Pacing the Faith

The Queen’s Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I
by John Cooper
Faber & Faber, 2011, 400 pages, $24.99

The History of England: Vol. II: Tudors
by Peter Ackroyd
Macmillan, 2012, 503 pages, $32.99

Even now, Oxford University’s Tudor era historian John Cooper gives the impression of clearing his throat and lowering his voice in awkwardness as he begins a chapter on the Catholic English mission nearly 450 years ago.

“The story which is about to unfold,” he writes, “is deeply contested … The myth that Catholicism is somehow alien to Englishness has had a long and corrosive effect on the national memory of the British Isles.” It is also at the heart of, or at least was until fifty years ago, sectarian feelings in Australia, if not the Anglosphere generally.

The raw nerve with Protestants—and the sensitivity still surfaces with Tony Abbott’s Liberal leadership—is the lurking fear of a clerically-orchestrated Catholic plot to control society. Equally raw with Catholics is the visceral fear of anti-Catholicism.

Nearly as pervasive is the interest in Elizabeth I, her father Henry VIII and their Shakespearean times, the story still rarely absent for long from screen and bookshop. Today cartoonists occasionally depict fellow redhead Julia Gillard as an antipodean Elizabeth, especially when she is being imperious.

John Cooper’s biography of Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s principal secretary and spymaster, concentrates on processes behind the scenes worthy of a John le Carré novel, but even richer in double agents, turncoats and convoluted international intrigue. Cooper largely avoids blaming, but his message in summary is that everybody should have had a Bex, a cup of tea and a good lie-down instead of over-reaching and letting a difficult situation drift into enduring tragedy.

The story, in summary, is that the Elizabethan Settlement of the 1560s that established the Anglican Church, with hopeful room for Catholic and Lutheran or Calvinist tendencies under one roof, did not satisfy everyone, though it was to an extent in accord with some elite, at least, public opinion. Many Catholics pined for the passing of the medieval church, with its sumptuous interiors, its Latin mass, saints, relics and processions. These crumbled with the official priority for the English-language Bible and Book of Common Prayer as centrepieces. “Church Papistry”, as the most Catholic section of the newly created English church was known, drifted towards oddity and oblivion. Cambridge was producing a new, zealous breed of Protestant or Puritan clergy while some Oxford colleges clung to conservative Catholicism and welcomed the Counter-Reformation.

Officialdom, concerned that too deep a division would risk public disorder, began to crack down, especially as the Counter-Reformation developed a more pugnacious, efficient and uncompromising official Catholic style. Fear of public violence was real. England still had dreadful memories of the Wars of the Roses in the previous century. France had allowed religious freedom, but the differences became embroiled in Parisian politics and in 1560 the crown unleashed on Protestants the “wars of religion” in which thousands were killed.

In 1568 the Oxford academic William Allen, who became a cardinal in 1587, established a college at Douai on the French-Belgian border to train young priests for a mission to English families dissatisfied with the emerging English church. It would also translate the Bible into English on Catholic lines.

Allen’s mistake, Cooper suggests, was, after successfully interesting several thousand of the gentry in low-key Catholicism confined to private houses, then to approach continental Catholic rulers and the Vatican to mount an invasion to depose (and in some versions to kill) the “bastard Queen” (daughter of Henry VIII’s post-divorce marriage to Anne Boleyn). As told on television every few years, Elizabeth would be replaced with her French-educated Catholic cousin, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. Mary was next in line to the throne after it became clear that Elizabeth would never have a child. Mary’s son James—who was being reared as a Protestant in Scotland, but was thought convertible—would then be Mary’s heir. Mother and son would rule a united kingdom and restore the true religion.

The strategy was to land a French, Spanish or other continental force in the north or west of England, or in Wales, which were the most religiously conservative regions. These regions would then rise against Elizabeth and press inwards to the south-east, where landed gentry households primed by English Mission priests would complete the rebellion.

It was, Cooper says, an impractical strategy conceived in the isolation of Douai and later Rheims in France. The foreign rulers, until at last Philip II of Spain acted, gave all encouragement to undermining an upstart rival power but would not commit actual forces. The chronic French-Spanish rivalry ensured some degree of interest. Except for a fringe of mostly young zealots, English opinion, even among Catholics, opposed such an adventure and strongly supported their charismatic queen.

The essential difference was between maintaining the old faith, which was relatively uncontroversial, and restoring it by force. The Vatican has been reported recently as believing that its lending support to the forcible removal of Elizabeth was one of its worst decisions.

The drawn-out threat of foreign invasion and toppling of Elizabeth’s regime brought England to the point of hysteria, as several accompanying plots to assassinate or otherwise topple Elizabeth were uncovered. Some involved deeply sincere zealots from upper-class Catholic families, but adventurers, opportunists hoping for a big job in a Marian regime and conspiratorial cranks also joined in. The several turncoats even included ordained priests from Douai.

Walsingham was the intelligence chief tasked with foiling the plots, which he did very effectively. But he also, says Cooper, came close to dodginess himself. The critical affair of the Anthony Babington “plot” to replace Elizabeth with Mary came close to entrapment; Walsingham could have nipped it in the bud.

This was the affair that led to Mary’s treason trial and beheading in 1587 and gave Philip II the excuse he wanted—regicide was serious business—to unleash his Armada the following year to rid England of a supposed tyrant. The Armada was defeated in helpful weather at sea—Puritans discerned the hand of God—and there was little sign of the expected uprising. English Catholics, in a minority in a wavering and uncertain population, mostly stayed loyal to the Queen, like nearly everybody else. Walsingham kept the handful of possible militants under watch.

What happened later was probably going to happen in any case: the Anglicans muddling along to this day with semi-Catholic and evangelical wings; the English Catholic Church emerging robust and respected once (another couple of centuries later) the fear of invasion and subversion abated; Mary’s son James uniting the English and Scots kingdoms as a moderate Protestant. It could all have been so much easier and, dare one say it, more Christian.

Cooper’s account is mainly about men. Elizabeth is a bit player, but comes over as a brilliant intuitive politician. She left a lot of the detail to the men, such as Walsingham, around her but kept a strong hand on the purse strings. She used frequent glamorous processions around the country to achieve the mass loyalty that kept her on the throne. Personal appearances were so much easier when the population was only 3.5 million.

Cooper is fascinating on the spin-doctoring. This was when the term “British Empire” first appeared, he says, based on a fancy that Elizabeth was a descendant of the legendary King Arthur of a thousand years earlier. The Tudors at least had substantial Welsh blood, after four centuries of Norman or semi-French overlords.

The brash enthusiasts around Elizabeth dreamed of an Arthurian empire in North America, though the first colonies there were failures, as was an attempt to straighten out Ireland, which caused a few problems over the next few centuries. Hubris was alive and well as a new, confident England emerged after half a millennium of Norman-originated rule.

Walsingham’s exasperated comments on working with Elizabeth echo much of the hair-tearing one still hears from bureaucrats about “the minister”. Comments connecting her dramatics and indecision to her gender are probably best not reprinted here in this age of misogyny wars.

The other side also had its hubris. Cooper detects it at Douai–Rheims. Philip II, with the wealth of the Spanish American empire behind him, was notorious for it. Philip had another pride problem, Cooper reminds us. The issue between him and Elizabeth was not just religion, but politics, namely the Protestant-led revolt in the Netherlands against centuries of Hapsburg (now Spanish) rule. England’s security interest lay in Spain being booted out of its neighbour. Elizabeth was too cautious to join in officially but she encouraged freebooters to attack Spanish shipping, with the bonus of looting their American treasure. Haughty Philip, said snipers, including allegedly the Vatican, was being bested by a woman.

The crucial importance of well-judged pace in public affairs is clear also in Volume II of Peter Ackroyd’s History of England, covering the Tudor era. Like Cooper and many other modern historians, Ackroyd largely avoids comment and advocacy, but he presents Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, as a good judge of pace in his cautious peeling away of some of the accretion of customs and rites in the medieval English Catholic Church. After his break with Rome following his controversial divorce from Catherine of Aragon—it was really more a politically riven church annulment—Henry knew he had to go carefully to avoid upsetting not only his own subjects, but also continental rulers likely to invade a heretic kingdom.

The religious game-changer of the time was the appearance of English and other vernacular Bibles, following the invention of printing. Henry’s innovation, apart from breaking with Rome over the divorce and closing the monasteries, was a change of heart to let the English Bible loose. He also began paring away at the huge but tricky ground between faith and superstition.

Henry’s attack on the monasteries, though, comes over here as too fast and destructive, though there was a case for it—but the sale of vast confiscated monastery lands bought the support of his own gentry, who purchased the land.

The reign of his successor and only son, the manipulated boy king Edward VI, comes over as rash and destructive in its drastic Protestantising, against majority public will, during his short reign from 1547 to 1553. Queen Mary (1553–58, half-sister to Edward and Elizabeth) also seemed counter-productively rash in turning back the clock. But, Ackroyd implies, she lost good will less from well-paced re-Catholicisation and even the burning at the stake of key Protestants, than through her short and unhappy marriage to Philip of Spain.

Ackroyd acknowledges the difficulty of estimating public sentiment, but quoting others puts serious Catholics at about 5 per cent of the population. Serious Protestant thinkers were at first perhaps only 1 per cent, mainly elite clerics influenced by Martin Luther in Germany, but growing in London and among the sedentary artisans, such as weavers and potters—the sort of people who in the next century emigrated to puritan New England.

Most people, especially in the country, were naturally conservative and missed the pervasive communal piety of the medieval church, but accepted the changes, however grudgingly; new generations eventually regarded them as normal. A lot of people just became less religious.

Ackroyd’s book is a superb, fair, comprehensive, brisk, vivid account that makes Tudor times seem like yesterday, even with the dreadful extent of illness and early death, the official violence and the horror of religious heresy. It often reads like a novel.

He puts the number of Protestants burned at the stake on Mary’s orders at about 300 and Catholics Elizabeth had executed (beheaded, or hung, drawn and quartered) as 200, including the charismatic young Jesuit Edmund Campion. Neither author gives a count of Puritans jailed or executed. Ackroyd says Henry was no more tyrannical than his predecessors (but does not say he was a nice chap). Things began to improve slightly under Elizabeth, he suggests, and the infant buds of democracy begin to peep through.