X. THE REIGN OF EDWARD VI
Accession of Edward VI.--Hertford's Intrigues--He becomes Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector--War with Scotland--Battle of Pinkie--Reversal of Henry's Policy--Religious Reforms--Ambition of Lord Seymour of Sudeley--He marries Catherine Parr--His Arrest and Death--Popular Discontents--Rebellion in Devonshire and Cornwall--Ket's Rebellion in Norfolk--Warwick Suppresses it--Opposition to Somerset--His Rapacity--Fall of Somerset--Disgraceful Peace with France--Persecution of Romanists--Somerset's Efforts to regain Power--His Trial and Execution--New Treason Law--Northumberland's Schemes for Changing the Succession--Death of Edward.
The country was doomed once more to experience the inconveniences of a regal minority, to witness the struggles and manifold mischiefs of ambitious nobles, while the hand of the king was too feeble to keep them in restraint. The execution of Surrey, and the imprisonment and attainder of the great Duke of Norfolk, left the Seymours completely in the ascendant; and having recently risen into note and power, they very soon showed all the inflated ambition of such parvenus. The Earl of Hertford, as uncle of the king, was in reality the man now in possession of the chief power. The king was but a few months more than nine years of age. Henry, his father, acting on the discretion given him by an Act of Parliament of the twenty-eighth year of his reign, had by will settled the crown on Edward, and had appointed sixteen individuals as his executors, who should constitute also the Privy Council, and exercise the authority of the Crown till the young monarch was eighteen years of age. To enable these executors, or rather, to enable Hertford, to secure the person of the king, and take other measures for the establishment of their position, the death of Henry was kept secret for four days. Parliament, which was virtually dissolved by his death, met on the 29th of January, and proceeded to business as usual, so that any acts passed under these circumstances would have clearly become null. On the 31st Edward entered London amid the applause of the people.
On the day after his arrival at the Tower, that is, on February 1st, 1547, the greater part of the nobility and the prelates were summoned, and assembled there about three o'clock in the afternoon, in the presence-chamber, where they all successively knelt and kissed his majesty's hands, saying every one of them, "God save your grace!" Then Wriothesley, the Chancellor, produced Henry's will, and announced from it that sixteen persons were appointed to be his late majesty's executors, and to hold the office of governors of the present king and of the kingdom till he was eighteen years of age. To these were added twelve others, who were to aid them in any case of difficulty by their advice. Yet, although these formed a second council, it was totally destitute of any real authority and could only tender advice when asked.
The announcement of these names excited much animadversion and some censure. It was remarked that the greater part of them were new men; and the chief council consisted of those who had been about Henry in his last illness. But what next was disclosed was more extraordinary. The executors, when assembled in the Tower on the day of the young king's proclamation, declared that "they were resolved not only to stand to and maintain the last will and testament of their master, the late king, and every part and parcel of the same, to the uttermost of their powers, wits, and cunning, but also that every one of them present should take a corporal oath upon a book, for the more assured and effectual accomplishment of the same." And now it was announced that the Privy Council, for the better despatch of business, had resolved to place the Earl of Hertford at their head. This was so directly in opposition to the will, which had invested every member of the council with equal power, that it was received with no little wonder. The fact was that Hertford--who, before the old king's death, had determined to seize the supreme power during the minority of his nephew--had secured a majority in the council, who, as we shall soon find, had their object to attain. Wriothesley was the only one who stood out. He assured them that such an act invalidated the whole will. But he argued in vain and, finding it useless, he gave way; and thus Hertford was now proclaimed Protector of the realm and guardian of the king's person, with the understood but empty condition, that he should attempt nothing which had not the assent of a majority of the council. His triumph was completed by the titles of Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector of England.
Essex, that is Parr, brother of the late queen, became Marquis of Northampton; Lisle, Earl of Warwick; Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton; Sir Thomas Seymour, Baron Seymour of Sudeley, and Lord High Admiral; Rich became Baron Rich; Willoughby, Baron Willoughby; Sheffield, Baron Sheffield. Southampton was, however, soon compelled to resign office on the charge of having illegally put the Great Seal in commission.
Having thus seized and secured the actual sovereign power in England, Somerset began to turn his attention to foreign affairs. Henry VIII. had left it as a strict injunction to his council to secure the marriage of the Queen of Scots with his son Edward. Somerset, therefore, addressed a letter to the Scottish nobility, calling upon them to complete an arrangement which he recommended as equally advantageous with that to which they were bound by oaths, promises, and seals. The Scots took little notice of this communication from the man who had carried the commands of the late king through their land with fire and sword. The castle of St. Andrews, which the murderers of Cardinal Beaton held out against Arran, had in the course of this summer been surrendered to a French force, and the conspirators were conveyed to France. Some of them were confined in fortresses on the coast of Brittany, and others, amongst whom was John Knox, were sent to work in the galleys, whence they were not released till 1550. By the month of August, Somerset was once more prepared to invade Scotland, and to force, if possible, the young queen from the hands of Arran and the queen-mother. The forces were reviewed, and on the 29th they commenced their march. On the 2nd of September they were at Berwick, where they found Lord Clinton with the fleet, and from that point the army marched along the shore, supported by the ships at sea. Somerset took Douglas Castle, the property of Sir George Douglas, without resistance. The castle being rifled, was then blown up with gunpowder, as were also the peels of Thornton and Anderwick. Passing by Dunbar and the castle of Tantallon, the army, on Friday, the 8th of September, sat down near Prestonpans, the fleet being stationed opposite the town of Musselburgh.
To meet this invasion, Arran had sent the Fiery Cross from clan to clan through the Highlands, and had ordered every Scot capable of bearing arms to meet at Musselburgh. The two armies now lay at Pinkie, not much more than a couple of miles from each other. On the 9th the Scottish horse were seen parading themselves boldly on the height which lay between the hosts, called Falside, or Fawside Brae. The two armies had the sea to the north, while Falside rose facing the west, and having on its summit a castellated keep and a few huts.
Somerset and Warwick resolved to occupy the height on which stood St. Michael's Church, and for this purpose, early on the morning of the 10th, long called "Black Saturday" in Scotland, they advanced upon it about eight o'clock. But the Scots had also concluded to advance, and on the English approaching the first height, they were astonished to find that the Scots had quitted their strong position beyond the river, and were occupying the ground they had intended for themselves. It seems that the Scots had somehow got the idea that the English meant to retreat and escape them, and to prevent this they determined to surprise them in their camp, and were on the way for this purpose. At the sight of the English, the Scots pushed forward impetuously, hoping to get possession of Fawside Brae, but they were checked by a sharp discharge of artillery from the admiral's galley, which mowed down about thirty of them, as they defiled over the bridge near the sea. Seeing the English posted on the height with several pieces of artillery, the Scots halted in a fallow field, having in their front a deep ditch. The English, however, reckless of this obstacle, dashed on and, with Lord Grey at their head, made their way up to them. Standing in an almost impenetrable mass, the Scots kept crying, "Come here, loons! come here, tykes! come here, heretics!" and the like, and the English charging upon them, seemed for a moment to have disconcerted them, but soon were fain to turn and retreat. The flight became general, and the Scots rushing on expected to reap an easy victory. Lord Grey himself was severely wounded in the mouth, and the Scottish soldiers pressing on seized the Royal standard, when a desperate struggle ensued and, the staff of the standard being broken, part of it remained in the hands of the enemy, but the standard itself was rescued.
The fight now became general and fierce, and there was a hand-to-hand contest in which many fell on both sides; but the English commanders were men proved in many a great battle, and exerted themselves to restore order amongst their troops. Warwick was seen everywhere encouraging, ordering, and ranking his men afresh; while the artillery from the height, directed over the heads of their own regiments, mowed down the assailing Scots. The ardour of the soldiers restored, advantage was taken of the position of a large body of the enemy who in their impetuosity had rushed forward beyond the support of the main army. They were surrounded and attacked on all sides. Confounded by this unexpected occurrence, the Scots were thrown into confusion, and began to take to flight. Arran himself soon put spurs to his horse; Angus followed, and the Highland clans--who had never been engaged--fled en masse. The rout was general and the slaughter terrible, some making for Leith, some direct for Edinburgh, by fields or woods as they could, and others endeavoured to cross the marsh and reach Dalkeith.
Now was the time to push the object for which this expedition had been undertaken--the securing the young queen for the king. Somerset had attained a commanding position. He held the capital, as it were, under his hand, and fresh forces brought up, and judiciously employed, must have put the country so far into his power as to enable him to treat on the most advantageous terms for the accomplishment of this great national object; or if he could not obtain it by treaty, he might make himself master of her person by arms. But all this demonstration, this signal victory, this sanguinary butchery, which must add finally to the antipathy of the Scottish people if no real gain followed it, was cast aside with a strange recklessness which shewed that though Somerset could conquer in the field, he was totally destitute of the qualities of a statesman. Instead of making his success the platform of wise negotiation, and of a great national union, he converted it into a fresh aggravation of the ill-will of the Scots, by depriving it of all rational result. Being, it is supposed, apprised of some machinations of his brother, the admiral, in his absence, he commenced an instant march homeward, like a man that was beaten rather than a victor. On the 17th of September, only a week from the battle of Pinkie, he took his departure southwards. On entering England, he made the best of his way to London, the whole term of his absence having been only some six weeks. A Parliament was then summoned, and the Protector proceeded to carry out the contemplated reform in the Church. Already an ecclesiastical commission had been busily engaged in visitation of dioceses. For this purpose, the kingdom was divided into six circuits, to each of which was appointed a certain number of visitors, partly laymen partly clergymen, who, the moment they arrived in a diocese, became the only ecclesiastical authority there. They were empowered to call before them the bishop, the clergy, and five, six, or eight of the principal inhabitants of each parish, and put into their hands a body of royal injunctions, seven-and-thirty in number. These injunctions regarded religious doctrines and practice, and the visitors required an answer upon oath to every question which they chose to put concerning them. The injunctions were similar to those which had been framed and used by Cromwell, but the present practice of joining the laity with the clergy was an innovation of a more sweeping character. The commission promptly imprisoned Bonner and Gardiner, the leaders of the Roman Catholic party.
Parliament assembled on the 4th of November, and proceeded to mitigate some of the severities of the last reign. It repealed those monstrous acts of Henry VIII., which gave to Royal proclamations all the force of Acts of Parliament; likewise all the penal statutes against the Lollards, and all the new felonies created in the last reign, including the statute of the Six Articles. It admitted the laity as well as the clergy to receive the sacrament of the Lord's Supper in both kinds. It determined that the old fiction of electing bishops by "congé d'élire" should cease, and that all such appointments should proceed directly by nomination of the Crown; that all processes in the episcopal courts should be carried on in the king's name, and all documents issuing thence should be sealed, not with the bishop's seal, but with that of the Crown. The claim of spiritual supremacy was placed on the same level as the other rights of the Crown, and it was made a capital offence to deny that the king was supreme head of the Church; but with this distinction, that what was printed of that nature was direct high treason--what was merely spoken only became so by repetition. A bill for legalising the marriages of the clergy was brought into the Commons, and carried by a large majority; but, from some cause, was not carried to the Lords during the present session.
Parliament terminated its sitting on the 24th of December, and the council, carrying forward its measures for the advancement of the Reformation, issued an order prohibiting the burning of candles on Candlemas-Day, and the use of ashes on Ash Wednesday, and of palms on Palm Sunday. The order against images was repeated, and the clothes covering them were directed to be given to the poor. The people, however, who delighted in religious ceremonies, processions, and spectacles, and thought the sermons very dull, were by no means pleased with these innovations. There was to be no elevation of the Host, and the whole service was to be in English.
Cranmer employed himself in composing a catechism, which was published "for the singular profit and instruction of children and young people;" and a committee of bishops and divines sat to compile a new liturgy for the use of the English Church. They took the Latin missals and breviaries for the groundwork, omitting whatever they deemed superfluous or superstitious, and adding fresh matter. Before Christmas they had compiled a book of common prayer, differing in various particulars from the one now in use, and all ministers were ordered to make use of that book, under penalty, on refusal, of forfeiture of a year's income, and six months' imprisonment for the first offence; for the second, loss of all preferments, with twelve months' imprisonment; and for the third, imprisonment for life. Any one taking upon him to preach, except in his own house, without licence from the king's visitors, the Archbishop of Canterbury, or the bishop of the diocese, was liable to imprisonment. Latimer, who had resigned his bishopric in 1539, was now called forward again, and appointed to preach at St. Paul's Cross, and also in the king's privy garden, where Edward, attended by his court, used to listen to his bold and quaint eloquence for an hour together.
Towards the close of 1547, as we have seen, a bill passed the Commons authorising the marriage of the clergy, but on the 9th of February, 1548, a different bill for the same object was carried in the House of Lords, and accepted by the Commons.
While these events had been taking place in England, the war had been steadily prosecuted against Scotland, and led to the result which might naturally be expected, but which was least expected by the Protector--that of the passing of the young queen of Scotland into the hands of the French. Very soon after the battle of Pinkie, a council was summoned at Stirling, where the queen-dowager proposed that, to put an end to those barbarous inroads of the English on pretence of seeking the hand of the queen, they should apply to France for its assistance; that as a means of engaging it in effectual aid, they should offer the young queen in marriage to the Dauphin; and that for her better security she should be educated in the French court. There, in August, 1548, she was solemnly contracted to the Dauphin, afterwards Francis II.
But during the session of Parliament commencing on the 24th of November, a question of most serious import was brought forward concerning the Protector's brother. The lord high admiral, Thomas Seymour, had all the ambition of his elder brother, the Protector, but from some cause he had failed to acquire the same position at court. Henry VIII. had not only employed Somerset in great commissions, but had given him such marks of his confidence that, on his death, he easily engrossed all the power of the State under his son. The admiral did not witness this with indifference. The Protector, to satisfy him, got him created Baron Seymour of Sudeley, and with this title he received in August, 1548, the lordship of Sudeley in Gloucestershire, together with other lands and tenements in no less than eighteen counties. He made him, moreover, high admiral, a post which had been held by the Earl of Warwick, who received instead of it that of lord great chamberlain. These honours and estates might have well contented a man of even high ambition, but the aspiring of the Seymours brooked no limits. As he did not seem to succeed in his desire of rising to a station as lofty as that of his brother the Protector, through the Council and political alliance, he sought to achieve this by means of marriage. There were several ladies on whom he cast his eyes for this purpose. The Princesses Mary and Elizabeth were the next in succession, and he did not hesitate to aim at securing the hand of one of them, which would have realised his soaring wishes, or plunged him down at once to destruction. He seems then to have weighed the chances which a union with Lady Jane Grey might give him; but, as if not satisfied with the prospect, he suddenly determined on the queen-dowager. He had, indeed, paid his addresses to Catherine Parr before her marriage with Henry VIII., and Catherine was so much attached to him that she at first listened with obvious reluctance to Henry's proposal. No sooner was Henry dead than Seymour seems to have renewed his addresses to Catherine, and, with all her piety and prudence, the queen-dowager seems to have listened to him as promptly and readily. Though Henry only died at the end of January, 1547, in a single month, according to Leti, she had consented to a private contract of marriage, and she and Seymour had exchanged rings of betrothal. According to King Edward's journal, their marriage took place in May, but the courtship had been going on long before, and was only revealed to him when it was become dangerous to conceal it any longer, and they were privately married long before that. The marriage was publicly announced in June--a rapidity for such a transaction as strange as it was indecorous. Catherine Parr gave birth to a daughter on the 30th of August, 1548, and on the 7th of September, only eight days after, she died of puerperal fever. Rumours that her husband had poisoned her to enable him to aspire to the hand of the Princess Elizabeth, were spread by his enemies, but there does not appear the slightest foundation for the horrible charge.
The lord admiral, who had found it difficult to keep out of danger during the life of his wife, partly through his own rash ambition, and partly through the malice of his near relatives, soon fell into it after her death. In July of 1548, he had been called before the Council on the charge of having endeavoured to prevail on the king to write a letter, complaining of the arbitrary conduct of the Protector and of the restraint in which he was kept by him. Seymour was seeking, in fact, to supersede the Protector, and was threatened with imprisonment in the Tower; but the matter for that time was made up, and the Protector added £800 per annum to his income, by way of conciliating him.
But with Catherine departed his good genius. He gave a free play to his ambitious desires, and renewed his endeavours to compass a clandestine marriage with the Princess Elizabeth, as he had done with Catherine. Finding, however, that such a marriage would annul the claims of Elizabeth to the throne, he next devised means to extort from the Council a consent, which he was well aware it would never yield voluntarily. For this purpose he is said to have courted the friendship of the discontented section of the nobility, and made such a display of his wealth and retainers as was calculated to alarm the Protector and his party. The Protector now resolved to get rid of so dangerous an enemy, though he was his own brother. Sharrington, master of the mint at Bristol being accused of gross peculation by clipping the coin, issuing testoons, or shilling pieces, of a false value, and making fraudulent entries in his books, was boldly defended by the admiral, who owed him £3,000. But Sharrington, to save his life, ungratefully betrayed that of his advocate. He confessed that he had promised to coin money for the admiral, who could reckon on the services of 10,000 men, with whose aid he meant to carry off the king and change the government. This charge, made, no doubt, solely to save his own life, was enough for Somerset. Seymour was arrested on the 16th of January, 1549, on a charge of high treason, and committed to the Tower.
There was no lack of charges against him, true or false. It was stated that he had resolved to seize the king's person, and carry him to his castle of Holt, in Denbighshire, which had come to him in one of the royal grants; that he had confederated for this purpose with various noblemen and others, and had laid in large stores of provisions and a mass of money at that castle. He was also charged with having abused his authority as lord admiral, and encouraged piracy and smuggling, and with having circulated reports against the Lord Protector and Council too vile to be repeated. But the most remarkable were the charges against him of endeavouring, both before and after his marriage with the queen-dowager, to compass a marriage with the king's sister, the Lady Elizabeth, second inheritor to the Crown, to the peril of the king's person and danger to the throne. A Bill of Attainder was brought in against him; he was condemned without a hearing and executed on the 27th of March.
The Protector no sooner had put his brother out of his path into a bloody grave, than he was called upon to contend with a whole host of enemies. A variety of causes had reduced the common people to a condition of deep distress and discontent. The depreciation of the coinage by Henry VIII. had produced its certain consequence--the proportionate advance of the price of all purchasable articles. But with the rise in price of food and clothing, there had been no rise in the price of labour. The dissolution of the monasteries had thrown a vast number of people on the public without any resource. Besides the large number of monks and nuns who, instead of affording alms, were now obliged to seek a subsistence of some kind, the hundreds of thousands who had received daily assistance at the doors of convents and monasteries were obliged to beg, work, or starve. But the new proprietors who had obtained the abbey and chantry lands, found wool so much in demand, that instead of cultivating the land, and thus at once employing the people and growing corn for them, they threw their fields out of tillage, and made great enclosures where their profitable flocks could range without even the superintendence of a shepherd.
The people thus driven to starvation were still more exasperated by the change in the religion of the country, by the destruction of their images, and the desecration of the shrines of their saints. Their whole public life had been changed by the change of their religion. Their oldest and most sacred associations were broken. Their pageants, their processions, their pilgrimages were all rudely swept away as superstitious rubbish; their gay holidays had become a gloomy blank. What their fathers and their pastors had taught them as peculiarly holy and essential to their spiritual well-being, their rulers had now pronounced to be damnable doctrines and the delusions of priest-craft; and whilst smarting under this abrupt privation of their bodily and spiritual support, they beheld the new lords of the ancient church lands greedily cutting off not only the old streams of benevolence, but the means of livelihood by labour, and showing not the slightest regard for their sufferings. The priests, the monks, the remaining heads of the Papist party did not fail to point assiduously at all these things, and to fan the fires of the popular discontent.
The timidity of the Protector forced the ferment to a climax by the very means which he resorted to in order to mitigate it. He ordered all the new enclosures to be thrown open by a certain day. The people rejoiced at this, believing that now they had the Government on their side. But they waited in vain to see the Protector's order obeyed. The Royal proclamation fully bore out the complaints of the populace. It declared that many villages, in which from one hundred to two hundred people had lived, were entirely destroyed; that one shepherd now dwelt where numerous industrious families dwelt before; and that the realm was injured by turning arable land into pasture, and letting houses and families decay and lie waste. Hales, the commissioner, stated that the laws which forbade any one to keep more than 2,000 sheep, and which commanded the owners of church lands to keep household on the same, were disobeyed, the result being that numbers of the king's subjects had diminished. But though the Government admitted all this, it took no measures to make its proclamation effective; the landowners disregarded it, and the people, believing that they were only seconding the law, assembled in great numbers, chose their captains or leaders, broke down the enclosures, killed the deer in the parks, and began to spoil and waste, according to Holinshed, after the manner of an open rebellion. The day approached when the use of the old liturgy was to cease, and instead of the music, the spectacle, and all the imposing ceremonies of high Mass, they would be called on to listen to a plain sermon. Goaded to desperation by these grievances, the people rose in almost every part of the country.
In Wiltshire, Sir William Herbert raised a body of troops and dispersed the insurgents, killing some, and executing others according to martial law. The same was done in other quarters by the resident gentry. The Protector, alarmed, sent out commissioners to hear and decide all causes about enclosures, highways, and cottages. These commissioners were armed with great powers, the exercise of which produced as much dissatisfaction amongst the nobility and gentry as the enclosures had done amongst the people. The spirit of remonstrance entered into the very Council, and the Protector was checked in his proceedings; whereupon the people, not finding the redress they expected, again rose in rebellion.
In Devonshire the religious phase of the movement appeared first, and rapidly assumed a very formidable air. The new liturgy was read for the first time in the church of Sampford Courtenay, on Whit Sunday, and the next day the people compelled the clergyman to perform the ancient service. Having once resisted the law, the insurgents rapidly spread. Humphrey Arundel, the governor of St. Michael's Mount, took the lead, and a few days brought ten thousand men to his standard. As the other risings had been easily dispersed, the Government were rather dilatory in dealing with this; but finding that it steadily increased, Lord Russell was despatched with a small force against the malcontents, accompanied by three preachers, Gregory, Reynolds, and Coverdale, who were licensed to preach in such public places as Lord Russell should appoint.
The rebels had sat down before Exeter when Russell came up with them; but conscious of the great inferiority of his force, and expecting no miracles from the eloquence of his preachers, he adopted the plan of the Duke of Norfolk in the late reign, and offered to negotiate. Upon this, Arundel and his adherents drew up and presented fifteen articles, which went, indeed, to restore everything of the old faith and ritual that had been taken away. The Statute of the Six Articles was to be put in force, the Mass to be in Latin, the Sacrament to be again hung up and worshipped, all such as refused it homage were to be treated as heretics, souls in purgatory should be prayed for, images again be set up, the Bible be called in, and Cardinal Pole was to be of the king's Council. Half of the Church lands were to be restored to two of the chief abbeys in each county; in a word, Popery was to be restored and Protestantism abolished.
All this time Lord Russell lay at Honiton, not venturing to attack, the Government sending him instead of troops only proclamations, by one of which a free pardon was offered to all who would submit; by another, the lands, goods, and chattels of the insurgents were given to any who chose to take them; by a third, punishment of death by martial law was ordered for all taken in arms; and by a fourth, the commissioners were commanded to break down all illegal enclosures. None of these produced the least effect. Lord Russell had sent Sir Peter Carew to urge the Protector and Council to expedite reinforcements; but the Protector and Rich charged Sir Peter with having been the original cause of the outbreak. The bold baronet resented this imputation so stoutly, and charged home the Protector in a style so unaccustomed in courts, with his own neglect, that men and money were promised. Nothing, however, but the proclamations just mentioned arrived, and at length the rebels despatched a force to dislodge Russell from his position at Honiton. To prevent this, he advanced to Feniton Bridge, where he encountered the rebel detachment and defeated it. Soon after Lord Grey arrived with 300 German and Italian infantry, with which assistance he marched on Exeter, and again defeated the rebels. They rallied on Clifton Downs, and Lord Grey coming suddenly upon them and fearing they might overpower him, he ordered his men to despatch all the prisoners they had in their hands, and a sanguinary slaughter took place. A third and last encounter at Bridgewater completed the reduction of the Rising of the West.
But the most formidable demonstration was made by the rebels in Norfolk. It commenced at Aldborough, and appeared at first too insignificant for notice. But the rumours of what had been done in Kent, where the new enclosures had been broken down, gradually infected the people far and wide. They did not trouble themselves about the religious questions, but they expressed a particular rancour against gentlemen, for their insatiable avarice and their grasping at all land, their extortionate rents, and oppressions of the people. They declared that it was high time that not only the enclosure mania should be put a stop to, but abundance of other evils should be reformed.
On the 6th of July, at Wymondham, a few miles from Norwich, on occasion of a play which was annually performed there, the people, stimulated by what was being done elsewhere, began to throw down the dykes, as they were called, or fences round enclosures, and they found a leader in one Robert Ket, a tanner. Under an oak tree, called the Tree of Reformation, which stood on Mousehold Hill, near Norwich, Ket erected his throne, and established courts of chancery, king's bench, and common pleas, as in Westminster Hall; and, with a liberality which shamed the Government of that and of most succeeding times, he allowed not only the orators of his own but of the opposite party to harangue them from this tree. Ket, it is clear, was a man far beyond his times, sincerely seeking the reform of abuses, and not destruction of the constituted authority. The tree was used as a rostrum, and all who had anything to say climbed into it. Into the tree mounted frequently Master Aldrich, the mayor of Norwich, and others, who used all possible persuasions to the insurgents to desist from spoliation and disorderly courses. Clergymen of both persuasions preached to them from the oak, and Matthew Parker, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, one day ascended it, and addressed them in the plainest possible terms on the unwisdom of their attempt, and the ruin it was certain to bring upon them.
At length on the 31st of July, a Royal herald appeared in the camp, "and, standing before the Tree of Reformation, apparelled in his coat-of-arms, pronounced there, before all the multitude, with loud voice, a free pardon to all that would depart to their houses and, laying aside their armour, give over their traitorous enterprise." Some of the insurgents, who were already weary of the affair, and only wanted a good excuse for drawing off safely, took the offered pardon and disappeared; but Ket and the chief part of the people held their ground, saying they wanted no pardon, for they had done nothing but what was incumbent on true subjects.
Expecting that now some attack would soon be made upon them, they marched into Norwich to seize on all the artillery and ammunition they could, and carry it to their camp. The herald made another proclamation to them in the market-place, repeating the offer of pardon, but threatening death to all who did not immediately accept it. They bade him begone, for they wanted no such manner of mercy. From that day the number of Ket's followers grew again rapidly, for he seemed above the Government; and the herald returning to town, dissipated at Court any hope of the rebels dispersing of themselves. A troop of 1,500 horse, under the Marquis of Northampton, accompanied by a small force of mounted Italians, under Malatesta, were, therefore, sent down to Norwich, of which they took possession. But the next day Ket and his host descended from their hill, found their way into the city, engaged, defeated, and drove out the king's troops, killing Lord Sheffield and many gentlemen, and, their blood being up, set fire to the town, and plundered it as it burnt.
Northampton retreated ignominiously to town, where the Protector now saw that the affair was of a character that demanded vigorous suppression. An army of 8,000 men, 2,000 of whom were Germans, under the Earl of Warwick, about to proceed against Scotland, was directed to march to Norwich and disperse the rebels. Warwick arriving, made an entrance, after some resistance, into the city. But there he was assailed on every side with such impetuosity, that he found it all that he could do to defend himself, being deficient in ammunition. On the 26th of August, however, arrived a reinforcement of 1,400 lansquenets, with store of powder and ball, and the next day he marched out, and the enemy having imprudently left their strong position on the hill, he attacked them in the valley of Dussingdale, and at the first charge broke their ranks. They fled, their leader, Ket, galloping off before them. They were pursued for three or four miles, and the troopers cut them down all the way with such ruthless vengeance, that 3,500 of them were said to have perished. The rest, however, managed to surround themselves by a line of waggons, and, hastily forming a rampart of a trench and a bank fortified with stakes, resolved to stand their ground. Warwick, perceiving the strength of the place, and apprehensive of a great slaughter of his men, offered them a pardon; but they replied that they did not trust to the offer; they knew the fate that awaited them, and they preferred to die with arms in their hands rather than on the gallows. Warwick renewed his offer, and went himself to assure them of his sincerity, on which they laid down their arms, or retired with them in their hands. Ket alone was hanged on the walls of Norwich Castle, his brother on the steeple of Wymondham Church, and nine of the ringleaders on the Oak of Reformation.
Circumstances were now fast environing the Protector with danger. The feebleness of his government, his total want of success, both in Scotland and France, with which country he had become involved in an undeclared war, emboldened his enemies, who had become numerous and determined from the arrogance of his manners and his endeavours to check the enclosures of the aristocracy. Henry VIII. had never drawn any signal advantages from his hostile expeditions; but the forces which he collected and the determined character of the man impressed his foreign foes with a dread of him. It was evident that the neighbouring nations had learned Somerset's weakness, and therefore despised him. He had driven the Queen of Scots into the hands of the French, and they had driven him out of the country. He was on the very verge of losing Boulogne, which Henry had prided himself so much on conquering. At home the whole country had been thrown into a state of anarchy and insubordination by the reforms in religion, of which he was the avowed patron, and in the meantime he had allowed another to reap the honour of restoring order.
It was intended that the Protector himself should have proceeded against the rebels; but probably he thought that the man who had encouraged them to pull down the enclosures would appear with a very bad grace to punish them for doing it. Dudley, Earl of Warwick, was, therefore, selected for this office--a man quite as ambitious, quite as unprincipled, and far more daring than Somerset. He returned from Norfolk like a victor, and his reputation rose remarkably from that moment. He was looked up to as the able and successful man, and his ambitious views were warmly seconded by the wily old ex-Chancellor, Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, who hated Somerset for having dismissed him from office, and for having banished him from the Council. He now took up Warwick as a promising instrument for his revenge. He flattered him with the idea that he was the only man to restore the credit and peace of the nation.
Nor was it Warwick only whom Southampton stimulated to enmity against Somerset. He had arguments adapted to all; and where he found any seemingly resolved to stand by the Protector, he would significantly ask what friendship they hoped from a man who had murdered his own brother. Little art was needed to influence the old nobility against Somerset, and his hostility to the enclosures had raised up a host of enemies amongst the new, who should have been his natural friends. The people he had lost favour with, from his total want of success against the enemies of the country, and if there were any whom all these causes had not alienated, these were disgusted with his insolence and rapacity. He had bargained for large slices from the manors of bishoprics and cathedrals as the price of promotion to the clergy. He had obtained from the puppet king in his hands, grants of extensive Church lands for his services in Scotland, services which now were worse than null; and in the patent which invested him with these lands, drawn up under his own eye, he had himself styled "Duke of Somerset, by the grace of God," as if he were a king. He was accused of having sold many of the chantry lands to his friends at nominal prices, because he obtained a heavy premium upon the transaction; but what more than all shocked the public sense of religious decorum was that he had erected for himself a splendid palace in the Strand, where the one called from him Somerset House now stands, and had spared no outrage upon public rights and decencies in its erection. Not only private houses, but public buildings, and those of the most sacred character, had been displaced to make room for his proud mansion. To clear the ground for its site and to procure materials for its building, he pulled down three episcopal houses and two churches on the spot, St. Mary's and a church of St. John of Jerusalem, also a chapel, a cloister, and a charnel-house in St. Paul's Churchyard, and he carted away the remains of the dead by whole loads, and threw them into a pit in Bloomsbury. When he attempted to pull down St. Margaret's Church in Westminster, for the stones, the parishioners rose in tumult and drove his men away. Whatever profession of Reformed religion he might make, such proceedings as these stamped it as a pretence, hollow and even impious, in the minds of the public.
The feeling (which originated out of doors) had now made its way into the heart of the Council. Somerset's friends were silenced. His enemies spoke out boldly. During September there were great contentions in the Council; and by the beginning of October the two parties were ranged in hostile attitudes under their chiefs. Warwick and his followers met at Ely Place; the Protector was at Hampton Court, where he had the king. On the 5th of October, Somerset, in the king's name, sent the Secretary of the Council to know why the lords were assembling themselves in that manner, and commanding them, if they had anything to lay before him, to come before him peaceably and loyally. When this message was despatched, Somerset, fearful of the spirit in which this summons might be complied with, ordered the armour to be brought down out of the armoury at Hampton Court, sufficient for 500 men, to arm his followers, and had the doors barricaded, and people fetched in for the defence. But, instead of coming, Warwick and his party ordered the Lieutenant of the Tower, and the Lord Mayor and aldermen, to be summoned, who duly attended and proffered their obedience. They then despatched letters to the nobility and gentry in different parts of the kingdom, informing them of their doings and the motives for them. Alarmed at the aspect of affairs, Somerset conveyed the king to Windsor, under escort of 500 men; Cranmer and Sir William Paget alone, of all the Council, accompanying them. Finding himself rapidly deserted by his friends, Somerset judiciously submitted and signed a confession of his guilt, his presumption, and incapacity. Having signed this, he was promised his life, on condition that he should forfeit all his appointments, his goods and chattels, and so much of his estates as amounted to £2,000 a year. A bill to this effect passed both Houses of Parliament in January, 1550. Somerset remonstrated against the extent of this forfeiture, but the Council replied to him with so much sternness that the abject-spirited man shrank in terror, and on the 2nd of February signed a still more ignominious submission, disclaiming all idea of justifying himself, and expressing his gratitude to the king and Council for sparing his life and being content with a fine. On the 6th of February he was discharged from the Tower, and ten days after received a formal pardon. His officers and servants, who had been imprisoned, also recovered their liberty, but were heavily fined.
Warwick had humbled Somerset, but he could not prevent the country from being humbled with him. His party had blamed the Protector for proposing to surrender Boulogne, but they were now compelled, by the exhausted and disordered state of the nation, to accept even more disgraceful terms. During the winter the French had cut off all communication between Boulogne and Calais, and the Earl of Huntingdon found himself unable to re-open it, though he led against the enemy all his bands of mercenaries and 3,000 English veterans. His treasury and his storehouses were empty, and the French calculated confidently on taking the place at spring. Unable to send the necessary aid, a fresh proposal was made to the Emperor to occupy it, and this not tempting him, the Council next offered to cede it to him in full sovereignty, on condition that it should never be surrendered to France. Charles declined, and as a last resource a Florentine merchant, Antonio Guidotti, was employed to make the French aware that England was not averse from a peace. The French embraced the offer, but under such circumstances they were not likely to be very modest in their terms of accommodation.
The conference between the ambassadors was opened on the 21st of January, and the English proposed that, as an equivalent for the surrender of Boulogne, Mary of Scotland should be contracted to Edward. To this the French bluntly replied that that was impossible, as Henry had already agreed to marry her to the Dauphin. The next proposition was that the arrears of money due from the Crown of France should be paid up, and the payment of the fixed pension continued. To this the ambassadors of Henry replied, in a very different tone to that which English monarchs had been accustomed to hear from those of France, that their king would never condescend to pay tribute to any foreign Crown; that Henry VIII. had been enabled by the necessities of France to extort a pension from Francis; and that they would now avail themselves of the present difficulties of England to compel Edward to renounce it. The English envoys appeared, on this bold declaration, highly indignant, and as if they would break off the conference; but every day they receded more and more from their pretensions, and they ended by subscribing, on the 24th of March, to all the demands of their opponents.
These conditions were that there should be peace and union between the two countries, not merely for the lives of the present monarchs, but to the end of time; that Boulogne should be surrendered to the King of France with all its stores and ordnance; and that, in return for the money expended on the fortifications, they should pay to Edward 200,000 crowns on the delivery of the place, and 200,000 more in five months. But the English were previously to surrender Douglas and Lauder to the Queen of Scots, or, if they were already in the hands of the Scots, to raze the fortresses of Eyemouth and Roxburgh to the ground. Scotland was to be comprehended in the treaty if the queen desired it, and Edward bound himself not to make war on Scotland unless some new provocation were given.
So disgraceful was this treaty, such a surrender was it of the nation's dignity, that the people regarded it as an eternal opprobrium to the country; and from that hour the boastful claims of England on the French Crown were no more heard of, except in the ridiculous retention of the title of King of France by our sovereigns.
Freed from the embarrassments of foreign politics, the Council now proceeded with the work of Church reform; and during 1550 and part of 1551 was busily engaged checking on the one hand the opposition of the Romanist clergy, and on the other the latitudinarian tendencies of the Protestants. Bonner and Gardiner were the most considerable of the uncomplying prelates, and they were first brought under notice. Bonner had been called before the Council in August of 1549, for not complying with the requisitions of the Court in matters of religion; and in April, 1550, he was deprived of his see of London, and remanded to the Marshalsea, where he remained till the king's death. Ridley was appointed to the bishopric of London. Gardiner and Heath, Bishop of Worcester, were also imprisoned.
From the bishops, the reforming Council proceeded to higher game. The Princess Mary, the king's eldest sister, from the first had expressed her firm resolution of not adopting the new faith or ritual. She had, moreover, declared to Somerset, that during Edward's minority things ought to remain as the king her father had left them. Somerset replied that, on the contrary, he was only carrying out the plans which Henry had already settled in his own mind, but had not had time to complete. On the introduction of the new liturgy, she received in June, 1549, an intimation that she must conform to the provisions of the statute. Mary replied with spirit, that her conscience would not permit her to lay aside the practice of the religion that she believed in, and reminded the lords of the Council that they were bound by their oaths to maintain the Church as left by her father; adding, that they could not, with any decency, refuse liberty of worship to the daughter of the king who had raised them to what they were. The appeal to the liberality, the consciences, or the gratitude of these statesmen producing no effect, she next applied to a more influential person, the Emperor, Charles V., her great relative. He intervened on her behalf with such vigour that war between England and Germany seemed at one time inevitable, and the Council gave way. The persecutions were shortly afterwards renewed, but Mary remained firm, and finally was completely victorious.
The ungenerous conduct of the Warwick party towards Mary, and the disgraceful conditions of the peace with France, naturally caused a considerable revival of Somerset's influence at Court, and the remainder of the summer was spent by him in intriguing for the increase of his favour. He surrounded himself with a strong body of armed men; there were secret debates among his friends on the possibility of raising the City in his behalf, and he did not hesitate to drop hints that assassination only could free him from his implacable enemies. But whilst the irresolute Somerset plotted, Warwick acted. He secured for himself the appointment of warden of the Scottish marches, thus cutting off the danger which had lately appeared of Somerset's retreat thither. Armed with the preponderating influence which that office conferred in the northern districts, on the 27th of September or the 17th of October he was announced as Duke of Northumberland, a title venerated by the Border people, and which had been extinct since the attainder of Earl Percy in 1527. In this formidable position of power and dignity he was strengthened by his friends and partisans being at the same time elevated in the peerage. The Marquis of Dorset was created Duke of Suffolk, the Earl of Wiltshire, Marquis of Winchester, and Sir William Herbert, Baron of Cardiff and Earl of Pembroke. Cecil, Cheke, Sidney, and Nevil received the honour of knighthood.
This movement in favour of Warwick was followed by consequences of still more startling character to the Duke of Somerset. His enemies now felt safe, and on the 16th of October, 1551, the news flew through London that he was arrested on a charge of conspiracy and high treason, and committed to the Tower. He had been apprised that depositions of a serious character had been made against him by Sir Thomas Palmer, a partisan of Warwick's, whereupon he sent for Palmer, and strictly interrogated him, but on his positive denial, let him go. Not satisfied, however, he wrote to Cecil, telling him that he suspected something was in agitation against him. Cecil replied with his characteristic astuteness, that if he were innocent he could have nothing to fear; if he were guilty, he could only lament his misfortune. Piqued at this reply, he sent a letter of defiance, but took no means for the security of his person. Palmer, notwithstanding his denial, had, however, it seems, really lodged this charge against him on the 7th of the month with Warwick:--That in a conference with Somerset in April last, in his garden, the duke assured him that at the time that the solemn declaration of Sir William Herbert had prevented him from going northward, he had sent Lord Grey to raise their friends there; that after that he had formed the design of inviting Warwick, Northampton, and the chiefs of that party, and of assassinating them, either there, or on their return home; that at this very moment he was planning to raise an insurrection in London, to destroy his enemy, and to seize the direction of Government; that Sir Miles Partridge was to call out the apprentices of the City, kill the City guard, and get possession of the Great Seal; and that Sir Thomas Arundel had secured the Tower, and Sir Ralph Vane had a force of 2,000 men ready to support them.
Probably this was a mixture of some truth with a much larger portion of convenient falsehood. The duke was accordingly arrested, and the next day the duchess, with her favourites, Mr. and Mrs. Crane, Sir Miles Partridge, Sir Thomas Arundel, Sir Thomas Holcroft, Sir Michael Stanhope, and others of the duke's friends, were also arrested, and committed to the Tower. The king was already brought up from Hampton Court to Westminster for greater security and convenience during the trials of the conspirators. A message was sent in the king's name to the Lord Mayor and Corporation, informing them that the conspirators had agreed to seize the Tower, kill the guards of the City, seize the Great Seal, set fire to the town, and depart for the Isle of Wight; and they were, therefore, ordered to keep the gates well, and maintain a strong patrol in the streets.
The trial of the duke, such as it was, took place on the 1st of December, in Westminster Hall. Twenty-seven peers were summoned to sit as his judges, the Marquis of Winchester being appointed Lord High Steward, to preside. On that morning Somerset was brought from the Tower, with the axe borne before him; whilst a great number of men carrying bills, glaives, halberds, and poll-axes, guarded him. A new platform was raised in the hall, on which the lords, his judges, sat; and above them was the Lord High Steward, on a raised seat ascended by three steps, and over it a canopy of State. The judges consisted almost wholly of the duke's enemies, and conspicuous amongst them were Northumberland, Northampton, and Pembroke. The witnesses against him were not produced, but merely their depositions read. Somerset denied the whole of the charges respecting his intention to raise the City of London, declaring that the idea of killing the City guard was worthy only of a madman. As to the accusation of proposing to assassinate the Duke of Northumberland and others, he admitted that he had thought of it, and even talked of it, but on mature consideration had abandoned it for ever.
On this confession the judges declared him guilty of felony without benefit of clergy. They were desirous to adjudge it treason, but this Northumberland himself overruled. When this sentence was pronounced, Somerset fell on his knees, and thanked the lords for the fair trial they had given him, and implored pardon from Northumberland, Northampton, and Pembroke, for his design against their lives, entreating them to pray the king's mercy to him and his grace towards his wife, his children, and his servants. On the sentence being pronounced only felony, the axe of the Tower was withdrawn; and the people, seeing him returning without that fatal instrument, imagined that he was acquitted, and gave such shouts, that they were heard from Charing Cross to the hall. According to Holinshed, the Duke of Somerset landed from the river "at the crane of the Vine-tree, and so passed through London, where were both acclamations--the one cried for joy that he was acquitted, the other cried that he was condemned."
Six weeks after his sentence, the warrant for his execution was signed. The chronicler quaintly remarks that "Christmas being thus passed and spent with much mirth and pastime, it was thought now good to proceed to the execution of the judgment against the Duke of Somerset." The day of execution was the 22nd of January, 1552. To prevent the vast concourse which, from the popularity of his character among the common people, from his opposition to enclosures during his Protectorship, was sure to take place, the Council had issued a precept to the Lord Mayor, commanding him to take all necessary measures for restraining the rush towards Tower Hill. The constables in every ward had, therefore, strictly charged every one not to leave their houses before ten o'clock that morning. But, by the very dawn, Tower Hill was one mass of heads, assembled more in expectation of the duke's reprieve than of his execution. At eight o'clock he was delivered to the sheriffs of London, who led him out to the scaffold on Tower Hill. He died calmly and nobly.
Parliament met the day after the execution of Somerset; and as it had been originally summoned by him, it appeared to act as inspired with a spirit which resented his treatment and his death; and this spirit tended greatly during this session to revive that ancient independence which Henry VIII. had so completely quelled during his life. Most deserving of notice was the enactment which ordered the churchwardens in every parish to collect contributions for the support of the poor. This, though it appeared at first sight a voluntary contribution under the sanction of Government, was in reality a compulsory one, for the bishop of the diocese had authority to proceed against such as refused to subscribe. From this germ grew the English poor-law, with all its machinery and consequences.
The Crown attempted to re-enact some of the most arbitrary and oppressive laws of Henry VIII., though they had been repealed in the first Parliament of this reign. A bill was sent to the Lords, making it treason to call the king, or any of his heirs, a heretic, schismatic, tyrant, or usurper. The Lords passed it without hesitation, for it most probably proceeded from Warwick, and the Lords were strongly devoted to him; but the Commons drew the same line which had been drawn regarding the deniers of the supremacy. They would admit the offence to be treason only when it was done by "writing, printing, carving, or graving," which indicated deliberate purpose; but what was spoken, as it might result from indiscretion or sudden passion, they decreed to be only a minor offence, punishable by fine or forfeiture, and only rendered treasonable by a third repetition. The Commons also added a most invaluable clause, the necessity of which had been constantly pressing on the public attention, and had just been strikingly demonstrated by the trial of Somerset. It was now enacted that no person should be arraigned, indicted, convicted, or attainted of any manner of treason unless on the oath of two lawful accusers, who should be brought before him at the time of his arraignment, and there should openly maintain their charges against him.
But in prosecuting the reforms of the Church, the Parliament proceeded with a far more arbitrary spirit. The Common Prayer Book underwent much revision, and an Act was passed by which the bishops were empowered to compel attendance on the amended form of service by spiritual censures, and the magistrates to punish corporally all who used any other. Any one daring to attend any other form of worship was liable to six months' imprisonment for the first offence, twelve months for the second, and confinement for life for the third. So little did our Church reformers of that day understand of the rights of conscience. In the same spirit Cranmer proceeded to frame a collection of the articles of religion, and a code of ecclesiastical constitutions.
Parliament, proving too independent, was dissolved, and in preparing for a new Parliament, Northumberland took such measures as showed that his own power and aggrandisement were the first things in his thoughts, the Constitution of the kingdom the last. Letters were sent in the king's name to all the sheriffs, directing them, in the most straightforward manner, to abuse their powers in order to return a Parliament completely subservient to the Government.
The only object which the Duke of Northumberland had in view in calling the new Parliament together was to procure liberal supplies. The appropriation of the monastic and chartered lands had left the Crown nearly as poor as it had found it. Such portions of these lands as still remained in its possession were totally inadequate to meet the annual demands of the Government. Northumberland, therefore, asked for two-tenths and two-fifteenths; but even with his care to pack the Commons he found it no easy task to obtain supplies, and the friends of Somerset again assembled in considerable force in the House, resenting in strong terms the pretence thrown out in the preamble to the bill that it was owing to the extravagance and improvidence of the late Duke of Somerset, to his involving the country in needless wars, debasing the coin, and occasioning a terrible rebellion.
But the king's health was fast failing, and it was high time for Northumberland to make sure his position and fortune. The constitution of Edward had long betrayed symptoms of frailty. In the early spring of the past year he was successively attacked by measles and small-pox. In the autumn, through incautious exposure to cold, he was attacked by inflammation of the lungs, and so enfeebled was he become by the meeting of Parliament on the 1st of March, 1553, that he was obliged to receive the two Houses at his palace of Whitehall. He was greatly exhausted by the exertion, being evidently far gone in a consumption, and harassed with a troublesome cough.
Northumberland, from the day on which he rose into the ascendant at Court, had shown that he was the true son of the old licensed extortioner. He had laboured assiduously not only to surround himself by interested adherents, but to add estate to estate. He inherited a large property, the accumulations of oppression and crimes of the blackest dye. But during the three years in which he had enjoyed all but kingly power, he had been diligently at work creating a kingly demesne. He was become the Steward of the East Riding of Yorkshire, and likewise of all the Royal manors in the five northern counties. He had obtained Tynemouth and Alnwick in Northumberland, Barnard Castle in Durham, and immense estates in Warwick, Worcester, and Somerset shires. The more he saw the king fail, the more anxious he was to place his brother, his sons, his relatives, and most devoted partisans in places of honour and profit around him at Court. This done, he advanced to bolder measures, to which these were only the stepping-stones. Lady Jane Grey was the daughter of Frances, Duchess of Suffolk, whose mother was Mary, the sister of Henry VIII. Mary first married Louis XII. of France, by whom she had no children, and next, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, by whom she had two daughters. The younger of these married Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, but the elder, Frances, whose claim came first, had by the Marquis of Dorset (afterwards Duke of Suffolk) three daughters, Jane, Catherine, and Mary.
Northumberland, casting his eye over the descendants of Henry VIII., saw the only son, King Edward, dying, and the two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, bastardised by Acts of Parliament still unrepealed. A daring scheme seized his ambitious mind--a scheme to set aside these two princesses, the elder of whom, and immediate heir to the throne, was especially dangerous to the permanence of the newly-established Protestantism. It was true that Margaret of Scotland, the sister of Henry VIII., was older than his sister Mary, and her grand-daughter, Mary Queen of Scots, would have taken precedence of the descendants of Mary, but she and her issue had been entirely passed over in the will of Henry. Leaving out, then, this line, and setting aside the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth as legally illegitimate, Lady Jane Grey would become heir to the throne. Northumberland resolved, therefore, to secure Lady Jane in marriage for his son Lord Guilford Dudley; to obtain Lady Jane's sister, Catherine, for Lord Herbert, son of the Earl of Pembroke, who owed title, estates, and everything to the favour of Northumberland; and to marry his own daughter Catherine to the eldest son of the Earl of Huntingdon. The marriages were celebrated at Durham House, the Duke of Northumberland's new residence in the Strand.
Northumberland's next step was to induce the king to bequeath the crown to Lady Jane. The dying prince listened with a mind which had long been under the influence of the more powerful will of Dudley, and saw nothing but the most patriotic objects in his recommendations. He no doubt considered it a great kingly duty to decide the succession by will as his father had done; and that the whole responsibility might rest on himself, and not on Northumberland, who had so much at stake, he was easily induced to sketch the form of his devise of the Crown with his own pen. In this rough draft he entailed the succession on "the Lady Frances's heirs masles," next on "Lady Jane's heirs masles," and then on the heirs male of her sisters. This, however, did not accord with the plans of Northumberland, for none of the ladies named had any heirs male; and, therefore, on the death of Edward, the Crown would have passed over the whole family, and would go to the next of kin. A slight alteration was accordingly made. The letter "s" at the end of "Jane's" was scored out, the words "and her" inserted, and thus the bequest stood "to the Lady Jane and her heirs masles." Northumberland then compelled the judges to draw out letters patent under the Great Seal confirming the disposition of the Crown.
But Northumberland, not satisfied with the will of the king and the act of the Crown lawyer, produced another document, to which he required the signatures of the members of the Council and of the legal advisers of the Crown, who pledged, to the number of four-and-twenty, their oaths and honour to support this arrangement. The legal instrument, being prepared, was engrossed on parchment, and was authenticated by the Great Seal. Northumberland was preparing to secure his position by force of arms, when the poor young king, whose mind had been overtaxed by his advisers, died on the 6th of July, 1553.
XI. THE REIGN OF MARY
Proclamation of Lady Jane Grey--Mary's Resistance--Northumberland's Failure--Mary is Proclaimed--The Advice of Charles V.--Execution of Northumberland--Restoration of the Roman Church--Proposed Marriage with Philip of Spain--Consequent Risings throughout England--Wyatt's Rebellion--Execution of Lady Jane Grey--Imprisonment of Elizabeth--Marriage of Philip and Mary--England Accepts the Papal Absolution--Persecuting Statutes Re-enacted--Martyrdom of Rogers, Hooper, and Taylor--Di Castro's Sermon--Sickness of Mary--Trials of Ridley, Latimer, and Cranmer--Martyrdom of Ridley and Latimer--Confession and Death of Cranmer--Departure of Philip--The Dudley Conspiracy--Return of Philip--War with France--Battle of St. Quentin--Loss of Calais--Death of Mary.
As Mary fled from the emissaries of Northumberland on the 7th of July, after learning the death of her brother, she arrived on the ensuing evening at Sawston Hall, near Cambridge, the seat of Mr. Huddlestone, a zealous Romanist, one of whose kinsmen was a gentleman of Mary's retinue. There she passed the night, but was compelled to resume her journey early in the morning, the Protestant party in Cambridge having heard of her arrival, and being on the march to attack her. She and her followers were obliged to make the best of their way thence in different disguises, and turning on the Gogmagog Hills to take a look at the hall, she saw it in flames: her night's sojourn had cost her entertainer the home of his ancestors. On seeing this, she exclaimed, as quite certain of her fortunes, "Well, let it burn, I will build him a better;" and she kept her word. She passed through Bury St. Edmunds, and the next night reached the seat of Kenninghall, in Norfolk. Thence without delay she despatched a messenger to the Privy Council, commanding them to desist from the treasonable scheme which she knew that they were attempting, and ordering them to proclaim her their rightful sovereign, in which case all that was past should be pardoned. The messenger arrived just in time to see the rival queen proclaimed on the 10th, and to bring back a reply peculiarly insulting for its gross language, asserting her illegitimacy, and calling upon her to submit to her sovereign, Queen Jane.
Mary on this occasion displayed the strong spirit of the Tudor. Though Northumberland had all the powers of the Government, the military strength, the influence of party, and the support of the nobility of the nation apparently under his hand, and possessed the reputation of being an able and most successful general, and though she had nobody with her but Sir Thomas Warton, the steward of her household, Andrew Huddlestone, and her ladies; though she had neither troops nor money, Mary did not hesitate. Kenninghall was but a defenceless house in an open country; she, therefore, rode forward to Framlingham Castle, not far from the Suffolk coast, where, in a strong fortress, she could await the result of an appeal to her subjects and, were she forced to fly, could easily escape across to Holland, and put herself under the protection of her Imperial kinsman.
Once within the lofty walls of Framlingham, she commanded the standard of England to be cast loose to the winds, and caused herself to be proclaimed Queen-regnant of England and Ireland. The effect was soon seen. Sir Henry Jerningham and Sir Henry Bedingfeld had joined her with a few followers before she quitted Kenninghall, and had served her as a guard in her ride of twenty miles to Framlingham. Sir John Sulyard now arrived, and was appointed captain of her guard. He was speedily followed by the tenants of Sir Henry Bedingfeld, to the number of 140. By the influence of Sir Henry Jerningham, Yarmouth declared for her; and soon after flocked in, with more or less of followers, Lord Thomas Howard, a grandson of the old Duke of Norfolk; Sir William Drury; Sir Thomas Cornwallis, High Sheriff of Suffolk; Sir John Skelton; and Sir John Tyrrel. These were all zealous Papists; and the people of Norfolk and Suffolk hurried to her standard, impelled by the memory of Northumberland's sanguinary extinction of Ket's rebellion, the horrors of which still kept alive a deep detestation of the unprincipled duke in those counties. In a very short time Mary beheld herself surrounded by an army of 13,000 men, all serving without pay, but confidently calculating on the certain recompense which, as queen, she would soon be able to award them. Lord Derby rose for her in Cheshire, and Carew proclaimed her in Devonshire.
Northumberland saw that no time was to be lost. It was necessary that forces should be instantly despatched to check the growth of Mary's army, and to disperse it altogether. But who should command it? There was no one so proper as himself; but he suspected the fidelity of the Council, and was unwilling to remove himself to a distance from them; he therefore recommended the Duke of Suffolk, the father of Lady Jane, to the command of the expedition. The Council, who were anxious to get rid of Northumberland in order that they might themselves escape to Mary's camp, represented privately that Suffolk was a general of no reputation, that everything depended on decisive proceedings in the outset, and that he alone was the man for the purpose. They, moreover, so excited the fears of Lady Jane that she entreated in tears that her father might remain with her.
Northumberland consented, though with many misgivings. He equally distrusted the Council and the citizens. On the 13th of July he set out, urging on the Council at his departure fidelity to the trust reposed in them, and receiving from them the most earnest protestations of zeal and attachment. At every step some expectation was falsified, or some disastrous news met him. The promised reinforcements did not arrive, but he heard of them taking the way to the camp of Mary instead of to his own. He heard of the defection of the fleet; and lastly, a prostrating blow, of the Council having gone over to Queen Mary. Struck with dismay at this accumulation of evil tidings, he retreated from Bury St. Edmunds, which he had reached, to Cambridge, and there betrayed pitiable indecision.
Scarcely had he left London before the Council, whilst outwardly professing much activity for the interests of Queen Jane, set to work to terminate as soon as possible the perilous farce of her royalty. On the evening of Sunday, the 16th, the Lord Treasurer left the Tower, and made a visit to his own house, contrary to the positive order of Northumberland, who had strictly enjoined Suffolk to keep the whole Council within its walls. On the 19th the Lord Treasurer and Lord Privy Seal, the Earls of Arundel, Shrewsbury, and Pembroke, Sir Thomas Cheney, and Sir John Mason, left the Tower, on the plea that it was necessary to levy forces, and to receive the French ambassador, and that Baynard's Castle, the residence of the Earl of Pembroke, was a much more convenient place for these purposes. As they professed to be actuated by zeal for the cause of his daughter, Suffolk, a very weak person, was easily duped. No sooner had they reached Baynard's Castle than they unanimously declared for Queen Mary.
Immediately after proclaiming the new queen, the Council sent to summon the Duke of Suffolk to surrender the Tower, which he did with all alacrity, and, proceeding to Baynard's Castle, signed the proclamations which the Council were issuing. Poor Lady Jane resigned her uneasy and unblessed crown of nine days with unfeigned joy, and the next morning returned to Sion House. This brief period of queenship, which had been thrust upon her against her own wishes and better judgment, had been embittered not only by her own sense of injustice towards her kinswoman, the Princess Mary, and by apprehension of the consequences to herself and all her friends, but still more by the harshness and insatiate ambition of her husband and his mother.
The Council despatched a letter to Northumberland by Richard Rose, the herald, commanding him to disband his army, and return to his allegiance to Queen Mary, under penalty of being declared a traitor. But before this reached him he had submitted himself, and in a manner the least heroic and dignified possible. On the Sunday he had induced Dr. Sandys, the vice-chancellor of the university, to preach a sermon against the title and religion of Mary. The very next day the news of the revolution at London arrived, and Northumberland, proceeding to the market-place, proclaimed the woman he had thus denounced, and flung up his cap as if in joy at the event, whilst the tears of grief and chagrin streamed down his face. Turning to Doctor Sandys, who was again with him, he said, "Queen Mary was a merciful woman, and that, doubtless, all would receive the benefit of her general pardon." But Sandys, who could not help despising him, bade him "not flatter himself with that; for if the queen were ever so inclined to pardon, those who ruled her would destroy him, whoever else were spared." Immediately after, Sir John Gates, one of his oldest and most obsequious instruments, arrested him, when he had his boots half-drawn on, so that he could not help himself; and, on the following morning, the Earl of Arundel, arriving with a body of troops, took possession of Northumberland, his captor, Gates, and Dr. Sandys, and sent them off to the Tower.
Mary dismissed her army, which had never exceeded 15,000, and which had had no occasion to draw a sword, before quitting Wanstead, except 3,000 horsemen in uniforms of green and white, red and white, and blue and white. These, too, she sent back before entering the City gate, thus showing her perfect confidence in the attachment of her capital. From that point her only guard was that of the City, which brought up the rear with bows and javelins. As Mary and her sister Elizabeth rode through the crowded streets, they were accompanied by a continuous roar of acclamation; and on entering the court of the Tower they beheld, kneeling on the green before St. Peter's Church, the State prisoners who had been detained there during the reigns of Henry VIII. and Edward VI. These were Courtenay, the son of the Marquis of Exeter, who was executed in 1538; the old Duke of Norfolk, still under sentence of death; and the Bishops of Durham and Winchester, Tunstall and Gardiner. Gardiner pronounced a congratulation on behalf of the others; and Mary, bursting into tears at the sight, called them to her, exclaiming, "Ye are all my prisoners!" raised them one by one, kissed them, and set them at liberty. To extend the joy of her safe establishment upon the throne of her ancestors, she ordered eighteen pence to be distributed to every poor householder in the City.
It was Mary's misfortune that she had been educated to place so much reliance on the wisdom and friendship of her great relative, the Emperor Charles V. He had been her champion, as he had been that of her mother. When pressed on the subject of her religion during the last reign, he had menaced the country with war if the freedom of her conscience were violated. It was natural, therefore, that she should now look to him for counsel, seeing that almost all those whom she was obliged to employ or to have around her had been her enemies during her brother's reign. Charles communicated his opinions through Simon Renard, his ambassador, who was to be the medium of their correspondence, and to advise her in matters not of sufficient importance to require the Emperor's judgment, or not allowing of sufficient time to obtain it. Renard was ordered to act warily, and to show himself little at Court, so as to avoid suspicion.
Charles advised her to make examples of the chief conspirators, and to punish the subordinates more mildly, so as to obtain a character of moderation. He insisted upon it as necessary, however, that Lady Jane Grey should be included in the list for capital punishment, and to this Mary would by no means consent. She replied that "she could not find in her heart or conscience to put her unfortunate kinswoman to death, who had not been an accomplice of Northumberland, but merely an unresisting instrument in his hands. If there were any crime in being his daughter-in-law, even of that her cousin Jane was not guilty, for she had been legally contracted to another, and, therefore, her marriage with Lord Guilford Dudley was not valid. As to the danger existing from her pretensions, it was but imaginary, and every requisite precaution should be taken before she was set at liberty."
Mary's selection of prisoners was remarkably small considering the number in her hands, and the character of their offence against her. She contented herself with putting only seven of them on their trial--namely, Northumberland, his son the Earl of Warwick, the Marquis of Northampton, Sir John Gates, Sir Henry Gates, Sir Andrew Dudley, and Sir Thomas Palmer--his chief councillors and his associates. Northumberland submitted to the court whether a man could be guilty of treason who acted on the authority of Council, and under warrant of the Great Seal; or could they, who had been his chief advisers and accomplices during the whole time, sit as his judges? The Duke of Norfolk, who presided at the trial as High Steward, replied that the Council and Great Seal which he spoke of were those of a usurper, and, therefore, so far from availing him, only aggravated the offence, and that the lords in question could sit as his judges, because they were under no attainder.
Finding that his appeal had done him no service, Northumberland and his fellow-prisoners pleaded guilty. The duke prayed that his sentence might be commuted into decapitation, as became a peer of the realm, and he prayed the queen that she would be merciful to his children on account of their youth. He desired also that an able divine might be sent to him for the settling of his conscience, thereby intimating that he was at heart a Romanist, in hopes, no doubt, of winning upon the mind of the queen, for he was very anxious to save his life. He professed, too, that he was in possession of certain State secrets of vital importance to her Majesty, and entreated that two members of the Council might be sent to him to receive these matters from him. What his object was became manifest from the result, for Gardiner and another member of the Council being sent to him in consequence, he implored Gardiner passionately to intercede for his life. Gardiner gave him little hope, but promised to do what he could, and on returning to the queen so much moved her, that she was inclined to grant the request; but others of the Council wrote through Renard to the Emperor, who strenuously warned her, if she valued her safety, or the peace of her reign, not to listen to the arch-traitor. On Tuesday, the 22nd of August, Northumberland, Gates, and Palmer were brought from the Tower for execution on Tower Hill. Of the eleven condemned, only these three were executed--an instance of clemency, in so gross a conspiracy to deprive a sovereign of a throne, which is without parallel. When the Duke of Northumberland and Gates met on the scaffold, they each accused the other of being the author of the treason. Northumberland charged the whole design on Gates and the Council; Gates laid it more truly on Northumberland and his high authority. They protested, however, that they entirely forgave each other, and Northumberland, stepping to the rail, made a speech, praying for a long and happy reign to the queen, and calling on the people to bear witness that he died in the true Catholic faith. Though he condemned it, he said, in his heart, ambition had led him to conform to the new faith, the adoption of which had filled both England and Germany with constant dissensions, troubles, and civil wars. After repeating the "Miserere," "De Profundis," and the "Paternoster," with some portion of another psalm, concluding with the words, "Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit," he laid his head on the block, saying that he deserved a thousand deaths, and it was severed at a stroke. Gates and Palmer died professing much penitence.
The accession of Mary was a joyful event to the Papal Court. Julius III. appointed Cardinal Pole his legate to the queen; but Pole was by no means in haste, without obtaining further information, to fill this office in a country where the people, whose sturdy character he well knew, had to so great an extent imbibed the doctrines of the Reformation. Dandino, the Papal legate at Brussels, therefore despatched a gentleman of his suite to proceed to London and cautiously spy out the land. Before making himself known, this emissary, Gianfrancesco Commendone, went about London for some days gathering up all evidences of the public feeling on the question of the Church. He then procured a private interview with Mary, and was delighted to hear from her own lips that she was fully resolved on reconciling her kingdom to the Papal See, and meant to obtain the repeal of all laws restricting the doctrines or discipline of the Roman Church; but that it required caution, and that no trace of any correspondence with Rome must come to light.
Mary was, however, inclined to go faster and farther than some of her advisers, and Gardiner, though so staunch a Papist, was too much of an Englishman to wish to see the supremacy restored to the Pontiff. But others were not so patriotic. Throughout the kingdom the Protestant preachers were silenced. The great bell at Christ Church, Oxford, was just recast, and the first use of it was to call the people to Mass. "That bell then rung," says Fuller, "the knell of Gospel truth in the city of Oxford, afterwards filled with Protestant tears."
Four days after her coronation, on October 1st, Mary opened her first Parliament; and she opened it in a manner which showed plainly what was to come. Both peers and commoners were called upon to attend her majesty at a solemn Mass of the Holy Ghost. This was an immediate test of what degree of compliance was to be expected in the attempt to return to the ancient order of things; and the success of the experiment was most encouraging. With the exception of Taylor Bishop of Lincoln, and Harley Bishop of Hereford, the whole Parliament--peers, prelates, and commoners--fell on their knees at the elevation of the Host, and participated with an air of devotion in that which in the last reign they had declared an abomination. But such was the zeal now for the lately abhorred Mass, that the two noncomplying bishops were thrust out of the queen's presence, and out of the abbey altogether. There were those who insinuated that the Emperor furnished Mary with funds to bribe her Parliament on this occasion; but, besides that Charles was not so lavish of his money, events soon showed that the Parliament, though so exceedingly pliant in the matter of religion, was stubborn enough regarding the estates obtained from the Church, and also concerning Mary's scheme of a Spanish marriage.
The first act of legislation was to restore the securities to life and property which had been granted in the twenty-fifth year of Edward III., and which had been so completely prostrated by the acts of Henry VIII. Such an Act had been passed at the commencement of the last reign, but had been again violated in the cases of the two Seymours. The Parliament, looking back on the sanguinary lawlessness of that monarch, did not think the country sufficiently safe from charges of constructive treason and felony without a fresh enactment. It next passed an Act annulling the divorce of Queen Catherine of Aragon, by Cranmer, and declaring the present queen legitimate. This Act indeed tacitly declared Elizabeth illegitimate, but there was no getting altogether out of the difficulties which the licentious proceedings of Henry VIII. had created, and it was deemed best to pass that point over in silence, leaving the queen to treat her sister as if born in genuine wedlock.
The next Act went to restore the Papal Church in England, stopping short, however, of the supremacy. This received no opposition in the House of Lords, but occasioned a debate of two days in the Commons. It passed, however, eventually without a division, and by it was swept away at once the whole system of Protestantism established by Cranmer during the reign of Edward VI. The Reformed liturgy, which the Parliament of that monarch had declared was framed by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, was now pronounced to be "a new thing, imagined and devised by a few of singular opinions." This abolished the marriages of priests and illegitimatised their children. From the 20th day of November divine worship was to be performed, and the sacraments were to be administered, as in the last year of Henry VIII. Thus were the tyrannic Six Articles restored, and all but the Papal supremacy. Even the discussion of the ritual and doctrines of Edward VI. became so warm, that the queen prorogued Parliament for three days. On calling the House of Commons together again, and proceeding with the Bill, no mention was made of the restoration of the Church property, though the queen was anxious to restore all that was in the hands of the Crown; for the Lords, and gentlemen even of the House of Commons, who were in possession of those lands, would have raised a far different opposition to that which was manifested regarding the State religion. No sooner were these Bills passed than the clergy met in Convocation, and passed decrees for the speedy enforcement of all the new regulations.
The persecution of the Reformed clergy who had stood firm became vehement. The married clergy were called upon to abandon their wives, and there was a rush of the expelled priests again to fill their pulpits. In the cities there was considerable opposition, for there the people had read and reflected, but generally throughout the agricultural districts the change took place with the ease and rapidity of the scene-shifting at a theatre. Many of the married priests, however, would not abandon their wives and children, and were turned adrift into the highways, or were thrust into prison. Many fled abroad, hoping for more Christian treatment from the Reformed churches there, but in vain, for their doctrines did not accord with those of the foreign Reformers, who deemed them heretical.
About half the English bishops conformed; the rest were ejected from their sees, and several of them were imprisoned. Soon after Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley were sent to the Tower, Holgate, Archbishop of York, was sent thither also. Poynet, who was Bishop of Winchester during Gardiner's expulsion, was imprisoned for having married. Taylor of Lincoln and Harley of Hereford, for refusing to kneel on the elevation of the Host at the queen's coronation, and for other heresies, were committed to prison. On the 13th of October Cranmer was brought to trial in the Guildhall, on a charge of treason, with Lady Jane Grey, her husband Lord Guilford Dudley, and Lord Ambrose Dudley, his brother. They were all condemned to death as traitors, and a bill of attainder was passed through Parliament against them. Lady Jane's sentence was to be beheaded or burnt at the queen's pleasure, which was then the law of England in all cases where women committed high treason, or petty treason by the murder of their husbands. The fate of Lady Jane, who pleaded guilty, and exhibited the most mild and amiable demeanour on the occasion, excited deep sympathy, and crowds followed her as she was reconducted to the Tower, weeping and lamenting her hard fate. It was well understood, however, that the queen had no intention of carrying the sentence into effect against any of the prisoners; but she deemed it a means of keeping quiet her partisans to hold them in prison under sentence of death. She gave orders that they should receive every indulgence consistent with their security, and Lady Jane was permitted to walk in the queen's garden at the Tower, and even on Tower Hill.
The subject which created the greatest difficulty to this Parliament was that of the queen's marriage. The wily Renard suggested to Mary as a possible husband Philip the heir of Charles V., and she eagerly seized on the idea though she knew that it would be very unpopular. The first to remonstrate with Mary on the subject was Gardiner, her Chancellor, who boldly pointed out to her the repugnance of the nation to a Spanish marriage; that she would be the paramount authority if she married a subject, but that it would be difficult to maintain that rank with a Spanish king; that the arrogance of the Spanish had made them odious to all nations, and that this quality had shown itself conspicuously in Philip. He was greatly disliked by his own people, and it was not likely that he would be tolerated by the English; moreover, alliance with Spain meant perpetual war with France, which would never suffer the Netherlands to be annexed to the crown of England. The rest of Mary's Council took up the same strain, with the exception of the old Duke of Norfolk, and the Lords Arundel and Paget. The Protestant party out of doors were furious against the match, declaring that it would bring the Inquisition into the country, to rivet Popery upon it, and to make England the slave of taxation to the Spaniards. The Parliament took up the subject with equal hostility, and the Commons sent their Speaker to her, attended by a deputation of twenty members, praying her Majesty not to marry a foreigner.
Noailles, the French ambassador, was delighted with this movement, and took much credit to himself for inciting influential parties to it; but Mary believed it to originate with Gardiner, and the lion spirit of her father coming over her, she vowed that she would prove a match for the cunning of the Chancellor. That very night she sent for the Spanish ambassador, and bidding him follow her into her private oratory, she there knelt down before the altar, and after chanting the hymn, "Veni Creator Spiritus," she made a vow to God that she would marry Philip of Spain, and whilst she lived, no other man but him. Thus she put it out of her power, if she kept her vow, to marry any other person should she outlive Philip, showing the force of the paroxysm of determination which was upon her. The effort would seem to have been very violent, for immediately after she was taken ill, and continued so for some days.
It was on the last day of October that this curious circumstance took place, and on the 17th of November she sent for the House of Commons, when the Speaker read the address giving her their advice regarding her marriage. Instead of the Chancellor returning the answer, as was the custom, Mary replied herself, thanking them for their care that she should have a succession in her own children, but rebuking them for presuming to dictate to her the choice of a husband. She declared that the marriages of her predecessors had always been free, a privilege which, she assured them, she was resolved to maintain. At the same time, she added, she should be careful to make such a selection as should contribute both to her own happiness and to that of her people.
The plain declaration of the queen to her Parliament was not necessary to inform those about her who were interested in the question; they had speedy information of her having favoured the Spanish suit, and Noailles was certainly mixed up in conspiracies to defeat it. It was proposed to place Courtenay, the young Earl of Devon, who had long been a prisoner in the Tower, at the head of the Reformed party, and if Mary would not consent to marry him, to assassinate Arundel and Paget, the advocates of the Spanish match; to marry Elizabeth to Courtenay, and raise the standard of rebellion in Devonshire. It appears from the despatches of Noailles that the Duke of Suffolk, the father of Lady Jane Grey, was in this conspiracy. But the folly and the unstable character of their hero, Courtenay, was fatal to their design, and of that Noailles very soon became sensible. It was suggested by some of the parties that Courtenay should steal away from Court, get across to France, and thence join the conspirators in Devonshire; but Noailles opposed this plan, declaring that the moment Courtenay quitted the coast of England his chance was utterly lost; and he wrote to his own government, saying that the scheme would fall to nothing; for although Courtenay and Elizabeth were fitting persons to cause a rising, such was the want of decision of Courtenay, he would let himself be taken before he would act--the thing which actually came to pass.
On the 2nd of January, 1554, a splendid embassy, sent by the Emperor, headed by the Counts Egmont and Lalain, the Lord of Courrieres, and the Sieur de Nigry, landed in Kent, to arrange the marriage between Mary and Philip. The unpopularity of this measure was immediately manifested, for the men of Kent, taking Egmont for Philip, rose in fury, and would have torn him to pieces if they could have got hold of him. Having, however, reached Westminster in safety, on the 14th of January, a numerous assembly of nobles, prelates, and courtiers was summoned to the queen's presence-chamber, where Gardiner, who had found it necessary to relinquish his opposition, stated to them the proposed conditions of the treaty. The greatest care was evidently taken to disarm the fears of the English, and nothing could appear more moderate than the terms of this alliance. Philip and Mary were to confer on each other the titles of their respective kingdoms, but each kingdom was still to be governed by its own laws and constitution. None but English subjects were to hold office in this country, not even in the king's private service. If the queen had an heir, it was to be her successor in her own dominions, and also in all Philip's dominions of Burgundy, Holland, and Flanders, which were for ever to become part and parcel of England. This certainly, on the face of it, was a most advantageous condition for England, but had it taken effect, it would undoubtedly have proved a most disastrous one, involving us perpetually in the wars and struggles of the Continent, and draining these islands to defend those foreign territories.
Another condition of the treaty was that Mary was not to be carried out of the kingdom except at her own request, nor any of her children, except by the consent of the peers. The Commons were totally ignored in the matter. Philip was not to entangle England in the Continental wars of his father, nor to appropriate any of the naval or military resources of this country, or the property or jewels of the Crown, to any foreign purposes. If there was no issue of the marriage, all the conditions of the treaty at once became void, and Philip ceased to be king even in name. If he died first, which was not very probable, Mary was to enjoy a dower of 60,000 ducats per annum, secured on lands in Spain and Flanders. No mention was made of any payment to Philip if he happened to be the survivor. But there was one little clause which stipulated that Philip should aid Mary in governing her kingdom--an ominous word, which might be made of vast significance.
Within five days came the startling news that three insurrections had broken out in different quarters of the kingdom. One was a-foot in the midland counties, where the Duke of Suffolk and the Grey family had property and influence. There the cry was for the Lady Jane. Mary had been completely deceived by the Duke of Suffolk, whom she had pardoned and liberated from the Tower. In return for her leniency he affected so hearty an approval of her marriage, that she instantly thought of him as the man to put down the other rebellions, and sending for him, found that he and his brothers, Lord Thomas and Lord John Grey, had ridden off with a strong body of horse to Leicestershire, proclaiming Lady Jane in every town through which they passed. They found no response to their cry, a fact which any but the most rash speculators might have been certain of. The Earl of Huntingdon, a relative of the queen's, took the field against the Greys, who by their folly brought certain death to Lady Jane, and defeated them near Coventry, upon which they fled for their lives.
The second insurrection was in the west, under Sir Peter Carew, whose project was to place Elizabeth and Courtenay, Earl of Devon, on the throne, and restore the Protestant religion. These parties, as well as the third under Sir Thomas Wyatt, had consented to act together, and thus paralyse the efforts of Mary, by the simultaneous outbreak in so many quarters. But the miserable folly of their plans became evident at once. They did not even unite in the choice of the same person as their future monarch, and had they put down Mary, must then have come to blows amongst themselves. Carew found Devonshire as indifferent to his call as the Greys had found Leicestershire. Courtenay was to have put himself at their head, but never went; and Carew, Gibbs, and Champernham called on the people of Exeter to sign an address to the queen, stating that they would have no Spanish despot. The people of Devon gave no support to the movement. The Earl of Bedford appeared at the head of the queen's troops. A number of the conspirators were seized, and Carew with others fled to France.
But the most formidable section of this tripartite rebellion was that under Sir Thomas Wyatt. He fixed his headquarters at Rochester, having a fleet of five sail, under his associate Winter, which brought him ordnance and ammunition. Wyatt was only a youth of twenty-three, but he was full of both courage and enthusiasm, and endeavoured to rouse the people of Canterbury to follow him. There, however, he was not successful, and this cast a damp upon his adherents. Sir Robert Southwell defeated a party of the insurgents under Knevet, and the Lord Abergavenny another party under Isley, and the spirits of Wyatt's troops began to sink rapidly. Many of his supporters sent to the Council, offering to surrender on promise of full pardon, and a little delay would probably have witnessed the total dispersion of his force.
But on the 29th of January, the Duke of Norfolk marched from London with a detachment of the guards under Sir Henry Jerningham. On reaching Rochester they found Wyatt encamped in the ruins of the old castle, and the bridge bristling with cannon, and with well-armed Kentishmen. Norfolk endeavoured to dissolve the hostile force by sending a herald to proclaim a pardon to all that would lay down their arms, but Wyatt would not permit him to read the paper. Norfolk then ordered his troops to force the bridge; but this duty falling to a detachment of 500 of the train-bands of the city under Captain Brett, the moment they reached the bridge Brett turned round, and addressed his followers thus:--"Masters, we go about to fight against our native countrymen of England, and our friends, in a quarrel unrightful and wicked; for they, considering the great miseries that are like to fall upon us, if we shall be under the rule of the proud Spaniards, or strangers, are here assembled to make resistance to their coming, for the avoiding the great mischiefs likely to alight not only upon themselves, but upon every of us and the whole realm; wherefore I think no English heart ought to say against them. I and others will spend our blood in their quarrel."
On hearing this, his men shouted, one and all, "A Wyatt! a Wyatt!" and turned their guns not against the bridge, but against Norfolk's forces. At this sight Norfolk and his officers, imagining a universal treason, turned their horses and fled at full speed, leaving behind them their cannon and ammunition. The train-bands crossed the bridge and joined Wyatt's soldiers, followed by three-fourths of the queen's troops, and some companies of the guard. Norfolk and his fugitive officers galloping into London carried with them the direst consternation. In City and Court alike the most terrible panic prevailed. The lawyers in Westminster Hall pleaded in suits of armour hidden under their robes, and Dr. Weston preached before the queen in Whitehall Chapel, on Candlemas Day, in armour under his clerical vestments. Mary alone seemed calm and self-possessed. She mounted her horse, and, attended by her ladies and her Council, rode into the City, where, summoning Sir Thomas White, Lord Mayor and tailor, and the aldermen to meet, who all came clad in armour under their civic livery, she ascended a chair of State, and with her sceptre in hand addressed them, declaring she would never marry except with leave of Parliament.
Her courage gained the day. From some cause the insurgents had not pushed forward with the celerity which the flight of Norfolk appeared to make easy. Instead of marching on the City and taking advantage of its panic, Wyatt was three days in reaching Deptford and Greenwich, and he then lay three more days there, though his success was said to have raised his forces to 15,000 men. Meantime the City had recovered its courage by the valiant bearing of the queen, and the news of the dispersion of the other two divisions of the rebels. The golden opportunity was irrevocably lost. On the 3rd of February Wyatt marched along the river side to Southwark. Coming to the end of London Bridge, he found the drawbridge raised, the gates closed, and the citizens, headed by the Lord Mayor and aldermen in armour, in strong force ready to resist his entrance. He was surprised to find the Londoners determined not to admit him, for he had been led to believe that they were as hostile to the marriage as himself. He planted two pieces of artillery at the foot of the bridge, but this was evidently with the view of defending his own position, and not of forcing the gates, for he cut a deep ditch between the bridge and the fort which he occupied, and then protected his flanks from attack by other guns, one pointing down Bermondsey Street, one by St. George's Church, and the third towards the Bishop of Winchester's house. He must still have hoped for a demonstration in the City in his favour, for he remained stationary two whole days, without making an attack on the bridge. On the third morning this inaction was broken by the garrison in the Tower opening a brisk cannonade against him with all their heavy ordnance, doing immense damage to the houses in the vicinity of the bridge fort, and to the towers of St. Olave's and St. Mary Overy's.
The people of Southwark, seeing the inaction of Wyatt and the mischief done to their property, now cried out amain, and desired him to take himself away, which he did. He told the people that he would not have them hurt on his account, and forthwith commenced a march towards Kingston, hoping to be able to cross the bridge there, which he supposed would be unguarded, and that so he might fall on Westminster and London on the side where they were but indifferently fortified. He reached Kingston about four o'clock in the afternoon of the 6th of February, where he found a part of the bridge broken down, and an armed force ready to oppose his passage. His object being to cross here, and not, as at London Bridge, to await a voluntary admission, he brought up his artillery, swept the enemy from the opposite bank, and by the help of some sailors, who brought up boats and barges, he had the bridge made passable, and his troops crossed over. By this time it was eleven o'clock at night; his troops were extremely fatigued by their march and their labours here, but he now deemed it absolutely necessary to push on, and allow the Government no more time than he could help to collect forces into his path, and strengthen their position. He marched on, therefore, through a miserable winter night, and staying most imprudently to re-mount a heavy gun which had broken down, it was broad daylight when he arrived at what is now Hyde Park, where the Earl of Pembroke was posted with the royal forces to receive him.
Lord Clinton headed the cavalry, and took his station with a battery of cannon on the rising ground opposite to the palace of St. James's, at the top of the present St. James's Street, and his cavalry extended from that spot to the present Jermyn Street. All that quarter of dense building, including Piccadilly, Pall Mall, and St. James's Square, was then open and called St. James's Fields. About nine o'clock appeared the advance guard of Wyatt's army. The morning was dismal, gloomy, and rainy, and his troops, who had been wading through muddy roads all night, were in no condition to face a fresh army. Many had deserted at Kingston, many more had dropped off since, and seeing the strength of the force placed to obstruct him, he divided his own into three parts. One of these, led by Captain Cobham, took the way through St. James's Park at the back of the palace, which was barricaded at all points, guards being stationed at the windows, even those of the queen's bed-chamber and with drawing-rooms. Cobham's division fired on the palace as it passed, whilst another division under Captain Knevet, holding more to the right, assaulted the palaces of Westminster and Whitehall.
But Wyatt, at the head of the main division, charged Clinton's cavalry; the cannon were brought up, and a general engagement took place between the rebel army and the troops under Clinton and the infantry under Pembroke. Wyatt's charge seemed to make the cavalry give way, but it was only a stratagem on the part of Clinton, who opened his ranks to let Wyatt and about four hundred of his followers pass, when he closed and cut off the main body from their commander. In all Wyatt's proceedings he displayed great bravery, but little military experience or caution.
His main forces, now deprived of their leader, wavered and gave way, but instead of breaking took another course to reach the City. Wyatt, as if unconscious that he had left the bulk of his army behind him, and had now the enemy between it and himself, rushed along past Charing Cross and through the Strand to Ludgate, in the fond hope still that the citizens would admit him and join him. In the passages of the Strand were posted bodies of soldiers under the Earl of Worcester and the contemptible Courtenay, who, on the sight of Wyatt, fled.
On reaching Ludgate, Wyatt found the gates closed, and instead of the citizens who had promised to receive him, Lord William Howard appeared over the gate, crying sternly, "Avaunt, traitor! avaunt; you enter not here!" Finding no access there, the unhappy man turned to rejoin and assist his troops, but he was met by those of Pembroke, who had poured after him like a flood. With the energy of despair he fought his way back as far as the Temple, where he found only twenty-four of his followers surviving. At Temple Bar he threw away his sword, which was broken, and surrendered himself to Sir Maurice Berkeley, who immediately mounted him behind him and carried him off to Court.
Mary had displayed the most extraordinary clemency on the termination of the former conspiracy, for which not only the Emperor but her own Ministers had blamed her. Her Council now urged her to make a more salutary example of these offenders, to prevent a repetition of rebellion. On the previous occasion she had permitted only three of the ringleaders to be put to death. On this occasion five of the chief conspirators were condemned, and four of them were executed, Croft being pardoned. Suffolk fell without any commiseration. It was difficult to decide whether his folly or his ingratitude had been the greater. He had twice been a traitor to the queen, the second time after being most mercifully pardoned. He had twice put his amiable and excellent daughter's life in jeopardy; the second time after seeing how hopeless was the attempt to place her on the throne, and therefore, to a certainty, by the second revolt, involving her death; and to add to his infamy, he endeavoured to win escape for himself by betraying others. He was beheaded on the 23rd of February. Wyatt was kept in the Tower till the 11th of April, when he was executed. Unlike Suffolk, he tried to exculpate others, declaring in his last moments that neither the Princess Elizabeth nor Courtenay, who were suspected of being privy to his designs, knew anything of them. Wyatt seems to have been a brave and honest man, who believed himself acting the part of a patriot in endeavouring to preserve the country from the Spanish yoke, and who, in the sincerity of his own heart, had too confidently trusted to the assurances of faithless men. Had he succeeded, and placed the Protestant Princess Elizabeth on the throne, his name, instead of remaining that of a traitor, would have stood side by side with that of Hampden. His body was quartered and exposed in different places. His head was stuck on a pole at Hay Hill, near Hyde Park, whence it was stolen by some of his friends.
Sir Nicholas Throgmorton was the sixth, who was tried at Guildhall on the 17th of April, the very day of Lord Grey's execution. His condemnation and death were regarded as certain; but on being brought to the bar he adroitly pleaded that the recent statute abolishing all treasons since the reign of Edward III., covered anything which he could possibly have done, and that his offence being only words, were by the same statute declared to be no overt act at all. He stated this with so much skill and eloquence, at the same time contending that there was not a particle of evidence of his having been an active accomplice of the rebels, that the jury acquitted him.
The execution which caused and still causes the deepest interest, and which always appears as a shadow on the character of Queen Mary, was that of her cousin, Lady Jane Grey. Till this second unfortunate insurrection, Mary steadily refused to listen to any persuasions to shed the blood of Lady Jane. She had had her tried and condemned to death, but she still permitted her to live, gave her a considerable degree of liberty and unusual indulgences, and it was generally understood that she meant eventually to pardon her. The ambassadors of Charles V. had strenuously urged her to prevent future danger by executing her rival, but she had replied that she could not find it in her conscience to put her unfortunate kinswoman to death, who had not been an accomplice of Northumberland, but merely an instrument in his hands; but now that the very mischief had taken place which the Emperor and her own Council had prognosticated; she was importuned on all sides to take what they described as the only prudent course. Poynet, the Bishop of Winchester, says that those lords of the Council who had been the most instrumental at the death of Edward VI. in thrusting royalty on Lady Jane--namely, Pembroke and Winchester--and who had been amongst the first to denounce Mary as illegitimate, were now the most remorseless advocates for Lady Jane's death.
Accordingly, the day after the fall of Wyatt, Mary signed the warrant for the execution of "Guilford Dudley and his wife," to take place within three days. On the morning of the execution the queen sent Lady Jane permission to have an interview with her husband, but she declined the favour as too trying, saying she should meet him within a few hours in heaven. She saw her husband go to execution from the window of the lodging in Master Partridge's house, and beheld the headless trunk borne back to be buried in the chapel. Lord Guilford Dudley was executed on Tower Hill in sight of a vast concourse, but a scaffold was erected for her on the Tower green. Immediately after his corpse had passed she was led forth by the Lieutenant of the Tower, and appeared to go to her fate without any discomposing fear, but in a serious frame, not a tear dimming her eye, though her gentlewomen, Elizabeth Tilney and Mistress Helen, were weeping greatly. She continued engaged in prayer, which she read from a book, till she came to the scaffold; there she made a short speech to the spectators, declaring that she deserved her punishment for allowing herself to be made the instrument of the ambition of others. "That device, however," she said, "was never of my seeking, but by the counsel of those who appeared to have better understanding of such things than I. As for the procurement or desire of such dignity by me, I wash my hands thereof before God and all you Christian people this day." She caused her gentlewomen to disrobe her, bandaged her own eyes with a handkerchief, and laying her head on the block, at one stroke it was severed from the body (February 12, 1554).
But this conspiracy had approached the queen much more nearly than in the person of Wyatt or the friends of Lady Jane Grey. It was discovered by intercepted letters of Wyatt, of Noailles, the French ambassador, and by one supposed to have been written by Elizabeth herself to the French king; that she was deeply implicated, and that the design of marrying her and Courtenay and placing them on the throne was well known, and apparently quite agreeable to her.
The refusal of Elizabeth to join her sister at the outbreak of the insurrection, and the flight of Courtenay at the moment of Wyatt's entry of London, excited suspicion, and this suspicion was soon converted into something very like fact by the three despatches of Noailles, written in cipher, and dated January 26th, 28th, and 30th. These despatches detailed the steps taken in her favour. Besides these there were two notes sent by Wyatt to Elizabeth, the first advising her to remove to Donington, the next informing her of his successful entry into Southwark. Then came what appeared clearly a letter of Elizabeth to the King of France. The Duke of Suffolk's confession was again corroborative of these details, namely, that the object of the insurrection was to depose Mary and place Elizabeth on the throne. William Thomas supported this, adding that it was intended to put the queen immediately to death. Croft confessed that he had solicited Elizabeth to return to Donington; Lord Russell said he had conveyed letters from Wyatt to Elizabeth, and another witness deposed to his knowledge of a correspondence between Courtenay and Carew respecting Courtenay's marriage with the princess.
With all these startling facts in her possession, Mary wrote to Elizabeth with an air of unsuspicious kindness, requesting her to come to her from Ashridge, informing her that malicious and ill-disposed persons accused her of favouring the late insurrection; but appearing not to believe it, and giving as a reason for her wishing her to be nearer, that the times were so unsettled that she would be in greater security with her. Elizabeth pleaded illness for not complying; but the queen sent Hastings, Southwell, and Cornwallis, members of Council, whom she received in her bed, and complained of being afflicted with a severe and dangerous malady. Mary, well acquainted with the deep dissimulation of her sister's character, then sent three of her own physicians, accompanied by Lord William Howard; and the physicians having given their opinion that she was quite able to travel, she was obliged to accompany them by short stages, borne in a litter. She appeared pale and bloated. It was said that she had been poisoned; but in a week she was quite well, and demanded an audience of the queen; but Mary had so much evidence in her hands of Elizabeth's proceedings, that she sent her word that it was necessary first to prove her innocence.
Courtenay had been arrested on the 12th of February, at the house of the Earl of Essex, and committed to the Tower. Mary was averse from sending her sister there, and asked each of the lords of the Council in rotation to admit Elizabeth to their houses, and take charge of her. All declined the dangerous office; she was, therefore, compelled to sign the warrant for her committal, and Elizabeth was conducted to the Tower by the Earl of Sussex and another nobleman on the 18th of March. Even whilst performing this duty, it appears that Elizabeth had influence enough with these noblemen to make them dilatory in the execution of their office, to the great anger of the queen, who upbraided them with their remissness, telling them they dared not have done such a thing in her father's time, and wishing that "he were alive for a month." Elizabeth on entering the Tower was dreadfully afraid that she was doomed to leave it as so many princes and nobles had done, without a head. She inquired whether Lady Jane's scaffold were removed, and was greatly relieved to hear that it was. But what alarmed Elizabeth still more, was that the Constable of the Tower was discharged from his office, and Sir Henry Bedingfield, a zealous Romanist, appointed in his place. The fact of Sir Robert Brackenbury having been seventy years before, in like manner, removed, and Sir James Tyrell put in, when the princes were murdered, appeared an ominous precedent, but there was no real cause for apprehension; Mary had no wish to shed her sister's blood. Elizabeth, spite of the evidence against her, protested vehemently her innocence, and wished "that God might confound her eternally if she was in any manner implicated with Wyatt."
The Court of Spain, through Renard the ambassador, urged perseveringly the execution of Elizabeth and Courtenay. Renard represented from his sovereign that there could be no security for her throne so long as Elizabeth and Courtenay were suffered to live. But Mary replied that though they had both of them, no doubt, listened willingly to the conspirators, and would have been ready had they succeeded to step into her throne, yet they had been guilty of no overt act, and, therefore, by the constitutional law of England which had been enacted in her first Parliament, they could not be put to death, but could only be imprisoned, or suffer forfeiture of their goods.
In spite of the many warnings and the most universal expression of dislike to the match, Mary persisted in her engagement of marriage with Philip of Spain, though he himself showed no unequivocal reluctance to the completion of it; never writing to her, but submitting to his fate, as it were, in obedience to the parental command. At the end of May the unwilling bridegroom resigned his government of Castile--which he held for his insane grandmother, Juana--into the hands of his sister, the Princess-Dowager of Portugal, and bade adieu to his family. He embarked at Corunna on the 13th of July for England, and landed at Southampton on the 20th, after a week's voyage. He married his wife, who was much older than himself, and whose importunate love soon began to annoy him, at Winchester.
On the 11th of November the third Parliament of Mary's reign was summoned, and she and her Royal husband rode from Hampton Court to Whitehall to open the session. The king and queen rode side by side, a sword of State being borne before each to betoken their independent sovereignties. The queen was extremely anxious to restore the lands reft from the Church by her father and brother to their ancient uses, but she must have known little of the men into whose hands those lands had fallen, if she could seriously hope for such a sacrifice. The Earl of Bedford, than whom no one had more deeply gorged himself with Church plunder, on hearing the proposition, tore his rosary from his girdle and flung it into the fire, saying he valued the abbey of Woborn more than any fatherly counsel that could come from Rome. All the rest of the Council were of the same way of thinking as Bedford, and Mary saw that it was a hopeless case to move them on that point, though she set them a very honourable example by surrendering the lands which still remained in the hands of the Crown, to the value of £60,000 a year.
Though Mary could not recover the property for the Church, she resolved to restore that Church to unity with Rome. She expressed her earnest desire to have the presence of her kinsman, Cardinal Pole, in her kingdom, and he now set out for England, from which he had been banished so many years. He rendered this return the more easy, by bringing with him from the Pope a bull which confirmed the nobles in their possession of the Church property, on condition that the Papal supremacy was restored. The queen despatched Sir Edward Hastings to accompany the cardinal; and Sir William Cecil, who had been Edward's unhesitating minister in stripping the Church, set out of his own accord to pay homage to the Papal representative. Cecil's only real religion was ambition, and Mary knew that so well that, in spite of all his time-serving, she never would place any confidence in him, whence his bitter hostility to her memory.
Pole, on his arrival, ascended the Thames from Greenwich in a splendid State barge, at the prow of which he fixed a large silver cross, thus marking the entrance of the legatine and Papal authority into the country, as it were, in a triumphal manner. On the 24th of November the king and queen met the united Parliament in the presence-chamber of the palace of Whitehall: this was owing to the indisposition of the queen. Gardiner introduced the business, which, he told them, was the weightiest that ever happened in this realm, and begged their utmost attention to Cardinal Pole. Pole then made a long speech, reverting to his own history as well as that of the nation. All listened in solemn seriousness and yet apprehension when he announced to them the fact that the Pope was ready to absolve the English from their crimes of heresy and contumacy. But when he added that this was to be done without any reclamation of the Church lands, there was a unanimous vote of both Houses for reconciliation with Rome.
The next morning, the king, queen, and Parliament met again in the presence-chamber, when, Pole presenting himself, Philip and Mary rose, and, bowing profoundly to him, presented him with the vote of Parliament. The cardinal, on receiving it, offered up thanks to God for this auspicious event, and then ordered his commission to be read. The Peers and Commons then fell on their knees and received absolution and benediction from the hands of the cardinal, and thus for a time again was the great breach between England and the Papacy healed.
Parliament proceeded to pass Acts confirming all that was now done, and repealing all the statutes which had been passed against the Roman Church since the 20th of Henry VIII., while the clergy in Convocation made formal resignation of the possessions which had passed into the hands of laymen. The legate also issued decrees authorising all cathedral churches, hospitals, and schools founded since the schism, to be preserved, and that all persons who had contracted marriage within prescribed degrees should remain married notwithstanding.
The year 1555 opened with dark and threatening features. The queen's health was failing; and, under the idea that she was merely suffering maternal inconvenience, she was rapidly advancing in a dropsy which, in less than four years, was destined to sink her to the tomb. The king, gloomy, despotic, and, consequently, unpopular, though he often endeavoured to act against his nature, and assume a popular character, still hoping for an heir to the English crown, had obtained from Parliament an Act constituting him regent, in case Mary should die after the birth of a child, during the minority of that child. Thus, whether the queen lived or died, he appeared to possess a reasonable prospect of obtaining the supreme power in this country; and how he would have used it, we may judge from his government of Spain and the Netherlands. If the child was a female, he was made governor till her fifteenth year; if a male, till his eighteenth year. Philip protested on his honour that he would give up the government faithfully when the child came of age; but Lord Paget asked "who was to sue the bond if he did not?"--a suggestion never forgiven. With this flattering but illusive prospect before him, the tempest of persecution soon burst forth; and, had Providence permitted, England would soon have exhibited the same scene of tyranny, bloodshed, and insult which Flanders did under his rule. As it was, for a short period, terrible war for conscience' sake burst forth, the prisons were thronged, and the fires of death blazed out in every quarter of the island. Mary, with failing health, and doting absurdly on her husband, was easily drawn to acquiesce in deeds and measures which made her name a byword to all future times.
We are now called upon to pass through a reign of terror, a time of fire and blood, such as has no parallel in the history of England. The statutes against the Lollards enacted in the reigns of Richard II., Henry IV., and Henry V., were revived and were to come into force on the 20th of January. Bonner, accompanied by eight bishops and 160 priests, made a grand procession through the streets of London, and held services of public thanksgiving for the happy restoration of Catholicism. A commission was then held in the Church of St. Mary Overy, in Southwark, for the trial of heretics. The first man brought before this court, over which Gardiner presided, was John Rogers, a prebendary of St. Paul's, who had nobly distinguished himself by defending the first priest sent by Mary to preach Papacy at St. Paul's Cross. The Court condemned him to be burnt, and on the 4th of February this horrible sentence was executed in the most barbarous manner. The day of his death was kept a profound secret from him, and early that morning he was suddenly awakened out of a sound sleep and informed that he was to be burnt that day. The condemned man, so far from sinking under the appalling announcement, only calmly observed, "Then I need not truss my points." He requested to be permitted to take leave of his wife and children, of whom he had eleven--one still at the breast--but this Bonner refused. As he was led by the sheriffs towards Smithfield, where he was to suffer, he sang the "Miserere." His wife and children were placed where he would have a full view of them at the stake, and it was expected that this would induce him to recant and save his life, and thus induce others to follow his example; but outwardly unmoved, he maintained the most sublime fortitude.
Bishop Hooper, Ferrar, Bishop of St. David's, Dr. Rowland Taylor of Hadleigh, in Suffolk, and Lawrence Saunders, Rector of Allhallows, Coventry, were all condemned to the same death, and, like Rogers, were offered their lives on recantation, which one and all refused. The treatment of the pious Bishop Hooper was a most glaring case of ingratitude. Decided Protestant as he was, and of the most primitive simplicity of faith, he had from the first manifested the most staunch loyalty to Mary. In his own account of himself he says, "When Mary's fortunes were at the worst, I rode myself from place to place, as is well known, to win and stay the people to her party. And whereas when another was proclaimed [Lady Jane Grey] I preferred our queen, notwithstanding the proclamations. I sent horses in both shires [Gloucestershire and Worcester] to serve her in great danger, as Sir John Talbot and William Lygon, Esq., can testify." Hooper was sent down to Gloucester, his own diocese, to suffer, where he was burnt on the 9th of February, in a slow fire, to increase and prolong his agonies to the utmost. On the same day Dr. Taylor was burnt at Hadleigh.
This shocking state of things was interrupted for some time by the sudden and extraordinary outbreak of Alphonso di Castro, the confessor of King Philip, a Spanish friar, who preached before the Court a sermon in which he most vehemently and eloquently inveighed against the wickedness and inhumanity of burning people for their opinions. He declared that the practice was not learned in the Scriptures, but the contrary; for it was decidedly opposed to both the letter and the spirit of the New Testament; that it was the duty of the Government and the clergy to win men to the Gospel by mildness, and not to kill but to instruct the ignorant. A mystery has always hung over this singular demonstration. Some thought Philip, some that Mary, had ordered him to preach this sermon, but it is far more probable that it was the spontaneous act of zeal in a man who was enlightened beyond his age and his country. It is not probable that it proceeded from Philip, for he could at once have commanded this change; it is besides contrary to his life-long policy. Had it been the will of the sovereigns it would have produced a permanent effect. As it was, it took the Court and country by surprise. The impression on the Court was so powerful that all further burnings ceased for five weeks, by which time the good friar's sermon had lost its effect; and the religious butcheries went on as fiercely as ever, till more than two hundred persons had been slaughtered on account of their faith in this short reign. Miles Coverdale, the venerable translator of the Bible, was saved from this death by the King of Denmark writing to Mary and claiming him as his subject.
Mary had now, according to the custom of English queens, formally taken to her chamber in expectation of giving birth to an heir to the throne. She chose Hampton Court as the scene of this vainly-hoped-for event, and went there on the 3rd of April, where she continued secluded from her subjects, only being seen on one occasion, till the 21st of July, after she had again returned to St. James's. This occasion was on the 23rd of May, St. George's Day, when she stood at a window of the palace to see the procession of the Knights of the Garter with Philip at their head, attended by Gardiner the Lord Chancellor, and a crowd of priests with crosses, march round the courts and cloisters of Hampton Court. A few days afterwards there was a report that a prince was born, and there was much ringing of bells and singing Te Deum in the City and other places. But it soon became known, that there was no hope of an heir, but that the queen was suffering under a mortal disease, and that such was her condition, "that she sat whole days together on the ground crouched together with her knees higher than her head." On the 21st of July she removed for her health from London to Eltham Palace.
Gardiner took advantage of the pause in persecution caused by the sermon of Di Castro to withdraw from his odious office of chief inquisitor. Might he not have instigated the friar to express his opinion so boldly, for it is obvious that he wanted to be clear of the dreadful work of murdering his fellow-subjects for their faith? He therefore withdrew from the office, and a more sanguinary man took it up. This was Bonner, Bishop of London. He opened his inquisitorial court in the consistory court of St. Paul's, and compelled the Lord Mayor and aldermen to attend and countenance his proceedings. Burnet gives a letter written in the name of Philip and Mary exhorting him to increased activity; but from what we have seen of Mary's condition we may safely attribute the spur to Philip. Cardinal Pole did all in his power to put an end to the persecutions, but in vain.
It was now resolved to proceed to extremities with the three eminent prelates, Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer. But the charge of high treason was dropped, undoubtedly because it was hoped that they might, by the prospect of the flames, be brought as heretics to recantation. On the 15th of April, 1554, they were led from their prisons to St. Mary's Church, Oxford, where the doctors of the university sat in judgment upon them. They were promised a free and fair discussion of their tenets, and the still more vain assurance was given that if they could convince their opponents they should be set free. The so-called disputation continued three days, but it more truly represented a bear-baiting than the discussion of men in quest of the truth.
On the 16th of April, the day appointed, Cranmer appeared before this disorderly assembly in the divinity school. He was treated with peculiar indignity, for they had a deep hatred of him from the long and conspicuous part which he had enacted in the work of Reformation. It was in vain that he attempted to state his views, for he was interrupted at every moment by half a dozen persons at once; and whenever he advanced anything particularly difficult of answer, the doctors denounced him as ignorant and unlearned, and the students hissed and clapped their hands outrageously. The next day Ridley experienced the same treatment, but he was a man of a much more bold and determined character, of profound learning, and ready address, and, in spite of the most disreputable clamour and riot, he made himself heard above all the storm, and with telling effect. When his adversaries shouted at him five or six at a time, he calmly observed, "I have but one tongue, I cannot answer all at once."
Latimer was not only oppressed by age but by sickness, and he was scarcely able to stand. He appealed to his base judges to pity his weakness and give him a fair hearing. "Ha! good master," he said to Weston, the moderator, "I pray ye be good to an old man; ye may be once as old as I am: ye may come to this age and this debility." But he appealed in vain; his judges and hearers were lost to all sense of what was due to truth and religion, of what was due to the age and spirit of a veteran servant of God, whatever might have been his errors or failings. The rude students only laughed, hissed, clapped their hands, and mocked the old man the more. Seeing that all hopes of a hearing were vain, he told the rabble of his judges and spectators, for such they truly were, "that he had spoken before attentive kings for two and three hours at a time, but that he could not declare his mind there for a quarter of an hour for mockings, revilings, checks, rebukes, and taunts, such as he had not felt the like in such an audience all his life long." The three insulted and unheard prisoners wrote to the queen that they had been silenced by the noise, not by the arguments of their opponents, and Cranmer in his letter said, "I never knew nor heard of a more confused disputation in all my life; for albeit there was one appointed to dispute against me, yet every man spake his mind, and brought forth what him liked without order; and such haste was made that no answer could be suffered to be given."
On the 28th of April they were all three brought again into St. Mary's Church, and asked by Weston whether they were willing to conform, and on replying in the negative, were condemned as obstinate heretics, and returned to their prison. There they lay till the October of the following year (1555), when Ridley and Latimer were ordered to prepare for the stake. On the 16th of that month a stake was erected in the town ditch opposite to Balliol College. Soto, a Spanish priest, had been sent to them in person to try to convert them, but in vain; Latimer would not even listen to him; and now at the stake a Dr. Smith, who had renounced Popery in King Edward's time, and was again a pervert, preached a sermon on the text, "Though I give my body to be burned and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing." The two martyrs cheered each other, and exhorted one another to be courageous. Ridley, on approaching the pile, turned to Latimer who was following him, embraced and kissed him, saying, "Be of good heart, brother, for God will either assuage the fury of the flame, or strengthen us to bear it;" and when Latimer was tied to the stake back to back with his fellow-sufferer, he returned the consolation, exclaiming, "Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out." A lighted faggot was placed at the feet of Ridley, and matches were applied to the pile. Bags of gunpowder were hung round their necks to shorten their sufferings, and as the flames ascended Latimer quickly died, probably through suffocation in the smoke; but Ridley suffered long. His brother-in-law had piled the faggots high about him to hasten his death, but the flames did not readily find their way amongst them from their closeness, and a spectator hearing him cry out that he could not burn opened the pile, and an explosion of gunpowder almost instantly terminated his existence.
Cranmer was reserved for a future day. The punctilios of ecclesiastical form were strictly observed, and as he enjoyed the dignity of Primate of England, it required higher authority to decide his fate than that which had pronounced judgment on his companions. Latimer and Ridley had been sentenced by the commissioners of the legate, Cranmer must only be doomed by the Pontiff himself. He was therefore waited on in his cell by Brooks, Bishop of Gloucester, as Papal sub-delegate, and two Royal commissioners, and there cited to appear before him at Rome within eighty days, and answer for his heresies. As this was impossible, the citation was a mockery and an insult. When the archbishop saw his two friends led forth to their horrible death, his resolution, which never was very great, began to fail, and he now presented a woful image of terror and irresolution, very different to the bravery of his departed friends. He expressed a possibility of conversion to Rome, and desired a conference with Cardinal Pole. But soon he became ashamed of his own weakness, and wrote to the queen defending his own doctrines, which she commissioned the cardinal to answer. When the eighty days had expired, and the Pope had pronounced his sentence, and had appointed Bonner, and Thirlby, Bishop of Ely, to degrade him, and see his sentence executed, he once more trembled with apprehension, and gave out that he was ready to submit to the judgment of the queen; that he believed in the creed of the Catholic Church, and deplored and condemned his past apostacy. He forwarded this submission to the Council, which they found too vague, and required a more full and distinct confession, which he supplied. When the Bishops of London and Ely arrived to degrade him, he appealed from the judgment of the Pope to that of a general Council, but that not being listened to, he sent two other papers to the commissioners before they left Oxford, again fully and explicitly submitting to all the statutes of the realm regarding the supremacy, and professing his faith in all the doctrines and rites of the Romish Church.
On the 21st of March, 1556, Cranmer was conducted to St. Mary's Church, Oxford, where Dr. Cole, provost of Eton College, preached a sermon, in which he stated that notwithstanding Cranmer's repentance, he had done the Church so much mischief that he must die. That morning Garcina, a Spanish friar, had waited on him before leaving his cell, and presented him with a paper making a complete statement of his recantation and repentance, which he requested him to copy and sign. It seems that his enemies calculated that, having so fully committed himself, the fallen Primate would not, at the last hour, depart from his confession; but they were mistaken. Cranmer now saw nothing but death before him, and he most bitterly repented of his weakness and the renunciation of what he felt to be the holy truth. He therefore transcribed once more the paper which had been brought to him, but in place of the latter part of it he wrote in a very different conclusion. Accordingly, when he read his paper at the conclusion of the sermon, there was a profound silence till he came to the fifth article of it, which went on to declare that through fear of death, and beguiled by hopes of pardon, he had been led to renounce his genuine faith, but that he now declared that all his recantations were false; that he recalled them every one, rejected the Papal authority, and confirmed the whole doctrine contained in his book. The amazement was intense, the audience became agitated by various passions, there were mingled murmurings and approbation. The Lord Williams of Thame called to him to "remember himself and play the Christian." That was touching a string which woke the response of the hero and the martyr in the Primate. He replied that he did remember; that it was now too late to dissemble, and he must now speak the truth.
When the first astonishment at this unlooked-for declaration had passed, there was a rush to drag down Cranmer, and hurry him to the stake in the same spot where his friends Ridley and Latimer had suffered. There he was speedily stripped to the shirt and tied to the stake; through it all he was firm and calm. He no longer trembled at his fate; he declared that he had never changed his belief; hope of life only had wrung from him his recantation; and the moment that the flames burst out he thrust his right hand into them, saying, "This hath offended." The writers of those times say that he stood by the stake whilst the fire raged round him, as immovable as the stake itself, and lifting up his eyes to heaven, exclaimed, "Lord, receive my spirit," and very soon expired.
The day after the death of Cranmer, Cardinal Pole, who had now taken priest's orders, was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury; and showed his anxiety to check this fierce and impolitic persecution, but, as we shall find, with no great result.
While these terrible transactions had been taking place King Philip had quitted the kingdom. With all his endeavours to become popular with the English, Philip never could win their regard. He conformed to many national customs, and affected to enjoy the national amusements; threw off much of his hauteur, especially in his intercourse with the nobles, and conferred pensions on them on the plea that they had stood by the queen during the insurrection. But nothing could inspire the English with confidence in him. They had always an idea that the object of the Spaniards was to introduce the Spanish rule and dominance here. They had always the persuasion that it was no longer their own queen, but the future King of Spain and the Netherlands who ruled. It was clearly seen that Philip never had any real affection for Mary; it was the public opinion that he had now less than ever, whilst the poor invalid Mary doated on him, and was ready to yield up everything but the actual sovereignty to him. And now came a very sufficient cause for the departure of Philip from England. His father, Charles V., wearied of governing his vast empire, was anxious to abdicate in favour of his son. Philip embarked at Dover on the 4th of September, 1555. Mary accompanied him from Hampton to Greenwich, riding through London in a litter, in order, as the French ambassador states, "that her people might see that she was not dead." The queen was anxious to proceed as far as Dover, and see him embark, but her health did not permit this; and after parting from him with passionate grief, she endeavoured to console herself by having daily prayers offered for his safety and speedy return.
Charles V., at the age of only fifty-five, had now resigned his vast empire to his son and his brother Ferdinand; and Spain, the Netherlands, Naples, Sicily, Milan, and the new lands of South America, owned Philip as their lord. On the 25th of October, 1555, Charles, in an assembly of the States of the Netherlands, resigned these countries to Philip, and in a few months later he also put him in possession of the government of other parts of his dominions, Ferdinand succeeding to the Imperial crown. Charles then retired to the monastery of St. Just, near Placentia, on the borders of Spain and Portugal, where this great king, who had so long exercised so strong an influence on the destinies of Europe, lived as a simple private gentleman, retaining only a few servants and a single horse for his own use, and employing his now abundant leisure in religious exercises, in gardening, and clock-making.
During Philip's absence, a series of insurrections took place which disturbed the quiet of the queen, and in which the King of France seems to have borne no inconsiderable part. His assiduous minister, Noailles, disseminated reports that Mary, hopeless of issue, had resolved to settle the Crown on her husband. This having produced its effect, a conspiracy was set on foot to put Elizabeth on the throne, and depose Mary. Sir Henry Dudley, a relative of the late Duke of Northumberland, was to head it and the French king, to secure his interest, had settled a pension on him. The worthless Courtenay, who was at this moment on his way to Italy, whence he never returned, was still to play the part of husband to Elizabeth, though the management of the plot was to be consigned to Dudley. Elizabeth had again, it is said, fully consented to this plot, though the health of Mary was such as must have promised her the throne at no distant day. Dudley was already on the coast of Normandy with some of his fellow-conspirators, making preparations, when the King of France unexpectedly concluded a truce for five years with Philip. He therefore advised Dudley and his accomplices to lie quiet for a more favourable opportunity. This was a paralysing blow to the scheme of insurrection, and the coadjutors in England had gone so far that they did not think it safe to stop. Kingston, Uedale, Throgmorton, Staunton, and others of the league determined to seize the treasure in the Tower, and, once in possession of that, to raise forces and drive the queen from the throne. But one of them revealed the design; several of them were seized and executed, and others escaped to France. Mary applied by her ambassador, Lord Clinton, to Henry II. to have them delivered up, and received a polite promise of endeavour to secure them, which there was in reality no intention to fulfil. Amongst the conspirators arrested were two officers of the household of Elizabeth, Peckham and Werne, who made very awkward confessions; but again the princess escaped, it is said at the intercession of Philip, who was apprehensive, if Elizabeth was removed from the succession, of the claims of the French king on behalf of his daughter-in-law, the Queen of Scots. Elizabeth at all events escaped, protesting her innocence as stoutly as ever, but receiving from the Council in place of those two officers executed, two other trusty ones, Sir Thomas Pope and Robert Cage.
But if Elizabeth was uneasy, Mary was still more so. The disquiets which surrounded her, and the wretched state of her health, made her very anxious for the return of her husband. She had lost her able minister, Gardiner, who died in November, 1555, and his successor, Heath, Archbishop of York, by no means supplied his place. Mary, therefore, wrote long and repeated letters to urge the return of Philip, and, finding them unavailing, she despatched Lord Paget to represent the urgent need of his presence in the kingdom. At last his difficulties with France and the Pope brought Philip home to his wife when all conjugal persuasions on her part had failed. He sent over, to announce his approach, Robert Dudley, son of the late Duke of Northumberland, whom Mary had liberated from the Tower, and who already, it seems, had contrived to win so much favour as to be taken into the royal service, in which he continued to mount till, in the next reign, he became the notorious Earl of Leicester and favourite of Queen Elizabeth. On the 20th of March, 1556, Philip himself arrived at Greenwich. As he wanted to win the English to join him in the war against France, he paid particular respect to the City of London. During this visit there appeared at Court the novel sight of a Duke of Muscovy, in the character of ambassador from Russia, who astonished the public by the enormous size of the pearls and jewels that he wore, and the richness of his dress.
Philip used all his influence to induce the queen and her Council to declare war against Henry of France, who had broken that five years' truce into which he had so recently entered. But the finances of the country were not such as to render either the queen or her Council willing to go to war with France, which, connected as France was now with Scotland, was sure to occasion a war also with that country. Cardinal Pole and nearly the whole Council were strongly opposed to it. They assured her that to engage lightly in Philip's wars was to make England a dependency of Spain, and Philip, on the other hand, protested to the queen that if she did not aid him against France he would take his leave of her for ever.
While matters were in this position a circumstance occurred which turned the scale in Philip's favour. Henry II. of France, on deciding to accept the Pope's invitation, and to make war on Philip, called on Dudley and his adherents to renew their attempts on England. Dudley and his coadjutors opened a communication with the families of the Reformers in Calais and the surrounding district, who had suffered from the persecution of the English Government, or who were indignant at the cruelties practised on their fellow professors, and they concurred in a plan to betray Hammes and Guines to the French. This scheme was defeated by the means of an English spy who became cognisant of the secret. The mischief, though stopped there, soon showed itself in another quarter. Thomas Stafford, the second son of Lord Stafford, and grandson of the late Duke of Buckingham, mustered a small army of English, French, and Scots, and, sailing from Dieppe, landed at Scarborough in Yorkshire, and surprised the castle there. But he soon found that, however much the public might dislike the Spanish match, they were not at all inclined to rebel against their queen. Wotton, the English ambassador in France, had duly warned his court of the designs of Stafford, and on the fourth day the Earl of Westmoreland appeared with a strong body of troops before the castle, and compelled Stafford to surrender at discretion. Stafford, Saunders, and three or four others were sent to London, and committed to the Tower, where, under torture, they were made to confess that the King of France had instigated and assisted their enterprise. Stafford was beheaded on Tower Hill on the 28th of May, 1557, and the next day three of his confederates were hanged at Tyburn.
The Council had been averse from the war, and had advised that, instead of appearing as principals, we should merely confine ourselves to the furnishing that aid which we were bound to by our ancient treaties with the House of Burgundy. Now, however, it felt itself justified in proclaiming open war against the King of France, as the violator of the treaty between the nations, in having harboured the traitors against the queen, and in having sent them over in French ships to Scarborough with arms, ammunition, and money. Philip, having obtained what he wanted, hastened over to Flanders, and neither Mary nor England ever saw him again.
The Earl of Pembroke, accompanied by Lord Robert Dudley as his master of ordnance, followed Philip at the end of July with 7,000 men. They joined the army of Philip, consisting of men of many nations--Germans, Italians, Flemings, Dalmatians, Croats, Illyrians, and others--making altogether a force of 40,000 men, the supreme command of which was given to the rejected suitor of the Princess Elizabeth, Philibert Duke of Savoy. The duke successfully threatened an attack upon Marienberg, Rocroi, and Guise, but he finally drew up before St. Quentin, on the right bank of the Somme. There he won a great victory. The English fleet made descents upon France at various points, menaced Bordeaux and Bayonne, and plundered the defenceless inhabitants of the coasts. This was all that was achieved, except what Philip probably most looked for, the drawing of the Duke of Guise out of Italy. But this, while it removed all danger from Philip's Transalpine possessions, led to a loss on the part of his English ally which might be termed the crowning mischief of his union with Mary.
The Duke of Guise, disappointed of his laurels in Italy, was now planning an attack on Calais. The English were never less prepared for the invasion. The fleet which had ravaged the coasts of France, and the troops sent to Flanders, had totally exhausted the exchequer of Mary, which at no time was well supplied. To victual that navy the queen had seized all the corn she could find in Norfolk without paying for it, and to equip the army sent to aid Philip, she had made a forced loan on London, and on people of property in different places; she had levied the second year's subsidy voted by Parliament before its time, and now was helpless at the critical moment. Lord Wentworth, the Governor of Calais, foreseeing the approaching storm, sent repeated entreaties for reinforcements for its defence. They were wholly unattended to.
The Duke of Guise, after entering the English pale, sent a detachment of his army along the downs to Rysbank, and led the other himself, with a very heavy train of artillery, towards Newnham Bridge. He forced the outwork at the village of St. Agatha, at the commencement of the causeway, drove the garrison into Newnham, and took possession of the outwork. The bulwarks of Froyton and Nesle were abandoned, for the lord-deputy could send no forces to defend them. At Newnham Bridge the garrison withdrew so silently that the French continued firing upon the fort when the men were already in Calais; but at Rysbank the garrison surrendered with the fort. Thus, in a couple of days, the Duke of Guise was in possession of two most important forts, one commanding the harbour, the other the causeway across the marshes from Flanders. A battery on the heath of St. Pierre played on the wall to create a false alarm, whilst another in real earnest played on the castle. A breach was made in the wall near the water-gate, and, while the garrison was busy in repairing it, Guise cannonaded the castle (which was in a scandalous state of neglect) with fifteen double cannons. A wide breach was speedily made. Lord Wentworth, well aware that the castle could not be maintained, had ordered mines to be prepared, and calculated on blowing the castle and the Frenchmen into the air together as soon as they were in. Guise, seeing no garrison defending the breach, ordered one detachment to occupy the quay, and another, under Strozzi, to take up a position on the other side of the harbour. Strozzi was repulsed; but at ebb-tide in the evening, Grammont, at the head of 100 arquebusiers, marched up to the ditch opposite to the breach. No one being seen in the castle, Guise ordered plenty of hurdles to be thrown into the ditch, and, putting himself at the head of his men, forded the ditch, finding it not deeper than his girdle. The lord-deputy, seeing the French in the castle, ordered the train to be fired; but there was no explosion. The soldiers crossing from the ditch to the breach, with their clothes deluging the ground with water, had wet the train, and defeated Wentworth's design. The next morning Guise sent his troops to assault the town, calculating on as easy a conquest of it; but Sir Anthony Agar, with a handful of men, not only repulsed the French, but chased them back into the castle. The brave Sir Anthony, with a larger force, would have driven the French from the decayed old castle too, but he had the merest little knot of followers, and in the vain attempt to force the enemy out of the castle, he fell at the gate with his son, and eighty of his chief officers. Lord Wentworth perceiving the impossibility of continuing the defence, destitute of a garrison, and having waited in vain for reinforcements from Dover, that night demanded a parley, and surrendered.
The fall of Calais necessitated, as a matter of course, the loss of the whole Calais district. Having put Calais into a state of defence, Guise marched on the 13th of January, 1558, to Guines, about five miles distant, to reduce the town and fort there. These were defended stoutly by Lord Grey de Wilton, who had received about 400 Spanish and Burgundian soldiers from King Philip, but they were in too miserable a state of repair to be long held. The walls in a few days were knocked to pieces; the Spanish soldiers were nearly all killed, and the remaining force compelled their officers to surrender. The little castle of Hammes now only remained, and situated in the midst of extensive marshes, it might have given the enemy some trouble; but its governor, Lord Edward Dudley, the moment he heard of the surrender of Guines, abandoned it, and fled with his few soldiers into Flanders. The French were as elated at their success as the English were mortified with it, and the poor queen felt the loss so deeply, that she declared that if her body were opened after her death, the name of Calais would be found graven on her heart.
In England, during the spring, preparations were made for the invasion of France. Seven thousand troops were raised and diligently drilled. One hundred and forty ships were hired, which the Lord-Admiral Clinton collected in the harbour of Portsmouth, to be ready to join the fleet of Philip, and, in conjunction, to ravage the coasts of France; whilst Philip, with an army of Spanish, French, and English, should enter the country by land. But this fleet and the English army, instead of aiming to recover Calais, sailed to make an attack on Brest. But their progress had been so dilatory that the French had made ample preparations to receive them, and despairing of effecting any impression on Brest, they fell on the little port of Le Conquêt, which they took and pillaged, with a large church and several hamlets in its immediate neighbourhood. They then marched some miles up the country, burning and plundering, and the Flemings, in the eager quest of booty, going too far ahead, were surrounded, and 400 of them cut off.
It appeared as if the war would be brought to a conclusion by a pitched battle between the sovereigns of France and Spain. Philip had joined his general, the Duke of Savoy, and they lay near Dourlens with an army of 45,000 men. Henry had come into the camp of the Duke of Guise near Amiens, who had an army of nearly equal strength. All the world looked now for a great and decisive conflict. But Philip, though superior in numbers, as well as crowned with the prestige of victory, listened to offers of accommodation from Henry, and dismissing their armies into winter quarters, they betook themselves to negotiation. From the first no agreement appeared probable. Philip demanded the restoration of Calais, Henry that of Navarre, and they were still pursuing the hopeless phantom of accommodation, when the news of Queen Mary's death changed totally the position of Philip, and put an end to the attempt. She died, desolate and broken-hearted, on the 17th of November, 1558.
With all her bigotry, Mary had many excellent and amiable qualities. No English monarch ever maintained a less expensive and less corrupt court. She avoided all unnecessary taxation, and treated the cost of her war with France as largely a private charge of her own. She lived unostentatiously, went about amongst the poor with her maids, inquiring into their wants and relieving them. She was an enlightened patron of learning, and was the first to propose a hospital for old and invalid soldiers, leaving a legacy for this purpose, which was, however, never appropriated. Except in the matter of religious toleration, she showed a scrupulous regard for the maintenance of the Constitution and the law. Under her the administration of justice was pure and without respect of person. Nor were the interests of trade neglected. She was the first to make a commercial treaty with Russia, and she revoked the privileges of the Hanse Town merchants, who had exercised them to the hurt of her own people. By nature she was mild, but the persecution of her own faith in the persons of her mother and herself, and, above everything, the fatal Spanish marriage, produced a reaction which entailed all the calamities of her short and miserable reign.