United Kingdom

The tragedy of Mary’s reign was the belief not only that the old church of her mother’s day could be restored but also that it could be best served by fire and blood. At least 282 men and women were martyred in the Smithfield Fires during the last three years of her reign; compared with events on the Continent, the numbers were not large, but the emotional impact was great. Among the first half-dozen martyrs were the Protestant leaders Cranmer, Nicholas Ridley, Hugh Latimer, and John Hooper, who were burned to strike terror into the hearts of lesser men. Their deaths, however, had the opposite effect; their bravery encouraged others to withstand the flames, and the Smithfield Fires continued to burn because nobody could think of what to do with heretics except put them to death. The law required it, the prisons were overflowing, and the martyrs themselves offered the government no way out except to enforce the grisly laws.

Nicholas Ridley, detail of a portrait by an unknown artist, 1555; in the National Portrait Gallery, LondonCourtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

Mary’s reign was a study in failure. Her husband, who was 10 years her junior, remained in England as short a time as possible; the war between France and the Habsburg empire, into which her Spanish marriage had dragged the kingdom, was a disaster and resulted in the loss of England’s last Continental outpost, Calais; her subjects came to call her “Bloody Mary” and greeted the news of her death and the succession of her sister, Elizabeth, on November 17, 1558, with ringing bells and bonfires.

Elizabeth I (1558–1603)

No one in 1558, any more than in 1485, would have predicted that—despite the social discord, political floundering, and international humiliation of the past decade—the kingdom again stood on the threshold of an extraordinary reign. To make matters worse, the new monarch was the wrong sex. Englishmen knew that it was unholy and unnatural that “a woman should reign and have empire above men.” At age 25, however, Elizabeth I was better prepared than most women to have empire over men. She had survived the palace revolutions of her brother’s reign and the Roman Catholicism of her sister’s; she was the product of a fine Renaissance education, and she had learned the need for strong secular leadership devoid of religious bigotry. Moreover, she possessed her father’s magnetism without his egotism or ruthlessness. She was also her mother’s daughter, and the offspring of Anne Boleyn had no choice but to reestablish the royal supremacy and once again sever the ties with Rome.

Elizabeth’s religious settlement was constructed on the doctrine of adiaphorism, the belief that, except for a few fundamentals, there exists in religion a wide area of “things indifferent” that could be decided by the government on the basis of expediency. Conservative opposition was blunted by entitling the queen “supreme governor,” not “head,” of the church and by combining the words of the 1552 prayer book with the more conservative liturgical actions of the 1549 prayer book. At the same time, many of the old papal trappings of the church were retained. Protestant radicals went along with this compromise in the expectation that the principle of “things indifferent” meant that Elizabeth would, when the political dust had settled, rid her church of the “livery of Antichrist” and discard its “papal rags.” In this they were badly mistaken, for the queen was determined to keep her religious settlement exactly as it had been negotiated in 1559. As it turned out, Roman Catholics proved to be better losers than Protestants: of the 900 parish clergy, only 189 refused to accept Elizabeth as supreme governor, but the Protestant radicals—the future Puritans—were soon at loggerheads with their new sovereign.

The Tudor ideal of government

The religious settlement was part of a larger social arrangement that was authoritarian to its core. Elizabeth was determined to be queen in fact as well as in name. She tamed the House of Commons with tact combined with firmness, and she carried on a love affair with her kingdom in which womanhood, instead of being a disadvantage, became her greatest asset. The men she appointed to help her run and stage-manage the government were politiques like herself: William Cecil, Baron Burghley, her principal secretary and in 1572 her lord treasurer; Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury; and a small group of other moderate and secular men.