It's 1544.
King Henry VIII, now in the third decade of his reign,
bestrides England like an ageing colossus.
By making himself Supreme Head of the Church of England,
he'd taken the Monarchy to the peak of its power,
but at a huge personal cost.
For his headship of the church, known as the Royal Supremacy,
had been born out of Henry's desperate search
for an heir and love.
The turmoil of six marriages, two divorces, two executions
and a tragic bereavement had produced three children.
Now, the King felt it was time for reconciliation.
Henry's reunion with his family is commemorated
in this famous painting, known as The Family of Henry VIII.
The painting shows Henry enthroned between his son and heir
the seven-year-old Prince Edward and, to emphasise the line
of dynastic succession, Edward's long-dead mother Jane Seymour.
Standing further off to Henry's right is Mary, his elder daughter,
whom he bastardised when he divorced her mother.
To the left his younger daughter Elizabeth,
whom he'd also bastardised when he had her mother beheaded.
But the painting is more than a family portrait.
It's also a symbol of the political settlement by which Henry hoped to
preserve and prolong his legacy.
He decided that all three of his children
would be named as his heirs.
His son Edward would, of course, succeed him.
But if Edward died childless
the throne would pass to Henry's elder daughter Mary.
If she had no heir then her half-sister Elizabeth
would become Queen.
The arrangement was embodied
both in the King's own will and in a Parliamentary act of succession.
Henry's provisions for the succession held and, through
the rule of a minor and two women, gave England a sort of stability,
but they also ushered in profound political turmoil as well.
It turned out each of Henry's three children was determined
to use the Royal Supremacy to impose
a radically different form of religion on the English.
The resulting conflicts would send
hundreds to a terrible death at the stake or on the scaffold.
They would even force Queen Elizabeth I
to execute a fellow anointed sovereign.
On Christmas Eve 1545 Henry VIII made his last speech to Parliament
on the great issue dividing the nation - religion.
It was an emotional appeal for reconciliation between conservatives
who hankered after a return to Rome, and radical Protestants who wished
to press on for a complete reformation of the Church.
Henry sought a middle way
which would both preserve the Royal Supremacy, and prevent the quarrel
of Protestant and Catholic from tearing England apart.
But a year later, on 28th January 1547, Henry was dead aged 55.
With him died any prospect that the Royal Supremacy
would be used to save England from religious conflict.
Three weeks later, Henry's nine-year-old son
was crowned King Edward VI at Westminster Abbey.
The ceremony was conducted
by Thomas Cranmer - England's first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury,
the man who, 16 years earlier, had helped Henry VIII
to achieve supreme authority over church and state.
Now, Cranmer used Edward's Coronation to spell out
the Royal Supremacy's awe-inspiring claims.
During the ceremony no fewer than three crowns were placed
successively on the boy-king's head.
The second was the Imperial Crown itself - the supreme symbol
of the imperial monarchy, to which Edward's grandfather Henry VII
had aspired, and which his father Henry VIII had achieved.
And it wasn't only the crown.
Cranmer turned the whole ceremony
into a parable of the limitless powers of the new imperial monarchy.
First, he'd administered the coronation oath to the King.
But then, in a moment that was unique in the 1,000-year-old
history of the coronation, Cranmer had turned directly to the King
and people to explain, or rather to explain away, what he'd done.
He'd just given the oath to the King, he said.
But, he continued, neither he nor any other earthly man
had the right to hold him to account.
Instead, the chosen of God, the King, was answerable only to God.
The nakedness of the absolutism established by Henry VIII
now stood revealed.
And both those who ruled in Edward's name and, in the fullness of time,
Edward himself, were determined to use its powers to the uttermost.
Edward was being tutored by thoroughgoing Protestants.
He learned his lessons well, writing at the age of only 12
that the Pope was the true son of the devil, a bad man, an Antichrist.
Edward and his councillors now determined
to use the Royal Supremacy to force religious reform
and make England a fully Protestant nation.
The rebellion was eventually defeated.
But Edward soon found
a more dangerous opponent in his own half-sister and heir Mary.
It was to divorce her mother, Catherine of Aragon,
and to marry Anne Boleyn, that Henry had broken with Rome.
So, for Mary the Supremacy had always been a personal
as well as a religious affront.
Now, she discovered her true vocation - to be the beacon
of the old, true Catholic faith in England.
She openly continued to hear mass in the traditional Latin liturgy.
The clash between Mary and Edward, who was as stridently Protestant
as Mary was Catholic, began at Christmas 1550.
It was a family reunion, with Mary, Edward
and Elizabeth all gathered together under one roof for the festivities.
But, as so often, Christmas turned into a time for family quarrels,
as the 13-year-old Edward upbraided his 34-year-old sister for daring
to break his laws and hear mass.
Humiliated, Mary burst into tears.
But she would submit herself neither to her brother's laws
nor to his religion.
When she was next summoned to court
a few weeks later, Mary came with a large retinue, all of them
conspicuously carrying rosaries as a badge of their Catholicism.
Mary had arrived in force for what she knew would be a confrontation
with the full weight of Edward's government.
But, when she was summoned before the King and Council
and taxed with disobedience, she played her trump card.
Her cousin on her mother's side
was the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V - the most powerful ruler in Europe.
Mary now invoked his mighty protection.
The imperial ambassador hurried to Court to threaten war if Mary were
not given freedom of religion.
Faced with the combination of foreign war
and Catholic insurrection at home, the Council backed off.
It was Edward's turn to weep tears of frustration.
And there was worse to come.
In the winter of 1552, Edward started to cough blood.
By the following spring it was obvious to everyone
that the young King was dying.
Mary's Catholicism now became more than an obstacle to the progress
of reform - it threatened the very survival of Protestantism itself,
for Mary was Edward's legal heir.
She would succeed as Queen and Supreme Head.
And like her father and brother before her, she'd be able to remake
the religion of England according to her own Catholic lights.
The thought of Mary as his Catholic successor was intolerable
tothe hotly Protestant Edward.
So, with a confidence that was breathtaking in a 15-year-old boy,
he decided unilaterally to change the rules.
And this is the document in which he did it.
It's headed in his bold schoolboy handwriting -
"My device for the succession".
First, he excluded Elizabeth,
as well as Mary, on the grounds that both his half-sisters were bastards.
Second, he transferred the throne to the family of his cousins the Greys.
And third, he decided that women were unfit to rule in their own
right, though they could transfer their claim to their sons, or,
in legal jargon, their "heirs male".
The problem was that all his Grey cousins were women,
and though they'd been married off at breakneck speed,
none of them had yet had children.
Now, in the course of time no doubt,
this problem would have corrected itself.
But in view of Edward's rapidly declining health, there wasn't time.
Instead Edward had to swallow his misogyny and with
two or three deft strokes of the pen changed the rules one last time.
Originally he'd left the crown to the sons of the eldest Grey sister -
the Lady Jane.
"The Lady Jane's heirs male".
A crossing-out and two words inserted over a caret
changed this to "the Lady Janeand herheirs male".
If Edward could make his device stick, the impeccably Protestant
and deeply learned Lady Jane Grey would be his successor as queen.
On the 6th July 1553 Edward died.
On the 10th the 16-year-old Lady Jane Grey was brought to the Tower
to be proclaimed Queen.
The Tower was the traditional location for such a proclamation.
The difference in this case was that Jane Grey would
never leave its precincts again.
By leaving the throne to Lady Jane Grey, Edward had flouted both his
father King Henry VIII's will and the act of succession.
This flagrant disregard for the law
was unacceptable even to many Protestants.
Moreover, Lady Jane Grey's supporters had made a fatal mistake -
they had failed to arrest Edward's Catholic sister Mary,
who was, according to Henry's will, the legitimate heir to the throne.
Instead, forewarned by friends at court, Mary fled out of reach
to the depths of East Anglia where she had vast estates and a loyal following.
On the 10th of July she proclaimed herself rightful Queen of England
and two days later she took up residence
at the Great Castle of Framlingham here, which she made her headquarters
for an armed assault on the throne of England.
Troops flooded in
and Mary inspected her army in front of the castle in true royal style.
But no blow needed to be struck.
Faced with Mary's overwhelming power,
the Grey faction threw in the towel
and Queen Jane was deposed after reigning for less than a fortnight.
It was legality, legitimacy and the sense that she was
Henry VIII's daughter that had won the day for Mary, but Mary herself
didn't see it like that.
She was convinced that her accession against all the odds was a miracle
brought about by God for his own purposes.
It was a sign, and she was now a woman with a mission - to restore England
to the Catholic faith.
But to prevent England ever returning to Protestantism,
Mary must marry and produce an heir.
For otherwise her father's will left
the throne to her Protestant half-sister, Elizabeth.
Long ago, Mary had been briefly betrothed to the Emperor Charles V.
Now, Charles offered her his own son and heir, Philip,
who'd been brought up in Spain
and was imbued with that country's Catholicism.
But the idea of a Spanish king ruling in England
was wildly unpopular.
An uprising in Kent, led by Sir Thomas Wyatt, fought
its way to London, and for a while Mary's throne was in real jeopardy.
But the rebellion was finally crushed, and Mary exacted a
terrible revenge, executing all the leaders of the conspiracy,
and the 17-year-old Lady Jane Grey herself, whom hitherto she'd spared.
With the rebellion defeated,
and with Parliament's reluctant acquiescence,
there was now no barrier to Mary's marriage to Philip.
Philip landed at Southampton on 20th July, and five days later
he and Mary were married here at Winchester Cathedral.
The couple processed from the west doors along an elevated walkway to
a high platform at the centre of the knave where the ceremony took place.
It deliberately evoked an older, better world.
Mary used an old-fashioned wedding ring made of a band of plain gold
and she swore the woman's old oath,
to be "bonny and buxom in bed and at board".
Of course, if the couple had children, that older, better Catholic world
would live again.
A few months later, Mary, like her namesake
the blessed virgin, declared that the "babe had stirred in her womb".
The prospect of a Catholic heir greatly strengthened Mary's hand,
and Parliament voted to return the Church of England
to the obedience of the Pope.
The Royal Supremacy,
which Henry VIII had forced on the English people, seemed to be over.
In early April Mary moved to Hampton Court for the birth of the child
that would crown her life and reign,
and guarantee the future of Catholic England.
Mary's confinement, as was customary, began with the ceremony
of the Queen's taking to her chamber,
in which she bade farewell to the male-dominated world of the court
and withdrew instead
into the purely female realm of her birthing chamber.
There etiquette required she should have remained secluded and invisible
until the birth. But Mary couldn't keep her joy to herself.
Instead, on St George's Day, she appeared at a window
to watch her husband Philip lead the celebrations below.
She even turned sideways on
so that her big belly was shown off to the crowds below.
Good Catholics rejoiced with the Queen, as they
did when the serious business of enforcing Catholicism began.
Part of the return to Rome
was the restoration of heresy laws which punished those who denied
the Catholic faith with the horrible death of burning alive.
The burnings began in February 1555.
Over the following three years
more than 300 men and women died in agony at the stake.
Faced with such persecution, many other leading Protestants
fled into exile abroad.
One of the exiles was the protestant cleric John Foxe
who decided to write a history of the persecutions.
Using the trial records, eyewitness accounts and the writings of the
martyrs themselves, he compiled his acts and monuments here.
Soon known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, it became, after the Bible,
the second most read book in English and it damned Mary's reputation
forever as Bloody Mary, especially the gruesome woodcuts.
But Foxe's propaganda would have amounted to very little if it hadn't
quickly become obvious that Mary's condition was a phantom pregnancy.
By early summer, she was a public laughing stock, with stories
circulating that she was pregnant with a lap dog or a monkey.
By August, even Mary herself had abandoned hope.
Moreover, at 39, it seemed unlikely she would ever conceive again.
With her pregnancy exposed as a delusion,
power started to ebb away from the Queen.
Philip, now with no long-term interest in England,
abandoned his wife to return to his Continental possessions.
Still worse, her failure to produce an heir, and with it
the guarantee of a Catholic future, broke Mary's hold on Parliament.
Crucial to the government's plans for the final suppression of Protestantism
was a bill to confiscate the landed estates of the Protestant exiles.
If the bill passed, the economic foundations of
resistance would be destroyed.
The government strained every nerve, but so too did the opposition,
led by Sir Anthony Kingston. With the connivance of the Sergeant at Arms,
the doors of the House were locked from the inside.
As the members milled around, Kingston thundered his protests
and the bill was defeated.
Scenes like these would not be seen again in the Commons until the 17th century.
Despite the loss of the political initiative, Mary grimly persisted
with the persecution of Protestants.
Her most illustrious victim was Archbishop Thomas Cranmer.
But Cranmer was caught on the horns of a dilemma.
In creating the royal supremacy,
he'd argued that monarchs were God's agents on earth,
and that obedience to them was an absolute religious duty.
But what to do when the monarch was of the wrong religion?
Obey the Queen? Or Christ?
At his heresy trial, Cranmer, old, worn out and terrified of the fire,
recanted his Protestantism.
It was a huge propaganda coup for Mary.
But Mary wasn't satisfied.
She bore Cranmer a deep grudge for divorcing her mother
and even though church law said that a repentant heretic should
be pardoned, was determined that he would burn.
Cranmer's execution was to take place in Oxford,
preceded by a public repetition of his recantation.
Early on a rainy morning
he was bought to the University Church here.
You can still see where sections of the piers were cut away to build
a high platform to give maximum publicity to what the authorities
were confident would be a repetition of his recantation and confession.
Instead, in an astonishing theatrical coup, Cranmer repudiated
his recantation and as the hubbub rose from the church, managed
to shout out a final denunciation of the Pope as antichrist.
He was pulled down from the scaffold and hurried to the stake.
But Cranmer hadn't finished.
As the flames rose he stuck out his right hand,
which had signed his recantation, into the heart of the fire.
It had sinned so it should first be punished, he said.
It was a magnificent gesture which vindicated Cranmer's integrity,
and saved the good faith of Protestantism.
Mary's vengefulness had turned the propaganda coup
of Cranmer's recantation into a public relations disaster,
which fired her opponents with a new zeal to resist Bloody Mary.
Among them was John Ponet, a Protestant bishop
who'd fled into exile in Strasbourg when the burnings began.
He was an old friend of Cranmer's.
But, unlike Cranmer,
Ponet's experience of Mary's tyranny led him to question the intellectual
foundations of the Supremacy, and reject outright
the idea that the King was ordained by God to rule his church on Earth.
And this is the revolutionary book in which Ponet did it.
Published in 1556, it's called A Shorte Treatise of Politike Power.
Its title page, with the motto taken from Psalm 118, says it all -
"it is better to trust in the Lord than to trust in princes."
This meant that kings, far from being the god-like creatures
of Henry VIII's and Cranmer's imagination,
were human at best and sub-human at their all-too-frequent worst.
And this meant in turn that kings were human creations and had to be
subject to human control.
If, therefore, Ponet went on to argue, a king or queen broke human or divine law
they should be reproved or even deposed.
And if, like Mary, they were a cruel and persecuting idolator
then it was a virtuous act to assassinate them as a tyrant.
By ignoring Henry VIII's call for moderation and resorting instead to
religious extremes, Edward and Mary had provoked conspiracy, rebellion,
and finally, Ponet's head-on challenge to the authority
and legitimacy of kingship itself.
But Mary was soon beyond the reach of Ponet's seditious theorising.
In 1558 she became seriously ill, though she fondly imagined
she was pregnant again.
She even wrote her will, leaving the throne to her unborn Catholic child.
But, six months later, with her health rapidly fading,
even Mary had to face reality, and she added this codicil to her will.
In it, she finally acknowledged that it was likely that she would have
"no issue or heir of her body", and that she would be succeeded instead
"by her heir and successor, by the laws and statutes of this realm".
That, of course, was half-sister Elizabeth, though Mary couldn't even
bring herself to write her name.
Mary, seeing visions to the last of heavenly children, died on the night
of 16th November 1558. She was 42.
Two of Henry's three children had imperilled by their
contrasting religious extremism, both the Supremacy and the crown.
Would his last surviving heir, Elizabeth, do any better?
After years of danger and uncertainty,
Henry VIII's daughter Elizabeth
was on the verge of becoming Queen of England.
This is a portrait of Elizabeth aged 14,
and painted in the last weeks of her father's life.
It shows her as the very model of a religious, learned princess.
But the reality of Elizabeth's life
under the reigns of her brother and sister was to be very different
from the studious calm suggested by this picture,
especially under her sister Mary.
During Mary's reign,
Elizabeth occupied the impossible position
which she would later call "second person".
By their father's will, she was Mary's heir presumptive.
She was also, as a covert Protestant,
guaranteed to undo everything that Mary held dear.
This made her both the focus of every conspiracy against Mary,
and the target of her sister's fear and rage.
Mary had even sent her to the Tower on charges of treason.
Such experiences left Elizabeth with a set of indelible memories,
which meant she took
a very different view of policy from her brother and her sister.
News of Mary's death was brought to Elizabeth here at Hatfield.
The story goes that she fell on her knees exclaiming with the Psalmist,
"This is the Lord's doing; it is marvellous in our eyes".
Actually, Elizabeth had been preparing herself
for this moment for weeks.
And her right-hand man in her preparations for power
was Sir William Cecil.
It was to be the beginning of a life-long partnership.
Cecil, born the son of a Tudor courtier
some 13 years before Elizabeth,
had shared many of her experiences and, as a Protestant,
suffered the same fears under Mary
when he too had saved his skin by conforming to Catholicism.
But there was a difference.
Cecil, unlike Elizabeth, drew the harsh lesson of never again.
Never again must there be a Catholic monarch or heir
and if by mischance, one appeared,
then people, Council and Parliament together
could and should remove them.
These were Ponet's arguments,
though Cecil was a moderate in comparison.
Nevertheless, it would make for an interesting relationship
between Cecil and his imperious, headstrong young Queen,
with her high views of royal power and her moderate line in religion.
And indeed, establishing a new religious settlement
was Elizabeth's first task as Queen.
Mary's Parliament
had made Catholicism once more the religion of England
and only another parliament could change it.
But to what?
Elizabeth's first parliament met in January 1559.
It was opened with a speech by the acting Lord Chancellor.
He spoke in Elizabeth's name but his phraseology deliberately
invoked her father's great speech on religion to the parliament of 1545.
Like her father, Elizabeth wanted the middle way in religion,
partly because she believed in it, and partly because she too saw it
as the best defence of the Royal Supremacy
which she was determined to revive as her God-given right.
But Elizabeth's plans for a moderate religious settlement
came under fire from both extremes, from Catholics
in the Lords and Protestants in the Commons and Council.
Finally, to overcome her Catholic peers and bishops,
Elizabeth had to join forces
with her Protestant Commons and Councillors.
She duly got the settlement and the Supremacy, though
with the narrowest of majorities in the Lords of only three votes.
The price however was her acceptance of Cranmer's second,
much more radically Protestant prayer book of 1552.
In the infighting between the religious extremes,
it seemed that Elizabeth's hoped for moderate settlement had been lost.
The outcome of the Parliament had been a triumph for Cecil.
He had outmanoeuvred and strong-armed the Catholics
to restore the Royal Supremacy,
and he had, so it seemed, outmanoeuvred Elizabeth as well,
to bring back the extreme Protestantism of her brother Edward.
Elizabeth was equal to the challenge.
She insisted, against fierce opposition,
on inserting the so-called Ornaments Rubric into the legislation.
This empowered her, on her sole authority
as Supreme Governor of the Church, to retain traditional ceremonies,
like making the sign of the cross in baptism, and to require the clergy
to wear traditional vestments, like the surplice and the cope.
The result was a Church that was Protestant in doctrine,
Catholic in appearance, and would, Elizabeth hoped,
satisfy all but a handful of extremists on both sides.
And Elizabeth's hopes would almost certainly have been fulfilled
but for the issue of the succession.
It was the succession which had driven the giddy switchback from
Catholicism to Protestantism, and it had the potential to do it again.
It was clear to Cecil that the best way
to secure the succession was for the Queen to marry and produce an heir.
But Elizabeth was less sure.
She'd seen how her sister's choice of a husband
had sparked dissent and rebellion.
Elizabeth determined that England would
"have one mistress and no master".
But if Elizabeth could not or would not marry, who would succeed her?
Her father's will here had an answer for that too,
for if Elizabeth died childless,
this clause here prescribed that she should be succeeded
by the descendants of her aunt Mary, Henry's younger sister.
But they were the Greys.
Elizabeth hated the Grey family
because they had helped put Jane Grey on the throne.
Then, Elizabeth had been publicly branded a bastard
and barred from the succession.
In revenge, Elizabeth would never allow the throne to pass to a Grey.
But what to do about her father's will here?
Her brother and her sister, to whom its terms were equally unacceptable
had challenged it head-on and failed.
Elizabeth was subtler.
The will was given one last public outing in the second parliament of
the reign and then it was returned to the safe-deposit of the treasury
and put as this marginal note records, in an iron chest.
And the key to the chest in effect was thrown away.
It was a case of out of sight, out of mind.
With the lightest of touches,
Elizabeth had nudged her father's will into oblivion.
This left as her most obvious heir her cousin Mary, the granddaughter
of Henry's eldest sister Margaret.
Mary was Queen Consort of France and Queen of Scots in her own right.
She was also a Catholic.
In August 1561, after the death of her husband the French King,
Mary returned to Scotland as Queen.
Mary was far more interested in her claim to the English throne,
and in September, she sent her personal emissary,
Sir William Maitland, to negotiate directly with Elizabeth.
Elizabeth was all graciousness in her private, face to face interviews with Maitland.
She acknowledged that Mary was of the blood royal of England,
was her cousin and her nearest living kinswoman,
and that as such, she loved her dearly.
She also, under Maitland's subtle prodding, went further.
She knew, she said, no-one with a better claim
to be her successor than Mary, nor any that she preferred to her.
She even swore that she would do nothing to impede Mary's claim.
But the final step of declaring Mary her heir,
she told a crestfallen Maitland, she would never, ever take.
But Elizabeth had already gone far too far for Cecil.
He'd already lived through the reign of one Mary
and her attempt to re-Catholicise England,
and he was determined never to suffer another one.
Matters came to a head in the Parliament of 1566,
which attempted to force Elizabeth to name a successor,
and by implication, to exclude the claim of Mary Queen of Scots.
Furious, Elizabeth summoned 30 members of each House
to her palace at Whitehall,
where she delivered an extraordinary speech.
Elizabeth was at her fiery, brilliant best.
She would never name an heir, she said,
because they would become "second person",
and she, better than anyone else,
she continued, knew the danger of that position, since,
as Mary's legally appointed heir, she'd been "second person" herself.
As such, her own life had been in constant danger and she'd been
the focus of plots and treason.
At this point, Elizabeth became sharply personal.
Many of the MPs, she said, turning to the Commons delegation,
had been amongst the plotters,
and only her own honour prevented her from naming names.
Similarly, turning now to the Lords, many of the bishops,
under Jane Grey, had preached treasonably,
that she, Elizabeth, was a bastard.
"Well, I wish not for the death of any man", she said,
not altogether convincingly.
No head can have felt too secure on its shoulders
by the time that the Queen had finished.
But the issue of the succession wouldn't go away,
and it was brought into sharp focus when a rebellion
brought about by disgust at her scandalous personal life
forced Mary to flee Scotland and seek Elizabeth's protection.
The presence of Mary Queen of Scots in England would force Elizabeth
into the very actions she'd tried so hard to avoid.
Mary Queen of Scots' flight to England
was a disaster for Elizabeth.
In Scotland, Mary, despite her Catholicism,
had been lukewarm about religion.
She'd lived with a Protestant government, and even taken
a Protestant as her third husband.
But in England it was different.
Here Mary played up her Catholicism,
and Catholics in turn identified with her.
The issue for both Mary and the English Catholics
was the succession.
Mary was Elizabeth's obvious heir, but Elizabeth steadfastly refused
to recognise her as such.
By bidding for Catholic support,
Mary was hoping to force Elizabeth's hand,
and, in turn, the prospect of an heir of their own faith
gave English Catholics,
who'd almost lost hope, stomach for the fight once more.
The spectre, which Elizabeth had striven so hard to lay,
of a second person who differed in religion from the monarch,
was about to rise once more.
As Elizabeth had foreseen, the plots soon began.
Catholics saw Mary as a means back to power,
and used her as a focus for rebellion.
Despite her precarious position, Mary was naive enough to allow
herself to be implicated in several of these plots.
But Elizabeth refused to take action against Mary.
Her instinct was to try to defuse the conflict, and above all
she didn't want Mary to become a martyr.
But Elizabeth's hopes of avoiding conflict were dashed,
when her middle way came under attack from both extremes.
First to move against her was Rome.
This is the Papal edict or bull, issued by the Pope in 1570,
known from its opening words as Regnans In Excelsis,
"reigning on high",
it sets out the most extreme version of the Papal claim to rule
"all people and all kingdoms".
Then, for her defiance of this claim, it condemns Elizabeth,
deposes and excommunicates her,
and absolves all her subjects from their oath of allegiance.
The Bull was the Catholic version
of the arguments of the Protestant Ponet,
and, as with Ponet, its logical outcome was tyrannicide -
the assassination or murder of the errant ruler.
The Pope had, in effect, declared war on Elizabeth
by calling for her murder.
But two could play at that game,
and Elizabeth's council responded in kind.
Violent times breed violent measures
and few had been more violent than this bond of association here.
Drawn up by the privy council, it's a kind of licensed lynch law.
If Elizabeth were to be assassinated
in favour of any possible claimant
to the throne, then those who joined the bond undertook
to band together to "prosecute such person or persons to the death"
and "to take the uttermost revenge on them by any possible means."
The Protestant nobility and gentry flocked to subscribe to the bond
in their hundreds, as these masses of signed and sealed copies show.
Mary wasn't mentioned by name in the bond
but everybody knew she was the target.
The bond was subsequently legalised by an act of Parliament,
which also set up a tribunal to determine her guilt or innocence.
But Cecil had wanted to go
much, much further and establish a great council to rule England
in the interregnum that would follow Elizabeth's murder.
The great council would exercise all the royal powers and,
together with a recalled parliament, would choose the next monarch.
This was Ponet translated into a parliamentary statute
and Elizabeth was having none of it.
For Elizabeth saw the bond as being as offensive as
Regnans In Excelsis,
since it too set religion above the crown,
and permitted subjects to judge a sovereign.
But not even Elizabeth could protect Mary
from her own folly or Cecil's vendetta.
In 1586, Mary was lured into
giving her explicit endorsement to a plot to assassinate Elizabeth.
Faced with incontrovertible evidence of her guilt,
Elizabeth was forced to agree to her trial and condemnation.
She even signed the death warrant.
But gave instructions that the execution wasn't to be carried out
without her further command.
But for once, Cecil didn't obey his Queen.
Instead, a secret meeting of the Council was convened
in his private rooms at Court,
and, acting on their own authority,
and in defiance of the Queen's express commands,
the councillors despatched the death warrant to Mary's prison
at Fotheringhay Castle.
There, in the Great Hall, Mary was publicly beheaded.
She died magnificently, clutching the crucifix
and wearing a scarlet petticoat as a martyr to her Catholic faith.
But she also, Queen Regnant though she was, had been publicly executed
like any other common criminal.
The divinity that doth hedge a King, which Elizabeth had fought so hard
to preserve, had evaporated, never fully to return.
The execution of Mary was a watershed.
Henry VIII and his three children had each sought to re-shape
the religion of the nation
according to their own personal preferences.
But as a fierce, nationalistic Protestantism took hold in England,
it was becoming clear that a monarch or an heir
who stepped too far out of line
with the religious prejudices of the nation,
would do so at their peril.
The dangerous liaison between monarchy and religion
had claimed its first victim in Mary Queen of Scots.
She would not be the last.