Heretic Queen (6 page)

Others advised a revolutionary blow to the Marian religious solution: to call Parliament forthwith and set up a national church complete with its own Protestant prayer book, admonishing that “the sooner that religion is restored, God is the more glorified, and … will be more merciful to us and better save and defend her Highness from all dangers.”
14

Elizabeth had already given her people a clear sign of her Protestant intentions on Christmas Day when she ordered Archbishop Oglethorpe
not
to elevate the host at Mass in accordance with the Catholic rite. His refusal to obey his queen resulted in Elizabeth storming out of the service immediately. Two days later, though she hadn't had the authority to do so, she issued a proclamation permitting certain parts of the service in English after the Protestant fashion but forbidding all preaching and teaching as a restraint on the most vocal of the “ministers of Lucifer”—as the Catholic bishops called the Protestant Marian exiles.
15

*   *   *

So, while Sir William
Cecil gathered up all advices from both Protestants and Catholics, privy councillors and burgesses, and port towns and the City of London and compiled the first of his many “memoranda of lists” of pros and cons, Elizabeth ordered him to issue the writs summoning Parliament for its first session on January 23, 1559. On February 9, the “Bill to restore the supremacy of the Church of England &c. to the Crown of the realm” had its first reading in the Commons. Where Mary had bulldozed through her “Act of Repeal in restoring Papal Authority in England to the House of Lords,” Elizabeth had to be more circumspect, channeling her proposals through the Commons. Despite those ten seats left vacant by bishops who had died in the autumn of 1558, a large minority of the upper house still wore the purple gowns of Catholic bishops. If the bishops opposed the anointed monarch, Elizabeth preferred that the confrontation take place between the Commons and the Lords, not the monarchy and the Lords. In the event, it was the Commons that would prove to be the trickier of the two houses.

A second bill was drafted for “Royal Supremacy over the Church,” with the queen as its head. At the same time, Elizabeth tried to calm the Spanish Ambassador, Count de Feria, over any perceived changes away from Mary's religious settlement. He wrote to the Vatican pretending to know that Elizabeth was “resolved to restore religion as her father left it,” meaning effectively as an Anglican form of Catholicism albeit with the monarch as head of the church.
16
Whether this was cunning political maneuvering to bring the more moderate Catholic bishops to her side in the struggle ahead is rather difficult to say, but it would have been a masterstroke of both political and religious unity if she could have engineered it. The Catholic bishops could have preserved Elizabeth from a heavy reliance on the Protestant hard-liners, or “hot gospellers,” allowing the queen to tread her middle way. Instead, England and Elizabeth came a poor second for the bishops.

With a core of around a quarter of the members of Parliament being Marian exiles, men clothed in what would become known as “Puritan gray,” Elizabeth found that the House of Commons would represent a formidable force for reform, despite her wishes. The radical leaders—men like Sir Anthony Cooke, Cecil's father-in-law, and Sir Francis Knollys, Elizabeth's cousin by marriage—apparently swept aside the weakened Catholic opposition in the Commons and added another bill “for the order of service and ministers in the church.” The following day, yet another bill, “The book for the common prayer and ministration of the sacraments,” put forward by both Cooke and Knollys, was entered in the Commons Journal.
17
The Protestant “ministers of Lucifer” were in firm control of the Commons, aiming to put forward an extreme solution to the religious question with their own radical bill and prayer book. Cooke and Knollys led the Commons in the prolonged debate that ensued, aimed at tagging on these two bills to the Supremacy Bill that had already gone up to the Lords.
18
Their action was tantamount to bringing the religious settlement back to the days of Edward VI and the 1552 prayer book that had been such an abomination to Catholics.

This was a most unwelcomed maneuver from the “ministers of Lucifer,” hateful to Elizabeth and absolutely contrary to her policy at this most sensitive moment. Naturally the amended Supremacy Bill was in trouble in the Lords. Catholic voices were raised to a fever pitch against it. Bishop Scot of Chester delivered a long-winded speech, effectively saying he was opposed to the queen as head of the church. The archbishop of York, Nicholas Heath, gave a rather more succinct account of why the queen could not be “Supreme Head of the Church of England, immediate and next unto God.” Parliament had no right, he believed, to grant any spiritual role to her, particularly as she was a woman and incapable of fulfilling Christ's injunction to Peter to feed his flock. St. Paul, he quoted, had placed an obligation on women to be silent in church and not to “lord it” over men. Paradoxically, this was the same argument used by the Presbyterian “hot gospeller” John Knox in his tirade against the “monstrous regiment of women” that had so offended Elizabeth. Common ground had been struck by extremists on both sides.

The Commons at last understood that they would never get their amended bill through the House of Lords. With Easter looming on the calendar—Sunday, March 26—a compromise needed to be made for the holiday or the Catholic order of service would stand, with the pope as head of the Church of England. Either the Commons would accept the Lords' amendments and lose the Protestant prayer book or reject them and retain the pope. The compromise—which pleased none—was that Elizabeth would become Supreme Head of the Church of England. On March 22, the queen made it known that she intended to give her assent to the Act of Supremacy “in the present last session of Parliament” reviving the statute of Edward VI for Communion in
both kinds
—meaning both Protestant and Catholic.
19
The “ministers of Lucifer” glowered with rage at the compromise. In the words of the Spanish ambassador two days later, “I see that the heretics are very downcast in the last few days.”

*   *   *

What the Spanish
ambassador hadn't known was that Elizabeth had made a complete volte-face on her “hasten slowly” policy. On Palm Sunday, March 19, the queen received word that a peace treaty had been signed at Cateau-Cambrésis between Spain, England, and France. Relieved of the uncertainty regarding the peace negotiations, William Cecil made his true feelings known to Elizabeth and, along with Sir Nicholas Bacon, Sir Francis Knollys, and others advising the Privy Council persuaded her that now was the time to strike in
all
religious matters—including the uniformity of churches in England and their prayer book. What most likely sealed their success was the argument from Cecil that though history repeats itself, it seldom does so in precisely the same way. The challenges that Elizabeth faced differed from those in her father's or her brother's or her sister's reigns and needed to be treated with an independent solution. The following morning, Elizabeth gave her assent to a disputation between nine Protestant and nine Catholic divines to determine the questions of supremacy and uniformity.

With only days to go before the originally intended deadline of March 24, Elizabeth ordered instead that Parliament be adjourned until after Easter, when the disputation could take place. Of the nine Protestant voices, only one had not been exiled during Mary's reign. As feared, pandemonium broke out, and the disputation was adjourned. The clerk of the Commons made only one entry in his
Journal
noting that some members of the House met, read part of a bill, and “adjourned to hear the disputation between the bishops … and other Englishmen that came from Geneva.”
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*   *   *

Timing in the religious
settlement was everything. Elizabeth had been won over to the Protestant side by an improvement in her international fortunes, irrespective of the debates in Parliament. The Commons, in the main the strong Protestant voices of the “hot gospellers,” charged forward and appended another bill to restore to the crown any monasteries or chantries revived under Mary. The only point on which both sides of the religious divide were united was that a woman could not be the Supreme Head of the Church. Elizabeth gave an indication of royal assent if the Commons would consider a compromise. The “hot gospellers” assented, and Elizabeth agreed to adopt the title of Supreme Governor of the Church of England instead. Both sides were relieved and further agreed quickly on one final amendment: that nothing done by this particular Parliament should be judged heresy or schism later. The bills as amended passed the Lords with all the Catholic spiritual peers and one lay peer dissenting.
21

By Easter 1559, England had a combined Act of Supremacy and Act of Uniformity, and a legitimate queen. Only time would tell if Elizabeth—naturally imperious, formidable, self-willed, and calculating, but nonetheless a politically untested twenty-five-year-old woman—would prove a strong enough sovereign to bring England through its social, economic, political, and religious crises with any degree of diplomacy, vision, and aplomb.

Few outside the corridors of power understood Elizabeth's need to have her people obey her command regardless of their religious beliefs and for no other reason than they were loyal English men and women. Even fewer understood that she valued freedom of speech in Parliament and elsewhere.
22
From Elizabeth's viewpoint, the outpouring of love expressed by Londoners during her coronation procession had made it clear that they saw her as the Protestant savior providing the nation with new hope, prosperity, and independence from the foreign influence that rankled so during her sister Mary's reign. To succeed in their expectations, she would need all of the powers of diplomacy, tact, and even dissimulation that she could summon.

Failure was simply not an option.

 

THREE

Determined to Be a Virgin Queen

It is hoped that the Queen will not long continue to temporize so much in regard to her marriage, and many think that she will not be so very uncompliant with the wishes of the King [of Spain] who greatly fears lest your Holiness should make some pronouncement [of bastardy] … against the said Queen to the advantage of the King of France.

—Coded intelligence from London to Pope Paul IV, April 24, 1559

Hand in hand with the Act of Uniformity was the preoccupation that haunted the entire Tudor dynasty: the succession. Elizabeth's advisers were frankly stumped as to who would make a suitable husband to strengthen the Protestant settlement. Love, of course, never entered into the equation. The issue of who would be England's monarch after Elizabeth, and whom she could marry to give England the son and heir to ensure a
Protestant
succession, was a top state priority. Ancillary worries like what would happen if she died while that son was in his minority or, worse, if she, too, only gave birth to a girl, were not foremost in the minds of those urging her to wed. Yet despite the huge significance surrounding the succession, Elizabeth herself seemed to be uninterested in the marriage question at all.

By the spring of 1559, Elizabeth had bestowed her distinct favor on her dashing Master of the Horse, Sir Robert Dudley. Elizabeth had known Dudley most of her life, significantly sharing her time with him while they were both prisoners in the Tower, where their bond of friendship grew. However, as the son and grandson of men who had been executed as traitors, and the brother-in-law of poor Lady Jane Grey, executed by Mary for usurping her throne, Lord Robert could have only been termed, at the best of times, a poor choice of consort. Dudley was further disqualified as a possible husband on other, more substantial, grounds. He was already a married man. His wife of some years, Amy, was safely tucked away in the country reportedly dying of a “lump in her breast.”

Count de Feria wrote to Philip II that spring, “Lord Robert has come so much in favor that he does whatever he likes with affairs, and it is even said that her Majesty visits him in his chamber day and night. People talk of this so freely that they go so far as to say that … the Queen is only waiting for her [his wife] to die to marry Lord Robert.”
1

Never one to be deterred from a desire to control Elizabeth, and thereby England, de Feria suggested to Philip that it might “be well to approach Lord Robert on your Majesty's behalf, promising him your help and favour and coming to terms with him.”
2
What terms, if any, could those possibly be?

When William Cecil got word of de Feria's plotting, he was livid. He had been bewildered by the queen's sudden girlish flirtation with Dudley and was determined to get her married off and into safe hands before it was too late. Memories were long when it came to certain matters, and none had forgotten that while still a princess, Elizabeth had nearly lost her reputation and perhaps more through her scandalous association with Thomas Seymour, her stepfather. It was one thing for a young princess to act flirtatiously but quite another matter altogether for a queen of England to behave so indecorously.

Still, Elizabeth was queen and felt that Cecil was the one behaving unreasonably. Given Elizabeth's lifelong expertise at playing one faction against another, it's quite possible that the more Cecil protested, the more she sought to bring him to heel by ignoring him, but that is not to take anything away from what would become a deep and lasting devotion to Dudley. Her daily outings with her Master of the Horse, hunting from morning until night, were the steamy stuff melting all diplomatic missives. The French, Venetian, Spanish, and papal envoys speculated madly, and incorrectly, about Elizabeth's intentions. It seemed to Cecil that the longer the affair continued, the less marriageable Elizabeth would become, potentially endangering her reputation and the realm beyond repair.