claimed supremacy
over the English church. To refuse to swear was to
invite a treason charge. The fact that virtually
the entire nation complied demonstrates the regime's strength. The fact that the regime
needed to extort such an oath demonstrates its weakness. Kings don't normally need
their subjects' consent in order to marry. By requiring the entire population to express an opinion on the subject, even if that opinion
was prescribed for them, the regime had opened up
undreamt of possibilities for political participation. This was the first time
that the English population or the English adult male
population as a whole had ever been formally
drawn into politics. It's also a sign that
Henry VII's reformation, as it was not yet called, would be more than a matter
for lawyers and for bishops. Already it was reaching
out into the parishes. Orders went out to ban the prayers for the Pope said at every mass, and to ensure that
preachers extolled the title that the King had now claimed for himself of supreme head of the church of England. As yet these changes were clouds no bigger than a man's hand, most parishes accommodated them with a few hand-inked corrections
to their service books. But they were signs of what was to come. Thomas Cromwell was soon given
the grand new minted title of the King's "Vice-Gerent in spirituals", which empowered him, even though he's a mere
layman, not a priest, empowered him to exercise
the King's supremacy over the church on his master's behalf. He had been a former man of
business for Cardinal Wolsey, and he now quickly redoubled
the reforming efforts he'd made on his old master's behalf. A steady flow of ominous
initiatives poured out of the formidable bureaucratic machine that Cromwell was developing. His commissioners traveled the country, reporting on the property and income of every parish in the church, and also searching with undisguised malice for reports of moral
lapses in monastic houses. They don't seem to have concocted
much evidence wholesale. That sort of crude tactic was limited to emergencies like the
Thomas More's situation. Cromwell's machine was perfectly capable of using ambiguous categories, such that for example a few
reports from a monastery of what used to be called solitary vice could be legally classified as sodomy and used to tar the reputation
of the entire house. As these sorts of defamatory
reports circulated, in the summer of 1535, Henry VIII went on an
extensive royal progress to the West of England, which helped to cool anxieties there. He was always superb of
the theatrics of monarchy. But the North simmered. In the spring of 1536, Ann Boleyn, the new queen to whose legitimacy the entire nation had just sworn was suddenly declared an
adulterous, incestuous traitor. The marriage was declared
to have been invalid from the beginning and she was beheaded. What are people supposed to think? Rumors flew. A new set of royal injunctions
that same year ordered that every church should
keep a comprehensive register of all baptisms, marriages, and funerals. What did it mean? Were all those services
now going to be taxed? How far could the King
and the clique of heretics around him push their luck? As it turned out, the last straw was not a new policy, but one which looked
back to Cardinal Wolsey in the previous decade, putting monasteries to better use. Wolsey had seized several
carefully selected monastic houses for carefully pious purposes. But in his last year in power, he'd secured new authority to
repurpose monastic property on a larger scale. Those powers had lapsed
with his fall in 1529/1530. But parliament considered
several other such schemes in the early 30's. I think it's likely that whoever had been in power in England in the 1530s would have ended up
raiding the monastic state. But as it happened, it
was Thomas Chromwell, or this former enforcer who did this and he did it with verve
thoroughness and a sharp eye. In the spring of 1536, he secured a blunt but
effective piece of legislation. All religious houses with an annual income of less than 200 pounds
would be dissolved, that is closed down. The monks and nuns either
released from their vows or transferred to other houses. The monasteries lands
and goods would be placed in the care of the church's supreme head. The pretense that this was
about reform rather than plunder was scarcely maintained. The commissioners who set
out to enforce this policy in the autumn of 1536 touched a match to an already tinder dry bonfire of popular grievance and suspicion, especially in the North of England, where parish churches
were thinly scattered and monasteries and the
services that they provided were integral to many
lay Christians lives. The revolts began in Lincolnshire and they rapidly spread North. The biggest, the most
dangerous rising centered in Yorkshire called itself, "The pilgrimage of Grace
for the Common Wealth." These pilgrims marched under
a banner of "Christ's Wounds". This is one of the surviving ones, ominously following the example
the regime had set them. They bound themselves with a common oath. They declared their loyalty to the King, but they also declared that they were known in their conscience with spreading heresies, suppression of houses of religion, and other matters touching
the common's wealth. And indeed the dissolution was at the center of their concerns. It was a disaster, they said, whereby the service of
God is not only minished, but also the poorality of
your realm be unrelieved. So spiritual and secular
concerns are intertwined. But the rebels also bluntly
demanded that the circle of heretics around the
King must be driven out, that the bastardized Princess Mary should be restored to
the line of succession, and at least some degree
of the Pope's authority should be restored. Within weeks, there were 40,000
rebels in arms in the North, in alarmingly good order, and there were frightening
whispers of sympathy in the South as well. London was a buzz with reports
of the rebels' demands. The city authorities
tried to impound weapons. The furious King scrambled
together what forces he could, but it quickly became clear
that if it came to a fight, he and his reformation could not win. It was a moment, maybe the moment, when popular will could
conceivably have stopped the English reformation
and it didn't happen. The King didn't win a battle,
but he didn't need to. Instead he outlasted and
outmaneuvered his opponents. He loaded them into dispersing
with empty promises. He found pretexts to
abandon those promises as soon as it was safe to do so. He rounded up and
slaughtered the ringleaders, and he imposed martial law
on the North of England. So it was a turning point, but not the one that pilgrims had wanted. The King's opponents had
shown their hand and lost. Who was gonna stand in his way now? Cromwell whose life had hung by a thread while the pilgrims army was on the march now redoubled his efforts. His reformation began to
reach into parish life like it had never done before. In 1538, a systematic assault was made on shrines, relics,
and sites of pilgrimage across the country. Once venerated objects
were publicly ridiculed and then privately melted
down, burned, or pulverized. A suave of traditional
saints days and fasting days were banned, cowed, disorientated. Concerned to save what
fragments they could of their community's former property, most parishes mutually complied. And by 1540, Cromwell had dissolved not only the smaller monasteries targeted in 1536, but every single religious
house in England. It's the biggest transfer of landed wealth in English history. But in that same year, in 1540, Cromwell's luck finally ran out. A sudden capricious surge of the King's rage cost him his head. There have been any number
of explanations advanced for Cromwell's fall, ranging from the elaborate
to the storybook simple. But whatever you make of the
frantic political maneuvers of that spring and summer, the fundamental fact remains, even the most skilled
gambler who plays dice with the devil will sooner
or later lose a hand. This is what tended to happen to people whom Henry
VIII was intimate with. It's what had happened to Cardinal Wolsey and to Ann Boylen before, and others not leased
out to Bishop Cranmer and the King's last wife Katherine Parr came within a whisker of the same fate. One thing that that perspective shows us is that Cromwell's fall from power didn't mean as much as it seemed to. Combined with a law passed
the previous year in 1539, the so-called Act of Six Articles which declared the King's loyalty to a set of traditional
Catholic doctrines. That law plus Cromwell's death
encouraged English Catholics to believe that the tide had turned and that the worst was over. But the execution of Cromwell was not a carefully considered
change of direction. It was a spasm of homicidal paranoia. Henry VIII had come to
enjoy his self image as the purifier of the English church and the accompanying profits. In 1541, a long delayed royal progress to the North of England brought
a shocked King face-to-face with the continued veneration
of images and statues there, and a fresh purge of "idolatry" followed. Archbishop Cranmer persuaded the King to introduce a new English language form for processional press in 1544. Those prayers did not, however, bring victory in the
ruinously expensive wars with France and Scotland. And so in late 1545, a new law gave the King
power to seize the endowments of Chancery's, colleges, and virtually any other
church foundation he pleased. In 1546, he seriously considered
systematically stripping the assets of England's two universities, before deciding in his capricious way that it tickled his fancy more to found an ostentatious new college at each of the two universities instead. By then, Henry VIII was
already seriously ill. When he finally died in early 1547, his crown passed to his
nine-year-old son here doing his best to show that he's
a chip off the old block. But the question was who
would rule in the boy's name? And whether by chance or not in the last two months
of the old King's life, the murderous dance of court
politics lurched decisively against the religious conservatives. When the music stopped, when the King died on the
27th of January, 1547, Bishop Gardner, the leading
conservative church man, was once again frozen out of favor. The Duke of Norfolk, the
leading conservative nobleman, was only hours away from being beheaded. The King's death actually saved him. The new regime was a
little less homicidal, although the six years in prison that he enjoyed instead
permanently broke his health. In what amounted to an internal coup, the Government of England was seized by a determined clique of Protestants, headed by the King's swashbuckling
uncle Edward Seymour, the brother of Henry VIII's third wife. Seymour became Duke of
Somerset and Lord Protector. England has never been
ruled by a government whose views are so sharply out of step with the country as whole. There was more to the program which this government pushed insistently through over the next six
years than simple destruction. Yet traditionalists could be
forgiven for feeling that way. A new set of royal injunctions
ordered every parish to take away, utterly extinct, and destroy all shrines, coverings
of shrines, pictures, paintings, and other monuments
of themed pilgrimages, miracles, idolatry, and superstition, so that there remain
no memory of the same. Even before the injunctions
were issued, it had begun. Protestant provocateurs
were attacking images, rightly confident that no
one was gonna stop them. In November, 1547, even the great route, the crucifix in St. Paul's cathedral in London was desecrated. Printers began producing
outspokenly, evangelical works, viciously mocking pieties that had once been universally respected. No one was willing to print the books to make him the opposite case. If parish priests were inclined to argue, the regime suspended
all preaching licenses, until the new wave of
preachers could be approved. And in the meantime, an official set of printed sermons were sent to every parish, and reluctant priests
ordered to read them aloud. The regime's determination
to push through this agenda was sharpened by its
desperate need for cash. Protector Somerset held
himself into a fresh and ultimately doomed war with Scotland. In late 1547, the regime did what
Henry VIII had threatened and dissolved all the chancerys
and collegiate churches. The universities alone were accepted. This second dissolution is
now much less well-known than the assault on the monasteries, but its impact was comparable. Another vast suave of property
passed into royal hands. These endowments had supported
many thousands of priests, almost as many as held parish positions. They'd acted as teachers, as scriveners, or in other vital roles
in local communities, and they're now pensioned
off on a pittance. The prayers that they'd said and the sacraments that they'd celebrated on behalf of the deceased
parents, grandparents, and children of the
parishes simply stopped. The principle link between the worlds of the living and the dead that their work represented had been cut. And the ratchet of
change only accelerated. In 1548, as the chancerys and
colleges were being shuttered, traditional liturgical practices like the use of Holy Water were banned. A new English language order for the mass, (indistinct) was in
Latin, was implemented. Senior clergy who objected were one by one deprived
of office, imprisoned, or driven into exile, but not killed. That's a sign that this regime lacked both Henry VIII's self-confidence
and also his vengefulness. In 1549, the most imposing
physical monuments of the old religion, the roots and the consecrated
stone altered were destroyed. Every one of the 9,000 parish churches in medieval England and Wales
will have had a rude loft, a life-sized carved crucifix, a top of the screen separating
the chancel from the nave, the dying Christ flanked by
equally life-sized figures of his mother and the apostle John. Not a single one of those
medieval images now survives. This is a modern reconstruction. An ominously titled act
of uniformity required that from the feast of Pentecost in 1549, every parish should
abandon its old liturgy in favor of a new English order of service to be the same everywhere
with the forceful title, "The Booke of Common Praier." Again we might imagine there's only so much unwelcome radicalism
that rulers can foist on their people before they push back. In the summer of 1549, a wave of unrest swept
across much of England, stirred chiefly by economic wars. The population had been
growing for decades, slowly pushing up rents,
impoverishing peasants, enriching landowners. And that situation is now
worsened by a surge of inflation as a cash-strapped government
begins debasing the coinage to fund its wars. So in the summer of 1549,
there's rioting, there's looting, there's a tax on landowners. There are encampments as
alarmingly well-ordered troops of protesters assembled to
petition their rulers for redress and make clear that they're not going home until they get an answer
that's satisfactory. Some of these protestors wrap themselves in the banner of the old religion. In Hampshire and Sussex, there was talk of marching under the flag of "Christ's Wounds" like the pilgrims back in 1536. In the Southwest, probably the most persistently
rebellious corner of England, it went beyond encampments, that already been disturbances
in Cornwall in 1547 and 1548, including the lynching of a senior cleric. The rebellion there in
1549 is much more serious. The Cornish rebels focused
not on the economic wars that were prominent in
the rest of the country, but squarely on religious change. In 1536 the trigger had been
the assault on the monasteries. This time, it was the new
English Book of Common Prayer, which the rebels dismissed
as a Christmas game, a parody of true religion. They marched East hoping to rally the region to their course. But they made it no further than Devin. And the support that they found even there was less than they hoped. The city of Exeter held out against them before it was relieved by a royal army. And the rebels were now pursued West, cornered and slaughtered, despite their attempts to surrender. Dozens of priests, the presumed fire
starters of the rebellion were killed in reprisals. So once again, a moment when popular will might've forced a change of direction had come and gone. Because across most of
the rest of England, the campers seem, if anything, to have aligned themselves
not with the old religion, but with the new one. Protector Somerset's favorite preachers had spent two years touring the country, blaming the wars of the people
on the greed of landowners, and presenting their own
moral crusade as a solution, a stance which may seem naive, but we do have to say
it was sincerely meant. Now whether the campers
of 1549 really accepted those kinds of claims or
just thought it was wise to adopt their rulers can't. A great, many of them did
couch their economic complaints in the regime's own
Protestant religious rhetoric. Protector Somerset
pretended to listen to them. I mean, in truth, he was
unable to do anything else. Most of the campers dispersed
without serious incident as the summer wore on being soothed by promises of listening from the center. Only in Norfolk did a combination of some specific local wars and a ham-handed government response lead to serious violence, the incident known to
history as Kett's Rebellion, which ended with a foreign mercenary army. Always good to use foreign mercenaries if you need to put down a
rebellion amongst your own people. A foreign mercenary army
slaughtering thousands at the battle of Dussindale
on the 27th of August, 1549. The political fallout from this summer of chaos was dramatic. Protector Somerset was blamed by those at the center of the regime for having led the country into chaos and he's forced out of power. The government took on a steely new face. Its dominant figure
was the man who had won the battle of Dussindale
against the North rebels, John Dudley, the Earl of Warrick. He soon elevated himself to the title which he's most remembered
by, Duke of Northumberland. But once the dust was cleared from this autumn of
furious political intrigue, it became clear that the one thing that this reconstituted
regime was not going to change was its religious policy. That was still dominated
by convinced Protestants, not least Archbishop Cranmer, but above all, the precocious
young King himself. The ratchet of change only accelerated, further asset stripping, even extending to
parish's communion silver. A new, more radical
revision of the prayer book, a new set of 42 articles of religion, defining the English church's doctrines as unambiguously, reformed Protestant, the tradition which would
later be called Calvinist. So the rebellions of 1549 in
the end did the same thing that those of 1536 had done. A dangerous brush with popular opposition didn't weaken the reformers,
it strengthened them. The political potency of religious
traditionalism in England is at its lowest ever ebb during the final three or so
years of Edward VI's reign. The remaining conservative churchmen are priced out of office and replaced with Protestant zealots. Their lay supporters are
left mute and bewildered. Many of them clinging to the fantasy that when the King grew up, he would be their good lord
and restore true religion. These people, like our Kentish
schoolmaster John Proctor, had gone along with
Henry VIII's reformation. They'd sworn to accept him as
supreme head of the church. They trusted that he and his heirs would be true to the faith that they hoped he shared with them. Now that trust was going septic on them. But what could they do apart
from utter helpless prayers? And then in the summer of 1553, those prayers were answered. Instead of growing up to
be a Protestant tyrant, the 15-year-old king died of tuberculosis. He tried to fix the succession in favor of a young Protestant cousin who just so happens to be married to the Duke of Northumberland son, but the plan was carried out too inaptly and it smelled too much
of trickery to succeed. Instead, in the century's
most successful rebellion, Henry VIII cast off eldest daughter, Mary, swept to the throne. The wave of popular support
that she rode to power reflected her perceived legitimacy,
perhaps more than her religion, but it was still immediately obvious that England's 20-year
heretical nightmare was over. The people who'd been
cowed into collaboration by Henry VIII and bewildered
into silence by Edward VI could now cheer. Perhaps they weren't actively demanding the full scale return to
people obedience that followed, but they certainly accepted it. That much at least we can deduce
from the effort and expense that people poured into restoring their looted parish churches
over the next five years, despite the continuing economic wars and latterly two devastating years of epidemics and near famine. Of course their relief was short-lived. Queen Mary did quickly marry, but the royal pregnancy
which was announced and widely celebrated
turned out to be a mirage. When she died in 1558, she was as childless as
her young brother had been. Unlike him she was too
wise or too cowardly to try to rig the succession. She accepted that the throne would pass to her Protestant half sister Elizabeth. The survivors of Edward VI
Protestant establishment now reassembled. It looked as if it was
all going to begin again, as if nothing had changed. But that's not quite
how things turned out. True, after a few months
of delicate politicking, the new queen enacted a
set of religious policies which broadly reset the
dial to where it had been in the last year of King Edward's life. There was once again an
English Book of Common Prayer, enforced by another act of uniformity, and another sweeping set
of royal injunctions, banning all the pieties and ornaments, so painstakingly restored under Mary. There's almost a clean
sweep of the bishops. Many of Elizabeth newcomers were radicals who'd returned from years in exile, drinking at the wellsprings
of Protestant purity in Switzerland and Germany. The restored monasteries were closed, only a handful of them anyway. Royal commissioners patiently
went from church to church, purging them off so-called idolatry. The most obvious difference was that this time death didn't intervene. Elizabeth kept her so-called settlement of religion in place for almost 45 years. And her successor James I
did no more than tweak it. England's religion wasn't only broken, but it was forcibly
reset into a new shape, and held there long enough
that the bones knitted. But this bleak story
of England's defamation isn't quite adequate, for one thing as we'll see
in the following lectures. By the start of Elizabeth's reign, it's becoming impossible to ignore the fact that England genuinely did have a mass Protestant movement, a small one, but nevertheless. For another Elizabeth's reformation was not so much a
restoration of her brothers than a kind of effigy of it. It didn't have the same relentless drive to uproot behind it. Her own idiosyncratic, but stubborn affection for some of the old ways made its mark. It helped some of her
traditionalist subjects to feel that they weren't entirely
voiceless in this new world. Most importantly for
those traditionalists, the world had been
transformed by Mary's reign. She had failed to save Catholic England, but she had saved English Catholicism. The traditionalists who'd been paralyzed and impotent in the last
years of Edward's reign were under their new
heretical monarch energized and grimly ready. Elizabeth hoped to persuade a number of Mary's bishops to
accept her new settlement. Men like Cuthbert Tunstall, the elderly Bishop of Darren who had openly supported
Henry's reformation and who had tried for a
while to work with Edwards. But Tunstall now refused to have anything to do with Elizabeth settlement. And all but one of the other
bishops joined him in this. The one exception being an
undistinguished Welch Bishop whose reward was to be allowed to serve out the last four
years of his life undisturbed. For almost everybody else, the battle lines were now clear. English Catholics, and we can begin to use
that term meaningfully, knew where they stood. They had lost their taste
for helpless conformity. Most of the stubborn
Marion ex bishops lived out their lives in Elisabeth's prisons. A younger generation
of leaders chose exile, plotting their eventual return. They bombarded the new
regime with printed polemics. They worked to drum up
continent-wide support for their course. The most obvious fruit of
which was a new seminary for English Catholics established at Douai in the Netherlands in 1568. But most of those who were now thinking of themselves as Catholics
remained in England. Some chose to be recognizance. This was a newly created legal category of defining those who defiantly refused to attend Protestant worship and had to pay a regular fine as a result. Others became so-called church papists, that is papist at heart, but nevertheless attending
the established church, cloaking their Catholic allegiance in a show of outward conformity. What no one knew was how strong these Catholic remnants were. For a decade, Elizabeth and her ministers sedulously avoided confronting or provoking them. They restricted themselves to carefully implementing
the new settlement, progressively easing Catholics out of positions of influence, slowly placing a new generation
of clerics in the parishes. They hoped, the regime hoped
that time was on their side, and they feared that if
1536 or 1549 were repeated, they might not be lucky a third time. The thorny war was brought to
an end when a political crisis that had been simmering
since the beginning of the reign boiled over. The crisis was same
crisis as it always was with the Tudors, the succession. Queen Elizabeth was
unmarried and childless. Most of the serious
candidates to succeed her should she drop dead one day, and she was seriously ill in 1562, this was a real threat. Most of the serious candidates to succeed her were Catholics. This made her reformation
feel much less secure at the time than it looks
to us in retrospect, especially because by
far the most plausible of those Catholic candidates was her cousin, Mary, the Queen of Scots, who spent the 1560s
trying to position herself as Elizabeth's natural successor. This effort is spectacularly unsuccessful, so much so that in 1567, it leads to Mary being deposed
from her Scottish throne. And by 1568, it sees her
imprisoned in England suspected of having murdered her second husband. But no matter what prison she's in, as long as she breathed, she remained Elisabeth's likeliest heir. For Catholics the prospect of a new queen who could reverse their
fortunes at a stroke was too much to resist. In the autumn of 1569, made a ferment of schemes
and plots to Catholic earls in England's north-east
stumbled into rebellion, aiming to liberate the Scottish queen. Soon, most of the region was in arms. There were bonfires of
Protestant prayer books. The Catholic mass was
celebrated in Durham cathedral and the earls prepared to march south. And once again, the threat evaporated. Too few men rallied to the earl's banner. Their hopes hinged on liberating the imprisoned Scottish queen, but she's whisked South long
before they could reach her. A royal army is assembled
with daunting speed and it meets no real resistance. The earl's small force ebbed
away as they ran out of money. And they fled to Scotland where the deposed queen's
enemies quickly did their best to carry favor with England
by hunting the earls down. England's Catholics evidently had spirit, but it was suddenly plain that they no longer had the numbers. A second desperate rising in Cumberland was bloodily put down in February of 1570, and Elizabeth soldiers
now took full advantage of the weakness that
had just been revealed in their opponents. What followed was a
systematic punitive campaign of repression which was without precedent in Tudor England. Suspects were tortured, explicit quotas of between
20 and 40% were set by region for the proportion of suspects
who should be executed. And at least 600 were killed. There's scarcely even a
pretense of individual justice. This is exemplary terror and it worked. Catholic England would never rebel again. The survivors, both at home and abroad, faced two alternative paths. The first was laid out
for them by Pope Pius V, who in the wake of the risings, issued a bull excommunicating
England's heretical queen, and calling on her subjects
to rise up against her. In this defiant spirit, the seminary at Douai and
the others that joined it were training English Catholic exiles and sending them back
home as missionaries, stiffening spines, keeping
underground networks alive, bringing the cutting-edge of counter-reformation
Catholicism to England's shiners. In 1579, a recently founded
English college at Rome itself, was taken over by the most
formidable missionary order of the age, the Jesuits, who quickly made themselves the leaders of English Catholic resistance. This whole movement's
message to ordinary Catholics in England was be
resolute, shun conformity, wait, pray, and be ready. Meanwhile, the high command laid plans. Elizabeth might be assassinated. The Scottish queen might be freed. The King of Spain's Armada
might transport a Catholic army to Kent and an army of English Catholics might rise up to join him. These hopes were not ridiculous. The regime took them immensely seriously. But realistic or not, the one thing that we know
is that they came to nothing. At best, they helped England's Catholics to become a stubborn minority, cherishing their martyrs, and holding on to the
faith of their fathers for centuries to come. The cost was high. It was already playing
that the Elizabethan state was perfectly ready to
shed Catholic blood. The missionary priests met
a storm of persecution. Henry VIII executed dozens
of people loyalists, charging them with treason on the basis that they were recognizing
a foreign prince, the Pope, over their own natural sovereign. But nobody died in this
way between 1544 and 1573. Then a trickle of executions
in the 70's turned into a flood in the 80's and 90's, nearly 200 in all. The fines for requesense were ramped up to unpayable levels. Torture was again authorized. Simply to be a Catholic became in effect presumptive evidence of treason. So seeing that that's
where the first path led, it's no surprise that
some English Catholics were tempted by the other way, to emphasize their loyalty to the queen, to try to find a way
to practice their faith without declaring war on their country. The Jesuits staunchly
opposed such compromises. And so by the late 1590s, the English mission is bitterly divided over this issue into pro
and anti Jesuit parties. And Elizabeth's regime
naturally does everything it can deliberately to stir up trouble amongst these opposing groups. Rome eventually has to
intervene to settle the dispute, and the compromisers are the
ones who get slapped down. As if to emphasize the point, in 1605, one group of very uncompromising Catholics nearly pulled off the most
audacious plot of them all, to blow up the new King James I and his entire parliament with gun-powder. But it was the compromisers
who had time on their side. There would be no more
spectacular plots after this. And regular prosecution
came to an end too. King James' diplomatic opening
to England's Catholic powers and especially his son Charles I marriage to a Catholic princess who was allowed to practice her faith at court. These things gave
English Catholics friends in high places once again. There were spasms of bloody panic during the civil war of the 1640s, during the exclusion crisis and the entirely imaginary
Popish Plot of the 1670s. But aside from those
feverously paranoid moments, it slowly became clear
that a kind of equilibrium had been reached. England's defamation was
not going to be reversed by some political (indistinct). But nor were England's Catholics
going to be exterminated. They and their Protestant neighbors would have to work out a
way of living together. To see how that could be made to happen, look at the Sussex town of Arundel. This was the realm of FitzAlan family, the Earls of Arundel, who were staunchly loyal both
to their Catholic religion and also to their Protestant monarchs. In the middle ages, the town's collegiate
church had also housed in the same building, the
FitzAlan family's chapel. There'd been a simple iron gate built to separate the two parts of the building. When Henry VIII seized the collegiate church's assets in 1544, the Earl secured a unique coup. He managed to buy the part of the building that was the chapel back
as his private property. And so from then, until now, Sir Nicholas' church in
Arundel has been an entity which is unique, but which is also a microcosm
of the whole of England, a divided church housing
a frozen conflict. Most of the building is the Protestant now rather the Anglican parish church, where the monarch is still
acknowledged as supreme governor. But on the other side of that gate, a gate that still stands, a gate that was never unlocked
between 1544 and 1977, and has only been opened a
handful of times since then. On the other side of the gate
stands a Catholic chapel. Of course, for most of those
centuries, this was illegal. But as long as the FitzAlan's and their heirs, the Howard's
pretended to conceal it, successive Protestant governments were willing to play along. The pretense that England was no longer a Catholic country was the same game played
on a larger scale. In fact Catholicism is built
into the very architecture of post reformation England. To ignore the fact that only
a gate separates the two takes a continuous effort of the will. Whether you see that gate
as a disfiguring scar or as the kind of fence that
makes for good neighbors is up to you. But nothing would be more
simple or more destabilizing than to swing it open. Thank you very much for being with me for this lecture today. Our next lecture in this series is at the beginning of February.
