had been harshly used during her brother's life, on account of her religion. She had been little better than a state prisoner for some years; and she knew that the Protestant leaders would, if possible, exclude her from the throne. The attempt to place the crown on the head of Jane Grey was a stroke aimed against her rights, her honour, and perhaps her life. Before Jane was proclaimed, a guard was on its way to seize upon her person at Hunsdon. She was branded as illegitimate in the late king's will; and those who had no sympathies with lady Jane, made no secret of their preference or Anne Boleyn's daughter, the lady Elizabeth. All this was irritating; yet all this she seemed ready to forgive. When she entered London in triumph, Elizabeth rode by her side; and when they met, she had embraced her younger sister, and even her ladies, with apparent, perhaps with real, affection. She wished that no severity should mark the beginning of her reign. Lady Jane Grey, she said, was but a girl, an instrument in the hands of others. It would be a shame to punish her for a treason of which she was innocent. Even old Northumberland might, she thought, be spared; and all his adherents, now that their cause was so utterly hopeless, might be forgiven. She was even prepared to grant toleration to her Protestant subjects. Had she governed upon the principles she prescribed for herself during the first few days of her reign, it may be doubtful whether England would have been so thoroughly Protestant as it became under Elizabeth, but her name would have descended to us as one of the most beneficent of English kings. For the One fatal delusion blighted all. Mary was not merely a Roman Catholic, she was a Papist. Mr. Froude cautions his readers to mark the distinction; and it is one of great importance in English history. England, Roman Catholic for centuries, was never Papal. The priesthood were often Papists, but not the people. priesthood were governed by Italian mercenaries, harpies sent from Rome, as often as the pope could force them on a vacant bishopric and a reluctant sovereign. But for ages before the Reformation, the statute book shows not only a constant determination to resist the secular interference of the Roman see, but a constitutional protest, never intermitted, against all its claims except those of a spiritual character. Her brother's funeral first aroused those suspicions in her subjects which soon deepened into hatred. Edward should be buried in Westminster Abbey with the pompous rites of Romanism, with processions, dirge, and masses for the salvation of his soul. Renard, the representative of Charles V., was now in London, the queen's confidential adviser; he saw her rashness, and entreated her to proceed with caution. He wrote upon the subject in haste to his royal master, who hurried to repeat the cautions of his ambassador. The late king's coffin remained aboveground for several weeks; Mary the while unwilling to yield the point, yet evidently afraid of the consequences. Her soul's health, and her regard for her brother's soul, were above all other considerations; she would sacrifice her crown, her life, she said, but not her conscience. Renard suggested a happy compromise: Edward had died a heretic; let him be buried with the Protestant rites at Westminster, and let mass be said for the repose of his soul, before the court, in the chapel at the Tower. A reluctant consent was given, and the last office Cranmer performed as archbishop of Canterbury, was to commit the body of his sainted master to the tomb, "ashes to ashes, dust to dust." The confidence of the people was deeply shaken. We cannot understand how Mr. Froude reconciles the facts which he himself relates, and which are but a few out of those which may be seen in Foxe and other contemporary writers, with the assertion he repeats so often and with so much dogmatism, that Popery or the secular claims of the court of Rome apart, England was indifferent about the Reformation. He admits that even in the first weeks of her reign, and before the execution of lady Jane Grey-a date from which the tenderness of the people revived, and with it their affection for the Protestantism so nobly represented in her person, -it was already dangerous to preach openly in favour of the mass. Even the yeomen of the guard within the Tower, he tells us, "uttered angry murmurs and curses " against Gardiner, the bishop of Winchester, for daring to chant the mass for the dead on the day of king Edward's funeral; and Renard trembled for the consequences. Elizabeth had been requested to attend the service, and had refused. "Noailles, the French ambassador, anticipated a civil war. Twenty thousand men, he said, would lose their lives before England would be cured of heresy. Yet Mary had made a beginning, and as she had begun, she was resolved that others. should continue." (p. 59.) Here, at least, was no question of papal supremacy. The queen had merely returned to the state of things which existed in her father's later days. She was, like him, the head of the church, and it was not known with what impatience she bore the title which her father had assumed, nor that she had secretly resolved to abjure it. Yet her own body guard, in her own palace, salute her own bishop, when he reads the mass in her royal presence, with angry murmurs and curses. This was on the sixth of August. On the next Sunday the following scene occurs. We are familiar with it; but we give it once more in Mr. Froude's own words: "On Sunday the 13th, another priest was attacked at the altar; the vestments were torn from his back, and the chalice snatched from his hands. Bourne, whom the queen had appointed her chaplain, preached at St. Paul's Cross. A crowd of refugees and English fanatics had collected round the pulpit; and when he spoke something in praise of Bonner, and said that he had been unjustly imprisoned, yells arose of 'Papist ! Papist! Tear him down!' A dagger was hurled at the preacher; swords were drawn; the mayor attempted to interfere, but he could not make his way through the dense mass of the rioters; and Bourne would have paid for his rashness with his life, had not Courtenay, who was a popular favourite, with his mother the Marchioness of Exeter, thrown themselves on the pulpit steps, while Bradford sprang to his side, and kept the people back till he could be carried off. "But the danger did not end there. The Protestant orators sounded the alarm through London. Meetings were held, and inflammatory placards were scattered about the streets. If religion was to be tampered with, men were heard to say, it was better at once to fetch Northumberland from the Tower." (p. 61.) Yet a month afterwards the popular feeling, we are told, except in London and a few large towns, was with the queen. The proof does not appear to us to bear out the conclusion. It is inferred, from "the eagerness with which the country generally availed itself of the permission to restore the catholic ritual." Surely this, admitting the statement to be correct, proves nothing beyond the power of the parochial clergy, who, up to this time, we know, and indeed long afterwards, were in general the old "mass-priests," devoted creatures of Rome. But Mr. Froude proceeds to maintain that "except in London and the large towns, the numerical majority among the people did desire a celibate priesthood, the ceremony which the custom of centuries had sanctified, and the ancient faith of their fathers, as reformed by Henry the Eighth." If so, how does he explain the anxiety of Renard? how the alarm of Noailles? neither of whom had the slightest interest in the question of papal supremacy; and were glad, indeed, that the pope should be kept at bay? The truth is, that the seething pot which the prophet saw, describes the condition of England. The sleep of ages had been disturbed; there was an universal ferment; a few, no doubt, desired to return to the old state of things; but all the intelligence of England, with rare exceptions, was already in favour of further progress and of the Reformation. Every event of this miserable reign shows the direction which public opinion had already taken. For many years the cauldron was sometimes at rest, sometimes bubbling up, and boiling over; for "her scum was in her;" the scum of a popish faction; now spread over the surface, now settling on the lees. A careless observer might at times have thought the agitation over, when in truth it had but just begun. Mary was one of that herd of common minds who must have an adviser; an adviser who becomes a tyrant because he has to deal with a slavish soul. Invariably the advisers of such persons are men of but little principle; for the insolent freaks, the senseless pertinacity, the not unfrequent outbursts of jealousy and other bad tempers in the pupil drive the wise and good from their counsels. Mary had three such tyrants: Renard in politics, Pole in theology, Gardiner in the lower details of conscience and domestic life. We are willing to take the most favourable view of her character; we are willing to allow that in some of the worst actions of her life she was what these men made her. Renard was devoted to the interests of Spain and of the emperor. For England he had no regard whatever, and can scarcely be said to have pretended any; though of course he professed the warmest interest in the happiness of the queen. This, he persuaded her, without much difficulty, would never be complete until she were married, and no marriage could become a person of her high condition so well as one with the son of an emperor. The bait was eagerly taken; but from that moment, all that remained of the confidence of her subjects was lost. The queen would have pardoned the conspirators; or at least the youthful pair whose tragical fate has ever since been mourned with a deep and universal sorrow such as no other event in history has produced. Renard insisted that they must die; of course he was immediately obeyed. Elizabeth was young and handsome, and she shared, in no small measure, the favour of the people. Renard suggested that she too must be disposed of; and the unnatural sister was brought to listen without horror to the policy of having her rival assassinated. But the utmost caution must be used, and it was soon necessary to restrain the queen's impetuosity; and Renard wrote to inform his royal master that Mary "had arrived at a fixed conviction that Elizabeth, without she could be first disposed of, would be a cause of infinite calamity to the realm." The princess, alarmed by the insults she received at court, by the whispers repeated in her ear, and by other intimations, asked permission to retire into the country; it was granted; and the queen took leave of her with an appearance of affection so well counterfeited, that Renard thought it worthy of being chronicled in his report to the emperor. But she surrounded her with spies; and her hatred was in no wise abated when she was told that five hundred gentlemen formed a voluntary escort for her as she left London. At present, however, her execution was too impolitic a measure. All these events occurred in the year 1553, before queen Mary had been six months upon her throne. Never, perhaps, did a sovereign contrive to throw away the affections of her subjects so fatally and yet so fast. Never did woman sink more rapidly from decorum and seeming gentleness, to become, while time shall last, the standing type and representative of all that is base, and merciless, and cruel. Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, was the second evil genius of the queen. Mr. Froude describes him as the "incarnate expression of the fury of the ecclesiastical faction." He had been a persecutor long ago. He was Henry the Eighth's lord high chancellor in 1545, when he threw off his gown, and with his own hands tore the lovely and high-born Anne Askew on the rack, before he dismissed her to the more merciful fires of Smithfield.* He knew Foxe has mentioned. Nothing is so serviceable to the cause of truth as a round denial. We recommend our readers, if they still doubt the story, to read a pamphlet of fourteen pages, just issued, of *The charge is so horrible, that we can forgive Dr. Lingard and many others for denying it, though not for charging Foxe with having forged the story. It is perfectly true, with all the aggravations that he was hated by the people; he wore armour under his clerical apparel, and took other measures to guard himself against their vengeance. Some of the most nefarious acts of Mary are to be traced directly to this man's suggestions. He would emancipate the church; he would extinguish heresy with fire and sword; he would establish the Inquisition in England. While the wily Renard still cautioned moderation, he urged the immediate destruction of Elizabeth. In opposition to the lords of the council, he carried one point, and had her committed to the Tower: "The terrible name of the Tower was like a death-knell. The princess entreated a short delay, till she could write a few words to the queen: the queen could not know the truth, she said, or else she was played upon by Gardiner. Alas! she did not know the queen: Winchester hesitated; Lord Sussex, more generous, accepted the risk, and promised on his knees to place her letter in the queen's hands. "The very lines traced by Elizabeth in that bitter moment may still be read in the State Paper Office, and her hand was more than usually firm." (p. 206.) Her letter was fruitless, and to the Tower she was carried on Palm Sunday, March, 1554, on the unproved and, as it soon appeared, false charge of having instigated Wyatt's late rebellion. They dare not carry Elizabeth through the city; and when this piece of information and her sister's letter were laid before Mary, she answered by a burst of rage, storming at the bearer and his friends in the council: "she wished her father was alive, and once more amongst them." Gardiner and Renard now both urged despatch in bringing Elizabeth to trial; but they were unsupported; the scheme was too monstrous to be undertaken. Gardiner, then, would send her to Pomfret Castle, where one monarch had perished in times past. The suggestion was significant; but the council again wanted courage, or wanted baseness. Gardiner, as a last resource, would at least disinherit her. But here again he failed: the lords of the council would not introduce his bill to parliament. Exasperated by opposition, he consoled himself with cruelty. He introduced and carried a bill reviving the horrible statute for burning heretics, but only through the house of commons. After awhile his efforts were more successful; the lords consented; and the persecuting acts, which Henry VIII. and Edward had repealed, appeared once more on the statute books. The persecutions which have made 1555 a year of horrors were now about to commence; and the character of Gardiner stands out in its darkest shades. In the reign of Henry he had shown himself an indifferent subject of the pope. He had acknowledged the king to be the head of the church; he had justified his marriage which we give the full title, and they will doubt no more. The Racking of Anne Askew. Extracted from the Notes to "Narratives of the Reformation." Edited for the Camden Society, by John |