ENGLAND UNDER MARY
The Duke of Northumberland was very anxious to keep the young King’s
death a secret, in order that he might get the two Princesses into his
power. But, the Princess Mary, being informed of that event as she was
on her way to London to see her sick brother, turned her horse’s head,
and rode away into Norfolk. The Earl of Arundel was her friend, and it
was he who sent her warning of what had happened.
As the secret could not be kept, the Duke of Northumberland and the
council sent for the Lord Mayor of London and some of the aldermen, and
made a merit of telling it to them. Then, they made it known to the
people, and set off to inform Lady Jane Grey that she was to be Queen.
She was a pretty girl of only sixteen, and was amiable, learned, and
clever. When the lords who came to her, fell on their knees before her,
and told her what tidings they brought, she was so astonished that she
fainted. On recovering, she expressed her sorrow for the young King’s
death, and said that she knew she was unfit to govern the kingdom; but
that if she must be Queen, she prayed God to direct her. She was then
at Sion House, near Brentford; and the lords took her down the river in
state to the Tower, that she might remain there (as the custom was)
until she was crowned. But the people were not at all favourable to
Lady Jane, considering that the right to be Queen was Mary’s, and
greatly disliking the Duke of Northumberland. They were not put into a
better humour by the Duke’s causing a vintner’s servant, one Gabriel
Pot, to be taken up for expressing his dissatisfaction among the crowd,
and to have his ears nailed to the pillory, and cut off. Some powerful
men among the nobility declared on Mary’s side. They raised troops to
support her cause, had her proclaimed Queen at Norwich, and gathered
around her at the castle of Framlingham, which belonged to the Duke of
Norfolk. For, she was not considered so safe as yet, but that it was
best to keep her in a castle on the sea-coast, from whence she might be
sent abroad, if necessary.
The Council would have despatched Lady Jane’s father, the Duke of
Suffolk, as the general of the army against this force; but, as Lady
Jane implored that her father might remain with her, and as he was
known to be but a weak man, they told the Duke of Northumberland that
he must take the command himself. He was not very ready to do so, as he
mistrusted the Council much; but there was no help for it, and he set
forth with a heavy heart, observing to a lord who rode beside him
through Shoreditch at the head of the troops, that, although the people
pressed in great numbers to look at them, they were terribly silent.
And his fears for himself turned out to be well founded. While he was
waiting at Cambridge for further help from the Council, the Council
took it into their heads to turn their backs on Lady Jane’s cause, and
to take up the Princess Mary’s. This was chiefly owing to the
before-mentioned Earl of Arundel, who represented to the Lord Mayor and
aldermen, in a second interview with those sagacious persons, that, as
for himself, he did not perceive the Reformed religion to be in much
danger—which Lord Pembroke backed by flourishing his sword as another
kind of persuasion. The Lord Mayor and aldermen, thus enlightened, said
there could be no doubt that the Princess Mary ought to be Queen. So,
she was proclaimed at the Cross by St. Paul’s, and barrels of wine were
given to the people, and they got very drunk, and danced round blazing
bonfires—little thinking, poor wretches, what other bonfires would soon
be blazing in Queen Mary’s name.
After a ten days’ dream of royalty, Lady Jane Grey resigned the Crown
with great willingness, saying that she had only accepted it in
obedience to her father and mother; and went gladly back to her
pleasant house by the river, and her books. Mary then came on towards
London; and at Wanstead in Essex, was joined by her half-sister, the
Princess Elizabeth. They passed through the streets of London to the
Tower, and there the new Queen met some eminent prisoners then confined
in it, kissed them, and gave them their liberty. Among these was that
Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, who had been imprisoned in the last
reign for holding to the unreformed religion. Him she soon made
chancellor.
The Duke of Northumberland had been taken prisoner, and, together with
his son and five others, was quickly brought before the Council. He,
not unnaturally, asked that Council, in his defence, whether it was
treason to obey orders that had been issued under the great seal; and,
if it were, whether they, who had obeyed them too, ought to be his
judges? But they made light of these points; and, being resolved to
have him out of the way, soon sentenced him to death. He had risen into
power upon the death of another man, and made but a poor show (as might
be expected) when he himself lay low. He entreated Gardiner to let him
live, if it were only in a mouse’s hole; and, when he ascended the
scaffold to be beheaded on Tower Hill, addressed the people in a
miserable way, saying that he had been incited by others, and exhorting
them to return to the unreformed religion, which he told them was his
faith. There seems reason to suppose that he expected a pardon even
then, in return for this confession; but it matters little whether he
did or not. His head was struck off.
Mary was now crowned Queen. She was thirty-seven years of age, short
and thin, wrinkled in the face, and very unhealthy. But she had a great
liking for show and for bright colours, and all the ladies of her Court
were magnificently dressed. She had a great liking too for old customs,
without much sense in them; and she was oiled in the oldest way, and
blessed in the oldest way, and done all manner of things to in the
oldest way, at her coronation. I hope they did her good.
She soon began to show her desire to put down the Reformed religion,
and put up the unreformed one: though it was dangerous work as yet, the
people being something wiser than they used to be. They even cast a
shower of stones—and among them a dagger—at one of the royal chaplains
who attacked the Reformed religion in a public sermon. But the Queen
and her priests went steadily on. Ridley, the powerful bishop of the
last reign, was seized and sent to the Tower. Latimer, also celebrated
among the Clergy of the last reign, was likewise sent to the Tower, and
Cranmer speedily followed. Latimer was an aged man; and, as his guards
took him through Smithfield, he looked round it, and said, ‘This is a
place that hath long groaned for me.’ For he knew well, what kind of
bonfires would soon be burning. Nor was the knowledge confined to him.
The prisons were fast filled with the chief Protestants, who were there
left rotting in darkness, hunger, dirt, and separation from their
friends; many, who had time left them for escape, fled from the
kingdom; and the dullest of the people began, now, to see what was
coming.
It came on fast. A Parliament was got together; not without strong
suspicion of unfairness; and they annulled the divorce, formerly
pronounced by Cranmer between the Queen’s mother and King Henry the
Eighth, and unmade all the laws on the subject of religion that had
been made in the last King Edward’s reign. They began their
proceedings, in violation of the law, by having the old mass said
before them in Latin, and by turning out a bishop who would not kneel
down. They also declared guilty of treason, Lady Jane Grey for aspiring
to the Crown; her husband, for being her husband; and Cranmer, for not
believing in the mass aforesaid. They then prayed the Queen graciously
to choose a husband for herself, as soon as might be.
Now, the question who should be the Queen’s husband had given rise to a
great deal of discussion, and to several contending parties. Some said
Cardinal Pole was the man—but the Queen was of opinion that he was
_not_ the man, he being too old and too much of a student. Others said
that the gallant young Courtenay, whom the Queen had made Earl of
Devonshire, was the man—and the Queen thought so too, for a while; but
she changed her mind. At last it appeared that Philip, Prince of Spain,
was certainly the man—though certainly not the people’s man; for they
detested the idea of such a marriage from the beginning to the end, and
murmured that the Spaniard would establish in England, by the aid of
foreign soldiers, the worst abuses of the Popish religion, and even the
terrible Inquisition itself.
These discontents gave rise to a conspiracy for marrying young
Courtenay to the Princess Elizabeth, and setting them up, with popular
tumults all over the kingdom, against the Queen. This was discovered in
time by Gardiner; but in Kent, the old bold county, the people rose in
their old bold way. Sir Thomas Wyat, a man of great daring, was their
leader. He raised his standard at Maidstone, marched on to Rochester,
established himself in the old castle there, and prepared to hold out
against the Duke of Norfolk, who came against him with a party of the
Queen’s guards, and a body of five hundred London men. The London men,
however, were all for Elizabeth, and not at all for Mary. They
declared, under the castle walls, for Wyat; the Duke retreated; and
Wyat came on to Deptford, at the head of fifteen thousand men.
But these, in their turn, fell away. When he came to Southwark, there
were only two thousand left. Not dismayed by finding the London
citizens in arms, and the guns at the Tower ready to oppose his
crossing the river there, Wyat led them off to Kingston-upon-Thames,
intending to cross the bridge that he knew to be in that place, and so
to work his way round to Ludgate, one of the old gates of the City. He
found the bridge broken down, but mended it, came across, and bravely
fought his way up Fleet Street to Ludgate Hill. Finding the gate closed
against him, he fought his way back again, sword in hand, to Temple
Bar. Here, being overpowered, he surrendered himself, and three or four
hundred of his men were taken, besides a hundred killed. Wyat, in a
moment of weakness (and perhaps of torture) was afterwards made to
accuse the Princess Elizabeth as his accomplice to some very small
extent. But his manhood soon returned to him, and he refused to save
his life by making any more false confessions. He was quartered and
distributed in the usual brutal way, and from fifty to a hundred of his
followers were hanged. The rest were led out, with halters round their
necks, to be pardoned, and to make a parade of crying out, ‘God save
Queen Mary!’
In the danger of this rebellion, the Queen showed herself to be a woman
of courage and spirit. She disdained to retreat to any place of safety,
and went down to the Guildhall, sceptre in hand, and made a gallant
speech to the Lord Mayor and citizens. But on the day after Wyat’s
defeat, she did the most cruel act, even of her cruel reign, in signing
the warrant for the execution of Lady Jane Grey.
They tried to persuade Lady Jane to accept the unreformed religion; but
she steadily refused. On the morning when she was to die, she saw from
her window the bleeding and headless body of her husband brought back
in a cart from the scaffold on Tower Hill where he had laid down his
life. But, as she had declined to see him before his execution, lest
she should be overpowered and not make a good end, so, she even now
showed a constancy and calmness that will never be forgotten. She came
up to the scaffold with a firm step and a quiet face, and addressed the
bystanders in a steady voice. They were not numerous; for she was too
young, too innocent and fair, to be murdered before the people on Tower
Hill, as her husband had just been; so, the place of her execution was
within the Tower itself. She said that she had done an unlawful act in
taking what was Queen Mary’s right; but that she had done so with no
bad intent, and that she died a humble Christian. She begged the
executioner to despatch her quickly, and she asked him, ‘Will you take
my head off before I lay me down?’ He answered, ‘No, Madam,’ and then
she was very quiet while they bandaged her eyes. Being blinded, and
unable to see the block on which she was to lay her young head, she was
seen to feel about for it with her hands, and was heard to say,
confused, ‘O what shall I do! Where is it?’ Then they guided her to the
right place, and the executioner struck off her head. You know too
well, now, what dreadful deeds the executioner did in England, through
many, many years, and how his axe descended on the hateful block
through the necks of some of the bravest, wisest, and best in the land.
But it never struck so cruel and so vile a blow as this.
The father of Lady Jane soon followed, but was little pitied. Queen
Mary’s next object was to lay hold of Elizabeth, and this was pursued
with great eagerness. Five hundred men were sent to her retired house
at Ashridge, by Berkhampstead, with orders to bring her up, alive or
dead. They got there at ten at night, when she was sick in bed. But,
their leaders followed her lady into her bedchamber, whence she was
brought out betimes next morning, and put into a litter to be conveyed
to London. She was so weak and ill, that she was five days on the road;
still, she was so resolved to be seen by the people that she had the
curtains of the litter opened; and so, very pale and sickly, passed
through the streets. She wrote to her sister, saying she was innocent
of any crime, and asking why she was made a prisoner; but she got no
answer, and was ordered to the Tower. They took her in by the Traitor’s
Gate, to which she objected, but in vain. One of the lords who conveyed
her offered to cover her with his cloak, as it was raining, but she put
it away from her, proudly and scornfully, and passed into the Tower,
and sat down in a court-yard on a stone. They besought her to come in
out of the wet; but she answered that it was better sitting there, than
in a worse place. At length she went to her apartment, where she was
kept a prisoner, though not so close a prisoner as at Woodstock,
whither she was afterwards removed, and where she is said to have one
day envied a milkmaid whom she heard singing in the sunshine as she
went through the green fields. Gardiner, than whom there were not many
worse men among the fierce and sullen priests, cared little to keep
secret his stern desire for her death: being used to say that it was of
little service to shake off the leaves, and lop the branches of the
tree of heresy, if its root, the hope of heretics, were left. He
failed, however, in his benevolent design. Elizabeth was, at length,
released; and Hatfield House was assigned to her as a residence, under
the care of one Sir Thomas Pope.
It would seem that Philip, the Prince of Spain, was a main cause of
this change in Elizabeth’s fortunes. He was not an amiable man, being,
on the contrary, proud, overbearing, and gloomy; but he and the Spanish
lords who came over with him, assuredly did discountenance the idea of
doing any violence to the Princess. It may have been mere prudence, but
we will hope it was manhood and honour. The Queen had been expecting
her husband with great impatience, and at length he came, to her great
joy, though he never cared much for her. They were married by Gardiner,
at Winchester, and there was more holiday-making among the people; but
they had their old distrust of this Spanish marriage, in which even the
Parliament shared. Though the members of that Parliament were far from
honest, and were strongly suspected to have been bought with Spanish
money, they would pass no bill to enable the Queen to set aside the
Princess Elizabeth and appoint her own successor.
Although Gardiner failed in this object, as well as in the darker one
of bringing the Princess to the scaffold, he went on at a great pace in
the revival of the unreformed religion. A new Parliament was packed, in
which there were no Protestants. Preparations were made to receive
Cardinal Pole in England as the Pope’s messenger, bringing his holy
declaration that all the nobility who had acquired Church property,
should keep it—which was done to enlist their selfish interest on the
Pope’s side. Then a great scene was enacted, which was the triumph of
the Queen’s plans. Cardinal Pole arrived in great splendour and
dignity, and was received with great pomp. The Parliament joined in a
petition expressive of their sorrow at the change in the national
religion, and praying him to receive the country again into the Popish
Church. With the Queen sitting on her throne, and the King on one side
of her, and the Cardinal on the other, and the Parliament present,
Gardiner read the petition aloud. The Cardinal then made a great
speech, and was so obliging as to say that all was forgotten and
forgiven, and that the kingdom was solemnly made Roman Catholic again.
Everything was now ready for the lighting of the terrible bonfires. The
Queen having declared to the Council, in writing, that she would wish
none of her subjects to be burnt without some of the Council being
present, and that she would particularly wish there to be good sermons
at all burnings, the Council knew pretty well what was to be done next.
So, after the Cardinal had blessed all the bishops as a preface to the
burnings, the Chancellor Gardiner opened a High Court at Saint Mary
Overy, on the Southwark side of London Bridge, for the trial of
heretics. Here, two of the late Protestant clergymen, Hooper, Bishop of
Gloucester, and Rogers, a Prebendary of St. Paul’s, were brought to be
tried. Hooper was tried first for being married, though a priest, and
for not believing in the mass. He admitted both of these accusations,
and said that the mass was a wicked imposition. Then they tried Rogers,
who said the same. Next morning the two were brought up to be
sentenced; and then Rogers said that his poor wife, being a German
woman and a stranger in the land, he hoped might be allowed to come to
speak to him before he died. To this the inhuman Gardiner replied, that
she was not his wife. ‘Yea, but she is, my lord,’ said Rogers, ‘and she
hath been my wife these eighteen years.’ His request was still refused,
and they were both sent to Newgate; all those who stood in the streets
to sell things, being ordered to put out their lights that the people
might not see them. But, the people stood at their doors with candles
in their hands, and prayed for them as they went by. Soon afterwards,
Rogers was taken out of jail to be burnt in Smithfield; and, in the
crowd as he went along, he saw his poor wife and his ten children, of
whom the youngest was a little baby. And so he was burnt to death.
The next day, Hooper, who was to be burnt at Gloucester, was brought
out to take his last journey, and was made to wear a hood over his face
that he might not be known by the people. But, they did know him for
all that, down in his own part of the country; and, when he came near
Gloucester, they lined the road, making prayers and lamentations. His
guards took him to a lodging, where he slept soundly all night. At nine
o’clock next morning, he was brought forth leaning on a staff; for he
had taken cold in prison, and was infirm. The iron stake, and the iron
chain which was to bind him to it, were fixed up near a great elm-tree
in a pleasant open place before the cathedral, where, on peaceful
Sundays, he had been accustomed to preach and to pray, when he was
bishop of Gloucester. This tree, which had no leaves then, it being
February, was filled with people; and the priests of Gloucester College
were looking complacently on from a window, and there was a great
concourse of spectators in every spot from which a glimpse of the
dreadful sight could be beheld. When the old man kneeled down on the
small platform at the foot of the stake, and prayed aloud, the nearest
people were observed to be so attentive to his prayers that they were
ordered to stand farther back; for it did not suit the Romish Church to
have those Protestant words heard. His prayers concluded, he went up to
the stake and was stripped to his shirt, and chained ready for the
fire. One of his guards had such compassion on him that, to shorten his
agonies, he tied some packets of gunpowder about him. Then they heaped
up wood and straw and reeds, and set them all alight. But, unhappily,
the wood was green and damp, and there was a wind blowing that blew
what flame there was, away. Thus, through three-quarters of an hour,
the good old man was scorched and roasted and smoked, as the fire rose
and sank; and all that time they saw him, as he burned, moving his lips
in prayer, and beating his breast with one hand, even after the other
was burnt away and had fallen off.
Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, were taken to Oxford to dispute with a
commission of priests and doctors about the mass. They were shamefully
treated; and it is recorded that the Oxford scholars hissed and howled
and groaned, and misconducted themselves in an anything but a scholarly
way. The prisoners were taken back to jail, and afterwards tried in St.
Mary’s Church. They were all found guilty. On the sixteenth of the
month of October, Ridley and Latimer were brought out, to make another
of the dreadful bonfires.
The scene of the suffering of these two good Protestant men was in the
City ditch, near Baliol College. On coming to the dreadful spot, they
kissed the stakes, and then embraced each other. And then a learned
doctor got up into a pulpit which was placed there, and preached a
sermon from the text, ‘Though I give my body to be burned, and have not
charity, it profiteth me nothing.’ When you think of the charity of
burning men alive, you may imagine that this learned doctor had a
rather brazen face. Ridley would have answered his sermon when it came
to an end, but was not allowed. When Latimer was stripped, it appeared
that he had dressed himself under his other clothes, in a new shroud;
and, as he stood in it before all the people, it was noted of him, and
long remembered, that, whereas he had been stooping and feeble but a
few minutes before, he now stood upright and handsome, in the knowledge
that he was dying for a just and a great cause. Ridley’s brother-in-law
was there with bags of gunpowder; and when they were both chained up,
he tied them round their bodies. Then, a light was thrown upon the pile
to fire it. ‘Be of good comfort, Master Ridley,’ said Latimer, at that
awful moment, ‘and play the man! We shall this day light such a candle,
by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’ And
then he was seen to make motions with his hands as if he were washing
them in the flames, and to stroke his aged face with them, and was
heard to cry, ‘Father of Heaven, receive my soul!’ He died quickly, but
the fire, after having burned the legs of Ridley, sunk. There he
lingered, chained to the iron post, and crying, ‘O! I cannot burn! O!
for Christ’s sake let the fire come unto me!’ And still, when his
brother-in-law had heaped on more wood, he was heard through the
blinding smoke, still dismally crying, ‘O! I cannot burn, I cannot
burn!’ At last, the gunpowder caught fire, and ended his miseries.
Five days after this fearful scene, Gardiner went to his tremendous
account before God, for the cruelties he had so much assisted in
committing.
Cranmer remained still alive and in prison. He was brought out again in
February, for more examining and trying, by Bonner, Bishop of London:
another man of blood, who had succeeded to Gardiner’s work, even in his
lifetime, when Gardiner was tired of it. Cranmer was now degraded as a
priest, and left for death; but, if the Queen hated any one on earth,
she hated him, and it was resolved that he should be ruined and
disgraced to the utmost. There is no doubt that the Queen and her
husband personally urged on these deeds, because they wrote to the
Council, urging them to be active in the kindling of the fearful fires.
As Cranmer was known not to be a firm man, a plan was laid for
surrounding him with artful people, and inducing him to recant to the
unreformed religion. Deans and friars visited him, played at bowls with
him, showed him various attentions, talked persuasively with him, gave
him money for his prison comforts, and induced him to sign, I fear, as
many as six recantations. But when, after all, he was taken out to be
burnt, he was nobly true to his better self, and made a glorious end.
After prayers and a sermon, Dr. Cole, the preacher of the day (who had
been one of the artful priests about Cranmer in prison), required him
to make a public confession of his faith before the people. This, Cole
did, expecting that he would declare himself a Roman Catholic. ‘I will
make a profession of my faith,’ said Cranmer, ‘and with a good will
too.’
Then, he arose before them all, and took from the sleeve of his robe a
written prayer and read it aloud. That done, he kneeled and said the
Lord’s Prayer, all the people joining; and then he arose again and told
them that he believed in the Bible, and that in what he had lately
written, he had written what was not the truth, and that, because his
right hand had signed those papers, he would burn his right hand first
when he came to the fire. As for the Pope, he did refuse him and
denounce him as the enemy of Heaven. Hereupon the pious Dr. Cole cried
out to the guards to stop that heretic’s mouth and take him away.
So they took him away, and chained him to the stake, where he hastily
took off his own clothes to make ready for the flames. And he stood
before the people with a bald head and a white and flowing beard. He
was so firm now when the worst was come, that he again declared against
his recantation, and was so impressive and so undismayed, that a
certain lord, who was one of the directors of the execution, called out
to the men to make haste! When the fire was lighted, Cranmer, true to
his latest word, stretched out his right hand, and crying out, ‘This
hand hath offended!’ held it among the flames, until it blazed and
burned away. His heart was found entire among his ashes, and he left at
last a memorable name in English history. Cardinal Pole celebrated the
day by saying his first mass, and next day he was made Archbishop of
Canterbury in Cranmer’s place.
The Queen’s husband, who was now mostly abroad in his own dominions,
and generally made a coarse jest of her to his more familiar courtiers,
was at war with France, and came over to seek the assistance of
England. England was very unwilling to engage in a French war for his
sake; but it happened that the King of France, at this very time, aided
a descent upon the English coast. Hence, war was declared, greatly to
Philip’s satisfaction; and the Queen raised a sum of money with which
to carry it on, by every unjustifiable means in her power. It met with
no profitable return, for the French Duke of Guise surprised Calais,
and the English sustained a complete defeat. The losses they met with
in France greatly mortified the national pride, and the Queen never
recovered the blow.
There was a bad fever raging in England at this time, and I am glad to
write that the Queen took it, and the hour of her death came. ‘When I
am dead and my body is opened,’ she said to those around those around
her, ‘ye shall find Calais written on my heart.’ I should have thought,
if anything were written on it, they would have found the words—Jane
Grey, Hooper, Rogers, Ridley, Latimer, Cranmer, and three hundred
people burnt alive within four years of my wicked reign, including
sixty women and forty little children. But it is enough that their
deaths were written in Heaven.
The Queen died on the seventeenth of November, fifteen hundred and
fifty-eight, after reigning not quite five years and a half, and in the
forty-fourth year of her age. Cardinal Pole died of the same fever next
day.
As Bloody Queen Mary, this woman has become famous, and as Bloody Queen
Mary, she will ever be justly remembered with horror and detestation in
Great Britain. Her memory has been held in such abhorrence that some
writers have arisen in later years to take her part, and to show that
she was, upon the whole, quite an amiable and cheerful sovereign! ‘By
their fruits ye shall know them,’ said Our Saviour. The stake and the
fire were the fruits of this reign, and you will judge this Queen by
nothing else.