Edward VI and Mary I

Eleven years, four changes of official religion. The remarkable thing is that the state held.

• Somerset (1547–49) repealed the heresy and treason laws and moved the Church towards Protestantism. The 1549 Book of Common Prayer provoked the Western (Prayer Book) Rebellion; the same summer, Kett's Rebellion in Norfolk protested against enclosure and misgovernment. Somerset fell that October.
• Northumberland (1549–53) ended the wars, restored the coinage, and pushed the Reformation further — the 1552 Prayer Book and the Forty-Two Articles. His attempt to divert the succession to Lady Jane Grey in July 1553 collapsed in days.
• Mary I (1553–58) restored papal authority, married Philip of Spain — provoking Wyatt's rebellion (1554) — and revived the heresy laws. Ridley and Latimer were burned in October 1555, Cranmer in March 1556. Calais fell in January 1558. Mary and Cardinal Pole died on the same day, 17 November 1558.

Elizabeth's inheritance: a divided Church, a debased currency, a lost war, and a country that had been told four times in eleven years what to believe. That is the context for everything she did in 1559.

A settlement built on studied ambiguity

The Elizabethan Religious Settlement was carried through Parliament in 1559.

• The Act of Supremacy (1559) made Elizabeth Supreme Governor — not Supreme Head. The change of word softened Catholic and gendered objections at a stroke.
• The Act of Uniformity (1559) imposed a Book of Common Prayer that fused the language of the 1549 and 1552 books. The words of administration at communion were left deliberately capable of both a Catholic and a Protestant reading.
• The Thirty-Nine Articles (1563) fixed doctrine in a broadly Reformed direction, while ceremony and church government remained conservative.
• Enforcement was initially light: fines for non-attendance were modest, and the regime preferred outward conformity to inquisition into consciences.

The Neale–Jones debate — the single most examinable historiographical quarrel in this unit. J.E. Neale (Elizabeth I and her Parliaments, 1953–57) argued that Elizabeth wanted a conservative settlement but was pushed leftwards by a radical 'Puritan choir' in the Commons. Norman Jones (Faith by Statute, 1982) demolished this: the real opposition came from the Catholic bishops in the Lords, and the settlement was substantially what Elizabeth intended. Jones's evidence was the parliamentary record itself. Neale's 'Puritan choir' has not survived contact with it.

Who shaped the 1559 settlement?

Pressure from within the Church

The Puritan challenge came not from outside the Church but from people who wanted it further reformed.

• The Vestiarian Controversy (from 1566): a quarrel over clerical dress that was really a quarrel over how far the Reformation should go.
• Presbyterianism: Thomas Cartwright's lectures in Cambridge (1570) attacked the very existence of bishops. Presbyterian organisation — the classis movement — sought to replace episcopal government from below.
• Parliamentary agitation: Peter Wentworth and others pressed for further reform and for free speech; Elizabeth's response — imprisonment and prohibition — makes clear where she thought sovereignty over the Church lay.
• Suppression: Archbishop Whitgift (from 1583) enforced conformity through the Court of High Commission. By the 1590s organised Presbyterianism had been broken.

Patrick Collinson's The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967) reframed Puritanism as a movement within the Established Church — a temperature, not a sect. His later idea of the Elizabethan 'monarchical republic' (1987) argued that Elizabeth's councillors were prepared to act as citizens in an emergency: the 1584 Bond of Association contemplated government without a monarch if she were assassinated. That is a startling claim about a supposedly absolute personal monarchy — and it is exactly the sort of interpretation OCR loves to set.

Plot, bull, and the execution of a queen

The Catholic threat was real, and it hardened over time — largely because of events abroad.

• The Revolt of the Northern Earls (1569) — Northumberland and Westmorland — was the last great feudal-style rising, and it failed.
• Regnans in Excelsis (1570): the papal bull excommunicating Elizabeth and purporting to release her subjects from allegiance made every English Catholic a potential traitor in law and in official suspicion.
• The plots: Ridolfi (1571), Throckmorton (1583), Babington (1586) — all revolving around Mary, Queen of Scots, in English custody since 1568. She was executed on 8 February 1587, after Elizabeth's long and genuine reluctance.
• The mission: seminary priests from Douai (from 1574) and the Jesuits (from 1580, including Edmund Campion, executed 1581) sustained English Catholicism — and provoked savage anti-Catholic legislation.
• War: the Treaty of Nonsuch (1585) committed England to the Dutch revolt; the Spanish Armada (1588) failed. The war with Spain ground on until 1604.

Which challenge?

Tap a development, then the kind of challenge to the Elizabethan settlement it represents.

Why 1570 changed everything

Gloriana in trouble

The last decade was the hardest, and the one students most often skip.

• Dearth: a run of bad harvests in the mid-1590s brought real hunger, high prices and disorder. The Poor Law of 1598 and the Act for the Relief of the Poor (1601) created a compulsory, parish-based, rate-funded system that endured until 1834.
• War: the Spanish war continued and the Nine Years War in Ireland (1594–1603) — Tyrone's rebellion — was ruinously expensive; the defeat of the Spanish-Irish force at Kinsale (1601) settled it.
• Faction: the rivalry of Robert Cecil and the Earl of Essex poisoned the court. Essex's rebellion of February 1601 was a shambles, and he was executed.
• Parliament: anger over monopolies produced a genuine confrontation in 1601. Elizabeth's retreat, in the speech later known as the Golden Speech, was a masterpiece of political management — and an admission of weakness.
• Elizabeth died on 24 March 1603; James VI of Scotland succeeded without incident.

Interpretation: John Guy argued for a distinct 'second reign' after about 1585 — a harder, more troubled, more factional period, quite unlike the Gloriana of the 1570s. Christopher Haigh's Elizabeth I (1988) went further, presenting a queen who governed by evasion, delay and image, and left her successor a mountain of unsolved problems. Both are correctives to a mythologised 'Golden Age'.

Build the later Tudor spine

Tap the events in chronological order, earliest first.

Interpretation → historian

Tap an argument on the left, then the historian most associated with it.

Using historiography in a source enquiry

The enquiry and the essay

OCR Unit Group 1: 1 hour 30 minutes, 50 marks, 25% of the A-level — a source-based enquiry and a period-study essay.

• In the enquiry, sources are to be used, not described. Group them by the argument they support, weigh who wrote them, when, for whom, and why, and test each against your contextual knowledge. A Catholic exile writing in 1585 and a privy councillor writing in 1559 are not simply 'biased' — they are usefully partial, and knowing how they are partial is the whole skill.
• In the essay, argue. 'How successfully did Elizabeth I manage the Catholic threat?' is a question about criteria: successful by what measure — survival, conversion, security, cost? Define the measure, then judge.

The habit that separates the top band: refuse the myth. 'The Golden Age' and 'Gloriana' were deliberate constructions, made by the Elizabethan regime and rebuilt by Victorian historians. Noticing that in your first paragraph signals that you are thinking like a historian, not repeating a story.

Why Elizabeth would not marry

How Elizabethan politics actually worked

The old Whig picture of a rising Parliament heroically confronting the Crown has not survived scrutiny — and knowing why is worth marks.

• Neale saw Parliament as an arena of conflict, with an organised Puritan opposition. Sir Geoffrey Elton and Michael Graves replied that it was primarily an arena of business and management: Councillors sat in the Commons, drafted the bills and steered them. Most parliamentary time went on legislation, not confrontation.
• Real conflict did occur — over the succession, marriage, Mary Queen of Scots, religion and, in 1601, monopolies. Elizabeth's retreat over monopolies in the speech later called the Golden Speech shows she knew when to yield.
• The Council, not Parliament, was where England was governed — dominated for decades by William Cecil, Lord Burghley.

Collinson's provocation, again: if the Privy Council could plan, in the Bond of Association (1584), to govern in the event of the queen's assassination, then Elizabethan England contained a strand of republican thinking inside a monarchy. That is a startling claim — and an excellent one to test against a source.

Parliament's real business

Population, prices and the parish

The social and economic strand is examined, and most candidates arrive underprepared.

• Population growth across the century pushed up demand for food and land while wages lagged behind prices — the long inflation worsened by Henry VIII's and Somerset's debasement of the coinage.
• Enclosure and rack-renting fed rural grievance — a central complaint of Kett's Rebellion (1549) — and repeated government proclamations achieved very little.
• Poverty was reconceived. Vagrancy laws grew harsher, but the great statutes — the Poor Law of 1598 and the Act for the Relief of the Poor (1601) — created a compulsory, rate-funded, parish-based system with overseers of the poor, distinguishing the impotent from the able-bodied. It endured until 1834.
• The 1590s brought a run of harvest failures, dearth and disorder — the sharpest social crisis of the reign, and the immediate context of the 1598 and 1601 Acts.

Link, don't list: the dissolution of the monasteries removed a major source of charitable relief; population growth and inflation increased need; and the 1590s crisis forced the state to act. The Elizabethan Poor Law is a consequence of the Reformation as much as of dearth — and saying so shows genuine command of the period.

The big ideas to carry into the exam

You now have the whole of OCR's later Tudor unit — and the debates that make it arguable. Press Finish to see your score.