The Elizabethans (14 page)

Elizabeth wished to revert to the Catholic idea of a celibate clergy. She succeeded (largely) in banning women from cathedral closes, and was unpardonably rude to clergy wives when she encountered them. Archbishop Parker’s wife, Margaret Harlestone, committed a triple offence in the Queen’s eyes. Not only was she married to an archbishop, something Elizabeth abhorred, but she was also a beautiful woman – far more beautiful than the Queen. Worse still, perhaps, Margaret was a clever woman who conversed fluently in Latin and Greek. When the Parkers entertained the Queen at Lambeth Palace, the Queen thanked the archbishop effusively, but then turned to Mrs Parker: ‘And you – Madam I may not call you, and Mistress I am ashamed to call you, so I know not what to call you, but yet I do thank you.’
¹⁴
This anecdote still has the power to make the reader cringe on Elizabeth’s behalf.

The Parkers, the first married couple to reside at Lambeth Palace, were prodigiously hospitable. The Great Hall was hung with Flemish tapestries of harmonious colours. Food was served on silver and gold. There were no forks in those days – guests ate with knives and fingers. And we can see what they ate from a book in the archbishop’s library, preserved in Corpus Christi, Cambridge – ‘A Proper newe booke of Cookerye’, which Mrs Parker purchased in 1560. The recipes appropriately follow the liturgical calendar. ‘Brawn is beste from a fortnight before Mychalemas tyll lente, mutton is good at all times, but from Easter to Mydsommer it is worste’ . . . ‘A Pollard is speciall good in Maye, at Mydsommer he is a bucke and is verye good tyll holye Rood daye’ (a pollard is a stag without horns).
¹⁵

So the Church, in its prayers and feasts, its meals as well as its liturgy, maintained the old Catholic calendar: Advent, Christmas, Candlemas, Lent, Easter, Pentecost. Yet in other ways the Church of England at this date seemed intolerantly, even belligerently, Protestant. Protestant were its 39 Articles – a sort of manifesto of belief and practice to which the clergy must subscribe. Protestant was its vandalism. In the episcopal registry at Lincoln there is a parchment manuscript volume upon whose vellum cover is inscribed
INVENTARIUM MONUMENTORUM SUPERSTITIONIS
. It describes how, in parish after parish, the church wardens systematically destroyed the beautiful outward signs of Catholic devotion:

Thorpe in P’rochie de Heyther – Wittiam Smyth church warden, 8 April 1566. Itm we had no Roode nor other Imageis but that were painted on the wall and thei ar defaced and put oute anno pmo Eliz. John psonne beinge churchwarden.

Itm two vestments a sepulchre cloth two banner clothes and a crosse clothe sold to Wittm Cressie about e a moneth sens 1565 wch was defaced before he brought them. Itm one mass boore burnte yesterdaie.

As this item shows, the actual service book in this remote Lincolnshire parish continued to be the old Mass book until 1566, a full eight years after Elizabeth came to the throne. In the same year we find ‘
ASBYE IUXA SLEFORD
[that is Sleaford Abbey, Lincolnshire]
¹⁶
William Daunce and Robert Cranwell 26 April 1566 Imprimis or Images of the Rood mary and Jhon wth all other Images – burned Ao iijo Elizabethe. Itm iij papistical books – wch did belonge to Mr Yorke who had defaced them Ao quarto Elizabethe the other were stole awaie in queene maries reign.’
¹⁷
The Yorkes had been settled at Ashby-de-la-Laund since the Wars of the Roses. Why did Mr Yorke deface his ‘papistical books’ in the fourth year of Elizabeth’s reign? History cannot tell us. All over the country we find the same thing happening. In another parish we find Thomas Waite and Thomas Stevenson, church wardens, 29 April 1566: ‘The rood marie and Johnne and all other Imagies of papistrie – were burnte by a plu’mer in a 1562 . . . Itm two vestements were cut in pieces yeterdaie and sold to Thomas Waite and George Holmes and theye have put them to prophane use.’
¹⁸
At Somersby, where in the nineteenth century Alfred Tennyson’s father would be the alcoholic rector: ‘Itm iij candellstickes a crose a hollie water fatt censors and a sacring bell – sold to a puterer of Lincoln at Grantham faire this year by the said churchwardens’.
¹⁹
And at Grantham – one day destined to be Margaret Thatcher’s home town:

ffurst we present that the Roode loft stode vpe in carved work in the ffurst yeare of the Queenes maiestie Reigne that nowe is and was broken downe and sold and the mony to the use of the poore and paying wages for taking downe to carpenters and masons and of the surplasage accompt was made by John Taylyer then being churche warden to master Bentham master ffleetwod and mast everyngton then beying visitors.
²⁰

At Grantham, too, we find them selling ‘a silver and copper shrine called senet Wulffran shrine’ . . . ‘and bought wythe the pyrce thereof a silver pott pcell Glyt an [
sic
] an ewer of silver for the mynistracion of the holye and most sacred supper of our lorde Jesus Crist called the holye comanyon’.
²¹

These visitations, and the enforcement of the injunctions, should not be seen in purely religious terms. It is true that many of the Elizabethan bishops, and the enforcers they employed to visit parishes and ensure the destruction of the ‘monuments of superstition’, were motivated by Protestant zeal. But during a decade when Mary, Queen of Scots was seen as a constant threat to Elizabeth’s throne, the government was terrified by the political implications of Catholicism. It did not want a repetition of what had happened upon the death of Edward VI when, for example, at Cratfield the reredos of a medieval high altar had been brought out of hiding from the vicarage barn; or at Long Metlow, or Morebath, where much-loved vestments, statues, reliquaries and Mass books came out from hiding upon the accession of Mary Tudor.
²²
It was essential, from a political point of view, for Cecil and Parker to drive forward a much more thoroughgoing destruction of the outward signs of Catholic piety. To this extent, some of the vandalism – the ripping-up of copes and chasubles and the use of missals to line pudding basins – should be seen in the light of those patriotic enthusiasts in 1939–40 who turned signposts the wrong away round to confuse any Nazi storm-troopers who might have come marching down the English roads. The Queen of Scotland, or the armies of France, would
not
find an England secretly eager to reinstate reliquaries or to reclothe their clergy in Mass vestments, which were by now indelibly associated with intrusions upon the political as well as the religious liberties of the English.

The
piety
of those for whom holy water stoups, crucifixes or coloured stoles were valuable did not vanish as easily as broken stained glass or a shredded frontal. John Cosin, chaplain to the royalist court in exile during the 1650s and subsequently Bishop of Durham in 1660, looked back on his time as chaplain to Bishop Overall of Norwich (1560–1619) and remembered, for example, how that bishop ignored the Protestantising rubrics of the Settlement and used (as did the Queen herself in the Chapel Royal) the more Catholic order of the 1549 liturgy.
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Bishop Lancelot Andrewes (1555–1626), who received a supposedly Protestant education from Richard Mulcaster at Merchant Taylors’ School (see
Chapter 6
), when he became Bishop of Ely had ‘an altar with two silver candlesticks on it. A silver gilt canister for the wafers . . . A chalice with Christ engraven on it’ and other tokens of the belief, expressed in his
Preces Privatae
, in the:

Catholic Church

Eastern, Western, British.

To a Roman cardinal, Andrewes would write, ‘Our Bishops have been ordained in each case by three bishops and by true bishops. I say by true bishops for they were ordained by yours, unless yours are not true bishops.’ Archbishop Laud, in the reign of Charles I, could insist that ‘The altar is the greatest place of God’s residence upon earth, for there it is . . . This is my body.’
²⁴
And again:

In the sacrament is the very true and natural body and blood of Christ, even that which was born of the Virgin Mary which ascended into heaven, which sitteth at the right hand of God the Father, which shall come to judge the quick and the dead: only we differ ‘in modo’ [from Roman Catholics] in the way and manner of being we confess all the one thing to be in The Sacrament, and dissent in the manner of being there.
²⁵

What Hilaire Belloc called ‘the Catholic thing’ – Mass, the recitation of the hours of prayer, confession – continued within the Church of England, as did the Catholic order of bishops, priests and deacons, even if there were times when it became an underground stream invisible from the surface. It is often assumed, by Roman Catholic or secularist historians, that idleness and cowardice explained the fact that so few clergy and laity stood out against the Elizabethan Settlement. ‘Out of 9,400 clergy in England only 192 refused the oath of supremacy.’
²⁶
One reason for this could have been that, whatever Protestant resolutions were being passed in London, and whatever was demanded by bishops and official busybodies, the people of England continued to find Catholic sustenance in their national Church. A modern historian asks how ‘one of the most Catholic countries became one of the least.’
²⁷
One answer to this is that it did not, but that its Catholicism found it could survive, under the Protestant dispensation of the Elizabethan Church. Another answer is that the Reformation took a very, very long time. Yet another answer is that only a minority of zealots – and those chiefly in the North – felt it was necessary to ally themselves with the Queen of Scots or the King of Spain or the Pope of Rome in order to worship God in an English church; and the more these foreign potentates threatened England, the more entrenched the Protestantism of the English became.

But, as the parish visitations to the diocese of Chichester revealed, as late as 1569 the Reformation was not greeted with enthusiasm in all areas of the national Church. In the cathedral itself was one William Weaye, appointed by the Henrician Bishop Sherburne to a clerkship and summoned before the dean and chapter on 13 October 1569. It was charged that he had in his possession certain Catholic theological and devotional books and a portable altar. He did not deny it, and when asked what he thought of Purgatory, the veneration of the saints, the Mass and transubstantiation, he admitted that he ‘lyketh of these’. ‘He believes as the Catholic Church does, whereof he thinks the Pope to be head, or else there should be many heads if every prince were supreme governor in their own realm.’ Poor old Weaye was deprived of his clerkship and fined thirty shillings ‘out of hand’,
²⁸
but for every case brought before the courts there must have been hundreds where a blind eye was turned to Catholicism being practised within the Church of England.

The archbishop’s commissary, visiting in 1569, concluded sadly:

except it be about Lewes and a little in Chichester, the whole diocese is very blind and superstitious for want of teaching.

They use in many places ringing between morning and the litany, and all the night following All Saints’ day, as before in time of blind ignorance and superstition taught by the pope’s clergy.

Many bring to church the old popish Latin primers, and use to pray upon them all the time when the lessons are being read.

Some old folks and women used to have beads in the churches, but these I took away from them but they have some yet at home in their houses.
²⁹

In the country parishes of Sussex there was little contact with the outside world. For much of the year the few existent roads were impassable. No wonder that twelve years after they had been made illegal in London, the tiny Sussex parish of Tarring should still be using ‘vestments and the old mass book’.

Eamon Duffy, a modern historian of the sixteenth-century Church, ended his haunting account
The Stripping of the Altars
, which is the story of the Reformation: ‘Cranmer’s sombrely magnificent prose, read week by week, entered and possessed their minds, and became the fabric of their prayer, the utterance of their most solemn and their most vulnerable moments.’
³⁰
But this was not something that happened overnight. The outward events of the political world had far more to do with this than the often Cambridge-educated Lutheran or Calvinist preachers sent to unresponsive congregations from London to the remoter corners of England. If the English stopped praying from Latin primers or muttering over beads (and not all did), it was not necessarily because they had been bossed by home-grown Protestants. It was because if there was anything they resented more than the busybodydom of an ‘archbishop’s commissary’, it was the threat to their own queen’s authority by the Queen of Scotland or some other foreign power. The successive popes did far more to make England Protestant. At home, the system of double-think, of turning a blind eye, of nodding and winking, which has often made English life so confusing for social observers, left their inner and religious life rather more ambiguous, rather less easy to categorise than the busybodies would have liked. This was certainly true of the 1560s before events made life for crypto-Catholics much more difficult. For the first dozen years of the reign it was perfectly in order to pay lip service to the new Church order and, if challenged, to offer a bribe or a fine, to carry on regardless.