THE ENGLISH REFORMATION.
1536-1553.
The breach between England and Rome had become irreparable when
Henry executed More and Fisher, and when Pope Paul had declared the
king deposed. The Church of England had now seceded from the Roman
obedience, and organized herself as an independent body with the
sovereign as her Supreme Head. The secession had been carried out
entirely on the king's initiative, but the nation had acquiesced in
it because of the old and long-felt abuses of which the papacy had
always been the maintainer. King and people alike wished to make an end
of the customs by which the Pope had profited,--his vast gains from
the _annates_ of English sees and benefices; his habit of appointing
non-resident Italians to the richest English preferments; his power
of summoning litigants on ecclesiastical matters before the distant,
costly, and corrupt Church courts at Rome. It was generally thought
that when England freed herself from the Roman obedience, she would be
able to reform in peace all the faults and abuses which disfigured her
ecclesiastical system. Further than this the majority of the nation did
not at first wish to go; they had not ceased to be Catholics, though
they were no longer Roman Catholics. Only a comparatively small section
of the English people had yet been affected by the later developments
of Continental Protestantism.
[Sidenote: =German Protestantism.=]
But the conditions of the English and the Germans at the moment when
both threw off the yoke of Rome, were sufficiently similar to make
it inevitable that the theories of the Continental Reformers would
ere long begin to act upon English minds. The German protest against
the papacy had taken shape in the declaration that the Bible alone
was the rule by which Christian men should order their lives--that
the tradition of the mediaeval Church, which supplemented the teaching
of the Gospels, was dangerous, full of errors and superstitions, and
often directly opposed to scriptural precept. Mediaeval traditions
were the bulwark of the Roman see, and ere long we find King Henry and
his bishops following the Germans into this position, and basing the
reform of the English Church on the Bible, and the Bible alone. But
when tradition was rejected and the Scriptures taken as the sole test
of all doctrines, further development became inevitable. There soon
arose Reformers in England, as on the Continent, who could not find
in their Bibles any justification for some of the doctrines to which
King Henry clung most obstinately, and most of all for the dogma of
Transubstantiation, round which the Roman Church had built up its main
claim to rule the souls of men.
[Sidenote: =Doctrine of transubstantiation.=]
This doctrine concerning "the Sacrifice of the Mass," as commonly held
at this time in the Western Church, taught that, at the celebration of
the Holy Communion, when the priest had consecrated the sacramental
bread and wine, the very flesh and blood of Christ became carnally
and corporeally present in the chalice and patten--that the bread and
wine were no longer bread and wine, but had been transubstantiated
into Christ's own body, which was day by day offered up in sacrifice
for the sins of the world. The Pope and the priesthood, by their
power of granting or refusing the sacrament to the laity, stood as
the sole mediators between God and man. The Continental Protestants,
cut off from the main body of the Western Church by the Pope's ban,
had formulated theories which struck at the roots of the power of the
clergy. Many of them treated the sacrament of the Lord's Supper as no
more than a solemn ceremony, denying any sacramental character to the
rite. The majority of the early English Protestants fell into this
extreme view.
[Sidenote: =Attitude of the king.=]
Now Henry VIII. to the end of his days stood firm to the mediaeval
doctrine of the sacrament, and fully accepted Transubstantiation,
though he denied the deduction which the Roman Church had drawn from
it--that by it the Pope and clergy are the despotic masters of the
souls of men. He merely desired to place himself in the position
which the Pope had hitherto held, as head of the spiritual hierarchy
of England. With the pliant Cranmer and other bishops of his own to
serve him, he wished to become as despotic a sovereign over the souls
of Englishmen as he already was over their bodies. To a great extent
he succeeded, and for the last twelve years of his reign he exercised
a hateful spiritual tyranny over his subjects, drawing a hard-and-fast
line of submission to his own views, which no man was allowed to
overstep in either direction. Roman Catholics who denied his power to
supersede the Pope's authority were hung as traitors. Protestants who
refused to accept his theory of the Sacraments were burnt as heretics.
[Sidenote: =The monasteries.=]
The turning-point of Henry's reign was the turbulent and boisterous
year 1536-7. In pursuance of his plan of a campaign against the papacy,
disguised under the shape of a reform of abuses, Henry had resolved to
attack the monasteries. The monks had long been an unpopular class: the
impulse towards monasticism, which had been so vigorous in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries, had long died away, and ever since the time
of Wicliffe men had been asking each other what was the use of the
monasteries? There were no less than 619 of them in England. They were
enormously wealthy, and they did little to justify their existence;
they had long ceased to be centres of learning or of teaching. Beyond
going through their daily round of mechanical Church services, their
inmates did absolutely nothing. Their wealth had led to much luxury,
both of splendid building and of high living. To this day the traveller
who measures the ruins of enormous and sumptuous abbeys planted in the
wilderness--like Tintern or Fountains--and learns that they served
no public or spiritual end save the sheltering of a few dozen monks,
wonders at the magnificence of the husk which contained so small and
withered a kernel. But the monasteries were worse than useless--they
were absolutely harmful; their worst habit was to acquire rich country
livings, draw all the tithes from them, and work them with a vicar
on starvation wages. If we see a poor living in modern England, we
generally find that the monks sucked the marrow out of it in the Middle
Ages, to rear their colossal chapels and their magnificent refectories.
It was the monasteries, too, which by their indiscriminate doles and
charities, reared and fostered the horde of itinerant beggars who,
under the name of pilgrims, tramped from abbey to abbey all the year
round. Worse than this, there is no doubt that a considerable amount
of evil living prevailed in some of the monasteries. Before the
Reformation had been heard of, we find Archbishop Warham and Cardinal
Wolsey storming at the immorality of certain religious houses. It was
but natural that idleness, luxury, and high living should breed such
results among the grosser souls in the monastic corporations. In public
esteem the better houses suffered for the sins of the worse.
[Sidenote: =Inquiry into their condition.=]
The monks had always been the faithful allies of the Popes, and
Henry determined to suppress this "papal militia," as they have been
called, and at the same time to fill his pockets from their plunder.
Accordingly, he sent commissioners round England, to report on the
state of the religious houses. These officials--as the king had
wished--drew up a very gloomy report. They declared that they found
nothing but idleness and corruption among the smaller monasteries, and
that many of the greater were no better. There can be no doubt that
they grossly exaggerated the blackness of the picture, knowing that the
king would welcome all possible justification for the action which he
was meditating. But it is equally certain that in most parts of England
the monks were deservedly unpopular, and that the commissioners' report
only reflected the nation's belief.
[Sidenote: =The lesser monasteries suppressed.=]
Henry laid the report before his Parliament, and at his suggestion an
act was passed suppressing the lesser monasteries--all such as had an
income of less than £200 per annum. Their goods were confiscated to the
Crown, but an allowance was made to such of the monks as did not find
places in the surviving monasteries of the larger sort (1536).
[Sidenote: =Henry and Anne Boleyn.=]
The year of the dissolution of small monasteries was notable for a
tragedy in the palace, which shows Henry's unlovely character at its
worst. He had been growing cold to the fair and ambitious queen who had
brought on him his quarrel with Rome. She had disappointed his hope of
a male heir--only the Princess Elizabeth had sprung from the marriage.
Henry had tired of her voluptuous airs and graces, and was beginning
to feel vexed at the want of dignity and decorum which she displayed
among his courtiers. Anne's light words and unseemly familiarity with
many of the gentlemen of his household roused his anger. But what was
most fatal to the unfortunate queen was that his eye had caught another
face about the court, which now seemed to him more attractive than his
wife's.
[Sidenote: =Anne's execution.--Marriage with Jane Seymour.=]
Suddenly and unexpectedly the storm burst. On May 2, 1536, the king
sent Anne to the Tower, and charged her with misconduct with several
members of his household. Protesting her innocence and amazement to
the last, the unhappy young wife was tried, condemned, and executed,
within a space of less than three weeks from her arrest. Her own father
and uncle sat on the bench of peers which declared her an adulteress;
but the fact witnesses to their shame and cowardice rather than to her
criminality. In all probability she was guilty of nothing more than
unwise levity; her real crime was not adultery, but standing in the
way of Henry's lawless desires. With the most unseemly haste, the king
wedded Jane Seymour, the lady who had already attracted his notice, the
moment that his wretched second wife had breathed her last.
[Sidenote: =Rebellion in Ireland and the North.=]
But he had small leisure to spend on his wedding, for the year 1536
was one of great peril to him. A rebellion in Ireland, led by the
Fitzgeralds, the greatest of the Anglo-Irish nobles, was already in
progress. A still more dangerous phenomenon was the stir which was
arising in the North of England. The Northern counties were always a
generation behind the rest of England in their politics. There the
monks were more powerful and less disliked than in any other part
of the land, and the nobles still retained much of their old feudal
power over their vassals, and some of their old turbulence. The North
had beheld the breach with Rome with dismay and dislike, and remained
strongly Papist in its sympathies. The dissolution of the monasteries
moved it to an active protest against the king's religious action.
[Sidenote: =The Pilgrimage of Grace.=]
Rioting suddenly broke out in Lincolnshire, and then in Yorkshire. The
insurgents gathered in great bands, and at last no less than 30,000
men mustered at Doncaster, under Robert Aske, a lawyer, and Lord
Darcy. They called themselves the army of the Church, raised a banner
displaying the five wounds of Christ as their standard, and demanded a
reconciliation with the Pope, the restoration of the religious houses,
and the dismissal of the king's impious minister Cromwell, and the
"heretic bishops" who had favoured the breach with Rome. The gentry of
the North and the priors and abbots of the great abbeys of Yorkshire
joined the rising, which men called "the Pilgrimage of Grace," because
the rebels wished to go to meet the king, and to submit their demands
to his personal judgment. Henry was caught unprepared, but he managed
to extricate himself from the peril by his unscrupulous double-dealing.
He sent the Duke of Norfolk, whose dislike of Protestantism was well
known, to treat with the rebels. Norfolk pledged his word that the king
would pardon the insurgents, and take all their demands into favourable
consideration. The simple Northerners dispersed, trusting to Henry's
good faith; but the king employed the time he had gained in raising an
army, and getting together a great train of artillery. He then marched
into Yorkshire as an invader, and made no further pretence of listening
to the claims of the insurgents. In consequence, the more vehement
of the partisans of the old faith again took arms. This was as Henry
desired, for he wanted an excuse to terrorize the North. He easily put
down the second rising, and hung all the leaders of the Pilgrimage
of Grace: Aske, Lord Darcy, Lord Hussey, and the abbots of all the
greatest monastic establishments of the North--Whalley, Fountains,
Jervaulx, Barlings, and Sawley (March-May, 1537).
[Sidenote: =Execution of the Marquis of Exeter and Henry Pole.=]
This fearful blow cowed most of the partisans of the papacy, and no
more open revolts followed. But a little later the last representatives
of the house of York were detected in paths which the king suspected
to be treasonable. They thought, it seems, that the indignation
of the Catholics against the king's doings might be turned into a
dynastic revolution in favour of the old royal line. Edward Courtenay,
Marquis of Exeter, a grandson of Edward IV., and Henry Pole, Lord
Montagu, a grandson of George of Clarence, were the persons implicated
in this intrigue, which never got beyond the stage of treasonable
talk. Nevertheless, the king beheaded them both, though the evidence
against them was most imperfect; but Henry never stayed his hand
for want of legal proof, and slew all whom he suspected. He even
imprisoned, and some years afterwards executed, the aged mother of Lord
Montagu--Margaret of Clarence, Countess of Salisbury, sister of the
unfortunate Edward of Clarence, whom his father had slain forty-one
years back.
[Sidenote: =The Irish rebellion crushed.=]
The insurrection in Ireland, which had been raging at the same time
as the Pilgrimage of Grace, ended in a way no less profitable to the
king. Not only did he capture and hang well-nigh the whole family of
the Fitzgeralds of Kildare, the heads of the rising, but his armies,
under Lord-Deputy Grey, pushed out from the English Pale, and compelled
most of the chiefs of Munster and Connaught to do homage to the
Crown, though the king's writ had not run in those provinces for two
centuries. This was the first step towards the conquest of Ireland
afterwards carried out by Queen Elizabeth.
[Sidenote: =Growth of Protestantism. Tyndale's Bible.=]
Meanwhile Henry's determination to strike at all the roots of papal
power in England, had been carrying him further than he himself
realized on the road towards Protestantism. The "Articles of 1536,"
drawn up by his own hand, declared that all doctrines and ceremonies
for which authority could not be found in the Bible, were superstitious
and erroneous. As a logical consequence of this declaration, the
Bible itself, translated into English, was issued to the people by
royal order in 1538, and ordered to be placed in every church. The
translation used was that made by a zealous Protestant, William
Tyndale, who had printed it in Antwerp some years before; the
unfortunate translator had been caught and burnt by the Emperor Charles
V., only a short time before his book became the rule of life for
Englishmen.
[Sidenote: =The greater monasteries suppressed.=]
When the Bible had once been placed in the hands of the people,
Protestantism in England began to advance by leaps and bounds. It was
secretly favoured both by Archbishop Cranmer and by the king's great
minister Cromwell. The latter, more logical than his master, wished to
see all traces of Roman Catholicism removed from England, and tried to
guide the king towards a frank recognition of Protestantism, and an
alliance with the Lutheran princes of Germany. But it was dangerous
work to endeavour to govern or persuade Henry, as Cromwell was to
find to his cost. One more step at least he did induce his master to
take--the final destruction of all the remaining monasteries. The
plunder of the lesser houses had been so profitable, that Henry was
easily induced to doom the greater to the same fate. In the course of
1538-9-40 all were swept away; in many cases, the abbots and monks were
induced to surrender their estates peaceably into the king's hands,
in return for pensions or promotion. But where persuasion failed,
force was used; an Act of Parliament was passed by Henry's submissive
Commons, bestowing on him the lands of all monastic foundations. Then
they were suppressed--the harmless and well-ordered ones no less
than the worst and most corrupt. When the monks offered obstinate
resistance, the king dealt very cruelly with them--the wealthy abbots
of Glastonbury, Reading, and Colchester, were all hung, really for
reluctance to surrender their houses, nominally for treason in refusing
to acknowledge the king's complete spiritual supremacy as head of the
Church. The enormous plunder of the monasteries brought the king little
permanent good; he had promised to use it for ecclesiastical purposes,
and had broached a scheme for founding many new churches and schools,
and creating twenty fresh bishoprics. But in the end he lavished most
of the lands of the religious houses upon those of the nobles and
gentry whom he thought worth bribing. The Church only benefited by the
endowing of the six new bishoprics--Oxford, Chester, Peterborough,
Bristol, Gloucester, and the short-lived see of Westminster.
[Sidenote: =The Six Articles.=]
But Henry was resolved to show the Protestants that they must not
expect his countenance, in spite of the blows which he was dealing at
the Roman Catholics. In the very year in which the majority of the
greater monasteries fell, he forced his Parliament to pass the cruel
"Bill of the Six Articles." This odious measure condemned to forfeiture
on the first offence, and to death on the second, all who should write
or speak against certain of the ancient doctrines of the mediaeval
Church, of which Transubstantiation in the Sacrament, the celibacy of
the clergy, and auricular confession were the chief (1539).
[Sidenote: =Birth of a son. Death of Jane Seymour.=]
Meanwhile the king had at last obtained the male heir for whom he had
so much longed. His third wife, Jane Seymour, bore him a son, Prince
Edward, in 1537, though she died at the child's birth. On this boy
all Henry's fondness was lavished: he was to be the sole heir to the
throne, and his sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, were both stigmatized as
illegitimate.
[Sidenote: =Marriage with Anne of Cleves.=]
After he had mourned Queen Jane for two years, Henry wished to marry
again. By Cromwell's persuasion he sought a wife among the Protestant
princes of Germany, thinking so to strengthen himself against the
Emperor Charles, who never to his death forgave him the matter of
Catherine of Aragon's divorce. To his own ruin, Cromwell persuaded the
king to choose Anne, sister of Duke William of Cleves, as his fourth
spouse. The lady was plain and stupid--facts which Cromwell carefully
concealed from his master till she had been solemnly betrothed to him
and brought over to England. Henry was bitterly provoked when he was
confronted with his new queen, and could not behave with ordinary
civility to her. When he learnt that the German alliances which he
was to buy with his marriage had fallen through, he repudiated the
unfortunate Anne. She was fortunately of a philosophic mood, and
readily consented to be bought off for a large annual pension and a
handsome residence at Chelsea.
[Sidenote: =Execution of Cromwell.=]
Henry at once wreaked his vengeance on Cromwell for deceiving him as
to Anne and for failing in his negotiations with the German princes.
He had him arrested, and accused him of receiving bribes and of having
favoured the Protestants by "dispersing heretical books and secretly
releasing heretics from prison." Both charges were probably true,
but they form no excuse for Henry's cruel treatment of the faithful
and intrepid minister who had helped him through all the troubles of
1536-40. Cromwell was attainted and beheaded, to the great joy of the
Roman Catholics, who thought that he had been the king's tempter and
evil genius, whereas in truth he had been no more than his tool.
[Sidenote: =Marriages with Catherine Howard and Catherine Parr.=]
Cromwell's end greatly encouraged the Roman Catholic party, and they
were still more elated when the king married a lady known to incline
towards the old faith. This was Catherine Howard, a cousin of Anne
Boleyn and, like her, a niece of the Duke of Norfolk (1540). Henry
had been caught by her beauty, and had not discovered that she was a
person of abandoned manners, whose amours were known to many persons
about the court. Within eighteen months of her marriage, she was
detected in misconduct with one of her old lovers, and sent to the
block. In her case Henry had much more excuse for his ruthless cruelty
than in that of Anne Boleyn; but what kind of wives could a monarch
of such manners expect to find? He was undeservedly fortunate in his
sixth marriage, with Catherine Parr, the dowager Lady Latimer, whom
he wedded a year after Catherine Howard's execution. She was a young
widow of twenty-six, a person of piety and discretion, who gave no
opportunity of offence to the king, and nursed him faithfully through
the infirmities of his later years. For Henry, who had now reached
the age of fifty-two, was growing grossly corpulent and developing a
complication of diseases which racked him fearfully during the last
five years of his life, and partly explain the frantic exhibitions of
cruelty to which he often gave way.
[Sidenote: =Scottish war.--Battle of Solway Moss.=]
The time was a very evil one for England. Not only was the king
persecuting Romanist and Protestant indifferently, but he had added
external to internal troubles. A war with Scotland had broken out in
1540, and was always keeping the northern frontier unquiet, though the
English had the better in the fighting. James V. allied himself to
France, and Henry had to keep guard against attacks on the south as
well as the north. The victory of Solway Moss (November, 1542) put an
end to any danger from Scotland; the news of it killed King James, who
left his throne to his infant daughter Mary, the celebrated "Queen of
Scots." Her minority gave rise to factious struggles among the Scottish
nobles, and Henry, by buying over one party, was able to keep the rest
in check. In 1544 a great English army, under the Earl of Hertford,
Jane Seymour's brother, laid waste the whole of the Lowlands and burnt
Edinburgh, but did not succeed in driving the enemy to sue for peace.
[Sidenote: =War with France.=]
The French war was far more dangerous. King Francis collected a great
fleet in Normandy, and threatened an invasion of England. Henry
was forced to arm and pay a vast array of shire levies to meet the
attack, but when it came (1545) the French were only able to land and
make a raid in the Isle of Wight. They drew back after fruitlessly
demonstrating against Portsmouth and burning a few English ships.
The balance of gain in the war was actually in favour of Henry, who
had taken Boulogne (1544), and proved able to retain it against all
attempts, till it was ceded to him by France at the peace of 1546.
[Sidenote: =Debasement of the currency.=]
But the struggles with France and Scotland had the most disastrous
effects on the finances of the realm. Henry had wasted all the wealth
that he had wrested from the monasteries, and now, to fill his pockets,
tried the unrighteous expedient of debasing the currency. English
money, which had been hitherto the best and purest in Europe, was
horribly misused by him. He put one-sixth of copper into the gold
sovereign, and one-half and afterwards two-thirds of copper into the
silver shilling, to the lamentable defrauding of his subjects, who
found that English money would no longer be accepted by Continental
traders, though previously it had been more esteemed than that of any
other country.
[Sidenote: =Growth of pauperism.=]
The debasement of the coinage was only one of the many symptoms of
misgovernment which embittered the end of Henry's reign. The general
upheaval of society caused by the overthrow of the monasteries, and
the sudden transfer of their enormous estates to new holders, had
given rise to much distress. Not only were the paupers who had lived
on the monks' doles, and the pilgrims who had been wont to wander
from abbey to abbey, thrown on the world to beg, but many of the old
tenant farmers were displaced. For the new owners often preferred
sheep-breeding to agriculture, and drove out the cottiers who had
been wont to hold a few acres under the old-fashioned management
of the monastic bodies. Contemporary writers speak bitterly of the
plague of "sturdy and valiant beggars" who flooded the land--unfrocked
monks, pilgrims whose trade was over, disbanded soldiers, and evicted
peasantry. The king and his Parliament issued the most ferocious laws
against these vagrants--when apprehended they were to be branded, and
given as serfs for two years to any one who chose to ask for their
services. If caught a second time, they were liable to be hung as
incorrigible.
[Sidenote: =Execution of the Earl of Surrey.=]
To complete this gloomy picture, there only remains to be added the
story of the king's last outburst of suspicion and cruelty. Conceiving
that the Duke of Norfolk and his son, the Earl of Surrey, were counting
on his approaching death to make an attempt to seize the regency, he
had them both apprehended, though nothing definite could be alleged
against them, save that of late they had taken to quartering the royal
arms in their family shield--a distinction to which they were entitled
as descended from Edward III. Surrey, a soldier of great promise and
a poet of considerable power, was beheaded; his father was doomed to
follow him, had not the king's death intervened. It is even said that
Henry, in one of his more irritable moods, was threatening to try his
blameless wife, Queen Catherine, for concealed Protestantism.
[Sidenote: =Death of Henry.--Condition of England.=]
But to the general relief of England, Henry died before this last
crime could be consummated (January 28, 1547). He left his realm in a
condition of great misery, and for all its troubles he was personally
responsible. His breach with the papacy had been the result of
private pique, not of conscience or principle. When committed to the
anti-Roman cause, he had refused to move forward with the one half
of his subjects, or to remain behind with the other. He had anchored
the English Church for a time in a middle position, intolerable
alike to Protestant Reformers and to the Partisans of the Papacy and
subjection to Rome. If the nation owed him a certain debt of gratitude
for not committing England to some of the excesses of Continental
Protestantism, yet it owed him no thanks for officering the Church
with a hierarchy of bishops, some of whom, like Cranmer, were meanly
timid and pliant, while others were men of low ideals and unworthy
lives, the mere creatures of court favour. Nor is it possible to view
with equanimity the way in which Henry wasted on pageants, foreign
intrigues, and fawning courtiers, the vast sums which the State had
acquired by the very proper and necessary abolition of the monasteries.
Of Henry's unbounded selfishness, of his ingratitude to those who had
served him best, of his ruthless cruelty to all who stood in his way,
we need not further speak. The story of his reign develops each of
these traits in its own particular blackness.
[Sidenote: =Henry's foreign policy.=]
Some historians have endeavoured to justify Henry's wavering foreign
policy, and all his forcible-feeble wars with Continental powers, by
the plea that, if he got no gain in land or gold thereby, yet he raised
England to a higher place among European nations than she had held in
his father's day. But this statement seems unwise. Henry, though much
flattered and courted at times, was in fact the mere dupe of Francis I.
and Charles V., each of whom cheated him again and again, and left him
hopelessly in the lurch. England's growing wealth and power would have
won her back her proper place in Europe far better than Henry's chaotic
intrigues. His whole foreign policy was a mistake and a tangle from
first to last.
[Sidenote: =The regency.--The Duke of Somerset Protector.=]
It remained to be seen who would now sway the sword and sceptre that
the dead tyrant had gripped so firmly. In his last years Henry had
surrounded himself by ministers less notable and less capable than
Wolsey or Cromwell. The chief place was held by his brother-in-law,
Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, the brother of the unfortunate Queen
Jane, and the uncle of Prince Edward, the heir to the crown. It was
natural that the charge of the young king--a bright and promising, but
delicate lad, now in his tenth year--should fall to his uncle; but the
late king, distrusting Hertford's wisdom, had left the regency, not
to him individually, but to a council of sixteen members, of which he
was but the president. Seymour, however, succeeded in getting a more
complete control over his colleagues than had been intended, mainly
by bribing them to consent with titles and large gifts of money. They
allowed him to make himself "Protector of the realm and of the king's
person," and to create himself Duke of Somerset. In return he made
the two chief members of the council earls; Wriothsley, head of the
Anglo-Catholic party, became Earl of Southampton; Dudley--son of that
Dudley who had paid with his head for serving Henry VII. too well--was
created Earl of Warwick.
[Sidenote: =Protestantism of Somerset.--First English Prayer-book.=]
Having seized the reins of power, the Duke of Somerset soon showed
himself a man of a character very different from the late king's
expectation. Instead of pursuing the middle course of Anglo-Catholic
policy which Henry had always marked out, he threw himself at once into
the hands of the Protestants. His first actions were directed towards
the completion of the Reformation, by sweeping away all those remnants
of the old faith which the late king had retained himself and imposed
upon his subjects. Henry VIII. had issued the Bible in English, and
caused the Litany and certain other parts of the Church service to be
said in the national tongue. But Somerset abolished the use of the
Latin language altogether, and caused the Communion Service and all the
rest of the rites of the Church to be celebrated in English. By the
end of 1548 he had authorized the issue of the "First Book of Common
Prayer," the earliest form of our own Anglican Prayer-book. Cranmer had
the chief part in its compilation, and his great gifts of expression
are borne witness to by many of the most spiritual and beautiful
prayers of our splendid and sonorous liturgy. When the fear of Henry
had been removed from his mind, Cranmer showed himself an undoubted
Protestant; but he was a moderate man, and spared many old rites and
customs, harmless in themselves, from a love of conservatism. The
Prayer-book was well received by all save the extreme Romanists, and
the few partisans of Continental Protestantism who complained that it
did not go far enough.
If the introduction of the English Prayer-book was both popular and
necessary, it was far otherwise with the measures which accompanied it.
Somerset's first year of rule was the time of the demolition of all the
old church ornaments and furniture, which the Protestants condemned as
mere idols and lumber. Not only were the images and pictures removed,
but much beautiful carved work and stained glass was ruthlessly broken
up. This was done with an irreverence and violence which deeply shocked
the majority of the nation, and Somerset's agents made no distinction
between monuments of superstition and harmless works of religious art.
Two of the bishops, Bonner of London and Gardiner of Winchester, who
ventured to oppose the Protector's doings, were placed in honourable
confinement.
[Sidenote: =Invasion of Scotland.--Battle of Pinkie.=]
While England was disturbed with these changes, many of them rational
and necessary, but all of them hasty and rash, Somerset had succeeded
in plunging the realm into two foreign wars. The English party north
of the Tweed had promised the hand of their little five-year-old Queen
Mary to King Edward, but when they proved unable to fulfil their
promise, owing to the hatred of the majority of the Scots for England,
the Protector resolved to use coercive measures. He declared war, and
invaded the Lowlands in the autumn of 1547, wasting the country before
him till he was met by the whole levy of Scotland on the hillside
of Pinkie, near Musselborough. There he inflicted on them a bloody
defeat, but gained no advantage thereby; for the Scots sent their
child-queen over to France, to keep her safe from English hands, and
when she reached the court of Henry II. she was wedded to his son,
the Dauphin Francis. Thus Somerset entirely lost the object of his
campaign, and only earned the desperate hate of the Scots for the
carnage of Pinkie.
[Sidenote: =Plots and Rebellions in England.=]
The war with Scotland brought about a war with France, in which the
Protector wasted much money. The struggle went against the English,
and ultimately led to the loss of Boulogne, the sole conquest of
Henry VIII. While this war was in progress, Somerset was involved in
serious troubles within the bounds of England itself. He detected his
own brother, Lord Seymour of Sudely, plotting to marry the Princess
Elizabeth, and oust him from the regency. Seymour was pardoned once,
but, on renewing his conspiracy, was apprehended and beheaded. But
domestic plots were less to be feared than popular risings. In 1548-49
two dangerous rebellions broke out in West and East. In Devonshire the
old Catholic party rose in arms, clamouring for the restoration of the
Mass and the suppression of Protestantism. In the Eastern Counties an
insurrection of another sort was seen; the peasantry banded themselves
together under the tanner Robert Ket, who called himself the "King of
Norfolk and Suffolk." They dreamed of a social revolution such as that
which Wat Tyler had demanded in an earlier age, though their grievances
were not the same as those of the fourteenth century. They complained
of the rapacity of the new landholders who had superseded the old
monastic bodies, and who were evicting the old peasantry right and
left, and turning farms into sheep-runs, because wool paid better than
corn. The enclosure of common lands, the debasement of the coinage, and
the slowness and inefficacy of the law when used by the poor man, were
also denounced. Ket and his fellows began seizing and trying unpopular
landholders, and spoke of making a clean sweep of the upper classes.
[Sidenote: =Ket's rebellion put down.=]
Now, the Protector had no scruple in putting down the rising of the
Devonshire Papists with great severity, but he felt that the Norfolk
men had great excuses for their anger, and did not deal promptly and
sternly with them. Ket's rising became very dangerous, and it seemed
as if anarchy would set in all over the Eastern Counties. The rebels
defeated the Marquis of Northampton, and stormed Norwich; they were
only dispersed at last by Dudley, the Earl of Warwick, who marched
against them with a mercenary force which had been collected for the
Scottish war, and routed them on Mousehold Heath. Ket was then hung,
and the rebellion subsided.
[Sidenote: =Deposition of Somerset.=]
Somerset's mismanagement and weakness had so disgusted his colleagues
in the regency that, after the eastern rebellion, they resolved to
depose him from the Protectorship. Finding that he could count on small
support, and that the council would be able to turn against him the
armies which had pacified Norfolk and Devon, he wisely laid down his
power. He was sent for a short time to the Tower, but soon the council
released him, and gave him a place among them (1550).
[Sidenote: =Earl of Warwick Protector.=]
Somerset's place was taken by John Dudley, the Earl of Warwick, son
of the extortionate minister of Henry VII. The new Protector was far
more unscrupulous and corrupt than his predecessor. Somerset had been
a well-meaning if an incapable ruler. Warwick was purely self-seeking,
and cared nothing for national ends. He showed himself not much more
competent as a ruler than the man he had overthrown, but he kept his
power more firmly than Somerset, because he never hesitated to strike
down all who opposed him, without any regard for justice or mercy.
[Sidenote: =His religious policy.--Second Book of Common Prayer.=]
Warwick, finding the Protestant party in the ascendant, used them
for his own ends, though in reality he was perfectly indifferent to
religion. His tendencies were shown by the appointment of several
bishops of ultra-Protestant views, and by the issuing of the "Second
Book of Common Prayer," to supersede the first. In this volume strong
signs of the influence of Continental Protestantism are found, and the
many traces of the pre-Reformation ritual were swept away.
Warwick's administration (1550-53) was no happier than Somerset's. He
was forced to make a humiliating peace with France, and to surrender
Boulogne. Though he began to reform the coinage by issuing good silver
money, yet he made the change harmful to the people by refusing to take
back the old base money at the rate at which it had been issued,[32]
and by actually uttering a considerable amount of debased money himself.
[Sidenote: =Marriage of his son and Lady Jane Grey.=]
But reckless self-seeking was the main key-note of Warwick's rule.
He employed his power unscrupulously to enrich both himself and his
family. He took for himself the title of Duke of Northumberland, and
ere long allied himself to the royal house by marrying his younger
son, Guildford Dudley, to the king's cousin, Lady Jane Grey, the
granddaughter of the Princess Mary, the favourite sister of Henry VIII.
This alliance led him into schemes which were to prove his ruin. The
young king was a bright and precocious boy, showing signs of capacity
and strength of will beyond his years. If he had lived, he would have
been a man of mark, for already in his sixteenth year he was showing
a keen interest in politics and religion, and a tendency to think for
himself. But he was incurably delicate, and by 1553 was obviously
falling into consumption.
[Sidenote: =The succession to the crown.--Will of Henry VIII.=]
Dudley saw that his power was bound to vanish on the king's death, if
the law of succession was maintained, and the king's eldest sister
Mary, the child of Catherine of Aragon, allowed to succeed. The late
king had drawn up a will, in which he indicated that, if Edward died,
he should be followed first by Mary, and then by her younger sister
Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn. Henry had then added that,
if all his children died heirless, he left the crown to the issue of
his favourite sister Mary, the Duchess of Suffolk, and not to the
descendants of his elder sister, Margaret of Scotland.
[Sidenote: =Edward VI. bequeaths the crown to Lady Jane Grey.=]
Now, Lady Jane Grey, the heiress of Mary of Suffolk, was in
Northumberland's hands, through her marriage with his son. Accordingly,
the duke resolved to persuade the young king to cut his sisters out of
the succession, and leave the crown by will to his cousin. The pretext
used was that both Mary and Elizabeth were illegitimate, the marriages
of Catherine and of Anne to Henry VIII. having both been declared void
at different times by the obsequious Parliaments of the last reign. It
was, of course, utterly absurd that a boy of sixteen should have the
power to make a will transferring the crown, for by English usage the
king's title depended on hereditary right and Parliamentary sanction,
not on the arbitrary decision of his predecessor. It was entirely
unconstitutional to think of disinheriting the two princesses by a mere
private document drawn up by their brother. But the young king was
persuaded to grant his guardian's request, mainly because he feared
the Romanist reaction which he knew would follow on the accession of
his elder sister, who had always remained an obstinate adherent of the
papacy.
[Sidenote: =Execution of Somerset.=]
Long before the king's death, Northumberland had taken all the measures
which he thought necessary for carrying out this arbitrary change in
the succession. He had packed the council with his hired partisans,
and swept away the only man that he feared, his predecessor Somerset.
For noting that the late Protector was regaining popularity, and might
prove a check upon him, he suddenly laid against him charges of treason
and felony, alleging that he was plotting to regain the regency by
force of arms. The unfortunate Somerset was condemned and executed,
to the great indignation of the people, who esteemed his good heart,
though they had doubted his judgment (1552).
All through the following year King Edward's health was failing, and
Dudley was perfecting his plans. In the summer of 1553 the young king
wasted away, and slowly sank into his grave. His cousin, Lady Jane, was
at once proclaimed queen by the unscrupulous Protector.
FOOTNOTE:
[32] He would only take back as sixpences the base testoons (or
shillings) which Somerset had paid out from the treasury at full value,
alleging truly enough that they had but 4-1/2_d._ of good silver in
them.