The queen would probably have found the parliament which met on the 20th of January little better disposed towards her than its predecessor. The subsidy which should have paid the crown debts had gone as the opposition had foretold, and the country had been dragged after all into the war so long dreaded and so much deprecated. The forced loan of £100,000 had followed, and money was again wanted. But ordinary occasions of discontent disappeared in the enormous misfortune of the loss of Calais; or rather, the loss of Calais had so humbled the nation in its own eyes, that it expected On the 26th, a committee, composed of thirty members of both houses, met to consider the crisis. The resolution of parliament decided the council in the course which they must pursue with respect to Calais. Philip, unable to prevent the catastrophe alone, proposed to take the field at once with a united army of English and Spaniards, to avenge it, and effect a recapture. He laid his plans before the council. The council, in reply, thanked his majesty for his good affection towards the realm; they would have accepted his offer on their knees had it been possible, but the state of England obliged them to decline. The enemy, after the time which had been allowed them, "would be in such strength that it was doubtful if by force alone they could be expelled." If England sent out an army, it could not send less than twenty thousand men; and the troops would go unwillingly upon a service for which they had no heart, at a time of year when they were unused to exposure. Before the year was out £150,000 at the lowest would have to be spent in keeping the musters of the country under arms. The navy and the defences of the coast and of the isles, would cost £200,000, without including the losses of cannon and military stores at Guisnes and Calais, which would have to be made good. The campaign which Philip proposed could not cost less than a further £170,000; and so much money could not be had "without the people should have strange impositions set upon them, which they could not bear." There was but "a wan hope of recovering Calais," and "inconveniences might follow" if the attempt was made and failed. "The people have only in their heads," the council added, "the defence of the realm by land and sea." The hated connection with Spain had produced all the evils which the opponents of the marriage had foretold, and no good was expected from any enterprise pursued in common with Philip. Prone as the English were to explain events by supernatural causes, they saw, like the queen, in the misfortunes which had haunted her, an evidence that Heaven was not on her side, and they despaired of success in anything until it could be undertaken under better auspices. They would take care of themselves at home, and they would do no more. In reducing the subsidy, the Commons Every peer, knight, or gentleman, with an income above £1000 a-year, was called on to furnish sixteen horses, with steel harness, forty corslets, coats of mail, and morions, thirty longbows, with sheaves of arrows, and as many steelcaps, halberds, blackbills, and haquebuts. All English subjects, in a descending scale, were required to arm others or arm themselves according to their property. In the levies of the past summer, men had shrunk from service, and muster-masters, after the fashion of Falstaff, had taken bribes to excuse them. On the present occasion no excuse was to be taken, and every able-bodied man, of any rank, from sixteen to sixty, was to be ready to take arms when called upon, and join his officers, under pain of death. The chief immediate difficulty was to find money for present necessities. The loan was gone. The subsidy would not come in for six months. Englefield, Waldegrave, Petre, Baker, and Sir Walter Mildmay, were formed into a permanent committee of ways and means, with instructions to sit daily "till some device had been arrived at." To this last appeal the corporation responded with a loan of £20,000, at twelve per cent.; the Merchant Adventurers contributed £18,000 more; and Gresham sent from Flanders from time to time whatever he could obtain. In this way dockyards and armouries were set in activity, and the castles on the coast were repaired. The musters for Derbyshire were set down at fifteen hundred. Lord Shrewsbury raised four hundred from among his own dependents on his estates. The magistrates declared that, owing to dearth, want, and waste of means in the war of the last year, the "poor little county" could provide but one hundred more. The musters in Devonshire broke up and went to their homes. The musters in Lincolnshire mutinied. The ringleaders in both counties were immediately hanged; With the summer, fever and ague set in like a pestilence, Philip so far humoured the fancy, which he must have known to be delusive, that he sent the Count de Feria to congratulate her. Her letter, he said, contained the best news which he had heard since the loss of Calais. But the bubble broke soon. Mary had parted from her husband on the 5th of the preceding July, and her suspense, therefore, was not long protracted. It is scarcely necessary to say in what direction her second disappointment vented itself. Cranmer alone hitherto had suffered after recantation; to others, pardon had continued to be offered to the last moment. But this poor mercy was now extinguished. A man in Hampshire, named Bembridge, exclaimed at the point of execution that he would submit; a form was produced on the spot, which Bembridge signed, and the sheriff, Sir Richard Pexall, reprieved him by his own authority. But a letter of council came instantly to Pexall, that "the queen's majesty could not but find it very strange" that he had saved from punishment a man condemned for heresy: the execution was to proceed out of hand; and "if the prisoner continued in the Catholic faith, as he pretended," "some discreet and learned man might be present with him in his death, for the aiding of him to die God's servant." "We know that they are the people of God, and therefore we cannot choose but wish well to them and say, God strengthen them. God almighty, for Christ's sake, strengthen them." The multitude shouted, in reply, "Amen, Amen." Alarmed himself, this time, at the display of emotion, Bonner dared not outrage the metropolis with the deaths of the remaining six. Yet, not to let them escape him, he tried them privately in his own house at Fulham, and burnt them at Brentford at night in the darkness. So fared the Protestants, murdered to propitiate Providence, and, if possible, extort for the queen a return of the Divine favour. The alarm of invasion diminished as summer advanced. England had again a fleet upon the seas which feared no enemy, and could even act on the offensive. In May, two hundred and forty ships, large and small, were collected at Portsmouth; Lord Clinton, who was now admiral in the place of Howard, after an ineffectual cruise in the south of the Channel, returned to Portsmouth on the 8th of July. A few vessels remained in the neighbourhood of Calais, when M. de Thermes, whom the Duke of Guise left in command there, with the garrison of Boulogne, some levies collected in Picardy, and his own troops, in all about 9000 men, ventured an inroad into the Low Countries, took Dunkirk, and plundered it. Not caring to penetrate further, he was retreating with his booty, when Count Egmont, with a few thousand Burgundians and Flemings, cut in at Gravelines between the French and their own frontiers. They had no means of passing, except at low water, between the town of Gravelines and the sea, and the English ships, which were in De Thermes, obliged to advance when the tide would permit him, dashed at the dangerous passage; the guns of Gravelines on one side, the guns of the English vessels on the other, tore his ranks to pieces, and Egmont charging when their confusion was at its worst, the French were almost annihilated. Five thousand were killed, De Thermes himself, Senarpont of Boulogne, the Governor of Picardy, and many other men of note, were taken. If Clinton had been at hand with the strength of the fleet, and a dash had been made at Calais by land and sea, it would have been recovered more easily than it had been lost. But fortune had no such favour to bestow on Queen Mary. Clinton was still loitering at Spithead, and when news of the action came it was too late. The plan of the naval campaign for the season was to attack Brest with the united strength of England and Flanders, and hold it as a security for the restoration of Calais at the peace. It was for the arrival of his allies that Clinton had been waiting, and it was only at the end of the month that the combined fleet, a hundred and forty sail, left Portsmouth for the coast of Brittany. They appeared duly off Brest; yet, when their object was before them, they changed their minds on the feasibility of their enterprise; and leaving their original design they landed a force at ConquÊt, which they plundered and burnt, and afterwards destroyed some other villages in the neighbourhood. The achievement was not a very splendid one. Four or five hundred Flemings who ventured too far from the fleet were cut off; and as the Duke d'Estampes was said to be coming up with 20,000 men, Clinton re-embarked his men in haste, returned to Portsmouth, after an ineffectual and merely mischievous demonstration, and then reported the sickness in the fleet so considerable, that the operations for the season must be considered at an end. In the meantime, the contending princes in their own persons, Philip with the powers of the Low Countries and Spain, Henry with the whole available strength of France, sate watching each other in entrenched camps upon the Somme. The French king, with the recollection of St. Quentin fresh upon him, would not risk a second such defeat. Philip would not hazard his late advantage by forcing an action which might lose for him all that he had gained. In the pause, the conviction came slowly over both, that there was no need for further bloodshed, and that the On September 21, the emperor passed away in his retirement at St. Just. With him perished the traditions and passions of which he was the last representative, and a new page was turning in the history of mankind. Essential ground of quarrel between Henry and Philip there was none; the outward accidental ground—the claims on Milan and Naples, Savoy and Navarre—had been rendered easy of settlement by the conquest of Calais, and by the marriage which was consummated a few weeks after Guise's victory, between the Dauphin and the Queen of Scots. Satisfied with the triumph of a policy which had annexed the crown of Scotland to France, and with having driven the English by main strength from their last foothold on French soil, Henry could now be content to evacuate Savoy and Piedmont, if Philip, on his side, would repeat the desertion of CrÊpy, and having brought England into the war, would leave her to endure her own losses, or avenge them by her single strength. With this secret meaning on the part of France, an overture for a peace was commenced in the autumn of 1558, through the mediation of the Duchess of Lorraine. An armistice was agreed upon, and the first conference was held at the abbey of Cercamp, where Arundel, Wotton, and Thirlby attended as the representatives of England. How far Philip would consent to an arrangement so perfidious towards the country of which he was the nominal sovereign, depended, first, on the life of the queen. The titular King of England could by no fiction or pretext relieve himself of the duties which the designation imposed upon him; and if the English were deserted their resentment would explode in a revolution of which Mary would be the instant victim. At the opening of the conference it was immediately evident that France would not part with Calais. The English commissioners had been ordered to take no part in the discussion, unless the restitution was agreed on as a preliminary; and when they made their demand, Henry replied that "he would hazard his crown rather than forego his conquest." "To our minds," they wrote, "Calais is so necessary to be had again for the quieting of the world's mind in England, and it should so much offend and exasperate England, if any peace was made without restitution of it, that, for our part, no earthly private commodity nor profit could induce us thereto, nor nothing could be more grievous to us than to be ministers therein." They were on the point of departure, when a letter from Philip required them to remain at their posts. Contrary to their expectation, the king promised to support England in insisting on the restoration, and his own commissioners were instructed equally to agree to nothing unless it was conceded. And these events, or the one great event, was now close, and the shadows were drawing down over the life of the unfortunate Mary. Amidst discontent and misery at home, disgrace and failure abroad, the fantastic comparisons, the delirious analogies, the child which was to be born of the Virgin Mary for the salvation of mankind—where were now these visionary and humiliating dreams? The count reached London on the 9th of November. He was admitted to an interview, and the queen, too brave to repine at what was now inevitable, and anxious to the last to please her husband, declared herself "well content" that it should be as he wished; she entreated only that her debts might be paid, and that "religion" should not be changed. Leaving Mary's deathbed, De Feria informed the council of the king's request, and from the council hastened to the house of Lord Clinton, a few miles from London, where Elizabeth was staying. In Philip's name, he informed her that her succession was assured; his master had used his influence in her favour, and no opposition need be anticipated. Elizabeth listened graciously. That Philip's services to her, however, had been so considerable as De Feria told her, she was unable to allow. She admitted, and admitted thankfully, the good offices which he had shown to her when she was at Woodstock. She was perhaps ignorant that it was for the safety of Philip's life that her own had been so nearly sacrificed; that Philip's interest in her succession had commenced only when his own appeared impossible. But she knew how narrow had been her escape; she had neither forgotten her danger, nor ceased to resent her treatment. It was to the people of England, she told the count, that she owed her real gratitude. The people had saved her from destruction; the people had prevented her sister from changing the settlement of the crown. She would be the people's queen, and she would reign in the people's interest. De Feria feared, from what she said, that "in religion she would not go right." The ladies by whom she was surrounded were suspected; Sir William Cecil, whose conformity was as transparent then as it is now, would be her principal secretary; It is possible that Pole was made acquainted with Elizabeth's feelings towards him. To himself personally, those feelings were of little moment, for he, too, like the queen, was dying—dying to be spared a second exile, and the wretchedness of seeing with his eyes the dissolution of the phantom fabric which he had given the labours of his life to build. Yet what he did not live to behold he could not have failed to anticipate. The spirit of Henry VIII. was rising from the grave to scatter his work to all the winds; while he, the champion of Heaven, the destroyer of heresy, was lying himself under a charge of the same crime, with the pope for his accuser. Without straining too far the licence of imagination, we may believe that the disease which was destroying him was chiefly a broken heart. But it was painful to him to lie under the ill opinion of the person who was so soon to be on the throne of England; and possibly he wished to leave her, as a legacy, the warning entreaties of a dying man. Three days after De Feria's visit, therefore, Pole sent the Dean of Worcester to Elizabeth with a message, the import of which is unknown; and a short letter, as the dean's credentials, saying only that the legate desired, before he should depart, to leave all persons satisfied of him, and especially her grace. This was the 14th of November. The same day, or the day after, a lady-in-waiting carried the queen's last wishes to her successor. They were the same which she had already mentioned to De Feria—that her debts should be paid, and that the Catholic religion might be maintained, with an additional request that her servants should be properly cared for. A few hours later (November 17), at Lambeth, Pole followed her, and the reign of the pope of England, and the reign of terror, closed together. No English sovereign ever ascended the throne with larger popularity than Mary Tudor. The country was eager to atone to her for her mother's injuries; and the instinctive loyalty of the English towards their natural sovereign was enhanced by the abortive efforts of Northumberland to rob her of her inheritance. She had reigned little more than five years, and she descended into the grave amidst curses deeper than the acclamations which had welcomed her accession. In that brief time she had swathed her name in the horrid epithet which will cling to it for ever; and yet from the passions which in general tempt sovereigns into crime, she was entirely free: to the time of her accession she had lived a blameless, and, in many respects, a noble life; and few men or women have lived less capable of doing knowingly a wrong thing. Philip's conduct, which could not extinguish her passion for him, and the collapse of the inflated imaginations which had surrounded her supposed pregnancy, it can hardly be doubted, affected her sanity. Those forlorn hours when she would sit on the ground with her knees drawn to her face; those restless days and nights when, like a ghost, she would wander about the palace galleries, rousing herself only to write tear-blotted letters to her husband; those bursts of fury over the libels dropped in her way; or the marchings in procession behind the host in the London streets—these are all symptoms of hysterical derangement, and leave little room, as we think of her, for other feelings than pity. But if Mary was insane, the madness was of a kind which placed her absolutely under her spiritual directors; and the responsibility for her cruelties, if responsibility be anything but a name, rests first with Gardiner, who commenced them, and, secondly, and in a higher degree, with Reginald Pole. Because Pole, with the council, once interfered to prevent an imprudent massacre in Smithfield; because, being legate, he left the common duties of his diocese to subordinates, he is not to be held innocent of atrocities which could neither have been commenced nor continued without his sanction; and he was notoriously the one person in the council whom the queen But neither these nor any other feelings of English growth could have produced the scenes which have stamped this unhappy reign with a character so frightful. The parliament which re-enacted the Lollard statutes, had refused to restore the Six Articles as being too severe; yet under the Six Articles twenty-one persons only suffered in six years; while, perhaps, not twice as many more had been executed under the earlier acts in the century and a half in which they had stood on the Statute roll. The harshness of the law confined the action of it to men who were definitely dangerous; and when the bishops' powers were given back to them, there was little anticipation of the manner in which those powers would be misused. And that except from some special influences they would not have been thus misused, the local character of the persecution may be taken to prove. The storm was violent only in London, in Essex, which was in the diocese of London, and in Canterbury. It raged long after the death of Gardiner; and Gardiner, though he made the beginning, ceased after the first few months to take further part in it. The Bishop of Winchester would have had a persecution, and a keen one; but the fervour of others left his lagging zeal far behind. For the first and last time the true Ultramontane spirit was dominant in England; the genuine conviction that, as the orthodox prophets and sovereigns of Israel slew the worshippers of Baal, so were Catholics rulers called upon, as their first duty, to extirpate heretics as the enemies of God and man. The language of the legate to the city of London shows the devout sincerity with which he held that opinion himself. Through him, and sustained by his authority, the queen held it; and by these two the ecclesiastical government of England was conducted. The teachers who finally converted the English nation to Protestantism were not the declaimers from the pulpit, nor the voluminous controversialists with the pen. These, indeed, could produce arguments which, to those who were already convinced, seemed as if they ought to produce conviction; but conviction did not follow till the fruits of the doctrine bore witness to the spirit from which it came. The evangelical teachers, caring only to be allowed to develop their own opinions, and persecute their opponents, had walked hand in hand with men who had spared neither tomb nor altar, who had stripped the lead from the church roofs, and stolen the bells from the church towers; and between them they had so outraged such plain honest minds as remained in England, that had Mary been content with mild repression, had she left the pope to those who loved him, and married, instead of Philip, some English lord, the mass would have retained its place, the clergy in moderate form would have resumed their old authority, and the Reformation would have waited for a century. In an evil hour, the queen listened to the unwise advisers, who told her that moderation in religion was the sin of the LaodicÆans; and while the fanatics who had brought scandal on the Reforming cause, either truckled, like Shaxton, or stole abroad to wrangle over surplices and forms of prayer, the true and the good atoned with their lives for the crimes of others, and vindicated a noble cause by nobly dying for it. Although Pole and Mary could have laid their hands on earl and baron, knight and gentleman, whose heresy was notorious, although in the queen's own guard there were many who never listened to a mass, Yet, as has been already said, interference was impossible except by armed force. The country knew from the first that by the course of nature the period of cruelty must be a brief one; it knew that a successful rebellion is at best a calamity; and the bravest and wisest men would not injure an illustrious cause by conduct less than worthy of it, so long as endurance was possible. They had saved Elizabeth's life and Elizabeth's rights, and Elizabeth, when her time came, would deliver her subjects. The Catholics, therefore, were permitted to continue their cruelties till the cup of iniquity was full; till they had taught the educated laity of England to regard them with horror; and till the Romanist superstition had died, amidst the execrations of the people, of its own excess.(Back to Content) |