The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (38 page)

The clever, slender young woman who took over the English throne in 1558 had not kept her head on her shoulders through all her vicissitudes without it having a deep effect on her character. When at the London pageant for her coronation the figure of Old Father Time passed by, she was heard by people standing near her to murmur with wonder, ‘And Time has brought me hither.’ Elizabeth’s insecure and troubled early life had created a consummate pragmatist, who had a great deal in common with her grandfather Henry VII. Like him she was thrifty to the point of miserliness when it came to spending money. This was fortunate as the country she inherited had been almost bankrupted by Philip’s war. Unlike her father she was reluctant to go to war partly because of the expense, partly because she was so cautious that she was reluctant to commit herself to one side or the other. She rarely moved in a straightforward fashion but dilly-dallied on foreign policy–to the despair of her ministers.

The new queen’s experience of religious extremism in her brother’s and sister’s reigns had left her with a great dislike of such emotions and a natural tolerance. Soon after her accession she announced she ‘would make no windows in men’s souls’, and for the first decade or so of her life she was content for a secret Catholicism to go on as long as the outward forms of Protestantism were observed.

Queen Elizabeth inherited the Tudor common touch and charm that her brother and sister had so signally lacked, as well as the strong personality which had kept England at the feet of her father. She had his formidable intellect, his warmth and his striking wit. She had none of her mother’s dark colouring, having pale Tudor skin, red hair and an imperious hooked nose. Like Henry VIII she believed in showing herself to the country and staying with the gentry and nobility who upheld the Tudor state, hence the very many houses whose grandest bedrooms bear the legend ‘Queen Elizabeth slept here’. Like Henry VIII too she held a very splendid court, full of balls, masques and intrigues, at which the most dazzlingly dressed figure and the most spirited dancer was herself.

She was just as capable as her father at bending Parliament to her will and she never failed to get the supplies she asked for. Though constantly urged by her Council and Parliament to marry and ensure a Protestant succession she never did. She was perhaps finally wedded to her country. As she said in her Golden Speech when she had been forty-three years on the throne, ‘Though God has raised me high, yet this I count the glory of my crown, that I have reigned with your loves. And though you have had, and may have, many mightier and wiser princes sitting in this seat; yet you never had, nor shall have, any that will love you better.’

Queen Elizabeth the Great presided over a unique moment in English history. Her seamen sailed round the world and kept the seas free for Protestantism by defeating the Spanish Armada. Her playhouses saw productions of some of the greatest drama the world has ever known, the plays of William Shakespeare. And at a time when the wars of religion were creating bitter civil conflicts all over Europe, the middle way she followed helped Protestantism to take peaceful root. While so many monarchs met deaths by assassination, Elizabeth survived.

The queen was extremely vain, a characteristic she inherited from her coquettish mother; from her father she got a love of regal splendour. To the end of her life she delighted in court revels and fabulously expensive dresses, whose fashions became more and more exaggerated as the century wore on. Frilled ruffs, vast hairdos, jewels by the yard, banquets and male favourites were the hallmarks of her reign, and she soon acquired the nickname Gloriana. Ambassadors who did not know her regarded as frivolous her obsession with dancing and with young men–favourites like Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Sir Christopher Hatton and finally the Earl of Essex. They did not see the dedicated and Machiavellian stateswoman closeted with master strategists like Sir Francis Walsingham and plotting how to keep Philip of Spain at bay. They failed to take seriously a woman whose criteria for selecting civil servants was so disinterested that she chose the great statesman William Cecil as her chief minister or principal secretary of state because she believed ‘that you will not be corrupted with any manner of gift, and that you will be faithful to the state, and that without respect of my private will you will give me that counsel you think best’. Unlike those of her father, her ministers left her service only if death removed them. Cecil was at her side for forty years.

The new queen’s most pressing problem was the English Church, now rejoined to Rome. As a highly accomplished daughter of the New Learning who spoke fluent Latin and French and read Greek, Elizabeth possessed religious sympathies that were advanced Protestant, those of the second Edwardian prayer book. She did not believe in the Real Presence, as she made clear soon after her accession by leaving Mass when the Communion wafer was elevated. But her intention was to return the Church to that of her father’s less controversial Reformation, which did not offend Catholics. But a huge problem faced her, namely personnel. The old Henrician Protestants were dead, the clergy in charge were Catholic and the men required to run the Elizabethan Church could only be the Protestants who had fled abroad, the Marian exiles.

The Marian exiles were just the sort of religious extremists towards whom the queen felt a natural antipathy. Far from being the polished courtiers her feminine nature delighted in, they were rough and ready, deliberately eschewing good manners in favour of sincerity. Many of them had been profoundly influenced by Jean Calvin in Geneva, one of the main centres for Protestant refugees. Calvin’s study of the Bible had convinced him that hierarchy was wrong and he rejected much of the Church’s supervision of religion: there should be no official prayer book, and churches should be run by small groups of ministers or presbyters. He rejected even the few sacraments Luther had accepted, for he had worked out a theory of predestination–men and women were either damned or saved. What mattered was the moral purity of the elect (as the saved were known). Rather than in acts of worship their religion was to be expressed in the moral purity of their daily life, in conduct and clothing (from this would derive their name of Puritans). With the new queen a Protestant, the Marian exiles had returned to England full of high hopes of significantly reforming the Church of England along Calvinist lines.

But this autonomous and democratic kind of religion could not have appealed less to Elizabeth. As her father’s daughter she believed that the state control of religion was necessary for an orderly country and she spent much of her reign combating Puritanism, with only moderately successful results. She was personally affronted by their leading spokesman, the savage propagandist John Knox, whose notorious pamphlet
First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women
attacked women rulers. She banned him from London, so he found his way to Scotland and founded the Calvinist Reformation in Scotland. Like most Puritans the strength of Knox’s religious convictions meant he was no respecter of persons, even of royalty. Elizabeth found this intolerable.

Nevertheless the Marian exiles were all the clergy the queen had to work with. Fortunately the Dean of Lincoln, Matthew Parker, whom Elizabeth made Archbishop of Canterbury, was a man after her own heart. The scholarly Parker, who had also been her mother Anne Boleyn’s personal chaplain, had managed to remain in England during Mary’s reign and so had not come under any extremist influences abroad. Like the queen he believed in the Church’s regulation of religion. He thought it more important to please the majority of English people who were still attached to old forms, whether in rituals of worship or vestments. Thanks to Parker and the queen’s genius for compromise and harmonization, the 1559 Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, whereby the English Church once more cut its links with the papacy, appeared to be all things to all men. Although the Elizabethan settlement really took for its essentials the second prayer book of Edward VI, its Communion seemed both to celebrate a Real Presence and to be a commemorative act. The new Church thus offended as few Catholics as possible, in order to unite England behind the queen. Elizabeth declared herself more modestly to be the Church’s supreme governor instead of supreme head, in order to leave her ecclesiastics free to determine affairs of the Church. And to make sure the Puritan clergy toed the line, Archbishop Parker set up the Court of Ecclesiastical Commission to enforce the Elizabethan settlement in every parish.

In the early part of her reign Elizabeth’s moderation paid off. She had little trouble from English Catholics or the Catholic clergy, most of whom became priests in the Church of England. It was the former Marian exiles whose behaviour continued to anger her. Initially she was in too weak a position to protest when many of them refused to adopt signs of popish ‘superstition’ such as wearing surplices or making the sign of the cross. But seven years after her accession in 1565 the queen and Parker felt strong enough to move against the Puritans. Parker’s ‘Advertisements’ were given to the clergy. These were guidelines enforcing observance of the prayer book and the wearing of surplices, which resulted in about thirty clergymen losing their livings.

With this action the way became clearer for the Puritans. Most of them had believed optimistically that the Elizabethan settlement was only a beginning. Now it was clear that as far as the queen was concerned it was intended to be the end. From then on there were constant attacks against Church government from the Puritans, taking their stand on the New Testament. Since there were no bishops in the New Testament, went one Archbishop Matthew Parker, argument, there should be none in the Elizabethan Church. With the death of Parker in 1575 the queen found herself more isolated than she had supposed. Many MPs and many of her civil servants, especially those who worked for Cecil’s colleague, her other royal secretary Sir Francis Walsingham, had become increasingly attracted to the aims of the Puritan clergy. They disapproved of the Ecclesiastical Commission which was compared even by the faithful William Cecil, or Lord Burghley as he had become, to the Spanish Inquisition in its ruthless methods and lack of interest in afair trial.

The appalled queen suddenly found that her new Archbishop of Canterbury Edmund Grindal was in sympathy with what is known as the ‘prophesyings’ movement, the increasingly popular Bible self-help groups run by the Puritan clergy to which the laity were invited. As they often resulted in criticism of the Church, Elizabeth believed they should be suppressed. Grindal believed they should merely be regulated. When the archbishop, greatly daring, refused to suppress them he was suspended for five years. In 1583 his place as Archbishop of Canterbury was taken by John Whitgift. The small, dark and ferocious Archbishop Whitgift was as much a Calvinist as Grindal, but, for him, where Puritan ideas conflicted with a settled order of doctrine the law of the land should prevail. With Whitgift in charge, pursuit of the Puritans became much more effective. No fewer than 200 clergymen lost their livings when all those suspected of being Puritans were hauled up before the Court of Ecclesiastical Commission to swear to a new Act of Six Articles emphasizing the Royal Supremacy in religious affairs. By the end of her reign as Elizabeth became increasingly severe in her treatment of dissenters, the death penalty or exile was the punishment for all those who would not attend the Anglican Church.

Henry VIII’s equivocation about the Mass had kept the Catholic powers out of England. Elizabeth’s equally careful footwork with the religious settlement, her stern line against Calvinists and her warm reception of France and Spain for the first twelve years of her reign also kept England free from invasion. In fact, so mixed were the signals coming from the queen that her widowed brother-in-law Philip II believed he could marry her–as did various other Catholics such as Archduke Charles of Austria, Archbishop John Whitgift, the future Henry III of France and his younger brother the Duke of Anjou. Thanks to Elizabeth’s caution over the settlement, during the first decade of her reign when her title could have been in dispute, and Philip of Spain could have invaded to aid English Catholics, no Catholic plots erupted. On the whole Catholics paid their fines, did not attend Anglican services and had Mass said quietly in their own homes.

But towards the end of the decade the situation changed, for a number of reasons, and the chief enemy to the Elizabethan state became Catholicism. For the next twenty years Elizabeth and Protestant England found themselves under serious threat. This was the consequence of the arrival in England of Elizabeth’s first cousin once removed, Mary Queen of Scots, a Catholic who as Henry VIII’s great-niece had a claim to the English throne, being next in blood.

When Elizabeth had expelled John Knox from England and he had taken his fiery energies north to Scotland, the religious revolt he inspired among the Scottish Protestant nobles, the Lords of the Congregation as they called themselves, turned into a patriotic war to rid Scotland of the French Catholic regent Mary of Guise, mother of Mary Queen of Scots. Though Elizabeth disliked helping rebels, on her Council’s advice in 1560 she had despatched troops to aid the Scots against the French government. On the death of Mary of Guise what was in effect a Calvinist Scottish republic had been created by the Lords of the Congregation: a new Scots Parliament renounced the pope and a General Assembly was created, the chief council of the Presbyterian Church. Undeterred by this Calvinist seizure of power, a year later the daughter of James V–recently widowed by the death of Francis II of France–landed in Scotland to claim her kingdom as Mary Queen of Scots.

Mary Queen of Scots was a great beauty, tall and fascinating. But in contrast to her cousin Elizabeth she possessed almost no political skill or feel for statecraft and had a foolishly headstrong and passionate character. At first, however, her charm won over the Protestant lords ruling Scotland. She made no attempt to drive out the Calvinist religion now established there or to reconvert the country. But she did insist on hearing her own Mass in her private apartments, thereby incurring the wrath of John Knox, who publicly preached in Edinburgh that one of the queen’s Masses was ‘more fearful to me than ten thousand armed enemies’. But Mary emphasized to her Catholic contacts abroad, especially Philip of Spain and her Guise uncles, that now was not the moment to invade Scotland and attempt a reconversion. She allowed her half-brother the Earl of Moray, an illegitimate son of James V, to continue to govern Scotland.