Hello and welcome to Western CIV. Episode two hundred and ninety three, Burning
England. Last week we witnessed Mary, the first Queen of England, earned
the nickname we all know her by, Bloody Mary. I suppose it should
be Burning Mary, but I guess Bloody Mary just sounds better. Mary was
determined to make England Catholic again, even if that meant burning every heretical evangelical
in the Kingdom. But the fact of the matter is, as we will
see in our final episode today, on Bloody Mary and England had simply gone
too far to turn around the ship. By large, many, if not
most Englishmen were fine going back to the age of Henry the Eighth. They
accepted that much, but going back past Henry's break with Rome was now simply
impossible. Based on a variety of factors, Mary does not live to be
queen for very long. In the end, she reigns a bit longer than
Edward, but not by much, perhaps a few months, and her death
will unequivocally end any Catholic dreams of a final restoration. Mary had no compassion
for unabashed heretics. In February fifteen fifty five, two Catholic priests preached sermons
against the burnings. They believed it was better for heretics to quote live and
be converted end quote. More likely than not, what was happening here was
an effort by King Philip, no longer in England, to pump the breaks
on an increasingly unpopular crusade. To those in the continent, Mary's actions were
beginning to look like madness, but these voices were in the minority amongst her
conservative faction. In fifteen fifty six, a different priest, Spanish priest,
dedicated a lengthy work to Philip justifying the death penalty for heretics. The punishment
was, he wrote, after all, only reserved for those who refused to
recant, a fact Mary's apologists consistently pointed Outnumber fifteen fifty five, Mary's agents
were closing in on what could only be described as the most important confession of
all the former Archbishop Cranmer. Cranmer had been wavering for a long time.
Now no one could help but notice that the more he inch toward confession,
the better his conditions of captivity became. The message was unmistakable. On January
the twenty eighth of fifteen fifty six, he signed a statement recognizing the authority
of the pope quote so far as God's laws and the customs of the realm
will permit end quote. An elastic confession, for sure, but one nonetheless
under intense pressure. He made two more ambiguous confessions in mid February that then,
with his execution date quickly approaching March the seven, he cracked. Grandmurred,
desperate to avoid the stake, ultimately signed a comprehensive surrender, affirming papal
supremacy, purgatory and even transubstantiation, a doctrine he had preached against four decades.
It was a stunning reversal, yet it did not signal a complete victory
for the Conservatives. Many within Mary's Council feared that the names affixed to the
confession, those of two Spanish friars, would inflame already xenophobic concerns smoldering in
London. These concerns were heightened by the discovery of a truly insane treason plot.
This one is up there, probably with the gunpowder plot that we'll get
to some year. The plot, this time was to raid the Royal Mint
and then use that money to fund an army in place Princess Elizabeth on the
throne. Amidst these concerns, Cranmer's execution date was once more postponed and a
new recantation deemed necessary. But in the end none of this mattered. Henry
might be dead, but Elizabeth still needed a scapegoat, and Cranmer was to
marry Honestly, the architect of it all, the architect of the break with
Rome and were still Mary believed Cranmer to have been the man who had broken
up her parents' marriage. That wasn't precisely true, but given what the young
Mary went through, her desire for vengeance I suppose is understandable. The problem
was it wasn't a politically astute move. Despite realizing this was the end,
Cranmer signed another recantation just before his execution on March the twentieth. Many observers
might have thought, if he said the right things while facing the pire,
he might yet be saved. Yet indeed, there were some well placed gentlemen
in the audience who surely assumed such was the case. But then something strange
happened. Cranmer had another change of heart. Instead of confessing, he shouted
out that he revoked all his previous statements. He reaffirmed his writings against Gardner
and the Eucharist. At the top of his lungs, the elderly man proclaimed,
quote and as for the Pope, I refuse him as Christ's enemy and
anti Christ end quote. Gramner was then bustled quickly over to the execution site.
There, with one final act of defiance, he thrust his right hand,
the hand which had signed the false confessions, into the heart of the
fire. Granmer's death marked a major turning point. He was now clearly a
martyr, and there was nothing Mary could do about it. Worse still,
I mean, truth be told, it had all been her fault. Now,
Mary did enjoy some successes. John Cheek, of famous English Protestant living
in exilen Strasburg, was lured by Mary's agents into visiting the Low Countries.
There, Philip's agents grabbed him. Philip, in addition to being the Lord
of Spain, now ruled the Low Countries. Not particularly effectively, though,
as I'll talk about in the next episode, Cheek had no interest in burning
alive. He confessed to everything almost immediately, much to the lament of his
fellow exiles. But heresy as a whole showed no signs of diminishing. Fifteen
fifty six proved to be a hotter year in England than had been fifteen fifty
five. Eighty five alleged heretics were burned, a further eleven died in prison.
Of those fifty five, by the way, twenty two were women.
Geographically, the executions were not even Almost all the executions took place around London,
Essex, and Kent. In twenty six English counties, there were no
burnings at all. To an extent, the burnings happened where the authorities wanted
them. To Mary's Court all the way to the end saw London in that
particular region of England as the epicenter of the heresy problem. Executions normally passed
with no major protest, at least no recorded protest. Mary was eventually forced
to follow the lead of the Spanish Inquisition. Burning people in their home counties
just simply wasn't popular, so executions were done, oftentimes in batches and in
regional centers. Sympathy for the victims was countered by assurances that they deserved to
die, they were not martyrs but malignants. With the support of poll now
installed in Cranmer's place as Archbishop of Canterbury. Writers contrasted the heretics quote that
lately have been justly burned end quote with true martyrs quote which have suffered for
the unity of the Catholic Church end quote. Men like Sir Thomas Moore Lay
Catholic writers likewise praised those martyrs who had died under Henry and mocked condemned evangelicals
and their supporters. They wrote that their deaths consigned them to deserve oblivion,
and that the only memorial to them would be quote enrolled in a few three
halfpenny books which steal out of Germany end quote. Abroad, Edwardian clerics used
the time and space to stamp out radical elements within the Evangelical faith, and
a baptism was no longer to be tolerated. By and large. These flocks
in exile followed the fifteen fifty two Book of the Common Prayer. Hence,
as we go forward, what you might notice is an increasing orthodoxy amongst the
Evangelicals, especially upon their triumphal return. Persecutions purified English Protestantism in its heart
and its heart lands. It steeled itself to resist the onslaught of what it
saws the Antichrist. In May of fifteen fifty six, heresy commissioners in East
Anglia received an alarming report from a small group of beleaguered Catholic citizens in Ipswich.
Inhabitants had fled the town and quote lurked in secret places end quote.
Another twenty refused to receive the sacrament, and a dozen came to church,
but refused and looked away at the elevation of the host. There were also
a half dozen priest wives that have access to their husband. At least that's
what they said. Things were worse still in the town of Colchester, according
to a letter from the priest written in fifteen fifty six. Quote, the
detestable sort of schismatics were never so bold since the King and Queen's Majesty's reign
as they are now at this present. They assembled together upon the Sabbath day
in the time of divine service, sometimes in one house, sometimes in another,
and there keep their privy conventals and schools of heresy. The ministers of
the church are hemmed in in open streets and called knaves. The blessed sacrament
of the Altar is blasphemed and rallied upon in every ale house and tavern,
and fasting is not regarded. Seditious talks and news are rife, both in
town and country end quote. All of this, by the way, was
in spite of a slew of exemplary burnings in the town six at once actually
on April twenty eight, fifteen fifty six, and a recent visit from the
Bishop. Colchester in reality was probably the most Protestant place in all of England.
Yet even or especially here, religious rivalries continued to shape social divisions.
Protestants drank at one pub, the King's Head, Catholics drank at another,
the White Heart. One writer went so far as to comment on quote,
to the old law, where the people of God were the most straightly commanded,
they should not mingle themselves with the ungodly heathen end quote. To many,
salvation lay in separation, and hatred sometimes did not end in death,
nor were the dead safe from punishment. In January fifteen fifty seven, the
former professor of Divinity at Cambridge, Martin Bucher, was dug up, declared
a heretic, and dragged to the town square, where in his coffin he
was duly chained to the stake before being consumed by the flames. He might
have been the only victim of Mary's fires for whom the process was at least
not physically painful. Having been already dead. Prior to his return to England,
Reginald Pole, the Pope's Legate, pondered whether it was right to exhume
all evangelicals buried in consecrated grounds. Luckily, several high ranking officials steered him
away from that particularly divisive and terrible idea. There were even some rumors that
Mary had her father, Henry the Eighth dug Up, exhumed, burned,
reduced to ashes, but so far as my research can tell, that is
a patent falsehood. The exhumation and subsequent burning of Bucher was more than just
a petty, vindictive act. It was the symbolic face of a serious and
successful campaign to reclaim the major universities of England for Catholicism, culminating in legateine
visitations by Pole of Oxford in fifteen fifty six and Cambridge in fifteen fifty seven.
This was a priority for him, who actually had become the Chancellor of
Cambridge upon the death of Stephen Gardner in fifteen fifty five, and Oxford just
a year later. New statutes, new curriculum, including the restoration of the
faculties of canon law, and a thorough purge of heretical books from college libraries,
did much to restore official confidence in the university's essential orthodoxy. Now to
a considerable extent, these universities already purged themselves. A wave of exiles washed
over to Germany and Switzerland, particularly from Cambridge, where within six months of
Mary's ascension to the throne, only three former heads of House remained in place.
The others were all replaced by reliable Catholics. Now, while all this
was going on, what no one realized is how short on time everyone really
was. The Catholic bishops didn't know it, and so the program of refurbishment
and restoration rolled on throughout fifteen fifty seven. In fifteen fifty four, only
half all the parishes in Bath and Wells met the requirements for books and altars.
By fifteen fifty seven, just three years later, that number had gone
from fifty percent to eighty six percent. There remained some evidence of what the
Catholic bishops called heresy here and there, but by and large. The English
Church once more at least looked Catholic Masses for the dead were back by fifteen
fifty seven. Between fifteen fifty four and fifty eight, the number of requests
for said masses increased four times in wills recorded in East Sussex, and that's
probably not an anomaly. But getting back to practical matters, Mary still did
not have an air and that was a major problem. Under the terms of
Henry's will, which is what gave Mary her legitimacy, Princess Elizabeth was next
in line. Even secretly, of course, Philip, Mary's husband, began
to wonder about a match with Elizabeth should Mary die. Elizabeth had been a
willing member of Mary's core since her release from captivity at the end of Edward's
reign. She remained so now in fifteen fifty seven, And of course there's
always the matter of politics. None of these religious questions take place in a
vacuum. The English returned to Rome got caught up in European politics, specifically
the seemingly never ending conflict between the Habsburgs and the French House of Valois.
In one of its many permutations, in fifteen fifty six, the Pope again
switched sides, allying himself with France over Philip of Spain. In a somewhat
petty move. This Pope, Paul the fourth then revoked Reginald Pole's papal legate
position in England. In his place, Paul appointed an almost completely unknown quartier,
whom Mary patently refused to allow in the country that Jerry. On the
top of this whole affair was a brief but busy are uprising in Yorkshire,
led by none other than an evangelical nephew of Cardinal Pohl papal legate. His
unsuccessful bid to raise the population against Mary ended with his head being separated from
his neck on May the twenty eighth, fifteen fifty seven. Mary, however,
believed that the French King I'll read the second to have been behind the
rebellion. He wasn't, and in fact himself had less than two years to
live still in her name alone, Mary declared war on Scotland and France on
June the seventh. At first the war went well. The English slash Spanish
won a resounding victory in Pickardy. But then disaster struck. Not a military
disaster either, a vicious strain of influenza hit England during the late summer fifteen
fifty seven. It proved to be the worst epidemic in England during the entire
sixteenth century. Mortality rates were sixty percent higher than normal, and the pressures
on the poor were unprecedented. Hull responded that November by preaching a sermon of
repentance, and he meant something specific by that. Sure, the Evangelicals had
built a few hospitals in London, but the Catholic Church had built hundreds across
the city of northern Italy. If the people who had stolen the wealth of
the Church under Henry the Eighth Pule railed would just give it back, then
maybe the Church could do something to ease the suffering of the poor. Greed,
immorality, disobedience. According to Paul, these were all legacies of the
schism. He traced a logical line of decline from King Henry's first assumption of
his what he called strange time idol to the heresy and iconoclasm of recent years.
Once again, Sir Thomas Moore was propped up as a true martyr for
the cause. The themes were obvious. Rome was a cohesive agent. It
could create a charitable society. The other option was heresy, schism, and
the collapse of all order. There was no third option. This was the
theme of numerous sermons by bishops and others at Saint Paul's Cross, by preachers
licensed by Pole for various dioceses, and by clerical officiants all throughout England.
The Marian regime was as eager to proclaim its message from the pulpit as its
Edwardian predecessor had been, and to emerge triumphant from an intensifying battle of ideas.
Of course, it was ironic to the least that at the turn of
fifteen fifty seven fifty eight, when Pole in England was embroiled in this bitter
conflict, the Pope considered Cardinal Pole a flagoned heretic. But the new year
began badly. A surprise French attack in early January succeeded in recapturing Calais,
the last remnant of the once mighty English Empire. In France, people could
scarcely believe it. The campaign against heresy slowed down in fifteen fifty eight,
a result of disruption caused by the influenza epidemic. Though a far from negligible.
Forty three people were burned over the course of the year, bringing the
total for the reign to two hundred and eighty four, with a further twenty
eight accused heretics dying in prison those still heavily concentrated in the southeast. The
victims of fifteen fifty eight were executed across eleven counties. The single burnings taking
place in Exeter and Richmond and Yorkshire were unusual spectacles for their residence. Many
of those executed came from secret churches or prayer groups of evangelicals. That might
prove, depending on how you want to look at it, that the Marian
regime was getting better at breaking down such illicit meetings, or that the Evangelicals
were strengthening their resolve. Either way, one conclusion was unmistakable. The authorities
were nowhere close to winning the battle against heresy. Indeed, the question amongst
the Evangelicals, both within Eggland and in exile, was not whether to conform
or not. It was whether to abstain from the Marian Church or affirmatively oppose
it. It seemed that the tide was turning. Mary could not, after
all, burn England clean of heresy. She had tried, and she had
failed. In early fifteen fifty eight, John Knox published his inflammatory tract,
A First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. Its purpose,
as the title suggested, was to argue for the unlawfulness of female rule,
which was, according to Knox, quote repugnant to nature, contumingly insult
to God, the subversion of good order end quote. Knox was blaming really
a trio of Popish marys, that of England, of Scotland, Mary of
Geese, and pronounced that quote women may and ought to be deposed from authority
end quote. If this weren't enough of an argument, Knox published again in
July of fifteen fifty eight, the outline for an envisioned second Blast. In
it, he argued that monarch should be elected rather than succeed by inheritance,
that Catholics and notorious sinners must be barred from bearing rule, that oaths of
allegiance to such rulers were null, and that unfit rulers might legitimately beat posed.
Now, these were not universal or even majority views among the exiles,
let alone the more prudent evangelicals keeping their heads down at home. But in
the late fifteen fifties, it was becoming more widely accepted by Catholics as well
as evangelicals, that the duty of political obedience was contingent rather than absolute,
that the obligations to the laws of God or of his Church always took precedent
over merely human regulations. Christians, i suppose, had always known and believed
this, but for thirty years or more the English people had been parties to
an unrelenting series of arguments, both coming from the prince and from the pulpit,
continued in homes, continued in taverns, about what God's laws actually were.
The difficulty of identifying god laws accurately shook to the core any residual assumption
that kings, parliaments, or bishops could automatically be relied upon to implement them
correctly. These ideas really started with John Calvin in Geneva and his compact theory,
the idea of a contract one that is open to interpretation. And now
they were coming to fruition. Henry the Aightes pitched his people had been simple
trust and obey. It was a strategy not even Henry's excessive personal or regal
charisma could prevent from misfiring, and one that was even less likely to succeed
when the old king was replaced first by a child and then a woman.
Edward and Mary claimed to be followers rather than embodiments, of the true religion,
and they commanded their people to worship as they did. Their policies in
propaganda, though totally opposed to each other, had the similar effect of an
emboldening sum in their support for official religion and confirming others in their opposition to
it. Yet a third group, probably the majority, were eager to obey,
but had been left with an uneasy, unshakable sense that their political loyalty
and their religious convitions were different and incompatible things. This was the lesson of
the sixteenth century, if you needed to sum it up in one sentence.
But there were practicalities. As I mentioned before, In January fifteen fifty eight,
Mary informed her husband that she believed herself to be pregnant. Philip had
last been in England in July of the preceding year, so clearly she should
have done decisively by that point whether or not she was. She was not
pregnant. To Mary, this realization was a cruel cut. No doubt she
thought back to her own mother, whose inability to conceive a baby boy heralded
her political fall. But the fact of Mary's inability to conceive is also the
decisive political fact of her reign. By April, Mary had to admit she
was not pregnant. Had she conceived in July, she would have been over
nine months at that point. Zme, Yeah, time to admit it.
But things took a turn for the worse. In late summer, Mary developed
a fever and took to her apartment. It got worse still in October,
Mary's health took a turn. She was dying. Mary historians believe, but
still do not know for sure, had ovarian cancer. Philip knew he had
no chance of succeeding his wife as king. It had been the key term
of their marriage treaty. His goal became to see a smooth transition of power,
and crucially one in which the French were cut out. To that end,
Philip quietly acknowledged the Princess Elizabeth as Mary's heir apparent was after all,
what was specified in Henry's will. As always, Henry the eighth continued to
loom like a massive shadow over England even a decade after his death, Mary
duly changed her will on October twenty eighth to reflect this new reality. Parliament
confirmed Elizabeth as the heir on November the fifth, and two days later the
princess herself got the news. Mary, in her final days, demanded to
know that Elizabeth was a good Catholic. Elizabeth quickly assured the messengers sent to
see her that she was not that any of that really mattered. Queen Mary
the First of England received the Catholic right of extreme unction on November thirteenth,
fifteen fifty eight. On the morning of November seventeenth, fifteen fifty eight,
she died. Reginald Pohl, whose health had also been failing for some time,
outlived his queen by only twelve hours. Perhaps it was for the best.
He would not like to have seen what happened next. For Protestants living
abroad, there must have been some hope, but I say some and not
total. Elizabeth was twenty five years old, She was very much an unknown
quantity, and now she was Queen of England. Before we continue with England
next week, I want to pick up on Phillip's story actually and discuss the
royal quagmire that he had gotten into. That was the Low Countries in the
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