The more committed or devout Catholics now migrated to France or to Italy, taking with them their threatened relics; among them were the monks who had been ejected from the Charterhouse of London. One woodcut showed the exodus of the faithful, with the legend ‘Ship over your trinkets and be packing you Papistes’. One priest threw himself from the steeple of St Magnus the Martyr, on Lower Thames Street, into the river below.
In the spring of 1547, three months after the coronation, a set of injunctions was issued for the general purification of the churches. Every picture was to be removed from the walls, and every image of saint or apostle was to be put away ‘so that there should remain no memory of the same’. Rosaries were no longer to be used. The ‘lighting of candles, kissing, kneeling, decking of images’ were denounced as superstitious; processions to shrines were no longer permitted, and in the more radical parishes of London stained-glass windows were smashed or removed. Other godly parishes were filled with equal enthusiasm. In Much Wenlock, Shropshire, the bones of a local saint were thrown onto a bonfire. In Norwich ‘divers curates and other idle persons’ visited the churches in the search for idolatrous images. In Durham the royal commissioners jumped up and down on the monstrance paraded at the festival of Corpus Christi. It was decreed that elaborate polyphonal music was no longer appropriate in a house of worship. The organs also fell silent. It had been said by reformers that the music of the old Church was ‘but roaring, howling, whistling, mumming, conjuring and juggling; and the playing at the organs a foolish vanity’.
The injunctions had also ordered the use of the English litany, and the reading of the lessons in English. The churchwardens were required to purchase one copy of the Paraphrase of the New Testament of Erasmus, a key text for the reformers. They were also obliged to keep within the church an edition of Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Homilies, a collection of twelve sermons on the principal doctrines of the English Church; the sermons were to be read from the pulpit on successive Sundays, and were largely Cranmer’s own work in which he was able to set out his vision of the reformed faith. That is why there was no mention of the Mass, and only the most cursory reference to baptism. The sovereign source of strength and power lay in a proper reading of the Bible for ‘the Scripture is full, as well of low valleys, plain ways, and easy for every man to walk in, as also of high hills and mountains, which few men can ascend unto’. The graceful cadences and euphonies of Cranmer’s style did much to ease the introduction of the new faith.
In May 1547, a general ‘visitation’ of the churches was announced. The country was divided into six circuits, and the royal commissioners interrogated the parish clergy on their compliance with the injunctions. Was the English litany in proper use? Did any priest still preach the primacy of the pope? Are there still any ‘misused images … clothes, stones, shoes, offerings, kissings, candlesticks, trindles of wax and such like’? The visitors commanded all parishes to give up their ancient festivals or ‘church ales’ in which money was raised for the maintenance of the church fabric; festivals in commemoration of the local saint were also forbidden.
One by one the great seasonal festivities of the old Church were silenced. The processions on Corpus Christi in celebration of the holy Eucharist, the May games of Robin Hood, the Hocktide ‘bindings’ of Easter where the members of one sex tied up the other, only to release them on the promise of a kiss or a small payment – all of these were denounced as relics of popery. There were to be no more rituals involving the ‘boy bishops’, whereby a young boy was dressed up to parody a divine, and the churches were no longer to be decorated with flowers. The religious guilds were abolished, too, and with them vanished the pageant plays of previous generations. One contemporary wrote that the country, ‘once renowned throughout Christendom as merry England, has lost its joy and merriment, and must be called sad and sorrowful England’.
So the interiors of the churches were now whitewashed with lime and chalk; the crucifix was supplanted by the royal arms, and the written commandments took the place of the frescoes. They had been, as one fervent homilist put it, ‘scoured of such gay gazing sights’. The conservative faithful compared them to barns rather than to chapels but, for the godly, they were the appropriate setting for psalms, Bible readings and sermons. These more radical and reformed churches were now fundamentally different from any that had come before, and were the harbingers of wholly new forms of worship. In the winter of 1547 the great rood of St Paul’s Cathedral, together with all the other images, was taken down in the course of one night. Subsequently the charnel house and chapel were turned into dwelling houses and shops. A decline in lay piety was already sufficiently obvious. When John Leland had toured the southwest of England five years previously, to prepare material for his Itinerary, he could find no signs of any church-building; the churches he praised were all the work of earlier generations.
Two bishops spoke out against the changes. Stephen Gardiner, excluded from the councils of the king, denounced the excessive zeal for innovation. ‘If you cut the old canal,’ he said, ‘the water is apt to run further than you have a mind to.’ When he was warned that his opposition to the council might put him in danger he replied that ‘I am already by nature condemned to death’. Gardiner wrote to the protector asking him not to continue with his work of reform during the minority of the king; he believed that it would endanger public peace. The bishop also wrote to Thomas Cranmer, disputing some of the doctrines upheld in the Book of Homilies. Gardiner was summoned to the council and required to obey the new injunctions; when he prevaricated he was sent to the Fleet prison, accompanied by his cook and two servants.
Edmund Bonner, bishop of London, had already preceded him to that place. ‘Ah bishop,’ the reforming duchess of Suffolk exclaimed as she passed beneath the window of Gardiner’s cell, ‘it is merry with the lambs when the wolves are shut up!’ But the bishops were not the only protesters. The French ambassador reported murmurings of grief and anger ‘in the northern parts on account of the novelties which are attempted every day by these new governors against the ancient approved religion’. The murmurings grew louder and louder until eventually a rebellion arose in the land.
18
Have at all papists!
Protector Somerset was, above all else, a soldier; his sphere was war. From the earliest days of the protectorate he was concerned with national defences, along the south coast and in the northern lands where the threat from Scotland was still very strong. He had proved his military capacities in that country, by mounting a successful invasion and an effective border raid in two successive years, and his eyes were turned to Scotland again. In 1543 Prince Edward had been betrothed to Mary, infant queen of Scots, but nothing had transpired. It was most unlikely that anything would. Yet Somerset still publicly expressed hopes of a union between the two countries, a kingdom of ‘Great Britain’ united in the strength of the reformed religion.
Like many successful military commanders he was rough in speech and inclined to deliver orders rather than to consult; he came to rely upon proclamations, for example, as the method of ordering the nation and issued seventy-seven of them in a little under three years. They varied from decrees against the hoarding of grain to the regulation of the price of meat. These proclamations did not have to be approved by the council, and in almost every case they were accompanied by the threat of severe punishment. It may be that he was uneasy about the source and nature of his power and therefore required the blunt force of the proclamation. Whatever the reason, he acquired a reputation for arrogance and froideur; it was widely reported that he did not truly consult with his colleagues of the council and preferred to rule all from a lonely eminence. ‘Of late,’ one old courtier wrote to him, ‘your Grace is grown into great choleric fashions, whensoever you are contraried in that which you have conceived in your head.’ Yet he did possess what might be called a paternalistic concern for the country, as long as its interests coincided with his own.