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HISTORY
OF
THE ENGLISH PEOPLE
BY
JOHN RICHARD GREEN, M.A.
HONORARY FELLOW OF JESUS COLLEGE, OXFORD
VOLUME IV
THE REFORMATION, 1540-1593
London
MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD.
NEW YORK: MACMILLAN & CO.
1896
_First Edition, Demy 8vo, November 1877,_
_Reprinted December 1877, 1881, 1885, 1890_
_Eversley Edition 1896_
CONTENTS
BOOK VI
THE REFORMATION. 1540-1603
CHAPTER I
PAGE
THE PROTESTANT REVOLUTION. 1540-1553 7
CHAPTER II
THE CATHOLIC REACTION. 1553-1558 72
CHAPTER III
THE ENGLAND OF ELIZABETH. 1558-1561 146
CHAPTER IV
ENGLAND AND MARY STUART. 1561-1567 195
CHAPTER V
ENGLAND AND THE PAPACY. 1567-1582. 247
CHAPTER VI
ENGLAND AND SPAIN. 1582-1593 323
BOOK VI
THE REFORMATION
1540-1603
AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK VI
1540-1603
For the close of Henry the Eighth's reign as for the reigns of Edward
and Mary we possess copious materials. Strype covers this period in his
"Memorials" and in his lives of Cranmer, Cheke, and Smith; Hayward's
"Life of Edward the Sixth" may be supplemented by the young king's own
Journal; "Machyn's Diary" gives us the aspect of affairs as they
presented themselves to a common Englishman; while Holinshed is near
enough to serve as a contemporary authority. The troubled period of the
Protectorate is illustrated by Mr. Tytler in the correspondence which he
has published in his "England under Edward the Sixth and Mary," while
much light is thrown on its close by Mr. Nicholls in the "Chronicle of
Queen Jane," published by the Camden Society. In spite of countless
errors, of Puritan prejudices, and some deliberate suppressions of the
truth, its mass of facts and wonderful charm of style will always give
importance to the "Acts and Monuments" or "Book of Martyrs" of John
Foxe, as a record of the Marian persecution. Among outer observers, the
Venetian Soranzo throws some light on the Protectorate; and the
despatches of Giovanni Michiel, published by Mr. Friedmann, give us a
new insight into the events of Mary's reign.
For the succeeding reign we have a valuable contemporary account in
Camden's "Life of Elizabeth." The "Annals" of Sir John Hayward refer to
the first four years of the Queen's rule. Its political and diplomatic
side is only now being fully unveiled in the Calendar of State Papers
for this period, which are being issued by the Master of the Rolls, and
fresh light has yet to be looked for from the Cecil Papers and the
documents at Simancas, some of which are embodied in the history of this
reign by Mr. Froude. Among the published materials for this time we have
the Burleigh Papers, the Sidney Papers, the Sadler State Papers, much
correspondence in the Hardwicke State Papers, the letters published by
Mr. Wright in his "Elizabeth and her Times," the collections of Murdin,
the Egerton Papers, the "Letters of Elizabeth and James the Sixth"
published by Mr. Bruce. Harrington's "Nugae Antiquae" contain some details
of value. Among foreign materials as yet published the "Papiers d'Etat"
of Cardinal Granvelle and the series of French despatches published by
M. Teulet are among the more important. Mr. Motley in his "Rise of the
Dutch Republic" and "History of the United Netherlands" has used the
State Papers of the countries concerned in this struggle to pour a flood
of new light on the diplomacy and outer policy of Burleigh and his
mistress. His wide and independent research among the same class of
documents gives almost an original value to Ranke's treatment of this
period in his English History. The earlier religious changes in Scotland
have been painted with wonderful energy, and on the whole with
truthfulness, by Knox himself in his "History of the Reformation." Among
the contemporary materials for the history of Mary Stuart we have the
well-known works of Buchanan and Leslie, Labanoff's "Lettres et Memoires
de Marie Stuart," the correspondence appended to Mignet's biography,
Stevenson's "Illustrations of the Life of Queen Mary," Melville's
Memoirs, and the collections of Keith and Anderson.
For the religious history of Elizabeth's reign Strype, as usual, gives
us copious details in his "Annals," his lives of Parker, Grindal, and
Whitgift. Some light is thrown on the Queen's earlier steps by the
Zuerich Letters published by the Parker Society. The strife with the
later Puritans can only be fairly judged after reading the Martin
Marprelate Tracts, which have been reprinted by Mr. Maskell, who has
given a short abstract of the more important in his "History of the
Martin Marprelate Controversy." Her policy towards the Catholics is set
out in Burleigh's tract "The Execution of Justice in England, not for
Religion, but for Treason," which was answered by Allen in his "Defense
of the English Catholics." On the actual working of the penal laws much
new information has been given us in the series of contemporary
narratives published by Father Morris under the title of "The Troubles
of our Catholic Forefathers"; the general history of the Catholics may
be found in the work of Dodd; and the sufferings of the Jesuits in
More's "Historia Provinciae Anglicanae Societatis Jesu." To these may be
added Mr. Simpson's biography of Campion. For our constitutional history
during Elizabeth's reign we have D'Ewes's Journals and Townshend's
"Journal of Parliamentary Proceedings from 1580 to 1601," the first
detailed account we possess of the proceedings of the House of Commons.
Macpherson in his Annals of Commerce gives details of the wonderful
expansion of English trade during this period, and Hakluyt's collection
of Voyages tells of its wonderful activity. Amidst a crowd of
biographers, whose number marks the new importance of individual life
and action at the time, we may note as embodying information elsewhere
inaccessible the lives of Hatton and Davison by Sir Harris Nicolas, the
three accounts of Raleigh by Oldys, Tytler, and Mr. Edwards, the Lives
of the two Devereux, Earls of Essex, Mr. Spedding's "Life of Bacon," and
Barrow's "Life of Sir Francis Drake."
CHAPTER I
THE PROTESTANT REVOLUTION
1540-1553
[Sidenote: Cromwell and the Monarchy.]
At the death of Cromwell the success of his policy was complete. The
Monarchy had reached the height of its power. The old liberties of
England lay prostrate at the feet of the king. The Lords were cowed and
spiritless; the House of Commons was filled with the creatures of the
Court and degraded into an engine of tyranny. Royal proclamations were
taking the place of parliamentary legislation; royal benevolences were
encroaching more and more on the right of parliamentary taxation.
Justice was prostituted in the ordinary courts to the royal will, while
the boundless and arbitrary powers of the royal Council were gradually
superseding the slower processes of the Common Law. The religious
changes had thrown an almost sacred character over the "majesty" of the
king. Henry was the Head of the Church. From the primate to the meanest
deacon every minister of it derived from him his sole right to exercise
spiritual powers. The voice of its preachers was the echo of his will.
He alone could define orthodoxy or declare heresy. The forms of its
worship and belief were changed and rechanged at the royal caprice. Half
of its wealth went to swell the royal treasury, and the other half lay
at the king's mercy. It was this unprecedented concentration of all
power in the hands of a single man that overawed the imagination of
Henry's subjects. He was regarded as something high above the laws which
govern common men. The voices of statesmen and priests extolled his
wisdom and authority as more than human. The Parliament itself rose and
bowed to the vacant throne when his name was mentioned. An absolute
devotion to his person replaced the old loyalty to the law. When the
Primate of the English Church described the chief merit of Cromwell, it
was by asserting that he loved the king "no less than he loved God."
[Sidenote: Cromwell and the Parliament.]
It was indeed Cromwell who more than any man had reared this fabric of
king-worship. But he had hardly reared it when it began to give way. The
very success of his measures indeed brought about the ruin of his
policy. One of the most striking features of Cromwell's system had been
his developement of parliamentary action. The great assembly which the
Monarchy had dreaded and silenced from the days of Edward the Fourth to
the days of Wolsey had been called to the front again at the Cardinal's
fall. Proud of his popularity, and conscious of his people's sympathy
with him in his protest against a foreign jurisdiction, Henry set aside
the policy of the Crown to deal a heavier blow at the Papacy. Both the
parties represented in the ministry that followed Wolsey welcomed the
change, for the nobles represented by Norfolk and the men of the New
Learning represented by More regarded Parliament with the same favour.
More indeed in significant though almost exaggerated phrases set its
omnipotence face to face with the growing despotism of the Crown. The
policy of Cromwell fell in with this revival of the two Houses. The
daring of his temper led him not to dread and suppress national
institutions, but to seize them and master them, and to turn them into
means of enhancing the royal power. As he saw in the Church a means of
raising the king into the spiritual ruler of the faith and consciences
of his people, so he saw in the Parliament a means of shrouding the
boldest aggressions of the monarchy under the veil of popular assent,
and of giving to the most ruthless acts of despotism the stamp and
semblance of law. He saw nothing to fear in a House of Lords whose
nobles cowered helpless before the might of the Crown, and whose
spiritual members his policy was degrading into mere tools of the royal
will. Nor could he find anything to dread in a House of Commons which
was crowded with members directly or indirectly nominated by the royal
Council. With a Parliament such as this Cromwell might well trust to
make the nation itself through its very representatives an accomplice in
the work of absolutism.
[Sidenote: Growth of Parliamentary power.]
His trust seemed more than justified by the conduct of the Houses. It
was by parliamentary statutes that the Church was prostrated at the feet
of the Monarchy. It was by bills of attainder that great nobles were
brought to the block. It was under constitutional forms that freedom was
gagged with new treasons and oaths and questionings. One of the first
bills of Cromwell's Parliaments freed Henry from the need of paying his
debts, one of the last gave his proclamations the force of laws. In the
action of the two Houses the Crown seemed to have discovered a means of
carrying its power into regions from which a bare despotism has often
had to shrink. Henry might have dared single-handed to break with Rome
or to send Sir Thomas More to the block. But without Parliament to back
him he could hardly have ventured on such an enormous confiscation of
property as was involved in the suppression of the monasteries or on
such changes in the national religion as were brought about by the Ten
Articles and the Six. It was this discovery of the use to which the
Houses could be turned that accounts for the immense developement of
their powers, the immense widening of their range of action, which they
owe to Cromwell. Now that the great engine was at his own command, he
used it as it had never been used before. Instead of rare and short
assemblies of Parliament, England saw it gathered year after year. All
the jealousy with which the Crown had watched its older encroachments on
the prerogative was set aside. Matters which had even in the days of
their greatest influence been scrupulously withheld from the cognizance
of the Houses were now absolutely forced on their attention. It was by
Parliament that England was torn from the great body of Western
Christendom. It was by parliamentary enactment that the English Church
was reft of its older liberties and made absolutely subservient to the
Crown. It was a parliamentary statute that defined the very faith and
religion of the land. The vastest confiscation of landed property which
England had ever witnessed was wrought by Parliament. It regulated the
succession to the throne. It decided on the validity of the king's
marriages and the legitimacy of the king's children. Former sovereigns
had struggled against the claim of the Houses to meddle with the royal
ministers or with members of the royal household. Now Parliament was
called on by the king himself to attaint his ministers and his Queens.
[Sidenote: The New Nobles.]
The fearlessness and completeness of such a policy as this brings home
to us more than any other of his plans the genius of Cromwell. But its
success depended wholly on the absolute servility of Parliament to the
will of the Crown, and Cromwell's own action made the continuance of
such a servility impossible. The part which the Houses were to play in
after years shows the importance of clinging to the forms of
constitutional freedom, even when their life is all but lost. In the
inevitable reaction against tyranny they furnish centres for the
reviving energies of the people, while the returning tide of liberty is
enabled through their preservation to flow quietly and naturally along
its traditional channels. And even before Cromwell passed to his doom
the tide of liberty was returning. On one occasion during his rule a
"great debate" on the suppression of the lesser monasteries showed that
elements of resistance still survived; and these elements developed
rapidly as the power of the Crown declined under the minority of Edward
and the unpopularity of Mary. To this revival of a spirit of
independence the spoliation of the Church largely contributed. Partly
from necessity, partly from a desire to build up a faction interested in
the maintenance of their ecclesiastical policy, Cromwell and the king
squandered the vast mass of wealth which flowed into the Treasury from
the dissolution of the monasteries with reckless prodigality. Three
hundred and seventy-six smaller houses had been suppressed in 1536; six
hundred and forty-five greater houses were surrendered or seized in
1539. Some of the spoil was devoted to the erection of six new
bishopricks; a larger part went to the fortification of the coast. But
the bulk of these possessions was granted lavishly away to the nobles
and courtiers about the king, and to a host of adventurers who "had
become gospellers for the abbey lands." Something like a fifth of the
actual land in the kingdom was in this way transferred from the holding
of the Church to that of nobles and gentry. Not only were the older
houses enriched, but a new aristocracy was erected from among the
dependants of the Court. The Russells and the Cavendishes are familiar
instances of families which rose from obscurity through the enormous
grants of Church-land made to Henry's courtiers. The old baronage was
thus hardly crushed before a new aristocracy took its place. "Those
families within or without the bounds of the peerage," observes Mr.
Hallam, "who are now deemed the most considerable, will be found, with
no great number of exceptions, to have first become conspicuous under
the Tudor line of kings and, if we could trace the title of their
estates, to have acquired no small portion of them mediately or
immediately from monastic or other ecclesiastical foundations." The
leading part which these freshly-created peers took in the events which
followed Henry's death gave strength and vigour to the whole order. But
the smaller gentry shared in the general enrichment of the landed
proprietors, and the new energy of the Lords was soon followed by a
display of political independence among the Commons themselves.
[Sidenote: Results of the Religious Changes.]
While the prodigality of Cromwell's system thus brought into being a new
check upon the Crown by enriching the nobles and the lesser gentry, the
religious changes it brought about gave fire and vigour to the elements
of opposition which were slowly gathering. What did most to ruin the
king-worship that Cromwell set up was Cromwell's ecclesiastical policy.
In reducing the Church to mere slavery beneath the royal power he
believed himself to be trampling down the last constitutional force
which could hold the Monarchy in check. What he really did was to give
life and energy to new forces which were bound from their very nature to
battle with the Monarchy for even more than the old English freedom.
When Cromwell seized on the Church he held himself to be seizing for the
Crown the mastery which the Church had wielded till now over the
consciences and reverence of men. But the very humiliation of the great
religious body broke the spell beneath which Englishmen had bowed. In
form nothing had been changed. The outer constitution of the Church
remained utterly unaltered. The English bishop, freed from the papal
control, freed from the check of monastic independence, seemed greater
and more imposing than ever. The priest still clung to rectory and
church. If images were taken out of churches, if here and there a
rood-loft was pulled down or a saint's shrine demolished, no change was
made in form of ritual or mode of worship. The mass was untouched. Every
hymn, every prayer, was still in Latin; confession, penance, fastings
and feastings, extreme unction, went on as before. There was little to
show that any change had taken place; and yet every ploughman felt that
all was changed. The bishop, gorgeous as he might be in mitre and cope,
was a mere tool of the king. The priest was trembling before heretics he
used to burn. Farmer or shopkeeper might enter their church any Sunday
morning to find mass or service utterly transformed. The spell of
tradition, of unbroken continuance, was over; and with it the power
which the Church had wielded over the souls of men was in great part
done away.
It was not that the new Protestantism was as yet formidable, for,
violent and daring as they were, the adherents of Luther were few in
number, and drawn mostly from the poorer classes among whom Wyclifite
heresy had lingered or from the class of scholars whose theological
studies drew their sympathy to the movement over sea. It was that the
lump was now ready to be leavened by this petty leaven, that men's hold
on the firm ground of custom was broken and their minds set drifting and
questioning, that little as was the actual religious change, the thought
of religious change had become familiar to the people as a whole. And
with religious change was certain to come religious revolt. The human
conscience was hardly likely to move everywhere in strict time to the
slow advance of Henry's reforms. Men who had been roused from implicit
obedience to the Papacy as a revelation of the Divine will by hearing
the Pope denounced in royal proclamations as a usurper and an impostor
were hardly inclined to take up submissively the new official doctrine
which substituted implicit belief in the King for implicit belief in the
"Bishop of Rome." But bound as Church and King now were together, it was
impossible to deny a tenet of the one without entering on a course of
opposition to the other. Cromwell had raised against the Monarchy the
most fatal of all enemies, the force of the individual conscience, the
enthusiasm of religious belief, the fire of religious fanaticism. Slowly
as the area of the new Protestantism extended, every man that it gained
was a possible opponent of the Crown. And should the time come, as the
time was soon to come, when the Crown moved to the side of
Protestantism, then in turn every soul that the older faith retained
was pledged to a lifelong combat with the Monarchy.
[Sidenote: The Imperial Alliance.]
How irresistible was the national drift was seen on Cromwell's fall. Its
first result indeed promised to be a reversal of all that Cromwell had
done. Norfolk returned to power, and his influence over Henry seemed
secured by the king's repudiation of Anne of Cleves and his marriage in
the summer of 1540 to a niece of the Duke, Catharine Howard. But
Norfolk's temper had now become wholly hostile to the movement about
him. "I never read the Scripture nor never will!" the Duke replied hotly
to a Protestant arguer. "It was merry in England afore the new learning
came up; yea, I would all things were as hath been in times past." In
his preference of an Imperial alliance to an alliance with Francis and
the Lutherans Henry went warmly with his minister. Parted as he had been
from Charles by the question of the divorce, the King's sympathies had
remained true to the Emperor; and at this moment he was embittered
against France by the difficulties it threw in the way of his projects
for gaining a hold upon Scotland. Above all the king still clung to the
hope of a purification of the Church by a Council, as well as of a
reconciliation of England with the general body of this purified
Christendom, and it was only by the Emperor that such a Council could be
convened or such a reconciliation brought about. An alliance with him
was far from indicating any retreat from Henry's position of
independence or any submission to the Papacy. To the men of his own day
Charles seemed no Catholic bigot. On the contrary the stricter
representatives of Catholicism such as Paul the Fourth denounced him as
a patron of heretics, and attributed the upgrowth of Lutheranism to his
steady protection and encouragement. Nor was the charge without seeming
justification. The old jealousy between Pope and Emperor, the more
recent hostility between them as rival Italian powers, had from the
beginning proved Luther's security. At the first appearance of the
reformer Maximilian had recommended the Elector of Saxony to suffer no
harm to be done to him; "there might come a time," said the old Emperor,
"when he would be needed." Charles had looked on the matter mainly in
the same political way. In his earliest years he bought Leo's aid in his
recovery of Milan from the French king by issuing the ban of the Empire
against Luther in the Diet of Worms; but every Italian held that in
suffering the reformer to withdraw unharmed Charles had shown not so
much regard to his own safe-conduct as a purpose still "to keep the Pope
in check with that rein." And as Charles dealt with Luther so he dealt
with Lutheranism. The new faith profited by the Emperor's struggle with
Clement the Seventh for the lordship over Italy. It was in the midst of
this struggle that his brother and representative, Ferdinand, signed in
the Diet of Spires an Imperial decree by which the German States were
left free to arrange their religious affairs "as each should best answer
to God and the Emperor." The decree gave a legal existence to the
Protestant body in the Empire which it never afterwards lost.
[Sidenote: Charles and the Council.]
Such a step might well encourage the belief that Charles was himself
inclining to Lutheranism; and the belief gathered strength as he sent
Lutheran armies over the Alps to sack Rome and to hold the Pope a
prisoner. The belief was a false one, for Charles remained utterly
untouched by the religious movement about him; but even when his strife
with the Papacy was to a great extent lulled by Clement's submission, he
still turned a deaf ear to the Papal appeals for dealing with
Lutheranism by fire and sword. His political interests and the
conception which he held of his duty as Emperor alike swayed him to
milder counsels. He purposed indeed to restore religious unity. His
political aim was to bring Germany to his feet as he had brought Italy;
and he saw that the religious schism was the great obstacle in the way
of his realizing this design. As the temporal head of the Catholic world
he was still more strongly bent to heal the breaches of Catholicism. But
he had no wish to insist on an unconditional submission to the Papacy.
He believed that there were evils to be cured on the one side as on the
other; and Charles saw the high position which awaited him if as Emperor
he could bring about a reformation of the Church and a reunion of
Christendom. Violent as Luther's words had been, the Lutheran princes
and the bulk of Lutheran theologians had not yet come to look on
Catholicism as an irreconcileable foe. Even on the papal side there was
a learned and active party, a party headed by Contarini and Pole, whose
theological sympathies went in many points with the Lutherans, and who
looked to the winning back of the Lutherans as the needful prelude to
any reform in the doctrine and practice of the Church; while Melancthon
was as hopeful as Contarini that such a reform might be wrought and the
Church again become universal. In his proposal of a Council to carry on
the double work of purification and reunion therefore Charles stood out
as the representative of the larger part both of the Catholic and the
Protestant world. Against such a proposal however Rome struggled hard.
All her tradition was against Councils, where the assembled bishops had
in earlier days asserted their superiority to the Pope, and where the
Emperor who convened the assembly and carried out its decrees rose into
dangerous rivalry with the Papacy. Crushed as he was, Clement the
Seventh throughout his lifetime held the proposal of a Council
stubbornly at bay. But under his successor, Paul the Third, the
influence of Contarini and the moderate Catholics secured a more
favourable reception of plans of reconciliation. In April, 1541,
conferences for this purpose were in fact opened at Augsburg in which
Contarini, as Papal legate, accepted a definition of the moot question
of justifications by faith which satisfied Bucer and Melancthon. On the
other side, the Landgrave of Hesse and the Elector of Brandenburg
publicly declared that they believed it possible to come to terms on the
yet more vexed questions of the Mass and the Papal supremacy.
[Sidenote: Charles and Henry.]
Never had the reunion of the world seemed so near; and the hopes that
were stirring found an echo in England as well as in Germany. We can
hardly doubt indeed that it was the revival of these hopes which had
brought about the fall of Cromwell and the recall of Norfolk to power.
Norfolk, like his master, looked to a purification of the Church by a
Council as the prelude to a reconciliation of England with the general
body of Catholicism; and both saw that it was by the influence of the
Emperor alone that such a Council could be brought about. Charles on the
other hand was ready to welcome Henry's advances. The quarrel over
Catharine had ended with her death; and the wrong done her had been in
part atoned for by the fall of Anne Boleyn. The aid of Henry too was
needed to hold in check the opposition of France. The chief means which
France still possessed of holding the Emperor at bay lay in the disunion
of the Empire, and it was resolute to preserve this weapon against him
at whatever cost to Christendom. While Francis remonstrated at Rome
against the concessions made to the Lutherans by the Legates, he urged
the Lutheran princes to make no terms with the Papacy. To the
Protestants he held out hopes of his own conversion, while he promised
Pope Paul that he would defend him with his life against Emperor and
heretics. His intrigues were aided by the suspicions of both the
religious parties. Luther refused to believe in the sincerity of the
concessions made by the Legates; Paul the Third held aloof from them in
sullen silence. Meanwhile Francis was preparing to raise more material
obstacles to the Emperor's designs. Charles had bought his last
reconciliation with the king by a promise of restoring the Milanese, but
he had no serious purpose of ever fulfilling his pledge, and his
retention of the Duchy gave the French king a fair pretext for
threatening a renewal of the war.
[Sidenote: James the Fifth.]
England, as Francis hoped, he could hold in check through his alliance
with the Scots. After the final expulsion of Albany in 1524 Scottish
history became little more than a strife between Margaret Tudor and her
husband, the Earl of Angus, for power; but the growth of James the
Fifth to manhood at last secured rest for the land. James had all the
varied ability of his race, and he carried out with vigour its
traditional policy. The Highland chieftains, the great lords of the
Lowlands, were brought more under the royal sway; the Church was
strengthened to serve as a check on the feudal baronage; the alliance
with France was strictly preserved, as the one security against English
aggression. Nephew as he was indeed of the English king, James from the
outset of his reign took up an attitude hostile to England. He was
jealous of the influence which the two Henries had established in his
realm by the marriage of Margaret and by the building up of an English
party under the Douglases; the great Churchmen who formed his most
trusted advisers dreaded the influence of the religious changes across
the border; while the people clung to their old hatred of England and
their old dependence on France. It was only by two inroads of the border
lords that Henry checked the hostile intrigues of James in 1532; his
efforts to influence his nephew by an interview and alliance were met by
the king's marriage with two French wives in succession, Magdalen of
Valois, a daughter of Francis, and Mary, a daughter of the Duke of
Guise. In 1539 when the projected coalition between France and the
Empire threatened England, it had been needful to send Norfolk with an
army to the Scotch frontier, and now that France was again hostile
Norfolk had to move anew to the border in the autumn of 1541.
[Sidenote: Defeat at the Solway.]
While the Duke was fruitlessly endeavouring to bring James to fresh
friendship a sudden blow at home weakened his power. At the close of the
year Catharine Howard was arrested on a charge of adultery; a Parliament
which assembled in January 1542 passed a Bill of Attainder; and in
February the Queen was sent to the block. She was replaced by the widow
of Lord Latimer, Catharine Parr; and the influence of Norfolk in the
king's counsels gradually gave way to that of Bishop Gardiner of
Winchester. But Henry clung to the policy which the Duke favoured. At
the end of 1541 two great calamities, the loss of Hungary after a
victory of the Turks and a crushing defeat at Algiers, so weakened
Charles that in the summer of the following year Francis ventured to
attack him. The attack served only to draw closer the negotiations
between England and the Emperor; and Francis was forced, as he had
threatened, to give Henry work to occupy him at home. The busiest
counsellor of the Scotch king, Cardinal Beaton, crossed the seas to
negotiate a joint attack, and the attitude of Scotland became so
menacing that in the autumn of 1542 Norfolk was again sent to the border
with twenty thousand men. But terrible as were his ravages, he could not
bring the Scotch army to an engagement, and want of supplies soon forced
him to fall back over the border. It was in vain that James urged his
nobles to follow him in a counter-invasion. They were ready to defend
their country; but the memory of Flodden was still fresh, and success in
England would only give dangerous strength to a king in whom they saw an
enemy. But James was as stubborn in his purpose as the lords. Anxious
only to free himself from their presence, he waited till the two armies
had alike withdrawn, and then suddenly summoned his subjects to meet him
in arms on the western border. A disorderly host gathered at Lochmaben
and passed into Cumberland; but the English borderers followed on them
fast, and were preparing to attack when at nightfall on the twenty-fifth
of November a panic seized the whole Scotch force. Lost in the darkness
and cut off from retreat by the Solway Firth, thousands of men with all
the baggage and guns fell into the hands of the pursuers. The news of
this rout fell on the young king like a sentence of death. For a while
he wandered desperately from palace to palace till at the opening of
December the tidings met him at Falkland that his queen, Mary of Guise,
had given birth to a child. His two boys had both died in youth, and he
was longing passionately for an heir to the crown which was slipping
from his grasp. But the child was a daughter, the Mary Stuart of later
history. "The deil go with it," muttered the dying king, as his mind
fell back to the close of the line of Bruce and the marriage with
Robert's daughter which brought the Stuarts to the Scottish throne, "The
deil go with it! It will end as it began. It came with a lass, and it
will go with a lass." A few days later he died.
[Sidenote: The Marriage Treaty.]
The death of James did more than remove a formidable foe. It opened up
for the first time a prospect of that union of the two kingdoms which
was at last to close their long hostility. Scotland, torn by factions
and with a babe for queen, seemed to lie at Henry's feet: and the king
seized the opportunity of completing his father's work by a union of the
realms. At the opening of 1543 he proposed to the Scotch regent, the
Earl of Arran, the marriage of the infant Mary Stuart with his son
Edward. To ensure this bridal he demanded that Mary should at once be
sent to England, the four great fortresses of Scotland be placed in
English hands, and a voice given to Henry himself in the administration
of the Scotch Council of Regency. Arran and the Queen-mother, rivals as
they were, vied with each other in apparent goodwill to the marriage;
but there was a steady refusal to break the league with France, and the
"English lords," as the Douglas faction were called, owned themselves
helpless in the face of the national jealousy of English ambition. The
temper of the nation itself was seen in the answer made by the Scotch
Parliament which gathered in the spring. If they consented to the young
Queen's betrothal, they not only rejected the demands which accompanied
the proposal, but insisted that in case of such a union Scotland should
have a perpetual regent of its own, and that this office should be
hereditary in the House of Arran. Warned by his very partizans that the
delivery of Mary was impossible, that if such a demand were pressed
"there was not so little a boy but he would hurl stones against it, the
wives would handle their distaffs, and the commons would universally die
in it," Henry's proposals dropped in July to a treaty of alliance,
offensive and defensive, he suffered France to be included among the
allies of Scotland named in it, he consented that the young Queen should
remain with her mother till the age of ten, and offered guarantees for
the maintenance of Scotch independence.
[Sidenote: Scotland and France.]
But modify it as he might, Henry knew that such a project of union could
only be carried out by a war with Francis. His negotiations for a treaty
with Charles had long been delayed through Henry's wish to drag the
Emperor into an open breach with the Papacy, but at the moment of the
King's first proposals for the marriage of Mary Stuart with his son the
need of finding a check upon France forced on a formal alliance with the
Emperor in February 1543. The two allies agreed that the war should be
continued till the Duchy of Burgundy had been restored to the Emperor
and till England had recovered Normandy and Guienne; while the joint
fleets of Henry and Charles held the Channel and sheltered England from
any danger of French attack. The main end of this treaty was doubtless
to give Francis work at home which might prevent the despatch of a
French force into Scotland and the overthrow of Henry's hopes of a
Scotch marriage. These hopes were strengthened as the summer went on by
the acceptance of his later proposals in a Parliament which was packed
by the Regent, and by the actual conclusion of a marriage-treaty. But if
Francis could spare neither horse nor man for action in Scotland his
influence in the northern kingdom was strong enough to foil Henry's
plans. The Churchmen were as bitterly opposed to such a marriage as the
partizans of France; and their head, Cardinal Beaton, who had held aloof
from the Regent's Parliament, suddenly seized the Queen-mother and her
babe, crowned the infant Mary, called a Parliament in December which
annulled the marriage-treaty, and set Henry at defiance.
[Sidenote: War with France.]
The king's wrath at this overthrow of his hopes showed itself in a
brutal and impolitic act of vengeance. He was a skilful shipbuilder; and
among the many enterprises which the restless genius of Cromwell
undertook there was probably none in which Henry took so keen an
interest as in his creation of an English fleet. Hitherto merchant ships
had been impressed when a fleet was needed; but the progress of naval
warfare had made the maintenance of an armed force at sea a condition
of maritime power, and the resources furnished by the dissolution of the
abbeys had been devoted in part to the building of ships of war, the
largest of which, the _Mary Rose_, carried a crew of seven hundred men.
The new strength which England was to wield in its navy was first seen
in 1544. An army was gathered under Lord Hertford; and while Scotland
was looking for the usual advance over the border the Earl's forces were
quietly put on board and the English fleet appeared on the third of May
in the Firth of Forth. The surprise made resistance impossible. Leith
was seized and sacked, Edinburgh, then a town of wooden houses, was
given to the flames, and burned for three days and three nights. The
country for seven miles round was harried into a desert. The blow was a
hard one, but it was little likely to bring Scotchmen round to Henry's
projects of union. A brutal raid of the English borderers on Melrose and
the destruction of his ancestors' tombs estranged the Earl of Angus, and
was quickly avenged by his overthrow of the marauders at Ancrum Moor.
Henry had yet to learn the uselessness of mere force to compass his
ends. "I shall be glad to serve the king of England, with my honour,"
said the Lord of Buccleugh to an English envoy, "but I will not be
constrained thereto if all Teviotdale be burned to the bottom of hell."
Hertford's force returned in good time to join the army which Henry in
person was gathering at Calais to co-operate with the forces assembled
by Charles on the north-eastern frontier of France. Each sovereign found
himself at the head of forty thousand men, and the Emperor's military
ability was seen in his proposal for an advance of both armies upon
Paris. But though Henry found no French force in his front, his cautious
temper shrank from the risk of leaving fortresses in his rear; and while
their allies pushed boldly past Chalons on the capital, the English
troops were detained till September in the capture of Boulogne, and only
left Boulogne to form the siege of Montreuil. The French were thus
enabled to throw their whole force on the Emperor, and Charles found
himself in a position from which negotiation alone could extricate him.
[Sidenote: Growth of Lutheranism.]
His ends were in fact gained by the humiliation of France, and he had as
little desire to give England a strong foothold in the neighbourhood of
his own Netherlands as in Wolsey's days. The widening of English
territory there could hardly fail to encourage that upgrowth of heresy
which the Emperor justly looked upon as the greatest danger to the hold
of Spain upon the Low Countries, while it would bring Henry a step
nearer to the chain of Protestant states which began on the Lower Rhine.
The plans which Charles had formed for uniting the Catholics and
Lutherans in the conferences of Augsburg had broken down before the
opposition both of Luther and the Pope. On both sides indeed the
religious contest was gathering new violence. A revival had begun in the
Church itself, but it was the revival of a militant and uncompromising
orthodoxy. In 1542 the fanaticism of Cardinal Caraffa forced on the
establishment of a supreme Tribunal of the Inquisition at Rome. The next
year saw the establishment of the Jesuits. Meanwhile Lutheranism took a
new energy. The whole north of Germany became Protestant. In 1539 the
younger branches of the house of Saxony joined the elder in a common
adherence to Lutheranism; and their conversion had been followed by that
of the Elector of Brandenburg. Southern Germany seemed bent on following
the example of the north. The hereditary possessions of Charles himself
fell away from Catholicism. The Austrian duchies were overrun with
heresy. Bohemia promised soon to become Hussite again. Persecution
failed to check the triumph of the new opinions in the Low Countries.
The Empire itself threatened to become Protestant. In 1540 the accession
of the Elector Palatine robbed Catholicism of Central Germany and the
Upper Rhine; and three years later, at the opening of the war with
France, that of the Archbishop of Koln gave the Protestants not only the
Central Rhineland but a majority in the College of Electors. It seemed
impossible for Charles to prevent the Empire from repudiating
Catholicism in his lifetime, or to hinder the Imperial Crown from
falling to a Protestant at his death.
[Sidenote: England and France.]
The great fabric of power which had been built up by the policy of
Ferdinand of Aragon was thus threatened with utter ruin, and Charles saw
himself forced into the struggle he had so long avoided, if not for the
interests of religion, at any rate for the interests of the House of
Austria. He still hoped for a reunion from the Council which was
assembling at Trent, and from which a purified Catholicism was to come.
But he no longer hoped that the Lutherans would yield to the mere voice
of the Council. They would yield only to force, and the first step in
such a process of compulsion must be the breaking up of their League of
Schmalkald. Only France could save them; and it was to isolate them from
France that Charles availed himself of the terror his march on Paris had
caused, and concluded a treaty with that power in September 1544. The
progress of Protestantism had startled even France itself; and her old
policy seemed to be abandoned in her promises of co-operation in the
task of repressing heresy in the Empire. But a stronger security against
French intervention lay in the unscrupulous dexterity with which, while
withdrawing from the struggle, Charles left Henry and Francis still at
strife. Henry would not cede Boulogne, and Francis saw no means of
forcing him to a peace save by a threat of invasion. While an army
closed round Boulogne, and a squadron carried troops to Scotland, a
hundred and fifty French ships were gathered in the Channel and crossed
in the summer of 1545 to the Isle of Wight. But their attacks were
feebly conducted and the fleet at last returned to its harbours without
striking any serious blow, while the siege of Boulogne dragged idly on
through the year. Both kings however drew to peace. In spite of the
treaty of Crepy it was impossible for France to abandon the Lutherans,
and Francis was eager to free his hands for action across the Rhine.
Henry on the other hand, deserted by his ally and with a treasury ruined
by the cost of the war, was ready at last to surrender his gains in it.
In June 1546 a peace was concluded by which England engaged to surrender
Boulogne on payment of a heavy ransom, and France to restore the annual
subsidy which had been promised in 1525.
[Sidenote: The Peace.]
What aided in the close of the war was a new aspect of affairs in
Scotland. Since the death of James the Fifth the great foe of England in
the north had been the Archbishop of St. Andrews, Cardinal Beaton. In
despair of shaking his power his rivals had proposed schemes for his
assassination to Henry, and these schemes had been expressly approved.
But plot after plot broke down; and it was not till May 1546 that a
group of Scotch nobles who favoured the Reformation surprised his castle
at St. Andrews. Shrieking miserably, "I am a priest! I am a priest! Fie!
Fie! All is gone!" the Cardinal was brutally murdered, and his body hung
over the castle-walls. His death made it easy to include Scotland in the
peace with France which was concluded in the summer. But in England
itself peace was a necessity. The Crown was penniless. In spite of the
confiscation of the abbey lands in 1539 the treasury was found empty at
the very opening of the war: the large subsidies granted by the
Parliament were expended; and conscious that a fresh grant could hardly
be expected even from the servile Houses the government in 1545 fell
back on its old resource of benevolences. Of two London merchants who
resisted this demand as illegal one was sent to the Fleet, the second
ordered to join the army on the Scotch border; but it was significant
that resistance had been offered, and the failure of the war-taxes which
were voted at the close of the year to supply the royal needs drove the
Council to fresh acts of confiscation. A vast mass of Church property
still remained for the spoiler, and by a bill of 1545 more than two
thousand chauntries and chapels, with a hundred and ten hospitals, were
suppressed to the profit of the Crown. Enormous as this booty was, it
could only be slowly realized; and the immediate pressure forced the
Council to take refuge in the last and worst measure any government can
adopt, a debasement of the currency. The evils of such a course were
felt till the reign of Elizabeth. But it was a course that could not be
repeated; and financial exhaustion played its part in bringing the war
to an end.
[Sidenote: Charles and the League of Schmalkald.]
A still greater part was played by the aspect of affairs in the Empire.
Once freed from the check of the war Charles had moved fast to his aim.
In 1545 he had adjusted all minor differences with Paul the Third, and
Pope and Emperor had resolved on the immediate convocation of the
Council, and on the enforcement of its decisions by weight of arms.
Should the Emperor be driven to war with the Lutheran princes, the Pope
engaged to support him with all his power. "Were it needful" Paul
promised "he would sell his very crown in his service." In December the
Council was actually opened at Trent, and its proceedings soon showed
that no concessions to the Lutherans could be looked for. The Emperor's
demand that the reform of the Church should first be taken in hand was
evaded; and on the two great questions of the authority of the Bible as
a ground of faith, and of justification, the sentence of the Council
directly condemned the Protestant opinions. The Lutherans showed their
resolve to make no submission by refusing to send representatives to
Trent; and Charles carried out his pledges to the Papacy by taking the
field in the spring of 1546 to break up the League of Schmalkald. But
the army gathered under the Elector of Saxony and the Landgrave of Hesse
so far outnumbered the Imperial forces that the Emperor could not
venture on a battle. Henry watched the course of Charles with a growing
anxiety. The hopes of a purified and united Christendom which had drawn
him a few years back to the Emperor's side faded before the stern
realities of the Council. The highest pretensions of the Papacy had been
sanctioned by the bishops gathered at Trent; and to the pretensions of
the Papacy Henry was resolved not to bow. He was driven, whether he
would or no, on the policy of Cromwell; and in the last months of his
life he offered aid to the League of Schmalkald. His offers were
rejected; for the Lutheran princes had no faith in his sincerity, and
believed themselves strong enough to deal with the Emperor without
foreign help.
[Sidenote: Effect on English Religion.]
But his attitude without told on his policy at home. To the hotter
Catholics as to the hotter Protestants the years since Cromwell's fall
had seemed years of a gradual return to Catholicism. There had been a
slight sharpening of persecution for the Protestants, and restrictions
had been put on the reading of the English Bible. The alliance with
Charles and the hope of reconciling England anew with a pacified
Christendom gave fresh cause for suppressing heresy. Neither Norfolk nor
his master indeed desired any rigorous measure of reaction, for Henry
remained proud of the work he had done. His bitterness against the
Papacy only grew as the years went by; and at the very moment that
heretics were suffering for a denial of the mass, others were suffering
by their side for a denial of the supremacy. But strange and anomalous
as its system seemed, the drift of Henry's religious government had as
yet been in one direction, that of a return to and reconciliation with
the body of the Catholic Church. With the decision of the Council and
the new attitude of the Emperor this drift was suddenly arrested. It was
not that Henry realized the revolution that was opening before him or
the vast importance of the steps which his policy now led him to take.
His tendency, like that of his people, was religious rather than
theological, practical rather than speculative. Of the immense problems
which were opening in the world neither he nor England saw anything. The
religious strife which was to break Europe asunder was to the king as to
the bulk of Englishmen a quarrel of words and hot temper; the truth
which Christendom was to rend itself to pieces in striving to discover
was a thing that could easily be found with the aid of God. There is
something humorous as there is something pathetic in the warnings which
Henry addressed to the Parliament at the close of 1545. The shadow of
death as it fell over him gave the king's words a new gentleness and
tenderness. "The special foundation of our religion being charity
between man and man, it is so refrigerate as there never was more
dissension and lack of love between man and man, the occasions whereof
are opinions only and names devised for the continuance of the same.
Some are called Papists, some Lutherans, and some Anabaptists; names
devised of the devil, and yet not fully without ground, for the severing
of one man's heart by conceit of opinion from the other." But the remedy
was a simple one. Every man was "to travail first for his own
amendment." Then the bishops and clergy were to agree in their teaching,
"which, seeing there is but one truth and verity, they may easily do,
calling therein for the grace of God." Then the nobles and laity were to
be pious and humble, to read their new Bibles "reverently and humbly ...
and in any doubt to resort to the learned or at best the higher powers."
"I am very sorry to know and hear how unreverendly that precious jewel,
the Word of God, is disputed, rimed, sung, and jangled in every alehouse
and tavern. This kind of man is depraved and that kind of man, this
ceremony and that ceremony." All this controversy might be done away by
simple charity. "Therefore be in charity one with another like brother
and brother. Have respect to the pleasing of God; and then I doubt not
that love I spoke of shall never be dissolved between us."
[Sidenote: The Religious Truce.]
There is something wonderful in the English coolness and narrowness, in
the speculative blindness and practical good sense which could look out
over such a world at such a moment, and could see nothing in it save a
quarrel of "opinions, and of names devised for the continuance of the
same." But Henry only expressed the general feeling of his people.
England indeed was being slowly leavened with a new spirit. The
humiliation of the clergy, the Lutheran tendencies of half the bishops,
the crash of the abbeys, the destruction of chauntries and mass-chapels,
a measure which told closely on the actual worship of the day, the new
articles of faith, the diffusion of Bibles, the "jangling" and
discussion which followed on every step in the king's course, were all
telling on the thoughts of men. But the temper of the nation as a whole
remained religiously conservative. It drifted rather to the moderate
reforms of the New Learning than to any radical reconstruction of the
Church. There was a general disinclination indeed to push matters to
either extreme, a general shrinking from the persecution which the
Catholic called for as from the destruction which the Protestant was
desiring. It was significant that a new heresy bill which passed through
the Lords in 1545 quietly disappeared when it reached the Commons. But
this shrinking rested rather on national than on theological grounds,
on a craving for national union which Henry expressed in his cry for
"brotherly love," and on an imperfect appreciation of the real nature or
consequence of the points at issue which made men shrink from burning
their neighbours for "opinions and names devised for the continuance of
the same." What Henry and what the bulk of Englishmen wanted was, not
indeed wholly to rest in what had been done, but to do little more save
the remedying of obvious abuses or the carrying on of obvious
improvements. One such improvement was the supplying men with the means
of private devotion in their own tongue, a measure from which none but
the fanatics of either side dissented. This process went slowly on in
the issuing of two primers in 1535 and 1539, the rendering into English
of the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments, the
publication of an English Litany for outdoor processions in 1544, and
the adding to this of a collection of English prayers in 1545.
[Sidenote: The Court Factions.]
But the very tone of Henry shows his consciousness that this religious
truce rested on his will alone. Around him as he lay dying stood men who
were girding themselves to a fierce struggle for power, a struggle that
could not fail to wake the elements of religious discord which he had
striven to lull asleep. Adherents of the Papacy, advocates of a new
submission to a foreign spiritual jurisdiction there were few or none;
for the most conservative of English Churchmen or nobles had as yet no
wish to restore the older Roman supremacy. But Norfolk and Gardiner were
content with this assertion of national and ecclesiastical independence;
in all matters of faith they were earnest to conserve, to keep things as
they were, and in front of them stood a group of nobles who were bent on
radical change. The marriages, the reforms, the profusion of Henry had
aided him in his policy of weakening the nobles by building up a new
nobility which sprang from the Court and was wholly dependent on the
Crown. Such were the Russells, the Cavendishes, the Wriothesleys, the
Fitzwilliams. Such was John Dudley, a son of the Dudley who had been put
to death for his financial oppression in Henry the Seventh's days, but
who had been restored in blood, attached to the court, raised to the
peerage as Lord Lisle, and who, whether as adviser or general, had been
actively employed in high stations at the close of this reign. Such
above all were the two brothers of Jane Seymour. The elder of the two,
Edward Seymour, had been raised to the earldom of Hertford, and
entrusted with the command of the English army in its operations against
Scotland. As uncle of Henry's boy Edward, he could not fail to play a
leading part in the coming reign; and the nobles of the "new blood," as
their opponents called them in disdain, drew round him as their head.
Without any historical hold on the country, raised by the royal caprice,
and enriched by the spoil of the monasteries, these nobles were pledged
to the changes from which they had sprung and to the party of change.
Over the mass of the nation their influence was small; and in the strife
for power with the older nobles which they were anticipating they were
forced to look to the small but resolute body of men who, whether from
religious enthusiasm or from greed of wealth or power, were bent on
bringing the English Church nearer to conformity with the reformed
Churches of the Continent. As Henry drew to his grave the two factions
faced each other with gathering dread and gathering hate. Hot words
betrayed their hopes. "If God should call the king to his mercy," said
Norfolk's son, Lord Surrey, "who were so meet to govern the Prince as my
lord my father?" "Rather than it should come to pass," retorted a
partizan of Hertford's, "that the Prince should be under the governance
of your father or you, I would abide the adventure to thrust a dagger in
you!"
[Sidenote: Lord Surrey.]
In the history of English poetry the name of Lord Surrey takes an
illustrious place. An Elizabethan writer tells us how at this time
"sprang up a new company of courtly makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyatt the
elder and Henry, Earl of Surrey, were the two chieftains; who having
travelled to Italy, and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and
style of the Italian poesy, as novices newly crept out of the schools of
Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, they greatly polished our rude and homely
manner of vulgar poesy from what it had been before, and for that cause
may justly be said to be the first reformers of our English metre and
style." The dull moralizings of the rimers who followed Chaucer, the
rough but vivacious doggrel of Skelton, made way in the hands of Wyatt
and Surrey for delicate imitations of the songs, sonnets, and rondels of
Italy and France. With the Italian conceits came an Italian refinement
whether of words or of thought; and the force and versatility of
Surrey's youth showed itself in whimsical satires, in classical
translations, in love-sonnets, and in paraphrases of the Psalms. In his
version of two books of the AEneid he was the first to introduce into
England the Italian blank verse which was to play so great a part in our
literature. But with the poetic taste of the Renascence Surrey inherited
its wild and reckless energy. Once he was sent to the Fleet for
challenging a gentleman to fight. Release enabled him to join his father
in an expedition against Scotland, but he was no sooner back than the
Londoners complained how at Candlemas the young lord and his comrades
"went out with stone bows at midnight," and how next day "there was
great clamour of the breaking of many glass windows both of houses and
churches, and shooting at men that might be in the streets." In spite of
his humorous excuse that the jest only purposed to bring home to men
that "from justice' rod no fault is free, but that all such as work
unright in most quiet are next unrest," Surrey paid for this outbreak
with a fresh arrest which drove him to find solace in paraphrases of
Ecclesiastes and the Psalms. Soon he was over sea with the English
troops in Flanders, and in 1544 serving as marshal of the camp to
conduct the retreat after the siege of Montreuil. Sent to relieve
Boulogne, he remained in charge of the town till the spring of 1546,
when he returned to England to rime sonnets to a fair Geraldine, the
daughter of the Earl of Kildare, and to plunge into the strife of
factions around the dying king.
[Sidenote: Fall of the Howards.]
All moral bounds had been loosened by the spirit of the Renascence, and,
if we accept the charge of his rivals, Surrey now aimed at gaining a
hold on Henry by offering him his sister as a mistress. It is as
possible that the young Earl was aiming simply at the displacement of
Catharine Parr, and at the renewal by his sister's elevation to the
throne of that matrimonial hold upon Henry which the Howards had already
succeeded in gaining through the unions with Anne Boleyn and Catharine
Howard. But a temper such as Surrey's was ill matched against the subtle
and unscrupulous schemers who saw their enemy in a pride that scorned
the "new men" about him and vowed that when once the king was dead "they
should smart for it." The turn of foreign affairs gave a fresh strength
to the party which sympathized with the Protestants and denounced that
alliance with the Emperor which had been throughout the policy of the
Howards. Henry's offer of aid to the Lutheran princes marked the triumph
of this party in the royal councils; and the new steps which Cranmer was
suffered to make towards an English Liturgy showed that the religious
truce of Henry's later years was at last abandoned. Hertford, the head
of the "new men," came more to the front as the waning health of the
king brought Jane Seymour's boy, Edward, nearer to the throne. In the
new reign Hertford, as the boy's uncle, was sure to play a great part;
and he used his new influence to remove the only effective obstacle to
his future greatness. Surrey's talk of his royal blood, the Duke's
quartering of the royal arms to mark his Plantagenet descent, and some
secret interviews with the French ambassador, were adroitly used to wake
Henry's jealousy of the dangers which might beset the throne of his
child. Norfolk and his son were alike committed to the Tower at the
close of 1546. A month later Surrey was condemned and sent to the block,
and his father was only saved by the sudden death of Henry the Eighth in
January, 1547.
[Sidenote: Hertford made Protector.]
By an Act passed in the Parliament of 1544 it had been provided that the
crown should pass to Henry's son Edward, and on Edward's death without
issue to his sister Mary. Should Mary prove childless it was to go to
Elizabeth, the child of Anne Boleyn. Beyond this point the Houses would
make no provision, but power was given to the king to make further
dispositions by will. At his death it was found that Henry had passed
over the line of his sister Margaret of Scotland, and named as next in
the succession to Elizabeth the daughters of his younger sister Mary by
her marriage with Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. As Edward was but
nine years old Henry had appointed a carefully-balanced Council of
Regency; but the will fell into Hertford's keeping, and when the list of
regents was at last disclosed Gardiner, who had till now been the
leading minister, was declared to have been excluded from the number of
executors. Whether the exclusion was Henry's act or the act of the men
who used his name, the absence of the bishop with the imprisonment of
Norfolk threw the balance of power on the side of the "new men" who were
represented by Hertford and Lisle. Their chief opponent, the Chancellor
Wriothesley, struggled in vain against their next step towards
supremacy, the modification of Henry's will by the nomination of
Hertford as Protector of the realm and governor of Edward's person.
Alleged directions from the dying king served as pretexts for the
elevation of the whole party to higher rank in the state. It was to
repair "the decay of the old English nobility" that Hertford raised
himself to the dukedom of Somerset and his brother to the barony of
Seymour, the queen's brother Lord Parr to the marquisate of Northampton,
Lisle to the earldom of Warwick, Russell to that of Bedford, Wriothesley
to that of Southampton. Ten of their partizans became barons, and as the
number of peers in spite of recent creations still stood at about fifty
such a group constituted a power in the Upper House. Alleged directions
of the king were conveniently remembered to endow the new peers with
public money, though the treasury was beggared and the debt pressing.
The expulsion of Wriothesley from the Chancellorship and Council soon
left the "new men" without a check; but they were hardly masters of the
royal power when a bold stroke of Somerset laid all at his feet. A new
patent of Protectorate, drawn out in the boy-king's name, empowered his
uncle to act with or without the consent of his fellow-executors, and
left him supreme in the realm.
[Sidenote: Somerset and the Protestants.]
Boldly and adroitly as the whole revolution had been managed, it was
none the less a revolution. To crush their opponents the Council had
first used, and then set aside, Henry's will. Hertford in turn by the
use of his nephew's name set aside both the will and the Council. A
country gentleman, who had risen by the accident of his sister's
queenship to high rank at the Court, had thus by sheer intrigue and
self-assertion made himself ruler of the realm. But daring and
self-confident as he was, Somerset was forced by his very elevation to
seek support for the power he had won by this surprise in measures which
marked the retreat of the Monarchy from that position of pure absolutism
which it had reached at the close of Henry's reign. The Statute that had
given to royal proclamations the force of law was repealed, and several
of the new felonies and treasons which Cromwell had created and used
with so terrible an effect were erased from the Statute Book. The
popularity however which such measures won was too vague a force to
serve in the strife of the moment. Against the pressure of the
conservative party who had so suddenly found themselves jockeyed out of
power Somerset and the "new men" could look for no help but from the
Protestants. The hope of their support united with the new Protector's
personal predilections in his patronage of the innovations against which
Henry had battled to the last. Cranmer had now drifted into a purely
Protestant position; and his open break with the older system followed
quickly on Seymour's rise to power. "This year," says a contemporary,
"the Archbishop of Canterbury did eat meat openly in Lent in the Hall of
Lambeth, the like of which was never seen since England was a Christian
country." This notable act was followed by a rapid succession of
sweeping changes. The legal prohibitions of Lollardry were rescinded;
the Six Articles were repealed; a royal injunction removed all pictures
and images from the churches. A formal Statute gave priests the right
to marry. A resolution of Convocation which was confirmed by Parliament
brought about the significant change which first definitely marked the
severance of the English Church in doctrine from the Roman, by ordering
that the sacrament of the altar should be administered in both kinds.
[Sidenote: The Common Prayer.]
A yet more significant change followed. The old tongue of the Church was
now to be disused in public worship. The universal use of Latin had
marked the Catholic and European character of the older religion: the
use of English marked the strictly national and local character of the
new system. In the spring of 1548 a common Communion Service in English
was added to the solitary Mass of the priest; an English book of Common
Prayer, the Liturgy which with slight alterations is still used in the
Church of England, soon replaced the Missal and Breviary from which its
contents are mainly drawn. The name "Common Prayer," which was given to
the new Liturgy, marked its real import. The theory of worship which
prevailed through Mediaeval Christendom, the belief that the worshipper
assisted only at rites wrought for him by priestly hands, at a sacrifice
wrought through priestly intervention, at the offering of prayer and
praise by priestly lips, was now set at naught. "The laity," it has been
picturesquely said, "were called up into the Chancel." The act of
devotion became a "common prayer" of the whole body of worshippers. The
Mass became a "communion" of the whole Christian fellowship. The priest
was no longer the offerer of a mysterious sacrifice, the mediator
between God and the worshipper; he was set on a level with the rest of
the Church, and brought down to be the simple mouthpiece of the
congregation.
[Sidenote: The Triumph of the Emperor.]
What gave a wider importance to these measures was their bearing on the
general politics of Christendom. The adhesion of England to the
Protestant cause came at a moment when Protestantism seemed on the verge
of ruin. The confidence of the Lutheran princes in their ability to
resist the Emperor had been seen in their refusal of succour from Henry
the Eighth. But in the winter of Henry's death the secession of Duke
Maurice of Saxony with many of his colleagues from the League of
Schmalkald so weakened the Protestant body that Charles was able to put
its leaders to the ban of the Empire. Hertford was hardly Protector when
the German princes called loudly for aid; but the fifty thousand crowns
which were secretly sent by the English Council could scarcely have
reached them when in April 1547 Charles surprised their camp at Muhlberg
and routed their whole army. The Elector of Saxony was taken prisoner;
the Landgrave of Hesse surrendered in despair. His victory left Charles
master of the Empire. The jealousy of the Pope indeed at once revived
with the Emperor's success, and his recall of the bishops from Trent
forced Charles to defer his wider plans for enforcing religious unity;
while in Germany itself he was forced to reckon with Duke Maurice and
the Protestant princes who had deserted the League of Schmalkald, but
whose one object in joining the Emperor had been to provide a check on
his after movements. For the moment therefore he was driven to prolong
the religious truce by an arrangement called the "Interim." But the
Emperor's purpose was now clear. Wherever his power was actually felt
the religious reaction began; and the Imperial towns which held firmly
to the Lutheran creed were reduced by force of arms. It was of the
highest moment that in this hour of despair the Protestants saw their
rule suddenly established in a new quarter, and the Lutheranism which
was being trampled under foot in its own home triumphant in England.
England became the common refuge of the panic-struck Protestants. Bucer
and Fagius were sent to lecture at Cambridge, Peter Martyr advocated the
anti-sacramentarian views of Calvin at Oxford. Cranmer welcomed refugees
from every country, Germans, Italians, French, Poles, and Swiss, to his
palace at Lambeth. When persecution broke out in the Low Countries the
fugitive Walloons were received at London and Canterbury, and allowed to
set up in both places their own churches.
[Sidenote: Pinkie Cleugh.]
But Somerset dreamed of a wider triumph for "the religion." On his
death-bed Henry was said to have enforced on the Council the need of
carrying out his policy of a union of Scotland with England through the
marriage of its Queen with his boy. A wise statesmanship would have
suffered the Protestant movement which had been growing stronger in the
northern kingdom since Beaton's death to run quietly its course; and his
colleagues warned Somerset to leave Scotch affairs untouched till Edward
was old enough to undertake them in person. But these counsels were set
aside; and a renewal of the border warfare enforced the Protector's
demands for a closer union of the kingdoms. The jealousy of France was
roused at once, and a French fleet appeared off the Scottish coast to
reduce the castle of St. Andrews, which had been held since Beaton's
death by the English partizans who murdered him. The challenge called
Somerset himself to the field; and crossing the Tweed with a fine army
of eighteen thousand men in the summer of 1547 the Protector pushed
along the coast till he found the Scots encamped behind the Esk on the
slopes of Musselburgh, six miles eastward of Edinburgh. The English
invasion had drawn all the factions of the kingdom together against the
stranger, and a body of "Gospellers" under Lord Angus formed the
advance-guard of the Scotch army as it moved by its right on the tenth
of September to turn the English position and drive Somerset into the
sea. The English horse charged the Scottish front only to be flung off
by its pikemen; but their triumph threw the Lowlanders into disorder,
and as they pushed forward in pursuit their advance was roughly checked
by the fire of a body of Italian musketeers whom Somerset had brought
with him. The check was turned into a defeat by a general charge of the
English line, a fatal panic broke the Scottish host, and ten thousand
men fell in its headlong flight beneath the English lances.
[Sidenote: Somerset's Policy.]
Victor as he was at Pinkie Cleugh, Somerset was soon forced by famine to
fall back from the wasted country. His victory indeed had been more
fatal to the interests of England than a defeat. The Scots in despair
turned as of old to France, and bought its protection by consenting to
the child-queen's marriage with the son of Henry the Second, who had
followed Francis on the throne. In the summer of 1548 Mary Stuart sailed
under the escort of a French fleet and landed safely at Brest. Not only
was the Tudor policy of union foiled, as it seemed, for ever, but
Scotland was henceforth to be a part of the French realm. To north as to
south England would feel the pressure of the French king. Nor was
Somerset's policy more successful at home. The religious changes he was
forcing on the land were carried through with the despotism, if not with
the vigour, of Cromwell. In his acceptance of the personal supremacy of
the sovereign, Gardiner was ready to bow to every change which Henry had
ordered, or which his son, when of age to be fully king, might order in
the days to come. But he denounced all ecclesiastical changes made
during the king's minority as illegal and invalid. Untenable as it was,
this protest probably represented the general mind of Englishmen; but
the bishop was committed by the Council to prison in the Fleet, and
though soon released was sent by the Protector to the Tower. The power
of preaching was restricted by the issue of licences only to the friends
of the Primate. While all counter-arguments were rigidly suppressed, a
crowd of Protestant pamphleteers flooded the country with vehement
invectives against the Mass and its superstitious accompaniments. The
suppression of chauntries and religious gilds which was now being
carried out enabled Somerset to buy the assent of noble and landowner to
his measures by glutting their greed with the last spoils of the Church.
[Sidenote: The Revolts.]
But it was impossible to buy off the general aversion of the people to
the Protector's measures; and German and Italian mercenaries had to be
introduced to stamp out the popular discontent which broke out in the
east, in the west, and in the midland counties. Everywhere men protested
against the new changes and called for the maintenance of the system of
Henry the Eighth. The Cornishmen refused to receive the new service
"because it is like a Christmas game." In 1549 Devonshire demanded by
open revolt the restoration of the Mass and the Six Articles as well as
a partial re-establishment of the suppressed abbeys. The agrarian
discontent woke again in the general disorder. Enclosures and evictions
were going steadily on, and the bitterness of the change was being
heightened by the results of the dissolution of the abbeys. Church lands
had always been underlet, the monks were easy landlords, and on no
estates had the peasantry been as yet so much exempt from the general
revolution in culture. But the new lay masters to whom the abbey lands
fell were quick to reap their full value by a rise of rents and by the
same processes of eviction and enclosure as went on elsewhere. The
distress was deepened by the change in the value of money which was now
beginning to be felt from the mass of gold and silver which the New
World was yielding to the Old, and still more by a general rise of
prices that followed on the debasement of the coinage which had begun
with Henry and went on yet more unscrupulously under Somerset. The
trouble came at last to a head in the manufacturing districts of the
eastern counties. Twenty thousand men gathered round an "oak of
Reformation" near Norwich, and repulsing the royal troops in a desperate
engagement renewed the old cries for a removal of evil counsellors, a
prohibition of enclosures, and redress for the grievances of the poor.
[Sidenote: Somerset's Fall.]
The revolt of the Norfolk men was stamped out in blood by the energy of
Lord Warwick, as the revolt in the west had been put down by Lord
Russell, but the risings had given a fatal blow to Somerset's power. It
had already been weakened by strife within his own family. His brother
Thomas had been created Lord Seymour and raised to the post of Lord High
Admiral; but, glutted as he was with lands and honours, his envy at
Somerset's fortunes broke out in a secret marriage with the
Queen-dowager, Catharine Parr, in an attempt on her death to marry
Elizabeth, and in intrigues to win the confidence of the young king and
detach him from his brother. Seymour's discontent was mounting into open
revolt when in the January of 1549 he was arrested, refused a trial,
attainted, and sent to the block. The stain of a brother's blood,
however justly shed, rested from that hour on Somerset, while the nobles
were estranged from him by his resolve to enforce the laws against
enclosures and evictions, as well as by the weakness he had shown in the
presence of the revolt. Able indeed as Somerset was, his temper was not
that of a ruler of men; and his miserable administration had all but
brought government to a standstill. While he was dreaming of a fresh
invasion of Scotland the treasury was empty, not a servant of the state
was paid, and the soldiers he had engaged on the Continent refused to
cross the Channel in despair of receiving their hire. It was only by
loans raised at ruinous interest that the Protector escaped sheer
bankruptcy when the revolts in east and west came to swell the royal
expenses. His weakness in tampering with the popular demands completed
his ruin. The nobles dreaded a communistic outbreak like that of the
Suabian peasantry, and their dread was justified by prophecies that
monarchy and nobility were alike to be destroyed and a new rule set up
under governors elected by the people. They dreaded yet more the being
forced to disgorge their spoil to appease the discontent. At the close
of 1549 therefore the Council withdrew openly from Somerset, and forced
the Protector to resign.
[Sidenote: Warwick's Protectorate]
His office passed to the Earl of Warwick, to whose ruthless severity the
suppression of the revolt was mainly due. The change of governors
however brought about no change of system. Peace indeed was won from
France by the immediate surrender of Boulogne; but the misgovernment
remained as great as ever, the currency was yet further debased, and a
wild attempt made to remedy the effects of this measure by a royal
fixing of prices. It was in vain that Latimer denounced the prevailing
greed, and bade the Protestant lords choose "either restitution or else
damnation." Their sole aim seemed to be that of building up their own
fortunes at the cost of the State. All pretence of winning popular
sympathy was gone, and the rule of the upstart nobles who formed the
Council of Regency became simply a rule of terror. "The greater part of
the people," one of their creatures, Cecil, avowed, "is not in favour of
defending this cause, but of aiding its adversaries; on that side are
the greater part of the nobles, who absent themselves from Court, all
the bishops save three or four, almost all the judges and lawyers,
almost all the justices of the peace, the priests who can move their
flocks any way, for the whole of the commonalty is in such a state of
irritation that it will easily follow any stir towards change." But
united as it was in its opposition the nation was helpless. The system
of despotism which Cromwell built up had been seized by a knot of
adventurers, and with German and Italian mercenaries at their disposal
they rode roughshod over the land.
[Sidenote: The Reformation]
At such a moment it seemed madness to provoke foes abroad as well as at
home, but the fanaticism of the young king was resolved to force on his
sister Mary a compliance with the new changes, and her resistance was
soon backed by the remonstrances of her cousin, the Emperor. Charles was
now at the height of his power, master of Germany, preparing to make the
Empire hereditary in the person of his son, Philip, and preluding a
wider effort to suppress heresy throughout the world by the
establishment of the Inquisition in the Netherlands and a fiery
persecution which drove thousands of Walloon heretics to find a refuge
in England. But heedless of dangers from without or of dangers from
within Cranmer and his colleagues advanced more boldly than ever in the
career of innovation. Four prelates who adhered to the older system were
deprived of their sees and committed on frivolous pretexts to the Tower.
A new Catechism embodied the doctrines of the reformers, and a book of
Homilies which enforced the chief Protestant tenets was ordered to be
read in churches. A crowning defiance was given to the doctrine of the
Mass by an order to demolish the stone altars and replace them by wooden
tables, which were stationed for the most part in the middle of the
church. In 1552 a revised Prayer Book was issued, and every change made
in it leaned directly towards the extreme Protestantism which was at
this time finding a home at Geneva. On the cardinal point of difference,
the question of the sacrament, the new formularies broke away not only
from the doctrine of Rome but from that of Luther, and embodied the
anti-sacramentarian tenets of Zwingli and Calvin. Forty-two Articles of
Religion were introduced; and though since reduced by omissions to
thirty-nine these have remained to this day the formal standard of
doctrine in the English Church. Like the Prayer Book, they were mainly
the work of Cranmer; and belonging as they did to the class of
Confessions which were now being framed in Germany to be presented to
the Council of Christendom which Charles was still resolute to
reassemble, they marked the adhesion of England to the Protestant
movement on the Continent. Even the episcopal mode of government which
still connected the English Church with the old Catholic Communion was
reduced to a form; in Cranmer's mind the spiritual powers of the bishops
were drawn simply from the king's commission as their temporal
jurisdiction was exercised in the king's name. They were reduced
therefore to the position of royal officers, and called to hold their
offices simply at the royal pleasure. The sufferings of the Protestants
had failed to teach them the worth of religious liberty; and a new code
of ecclesiastical laws, which was ordered to be drawn up by a board of
Commissioners as a substitute for the Canon Law of the Catholic Church,
although it shrank from the penalty of death, attached that of perpetual
imprisonment or exile to the crimes of heresy, blasphemy, and adultery,
and declared excommunication to involve a severance of the offender from
the mercy of God and his deliverance into the tyranny of the devil.
Delays in the completion of this Code prevented its legal establishment
during Edward's reign; but the use of the new Liturgy and attendance at
the new service were enforced by imprisonment, and subscription to the
Articles of Faith was demanded by royal authority from all clergymen,
churchwardens, and schoolmasters.
[Sidenote: The Religious Disorder.]
The distaste for changes so hurried and so rigorously enforced was
increased by the daring speculations of the more extreme Protestants.
The real value of the religious revolution of the sixteenth century to
mankind lay, not in its substitution of one creed for another, but in
the new spirit of enquiry, the new freedom of thought and of discussion,
which was awakened during the process of change. But however familiar
such a truth may be to us, it was absolutely hidden from the England of
the time. Men heard with horror that the foundations of faith and
morality were questioned, polygamy advocated, oaths denounced as
unlawful, community of goods raised into a sacred obligation, the very
Godhead of the Founder of Christianity denied. The repeal of the Statute
of Heresy left indeed the powers of the Common Law intact, and Cranmer
availed himself of these to send heretics of the last class without
mercy to the stake. But within the Church itself the Primate's desire
for uniformity was roughly resisted by the more ardent members of his
own party. Hooper, who had been named Bishop of Gloucester, refused to
wear the episcopal habits, and denounced them as the livery of the
"harlot of Babylon," a name for the Papacy which was supposed to have
been discovered in the Apocalypse. Ecclesiastical order came almost to
an end. Priests flung aside the surplice as superstitious. Patrons of
livings presented their huntsmen or gamekeepers to the benefices in
their gift, and kept the stipend. All teaching of divinity ceased at the
Universities: the students indeed had fallen off in numbers, the
libraries were in part scattered or burned, the intellectual impulse of
the New Learning died away. One noble measure indeed, the foundation of
eighteen Grammar Schools, was destined to throw a lustre over the name
of Edward, but it had no time to bear fruit in his reign.
[Sidenote: Ireland and the Reformation]
While the reckless energy of the reformers brought England to the verge
of chaos, it brought Ireland to the brink of rebellion. The fall of
Cromwell had been followed by a long respite in the religious changes
which he was forcing on the conquered dependency; but with the accession
of Edward the Sixth the system of change was renewed with all the energy
of Protestant zeal. In 1551 the bishops were summoned before the deputy,
Sir Anthony St. Leger, to receive the new English Liturgy which, though
written in a tongue as strange to the native Irish as Latin itself, was
now to supersede the Latin service-book in every diocese. The order was
the signal for an open strife. "Now shall every illiterate fellow read
mass," burst forth Dowdall, the Archbishop of Armagh, as he flung out of
the chamber with all but one of his suffragans at his heels. Archbishop
Browne of Dublin on the other hand was followed in his profession of
obedience by the Bishops of Meath, Limerick, and Kildare. The
government however was far from quailing before the division of the
episcopate. Dowdall was driven from the country; and the vacant sees
were filled with Protestants, like Bale, of the most advanced type. But
no change could be wrought by measures such as these in the opinions of
the people themselves. The new episcopal reformers spoke no Irish, and
of their English sermons not a word was understood by the rude kernes
around the pulpit. The native priests remained silent. "As for preaching
we have none," reports a zealous Protestant, "without which the ignorant
can have no knowledge." The prelates who used the new Prayer Book were
simply regarded as heretics. The Bishop of Meath was assured by one of
his flock that, "if the country wist how, they would eat you."
Protestantism had failed to wrest a single Irishman from his older
convictions, but it succeeded in uniting all Ireland against the Crown.
The old political distinctions which had been produced by the conquest
of Strongbow faded before the new struggle for a common faith. The
population within the Pale and without it became one, "not as the Irish
nation," it has been acutely said, "but as Catholics." A new sense of
national identity was found in the identity of religion. "Both English
and Irish begin to oppose your Lordship's orders," Browne had written to
Cromwell at the very outset of these changes, "and to lay aside their
national old quarrels."
[Sidenote: The Peace of Passau.]
Oversea indeed the perils of the new government passed suddenly away.
Charles had backed Mary's resistance with threats, and as he moved
forward to that mastery of the world to which he confidently looked his
threats might any day become serious dangers. But the peace with England
had set the French government free to act in Germany, and it found
allies in the great middle party of princes whose secession from the
League of Schmalkald had seemed to bring ruin to the Protestant cause.
The aim of Duke Maurice in bringing them to desert the League had been
to tie the Emperor's hands by the very fact of their joining him, and
for a while this policy had been successful. But the death of Paul the
Third, whose jealousy had till now foiled the Emperor's plans, and the
accession of an Imperial nominee to the Papal throne, enabled Charles to
move more boldly to his ends, and at the close of 1551 a fresh assembly
of the Council at Trent, and an Imperial summons of the Lutheran powers
to send divines to its sessions and to submit to its decisions, brought
matters to an issue. Maurice was forced to accept the aid of the
stranger and to conclude a secret treaty with France. He was engaged as
a general of Charles in the siege of Magdeburg; but in the spring of
1552 the army he had then at command was suddenly marched to the south,
and through the passes of the Tyrol the Duke moved straight on the
Imperial camp at Innspruck. Charles was forced to flee for very life
while the Council at Trent broke hastily up, and in a few months the
whole Imperial design was in ruin. Henry the Second was already moving
on the Rhine; to meet the French king Charles was forced to come to
terms with the Lutheran princes; and his signature in the summer of a
Treaty at Passau secured to their states the free exercise of the
reformed religion and gave the Protestant princes their due weight in
the tribunals of the empire.
[Sidenote: The Protestant Misrule.]
The humiliation of the Emperor, the fierce warfare which now engaged
both his forces and those of France, removed from England the danger of
outer interference. But within the misrule went recklessly on. All that
men saw was a religious and political chaos, in which ecclesiastical
order had perished and in which politics were dying down into the
squabbles of a knot of nobles over the spoils of the Church and the
Crown. Not content with Somerset's degradation, the Council charged him
in 1551 with treason, and sent him to the block. Honours and lands were
lavished as ever on themselves and their adherents. Warwick became Duke
of Northumberland, Lord Dorset was made Duke of Suffolk, Paulet rose to
the Marquisate of Winchester, Sir William Herbert was created Earl of
Pembroke. The plunder of the chauntries and the gilds failed to glut
the appetite of this crew of spoilers. Half the lands of every see were
flung to them in vain; an attempt was made to satisfy their greed by a
suppression of the wealthy see of Durham; and the whole endowments of
the Church were threatened with confiscation. But while the courtiers
gorged themselves with manors, the Treasury grew poorer. The coinage was
again debased. Crown lands to the value of five millions of our modern
money had been granted away to the friends of Somerset and Warwick. The
royal expenditure mounted in seventeen years to more than four times its
previous total. In spite of the brutality and bloodshed with which
revolt had been suppressed, and of the foreign soldiery on whom the
Council relied, there were signs of resistance which would have made
less reckless statesmen pause. The temper of the Parliament had drifted
far from the slavish subservience which it showed at the close of
Henry's reign. The House of Commons met Northumberland's project for the
pillage of the bishoprick of Durham with opposition, and rejected a new
treason bill. In 1552 the Duke was compelled to force nominees of his
own on the constituencies by writs from the Council before he could
count on a House to his mind. Such writs had been often issued since the
days of Henry the Seventh; but the ministers of Edward were driven to
an expedient which shows how rapidly the temper of independence was
growing. The summons of new members from places hitherto unrepresented
was among the prerogatives of the Crown, and the Protectorate used this
power to issue writs to small villages in the west which could be
trusted to return members to its mind.
[Sidenote: Edward the Sixth.]
This "packing of Parliament" was to be largely extended in the following
reigns; but it passed as yet with little comment. What really kept
England quiet was a trust that the young king, who would be of age in
two or three years, would then set all things right again. "When he
comes of age," said a Hampshire squire, "he will see another rule, and
hang up a hundred heretic knaves." Edward's temper was as lordly as that
of his father, and had he once really reigned he would probably have
dealt as roughly with the plunderers who had used his name as England
hoped. But he was a fanatical Protestant, and his rule would almost
certainly have forced on a religious strife as bitter and disastrous as
the strife which broke the strength of Germany and France. From this
calamity the country was saved by his waning health. Edward was now
fifteen, but in the opening of 1553 the signs of coming death became too
clear for Northumberland and his fellows to mistake them. By the Statute
of the Succession the death of the young king would bring Mary to the
throne; and as Mary was known to have refused acceptance of all changes
in her father's system, and was looked on as anxious only to restore it,
her accession became a subject of national hope. But to Northumberland
and his fellows her succession was fatal. They had personally outraged
Mary by their attempts to force her into compliance with their system.
Her first act would be to free Norfolk and the bishops whom they held
prisoners in the Tower, and to set these bitter enemies in power. With
ruin before them the Protestant lords were ready for a fresh revolution;
and the bigotry of the young king fell in with their plans.
[Sidenote: Edward's Will.]
In his zeal for "the religion," and in his absolute faith in his royal
autocracy, Edward was ready to override will and statute and to set
Mary's rights aside. In such a case the crown fell legally to Elizabeth,
the daughter of Anne Boleyn, who had been placed by the Act next in
succession to Mary, and whose training under Catharine Parr and the
Seymours gave good hopes of her Protestant sympathies. The cause of
Elizabeth would have united the whole of the "new men" in its defence,
and might have proved a formidable difficulty in Mary's way. But for the
maintenance of his personal power Northumberland could as little count
on Elizabeth as on Mary; and in Edward's death the Duke saw a chance of
raising, if not himself, at any rate his own blood to the throne. He
persuaded the young king that he possessed as great a right as his
father to settle the succession of the Crown by will. Henry had passed
by the children of his sister Margaret of Scotland, and had placed next
to Elizabeth in the succession the children of his younger sister Mary,
the wife of Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk. Frances, Mary's child
by this marriage, was still living, the mother of three daughters by her
marriage with Grey, Lord Dorset, a hot partizan of the religious
changes, who had been raised under the Protectorate to the Dukedom of
Suffolk. Frances was a woman of thirty-seven; but her accession to the
Crown squared as little with Northumberland's plans as that of Mary or
Elizabeth. In the will therefore which the young king drew up Edward was
brought to pass over Frances, and to name as his successor her eldest
daughter, the Lady Jane Grey. The marriage of Jane Grey with Guildford
Dudley, the fourth son of Northumberland, was all that was needed to
complete the unscrupulous plot. It was the celebration of this marriage
in May which first woke a public suspicion of the existence of such
designs, and the general murmur which followed on the suspicion might
have warned the Duke of his danger. But the secret was closely kept, and
it was only in June that Edward's "plan" was laid in the same strict
secrecy before Northumberland's colleagues. A project which raised the
Duke into a virtual sovereignty over the realm could hardly fail to stir
resistance in the Council. The king however was resolute, and his will
was used to set aside all scruples. The judges who represented that
letters patent could not override a positive statute were forced into
signing their assent by Edward's express command. To their signatures
were added those of the whole Council with Cranmer at its head. The
primate indeed remonstrated, but his remonstrances proved as fruitless
as those of his fellow-councillors.
[Sidenote: Fall of Northumberland.]
The deed was hardly done when on the sixth of July the young king passed
away. Northumberland felt little anxiety about the success of his
design. He had won over Lord Hastings to his support by giving him his
daughter in marriage, and had secured the help of Lord Pembroke by
wedding Jane's sister, Catharine, to his son. The army, the fortresses,
the foreign soldiers, were at his command; the hotter Protestants were
with him; France, in dread of Mary's kinship with the Emperor, offered
support to his plans. Jane therefore was at once proclaimed Queen on
Edward's death, and accepted as their sovereign by the Lords of the
Council. But the temper of the whole people rebelled against so lawless
a usurpation. The eastern counties rose as one man to support Mary; and
when Northumberland marched from London with ten thousand at his back
to crush the rising, the Londoners, Protestant as they were, showed
their ill-will by a stubborn silence. "The people crowd to look upon
us," the Duke noted gloomily, "but not one calls 'God speed ye.'" While
he halted for reinforcements his own colleagues struck him down. Eager
to throw from their necks the yoke of a rival who had made himself a
master, the Council no sooner saw the popular reaction than they
proclaimed Mary Queen; and this step was at once followed by a
declaration of the fleet in her favour, and by the announcement of the
levies in every shire that they would only fight in her cause. As the
tidings reached him the Duke's courage suddenly gave way. His retreat to
Cambridge was the signal for a general defection. Northumberland himself
threw his cap into the air and shouted with his men for Queen Mary. But
his submission failed to avert his doom; and the death of the Duke drew
with it the imprisonment in the Tower of the hapless girl whom he had
made the tool of his ambition.