# Church and State under the Tudors/Chapter 7

CHAPTER VII
REIGN OF MARY
We have witnessed the worst excesses of the reforming party. We have seen how the Lords of the Council cared little enough for either religion or morality, or the prosperity of the State or the good of the people, or any other thing except power and honour and wealth for themselves and their friends. We are now to see how, the moment the pressure was taken off, the Catholic party ran into excesses even more extreme than those of their opponents; how the reaction even exceeded the action which provoked it, and that to such an extent that its effects have continued, though in a gradually diminishing degree, up to times within the memory of still living men.
It is unnecessary here to enter into the mere facts of the political history; how Northumberland's ill-arranged and almost childish scheme fell to pieces and collapsed, and how, within a few days of Edward's death, Mary found herself undisputed Queen of England, and those who opposed her had not only gained nothing, but had put themselves entirety at her mercy. Mary was herself, perhaps, as unfit to rule as any sovereign who ever arrived at a throne in mature age. Of the Roman Emperors it has often been remarked that those who had attained mature years before they ascended the throne mostly became good rulers. But with Mary it was not so. Again, we are told that ​'sweet are the uses of adversity,' and Mary's life of tHirty-seven years before her accession had been one long course of adversity, but to her its uses had not been sweet. Her life had been throughout a most unhappy one. The estrangement between her father and mother began when she was still a mere child, and from that time till her mother's death her life was made miserable, not only by witnessing the constant persecution, injustice, and indignity, with which her mother was treated, but by enduring a full share of similar ill-treatment in her own person. On Katherine's death she became formally reconciled to her father, but in order to do so was compelled to write to him acknowledging his supremacy, the unlawfulness of her mother's marriage, and her own illegitimacy, and thus retained no right to the succession except what it pleased Henry afterwards to assign to her in his will. During her brother Edward's reign, her constant adhesion to the old faith—or, at any rate, her opposition to the further development of the Reformation—was a source of continual complaint to the Council and continual annoyance to herself. Her life, moreover, had been, for a person in her situation, a very secluded one; and thus her knowledge of the world and of mankind had not only been very limited in amount, but had been warped and coloured by the constant feeling that the world, so far as she knew of it and heard of it, was all going wrong, and that her first duty, if ever she came to take an active share in its government, would be to head it back, and lead, or rather drive, it once more into the ancient paths. Mary possessed by inheritance her full share of the pride and sternness of her Spanish mother, as well as the self-will and vehement temper, and also the courage and energy, of the Tudors, and the reaction ​produced by a sudden change from a life such as I have described to a position of almost unchecked power, upon such a temperament, was not unlikely to drive her to some excesses.
In the first weeks after her accession, when, for almost the only time in her life, Mary found herself welcomed and apparently beloved by her people, she displayed for a brief moment some small measure of that geniality and frankness which made her father, and afterwards her sister, despite their rough dealings and choleric tempers, the most popular of sovereigns: but she seems to have expected every obstacle to give way at once before her; and when opposition and disappointment came upon her, and ill-health speedily followed, she sank at once into a soured, disappointed, angry zealot, rendered only the more self-willed, the more unscrupulous, and the more cruel, by the constant ill-success of all her efforts and the miscarriage of all her schemes.
The actual relations of Church and State during her reign changed more strangely than even during her father's. Mary found herself by law on her accession Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ supremum caput, albeit the assumption of such a title must have seemed to her the extreme of blasphemous presumption. Yet even Mary did not venture, in the first weeks of her reign, to show openly her intention of bringing England once more into bondage to the Pope, although the general disgust and disaffection, caused by the misgovernment of Edward's Council, might seem to have afforded an unusually good opportunity for so doing. Gardiner was released from the Tower and restored to the Council board. Edward's bishops were removed, and those expelled by him were restored to their sees, and Acts were ​passed—1 Mary, Sess. 1, c. i., repealing some of the recent extensions of the Treason-felony and Præmunire Acts; 1 Mary, Sess. 2, c. i., declaring the Queen's legitimacy and repealing any Acts in a contrary sense; and, lastly, 1 Mary, Sess. 2, c. ii., the famous Act which repealed almost the whole of Edward VI.'s ecclesiastical legislation and re-established Divine service and the administration of the Sacraments as they existed in the last years of Henry VIII.
To this point it seems likely that the Queen carried the general feeling of the country with her. Though the reformed religion had progressed since Henry's death, it is probable that the majority of the nation still retained their j^reference, if not for the old faith, at least for the old ritual and ceremonies. It is certain, in fact, that they did so in most parts of the country, though apparently not in London nor in the eastern counties. Moreover, the outrageous proceedings of Edward's Council had for the moment alienated very many who, left to themselves, would have taken the side of the Reformation, and made them look back upon the later years of Henry's reign as a time of moderation and comparative tranquillity. But indications were early given, though not so early generally understood, that Mary did not intend to rest in this illogical though generally acceptable position; for in the inhibition from preaching, published on August 18, she speaks of herself as 'of that religion which she had professed from her infancy,' and limits her previously-promised toleration of other opinions 'till public order should be taken of it by common assent.' The expulsion of the Edwardine bishops from the sees whose previous occupants had been removed to make room for them, ​and the restoration of the latter, were also acquiesced in as a necessary consequence of the righteous reversal of the high-handed measures taken during the Protectorate. There can be no reasonable doubt that, as a rule, the Londoners preferred Ridley to Bonner; but they probably felt that Bonner had received hard measure from the party which had just fallen from power, and that, as there could not be two kings of Brentford, his restoration was the natural consequence of their fall, and Ridley's expulsion a necessary preliminary to it.
In September, Archbishop Cranmer, who had hitherto simply been ordered to confine himself to his own palace, was sent, together with Ridley and Latimer, to the Tower. How far the immediate cause of this was the manifesto against the Mass, which he seems to have written but not published, but which became known, and was acknowledged by him before the Council, is not easy to determine; nor is it of much importance, since it seems clear that, when he had once resolved to remain in England, his final doom was no longer doubtful, or was only rendered so by his own subsequent vacillation.
With the beginning of the third session of her first Parliament, Mary's brief popularity may be said to have come to an end. She now decided, contrary to the advice of her wisest councillors, on the marriage with Philip of Spain, a match which was abhorred by all her subjects, except the small section who were, to adopt a modern phrase, 'Catholics first and Englishmen only afterwards.' To the nation in general no proposition could have been more hateful. It had, it is true, one and one only recommendation, viz. that it secured Spain as a permanent ally against France, ​and thus did away with the virtual subjugation of England to the latter power, which was threatened by the marriage of Mary of Scotland, the heir nearest in blood to the English crown, with the Dauphin of France. But even this advantage was more apparent than real, as was proved by the subsequent policy of Elizabeth, which proceeded on the assumption that the mere instinct of self-preservation would compel Spain to continue in alliance with England in order to check the growth of the power of France. In the meanwhile the disadvantages were evident enough. The power of England in Europe at the accession of Mary was a mere shadow of what it once had been; while Spain was, at the moment, the most powerful nation in the world. Hence it was clear that if the two were to become one, Spain, and not England, would be that one. Treaties and paper arrangements would be useless, and should the issue of Mary's marriage with Philip be an only son, there would plainly be noticing but the uncertain life of Don Carlos between him and the combined crowns of Spain and the Indies, England and the Low Countries, and England would become a mere permanent appendage to Spain. But, besides these prospective evils, hateful to all Englishmen, Catholic and Protestant alike, there was also the more immediate certainty that all Philip's influence would be thrown into the scale in favour of the Queen's known desire for an immediate and unreserved reconciliation with the see of Rome. To the thorough-going Protestants this meant not loss or inconvenience, but actual persecution; and the religious persecution of the sixteenth century wore no kid gloves. To the forty thousand families who had profited by the spoliation of the monasteries it meant loss, impoverishment, in many cases ruin; to the mass of the nation, even to those ​whose faith was what it had ever been, it implied the renewal of all those annoyances, scandals, and practical inconveniences and oppressions, from which Henry VIII.'s drastic measures had, as they hoped, delivered them for ever. Only to the really enthusiastic and bigoted Papists, a minority probably smaller even than that of the Protestant fanatics, could the Spanish marriage be a truly welcome measure.
Mary's great aim was undoubtedly the restoration of England to the unity of the Catholic Church. In this aim she was, as Mr. Green very truly tells us, almost alone, and that she should have succeeded in it as far as she did, was due to the curious complication of political and religious aims and circumstances by which she was surrounded. Lord Paget looked upon the matter from a purely political point of view, and regarding, as he did, the peril to England from the impending union of Scotland with France, he was disposed to support the marriage with Philip as the best course for the safety of the country, though he loved neither the Pope nor religious persecution. Renard and his master, though objecting to neither of them when the times were suitable to them, advised a degree of caution and moderation in religious matters which were little in accord with Mary's fanatical enthusiasm; but their views of the religious question were quite overshadowed by their paramount anxiety to create a power in their own hands which should outweigh that of France. Gardiner, the ablest and most influential of Mary's ministers, Paget perhaps excepted, appears at this time to have held a view different from either of them, and far more in accord with that of the bulk of Englishmen of the time. Gardiner had been brought up by Cardinal Wolsey, and ​was a kind of survival of the old ecclesiastical politician; but the politician in him always preponderated slightly over the ecclesiastic. He had seen much of the evils of the Roman supremacy, and had gone with Henry VIII. in his subversion of it; and though later on he became one of the Roman party, it is not credible that he was really sincere in his wish for its restoration. His efforts, up to this time, had always been directed towards the revival of the system which had prevailed in the later years of Henry, viz.: the maintenance of the old faith and the old ritual almost unaltered, together with a rigid intolerance of difference of opinion, and with little or no diminution of the authority of the clergy, but with the substitution of the Royal for the Papal headship. He wished Mary to marry a subject, and to send Elizabeth to the Tower, and he hated the Spanish match as certain to lead to the re-establishment of the Papal power in England, and probably by violent means. Mary herself possessed all the self-will of the Tudors, reinforced by the obstinacy of her Spanish forefathers; and partly by playing off the different parties against one another, and partly by insisting obstinately on her own personal right to marry as she pleased, she gained her point at last. The only real ally whom she had throughout was Reginald Pole, a man as fanatical, as narrow, and, though from different causes, as politically ignorant, as herself, but without a tithe of her courage or her patience, who had been in exile for years, and was not even yet permitted to return to England, and whose knowledge of England was therefore obtained at second-hand and coloured by all the fancies of an enthusiast and a dreamer.
Mary's determination to marry Philip was—at least in the first instance—simply a means to an end, and the ​end in question was the restoration of England to the unity of the Catholic faith. She was probably quite sincere in her reiterated statement that she was content as she was, and had no wish to marry at all; but this she conceived to be the appointed task of her life, and as soon as she had come to the conclusion that the true means to accomplish it was by a marriage with Philip, to marry Philip became part of her duty as Queen. That she afterwards nursed herself into an enthusiastic desire for the marriage itself, and was disappointed just in proportion to her enthusiasm, is a mere incident in the history, and serves only to show how really great her ignorance was, and how completely she had fallen into the hands of a single party in the State. That she should have looked upon Philip as the person who would enable her to carry out her reactionary views, may seem strange when we consider the repeated exhortations to caution and moderation in her dealings with religion which she received from both Philip's father and his ambassador Renard at the beginning of her reign: but she may well have considered that their advice was due to an exaggerated view of the number and influence of the Protestant party in England, such as an ambassador, drawing his conclusions mainly from what he saw in London, would be not unlikely to form; and she knew that both Philip and his father were pretty deeply committed on the orthodox side. That she was right in the main, the later history of her reign shows plainly enough. The action and reaction of the different parties concerned, and the curious modes in which their various aims crossed and partially defeated one another, all seemed, at this period, to ​work together to enable the Queen to carry out her own, which, as already said, concurred with no one's else.
Besides the restoration of the Papal power the other great object was the exclusion of Elizabeth from the succession to the throne.
Gardiner, it would seem, would even have backed her in this latter design, but Gardiner did not approve of the marriage with Philip and was at this time less than lukewarm in his zeal for the Pope. Paget, the sole advocate of the marriage, was earnest in maintaining the claims of Elizabeth, and even the necessity of recognising them to the full. He was a latitudinarian in religion, and certainly not anxious to restore the Pope. All the more moderate Catholics went with Gardiner.
The Protestants, on the other hand, could not so with Paget: they had a dread, only too well founded, of Philip and his Spaniards.
Hence, while nobody supported the Queen heartily, none were, except the Protestants, heartily opposed to her. Parliament, it is true, was opposed to the Spanish match, and the House of Commons even ventured to remonstrate with Mary on the subject. They gained nothing by their motion but a rebuke for their presumption from the Queen, together with the reply that 'on this matter she would take counsel with God, and with none other.' This famous interview occurred on Nov. 16. Two months afterwards broke out the rebellion of Sir Thomas Wyatt. But the rebellion was badly led. Courtenay was a coward and -a weakling, if not even a conscious traitor. He betrayed Carew to Gardiner, and precipitated the whole movement, Carew hastened off into Devonshire, but was unable to effect a rising, and had to make his escape. Suffolk ​was equally unsuccessful in the Midlands. But even so there was a time when the danger was extreme: Wyatt had London and the Queen's person almost at his mercy, and it appeared to be almost certain that he would succeed. At this point of extreme peril the Queen's own courage and determination saved her. She rode to the Guildhall and appealed in person to the Corporation to defend her, pledging herself at the moment to give up the Spanish marriage if it should not appear to Parliament that it would be for the benefit of the whole realm. This was the turning-point of the movement. Wyatt reached the south side of London Bridge, and found it closed against him; and before he could make his way round by Kingston, the Queen and the City were better prepared, his own troops were exhausted, and the enterprise was hopeless. The results of its failure were soon apparent: not only were the leaders executed, but Lady Jane Dudley as well as her father, her husband, and her brothers, were put to death, and the preparations for the marriage went on as before, the proxy marriage taking place on March 6.
Every effort was made by Gardiner and Renard to incense the Queen against Elizabeth, and she was sent to the Tower, and escaped but narrowly, and only by means of the active intervention of several of the Lords of the Council. It was not, however, only in the revenge taken upon the rebels, and their friends as such, that the failure of Wyatt's rebellion showed its fruits. It was looked upon specially, and probably with justice, as pre-eminently the rising of the Protestants; and its failure furnished a pretext, as well as a motive, for further action against them. Accordingly, we find ​three remarkable documents, which have been printed by Burnet, all bearing dates in March 1554—in the interval, that is to say, between the suppression of Wyatt's rebellion and the meeting of Parliament at the beginning of April. The first of these is a letter to Bishop Bonner, containing a number of injunctions (articles they are called) to be put in execution without delay throughout his diocese. They command, among other things, the use of all the ecclesiastical laws and canons which were in use in Henry VIII.'s time, not being directly contrary to the laws of the realm; the disuse by the bishop of the phrase 'regia auctoritate fulcitus,' and of the oath of supremacy; the deprivation or divorce of all married clergy; and rigid care on the part of the bishops for the exclusion of all Sacramentaries and other heretics from holy orders. This is in several respects a remarkable document; it describes itself as given under our signet at our palace, &c., and, although addressed to the Bishop) of London to be put in execution in the whole diocese, most of its items begin with the words 'That every bishop,' &c., as though intended, as it doubtless was, to be observed through the whole realm. The second and third are commissions given to the Bishops of Winchester, Durham, London, St. Asaph, Chichester, and Llandaff; the first, in Latin, to eject the Archbishop of York and the Bishops of St. Davids, Chester, and Bristol, from their sees on account of their having contracted marriage; and the second, in English, to eject those of Lincoln, Gloucester, and Hereford, on the ground that they held their sees by the late King's letters patent with the express clause 'quamdiu se bene gesserint,' and had since, both by teaching erroneous doctrine, and also by ​inordinate life and conversation, declared themselves very unworthy of that vocation and dignity in the Church.
All these three important documents would appear to rest upon the royal authority only; that is, upon that very 'supremacy' which Mary was so anxious to resign and repudiate. The time chosen to issue the two latter was dictated, in all probability, not only by the feeling of irritation caused by Wyatt's rebellion, but also by considerations of policy, to diminish the hostile votes in the House of Lords, when, in order to redeem her pledge to the City of London, the Queen would be compelled to submit the Spanish marriage to the final decision of Parliament. During all this time the disputes in the Council had been so hot, the general disgust of the people at the severity with which Wyatt's rising had been punished so great, and party spirit had run so high, that Renard had more than once threatened that the arrival of the Prince of Spain must be deferred until the country became more tranquil.
Early in April Parliament met, but though the Marriage Bill was permitted to pass, the House showed no great complacency in other matters. Thus, of three bills introduced by Gardiner, viz. (1) for restoring the Six Articles, (2) to revive the Lollard statutes of Henry IV., and (3) to restore the episcopal jurisdiction, the first never reached a second reading at all, and the other two, though they passed the Commons, could not be got through the Lords, and Parliament was dissolved while they were still unpassed. It is to be noted that in these cases, as in several others about this time, the reactionary measures of Gardiner and his mistress were carried through the Commons with more ease than ​through the Lords. It may, however, be doubted whether the compliance of the Commons in such matters can be taken as a fair proof of the general consent of the nation. That pressure of all kinds was unscrupulously used, not only during elections, but upon members themselves when elected, in these times is notorious, and there is no reason to suppose it was less on this occasion than on others. Parliament was dissolved on May 5, but it was not till June 19 that the news arrived that Philip was on his way to England; and at last, towards the close of July, the marriage took place.
And what a marriage it was! The bride more than ten years older than her husband, haggard and wizened and older even than her age, and utterly destitute of all those personal charms which might have attracted, and for a time at least retained, the affection of such a man as Philip, but withal worked up by the combined effect of vanity, enthusiasm, and the constant flattery of interested attendants, to a pitch of persistent and demonstrative fondness more repulsive in such a person than the most chilling indifference. Her mind, doubtless, was more attractive than her person, or might have been so, for Mary was an educated and accomplished woman: but she was a religious enthusiast, and her religion was of the narrowest, the most fanatical, and the most superstitious type; and she had so completely assimilated the dogma that the end justifies the means, that there was scarcely any method, however cruel or treacherous, which she would hesitate to adopt for the good of the faith. The bridegroom was young enough—indeed, far too young for his wife—but he was undersized, pale, feeble, and, if the truth must be told, cowardly, repellent in manners and repulsive in feature, ​and already a thorough sensualist; a man of a dark, gloomy, and mercilessly cruel temper, selfish to the extreme to which selfishness can go, destitute of natural affection, and absolutely unfeeling, as well as unscrupulous in regard to those who stood in his way. He was as bitter and narrow a bigot as Mary herself; and this was, indeed, their only point of sympathy. But there was a difference between the two. Mary was thoroughly single-minded: if she sacrificed others, she was ready to sacrifice herself as well. Philip always kept an eye on his own interests, and when they were at stake could be as hard on the Pope as on a heretic. The one was a bigoted fanatic, the other a fanatical hypocrite. In all the long array of historical portraits, of whatever age, we can scarcely find any one single character more entirely detestable, or more absolutely destitute of redeeming features, than that of Philip II. From such a marriage what good could follow to Mary or to England?
In the autumn a visitation of the dioceses by their bishops took place, largely in the spirit of the Queen's letter to Bonner already referred to. Bonner's own visitation articles still remain in his register, and are quoted by Burnet and Wilkins, though with some variations, and probably from different copies. These articles, as we learn from Renard, created a ferment in London, and Bonner found it necessary to defer his proceedings. It is worthy of note that Renard anticipated the probability of similar trouble in other dioceses; a prognostication which seems to suggest two things, viz. that other bishops were about to follow a similar course to Bonner's, and that practical returns of this kind to the old ecclesiastical order of thing's were not altogether popular even elsewhere than in London. The ​ambassador's letters at this time have a certain tone of uneasiness throughout, and he seems to rest his hopes of continued tranquillity chiefly on the fact that the malcontents had no head, and were unable to trust one another. Parliament was to meet in November, and every sort of pressure appears to have been used to influence the elections in the Lower House and to gain over the members of the Upper; and, judging by the results, with much success. When assembled, its subservience was as conspicuous, though not quite so complete, as it had ever been even under Henry VIII. Its first work was to reverse the attainder of Cardinal Pole, and thus pave the way for his return to England; and then it proceeded to pass some of the very measures which the preceding Parliament, some six months before, had rejected. The Act of 1 and 2 Philip and Mary, c. vi., revived the bloody legislation of Richard H., Henry IV., and Henry V., for the punishment of heretics; and 1 and 2 Philip and Mary, c. viii., repealed at once the anti-papal legislation of Henry VIII. from his twentieth year onwards; that of Edward VI. having, as we have seen, been already abolished in the second session of Mary's first Parliament—though, as a condition precedent to this, the Houses insisted on, and received, a distinct assurance, in the Pope's name, that the holders of Church lands were not to be molested. But not even so was the humiliation of the British Parliament, or of the British nation in its Parliament, complete; for in the interval between the passing of the repeal of Pole's attainder and the other legislation just mentioned, the two Houses had humbly petitioned the King and Queen to sue for their absolution to the legate, and had received it on their knees, and been re-admitted into the unity of ​the Catholic Church. But, great as were the successes of the Catholic party under the exceptionally favourable circumstances of the early part of Mary's reign, they were far from coming up to the level of the wishes and hopes of Pole or Gardiner and the Catholic clergy. Parliament had stoutly refused to exclude Elizabeth from the succession, or to permit Philip to ignore the conditions imposed upon him on his marriage, or to remove or define the Præmunire, or to meddle with the Mortmain Act beyond a temporary suspension, or to restore the Church lands, or even to take away the impropriated tithes from their lay owners. Thus, though much was given, much also was withheld; and Pole and the Court party were but imperfectly satisfied.
An unsuccessful attempt to give additional power to Philip by a Regency Bill brought about a dissolution of Parliament in the middle of January 1555. Thus, in eighteen months after Edward's death, the whole, not only of his religious system, but of his father's also, was swept away, and the power of the Pope, and of the Catholic clergy, was re-established in England as it had been in the early days of Henry's reign—so far, at least, as it was in the power of law to re-establish it. But the England of 1555 was not the England of 1525: the thirty years which had elapsed since Henry first openly agitated the question of divorcing Mary's mother, had been years which had brought more change in the social, moral, and intellectual condition of the country than the whole previous century; and though Mary had succeeded in sweeping away, for the time, almost the whole legislation of the period, the other factors in the condition of the nation were beyond the powers even of a Tudor monarch. Mary's success had, indeed, been ​marvellous, and in the main it was all her own work. Her one idea, when she arrived at the throne, was to restore religion; that is to say, the sway of the Pope and the Roman Church. With that view she had brought about the Spanish marriage, against the opposition of Gardiner himself, the leader of the Catholic clergy, and with no support beyond that of Paget and a small knot of latitudinarian statesmen; and, with the additional influence derived from that marriage, had succeeded in bringing about the complete legislative revolution which we have just seen. For the revolution was now, indeed, complete, and even the most important of the subsequent Acts of the reign (2 and 3 Philip and Mary, c. 4), by which the Crown renounced the first-fruits and tenths, were but matters of detail, however important they might be in their effects. But, wonderful as it was, Mary's success was not complete. Nor was it satisfactory to herself. She had failed in excluding Elizabeth from the succession; she had failed in securing any powder to Philip beyond the term of her own life; and not only had she failed in effecting a restoration to the Church of the lands and goods torn from it by her father, but the spirit which had been displayed when she had raised the question, was such as may well have aroused a doubt in her own mind, as it clearly did in those of others, as to the sincerity and permanence of the change which she had effected. Some such thought as this, no doubt, urged on Mary in the course of severity which she now adopted. Of her sincerity there can be no doubt, and she may well have felt that her work was but ​half done; that, by the recent legislation, she had cleared the way and acquired the means for effecting her object, but the object itself was as yet far from being attained.
Half her own ministers were either latitudinarians, like Paget, or concealed heretics, like Cecil. Elizabeth was her inevitable successor, and Elizabeth belonged to the latter category; and Mary most probably felt that her own life was uncertain, and that, unless she could root out the tendency to heresy, which she saw all around her, in her own lifetime, all would relapse at her death, and her labour would be in vain. Whatever the constraining motive, or, as is more likely, the combination of motives, there is no doubt of the fact that with the close of the first Parliament of Philip and Mary began the cruellest, the most relentless, and the longest persecution which has ever been seen in England; and that, in the main, it is to Mary herself personally that this persecution is due. Gardiner's share in it is not so clear, for though it is evident that at first he was in its favour, it seems also clear that he did not long remain so. Incapable of religious zeal himself, he seems to have doubted, until repeated trials had cleared up the doubt, whether the Protestants believed any more sincerely than he did—whether, when it came to the point, they would think their particular views were worth defending at the cost of their lives.
From the position which Gardiner held in Mary's esteem and counsels, there can be no hesitation about fixing the charge of the commencement of the persecution upon him—at least, it could not have commenced without his concurrence or against his will; but ​he probably thought that a very few executions would be sufficient to check the zeal of the Protestants, and when he found that he was mistaken he did not care to go on. It is true that two important factors may have contributed to diminish Gardiner's zeal, viz. the fact that Pole arrived in England only a few weeks before the outbreak of the persecution, and that Gardiner's own health began to fail very shortly after this; for he died on November 13, 1555, exactly a year after Pole left Brussels on his journey to England, and had been ill probably for some months before. The other principal agent in the persecutions, Bishop Bonner, seems to have received rather hard measure both from his contemporaries and from posterity. That he was a man of coarse mind and brutal manners there is no room for doubt; and, having chosen his party from whatever reasons, he went all lengths with it, with little pity and no scrupples, and often with a malignant satisfaction in paying off old scores upon his personal enemies with somewhat large usury. Such a man is likely to be, and often is, popularly accepted as the embodiment of the system of which he is the expression, when, in fact, his part is that rather of the executioner than of the judge. But we all recognise the fact that Jack Ketch is not a popular character, albeit he may deserve his unpopularity far less than the Judge Jeffreys who calls his services into requisition; and Bonner, who was the hand rather than the head or heart of the persecution, probably obtained a larger share of its unpopularity than fairly belonged to him. His return to his see, at the commencement of Mary's reign, seems to have been popular; and we know at ​least of one occasion on which he appears to have tried to save a victim, even against his own will. Another person who shares to some extent the responsibility of the persecution is Cardinal Pole. But to him, on the other hand, historians appear to have been most unaccountably lenient. He may possibly have deserved his early reputation as a learned and studious man, and he seems to have been sincere, and fairly free from selfish and personally ambitious schemes; but he was a pedant, and what would in modern days be called a prig. As a negotiator he was incompetent, and as a statesman beneath contempt. He held the seals for a few months after Gardiner's death, until he received an intimation from the Pope that his legate must not serve two masters, when he retired to make room for Archbishop Heath; and at this time De Noailles describes Mary as so regarding the legate that 'she neither will nor can do anything without him.' This is the very winter, also, when the horrors of the Lollards' Tower and Bonner's coal-house were perpetrated. Added to this, his own injunctions to the bishops, of February 1555, for the reconciling of their dioceses to the Church, introduced a register of all persons in each parish who had been reconciled, with a promise of a future visitation of a very significant character. Moreover, towards the latter part of the persecution, in no place did it rage more hotly than in Pole's own diocese of Canterbury: and although it is alleged that Thornton, the Suffragan of Dover, and Archdeacon Harpsfield, were the principal agents in the matter, yet it ought not to be forgotten that Thornton and Harpsfield were but Pole's subordinates, and there is no reason why the rule 'qui facit per alium facit ​per se' should not be applied to the full in such a case as this. It is therefore quite futile to endeavour to relieve Pole from the charge of complicity in the abominations of the Marian persecution. But neither, to do him justice, is there any good reason to believe that he would have disowned his share in it.
The ecclesiastical counter-revolution of Mary's reign was in many respects very remarkable. It seems that the English Church, in any intelligible sense of the words, had very little to do with it, and that little was of a kind which reminds one of the Japanese institution of happy despatch. Mary's methods were precisely those of her father and Cromwell, but the process to which they were applied was the reverse of that for which they had employed them. Parliament, as we have seen, she was unable to control with the completeness with which Cromwell had done it, though even with Parliament her success was surprising; but Convocation was far more compliant, and how it became so is sufficiently indicated by the fact that, whereas the assembly of the previous year had authorised the Fortytwo Articles, and, as seems almost certain, Ponet's Catechism also, the new Lower House contained but six members who declined to sign Weston's bill declaring the latter 'pestiferous and full of heresies.'
The first of Mary's Convocations conducted the well-known disputation on the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, at St, Paul's, and decided, as of course, in favour of the Roman doctrine. The second managed the still more famous disputations with Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, at Oxford. The third Convocation synchronised with the first Parliament of Philip and Mary, ​and its proceedings show the greater boldness which had been infused into the Roman party by the Queen's marriage with Philip. Not only did they receive the Pope's absolution, at the mouth of Cardinal Pole, with becoming humility, but they petitioned, and petitioned successfully, for the repeal en masse of the whole antipapal legislation of Henry VIII. from the twentieth year of his reign onwards. The one point in which they failed was that of the restoration of the Church lands, and in this their failure was as conspicuous as was their success in other matters. Yet, had Mary's reign been prolonged, or had the birth of an heir perpetuated the sway of the Spanish dynasty, it seems that the English clergy would have been indeed in evil case as a result of their own success. They had sold themselves to the Pope more completely than their predecessors had ever done: and yet, if we look at the share which the Crown had had in the bargain, it might be fairly doubted how far they had efficiently emancipated themselves from State control, as the next reign, indeed, sufficed to show; and in the meanwhile they had failed to regain that position of wealth, and of the independence which wealth gives, which had for ages gone so far in enabling them to oppress the people, and to make their own terms often with the Crown itself.
The subsequent Convocations of this reign were of little importance, inasmuch as they were practically over-shadowed by the Legatine Synod which Pole assembled in November 1555. It is worthy of notice that Pole thought it necessary, or at any rate wise, to obtain a warrant under the Great Seal as a condition preliminary to assembling this Synod, since it showed, ​in the first place, a sense of the necessity of obtaining the licence of the civil powers for his proceedings, and, in the second, a truly remarkable forgetfulness of the fact that Wolsey, less than half a century earlier, had obtained the same licence to perform the same act, yet it had failed to shield him from the Præmunire, the very same law which the utmost efforts of Pole's friends in Parliament had failed to get repealed. But, whatever may be thought of the security, or the reverse, of Pole's position, it is clear that the English Church, so far as that mysterious entity was represented by Convocation, had got itself placed effectually between the upper and the nether millstone.
And now there remains but little more to be said of the relations of Church and State in Mary's reign. The Church in England now meant nothing but the Popish clergy, and of the Church in that sense of the word Mary was the abject slave: but Mary was a Tudor monarch, and a Tudor monarch could say, with as much truth as Louis XIV. a century later, 'L'etat c'est moi'; so that the whole country was delivered up to the tender mercies of the Popish clergy, and truly is it said that the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel. True, these saintly men would not embrue their hands in human blood; but they would, and they did, arrange with the State that from their judgment there should be no appeal, and that their convicts should die by the cruellest death which human wickedness has ever yet invented.
There are one or two matters connected with Mary's persecution which, although they do not come directly within the category of matters affecting the relations of Church and State, yet concerned those ​relations so intimately, that it appears necessary to notice them in this place. One of these is the arbitrary character of the proceedings instituted against heretics.
Burnet prints the original letter of Philip and Mary to the justices of Norfolk, ordering them in the plainest terms to make investigation into the behaviour of private persons, to employ informers, to call before them such as may 'probably be suspected,' and compel them to give an account of themselves. That this letter is but a sample is further proved by another, addressed to Bishop Bonner, and expatiating upon his slackness and want of zeal, in which their Majesties speak of having sent letters similar to the above to 'the justices of the peace within every of the counties in this our realm.' This seems to have been the completest instance on record of the introduction into England of the practical methods of the Inquisition, which Gardiner, as we are told, had been anxious, still earlier in the reign, to set up in England; and it is worthy of notice that it was now introduced apparently on direct royal authority alone. Instances are to be found of remonstrance against Mary's policy of persecution from even the most unlikely quarters—from Charles V., from Renard, from Philip II. (at least, indirectly), and even from Gardiner himself—but they all seem to have ​been in vain: some, doubtless, were insincere, and those which were not so, coming from whence they came, can be attributed to policy only, and not to honest conviction; but, by whatever motive dictated, they all met the same fate. Mary went on her way without pity, without remorse, and not less without reason. And yet Mary's conduct must, in fairness, be attributed to pure religious fanaticism. It breaks from her at every opportunity, from the beginning of her reign to the end of it. Her reply to the Commons, when they remonstrated about the Spanish marriage, that in this matter she would take counsel of God, and of none other; her statement, also to Parliament, on the subject of the firstfruits and tenths, that she could not take them with a clear conscience; her profound belief that she had been preserved, almost miraculously, for the special purpose of restoring England to the unity of the Catholic Church; all these and other indications, while they are no way inconsistent with the self-willed, narrow, sour, and ignorant woman which Mary certainly was, all point also to one completely under the power of a dominant religious belief, as sincere and brave as it was narrow and mischievous. Nay, it would almost seem, if the whole circumstances be fairly considered, that the very act of her reign which has been especially pointed out as dictated by private and personal revenge, viz. her ferocious persecution of Cranmer, was really due to the same conviction. On what principle, or for what reason, was Mary's conduct to Gardiner and to Cranmer so widely different? During the greater part, ​if not the whole, of Henry's reign, Gardiner had been fully as much her enemy, and fully as much her father's tool, as Cranmer had been, and with her mother's divorce he had to the full as much to do. He had been sent to Rome, as one of Henry's ambassadors on the subject, long before Cranmer had any concern with it. He was Henry's principal counsel at the famous trial before the two legates; and he sat with Cranmer, and concurred in his judgment, at the final conclusion before the Court at Dunstable. Cranmer, therefore, could not easily, on this ground, be more obnoxious to her than Gardiner was; and, on the other hand, Burnet tells us, though again without giving his authority, that at a time when her father was much incensed against her, Cranmer ventured upon the not altogether safe office of interceding for her, when Gardiner himself and the Duke of Norfolk stood aside and left her to her fate. From the very beginning of the divorce negotiations Gardiner had been one of the j)rime agents of the King, and had continued to be so to the very end of them; and up to and beyond the passing of the Supremacy Act—indeed, till after the death of Katherine of Arragon—Cranmer and Gardiner had acted together; nor is there any evidence that the former had acted more rigorously against the Queen than the latter—indeed, the supposition is negatived by the character of the two men. The first indication of any divergence between their views appears in the discussions preceding the Act of Six Articles. It was, in fact, doubtless Cromwell's reduction of the bishops to mere State officers, after the Supremacy Act, which first inclined Gardiner to a reactionary course; and it was the fact ​of his becoming reactionary, and more and more reactionary as time went on, which made him change gradually from Mary's bitterest enemy to almost her closest and most trusted friend; and his so doing shows how completely Mary could overcome her most natural and most sacred private feelings at the bidding of her religious fanaticism, and in the interests of her cherished Church. And just as Gardiner had moved in a retrograde, so had Cranmer moved in an advancing, direction from the time when he sentenced Frith for denying the Corporal Presence in the Eucharist, to that at which he adopted Frith's words on the very same subject, and incorporated them in a note into his own Communion Office.
Is it not possible, too, that in Cromwell's later legislation we may find the key to Gardiner's later and reactionary course? His early career showed that he had little real regard for the Papal claims or the unity of the Church; but nothing in his whole life ever gave rise to a suspicion that he undervalued the privileges of the clergy or the power and dignity of a bishop.
He cared little whether Pope or King was called Head of the Church, but he cared a great deal for the bishop's revenues and the bishop's courts and rights and jurisdictions; and when he found out that the royal supremacy was to be a reality, and not a mere title, and that it meant a lay vicar-general presiding in Convocation, and a Church made realty subject to one master, instead of maintaining a position in which it might alternately despise each of two, then the scales fell from his eyes, and he began to perceive that the clergy were in danger of exchanging 'King Log for King Stork,' and that the Pope in Italy, with all his exactions and extortions, was a better bargain than the ​King in England, intent upon obedience no less than taxation, and always at hand to enforce his authority. Hence, perhaps, his enmity to Cromwell first and to Cranmer afterwards, his obstructive tactics under Edward VI., and his active retrogression under Mary.
There is probably no single character in history of which it is more difficult to arrive at a tolerably accurate and fair estimate than that of Archbishop Cranmer. Not only was his a 'strangely mingled' and highly complex nature, but it was cast upon the most perplexed and stormy period of all modern history; therein to occupy a post of the very greatest difficulty and danger. But, over and above all this, Cranmer was the most prominent leader of a party, at a time when party spirit ran its very highest, when every leader and every follower fell, and could not but fall, into errors, and when every error was seized upon by a hundred malignant enemies, and painted for all posterity in the blackest colours. He has suffered, too, almost as much from the exaggerated encomiums of excited partisans, as from the slanders of unscrupulous opponents. In a word, his reputation has been the chosen battle-ground of the most embittered party warfare that the world has ever seen, and a task eminently difficult in itself has been rendered almost impossible by the struggles of the combatants.
If we lay aside the merely rhetorical slanders of malignant opponents, we shall, I think, arrive at the conclusion that the main charges brought against Cranmer's character resolve themselves into three, viz. (1) that he was insincere in his oath to the Pope when first made Archbishop of Canterbury—that he never meant to observe it, and was guilty of deliberate perjury; (2) that he perpetually yielded to the wishes ​of Henry VIII. in regard to his divorces and other matters, and must have done so in divers cases against his own conscience, and with full knowledge that he did wrong; and (3) that in his last struggle under Mary he recanted several times in the hope of saving his life.
I. The first of these charges need not detain us long. It belongs almost to that very class which we have just excluded from notice. Cranmer had, like every archbishop for many centuries, two oaths to take, one to the Pope and another to the King. Like almost every similar pledge, when a functionary owes allegiance to two different authorities, these oaths, if strictly interpreted by a man of scrupulous conscience, would be found to be more or less incompatible. That they were felt to be so in older and less difficult times, is proved by the fact that Archbishop Langham, in Edward III.'s time, 'solemnly renounced all expressions in the Papal bulls which militated against the Royal prerogative, or infringed upon the laws lately enacted' (the laws in question being no other than the Statute of Provisors); while, on the other hand, in the reign of Edward I., Archbishop Peckham 'openly stated that whatever oaths he might have taken {e.g. to the King), he should feel himself absolved from them if they interfered with his duty to the Pope.' To quote a more modern instance, the case is exactly similar to the charge brought against the Heads and Fellows of Colleges in Oxford and Cambridge, in regard to their oaths to obey statutes, &c., for several years previously to the appointment of the Royal Commission of 1850. But though ​these truly shocking accusations were thus freely dealt around, and all the Heads of Colleges were held up to contempt as so many perjurers, yet no man ever really thought the worse of them, nor did one of them suffer either in person or reputation; in other words, no one really believed the charge. It is singular also, and worthy of remark, that these charges against Cranmer are mostly heard now from the mouths of clergymen of a particular party in the English Church, every one of whom has committed the same offence as Cranmer, only in a more flagrant form than he, and without his excuses, when he has declared his belief in the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England.
We must never forget that, to a mind like Cranmer's, versatile and subtle by natural constitution, and trained, and we may also say sophisticated, by a life-long familiarity with every phase and shade of controversial learning, it is almost, perhaps quite, impossible to put a question in a way which will admit of a perfectly unqualified answer, or which will present itself to it for simple denial or affirmation; and when such a mind is accompanied by a temperament naturally nervous and timid, and placed in a body depressed and weakened by age, imprisonment, and ill-treatment, it must be a very immaculate or a very Pharisaical accuser who will dare to cast the first stone at him. Every man is to some extent the victim of circumstances, and every man is to a still greater extent limited by the constitution of mind and body with which he came into the world. These are the facts which make the command that we judge not others as perfect a precept in philosophy as it is a rule in morals, since a really just judgment of another is impossible to man. We may, in many cases, be compelled to pass a judgment, and justified in passing one ​without qualification; but it must always be an objective judgment—i.e., a judgment on the conduct of aman in its relation to others, not an absolute judgment on the moral value of the man himself.
II. The second charge is a far graver one, and there is, alas! less to be said in Cranmer's defence. Still, it is less than it appears to us of the present day, when we look at it in the light—or the darkness, I should perhaps better say—of the times in which he lived. Of Henry's three divorces, the circumstances were all different. In regard to the first, and most important—that from Katherine of Arragon—there is no doubt whatever that it was defensible, and that Cranmer believed it was right. The question of Anne Boleyn's guilt or innocence is one which most historians, of late years, have given up as insoluble; but if any man really knew the rights of the question at the time, Cranmer was that man.
The divorce of Anne of Cleves seems to have been, on the King's side, the most groundless and inexcusable of all; but it must be conceded, as far as the judge is concerned, that she herself appears to have concurred in it. Thus, if we take the charges against Cranmer of having violated justice in deference to the royal wishes, we shall find ourselves compelled, so to speak, to grant him an acquittal in two out of the three, and a verdict of not proven in that of Anne Boleyn. Now, when we take into consideration the fact so often referred to, that in Tudor times to be prosecuted by the Crown was practically equivalent to being condemned, and that the only two men who openly stood out against Henry's will were More and Fisher, both of whom lost their heads in consequence, we can hardly be surprised that any man should object to doing the same in a doubtful case. ​More and Fisher may have died for what seems to be a small point, but it was, at any rate, a point about which they had no doubt. They clearly thought that they would violate their consciences by taking the oath required of them; Cranmer, on the other hand, in the cases the particulars of which we know, did not think that he was doing wrong in pronouncing the divorce, and we may, therefore, fairly give him credit for similar conduct in that of Anne Boleyn, which we do not know.
In the matter of the divorces, then, we may say that, in regard to those of Katherine of Arragon and Anne of Cleves, Cranmer clearly did that which was his duty as a judge, holding the beliefs that he actually held, and that which every just judge would have found himself compelled to do. In the remaining case, we have to admit that we have too little information to justify us in either condemning or acquitting him. The charge of having assisted in the condemnation of Frith and Lambert, which comes also under this heading, resolves itself really into a statement that Cranmer had not completely assimilated a doctrine which, if it existed at all in his time, did so only as a theory, and which, even now, is but very imperfectly followed—viz., the doctrine of toleration. A Puritan divine at the epoch of the Rebellion, almost a century later, speaks of a toleration as 'the grand design of the devil!'
On this head, also, there is much to be put down to Cranmer's credit. He, and he alone, ventured on three several occasions to intercede, though mostly in vain, for some of the victims of Henry's ferocious tyranny—viz., for Anne Boleyn, for Cromwell, and, as we have just seen, according to Burnet, for the Princess Mary herself; and again, in the matter of the Act of Six Articles, he steadily, and from beginning to end, opposed Henry's will. ​He not only declined to advocate it, but he also declined to abstain from opposing it, and did oppose it throughout its course in the Lords.
Thus, it will be seen in regard to the charge of habitual and unworthy yielding to Henry's will, that in respect to the divorces he could do no other than he did, if we admit that we are not fully enough informed to condemn him in the case of Anne Boleyn; while, on the other hand, he, a constitutionally timid man, ventured to oppose Henry's will on several occasions, and to an extent, in the case of the Bill of Six Articles,—as Bishop Phillpotts, no great admirer of him, has pointed out—which More and Fisher never equalled. Of his error in regard to Northumberland's conspiracy I have already spoken.
III. We come, therefore, in the last place, to speak of the recantations between his trial and his execution, of which so much capital has been made by his detractors. That these require much excuse it is impossible to deny, but that they are absolutely inexcusable let him only assert who has stood firm in equally trying circumstances.
Cranmer had great reason—apart from the unwillingness to die which most men feel—to desire to live. He had done much to build up a Protestant Church in England, and seemed almost within reach of the end of his labours, and the crowning of the work, when Edward's death brought it to a sudden end. He may well have longed to finish it; he may well have indulged a hope that something would occur to frustrate Mary's plans, or even to alter her designs (for before his death her hopes of offspring had disappeared, and her health was manifestly failing), and have longed to ​be still alive when the good time came, and to have his share in the completion of that on which he had spent so much labour, and for which he had gone through so many perils. Added to all this, he was an old man, and he went through misery enough in the last months of his life to have worn down the resolution of a stronger man than he; and had been worried by the perpetual arguments of Dr. Soto and his fellows—arguments always reinforced by the deluding hope of life and pardon—till his half-starved and weakened frame had, in all probability, reacted, for the time at least, both upon his intellect and his moral power. And so he fell—and no more pitiable fall than his is recorded in the long roll of history. But even that fall, grievous as it was, was not altogether unatoned for. At the last moment he found that his weakness and humiliation had been all in vain. His enemies had strained and twisted even their own pitiless laws in order to prevent his escape, to put him through the lowests depths of humiliation, and finally to bring him to the cruellest of deaths. They were just anticipating the final scene of triumph. They were to wreak their vengeance to the utmost on the man who had done more than any other man to perpetuate the schism from Rome, and to organise the English Protestant Church. They brought him out to die, and expected to hear him, in the face of a whole congregation, openly confess that Rome was the true Church of God, that the Pope was the legitimate Vicar of Christ, that Protestantism was utter heresy, that the system which he had established was utterly rotten, and himself a hypocrite, an apostate, and a too-late repentant heretic. But the scales had at last fallen from Cranmer's eyes—all his illusion had at last departed. He saw all at once ​the cruel craft of his enemies, and his own folly and baseness and cowardice. It was as if the evil spirit had departed from him, and he was once more in his right mind. All at once he recovered his manliness and his courage.
Cole, the preacher, at the end of his sermon had said: 'Lest any man should doubt the sincerity of this man's repentance, you shall hear him speak before you. I pray you. Master Cranmer, that you will now perform that you promised not long ago—that you would openly express the true and undoubted profession of your faith.' Then Cranmer spoke, and, after a prayer for forgiveness, he entered upon a kind of sermon, in which he solemnly warned his hearers, with all the earnestness of a dying man, against what he considered the prevailing vices of the time; and finally, when the interest of his hearers was wound up to the very highest pitch, he began with the words: 'And now I come to the great thing that troubleth my conscience more than any other thing that ever I said or did in my life'—words which might, quite naturally, lead up to a recantation of his heresy. Then followed—'and that is the setting abroad of writings contrary to the truth, which here I now renounce and refuse as things written with my hand contrary to the truth which I thought in my heart, and written for fear of death, to save my life, if it might be; and that is all such bills and papers as I have written and signed with my hand since my degradation, wherein I have written many things untrue; and forasmuch as my hand offended in writing contrary to my heart, my hand, therefore, shall first be punished; for, if I may come to the fire, it shall be first burnt.' The consternation produced by this bold speech seems to have been so great that, for the moment, those in authority forgot ​to stop the speaker, and he was able to add the final and important sentence: 'As for the Pope, I utterly refuse him, as Christ's enemy and Antichrist, with all his false doctrine; and as for the Sacrament, I believe as I have taught in my book against the Bishop of Winchester.' Then, indeed, there arose shouts of 'Pull him down!' 'Away with him!' 'Stop his mouth!' and so on. Further speech was not permitted. He was haled off to the stake, pursued to the last moment with the arguments and reproaches of the disappointed friars, and there took his death, without shrinking and without bravado, stood and held his right hand in the flame, and 'never stirred nor cried' till life was gone. Surely a death like this was some sort of atonement for the weakness and the fall which went before it. Whether it were so or not, at least it was a heavy blow to the Catholic party. They had striven hard to win a double triumph, and had violated justice, and been crueller than their own cruel laws to make their triumph and their vengeance complete. They had spared no effort to secure his recantation, had lured him to it by hopes of life, and, when they had succeeded, they would take his life as well. Then, at the last moment, he had turned upon them, flung back his recantation in their teeth, and, like Samson, to whom Mr. Froude has well compared him, 'the dead that he slew at his death were more than they that he slew in his life.' It is with no less truth than eloquence that Mr. Green has told us that 'it was with the unerring instinct of a popular movement that, among a crowd of far more heroic sufferers, the Protestants fixed, in spite of his recantations, upon the martyrdom of Cranmer as the deathblow to Catholicism in England. For one man who felt within him the joy of Rowland Taylor at the prospect ​of the stake, there were thousands who felt the shuddering dread of Cranmer. The triumphant cry of Latimer could reach only hearts as bold as his own; while the sad pathos of the Primate's humiliation and repentance struck chords of sympathy and pity in the hearts of all. It is from that moment that we may trace the bitter remembrance of the blood shed in the cause of Rome, which, however partial and unjust it may seem to an historic observer, still lies graven deep in the temper of the English people.'
Of Mary herself, by far the most charitable, and not improbably the truest account, is, that from a period shortly after her marriage with Philip, she ceased to be fully responsible for her actions. Early in 1556 De Noailles, the French Ambassador, describes her as 'in a continual state of excitement because she could not enjoy either the presence of her husband or the affection of her subjects'; and again he says: 'She sleeps but three or four hours, and spends the rest of her time in weeping, and regretting, and writing to bring her husband back, and anger against her subjects.' She is described as constantly breaking out into the most violent and abusive language when speaking of her heretical and disaffected subjects; and Henry II. (of France), in writing to De Noailles, speaks of her as 'possédée et maniée.' And when at last there came upon her the evident disgust and desertion of Philip, the constantly-recurring libels and lampoons which manifested the growing hatred of her subjects, and, finally, the disgrace and danger involved in the loss of Calais, she sank into a condition of dull, miserable despondency and gloom, from which one might suppose that even death itself must have been a welcome deliverance. There is, in fact, a good deal of contemporary evidence ​which suggests the above conclusion. The fits of despondency into which she fell alternated with passion which vented itself in the most violent language. Her habits of wandering about her palace at night, and of sitting for hours on the floor, with her knees drawn up to her face, and her further habit of perpetually looking out for miracles, and regarding the most ordinary occurrences as miraculous, all point in the same direction, and we may fairly, as well as charitably, believe, that at any rate from the time that she recognised the fact that she could bear no child, and that Elizabeth must be her inevitable successor, Mary Tudor was no longer responsible for her actions. So considering, we may regard her as the most pitiable of human beings; otherwise she can hardly be relieved from the opprobrium which for three centuries has been attached to her name.
Little enough of the acts and deeds of Mary's Government took any permanent place in the constitution or laws of England. Most of her work was to undo that of her two immediate predecessors—her father and brother. Hers, in its turn, was mainly undone by her sister and successor; yet is there no sovereign who ever sat on the English throne, unless it be Henry VIII. himself, who has produced a greater or more permanent effect upon the subsequent history of the country. The loathing which Mary's persecution produced in the minds of Englishmen did more to establish the Reformation in England than any other single cause. 'You have lost the hearts of twenty thousand that were rank Papists within this twelvemonth,' wrote a lady to Bonner. The courage and the faith which ennobled and made heroes of 'prentices and herdsmen produced its natural effect, and the combined ​horror of the cruelty of the one party, and admiration of the courageous endurance of the other, produced a fixed hatred of the Roman Church and of Roman churchmen in the bulk of the English nation which was at least as immovable as it may have been unreasoning, which was kept alive for many years afterwards by the conspiracies against Elizabeth and the famous Gunpowder Plot, which lasted for three centuries, and of which traces still remain.
Another result of the persecution was that many of the Protestant divines who had flourished under Edward were driven into exile, and sought refuge, not among the Lutherans of North Germany, but among the Zwinglian and Calvinist communities of Switzerland and the Upper Rhine. This is a fact which has a double significance, and is of much importance. It shows, in the first place, the strong tendency towards the Zwinglian form of Protestantism which had developed itself in the English Church during Edward's reign, for the exiles would naturally direct their steps towards those amongst their co-religionists with whom they most strongly sympathised; and it accounts, as has been often pointed out, for the further development of the same or similar tendencies which took place in Elizabeth's reign. The strength of this tendency in the Swiss towns to which the exiles went, naturally affected their minds, and, reinforced as it was by the cordiality and kindness with which they were mostly received, and the sentiments of gratitude and affection thus awakened in them, soon made a conquest of them altogether, and this form of Christianity became in their eyes the only ​one really worthy of the name. But while most of these men, filled with love and admiration of Bullinger, Martyr, and some other of the Swiss leaders of reform, were content to enjoy their friendship and imbibe their doctrines, a few others—of whom Whittingham (afterwards Dean of Durham) was the most notable—became enamoured of their discipline as well, and, bringing their passion for it also back to England with them, laid the foundation of the Puritan movement, and of all its momentous results.
Mary died on November 16, 1558, and the total result of her reign had been misery to herself and disgrace and wretchedness to her country. She had ascended the throne, little more than five years before, amidst all but universal joy and gratulation. Her subjects, apparently, moved by that curious sympathy so constantly shown to monarchs, rejoiced to see her emerge from the clouds of undeserved misfortune which had surrounded her early life, and, themselves smarting under the selfish government of Edward's Council, indulged freely in all those vague and groundless hopes which so often usher in the beginning of a new regime. In those few years all was changed, and the rejoicings which proclaimed the accession of Elizabeth were more than half due to the relief felt at having escaped from Mary's tyranny.
* ↑ Burnet, vol. ii. p. 394.
* ↑ Strictly speaking this was a new Parliament, though the Acts are reckoned as if it were the same.
* ↑ Green, vol. ii. p. 247.
* ↑ See despatches in the Granvelle Papers, vol. iv.; quoted also by Froude, vol. vi. p. 43.
* ↑ Renard, as noted by Froude, vol. vi. p. 120.
* ↑ Green, vol. ii. pp. 250-1.
* ↑ Burnet, vol. v. pp. 381-8, also Appendix, Note V.
* ↑ According to Burnet, the new bishops were sixteen in number: vol. ii. p. 444.
* ↑ Froude, vol. vi. p. 221.
* ↑ Burnet, vol. ii. p. 447; also Green, vol. ii. p. 252.
* ↑ Granvelle Papers, iv. 329.
* ↑ Granvelle Papers, vol. iv. p. 317.
* ↑ Froude, vol. vi. pp. 292-306.
* ↑ In the despatches of the period there is a constant repetition of the statement that if Elizabeth succeed there will surely be a recurrence to heresy. See for example Renard's despatch of June 27, 1555, quoted by Froude, vol. vi. p. 355, where he says that the succession 'must fall to Elizabeth, and with Elizabeth there will be a religious revolution.'
* ↑ See Renard in State papers quoted by Froude, vol. vi. p. 197. See also the commission to Bonner, Thirlby, and others, for a severe way of proceeding against heretics (Burnet, vol. v. p. 469).
* ↑ De Noailles to the Queen of Scots, Sept. 9, 1555.—Ambassades de M. M. de Noailles, vol. v. p. 127.
* ↑ De Noailles, vol. v. p. 256.
* ↑ Lathbury, pp. 148-9.
* ↑ Lathbury, p. 152.
* ↑ Burnet, vol. v. pp. 427 and 429.
* ↑ Renard as quoted by Froude, vol. vi. p. 197.
* ↑ At the beginning of her reign, as we have seen, and again after the burning of Hooper. See also Granvelle Papers, vol. iv. pp. 393, 402.
* ↑ Philip had made Alphonsus à Castro (!) preach a sermon before him, in February 1555, against taking away men's lives for religion. Burnet, vol. ii. p. 490.
* ↑ Gardiner, followed by her other bishops, sitting to try Rogers, shifted the responsibility for the persecution from their own shoulders to the Queen's (Burnet, vol. ii. p. 484). Also Pole's instructions to the bishops and their officials especially concerning the keeping of a register of those reconciled to the Church, and summoning before them those unreconciled, and proceeding against them (Burnet, vol. vi. pp. 366-9).
* ↑ Burnet, vol. ii. p. 535; where it is to be observed that he quotes no authority for his statement.
* ↑ Burnet, vol. i. pp. 135, 219.
* ↑ Burnet, vol. ii. p. 387.
* ↑ Hook, Archbishop of Canterbury, vol. iv. pp. 198-9.
* ↑ Ib. vol. iii. p. 346.
* ↑ Chaps, iv., v., vi., and vii., of the late Sir William Hamilton, Discussion on Philosophy, Education, &c. (Longmans, 1852).
* ↑ Oughton, Ordo judiciorum, p. 320.
* ↑ Bishop Phillpott's Correspondence with Lord Macaulay, p. 4. Murray, 1861.
* ↑ See this point argued out by Mr. Pocock in the English Review and in his lecture. Grindal, in the early days of Elizabeth's reign, writes of 'Lutherans and semi-Papists' as if synonymous. See above, p. 116.