Academic literature on the topic 'Mary I, Queen of England, 1516-1558 – Religion'

Queen Mary Tudor died on the night of 17 November 1558. A few hours later, across the river at Lambeth, her cousin, Reginald Pole, Cardinal Archbishop of Canterbury, followed her, victim of the ague which he had contracted in the summer. England again had a change of monarch, the third in less than twelve years. What was not clear at the time was whether there would be another change in religion. With hindsight, it is clear that the programme of reform which sought to reunite the English Church with the see of Rome and to revivify it with the Tridentine reforms with which Pole had been so closely involved, had died also on that November night. Parliament was in session when Mary died, and immediately Elizabeth was proclaimed queen by Nicholas Heath, Archbishop of York, in his capacity as Lord Chancellor; there was no dissent such as had accompanied the accession of the new Queen's half-sister. It soon became clear, however, that the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn was unlikely to retain the settlement of religion in the precise form in which it had been left by the daughter of Katharine of Aragon. On Christmas Day, the Queen ordered that the elevation of the Blessed Sacrament was not to take place during the Mass to be celebrated in her chapel by the Bishop of Carlisle, Owen Oglethorpe. His refusal to obey this command led the Queen to leave the chapel after the gospel had been read. Two days later, a royal proclamation restored the first liturgical changes of Henry VIII, ordering that the epistle and gospel of the Mass were thenceforward to be read in English, along with the litany which usually preceded the service. The coronation of Elizabeth should have been conducted by the senior surviving churchman, Heath of York; he had resigned the Chancellorship before the end of 1558, and declined to conduct the service. It was Oglethorpe, as bishop of a suffragan see of the Northern Province, who crowned the new Queen, with no other diocesan bishops present. The coronation Mass was sung by one of the Reformers, Dr. George Carewe, who omitted the elevation, and another Reformer preached the sermon.

The beginning of Elizabeth i's reign was a happy and confident time for committed English Protestants in spite of their doubtful and precarious position in the world. They had almost miraculously survived both the death of their Protestant king, Edward vi, and the reign of the Catholic queen, Mary, and her foreign husband, Philip n of Spain. It seemed that God was testing Protestantism in England. Since he allowed Elizabeth to succeed to the throne, Protestantism, it seemed, had passed the test. As a result early English Protestants confidently began to formulate their place in both the world and history while attacking the established positions of their Catholic opponents. English Catholics defended themselves from these attacks and replied with some of their own. This debate over the historical situation of the Church of England continued through the reign of James i and beyond. During the course of the debate both sides commented frequently and necessarily on what they thought was Martin Luther's place in church history.

This chapter rehearses the dis/continuities between the reigns of Mary Tudor and Elizabeth Tudor. It looks at the attempts to embed the new regime in England and Ireland in and after 1558/1559 and at the foreign policy issues which Elizabeth’s accession generated. First and foremost, this meant the relationship with Scotland, particularly after the return from the Continent of Mary Stuart. In the early and mid-1560s contemporaries witnessed the Scottish queen doing all the things that the English queen was conspicuously failing to do, that is, until the implosion of Mary’s government, her deposition, and the civil war in Scotland. Mary’s arrival in England produced a breakdown of consensus about how her relationship to Elizabeth should be negotiated; in the end there was a rebellion in the North of England which was phrased in part by reference to Catholic hostility to the Elizabethan settlement of religion.