history’s ultimate unwanted guest. Most of England wanted her dead, particularly when she stupidly and treacherously got involved in plots against her host; yet Elizabeth defied her advisers, and it was many years until she made the fateful decision.
And so, Mary was at last executed in a forlorn Northamptonshire castle. England rejoiced; bonfires were lit, bells rang across the land, and the celebrations continued for days. As for Elizabeth, she wept uncontrollably. Then she recovered and went on to preside over the defeat of the Spanish armada.
‘Bloody’ Mary Tudor, Queen of England
Mary has had a bad press, not least from Protestant propagandists infuriated by her enthusiastic burning of those whom she regarded as heretics. She is still known by the unkind but valid soubriquet of ‘Bloody Mary’. She executed nearly 300 Protestants, many of whom became celebrated martyrs. The policy was counter-productive, particularly because so many of those who were killed, including the leading churchmen Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer and Hooper, died so well and courageously. Although most of her subjects probably remained Catholics, Mary could not capitalise on this. Her controversial marriage to Philip II of Spain achieved little. Compared to her half-sister Elizabeth, who succeeded her, she was a poor monarch and indeed a total failure.
But she had a rotten life. She had seen her dignified mother, Catherine of Aragon, humiliated by her father, the brutish Henry VIII. She herself was declared a bastard. Her marriage to Philip was blighted by her inability to produce a child. As she was growing up, she showed a propensity to be fun-loving. She enjoyed gambling and adored fine clothes and jewellery. Slowly, grimly, dourness and duty took over.
Andrew Melville
A clever, cultured and cosmopolitan man from Angus, Melville played the part of Calvin to Knox’s Luther: he organised the second phase of the Scottish Reformation and gave it intellectual solidity. Like Knox, he was a democrat and was not afraid to harangue his monarch, in this case James VI. He outdid James in debate, and also insulted him, calling him ‘God’s silly vassal’. He eventually paid for his impudence when James had him imprisoned in London.
A brilliant intellectual, he accomplished much at Glasgow University, of which he was principal. He was a rigorous Presbyterian, and it was mainly thanks to him that Scotland became a firmly Presbyterian nation.
Pope Paul IV
The first and lesser of the two great Counter-Reformation Puritan popes, the Neapolitan Gian Pietro Caraffa at last became pope at the grand old age of 79. Personally fearless, he was a ferocious and tyrannical figure. He despised the Council of Trent, the great engine of Catholic reform. He preferred the Inquisition and the Index of Prohibited Books. He detested Spaniards almost as much as he hated Protestants. He held the Holy Roman Emperor in contempt.
He was probably slightly mad. But he succeeded in cleaning Rome up, driving out prostitutes and gangsters, bandits and beggars. In his severe personal asceticism, his refusal to compromise, and his resolute war on venality, corruption and softness, he could not have been more removed from the frivolous and decadent Renaissance popes whose disgraceful, self-indulgent antics had exacerbated the crisis in the old Church at the very time when pressure for reform was stirring.
Philip II of Spain
The son of Emperor Charles V, Philip II of Spain was a poor leader and constantly betrayed his avowed cause of Catholicism. Somehow he managed to bankrupt Spain, which should have been the wealthiest power in the world. He constantly failed, not just financially but also militarily. His most celebrated defeat was by the English, when the grand armada of 1588 was scattered (with considerable help from the weather). He also managed to lose most of his Dutch colonies after years of debilitating conflict.
He was briefly married to Queen Mary Tudor of England. He never trusted his generals; and, for the most part, he was ill-served by them. He abjectly failed in his mission to stamp out heresy in Western Europe. His incompetence rendered him, paradoxically, a good friend of Protestantism.
Pope Saint Pius V
Arguably the greatest pope in a turbulent and momentous century, Michele Ghislieri was the second of the outstanding Puritan popes. A former shepherd, he was a very clean-living Dominican who steadily worked his way through various offices – including that of inquisitor general. Here he incurred the wrath of Caraffa, who thought he was too soft. Nonetheless, he carried on Caraffa’s tradition of austerity and fierceness, but he mingled it with a leavening of compassion. He controversially excommunicated Queen Elizabeth of England.
He completed Caraffa’s work by finally turning Rome, for most of the sixteenth century second only to Paris as a centre of decadence, into a clean and even monastic city. The later masters of the high baroque, such as Gianlorenzo Bernini, adorned Rome with gorgeous sensual art yet did not destroy the city’s new spirituality.
Pius V made the eternal city a fitting place of pilgrimage. He also turned the office of pope into what it surely should be, that of a priest, a pastor and a cleric rather than a worldly potentate (despite his part in gathering the vast navy that finally defeated the Turks at Lepanto).
He has been accused of political naivety, yet he had the foresight and the wisdom to put the main decisions of the long-standing Council of Trent into effect; and this was a political as much as a spiritual process. He published the all-important catechism which codified the long work of Trent. He relied overmuch on the Inquisition, and he was not averse to using cruelty and torture when he deemed it necessary. But he cleansed Rome, he cleansed the papacy, and overall he was a good man. Arguably the most significant Catholic figure of the sixteenth century after Loyola, he was much later (in 1712) canonised.
Girolamo Savonarola
A Dominican who was a preacher of raw power, Savonarola was a terrifying enemy of frivolity, immorality, corruption, showy wealth and the abuse of clerical office. Determined to cleanse and renew the mercenary Church, he was the most notable of the ‘outriders’, the various anticipators of the Reformation.
For a time, he held total sway over the republic of Florence, preaching in a way that put fear into some (including Michelangelo) and inspired others. He organised the celebrated ‘bonfires of the vanities’. All this was too much for the papacy; after a mockery of a trial, he was burned to death.
Suleiman the Magnificent
Ottoman sultan and warlord, his sultanate of forty-six years was crucial in that it diverted the forces that might well have otherwise crushed the Reformation. Suleiman led from the front. He was one of the most adept practitioners of the grisly art of war that the world has ever known, and he rampaged around vast tracts of Eastern Europe, posing a constant threat to the security of the West in general and the Holy Roman Empire in particular. For example, in a hard-fought battle in 1526, his cavalry utterly routed the massed armies of Hungary, leaving around 18,000 slaughtered in the field, including the king and many of his nobles.
Suleiman was even stronger in the Mediterranean, and his mastery of that sea allowed him to move with impunity through North Africa and much of the Middle East. He was indeed magnificent: he was a great legislator and a distinguished patron of the arts as well as a fearsome generalissimo. In Western Europe, popes, princes, emperors, queens and kings were all deeply afraid of him.
Five years after he died in 1566, the papacy at last managed to gather the military forces of Roman Catholic Christendom, and they defeated the Turks in the huge set-piece sea battle of Lepanto.
Suleiman’s role in the history of the Reformation may be peripheral, but it is highly significant nonetheless.
William Tyndale
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