Part 19 (1/2)
Yet with the ma.s.ses the work of arming went forward languidly. The nation was heavy at heart, and it was in vain that the n.o.blemen and gentlemen endeavoured to raise men's spirits; the black incubus of the priesthood sat upon them like a nightmare. The burnings had been suspended while parliament was in session. On the 28th of March the work began again, and Cuthbert Simson, the minister of a protestant congregation, was put to death in Smithfield, having been first racked to extort from him the names of his supporters;[644] on the same day Reginald Pole, to clear himself of the charge of heresy, sent a fresh commission to Harpsfeld, to purge the diocese of Canterbury;[645] and the people, sick to their very souls at the abominable spectacles which were thrust before them, sank into a sullen despondency.
The musters for Derbys.h.i.+re were set down at fifteen hundred. Lord Shrewsbury raised four hundred from among his own dependents on his estates. The magistrates declared that, owing to dearth, want, and waste of means in the war of the last year, the ”poor little county” could provide but one hundred more.
The musters in Devons.h.i.+re broke up and went to their homes. The musters in Lincolns.h.i.+re mutinied. The ringleaders in both counties were immediately hanged;[646] yet the loyalty was none the greater. The exiled divines in Germany, believing that the people were at last ripe for insurrection, called on them to rise and put down the tyranny which was crus.h.i.+ng them. Goodman published a tract on the obedience of subjects, and John Knox blew his ”First Blast against the Monstrous Regimen of Women.” The queen, as if the ordinary laws of the country had no existence, sent out a proclamation that any one who was found to have these books in his or her possession, or who, finding such books, did not instantly burn them, should be executed as a rebel by martial law.[647] ”Affectionate as I be to my country and countrymen,” said Sir Thomas Smith, ”I was ashamed of both; they went about their matters as men amazed, that wist not where to begin or end. And what marvel was it? Here was nothing but firing, heading, hanging, quartering and burning, taxing and levying. A few priests in white rochets ruled all, who with setting up of six-foot roods and rebuilding of roodlofts, thought to make all sure.”
With the summer, fever and ague set in like a pestilence, ”G.o.d did so punish the realm,” said Sir Thomas Smith again, ”with quartan agues, and with such other long and new sicknesses, that in the last two years of the reign of Queen Mary, so many of her subjects was made away, what with the execution of sword and fire, what by sicknesses, that the third part of the men of England were consumed.”[648] In the spring, the queen, misled by the same symptoms which had deceived her before, had again fancied herself enceinte. She made her will in the avowed expectation that she was about to undergo the perils of childbearing. She wrote for her husband to come to her. She sent the fleet into the Channel, and laid relays of horses along the roads to London from Dover and from Harwich, that he might choose at which port to land.
Philip so far humoured the fancy, which he must have known to be delusive, that he sent the Count de Feria to congratulate her. Her letter, he said, contained the best news which he had heard since the loss of Calais. But the bubble broke soon. Mary had parted from her husband on the 5th of the preceding July, and her suspense, therefore, was not long protracted. It is scarcely necessary to say in what direction her second disappointment vented itself.
Cranmer alone hitherto had suffered after recantation; to others, pardon had continued to be offered to the last moment. But this poor mercy was now extinguished. A man in Hamps.h.i.+re, named Bembridge, exclaimed at the point of execution that he would submit; a form was produced on the spot, which Bembridge signed, and the sheriff, Sir Richard Pexall, reprieved him by his own authority. But a letter of council came instantly to Pexall, that ”the queen's majesty could not but find it very strange” that he had saved from punishment a man condemned for heresy: the execution was to proceed out of hand; and ”if the prisoner continued in the Catholic faith, as he pretended,” ”some discreet and learned man might be present with him in his death, for the aiding of him to die G.o.d's servant.”[649] Bembridge was accordingly burnt, and the sheriff, for the lenity which he had dare to show, was committed to the Fleet. Whole detachments of men and women were again slaughtered in London; and the queen, exasperated at the determination with which the populace cheered the sufferers with their sympathy, sent out a proclamation forbidding her subjects to approach, touch, speak to, or comfort heretics on their way to execution, under pain of death. Shortly after, a congregation of Protestants were detected at a prayer-meeting in a field near the city; thirteen were taken as prisoners before Bonner, and seven were burnt at Smithfield together on the 28th of June. The people replied to the queen's menaces by crowding about the stake with pa.s.sionate demonstrations of affection, and Thomas Bentham, a friend of Lever the preacher, when the f.a.ggots were lighted, stood out in the presence of the throng, and cried:
”We know that they are the people of G.o.d, and therefore we cannot choose but wish well to them and say, G.o.d strengthen them. G.o.d almighty, for Christ's sake, strengthen them.”
The mult.i.tude shouted, in reply, ”Amen, Amen.”[650]
Alarmed himself, this time, at the display of emotion, Bonner dared not outrage the metropolis with the deaths of the remaining six. Yet, not to let them escape him, he tried them privately in his own house at Fulham, and burnt them at Brentford at night in the darkness.[651]
So fared the Protestants, murdered to propitiate Providence, and, if possible, extort for the queen a return of the Divine favour. The alarm of invasion diminished as summer advanced. England had again a fleet upon the seas which feared no enemy, and could even act on the offensive. In May, two hundred and forty s.h.i.+ps, large and small, were collected at Portsmouth;[652] and on the day of the burning at Brentford, accident gave a small squadron among them a share in a considerable victory.
Lord Clinton, who was now admiral in the place of Howard, after an ineffectual cruise in the south of the Channel, returned to Portsmouth on the 8th of July. A few vessels remained in the neighbourhood of Calais, when M. de Thermes, whom the Duke of Guise left in command there, with the garrison of Boulogne, some levies collected in Picardy, and his own troops, in all about 9000 men, ventured an inroad into the Low Countries, took Dunkirk, and plundered it. Not caring to penetrate further, he was retreating with his booty, when Count Egmont, with a few thousand Burgundians and Flemings, cut in at Gravelines between the French and their own frontiers. They had no means of pa.s.sing, except at low water, between the town of Gravelines and the sea, and the English s.h.i.+ps, which were in communication with Egmont, stood in as near as they could venture, so as to command the sands.
De Thermes, obliged to advance when the tide would permit him, dashed at the dangerous pa.s.sage; the guns of Gravelines on one side, the guns of the English vessels on the other, tore his ranks to pieces, and Egmont charging when their confusion was at its worst, the French were almost annihilated. Five thousand were killed, De Thermes himself, Senarpont of Boulogne, the Governor of Picardy, and many other men of note, were taken. If Clinton had been at hand with the strength of the fleet, and a dash had been made at Calais by land and sea, it would have been recovered more easily than it had been lost. But fortune had no such favour to bestow on Queen Mary. Clinton was still loitering at Spithead, and when news of the action came it was too late.
The plan of the naval campaign for the season was to attack Brest with the united strength of England and Flanders, and hold it as a security for the restoration of Calais at the peace. It was for the arrival of his allies that Clinton had been waiting, and it was only at the end of the month that the combined fleet, a hundred and forty sail, left Portsmouth for the coast of Brittany. They appeared duly off Brest; yet, when their object was before them, they changed their minds on the feasibility of their enterprise; and leaving their original design they landed a force at Conquet, which they plundered and burnt, and afterwards destroyed some other villages in the neighbourhood. The achievement was not a very splendid one. Four or five hundred Flemings who ventured too far from the fleet were cut off; and as the Duke d'Estampes was said to be coming up with 20,000 men, Clinton re-embarked his men in haste, returned to Portsmouth, after an ineffectual and merely mischievous demonstration, and then reported the sickness in the fleet so considerable, that the operations for the season must be considered at an end.[653]
In the meantime, the contending princes in their own persons, Philip with the powers of the Low Countries and Spain, Henry with the whole available strength of France, sate watching each other in entrenched camps upon the Somme. The French king, with the recollection of St. Quentin fresh upon him, would not risk a second such defeat. Philip would not hazard his late advantage by forcing an action which might lose for him all that he had gained. In the pause, the conviction came slowly over both, that there was no need for further bloodshed, and that the long, weary, profitless war might at last have an end. A mighty revolution had pa.s.sed over Europe since Francis first led an army over the Alps. The world had pa.s.sed into a new era; and the question of strength had to be tried, not any more between Spaniard and Frenchman, but between Protestant and Catholic. Already the disciples of Calvin threatened the Church of France; Holland was vexing the superst.i.tion of Philip, and the Protestants in Scotland were breaking from the hand of Mary of Guise: more and more the Catholic princes felt the want of a general council, that the questions of the day might be taken hold of firmly, and the Inquisition be set to work on some resolute principle of concert.
On September 21, the emperor pa.s.sed away in his retirement at St. Just. With him perished the traditions and pa.s.sions of which he was the last representative, and a new page was turning in the history of mankind. Essential ground of quarrel between Henry and Philip there was none; the outward accidental ground-the claims on Milan and Naples, Savoy and Navarre-had been rendered easy of settlement by the conquest of Calais, and by the marriage which was consummated a few weeks after Guise's victory, between the Dauphin and the Queen of Scots.
Satisfied with the triumph of a policy which had annexed the crown of Scotland to France, and with having driven the English by main strength from their last foothold on French soil, Henry could now be content to evacuate Savoy and Piedmont, if Philip, on his side, would repeat the desertion of Crepy, and having brought England into the war, would leave her to endure her own losses, or avenge them by her single strength. With this secret meaning on the part of France, an overture for a peace was commenced in the autumn of 1558, through the mediation of the d.u.c.h.ess of Lorraine. An armistice was agreed upon, and the first conference was held at the abbey of Cercamp, where Arundel, Wotton, and Thirlby attended as the representatives of England.
How far Philip would consent to an arrangement so perfidious towards the country of which he was the nominal sovereign, depended, first, on the life of the queen. The t.i.tular King of England could by no fiction or pretext relieve himself of the duties which the designation imposed upon him; and if the English were deserted their resentment would explode in a revolution of which Mary would be the instant victim.[654]
Mary, indeed, would soon cease to be a difficulty. She was attacked in September by the fever which was carrying off so many of her subjects. The fresh disease aggravated her const.i.tutional disorder, and her days were drawing fast to their end. But Philip's hold on England need not perish with the death of his wife, if he could persuade her sister to take her place. His policy, therefore, was for the present to linger out the negotiations; to identify in appearance his own and the English interests, and to wait the events of the winter.
At the opening of the conference it was immediately evident that France would not part with Calais. The English commissioners had been ordered to take no part in the discussion, unless the rest.i.tution was agreed on as a preliminary; and when they made their demand, Henry replied that ”he would hazard his crown rather than forego his conquest.”[655] The resolution was expressed decisively; and they saw, or thought they saw, so much indifference in the Spanish representatives, that they at first intended to return to England on the spot.
”To our minds,” they wrote, ”Calais is so necessary to be had again for the quieting of the world's mind in England, and it should so much offend and exasperate England, if any peace was made without rest.i.tution of it, that, for our part, no earthly private commodity nor profit could induce us thereto, nor nothing could be more grievous to us than to be ministers therein.”[656]
They were on the point of departure, when a letter from Philip required them to remain at their posts. Contrary to their expectation, the king promised to support England in insisting on the restoration, and his own commissioners were instructed equally to agree to nothing unless it was conceded.[657] Thus for a time the negotiation remained suspended till events should clear up the course which the different parties would follow.
And these events, or the one great event, was now close, and the shadows were drawing down over the life of the unfortunate Mary. Amidst discontent and misery at home, disgrace and failure abroad, the fantastic comparisons, the delirious a.n.a.logies, the child which was to be born of the Virgin Mary for the salvation of mankind-where were now these visionary and humiliating dreams?