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Chapter XXX
- ENGLAND UNDER MARY
THE Duke of Northumberland was very anxious to keep the young
King's death a secret, in order that he might get the two
Princesses into his power. But, the Princess Mary, being informed
of that event as she was on her way to London to see her sick
brother, turned her horse's head, and rode away into Norfolk. The
Earl of Arundel was her friend, and it was he who sent her warning
of what had happened.
As the secret could not be kept, the Duke of Northumberland and the
council sent for the Lord Mayor of London and some of the aldermen,
and made a merit of telling it to them. Then, they made it known
to the people, and set off to inform Lady Jane Grey that she was to
be Queen.
She was a pretty girl of only sixteen, and was amiable, learned,
and clever. When the lords who came to her, fell on their knees
before her, and told her what tidings they brought, she was so
astonished that she fainted. On recovering, she expressed her
sorrow for the young King's death, and said that she knew she was
unfit to govern the kingdom; but that if she must be Queen, she
prayed God to direct her. She was then at Sion House, near
Brentford; and the lords took her down the river in state to the
Tower, that she might remain there (as the custom was) until she
was crowned. But the people were not at all favourable to Lady
Jane, considering that the right to be Queen was Mary's, and
greatly disliking the Duke of Northumberland. They were not put
into a better humour by the Duke's causing a vintner's servant, one
Gabriel Pot, to be taken up for expressing his dissatisfaction
among the crowd, and to have his ears nailed to the pillory, and
cut off. Some powerful men among the nobility declared on Mary's
side. They raised troops to support her cause, had her proclaimed
Queen at Norwich, and gathered around her at the castle of
Framlingham, which belonged to the Duke of Norfolk. For, she was
not considered so safe as yet, but that it was best to keep her in
a castle on the sea-coast, from whence she might be sent abroad, if
necessary.
The Council would have despatched Lady Jane's father, the Duke of
Suffolk, as the general of the army against this force; but, as
Lady Jane implored that her father might remain with her, and as he
was known to be but a weak man, they told the Duke of
Northumberland that he must take the command himself. He was not
very ready to do so, as he mistrusted the Council much; but there
was no help for it, and he set forth with a heavy heart, observing
to a lord who rode beside him through Shoreditch at the head of the
troops, that, although the people pressed in great numbers to look
at them, they were terribly silent.
And his fears for himself turned out to be well founded. While he
was waiting at Cambridge for further help from the Council, the
Council took it into their heads to turn their backs on Lady Jane's
cause, and to take up the Princess Mary's. This was chiefly owing
to the before-mentioned Earl of Arundel, who represented to the
Lord Mayor and aldermen, in a second interview with those sagacious
persons, that, as for himself, he did not perceive the Reformed
religion to be in much danger - which Lord Pembroke backed by
flourishing his sword as another kind of persuasion. The Lord
Mayor and aldermen, thus enlightened, said there could be no doubt
that the Princess Mary ought to be Queen. So, she was proclaimed
at the Cross by St. Paul's, and barrels of wine were given to the
people, and they got very drunk, and danced round blazing bonfires
- little thinking, poor wretches, what other bonfires would soon be
blazing in Queen Mary's name.
After a ten days' dream of royalty, Lady Jane Grey resigned the
Crown with great willingness, saying that she had only accepted it
in obedience to her father and mother; and went gladly back to her
pleasant house by the river, and her books. Mary then came on
towards London; and at Wanstead in Essex, was joined by her half-
sister, the Princess Elizabeth. They passed through the streets of
London to the Tower, and there the new Queen met some eminent
prisoners then confined in it, kissed them, and gave them their
liberty. Among these was that Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, who
had been imprisoned in the last reign for holding to the unreformed
religion. Him she soon made chancellor.
The Duke of Northumberland had been taken prisoner, and, together
with his son and five others, was quickly brought before the
Council. He, not unnaturally, asked that Council, in his defence,
whether it was treason to obey orders that had been issued under
the great seal; and, if it were, whether they, who had obeyed them
too, ought to be his judges? But they made light of these points;
and, being resolved to have him out of the way, soon sentenced him
to death. He had risen into power upon the death of another man,
and made but a poor show (as might be expected) when he himself lay
low. He entreated Gardiner to let him live, if it were only in a
mouse's hole; and, when he ascended the scaffold to be beheaded on
Tower Hill, addressed the people in a miserable way, saying that he
had been incited by others, and exhorting them to return to the
unreformed religion, which he told them was his faith. There seems
reason to suppose that he expected a pardon even then, in return
for this confession; but it matters little whether he did or not.
His head was struck off.
Mary was now crowned Queen. She was thirty-seven years of age,
short and thin, wrinkled in the face, and very unhealthy. But she
had a great liking for show and for bright colours, and all the
ladies of her Court were magnificently dressed. She had a great
liking too for old customs, without much sense in them; and she was
oiled in the oldest way, and blessed in the oldest way, and done
all manner of things to in the oldest way, at her coronation. I
hope they did her good.
She soon began to show her desire to put down the Reformed
religion, and put up the unreformed one: though it was dangerous
work as yet, the people being something wiser than they used to be.
They even cast a shower of stones - and among them a dagger - at
one of the royal chaplains who attacked the Reformed religion in a
public sermon. But the Queen and her priests went steadily on.
Ridley, the powerful bishop of the last reign, was seized and sent
to the Tower. LATIMER, also celebrated among the Clergy of the
last reign, was likewise sent to the Tower, and Cranmer speedily
followed. Latimer was an aged man; and, as his guards took him
through Smithfield, he looked round it, and said, 'This is a place
that hath long groaned for me.' For he knew well, what kind of
bonfires would soon be burning. Nor was the knowledge confined to
him. The prisons were fast filled with the chief Protestants, who
were there left rotting in darkness, hunger, dirt, and separation
from their friends; many, who had time left them for escape, fled
from the kingdom; and the dullest of the people began, now, to see
what was coming.
It came on fast. A Parliament was got together; not without strong
suspicion of unfairness; and they annulled the divorce, formerly
pronounced by Cranmer between the Queen's mother and King Henry the
Eighth, and unmade all the laws on the subject of religion that had
been made in the last King Edward's reign. They began their
proceedings, in violation of the law, by having the old mass said
before them in Latin, and by turning out a bishop who would not
kneel down. They also declared guilty of treason, Lady Jane Grey
for aspiring to the Crown; her husband, for being her husband; and
Cranmer, for not believing in the mass aforesaid. They then prayed
the Queen graciously to choose a husband for herself, as soon as
might be.
Now, the question who should be the Queen's husband had given rise
to a great deal of discussion, and to several contending parties.
Some said Cardinal Pole was the man - but the Queen was of opinion
that he was NOT the man, he being too old and too much of a
student. Others said that the gallant young COURTENAY, whom the
Queen had made Earl of Devonshire, was the man - and the Queen
thought so too, for a while; but she changed her mind. At last it
appeared that PHILIP, PRINCE OF SPAIN, was certainly the man -
though certainly not the people's man; for they detested the idea
of such a marriage from the beginning to the end, and murmured that
the Spaniard would establish in England, by the aid of foreign
soldiers, the worst abuses of the Popish religion, and even the
terrible Inquisition itself.
These discontents gave rise to a conspiracy for marrying young
Courtenay to the Princess Elizabeth, and setting them up, with
popular tumults all over the kingdom, against the Queen. This was
discovered in time by Gardiner; but in Kent, the old bold county,
the people rose in their old bold way. SIR THOMAS WYAT, a man of
great daring, was their leader. He raised his standard at
Maidstone, marched on to Rochester, established himself in the old
castle there, and prepared to hold out against the Duke of Norfolk,
who came against him with a party of the Queen's guards, and a body
of five hundred London men. The London men, however, were all for
Elizabeth, and not at all for Mary. They declared, under the
castle walls, for Wyat; the Duke retreated; and Wyat came on to
Deptford, at the head of fifteen thousand men.
But these, in their turn, fell away. When he came to Southwark,
there were only two thousand left. Not dismayed by finding the
London citizens in arms, and the guns at the Tower ready to oppose
his crossing the river there, Wyat led them off to Kingston-upon-
Thames, intending to cross the bridge that he knew to be in that
place, and so to work his way round to Ludgate, one of the old
gates of the City. He found the bridge broken down, but mended it,
came across, and bravely fought his way up Fleet Street to Ludgate
Hill. Finding the gate closed against him, he fought his way back
again, sword in hand, to Temple Bar. Here, being overpowered, he
surrendered himself, and three or four hundred of his men were
taken, besides a hundred killed. Wyat, in a moment of weakness
(and perhaps of torture) was afterwards made to accuse the Princess
Elizabeth as his accomplice to some very small extent. But his
manhood soon returned to him, and he refused to save his life by
making any more false confessions. He was quartered and
distributed in the usual brutal way, and from fifty to a hundred of
his followers were hanged. The rest were led out, with halters
round their necks, to be pardoned, and to make a parade of crying
out, 'God save Queen Mary!'
In the danger of this rebellion, the Queen showed herself to be a
woman of courage and spirit. She disdained to retreat to any place
of safety, and went down to the Guildhall, sceptre in hand, and
made a gallant speech to the Lord Mayor and citizens. But on the
day after Wyat's defeat, she did the most cruel act, even of her
cruel reign, in signing the warrant for the execution of Lady Jane
Grey.
They tried to persuade Lady Jane to accept the unreformed religion;
but she steadily refused. On the morning when she was to die, she
saw from her window the bleeding and headless body of her husband
brought back in a cart from the scaffold on Tower Hill where he had
laid down his life. But, as she had declined to see him before his
execution, lest she should be overpowered and not make a good end,
so, she even now showed a constancy and calmness that will never be
forgotten. She came up to the scaffold with a firm step and a
quiet face, and addressed the bystanders in a steady voice. They
were not numerous; for she was too young, too innocent and fair, to
be murdered before the people on Tower Hill, as her husband had
just been; so, the place of her execution was within the Tower
itself. She said that she had done an unlawful act in taking what
was Queen Mary's right; but that she had done so with no bad
intent, and that she died a humble Christian. She begged the
executioner to despatch her quickly, and she asked him, 'Will you
take my head off before I lay me down?' He answered, 'No, Madam,'
and then she was very quiet while they bandaged her eyes. Being
blinded, and unable to see the block on which she was to lay her
young head, she was seen to feel about for it with her hands, and
was heard to say, confused, 'O what shall I do! Where is it?'
Then they guided her to the right place, and the executioner struck
off her head. You know too well, now, what dreadful deeds the
executioner did in England, through many, many years, and how his
axe descended on the hateful block through the necks of some of the
bravest, wisest, and best in the land. But it never struck so
cruel and so vile a blow as this.
The father of Lady Jane soon followed, but was little pitied.
Queen Mary's next object was to lay hold of Elizabeth, and this was
pursued with great eagerness. Five hundred men were sent to her
retired house at Ashridge, by Berkhampstead, with orders to bring
her up, alive or dead. They got there at ten at night, when she
was sick in bed. But, their leaders followed her lady into her
bedchamber, whence she was brought out betimes next morning, and
put into a litter to be conveyed to London. She was so weak and
ill, that she was five days on the road; still, she was so resolved
to be seen by the people that she had the curtains of the litter
opened; and so, very pale and sickly, passed through the streets.
She wrote to her sister, saying she was innocent of any crime, and
asking why she was made a prisoner; but she got no answer, and was
ordered to the Tower. They took her in by the Traitor's Gate, to
which she objected, but in vain. One of the lords who conveyed her
offered to cover her with his cloak, as it was raining, but she put
it away from her, proudly and scornfully, and passed into the
Tower, and sat down in a court-yard on a stone. They besought her
to come in out of the wet; but she answered that it was better
sitting there, than in a worse place. At length she went to her
apartment, where she was kept a prisoner, though not so close a
prisoner as at Woodstock, whither she was afterwards removed, and
where she is said to have one day envied a milkmaid whom she heard
singing in the sunshine as she went through the green fields.
Gardiner, than whom there were not many worse men among the fierce
and sullen priests, cared little to keep secret his stern desire
for her death: being used to say that it was of little service to
shake off the leaves, and lop the branches of the tree of heresy,
if its root, the hope of heretics, were left. He failed, however,
in his benevolent design. Elizabeth was, at length, released; and
Hatfield House was assigned to her as a residence, under the care
of one SIR THOMAS POPE.
It would seem that Philip, the Prince of Spain, was a main cause of
this change in Elizabeth's fortunes. He was not an amiable man,
being, on the contrary, proud, overbearing, and gloomy; but he and
the Spanish lords who came over with him, assuredly did
discountenance the idea of doing any violence to the Princess. It
may have been mere prudence, but we will hope it was manhood and
honour. The Queen had been expecting her husband with great
impatience, and at length he came, to her great joy, though he
never cared much for her. They were married by Gardiner, at
Winchester, and there was more holiday-making among the people; but
they had their old distrust of this Spanish marriage, in which even
the Parliament shared. Though the members of that Parliament were
far from honest, and were strongly suspected to have been bought
with Spanish money, they would pass no bill to enable the Queen to
set aside the Princess Elizabeth and appoint her own successor.
Although Gardiner failed in this object, as well as in the darker
one of bringing the Princess to the scaffold, he went on at a great
pace in the revival of the unreformed religion. A new Parliament
was packed, in which there were no Protestants. Preparations were
made to receive Cardinal Pole in England as the Pope's messenger,
bringing his holy declaration that all the nobility who had
acquired Church property, should keep it - which was done to enlist
their selfish interest on the Pope's side. Then a great scene was
enacted, which was the triumph of the Queen's plans. Cardinal Pole
arrived in great splendour and dignity, and was received with great
pomp. The Parliament joined in a petition expressive of their
sorrow at the change in the national religion, and praying him to
receive the country again into the Popish Church. With the Queen
sitting on her throne, and the King on one side of her, and the
Cardinal on the other, and the Parliament present, Gardiner read
the petition aloud. The Cardinal then made a great speech, and was
so obliging as to say that all was forgotten and forgiven, and that
the kingdom was solemnly made Roman Catholic again.
Everything was now ready for the lighting of the terrible bonfires.
The Queen having declared to the Council, in writing, that she
would wish none of her subjects to be burnt without some of the
Council being present, and that she would particularly wish there
to be good sermons at all burnings, the Council knew pretty well
what was to be done next. So, after the Cardinal had blessed all
the bishops as a preface to the burnings, the Chancellor Gardiner
opened a High Court at Saint Mary Overy, on the Southwark side of
London Bridge, for the trial of heretics. Here, two of the late
Protestant clergymen, HOOPER, Bishop of Gloucester, and ROGERS, a
Prebendary of St. Paul's, were brought to be tried. Hooper was
tried first for being married, though a priest, and for not
believing in the mass. He admitted both of these accusations, and
said that the mass was a wicked imposition. Then they tried
Rogers, who said the same. Next morning the two were brought up to
be sentenced; and then Rogers said that his poor wife, being a
German woman and a stranger in the land, he hoped might be allowed
to come to speak to him before he died. To this the inhuman
Gardiner replied, that she was not his wife. 'Yea, but she is, my
lord,' said Rogers, 'and she hath been my wife these eighteen
years.' His request was still refused, and they were both sent to
Newgate; all those who stood in the streets to sell things, being
ordered to put out their lights that the people might not see them.
But, the people stood at their doors with candles in their hands,
and prayed for them as they went by. Soon afterwards, Rogers was
taken out of jail to be burnt in Smithfield; and, in the crowd as
he went along, he saw his poor wife and his ten children, of whom
the youngest was a little baby. And so he was burnt to death.
The next day, Hooper, who was to be burnt at Gloucester, was
brought out to take his last journey, and was made to wear a hood
over his face that he might not be known by the people. But, they
did know him for all that, down in his own part of the country;
and, when he came near Gloucester, they lined the road, making
prayers and lamentations. His guards took him to a lodging, where
he slept soundly all night. At nine o'clock next morning, he was
brought forth leaning on a staff; for he had taken cold in prison,
and was infirm. The iron stake, and the iron chain which was to
bind him to it, were fixed up near a great elm-tree in a pleasant
open place before the cathedral, where, on peaceful Sundays, he had
been accustomed to preach and to pray, when he was bishop of
Gloucester. This tree, which had no leaves then, it being
February, was filled with people; and the priests of Gloucester
College were looking complacently on from a window, and there was a
great concourse of spectators in every spot from which a glimpse of
the dreadful sight could be beheld. When the old man kneeled down
on the small platform at the foot of the stake, and prayed aloud,
the nearest people were observed to be so attentive to his prayers
that they were ordered to stand farther back; for it did not suit
the Romish Church to have those Protestant words heard. His
prayers concluded, he went up to the stake and was stripped to his
shirt, and chained ready for the fire. One of his guards had such
compassion on him that, to shorten his agonies, he tied some
packets of gunpowder about him. Then they heaped up wood and straw
and reeds, and set them all alight. But, unhappily, the wood was
green and damp, and there was a wind blowing that blew what flame
there was, away. Thus, through three-quarters of an hour, the good
old man was scorched and roasted and smoked, as the fire rose and
sank; and all that time they saw him, as he burned, moving his lips
in prayer, and beating his breast with one hand, even after the
other was burnt away and had fallen off.
Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, were taken to Oxford to dispute with
a commission of priests and doctors about the mass. They were
shamefully treated; and it is recorded that the Oxford scholars
hissed and howled and groaned, and misconducted themselves in an
anything but a scholarly way. The prisoners were taken back to
jail, and afterwards tried in St. Mary's Church. They were all
found guilty. On the sixteenth of the month of October, Ridley and
Latimer were brought out, to make another of the dreadful bonfires.
The scene of the suffering of these two good Protestant men was in
the City ditch, near Baliol College. On coming to the dreadful
spot, they kissed the stakes, and then embraced each other. And
then a learned doctor got up into a pulpit which was placed there,
and preached a sermon from the text, 'Though I give my body to be
burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.' When you
think of the charity of burning men alive, you may imagine that
this learned doctor had a rather brazen face. Ridley would have
answered his sermon when it came to an end, but was not allowed.
When Latimer was stripped, it appeared that he had dressed himself
under his other clothes, in a new shroud; and, as he stood in it
before all the people, it was noted of him, and long remembered,
that, whereas he had been stooping and feeble but a few minutes
before, he now stood upright and handsome, in the knowledge that he
was dying for a just and a great cause. Ridley's brother-in-law
was there with bags of gunpowder; and when they were both chained
up, he tied them round their bodies. Then, a light was thrown upon
the pile to fire it. 'Be of good comfort, Master Ridley,' said
Latimer, at that awful moment, 'and 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.' And then he was seen to make motions with
his hands as if he were washing them in the flames, and to stroke
his aged face with them, and was heard to cry, 'Father of Heaven,
receive my soul!' He died quickly, but the fire, after having
burned the legs of Ridley, sunk. There he lingered, chained to the
iron post, and crying, 'O! I cannot burn! O! for Christ's sake
let the fire come unto me!' And still, when his brother-in-law had
heaped on more wood, he was heard through the blinding smoke, still
dismally crying, 'O! I cannot burn, I cannot burn!' At last, the
gunpowder caught fire, and ended his miseries.
Five days after this fearful scene, Gardiner went to his tremendous
account before God, for the cruelties he had so much assisted in
committing.
Cranmer remained still alive and in prison. He was brought out
again in February, for more examining and trying, by Bonner, Bishop
of London: another man of blood, who had succeeded to Gardiner's
work, even in his lifetime, when Gardiner was tired of it. Cranmer
was now degraded as a priest, and left for death; but, if the Queen
hated any one on earth, she hated him, and it was resolved that he
should be ruined and disgraced to the utmost. There is no doubt
that the Queen and her husband personally urged on these deeds,
because they wrote to the Council, urging them to be active in the
kindling of the fearful fires. As Cranmer was known not to be a
firm man, a plan was laid for surrounding him with artful people,
and inducing him to recant to the unreformed religion. Deans and
friars visited him, played at bowls with him, showed him various
attentions, talked persuasively with him, gave him money for his
prison comforts, and induced him to sign, I fear, as many as six
recantations. But when, after all, he was taken out to be burnt,
he was nobly true to his better self, and made a glorious end.
After prayers and a sermon, Dr. Cole, the preacher of the day (who
had been one of the artful priests about Cranmer in prison),
required him to make a public confession of his faith before the
people. This, Cole did, expecting that he would declare himself a
Roman Catholic. 'I will make a profession of my faith,' said
Cranmer, 'and with a good will too.'
Then, he arose before them all, and took from the sleeve of his
robe a written prayer and read it aloud. That done, he kneeled and
said the Lord's Prayer, all the people joining; and then he arose
again and told them that he believed in the Bible, and that in what
he had lately written, he had written what was not the truth, and
that, because his right hand had signed those papers, he would burn
his right hand first when he came to the fire. As for the Pope, he
did refuse him and denounce him as the enemy of Heaven. Hereupon
the pious Dr. Cole cried out to the guards to stop that heretic's
mouth and take him away.
So they took him away, and chained him to the stake, where he
hastily took off his own clothes to make ready for the flames. And
he stood before the people with a bald head and a white and flowing
beard. He was so firm now when the worst was come, that he again
declared against his recantation, and was so impressive and so
undismayed, that a certain lord, who was one of the directors of
the execution, called out to the men to make haste! When the fire
was lighted, Cranmer, true to his latest word, stretched out his
right hand, and crying out, 'This hand hath offended!' held it
among the flames, until it blazed and burned away. His heart was
found entire among his ashes, and he left at last a memorable name
in English history. Cardinal Pole celebrated the day by saying his
first mass, and next day he was made Archbishop of Canterbury in
Cranmer's place.
The Queen's husband, who was now mostly abroad in his own
dominions, and generally made a coarse jest of her to his more
familiar courtiers, was at war with France, and came over to seek
the assistance of England. England was very unwilling to engage in
a French war for his sake; but it happened that the King of France,
at this very time, aided a descent upon the English coast. Hence,
war was declared, greatly to Philip's satisfaction; and the Queen
raised a sum of money with which to carry it on, by every
unjustifiable means in her power. It met with no profitable
return, for the French Duke of Guise surprised Calais, and the
English sustained a complete defeat. The losses they met with in
France greatly mortified the national pride, and the Queen never
recovered the blow.
There was a bad fever raging in England at this time, and I am glad
to write that the Queen took it, and the hour of her death came.
'When I am dead and my body is opened,' she said to those around
those around her, 'ye shall find CALAIS written on my heart.' I
should have thought, if anything were written on it, they would
have found the words - JANE GREY, HOOPER, ROGERS, RIDLEY, LATIMER,
CRANMER, AND THREE HUNDRED PEOPLE BURNT ALIVE WITHIN FOUR YEARS OF
MY WICKED REIGN, INCLUDING SIXTY WOMEN AND FORTY LITTLE CHILDREN.
But it is enough that their deaths were written in Heaven.
The Queen died on the seventeenth of November, fifteen hundred and
fifty-eight, after reigning not quite five years and a half, and in
the forty-fourth year of her age. Cardinal Pole died of the same
fever next day.
As BLOODY QUEEN MARY, this woman has become famous, and as BLOODY
QUEEN MARY, she will ever be justly remembered with horror and
detestation in Great Britain. Her memory has been held in such
abhorrence that some writers have arisen in later years to take her
part, and to show that she was, upon the whole, quite an amiable
and cheerful sovereign! 'By their fruits ye shall know them,' said
OUR SAVIOUR. The stake and the fire were the fruits of this reign,
and you will judge this Queen by nothing else.
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