The queen would probably have found the parliament which met on the
20th of January little better disposed towards her than its
predecessor. The subsidy which should have paid the crown debts had
gone as the opposition had foretold, and the country had been dragged
after all into the war so long dreaded and so much deprecated. The
forced loan of L100,000 had followed, and money was again wanted.
But ordinary occasions of discontent disappeared in the enormous
misfortune of the loss of Calais; or rather, the loss of Calais had so
humbled the nation in its own eyes, that it expected {p.306} to be
overrun with French armies in the approaching summer. The church had
thriven under Mary's munificence, but every other interest had been
recklessly sacrificed. The fortresses were without arms, the ships
were unfit for service, the coast was defenceless. The parliament
postponed their complaints till the national safety had been provided
for.
On the 26th, a committee, composed of thirty members of both houses,
met to consider the crisis.[633] "That no way or policy should be
undevised or not thought upon," they divided themselves into three
sub-committees; and after three days' separate consultation the thirty
met again, and agreed to recommend the heaviest subsidy which had been
ever granted to an English sovereign, equivalent in modern computation
to an income-tax of 20 per cent, for two years. If levied fairly such
a tax would have yielded a large return. Michele, the Venetian, says
that many London merchants were worth as much as L60,000 in money; the
graziers and the merchants had made fortunes while the people had
starved. But either from hatred of the government, or else from
meanness of disposition, the money-making classes generally could not
be expected to communicate the extent of their possessions. The
landowners, truly or falsely, declared that, "for the most part, they
received no more rent than they were wont to receive," "yet, paying
for everything, they provided thrice as much by reason of the baseness
of the money."[634] It was calculated that the annual proceeds of the
subsidy would be no more than L140,000;[635] and even this the House
of Commons declared that the country would not bear for more than one
year. They did not choose perhaps to leave the queen at liberty to
abuse their confidence by giving her the full grant to squander on the
clergy. They were unanimous that the country must and should be
defended. They admitted that the sum which they were ready to vote
would fall short of the indispensable outlay; nevertheless, when the
report of the committee was laid before them they cut it down to half.
They agreed to give four shillings in the pound for one year, and to
pay it all at Midsummer. "They entreated her majesty to stay the
demanding of more" until another session of parliament. Should
circumstances then require it, they promised that they {p.307} would
add whatever might be necessary; but, for the present, "if any
invasion should be in the realm, or if the enemy should seek to annoy
them at home, they would have to employ themselves with all their
powers, which would not be without their great charges."[636]
[Footnote 633: _Commons Journals._]
[Footnote 634: Ibid. The famous graziers and other
people, how well willing soever they be taken to
be, will not be known of their wealth, and by
miscontentment of their loss, be grown stubborn and
liberal of talk. The Council to Philip: _Cotton.
MS. Titus_, B. 2.]
[Footnote 635: Estimate of the money to be provided
for the furniture and charges of the war: _MS.
Mary, Domestic_, vol. xii.]
[Footnote 636: Discourse on the order that was used
in granting of the Subsidy: _MS. Mary, Domestic_,
vol. xii.]
The resolution of parliament decided the council in the course which
they must pursue with respect to Calais. Philip, unable to prevent the
catastrophe alone, proposed to take the field at once with a united
army of English and Spaniards, to avenge it, and effect a recapture.
He laid his plans before the council. The council, in reply, thanked
his majesty for his good affection towards the realm; they would have
accepted his offer on their knees had it been possible, but the state
of England obliged them to decline. The enemy, after the time which
had been allowed them, "would be in such strength that it was doubtful
if by force alone they could be expelled." If England sent out an
army, it could not send less than twenty thousand men; and the troops
would go unwillingly upon a service for which they had no heart, at a
time of year when they were unused to exposure. Before the year was
out L150,000 at the lowest would have to be spent in keeping the
musters of the country under arms. The navy and the defences of the
coast and of the isles, would cost L200,000, without including the
losses of cannon and military stores at Guisnes and Calais, which
would have to be made good. The campaign which Philip proposed could
not cost less than a further L170,000; and so much money could not be
had "without the people should have strange impositions set upon them,
which they could not bear." There was but "a wan hope of recovering
Calais," and "inconveniences might follow" if the attempt was made and
failed.[637]
[Footnote 637: The Council to Philip: Cotton. _MSS.
Titus_, B. 2.]
"The people have only in their heads," the council added, "the defence
of the realm by land and sea." The hated connection with Spain had
produced all the evils which the opponents of the marriage had
foretold, and no good was expected from any enterprise pursued in
common with Philip. Prone as the English were to explain events by
supernatural causes, they saw, like the queen, in the misfortunes
which had haunted her, an evidence that Heaven was not on her side,
and they despaired of success in anything until it could be undertaken
under better auspices. They would take care of themselves at home, and
they would do no more. In reducing the subsidy, the Commons {p.308}
promised to defend the country "with the residue of their goods and
life," to "provide every man armour and weapons according to his
ability," and to insist by a special law that it should be done.[638]
[Footnote 638: _MS. Mary, Domestic_, vol. xii.]
Every peer, knight, or gentleman, with an income above L1000 a-year,
was called on to furnish sixteen horses, with steel harness, forty
corslets, coats of mail, and morions, thirty longbows, with sheaves of
arrows, and as many steelcaps, halberds, blackbills, and haquebuts.
All English subjects, in a descending scale, were required to arm
others or arm themselves according to their property.[639]
[Footnote 639: 4 and 5 Philip and Mary, statute 2.]
In the levies of the past summer, men had shrunk from service, and
muster-masters, after the fashion of Falstaff, had taken bribes to
excuse them. On the present occasion no excuse was to be taken, and
every able-bodied man, of any rank, from sixteen to sixty, was to be
ready to take arms when called upon, and join his officers, under pain
of death.[640] With these essential orders, the business of the
legislature ended, and parliament was prorogued on the 7th of March
till the following November.
[Footnote 640: Ibid. statute 3.]
The chief immediate difficulty was to find money for present
necessities. The loan was gone. The subsidy would not come in for six
months. Englefield, Waldegrave, Petre, Baker, and Sir Walter Mildmay,
were formed into a permanent committee of ways and means, with
instructions to sit daily "till some device had been arrived at."[641]
Sir Thomas Gresham was sent again to Antwerp to borrow L200,000, if
possible, at fourteen per cent.[642] The queen applied in person for a
loan to the citizens of London. For security, she offered to bind the
crown lands, "so assuredly as they themselves could cause to be
devised;"[643] and she promised, further, that, if she could legally
do it, she would dispense in their favour with the statute for the
limitation of usury.
[Footnote 641: _MS. Mary, Domestic_, vol. xii.]
[Footnote 642: _Flanders MSS. Mary._ The aggregate
of the debts to the Flanders Jews, which Elizabeth
inherited, cannot be prudently guessed at; and I
have not yet found any complete account on which I
can rely. It cost her, however, fifteen years of
economy to pay them off.]
[Footnote 643: Queen Mary to the Aldermen of the
City of London: _MS._ Ibid.]
To this last appeal the corporation responded with a loan of L20,000,
at twelve per cent.; the Merchant Adventurers contributed L18,000
more; and Gresham sent from Flanders from time to time whatever he
could obtain. In this way dockyards and armouries were set in
activity, and the castles on the coast were repaired.
{p.309} Yet with the masses the work of arming went forward
languidly. The nation was heavy at heart, and it was in vain that the
noblemen and gentlemen endeavoured to raise men's spirits; the black
incubus of the priesthood sat upon them like a nightmare. The burnings
had been suspended while parliament was in session. On the 28th of
March the work began again, and Cuthbert Simson, the minister of a
protestant congregation, was put to death in Smithfield, having been
first racked to extort from him the names of his supporters;[644] on
the same day Reginald Pole, to clear himself of the charge of heresy,
sent a fresh commission to Harpsfeld, to purge the diocese of
Canterbury;[645] and the people, sick to their very souls at the
abominable spectacles which were thrust before them, sank into a
sullen despondency.
[Footnote 644: Foxe: Burnet.]
[Footnote 645: Strype's _Memorials_, vol. vi. p.
120.]
The musters for Derbyshire were set down at fifteen hundred. Lord
Shrewsbury raised four hundred from among his own dependents on his
estates. The magistrates declared that, owing to dearth, want, and
waste of means in the war of the last year, the "poor little county"
could provide but one hundred more.
The musters in Devonshire broke up and went to their homes. The
musters in Lincolnshire mutinied. The ringleaders in both counties
were immediately hanged;[646] yet the loyalty was none the greater.
The exiled divines in Germany, believing that the people were at last
ripe for insurrection, called on them to rise and put down the tyranny
which was crushing them. Goodman published a tract on the obedience of
subjects, and John Knox blew his "First Blast against the Monstrous
Regimen of Women." The queen, as if the ordinary laws of the country
had no existence, sent out a proclamation that any one who was found
to have these books in his or her possession, or who, finding such
books, did not instantly burn them, should be executed as a rebel by
martial law.[647] "Affectionate as I be to my country and countrymen,"
said Sir Thomas Smith, "I was ashamed of both; they went about their
matters as men amazed, that wist not where to begin or end. And what
marvel was it? Here was nothing but firing, heading, hanging,
quartering and burning, taxing and levying. A few priests in white
rochets ruled all, who with setting up of six-foot roods and
rebuilding of roodlofts, thought to make all sure."
[Footnote 646: _Privy Council Register, MS. Mary._]
[Footnote 647: Royal Proclamation, June 6, 1558:
Strype's _Memorials_, vol. vi.; Foxe, vol. xiii.]
With the summer, fever and ague set in like a pestilence, {p.310}
"God did so punish the realm," said Sir Thomas Smith again, "with
quartan agues, and with such other long and new sicknesses, that in
the last two years of the reign of Queen Mary, so many of her subjects
was made away, what with the execution of sword and fire, what by
sicknesses, that the third part of the men of England were
consumed."[648] In the spring, the queen, misled by the same symptoms
which had deceived her before, had again fancied herself _enceinte_.
She made her will in the avowed expectation that she was about to
undergo the perils of childbearing. She wrote for her husband to come
to her. She sent the fleet into the Channel, and laid relays of horses
along the roads to London from Dover and from Harwich, that he might
choose at which port to land.
[Footnote 648: Oration on the Queen's Marriage:
Strype's _Life of Sir Thomas Smith_.]
Philip so far humoured the fancy, which he must have known to be
delusive, that he sent the Count de Feria to congratulate her. Her
letter, he said, contained the best news which he had heard since the
loss of Calais. But the bubble broke soon. Mary had parted from her
husband on the 5th of the preceding July, and her suspense, therefore,
was not long protracted. It is scarcely necessary to say in what
direction her second disappointment vented itself.
Cranmer alone hitherto had suffered after recantation; to others,
pardon had continued to be offered to the last moment. But this poor
mercy was now extinguished. A man in Hampshire, named Bembridge,
exclaimed at the point of execution that he would submit; a form was
produced on the spot, which Bembridge signed, and the sheriff, Sir
Richard Pexall, reprieved him by his own authority. But a letter of
council came instantly to Pexall, that "the queen's majesty could not
but find it very strange" that he had saved from punishment a man
condemned for heresy: the execution was to proceed out of hand; and
"if the prisoner continued in the Catholic faith, as he pretended,"
"some discreet and learned man might be present with him in his death,
for the aiding of him to die God's servant."[649] Bembridge was
accordingly burnt, and the sheriff, for the lenity which he had dare
to show, was committed to the Fleet. Whole detachments of men and
women were again slaughtered in London; and the queen, exasperated at
the determination with which the populace cheered the sufferers with
their sympathy, sent out a proclamation forbidding her subjects to
approach, touch, speak to, or comfort heretics on {p.311} their way
to execution, under pain of death. Shortly after, a congregation of
Protestants were detected at a prayer-meeting in a field near the
city; thirteen were taken as prisoners before Bonner, and seven were
burnt at Smithfield together on the 28th of June. The people replied
to the queen's menaces by crowding about the stake with passionate
demonstrations of affection, and Thomas Bentham, a friend of Lever the
preacher, when the faggots were lighted, stood out in the presence of
the throng, and cried:
[Footnote 649: _Privy Council Register, MS._]
"We know that they are the people of God, and therefore we cannot
choose but wish well to them and say, God strengthen them. God
almighty, for Christ's sake, strengthen them."