Hello, and welcome to Western SIV, episode two hundred and ninety one. Queen Mary's early years. After Mary survived her first rebellion, she grew almost overnight emboldened to a large extent. We need to remember that religion was Mary's one and only issue. She was the proverbial single issue candidate of the early modern period. And if we remember that, then I think it helps us
interpret the balance of her reign. She certainly did other things that were not directly connected to religion, but they were always with an eye toward achieving religious goals, which for Mary, of course, meant the full restoration of Catholicism and reunion with Rome. Let me give you an example. Mary's marriage to Philip the second of Spain had practical implications, namely, it gave England an
ostensible ally on the continent, and a powerful one at that. But from Mary's perspective, this was about a Catholic alliance and an heir, an heir that could continue Catholic restoration. We have to remember that when Mary became queen she was in her late thirties. If she was going to produce an air, she needed to do so right away. So I suppose it should come as little shock that Mary interpreted her initial survival and triumph in late fifteen fifty
three and early fifteen fifty four as a sign of providential pleasure. This was what God wanted. Mary was certain of that, so she turned up the pace of religious reform. Processions were restored, all the feast days that were celebrated under Henry the Eighth returned, and critical clerical celibacy was back. All the priests who had wed in Edward's reign had to renounce their wives and consorts. Those who did not lost their benefices. Those who did normally kept them,
but it was not a guarantee. There was also a very subtle change that few people noticed. Mary removed any requirement for the English to take the oath of supremacy. No one had to swear, as they did under Henry and Edward, that the monarch was the head of the English Church. But to anyone paying attention, the message was clear. This paved the way for a return to Rome, and of course there was another issue, Henry himself.
It was impossible for anyone to ignore the reality that King Henry the Eighth was the person who had orchestrated the break with Rome. He was never misled by wicked advisers. He had done it himself of his own free will. Now, normally English monarchs exalted those of their line when speaking about the past. But when Mary did this with reference to her father in a letter to the papal legate Reginald Pole back in fifteen fifty three, she was soundly rebuked.
He wasn't worth honoring. Pole wrote back, how could you honor the man who had killed Sir Thomas Moore. Pole pointedly told Mary that if she wouldn't speak ill of her father, then she needed at least stop honoring him. Now, for Mary, we need to remember this might not have been too big of an ask. Henry had divorced her beloved mother and then written Mary out of her own inheritance. The two had been estranged for much of
Mary's life. Psychologically, it might have actually done Mary some good to admit to herself that her father was not a hero worth emulating, though of course much of this we can never know for certain. Momentum for reconciliation with Rome was growing. Whole frustrated that the process was not more immediate, pressured Stephen Gardner endlessly to make it happen to an extent, this was not necessary. Gardener, it had seemed, had converted, once a close ally of royal
supremacy in Henry the Eighth. Gardener now firmly believed that reunion with Rome was not only morally right, but inevitable. It was God's will to correct a wayward people. Now, not everyone shared Gardner's desire to turn back the clock. A lot of people just looked at the situation from a practical perspective. Many had gone from Henry to Edward and now Mary with a simple shrug of the shoulders. They just didn't see royal supremacy as that big of a deal.
Gardener, at a dinner party in early fifty ten fifty four, was reportedly told by another dinner guest that all this was pointless, jipper jabbering royal supremacy had nothing to do with issues of doctrine. Of course, not everyone agreed, but my guess is that many people really didn't care. They just
wanted to get on with their lives. Sadly, the late sixteenth century, as we will see, was not filled with enough of those people to avoid an ocean of bloodshed for others, including Gardner, the years of blood between Henry and Edward's reign had just truly changed things. As I mentioned, a lot of blood had already been spilt. Gardner had watched as his friends were tried and condemned for treason, and that he himself confined to the Tower of
London. He knew what might happen if Mary should run out of time, and time was of the essence. In fact, we know in early fifteen fifty four he was literally champing at the bit to get legislation before Parliament, reversing Henry and Edwards's legislation and restoring England to Rome. As the new parliament opened on April third, fifteen fifty four, feelings were still quite raw. Evangelicals were conquered, but had by no means surrendered. Anti papal sentiments remained
high, as did animosity toward the Spanish marriage. Still, the Catholic faction now pressed its advantage. Six Evangelical bishops were sacked and replaced with Catholics. Three of the old bishops were trotted out for a mock debate at Oxford on the fourteenth of April on the nature of transubstantiation, among other topics, it should come as no surprise that the Royal moderator of said debate duly declared the Catholic side victorious, though I should point out, by all neutral accounts the
Evangelicals more than held their own. What it really looked like any observer was a dry run for a heresy trial, and if you lose those, you burn. The new bishops were efficient in their posts. All married clergy were deprived of their positions. In London, where the Evangelical faction had been the most successful, this amounted to about thirty percent of the clergy. Many of these men repented and returned to their positions, but a significant portion did not.
Clerical marriage would be one of the battle lines in the fight to come. Politics remained at the heart of everything. In the spring fifteen fifty four, it was impossible to get anything significant through Parliament because there were simply too many factions and none of them agreed on much. Mary remained the official of
the Church. Parliament turned down a few heresy charges, not because it doubted the guilt of the men in Vaulved, but because Paget, among others, feared that it might be a prelude to seizure of old ecclesiastical lands and many members of Parliament on those lands. The marriage treaty with Philip was confirmed, but honestly barely sure. The leading Edwardian evangelicals remained in prison, but to what end? It increasingly looked like Mary didn't have the votes or even the
basis to launch proceedings against them. Now, some things did move forward. On July thirteenth, Philip arrived in England for the wedding. Reportedly, and reportedly should be underlined in this sentence, everyone was overjoyed with the news. Of course, privately that certainly wasn't the case, though there were, truth be told, a massive amount of festivities, and everybody loves feasting. It
had been a long time since a royal wedding, after all. Yet if theirs was a match made in Heaven, there were reasons to doubt the chances of the marriage's success here on earth. Philip was more than ten years younger than Mary, who had never been a beauty, truth be told, and even in her younger days, the two had little in commons save religion. They didn't even speak the same language. Philip spoke to his betrothed in Spanish,
Mary replied in French. Throughout the proceedings, Philip's alleged Englishness was played up. Trumpeters declared that he was descended from Edward I, a dubious claim at best. Philip did his best to put any reservations about his rule to rest. He told his English lords that they should continue to prepare to be English. While those words did go a long way to quell uneasiness, at least in the part of the Great Magnates in London, xenophobic commoners remained unconvinced.
Wild rumors circulated, including that Philip intended to make a Spanish friar the Archbishop of Canterbury. He didn't. The rumors went both ways too. The Catholic faction leaked a rumor that Mary was already pregnant. She wasn't, nor could she have known even if she were. But such was the state of England in that time that no one knew what to believe. Things picked up
pace again in September fifteen fifty four. In that month, a Catholic bishop, Bishop Bonner, announced he would make a complete visitation of his diocese and would personally examine the clergy therein on all points of doctrine. Anyone found lacking would be removed. He did this without royal or even papal authority. Bonner believed he acted quote out of his zeal for God's service end quote. That
was enough, at least for him. Interestingly, Bonner was another of our reformed Catholic bishops, a one time loyal servant of Thomas Cromwell and a fierce critic of the pope. He had evidently seen the light. His new process highlighted the two key themes of the Catholic restoration in England, a return to Catholic liturgical life and forced Orthodoxy. In truth, the two were one and
the same. The Iconoclasm of fifteen forty seven to fifteen fifty two left parishes emptied of nearly everything needed for the daily, weekly, and seasonal performance of the Catholic faith. Bonner provided an extensive shopping list of items parishes needed to have or get quickly. Foremost, everyone needed a high stone altar with all its consecrated and dedicated and quote not any gravestone taken from the burial and put
up for an altar end quote. He had to make that specific because a lot of people were doing it. Other necessary parts were for the mass of course, were a chalice, crewits for the wine and water, candlesticks, a bell for ringing at the elevation. You needed a set of vestments for the priest, surplices for the clerk, a container for the incense, a sensor for burning it, a pack spread, a picks for the reserved sacrament.
Of picks. By the way, for those who don't know, is what you take the holy sacrament away from the church in It's like a vessel for those who were too ill to come to church, a curtain for veiling the altar and lent. In addition, of course, you had to have a missile. Parishes were to have seven other liturgical books in general, covering every range of services. In every church. There was to be a rude and a roote loft quote, as in times past hath been a custom end
quote. All parishes were to ensure that they had the necessary cross and banners for processions. A separate cross was required for funerals, along with a buyer for the dead and for routine and ritual blessings. There must be a christmatory for holy oils, a stoop for holy water in church, and of course, a vessel for carrying it around. All this, Bonner said was the
bare minimum of a sacramental religion. The articles did not require the reinstallation of images devotionally desirable, but at least from Bonner's perspective, for right now liturgically inessential. It was a challenging list, and some churches protested that the demands were simply impossible. By and large, however, the parishes of Bonner's diocese Drew Beth, knuckled down and figured out a way to get the stuff they
needed. Many parishes were able to mend broken altars and demand the return of their holy plate from the parishioners who had bought them. There were some legal battles over the return of ecclesiastical properties, and a couple of times these did get vicious, but across England in fifteen fifty four the pattern of restoration was quite impressive. In Bath, eighty four percent of parishes had an altar by that fall. Some were they aforementioned, and banned recycled gravestones, but for
the moment these worked all the same. By the end of fifteen fifty four, according to official accounting, in all, one hundred and sixty eight parishes across England high altars were rebuilt, vestments and books reobtained. Physically, at least, the restoration was going quite a well now truth be told. Of course, many parishes were using stop apps solutions while more expensive options could be fundraised. But we also have evidence that said fundraising was going pretty well.
Now. Restoration is a more loaded word than might at first appear. There could be no question of merely going back. Rudes, alters, images, investments were no longer what they had once perhaps been. They were the cultural foliage and a landscape of meaning, assumed to be natural and God given. Now all such objects had been profoundly and irrevocably politicized by prolonged processes of discussion, sometimes defense, sometimes denigration, and sometimes destruction. Replacing them was an
assertive but also a very divisive act. It was a statement of faith in an alternative future. It wasn't an invocation of a vanished past. There simply was no go going back. It was a future that some people dearly hoped not to see. In summer fifteen fifty four, shortly after the route was set up in Saint Paul's, a man joined a large crowd in front of it, bowed low and addressed the image in mocking and seditious words. Quote,
Sir, your mastership is welcome to town. I had thought to have talked with your mastership, but that ye here be clothed in the Queen's colors. I hope ye to be a summer bird, and that ye be dressed in white and green end quote. Bonner failed to see the funny side. Those who quote played the fool in the church end quote were part of a range, an extensive range of religious miscreants, clerical and lay, and he
aimed to discipline them. Gone. Now were the vague exhortations to unity and charity, with instructions not to call your neighbors a heretic or a papist. Knew the kind of people he was looking for, and now he wanted names. Married priests were a particular concern. There was to be a record of all who had been married, and of any still consorting with their quote unquote
concubines. Such marriages were not just moral lapses, they were schismatical. Without episcopal reconciliation, no married priest would be allowed to celebrate Mass, and nor was Mass to be said by any clergymen made schismatically and contrary to the old ordering custom of the Catholic Church, priests ordained under the Edwardian Ordinal were not
priests at all, period, full stop. Now, the greatest fear was of married priests or others quote naming themselves ministers end quote, and presiding over secret assemblies or conventicles, and teaching doctrine that was not accustomed to the Catholic
Church. It was also a worry that lay people might attends such gatherings or in other ways withdrawal from the collective worship, the Catholic worship by failing to confess, receive the sacramented Easter, or bring in their children to be confirmed. An eye was to be kept out for any who, at service time quote feigned occasions and quote doth use to go abroad, out of their own parishes and into the fields end quote. And of course those who on Sundays
kept themselves secretly to their houses. Much of the concern, however, was not about discreet withdrawal from Catholic practices, but argumentative engagement with them who they wanted to know spoke against sacraments in prayer for the dead, who mocked and jeered at the pre saying mass, who expounded scripture on their own authority.
What printers and booksellers disseminated slanderous books. Again, if there had been some vague nod towards religious tolerance at the beginning of Mary's Realm, it was very quickly fading away. Bonner's articles give the impression not so much of large scale withdrawal of evangelicals into schism as a variety of disruptive semi separatists within the parameters of the parish. Heretics at times declined to take part in this procession or
that procession, or perhaps contribute to the weekly Holy Loaf. They might bring their children to be baptized, but quote not suffer the priest to dip the child three times end quote. Worst of all, they might come to Mass, but then refuse to receive the sacrament, or find ways to express disdain for the holiest of holies. The visitations were met with some grumbling resistance, but many people were more than willing to turn on their neighbors and name names.
In London fifteen fifty four, four hundred and fifty charges were leveled on the basis of such accusations. The commonest accusation was failing to attend church on Sundays or another holy day. But there were other charges as well that were more serious, speaking against ceremonies, for example. The great majority of these brought before the court in fifteen fifty four repented and returned to the church. This likely did not mean many people in England had changed what they thought.
It meant that England was trying to figure out again how to live under a different set of rules. The whirlwind was becoming dizzying. Indeed, in early fifteen fifty four, John Bradford Than, a resident of the Tower of London, wrote a treatise. The question was about conformity, namely, was it right for someone who knew quote the truth to attend Mass. His answer an emphatic no. Those who knew it to be wrong, but conformed out of
weakness and cowardice were simply figures of contempt. His real argument was with the people who believed it was permissible to be there, that is, in church, in body, while worshiping God secretly and inwardly. The Mass, he
wrote, had no cracks through which such freedom of spirit might escape. It was a quote mar Malorium a sea of evils, an idolatrous, insidious miasma of corruption and defilement to hear mass or even be in church while it was being said, there was a sin breaking quote all God's laws, generally in every commandment, particularly end quote. There was short shrift for the idea that attendants could be redeemed by displays of disrespect at the elevation of the host.
That was like a servant willingly accompanying thieves to his master's house and expecting to be excused because he didn't actually steal anything himself. Nor did Bradford neglected objection. That was his only incorrect theologically but presumably often posed quote offending our brethren in not coming to mass end quote. Here sadly he said, there was little to be done. It was a case of offense taken, not given, for the evil of the thing. Meant it could never be offensive to
avoid an attack it to refuse the mass was to invite retribution. But Bradford's only practical advice for the people of England was to take up their cross and prepare to follow the true faith, the evangelical faith. His view was typical across Europe. Views toward conforming began to Harden. Such conformists were now called
Nicodemus, after the pharisee who visited Jesus secretly by night. The evangelical leader Heinrich Bollinger wrote an entire sermon decrying the actions of those who attended Mass, while rejecting its premise. Many of the people demanding that Englishmen stand up for their faith, however, were no longer in England. The number of those who left in fifteen fifty four were staggering, perhaps as many as a thousand, so I suppose it was a bit easier for them to be critical.
The new Catholic bishops were more than happy to see them go. Gardner even helped make arrangements for a few to leave the country. That doesn't mean it was an easy decision for people. Many of those who left were influential evangelical preacher who were abandoning their flocks by doing so. We have a number of accounts detailing just what a difficult choice this was for so many. Ironically, many of those who fled moved to, of all places, Catholic Italy.
It was just easier to get lost in the masses there. Some left cities and towns but didn't actually leave England. The evangelical printer John Day left London in fifteen fifty four for a little village called Barham, where he continued to operate a secret printing press until Mary's death years later. Not every kingdom overseas was willing to accept refugees either. A few sympathetic princes in Germany outright refused
to accept evangelicals out of fear of angering Charles the Fifth. As always during this age, politics and religion refused at the hip. One English refugee later wrote, quote, lost the saving truth at home and found it abroad. Our countrymen are become our enemies, and our strangers are made our friends. End quote. There's a lot hidden in this sentence of critical importance to our later story. A schism was beginning to form in the evangelical ranks, even
if no one knew it yet. After Mary's death, many of these exiles are going to return. They will then claim that they represent a sort of untainted church. The stage was already being set for the religious conflicts of Elizabethan England. For the moment, the arena of trouble that sort of indicates all this is Frankfurt, an imperial free city of largely Lutheran complexion. It enjoyed an uneasy friendship with Charles the Fifth after remaining loyal to him in the bout
of warfare brooking out in fifteen fifty two. Early in fifteen fifty four, the Frankfurt Town Council granted permission to settle the remnants of a small stranger church, a community of French weavers from Glastonbury in England. As other English exiles began to arrive that summer, the council insisted that they shouldn't dissent from the
a Frenchman who had already arrived. In doctrine or ceremony. It was an assertive performance of liturgies just banned in England that might be seen as a provocation to both Philip and Mary. In practice, these axiles found they could use their prayer book, but tailored it to resemble the liturgy of the French Congregation, which was derived from Calvin's Geneva. New prayers and psalms were added and
the litany discarded. The quiet local arrangements were barely in place when on the second of August fifteen fifty four, the leaders of the congregation, prominent among them, A man by the name of William Whittingham sent an eye catching letter to other English Ales. It invited them all to come and settle in Frankfurt, where worship was subject to no control and the church was free from all
superstitious ceremonies. The implication that other refugees worshiped superstitiously was provocative, to say the least. Englishmen then living in Zurich and Strasburg reported that while minor changes were permissible, the continued use of the Prayer Book was vital. They wanted to show solidarity with persecuted brethren still in England and to rebut papist accusations that
the Protestants were constantly shifting and changing positions. Hardened in November fifteen fifty four when John Knox, a veteran of battles over the fifteen fifty two Prayer Book, was invited by the Frankfurt Congregation to become their minister. He immediately allied himself with the aforementioned Whittingham. His co minister, Thomas Lever, then took the opposite view. Bail would prove to be just as controversial as Knox himself.
Both then wrote to John Calvin who returned their responses in fifteen fifty five in January, somewhat wearily urging all sides to compromise. In March fifteen fifty five, the Strasburg community decided to take matters in hand. A party of exiles there traveled north to Frankfurt. But at the very first divine service, these newcomers loudly interjected that the prayer book responses were being omitted by the Frankfurt
congregation. When challenged, they answered that quote this has the face of an English church end quote. Knox responded angrily. It wasn't long before the two groups broke into aschism of their own. Knox was content when all of the exiles from Strasburg were sent back, but this didn't quell the underlying tensions. What did it mean, Did you have to conform in some way to the changing nature of religious laws in England or did you have to remain completely pure?
Again? These were the fault lines already forming that are going to fracture in the years to come. The experience of the exile enabled growing numbers of English Protestants to see more clearly than ever that they were not in fact bound to the legacy of Henry the Eighth limited to adapting, reforming, or refining the old structures that he had rested control from the pope. A church could
be reconstituted from its very first and fundamental principles. The desire to do this and the fear sometimes of doing this would henceforth pull the movement of evangelical reform in evermore conflicting directions. But while new fault lines opened up on one side of the broad religious divide among English Catholics, a twenty ear schism was drawing finally to an end in a very different gesture of repudiation to the legacy of
Henry the Eighth. In late fifteen fifty four, within the court of Queen Mary, the decision was at last taken. The English Church was coming home to roam. If you've enjoyed the episode, feel free to check out the links in the show notes. Plenty more content there. Got the link to the website, as well as to a seven day free trial of Western civ two point zero have over one hundred hours of additional content. Right now. You can listen to it all for free for a week. If you are
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