A History of the Reformation Volume II Part 20

Here then a question immediately arises as to the form of oath which the Bishops have ordered to be taken in the name of G.o.d, the saints, and the Gospels; which impious oath Hooper positively refused to take. So, when he appeared before the King in the presence of the Council, Hooper convinced the King by many arguments that the oath should be taken in the name of G.o.d alone, who knoweth the heart. This took place on the 20th of July. It was so agreeable to the G.o.dly King, that with his own pen he erased the clause of the oath which sanctioned swearing by any creatures.

Nothing could be more G.o.dly than this act, or more worthy of a Christian king. When this was done there remained the form of episcopal consecration, wh., as lately prescribed by the Bishops in Parliament, differs but little from the popish one. Hooper therefore obtained a letter from the King to the Archbishop of Canterbury (Cranmer), that he might be consecrated without superst.i.tion. But he gained nothing by this, as he was referred from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Bishop of London (Ridley), who refused to use any other form of consecration than that which had been subscribed by Parliament. Thus the Bishops mutually endeavour that none of their glory shall depart. A few days after, on the 30th of July, Hooper obtained leave from the King and the Council to be consecrated by the Bishop of London without any superst.i.tion. He replied that he would shortly send an answer either to the Council or to Hooper. While, therefore, Hooper was expecting the Bishop's answer, the latter went to court and alienated the minds of the Council from Hooper, making light of the use of the vestments and the like in the church, and calling them mere matters of indifference. Many were so convinced by him that they would hardly listen to Hooper's defence when he came into court shortly afterwards. He therefore requested them, that if they would not hear him speak, they would at least think it proper to hear and read his written apology. His request was granted: wherefore he delivered to the King's councillors, in writing, his opinion respecting the discontinuance of the use of vestments and the like puerilities. And if the Bishop cannot satisfy the King with other reasons, Hooper will gain the victory. We are daily expecting the termination of this controversy, which is only conducted between individuals, either by conference or by letter, for fear of any tumult being excited among the ignorant. You see in what a state of affairs the Church would be if they were left to the Bishops, even to the best of them."

In the end, Hooper allowed himself to be persuaded, and was consecrated in the usual way.

The advanced Reformers in England were probably incited to demand more freedom than the law permitted by the sight of the liberty enjoyed by men who were not Englishmen. French and German Protestants had come to England for refuge, and had been welcomed. The King had permitted them to use the Augustines' church in London, that they might "have the pure ministry of the Word and Sacraments according to the apostolic form,"

and they enjoyed their privileges.

"We are altogether exempted by letters patent from the King and Council from the jurisdiction of the Bishops. To each church (I mean the German and the French) are a.s.signed two ministers of the Word (among whom is my unworthy self), over whom has been appointed superintendent the most ill.u.s.trious John a Lasco; by whose aid alone, under G.o.d, we foreigners have arrived at our present state of pure religion. Some of the Bishops, and especially the Bishop of London, with certain others, are opposed to our design; but I hope their opposition will be ineffectual. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the special patron of foreigners, has been the chief support and promoter of our church, to the great astonishment of some."[494]

These foreigners, outside episcopal control and not subject to the _Acts of Uniformity_, enjoyed liberties of wors.h.i.+p which were not granted to Englishmen. They were driven out of the country when Mary succeeded; but under Elizabeth and James they had the same privileges and were naturally envied by the English Puritans, coerced by Bishops and harried by Acts of Uniformity.

While the Reformation was being pushed forward in England at a speed too great for the majority of the people, the King was showing the feebleness of his const.i.tution. He died on the 6th of July 1553, and the collapse of the Reformation after his death showed the uncertainty of the foundation on which it had been built.

CHAPTER III.

THE REACTION UNDER MARY.[495]

One of the last acts of the dying King had been to make a will regulating the succession. It was doubtless suggested to him by the Duke of Northumberland, but, once adopted, the lad clung to it with Tudor tenacity. It set aside as illegitimate both his sisters. It also set aside the young Queen of Scotland, who, failing Mary and Elizabeth, was the legitimate heir, being the granddaughter of Margaret, the eldest sister of Henry VIII., and selected the Lady Jane Grey, the representative (eldest child of eldest child) of Mary, the younger sister of Henry VIII. Both the King and his Council seem to have thought that the nation would not submit to a Roman Catholic on the throne; and Charles V. appears to have agreed with them. He considered the chances of Mary's succession small.

The people of England, however, rallied to Mary, as the nearest in blood to their old monarch, who, notwithstanding his autocratic rule, had never lost touch with his people.

The new Queen naturally turned to her cousin Charles V. for guidance. He had upheld her mother's cause and her own; and in the dark days which were past, his Amba.s.sador Chapuys had been her indefatigable friend.

It was Mary's consuming desire to bring back the English Church and nation to obedience to Rome--to undo the work of her father, and especially of her brother. The Emperor recommended caution; he advised the Queen to be patient; to watch and accommodate her policy to the manifestations of the feelings of her people; to punish the leaders who had striven to keep her from the throne, but to treat all their followers with clemency. Above all, she was to mark carefully the att.i.tude of her sister Elizabeth, and to reorganise the finances of the country.

Mary had released Gardiner from the Tower, and made him her trusted Minister. His advice in all matters, save that of her marriage, coincided with the Emperor's. It was thought that small difficulty would be found in restoring the Roman Catholic religion, but that difficulties might arise about the papal supremacy, and especially about the reception of a papal Legate. Much depended on the Pope. If His Holiness did not demand the restoration of the ecclesiastical property alienated during the last two reigns, and now distributed among over forty thousand proprietors, all might go well.

Signs were not wanting, however, that if the people were almost unanimous in accepting Mary as their Queen, they were not united upon religion. When Dr. Gilbert Bourne, preaching at St. Paul's Cross (Aug.

13th, 1553) praised Bishop Bonner, he was interrupted by shouts; a dagger was thrown at him; he was hustled out of the pulpit, and his life was threatened. The tumult was only appeased when Bradford, a known Protestant, appealed to the crowd. The Lord Mayor of London was authorised to declare to the people that it was not the Queen's intention to constrain men's consciences, and that she meant to trust solely to persuasion to bring them to the true faith.

Five days later (August 18th), Mary issued her first _Proclamation about Religion_, in which she advised her subjects "to live together in quiet sort and Christian charity, leaving those new-found devilish terms of papist or heretic and such like." She declared that she meant to support that religion which she had always professed; but she promised "that she would not compel any of her subjects thereunto, _unto such time as further order, by common a.s.sent, may be taken therein_"--a somewhat significant threat. The proclamation prohibited unlicensed preaching and printing "any book, matter, ballad, rhyme, interlude, process, or treatise, or to play any interlude, except they have Her Grace's special licence in writing for the same," which makes it plain that from the outset Mary did not intend that any Protestant literature should be read by her subjects if she could help it.[496]

Mary was crowned with great ceremony on October 1st, and her first Parliament met four days later (Oct. 5th to Dec. 6th, 1553). It reversed a decision of a former Parliament, and declared that Henry VIII.'s marriage with Catharine of Aragon had been valid, and that Mary was the legitimate heir to the throne; and it wiped out all the religious legislation under Edward VI. The Council had wished the anti-papal laws of Henry VIII. to be rescinded; but Parliament, especially the House of Commons, was not prepared for anything so sweeping. The Church of England was legally restored to what it had been at the death of Henry, and Mary was left in the anomalous position of being the supreme head of the Church in England while she herself devoutly believed in the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome. The t.i.tle and the powers it gave were useful to restore by royal proclamation the mediaeval ritual and wors.h.i.+p, and Ma.s.s was reintroduced in this way in December.[497]

Meanwhile the marriage of the Queen was being discussed. Mary herself decided the matter by solemnly promising the Spanish Amba.s.sador (Oct.

19th) that she would wed Philip of Spain; the marriage treaty was signed on January 12th, 1554; the formal betrothal took place in March, and the wedding was celebrated on July 25th.[498] It was very unpopular from the first. The boys of London pelted with s...o...b..a.l.l.s the servants of the Spanish emba.s.sy sent to ratify the wedding treaty (Jan. 1st, 1554); the envoys themselves were very coldly received by the populace; and Mary had to issue a proclamation commanding that all courtesy should be used to the Prince of Spain and his train coming to England to marry the Queen.[499]

In September (1553) the p.r.o.nouncedly Protestant Bishops who had remained in England to face the storm, Cranmer, Ridley, Coverdale, Latimer, were ejected and imprisoned; the Protestant refugees from France and Germany and many of the eminent Protestant leaders had sought safety on the Continent; the deprived Romanist Bishops, Gardiner, Heath, Bonner, Day, had been reinstated; and the venerable Bishop Tunstall, who had acted as Wolsey's agent at the famous Diet of Worms, had been placed in the See of Durham.

Various risings, one or two of minor importance and a more formidable one under Sir Thomas Wyatt, had been crushed. Lady Jane Grey, Lord Guilford Dudley (February 12th, 1554), Sir Thomas Wyatt, Lord Suffolk, and others were executed. Charles V. strongly recommended the execution of the Princess Elizabeth, but his advice was not followed.

England was still an excommunicated land, and both Queen and King Consort were anxious to receive the papal peace. As soon as he had been informed by Mary of her succession to the throne, the Pope, Julius II., had selected Cardinal Pole to be his Legate to England (early in August 1553). No one could have been more suitable. He was related to the royal house of England, a grandson of the Duke of Clarence, who was the brother of Edward IV. He had so thoroughly disapproved of the anti-papal policy of Henry VIII. that he had been compelled to live in exile. He was a Cardinal, and had almost become Pope. No one could have been more acceptable to Mary. He had protested against her mother's divorce, and had suffered for it; and he was as anxious as she to see England restored to the papal obedience. But many difficulties had to be cleared away before Pole could land in England as the Pope's Legate. The English people did not love Legates, and their susceptibilities had to be soothed. If the Pope made the restoration of the Church lands a condition of the restoration of England to the papal obedience, and if Mary insisted on securing that obedience, there would be a rebellion, and she would lose her crown. No one knew all these difficulties better than the Emperor, and he exerted himself to overcome them. The Curia was persuaded that, as it was within the Canon Law to alienate ecclesiastical property for the redemption of prisoners, the Church might give up her claims to the English abbey lands in order to win back the whole kingdom. Pole himself had doubts about this. He believed that he might be allowed to reason with the lay appropriators and persuade them to make restoration, and his enthusiasm on the subject caused many misgivings in the minds of both Charles and Philip. Nor could the Cardinal land in England until his attainder as an English n.o.bleman had been reversed by Parliament. He had been appointed Legate to England once before (February 7th, 1536), in order to compa.s.s Henry VIII.'s return to the papal obedience; he had written against the Royal Supremacy. Neither Lords nor Commons were very anxious to receive him.

At last, more than thirteen months after his appointment, the way was open for his coming to England. He landed at Dover (Nov. 20th, 1554), went on to Gravesend, and there found waiting him an Act of Parliament revers ing his attainder. It had been introduced into the Lords, pa.s.sed in the Upper House in two days, was read three times in the Commons in one day, and received the Royal a.s.sent immediately thereafter (Nov.

27th, 1554). Tunstall, the Bishop of Durham, brought him letters patent, empowering him to exercise his office of Legate in England. He embarked in a royal barge with his silver cross in the prow, sailed up the Thames on a favouring tide, landed at Whitehall, and was welcomed by Mary and Philip. On the following day the two Houses of Parliament were invited to the Palace to meet him, and he explained his commission. The day after, the question was put in both Houses of Parliament whether the nation should return to the papal obedience, and was answered affirmatively. Whereupon Lords and Commons joined in a supplication to the Queen "that they might receive absolution, and be received into the body of the Holy Catholic Church, under the Pope, the Supreme Head thereof." The Supplication was presented on the 30th, and in its terms the Queen besought the Legate to absolve the realm for its disobedience and schism. Then, while the whole a.s.sembly knelt, King and Queen on their knees with the others, the Legate p.r.o.nounced the absolution, and received the kingdom "again into the unity of our Mother the Holy Church."

It now remained to Parliament to pa.s.s the laws which the change required. In one comprehensive statute all the anti-papal legislation of the reigns of Henry VIII. and of Edward VI. was rescinded, and England was, so far as laws could make it,[500] what it had been in the reign of Henry VII. Two days later (Dec. 2nd, 1554), on the first Sunday in Advent, Philip and Mary, with the Legate, attended divine service in St.

Paul's, and after Ma.s.s listened to an eloquent sermon from Bishop Gardiner, in the course of which he publicly abjured the teaching of his book _De vera obedientia_.[501] Convocation received a special absolution from the Legate. To show how thoroughly England had reconciled itself to Mother Church, Parliament proceeded to revive the old Acts against heresy which had been originally pa.s.sed for the suppression of Lollardy, among them the notorious _De haeretico comburendo_, and England had again the privilege of burning Evangelical Christians secured to it by Act of Parliament.[502]

In March 1554 the Queen had issued a series of _Injunctions_ to all Bishops, instructing them on a variety of matters, all tending to bring the Church into the condition in which it had been before the innovations of the late reign. The Bishops were to put into execution all canons and ecclesiastical laws which were not expressly contrary to the statutes of the realm. They were not to inscribe on any of their ecclesiastical doc.u.ments the phrase _regia auctoritate fulcitus_; they were to see that no heretic was admitted to any ecclesiastical office; they were to remove all married priests, and to insist that every person vowed to celibacy was to be separated from his wife if he had married; they were to observe all the holy days and ceremonies which were in use in the later days of the reign of King Henry VIII.; all schoolmasters suspected of heresy were to be removed from their office. These _Injunctions_ kept carefully within the lines of the Act which had rescinded the ecclesiastical legislation of the reign of Edward VI.[503]

The Bishop of London, Bonner, had previously issued a list of searching questions to be put to the clergy of his diocese, which concerned the laity as well as the clergy, and which went a good deal further. He asked whether there were any married clergymen, or clergymen who had not separated themselves from their wives or concubines? Whether any of the clergy maintained doctrines contrary to the Catholic faith? Whether any of the clergy had been irregularly or schismatically ordained? Whether any of them had said Ma.s.s or administered the sacraments in the English language after the Queen's proclamation? Whether they kept all the holy days and fasting days prescribed by the Church? Whether any of the clergy went about in other than full clerical dress? Whether any persons in the parish spoke in favour of clerical marriage? These and many other minute questions were put, with the evident intention of restoring the mediaeval ceremonies and customs in every detail.[504] His clergy a.s.sured the Bishop that it was impossible to make all the changes he demanded at once, and Bonner was obliged to give them till the month of November to get their parishes in order. This London visitation evidently provoked a great deal of discontent. In April (1554) "a dead cat was hung on the gallows in the Cheap, habited in garments like those of a priest. It had a shaven crown, and held in its forepaws a round piece of paper to represent a wafer.... A reward of twenty marks was offered for the discovery of the author of the outrage, but it was quite ineffectual."[505] Other graver incidents showed the smouldering discontent.

The revival in Parliament of the old anti-heresy laws may be taken as the time clearly foreshadowed in the Queen's first proclamation on religious affairs when persuasion was to cease and force take its place.

The plat.i.tudes of many modern historians about Mary's humane and merciful disposition, about Gardiner's aversion to shedding blood, about "the good Bishop" Bonner's benevolent attempt to persuade his victims to recant, may be dismissed from our minds. The fact remains, that the persecutions which began in 1555 were clearly indicated in 1553, and went on with increasing severity until the Queen's death put an end to them.

The visitations had done their work, and the most eminent of the Reformed bishops and divines had been caught and secured in various prisons. "The Tower, the Fleet, the Marshalsea, the King's Bench, Newgate, and the two Counters were full of them."[506] Their treatment differed. "The prisoners in the King's Bench had tolerably fair usage, and favour sometimes shown them. There was a pleasant garden belonging thereunto, where they had liberty sometimes to walk." They had also the liberty of meeting for wors.h.i.+p, as had the prisoners in the Marshalsea.

Their sympathisers who had escaped the search kept them supplied with food, as did the early Christians their suffering brethren in the first centuries. But in some of the other prisons the confessors were not only confined in loathsome cells, but suffered terribly from lack of food. At the end of Strype's catalogue of the two hundred and eighty-eight persons who were burnt during the reign of Mary, he significantly adds, "besides those that dyed of famyne in sondry prisons."[507] Some of the imprisoned were able to draw up (May 8th, 1554) and send out for circulation a confession of their faith, meant to show that they were suffering simply for holding and proclaiming what they believed to be scriptural truth. They declared that they believed all the canonical books of Scripture to be G.o.d's very Word, and that it was to be the judge in all controversies of faith; that the Catholic Church was the Church which believed and followed the doctrines taught in Scripture; that they accepted the Apostles' Creed and the decisions of the first four Oec.u.menical Councils and of the Council of Toledo, as well as the teachings of Athanasius, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Damasus; that they believed that justification came through the mercy of G.o.d, and that it was received by none but by faith only, and that faith was not an opinion, but a persuasion wrought by the Holy Ghost; they declared that the external service of G.o.d ought to be according to G.o.d's Word, and conducted in a language which the people could understand; they confessed that G.o.d only by Jesus Christ is to be prayed to, and therefore disapproved of the invocation of the saints; they disowned Purgatory and Ma.s.ses for the dead; they held that Baptism and the Lord's Supper were the Sacraments inst.i.tuted by Christ, were to be administered according to the inst.i.tution of Christ, and disallowed the mutilation of the sacrament, the theory of transubstantiation, and the adoration of the bread.[508] This was signed by Ferrar, Hooper, Coverdale (Bishops), by Rogers (the first martyr), by Bradford, Philpot, Crome, Saunders, and others. John Bradford, the single-minded, gentle scholar, was probably the author of the Confession.

Cardinal Pole, in his capacity as papal Legate, issued a commission (Jan. 28th, 1555) to Bishop Gardiner and several others to try the prisoners detained for heresy. Then followed (Feb. 4th, 1555) the burning of John Rogers, to whom Tyndale had entrusted his translation of the Scriptures, and who was the real compiler of the Bible known as Matthews'. The scenes at his execution might have warned the authorities that persecution was not going to be persuasive. Crowds cheered him as he pa.s.sed to his death, "as if he were going to his wedding," the French Amba.s.sador reported. His fate excited a strong feeling of sympathy among almost all cla.s.ses in society, which was ominous. Even Simon Renard, the trusted envoy of Charles V., took the liberty of warning Philip that less extreme measures ought to be used. But the worst of a persecuting policy is that when it has once begun it is almost impossible to give it up without confession of defeat. Bishop Hooper was sent to Gloucester to suffer in his cathedral town, Saunders to Coventry, and Dr. Taylor was burnt on Aldham Common in Suffolk. Several other martyrs suffered the same fate of burning a few days afterwards.

Robert Ferrar, the Reformed Bishop of St. David's, was sent to Carmarthen to be burnt in the chief town of his diocese (March 30th, 1555). Perhaps it was his death that gave rise to the verses in Welsh, exhorting the men of the Princ.i.p.ality to rise in defence of their religion against the English who were bent on its destruction, and calling them to extirpate image wors.h.i.+p and the use of the crucifix.[509]

Bishops Ridley and Latimer and Archbishop Cranmer had been kept in confinement at Oxford since April 1554; and they were now to be proceeded against. The two Bishops were brought before the Court acting on a commission from Cardinal Pole, the Legate. They were condemned on Oct. 1st, 1555, and on the 16th they were burnt at Oxford in the present Broad Street before Balliol College. Cranmer witnessed their death from the top of the tower in which he was confined.

In the Archbishop's case it was deemed necessary, in order to fulfil the requirements of Canon Law, that he should be tried by the Pope himself.

He was accordingly informed that his sovereigns had "denounced" him to the Pope, and that His Holiness had commissioned the Cardinal Du Puy, Prefect of the Inquisition, to act on his behalf, and that Du Puy had delegated the duty to James Brooks, who had succeeded Hooper as Bishop of Gloucester, to the Dean of St. Paul's, and to the Archdeacon of Canterbury. The trial took place in St. Mary's Church. The accusers, Philip and Mary, were represented by Drs. Martyn and Story. They, in the name of their sovereigns, presented a lengthy indictment, in which the chief charges were adultery, perjury, and heresy. The first meant that although a priest he had been married, and had even married a second time after he had been made an Archbishop; the second, that he had sworn obedience to the Pope and broken his oath; and the third, that he had denied the doctrine of transubstantiation.[510]

Cranmer refused to acknowledge the jurisdiction of his judges, but answered the charges brought against him to his accusers because they represented his sovereigns. He denied that the Pope had any ecclesiastical power within England; but submitted to the kingly supremacy. As Brooks had no authority from the Pope to do more than hear the case, no judgment was p.r.o.nounced; it was only intimated that the proceedings would be reported to Rome. Cranmer was conducted back to his prison. There he addressed first one, then a second letter to the Queen.[511] In dignified and perfectly respectful language he expressed the degradation of the kingdom exhibited in the act of the sovereigns appealing to an "outward judge, or to an authority coming from any person out of this realm" to judge between them and one of their own subjects. Cranmer early in his career had come to the unalterable opinion that the papal supremacy was responsible for the abuses and disorders in the mediaeval Church, and that reformation was impossible so long as it was maintained. In common with every thoughtful man of his generation, he repudiated the whole structure of papal claims built up by the Roman Curia during the fifteenth century, and held that it was in every way incompatible with the loyalty which every subject owed to his sovereign and to the laws of his country. He took his stand on this conviction.

"Ignorance, I know," he said, "may excuse other men; but he that knoweth how prejudicial and injurious the power and authority which the Pope challengeth everywhere is to the Crown, laws, and customs of this realm, and yet will allow the same, I cannot see in anywise how he can keep his due allegiance, fidelity, and truth to the Crown and slate of this realm."

In his second letter he struck a bolder note, and declared that the oath which Mary had sworn to maintain the laws, liberties, and customs of the realm was inconsistent with the other oath she had taken to obey the Pope, to defend his person, and to maintain his authority, honour, laws, and privileges. The accusation of perjury did not touch him at all. The sovereigns--Bishop Brooks, appointed to try him--every const.i.tuted authority in the realm--when confronted by it, had to choose between the oath of allegiance to country or to Papacy; he had chosen allegiance to his fatherland; others who acted differently betrayed it. That was his position. The words he addressed to Queen Mary--"I fear me that there be contradictions in your oath "--was his justification.

At Rome, Cranmer was found guilty of contumacy, and the command went forth that he was to be deposed, degraded, and punished as a heretic. In the meantime he was burnt in effigy at Rome. When he heard his sentence, he composed an Appeal to a General Council, following, he said, the example of Luther.[512] The degradation was committed to Bonner and Thirlby, and was executed by the former with his usual brutality. This done, he was handed over to the secular authorities for execution. Then began a carefully prepared course of refined mental torture, which resulted in the "Recantations of Thomas Cranmer."[513] A series of recantations was presented to him, which he was ordered to sign by his sovereign; and, strange as it may seem now, it was the sovereign's command that made it almost impossible for Cranmer to refuse to sign the papers which, one after another, were given him. He was a man who felt the necessity of an ultimate authority. He had deliberately put aside that of the Pope, and as deliberately placed that of the sovereign in its place; and now the ultimate authority, which his conscience approved, commanded him to sign. The first four were not real recantations; Cranmer could sign them with a good conscience; they consisted of generalities, the effect of which depended on the meaning of the terms used, and everyone knew the meanings which he had attached to the words all throughout his public life. But the fifth and the sixth soiled his conscience and occasioned his remorse. It was not enough for Mary, Pole, and Bonner that they were able to destroy by fire the bodies of English Reformers, they hoped by working partly on the conscience and partly on the weakness of the leader of the English Reformation, to show the worthlessness of the whole movement. In the end, the aged martyr redeemed his momentary weakness by a last act of heroism. He knew that his recantations had been published, and that any further declaration made would probably be suppressed by his unscrupulous antagonists. He resolved by a single action to defeat their calculations and stamp his sincerity on the memories of his countrymen. His dying speech was silenced, as he might well have expected; but he had made up his mind to something which could not be stifled.[514]

"At the moment he was taken to the stake he drew from his bosom the identical paper (the recantation), throwing it, in the presence of the mult.i.tude, with his own hands into the flames, asking pardon of G.o.d and of the people for having consented to such an act, which he excused by saying that he did it for the public benefit, as, had his life, which he sought to save, been spared him, he might at some time have still been of use to them, praying them all to persist in the doctrines believed by him, and absolutely denying the Sacrament and the supremacy of the Church. And, finally, stretching forth his arm and right hand, he said: 'This which hath sinned, having signed the writing, must be the first to suffer punishment'; and thus did he place it in the fire and burned it himself."[515]

If the martyrdoms of Ridley and Latimer lighted the torch, Cranmer's spread the conflagration which in the end burnt up the Romanist reaction and made England a Protestant nation. The very weakness of the aged Primate became a background to make the clearer his final heroism. The "common man" sympathised with him all the more. He had never been a very strong man in the usual sense of the words. The qualities which go to form the exquisite liturgist demand an amount of religious sensibility and sympathy which seldom belongs to the leader of a minority with the present against it and the future before it. His peculiar kind of courage, which enabled him to face Henry VIII. in his most truculent moods, was liker a woman's than a man's, and was especially called forth by sympathy with others in suffering. None of Henry's Ministers pleaded harder or more persistently for the Princess Mary, the woman who burnt him, than did Cranmer; and he alone of all his fellows dared to beseech the monarch for Cromwell in his fall.[516]

The death of Cranmer was followed by a long succession of martyrdoms.

Cardinal Pole became the Archbishop of Canterbury, and in Philip's absence the princ.i.p.al adviser of the Queen. He did not manage, if he tried, to stop the burnings. Sometimes he rescued prisoners from the vindictive Bonner; at others he seems to have hounded on the persecutors. Mary's conscience, never satisfied at the confiscation of property, compelled her to restore the lands still in possession of the Crown, and to give up the "first fruits" of English benefices--the only result being to awaken the fears of thousands of proprietors, and set them against the papal claims. She attempted to restore the monastic inst.i.tutions, with but scanty results; to revive pilgrimages to shrines, which were very forced affairs, and had to be kept alive by fining the parents of children who did not join them. The elevation of Pope Paul IV. (Cardinal Caraffa) to the See of Rome increased her difficulties.

The new Pontiff, a Neapolitan, hated her Spanish husband, and personally disliked Cardinal Pole, her chief adviser. Her last years were full of troubles.

Mary died in 1558 (Nov. 17th). "The unhappiest of queens, and wives, and women," she had been born amidst the rejoicings of a nation, her mother a princess of the haughtiest house in Europe. In her girlhood she had been the bride-elect of the Emperor--a lovely, winning young creature, all men say. In her seventeenth year, at the age when girls are most sensitive, the crus.h.i.+ng stroke which blasted her whole life fell upon her. Her father, the Parliament, and the Church of her country called her illegitimate; and thus branded, she was sent into solitude to brood over her disgrace. When almost all England hailed her Queen in her thirty-seventh year, she was already an old woman, with sallow face, harsh voice, her dark bright eyes alone telling how beautiful she had once been. But the nation seemed to love her who had been so long yearning for affection; she married the man of her choice; and she felt herself the instrument selected by Heaven to restore an excommunicated nation to the peace of G.o.d. Her husband, whom she idolised, tired of living with her after a few years. The child she pa.s.sionately longed for and pathetically believed to be coming never came.[517] The Church and the Pope she had sacrificed so much for, disregarded her entreaties, and seemed careless of her troubles. The people who had welcomed her, and whom she really loved, called her "b.l.o.o.d.y" Mary,--a name which was, after all, so well deserved that it will always remain. Each disappointment she took as a warning from Heaven that atonement had not yet been paid for England's crimes, and the fires of persecution were kept burning to appease the G.o.d of sixteenth century Romanism.

CHAPTER IV.

THE SETTLEMENT UNDER ELIZABETH.[518]

Mary Tudor's health had long been frail, and when it was known for certain that she would leave no direct heir (i.e. from about June 1558), the people of England were silently coming to the conclusion that Elizabeth must be Queen, or civil war would result. It seemed also to be a.s.sumed that she would be a Protestant, and that her chief adviser would be William Cecil, who had been trained in statecraft as secretary to England's greatest statesman, the Lord Protector Somerset. So it fell out.

Many things contributed to create such expectations. The young intellectual life of England was slowly becoming Protestant. Both the Spanish amba.s.sadors noticed this with alarm, and reported it to their master.[519] This was especially the case among the young ladies of the upper cla.s.ses, who were becoming students learned in Latin, Greek, and Italian, and at the same time devout Protestants, with a distinct leaning to what afterwards became Puritanism. Elizabeth herself, at her most impressionable age had been the pupil of Bishop Hooper, who was accustomed to praise her intelligence. "In religious matters she has been saturated ever since she was born in a bitter hatred to our faith,"