God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot. Alice Hogge

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СКАЧАТЬ new found devilish Terms of Papist or Heretic’. Her first Parliament had seemed to speak for the majority of her people. Then had come marriage to the reviled King Philip of Spain, the burning of Protestants and a disastrous war with France, and now those same people, the stench of the execution pyres fresh in their nostrils, awaited her death with impatience. On 17 November 1558 it finally came and ‘all the churches in London did ring and at night [the people] did make bonfires and set tables in the street and did eat and drink and make merry for the new Queen’, wrote Machyn in his diary. At just twenty-five years old, though, that new young queen, Elizabeth, was very much an unknown quantity. While London celebrated, Oxford held its breath and waited for what the royal visitors would bring.¹⁵

      On Christmas Day 1558, just weeks into the new reign, Dr Owen Oglethorpe of Magdalen, now Bishop of Carlisle and the officiating divine for the festivities, received a message from Queen Elizabeth asking him not to elevate the consecrated host at High Mass that day. The Spanish ambassador, Count de Feria, reported Oglethorpe’s refusal to comply with the request: ‘Her Majesty was mistress of his body and life, but not of his conscience’. Elizabeth heard mass that day until the gospel had been read and then, as Oglethorpe prepared to celebrate the transformation of bread to body and wine to blood, she rose and left the royal chapel. To those who watched and waited this was the first public indication of which way the Queen might jump.¹⁶

      If Elizabeth herself had wanted a sign of how the battle lines were forming she need not have looked far. Mary’s death had brought with it a flurry of bag packing in Geneva, Zurich, Strasbourg and Frankfurt, the centres of Protestantism, as the exiles from the previous reign prepared to return home. After all, Elizabeth, like her brother Edward, had been educated from childhood in the new religion. Meanwhile, the opposing camp was quick to make its objections felt. At Mary’s funeral the Bishop of Winchester praised the dead monarch as a good and loyal daughter of the true Church, referring to Elizabeth, throughout, as ‘the other sister’. He laid down his challenge to the new Queen, a challenge peculiar to her sex, in the bluntest of terms: ‘How can I, a woman, be head of the church, who, by Scripture, am forbidden to speak in church, except the church shall have a dumb head?’ At Elizabeth’s coronation the Archbishop of York refused to officiate and only Owen Oglethorpe could be persuaded to perform the ceremony. And in France King Henri II, who had ordered that the arms of England should be quartered with those of Scotland upon the marriage of Mary Stuart to the Dauphin, now encouraged his son and daughter-in-law to style themselves King and Queen of England.¹⁷

      Was Elizabeth’s choice of religion ever really in doubt then? She was the daughter of the ‘concubine Anne Boleyn’, the woman for whom Henry VIII had broken with Rome in the first place. Her parents’ marriage had never been recognized by the Catholic Church and her own legitimacy of birth had long been a subject for parliamentary enactment. Just days before her mother’s execution Thomas Cranmer had annulled her parents’ marriage and Elizabeth, at a stroke, was both bastardized and disinherited. Her present claim to the throne rested on her father’s will and the Succession Act of 1543, which reinstated her as Henry’s heir, and the French, in particular, were quick to cast doubts on Parliament’s right to tamper with these sacred laws of inheritance—by Christmas 1558 they ‘did not let to say and talk openly that Her Highness is not lawful Queen of England and that they have already sent to Rome to disprove her right’, wrote Lord Cobham, Elizabeth’s envoy in Paris.¹⁸

      The French had indeed sent to Rome. By the New Year Sir Edward Carne was reporting back from the Holy City that ‘the ambassador of the French laboreth the Pope to declare the Queen illegitimate and the Scottish Queen successor to Queen Mary’. That the French chose to object to Elizabeth’s claim out of political self-interest rather than religious scruple was not in question: they had raised similar doubts about the legitimacy of Elizabeth’s sister Mary when Henry VIII tried to engineer an overly advantageous marriage treaty between her and the Duc d’Orléans. But their challenge to her title underlined Elizabeth’s quandary. If she wished to retain papal supremacy in England she would need to throw herself on the mercy of the Pope. Paul IV had intimated that he was quite ready to consider her claim to her title, but could she really stomach the indignity of going cap in hand to Rome, begging to be excused her bastardy? And could she afford to begin her reign from a position of such weakness? Surely England’s throne was her birthright and no Pope could grant her dispensation to wear the crown? So ‘the wolves of Geneva’ packing to return home to England knew from the start that the odds on Elizabeth seeking a national religion, independent of Rome, were short enough for them to stake their lives on. Now they came back in readiness for that outcome.¹⁹

      They did not have long to wait. On 8 May 1559 Elizabeth dissolved the first Parliament of her reign, giving royal assent to those acts from which her new Church would take its shape: the Act of Supremacy, which settled on Elizabeth the title of Supreme Governor of that Church, and the Act of Uniformity, which agreed the doctrine it should follow.

The reactions followed swiftly. ‘A leaden mediocrity,’ wrote the newly returned Protestant, John Jewel. ‘The Papacy was never abolished…but rather transferred to the sovereign,’ wrote Theodore Béza in Geneva to Heinrich Bullinger in Zurich. From the first, Elizabeth’s was a Protestant settlement that failed to please the Protestants. But neither did it please the Catholics. ‘Religion here now is simply a question of policy’, wrote the Bishop of Aquila from London, ‘and in a hundred thousand ways they let us see that they neither love us nor fear us.’ John Jewel expressed his surprise that ‘the ranks of the papists have fallen almost of their own accord’, and Count de Feria wrote sadly home to Spain to explain why: ‘The Catholics are in a great majority in the country, and if the leading men in it were not of so small account things would have turned out differently.’* And in London a zealous mob went on the rampage, stripping the capital’s churches of their statues and stained-glass windows ‘as if it had been the sacking of some hostile city’.²⁰

      From the start Elizabeth’s religious settlement was a compromise. Like all compromises it failed to satisfy anyone and like all compromises it would be subjected to stresses and strains as each dissatisfied party tried, in turn, to wrest back the advantage. But it is the fact that there was need for a compromise that is of significance to this story, because it suggests a country divided into pressure groups of equal fighting weight.

      The religious changes of the English Reformation, so decisive and so devastating for a select few in key positions of authority, had filtered slowly through the rest of the country, dependent upon the efficiency and willingness of those officers charged with their enforcement. By 1558 England’s religious spectrum was a kaleidoscope of colours ranging all the way from the most Roman of purples to Puritan grey. It is impossible to estimate the precise number of confirmed Catholics and Protestants, together with the number of relative indifferents, in England at Elizabeth’s succession. It is equally impossible to arrive at a precise and consistent definition for English Catholicism or English Protestantism at this time: these were not hermetic terms upon which everyone could agree and with which everyone could identify. Indeed it is unlikely that everyone could have told you what they were, Catholic or Protestant, if questioned. It is highly probable that in reaching a compromise settlement the Government paid close attention to the predictable response of the powerful and predatory Catholic nations of Europe. But it is certain that such a compromise would not have been necessary had England not been divided, top to bottom, on this matter of religion. The England Elizabeth inherited was definitely not a Protestant country.

      For every Londoner in the largely pro-Protestant capital who went on a spree of vandalism, there was someone else in the shires and villages quietly secreting away the statues, crucifixes and church plate for happier СКАЧАТЬ