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English Catholic Bishops in the Early Elizabethan Era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

Kenneth W. T. Carleton
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Extract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , May 1996 , pp. 1 - 15
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1996

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References

Notes

1 John Jewel to Peter Martyr, from London, 28 April 1559, ZL p. 20.

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4 If we exclude the Bishop of Sodor and Man, Stanley Thomas, who took the oath and continued in office until his death in 1570, on the basis that his see, unlike every other diocese of the English Church, had no temporal baronetcy attached to it giving its bishop a seat in the House of Lords.

5 The letters of Robert Joseph, a Benedictine of Evesham, covering the period of his residence there from 1521 to 1530 give a very strong impression of a place where Erasmian humanism was flourishing.

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32 The letter, and the Queen's reply, are now lost.

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