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The Reformation

Queen Mary, 1553-1559

Mary was only in her 30s when she became the first queen ever to rule England, and there was every reason to expect that she would not only have a long life but would produce heirs as well. She was a devout Catholic and was married to Philip, the prince of Spain. Catholics everywhere rejoiced at their good fortune.

But nothing turned out right for the Catholics. Her marriage to Philip was loveless and he rarely visited England. There were no children. And Mary died unexpectedly young.

Moreover, the business of reverting to Catholicism was tricky. The Protestant prayer books were banned, and Catholic priests returned to the pulpit. Although there were no immediate persecutions, many of the Lutheran refugees found reasons to return to their homelands, in part because the religious Peace of Augsburg in 1555 made it propitious to do so.

But Henry had redistributed much of the land he had seized from the Church to great numbers of nobles and gentlemen, and these landowners had no intention of returning their properties to the Church. By 1554, Parliament had stated in law that all the confiscated lands were to remain in the hands of their new owners--Henry's real estate scheme had worked. This meant that the monasteries were not re-opened, and many of the returning bishops found themselves much impoverished.

The Protestants, of course, resisted, and some openly. Mary sought to enforce religious uniformity and ordered arrests. Some of these went to trial, and some of those trials ended in public executions, the victims being burned at the stake for heresy.

The most notorious of these took place at Smithfield, near Oxford. Over three hundred were burned in the Smithfield Fires between 1553 and 1558, giving England her first Protestant martyrs and giving the queen the harsh title "Bloody Mary". Mary herself was a gentle soul who found that the logic of her ardent faith, and the demands of politics, led her to endorse acts from which she personally quailed.

The general public had begun by loving Mary, for her attractive personal qualities, but they ended by hating her. The worst blunder, politically, was that most of those who died in the Smithfield Fires were ordinary people--tradesmen and peasants. The great lords who had fostered, protected, or even openly professed Protestantism, were able to use their influence to avoid arrest and execution. So Mary's attempt to enforce Catholicism was viewed as hypocritical and biased.

And then, with her death, the Reformation in England lurched yet again. For, the next in line, and indeed the only child of Henry who still lived, was the young Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn. So, in 1559, the persecutions ended, and no one was quite sure which direction reform would take under the new queen.