The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (7 page)

8
King Edward and the Reformation: Diarmaid MacCulloch,
Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation
(London, 1999), 14–41, 102; Peter Marshall,
Reformation England 1480–1642
(London, 2003), 58–85.

9
Portraits: R. Ormond and M. Rogers (eds),
Dictionary of British Portraiture
(London, 1979), I, 146; NPG 1704, 1807. St Paul’s epitaph: Henry Holland,
Monumenta Sepulchraria Sancti Pauli
(1614), STC 13583.5 [17–19]; Cooper,
Athenae Cantabrigienses
, II, 89–90. Gray’s Inn: Foster,
Gray’s Inn
, 22; Stow,
Survey of London
, under ‘The suburbes without the walles’; Greg Walker,
Plays of Persuasion: Drama and Politics at the Court of Henry VIII
(Cambridge, 1991), 33–5. Religion in London: Susan Brigden,
London and the Reformation
(Oxford, 1989), chapters 10–12; Andrew Pettegree,
Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-Century London
(Oxford, 1986), 272.

10
Edward’s illness: W. K. Jordan (ed.),
The Chronicle and Political Papers of King Edward VI
(Ithaca, 1966), 117. Mary’s accession and Wyatt’s rebellion: D. M. Loades,
Two Tudor Conspiracies
(Cambridge, 1965), map; Anna Whitelock and Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘Princess Mary’s Household and the Succession Crisis, July 1553’,
HJ
50 (2007), 265–87; Brigden,
London and the Reformation
, chapter 13; J. P. D. Cooper,
Propaganda and the Tudor State: Political Culture in the Westcountry
(Oxford, 2003), 163–70. Walsingham relatives: Read,
Walsingham
, I, 22.

11
Nicodemism and conventicles: Brigden,
London and the Reformation
, 559–60, 600–4. Cecil and the mass: Alford,
Burghley
, 74.

12
Basel: C. H. Garrett,
The Marian Exiles: A Study in the Origins of Elizabethan Puritanism
(Cambridge, 1938), 55–7, 143–4, 319–20, 357–8; H. G. Wackernagel (ed.),
Die Matrikel der Universität Basel
(Basel, 1951), II, 91; Read,
Walsingham
, I, 25; Diarmaid MacCulloch,
Reformation: Europe’s House Divided
(London, 2003), 194, 261. Padua: Jonathan Woolfson,
Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy, 1485–1603
(Toronto, 1998), 221–2, 231, 280–1.

13
Walsingham to his nephew: printed in Read,
Walsingham
, I, 18–20. Sidney to Denny: printed in James M. Osborn,
Young Philip Sidney 1572–1577
(New Haven and London, 1972), 537–40.

14
Activism in the Veneto: Kenneth R. Bartlett, ‘The English Exile Community in Italy and the Political Opposition to Queen Mary I’,
Albion
13 (1981), 223–41; ‘The Misfortune that is Wished for Him: The Exile and Death of Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon’,
Canadian Journal of History
14 (1979), 1–28.

15
Cecil in Mary’s reign: Alford,
Burghley
, 65–82. Thomas Walsingham and Pole:
APC
V (1554–6), 83.

16
Restoration and persecution: Eamon Duffy,
Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor
(New Haven and London, 2009), reference to ‘microscopic’ scrutiny at 131; Eamon Duffy and David Loades (ed.),
The Church of Mary Tudor
(Aldershot, 2006); Judith M. Richards,
Mary Tudor
(London, 2008), chapter 10; Gina Alexander, ‘Bonner and the Marian Persecutions’,
History
60 (1975), 374–91. Stratford-le-Bow: John Foxe,
Actes and Monuments
(London, 1570), 2,097.

17
Radical political thought: Robert M. Kingdon, ‘Calvinism and Resistance Theory, 1550–1580’, in J. H. Burns (ed.),
The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700
(Cambridge, 1991), 193–218.

2 Massacre at Paris

On 6 November 1558 Queen Mary, childless and ravaged by fever, yielded to the inevitable and named Elizabeth as her successor. Her husband Philip of Spain had not been seen in England for more than a year. Hopes that the queen would give birth to a child had turned to ashes. Any chance of sustaining the Catholic faith to which Mary had devoted her life now depended on her half-sister, the offspring of Anne Boleyn and their father’s break from Rome. By recognising Elizabeth as her heir, maybe Mary hoped to coax her into maintaining the rites and rituals which she had tenderly restored over the previous five years. If so, then she was deluding herself. Although Elizabeth had outwardly conformed to Catholicism during the reign of her sister, Protestants knew that she was a true reformer at heart. The deaths of Queen Mary and Cardinal Pole on the same day, 17 November, were taken as proof that the providential course of history had been restored. In later years Elizabeth’s accession day would become an annual festival marked by bonfires and patriotic sermons.

The bells ringing across the nation to announce the peaceful transfer of power sounded a reveille to the English Protestant diaspora. Several hundred clergy, merchants and gentlemen were soon streaming home to pick up the threads of their lives. They might not have had a master plan for the future shape of the Church of England, but collectively the Marian exiles would make a deep impression on the age of Elizabeth. All but one of Queen Mary’s bishops resigned in 1559, compelling Elizabeth to look to the émigrés to recruit the next generation of Church
leaders. Fourteen of the twenty-five bishops who sat in the 1563 Convocation or synod had taken refuge in Germany and Switzerland. Protestantism in England had previously been moulded mainly by Luther and Bucer. Now it was infused with Calvinist ideas: the predestination of the elect to salvation and the structuring of the Church along presbyterian lines, with authority invested in congregations rather than bishops. This second wave of religious reform came with its own Geneva translation of the Bible, cheaper and easier to carry than the Great Bible of Henry VIII’s reign.
¹

Political thought had also moved on during the time of exodus. Queen Mary and her ministers had regarded Protestantism as a disease which could be cut out of the body politic, driving John Knox and John Ponet to pioneer theories of resistance to royal power. Now that Elizabeth was on the throne, the threat that had sparked such radical thinking had faded. But the principle of absolute monarchy had been questioned, and the genie could not be put back in the bottle. It was no longer enough to preach the gospel of obedience: the crown would have to engage with those who saw the power of any earthly monarchy as limited by God. The sovereignty of a woman threw up even greater challenges. Mary’s reign had been a time of persecution, popular rebellion and a disastrous foreign war; Elizabeth could hardly call upon her sister as a precedent.

Elizabeth’s government was full of men who had tailored their religion to suit the fashion dictated by Queen Mary’s regime. William Cecil had acted like an evangelical in King Edward’s day, yet he allowed the Catholic mass back into his household and courted the friendship of Cardinal Pole. Robert Dudley jousted at Mary’s court and fought in her army in France to atone for his family’s role in the Jane Grey conspiracy. The Earl of Sussex defended London against Wyatt’s rebels in 1554 and was appointed a gentleman of King Philip’s privy chamber.
Sir Thomas Smith advised Mary on the economy and was paid a handsome royal pension. Sir Nicholas Bacon quietly carried on his work for the Court of Wards while his wife served as a gentlewoman of Queen Mary’s privy chamber. None of this is to deny the Protestantism of Elizabeth’s principal councillors, but it does mark Walsingham out among his peers: a man who could not be lured from his faith by the promise of patronage.

Walsingham was back in England by the spring of 1559, when he was elected to Parliament for the seat of Bossiney in Cornwall. A hamlet skirting the ruins of Tintagel Castle seems an unlikely start for one of the great political careers of the sixteenth century. Bossiney was condemned as a rotten borough by the Reform Act of 1832, and barely even registers on a modern map. Walsingham probably never saw the place, but he did understand its significance. As part of the estate of the duchy of Cornwall, Bossiney was effectively under the control of the crown. Elections were managed by the lord warden of the stannaries; in this case Francis Russell, Earl of Bedford and Walsingham’s fellow exile in the Veneto. There was a natural affinity of faith between the two men. Bedford had studied with Heinrich Bullinger at Zurich and corresponded with Calvin following his return to England, using his position in the Lords to denounce the papacy as ‘a sink of crime and a cess-pool of iniquity’.

Elizabeth’s first parliament opened in January 1559 with a service at Westminster Abbey. Its dissolved Benedictine community had been re-founded by Mary, but the new queen had no time for monasteries. When Abbot Feckenham led his monks to meet Elizabeth at the abbey door, she objected to their processional candles: ‘Away with these torches, for we see very well’. It was a signal that the devotional world of saints and altars, lights before images and the elevation of the consecrated Host, would soon be gone for good. After three months of 
debate, the constitution and liturgy of the Church were settled by statute. The Act of Supremacy restored the sovereignty of the crown which had been asserted in 1534, though with one important difference: Elizabeth was styled as ‘supreme governor’ rather than ‘supreme head’ of the Church of England. This was an astute piece of politics, the queen outmanoeuvring objectors on both sides of the religious divide. The mystical union between monarchy and priesthood asserted by her father and her brother did not easily translate into the rule of a woman. But the altered title also reflects the humility before God detectable in the prayers which Elizabeth composed throughout her life.

The second pillar of the Elizabethan Church was the Act of Uniformity. Services would be conducted according to the Book of Common Prayer; anyone absent without good cause would be fined a shilling a week. The liturgy was based on the more thoroughly Protestant prayer book of 1552, but again there was an attempt to soften the impact of change. Ministers were required to wear a surplice, not quite the sumptuous vestments of the Catholic past but still a visible mark of their ordained priesthood. The order for holy communion manoeuvred the conservative formula of the 1549 Prayer Book, ‘The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul into everlasting life’, into the more commemorative rite of 1552, ‘Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving’. By combining the two, it was hoped the Eucharist would revert to what it once had been, a celebration of communal peace in which all could take part.
²

Walsingham was one of nineteen Marian exiles elected to Parliament in 1559. The Commons had swollen to a total of four hundred MPs by the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, and the queen would enfranchise another thirty-one boroughs of her own. Putting this in perspective, the House of Commons 
was two-thirds its modern size at a time when the total population of England and Wales was about one-twentieth of today’s. Henry VIII and Cromwell had created a new role for Parliament, extending its jurisdiction over spiritual affairs and using it to justify the break from Rome. What Parliament had created only Parliament could modify, hence Elizabeth’s use of Lords and Commons to revive the royal supremacy over the Church in 1559. Once this framework had been rebuilt, however, she wanted to see no more wrangling over religion. The ambiguities in Elizabeth’s Church settlement may have offended the hotter Protestants on her council, but they also appealed to the conservative majority of her people. In her opinion, the question of religion was now a matter for the queen alone.