CHAPTER V.

THE MARIAN REACTION.

The Spanish match-Arrival of the legate-The lighting of the fires-Latimer and Ridley-Cranmer-Loss of Calais-The Puritans.

M

ARY'S accession was the opening of a short and violent reaction in the history of the Reformation, for she had already shown herself a devoted adherent of the Romish Church. During the late reign, she had steadily defied every effort to bend her rigid Romanism. Now, exalted to the throne, she turned that passive energy into an instrument of tremendous power.

She set free Gardiner, Bonner, Tunstall, Day, and Heath, and sent to prison in their stead Ridley, Latimer, Cranmer, and other Reformers. At the same time, she assured the Lord Mayor that every one would be allowed to exercise his religion according to his conscience. Bishop Gardiner became chancellor. It was a necessary act to sweep the intriguing Northumberland off the stage. Recanting his Protestantism, and kissing the cross he had marked in the sawdust, he was beheaded on Tower Hill, the sons of his victim Somerset looking on among the crowd.

Immediately after Mary's accession, Reginald Pole,* whom residence had made half Italian, received his commission from the Pope as legate to England. A secret messenger from

*Pole. See Genealogical Table, p. 306.

Rome had an audience of the queen, who told him that she could not receive the legate yet, but that she meant to contract such a marriage as would strengthen the Roman interest in her realm, and that her heart was unalterably given to the Papacy. Before this emissary left England the mass had been restored, and in the ruder districts of the land had been received with joy. The match which was to rebuild Roman Catholicism in England was suggested by the Emperor Charles, who was desirous of strengthening himself against France by an alliance between England and Spain. He therefore proposed the marriage of his son Philip with Mary, who was only about ten years older than he. Mary coquetted a little with her consent; but the voice of the whole country rose loud against the marriage.

Discontent, fomented secretly by France, broke into rebellion. Sir Peter Carew, failing to raise the Devonshire men, fled to France. Sir Thomas Wyatt, the son of Surrey's poetic friend, met at first with some success. While 1554 he was traversing in Kent almost the same road which had led Tyler and Cade to their graves, the Duke of Suffolk, Lady Jane Grey's father, made a fruitless attempt on Coventry. Finding the passage of London Bridge impossible, the rebel knight led his diminished force to Kingston, crossed the Thames. there with little trouble, and entered London, where his straggling files were cut in two, and he himself was caught as in a trap. This insurrection caused many deaths. Jane and her husband suffered first. Her father soon followed. Wyatt did not escape his doom. The Princess Elizabeth, too, was involved in considerable danger. Had the rising been successful, she would have been made queen. It was therefore necessary, in the eyes of Mary's supporters, that she should Mar. 18. be kept under watch and ward. She was therefore committed to the Tower, passing through the ominous Traitors' Gate.

In two months the popular feeling obliged her jailers to remove her to the more pleasant solitude of Woodstock.

Then the long-looked-for Spanish bridegroom sailed into Southampton Water. No cannon boomed on the July 20. Solent, lest the French cruisers might hear.

Landing

in silence, he rode through heavy rain to Winchester, where Mary impatiently awaited his approach. The betrothal was then completed by the marriage ceremony. What seemed the strongest link in the new Romish chain was welded with apparent firmness. For a year the husband hung about the English court, disliked and disliking.

During that year Cardinal Pole, the papal legate, arrived in England by way of Dover. As he swept in a stately barge, decorated with a silver cross, from Gravesend to London, his enraptured Italian suite discovered that the river was miraculously flowing backward to bear them to their destination. They were not used in the Tiber to the ebb and flow of the tide. At Whitehall Stairs, Pole found himself in the arms of the king and queen, who started from the dinner-table to embrace one only less sacred in their eyes than Pope Julius himself. Somewhat later, he took up his quarters in Lambeth Palace; for Cranmer, whose pall was destined for his sacred shoulders, was then lying in one of the Tower cells. A week afterwards, in the hall of the palace, amid a crowd of Nov. 30. Englishmen and Spaniards, the cardinal pronounced over the heads of the kneeling sovereigns the words of the absolution formula, which took England back to the bosom of the Romish Church.

The free spirit of the laity, which had been growing for thirty years, could not be wholly gagged. The acts of Henry the Eighth which bore against the papal power were indeed all swept away at once, chiefly through the efforts of Gardiner, who swayed the Lords and Commons almost at his will. clergy clamoured for their old powers, and got many of them. In two things, however, the court party met with decided opposition. They could not force the Commons either to permit

The

the coronation of Philip, or to cut off Elizabeth from the succession.

All was now ready for the lighting of the fires. The net had been already cast, and the prisons contained many heretics. In every diocese a register was to be kept, in which the names of all complying before Easter with the return to Romanism were to be entered. Rogers, a canon of St. Paul's, and Hooper, the charitable Bishop of Gloucester, appearing in a Southwark church before Gardiner, Bonner, and others, refused to recant, and received sentence of death. Rogers had been in Newgate, and Hooper had been lying in a fetid ward of the Fleet for many months. Rogers was the first to die. Twice he begged to see his wife; twice this sad consolation was denied him. He saw her, with nine little ones clustered at her skirts and a tenth upon her breast, as he went to his baptism of fire in Smithfield. Hooper was carried down to Gloucester; and there, in an open space opposite the college, the fagots were piled around him on a wet and stormy morning in February. The Feb. 9. gunpowder fastened to his limbs did not stun him

Feb. 4,

1555

with its explosion. The wet wood could scarcely be kindled. It was a frightful scene of slow torture prolonged for threequarters of an hour; yet he never flinched. Rowland Taylor, rector of Hadleigh in Suffolk, was burned the same day on Aldham Common. Before that awful year-1555-had reached its middle, several other names were added to the list of martyrs. Ferrars, Bishop of St. David, suffered in the marketplace of Caermarthen; and Cardmaker, Prebendary of Wells, who had weakly yielded to the first gust of the storm, fed the flames in Smithfield. But the crown of martyrdom was not reserved for the priesthood. The laity, especially the trading classes, also bore noble witness to the truth. William Hunter, a London apprentice who had been detected reading the Bible in Brentwood Church, and an upholsterer named Warne who had accompanied Cardmaker to the stake, added their names to the

honoured roll of English martyrs. While fires like these were sending up their horrid smoke to heaven, Mary's cup of misery was rapidly filling to the brim. Her hope of bearing a child melted into disappointment and despair. She was forced to release Elizabeth from custody at Woodstock. Her husband Philip, whose cold stateliness repelled the English people, was not sorry to leave the country at the request of his father, in whose breast the thought of abdication had latterly been growing strong.

There yet remained in prison three of the Reformers, each of whom is a central figure in the changeful drama. Pole issued a commission to try Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley, who were forthwith brought to Oxford and there confronted with a tribunal of three Romish bishops. Cranmer, "in a black gown and leaning on a stick," appeared first before the altar of St. Mary's Church, where the commission sat. Charged with having fallen from the faith by various steps which led at last to heresy and treachery, the primate resolutely denied the authority of the Bishop of Rome, answering all the taunts of the queen's proctors with calmness and point. He went back to his cell. Ridley and his aged and illustrious companion at the stake were tried in the Divinity School. The ancient bloodrusted weapon of King Henry's reign was levelled at their precious lives. Questioned as to their belief in the real presence, both distinctly spoke what their judges looked upon as deadly heresy. In that plain and striking language which made Latimer's sermons the most powerful engine in the English Reformation, the apostle, trembling with eighty years, spoke out his mind. "Bread is bread and wine is wine. It is true that there is a change in the sacrament, but the change is not in the nature but in the dignity." Pole thought to convert these men by the arguments of a Spanish friar. The dream of course was vain. On the 16th of October the two men came out of prison to their death-Ridley carefully dressed in a