The Elizabethans (13 page)

In Westminster Hall, at the end of March 1559, she had commanded a public debate about such matters as the Eucharist. Elizabeth herself, when once quizzed by her Catholic sister about her beliefs, had replied with the theologically impeccable, but brilliantly ambivalent quatrain of her own composition:

Christ was the Word that spake it,

He took the bread and brake it,

And what His words did make it,

That I believe and take it.

Only the word
did
is dubious from a Catholic viewpoint, since it implies a questioning of the sacerdotal power to summon Christ to the altar with each and every offering of the Eucharistic sacrifice.

But where did it leave the English churchgoer who, in one generation, had lived through the Henrician Reformation, the Edwardian Reformation and the Marian Counter-Reformation? Henry had abolished monasteries, cut off the English Church from the Pope and placed in every parish church what Catholics deemed to be an heretical translation of the Bible. But he had insisted upon the very presence of Christ in the Mass. He had retained Catholic Holy Orders – bishops, priests and deacons – and he had insisted that those who wished should go to confession to a priest and receive absolution. Edward VI’s advisers were much more Protestant and, without the restraining influence of the ambivalent Cranmer, the mellifluous compiler of the new Prayer Books, might easily have introduced a system of Presbyterianism in which bishops and priests were abolished and the Eucharist declared unambiguously to be no more than a memorial meal, its elements merely bread and wine.

Mary had come to the throne and she had never wavered from the position for which Henry VIII’s greatest Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, had died: that a Catholicism that tried to separate itself from its parent stem, the Holy See of Rome, was an impossibility. But in her fervent desire to restore Catholicism she had burned heretics at the stake, including Elizabeth’s godfather, Archbishop Cranmer.

Elizabeth’s desire was, in the words of the Lord Keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon, ‘to secure and unite the people of the realm in one uniform order to the glory of God and to general tranquillity’.
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This might have been her desire, but the reality was the reverse either of order or tranquillity.

The Venetian observer Il Schifanoya noted that the Bishop of London, Edmund Bonner, defiantly continued to have the old Roman Mass at St Paul’s Cathedral up to St John the Baptist’s Day (24 June) 1559. When the Council summoned him, he robustly answered, ‘I possess three things, soul, body and property: of the two last you can dispose at your pleasure, but as to the soul God alone can command me.’
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He was eventually imprisoned in the Marshalsea, where he died of an illness. Elizabeth had a particular hatred of Bonner, who had been a leading enthusiast for the incineration of (live) heretics at Smithfield. (He had, however, accepted Henry VIII’s claim to be the head of the English Church and he had not followed the path of More or Fisher to martyrdom or recusancy.) Equally, however, Elizabeth would have disapproved of the Puritan louts who rioted within yards of St Paul’s. ‘These accursed preachers,’ wrote the Venetian:

who have come from Germany, do not fail to preach in their own fashion, both in public and in private, in such wise that they persuaded certain rogues to forcibly enter the church of St Mary-le-Bow in the middle of Cheapside, and force the shrine of the most Holy Sacrament, breaking the tabernacle, and throwing the most precious consecrated body of Jesus Christ to the ground. They also destroyed the altar and the images, with the pall and church linen, breaking everything into a thousand pieces.

Equally baffling to the Italian was the fact that in the Chapel Royal, ‘Mass was sung in English, with the Communion being given in both kinds.’ (Among the Roman Catholics it was only the custom – and still is the custom in most churches – to give the Host, reserving the Chalice for the celebrant priest alone.) The Venetian was fascinated to learn that the Mass had been sung by a priest wearing Catholic vestments, but that to distribute Communion he had divested himself and wore just a surplice –
la semplice cotta
.
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To impose order on this anarchy was no easy task, and it would require a new Archbishop of Canterbury. Mary, astonishingly for one who cared so much about the Church, had an ageing and enfeebled collection of bishops. You would have expected her, and her Archbishop, Reginald Pole, to urge upon the Pope the necessity of the swift replacement of dead or decrepit diocesans, but at the time of her death there were no fewer than nine vacant sees, whose bishops had died in the last year of her reign. Pole himself had died at the same time as Mary herself, so Elizabeth did not have the painful task of removing him. The Archbishop of York, Nicholas Heath, was urged to accept the Elizabethan settlement of the Church, but he was unable to do so, and was permitted to retire to Surrey. Of the remaining diocesan bishops, only Anthony Kitchin of Llandaff took the oath to Elizabeth. This left no more than ten who at first tried to block the religious reforms in the House of Lords and were then removed from office. None of them were killed, still less burned at the stake as Cranmer had been.

Guided no doubt by Cambridge-obsessed William Cecil, the Queen appointed a don as the new Archbishop of Canterbury. This was the prodigious scholar and bibliophile Matthew Parker, Master of Corpus Christi College and Vice Chancellor of Cecil’s old university. Elizabeth herself had reason to love Parker. He had been her mother’s chaplain, and when Anne Boleyn was about to be beheaded she urged the Protestant Dr Parker to give spiritual guidance to her little daughter. He had preached before the ‘lady Elizabeth’ at Hatfield.
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A diffident man unused to the machinations of courts or the hurly-burly of politics, Parker seemed at first an improbable pilot for the fledgling Church of England. He himself certainly thought so, confiding to his diary, ‘
17 Decembr, Ann. 1559.
CONSECRATUS
sum in Archiepiscopum Cantuarien. Heu! Heu! Domine Deus, in quae tempora servasti me? Jam veni in profundum aquarum, et tempestas demersit me
.’ (17 December 1559. I was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury. Alas! Alas! Lord God, for what times has thou kept me? For now I am plunged into the depth of the waters and the storm has overwhelmed me.)
⁶

It is worth noting – since it was questioned subsequently by controversialists with an axe to grind – that Parker’s consecration could leave no doubt of its Catholic and Apostolic intentions. That is, the bishops who took part in the ceremony believed their authority to derive in an unbroken line, by the laying-on of hands, back to the Apostles of Christ himself. The bishops who consecrated Parker were William Barlow, former Prior of Bisham, who had been made a bishop in Henry VIII’s reign and was Bishop of St David’s until deprived of his see by Mary; Hodgkins, another bishop consecrated in Henry VIII’s time; and two bishops of Edwardian vintage, Miles Coverdale and John Scory. The consecrating bishops invoked the Holy Spirit with the words of the Apostle Paul: ‘Take the Holy Ghost, and remember that thou stir up the grace of God that is in thee by imposition of hands.’
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It cannot be doubted that all those present would have seen this as much more than a mere form of words, and that they would have shared William Cecil’s view that English bishops ‘had been apostolically ordained and not merely elected by a congregation like Lutheran or Calvinist heretics.’
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Forty-five years passed before the concoction of the so-called Nag’s Head Fable, first published in Antwerp, in 1604. This claimed that the deprived Catholic bishops had been summoned to the Nag’s Head tavern in Cheapside and asked to consecrate Parker and the other new Elizabethan bishops. When they refused, pressure was put upon Scory, ‘an apostate monk’, to do so, even though he was not – according to the fable – himself consecrated; and ‘they all rose up Bishops’ after Scory had merely waved a Bible over their heads. This scurrilous yarn would not be worth denying, were it not for the fact that so many, even down to the twentieth century, were persuaded by it.

Though the Nag’s Head Fable is no longer believed, there has been a tendency, even among academic historians of our own day, to speak as if Parker’s consecration was somehow unreal or invalid. Kenneth Carleton, in
Bishops and Reform in the English Church, 1520–1559
, wrote, ‘the day 17 December 1559 was a watershed in the history of the English Church. More than any other event, the consecration of Matthew Parker marked the final and definitive split from the Western Catholicism which subsisted in the Church of Rome and drew its unifying principle from communion with the Pope’. This is on a surface level self-evidently true, but even this statement needs qualifying. When the Council of Trent reassembled (it rumbled on, redefining doctrine and making European liturgy uniform for nearly twenty years, from 1545 to 1563), the Pope invited Elizabeth I to send representatives of the English Church, and William Cecil (no papalist he) felt that the Church ‘could not refuse to allow the presidency of the Pope, provided it was understood that the Pope was not above the Council, but merely its head; and its decision should be accepted in England if they were in harmony with Holy Scripture and the first four Councils’ – that is, of the early Church.
⁹

That is why some readers could be misled by Carleton’s conclusion: ‘from Parker onwards, it could truly be said that the Anglican Church possessed a Protestant episcopate’. It could not be truly said, for the reasons already rehearsed in this chapter: namely, no such body as ‘the Anglican Church’ existed and, although Parker would appoint some Protestant-minded clergymen as bishops, none of them would have recognised such a phenomenon as ‘a Protestant episcopate’.
¹⁰
There is in fact no such thing. Either there is an episcopate, whose bishops are bishops of the universal Church, or there is no episcopate. How important it was to have bishops, whether you could have a Church without bishops – these were matters that the Elizabethans discussed keenly. But a bishop, was (is) a bishop, whether he calls himself a Copt or a Russian, an Englishman or an Italian.

Parker then set to work filling the many sees that had become vacant owing to Pole’s negligence or the resignation of their conservative occupants. Many of the new bishops were far more Protestant than the Queen, but she insisted that they dress in the same outfits as had been worn by the Catholic bishops of Mary’s reign – a rochet, or long surplice with gathered cuffs, over which they wore a chimere, a sleeveless tabard, which reached to their ankles. Bishops of the Church of England still wear this rig in Parliament to this day. The clothes of the ordinary clergy were no less important to Elizabeth, as they were to many of her contemporaries. The apparel oft proclaims the man, and clothes in church have a symbolic significance that was not lost on the controversialists of those overheated times. To celebrate Mass, a priest in the Western Church wears a chasuble, a sleeveless garment like a poncho, thrown over the head. Its historical origin was in the
pinula
or
planeta
of the late classical world. Early chasubles were simply the ‘Sunday best’ of a Roman man in the fourth century. But what had been simply a sign that the president at the Eucharist wished to look smart,
endimanché
, became in time a symbol of the accumulations of Catholic doctrine surrounding the liturgy at which the garment was worn. To wear a chasuble meant that you believed Christ came to the altar. It meant the Real Presence. It meant a Catholic understanding of the Sacrament. The Queen, whose father wrote theological treatises, whose sister had burned heretics at the stake and whose closest adviser was the religiously Protestant Cecil, did not, surely, ask her bishops and priests to wear vestments simply because they looked pretty. She wanted the ministers of the Sacrament in the Church of England to wear chasubles at the Eucharistic table because she wanted Henry VIII’s Anglo-Catholic religion – Catholicism translated into English, Catholicism without the Pope – to be the norm. John Jewel, a learned and godly man who had gone into exile during Mary’s reign, returned and was made Bishop of Salisbury.

Jewel wrote the first major theological treatise of the reign,
An Apology of the Church of England
(published in 1562). He maintained that the Church of England, far from departing from Catholic tradition, was in fact returning to it. It was Rome that had departed ‘from God’s word, from Christ’s commandments, from the apostles’ ordinances, from the primitive church’s examples, from the old fathers and councils orders’. The church orders decreed by Elizabeth and her advisers were
not
an innovation, still less a new denomination. England had ‘returned to the apostles and old Catholic fathers’.
¹¹

But the Church of England had no hope of succeeding, no hope of uniting the doubting Catholic with the fervent Puritan, unless it was prepared to compromise. Elizabeth herself was forced to climb down over the question of chasubles. Jewel gently reminded her that ‘touching the knowledge of God’s word and cases of religion certain it is the King is inferior to a bishop’.
¹²
Chasubles were discarded – only to be revived by nineteenth-century ritualists. In cathedrals and colleges it was required that the clergy wore copes (cloak-like vestments). In ordinary parishes a surplice was all that was needed. Elizabeth’s request that churches should keep their crucifixes – that is, an image of the cross with a statue of the suffering Christ upon it – was largely ignored, and in especially Protestant places, such as the City of London, bonfires were lit in Cheapside to burn ‘all the roods and Maries and Johns and many other of the church goods.’
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