History of the English People Volume Iv Part 4

The Covenant of the Scotch n.o.bles marked a new epoch in the strife of religions. Till now the reformers had opposed the doctrine of nationality to the doctrine of Catholicism. In the teeth of the pretensions which the Church advanced to a uniformity of religion in every land, whatever might be its differences of race or government, the first Protestants had advanced the principle that each prince or people had alone the right to determine its form of faith and wors.h.i.+p. "Cujus regio" ran the famous phrase which embodied their theory, "ejus religio." It was the acknowledgement of this principle that the Lutheran princes obtained at the Diet of Spires; it was on this principle that Henry based his Act of Supremacy. Its strength lay in the correspondence of such a doctrine with the political circ.u.mstances of the time. It was the growing feeling of nationality which combined with the growing developement of monarchical power to establish the theory that the political and religious life of each nation should be one, and that the religion of the people should follow the faith of the prince. Had Protestantism, as seemed at one time possible, secured the adhesion of all the European princes, such a theory might well have led everywhere as it led in England to the establishment of the worst of tyrannies, a tyranny that claims to lord alike over both body and soul. The world was saved from this danger by the tenacity with which the old religion still held its power. In half the countries of Europe the disciples of the new opinions had soon to choose between submission to their conscience and submission to their prince; and a movement which began in contending for the religious supremacy of kings ended in those wars of religion which arrayed nation after nation against their sovereigns. In this religious revolution Scotland led the way. Her Protestantism was the first to draw the sword against earthly rulers. The solemn "Covenant" which bound together her "Congregation" in the face of the regency, which pledged its members to withdraw from all submission to the religion of the State and to maintain in the face of the State their liberty of conscience, opened that vast series of struggles which ended in Germany with the Peace of Westphalia and in England with the Toleration Act of William the Third.

[Sidenote: The Exiles.]

The "Covenant" of the lords sounded a bold defiance to the Catholic reaction across the border. While Mary replaced the Prayer-Book by the Ma.s.s, the Scotch lords resolved that wherever their power extended the Common Prayer should be read in all churches. While hundreds were going to the stake in England the Scotch n.o.bles boldly met the burning of their preachers by a threat of war. "They trouble our preachers," ran their bold remonstrance against the bishops in the Queen-mother's presence; "they would murder them and us! shall we suffer this any longer? No, madam, it shall not be!" and therewith every man put on his steel bonnet. The Regent was helpless for the moment and could find refuge only in fair words, words so fair that for a while the sternest of the reformers believed her to be drifting to their faith. She was in truth fettered by the need of avoiding civil strife at a time when the war of England against France made a Scotch war against England inevitable. The n.o.bles refused indeed to cross the border, but the threat of a Scotch invasion was one of the dangers against which Mary Tudor now found herself forced to provide. Nor was the uprise of Protestantism in Scotland the only result of her policy in giving fire and strength to the new religion. Each step in the persecution had been marked by a fresh flight of preachers, merchants, and gentry across the seas. "Some fled into France, some into Flanders, and some into the high countries of the Empire." As early as 1554 we find groups of such refugees at Frankfort, Emden, Zurich, and Stra.s.sburg. Calvin welcomed some of them at Geneva; the "lords of Berne" suffered a group to settle at Aarau; a hundred gathered round the d.u.c.h.ess of Suffolk at Wesel.

Amongst the exiles we find many who were to be bishops and statesmen in the coming reign. Sir Francis Knollys was at Frankfort, Sir Francis Walsingham travelled in France; among the divines were the later archbishops Grindal and Sandys, and the later bishops Horne, Parkhurst, Aylmer, Jewel, and c.o.x. Mingled with these were men who had already played their part in Edward's reign, such as Poinet, the deprived Bishop of Winchester, Bale, the deprived Bishop of Ossory, and the preachers Lever and Knox.

[Sidenote: The Extreme Protestants.]

Gardiner had threatened that the fugitives should gnaw their fingers from hunger, but ample supplies reached them from London merchants and other partizans in England, and they seem to have lived in fair comfort while their brethren at home were "going to the fire." Their chief troubles sprang from strife among themselves. The hotter spirits among the English Protestants had seen with discontent the retention of much that they looked on as superst.i.tious and Popish in even the last liturgy of Edward's reign. That ministers should still wear white surplices, that litanies should be sung, that the congregation should respond to the priest, that babes should be signed in baptism with the sign of the cross, that rings should be given in marriage, filled them with horror.

Hooper, the leader of this party, refused when made bishop to don his rochet; and had only been driven by imprisonment to vest himself in "the rags of Popery." Trivial indeed as such questions seemed in themselves, an issue lay behind them which was enough to make men face worse evils than a prison. The royal supremacy, the heads.h.i.+p of the Church, which Henry the Eighth claimed for himself and his successors, was, as we have seen, simply an application of the principle which the states of North Germany had found so effective in meeting the pretensions of the Emperor or the Pope. The same sentiment of national life took a new form in the preservation of whatever the change of religious thought left it possible to preserve in the national tradition of faith and wors.h.i.+p. In the Lutheran churches, though the Ma.s.s was gone, reredos and crucifix remained untouched. In England the whole ecclesiastical machinery was jealously preserved. Its Church was still governed by bishops who traced their succession to the Apostles. The words of its new Prayer-Book adhered as closely as they might to the words of Missal and Breviary.

What made such an arrangement possible was the weakness of the purely religious impulse in the earlier stages of the Reformation. In Germany indeed or in England, the pressure for theological change was small; the religious impulse told on but a small part, and that not an influential part, of the population; it did in fact little more than quicken and bring into action the older and widely-felt pa.s.sion for ecclesiastical independence.

[Sidenote: Protestantism and the Supremacy.]

But the establishment of this independence at once gave fresh force to the religious movement. From denouncing the Pope as a usurper of national rights men pa.s.sed easily to denounce the Papal system as in itself Antichristian. In setting aside the voice of the Papacy as a ground of faith the new churches had been forced to find a ground of faith in the Bible. But the reading and discussion of the Bible opened up a thousand questions of belief and ritual, and the hatred of Rome drew men more and more to find answers to such questions which were antagonistic to the creed and usages of a past that was identified in their eyes with the Papacy. Such questions could hardly fail to find an echo in the people at large. To the bulk of men ecclesiastical inst.i.tutions are things dim and remote; and the establishment of ecclesiastical independence, though it gratified the national pride, could have raised little personal enthusiasm. But the direct and personal interest of every man seemed to lie in the right holding of religious truth, and thus the theological aspect of the Reformation tended more and more to supersede its political one. All that is generous and chivalrous in human feeling told in the same direction. To statesmen like Gardiner or Paget the acceptance of one form of faith or wors.h.i.+p after another as one sovereign after another occupied the throne seemed, no doubt, a logical and inevitable result of their acceptance of the royal supremacy. But to the people at large there must have been something false and ign.o.ble in the sight of a statesman or a priest who had cast off the Ma.s.s under Edward to embrace it again under Mary, and who was ready again to cast it off at the will of Mary's successor. If wors.h.i.+p and belief were indeed spiritual things, if they had any semblance of connexion with divine realities, men must have felt that it was impossible to put them on and off at a king's caprice. It was this, even more than the natural pity which they raised, that gave their weight to the Protestant martyrdoms under Mary. They stood out in emphatic protest against the doctrine of local religion, of a belief dictated by the will of kings. From the Primate of the Church to the "blind girl" who perished at Colchester, three hundred were found in England who chose rather to go to the fire than to take up again at the Queen's will what their individual conscience had renounced as a lie against G.o.d.

[Sidenote: Calvin.]

But from the actual a.s.sertion of such a right of the individual conscience to find and hold what was true, even those who witnessed for it by their death would have shrunk. Driven by sheer force of fact from the theory of a national and royal faith, men still shuddered to stand alone. The old doctrine of a Catholic Christianity flung over them its spell. Rome indeed they looked on as Antichrist, but the doctrine which Rome had held so long and so firmly, the doctrine that truth should be coextensive with the world and not limited by national boundaries, that the Church was one in all countries and among all peoples, that there was a Christendom which embraced all kingdoms and a Christian law that ruled peoples and kings, became more and more the doctrine of Rome's bitterest opponents. It was this doctrine which found its embodiment in John Calvin, a young French scholar, driven in early manhood from his own country by the persecution of Francis the First. Calvin established himself at Basle, and produced there in 1535 at the age of twenty-six a book which was to form the theology of the Huguenot churches, his "Inst.i.tutes of the Christian Religion." What was really original in this work was Calvin's doctrine of the organization of the Church and of its relation to the State. The base of the Christian republic was with him the Christian man, elected and called of G.o.d, preserved by His grace from the power of sin, predestinate to eternal life. Every such Christian man is in himself a priest, and every group of such men is a Church, self-governing, independent of all save G.o.d, supreme in its authority over all matters ecclesiastical and spiritual. The const.i.tution of such a church, where each member as a Christian was equal before G.o.d, necessarily took a democratic form. In Calvin's theory of Church government it is the Church which itself elects its lay elders and lay deacons for purposes of administration; it is with the approval and consent of the Church that elders and deacons with the existing body of pastors elect new ministers. It is through these officers that the Church exercises its power of the keys, the power of diffusing the truth and the power of correcting error. To the minister belong the preaching of the word and the direction of all religious instruction; to the body of ministers belong the interpretation of scripture and the decision of doctrine. On the other hand the administration of discipline, the supervision of the moral conduct of each professing Christian, the admonition of the erring, the excommunication and exclusion from the body of the Church of the unbelieving and the utterly unworthy, belong to the Consistory, the joint a.s.sembly of ministers and elders. To this discipline princes as well as common men are alike subject; princes as well as common men must take their doctrine from the ministers of the Church.

[Sidenote: Calvinism.]

The claims of the older faith to spiritual and ecclesiastical supremacy over the powers of earth reappeared in this theory. Calvin like the Papacy ignored all national independence, all pretensions of peoples as such to create their own system of church doctrine or church government.

Doctrine and government he held to be already laid down in the words of the Bible, and all questions that rose out of those words came under the decision of the ecclesiastical body of ministers. Wherever a reformed religion appeared, there was provided for it a simple but orderly organization which in its range and effectiveness rivalled that of the older Catholicism. On the other hand this organization rested on a wholly new basis; spiritual and ecclesiastical power came from below not from above; the true sovereign in this Christian state was not Pope or Bishop but the Christian man. Despotic as the authority of pastor and elders seemed, pastor and elders were alike the creation of the whole congregation, and their judgement could in the last resort be adopted or set aside by it. Such a system stood out in bold defiance against the tendencies of the day. On its religious side it came into conflict with that principle of nationality, of ecclesiastical as well as civil subjection to the prince, on which the reformed Churches and above all the Church of England had till now been built up. As a vast and consecrated democracy it stood in contrast with the whole social and political framework of the European nations. Grave as we may count the faults of Calvinism, alien as its temper may in many ways be from the temper of the modern world, it is in Calvinism that the modern world strikes its roots, for it was Calvinism that first revealed the worth and dignity of Man. Called of G.o.d, and heir of heaven, the trader at his counter and the digger in his field suddenly rose into equality with the n.o.ble and the king.

[Sidenote: Calvin and the Exiles.]

It was this system that Calvin by a singular fortune was able to put into actual working in the little city of Geneva, where the party of the Reformation had become master and called him in 1536 to be their spiritual head. Driven out but again recalled, his influence made Geneva from 1541 the centre of the Protestant world. The refugees who crowded to the little town from persecution in France, in the Netherlands, in England, found there an exact and formal doctrine, a rigid discipline of manners and faith, a system of church government, a form of church wors.h.i.+p, stripped, as they held, of the last remnant of the superst.i.tions of the past. Calvin himself with his austere and frugal life, his enormous industry, his power of government, his quick decision, his undoubting self-confidence, his unswerving will, remained for three-and-twenty years till his death in 1564 supreme over Protestant opinion. His influence told heavily on England. From the hour of Cromwell's fall the sympathies of the English reformers had drawn them, not to the Lutheran Churches of North Germany, but to the more progressive Churches of the Rhineland and the Netherlands: and on the critical question of the Lord's Supper which mainly divided the two great branches of the Reformation Cranmer and his partizans became more definitely anti-sacramentarian as the years went by. At Edward's death the exiles showed their tendencies by seeking refuge not with the Lutheran Churches of North Germany but with the Calvinistic Churches of Switzerland or the Rhine; and contact with such leaders as Bullinger at Zurich or Calvin at Geneva could hardly fail to give fresh vigour to the party which longed for a closer union with the foreign churches and a more open breach with the past.

[Sidenote: The troubles at Frankfort.]

The results of this contact first showed themselves at Frankfort. At the instigation of Whittingham, who in Elizabeth's days became Dean of Durham, a body of English exiles that had found shelter there resolved to reform both wors.h.i.+p and discipline. The obnoxious usages were expunged from the Prayer-Book, omissions were made in the communion service, a minister and deacons chosen, and rules drawn up for church government after the Genevan model. Free at last "from all dregs of superst.i.tious ceremonies" the Frankfort refugees thanked G.o.d "that had given them such a church in a strange land wherein they might hear G.o.d's holy word preached, the sacraments rightly ministered, and discipline used, which in their own country could never be obtained." But their invitation to the other English exiles to join them in the enjoyment of these blessings met with a steady repulse. Lever and the exiles at Zurich refused to come unless they might "altogether serve and praise G.o.d as freely and uprightly as the order last taken in the Church of England permitteth and presenteth, for we are fully determined to admit and use no other." The main body of the exiles who were then gathered at Stra.s.sburg echoed the refusal. Knox however, who had been chosen minister by the Frankfort congregation, moved rapidly forward, rejecting the communion service altogether as superst.i.tious, and drawing up a new "order" of wors.h.i.+p after the Genevan model. But in the spring of 1555 these efforts were foiled by the arrival of fresh exiles from England of a more conservative turn: the reformers were outvoted; Knox was driven from the town by the magistrates "in fear of the Emperor" whom he had outraged in an "Admonition" to the English people which he had lately issued; and the English service was restored. Whittingham and his adherents, still resolute, as Bale wrote, "to erect a Church of the Purity" (we may perhaps trace in the sneer the origin of their later name of Puritans), found a fresh refuge at Basle and Geneva, where the leaders of the party occupied themselves in a metrical translation of the Psalms which left its traces on English psalmody and in the production of what was afterwards known as the Geneva Bible.

[Sidenote: The seditious books.]

Petty as this strife at Frankfort may seem, it marks the first open appearance of English Puritanism, and the beginning of a struggle which widened through the reign of Elizabeth till under the Stuarts it broke England in pieces. But busy as they were in strife among themselves, the exiles were still more busy in fanning the discontent at home. Books, pamphlets, broadsides, were written and sent for distribution to England. The violence of their language was incredible. No sooner had Bonner issued his injunctions than Bale denounced him in a fierce reply as "a beastly belly-G.o.d and d.a.m.nable dung-hill." With a spirit worthy of the "b.l.o.o.d.y bitesheeps" whom he attacked, the ex-Bishop of Ossory regretted that when Henry plucked down Becket's shrine he had not burned the idolatrous priests upon it. It probably mattered little to Bale that at the moment when he wrote not a single Protestant had as yet been sent to the stake; but language such as this was hardly likely to stir Mary to a spirit of moderation. The Spanish marriage gave the refugees a fairer opportunity of attack, and the Government was forced to make enquiries of the wardens of city gilds "whether they had seen or heard of any of these books which had come from beyond seas." The violence of the exiles was doubled by the suppression of Wyatt's revolt. Poinet, the late Bishop of Winchester, who had taken part in it, fled over sea to write a "Sharp Tractate of political power" in which he discussed the question "whether it be lawful to depose an evil governor and kill a tyrant."

[Sidenote: Knox and Goodman.]

But with the actual outbreak of persecution and the death of Cranmer all restraint was thrown aside. In his "First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women" Knox denounced Mary as a Jezebel, a traitress, and a b.a.s.t.a.r.d. He declared the rule of women to be against the law of Nature and of G.o.d. The duty, whether of the estates or people of the realm, was "first to remove from honour and authority that monster in nature; secondarily, if any presume to defend that impiety, they ought not to fear first to p.r.o.nounce, then after to execute against them the sentence of death." To keep the oath of allegiance was "nothing but plain rebellion against G.o.d." "The day of vengeance," burst out the writer, "which shall apprehend that horrible monster, Jezebel of England, and such as maintain her monstrous cruelty is already appointed in the counsel of the Eternal; and I verily believe that it is so nigh that she shall not reign so long in tyranny as. .h.i.therto she hath done, when G.o.d shall declare himself her enemy." Another exile, Goodman, enquired "how superior powers ought to be obeyed of their subjects; and wherein they may lawfully by G.o.d's word be disobeyed and resisted." His book was a direct summons to rebellion. "By giving authority to an idolatrous woman" Goodman wrote to his English fellow-subjects, "ye have banished Christ and his Gospel. Then in taking the same authority from her you shall restore Christ and his word, and shall do well. In obeying her you have disobeyed G.o.d; then in disobeying her you shall please G.o.d." "Though it should appear at the first sight," he urged, "a great disorder that the people should take unto them the punishment of transgressions, yet when the magistrates and other officers cease to do their duties they are as it were without officers, yea, worse than if they had none at all, and then G.o.d giveth the sword into the people's hand." And what the people were to do with the sword Poinet had already put very clearly. It was the "unG.o.dly serpent Mary" who was "the chief instrument of all this present misery in England." "Now both by G.o.d's laws and man's," concluded the bishop, "she ought to be punished with death, as an open idolatress in the sight of G.o.d, and a cruel murderer of His saints before men, and merciless traitress to her own native country."

Behind the wild rhetoric of words like these lay the new sense of a prophetic power, the sense of a divine commission given to the preachers of the Word to rebuke n.o.bles and kings. At the moment when the policy of Cromwell crushed the Church as a political power and freed the growing Monarchy from the const.i.tutional check which its independence furnished, a new check offered itself in the very enthusiasm which sprang out of the wreck of the great religious body. Men stirred with a new sense of righteousness and of a divine government of the world, men too whose natural boldness was quickened and fired by daily contact with the older seers who rebuked David or Jezebel, could not hold their peace in the presence of wrong. While n.o.bles and statesmen were cowering in silence before the dreaded power of the kings.h.i.+p the preachers spoke bluntly out. Not only Latimer, but Knox, Grindal, and Lever had uttered fiery remonstrances against the plunderers of Edward's reign. Bradford had threatened them with the divine judgement which at last overtook them.

"'The judgement of the Lord! The judgement of the Lord!' cried he, with a lamentable voice and weeping tears." Wise or unwise, the pamphlets of the exiles only carried on this theory to its full developement. The great conception of the mediaeval Church, that of the responsibility of kings to a spiritual power, was revived at an hour when kings.h.i.+p was trampling all responsibility to G.o.d or man beneath its feet. Such a revival was to have large and beneficial issues in our later history.

Gathering strength under Elizabeth, it created at the close of her reign that moral force of public opinion which under the name of Puritanism brought the acts and policy of our kings to the tests of reason and the Gospel. However ill directed that force might be, however erroneously such tests were often applied, it is to this new force that we owe the restoration of liberty and the establishment of religious freedom. As the voice of the first Christian preachers had broken the despotism of the Roman Empire, so the voice of the preachers of Puritanism broke the despotism of the English Monarchy.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth.]

But great as their issues were to be, for the moment these protests only quickened the persecution at home. We can hardly wonder that the arrival of Goodman's book in England in the summer of 1558 was followed by stern measures to prevent the circulation of such incentives to revolt.

"Whereas divers books" ran a royal proclamation, "filled with heresy, sedition, and treason, have of late and be daily brought into the realm out of foreign countries and places beyond seas, and some also covertly printed within this realm and cast abroad in sundry parts thereof, whereby not only G.o.d is dishonoured but also encouragement is given to disobey lawful princes and governors," any person possessing such books "shall be reported and taken for a rebel, and shall without delay be executed for that offence according to the order of martial law." But what really robbed these pamphlets of all force for harm was the prudence and foresight of the people itself. Never indeed did the nation show its patient good sense more clearly than in the later years of Mary's reign. While fires blazed in Smithfield and news of defeat came from over sea, while the hot voices of Protestant zealots hounded men on to a.s.sa.s.sination and revolt, the bulk of Englishmen looked quietly from the dying Queen to the girl who in a little while must wear her crown.

What nerved men to endure the shame and bloodshed about them was the certainty of the speedy succession of the daughter of Anne Boleyn.

Elizabeth was now in her twenty-fifth year. Personally she had much of her mother's charm with more than her mother's beauty. Her figure was commanding, her face long but queenly and intelligent, her eyes quick and fine. She had grown up amidst the liberal culture of Henry's court a bold horsewoman, a good shot, a graceful dancer, a skilled musician, and an accomplished scholar. Even among the highly-trained women who caught the impulse of the New Learning she stood in the extent of her acquirements without a peer. Ascham, who succeeded Grindal and Cheke in the direction of her studies, tells us how keen and resolute was Elizabeth's love of learning, even in her girlhood. At sixteen she already showed "a man's power of application" to her books. She had read almost the whole of Cicero and a great part of Livy. She began the day with the study of the New Testament in Greek, and followed this up by reading selected orations of Isocrates and the tragedies of Sophocles.

She could speak Latin with fluency and Greek moderately well. Her love of cla.s.sical culture lasted through her life. Amidst the press and cares of her later reign we find Ascham recording how "after dinner I went up to read with the Queen's majesty that n.o.ble oration of Demosthenes against aeschines." At a later time her Latin served her to rebuke the insolence of a Polish amba.s.sador, and she could "rub up her rusty Greek"

at need to bandy pedantry with a Vice-Chancellor. But Elizabeth was far as yet from being a mere pedant. She could already speak French and Italian as fluently as her mother-tongue. In later days we find her familiar with Ariosto and Ta.s.so. The purity of her literary taste, the love for a chaste and simple style, which Ascham noted with praise in her girlhood, had not yet perished under the influence of euphuism. But even amidst the affectation and love of anagrams and puerilities which sullied her later years Elizabeth remained a lover of letters and of all that was greatest and purest in letters. She listened with delight to the "Faery Queen," and found a smile for "Master Spenser" when he appeared in her presence.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth and Mary.]

From the bodily and mental energy of her girlhood, the close of Edward's reign drew Elizabeth at nineteen to face the sterner problems of religion and politics. In the daring attempt of Northumberland to place Jane Grey on the throne Elizabeth's rights were equally set aside with those of Mary; and the first public act of the girl was to call the gentry to her standard and to join her sister with five hundred followers in her train. But the momentary union was soon dissolved. The daughter of Catharine could look with little but hate on the daughter of Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth's tendency to the "new religion" jarred with the Queen's bigotry; and the warnings of the imperial amba.s.sador were hardly needful to spur Mary to watch jealously a possible pretender to her throne. The girl bent to the Queen's will in hearing ma.s.s, but her manner showed that the compromise was merely a matter of obedience, and fed the hopes of the Protestant zealots who saw in the Spanish marriage a chance of driving Mary from the throne. The resolve which the Queen showed to cancel her sister's right of succession only quickened the project for setting Elizabeth in her place; and it was to make Elizabeth their sovereign that Suffolk rose in Leicesters.h.i.+re and Wyatt and his Kentishmen marched against London Bridge. The failure of the rising seemed to ensure her doom. The Emperor pressed for her death as a security for Philip on his arrival; and the detection of a correspondence with the French king served as a pretext for her committal to the Tower. The fierce Tudor temper broke through Elizabeth's self-control as she landed at Traitor's Gate. "Are all these harnessed men there for me?" she cried as she saw the guard; "it needed not for me, being but a weak woman!" and pa.s.sionately calling on the soldiers to "bear witness that I come as no traitor!" she flung herself down on a stone in the rain and refused to enter her prison.

"Better sitting here than in a worse place," she cried; "I know not whither you will bring me." But Elizabeth's danger was less than it seemed. Wyatt denied to the last her complicity in the revolt, and in spite of Gardiner's will to "go roundly to work" with her the Lords of the Council forced Mary to set her free. The Queen's terrors however revived with her hopes of a child in the summer of 1555. To Mary her sister seemed the one danger which threatened the succession of her coming babe and the vast issues which hung on it, and Elizabeth was summoned to her sister's side and kept a close prisoner at Hampton Court. Philip joined in this precaution, for "holding her in his power he could depart safely and without peril" in the event of the Queen's death in childbirth; and other plans were perhaps already stirring his breast. Should Mary die, a fresh match might renew his hold on England; "he might hope," writes the Venetian amba.s.sador, "with the help of many of the n.o.bility, won over by his presents and favours, to marry her (Elizabeth) again, and thus succeed anew to the crown."

[Sidenote: Elizabeth and Philip.]

But whatever may have been Philip's designs, the time had not as yet come for their realization; the final disappointment of the Queen's hopes of childbirth set Elizabeth free, and in July she returned to her house at Ashridge. From this moment her position was utterly changed.

With the disappearance of all chance of offspring from the Queen and the certainty of Mary's coming death her sister's danger pa.s.sed away.

Elizabeth alone stood between England and the succession of Mary Stuart; and, whatever might be the wishes of the Queen, the policy of the House of Austria forced it to support even the daughter of Anne Boleyn against a claimant who would bind England to the French monarchy. From this moment therefore Philip watched jealously over Elizabeth's safety. On his departure for the Continent he gave written instructions to the Queen to show favour to her sister, and the charge was repeated to those of his followers whom he left behind him. What guarded her even more effectually was the love of the people. When Philip at a later time claimed Elizabeth's grat.i.tude for his protection she told him bluntly that her grat.i.tude was really due neither to him nor her n.o.bles, though she owned her obligations to both, but to the English people. It was they who had saved her from death and hindered all projects for barring her right to the throne. "It is the people," she said, "who have placed me where I am now." It was indeed their faith in Elizabeth's speedy succession that enabled Englishmen to bear the bloodshed and shame of Mary's later years, and to wait patiently for the end.

Nor were these years of waiting without value for Elizabeth herself. The steady purpose, the clear perception of a just policy which ran through her wonderful reign, were formed as the girl looked coolly on at the chaos of bigotry and misrule which spread before her. More and more she realized what was to be the aim of her after life, the aim of reuniting the England which Edward and Mary alike had rent into two warring nations, of restoring again that English independence which Mary was trailing at the feet of Spain. With such an aim she could draw to her the men who, indifferent like herself to purely spiritual considerations, and estranged from Mary's system rather by its political than its religious consequences, were anxious for the restoration of English independence and English order. It was among these "Politicals,"

as they were soon to be called, that Elizabeth found at this moment a counsellor who was to stand by her side through the long years of her after reign. William Cecil sprang from the smaller gentry whom the changes of the time were bringing to the front. He was the son of a Yeoman of the Wardrobe at Henry's court; but his abilities had already raised him at the age of twenty-seven to the post of secretary to the Duke of Somerset, and through Somerset's Protectorate he remained high in his confidence. He was seized by the Lords on the Duke's arrest, and even sent to the Tower; but he was set at liberty with his master, and his ability was now so well known that a few months later saw him Secretary of State under Northumberland. The post and the knighthood which accompanied it hardly compensated for the yoke which Northumberland's pride laid upon all who served him, or for the risks in which his ambition involved them. Cecil saw with a fatal clearness the silent opposition of the whole realm to the system of the Protectorate, and the knowledge of this convinced him that the Duke's schemes for a change in the succession were destined to failure. On the disclosure of the plot to set Mary aside he withdrew for some days from the court, and even meditated flight from the country, till fear of the young king's wrath drew him back to share in the submission of his fellow-counsellors and to pledge himself with them to carry the new settlement into effect.

But Northumberland had no sooner quitted London than Cecil became the soul of the intrigues by which the royal Council declared themselves in Mary's favour. His desertion of the Duke secured him pardon from the Queen, and though he was known to be in heart "a heretic" he continued at court, conformed like Elizabeth to the established religion, confessed and attended ma.s.s. Cecil was employed in bringing Pole to England and in attending him in emba.s.sies abroad. But his caution held him aloof from any close connexion with public affairs. He busied himself in building at Burghley and in the culture of the Church lands he had won from Edward the Sixth, while he drew closer to the girl who alone could rescue England from the misgovernment of Mary's rule. Even before the Queen's death it was known that Cecil would be the chief counsellor of the coming reign. "I am told for certain," the Spanish amba.s.sador wrote to Philip after a visit to Elizabeth during the last hours of Mary's life, "that Cecil who was secretary to King Edward will be her secretary also. He has the character of a prudent and virtuous man, although a heretic." But it was only from a belief that Cecil retained at heart the convictions of his earlier days that men could call him a heretic. In all outer matters of faith or wors.h.i.+p he conformed to the religion of the state.

[Sidenote: The Politicals.]

It is idle to charge Cecil, or the ma.s.s of Englishmen who conformed with him in turn to the religion of Henry, of Edward, of Mary, and of Elizabeth, with baseness or hypocrisy. They followed the accepted doctrine of the time--that every realm, through its rulers, had the sole right of determining what should be the form of religion within its bounds. What the Marian persecution was gradually pressing on such men was a conviction, not of the falsehood of such a doctrine, but of the need of limiting it. Under Henry, under Edward, under Mary, no distinction had been drawn between inner belief and outer conformity.

Every English subject was called upon to adjust his conscience as well as his conduct to the varying policy of the state. But the fires of Smithfield had proved that obedience such as this could not be exacted save by a persecution which filled all England with horror. Such a persecution indeed failed in the very end for which it was wrought.

Instead of strengthening religious unity, it gave a new force to religious separation; it enlisted the conscience of the zealot in the cause of resistance; it secured the sympathy of the great ma.s.s of waverers to those who withstood the civil power. To Cecil, as to the purely political statesmen of whom he was the type, such a persecution seemed as needless as it was mischievous. Conformity indeed was necessary, for men could as yet conceive of no state without a religion or of civil obedience apart from compliance with the religious order of the state. But only outer conformity was needed. That no man should set up a wors.h.i.+p other than that of the nation at large, that every subject should duly attend at the national wors.h.i.+p, Cecil believed to be essential to public order. But he saw no need for prying into the actual beliefs of those who conformed to the religious laws of the realm, nor did he think that such beliefs could be changed by the fear of punishment. While refusing freedom of wors.h.i.+p therefore, Cecil, like Elizabeth, was ready to concede freedom of conscience. And in this concession we can hardly doubt that the bulk of Englishmen went with him. Catholics shared with Protestants the horror of Mary's persecution.

To Protestantism indeed the horror of the persecution had done much to give a force such as it had never had before. The number of Protestants grew with every murder done in the cause of Catholicism. But they still remained a small part of the realm. What the bulk of Englishmen had been driven to by the martyrdoms was not a change of creed, but a longing for religious peace and for such a system of government as, without destroying the spiritual oneness of the nation, would render a religious peace possible. And such a system of government Cecil and Elizabeth were prepared to give.

[Sidenote: Mary's death.]

We may ascribe to Cecil's counsels somewhat of the wise patience with which Elizabeth waited for the coming crown. Her succession was a.s.sured, and the throng of visitors to her presence showed a general sense that the Queen's end was near. Mary stood lonely and desolate in her realm.

"I will not be buried while I am living, as my sister was," Elizabeth said in later years. "Do I not know how during her life every one hastened to me at Hatfield?" The bloodshed indeed went on more busily than ever. It had spread now from bishops and priests to the people itself, and the sufferers were sent in batches to the flames. In a single day thirteen victims, two of them women, were burned at Stratford-le-Bow. Seventy-three Protestants of Colchester were dragged through the streets of London tied to a single rope. A new commission for the suppression of heresy was exempted by royal authority from all restrictions of law which fettered its activity. But the work of terror broke down before the silent revolt of the whole nation. The persecution failed even to put an end to heretical wors.h.i.+p. Not only do we find ministers moving about in London and Kent to hold "secret meetings of the Gospellers," but up to the middle of 1555 four parishes in Ess.e.x still persisted in using the English-Prayer Book. Open marks of sympathy at last began to be offered to the victims at the stake. "There were seven men burned in Smithfield the twenty-eighth day of July," a Londoner writes in 1558, "a fearful and a cruel proclamation being made that under pain of present death no man should either approach nigh unto them, touch them, neither speak to them nor comfort them. Yet were they so comfortably taken by the hand and so goodly comforted, notwithstanding that fearful proclamation and the present threatenings of the sheriffs and serjeants, that the adversaries themselves were astonished." The crowd round the fire shouted "Amen" to the martyrs'

prayers, and prayed with them that G.o.d would strengthen them. What galled Mary yet more was the ill will of the Pope. Paul the Fourth still adhered to his demand for full restoration of the Church lands, and held England as only partly reconciled to the Holy See. He was hostile to Philip; he was yet more hostile to Pole. At this moment he dealt a last blow at the Queen by depriving Pole of his legatine power, and was believed to be on the point of calling him to answer a charge of heresy.

Even when she was freed from part of her troubles in the autumn of 1558 by the opening of conferences for peace at Cambray a fresh danger disclosed itself. The demands of the queen's envoys for the restoration of Calais met with so stubborn a refusal from France that it seemed as if England would be left alone to bear the brunt of a future struggle, for Mary's fierce pride, had she lived, could hardly have bowed to the surrender of the town. But the Queen was dying. Her health had long been weak, and the miseries and failure of her reign hastened the progress of disease. Already enfeebled, she was attacked as winter drew near by a fever which was at this time ravaging the country, and on the seventeenth of November, 1558, she breathed her last.

CHAPTER III

THE ENGLAND OF ELIZABETH

1558-1561

[Sidenote: Elizabeth's accession.]

Tradition still points out the tree in Hatfield Park beneath which Elizabeth was sitting when she received the news of her peaceful accession to the throne. She fell on her knees, and drawing a long breath, exclaimed at last, "It is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes." To the last these words remained stamped on the golden coinage of the Queen. The sense never left her that her preservation and her reign were the issues of a direct interposition of G.o.d. Daring and self-confident indeed as was her temper, it was awed into seriousness by the weight of responsibility which fell on her with her sister's death.

Never had the fortunes of England sunk to a lower ebb. Dragged at the heels of Philip into a useless and ruinous war, the country was left without an ally save Spain. The loss of Calais gave France the mastery of the Channel, and seemed to English eyes "to introduce the French King within the threshold of our house." "If G.o.d start not forth to the helm," wrote the Council in an appeal to the country, "we be at the point of greatest misery that can happen to any people, which is to become thrall to a foreign nation." The French king in fact "bestrode the realm, having one foot in Calais and the other in Scotland." Ireland too was torn with civil war, while Scotland, always a danger in the north, had become formidable through the French marriage of its queen.

In presence of enemies such as these, the country lay helpless, without army or fleet, or the means of manning one, for the treasury, already drained by the waste of Edward's reign, had been utterly exhausted by the restoration of the Church lands in possession of the Crown and by the cost of the war with France. But formidable as was the danger from without, it was little to the danger from within. The country was humiliated by defeat and brought to the verge of rebellion by the bloodshed and misgovernment of Mary's reign. The social discontent which had been trampled down for a while by the hors.e.m.e.n of Somerset remained a menace to further order. Above all, the religious strife had pa.s.sed beyond hope of reconciliation now that the reformers were parted from their opponents by the fires of Smithfield and the party of the New Learning all but dissolved. The more earnest Catholics were bound helplessly to Rome. The temper of the Protestants, burned at home or driven into exile abroad, had become a fiercer thing, and the Calvinistic refugees were pouring back from Geneva with dreams of revolutionary changes in Church and State.