The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (32 page)

It was characteristic of this regime to bring in starker changes under cover of moderation and traditionalism, and then, having offered reform, to attempt to suppress the diversity and licence which that reform had encouraged. So the very first Act of Edward’s first Parliament was against revilers of the sacrament of the altar, and for communion to be received by all, laity as well as clergy, in the two kinds, of bread and wine. For lay people to receive the consecrated wine was a radical change. Such a change was likely to encourage the ‘human and corrupt curiosity’, speculation of the grossest kind, into the nature of Christ’s presence in the sacrament, which the first part of that Act condemned. All the while Archbishop Cranmer was working towards presenting the people with a new understanding of the way in which they should worship their God.

Human corruption and mutability had perverted divine service, as it did every creation of man, observed Cranmer. The task he now set himself was to create, by drawing upon the great variety of rites and uses through England and from the Catholic tradition of Western Christendom, a single, uniform liturgy, in English. Following St Paul, Cranmer asked how the people could ‘say Amen to that they understand not?’ And Cranmer’s intent was more ambitious still. The people must be brought to a proper understanding of their relationship with God in the central, most mysterious, sacrament: the Eucharist. Cranmer’s private belief had been changing; not always in concert with the official orthodoxy which he, as Archbishop, must uphold. His conservative opponents taunted him for this ambiguity: ‘What believe
you
, and how do
you
believe, my lord?’ Bishop Bonner asked him. Cranmer would insist at his trial in 1555 that he had only ever held two beliefs regarding the Eucharist. He had moved away from the strict doctrine of transubstantiation during the 1530s and, after 1546, believed in the spiritual
presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Now he intended to enshrine that belief in the new Order of Communion which was to be universally imposed from Whitsun 1549. Believing firmly that a propitiatory sacrifice had been offered once, and once only, by Christ on the Cross, Cranmer in his new rite sought to remove any implication that the priest was offering a propitiatory sacrifice of the body and blood of Christ, here really present in the form of bread and wine. The Mass was not now to be understood as a good work to remit the sins of those for whom it was offered, living and dead. Instead of a sacrifice, the Communion was a celebration, according to Gospel precept, ‘a perpetual memory of that His precious death until His coming again’; a sacrifice instead of praise and thanksgiving. No one should doubt Christ’s presence
in spirit
in the sacrament. To all who believe:

But the loss of the elevation at the sacring (the moment of greatest power and benediction), of the pax, of the sharing of holy bread; the obliteration of the great cycle of feast days dedicated to the celestial army of saints; the use of English instead of Latin; and the clear reforming impulse which lay behind the new rite, made the Book of Common Prayer an abomination to all of conservative mind. How many were of conservative mind is uncertain, but perhaps most of the population were, as Cranmer well knew. That the language of the services was so direct, so beautiful, so perfectly suited to the expression of things mysterious that it would last for centuries, could mean nothing at all to parishioners whom it left bereft and bewildered. In Yorkshire, Robert Parkyn, a conservative priest, angrily lamented the loss of the elevation of the elements, of ‘adoration, or reservation in the pyx’. The pyx, containing the blessed sacrament reserved, hanging above the altar, had been the focus of popular eucharistic devotion. To many, the new service was blasphemous and absurd; ‘a Yule lark’, a ‘Christmas game’, and in various communities its imposition precipitated revolt. The Western rebels’ tone was peremptory and vengeful:

Yet their rebellious energies were dissipated by a long and fruitless siege at Exeter, and their rising was brutally put down. Their priestly leaders were hanged in chains from the steeples of their churches. The spirit of revolt may have died in the South-West but not, surely, the spirit of inward resistance to the religious changes. The rising’s overthrow could not be credited to the Protector’s adept intervention, so his opponents in the Privy Council judged.

In the aftermath of the risings ‘a most dangerous conspiracy’ formed against the Protector. At Hampton Court at the beginning of October 1549, Somerset waited with the King, the Archbishop, a few counsellors, and an army of ‘peasants’ with pitch forks who had answered the call for a general array. In London the rival lords of the Council, led by the Earl of Warwick, waited with the City fathers. In Andover, Lord Russell and Sir William Herbert waited with the army which had suppressed the Western rebellion, fearing ‘an universal calamity and thraldom’ and hoping that ‘no effusion of blood may follow’. Everyone was waiting to see which side would win the greater support, fearing reprisals against the losers.

War among the nobility, not seen since the Wars of the Roses a century before, seemed likely. On 6 October the London Lords, Somerset’s rivals in Council, had ridden armed through the City with liveried bands of retainers. A year before Thomas Seymour had dreamed of raising 10,000 men, had imagined England divided into power blocks of ‘noble men to countervail such other noble men’, and had boasted of his own ‘goodly manred’ in the Marches of Wales. Now Somerset’s tenants might have rallied to him from his estates in Wiltshire had not Russell and Herbert delayed in Hampshire with their troops to prevent them. At this moment of great insecurity an older world of lordship surfaced.

New forces in politics also now appeared. During the conspiracy to bring down the Protector, popular support was rallied in the name of the new religion. Somerset’s cause was proclaimed by those who feared that his downfall would end both patronage for the poor and evangelical reform. Yet his supposed championship of the estate of poverty and of the Gospel might lose him as much support as it gained. Proclamations were issued accusing the Protector’s enemies both of conservatism in religion and of oppressive social policies, but such was the confusion that rumours spread too that Somerset would restore the Mass. His
ruthlessness in pursuit of power made anything seem possible. Hearing that the Lords sought ‘his blood and his death’, Somerset moved with the King to Windsor to be better defended. ‘Me thinks I am in prison,’ wrote Edward. So he was, for possession of his person was the key to power. By 9 October, when London’s governors and Russell and Herbert declared for the London Lords, the prospect of civil war was averted. The King was safely handed over. Offered his life, though not his liberty, Somerset surrendered.

Who would rule instead? Behind the conspiracy there lay a group of politicians, conservative in religion, led by Thomas Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, whom Somerset had ousted in 1547. Originally, the conspirators had planned to make the Lady Mary regent, with or without her collusion. But some evangelicals – among whom John Dudley, Earl of Warwick was one – had moved against Somerset partly to save their cause from his reckless egoism, and they were alarmed by any prospect of a conservative revanche with the Lady Mary as its figurehead. Any alliance between such subtle and deadly politicians as Dudley and Wriothesley would be fraught, and conspiracy did not end with Somerset’s fall. Now Wriothesley, allied with the Earl of Arundel, conspired against the evangelicals. They determined that Somerset should die, and with him Warwick, whom they would implicate in Somerset’s designs: they were ‘traitors both and both worthy to die’. Early in January 1550 Warwick, knowing that his fate and Somerset’s were bound together, struck before he was struck down. Laying his hand on his sword, he told Wriothesley: ‘My lord, you seek his blood, and he that seeketh his blood would have mine also.’ Wriothesley and Arundel were evicted from court.

Warwick’s control of the court, his ‘great friends around the King’, placed there in mid October through Cranmer’s influence, allowed him to prevent another conservative coup or any future attempt to abduct the King, and to save himself. Now he moved to purge his erstwhile conservative allies and to add his own supporters to the Council. Since it was safer to have enemies within, and to be vigilant, than to have enemies without, Somerset was allowed to return. Bishop Hooper had preached to Somerset in prison at Christmas 1549, urging him not to seek revenge, but in vain. Somerset’s evident ambition to return to the principal place remained one of the gravest dangers to the new regime. Acute social distress was reason enough to fear insurrection, but more alarming still was the knowledge that the loyalty of the poor was to
Somerset, and if they rose again it would be in his name. As 1550 began, a court observer warned that ‘by the divisions of the great the mad rage of the idle commoners is much provoked… so that this year to come is like to be worse than any was yet’.

One who knew John Dudley, Earl of Warwick well said that ‘he had such a head that he seldom went about anything but he conceived first three or four purposes beforehand’. Past master of the double-cross and double bluff, he had learnt in the hard school of Henry’s last years, but not even he could have foreseen the dangers of alliance with Wriothesley, nor his own subsequent betrayal of Wriothesley and its consequences. Having purged the conservatives in Council and repudiated Mary’s regency, Warwick needed new allies and a way to prevent any Catholic resurgence which would threaten him. His new allies would be evangelicals, principally Archbishop Cranmer, whose influence over his royal godson was high. Warwick’s source of power was the Council, of which he became Lord President, and the court, which from February 1550 he controlled as Great Master of the Royal Household, staffing the Privy Chamber with his own men, who guarded access and patrolled the precincts. He needed also the support of the King, who became more attached to the evangelical cause and more imperious as he grew older. Soon Warwick advanced evangelical reform with such commitment that he confounded contemporaries.

While the councillors fought for primacy during that winter of 1549 to 1550 the imprisoned Catholic Bishops Bonner and Gardiner had eagerly awaited their release. The reformers despaired, thinking that Christ had abandoned England. But on Christmas Day 1549 orders came for the destruction of all Catholic service books and for the enforcement of the Book of Common Prayer. The Lady Mary, thinking Warwick ‘the most unstable man in England’ and alarmed by the Council’s moves to force her to renounce her religion, sought sanctuary with her Habsburg cousins. In May 1550 she prepared for escape by boat down an Essex creek to the Emperor’s waiting ships on the coast. Mary’s flight was foiled by a general watch for disorder in Essex. There were watches everywhere that spring, for this government lived in permanent terror of popular disturbance.

Tudor government rested upon consent and popular support, and Warwick’s regime possessed neither. A general hostility grew against
Warwick and his followers. By January 1551 it was said that he governed ‘absolutely’ (which was not true), and that he was ‘hated by the commons and more feared than loved by the rest’ (which was). The social distress was palpable. As the effects of the debasement of the coinage bit more deeply, inflation compounded the penury caused by the appalling harvests of 1550 and 1551. The annual rate of inflation in London for 1549–51 was 21 per cent. The price of flour doubled, and the size of a halfpenny loaf of bread, the staple diet of the poor, shrank. In February 1551 the governors of St Bartholomew’s hospital, seeing that the halfpenny loaf would no longer feed two men at a meal, increased the ration by half. The suffering looked for scapegoats. Though the Council was concerned with social justice, and sent out commissions to ensure the equitable provision of wheat, it won no credit for it. The attempts in the spring and summer to restore the coinage were sadly mismanaged and only brought rumours that the rich were profiting from the misery of the poor and that Warwick, in his greed and pride, was creating his own coinage, bearing the stamp of his own badge, the bear and ragged staff. Spring was the ‘stirring time’ when the people might rise. In the springs of 1549, 1550, 1552 and 1553 Parliament was dissolved and the lords and gentry were sent back to their localities to keep order. Warwick began to elevate powerful nobles to the Council: not only to secure their support but to keep their ‘countries’ quiet. These men, chosen as experienced military leaders, were licensed to retain fifty or a hundred horsemen and given strategic defensive commands.