United Kingdom

How long a kingdom still attached to the outward trappings of Roman Catholicism would have tolerated doctrinal radicalism and the plundering of chantry lands and episcopal revenues under Somerset and Northumberland is difficult to say, but in 1553 the ground upon which Northumberland had built his power crumbled: Edward was dying of consumption. To save the kingdom from Roman Catholicism and himself from Roman Catholic Mary, who was Edward’s successor under the terms of a statute of Henry VIII as well as that king’s will, Northumberland—with the support, perhaps even the encouragement, of the dying king—tried his hand at kingmaking. Together they devised a new order of succession in which Mary and Elizabeth were declared illegitimate and the crown passed to Lady Jane Grey, the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister (Mary, duchess of Suffolk) and, incidentally, Northumberland’s daughter-in-law. The gamble failed, for when Edward died on July 6, 1553, the kingdom rallied to the daughter of Catherine of Aragon. Whatever their religious inclinations, Englishmen preferred a Tudor on the throne. In nine days the interlude was over, and Northumberland and his daughter-in-law were in the Tower of London.

Mary I (1553–58)

Roman Catholicism was not a lost cause when Mary came to the throne. If she had lived as long as her sister Elizabeth was to live (the womb cancer from which Mary died in 1558 not only brought her Catholic restoration to an end but rendered her childless and heirless), England would probably have been an irrevocably Catholic country. Mary was indeed determined to restore Catholicism, but she was also determined to act in accordance with the law. She worked with and through successive Parliaments to reverse all the statutes that excluded papal jurisdiction from England and to revoke her half-brother’s doctrinal and liturgical reforms; however, she persuaded Rome to allow her to confirm the dissolution of the monasteries and the secularization of church properties. New monasteries were to be created, but the vast wealth of the dissolved ones remained in lay hands. She also gave the married Protestant clergy a straight choice: to remain with their wives and surrender their livings or to surrender their wives and resume their priestly ministry. Her resolute Catholicism was laced with realism. With her principal adviser, Reginald Cardinal Pole, she planned for a long-term improvement in the education and training of the clergy and the sumptuous refurbishment of parish churches. She took her inspiration from the Erasmian humanist reforms long championed by Pole in his Italian exile. But this liberal Catholicism was in the process of being repudiated by the Council of Trent, with its uncompromising policies. Pole was recalled to Rome by a hard-line pope and accused of heresy for his previous attempts to achieve an accommodation with Protestantism. Mary’s plans were torpedoed as much by the internal struggle for control of the Roman church as by the strength of Protestant opposition in England. Most potential leaders of a resistance movement had been encouraged by Mary to emigrate and had done so, but there were scores of underground Protestant cells during her reign. In thousands of parish churches, the restored liturgy and worship were welcomed.

Mary’s decision to marry Prince Philip of Spain (later Philip II), her Habsburg cousin and the son of Charles V, the man who had defended her mother’s marital rights, proved to be unwise. Given her age—she was 32 when she came to the throne—a quick marriage was essential to childbearing, but this one proved to be a failure. Her marriage was without love or children, and, by associating Roman Catholicism in the popular mind with Spanish arrogance, it triggered a rebellion that almost overthrew the Tudor throne. In January 1554, under the leadership of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger, the peasants of Kent rose up against the queen’s Roman Catholic and Spanish policies, and 3,000 men marched on London. The rebellion was crushed, but it revealed to Mary and her chief minister, Cardinal Pole, that the kingdom was filled with disloyal hearts who placed Protestantism and nationalism higher than their obedience to the throne.