two islands, and the primate borrowed some of his patron's vigor.
Recalcitrant priests were thrown into prison, images were plucked down
from the rood-loft, and the most venerable of Irish relics, the staff
of St. Patrick, was burned in the market-place. But he found no support
in his vigor save from across the channel. The Irish council looked
coldly on; even the Lord Deputy still knelt to say prayers before an
image at Trim. A sullen, dogged opposition baffled Cromwell's efforts,
and their only result was to unite all Ireland against the Crown.
But Cromwell found it easier to deal with Irish inaction than with the
feverish activity which his reforms stirred in England itself. It was
impossible to strike blow after blow at the Church without rousing wild
hopes in the party who sympathized with the work which Luther was doing
oversea. Few as these "Lutherans" or "Protestants" still were in
numbers, their new hopes made them a formidable force; and in the school
of persecution they had learned a violence which delighted in outrages
on the faith which had so long trampled them under foot. At the very
outset of Cromwell's changes, four Suffolk youths broke into a church at
Dovercourt, tore down a wonder-working crucifix, and burned it in the
fields.
The suppression of the lesser monasteries was the signal for a new
outburst of ribald insult to the old religion. The roughness, insolence,
and extortion of the commissioners sent to effect it drove the whole
monastic body to despair. Their servants rode along the road with copes
for doublets or tunicles for saddle-cloths, and scattered panic among
the larger houses which were left. Some sold their jewels and relics to
provide for the evil day they saw approaching. Some begged of their own
will for dissolution. It was worse when fresh ordinances of the
vicar-general ordered the removal of objects of superstitious
veneration. Their removal, bitter enough to those whose religion twined
itself around the image or the relic which was taken away, was
embittered yet more by the insults with which it was accompanied.
A miraculous rood at Boxley, which bowed its head and stirred its eyes,
was paraded from market to market and exhibited as a juggle before the
court. Images of the Virgin were stripped of their costly vestments and
sent to be publicly burned at London. Latimer forwarded to the capital
the figure of Our Lady, which he had thrust out of his cathedral church
at Worcester with rough words of scorn: "She with her old sister of
Walsingham, her younger sister of Ipswich, and their two other sisters
of Doncaster and Penrice, would make a jolly muster at Smithfield."
Fresh orders were given to fling all relics from their reliquaries, and
to level every shrine with the ground. In 1538 the bones of St. Thomas
of Canterbury were torn from the stately shrine which had been the glory
of his metropolitan church, and his name was erased from the
service-books as that of a traitor.
The introduction of the English Bible into churches gave a new opening
for the zeal of the Protestants. In spite of royal injunctions that it
should be read decently and without comment, the young zealots of the
party prided themselves on shouting it out to a circle of excited
hearers during the service of mass, and accompanied their reading with
violent expositions. Protestant maidens took the new English primer to
church with them and studied it ostentatiously during matins. Insult
passed into open violence when the bishops' courts were invaded and
broken up by Protestant mobs; and law and public opinion were outraged
at once when priests who favored the new doctrines began openly to bring
home wives to their vicarages.
A fiery outburst of popular discussion compensated for the silence of
the pulpits. The new Scriptures, in Henry's bitter words of complaint,
were "disputed, rhymed, sung, and jangled in every tavern and alehouse."
The articles which dictated the belief of the English Church roused a
furious controversy. Above all, the sacrament of the mass, the centre of
the Catholic system of faith and worship, and which still remained
sacred to the bulk of Englishmen, was attacked with a scurrility and
profaneness which pass belief. The doctrine of transubstantiation, which
was as yet recognized by law, was held up in scorn in ballads and
mystery plays. In one church a Protestant lawyer raised a dog in his
hands when the priest elevated the host. The most sacred words of the
old worship, the words of consecration, "_Hoc est corpus_," were
travestied into a nickname for jugglery as "Hocus-pocus."
It was by this attack on the mass, even more than by the other outrages,
that the temper both of Henry and the nation was stirred to a deep
resentment. With the Protestants Henry had no sympathy whatever. He was
a man of the New Learning; he was proud of his orthodoxy and of his
title of "Defender of the Faith." And above all he shared to the utmost
his people's love of order, their clinging to the past, their hatred of
extravagance and excess. The first sign of reaction was seen in the
parliament of 1539. Never had the houses shown so little care for
political liberty. The monarchy seemed to free itself from all
parliamentary restrictions whatever when a formal statute gave the
King's proclamations the force of parliamentary laws.
Nor did the Church find favor with them. No word of the old opposition
was heard when a bill was introduced granting to the King the greater
monasteries which had been saved in 1536. More than six hundred
religious houses fell at a blow, and so great was the spoil that the
King promised never again to call on his people for subsidies. But the
houses were equally at one in withstanding the new innovations of
religion, and an act for "abolishing diversity of opinions in certain
articles concerning Christian religion" passed with general assent. On
the doctrine of transubstantiation, which was reasserted by the first of
six articles to which the act owes its usual name, there was no
difference of feeling or belief between the men of the New Learning and
the older Catholics. But the road to a further instalment of even
moderate reform seemed closed by the five other articles which
sanctioned communion in one kind, the celibacy of the clergy, monastic
vows, private masses, and auricular confession.
A more terrible feature of the reaction was the revival of persecution.
Burning was denounced as the penalty for a denial of transubstantiation;
on a second offence it became the penalty for an infraction of the other
five doctrines. A refusal to confess or to attend mass was made felony.
It was in vain that Cranmer, with the five bishops who partially
sympathized with the Protestants, struggled against the bill in the
lords: the commons were "all of one opinion," and Henry himself acted as
spokesman on the side of the articles. In London alone five hundred
Protestants were indicted under the new act. Latimer and Shaxton were
imprisoned, and the former forced into a resignation of his see. Cranmer
himself was only saved by Henry's personal favor. But the first burst
of triumph was no sooner spent than the hand of Cromwell made itself
felt. Though his opinions remained those of the New Learning and
differed little from the general sentiment which found itself
represented in the act, he leaned instinctively to the one party which
did not long for his fall. His wish was to restrain the Protestant
excesses, but he had no mind to ruin the Protestants. In a little time
therefore the bishops were quietly released. The London indictments were
quashed. The magistrates were checked in their enforcement of the law,
while a general pardon cleared the prisons of the heretics who had been
arrested under its provisions.
A few months after the enactment of the Six Articles we find from a
Protestant letter that persecution had wholly ceased, "the Word is
powerfully preached and books of every kind may safely be exposed for
sale." Never indeed had Cromwell shown such greatness as in his last
struggle against fate. "Beknaved" by the King, whose confidence in him
waned as he discerned the full meaning of the religious changes which
Cromwell had brought about, met too by a growing opposition in the
council as his favor declined, the temper of the man remained
indomitable as ever. He stood absolutely alone. Wolsey, hated as he had
been by the nobles, had been supported by the Church; but churchmen
hated Cromwell with an even fiercer hate than the nobles themselves. His
only friends were the Protestants, and their friendship was more fatal
than the hatred of his foes. But he showed no signs of fear or of
halting in the course he had entered on. So long as Henry supported him,
however reluctant his support might be, he was more than a match for his
foes.
He was strong enough to expel his chief opponent, Bishop Gardiner of
Winchester, from the royal council. He met the hostility of the nobles
with a threat which marked his power. "If the lords would handle him so,
he would give them such a breakfast as never was made in England, and
that the proudest of them should know."
He soon gave a terrible earnest of the way in which he could fulfil his
threat. The opposition to his system gathered, above all, round two
houses which represented what yet lingered of the Yorkist tradition, the
Courtenays and the Poles. Courtenay, the Marquis of Exeter, was of royal
blood, a grandson through his mother of Edward IV. He was known to have
bitterly denounced the "knaves that ruled about the King"; and his
threats to "give them some day a buffet" were formidable in the mouth of
one whose influence in the western counties was supreme.
Margaret, the Countess of Salisbury, a daughter of the Duke of Clarence
by the heiress of the Earl of Warwick, and a niece of Edward IV, had
married Sir Richard Pole, and became mother of Lord Montacute as of Sir
Geoffry and Reginald Pole. The temper of her house might be guessed from
the conduct of the younger of the three brothers. After refusing the
highest favors from Henry as the price of his approval of the divorce,
Reginald Pole had taken refuge at Rome, where he had bitterly attacked
the King in a book, _The Unity of the Church_.
"There may be found ways enough in Italy," Cromwell wrote to him in
significant words, "to rid a treacherous subject. When Justice can take
no place by process of law at home, sometimes she may be enforced to
take new means abroad." But he had left hostages in Henry's hands. "Pity
that the folly of one witless fool," Cromwell wrote ominously, "should
be the ruin of so great a family. Let him follow ambition as fast as he
can, those that little have offended (saving that he is of their kin),
were it not for the great mercy and benignity of the Prince, should and
might feel what it is to have such a traitor as their kinsman." The
"great mercy and benignity of the Prince" was no longer to shelter them.
In 1538 the Pope, Paul III, published a bull of excommunication and
deposition against Henry, and Pole pressed the Emperor vigorously,
though ineffectually, to carry the bull into execution. His efforts only
brought about, as Cromwell had threatened, the ruin of his house. His
brother, Lord Montacute, and the Marquis of Exeter, with other friends
of the two great families, were arrested on a charge of treason and
executed in the opening of 1539, while the Countess of Salisbury was
attainted in parliament and sent to the Tower.
Almost as terrible an act of bloodshed closed the year. The abbots of
Glastonbury, Reading, and Colchester, men who had sat as mitred abbots
among the lords, were charged with a denial of the King's supremacy and
hanged as traitors. But Cromwell relied for success on more than
terror. His single will forced on a scheme of foreign policy whose aim
was to bind England to the cause of the Reformation while it bound Henry
helplessly to his minister. The daring boast which his enemies laid
afterward to Cromwell's charge, whether uttered or not, is but the
expression of his system--"In brief time he would bring things to such a
pass that the King with all his power should not be able to hinder him."
His plans rested, like the plan which proved fatal to Wolsey, on a fresh
marriage of his master; Henry's third wife, Jane Seymour, had died in
childbirth; and in the opening of 1540 Cromwell replaced her by a German
consort, Anne of Cleves, a sister-in-law of the Lutheran Elector of
Saxony. He dared even to resist Henry's caprice when the King revolted
on their first interview from the coarse features and unwieldy form of
his new bride. For the moment Cromwell had brought matters "to such a
pass" that it was impossible to recoil from the marriage, and the
minister's elevation to the earldom of Essex seemed to proclaim his
success.
The marriage of Anne of Cleves, however, was but the first step in a
policy which, had it been carried out as he designed it, would have
anticipated the triumphs of Richelieu. Charles and the house of Austria
could alone bring about a Catholic reaction strong enough to arrest and
roll back the Reformation; and Cromwell was no sooner united with the
princes of North Germany than he sought to league them with France for
the overthrow of the Emperor.
Had he succeeded, the whole face of Europe would have been changed,
Southern Germany would have been secured for Protestantism, and the
Thirty Years' War averted. But he failed as men fail who stand ahead of
their age. The German princes shrank from a contest with the Emperor,
France from a struggle which would be fatal to Catholicism; and Henry,
left alone to bear the resentment of the house of Austria and chained to
a wife he loathed, turned savagely on his minister.
In June the long struggle came to an end. The nobles sprang on Cromwell
with a fierceness that told of their long-hoarded hate. Taunts and
execrations burst from the Lords at the council table as the Duke of
Norfolk, who had been intrusted with the minister's arrest, tore the
ensign of the garter from his neck. At the charge of treason Cromwell
flung his cap on the ground with a passionate cry of despair. "This,
then," he exclaimed, "is my guerdon for the services I have done! On
your consciences, I ask you, am I a traitor?" Then, with a sudden sense
that all was over, he bade his foes make quick work, and not leave him
to languish in prison.
Quick work was made. A few days after his arrest he was attainted in
parliament, and at the close of July a burst of popular applause hailed
his death on the scaffold.
CARTIER EXPLORES CANADA
FRENCH ATTEMPTS AT COLONIZATION
A.D. 1534
H. H. MILES
Early in the sixteenth century, when France, after the
Hundred Years' War with England, had begun to be a notable
European power, the nation, under the young and brilliant
Francis I, took up the project of prosecuting New World
discovery and obtaining a firm footing on the mainland of
America. The French King's attention had been directed to
the enterprise by his grand admiral, Philip de Chabot, who
seems to have been interested in the hardy mariner and
skilled navigator, Jacques Cartier, and wished to place him
at the head of an expedition to the New World, to prosecute
discovery on the northeastern coast of America. This was in
the year A.D. 1534, ten year after Verrazano had been in the
region and named it New France, in honor of the French King.
On April 20, 1534, Cartier, with two small vessels of about
sixty tons each, set sail from the Britanny port of St. Malo
for Newfoundland, on the banks of which Cartier's Breton and
Norman countrymen had long been accustomed to fish. The
incidents of this and the subsequent voyages of the St. Malo
mariner, with an account of the expedition under the Viceroy
of Canada, the Sieur de Roberval, will be found appended in
Dr. Miles' interesting narrative.
Canada was discovered in the year 1534, by Jacques Cartier (or
Quartier), a mariner belonging to the small French seaport St. Malo. He
was a man in whom were combined the qualities of prudence, industry,
skill, perseverance, courage, and a deep sense of religion. Commissioned
by the King of France, Francis I, he conducted three successive
expeditions across the Atlantic for the purpose of prosecuting discovery
in the western hemisphere; and it is well understood that he had
previously gained experience in seamanship on board fishing-vessels
trading between Europe and the Banks of Newfoundland.
He was selected and recommended to the King for appointment as one who
might be expected to realize, for the benefit of France, some of the
discoveries of his predecessor, Verrazano, which had been attended with
no substantial result, since this navigator and his companions had
scarcely done more than view, from a distance, the coasts of the
extensive regions to which the name of New France had been given. It was
also expected of Cartier that, through his endeavors, valuable lands
would be taken possession of in the King's name, and that places
suitable for settlement, and stations for carrying on traffic, would be
established. Moreover, it was hoped that the precious metals would be
procured in those parts, and that a passage onward to China (Cathay) and
the East Indies would be found out. And, finally, the ambitious
sovereign of France was induced to believe that, in spite of the
pretensions of Portugal and Spain,[44] he might make good his own claim
to a share in transatlantic territories.
With such objects in view, Jacques Cartier set sail from St. Malo, on
Monday, April 20, 1534.[45] His command consisted of two small vessels,
with crews amounting to about one hundred twenty men, and provisioned
for four or five months.
On May 10th the little squadron arrived off Cape Bonavista,
Newfoundland; but, as the ice and snow of the previous winter had not
yet disappeared, the vessels were laid up for ten days in a harbor near
by, named St. Catherine's. From this, on the 21st, they sailed northward
to an island northeast of Cape Bonavista, situated about forty miles
from the mainland, which had been called by the Portuguese the "Isle of
Birds." Here were found several species of birds which, it appears,
frequented the island at that season of the year in prodigious numbers,
so that, according to Cartier's own narrative, the crews had no
difficulty in capturing enough of them, both for their immediate use and
to fill eight or ten large barrels (_pippes_) for future consumption.
Bears and foxes are described as passing from the mainland, in order to
feed upon the birds as well as their eggs and young.
From the Isle of Birds the ships proceeded northward and westward until
they came to the Straits of Belle-Isle, when they were detained by foul
weather, and by ice, in a harbor, from May 27th until June 9th. The
ensuing fifteen days were spent in exploring the coast of Labrador as
far as Blanc Sablon and the western coast of Newfoundland. For the most
part these regions, including contiguous islands, were pronounced by
Cartier to be unfit for settlement, especially Labrador, of which he
remarks, "it might, as well as not, be taken for the country assigned by
God to Cain." From the shore of Newfoundland the vessels were steered
westward across the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and about June 25th arrived in
the vicinity of the Magdalen Islands. Of an island named "Isle Bryon,"
Cartier says it contained the best land they had yet seen, and that "one
acre of it was worth the whole of Newfoundland." Birds were plentiful,
and on its shores were to be seen "beasts as large as oxen and
possessing great tusks like elephants, which, when approached, leaped
suddenly into the sea." There were very fine trees and rich tracts of
ground, on which were seen growing quantities of "wild corn, peas in
flower, currants, strawberries, roses, and sweet herbs." Cartier noticed
the character of the tides and waves, which swept high and strong among
the islands, and which suggested to his mind the existence of an opening
between the south of Newfoundland and Cape Breton.
Toward the end of June the islands and mainland of the northwest part of
the territory now called New Brunswick came in sight, and, as land was
approached, Cartier began at once to search for a passage through which
he might sail farther westward.
The ships' boats were several times lowered, and the crews made to row
close inshore in the bays and inlets, for the purpose of discovering an
opening. On these occasions natives were sometimes seen upon the beach,
or moving about in bark canoes, with whom the French contrived to
establish a friendly intercourse and traffic, by means of signs and
presents of hatchets, knives, small crucifixes, beads, and toys. On one
occasion they had in sight from forty to fifty canoes full of savages,
of which seven paddled close up to the French boats, so as to surround
them, and were driven away only by demonstrations of force. Cartier
learned afterward that it was customary for these savages to come down
from parts more inland, in great numbers, to the coast, during the
fishing season, and that this was the cause of his finding so many of
them at that time. On the 7th day of the month a considerable body of
the same savages came about the ships, and some traffic occurred. Gifts,
consisting of knives, hatchets, and toys, along with a red cap for their
head chief, caused them to depart in great joy.
Early in July, Cartier found that he was in a considerable bay, which he
named "La Baie des Chaleurs." He continued to employ his boats in the
examination of the smaller inlets and mouths of the rivers flowing into
the bay, hoping that an opening might be discovered similar to that by
which, a month before, he had passed round the north of Newfoundland
into the gulf. After the 16th the weather was boisterous, and the ships
were anchored for shelter close to the shore several days. During this
time the savages came there to fish for mackerel, which were abundant,
and held friendly intercourse with Cartier and his people. They were
very poor and miserably clad in old skins, and sang and danced to
testify their pleasure on receiving the presents which the French
distributed among them.