CHAPTER II

THE CATHOLIC REACTION

1553-1558

[Sidenote: Mary and the Monarchy.]

The triumph of Mary was a fatal blow at the system of despotism which

Henry the Eighth had established. It was a system that rested not so

much on the actual strength possessed by the Crown as on the absence of

any effective forces of resistance. At Henry's death the one force of

opposition which had developed itself was that of the Protestants, but

whether in numbers or political weight the Protestants were as yet of

small consequence, and their resistance did little to break the general

drift of both nation and king. For great as were the changes which Henry

had wrought in the severance of England from the Papacy and the

establishment of the ecclesiastical supremacy of the Crown, they were

wrought with fair assent from the people at large; and when once the

discontent roused by Cromwell's violence had been appeased by his fall

England as a whole acquiesced in the conservative system of the king.

This national union however was broken by the Protectorate. At the

moment when it had reached its height the royal authority was seized by

a knot of nobles and recklessly used to further the revolutionary

projects of a small minority of the people. From the hour of this

revolution a new impulse was given to resistance. The older nobility,

the bulk of the gentry, the wealthier merchants, the great mass of the

people, found themselves thrown by the very instinct of conservatism

into opposition to the Crown. It was only by foreign hirelings that

revolt was suppressed; it was only by a reckless abuse of the system of

packing the Houses that Parliament could be held in check. At last the

Government ventured on an open defiance of law; and a statute of the

realm was set aside at the imperious bidding of a boy of fifteen. Master

of the royal forces, wielding at his will the royal authority,

Northumberland used the voice of the dying Edward to set aside rights of

succession as sacred as his own. But the attempt proved an utter

failure. The very forces on which the Duke relied turned against him.

The whole nation fronted him in arms. The sovereign whom the voice of

the young king named as his successor passed from the throne to the

Tower, and a sovereign whose title rested on parliamentary statute took

her place.

[Sidenote: The religious reaction.]

At the opening of August Mary entered London in triumph. Short and thin

in figure, with a face drawn and colourless that told of constant

ill-health, there was little in the outer seeming of the new queen to

recall her father; but her hard, bright eyes, her manlike voice, her

fearlessness and self-will, told of her Tudor blood, as her skill in

music, her knowledge of languages, her love of learning, spoke of the

culture and refinement of Henry's Court. Though Mary was thirty-seven

years old, the strict retirement in which she had lived had left her as

ignorant of the actual temper of England as England was ignorant of her

own. She had founded her resistance to the changes of the Protectorate

on a resolve to adhere to her father's system till her brother came of

age to rule, and England believed her to be longing like itself simply

for a restoration of what Henry had left. The belief was confirmed by

her earlier actions. The changes of the Protectorate were treated as

null and void. Gardiner, Henry's minister, was drawn from the Tower to

take the lead as Chancellor at the Queen's Council-board. Bonner and the

deposed bishops were restored to their sees. Ridley with the others who

had displaced them was again expelled. Latimer, as a representative of

the extreme Protestants, was sent to the Tower; and the foreign

refugees, as anti-sacramentarians, were ordered to leave England. On an

indignant protest from Cranmer against reports that he was ready to

abandon the new reforms the Archbishop was sent for his seditious

demeanour to the Tower, and soon put on his trial for treason with Lady

Jane Grey, her husband, and two of his brothers. Each pleaded guilty;

but no attempt was made to carry out the sentence of death. In all this

England went with the Queen. The popular enthusiasm hardly waited in

fact for the orders of the Government. The whole system which had been

pursued during Edward's reign fell with a sudden crash. London indeed

retained much of its Protestant sympathy, but over the rest of the

country the tide of reaction swept without a check. The married priests

were driven from their churches, the images were replaced. In many

parishes the new Prayer Book was set aside and the mass restored. The

Parliament which met in October annulled the laws made respecting

religion during the past reign, and re-established the form of service

as used in the last year of Henry the Eighth.

[Sidenote: Mary's aim.]

Up to this point the temper of England went fairly with that of the

Queen. But there were from the first signs of a radical difference

between the aim of Mary and that of her people. With the restoration of

her father's system the nation as a whole was satisfied. Mary on the

other hand looked on such a restoration simply as a step towards a

complete revival of the system which Henry had done away. Through long

years of suffering and peril her fanaticism had been patiently brooding

over the hope of restoring to England its older religion. She believed,

as she said at a later time to the Parliament, that "she had been

predestined and preserved by God to the succession of the Crown for no

other end save that He might make use of her above all else in the

bringing back of the realm to the Catholic faith." Her zeal however was

checked by the fact that she stood almost alone in her aim, as well as

by cautious advice from her cousin, the Emperor; and she assured the

Londoners that "albeit her own conscience was stayed in matters of

religion, yet she meant not to compel or strain men's consciences

otherwise than God should, as she trusted, put in their hearts a

persuasion of the truth that she was in, through the opening of his word

unto them by godly, and virtuous, and learned preachers." She had in

fact not ventured as yet to refuse the title of "Head of the Church next

under God" or to disclaim the powers which the Act of Supremacy gave

her; on the contrary she used these powers in the regulation of

preaching as her father had used them. The strenuous resistance with

which her proposal to set aside the new Prayer Book was met in

Parliament warned her of the difficulties that awaited any projects of

radical change. The proposal was carried, but only after a hot conflict

which lasted over six days and which left a third of the Lower House

still opposed to it. Their opposition by no means implied approval of

the whole series of religious changes of which the Prayer Book formed a

part, for the more moderate Catholics were pleading at this time for

prayers in the vulgar tongue, and on this question followers of More and

Colet might have voted with the followers of Cranmer. But it showed how

far men's minds were from any spirit of blind reaction or blind

compliance with the royal will.

[Sidenote: The Spanish Marriage.]

The temper of the Parliament indeed was very different from that of the

Houses which had knelt before Henry the Eighth. If it consented to

repeal the enactment which rendered her mother's marriage invalid and to

declare Mary "born in lawful matrimony," it secured the abolition of all

the new treasons and felonies created in the two last reigns. The demand

for their abolition showed that jealousy of the growth of civil tyranny

had now spread from the minds of philosophers like More to the minds of

common Englishmen. Still keener was the jealousy of any marked

revolution in the religious system which Henry had established. The wish

to return to the obedience of Rome lingered indeed among some of the

clergy and in the northern shires. But elsewhere the system of a

national Church was popular, and it was backed by the existence of a

large and influential class who had been enriched by the abbey lands.

Forty thousand families had profited by the spoil, and watched anxiously

any approach of danger to their new possessions, such as submission to

the Papacy was likely to bring about. On such a submission however Mary

was resolved: and it was to gain strength for such a step that she

determined to seek a husband from her mother's house. The policy of

Ferdinand of Aragon, so long held at bay by adverse fortune, was now to

find its complete fulfilment. To one line of the house of Austria, that

of Charles the Fifth, had fallen not only the Imperial Crown but the

great heritage of Burgundy, Aragon, Naples, Castille, and the Castillian

dependencies in the New World. To a second, that of the Emperor's

brother Ferdinand, had fallen the Austrian duchies, Bohemia and Hungary.

The marriage of Catharine was now, as it seemed, to bear its fruits by

the union of Mary with a son of Charles, and the placing a third

Austrian line upon the throne of England. The gigantic scheme of

bringing all western Europe together under the rule of a single family

seemed at last to draw to its realization.

[Sidenote: Its political grounds.]

It was no doubt from political as well as religious motives that Mary

set her heart on this union. Her rejection of Gardiner's proposal that

she should marry the young Courtenay, Earl of Devon, a son of the

Marquis of Exeter whom Henry had beheaded, the resolve which she

expressed to wed "no subject, no Englishman," was founded in part on

the danger to her throne from the pretensions of Mary Stuart, whose

adherents cared little for the exclusion of the Scotch line from the

succession by Henry's will and already alleged the illegitimate births

of both Mary Tudor and Elizabeth through the annulling of their mothers'

marriages as a ground for denying their right to the throne. Such claims

became doubly formidable through the marriage of Mary Stuart with the

heir of the French Crown, and the virtual union of both Scotland and

France in this claimant's hands. It was only to Charles that the Queen

could look for aid against such a pressure as this, and Charles was

forced to give her aid. His old dreams of a mastery of the world had

faded away before the stern realities of the Peace of Passau and his

repulse from the walls of Metz. His hold over the Empire was broken.

France was more formidable than ever. To crown his difficulties the

growth of heresy and of the spirit of independence in the Netherlands

threatened to rob him of the finest part of the Burgundian heritage.

With Mary Stuart once on the English throne, and the great island of the

west knit to the French monarchy, the balance of power would be utterly

overthrown, the Low Countries lost, and the Imperial Crown, as it could

hardly be doubted, reft from the house of Austria. He was quick

therefore to welcome the Queen's advances, and to offer his son Philip,

who though not yet twenty-six was already a widower, as a candidate for

her hand.

[Sidenote: Opposition of Parliament.]

The offer came weighted with a heavy bribe. The keen foresight of the

Emperor already saw the difficulty of holding the Netherlands in union

with the Spanish monarchy; and while Spain, Naples, and Franche Comte

descended to Philip's eldest son, Charles promised the heritage of the

Low Countries with England to the issue of Philip and Mary. He accepted

too the demand of Gardiner and the Council that in the event of such a

union England should preserve complete independence both of policy and

action. In any case the marriage would save England from the grasp of

France, and restore it, as the Emperor hinted, to the obedience of the

Church. But the project was hardly declared when it was met by an

outburst of popular indignation. Gardiner himself was against a union

that would annul the national independence which had till now been the

aim of Tudor policy, and that would drag England helplessly in the wake

of the House of Austria. The mass of conservative Englishmen shrank from

the religious aspects of the marriage. For the Emperor had now ceased to

be an object of hope or confidence as a mediator who would at once

purify the Church from abuses, and restore the unity of Christendom; he

had ranged himself definitely on the side of the Papacy and of the

Council of Trent; and the cruelties of the Inquisition which he had

introduced into Flanders gave a terrible indication of the bigotry

which he was to bequeath to his House. The marriage with Philip meant,

it could hardly be doubted, a submission to the Papacy, and an undoing

not only of the religious changes of Edward but of the whole system of

Henry. Loyal and conservative as was the temper of the Parliament, it

was at one in its opposition to a Spanish marriage and in the request

which it made through a deputation of its members to the Queen that she

would marry an Englishman. The request was a new step forward on the

part of the Houses to the recovery of their older rights. Already called

by Cromwell's policy to more than their old power in ecclesiastical

matters, their dread of revolutionary change pushed them to an

intervention in matters of state. Mary noted the advance with all a

Tudor's jealousy. She interrupted the speaker; she rebuked the

Parliament for taking too much on itself; she declared she would take

counsel on such a matter "with God and with none other." But the

remonstrance had been made, the interference was to serve as a precedent

in the reign to come, and a fresh proof had been given that Parliament

was no longer the slavish tool of the Crown.

[Sidenote: Wyatt's rising.]

But while the nation grumbled and the Parliament remonstrated, one party

in the realm was filled with absolute panic by the news of the Spanish

match. The Protestants saw in the marriage not only the final overthrow

of their religious hopes, but a close of the religious truce, and an

opening of persecution. The general opposition to the match, with the

dread of the holders of Church lands that their possessions were in

danger, encouraged the more violent to plan a rising; and France,

naturally jealous of an increase of power by its great opponent,

promised to support them by an incursion from Scotland and an attack on

Calais. The real aim of the rebellion was, no doubt, the displacement of

Mary, and the setting either of Jane Grey, or, as the bulk of the

Protestants desired, of Elizabeth, on the throne. But these hopes were

cautiously hidden; and the conspirators declared their aim to be that of

freeing the Queen from evil counsellors, and of preventing her union

with the Prince of Spain. The plan combined three simultaneous outbreaks

of revolt. Sir Peter Carew engaged to raise the west, the Duke of

Suffolk to call the midland counties to arms, while Sir Thomas Wyatt led

the Kentishmen on London. The rising was planned for the spring of 1554.

But the vigilance of the Government drove it to a premature explosion in

January, and baffled it in the centre and the west. Carew fled to

France; Suffolk, who appeared in arms at Leicester, found small response

from the people, and was soon sent prisoner to the Tower. The Kentish

rising however proved a more formidable danger. A cry that the Spaniards

were coming "to conquer the realm" drew thousands to Wyatt's standard.

The ships in the Thames submitted to be seized by the insurgents. A

party of the train-bands of London, who marched with the royal guard

under the old Duke of Norfolk against them, deserted to the rebels in a

mass with shouts of "A Wyatt! a Wyatt! we are all Englishmen!"

[Sidenote: Its failure.]

Had the Kentishmen moved quickly on the capital, its gates would have

been flung open and success would have been assured. But at the critical

moment Mary was saved by her queenly courage. Riding boldly to the

Guildhall she appealed with "a man's voice" to the loyalty of the

citizens, and denounced the declaration of Wyatt's followers as "a

Spanish cloak to cover their purpose against our religion." She pledged

herself, "on the word of a Queen, that if it shall not probably appear

to all the nobility and commons in the high court of Parliament that

this marriage shall be for the high benefit and commodity of all the

whole realm, then will I abstain from marriage while I live." The pledge

was a momentous one, for it owned the very claim of the two Houses which

the Queen had till now haughtily rejected; and with the remonstrance of

the Parliament still fresh in their ears the Londoners may well have

believed that the marriage-project would come quietly to an end. The

dread too of any change in religion by the return of the violent

Protestantism of Edward's day could hardly fail to win Mary support

among the citizens. The mayor answered for their loyalty, and when Wyatt

appeared on the Southwark bank the bridge was secured against him. But

the rebel leader knew that the issue of the revolt hung on the question

which side London would take, and that a large part of the Londoners

favoured his cause. Marching therefore up the Thames he seized a bridge

at Kingston, threw his force across the river, and turned rapidly back

on the capital. But a night march along miry roads wearied and

disorganized his men; the bulk of them were cut off from their leader by

a royal force which had gathered in the fields at what is now Hyde Park

Corner, and only Wyatt himself with a handful of followers pushed

desperately on past the palace of St. James, whence the Queen refused to

fly even while the rebels were marching beneath its walls, along the

Strand to Ludgate. "I have kept touch," he cried as he sank exhausted at

the gate. But it was closed: his adherents within were powerless to

effect their promised diversion in his favour; and as he fell back the

daring leader was surrounded at Temple Bar and sent to the Tower.

[Sidenote: The marriage.]

The failure of the revolt was fatal to the girl whom part at least of

the rebels would have placed on the throne. Lady Jane Grey, who had till

now been spared and treated with great leniency, was sent to the block;

and her father, her husband, and her uncle, atoned for the ambition of

the House of Suffolk by the death of traitors. Wyatt and his chief

adherents followed them to execution, while the bodies of the poorer

insurgents were dangling on gibbets round London. Elizabeth, who had

with some reason been suspected of complicity in the insurrection, was

sent to the Tower; and only saved from death by the interposition of the

Council. The leading Protestants fled in terror over sea. But the

failure of the revolt did more than crush the Protestant party; it

enabled the Queen to lay aside the mask of moderation which had been

forced on her by the earlier difficulties of her reign. An order for the

expulsion of all married clergy from their cures, with the deprivation

of nine bishops who had been appointed during the Protectorate and who

represented its religious tendencies, proved the Queen's resolve to

enter boldly on a course of reaction. Her victory secured the Spanish

marriage. It was to prevent Philip's union with Mary that Wyatt had

risen, and with his overthrow the Queen's policy stood triumphant. The

whole strength of the conservative opposition was lost when opposition

could be branded as disloyalty. Mary too was true to the pledge she had

given that the match should only be brought about with the assent of

Parliament. But pressure was unscrupulously used to secure compliant

members in the new elections, and a reluctant assent to the marriage was

wrung from the Houses when they assembled in the spring. Philip was

created king of Naples by his father to give dignity to his union; and

in the following July Mary met him at Winchester and became his wife.

[Sidenote: Philip.]

As he entered London with the Queen, men noted curiously the look of the

young king whose fortunes were to be so closely linked with those of

England for fifty years to come. Far younger than his bride, for he was

but twenty-six, there was little of youth in the small and fragile

frame, the sickly face, the sedentary habits, the Spanish silence and

reserve, which estranged Englishmen from Philip as they had already

estranged his subjects in Italy and his future subjects in the

Netherlands. Here however he sought by an unusual pleasantness of

demeanour as well as by profuse distributions of gifts to win the

national goodwill, for it was only by winning it that he could

accomplish the work he came to do. His first aim was to reconcile

England with the Church. The new Spanish marriage was to repair the harm

which the earlier Spanish marriage had brought about by securing that

submission to Rome on which Mary was resolved. Even before Philip's

landing in England the great obstacle to reunion had been removed by the

consent of Julius the Third under pressure from the Emperor to waive the

restoration of the Church lands in the event of England's return to

obedience. Other and almost as great obstacles indeed seemed to remain.

The temper of the nation had gone with Henry in his rejection of the

Papal jurisdiction. Mary's counsellors had been foremost among the men

who advocated the change. Her minister, Bishop Gardiner, seemed pledged

to oppose any submission to Rome. As secretary of state after Wolsey's

fall he had taken a prominent part in the measures which brought about a

severance between England and the Papacy; as Bishop of Winchester he had

written a famous tract "On True Obedience" in which the Papal supremacy

had been expressly repudiated; and to the end of Henry's days he had

been looked upon as the leading advocate of the system of a national and

independent Church. Nor had his attitude changed in Edward's reign. In

the process for his deprivation he avowed himself ready as ever to

maintain as well "the supremacy and supreme authority of the king's

majesty that now is as the abolishing of the usurped power of the Bishop

of Rome."

[Sidenote: The submission to Rome.]

But with the later changes of the Protectorate Gardiner had seen his

dream of a national yet orthodox Church vanish away. He had seen how

inevitably severance from Rome drew with it a connexion with the

Protestant Churches and a repudiation of Catholic belief. In the hours

of imprisonment his mind fell back on the old ecclesiastical order with

which the old spiritual order seemed inextricably entwined, and he was

ready now to submit to the Papacy as the one means of preserving the

faith to which he clung. His attitude was of the highest significance,

for Gardiner more than any one was a representative of the dominant

English opinion of his day. As the moderate party which had supported

the policy of Henry the Eighth saw its hopes disappear, it ranged

itself, like the Bishop, on the side of a unity which could now only be

brought about by reconciliation with Rome. The effort of the Protestants

in Wyatt's insurrection to regain their power and revive the system of

the Protectorate served only to give a fresh impulse to this drift of

conservative opinion. Mary therefore found little opposition to her

plans. The peers were won over by Philip through the pensions he

lavished among them, while pressure was unscrupulously used by the

Council to secure a compliant House of Commons. When the Parliament met

in November these measures were found to have been successful. The

attainder of Reginald Pole, who had been appointed by the Pope to

receive the submission of the realm, was reversed; and the Legate

entered London by the river with his cross gleaming from the prow of his

barge. He was solemnly welcomed in full Parliament. The two Houses

decided by a formal vote to return to the obedience of the Papal See; on

the assurance of Pole in the Pope's name that holders of Church lands

should not be disturbed in their possession the statutes abolishing

Papal jurisdiction in England were repealed; and Lords and Commons

received on their knees an absolution which freed the realm from the

guilt incurred by its schism and heresy.

[Sidenote: Mary's difficulties.]

But, even in the hour of her triumph, the temper both of Parliament and

the nation warned the Queen of the failure of her hope to bind England

to a purely Catholic policy. The growing independence of the two Houses

was seen in the impossibility of procuring from them any change in the

order of succession. The victory of Rome was incomplete so long as its

right of dispensation was implicitly denied by a recognition of

Elizabeth's legitimacy, and Mary longed to avenge her mother by humbling

the child of Anne Boleyn. But in spite of Pole's efforts and the Queen's

support a proposal to oust her sister from the line of succession could

not even be submitted to the Houses, nor could their assent be won to

the postponing the succession of Elizabeth to that of Philip. The temper

of the nation at large was equally decided. In the first Parliament of

Mary a proposal to renew the laws against heresy had been thrown out by

the Lords, even after the failure of Wyatt's insurrection. Philip's

influence secured the re-enactment of the statute of Henry the Fourth in

the Parliament which followed his arrival; but the sullen discontent of

London compelled its Bishop, Bonner, to withdraw a series of articles of

enquiry, by which he hoped to purge his diocese of heresy, and even the

Council was divided on the question of persecution. In the very

interests of Catholicism the Emperor himself counselled prudence and

delay. Philip gave the same counsel. From the moment of his arrival the

young king exercised a powerful influence over the Government, and he

was gradually drawing into his hands the whole direction of affairs.

But, bigot as he was in matters of faith, Philip's temper was that of a

statesman, not of a fanatic. If he came to England resolute to win the

country to union with the Church, his conciliatory policy was already

seen in the concessions he wrested from the Papacy in the matter of the

Church lands, and his aim was rather to hold England together and to

give time for a reaction of opinion than to revive the old discord by

any measures of severity. It was indeed only from a united and contented

England that he could hope for effective aid in the struggle of his

house with France, and in spite of his pledges Philip's one aim in

marrying Mary was to secure that aid.

[Sidenote: The persecution.]

But whether from without or from within warning was wasted on the fierce

bigotry of the Queen. It was, as Gardiner asserted, not at the counsel

of her ministers but by her own personal will that the laws against

heresy had been laid before Parliament; and now that they were enacted

Mary pressed for their execution. Her resolve was probably quickened by

the action of the Protestant zealots. The failure of Wyatt's revolt was

far from taming the enthusiasm of the wilder reformers. The restoration

of the old worship was followed by outbreaks of bold defiance. A tailor

of St. Giles in the Fields shaved a dog with the priestly tonsure. A cat

was found hanging in the Cheap "with her head shorn, and the likeness of

a vestment cast over her, with her forefeet tied together and a round

piece of paper like a singing cake between them." Yet more galling were

the ballads which were circulated in mockery of the mass, the pamphlets

which came from the exiles over sea, the seditious broadsides dropped in

the streets, the interludes in which the most sacred acts of the old

religion were flouted with ribald mockery. All this defiance only served

to quicken afresh the purpose of the Queen. But it was not till the

opening of 1555, when she had already been a year and a half on the

throne, that the opposition of her councillors was at last mastered and

the persecution began. In February the deprived bishop of Gloucester,

Hooper, was burned in his cathedral city, a London vicar, Lawrence

Saunders, at Coventry, and Rogers, a prebendary of St. Paul's, at

London. Ferrar, the deprived bishop of St. David's, who was burned at

Caermarthen, was one of eight victims who suffered in March. Four

followed in April and May, six in June, eleven in July, eighteen in

August, eleven in September. In October Ridley, the deprived bishop of

London, was drawn with Latimer from their prison at Oxford. "Play the

man, Master Ridley!" cried the old preacher of the Reformation as the

flames shot up around him; "we shall this day light up such a candle by

God's grace in England as I trust shall never be put out."

[Sidenote: Rowland Taylor.]

If the Protestants had not known how to govern, indeed, they knew how to

die; and the cause which prosperity had ruined revived in the dark hour

of persecution. The memory of their violence and greed faded away as

they passed unwavering to their doom. Such a story as that of Rowland

Taylor, the Vicar of Hadleigh, tells us more of the work which was now

begun, and of the effect it was likely to produce, than pages of

historic dissertation. Taylor, who as a man of mark had been one of the

first victims chosen for execution, was arrested in London, and

condemned to suffer in his own parish. His wife, "suspecting that her

husband should that night be carried away," had waited through the

darkness with her children in the porch of St. Botolph's beside Aldgate.

"Now when the sheriff his company came against St. Botolph's Church

Elizabeth cried, saying, 'O my dear father! Mother! mother! here is my

father led away!' Then cried his wife, 'Rowland, Rowland, where art

thou?'--for it was a very dark morning, that the one could not see the

other. Dr. Taylor answered, 'I am here, dear wife,' and stayed. The

sheriff's men would have led him forth, but the sheriff said, 'Stay a

little, masters, I pray you, and let him speak to his wife.' Then came

she to him, and he took his daughter Mary in his arms, and he and his

wife and Elizabeth knelt down and said the Lord's prayer. At which sight

the sheriff wept apace, and so did divers others of the company. After

they had prayed he rose up and kissed his wife and shook her by the

hand, and said, 'Farewell, my dear wife, be of good comfort, for I am

quiet in my conscience! God shall still be a father to my children.'...

Then said his wife, 'God be with thee, dear Rowland! I will, with God's

grace, meet thee at Hadleigh.'

"All the way Dr. Taylor was merry and cheerful as one that accounted

himself going to a most pleasant banquet or bridal.... Coming within two

miles of Hadleigh he desired to light off his horse, which done he

leaped and set a frisk or twain as men commonly do for dancing. 'Why,

master Doctor,' quoth the Sheriff, 'how do you now?' He answered, 'Well,

God be praised, Master Sheriff, never better; for now I know I am almost

at home. I lack not past two stiles to go over, and I am even at my

Father's house!'... The streets of Hadleigh were beset on both sides

with men and women of the town and country who waited to see him; whom

when they beheld so led to death, with weeping eyes and lamentable

voices, they cried, 'Ah, good Lord! there goeth our good shepherd from

us!'" The journey was at last over. "'What place is this,' he asked,

'and what meaneth it that so much people are gathered together?' It was

answered, 'It is Oldham Common, the place where you must suffer, and the

people are come to look upon you.' Then said he, 'Thanked be God, I am

even at home!'... But when the people saw his reverend and ancient

face, with a long white beard, they burst out with weeping tears and

cried, saying, 'God save thee, good Dr. Taylor; God strengthen thee and

help thee; the Holy Ghost comfort thee!' He wished, but was not

suffered, to speak. When he had prayed, he went to the stake and kissed

it, and set himself into a pitch-barrel which they had set for him to

stand on, and so stood with his back upright against the stake, with his

hands folded together and his eyes towards heaven, and so let himself be

burned." One of the executioners "cruelly cast a fagot at him, which hit

upon his head and brake his face that the blood ran down his visage.

Then said Dr. Taylor, 'O friend, I have harm enough--what needed that?'"

One more act of brutality brought his sufferings to an end. "So stood he

still without either crying or moving, with his hands folded together,

till Soyce with a halberd struck him on the head that the brains fell

out, and the dead corpse fell down into the fire."

[Sidenote: The area of the Martyrdoms.]

The terror of death was powerless against men like these. Bonner, the

Bishop of London, to whom, as bishop of the diocese in which the Council

sate, its victims were generally delivered for execution, but who, in

spite of the nickname and hatred which his official prominence in the

work of death earned him, seems to have been naturally a good-humoured

and merciful man, asked a youth who was brought before him whether he

thought he could bear the fire. The boy at once held his hand without

flinching in the flame of a candle that stood by. Rogers, a

fellow-worker with Tyndale in the translation of the Bible, and one of

the foremost among the Protestant preachers, died bathing his hands in

the flame "as if it had been in cold water." Even the commonest lives

gleamed for a moment into poetry at the stake. "Pray for me," a boy,

William Brown, who had been brought home to Brentwood to suffer, asked

of the bystanders. "I will pray no more for thee," one of them replied,

"than I will pray for a dog." "'Then,' said William, 'Son of God, shine

upon me'; and immediately the sun in the elements shone out of a dark

cloud so full in his face that he was constrained to look another way;

whereat the people mused because it was so dark a little time before."

Brentwood lay within a district on which the hand of the Queen fell

heavier than elsewhere. The persecution was mainly confined to the more

active and populous parts of the country, to London, Kent, Sussex, and

the Eastern Counties. Of the two hundred and eighty whom we know to have

suffered during the last three years and a half of Mary's reign more

than forty were burned in London, seventeen in the neighbouring village

of Stratford-le-Bow, four in Islington, two in Southwark, and one each

at Barnet, St. Albans, and Ware. Kent, at that time a home of mining and

manufacturing industry, suffered as heavily as London. Of its sixty

martyrs more than forty were furnished by Canterbury, which was then but

a city of some few thousand inhabitants, and seven by Maidstone. The

remaining eight suffered at Rochester, Ashford, and Dartford. Of the

twenty-five who died in Sussex the little town of Lewes sent seventeen

to the fire. Seventy were contributed by the Eastern Counties, the seat

of the woollen manufacture. Beyond these districts executions were rare.

Westward of Sussex we find the record of but a dozen martyrdoms, six of

which were at Bristol, and four at Salisbury. Chester and Wales

contributed but four sufferers to the list. In the Midland Counties

between Thames and the Humber only twenty-four suffered martyrdom. North

of the Humber we find the names of but two Yorkshiremen burned at

Bedale.

[Sidenote: Failure of the persecution.]

But heavily as the martyrdoms fell on the district within which they

were practically confined, and where as we may conclude Protestantism

was more dominant than elsewhere, the work of terror failed in the very

ends for which it was wrought. The old spirit of insolent defiance, of

outrageous violence, rose into fresh life at the challenge of

persecution. A Protestant hung a string of puddings round a priest's

neck in derision of his beads. The restored images were grossly

insulted. The old scurrilous ballads against the mass and relics were

heard in the streets. Men were goaded to sheer madness by the bloodshed

and violence about them. One miserable wretch, driven to frenzy, stabbed

the priest of St. Margaret's as he stood with the chalice in his hand.

It was a more formidable sign of the times that acts of violence such as

these no longer stirred the people at large to their former resentment.

The horror of the persecution swept away all other feelings. Every death

at the stake won hundreds to the cause for which the victims died. "You

have lost the hearts of twenty thousands that were rank Papists within

these twelve months," a Protestant wrote triumphantly to Bonner. Bonner

indeed, who had never been a very zealous persecutor, was sick of his

work; and the energy of the bishops soon relaxed. But Mary had no

thought of hesitation in the course she had entered on, and though the

Imperial ambassador noted the rapid growth of public discontent

"rattling letters" from the council pressed the lagging prelates to

fresh activity. Yet the persecution had hardly begun before

difficulties were thickening round the Queen. In her passionate longing

for an heir who would carry on her religious work Mary had believed

herself to be with child; but in the summer of 1555 all hopes of any

childbirth passed away, and the overthrow of his projects for the

permanent acquisition of England to the House of Austria at once

disenchanted Philip with his stay in the realm. But even had all gone

well it was impossible for the king to remain longer in England. He was

needed in the Netherlands to play his part in the memorable act which

was to close the Emperor's political life. Already King of Naples and

Lord of Milan, Philip received by his father's solemn resignation on the

twenty-fifth of October the Burgundian heritage; and a month later

Charles ceded to him the crowns of Castille and Aragon with their

dependencies in the New World and in the Old. The Empire indeed passed

to his uncle Ferdinand of Austria; but with this exception the whole of

his father's vast dominions lay now in the grasp of Philip. Of the

realms which he ruled, England was but one and far from the greatest

one, and even had he wished to return his continued stay there became

impossible.

[Sidenote: The Catholic revival.]

He was forced to leave the direction of affairs to Cardinal Pole, who on

the death of Gardiner in November 1555 took the chief place in Council.

At once Papal Legate and chief minister of the Crown, Pole carried on

that union of the civil and ecclesiastical authority which had been

first seen in Wolsey and had formed the groundwork of the system of

Cromwell. But he found himself hampered by difficulties which even the

ability of Cromwell or Wolsey could hardly have met. The embassy which

carried to Rome the submission of the realm found a fresh Pope, Paul the

Fourth, on the throne. His accession marked the opening of a new era in

the history of the Papacy. Till now the fortunes of Catholicism had been

steadily sinking to a lower ebb. With the Peace of Passau the Empire

seemed lost to it. The new Protestant faith stood triumphant in the

north of Germany, and it was already advancing to the conquest of the

south. The nobles of Austria were forsaking the older religion. A

Venetian ambassador estimated the German Catholics at little more than a

tenth of the whole population of Germany. Eastward the nobles of Hungary

and Poland became Protestants in a mass. In the west France was yielding

more and more to heresy, and England had hardly been rescued from it by

Mary's accession. Only where the dead hand of Spain lay heavy, in

Castille, in Aragon, or in Italy, was the Reformation thoroughly crushed

out; and even the dead hand of Spain failed to crush heresy in the Low

Countries. But at the moment when ruin seemed certain the older faith

rallied to a new resistance. While Protestantism was degraded and

weakened by the prostitution of the Reformation to political ends, by

the greed and worthlessness of the German princes who espoused its

cause, by the factious lawlessness of the nobles in Poland and the

Huguenots in France, while it wasted its strength in theological

controversies and persecutions, in the bitter and venomous discussions

between the Churches which followed Luther and the Churches which

followed Zwingli or Calvin, the great communion which it assailed felt

at last the uses of adversity. The Catholic world rallied round the

Council of Trent. In the very face of heresy the Catholic faith was anew

settled and defined. The Papacy was owned afresh as the centre of

Catholic union. The enthusiasm of the Protestants was met by a

counter-enthusiasm among their opponents. New religious orders rose to

meet the wants of the day; the Capuchins became the preachers of

Catholicism, the Jesuits became not only its preachers but its

directors, its schoolmasters, its missionaries, its diplomatists. Their

organization, their blind obedience, their real ability, their fanatical

zeal, galvanized the pulpit, the school, the confessional, into a new

life.

[Sidenote: Paul the Fourth.]

It was this movement, this rally of Catholicism, which now placed its

representative on the Papal throne. At the moment when Luther was first

opening his attack on the Papacy Giovanni Caraffa had laid down his

sees of Chieti and Brindisi to found the order of Theatines in a little

house on the Pincian Hill. His aim was the reformation of the clergy,

but the impulse which he gave told on the growing fervour of the

Catholic world, and its issue was seen in the institution of the

Capuchins and the Jesuits. Created Cardinal by Paul the Third, he found

himself face to face with the more liberal theologians who were longing

for a reconciliation between Lutheranism and the Papacy, such as

Contarini and Pole, but his violent orthodoxy foiled their efforts in

the conference at Ratisbon, and prevailed on the Pope to trust to the

sterner methods of the Inquisition. As Caraffa wielded its powers, the

Inquisition spread terror throughout Italy. At due intervals groups of

heretics were burned before the Dominican Church at Rome; scholars like

Peter Martyr were driven over sea; and the publication of an index of

prohibited books gave a death-blow to Italian literature. On the verge

of eighty the stern Inquisitor became Pope as Paul the Fourth. His

conception of the Papal power was as high as that of Hildebrand or

Innocent the Third, and he flung contemptuously aside the system of

compromise which his predecessor had been brought to adopt by the

caution of the Emperor. "Charles," he said, was a "favourer of

heretics," and he laid to his charge the prosperity of Lutheranism in

the Empire. That England should make terms for its return to obedience

galled his pride, while his fanaticism would hear of no surrender of the

property of the Church. Philip, who had wrested the concession from

Julius the Third, had no influence over a Pope who hoped to drive the

Spaniards from Italy, and Pole was suspected by Paul of a leaning to

heresy.

[Sidenote: England and the Papacy.]

The English ambassadors found therefore a rough greeting when the terms

of the submission were laid before the Pope. Paul utterly repudiated the

agreement which had been entered into between the Legate and the

Parliament; he demanded the restoration of every acre of Church

property; and he annulled all alienation of it by a general bull. His

attitude undid all that Mary had done. In spite of the pompous

reconciliation in which the Houses had knelt at the feet of Pole,

England was still unreconciled to the Papacy, for the country and the

Pope were at issue on a matter where concession was now impossible on

either side. The Queen's own heart went with the Pope's demand. But the

first step on which she ventured towards a compliance with it showed the

difficulties she would have to meet. The grant of the first-fruits to

Henry the Eighth had undoubtedly rested on his claim of supremacy over

the Church; and now that this was at an end Mary had grounds for

proposing their restoration to church purposes. But the proposal was

looked on as a step towards the resumption of the monastic lands, and

after a hot and prolonged debate at the close of 1555 the Commons only

assented to it by a small majority. It was plain that no hearing would

be given to the Pope's demand for a restoration of all Church property;

great lords were heard to threaten that they would keep their lands so

long as they had a sword by their side; and England was thus left at

hopeless variance with the Papacy.

[Sidenote: Cranmer.]

But, difficult as Mary's task became, she clung as tenaciously as ever

to her work of blood. The martyrdoms went steadily on, and at the

opening of 1556 the sanction of Rome enabled the Queen to deal with a

victim whose death woke all England to the reality of the persecution.

Far as he stood in character beneath many who had gone before him to the

stake, Cranmer stood high above all in his ecclesiastical position. To

burn the Primate of the English Church for heresy was to shut out meaner

victims from all hope of escape. And on the position of Cranmer none

cast a doubt. The other prelates who had suffered had been placed in

their sees after the separation from Rome, and were hardly regarded as

bishops by their opponents. But, whatever had been his part in the

schism, Cranmer had received his Pallium from the Pope. He was, in the

eyes of all, Archbishop of Canterbury, the successor of St. Augustine

and of St. Thomas in the second see of Western Christendom. Revenge

however and religious zeal alike urged the Queen to bring Cranmer to

the stake. First among the many decisions in which the Archbishop had

prostituted justice to Henry's will stood that by which he had annulled

the king's marriage with Catharine and declared Mary a bastard. The last

of his political acts had been to join, whether reluctantly or no, in

the shameless plot to exclude Mary from the throne. His great position

too made Cranmer more than any man a representative of the religious

revolution which had passed over the land. His figure stood with those

of Henry and of Cromwell on the frontispiece of the English Bible. The

decisive change which had been given to the character of the Reformation

under Edward was due wholly to Cranmer. It was his voice that men heard

and still hear in the accents of the English Liturgy.

[Sidenote: His death.]

As an Archbishop, Cranmer's judgment rested with no meaner tribunal than

that of Rome, and his execution had been necessarily delayed till its

sentence could be given. It was not till the opening of 1556 that the

Papal see convicted him of heresy. As a heretic he was now condemned to

suffer at the stake. But the courage which Cranmer had shown since the

accession of Mary gave way the moment his final doom was announced. The

moral cowardice which had displayed itself in his miserable compliance

with the lust and despotism of Henry displayed itself again in six

successive recantations by which he hoped to purchase pardon. But

pardon was impossible; and Cranmer's strangely mingled nature found a

power in its very weakness when he was brought into the church of St.

Mary at Oxford on the twenty-first of March to repeat his recantation on

the way to the stake. "Now," ended his address to the hushed

congregation before him, "now I come to the great thing that troubleth

my conscience more than any other thing that ever I said or did in my

life, and that is the setting abroad of writings contrary to the truth;

which here I now renounce and refuse as things written by my hand

contrary to the truth which I thought in my heart, and written for fear

of death to save my life, if it might be. And, forasmuch as my hand

offended in writing contrary to my heart, my hand therefore shall be the

first punished; for if I come to the fire, it shall be the first

burned." "This was the hand that wrote it," he again exclaimed at the

stake, "therefore it shall suffer first punishment"; and holding it

steadily in the flame "he never stirred nor cried" till life was gone.

[Sidenote: War with France.]

It was with the unerring instinct of a popular movement that, among a

crowd of far more heroic sufferers, the Protestants fixed, in spite of

his recantations, on the martyrdom of Cranmer as the death-blow to

Catholicism in England. For one man who felt within him the joy of

Rowland Taylor at the prospect of the stake, there were thousands who

felt the shuddering dread of Cranmer. The triumphant cry of Latimer

could reach only hearts as bold as his own, while the sad pathos of the

Primate's humiliation and repentance struck chords of sympathy and pity

in the hearts of all. It is from that moment that we may trace the

bitter remembrance of the blood shed in the cause of Rome; which,

however partial and unjust it must seem to an historic observer, still

lies graven deep in the temper of the English people. But the Queen

struggled desperately on. She did what was possible to satisfy the

unyielding Pope. In the face of the Parliament's significant reluctance

even to restore the first-fruits to the Church, she refounded all she

could of the abbeys which had been suppressed. One of the greatest of

these, the Abbey of Westminster, was re-established before the close of

1556, and John Feckenham installed as its abbot. Such a step could

hardly fail to wake the old jealousy of any attempt to reclaim the

Church lands, and thus to alienate the nobles and gentry from the Queen.

They were soon to be alienated yet more by her breach of the solemn

covenant on which her marriage was based. Even the most reckless of her

counsellors felt the unwisdom of aiding Philip in his strife with

France. The accession of England to the vast dominion which the Emperor

had ceded to his son in 1555 all but realized the plans of Ferdinand the

Catholic for making the house of Austria master of Western Christendom.

France was its one effective foe; and the overthrow of France in the war

which was going on between the two powers would leave Philip without a

check. How keenly this was felt at the English council-board was seen in

the resistance which was made to Philip's effort to drag his new realm

into the war. Such an effort was in itself a crowning breach of faith,

for the king's marriage had been accompanied by a solemn pledge that

England should not be drawn into the strifes of Spain. But Philip knew

little of good faith when his interest was at stake. The English fleet

would give him the mastery of the seas, English soldiers would turn the

scale in Flanders, and at the opening of 1557 the king again crossed the

Channel and spent three months in pressing his cause on Mary and her

advisers.

[Sidenote: Loss of Calais.]

"He did more," says a Spanish writer of the time, "than any one would

have believed possible with that proud and indomitable nation." What he

was most aided by was provocation from France. A body of refugees who

had found shelter there landed in Yorkshire in the spring; and their

leader, Thomas Stafford, a grandson of the late Duke of Buckingham,

called the people to rise against the tyranny of foreigners and "the

satanic designs of an unlawful Queen." The French king hoped that a

rising would give the Queen work at home; but the revolt was easily

crushed, and the insult enabled Mary to override her counsellors'

reluctance and to declare war against France. The war opened with

triumphs both on land and at sea. The junction of the English fleet made

Philip master of the Channel. Eight thousand men, "all clad in their

green," were sent to Flanders under Lord Pembroke, and joined Philip's

forces in August in time to take part in the great victory of St.

Quentin. In October the little army returned home in triumph, but the

gleam of success vanished suddenly away. In the autumn of 1557 the

English ships were defeated in an attack on the Orkneys. In January 1558

the Duke of Guise flung himself with characteristic secrecy and energy

upon Calais and compelled it to surrender before succour could arrive.

"The chief jewel of the realm," as Mary herself called it, was suddenly

reft away; and the surrender of Guisnes, which soon followed, left

England without a foot of land on the Continent.

[Sidenote: Mary and Ireland.]

Bitterly as the blow was felt, the Council, though passionately pressed

by the Queen, could find neither money nor men for any attempt to

recover the town. The war indeed went steadily for Spain and her allies;

and Philip owed his victory at Gravelines in the summer of 1558 mainly

to the opportune arrival of ten English ships of war which opened fire

on the flank of the French army that lay open to the sea. But England

could not be brought to take further part in the contest. The levies

which were being raised mutinied and dispersed. The forced loan to

which Mary was driven to resort came in slowly. The treasury was drained

not only by the opening of the war with France but by the opening of a

fresh strife in Ireland. To the struggle of religion which had begun

there under the Protectorate the accession of Mary had put an end. The

shadowy form of the earlier Irish Protestantism melted quietly away.

There were in fact no Protestants in Ireland save the new bishops; and

when Bale had fled over sea from his diocese of Ossory and his

fellow-prelates had been deprived the Irish Church resumed its old

appearance. No attempt indeed was made to restore the monasteries; and

Mary exercised her supremacy, deposed or appointed bishops, and

repudiated Papal interference with her ecclesiastical acts as vigorously

as her father. But the Mass was restored, the old modes of religious

worship were again held in honour, and religious dissension between the

Government and its Irish subjects came for the time to an end. With the

close however of one danger came the rise of another. England was

growing tired of the policy of conciliation which had been steadily

pursued by Henry the Eighth and his successor. As yet it had been

rewarded with precisely the sort of success which Wolsey and Cromwell

anticipated. The chiefs had come quietly in to the plan, and their septs

had followed them in submission to the new order. "The winning of the

Earl of Desmond was the winning of the rest of Munster with small

charges. The making O'Brien an Earl made all that country obedient." The

Macwilliam became Lord Clanrickard, and the Fitzpatricks Barons of Upper

Ossory. A visit of the great northern chief who had accepted the title

of Earl of Tyrone to the English Court was regarded as a marked step in

the process of civilization.

[Sidenote: The Irish War.]

In the south, where the system of English law was slowly spreading, the

chieftains sate on the bench side by side with the English justices of

the peace; and something had been done to check the feuds and disorder

of the wild tribes between Limerick and Tipperary. "Men may pass quietly

throughout these countries without danger of robbery or other

displeasure." In the Clanrickard county, once wasted with war,

"ploughing increaseth daily." In Tyrone and the north however the old

disorder reigned without a check; and everywhere the process of

improvement tried the temper of the English Deputies by the slowness of

its advance. The only hope of any real progress lay in patience; and

there were signs that the Government at Dublin found it hard to wait.

The "rough handling" of the chiefs by Sir Edward Bellingham, a Lord

Deputy under the Protector Somerset, roused a spirit of revolt that only

subsided when the poverty of the Exchequer forced him to withdraw the

garrisons he had planted in the heart of the country. His successor in

Mary's reign, Lord Sussex, made raid after raid to no purpose on the

obstinate tribes of the north, burning in one the Cathedral of Armagh

and three other churches. A far more serious breach in the system of

conciliation was made when the project of English colonization which

Henry had steadily rejected was adopted by the same Lord Deputy, and

when the country of the O'Connors was assigned to English settlers and

made shire-land under the names of King's and Queen's Counties in honour

of Philip and Mary. A savage warfare began at once between the planters

and the dispossessed septs, a warfare which only ended in the following

reign in the extermination of the Irishmen, and commissioners were

appointed to survey waste lands with the aim of carrying the work of

colonization into other districts. The pressure of the war against

France put an end to these wider projects, but the strife in Meath went

savagely on and proved a sore drain to the Exchequer.

[Sidenote: Scotland and Protestantism.]

Nor was Mary without difficulties in the North. Religiously as well as

politically her reign told in a marked way on the fortunes of Scotland.

If the Queen's policy failed to crush Protestantism in England, it gave

a new impulse to it in the northern realm. In Scotland the wealth and

worldliness of the great churchmen had long ago spread a taste for

heresy among the people; and Lollardry survived as a power north of the

border long after it had almost died out to the south of it. The impulse

of the Lutheran movement was seen in the diffusion of the new opinions

by a few scholars, such as Wishart and Hamilton; but though Henry the

Eighth pressed his nephew James the Fifth to follow him in the work he

was doing in England, it was plain that the Scotch reformers could look

for little favour from the Crown. The policy of the Scottish kings

regarded the Church as their ally against the turbulent nobles, and

James steadily held its enemies at bay. The Regent, Mary of Guise, clung

to the same policy. But stoutly as the whole nation withstood the

English efforts to acquire a political supremacy, the religious

revolution in England told more and more on the Scotch nobles. No

nobility was so poor as that of Scotland, and nowhere in Europe was the

contrast between their poverty and the riches of the Church so great.

Each step of the vast spoliation that went on south of the border, the

confiscation of the lesser abbeys, the suppression of the greater, the

secularization of chauntries and hospitals, woke a fresh greed in the

baronage of the north. The new opinions soon found disciples among them.

It was a group of Protestant nobles who surprised the Castle of St.

Andrews and murdered Cardinal Beaton. The "Gospellers" from the Lowlands

already formed a marked body in the army that fought at Pinkie Cleugh.

As yet however the growth of the new opinions had been slow, and there

had been till now little public show of resistance to the religion of

the State.

[Sidenote: Knox.]

With the accession of Mary however all was changed. Under Henry and

Edward the Catholicism of Scotland had profited by the national

opposition to a Protestant England; but now that Catholicism was again

triumphant in England Protestantism became far less odious to the Scotch

statesmen. A still greater change was wrought by the marriage with

Philip. Such a match, securing as it did to England the aid of Spain in

any future aggression upon Scotland, became a danger to the northern

realm which not only drew her closer to France but forced her to give

shelter and support to the sectaries who promised to prove a check upon

Mary. Many of the exiles therefore who left England for the sake of

religion found a refuge in Scotland. Amongst these was John Knox. Knox

had been one of the followers of Wishart; he had acted as pastor to the

Protestants who after Beaton's murder held the Castle of St. Andrews,

and had been captured with them by a French force in the summer of 1547.

The Frenchmen sent the heretics to the galleys; and it was as a galley

slave in one of their vessels that Knox next saw his native shores. As

the vessel lay tossing in the bay of St. Andrews, a comrade bade him

look to the land, and asked him if he knew it. "I know it well" was the

answer; "for I see the steeple of that place where God first in public

opened my mouth to His glory; and I am fully persuaded, how weak that

ever I now appear, I shall not depart this life till my tongue glorify

His holy name in the same place!" It was long however before he could

return. Released at the opening of 1549, Knox found shelter in England,

where he became one of the most stirring among the preachers of the day,

and was offered a bishoprick by Northumberland. Mary's accession drove

him again to France. But the new policy of the Regent now opened

Scotland to the English refugees, and it was as one of these that Knox

returned in 1555 to his own country. Although he soon withdrew to take

charge of the English congregation at Frankfort and Geneva his energy

had already given a decisive impulse to the new movement. In a gathering

at the house of Lord Erskine he persuaded the assembly to "refuse all

society with idolatry, and bind themselves to the uttermost of their

power to maintain the true preaching of the Evangile, as God should

offer to their preachers an opportunity." The confederacy woke anew the

jealousy of the government, and persecution revived. But some of the

greatest nobles now joined the reforming cause. The Earl of Morton, the

head of the house of Douglas, the Earl of Argyle, the greatest chieftain

of the west, and above all a bastard son of the late king, Lord James

Stuart, who bore as yet the title of prior of St. Andrews, but who was

to be better known afterwards as the Earl of Murray, placed themselves

at the head of the movement. The remonstrances of Knox from his exile at

Geneva stirred them to interfere in behalf of the persecuted

Protestants; and at the close of 1557 these nobles united with the rest

of the Protestant leaders in an engagement which became memorable as the

first among those Covenants which were to give shape and colour to

Scotch religion.

[Sidenote: The First Covenant.]

"We," ran this solemn bond, "perceiving how Satan in his members, the

Antichrists of our time, cruelly doth rage, seeking to overthrow and to

destroy the Evangel of Christ, and His Congregation, ought according to

our bounden duty to strive in our Master's cause even unto the death,

being certain of our victory in Him. The which our duty being well

considered, we do promise before the Majesty of God and His Congregation

that we, by His grace, shall with all diligence continually apply our

whole power, substance, and our very lives to maintain, set forward, and

establish the most blessed Word of God and His Congregation, and shall

labour at our possibility to have faithful ministers, purely and truly

to minister Christ's Evangel and sacraments to His people. We shall

maintain them, nourish them, and defend them, the whole Congregation of

Christ and every member thereof, at our whole power and wearing of our

lives, against Satan and all wicked power that does intend tyranny or

trouble against the foresaid Congregation. Unto the which Holy Word and

Congregation we do join us, and also do forsake and renounce the

congregation of Satan with all the superstitious abomination and

idolatry thereof: and moreover shall declare ourselves manifestly

enemies thereto by this our faithful promise before God, testified to

His Congregation by our subscription at these presents."

[Sidenote: Scotland and Protestantism.]

The Covenant of the Scotch nobles marked a new epoch in the strife of

religions. Till now the reformers had opposed the doctrine of

nationality to the doctrine of Catholicism. In the teeth of the

pretensions which the Church advanced to a uniformity of religion in

every land, whatever might be its differences of race or government, the

first Protestants had advanced the principle that each prince or people

had alone the right to determine its form of faith and worship. "Cujus

regio" ran the famous phrase which embodied their theory, "ejus

religio." It was the acknowledgement of this principle that the Lutheran

princes obtained at the Diet of Spires; it was on this principle that

Henry based his Act of Supremacy. Its strength lay in the correspondence

of such a doctrine with the political circumstances of the time. It was

the growing feeling of nationality which combined with the growing

developement of monarchical power to establish the theory that the

political and religious life of each nation should be one, and that the

religion of the people should follow the faith of the prince. Had

Protestantism, as seemed at one time possible, secured the adhesion of

all the European princes, such a theory might well have led everywhere

as it led in England to the establishment of the worst of tyrannies, a

tyranny that claims to lord alike over both body and soul. The world was

saved from this danger by the tenacity with which the old religion still

held its power. In half the countries of Europe the disciples of the new

opinions had soon to choose between submission to their conscience and

submission to their prince; and a movement which began in contending for

the religious supremacy of kings ended in those wars of religion which

arrayed nation after nation against their sovereigns. In this religious

revolution Scotland led the way. Her Protestantism was the first to draw

the sword against earthly rulers. The solemn "Covenant" which bound

together her "Congregation" in the face of the regency, which pledged

its members to withdraw from all submission to the religion of the State

and to maintain in the face of the State their liberty of conscience,

opened that vast series of struggles which ended in Germany with the

Peace of Westphalia and in England with the Toleration Act of William

the Third.

[Sidenote: The Exiles.]

The "Covenant" of the lords sounded a bold defiance to the Catholic

reaction across the border. While Mary replaced the Prayer-Book by the

Mass, the Scotch lords resolved that wherever their power extended the

Common Prayer should be read in all churches. While hundreds were going

to the stake in England the Scotch nobles boldly met the burning of

their preachers by a threat of war. "They trouble our preachers," ran

their bold remonstrance against the bishops in the Queen-mother's

presence; "they would murder them and us! shall we suffer this any

longer? No, madam, it shall not be!" and therewith every man put on his

steel bonnet. The Regent was helpless for the moment and could find

refuge only in fair words, words so fair that for a while the sternest

of the reformers believed her to be drifting to their faith. She was in

truth fettered by the need of avoiding civil strife at a time when the

war of England against France made a Scotch war against England

inevitable. The nobles refused indeed to cross the border, but the

threat of a Scotch invasion was one of the dangers against which Mary

Tudor now found herself forced to provide. Nor was the uprise of

Protestantism in Scotland the only result of her policy in giving fire

and strength to the new religion. Each step in the persecution had been

marked by a fresh flight of preachers, merchants, and gentry across the

seas. "Some fled into France, some into Flanders, and some into the high

countries of the Empire." As early as 1554 we find groups of such

refugees at Frankfort, Emden, Zuerich, and Strassburg. Calvin welcomed

some of them at Geneva; the "lords of Berne" suffered a group to settle

at Aarau; a hundred gathered round the Duchess of Suffolk at Wesel.

Amongst the exiles we find many who were to be bishops and statesmen in

the coming reign. Sir Francis Knollys was at Frankfort, Sir Francis

Walsingham travelled in France; among the divines were the later

archbishops Grindal and Sandys, and the later bishops Horne, Parkhurst,

Aylmer, Jewel, and Cox. Mingled with these were men who had already

played their part in Edward's reign, such as Poinet, the deprived Bishop

of Winchester, Bale, the deprived Bishop of Ossory, and the preachers

Lever and Knox.

[Sidenote: The Extreme Protestants.]

Gardiner had threatened that the fugitives should gnaw their fingers

from hunger, but ample supplies reached them from London merchants and

other partizans in England, and they seem to have lived in fair comfort

while their brethren at home were "going to the fire." Their chief

troubles sprang from strife among themselves. The hotter spirits among

the English Protestants had seen with discontent the retention of much

that they looked on as superstitious and Popish in even the last liturgy

of Edward's reign. That ministers should still wear white surplices,

that litanies should be sung, that the congregation should respond to

the priest, that babes should be signed in baptism with the sign of the

cross, that rings should be given in marriage, filled them with horror.

Hooper, the leader of this party, refused when made bishop to don his

rochet; and had only been driven by imprisonment to vest himself in "the

rags of Popery." Trivial indeed as such questions seemed in themselves,

an issue lay behind them which was enough to make men face worse evils

than a prison. The royal supremacy, the headship of the Church, which

Henry the Eighth claimed for himself and his successors, was, as we have

seen, simply an application of the principle which the states of North

Germany had found so effective in meeting the pretensions of the Emperor

or the Pope. The same sentiment of national life took a new form in the

preservation of whatever the change of religious thought left it

possible to preserve in the national tradition of faith and worship. In

the Lutheran churches, though the Mass was gone, reredos and crucifix

remained untouched. In England the whole ecclesiastical machinery was

jealously preserved. Its Church was still governed by bishops who traced

their succession to the Apostles. The words of its new Prayer-Book

adhered as closely as they might to the words of Missal and Breviary.

What made such an arrangement possible was the weakness of the purely

religious impulse in the earlier stages of the Reformation. In Germany

indeed or in England, the pressure for theological change was small; the

religious impulse told on but a small part, and that not an influential

part, of the population; it did in fact little more than quicken and

bring into action the older and widely-felt passion for ecclesiastical

independence.

[Sidenote: Protestantism and the Supremacy.]

But the establishment of this independence at once gave fresh force to

the religious movement. From denouncing the Pope as a usurper of

national rights men passed easily to denounce the Papal system as in

itself Antichristian. In setting aside the voice of the Papacy as a

ground of faith the new churches had been forced to find a ground of

faith in the Bible. But the reading and discussion of the Bible opened

up a thousand questions of belief and ritual, and the hatred of Rome

drew men more and more to find answers to such questions which were

antagonistic to the creed and usages of a past that was identified in

their eyes with the Papacy. Such questions could hardly fail to find an

echo in the people at large. To the bulk of men ecclesiastical

institutions are things dim and remote; and the establishment of

ecclesiastical independence, though it gratified the national pride,

could have raised little personal enthusiasm. But the direct and

personal interest of every man seemed to lie in the right holding of

religious truth, and thus the theological aspect of the Reformation

tended more and more to supersede its political one. All that is

generous and chivalrous in human feeling told in the same direction. To

statesmen like Gardiner or Paget the acceptance of one form of faith or

worship after another as one sovereign after another occupied the throne

seemed, no doubt, a logical and inevitable result of their acceptance of

the royal supremacy. But to the people at large there must have been

something false and ignoble in the sight of a statesman or a priest who

had cast off the Mass under Edward to embrace it again under Mary, and

who was ready again to cast it off at the will of Mary's successor. If

worship and belief were indeed spiritual things, if they had any

semblance of connexion with divine realities, men must have felt that it

was impossible to put them on and off at a king's caprice. It was this,

even more than the natural pity which they raised, that gave their

weight to the Protestant martyrdoms under Mary. They stood out in

emphatic protest against the doctrine of local religion, of a belief

dictated by the will of kings. From the Primate of the Church to the

"blind girl" who perished at Colchester, three hundred were found in

England who chose rather to go to the fire than to take up again at the

Queen's will what their individual conscience had renounced as a lie

against God.

[Sidenote: Calvin.]

But from the actual assertion of such a right of the individual

conscience to find and hold what was true, even those who witnessed for

it by their death would have shrunk. Driven by sheer force of fact from

the theory of a national and royal faith, men still shuddered to stand

alone. The old doctrine of a Catholic Christianity flung over them its

spell. Rome indeed they looked on as Antichrist, but the doctrine which

Rome had held so long and so firmly, the doctrine that truth should be

coextensive with the world and not limited by national boundaries, that

the Church was one in all countries and among all peoples, that there

was a Christendom which embraced all kingdoms and a Christian law that

ruled peoples and kings, became more and more the doctrine of Rome's

bitterest opponents. It was this doctrine which found its embodiment in

John Calvin, a young French scholar, driven in early manhood from his

own country by the persecution of Francis the First. Calvin established

himself at Basle, and produced there in 1535 at the age of twenty-six a

book which was to form the theology of the Huguenot churches, his

"Institutes of the Christian Religion." What was really original in this

work was Calvin's doctrine of the organization of the Church and of its

relation to the State. The base of the Christian republic was with him

the Christian man, elected and called of God, preserved by His grace

from the power of sin, predestinate to eternal life. Every such

Christian man is in himself a priest, and every group of such men is a

Church, self-governing, independent of all save God, supreme in its

authority over all matters ecclesiastical and spiritual. The

constitution of such a church, where each member as a Christian was

equal before God, necessarily took a democratic form. In Calvin's theory

of Church government it is the Church which itself elects its lay elders

and lay deacons for purposes of administration; it is with the approval

and consent of the Church that elders and deacons with the existing body

of pastors elect new ministers. It is through these officers that the

Church exercises its power of the keys, the power of diffusing the truth

and the power of correcting error. To the minister belong the preaching

of the word and the direction of all religious instruction; to the body

of ministers belong the interpretation of scripture and the decision of

doctrine. On the other hand the administration of discipline, the

supervision of the moral conduct of each professing Christian, the

admonition of the erring, the excommunication and exclusion from the

body of the Church of the unbelieving and the utterly unworthy, belong

to the Consistory, the joint assembly of ministers and elders. To this

discipline princes as well as common men are alike subject; princes as

well as common men must take their doctrine from the ministers of the

Church.

[Sidenote: Calvinism.]

The claims of the older faith to spiritual and ecclesiastical supremacy

over the powers of earth reappeared in this theory. Calvin like the

Papacy ignored all national independence, all pretensions of peoples as

such to create their own system of church doctrine or church government.

Doctrine and government he held to be already laid down in the words of

the Bible, and all questions that rose out of those words came under the

decision of the ecclesiastical body of ministers. Wherever a reformed

religion appeared, there was provided for it a simple but orderly

organization which in its range and effectiveness rivalled that of the

older Catholicism. On the other hand this organization rested on a

wholly new basis; spiritual and ecclesiastical power came from below not

from above; the true sovereign in this Christian state was not Pope or

Bishop but the Christian man. Despotic as the authority of pastor and

elders seemed, pastor and elders were alike the creation of the whole

congregation, and their judgement could in the last resort be adopted or

set aside by it. Such a system stood out in bold defiance against the

tendencies of the day. On its religious side it came into conflict with

that principle of nationality, of ecclesiastical as well as civil

subjection to the prince, on which the reformed Churches and above all

the Church of England had till now been built up. As a vast and

consecrated democracy it stood in contrast with the whole social and

political framework of the European nations. Grave as we may count the

faults of Calvinism, alien as its temper may in many ways be from the

temper of the modern world, it is in Calvinism that the modern world

strikes its roots, for it was Calvinism that first revealed the worth

and dignity of Man. Called of God, and heir of heaven, the trader at his

counter and the digger in his field suddenly rose into equality with the

noble and the king.

[Sidenote: Calvin and the Exiles.]

It was this system that Calvin by a singular fortune was able to put

into actual working in the little city of Geneva, where the party of the

Reformation had become master and called him in 1536 to be their

spiritual head. Driven out but again recalled, his influence made Geneva

from 1541 the centre of the Protestant world. The refugees who crowded

to the little town from persecution in France, in the Netherlands, in

England, found there an exact and formal doctrine, a rigid discipline of

manners and faith, a system of church government, a form of church

worship, stripped, as they held, of the last remnant of the

superstitions of the past. Calvin himself with his austere and frugal

life, his enormous industry, his power of government, his quick

decision, his undoubting self-confidence, his unswerving will, remained

for three-and-twenty years till his death in 1564 supreme over

Protestant opinion. His influence told heavily on England. From the hour

of Cromwell's fall the sympathies of the English reformers had drawn

them, not to the Lutheran Churches of North Germany, but to the more

progressive Churches of the Rhineland and the Netherlands: and on the

critical question of the Lord's Supper which mainly divided the two

great branches of the Reformation Cranmer and his partizans became more

definitely anti-sacramentarian as the years went by. At Edward's death

the exiles showed their tendencies by seeking refuge not with the

Lutheran Churches of North Germany but with the Calvinistic Churches of

Switzerland or the Rhine; and contact with such leaders as Bullinger at

Zuerich or Calvin at Geneva could hardly fail to give fresh vigour to the

party which longed for a closer union with the foreign churches and a

more open breach with the past.

[Sidenote: The troubles at Frankfort.]

The results of this contact first showed themselves at Frankfort. At the

instigation of Whittingham, who in Elizabeth's days became Dean of

Durham, a body of English exiles that had found shelter there resolved

to reform both worship and discipline. The obnoxious usages were

expunged from the Prayer-Book, omissions were made in the communion

service, a minister and deacons chosen, and rules drawn up for church

government after the Genevan model. Free at last "from all dregs of

superstitious ceremonies" the Frankfort refugees thanked God "that had

given them such a church in a strange land wherein they might hear God's

holy word preached, the sacraments rightly ministered, and discipline

used, which in their own country could never be obtained." But their

invitation to the other English exiles to join them in the enjoyment of

these blessings met with a steady repulse. Lever and the exiles at

Zuerich refused to come unless they might "altogether serve and praise

God as freely and uprightly as the order last taken in the Church of

England permitteth and presenteth, for we are fully determined to admit

and use no other." The main body of the exiles who were then gathered at

Strassburg echoed the refusal. Knox however, who had been chosen

minister by the Frankfort congregation, moved rapidly forward, rejecting

the communion service altogether as superstitious, and drawing up a new

"order" of worship after the Genevan model. But in the spring of 1555

these efforts were foiled by the arrival of fresh exiles from England of

a more conservative turn: the reformers were outvoted; Knox was driven

from the town by the magistrates "in fear of the Emperor" whom he had

outraged in an "Admonition" to the English people which he had lately

issued; and the English service was restored. Whittingham and his

adherents, still resolute, as Bale wrote, "to erect a Church of the

Purity" (we may perhaps trace in the sneer the origin of their later

name of Puritans), found a fresh refuge at Basle and Geneva, where the

leaders of the party occupied themselves in a metrical translation of

the Psalms which left its traces on English psalmody and in the

production of what was afterwards known as the Geneva Bible.

[Sidenote: The seditious books.]

Petty as this strife at Frankfort may seem, it marks the first open

appearance of English Puritanism, and the beginning of a struggle which

widened through the reign of Elizabeth till under the Stuarts it broke

England in pieces. But busy as they were in strife among themselves, the

exiles were still more busy in fanning the discontent at home. Books,

pamphlets, broadsides, were written and sent for distribution to

England. The violence of their language was incredible. No sooner had

Bonner issued his injunctions than Bale denounced him in a fierce reply

as "a beastly belly-god and damnable dung-hill." With a spirit worthy of

the "bloody bitesheeps" whom he attacked, the ex-Bishop of Ossory

regretted that when Henry plucked down Becket's shrine he had not burned

the idolatrous priests upon it. It probably mattered little to Bale that

at the moment when he wrote not a single Protestant had as yet been sent

to the stake; but language such as this was hardly likely to stir Mary

to a spirit of moderation. The Spanish marriage gave the refugees a

fairer opportunity of attack, and the Government was forced to make

enquiries of the wardens of city gilds "whether they had seen or heard

of any of these books which had come from beyond seas." The violence of

the exiles was doubled by the suppression of Wyatt's revolt. Poinet, the

late Bishop of Winchester, who had taken part in it, fled over sea to

write a "Sharp Tractate of political power" in which he discussed the

question "whether it be lawful to depose an evil governor and kill a

tyrant."

[Sidenote: Knox and Goodman.]

But with the actual outbreak of persecution and the death of Cranmer all

restraint was thrown aside. In his "First Blast of the Trumpet against

the Monstrous Regiment of Women" Knox denounced Mary as a Jezebel, a

traitress, and a bastard. He declared the rule of women to be against

the law of Nature and of God. The duty, whether of the estates or people

of the realm, was "first to remove from honour and authority that

monster in nature; secondarily, if any presume to defend that impiety,

they ought not to fear first to pronounce, then after to execute against

them the sentence of death." To keep the oath of allegiance was "nothing

but plain rebellion against God." "The day of vengeance," burst out the

writer, "which shall apprehend that horrible monster, Jezebel of

England, and such as maintain her monstrous cruelty is already appointed

in the counsel of the Eternal; and I verily believe that it is so nigh

that she shall not reign so long in tyranny as hitherto she hath done,

when God shall declare himself her enemy." Another exile, Goodman,

enquired "how superior powers ought to be obeyed of their subjects; and

wherein they may lawfully by God's word be disobeyed and resisted." His

book was a direct summons to rebellion. "By giving authority to an

idolatrous woman" Goodman wrote to his English fellow-subjects, "ye

have banished Christ and his Gospel. Then in taking the same authority

from her you shall restore Christ and his word, and shall do well. In

obeying her you have disobeyed God; then in disobeying her you shall

please God." "Though it should appear at the first sight," he urged, "a

great disorder that the people should take unto them the punishment of

transgressions, yet when the magistrates and other officers cease to do

their duties they are as it were without officers, yea, worse than if

they had none at all, and then God giveth the sword into the people's

hand." And what the people were to do with the sword Poinet had already

put very clearly. It was the "ungodly serpent Mary" who was "the chief

instrument of all this present misery in England." "Now both by God's

laws and man's," concluded the bishop, "she ought to be punished with

death, as an open idolatress in the sight of God, and a cruel murderer

of His saints before men, and merciless traitress to her own native

country."

Behind the wild rhetoric of words like these lay the new sense of a

prophetic power, the sense of a divine commission given to the preachers

of the Word to rebuke nobles and kings. At the moment when the policy of

Cromwell crushed the Church as a political power and freed the growing

Monarchy from the constitutional check which its independence furnished,

a new check offered itself in the very enthusiasm which sprang out of

the wreck of the great religious body. Men stirred with a new sense of

righteousness and of a divine government of the world, men too whose

natural boldness was quickened and fired by daily contact with the older

seers who rebuked David or Jezebel, could not hold their peace in the

presence of wrong. While nobles and statesmen were cowering in silence

before the dreaded power of the kingship the preachers spoke bluntly

out. Not only Latimer, but Knox, Grindal, and Lever had uttered fiery

remonstrances against the plunderers of Edward's reign. Bradford had

threatened them with the divine judgement which at last overtook them.

"'The judgement of the Lord! The judgement of the Lord!' cried he, with

a lamentable voice and weeping tears." Wise or unwise, the pamphlets of

the exiles only carried on this theory to its full developement. The

great conception of the mediaeval Church, that of the responsibility of

kings to a spiritual power, was revived at an hour when kingship was

trampling all responsibility to God or man beneath its feet. Such a

revival was to have large and beneficial issues in our later history.

Gathering strength under Elizabeth, it created at the close of her reign

that moral force of public opinion which under the name of Puritanism

brought the acts and policy of our kings to the tests of reason and the

Gospel. However ill directed that force might be, however erroneously

such tests were often applied, it is to this new force that we owe the

restoration of liberty and the establishment of religious freedom. As

the voice of the first Christian preachers had broken the despotism of

the Roman Empire, so the voice of the preachers of Puritanism broke the

despotism of the English Monarchy.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth.]

But great as their issues were to be, for the moment these protests only

quickened the persecution at home. We can hardly wonder that the arrival

of Goodman's book in England in the summer of 1558 was followed by stern

measures to prevent the circulation of such incentives to revolt.

"Whereas divers books" ran a royal proclamation, "filled with heresy,

sedition, and treason, have of late and be daily brought into the realm

out of foreign countries and places beyond seas, and some also covertly

printed within this realm and cast abroad in sundry parts thereof,

whereby not only God is dishonoured but also encouragement is given to

disobey lawful princes and governors," any person possessing such books

"shall be reported and taken for a rebel, and shall without delay be

executed for that offence according to the order of martial law." But

what really robbed these pamphlets of all force for harm was the

prudence and foresight of the people itself. Never indeed did the nation

show its patient good sense more clearly than in the later years of

Mary's reign. While fires blazed in Smithfield and news of defeat came

from over sea, while the hot voices of Protestant zealots hounded men on

to assassination and revolt, the bulk of Englishmen looked quietly from

the dying Queen to the girl who in a little while must wear her crown.

What nerved men to endure the shame and bloodshed about them was the

certainty of the speedy succession of the daughter of Anne Boleyn.

Elizabeth was now in her twenty-fifth year. Personally she had much of

her mother's charm with more than her mother's beauty. Her figure was

commanding, her face long but queenly and intelligent, her eyes quick

and fine. She had grown up amidst the liberal culture of Henry's court a

bold horsewoman, a good shot, a graceful dancer, a skilled musician, and

an accomplished scholar. Even among the highly-trained women who caught

the impulse of the New Learning she stood in the extent of her

acquirements without a peer. Ascham, who succeeded Grindal and Cheke in

the direction of her studies, tells us how keen and resolute was

Elizabeth's love of learning, even in her girlhood. At sixteen she

already showed "a man's power of application" to her books. She had read

almost the whole of Cicero and a great part of Livy. She began the day

with the study of the New Testament in Greek, and followed this up by

reading selected orations of Isocrates and the tragedies of Sophocles.

She could speak Latin with fluency and Greek moderately well. Her love

of classical culture lasted through her life. Amidst the press and cares

of her later reign we find Ascham recording how "after dinner I went up

to read with the Queen's majesty that noble oration of Demosthenes

against AEschines." At a later time her Latin served her to rebuke the

insolence of a Polish ambassador, and she could "rub up her rusty Greek"

at need to bandy pedantry with a Vice-Chancellor. But Elizabeth was far

as yet from being a mere pedant. She could already speak French and

Italian as fluently as her mother-tongue. In later days we find her

familiar with Ariosto and Tasso. The purity of her literary taste, the

love for a chaste and simple style, which Ascham noted with praise in

her girlhood, had not yet perished under the influence of euphuism. But

even amidst the affectation and love of anagrams and puerilities which

sullied her later years Elizabeth remained a lover of letters and of all

that was greatest and purest in letters. She listened with delight to

the "Faery Queen," and found a smile for "Master Spenser" when he

appeared in her presence.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth and Mary.]

From the bodily and mental energy of her girlhood, the close of Edward's

reign drew Elizabeth at nineteen to face the sterner problems of

religion and politics. In the daring attempt of Northumberland to place

Jane Grey on the throne Elizabeth's rights were equally set aside with

those of Mary; and the first public act of the girl was to call the

gentry to her standard and to join her sister with five hundred

followers in her train. But the momentary union was soon dissolved. The

daughter of Catharine could look with little but hate on the daughter of

Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth's tendency to the "new religion" jarred with the

Queen's bigotry; and the warnings of the imperial ambassador were hardly

needful to spur Mary to watch jealously a possible pretender to her

throne. The girl bent to the Queen's will in hearing mass, but her

manner showed that the compromise was merely a matter of obedience, and

fed the hopes of the Protestant zealots who saw in the Spanish marriage

a chance of driving Mary from the throne. The resolve which the Queen

showed to cancel her sister's right of succession only quickened the

project for setting Elizabeth in her place; and it was to make Elizabeth

their sovereign that Suffolk rose in Leicestershire and Wyatt and his

Kentishmen marched against London Bridge. The failure of the rising

seemed to ensure her doom. The Emperor pressed for her death as a

security for Philip on his arrival; and the detection of a

correspondence with the French king served as a pretext for her

committal to the Tower. The fierce Tudor temper broke through

Elizabeth's self-control as she landed at Traitor's Gate. "Are all

these harnessed men there for me?" she cried as she saw the guard; "it

needed not for me, being but a weak woman!" and passionately calling on

the soldiers to "bear witness that I come as no traitor!" she flung

herself down on a stone in the rain and refused to enter her prison.

"Better sitting here than in a worse place," she cried; "I know not

whither you will bring me." But Elizabeth's danger was less than it

seemed. Wyatt denied to the last her complicity in the revolt, and in

spite of Gardiner's will to "go roundly to work" with her the Lords of

the Council forced Mary to set her free. The Queen's terrors however

revived with her hopes of a child in the summer of 1555. To Mary her

sister seemed the one danger which threatened the succession of her

coming babe and the vast issues which hung on it, and Elizabeth was

summoned to her sister's side and kept a close prisoner at Hampton

Court. Philip joined in this precaution, for "holding her in his power

he could depart safely and without peril" in the event of the Queen's

death in childbirth; and other plans were perhaps already stirring his

breast. Should Mary die, a fresh match might renew his hold on England;

"he might hope," writes the Venetian ambassador, "with the help of many

of the nobility, won over by his presents and favours, to marry her

(Elizabeth) again, and thus succeed anew to the crown."

[Sidenote: Elizabeth and Philip.]

But whatever may have been Philip's designs, the time had not as yet

come for their realization; the final disappointment of the Queen's

hopes of childbirth set Elizabeth free, and in July she returned to her

house at Ashridge. From this moment her position was utterly changed.

With the disappearance of all chance of offspring from the Queen and the

certainty of Mary's coming death her sister's danger passed away.

Elizabeth alone stood between England and the succession of Mary Stuart;

and, whatever might be the wishes of the Queen, the policy of the House

of Austria forced it to support even the daughter of Anne Boleyn against

a claimant who would bind England to the French monarchy. From this

moment therefore Philip watched jealously over Elizabeth's safety. On

his departure for the Continent he gave written instructions to the

Queen to show favour to her sister, and the charge was repeated to those

of his followers whom he left behind him. What guarded her even more

effectually was the love of the people. When Philip at a later time

claimed Elizabeth's gratitude for his protection she told him bluntly

that her gratitude was really due neither to him nor her nobles, though

she owned her obligations to both, but to the English people. It was

they who had saved her from death and hindered all projects for barring

her right to the throne. "It is the people," she said, "who have placed

me where I am now." It was indeed their faith in Elizabeth's speedy

succession that enabled Englishmen to bear the bloodshed and shame of

Mary's later years, and to wait patiently for the end.

Nor were these years of waiting without value for Elizabeth herself. The

steady purpose, the clear perception of a just policy which ran through

her wonderful reign, were formed as the girl looked coolly on at the

chaos of bigotry and misrule which spread before her. More and more she

realized what was to be the aim of her after life, the aim of reuniting

the England which Edward and Mary alike had rent into two warring

nations, of restoring again that English independence which Mary was

trailing at the feet of Spain. With such an aim she could draw to her

the men who, indifferent like herself to purely spiritual

considerations, and estranged from Mary's system rather by its political

than its religious consequences, were anxious for the restoration of

English independence and English order. It was among these "Politicals,"

as they were soon to be called, that Elizabeth found at this moment a

counsellor who was to stand by her side through the long years of her

after reign. William Cecil sprang from the smaller gentry whom the

changes of the time were bringing to the front. He was the son of a

Yeoman of the Wardrobe at Henry's court; but his abilities had already

raised him at the age of twenty-seven to the post of secretary to the

Duke of Somerset, and through Somerset's Protectorate he remained high

in his confidence. He was seized by the Lords on the Duke's arrest, and

even sent to the Tower; but he was set at liberty with his master, and

his ability was now so well known that a few months later saw him

Secretary of State under Northumberland. The post and the knighthood

which accompanied it hardly compensated for the yoke which

Northumberland's pride laid upon all who served him, or for the risks in

which his ambition involved them. Cecil saw with a fatal clearness the

silent opposition of the whole realm to the system of the Protectorate,

and the knowledge of this convinced him that the Duke's schemes for a

change in the succession were destined to failure. On the disclosure of

the plot to set Mary aside he withdrew for some days from the court, and

even meditated flight from the country, till fear of the young king's

wrath drew him back to share in the submission of his fellow-counsellors

and to pledge himself with them to carry the new settlement into effect.

But Northumberland had no sooner quitted London than Cecil became the

soul of the intrigues by which the royal Council declared themselves in

Mary's favour. His desertion of the Duke secured him pardon from the

Queen, and though he was known to be in heart "a heretic" he continued

at court, conformed like Elizabeth to the established religion,

confessed and attended mass. Cecil was employed in bringing Pole to

England and in attending him in embassies abroad. But his caution held

him aloof from any close connexion with public affairs. He busied

himself in building at Burghley and in the culture of the Church lands

he had won from Edward the Sixth, while he drew closer to the girl who

alone could rescue England from the misgovernment of Mary's rule. Even

before the Queen's death it was known that Cecil would be the chief

counsellor of the coming reign. "I am told for certain," the Spanish

ambassador wrote to Philip after a visit to Elizabeth during the last

hours of Mary's life, "that Cecil who was secretary to King Edward will

be her secretary also. He has the character of a prudent and virtuous

man, although a heretic." But it was only from a belief that Cecil

retained at heart the convictions of his earlier days that men could

call him a heretic. In all outer matters of faith or worship he

conformed to the religion of the state.

[Sidenote: The Politicals.]

It is idle to charge Cecil, or the mass of Englishmen who conformed with

him in turn to the religion of Henry, of Edward, of Mary, and of

Elizabeth, with baseness or hypocrisy. They followed the accepted

doctrine of the time--that every realm, through its rulers, had the sole

right of determining what should be the form of religion within its

bounds. What the Marian persecution was gradually pressing on such men

was a conviction, not of the falsehood of such a doctrine, but of the

need of limiting it. Under Henry, under Edward, under Mary, no

distinction had been drawn between inner belief and outer conformity.

Every English subject was called upon to adjust his conscience as well

as his conduct to the varying policy of the state. But the fires of

Smithfield had proved that obedience such as this could not be exacted

save by a persecution which filled all England with horror. Such a

persecution indeed failed in the very end for which it was wrought.

Instead of strengthening religious unity, it gave a new force to

religious separation; it enlisted the conscience of the zealot in the

cause of resistance; it secured the sympathy of the great mass of

waverers to those who withstood the civil power. To Cecil, as to the

purely political statesmen of whom he was the type, such a persecution

seemed as needless as it was mischievous. Conformity indeed was

necessary, for men could as yet conceive of no state without a religion

or of civil obedience apart from compliance with the religious order of

the state. But only outer conformity was needed. That no man should set

up a worship other than that of the nation at large, that every subject

should duly attend at the national worship, Cecil believed to be

essential to public order. But he saw no need for prying into the actual

beliefs of those who conformed to the religious laws of the realm, nor

did he think that such beliefs could be changed by the fear of

punishment. While refusing freedom of worship therefore, Cecil, like

Elizabeth, was ready to concede freedom of conscience. And in this

concession we can hardly doubt that the bulk of Englishmen went with

him. Catholics shared with Protestants the horror of Mary's persecution.

To Protestantism indeed the horror of the persecution had done much to

give a force such as it had never had before. The number of Protestants

grew with every murder done in the cause of Catholicism. But they still

remained a small part of the realm. What the bulk of Englishmen had been

driven to by the martyrdoms was not a change of creed, but a longing for

religious peace and for such a system of government as, without

destroying the spiritual oneness of the nation, would render a religious

peace possible. And such a system of government Cecil and Elizabeth were

prepared to give.

[Sidenote: Mary's death.]

We may ascribe to Cecil's counsels somewhat of the wise patience with

which Elizabeth waited for the coming crown. Her succession was assured,

and the throng of visitors to her presence showed a general sense that

the Queen's end was near. Mary stood lonely and desolate in her realm.

"I will not be buried while I am living, as my sister was," Elizabeth

said in later years. "Do I not know how during her life every one

hastened to me at Hatfield?" The bloodshed indeed went on more busily

than ever. It had spread now from bishops and priests to the people

itself, and the sufferers were sent in batches to the flames. In a

single day thirteen victims, two of them women, were burned at

Stratford-le-Bow. Seventy-three Protestants of Colchester were dragged

through the streets of London tied to a single rope. A new commission

for the suppression of heresy was exempted by royal authority from all

restrictions of law which fettered its activity. But the work of terror

broke down before the silent revolt of the whole nation. The persecution

failed even to put an end to heretical worship. Not only do we find

ministers moving about in London and Kent to hold "secret meetings of

the Gospellers," but up to the middle of 1555 four parishes in Essex

still persisted in using the English-Prayer Book. Open marks of sympathy

at last began to be offered to the victims at the stake. "There were

seven men burned in Smithfield the twenty-eighth day of July," a

Londoner writes in 1558, "a fearful and a cruel proclamation being made

that under pain of present death no man should either approach nigh unto

them, touch them, neither speak to them nor comfort them. Yet were they

so comfortably taken by the hand and so goodly comforted,

notwithstanding that fearful proclamation and the present threatenings

of the sheriffs and serjeants, that the adversaries themselves were

astonished." The crowd round the fire shouted "Amen" to the martyrs'

prayers, and prayed with them that God would strengthen them. What

galled Mary yet more was the ill will of the Pope. Paul the Fourth still

adhered to his demand for full restoration of the Church lands, and held

England as only partly reconciled to the Holy See. He was hostile to

Philip; he was yet more hostile to Pole. At this moment he dealt a last

blow at the Queen by depriving Pole of his legatine power, and was

believed to be on the point of calling him to answer a charge of heresy.

Even when she was freed from part of her troubles in the autumn of 1558

by the opening of conferences for peace at Cambray a fresh danger

disclosed itself. The demands of the queen's envoys for the restoration

of Calais met with so stubborn a refusal from France that it seemed as

if England would be left alone to bear the brunt of a future struggle,

for Mary's fierce pride, had she lived, could hardly have bowed to the

surrender of the town. But the Queen was dying. Her health had long been

weak, and the miseries and failure of her reign hastened the progress of

disease. Already enfeebled, she was attacked as winter drew near by a

fever which was at this time ravaging the country, and on the

seventeenth of November, 1558, she breathed her last.