ABSTRACT
If Queen Mary had intended by sending Hooper to his death in Gloucester to intimidate his local friends into abandoning their reformed ideas and by doing so convince them to come back to the Catholic fold, it was a huge miscalculation.1 In this chapter we will look at the Gloucester Vale in the years following Hooper’s execution, and we will see that several missteps on the Marian regime’s part cost it the allegiance of the urban political class, along with many of the most powerful of the surrounding gentry. The trouble began even before Hooper’s execution in the city, and may explain the great opposition many had to it. Most took a waitand-see attitude towards the new queen, and as with their bishop, few seem to have supported Lady Jane. Within months, the rather fast-paced religious change and the queen’s unpopular announcement that she would wed Prince Philip, heir to the Spanish throne, set the stage for Sir Thomas Wyatt’s nearly successful rebellion. When Wyatt entered the city on 6 February 1554 only the loyalty of London itself saved the queen.
