Chapter Five: On the Government of Mary I, the Lollard Uprising and its Fall, the Persecution of the Protestants in England and Ireland, and the Survival of the Evangelical Church in Ireland Through Many Tribulations.
In the year of our lord 1536, Mary Tudor took to herself full governance of the kingdom of England, dismissing her regency council in dramatic fashion at Christmastide. Now a woman of twenty, the queen had increased her role in government every year throughout the regency, yet it was widely expected that men like Moore, Fisher, Cromwell and the Duke of Suffolk, who had governed the country with shrewdness in her minority, would retain high station. This was not to be, for Mary entrusted her government to papists of a more fanatical sort, assorted Spaniards who were confidants of the dowager queen, and much of that kind. Fisher, she could not remove, for by now he was Archbishop of Canterbury and Cardinal of the Roman church. Though in doctrine he was as dedicated a papist as any man in England, few men were abler, and none can doubt his piety. Thomas Moore was dismissed, as was Cromwell, whom men close to the queen, many of them inquisitors from Spain, viewed with suspicion of lollardy. Cruelest of all, however, was her treatment of Suffolk, who she feared was conniving to have his son Thomas made king in her place. Arrested on suspicion of treason, Suffolk was confined to the tower of London, and his son taken under the wardship of his godfather, the aged Thomas Woolsey. By now, the queen believed the cardinal to be a shell of himself, broken by his dismissal. In fact, the truth could not have been more different, for Woolsey, like a patient spider, bided his time. In the boy of eight now entrusted to his care, Woolsey would find one last chance to leave a lasting legacy, and would pursue this project with great vigor until his death in 1545. In the meantime Charles Brandon, father to Thomas, languished in the tower of London, accused of crimes for which no evidence has been produced (1).
Yet this error was hardly the greatest of Mary's young rule. To leave both Brandon and Cromwell at liberty would have been both prudent and merciful. To leave Brandon free but imprison Cromwell might have demonstrated, at least, a degree of shrewdness. But to imprison Brandon and dismiss but not imprison Cromwell, all the while planning an eventual heresy trial against him may only be seen as the height of folly. For Thomas Cromwell possessed in full measure the shrewdness of his former master Woolsey. Through quiet efforts throughout the regency, he built up for himself a cadre of loyal men skilled in arms, and appointed many Lollard sympathizers to high posts in government. And now, aware of Mary's ultimate plans, he began the preparation of his counter-stroke.
The spark that lit the fire of the first Lollard uprising was the burning of Matthew Parker in April, 1536. Parker's case had been pending before the ecclesiastical court at Christmastide. Now, through pressure from the queen, the case against him was expedited, a guilty verdict swiftly obtained, and Parker scheduled for summary burning at the lollard's pit. Even Cardinal Fisher protested the sentence, though this may have been more out of distaste for the speed of the process and jealousy over a prerogative he felt ought to be reserved for his office. Nevertheless, Matthew Parker was burned on the Fifteenth of April, 1536. Yet rather than weakening the feelings of the Lollards, the burning spurred them to action. An angry mob, whipped up by Cromwell and his allies, began a riot in London, attacking many papist churches and destroying a great deal of property. The queen's party reacted to this with draconian measures, as troops were set loose on London. At the same time, Queen Mary announced the establishment of a royal inquisition in England, mirroring that found in Spain, to be established forthwith and tasked with rooting out heresy and lollardy. London was by now inflamed, and on April 26, soldiers were attacked in Southwark, leading to riots and a great fire. Rioting spread, and eventually, the soldiers met armed, organized opposition, and were driven out of London. On May 5, Thomas Cromwell, along with allies including the Mayor of London, led an armed force to march on the palace, leading the queen and her court to flea to Oxford. In London, Cromwell and his allies declared for the child princess Elizabeth FitzRoy, in accordance with the Henrician Testament. Word of the uprising quickly spread, for Cromwell had planned well, and recruited agents against this day. Soon, much of southern England was aflame with the rebellion. Some were Lollards in truth, many others were merely agrieved peasants, and some were men formerly of the regency shunted aside by the queen. Few records of that time remain, though it is known that a rump parliament of Lollard sympathizers met in London four times between June and September, and that contact was made with Thomas Boleyn in France, who went so far as to hire soldiers for an expedition to England. These men would, in due course, be put to a far different use of great significance.
Mary was far from idle, and demonstrated a fearlessness and tanacity that would prove the undoing of many of her opponents throughout her reign. Gathering loyal forces in the north, she wrote also to her cousin Charles, asking for the loan of Spanish troops stationed in the low countries. These forces would land at Dover in August 1536, while Mary's own loyalist forces marched south, consolidating support from the great nobles as she went. In command was Mary's husband, Reginald Pole. The disciplined Spanish forces defeated a numerically superior but disorganized Lollard force outside of Canterbury in late August, to the great relief of Cardinal Fisher, who was besieged there. Meanwhile, the royalists smashed a second army of Lollards just north of London. Thus collapsed the last organized forces loyal to the Lollard uprising.
With the collapse of resistance, many men of the Protestant cause lost their lives. Myles Coverdale, Cromwell himself, Matthew Parker, and thousands more men whose names are now lost to history suffered execution at the hands of Mary's men. Hugh Latimer, whose support for the uprising proved too tepid for men like Cromwell and Coverdale, fled to Ireland, where he was warmly welcomed by Bilney and Barnes. As Lollard sympathizers fled hither and yon, monks from Spain descended on England, bringing with them the methods by which many Jews and Moors were put to torture and death. Upon England, then, landed the full force of the inquisition, with the backing of royal will and might. After quarreling with the inquisitors quite fiercely, for that he felt they threatened the supremacy of Canterbury in England too much, Fisher was dispatched to the Council then being held at Trent, and served there as a delegate for English interests. Long would it be before the most beloved cardinal in England would return home. Even Thomas Moore was not above suspicion, for in that era of fear and suspicion, he was thought too much a humanist, and by the queen, too much a partisan of her father besides.
Of those Lollards not killed, many also fled, to Crance, to Scotland and to Ireland. Those in France would, as I shall discuss in a future chapter of this work, receive a very mixed reception, and many would join the Peru relief expedition launched by Boleyn in 1539. Those in Scotland found themselves facing percecution at the hands of the Scottish bishop James Beaton, as fierce a papist as any man in the isles. Those who came to Ireland were, inn the whole, of the Evangelical persuasion, and found there a warm welcome, vanishing into the new monastic communities. Yet their reprieve would prove temporary, as the attention of the queen and her inquisitors turned to Ireland.
It was in 1538, two years after assuming full control of the government, that Queen Mary turned eyes to Ireland. It was determined, at this point, that England was sufficiently passified and restored to the church that affairs in Ireland could now be a priority. Jeffrey Pole, brother to the queen's husband Reginald, was made Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and dispatched with a substantial force of English soldiers and inquisitors from Spain. Their mission was the restoration of both papal and English authority on the island. To that end, a writ of excommunication was, at the behest of the queen, promulgated against Thomas Bilney, Gerald FitzGerald and "all those who hold with their Lutheran doctrines". News of this writ reached Ireland, and it was only at this point, in consultation with a great part of the English and Gaelic clergy, that Thomas Bilney declared the official separation of the Irish church from that of the papacy. In his Notes on the Independence of the Irish Church, Bilney articulated, for the first time, both the doctrine that our church had firm Egyptian roots and a pedigree essentially separate from that of Rome. Though the move had been long in coming, it nevertheless surprised some few in Ireland, who did not see the split as inevitable. Yet, for the most part, Ireland's sons were believed willing to hold to their church and resist England and popery alike.
Yet, as has always been the case in Ireland, disunity would prove an insuperable obstacle to the fight against the foreign foe. For, among the Burke clans, feuds carried on since before the beginnings of the Irish reformation remained divisive. Nor were the Butlers and FitzGeralds entirely united. Thus it was that Jeffrey Pole found willing allies in Ireland, and with their aid, waged a campaign so bloody and ferocious as to leave its mark on the soul of Ireland for generations. Dublin was captured first, and many priests loyal to Bilney found themselves burned, though the bishop himself escaped. Gerald FitzGerald was again besieged at Kildare, but Pole remained content, at first, merely to pin the Earl of Kildare there. He defeated the Earl's eldest son Thomas in open battle outside the walls of Kildare, for Thomas sought to protect the monastery of which his sister Anne was Abbess. Thomas' forces were defeated, he himself killed, and Kildare sacked, with much violence and indignity perpetrated against the religious women of that abby. The intrepid lady Anne was among those captured, and would be burned by Lord Pole's inquisitors within sight of the walls of Kildare Castle. So enraged was Gerald FitzGerald that he sallied forth with his men, only to be cut down in the fighting. Alone of his sons, Edward FitzGerald and Gerald, namesake of his father, escaped the Slaughter at Kildare.
With the FitzGerald's broken, Pole turned to the Butlers. Piers Butler swiftly made pledges of loyalty to both church and crown, though in fact, he and his following did much to aid those of evangelical sympathy in fleeing the inquisition. Many a lord of the Pail followed Ormund's example, for they knew they could not stand alone against England. Yet, as Pole turned to deal with the Gaelic men of Ireland, he found that difficulty always faced by English forces in such inhospitable parts. Gaelic forces attacked, but then faded away. Pledges of loyalty were given, but not honored. Feuds were carried on without consideration of the English. Most of all, the new evangelical monastic communities proved their worth. Many were established in such wild and inaccessible locales as to make them almost impossible for the English to find. Other communities proved extremely mobile, slipping into the wild Gaelic lands, and scattering their books among the various clans. Then too, it was often difficult for an Englishmen, let alone a Spanish inquisitor, to determine the difference between a village and a monastery, for many monasteries looked like villages, and many villages were as active in copying and disseminating both the Gaelic and English bibles and the works of Luther, Bilney, Barnes and now Latimer as any monastery. "To hold Ireland and convert it," Lord Pole wrote his brother the king "is a task as impossible as holding water". Nevertheless, Pole would persist in his thankless task for nearly five years, until Ireland became, for Queen Mary, a matter of less import than the happenings on the continent. For it was in the year 1543 that, after long upheavals which shall be described subsequent to this, a new great war of religion broke out on the continent, and pitted Mary's Spanish ally against a new and powerful foe.
Notes:
1. Butler here takes a line common to historians of a Brandonian persuasion, but not born out by subsequent investigation. In fact, there is some evidence that Suffolk did conspire against the Queen, although, unlike his son, he proved not particularly adept at intrigue.