# Cassell's Illustrated History of England/Volume 2/Chapter 12

Chapter XII.
The Reign of Queen Mary.
The ascension of Mary to the throne of England was a remarkable event. She was the first English queen in her own right since the Norman conquest; nor even in the Saxon times had a woman reigned over these islands. The ancient Britons admitted the right of females to rule as sovereigns, and there were amongst them queens-regnant in their own right; but since then, though the common law recognised the claim, the fierce martial spirit of Europe had generally passed over women in the fullest hereditary descent, and placed the sceptre in a male hand. The Empress Matilda could not obtain the throne due to her by her birth, and the same custom had made itself felt in the cases of Eleanor of Brittany and Elizabeth of York. But the ferocious wars of England, and the bloody spirit induced by them, had destroyed almost all Royal male descent in England at this time. There were Mary and her sister Elizabeth, Mary the Queen of Scots, the great-niece of Henry VIII., and Lady Jane Grey and her sisters, whose claims we have stated. It was, therefore, a most interesting epoch, which was to place a woman on the throne, and set the example of female reigns, destined to be so remarkable. But if Mary's position as a woman was novel, it was peculiarly critical, as it regarded the new spirit and new institutions which had developed themselves in the country. She was firmly attached to the old spirit and the old institutions; and both at home and abroad men were anxiously watching what would be the result of her becoming queen.
Especially was the question of deep interest to the Pope, and the sovereigns of France, Spain, and the Netherlands. If Mary brought back the old religion, how greatly would the union betwixt her and her relatives of Spain and the Netherlands be augmented. It was an event which opened up wonderful scenes to the imagination of Charles, and in his old age gave new impetus to his thirst for universal dominion. The King of France had secured the Queen of Scotland for his son, but what was that advantage compared with the opportunity of his own son securing the heiress of England? He had seen, with fearful pangs of political jealousy, the prospect of the union of France and Scotland under one Crown; but now, what was to prevent the Crowns of Spain, of the Netherlands, and of England being blended into one glorious imperial diadem? All that Charles hoped of course Henry feared, and therefore each monarch had long been keeping a close and absorbing watch on the sinking powers of the late king. Renard, tho ambassador of the emperor, and Noailles, the ambassador of the King of France, had kept close to the throne of the dying youth, watching with breathless interest every symptom of the advancing disease, and preparing by every diplomatic art for the coming crisis.
As Mary pursued her flight on the 7th of July, after learning the death of her brother, she arrived in the ensuing evening at the gates of Sawston Hall, near Cambridge, the seat of a Mr. Huddlestone, a zealous Romanist, a kinsman of whose was a gentleman of Mary's retinue. There she passed the night, but was compelled to resume her journey early in the morning, the Protestant party in Cambridge having heard of her arrival, and being on the march to attack her. She and her followers were obliged to make the best of their way thence in different disguises, and turning on the Gogmagog Hills to take a look at the hall, she saw it in flames: her night's sojourn had cost her entertainer the home of his ancestors. On seeing this, she exclaimed, as quite ​certain of her fortunes, "Well, let it burn, I will build him a better;" and she kept her word. She passed through Bury St. Edmunds, and the next night reached the seat of Kenninghall, in Norfolk. Thence without delay she dispatched a messenger to the Privy Council, commanding them to desist from the treasonable scheme which she knew that they were attempting, and ordering them to proclaim her their rightful sovereign, in which case all that was past should be pardoned. The messenger arrived just in time to see the rival queen proclaimed on the 10th, and to bring back a reply peculiarly insulting for its gross language, asserting her illegitimacy, and calling upon her to submit to her sovereign, Queen Jane.
Mary on this occasion displayed the strong spirit of the Tudor. Though Northumberland had all the powers of the Government, the military strength, the influence of party, and the support of the nobility of the nation apparently under his hand, and possessed the reputation of being an able and most successful general, and though she had nobody with her but Sir Thomas Wharton, the steward of her household, Andrew Huddlestone, and her ladies, though she had neither troops nor money, she did not hesitate. Kenninghall was but a defenceless house in an open country; she therefore rode forward to Framlingham Castle, not far from the Suffolk coast, where, in a strong fortress, she could await the result of an appeal to her subjects, and, were she forced to fly, could easily escape across to Holland and put herself under the protection of her imperial kinsman.
Queen Mary I.
The Crown of England offered to Lady Grey. (see page 344.)
In the lofty fortress of Framlingham, whence she could see over the woods the German Ocean, and near to the seaport of Aldborough, she remained, as is supposed, till the end of the month, but meantime her cause had grown rapidly and spread far and wide. On the 12th, only two days after her arrival there, she was proclaimed queen at Norwich. On the 15th, or thereabouts, a fleet was seen off the coast bearing for Yarmouth. It consisted of six ships of war, and was carrying artillery and ammunition for the siege of Framlingham Castle; and having effected that service, it was to cruise about to intercept her flight to the Continent. Sir Henry Jerningham put out from Yarmouth as these vessels drew near, to hail them. The sailors demanding what he wanted, he replied, "Your captains, who are rebels to their lawful Queen Mary." "If they are," said the men, "we will throw them into the sea, for we are her true subjects;" upon which the captains surrendered, and Sir Henry conveyed them into Yarmouth.
On the 16th, Mr. Smith, clerk of the Council at Framlingham, announced a despatch from Mr. Brande, stating that Sir Edward Hastings, on the 15th, at Drayton, the seat of Lord Paget, had mustered 10,000 of the militia of Oxford, Bucks, Berkshire, and Middlesex, with the intention of marching to seize the palace of Westminster for the queen. Before leaving Kenninghall, Mary had written to Sir Edward Hastings claiming his allegiance. Sir Edward was brother to the Earl of Huntingdon, who was closely allied by marriage with Northumberland, but he was at the same time great-nephew to Cardinal Pole, and otherwise connected with his family. Sir Edward had been commissioned to raise this force by Northumberland, and the news of his defection coming simultaneously with that of the defection of the fleet at Yarmouth, must have thunderstruck Northumberland. On the same day, the 16th, a placard was found affixed to the door of Queenhithe Church, asserting that Mary had been proclaimed queen in every town of England except London; and so rapidly was the spirit of adhesion to Mary spreading, that that very day the Earls of Sussex and Bath deserted the Council, and took their way to Framlingham, at the head of their armed vassals.
The same day all the vessels in the harbour of Harwich declared for Mary, dismissing Sir Richard Broke and other uncomplying officers from their commands; John Hughes, the Comptroller of the Customs at Yarmouth, went over, and John Grice, the captain of a ship of war. Mary ordered artillery and ammunition to be provided from Grice's ship and from Aldborough, to be forwarded for the defence of Framlingham; and on the 18th, seeing the zealous support which was every day manifesting itself, she issued a proclamation, offering £1,000 in land to any noble, £500 to any gentleman, and £100 to any yeoman, who should bring Northumberland prisoner to the queen. At the same time she maintained a guard of 500 men over her own person; and, no doubt, receiving information that the prisoners who crowded the gaols of Suffolk and Norfolk were chiefly those who had suffered for their opposition to the innovations of the reign of Edward, and especially under the more recent measure of Northumberland, she ordered them to be all set at liberty.
Meantime Northumberland, with all his planning, was but ill prepared for the execution of his design when the king's death took place. It was the part of a clever diplomatist to have in good time secured in his hands the two next heirs to the throne. This not being done, and other matters being equally unsettled, he kept the death of the king concealed for two days, during which time he was deep in consultation with the Council. An exception, however, was made in favour of the lord mayor and aldermen of London, who were invited to Greenwich, where the Council was sitting, the death of the king revealed to them, and the fact that by Edward's will the Lady Jane Grey was appointed his successor. They were bound under a severe penalty not to divulge these secrets till they should receive orders from the Council, but to be prepared to preserve order in the city. The officers of the guards and of the household, and twelve eminent citizens were at the same time admitted to the knowledge of the king's decease, and sworn to their allegiance.
Lady Jane Grey, the innocent object of these hazardous plans, had obtained a short leave of absence from Court, and was indulging her love of quiet and of books, when she was suddenly summoned by the Lady Sydney, the sister of her husband, to return to Sion House, and there to await the commands of the king, of whose death she was yet ignorant. On the morning of the 10th she was surprised by a deputation, consisting of the Duke of Northumberland, the Marquis of Northampton, and the Earls of Arundel, Huntingdon, and Pembroke. Soon after entered the Duchesses of Northumberland and Suffolk, and the Marchioness of Northampton. Her mother-in-law, the Duchess of Northumberland, had already dropped some mysterious hints of some wonderful fortune awaiting her, and now the serious aspect of her visitors filled her with alarm. The Duke of Northumberland then informed her that the king, her cousin, was dead; that he had felt great concern for the continuance of the Church in the form and spirit in which it now was; and that on this account, and also to preserve the kingdom from the disorders which the illegitimacy of his sisters might occasion, he had in his will passed them over, and bequeathed the Crown to her, as the true legitimate heir, and, moreover, holding the true faith.
He had, therefore, in the will, ordered the Council to proclaim her queen, and in default of her issue, her sisters Catherine and Mary. The attendant nobles on this fell on their knees, declared her their queen, and vowed to defend her right with their blood, if necessary. One of them, Arundel, as we have seen, was already in communication with Mary, and warned her of what was being done.
At this surprising revelation the Lady Jane swooned, and fell with a shriek on the floor. On recovering, she ​was overwhelmed with grief and terror, and declared herself a most unfit person for a sovereign. She was but a girl of sixteen, and was especially fond of retirement and study.
That afternoon she was conveyed by water to the Tower, according to the usual custom on the accession of a new sovereign, and preparatory to the coronation. She arrived there in state about three o'clock. On her entrance, her mother, the Duchess of Suffolk, bore her train. The Lord Treasurer presented to her the Crown, and her assembled relatives saluted her on their knees. The unhappy victim of this fatal enterprise had opposed the prosecution of the plan with all her energy in private, and amid many tears and fears. She was far from thinking it either just or likely to succeed, but all her efforts were fruitless against her aspiring connections. Her old schoolmaster, Roger Ascham, describes her as a most amiable and excellent young woman, pleasing in her person, if not regularly beautiful, fond of domestic life and literature, and accustomed to read Plato in Greek.
At six o'clock that evening, proclamation was made in London of the death of King Edward, and the succession of Queen Jane by his will; and a long announcement of the reasons which had led to this, signed by the new queen, was made public. Those reasons were of the most flimsy and superficial kind. They admitted that the succession was settled by the 35th of Henry VIII. in favour of Mary and Elizabeth, but pleaded that that was rendered void by a previous statute, which declared their illegitimacy, being unrepealed. It asserted that even had they been born in lawful wedlock, they could not inherit from the late king, being only his sisters in half-blood, as though they did not already inherit from their father, Henry, or as though Edward, their brother, supposing them legitimate, could not bequeath the Crown just as fully to them as to the Lady Jane. Various other reasons, all as frivolous, were added, the only valid one being the danger of the realm, in case of the succession of Mary, being brought again under the Papal dominion. To this proclamation there was no cordial response, the people listening in ominous silence.
On the following morning, whilst Lady Jane's party were feeling the chill of this inauspicious beginning, the messenger of Mary arrived, commanding the Council to see that she was duly proclaimed, and warning them to desist from their treasonable purposes. Scarcely had they returned their uncourteous refusal, when news came pouring in that Mary had taken possession of the castle of Framlingham, and that the nobility, gentry, and people of Suffolk were flocking to her standard.
Northumberland saw that no time was to be lost. It was necessary that forces should be instantly dispatched to check the growth of Mary's army, and to disperse it altogether. But who should command it? There was no one so proper as himself; but he suspected the fidelity of the Council, and was unwilling to remove himself to a distance from them; he therefore recommended the Duke of Suffolk, the father of Lady Jane, to the command of the expedition. The Council, who were anxious to get rid of Northumberland in order that they might themselves escape to Mary's camp, represented privately that Suffolk was a general of no reputation, that everything depended on decisive proceedings in the outset, and that he alone was the man for the purpose. They moreover so excited the fears of Lady Jane that she entreated in tears that her father might remain with her. "Whereupon," says Stow, "the Council persuaded the Duke of Northumberland to take that voyage upon himself, saying that no man was so fit therefor, because he had achieved the victory in Norfolk once already, and was so feared there that none durst lift up their weapons against him; besides, that he was the best man of war in the realm, as well for the ordering of his camp and soldiers, both in battle and in their tents, as also by experience, knowledge, and wisdom, he could animate his army with witty persuasions, and also pacify and allay his enemies' pride with his stout courage, or else dissuade them, if need were, from their enterprise. Finally, they said, this is the short and long, the queen will in no wise grant that her father should take it upon him."
Northumberland consented, though with many misgivings. He equally distrusted the Council and the citizens. On the 13th of July he set out, urging on the Council at his departure fidelity to the trust reposed in them, and received from them the most earnest protestations of zeal and attachment. If these assurances did not inspire him with confidence, far less did the aspect of the people as he marched out of the city with his little army, so that he could not help remarking to Sir John Gates, "The people come to look at us, but not one exclaims, 'God speed you!'" The people, in fact, now regarded him as a desperate adventurer. They said, they now saw through him and all his actions; that he had incited Somerset to put to death his own brother, and then he had got Somerset executed, so that the young king might be stripped of his nearest relatives, his natural protectors, and left in his own hands; and that now he had poisoned him to make way for his daughter-in-law, Lady Jane, and thus too for his son.
To remove these impressions as much as possible, he now sent for the most eminent preachers, and especially Ridley, and exhorted them to disabuse the people in their sermons whilst he was away. Accordingly, Ridley preached on the following Sunday at St. Paul's Cross, before the lord mayor, aldermen, and a great concourse of the people. In his sermon he drew a striking contrast betwixt the daughters of Henry VIII., and especially Mary, and the Lady Jane. He represented that not only the illegitimacy of the two princesses had induced their brother Edward to omit them from the succession, but the certain prospect of destruction to the reformed religion if Mary succeeded, and the equally certain prospect of its maintenance if the amiable, able, and pious Lady Jane was queen. On the one hand, there were the bigoted Spanish connections of Mary, the supporters of the Inquisition, and most probably a prince of that despotic house as her husband; on the other hand, there would be a noble Protestant queen surrounded by the prelates and councillors who had so stoutly combated for the pure faith. To satisfy them of the determined Popery of Mary, he related a personal interview which he had with her before the late king's death. He had ridden over in September from his house at Hadlam to her residence at Hunsdon, to pay his respects to her. She had invited him to stay and dine, and after dinner he informed her that he intended on Sunday to come as her diocesan ​and preach before her. Mary replied that certainly the parish church would be open to him, but that he must not calculate on seeing her or her household there. He had answered that he hoped she would not refuse God's word. She answered that she did not know what they called God's word now, but certainly it was not the same as in her father's time. "God's word," rejoined Ridley, "was the same at all times, but had been better understood and practised in some ages than others." She replied, that he durst not have avowed his present faith in her father's lifetime, and asked if he were of the Council. He said he was not; and on his retiring, she thanked him for coming to see her, but not at all for his proposal to preach before her.
But not all the eloquence of Ridley, nor the terrors of Mary's bigotry, could move the people, who had a simple, strong conviction that a deed of flagrant wrong was attempted. Northumberland meantime was pursuing his melancholy march towards Framlingham. He was accompanied by his son, the Earl of Warwick, the Marquis of Northampton, the Earl of Huntingdon, and Lord Grey. His army amounted only to 8,000 infantry and 2,000 cavalry, but it was so superior in discipline and military supplies, that under ordinary circumstances, with the same vigour and address which he had formerly shown in Scotland and in Norfolk, the superior number of the enemy would have availed nothing against him. Here the circumstances were significantly different. He was no longer battling against a national foe, with a bold heart, and the hope of glory and advancement; he was fighting against his true sovereign, and everything around him or which reached his ears made him feel, moreover, that he was fighting against the convictions of the nation. Instead of the animation of the conqueror, the terrors of the traitor fell over him. At every step some expectation was falsified, or some disastrous news met him. The promised reinforcements did not arrive, but he heard of them taking the way to the camp of Mary instead of his own. He heard of the defection of the fleet; and lastly, a prostrating blow, of the Council having gone over to Queen Mary. Struck with dismay at this accumulation of evil tidings, he retreated from Bury St. Edmunds, which he had reached, to Cambridge, and there betrayed the most pitiable indecision.
Scarcely had he left London before the Council, whilst outwardly professing much activity for the interests of Queen Jane, was really at work to terminate as soon as possible the perilous farce of her Royalty. On the very evening of Sunday the 16th, on which Ridley had preached to the people, the Lord Treasurer left the Tower and made a visit to his own house, contrary to the positive order of Northumberland, who had strictly enjoined Suffolk to keep the whole Council within its walls. On the 19th the Lord Treasurer and Lord Privy Seal, the Earls of Arundel, Shrewsbury, and Pembroke, Sir Thomas Cheney, and Sir John Mason, left the Tower on the plea that it was necessary to levy forces, and to receive the French ambassador, and that Baynard's Castle, the residence of the Earl of Pembroke, was a much more convenient place for these purposes. As they professed to be actuated by zeal for the cause of his daughter, Suffolk, a very weak person, was easily duped. No sooner had they reached Baynard's Castle, than they unanimously declared for Queen Mary. They sent for the lord mayor and the aldermen, and the Earl of Arundel announced to them that the Council had resolved to proclaim Queen Mary, denouncing the opposition in no measured terms. The Earl of Pembroke starting up as he finished, and drawing his sword, exclaimed, "If the arguments of my Lord Arundel do not persuade you, this sword shall make Mary queen, or I will die in her quarrel." Shouts of applause echoed his declaration, and they all forthwith rode to St. Paul's Cross, where the garter king-at-arms, arrayed in his heraldic coat, blew his trumpet and proclaimed Mary Queen of England, France, and Ireland. This time there was no gloomy silence, but triumphant acclamations; and the whole body of nobles and civic gentlemen went in procession to St. Paul's, and together sung "Te Deum." Beer, wine, and money were distributed amongst the people, and the day was finished amid the blaze of bonfires, illuminations, and loud rejoicings.
Immediately after proclaiming the new queen, the Council sent to summon the Duke of Suffolk to surrender the Tower, which he did with all alacrity, and, proceeding to Baynard's Castle, signed the proclamations which the Council were issuing. Poor Lady Jane resigned her uneasy and unblessed crown of nine days with unfeigned joy, and the nest morning returned to Sion House. This brief period of queenship, which had been thrust upon her against her own wishes and better judgment, had been embittered not only by her own sense of injustice towards her kinswoman, the Princess Mary, and by apprehension of the consequences to herself and all her friends, but still more by the harshness and insatiate ambition of her husband and his mother. In Lady Jane's own letter to Mary from the Tower, we find that whilst in that Royal fortress, her husband, Lord Guildford, insisted on being crowned with her, which she did not think it advisable at once to accede to. A very warm altercation ensued, and she then thought she could give him the crown by Act of Parliament. On reflection, however, she felt it best to waive this question, which so much incensed her husband that he refused to go near her. His mother then upbraided her so severely that she became very ill, and imagined from her sensations that they had given her poison. In the Italian version of her own account, as preserved by Pollini and Rosso, she says that the duchess treated her very ill, "molto malamente," and with the most angry disdain. It was clearly to her a deep and bitter baptism of misery.
The Council dispatched a letter to Northumberland by Richard Rose, the herald, commanding him to disband his army and return to his allegiance to Queen Mary, under penalty of being declared a traitor. But before this reached him he had submitted himself, and in a manner the least heroic and dignified possible. On the Sunday he had induced Dr. Sandys, the vice-chancellor of the university, to preach a sermon against the title and religion of Mary. The very next day the news of the revolution at London arrived, and Northumberland proceeding to the market-place proclaimed the woman he had thus denounced, and flung up his cap as if in joy at the event, whilst the tears of grief and chagrin streamed down his face. Turning to Dr. Sandys, who was again with him, he said, "Queen Mary was a merciful woman, ​and that, doubtless, all would receive the benefit of her general pardon." But Sandys, who could not help despising him, bade him "not flatter himself with that; for if the queen were ever so inclined to pardon, those who ruled her would destroy him, whoever else were spared."
Immediately after, Sir John Grates, one of his oldest and most obsequious instruments, arrested him when he had his boots half-drawn on, so that he could not help himself; and, on the following morning, the Earl of Arundel arriving with a body of troops, took possession of Northumberland, his captor, Gates, and Dr. Sandys, and sent them off to the Tower. The conduct of the duke on his arrest by Arundel was equally destitute of greatness as his proclamation of the queen: he fell on his knees before the earl, who had a great hatred of him, and abjectly begged for life. The arrest of Northumberland was the signal for the loaders of his party to hasten to the queen at Framlingham, and to endeavour to make their peace. Amongst these were the Marquis of Northampton, Lord Robert Dudley, and Bishop Ridley. They were all sent to the Tower; Ridley's great crime being the vehement sermon preached at St. Paul's Cross against the queen at the instance of Northumberland.
The camp at Framlingham broke up on the last day of July, and Mary set forward towards the metropolis, at every step receiving the homage of her now eagerly-flocking subjects. Amongst the very first to hasten to her presence was Cecil, who presented himself at Ipswich, her first resting-place. He made the most plausible excuse for his conduct in assisting to plant a rival on her throne, protesting all the time his heart was not in it; it was all necessity. The account we have of his conduct is one drawn up under his own eye, and found in the State Paper Office by Mr. Tytler, stamping him as a most consummate hypocrite. At the queen's second halting-place, Ingatestone, the seat of Sir William Petre, the Council who had been the supporters of Queen Jane were presented, and kissed her hand; Cecil was again the first to pay this homage, and endeavour by every display of assumed devotion to win her favour. But though he added to his political pliancy a most sedulous devotion to Popery, as suddenly assumed, Mary was never imposed upon by him, and steadily excluded him from the sweets of office. At Wanstead Mary was met by her sister Elizabeth, attended by a company of 1,000 horse, by knights, ladies, gentlemen, and their retainers. Elizabeth had taken no active part in the late transactions. She professed to be suffering indisposition, and so remained quiescent. If she showed no ardent sympathy as a sister, she had boldly stated to the emissaries of Northumberland, when they came to offer her ample lands and pensions, on condition that she resigned her right to the succession, that they must agree with Mary first, for during her lifetime she had no right to resign. Now, on hearing of the approach of her sister, she rode forth with this gallant company to meet her, and, on the 3rd of August, they proceeded together to London. The Venetian ambassador, who was present, describes these remarkable sisters thus: "The queen," he says, "was of small stature, slender and delicate in person, totally unlike both her father and mother. She had very lively, piercing eyes, which inspired not reverence only, but fear. Her face was well-formed, and when young she must have been good-looking. Her voice was thick and loud like a man's, and when she spoke she was heard a good way off. She was then about forty years of age; was dressed in violet velvet, and rode a small white, ambling nag, with housings fringed with gold. Elizabeth was about half her age, still in the bloom of youth, with a countenance more pleasing than handsome; a tall and portly figure, large blue eyes, and hands the elegant symmetry of which she was proud to display."
Mary dismissed her army, which had never exceeded 15,000, and which had had no occasion to draw a sword, before quitting Wanstead, except 3,000 horsemen in uniforms of green and white, red and white, and blue and white. These, too, she sent back before entering the city gate, thus showing her perfect confidence in the attachment of her capital. From that point her only guard was that of the city, which brought up the roar with bows and javelins. As the royal sisters rode through the crowded streets, they were accompanied by a continuous roar of acclamation; and on entering the court of the Tower they beheld, kneeling on the green before St. Peter's Church, the state prisoners who had been detained there during the reigns of Henry VIII. and Edward VI. These were Courtenay, the son of the Marquis of Exeter, who was executed in 1535; the old Duke of Norfolk, still under sentence of death; and the Bishops of Durham and Winchester, Tunstall and Gardiner. Gardiner pronounced a congratulation on behalf of the others; and Mary, bursting into tears at the sight, called them to her, exclaiming, "Ye are all my prisoners!" raised them one by one, kissed them, and set them at liberty. To extend the joy of her safe establishment upon the throne of her ancestors, she ordered eighteen pence to be distributed to every poor householder in the city.
Arundel had already arrived with Northumberland and the other prisoners from Cambridge, and he now was commanded to secure the Duke of Suffolk and Lady Jane Grey, and lodge them in the Tower likewise. This being done, Mary rather seemed to take pleasure in liberating and pardoning. The moment that Suffolk was conveyed to the Tower, his duchess threw herself at the feet of the queen, and implored her forgiveness of him with many lamentations, telling her that he was very ill, and would die if shut up in the Tower. Mary kindly conceded the favour, and within three days Suffolk was again at large—"a wonderful instance of mercy," may Bishop Godwin well remark. The Duke of Norfolk, and Courtenay, Earl of Devonshire, were restored to their rank and estates. Norfolk soon after sat as High Steward at the trial of Northumberland. Gertrude, the mother of Courtenay, the Marchioness of Exeter, was made lady of the bed-chamber, and admitted to such intimacy that she slept with the queen herself. The Duchess of Somerset was set free, and her family restored to its rights and position. Her son, though not made again Duke of Somerset, which was a Royal title, was acknowledged as Earl of Hertford, and her daughters, who had been subsisting on miserable annuities amongst their relations, were, three of them, appointed maids of honour. The heirs of Partridge, Vane, and Stanhope, who had been executed with the ​Protector, were reinstated in their property. All these acts of liberality shown to zealous Protestants were sufficient proofs that Mary had a naturally good heart; and had she not unfortunately become connected with the bigoted Spanish Court, might have left a very different name to posterity from that which this union procured her.
Lady Jane Grey and Roger Ascham.
Execution of the Duke of Northumberland on Tower Hill. (See page 351.)
​strictly Popish; and her Council and clergy, anxious to testify their loyalty, began to show an intolerant spirit which soon became contagious. One of her chaplains, of the name of Walker, approaching, in the Tower chapel, with the censer to the queen, Dr. Weston thrust him away, saying, "Shamest thou not to do this office, being a priest having a wife? I tell thee the queen will not be censed by such as thou."
A second proclamation was soon issued, giving note of a projected change, announcing that religion was to be settled by "common consent"—that was, by Act of Parliament. The people of Ipswich, finding the Papist party beginning to obstruct and harass them in their practice of the reformed faith, presented a petition to the queen by a Mr. Dobbs, claiming her protection on the faith of her proclamation. But the Council set the messenger in the stocks for his trouble. Before the queen arrived in London, the officious Council had committed to the Fleet Judge Hales, one of the most upright and undaunted men of the age. He had from the first positively refused to have any hand in disinheriting Mary. He had courageously told Northumberland that what he was attempting was contrary to the law, and had from the bench charged the people of Kent to keep the law as it was in King Edward's time. The unhappy judge was so affected in his mind by this treatment, that he attempted his life in the prison. Mary, on coming to London, had him liberated, sent for him, and spoke consolingly to him, but his brain never recovered the shock, and he soon effected his own destruction.
Mr. Edward Underhill, a Worcestershire gentleman, a most ardent Protestant, and thence called the "hot gospeller," but at the same time a most devoted and fearless partisan of the queen's, had also been expelled from the band of gentlemen pensioners, and thrown into Newgate, for writing a satirical ballad against Papists. Very soon after the queen's arrival, she liberated him too, and restored him to his place as a gentleman pensioner, ordering him to receive his salary for the whole time that he had been in prison. Whenever any one at this time was able to get to her presence, or to have their case mentioned by a friend, he was pretty sure of redress. But those who were too distant, or had no influential acquaintance, suffered sharply from the zeal of the Council.
With such men as Gardiner, Bonner, Heath, Day, and Vesey in the Council, we cannot wonder that even after the queen's arrival the Protestants were promptly coerced. These men sat as a junta in that secret court of the Star Chamber in Westminster Palace, which through the reigns of Henry VII. and Henry VIII. had done the godless and unconstitutional work of these sovereigns; and this English Inquisition was yet destined to do many a bloody deed, and cause many a groan from the hearts of the innocent and the good to rise to heaven in unforgotten appeal.
In another respect the new queen displayed her sound sense, and her desire for the good of her people. The depreciation of the currency by Henry VIII. had introduced much disorder and distress. She now commanded the coinage to be restored to its true value, and introduced it in a fresh issue of sovereigns, half-sovereigns, angels, and half-angels in gold, and of groats, half-groats, and pennies in silver, all of the standard purity, charging the Government and not the people with the loss. She also remitted the subsidy of four shillings in the pound on land, and two and eightpence on goods which was granted before the king's death. She made Gardiner chancellor, gave Tunstall and Lord Paget principal appointments in the ministry, and introduced a more cheerful spirit and a more gay style of dress amongst the ladies of her Court.
But it was Mary's misfortune that she had been educated to place so much reliance on the wisdom and friendship of her great relative, the Emperor Charles V. He had been her champion as he had been that of her mother. When pressed on the subject of her religion during the last reign, he had menaced the country with war if the freedom of her conscience was violated. It was natural, therefore, that she should now look to him for counsel, seeing that almost all those whom she was obliged to employ or to have around her had been her enemies during her brother's reign. Charles communicated his opinions through Simon de Renard, his ambassador, who was to be the medium of their correspondence, and to advise her in matters not of sufficient importance to require the emperor's judgment, or not allowing of sufficient time to obtain it. Renard was ordered to act warily, and to show himself little at Court, so as to avoid suspicion.
Charles advised her to make examples of the chief conspirators, and to punish the subordinates more mildly, so as to obtain a character of moderation. He insisted upon it as necessary, however, that Lady Jane Grey should be included in the list for capital punishment, and to this Mary would by no means consent. She replied that "she could not find in her heart or conscience to put her unfortunate kinswoman to death, who had not been an accomplice of Northumberland, but merely an unresisting instrument in his hands. "If there were any crime in being his daughter-in-law, even of that her cousin Jane was not guilty, for she had been legally contracted to another, and, therefore, her marriage with Lord Guildford Dudley was not valid. As to the danger existing from her pretensions, it was but imaginary, and every requisite precaution should be taken before she was set at liberty."
Mary's selection of prisoners was remarkably small considering the number in her hands, and the character of their offence against her. She contented herself with putting only seven of them on their trial—namely, Northumberland, his son the Earl of Warwick, the Marquis of Northampton, Sir John Gates, Sir Henry Gates, Sir Andrew Dudley, and Sir Thomas Palmer—his chief councillors and his associates. Northumberland submitted to the Court whether a man could be guilty of treason who acted on the authority of Council, and under warrant of the great seal; or could they, who had been his chief advisers and accomplices during the whole time, sit as his judges? The Duke of Norfolk, who presided at the trial as High Steward, replied that the Council and great seal which he spoke of were those of a usurper, and, therefore, so far from availing him, only aggravated the offence, and that the lords in question could sit as his judges, because they were under no attainder. ​Finding that his appeal had done him no service, Northumberland and his fellow prisoners pleaded guilty. The duke prayed that his sentence might be commuted into decapitation, as became a peer of the realm, and he prayed the queen that she would be merciful to his children on account of their youth. He desired also that an able divine might be sent to him for the settling of his conscience, thereby intimating that he was at heart a Romanist, in hopes, no doubt, of winning upon the mind of the queen, for he was very anxious to save his life. He professed, too, that he was in possession of certain State secrets of vital importance to Her Majesty, and entreated that two members of the Council might be sent to him to receive these matters from him. What his object was became manifest from the result, for Gardiner and another member of the Council being sent to him in consequence, he implored Gardiner passionately to intercede for his life. Gardiner gave him little hope, but promised to do what he could, and on returning to the queen so much moved her, that she was inclined to grant the request; but others of the Council wrote through Renard to the emperor, who strenuously warned her, if she valued her safety, or the peace of her reign, not to listen to such an arch traitor. Yet a letter of Northumberland's to Lord Arundel, the night before his execution, preserved in Tierney's "History of the Castle and Town of Arundel," shows that to the last he clung convulsively to the hope of life. He there asks for life, "yea, the life of a dogge, that he may but lyve and kiss the queen's feet."
We shall see that this weak, bad man actually did profess himself a Romanist on the scaffold. The fact was that his only religion was his ambition, and this was pretty well known during Edward's life; for on one occasion, according to Strype, he spoke so contemptuously of the new religion, that Cranmer, in a moment of excitement, actually challenged him to fight a duel. Northumberland's eldest son, the Earl of Warwick, who was tried with him, behaved with much more dignity. He wasted no endeavours on vain and transparent excuses, he craved no forgiveness, but merely begged that his debts might be discharged out of his confiscated property. The Marquis of Northampton pleaded that he was not in office during this conspiracy, and had had no concern in it, being engaged in hunting and other field sports; whereas it was notorious that he was mixed up with the whole of it, and had been one of the noblemen who went to present the crown to Lady Jane at Sion House. His plea did not prevent his receiving sentence. The commoners were tried the next day in the same court, and were also sentenced as traitors. The next day being Sunday, another priest was ordered to preach at St. Paul's Cross, and in order to protect him, several lords of the Council, as the Lord Privy Seal, the Earl of Bedford, the Earl of Pembroke, the Lords Rich and Wentworth, accompanied by 200 of the guard, with their captain, Sir Henry Jerningham, went thither, and the preacher was surrounded by halberdiers. The mayor and aldermen in their liveries also attended. This was an indication of what was coming, and in accordance with a past proclamation of the queen, in which she had declared that she did not mean to compel and constrain other men's consciences, but that the lord mayor must not suffer the reading of the Scriptures in the churches of the city, or the preaching of curates who were not licensed by her. The Sunday on which the riot took place at the Cross was, therefore, the last in which the form of religion established by Edward VI. was tolerated.
On Tuesday, the 22nd of August, Northumberland, Gates, and Palmer were brought from the Tower to execution on Tower Hill. Of the eleven condemned, only these three were executed—an instance of clemency, in so gross a conspiracy to deprive a sovereign of a throne, which is without parallel. When the Duke of Northumberland and Gates met on the scaffold, they each accused the other of being the author of the treason. Northumberland charged the whole design on Gates and the Council; Gates charged it more truly on Northumberland and his high authority. They protested, however, that they entirely forgave each other, and Northumberland, stepping to the rail, made a long speech, praying for a long and happy reign to the queen; calling on the people to bear witness that he died in the true Catholic faith. Ambition, he said, had led him to conform to the new faith, though he condemned it in his heart, and the adoption of which had filled both England and Germany with constant dissensions, troubles, and civil wars. After repeating the "Miserere," "De Profundis," and the "Paternoster," with some portion of another psalm, concluding with the words, "Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit," he laid his head on the block, saying that he deserved a thousand deaths, and it was severed at a stroke. Gates and Palmer died professing great penitence.
The Lancaster herald, an old servant of the duke's, obtained an audience of the queen after the execution, and, no doubt, impressed with the idea that the head of Northumberland would be impaled in some public spot as that of a traitor, prayed that it might be given to him for burial. Mary bade him, in God's name, see that both head and body received proper interment; and, accordingly, the gory remains of the duke were deposited in the chapel of St. Peter, in the Tower, by the side of his victim, Somerset, so that, says Stowe, there now lay before the high altar two headless dukes betwixt two headless queens—the Dukes of Somerset and Northumberland betwixt Queen Anne Boleyn and Queen Catherine Howard.
During these transactions Mary was residing at Richmond Palace, having quitted the Tower on the 12th of the month. It would soon be necessary to return thither, preparatory to her coronation but there was one person whom she sent thither as a prisoner previous to her revisiting the awful old fortress herself, and that was Cranmer. With all Mary's natural goodness and kindness of heart, with all the proofs which she had lately given of her forgiveness of her enemies, there was one subject which, above all others, she deemed lay as a sacred duty upon her, and from which neither her own life nor that of others would turn her aside. Though she had pledged herself not to alter the form of religion which had been established by her late brother, there is no doubt that she had vowed in her own innermost heart to remove it, notwithstanding, and to restore that only worship which she believed to be the true one. From her earliest years the fate of her mother and of her religion ​had been strangely blended together, and stamped into her heart by sad and solemn memories. Her mother had been compelled to give place to another queen, who had the reputation of favouring the Reformers. With her mother's persecutions her own commenced. When her mother was declared not to be the lawful wife of Henry, she was declared to be illegitimate. Anne Boleyn, that mother's successful rival, had been her harsh stepmother and bitter enemy, sowing hatred against her in her father's mind, which conduct she deeply repented in the hour of death. Her father and her father's ministers had banished her from Court, shut her up in country houses surrounded by spies, and pursued her with constant annoyance to compel her to renounce her mother's faith. She had been forced to sign humiliating deeds, acknowledging her birth illegitimate, and her religion a vile superstition. This treatment had been continued through the reign of her brother, and by his last act she was again branded as a heretic and a bastard; and both on the plea of her birth and her religion excluded from the throne. It would have been a wonder if she had not been stiffened into a bigot by a long course of outrage; and still more, if leaning with a kindly feeling on her mother's family, as those who alone had shown any regard for her, any disposition to defend her interests, she had not been encouraged by their counsels to rebuild the religious fabric which her enemies had thrown down.
Cranmer was tho most prominent figure in the ranks of the hostile religionists. He was, and had been, the grand leader of the movement. It was he who had first advised the abandonment of the Papal authority, and the procedure to her mother's divorce on the authority of universities and of learned jurists. It was he who declared Catherine's marriage null, and that of Anne Boleyn legal; he who had sanctioned the assumption of the supremacy of the Church by her father, Henry; and who had framed and established the reformed creed under her brother. In Mary's eyes Cranmer appeared an arch-heretic, and the main designer and executor of the mischief that had taken place. It was not to be expected that she would long leave him in the continuance of a career which she regarded as equally illegal and unholy. One of her first acts was to order him to confine himself to his palace at Lambeth, thus interdicting the exorcise of his archiepiscopal functions. Whilst thus confined to his house, word was brought him that the old service had been performed in his cathedral at Canterbury; and what mortified him still more, was to learn that it was commonly reported that this was by his own consent, if not direction. He had during the reign of Henry VIII. been so timid in the assertion of his real opinions—had, out of terror of death, so long sacrificed his conscience to his safety, swearing to the Six Articles of the tyrant, and even submitting to sit in judgment on Protestants, and to sentence them to death for the courageous avowal of opinions which he held himself, yet dared not disclose—that the public now were ready enough to believe that he would again conform to the commands of a Papist queen, rather than renounce his lofty station, and run the risk of the stake. But Cranmer now displayed a courage more worthy of himself. Assisted by his friend, Peter Martyr, he put forth a declaration of his opinions, boldly designating Romanism as the invention of the devil, and the doctrines and ritual established by Edward VI. as those held and practised by the primitive Church. He vindicated himself from the charge of apostacy, and declared that the mass had not been performed in his church at Canterbury by any order or permission of his, but was the act of a false, time-serving monk. He offered to show to the queen the many false doctrines and terrible blasphemies contained in the Papal missal. Copies of this manifesto having found their way into tho streets, the archbishop was arrested and brought before the Council on the 13th of September, and after a long hearing was committed to the Tower for treason against the queen, and for aggravating the same by spreading abroad seditious bills, and moving tumults amongst the people. A few days after, Latimer was also arrested on a similar charge, and sent to the Tower for "his seditious demeanour."
The Royal advisers, increasing in boldness, counselled the same rigorous treatment of the heretic Princess Elizabeth. They declared that the Reformers were looking to her as their hope for the restoration of their Church, and that Mary could only be safe by placing her in custody. Mary would not listen to these suggestions. She rather hoped to win over the mind of Elizabeth by persuasion than by attempts of coercion, which had succeeded so ill in her own case. Elizabeth, however, showed no signs of changing her religion, till it was suggested that her firmness resulted not from any conscientious views, but from the prospects of superseding her sister on account of her faith, which was held out to her by the Reformers. Elizabeth is said then to have expressed a willingness to inquire into the grounds of the old religion, to have finally professed herself a convert, and to have established a chapel in her own house. Such are the statements of the French and Spanish ambassadors, and Mary showed the utmost regard for Elizabeth, taking her by the hand on all great occasions, and never dining in public without her.
The accession of Mary was a joyful event to the Papal Court. Julius III. appointed Cardinal Pole his legate to the queen; but Pole was by no means in haste, without obtaining further information, to fill this office in a country where the people, whose sturdy character he well know, had to so great an extent imbibed the doctrines of the Reformation. Dandino, tho Papal legate at Brussels, therefore dispatched a gentleman of his suite to proceed to London and cautiously spy out the land. Before making himself known, this emissary, Gianfrancesco Commendone, went about London for some days gathering up all evidences of the public feeling on the question of the Church. He then procured a private interview with Mary, and was delighted to hear from her own lips that she was fully resolved on reconciling her kingdom to the Papal See, and meant to obtain the repeal of all laws restricting the doctrines or discipline of the Roman Church; but that it required caution, and that no trace of any correspondence with Rome must come to light.
Mary was, however, inclined to go faster and farther than some of her advisers, and Gardiner, though so staunch a Papist, was too much of an Englishman to wish to see the supremacy restored to the Pontiff. But others were not so patriotic. Throughout the kingdom ​the Protestant preachers were silenced. The great bell at Christchurch, Oxford, was just recast, and the first use of it was to call the people to mass. "That bell then rung," says Fuller, "the knell of Gospel truth in the city of Oxford, afterwards filled with Protestant tears."
Such was the state of affairs when the queen's coronation took place on the 1st of October. Three days previous to this she proceeded from Whitehall to the Tower attended by a splendid retinue in barges, and was met by the lord mayor and the officers of the corporation in their barges, and with music. She had borrowed £20,000 from the City to defray the expenses of this ceremony till Parliament met, and granted her supplies. The next day she knighted fifteen knights of the Bath, amongst whom were her cousin Courtenay, Earl of Devon, and the Earl of Surrey. Tho following day Mary rode through the city in procession. She was borne in a magnificent litter betwixt six white horses; the Princess Elizabeth rode next in a rich open chariot, and by her side Anne of Cleves. They were preceded by a procession of 500 noblemen and gentlemen on horseback, including the foreign ambassadors and prebites; and after the chariot of Elizabeth, Sir Edward Hastings, the queen's Master of the Horse, led her palfrey. Then came a train of seventy ladies riding on horseback and in chariots, in alternate succession. The queen was attired in blue velvet furred with ermine, bearing on her head a caul of gold network, set with pearls and jewels, so heavy that she was obliged to support it with one hand. The ladies were chiefly dressed in kirtles of gold and silver cloths and robes of crimson velvet, the gentlemen in equally gorgeous costume.
The City presented a variety of pageants. In Fenchurch Street four giants addressed Her Majesty in orations, and in Gracechurch Street a stupendous angel, with a stupendous trumpet, sat upon a triumphal arch, and played a solo, to the astonishment of the people. In Cornhill and Cheapside the conduits ran with wine; and in the latter street the corporation presented the queen with a purse containing 1,000 marks of gold. Stowe says that "in Paul's Churchyard, against the school, one Master Heywood sat in a pageant under a vine, and made to her an oration in Latin and English. Then there was one Peter, a Dutchman, stood on the weather-cock of St. Paul's steeple, holding a streamer in his hand of five yards long; and waving thereof, stood some time on one foot, and some time on the other, and then kneeled on his knees, to the great marvel of all people."
The next day, the 1st of October, the coronation was conducted with equal splendour, the walls of the choir of Westminster Abbey being hung with rich arras, and blue cloth being laid from the marble chair in Westminster Hall to the pulpit in Westminster Abbey, for the queen to walk on. Directly after the queen walked Elizabeth, followed by Anne of Cleves, Mary showing an amiable desire to give every distinction to these near connections. Gardiner, in the absence of the imprisoned primate, placed the crown upon her head, or rather three crowns—first, the crown of St. Edward, then the imperial crown of England, and, lastly, a very rich diadem made expressly for her.
Four days later, Mary opened her first Parliament; and she opened it in a manner which showed plainly what was to come. Both peers and commoners were called upon to attend her majesty at a solemn mass of the Holy Ghost. This was an immediate test of what degree of compliance was to be expected in the attempt to return to tho ancient order of things; and the success of the experiment was most encouraging. With the exception of Taylor Bishop of Lincoln, and Harley Bishop of Hereford, tho whole Parliament—peers, prelates, and commoners—fell on their knees at the elevation of the host, and participated with an air of devotion in that which in the last reign they had declared an abomination. But such was tho zeal now for the lately abhorred mass, that the two uncomplying bishops were rudely thrust out of the queen's presence, and out of the abbey altogether. There were those who insinuated that the emperor furnished Mary with funds to bribe her Parliament on this occasion; but, besides that Charles was not so lavish of his money, events soon showed that the Parliament, though so exceedingly pliant in the matter of religion, was stubborn enough regarding the estates obtained from the Church, and also concerning Mary's scheme of a Spanish marriage.
The first act of legislation was to restore the securities to life and property which had been granted in the twenty-fifth year of Edward III., and which had been so completely prostrated by the Acts of Henry VIII. Such an Act had been passed at the commencement of the last reign, but had been again violated in the cases of the two Seymours. The defiance of all the safeguards of the constitution by Henry VIII. had been such, that it has been calculated that no less than 72,000 persons perished on the gibbet in his reign. The Parliament, looking back on the sanguinary lawlessness of that monarch, did not think the country sufficiently safe from charges of constructive treason and felony without a fresh enactment. It next passed an Act annulling the divorce of Queen Catherine of Arragon, by Cranmer, and declaring the present queen legitimate. This Act indeed tacitly declared Elizabeth illegitimate, but there was no getting altogether out of the difficulties which tho licentious proceedings of Henry VIII. had created, and it was deemed best to pass that point over in silence, leaving the queen to treat her sister as if born in genuine wedlock.
The next Bill went to restore the Papal Church in England, stopping short, however, of the supremacy. This received no opposition in the House of Lords, but occasioned a debate of two days in the Commons. It passed, however, eventually without a division, and by it was swept away at once the whole system of Protestantism established by Cranmer during the reign of Edward VI. The reformed liturgy, which the Parliament of that monarch had declared was framed by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, was now pronounced to be "a new thing, imagined and devised by a few of singular opinions." This abolished the marriages of priests and illegitimated their children. From the 20th day of the next month divine worship was to be performed, and the sacraments administered, as in the last year of the reign of Henry VIII. Thus were the tyrannic Six Articles restored, and all but the Papal supremacy. Even the discussion of the ritual and doctrines of Edward VI. became so warm, that the queen prorogued Parliament for three days. On calling the House of ​Commons together again, and proceeding with the Bill, no mention was made of the restoration of the Church property, though the queen was anxious to restore all that was in the hands of the Crown; for the Lords, and gentlemen even of the House of Commons, who were in possession of those lands, would have raised a far different opposition to that which was manifested regarding the State religion.
Philip of Spain. From the original picture by Titian.
No sooner were these Bills passed than the clergy met in convocation, and passed decrees for the speedy enforcement of all the new regulations. Gardiner had taken care to dismiss all such bishops as he knew would not readily comply. The sentiments expressed in this convocation were those of the most unchecked exultation in the restoration of Popery, even from those who had professed to be zealous Protestants before the accession of Mary, and the adulation of the queen was something almost unparalleled in the king-worship of Courts. The Bishop of London's chaplain, who opened the convocation with a sermon, compared Mary to all the most extraordinary women who ever appeared. She was equal to Miriam, Deborah, Esther, and Judith of the Old Testament, and nearly so to the Virgin Mary. He was now succeeded by Weston the prolocutor, who dwelt, moreover, at great length on the persecution of the Papal prelates and clergy during the last reign, as a hint of what ought now to be the treatment of their enemies. The convocation was not slow to learn. It declared the Book of Common Prayer an abomination, and ordered the immediate suppression of the reformed catechism. It was a curious fact, that amongst the pernicious books which had been used in the reformed worship, was the queen's own translation of the Paraphrases of Erasmus, which, being completed by Udal and Cox, had been ordered to be placed in all the churches along with the Bible as its best exposition. Thus the queen was made to condemn her own literary labour to the flames as heretical.
The persecution of the reformed clergy who had stood firm became vehement. The married clergy were called upon to abandon their wives, and there was a rush of the expelled priests again to fill their pulpits. In the cities ​there was considerable opposition, for there the people had read and reflected, but generally throughout the agricultural districts the change took place with the case and rapidity of the scene-shifting at a theatre. Many of the married priests, however, would not abandon their wives and children, and were turned adrift into the highways, or were thrust into prison. Many fled abroad, hoping for more Christian treatment from the reformed churches there, but in vain, for their doctrines did not accord with those of the foreign Reformers, who deemed them heretical.
Allington Castle, the residence of Thomas Wyatt. Forfeited to the crown, 1554.
About half the English bishops conformed, the rest were ejected from their sees, and several of them were imprisoned. Soon after Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley were sent to the Tower, Holgate, Archbishop of York, was sent thither also. Poynet, who was Bishop of Winchester during Gardiner's expulsion, was imprisoned for having married. Taylor of Lincoln and Harley of ​Hereford, for refusing to kneel on the elevation of the host at the queen's coronation, and for other heresies, were committed to prison. Ferrar of St. David's, Bird of Exeter, and Coverdale, the translator of the Bible, were all imprisoned for marriage or other offences. Yet as long as the queen maintained the supremacy of the Church, and was not closely connected with the Spanish Court, her native goodness of heart withheld her from the commission of any such cruelties as disgraced the after years of her reign. On the contrary, she often manifested much sympathy with the sufferings of the ejected clergy, and a fact recorded by Fox, who had to narrate her subsequent severities, shows that she was capable of real magnanimity. Dr. Edward Sandys had been thrown into prison for a daring attack on the queen's title to the throne, and on her religion; yet at the intercession of one of the ladies of the bed-chamber, she ordered him to be set at liberty. She was not, however, disposed to pass over the offences of Cranmer, who had been so terrible an enemy to her mother. On the 13th of October he was brought to trial in Guildhall, on a charge of treason, together with Lady Jane Grey, her husband lord Guildford Dudley, and Lord Ambrose Dudley, his brother. They were all condemned to death as traitors, and a bill of attainder was passed through Parliament against them. Lady Jane's sentence was to be beheaded or burnt at the queen's pleasure, which was then the law of England in all cases were women committed high treason, or petty treason by the murder of their husbands. The fate of Lady Jane, who pleaded guilty, and exhibited the most mild and amiable demeanour on the occasion, excited deep sympathy, and crowds followed her as she was reconducted to the Tower, weeping and lamenting her hard fate. It was well understood, however, that the queen had no intention of carrying the sentence into effect against any of the prisoners; but she deemed it a means of keeping quiet her partisans to hold them in prison under sentence of death. She gave orders that they should receive every indulgence consistent with their security, and Lady Jane was permitted to walk in the queen's garden at the Tower, and even on Tower Hill. The subject which created the greatest difficulty to this Parliament was that of the queen's marriage. At the commencement of the session the Commons had voted an address to the queen, praying her to marry, to secure the succession to the throne, but imploring her to select her husband from amongst her subjects, and not from any foreign princely family. This was suggested by a very prevalent fear that her partiality, from connections of affinity and religion, for the Spanish family, might lead her to favour the ambitious views of the emperor, and take a husband from his house, thus making this country a province of Spain, and introduce here the despotic and persecuting spirit which prevailed there. Mary had, indeed, shown a decided preference for Courtenay, the young Earl of Devon. He was a remarkably handsome man, but having been a prisoner in the Tower from the time of the execution of his father, the Marquis of Exeter—in the tenth year of his own age—till the accession of Mary, when he was above thirty, he had naturally remained ill-instructed, and acquired low habits in his Tower life. Mary had taken great pains to form his manners, and kept him near her own person, electing his mother as her most confidential friend. But Courtenay was incorrigible. He gave a loose rein to his love of vulgar pleasures, frequented the most debased society, and soon thoroughly disgusted the queen. The French and Venetian ambassadors, who were anxious by all means to prevent a Spanish alliance, used every endeavour to induce Courtenay to conduct himself so as to secure the high honour of such a match, but it was in vain, and Mary soon began to give out that it was not befitting her to marry a subject, though to her intimate friends she candidly avowed that the dissolute character of Courtenay was the real cause of her looking abroad.
When Courtenay had lost all chance of securing the queen's hand, the indefatigable Noailles, the French ambassador, endeavoured to turn the scale in favour of the queen's celebrated kinsman, Cardinal Pole. Mary had sent Pole an earnest and immediate invitation to come over to England, and the public, ready to catch at any straw which afforded the least hope of escaping the Spanish match, fell readily into the anticipation that he was the man. Pole had not taken priest's orders, or if he had, dispensation might have been obtained; he was already fifty-three years of age, and become irrevocably addicted to the love of study and seclusion. No idea of marrying the Queen of England ever seems to have entered his head. He was living in a beautiful monastery at Magguzzano, on the Lake of Guarda, and all worldly ambition appeared to have quitted him. But on the news of his cousin's elevation to the throne, the daughter of that Catherine whose most zealous and eloquent champion he had been, and of that faith which he clung to at the expense of the highest promotion in England, he showed himself ready to abandon his repose, and to devote himself to the re-establishment of his beloved Church in his native land. He gladly accepted the office of Papal legate in England, and set out on his journey.
But there was another and more powerful person watching every highway in Europe which pointed towards England, who had designs of his own which he was already labouring diligently to accomplish in that quarter—and who was no other than the Emperor Charles V. Greatly alarmed at the journey of Cardinal Pole towards England, Charles lost no time in preventing his arrival there. He dreaded lest Mary had some old attachment for the cardinal, as she had been chiefly educated by his mother, the Countess of Salisbury, whom Henry VIII. so barbarously beheaded. Charles used his influence with the Pope to obtain his recall. He dispatched Mendoza to stop him in Germany, and alarm him with the representation of the danger of a Papal legate appearing in England till the religious changes were completely effected. Pole halted in his progress, and returned to Dillinghen on the Danube, where he awaited further instructions from the Pope. These were to suspend his journey for the present.
Meantime, Noailles, the French ambassador, was equally active in preventing the designs of Charles. He intrigued with the leaders of the Protestant party, holding midnight conferences with them in his own house, and now advised them to defend themselves from the menaced Spanish despotism by force of arms, promising them the aid of France. Pole, on the other hand, though he could ​not reach England, gave the queen the soundest advice by letter, namely, not to marry at all; and his advice was earnestly seconded by his friend, Friar Peyto, tho same plain speaker who had so startled Henry from his pulpit at Greenwich by denouncing his seizure of the monastic church, and whom Cromwell had therefore threatened to sew up in a sack and fling into tho Thames. Peyto had retired to the Continent and resided in the cardinal's house. He now wrote to Mary with as much honest plainness as he had spoken to her father. "Do not marry," he said, "or you will be tho slave of a young husband. Besides, at your age tho chance of bringing heirs to tho throne is doubtful, and, moreover, must be dangerous to your life."
Nothing, however, could move Mary from her project of matrimony. Giving up Courtenay, who was the slave of low vices, she now consulted her great relative, the emperor, her invariable counsellor in all serious matters. The advice from such a quarter could only be of one character. Mary, as a child, had been betrothed to Charles himself, but she then appeared so distant from the throne that he had cavalierly given her up. He now wrote in a strain of the most delicate flattery, which, without saying that he repented of his conduct, expressed it. He fully approved, he said, of the reasons which induced her to relinquish all idea of Courtenay, and only regretted that Pole, so worthy of her, declined all worldly distinctions for the sacred duties of the Church. Were he of fitting age, ho would himself aspire to the honour of her hand, but that not being suitable, whom could he offer her more dear to him than his own son? The advantages of such an alliance, he said, were too prominent to need pointing out, but he would not say a word to bias her judgment; on the contrary, he entreated her to reflect seriously, but without any restraint, on the proposition, and then inform him of the result.
But though Charles put on such a paternal and disinterested air, his ambassador, Renard, was at the queen's elbow to give all the colouring of his rhetoric to the scheme, to expatiate on the beauty and accomplishments of Philip, and on the splendour of the position which such a union of crowns would confer on them above all the world. Mary listened to the proposal with unconcealed pleasure, a pleasure far from reciprocated on the part of Philip, who was only twenty-six years of age, and earnestly entreated his father not to marry him to a woman eleven years older than himself. The union was privately and quickly agreed upon. The wary emperor, however, advised Mary to keep the contract secret for the present, as some of her ministers were desirous that the queen should wed the archduke, his nephew, and all were opposed to the Spanish alliance.
Such secrets, however, soon transpire at Courts, and rumours of this proposed alliance soon spread abroad, creating great alarm and anxiety. The first to remonstrate with Mary on the subject was Gardiner, her chancellor, who boldly pointed out to her the repugnance of the nation to a Spanish marriage; that she would be the paramount authority if she married a subject, but that it would be difficult to maintain that rank with a Spanish king; that the arrogance of the Spanish had made them odious to all nations, and this quality had already shown itself conspicuously in Philip. He was greatly disliked by his own people, and it was not likely that he would be tolerated by the English; that alliance with Spain meant perpetual war with France, which would never suffer the Netherlands to be annexed to the Crown of England. The rest of Mary's Council took up the same strain, with the exception of the old Duke of Norfolk and the Lords Arundel and Paget. The Protestant party out of doors were furious against the match, declaring that it was meant to bring the Inquisition into tho country, to rivet Popery upon it, and to make England the slave of taxation to the Spaniards. The Parliament took up the subject with equal hostility, and the Commons sent their Speaker to her, attended by a deputation of twenty members, praying Her Majesty not to marry a foreigner.
Noailles, tho French ambassador, was delighted with this movement, and took much credit to himself for inciting influential parties to it; but Mary believed it to originate with Gardiner, and the lion spirit of her father coming over her, she vowed that she would prove a match for the cunning of the Chancellor. That very night she sent for the Spanish ambassador, and bidding him follow her into her private oratory, she there knelt down before the altar, and after chanting the hymn, "Veni Creator Spiritus," she made a vow to God that she would marry Philip of Spain, and whilst she lived, no other man but him. Thus she put it out of her power, if she kept her vow, to marry any other person should she outlive Philip, showing the force of the paroxysm of determination which was upon her. The effort would seem to have been very violent, for immediately after she was taken ill, and continued so for some days.
It was on the last day of October that this curious circumstance took place, and on the 17th of November she sent for the House of Commons, when the Speaker read the address giving her their advice regarding her marriage; and, instead of the Chancellor returning the answer, as was the custom, Mary answered herself, thanking them for their care that she should have a succession in her own children, but rebuking them for presuming to dictate to her the choice of a husband. She declared that the marriages of her predecessors had always been free, a privilege which, she assured them, she was resolved to maintain. At the same time, she added, she should be careful to make such a selection as should contribute both to her own happiness and to that of her people.
The plain declaration of the queen to her Parliament was not necessary to inform those about her who were interested in the question; they had speedy information, of her having favoured the Spanish suit, and Noailles was certainly mixed up in conspiracies to defeat it. It was proposed to place Courtenay at the head of the reformed, party, and if Mary would not consent to many him, to assassinate Arundel and Paget, the advocates of the Spanish match; to marry Elizabeth to Courtenay, and raise the standard of rebellion in Devonshire. It appears from the despatches of Noailles that the Duke of Suffolk, the father of Lady Jane Grey, was in this conspiracy. But the folly and the unstable character of their hero, Courtenay, was fatal to their design, and of that Noailles very soon became sensible. It was proposed by some of the parties that Courtenay should steal away from Court, ​get across to France, and thence join the conspirators in Devonshire; but Noailles opposed this plan, declaring that the moment Courtenay quitted the coast of England his chance was utterly lost; and he wrote to his own Government, saying that the scheme would fall to nothing; for although Courtenay and Elizabeth were fitting persons to cause a rising, that such was the want of decision of Courtenay, that he would let himself be taken before he would act—the thing which actually came to pass.
Great Seal of Queen Mary.
On the 6th of December the queen dissolved Parliament, and took an affectionate leave of Elizabeth, who went to her seat at Ashridge. There had not been wanting whisperers to sow dissension betwixt the sisters, by representing Elizabeth as cognisant of the conspiracies with Courtenay, and of having received nocturnal visits from Noailles. The queen questioned the princess on these heads, professed herself quite satisfied of Elizabeth not having received any such visits from the French ambassador, and closing her ears against all attempts to make her sister suspected by her, she presented her on her departure with two sets of large pearls, and several rosaries splendidly studded with jewels.
Autograph of Queen Mary.
On the 2nd of January, 1554, a splendid embassy, sent by the Emperor, headed by the Counts Egmont and Lalain, the Lord of Courrieres, and the Sieur de Nigry, landed in Kent, to arrange the marriage betwixt Mary and Philip. The unpopularity of this measure was immediately manifested, for the men of Kent, taking Egmont for Philip, rose in fury, and would have torn him to pieces if they could have got hold of him. Having, however, reached Westminster in safety, on the 14th of January, a numerous assembly of nobles, prelates, and courtiers was summoned to the queen's presence-chamber, where Gardiner, who had found it necessary to relinquish his opposition, stated to them the proposed conditions of the treaty. The greatest care was evidently taken to disarm the fears of the English, and nothing could appear more moderate than the terms of this alliance. Philip and Mary were to confer on each other the titles of their respective kingdoms, but each kingdom was still to be governed by its own laws and constitution. None but English subjects were to hold office in this country, not even in the king's private service. If the queen had an heir, it was to be her successor in her own dominions, and also in all Philip's dominions of Burgundy, Holland, and Flanders, which were for ever to become part and parcel of England. This certainly, on the face of it, was a most advantageous condition for England, but which, had it taken effect, would undoubtedly have proved a most disastrous one, involving us perpetually in the wars and struggles of the Continent, and draining these islands to defend those foreign territories. Providence protected this nation from the alluring mischief. Another condition of the treaty was that Mary was not to be carried out of the kingdom except at her own request, nor any of her children, except by the consent of the peers. The Commons were totally ignored in the matter. Philip was not to entangle England in the Continental wars of his father, nor to appropriate any of the naval or military resources of this country, or the property or jewels of the Crown, to any foreign purposes. If there was no issue of the marriage, all the conditions of the treaty at once became void, and Philip ceased to be king even in name. If he died first, which was not very probable, Mary was to enjoy a dower of 60,000 ducats per annum, secured on lands in Spain and Flanders. No mention was made of any payment to Philip if he were the survivor. But there was one little clause, which stipulated that Philip should aid Mary in governing her kingdom—an ominous word, which might be made of vast significance.
By this treaty the interests of Don Carlos, the son of Philip by a former marriage, were strangely overlooked, ​and to his intense indignation. In case of children by this new marriage, Burgundy and Flanders were to pass away from him, and if he had himself no issue, Spain, Sicily, Milan, and the rest of the Spanish territories were to fall to Mary's offspring.
Notwithstanding all these promises of aggrandisement to England, the match acquired no favour in the eyes of the people. The nest day, the Lord Mayor, aldermen, and forty of the most eminent citizens of London were summoned to Court, and Gardiner there made known to them what had taken place, and detailed all the conditions, amplifying and making them as imposing as possible, and bidding those City authorities rejoice in so auspicious an event. But the affair by this means becoming known to the public, there was such a ferment that the Spanish embassy was glad to get away in safety. Many years after, Elizabeth, reminded of it by the opposition to a proposed marriage of her own just as unpopular, wrote to Stafford, her ambassador in France, her reminiscences of it:—"It happened," she said, "in Queen Mary's days, that, when a solemn embassade of five or six at least were sent from tho Emperor and King of Spain, even after her marriage articles were signed and sealed, and the matter divulged, the danger was so near the queen's chamber-door, that it was high time for those messengers to depart without leave taking, and bequeath themselves to the speed of tho river stream, and by water pass by with all possible haste to Gravesend."
Within five days came the startling news that three insurrections had broken out in different quarters of the kingdom. One was a-foot in the midland counties, where the Duke of Suffolk and the Grey family had property and influence. There the cry was for the Lady Jane. Mary had been so completely deceived by the Duke of Suffolk, whom she had pardoned and liberated from the Tower, and in return for which he affected so hearty an approval of her marriage, that she instantly thought of him as the man to put down the other rebellions, and sending for him, found that he and his brothers, Lord Thomas and Lord John Grey, had ridden off with a strong body of horse to Leicestershire, proclaiming Lady Jane in every town through which they passed. They found no response to their cry, a fact which any but the most rash speculators might have been certain of. The Earl of Huntingdon, a relative of the queen's, took the field against the Greys, who by their folly brought certain death to Lady Jane, and defeated them near Coventry, upon which they fled for their lives.
The second insurrection was in the west, under Sir Peter Carew, whose project was to place Elizabeth and Courtenay, Earl of Devon, on the throne, and restore the Protestant religion. These parties, as well as the third under Sir Thomas Wyatt, had consented to act together, and thus paralyse the efforts of Mary, by the simultaneous outbreak in so many quarters. But the miserable folly of their plans became evident at once. They did not even unite in the choice of the same person as their future monarch, and had they put down Mary, must then have come to blows amongst themselves. Carew found Devonshire as indifferent to his call as the Greys had found Leicestershire. Courtenay was to have put himself at their head, but never went; and Carew, Gibbs, and Champernham called on the people of Exeter to sign an address to the queen, stating that they would have no Spanish despot. The people of Devon gave no support to the movement. The Earl of Bedford appeared at the head of the queen's troops. A number of the conspirators were seized, and Carew with others fled to France.
But the most formidable section of this tripartite rebellion was that under Sir Thomas Wyatt. Wyatt was the son of Sir Thomas Wyatt the poet, the friend of Surrey and of Anne Boleyn. He had accompanied his father on an embassy to Spain, where the latter fell into danger of the Inquisition, and he had conceived such a dreadful idea of the bigotry and cruelty of the Spaniards, that, though he was a Papist, and had been one of the foremost to support Mary, and to oppose Northumberland, a relative of his own, he now determined to risk his very life to prevent the establishment of a Spanish prince and Spanish notions in England. He had, therefore, readily entered into the conspiracy with Suffolk and Carew, and undertook to attempt the seizure of the Tower, where Lady Jane and her husband lay, and the possession of London, whilst the other insurgent chiefs raised the country. He unfurled the standard of revolt in Kent, and 1,500 men immediately ranged themselves round it, and 5,000 more declared themselves ready at the first call to march out and join him. He fixed his head-quarters at Rochester, having a fleet of five sail, under his associate Winter, which brought him ordnance and ammunition. Wyatt was only a youth of twenty-three, but he was fall of both courage and enthusiasm, and endeavoured to rouse the people of Canterbury to follow him. There, however, he was not successful, and this cast a damp upon his adherents. Sir Robert Southwell defeated a party of the insurgents under Knevet, and the Lord Abergavenny another party under Isley, and the spirits of his troops began to sink rapidly. Many of his supporters sent to the Council, offering to surrender on promise of full pardon, and a little delay would probably have witnessed the total dispersion of his force.
But on tho 29th of January, tho Duke of Norfolk marched from London with a detachment of the guards under Sir Henry Jerningham. On reaching Rochester they found Wyatt encamped in the ruins of the old castle, and tho bridge bristling with cannon, and with well-armed Kentishmen. Norfolk endeavoured to dissolve tho hostile force by sending a herald to proclaim a pardon to all that would lay down their arms, but Wyatt would not permit him to read the paper. Norfolk then ordered his troops to force the bridge; but this duty falling to a detachment of 500 of the train-bands of the city under Captain Brett, the moment they reached the bridge Brett turned round, and addressed his followers thus:—"Masters, we go about to fight against our native countrymen of England, and our friends, in a quarrel unrightful and wicked; for they, considering the great miseries that are like to fall upon us, if we shall be under the rule of the proud Spaniards, or strangers, are here assembled to make resistance to their coming, for the avoiding the great mischiefs likely to alight not only upon themselves, but upon every of us and the whole realm; wherefore I think no English. ​heart ought to say against them. I and others will spend our blood in their quarrel."
Queen Mary in her private Oratory.
Wyatt, on his way to Execution, solemnly exonerating the Princess Elizabeth and Courtenay from participation in his Rebellion. (See page 365.)
​Spain, but that their demands showed that the marriage was the least of all their objects; that these wanted to control her person, and direct her Government as they pleased. But her father had found them of the City loving subjects, and she trusted to do the same in spite of this Wyatt or any other rebel. She then went on:—
"Now concerning my intended marriage. I am neither so desirous of wedding, nor so precisely wedded to my will, that I needs must have a husband. Hitherto I have lived a virgin, and I doubt, not with God's grace, so to live still. But if, as my ancestors have done, it might please God that I should leave you a successor, to be your governor, I trust you would rejoice thereat; also I know it would be to your comfort. Yet, if I thought this marriage would endanger any of you my loving subjects, or the Royal estate of this English realm, I would never consent thereto, nor marry while I lived. On the word of a queen I assure you, that if this marriage appear not before the high court of Parliament, nobility, and Commons, for the singular benefit of the whole realm, then I will abstain, not only from this, but from any other.
"Wherefore, good subjects, pluck up your hearts! Like true men stand fast with your lawful sovereign against these rebels and fear them not; for I do not, I assure you. I leave with you my Lord Howard and my lord treasurer, to assist my lord mayor in the safe guard of the City from spoil and sack, which is the only aim of the rebellious crew."
Having made this short speech, to which the people shouted "God save Queen Mary and the Prince of Spain!" she mounted and rode with her train across Cheapside to the water-stairs of the Three Cranes in the Vintry. As she alighted and was about to step into her barge, a hosier stepped out of the crowd and said to her, "Your Grace will do well to make your foreward of battle of your bishops and priests, for they be trusty and will not deceive you." Her ironic adviser was instantly seized and sent to Newgate. She bade her rowers take her as near as possible to London Bridge, where the attack of Wyatt was expected; and then was rowed to Whitehall, where she appointed the Earl of Pembroke the general of her forces, which were mustering for the defence of the palace and St. James's. Scarcely had she reached her house when she received the welcome tidings of the defeat of the Duke of Suffolk in the midland counties, and of Carew in Devonshire. She forthwith offered a pardon to all the Kentish men, except Wyatt, Sir George Harper, and the other leaders. She offered also a reward of lands, with £100 a year to any one who would take or kill Wyatt.
From some cause that insurgent had not pushed forward with the celerity which the flight of Norfolk appeared to make easy. Instead of marching upon the City and taking advantage of its panic, he was three days in reaching Deptford and Greenwich, and he then lay three more days there, though his success was said to have raised his forces to 15,000 men. Meantime the City had recovered its courage by the valiant bearing of the queen, and the news of the dispersion of the other two divisions of the rebels. The golden opportunity was irrevocably lost. On the 3rd of February he marched along the river side to Southwark. He entered Southwark by Kent Street, and proceeded by St. George's Church, finding no opposition, but on the contrary was cheered by the people, and joined by many of them and of country people who were awaiting them in the inns. Wyatt ordered his men to avoid all pillage, and to pay for what they had, but a number of his officers led their men to a palace of Gardiner's in Southwark, which they plundered, leaving not so much as a lock on the doors, and destroying his noble library, by tearing, burning, and cutting to pieces his books; "so that," says Stowe, "you might have waded to the knees in the leaves of books cut, and thrown under foot."
Coming to the end of London Bridge, Wyatt found the drawbridge raised, the gates closed, and the citizens, headed by the lord mayor and aldermen in armour, in strong force ready to resist his entrance. He was surprised to find the Londoners determined not to admit him, for he had been led to believe that they were as hostile to the marriage as himself. He planted two pieces of artillery at the foot of the bridge, but this was evidently with the view of defending his own position, and not of forcing the gates, for he cut a deep ditch bewixt the bridge and the fort which he occupied, and then protected his flanks from attack by other guns, one pointing down Bermondsey Street, one by St. George's Church, and the third towards the Bishop of Winchester's house. He must still have hoped for a demonstration in the City in his favour, for he remained stationary two whole days, without making an attack on the bridge. On the third morning this inaction was broken by the garrison in the Tower opening a brisk cannonade against him with all their heavy ordnance, doing immense damage to the houses in the vicinity of the bridge fort, and to the towers of St. Olave's and St. Mary Overy's.
The people of Southwark, seeing the inaction of Wyatt and the mischief done to their property, now cried out amain, and desired him to take himself away, which he did. He told the people that he would not have them hurt on his account, and forthwith commenced a march towards Kingston, hoping to be able to cross the bridge there, which he supposed would be unguarded, and that so he might fall on Westminster and London, on that side where they were but indifferently fortified. On his way he met a Mr. Dorell, a merchant of London, and said to him, "Ah, cousin Dorell, I pray you commend me unto your citizens, and say unto them, from me, that when liberty was offered to them, they would not receive it, neither would they admit me within their gates, who for their freedom, and for relieving them from the oppression of foreigners, would frankly spend my blood in this cause and quarrel."
These words are clear proof that Wyatt had been led confidently to expect the Londoners to co-operate with him, and it is equally clear from his subsequent conduct that he still clung to this hope. He reached Kingston about four o'clock in the afternoon of the 6th of February, where he found a part of the bridge broken down, and an armed force ready to oppose his passage. His object being to cross here, and not, as at London Bridge, to await a voluntary admission, he ​brought up his artillery, swept the enemy from the opposite bank, and by the help of some sailors, who brought up boats and barges, he had the bridge made passable, and his troops crossed over. By this time it was eleven o'clock at night; his troops were extremely fatigued by their march and their labours here, but he now deemed it absolutely necessary to push on, and allow the Government no more time than he could help to collect forces into his path, and strengthen their position. He marched on, therefore, through a miserable winter night, and staying most imprudently to remount a heavy gun which had broken down, it was broad day when he arrived at Hyde Park, and the Earl of Pembroke was posted with the Royal forces to receive him.
Lady Jane Grey watching the Execution of her Husband. (See page 368.)
The alarm in the palace that night had been inconceivable. The women were weeping and bewailing their danger, the councillors and ministers of the queen were crowding round her, and imploring her to take refuge in the Tower. Gardiner on his knees besought her to comply and to enter a boat which awaited her at Whitehall Stairs. But Mary, with the spirit of the Tudor was, amid all the terror and heart-failing around, calm and resolute, and replied that "she would set no example of cowardice. If Pembroke and Clinton were true to their posts she would not desert hers." ​Lord Clinton headed the cavalry, and took his station with a battery of cannon on the rising ground opposite to the palace of St. James's, at the top of the present St. James's Street, and his cavalry extended from that spot to the present Jermyn Street. All that quarter of dense building, including Piccadilly, Pall Mall, and St. James's Square, was then open and called St. James's Fields. About nine o'clock appeared the advanced guard of Wyatt's army. The morning was dismal, gloomy, and rainy, and his troops, who had been wading through muddy roads all night, were in no condition to face a fresh army. Many had deserted at Kingston, many more had dropped off since, and seeing the strength of the force placed to obstruct him, he divided his own into three parts. One of these, led by Captain Cobham, took the way through St. James's Park at the back of the palace, which was barricaded at all points, and guards stationed at all the windows, even those of the queen's bed-chamber and withdrawing-rooms. Cobham's division fired on the palace as it passed, whilst another division under Captain Knevet, holding more to the right, assaulted the palaces of Westminster and Whitehall.
But Wyatt, at the head of the main division, charged Clinton's cavalry; the cannon were brought up, and a general engagement took place betwixt the rebel army and the troops both under Clinton and the infantry under Pembroke. Wyatt's charge seemed to make the cavalry give way, but it was only a stratagem on the part of Clinton, who opened his ranks to let Wyatt and about 400 of his followers pass, when he closed and cut off the main body from their commander. In all Wyatt's proceedings he displayed great bravery, but little military experience or caution.
His main forces, now deprived of their leader, wavered and gave way, but instead of breaking took another course to reach the City. Wyatt, as if unconscious that he had left the great body of his army behind him, and had now the enemy betwixt it and himself, rushed along past Charing Cross and through the Strand to Ludgate, in the fond hope still that the citizens would admit him and join him. In the passages of the Strand were posted bodies of soldiers under the Earl of Worcester and the contemptible Courtenay, who, on the sight of Wyatt, fled. It was supposed to be cowardice on his part, but was most probably treason, for he had engaged to unite with Wyatt, but had not the honesty to do one thing or another. He was at once traitor to the queen and to Wyatt—a miserable coward and poltroon.
On reaching Ludgate, Wyatt found the gates closed, and instead of the citizens who had promised to receive him, Lord William Howard appeared over the gate, crying, sternly, "Avaunt, traitor! avaunt; you enter not here!" Finding no access there, the unhappy man turned to rejoin and assist his troops, but he was met by those of Pembroke, who had poured after him like a flood. In the desperation of despair he fought his way back as far as the Temple, where he found only about fifty of his followers surviving. Then Norroy King-at-Arms rode up to him and called upon him to yield, and not madly to sacrifice the lives of his brave associates. Wyatt continued fighting like a maniac, but was forced back by the overwhelming body of opponents down Fleet Street, till, sitting completely exhausted on a fish-stall opposite to the Belle Sauvage, he threw away his sword, which was broken, and surrendered himself to Sir Maurice Berkeley, who immediately mounted him behind him and carried him off to Court.
Meantime the battle raged around the palaces of Westminster and Whitehall. Knevet's forces attacked the rear of these two palaces, whilst the troops of Cobham had pushed their way past St. James's Palace to Charing Cross, and were stoutly fighting with the soldiers of Pembroke and Clinton. Had Wyatt been able to cut his way back to Cobham at Charing Cross, the issue might have been doubtful; but he was missing, and the brave Kentish men were obliged to contend under every disadvantage. They were covered with mud and soaked with rain from their wretched night-march, and the queen's troops cried, "Down with the draggletails!" Still the fight continued: the hottest work was about the rear of Westminster Palace, which was chiefly protected by the gate-house, an old castellated portal leading to the abbey. The queen is said to have stood on the gallery of the gate-house in the fiercest crisis of the battle, and saw her guards under Sir John Gage give way before the insurgents led on by Knevet. Sir John himself, an old man, was knocked down in the mud, but was recovered, and conveyed into the palace court. The guards rushed into the court after him and ran to hide themselves in the offices. The porter managed to clap to the gates, and exclude the enemy, and with them a considerable number of the guards. Their case being reported to the queen, she ordered the gates to be flung open, but had it announced to them that she expected them to stand to their arms and defend the palace. The lawyers, who had been pleading in Westminster Hall in full armour, came to their aid and greatly encouraged them.
It would seem that by this time the queen had retreated to Whitehall, for we are told that Courtenay, having fled from Wyatt, rushed into her presence there, crying that "her battle was broke, that all was lost and surrendered to Wyatt." Mary replied with infinite scorn, "that such might be the opinion of those who dared not to go near enough to see the truth of the trial, but that for herself, she would abide the upshot of her rightful quarrel, or die with the brave men then fighting for her." The palace at that moment was surrounded by the forces of Cobham, and the contest was raging at Charing Cross, from which they could hear the firing and shouting. The gentlemen-at-arms had hard work to beat back the assailants with their battle-axes, from both the front and the rear of the palace. They were continually discouraged by fugitives from the battle running thither and crying, "Away, away, all is lost! a barge, a barge!" But the queen would not move a step, nor did she change colour, but asking where Lord Pembroke was, and being told in the battle, "Well, then," she replied, "all that dare not fight may fall to prayers, and I warrant we shall hear better news anon. God will not deceive me, in whom my chief trust is."
Pembroke's detachment had now fought its way to the vicinity of the palace, and the queen being made aware of it, went out to the front and stood betwixt two gentlemen-at-arms within arquebuse shot of the enemy to ​witness the last struggle. Pembroke routed the enemy, and the band of gentlemen-at-arms, all of them men of family and many of them of high rank, being then admitted to the queen's presence, she thanked them most cordially for their gallant defence of her palace and person. It is difficult to say whether they or their queen had shown the more undaunted spirit.
Carving ascribed to John Dudley, in the Beauchamp Tower.
Mary had displayed the most extraordinary clemency on the termination of the former conspiracy, for which not only the emperor but her own ministers had blamed her. Her Council now urged her to make a more salutary example of these offenders, to prevent a repetition of rebellion. On the previous occasion she had permitted only three of the ringleaders to be put to death. On this occasion five of the chief conspirators were condemned, and four of them were executed. Croft being pardoned. Suffolk foil without any commiseration. It was difficult to decide whether his folly or his ingratitude had been the greater. He had twice been a traitor to the queen, the second time after being most mercifully pardoned. He had twice put his amiable and excellent daughter's life in jeopardy; the second time after seeing how hopeless was the attempt to place her on the throne, and therefore, to a certainty, by the second revolt, involving her death; and to add to his infamy, he endeavoured to win escape for himself by betraying others. He was beheaded on the 23rd of February. Wyatt was kept in the Tower till the 11th of April, when he was executed. Unlike Suffolk, he tried to exculpate others, declaring in his last moments that neither the Princess Elizabeth nor Courtenay, who were suspected of being privy to his designs, knew anything of them. Wyatt seems to have been a brave and honest man, who believed himself acting the part of a patriot in endeavouring to preserve the country from the Spanish yoke, and who, in the sincerity of his own heart, had too confidently trusted to the assurances of faithless men. Had he succeeded, and placed the Protestant Princess Elizabeth on the throne, his name, instead of remaining that of traitor, would have stood side by side with that of Hampden. His body was quartered and exposed in different places. His head was stuck on a pole at Hay Hill, near Hyde Park, whence it was stolen by some of his friends.
On the 17th of the same month Lord Thomas Grey, the brother of Suffolk, was executed on Tower Hill, and William Thomas, who was clerk of the Council in the last reign, and who wrote a very apologetic account of the deeds of Henry VIII., was hanged on the 18th of May at Tyburn, after having attempted suicide in prison.
Sir Nicholas Throckmorton was the sixth, who was tried at Guildhall on the 17th of April, the very day of Lord Grey's execution. His condemnation and death were regarded as certain; but on being brought to the bar he adroitly pleaded that the recent statute abolishing all treasons since the reign of Edward III., covered anything which he could possibly have done, and that his offence, being only words, were by the same statute declared to be no overt act at all. He stated this with so much skill and eloquence, at the same time contending that there was not a particle of evidence of his having been an active accomplice of the rebels, that the jury acquitted him. The judges were confounded at such a result. "How!" cried Sir Thomas Bromley, the lord chief justice, "remember yourselves better. This business concerns the queen's highness. Take heed what ye do."
Inscription cut by the Husband of Lady Jane Grey on the wall of his prison.
The jury, one and all respectable London merchants, stood to their verdict, and no brow-beating on the part of the attorney-general, or menaces on the part of the judges, could intimidate them to surrender it. Sir Nicholas claimed to be liberated on the plain verdict of the jury, and the lord chief justice having no other alternative, admitted that he must discharge him on the payment of fees, but, added he, with a lawyer's ready sophistry, "Take him back. Master Lieutenant, to the Tower, nevertheless, for there are other things to be laid to his charge." Sir Nicholas was remanded and kept prisoner still for some time, but finally escaped with less punishment than his independent jury. It was so strange a novelty for a jury to exercise its most undoubted right, that the attorney-general suggested that they should each be bound in a recognisance of £500, to answer to such charges as the queen might present against them for their conduct; they were, therefore, notwithstanding their remonstrances, committed to prison. Four of them in a while made their submission, implored pardon, and were discharged: the other and nobler eight were detained in prison for more than six months, when they were brought into the abominable and illegal court of Star Chamber, where they as boldly declared that they had given their verdict according to their consciences, and demanded to be set at liberty. The judges, astonished and most indignant at such daring, decreed that the foreman and the other members of the jury who had spoken so undauntedly ​in court should pay £2,000 each as a fine, and the rest 1,000 marks each. They refused, and were recommitted to prison, whence they did not escape till they had been there altogether eight months, and paid five of them £220 a-piece, and the other three, who were much poorer men, £60 each.
Of the humbler victims, Brett, the captain of the train-bands, and about twenty of his common soldiers, who had gone over to Wyatt at Rochester Bridge, were sent down there and executed as traitors, and gibbeted. A proclamation was issued, forbidding any one on pain of death to harbour any of Wyatt's faction, and commanding all men to bring them forth and deliver them forthwith to the lord mayor and the queen's justices.
"By reason of this proclamation," says Holinshed, "a great number of these poor caitiffs were brought forth, being so many in number that all the prisons in number sufficed not to receive them; so that for lack of place they were fain to bestow them in divers churches of the said City. And shortly after there were set up in London, for a terror to the common sort—because the White-Coats (train-bands) being sent out of the City, as before ye have heard, revolted from the queen's part to the aid of Wyatt—twenty pair of gallows, on the which were hanged in several places to the number of fifty persons."
These gibbets and their revolting burdens were not removed till July, when Phillip was about to enter London. Four hundred other prisoners were conducted to the palace with halters about their necks, where the queen appeared at a balcony, pronounced their pardon, and dismissed them to their homes. Mary has been accused of great cruelty in the punishment of these insurgents, but her really cruel deeds had not commenced yet. To us there appears a wonderful clemency and moderation in her treatment of them. When we consider that this was a second attempt to dethrone her within six months, and remember the surprising vengeance which her father, and even her brother, took on like occasions, and still more the bloody recompence of rebellion in 1715 and 1745, we must pronounce the conduct of Mary mild in the extreme.
The Princess Elizabeth at Traitor's Gate. (See page 368.)
The execution which caused and still causes the deepest interest, and which always appears as a shadow on the character of Queen Mary, was that of her cousin Lady Jane Grey. Till this second unfortunate insurrection, Mary steadily refused to listen to any persuasions to shed the blood of Lady Jane. She had had her tried and condemned to death, but she still permitted her to live, gave her a considerable degree of liberty and unusual indulgences, and it was generally understood that she meant eventually to pardon her. The ambassadors of Charles V. had strenuously urged her to prevent future danger by executing her rival, but she had replied that she could not find in her conscience to put her unfortunate kinswoman to death, who had not been an accomplice of Northumberland, but merely an unresisting instrument in his hands; but now that the very mischief had taken place which the emperor and her own Council had prognosticated, she was importuned on all sides to take what they described as the only prudent course. Poynet, the Bishop of Winchester, says that those lords of the Council who had been the most instrumental at the death of Edward VI. in thrusting Royalty on Lady Jane—namely, Pembroke and Winchester—and who had been amongst the first to denounce Mary as illegitimate, were now the most remorseless advocates for Lady Jane's death.
Reception of the First Russian Embassy in England. (See page 372.)
​Jane permission to have an interview with her husband, but she declined the favour as too trying, saying she should meet him within a few hours in heaven. The queen also sent to her her own chaplain, Dr. Feckenham, the Dean of St. Paul's, to offer her religious consolation; but Lady Jane, knowing that there could be neither consolation nor use in discussing their differing creeds, told him her time was too short for controversy. She added that she was prepared to receive patiently her death in any manner it would please the queen to appoint; that it was true her flesh shuddered, as was natural to frail mortality, but her spirit would spring rejoicing into the eternal light, where she hoped the angels of God would receive it. She saw her husband go to execution from the window of the lodging in Master Partridge's house, and beheld the headless trunk borne back to be buried in the chapel. Lord Guildford Dudley was executed on Tower Hill in sight of a vast concourse, but a scaffold was erected for her in the Tower green. Immediately after his corpse had passed she was led forth by the Lieutenant of the Tower, and appeared to go to her fate without any discomposing fear, but in a serious frame, not a tear dimming her eye, though her gentlewomen, Elizabeth Tilney and Mistress Helen, were weeping greatly. She continued engaged in prayer, which she read from a book, till she came to the scaffold; there she made a short speech to the spectators, declaring that she deserved her punishment for allowing herself to be made the instrument of the ambition of others. "That device, however," she said, "was never of my seeking, but by the counsel of those who appeared to have better understanding of such things than I. As for the procurement or desire of such dignity by me, I wash my hands thereof before God and all you Christian people this day." She caused her gentlewomen to disrobe her, bandaged her own eyes with a handkerchief, and laying her head on the block, at one stroke it was severed from the body. "Such," says Bishop Goodwin, "was the end of Jane Grey, a lady renowned for the greatness of her birth, but far more for her virtues and excellency of art; who, swayed by the ambition of her father-in-law and imperious mother, took on her that fatal title of queen: and being presently hurried from a kingdom to a scaffold, suffered for the faults of others, having overcome all the frowns of adverse fortune by constancy and innocence." It should not be forgotten that this amiable young woman, the victim of hard and ruthless politicians, was only sixteen years of age.
But this conspiracy had approached the queen much more nearly than in the person of Wyatt or the friends of Lady Jane Grey. It was discovered by intercepted letters of Wyatt, of Noailles, the French ambassador, and by one supposed to have been written by Elizabeth herself to the French king, that she was deeply implicated, and that the design of marrying her and Courtenay and placing them on the throne was well known, and apparently quite agreeable to her.
The refusal of Elizabeth to join her sister at the outbreak of the insurrection, and the flight of Courtenay at the moment of Wyatt's entry of London, excited suspicion, and this suspicion was soon converted into something very like fact by the three despatches of Noailles, written in cipher, and dated January 26th, 28th, and 30th. These despatches detailed the steps taken in her favour. Besides these there were two notes sent by Wyatt to Elizabeth, the first advising her to remove to Donnington, the next informing her of his successful entry into Southwark. Then came what appeared clearly a letter of Elizabeth to the King of France. The Duke of Suffolk's confession was again corroborative of these details, namely, that the object of the insurrection was to depose Mary and place Elizabeth on the throne. William Thomas supported this, adding that it was intended to put the queen immediately to death. Croft confessed that he had solicited Elizabeth to return to Donnington; Lord Russell said he had conveyed letters from Wyatt to Elizabeth, and another witness deposed to his knowledge of a correspondence betwixt Courtenay and Carew respecting Courtenay's marriage with the princess.
With all these startling facts in her possession, Mary wrote to Elizabeth with an air of unsuspicious kindness, requesting her to come to her from Ashridge, informing her that malicious and ill-disposed persons accused her of favouring the late insurrection; but appearing not to believe it, and giving as a reason for her wishing her to be nearer, that the times were so unsettled that she would be in greater security with her. Elizabeth pleaded illness for not complying; but the queen sent Hastings, Southwell, and Cornwallis, members of Council, whom she received in her bed, and complained of being afflicted with a severe and dangerous malady. Mary, well acquainted with the deep dissimulation of her sister's character, then sent three of her own physicians, accompanied by Lord William Howard; and the physicians having given their opinion that she was quite able to travel, she was obliged to accompany them by short stages, borne in a litter. She appeared pale and bloated. It was said that she was unrecoverably poisoned; but in a week she was quite well, and demanded an audience of the queen; but Mary had so much evidence in her hands of Elizabeth's proceedings, that she sent her word that it was necessary first to prove her innocence.
Courtenay had been arrested on the 12th of February, at the house of the Earl of Essex, and committed to the Tower. Mary was averse to send her sister there, and asked each of the lords of the Council in rotation to admit Elizabeth to their houses, and to take charge of her. All without exception declined the dangerous office; she was, therefore, compelled to sign the warrant for her committal, and she was conducted to the Tower by the Earl of Sussex and another nobleman on the 18th of March. Even whilst performing this duty, it appears that Elizabeth had influence enough with these noblemen to make them dilatory in the execution of their office, to the great anger of the queen, who upbraided them with their remissness, telling them they dared not have done such a thing in her father's time, and wishing that "he were alive for a month." Elizabeth on entering the Tower was dreadfully afraid that she was doomed to leave it as so many princes and nobles had done, without a head. She inquired whether Lady Jane's scaffold were removed, and was greatly relieved to hear that it was. But what alarmed Elizabeth still more, was that the Constable of the Tower was discharged from his office, and Sir Henry Bedingfield, a zealous Romanist, appointed in his place. ​The fact of Sir Robert Brackenbury having been seventy years before, in like manner, removed, and Sir James Tyrrell put in, when the princes were murdered, appeared an ominous precedent, but there was no real cause for apprehension; Mary had no wish to shed her sister's blood. Elizabeth, spite of the evidence against her, protested vehemently her innocence, and wished "that God might confound her eternally if she was in any manner implicated with Wyatt."
The Court of Spain, through Renard the ambassador, urged perseveringly the execution of Elizabeth and Courtenay. Renard represented from his sovereign that there could be no security for her throne so long as Elizabeth and Courtenay were suffered to live. But Mary replied that though they had both of them, no doubt, listened willingly to the conspirators, and would have been ready had they succeeded to step into her throne, yet they had been guilty of no overt act, and therefore, by the constitutional law of England which had been enacted in her first Parliament, they could not be put to death, but could only be imprisoned, or suffer forfeiture of their goods. Some authorities accuse Gardiner of joining in the plan for the execution of Elizabeth, at the same time that he was earnest to save Courtenay; but others exonerate him of this charge, and make him more consistent.
In the Council it was, moreover, mooted to send Elizabeth abroad, either to be kept at Brussels, or put under the care of the Queen of Hungary, or—the favourite scheme of Philip—to marry her to Philibert Emanuel of Savoy, the disinherited Prince of Piedmont. But Mary would consent to none of these plans contrary to Elizabeth's free will and consent; she therefore removed her sister from the Tower, first to Richmond, and thence, under the care of Lord Williams of Tame and Sir Henry Bedingfield, to Woodstock. Bedingfield, who was keeper, does not seem, with all his vigilance, to have been an unkind one, for he was in favour with Elizabeth after she became queen, and frequently repaired to Court to pay his respects to her. Courtenay, in the week following Elizabeth's removal from the Tower, was also sent thence to Fotheringay Castle.
Mary had dismissed her Parliament on the 5th of May. Before this dissolution the peers had unanimously enacted that the ancient penalties against heretics should be enforced. These heretics were the members of the Church which these same peers, only four years before, had, with every appearance of enthusiasm, established; and, to add to the infamy of their character, Renard, the emperor's ambassador, openly boasted of having bribed them to this work of evil. Previous to the dissolution of Parliament, the queen had taken every opportunity of parading her religion before the people. On the 3rd of May, that is, in Rogation week, she had made a procession with five bishops mitred, and her heralds and sergeants-at-arms, to St. Giles's-in-the-Field, St. Martin's-in-the-Field, and to Westminster, where they had a sermon and song-mass, and made good cheer, and afterwards went about the park, and home to St. James's Court there.
These displays, and the approaching arrival of the Prince of Spain, gave the greatest disgust to a large body of her subjects, and there were various conspiracies against her life and reputation. The Court and clergy were greatly incensed at finding a cat with shorn crown, and in the costume of a Catholic priest, hanging on a gallows in Cheapside. As Dr. Pendleton was preaching Catholicism at St. Paul's Cross, he was shot at, and narrowly escaped with his life. A strange piece of mummery was also at this time played off in the City against the queen's religion. Crowds of people, said to amount to 17,000 at one time, were daily assembled about an empty house in Aldersgate Street, from the wall of which there came a voice, which many declared was that of an angel denouncing the queen's marriage. When the crowd shouted "God save the queen," it preserved silence. When they shouted "God save the Lady Elizabeth," it answered, "So be it." When they asked what the mass was, it answered, "Idolatry."
To examine into the character of this seditious oracle, the Council deputed Lord Admiral Howard and Lord Paget. They ordered the wall to be pulled down where the voice came from, and soon laid bare the spirit in the shape of a young woman of the name of Elizabeth Crofts, who confessed that she was hired for the purpose by one Drakes, a servant to Sir Anthony Neville. "She had lain whistling," says Stowe, "in a strange whistle made for the purpose; and there were other companions—one named Miles, clerk of St. Botolph's without Aldersgate, a player, a weaver, Hill, clerk of St. Leonard's, in Forbes Lane, and other confederates with her, which, putting themselves amongst the press, took upon them to interpret what the spirit said, expressing certain seditious words against the queen, the Prince of Spain, the mass confession, &c." Some said it was an angel and a voice from heaven, some the Holy Ghost, &c. The young woman was made to stand upon a scaffold at St. Paul's Cross during the sermon, and there before all the people to confess the trick. The punishment was certainly lenient. Henry VIII. would have burned her, and hanged all her accomplices. This clemency was even confessed by the queen's Protestant enemies, as in some doggrel verses laid on the desk of her chapel—
"And yet you do seem merciful
In midst of tyranny,
And holy, whereas you maintain
Most vile idolatry."
But very different were the atrocious attacks upon her character which were scattered about, both written and printed, and many of them of a very gross character industriously thrown in her way. Of all the strange conspiracies, however, against her, the strangest was that related by Lord Bacon:—"I have heard that there was a conspiracy to kill Queen Mary as she walked in St. James's Park, by means of a burning-glass, fixed on the leads of a neighbouring house."
Spite, however, of all warnings and the most universal expression of dislike to the match, Mary persisted in her engagement of marriage with Philip of Spain, though he himself showed no unequivocal reluctance to the completion of it; never writing to her, but submitting to his fate, as it were, in obedience to the parental command. At the end of May the unwilling bridegroom resigned his government of Castile—which he held for his insane grandmother, Juana—into the hands of his sister, the Princess-Dowager of Portugal, and bade adieu to his family. He embarked at Corunna on the 13th of July ​for England, and landed at Southampton on the 20th, after a week's voyage. Mary had discussed ere his arrival the position and title which Philip was to bear in England. She appeared disposed to give him all the power and dignity that she could, but in much of this she was very properly opposed by her Council, and especially by Gardiner, her chancellor, who, though he was a positive bigot and a fierce persecutor on account of religion, had many of the qualities of a sterling patriot. On the other hand, Renard was on the watch to claim for his master all the concessions possible. The first point mooted was whether the name of the king or the queen should stand first. Gardiner contended that as Mary was queen-regnant of her own kingdom, and Philip mere king-consort, the queen's name must take precedence. This Renard stoutly opposed, and as the queen was too ready to concede, it was decided that Philip's name should stand first. Mary next proposed that Philip should receive the honour of a coronation, but on this head Gardiner would not yield, and therefore the coronation was set aside. The queen next proposed, with as little success, that Philip should be crowned with the diadem of the queens-consort of England, and she was obliged to content herself with the arrangement that he should be invested with the collar and mantle of the Garter the moment he set foot on English ground.
These matters being settled, she retired with her Court to the palace of Guildford, to be near Southampton, where the prince was expected to land. When the fleet was expected in July she sent Lord Russell, privy-seal, to await his arrival, with the injunction to obey his commands in all things. This was the one weakness which ruined Mary's happiness, involved her in the horrors of persecution, and blackened her character to all futurity—the fond idea that she must in all things be subject to her husband.
Her courtiers were far from participating in this feeling. The Lord-Admiral Howard had been dispatched by Mary to meet and escort the prince to England. Howard was furnished with a fine fleet, and the emperor's ambassador, Renard, offered him a pension in token of the prince's sense of this service, but Howard declined accepting it, only referring him to the queen. Mary gave her consent for the grant: it in no degree subdued the blunt John Bullism of the admiral. The same ambassador was very soon excessively indignant at the admiral, on the joining of the fleets, irreverently calling the Spanish and Flemish vessels mussel-shells. Howard conceived a great contempt for the Spanish admiral, and quarrelled with him. The sailors were just as rough and uncomplimentary as their commander. They pushed and elbowed the Spanish sailors whenever they met, and the Spanish admiral forbade his men going on shore, during the month they lay off Corunna waiting for Philip, to prevent downright bloodshed. When they came into the narrow seas the English admiral insisted on the Spanish commander lowering topsails out of respect for the British fleet, and when he refused, Howard fired a gun over the admiral's ship, notwithstanding the prince being aboard, to compel him.
When the news arrived of Philip having landed at Southampton, the queen, who happened then to be at Windsor, set off the next day with a gay retinue to meet him at Winchester, where the marriage was fixed to take place. She arrived there on the 23rd of July, that is, three days after her bridegroom. He came attended by many Spanish officers of high rank, and amongst them the Duke of Alva, whose name afterwards became so infamous for his atrocities committed in the Netherlands on the Protestants. Philip, on ascending the stairs from the beach at Southampton, was received by a great concourse of nobles and ladies deputed for that purpose by the queen. He was immediately invested with the insignia of the order of the Garter, and, mounted on a beautiful genet, which the queen had sent him by the Master of the Horse, he rode to the church of the Holy Rood, and returned thanks for his safe voyage.
Philip was dressed simply in black velvet, having a barret-cap of the same, with small chains of gold. He was described as a man of singular beauty, but the judgment of others is not in accordance with these representations: "his complexion being cane-coloured, his hair sandy and scanty, his eyes small, blue, and weak, with a glowing expression of face, which is peculiarly odious in a person of very light complexion. A mighty volume of brain, although it sloped too much towards the top of the head, denoted that this unpleasant-looking prince was a man of considerable abilities."
The weather was terribly rainy and tempestuous although July. "It was a cruel rain," says Baoardo, an Italian who was present, through which Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, came to welcome Don Philip, accompanied by fifty gentlemen with rich gold chains about their necks, dressed in black velvet, passamented with gold, and a hundred other gentlemen dressed in black cloth bound with gold. The Duchess of Alva landed in the evening, and was carried on shore in a chair of black velvet, borne by four of her gentlemen. Don Philip dispatched the next morning his grand chamberlain, Don Ruy Gomez de Silva, with a magnificent offering of jewels of the value of 50,000 ducats, as a present to his Royal bride. That day being Sunday, after mass he dined in public, and was waited upon by his newly-appointed English officers of the household, to the great chagrin of his Spanish attendants, most of whom were, according to the marriage treaty, obliged to return with the Spanish fleet. Don Philip courted popularity. He told his new attendants in Latin that he was come to live among them like an Englishman; and in proof thereof, drank some ale for the first time, which he gravely commended as "the wine of the country." The next day he and his retinue set forward for Winchester in still pouring rain; which they, however, only suffered in common with the Earl of Pembroke and a splendid cavalcade of 150 gentlemen and nobles in black velvet and gold chains, and a body-guard of 100 archers mounted, and wearing the prince's livery of yellow cloth, striped with red velvet, and with cordons of white and crimson silk. Besides these there were 4,000 spectators variously mounted, who closed the procession.
A ludicrous incident soon occurred. A gentleman came riding fast from the queen, praying him to proceed no further in such weather. Philip, seeing him present a small ring, and but imperfectly understanding his language, immediately imagined that the queen had sent to warn him of some menaced danger from his discontented subjects, for he was well aware how ill-disposed they were ​to the marriage. He therefore called Alva and Egmont to him, in great consternation, and consulted what was to be done; but a nobleman, who overheard their discourse, dissipated their alarm by telling them in French that the queen had sent her loving greeting, and prayed him not to commence his journey to Winchester in such weather. The message was intended to reach him before setting out.
All fears being dissipated, the prince resolved gallantly to go forward, and the procession proceeded with true Spanish gravity; so that, although Winchester is only ten miles from Southampton, it was betwixt six and seven o'clock when they arrived.
The queen was not favoured with any better weather when three days afterwards she arrived and took up her abode in the episcopal palace. The wedding ceremony took place in the cathedral with great state and much magnificence. The chair on which Mary sat, which was said to have been sent from Rome and blessed by the Pope, is still preserved in the cathedral. After the marriage came great banqueting; but however the king and queen might harmonise, there was many a feud and frown amongst their followers. One of the most singular men of the age, Edward Underhill, called the "hot gospeller," who, though a most independent and undaunted Protestant, was always one of the most chivalrous attendants of the queen as gentleman-at-arms, had been strongly objected to by the Earl of Arundel as being included in the cortége. He was not the less coolly looked on by his old enemy, Norreys, now queen's usher. Norreys, coming into the presence-chamber, and seeing Underhill, fixed his eyes on him, and demanded what he did there. "Marry, sir," replied the bold Protestant, "what do you do here?" Norreys, confounded at this address, vowed to report him to the queen, when another of the gentlemen-at-arms condemned the language of Norreys, declaring that Underhill was one of the most devoted and respected servants of Her Majesty, and was only discharging his proper office.
By slow degrees the new-married monarchs approached their capital. They went first to Basing House on a visit to Paulet, Marquis of Winchester, and thence to Windsor Castle, where, on the 5th of August, was held a grand festival of the Garter, at which Philip was admitted, and immediately took his place as the sovereign of the order. On the 9th they removed to Richmond Palace, where they remained till the 27th, embarking then on the Thames, and being rowed in great state to the City, where they were received with the usual pageantry and quaint devices, amidst which the citizens did not omit a hint of their regret at the change in religion. Amongst the figures stood one of Henry VIII. holding a book, as if he would present it to the queen, inscribed, Verbum Dei. The queen was indignant at the reminder, and had the words so hastily painted out, that they obliterated her father's fingers with them.
The most grateful sight to the citizens, and the best calculated to make the presence of the Spaniards tolerable, was that of ninety-five chests of bullion, each chest a yard and a quarter long. This goodly load was piled in twenty carts, and conducted to the Tower with all befitting ostentation.
Having held their Court at Whitehall and received the visits of their nobility and gentry, Philip and Mary took the occasion of the death of the old Duke of Norfolk to put a stop to the festivities, to dismiss the courtiers, and to retire to Hampton Court, where they remained for some time in great seclusion, so much so that the public found cause of great complaint in the new Spanish custom. "Formerly," the people said, "the gates of our palaces were open all day long, and the faithful subject could have access, at least, to a view of his sovereign;" but now, since the Spanish marriage, the gates were closed, and no one could be admitted without stating his identity and his business.
If Mary, however, shut out her people, she did not close her heart to her guilty sister. She sent for Elizabeth, who was brought under a strong guard from Woodstock. On arriving at Hampton Court she had her admitted to her bed-chamber, where Elizabeth fell on her knees, and protested as firmly as ever her innocence. If the statements of the intercepted letters are to be relied on, Mary had too convincing proofs in her own hands to allow her to give credit to Elizabeth's asseverations, and to cut the matter short she replied, putting a valuable ring on Elizabeth's finger, "Whether you be guilty or innocent, I forgive you." Mary, however, without making Elizabeth a prisoner, thought it necessary to place a trusty person in her house under the character of comptroller of her household, and Sir Thomas Pope was chosen for this office. Subsequent events showed the prudence of this arrangement, for though Elizabeth was repeatedly tempted to listen to artful plotters, such a guard was maintained over her that she never again fell under disgrace with the queen.
On the 11th of November the third Parliament of Mary's reign was summoned, and she and her Royal husband rode from Hampton Court to Whitehall to open the session. The king and queen rode side by side, a sword of state being borne before each to betoken their independent sovereignties. The queen was extremely anxious to restore the lands reft from the Church by her father and brother to their ancient uses, but she must have known little of the men into whose hands those lands had fallen, if she could seriously hope for such a sacrifice. The Earl of Bedford, than whom no one had more deeply gorged himself with Church plunder, on hearing the proposition, tore his rosary from his girdle, and flung it into the fire, saying, he valued the abbey of Wobern more than any fatherly council that could come from Rome. All the rest of the council were of the same way of thinking as Bedford, and Mary saw that it was a hopeless case to move them on that point, though she set them a very honourable example by surrendering the lands which still remained in the hands of the Crown, to the value of £60,000 a year.
Though Mary could not recover the property to the Church, she resolved to restore that Church to unity with Rome. She expressed her earnest desire to have the presence of her kinsman, Cardinal Pole, in her kingdom, and he now set out for England, from which he had been banished so many years; and he rendered this return the more easy, by bringing with him from the Pope a bull, which confirmed the nobles in their ​possession of the Church property, on condition that the Papal supremacy was restored. The queen dispatched Sir Edward Hastings to accompany the cardinal; and Sir William Cecil, who had been Edward's unhesitating minister in stripping the Church, set out of his own accord to pay homage to the Papal representative. Cecil's only real religion was ambition, and Mary knew that so well that, spite of all his time-serving, she never would place any confidence in him, whence his bitter hostility to her memory.
Pole, on his arrival, ascended the Thames from Greenwich in a splendid state barge, at the prow of which he fixed a large silver cross, thus marking the entrance of the legatine and Papal authority into the country, as it were, in a triumphal manner.
Gardiner, the chancellor, received him at the Water-gate; King Philip at the grand entrance, and the queen at the head of the stairs, where she exclaimed on seeing him, "The day that I ascended the throne I did not feel such joy." His arrival was celebrated by grand banquetings and a tournament, at which the English and Spanish nobles contended, with King Philip at their head. In this tournament the Spaniards introduced a novelty—the Moorish game of throwing the jeered, or cane.
The cardinal had assigned him for his residence the archiepiscopal palace at Lambeth, vacant by the imprisonment of the primate; and thus was the old faith placed in the ascendancy, its highest representative in this country occupying the official residence of the reforming metropolitan.
On the 24th of November the king and queen met the united Parliament in the presence-chamber of the palace of Whitehall: this was owing to the indisposition of the queen. Gardiner introduced the business, which, he told them, was the weightiest that ever happened in this realm, and begged their utmost attention to Cardinal Pole, who would open the same. Pole then made a long speech, reverting to his own history as well as that of the nation. All listened in solemn seriousness and yet apprehension when he announced to them the fact that the Pope was ready to absolve the English from their crimes of heresy and contumacy. But when he added that this was to be done without any reclamation of the Church lands, there was a unanimous vote of both Houses for reconciliation with Rome.
The nest morning, the king, queen, and Parliament met again in the presence-chamber, when, Pole presenting himself, Philip and Mary rose, and bowing profoundly to him, presented him with the vote of Parliament. The cardinal, on receiving it, offered up thanks to God for this auspicious event, and then ordered his commission to be read. The Peers and Commons then fell on their knees and received absolution and benediction from the hands of the cardinal, and thus for a time again was the great breach betwixt England and the Papacy healed, or rather skinned over. The whole assembly, including their majesties, proceeded to St. Stephen's Chapel, where "Te Deum" was sung, and the next Sunday the legate made his public entry into London, and he and Philip attended at St. Paul's Cross, where Gardiner preached, making great lamentation over his own backslidings and those of the nation in the reign of Henry VIII., and exhorting all now to do as he had done, and make reparation for their apostacy by seeking the unity of the Church.
Parliament proceeded to pass acts confirming all that was now done, repealing all the statutes which had passed against the Roman Church since the 20th of Henry VIII., and the clergy in Convocation making formal resignation of the possessions which had passed into the hands of laymen. The legate also issued decrees authorising all cathedral churches, hospitals, and schools, founded since the schism, to be preserved, and that all persons who had contracted marriages within prescribed degrees should remain married notwithstanding.
The Christmas of 1554 was celebrated with unusual splendour and gaiety. The wedding festivities of the queen had been cut short by the death of Norfolk, and it was intended to make these a sort of reparation to the pleasure-loving courtiers. The queen and the Princess Elizabeth being reconciled, that lady was present and treated with all distinction by both the king and queen. It was a popular idea that Philip was anxious to send Elizabeth to Spain and have her consigned to some convent there, but Philip was too politic for that. He had no children by his English queen, though there were confident expectations of that kind, and till he was secure of an English heir, it was his policy to maintain Elizabeth in the position of the heir-apparent, as a set off to the Queen of Scots, who was about to be married to the heir of the French throne.
Besides Elizabeth, there were now assembled at the English Court a number of persons destined to fill the most prominent places in the history of Europe, for good as for evil. There was the Duke of Alva, veiling under the graces of a fine person one of the most cruel and dangerous spirits which ever exercised its malignant force on human destinies. There were two, also, of the celebrated victims of Philip and Alva—the Counts Egmont and Horne, the patriots of Flanders, who shed their blood on the scaffold for defending their country against the tyranny of this king and this his minister. There was Ruy Gomez, the future famous prime minister of Spain; Philibert Emanuel of Savoy, the lover of Elizabeth and conqueror of St. Quintin; and the Prince of Orange, calmly mixing with the festive throng, unconscious that it was his high destiny to pluck oppressed Holland from the iron grasp of this same Philip. So closed, in a blaze of brief splendour, the year 1554.
To Mary the honour is due of concluding, early in the following year, the first commercial treaty with Russia. She sent Chancellor, the northern explorer, on an embassy to the Czar Iwan Wasiljevitch, who brought back with him Osep Napea Gregorivitch as the first Russian ambassador who ever appeared in England. She incorporated by charter the company of merchant adventurers trading to Muscovy. Napea was received with great distinction by Mary at Court, in May, 1555, and astonished the courtiers by the enormous size of the pearls and gems on his cap, and the ouches which he wore on his robes.
The year 1555 opened with dark and threatening ​features. The queen's health was failing; and, under the idea that she was merely suffering maternal inconvenience, she was rapidly advancing in a dropsy which, in less than two years, was destined to sink her to the tomb. The king, gloomy, despotic, and, consequently, unpopular, though he often endeavoured to act against his nature, and assume a popular character, still hoping for an heir to the English crown, had obtained from Parliament an act constituting him regent, in case Mary should die after the birth of a child, during the minority of that child. Thus, whether the queen lived or died, he appeared to possess a reasonable prospect of obtaining the supreme power in this country; and how he would have used it, we may judge from his government of Spain and the Netherlands. If the child was a female, he was made governor till her fifteenth year; if a male, till his eighteenth year. Philip protested on his honour that he would give up the government faithfully when the child came of age; but Lord Paget asked "who was to sue the bond if he did not?"—a suggestion never forgiven. With this flattering but illusive prospect before him, the tempest of persecution soon burst forth; and, had Providence permitted, England would soon have exhibited the same scene of tyranny, bloodshed, and insult which Flanders did under his rule. As it was, for a short period, terrible war for conscience' sake burst forth, the prisons were thronged, and the fires of death blazed out in every quarter of the island. Mary, with failing health, and doting absurdly on her husband, was easily drawn to acquiesce in deeds and measures which have made her name a terror and a byword to all future times.
Room in which Lord Guildford Dudley was imprisoned in the Beauchamp Tower.
One little gleam of mercy and magnanimity preceded this reign of horror, like the streak of red in the morning sky which often heralds a tempestuous day. Gardiner, accompanied by several members of the Council, went to the Tower, and by royal authority, and, as he said, at the intercession of the emperor, liberated the state prisoners confined there on account of their participation in the attempts of Northumberland and Wyatt. These were Holgate, Archbishop of York, Ambrose, Henry, and Andrew Dudley, sons to the late Duke of Northumberland, Sir James Crofts, and Sir Nicholas Throckmorton. Courtenay, who had been liberated from Fotheringay, received a permission to travel, a permission believed to be tantamount to a command. Indeed, the presence of this handsome but contemptible man could not be pleasant to himself or any one else at the English Court. He had shown himself cowardly, dissipated, and ungrateful. He had rebelled in his heart, if not by any daring act, against Mary, who liberated him from a life-long prison. He had entered into those designs with Elizabeth which must make his presence a continual reproach to her, and he had not strength of character to grow wiser or better by experience. He appears to have continued his life of low debauch on the Continent, and died at Padua in 1556, leaving the title of Earl of Devon extinct in the Courtenay family, for nearly three centuries.
In February, the Viscount Montague, the Bishop of Ely, and Sir Edward Carne, were dispatched to Rome to ratify the union which had taken place betwixt England and the Papal Court. Two Popes died whilst they were on their journey, Julius III. and Marcellus II.; and Paul IV. was elected just before their arrival. Cardinal Pole having on both occasions been an unsuccessful candidate for the tiara. Paul received the ambassadors, naturally, with much pleasure. At the petition of Philip and Mary, he raised the lordship of Ireland to the dignity of a kingdom. The ​ambassadors, on their part, recognised the Pontiff as the head of the universal Church, presented him a copy of the Act by which his authority was restored in England, and obtained his ratification of the acts of his legate, granting absolution to all for the offence of the schism, and confirming the bishoprics created during that period.
Whilst the ambassadors were thus cementing again the ancient alliance at Rome, the Spanish rule in England was growing every day more unpopular. Few of the Spaniards as had been allowed to remain, the English saw them with unconquerable aversion. They could not pass them in the streets without insulting them. These fracas became so frequent and violent, and the English had such a positive notion that Philip meant to bring this country under Spanish rule, that he was obliged to try and hang a Spaniard who had killed an Englishman at Charing Cross. The people were ready to listen to any story which confirmed this idea, or which promised to unsettle the Government, and amongst other projects there was one of the Simnel and Warbeck class, though a very threadbare one.
A youth appeared in Kent, who gave himself out as Edward VI., who, he declared, had only been in a trance, and not actually dead, and had been recovered from the tomb. The story, improbable as it was, soon flew far and wide amongst the people, and reaching the ears of the Council, excited so much apprehension, that the lad was seized at Eltham, and conducted to Hampton Court. He there confessed that he had been put upon this scheme, and he was sent in a cart through London with a paper over his head, stating that he was the impostor who had pretended to be King Edward. He was then conveyed to Westminster, exhibited in the hall, and afterwards whipped at a cart's tail back through the streets of London, and then sent off into the north, whence, it seems, he came. Being afterwards found rambling about and repeating the same tale, he was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn, in the following year.
Before launching into the horrors that are now before us, we will quote the observations of Miss Strickland in her life of Queen Mary, because they take a view of the character of Mary, and of the real origin of the persecutions of her reign, different from the general estimate, and, at all events, deserving of being heard.
Noailles expressly assured his sovereign, the King of France, that it was of little use appealing to Queen Mary as an independent sovereign; for from the day of her marriage, Philip of Spain ruled virtually in every measure, domestic or foreign, in the kingdom of England.
"The bishops received notice to make processions and prayers for the life and safety of the heir to the throne, of which the queen expected to become mother.
"It is true that her hope of bringing offspring was utterly delusive; the increase of her figure was but symptomatic of dropsy, attended by a complication of the most dreadful disorders which can afflict the female frame, under which every faculty of her mind and body sank for months. At this time commenced that horrible persecution of the Protestants which has stained her name to all futurity; but if eternal obloquy was incurred by the half-dead queen, what is the due of the Parliaments which legalised the acts of cruelty committed in her name? Shall we call the House of Lords bigoted, when its majority, which sanctioned this wickedness, were composed of the same individuals who had planted, very recently, the Protestant Church of England? Surely not; for the name implies honest though wrong-headed attachment to one religion. Shall we suppose that the land groaned under the iron sway of a standing army? or that the Spanish bridegroom had introduced foreign forces? But reference to facts will prove that even Philip's household servants were sent back with his fleet, and a few valets, fools, and fiddlers belonging to the grandees, his bridesmen, were all the forces permitted to land—no very formidable band to Englishmen. The queen had kept her word rigorously when she asserted 'that no alteration should be made in religion without universal consent.'
"Three times in two years had she sent the House of Commons back to their constituents, although they were most compliant in any measure relative to her religion. If she had bribed one Parliament, why did she not keep it sitting during her short reign? If the Parliament had been honest as herself, her reign would have been the pride of her country, instead of its reproach; because if they had done their duty in guarding their fellow-creatures from bloody penal laws respecting religion, the queen, by her first regal act in restoring the free constitution of the great Plantagenets, had put it out of the power of her Government to take furtive vengeance on any individual who opposed it. She had exerted all the energies of her great eloquence to impress on the minds of her judges that they were to sit 'as indifferent umpires between herself and her people.' She had no standing army to awe Parliament—no rich civil list to bribe them. By restoring the great estates of the Howards, the Percys, and many other victims of Henry VIII., and of the regency of Edward VI., by giving back the revenues of the plundered bishoprics and the Church lands possessed by the Crown, she had reduced herself to poverty as complete as the most enthusiastic lover of freedom could desire. But her personal expenditure was extremely economical, and she successfully struggled with poverty till her husband involved England in a French war. The French ambassador affirmed in his despatches that the queen was so very poor that her want of money was apparent in everything pertaining to herself, even to the dishes put upon her own table. Such self-denial contributed to render her unpopular among her courtiers, and penuriousness has been added to the list of her ill qualities; but those who reckon up the vast sums she had restored to their rightful owners, or refused to appropriate in confiscation, will allow that hers was an honourable poverty.
"The fact of whether the torpid and half-dead queen was the instigator of a persecution the memory of which curdles the blood with horror, at this distance of time, is a question of less moral import at the present day than a close analysation of the evils with which selfish interests had infected the legislative powers of our country. It was in vain that Mary almost abstained from creation of peers, and restored the ancient custom. ​of annual Parliaments; the majority of the persons composing the Houses of Peers and Commons were dishonest, indifferent to all religions, and willing to establish the most opposing rituals so that they might retain their grasp on the accursed thing with which their very souls were corrupted—for corrupted they were, though not by the unfortunate queen. The Church lands with which Henry VIII. had bribed his aristocracy, titled and untitled, into co-operation with his enormities, both personal and political, had induced national depravity. The leaders of the Marian persecution, Gardiner and Bonner, were of the apostate class of persecutors. 'Flesh bred in murder,' they had belonged to the Government of Henry VIII., which sent the zealous Roman Catholic and the pious Protestant to the same stake. For the sake of worldly advantage, either for ambition or power, Gardiner and Bonner had, for twenty years, promoted the burning or quartering of the advocates of Papal supremacy; they now turned with the tide, and burnt, with the same degree of conscientiousness, the opposers of Papal supremacy.
"The persecution appears to have been greatly aggravated by the caprice or the private vengeance of these prelates; for a great jurist of our times (Sir James Macintosh), who paid unprejudiced attention to the facts, has thus summed up the case:—'Of fourteen bishoprics, the Catholic prelates used their influence so successfully as altogether to prevent bloodshed in nine, and to reduce it within limits in the remaining five. Bonner, "whom all generations call bloody," raged so furiously in the diocese of London, as to be charged with burning half the martyrs in the kingdom.' Cardinal Pole, the queen's relative and familiar friend, took no part in these horrible condemnations. He considered that his vocation was the reformation of manners; he used to blame Gardiner for his reliance on the arm of flesh, and was known to rescue from Bonner's crowded pile of martyrs the inhabitants of his own district. It is more probable that the queen's private opinion leaned rather to her cousin, who had retained the religion she loved unchanged, than to Gardiner, who had been its persecutor; but Gardiner was armed with the legislative powers of the kingdom, unworthy as its time-serving legislators were to exercise them. Yet all ought not to be included in one sweeping censure; a noble minority of good men, disgusted at the detestable penal laws which lighted the torturing fires for Protestants, seceded bodily from the House of Commons, after vainly opposing them. This glorious band, for the honour of human nature, was composed of Catholics as well as Protestants; it was headed by the great jurist Plowden, a Catholic so firm as to refuse the chancellorship when persuaded to take it by Queen Elizabeth, because he would not change his religion. This secession was the first indication of a principle of merciful toleration to be found among any legislators in England. Few were the numbers of these good men (thirty-seven in all), and it was long before their principles gained ground; for, truly, the world had not made sufficient advance in Christian civilisation at that time to recognise any virtue in religious toleration."
We are now called upon to pass through a reign of terror, a time of fire and blood, such as has no parallel in the history of England. With the Spaniards had come to England, if not the Inquisition in its bodily form, yet the spirit of the Inquisition. The first burst of the storm fell upon the married priests, who were insulted and driven from their livings. In London, a number of them were made to march in procession round St. Paul's Church, wrapped in white sheets, and bearing in their hands scourges and tapers. They were then publicly whipped, and this was a precedent for the same indignities in other parts of the kingdom. The wives of these priests were treated with the utmost contumely. The statutes against the Lollards enacted in the reigns of Richard II., Henry IV., and Henry V., were revived and were to come into force on the 20th of January. Bonner, accompanied by eight bishops and 160 priests, made a grand procession through the streets of London, and had services of public thanksgiving for the happy restoration of Catholicism. A commission was then held in the Church of St. Mary Overy, in Southwark, for the trial of heretics. The first man brought before this court, over which Gardiner presided, was John Rogers, a prebendary of St. Paul's, who had nobly distinguished himself by defending the first priest sent by Mary to preach Papacy at St. Paul's Cross. He had been lying in a vile prison amongst thieves for more than a year. He now came forth prepared for death, with a bravery that nothing could daunt. He boldly asked Gardiner, who was brow-beating and insulting him, whether he himself did not for twenty years renounce the Pope, and put up prayers for his eternal exclusion from England. Gardiner endeavoured to parry this home-thrust by saying that he was forced to it by cruelty. "And," rejoined Rogers, "does it become you to practise this same cruelty on us?" He not only thus addressed Gardiner but appealed to the whole Court, whether they had not sworn, year after year under Henry and Edward, to maintain the laws which they introduced on the subject of religion, and how could they now condemn others for persisting conscientiously in that course? He vindicated his marriage as being originally contracted in Germany, where the marriages of clergymen were legal, and as being since allowed also in this country, and reminded them that he had not brought his wife into this country until such marriages were made lawful here.
The Court condemned him to be burnt, and on the 4th of February this horrible sentence was executed in the most barbarous manner. The day of his death was kept a profound secret from him, and early that morning he was suddenly awakened out of a sound sleep, and informed that he was to be burnt that day. The condemned man, so far from sinking under the appalling announcement, only calmly observed, "Then I need not truss my points." He requested to be permitted to take leave of his wife and children, of whom he had eleven—one still at the breast—but this Bonner refused. As he was led by the sheriffs towards Smithfield, where he was to suffer, he sang the "Miserere." His wife and children were placed where he would have a full view of them at the stake, and it was expected that this would induce him to recant and save his life, and thus induce others to follow his example; but outwardly unmoved, he maintained the ​most sublime fortitude. Noailles, the French ambassador, who was a spectator, wrote to his own sovereign, who was equally persecuting the Protestants in his kingdom—"This day the confirmation of the alliance between the Pope and this kingdom has been made by a public and solemn sacrifice of a preaching doctor named Rogers, who has been burnt alive for being a Lutheran, but he has met his death persisting in his opinion; at which the greater part of the people here took such pleasure that they did not fear to give him many acclamations to comfort his courage: and even his children stood by consoling him in such a way, that he looked as if they were conducting him to a merry marriage."
Bishop Hooper, Ferrar, Bishop of St. David's, Dr. Rowland Taylor of Hadleigh, in Suffolk, and Lawrence Saunders, Rector of Allhallows, Coventry, were all condemned to the same death, and, like Rogers, offered their lives on recantation, which one and all refused. The treatment of the pious Bishop Hooper was a most glaring case of ingratitude. Decided Protestant as he was, and of the most primitive simplicity of faith, he had from the first manifested the most stanch loyalty to Mary. In his own account of himself, he says, "When Mary's fortunes were at the worst, I rode myself from place to place, as is well known, to win and stay the people to her party. And whereas, when another was proclaimed (Lady Jane Grey) I preferred our queen, notwithstanding the proclamations. I sent horses in both shires (Gloucestershire and Worcester) to serve her in great danger, as Sir John Talbot and William Lygon, Esq., can testify."
Hooper was sent down to Gloucester, his own diocese, to suffer, where he was burnt on the 9th of February, in a slow fire, to increase and prolong his agonies to the utmost. On the same day Dr. Taylor was burnt at Hadleigh. He had formerly been chaplain in the house of Cranmer, who gave him the living of Hadleigh. Taylor, an ancestor of the pious and eloquent Jeremy Taylor, was a man of a singular boldness and promptness in avowing his opinions. The change in the State religion soon manifested itself in his church. The rector of the neighbouring parish of Aldham, on Mary's accession, presented himself at Hadleigh Church to celebrate mass, because Taylor firmly refused to perform it himself. On hearing of his arrival, Taylor hastened to the church to prevent him, but found him clad in the vestments of a priest, already before a newly-erected altar, and preparing to say mass, defended by a number of men with drawn swords. "Thou devil!" exclaimed the plain-spoken Taylor; "who made thee so bold as to enter into this church of Christ?" "Thou traitor," retorted the Rector of Aldham, "what dost thou here to let the queen's proceedings?" "I am no traitor," replied Taylor, "but the shepherd whom God hath appointed to feed his flock in this place, and I command thee, thou Popish wolf, in the name of God, to avoid hence." The Rector of Aldham and his followers, however, pushed Taylor out of his own church, and fastened the door, whilst they proceeded with the service. The rector's parishioners, sympathising with their pastor, flung stones through the windows. Taylor was advised to hide himself from the certain vengeance of the Government; but he replied that he was too old for flight, and had already lived too long to witness such unhappy changes.
When brought before Gardiner, the undaunted man told the bishop to his face that it ill became him, who had so often sworn under Henry VIII. and Edward to maintain the new form of religion, to break his oaths and attempt to compel others to break them. He was committed to prison, on his own confession that he was a married man, and one who held the mass to be a vile idolatry. On the 4th of February, Bonner went to Taylor's prison to degrade him from the priesthood, and found him as courageous as ever. When Bonner was about to strike him on the head with the crosier, according to the formula on such occasions, his chaplain, alarmed, cried out, "My lord, strike him not, for he will surely strike again!" "Yea, by St. Peter, will I," said Taylor; "for the cause is Christ's, and I were no good Christian if I refused to fight in my master's quarrel." When brought to the stake at Hadleigh, one of the sheriff's men, probably out of a compassionate motive, struck him on the head with his halberd, and thrust him in the centre of the flames, thus mercifully shortening his sufferings.
Ferrar, the Bishop of St. David's, was burnt in his own diocese on the 30th of March, and Lawrence Saunders, Rector of Allhallows, was burnt at Coventry. On Easter day a monk of the name of Flower or Branch, who had become a Protestant, was so excited against a priest who was administering the sacrament to the people in the Roman fashion in the church of St. Margaret's, Westminster, that he stabbed him; and for this sacrilegious crime had his right hand cut off on the 24th of April, and was afterwards burnt in the Sanctuary, near St. Margaret's churchyard.
The burnings now went on as a matter of course. John Cardmaker, chancellor of the church at Wells, was burnt in London on the 31st of May; John Broadfoot, a most learned and pious man, suffered the same death, in the same place, about a month afterwards. About the same time, Thomas Hawkes, a gentleman of Essex, was burnt at Coggeshall; John Lawrence, a priest, at Colchester; Tomkins, a weaver, at Shoreditch; Piggott, a butcher, at Braintree; Knight, a barber, at Maldon; and Hunter, a silk-weaver's apprentice, at Brentwood. These were followed by a crowd of others in different parts of the kingdom; and the prisons everywhere were crowded with the unfortunate Protestants, who suffered all the horrors which confinement in the appalling prisons of those times—prisons dark, unventilated, undrained, having no provisions for cleanliness and decency inevitably inflicted.
This shocking state of things was interrupted for some time by the sudden and extraordinary outbreak of Alphonso di Castro, the confessor of King Philip, a Spanish friar, who preached before the Court a sermon in which he most vehemently and eloquently inveighed against the wickedness and inhumanity of burning people for their opinions. He declared that the practice was not learned in the Scriptures, but the contrary; for it was decidedly opposed to both the letter and the spirit of the New Testament; that it was the duty of the Government and the clergy to win men to the Gospel by mildness, and not to kill but to instruct the ignorant. A mystery has always hung over this singular demonstration. Some thought Philip, some that Mary, had ordered him to ​preach this sermon, but it is far more probable that it was the spontaneous act of zeal in a man who was enlightened beyond his age and his country. It is not probable that it proceeded from Philip, for he could at once have commanded this change; it is besides contrary to his life-long policy. Had it been the will of the sovereigns it would have produced a permanent effect. As it was, it took the Court and country by surprise. The impression on the Court was so powerful that all further burnings ceased for five weeks, by which time the good friar's sermon had lost its effect; and the religious butcheries went on as fiercely as ever, till more than two hundred persons had been slaughtered on account of their faith in this short reign. Miles Coverdale, the venerable translator of the Bible, was saved from this death by the King of Denmark writing to Mary and claiming him as his subject.
Mary had now, according to the custom of English queens, formally taken to her chamber in expectation of giving birth to an heir to the throne. She chose Hampton Court as the scene of this vainly hoped-for event, and went there on the 3rd of April, where she continued secluded from her subjects, only being seen on one occasion, till the 21st of July, after she had again returned to St. James's. This occasion was on the 23rd of May, St. George's Day. when she stood at a window of the palace to see the procession of the Knights of the Garter with Philip at their head, attended by Gardiner, tho lord chancellor, and a crowd of priests with crosses, march round the courts and cloisters of Hampton Court. A few days afterwards there was a report that a prince was born, and there was much ringing of bells and singing "Te Deum" in the City and other places. But it soon became known that there was no hope of an heir, but that the queen was suffering under a mortal disease, and that such was her condition, "that she sat whole days together on the ground crouched together with her knees higher than her head." On the 21st of July she removed for her health from London to Eltham Palace.
Whilst Mary was thus suffering frightfully in person—from a complication of complaints, from dropsy, excessive head-aches, her head often being enormously swelled, and from hysterics—and whilst her reputation was suffering still more from the cruelties practised on her Protestant subjects, her heartless husband was leading a dissolute life, and even attempting to corrupt the maids of honour. Mary probably never knew anything of this, "for sometimes," says Fox, "she laid for weeks without speaking, as one dead, and more than once the rumour went that she had died in childbed."
Gardiner took advantage of the pause in persecution caused by the sermon of Di Castro, to withdraw from his odious office of chief inquisitor. Might he not have instigated the friar to express his opinion so boldly, for it is obvious that he wanted to be clear of the dreadful work of murdering his fellow-subjects for their faith? He therefore withdrew from the office, and a more sanguinary man took it up. This was Bonner, Bishop of London. He opened his inquisitorial court in the consistory court of St. Paul's, and compelled the lord mayor and aldermen to attend and countenance his proceedings. Bonner condemned men to the flames with unrivalled facility, at tho rate of half-a-dozen per day; and in this work he was stimulated to diligence by the Privy Council, who urged him continually forward. Burnet gives a letter written in the name of Philip and Mary exhorting him to increased activity; but from what we have seen of Mary's condition we may safely attribute the spur to Philip. Cardinal Pole did all in his power to put an end to the persecutions, but in vain.
It was now resolved to proceed to extremities with the three eminent prelates, Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer. They had been long in prison, and had now been for the space of a year removed from the Tower to Oxford. They were all, in the eyes of tho law, guilty of high treason, for they had all done their best to exclude the present queen from the throne. Cranmer had made the first breach in the Papal power in England by suggesting to Henry VIII. the mode of getting rid of Catherine, and of assuming the supremacy in the Church. Though obliged to conform to Henry's notions during his reign, he had under Edward given a great start to Protestantism, and had cordially concurred with Northumberland in setting aside Mary in the will of Edward. Ridley had openly espoused the cause of Lady Jane Grey, and Latimer had publicly preached, both in Edward's time and at the accession of Mary, against her succession to the throne on account of her Popery.
But the charge of high treason was dropped, undoubtedly because it was hoped that they might, by the prospect of the flames, be brought as heretics to recantation. On the 15th of April, 1551, they were led from their prisons to St. Mary's Church, where the doctors of the university sat in judgment upon them. They were promised a free and fair discussion of their tenets, and the still more vain assurance was given them that if they could convince their opponents, they should be set free. The so-called disputation continued three days, but it much more truly represented a bear-baiting, than the honest discussion of men in quest of the truth.
On the 16th of April, the day appointed, Cranmer appeared before this disorderly assembly in the divinity school. He was treated with peculiar indignity, for they had a deep hatred of him from tho long and conspicuous part which he had enacted in the work of Reformation. It was in vain that he attempted to state his views, for he was interrupted at every moment by half-a-dozen persons at once; and whenever he advanced anything particularly difficult of answer, the doctors denounced him as ignorant and unlearned, and the students hissed and clapped their hands outrageously. The next day Ridley experienced the same treatment, but he was a man of a much more bold and determined character, of profound learning, and ready address, and spite of the most disreputable clamour and riot, he made himself heard above all the storm, and with telling effect. When his adversaries shouted at him five or six at a time, he calmly observed, "I have but one tongue, I cannot answer all at once."
Poor old Latimer was not only oppressed by age, but by sickness, and he was scarcely able to stand. He appealed to his base judges to pity his weakness and give him a fair hearing. "Ha! good master," ​he said to Weston, the moderator, "I pray ye be good to an old man; ye may be once as old as I am: ye may come to this age and this debility."
The Burning of Archbishop Cranmer.
But he appealed in vain, his judges and hearers were lost to all sense of what is due to truth and religion, of what is due to the age and spirit of a veteran servant checks, rebukes, and taunts, such as he had not felt the like in such an audience all his life long." The three insulted and unheard prisoners wrote to the queen that they had been silenced by the noise, not by the arguments of their opponents, and Cranmer in his letter said:—"I never knew nor heard of a more confused disputation in of God, whatever may have been his errors or failings. The rude students only laughed, hissed, clapped their hands, and mocked the old man the more. Seeing that all hopes of a hearing were vain, he told the rabble of his judges and spectators, for such they truly were, "that he had spoken before attentive kings for two and three hours at a time, but that he could not declare his mind there for a quarter of an hour for mockings, revilings, all my life; for albeit there was one appointed to dispute against me, yet every man spake his mind, and brought forth what him liked without order, and such haste was made, that no answer could be suffered to be given."
The Recantation of Archbishop Cranmer, in St. Mary’s Church. (See page 381.)
​returned to their prison. There they lay till the October of the following year, when Ridley and Latimer were ordered to prepare for the stake. On the 16th of that month, a stake was erected in the town ditch opposite to Baliol College. Soto, a Spanish priest, had been sent to them in person to try to convert them, but in vain; Latimer would not even listen to him; and now at the stake a Dr. Smith, who had renounced Popery in King Edward's time, and was again a pervert, preached a sermon on the text, "Though I give my body to be burned and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing." The two martyrs cheered each other, and exhorted one another to be courageous. Ridley, on approaching the pile, turned to Latimer who was following him, embraced and kissed him, saying, "Be of good heart, brother, for God will either assuage the fury of the flame, or strengthen us to bear it;" and when Latimer was tied to the stake back to back with his fellow-sufferer, he returned the consolation, exclaiming, "Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out."
A lighted fagot was placed at the feet of Ridley, and matches applied to the pile. Bags of gunpowder were lung round their necks to shorten their sufferings, and as the flames ascended, Latimer was very quickly dead, probably through suffocation in the smoke; but Ridley suffered long. His brother-in-law had piled the faggots high about him to hasten his death, but the flames did not readily find their way amongst them from their closeness, and a spectator hearing him cry out that he could not burn, opened the pile, and an explosion of gunpowder almost instantly terminated his existence.
Cranmer was reserved for a future day. The punctilios of ecclesiastical form were strictly observed, and as he enjoyed the dignity of primate of England, it required higher authority to decide his fate than that which had pronounced judgment on his companions. Latimer and Ridley had been sentenced by the commissioners of the legate, Cranmer must only be doomed by the Pontiff himself. He was, therefore, waited on in his cell by Brooks, Bishop of Gloucester, as Papal sub-delegate, and two Royal commissioners, and there cited to appear before him at Rome within eighty days, and answer for his heresies. As this was impossible, the citation was a mockery and an insult. When the archbishop saw his two friends led forth to their horrible death, his resolution, which never was very great, began to fail, and he now presented a woful image of terror and irresolution, very different to the bravery of his departed friends. He expressed a possibility of conversion to Rome, and desired a conference with Cardinal Pole. But soon he became ashamed of his own weakness, and wrote to the queen defending his own doctrines, which she commissioned the cardinal to answer. When the eighty days had expired, and the Pope had pronounced his sentence, and had appointed Bonner, and Thirlby, Bishop of Ely, to degrade him, and see his sentence executed, he once more trembled with apprehension, and gave out that he was ready to submit to the judgment of the queen; that he believed in the creed of the Catholic Church, and deplored and condemned his past apostacy. He forwarded this submission to the Council, which they found too vague, and required a more full and distinct confession, which he supplied. When the Bishops of London and Ely arrived to degrade him, he appealed from the judgment of the Pope to that of a general Council, but that not being listened to, he sent two other papers to the commissioners before they left Oxford, again fully and explicitly submitting to all the statutes of the realm regarding the supremacy, and professing his faith in all the doctrines and rites of the Romish Church.
It is asserted by the Protestant party that, in order to induce him to recant, he was promised his life on full conversion, but Lingard, on the authority of Strype, asserts that no such expectations were held out to him; that they were distinctly to Latimer and Ridley, but when the question was put whether the same favour should be extended to Cranmer, the Council decided in the negative, on the ground that, independent of his political offences, he was the cause of the schism in the reign of Henry, and of the change of religion in the reign of Edward, and that such offences required that he should suffer for example's sake; that the writ was directed to the mayor or bailiffs of Oxford, the day of execution fixed, and that, still hoping for pardon, he made a fifth recantation, as full as his adversaries could possibly desire, abjuring all his Protestant principles as erroneous doctrines; that he sent this paper to Cardinal Pole, praying a respite of a few days that he might prepare a still more convincing proof of his repentance, and do away, before his death, the scandal given by his past conduct. This prayer, it is said, the queen cheerfully granted; and if the persons in whose hands he was at Oxford held out a prospect of final pardon, this was probably a base and unwarranted deceit on their part, in order to induce the frail prelate to humiliate himself and his cause the more. But we are told that they now removed him from his prison to the house of the Dean of Christchurch, where they treated him luxuriously and did everything to make life sweet, and the prospect of the burning stake awful to him; that he was allowed to walk about at his pleasure, to play at bowls, and that he was assured that the queen loved him and only wished for his conversion; that the Council were rather his friends than his enemies, and would be glad to see him again amongst them in honour and dignity. Whoever authorised these false pretences, whether in high or low station, were guilty of the most infamous conduct. Under these delusions he now penned his sixth confession, acknowledging that he had been a greater persecutor of the Church than Paul, and trusted that, like Paul, he might make ample reparations. What he had thrown down he could not restore; but, like the penitent thief upon the cross, he trusted to obtain mercy through his confession. He declared himself worthy of eternal punishment; that he had blasphemed against the sacrament, had sinned against heaven and his sovereign, and implored pardon from the Pope, the king, and queen.
On the 21st of March, 1556, Cranmer was conducted to St. Mary's Church, where Dr. Cole, provost of Eton College, preached a sermon, in which he stated that notwithstanding Cranmer's full repentance, he had done the Church so much mischief that he must die. That morning Garcina, a Spanish friar, had waited on him before leaving his cell, and presented him with a paper ​making a complete statement of his recantation and repentance, which he requested him to transcribe and sign. It seems that his enemies calculated that, having so fully committed himself, the fallen primate would not at the last hour depart from his confession; but they were mistaken. Cranmer now saw nothing but death before him, and he most bitterly repented of his weakness and the renunciation of what he felt to be the holy truth. He had, therefore, transcribed once more the paper which had been brought to him, but in place of the latter part of it he wrote in a very different conclusion. Accordingly, when he read his paper at the conclusion of the sermon there was a profound silence till he came to the fifth article of it, which went on to declare that through fear of death, and beguiled by hopes of pardon, he had been led to renounce his genuine faith, but that he now declared that all his recantations were false; that he recalled them every one, rejected the Papal authority, and confirmed the whole doctrine contained in his book. The amazement was intense, the audience became agitated by various passions, there were mingled murmurings and approbation. The Lord Williams of Thame called to him to "remember himself and play the Christian." That was touching a string which woke the response of the hero and the martyr in the primate. He replied that he did remember; that it was now too late to dissemble, and he must now speak the truth.
This was the time which was to atone for all the weakness of nature in Cranmer, for all his shrinkings, his compliances, his concealments, and almost for his persecutions of others. He saw death certain, and its terrors vanished. The mighty and sublime truth which he had always worshipped in his heart, but which he had not always had the strength to testify and maintain, though he had still been permitted to serve it essentially, now assumed its whole place in his soul, and nerved him for one final and glorious victory.
When the first astonishment at this unlooked-for declaration had passed, there was a rush to drag down Cranmer, and hurry him to the stake in the same spot where his friends Ridley and Latimer had suffered. There he was speedily stripped to the shirt and tied to the stake; through it all he was firm and calm. He no longer trembled at his fate; he declared that he had never changed his belief; hope of life only had wrung from him his recantation; and the moment that the flames burst out he thrust his right hand into them saying, "This hath offended." The writers of those times say, that he stood by the stake whilst the fire raged round him, as immovable as the stake itself, and lifting up his eyes to heaven, exclaimed, "Lord, receive my spirit," and very soon expired.
The burning of Latimer, Ridley, and Cranmer has justly been pronounced a gross political blunder. The noble firmness and dignity with which these eminent men died, made a profound and lasting impression on the public mind. Their faith was, as it were, burnt into the general heart with their death. The enemies of Cranmer had particularly calculated on dishonouring the Reformation in him; at the last moment he rose, and threw new lustre on it. Men might have despised a faith which its adherents were weak enough to renounce; but its opponents drove their triumph too far, and it became the triumph of their victims, whose end, ennobled by their religion, made men reflect on that, and gave new impulse, and widely different influence to it.
The day after the death of Cranmer, Cardinal Pole, who had now taken priest's orders, was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury; and showed his anxiety to check this fierce and impolitic persecution, but, as we shall find, with no great result.
Whilst these terrible transactions had been taking place King Philip had quitted the kingdom. With all his endeavour's to become popular with the English, Philip never could win their regard. He conformed to many national customs, and affected to enjoy the national amusements; threw off much of his hauteur, especially in his intercourse with the nobles, and conferred pensions on them on the plea that they had stood by the queen during the insurrection. But nothing could inspire the English with confidence in him. They had always an idea that the object of the Spaniards was to introduce the Spanish rule and dominance here. They had always the persuasion that it was no longer their own queen but the future King of Spain and the Netherlands who ruled. It was clearly seen that Philip never had any real affection for Mary; it was the public opinion that he had now less than ever, whilst the poor invalid Mary doated on him, and was ready to yield up everything but the actual sovereignty to him. And now came a very sufficient cause for the departure of Philip from England. His father, Charles V., wearied of governing his vast empire, was anxious to abdicate in favour of his son. Philip embarked at Dover on the 4th of September, 1555. Mary accompanied him from Hampton to Greenwich, riding through London in a litter, in order, as the French ambassador states, "that her people might see that she was not dead." The queen was anxious to proceed as far as Dover, and see him embark, but her health did not permit this; and after parting with him with passionate grief, she endeavoured to console herself by having daily prayers offered for his safety and speedy return.
Before quitting the kingdom, Philip took care to leave with Cardinal Pole directions for the guidance of the Council, and these directions, which remain in the cardinal's handwriting, are as absolute, and as void of reference to any option of the queen's, as if there were no such person. This is plain proof that the English were quite right when they ascribed to Philip the real and sole government of the country, the queen having an idea that it was her duty as a wife to submit in all things to her husband. This important fact is fully substantiated by an oration of Sir Thomas Smith, in which he traced all the cruelty of Mary's reign to her marriage; by Fuller, the Church historian, who, whilst recording all the horrors of her reign, admits that "she had been a worthy princess if as little cruelty had been done under her as by her;" and by Fox, in his "Book of Martyrs," who declares that "she was a woman every way excellent while she followed her own inclination." Nor did the queen resume more power in his absence, for we are assured by Noailles, that he maintained a constant correspondence with his ministers, and no appointment or measure was carried into effect without his previous knowledge and consent.
Scarcely was Philip gone when Mary alarmed the ​nobility by agitating the question of the resumption of the Church lands, declaring that they had been taken from the proper owners in the time of schism. She offered to resign those held by the Crown on the same principle; but Parliament would listen to neither of these propositions for some time, and finally only permitted the Government to restore the first-fruits, tenths, and impropriations, fearing that it might only be a prelude to a demand of the Church lands held by themselves. On the 12th of November, 1558, before the closing of the Parliament, Gardiner died, and Heath, the Archbishop of York, a man of much inferior talent, was made chancellor.
During Philip's absence in 1556, he sent continual demands for money. It was impossible to supply this, and it was contrary to the marriage treaty. Mary, in resigning the tenths and first-fruits, gave up an income of £60,000 a year; and when she applied to Parliament, the Commons asked whether it was reasonable that the subjects should be taxed to relieve the necessities of the sovereign when she refused to avail herself of the resources lawfully in her own hands. There were public complaints that Philip was draining the country for his own Continental purposes. Disappointed in Parliament, she next endeavoured to raise a loan. She named 1,000 persons, and demanded a contribution of £60 from each, to make up a sum of £60,000. Next 60,000 marks were levied on 7,000 yeomen, who had not contributed to the loan, and from the merchants £36,000. These sums not sufficing, still more extraordinary means were resorted to. Embargoes and prohibitions of exportation of goods were laid on to benefit merchants who had already goods in foreign markets, and who paid largely for this monopoly. Being refused a loan by the English Company in Antwerp, three ships laden with goods for the Antwerp fair were seized in the English ports, and detained till they agreed to the loan of £60,000 and to a charge of twenty shillings on each piece of goods.
Whilst Mary at home was thus incurring great odium by these arbitrary measures, her heartless husband, for whom the money was extorted, was living a dissolute life, and even ridiculing the person and manners of his wife amongst his courtiers. But though he could be jocose on this subject, so disgraceful in a husband, his influence on the country of his wife was disastrous and oppressive. All who were inclined to maintain their fidelity to the reformed opinions, were safe only in the deepest retirement. The Earls of Oxford, Westmorland, and Bedford, and the Lord Willoughby got into trouble on account of their religion, and Bedford was imprisoned for a short time. Even Sir Ralph Sadler, who had shown so little conscience in his Scotch diplomacy, retired to his rural mansion at Hackney, and avoided exciting attention till the accession of Elizabeth. Sir William Cecil, the soul of caution itself, having in vain tried to get into the service of Queen Mary, studied to avoid the observation of her ministers, and is said to have laid down a plan for the conduct of the Princess Elizabeth during this hazardous period, which she afterwards repaid by high honours and deep confidence. But the treatment of one illustrious man at this period excited great indignation amongst the liberal party. Sir John Cheke, one of the finest scholars of the age, whose name Milton apostrophises in his sonnets, as he
"Who first taught Cambridge and King Edward Greek,"
had taken part in the attempt to place Lady Jane Grey on the throne. He was thrown into the Tower, but was, after a while, liberated, and allowed to retire to the Continent. There he stayed some time, at Basle, in Switzerland, enjoying the Protestant worship. Thence he visited Rome, and returned safe to Flanders on his way homewards. Philip, hearing of his visit to his old friends, Lord Paget and Sir John Mason, Mary's ambassadors to the Netherlands, and now converts to Romanism, had him seized on the road betwixt Antwerp and Brussels, bound hand and foot, thrown into a cart, and carried off to a vessel bound for England. He was conveyed, gagged and muffled, to the Tower, where he was, through fear of death, compelled to sign his recantation, and have it published in the most humiliating manner. He is even said to have been compelled to sit on the bench by Bonner, and take part in persecuting those of his own faith. These shameful oppressions so affected him as to terminate his life at the age of forty-seven.
The hateful Star Chamber was now in full operation. It was, in fact, an English inquisition. Commissioners were empowered to inquire into heresies, and sale or possession of heretical books, to seize all persons offending in such particulars, and bring them to trial. They were authorised to break open houses, to search premises, compel attendance of witnesses, and to apply torture where they met with any stubbornness. Informers and secret spies abounded; they were to give secret information to the justices, and these were to examine the prisoners secretly and without permitting them to see their accusers. Nothing but the name of the Inquisition was wanting, for there were in active operation all its main elements—spies, secret seizure and imprisonment, tortures and the stake. Crimes grew and multiplied with the reign of terror; fifty-two malefactors were executed at Oxford at one assizes; yet this did not clear the highways of thieves, and some of these were of aristocratic rank. A son of Lord Sandys was hanged in London for a robbery on Whit Sunday of property valued at £4,000. A son of Sir Edmund Peckham and one John Daniel were hanged soon afterwards and beheaded, on Tower Hill, for an attempt to rob the Treasury. There were deep discontents and plots, and in Norfolk, one Clever, who had been a schoolmaster, and three brothers of the name of Lincoln, were hanged, drawn, and quartered for an attempt at insurrection. To complete the dismal catalogue of the miseries of this gloomy time, fires and fatal maladies raged in the cities.
The Emperor Charles V., at the age of only fifty-five, had now resigned his immense empire to his son; and Spain, the Netherlands, Naples, Sicily, Milan, and the new and beautiful lands of South America, owned Philip as their lord. On the 25th of October, 1555, Charles, in an assembly of the States of the Netherlands, formally resigned the government of these countries to Philip, and in a few months later he also put him in possession of all his other governments. He then retired to the monastery of St. Just, near Placentia, on the borders of Spain and ​Portugal, where this great king, who had so long exercised so strong an influence on the destinies of Europe, shrunk into the condition of a private gentleman, retaining only a few servants and a single horse for his own use, and employing his now abundant leisure in religious exercises, in gardening, and clock-making.
During Philip's absence, a series of insurrections took place which disturbed the quiet of the queen, and in which the King of France seems to have borne no inconsiderable part. His assiduous minister, Noailles, disseminated reports that Mary, hopeless of issue, had resolved to settle the crown on her husband. This having produced its effect, a conspiracy was set on foot to put Elizabeth on the throne, and depose Mary. Henry Dudley, a relative of the late Duke of Northumberland, was to head it, and the French king, to secure his interest, had settled a handsome pension upon him. The worthless Courtenay, who was at this moment on his way to Italy, whence he never returned, was still to play the part of husband to Elizabeth, though the management of the plot was to be consigned to Dudley. Elizabeth had again, it is said, fully consented to this plot, though the health of Mary was such as must have promised her the throne at no distant day. Dudley was already on the coast of Normandy with some of his fellow conspirators, making preparations, when the King of Franco unexpectedly concluded a truce for five years with Philip. He therefore advised Dudley and his accomplices to lie quiet for a more favourable opportunity. This was a paralysing blow to the scheme of insurrection, and the coadjutors in England had gone so far that they did not think it safe to stop. Kingston, Udal, Throckmorton, Staunton, and others of the league determined to seize the treasure in the Tower, and once in possession of that, to raise forces and drive the queen from the throne. But one of them revealed the design, several of them were seized and executed, and others escaped to France. Mary applied by her ambassador. Lord Clinton, to Henry II. to have them delivered up, and received a polite promise of endeavour to secure them, which there was in reality no intention to fulfil. Amongst the conspirators arrested were two officers of the household of Elizabeth, Peckham and Werne, who made very awkward confessions; but again the princess escaped, it is said at the intercession of Philip, who was apprehensive, if Elizabeth was removed from the succession, of the claims of the French king on behalf of his daughter-in-law, the Queen of Scots. Elizabeth at all events escaped, protesting her innocence as stoutly as ever, but receiving from the Council in place of those two officers executed, two other trusty ones, Sir Thomas Pope and Robert Cage.
Very awkwardly, however, for Elizabeth, another eruption took place. The refugees in France pitched upon a young man of the name of Cleobury, who resembled the Earl of Devon, and persuaded him to personate him. He was landed on the coast of Sussex, and gave out that he was Courtenay, come to marry Elizabeth with her consent, and had himself and the princess proclaimed king and queen. The people, however, were too well acquainted with the worthlessness of Courtenay; they seized Cleobury, and he was executed at Bury.
Elizabeth, justly alarmed at this pretence of her cognisance of this miserable attempt immediately on the heels of the other, wrote to Mary declaring her detestation of all such treasons, and wishing that "there were good surgeons for making anatomies of hearts," that the queen might see the clearness of hers from all such hateful designs. The queen and Council expressed their perfect assurance of Elizabeth's non-concern with these transactions, but Elizabeth was still so apprehensive of danger that she applied privately to the French ambassador to find means to convey her safely to France. The intriguing Noailles was now, however, gone, and his successor, the Bishop of Acqs, gave her honest advice, telling her to remain where she was, and on no account to quit the kingdom; for if her sister, the present queen, had, on the insurrection of Lady Jane Grey, gone over to Flanders, as some of her friends advised her, she might have been there still.
But if Elizabeth was uneasy, Mary was still more so. The disquiets which surrounded her, and the wretched state of her health, made her very anxious for the return of her husband. She had lost her able minister, Gardiner, and his successor, Heath, Archbishop of York, by no means supplied his place. Mary, therefore, wrote long and repeated letters to urge the return of Philip, and, finding them unavailing, she dispatched Lord Paget to represent the urgent need of his presence in the kingdom. But Philip, besides his indifference, or rather repugnance, to his valetudinarian wife, was now occupied with causes of deep apprehension on the side of Italy. Cardinal Caraffa, a Neapolitan, was, from the rigour of the Spanish Government in his native country, a decided enemy of Spain. He was now elevated to the Popedom as Paul IV., and determined to exert all the influence of his position to liberate Naples from the yoke of Philip. For this purpose he fomented a spirit of disaffection in that country against the Spaniards, and prepared to assist the movement by an alliance with France, which should menace all Italy with a French invasion. But he had a subtle and daring enemy to contend with in the Duke of Alva, who soon after made himself so dreadfully famous by his relentless massacres of the Protestants in the Netherlands. About midsummer of 1556, the Pope discovered a private correspondence betwixt Garcilasso de la Vega, the ambassador of Philip at Rome, and the Duke of Alva, Viceroy of Naples, in which Garcilasso represented to Alva the defenceless state of the Roman territories, and how easily they might be seized by a Spanish army. Paul arrested Garcilasso; imprisoned and put to the torture de Tassis, the Postmaster General of Rome, for transmitting these letters; and ordered his officers to proceed against Philip for this breach of the feudal tenure by which he held Naples. But Alva was not a man to wait to be attacked, he marched across the Papal frontiers, and carried terror and confusion through the ecclesiastical states. He advanced as far as Tivoli before the Pope would listen to any terms of accommodation. Paul then solicited an armistice, and the Spaniards would soon have dictated ​a peace on their own terms, but the French, under the Duke of Guise, hastened over the Alps to his assistance, with 12,000 infantry, 400 men-at-arms, 700 light horse, and a great number of knights.
This turn of affairs brought Philip home to his wife when all conjugal persuasions on her part had failed. He sent over, to announce his approach, Robert Dudley, son of the late Duke of Northumberland, whom Mary had liberated from the Tower, and who already, it seems, had contrived to win so much favour as to be taken into the Royal service, in which he continued to mount, till, in the next reign, he became the notorious Earl of Leicester and great favourite of Queen Elizabeth. On the 20th of March Philip himself arrived at Greenwich. As he wanted to win the English to join him in the war against France, he paid great court to the City of London. During this visit there appeared at Court the novel sight of a Duke of Muscovy, in the character of ambassador from Russia, who astonished the public by the enormous size of the pearls and jewels that he wore, and the richness of his dress.
Place of Execution, Smithfield.
Philip used all his influence to induce the queen and her Council to declare war against Henry of France, who had broken that five years' truce into which ho had so recently entered. But the finances of the country were not such as to render either the queen or her Council willing to go to war with France, which, connected as France was now with Scotland, was sure to occasion a war also with that country. Cardinal Pole and nearly the whole Council were strongly opposed to it. They assured her that to engage lightly in Philip's wars was to make England a dependence of Spain, and Philip, on the other hand, protested to the queen, that if she did not aid him against France he would take his leave of her for ever.
Martyr's Stone at Hadleigh.
Siege of Calais: Departure of the Citizens. (See page 387)
​cruelties practised on their fellow professors, and they concurred in a plan to betray Hammes and Guines to the French. This scheme was defeated by the means of an English spy who became cognisant of the secret. The mischief, though stopped there, soon showed itself in another quarter. Thomas Stafford, the second son of Lord Stafford, and grandson of the late Duke of Buckingham, mustered a small army of English, French, and Scotch, and, sailing from Dieppe, landed at Scarborough in Yorkshire, and surprised the castle there. He was accompanied by one Richard Saunders and others, and flattered himself that Philip and Mary were so unpopular that they had only to hoist their banner and the people would flock to it. He made a proclamation that he was come to deliver the country from the tyranny of strangers, and to defeat the designs of the unlawful and unworthy queen, who was wasting the wealth of the kingdom on her Spanish husband, and was about to bring in a Spanish army of 12,000 men to subdue it. But he soon found that, however much the public might dislike the Spanish match, they were not at all inclined to rebel against their queen.
Wotton, the English ambassador in France, had duly warned his Court of the designs of Stafford, and on the fourth day the Earl of Westmoreland appeared with a strong body of troops before the castle, and compelled Stafford to surrender at discretion. Stafford, Saunders, and three or four others were sent to London, and committed to the Tower, where, under torture, they were made to confess that the King of France had instigated and assisted their enterprise. Stafford was beheaded on Tower Hill on the 28th of May, and the next day three of his confederates were hanged at Tyburn. Saunders had probably turned queen's evidence, for he received a pardon.
The Council, which had been averse to the war, and which had advised that, instead of appearing as principals, we should merely confine ourselves to the furnishing that aid which we were bound to by our ancient treaties with the House of Burgundy, now felt itself justified in proclaiming open war against the King of France, as the violator of the treaty betwixt the nations, in having harboured the traitors against the queen, and in having sent them over in French ships to Scarborough with arms, ammunition, and money.
The King of France undoubtedly had from the commencement of Mary's reign been a secret and persevering enemy of hers. She had always shown a predilection for the Royal House of Spain, and her marriage with Philip completed the cause of enmity. Henry had maintained his ambassador in England rather as a spy and fomenter of treasons than as an emissary of peace. Noailles and the Bishop of Acqs had to do with all the rebellions which had distracted Mary's reign, from those of Northumberland and Wyatt to those of Dudley and Stafford. The latter ambassador, when recalled by Henry on the proclamation of war, took the opportunity at Calais to examine the fortifications, and reported to his monarch that they were in a very neglected and dilapidated condition. At his request Senarpont, the Governor of Boulogne, had gone over in disguise, and made the same examination with the same result, reporting that the town might be readily captured by a sudden and unexpected assault; information which we shall find was not neglected.
Philip, having obtained what he wanted, hastened over to Flanders, and neither Mary nor England ever saw him again. His abode in this country had been accompanied by so much bloodshed and religious persecution, that no one hesitated to attribute these horrors to him; and he was seen to retire with a feeling of greatly augmented aversion in every one except his infatuated queen. Yet even she is said to have been so exasperated at his conduct during his last sojourn, and so jealous of his attentions to his beautiful cousin, Christina of Denmark, the widowed Duchess of Lorraine, that she cut to shreds a portrait of Philip with her own hands. What was of much more moment, however, was the fact, that Philip had no sooner arrived in England than the persecutions had been renewed with all their vigour. During his short stay ten men and women were burnt in Smithfield, and executions far more bloody and numerous followed the insurrection of Stafford than had marked the suppression of Wyatt's rebellion.
The Earl of Pembroke, accompanied by Lord Robert Dudley as his master of ordnance, followed Philip at the end of July with 7,000 men. They joined the army of Philip, consisting of men of many nations—Germans, Italians, Flemings, Dalmatians, Croats, Illyrians, and others—making altogether a force of 40,000 men, the supreme command of which was given to the rejected suitor of the Princess Elizabeth, Philibert, Duke of Savoy. The duke successfully menaced an attack upon Marienberg, Rocroy, and Guise, but he finally drew up before St. Quentin, on the right bank of the Somme. The King of France endeavoured to throw supplies into the place, by conveying them across the vast marshes which extended along one side of it. On the 9th of August, the Constable Montmorency marched from La Fere with a large body of cavalry and 15,000 foot. He posted himself along the marsh, and put out boats, which he had placed upon carts, to convey over the provisions. Some of these reached the town, but before any great number had accomplished this, the Spaniards, making a detour and coming suddenly upon them with 6,000 horse, broke the cavalry of the French, and then charging the infantry, put them to the rout. One half of the French army was taken or destroyed: the constable, the Marshal St. Andre, and most of the officers were captured. The infantry under Philip, and the English auxiliaries who had guarded the opposite banks of the river, marched to the town and carried it by assault. Such was the terror created in France that many believed if Philip had advanced upon Paris, he might have taken it. But the character of Philip was distinguished by caution, not enterprise. He ordered his army to lay siege to Ham and the Cattelet, which places they eventually took; but in the meantime the French had fortified Paris. The English fleet made descents upon France at various points, menaced Bordeaux and Bayonne, and plundered the defenceless inhabitants of the coasts. This was all that was achieved, except, what Philip probably most looked for, the drawing the Duke of Guise out of Italy. But this, whilst it ​removed all danger from Philip's Transalpine possessions, led to a loss on tho part of his English ally, which might be termed the crowning mischief of his union with Mary.
The news of the victory of St. Quentin was received in England with extraordinary rejoicings, the kindling of bonfires, and singing of Te Deum. Philip, on the approach of winter, retired into quarters in Flanders. Meantime, the Scotch had invaded the northern counties on the departure of the English army for France. There had been many mutual inroads and skirmishes, but by the time that Scotland could get together a considerable army, October had set in, and with it bad weather. The roads and rivers became almost impassable, and a contagious disease broke out amongst the troops. When the united army of Scots and French crossed the Tweed to assault the castle of Wark, they found the Earl of Shrewsbury laying near with a largo army. Instead of attacking him, they began to hold councils, in which they showed more caution than boldness, and talked much of the fatal field of Flodden, and of the recent defeat of their French ally at St. Quentin, and they agreed to retreat and disband the army. The Earl of Huntly was the only leader who opposed this undignified counsel, and for his remonstrance he was put under arrest, and tho queen-regent, in defiance of her entreaties, menaces, and tears, saw the army quit the field without a blow.
But this demonstration on the part of Scotland had drawn the attention of tho English Council from a more important point. Tho Duke of Guise, disappointed of his laurels in Italy, was now planning an attack on Calais. The information of the Bishop of Acqs and the Governor of Boulogne was ever present to the Government of France. When King Philip drew off his forces from St. Quentin, the Duke of Guise commenced his march in that direction. In the month of December he had assembled at Compiègne 25,000 men, with a numerous train of battering artillery. Suddenly he marched out; but whilst every one expected him to take the road towards St. Quentin, he took that towards Calais, and, on the 1st of January, 1558, he was seen advancing on the road from Sandgate to Hammes. He was bound to carry out an idea of Admiral Coligni's and attempt Calais in the middle of winter, when such an attempt would be least expected.
The English were never less prepared for the invasion. The fleet which had ravaged the coasts of France, and the troops sent to Flanders, had totally exhausted the exchequer of Mary, which at no time was well supplied. To victual that navy the queen had seized all the corn she could find in Norfolk, without paying for it, and to equip the army sent to aid Philip, she had made a forced loan on London, and on people of property in different places; she had levied the second year's subsidy voted by Parliament before its time, and now was helpless at the critical moment.
It is only justice to Philip to state that the moment he heard of the design of the Duke of Guise, he offered to throw a garrison of Spanish troops into the town for its defence; but this was declined from the fear that, once in possession, he might remain so. The caution was worse than useless, unless the English had possessed means of defending it themselves, for Philip's possession if by consent of the English Government, would have appeared a matter of diplomatic arrangement, the capture of it by the French must be a serious blow to the military reputation of the nation. This means of defence the English Government had not. Lord Wentworth, the Governor of Calais, prescient of the approaching storm, sent repeated entreaties for reinforcements for its defence. They were wholly unattended to.
The Duke of Guise, after entering the English pale, sent a detachment of his army along the downs to Risebank, and led the other himself, with a very heavy train of artillery, towards Newnham Bridge. He forced the outwork at the village of St. Agatha, at the commencement of the causeway, drove the garrison into Newnham, and took possession of the outwork. The bulwarks of Froytou and Neslo were abandoned, for the lord-deputy could send no forces to defend them. At Newnham Bridge the garrison withdrew so silently that the French continued firing upon tho fort when the men were already in Calais; but at Risebank the garrison surrendered with the fort.
Thus, in a couple of days, the Duke of Guise was in possession of two most important forts, one commanding the harbour, the other the causeway across the marshes from Flanders. A battery on the heath of St. Pierre played on the wall to create a false alarm, whilst another in real earnest played on the castle. A breach was made in the wall near the Watergate, and, whilst the garrison was busy in repairing it, Guise cannonaded the castle (which was in a scandalous state of neglect) with fifteen double cannons. A wide breach was speedily made. Lord Wentworth, well aware that the castle could not be maintained, had ordered mines to be prepared, and calculated on blowing the castle and the Frenchmen into tho air together as soon as they were in.
Guise, seeing no garrison defending the breach, ordered one detachment to occupy the quay, and another, under Strozzi, to take up a position on the other side of the harbour. Strozzi was repulsed; but at ebb-tide in the evening, Grammont, at the head of 100 arquebusiers, marched up to the ditch opposite to the breach. No one being soon in the castle, Guise ordered plenty of hurdles to be thrown into the ditch, and, putting himself at the head of his men, forded the ditch, finding it not deeper than his girdle. The lord-deputy, seeing the French in the castle, ordered the train to be fired; but there was no explosion. The soldiers crossing from the ditch to the breach, with their clothes deluging the ground with water, had wet the train and defeated Wentworth's design.
The next morning Guise sent his troops to assault the town, calculating on as easy a conquest of it; but Sir Anthony Agar, with a handful of men, not only repulsed tho French, but chased them back into the castle. The brave Sir Anthony, with a larger force, would have driven the French from the decayed old castle too, but he had the merest little knot of followers, and in the vain attempt to force the enemy out of the castle, he fell at the gate with his son, and eighty of his chief officers. Lord Wentworth perceiving the ​impossibility of continuing the defence, destitute of a garrison, and having waited in vain for reinforcements from Dover, that night demanded a parley, and offered to surrender on conditions. But the French, certain of compelling a surrender, refused all conditions but the following, which Wentworth was obliged to accept:—
"The town," says Holinshed, "with all the great artillery, victuals, and munitions, should be fully yielded to the French king, the lives of the inhabitants only saved, to whom safe conduct should be granted to pass where they listed, saving the lord-deputy, with fifty other such as the duke should appoint, to remain prisoners, and to be put to their ransom. The next morning the Frenchmen entered and possessed the town, and forthwith all the men, women, and children, were commanded to leave their houses, and to go to certain places appointed for them to remain in, till orders might be taken for their sending away.
"The places thus appointed for them to remain in, were chiefly four—the two churches of our Lady and St. Nicholas, the deputy's house, and the Staple, where they rested a great part of the day, and one whole night, and the next day, till three of the clock at afternoon, without either meat or drink. And while they were thus in the churches, and those other places, the Duke of Guise, in the name of the French king, in their hearing, made a proclamation, strictly charging all and every person that were inhabitants of the town of Calais, having about them any money, plate, or jewels, to the value of one groat, to bring the same forthwith, and lay it down upon the high altars of the same churches, upon pain of death, bearing them in hand, also, that they should be searched. By reason of which proclamation, there was made a great and sorrowful offertory. And while they were at this offering within the churches, the Frenchmen entered their houses and rifled the same, where was found inestimable riches and treasure, especially of ordnance, armour, and other munitions. Thus dealt the French with the English, in recompense of the like usage to the French, when the forces of King Philip prevailed at St. Quentin; where, not content with the honour of victory, the English, in sacking the town, sought nothing more than the satisfying of their greedy vein of covetousness, with an extreme neglect of all moderation.
"About two of the clock next day at afternoon, being the 7th of January, a great number of the meanest sort were suffered to pass out of the town in safety, being guarded through the army with a number of Scottish light horsemen, who used the English very well and friendly; and after this every day, for the space of three or four days together, there were sent away divers companies of them, till all were avoided; those only excepted that were appointed to be reserved for prisoners, as the Lord Wentworth and others. There were in the town of Calais 500 English soldiers ordinary, and no more; and of the townsmen not fully 200 fighting men (a small garrison for such a town), and there were in the whole number of men, women, and children (as they were accounted when they went out of the gate) 4,200 persons."
Thus was lost the great conquest of Edward III. It cost that victorious king, with a large army, an obstinate siege of nearly a year, and after having been proudly maintained for 210 years, was thus lost in eight days. The fact affords the clearest proof of the miserable government of the country by the ministry of Mary, for she herself was now incapable of diplomatic management; and it affords equal proof of the intense suspicion entertained by that ministry of King Philip, for though he again offered to regain the place for the queen, and to remove any fear of his wanting to secure the place for himself, now proposed not to retake it entirely by his own forces, but by any number of such joined by an equal number of English,—this offer was rejected, on the plea that it was not possible to raise the necessary forces in time, that the greater part of the artillery was lost, and the soldiers would not be able to bear the rigours of the siege in the depth of winter.
The fall of Calais necessitated, as a matter of course, the loss of the whole Calais district. Having put Calais into a state of defence, the Duke of Guise marched on the 13th of January to Guisnes, about five miles distant, to reduce the town and fort there. These were defended stoutly by Lord Grey de Wilton, who had received about 400 Spanish and Burgundian soldiers from King Philip, but they were in too miserable a state of repair to be long held. The walls in a few days were knocked to pieces; the Spanish soldiers were nearly all killed, and the remaining force compelled their officers to surrender. The little castle of Ham now only remained, and situated in the midst of extensive marshes, it might have given the enemy some trouble; but its governor, Lord Edward Dudley, the moment he heard of the surrender of Guisnes, abandoned it, and fled with his few soldiers into Flanders.
The rejoicing of the French over this removal of the English from their soil was unbounded. The mortification of the English was as great, and the wretched queen felt it so deeply, that she declared if she were opened after her death the name of Calais would be found engraven on her heart. But in reality the gain to the French was far greater than the loss to the English. The possession of Calais opened a way, at any moment of internal dissension or weakness, into the heart of the kingdom, and enabled the English to unite with the Flemings in that quarter in annoying France. To the English it was rather an expense and a burden, than a real advantage. It was a temptation to engage in inroads on the French, and in coalitions with the Flemish for such purposes, which brought no lasting result but expense; and as a means of defence of the English coasts it was useless. The British fleet was sufficient for that purpose, and was likely to be the more efficiently maintained if there were no false reliance placed on Calais. But nothing could soothe the injured national feelings for the moment but thoughts of revenge and re-conquest. Parliament met on the 20th of January, and such an intense spirit was shown for avenging the national disgrace, and recovering Calais, that it granted, besides a fifteenth, a subsidy of four shillings in the pound on land, and two shillings and eightpence in the pound on goods. The clergy, also, in Convocation, granted an aid of eight shillings in the pound. These taxes were to be paid in annual instalments in four years.
The zeal of the English was stimulated by the ​exultation of the French king. He made a visit of triumph to his newly recovered district of Calais, and returned to Paris to celebrate the marriage of the dauphin with the young Queen of Scots—an event which took place on the 24th of April, 1558, the greater portion of the princes, prelates, and nobles, of both France and Scotland attending the ceremony. Mary was then only in her sixteenth year, and the dauphin, her husband, a weakly and imbecile boy of but a few months older.
In England, during the spring, preparations were made for the invasion of France. Seven thousand troops were raised and diligently drilled. One hundred and forty ships were hired, which the Lord-Admiral Clinton collected in the harbour of Portsmouth, to be ready to join the fleet of Philip, and, in conjunction, to ravage the coasts of France; whilst Philip, with an army of Spanish, French, and English, should enter the country by land.
"It is verily believed," says Holinshed, "that if the admirals of England and Spain had been present there with their navies, as the other few ships of England were, and upon the sudden had attempted Calais with the aid of the Count of Egmont, having his power present, the town of Calais might have been recovered again with as little difficulty, and haply in as short a time as it was before gained by the Duke of Guise."
Holinshed says thus for the following reason. The Marshal De Termes, the Governor of Calais, had made an expedition into Flanders with 11,000 men; had forced a passage over the river Aar, reached Dunkirk, and Burg St. Winoc, and burnt them to the ground. He was still advancing, ravaging some of the richest country of Flanders, to near Newport, when he was suddenly arrested in his progress by Count Egmont. In attempting to retreat, Egmont cut off De Termes' line of march near Gravelines by outmarching him with one wing of his army. They there came to an engagement near the mouth of the Aar, and whilst the Spaniards were cannonading them on the one side, ten English ships, under Admiral Malins, off the coast near Gravelines, hearing the roar of the artillery, sailed up the Aar, and perceiving the position of affairs, opened a terrible fire on the right flank of the French army. This surprise threw the French into confusion, and so encouraged the Spaniards that they gained a most decisive victory. The routed French ran in hundreds into the sea, where the English secured 200 of them; and, by consent of Count Egmont, received them as their prisoners in order to obtain their ransom. Five thousand of the French perished on the field of battle, or at the hands of the enraged peasantry, whose lands and houses they had just before destroyed, and who had followed the army of Egmont crying for vengeance.
Marshal de Termes, Senarpont, Governor of Calais, and many of the French officers were taken prisoners, and the garrison of Calais was annihilated almost to a man, creating such a panic in the few left to guard the town, that, as Holinshed observes, had the combined Flemish and English fleet been there, Calais had, in all probability, been retaken.
But this fleet and the English army, instead of aiming to recover Calais, had sailed to make an attack on Brest. The English fleet, consisting of 140 sail, commanded by the Lord Admiral Clinton, and carrying a land force of 6,000 men, under the Earls of Huntingdon and Rutland, had joined a much smaller squadron of the Flemings, and reached Brest. But their progress had been so dilatory that the French had made ample preparations to receive them, and, despairing of effecting any impression on Brest, they fell on the little port of Conquest, which they took and pillaged, with a large church and several hamlets in its immediate neighbourhood. They then marched some miles up the country, burning and plundering, and the Flemings, in the eager quest of booty, going too far a-head, were surrounded, and 400 of them cut off. The English, with more caution, regained their ships. The Duke D'Estampes, having collected a strong body of Bretons, appeared upon the scene, and the Lords Huntingdon and Rutland, not thinking it prudent to engage, drew off their forces, and now finding the people on all the coasts up in arms, returned home without executing any further service.
It appeared as if the war would be brought to a conclusion by a pitched battle betwixt the sovereigns of France and Spain. Philip had joined his general, the Duke of Savoy, and they lay near Dourlens with an army of 45,000 men. Henry had come into the camp of the Duke of Guise near Amiens, who had an army of nearly equal strength. All the world looked now for a great and decisive conflict. But Philip, though superior in numbers, as well as crowned with the prestige of victory, listened to offers of accommodation from Henry, and dismissing their armies into winter quarters, they betook themselves to negotiation. From the first no agreement appeared probable. Philip demanded the restoration of Calais, Henry that of Navarre, and they were still pursuing the hopeless phantom of accommodation, when the news of Queen Mary's death changed totally the position of Philip, and put an end to the attempt.
Mary was sinking to the grave before Philip left England the last time, and his conduct was not calculated to prolong her life. The loss of Calais also fell heavily on her diseased frame and melancholy mind. Her dispute with the Pope, the continual appearances of insurrection, the bitterness and hostile activity of the Protestants, whom all her persecutions had not daunted, and the fears that her anxious endeavours to re-establish the Papal Church would all prove vain, knowing the secret bias of her sister and successor, were a combination of causes, added to her inveterate dropsy, which brought her daily nearer and nearer to her end. Her heart, yearning with affection towards her husband, had been grievously disappointed. Her soul, yearning still more fervently for the triumph of her beloved Church, had found no consolation in hope. She had alienated the love of her subjects, and covered her name with a sanguinary reproach. To make her situation still more desolate and depressing, nature during her reign had, as it were, sympathised with the unhappy course and character of events. A series of most wet, cold, and dismal seasons had been followed by their natural consequences, famines, fevers, and agues. Strange meteors were seen in the damp autumns near the end of Mary's reign, and all these things, certainly the natural precursors of disease and death, were regarded ​as the manifestations of Divine wrath against the nation for the cruelties practised on the Protestants. The blazing exhalations of the marshes were thought to be supernatural reminders, especially, of the fires of Smithfield.
Amid such lurid lights and superstitious gloom, the sun of Queen Mary went down. She had caught an intermittent fever at Richmond in the spring, and the great specific Peruvian bark, had not yet made itself sufficiently known to be available, still loss were sanitary principles understood.
Queen Elizabeth.
From Richmond Palace she was removed to Hampton Court, a situation of equal disadvantage to an aguish patient, and, getting no better, was removed, in the autumn, to St. James's Palace. There she received the news of the death of her old kinsman and counsellor, Charles V., which took place in September, 1558. Her other able kinsman and counsellor, Cardinal Pole was also lying on his death-bed, his exit expected from day to day. Instead of a conciliatory visit from her husband, he sent over to her the Count de Feria, with a ring and a message of condolence. By Feria he also sent to her the recommendation of Elizabeth as her successor; a politic step on the part of Philip, who, aware of the high spirit and distinguished abilities of that princess, was thus anxious to secure her favour.
Queen Elizabeth acknowledged by the Bishops.(See page 394.)
​from day to day. Hatfield House, the residence of Elizabeth, was now much, more of a Court than St. James's. The dying queen seemed to look on this with indifference; but even in the midst of flattery it sunk deep into the soul of Elizabeth, and when the end of her reign was approaching, she often referred to the circumstance and refused to name a successor.
On receiving Philip's recommendation of Elizabeth, Mary sent the Countess de Feria, formerly Jane Dormer, to her sister with her jewels, and to these were added, by Philip's own order, a very precious casket of his own jewels which he had left at St. James's, and which Elizabeth had greatly admired. By the Countess de Feria, Mary again repeated her solemn injunction that Elizabeth should pay her debts and maintain the Church as established, both of which the countess reported that she swore to do.
On the 17th of November, between four and five o'clock in the morning, her end visibly approaching, at her desire mass was performed in her chamber. At the elevation of the host, she lifted her weary eyes towards heaven, and as the benediction was spoken her head dropped, and she expired in the forty-second year of her age. Cardinal Pole being informed of her decease, expressed his deep satisfaction at the prospect of so speedily following her, and within two and twenty hours also took his mortal departure.
Mary was interred on the north side of Henry VII.'s chapel. No tomb was ever erected to her memory. James I. placed two black tablets with Latin inscriptions to mark the graves of Mary and Elizabeth, and when the Royal vault was opened in 1670, for the funeral of Monk, Duke of Albemarle, the hearts of the two sisters were found in urns.
With all the bigotry of Mary, and the horrors which her concession to the persecuting spirit of her Spanish husband brought upon this country, she had many good and amiable qualities, and had she reached the throne in an age when no religious strife existed, would probably have left a name regarded with much favour by posterity. None of our sovereigns ever maintained a less expensive court. None of them were ever so anxious to avoid unnecessarily taxing the country. When obliged to go to war with France, she regarded the expenditure incurred in a great measure as her own, and in her will treated the remaining debt as if it were her private obligation.
She was careful to avoid burdening her subjects, even by the processions which it was the custom of our monarchs to make, and in which her successor, Elizabeth, was especially fond of indulging. She seldom went farther than to her palace at Croydon, where she lived in a most unostentatious manner, walked about amongst the poor with her maids without any distinction of dress, inquired into their wants, and had them relieved. She restored to the universities that portion of their revenues which had been seized by the Crown in the late reigns. She built the public schools in the University of Oxford, though in no magnificent style; and during her reign Sir Thomas Pope founded Trinity College, and Sir Thomas White St. John's, on the site of Bernard's College; and in Cambridge Dr. Caius made such additions to Gonvil Hall, and endowed it with so many advowsons, manors, and demesnes, that it is now chiefly known by his name. Mary also granted a mansion on Bennet's Hill, near St. Paul's, for the Herald's College, which remains so to this day. She refounded the hospital of the Savoy, which had been confiscated by Henry VIII.; and the ladies of her Court, at her instigation, assisted in furnishing it with beds. But what is a perpetual honour to her memory is, that she was the first to propose a hospital for old or invalid soldiers, and in her will to leave funds for the purpose, which, however, never were appropriated. "Forasmuch," she says, "as there is no house or hospital specially ordained and provided for the relief of poor and old soldiers—namely, of such as have been hurt or maimed in the wars and service of this realm—the which, we think, both honour, conscience, and charity willeth should be provided for; and, therefore, my mind and will is that my executors shall, as shortly as they may after my decease, provide some convenient house within or nigh the suburbs of the City of London, the which house I would have founded and created, being governed with one master and two brethren; and I will that this hospital be endowed with manors, lands, and possessions to the value of four hundred marks yearly."
In her Court Mary preserved strict morals; and in everything, except in the toleration of religion, she showed a most careful regard to the maintenance of the constitution and the law, in most striking contrast to the practice of her father, and even of her sister Elizabeth. One of the insurgents whom she had pardoned, presented her with a plan by which she might make herself independent of Parliament, and this plan was recommended to her by the Spanish ambassador. She sent, however, for Gardiner, her own chancellor, and putting it into his hand, bade him peruse it, and, as he should answer at the judgment-seat of God, declare his real opinion of it. "Madam," replied Gardiner, on reading it, "it is a pity that so virtuous a lady should be surrounded by such sycophants. The book is naught; it is filled with things too horrible to be thought of." She thanked him, and threw the paper into the fire.
Precisely similar was her conduct when she appointed Morgan Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. "I charge you," she said, "to minister the justice and law indifferently, without respect of persons; and, notwithstanding the old error among you, which will not admit any witness to speak or other matter to be heard in favour of the adversary, the Crown being a party, it is my pleasure that whatever can be brought in favour of the subject may be admitted and heard. You are to sit there, not as advocates for me, but as indifferent judges between me and my people."
Mary was also attentive to the interests of trade. She was the first to make a commercial treaty with Russia, by which the woollen cloths and linens of England were exchanged to great advantage for the skins and furs of northern Muscovy; and she revoked the privileges of the Hanse Town merchants in London, or "merchants of the Steelyard," as they were called, which had been very injurious to the interests of her own subjects.
All these facts, fully confirmed by the modern researches of the great historical antiquaries, Tytler and Sir Frederick Madden, give us a very different idea of Mary from that hitherto suggested in history. Taking a ​complete view of her with these modern lights, we are bound to believe that, as a woman, she was naturally mild, but that the persecution of her own faith, in her mother and herself personally, produced a fatal reaction, which yet, had it not been for the more fatal Spanish marriage, would have been to some extent restrained by her better qualities.