History of the English People Volume Iv Part 2

At such a moment it seemed madness to provoke foes abroad as well as at home, but the fanaticism of the young king was resolved to force on his sister Mary a compliance with the new changes, and her resistance was soon backed by the remonstrances of her cousin, the Emperor. Charles was now at the height of his power, master of Germany, preparing to make the Empire hereditary in the person of his son, Philip, and preluding a wider effort to suppress heresy throughout the world by the establishment of the Inquisition in the Netherlands and a fiery persecution which drove thousands of Walloon heretics to find a refuge in England. But heedless of dangers from without or of dangers from within Cranmer and his colleagues advanced more boldly than ever in the career of innovation. Four prelates who adhered to the older system were deprived of their sees and committed on frivolous pretexts to the Tower.

A new Catechism embodied the doctrines of the reformers, and a book of Homilies which enforced the chief Protestant tenets was ordered to be read in churches. A crowning defiance was given to the doctrine of the Ma.s.s by an order to demolish the stone altars and replace them by wooden tables, which were stationed for the most part in the middle of the church. In 1552 a revised Prayer Book was issued, and every change made in it leaned directly towards the extreme Protestantism which was at this time finding a home at Geneva. On the cardinal point of difference, the question of the sacrament, the new formularies broke away not only from the doctrine of Rome but from that of Luther, and embodied the anti-sacramentarian tenets of Zwingli and Calvin. Forty-two Articles of Religion were introduced; and though since reduced by omissions to thirty-nine these have remained to this day the formal standard of doctrine in the English Church. Like the Prayer Book, they were mainly the work of Cranmer; and belonging as they did to the cla.s.s of Confessions which were now being framed in Germany to be presented to the Council of Christendom which Charles was still resolute to rea.s.semble, they marked the adhesion of England to the Protestant movement on the Continent. Even the episcopal mode of government which still connected the English Church with the old Catholic Communion was reduced to a form; in Cranmer's mind the spiritual powers of the bishops were drawn simply from the king's commission as their temporal jurisdiction was exercised in the king's name. They were reduced therefore to the position of royal officers, and called to hold their offices simply at the royal pleasure. The sufferings of the Protestants had failed to teach them the worth of religious liberty; and a new code of ecclesiastical laws, which was ordered to be drawn up by a board of Commissioners as a subst.i.tute for the Canon Law of the Catholic Church, although it shrank from the penalty of death, attached that of perpetual imprisonment or exile to the crimes of heresy, blasphemy, and adultery, and declared excommunication to involve a severance of the offender from the mercy of G.o.d and his deliverance into the tyranny of the devil.

Delays in the completion of this Code prevented its legal establishment during Edward's reign; but the use of the new Liturgy and attendance at the new service were enforced by imprisonment, and subscription to the Articles of Faith was demanded by royal authority from all clergymen, churchwardens, and schoolmasters.

[Sidenote: The Religious Disorder.]

The distaste for changes so hurried and so rigorously enforced was increased by the daring speculations of the more extreme Protestants.

The real value of the religious revolution of the sixteenth century to mankind lay, not in its subst.i.tution of one creed for another, but in the new spirit of enquiry, the new freedom of thought and of discussion, which was awakened during the process of change. But however familiar such a truth may be to us, it was absolutely hidden from the England of the time. Men heard with horror that the foundations of faith and morality were questioned, polygamy advocated, oaths denounced as unlawful, community of goods raised into a sacred obligation, the very G.o.dhead of the Founder of Christianity denied. The repeal of the Statute of Heresy left indeed the powers of the Common Law intact, and Cranmer availed himself of these to send heretics of the last cla.s.s without mercy to the stake. But within the Church itself the Primate's desire for uniformity was roughly resisted by the more ardent members of his own party. Hooper, who had been named Bishop of Gloucester, refused to wear the episcopal habits, and denounced them as the livery of the "harlot of Babylon," a name for the Papacy which was supposed to have been discovered in the Apocalypse. Ecclesiastical order came almost to an end. Priests flung aside the surplice as superst.i.tious. Patrons of livings presented their huntsmen or gamekeepers to the benefices in their gift, and kept the stipend. All teaching of divinity ceased at the Universities: the students indeed had fallen off in numbers, the libraries were in part scattered or burned, the intellectual impulse of the New Learning died away. One n.o.ble measure indeed, the foundation of eighteen Grammar Schools, was destined to throw a l.u.s.tre over the name of Edward, but it had no time to bear fruit in his reign.

[Sidenote: Ireland and the Reformation]

While the reckless energy of the reformers brought England to the verge of chaos, it brought Ireland to the brink of rebellion. The fall of Cromwell had been followed by a long respite in the religious changes which he was forcing on the conquered dependency; but with the accession of Edward the Sixth the system of change was renewed with all the energy of Protestant zeal. In 1551 the bishops were summoned before the deputy, Sir Anthony St. Leger, to receive the new English Liturgy which, though written in a tongue as strange to the native Irish as Latin itself, was now to supersede the Latin service-book in every diocese. The order was the signal for an open strife. "Now shall every illiterate fellow read ma.s.s," burst forth Dowdall, the Archbishop of Armagh, as he flung out of the chamber with all but one of his suffragans at his heels. Archbishop Browne of Dublin on the other hand was followed in his profession of obedience by the Bishops of Meath, Limerick, and Kildare. The government however was far from quailing before the division of the episcopate. Dowdall was driven from the country; and the vacant sees were filled with Protestants, like Bale, of the most advanced type. But no change could be wrought by measures such as these in the opinions of the people themselves. The new episcopal reformers spoke no Irish, and of their English sermons not a word was understood by the rude kernes around the pulpit. The native priests remained silent. "As for preaching we have none," reports a zealous Protestant, "without which the ignorant can have no knowledge." The prelates who used the new Prayer Book were simply regarded as heretics. The Bishop of Meath was a.s.sured by one of his flock that, "if the country wist how, they would eat you."

Protestantism had failed to wrest a single Irishman from his older convictions, but it succeeded in uniting all Ireland against the Crown.

The old political distinctions which had been produced by the conquest of Strongbow faded before the new struggle for a common faith. The population within the Pale and without it became one, "not as the Irish nation," it has been acutely said, "but as Catholics." A new sense of national ident.i.ty was found in the ident.i.ty of religion. "Both English and Irish begin to oppose your Lords.h.i.+p's orders," Browne had written to Cromwell at the very outset of these changes, "and to lay aside their national old quarrels."

[Sidenote: The Peace of Pa.s.sau.]

Oversea indeed the perils of the new government pa.s.sed suddenly away.

Charles had backed Mary's resistance with threats, and as he moved forward to that mastery of the world to which he confidently looked his threats might any day become serious dangers. But the peace with England had set the French government free to act in Germany, and it found allies in the great middle party of princes whose secession from the League of Schmalkald had seemed to bring ruin to the Protestant cause.

The aim of Duke Maurice in bringing them to desert the League had been to tie the Emperor's hands by the very fact of their joining him, and for a while this policy had been successful. But the death of Paul the Third, whose jealousy had till now foiled the Emperor's plans, and the accession of an Imperial nominee to the Papal throne, enabled Charles to move more boldly to his ends, and at the close of 1551 a fresh a.s.sembly of the Council at Trent, and an Imperial summons of the Lutheran powers to send divines to its sessions and to submit to its decisions, brought matters to an issue. Maurice was forced to accept the aid of the stranger and to conclude a secret treaty with France. He was engaged as a general of Charles in the siege of Magdeburg; but in the spring of 1552 the army he had then at command was suddenly marched to the south, and through the pa.s.ses of the Tyrol the Duke moved straight on the Imperial camp at Innspruck. Charles was forced to flee for very life while the Council at Trent broke hastily up, and in a few months the whole Imperial design was in ruin. Henry the Second was already moving on the Rhine; to meet the French king Charles was forced to come to terms with the Lutheran princes; and his signature in the summer of a Treaty at Pa.s.sau secured to their states the free exercise of the reformed religion and gave the Protestant princes their due weight in the tribunals of the empire.

[Sidenote: The Protestant Misrule.]

The humiliation of the Emperor, the fierce warfare which now engaged both his forces and those of France, removed from England the danger of outer interference. But within the misrule went recklessly on. All that men saw was a religious and political chaos, in which ecclesiastical order had perished and in which politics were dying down into the squabbles of a knot of n.o.bles over the spoils of the Church and the Crown. Not content with Somerset's degradation, the Council charged him in 1551 with treason, and sent him to the block. Honours and lands were lavished as ever on themselves and their adherents. Warwick became Duke of Northumberland, Lord Dorset was made Duke of Suffolk, Paulet rose to the Marquisate of Winchester, Sir William Herbert was created Earl of Pembroke. The plunder of the chauntries and the gilds failed to glut the appet.i.te of this crew of spoilers. Half the lands of every see were flung to them in vain; an attempt was made to satisfy their greed by a suppression of the wealthy see of Durham; and the whole endowments of the Church were threatened with confiscation. But while the courtiers gorged themselves with manors, the Treasury grew poorer. The coinage was again debased. Crown lands to the value of five millions of our modern money had been granted away to the friends of Somerset and Warwick. The royal expenditure mounted in seventeen years to more than four times its previous total. In spite of the brutality and bloodshed with which revolt had been suppressed, and of the foreign soldiery on whom the Council relied, there were signs of resistance which would have made less reckless statesmen pause. The temper of the Parliament had drifted far from the slavish subservience which it showed at the close of Henry's reign. The House of Commons met Northumberland's project for the pillage of the bishop.r.i.c.k of Durham with opposition, and rejected a new treason bill. In 1552 the Duke was compelled to force nominees of his own on the const.i.tuencies by writs from the Council before he could count on a House to his mind. Such writs had been often issued since the days of Henry the Seventh; but the ministers of Edward were driven to an expedient which shows how rapidly the temper of independence was growing. The summons of new members from places. .h.i.therto unrepresented was among the prerogatives of the Crown, and the Protectorate used this power to issue writs to small villages in the west which could be trusted to return members to its mind.

[Sidenote: Edward the Sixth.]

This "packing of Parliament" was to be largely extended in the following reigns; but it pa.s.sed as yet with little comment. What really kept England quiet was a trust that the young king, who would be of age in two or three years, would then set all things right again. "When he comes of age," said a Hamps.h.i.+re squire, "he will see another rule, and hang up a hundred heretic knaves." Edward's temper was as lordly as that of his father, and had he once really reigned he would probably have dealt as roughly with the plunderers who had used his name as England hoped. But he was a fanatical Protestant, and his rule would almost certainly have forced on a religious strife as bitter and disastrous as the strife which broke the strength of Germany and France. From this calamity the country was saved by his waning health. Edward was now fifteen, but in the opening of 1553 the signs of coming death became too clear for Northumberland and his fellows to mistake them. By the Statute of the Succession the death of the young king would bring Mary to the throne; and as Mary was known to have refused acceptance of all changes in her father's system, and was looked on as anxious only to restore it, her accession became a subject of national hope. But to Northumberland and his fellows her succession was fatal. They had personally outraged Mary by their attempts to force her into compliance with their system.

Her first act would be to free Norfolk and the bishops whom they held prisoners in the Tower, and to set these bitter enemies in power. With ruin before them the Protestant lords were ready for a fresh revolution; and the bigotry of the young king fell in with their plans.

[Sidenote: Edward's Will.]

In his zeal for "the religion," and in his absolute faith in his royal autocracy, Edward was ready to override will and statute and to set Mary's rights aside. In such a case the crown fell legally to Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn, who had been placed by the Act next in succession to Mary, and whose training under Catharine Parr and the Seymours gave good hopes of her Protestant sympathies. The cause of Elizabeth would have united the whole of the "new men" in its defence, and might have proved a formidable difficulty in Mary's way. But for the maintenance of his personal power Northumberland could as little count on Elizabeth as on Mary; and in Edward's death the Duke saw a chance of raising, if not himself, at any rate his own blood to the throne. He persuaded the young king that he possessed as great a right as his father to settle the succession of the Crown by will. Henry had pa.s.sed by the children of his sister Margaret of Scotland, and had placed next to Elizabeth in the succession the children of his younger sister Mary, the wife of Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk. Frances, Mary's child by this marriage, was still living, the mother of three daughters by her marriage with Grey, Lord Dorset, a hot partizan of the religious changes, who had been raised under the Protectorate to the Dukedom of Suffolk. Frances was a woman of thirty-seven; but her accession to the Crown squared as little with Northumberland's plans as that of Mary or Elizabeth. In the will therefore which the young king drew up Edward was brought to pa.s.s over Frances, and to name as his successor her eldest daughter, the Lady Jane Grey. The marriage of Jane Grey with Guildford Dudley, the fourth son of Northumberland, was all that was needed to complete the unscrupulous plot. It was the celebration of this marriage in May which first woke a public suspicion of the existence of such designs, and the general murmur which followed on the suspicion might have warned the Duke of his danger. But the secret was closely kept, and it was only in June that Edward's "plan" was laid in the same strict secrecy before Northumberland's colleagues. A project which raised the Duke into a virtual sovereignty over the realm could hardly fail to stir resistance in the Council. The king however was resolute, and his will was used to set aside all scruples. The judges who represented that letters patent could not override a positive statute were forced into signing their a.s.sent by Edward's express command. To their signatures were added those of the whole Council with Cranmer at its head. The primate indeed remonstrated, but his remonstrances proved as fruitless as those of his fellow-councillors.

[Sidenote: Fall of Northumberland.]

The deed was hardly done when on the sixth of July the young king pa.s.sed away. Northumberland felt little anxiety about the success of his design. He had won over Lord Hastings to his support by giving him his daughter in marriage, and had secured the help of Lord Pembroke by wedding Jane's sister, Catharine, to his son. The army, the fortresses, the foreign soldiers, were at his command; the hotter Protestants were with him; France, in dread of Mary's kins.h.i.+p with the Emperor, offered support to his plans. Jane therefore was at once proclaimed Queen on Edward's death, and accepted as their sovereign by the Lords of the Council. But the temper of the whole people rebelled against so lawless a usurpation. The eastern counties rose as one man to support Mary; and when Northumberland marched from London with ten thousand at his back to crush the rising, the Londoners, Protestant as they were, showed their ill-will by a stubborn silence. "The people crowd to look upon us," the Duke noted gloomily, "but not one calls 'G.o.d speed ye.'" While he halted for reinforcements his own colleagues struck him down. Eager to throw from their necks the yoke of a rival who had made himself a master, the Council no sooner saw the popular reaction than they proclaimed Mary Queen; and this step was at once followed by a declaration of the fleet in her favour, and by the announcement of the levies in every s.h.i.+re that they would only fight in her cause. As the tidings reached him the Duke's courage suddenly gave way. His retreat to Cambridge was the signal for a general defection. Northumberland himself threw his cap into the air and shouted with his men for Queen Mary. But his submission failed to avert his doom; and the death of the Duke drew with it the imprisonment in the Tower of the hapless girl whom he had made the tool of his ambition.

CHAPTER II

THE CATHOLIC REACTION

1553-1558

[Sidenote: Mary and the Monarchy.]

The triumph of Mary was a fatal blow at the system of despotism which Henry the Eighth had established. It was a system that rested not so much on the actual strength possessed by the Crown as on the absence of any effective forces of resistance. At Henry's death the one force of opposition which had developed itself was that of the Protestants, but whether in numbers or political weight the Protestants were as yet of small consequence, and their resistance did little to break the general drift of both nation and king. For great as were the changes which Henry had wrought in the severance of England from the Papacy and the establishment of the ecclesiastical supremacy of the Crown, they were wrought with fair a.s.sent from the people at large; and when once the discontent roused by Cromwell's violence had been appeased by his fall England as a whole acquiesced in the conservative system of the king.

This national union however was broken by the Protectorate. At the moment when it had reached its height the royal authority was seized by a knot of n.o.bles and recklessly used to further the revolutionary projects of a small minority of the people. From the hour of this revolution a new impulse was given to resistance. The older n.o.bility, the bulk of the gentry, the wealthier merchants, the great ma.s.s of the people, found themselves thrown by the very instinct of conservatism into opposition to the Crown. It was only by foreign hirelings that revolt was suppressed; it was only by a reckless abuse of the system of packing the Houses that Parliament could be held in check. At last the Government ventured on an open defiance of law; and a statute of the realm was set aside at the imperious bidding of a boy of fifteen. Master of the royal forces, wielding at his will the royal authority, Northumberland used the voice of the dying Edward to set aside rights of succession as sacred as his own. But the attempt proved an utter failure. The very forces on which the Duke relied turned against him.

The whole nation fronted him in arms. The sovereign whom the voice of the young king named as his successor pa.s.sed from the throne to the Tower, and a sovereign whose t.i.tle rested on parliamentary statute took her place.

[Sidenote: The religious reaction.]

At the opening of August Mary entered London in triumph. Short and thin in figure, with a face drawn and colourless that told of constant ill-health, there was little in the outer seeming of the new queen to recall her father; but her hard, bright eyes, her manlike voice, her fearlessness and self-will, told of her Tudor blood, as her skill in music, her knowledge of languages, her love of learning, spoke of the culture and refinement of Henry's Court. Though Mary was thirty-seven years old, the strict retirement in which she had lived had left her as ignorant of the actual temper of England as England was ignorant of her own. She had founded her resistance to the changes of the Protectorate on a resolve to adhere to her father's system till her brother came of age to rule, and England believed her to be longing like itself simply for a restoration of what Henry had left. The belief was confirmed by her earlier actions. The changes of the Protectorate were treated as null and void. Gardiner, Henry's minister, was drawn from the Tower to take the lead as Chancellor at the Queen's Council-board. Bonner and the deposed bishops were restored to their sees. Ridley with the others who had displaced them was again expelled. Latimer, as a representative of the extreme Protestants, was sent to the Tower; and the foreign refugees, as anti-sacramentarians, were ordered to leave England. On an indignant protest from Cranmer against reports that he was ready to abandon the new reforms the Archbishop was sent for his seditious demeanour to the Tower, and soon put on his trial for treason with Lady Jane Grey, her husband, and two of his brothers. Each pleaded guilty; but no attempt was made to carry out the sentence of death. In all this England went with the Queen. The popular enthusiasm hardly waited in fact for the orders of the Government. The whole system which had been pursued during Edward's reign fell with a sudden crash. London indeed retained much of its Protestant sympathy, but over the rest of the country the tide of reaction swept without a check. The married priests were driven from their churches, the images were replaced. In many parishes the new Prayer Book was set aside and the ma.s.s restored. The Parliament which met in October annulled the laws made respecting religion during the past reign, and re-established the form of service as used in the last year of Henry the Eighth.

[Sidenote: Mary's aim.]

Up to this point the temper of England went fairly with that of the Queen. But there were from the first signs of a radical difference between the aim of Mary and that of her people. With the restoration of her father's system the nation as a whole was satisfied. Mary on the other hand looked on such a restoration simply as a step towards a complete revival of the system which Henry had done away. Through long years of suffering and peril her fanaticism had been patiently brooding over the hope of restoring to England its older religion. She believed, as she said at a later time to the Parliament, that "she had been predestined and preserved by G.o.d to the succession of the Crown for no other end save that He might make use of her above all else in the bringing back of the realm to the Catholic faith." Her zeal however was checked by the fact that she stood almost alone in her aim, as well as by cautious advice from her cousin, the Emperor; and she a.s.sured the Londoners that "albeit her own conscience was stayed in matters of religion, yet she meant not to compel or strain men's consciences otherwise than G.o.d should, as she trusted, put in their hearts a persuasion of the truth that she was in, through the opening of his word unto them by G.o.dly, and virtuous, and learned preachers." She had in fact not ventured as yet to refuse the t.i.tle of "Head of the Church next under G.o.d" or to disclaim the powers which the Act of Supremacy gave her; on the contrary she used these powers in the regulation of preaching as her father had used them. The strenuous resistance with which her proposal to set aside the new Prayer Book was met in Parliament warned her of the difficulties that awaited any projects of radical change. The proposal was carried, but only after a hot conflict which lasted over six days and which left a third of the Lower House still opposed to it. Their opposition by no means implied approval of the whole series of religious changes of which the Prayer Book formed a part, for the more moderate Catholics were pleading at this time for prayers in the vulgar tongue, and on this question followers of More and Colet might have voted with the followers of Cranmer. But it showed how far men's minds were from any spirit of blind reaction or blind compliance with the royal will.

[Sidenote: The Spanish Marriage.]

The temper of the Parliament indeed was very different from that of the Houses which had knelt before Henry the Eighth. If it consented to repeal the enactment which rendered her mother's marriage invalid and to declare Mary "born in lawful matrimony," it secured the abolition of all the new treasons and felonies created in the two last reigns. The demand for their abolition showed that jealousy of the growth of civil tyranny had now spread from the minds of philosophers like More to the minds of common Englishmen. Still keener was the jealousy of any marked revolution in the religious system which Henry had established. The wish to return to the obedience of Rome lingered indeed among some of the clergy and in the northern s.h.i.+res. But elsewhere the system of a national Church was popular, and it was backed by the existence of a large and influential cla.s.s who had been enriched by the abbey lands.

Forty thousand families had profited by the spoil, and watched anxiously any approach of danger to their new possessions, such as submission to the Papacy was likely to bring about. On such a submission however Mary was resolved: and it was to gain strength for such a step that she determined to seek a husband from her mother's house. The policy of Ferdinand of Aragon, so long held at bay by adverse fortune, was now to find its complete fulfilment. To one line of the house of Austria, that of Charles the Fifth, had fallen not only the Imperial Crown but the great heritage of Burgundy, Aragon, Naples, Castille, and the Castillian dependencies in the New World. To a second, that of the Emperor's brother Ferdinand, had fallen the Austrian duchies, Bohemia and Hungary.

The marriage of Catharine was now, as it seemed, to bear its fruits by the union of Mary with a son of Charles, and the placing a third Austrian line upon the throne of England. The gigantic scheme of bringing all western Europe together under the rule of a single family seemed at last to draw to its realization.

[Sidenote: Its political grounds.]

It was no doubt from political as well as religious motives that Mary set her heart on this union. Her rejection of Gardiner's proposal that she should marry the young Courtenay, Earl of Devon, a son of the Marquis of Exeter whom Henry had beheaded, the resolve which she expressed to wed "no subject, no Englishman," was founded in part on the danger to her throne from the pretensions of Mary Stuart, whose adherents cared little for the exclusion of the Scotch line from the succession by Henry's will and already alleged the illegitimate births of both Mary Tudor and Elizabeth through the annulling of their mothers'

marriages as a ground for denying their right to the throne. Such claims became doubly formidable through the marriage of Mary Stuart with the heir of the French Crown, and the virtual union of both Scotland and France in this claimant's hands. It was only to Charles that the Queen could look for aid against such a pressure as this, and Charles was forced to give her aid. His old dreams of a mastery of the world had faded away before the stern realities of the Peace of Pa.s.sau and his repulse from the walls of Metz. His hold over the Empire was broken.

France was more formidable than ever. To crown his difficulties the growth of heresy and of the spirit of independence in the Netherlands threatened to rob him of the finest part of the Burgundian heritage.

With Mary Stuart once on the English throne, and the great island of the west knit to the French monarchy, the balance of power would be utterly overthrown, the Low Countries lost, and the Imperial Crown, as it could hardly be doubted, reft from the house of Austria. He was quick therefore to welcome the Queen's advances, and to offer his son Philip, who though not yet twenty-six was already a widower, as a candidate for her hand.

[Sidenote: Opposition of Parliament.]

The offer came weighted with a heavy bribe. The keen foresight of the Emperor already saw the difficulty of holding the Netherlands in union with the Spanish monarchy; and while Spain, Naples, and Franche Comte descended to Philip's eldest son, Charles promised the heritage of the Low Countries with England to the issue of Philip and Mary. He accepted too the demand of Gardiner and the Council that in the event of such a union England should preserve complete independence both of policy and action. In any case the marriage would save England from the grasp of France, and restore it, as the Emperor hinted, to the obedience of the Church. But the project was hardly declared when it was met by an outburst of popular indignation. Gardiner himself was against a union that would annul the national independence which had till now been the aim of Tudor policy, and that would drag England helplessly in the wake of the House of Austria. The ma.s.s of conservative Englishmen shrank from the religious aspects of the marriage. For the Emperor had now ceased to be an object of hope or confidence as a mediator who would at once purify the Church from abuses, and restore the unity of Christendom; he had ranged himself definitely on the side of the Papacy and of the Council of Trent; and the cruelties of the Inquisition which he had introduced into Flanders gave a terrible indication of the bigotry which he was to bequeath to his House. The marriage with Philip meant, it could hardly be doubted, a submission to the Papacy, and an undoing not only of the religious changes of Edward but of the whole system of Henry. Loyal and conservative as was the temper of the Parliament, it was at one in its opposition to a Spanish marriage and in the request which it made through a deputation of its members to the Queen that she would marry an Englishman. The request was a new step forward on the part of the Houses to the recovery of their older rights. Already called by Cromwell's policy to more than their old power in ecclesiastical matters, their dread of revolutionary change pushed them to an intervention in matters of state. Mary noted the advance with all a Tudor's jealousy. She interrupted the speaker; she rebuked the Parliament for taking too much on itself; she declared she would take counsel on such a matter "with G.o.d and with none other." But the remonstrance had been made, the interference was to serve as a precedent in the reign to come, and a fresh proof had been given that Parliament was no longer the slavish tool of the Crown.

[Sidenote: Wyatt's rising.]

But while the nation grumbled and the Parliament remonstrated, one party in the realm was filled with absolute panic by the news of the Spanish match. The Protestants saw in the marriage not only the final overthrow of their religious hopes, but a close of the religious truce, and an opening of persecution. The general opposition to the match, with the dread of the holders of Church lands that their possessions were in danger, encouraged the more violent to plan a rising; and France, naturally jealous of an increase of power by its great opponent, promised to support them by an incursion from Scotland and an attack on Calais. The real aim of the rebellion was, no doubt, the displacement of Mary, and the setting either of Jane Grey, or, as the bulk of the Protestants desired, of Elizabeth, on the throne. But these hopes were cautiously hidden; and the conspirators declared their aim to be that of freeing the Queen from evil counsellors, and of preventing her union with the Prince of Spain. The plan combined three simultaneous outbreaks of revolt. Sir Peter Carew engaged to raise the west, the Duke of Suffolk to call the midland counties to arms, while Sir Thomas Wyatt led the Kentishmen on London. The rising was planned for the spring of 1554.

But the vigilance of the Government drove it to a premature explosion in January, and baffled it in the centre and the west. Carew fled to France; Suffolk, who appeared in arms at Leicester, found small response from the people, and was soon sent prisoner to the Tower. The Kentish rising however proved a more formidable danger. A cry that the Spaniards were coming "to conquer the realm" drew thousands to Wyatt's standard.

The s.h.i.+ps in the Thames submitted to be seized by the insurgents. A party of the train-bands of London, who marched with the royal guard under the old Duke of Norfolk against them, deserted to the rebels in a ma.s.s with shouts of "A Wyatt! a Wyatt! we are all Englishmen!"

[Sidenote: Its failure.]

Had the Kentishmen moved quickly on the capital, its gates would have been flung open and success would have been a.s.sured. But at the critical moment Mary was saved by her queenly courage. Riding boldly to the Guildhall she appealed with "a man's voice" to the loyalty of the citizens, and denounced the declaration of Wyatt's followers as "a Spanish cloak to cover their purpose against our religion." She pledged herself, "on the word of a Queen, that if it shall not probably appear to all the n.o.bility and commons in the high court of Parliament that this marriage shall be for the high benefit and commodity of all the whole realm, then will I abstain from marriage while I live." The pledge was a momentous one, for it owned the very claim of the two Houses which the Queen had till now haughtily rejected; and with the remonstrance of the Parliament still fresh in their ears the Londoners may well have believed that the marriage-project would come quietly to an end. The dread too of any change in religion by the return of the violent Protestantism of Edward's day could hardly fail to win Mary support among the citizens. The mayor answered for their loyalty, and when Wyatt appeared on the Southwark bank the bridge was secured against him. But the rebel leader knew that the issue of the revolt hung on the question which side London would take, and that a large part of the Londoners favoured his cause. Marching therefore up the Thames he seized a bridge at Kingston, threw his force across the river, and turned rapidly back on the capital. But a night march along miry roads wearied and disorganized his men; the bulk of them were cut off from their leader by a royal force which had gathered in the fields at what is now Hyde Park Corner, and only Wyatt himself with a handful of followers pushed desperately on past the palace of St. James, whence the Queen refused to fly even while the rebels were marching beneath its walls, along the Strand to Ludgate. "I have kept touch," he cried as he sank exhausted at the gate. But it was closed: his adherents within were powerless to effect their promised diversion in his favour; and as he fell back the daring leader was surrounded at Temple Bar and sent to the Tower.

[Sidenote: The marriage.]

The failure of the revolt was fatal to the girl whom part at least of the rebels would have placed on the throne. Lady Jane Grey, who had till now been spared and treated with great leniency, was sent to the block; and her father, her husband, and her uncle, atoned for the ambition of the House of Suffolk by the death of traitors. Wyatt and his chief adherents followed them to execution, while the bodies of the poorer insurgents were dangling on gibbets round London. Elizabeth, who had with some reason been suspected of complicity in the insurrection, was sent to the Tower; and only saved from death by the interposition of the Council. The leading Protestants fled in terror over sea. But the failure of the revolt did more than crush the Protestant party; it enabled the Queen to lay aside the mask of moderation which had been forced on her by the earlier difficulties of her reign. An order for the expulsion of all married clergy from their cures, with the deprivation of nine bishops who had been appointed during the Protectorate and who represented its religious tendencies, proved the Queen's resolve to enter boldly on a course of reaction. Her victory secured the Spanish marriage. It was to prevent Philip's union with Mary that Wyatt had risen, and with his overthrow the Queen's policy stood triumphant. The whole strength of the conservative opposition was lost when opposition could be branded as disloyalty. Mary too was true to the pledge she had given that the match should only be brought about with the a.s.sent of Parliament. But pressure was unscrupulously used to secure compliant members in the new elections, and a reluctant a.s.sent to the marriage was wrung from the Houses when they a.s.sembled in the spring. Philip was created king of Naples by his father to give dignity to his union; and in the following July Mary met him at Winchester and became his wife.

[Sidenote: Philip.]

As he entered London with the Queen, men noted curiously the look of the young king whose fortunes were to be so closely linked with those of England for fifty years to come. Far younger than his bride, for he was but twenty-six, there was little of youth in the small and fragile frame, the sickly face, the sedentary habits, the Spanish silence and reserve, which estranged Englishmen from Philip as they had already estranged his subjects in Italy and his future subjects in the Netherlands. Here however he sought by an unusual pleasantness of demeanour as well as by profuse distributions of gifts to win the national goodwill, for it was only by winning it that he could accomplish the work he came to do. His first aim was to reconcile England with the Church. The new Spanish marriage was to repair the harm which the earlier Spanish marriage had brought about by securing that submission to Rome on which Mary was resolved. Even before Philip's landing in England the great obstacle to reunion had been removed by the consent of Julius the Third under pressure from the Emperor to waive the restoration of the Church lands in the event of England's return to obedience. Other and almost as great obstacles indeed seemed to remain.

The temper of the nation had gone with Henry in his rejection of the Papal jurisdiction. Mary's counsellors had been foremost among the men who advocated the change. Her minister, Bishop Gardiner, seemed pledged to oppose any submission to Rome. As secretary of state after Wolsey's fall he had taken a prominent part in the measures which brought about a severance between England and the Papacy; as Bishop of Winchester he had written a famous tract "On True Obedience" in which the Papal supremacy had been expressly repudiated; and to the end of Henry's days he had been looked upon as the leading advocate of the system of a national and independent Church. Nor had his att.i.tude changed in Edward's reign. In the process for his deprivation he avowed himself ready as ever to maintain as well "the supremacy and supreme authority of the king's majesty that now is as the abolis.h.i.+ng of the usurped power of the Bishop of Rome."

[Sidenote: The submission to Rome.]