Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564
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in person to the Guildhall, and faced an excited assemblage that was
debating which side to take. She told it that she was quite ready to
abandon the Spanish marriage if the Commons so wished, and indeed
"to abstain from marriage while I live"; but meanwhile she would not
let that issue be made "a Spanish cloak" for a political revolution.
"I cannot tell," she said, "how naturally the mother loveth her child,
for I was never the mother of any; but certainly if a queen may as
naturally and earnestly love her subjects as the mother doth her
child, then assure yourselves that I, being your lady and mistress, do
as earnestly and tenderly love and favor you." `062639 Her words and
spirit were warmly applauded, and the assembly pledged her its
support. Agents of the government were able, almost in a day, to
muster 25,000 armed men. Suffolk was arrested, Croft and Carew fled
into hiding. Wyatt, so abandoned, led his small force to battle in the
streets of London, and made his way almost to the Queen's palace at
Whitehall. Mary's guards begged her to flee; she would not. Finally
Wyatt's men were overcome; he yielded in exhaustion of body and
soul, and was taken to the Tower. Mary breathed safely again, but
she was never more the gentle Queen.
IV. "BLOODY MARY": 1554-58
-
Her advisers had often condemned her policy of pardon. The Emperor
and his ambassador had censured her for allowing life, even liberty,
to persons who had conspired against her and would be free to do so
again. How, she was asked, could Philip trust himself in a land
where his enemies were left unhindered to plot his assassination?
Bishop Gardiner argued that mercy to the nation required that traitors
should be put to death. The Queen, in a panic of fright, veered to the
views of her counselors. She ordered the execution of Lady Jane
Grey, who had never wanted to be queen, and of Jane's husband, who had
so wanted to be king. Jane, still but seventeen, went to her death
stoically, without protest or tears (February 12, 1554). Suffolk,
her father, was beheaded, and a hundred lesser rebels were hanged.
Some conspirators were spared for a while in the hope of eliciting
useful confessions. Wyatt at first incriminated Elizabeth as privy
to the plan, but on the scaffold (April 11, 1554) he exonerated her of
all cognizance. Courtenay, after a year's imprisonment, was let off
with banishment. Charles advised Mary to put Courtenay and Elizabeth
to death as perpetual threats to her life. Mary sent for Elizabeth,
kept her in the palace of St. James for a month, then for two months
imprisoned her in the Tower. Renard urged her immediate execution, but
Mary objected that Elizabeth's complicity had not been proved. `062640
During these fateful months Elizabeth's life hung in the balance,
and this terror helped to form her character to suspicion and
insecurity, and was echoed in the severity of her later reign, when
she had the same worry about Mary Stuart that Mary Tudor now had about
Elizabeth. On May 18 the future queen was moved to Woodstock, where
she lived in loose confinement but under watch. Fear that another plot
might raise Elizabeth to the throne urged Mary on to marriage in the
hope of motherhood.
Philip was not so eager. Through a proxy in England he married
Mary on March 6, 1554, but he did not reach England till July 20.
The English were pleasantly surprised to find him physically and
socially tolerable: a rather strange triangular face sloping from
broad forehead to narrow chin, adorned with yellow hair and beard; but
also a gracious manner, a ready wit, gifts for all, and no hint that
he and his retinue considered the English to be barbarians. Even for
Elizabeth he had a kind word, perhaps foreseeing that Mary might prove
childless, that Elizabeth would someday be queen, and that this
would be a lesser evil than the accession of Mary Queen of Scots- long
since bound to France- to the throne of England. Mary, though so
much older than Philip, looked up to him with girlish admiration.
Starved for affection through so many years, she rejoiced now to
have won so charming and mighty a prince, and she gave herself to
him with such unquestioning devotion that her court wondered whether
England was not already subject to Spain. To Charles V she wrote
humbly that she was now "happier than I can say, as I daily discover
in the King my husband so many virtues and perfections that I
constantly pray God to grant me grace to please him." `062641
Her desire to give Philip a son and England an heir was so absorbing
that she soon conceived herself pregnant. Her amenorrhea was now
welcomed as a royal sign, and hope silenced the thought that that
condition had often come to her before. Digestive disturbances were
accepted as additional proofs of motherhood, and the Venetian
ambassador reported that the Queen's "paps" had swollen and given
milk. For a long time Mary rejoiced in the thought that she too,
like the poorest woman in her realm, could bear a child; and we cannot
imagine her desolation when her doctors finally convinced her that her
swelling was dropsy. Meanwhile the rumor of her pregnancy had swept
through England; prayers and processions were arranged for her happy
delivery; soon gossip said that she had borne a boy. Shops closed
for a holiday, men and women feasted in the streets, church bells
rang, and a clergyman announced that the child was "fair and
beautiful" as became a prince. `062642 Broken with frustration and
shame, Mary hid herself for months from the public view.
She was in a measure consoled by the return of Cardinal Pole to
England. Charles had detained him at Brussels because Pole had opposed
the Spanish marriage; but now that this had been consummated the
Imperial objections subsided; the Cardinal, as papal legate, crossed
the Channel (November 20, 1554) to the land he had left twenty-two
years before; and the warm welcome given him by officials, clergy, and
people attested the general satisfaction over renewal of relations
with the papacy. He greeted Mary with almost the choicest phrase in
his vocabulary: Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum, benedicta
tu in mulieribus, and he trusted that he might soon add, "Blessed
is the fruit of thy womb." `062643 When Parliament learned that Pole
brought papal consent to the retention of confiscated Church
property by the present holders, all went merry as a wedding should.
Parliament, on its knees, expressed repentance for its offenses
against the Church, and Bishop Gardiner, having confessed his own
vacillation, gave the penitents absolution. The ecclesiastical
supremacy of the pope was acknowledged, his right to annates and
"first fruits" was reaffirmed, episcopal courts were re-established,
and parish tithes were restored to the clergy. The old statutes
against Lollardry were renewed, and censorship of publications was
returned from state to Church authorities. After the turmoil of twenty
years everything seemed as before.
Philip stayed with Mary thirteen months, hoping with her for a
child; when no sure sign of it appeared he begged her to let him go to
Brussels, where the planned abdication of his father required his
presence. She consented sadly, went with him to the barge that was
to take him down the Thames, and watched from a window till the
barge disappeared (August 28, 1555). Philip felt that he had done
his duty through an arduous year of making love to a sick woman, and
he rewarded himself with the full-blooded ladies of Brussels.
Pole was now the most influential man in England. He busied
himself with the reorganization and reform of the English Church. With
Mary's help he restored some monasteries and a nunnery. Mary was happy
to see the old religious customs live again, to see crucifixes and
holy pictures again in the churches, to join in pious processions of
priests, children, or guilds, to sit or kneel through long Masses
for the quick and the dead. On Maundy Thursday, 1556, she washed and
kissed the feet of forty-one old women, shuffling from one to the next
on her knees, and gave alms to all. `062644 Now that hope of
motherhood had gone, religion was her sustaining solace.
But she could not quite resurrect the past. The new ideas had
aroused an exciting ferment in city minds; there were still a dozen
sects clandestinely publishing their literature and their creeds. Mary
was pained to hear of groups that denied the divinity of Christ, the
existence of the Holy Ghost, the transmission of original sin. To
her simple faith these heresies seemed mortal crimes, far worse than
treason. Could the heretics know better than her beloved Cardinal
how to deal with the human soul? Word came to her that one preacher
had prayed aloud, before his congregation, that God would either
convert her or soon remove her from the earth. `062645 One day a
dead dog with a monastically tonsured head, and a rope around its
neck, was thrown through a window into the Queen's chamber. `062646 In
Kent a priest had his nose cut off. `062647 It seemed unreasonable
to Mary that the Protestant emigres, to whom she had allowed safe
departure from England, should be sending back pamphlets attacking her
as a reactionary fool, and speaking of the "lousy Latin service" of an
"idolatrous Mass." `062648 Some pamphlets urged their readers to
rise in revolt and depose the Queen. `062649 A meeting of 17,000
persons at Aldgate (March 14, 1554) heard a call to put Elizabeth on
the throne. `062650 Insurrections in England were planned by English
Protestants abroad.
Mary was by nature and habit merciful- till 1555. What transformed
her into the most hated of English queens? Partly the provocation of
attacks that showed no respect for her person, her faith, or her
feelings; partly the fear that heresy was a cover for political
revolt; partly the sufferings and disappointments that had
embittered her spirit and darkened her judgment; partly the firm
belief of her most trusted advisers- Philip, Gardiner, Pole- that
religious unity was indispensable to national solidarity and survival.
Philip was soon to illustrate his principles in the Netherlands.
Bishop Gardiner had already (in the spring of 1554) vowed to burn
the three Protestant bishops- Hooper, Ridley, Latimer- unless they
recanted. `062651 Cardinal Pole, like Mary, was of a kindly
disposition, but inflexible in dogma; he loved the Church so much that
he shuddered at any questioning of her doctrines or authority. He
did not take any direct or personal lead in the Marian persecution; he
counseled moderation, and once freed twenty persons whom Bishop Bonner
had sentenced to the stake. `062652 Nevertheless he instructed the
clergy that if all peaceful methods of suasion failed, major
heretics should be "removed from life and cut off as rotten members
from the body." `062653 Mary's own view was expressed hesitantly.
"Touching the punishment of heretics, we think it ought to be done
without rashness, not leaving meanwhile to do justice to such as by
learning would seek to deceive the simple." `062654 Her responsibility
was at first merely permissive, but it was real. When (1558) the war
with France proved disastrous to her and England, she ascribed the
failure to God's anger at her lenience with heresy, and thereafter she
positively promoted the persecution.
Gardiner opened the reign of terror by summoning to his episcopal
court (January 22, 1555) six clergymen who had refused to accept the
re-established creed. *06057 One recanted; four, including John
Hooper, deposed Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester, were burned
(February 4-8, 1555). Gardiner seems to have had a revulsion of
feeling after these executions; he took no further part in the
persecution; his health broke down, and he died in November of this
year. Bishop Bonner took charge of the slaughter. Philip, still in
England, advised moderation; when Bonner condemned six more to the
stake the Imperial ambassador, Renard, objected to "this barbarous
precipitancy"; `062657 and Philip's confessor, a Spanish friar,
preaching before the court, denounced the convictions as contrary to
the mild and forgiving spirit inculcated by Christ. `062658 Bonner
suspended the sentences for five weeks, then ordered them carried out.
He thought himself lenient, and indeed was once reprimanded by the
Queen's Council for insufficient zeal in prosecuting heresy. `062659
To each heretic he offered full pardon for recantation, and often
added a promise of financial aid or some comfortable
employment; `062660 but when such inducements failed he passed
sentence grimly. Usually a bag of gunpowder was placed between the
legs of the condemned, so that the flames would cause a speedy
death; but in Hooper's case the wood burned too slowly, the powder
failed to explode, and the former bishop suffered agonies for almost
an hour.
Most of the martyrs were simple workingmen who had learned to read
the Bible, and had been encouraged in the Protestant interpretation of
it during the previous reign. Perhaps the persecutors thought it
justice that the ecclesiastics who had done most to inculcate the
Protestant faith should be called upon to testify to it by
martyrdom. In September 1555, Cranmer, sixty-six, Ridley,
sixty-five, and Latimer, eighty, were brought from the Tower to
stand trial at Oxford. Latimer had tarnished his eloquent career by
approving the burning of Anabaptists and obstinate Franciscans under
Henry VIII. Ridley had actively supported Jane Grey's usurpation,
had called Mary a bastard, and had assisted in deposing Bonner and
Gardiner from their sees. Cranmer had been the intellectual head of
the English Reformation: had dissolved the marriage of Henry and
Catherine, had married Henry to Anne Boleyn, had replaced the Mass
with the Book of Common Prayer, had prosecuted Frith, Lambert, and
other Catholics, had signed Edward's devise of the crown to Jane Grey,
and had denounced the Mass as a blasphemy. All these men had now
been in the Tower for two years, daily expecting death.
Cranmer was tried at Oxford on September 7. His examiners made every
effort to elicit a recantation. He stood his ground firmly, and was
judged guilty; but as he was an archbishop his sentence was reserved
to the Pope, and he was returned to the Tower. On September 30
Ridley was tried, and stood his ground. On the same day Latimer was
led before the ecclesiastical court: a man now quite careless of life,
dressed in an old threadbare gown, his white head covered with a cap
upon a nightcap over a handkerchief, his spectacles hanging from his
neck, a New Testament attached to his belt. He too denied
transubstantiation. On October 1 they were condemned; on October 6
they were burned. Before the pyre they knelt and prayed together. They
were bound with chains to an iron post, a bag of powder was hung
around each man's neck, the faggots were lit. "Be of good cheer,
Master Ridley," said Latimer, "play the man; we shall this day light
such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be
put out." `062661
On December 4 Pope Paul IV confirmed the sentence against Cranmer.
For a time the first Protestant archbishop of Canterbury gave way to
forgivable fear; no man who could write such sensitive English as
the Book of Common Prayer could face these ordeals without exceptional
suffering of body and mind. Moved perhaps by Pole's fervent appeal,
Cranmer repeatedly "renounced and abhorred and detested all manner
of heresies and errors of Luther and Zwingli," and professed belief in
the seven sacraments, in transubstantiation, purgatory, and all
other teachings of the Roman church. By every precedent such
recantations should have commuted his sentence to imprisonment, but
(according to Foxe) Mary rejected the retractions as insincere, and
ordered Cranmer's execution. `062662
In St. Mary's Church, Oxford, on the morning of his death (March 21,
1556), he read his seventh and last recantation. Then, to the
astonishment of all present, he added:
-
And now I come to the great thing, which so much troubleth my
conscience more than anything that ever I did or said in my whole
life, and that is the setting abroad of a writing contrary to the
truth; which now here I renounce and refuse... as written for fear
of death... and that is, all such bills and papers which I have
written or signed with my hand since my degradation.... And
forasmuch as my hand offended, writing contrary to my heart, my hand
shall first be punished therefor, for... it shall be first burned. And
as for the pope, I refuse him as Christ's enemy and
Antichrist. `062663
-
On the pyre, as the flames neared his body, he stretched out his
hand into them, and held it there, says Foxe, "steadfast and
immovable... that all men might see his hand burned before his body
was touched. And using often the words of Stephen, 'Lord, receive my
spirit,' in the greatness of the flame he gave up the ghost." `062664
His death marked the zenith of the persecution. Some 300 persons
died in its course, 273 of them in the last four years of the reign.
As the holocaust advanced it became clear that it had been a
mistake. Protestantism drew strength from its martyrs as early
Christianity had done, and many Catholics were disturbed in their
faith, and shamed in their Queen, by the sufferings and fortitude of
the victims. Bishop Bonner, though he did not enjoy the work, came
to be called "Bloody Bonner" because his diocese saw most of the
executions; one woman called him "the common cutthroat and general
slaughter-slave to all the bishops in England." `062665 Hundreds of
English Protestants found refuge in Catholic France, and labored there
to bring the sorry reign to an end. Henry II, while persecuting French
Protestants, encouraged English plots against Catholic Mary, whose
marriage with the King of Spain left France surrounded by hostile
powers. In April 1556, British agents discovered a conspiracy, led
by Sir Henry Dudley, to depose Mary and enthrone Elizabeth. Several
arrests were made, including two members of Elizabeth's household; one
confession implicated Elizabeth herself, and the French King. The
movement was suppressed, but it left Mary in constant fear of
assassination.
One group of fugitives encountered tribulations that reveal the
dogmatic temper of the times. Jan Laski, a Polish Calvinist, had
come to London in 1548, and had founded there the first Presbyterian
church in England. A month after Mary's accession Laski and part of
his congregation left London in two Danish vessels. At Copenhagen they
were denied entry unless they signed the official Lutheran
confession of faith. As firm Calvinists, they declined. Refused
permission to land, they sailed to Wismar, Lubeck, and Hamburg, and in
each case met with the same demand and repulse. `062666 The
Lutherans of Germany shed no tears over Mary's victims, but
denounced them as detestable heretics and "Devil's martyrs" for
denying the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. `062667 Calvin
condemned the merciless sectarianism of the Lutherans, and in that
year (1553) burned Servetus at the stake. After buffeting the North
Sea through most of the winter, the refugees at last found entry and
humanity at Emden.
Mary moved with somber fatality to her end. Her pious husband, now
anomalously at war with the papacy as well as with France, came to
England (March 20, 1557) and urged the Queen to bring Britain into the
war as his ally. To make his mission less hateful to the English, he
persuaded Mary to moderate the persecution. `062668 But he could not
so easily win public support; on the contrary, a month after his
arrival, Thomas Stafford, a nephew of Cardinal Pole, fomented a
rebellion with a view to freeing England from both Mary and Philip. He
was defeated and hanged (May 28, 1557). To fill the Queen's cup of
misery the Pope in that month repudiated Pole as papal legate, and
accused him of heresy. On June 7 Mary, anxious to please Philip, and
convinced that Henry II had supported Stafford's plot, declared war
against France. Having accomplished his purpose, Philip left England
in July. Mary suspected that she would never see him again. "I Will
live the rest of my days without the company of men," she
said. `062669 In this unwanted war England lost Calais (January 6,
1558), which it had held for 211 years; and the thousands of
Englishmen and women who had lived there, and now fled as penniless
fugitives to Britain, spread the bitter charge that Mary's
government had been criminally negligent in defending England's last
possession on the Continent. Philip made a peace favorable to himself,
without requiring the restoration of Calais. It was an old phrase that
that precious port was "the brightest jewel in the English crown."
Mary added another mot to the tale: "When I am dead and opened you
will find Calais lying in my heart." `062670
Early in 1558 the Queen again thought herself pregnant. She made her
will in expectation of a dangerous delivery, and dispatched a
message to Philip beseeching his presence at the happy event. He
sent his congratulations, but he did not have to come; Mary was
mistaken. She was now quite forlorn, perhaps in some measure insane.
She sat for hours on the floor with knees drawn up to her chin; she
wandered like a ghost through the palace galleries; she wrote
tear-blotted letters to a King who, anticipating her death, ordered
his agents in England to incline the heart of Elizabeth toward
marriage with some Spanish grandee, or with Philip himself.
In Mary's final summers a plague of ague fever moved through
England. In September 1558, it struck the Queen. Combined with
dropsy and "a superfluity of black bile," it so weakened her that
her will to live fell away. On November 6 she sent the crown jewels to
Elizabeth. It was a gracious act, in which love of the Church
yielded to her desire to give England an orderly succession. She
suffered long periods of unconsciousness; from one of these she
awoke to tell how she had happily dreamed of children playing and
singing before her. `062671 On November 17 she heard Mass early, and
uttered the responses ardently. Before dawn she died.
On the same day died Cardinal Pole, as profoundly defeated as his
Queen. In estimating him we must record the bitter fact that at the
beginning of his last month he had condemned three men and two women
to be burned for heresy. It is true that all parties except the
Anabaptists, in those years of mad certainty, agreed that religious
unity had to be preserved, even, if necessary, by punishing dissent
with death. But nowhere in contemporary Christendom- not even in
Spain- were so many men and women burned for their opinions as
during Reginald Pole's primacy of the English Church.
For Mary we may speak a more lenient word. Grief, illness, and
many suffered wrongs had warped her mind. Her clemency passed into
cruelty only after conspiracies had sought to deprive her of her crown
on her head. She listened too trustingly to ecclesiastics who,
having themselves been persecuted, sought revenge. Till the end she
thought she was fulfilling by murder her obligations to the faith
which she loved as the vital medium of her life. She does not quite
deserve the name of "Bloody Mary," unless we are to spread that
adjective over all her time; it simplifies pitilessly a character in
which there had been much to love. It is her strange distinction
that she carried on the work of her father in alienating England
from Rome. She showed to an England still Catholic the worst side of
the Church she served. When she died England was readier than before
to accept the new faith that she had labored to destroy.
CHAPTER XXVII: From Robert Bruce to John Knox: 1300-1561