The effort to overthrow Mary's throne had strengthened it: for the second time she had rallied around it the preponderant majority of the nation. And this was all the more surprising, since no one could doubt any longer in what direction the Queen's exclusive religious views would lead her. In her victory she saw a divine providence, by which it was made doubly her duty to persevere, without looking back, in the path she had once taken. In full understanding with her Gardiner proceeded without further scruple, in the Parliament which met in April 1554, to attempt to carry through the two points on which all else depended, the abrogation of the Queen's spiritual title, which implied restoration of the Pope's authority, and the revival of the old laws against heretics. These views and proposals however met with unexpected opposition, both in the nation, and no less in the Privy Council and Parliament, especially in the Upper House. The lay lords did not wish to make the bishops so powerful again as they had once been, and rejected the restoration of the Pope's authority unless they previously had security for their possession of the confiscated church property. The first proposition could not, so far as can be seen, even be properly brought forward: Only in one thing were the two parties united, in recognising the marriage contract concluded with Spain: it was passed unanimously by Parliament. In July 1554 Don Philip reached England with a numerous fleet, divided into three squadrons, with a brilliant suite on board. At Southampton the leader of one of the two parties, the Earl of Arundel, received him; Bishop Gardiner, the leader of the other, gave the blessing of the church to the marriage in Winchester cathedral. The day before the Emperor had resigned the crown of Naples to his son, to make him equal with the Queen in rank. How grand it sounded, when the king-at-arms proclaimed the united titles: Philip and Mary, King and Queen of England, France, Naples, Jerusalem, Ireland! A title with an almost Plantagenet sound, but which now however only denoted the closest union between the Spanish monarchy and the Catholics of England. Philip was solicitous to gain over the different parties and classes of England: for he had been told that England was a popular monarchy. He belied his Spanish gravity and showed himself, despite the stiffness that was his natural characteristic, affable to every man: he tried to make the impression, and successfully, that he desired the prosperity of England. One of the chief resources of the time, that of securing the most considerable persons by means of pensions, he made use of to a great extent. Both parties were provided for by annual payments and presents, Pembroke and Arundel as well as Derby and Rochester. We are assured that this liberality exercised a very advantageous influence on the disposition of the country. All now depended on whether the King's influence would be sufficient to carry at the next meeting of Parliament in November, the proposals which had been rejected in the last session. But for this, according to the view not merely of the English lords, but of the imperial ambassador and of the Emperor himself, a previous condition was indispensable. The English nobles must be relieved from all apprehension lest the confiscated ecclesiastical property should ever again be wrested from them. Cardinal Pole had been already for some time residing in the Netherlands: but he was told that his arrival in England would be not merely fruitless but detrimental unless he brought with him a sufficient dispensation with regard to this. In Rome the concession was opposed on the ground that it would be setting a bad precedent. But when it was pointed out that the English confiscations did not touch any church lands, but only monastic property, and still more that without this concession the restoration of obedience to the church could not be attained, Pope Julius III yielded to the request. Two less comprehensive forms were rejected by the Emperor: at last one was granted which would satisfy the English. The form of the absolution which the Pope was to bestow after their submission was previously arranged: it was agreed to avoid everything that could remind men of the old pretensions and awaken the national antipathies. Meanwhile the elections to Parliament were completed. The proclamation issued gives the ruling points of view without reserve. An invitation to elect Catholic members of merit was coupled with the assurance that there was no intention of disturbing any kind of property. The means lately used for preventing any hostile influence were not yet sufficient: the advice was given from Brussels to go back to the older and stricter forms. The leading men of the Upper House were won over: there could be no doubt about the tone of the Lower. At their first sitting a resolution to release Cardinal The Parliament declared itself ready to return to the obedience of the Roman See, and repeal all the statutes against it, provided that the cardinal pronounced a general dispensation, that every man might keep without scruple the ecclesiastical property which had fallen to his share. With heartfelt joy Cardinal Pole pronounced it without delay, first at a meeting of the Parliament in the palace, then with greater solemnity at S. Paul's at a high mass attended by the Court with a brilliant suite; among those present were the knights who wore the Burgundian order of the Golden Fleece, and those who wore the English Order of the Garter. The agreement that now followed bears more of a juridical than of a religious character. The jurisdiction was given back to the Pope which he possessed before the twentieth year of Henry VIII (1529): the statutes by which it was abolished were severally enumerated and repealed: on the other hand the Pope's legate in his name consented that the owners of church property should not be disturbed in their possession, either now or at any future time, either by church councils or by Papal decrees. Such property was henceforth to be quite as exclusively subject to the jurisdiction of the crown as any other; whoever dared to call in question the validity of the title in any spiritual court whatever, within or without the realm, was to be punished as an enemy of the Queen. The cardinal legate strove long to prevent the two enactments, as to the restoration of obedience and the title to the ecclesiastical property, from being combined together in one Act, since it might look as if the Pope's concession was the price of this obedience to him; he once said, he would rather let all remain as it was and go back to Rome than yield on this point. But the English nobility adhered immoveably to its demand; it wished to prevent all danger of the restoration of obedience becoming in any way detrimental to its acquisitions, an object which was clearly best secured by combining both enactments in a single statute, so that they must stand or fall together; even the King's representations effected no alteration in this; the cardinal had to comply. On the other hand the King's influence, if we believe himself, had all possible success in the other affair, which was at any rate not less weighty. 'With the intervention of the Parliament,' he continues in the above-mentioned letter, 'we have made a law, I and the most illustrious Queen, for the punishment of heretics and all enemies of holy church; we have revived the old ordinances of the realm, which will serve this If we put together these four great Acts, the abolition of the Common Prayer-book, the Spanish marriage, the restoration of obedience to Rome, and the revival of the heresy laws, we could hardly doubt the intention of the members of the government, and of the Parliament, to return completely to the ancient political and religious state of things. With some members such an intention may have been the predominant one: to assume it in all, or even in the majority, would be an error. The agreement then legalised as to ecclesiastical property, and the abolition of the monastic system, already formed such an anomaly in the Roman Catholic church, that the ecclesiastical condition of England would have always retained a very abnormal character. And the obedience expressed was by no means complete. For it should have included above all a recognition of that right of dispensation, about which the original quarrel had broken out, and the revocation of the order of succession which was based on its rejection. In fact Gardiner's intention was to bring matters to this; being besides a great enemy and even persecutor of Elizabeth, he wished to see her illegitimacy pronounced in due form; At this moment the revived heresy-laws began to be put into execution. Prosecutions were instituted for statements that under another order of things would have been considered as fully authorised. Still more than to single offences was attention directed to any variations in doctrine. In these proceedings we can remark the points which were then chiefly in question. The first of the accused, one of the earliest and most influential of the martyrs, John Rogers, was reminded of the article which speaks of the faith in one holy catholic church; he replied that by it was meant the universal church of all But now what an impression must these executions produce, combined with what preceded and followed them. Gardiner appears in all this imperious, proud, and with that confident tone which the possessors of power assume, implying that they regard themselves as being also mentally superior; Bonner Bishop of London fanatical, without any power of discernment, and almost bloodthirsty. His attention was once drawn to the ill effects of his rough acts of violence; he replied that he must do God's work without fear of men. Under the last government they had both had much to endure: they had been deprived by their enemies and thrown into prison: now they employed the temporal arm in their own favour; they felt no scruple in sentencing their old opponents to death in accordance with the severity of the laws which they had again brought into active operation. Such was the issue of As Queen Mary is designated 'The Bloody,' we are astonished when we read the authentic descriptions, still extant, of her personal appearance. She was a little, slim, delicate, sickly woman, with hair already turning grey. She played on the lute, and had even given instruction in music; she had a skilful hand; on personal acquaintance she made the impression of goodness and mildness. But yet there was something in her eyes that could even rouse fear; her voice, which could be heard at a great distance, told of something unwomanly in her. She was a good speaker in public; never did she show a trace of timidity in danger. The troubles she had experienced from her youth, her constant antagonism to the authority under which she lived, had especially hardened in her the self-will which is recognisable in all the Tudors. A peculiarity found elsewhere also in gifted women, that they are weary of all which surrounds them at home, and give to what is foreign a sympathy above its worth, had become to her a second nature. She rejected with aversion the idea of marrying Courtenay, for this reason among others that he was an Englishman. She, the Queen of England, had no sympathy for the life, the interests, the struggles of her people: she hated them from her childhood. All her sympathies were for the nation from which her mother came, for its views and manners: her husband was her ideal of a man: we are assured that she even overlooked his infidelities to her because he did not enter into permanent relations with any other woman. Besides this he was the only man who could support her in the great project for which she thought herself marked out by God, the restoration of Catholicism. The conduct of the Queen and her government, without whose help ecclesiastical authority would have been null and void, had a result that extended far beyond her time: men began to inquire into the claims of the temporal power. John Knox, who had now to fly from England before a Queen, as he had previously from Scotland before a Queen-regent, and whose word was of weight, poured forth his feelings in a piercing call, which he himself named 'a blast of the trumpet,' against the right of women to the government of a country, which ought to be exercised only by men. And while Knox went no further than the immediate case, others examined into the powers of all State authority: above all, to prevent its taking part in religious persecution, they brought forward the principles according to which sovereignty issues originally from the people. Mary's government had awakened in Protestantism, and that not merely in England, the hostility of political theory. But besides no man could hide from himself, that discontent, even without theory, had grown in England in an alarming manner. The French and Imperial ambassadors The Queen had hitherto flattered herself and her partisans with the hope that she would give the country an heir to the throne. When this expectation proved fallacious in the summer of 1555 it produced an impression which, as the imperial ambassador says, no pen could describe. The appearance had been caused by an unhealthy condition of body, which was now looked on rather as a prognostic of her fast approaching death. It is already clear, remarks the ambassador, that least confidence can be placed in those who have been hitherto most trusted: many a man still wears a mask: others even show their ill-will quite openly. For so badly is the succession at present arranged that my lady Elizabeth will without doubt ascend the throne on Mary's death and will restore heresy. While things were in this state, Philip II was led to resolve on going to the Netherlands by the vicissitudes of the French war and his father's state of health; he wished either to bring about peace, or to push the war with energy. He had hitherto exercised a moderating influence on the government. Not to let all fall back into the previous party-strife, he thought it best to give the eight leading members of the Privy Council a pre-eminent place in the management of business. He could not avoid admitting men of both parties even among these; but he had already found a man whom he could set over the others and trust with the supreme rule of affairs in complete confidence. This was Cardinal Pole, who after Cranmer's death received the Archbishopric of Canterbury, long ago bestowed on him at Rome, and was released from the duty of again returning to the Roman court. He was descended from the house of the Yorkist Suffolks, persecuted by the earlier Tudors with great severity; but how A singular government this, composed of an absent king, who however had to be consulted in all weighty matters, a cardinal, and a dying queen who lived exclusively in church ideas. Difficulties could not be wanting: they arose first in church matters themselves. We know how much the recognition of the alienation of the church property, to which Julius III was brought to consent by the Emperor, contributed to the restoration of church obedience; among the English nobility it formed the main When the proposal came under discussion in the Lower House, it met with lively opposition. A commission was then appointed, to which the Upper House sent two earls, two barons, and two bishops, and to which some lawyers were added; by these the proposed articles were revised and then laid before them again. The decisive sitting was on the 3rd December 1555. The doors were closed: no stranger was allowed to enter nor any member to leave the House. After they had sat in hot debate from early morning till three in the afternoon—just one of those debates, of which we have to regret that no detailed account has survived—the proposal was, it is true, accepted, but against such a large minority as was hitherto unheard of in the English Parliament, 120 votes to 183. Queen and cardinal regarded it as a great victory, for they had carried their view: but the tone of the country was still against them. However strong the stress which the cardinal laid on the statement that the concession of the crown was not to react in any way on private men's ownership of church property, the apprehension was nevertheless universal, From time to time seditious movements showed the insecurity of the situation. At the beginning of 1556 traces were detected of a plan for plundering the treasury in order to levy troops with the money. Meanwhile foreign affairs took a turn which threatened to involve England in a dangerous complication. The peace between the great powers had not been concluded: the truce they had made was broken off at the instigation of the Pope; hostilities began again, and Philip II returned to England for a couple of months to induce her to join in the war against France. The diplomatic correspondence shows that the imperial court from the beginning valued their near relation to England chiefly as the basis of an alliance against France. We can easily understand how this early object was now attained. Besides many other previous wrongs, Stafford's enterprise, which was ascribed to the intrigues of France, was a motive for declaring war against that Power. And a French war still retained its old charm for the English: their share in it surpassed all expectation. The English land forces co-operated with decisive effect in the great victory of S. Quintin, and similarly the appearance of the English fleet on the French coasts ensured Philip's predominance on the ocean. But it is very doubtful whether this was the part the English power should have played at this moment. By his father's abdication and retirement into the cloister Philip had become lord and master of the Spanish monarchy. Could it be the mission of the English to help in consolidating it in his hands? On the foundation then laid, and mainly through the peace which France saw herself compelled to make, its greatness was built up. For the Spanish monarchy the union with England, which rested on the able use to which the existing troubles and the personal position of the Queen were turned—and which, strictly speaking, was still a result of the policy of Ferdinand the Catholic—was of indescribable advantage: to the English it brought a loss which was severely felt. They had neglected to put Calais in a proper state of defence; at the first attack it fell into the hands of the French. The greatest value was still laid in England on a possession across the sea, which seemed indispensable for the command of the Channel; its extension was the main object of Henry VIII's last war: that now it was on the contrary utterly lost was felt to be a national disaster; the population of the town, which consisted of English, was expelled together with the garrison. But what now was the consequent situation of affairs in England! The Queen, who recognised no higher authority than that of the Papal See, was obliged to have Paul IV's messages intercepted, lest they should become known. While the ashes of the reputed heretics were still smoking on their Calvaries, the man who represented the Catholic form of religion, and was working effectively for its progress, was accused of falling away from the orthodox faith, and summoned to Rome to answer for it. Meanwhile England did not feel herself strong enough, even with the help that Philip offered, to attempt the reconquest of Calais. The finances were completely disordered by the war; and the Parliament showed little zeal in restoring the balance: just before this the Queen had found herself obliged even to diminish the amount of a subsidy already as good as voted. However unwilling she might be to take the step after her previous experiences, she had to decide once more in the autumn of 1558 on calling a Parliament. Circumstances wore an appearance all the more dangerous, as the Scotch were allied with the victorious French: the Queen represented to the Commons the need of extraordinary means of defence. A number of the leading lords appeared in the Lower House to give additional weight to the demand of the Crown by their presence. The Commons, though not quite willingly, were proceeding to deliberate on the subsidies demanded, when an event happened which relieved them from the necessity of A tertian or quartan fever was then prevalent in the Netherlands and in England, which was very fatal, especially to elderly persons of enfeebled health. NOTES: |