Queen Elizabeth I

Queen Elizabeth I

Queen Elizabeth I is regarded as one of the greatest monarchs in English history, reigning as queen of England and queen of Ireland from 1558 until her death in 1603, and, in name only, styling herself as queen of France.

Elizabeth was born the second daughter of King Henry VIII. King Henry had the marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, annulled as she had given birth to a daughter, Mary, and he had started a romance with Anne Boleyn, whom he married.

She gave birth to Elizabeth on September 7, 1533, and although Anne Boleyn was pretty, intelligent, witty, clever, and a devout Protestant, her inability to give Henry VIII a son essentially caused her to be executed, although the charge leveled against her was incestuous adultery.

As a result, Elizabeth, who was three when her mother was executed, grew up secluded from the court. When Henry VIII died in 1547, he was succeeded by his sickly son Edward VI. By this time Elizabeth could speak and read not only English and Latin, but also ancient Greek, French, Italian, and Spanish.


She managed to keep a low profile during the reign of Edward VI and tried to do the same during the reign of her older sister Mary, after Edward had died in 1553. Mary, however, was a devout Roman Catholic and determined to rebuild the Catholic Church in England. Elizabeth, by contrast, was Protestant but she was careful to keep herself removed from plots against her Catholic sister.

The most serious of these was Wyatt’s Rebellion of 1554, which sought to depose Mary and replace her with Elizabeth. Even though she was not involved, Elizabeth was, nevertheless, arrested and placed in the Tower of London, making the entry by boat through “Traitor’s Gate.”

The death of Mary on November 17, 1558, led to Elizabeth’s succeeding to the throne. She was crowned on January 15, 1559, by Owen Oglethorpe, bishop of Carlisle, as the Roman Catholic archbishop of Canterbury, Reginald Pole, had already fled and refused to take part in the coronation.

It was to be the last coronation where the Latin service was used; all subsequent coronations except that of George I in 1714 were in English. In 1559, Queen Elizabeth enacted the Act of Uniformity whereby all churches had to use the Book of Common Prayer.

In the same year, she also signed into law the Act of Supremacy whereby all public officials had to acknowledge, by oath, Elizabeth’s right, as sovereign, to be head of the Church of England. In these two acts, her main adviser, who would remain as such for the rest of her reign, was Sir William Cecil (later Lord Burghley).

There were many stories regarding whether Queen Elizabeth I wanted to marry. Certainly she enjoyed a long affair with Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, whom she appointed as master of the Queen’s Horse.

She was acutely aware of her sister’s bad move in marrying Philip II of Spain, and anxious not to marry any foreign Roman Catholic prince, although there were moves made by the French. With constant plots against Elizabeth, she faced trouble in Scotland from Mary, Queen of Scots, who was her first cousin once removed. Mary was the granddaughter of Margaret, sister of Henry VIII.

Mary was, however, unpopular in Scotland and after the death of her first husband in France, she returned to Scotland, where her second husband was murdered, most probably by the man whom she was subsequently to marry, Lord Bothwell. Mary was hounded out of Scotland, fleeing to England, where she was arrested and held in close confinement for the next 18 years.

In 1569, the Northern Rebellion led by Thomas Howard, the fourth duke of Norfolk; Charles Neville, the sixth earl of Westmoreland; and Thomas Percy, the seventh earl of Northumberland, failed, although it led to Elizabeth’s being excommunicated by the pope.

With Elizabeth allying herself to the Protestants in France and the Netherlands (United Provinces), she viewed the developments in Europe with concern, especially when Philip II of Spain became the king of Portugal after the last Portuguese king, Henry, died childless.

There was also a rebellion in Ireland, and when Sir Francis Walshingham, Elizabeth’s main spymaster, uncovered the Babington Plot implicating Mary, Queen of Scots. Mary was put on trial for treason, sentenced to death, and beheaded on February 8, 1587, at Fotheringay Castle.

With Mary having willed her lands to Philip II, Elizabeth was facing a major threat from the Spanish king, who was also angered at the way in which English ships attacked his treasure ships and others bringing wealth from the Americas. Francis Drake, who circumnavigated the world in 1577–79, Walter Raleigh, and John Hawkins, and Martin Frobisher were among the “sea dogs” preying on the Spanish ships.

In 1588, Philip II sent a massive navy and expeditionary force known as the Spanish Armada against England. By a mixture of luck and good planning, the Spanish Armada was crushed, with a few ships managing to escape around the northern coasts of Scotland and Ireland.

Queen Elizabeth I’s speech at Tilbury, rallying her soldiers and sailors, is one of the most famous in history: “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too.”

The reign of Queen Elizabeth I, known as the Elizabethan age, was also a period of great prosperity in England, with the Levant Company leading to the later formation of the East India Company. Many books were published, and many playwrights, notably William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, wrote large numbers of plays.

During the 1590s, Elizabeth continued to receive threats to her rule in Ireland, and in 1599 a plot was mounted by Robert Dudley’s stepson, Robert Devereaux, the earl of Essex, who had emerged as Elizabeth’s new favorite. Essex was executed on February 25, 1601. Elizabeth gradually came to see that her heir would be King James VI of Scotland, and when she died on March 24, 1603, James succeeded her.

Edward VI - King of England

Edward VI - King of England

Edward VI was the only son of Henry VIII, king of England, born from his marriage to his third wife, Jane Seymour, on January 28, 1537. He succeeded to the English throne at age nine by his father’s last will and by the parliamentary statute of 1543, and died unmarried at the age of 16 on July 6, 1553.

The young king inherited from his father a constitution, under which he was not only the secular king but also the supreme head of the Church of England. However, the kingdom was deeply divided among factions of great nobles in the court, and, in the countryside, the people were unsettled by the direction of the religious policy under the new king.

In spite of his lovable personality, good education, and well-respected intellectual capacity, the young king could hardly design and dictate policies on his own. Edward Seymour, the duke of Somerset and the king’s maternal uncle, ran the kingdom as lord protector in loco parentis (in the place of a parent) for the first three years.

After his dismissal from the court in 1549, John Dudley, the earl of Warwick, who became duke of Northumberland in 1551, ruled the nation as the chief minister under the pretense that the king had assumed full royal authority.


The two chief ministers shared similar interest in moving the Church of England toward Protestantism. In 1547, Parliament repealed the Six Articles, enacted in 1534 by the Reformation Parliament, to keep Catholic doctrines and practices in the Church of England. In 1549, the publication of Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer and the adoption of his 42 Articles by Parliament pushed the Anglican Church closer to Calvinism.

In 1552, Parliament enacted the Act of Uniformity, requiring all Englishmen to attend Calvinist-styled Anglican Church services. Moreover, Parliament stopped enforcing laws against heresy, permitted priests to get married, and even confiscated the property of Catholic chantries, where for centuries, local priests had been praying for souls wandering in purgatory.

To the Protestants in the Continent, these policy changes made England a safe haven and an escape from persecution by the Catholic Church. In England, the Protestants welcomed the reforms, although they felt that the policies did not satisfy their Calvinist needs. The Catholics, however, were shocked by their loss of properties, privileges, and powers and were provoked into rebellions in 1549.

Edward VI coat of arms

Neither of the two chief ministers was a master of statesmanship. They failed to curb runaway inflation and continuous devaluations of English currency. They lacked competence in pacifying domestic unrests caused by enclosure of land and worsening living conditions of the rural poor.

They appeared shortsighted and clumsy in maneuvering diplomacy to meet increasingly complicated challenges from other European nations. Most of all, they mismanaged the young king’s marriage, the great affair of the state.

The duke of Somerset invaded Scotland in 1547, intending to conclude the negotiation, which had begun under Henry VIII, for the marriage of Edward VI to Mary of Stuart, the four-year-old daughter of King James V.

Although the duke defeated the Scots at the Battle of Pinkie, the Scots betrothed the princess to Francis, the dauphin of the French throne, in 1548. After the fall of Somerset, the duke of Northumberland appeared to be actively negotiating a marriage of Edward to Elizabeth, the daughter of French king Henry II, in 1551.

The marriage never materialized. In 1553, rumors spread around the diplomatic circle in Paris that the duke was going to manage a marriage between Edward VI and Joanna, a daughter of Ferdinand, the brother of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor.

Despite his apparent busy diplomacy, the duke was secretly carrying out a plan of his own, probably with the king’s knowledge, that would enable Lady Jane Grey, his daughter-in-law and the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister, Mary, to succeed Edward and thus disinherit Mary I, the Catholic sister of the king, who had been bastardized by her father but later placed to succeed her brother in his last will.

Following the death of Edward VI, Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed queen with the military support of her father-in-law. However, much of the nation, though favoring a Protestant ruler, rallied against the conspiracy of the duke of Northumberland. The “reign” of Lady Jane Grey lasted only nine days, and Mary I eventually succeeded to the throne in 1553.

The dramatic turn toward Protestantism under Edward VI and the even more dramatic restoration of Catholicism under Queen Mary have been viewed as the major aspects of the so-called mid-Tudor crisis by many historians.

Dissenters in England

Dissenters in England

The term dissenters refers to those who officially or unofficially separate themselves from an established or state church. This term is sometimes used interchangeably in the context of early modern English history with Nonconformists.

However, nonconformity is a later development within the larger dissenter movement, usually denoting those who disagreed with the state church in both practice and principle. In England, religious dissenters did not constitute a single discernible movement or aktivitas but a series of protests against the established Church of England during the 16th to 18th centuries.

While the history of religious dissent is as old as Christianity itself, dissent in England can certainly be traced to the time of John Wycliffe and the sect known as the lollards. Wycliffe was a 14th century English university professor whose greatest contribution was his translation of the Scriptures into the English vernacular. He believed that the Bible was the supreme authority for religious matters, that the clergy should not own property, and that the Catholic understanding of transubstantiation had no basis in Scripture.


While his ideas were condemned by the Catholic Church, the later, more radical sect of the lollards adopted some of his views and continued on until the time of the English reformations in the 16th century, consequently setting the stage for later religious dissents.

English dissenters began to appear once again during the time of the Protestant Reformation in England under Edward VI, Elizabeth I, the Stuart kings, and during and after the time of the interregnum of the English Civil War. Many of these had hoped for a purer reformation of religion in England and expressed their dissatisfaction with the efforts of the English monarchy to continue to control the established state church.

During the reign of Elizabeth I, many of her Protestant advisers had also hoped for a reformation in England similar to the continental reformations. They desired a total break with the vestiges of the more liturgical and episcopal structures, which they felt were entirely consistent with the medieval Catholicism from which they had separated.

During this period, dissenters and Nonconformists began to refer to the group now commonly known as Puritans. Many of these English Puritans disliked both the structure of the episcopacy and an established state church. They began to separate themselves from the Church of England and have their own private meetings.

While Elizabeth I would attempt to get her clergy to conform, many of these dissenters would continue to spread their ideas about church government and worship, attracting more followers. In 1620, a group of these dissenters would sail to America on the May-flower and settle in New England in attempt to find religious freedom in the New World. Consequently, they transplanted their own religious dissent to America profoundly shaping both early American religion and national identify in the process.

During the time of the English Civil War (1642–51) and the interregnum (1649–60), the dissenters seized power and abolished the Church of England. They began to practice iconoclasm, destroying churches and stained glass and imprisoning many of the Anglican bishops.

Parliament was now the head of the Church of England and it quickly instituted a more presbyterian form of church government. The Westminster Assembly now became the sole and permanent committee dedicated to the reform of the English Church.

In May of 1660, Charles II was restored to the throne of England from exile in France. He made attempts to ensure some sort of religious toleration with his Declaration of Indulgence. However, the now mostly Anglican Parliament had forced him to withdraw this measure. Instead they passed what is known as the Clarendon code, which established Anglicanism as the true state religion of England and made overt threats toward any that might not conform.

The Test Act of 1673 required all persons in civil or military offices to subscribe to the oaths of supremacy and allegiance and to affirm that they did not believe in the doctrine of transubstantiation. Furthermore, they had to receive the sacrament of the Anglican Church within three months after admittance to office.

Eventually, in 1689, Parliament passed the Toleration Act, which allowed the English people to practice whatever religion they desired so long as they were trinitarian Protestants. This act however did not suspend any of their civil disabilities that went along with their dissenting religion.

The Test Act, which was expanded in 1678, was not suspended until 1828. In 1829, Parliament passed the Roman Catholic Relief Act, which began to give freedom to Roman Catholics to practice their religion freely for the first time since before the Reformation.

Consequently, many of the dissenters in English religious history survive in present-day Christian denominations. Many of these are now known as “Free Churches.” Some of these are Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists, Quakers, and Moravians.

Church of England

The Church of England was the national and reformed church established and amended by parliamentary statutes during the English Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries. Its institutions included Governorship in the Monarchy, Prelateship in the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the threefold episcopal ministry: bishops, priests, and deacons.

Its theological doctrines and liturgies sought to absorb truths from the Bible, the early Christian tradition, and reason, and to comprehend Catholic, humanist, and reformed elements of the time. The Church of England was not a theocracy, because in these two centuries, the legislative authority belonged to “King in Parliament.”

The Church of England was established in 1534 by the parliamentary Act of Supremacy, which recognized Henry VIII (r. 1509–47) as the “only supreme head on earth” of the Church of England, or the Anglican Church.


The Reformation Parliament (1529–36) abrogated papal authority and declared royal supremacy, but made no attempt theologically or liturgically to break with the Catholic past. Rather, the Six Articles enacted by the Parliament of 1539 reiterated Catholic teachings and practices and put a check on the spread of the embryonic Protestantism in England.

The ambiguities left from the reforms were tested after Henry VIII’s death. Under Edward VI (r. 1547–53), antipapal rhetoric increased, the apparatus of worship became simplified, and the Parliament reformed the Church of England to meet Calvinist essentials. Then, Queen Mary I (r. 1553–58) restored Catholicism, persecuted Calvinist heretics, and pushed her Protestant subjects into exile, or confined their worship in rural cells.

Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603) undertook the precarious task of reconstructing the Church of England according to Henry VIII’s blueprint and simultaneously finding a satisfactory settlement for the great majority of her subjects.

In 1559, her first Parliament enacted a new Act of Supremacy, which established her, using a slightly softer tone than her father’s, as the “supreme governor” of the Church of England. Despite the political independence from the papal authority, the church remained administratively and judicially the same. The convocations of Canterbury and York survived.

The diocesan hierarchy and administrative systems continued. The church courts, the ecclesiastic laws, and judicial proceedings followed basically medieval precedents and routines. Under the queen, one novel practice was to require Anglican clergy to take an oath of allegiance to the queen, as all her civil servants did.

In 1563, Parliament sanctioned the Thirty-Nine Articles. In 1571, under the queen’s personal instruction, a slightly altered version was approved by the convocation of the Church of England and was printed as an appendix to the Book of Common Prayer, a revision of Thomas Cranmer’s book of the same title issued originally in 1549.

While the Articles and the Book adopted some of the Protestant theological teachings and liturgical regulations (especially in the administration of baptism and Holy Communion) into the Church of England, they held firmly royal supremacy as the church’s foundation and episcopacy as its government.

Canterbury Cathedral

The Book served as the textbook, compelling local people to weekly church attendance and other services in liturgical uniformity and in the English vernacular, which managed to mask the differences between Catholic and Calvinistic followers within the church.

Although the queen’s sincere and meticulous compromise won the people’s broad acceptance, she could not pacify ardent opposition to her settlement. Neither was she able to persuade all her subjects to conform to the national and reformed church required by the Act of Uniformity of 1559.

The Marian bishops and their followers adamantly rejected her breach with Rome and her governorship of the church. After Pope Pius VI issued a bull in 1570 deposing her and absolving her Catholic subjects from allegiance, a series of plots were carried out against her life, including one led by her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1586.

At the same time, radical Calvinists refused to conform to the Church of England because of their resentment of its episcopal structure. To a great extent, the Catholic conspiracies confirmed the Calvinist conviction that the Church of England had to be purified of the accreted institutions, doctrines, and liturgies inherited from medieval Catholicism.

King James Bible

In the 17th century, both the popish plots, real or imagined, and radical movements of the Puritans would test the vitality of the Elizabethan Church of England. At the Hampton Court conference of 1604, the first Stuart king, James I (r. 1603–25), met his Puritan subjects to receive their petition for purifying the Catholic remnants from the Church of England. The king commissioned a panel of 54 to produce an authorized English Bible.

The so-called James I Version was finished in 1611, and the Church of England began to have its own standardized book for centuries to come. However, at the same conference, the king was displeased by the demands of the Puritan nonconformists to reform the episcopacy, and later responded to it with his succinct statement “No bishop, no king.”

Afterward, the Gunpowder Plot by Catholic extremists, aiming at blowing up all of royalty at the opening session of Parliament of 1605, further inflamed anti-Catholic sentiment in England, and helped the Puritan cause to gain growing support from its popular base.

The leading Puritan parliamentarians under King Charles I (r. 1625–49) became infuriated when the king refused to transform the Church of England toward congregational structure, and they linked the episcopal structure of the church to the king’s personal tyranny.

Civil War

Although the Puritans’ frustration alone might not have caused the breakout of the Civil War in 1642, the uncompromising antipapal and antiepiscopal attitude of the Puritan politicians and military men undoubtedly shaped the fate of England and its church in the next 20 years.

After the regicide of 1649, General Oliver Cromwell, a Puritan providentialist and a pragmatic politician, was forced to suppress his fellow Puritan extremists, the levellers and the followers of the fifth monarchism, in order to preserve the episcopal organization in his Puritan-styled Church of England.

During the Restoration (1660–88), endeavors were made among different religious leaders to find a new settlement, but King Charles II (r. 1660–85) and the Anglicans now in power refused to recognize the nonconformists who had been previously ordained to serve in their congregations.

The king expelled about 2,000 of them from the church after they refused to pass the test, defined by the Act of Test of 1673 as taking oaths of allegiance and receiving Holy Communion in the Church of England.

The national church became schismatic, and the specter of the Civil War loomed. When the nation faced a very real possibility of the restoration of Roman Catholicism under James II (r. 1685–88), Parliament met in 1688 to contemplate how to contend with the crisis.

In Parliament, the majority of the Tories supported royal authority, but cared about the future of the Church of England more than King James II; the Whigs favored parliamentary supremacy, but were willing to work with the Tories in order to prevent Catholic resurgence.

After suffering military defeats at the hand of the king’s opponents, James II abandoned the throne and fled to France at the end of 1688. In 1689, Parliament offered the Crown jointly to Mary (r. 1689–94), the Anglican daughter of James I, and her husband, William III (r. 1689–1702), the Calvinist duke of Orange.

In the same year, Parliament required William and Mary to accept the Bill of Rights, which was designed to guarantee the members of Parliament freedom of speech and immunity from prosecution for their opinions presented in parliamentary debates.

In 1689, the Parliament also adopted the Toleration Act, which offered some freedom of worship to the nonconformist Protestants; their right to hold public offices, however, was still technically restricted by the Act of Test of 1673, which would be finally repealed in 1828. But the Catholics did not gain religious freedom until 1829.

Political and religious struggles continued to disrupt the English life from the Glorious Revolution in England to the succession of the first Hanoverian king, George I (r. 1714–27), when the restoration of Catholicism became not only barred by law but also less and less realistic. However, the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 was the great landmark in the history of the Church of England.

In general, the religious strife and bloodshed that had troubled England for more than a century began to subside, and the national and reformed church began to operate within the Elizabethan framework of the church constitution. Moreover, the church spread throughout the British Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries, and hundreds of episcopacies all over the empire lived under the governorship of English monarchs.

Today, the Church of England is still the religion of the English monarchy but no longer enjoys any privileges over other religions in the British parliamentary democracy. The archbishop of Canterbury, as St. Augustine’s successor, is honored as the universal primate among the Episcopalian believers in more than 400 dioceses all around the world, but he exercises no authority over them. At the same time, the church is currently playing an important role in women’s ordination, Christian ecumenical dialogue, and interfaith communications among world religions.

Anne - Queen of Great Britain

Anne - Queen of Great Britain

The last of the Stuart rulers, Anne was born on February 6, 1665, in London to King James II (r. 1685–88) and Anne Hyde. Although her father converted to Roman Catholicism, Anne’s uncle, King Charles II, gave orders that Anne and her sister, Mary, were to be raised Protestant. In 1683, Anne married Prince George of Denmark, and by all accounts the two were well-matched and content in marriage.

They were plagued, however, with the inability to have a family. In 1700, their 11-year-old son, William, died. After at least 18 pregnancies, 13 ended in miscarriage or stillbirth, and in the others infants did not live to the age of two. William was the only child to survive into childhood.

Anne entered the line of succession according to the 1689 Bill of Rights and succeeded her brother-in-law, William III (reigned 1689–1702). She took the throne on March 8, 1702, as queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Anne was determined to look after the Anglican Church, believing that God had entrusted it to her care.

The War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13) erupted over disputed claims to the Spanish throne. This conflict dominated Queen Anne’s reign. France, Spain, and Bavaria were pitted against Britain, the Netherlands, Austria, most of Germany, Savoy, and Portugal.


Louis XIV (1638–1715) had repudiated the Partition Treaty of 1698’s solution to the succession problem. He debarred trade with the Spanish Indies and refused British imports as he set about his expansionist agenda. The dominating figure from the allies was General John Churchill, the duke of Marlborough (1650–1722), who marched rapidly to Blenheim to defeat the French in 1704.

The Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 ended the war, and its provisions were beneficial to Britain’s colonial and commercial interests. Britain’s marine supremacy was intact. Britain received Gibraltar and Minorca in Europe, along with Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Hudson Bay territory in North America. It won exclusive rights to supply slaves to the Spanish colonies. France was forced to recognize Protestant succession to the throne of Britain.

Statue of queen Anne

In 1707, England and Scotland combined under the Act of Union to become the single kingdom of Great Britain, making Anne the first monarch of Great Britain. The union of England and Scotland was mutually advantageous.

Scotland accepted free trade, better economic opportunity, and an intact church in exchange for recognition of the Protestant English succession to the throne. England also benefited politically and militarily by having the land and coastline of Scotland as part of its kingdom.

The parliamentary party differences between the Tories and the Whigs fully emerged during Anne’s reign. The Whigs were advocates of religious toleration, constitutional government, and the War of the Spanish Succession. The Tories adhered to the Anglican Church and divine right theory and supported the war only at early stages.

Marlborough, a Tory, had influence over the queen through his wife, Sarah Jennings (later Sarah Churchill, duchess of Marlborough, 1660–1744). Marlborough switched his loyalty to the Whigs and brought his son-in-law, Charles Spencer Sunderland, in as secretary of state. Anne excluded other Tories from office at the insistence of the Marlboroughs and Sidney Godolphin (lord high treasurer, 1702–10).

The Tories passed the Occasional Conformity and Schism Acts in 1711 and 1714, aimed at weakening the Nonconformists. But the Tory desire for putting Prince James Francis Edward Stuart, “The Old Pretender,” on the throne before the queen’s death was not fulfilled.

Anne had not produced an heir to her throne, so she arranged for the accession of a distant cousin, the Protestant Hanoverian prince George Louis (King George I, 1714–27). The Whigs were triumphant and enjoyed power for half a century. Queen Anne died on August 1, 1714, in London. She had no surviving children.

Afonso de Albuquerque - Portuguese Explorer

Afonso de Albuquerque - Portuguese Explorer

One of the great sea captains in Portuguese history, Afonso de Albuquerque captured the cities of Goa, Malacca, and Hormuz and founded the Portuguese empire in Asia. He was born in Alhandra, near Lisbon. Both his paternal grandfather and great-grandfather had been confidential secretaries to King João I and King Edward (Duarte), and his maternal grandfather had been an admiral in the Portuguese navy.

He grew up at the court of his godfather King Afonso V, and when he was 20 he sailed in the Portuguese fleet to Venice and was involved in the defeat of the Turks at the Battle of Taranto. He then spent 10 years in the Portuguese army in Morocco gaining military experience.

Albuquerque was present when the Portuguese under King Afonso V captured Arzila and Tangier in 1471, and Afonso’s son, King João II, made him a bodyguard and then his master of the horse. He returned to Morocco in 1489 and fought at the siege of Graciosa. When John’s brother Manuel I became king in 1495, Albuquerque returned again to Morocco.


It was during this time that Albuquerque became interested in Asia. The possibility of opening up a trade route was tantalizing to Albuquerque and in 1503 he joined his cousin Francisco to Cochin on the southwest coast of India, where they built the first Portuguese fortress in Asia.

King Manuel appointed Dom Francisco de Almeida as the first viceroy of India with the aim of increasing trade and establishing a permanent presence on the Indian subcontinent. In April 1506, Albuquerque set out on his second (and final) voyage—one that would last nine years. He was skilled in military tactics, seafaring, and handling men and was incredibly ambitious.

However he was only in charge of five of the fleet’s 16 ships. Overall command was given to Tristão da Cunha, who led the expedition up the east coast of Africa, and around Madagascar. They built a fort at Socotra to prevent Arab traders from passing through the mouth of the Red Sea and ensure a Portuguese trade monopoly with India.

In August 1507, Albuquerque was given permission by Tristão da Cunha to take six ships and 400 men. They headed straight for the Arabian and Persian coasts and, heavily armed, they sacked five towns in five weeks. Albuquerque then decided to attack the town of Hormuz (Ormuz), which was located on an island between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.

Taking it would cripple Turkish trade with the Middle East as it was the terminus for caravan routes from Egypt, Persia, Turkestan, and India. Even though Hormuz had a population of between 60,000 and 100,000, Albuquerque was able to capture the town and force it to pay him an annual tribute.

Monument of Afonso de Albuquerque

Albuquerque, appointed to succeed Almeida, found Almeida reluctant to hand over the office. Almeida was keen to avenge the death of his son, who was killed by an Egyptian fleet. He jailed Albuquerque and then led the Portuguese into a naval battle off the island of Din near Goa in February 1509.

In October 1509 the marshal of Portugal, Fernando Continho, on a tour of inspection, ordered the release of Albuquerque and demanded that Almeida hand over his office. Albuquerque then set out to create the Portuguese empire in Asia.

In January 1510 he attacked the port of Cochin but was unable to capture it. Two months later he attacked and took the town of Goa. After being there for two months he was forced out, but retook Goa in November 1510.

Albuquerque then made for Malacca (now Melaka), the richest port on the Malay Peninsula. It was the center where traders from the Indonesian archipelago brought their spices. It had a population of 100,000 and was well armed.

With 15 ships, three galleys, 800 European and 200 Indian soldiers, in July 1511, he attacked Malacca and after a day, took the city, which his men looted. They loaded their treasure into the Flor do Mar, and the ship was so overloaded that it sank off the coast of Sumatra; the wreck has never been found.

Back in Goa, Albuquerque fought off the attackers and then took a group of Portuguese and Indians to try to take the port of Aden. They failed and they returned to India. In February 1515, he again sailed from Goa, taking 26 ships to Hormuz.

However he was taken ill in September and sailed back to Goa. On the way back he heard that his success had made him many enemies in Lisbon and he had been replaced by an enemy, Lopo Soares. Albuquerque died on December 15, 1515, at sea off the coast of Goa.

Valois Dynasty

Valois Dynasty

The branch of the Capet family who ruled France from 1328 to 1589, the Valois, descended from 1285 when Philip III gave the county of Valois to his brother Charles. Charles’s son succeeded to the throne of France when the direct male line of the Capets failed in 1328.

The succession was challenged by the English king Edward III, who claimed a closer link to the Crown via his mother, the sister of the last king. This was one direct cause of the Hundred Years’ War.

There were three branches of Valois kings. The first was the direct line, reigning 1328–1498. The second was the Orleans branch, which reigned in the person of just one monarch, Charles V, noted poet Louis, was given the Duchy of Orleans. His descendant, Louis XII (1498–1515), succeeded in 1498.


The third branch, the House of Angoulême, which reigned from 1515 to 1589, also descended from Duke Charles of Orleans. When the male line of this family ended, it went to another branch of the royal family, the Bourbon dynasty, under Salic Law, which limited the royal succession to a paternal male relative.

The first king of the Valois family, Philip VI (1328–50), was unfortunate as he faced the great defeat of Crecy followed by the Black Death that took approximately one-third of France’s population. The second king, John the Good (1350–64), was captured at the Battle of Poitiers (1356) and spent the rest of his time as a prisoner of the English. This was a low point for France, as much of the country was occupied and facing civil unrest.

The later kings of the first branch proved more capable. Charles V (1364–80), often called the wisest of the Valois, was able to win back most of the English conquest but died young. His successor, Charles VI (1380–1422), succeeded as a child, gave promise of ability, but succumbed to insanity in 1392.

Thereafter, the French realm slid back into anarchy and eventual English invasion by Henry V, whose victory at Agincourt and intrigue by the House of Burgundy eventually led to a treaty in 1420 that made the English king, as the husband of Catherine of France, the heir. Perhaps half of France fell under English control.

The next king, Charles VII (1422–61), was not a great king but was called “the well-served” because of his advisers and aides. A series of events led to the eventual expulsion of the English from France during Charles VII’s reign. First, Joan of Arc inspired the French in her quest to rid her country of England.

Then Charles’s relatives persuaded him to establish the first standing army so as to reduce dependence on unreliable nobles. Additionally, the financier Jacques Coeur established a tax system to support the army. Together, these factors empowered the French to shake off English rule altogether.

Louis XI (1461–83), who along with Charles V, is considered the ablest of the Valois kings, faced a threat from Burgundy, which was an offshoot of the royal line of France. The duchy and county of Burgundy (Franche-Comté) together with much of the Netherlands were under the control of this family. Other nobles joined Charles to flout Louis XI’s authority.

Louis established a new civilian administration and gradually reduced the huge territories of the nobles. He was assisted by the defeat and death of his greatest rival, Charles of Burgundy, in 1477 so that with the exception of Brittany, the major fiefs of France had been annexed by his death. The marriage of his son Charles VIII (1483–98), who married the heiress of Brittany in 1498, completed the policy of consolidation.

On Charles’s death in 1498, the direct line ended, and Louis XII succeeded. He retained Brittany by marrying the widow of Charles VIII. He also continued the Italian Wars started by his predecessor. On his death in 1515, he was succeeded by his cousin and son-in-law Francis I.

A true Renaissance prince, Francis I spent the bulk of his reign struggling against the hegemony of the Habsburg dynasty as exemplified by charles v and I of Germany and Spain. His successor, Henry II, continued his policies. The French abandoned Italy at the end of his reign but gained the Lorraine territories of Metz, Toul, and Verdun.

The last kings of the Valois (Francis II, 1559–60; Charles IX, 1560–74; and Henry III, 1574–89) had their reigns overshadowed by the Wars of Religion between devout Catholics on the one hand and the Protestant Huguenots on the other. When the last of the kings was murdered by a religious fanatic motivated by revenge, the line ended after a tumultuous 261 years of rule.

Scottish Reformation

Scottish Reformation

The Scottish Reformation was the movement in Scotland that ended the Scottish state’s traditional, formal, religious, and governmental relationship with the Church of Rome.

The Catholic Church was succeeded by a Presbyterian Church after 1560, when the Scottish parliament formally ended papal jurisdiction in Scotland, prohibited the celebration of the Mass, and ratified a Reformed (Calvinist) doctrinal document, the Scots Confession of Faith (1560), which was succeeded by the binding Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), as statements subordinate only to Holy Scripture.

The reformer most commonly associated with this movement was John Knox; other early figures of prominence include John Douglas, John Row, John Spottiswoode, John Willock, and John Winram, who were preachers and coauthors of the Scots Confession, and Andrew Melville, a primary influence on the second Book of Discipline.


The Church of Scotland’s (often referred to as “the Kirk”) major Reformation statements on church polity are the first Book of Discipline (1560) and the second Book of Discipline (1578). During the Reformation, its liturgy followed the Book of Common Order, first published by Knox in Geneva in 1556.

As in many other parts of Europe, Catholic piety before the Reformation was strong, and religious orders enjoyed popularity and influence. The progress of the Reformation in Scotland was heavily influenced by a political scene resulting from the fate of the Scottish monarchy, which in turn was heavily influenced by three centuries of conflict with England.

The fact of repeated minority succession to the Scottish throne (James V’s minority lasted from 1513 to 1528, Mary, Queen of Scots, from 1543 to 1561, James VI’s from 1567 to 1581) meant that political power in Scotland was held by various coalitions of nobles rather than by the Scottish Crown.

These nobles repeatedly disagreed about the need to pursue alliances with France or with England, and their desire for a decentralized government is paralleled in the ultimate organization of the kirk.

James V was the grandson of Henry VII of England, but his father had been defeated and killed by English troops under his uncle, Henry VIII of England, at Flodden Field (1513). James V seems to have preferred a French alliance; he made a French marriage. Support for the pro-English faction in Scotland intensified as the Reformation started on the Continent, however, and its ideas made their way to Scotland.

While popular enthusiasm for Catholic eucharistic piety was strong, hostility toward ecclesiastical government and wealth became more focused in light of events on the Continent. Anticlericalism was a frequent theme of anti-Catholic polemic on the Continent, and the same was true in Scotland.

After Henry III introduced a reformation in England, he pressured James V to do the same. James threatened the papacy with a reformation and received a number of financial and ecclesiastical concessions in return. To mobilize popular sentiment behind his pro-French position, he attacked the English and was defeated at Solway Moss in 1542 when some of his own nobles surrendered to the English; he died a month later.

The decision for the French, in combination with England’s turn toward the Reformation, made England a convenient refuge for the Scottish instigators of religious reform periodically exiled after the 1520s. John Knox, sentenced to serve as a galley slave in 1547 for his role as an associate of the murderers of the Catholic archbishop of St. Andrews, was only one of many such exiles.

Succession

The succession of James V’s infant daughter led to further jockeying between the Scottish and French parties. Gordon Donaldson has pinpointed three crisis points during Mary’s minority. In 1543, the pro-English party gained the upper hand, pledging Mary to Henry VIII’s son, the future Edward VI of England (a Protestant).

In the same year, however, her regent, James Hamilton, earl of Arran, repudiated the English treaty, after which English troops began vandalizing and occupying southern Scotland. In 1547, in return for help against the English, Scotland betrothed Mary to the French dauphin in 1548; he ascended the French throne as Francis II in 1549.

Over the succeeding years, however, Scottish sentiment turned against France as it became apparent that the French projected Scotland’s absorption into France. Moreover, the English Crown sponsored a wave of pro-English, pro-Reformation propaganda, and its preachers were sent over the border and sheltered by members of the pro-English party in Scotland.

A temporary abatement under Mary I of England ended after the succession of Elizabeth I in 1558, who agreed to support the Scottish Protestant cause against the French.

Knox had been bought out of his French enslavement under Edward VI but expelled from England under Mary; he returned to Scotland from Geneva, where he had superintended a congregation of exiles, in 1556. In 1559, he preached a sermon that sparked a pro-English rebellion.

The rebellion drew English troops into France in 1560, which in turned triggered the withdrawal of both French and English troops later in 1560. At this point the Scottish parliament, flooded for this sitting by a group of minor nobles whose participation was illegal, formally ended Scotland’s relationship with the Roman Church.

During the remainder of Mary’s reign, an ecclesiastical compromise remained in effect in which revenues were divided between remaining benefice holders and the Reformed Church, but Mary as a Catholic could not govern the church, so an alternative body, the General Assembly, which Gordon Donaldson has termed a Protestant parliament, served as the kirk’s governing body. Mary, unwise in her marriages, was forced to abdicate in 1567, when Scotland reverted to a government of Protestant regents until James VI attained majority.

The most unique feature of the new Scottish Church was its decentralized church polity, formulated in the first Book of Discipline, which also legislated on practical matters. It emphasized preaching and the distribution of the two remaining sacraments (baptism and communion).

It forbade the observance of holy days, the celebration of masses and performance of prayers for the dead, and the invocation of saints. The structure of benefices was abolished, with resulting revenues to be used for supporting the clergy, educating the faithful, and maintaining the deserving poor.

Congregations were to elect deacons and elders to work with ministers to regulate congregations and maintain church discipline. The General Assembly accepted many of the book’s prescriptions but did not institute the radical withdrawal of benefices from their holders. Notably absent in the book were prescriptions for a church hierarchy.

In 1572, the Crown tried to introduce bishops into the church’s government, but this was abandoned by 1576 and repudiated in the second Book of Discipline. This document rejected royal or episcopal supremacy over the church and placed most governmental responsibilities (interpretation of Scripture, ordination of ministers, visitation, and jurisprudence) in the hands of either individual congregations (the word presbytery is used rarely) or supercongregational assemblies (synods or the General Assembly).

The Scottish parliament never affirmed the second Book of Discipline; indeed, James VI sought repeatedly to institute Crown and Episcopal control of ecclesiastical affairs. The conflict between the Presbyterian and Episcopal models of polity became a major dynamic within both the Scottish Church and Scotland’s relationship with England for the subsequent century.

The Reformation

In the 16th-century Reformation, spiritual traditions gave way to scientific views on religion, society, and philosophy. Europe witnessed a fermenting of great ideas stimulated by the Renaissance. A new urban middle class ascended, with its Protestant ethics of capital accumulation, and the old order of Europe changed. The Reformation had far-reaching consequences for the church, society, and the economy.

Humanism in Europe changed intellectual inquiry beginning in 1400 by encouraging people to think in terms of reason instead of faith. Medieval Christianity was becoming outdated and human interests began to predominate. The concept of chance rather than Providence became the hallmark of the age of Renaissance humanism.

The affairs of the secular world rather than of the divine world became primary. Among the thinkers of this kurun were Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536), Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540), Rudolphus Agricola (1443–85), and John Colet (ca. 1467–1519). The printing industry played an important role in educating people. Knowledge was disseminated at a faster rate after the invention of the printing press by Johann Gutenberg (1397–1468).

Commerce Clashes with Church

In the political arena, the decay of the Holy Roman Empire and the development of central governments had a profound effect on the feudal order, which changed with the rise of a new middle class. The geographical discoveries made by explorers altered European understanding of the world and led to a vast extension of commerce. The traditional wealth of landholdings found a rival in commercial wealth. The time was ripe for a careful reexamination and reconstruction of old institutions and the greatest one, the Roman Catholic Church, was no exception.


The Roman Catholic Church was marked by abuses and widespread corruption. The papacy had been discredited by immoral Alexander VI and the warlike Julius II. Desire for worldly possessions and political power became the norm for clergy. The sinecures, selling of indulgences, and pluralism further discredited the church.

Independent nations did not like the interference from an external sovereign like the pope and sought ecclesiastical independence. The pioneering reform movements against the church began with John Wycliffe (1320–84), who was declared a heretic. He advocated freedom of individual conscience.

Another reformer, John Huss (1317–1415) from the University of Prague, translated Wyclif’s works into Czech, was condemned by the Council of Constance (1414–18), and was executed. Girolamo Savonarola (1452–98) endeavored to effect etika reformation in Florence and was also slain. Erasmus of the Netherlands, professor of divinity at Cambridge in 1511–13, lampooned the papacy and the monasteries.

Debate Over Religious Reform

The onset of the 16th century witnessed debate over religious reforms, and from the second decade, the undisputed leader of the Reformation was Martin Luther (1483–1546), whose posting of the 95 Theses on the door of the Wittenberg castle church on October 31, 1517, challenged papal abuses and sale of indulgences. The princes supporting Luther hoped that his actions would undermine Rome’s authority over Germany.

Luther did not believe that purchasing indulgences would spare a soul from purgatory, and he did not believe that a person could be saved by his own deeds. He protested the rituals of the church, emphasizing that sacraments were essential for salvation. For him, it was God’s mercy that allowed for salvation, not institutions and sacraments. The printing press spread the message of Luther quickly, and his ideas created havoc in Europe.

The placid Pope Leo X (1513–21) sought a solution to the masalah of the Reformation and called Luther to present his case after excommunicating him in 1520. Luther began his journey to Worms on April 2, 1521, and was welcomed in towns that he passed through. The church and the powerful Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V (r. 1519–56), a supporter of the Roman Catholic Church, wanted Luther to retract his statements.

At the Imperial Diet of Worms, Luther stood firm in his belief and proclaimed that he could not submit his faith either to the pope or to the council, and his conscience was submissive to God’s will alone. He was allowed to go home and lead a life of seclusion, writing against the papacy.

Luther had been declared an outlaw but was comparatively safe because the Emperor was busy at war with France. The Diet did not remedy the ecclesiastical grievances, and Luther’s spiritual rebellion gave rise to political rebellion in the form of the Peasants’ War of 1524 and 1525.

Thomas Müntzer, a former Lutheran cleric, led the revolt, in which peasants demanded reforms of feudal excesses. Luther’s call for peace went unheeded and he sided with the princes. The ruling prince of each principality decided the type of Christianity that would be followed; the southern princes generally sided with Rome, whereas the northerners were loyal to Lutheran teachings.

At the Diet of Speyer in 1526, each German state was allowed to choose between the two religions. But after three years, in the second Diet, there was reenactment of the Edict of Worms and the Lutherans protested, thus gaining the name of Protestants.

Two Sides of the Reformation

Europe was soon divided into two blocs with the spread of the Reformation. The victory of the new faith in German Switzerland was feasible because of the efforts of Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531). Another notable figure in Protestant Reformation, Frenchman John Calvin (1509–64), emphasized faith and called for a return to the Bible.

He was of the belief that the church and state were essential for society and authority, for both were given by God. Calvinism did not make state supreme over the church, a point propounded by Luther. He encouraged the civil and ecclesiastical officers to work together against wickedness.

Calvin’s theological system was indirectly responsible for the cause of democracy and was embraced in England, Scotland, and the Netherlands, where democratic tradition was gaining ground. The Puritan tradition also became effective as far away as the New England colonies.

Protestant scholars went to Geneva, a center of Calvinist teaching, and took back Protestantism to their home countries in Europe. Calvin gave much importance to education and set up a training school for Protestant theologians, which eventually became the University of Geneva.

The Huguenots, or French Protestants, did not succeed in making reformation a national movement. Francis I (r. 1515–47) had already made arrangements with the papacy by the Concordat of Bologna in 1516. The persecution of the Huguenots reached its height in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572.

The religious wars were brought to an end by the Edict of Nantes in 1598, and the question of the Reformation was settled in France for the time being. The Reformation also did not make much headway in the Netherlands, which was under control of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

Calvinism spread after 1555, when Charles V bequeathed the Netherlands to his son Philip II. Dissatisfaction arose in the country because of the king’s administration, excessive use of Spanish troops, and heavy taxation. In 1568, the Inquisition condemned the people of the Netherlands as heretics. There arose an uprising in northern provinces under William of Orange-Nassau, prince of Orange.

The northern region proclaimed independence and the “United Provinces” became the Protestant kingdom of Holland. John Knox took Scotland toward Protestantism and left a legacy known as Presbyterianism. From 1559, Knox became the leader of Protestant rebellion against the Catholic regent of Scotland, Mary of Guise.

England’s break with Rome came when King Henry VIII (r. 1509–47) attacked the papal authority in England over the divorce question. The Acts of Appeals of 1533 forbade any appeal to Rome. Henry VIII proclaimed himself the head of the Church of England by the Act of Supremacy of 1534.

The Reformation parliament (1529–36) attacked the property of the church and dissolved the smaller monasteries. In 1539, greater monasteries were dissolved. In the subsequent reign of Edward VI, the Protestant Reformation made great strides. The efforts of King Christian II of Denmark made the Reformation easier in Denmark and Norway.

Gustavus Vasa (r. 1523–60) introduced the Reformation in Sweden for political reasons; the king became supreme authority pertaining to religious affairs. Although the Reformation did not succeed in Italy and Spain, it effected change in Hungary and Transylvania.

Counter-reformation

The Reformation produced the Catholic Reformation or Counter-Reformation, which endeavored to remove abuses. Reform-minded Pope Paul III entrusted the task of addressing abuses to cardinals. The Council of Trent (1545–63) removed some of the abuses and there was improvement through the efforts of popes such as Julius III (pope 1550–55), Paul IV (pope 1555–59), and Pius IV (1559–65), all of whom enforced discipline. The order of Jesuits acted as missionaries to purify the church. The Roman Catholic Church regained some of the ground that it had lost.

The Protestant Reformation was a watershed in the history of Christianity and its consequences were far-reaching. National language and education developed, and religion became accessible with the use of a common vernacular.

The rising bourgeoisie saw in Protestantism reiteration of qualities like hard labor and thrift, which strengthened the economy. The glorification of national states became the precursor to nationalism. The call of Calvinism and Puritan revolution had its echo in the American colonies, leading to the Declaration of Independence.