EP 02 - Bloody Mary Tudor?

Bloody Mary Tudor?

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Who exactly was a heretic?

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Who exactly was a heretic?

Wednesday 25 May 2022

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We're trying to understand why so many people were burned under Philip and Mary

Mary I by Master John, 1544, National Portrait Gallery (aged 28, ten years before her marriage to Philip)

Mary I became queen because she was Catholic, not in spite of it

What the traditional Protestant account of this period never told you is that religious intolerance did not begin in England when Mary came to the throne, or when she married Philip of Spain. Religious intolerance and persecution began in England and Wales under Edward VI.

Had the young king not fallen ill with tuberculosis and unexpectedly died in July 1553, a campaign of burning heretics by England’s Protestant government was being set up by both politicians and church leaders.

These Protestant reforms under Edward went on being extremely unpopular with the English people. We can be sure of this because, when the Councillors around the dying Edward attempted to seize the English throne for the king’s young protestant cousin, Lady Jane Grey, there were immediate and loud demands, across the country, that the throne should go to the rightful heir, the Catholic Mary.

This was an embarrassing development for traditional Protestant English historians. They concocted an entirely unconvincing narrative about how much English people respected the theory of legitimate succession and the rule of English law, more than they respected their own personal religious beliefs. This, they said, was the only reason the English grudgingly accepted Mary as queen.

Many years ago, historian Christopher Haig famously demonstrated that, in reality, as soon as Edward died, parishes all over England rapidly dug out the statues, altars and missals they had all along been hiding, and happily returned to saying Catholic Mass. What the traditional protestant historians’ account didn’t tell you was that Mary became queen because she was Catholic, not in spite of it.

A fantastic example of a pre-Somerset (pre-Edward VI) English church interior, St Fagan’s National Museum of Wales in Cardiff

In the 1540s, right across Europe, religious toleration cooled dramatically

The burnings under Philip and Mary coincide with the dramatic ending of religious toleration across Europe. In the 1540s the religious climate cooled dramatically across Europe. Debate between Protestant and Catholic, Catholic and Catholic, Protestant and Protestant, was progressively replaced by intolerance and persecution.

In England the darkness was held back for a while by the religious indifference of Henry VIII. But when Henry died and his young son succeeded him, power fell quickly into the hands of the Earl of Hertford. And then the reign of religious intolerance began.

Back in 1987 the historian Ronald Hutton published research that changed everything we knew about the reformation in England. Hutton showed that between 1547 and 1549, Hertford – or the Duke of Somerset as he rapidly made himself – railroaded through a sudden and brutal transformation of English parishes. He enforced more Protestant change on the English and Welsh in two years than Henry had in two decades.

Altars were destroyed, colourful wall paintings (the likes of which most of us have never seen) were whitewashed, stained glass was smashed and the old Latin words of the Mass replaced by a new English service.

In cultural terms, Somerset was a vandal who destroyed most of England’s medieval art at a stroke.
These changes were so extreme, in fact, that they had were one of the main causes of rebellion in nearly every county.

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Episode 02 - Who exactly was a heretic?

Almost all of Philip and Mary's councillors had experience in government stretching back through the violently protestant regime of Edward VI and into the reign of Henry VIII

Family of Henry VIII - Allegory of a Tudor Succession (Henry to Edward to Philip and Mary, to Elizabeth), attributed to Lucas de Heere, 1572, National Museum of Cardiff (on show at Sudeley Castle, Gloucestershire)

The German peace treaty of Augsburg, 1555, confirmed the widely held belief that the ruler chose the religion - Cuius regio, eius religio

The notion that one community could possibly contain more than one faith – or even more than one version of the same faith – would not be completely accepted in Britain, for example, until the nineteenth century.

Across Europe, and in England and Wales under Philip and Mary, heretics were tried by the church but executed by the secular government. Why? Because Sixteenth-century Europeans assumed that state and church ran society together, and that dissent from either one of them would break a parish, or a city or a nation apart. Heresy was like a kind of treason.

Where church and state began saying different things, as happened in parts of Germany between the 1520s and 1550s, in both France and the Netherlands in the 1560s (and would happen in England after 1640) the result in every case was civil war.

So the concept of cuius regio, eius religio – the ruler/government chose the religion - was simply a practical solution to a well-recognised problem. Religious unity was in practice defined and enforced everywhere not by the church but by the secular government.

Edward VI and the Pope: An Allegory of the Reformation, National Portrait Gallery.

(Henry VIII is in bed. Edward is king and iconoclasm under Seymour is in full swing. The Pope is dead. Paget facing, far right, becomes one of Philip and Mary's councillors, as do others equally involved with Edward's extreme protestantism: Paget, Petre, Paulet and Pembroke)

Philip and Mary's councillors had been deeply involved in extreme protestantism under Edward VI

We have seen that England in the mid-1550s was being governed by King Philip of Spain and a select council – a Spanish-style consejo cogido – of extremely able English politicians.

Almost all of them had experience in government stretching back through the violently protestant regime of Edward VI and into the reign of Henry VIII. Several of them had been personally involved in Henry’s original break with Rome.

To all appearances they had for years been living as active protestants. And yet here they were part of a government conducting a campaign against religious heresy that we have always understood to be a Catholic campaign to stamp out Protestantism.

So we’re still left with the difficult question how could this Select Council possibly have consented to a campaign from 1555 to 1558, which we are always told was intended to stamp out Protestantism? It may have been part of a Europe-wide pattern. But within England itself it seems to make no sense.

Stay with us while we delve deeper into this mystery.

More info and photos here.

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