WOODSTOCK, as existing A.D. 1714.

she was finally fixed under the vigilant eyes of the severe and suspicious Bedingfield. Six days after her liberation, Courtenay, Earl of Devon, was delivered out of the Tower and sent down to Fotheringay Castle, where he was watched with equal vigilance. Meanwhile preparations were making for the queen's marriage, and the people of London occasionally gave unequivocal proofs of their hatred of it, and of the changes introduced in the national religion. On one Sunday in June, as Dr. Pendleton was preaching Papistry at Paul's Cross, he was shot at and nearly killed. A little before, the court and clergy were greatly enraged at finding a cat, with her head shorn and dressed like a Roman priest, hanged on a gallows in Cheapside; and a little after, a still more violent excitement was produced by a poor wench who played the part of a spirit, and anticipated some of the impositions of the Cock Lane ghost, "expressing certain seditious words against the queen, the Prince of Spain, the mass, confession, &c."1

On the 19th of July, Philip, Prince of Spain, arrived in Southampton Water. As the Count of Egmont, one of his ambassadors, had been violently assaulted some short time before by the people, who took him for his master, Philip came well attended with a body-guard and troops, and he lingered a few days at the place of his disembarkation, as if in order to ascertain the humour of the nation. There was a little cir

arrival the prince travelled to Winchester, and there he was met on the following morning (it being a wet day), by his mature bride Mary, who took no pains to conceal her impatience, being enabled in her conscience to plead her anxiety for a legitimate and holy Roman succession as the only means of securing the faith in England. They had a long familiar talk, and, on the feast of St. James, the titular saint of Spain-their nuptials were celebrated at Winchester with great pomp.

Mary had summoned parliament some three months before her husband's arrival: both houses showed that they were still jealous of the Spaniard, and they adopted further precautions to prevent his ruling as a king in England. Philip brought large sums of money with him; but even money could not win him the good-will of the corrupt courtiers. In a word, no one loved him but Mary; and the fondness of a sick and excessively jealous wife was anything but agreeable. He soon showed her the real motives of his marriage, which were, to become absolute master of England, to wear the crown as if in his own right, and to dispose of all the resources of the country in his schemes of aggrandizement on the Continent. Though a bigot, he was certainly less anxious about the question of religion. Mary would have gratified him at the sacrifice of the interests and liberties of her people: she summoned a new parliament, and neglected no means likely to render it compliant. The Spanish gold was distributed with a liberal hand; and, imitating the precedent of former reigns, she wrote circular letters, commanding and imploring that the counties and boroughs would return such members as were wholly devoted to her interests and pleasures. This parliament met at Westminster on the 12th of November: the lords being as subservient as ever-the commons consisting wholly of Catholics or of men indifferent to the great question of religion. Both houses were ready to second the queen's bigotry, always with the old exception that she should by no means force them to surrender the temporal fruits of their late schism. In the preceding parliament, Mary had thought it prudent to retain

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OR the Protestants this year (1555) opened most gloomily. The queen sent Thomas Thirlby, the new Bishop of Ely, the Lord Anthony Montacute, and Sir Edward Carne, or Karne, with a very honourable train of gentlemen and others, as ambassadors to Rome, to confirm the reconciliation of the nation with the Catholic church, and concert measures for the promotion of the old religion, to the exclusion of all others. But Mary wanted no foreign advisers to urge her into the paths of intolerance and persecution. The conviction was deeply settled in her heart's core, and in her brain-and there were bishops of English birth to insist upon it-that toleration in religion only led to indifference and the eternal perdition of men's souls-that any reconciliation of parties or sects was not to be thought of-that it was the duty of religious princes to exterminate the heretical infection-that the mass of the people,' after all, were attached to the discipline and doctrine of the only true church; and that those of them who were not, would soon come back into the right way if all the heretical portion of the clergy, particularly the bishops, were taken Notwithstanding the progress made by the Reformation during the short reign of Edward VI., it is probable that this statement was correct. In London, and the great cities generally, there were many Protestants, but in the rural districts

their number was comparatively small. There appears, however, to have been a great difference in this respect among the counties. Norfolk and Suffolk, for example, were to a great extent Protestant, and no part of England suffered so much from Mary's persecutions, though they, in effect, had set her on the throne upon promises which her bigotry could never permit

her to keep.

| from them, and treated with wholesome severity. The prisons were already crowded—the inquisitors had only to choose their victims, and prepare their stakes and fagots. There were several preludes and preparations to accustom the people to the degradation of these spiritual teachers, whom, only two years before, all had been bound by law to revere and obey. Some married priests, who would not leave their wives, were sent in procession round St. Paul's Church with white sheets over them, and burning tapers and scourges in their hands; and when this humiliating ceremony was over, they were publicly whipped. These scenes were repeated in different parts of the kingdom; and the unlucky wives of clergymen were occasionally treated with equal contumely.2

The revived statutes against heretics-that is to say, the acts first passed against the Lollards in the times of Richard II., Henry IV., and Henry V.-were to take effect from the 20th of January (1555). Previous to that great day of rejoicing, Bonner, with eight bishops and 160 orthodox priests, made a grand procession through London to return thanks to the Almighty for the sudden renewal of Divine grace in the land. Then a commission sat in the church of St. Mary Overy, Southwark, for the trial of Protestants. The first man brought before them was John Rogers, a prebendary of St. Paul's, who had been lying in Newgate among cut-throats and desperadoes for more than a year. When questioned and brow-beaten by his judge, Rogers pointedly asked, "Did not you, yourself, for

2 Holinshed; Grafton; Stow; Strype.

twenty years, pray against the pope ?" "I was forced by cruelty," replied Bishop Gardiner. "And will you use the like cruelty to us?" said Rogers. The court sentenced him to the flames.' On the night after Rogers' martyrdom in Smithfield the Protestant Bishop Hooper, one of the pillars of the Reformed church, was told that he was to be burned, not in Smithfield, however, but at Gloucester, among his own people: and at Gloucester

PLACE OF BISHOP HOOPER'S MARTYRDOM, GLOUCESTER.2
From a sketch on the spot.

he was burned in a slow fire on the 9th of February. The same course was adopted with Robert Ferrar, Bishop of St. David's, a rigid man and of a rough behaviour, who was sent down from London to his own diocese, where he was burned alive on the 30th of March. About the same time fires were lighted in other parts of the kingdom. On the eastern side, on the very day that Bishop Hooper was burned at Gloucester, Dr. Rowland Taylor, who had lived for some time in the family of Archbishop Cranmer, who preferred him to the rectory of Hadleigh, in Suffolk, was burned in that town. This Taylor was one of the boldest of those who suffered for conscience sake, and, like nearly every one of those Protestant martyrs, he was a man of humble birth. From this Rowland Taylor descended the eloquent, the learned, the great and amiable Jeremy Taylor, the antagonist of the Church of

1 Fuller; Godwin; Blunt; Despatches of Noailles, the French ambassador. This execution produced a great effect upon the people, but one altogether different from what the wretched Mary and her bishops expected. Noailles, who was a Catholic, says, "This day the confirmation of the alliance between the pope and this kingdom has been made by a public and solemn sacrifice of a preaching doctor named Rogers, who has been burned alive for being a Lutheran; but he has met his death persisting in his opinion. At which the greater part of the people here took such pleasure that they did not fear to give him many acclamations to comfort his courage; and even his children

Rome, and yet the advocate of toleration-one of the first and best of that holy band who taught that God was not served by the torment of his creatures. The now prevalent fanaticism of the Papists occasionally awoke a like spirit on the part of the Protestants. On Easter Day, the most solemn festival of the Roman church, one William Branch, or Flower, who had once been a monk of Ely, but who had embraced the Reformed religion, stabbed a priest as he was administering the sacrament to the people in the manner of Rome in the church of St. Margaret's, Westminster. No crime could be so frightful as this in the eyes of the Catholics: there was no hope of escaping from a crowded church, and the enthusiast does not appear to have attempted it. On the 24th of April his sacrilegious right hand was cut off, and then, "for opinions in matters of religion," he was burned in the sanctuary near to St. Margaret's Churchyard.3

During the festivities of Easter the Princess Elizabeth was summoned to court, that she might congratulate the queen, who had taken her chamber at Hampton Court, to be delivered; and it should seem that Elizabeth acquitted herself very dexterously on this delicate occasion. But, to return to the chief business of this deplorable reign, John Cardmaker, chancellor of the church of Wells, was burned at London on the last day of May; and John Bradford suffered the same cruel death at the same place about a month later. A little before, or a little after these executions in the capital, Thomas Hawkes, an Essex gentleman, was burned at Coggeshall; John Lawrence, a priest, at Colchester; Tomkins, a weaver, at Shoreditch; Pigott, a butcher, at Braintree; Knight, a barber, at Maldon; and Hunter, an apprentice to a silk-weaver, at Brentwood.

Bishop Gardiner, the chancellor, who was far less cruel than many, soon grew weary of presiding in the horrible court at the church of St. Mary Overy: he withdrew as early as the month of February, when his duties devolved on an apter spirit, Bonner, Bishop of London, who possessed all the essentials for an inquisitor and familiar of the Holy Office in a greater degree than any Englishman we ever heard of. This prelate sat in the consistory of St. Paul's, where the

stood by consoling him, in such a way that he looked as if they were conducting him to a merry marriage."

2 Hooper was burned in the church-yard of St. Mary de Lode, in Gloucester. The spot on which his martyrdom was consummated, long pointed out by tradition, was indubitably ascer tained in 1826, by finding upon it the remains of the charred stake to which he had been attached. It is now marked by the small monument represented in the engraving. In the back ground is the western gate of the abbey, from which the priests witnessed the martyr's sufferings.

3 Stow: Godwin