The Reign of Mary Tudor Part 10

Here the act might have been expected to end. The nature of the transaction between the parliament and the pope had been made sufficiently clear. Yet, had nothing more been said, the surrender of their claims by the clergy would have implied that they had parted with something which they might have legitimately required. Under the inspiration of the lawyers, therefore, a series of clauses were superadded, explaining that, notwithstanding the dispensation, "The t.i.tle of all lands, possessions, and hereditaments in their majesties' realms and dominions was grounded in the laws, statutes, and customs of the same, and by their high jurisdiction, authority royal, and crown imperial, and in their courts only, might be impleaded, ordered, tried, and judged, and none otherwise:" and, therefore, "whosoever, by any process obtained out of any ecclesiastical court within the realm or without, or by pretence of any spiritual jurisdiction or otherwise, contrary to the laws of the realm, should inquiet or molest any person or persons, or body politic, for any of the said lands or things above specified, should incur the danger of Premunire, and should suffer and incur the forfeitures and pains contained in the same."[427]

Vainly the clergy had entreated for a limitation or removal of Premunire. That spectre remained unexorcised in all its shadowy terror; and while it survived, the penitence of England went no deeper than the lips, however fine the words and eloquent the phrases in which it was expressed. As some compensation, the Mortmain Act was suspended for twenty years. Yet, as if it were in reply to Pole's appeal, a mischievous provision closed the act, that, notwithstanding anything contained in it, laymen ent.i.tled to t.i.thes might recover them with the same readiness as before the first day of the present parliament.[428]

Such was the great statute of reconciliation with Rome, with which, in the inability to obtain a better, the legate was compelled to be satisfied, and to reconsider his threat of going back to Italy.

This first conflict was no sooner ended than another commenced. The Commons would not consent that Philip should be crowned; but, as the queen said she was enceinte, provision had to be made for a regency, and a bill was introduced into the Upper House which has not survived, but which, in spirit, was unfavourable to the king.[429] Gardiner, in the course of the debate, attempted to put in a clause affecting Elizabeth,[430] but the success was no better than usual. The act went down to the Commons, where, however, it was immediately cancelled. Though the Commons would give Philip no rights as king, they were better disposed towards him than the Lords; and they drew another bill of their own, in which they declared the father to be the natural and fitting guardian of the child. The experience of protectorates, they said, had been uniformly unfortunate, and should the queen die leaving an heir, Philip should be regent of the realm during the minority; if obliged to be absent on the Continent, he might himself nominate his deputy;[431] and so long as it should be his pleasure to remain in England, his person should be under the protection of the laws of high treason.

Taking courage from the apparent disposition of the House, the friends of the court proposed that, should the queen die childless, the crown should devolve absolutely upon him for his life.[432] But in this they were going too far. The suggestion was listened to coldly; and Philip, who had really calculated on obtaining from parliament, in some form or other, a security for his succession, despatched Ruy Gomez to Brussels, to consult the emperor on the course which should be pursued.[433] On the whole, however, could the bill of the House of Commons be carried, Renard was disposed to be contented; the queen was confident in her hopes of an heir, and it might not be worth while to irritate the people unnecessarily about Elizabeth.[434] The clause empowering Philip to govern by deputy in his absence was especially satisfactory.[435]

But the peers, whom the Commons had refused to consult on the new form of the measure, would not part so easily with their own opinions; they adopted the phraseology of the Lower House, but this particular and precious feature in it they pared away. The bill, as it eventually pa.s.sed, declared Philip regent till his child should be of age, and so long as he continued in the realm; but, at the same time, fatally for the objects at which he was aiming, it bound him again to observe all the articles of the marriage treaty, "which, during the time that he should hold the government, should remain and continue in as full force and strength, as if they were newly inserted and rehea.r.s.ed in the present act."[436]

The disposition of the House of Lords was the more dangerous, because the bishops, of course, voted with the government, and the strength of the opposition, therefore, implied something like unanimity in the lay peers. The persecuting act had been carried with difficulty, and in the reconciliation with Rome the legate had been studiously mortified. On the succession and the coronation the court had been wholly baffled; and in the Regency Bill they had obtained but half of what they had desired. At the least Mary had hoped to secure for the king the free disposal of the army and the finances, and she had not been able so much as to ask for it. Compelled to rest contented with such advantages as had been secured, the court would not risk the results of further controversy by prolonging the session; and on the 16th of January, at four o'clock in the afternoon, the king and queen came to the House of Lords almost unattended, and with an evident expression of dissatisfaction dissolved the parliament.[437]

I have been particular in relating the proceedings of this parliament, because it marks the point where the flood tide of reaction ceased to ascend, and the ebb recommenced. From the beginning of the Reformation in 1529, two distinct movements had gone on side by side-the alteration of doctrines, and the emanc.i.p.ation of the laity from papal and ecclesiastical domination. With the first, the contemporaries of Henry VIII., the country gentlemen and the peers, who were the heads of families at the period of Mary's accession, had never sympathised; and the tyranny of the Protestants while they were in power had converted a disapproval which time would have overcome, into active and determined indignation. The papacy was a mixed question; the Pilgrims of Grace in 1536, and the Cornish rebels in 1549, had demanded the restoration of the spiritual primacy to the See of St. Peter, and Henry himself, until Pole and Paul III. called on Europe to unite in a crusade against him, had not determined wholly against some degree of concession. In the pope, as a sovereign who claimed reverence and tribute, who interfered with the laws of the land, and maintained at Rome a supreme court of appeal-who pretended a right to depose kings and absolve subjects from their allegiance-who held a weapon in excommunication as terrible to the laity as Premunire was terrible to ecclesiastics-in the pope under this aspect, only a few insignificant fanatics entertained any kind of interest.

But experience had proved that to a nation cut off from the centre of Catholic union, the maintenance of orthodoxy was impossible: the supremacy of the pope, therefore, came back as a tolerated feature in the return to the Catholic faith, and the ecclesiastical courts were reinstated in authority to check unlicensed extravagance of opinion. Their restored power, however, was over opinion only; wherever the pretensions of the church would come in collision with the political const.i.tution, wherever they menaced the independence of the temporal magistrate or the tenure of property, there the progress of restoration was checked by the rock, and could eat no further into the soil. The pope and the clergy recovered their t.i.tular rank, and in one direction unhappily they recovered the reality of power. But the temporal spoils of the struggle remained with the laity, and if the clergy lifted a hand to retake them, their weapons would be instantly wrenched from their grasp.

If the genuine friends of human freedom had acquiesced without resistance in this conclusion, if the n.o.bility had contented themselves with securing their worldly and political interests, and had made no effort to restrain or modify the exercise of the authority which they were giving back, they might be accused of having accepted a dishonourable compromise. But they did what they could. They worked with such legal means as were in their power, and for two parliaments they succeeded in keeping persecution at bay; they failed in the third, but failed only after a struggle. The Protestants themselves had created, by their own misconduct, the difficulty of defending them; and armed unconst.i.tutional resistance was an expedient to be resorted to, only when it had been seen how the clergy would conduct themselves. English statesmen may be pardoned if they did not antic.i.p.ate the pa.s.sions to which the guardians of orthodoxy were about to abandon themselves. Parliament had maintained the independence of the English courts of law. It had maintained the Premunire. It had forbidden the succession to be tampered with. If this was not everything, it was something-something which in the end would be the undoing of all the rest.

The court and the bishops, however, were for the present absolute in their own province. The persecuting acts were once more upon the Statute Book; and when the realities of the debates in parliament had disappeared, the cardinal and the queen could again give the rein to their imagination. They had called up a phantom out of its grave, and they persuaded themselves that they were witnessing the resurrection of the spirit of truth, that heresy was about to vanish from off the English soil, like an exhalation of the morning, at the brightness of the papal return. The chancellor and the clergy were springing at the leash like hounds with the game in view, fanaticism and revenge las.h.i.+ng them forward. If the temporal schemes of the court were thwarted, it was, perhaps, because Heaven desired that exclusive attention should be given first to the salvation of souls.

For all past political offences, therefore, there was now an amnesty, and such prisoners as remained unexecuted for Wyatt's conspiracy were released from the Tower on the 18th of January. On the 25th a hundred and sixty priests walked in procession through the London streets, chanting litanies, with eight bishops walking after them, and Bonner carrying the host. On the 28th the cardinal issued his first general instructions. The bishops were directed to call together their clergy in every diocese in England, and to inform them of the benevolent love of the Holy Father, and of the arrival of the legate with powers to absolve them from their guilt. They were to relate the acts of the late parliament, with the reconciliation and absolution of the Lords and Commons; and they were to give general notice that authority had been restored to the ecclesiastical courts, to proceed against the enemies of the faith, and punish them according to law.

A day was then to be fixed on which the clergy should appear with their confessions, and be received into the church. In the a.s.signment of their several penances, a distinction was to be made between those who had taught heresy and those who had merely lapsed into it.

When the clergy had been reconciled, they were again in turn to exhort the laity in all churches and cathedrals, to accept the grace which was offered to them; and that they might understand that they were not at liberty to refuse the invitation, a time was a.s.signed to them within which their submissions must be all completed. A book was to be kept in every diocese, where the names of those who were received were to be entered. A visitation was to be held throughout the country at the end of the spring, and all who had not complied before Easter day, or who, after compliance, "had returned to their vomit", would be proceeded against with the utmost severity of the law.[438]

The introduction of the Register was the Inquisition under another name. There was no limit, except in the humanity or the prudence of the bishops, to the tyranny which they would be enabled to exercise. The cardinal professed to desire that, before heretics were punished with death, mild means should first be tried with them;[439] the meaning which he attached to the words was ill.u.s.trated in an instant example.

The instructions were the signal for the bishops to commence business. On the day of their appearance, Gardiner, Bonner, Tunstal, and three other prelates, formed a court in St. Mary Overy's Church, in Southwark; and Hooper, and Rogers, a canon of St. Paul's, were brought up before them.

Rogers had been distinguished in the first bright days of Protestantism. He had been a fellow-labourer with Tyndal and Coverdale, at Antwerp, in the translation of the Bible. Afterwards, taking a German wife, he lived for a time at Wittenberg, not unknown, we may be sure, to Martin Luther. On the accession of Edward, he returned to England, and worked among the London clergy till the end of the reign; and on Mary's accession he was one of the preachers at Paul's Cross who had dared to speak against the reaction. He had been rebuked by the council, and his friends had urged him to fly; but, like Cranmer, he thought that duty required him to stay at his post, and, in due time, without, however, having given fresh provocation, he was shut up in Newgate by Bonner.

Hooper, when the unfortunate garment controversy was brought to an end, had shown by his conduct in his diocese that in one instance at least doctrinal fanaticism was compatible with the loftiest excellence. While the great world was scrambling for the church property, Hooper was found pet.i.tioning the council for leave to augment impoverished livings out of his own income.[440] In the hall of his palace at Gloucester a profuse hospitality was offered daily to those who were most in need of it. The poor of the city were invited by relays to solid meat dinners, and the bishop with the courtesy of a gentleman dined with them, and treated them with the same respect as if they had been the highest in the land. He was one of the first persons arrested after Mary's accession, and the cross of persecution at once happily made his peace with Ridley. In an affectionate interchange of letters, the two confessors exhorted each other to constancy in the end which both foresaw, determining "if they could not overthrow, at least, to shake those high alt.i.tudes" of spiritual tyranny.[441] The Fleet prison had now been Hooper's house for eighteen months. At first, on payment of heavy fees to the warden, he had lived in some degree of comfort; but as soon as his deprivation was declared, Gardiner ordered that he should be confined in one of the common prisoners' wards; where "with a wicked man and a wicked woman" for his companions, with a bed of straw and a rotten counterpane, the prison sink on one side of his cell and Fleet ditch on the other, he waited till it would please parliament to permit the dignitaries of the Church to murder him.[442]

These were the two persons with whom the Marian persecution opened. On their appearance in the court, they were required briefly to make their submission. They attempted to argue; but they were told that when parliament had determined a thing, private men were not to call it in question, and they were allowed twenty-four hours to make up their minds. As they were leaving the church Hooper was heard to say, "Come, brother Rogers, must we two take this matter first in hand and fry these f.a.ggots?" "Yea, sir, with G.o.d's grace," Rogers answered. "Doubt not," Hooper said, "but G.o.d will give us strength."

They were remanded to prison. The next morning they were brought again before the court. "The queen's mercy" was offered them, if they would recant; they refused, and they were sentenced to die. Rogers asked to be allowed to take leave of his wife and children. Gardiner, with a savage taunt, rejected the request. The day of execution was left uncertain. They were sent to Newgate to wait the queen's pleasure. On the 30th, Taylor of Hadley, Laurence Sandars, rector of All Hallows, and the ill.u.s.trious Bradford, were pa.s.sed through the same forms with the same results. Another, a notorious preacher, called Cardmaker, flinched, and made his submission.

Rogers was to "break the ice," as Bradford described it.[443] On the morning of the 4th of February the wife of the keeper of Newgate came to his bedside. He was sleeping soundly, and she woke him with difficulty to let him know that he was wanted. The Bishop of London was waiting, she said, to degrade him from the priesthood, and he was then to go out and die. Rubbing his eyes, and collecting himself, he hurried on his clothes. "If it be thus." he said, "I need not tie my points." Hooper had been sent for also for the ceremony of degradation. The vestments used in the ma.s.s were thrown over them, and were then one by one removed. They were p.r.o.nounced deposed from the priestly office, incapable of offering further sacrifice-except, indeed, the only acceptable sacrifice which man can ever offer, the sacrifice of himself. Again Rogers entreated permission to see his wife, and again he was refused.

The two friends were then parted. Hooper was to suffer at Gloucester, and returned to his cell; Rogers was committed to the sheriff, and led out to Smithfield. The Catholics had affected to sneer at the faith of their rivals. There was a general conviction among them, which was shared probably by Pole and Gardiner, that the Protestants would all flinch at the last; that they had no "doctrine that would abide the fire." When Rogers appeared, therefore, the exultation of the people in his constancy overpowered the horror of his fate, and he was received with rounds of cheers. His family, whom he was forbidden to part with in private, were waiting on the way to see him-his wife with nine little ones at her side and a tenth upon her breast-and they, too, welcomed him with hysterical cries of joy, as if he were on his way to a festival.[444] Sir Robert Rochester was in attendance at the stake to report his behaviour. At the last moment he was offered pardon if he would give way, but in vain. The fire was lighted. The suffering seemed to be nothing. He bathed his hands in the flame as "if it was cold water," raised his eyes to heaven, and died.

The same night a party of the royal guard took charge of Hooper, the order of whose execution was arranged by a mandate from the crown. As "an obstinate, false, and detestable heretic," he was to be burned in the city "which he had infected with his pernicious doctrines;" and "forasmuch as being a vainglorious person, and delighting in his tongue," he "might persuade the people into agreement with him, had he liberty to use it," care was to be taken that he should not speak either at the stake or on his way to it.[445] He was carried down on horseback by easy stages; and on the forenoon of Thursday, the 7th, he dined at Cirencester, "at a woman's house who had always hated the truth, and spoken all evil she could of him." This woman had shared in the opinion that Protestants had no serious convictions, and had often expressed her belief that Hooper, particularly, would fail if brought to the trial. She found that both in him and in his creed there was more than she had supposed; and "perceiving the cause of his coming, she lamented his case with tears, and showed him all the friends.h.i.+p she could."

At five in the evening he arrived at Gloucester. The road, for a mile outside the town, was lined with people, and the mayor was in attendance, with an escort, to prevent a rescue. But the feeling was rather of awe and expectation, and those who loved Hooper best knew that the highest service which he could render to his faith was to die for it.

A day's interval of preparation was allowed him, with a private room. He was in the custody of the sheriff; "and there was this difference observed between the keepers of the bishops' prisons and the keepers of the crown prisons, that the bishops' keepers were ever cruel; the keepers of the crown prisons showed, for the most part, such favour as they might."[446] After a sound night's rest, Hooper rose early, and pa.s.sed the morning in solitary prayer. In the course of the day, young Sir Anthony Kingston, one of the commissioners appointed to superintend the execution, expressed a wish to see him. Kingston was an old acquaintance, Hooper having been the means of bringing him out of evil ways. He entered the room unannounced. Hooper was on his knees, and, looking round at the intruder, did not at first know him. Kingston told him his name, and then, bursting into tears, said:-

"Oh, consider; life is sweet and death is bitter; therefore, seeing life may be had, desire to live, for life hereafter may do good."

Hooper answered:-

"I thank you for your counsel, yet it is not so friendly as I could have wished it to be. True it is, alas! Master Kingston, that death is bitter and life is sweet; therefore I have settled myself, through the strength of G.o.d's Holy Spirit, patiently to pa.s.s through the fire prepared for me, desiring you and others to commend me to G.o.d's mercy in your prayers."

"Well, my Lord," said Kingston, "then there is no remedy, and I will take my leave. I thank G.o.d that ever I knew you, for G.o.d appointed you to call me, being a lost child. I was both an adulterer and a fornicator, and G.o.d, by your good instruction, brought me to the forsaking of the same."

They parted, the tears on both their faces. Other friends were admitted afterwards. The queen's orders were little thought of, for Hooper had won the hearts of the guard on his way from London. In the evening the mayor and aldermen came, with the sheriffs, to shake hands with him. "It was a sign of their good will," he said, "and a proof that they had not forgotten the lessons which he used to teach them." He begged the sheriffs that there might be "a quick fire, to make an end shortly;" and for himself he would be as obedient as they could wish.

"If you think I do amiss in anything," he said, "hold up your fingers, and I have done; for I am not come hither as one enforced or compelled to die; I might have had my life, as is well known, with worldly gain, if I would have accounted my doctrine falsehood and heresy."

In the evening, at his own request, he was left alone. He slept undisturbed the early part of the night. From the time that he awoke till the guard entered, he was on his knees.

The morning was windy and wet. The scene of the execution was an open s.p.a.ce opposite the college, near a large elm tree, where Hooper had been accustomed to preach. Several thousand people were collected to see him suffer; some had climbed the tree, and were seated in the storm and rain among the leafless branches. A company of priests were in a room over the college gates, looking out with pity or satisfaction, as G.o.d or the devil was in their hearts.

"Alas!" said Hooper, when he was brought out, "why be all these people a.s.sembled here, and speech is prohibited me?" He had suffered in prison from sciatica, and was lame, but he limped cheerfully along with a stick, and smiled when he saw the stake. At the foot of it he knelt; and as he began to pray, a box was brought, and placed on a stool before his eyes, which he was told contained his pardon if he would recant.

"Away with it;" Hooper only cried; "away with it!"

"Despatch him, then," Lord Chandos said, "seeing there is no remedy."

He was undressed to his s.h.i.+rt, in the cold; a pound of gunpowder was tied between his legs, and as much more under either arm; he was fastened with an iron hoop to the stake, and he a.s.sisted with his own hands to arrange the f.a.ggots round him.

The fire was then brought, but the wood was green; the dry straw only kindled, and burning for a few moments was blown away by the wind. A violent flame paralysed the nerves at once, a slow one was torture. More f.a.ggots were thrown in, and again lighted, and this time the martyr's face was singed and scorched; but again the flames sank, and the hot damp sticks smouldered round his legs. He wiped his eyes with his hands, and cried, "For G.o.d's love, good people, let me have more fire!" A third supply of dry fuel was laid about him, and this time the powder exploded, but it had been ill placed, or was not enough. "Lord Jesu, have mercy on me!" he exclaimed; "Lord Jesu, receive my spirit!" These were his last articulate words; but his lips were long seen to move, and he continued to beat his breast with his hands. It was not till after three-quarters of an hour of torment that he at last expired.

The same day, at the same hour, Rowland Taylor was burnt on Aldham Common, in Suffolk. Laurance Sandars had been destroyed the day before at Coventry, kissing the stake, and crying, "Welcome the cross of Christ! welcome everlasting life!" The first-fruits of the Whitehall pageant were gathered. By the side of the rhetoric of the hysterical dreamer who presided in that vain melodrama, let me place a few words addressed by the murdered Bishop of Gloucester to his friends, a week before his sentence.

"The grace of G.o.d be with you, amen. I did write unto you of late, and told you what extremity the parliament had concluded upon concerning religion, suppressing the truth, and setting forth the untruth; intending to cause all men, by extremity, to forswear themselves; and to take again for the head of the church him that is neither head nor member of it, but a very enemy, as the word of G.o.d and all ancient writers do record. And for lack of law and authority they will use force and extremity, which have been the arguments to defend the pope and popery since their authority first began in the world. But now is the time of trial, to see whether we fear more G.o.d or man. It was an easy thing to hold with Christ whilst the prince and the world held with him; but now the world hateth him, it is the true trial who be his.

"Wherefore in the name, and in the virtue, strength, and power of his Holy Spirit, prepare yourselves in any case to adversity and constancy. Let us not run away when it is most time to fight. Remember, none shall be crowned but such as fight manfully; and he that endureth to the end shall be saved. Ye must now turn your cogitations from the perils you see, and mark the felicity that followeth the peril-either victory in this world of your enemies, or else a surrender of this life to inherit the everlasting kingdom. Beware of beholding too much the felicity or misery of this world; for the consideration and too earnest love or fear of either of them draweth from G.o.d. Wherefore think with yourselves as touching the felicity of the world, it is good; but none otherwise than it standeth with the favour of G.o.d; it is to be kept, but yet so far forth as by keeping it we lose not G.o.d. It is good abiding and tarrying still among our friends here, but yet so that we tarry not therewithal in G.o.d's displeasure, and hereafter dwell with the devils in fire everlasting. There is nothing under G.o.d but may be kept, so that G.o.d, being above all things we have, be not lost. Of adversity judge the same. Imprisonment is painful, but yet liberty upon evil conditions is more painful. The prisons stink; but yet not so much as sweet houses, where the fear and true honour of G.o.d lack. I must be alone and solitary; it is better so to be, and have G.o.d with me, than to be in company with the wicked. Loss of goods is great, but loss of G.o.d's grace and favour is greater. I am a poor simple creature, and cannot tell how to answer before such a great sort of n.o.ble, learned, and wise men. It is better to make answer before the pomp and pride of wicked men, than to stand naked, in the sight of all heaven and earth, before the just G.o.d at the latter day. I shall die by the hands of the cruel men; but he is blessed that loseth this life full of miseries, and findeth the life of eternal joys. It is pain and grief to depart from goods and friends; but yet not so much as to depart from grace and heaven itself. Wherefore there is neither felicity nor adversity of this world that can appear to be great, if it be weighed with the joys or pains in the world to come."[447]

Of five who had been sentenced, four were thus despatched. Bradford, the fifth, was respited, in the hope that the example might tell upon him. Six more were waiting their condemnation in Bonner's prisons. The enemies of the church were to submit or die. So said Gardiner, in the name of the English priesthood, with the pa.s.sion of a fierce revenge. So said the legate and the queen, in the delirious belief that they were chosen instruments of Providence.

So, however, did not say the English lay statesmen. The first and unexpected effect was to produce a difference of opinion in the court itself. Philip, to whom Renard had insisted on the necessity of more moderate measures, found it necessary to clear himself of responsibility; and the day after Hooper suffered, Alphonso a Castro, the king's chaplain, preached a sermon in the royal presence, in which he denounced the execution, and inveighed against the tyranny of the bishops. The Lords of the Council "talked strangely;" and so deep was the indignation, that the Flemish amba.s.sador again expected Gardiner's destruction. Paget refused to act with him in the council any more, and Philip himself talked more and more of going abroad. Renard, from the tone of his correspondence, believed evidently at this moment that the game of the church was played out and lost. He wrote to the emperor to entreat that when the king went he might not himself be left behind; he was held responsible by the people for the queen's misdoings; and a party of the young n.o.bility had sworn to kill him.[448]

Among the people the constancy of the martyrs had called out a burst of admiration. It was rumoured that bystanders had endeavoured to throw themselves into the fire to die at their side.[449] A prisoner, on examination before Bonner, was asked if he thought he could bear the flame. You may try me, if you will, he said. A candle was brought, and he held his hand, without flinching, in the blaze.[450] With such a humour abroad, it seemed to Renard that the Lords had only to give the signal, and the queen and the bishops would be overwhelmed.

He expected the movement in the spring. It is singular that, precisely as in the preceding winter, the deliberate intentions of moderate and competent persons were antic.i.p.ated and defeated by a partial and premature conspiracy. At the end of February a confederate revealed a project for an insurrection, partly religious and partly agrarian. Placards were to be issued simultaneously in all parts of the country, declaring that the queen's pregnancy was a delusion, and that she intended to pa.s.s upon the nation a supposit.i.tious child; the people were, therefore, invited to rise in arms, drive out the Spaniards, revolutionise religion, tear down the enclosures of the commons, and proclaim Courtenay king under the t.i.tle of Edward VII.[451] In such a scheme the lords and country gentlemen could bear no part. They could not risk a repet.i.tion of the popular rebellions of the late reign, and they resolved to wait the issue of the queen's pregnancy, while they watched over the safety of Elizabeth. The project of the court was now to send her to Flanders, where she was to remain under charge of the emperor; if possible, she was to be persuaded to go thither of her own accord; if she could not be persuaded, she would be otherwise removed. Lord William Howard, her constant guardian, requested permission to see and speak with her, and learn her own feelings. He was refused; but he went to her notwithstanding, and had a long private interview with her; and the court could only talk bitterly of his treason among themselves, make propositions to send him to the Tower which they durst not execute, and devise some other method of dealing with their difficulty.[452]

Meantime, Philip, who had pined for freedom after six weeks' experience of his bride, was becoming unmanageably impatient. A paper of advice and exhortation survives, which was addressed on this occasion by the amba.s.sador to his master, with reflections on the condition of England, and on the conduct which the king should pursue.

"Your majesty must remember," said Renard, "the purpose for which you came to England. The French had secured the Queen of Scotland for the Dauphin. They had afterwards made an alliance with the late king, and spared no pains to secure the support of England. To counteract their schemes, and to obtain a counter advantage in the war, the emperor, on the accession of the queen, resolved that your highness should marry her. Your highness, it is true, might wish that she was more agreeable;[453] but, on the other hand, she is infinitely virtuous, and, things being as they are, your highness, like a magnanimous prince, must remember her condition, and exert yourself, so far as you conveniently may, to a.s.sist her in the management of the kingdom.

"Your highness must consider that your departure will be misrepresented, your enemies will speak of it as a flight rather than as a necessary absence. The French will be busy with their intrigues, and the queen will not be pleased to lose you. The administration is in confusion, the divisions in the council are more violent than ever. Religion is unsettled; the heretics take advantage of these late barbarous punishments to say, that they are to be converted by fire, because their enemies are unable to convince them by reason or example. The orthodox clergy are still unreformed, and their scandalous conduct accords ill with the offices to which they are called.[454]

"Further, your highness will do well to weigh the uncertainty of the succession. Should the queen's pregnancy prove a mistake, the heretics will place their hopes in Elizabeth: and here you are in a difficulty whatever be done; for if Elizabeth be set aside, the crown will go to the Queen of Scots; if she succeed, she will restore heresy, and naturally attach herself to France. Some step must be taken about this before you leave the country; and you must satisfy the queen that you will a.s.sist her in her general difficulties, as a good lord and husband ought to do.[455]

"The council must be reformed, if possible, and the number diminished; those who remain must be invited to renew their oaths to your majesty. Regard must be had to the navy, and especially to the admiral Lord William Howard; and above all there must be no more of this barbarous precipitancy in putting heretics to death. The people must be won from their errors by gentleness and by better instruction. Except in cases of especial scandal, the bishops must not be permitted to irritate them by cruelty, and the legate must see that a better example is set by the clergy themselves.[456] The debts of the crown must be attended to; and your majesty should endeavour to do something which will give you popularity with the ma.s.ses. Before all things, attend to the succession.