Page images
PDF
EPUB

proach of a horrible death, and betrayed that | certain assurance of death. Accordingly, Cranweakness upon which his enemies had calculated. mer acted as every man would have done in the He had written in abject terms to the queen be- like situation; he renounced the pope and all his fore, and, by receiving the visits in his cell, and doctrines-he gave a brief summary of his real listening to the arguments of a learned Spanish faith-he protested against the atrocious means monk-a certain friar Soto-and other Catholics, which had been used-he accused himself of havhe seems to have wished that it should be be- ing, from fear of death, sacrificed truth and his lieved he was still open to conviction. He now conscience by subscribing the recantations. It was renewed his applications for mercy, and turned not convenient to permit him to make a long ada ready ear to those who suggested that mercy dress; he was soon pulled down from the platmight be obtained, though only by recantation. form in the church on which he stood, and hurried It was a vital point with his enemies to lead him away to the same ditch, over against Baliol Colto this; and, if the truth is told, they proceeded lege, where his more fortunate friends, Ridley with a dexterity and malice truly infernal, soft- and Latimer, had suffered five months before. ening the hardships of his captivity, which might He was stripped to the shirt, and tied to the have rendered death less terrible, and giving him stake: he made no moan or useless prayer for again to taste of the pleasures of life. They mercy in this world: the death which he had so removed him to the house of the dean of Christ- dreaded, and for so long a time, seemed less church, where he fared delicately, and was allowed dreadful when he saw it face to face. As soon as to play at bowls and walk about at his pleasure. the flames began to rise he thrust into them his Not to dwell upon this miserable scene, in which, right hand-that erring hand which had signed after all, Cranmer excites rather pity and com- the recantations.2 The Romish church of Engpassion than contempt, and in which he is far land, with all its absolute hopes, may almost be more easily excused than in many others of his said to have perished in the flames that consumed preceding career, he formally renounced the faith Cranmer. The impression made by his martyrdom he had taught, and, as his enemies were not satis- was immense, and as lasting as it was wide and fied with his signature to one scroll, he signed deep. On the side of the Catholics, the putting recantation after recantation until the number him to death was as gross an error in policy as amounted to six! But if we make a charitable it was atrocious and detestable as a crime. and a proper allowance for the weakness of human nature in the case of the victim, we can make none for the diabolical malice of his persecutors, who, when they had thus, as they conceived, loaded him with eternal obloquy, led him to the stake. While the monks and the learned doctors at Oxford were in great jubilee at having brought down to the very mire one of the proudest columns of the Reformed church, Mary sent secret orders to Dr. Cole, provost of Eton College, to prepare his condemned sermon. On the 21st of March the prisoner was brought up to St. Mary's Church, where Cole explained in the sermon that repentance does not avert all punishment, as examples in the Bible proved; that Cranmer had done the church and the Roman Catholics so much mischief that he must die; and that their majesties had, besides, other good reasons for burning him. The fallen Primate of England had learned the day before what was intended for him, and, having no longer the slightest hope of life, he seems to have summoned up resolution to meet his inevitable doom like a man. Some few men-their number was wonderfully small considering that death of torture-had recanted when brought to the stake and offered the queen's pardon on that condition; but it was not to be expected that any one would do so when there was no offer of pardon, but, on the contrary, a Strype has published them all. See Eccles. Mem. iv. 407.

[ocr errors]

On the very day after Cranmer's death, Cardinal Pole, who had now taken priest's orders, was consecrated and installed Archbishop of Canterbury. But, though primate and Papal legate, and fully convinced of the atrocity and worse than uselessness of persecution, he could not change the temper of the queen, nor stay the bloody hands of her favourites and ministers. Paul IV., who now wore the tiara, had been his personal enemy; and Pole, who apparently had not more courage than Cranmer, seems to have stood in awe of his fierce and intolerant spirit. On the 27th of June thirteen persons, being condemned for opinions concerning the sacrament, were burned at Stratford-le-Bow." "Neither did the cruelty of the persecutors exercise itself on the living only: the bones of Martin Bucer and Paul Phagius, long since dead, were dug up, formally accused of heresy, and, no man undertaking their cause (as who durst?), condemned, and publicly burned in the market-place at Cambridge. And Peter Martyr's wife, who died at Oxford, was disinterred, and with barbarous and inhuman spite buried in a dunghill.”

4

In order that we may not have to return to this revolting subject, we will here throw together a few other incidents, in completion of the picture of Mary's persecutions. From 'he mar

2 Godwin; Burnet; Strype; Blunt, Sketch of the Reformation.
3 Stow.
4 Godwin,

tyrdom of John Rogers, who suffered on the 4th of February, 1555, about six months after Mary's accession, to the five last victims, who were burned at Canterbury on the 10th of November, 1558, only seven days before her death, not fewer than 288 individuals, among whom were five bishops, twenty-one clergymen, fifty-five women, and four children, were burned in different places for their religious opinions; and, in addition to these, there were several hundreds who were tortured, ruined in their goods and estates, and many poor and friendless victims that were left to die of hunger in their prisons. With the exception of some few of the churchmen, these individuals were almost entirely of the middling or humbler classes the rich and great, as we have noticed, and as has been observed by several writers before us, showing little disposition to martyrdom. Only eight laymen of the rank of gentlemen are named; but it would be unjust to represent all the aristocracy as supple hypocrites, though they did not expose themselves voluntarily to persecution. The Earls of Oxford and Westmoreland and Lord Willoughby got into trouble, and were censured by the council for religion; and the second Earl of Bedford suffered a short imprisonment. Among those who were said to have "contemptuously gone over the seas," there were several persons of rank, whose property and interests suffered during their forced travels on the Continent. Other individuals, who held profitable places under government, voluntarily resigned them, and retired to the obscurity of a country life. The politic Cecil, who in heart and in head detested the course pursued, which he saw to be as bad in a political as in a religious light, conformed outwardly to what he could not resist; and it is said that he drew the line of conduct for the Princess Elizabeth, recommending humility and obedience, and certain compliances with the times. But it is quite certain that Elizabeth possessed a natural turn both for simulation and dissimulation, and that she scarcely stood in need of a guide and instructor in these particulars. She opened a chapel in her house, as commanded; she entertained masspriests; she kept a large crucifix constantly suspended in her chamber; she worked with her own hands garments for saints and Madonnas; and, when permitted to visit the court, and take part in the entertainments, she also, as a price paid therefor, accompanied the queen in her religious processions, which

VOL. II.

were conducted with great pomp, and in her visits to the re-Catholicized churches, which were in part restored to more than their ancient magnificence.' Elizabeth suffered more annoyance and persecution in the way of matrimony than on account of religion. Philip, who was most anxious to remove her by marriage out of the kingdom, proposed, and in fact insisted that she should give her hand to the Duke of Savoy, who came into England to press his own suit; but the princess obstinately refused, and had the art or good fortune to gain over to her side her sister Mary, who rarely opposed the wishes of her husband. Soon after the King of Sweden tried to obtain her hand for his eldest son Eric. The Swedish ambassador intrusted with this delicate mission was directed by his sovereign to make his application directly to Elizabeth herself, by a message in which neither the queen nor her council was at present to participate. Elizabeth, who confidently looked to the succession of the English crown, as one well aware of the state of Mary's health and of her own great popularity with a large portion of the nation, not only rejected the suit, but resolved to turn the gallant and generous mode in which it was opened by the Swede to her own immediate advantage. She declared that she could never listen to any overtures of this nature which had not previously received the sanction of her majesty. Her majesty was charmed at this declaration, and the two sisters thenceforward lived in tolerable friendship. Elizabeth, who lavished her protestations of gratitude for the queen's goodness-her acknowledgments that she was bound to honour,

[graphic]
[ocr errors]

HATFIELD HOUSE, HERTFORDSHIRE.-From Hall's Baronial Halls.

serve, love, and obey her highness in all things passed the greater part of the remainder of her sister's reign at her pleasant manor of Hatfield, 1 Relazione, by Michele, the Venetian ambassador; Despatches

115

with few privations, and no personal hardships | plished man to die in the forty-seventh year of to endure. A tender heart might have been racked and tortured by the fate of others; and in one particular case the royally dull feelings of Elizabeth must have been touched. Sir John Cheke, one of the finest scholars of that periodone of the best of men if he had risen above the intolerance and persecuting spirit of his age, had been preceptor to her brother King Edward, and had assisted in her own education. Sir John got free from the Tower, into which he was thrown for the part he had taken in the affair of Lady Jane Grey, but all his landed property was confiscated. Having obtained her majesty's permission to travel on the Continent for a limited period, he went to Switzerland. Led by his love of classical lore, he crossed the Alps into Italy, and even visited Rome, the head-quarters of the religion which he had attacked. In the beginning of 1556 he reached Strasburg, whence he addressed a letter to his dear friend and brotherin-law, Sir William Cecil, imploring him to hold fast his Protestant faith. From Strasburg Sir John Cheke privately repaired on a visit to his two learned friends Lord Paget and Sir John Mason, who were then Mary's ambassadors in Flanders. Both these men were recent court converts to Catholicism, and Paget had testified great zeal. On his return, between Brussels and Antwerp, Cheke, with his companion Sir Peter Carew, was arrested by a provost-marshal of King Philip, bound hand and foot, thrown into a cart, and conveyed to a vessel which was about to sail for England. It seems that his leave of absence had expired, and that there was no new political offence to be alleged against him except his not returning home at the time fixed. But in these cruel proceedings the queen and her husband, and the zealots of their party, aimed at a high object. Cheke, though a layman, had done almost as much as Cranmer in consolidating the Protestant church, and it was resolved to force him to recant. Gagged and muffled, he was thrown into the Tower, and, to escape the stake and the miseries to which he was subjected, he signed three ample recantations, and publicly proclaimed his acceptance of all the tenets and doctrines of the Roman church. But this was not deemed price enough for a liberation from prison to shame and obloquy: he was made to applaud the heavenly mercy of his persecutors; nay, it is said that he was obliged to take his seat on the bench by the side of Bishop Bonner, and assist that English inquisitor in sentencing his brother Protestants to the flames at Smithfield. Shame, remorse, and affliction caused this accom

of Noailles, the French ambassador. The Venetian says that, though Elizabeth was living Catholically (rivendo Cattolicamente), yet it was thought that she was only dissimulating.

his age of a death more terrible than burning.
Although the Inquisition never obtained a
name or formal establishment in England, all the
worst practices of that institution were adopted.
An ecclesiastical commission was appointed, with-
out authority of parliament, for the effectual ex-
tirpation of heresy. The commissioners were
empowered to inquire into all heresies, either by
presentments, by witnesses, or by any other poli-
tical way they could devise-to seize the bringers
in, the sellers, the readers of all heretical books—
to examine and punish all misbehaviour in any
church or chapel, and negligence in attending
mass, confession, and the rest-to try all priests
that did not preach pure Roman orthodoxy-
and if they found any that did obstinately per-
sist in their heresies, they were to put them into
the hands of their ordinaries, to be punished ac-
cording to the spiritual laws. The commissioners
had also full power to break open houses, to
search premises, to compel the attendance of wit-
nesses, "and to force them to make oath of such
things as might discover what they sought
after." It appears from letters written to Lord
North and others, that there was a standing
order "to put to the torture such obstinate per-
sons as would not confess." Informers were en-
couraged and courted; so that nearly every
villain could gratify his spite on his personal
enemies by accusing them of heresy or of disre-
spectful words; and, at the same time, secret spies
were retained, who not only frequented public
places, but also invaded the sacred privacy of
domestic life. The justices of the peace received
instructions to call secretly before them one or
two honest persons within their districts, or more,
at their discretion, and impose on them by oath
or otherwise, the duty of secretly learning and
searching out such persons as "evil behaved
themselves" in church, or that spoke against the
king's or queen's proceedings. And it was set
down in the same diabolical instructions, "that
the information shall be given secretly to the jus-
tices; and the same justices shall call the accused
persons before them, and examine them, without
declaring by whom they are accused." Although
the character of the upper classes of society had
been wofully deteriorated, the naturally frank
and generous spirit of the English people revolted
at such practices; and not the hundredth part of
the mischief was done which might have been
expected from the establishing of such a system.
This was the period of persecution for religious
opinions; the efforts and the success of Luther,
Calvin, and the other Reformers, had excited a
fury among the Catholics which nothing short of
blood and life could allay. The penal fires were

1 Burnet.

2

Ibid.

blazing from one end of Europe to the other; and terrible as was the brief rage of Mary's reign, England, as compared with most other Christian countries, was singularly fortunate.1

one of emperor, which it was not in his power to bestow." He chose for his retreat the monastery of St. Just, situated on the frontiers of Castile and Portugal, near to Placentia. He survived about two years, chiefly occupying his time in cultivating a little garden, reading divinity, making clocks, and trying experiments and inventions in mechanics. Many things are related of

bably as true as any of them, being that, upon finding he could never make two clocks to go exactly alike, he deplored the pains he had taken, and the blood he had shed, in order to make all mankind think and believe in one way.3

Mary's care for the souls of her subjects did not improve their morals. Without going to the full length of some Protestant writers, we may assert, upon good evidence, that crime was on the increase, and that capital offences, indepen-him in his retreat; one of the best, which is prodently of those of a religious kind, greatly multiplied. Fifty-two persons were condemned and executed at Oxford at one assize. Loathsome offences re-appeared: the highways became again insecure. On more than one occasion men of rank became thieves and cut-purses. In this unlucky year London and other cities were visited by the "hot burning fevers" which were particularly fatal to old persons. In the following year the country was afflicted by an extreme dearth, and pestilence stalked in the rear of famine. Plots and conspiracies, also, were not wanting, for which such abundant causes were ministered in the violation both of civil and religious liberty.

A.D. 1557.

Mary's husband Philip was now King of Spain, and absolute Lord of Naples, Sicily, the Milanese, the Low Countries, the Indies, and other fair and fertile countries, which well deserved a better master. This had not happened by the death, but by the voluntary resignation of his father Charles V. The emperor and king, who had been for forty years the mightiest potentate in Europe, becoming suddenly sick of worldly dominion

"Cast crowns for rosaries away-
An empire for a cell."

Though only fifty-five years old, and with his
faculties, both mental and physical, to all ap-
pearance unimpaired, he determined to renounce
his many crowns. On the 25th of October, 1555,
he met the states of the Low Countries, ex-
plained to them the reasons of his resignation,
absolved them from their oaths of allegiance,
and devolved his authority on Philip-weeping,
it is said, as he reflected on the burden which he
imposed upon his son. A few months later he for-
mally resigned to Philip all his other dominions,
and all his titles, with the exception of the lofty

1 According to Fra Paolo, in the Netherlands alone 50,000 persons were hanged, beheaded, buried alive, or burned on account of religion; and in France, even before the massacre of St. Bartholomew, the number of victims who suffered death in the same cause was to be stated, not, as in England, by hundreds, but by thousands. In Germany, besides the happier tens of thousands who perished in battle, fighting for the privilege of worshipping God in their own way, thousands died on the scaffold, in the flames, and in dungeons; and, as yet, the liberty of conscience was insecure.

7 Charles had secured it already to his brother Ferdinand, who became the Emperor Ferdinand I. 3 De Thou; Bayle. The real Inquisition was first established at Rome by the

[ocr errors]

It was not always that the most Catholic king enjoyed the favour of the court of Rome; for even in that high quarter political considerations or personal animosities continually interfered with the spiritual scheme. Paul IV., who, as a bigot, and as the first that introduced the tribunal of the Inquisition in Rome, might have been expected to lean towards the congenial fanaticism of Philip, hated the Spaniards with an ancient and hereditary hatred, and, as a necessary consequence, favoured the French and their party in Italy; for, without the arms of France, the pope saw no possibility of overthrowing the dominion of Spain, which, be it said, was oppressive, and barbarizing, and odious to the Italian people. The great ability of the Emperor Charles had imposed respect; but Paul thought the accession of Philip, in such unusual circumstances, too good an opportunity to be lost, and, before the new king was well settled on his throne, the pontiff opened negotiations with the French. He set on foot plots and conspiracies in Naples, his native country, which was groaning under the weight of Spanish misrule; and he finally arranged a grand plan, by which the French king was to expel Philip by force of arms, and take possession of the Neapolitan kingdom, of the Milanese, and the other states in Upper Italy, which his ancestors had claimed, and several times held, though for very short periods. But Paul had formed an erroneous estimate of Philip, who was ever vigilant and suspicious, and who soon obtained intelligence of the secret manœuvres in Italy. In an opportune moment, at the end of the year 1555, he sent the Duke of Alva to take advice of Paul IV., then only Cardinal Caraffa, a Neapolitan, under the pontificate of Paul III. It was rendered frightful by its rigorous laws and novel forms of procedure; but it did not obtain all its monstrous vigour until the election of Paul IV.; and the first thing the Romans did after the death of this odious pontiff (which happened in 1559) was to burn the tribunal of the Holy Office, to liberate all the prisoners for matters of religion, and to raze the prisons of the Inquisition to the ground. It is a great mistake to suppose that this horrid tribunal was most powerful at Rome. Many of the popes detested it. The true scene of its might was not beyond the Alps, but the Pyrenees — in Spain and Portugal. In a considerable part of Italy it was never established at all.

accident. Among the numerous English refugees in France was one Thomas Stafford, a person of some rank and influence, who entertained the notion of revolutionizing England. With only thirty-two persons he crossed over from France, landed at Scarborough in Yorkshire, and surprised the castle there: but, on the third day they were all made prisoners by the Earl of Westmoreland, without effusion of blood; Stafford, Richard Saunders, and three or four others, among whom was a Frenchman, were sent up to London, committed to the Tower, and there tortured into a confession that Henry II., the French king, had aided and abetted their enterprise; which was not altogether improbable, as the French court knew what Philip and the Spaniards were doing in London, as well as the devotion of Mary to her husband's interests. Upon the 28th of May, Stafford was beheaded on Tower-hill, and on the morrow three of his companions were drawn to Tyburn and there executed. Richard Saunders, who had probably been a traitor, or had divulged more than the rest, received the queen's pardon. Making the most of what had happened, the queen accused the French court of encouraging many traitorous bands of her subjects-of giving an asylum to her outlaws, who were maintained in France with annual pensions, contrary to treaty-of sending over to the castle of Scarborough, Stafford and others in French ships, provided with armour, munition, and money; and on the 7th of June she made a formal declaration of war-perhaps the first declaration of the kind thoroughly unpopular with the nation. Having obtained what he wanted, and earnestly recommended the instant raising of troops to act as auxiliaries to his own army on the northern frontiers of France, Philip took his departure on the 6th of July, and, happily for England, he never returned! It was difficult -most difficult to do her husband's bidding; but, with great exertions, Mary levied 1000 horse, 4000 foot, and 2000 pioneers, and sent them over to Flanders in the end of July, under the command of the Earl of Pembroke, with the Lord Robert Dudley, for his master of the ordnance.3

upon himself the government of Naples. Before | But the Spanish interests were served by a strange this, Alva was governor of Milan, and now he had the supreme command of the whole of Italy that appertained to the Spaniards, whose armies were reinforced in order to meet the French (then preparing to cross the Alps under the Duke of Guise) and keep down the Italian people, who, in many places, were ready to rise. The pope was in a paroxysm of rage, which did not permit him to wear an almost useless mask. He arrested and threw into prison Garcilasso de la Vega, who was then at Rome as ambassador from Philip in his quality of King of England; and he imprisoned and put to the torture De Tassis, the Roman postmaster, for passing certain letters written in the Spanish interest. The Duke of Alva, who soon afterwards massacred the Protestants in heaps in the Low Countries, showed little delicacy towards this turbulent head of the Catholic church: anticipating his movements, he marched an army across the Neapolitan frontiers into the Roman States. The Spaniards spread confusion, destruction, and terror through the whole Papal territory: people fled from the city of Rome, expecting another sack, and not doubting that the troops of his most Catholic majesty would prove as bloodthirsty and rapacious as the auxiliaries under the Constable Bourbon: but Paul IV., who had the fierce spirit of a pope of the fourteenth century, would not listen to terms of accommodation; and though one of his nephews, the Cardinal Caraffa, had a conference with the Duke of Alva, they concluded nothing but a truce for forty days. In the meanwhile, notwithstanding a solemn truce for five years, which still existed between France and Spain, the Duke of Guise had led an army through the passes of the Alps, and was looking forward with bright and not unreasonable hopes to the conquest of Lombardy. This was the state of affairs in Italy towards the end of the year 1556. In the month of March of the present year (1557) King Philip gratified his wife Mary with a short visit, and he entered London in some state, being accompanied by the queen and divers nobles of the real:n.2 But it was soon seen that his most Catholic majesty had not come for love, the sole object of his visit being to drive Mary and her council into a declaration of war against France. This, however, was not so easy a matter as he had fancied: Cardinal Pole and nearly the whole of the council opposed the measure; and even such of the ministry as were more compliant dreaded the effects of a war with France, which was sure to be accompanied by a war with Scotland, in the present deranged state of the finances and evident ill-humour of the people.

1 Giannone, Storia Civile del Regno di Napoli: Summonte; De Thou. 2 Stow; Holinshed.

Amidst this din of war, the Lady Anne of Cleves died very quietly at Chelsea. She left a good name behind her among the people, and was buried like a princess royal in Westminster Abbey.

Having joined the bands of Flemings, Germans, Italians, Dalmatians, Illyrians, Croats, and others, that formed the army of King Philip, the English marched with this mixed host, under the supreme command of Elizabeth's rejected

3 Stow; Holinshed,

« PreviousContinue »