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History of the English People, Volume IV

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Title: History of the English People, Volume IV

Author: John Richard Green


        
Release date: November 4, 2007 [eBook #23317]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, VOLUME IV ***




Produced by Paul Murray, Lisa Reigel, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net









HISTORY

OF

THE ENGLISH PEOPLE


BY

JOHN RICHARD GREEN, M.A.
HONORARY FELLOW OF JESUS COLLEGE, OXFORD




VOLUME IV

THE REFORMATION, 1540-1593


London
MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD.
NEW YORK: MACMILLAN & CO.
1896


_First Edition, Demy 8vo, November 1877,_
_Reprinted December 1877, 1881, 1885, 1890_
_Eversley Edition 1896_




CONTENTS


BOOK VI

THE REFORMATION. 1540-1603


CHAPTER I
                                              PAGE
THE PROTESTANT REVOLUTION. 1540-1553             7


CHAPTER II

THE CATHOLIC REACTION. 1553-1558                72


CHAPTER III

THE ENGLAND OF ELIZABETH. 1558-1561            146


CHAPTER IV

ENGLAND AND MARY STUART. 1561-1567             195


CHAPTER V

ENGLAND AND THE PAPACY. 1567-1582.             247


CHAPTER VI

ENGLAND AND SPAIN. 1582-1593                   323




BOOK VI

THE REFORMATION

1540-1603




AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK VI

1540-1603


For the close of Henry the Eighth's reign as for the reigns of Edward
and Mary we possess copious materials. Strype covers this period in his
"Memorials" and in his lives of Cranmer, Cheke, and Smith; Hayward's
"Life of Edward the Sixth" may be supplemented by the young king's own
Journal; "Machyn's Diary" gives us the aspect of affairs as they
presented themselves to a common Englishman; while Holinshed is near
enough to serve as a contemporary authority. The troubled period of the
Protectorate is illustrated by Mr. Tytler in the correspondence which he
has published in his "England under Edward the Sixth and Mary," while
much light is thrown on its close by Mr. Nicholls in the "Chronicle of
Queen Jane," published by the Camden Society. In spite of countless
errors, of Puritan prejudices, and some deliberate suppressions of the
truth, its mass of facts and wonderful charm of style will always give
importance to the "Acts and Monuments" or "Book of Martyrs" of John
Foxe, as a record of the Marian persecution. Among outer observers, the
Venetian Soranzo throws some light on the Protectorate; and the
despatches of Giovanni Michiel, published by Mr. Friedmann, give us a
new insight into the events of Mary's reign.

For the succeeding reign we have a valuable contemporary account in
Camden's "Life of Elizabeth." The "Annals" of Sir John Hayward refer to
the first four years of the Queen's rule. Its political and diplomatic
side is only now being fully unveiled in the Calendar of State Papers
for this period, which are being issued by the Master of the Rolls, and
fresh light has yet to be looked for from the Cecil Papers and the
documents at Simancas, some of which are embodied in the history of this
reign by Mr. Froude. Among the published materials for this time we have
the Burleigh Papers, the Sidney Papers, the Sadler State Papers, much
correspondence in the Hardwicke State Papers, the letters published by
Mr. Wright in his "Elizabeth and her Times," the collections of Murdin,
the Egerton Papers, the "Letters of Elizabeth and James the Sixth"
published by Mr. Bruce. Harrington's "Nugae Antiquae" contain some details
of value. Among foreign materials as yet published the "Papiers d'Etat"
of Cardinal Granvelle and the series of French despatches published by
M. Teulet are among the more important. Mr. Motley in his "Rise of the
Dutch Republic" and "History of the United Netherlands" has used the
State Papers of the countries concerned in this struggle to pour a flood
of new light on the diplomacy and outer policy of Burleigh and his
mistress. His wide and independent research among the same class of
documents gives almost an original value to Ranke's treatment of this
period in his English History. The earlier religious changes in Scotland
have been painted with wonderful energy, and on the whole with
truthfulness, by Knox himself in his "History of the Reformation." Among
the contemporary materials for the history of Mary Stuart we have the
well-known works of Buchanan and Leslie, Labanoff's "Lettres et Memoires
de Marie Stuart," the correspondence appended to Mignet's biography,
Stevenson's "Illustrations of the Life of Queen Mary," Melville's
Memoirs, and the collections of Keith and Anderson.

For the religious history of Elizabeth's reign Strype, as usual, gives
us copious details in his "Annals," his lives of Parker, Grindal, and
Whitgift. Some light is thrown on the Queen's earlier steps by the
Zuerich Letters published by the Parker Society. The strife with the
later Puritans can only be fairly judged after reading the Martin
Marprelate Tracts, which have been reprinted by Mr. Maskell, who has
given a short abstract of the more important in his "History of the
Martin Marprelate Controversy." Her policy towards the Catholics is set
out in Burleigh's tract "The Execution of Justice in England, not for
Religion, but for Treason," which was answered by Allen in his "Defense
of the English Catholics." On the actual working of the penal laws much
new information has been given us in the series of contemporary
narratives published by Father Morris under the title of "The Troubles
of our Catholic Forefathers"; the general history of the Catholics may
be found in the work of Dodd; and the sufferings of the Jesuits in
More's "Historia Provinciae Anglicanae Societatis Jesu." To these may be
added Mr. Simpson's biography of Campion. For our constitutional history
during Elizabeth's reign we have D'Ewes's Journals and Townshend's
"Journal of Parliamentary Proceedings from 1580 to 1601," the first
detailed account we possess of the proceedings of the House of Commons.
Macpherson in his Annals of Commerce gives details of the wonderful
expansion of English trade during this period, and Hakluyt's collection
of Voyages tells of its wonderful activity. Amidst a crowd of
biographers, whose number marks the new importance of individual life
and action at the time, we may note as embodying information elsewhere
inaccessible the lives of Hatton and Davison by Sir Harris Nicolas, the
three accounts of Raleigh by Oldys, Tytler, and Mr. Edwards, the Lives
of the two Devereux, Earls of Essex, Mr. Spedding's "Life of Bacon," and
Barrow's "Life of Sir Francis Drake."




CHAPTER I

THE PROTESTANT REVOLUTION

1540-1553


[Sidenote: Cromwell and the Monarchy.]

At the death of Cromwell the success of his policy was complete. The
Monarchy had reached the height of its power. The old liberties of
England lay prostrate at the feet of the king. The Lords were cowed and
spiritless; the House of Commons was filled with the creatures of the
Court and degraded into an engine of tyranny. Royal proclamations were
taking the place of parliamentary legislation; royal benevolences were
encroaching more and more on the right of parliamentary taxation.
Justice was prostituted in the ordinary courts to the royal will, while
the boundless and arbitrary powers of the royal Council were gradually
superseding the slower processes of the Common Law. The religious
changes had thrown an almost sacred character over the "majesty" of the
king. Henry was the Head of the Church. From the primate to the meanest
deacon every minister of it derived from him his sole right to exercise
spiritual powers. The voice of its preachers was the echo of his will.
He alone could define orthodoxy or declare heresy. The forms of its
worship and belief were changed and rechanged at the royal caprice. Half
of its wealth went to swell the royal treasury, and the other half lay
at the king's mercy. It was this unprecedented concentration of all
power in the hands of a single man that overawed the imagination of
Henry's subjects. He was regarded as something high above the laws which
govern common men. The voices of statesmen and priests extolled his
wisdom and authority as more than human. The Parliament itself rose and
bowed to the vacant throne when his name was mentioned. An absolute
devotion to his person replaced the old loyalty to the law. When the
Primate of the English Church described the chief merit of Cromwell, it
was by asserting that he loved the king "no less than he loved God."

[Sidenote: Cromwell and the Parliament.]

It was indeed Cromwell who more than any man had reared this fabric of
king-worship. But he had hardly reared it when it began to give way. The
very success of his measures indeed brought about the ruin of his
policy. One of the most striking features of Cromwell's system had been
his developement of parliamentary action. The great assembly which the
Monarchy had dreaded and silenced from the days of Edward the Fourth to
the days of Wolsey had been called to the front again at the Cardinal's
fall. Proud of his popularity, and conscious of his people's sympathy
with him in his protest against a foreign jurisdiction, Henry set aside
the policy of the Crown to deal a heavier blow at the Papacy. Both the
parties represented in the ministry that followed Wolsey welcomed the
change, for the nobles represented by Norfolk and the men of the New
Learning represented by More regarded Parliament with the same favour.
More indeed in significant though almost exaggerated phrases set its
omnipotence face to face with the growing despotism of the Crown. The
policy of Cromwell fell in with this revival of the two Houses. The
daring of his temper led him not to dread and suppress national
institutions, but to seize them and master them, and to turn them into
means of enhancing the royal power. As he saw in the Church a means of
raising the king into the spiritual ruler of the faith and consciences
of his people, so he saw in the Parliament a means of shrouding the
boldest aggressions of the monarchy under the veil of popular assent,
and of giving to the most ruthless acts of despotism the stamp and
semblance of law. He saw nothing to fear in a House of Lords whose
nobles cowered helpless before the might of the Crown, and whose
spiritual members his policy was degrading into mere tools of the royal
will. Nor could he find anything to dread in a House of Commons which
was crowded with members directly or indirectly nominated by the royal
Council. With a Parliament such as this Cromwell might well trust to
make the nation itself through its very representatives an accomplice in
the work of absolutism.

[Sidenote: Growth of Parliamentary power.]

His trust seemed more than justified by the conduct of the Houses. It
was by parliamentary statutes that the Church was prostrated at the feet
of the Monarchy. It was by bills of attainder that great nobles were
brought to the block. It was under constitutional forms that freedom was
gagged with new treasons and oaths and questionings. One of the first
bills of Cromwell's Parliaments freed Henry from the need of paying his
debts, one of the last gave his proclamations the force of laws. In the
action of the two Houses the Crown seemed to have discovered a means of
carrying its power into regions from which a bare despotism has often
had to shrink. Henry might have dared single-handed to break with Rome
or to send Sir Thomas More to the block. But without Parliament to back
him he could hardly have ventured on such an enormous confiscation of
property as was involved in the suppression of the monasteries or on
such changes in the national religion as were brought about by the Ten
Articles and the Six. It was this discovery of the use to which the
Houses could be turned that accounts for the immense developement of
their powers, the immense widening of their range of action, which they
owe to Cromwell. Now that the great engine was at his own command, he
used it as it had never been used before. Instead of rare and short
assemblies of Parliament, England saw it gathered year after year. All
the jealousy with which the Crown had watched its older encroachments on
the prerogative was set aside. Matters which had even in the days of
their greatest influence been scrupulously withheld from the cognizance
of the Houses were now absolutely forced on their attention. It was by
Parliament that England was torn from the great body of Western
Christendom. It was by parliamentary enactment that the English Church
was reft of its older liberties and made absolutely subservient to the
Crown. It was a parliamentary statute that defined the very faith and
religion of the land. The vastest confiscation of landed property which
England had ever witnessed was wrought by Parliament. It regulated the
succession to the throne. It decided on the validity of the king's
marriages and the legitimacy of the king's children. Former sovereigns
had struggled against the claim of the Houses to meddle with the royal
ministers or with members of the royal household. Now Parliament was
called on by the king himself to attaint his ministers and his Queens.

[Sidenote: The New Nobles.]

The fearlessness and completeness of such a policy as this brings home
to us more than any other of his plans the genius of Cromwell. But its
success depended wholly on the absolute servility of Parliament to the
will of the Crown, and Cromwell's own action made the continuance of
such a servility impossible. The part which the Houses were to play in
after years shows the importance of clinging to the forms of
constitutional freedom, even when their life is all but lost. In the
inevitable reaction against tyranny they furnish centres for the
reviving energies of the people, while the returning tide of liberty is
enabled through their preservation to flow quietly and naturally along
its traditional channels. And even before Cromwell passed to his doom
the tide of liberty was returning. On one occasion during his rule a
"great debate" on the suppression of the lesser monasteries showed that
elements of resistance still survived; and these elements developed
rapidly as the power of the Crown declined under the minority of Edward
and the unpopularity of Mary. To this revival of a spirit of
independence the spoliation of the Church largely contributed. Partly
from necessity, partly from a desire to build up a faction interested in
the maintenance of their ecclesiastical policy, Cromwell and the king
squandered the vast mass of wealth which flowed into the Treasury from
the dissolution of the monasteries with reckless prodigality. Three
hundred and seventy-six smaller houses had been suppressed in 1536; six
hundred and forty-five greater houses were surrendered or seized in
1539. Some of the spoil was devoted to the erection of six new
bishopricks; a larger part went to the fortification of the coast. But
the bulk of these possessions was granted lavishly away to the nobles
and courtiers about the king, and to a host of adventurers who "had
become gospellers for the abbey lands." Something like a fifth of the
actual land in the kingdom was in this way transferred from the holding
of the Church to that of nobles and gentry. Not only were the older
houses enriched, but a new aristocracy was erected from among the
dependants of the Court. The Russells and the Cavendishes are familiar
instances of families which rose from obscurity through the enormous
grants of Church-land made to Henry's courtiers. The old baronage was
thus hardly crushed before a new aristocracy took its place. "Those
families within or without the bounds of the peerage," observes Mr.
Hallam, "who are now deemed the most considerable, will be found, with
no great number of exceptions, to have first become conspicuous under
the Tudor line of kings and, if we could trace the title of their
estates, to have acquired no small portion of them mediately or
immediately from monastic or other ecclesiastical foundations." The
leading part which these freshly-created peers took in the events which
followed Henry's death gave strength and vigour to the whole order. But
the smaller gentry shared in the general enrichment of the landed
proprietors, and the new energy of the Lords was soon followed by a
display of political independence among the Commons themselves.

[Sidenote: Results of the Religious Changes.]

While the prodigality of Cromwell's system thus brought into being a new
check upon the Crown by enriching the nobles and the lesser gentry, the
religious changes it brought about gave fire and vigour to the elements
of opposition which were slowly gathering. What did most to ruin the
king-worship that Cromwell set up was Cromwell's ecclesiastical policy.
In reducing the Church to mere slavery beneath the royal power he
believed himself to be trampling down the last constitutional force
which could hold the Monarchy in check. What he really did was to give
life and energy to new forces which were bound from their very nature to
battle with the Monarchy for even more than the old English freedom.
When Cromwell seized on the Church he held himself to be seizing for the
Crown the mastery which the Church had wielded till now over the
consciences and reverence of men. But the very humiliation of the great
religious body broke the spell beneath which Englishmen had bowed. In
form nothing had been changed. The outer constitution of the Church
remained utterly unaltered. The English bishop, freed from the papal
control, freed from the check of monastic independence, seemed greater
and more imposing than ever. The priest still clung to rectory and
church. If images were taken out of churches, if here and there a
rood-loft was pulled down or a saint's shrine demolished, no change was
made in form of ritual or mode of worship. The mass was untouched. Every
hymn, every prayer, was still in Latin; confession, penance, fastings
and feastings, extreme unction, went on as before. There was little to
show that any change had taken place; and yet every ploughman felt that
all was changed. The bishop, gorgeous as he might be in mitre and cope,
was a mere tool of the king. The priest was trembling before heretics he
used to burn. Farmer or shopkeeper might enter their church any Sunday
morning to find mass or service utterly transformed. The spell of
tradition, of unbroken continuance, was over; and with it the power
which the Church had wielded over the souls of men was in great part
done away.

It was not that the new Protestantism was as yet formidable, for,
violent and daring as they were, the adherents of Luther were few in
number, and drawn mostly from the poorer classes among whom Wyclifite
heresy had lingered or from the class of scholars whose theological
studies drew their sympathy to the movement over sea. It was that the
lump was now ready to be leavened by this petty leaven, that men's hold
on the firm ground of custom was broken and their minds set drifting and
questioning, that little as was the actual religious change, the thought
of religious change had become familiar to the people as a whole. And
with religious change was certain to come religious revolt. The human
conscience was hardly likely to move everywhere in strict time to the
slow advance of Henry's reforms. Men who had been roused from implicit
obedience to the Papacy as a revelation of the Divine will by hearing
the Pope denounced in royal proclamations as a usurper and an impostor
were hardly inclined to take up submissively the new official doctrine
which substituted implicit belief in the King for implicit belief in the
"Bishop of Rome." But bound as Church and King now were together, it was
impossible to deny a tenet of the one without entering on a course of
opposition to the other. Cromwell had raised against the Monarchy the
most fatal of all enemies, the force of the individual conscience, the
enthusiasm of religious belief, the fire of religious fanaticism. Slowly
as the area of the new Protestantism extended, every man that it gained
was a possible opponent of the Crown. And should the time come, as the
time was soon to come, when the Crown moved to the side of
Protestantism, then in turn every soul that the older faith retained
was pledged to a lifelong combat with the Monarchy.

[Sidenote: The Imperial Alliance.]

How irresistible was the national drift was seen on Cromwell's fall. Its
first result indeed promised to be a reversal of all that Cromwell had
done. Norfolk returned to power, and his influence over Henry seemed
secured by the king's repudiation of Anne of Cleves and his marriage in
the summer of 1540 to a niece of the Duke, Catharine Howard. But
Norfolk's temper had now become wholly hostile to the movement about
him. "I never read the Scripture nor never will!" the Duke replied hotly
to a Protestant arguer. "It was merry in England afore the new learning
came up; yea, I would all things were as hath been in times past." In
his preference of an Imperial alliance to an alliance with Francis and
the Lutherans Henry went warmly with his minister. Parted as he had been
from Charles by the question of the divorce, the King's sympathies had
remained true to the Emperor; and at this moment he was embittered
against France by the difficulties it threw in the way of his projects
for gaining a hold upon Scotland. Above all the king still clung to the
hope of a purification of the Church by a Council, as well as of a
reconciliation of England with the general body of this purified
Christendom, and it was only by the Emperor that such a Council could be
convened or such a reconciliation brought about. An alliance with him
was far from indicating any retreat from Henry's position of
independence or any submission to the Papacy. To the men of his own day
Charles seemed no Catholic bigot. On the contrary the stricter
representatives of Catholicism such as Paul the Fourth denounced him as
a patron of heretics, and attributed the upgrowth of Lutheranism to his
steady protection and encouragement. Nor was the charge without seeming
justification. The old jealousy between Pope and Emperor, the more
recent hostility between them as rival Italian powers, had from the
beginning proved Luther's security. At the first appearance of the
reformer Maximilian had recommended the Elector of Saxony to suffer no
harm to be done to him; "there might come a time," said the old Emperor,
"when he would be needed." Charles had looked on the matter mainly in
the same political way. In his earliest years he bought Leo's aid in his
recovery of Milan from the French king by issuing the ban of the Empire
against Luther in the Diet of Worms; but every Italian held that in
suffering the reformer to withdraw unharmed Charles had shown not so
much regard to his own safe-conduct as a purpose still "to keep the Pope
in check with that rein." And as Charles dealt with Luther so he dealt
with Lutheranism. The new faith profited by the Emperor's struggle with
Clement the Seventh for the lordship over Italy. It was in the midst of
this struggle that his brother and representative, Ferdinand, signed in
the Diet of Spires an Imperial decree by which the German States were
left free to arrange their religious affairs "as each should best answer
to God and the Emperor." The decree gave a legal existence to the
Protestant body in the Empire which it never afterwards lost.

[Sidenote: Charles and the Council.]

Such a step might well encourage the belief that Charles was himself
inclining to Lutheranism; and the belief gathered strength as he sent
Lutheran armies over the Alps to sack Rome and to hold the Pope a
prisoner. The belief was a false one, for Charles remained utterly
untouched by the religious movement about him; but even when his strife
with the Papacy was to a great extent lulled by Clement's submission, he
still turned a deaf ear to the Papal appeals for dealing with
Lutheranism by fire and sword. His political interests and the
conception which he held of his duty as Emperor alike swayed him to
milder counsels. He purposed indeed to restore religious unity. His
political aim was to bring Germany to his feet as he had brought Italy;
and he saw that the religious schism was the great obstacle in the way
of his realizing this design. As the temporal head of the Catholic world
he was still more strongly bent to heal the breaches of Catholicism. But
he had no wish to insist on an unconditional submission to the Papacy.
He believed that there were evils to be cured on the one side as on the
other; and Charles saw the high position which awaited him if as Emperor
he could bring about a reformation of the Church and a reunion of
Christendom. Violent as Luther's words had been, the Lutheran princes
and the bulk of Lutheran theologians had not yet come to look on
Catholicism as an irreconcileable foe. Even on the papal side there was
a learned and active party, a party headed by Contarini and Pole, whose
theological sympathies went in many points with the Lutherans, and who
looked to the winning back of the Lutherans as the needful prelude to
any reform in the doctrine and practice of the Church; while Melancthon
was as hopeful as Contarini that such a reform might be wrought and the
Church again become universal. In his proposal of a Council to carry on
the double work of purification and reunion therefore Charles stood out
as the representative of the larger part both of the Catholic and the
Protestant world. Against such a proposal however Rome struggled hard.
All her tradition was against Councils, where the assembled bishops had
in earlier days asserted their superiority to the Pope, and where the
Emperor who convened the assembly and carried out its decrees rose into
dangerous rivalry with the Papacy. Crushed as he was, Clement the
Seventh throughout his lifetime held the proposal of a Council
stubbornly at bay. But under his successor, Paul the Third, the
influence of Contarini and the moderate Catholics secured a more
favourable reception of plans of reconciliation. In April, 1541,
conferences for this purpose were in fact opened at Augsburg in which
Contarini, as Papal legate, accepted a definition of the moot question
of justifications by faith which satisfied Bucer and Melancthon. On the
other side, the Landgrave of Hesse and the Elector of Brandenburg
publicly declared that they believed it possible to come to terms on the
yet more vexed questions of the Mass and the Papal supremacy.

[Sidenote: Charles and Henry.]

Never had the reunion of the world seemed so near; and the hopes that
were stirring found an echo in England as well as in Germany. We can
hardly doubt indeed that it was the revival of these hopes which had
brought about the fall of Cromwell and the recall of Norfolk to power.
Norfolk, like his master, looked to a purification of the Church by a
Council as the prelude to a reconciliation of England with the general
body of Catholicism; and both saw that it was by the influence of the
Emperor alone that such a Council could be brought about. Charles on the
other hand was ready to welcome Henry's advances. The quarrel over
Catharine had ended with her death; and the wrong done her had been in
part atoned for by the fall of Anne Boleyn. The aid of Henry too was
needed to hold in check the opposition of France. The chief means which
France still possessed of holding the Emperor at bay lay in the disunion
of the Empire, and it was resolute to preserve this weapon against him
at whatever cost to Christendom. While Francis remonstrated at Rome
against the concessions made to the Lutherans by the Legates, he urged
the Lutheran princes to make no terms with the Papacy. To the
Protestants he held out hopes of his own conversion, while he promised
Pope Paul that he would defend him with his life against Emperor and
heretics. His intrigues were aided by the suspicions of both the
religious parties. Luther refused to believe in the sincerity of the
concessions made by the Legates; Paul the Third held aloof from them in
sullen silence. Meanwhile Francis was preparing to raise more material
obstacles to the Emperor's designs. Charles had bought his last
reconciliation with the king by a promise of restoring the Milanese, but
he had no serious purpose of ever fulfilling his pledge, and his
retention of the Duchy gave the French king a fair pretext for
threatening a renewal of the war.

[Sidenote: James the Fifth.]

England, as Francis hoped, he could hold in check through his alliance
with the Scots. After the final expulsion of Albany in 1524 Scottish
history became little more than a strife between Margaret Tudor and her
husband, the Earl of Angus, for power; but the growth of James the
Fifth to manhood at last secured rest for the land. James had all the
varied ability of his race, and he carried out with vigour its
traditional policy. The Highland chieftains, the great lords of the
Lowlands, were brought more under the royal sway; the Church was
strengthened to serve as a check on the feudal baronage; the alliance
with France was strictly preserved, as the one security against English
aggression. Nephew as he was indeed of the English king, James from the
outset of his reign took up an attitude hostile to England. He was
jealous of the influence which the two Henries had established in his
realm by the marriage of Margaret and by the building up of an English
party under the Douglases; the great Churchmen who formed his most
trusted advisers dreaded the influence of the religious changes across
the border; while the people clung to their old hatred of England and
their old dependence on France. It was only by two inroads of the border
lords that Henry checked the hostile intrigues of James in 1532; his
efforts to influence his nephew by an interview and alliance were met by
the king's marriage with two French wives in succession, Magdalen of
Valois, a daughter of Francis, and Mary, a daughter of the Duke of
Guise. In 1539 when the projected coalition between France and the
Empire threatened England, it had been needful to send Norfolk with an
army to the Scotch frontier, and now that France was again hostile
Norfolk had to move anew to the border in the autumn of 1541.

[Sidenote: Defeat at the Solway.]

While the Duke was fruitlessly endeavouring to bring James to fresh
friendship a sudden blow at home weakened his power. At the close of the
year Catharine Howard was arrested on a charge of adultery; a Parliament
which assembled in January 1542 passed a Bill of Attainder; and in
February the Queen was sent to the block. She was replaced by the widow
of Lord Latimer, Catharine Parr; and the influence of Norfolk in the
king's counsels gradually gave way to that of Bishop Gardiner of
Winchester. But Henry clung to the policy which the Duke favoured. At
the end of 1541 two great calamities, the loss of Hungary after a
victory of the Turks and a crushing defeat at Algiers, so weakened
Charles that in the summer of the following year Francis ventured to
attack him. The attack served only to draw closer the negotiations
between England and the Emperor; and Francis was forced, as he had
threatened, to give Henry work to occupy him at home. The busiest
counsellor of the Scotch king, Cardinal Beaton, crossed the seas to
negotiate a joint attack, and the attitude of Scotland became so
menacing that in the autumn of 1542 Norfolk was again sent to the border
with twenty thousand men. But terrible as were his ravages, he could not
bring the Scotch army to an engagement, and want of supplies soon forced
him to fall back over the border. It was in vain that James urged his
nobles to follow him in a counter-invasion. They were ready to defend
their country; but the memory of Flodden was still fresh, and success in
England would only give dangerous strength to a king in whom they saw an
enemy. But James was as stubborn in his purpose as the lords. Anxious
only to free himself from their presence, he waited till the two armies
had alike withdrawn, and then suddenly summoned his subjects to meet him
in arms on the western border. A disorderly host gathered at Lochmaben
and passed into Cumberland; but the English borderers followed on them
fast, and were preparing to attack when at nightfall on the twenty-fifth
of November a panic seized the whole Scotch force. Lost in the darkness
and cut off from retreat by the Solway Firth, thousands of men with all
the baggage and guns fell into the hands of the pursuers. The news of
this rout fell on the young king like a sentence of death. For a while
he wandered desperately from palace to palace till at the opening of
December the tidings met him at Falkland that his queen, Mary of Guise,
had given birth to a child. His two boys had both died in youth, and he
was longing passionately for an heir to the crown which was slipping
from his grasp. But the child was a daughter, the Mary Stuart of later
history. "The deil go with it," muttered the dying king, as his mind
fell back to the close of the line of Bruce and the marriage with
Robert's daughter which brought the Stuarts to the Scottish throne, "The
deil go with it! It will end as it began. It came with a lass, and it
will go with a lass." A few days later he died.

[Sidenote: The Marriage Treaty.]

The death of James did more than remove a formidable foe. It opened up
for the first time a prospect of that union of the two kingdoms which
was at last to close their long hostility. Scotland, torn by factions
and with a babe for queen, seemed to lie at Henry's feet: and the king
seized the opportunity of completing his father's work by a union of the
realms. At the opening of 1543 he proposed to the Scotch regent, the
Earl of Arran, the marriage of the infant Mary Stuart with his son
Edward. To ensure this bridal he demanded that Mary should at once be
sent to England, the four great fortresses of Scotland be placed in
English hands, and a voice given to Henry himself in the administration
of the Scotch Council of Regency. Arran and the Queen-mother, rivals as
they were, vied with each other in apparent goodwill to the marriage;
but there was a steady refusal to break the league with France, and the
"English lords," as the Douglas faction were called, owned themselves
helpless in the face of the national jealousy of English ambition. The
temper of the nation itself was seen in the answer made by the Scotch
Parliament which gathered in the spring. If they consented to the young
Queen's betrothal, they not only rejected the demands which accompanied
the proposal, but insisted that in case of such a union Scotland should
have a perpetual regent of its own, and that this office should be
hereditary in the House of Arran. Warned by his very partizans that the
delivery of Mary was impossible, that if such a demand were pressed
"there was not so little a boy but he would hurl stones against it, the
wives would handle their distaffs, and the commons would universally die
in it," Henry's proposals dropped in July to a treaty of alliance,
offensive and defensive, he suffered France to be included among the
allies of Scotland named in it, he consented that the young Queen should
remain with her mother till the age of ten, and offered guarantees for
the maintenance of Scotch independence.

[Sidenote: Scotland and France.]

But modify it as he might, Henry knew that such a project of union could
only be carried out by a war with Francis. His negotiations for a treaty
with Charles had long been delayed through Henry's wish to drag the
Emperor into an open breach with the Papacy, but at the moment of the
King's first proposals for the marriage of Mary Stuart with his son the
need of finding a check upon France forced on a formal alliance with the
Emperor in February 1543. The two allies agreed that the war should be
continued till the Duchy of Burgundy had been restored to the Emperor
and till England had recovered Normandy and Guienne; while the joint
fleets of Henry and Charles held the Channel and sheltered England from
any danger of French attack. The main end of this treaty was doubtless
to give Francis work at home which might prevent the despatch of a
French force into Scotland and the overthrow of Henry's hopes of a
Scotch marriage. These hopes were strengthened as the summer went on by
the acceptance of his later proposals in a Parliament which was packed
by the Regent, and by the actual conclusion of a marriage-treaty. But if
Francis could spare neither horse nor man for action in Scotland his
influence in the northern kingdom was strong enough to foil Henry's
plans. The Churchmen were as bitterly opposed to such a marriage as the
partizans of France; and their head, Cardinal Beaton, who had held aloof
from the Regent's Parliament, suddenly seized the Queen-mother and her
babe, crowned the infant Mary, called a Parliament in December which
annulled the marriage-treaty, and set Henry at defiance.

[Sidenote: War with France.]

The king's wrath at this overthrow of his hopes showed itself in a
brutal and impolitic act of vengeance. He was a skilful shipbuilder; and
among the many enterprises which the restless genius of Cromwell
undertook there was probably none in which Henry took so keen an
interest as in his creation of an English fleet. Hitherto merchant ships
had been impressed when a fleet was needed; but the progress of naval
warfare had made the maintenance of an armed force at sea a condition
of maritime power, and the resources furnished by the dissolution of the
abbeys had been devoted in part to the building of ships of war, the
largest of which, the _Mary Rose_, carried a crew of seven hundred men.
The new strength which England was to wield in its navy was first seen
in 1544. An army was gathered under Lord Hertford; and while Scotland
was looking for the usual advance over the border the Earl's forces were
quietly put on board and the English fleet appeared on the third of May
in the Firth of Forth. The surprise made resistance impossible. Leith
was seized and sacked, Edinburgh, then a town of wooden houses, was
given to the flames, and burned for three days and three nights. The
country for seven miles round was harried into a desert. The blow was a
hard one, but it was little likely to bring Scotchmen round to Henry's
projects of union. A brutal raid of the English borderers on Melrose and
the destruction of his ancestors' tombs estranged the Earl of Angus, and
was quickly avenged by his overthrow of the marauders at Ancrum Moor.
Henry had yet to learn the uselessness of mere force to compass his
ends. "I shall be glad to serve the king of England, with my honour,"
said the Lord of Buccleugh to an English envoy, "but I will not be
constrained thereto if all Teviotdale be burned to the bottom of hell."

Hertford's force returned in good time to join the army which Henry in
person was gathering at Calais to co-operate with the forces assembled
by Charles on the north-eastern frontier of France. Each sovereign found
himself at the head of forty thousand men, and the Emperor's military
ability was seen in his proposal for an advance of both armies upon
Paris. But though Henry found no French force in his front, his cautious
temper shrank from the risk of leaving fortresses in his rear; and while
their allies pushed boldly past Chalons on the capital, the English
troops were detained till September in the capture of Boulogne, and only
left Boulogne to form the siege of Montreuil. The French were thus
enabled to throw their whole force on the Emperor, and Charles found
himself in a position from which negotiation alone could extricate him.

[Sidenote: Growth of Lutheranism.]

His ends were in fact gained by the humiliation of France, and he had as
little desire to give England a strong foothold in the neighbourhood of
his own Netherlands as in Wolsey's days. The widening of English
territory there could hardly fail to encourage that upgrowth of heresy
which the Emperor justly looked upon as the greatest danger to the hold
of Spain upon the Low Countries, while it would bring Henry a step
nearer to the chain of Protestant states which began on the Lower Rhine.
The plans which Charles had formed for uniting the Catholics and
Lutherans in the conferences of Augsburg had broken down before the
opposition both of Luther and the Pope. On both sides indeed the
religious contest was gathering new violence. A revival had begun in the
Church itself, but it was the revival of a militant and uncompromising
orthodoxy. In 1542 the fanaticism of Cardinal Caraffa forced on the
establishment of a supreme Tribunal of the Inquisition at Rome. The next
year saw the establishment of the Jesuits. Meanwhile Lutheranism took a
new energy. The whole north of Germany became Protestant. In 1539 the
younger branches of the house of Saxony joined the elder in a common
adherence to Lutheranism; and their conversion had been followed by that
of the Elector of Brandenburg. Southern Germany seemed bent on following
the example of the north. The hereditary possessions of Charles himself
fell away from Catholicism. The Austrian duchies were overrun with
heresy. Bohemia promised soon to become Hussite again. Persecution
failed to check the triumph of the new opinions in the Low Countries.
The Empire itself threatened to become Protestant. In 1540 the accession
of the Elector Palatine robbed Catholicism of Central Germany and the
Upper Rhine; and three years later, at the opening of the war with
France, that of the Archbishop of Koln gave the Protestants not only the
Central Rhineland but a majority in the College of Electors. It seemed
impossible for Charles to prevent the Empire from repudiating
Catholicism in his lifetime, or to hinder the Imperial Crown from
falling to a Protestant at his death.

[Sidenote: England and France.]

The great fabric of power which had been built up by the policy of
Ferdinand of Aragon was thus threatened with utter ruin, and Charles saw
himself forced into the struggle he had so long avoided, if not for the
interests of religion, at any rate for the interests of the House of
Austria. He still hoped for a reunion from the Council which was
assembling at Trent, and from which a purified Catholicism was to come.
But he no longer hoped that the Lutherans would yield to the mere voice
of the Council. They would yield only to force, and the first step in
such a process of compulsion must be the breaking up of their League of
Schmalkald. Only France could save them; and it was to isolate them from
France that Charles availed himself of the terror his march on Paris had
caused, and concluded a treaty with that power in September 1544. The
progress of Protestantism had startled even France itself; and her old
policy seemed to be abandoned in her promises of co-operation in the
task of repressing heresy in the Empire. But a stronger security against
French intervention lay in the unscrupulous dexterity with which, while
withdrawing from the struggle, Charles left Henry and Francis still at
strife. Henry would not cede Boulogne, and Francis saw no means of
forcing him to a peace save by a threat of invasion. While an army
closed round Boulogne, and a squadron carried troops to Scotland, a
hundred and fifty French ships were gathered in the Channel and crossed
in the summer of 1545 to the Isle of Wight. But their attacks were
feebly conducted and the fleet at last returned to its harbours without
striking any serious blow, while the siege of Boulogne dragged idly on
through the year. Both kings however drew to peace. In spite of the
treaty of Crepy it was impossible for France to abandon the Lutherans,
and Francis was eager to free his hands for action across the Rhine.
Henry on the other hand, deserted by his ally and with a treasury ruined
by the cost of the war, was ready at last to surrender his gains in it.
In June 1546 a peace was concluded by which England engaged to surrender
Boulogne on payment of a heavy ransom, and France to restore the annual
subsidy which had been promised in 1525.

[Sidenote: The Peace.]

What aided in the close of the war was a new aspect of affairs in
Scotland. Since the death of James the Fifth the great foe of England in
the north had been the Archbishop of St. Andrews, Cardinal Beaton. In
despair of shaking his power his rivals had proposed schemes for his
assassination to Henry, and these schemes had been expressly approved.
But plot after plot broke down; and it was not till May 1546 that a
group of Scotch nobles who favoured the Reformation surprised his castle
at St. Andrews. Shrieking miserably, "I am a priest! I am a priest! Fie!
Fie! All is gone!" the Cardinal was brutally murdered, and his body hung
over the castle-walls. His death made it easy to include Scotland in the
peace with France which was concluded in the summer. But in England
itself peace was a necessity. The Crown was penniless. In spite of the
confiscation of the abbey lands in 1539 the treasury was found empty at
the very opening of the war: the large subsidies granted by the
Parliament were expended; and conscious that a fresh grant could hardly
be expected even from the servile Houses the government in 1545 fell
back on its old resource of benevolences. Of two London merchants who
resisted this demand as illegal one was sent to the Fleet, the second
ordered to join the army on the Scotch border; but it was significant
that resistance had been offered, and the failure of the war-taxes which
were voted at the close of the year to supply the royal needs drove the
Council to fresh acts of confiscation. A vast mass of Church property
still remained for the spoiler, and by a bill of 1545 more than two
thousand chauntries and chapels, with a hundred and ten hospitals, were
suppressed to the profit of the Crown. Enormous as this booty was, it
could only be slowly realized; and the immediate pressure forced the
Council to take refuge in the last and worst measure any government can
adopt, a debasement of the currency. The evils of such a course were
felt till the reign of Elizabeth. But it was a course that could not be
repeated; and financial exhaustion played its part in bringing the war
to an end.

[Sidenote: Charles and the League of Schmalkald.]

A still greater part was played by the aspect of affairs in the Empire.
Once freed from the check of the war Charles had moved fast to his aim.
In 1545 he had adjusted all minor differences with Paul the Third, and
Pope and Emperor had resolved on the immediate convocation of the
Council, and on the enforcement of its decisions by weight of arms.
Should the Emperor be driven to war with the Lutheran princes, the Pope
engaged to support him with all his power. "Were it needful" Paul
promised "he would sell his very crown in his service." In December the
Council was actually opened at Trent, and its proceedings soon showed
that no concessions to the Lutherans could be looked for. The Emperor's
demand that the reform of the Church should first be taken in hand was
evaded; and on the two great questions of the authority of the Bible as
a ground of faith, and of justification, the sentence of the Council
directly condemned the Protestant opinions. The Lutherans showed their
resolve to make no submission by refusing to send representatives to
Trent; and Charles carried out his pledges to the Papacy by taking the
field in the spring of 1546 to break up the League of Schmalkald. But
the army gathered under the Elector of Saxony and the Landgrave of Hesse
so far outnumbered the Imperial forces that the Emperor could not
venture on a battle. Henry watched the course of Charles with a growing
anxiety. The hopes of a purified and united Christendom which had drawn
him a few years back to the Emperor's side faded before the stern
realities of the Council. The highest pretensions of the Papacy had been
sanctioned by the bishops gathered at Trent; and to the pretensions of
the Papacy Henry was resolved not to bow. He was driven, whether he
would or no, on the policy of Cromwell; and in the last months of his
life he offered aid to the League of Schmalkald. His offers were
rejected; for the Lutheran princes had no faith in his sincerity, and
believed themselves strong enough to deal with the Emperor without
foreign help.

[Sidenote: Effect on English Religion.]

But his attitude without told on his policy at home. To the hotter
Catholics as to the hotter Protestants the years since Cromwell's fall
had seemed years of a gradual return to Catholicism. There had been a
slight sharpening of persecution for the Protestants, and restrictions
had been put on the reading of the English Bible. The alliance with
Charles and the hope of reconciling England anew with a pacified
Christendom gave fresh cause for suppressing heresy. Neither Norfolk nor
his master indeed desired any rigorous measure of reaction, for Henry
remained proud of the work he had done. His bitterness against the
Papacy only grew as the years went by; and at the very moment that
heretics were suffering for a denial of the mass, others were suffering
by their side for a denial of the supremacy. But strange and anomalous
as its system seemed, the drift of Henry's religious government had as
yet been in one direction, that of a return to and reconciliation with
the body of the Catholic Church. With the decision of the Council and
the new attitude of the Emperor this drift was suddenly arrested. It was
not that Henry realized the revolution that was opening before him or
the vast importance of the steps which his policy now led him to take.
His tendency, like that of his people, was religious rather than
theological, practical rather than speculative. Of the immense problems
which were opening in the world neither he nor England saw anything. The
religious strife which was to break Europe asunder was to the king as to
the bulk of Englishmen a quarrel of words and hot temper; the truth
which Christendom was to rend itself to pieces in striving to discover
was a thing that could easily be found with the aid of God. There is
something humorous as there is something pathetic in the warnings which
Henry addressed to the Parliament at the close of 1545. The shadow of
death as it fell over him gave the king's words a new gentleness and
tenderness. "The special foundation of our religion being charity
between man and man, it is so refrigerate as there never was more
dissension and lack of love between man and man, the occasions whereof
are opinions only and names devised for the continuance of the same.
Some are called Papists, some Lutherans, and some Anabaptists; names
devised of the devil, and yet not fully without ground, for the severing
of one man's heart by conceit of opinion from the other." But the remedy
was a simple one. Every man was "to travail first for his own
amendment." Then the bishops and clergy were to agree in their teaching,
"which, seeing there is but one truth and verity, they may easily do,
calling therein for the grace of God." Then the nobles and laity were to
be pious and humble, to read their new Bibles "reverently and humbly ...
and in any doubt to resort to the learned or at best the higher powers."
"I am very sorry to know and hear how unreverendly that precious jewel,
the Word of God, is disputed, rimed, sung, and jangled in every alehouse
and tavern. This kind of man is depraved and that kind of man, this
ceremony and that ceremony." All this controversy might be done away by
simple charity. "Therefore be in charity one with another like brother
and brother. Have respect to the pleasing of God; and then I doubt not
that love I spoke of shall never be dissolved between us."

[Sidenote: The Religious Truce.]

There is something wonderful in the English coolness and narrowness, in
the speculative blindness and practical good sense which could look out
over such a world at such a moment, and could see nothing in it save a
quarrel of "opinions, and of names devised for the continuance of the
same." But Henry only expressed the general feeling of his people.
England indeed was being slowly leavened with a new spirit. The
humiliation of the clergy, the Lutheran tendencies of half the bishops,
the crash of the abbeys, the destruction of chauntries and mass-chapels,
a measure which told closely on the actual worship of the day, the new
articles of faith, the diffusion of Bibles, the "jangling" and
discussion which followed on every step in the king's course, were all
telling on the thoughts of men. But the temper of the nation as a whole
remained religiously conservative. It drifted rather to the moderate
reforms of the New Learning than to any radical reconstruction of the
Church. There was a general disinclination indeed to push matters to
either extreme, a general shrinking from the persecution which the
Catholic called for as from the destruction which the Protestant was
desiring. It was significant that a new heresy bill which passed through
the Lords in 1545 quietly disappeared when it reached the Commons. But
this shrinking rested rather on national than on theological grounds,
on a craving for national union which Henry expressed in his cry for
"brotherly love," and on an imperfect appreciation of the real nature or
consequence of the points at issue which made men shrink from burning
their neighbours for "opinions and names devised for the continuance of
the same." What Henry and what the bulk of Englishmen wanted was, not
indeed wholly to rest in what had been done, but to do little more save
the remedying of obvious abuses or the carrying on of obvious
improvements. One such improvement was the supplying men with the means
of private devotion in their own tongue, a measure from which none but
the fanatics of either side dissented. This process went slowly on in
the issuing of two primers in 1535 and 1539, the rendering into English
of the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments, the
publication of an English Litany for outdoor processions in 1544, and
the adding to this of a collection of English prayers in 1545.

[Sidenote: The Court Factions.]

But the very tone of Henry shows his consciousness that this religious
truce rested on his will alone. Around him as he lay dying stood men who
were girding themselves to a fierce struggle for power, a struggle that
could not fail to wake the elements of religious discord which he had
striven to lull asleep. Adherents of the Papacy, advocates of a new
submission to a foreign spiritual jurisdiction there were few or none;
for the most conservative of English Churchmen or nobles had as yet no
wish to restore the older Roman supremacy. But Norfolk and Gardiner were
content with this assertion of national and ecclesiastical independence;
in all matters of faith they were earnest to conserve, to keep things as
they were, and in front of them stood a group of nobles who were bent on
radical change. The marriages, the reforms, the profusion of Henry had
aided him in his policy of weakening the nobles by building up a new
nobility which sprang from the Court and was wholly dependent on the
Crown. Such were the Russells, the Cavendishes, the Wriothesleys, the
Fitzwilliams. Such was John Dudley, a son of the Dudley who had been put
to death for his financial oppression in Henry the Seventh's days, but
who had been restored in blood, attached to the court, raised to the
peerage as Lord Lisle, and who, whether as adviser or general, had been
actively employed in high stations at the close of this reign. Such
above all were the two brothers of Jane Seymour. The elder of the two,
Edward Seymour, had been raised to the earldom of Hertford, and
entrusted with the command of the English army in its operations against
Scotland. As uncle of Henry's boy Edward, he could not fail to play a
leading part in the coming reign; and the nobles of the "new blood," as
their opponents called them in disdain, drew round him as their head.
Without any historical hold on the country, raised by the royal caprice,
and enriched by the spoil of the monasteries, these nobles were pledged
to the changes from which they had sprung and to the party of change.
Over the mass of the nation their influence was small; and in the strife
for power with the older nobles which they were anticipating they were
forced to look to the small but resolute body of men who, whether from
religious enthusiasm or from greed of wealth or power, were bent on
bringing the English Church nearer to conformity with the reformed
Churches of the Continent. As Henry drew to his grave the two factions
faced each other with gathering dread and gathering hate. Hot words
betrayed their hopes. "If God should call the king to his mercy," said
Norfolk's son, Lord Surrey, "who were so meet to govern the Prince as my
lord my father?" "Rather than it should come to pass," retorted a
partizan of Hertford's, "that the Prince should be under the governance
of your father or you, I would abide the adventure to thrust a dagger in
you!"

[Sidenote: Lord Surrey.]

In the history of English poetry the name of Lord Surrey takes an
illustrious place. An Elizabethan writer tells us how at this time
"sprang up a new company of courtly makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyatt the
elder and Henry, Earl of Surrey, were the two chieftains; who having
travelled to Italy, and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and
style of the Italian poesy, as novices newly crept out of the schools of
Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, they greatly polished our rude and homely
manner of vulgar poesy from what it had been before, and for that cause
may justly be said to be the first reformers of our English metre and
style." The dull moralizings of the rimers who followed Chaucer, the
rough but vivacious doggrel of Skelton, made way in the hands of Wyatt
and Surrey for delicate imitations of the songs, sonnets, and rondels of
Italy and France. With the Italian conceits came an Italian refinement
whether of words or of thought; and the force and versatility of
Surrey's youth showed itself in whimsical satires, in classical
translations, in love-sonnets, and in paraphrases of the Psalms. In his
version of two books of the AEneid he was the first to introduce into
England the Italian blank verse which was to play so great a part in our
literature. But with the poetic taste of the Renascence Surrey inherited
its wild and reckless energy. Once he was sent to the Fleet for
challenging a gentleman to fight. Release enabled him to join his father
in an expedition against Scotland, but he was no sooner back than the
Londoners complained how at Candlemas the young lord and his comrades
"went out with stone bows at midnight," and how next day "there was
great clamour of the breaking of many glass windows both of houses and
churches, and shooting at men that might be in the streets." In spite of
his humorous excuse that the jest only purposed to bring home to men
that "from justice' rod no fault is free, but that all such as work
unright in most quiet are next unrest," Surrey paid for this outbreak
with a fresh arrest which drove him to find solace in paraphrases of
Ecclesiastes and the Psalms. Soon he was over sea with the English
troops in Flanders, and in 1544 serving as marshal of the camp to
conduct the retreat after the siege of Montreuil. Sent to relieve
Boulogne, he remained in charge of the town till the spring of 1546,
when he returned to England to rime sonnets to a fair Geraldine, the
daughter of the Earl of Kildare, and to plunge into the strife of
factions around the dying king.

[Sidenote: Fall of the Howards.]

All moral bounds had been loosened by the spirit of the Renascence, and,
if we accept the charge of his rivals, Surrey now aimed at gaining a
hold on Henry by offering him his sister as a mistress. It is as
possible that the young Earl was aiming simply at the displacement of
Catharine Parr, and at the renewal by his sister's elevation to the
throne of that matrimonial hold upon Henry which the Howards had already
succeeded in gaining through the unions with Anne Boleyn and Catharine
Howard. But a temper such as Surrey's was ill matched against the subtle
and unscrupulous schemers who saw their enemy in a pride that scorned
the "new men" about him and vowed that when once the king was dead "they
should smart for it." The turn of foreign affairs gave a fresh strength
to the party which sympathized with the Protestants and denounced that
alliance with the Emperor which had been throughout the policy of the
Howards. Henry's offer of aid to the Lutheran princes marked the triumph
of this party in the royal councils; and the new steps which Cranmer was
suffered to make towards an English Liturgy showed that the religious
truce of Henry's later years was at last abandoned. Hertford, the head
of the "new men," came more to the front as the waning health of the
king brought Jane Seymour's boy, Edward, nearer to the throne. In the
new reign Hertford, as the boy's uncle, was sure to play a great part;
and he used his new influence to remove the only effective obstacle to
his future greatness. Surrey's talk of his royal blood, the Duke's
quartering of the royal arms to mark his Plantagenet descent, and some
secret interviews with the French ambassador, were adroitly used to wake
Henry's jealousy of the dangers which might beset the throne of his
child. Norfolk and his son were alike committed to the Tower at the
close of 1546. A month later Surrey was condemned and sent to the block,
and his father was only saved by the sudden death of Henry the Eighth in
January, 1547.

[Sidenote: Hertford made Protector.]

By an Act passed in the Parliament of 1544 it had been provided that the
crown should pass to Henry's son Edward, and on Edward's death without
issue to his sister Mary. Should Mary prove childless it was to go to
Elizabeth, the child of Anne Boleyn. Beyond this point the Houses would
make no provision, but power was given to the king to make further
dispositions by will. At his death it was found that Henry had passed
over the line of his sister Margaret of Scotland, and named as next in
the succession to Elizabeth the daughters of his younger sister Mary by
her marriage with Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. As Edward was but
nine years old Henry had appointed a carefully-balanced Council of
Regency; but the will fell into Hertford's keeping, and when the list of
regents was at last disclosed Gardiner, who had till now been the
leading minister, was declared to have been excluded from the number of
executors. Whether the exclusion was Henry's act or the act of the men
who used his name, the absence of the bishop with the imprisonment of
Norfolk threw the balance of power on the side of the "new men" who were
represented by Hertford and Lisle. Their chief opponent, the Chancellor
Wriothesley, struggled in vain against their next step towards
supremacy, the modification of Henry's will by the nomination of
Hertford as Protector of the realm and governor of Edward's person.
Alleged directions from the dying king served as pretexts for the
elevation of the whole party to higher rank in the state. It was to
repair "the decay of the old English nobility" that Hertford raised
himself to the dukedom of Somerset and his brother to the barony of
Seymour, the queen's brother Lord Parr to the marquisate of Northampton,
Lisle to the earldom of Warwick, Russell to that of Bedford, Wriothesley
to that of Southampton. Ten of their partizans became barons, and as the
number of peers in spite of recent creations still stood at about fifty
such a group constituted a power in the Upper House. Alleged directions
of the king were conveniently remembered to endow the new peers with
public money, though the treasury was beggared and the debt pressing.
The expulsion of Wriothesley from the Chancellorship and Council soon
left the "new men" without a check; but they were hardly masters of the
royal power when a bold stroke of Somerset laid all at his feet. A new
patent of Protectorate, drawn out in the boy-king's name, empowered his
uncle to act with or without the consent of his fellow-executors, and
left him supreme in the realm.

[Sidenote: Somerset and the Protestants.]

Boldly and adroitly as the whole revolution had been managed, it was
none the less a revolution. To crush their opponents the Council had
first used, and then set aside, Henry's will. Hertford in turn by the
use of his nephew's name set aside both the will and the Council. A
country gentleman, who had risen by the accident of his sister's
queenship to high rank at the Court, had thus by sheer intrigue and
self-assertion made himself ruler of the realm. But daring and
self-confident as he was, Somerset was forced by his very elevation to
seek support for the power he had won by this surprise in measures which
marked the retreat of the Monarchy from that position of pure absolutism
which it had reached at the close of Henry's reign. The Statute that had
given to royal proclamations the force of law was repealed, and several
of the new felonies and treasons which Cromwell had created and used
with so terrible an effect were erased from the Statute Book. The
popularity however which such measures won was too vague a force to
serve in the strife of the moment. Against the pressure of the
conservative party who had so suddenly found themselves jockeyed out of
power Somerset and the "new men" could look for no help but from the
Protestants. The hope of their support united with the new Protector's
personal predilections in his patronage of the innovations against which
Henry had battled to the last. Cranmer had now drifted into a purely
Protestant position; and his open break with the older system followed
quickly on Seymour's rise to power. "This year," says a contemporary,
"the Archbishop of Canterbury did eat meat openly in Lent in the Hall of
Lambeth, the like of which was never seen since England was a Christian
country." This notable act was followed by a rapid succession of
sweeping changes. The legal prohibitions of Lollardry were rescinded;
the Six Articles were repealed; a royal injunction removed all pictures
and images from the churches. A formal Statute gave priests the right
to marry. A resolution of Convocation which was confirmed by Parliament
brought about the significant change which first definitely marked the
severance of the English Church in doctrine from the Roman, by ordering
that the sacrament of the altar should be administered in both kinds.

[Sidenote: The Common Prayer.]

A yet more significant change followed. The old tongue of the Church was
now to be disused in public worship. The universal use of Latin had
marked the Catholic and European character of the older religion: the
use of English marked the strictly national and local character of the
new system. In the spring of 1548 a common Communion Service in English
was added to the solitary Mass of the priest; an English book of Common
Prayer, the Liturgy which with slight alterations is still used in the
Church of England, soon replaced the Missal and Breviary from which its
contents are mainly drawn. The name "Common Prayer," which was given to
the new Liturgy, marked its real import. The theory of worship which
prevailed through Mediaeval Christendom, the belief that the worshipper
assisted only at rites wrought for him by priestly hands, at a sacrifice
wrought through priestly intervention, at the offering of prayer and
praise by priestly lips, was now set at naught. "The laity," it has been
picturesquely said, "were called up into the Chancel." The act of
devotion became a "common prayer" of the whole body of worshippers. The
Mass became a "communion" of the whole Christian fellowship. The priest
was no longer the offerer of a mysterious sacrifice, the mediator
between God and the worshipper; he was set on a level with the rest of
the Church, and brought down to be the simple mouthpiece of the
congregation.

[Sidenote: The Triumph of the Emperor.]

What gave a wider importance to these measures was their bearing on the
general politics of Christendom. The adhesion of England to the
Protestant cause came at a moment when Protestantism seemed on the verge
of ruin. The confidence of the Lutheran princes in their ability to
resist the Emperor had been seen in their refusal of succour from Henry
the Eighth. But in the winter of Henry's death the secession of Duke
Maurice of Saxony with many of his colleagues from the League of
Schmalkald so weakened the Protestant body that Charles was able to put
its leaders to the ban of the Empire. Hertford was hardly Protector when
the German princes called loudly for aid; but the fifty thousand crowns
which were secretly sent by the English Council could scarcely have
reached them when in April 1547 Charles surprised their camp at Muhlberg
and routed their whole army. The Elector of Saxony was taken prisoner;
the Landgrave of Hesse surrendered in despair. His victory left Charles
master of the Empire. The jealousy of the Pope indeed at once revived
with the Emperor's success, and his recall of the bishops from Trent
forced Charles to defer his wider plans for enforcing religious unity;
while in Germany itself he was forced to reckon with Duke Maurice and
the Protestant princes who had deserted the League of Schmalkald, but
whose one object in joining the Emperor had been to provide a check on
his after movements. For the moment therefore he was driven to prolong
the religious truce by an arrangement called the "Interim." But the
Emperor's purpose was now clear. Wherever his power was actually felt
the religious reaction began; and the Imperial towns which held firmly
to the Lutheran creed were reduced by force of arms. It was of the
highest moment that in this hour of despair the Protestants saw their
rule suddenly established in a new quarter, and the Lutheranism which
was being trampled under foot in its own home triumphant in England.
England became the common refuge of the panic-struck Protestants. Bucer
and Fagius were sent to lecture at Cambridge, Peter Martyr advocated the
anti-sacramentarian views of Calvin at Oxford. Cranmer welcomed refugees
from every country, Germans, Italians, French, Poles, and Swiss, to his
palace at Lambeth. When persecution broke out in the Low Countries the
fugitive Walloons were received at London and Canterbury, and allowed to
set up in both places their own churches.

[Sidenote: Pinkie Cleugh.]

But Somerset dreamed of a wider triumph for "the religion." On his
death-bed Henry was said to have enforced on the Council the need of
carrying out his policy of a union of Scotland with England through the
marriage of its Queen with his boy. A wise statesmanship would have
suffered the Protestant movement which had been growing stronger in the
northern kingdom since Beaton's death to run quietly its course; and his
colleagues warned Somerset to leave Scotch affairs untouched till Edward
was old enough to undertake them in person. But these counsels were set
aside; and a renewal of the border warfare enforced the Protector's
demands for a closer union of the kingdoms. The jealousy of France was
roused at once, and a French fleet appeared off the Scottish coast to
reduce the castle of St. Andrews, which had been held since Beaton's
death by the English partizans who murdered him. The challenge called
Somerset himself to the field; and crossing the Tweed with a fine army
of eighteen thousand men in the summer of 1547 the Protector pushed
along the coast till he found the Scots encamped behind the Esk on the
slopes of Musselburgh, six miles eastward of Edinburgh. The English
invasion had drawn all the factions of the kingdom together against the
stranger, and a body of "Gospellers" under Lord Angus formed the
advance-guard of the Scotch army as it moved by its right on the tenth
of September to turn the English position and drive Somerset into the
sea. The English horse charged the Scottish front only to be flung off
by its pikemen; but their triumph threw the Lowlanders into disorder,
and as they pushed forward in pursuit their advance was roughly checked
by the fire of a body of Italian musketeers whom Somerset had brought
with him. The check was turned into a defeat by a general charge of the
English line, a fatal panic broke the Scottish host, and ten thousand
men fell in its headlong flight beneath the English lances.

[Sidenote: Somerset's Policy.]

Victor as he was at Pinkie Cleugh, Somerset was soon forced by famine to
fall back from the wasted country. His victory indeed had been more
fatal to the interests of England than a defeat. The Scots in despair
turned as of old to France, and bought its protection by consenting to
the child-queen's marriage with the son of Henry the Second, who had
followed Francis on the throne. In the summer of 1548 Mary Stuart sailed
under the escort of a French fleet and landed safely at Brest. Not only
was the Tudor policy of union foiled, as it seemed, for ever, but
Scotland was henceforth to be a part of the French realm. To north as to
south England would feel the pressure of the French king. Nor was
Somerset's policy more successful at home. The religious changes he was
forcing on the land were carried through with the despotism, if not with
the vigour, of Cromwell. In his acceptance of the personal supremacy of
the sovereign, Gardiner was ready to bow to every change which Henry had
ordered, or which his son, when of age to be fully king, might order in
the days to come. But he denounced all ecclesiastical changes made
during the king's minority as illegal and invalid. Untenable as it was,
this protest probably represented the general mind of Englishmen; but
the bishop was committed by the Council to prison in the Fleet, and
though soon released was sent by the Protector to the Tower. The power
of preaching was restricted by the issue of licences only to the friends
of the Primate. While all counter-arguments were rigidly suppressed, a
crowd of Protestant pamphleteers flooded the country with vehement
invectives against the Mass and its superstitious accompaniments. The
suppression of chauntries and religious gilds which was now being
carried out enabled Somerset to buy the assent of noble and landowner to
his measures by glutting their greed with the last spoils of the Church.

[Sidenote: The Revolts.]

But it was impossible to buy off the general aversion of the people to
the Protector's measures; and German and Italian mercenaries had to be
introduced to stamp out the popular discontent which broke out in the
east, in the west, and in the midland counties. Everywhere men protested
against the new changes and called for the maintenance of the system of
Henry the Eighth. The Cornishmen refused to receive the new service
"because it is like a Christmas game." In 1549 Devonshire demanded by
open revolt the restoration of the Mass and the Six Articles as well as
a partial re-establishment of the suppressed abbeys. The agrarian
discontent woke again in the general disorder. Enclosures and evictions
were going steadily on, and the bitterness of the change was being
heightened by the results of the dissolution of the abbeys. Church lands
had always been underlet, the monks were easy landlords, and on no
estates had the peasantry been as yet so much exempt from the general
revolution in culture. But the new lay masters to whom the abbey lands
fell were quick to reap their full value by a rise of rents and by the
same processes of eviction and enclosure as went on elsewhere. The
distress was deepened by the change in the value of money which was now
beginning to be felt from the mass of gold and silver which the New
World was yielding to the Old, and still more by a general rise of
prices that followed on the debasement of the coinage which had begun
with Henry and went on yet more unscrupulously under Somerset. The
trouble came at last to a head in the manufacturing districts of the
eastern counties. Twenty thousand men gathered round an "oak of
Reformation" near Norwich, and repulsing the royal troops in a desperate
engagement renewed the old cries for a removal of evil counsellors, a
prohibition of enclosures, and redress for the grievances of the poor.

[Sidenote: Somerset's Fall.]

The revolt of the Norfolk men was stamped out in blood by the energy of
Lord Warwick, as the revolt in the west had been put down by Lord
Russell, but the risings had given a fatal blow to Somerset's power. It
had already been weakened by strife within his own family. His brother
Thomas had been created Lord Seymour and raised to the post of Lord High
Admiral; but, glutted as he was with lands and honours, his envy at
Somerset's fortunes broke out in a secret marriage with the
Queen-dowager, Catharine Parr, in an attempt on her death to marry
Elizabeth, and in intrigues to win the confidence of the young king and
detach him from his brother. Seymour's discontent was mounting into open
revolt when in the January of 1549 he was arrested, refused a trial,
attainted, and sent to the block. The stain of a brother's blood,
however justly shed, rested from that hour on Somerset, while the nobles
were estranged from him by his resolve to enforce the laws against
enclosures and evictions, as well as by the weakness he had shown in the
presence of the revolt. Able indeed as Somerset was, his temper was not
that of a ruler of men; and his miserable administration had all but
brought government to a standstill. While he was dreaming of a fresh
invasion of Scotland the treasury was empty, not a servant of the state
was paid, and the soldiers he had engaged on the Continent refused to
cross the Channel in despair of receiving their hire. It was only by
loans raised at ruinous interest that the Protector escaped sheer
bankruptcy when the revolts in east and west came to swell the royal
expenses. His weakness in tampering with the popular demands completed
his ruin. The nobles dreaded a communistic outbreak like that of the
Suabian peasantry, and their dread was justified by prophecies that
monarchy and nobility were alike to be destroyed and a new rule set up
under governors elected by the people. They dreaded yet more the being
forced to disgorge their spoil to appease the discontent. At the close
of 1549 therefore the Council withdrew openly from Somerset, and forced
the Protector to resign.

[Sidenote: Warwick's Protectorate]

His office passed to the Earl of Warwick, to whose ruthless severity the
suppression of the revolt was mainly due. The change of governors
however brought about no change of system. Peace indeed was won from
France by the immediate surrender of Boulogne; but the misgovernment
remained as great as ever, the currency was yet further debased, and a
wild attempt made to remedy the effects of this measure by a royal
fixing of prices. It was in vain that Latimer denounced the prevailing
greed, and bade the Protestant lords choose "either restitution or else
damnation." Their sole aim seemed to be that of building up their own
fortunes at the cost of the State. All pretence of winning popular
sympathy was gone, and the rule of the upstart nobles who formed the
Council of Regency became simply a rule of terror. "The greater part of
the people," one of their creatures, Cecil, avowed, "is not in favour of
defending this cause, but of aiding its adversaries; on that side are
the greater part of the nobles, who absent themselves from Court, all
the bishops save three or four, almost all the judges and lawyers,
almost all the justices of the peace, the priests who can move their
flocks any way, for the whole of the commonalty is in such a state of
irritation that it will easily follow any stir towards change." But
united as it was in its opposition the nation was helpless. The system
of despotism which Cromwell built up had been seized by a knot of
adventurers, and with German and Italian mercenaries at their disposal
they rode roughshod over the land.

[Sidenote: The Reformation]

At such a moment it seemed madness to provoke foes abroad as well as at
home, but the fanaticism of the young king was resolved to force on his
sister Mary a compliance with the new changes, and her resistance was
soon backed by the remonstrances of her cousin, the Emperor. Charles was
now at the height of his power, master of Germany, preparing to make the
Empire hereditary in the person of his son, Philip, and preluding a
wider effort to suppress heresy throughout the world by the
establishment of the Inquisition in the Netherlands and a fiery
persecution which drove thousands of Walloon heretics to find a refuge
in England. But heedless of dangers from without or of dangers from
within Cranmer and his colleagues advanced more boldly than ever in the
career of innovation. Four prelates who adhered to the older system were
deprived of their sees and committed on frivolous pretexts to the Tower.
A new Catechism embodied the doctrines of the reformers, and a book of
Homilies which enforced the chief Protestant tenets was ordered to be
read in churches. A crowning defiance was given to the doctrine of the
Mass by an order to demolish the stone altars and replace them by wooden
tables, which were stationed for the most part in the middle of the
church. In 1552 a revised Prayer Book was issued, and every change made
in it leaned directly towards the extreme Protestantism which was at
this time finding a home at Geneva. On the cardinal point of difference,
the question of the sacrament, the new formularies broke away not only
from the doctrine of Rome but from that of Luther, and embodied the
anti-sacramentarian tenets of Zwingli and Calvin. Forty-two Articles of
Religion were introduced; and though since reduced by omissions to
thirty-nine these have remained to this day the formal standard of
doctrine in the English Church. Like the Prayer Book, they were mainly
the work of Cranmer; and belonging as they did to the class of
Confessions which were now being framed in Germany to be presented to
the Council of Christendom which Charles was still resolute to
reassemble, they marked the adhesion of England to the Protestant
movement on the Continent. Even the episcopal mode of government which
still connected the English Church with the old Catholic Communion was
reduced to a form; in Cranmer's mind the spiritual powers of the bishops
were drawn simply from the king's commission as their temporal
jurisdiction was exercised in the king's name. They were reduced
therefore to the position of royal officers, and called to hold their
offices simply at the royal pleasure. The sufferings of the Protestants
had failed to teach them the worth of religious liberty; and a new code
of ecclesiastical laws, which was ordered to be drawn up by a board of
Commissioners as a substitute for the Canon Law of the Catholic Church,
although it shrank from the penalty of death, attached that of perpetual
imprisonment or exile to the crimes of heresy, blasphemy, and adultery,
and declared excommunication to involve a severance of the offender from
the mercy of God and his deliverance into the tyranny of the devil.
Delays in the completion of this Code prevented its legal establishment
during Edward's reign; but the use of the new Liturgy and attendance at
the new service were enforced by imprisonment, and subscription to the
Articles of Faith was demanded by royal authority from all clergymen,
churchwardens, and schoolmasters.

[Sidenote: The Religious Disorder.]

The distaste for changes so hurried and so rigorously enforced was
increased by the daring speculations of the more extreme Protestants.
The real value of the religious revolution of the sixteenth century to
mankind lay, not in its substitution of one creed for another, but in
the new spirit of enquiry, the new freedom of thought and of discussion,
which was awakened during the process of change. But however familiar
such a truth may be to us, it was absolutely hidden from the England of
the time. Men heard with horror that the foundations of faith and
morality were questioned, polygamy advocated, oaths denounced as
unlawful, community of goods raised into a sacred obligation, the very
Godhead of the Founder of Christianity denied. The repeal of the Statute
of Heresy left indeed the powers of the Common Law intact, and Cranmer
availed himself of these to send heretics of the last class without
mercy to the stake. But within the Church itself the Primate's desire
for uniformity was roughly resisted by the more ardent members of his
own party. Hooper, who had been named Bishop of Gloucester, refused to
wear the episcopal habits, and denounced them as the livery of the
"harlot of Babylon," a name for the Papacy which was supposed to have
been discovered in the Apocalypse. Ecclesiastical order came almost to
an end. Priests flung aside the surplice as superstitious. Patrons of
livings presented their huntsmen or gamekeepers to the benefices in
their gift, and kept the stipend. All teaching of divinity ceased at the
Universities: the students indeed had fallen off in numbers, the
libraries were in part scattered or burned, the intellectual impulse of
the New Learning died away. One noble measure indeed, the foundation of
eighteen Grammar Schools, was destined to throw a lustre over the name
of Edward, but it had no time to bear fruit in his reign.

[Sidenote: Ireland and the Reformation]

While the reckless energy of the reformers brought England to the verge
of chaos, it brought Ireland to the brink of rebellion. The fall of
Cromwell had been followed by a long respite in the religious changes
which he was forcing on the conquered dependency; but with the accession
of Edward the Sixth the system of change was renewed with all the energy
of Protestant zeal. In 1551 the bishops were summoned before the deputy,
Sir Anthony St. Leger, to receive the new English Liturgy which, though
written in a tongue as strange to the native Irish as Latin itself, was
now to supersede the Latin service-book in every diocese. The order was
the signal for an open strife. "Now shall every illiterate fellow read
mass," burst forth Dowdall, the Archbishop of Armagh, as he flung out of
the chamber with all but one of his suffragans at his heels. Archbishop
Browne of Dublin on the other hand was followed in his profession of
obedience by the Bishops of Meath, Limerick, and Kildare. The
government however was far from quailing before the division of the
episcopate. Dowdall was driven from the country; and the vacant sees
were filled with Protestants, like Bale, of the most advanced type. But
no change could be wrought by measures such as these in the opinions of
the people themselves. The new episcopal reformers spoke no Irish, and
of their English sermons not a word was understood by the rude kernes
around the pulpit. The native priests remained silent. "As for preaching
we have none," reports a zealous Protestant, "without which the ignorant
can have no knowledge." The prelates who used the new Prayer Book were
simply regarded as heretics. The Bishop of Meath was assured by one of
his flock that, "if the country wist how, they would eat you."
Protestantism had failed to wrest a single Irishman from his older
convictions, but it succeeded in uniting all Ireland against the Crown.
The old political distinctions which had been produced by the conquest
of Strongbow faded before the new struggle for a common faith. The
population within the Pale and without it became one, "not as the Irish
nation," it has been acutely said, "but as Catholics." A new sense of
national identity was found in the identity of religion. "Both English
and Irish begin to oppose your Lordship's orders," Browne had written to
Cromwell at the very outset of these changes, "and to lay aside their
national old quarrels."

[Sidenote: The Peace of Passau.]

Oversea indeed the perils of the new government passed suddenly away.
Charles had backed Mary's resistance with threats, and as he moved
forward to that mastery of the world to which he confidently looked his
threats might any day become serious dangers. But the peace with England
had set the French government free to act in Germany, and it found
allies in the great middle party of princes whose secession from the
League of Schmalkald had seemed to bring ruin to the Protestant cause.
The aim of Duke Maurice in bringing them to desert the League had been
to tie the Emperor's hands by the very fact of their joining him, and
for a while this policy had been successful. But the death of Paul the
Third, whose jealousy had till now foiled the Emperor's plans, and the
accession of an Imperial nominee to the Papal throne, enabled Charles to
move more boldly to his ends, and at the close of 1551 a fresh assembly
of the Council at Trent, and an Imperial summons of the Lutheran powers
to send divines to its sessions and to submit to its decisions, brought
matters to an issue. Maurice was forced to accept the aid of the
stranger and to conclude a secret treaty with France. He was engaged as
a general of Charles in the siege of Magdeburg; but in the spring of
1552 the army he had then at command was suddenly marched to the south,
and through the passes of the Tyrol the Duke moved straight on the
Imperial camp at Innspruck. Charles was forced to flee for very life
while the Council at Trent broke hastily up, and in a few months the
whole Imperial design was in ruin. Henry the Second was already moving
on the Rhine; to meet the French king Charles was forced to come to
terms with the Lutheran princes; and his signature in the summer of a
Treaty at Passau secured to their states the free exercise of the
reformed religion and gave the Protestant princes their due weight in
the tribunals of the empire.

[Sidenote: The Protestant Misrule.]

The humiliation of the Emperor, the fierce warfare which now engaged
both his forces and those of France, removed from England the danger of
outer interference. But within the misrule went recklessly on. All that
men saw was a religious and political chaos, in which ecclesiastical
order had perished and in which politics were dying down into the
squabbles of a knot of nobles over the spoils of the Church and the
Crown. Not content with Somerset's degradation, the Council charged him
in 1551 with treason, and sent him to the block. Honours and lands were
lavished as ever on themselves and their adherents. Warwick became Duke
of Northumberland, Lord Dorset was made Duke of Suffolk, Paulet rose to
the Marquisate of Winchester, Sir William Herbert was created Earl of
Pembroke. The plunder of the chauntries and the gilds failed to glut
the appetite of this crew of spoilers. Half the lands of every see were
flung to them in vain; an attempt was made to satisfy their greed by a
suppression of the wealthy see of Durham; and the whole endowments of
the Church were threatened with confiscation. But while the courtiers
gorged themselves with manors, the Treasury grew poorer. The coinage was
again debased. Crown lands to the value of five millions of our modern
money had been granted away to the friends of Somerset and Warwick. The
royal expenditure mounted in seventeen years to more than four times its
previous total. In spite of the brutality and bloodshed with which
revolt had been suppressed, and of the foreign soldiery on whom the
Council relied, there were signs of resistance which would have made
less reckless statesmen pause. The temper of the Parliament had drifted
far from the slavish subservience which it showed at the close of
Henry's reign. The House of Commons met Northumberland's project for the
pillage of the bishoprick of Durham with opposition, and rejected a new
treason bill. In 1552 the Duke was compelled to force nominees of his
own on the constituencies by writs from the Council before he could
count on a House to his mind. Such writs had been often issued since the
days of Henry the Seventh; but the ministers of Edward were driven to
an expedient which shows how rapidly the temper of independence was
growing. The summons of new members from places hitherto unrepresented
was among the prerogatives of the Crown, and the Protectorate used this
power to issue writs to small villages in the west which could be
trusted to return members to its mind.

[Sidenote: Edward the Sixth.]

This "packing of Parliament" was to be largely extended in the following
reigns; but it passed as yet with little comment. What really kept
England quiet was a trust that the young king, who would be of age in
two or three years, would then set all things right again. "When he
comes of age," said a Hampshire squire, "he will see another rule, and
hang up a hundred heretic knaves." Edward's temper was as lordly as that
of his father, and had he once really reigned he would probably have
dealt as roughly with the plunderers who had used his name as England
hoped. But he was a fanatical Protestant, and his rule would almost
certainly have forced on a religious strife as bitter and disastrous as
the strife which broke the strength of Germany and France. From this
calamity the country was saved by his waning health. Edward was now
fifteen, but in the opening of 1553 the signs of coming death became too
clear for Northumberland and his fellows to mistake them. By the Statute
of the Succession the death of the young king would bring Mary to the
throne; and as Mary was known to have refused acceptance of all changes
in her father's system, and was looked on as anxious only to restore it,
her accession became a subject of national hope. But to Northumberland
and his fellows her succession was fatal. They had personally outraged
Mary by their attempts to force her into compliance with their system.
Her first act would be to free Norfolk and the bishops whom they held
prisoners in the Tower, and to set these bitter enemies in power. With
ruin before them the Protestant lords were ready for a fresh revolution;
and the bigotry of the young king fell in with their plans.

[Sidenote: Edward's Will.]

In his zeal for "the religion," and in his absolute faith in his royal
autocracy, Edward was ready to override will and statute and to set
Mary's rights aside. In such a case the crown fell legally to Elizabeth,
the daughter of Anne Boleyn, who had been placed by the Act next in
succession to Mary, and whose training under Catharine Parr and the
Seymours gave good hopes of her Protestant sympathies. The cause of
Elizabeth would have united the whole of the "new men" in its defence,
and might have proved a formidable difficulty in Mary's way. But for the
maintenance of his personal power Northumberland could as little count
on Elizabeth as on Mary; and in Edward's death the Duke saw a chance of
raising, if not himself, at any rate his own blood to the throne. He
persuaded the young king that he possessed as great a right as his
father to settle the succession of the Crown by will. Henry had passed
by the children of his sister Margaret of Scotland, and had placed next
to Elizabeth in the succession the children of his younger sister Mary,
the wife of Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk. Frances, Mary's child
by this marriage, was still living, the mother of three daughters by her
marriage with Grey, Lord Dorset, a hot partizan of the religious
changes, who had been raised under the Protectorate to the Dukedom of
Suffolk. Frances was a woman of thirty-seven; but her accession to the
Crown squared as little with Northumberland's plans as that of Mary or
Elizabeth. In the will therefore which the young king drew up Edward was
brought to pass over Frances, and to name as his successor her eldest
daughter, the Lady Jane Grey. The marriage of Jane Grey with Guildford
Dudley, the fourth son of Northumberland, was all that was needed to
complete the unscrupulous plot. It was the celebration of this marriage
in May which first woke a public suspicion of the existence of such
designs, and the general murmur which followed on the suspicion might
have warned the Duke of his danger. But the secret was closely kept, and
it was only in June that Edward's "plan" was laid in the same strict
secrecy before Northumberland's colleagues. A project which raised the
Duke into a virtual sovereignty over the realm could hardly fail to stir
resistance in the Council. The king however was resolute, and his will
was used to set aside all scruples. The judges who represented that
letters patent could not override a positive statute were forced into
signing their assent by Edward's express command. To their signatures
were added those of the whole Council with Cranmer at its head. The
primate indeed remonstrated, but his remonstrances proved as fruitless
as those of his fellow-councillors.

[Sidenote: Fall of Northumberland.]

The deed was hardly done when on the sixth of July the young king passed
away. Northumberland felt little anxiety about the success of his
design. He had won over Lord Hastings to his support by giving him his
daughter in marriage, and had secured the help of Lord Pembroke by
wedding Jane's sister, Catharine, to his son. The army, the fortresses,
the foreign soldiers, were at his command; the hotter Protestants were
with him; France, in dread of Mary's kinship with the Emperor, offered
support to his plans. Jane therefore was at once proclaimed Queen on
Edward's death, and accepted as their sovereign by the Lords of the
Council. But the temper of the whole people rebelled against so lawless
a usurpation. The eastern counties rose as one man to support Mary; and
when Northumberland marched from London with ten thousand at his back
to crush the rising, the Londoners, Protestant as they were, showed
their ill-will by a stubborn silence. "The people crowd to look upon
us," the Duke noted gloomily, "but not one calls 'God speed ye.'" While
he halted for reinforcements his own colleagues struck him down. Eager
to throw from their necks the yoke of a rival who had made himself a
master, the Council no sooner saw the popular reaction than they
proclaimed Mary Queen; and this step was at once followed by a
declaration of the fleet in her favour, and by the announcement of the
levies in every shire that they would only fight in her cause. As the
tidings reached him the Duke's courage suddenly gave way. His retreat to
Cambridge was the signal for a general defection. Northumberland himself
threw his cap into the air and shouted with his men for Queen Mary. But
his submission failed to avert his doom; and the death of the Duke drew
with it the imprisonment in the Tower of the hapless girl whom he had
made the tool of his ambition.




CHAPTER II

THE CATHOLIC REACTION

1553-1558


[Sidenote: Mary and the Monarchy.]

The triumph of Mary was a fatal blow at the system of despotism which
Henry the Eighth had established. It was a system that rested not so
much on the actual strength possessed by the Crown as on the absence of
any effective forces of resistance. At Henry's death the one force of
opposition which had developed itself was that of the Protestants, but
whether in numbers or political weight the Protestants were as yet of
small consequence, and their resistance did little to break the general
drift of both nation and king. For great as were the changes which Henry
had wrought in the severance of England from the Papacy and the
establishment of the ecclesiastical supremacy of the Crown, they were
wrought with fair assent from the people at large; and when once the
discontent roused by Cromwell's violence had been appeased by his fall
England as a whole acquiesced in the conservative system of the king.
This national union however was broken by the Protectorate. At the
moment when it had reached its height the royal authority was seized by
a knot of nobles and recklessly used to further the revolutionary
projects of a small minority of the people. From the hour of this
revolution a new impulse was given to resistance. The older nobility,
the bulk of the gentry, the wealthier merchants, the great mass of the
people, found themselves thrown by the very instinct of conservatism
into opposition to the Crown. It was only by foreign hirelings that
revolt was suppressed; it was only by a reckless abuse of the system of
packing the Houses that Parliament could be held in check. At last the
Government ventured on an open defiance of law; and a statute of the
realm was set aside at the imperious bidding of a boy of fifteen. Master
of the royal forces, wielding at his will the royal authority,
Northumberland used the voice of the dying Edward to set aside rights of
succession as sacred as his own. But the attempt proved an utter
failure. The very forces on which the Duke relied turned against him.
The whole nation fronted him in arms. The sovereign whom the voice of
the young king named as his successor passed from the throne to the
Tower, and a sovereign whose title rested on parliamentary statute took
her place.

[Sidenote: The religious reaction.]

At the opening of August Mary entered London in triumph. Short and thin
in figure, with a face drawn and colourless that told of constant
ill-health, there was little in the outer seeming of the new queen to
recall her father; but her hard, bright eyes, her manlike voice, her
fearlessness and self-will, told of her Tudor blood, as her skill in
music, her knowledge of languages, her love of learning, spoke of the
culture and refinement of Henry's Court. Though Mary was thirty-seven
years old, the strict retirement in which she had lived had left her as
ignorant of the actual temper of England as England was ignorant of her
own. She had founded her resistance to the changes of the Protectorate
on a resolve to adhere to her father's system till her brother came of
age to rule, and England believed her to be longing like itself simply
for a restoration of what Henry had left. The belief was confirmed by
her earlier actions. The changes of the Protectorate were treated as
null and void. Gardiner, Henry's minister, was drawn from the Tower to
take the lead as Chancellor at the Queen's Council-board. Bonner and the
deposed bishops were restored to their sees. Ridley with the others who
had displaced them was again expelled. Latimer, as a representative of
the extreme Protestants, was sent to the Tower; and the foreign
refugees, as anti-sacramentarians, were ordered to leave England. On an
indignant protest from Cranmer against reports that he was ready to
abandon the new reforms the Archbishop was sent for his seditious
demeanour to the Tower, and soon put on his trial for treason with Lady
Jane Grey, her husband, and two of his brothers. Each pleaded guilty;
but no attempt was made to carry out the sentence of death. In all this
England went with the Queen. The popular enthusiasm hardly waited in
fact for the orders of the Government. The whole system which had been
pursued during Edward's reign fell with a sudden crash. London indeed
retained much of its Protestant sympathy, but over the rest of the
country the tide of reaction swept without a check. The married priests
were driven from their churches, the images were replaced. In many
parishes the new Prayer Book was set aside and the mass restored. The
Parliament which met in October annulled the laws made respecting
religion during the past reign, and re-established the form of service
as used in the last year of Henry the Eighth.

[Sidenote: Mary's aim.]

Up to this point the temper of England went fairly with that of the
Queen. But there were from the first signs of a radical difference
between the aim of Mary and that of her people. With the restoration of
her father's system the nation as a whole was satisfied. Mary on the
other hand looked on such a restoration simply as a step towards a
complete revival of the system which Henry had done away. Through long
years of suffering and peril her fanaticism had been patiently brooding
over the hope of restoring to England its older religion. She believed,
as she said at a later time to the Parliament, that "she had been
predestined and preserved by God to the succession of the Crown for no
other end save that He might make use of her above all else in the
bringing back of the realm to the Catholic faith." Her zeal however was
checked by the fact that she stood almost alone in her aim, as well as
by cautious advice from her cousin, the Emperor; and she assured the
Londoners that "albeit her own conscience was stayed in matters of
religion, yet she meant not to compel or strain men's consciences
otherwise than God should, as she trusted, put in their hearts a
persuasion of the truth that she was in, through the opening of his word
unto them by godly, and virtuous, and learned preachers." She had in
fact not ventured as yet to refuse the title of "Head of the Church next
under God" or to disclaim the powers which the Act of Supremacy gave
her; on the contrary she used these powers in the regulation of
preaching as her father had used them. The strenuous resistance with
which her proposal to set aside the new Prayer Book was met in
Parliament warned her of the difficulties that awaited any projects of
radical change. The proposal was carried, but only after a hot conflict
which lasted over six days and which left a third of the Lower House
still opposed to it. Their opposition by no means implied approval of
the whole series of religious changes of which the Prayer Book formed a
part, for the more moderate Catholics were pleading at this time for
prayers in the vulgar tongue, and on this question followers of More and
Colet might have voted with the followers of Cranmer. But it showed how
far men's minds were from any spirit of blind reaction or blind
compliance with the royal will.

[Sidenote: The Spanish Marriage.]

The temper of the Parliament indeed was very different from that of the
Houses which had knelt before Henry the Eighth. If it consented to
repeal the enactment which rendered her mother's marriage invalid and to
declare Mary "born in lawful matrimony," it secured the abolition of all
the new treasons and felonies created in the two last reigns. The demand
for their abolition showed that jealousy of the growth of civil tyranny
had now spread from the minds of philosophers like More to the minds of
common Englishmen. Still keener was the jealousy of any marked
revolution in the religious system which Henry had established. The wish
to return to the obedience of Rome lingered indeed among some of the
clergy and in the northern shires. But elsewhere the system of a
national Church was popular, and it was backed by the existence of a
large and influential class who had been enriched by the abbey lands.
Forty thousand families had profited by the spoil, and watched anxiously
any approach of danger to their new possessions, such as submission to
the Papacy was likely to bring about. On such a submission however Mary
was resolved: and it was to gain strength for such a step that she
determined to seek a husband from her mother's house. The policy of
Ferdinand of Aragon, so long held at bay by adverse fortune, was now to
find its complete fulfilment. To one line of the house of Austria, that
of Charles the Fifth, had fallen not only the Imperial Crown but the
great heritage of Burgundy, Aragon, Naples, Castille, and the Castillian
dependencies in the New World. To a second, that of the Emperor's
brother Ferdinand, had fallen the Austrian duchies, Bohemia and Hungary.
The marriage of Catharine was now, as it seemed, to bear its fruits by
the union of Mary with a son of Charles, and the placing a third
Austrian line upon the throne of England. The gigantic scheme of
bringing all western Europe together under the rule of a single family
seemed at last to draw to its realization.

[Sidenote: Its political grounds.]

It was no doubt from political as well as religious motives that Mary
set her heart on this union. Her rejection of Gardiner's proposal that
she should marry the young Courtenay, Earl of Devon, a son of the
Marquis of Exeter whom Henry had beheaded, the resolve which she
expressed to wed "no subject, no Englishman," was founded in part on
the danger to her throne from the pretensions of Mary Stuart, whose
adherents cared little for the exclusion of the Scotch line from the
succession by Henry's will and already alleged the illegitimate births
of both Mary Tudor and Elizabeth through the annulling of their mothers'
marriages as a ground for denying their right to the throne. Such claims
became doubly formidable through the marriage of Mary Stuart with the
heir of the French Crown, and the virtual union of both Scotland and
France in this claimant's hands. It was only to Charles that the Queen
could look for aid against such a pressure as this, and Charles was
forced to give her aid. His old dreams of a mastery of the world had
faded away before the stern realities of the Peace of Passau and his
repulse from the walls of Metz. His hold over the Empire was broken.
France was more formidable than ever. To crown his difficulties the
growth of heresy and of the spirit of independence in the Netherlands
threatened to rob him of the finest part of the Burgundian heritage.
With Mary Stuart once on the English throne, and the great island of the
west knit to the French monarchy, the balance of power would be utterly
overthrown, the Low Countries lost, and the Imperial Crown, as it could
hardly be doubted, reft from the house of Austria. He was quick
therefore to welcome the Queen's advances, and to offer his son Philip,
who though not yet twenty-six was already a widower, as a candidate for
her hand.

[Sidenote: Opposition of Parliament.]

The offer came weighted with a heavy bribe. The keen foresight of the
Emperor already saw the difficulty of holding the Netherlands in union
with the Spanish monarchy; and while Spain, Naples, and Franche Comte
descended to Philip's eldest son, Charles promised the heritage of the
Low Countries with England to the issue of Philip and Mary. He accepted
too the demand of Gardiner and the Council that in the event of such a
union England should preserve complete independence both of policy and
action. In any case the marriage would save England from the grasp of
France, and restore it, as the Emperor hinted, to the obedience of the
Church. But the project was hardly declared when it was met by an
outburst of popular indignation. Gardiner himself was against a union
that would annul the national independence which had till now been the
aim of Tudor policy, and that would drag England helplessly in the wake
of the House of Austria. The mass of conservative Englishmen shrank from
the religious aspects of the marriage. For the Emperor had now ceased to
be an object of hope or confidence as a mediator who would at once
purify the Church from abuses, and restore the unity of Christendom; he
had ranged himself definitely on the side of the Papacy and of the
Council of Trent; and the cruelties of the Inquisition which he had
introduced into Flanders gave a terrible indication of the bigotry
which he was to bequeath to his House. The marriage with Philip meant,
it could hardly be doubted, a submission to the Papacy, and an undoing
not only of the religious changes of Edward but of the whole system of
Henry. Loyal and conservative as was the temper of the Parliament, it
was at one in its opposition to a Spanish marriage and in the request
which it made through a deputation of its members to the Queen that she
would marry an Englishman. The request was a new step forward on the
part of the Houses to the recovery of their older rights. Already called
by Cromwell's policy to more than their old power in ecclesiastical
matters, their dread of revolutionary change pushed them to an
intervention in matters of state. Mary noted the advance with all a
Tudor's jealousy. She interrupted the speaker; she rebuked the
Parliament for taking too much on itself; she declared she would take
counsel on such a matter "with God and with none other." But the
remonstrance had been made, the interference was to serve as a precedent
in the reign to come, and a fresh proof had been given that Parliament
was no longer the slavish tool of the Crown.

[Sidenote: Wyatt's rising.]

But while the nation grumbled and the Parliament remonstrated, one party
in the realm was filled with absolute panic by the news of the Spanish
match. The Protestants saw in the marriage not only the final overthrow
of their religious hopes, but a close of the religious truce, and an
opening of persecution. The general opposition to the match, with the
dread of the holders of Church lands that their possessions were in
danger, encouraged the more violent to plan a rising; and France,
naturally jealous of an increase of power by its great opponent,
promised to support them by an incursion from Scotland and an attack on
Calais. The real aim of the rebellion was, no doubt, the displacement of
Mary, and the setting either of Jane Grey, or, as the bulk of the
Protestants desired, of Elizabeth, on the throne. But these hopes were
cautiously hidden; and the conspirators declared their aim to be that of
freeing the Queen from evil counsellors, and of preventing her union
with the Prince of Spain. The plan combined three simultaneous outbreaks
of revolt. Sir Peter Carew engaged to raise the west, the Duke of
Suffolk to call the midland counties to arms, while Sir Thomas Wyatt led
the Kentishmen on London. The rising was planned for the spring of 1554.
But the vigilance of the Government drove it to a premature explosion in
January, and baffled it in the centre and the west. Carew fled to
France; Suffolk, who appeared in arms at Leicester, found small response
from the people, and was soon sent prisoner to the Tower. The Kentish
rising however proved a more formidable danger. A cry that the Spaniards
were coming "to conquer the realm" drew thousands to Wyatt's standard.
The ships in the Thames submitted to be seized by the insurgents. A
party of the train-bands of London, who marched with the royal guard
under the old Duke of Norfolk against them, deserted to the rebels in a
mass with shouts of "A Wyatt! a Wyatt! we are all Englishmen!"

[Sidenote: Its failure.]

Had the Kentishmen moved quickly on the capital, its gates would have
been flung open and success would have been assured. But at the critical
moment Mary was saved by her queenly courage. Riding boldly to the
Guildhall she appealed with "a man's voice" to the loyalty of the
citizens, and denounced the declaration of Wyatt's followers as "a
Spanish cloak to cover their purpose against our religion." She pledged
herself, "on the word of a Queen, that if it shall not probably appear
to all the nobility and commons in the high court of Parliament that
this marriage shall be for the high benefit and commodity of all the
whole realm, then will I abstain from marriage while I live." The pledge
was a momentous one, for it owned the very claim of the two Houses which
the Queen had till now haughtily rejected; and with the remonstrance of
the Parliament still fresh in their ears the Londoners may well have
believed that the marriage-project would come quietly to an end. The
dread too of any change in religion by the return of the violent
Protestantism of Edward's day could hardly fail to win Mary support
among the citizens. The mayor answered for their loyalty, and when Wyatt
appeared on the Southwark bank the bridge was secured against him. But
the rebel leader knew that the issue of the revolt hung on the question
which side London would take, and that a large part of the Londoners
favoured his cause. Marching therefore up the Thames he seized a bridge
at Kingston, threw his force across the river, and turned rapidly back
on the capital. But a night march along miry roads wearied and
disorganized his men; the bulk of them were cut off from their leader by
a royal force which had gathered in the fields at what is now Hyde Park
Corner, and only Wyatt himself with a handful of followers pushed
desperately on past the palace of St. James, whence the Queen refused to
fly even while the rebels were marching beneath its walls, along the
Strand to Ludgate. "I have kept touch," he cried as he sank exhausted at
the gate. But it was closed: his adherents within were powerless to
effect their promised diversion in his favour; and as he fell back the
daring leader was surrounded at Temple Bar and sent to the Tower.

[Sidenote: The marriage.]

The failure of the revolt was fatal to the girl whom part at least of
the rebels would have placed on the throne. Lady Jane Grey, who had till
now been spared and treated with great leniency, was sent to the block;
and her father, her husband, and her uncle, atoned for the ambition of
the House of Suffolk by the death of traitors. Wyatt and his chief
adherents followed them to execution, while the bodies of the poorer
insurgents were dangling on gibbets round London. Elizabeth, who had
with some reason been suspected of complicity in the insurrection, was
sent to the Tower; and only saved from death by the interposition of the
Council. The leading Protestants fled in terror over sea. But the
failure of the revolt did more than crush the Protestant party; it
enabled the Queen to lay aside the mask of moderation which had been
forced on her by the earlier difficulties of her reign. An order for the
expulsion of all married clergy from their cures, with the deprivation
of nine bishops who had been appointed during the Protectorate and who
represented its religious tendencies, proved the Queen's resolve to
enter boldly on a course of reaction. Her victory secured the Spanish
marriage. It was to prevent Philip's union with Mary that Wyatt had
risen, and with his overthrow the Queen's policy stood triumphant. The
whole strength of the conservative opposition was lost when opposition
could be branded as disloyalty. Mary too was true to the pledge she had
given that the match should only be brought about with the assent of
Parliament. But pressure was unscrupulously used to secure compliant
members in the new elections, and a reluctant assent to the marriage was
wrung from the Houses when they assembled in the spring. Philip was
created king of Naples by his father to give dignity to his union; and
in the following July Mary met him at Winchester and became his wife.

[Sidenote: Philip.]

As he entered London with the Queen, men noted curiously the look of the
young king whose fortunes were to be so closely linked with those of
England for fifty years to come. Far younger than his bride, for he was
but twenty-six, there was little of youth in the small and fragile
frame, the sickly face, the sedentary habits, the Spanish silence and
reserve, which estranged Englishmen from Philip as they had already
estranged his subjects in Italy and his future subjects in the
Netherlands. Here however he sought by an unusual pleasantness of
demeanour as well as by profuse distributions of gifts to win the
national goodwill, for it was only by winning it that he could
accomplish the work he came to do. His first aim was to reconcile
England with the Church. The new Spanish marriage was to repair the harm
which the earlier Spanish marriage had brought about by securing that
submission to Rome on which Mary was resolved. Even before Philip's
landing in England the great obstacle to reunion had been removed by the
consent of Julius the Third under pressure from the Emperor to waive the
restoration of the Church lands in the event of England's return to
obedience. Other and almost as great obstacles indeed seemed to remain.
The temper of the nation had gone with Henry in his rejection of the
Papal jurisdiction. Mary's counsellors had been foremost among the men
who advocated the change. Her minister, Bishop Gardiner, seemed pledged
to oppose any submission to Rome. As secretary of state after Wolsey's
fall he had taken a prominent part in the measures which brought about a
severance between England and the Papacy; as Bishop of Winchester he had
written a famous tract "On True Obedience" in which the Papal supremacy
had been expressly repudiated; and to the end of Henry's days he had
been looked upon as the leading advocate of the system of a national and
independent Church. Nor had his attitude changed in Edward's reign. In
the process for his deprivation he avowed himself ready as ever to
maintain as well "the supremacy and supreme authority of the king's
majesty that now is as the abolishing of the usurped power of the Bishop
of Rome."

[Sidenote: The submission to Rome.]

But with the later changes of the Protectorate Gardiner had seen his
dream of a national yet orthodox Church vanish away. He had seen how
inevitably severance from Rome drew with it a connexion with the
Protestant Churches and a repudiation of Catholic belief. In the hours
of imprisonment his mind fell back on the old ecclesiastical order with
which the old spiritual order seemed inextricably entwined, and he was
ready now to submit to the Papacy as the one means of preserving the
faith to which he clung. His attitude was of the highest significance,
for Gardiner more than any one was a representative of the dominant
English opinion of his day. As the moderate party which had supported
the policy of Henry the Eighth saw its hopes disappear, it ranged
itself, like the Bishop, on the side of a unity which could now only be
brought about by reconciliation with Rome. The effort of the Protestants
in Wyatt's insurrection to regain their power and revive the system of
the Protectorate served only to give a fresh impulse to this drift of
conservative opinion. Mary therefore found little opposition to her
plans. The peers were won over by Philip through the pensions he
lavished among them, while pressure was unscrupulously used by the
Council to secure a compliant House of Commons. When the Parliament met
in November these measures were found to have been successful. The
attainder of Reginald Pole, who had been appointed by the Pope to
receive the submission of the realm, was reversed; and the Legate
entered London by the river with his cross gleaming from the prow of his
barge. He was solemnly welcomed in full Parliament. The two Houses
decided by a formal vote to return to the obedience of the Papal See; on
the assurance of Pole in the Pope's name that holders of Church lands
should not be disturbed in their possession the statutes abolishing
Papal jurisdiction in England were repealed; and Lords and Commons
received on their knees an absolution which freed the realm from the
guilt incurred by its schism and heresy.

[Sidenote: Mary's difficulties.]

But, even in the hour of her triumph, the temper both of Parliament and
the nation warned the Queen of the failure of her hope to bind England
to a purely Catholic policy. The growing independence of the two Houses
was seen in the impossibility of procuring from them any change in the
order of succession. The victory of Rome was incomplete so long as its
right of dispensation was implicitly denied by a recognition of
Elizabeth's legitimacy, and Mary longed to avenge her mother by humbling
the child of Anne Boleyn. But in spite of Pole's efforts and the Queen's
support a proposal to oust her sister from the line of succession could
not even be submitted to the Houses, nor could their assent be won to
the postponing the succession of Elizabeth to that of Philip. The temper
of the nation at large was equally decided. In the first Parliament of
Mary a proposal to renew the laws against heresy had been thrown out by
the Lords, even after the failure of Wyatt's insurrection. Philip's
influence secured the re-enactment of the statute of Henry the Fourth in
the Parliament which followed his arrival; but the sullen discontent of
London compelled its Bishop, Bonner, to withdraw a series of articles of
enquiry, by which he hoped to purge his diocese of heresy, and even the
Council was divided on the question of persecution. In the very
interests of Catholicism the Emperor himself counselled prudence and
delay. Philip gave the same counsel. From the moment of his arrival the
young king exercised a powerful influence over the Government, and he
was gradually drawing into his hands the whole direction of affairs.
But, bigot as he was in matters of faith, Philip's temper was that of a
statesman, not of a fanatic. If he came to England resolute to win the
country to union with the Church, his conciliatory policy was already
seen in the concessions he wrested from the Papacy in the matter of the
Church lands, and his aim was rather to hold England together and to
give time for a reaction of opinion than to revive the old discord by
any measures of severity. It was indeed only from a united and contented
England that he could hope for effective aid in the struggle of his
house with France, and in spite of his pledges Philip's one aim in
marrying Mary was to secure that aid.

[Sidenote: The persecution.]

But whether from without or from within warning was wasted on the fierce
bigotry of the Queen. It was, as Gardiner asserted, not at the counsel
of her ministers but by her own personal will that the laws against
heresy had been laid before Parliament; and now that they were enacted
Mary pressed for their execution. Her resolve was probably quickened by
the action of the Protestant zealots. The failure of Wyatt's revolt was
far from taming the enthusiasm of the wilder reformers. The restoration
of the old worship was followed by outbreaks of bold defiance. A tailor
of St. Giles in the Fields shaved a dog with the priestly tonsure. A cat
was found hanging in the Cheap "with her head shorn, and the likeness of
a vestment cast over her, with her forefeet tied together and a round
piece of paper like a singing cake between them." Yet more galling were
the ballads which were circulated in mockery of the mass, the pamphlets
which came from the exiles over sea, the seditious broadsides dropped in
the streets, the interludes in which the most sacred acts of the old
religion were flouted with ribald mockery. All this defiance only served
to quicken afresh the purpose of the Queen. But it was not till the
opening of 1555, when she had already been a year and a half on the
throne, that the opposition of her councillors was at last mastered and
the persecution began. In February the deprived bishop of Gloucester,
Hooper, was burned in his cathedral city, a London vicar, Lawrence
Saunders, at Coventry, and Rogers, a prebendary of St. Paul's, at
London. Ferrar, the deprived bishop of St. David's, who was burned at
Caermarthen, was one of eight victims who suffered in March. Four
followed in April and May, six in June, eleven in July, eighteen in
August, eleven in September. In October Ridley, the deprived bishop of
London, was drawn with Latimer from their prison at Oxford. "Play the
man, Master Ridley!" cried the old preacher of the Reformation as the
flames shot up around him; "we shall this day light up such a candle by
God's grace in England as I trust shall never be put out."

[Sidenote: Rowland Taylor.]

If the Protestants had not known how to govern, indeed, they knew how to
die; and the cause which prosperity had ruined revived in the dark hour
of persecution. The memory of their violence and greed faded away as
they passed unwavering to their doom. Such a story as that of Rowland
Taylor, the Vicar of Hadleigh, tells us more of the work which was now
begun, and of the effect it was likely to produce, than pages of
historic dissertation. Taylor, who as a man of mark had been one of the
first victims chosen for execution, was arrested in London, and
condemned to suffer in his own parish. His wife, "suspecting that her
husband should that night be carried away," had waited through the
darkness with her children in the porch of St. Botolph's beside Aldgate.
"Now when the sheriff his company came against St. Botolph's Church
Elizabeth cried, saying, 'O my dear father! Mother! mother! here is my
father led away!' Then cried his wife, 'Rowland, Rowland, where art
thou?'--for it was a very dark morning, that the one could not see the
other. Dr. Taylor answered, 'I am here, dear wife,' and stayed. The
sheriff's men would have led him forth, but the sheriff said, 'Stay a
little, masters, I pray you, and let him speak to his wife.' Then came
she to him, and he took his daughter Mary in his arms, and he and his
wife and Elizabeth knelt down and said the Lord's prayer. At which sight
the sheriff wept apace, and so did divers others of the company. After
they had prayed he rose up and kissed his wife and shook her by the
hand, and said, 'Farewell, my dear wife, be of good comfort, for I am
quiet in my conscience! God shall still be a father to my children.'...
Then said his wife, 'God be with thee, dear Rowland! I will, with God's
grace, meet thee at Hadleigh.'

"All the way Dr. Taylor was merry and cheerful as one that accounted
himself going to a most pleasant banquet or bridal.... Coming within two
miles of Hadleigh he desired to light off his horse, which done he
leaped and set a frisk or twain as men commonly do for dancing. 'Why,
master Doctor,' quoth the Sheriff, 'how do you now?' He answered, 'Well,
God be praised, Master Sheriff, never better; for now I know I am almost
at home. I lack not past two stiles to go over, and I am even at my
Father's house!'... The streets of Hadleigh were beset on both sides
with men and women of the town and country who waited to see him; whom
when they beheld so led to death, with weeping eyes and lamentable
voices, they cried, 'Ah, good Lord! there goeth our good shepherd from
us!'" The journey was at last over. "'What place is this,' he asked,
'and what meaneth it that so much people are gathered together?' It was
answered, 'It is Oldham Common, the place where you must suffer, and the
people are come to look upon you.' Then said he, 'Thanked be God, I am
even at home!'... But when the people saw his reverend and ancient
face, with a long white beard, they burst out with weeping tears and
cried, saying, 'God save thee, good Dr. Taylor; God strengthen thee and
help thee; the Holy Ghost comfort thee!' He wished, but was not
suffered, to speak. When he had prayed, he went to the stake and kissed
it, and set himself into a pitch-barrel which they had set for him to
stand on, and so stood with his back upright against the stake, with his
hands folded together and his eyes towards heaven, and so let himself be
burned." One of the executioners "cruelly cast a fagot at him, which hit
upon his head and brake his face that the blood ran down his visage.
Then said Dr. Taylor, 'O friend, I have harm enough--what needed that?'"
One more act of brutality brought his sufferings to an end. "So stood he
still without either crying or moving, with his hands folded together,
till Soyce with a halberd struck him on the head that the brains fell
out, and the dead corpse fell down into the fire."

[Sidenote: The area of the Martyrdoms.]

The terror of death was powerless against men like these. Bonner, the
Bishop of London, to whom, as bishop of the diocese in which the Council
sate, its victims were generally delivered for execution, but who, in
spite of the nickname and hatred which his official prominence in the
work of death earned him, seems to have been naturally a good-humoured
and merciful man, asked a youth who was brought before him whether he
thought he could bear the fire. The boy at once held his hand without
flinching in the flame of a candle that stood by. Rogers, a
fellow-worker with Tyndale in the translation of the Bible, and one of
the foremost among the Protestant preachers, died bathing his hands in
the flame "as if it had been in cold water." Even the commonest lives
gleamed for a moment into poetry at the stake. "Pray for me," a boy,
William Brown, who had been brought home to Brentwood to suffer, asked
of the bystanders. "I will pray no more for thee," one of them replied,
"than I will pray for a dog." "'Then,' said William, 'Son of God, shine
upon me'; and immediately the sun in the elements shone out of a dark
cloud so full in his face that he was constrained to look another way;
whereat the people mused because it was so dark a little time before."
Brentwood lay within a district on which the hand of the Queen fell
heavier than elsewhere. The persecution was mainly confined to the more
active and populous parts of the country, to London, Kent, Sussex, and
the Eastern Counties. Of the two hundred and eighty whom we know to have
suffered during the last three years and a half of Mary's reign more
than forty were burned in London, seventeen in the neighbouring village
of Stratford-le-Bow, four in Islington, two in Southwark, and one each
at Barnet, St. Albans, and Ware. Kent, at that time a home of mining and
manufacturing industry, suffered as heavily as London. Of its sixty
martyrs more than forty were furnished by Canterbury, which was then but
a city of some few thousand inhabitants, and seven by Maidstone. The
remaining eight suffered at Rochester, Ashford, and Dartford. Of the
twenty-five who died in Sussex the little town of Lewes sent seventeen
to the fire. Seventy were contributed by the Eastern Counties, the seat
of the woollen manufacture. Beyond these districts executions were rare.
Westward of Sussex we find the record of but a dozen martyrdoms, six of
which were at Bristol, and four at Salisbury. Chester and Wales
contributed but four sufferers to the list. In the Midland Counties
between Thames and the Humber only twenty-four suffered martyrdom. North
of the Humber we find the names of but two Yorkshiremen burned at
Bedale.

[Sidenote: Failure of the persecution.]

But heavily as the martyrdoms fell on the district within which they
were practically confined, and where as we may conclude Protestantism
was more dominant than elsewhere, the work of terror failed in the very
ends for which it was wrought. The old spirit of insolent defiance, of
outrageous violence, rose into fresh life at the challenge of
persecution. A Protestant hung a string of puddings round a priest's
neck in derision of his beads. The restored images were grossly
insulted. The old scurrilous ballads against the mass and relics were
heard in the streets. Men were goaded to sheer madness by the bloodshed
and violence about them. One miserable wretch, driven to frenzy, stabbed
the priest of St. Margaret's as he stood with the chalice in his hand.
It was a more formidable sign of the times that acts of violence such as
these no longer stirred the people at large to their former resentment.
The horror of the persecution swept away all other feelings. Every death
at the stake won hundreds to the cause for which the victims died. "You
have lost the hearts of twenty thousands that were rank Papists within
these twelve months," a Protestant wrote triumphantly to Bonner. Bonner
indeed, who had never been a very zealous persecutor, was sick of his
work; and the energy of the bishops soon relaxed. But Mary had no
thought of hesitation in the course she had entered on, and though the
Imperial ambassador noted the rapid growth of public discontent
"rattling letters" from the council pressed the lagging prelates to
fresh activity. Yet the persecution had hardly begun before
difficulties were thickening round the Queen. In her passionate longing
for an heir who would carry on her religious work Mary had believed
herself to be with child; but in the summer of 1555 all hopes of any
childbirth passed away, and the overthrow of his projects for the
permanent acquisition of England to the House of Austria at once
disenchanted Philip with his stay in the realm. But even had all gone
well it was impossible for the king to remain longer in England. He was
needed in the Netherlands to play his part in the memorable act which
was to close the Emperor's political life. Already King of Naples and
Lord of Milan, Philip received by his father's solemn resignation on the
twenty-fifth of October the Burgundian heritage; and a month later
Charles ceded to him the crowns of Castille and Aragon with their
dependencies in the New World and in the Old. The Empire indeed passed
to his uncle Ferdinand of Austria; but with this exception the whole of
his father's vast dominions lay now in the grasp of Philip. Of the
realms which he ruled, England was but one and far from the greatest
one, and even had he wished to return his continued stay there became
impossible.

[Sidenote: The Catholic revival.]

He was forced to leave the direction of affairs to Cardinal Pole, who on
the death of Gardiner in November 1555 took the chief place in Council.
At once Papal Legate and chief minister of the Crown, Pole carried on
that union of the civil and ecclesiastical authority which had been
first seen in Wolsey and had formed the groundwork of the system of
Cromwell. But he found himself hampered by difficulties which even the
ability of Cromwell or Wolsey could hardly have met. The embassy which
carried to Rome the submission of the realm found a fresh Pope, Paul the
Fourth, on the throne. His accession marked the opening of a new era in
the history of the Papacy. Till now the fortunes of Catholicism had been
steadily sinking to a lower ebb. With the Peace of Passau the Empire
seemed lost to it. The new Protestant faith stood triumphant in the
north of Germany, and it was already advancing to the conquest of the
south. The nobles of Austria were forsaking the older religion. A
Venetian ambassador estimated the German Catholics at little more than a
tenth of the whole population of Germany. Eastward the nobles of Hungary
and Poland became Protestants in a mass. In the west France was yielding
more and more to heresy, and England had hardly been rescued from it by
Mary's accession. Only where the dead hand of Spain lay heavy, in
Castille, in Aragon, or in Italy, was the Reformation thoroughly crushed
out; and even the dead hand of Spain failed to crush heresy in the Low
Countries. But at the moment when ruin seemed certain the older faith
rallied to a new resistance. While Protestantism was degraded and
weakened by the prostitution of the Reformation to political ends, by
the greed and worthlessness of the German princes who espoused its
cause, by the factious lawlessness of the nobles in Poland and the
Huguenots in France, while it wasted its strength in theological
controversies and persecutions, in the bitter and venomous discussions
between the Churches which followed Luther and the Churches which
followed Zwingli or Calvin, the great communion which it assailed felt
at last the uses of adversity. The Catholic world rallied round the
Council of Trent. In the very face of heresy the Catholic faith was anew
settled and defined. The Papacy was owned afresh as the centre of
Catholic union. The enthusiasm of the Protestants was met by a
counter-enthusiasm among their opponents. New religious orders rose to
meet the wants of the day; the Capuchins became the preachers of
Catholicism, the Jesuits became not only its preachers but its
directors, its schoolmasters, its missionaries, its diplomatists. Their
organization, their blind obedience, their real ability, their fanatical
zeal, galvanized the pulpit, the school, the confessional, into a new
life.

[Sidenote: Paul the Fourth.]

It was this movement, this rally of Catholicism, which now placed its
representative on the Papal throne. At the moment when Luther was first
opening his attack on the Papacy Giovanni Caraffa had laid down his
sees of Chieti and Brindisi to found the order of Theatines in a little
house on the Pincian Hill. His aim was the reformation of the clergy,
but the impulse which he gave told on the growing fervour of the
Catholic world, and its issue was seen in the institution of the
Capuchins and the Jesuits. Created Cardinal by Paul the Third, he found
himself face to face with the more liberal theologians who were longing
for a reconciliation between Lutheranism and the Papacy, such as
Contarini and Pole, but his violent orthodoxy foiled their efforts in
the conference at Ratisbon, and prevailed on the Pope to trust to the
sterner methods of the Inquisition. As Caraffa wielded its powers, the
Inquisition spread terror throughout Italy. At due intervals groups of
heretics were burned before the Dominican Church at Rome; scholars like
Peter Martyr were driven over sea; and the publication of an index of
prohibited books gave a death-blow to Italian literature. On the verge
of eighty the stern Inquisitor became Pope as Paul the Fourth. His
conception of the Papal power was as high as that of Hildebrand or
Innocent the Third, and he flung contemptuously aside the system of
compromise which his predecessor had been brought to adopt by the
caution of the Emperor. "Charles," he said, was a "favourer of
heretics," and he laid to his charge the prosperity of Lutheranism in
the Empire. That England should make terms for its return to obedience
galled his pride, while his fanaticism would hear of no surrender of the
property of the Church. Philip, who had wrested the concession from
Julius the Third, had no influence over a Pope who hoped to drive the
Spaniards from Italy, and Pole was suspected by Paul of a leaning to
heresy.

[Sidenote: England and the Papacy.]

The English ambassadors found therefore a rough greeting when the terms
of the submission were laid before the Pope. Paul utterly repudiated the
agreement which had been entered into between the Legate and the
Parliament; he demanded the restoration of every acre of Church
property; and he annulled all alienation of it by a general bull. His
attitude undid all that Mary had done. In spite of the pompous
reconciliation in which the Houses had knelt at the feet of Pole,
England was still unreconciled to the Papacy, for the country and the
Pope were at issue on a matter where concession was now impossible on
either side. The Queen's own heart went with the Pope's demand. But the
first step on which she ventured towards a compliance with it showed the
difficulties she would have to meet. The grant of the first-fruits to
Henry the Eighth had undoubtedly rested on his claim of supremacy over
the Church; and now that this was at an end Mary had grounds for
proposing their restoration to church purposes. But the proposal was
looked on as a step towards the resumption of the monastic lands, and
after a hot and prolonged debate at the close of 1555 the Commons only
assented to it by a small majority. It was plain that no hearing would
be given to the Pope's demand for a restoration of all Church property;
great lords were heard to threaten that they would keep their lands so
long as they had a sword by their side; and England was thus left at
hopeless variance with the Papacy.

[Sidenote: Cranmer.]

But, difficult as Mary's task became, she clung as tenaciously as ever
to her work of blood. The martyrdoms went steadily on, and at the
opening of 1556 the sanction of Rome enabled the Queen to deal with a
victim whose death woke all England to the reality of the persecution.
Far as he stood in character beneath many who had gone before him to the
stake, Cranmer stood high above all in his ecclesiastical position. To
burn the Primate of the English Church for heresy was to shut out meaner
victims from all hope of escape. And on the position of Cranmer none
cast a doubt. The other prelates who had suffered had been placed in
their sees after the separation from Rome, and were hardly regarded as
bishops by their opponents. But, whatever had been his part in the
schism, Cranmer had received his Pallium from the Pope. He was, in the
eyes of all, Archbishop of Canterbury, the successor of St. Augustine
and of St. Thomas in the second see of Western Christendom. Revenge
however and religious zeal alike urged the Queen to bring Cranmer to
the stake. First among the many decisions in which the Archbishop had
prostituted justice to Henry's will stood that by which he had annulled
the king's marriage with Catharine and declared Mary a bastard. The last
of his political acts had been to join, whether reluctantly or no, in
the shameless plot to exclude Mary from the throne. His great position
too made Cranmer more than any man a representative of the religious
revolution which had passed over the land. His figure stood with those
of Henry and of Cromwell on the frontispiece of the English Bible. The
decisive change which had been given to the character of the Reformation
under Edward was due wholly to Cranmer. It was his voice that men heard
and still hear in the accents of the English Liturgy.

[Sidenote: His death.]

As an Archbishop, Cranmer's judgment rested with no meaner tribunal than
that of Rome, and his execution had been necessarily delayed till its
sentence could be given. It was not till the opening of 1556 that the
Papal see convicted him of heresy. As a heretic he was now condemned to
suffer at the stake. But the courage which Cranmer had shown since the
accession of Mary gave way the moment his final doom was announced. The
moral cowardice which had displayed itself in his miserable compliance
with the lust and despotism of Henry displayed itself again in six
successive recantations by which he hoped to purchase pardon. But
pardon was impossible; and Cranmer's strangely mingled nature found a
power in its very weakness when he was brought into the church of St.
Mary at Oxford on the twenty-first of March to repeat his recantation on
the way to the stake. "Now," ended his address to the hushed
congregation before him, "now I come to the great thing that troubleth
my conscience more than any other thing that ever I said or did in my
life, and that is the setting abroad of writings contrary to the truth;
which here I now renounce and refuse as things written by my hand
contrary to the truth which I thought in my heart, and written for fear
of death to save my life, if it might be. And, forasmuch as my hand
offended in writing contrary to my heart, my hand therefore shall be the
first punished; for if I come to the fire, it shall be the first
burned." "This was the hand that wrote it," he again exclaimed at the
stake, "therefore it shall suffer first punishment"; and holding it
steadily in the flame "he never stirred nor cried" till life was gone.

[Sidenote: War with France.]

It was with the unerring instinct of a popular movement that, among a
crowd of far more heroic sufferers, the Protestants fixed, in spite of
his recantations, on the martyrdom of Cranmer as the death-blow to
Catholicism in England. For one man who felt within him the joy of
Rowland Taylor at the prospect of the stake, there were thousands who
felt the shuddering dread of Cranmer. The triumphant cry of Latimer
could reach only hearts as bold as his own, while the sad pathos of the
Primate's humiliation and repentance struck chords of sympathy and pity
in the hearts of all. It is from that moment that we may trace the
bitter remembrance of the blood shed in the cause of Rome; which,
however partial and unjust it must seem to an historic observer, still
lies graven deep in the temper of the English people. But the Queen
struggled desperately on. She did what was possible to satisfy the
unyielding Pope. In the face of the Parliament's significant reluctance
even to restore the first-fruits to the Church, she refounded all she
could of the abbeys which had been suppressed. One of the greatest of
these, the Abbey of Westminster, was re-established before the close of
1556, and John Feckenham installed as its abbot. Such a step could
hardly fail to wake the old jealousy of any attempt to reclaim the
Church lands, and thus to alienate the nobles and gentry from the Queen.
They were soon to be alienated yet more by her breach of the solemn
covenant on which her marriage was based. Even the most reckless of her
counsellors felt the unwisdom of aiding Philip in his strife with
France. The accession of England to the vast dominion which the Emperor
had ceded to his son in 1555 all but realized the plans of Ferdinand the
Catholic for making the house of Austria master of Western Christendom.
France was its one effective foe; and the overthrow of France in the war
which was going on between the two powers would leave Philip without a
check. How keenly this was felt at the English council-board was seen in
the resistance which was made to Philip's effort to drag his new realm
into the war. Such an effort was in itself a crowning breach of faith,
for the king's marriage had been accompanied by a solemn pledge that
England should not be drawn into the strifes of Spain. But Philip knew
little of good faith when his interest was at stake. The English fleet
would give him the mastery of the seas, English soldiers would turn the
scale in Flanders, and at the opening of 1557 the king again crossed the
Channel and spent three months in pressing his cause on Mary and her
advisers.

[Sidenote: Loss of Calais.]

"He did more," says a Spanish writer of the time, "than any one would
have believed possible with that proud and indomitable nation." What he
was most aided by was provocation from France. A body of refugees who
had found shelter there landed in Yorkshire in the spring; and their
leader, Thomas Stafford, a grandson of the late Duke of Buckingham,
called the people to rise against the tyranny of foreigners and "the
satanic designs of an unlawful Queen." The French king hoped that a
rising would give the Queen work at home; but the revolt was easily
crushed, and the insult enabled Mary to override her counsellors'
reluctance and to declare war against France. The war opened with
triumphs both on land and at sea. The junction of the English fleet made
Philip master of the Channel. Eight thousand men, "all clad in their
green," were sent to Flanders under Lord Pembroke, and joined Philip's
forces in August in time to take part in the great victory of St.
Quentin. In October the little army returned home in triumph, but the
gleam of success vanished suddenly away. In the autumn of 1557 the
English ships were defeated in an attack on the Orkneys. In January 1558
the Duke of Guise flung himself with characteristic secrecy and energy
upon Calais and compelled it to surrender before succour could arrive.
"The chief jewel of the realm," as Mary herself called it, was suddenly
reft away; and the surrender of Guisnes, which soon followed, left
England without a foot of land on the Continent.

[Sidenote: Mary and Ireland.]

Bitterly as the blow was felt, the Council, though passionately pressed
by the Queen, could find neither money nor men for any attempt to
recover the town. The war indeed went steadily for Spain and her allies;
and Philip owed his victory at Gravelines in the summer of 1558 mainly
to the opportune arrival of ten English ships of war which opened fire
on the flank of the French army that lay open to the sea. But England
could not be brought to take further part in the contest. The levies
which were being raised mutinied and dispersed. The forced loan to
which Mary was driven to resort came in slowly. The treasury was drained
not only by the opening of the war with France but by the opening of a
fresh strife in Ireland. To the struggle of religion which had begun
there under the Protectorate the accession of Mary had put an end. The
shadowy form of the earlier Irish Protestantism melted quietly away.
There were in fact no Protestants in Ireland save the new bishops; and
when Bale had fled over sea from his diocese of Ossory and his
fellow-prelates had been deprived the Irish Church resumed its old
appearance. No attempt indeed was made to restore the monasteries; and
Mary exercised her supremacy, deposed or appointed bishops, and
repudiated Papal interference with her ecclesiastical acts as vigorously
as her father. But the Mass was restored, the old modes of religious
worship were again held in honour, and religious dissension between the
Government and its Irish subjects came for the time to an end. With the
close however of one danger came the rise of another. England was
growing tired of the policy of conciliation which had been steadily
pursued by Henry the Eighth and his successor. As yet it had been
rewarded with precisely the sort of success which Wolsey and Cromwell
anticipated. The chiefs had come quietly in to the plan, and their septs
had followed them in submission to the new order. "The winning of the
Earl of Desmond was the winning of the rest of Munster with small
charges. The making O'Brien an Earl made all that country obedient." The
Macwilliam became Lord Clanrickard, and the Fitzpatricks Barons of Upper
Ossory. A visit of the great northern chief who had accepted the title
of Earl of Tyrone to the English Court was regarded as a marked step in
the process of civilization.

[Sidenote: The Irish War.]

In the south, where the system of English law was slowly spreading, the
chieftains sate on the bench side by side with the English justices of
the peace; and something had been done to check the feuds and disorder
of the wild tribes between Limerick and Tipperary. "Men may pass quietly
throughout these countries without danger of robbery or other
displeasure." In the Clanrickard county, once wasted with war,
"ploughing increaseth daily." In Tyrone and the north however the old
disorder reigned without a check; and everywhere the process of
improvement tried the temper of the English Deputies by the slowness of
its advance. The only hope of any real progress lay in patience; and
there were signs that the Government at Dublin found it hard to wait.
The "rough handling" of the chiefs by Sir Edward Bellingham, a Lord
Deputy under the Protector Somerset, roused a spirit of revolt that only
subsided when the poverty of the Exchequer forced him to withdraw the
garrisons he had planted in the heart of the country. His successor in
Mary's reign, Lord Sussex, made raid after raid to no purpose on the
obstinate tribes of the north, burning in one the Cathedral of Armagh
and three other churches. A far more serious breach in the system of
conciliation was made when the project of English colonization which
Henry had steadily rejected was adopted by the same Lord Deputy, and
when the country of the O'Connors was assigned to English settlers and
made shire-land under the names of King's and Queen's Counties in honour
of Philip and Mary. A savage warfare began at once between the planters
and the dispossessed septs, a warfare which only ended in the following
reign in the extermination of the Irishmen, and commissioners were
appointed to survey waste lands with the aim of carrying the work of
colonization into other districts. The pressure of the war against
France put an end to these wider projects, but the strife in Meath went
savagely on and proved a sore drain to the Exchequer.

[Sidenote: Scotland and Protestantism.]

Nor was Mary without difficulties in the North. Religiously as well as
politically her reign told in a marked way on the fortunes of Scotland.
If the Queen's policy failed to crush Protestantism in England, it gave
a new impulse to it in the northern realm. In Scotland the wealth and
worldliness of the great churchmen had long ago spread a taste for
heresy among the people; and Lollardry survived as a power north of the
border long after it had almost died out to the south of it. The impulse
of the Lutheran movement was seen in the diffusion of the new opinions
by a few scholars, such as Wishart and Hamilton; but though Henry the
Eighth pressed his nephew James the Fifth to follow him in the work he
was doing in England, it was plain that the Scotch reformers could look
for little favour from the Crown. The policy of the Scottish kings
regarded the Church as their ally against the turbulent nobles, and
James steadily held its enemies at bay. The Regent, Mary of Guise, clung
to the same policy. But stoutly as the whole nation withstood the
English efforts to acquire a political supremacy, the religious
revolution in England told more and more on the Scotch nobles. No
nobility was so poor as that of Scotland, and nowhere in Europe was the
contrast between their poverty and the riches of the Church so great.
Each step of the vast spoliation that went on south of the border, the
confiscation of the lesser abbeys, the suppression of the greater, the
secularization of chauntries and hospitals, woke a fresh greed in the
baronage of the north. The new opinions soon found disciples among them.
It was a group of Protestant nobles who surprised the Castle of St.
Andrews and murdered Cardinal Beaton. The "Gospellers" from the Lowlands
already formed a marked body in the army that fought at Pinkie Cleugh.
As yet however the growth of the new opinions had been slow, and there
had been till now little public show of resistance to the religion of
the State.

[Sidenote: Knox.]

With the accession of Mary however all was changed. Under Henry and
Edward the Catholicism of Scotland had profited by the national
opposition to a Protestant England; but now that Catholicism was again
triumphant in England Protestantism became far less odious to the Scotch
statesmen. A still greater change was wrought by the marriage with
Philip. Such a match, securing as it did to England the aid of Spain in
any future aggression upon Scotland, became a danger to the northern
realm which not only drew her closer to France but forced her to give
shelter and support to the sectaries who promised to prove a check upon
Mary. Many of the exiles therefore who left England for the sake of
religion found a refuge in Scotland. Amongst these was John Knox. Knox
had been one of the followers of Wishart; he had acted as pastor to the
Protestants who after Beaton's murder held the Castle of St. Andrews,
and had been captured with them by a French force in the summer of 1547.
The Frenchmen sent the heretics to the galleys; and it was as a galley
slave in one of their vessels that Knox next saw his native shores. As
the vessel lay tossing in the bay of St. Andrews, a comrade bade him
look to the land, and asked him if he knew it. "I know it well" was the
answer; "for I see the steeple of that place where God first in public
opened my mouth to His glory; and I am fully persuaded, how weak that
ever I now appear, I shall not depart this life till my tongue glorify
His holy name in the same place!" It was long however before he could
return. Released at the opening of 1549, Knox found shelter in England,
where he became one of the most stirring among the preachers of the day,
and was offered a bishoprick by Northumberland. Mary's accession drove
him again to France. But the new policy of the Regent now opened
Scotland to the English refugees, and it was as one of these that Knox
returned in 1555 to his own country. Although he soon withdrew to take
charge of the English congregation at Frankfort and Geneva his energy
had already given a decisive impulse to the new movement. In a gathering
at the house of Lord Erskine he persuaded the assembly to "refuse all
society with idolatry, and bind themselves to the uttermost of their
power to maintain the true preaching of the Evangile, as God should
offer to their preachers an opportunity." The confederacy woke anew the
jealousy of the government, and persecution revived. But some of the
greatest nobles now joined the reforming cause. The Earl of Morton, the
head of the house of Douglas, the Earl of Argyle, the greatest chieftain
of the west, and above all a bastard son of the late king, Lord James
Stuart, who bore as yet the title of prior of St. Andrews, but who was
to be better known afterwards as the Earl of Murray, placed themselves
at the head of the movement. The remonstrances of Knox from his exile at
Geneva stirred them to interfere in behalf of the persecuted
Protestants; and at the close of 1557 these nobles united with the rest
of the Protestant leaders in an engagement which became memorable as the
first among those Covenants which were to give shape and colour to
Scotch religion.

[Sidenote: The First Covenant.]

"We," ran this solemn bond, "perceiving how Satan in his members, the
Antichrists of our time, cruelly doth rage, seeking to overthrow and to
destroy the Evangel of Christ, and His Congregation, ought according to
our bounden duty to strive in our Master's cause even unto the death,
being certain of our victory in Him. The which our duty being well
considered, we do promise before the Majesty of God and His Congregation
that we, by His grace, shall with all diligence continually apply our
whole power, substance, and our very lives to maintain, set forward, and
establish the most blessed Word of God and His Congregation, and shall
labour at our possibility to have faithful ministers, purely and truly
to minister Christ's Evangel and sacraments to His people. We shall
maintain them, nourish them, and defend them, the whole Congregation of
Christ and every member thereof, at our whole power and wearing of our
lives, against Satan and all wicked power that does intend tyranny or
trouble against the foresaid Congregation. Unto the which Holy Word and
Congregation we do join us, and also do forsake and renounce the
congregation of Satan with all the superstitious abomination and
idolatry thereof: and moreover shall declare ourselves manifestly
enemies thereto by this our faithful promise before God, testified to
His Congregation by our subscription at these presents."

[Sidenote: Scotland and Protestantism.]

The Covenant of the Scotch nobles marked a new epoch in the strife of
religions. Till now the reformers had opposed the doctrine of
nationality to the doctrine of Catholicism. In the teeth of the
pretensions which the Church advanced to a uniformity of religion in
every land, whatever might be its differences of race or government, the
first Protestants had advanced the principle that each prince or people
had alone the right to determine its form of faith and worship. "Cujus
regio" ran the famous phrase which embodied their theory, "ejus
religio." It was the acknowledgement of this principle that the Lutheran
princes obtained at the Diet of Spires; it was on this principle that
Henry based his Act of Supremacy. Its strength lay in the correspondence
of such a doctrine with the political circumstances of the time. It was
the growing feeling of nationality which combined with the growing
developement of monarchical power to establish the theory that the
political and religious life of each nation should be one, and that the
religion of the people should follow the faith of the prince. Had
Protestantism, as seemed at one time possible, secured the adhesion of
all the European princes, such a theory might well have led everywhere
as it led in England to the establishment of the worst of tyrannies, a
tyranny that claims to lord alike over both body and soul. The world was
saved from this danger by the tenacity with which the old religion still
held its power. In half the countries of Europe the disciples of the new
opinions had soon to choose between submission to their conscience and
submission to their prince; and a movement which began in contending for
the religious supremacy of kings ended in those wars of religion which
arrayed nation after nation against their sovereigns. In this religious
revolution Scotland led the way. Her Protestantism was the first to draw
the sword against earthly rulers. The solemn "Covenant" which bound
together her "Congregation" in the face of the regency, which pledged
its members to withdraw from all submission to the religion of the State
and to maintain in the face of the State their liberty of conscience,
opened that vast series of struggles which ended in Germany with the
Peace of Westphalia and in England with the Toleration Act of William
the Third.

[Sidenote: The Exiles.]

The "Covenant" of the lords sounded a bold defiance to the Catholic
reaction across the border. While Mary replaced the Prayer-Book by the
Mass, the Scotch lords resolved that wherever their power extended the
Common Prayer should be read in all churches. While hundreds were going
to the stake in England the Scotch nobles boldly met the burning of
their preachers by a threat of war. "They trouble our preachers," ran
their bold remonstrance against the bishops in the Queen-mother's
presence; "they would murder them and us! shall we suffer this any
longer? No, madam, it shall not be!" and therewith every man put on his
steel bonnet. The Regent was helpless for the moment and could find
refuge only in fair words, words so fair that for a while the sternest
of the reformers believed her to be drifting to their faith. She was in
truth fettered by the need of avoiding civil strife at a time when the
war of England against France made a Scotch war against England
inevitable. The nobles refused indeed to cross the border, but the
threat of a Scotch invasion was one of the dangers against which Mary
Tudor now found herself forced to provide. Nor was the uprise of
Protestantism in Scotland the only result of her policy in giving fire
and strength to the new religion. Each step in the persecution had been
marked by a fresh flight of preachers, merchants, and gentry across the
seas. "Some fled into France, some into Flanders, and some into the high
countries of the Empire." As early as 1554 we find groups of such
refugees at Frankfort, Emden, Zuerich, and Strassburg. Calvin welcomed
some of them at Geneva; the "lords of Berne" suffered a group to settle
at Aarau; a hundred gathered round the Duchess of Suffolk at Wesel.
Amongst the exiles we find many who were to be bishops and statesmen in
the coming reign. Sir Francis Knollys was at Frankfort, Sir Francis
Walsingham travelled in France; among the divines were the later
archbishops Grindal and Sandys, and the later bishops Horne, Parkhurst,
Aylmer, Jewel, and Cox. Mingled with these were men who had already
played their part in Edward's reign, such as Poinet, the deprived Bishop
of Winchester, Bale, the deprived Bishop of Ossory, and the preachers
Lever and Knox.

[Sidenote: The Extreme Protestants.]

Gardiner had threatened that the fugitives should gnaw their fingers
from hunger, but ample supplies reached them from London merchants and
other partizans in England, and they seem to have lived in fair comfort
while their brethren at home were "going to the fire." Their chief
troubles sprang from strife among themselves. The hotter spirits among
the English Protestants had seen with discontent the retention of much
that they looked on as superstitious and Popish in even the last liturgy
of Edward's reign. That ministers should still wear white surplices,
that litanies should be sung, that the congregation should respond to
the priest, that babes should be signed in baptism with the sign of the
cross, that rings should be given in marriage, filled them with horror.
Hooper, the leader of this party, refused when made bishop to don his
rochet; and had only been driven by imprisonment to vest himself in "the
rags of Popery." Trivial indeed as such questions seemed in themselves,
an issue lay behind them which was enough to make men face worse evils
than a prison. The royal supremacy, the headship of the Church, which
Henry the Eighth claimed for himself and his successors, was, as we have
seen, simply an application of the principle which the states of North
Germany had found so effective in meeting the pretensions of the Emperor
or the Pope. The same sentiment of national life took a new form in the
preservation of whatever the change of religious thought left it
possible to preserve in the national tradition of faith and worship. In
the Lutheran churches, though the Mass was gone, reredos and crucifix
remained untouched. In England the whole ecclesiastical machinery was
jealously preserved. Its Church was still governed by bishops who traced
their succession to the Apostles. The words of its new Prayer-Book
adhered as closely as they might to the words of Missal and Breviary.
What made such an arrangement possible was the weakness of the purely
religious impulse in the earlier stages of the Reformation. In Germany
indeed or in England, the pressure for theological change was small; the
religious impulse told on but a small part, and that not an influential
part, of the population; it did in fact little more than quicken and
bring into action the older and widely-felt passion for ecclesiastical
independence.

[Sidenote: Protestantism and the Supremacy.]

But the establishment of this independence at once gave fresh force to
the religious movement. From denouncing the Pope as a usurper of
national rights men passed easily to denounce the Papal system as in
itself Antichristian. In setting aside the voice of the Papacy as a
ground of faith the new churches had been forced to find a ground of
faith in the Bible. But the reading and discussion of the Bible opened
up a thousand questions of belief and ritual, and the hatred of Rome
drew men more and more to find answers to such questions which were
antagonistic to the creed and usages of a past that was identified in
their eyes with the Papacy. Such questions could hardly fail to find an
echo in the people at large. To the bulk of men ecclesiastical
institutions are things dim and remote; and the establishment of
ecclesiastical independence, though it gratified the national pride,
could have raised little personal enthusiasm. But the direct and
personal interest of every man seemed to lie in the right holding of
religious truth, and thus the theological aspect of the Reformation
tended more and more to supersede its political one. All that is
generous and chivalrous in human feeling told in the same direction. To
statesmen like Gardiner or Paget the acceptance of one form of faith or
worship after another as one sovereign after another occupied the throne
seemed, no doubt, a logical and inevitable result of their acceptance of
the royal supremacy. But to the people at large there must have been
something false and ignoble in the sight of a statesman or a priest who
had cast off the Mass under Edward to embrace it again under Mary, and
who was ready again to cast it off at the will of Mary's successor. If
worship and belief were indeed spiritual things, if they had any
semblance of connexion with divine realities, men must have felt that it
was impossible to put them on and off at a king's caprice. It was this,
even more than the natural pity which they raised, that gave their
weight to the Protestant martyrdoms under Mary. They stood out in
emphatic protest against the doctrine of local religion, of a belief
dictated by the will of kings. From the Primate of the Church to the
"blind girl" who perished at Colchester, three hundred were found in
England who chose rather to go to the fire than to take up again at the
Queen's will what their individual conscience had renounced as a lie
against God.

[Sidenote: Calvin.]

But from the actual assertion of such a right of the individual
conscience to find and hold what was true, even those who witnessed for
it by their death would have shrunk. Driven by sheer force of fact from
the theory of a national and royal faith, men still shuddered to stand
alone. The old doctrine of a Catholic Christianity flung over them its
spell. Rome indeed they looked on as Antichrist, but the doctrine which
Rome had held so long and so firmly, the doctrine that truth should be
coextensive with the world and not limited by national boundaries, that
the Church was one in all countries and among all peoples, that there
was a Christendom which embraced all kingdoms and a Christian law that
ruled peoples and kings, became more and more the doctrine of Rome's
bitterest opponents. It was this doctrine which found its embodiment in
John Calvin, a young French scholar, driven in early manhood from his
own country by the persecution of Francis the First. Calvin established
himself at Basle, and produced there in 1535 at the age of twenty-six a
book which was to form the theology of the Huguenot churches, his
"Institutes of the Christian Religion." What was really original in this
work was Calvin's doctrine of the organization of the Church and of its
relation to the State. The base of the Christian republic was with him
the Christian man, elected and called of God, preserved by His grace
from the power of sin, predestinate to eternal life. Every such
Christian man is in himself a priest, and every group of such men is a
Church, self-governing, independent of all save God, supreme in its
authority over all matters ecclesiastical and spiritual. The
constitution of such a church, where each member as a Christian was
equal before God, necessarily took a democratic form. In Calvin's theory
of Church government it is the Church which itself elects its lay elders
and lay deacons for purposes of administration; it is with the approval
and consent of the Church that elders and deacons with the existing body
of pastors elect new ministers. It is through these officers that the
Church exercises its power of the keys, the power of diffusing the truth
and the power of correcting error. To the minister belong the preaching
of the word and the direction of all religious instruction; to the body
of ministers belong the interpretation of scripture and the decision of
doctrine. On the other hand the administration of discipline, the
supervision of the moral conduct of each professing Christian, the
admonition of the erring, the excommunication and exclusion from the
body of the Church of the unbelieving and the utterly unworthy, belong
to the Consistory, the joint assembly of ministers and elders. To this
discipline princes as well as common men are alike subject; princes as
well as common men must take their doctrine from the ministers of the
Church.

[Sidenote: Calvinism.]

The claims of the older faith to spiritual and ecclesiastical supremacy
over the powers of earth reappeared in this theory. Calvin like the
Papacy ignored all national independence, all pretensions of peoples as
such to create their own system of church doctrine or church government.
Doctrine and government he held to be already laid down in the words of
the Bible, and all questions that rose out of those words came under the
decision of the ecclesiastical body of ministers. Wherever a reformed
religion appeared, there was provided for it a simple but orderly
organization which in its range and effectiveness rivalled that of the
older Catholicism. On the other hand this organization rested on a
wholly new basis; spiritual and ecclesiastical power came from below not
from above; the true sovereign in this Christian state was not Pope or
Bishop but the Christian man. Despotic as the authority of pastor and
elders seemed, pastor and elders were alike the creation of the whole
congregation, and their judgement could in the last resort be adopted or
set aside by it. Such a system stood out in bold defiance against the
tendencies of the day. On its religious side it came into conflict with
that principle of nationality, of ecclesiastical as well as civil
subjection to the prince, on which the reformed Churches and above all
the Church of England had till now been built up. As a vast and
consecrated democracy it stood in contrast with the whole social and
political framework of the European nations. Grave as we may count the
faults of Calvinism, alien as its temper may in many ways be from the
temper of the modern world, it is in Calvinism that the modern world
strikes its roots, for it was Calvinism that first revealed the worth
and dignity of Man. Called of God, and heir of heaven, the trader at his
counter and the digger in his field suddenly rose into equality with the
noble and the king.

[Sidenote: Calvin and the Exiles.]

It was this system that Calvin by a singular fortune was able to put
into actual working in the little city of Geneva, where the party of the
Reformation had become master and called him in 1536 to be their
spiritual head. Driven out but again recalled, his influence made Geneva
from 1541 the centre of the Protestant world. The refugees who crowded
to the little town from persecution in France, in the Netherlands, in
England, found there an exact and formal doctrine, a rigid discipline of
manners and faith, a system of church government, a form of church
worship, stripped, as they held, of the last remnant of the
superstitions of the past. Calvin himself with his austere and frugal
life, his enormous industry, his power of government, his quick
decision, his undoubting self-confidence, his unswerving will, remained
for three-and-twenty years till his death in 1564 supreme over
Protestant opinion. His influence told heavily on England. From the hour
of Cromwell's fall the sympathies of the English reformers had drawn
them, not to the Lutheran Churches of North Germany, but to the more
progressive Churches of the Rhineland and the Netherlands: and on the
critical question of the Lord's Supper which mainly divided the two
great branches of the Reformation Cranmer and his partizans became more
definitely anti-sacramentarian as the years went by. At Edward's death
the exiles showed their tendencies by seeking refuge not with the
Lutheran Churches of North Germany but with the Calvinistic Churches of
Switzerland or the Rhine; and contact with such leaders as Bullinger at
Zuerich or Calvin at Geneva could hardly fail to give fresh vigour to the
party which longed for a closer union with the foreign churches and a
more open breach with the past.

[Sidenote: The troubles at Frankfort.]

The results of this contact first showed themselves at Frankfort. At the
instigation of Whittingham, who in Elizabeth's days became Dean of
Durham, a body of English exiles that had found shelter there resolved
to reform both worship and discipline. The obnoxious usages were
expunged from the Prayer-Book, omissions were made in the communion
service, a minister and deacons chosen, and rules drawn up for church
government after the Genevan model. Free at last "from all dregs of
superstitious ceremonies" the Frankfort refugees thanked God "that had
given them such a church in a strange land wherein they might hear God's
holy word preached, the sacraments rightly ministered, and discipline
used, which in their own country could never be obtained." But their
invitation to the other English exiles to join them in the enjoyment of
these blessings met with a steady repulse. Lever and the exiles at
Zuerich refused to come unless they might "altogether serve and praise
God as freely and uprightly as the order last taken in the Church of
England permitteth and presenteth, for we are fully determined to admit
and use no other." The main body of the exiles who were then gathered at
Strassburg echoed the refusal. Knox however, who had been chosen
minister by the Frankfort congregation, moved rapidly forward, rejecting
the communion service altogether as superstitious, and drawing up a new
"order" of worship after the Genevan model. But in the spring of 1555
these efforts were foiled by the arrival of fresh exiles from England of
a more conservative turn: the reformers were outvoted; Knox was driven
from the town by the magistrates "in fear of the Emperor" whom he had
outraged in an "Admonition" to the English people which he had lately
issued; and the English service was restored. Whittingham and his
adherents, still resolute, as Bale wrote, "to erect a Church of the
Purity" (we may perhaps trace in the sneer the origin of their later
name of Puritans), found a fresh refuge at Basle and Geneva, where the
leaders of the party occupied themselves in a metrical translation of
the Psalms which left its traces on English psalmody and in the
production of what was afterwards known as the Geneva Bible.

[Sidenote: The seditious books.]

Petty as this strife at Frankfort may seem, it marks the first open
appearance of English Puritanism, and the beginning of a struggle which
widened through the reign of Elizabeth till under the Stuarts it broke
England in pieces. But busy as they were in strife among themselves, the
exiles were still more busy in fanning the discontent at home. Books,
pamphlets, broadsides, were written and sent for distribution to
England. The violence of their language was incredible. No sooner had
Bonner issued his injunctions than Bale denounced him in a fierce reply
as "a beastly belly-god and damnable dung-hill." With a spirit worthy of
the "bloody bitesheeps" whom he attacked, the ex-Bishop of Ossory
regretted that when Henry plucked down Becket's shrine he had not burned
the idolatrous priests upon it. It probably mattered little to Bale that
at the moment when he wrote not a single Protestant had as yet been sent
to the stake; but language such as this was hardly likely to stir Mary
to a spirit of moderation. The Spanish marriage gave the refugees a
fairer opportunity of attack, and the Government was forced to make
enquiries of the wardens of city gilds "whether they had seen or heard
of any of these books which had come from beyond seas." The violence of
the exiles was doubled by the suppression of Wyatt's revolt. Poinet, the
late Bishop of Winchester, who had taken part in it, fled over sea to
write a "Sharp Tractate of political power" in which he discussed the
question "whether it be lawful to depose an evil governor and kill a
tyrant."

[Sidenote: Knox and Goodman.]

But with the actual outbreak of persecution and the death of Cranmer all
restraint was thrown aside. In his "First Blast of the Trumpet against
the Monstrous Regiment of Women" Knox denounced Mary as a Jezebel, a
traitress, and a bastard. He declared the rule of women to be against
the law of Nature and of God. The duty, whether of the estates or people
of the realm, was "first to remove from honour and authority that
monster in nature; secondarily, if any presume to defend that impiety,
they ought not to fear first to pronounce, then after to execute against
them the sentence of death." To keep the oath of allegiance was "nothing
but plain rebellion against God." "The day of vengeance," burst out the
writer, "which shall apprehend that horrible monster, Jezebel of
England, and such as maintain her monstrous cruelty is already appointed
in the counsel of the Eternal; and I verily believe that it is so nigh
that she shall not reign so long in tyranny as hitherto she hath done,
when God shall declare himself her enemy." Another exile, Goodman,
enquired "how superior powers ought to be obeyed of their subjects; and
wherein they may lawfully by God's word be disobeyed and resisted." His
book was a direct summons to rebellion. "By giving authority to an
idolatrous woman" Goodman wrote to his English fellow-subjects, "ye
have banished Christ and his Gospel. Then in taking the same authority
from her you shall restore Christ and his word, and shall do well. In
obeying her you have disobeyed God; then in disobeying her you shall
please God." "Though it should appear at the first sight," he urged, "a
great disorder that the people should take unto them the punishment of
transgressions, yet when the magistrates and other officers cease to do
their duties they are as it were without officers, yea, worse than if
they had none at all, and then God giveth the sword into the people's
hand." And what the people were to do with the sword Poinet had already
put very clearly. It was the "ungodly serpent Mary" who was "the chief
instrument of all this present misery in England." "Now both by God's
laws and man's," concluded the bishop, "she ought to be punished with
death, as an open idolatress in the sight of God, and a cruel murderer
of His saints before men, and merciless traitress to her own native
country."

Behind the wild rhetoric of words like these lay the new sense of a
prophetic power, the sense of a divine commission given to the preachers
of the Word to rebuke nobles and kings. At the moment when the policy of
Cromwell crushed the Church as a political power and freed the growing
Monarchy from the constitutional check which its independence furnished,
a new check offered itself in the very enthusiasm which sprang out of
the wreck of the great religious body. Men stirred with a new sense of
righteousness and of a divine government of the world, men too whose
natural boldness was quickened and fired by daily contact with the older
seers who rebuked David or Jezebel, could not hold their peace in the
presence of wrong. While nobles and statesmen were cowering in silence
before the dreaded power of the kingship the preachers spoke bluntly
out. Not only Latimer, but Knox, Grindal, and Lever had uttered fiery
remonstrances against the plunderers of Edward's reign. Bradford had
threatened them with the divine judgement which at last overtook them.
"'The judgement of the Lord! The judgement of the Lord!' cried he, with
a lamentable voice and weeping tears." Wise or unwise, the pamphlets of
the exiles only carried on this theory to its full developement. The
great conception of the mediaeval Church, that of the responsibility of
kings to a spiritual power, was revived at an hour when kingship was
trampling all responsibility to God or man beneath its feet. Such a
revival was to have large and beneficial issues in our later history.
Gathering strength under Elizabeth, it created at the close of her reign
that moral force of public opinion which under the name of Puritanism
brought the acts and policy of our kings to the tests of reason and the
Gospel. However ill directed that force might be, however erroneously
such tests were often applied, it is to this new force that we owe the
restoration of liberty and the establishment of religious freedom. As
the voice of the first Christian preachers had broken the despotism of
the Roman Empire, so the voice of the preachers of Puritanism broke the
despotism of the English Monarchy.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth.]

But great as their issues were to be, for the moment these protests only
quickened the persecution at home. We can hardly wonder that the arrival
of Goodman's book in England in the summer of 1558 was followed by stern
measures to prevent the circulation of such incentives to revolt.
"Whereas divers books" ran a royal proclamation, "filled with heresy,
sedition, and treason, have of late and be daily brought into the realm
out of foreign countries and places beyond seas, and some also covertly
printed within this realm and cast abroad in sundry parts thereof,
whereby not only God is dishonoured but also encouragement is given to
disobey lawful princes and governors," any person possessing such books
"shall be reported and taken for a rebel, and shall without delay be
executed for that offence according to the order of martial law." But
what really robbed these pamphlets of all force for harm was the
prudence and foresight of the people itself. Never indeed did the nation
show its patient good sense more clearly than in the later years of
Mary's reign. While fires blazed in Smithfield and news of defeat came
from over sea, while the hot voices of Protestant zealots hounded men on
to assassination and revolt, the bulk of Englishmen looked quietly from
the dying Queen to the girl who in a little while must wear her crown.
What nerved men to endure the shame and bloodshed about them was the
certainty of the speedy succession of the daughter of Anne Boleyn.
Elizabeth was now in her twenty-fifth year. Personally she had much of
her mother's charm with more than her mother's beauty. Her figure was
commanding, her face long but queenly and intelligent, her eyes quick
and fine. She had grown up amidst the liberal culture of Henry's court a
bold horsewoman, a good shot, a graceful dancer, a skilled musician, and
an accomplished scholar. Even among the highly-trained women who caught
the impulse of the New Learning she stood in the extent of her
acquirements without a peer. Ascham, who succeeded Grindal and Cheke in
the direction of her studies, tells us how keen and resolute was
Elizabeth's love of learning, even in her girlhood. At sixteen she
already showed "a man's power of application" to her books. She had read
almost the whole of Cicero and a great part of Livy. She began the day
with the study of the New Testament in Greek, and followed this up by
reading selected orations of Isocrates and the tragedies of Sophocles.
She could speak Latin with fluency and Greek moderately well. Her love
of classical culture lasted through her life. Amidst the press and cares
of her later reign we find Ascham recording how "after dinner I went up
to read with the Queen's majesty that noble oration of Demosthenes
against AEschines." At a later time her Latin served her to rebuke the
insolence of a Polish ambassador, and she could "rub up her rusty Greek"
at need to bandy pedantry with a Vice-Chancellor. But Elizabeth was far
as yet from being a mere pedant. She could already speak French and
Italian as fluently as her mother-tongue. In later days we find her
familiar with Ariosto and Tasso. The purity of her literary taste, the
love for a chaste and simple style, which Ascham noted with praise in
her girlhood, had not yet perished under the influence of euphuism. But
even amidst the affectation and love of anagrams and puerilities which
sullied her later years Elizabeth remained a lover of letters and of all
that was greatest and purest in letters. She listened with delight to
the "Faery Queen," and found a smile for "Master Spenser" when he
appeared in her presence.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth and Mary.]

From the bodily and mental energy of her girlhood, the close of Edward's
reign drew Elizabeth at nineteen to face the sterner problems of
religion and politics. In the daring attempt of Northumberland to place
Jane Grey on the throne Elizabeth's rights were equally set aside with
those of Mary; and the first public act of the girl was to call the
gentry to her standard and to join her sister with five hundred
followers in her train. But the momentary union was soon dissolved. The
daughter of Catharine could look with little but hate on the daughter of
Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth's tendency to the "new religion" jarred with the
Queen's bigotry; and the warnings of the imperial ambassador were hardly
needful to spur Mary to watch jealously a possible pretender to her
throne. The girl bent to the Queen's will in hearing mass, but her
manner showed that the compromise was merely a matter of obedience, and
fed the hopes of the Protestant zealots who saw in the Spanish marriage
a chance of driving Mary from the throne. The resolve which the Queen
showed to cancel her sister's right of succession only quickened the
project for setting Elizabeth in her place; and it was to make Elizabeth
their sovereign that Suffolk rose in Leicestershire and Wyatt and his
Kentishmen marched against London Bridge. The failure of the rising
seemed to ensure her doom. The Emperor pressed for her death as a
security for Philip on his arrival; and the detection of a
correspondence with the French king served as a pretext for her
committal to the Tower. The fierce Tudor temper broke through
Elizabeth's self-control as she landed at Traitor's Gate. "Are all
these harnessed men there for me?" she cried as she saw the guard; "it
needed not for me, being but a weak woman!" and passionately calling on
the soldiers to "bear witness that I come as no traitor!" she flung
herself down on a stone in the rain and refused to enter her prison.
"Better sitting here than in a worse place," she cried; "I know not
whither you will bring me." But Elizabeth's danger was less than it
seemed. Wyatt denied to the last her complicity in the revolt, and in
spite of Gardiner's will to "go roundly to work" with her the Lords of
the Council forced Mary to set her free. The Queen's terrors however
revived with her hopes of a child in the summer of 1555. To Mary her
sister seemed the one danger which threatened the succession of her
coming babe and the vast issues which hung on it, and Elizabeth was
summoned to her sister's side and kept a close prisoner at Hampton
Court. Philip joined in this precaution, for "holding her in his power
he could depart safely and without peril" in the event of the Queen's
death in childbirth; and other plans were perhaps already stirring his
breast. Should Mary die, a fresh match might renew his hold on England;
"he might hope," writes the Venetian ambassador, "with the help of many
of the nobility, won over by his presents and favours, to marry her
(Elizabeth) again, and thus succeed anew to the crown."

[Sidenote: Elizabeth and Philip.]

But whatever may have been Philip's designs, the time had not as yet
come for their realization; the final disappointment of the Queen's
hopes of childbirth set Elizabeth free, and in July she returned to her
house at Ashridge. From this moment her position was utterly changed.
With the disappearance of all chance of offspring from the Queen and the
certainty of Mary's coming death her sister's danger passed away.
Elizabeth alone stood between England and the succession of Mary Stuart;
and, whatever might be the wishes of the Queen, the policy of the House
of Austria forced it to support even the daughter of Anne Boleyn against
a claimant who would bind England to the French monarchy. From this
moment therefore Philip watched jealously over Elizabeth's safety. On
his departure for the Continent he gave written instructions to the
Queen to show favour to her sister, and the charge was repeated to those
of his followers whom he left behind him. What guarded her even more
effectually was the love of the people. When Philip at a later time
claimed Elizabeth's gratitude for his protection she told him bluntly
that her gratitude was really due neither to him nor her nobles, though
she owned her obligations to both, but to the English people. It was
they who had saved her from death and hindered all projects for barring
her right to the throne. "It is the people," she said, "who have placed
me where I am now." It was indeed their faith in Elizabeth's speedy
succession that enabled Englishmen to bear the bloodshed and shame of
Mary's later years, and to wait patiently for the end.

Nor were these years of waiting without value for Elizabeth herself. The
steady purpose, the clear perception of a just policy which ran through
her wonderful reign, were formed as the girl looked coolly on at the
chaos of bigotry and misrule which spread before her. More and more she
realized what was to be the aim of her after life, the aim of reuniting
the England which Edward and Mary alike had rent into two warring
nations, of restoring again that English independence which Mary was
trailing at the feet of Spain. With such an aim she could draw to her
the men who, indifferent like herself to purely spiritual
considerations, and estranged from Mary's system rather by its political
than its religious consequences, were anxious for the restoration of
English independence and English order. It was among these "Politicals,"
as they were soon to be called, that Elizabeth found at this moment a
counsellor who was to stand by her side through the long years of her
after reign. William Cecil sprang from the smaller gentry whom the
changes of the time were bringing to the front. He was the son of a
Yeoman of the Wardrobe at Henry's court; but his abilities had already
raised him at the age of twenty-seven to the post of secretary to the
Duke of Somerset, and through Somerset's Protectorate he remained high
in his confidence. He was seized by the Lords on the Duke's arrest, and
even sent to the Tower; but he was set at liberty with his master, and
his ability was now so well known that a few months later saw him
Secretary of State under Northumberland. The post and the knighthood
which accompanied it hardly compensated for the yoke which
Northumberland's pride laid upon all who served him, or for the risks in
which his ambition involved them. Cecil saw with a fatal clearness the
silent opposition of the whole realm to the system of the Protectorate,
and the knowledge of this convinced him that the Duke's schemes for a
change in the succession were destined to failure. On the disclosure of
the plot to set Mary aside he withdrew for some days from the court, and
even meditated flight from the country, till fear of the young king's
wrath drew him back to share in the submission of his fellow-counsellors
and to pledge himself with them to carry the new settlement into effect.
But Northumberland had no sooner quitted London than Cecil became the
soul of the intrigues by which the royal Council declared themselves in
Mary's favour. His desertion of the Duke secured him pardon from the
Queen, and though he was known to be in heart "a heretic" he continued
at court, conformed like Elizabeth to the established religion,
confessed and attended mass. Cecil was employed in bringing Pole to
England and in attending him in embassies abroad. But his caution held
him aloof from any close connexion with public affairs. He busied
himself in building at Burghley and in the culture of the Church lands
he had won from Edward the Sixth, while he drew closer to the girl who
alone could rescue England from the misgovernment of Mary's rule. Even
before the Queen's death it was known that Cecil would be the chief
counsellor of the coming reign. "I am told for certain," the Spanish
ambassador wrote to Philip after a visit to Elizabeth during the last
hours of Mary's life, "that Cecil who was secretary to King Edward will
be her secretary also. He has the character of a prudent and virtuous
man, although a heretic." But it was only from a belief that Cecil
retained at heart the convictions of his earlier days that men could
call him a heretic. In all outer matters of faith or worship he
conformed to the religion of the state.

[Sidenote: The Politicals.]

It is idle to charge Cecil, or the mass of Englishmen who conformed with
him in turn to the religion of Henry, of Edward, of Mary, and of
Elizabeth, with baseness or hypocrisy. They followed the accepted
doctrine of the time--that every realm, through its rulers, had the sole
right of determining what should be the form of religion within its
bounds. What the Marian persecution was gradually pressing on such men
was a conviction, not of the falsehood of such a doctrine, but of the
need of limiting it. Under Henry, under Edward, under Mary, no
distinction had been drawn between inner belief and outer conformity.
Every English subject was called upon to adjust his conscience as well
as his conduct to the varying policy of the state. But the fires of
Smithfield had proved that obedience such as this could not be exacted
save by a persecution which filled all Engla

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