THE CATHOLIC REACTION.
1553-1558.
[Sidenote: =England loyal to Princess Mary.=]
The death of Edward VI. gave the signal for the outbreak of trouble all
over England. The nation had acquiesced in the selfish and unscrupulous
government of Northumberland solely because of its loyalty to the
young king. When Edward passed away, it became at once evident that
the Protector's power had no firm base, and that his attempt to change
the succession would be fruitless. For every man, the Protestant no
less than the Catholic, was fully persuaded that the Princess Mary was
the true heir to the crown, and there was no party in the state--save
the personal adherents of Dudley--who were prepared to strike a blow
against her.
[Sidenote: =Lady Jane Grey proclaimed queen.=]
Meanwhile, however, the Protector proclaimed his daughter-in-law queen
in London, though citizens and courtiers alike maintained an attitude
of cold disapproval. The Lady Jane was personally well liked; she was
an innocent girl of seventeen, who loved her husband and her books, and
had no knowledge or skill in affairs of state. But every one knew that
she was a usurper--a fact which no personal merits could gloze over.
[Sidenote: =Collapse and execution of Northumberland.=]
Northumberland directed his first efforts to seize the person of the
Princess Mary. He sent his son, the Earl of Warwick, to lay hands
on her, but she escaped and fled into the Eastern Counties, where
the gentry of Norfolk and Suffolk, the most Protestant shires in the
kingdom, hailed her as queen, and armed to defend her. Warwick's troops
dispersed when he strove to induce them to attack the followers of
the rightful heiress. This alarming symptom startled the Protector
out of his security; he raised a larger force and set out at once to
suppress the rising. But the moment that he had left London there was
an outbreak in the capital itself. The majority of the royal council,
when Northumberland's eye was off them, threw in their lot with the
rioters, and London fell into the hands of Mary's partisans. Nor was
this all. The whole of the shires from north to south rose in Mary's
favour, and the Protector, who had marched as far as Cambridge, saw his
army melt away from him. When the Earl of Arundel came against him in
the name of the rightful queen, he was constrained to give up his sword
and yield himself a prisoner. He was brought back to London, tried,
and condemned for high treason. His last days showed the meanness
of his character; for, in the hope of propitiating the queen, he
declared himself a Catholic, heard Mass, and made fulsome and degrading
protestations of contrition and humility. They did not save his life,
for he was beheaded, to the great joy of all England, only six weeks
after the death of Edward VI. (August 22, 1553). Mary cast into prison
all Northumberland's tools: the unfortunate Lady Jane--queen for just
thirteen days--her husband Lord Guildford Dudley, her father the Duke
of Suffolk, and most of the Dudley kin. For the present they suffered
no further harm.
[Sidenote: =The fanaticism of Mary.=]
The rightful heiress was now set upon the throne, and England
had leisure to look on her and learn her moods. Mary was in her
thirty-ninth year. Ever since her unfortunate mother's divorce she
had been living in neglect and seclusion; her father had stigmatized
her as a bastard, and her brother had kept her from court. For twenty
years she had been nursing her own and her mother's wrongs in lonely
country manors, denied all the state and deference that were her due,
and closely supervised by the underlings of the Crown. It was small
wonder that she had grown up discontented, suspicious, and morose. One
help had sustained her through all her troubles--her intense faith
in the old creed, which she believed to be true, and therefore bound
to triumph in the end. _Veritas temporis filia_ was her favourite
motto.[33] Mary's Catholicism was something more than earnest; it was
a devouring flame, ready to consume all that stood in its way. She was
set on avenging all the blood that had been shed by her father, all
the insults to the old faith that had been inflicted by the ministers
of her brother. She thought that she had come with a mission not merely
to reconcile England to the papacy, but to scourge her for her past
backsliding.
The nation did not yet know of the habits of mind which its mistress
harboured. The Protestants were ready to acquiesce in her rule; the
majority, who were neither Protestants nor Papists, trusted that she
was about to take up the middle course that her father had chosen; the
Romanist minority hardly expected more than this from her at the first.
But Mary's actions soon showed that she was set on a more violent
reaction; not only did she release from bonds the imprisoned bishops,
Bonner and Gardiner, the old Duke of Norfolk--a captive since 1547--and
all others who had suffered under her father and brother, but she
began to molest those who had taken a prominent part in the religious
doings of the late reign. Proceedings were begun against ten Protestant
bishops, including Cranmer, the Primate of England, before she had been
two months on the throne. Some of them fled over seas; the others were
caught and put into confinement. The restoration of the Latin Mass was
everywhere commanded. All married clergy were threatened with removal
from their benefices. Mary began to speak openly of placing her realm
under the supremacy of the Pope, and even of restoring to the Church
all the monastic estates that her father had appropriated, an idea
which filled every landowner with dismay.
[Sidenote: =Projected marriage with Philip of Spain.=]
Meanwhile, another project was filling Mary's brain. She was determined
to marry, and to rear up a Catholic heir to the throne; for she hated
her half-sister, the Princess Elizabeth--Anne Boleyn's child--and
utterly refused to acknowledge her legitimacy, or to own her as her
next of kin. Mary had conceived a romantic affection on hearsay
evidence for her cousin, Philip of Spain, the son and heir of the
Emperor Charles V., a young prince twelve years her junior, whose
charms and merits had been grossly overpraised to her by interested
persons. The prospect of winning England for his son allured the
Emperor, and he warmly pressed the marriage, though Philip did not view
with satisfaction the pursuit of such an elderly bride.
[Sidenote: =Unpopularity of the Spanish match.=]
When the queen's intention of wedding Philip of Spain began to be
known, it led to great discontent, for such a match implied not only a
close union with the papal party on the Continent, but the resumption
of the war with France, which had brought so much loss and so little
gain under Henry VIII. and Edward VI.; for Spain and France were still
involved in their standing struggle for domination on the Continent,
and alliance with the one meant war with the other.
[Sidenote: =Wyatt's rebellion.=]
When the queen's betrothal to Philip was announced, trouble at once
followed. The Protestant party had viewed with dismay the restoration
of the Mass, and foresaw persecution close at hand; many who were
not Protestants were anxious to stop the Spanish marriage and the
renewal of the foreign war. Hence came the breaking out of a dangerous
rebellion, aiming at Mary's deposition, and the substitution for her of
her sister Elizabeth, who was, however, kept in ignorance of the plot.
The conspirators intended her to marry Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon,
son of the Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, whom Henry VIII. had beheaded
in 1539, and last heir of the house of York. Courtenay himself, a vain
and incapable young man, was not the real head of the conspiracy, which
was mainly guided by the Duke of Suffolk--the father of Lady Jane
Grey--and by Sir Thomas Wyatt, a young knight of Kent. Courtenay's
babbling folly betrayed the plot too soon, and the conspirators had to
rise before they were ready. Their armed bands were easily crushed in
all parts of England save in Kent; Wyatt raised 10,000 men in that very
Protestant county, and boldly marched on London. The Government had no
sufficient force ready to hold him back, and he nearly succeeded in
seizing the capital and the queen's person, for many of the Londoners
were ready to throw open the gates to him. But the queen induced him
to halt for a day by sending offers for an accommodation, and when he
reached London Bridge he found it so strongly held that after some
heavy fighting he gave up the passage as impossible, and started
westward to cross the Thames at Kingston. This delay saved Mary. She
displayed great courage and activity, hurried up to London all the
trustworthy gentry within her reach, persuaded many of the citizens to
arm in her favour, and was able to offer a firm resistance when Wyatt
at last appeared in Middlesex and pressed on into the western suburbs
of the city. The queen's troops and the insurgents fought a running
fight from Knightsbridge to Charing Cross; Wyatt, with the head of his
column, cut his way down the Strand as far as Ludgate Hill, but his
main body was broken up and dispersed, and he himself, after a gallant
struggle, was taken prisoner at Temple Bar.
[Sidenote: =Harsh measures of Mary.=]
Mary had much excuse for severity against the conquered rebels, but
her vengeance went far beyond the bounds of wisdom. Wyatt was cruelly
tortured to make him implicate the Princess Elizabeth in the plot,
but died protesting that he had acted without her knowledge. Suffolk
and his brother, Sir Thomas Grey, were beheaded; eighty of the more
important rebels were hung; but in addition the unpardonable crime of
slaying Lady Jane Grey was committed. She and her husband had been
prisoners all the time of the rising, but Mary thought the opportunity
of getting rid of her too good to be lost, and beheaded both her
and Lord Guildford Dudley, on the vain pretence that they had been
concerned in the conspiracy. The young ex-queen suffered with a dignity
and constancy that moved all hearts, affirming to the last her firm
adherence to the Protestant faith, and her innocence of all treasonable
intent against her cousin (February 12, 1554). There seems little
doubt that the queen's own sister, the Princess Elizabeth, would have
shared Lady Jane's fate, if only sufficient evidence against her could
have been procured. The incapable Earl of Devon owed his life to his
insignificance, and was banished after a long sojourn in the Tower.
[Sidenote: =Marriage with Philip.--Submission to Rome.=]
Victorious over her enemies, Queen Mary was now able to carry out
her unwise plans without hindrance. In July, 1554, Philip of Spain
came over from Flanders, and wedded her at Winchester. In the same
autumn a Parliament, elected under strong royal pressure, voted in
favour of reconciliation with Rome, and a complete acknowledgment
of the papal supremacy. In the capacity of Legate to England, there
appeared Reginald Pole, a long-exiled English cardinal of Yorkist
blood, brother of that Lord Montagu whom Henry VIII. had slain in
1539. He solemnly absolved the two Houses of Parliament from the
papal excommunication which so long had lain upon the land. Shortly
afterwards the submission of the realm to the papacy was celebrated
in the most typical way by the solemn re-enacting of the cruel statute
of Henry IV., _De Heretico Comburendo_, which made the stake once more
the doom of all who refused to obey the Pope. Mary herself, a fanatical
party among her bishops, of whom Bonner of London was the worst, and
the Legate must all take their share of the responsibility for this
crime. The queen had her wrongs to revenge; the bishops had suffered
long in prison under King Edward; Pole had been accused by his enemies
of Lutheranism, and was anxious to vindicate his orthodoxy by showing a
readiness to put Protestants to death.
[Sidenote: =Persecution of the Protestants--Latimer and Ridley.=]
From the moment of the enacting of the laws against heresy (January,
1555), the history of Mary's reign became a catalogue of horrors. Even
the callous Philip of Spain, moved by policy if not by pity, besought
his wife to hold her hand. But Mary was inflexible. The burnings began
with those of Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester, and Rogers, Prebendary of
St. Paul's, in February, 1555. They went steadily on at the rate of
about ten persons a month, till the queen's death. The persecution
raged worst in London, the see of the rough and harsh Bishop Bonner; in
Canterbury, where Pole succeeded Cranmer; and in the Eastern Counties;
there were comparatively few victims in the West and North. As cautious
men fled over-sea, and weak men conformed to the queen's faith, it was
precisely the most fervent and pious of the Protestants who suffered.
The sight of so many men of godly life and blameless conversation
going to the stake for their faith, achieved the end that neither the
sternness of Henry VIII. nor the violence of Northumberland had been
able to secure--it practically converted England to Protestantism. The
bigoted queen was always remembered by the English as "Bloody Mary;"
her victims as "the Martyrs." A few of them deserve special mention:
Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, and Ridley, Bishop of London, were burnt
together under the walls of Oxford, on September 7, 1555, after being
kept in prison for two years. They had been well known as the best
of the Protestant bishops, and Latimer's fearless sermons had often
protested, in the presence of the late king and the Protectors, against
the self-seeking and corruption of the court. "Play the man, Master
Ridley," said Latimer, when he and his companion stood at the stake;
"for we shall this day light such a candle in England, as by the grace
of God shall never be put out."
[Sidenote: =Cranmer burnt.=]
Six months later there suffered a man of weaker and more vacillating
faith, Archbishop Cranmer, against whom the queen was especially
bitter, because he had pronounced her mother's divorce. Cranmer was a
man of real piety, but wholly destitute of moral courage. His jailors
forced him to witness the burning of Ridley and Latimer, in order to
shake his courage, and subjected him to many harassing trials and
cross-examinations, under which his spirit at last broke down. Yielding
to a moment of weakness, and lured by a false hint that he might save
his life by recantation, he consented to be received back into the
Roman Communion. But when he found that his enemies were set upon his
death, he refused to conform, bade the multitude assembled in St.
Mary's Church at Oxford "beware of the Pope, Christ's enemy, a very
Antichrist with all his false doctrine," and went with firmness to the
stake, thrusting first into the flames the right hand with which he had
written his promise to recant (March, 1556).
Altogether there suffered in the Marian persecution five bishops and
about 300 others, among whom were included several women and even
children. Mary looked upon her wicked doings not merely as righteous
in themselves, but as a means of moving Heaven in her favour for the
great end that she had in view--the raising up of a Catholic heir. Her
heart was set on bearing a son, and when this was denied her, she fell
into a state of gloomy depression. Her morbid and hysterical temper
rendered her insufferable to her husband Philip, who betook himself
to the Continent, where his father, Charles V., was about to abdicate
in his favour. After he became King of Spain (1556) he only paid one
short visit to his English realm and his jealous wife, and escaped as
quickly as he might. Mary remained a prey to melancholy and disease,
and obstinately persisted in "working out her salvation" by faggot and
stake. The country grew more and more discontented; conspiracy was
rife, fostered by the exiled Protestants, who had gathered in Paris,
and tried to excite rebellion by the aid of the King of France. Their
efforts nearly cost the life of the Princess Elizabeth, whom the queen
kept in confinement, and would have slain if her cautious sister had
not been wise enough to avoid all suspicion of offence.
[Sidenote: =War with France.--Loss of Calais.=]
The war with France, which was the necessary consequence of the Spanish
match, proved very disastrous for England. Mary's ministers gave Philip
no very useful help, while, on the other hand, they contrived to
lose the last Continental possession of the Crown. Calais, which had
remained in English hands ever since Edward III. captured it in 1346,
was suddenly invested by the Duke of Guise, who commanded the French
army of the North. The garrison was caught unprepared, and was very
weak in numbers. After a few days' siege it was forced to yield, before
any help could come either from England or Spain (January, 1558). This
disgrace told heavily on the queen's health; she cried that when she
died "Calais" would be found written on her heart, and fell into a
deeper melancholy than before.
Yet her miserable life was protracted ten months longer, and she
survived till November, 1558, racked by disease, and calling in vain
for her absent husband, yet persecuting vigorously to the last. Her
cousin and adviser, Cardinal Pole, died within three days of her.
So ended Mary Tudor, who in five years had rendered Romanism more
hateful in the eyes of Englishmen than five centuries of papal
aggression had availed to make it, and who had by her persecutions
caused the adoption of Protestantism under her successor to become
inevitable.
FOOTNOTE:
[33] For example, she chose it for her coinage.