Chapter 8
In This Chapter
● Nudging towards reform
● Reforming and rewriting: the new prayer books
● Putting down the western rebellion
● Dealing with dissent
When Henry VIII died a lot of confusion over religious matters existed. The break with Rome was political and among the king’s advisers were moderate, humanist reformers, some of whom were secret Protestants. Between 1547 and 1553 they ‘came out’ and made the Church of England Protestant.
The religious situation that the new king, Edward VI, faced looked like this:
● Diehard Catholics carried on worship in the old way with Latin masses and traditional types of service.
● Conservatives - like Arundel and Southampton, who were on the Council until Dudley axed them - despised the pope but still believed in traditional types of worship like the mass. The vast majority of people were probably conservatives.
● Moderate Protestants thought (like the humanists) that a lot of the Catholic services were mumbo-jumbo.
● Strong Protestants followed the ideas of Luther and other European reformers who believed the Catholic Church was full of idolatry and the pope was the Antichrist.
See what we mean by confusing? In this chapter we explore the bumpy ride towards Protestanism during Edward’s reign.
134 Part III: Remembering the Forgotten Tudors: Edward VI and Mary
Choosing Reform: Gently Does It
Understanding people’s motivation as far as religion goes in the 16th century is tough nowadays. People today live in a very different age when organised religion no longer has the huge hold it had in the past. Telling real religious conviction from people grabbing opportunities and paying lip service is also quite difficult, but here’s a general overview:
● The reformers in Henry VIII’s Council were largely a political party and they fought the conservatives tooth and nail in the last years of his reign.
● Some key people, especially Henry VIII’s wife Catherine Parr (see Chapter 5) and Archbishop Cranmer (see Chapter 6), were genuine religious reformers.
● Most people in the corridors of power and elsewhere did their political sums and waited to see which way the religious wind blew before taking sides.
It may be that some people were influenced by the young king’s education. After all, when he turned 18 in 1555, Edward would rule in his own right and call the religious tune.
Sewing the seeds
Because Edward was taught by reformers - men like John Cheke - it was likely that the boy would choose a Protestant Church when he came of age. This is what Edward’s protector Somerset (see Chapter 7 for more on the king’s protectorate) assumed, pushing ideas of the Royal Supremacy (see Chapter 6) to remind everyone who now ran the Church.
As soon as Henry was dead, something of a floodgate opened. Reformers in London began writing Protestant pamphlets, smashing saints’ statues and sticking their own heads above the religious parapet, demanding changes in all directions. Somerset’s government did little to stop all this because he became convinced that Protestantism was the way forward.
As we explain in the Chapter 7, what most people in the past found difficult to accept was change. London has always been at the cutting edge of new stuff, but the farther away you went in the 16th century, the more likely you were to meet deep conservatism and mistrust of new-fangled ideas. In the West Country, Wales and parts of the North like Lancashire, people longed for the old security of the Catholic Church and had serious doubts about the Royal Supremacy.
Testing the water with new bishops
Traditionally, when a king died royal officials’ jobs ended. In practice this was rarely the case and it never affected churchmen. But when Henry VIII died, Cranmer sent out new letters of appointment to the bishops. The message was clear: Cranmer and the quietly Protestant Council were giving out the jobs.
Opposition came straight away from Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, (surprise, surprise!) because the man hated Protestants. He argued that it was the job of the supreme head of the Church to defend not undermine it, and that he held his own job by virtue of being a priest, not because the king had given it to him (although, in fact, Henry had).
In the meantime, moves towards Protestantism were happening all over the place. People sang evening prayer in English, not Latin, in the Chapel Royal; a preacher at Paul’s Cross (the trendy place for far-out sermons outside the cathedral in London) said it was okay to eat meat during Lent; and smashing of statues continued.
Moving on: Visitations and homilies
In the summer of 1547 Cranmer took two cautious steps towards reform:
● The royal visitation: Cranmer backed Protector Somerset in carrying out a royal visitation like the one that had destroyed the monasteries in 1538 (see Chapter 6). Objections came from Bishop Gardiner (of course) and Edmund Bonner (bishop of London), both of whom were banged up in Fleet Prison. Under the visitation, the country was divided into six areas and 30 visitors were given the job of checking out churches. They insisted that churchmen should teach and speak the Lord’s Prayer in English.
● The homilies: Cranmer wrote 12 homilies (sermons) that he expected churches to use in services. The homilies were Protestant in tone but within the law of Henry VIII’s Act of Six Articles (see Chapter 6), except for the one about justification through faith, which sounded horribly Lutheran in that it talked about finding salvation through faith alone and said nothing about doing good works.
Gardiner, true to form, went ballistic, claiming that Cranmer had gone too far, proving how out of touch the bishop of Winchester was with the direction in which the Church was now travelling.
Edward VI’s first Parliament abolished the Act of Six Articles. Now the Church of England was in a sort of limbo - who knew exactly what to believe? In that sense, Gardiner’s opinion was as good as anybody else’s.
Dissolving the chantries by law
The chantries were private chapels set up to pray for the souls of the dead. Some of these were cheapskate affairs, where a single priest (like John Rous at Guy’s Cliffe; see Chapter 2) said mass once a month for a year or two to whole colleges of clergymen saying prayers forever. Forever literally meant in perpetuity, with younger monks taking over from older ones when they died. This process was designed to help those souls believed to be in purgatory, but for years people (Henry VIII included) had been questioning the existence of purgatory.
Parliament had voted in 1545 to shut the chantries down and give the cash to the king. This hadn’t happened. So in 1547 the topic was on the front burner again. This time Parliament argued that prayers for the dead were pointless and clashed with the justification by faith ideas of the Protestants. Justification by faith (or solo fide in the original Latin) meant that all you had to do was put all your faith in God, and he would do the rest.
Result? All chantries closed, another nail in the Catholic coffin; oh, and Edward VI got land worth £600,000.
The removal of the chantries hit ordinary people in a way the destruction of the monasteries hadn’t. Some of Somerset’s commissioners got frosty receptions, but as usual even opponents cashed in by buying ex-Church land so they didn’t feel too badly about it.
Trying to make things clear
Without the Six Articles as a framework, extreme conservatives and extreme reformers were all trying to make headway according to their own beliefs. So the Council stepped in and said:
● Extreme Protestants must slow down.
● Everybody had to fast during Lent.
● Nobody should go it alone with new religious ideas.
● The Council knows best and is sorting it all out.
The communion service was changed by Parliament, working with Cranmer, ready for Easter 1548, and Cranmer also set up an English version of the mass - it was up to individual priests whether they used it or not.
On 11 February the Council told Cranmer to tell the bishops to scrap all saints’ images from churches and chapels. Henry had made a similar effort (see the Rood of Grace in Chapter 6), but now the directive was for real. Conservatives like bishops Tunstall of Durham and Heath of Worcester did little more than pass Cranmer’s word on. But by the end of 1548 the writing was on the wall. The mass was still there (just about) but more change was to come.
Introducing the First Prayer Book
For centuries the Catholic Church had used slightly different types of Latin service depending on where you lived around the country. Archbishop Cranmer streamlined the service to a single common version in English.
Changing content and language
In 1544 Henry VIII had let Cranmer translate the mass into English.
Churchmen used the English mass now and again in the Chapel Royal, but never in the country at large.
The whole point of having the Bible and church services in English was so that everyone could understand what was going on. The Catholics didn’t object to this for its own sake but they did have a problem:
● The Catholic Church did as the pope said, but Henry had brought an end to that in England.
● The Catholic Church relied on Latin as a common European language dating back to the 5th century.
Priests understood Latin (in theory!) so the congregation didn’t have to. This sounds very odd today. The magic phrase hocus pocus comes from the people’s garbled version of the communion service - hoc est corpus - ‘This is the body [of Christ]’.
The Protestant point of view was:
● Church services should be collective acts of worship in a language everybody understood.
● The job of the priest was just to lead the congregation.
First, Cranmer took the most common type of mass - the Sarum (Salisbury) Use - and changed it. He shortened the rite for the dying, taking out all mention of purgatory. He also removed anything about transubstantiation (the idea that bread and wine taken during communion become the body and blood of Christ) and the priest’s role being miraculous. God was ‘real’ without being physical - that put the reforming cat among the conservative pigeons. Private masses were now out - no congregation; no mass.
Next, Cranmer presented the first draft of his new prayer book - the Book of Common Prayer - to a church conference at Chertsey Abbey in September 1548. The attendees tinkered with the new book slightly and then passed it to the bishops for approval in October. By December, the book was part of a parliamentary bill.
The purpose of this Bill of Uniformity was to sort out the Church once and for all in a ‘uniform, quiet and Godly order’. All parishes were to have the new prayer book (which they had to buy) by Whitsun (May) and churches faced punishments for not accepting the book.
In the House of Lords only two of the temporal peers voted against it but the spiritual peers (the bishops) were split ten-to-eight in favour.
Passing the Bill of Uniformity was a huge step forward for Parliament, which from now on became the place to decide all matters about the Church. The Church of England was accepted by law and so it remains today. The law was a step up in terms of the power of Parliament because the Commons and Lords were no longer just a rubber stamp for the king. This was to have serious repercussions for the Stuarts in the next century.
Making enemies
Of course, not everyone welcomed Cranmer’s reforms and prayer book:
● Some parish priests went on using the Latin mass until their bishops stopped them.
● Some priests ignored the bit in the prayer book about speaking with a ‘clear and distinct voice’ and mumbled instead. Some of their congregations probably assumed the mass was still hocus pocus.
● The king’s sister, Mary, was most unimpressed (see the nearby sidebar ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary’).
● Extreme Protestants didn’t believe the reforms had gone far enough.
Rebelling in the West
Most resistance to the prayer book came from farthest away from London. In Cornwall most people didn’t even speak English, but had their own version of Gaelic, and they and the men of Devon rebelled. Figure 8-1 provides a general lie of the land.
Trouble first broke out on Whit Monday, 1549, in the village of Sampford Courtenay where the priest was forced to stick to the Latin mass. The area had been badly hit by the destruction of the chantries (see ‘Dissolving the chantries by law’, earlier in this chapter), and local land issues probably existed (this was the time of Kett’s Rebellion in East Anglia; see Chapter 7).
Figure 8-1: Western England.
When a local gentleman tried to talk sense to everybody a mob murdered him on 9 June. With no strong nobleman on hand to step in (Henry VIII had removed the Courtenay earls of Devon), mobs grew and discontent spread from Bodmin in Cornwall. People talked of a march on London (as with the Pilgrimage of Grace - see Chapter 6 - and Kett’s Rebellion).
Mary, Mary, quite contrary
One person seriously peeved by Cranmer's changes was Princess Mary. A devout Catholic, she invited anybody who wanted to go to join her in the old Latin mass at her house in Hunsdon, Hertfordshire at Whitsun 1548. She let it be known that the new services would never happen in any area she controlled.
Mary went head to head with the Council, complaining that they had no right to tinker with religion while the king was a child. As she was an heir to the throne, her position was acutely embarrassing for the Council.
As always, Mary got the backing of cousin Charles V, who said he would take action if her right to worship was challenged again. The Council in turn agreed that Mary could get on with her Latin mass with a few servants only, but she mustn't hold her mass in public. Mary ignored them.
Sir Thomas Pomeroy was the only rebel leader with any status and he used the revolt to try and get back the fortune he’d squandered. The rebels sent 15 demands to the Council, which included:
● Scrapping all religious changes since 1547
● Reinstating the Six Articles (see Chapter 6)
● Bringing Reginald Pole, who’d been kicked out by Henry VIII (see Chapter 4), back to England
The whole thing sounded like the work of Catholic priests and even Bishop Gardiner couldn’t believe what the rebels were demanding.
Getting heavy
Cranmer was furious with the response from the West, especially when the rebels called his new form of service ‘a Christmas game’. The rebels besieged Exeter and cut off supplies to the city on 2 July. Many people inside the walls backed the rebels and constantly demanded the city open its gates.
Somerset had to act, so he sent Sir Peter Carew, a Devon landowner, to negotiate. He failed. Somerset then sent Lord John Russell with a 1,400-man force to put the rebellion down. Russell was joined by Lord Grey’s cavalry and William Herbert’s 2,000 Welshmen. It was unfortunate that Russell didn’t have enough men or clear instructions as to what to do. He clashed with the rebels at Ferry Bridges near Exeter on 27 July but the result was a draw.
Russell now marched on Exeter itself and the rebels, led by Humphrey Arundell, a Catholic landowner from Helland, near Bodmin, pulled back to the village of Clyst St Mary. After a three-day fight, losses were heavy on both sides. Arundell limped west with neither cavalry nor artillery to help him while Russell entered Exeter.
Russell at last caught the rebels at Sampford Courtenay where the whole protest had begun, and he smashed them with his Italian harquebusiers (musketeers). Arundell was beaten at Launceston and the ring-leaders were hanged.
This was a far more serious - and bloody - rising than Kett’s and the Council dealt with it harshly.
Taking in the refugees
As soon as word got round that England was going Protestant, refugees started to trickle in from places where the Catholic Church was all-powerful: France, Spain, Italy, the Low Countries and the Rhineland. Many of the refugees were skilled workers and they set up businesses in London, Norwich and Southampton. A load of Flemish weavers even settled in Glastonbury in Somerset.
These refugees were allowed to worship in their own way in the ‘stranger churches’ they set up, not bothered by the Book of Common Prayer.
Vallerand Poullin, a famous scholar, ran the French church in London and the Polish nobleman-turned-pastor John a Lasco ran the Dutch church.
Many of these refugees were Zwinglians, following the Swiss reformer’s ideas rather than those of Luther, the German monk who’d begun the Reformation. Most important was Heinrich Bullinger who had friends in high places after Bishop John Hooper, whom Henry VIII had exiled to Zurich, came back to preach to the Court in 1549 under Somerset’s protection.
England wasn’t open house, however. Not everyone was welcome and nobody wanted the Anabaptists, who believed in adult baptism, because the majority saw them as being too extreme and troublemakers.
Continuing with Cranmer, hoping with Hooper
The fall of Somerset in October 1549 (see Chapter 7) barely broke the reformers’ stride. Cranmer brought in yet more changes. Now only three holy orders existed: bishop, priest and deacon. All the others - priors, abbots, prioresses, abbesses, monks, nuns, friars, clerks, chaplains and pardoners - had gone.
Countering the Counter-Reformation
A Church that had called the shots in Christendom for 1,400 years wasn't just going to roll over, and the Council of Trent (Italy), which began in 1545, marked the Catholic Church's fight back against the rise of Protestantism throughout Europe. The Council met frequently in northern Italy and elsewhere over the next few years. Leading Catholic churchmen backed the Society of Jesus and the torture of the Inquisition, denouncing the Protestant ideas wherever they existed throughout Europe.
So, Cranmer called in Protestant heavies to make England's position clear.
● Philip Melanchthon, leader of the Lutherans now that Luther was dead, said no when offered a post in England.
● Martin Bucer, one of those top scholars consulted by Henry VIII over his divorce from Catherine of Aragon, quarrelled with the Lutherans so accepted Cranmer's offer of a teaching job at Cambridge University.
● Peter Martyr took up Cranmer's offer of a similar job at Oxford University, but Oxford was always more right-wing than Cambridge and his fellow lecturers gave him a hard time. Martyr made suggestions for Cranmer's revised prayer book (see 'Getting Radical: The Second Prayer Book'.
John Dudley, who’d taken over from Somerset (see Chapter 7), put John Hooper forward as bishop of Gloucester. Hooper came out of nowhere. An Oxford-educated Cistercian from Gloucester, he became a reformer after reading Zwingli, got out of England in 1539, married and settled in Zurich. (The Cistercians were an order of monks founded in 1098. Originally they were strict, but perhaps their involvement in agriculture and wine-making over the centuries made them more worldly!) He came back to England ten years later and became a popular London preacher.
Things were black and white to Hooper: if the Scriptures said to do something, you did it; if the Scriptures said nothing about an act, that act was forbidden.
Hooper refused to wear traditional papist robes for his consecration ceremony. In Chapter 1 we explain how clothes and status were important to the Tudors, so Hooper’s protest caused a storm in the Church. Nothing new here, of course - the Catholic Church had nearly burst a blood vessel arguing, centuries earlier, about how monks should have their hair cut! The whole incident was a storm in a stirrup cup (nobody in England knew what tea was at this time!) with Dudley going head to head with the Council. Hooper ended up in prison for being difficult and eventually went through the ceremony in the clothes he hated. Who said the Tudors weren’t petty?
After the robes incident, Hooper behaved himself - he worked hard, prayed, heard religious cases and visited schools. He also carried out a visitation and was horrified to find that many of his priests couldn’t say the Lord’s Prayer or even find it in the Book of Common PrayeA
John Foxe paints a pen-portrait of Hooper in his Book of Martyrs (1563). The bishop was extremely generous and charitable but so terrifyingly grim that people turned away rather than talk to him.
Hooper was promoted to the see of Worcester in May 1552, but as things turned out his days were numbered.
Getting Radical: Moving on with the Second Prayer Book
As with all new ideas, the Book of Common Prayer went not far enough for some, but too far for others. Protestant extremists felt the book was too conservative and they didn’t like the bit about the spiritual presence of God during communion. They had some heavyweight backing-in England, John Hooper, Peter Martyr (see the sidebar, ‘Countering the CounterReformation’), Martin Bucer, Nicholas Ridley (bishop of London) and John Cheke (Edward VI’s tutor); and in Europe by 1551, John Calvin, whose followers out of Geneva were becoming just as numerous as the Lutherans.
Conservative opposition was chopped in all directions. Gardiner and Bonner hadn’t only lost their sees, they were in jail (see the earlier section ‘Moving on: Visitations and homilies’). Cuthbert Tunstall, bishop of Durham, was framed for treason and was also removed. Anybody not going to church or still carrying out the Catholic mass was to be hit with fines or imprisonment.
Cranmer got on with the revised version of his prayer book. This time he bypassed the bishops and took his book straight to Parliament. The Act for the Uniformity of Common Prayer passed both Houses at the end of March 1552. Dudley, now promoted to be duke of Northumberland, made sure the law went through unopposed.
A French version of the prayer book was produced for the Channel Islands and European exiles in London (how 21st-century politically correct is that!). And this happened at the same time that English people treated all foreigners with suspicion and, in the worst cases, spat at foreigners in the street.
Picking apart the revised prayer book: Noxious Knox
The Book of Common Prayer talked about kneeling to take communion, but some reformers thought sitting (as in the Last Supper) would be better. The abrasive John Knox - a Scotsman who was one of the king’s chaplains and who’d later be a fanatical opponent of Mary Queen of Scots and women in general - made a fuss about all this. Knox was backed by Hooper, a Lasco and even Dudley in the Council.
Publication of the book was held up until ‘certain faults therein be corrected’. Cranmer was furious. He’d already had his views on the sale of the chantries ignored and Parliament had turned down his ideas for changing Church law in 1552. This was the last straw.
Cranmer realised, a bit late perhaps, that the secular authorities (the Council and Parliament) were sidelining the bishops at every turn. In a way, it was his own fault because he’d missed too many crucial Council meetings (like the one over communion kneeling). Also, he’d been too keen to turn the bishops into better priests, which made them worse politicians, likely to be outmanoeuvred by everybody else.
Defining faith
The Augsburg Confession was a book that explained clearly the beliefs, principles and practices of Lutheranism. Cranmer realised by the autumn of 1549 that the Church of England needed something similar so that everybody would sing from the same hymn sheet. He started working on this at once.
Bishop Hooper had the same idea, but decided to go it alone, coming up with 19 Articles in Gloucester in 1552. This kind of private enterprise would cause chaos because every bishop in England would be dreaming up any number of quite possibly conflicting Articles, so the Council gave Cranmer the go-ahead to come up with a solution. In May 1552 he produced his 42 Articles of the Faith, which became 45 by September.
The Council annoyed Cranmer again by giving the Articles to the royal chaplains - including Knox - to pick over, and the chaplains reduced the number to 42 once more. A bureaucratic delay followed, and Cranmer had to be patient because he knew he couldn’t publish the Articles without the Council’s say-so. On 9 June 1553 the Articles finally saw the light of day. They were a clear statement that England was now a fully Protestant country, and they included warnings about the extremism of the Anabaptists (see ‘Taking in the refugees’), who were fast becoming the bogey-men lurking in the shadows.
Reforming zeal and dodgy dealings
The real driving force behind the religious changes under Edward came not from Cranmer but from Dudley.
It was pretty obvious that by October 1549, by which time he was 12, the precocious boy king was firmly Protestant and quite keen on the Swiss school of reformers. If Dudley wanted to stay in power by becoming chief minister when Edward came of age in 1555, he needed to show some reforming zeal.
Dudley was also busy lining his pockets. He carried out shady deals selling off chantry lands to his friends and backers, and he ‘unlorded’ several bishops, which took away their lands and palaces and made money for the crown. Could there be a more devoted servant of his king?
The Catholic response to the prayer book
The second prayer book didn't actually make much difference to the Catholics. After all, the things they cared about - the mass, prayers for the dead - had already gone with the first version in 1549. If Cranmer's Church was bickering among themselves, that was fine, because their actions were all heresy anyway.
The impression we get about the Reformation is that as soon as the Book of Common Prayer came in, Catholics in England went underground, hid priests in special hidey-holes in their houses and were all secretly hoping for an invasion from Spain. Some of this was certainly true, but not until years later under Elizabeth, as you see in Chapters 12 to 18.
Clashing with Hibernia Ecclesia: The Irish Church
The Royal Supremacy (see Chapter 6) had gone down surprisingly well in Ireland because the clergy, who sat as a third house in the Dublin Parliament, saw it was a way to sort out their wayward flocks. But after that, it was downhill all the way:
● The Irish Parliament didn't meet at all between 1543 and 1557, so the Edwardian Reformation, including the new prayer books, was foisted on Ireland with no discussion whatsoever.
● Because the prayer books and services were now in English, they had no effect on the majority of Gaelic-speaking Irishmen.
● When bishops died, it was almost impossible to replace them.
● Jesuit missionary priests began to arrive in Ireland from 1541.
● The Pope continued to appoint Irish archbishops, like Robert Wauchop in Armagh, in defiance of Henry VIII who'd already given the job to George Dowdall in 1543.
● Most Irish men and women stayed loyal to the Pope, carrying out demonstrations from time to time against the Protestant faith, as when Bishop John Bale was forced out of the country in August 1553.
Reversions were happening all over the place, which meant that some courtiers made property killings and others got fat annuities. For example:
● The sees of Exeter, Coventry and Lichfield were reduced in size and the lands sold off.
● The new diocese of Westminster was merged with London.
● Parliament broke up the see of Durham in 1552.
The biggest killing came with the richest see of all - Winchester. Bishop Gardiner had clashed with the Council so often they’d fired him and the reformer John Ponet got the job instead. Ponet wasn’t interested in money, so Dudley bought the see off him for an annuity of £1333. The lands were actually worth over £3,500 a year, so tens of thousands came into the Council’s hands, mostly those of William Paulet, the lord treasurer.
One man who might have stopped all this racketeering was Thomas Cranmer, especially because from 1550 he and the Council were drifting seriously apart. But he’d spent a great deal of time - and his own money - in making Edward’s Reformation work and he wasn’t going to rock too many boats.
Managing Mary
Henry VIII’s eldest daughter had been horrified by religious events since her father’s death. She’d refused to get involved in the regency, even when that meant plotting against Somerset, and she’d taken a personal dislike to Dudley, calling him ‘the most unstable [religiously unreliable] man in England’.
Mary was concerned for her own privileges and even safety, but she had an ally: her cousin, Charles V, who, as holy Roman emperor, was the most powerful man in Europe.
Plotting her escape
Van der Delft, Charles V’s ambassador in London, was about to be recalled because of ill health, and he and Mary hatched a plot for her to go with him to the safety of the emperor. Mary would be giving up her right to the throne by doing this - leaving the country voluntarily could be taken as a sign that Mary had given up her position as Henry VIII’s heir - but Edward wasn’t 13 yet and that door seemed to be closed. No one expected that Edward wouldn’t grow up to be king and have children of his own, so Mary was unlikely to inherit anyway.
Mary’s plan was to be rowed out from Maldon in Essex to van der Delft’s waiting ship. Unfortunately, food shortages and high prices had led to local rioting in Essex and government troops were watching the coast, as well as Mary’s house at Woodham Walter.
Mary’s Plan B (the Tudors were, after all, a pretty cunning lot!) was to steal a ship with van der Delft’s secretary, Jehan Dubois. Mary had doubts - she packed and unpacked several times and dithered and delayed until Dubois had to go for fear of being caught in the plot himself (after all, a Dutchman whisking an heir to the English throne abroad raised all kinds of problems, even if it was Mary’s idea).
While Mary felt abandoned and was wailing ‘What is to become of me?’, cousin Charles breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t worth antagonising England over a woman who couldn’t make up her mind.
Coming to Court
Mary attended Court at Christmas 1550 to find herself under attack from the king himself. She’d always pretended that all this religious nonsense was the work of the evil advisers on the Council. Now she saw that Edward was as heretical as any of them and he seemed to know all about her plans. It must have been humiliating for the 34-year-old princess to be told off by a 13-year-old, king or no king.
Charles continued to support Mary, but Edward wouldn’t back down and the emperor knew that Dudley was moving towards a French alliance. Charles couldn’t afford to go to war for Mary’s sake, so he told his cousin to shut up and give in gracefully - drop the public Catholic worship idea and count herself lucky. Without Charles’s support, Mary had no choice.
Edward gave in slightly and the Council backed off. Mary continued with the Latin mass in private, but the public services in her chapel (which she never went to) used the Book of Common Prayer.
Many saw Mary as the symbolic head of the old guard. What wasn’t clear was whether she was an out-and-out Catholic, like her mother, Catherine of Aragon (see Chapter 5), or whether she believed in the Six Articles as laid down by her father for his Church. Edward’s death in July 1553 would throw a spotlight on Mary and perhaps stop the English Reformation in its tracks (see Chapter 9).