MARRIAGE OF MARY AND PHILIP.

possession of the Church property, on condition that the Papal supremacy was restored. The queen dispatched Sir Edward Hastings to accompany the cardinal; and Sir William Cecil, who had been Edward's unhesitating minister in stripping the Church, set out of his own accord to pay homage to the Papal representative. Cecil's only real religion was ambition, and Mary knew that so well that, spite of all his time-serving, she never would place any confidence in him, whence his bitter hostility to her memory.

the Thames from Pole, on his arrival, ascended Greenwich in a splendid state barge, at the prow of which he fixed a large silver cross, thus marking the entrance of the legatine and Papal authority into the country, as it were, in a triumphal manner.

the reign of Henry VIII., and exhorting all now to do as he had done, and make reparation for their apostacy by seeking the unity of the Church.

Parliament proceeded to pass acts confirming all that was now done, repealing all the statutes which had passed against the Roman Church since the 20th of Henry VIII., and the clergy in Convocation making formal resignation of the possessions which had passed into the hands of laymen. The legate also issued decrees authorising all cathedral churches, hospitals, and schools, founded since the schism, to be preserved, and that all persons who had contracted marriages within prescribed degrees should remain married notwithstanding.

The Christmas of 1554 was celebrated with unusual Gardiner, the chancellor, received him at the Water- splendour and gaiety. The wedding festivities of the gate; King Philip at the grand entrance, and the queen had been cut short by the death of Norfolk, and queen at the head of the stairs, where she exclaimed it was intended to make these a sort of reparation to on seeing him, "The day that I ascended the throne the pleasure-loving courtiers. The queen and the I did not feel such joy." His arrival was celebrated Princess Elizabeth being reconciled, that lady was by grand banquetings and a tournament, at which the English and Spanish nobles contended, with King Philip at their head. In this tournament the Spaniards introduced a novelty- the Moorish game of throwing the jeered, or cane.

The cardinal had assigned him for his residence the archiepiscopal palace at Lambeth, vacant by the imprisonment of the primate; and thus was the old faith placed in the ascendancy, its highest representative in this country occupying the official residence of the reforming metropolitan.

present and treated with all distinction by both the king and queen. It was a popular idea that Philip was anxious to send Elizabeth to Spain and have her consigned to some convent there, but Philip was too politic for that. He had no children by his English queen, though there were confident expectations of that kind, and till he was secure of an English heir, it was his policy to maintain Elizabeth in the position of the heir-apparent, as a set off to the Queen of Scots, who was about to be married to the heir of the French throne.

On the 24th of November the king and queen met Besides Elizabeth, there were now assembled at the the united Parliament in the presence-chamber of the English Court a number of persons destined to fill the palace of Whitehall: this was owing to the indisposition most prominent places in the history of Europe, for good of the queen. Gardiner introduced the business, which, as for evil. There was the Duke of Alva, veiling under he told them, was the weightiest that ever happened in the graces of a fine person one of the most cruel and this realm, and begged their utmost attention to Cardi- dangerous spirits which ever exercised its malignant nal Pole, who would open the same. Pole then made force on human destinies. There were two, also, of a long speech, reverting to his own history as well the celebrated victims of Philip and Alva-the Counts as that of the nation. All listened in solemn serious-Egmont and Horne, the patriots of Flanders, who shed ness and yet apprehension when he announced to them their blood on the scaffold for defending their country the fact that the Pope was ready to absolve the English against the tyranny of this king and this his minister. from their crimes of heresy and contumacy. But when There was Ruy Gomez, the future famous prime he added that this was to be done without any re- minister of Spain; Philibert Emanuel of Savoy, the clamation of the Church lands, there was a unanimous lover of Elizabeth and conqueror of St. Quintin; and vote of both Houses for reconciliation with Rome. the Prince of Orange, calmly mixing with the festive throng, unconscious that it was his high destiny to pluck oppressed Holland from the iron grasp of this same Philip. So closed, in a blaze of brief splendour, the year 1554.

The next morning, the king, queen, and Parliament met again in the presence-chamber, when, Pole presenting himself, Philip and Mary rose, and bowing profoundly to him, presented him with the vote of Parliament. The cardinal, on receiving it, offered up thanks to God for this auspicious event, and then ordered his commission to be read. The Peers and Commons then fell on their knees and received absolution and benediction from the hands of the cardinal, and thus for a time again was the great breach betwixt England and the Papacy healed, or rather skinned over. The whole assembly, including their majesties, proceeded to St. Stephen's Chapel, where "Te Deum" was sung, and the next Sunday the legate made his public entry into London, and he and Philip attended at St. Paul's Cross, where Gardiner preached, making great lamentation over his own backslidings and those of the nation in

To Mary the honour is due of concluding, early in the following year, the first commercial treaty with Russia. She sent Chancellor, the northern explorer, on an embassy to the Czar Iwan Wasiljevitch, who brought back with him Osep Napea Gregorivitch as the first Russian ambassador who ever appeared in England. She incorporated by charter the company of merchant adventurers trading to Muscovy. Napea was received with great distinction by Mary at Court, in May, 1555, and astonished the courtiers by the enormous size of the pearls and gems on his cap, and the ouches which he wore on his robes.

The year 1555 opened with dark and threatening feu

A.D. 1555.]

UNION WITH ROME CONSUMMATED.

373

accompanied by several members of the Council, went to the Tower, and by royal authority, and, as he said, at the intercession of the emperor, liberated the state prisoners confined there on account of their participaconsequently, tion in the attempts of Northumberland and Wyatt. These were Holgate, Archbishop of York, Ambrose, Henry, and Andrew Dudley, sons to the late Duke of Northumberland, Sir James Crofts, and Sir Nicholas Throckmorton. Courtenay, who had been liberated from Fotheringay, received a permission to travel, a permission believed to be tantamount to a command. Indeed, the presence of this handsome but contemptible man could not be pleasant to himself or any one else at the

tures. The queen's health was failing; and, under the
idea that she was merely suffering maternal incon-
venience, she was rapidly advancing in a dropsy which,
in less than two years, was destined to sink her to the
tomb. The king, gloomy, despotic, and,
unpopular, though he often endeavoured to act against
his nature, and assume a popular character, still hoping
for an heir to the English crown, had obtained from
Parliament an act constituting him regent, in case
Mary should die after the birth of a child, during the
minority of that child. Thus, whether the queen lived
or died, he appeared to possess a reasonable prospect of
obtaining the supreme power in this country; and how
he would have used it, we may judge from

ment of Spain and the Netherlands. If the English Court. He had shown himself cowardly, dis

sipated, and ungrateful. He had rebelled in his heart, female he was made governor t till her fifteenth year; if if not by any daring act, against Mary, who liberated a male, till his eighteenth year. Philip protested on his him from a life-long prison. He had entered into those lped ben soup todt bor sortentus berg oft

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100

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honour that he would give up the government faithfully designs with Elizabeth which must make his presence when the child T hild came of age; but Lord Paget asked a continual reproach to her, and he had not strength "who was to sue the the bond i if he did not?"—a sugge a sugges-of character to grow wiser or better by experience. tion never forgiven. With this flattering but illusive He appears to have continued his life of low debauch prospect before him, the tempest of persecution soon on the Continent, and died at Padua in 1556, leaving burst forth; and, had Providence permitted, England the titles of Earl of Devon extinct in the Courtenay would soon have exhibited the same scene e same scene of tyranny, family, for nearly three centuries, bloodshed, and insult which Flanders didd under his rule. As it was, for a short period, terrible war for conscience' sake burst forth, the prisons were thronged, and the fires of death blazed out in every quarter of the island.Mary, wa failing g health, and doting absurdly on her husband, was easily drawn to acquiesce in deeds and measures which have made her name a terror and a byword to all future times.

One little gleam of mercy and magnanimity préceded this reign of horror, like the streak of red in the morning sky which often heralds a tempestuous day. Gardiner,

In February, the Viscount Montague, the Bishop of Ely, and Sir Edward Carne, were dispatched to Rome to ratify the union which had taken place betwixt England and the Papal Court. Two Popes died whilst they were on their journey, Julius III. and Marcellus II.; and Paul IV. was elected just before their arrival, Cardinal Pole having on both occasions been an unsuccessful candidate for the tiara. Paul received the ambassadors, naturally, with much pleasure. At the petition of Philip and Mary, he raised the lordship of Ireland to the dignity of a kingdom. The ambas

sadors, on their part, recognised the Pontiff as the head curred by the half-dead queen, what is the due of the of the universal Church, presented him a copy of the Parliaments which legalised the acts of cruelty comAct by which his authority was restored in England, mitted in her name? Shall we call the House of Lords and obtained his ratification of the acts of his legate, bigoted, when its majority, which sanctioned this wickedgranting absolution to all for the offence of the schism, ness, were composed of the same individuals who had and confirming the bishoprics created during that period. planted, very recently, the Protestant Church of EngWhilst the ambassadors were thus cementing again land? Surely not; for the name implies honest though the ancient alliance at Rome, the Spanish rule in Eng-wrong-headed attachment to one religion. Shall we land was growing every day more unpopular. Few of suppose that the land groaned under the iron sway of the Spaniards as had been allowed to remain, the Eng- a standing army? or that the Spanish bridegroom had lish saw them with unconquerable aversion. They could introduced foreign forces? But reference to facts will not pass them in the streets without insulting them. prove that even Philip's household servants were sent These fracas became so frequent and violent, and the back with his fleet, and a few valets, fools, and fiddlers English had such a positive notion that Philip meant belonging to the grandees, his bridesmen, were all the to bring this country under Spanish rule, that he was forces permitted to land-no very formidable band to obliged to try and hang a Spaniard who had killed an Englishmen. The queen had kept her word rigorously Englishman at Charing Cross. The people were ready when she asserted that no alteration should be made to listen to any story which confirmed this idea, or in religion without universal consent.' which promised to unsettle the Government, and amongst other projects there was one of the Simnel and Warbeck class, though a very threadbare one.

A youth appeared in Kent, who gave himself out as Edward VI., who, he declared, had only been in a trance, and not actually dead, and had been recovered from the tomb. The story, improbable as it was, soon flew far and wide amongst the people, and reaching the ears of the Council, excited so much apprehension, that the lad was seized at Eltham, and conducted to Hampton Court. He there confessed that he had been put upon this scheme, and he was sent in a cart through London with a paper over his head, stating that he was the impostor who had pretended to be King Edward. He was then conveyed to Westminster, exhibited in the hall, and afterwards whipped at a cart's tail back through the streets of London, and then sent off into the north, whence, it seems, he came. Being afterwards found rambling about and repeating the same tale, he was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn, in the following year.

"Three times in two years had she sent the House of Commons back to their constituents, although they were most compliant in any measure relative to her religion. If she had bribed one Parliament, why did she not keep it sitting during her short reign? If the Parliament had been honest as herself, her reign would have been the pride of her country, instead of its reproach; because if they had done their duty in guarding their fellow-creatures from bloody penal laws respecting religion, the queen, by her frst regal act in restoring the free constitution of the great Plantagenets, had put it out of the power of her Government to take furtive vengeance on any individual who opposed it. She had exerted all the energies of her great eloquence to impress on the minds of her judges that they were to sit as indifferent umpires between herself and her people.' She had no standing army to awe Parliament -no rich civil list to bribe them. By restoring the great estates of the Howards, the Percys, and many other victims of Henry VIII., and of the regency of Edward VI., by giving back the revenues of the plundered bishoprics and the Church lands possessed by the Crown, she had reduced herself to poverty as complete as the most enthusiastic lover of freedom could desire. But her personal expenditure was extremely economical, and she successfully struggled with poverty till her husband involved England in a French war. The French ambassador affirmed in his despatches that the queen was "Noailles expressly assured his sovereign, the King so very poor that her want of money was apparent of France, that it was of little use appealing to Queen in everything pertaining to herself, even to the dishes Mary as an independent sovereign; for from the day put upon her own table. Such self-denial contributed of her marriage, Philip of Spain ruled virtually in every to render her unpopular among her courtiers, and penumeasure, domestic or foreign, in the kingdom of Eng-riousness has been added to the list of her ill qualities; land. but those who reckon up the vast sums she had restored to their rightful owners, or refused to appropriate in confiscation, will allow that hers was an honourable poverty.

Before launching into the horrors that are now before us, we will quote the observations of Miss Strickland in her life of Queen Mary, because they take a view of the character of Mary, and of the real origin of the persecutions of her reign, different from the general estimate, and, at all events, deserving of being heard.

The bishops received notice to make processions and prayers for the life and safety of the heir to the throne, of which the queen expected to become mother.

"It is true that her hope of bringing offspring was utterly delusive; the increase of her figure was but symptomatic of dropsy, attended by a complication of the most dreadful disorders which can afflict the female frame, under which every faculty of her mind and body sank for months. At this time commenced that horrible persecution of the Protestants which has stained her namo to all futurity; but if eternal obloquy was in

"The fact of whether the torpid and half-dead queen was the instigator of a persecution the memory of which curdles the blood with horror, at this distance of time, is a question of less moral import at the present day than a close analysation of the evils with which selfish interests had infected the legislative powers of our country. It was in vain that Mary almost abstained from creation of peers, and restored the ancient custom

A.D. 1555.]

MARTYRDOM OF JOHN ROGERS.

375

in the history of England. With the Spaniards had come to England, if not the Inquisition in its bodily form, yet the spirit of the Inquisition. The first burst of the storm fell upon the married priests, who were insulted and driven from their livings. In London, a number of them were made to march in procession round St. Paul's Church, wrapped in white sheets, and bearing in their hands scourges and tapers. They were then publicly whipped, and this was a precedent for the same indignities in other parts of the kingdom. The wives of these priests were treated with the utmost contumely. The statutes against the Lollards enacted in the reigns of Richard II., Henry IV., and Henry V., were revived and were to come into force on the 20th of January. Bonner, accompanied by eight bishops and 160 priests, made a grand procession through the streets of London, and had services of public thanksgiving

sion was then held in the Church of St. Mary Overy, in Southwark, for the trial of heretics. The first man brought before this court, over which Gardiner pre

of annual Parliaments; the majority of the persons composing the Houses of Peers and Commons were dishonest, indifferent to all religions, and willing to establish the most opposing rituals so that they might retain their grasp on the accursed thing with which their very souls were corrupted-for corrupted they were, though not by the unfortunate queen. The Church lands with which Henry VIII. had bribed his aristocracy, titled and untitled, into co-operation with his enormities, both personal and political, had induced national depravity. The leaders of the Marian persecution, Gardiner and Bonner, were of the apostate class of persecutors. Flesh bred in murder,' they had belonged to the Government of Henry VIII., which sent the zealous Roman Catholic and the pious Protestant to the same stake. For the sake of worldly advantage, either for ambition or power, Gardiner and Bonner had, for twenty years, promoted the burning or quartering for the happy restoration of Catholicism. A commisof the advocates of Papal supremacy; they now turned with the tide, and burnt, with the same degree of conscientiousness, the opposers of Papal supremacy. "The persecution appears to have been greatly ag-sided, was John Rogers, a prebendary of St. Paul's, gravated by the caprice or the private vengeance of these prelates; for a great jurist of our times (Sir James Macintosh), who paid unprejudiced attention to the facts, has thus summed up the case:-'Of fourteen bishoprics, the Catholic prelates used their influence so successfully as altogether to prevent bloodshed in nine, and to reduce it within limits in the remaining five. Bonner, "whom all generations call bloody," raged so furiously in the diocese of London, as to be charged with burning half the martyrs in the kingdom.' Cardinal Pole, the queen's relative and familiar friend, took no part in these horrible condemnations. He considered that his vocation was the reformation of manners; he used to blame Gardiner for his reliance on the arm of flesh, and was known to rescue from Bonner's crowded pile of martyrs the inhabitants of his own district. It is more probable that the queen's private opinion leaned rather to her cousin, who had retained the religion she loved unchanged, than to Gardiner, who had been its persecutor; but Gardiner was armed with the legislative powers of the kingdom, unworthy as its time-serving legislators were to exercise them. Yet all ought not to be included in one sweeping censure; a noble minority of good men, disgusted at the detestable penal laws which lighted the torturing fires for Protestants, seceded bodily from the House of Commons, after vainly opposing them. This glorious band, for the honour of human nature, was composed of Catholics as well as Protestants; it was headed by the great jurist Plowden, a Catholic so firm as to refuse the chancellorship when persuaded to take it by Queen Elizabeth, because he would not change his religion. This secession was the first indication of a principle of merciful toleration to be found among any legislators in England. Few were the numbers of these good men (thirty-seven in all), and it was long before their principles gained ground; for, truly, the world had not made sufficient advance in Christian civilisation at that time to recognise any virtue in religious toleration."

We are now called upon to pass through a reign of terror, a time of fire and blood, such as has no parallel

who had nobly distinguished himself by defending the first priest sent by Mary to preach Papacy at St. Paul's Cross. He had been lying in a vile prison amongst thieves for more than a year. He now came forth prepared for death, with a bravery that nothing could daunt. He boldly asked Gardiner, who was browbeating and insulting him, whether he himself did not for twenty years renounce the Pope, and put up prayers for his eternal exclusion from England. Gardiner endeavoured to parry this home-thrust by saying that he was forced to it by cruelty. "And," rejoined Rogers, "does it become you to practise this same cruelty on us?" He not only thus addressed Gardiner but appealed to the whole Court, whether they had not sworn, year after year under Henry and Edward, to maintain the laws which they introduced on the subject of religion, and how could they now condemn others for persisting conscientiously in that course? He vindicated his marriage as being originally contracted in Germany, where the marriages of clergymen were legal, and as being since allowed also in this country, and reminded them that he had not brought his wife into this country until such marriages were made lawful here.

The Court condemned him to be burnt, and on the 4th of February this horrible sentence was executed in the most barbarous manner. The day of his death was kept a profound secret from him, and early that morning he was suddenly awakened out of a sound sleep, and informed that he was to be burnt that day. The condemned man, so far from sinking under the appalling announcement, only calmly observed, "Then I need not truss my points." He requested to be permitted to take leave of his wife and children, of whom he had eleven-one still at the breast-but this Bonner refused. As he was led by the sheriffs towards Smithfield, where he was to suffer, he sang the "Miserere" His wife and children were placed where he would have a full view of them at the stake, and it was expected that this would induce him to recant and save his life, and thus induce others to follow his example; but outwardly unmoved, he maintained the