A. K. Chidgzey

The English Reformation began with the desire to end a marriage, it was sustained because the Pope said no, and then upheld by the economic advantages of not having to send money to Rome. Thomas Cranmer seemed genuinely interested in theological reform, more so than anyone else. And he managed to make some change – change that would go on to shape the religious landscape of the English speaking world.

In this, the fourth episode on this topic, we’re going to examine the reigns of Queen Mary and then Elizabeth. Mary gave the country whiplash by returning to the Catholicism of her mother, but then Elizabeth returned the country to the Protestantism of her mother. But it took on a very unique shape under Elizabeth, one only a competent politician like Good Queen Bess could implement.

But let’s do a quick recap. King Henry VIII was married to Catherine of Aragon. They were unable to have a son, but gave birth to a daughter. Henry thought God was punishing him because Catherine had originally been married to his brother. He sought an annulment, but the Pope said no. So Henry ditched the Pope, replaced Cardinal Wolsey with Thomas Cranmer, and made himself the Supreme Head of the Church of England. He annulled his marriage to Catherine and then married Anne Boleyn. Together they had another daughter, named Elizabeth. Henry again believed God was punishing him and so he wanted to get rid of Anne. She too was beheaded on charges of incest and treason. He married Jane Seymour, who didn’t push her political or theological ideas on Henry and then gave birth to a son – Henry’s dream wife. They named their son Edward, the long awaited son. Things were good. But then Jane died about two weeks later. Henry went on to marry Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, and Catherine Parr. His final years weren’t great, waging pointless wars and becoming quite unwell.

Meanwhile, Thomas Cranmer had been trying to make theological changes, inspired by the Lutheranism in Europe and empowered by Henry’s new reformed ideas, but Henry didn’t really want much to change. Cranmer’s opportunity came when Henry died and Edward became king at the age of 9. Cranmer and Edward pushed through some Protestant ideas and Cranmer published the Book of Common Prayer, but Edward died at 15 and was replaced by Mary, daughter of Henry and Catherine, who went about repealing all the new Protestant laws. And now we’re now all caught up.

Let’s continue the story…

When Mary became queen she was 37 and the need for an heir was becoming increasingly pressing, especially if she wanted England to remain Catholic. So she married the son of the emperor Charles V, Philip of Spain. This wasn’t popular, and a rebellion broke out but was swiftly defeated. And then soon after she fell pregnant, which was good for her but not for the English Protestants, because an heir would certify a Catholic dynasty.

However, tragically, this was a false pregnancy. As we saw in the last episode, Mary had health complications as a teenager and now she showed all the normal signs of pregnancy for a full 9 months, but then those signs simply disappeared. It’s quite possible that her false pregnancy was brought on by her strong desire to fall pregnant and all the stress of producing an heir. She saw what happened to her mother and then Anne Boleyn after all. False pregnancy, or pseudocyesis, is a very real phenomenon where the brain produces all the hormones despite no real fetus. And I don’t need to tell you just how devastating this would be, and Mary fell into a deep depression.

She came to believe that this false pregnancy was God punishing her for tolerating heresy. And things started to get pretty bad. Mary’s plan to bring back Catholicism turned a violent corner. She began persecuting Protestants severely, burning many at the stake. For this, she received the derogatory nickname Bloody Mary. So next time you’re drinking a Bloody Mary cocktail, just remember that that drink was inspired by a woman who suffered a horrible false pregnancy and went on a murderous rampage.

One of those people to be executed was our ever-faithful Protestant theologian, who has actually been a part of this story almost from the start, at least since Thomas Wolsey conveniently died of apparent natural causes on his way to being tried for treason, and who had authored the book of common prayer, Thomas Cranmer. He had been imprisoned for about two years, due to his role in the annulment of Mary’s mother, Catherine of Aragon, but also for his blasphemous theological publications. In prison he became unwell and recanted his Protestant beliefs but, so the story goes, regretted this recantation so much that at his execution he shoved the hand he had used to sign the recantation into the fire first and held it there until the rest of his body was engulfed by the flames.

During this period, which is known as the Marian Persecutions, Philip stoked the flames. The Spanish were a strongly Catholic people, and Catherine had been Philip’s great aunt, so he might have held a bit of grudge. Smothering the Protestant movement would strengthen Philip’s authority. There was English Catholics who resented how they had been treated during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI. One of those was a man named Edmund Bonner, a consummate politician, who was the bishop of London and who took the oath of supremacy but resisted reformation ideas. During Edward’s reign, his opposition to Protestantism increased and was thrown into prison. But when Mary came along, she had him reinstated. Of all of the people to have been burnt at the stake, a third of them took place within Bonner’s own diocese. It seems he took a particular sadistic delight in all this and there is a story, possibly legendary, that Bonner interrogated a particularly stubborn Protestant who refused to recant, holding the man’s hand over a candle until the skin started to blister.

Lovely.

Approximately 300 people were executed during Mary’s reign, which is a lot, and let’s be honest, one person executed for practicing a different religion is one too many, and it seems a bit harsh to roast someone on a spit because they think, “You know I’m not quite sure if this is literally the body and blood of Jesus…” but nevertheless this is nothing compared to what was happening on the European continent where wars were raging. But the rate of executions was entirely unprecedented in England. Hence Mary’s unfortunate nickname.

By and large, Philip was kind of absent through Mary’s reign, and does not seem to have been particularly interested in Mary, just basically seeing her as a ticket to more wealth and power. He regularly tried to manipulate Mary into doing his bidding, which happened to be whatever was best for Spain, including drawing the English into a stupid war against France. This was a terrible and costly strategic decision, which Mary’s advisors had warned against. Plus, the pope himself supported France, so considering that she wanted to restore England to Catholicism, it wasn’t really a great idea to attack the Pope’s ally.

But during this war, Mary fell pregnant again, or at least she thought she did, for again there was no baby. And then in 1558 she became unwell. She hadn’t been in a great place, either physically or mentally, for a long time, possibly her whole life. She died, possibly from ovarian cancer, in 1558. With no heir, the crown was passed to her younger sister, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth was the daughter of Henry and Anne Boleyn, and so she grew up in this kind of awkward transition between Catholicism and a new reformed way of doing things. She had no great love for Catholicism, but she also had no great hatred of it either, not like Mary who deeply resented Protestantism for what it had done to her mother.

Elizabeth remained Protestant during Mary’s reign, and this put her at peril. She was distantly connected to a rebellion that occurred in 1554, and she was thrown into the Tower of London for some time. Mary came to believe that her reign was in jeopardy so long as Elizabeth was alive. Even though, by all accounts, they were good friends as children. Nevertheless, when it became clear that Mary would die soon, Mary declared Elizabeth her heir. Which actually says a great deal about their relationship – Mary was an ardent Catholic after all, and so giving the succession to a Protestant was a big deal. Mary clearly must have loved and respected her sister very much, despite everything.

Upon Elizabeth’s succession, she inherited two great challenges: the need to unite the country and to defend the country from other nations who tried to take advantage of England’s weakened position, including both France and Spain. Plus, she was 25 and unmarried, a vulnerable position for any woman of the 16^th century, let alone the Queen of England. And suiters were popping up everywhere, possibly reminding her of Thomas Seymour which put a bad taste in her mouth. But she proved to be a deft leader.

Elizabeth returned the nation to Protestantism, the faith of her mother, but she did so carefully. There were Catholics who still supported Mary’s policies, Protestant exiles returning from the continent, many of whom were hardened Calvinists, and some new emerging groups such as the Puritans who didn’t think the reformation had gone far enough. So she had a lot to contend with, and the nation was divided. But she wasn’t an extremist and she wanted unity and to avoid the sort of religious wars that she saw going on in Europe. She sought a middle way between Catholicism and Protestantism, which has become known as the Elizabethan Settlement.

She did this, basically, by rolling back many of Mary’s Catholic policies and putting into place a number of acts and revisions. In 1559 the Book of Common Prayer received another revision, which include both positions on the eucharist, both the Catholic transubstantiation and a reformed memorialism. If you remember back, the Book of Common Prayer was published by Cranmer during Edward’s reign and was rather vague on the details regarding on the eucharist, but was revised to reflect a much more reformed position without any trace of transubstantiation. Mary then outlawed the book and reinstated the Latin rites of Catholicism. With hard lines Catholics on one side and hard line Protestants on the other, Elizabeth was stuck between a rock and a hard place, and so decided to throw both in there. So the Book of Common Prayer in 1559 reflected both transubstantiation and memorialism. Take your pick. Choose your own adventure. However, while most people didn’t really care and were pretty happy with this – it could possibly be seen as one of the early movements toward religious tolerance – those on the extreme, loud, vocal ends viewed this as a bit of a cop out. The Puritans didn’t want anything to do with anything that sounded remotely like popery. But the Act of Uniformity, passed in that same year, ensured that English worship would follow the prayer book.

She also passed the Act of Supremacy, which changed the language of Henry’s Act of Supremacy. She was made the supreme governor of the Church of England, not the supreme head, as Henry had insisted. She argued that Jesus was the head. This indicates to me that she was actually genuinely concerned with good theology and authentic worship. Possibly the first English monarch who genuinely cared about this stuff in a long time. Over the next four years, Elizabeth worked with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Mathew Parker, to finally nail the new Anglican doctrine. The 42 Articles that were written during Edward’s reign but were never put into practice because Edward died and Mary became queen had a much more reformed, Calvinist, flavour, over against the Catholicism that the English church was separating itself from. This became the basis for Elizabeth’s religious reforms, which were enshrined in what was called the 39 Articles. To be honest, I don’t really love how they name things – the 10 articles, the 6 articles, the 42 Article, and the 39 Articles. They might have had better success if their marketing team came up with better names. That said, it is very British.

These Elizabethan 39 Articles are decidedly Protestant. Transubstantiation was finally rejected as ‘repugnant’, though the language was softened in later years, and declared that ‘justification by faith only is a most wholesome doctrine’, thereby adopting the reformed doctrine of justification by faith alone. The final break with Rome came in 1570 Pope Pius V published the Papal Bull, which is basically a decree from the pope, called Regnans in Excelsis, which excommunicated and deposed Elizabeth, and absolved the Catholics in England from owing her allegiance. The pope ordered his Catholic subjects in England to disobey her. Which meant that every Catholic in England suddenly had a target on their back and immediately became potential traitors. So it wasn’t a very smart political move by the pope, putting his flock in danger like that. It was a difficult time to be a Catholic, and stayed that way for quite a long time, despite Elizabeth’s efforts to ensure their safety and freedom.

In 1588, the Spanish had evidently had enough and sent an armada to invade England. The Spanish Armada outnumbered the English by a not inconsiderable amount and got a head start, but thanks to some fortuitous weather – at least for the English – and some good tactics by the English sailors, the Spanish Armada was beaten and they were sent home in tatters and with their tales between their legs. It was a major political win for Elizabeth.

Overshadowing a lot of her successes was the issue of marriage. Or rather, the lack of marriage. She never married, despite many suitors. Why she never married has been a topic of debate for a long time. It’s possible that her encounter with Thomas Seymour put her off, or she might have been wary about repeating her sister Mary’s mistake in marrying a foreigner who might wield far too much influence over England. There’s also the issue of the patriarchal world in which she lived. If she married someone, that man would then have authority over her. This could be problematic for a queen. So there’s a bit of a complicated cocktail of reasons why she felt she should never marry.

Because she was not married and did not have children, she inherited the nickname the Virgin Queen. Because this is the sort of thing that people always get obsessed with. A cultic myth grew up around her and she was compared to the Virgin Mary.

But there was one man who seems to have been of interest to her. Robert Dudley was a childhood friend and they had always been close. However, he had wife. Well, there’s an easy to solve that dilemma: push her down a staircase.

Now, there’s no evidence that Robert killed his wife by pushing her down some stairs, but it’s pretty suspicious. I mean come on, a flight of stairs? How cliched. In any case, Elizabeth did not marry Dudley. Ha! Loser. Turns out pushing your wife down a staircase does not pay off.

Or maybe it does, because he was made an earl and though they never married she had his bedchambers moved next to her apartment. Shortly after, she became a recluse for a little while and there were rumours that she had fallen ill with a sickness that apparently caused her body to swell. Then, some 20 odd years later a man, who just happened to be in his mid twenties, was discovered in Spain who claimed to be Robert and Elizabeth’s illegitimate son. But the Spanish were unconvinced, and if there really was any truth to the tale the Spanish would have jumped on it to humiliate the English. This man then just kind of…disappeared. Historians generally say that the amount of scrutiny that Elizabeth was permanently under would have made a full term pregnancy pretty much impossible. Fun story though.

Ultimately, she said she was married to the nation and to the people. But also…why should we really care? If she chose to not get married, for her own reasons, whatever they may have been, all power to her. But that’s a very 21st-century way of thinking. In the 16^th century, her behaviour was extremely weird, if not scandalous and unpatriotic, because she wasn’t producing an heir.

There’s a whole lot of other stuff that happened during Elizabeth’s reign, including the start of the East India Company, the colonization of North America, and…oh yes that’s right, the transatlantic slave trade, that little thing, which of course didn’t start with the English but it didn’t take them long to get involved and Elizabeth commissioned the first British slave trading ship, which was called the Good Ship Jesus and she said that Africans could only be taken to the Americas if they consented.

I’m guessing there might have been some misunderstanding about how that word consent was meant to be understood.

In her final years, some of Elizabeth’s friends died and she fell into depression. She died on the 24^th of March 1603. With no direct heir, the closest relation was King James VI of Scotland, who was the great granddaughter of King Henry VIII’s younger sister. James became King James I of England, the man after whom the King James Bible was named, and whose story is…well let’s just it’s fabulous. But that’s for another time.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode, and I hope you’ve enjoyed this series on the English Reformation. Why dedicate 4 whole episodes to this topic? I acknowledge that’s a pretty heavy commitment. But, firstly, this is my podcast and I find the English Reformation really interesting, so that means you have to too, and you’ve listened this far, so you must have found it interesting! Also, we’ve really only scratched the surface.

Secondly, one thing that often gets overlooked when exploring these various isms and schisms is the human aspect. The people who cause these schisms and movements and devise these isms and doctrines have political motivations, economic concerns, and there’s almost always big personalities who are able to sway people’s opinions. Nothing is ever cut and dry, nothing is ever a simple theological discussion. And so in these episodes I’ve tried to draw out that human aspect. From Henry’s greed and narcissism, to the political machinations of aristocratic men, to Mary and Elizabeth witnessing what happened to their mothers and having troubled upbringings. Politics, economics, personalities…all of these things have shaped what the church looks like today, just as much, if not more in some cases, as actual theology.

And I’ll leave you to chew on that.