Volume Iv Part 3 (1/2)

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Church lands should not be disturbed in their possession the statutes abolis.h.i.+ng Papal jurisdiction in England were repealed; and Lords and Commons received on their knees an absolution which freed the realm from the guilt incurred by its schism and heresy.

[Sidenote: Mary's difficulties.]

But, even in the hour of her triumph, the temper both of Parliament and the nation warned the Queen of the failure of her hope to bind England to a purely Catholic policy. The growing independence of the two Houses was seen in the impossibility of procuring from them any change in the order of succession. The victory of Rome was incomplete so long as its right of dispensation was implicitly denied by a recognition of Elizabeth's legitimacy, and Mary longed to avenge her mother by humbling the child of Anne Boleyn. But in spite of Pole's efforts and the Queen's support a proposal to oust her sister from the line of succession could not even be submitted to the Houses, nor could their a.s.sent be won to the postponing the succession of Elizabeth to that of Philip. The temper of the nation at large was equally decided. In the first Parliament of Mary a proposal to renew the laws against heresy had been thrown out by the Lords, even after the failure of Wyatt's insurrection. Philip's influence secured the re-enactment of the statute of Henry the Fourth in the Parliament which followed his arrival; but the sullen discontent of London compelled its Bishop, Bonner, to withdraw a series of articles of enquiry, by which he hoped to purge his diocese of heresy, and even the Council was divided on the question of persecution. In the very interests of Catholicism the Emperor himself counselled prudence and delay. Philip gave the same counsel. From the moment of his arrival the young king exercised a powerful influence over the Government, and he was gradually drawing into his hands the whole direction of affairs.

But, bigot as he was in matters of faith, Philip's temper was that of a statesman, not of a fanatic. If he came to England resolute to win the country to union with the Church, his conciliatory policy was already seen in the concessions he wrested from the Papacy in the matter of the Church lands, and his aim was rather to hold England together and to give time for a reaction of opinion than to revive the old discord by any measures of severity. It was indeed only from a united and contented England that he could hope for effective aid in the struggle of his house with France, and in spite of his pledges Philip's one aim in marrying Mary was to secure that aid.

[Sidenote: The persecution.]

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

[Sidenote: Rowland Taylor.]

If the Protestants had not known how to govern, indeed, they knew how to die; and the cause which prosperity had ruined revived in the dark hour of persecution. The memory of their violence and greed faded away as they pa.s.sed unwavering to their doom. Such a story as that of Rowland Taylor, the Vicar of Hadleigh, tells us more of the work which was now begun, and of the effect it was likely to produce, than pages of historic dissertation. Taylor, who as a man of mark had been one of the first victims chosen for execution, was arrested in London, and condemned to suffer in his own parish. His wife, ”suspecting that her husband should that night be carried away,” had waited through the darkness with her children in the porch of St. Botolph's beside Aldgate.

”Now when the sheriff his company came against St. Botolph's Church Elizabeth cried, saying, 'O my dear father! Mother! mother! here is my father led away!' Then cried his wife, 'Rowland, Rowland, where art thou?'--for it was a very dark morning, that the one could not see the other. Dr. Taylor answered, 'I am here, dear wife,' and stayed. The sheriff's men would have led him forth, but the sheriff said, 'Stay a little, masters, I pray you, and let him speak to his wife.' Then came she to him, and he took his daughter Mary in his arms, and he and his wife and Elizabeth knelt down and said the Lord's prayer. At which sight the sheriff wept apace, and so did divers others of the company. After they had prayed he rose up and kissed his wife and shook her by the hand, and said, 'Farewell, my dear wife, be of good comfort, for I am quiet in my conscience! G.o.d shall still be a father to my children.'...

Then said his wife, 'G.o.d be with thee, dear Rowland! I will, with G.o.d's grace, meet thee at Hadleigh.'

”All the way Dr. Taylor was merry and cheerful as one that accounted himself going to a most pleasant banquet or bridal.... Coming within two miles of Hadleigh he desired to light off his horse, which done he leaped and set a frisk or twain as men commonly do for dancing. 'Why, master Doctor,' quoth the Sheriff, 'how do you now?' He answered, 'Well, G.o.d be praised, Master Sheriff, never better; for now I know I am almost at home. I lack not past two stiles to go over, and I am even at my Father's house!'... The streets of Hadleigh were beset on both sides with men and women of the town and country who waited to see him; whom when they beheld so led to death, with weeping eyes and lamentable voices, they cried, 'Ah, good Lord! there goeth our good shepherd from us!'” The journey was at last over. ”'What place is this,' he asked, 'and what meaneth it that so much people are gathered together?' It was answered, 'It is Oldham Common, the place where you must suffer, and the people are come to look upon you.' Then said he, 'Thanked be G.o.d, I am even at home!'... But when the people saw his reverend and ancient face, with a long white beard, they burst out with weeping tears and cried, saying, 'G.o.d save thee, good Dr. Taylor; G.o.d strengthen thee and help thee; the Holy Ghost comfort thee!' He wished, but was not suffered, to speak. When he had prayed, he went to the stake and kissed it, and set himself into a pitch-barrel which they had set for him to stand on, and so stood with his back upright against the stake, with his hands folded together and his eyes towards heaven, and so let himself be burned.” One of the executioners ”cruelly cast a f.a.got at him, which hit upon his head and brake his face that the blood ran down his visage.

Then said Dr. Taylor, 'O friend, I have harm enough--what needed that?'”

One more act of brutality brought his sufferings to an end. ”So stood he still without either crying or moving, with his hands folded together, till Soyce with a halberd struck him on the head that the brains fell out, and the dead corpse fell down into the fire.”

[Sidenote: The area of the Martyrdoms.]

The terror of death was powerless against men like these. Bonner, the Bishop of London, to whom, as bishop of the diocese in which the Council sate, its victims were generally delivered for execution, but who, in spite of the nickname and hatred which his official prominence in the work of death earned him, seems to have been naturally a good-humoured and merciful man, asked a youth who was brought before him whether he thought he could bear the fire. The boy at once held his hand without flinching in the flame of a candle that stood by. Rogers, a fellow-worker with Tyndale in the translation of the Bible, and one of the foremost among the Protestant preachers, died bathing his hands in the flame ”as if it had been in cold water.” Even the commonest lives gleamed for a moment into poetry at the stake. ”Pray for me,” a boy, William Brown, who had been brought home to Brentwood to suffer, asked of the bystanders. ”I will pray no more for thee,” one of them replied, ”than I will pray for a dog.” ”'Then,' said William, 'Son of G.o.d, s.h.i.+ne upon me'; and immediately the sun in the elements shone out of a dark cloud so full in his face that he was constrained to look another way; whereat the people mused because it was so dark a little time before.”

Brentwood lay within a district on which the hand of the Queen fell heavier than elsewhere. The persecution was mainly confined to the more active and populous parts of the country, to London, Kent, Suss.e.x, and the Eastern Counties. Of the two hundred and eighty whom we know to have suffered during the last three years and a half of Mary's reign more than forty were burned in London, seventeen in the neighbouring village of Stratford-le-Bow, four in Islington, two in Southwark, and one each at Barnet, St. Albans, and Ware. Kent, at that time a home of mining and manufacturing industry, suffered as heavily as London. Of its sixty martyrs more than forty were furnished by Canterbury, which was then but a city of some few thousand inhabitants, and seven by Maidstone. The remaining eight suffered at Rochester, Ashford, and Dartford. Of the twenty-five who died in Suss.e.x the little town of Lewes sent seventeen to the fire. Seventy were contributed by the Eastern Counties, the seat of the woollen manufacture. Beyond these districts executions were rare.

Westward of Suss.e.x we find the record of but a dozen martyrdoms, six of which were at Bristol, and four at Salisbury. Chester and Wales contributed but four sufferers to the list. In the Midland Counties between Thames and the Humber only twenty-four suffered martyrdom. North of the Humber we find the names of but two Yorks.h.i.+remen burned at Bedale.

[Sidenote: Failure of the persecution.]

But heavily as the martyrdoms fell on the district within which they were practically confined, and where as we may conclude Protestantism was more dominant than elsewhere, the work of terror failed in the very ends for which it was wrought. The old spirit of insolent defiance, of outrageous violence, rose into fresh life at the challenge of persecution. A Protestant hung a string of puddings round a priest's neck in derision of his beads. The restored images were grossly insulted. The old scurrilous ballads against the ma.s.s and relics were heard in the streets. Men were goaded to sheer madness by the bloodshed and violence about them. One miserable wretch, driven to frenzy, stabbed the priest of St. Margaret's as he stood with the chalice in his hand.

It was a more formidable sign of the times that acts of violence such as these no longer stirred the people at large to their former resentment.

The horror of the persecution swept away all other feelings. Every death at the stake won hundreds to the cause for which the victims died. ”You have lost the hearts of twenty thousands that were rank Papists within these twelve months,” a Protestant wrote triumphantly to Bonner. Bonner indeed, who had never been a very zealous persecutor, was sick of his work; and the energy of the bishops soon relaxed. But Mary had no thought of hesitation in the course she had entered on, and though the Imperial amba.s.sador noted the rapid growth of public discontent ”rattling letters” from the council pressed the lagging prelates to fresh activity. Yet the persecution had hardly begun before difficulties were thickening round the Queen. In her pa.s.sionate longing for an heir who would carry on her religious work Mary had believed herself to be with child; but in the summer of 1555 all hopes of any childbirth pa.s.sed away, and the overthrow of his projects for the permanent acquisition of England to the House of Austria at once disenchanted Philip with his stay in the realm. But even had all gone well it was impossible for the king to remain longer in England. He was needed in the Netherlands to play his part in the memorable act which was to close the Emperor's political life. Already King of Naples and Lord of Milan, Philip received by his father's solemn resignation on the twenty-fifth of October the Burgundian heritage; and a month later Charles ceded to him the crowns of Castille and Aragon with their dependencies in the New World and in the Old. The Empire indeed pa.s.sed to his uncle Ferdinand of Austria; but with this exception the whole of his father's vast dominions lay now in the grasp of Philip. Of the realms which he ruled, England was but one and far from the greatest one, and even had he wished to return his continued stay there became impossible.

[Sidenote: The Catholic revival.]

He was forced to leave the direction of affairs to Cardinal Pole, who on the death of Gardiner in November 1555 took the chief place in Council.

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

[Sidenote: Paul the Fourth.]

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

[Sidenote: England and the Papacy.]

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

[Sidenote: Cranmer.]

But, difficult as Mary's task became, she clung as tenaciously as ever to her work of blood. The martyrdoms went steadily on, and at the opening of 1556 the sanction of Rome enabled the Queen to deal with a victim whose death woke all England to the reality of the persecution.

Far as he stood in character beneath many who had gone before him to the stake, Cranmer stood high above all in his ecclesiastical position. To burn the Primate of the English Church for heresy was to shut out meaner victims from all hope of escape. And on the position of Cranmer none cast a doubt. The other prelates who had suffered had been placed in their sees after the separation from Rome, and were hardly regarded as bishops by their opponents. But, whatever had been his part in the schism, Cranmer had received his Pallium from the Pope. He was, in the eyes of all, Archbishop of Canterbury, the successor of St. Augustine and of St. Thomas in the second see of Western Christendom. Revenge however and religious zeal alike urged the Queen to bring Cranmer to the stake. First among the many decisions in which the Archbishop had prost.i.tuted justice to Henry's will stood that by which he had annulled the king's marriage with Catharine and declared Mary a b.a.s.t.a.r.d. The last of his political acts had been to join, whether reluctantly or no, in the shameless plot to exclude Mary from the throne. His great position too made Cranmer more than any man a representative of the religious revolution which had pa.s.sed over the land. His figure stood with those of Henry and of Cromwell on the frontispiece of the English Bible. The decisive change which had been given to the character of the Reformation under Edward was due wholly to Cranmer. It was his voice that men heard and still hear in the accents of the English Liturgy.

[Sidenote: His death.]