In this third episode of the #reformation500 English Reformation Month series, we talk about the fast changes that Archbishop Cranmer implements under Edward, and then winds up getting burned under Mary.
[advertisement insert here: if you like this show, and you want to support me and my work, the best thing you can do (and it’s free!) is to leave us a rating on iTunes. It really helps others discover the podcast. Second best is to buy Tudor-themed gifts for all your loved ones at my shop, at TudorFair.com, like leggings with the Anne Boleyn portrait pattern on them, or boots with Elizabeth I portraits. Finally, you can also become a patron of this show for as little as $1/episode at Patreon.com/englandcast … And thank you!]
Episode Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora Podcast Network. I’m your host, Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and being more deeply in touch with our own humanity.
This is Episode 89. It’s the third in the four-part mini-series on the English Reformation that I’m doing this year, the 500th anniversary of the 95 theses. This third one is the chaotic 11 years of Edward and Mary’s reigns from 1547 to 1558, when England got religious whiplash. If you didn’t listen to the previous two, go back and do that now, so you’re all caught up.
So I have a couple of announcements. First up, the tour announcement for 2018. I’m so excited you guys! I’m teaming up with Nathan Amin, founder of the Henry Tudor Society and we’ve created a seven-day tour of Tudor Wales next spring. We’ll be visiting some of the most important places in the stories of the early Tudors. We’re going to start off in Windsor where Owen Tudor met the Queen Catherine of Valois and fell in love with her. And then we’ll move west into Wales visiting Carmarthen, Pembrokeshire, the Island of Anglesey, moving on to Ludlow and there will be guest expert speakers at some of the different stops, and there’ll be tours and lots of time to explore as well.
So you can see the complete itinerary and view the costs and what’s included, go to Englandcast.com/tours. I’m so excited about this tour. I’m so excited to share these stories of the early Tudors with you. It’s something that I’ve become much more interested in the past year or so, and it’s just gonna be so much fun! I hope you can make it. We’re capping the tour to only 14 people, so it’s going to be very intimate and very cozy. And we’re going to have such a great time and I hope you can make it.
So now I need to thank my patrons. I have amazing patrons thank you to Kathy, Juergen, Ashley Kendra, Anne Boleyn also known as Jessica, Elizabeth, Cynthia, Judy, Ian, Lara, Barbara, Sharkiva, Amy, Allison, Joanne, Kathy, Christine, Anneta, Mary, Candace, Rebecca from TudorsDyansty.com, Al, and Shandor. I love you guys, you’re awesome! You can find out how to join this exclusive list of awesome people. And you can head on over to Englandcast.com and click on the donate and support button at the top menu. The Patreon level starts at just $1/show so you can consider doing that to support the podcast as well.
So now let’s move on to religion. When we left off last week, Henry VIII had spent years persecuting people with whom he disagreed religiously on all sides of the spectrum – the heretics who denied the miracle of transubstantiation, as well as the Catholics who said that the Pope was the Head of the Church. Henry was an equal opportunity burner of religious dissidents. He tried to walk the middle line which just left both sides confused, but he left his son, Edward’s education in the hands of Archbishop Cranmer. Archbishop Cranmer was a Protestant, he chose Protestant tutors for the prince. That brings us to 1547 and Henry’s death.
Edward was nine when he became the king. His uncle Edward Seymour became the Lord Protector during Edward’s minority, and he took control of the government. He had a whole group of reform-minded men who took control of the government with him. So these men were largely just concerned with lining their own pocketbooks and getting power for themselves, but they were all Protestants and reformers. And so they gave Archbishop Crammer much more latitude in enacting changes than he had been able to do in the last decade of Henry’s reign. Of course, as we talked about last time, after about 1539, Henry moved back in with the conservatives at court and so Crammer found himself leashed in a little bit more than he would have liked to have been.
In the next two years, Crammer and the government enacted sweeping reforms. They went much further than Henry VIII or Anne Boleyn could have ever dreamt of. In 1547, when the first things they did was Parliament repealed the heresy laws and the Six Articles. There would be no more Protestant burnings. They just ended, they ordered the obliteration of religious paintings and images by whitewashing them in the churches. They thought, of course, that they were pious, that they were idolatry, and so they just whitewashed them. This is the period where we see whitewashing, we see altars destroyed, we see a lot of the great church music from this time from pre-Tudor era. This is where it all gets destroyed.
Musically we start to see these rules enacted. The famous rule that you could only have one note per syllable so that people could understand the words that were being sung. Everything had to be sung in English, no more fancy Latin polyphony. You have to have things very simple and very clear, understandable. So a book of homilies was issued with religious Protestant sermons. And also remember those guilds that I talked about in the first episode? Those religious guilds, yeah, they were gone. They were suppressed and their goods were taken and given to the crown. Festivals were no longer allowed to include any kind of accessories that were deemed too popish like ashes, like incense, or candles, nothing like that, that would seem too popish. So that’s what happens right away in the first year after Henry’s death in 1548.
Communion with both bread and wine was allowed in the style of the Protestants. Catholics to this day only receive the body of Christ, the host, the consecrated wafer or bread, rather than the wine, rather than both of them. In 1549, Cranmer issued a prayer book, an act of uniformity that demanded that this prayer book was used. The prayer book was a simplified sermon in English that was, if not totally Protestant, at least it was halfway there. It actually led to the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549.
When the prayer book was first used on Sunday, the people of Stanford county in Devon, they forced their priests to put on his vestments and say, a Latin mass and this movement spread around Devon and Cornwall and within days, the parishioners in Cornwall were also demanding to hear Latin masses. So there was this big rebellion over this new prayer book, actually lasted for over six months, and eventually, it led to the Siege of Exeter, and over 4000 rebels were either killed or executed in this Prayer Book Rebellion.
After the rebellion, we start to see the fall of Edward Seymour in status in the council and John Dudley begins to rise in prominence. But if anything, that made even more changes possible, he was much more Protestant as well. And also at this period, we start to see Edward turning into the young boy who was so evangelical, so Protestant, even to the point of fanaticism. He was often described as the young Josiah who was going to bring truth and reform to the church. In 1552, a new prayer book came out, openly Protestant.
And in 1553, right towards the end of Edward’s reign, we see a new statement of belief, this is called the Forty-two Articles. These articles put forth a belief system based on justification or salvation by faith alone. Remember all that talk of purgatory from the first episode? Purgatory was gone. The idea that you could do good works to ease yourself through the process of purging your soul of sin, totally gone. Salvation came not from good works, not from any works, but merely by faith. The Articles also repudiated transubstantiation, but they also attacked the radical anabaptist beliefs in three of the articles.
So there was this rise in the Anabaptist beliefs and that was seen in a kingdom established by the anabaptist Jan van Leiden in Münster in the years between 1534 and 1535. So van Leiden believed himself to be a new David and he was preparing for the second coming of Christ as King David had prepared for the first, and he established this Kingdom in Münster. He instituted communal ownership of property. He made marriage compulsory for women, and permitted polygamy for men. So kudos to him, I guess van Leiden’s reign was ended only by military force, but this image of him was going to haunt Protestants for decades, people would associate Protestants with this movement of the anabaptist, Jan van Leiden. And so in the Forty-Two Articles, three of those articles are dedicated to repudiating the Anabaptist beliefs.
So in six years from 1547 to 1553, we moved from a church that is mostly orthodox with elements of reform with a strong Protestant minority in the government and court, but in most, most of the ways it’s orthodox, you still have to believe in transubstantiation communion is done in the same way for all intents and purposes. It’s still a pretty orthodox church with Henry as the Head of the Church rather than the Pope. Then we have six years where the church becomes clearly Protestant with a young boy king who is a zealot. And in 1553, the Church of England was clearly Protestant. It was centered on the English Bible and prayer book, and the nation was deeply, deeply divided in matters of religion, especially geographically.
We talked before about how the southeast was where Protestant thought grew the strongest because of the trade routes with the Low Countries. So you see this Protestant southeast and then in parts of the West Country and in Yorkshire, and farther up, you see still this importance of Catholicism, that’s still very important to the people. The nation is divided in religious belief and also geographically, in terms of that belief.
So then in the summer of 1553, Edward VI that died just a month after the Protestant Forty-two Articles were released, the Duke of Northumberland proclaimed Lady Jane Grey as queen. She was the nearest Protestant successor who could be named. There was a whole plot around having Edward name her as his heir, Edward could have named Princess Elizabeth. But his rationale for leaving out his sister Mary was that she was illegitimate. Elizabeth had also been declared illegitimate. So if he was going to be consistent with that, he had to move on to the Protestant line of his aunt. That was Henry’s sister Mary, who married Charles Brandon and her heirs. Lady Jane Grey was Mary and Charles’ granddaughter.
So Henry’s daughter, Mary from Catherine of Aragon, she was not willing to accept this new role. She had been living in East Anglia almost in seclusion. She was practicing her Catholic faith this whole time, she got into arguments with Edward around Catholicism, and how much she could practice her faith. She would hold many masses for her household, and she was just really trying to stay out of the court and be able to practice her faith. So she raised an army and she marches on to London. And even Protestants recognized that Mary was actually named next in Henry VIII’s will and supported her claim.
People didn’t even know who Lady Jean Grey was really. So there are stories of ambassadors having to see the family tree to figure out who she is, so they can tell their monarch who this new queen is, but everybody knew who Mary was. Everybody recognized that she was actually legitimate, and they came out and supported her. So we see Northumberland losing his nerve, he gives in, and he disbands his troops.
Now, Mary is queen. Calling her a loyal Catholic is not going far enough. She was a devout, loyal Catholic as much as Edward was a zealot towards Protestantism. She was even more so towards Catholicism, and it makes sense, she was a teenager when her parent’s marriage fell apart. And she saw Henry VIII effectively destroy her religion in order to marry Anne Boleyn. She clung to her faith and her old religion as a way to stay close to her mother, as a way to you know, you could psychoanalyze this for ages, but it’s pretty clear, it makes sense why she would have clung to her old faith.
So late in 1553, just after she becomes queen, Parliament repeals Edward’s Act of Uniformity, which had enforced the Protestant worship, but there were 80 members of Parliament who said no, who voted no on that, but it still passed early in 1554.
Mary starts preparing to marry Philip of Spain, Prince Philip, and this is the future Philip who would invade with the Spanish Armada decades later. Spain was the country of her mother. And during this period, it was deep into the Inquisition. So there was no question that Philip was going to be Catholic, that marriage was going to bring a Spanish king consort, and it was accepted by Parliament only after the suppression of the rebellion.
This is Wyatt’s Rebellion, which wanted to stop the marriage and rose up in support of Elizabeth I. This is the rebellion that actually led to the execution of Lady Jane Grey too. Mary had wanted to be lenient seeing her as a pawn in this game that she wasn’t actually playing. She wanted to bring people back to religion by showing her faith and her good works in action, but after Wyatt’s, she felt that she had no choice but to execute Jane, who was still gonna be a figurehead for some of these rebellions, as well as the other ringleaders of the rebellions.
In the autumn of 1554, so we’re now a year into her reign, she brought back official reconciliation with the Pope. She brought back full people jurisdiction, she healed the schism. Cardinal Reginald Pole, had been living in exile, he was a churchman related all the way back to the Yorkist family during the Wars of the Roses. So his mother was Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, who is the daughter of the Duke of Clarence, who was the brother of Edward IV. So this line goes deep. Cardinal Reginald Pole, came back to officially absolve the country of its sins separating from the Pope, and he was appointed the new Archbishop of Canterbury.
The absolution of England from this schism is interesting, it was only agreed after the Pope accepted that the lands belonging to the monasteries that had been seized, would stay with those people who owned them now. So Mary wasn’t going to take the land back from the people who had purchased it from the monasteries, when the monasteries were dissolved 15 years before then, so the land was still gonna stay in private ownership. This was a compromise that they had to reach, but Protestant leaders and ministers were stripped of their positions, many fled into exile abroad.
So we see England being healed back with the Pope. But with still this leftover holdover of Henry’s dissolution of the monasteries, Oxford and Cambridge were purged, 60 members of Cambridge, 80 members of Oxford went into exile. 800 ministers and their families also went into exile. So we see people going into exile in Switzerland, even into Northern Italy. There’s a number of people who went into exile who came back and were very famous like Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I’s spymaster.
From December of 1554, those who remained faced a revival of the Heresy Act, and Mary starts to earn her nickname of Bloody Mary. Up until that point, she wasn’t that bloody yet, but she becomes bloody after this point. So Mary saw it as her assignment from God to restore the breach with Rome and to persecute the heretics. It was partly a personal vendetta, like we talked about, those who helped break up her parent’s marriage, but it was also deeply personal for her conscience to restore the true religion to England.
Now, many people blame Philip for this as well. But he was a pragmatist. And he did realize that creating martyrs out of Protestants would only make their cases stronger and people revere them which is what happened with Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the other books that came out after this period. That’s why we remember her as Bloody Mary. He wanted to punish maybe just a few leaders, but then things started to get out of hand, and Mary killed hundreds of Protestants.
The most gruesome case was when she had a woman burned who was eight months pregnant. The lucky ones would have friends bring gunpowder so that they would die faster. Those who didn’t have that went through agony, sometimes taking hours to die, but there were relatively few who we recanted.
Between 1555 and 1558, over 300 people were burned at the stake. Some of them were important people in the Henrician Reformation, people like Bishops Latimer and Ridley were burned in 1555 in the marketplace in Oxford. Bishop Latimer called out to Ridley as the flames crapped out to them. And there’s the famous line where he says,
“Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England, as I trust shall never be put out.”
Archbishop Cranmer, who became Archbishop so that Henry could get a divorce, was burned in 1556. He temporarily recanted his faith. Then he went back on his recantation when he was burned, he put his hand into the fire that had signed the recounting first because he said this is “the hand that has offended”. Many of the people who were burned were just normal people from London or the southeast. Almost half of the burnings took place in London and Colchester and Canterbury. Those people who were burned were generally laypeople, only about 10% were clergy. Most were young, under 30, and a very high proportion were in their 20’s. They were people that had grown up in the new Protestant religion and they were prepared to become martyrs for it.
Mary clearly had never expected the resistance to be so strong or to last as long as it did, but she did stay with her policy until the end, even when there were maybe people who were questioning her. She showed that she shared her father’s stubborn streak. There had never been a religious persecution in this intensity in England and her policy was going to then associate Catholicism with that persecution. So people would always kind of feel iffy about Catholicism because of what had happened with Mary.
Mary died in 1558. She was only 42. She didn’t have an heir, she had several phantom pregnancies but no heir, and so she recognized that Elizabeth was going to be her heir as well. Many modern historians believe that if Mary had been given time, the old religion may have come back and been successful, but she didn’t have that time. The person who did have the time to create stability in the country and reach a religious settlement was Elizabeth. Elizabeth would reign for 45 years and it would be her final compromise settlement that decided religion for the Tudors.
So there we have it. Links for everything, including the books I’m using this month at Englandcast.com. Remember to check out the shop and consider supporting the show on Patreon, and you can get in touch with me through the listener support line at 8016TEYSKO or through Twitter @Teysko or Facebook.com/Englandcast. Thanks so much for listening and I will be back next week to talk about the Elizabethan settlement.
[advertisement insert here: if you like this show, and you want to support me and my work, the best thing you can do (and it’s free!) is to leave us a rating on iTunes. It really helps others discover the podcast. Second best is to buy Tudor-themed gifts for all your loved ones at my shop, at TudorFair.com, like leggings with the Anne Boleyn portrait pattern on them, or boots with Elizabeth I portraits. Finally, you can also become a patron of this show for as little as $1/episode at Patreon.com/englandcast … And thank you!]