FIG. 16-6 “Persecutions Carried Out against Catholics by Protestant Calvinists in England,” sixteenth century.
The music of the Anglican church did not develop in any more smooth or orderly a fashion than did
the church itself. After Edward things took a dialectical turn, to put it a little euphemistically. The boy-
king was succeeded by his half-sister, Mary I (“Bloody Mary”), Henry VIII’s daughter by Katharine of
Aragon. She was a loyal Catholic and undid the whole reform except for the confiscation of monastic
property. What was instituted through violence had to be suppressed through violence. Cranmer was
burned at the stake. Protestantism again became an illegal heresy. Mary died in 1558 after a reign even
shorter than Edward’s, but one that brought the country to the brink of a religious civil war.
It was in this atmosphere that Mary’s half-sister Elizabeth I ascended the throne. She achieved a
compromise—a synthesis, so to speak, known as the Elizabethan Settlement—between the antithetical
religious factions, that by letting English politics simmer down allowed the nation’s economy to surge, its
international prestige to bloom, and the arts to flourish. One of her first decisions was to reinstitute the
Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, but with far less anti-Catholic doctrinal and liturgical zealotry.
“Mariolatry” and “popish ditties” were no longer actively persecuted, and the Book of Common Prayer
was actually translated, for the use of colleges, into Latin (as Liber Precum publicarum). While the
Catholic Church remained legally abolished, recusants were not to be subject to legal reprisal, at least for
a while.
Gradually, however, tolerance of recusants was withdrawn, and penal measures against them
reinstituted, following numerous rebellious plots and attempts on the childless Elizabeth’s life that would
have placed Mary Stuart (Mary Queen of Scots), a loyal Catholic, on the throne. Pope Pius V and his
successor Gregory XIII (both of them major patrons of Palestrina) also did their best to destabilize
Elizabeth, the former by formally (and superfluously) excommunicating her in 1570; and the latter by
authorizing a clandestine army of English Jesuit missionaries, who began to infiltrate the British isles
from their base, the English college at Douai in the north of France, beginning in 1580. This gave rise to
new reprisals, including grisly public executions. Matters reached a head (so to speak) with the
decapitation of Mary Stuart herself in 1587, after which life could be easily as dangerous for Catholics in
England as it had been under Edward.
THE FIRST ENGLISH COSMOPOLITE
The religious predicaments of the Elizabethan period and its steadily eroding religious “settlement” were
epitomized in the recusant William Byrd’s long career as the country’s foremost musician, a career that
spanned virtually the whole of Elizabeth’s reign. At the beginning, Elizabeth’s tolerance of ritualism
within the Church of England made it possible for a high art of Latin polyphony to flourish again. Yet it
was a changed art nevertheless. It had been affected—one might even say contaminated—by continental