Mary’s decision to marry Prince Philip of Spain (later Philip II), her Habsburg cousin and the son of Charles V, the man who had defended her mother’s marital rights, proved to be unwise. Given her age—she was 32 when she came to the throne—a quick marriage was essential to childbearing, but this one proved to be a failure. Her marriage was without love or children, and, by associating Roman Catholicism in the popular mind with Spanish arrogance, it triggered a rebellion that almost overthrew the Tudor throne. In January 1554, under the leadership of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger, the peasants of Kent rose up against the queen’s Roman Catholic and Spanish policies, and 3,000 men marched on London. The rebellion was crushed, but it revealed to Mary and her chief minister, Cardinal Pole, that the kingdom was filled with disloyal hearts who placed Protestantism and nationalism higher than their obedience to the throne.
The tragedy of Mary’s reign was the belief not only that the old church of her mother’s day could be restored but also that it could be best served by fire and blood. At least 282 men and women were martyred in the Smithfield Fires during the last three years of her reign; compared with events on the Continent, the numbers were not large, but the emotional impact was great. Among the first half-dozen martyrs were the Protestant leaders Cranmer, Nicholas Ridley, Hugh Latimer, and John Hooper, who were burned to strike terror into the hearts of lesser men. Their deaths, however, had the opposite effect; their bravery encouraged others to withstand the flames, and the Smithfield Fires continued to burn because nobody could think of what to do with heretics except put them to death. The law required it, the prisons were overflowing, and the martyrs themselves offered the government no way out except to enforce the grisly laws.
Nicholas Ridley, detail of a portrait by an unknown artist, 1555; in the National Portrait Gallery, LondonCourtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London
Mary’s reign was a study in failure. Her husband, who was 10 years her junior, remained in England as short a time as possible; the war between France and the Habsburg empire, into which her Spanish marriage had dragged the kingdom, was a disaster and resulted in the loss of England’s last Continental outpost, Calais; her subjects came to call her “Bloody Mary” and greeted the news of her death and the succession of her sister, Elizabeth, on November 17, 1558, with ringing bells and bonfires. Elizabeth I (1558–1603)
No one in 1558, any more than in 1485, would have predicted that—despite the social discord, political floundering, and international humiliation of the past decade—the kingdom again stood on the threshold of an extraordinary reign. To make matters worse, the new monarch was the wrong sex. Englishmen knew that it was unholy and unnatural that “a woman should reign and have empire above men.” At age 25, however, Elizabeth I was better prepared than most women to have empire over men. She had survived the palace revolutions of her brother’s reign and the Roman Catholicism of her sister’s; she was the product of a fine Renaissance education, and she had learned the need for strong secular leadership devoid of religious bigotry. Moreover, she possessed her father’s magnetism without his egotism or ruthlessness. She was also her mother’s daughter, and the offspring of Anne Boleyn had no choice but to reestablish the royal supremacy and once again sever the ties with Rome.
Elizabeth’s religious settlement was constructed on the doctrine of adiaphorism, the belief that, except for a few fundamentals, there exists in religion a wide area of “things indifferent” that could be decided by the government on the basis of expediency. Conservative opposition was blunted by entitling the queen “supreme governor,” not “head,” of the church and by combining the words of the 1552 prayer book with the more conservative liturgical actions of the 1549 prayer book. At the same time, many of the old papal trappings of the church were retained. Protestant radicals went along with this compromise in the expectation that the principle of “things indifferent” meant that Elizabeth would, when the political dust had settled, rid her church of the “livery of Antichrist” and discard its “papal rags.” In this they were badly mistaken, for the queen was determined to keep her religious settlement exactly as it had been negotiated in 1559. As it turned out, Roman Catholics proved to be better losers than Protestants: of the 900 parish clergy, only 189 refused to accept Elizabeth as supreme governor, but the Protestant radicals—the future Puritans—were soon at loggerheads with their new sovereign. The Tudor ideal of government
The religious settlement was part of a larger social arrangement that was authoritarian to its core. Elizabeth was determined to be queen in fact as well as in name. She tamed the House of Commons with tact combined with firmness, and she carried on a love affair with her kingdom in which womanhood, instead of being a disadvantage, became her greatest asset. The men she appointed to help her run and stage-manage the government were politiques like herself: William Cecil, Baron Burghley, her principal secretary and in 1572 her lord treasurer; Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury; and a small group of other moderate and secular men.
In setting her house in order, the queen followed the hierarchical assumptions of her day. All creation was presumed to be a great chain of being, running from the tiniest insect to the Godhead itself, and the universe was seen as an organic whole in which each part played a divinely prescribed role. In politics every element was expected to obey “one head, one governor, one law” in exactly the same way as all parts of the human body obeyed the brain. The crown was divine and gave leadership, but it did not exist alone, nor could it claim a monopoly of divinity, for all parts of the body politic had been created by God. The organ that spoke for the entire kingdom was not the king alone but “king in Parliament,” and, when Elizabeth sat in the midst of her Lords and Commons, it was said that “every Englishman is intended to be there present from the prince to the lowest person in England.” The Tudors needed no standing army in “the French fashion” because God’s will and the monarch’s decrees were enshrined in acts of Parliament, and this was society’s greatest defense against rebellion. The controlling mind within this mystical union of crown and Parliament belonged to the queen. The Privy Council, acting as the spokesman of royalty, planned and initiated all legislation, and Parliament was expected to turn that legislation into law. Inside and outside Parliament the goal of Tudor government was benevolent paternalism in which the strong hand of authoritarianism was masked by the careful shaping of public opinion, the artistry of pomp and ceremony, and the deliberate effort to tie the ruling elite to the crown by catering to the financial and social aspirations of the landed country gentleman. Every aspect of government was intimate because it was small and rested on the support of probably no more than 5,000 key persons. The bureaucracy consisted of a handful of privy councillors at the top and possibly 500 paid civil servants at the bottom—the 15 members of the secretariat, the 265 clerks and custom officials of the treasury, a staff of 50 in the judiciary, and approximately 150 more scattered in other departments. Tudor government was not predominantly professional. Most of the work was done by unpaid amateurs: the sheriffs of the shires, the lord lieutenants of the counties, and, above all, the Tudor maids of all work, the 1,500 or so justices of the peace. Meanwhile, each of the 180 “corporate” towns and cities was governed by men chosen locally by a variety of means laid down in the particular royal charter each had been granted.