Christmas of 1554 was a period when things were looking up for Catholic England. Queen Mary was reconciling England with the Pope. She had married Philip of Spain six months earlier, and everyone believed her to be pregnant, carrying the Catholic heir that everyone was hoping for (everyone who was a Catholic, at least).
The previous six years of whitewashing over paintings, destroying altars and music, and stripping the Church of anything that could be seen as idolatry was over, and Mary was going to bring the Church back into the Papal fold, and give birth to a son who would carry on the Catholic tradition.
This period of expectation was short lived – by the summer everyone realized that Mary’s pregnancy was a phantom one (likely related to the cancer that would ultimately kill her).
Cardinal Reginald Pole returned to England in triumph in November of 1554. He was a cousin to Henry VIII, the grandson of a Plantagenet prince (George, Duke of Clarence, executed by drowning in a vat of wine, supposedly), Reginald’s mother had been executed as the price of his own disloyalty to Henry VIII after the Reformation. With the Cardinal away in Rome plotting, Henry punished his mother for the sins of the son.
But in 1554, Reginald Pole came back, marking the official forgiveness from the Pope to England. When he met Mary he greeted her with, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.” This is a pun on the idea that Mary was pregnant at the time.
The music in this album from Gallicantus highlights this period of mercy for Catholics during this period in 1554 and 1555, before the mass burnings of Protestants had begun, and there was the hope that England would be restored easily to the Catholic fold through simply being educated as to the error of the Protestant ways.
For example, take the seven-part motet Peccavimus cum patribus by court composer Christopher Tye, filled with Biblical paraphrase and pleas for mercy, has been dated to this same period of repentant expectation. “Although by no means the only Renaissance motet to strike a penitential pose, Dr Tye’s Peccavimus recalls one of the most striking images of the mid-1550s, the medallion ‘Anglia resurges’, in which prodigal England kneels at the feet of Pope Julius III. Educated Tudor listeners would also have noticed the text’s allusion to Judith, slayer of the Assyrian general Holofernes, a much-favoured Biblical analogue for Queen Mary.” (Hyperion liner notes)
If you want to deep dive into the music from this heady time for Catholics, before Elizabeth changed things forever, you could find much worse ways to spend an hour with headphones.
Buy the album on Amazon today, or listen on Spotify. When you listen, let me know what you thought about Queen Mary’s Big Belly.
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Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast, one of the longest running indie history podcasts, going since 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. She writes books, created the original Tudor Planner (a yearly diary filled with Tudor history) and in 2019 created the world's first Tudorcon (you can "attend" online this year!). She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 20 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history.