The Story of Britain Read online

  “Get rid of her,” he hissed to Thomas Cromwell.

  So Cromwell made up a story that the queen had betrayed Henry by taking a lover, and Anne Boleyn was arrested and executed.

  Then Henry spotted a pretty courtier called Jane Seymour. Jane was sweet-faced and stupid. Henry married her, and the next year she gave birth, and this time the baby was a boy. They named him Edward, and let off fireworks to celebrate the birth of a prince. But the queen grew sick. Giving birth was dangerous in the days before proper doctors and medicine, and Queen Jane died, so Henry was alone again.

  By now he had grown so fat he could hardly walk. He sat slumped in his throne, breathing noisily through his mouth. His face looked like a slab of raw beef, and his mean little eyes darted suspiciously around the court. Were people laughing at him? Were they plotting against him? Many people think it would be wonderful to have absolute power. In fact, hardly anyone enjoys it. Just as misers always want more gold, rulers never have enough power to satisfy them.

  Cromwell persuaded the king to marry again. He suggested the daughter of the duke of Cleves, an important town in Flanders, and sent Hans Holbein to paint Anne of Cleves’s portrait. Holbein’s picture showed a delicate young woman with fine features, and the king was delighted. Unfortunately Holbein had made Anne look a lot prettier than she really was. When she arrived in England, Henry took one look at her and stormed out of the room.

  “She looks like a horse!” he screamed at Cromwell. “A Flanders mare! Get rid of her!”

  Cromwell arranged yet another divorce, but the king never trusted him after that. Soon Cromwell was arrested, and the minister who had killed so many others was executed himself.

  So the king had had four wives in seven years: Catherine of Aragon: divorced; Anne Boleyn: beheaded; Jane Seymour: died; Anne of Cleves: divorced. Everyone wondered what would happen next.

  Catherine Howard was beautiful, young and empty-headed. Her relatives made sure she caught the king’s eye, and Henry soon fell in love with her and they married. He didn’t notice how his courtiers sniggered when they saw them together, for Henry was old and fat, while Catherine, who was just nineteen, was the prettiest girl at court. Unfortunately she could only think of the fine clothes and jewels she would have as queen, and was too stupid to realize that she ought to stop seeing her old lovers. When someone told the king Catherine was cheating on him, he was furious. After just two years as queen, she too was taken to the Tower and executed.

  “Divorced, beheaded, died,” chanted children in the London streets. “Divorced, beheaded…”

  Henry married once more before he died. Katherine Parr was a sensible lady of the court; there was no danger of her taking a lover. She did her best to make Henry happy, but he was old by now, and while on the outside he grew more bloated, on the inside he was eaten up by suspicion. He didn’t trust his advisers. He refused to do any work. He lay in bed, too fat to walk, feared by everybody, and so eaten up by his own power that he could enjoy nothing.

  Meanwhile, great changes were taking place in the rest of Europe. More people became Protestants, and bitter wars broke out between Protestants and Catholics. More and more people in England and Wales became Protestant too. They wanted the Church of England to turn into a proper Protestant Church, like the ones Martin Luther and John Calvin had started.

  “The Church of England is neither one thing nor the other,” they complained.

  But Henry wouldn’t let them change it. He had got rid of the pope, but didn’t want a proper Reformation.

  Katherine Parr was a Protestant, though. So were Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury; and the lords who brought up Prince Edward, the king’s son. So when King Henry VIII died, the Reformation arrived. England and Wales would never be the same again.

  The Stripping of the Altars

  ONE day, not long after Edward VI became king, a horseman rode into the little village of Morebath, on Exmoor. A man in black robes dismounted and entered the house of the vicar, Christopher Trychay.

  The villagers gathered in the street outside. It wasn’t often that people in Morebath had visitors. They waited several hours before the man in black came out and rode away. Then Christopher Trychay appeared, looking as if he had aged ten years in a single afternoon.

  “We have orders from the king,” he told the villagers sadly. “We must change our church.”

  The villagers were proud of their church. They had all paid to make it as grand as possible, with a stained glass window, a statue of Christ’s mother, Mary, before which they always kept a candle burning, fine robes for the vicar and a screen shining with gold. Now Christopher Trychay told them they had to sell the robes, dismantle the screen and blow out the candle.

  “We’ll soon get used to it,” he said sadly.

  The villagers spent Saturday taking down the screen and removing the statue. By Sunday morning their church was as bare as a barn. They hardly recognized it as the place they loved.

  Edward VI and his advisers sent commissioners all over the country to make England Protestant. Everything Catholic had to go: candles, incense, statues and screens, Latin Bibles and jewelled robes. If a church had stained glass windows, Protestants threw stones at them and broke them. If its entrance was decorated with statues of saints, they hacked off the saints’ faces, and if its wall had a painting of the Day of Judgement, when the dead would rise from their graves, they made the villagers paint over it with whitewash. Protestants wanted churches as simple as possible.

  The archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, announced that church services would no longer be held in Latin but in English, and wrote an English Book of Common Prayer to replace the old Catholic service. The first day it was used, everyone stared at one another in astonishment. Some were delighted. They had never before understood what they were praying for, and it was right, they said, that ordinary people should understand what was said in church – hadn’t Christ’s own disciples been ordinary working men? But others said it was wrong to get rid of things people had believed in for so long.

  It was they who rebelled against the king, first in Cornwall, then Norfolk. Robert Kett led an army from Norwich towards London. But, just as in King Henry’s time, the king’s soldiers defeated the rebels and hanged their leaders. Edward VI and his advisers were determined to change what the English believed, so they sent out more Protestant commissioners who smashed more stained glass windows and tore down more statues.

  When the commissioners were gone, the families of Morebath and other villages found themselves kneeling in bare white churches and muttering awkward prayers in English. And they felt as if their whole world had come to an end.

  The Nine Days Queen

  BUT if Protestants thought they had driven Catholics out of England and Wales for ever, they were wrong. Edward had always been sickly, and as he grew up he became thinner and paler. He began to cough. Eventually his doctors called in Edward’s advisers and gave them terrible news – the young king was dying.

  Protestants faced disaster. For Henry VIII had written in his will that if Edward died without any children, the throne of England should pass to his eldest daughter, Mary. And Mary was a Catholic.

  “Mary must not become queen!” the advisers whispered.

  So they agreed a plan with Edward. To keep out Mary, he left the throne to his cousin, a girl called Jane Grey. Jane Grey was plain and quiet, and never expected to become queen. She was horrified when her father called her into his study to tell her what had been decided.

  “I don’t want to be queen!” she exclaimed. “What about Princess Mary?”

  “Never mind Princess Mary!” her father ordered. “Do as you are told!”

  But as Jane Grey rode through London to be proclaimed as queen, she couldn’t help noticing how people stared at her. She knew they were thinking the same as she had: What about Princess Mary?

  People had always felt sorry for Mary, because Henry VIII had divorced her mother, Catherine of Arag
on, and treated her badly. When Mary, who was in Suffolk, announced she was going to go to London to make herself queen, huge crowds came to cheer her on her way. By the time she reached it, nine days later, hardly anyone supported poor Jane Grey.

  “Where is the girl who dares call herself queen?” Mary asked as she rode triumphantly into London.

  Soldiers arrested Jane Grey and her father and took them to the Tower of London. First they executed her father, then told Jane that she too had to die.

  “But I never wanted to be queen!” Jane sobbed.

  She had only ever wanted to be plain Jane Grey; instead she had been caught up in arguments about power and religion that she never really understood. But it made no difference. The next morning, Jane was led to Tower Hill, blindfolded and forced to kneel down with her head on a block of wood. Then the executioner raised his axe and brought it down on the neck of the Nine Days Queen.

  So Mary became queen. And the first thing she did was declare England Catholic again.

  Bloody Mary

  A lot of people were pleased to go back to the old ways. The villagers of Morebath put their statue back up, and the smell of incense filled their church once more. But Protestants were horrified. And everyone became worried when Mary announced she wanted to marry Philip II, who ruled England’s worst enemy, Spain.

  Spain was the richest and most powerful country in Europe – and the most Catholic. The king of Spain had sworn to stamp out Protestants in his empire, and Mary set out to do the same in England. She sent Protestant vicars to the Tower and declared the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, a “heretic” – an enemy of the Church. The punishment for heresy was to be tied to a stake and burnt alive.

  Cranmer had written the first prayer book in English. In the last few years many had grown to love it because the prayers were as beautiful as poetry, and they found it easy to remember them. Even most Catholics thought it wrong to burn the archbishop of Canterbury, but Cranmer was arrested and locked in a prison cell.

  He lay awake at night imagining what it would be like to be burnt alive. He imagined he could already smell smoke and hear the crackle of flames. Sometimes, in the days that followed, he wondered if Mary was just trying to frighten him, but every week he heard news of Protestants being arrested and burnt alive. Some screamed as the fires were lit, he was told, while others, the brave ones, just closed their eyes and prayed to God. Cranmer didn’t think he had the courage to do that, so at last he wrote the queen an apology for his English prayer book, and for what the Protestants had done. He felt guilty afterwards, but at least he was alive.

  But Mary didn’t let him go. She had decided to kill him anyway. When Cranmer realized this, he was so angry he forgot his fear. He didn’t scream when the soldiers tied him to the stake, but made a speech saying how much he regretted the cowardice that caused him to write his “apology”. And as the flames rose, he thrust his right hand into them. “This was the hand that wrote it,” he cried, “therefore it shall suffer first punishment!”

  Mary was queen for five years, and killed hundreds of Protestants. Soon people began to fear her instead of respecting her. And they started to give her a new nickname: Bloody Mary.

  Queen Elizabeth

  ALTHOUGH Catholics were pleased at the triumph of their faith, they were worried about the future. Mary had no children, so England’s next ruler would be Henry VIII’s youngest daughter, Elizabeth, who was Protestant. Mary hated Elizabeth. She arrested her, sent her to the Tower, and visited her cell to scream abuse at her.

  “You are plotting against me, sister!” she shouted. “Plotting to bring back the Protestants!”

  Fortunately Elizabeth was just as clever as her mother, Anne Boleyn, and just as proud and determined as her father, Henry VIII. She was too intelligent to be caught out by Mary’s questions, but answered her quietly, giving Mary no excuse to accuse her of treason.

  Then Elizabeth was told she wouldn’t be queen after all, for Mary had announced she was pregnant. But the months passed, no baby appeared, and Mary’s doctors looked more and more worried. At last they realized the truth. The queen wasn’t pregnant, but ill with a terrible disease of the stomach. Not long afterwards, Bloody Mary died, and Elizabeth became queen in her place.

  As queen, Elizabeth needed all her intelligence, because England and Wales were now divided between Protestants and Catholics who hated one another. In France the two sects had begun fighting, and she didn’t want that to happen in her country. So she tried to find a compromise.

  She made herself head of the Church of England instead of the pope, just as her father had done. She brought back Thomas Cranmer’s English prayer book. But she didn’t get rid of bishops, as many Protestants wanted, and she wasn’t as stern as King Edward about destroying statues and candles.

  Unfortunately compromises sometimes leave everyone unhappy. The most fiery Protestants, who were called Puritans, said God had made everyone equal, so they hated bishops and wanted churches to be as plain as possible. Meanwhile, Catholics kept trying to bring back the old religion, holding services in secret and hiding priests in “priests’ holes” in their houses. Captured priests were tried and executed until Catholics claimed Elizabeth persecuted them as much as Mary had persecuted Protestants.

  Apart from keeping the peace between people of different beliefs, Elizabeth had a second problem to deal with. She had to put up with rumours about whom she would choose to marry. Until Mary, England had never had a queen, and people couldn’t get used to the idea of being ruled by a woman.

  “When’s she going to fall in love?” courtiers whispered.

  In fact, Elizabeth already was in love. As a girl she had fallen for a handsome young earl called Robert Dudley. She longed to marry him, but knew that if she did, Dudley would order her around, and all the other lords would be jealous.

  I’m the queen, she told herself. No one will tell me what to do! So she forced herself to stop thinking about Robert Dudley.

  Her advisers suggested she marry the king of France’s son.

  Then the French will want to run England, Elizabeth thought, and the Spanish will attack us. So she refused to marry him, either.

  Instead she devoted herself to the task of being queen. She travelled from town to town and spent hours in meetings with her advisers. Gradually her looks faded. Her face grew wrinkled, so she covered it in white make-up; her hair turned grey, so she put on a red wig. People started to call her the Virgin Queen.

  “I’m married to my country,” Elizabeth said.

  And however sad or lonely she felt, she never regretted her decision. For her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, got married three times, and Mary’s husbands brought her – and Scotland – nothing but trouble.

  Mary, Queen of Scots

  AFTER King James IV of Scotland died at the Battle of Flodden, his son James V became king and married a French lady called Mary of Guise. James was desperate for a son, because having only daughters would end his royal line, just as it had ended Robert Bruce’s. Mary of Guise became pregnant, but soon afterwards James fell ill, and was close to death when the bad news arrived. His wife had given birth to a girl.

  “It cam’ wi’ a lass and it will gang wi’ a lass,” James muttered sadly, then turned his face to the wall and died.

  He didn’t know that his baby daughter would become one of the most famous of all monarchs: Mary, Queen of Scots.

  Mary of Guise ruled Scotland while her daughter grew up. It was even harder to rule than England. Its barons were more quarrelsome, its arguments about religion even more bitter. Mary of Guise was a Catholic, but some Scots were determined to make Scotland Protestant. They attacked Catholic leaders, and Mary of Guise had to send for French soldiers to help her.

  One of the Protestants, John Knox, was captured and sent to be a slave in the French navy. After he was released – hating Catholics even more – he went to Geneva, whose leader, John Calvin, had thrown out bishops and made the whole town Protestan
t. John Knox dreamed of making Scotland the same, and wrote a book attacking both Mary of Guise and Bloody Mary, who was queen of England at the time. He called it The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women!

  By then Mary of Guise had sent her daughter to France to protect her from the English. When she was only a child, Henry VIII had decided to make her marry his son, Prince Edward. Most princes sent their lovers jewels, but Henry sent an army to force the Scots to agree. Scots called his attack the “rough wooing”.

  In France she was safe, and Mary spent her whole childhood there. She grew up to be very beautiful, married the French king’s son, Francis, and became queen of France. Unfortunately Francis, who had always been sickly, fell ill and died, and when her mother died soon afterwards, Mary decided to return home as queen of Scotland.

  By then Mary could hardly remember what Scotland was like. She behaved and dressed like a Frenchwoman, and spoke French better than English. As her ship sailed north, she and her ladies-in-waiting shivered on the deck, watching the sea turn grey and the sky cloud over. When Scotland’s bare mountains came in sight, she thought she had never seen so wild and frightening a place in her life.

  Even more frightening, though, was John Knox, who was waiting for her in Edinburgh. Knox hated the idea of a Catholic queen, and hated Mary’s extravagant habits.

  “Look at her rich dresses!” he screeched. “Look at all her jewels! A true Christian should care about her soul, not her wardrobe!”

  In the end Mary decided the only way to fight back was to meet him, so she invited Knox to her palace of Holyroodhouse to argue about religion with her. Not surprisingly they disagreed about everything. Mary thought it was right for a queen to wear rich clothes, while Knox wanted everyone to live harsh, simple lives with no luxury. Mary liked the way the Catholic Church was organized, with the pope at the top, then his cardinals and bishops, then the priests. But Knox thought everyone ought to be equal. There should be no bishops, he shouted, just ordinary people.