"For God's sake, be my honourable masters, and rid
me out of this dungeon, for I do lie here a man
sore pained with the stone, and among the newts and
spiders. For the love of God, I ask it; for I do
all things in the place that I do lie in. My good
and honourable masters, for God's sake, be good to
me, and consider that I did never give my consent
to do no evil. Good Mr. Englefield, consider my
meaning, and be good master to me, and consider the
place I lie in, and the pain of the
stone."--Daniel's Confessions: _MS. Mary,
Domestic_, vol. viii.
The effect, however, apparently was what the
examiners desired. A note of the council remains to
the effect that--
"Daniel being yesterday removed, to a worse
lodging, beginneth this day to be more open and
plain than he hath been, whereby we perceive he
knoweth all, and we trust and think verily he will
utter the same."--Privy Council Minutes, Ibid.]
But the danger did not pass off with the execution of a few youths. An
inveterate conviction had taken hold of men of all ranks, that Philip
was coming over with an army to destroy {p.269} English liberty.
Paget went to Flanders to entreat him to come back unattended, to
dispel the alarm by his presence, and to comfort the queen; but Paget
returned with a letter instead of Philip, and the poor queen looked
ten years older on the receipt of it. She durst not stir abroad to
face the execration with which the people now received her. She passed
her time in frenzied extremities of passion, "because she could
neither enjoy the presence of her husband, nor the affection of her
subjects; and dreading every moment that her life might be attempted
by her own attendants."[569] A fleet was fitted out in the Channel. A
bishop in the queen's confidence was asked the reason by another
bishop. "To overawe rebels," was the answer, "and to carry off
Elizabeth into Flanders or Spain."[570] The government was conducted
entirely by the legate and the small knot of Catholic fanatics who had
adhered to the queen's fortunes in the late reign. Lord William Howard
told Noailles that he and the other lords lived in perpetual dread and
suspicion; if his honour would allow him, he would throw up his
office, and retire, with those who had gone before him, as a poor
gentleman, to France.
[Footnote 569: Estant en continuel fureur de ne
pouvoir jouir de la presence de son mary ny de
l'amour de son peuple, et dans une fort grande peur
d'estre offensee de sa propre vie par aulcungs des
siens.--Noailles to the King of France, May 7:
_Ambassades_, vol. v.]
[Footnote 570: Same to Montmorency, April 21:
Ibid.]
The general suffering was aggravated by a likelihood of famine. The
harvest of 1555 had failed, and bread, with all other articles of
food, was daily rising. The conspiracy exasperated the persecution,
which was degenerating into wholesale atrocity. On the 23rd of April,
six men were burnt at Smithfield; on the 28th, six more were burnt at
Colchester; on the 15th of May, an old lame man and a blind man were
burnt at Stratford-le-Bow. In the same month three women suffered at
Smithfield, and a blind boy was burnt at Gloucester. In Guernsey, a
mother and her two daughters were brought to the stake. One of the
latter, a married woman with child, was delivered in the midst of her
torments, and the infant just rescued was tossed back into the
flames.[571] Reason, humanity, even common prudence, were cast to the
winds. On the 27th of June, thirteen unfortunates, eleven men and two
women, were destroyed together at Stratford-le-Bow, in the presence
{p.270} of twenty thousand people.[572] A schoolmaster, in Norfolk,
in July read an inflammatory proclamation in a church. He and three
others were instantly hanged. Ferocity in the government and
lawlessness in the people went hand in hand. Along the river bank
stood rows of gibbets, with bodies of pirates swinging from them in
the wind. In the autumn, sixty men were sentenced to be hanged
together, for what crime is unknown, at Oxford;[573] and as a symbol
at head-quarters of the system of the administration, four corpses of
thieves hung as a spectacle of terror before the very gates of St.
James's Palace.[574]
[Footnote 571: Foxe. This hideous story was
challenged by Harding, the controversialist, in the
next reign. He was unfortunate in calling attention
to it, for the case was inquired into, and the
account was found too certainly true.]
[Footnote 572: Machyn's _Diary_.]
[Footnote 573: Machyn.]
[Footnote 574: Ibid.]
On the 20th of August, twenty-three men and women were brought to
London from Colchester, tied in a string with ropes to furnish another
holocaust. A thousand people cheered them through the streets as they
entered the city; and the symptoms of disorder were so significant and
threatening, that Bonner wrote to Pole for instructions how he should
proceed. The government was alarmed; "the council, not without good
consideration," decided that it would be dangerous to go on with the
executions; and Pole, checking Bonner's zeal, allowed the prisoners to
escape for the time, under an easy form of submission which they could
conscientiously make. They were dismissed to their homes, only,
however, for several of them to be slaughtered afterwards, under fresh
pretexts, in detail;[575] and Pole took an occasion, as will be
presently seen, of reprimanding the citizens of London for their
unnatural sympathy with God's enemies. That he had no objection to
these large massacres, when they could be ventured safely, he showed
himself in the following year, when fourteen heretics, of both sexes,
were burnt in two days at Canterbury and Maidstone.[576]
[Footnote 575: See their stories: Foxe, vol. viii.]
[Footnote 576: Foxe, vol. viii.]
Why, it may well be asked, did not the lords and gentlemen of England
rise and trample down the perpetrators of these devilish enormities?
It is a grave question, to which, nevertheless, some tolerable answer
is possible.
On the 21st of January, 1557, the English ambassador in Paris wrote in
cypher to Sir William Petre, of "a matter" which he desired should not
be communicated to the queen, "lest it should disquiet her." A refugee
had informed him, "that there was a great conspiracy in hand against
the queen, which without doubt would deprive her of her estate." He
had asked for names, but these his informant would not give, saying
merely, "the best of England were in it," and "such a {p.271} number
agreed thereupon, that it was impossible but that it would take
effect." There was no chance of discovery; "the matter had been in
hand for a year or thereabouts," yet no one "had uttered a word of
it;" should it become known, the conspirators were so strong that the
catastrophe would only be precipitated. They would have moved already,
"but for one man who had stayed them for a while."
Entreaties for more explicitness were fruitless. "By no means," wrote
Wotton, "would he name any man unto me; but only said that the
chiefest of them were such as had never offended the queen's highness
before; that the matter should begin in the evening, and the next day
by eight in the morning it should be done."
The queen was not to be killed; at least, not immediately. "They will
not kill her," the man said, "but deprive her of her estate, and then
might she chance to be used as she used Queen Jane;" and he added,
"_that they who went about the matter would not agree that any foreign
prince should have any meddling in it; neither Dudley nor any of the
English gentlemen in France were privy to the matter_."[577]
[Footnote 577: Wotton to Petre, cypher: _French
MSS., Mary_, bundle 13. State Paper Office.]
That any such combination as this letter described ever really menaced
Mary's throne cannot be affirmed with certainty. The last two
sentences, however, point to the difficulty which had embarrassed all
attempts which had been hitherto ventured. The vice of the previous
conspiracies had been the intrigues with France. The better order of
English statesmen refused to connect themselves with movements which
would give the court of Paris a dangerous influence in England, and
would entitle the French king to press the claims of the Queen of
Scots upon the English crown. If there was truth in the refugee's
story, if there really was a conspiracy of "the best of England,"
clear of all such mischievous elements, it must have consisted of the
body of the nobility, whom Lord William Howard described to Noailles
as equally dissatisfied with himself. The heresy acts had been
restored by the help of the bishops against the sustained opposition
of the majority of the lay peers. For the hundred and fifty years
during which those acts had been upon the Statute Book, they had
expressed the general feeling of the country, yet during all that
time, fewer persons had suffered under them than had been sacrificed
during the last twelve months. Having failed to destroy her sister,
having been unable to alter {p.272} the succession, the queen was
desperate; the Spaniards were watching their opportunity to interfere
by force, and would want no encouragement which she could give them;
and every honest English statesman must have watched her with the most
jealous distrust. Yet, on the other hand, she was childless; her life
must necessarily soon close by the course of nature, and with her life
the tyranny would end. If force was attempted, she would not fall
without a struggle; the clergy would stand by her, and all whom the
clergy could influence. Philip would have the pretext, for which he
was longing, for sending Spanish troops; and though liberty might and
would prevail in the end, thousands of lives might be sacrificed, and
Elizabeth's succession would be stained. The appeal to strength was,
and is, the last to which good men will allow themselves to be driven.
The lords understood one another: they would not be the first to
commence; but if an attempt were made to carry off Elizabeth, or to
throw on land a single Spanish battalion, they would know how to act.
Meantime, Dudley, Ashton, Horsey, the brothers Tremayne, and "divers
others," were safe in France, and were hospitably entertained there.
In England they were proclaimed traitors. At Paris they were received
openly at court. The queen wrote to Wotton with her own hand,
commanding him to demand their surrender.[578] She sent for Noailles,
and required that "those wretches, those heretics, those traitorous
execrable villains," who had conspired against her throne should be
placed in her hands.[579] Henry, with unembarrassed coolness, promised
Wotton that they should be apprehended, while he furnished them with
ships, which they openly fitted for sea at the mouth of the Seine; and
one of their number, Henry Killegrew, went to Italy to look for
Courtenay, who was in honourable exile there, to entreat him to put
himself at their head. Courtenay promised to come, so Killegrew
reported on his return;[580] his name would have given them strength,
his presence weakness; but if he really thought again of mixing
himself in conspiracies his intentions were frustrated. The last
direct heir of the noblest family in England died at the end of the
summer, of an ague caught among the lagoons at Venice.[581]
[Footnote 578: The Queen to Wotton: _MS. France_,
bundle 13.]
[Footnote 579: Gens abominables, heretiques et
traistres villains et execrables.--Noailles to the
King, May 7: _Ambassades_, vol. v.]
[Footnote 580: Wotton to Petre, cypher: _French
MSS._ State Paper Office, bundle 13.]
[Footnote 581: His death was of course attributed
by the world to poison. Courtenay's birth, and the
fortune which was so nearly thrust upon him, give
his fate a kind of interest, and an authentic
account of it may not be unwelcome.
On the 18th of September, Peter Vannes, the English
resident at Venice, wrote to the queen from
Padua:--
"It hath pleased Almighty God, as the Author of all
goodness, and as One that doth nothing in vain, to
call the Earl of Devonshire to his mercy, even
about the hour, or little more or less, that I am
writing of this present; and being very sorry to
trouble your Highness with this kind of news, yet
forasmuch as the providence of God must be
fulfilled in all things, I shall somewhat touch his
sickness till the hour of death. True it is that
he, as I have perceived, for the avoiding all
suspicion from himself, hath chosen a life more
solitary than needed, saving the company of certain
gentlemen, Venetians, among whom he was much made
of. It chanced him upon three weeks agone, for his
honest recreation, to go to a place called Lio, a
piece of an island five miles from Venice, for to
see his hawks fly upon a wasted ground, without any
houses; and there he was suddenly taken with a
great tempest of wind and rain, insomuch that his
boat, called [a] gondola, could not well return to
Venice: and he was fain, for his succour, to take a
certain searcher's boat that by chance there
arrived, and so to Venice he came, being body and
legs very thinly clothed, refusing to change them
with any warmer garment. And upon that time, or
within few days after, as he told me, had a fall
upon the stairs of his house, and after seeming to
himself to be well, and finding no pain, took his
journey hither unto Padua; and for the avoiding of
the weariness of the water, and the labouring of
horses, chose the worse way coming; and so by
certain waggons called coaches, very shaking and
uneasy to my judgment, came to Padua upon Saturday
at night. Of whose coming being advertised, I went
to visit him on the morrow after, and found him
very weak; and since that time he began to appear
every day worse and worse, avoiding friends'
visitations; and drew himself to the counsel of two
of the best physicians of this town, and entered
into a continued hot ague, sometimes more vehement
than at another; and as I have seen and heard, he
hath been always diligently attended. I have
charged his servants in your name, and as they will
avoid your displeasure, that a true inventory shall
be made of such small movables as he had here, and
that especially all kind of writings and letters
that he had either here or at Venice, shall be put
in assurance, abiding for your commandment. I am
now about to see the order of his burial, with as
much sparing and as much honour as can be done; for
the merchantmen on whom, by your Grace's
commandment, he had a credit of 3 or 4 thousand
crowns, are not as yet willing to disburse any
money without a sufficient discharge of my Lord of
Devonshire's hand, the doing whereof is past. I
shall shift to see him buried as well as I can;
notwithstanding, I beseech your Grace not to be
discontented with me that I am at the next door to
go a begging.
"My said Lord of Devonshire is dead, in mine
opinion a very good Christian man; for after that I
had much exhorted him to take his communion and
rites of the Church as a thing most necessary, and
by whose means God giveth unto His chosen people
health, both bodily and ghostly, he answered me, by
broken words, that he was well content so to do:
and in token thereof, and in repentance for his
sins, he lift up his eyes and knocked himself upon
the heart; and after I had suffered him to pause a
good while, I caused the Sacrament to be brought,
and after the priest's godly exhortation, he forced
himself to receive the blessed Communion; but his
tongue had so stopped his mouth, and his teeth so
clove together, that in no wise he could receive
that same; and after this sort this gentleman is
gone, as I do not doubt, to God his mercy.
"I shall not let to say to your Grace, that since
his coming to Padua, by way of communication, he
showed unto me, that it had been reported unto him
that some one had said that he was better French
than English, and if God did recover him and send
him his health so that he might come to the
knowledge of his misreporter, he was minded to try
that quarrel by the sword."
In a letter written a few days later, Vannes said
that, in consequence of rumours having gone abroad
that the earl had been poisoned, the Podesta, at
his request, had ordered the body to be opened, and
examined by physicians, which was accordingly
done.--Peter Vannes to the Queen: _Venetian MSS._
State Paper Office.]
{p.273} The refugees, however, could do their work without Courtenay.
The Killegrews, the Tremaynes, young Stafford, and many more, put to
sea with three or four vessels, and treated all Spaniards with whom
they could fall in as their natural enemies. Before the summer was
out, they had "taken divers good prizes," and "did trust they should
take more." "In case the worst fell, the gain thereof would find them
all;" and on the 4th of August it was reported that they had taken a
fort "on one of her majesty's islands," probably in Scilly, where the
dangerous and intricate navigation placed them beyond risk of capture.
Making war on their own account, half as pirates, half as crusaders,
these youthful adventurers seized the Spanish caracks on their way to
Flanders, sailed openly with their prizes into Rochelle or La Hogue,
sold them, and bought arms {p.274} and ammunition. Their finances
were soon prosperous. Wild spirits of all nations--Scots, English,
French, whoever chose to offer--found service under their flag. They
were the first specimens of the buccaneering chivalry of the next
generation--the germ out of which rose the Drakes, the Raleighs, the
Hawkinses, who harried the conquerors of the New World.
In vain Wotton protested. The French king affected to be sorry. The
Constable said that France was large; things happened which ought not
to happen, yet could not be helped; the adventurers should be put
down, if possible.
"These men brought nothing with them out of England," Wotton doggedly
replied, "and were in such good credit with the people in France that
nobody would lend them a shilling, and yet had they found ships which
they had armed, and manned with good numbers of soldiers. What would
the queen's highness think?"
The French court, in affected deference to such complaints, armed
vessels, which they pretended were to pursue the privateers to their
nest; but, as Wotton ascertained, they were intended really to act as
their consorts.[582]
[Footnote 582: Letters of Wotton to the Queen:
_French MSS._, bundle 13, State Paper Office.]
It was plain that the French king did not anticipate any long
{p.275} continuance to the truce of Vaucelles. In fact, Paul IV.,
whose schemes in Italy that truce had arrested, had succeeded in
inducing him to break it. Lest his oath should make a difficulty, the
pope had an ever-ready dispensation; and Paul's nephew, Cardinal
Caraffa, came to Paris in July to make arrangements for the expulsion
of the Spaniards from Naples.[583]
[Footnote 583: Wotton to Petre: _MS._ Ibid. Compare
Sir James Melville's _Memoirs_, p. 38.]
To insure Henry the continued support of the papacy, Paul undertook to
create French cardinals on so large a scale as would give him the
command of the next election. Henry, in spite of the entreaties of
Montmorency, promised, on his side, to send an army to Paul's support;
and the pope, without waiting for the arrival of the French troops,
seized the Duchy of Paleano, and excommunicated the Colonnas, as the
friends of the enemies of the Holy See. Scarcely caring to look for a
pretext, he declared the Spanish prince deprived of the kingdom of
Naples; and himself attempted to put in force his sentence against the
Duke of Alva, who was acting there as Philip's viceroy.
The event had thus actually arrived, of which the expectation the year
before had appeared so alarming. The most orthodox sovereign in Europe
found himself forced into war with his spiritual father. The parent
was become insane; the faithful child was obliged, in consequence, to
place him under restraint, with as much tenderness and respect as the
circumstances permitted. To the English council Philip explained the
hard necessity under which he was placed.[584]
[Footnote 584: "Pontifex, tantum abest ut
mollissimis obsequiis atque officiis acquieverit,
non potuit tandem sibi obtemperare quin pleno
Cardinalium Senatu Regni Neapolitani privationem
per suum fiscalem proposuerit, cum nullius nos in
ipsum Pontificem, aut sedem apostolicam contumaciae,
summae quin potius uti fas est observantiae nobis
simus conscii, ac ne in praefracta quidem ejus
obstinatione a solitis officiis destitum est, donec
cum nulla molliore ope malum posset mitigari;
magisque indies ac magis propagaretur videretque
Albae Dux copias eum undique contrahere, apparatum
facere, tempus ducere, quoscumque principes
quibuscumque conditionibus sollicitare, ut
ingruenti rerum omnium ruinae occurreret, ad hoc
extremum remedium invitus coactusque descendit. Quae
omnia quanquam vobis comperta quando in eorum
mentionem per vestras litteras incidistis, per nos
etiam vobis significanda duximus; atque id praeterea
ea temperantia ac modestia hoc bellum a duce geri
atque administrari, ut nihil nisi orbis Christiani
tranquillitas, sedis apostolicae dignitas, et
nostrorum regnorum securitas procuretur, neque
ullum nos ex hoc bello gloriae aucupemur, summum
potius dolorem animique aegritudinem
percipiamus."--Philip to the English Council: _MS.
Mary, Domestic_, vol. ix. State Paper Office.]
The Duke of Alva crossed the Neapolitan frontier into the States of
the Church with twelve thousand men, taking the towns {p.276} that
lay in his way; and protesting while he did it that he was the most
faithful servant of the Holy See. Individually a pious Catholic,
officially a military machine, Alva obeyed orders with mechanical
inflexibility, and, irresistible as destiny, advanced towards Rome.
The college of cardinals, who remembered the occupation of the city by
Bourbon's army, implored the pope to have pity on them. The pope had
been too precipitate in commencing operations without waiting for the
French. He was forced to submit his pride, and sue for an armistice,
to which Alva, in the moderation of conscious strength, consented.
The French, on the other hand, were preparing to strike a blow in a
quarter where as yet they were unlooked for.
The pastoral anxieties of the English legate had extended to Calais,
where the Protestants were in considerable numbers. A commission was
sent thither which proceeded with the usual severities,[585] and the
sufferers, or those among the garrisons in Calais and Guisnes whose
sympathy with the Reformation was stronger than their patriotism,
placed themselves in correspondence with Sir Henry Dudley, at Paris.
The pay of the troops was long in arrear, and they were all mutinous
and discontented. Neither Guisnes, Hammes, nor Calais itself were
provisioned for more than three or four weeks; and the refugees,
caring only to revenge themselves on Mary, were laying a train in
connection with several of the "chiefest officers" in the three
fortresses, to betray them into the hands of France. The existence of
a conspiracy became known by accident to some one, who placed Wotton
on his guard; and Wotton, by vigilance and by the help of spies,
ascertained gradually the nature of the scheme. In the beginning of
October he discovered that Senarpont, the governor of Boulogne, was
silently increasing the garrison of the Boullonnois. Then he heard of
troops collecting at Rouen, of large preparations of military stores,
of sappers' and miners' tools, and "great files, which would cut in
two without noise the largest [harbour] chains."[586] Next, it seemed
that the leader of the adventurous party, which fourteen years before
"took the town of Marano by practise and subtlety," was in Calais in
disguise. Finally, he learnt that Henry himself was going to Rouen, to
conduct the enterprise in person.
[Footnote 585: "There is a faction or dissension
within Calais for religion's sake, whereof it
seemeth that a commission of late sent thither, I
cannot tell whether somewhat rigorously used, may
have given occasion."--Wotton to the Queen, cypher:
_French MSS._, bundle 13, State Paper Office.]
[Footnote 586: Wotton to the Queen, cypher: _French
MSS._, bundle 13, State Paper Office.]
{p.277} The disaffection had penetrated so deeply into the English
garrisons that caution was required in dealing with them; while for
some weeks either the queen disbelieved the danger, or the council
took no steps to obviate it. The Catholic clique had, in fact, not a
soldier among them, and possibly knew not in which direction to turn.
The honour of his country at last recalled Lord Pembroke to the public
service in time to save Calais for a few more months.
By the middle of November eighteen ensigns of French infantry and a
thousand horse were at Abbeville. Dudley, with the refugee fleet, was
in readiness to blockade the harbour, while Henry was to march upon
the town. If possible, he would find the gates open: at all events he
would meet with no protracted resistance. But the move had been
anticipated. Reinforcements and supplies were sent from England, money
was despatched to pay up the arrears of the troops, and Pembroke
himself went over in command.[587] No open inquiry was ventured, but
the suspected persons were quietly removed. The French withdrew, and
the queen's government, through the bad patriotism of the refugees,
recovered a momentary strength.
[Footnote 587: The Council to Philip, November
22nd: _MS. Domestic, Mary_, vol. ix.]
The faint good fortune came opportunely; for in England the harvest
had again failed, and the threat of famine had become the reality. On
the 23rd of December malt was sold in London for forty shillings a
quarter, and white flour at six shillings a bushel. The helpless
remedy was attempted of crying up the base money, but the markets
answered only by a further rise.[588] In the utter misery of the
people, some were feeding upon acorns; some, in London, more
piteously, left their infant children at the doors of their wealthy
neighbours, to save them from starvation.
[Footnote 588: Machyn.]
A famine was considered to be the immediate work of Heaven, and to be
sent for an immediate moral cause. And yet the monasteries were rising
from their ruins. Westminster was again an abbey. Feckenham was
installed abbot on the 29th of November, with the ancient ceremonies,
and walked in sad procession round the cloisters at the head of his
friars.[589] The remnant of the monks of Glastonbury had crawled back
into the ruins of their home. The queen had spared no effort and no
{p.278} sacrifice where her own power extended; and she had exhorted
and advised where she was unable to act. Yet enough had not been done.
In Ireland, indeed, the Catholic spirit had life in it. The Earl of
Desmond had allowed no stone to be thrown down from the religious
houses which had fallen to his share in the distribution. He had
sheltered and supported the monks in the bad times, he now replaced
them at his private cost;[590] and the example was telling among the
chiefs. But in England, unfortunately, the lay owners of the church
lands, orthodox and unorthodox alike, were hopelessly impenitent.
[Footnote 589: The new monks did not do credit to
their restoration. Anne of Cleves died the next
year, and lay in state in the abbey.
"The 22nd of August," says Machyn, "was the herse
of my Lady Anne Cleves taken down at Westminster,
the which the monks by night had spoiled of all
velvet cloth, arms, banners, penselles, of all the
majesty and valence, the which was never seen afore
so done."--_Diary_, p. 148.]
[Footnote 590: Desmond to the Queen: _Irish MSS._
State Paper Office.]
This, perhaps, was one cause of God's displeasure--the heretics were
another; the heretics, and the sympathy with heresy displayed by the
inhabitants of London, which had compelled the temporary release of
the prisoners sent up from Essex.
It has been mentioned that the legate took occasion to admonish the
citizens for their behaviour. In the present or the following
year[591] he issued a pastoral letter, laying before them, and before
the educated inhabitants of England generally, their duty at the
present crisis; with an explanation, not entirely accurate, of the
spirit in which the church had hitherto dealt with them. "That by
license and dispensation," he said, "you do enjoy, and keep, and
possess such goods and lands of the church as were found in your
hands, this was done of the church your mother's tenderness unto you,
considering your imbecility and weakness after so sore a sickness that
you had in the schism, at the which time your appetite served you to
no meat, but to that fruit that came from the lands of the church; and
by that you lived, which she was content you should keep still, and
made promise it should not be taken from you. And so it was left in
your hand, as it were an apple in a child's hand given by the mother,
which she, perceiving him to feed too much of, and knowing it should
do him hurt if he himself should eat the whole, would have him give
her a little piece thereof, which the boy refusing, and whereas he
would cry out if she would take it from him, letteth him alone
therewith. But the father, her husband, coming in, if he shall see how
the boy will not let go one morsel to the mother that hath given him
the whole, she asking it with so fair means, he may peradventure take
the apple out of the {p.279} boy's hand, and if he cry, beat him
also, and cast the apple out of the window."
[Footnote 591: "Three years and more after the
restoration of the people to the church," the
legate says in the body of the letter. The date of
it will be December, 1556, or December, 1557, as
the three years are calculated from the restoration
of Orthodoxy, or from the reunion with Rome.]
The maternal tenderness, under this aspect of the secularisation, had
been more weak than wise.
"As the English laity had dishonoured the ministers of the church
above all people," continued the legate, "so must they now honour them
above all people, remembering Christ's words--'He that despiseth you
despiseth Me.' They must obey the priests, therefore, implicitly; they
must be careful to pay their tithes honestly; what they denied their
priests they denied their God; and they must show their repentance
especially where they had especially offended, touching the injuries
they had done to the ministers of God, whom God had set over them, to
be honoured as they would their natural father."
"And this," he said, coming to the heart of the matter, "this you
cannot do if you favour heretics, who being the very enemies of God
and man, yet specially their enmity extendeth against priests. Here is
another point that you must show worthy of a repentant mind: that
whereas you have sore offended God by giving favour to heretics, now
temper your favour under such manner that if you can convert them by
any ways unto the unity of the church, then do it, for it is a great
work of mercy. But if ye cannot, and ye suffer or favour them, there
cannot be a work of greater cruelty against the commonwealth than to
nourish or favour any such. _For be you assured, there is no kind of
men so pernicious to the commonwealth as they be; there are no
thieves, no murderers, no adulterers, nor no kind of treason, to be
compared to theirs, who, as it were, undermining the chief foundation
of all commonwealths, which is religion, maketh an entry to all kinds
of vices in the most heinous manner._" ... "You specially of the City
of London, you being the first that received the fruit of grace in the
new plantation, the seed of benediction being first cast upon you, to
make you a ground to bring forth all fruit of sanctity and justice;
... shall I say, that after all this done, more briars and thorns hath
grown here among you than in all the realm besides? I cannot say so,
nor I will not; albeit it might so seem, for a greater multitude of
these brambles and briars were cast in the fire here among you than in
any place besides; but many of them being grown in other places, and
brought in and burned among you, may give occasion that you have a
worse name without your desert. The thing standeth not in the
name--bethink you yourselves how it standeth.... Wherefore cometh
this, that when any heretic {p.280} shall go to execution, he shall
lack no comforting of you, and encouraging to die in his perverse
opinion? that when he shall be put in prison he shall have more
cherishing?... As it is now, this may not be suffered.... For their
boldness in their death, it is small argument of grace to be in them;
Christ himself showing more heaviness and dolour at his dying hour
than did the thieves that hung beside him, which did blaspheme Christ,
setting nought by him, specially one of them, showing no further fear.
So do the heretics at their deaths like the blasphemer."[592]
[Footnote 592: Address of Cardinal Pole to the
citizens of London: Strype's Memorials, vol. vi.]
Cruel and savage as the persecution had become, it was still
inadequate. The famine lasted, and therefore God was angry.
The new year opened with the appointment of a commission, consisting
of Bonner, Thirlby, and twenty other peers, gentlemen, and canon
lawyers, on whom the court could rely. "Wicked persons" had invented
slanders against the queen's person, and had sown "pestilent heresies"
in the realm. The queen, therefore, "minding to punish such
enormities," and having especial trust in the wisdom of these persons,
gave them power to institute inquiries at their pleasure into the
conduct and opinions of every man and woman in all parts of the
kingdom. The protection of the law was suspended. The commissioners
might arrest any person at any place. Three of them were enough to
form a court; and mayors, sheriffs, and magistrates were commanded to
assist at their peril.
The object of the commission was "to search and find out" the sellers
of heretical books, or those who in any way professed heresy or taught
it; to ascertain who refused to attend mass, to walk in procession, to
use holy water, or in any way betrayed disrespect for the established
religion. Those who "persisted in their bad opinions" were to be given
up to their ordinary, to be punished according to law. The
commissioners were themselves empowered to punish with fine or
imprisonment those who yielded, or those whose offences were in the
second degree, taking care to collect the fines which they inflicted,
and to certify the exchequer of their receipts. They were not
embarrassed by a necessity of impanelling juries; they might call
juries if they pleased; they might use "all other means and politic
ways that they could devise." No Spanish inquisition possessed larger
or less tolerable powers; no English sovereign {p.281} ever more
entirely set aside the restrictions of the law.[593] The appointment
of the commission was followed up by Pole in a visitation of the
diocese of Canterbury. Persons were nominated to examine into the
doctrines of the clergy; to learn whether those who had been married
held communication with their wives; whether the names of those who
had not been reconciled had been registered as he had ordered; and
from every clergyman to ascertain the habits, beliefs, and opinions of
every resident, male or female, in his parish.[594]
[Footnote 593: Royal Commission printed in Foxe,
vol. viii. p. 301, and by Burnet in his
_Collectanea_.]
[Footnote 594: Articles of the visitation of
Cardinal Pole: Foxe, vol. iii.]
Other commissioners again were sent to the universities, with powers
extending, not over the living only, but the dead.
Scot, Bishop of Chester, Watson, Bishop of Lincoln, and
Christopherson, Master of Trinity and Bishop of Chichester, went in
January to Cambridge, accompanied by Ormaneto, the Venetian, a
confidential friend of the legate. Bucer and Fagius slept in St.
Mary's and St. Michael's. The 10th of January, the day after the
bishops' arrival, the two churches were laid under an interdict, as
defiled with the presence of unhallowed bodies. On the 15th a summons
was fixed to St. Mary's door, citing Martin Bucer and Paul Fagius, or
any other who would plead on their behalf, to make answer three days
after, before the commission, on a charge of heresy. The court sate,
and no one appeared. The session was adjourned for a week, while the
colleges were searched, and Primers, Prayer-books, Bibles, or other
interdicted volumes, were hunted out and brought together. On the 26th
the bishops met again; the accused remained undefended, and the heresy
was taken to be proved; sentence was passed therefore, that the bodies
should be disinterred and burnt. On the 6th of February the coffins
were taken out of the graves, and chained to a stake in the
market-place; the Bibles and prayer-books were heaped round them with
a pile of faggots, and books and bodies were reduced to ashes.
Having purged Cambridge, Ormaneto proceeded to Oxford, on business of
the same description.
Peter Martyr, when he came into residence as divinity professor at
Christ Church, had outraged the orthodox party in the university by
bringing a wife within the college walls; and Catherine Cathie, so the
wife was named, had, like the wife of Luther, been a professed nun.
She had died before Mary's accession, and had been buried in the
cathedral. A process has now instituted against her similar to that at
Cambridge.
{p.282} An unforeseen difficulty occurred in the conduct of the
prosecution. Catherine Cathie had lived quietly and unobtrusively; she
had taught nothing and had written no books; and no evidence could be
found to justify her conviction on a charge of heresy.
Ormaneto wrote to the legate for instructions; and as burning was not
permissible, the legate replied that, "forasmuch as Catherine Cathie,
of detestable memory, had called herself the wife of Peter Martyr, a
heretic, although both he and she had before taken vows of religion;
forasmuch as she had lived with him in Oxford in fornication, and
after her death was buried near the sepulchre of the Holy Virgin St.
Frideswide, Ormaneto should invite the dean of the cathedral to cast
out the carcase from holy ground, and deal with it according to his
discretion."
Catherine Cathie, therefore, was dug up, taken out of her coffin, and
flung into a cesspool at the back of the dean's house, and it was
hoped that by this means the blessed St. Frideswide would be able to
rest again in peace. Human foresight is imperfect; years passed and
times changed; and Elizabeth, when she had the power to command,
directed that the body should be restored to decent burial. The
fragments were recovered with difficulty, and were about to be
replaced in the earth under the floor of the cathedral, when some one
produced the sacred box which contained the remains of St. Frideswide.
Made accessible to the veneration of the faithful by Cardinal Pole,
the relics had been concealed on the return of heresy by some pious
worshipper. They were brought out at the critical moment, and an
instant sense of the fitness of things consigned to the same
resting-place the bones of the wife of Peter Martyr. The married nun
and the virgin saint were buried together, and the dust of the two
still remains under the pavement inextricably blended.[595]
[Footnote 595: Wood's _Annals of the University of
Oxford_.--The story is authentic. The following is
the Roman Catholic version of it:--"Oxonii sepulta
fuerat digna Petro Martyre concubina, parthenonis
et ipsa desertrix sacrilega ut ille coenobii. Ejus
ossa refodi jusserat Maria et sterquilinio ut par
erat condi. Nunc aemulo plane sanctitatis et
virginitatis in Elizabathe ingenio requisita sunt
inter sordes sterquilinii publici quarum foedissima
pars erant, et incredibili studio inventa purgata
lota in thecam eandem reponuntur in qua S.
Frideswidae reliquiae colebantur, et cum his adeo
confusa ut nulla unquam possunt diligentia secerni.
Clauditur loculus et cubitalibus litteris hoc
epitaphio decoratur, 'Hic jacet religio cum
superstitione,' meliore titulo meretrici haeretici
pessimi concubinae; proh nefas! deteriore ancillae
Christi sanctissimae virgini attributo."--Foxe, vol.
viii. Editor's note.]
{p.283} But Pole did not live to see the retribution. Convinced, if
ever there was a sincere conviction in any man, that the course which
he was pursuing was precisely that which God required of him, he
laboured on in his dark vocation. Through the spring and summer the
persecution, under the new commission, raged with redoubled fury.
The subject is one to which it will not be necessary to return, except
with some brief details. In this place, therefore, shall be given an
extract from a tract in circulation among the Protestants who were
expecting death; and it may be judged, from the sentiments with which
these noble-natured men faced the prospect of their terrible trial,
with what justice Pole called them brambles and briars only fit to be
burnt--criminals worse than thieves, or murderers, or adulterers.[596]
[Footnote 596: An excellent epistle, translated
from French into English by Thomas Pownell, with a
preface, A.D. 1556. The copy from which I make my
extract is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford; it is
marked in the margin in various places with a
finger [Symbol: Hand] apparently almost as old as
the printing; and this finger was perhaps drawn by
some one whom the words were consoling or
inspiriting in the hour of his own trial.]
"The cross of persecution, if we will put childishness apart, and
visibly weigh the worthiness thereof, is that sovereign, tried
medicine that quencheth the daily digested poison of self-love,
worldly pleasure, fleshly felicity. It is the only worthy poison of
ambition, covetousness, extortion, uncleanness, licentiousness, wrath,
strife, sedition, sects, malice, and such other wayward worms: it is
the hard hammer that breaketh off the rust from the anchor of a
Christian faith. O profitable instrument! O excellent exercise, that
cannot be spared in a Christian life! with what alacrity of mind, with
what desirous affection, with what earnest zeal, ought we to embrace
this incomparable jewel, this sovereign medicine, this comfortable cup
of tribulation.
"When a piece of ground is limited and bounded, it doth not only
signify that it goeth no further, but also it tendeth and stretcheth
to the bound. It is not enough to consider that we shall not pass the
time that God hath limited and determined us to live, but we must
assuredly persuade ourselves that we shall live as long as He hath
ordained us to live; and so shall we do, in despite of all our
enemies.
"And tell me, have men given us our life? No, forsooth. No more can
they take it away from us. God hath given it, and God only doth take
it away, for He is the Lord of death as well as of life; wherefore
when the appointed time of our death is come, let us assure ourselves,
that it is God only and none {p.284} other that doth kill us, for He
saith, It is I that kill and make alive again.
"Let us follow the example of Christ, our Master, who seeing His death
approaching, said to God, My Father, not as I will, but as thou wilt;
thy will be done, and not mine.--Let us offer then, unto God our
Father, ourselves for a sacrifice, whose savour, although it be evil
in the nose of the world, yet it is good and agreeable unto God, by
Jesus Christ his Son, in the faith of whom we do dedicate and offer
ourselves, when we perceive our hour to approach.
"And, whatsoever betide, let us not fear men; let us not fear them.
God doth inhibit and forbid us in the same, saying, by his prophet,
Fear them not, for I am with you; and seeing God doth forbid us to
fear men, can we fear them without sin? No truly. To what purpose do
we fear them? Men of themselves can do nothing, and if at any time
they have any power, the same only cometh unto them from God, and is
given unto them only to accomplish the will of God. But peradventure
ye will say to me that Jesus Christ himself, in the time of his cross,
did fear death, and therefore it is no marvel though we do fear it, in
whom is no such perfection and constancy. Truly the flesh doth always
abuse herself with the example of Jesus Christ; she doth abuse it, for
she cannot rightfully use it, inasmuch as the flesh is in all ways
repugnant unto the spirit and the good will of God. Forasmuch as ye
will herein follow Christ--well, I am contented--fear death, but fear
it as he did fear it. If you will say that Christ had fear of death,
consider the same also to be on such sort as the fear did not keep him
back from the voluntary obedience of his Father, and from saying, with
unfeigned lips, Thy will be done.
"Ye will say, We fear not death for any fear we have to be damned,
neither for any diffidence that we have of eternal life; but we fear
death for the human understanding that we have of the great pain that
some do suffer in dying, and especially in dying by fire; for we
suppose that pain to surmount all patience. O fond flesh, thy voice is
always full of love of thyself, and of a secret diffidence and
mistrust of the Almighty power, wisdom, and goodness of God."
While the true heroes of the age were fighting for freedom with the
weapons of noble suffering, the world was about to recommence its own
battles, with which it is less easy to sympathise. The attempt on
Calais having failed, it became a question at the French court,
whether, after having given so {p.285} just cause of quarrel to
England, wisdom would not suggest an abandonment of the intention of
recommencing the war with Philip. Noailles crossed to Paris in
December, where the king questioned him whether Mary would be able to
declare war. Noailles assured him, "that out of doubt she would not;
for if she should send those whom she trusted out of the realm, then
would they whom she trusted not, not fail to be busy within the
realm."[597] Reassured by the ambassador's opinion, Henry resumed his
intentions. In March, the Duke of Guise led an army into Italy. The
pope recovered courage, defied Alva, and again laid claim to Naples;
and it was to be seen now whether Noailles was right--whether the
English people would unite with the court to resent the French king's
conduct sufficiently to permit Mary at last to join in the quarrel.
[Footnote 597: Wotton to Petre: _French MSS._,
bundle 13, State Paper Office.]
Philip, anxious and hopeful, paid England the respect of returning for
a few weeks, and in the same month of March came over to sue the
council in person. The affair at Calais was a substantial ground for a
rupture, but the attack, though intended, had not been actually made.
The story might seem, to the suspicions of the country, to have been
invented by the court; and, in other respects, Mary's injuries were
not the injuries of the nation. The currency was still prostrate; the
people in unexampled distress. The Flanders debts were as heavy as
ever, and the queen had insisted on abandoning a fifth of her
revenues. A war would inevitably be most unpopular. The attempt
nevertheless was made. The queen produced the treaty of 1546, between
England and the empire; and, in compliance with its provisions, laid
before the privy council a proposal, if not to declare war with
France, yet to threaten a declaration, in the event of an invasion of
the Netherlands.
The privy council considered the queen's request; their conclusion was
not what she desired.
The treaty of 1546, the council replied, had been abrogated by the
treaty of marriage, so far as it might involve England in a war with
France. "Her majesty would be unable to maintain a war, and,
therefore, to say to the French king that she would aid her husband,
according to the treaty, and not being able to perform it, indeed
would be dishonourable, and many ways dangerous." "It was to be
considered further, that, if by these means the realm should be drawn
into war, the fault would be imputed to the king's majesty." "The
common {p.286} people of the realm were at present many ways
grieved--some pinched with famine, some for want of payment of money
due to them, some discontented for matters of religion; and,
generally, all yet tasting the smart of the late wars. It would be
hard to have any aid of money of them. And in times past," the council
added, significantly, "although the prince found himself able to make
and maintain wars, yet the causes of those wars were opened for the
most part in parliament."[598]
[Footnote 598: Answer of the Privy Council to the
queen's question whether England shall enter the
wars with France.--_Sloane MSS._ 1786, British
Museum.]
Objections so decided and so just would have hardly been overcome, but
for an injudicious enterprise of the refugees, under French auspices.
The French court believed that, by keeping Mary in alarm at home, they
would make it the less easy for her to join in the war. They mistook
the disposition of the people, who resented and detested the
interference of France in their concerns.
Among the exiles at the court of Paris, the most distinguished by
birth, if not by ability, was Sir Thomas Stafford, Lord Stafford's
second son, and grandson of the Duke of Buckingham, who was put to
death under Henry VIII. On the 27th of April, Wotton sent notice to
the queen that Stafford had sailed from the mouth of the Seine with
two vessels well manned and appointed. His destination was unknown;
but it was understood that he intended to take some fortress on the
English coast, and that the refugees, in a body, intended to follow
him. Before Wotton's letter arrived, the scheme, such as it was, had
been already executed. Stafford, with thirty Englishmen and one
Frenchman, had surprised Scarborough Castle, and sent his
proclamations through Yorkshire. He was come, he said, to deliver his
country from foreign tyranny. He had sure evidence that an army of
Spaniards was about to land, and that Philip intended to seize the
crown by force. The queen, by her marriage with a stranger, had
forfeited her own rights; and he himself, as the protector of English
liberty, intended to bestow the crown on the next rightful heir, and
to restore all such acts, laws, liberties, and customs as were
established in the time of that most prudent prince, King Henry VIII.
"He did not mind," he thought it necessary to add, "to work his own
advancement touching possession of the crown, but to restore the blood
and house of the Staffords to its pristine estate, which had been
wrongfully suppressed by Cardinal Wolsey."[599]
[Footnote 599: Proclamation of Thomas Stafford, son
to the Lord Henry, rightful Duke of
Buckingham.--Strype's _Memorials_, vol. vi. p.
515.]
{p.287} The landing of Edward IV., at Ravenspurg, had made any wild
enterprise seem feasible, and Stafford had counted on the notorious
hatred of the people for the queen.
But if the Spaniards meditated a descent upon England, it was not by
adventurers like the refugees that their coming would be either
prevented or avenged; and the good sense of the country had determined
once for all to give no countenance to revolution supported by France.
The occupation of Scarborough lasted two days, at the end of which
Stafford and his whole party were taken by the Earl of Westmoreland.
Thirty-two prisoners were sent to London; thirty-one were put to
death; and the council reluctantly withdrew their opposition to the
war. A hundred and forty thousand pounds were in the exchequer, being
part of the subsidy granted by parliament to pay the crown debts.[600]
With this the court prepared to commence, trusting to fortune for the
future. War was to be declared on the 7th of June, and, while seven
thousand men were to cross the Channel and join Pembroke in the Low
Countries,[601] Howard was to cruise with the fleet in the Channel to
use his discretion in annoying the enemy, and, if possible, to destroy
the French ships at Dieppe.[602]
[Footnote 600: Exchequer Accounts: _MS. Mary,
Domestic_, vol. xii. State Paper Office.]
[Footnote 601: Bitterly hating their work that they
were sent upon, "the people went to the musters,
said Sir Thomas Smith, with kerchiefs on their
heads--they went to the wars hanging down their
looks; they came from them as men dismayed and
forlorn."--Strype's _Life of Sir Thomas Smith_,
Appendix, p. 249.]
[Footnote 602: Instructions to the Lord Admiral:
_MS. Mary, Domestic_, vol. xi.]
Happy, however, in having succeeded in gratifying her husband, the
queen brought at once upon herself a blow which she had little
foreseen, and from a quarter from which an injury was most painful. In
her desire to punish France for assisting her rebellious heretical
subjects, she seemed to have forgotten that France had an ally beyond
the Alps. No sooner did Paul IV. learn that England was about to
declare on the side of Philip, than, under the plausible pretence that
he could have no ambassador residing in a country with which he was at
war, he resolved to gratify his old animosity against Cardinal Pole,
and cancel his legation.
Sir Edward Karne, the English resident at Rome, waited on the pope to
remonstrate. He urged Paul to recollect how much the Holy See owed to
the queen, and how dangerous it might be to re-open a wound
imperfectly healed. The pope at first was obstinate. At length he
seemed so far inclined to yield as to {p.288} say that, if the queen
would herself expressly desire it, he would distinguish between her
and her husband.[603] But the suspension of the legation, though not
at first published, was carried through the Consistory; and so
ingeniously was it worded, that not only the formal and especial
commission was declared at an end, but the legatine privileges,
attached by immemorial custom to the archbishopric of Canterbury, were
cancelled with it. The pope chose to leave himself without
representative, ordinary or extraordinary, at the English court.
[Footnote 603: Sir Edward Karne to the Queen:
Burnet's _Collectanea_.]
The queen was in despair. Before Karne's letter reached her, she had
heard what was impending, and she wrote a letter of passionate
expostulation, in which she expatiated on her services to religion,
and on the assistance which Pole had rendered her. She said that, in
the unsettled condition of England, the presence of a legate with
supreme authority was absolutely necessary; and she implored Paul to
reconsider a decision so rash and so unkind.
The council added their separate protest.[604] "They had heard with
infinite grief that the legate was to be taken from them. There was no
precedent for the recall of a legate who had been once commissioned,
unless from fault of his own; and for themselves, they were
unconscious of having misconducted themselves in any way since the
reconciliation. Cardinal Pole had been the saviour of religion. Before
his coming to England, the queen, with the best intentions to do good,
had failed to arrest the growth of heresy, and the name of the Holy
See was held in detestation. Pole, the noblest and most distinguished
of the cardinals, had made what was crooked straight; he had
introduced reforms everywhere; in a few years the wound would heal,
and all would be well. If, however, he were now removed, the
convalescent, deserted too soon by his physician, would relapse, and
be worse than before. They entreated his holiness, therefore, to
listen to them, and allow him to remain. When they were reconciled,
the pope then reigning had promised that the customary privileges and
immunities of the English nation should be maintained. It was the
special prerogative {p.289} of English sovereigns to have a legate
perpetually resident in the person of the Archbishop of Canterbury;
and from immemorial time there was no record of any archbishop to whom
the legatine character had not attached as of right. The queen, who
had risked her life for the faith of the church, did not deserve that
the first exception should be made in her disfavour. The bishops did
not deserve it. The few who, in the late times of trial, had remained
faithful, did not deserve it. Even if the queen would consent and give
way, they would themselves be obliged to remonstrate."[605]
[Footnote 604: Printed by Strype, _Memorials of the
Reformation_, vol. vi. p. 476, and described by him
as a letter of the parliament. But at this time
there was no parliament in existence; the last had
been dissolved eighteen months before, the next did
not meet till the ensuing January. The queen's
letter is dated the 21st May, and the letter which
I suppose to have been from the council, and
another, said also to have been from "the
nobility," were evidently written under the same
impression, and at the same time, when the idea of
the recall was new.]
[Footnote 605: Letters to the Pope: Strype, vol.
vi. pp. 476-482. The drafts of the letters are not
signed, nor does it appear what names were attached
to them. It is not even certain that they were
sent.]
Karne's letter produced a brief hope that the pope would relent. But
the partial promise of reconsidering his resolution had been extorted
from Paul, while it was uncertain whether England would actually join
in the conflict; the intended declaration of war had in the interval
become a reality, and the pope, more indignant than ever, chose to
consider Pole personally responsible for the queen's conduct. Since a
point was made of the presence of a papal legate in England, he was so
far ready to give way; but so far only. The king left England the
first week in July. Mary accompanied him to Dover, and there a papal
nuncio met her, bringing a commission by which Pole was reduced into
the ordinary rank of archbishop; and the office of papal
representative was conferred on Peto, the Greenwich friar. For his
objections to the present legate, the pope gave the strange but
wounding reason, that his orthodoxy was not above suspicion.
The queen, with something of her father's temper in her, ordered the
nuncio to return to Calais till she could again communicate with Rome.
She interdicted Peto from accepting the commission, and desired Pole
to continue to exercise his functions till the pope had pronounced
again a final resolution. Pole, however, was too faithful a child of
the church to disobey a papal injunction; he relinquished his office,
but he sent Ormaneto to Rome with his own entreaties and protests.
Never had a legate of the Holy See been treated as he was treated, he
said; there was no precedent, therefore, to teach him how to act, nor
was ever charge of heresy urged with less occasion than against one
whose whole employment had been to recover souls to Christ and his
church, and to cut off those that were obstinate as rotten members.
His services to the {p.290} church, he passionately exclaimed,
transcended far the services of any legate who had been employed for
centuries, and, nevertheless, he found himself accused of heresy by
the Vicar of Christ upon earth. Such an insult was unjust and
unprovoked; and his holiness should consider also what he was doing in
bringing the queen, the mother of obedience, into heaviness and
sorrow. Mother of obedience the Queen of England might well be called,
whom God had made a mother of sons who were the joy of the whole
church. How was the pope rewarding this sainted woman, when with the
thunder of his voice he accused the king, her husband, of schism, and
himself, the legate, of heresy?[606]
[Footnote 606: Pole to the Pope: Strype's
_Memorials_, vol. vi. p. 34, etc.]
Scarcely in his whole troubled life had a calamity more agitating
overtaken Reginald Pole. To maintain the supremacy of the successor of
St. Peter, he had spent twenty years in treason to his native country.
He had held up his sovereign to the execration of mankind for
rejecting an authority which had rewarded him with an act of enormous
injustice; and to plead his consciousness of innocence before the
world against his spiritual sovereign, would be to commit the same
crime of disobedience for which he had put to death Cranmer, and
laboured to set Europe on fire. Most fatal, most subtle
retribution--for he knew that he was accused without cause; he knew
that the pope after all was but a peevish, violent, and spiteful old
man; he knew it--yet even to himself he could not admit his own
conviction.
Fortune, however, seemed inclined for a time to make some amends to
Mary in the results of the war.
The French usually opened their summer campaigns by an advance into
Lorraine or the Netherlands. This year their aggressive resources had
been directed wholly into Italy, and at home they remained on the
defensive. Philip, with creditable exertion, collected an army of
50,000 men, to take advantage of the opportunity. Fixing his own
residence at Cambray, he gave the command in the field to the Duke of
Savoy; and Philibert, after having succeeded in distracting the
attention of the enemy, and leading them to expect him in Champagne,
turned suddenly into Picardy, and invested the town of St. Quentin.
The garrison must soon have yielded, had not Coligny, the Admiral of
France, broken through the siege lines and carried in reinforcements.
Time was thus gained, and the constable, eager to save a strong place,
the possession of which would open to the Spaniards the road to Paris,
advanced with all the force {p.291} which he could collect, not
meaning to risk a battle, but to throw provisions and further supplies
of men into St. Quentin. Montmorency had but 20,000 men with him. His
levies consisted of the reserved force of the kingdom--princes, peers,
knights, gentlemen, with their personal retinues, the best blood in
France. It was such an army as that which lost Agincourt, and a fate
not very different was prepared for it.
On the 10th of August, the constable was forced by accident into an
engagement, in which he had the disadvantage of position as well as of
numbers. Mistaken movements caused a panic in the opening of the
battle, and the almost instant result was a confused and hopeless
rout. The Duke d'Enghien fell on the field with four thousand men; the
constable himself, the Duke de Montpensier, the Duke de Longueville,
the Marshal St. Andre, three hundred gentlemen, and several thousand
common soldiers, were taken; the defeat was irretrievably complete,
and to the victors almost bloodless. The English did not share in the
glory of the battle, for they were not present; but they arrived two
days after to take part in the storming of St. Quentin, and to share,
to their shame, in the sack and spoiling of the town. They gained no
honour; but they were on the winning side. The victory was credited to
the queen as a success, and was celebrated in London with processions,
bonfires, and _Te Deums_.
Nor was the defeat at St. Quentin the only disaster which the French
arms experienced. Henry sent in haste to Italy for the Duke of Guise
to defend Paris, where Philibert was daily expected. Guise was already
returning after a failure less conspicuous, but not less complete,
than that of the constable. The pope had received him on his arrival
with enthusiasm, but the promised papal contingent for the campaign
had not been provided; the pope was contented to be the soul of the
enterprise of which France was to furnish the body. Guise advanced
alone for the conquest of Naples, and he found himself, like De
Lautrec in 1528, baffled by an enemy who would not meet him in the
field, and obliged to waste his time and the health of his army in a
series of unsuccessful sieges, till in a few months the climate had
done Alva's work. The French troops perished in thousands, and Guise
at last drew off his thinned ranks and fell back on Rome. Here the
news of St. Quentin reached him, and the duke, leaving Paul to his
fate, amid a storm of mutual reproaches, hurried back to his own
country.
The pontiff had now no resource but to yield; and the piety of the
Spaniards, whom he had compelled against their will to {p.292} be
his enemies, softened the ignominy of his compelled submission.
Cardinal Caraffa and the Duke of Alva met at Cava, where, in a few
words, it was agreed that his holiness should relinquish his alliance
with France, and cease to trouble the Colonnas. Alva, on his side,
restored the papal towns which he had taken; he went to Rome to ask
pardon on his knees, in Philip's name, for the violence which he had
used to his spiritual father; and the pope gave him gracious
absolution.
This bad business, which had tried Mary so severely, was thus well
finished, and on the 6th of October London was again illuminated for
the peace between the king and the papacy. But the shadow which had
been thrown on Pole was maliciously permitted to remain unremoved; on
him, perhaps from personal ill-feeling, Paul visited his own
disappointment. With the return of peace there was no longer any
plausible reason for the recall of the legation; Peto was dead, having
survived his unpropitious honours but a few months: yet, unmoved by
Pole's entreaties, the pope refused to permit him to resume his
legatine functions, except so far as they were inherent in the
archbishopric. The odious accusation of heresy was not withdrawn; and
the torturing charge was left to embitter the peace of mind, and
poison the last days of the most faithful servant of the church who
was then living.[607]
[Footnote 607: Pole's sufferings in consequence
were really piteous. "Your holiness," he wrote on
the 30th of March, 1558, "is taking my life from me
when you take from me the reputation of orthodoxy.
You told the English ambassador it was God's doing;
God has told you, like Abraham, to kill your son;
and that your holiness intends that kind of death
for me, I know far more certainly than Isaac seemed
to know his father's purpose. When I see the fire
and the knife in the hands of your holiness, and
the wood laid upon my shoulders, there is no need
for me to ask where is the victim.
"When I was yet a lamb, I gave myself as a
sacrifice to the pontiff, who chose me for a
cardinal. Thus I thought of myself; thus I spoke
when I lay prostrate before the altar. Little did I
then think the time would come, when I should be
offered up by my father's hands a second time,
especially when the Bishop of Rochester was here
hanging as a ram among the briars ready to be
immolated," etc.--Pole to the Pope: _Epistolae_,
vol. v. p. 31.]
And again, though there was peace with the pope, there was still war
with France; there was still war with Scotland. The events which had
taken place in Scotland will be related hereafter. It is enough for
the present to say that the Scots had been true as usual to their old
allies; no sooner was an English army landed in France, than a Scotch
army was wasting and burning on the Border. A second force had to be
raised and kept in the field to meet them, and the scantily supplied
treasury was soon empty.
{p.293} Money had to be found somewhere. The harvest, happily, had
been at last abundant, and wheat had fallen from fifty shillings a
quarter to four or five. The country was in a condition to lend, and a
commission was sent out for a forced loan, calculated on the
assessment of the last subsidy. Lists of the owners of property in
each county were drawn out, with sums of money opposite to their
names, and the collectors were directed "to travail by all the best
ways they might for obtaining the sums noted." Persons found
conformable were to receive acknowledgments. Should "any be froward"
they were to find securities to appear when called on before the privy
council, or to be arrested on the spot and sent to London.[608] A
hundred and ten thousand pounds were collected under the commission,
in spite of outcry and resistance;[609] but it was not enough for the
hungry consumption of the war, and the court was driven to call a
parliament.
[Footnote 608: Commission for the Loan: _MS. Mary,
Domestic_, vol. xi.]
[Footnote 609: Ibid. vol. xii.]
The writs went out at the beginning of December, accompanied with the
usual circulars; to which the queen added a promise, that if the
mayors and sheriffs[610] would consult her wishes she would remember
their services. In a second address she said her pleasure was that
when the privy council, or any of them within their jurisdiction,
should recommend "men of learning and wisdom," their directions should
"be regarded and followed."[611] Yet there was not perhaps any wish to
have the House of Commons unfairly packed. Mary desired, probably
{p.294} with sincerity, "to have the assembly of the most chiefest
men in the realm for advice and counsel."
[Footnote 610: The queen to all sheriffs, mayors,
etc.--For the well choosing of the knights of the
shire and burgesses:
"Trusty and well-beloved, we greet you well: and
whereas for certain great and weighty causes
touching both the honour of Almighty God, and the
wealth and good government of this our realm, we
have summoned our High Court of Parliament, to be
holden at Westminster, the 20th of January next:
and forasmuch as we consider that a great part of
the furthering of such things, as shall be treated
in our said parliament, and bringing them to good
effect, shall consist in the well appointing and
choosing of such as shall be knights of shires,
citizens of any city, or burgesses of other towns
corporate, we have thought good to require you to
have good regard, and so far forth as in you may
lie, to provide that such as shall be appointed may
be men given to good order, Catholic, and discreet,
and so qualified, as the antient law of this realm
requireth; giving the freeholders, citizens,
burgesses within our said county to understand,
what our will and pleasure is in that behalf.
Hereby as you shall do good service unto God and
this your country, so shall you also do us right
acceptable pleasure, which we shall consider
towards you as any occasion may shew. Given under
our signet, December 10, 1557."--_MS. Mary,
Domestic_, vol. xii.]
[Footnote 611: _MS._ Ibid.]
How the parliament would have acted in the circumstances under which
the meeting was anticipated, is very uncertain. The intense
unpopularity of the war had been little relieved by the victory at St.
Quentin, and the general state of suffering made a fresh demand for
money infinitely grievous. But between the issue of the writs and the
20th of January a blow had fallen on England which left room for no
other thought.
For the last ten years the French had kept their eyes on Calais. The
recovery of Boulogne was an insufficient retaliation for the disgrace
which they had suffered in the loss of it, while the ill success with
which the English maintained themselves in their new conquest,
suggested the hope, and proved the possibility, of expelling them from
the old. The occupation of a French fortress by a foreign power was a
perpetual insult to the national pride; it was a memorial of evil
times; while it gave England inconvenient authority in the "narrow
seas." Scarcely a month had passed since Mary had been on the throne,
without a hint from some quarter or other to the English government to
look well to Calais; and the recent plot for its surprise was but one
of a series of schemes which had been successively formed and
abandoned.
In 1541 the defences of Guisnes, Hammes, and Calais, had been repaired
by Henry VIII. The dykes had been cleared and enlarged, the
embankments strengthened, and the sluices put in order.[612] But in
the wasteful times of Edward, the works had fallen again into ruin;
and Mary, straitened by debt, by a diminished revenue, and a supposed
obligation to make good the losses of the clergy, had found neither
means nor leisure to attend to them.
[Footnote 612: A complete account of the repairs at
Calais, with the cost of work, and the wages of the
workmen, is printed in an appendix to the
_Chronicle of Calais_, published by the Camden
Society.]
In the year 1500, the cost of maintaining the three fortresses was
something less than L10,000 a-year;[613] and the expense had been
almost or entirely supported by the revenue of the Pale. The more
extended fortifications had necessitated an increase in the garrison;
two hundred men were now scarcely sufficient to man the works;[614]
while, owing to bad government, and the growing anomaly of the English
position, the wealthier inhabitants {p.295} had migrated over the
frontiers, and left the Pale to a scanty, wretched, starving
population, who could scarcely extract from the soil sufficient for
their own subsistence.[615] While the cost of the occupation was
becoming greater, the means of meeting it became less. The country
could no longer thrive in English hands, and it was time for the
invaders to begone.
[Footnote 613: _Chronicle of Calais._]
[Footnote 614: Lord Grey to the Queen, June 13,
1557: _Calais MSS._ bundle 10, State Paper Office.]
[Footnote 615: In 1550, Sir John Mason wrote to the
council, "I have heard say that, not long sythen
the Low Countries were able to set to the field 300
able men on horseback; I think there lacketh of
that number at this present a great many, the
occasion whereof, by the report of the king's
ministers on this side, is for that the king's
lands are so raised as no man is able to live
thereupon unless it is a sort of poor dryvells,
that must dig their living with their nails out of
the ground, and be not able scarce to maintain a
jade to carry their corn to market." _French MSS._
Edward VI. bundle 9.]
The government in London, however, seemed, notwithstanding warnings,
to be unable to conceive the loss of so old a possession to be a
possibility; and Calais shared the persevering neglect to which the
temporal interests of the realm were subjected. The near escape from
the Dudley treason created a momentary improvement. The arrears of
wages were paid up, and the garrison was increased. Yet a few months
after, when war was on the point of being declared, there were but two
hundred men in Guisnes, a number inadequate to defend even the castle;
and although the French fleet at that time commanded the Channel,
Calais contained provisions to last but for a few weeks.[616] Lord
Grey, the governor of Guisnes, reported in June, after the
declaration, that the French were collecting in strength in the
neighbourhood, and that unless he was reinforced, he was at their
mercy. A small detachment was sent over in consequence of Grey's
letter; but on the 2nd of July Sir Thomas Cornwallis informed the
queen that the numbers were still inadequate. "The enemy," Cornwallis
said, "perceiving our weakness, maketh daily attempts upon your
subjects, who are much abashed to see the courage of your enemies,
whom they are not able to hurt nor yet defend themselves." He
entreated that a larger force should be sent immediately, and
maintained in the Pale during the war. The charge would be great, but
the peril would be greater if the men were not provided; and as her
majesty had been pleased to enter into the war, her honour must be
more considered than her treasure.[617]
[Footnote 616: _Calais MSS._ bundle 10.]
[Footnote 617: Cornwallis to the Queen: _Calais
MSS._ bundle 10.]
The arrival of the army under Pembroke removed the immediate ground
for alarm; and after the defeat of the French, the {p.296} danger
was supposed to be over altogether. The queen was frightened at the
expenses which she was incurring, and again allowed the establishment
to sink below the legitimate level. Lord Wentworth was left at Calais
with not more than five hundred men. Grey had something more than a
thousand at Guisnes, but a part only were English; the rest were
Burgundians and Spaniards. More unfortunately also, a proclamation had
forbidden the export of corn in England, from which Calais had not
been excepted. Guisnes and Hammes depended for their supplies on
Calais, and by the middle of the winter there was an actual scarcity
of food.[618]
[Footnote 618: When all your majesty's pieces on
this side make account to be furnished of victuals
and other necessaries from hence, it is so that of
victuals your highness hath presently none here,
and the town hath none; by reason that the
restraint in the realm hath been so strait, and the
victuallers as were wont to bring daily hither good
quantities of butter, cheese, bacon, wheat, and
other things, might not of late be suffered to have
any recourse hither, whereby is grown a very great
scarcity.--Wentworth to the Queen: _Calais MSS._
bundle 10.]
Up to the beginning of December, notwithstanding, there were no
external symptoms to create uneasiness; military movements lay under
the usual stagnation of winter, and except a few detachments on the
frontiers of the Pale, who gave trouble by marauding excursions, the
French appeared to be resting in profound repose. On the 1st of
December, the governor of Guisnes reported an expedition for the
destruction of one of their outlying parties, which had been
accomplished with ominous cruelty.
"I advertised your grace," Lord Grey wrote to the queen, "how I
purposed to make a journey to a church called Bushing, strongly
fortified by the enemy, much annoying this your majesty's frontier. It
may please your majesty, upon Monday last, at nine of the clock at
night, having with me Mr. Aucher marshal of Calais, Mr. Alexander
captain of Newnham Bridge, Sir Henry Palmer, my son,[619] and my
cousin Louis Dives, with such horsemen and footmen as could be
conveniently spared abroad in service, leaving your majesty's pieces
in surety, I took my journey towards the said Bushing, and carried
with me two cannon and a sacre, for that both the weather and the ways
served well to the purpose, and next morning came hither before day.
And having before our coming enclosed the said Bushing with two
hundred footmen harquebuziers, I sent an officer to summon the same in
the king's highness' and your majesty's name; whereunto the captain
there, a man of good {p.297} estimation, who the day before was sent
there with twelve men by M. Senarpont, captain of Boulogne, answered
that he was not minded to render, but would keep it with such men as
he had, which were forty in number or thereabouts, even to the death;
and further said, if their fortune was so to lose their lives, he knew
that the king his master had more men alive to serve, with many other
words of French bravery. Upon this answer, I caused the gunners to
bring up their artillery to plank, and then shot off immediately ten
or twelve times. But yet for all this they would not yield. At length,
when the cannon had made an indifferent breach, the Frenchmen made
signs to parley, and would gladly have rendered; but I again, weighing
it not meet to abuse your majesty's service therein, and having Sir H.
Palmer there hurt, and some others of my men, refused to receive them,
and, according to the law of arms, put as many of them to the sword as
could be gotten at the entry of the breach, and all the rest were
blown up with the steeple at the rasing thereof, and so all
slain."[620]
[Footnote 619: Sir Arthur Grey.]
[Footnote 620: Grey to the Queen: _Calais MSS._
bundle 10.]
The law of arms forbade the defence of a fort not rationally
defensible; but it was over hardly construed against a gallant
gentleman. Grey was a fierce, stern man. It was Grey who hung the
priests in Oxfordshire from their church towers. It was Grey who led
the fiery charge upon the Scots at Musselburgh, and with a pike wound,
which laid open cheek, tongue, and palate, he "pursued out the chase,"
till, choked by heat, dust, and his own blood, he was near falling
under his horse's feet.[621]
[Footnote 621: He was held up by the Earl of
Warwick, who sprang from his own horse, and "did
lift a firkin of ale" to Grey's mouth. _Life of
Lord Grey of Wilton_, by his son.]
Three weeks passed, and still the French had made no sign. On the 22nd
an indistinct rumour came to Guisnes that danger was near. The frost
had set in; the low damp ground was hard, the dykes were frozen; and
in sending notice of the report to England, Grey said that Calais was
unprovided with food; Guisnes contained a few droves of cattle brought
in by forays over the frontier,[622] but no corn. On the 27th, the
intelligence became more distinct and more alarming. The Duke of Guise
was at Compiegne. A force of uncertain magnitude, but known to be
large, had suddenly appeared at Abbeville. Something evidently was
intended, and something on a scale which the English commanders felt
ill prepared to encounter. In a hurried council of war held at Calais,
it was resolved to make no attempt {p.298} to meet the enemy in the
field until the arrival of reinforcements, which were written for in
pressing haste.[623]
[Footnote 622: Grey to the Queen: _Calais MSS._
bundle 10.]
[Footnote 623: Wentworth and Grey to the Queen:
_Calais MSS._ bundle 10.]
But the foes with whom they had to deal knew their condition, and were
as well aware as themselves that success depended on rapidity. Had the
queen paid attention to Grey's despatch of the 22nd there was time to
have trebled the garrison and thrown in supplies; but it was vague,
and no notice was taken of it. The joint letter of Grey and Wentworth
written on the 27th, was in London in two days, and there were ships
at Portsmouth and in the Thames, which ought to have been ready for
sea at a moment's warning. Orders were sent to prepare; the Earl of
Rutland was commissioned to raise troops; and the queen, though
without sending men, sent a courier with encouragements and promises.
But when every moment was precious, a fatal slowness, and more fatal
irresolution hung about the movements of the government. On the 29th
Wentworth wrote again, that the French were certainly arming and might
be looked for immediately. On the 31st, the queen, deceived probably
by some emissary of Guise, replied, that "she had intelligence that no
enterprise was intended against Calais or the Pale," and that she had
therefore countermanded the reinforcements.[624]
[Footnote 624: The Queen to Wentworth: Ibid.]
The letter containing the death sentence, for it was nothing less, of
English rule in Calais was crossed on the way by another from Grey, in
which he informed the queen that there were thirty or forty vessels in
the harbour at Hambletue, two fitted as floating batteries, the rest
loaded with hurdles, ladders, and other materials for a siege.
Four-and-twenty thousand men were in the camp above Boulogne; and
their mark he knew to be Calais. For himself, he would defend his
charge to the death; but help must be sent instantly, or it would be
too late to be of use.
The afternoon of the same day, December 31, he added, in a postscript,
that flying companies of the French were at that moment before
Guisnes; part of the garrison had been out to skirmish, but had been
driven in by numbers; the whole country was alive with troops.
The next morning (January 1, 1558) Wentworth reported to the same
purpose, that, on the land side, Calais was then invested. The sea was
still open, and the forts at the mouth of the harbour on the Rysbank
were yet in his hands. Heavy siege cannon, however, were said to be on
their way from Boulogne, and it was uncertain how long he could hold
them.
{p.299} The defences of Calais towards the land, though in bad
repair, had been laid out with the best engineering skill of the time.
The country was intersected with deep muddy ditches; the roads were
causeways, and at the bridges were bulwarks and cannon. Guisnes, which
was three miles from Calais, was connected with it by a line of small
forts and "turnpikes." Hammes lay between the two, equidistant from
both. Towards the sea the long line of low sandhills, rising in front
of the harbour to the Rysbank, formed a natural pier; and on the
Rysbank was the castle, which commanded the entrance and the town. The
possession of the Rysbank was the possession of Calais.
The approaches to the sandhills were commanded by a bulwark towards
the south-west called the Sandgate, and further inland by a large work
called Newnham Bridge. At this last place were sluices, through which,
at high water, the sea could be let in over the marshes. If done
effectually, the town could by this means be effectually protected;
but unfortunately, owing to the bad condition of the banks, the sea
water leaked in from the high levels to the wells and reservoirs in
Calais.
The night of the 1st of January the French remained quiet; with the
morning they advanced in force upon Newnham Bridge. An advanced party
of English archers and musketeers who were outside the gate were
driven in, and the enemy pushed in pursuit so close under the walls
that the heavy guns could not be depressed to touch them. The English,
however, bored holes through the gates with augers, fired their
muskets through them, and so forced their assailants back. Towards
Hammes and Guisnes the sea was let in, and the French, finding
themselves up to their waists in water, and the tide still rising,
retreated on that side also. Wentworth wrote in the afternoon in high
spirits at the result of the first attack. The brewers were set to
work to fill their vats with fresh water, that full advantage might be
taken of the next tide. Working parties were sent to cut the sluices,
and the English commander felt confident that if help was on the way,
or could now be looked for, he could keep his charge secure. But the
enemy, he said, were now thirty thousand strong; Guise had taken the
Sandgate, and upwards of a hundred boats were passing backwards and
forwards to Boulogne and Hambletue, bringing stores and
ammunition.[625] {p.300} If the queen had a body of men in
readiness, they would come without delay. If she was unprepared, "the
passages should be thrown open," and "liberty be proclaimed for all
men to come that would bring sufficient victuals for themselves;"
thus, he "was of opinion that there would be enough with more speed
than would be made by order."
[Footnote 625: "Surely," Wentworth wrote to the
queen, "if your majesty's ships had been on the
shore, they might either have letted this voyage,
or, at the least, very much hindered it, and not
unlike to have distressed them, being only small
boats. Their ordnance that comes shall be conveyed
in the same sort. It may therefore please your
majesty to consider it. I am, as a man may be, most
sure that they will first attempt upon Rysbank, and
that way chiefly assail the town. Marry, I think
that they lie hovering in the country for the
coming of their great artillery and also to be
masters of the sea, and therefore I trust your
highness will haste over all things necessary with
all expedition."--Wentworth to the Queen: _Calais
MSS._ bundle 10.]
So far Wentworth had written. While the pen was in his hand, a message
reached him, that the French, without waiting for their guns, were
streaming up over the Rysbank, and laying ladders against the walls of
the fort. He had but time to close his letter, and send his swiftest
boat out of the harbour with it, when the castle was won, and ingress
and egress at an end. The same evening, the heavy guns came from
Boulogne, and for two days and nights the town was fired upon
incessantly from the sandbank, and from "St. Peter's Heath."
The fate of Calais was now a question of hours; Wentworth had but 500
men to repel an army, and he was without provisions. Calais was
probably gone, but Guisnes might be saved; Guisnes could be relieved
with a great effort out of the Netherlands. On the night of the 4th,
Grey found means to send a letter through the French lines to England.
"The enemy," he said, "were now in possession of Calais harbour, and
all the country between Calais and Guisnes." He was now "clean cut off
from all relief and aid which he looked to have;" and there "was no
other way for the succour of Calais" and the other fortresses, but "a
power of men out of England or from the king's majesty, or from both,"
either to force the French into a battle or to raise the siege. Come
what would, he would himself do the duty of a faithful subject, and
keep the castle while men could hold it.[626]
[Footnote 626: Grey to the Queen: _Calais MSS._ The
letter was dated January 4, seven o'clock at night.
The messenger was to carry it to Gravelines under
cover of darkness. It is endorsed, "Haste, haste,
haste! post haste for thy life, for thy life."]
The court, which had been incredulous of danger till it had appeared,
was now paralysed by the greatness of it. Definite orders to collect
troops were not issued till the 2nd of January. The Earl of Rutland
galloped the same day to Dover, where the musters were to meet, flung
himself into the first boat that he {p.301} found, without waiting
for them, and was half-way across the Channel when he was met by the
news of the loss of the Rysbank.[627] Rutland therefore returned to
Dover, happy so far to have escaped sharing the fate of Wentworth,
which his single presence could not have averted. The next day, the
3rd, parties of men came in slowly from Kent and Sussex; but so vague
had been the language of the proclamation, that they came without
arms; and although the country was at war with France, there were no
arms with which to provide them, either in Deal, Dover, or Sandwich.
Again, so indistinct had been Rutland's orders, that although a few
hundred men did come in at last tolerably well equipped, and the
Prince of Savoy had collected some companies of Spaniards at
Gravelines, and had sent word to Dover for the English to join him,
Rutland was now obliged to refer to London for permission to go over.
On the 7th, permission came; it was found by that time, or supposed to
be found, that the queen's ships were none of them seaworthy, and an
order of the council came out to press all competent merchant ships
and all able seamen everywhere, for the queen's service.[628] Rutland
contrived at last, by vigorous efforts, to collect a few hoys and
boats, but the French had by this time ships of war in co-operation
with them, and he could but approach the French coast near enough to
see that he could venture no nearer, and again return.[629]
[Footnote 627: Rutland to the Queen: _Calais MSS._]
[Footnote 628: _MS. Council Records._]
[Footnote 629: _MS. Mary, Domestic_, vol. xi.]
He would have been too late to save Calais at that time, however, even
if he had succeeded in crossing.
The day preceding, the 6th of January, after a furious cannonade,
Guise had stormed the castle. The English had attempted to blow it up
when they could not save it, but their powder train was wetted, and
they failed. The Spaniards, for once honourably careful of English
interests, came along the shore from Gravelines alone, since no one
joined them from England, and attempted in the face of overwhelming
odds to force their way into the town; but they were driven back, and
Wentworth, feeling that further resistance would lead to useless
slaughter, demanded a parley, and after a short discussion accepted
the terms of surrender offered by Guise. The garrison and the
inhabitants of Calais, amounting in all, men, women, and children, to
5000 souls, were permitted to retire to England with their lives, and
nothing more. Wentworth and fifty others {p.302} were to remain
prisoners; the town, with all that it contained, was to be given up to
the conquerors.
On these conditions the English laid down their arms and the French
troops entered. The spoil was enormous, and the plunder of St. Quentin
was not unjustly revenged; jewels, plate, and money were deposited on
the altars of the churches, and the inhabitants, carrying with them
the clothes which they wore, were sent as homeless beggars in the
ensuing week across the Channel.
Then only, when it was too late, the queen roused herself. As soon as
Calais had definitely fallen, all the English counties were called on
by proclamation to contribute their musters. Then all was haste,
eagerness, impetuosity; those who had money were to provide for those
who had none, till "order could be taken."
On the 7th of January, the vice-admiral, Sir William Woodhouse, was
directed to go instantly to sea, pressing everything that would float,
and promising indemnity to the owners in the queen's name. Thirty
thousand men were rapidly on their way to the coast; the weather had
all along been clear and frosty, with calms and light east winds, and
the sea off Dover was swiftly covered with a miscellaneous crowd of
vessels. On the 10th came the queen's command for the army to cross to
Dunkirk, join the Duke of Savoy, and save Guisnes.
But the opportunity which had been long offered, and long neglected,
was now altogether gone; the ships were ready, troops came, and arms
came, but a change of weather came also, and westerly gales and
storms. On the night of the 10th a gale blew up from the south-west
which raged for four days: such vessels as could face the sea, slipped
their moorings, and made their way into the Thames with loss of spars
and rigging; the hulls of the rest strewed Dover beach with wrecks, or
were swallowed in the quicksands of the Goodwin.
The effect of this last misfortune on the queen was to produce utter
prostration. Storms may rise, vessels may be wrecked, and excellent
enterprises may suffer hindrance, by the common laws or common chances
of things; but the queen in every large occurrence imagined a miracle;
Heaven she believed was against her. Though Guisnes was yet standing,
she ordered Woodhouse to collect the ships again in the Thames,
"forasmuch as the principal cause of their sending forth had
ceased;"[630] and on {p.303} the 13th she counter-ordered the
musters, and sent home all the troops which had arrived at Dover.[631]
[Footnote 630: The Queen to Sir William Woodhouse,
January 12: _MS. Mary, Domestic_, vol. xii.]
[Footnote 631: Circular for Staying of the Musters:
_MS. Mary, Domestic_, vol. xii.]
Having given way to despondency, the court should have communicated
with Grey, and directed him to make terms for himself and the
garrisons of Guisnes and Hammes. In the latter place there was but a
small detachment; but at Guisnes were eleven hundred men, who might
lose their lives in a desperate and now useless defence. The disaster,
however, had taken away the power of thinking or resolving upon
anything.
It must be said for Philip that he recognised more clearly and
discharged more faithfully the duty of an English sovereign than the
queen or the queen's advisers. Spanish and Burgundian troops were
called under arms as fast as possible; and when he heard of the gale
he sent ships from Antwerp and Dunkirk to bring across the English
army. But when his transports arrived at Dover they found the men all
gone. Proclamations went out on the 17th to call them back;[632] but
two days after there was a counter-panic and a dread of invasion, and
the perplexed levies were again told that they must remain at home. So
it went on to the end of the month; the resolution of one day
alternated with the hesitation of the next, and nothing was done.
The queen's government had lost their heads. Philip having done his
own part, did not feel it incumbent on him to risk a battle with
inferior numbers, when those who were more nearly concerned were
contented to be supine. Guisnes, therefore, and its defenders, were
left to their fate.
[Footnote 632: _MS. Mary, Domestic_, vol. xii.,
January 17.]
On Thursday, the 13th, the Duke of Guise appeared before the gates.
The garrison could have been starved out in a month, but Guise gave
England credit for energy, and would not run the risk of a blockade.
To reduce the extent of his lines, Grey abandoned the town, burnt the
houses, and withdrew into the castle. The French made their approaches
in form. On the morning of Monday the 17th they opened fire from two
heavily armed batteries, and by the middle of the day they had
silenced the English guns, and made a breach which they thought
practicable. A storming party ventured an attempt: after sharp
fighting the advanced columns had to retreat; but as they drew back
the batteries re-opened, and so effectively, that the coming on of
night alone saved the English from being driven at once, and on the
spot, from their defences. The walls were of the old {p.304} sort,
constructed when the art of gunnery was in its infancy, and brick and
stone crumbled to ruins before the heavy cannon which had come lately
into use.
Under shelter of the darkness earthworks were thrown up, which proved
a better protection; but the French on their side planted other
batteries, and all Tuesday and Wednesday the terrible bombardment was
continued. The old walls were swept away; the ditch was choked with
the rubbish, and was but a foot in depth; the French trenches had been
advanced close to its edge, and on Wednesday afternoon (January 19),
twelve companies of Gascons and Swiss again dashed at the breaches.
The Gascons were the first; the Swiss followed "with a stately
leisure;" and a hand-to-hand fight began all along the English works.
The guns from a single tower which had been left standing causing loss
to the assailants, it was destroyed by the batteries. The fight
continued till night, when darkness as before put an end to it.
The earthworks could be again repaired, but the powder began to fail,
and this loss was irreparable. Lord Grey, going his rounds in the
dark, trod upon a sword point, and was wounded in the foot. The
daylight brought the enemy again, who now succeeded in making
themselves masters of the outer line of defence. Grey, crippled as he
was, when he saw his men give way, sprung to the top of the rampart,
"wishing God that some shot would take him." A soldier caught him by
the scarf and pulled him down, and all that was left of the garrison
fell back, carrying their commander with them into the keep. The gate
was rammed close, but Guise could now finish his work at his leisure,
and had the English at his mercy. He sent a trumpeter in the evening
to propose a parley, and the soldiers insisted that if reasonable
terms could be had, they should be accepted. The extremity of the
position was obvious, and Grey, as we have seen, was no stranger to
the law of arms in such cases. Hostages were exchanged, and the next
morning the two commanders met in the French camp.
Better terms were offered by Guise than had been granted to
Calais--Grey, Sir Henry Palmer, and a few officers should consider
themselves prisoners; the rest of the garrison might depart with their
arms, and "every man a crown in his purse." Grey, however, demanded
that they should march out with their colours flying; Guise refused,
and after an hour's discussion they separated without a conclusion.
But the soldiers were insensible to nice distinctions; if they
{p.305} had the reality, they were not particular about the form.
Grey lectured them on the duties of honour; for his part, he said, he
would rather die under the red cross than lose it. The soldiers
replied that their case was desperate; they would not be thrust into
butchery or sell their lives for vain glory. The dispute was at its
height when the Swiss troops began to lay ladders to the walls; the
English refused to strike another blow; and Grey, on his own rule,
would have deserved to be executed had he persisted longer.
Guise's terms were accepted. He had lived to repay England for his
spear wound at Boulogne, and the last remnant of the conquests of the
Plantagenets was gone.
Measured by substantial value, the loss of Calais was a gain. English
princes were never again to lay claim to the crown of France, and the
possession of a fortress on French soil was a perpetual irritation.
But Calais was called the "brightest jewel in the English crown." A
jewel it was, useless, costly, but dearly prized. Over the gate of
Calais had once stood the insolent inscription:--
"Then shall the Frenchmen Calais win,
When iron and lead like cork shall swim:"
and the Frenchmen had won it, won it in fair and gallant fight.
If Spain should rise suddenly into her ancient strength and tear
Gibraltar from us, our mortification would be faint, compared to the
anguish of humiliated pride with which the loss of Calais distracted
the subjects of Queen Mary.