QUEEN ELIZABETH
 
 s Btst f)istorits 
 
 ENGLAND 
 
 BY 
 JOHN RICHARD GREEN, LL.D. 
 
 Illustrated 
 
 WITH A SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER OF RECENT EVENTS 
 
 BY JULIAN HAWTHORNE 
 
 IN FOUR VOLUMES 
 VOLUME TWO 
 
 NEW YORK AND LONDON 
 THE CO-OPERATIVE PUBLICATION SOCIETY
 
 HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 VOLUME TWO 
 
 2064912
 
 (XOTTEKTS. 
 
 BOOK V. 
 
 THE MONARCHY. 1461-1640. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 MM 
 
 THB HOUSE OF YORK. 14611485 11 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 THE REVIVAL OP LEABHINQ. 14851514 ..... 78 
 
 CHAPTER IIL 
 WOLSEY. 15141529 Ill 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 THOMAS CROMWELL. 15291540 . . . . 147 
 
 BOOK VI. 
 THE REFORMATION. 15401608. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 THB PROTESTANT REVOLUTION. 15401558 .... SOI 
 
 CHAPTER IL 
 THB CATHOLIC REACTION. 15531558 . S46
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER IIL 
 
 Mm 
 THE ENGLAND OF ELIZABETH. 15581561 .... 297 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 ENGLAND AND MAEY STUART. 15611567 .... 881 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 ENGLAND AND THE PAPACY. 1567 157 ... 867 
 
 CHAPTER VL 
 ENGLAND AND SPAIN. 15831593 420 
 
 CHAPTER VIL 
 THE ENGLAND OF SHAKSPERE. 10931603 . ... 456
 
 BOOK V. 
 THE MONARCHY. 
 
 14611540.
 
 AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK V. 
 
 14611540. 
 
 Edward the Fifth is the subject of a work attributed to Sir 
 Thomas More, and which almost certainly derives much of its im- 
 portance from Archbishop Morton. Whatever its historical worth 
 may be, it is remarkable in its English form as the first historical 
 work of any literary value which we possess written in our modern 
 prose. The " Letters and Papers of Richard the Third and Henry 
 the Seventh, " some " Memorials of Henry the Seventh, " including 
 his life by Bernard Andre of Toulouse, and a volume of " Materials" 
 for a history of his reign have been edited for the Rolls Series. A 
 biography of Henry is among the works of Lord Bacon. The his- 
 tory of Erasmus in England must be followed in his own interesting 
 letters ; the most accessible edition of the typical book of the revi- 
 val, the " Utopia, " is the Elizabethan translation, published by Mr. 
 Arber. Mr. Lupton has done much to increase our scanty knowl- 
 edge of Colet by his recent editions of several of his works. Halle's 
 Chronicle extends from the reign of Edward the Fourth to that of 
 Henry the Eighth ; for the latter he is copied by Grafton and fol- 
 lowed by Holinshed. Cavendish has given a faithful and touching 
 account of Wolsey in his later days, but for any real knowledge of 
 his administration or the foreign policy of Henry the Eighth we 
 must turn from these to the invaluable Calendars of State Papers for 
 this period from the English, Spanish, and Austrian archives, with 
 the prefaces of Professor Brewer and Mr. Bergenroth. Cromwell's 
 early life as told by Foxe is a mass of fable, and the State Papers 
 afford the only real information as to his ministry. For Sir Thomas 
 More we have a touching life by his son-in-law, Roper. The more 
 important documents for the religious history of the time will be 
 found in Mr. Pocock's edition of Burnet's "History of the Reforma- 
 tion ;" those relating to the dissolution of the monasteries in the 
 collection of letters on that subject published by the Camden Society, 
 and in the " Original Letters" of Sir Henry Ellis. A mass of mate- 
 rials of very various value has been accumulated by Strype in his 
 collections, which commence at this period.
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE HOUSE OP YORK. 
 1461-1485. 
 
 WITH the victory of Towton the war of the succession 
 came practically to an end. Though Margaret still strug- 
 gled on the northern border and the treachery of Warwick 
 for a while drove the new king from his realm, this gleam 
 of returning fortune only brought a more fatal ruin on the 
 House of Lancaster and seated the House of York more 
 firmly on the throne. But the Wars of the Roses did far 
 more than ruin one royal house or set up another. They 
 found England, in the words of Commines, "among all 
 the world's lordships of which I have knowledge, that 
 where the public weal is best ordered, and where least vio- 
 lence reigns over the people." An English King the 
 shrewd observer noticed "can undertake no enterprise 
 of account without assembling his Parliament, which is a 
 thing most wise and holy, and therefore are these kings 
 stronger and better served" than the despotic sovereigns 
 of the Continent. The English kingship, as a judge, Sir 
 John Fortescue, could boast when writing at this time, 
 was not an absolute but a limited monarchy ; the land was 
 not a land where the will of the prince was itself the law, 
 but where the prince could neither make laws nor impose 
 taxes save by his subjects' consent. At no time had Par- 
 liament played so constant and prominent a part in the 
 government of the realm. At no time had the principles 
 of constitutional liberty seemed so thoroughly understood 
 and so dear to the people at large. The long Parliamen- 
 tary contest between the Crown and the two Houses since 
 the days of Edward the First had firmly established the
 
 12 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. |BOOK v 
 
 great securities of national liberty the right of freedom 
 from arbitrary taxation, from arbitrary legislation, from 
 arbitrary imprisonment, and the responsibility of even the 
 highest servants of the Crown to Parliament and to the 
 law. 
 
 But with the close of the struggle for the succession this 
 liberty suddenly disappeared. If the Wars of the Roses 
 failed in utterly destroying English freedom, they suc- 
 ceeded in arresting its progress for more than a hundred 
 years. With them we enter on an epoch of constitutional 
 retrogression in which the slow work of the age that went 
 before it was rapidly undone. From the accession of Ed- 
 ward the Fourth Parliamentary life was almost suspended, 
 or was turned into a mere form by the overpowering in- 
 fluence of the Crown. The legislative powers of the two 
 Houses were usurped by the royal Council. Arbitrary 
 taxation reappeared in benevolences and forced loans. 
 Personal liberty was almost extinguished by a formidable 
 spy-system and by the constant practice of arbitrary im- 
 prisonment. Justice was degraded by the prodigal use of 
 bills of attainder, by a wide extension of the judicial power 
 of the royal Council, by the servility of judges, by the 
 coercion of juries. So vast and sweeping was the change 
 that to careless observers of a later day the constitutional 
 monarchy of the Edwards and the Henries seemed sud- 
 denly to have transformed itself under the Tudors into a 
 despotism as complete as the despotism of the Turk. Such 
 a view is no doubt exaggerated and unjust. Bend and 
 strain the law as he might, there never was a time when 
 the most wilful of English rulers failed to own the re- 
 straints of law; and the obedience of the most servile 
 among English subjects lay within bounds, at once politi- 
 cal and religious, which no theory of King- worship could 
 bring them to overpass. But even if we make these re- 
 serves, the character of the monarchy from the days of 
 Edward the Fourth to the days of Elizabeth remains some- 
 thing strange and isolated in our history. It is hard to
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 18 
 
 connect the kingship of the old English, the Norman, the 
 Angevin, or the Plantagenet kings with the kingship of 
 the House of York or of the House of Tudor. 
 
 The primary cause of this great change lay in the re- 
 covery of its older strength by the Crown. Through the 
 last hundred and fifty years the monarchy had been ham- 
 pered by the pressure of the war. Through the last fifty 
 it had been weakened by the insecurity of a disputed suc- 
 cession. It was to obtain supplies for the strife with Scot- 
 land and the strife with France that the earlier Plantage- 
 nets had been forced to yield to the ever-growing claims 
 which were advanced by the Parliament. It was to win 
 the consent of Parliament to its occupation of the throne 
 and its support against every rival that the house of Lan- 
 caster bent yet more humbly to its demands. But with 
 the loss of Guienne the war with France came virtually to 
 an end. The war with Scotland died down into a series 
 of border forays. The Wars of the Roses settled the ques- 
 tion of the succession, first by the seeming extinction of 
 the House of Lancaster, and then by the utter ruin of the 
 House of York. The royal treasury was not only relieved 
 from the drain which had left the crown at the mercy of 
 the Third Estate ; it was filled as it had never been filled 
 before by the forfeitures and confiscations of the civil war. 
 In the one bill of attainder which followed Towton twelve 
 great nobles and more than a hundred knights and squires 
 were stripped of their estates to the king's profit. Nearly 
 a fifth of the land is said to have passed into the royal pos- 
 session at one period or other of the civil strife. Edward the 
 Fourth and Henry the Seventh not only possessed a power 
 untrammelled by the difficulties which had beset the Crown 
 since the days of Edward the First, but they were masters 
 of a wealth such as the Crown had never known since the 
 days of Henry the Second. Throughout their reigns these 
 kings showed a firm resolve to shun the two rocks on which 
 the monarchy had been so nearly wrecked. No policy 
 was too inglorious that enabled them to avoid the need
 
 14 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 of war. The inheritance of a warlike policy, the con- 
 sciousness of great military abilities, the cry of his own 
 people for a renewal of the struggle, failed to lure Edward 
 from his system of peace. Henry clung to peace in spite 
 of the threatening growth of the French monarchy : he re- 
 fused to be drawn into any serious war even by its ac- 
 quisition of Brittany and of the coast-line that ran un- 
 broken along the Channel. Nor was any expedient too 
 degrading if it swelled the royal hoard. Edward by a 
 single stroke, the grant of the customs to the king for life, 
 secured a source of revenue which went far to relieve the 
 Crown from its dependence on Parliament. He stooped 
 to add to the gold which his confiscations amassed by 
 trading on a vast scale; his ships, freighted with tin, 
 wool, and cloth, made the name of the merchant-king fa- 
 mous in the ports of Italy and Greece. Henry was as 
 adroit and as shameless a financier as his predecessor. He 
 was his own treasurer, he kept his own accounts, he ticked 
 off with his own hand the compositions he levied on the 
 western shires for their abortive revolts. 
 
 With peace and a full treasury the need for calling Par- 
 liament together was removed. The collapse of the Houses 
 was in itself a revolution. Up to this moment they had 
 played a more and more prominent part in the government 
 of the realm. The progress made under the earlier Plan- 
 tagenets had gone as steadily on under Henry the Fourth 
 and his successor. The Commons had continued their ad- 
 vance. Not only had the right of self -taxation and of the 
 initiation of laws been explicitly yielded to them, but they 
 had interfered with the administration of the state, had 
 directed the application of subsidies, and called royal min 
 isters to account by repeated instances of impeachment. 
 Under the first two kings of the House of Lancaster Par- 
 liament had been summoned almost every year. Under 
 Henry the Sixth an important step was made in constitu- 
 tional progress by abandoning the old form of presenting 
 the requests of Parliament in the form of petitions which
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 15 
 
 were subsequently moulded into statutes by the royal 
 Council. The statute itself in its final form was now 
 presented for the royal assent and the Crown deprived of 
 all opportunity of modifying it. But with the reign of 
 Edward the Fourth not only this progress but the very 
 action of Parliament comes almost to an end. For the 
 first time since the days of John not a single law which 
 promoted freedom or remedied the abuses of power was 
 even proposed. The Houses indeed were only rarely called 
 together by Edward ; they were only once summoned dur- 
 ing the last thirteen years of Henry the Seventh. But 
 this discontinuance of Parliamentary life was not due 
 merely to the new financial system of the crown. The 
 policy of the kings was aided by the internal weakness of 
 Parliament itself. No institution suffered more from the 
 civil war. The Houses became mere gatherings of nobles 
 with their retainers and partisans. They were like armed 
 camps to which the great lords came with small armies at 
 their backs. When arms were prohibited the retainers of 
 the warring barons appeared, as in the Club Parliament 
 of 1426, with clubs on their shoulders. When clubs were 
 forbidden they hid stones and balls of lead in their clothes. 
 Amid scenes such as these the faith in and reverence 
 for Parliaments could hardly fail to die away. But the 
 very success of the House of York was a more fatal blow 
 to the trust in them. It was by the act of the Houses that 
 the Lancastrian line had been raised to the throne. Its 
 title was a Parliamentary title. Its existence was in fact 
 a contention that the will of Parliament could override the 
 claims of blood in the succession to the throne. With all 
 this the civil war dealt roughly and decisively. The Par- 
 liamentary line was driven from the throne. The Parlia- 
 mentary title was set aside as usurpation. The House of 
 York based its claim to the throne on the incapacity of 
 Parliament to set aside pretensions which were based on 
 sheer nearness of blood. The fall of the House of Lancas- 
 ter, the accession of the Yorkist Kings, must have seemed
 
 16 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [Boos V. 
 
 to the men who had witnessed the struggle a crushing de- 
 feat of the Parliament. 
 
 Weakened by failure, discredited by faction, no longer 
 needful as a source of supplies, it was easy for the Mon- 
 archy to rid itself of the check of the two Houses, and 
 their riddance at once restored the Crown to the power it 
 had held under the earlier Kings. But in actual fact Ed- 
 ward the Fourth found himself the possessor of a far greater 
 authority than this. The structure of feudal society fronted 
 a feudal King with two great rival powers in the Baron- 
 age and the Church. Even in England, though feudalism 
 had far less hold than elsewhere, the noble and the priest 
 formed effective checks on the Monarchy. But at the close 
 of the Wars of the Roses these older checks no longer served 
 as restraints upon the action of the Crown. With the 
 growth of Parliament the weight of the Baronage as a 
 separate constitutional element in the realm, even the sep- 
 arate influence of the Church, had fallen more and more 
 into decay. For their irregular and individual action was 
 gradually substituted the legal and continuous action of 
 the three Estates ; and now that the assembly of the estates 
 practically ceased it was too late to revive the older checks 
 which in earlier days had fettered the action of the Crown. 
 The kingship of Edward and his successors therefore was 
 not a mere restoration of the kingship of John or of Henry 
 the Second. It was the kingship of those Kings apart 
 from the constitutional forces which in their case stood 
 side by side with kingship, controlling and regulating its 
 action, apart from the force of custom, from the strong 
 arm of the baron, from the religious sanctions which 
 formed so effective a weapon in the hands of the priest, in 
 a word apart from that social organization from which our 
 political constitution had sprung. Nor was the growth of 
 Parliament the only cause for the weakness of these feudal 
 restraints. The older social order which had prevailed 
 throughout Western Europe since the fall of the Roman 
 Empire was now passing away. The speculation of the
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE MONARCHY. 1461-1540. 17 
 
 twelfth century, the scholastic criticism of the thirteenth, 
 the Lollardry and socialism of the fourteenth century, had 
 at last done their work. The spell of the past, the spell of 
 custom and tradition, which had enchained the minds of 
 men, was roughly broken. The supremacy of the warrior 
 in a world of war, the severance of privileged from un- 
 privileged classes, no longer seemed the one natural struc- 
 ture of society. The belief in its possession of supernatu- 
 ral truths and supernatural powers no longer held man in 
 unquestioning awe of the priesthood. The strength of the 
 Church was sapped alike by theological and moral revolt, 
 while the growth of new classes, the new greed of peace 
 and of the wealth that comes of peace, the advance of in- 
 dustry, the division of property, the progress of centralized 
 government, dealt fatal blows at the feudal organization 
 of the state. 
 
 Nor was the danger merely an external one. Noble and 
 priest alike were beginning to disbelieve in themselves. 
 The new knowledge which was now dawning on the world, 
 the new direct contact with the Greek and Roman litera- 
 tures which was just beginning to exert its influence on 
 western Europe, told above all on these wealthier and more 
 refined classes. The young scholar or noble who crossed 
 the Alps brought from the schools of Florence the dim im- 
 pression of a republican liberty or an imperial order which 
 disenchanted him of the world in which he found himself. 
 He looked on the feudalism about him as a brutal anarchy; 
 he looked on the Church itself as the supplanter of a nobler 
 and more philosophic morality. In England as elsewhere 
 the great ecclesiastical body still seemed imposing from 
 the memories of its past, its immense wealth, its tradition 
 of statesmanship, its long association with the intellectual 
 and religious aspirations of men, its hold on social life. 
 But its real power was small. Its moral inertness, its lack 
 of spiritual enthusiasm, gave it less and less hold on the 
 religious minds of the day. Its energies indeed seemed 
 absorbed in a mere clinging to existence. For in spite of
 
 18 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 steady repression Lollardry still lived on, no longer indeed 
 as an organized movement, but in scattered and secret 
 groups whose sole bond was a common loyalty to the Bible 
 and a common spirit of revolt against the religion of their 
 day. Nine years after the accession of Henry the Sixth 
 the Duke of Gloucester was traversing England with men- 
 at-arms for the purpose of repressing the risings of the Lol- 
 lards and of hindering the circulation of their invectives 
 against the clergy. In 1449 " Bible men" were still suffi- 
 ciently formidable to call a prelate to the front as a con- 
 troversialist : and the very title of Bishop Pecock's work, 
 "A Represser of overmuch blaming of the clergy," shows 
 the damage done by their virulent criticism. Its most 
 fatal effect was to rob the priesthood of moral power. 
 Taunted with a love of wealth, with a lower standard of 
 life than that of the ploughman and weaver who gathered 
 to read the Bible by night, dreading in themselves any 
 burst of emotion or enthusiasm as a possible prelude to 
 heresy, the clergy ceased to be the moral leaders of the na- 
 tion. They plunged as deeply as the men about them into 
 the darkest superstition, and above all into the belief in 
 sorcery and magic which formed so remarkable a feature 
 of the time. It was for conspiracy with a priest to waste 
 the King's life by sorcery that Eleanor Cobham did pen- 
 ance through the streets of London. The mist which 
 wrapped the battle-field of Barnet was attributed to the 
 incantations of Friar Bungay. The one pure figure which 
 rises out of the greed, the selfishness, the scepticism of the 
 time, the figure of Joan of Arc, was looked on by the doc- 
 tors and priests who judged her as that of a sorceress. 
 The prevalence of such beliefs tells its own tale of the in- 
 tellectual state of the clergy. They were ceasing in fact 
 to be an intellectual class art all. The monasteries were no 
 longer seats of learning. "I find in them," says Poggio, 
 an Italian scholar who visited England some twenty years 
 after Chaucer's death, "men given up to sensuality in 
 abundance, but very few lovers of learning and those of a
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 19 
 
 barbarous sort, skilled more in quibbles and sophisms than 
 in literature." The statement is no doubt colored by the 
 contempt of the new scholars for the scholastic philosophy 
 which had taken the place of letters in England as else- 
 where, but even scholasticism was now at its lowest ebb. 
 The erection of colleges, which began in the thirteenth cen- 
 tury but made little progress till the time we have reached, 
 failed to arrest the quick decline of the universities both 
 in the numbers and learning of their students. Those at 
 Oxford amounted to only a fifth of the scholars who had 
 attended its lectures a century before, and Oxford Latin 
 became proverbial for a jargon in which the very tradition 
 of grammar had been lost. Literature, which had till now 
 rested mainly in the hands of the clergy, came almost to 
 an end. Of all its nobler forms history alone lingered on ; 
 but it lingered in compilations or extracts from past writ- 
 ers, such as make up the so-called works of Walsingham, 
 in jejune monastic annals, or worthless popular compen- 
 diums. The only real trace of mental activity was seen in 
 the numerous treatises which dealt with alchemy or magic, 
 the elixir of life, or the philosopher's stone; a fungoua 
 growth which even more clearly than the absence of health- 
 ier letters witnessed to the progress of intellectual decay. 
 
 Somewhat of their old independence lingered indeed 
 among the lower clergy and the monastic orders ; it was 
 in fact the successful resistance of the last to an effort made 
 to establish arbitrary taxation which brought about their 
 ruin. Up to the terrible statutes of Thomas Cromwell the 
 clergy in convocation still asserted boldly their older rights 
 against the Crown. But it was through its prelates that 
 the Church exercised a directly political influence, and 
 these showed a different temper from the clergy. Driven 
 by sheer need, by the attack of the barons on their tempo- 
 ral possessions and of the Lollard on their spiritual author- 
 ity, into dependence on the Crown, their weight was thrown 
 into the scale of the monarchy. Their weakness told di- 
 rectly on the constitutional progress of the realm, for
 
 20 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 through the diminution in the number of the peers tempo- 
 ral the greater part of the House of Lords was now com- 
 posed of spiritual peers, of bishops and the greater abbots. 
 The statement which attributes this lessening of the bar- 
 onage to the Wars of the Roses seems indeed to be an error. 
 Although Henry the Seventh, in dread of opposition to his 
 throne, summoned only a portion of the temporal peers to 
 his first Parliament there were as many barons at his ac- 
 cession as at the accession of Henry the Sixth. Of the 
 greater houses only those of Beaufort and Tiptoft were ex- 
 tinguished by the civil war. The decline of the baronage, 
 the extinction of the greater families, the break-up of the 
 great estates, had in fact been going on throughout the 
 reign of the Edwards; and it was after Agincourt that 
 the number of temporal peers sank to its lowest ebb. From 
 that time till the time of the Tudors they numbered but 
 fifty-two. A reduction in the numbers of the baronage, 
 however, might have been more than compensated by the 
 concentration of great estates in the hands of the houses 
 that survived. What wrecked it as a military force was 
 the revolution which was taking place in the art of war. 
 The introduction of gunpowder ruined feudalism. The 
 mounted and heavily armed knight gave way to the meaner 
 footman. Fortresses which had been impregnable against 
 the attacks of the Middle Ages crumbled before the new 
 artillery. Although gunpowder had been in use as early 
 as Crey it was not till the accession of the House of Lan- 
 caster that it was really brought into effective employment 
 as a military resource. But the revolution in warfare was 
 immediate. The wars of Henry the Fifth were wars of 
 sieges. The "Last of the Barons," as Warwick has pic- 
 turesquely been styled, relied mainly on his train of artil- 
 lery. It was artillery that turned the day at Barnet and 
 Tewkesbury, and that gave Henry the Seventh his victory 
 over the formidable dangers which assailed him. The 
 strength which the change gave to the Crown was in fact 
 almost irresistible. Throughout the Middle Ages the call
 
 CHAP. l.J THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 21 
 
 of a great baron had been enough to raise a formidable re- 
 volt. Yeomen and retainers took down the bow from their 
 chimney corner, knights buckled on their armor, and in a 
 few days a host threatened the throne. Without artillery, 
 however, such a force was now helpless, and the one train 
 of artillery in the kingdom lay at the disposal of the King. 
 But a far greater strength than guns could give was 
 given to the monarchy by its maintenance of order and by 
 its policy of peace. For two hundred years England had 
 been almost constantly at war, and to war without had 
 been added discord and misrule within. As the country 
 tasted the sweets of rest and firm government that reaction 
 of feeling, that horror of fresh civil wars, that content with 
 its own internal growth and indifference to foreign aggran- 
 dizement, which distinguished the epoch of the Tudors be- 
 gan to assert its power. The Crown became identified 
 with the thought of national prosperity, almost with the 
 thought of national existence. Loyalty drew to itself the 
 force of patriotism. Devotion to the Crown became one in 
 men's minds with devotion to their country. For almost 
 a hundred years England lost all sense of a national indi- 
 viduality ; it saw itself only in the Crown. The tendency 
 became irresistible as the nation owned in the power of its 
 Kings its one security for social order, its one bulwark 
 against feudal outrage and popular anarchy. The violence 
 and anarchy which had always clung like a taint to the 
 baronage grew more and more unbearable as the nation 
 moved forward to a more settled peacefulness and industry. 
 But this tendency to violence received a new impulse from 
 the war with France. Long before the struggle was over 
 it had done its fatal work on the mood of the English no- 
 ble. His aim had become little more than a lust for gold, 
 a longing after plunder, after the pillage of farms, the sack 
 of cities, the ransom of captives. So intense was the greed 
 of gain that in the later years of the war only a threat of 
 death could keep the fighting-men in their ranks, and the 
 results of victory after victory were lost through the anr-
 
 22 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 iety of the conquerors to deposit their booty and captives 
 safely at home. The moment the hand of such leaders as 
 Henry the Fifth or Bedford was removed the war died 
 down into mere massacre and brigandage. " If God had 
 been a captain nowadays, "exclaimed a French general," 
 "he would have turned marauder." The temper thus 
 nursed on the fields of France found at last scope for action 
 in England itself. Even before the outbreak of the War 
 of the Roses the nobles had become as lawless and dissolute 
 at home as they were greedy and cruel abroad. 
 
 But with the struggle of York and Lancaster and the 
 paralysis of government which it brought with it, all hold 
 over the baronage was gone; and the lawlessness and bru- 
 tality of their temper showed itself without a check. The 
 disorder which their violence wrought in a single district 
 of the country is brought home by the Paston Letters, an 
 invaluable series of domestic correspondence which lifts 
 for us a corner of the veil that hides the social state of 
 England in the fifteenth century. We see houses sacked, 
 judges overawed or driven from the bench, peaceful men 
 hewn down by assassins or plundered by armed bands, 
 women carried off to forced marriages, elections controlled 
 by brute force, parliaments degraded into camps of armed 
 retainers. As the number of their actual vassals declined 
 with the progress of enfranchisement and the upgrowth 
 of the freeholder, the nobles had found a substitute for 
 them in the grant of their "liveries," the badges of their 
 households, to the smaller gentry and farmers of their 
 neighborhood, and this artificial revival of the dying feu- 
 dalism became one of the curses of the day. The outlaw, 
 the broken soldier returning penniless from the wars, found 
 shelter and wages in the train of the greater barons, and 
 furnished them with a force ready at any moment for vio- 
 lence or civil strife. The same motives which brought the 
 freeman of the tenth century to commend himself to thegn 
 or baron forced the yeoman or smaller gentleman of the 
 fifteenth to don the cognizance of his powerful neighbor,
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 23 
 
 and to ask for a grant of " livery" which would secure him 
 aid and patronage in fray or suit. For to meddle with 
 such a retainer was perilous even for sheriff or judge ; and 
 the force which a noble could summon at his call sufficed 
 to overawe a law-court or to drag a culprit from prison or 
 dock. The evils of this system of "maintenance" as it 
 was called had been felt long before the Wars of the Roses ; 
 and statutes both of Edward the First and of Richard the 
 Second had been aimed against it. But it was in the civil 
 war that it showed itself in its full force. The weakness 
 of the crown and the strife of political factions for suprem- 
 acy left the nobles masters of the field; and the white rose 
 of the House of York, the red rose of the House of Lan- 
 caster, the portcullis of the Beauforts, the pied bull of the 
 Nevilles, the bear and ragged staff which Warwick bor- 
 rowed from the Beauchamps, were seen on hundreds of 
 breasts in Parliament or on the battle-field. 
 
 The lawlessness of the baronage tended as it had always 
 tended to the profit of the crown by driving the people at 
 large to seek for order and protection at the hands of the 
 monarchy. And at this moment the craving for such a 
 protection was strengthened by the general growth of 
 wealth and industry. The smaller proprietors of the coun- 
 ties were growing fast both in wealth and numbers, while 
 the burgess class in the cities were drawing fresh riches 
 from the development of trade which characterized this 
 period. The noble himself owed his importance to his 
 wealth. Poggio, as he wandered through the island, noted 
 that " the noble who has the greatest revenue is most re- 
 spected ; and that even men of gentle blood attend to coun- 
 try business and sell their wool and cattle, not thinking 
 it any disparagement to engage in rural industry." Slowly 
 but surely the foreign commerce of the country, hitherto 
 conducted by the Italian, the Hanse merchant, or the trader 
 of Catalonia or southern Gaul, was passing into English 
 hands. English merchants were settled at Florence and 
 at Venice. English merchant ships appeared in the Bal-
 
 24 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 tic. The first faint upgrowth of manufactures was seen 
 in a crowd of protective statutes which formed a marked 
 feature in the legislation of Edward the Fourth. The 
 weight which the industrial classes had acquired was seen 
 in the bounds which their opinion set to the Wars of the 
 Roses. England presented to Philippe de Commines the 
 rare spectacle of a land where, brutal as was its civil strife, 
 " there are no buildings destroyed or demolished by war, 
 and where the mischief of it falls on those who make the 
 war." The ruin and bloodshed were limited in fact to the 
 great lords and their feudal retainers. If the towns once 
 or twice threw themselves, as at Towton, into the strug- 
 gle, the trading and agricultural classes for the most part 
 stood wholly apart from it. While the baronage was dash- 
 ing itself to pieces in battle after battle justice went on 
 undisturbed. The law courts sat at Westminster. The 
 judges rode on circuit as of old. The system of jury trial 
 took more and more its modern form by the separation of 
 the jurors from the witnesses. But beneath this outer 
 order and prosperity a social revolution was beginning 
 which tended as strongly as the outrages of the baronage 
 to the profit of the crown. The rise in the price of wool 
 was giving a fresh impulse to the changes in agriculture 
 which had begun with the Black Death and were to go 
 steadily on for a hundred years to come. These changes 
 were the throwing together of the smaller holdings, and 
 the introduction of sheep-farming, on an enormous scale. 
 The new wealth of the merchant classes helped on the 
 change. They began to invest largely in land, and these 
 "farming gentlemen and clerking knights," as Latimer 
 bitterly styled them, were restrained by few traditions or 
 associations in their eviction of the smaller tenants. The 
 land indeed had been greatly underlet, and as its value rose 
 with the peace and firm government of the early Tudors 
 the temptation to raise the customary rents became irre- 
 sistible. " That which went heretofore for twenty or forty 
 pounds a year," we learn in Henry the Eighth's day, "now
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE MONAECHY. 1461-1540. 25 
 
 is let for fifty or a hundred." But it had been only by 
 this low scale of rent that the small yeomanry class had 
 been enabled to exist. "My father," says Latimer, "was 
 a yeoman, and had no lands of his own ; only he had a 
 farm of three or four pounds by the year at the uttermost, 
 and hereupon he tilled so much as kept half-a-dozen men. 
 He had walk for a hundred sheep, and my mother milked 
 thirty kine; he was able and did find the King a harness 
 with himself and his horse while he came to the place that 
 he should receive the King's wages. I can remember that 
 I buckled his harness when he went to Blackheath Field. 
 He kept me to school : he married my sisters with five 
 pounds apiece, so that he brought them up in godliness 
 and fear of God. He kept hospitality for his poor neigh- 
 bors, and some alms he gave to the poor, and all this he 
 did of the same farm, where he that now hath it payeth 
 sixteen pounds by year or more, and is not able to do any- 
 thing for his prince, for himself, nor for his children, or 
 give a cup of drink to the poor." 
 
 Increase of rent ended with such tenants in the relin- 
 quishment of their holdings, but the bitterness of the ejec- 
 tions which the new system of cultivation necessitated was 
 increased by the iniquitous means that were often employed 
 to bring them about. The farmers, if we believe More in 
 1515, were "got rid of either by fraud or force, or tired 
 out with repeated wrongs into parting with their property." 
 " In this way it comes to pass that these poor wretches, 
 men, women, husbands, orphans, widows, parents with 
 little children, households greater in number than in wealth 
 (for arable fanning requires many hands, while one shep- 
 herd and herdsman will suffice for a pasture farm), all 
 these emigrate from their native fields without knowing 
 where to go." The sale of their scanty household stuff 
 drove them to wander homeless abroad, to be thrown into 
 prison as vagabonds, to beg and to steal. Yet in the face 
 of such a spectacle as this we still find the old complaint 
 of scarcity of labor, and the old legal remedy for it in a
 
 26 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 fixed scale of wages. The social disorder, in fact, baffled 
 the sagacity of English statesmen, and they could find no 
 better remedy for it than laws against the further exten- 
 sion of sheep-farms, and a formidable increase of public 
 executions. Both were alike fruitless. Enclosures and 
 evictions went on as before and swelled the numbers and 
 the turbulence of the floating labor class. The riots against 
 "enclosures," of which we first hear in the time of Henry 
 the Sixth and which became a constant feature of the Tudor 
 period, are indications not only of a perpetual strife going 
 on in every quarter between the landowners and the smaller 
 peasant class, but of a mass of social discontent which was 
 to seek constant outlets in violence and revolution. And 
 into this mass of disorder the break-up of the military 
 households and the return of wounded and disabled soldiers 
 from the wars introduced a dangerous leaven of outrage 
 and crime. England for the first time saw a distinct 
 criminal class in the organized gangs of robbers which be- 
 gan to infest the roads and were always ready to gather 
 round the standard of revolt. The gallows did their work 
 in vain. " If you do not remedy the evils which produce 
 thieves," More urged with bitter truth, "the rigorous ex- 
 ecution of justice in punishing thieves will be vain." But 
 even More could only suggest a remedy which, efficacious 
 as it was subsequently to prove, had yet to wait a century 
 for its realization. " Let the woollen manufacture be in- 
 troduced, so that honest employment may be found for 
 those whom want has made thieves or will make thieves 
 ere long." The extension of industry at last succeeded in 
 absorbing this mass of surplus labor, but the process was 
 not complete till the close of Elizabeth's day, and through- 
 out the time of the Tudors the discontent of the labor class 
 bound the wealthier classes to the crown. It was in truth 
 this social danger which lay at the root of the Tudor des- 
 potism. For the proprietary classes the repression of the 
 poor was a question of life and death. Employer and pro- 
 prietor were ready to surrender freedom into the hands of
 
 CHAP. l.J THE MONARCHY. 14611540. *7 
 
 the one power which could preserve them from social an- 
 archy. It was to the selfish panic of the landowners that 
 England owed the Statute of Laborers and its terrible 
 heritage of pauperism. It was to the selfish panic of both 
 landowner and merchant that she owed the despotism of 
 the Monarchy. 
 
 The most fatal effect of this panic, of this passion for 
 "order," was seen in the striving of these classes after 
 special privileges which the Crown alone could bestow. 
 Even before the outbreak of the civil war this tendency 
 toward privilege had produced important constitutional re- 
 sults. The character of the House of Commons had been 
 changed by the restriction of both the borough and the 
 county franchise. Up to this time all freemen settling in 
 a borough and paying their dues to it became by the mere 
 fact of settlement its burgesses. But during the reign of 
 Henry the Sixth and still more under Edward the Fourth 
 this largeness of borough life was roughly curtailed. The 
 trade companies which vindicated civic freedom from the 
 tyranny of the older merchant guilds themselves tended to 
 become a narrow and exclusive oligarchy. Most of the 
 boroughs had by this time acquired civic property, and it 
 was with the aim of securing their own enjoyment of this 
 against any share of it by " strangers" that the existing 
 burgesses for the most part procured charters of incorpora- 
 tion from the Crown, which turned them into a close body 
 and excluded from their number all who were not burgesses 
 by birth or who failed henceforth to purchase their right 
 of entrance by a long apprenticeship. In addition to this 
 narrowing of the burgess-body the internal government of 
 the boroughs had almost universally passed since the fail- 
 ure of the Communal movement in the thirteenth century 
 from the free gathering of the citizens in borough-mote 
 into the hands of Common Councils, either self -elected or 
 elected by the wealthier burgesses ; and to these councils, 
 or to a yet more restricted number of " select men" belong- 
 ing to them, clauses in the new charters generally confined
 
 28 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 the right of choosing their representatives in Parliament. 
 It was with this restriction that the long process of degra- 
 dation began which ended in reducing the representation 
 of our boroughs to a mere mockery. Influences which 
 would have had small weight over the town at large proved 
 irresistible by the small body of corporators or "select 
 men." Great nobles, neighboring landowners, the Crown 
 itself, seized on the boroughs as their prey, and dictated 
 the choice of their representatives. Corruption did what- 
 ever force failed to do : and from the Wars of the Roses to 
 the days of Pitt the voice of the people had to be looked 
 for not in the members for the towns but in the knights 
 for the counties. 
 
 The restriction of the county franchise on the other hand 
 was the direct work of the Parliament itself. Economic 
 changes were fast widening the franchise in the shires. 
 The number of freeholders increased with the subdivision 
 of estates and the social changes which we have already 
 noticed. But this increase of independence was marked 
 by " riots and divisions between the gentlemen and other 
 people" which the statesmen of the day attributed to the 
 excessive number of voters. In many counties the power 
 of the great lords undoubtedly enabled them to control 
 elections through the number of their retainers. In Cade's 
 revolt the Kentishmen complained that " the people of the 
 shire are not allowed to have their free elections in the 
 choosing of knights for the shire, but letters have been sent 
 from divers estates to the great nobles of the county, the 
 which enforceth their tenants and other people by force tc 
 choose other persons than the common will is." It was 
 primarily to check this abuse that a statute of the reign of 
 Henry the Sixth restricted in 1430 the right of voting in 
 shires to freeholders holding land worth forty shillings, 
 a sum equal in our money to at least twenty pounds a year 
 and representing a far higher proportional income at the 
 present time. Whatever its original purpose may have 
 been, the result of the statute was a wide disfranchise-
 
 CHAP. I.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 29 
 
 ment. It was aimed, in its own words, against voters " of 
 no value, whereof every of them pretended to have a voice 
 equivalent with the more worthy knights and esquires 
 dwelling in the same counties." But in actual working 
 the statute was interpreted in a more destructive fashion 
 than its words were intended to convey. Up to this time 
 all suitors who attended at the Sheriff's Court had voted 
 without question for the Knight of the Shire, but by the 
 new statute the great . bulk of the existing voters, every 
 leaseholder and every copyholder, found themselves im- 
 plicitly deprived of their franchise. 
 
 The restriction of the suffrage was the main cause that 
 broke the growing strength of the House of Commons. 
 The ruin of the baronage, the weakness of the prelacy, 
 broke that of the House of Lords. The power of the Par- 
 liament died down therefore at the very moment when the 
 cessation of war, the opening of new sources of revenue, 
 the cry for protection against social anarchy, doubled the 
 strength of the Crown. A change passed over the spirit 
 of English government which was little short of a revolu- 
 tion. The change, however, was a slow and gradual one. 
 It is with the victory of Towton that the new power of 
 the Monarchy begins, but in the years that immediately 
 followed this victory there was little to promise the tri- 
 umph of the Crown. The King, Edward the Fourth, waa 
 but a boy of nineteen ; and decisive as his march upon 
 London proved, he had as yet given few signs of political 
 ability. His luxurious temper showed itself in the pomp 
 and gayety of his court, in feast and tourney, or in love- 
 passages with city wives and noble ladies. The work of 
 government, the defence of the new throne against its 
 restless foes, he left as yet to sterner hands. Among the 
 few great houses who recalled the might of the older bar- 
 onage two families of the northern border stood first in 
 power and repute. The Percies had played the chief part 
 in the revolution which gave the crown to the House of 
 Lancaster. Their rivals, the Nevilles, had set the line of
 
 30 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. JBoOK V. 
 
 York on the throne. Fortune seemed to delight in adding 
 lands and wealth to the last powerful family. The heiress 
 of the Montacutes brought the Earldom of Salisbury and 
 the barony of Monthermer to a second son of their chief, 
 the Earl of Westmoreland ; and Salisbury's son, Richard 
 Neville, won the Earldom of Warwick with the hand of 
 the heiress of the Beauchamps. The ruin of the Percies, 
 whose lands and Earldom of Northumberland were granted 
 to Warwick's brother, raised the -Nevilles to unrivalled 
 greatness in the land. Warwick, who on his father's 
 death added the Earldom of Salisbury to his earlier titles, 
 had like his father warmly espoused the cause of Richard 
 of York, and it was to his counsels that men ascribed the 
 decisive step by which his cousin Edward of March as- 
 sumed the crown. From St. Albans to Towton he had 
 been the foremost among the assailants of the Lancastrian 
 line ; and the death of his uncle and father, the youth of 
 the King, and the glory of the great victory which con- 
 firmed his throne, placed the Earl at the head of the York- 
 ist party. 
 
 Warwick's services were munificently rewarded by a 
 grant of vast estates from the confiscated lands of the 
 Lancastrian baronage, and by his elevation to the highest 
 posts in the service of the State. He was Captain of 
 Calais, admiral of the fleet in the Channel, and Warden 
 of the Western Marches. The command of the northern 
 border lay in the lands of his brother, Lord Montagu, who 
 received as his share of the spoil the forfeited Earldom of 
 Northumberland and the estates of his hereditary rivals, 
 the Percies. A younger brother, George Neville, was 
 raised to the See of York and the post of Lord Chancellor. 
 Lesser rewards fell to Warwick's uncles, the minor chiefs 
 of the House of Neville, Lords Falconberg, Abergavenny, 
 and Latimer. The vast power which such an accumula- 
 tion of wealth and honors placed at the Earl's disposal 
 was wielded with consummate ability. In outer seeming 
 Warwick was the very type of the feudal baron. He
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE MONARCHY. 1461-1540. bl 
 
 could raise armies at his call from his own earldoms. Six 
 hundred lireried retainers followed him to Parliament. 
 Thousands of dependants feasted in his court-yard. But 
 few men w^re really further from the feudal ideal. Active 
 and ruthless warrior as he was, his enemies denied to 
 the Earl the gift of personal daring. In war he showed 
 himself more general than soldier, and in spite of a series 
 of victories his genius was not so much military as dip- 
 lomatic. A Burgundian chronicler who knew him well 
 describes him as the craftiest man of his day, "leplus 
 soubtil homme de son vivant." Secret, patient, without 
 faith or loyalty, ruthless, unscrupulous, what Warwick 
 excelled in was intrigue, treachery, the contrivance of 
 plots, and sudden desertions. 
 
 His temper brought out in terrible relief the moral dis- 
 organization of the time. The old order of the world was 
 passing away. Since the fall of the Roman Empire civil 
 society had been held together by the power of the given 
 word, by the " fealty" and " loyalty" that bound vassal to 
 lord and lord to king. A common faith in its possession 
 of supernatural truths and supernatural powers had bound 
 men together in the religious society which knew itself 
 as the Church. But the spell of religious belief was now 
 broken and the feudal conception of society was passing 
 away. On the other hand the individual sense of personal 
 duty, the political consciousness of each citizen that na- 
 tional order and national welfare are essential to his own 
 well-being, had not yet come. The bonds which had held 
 the world together through so many ages loosened and 
 broke only to leave man face to face with his own selfish- 
 ness. The motives that sway and ennoble the common 
 conduct of men were powerless over the ruling classes. 
 Pope and king, bishop and noble, vied with each other 
 in greed, in self-seeking, in lust, in faithlessness, in a 
 pitiless cruelty. It is this moral degradation that flings 
 BO dark a shade over the Wars of the Roses. From no 
 period in our annals do we turn with such weariness and
 
 32 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 disgust. Their savage battles, their ruthless executions, 
 their shameless treasons, seem all the more terrible from 
 the pure selfishness of the ends for which men fought, for 
 the utter want of all nobleness and chivalry in the contest 
 itself, of all great result in its close. And it is this moral 
 disorganization that expresses itself in the men whom the 
 civil war left behind it. Of honor, of loyalty, of good 
 faith, Warwick knew nothing. He had fought for the 
 House of Neville rather than for the House of York, had 
 set Edward on the throne as a puppet whom he could rule 
 at his will, and his policy seemed to have gained its end 
 in leaving the Earl master of the realm. 
 
 In the three years which followed Towton the power of 
 the Nevilles overshadowed that of the King. It was 
 Warwick who crushed a new rising which Margaret 
 brought about by a landing in the north, and who drove 
 the queen and her child over the Scotch border. It was 
 his brother, Lord Montagu, who suppressed a new revolt 
 in 1464. The defeat of this rising in the battle of Hexham 
 seemed to bring the miserable war to a close, for after 
 some helpless wanderings Henry the Sixth was betrayed 
 into the hands of his enemies and brought in triumph to 
 London. His feet were tied to the stirrups, he was led 
 thrice round the pillory, and then sent as a prisoner to 
 the Tower. Warwick was now all-powerful in the State, 
 but the cessation of the war was the signal for a silent 
 strife between the Earl and his young sovereign. In Ed- 
 ward indeed Warwick was to meet not only a consum- 
 mate general but a politician whose subtlety and rapidity 
 of conception were far above his own. As a mere boy 
 Edward had shown himself among the ablest and the most 
 pitiless of the warriors of the civil war. He had looked 
 on with cool ruthlessness while gray-haired nobles were 
 hurried to the block. The terrible bloodshed of Towton 
 woke no pity in his heart; he turned from it only to frame 
 a vast bill of attainder which drove twelve great nobles 
 and a hundred knights to beggary and exile. When
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 33 
 
 treachery placed his harmless rival in his power he visited 
 him with cruel insult. His military ability had been dis- 
 played in his rapid march upon London, the fierce blow 
 which freed him from his enemy in the rear, the decisive 
 victory at Towton. But his political ability was slower 
 in developing itself. In his earliest years he showed little 
 taste for the work of rule. While Warwick was winning 
 triumphs on battle-field after battle-field, the young King 
 seemed to abandon himself to a voluptuous indolence, to 
 revels with the city wives of London, and to the caresses 
 of mistresses like Jane Shore. Tall in stature and of sin- 
 gular beauty, his winning manners and gay carelessness 
 of bearing secured Edward a popularity which had been 
 denied to nobler kings. When he asked a rich old lady 
 for ten pounds toward a war with France, she answered, 
 "For thy comely face thou shalt have twenty." The 
 King thanked and kissed her, and the old woman made 
 her twenty forty. In outer appearance indeed no one 
 could contrast more utterly with the subtle sovereigns of 
 his time, with the mean-visaged Lewis of France or the 
 meanly clad Ferdinand of Aragon. But Edward's work 
 was the same as theirs and it was done as completely. 
 While jesting with aldermen, or dallying with mistresses, 
 or idling over new pages from the printing-press at West- 
 minster, Edward was silently laying the foundations of an 
 absolute rule. 
 
 The very faults of his nature helped him to success. 
 His pleasure-loving and self- indulgent temper needed the 
 pressure of emergency, of actual danger, to flash out into 
 action. Men like Commines who saw him only in mo- 
 ments of security and indolence scorned Edward as dull, 
 sensual, easy to be led and gulled by keener wits. It was 
 in the hour of need and despair that his genius showed it- 
 self, cool, rapid, subtle, utterly fearless, moving straight 
 to its aim through clouds of treachery and intrigue, and 
 striking hard when its aim was reached. But even in his 
 idler hours his purpose never wavered. His indolence and
 
 34 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. '[BOOK V. 
 
 gayety were in fact mere veils thrown over a will of steel. 
 From the first his aim was to free the Crown from the 
 control of the baronage. He made no secret of his hos- 
 tility to the nobles. At Towton as in all his after battles 
 he bade his followers slay knight and baron, but spare the 
 commons. In his earliest Parliament, that of 1461, he 
 renewed the statutes against giving of liveries, and though 
 this enactment proved as fruitless as its predecessors to 
 reduce the households of the baronage it marked Edward's 
 resolve to adhere to the invariable policy of the Crown in 
 striving for their reduction. But efforts like these, though 
 they indicated" the young King's policy, could produce little 
 effect so long as the mightiest of the barons overawed the 
 throne. Yet even a king as bold as Edward might well 
 have shrunk from a struggle with Warwick. The Earl 
 was all powerful in the state; the military resources of 
 the realm were in his hands. As captain of Calais he was 
 master of the one disciplined force at the disposal of the 
 Crown, and as admiral he controlled the royal fleet. The 
 forces he drew from his wide possessions, from his vast 
 wealth (for his official revenues alone were estimated at 
 eighty thousand crowns a year), from his warlike renown 
 and his wide kinship, were backed by his personal popu- 
 larity. Above all the Yorkist party, bound to Warwick 
 by a long series of victories, looked on him rather than on 
 the young and untried King as its head. Even Edward 
 was forced to delay any break with the Earl till the des- 
 perate struggle of Margaret was over. It was only after 
 her defeat at Hexham and the capture of Henry that the 
 King saw himself free for a strife with the great soldier 
 who overawed the throne. 
 
 The policy of Warwick pointed to a close alliance with 
 France. The Hundred Years' War, though it had driven 
 the English from Guienne and the South, had left the 
 French Monarchy hemmed in by great feudatories on every 
 other border. Brittany was almost independent in the 
 west. On the east the house of Anjou lay, restless and
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 95 
 
 ambitious, in Lorraine and Provence, while the house of 
 Burgundy occupied its hereditary duchy and Franche 
 Comte. On the northern frontier the same Burgundian 
 house was massing together into a single state nearly all 
 the crowd of counties, marquisates, and dukedoms which 
 now make up Holland and Belgium. Nobles hardly less 
 powerful or more dependent on the Crown held the central 
 provinces of the kingdom when Lewis the Eleventh 
 mounted its throne but a few months after Edward's ac- 
 cession. The temper of the new King drove him to a strife 
 for the mastery of his realm, and his efforts after central- 
 ization and a more effective rule soon goaded the baronage 
 into a mode of revolt. But Lewis saw well that a struggle 
 with it was only possible if England stood aloof. His 
 father's cool sagacity had planned the securing of his con- 
 quests by the marriage of Lewis himself to an English 
 wife, and though this project had fallen through, and the 
 civil wars had given safety to Prance to the end of 
 Charles' reign, the ruin of the Lancastrian cause at Tow- 
 ton again roused the danger of attack from England at the 
 moment when Lewis mounted the throne. Its young and 
 warlike King, the great baron who was still fresh from 
 the glory of Towton, might well resolve to win back the 
 heritage of Eleanor, that Duchy of Guienne which had 
 been lost but some ten years before. Even if such an 
 effort proved fruitless, Lewis saw that an English war 
 would not only ruin his plans for the overthrow of the 
 nobles, but would leave him more than ever at their mercy. 
 Above all it would throw him helplessly into the hands of 
 the Burgundian Duke. In the new struggle as in the old 
 the friendship of Burgundy could alone bring a favorable 
 issue, and such a friendship would have to be paid for by 
 sacrifices even more terrible than those which had been 
 wrenched from the need of Charles the Seventh. The 
 passing of Burgundy from the side of England to the side 
 of France after the Treaty of Arras had been bought by 
 the cession to its Duke of the towns along the Somme, of
 
 36 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 that Picardy which brought the Burgundian frontier to 
 some fifty miles from Paris. Sacrifices even more costly 
 would have to buy the aid of Burgundy in a struggle with 
 Edward the Fourth. 
 
 How vivid was his sense of these dangers was seen in 
 the eagerness of Lewis to get the truce with England re- 
 newed and extended. But his efforts for a general peace 
 broke down before the demands of the English council for 
 the restoration of Normandy and Guienne. Nor were his 
 difficulties from England alone. An English alliance was 
 unpopular in France itself. " Seek no friendship from the 
 English, Sire!" said Pierre de Breze, the Seneschal of 
 Normandy, "for the more they love you, the more all 
 Frenchmen will hate you I" All Lewis could do was to 
 fetter Edward's action by giving him work at home. 
 When Margaret appealed to him for aid after Towton he 
 refused any formal help, but her pledge to surrender 
 Calais in case of success drew from him some succor in 
 money and men which enabled the Queen to renew the 
 struggle in the north. Though her effort failed, the hint 
 so roughly given had been enough to change the mood of 
 the English statesmen; the truce with France was re- 
 newed, and a different reception met the new proposals of 
 alliance which followed it. Lewis indeed was now busy 
 with an even more pressing danger. In any struggle of 
 the King with England or the nobles what gave Burgundy 
 its chief weight was the possession of the towns on the 
 Somme, and it was his consciousness of the vital impor- 
 tance of these to his throne that spurred Lewis to the bold 
 and dextrous diplomacy by which Duke Philip the Good, 
 under the influence of counsellors who looked to the French 
 King for protection against the Duke's son, Charles of 
 Charolais, was brought to surrender Picardy on payment 
 of the sum stipulated for its ransom in the Treaty of Arras. 
 The formal surrender of the towns on the Somme took 
 place in October, 1463, but they were hardly his own when 
 Lewis turned to press his alliance upon England. From
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 37 
 
 Picardy, where he was busy in securing his newly-won 
 possessions, he sought an interview with Warwick. His 
 danger indeed was still great ; for the irritated nobles were 
 already drawing together into a League of the Public 
 Weal, and Charles of Charolais, indignant at the coun- 
 sellors who severed him from his father and at the King 
 who traded through them on the Duke's dotage, was eager 
 to place himself at its head. But these counsellors, the 
 Croys, saw their own ruin as well as the ruin of Lewis in 
 the success of a league of which Charles was the head ; 
 and at their instigation Duke Philip busied himself at the 
 opening of 1464 as the mediator of an alliance which would 
 secure Lewis against it, a triple alliance between Bur- 
 gundy and the French and English Kings. 
 
 Such an alliance had now become Warwick's settled 
 policy. In it lay the certainty of peace at home as abroad, 
 the assurance of security to the throne which he had built 
 up. While Margaret of Anjou could look for aid from 
 France the house of York could hope for no cessation of 
 the civil war. A union between France, Burgundy and 
 England left the partisans of Lancaster without hope. 
 When Lewis therefore summoned him to an interview on 
 the Somme, Warwick, though unable to quit England in 
 face of the dangers which still threatened from the north, 
 promised to send his brother the Chancellor to conduct a 
 negotiation. Whether the mission took place or no, the 
 questions not only of peace with France but of a marriage 
 between Edward and one of the French King's kinswomen 
 were discussed in the English Council as early as th 
 spring of 1464, for in the May of that year, at a moment 
 when Warwick was hurrying to the north to crush Mar- 
 garet's last effort in the battle of Hexham, a Burgundian 
 agent announced to the Croys that an English embassy 
 would be despatched to St. Omer on the coming St. John's 
 day to confer with Lewis and Duke Philip on the peace 
 and the marriage-treaty. The victory of Hexham and the 
 capture of Henry, successes which were accepted by for-
 
 38 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 eign powers as a final settlement of the civil strife, and 
 which left Edward's hands free as they had never been 
 free before, quickened the anxiety of Lewis, who felt every 
 day the toils of the great confederacy of the French princes 
 closing more tightly round him. But Margaret was still 
 in his hands, and Warwick remained firm in his policy of 
 alliance. At Michaelmas the Earl prepared to cross the 
 sea for the meeting at St. Omer. 
 
 It was this moment that Edward chose for a sudden and 
 decisive blow. Only six days before the departure of the 
 embassy the young King informed his Council that he was 
 already wedded. By a second match with a Kentish 
 knight, Sir Richard Woodville, Jacquetta of Luxemburg, 
 the widow of the Regent Duke of Bedford, had become 
 the mother of a daughter Elizabeth. Elizabeth married 
 Sir John Grey, a Lancastrian partisan, but his fall some 
 few years back in the second battle of St. Albans left her 
 a widow, and she caught the young King's fancy. At 
 the opening of May, at the moment when Warwick's pur- 
 pose to conclude the marriage-treaty was announced to the 
 court of Burgundy, Edward had secretly made her his 
 wife. He had reserved, however, the announcement of 
 his marriage till the very eve of the negotiations, when its 
 disclosure served not only to shatter Warwick's plans but 
 to strike a sudden and decisive blow at the sway he had 
 wielded till now in the royal Council. The blow in fact 
 was so sudden and unexpected that Warwick could only 
 take refuge in a feigned submission. " The King, " wrote 
 one of his partisans, Lord Wenlock, to the Court of Bur- 
 gundy, " has taken a wife at his pleasure, without knowl- 
 edge of them whom he ought to have called to counsel him ; 
 by reason of which it is highly displeasing to many great 
 lords and to the bulk of his Council. But since the mar- 
 riage has gone so far that it cannot be helped, we must 
 take patience in spite of ourselves." Not only did the ne- 
 gotiations with France come to an end, but the Earl found 
 himself cut off from the King's counsels. " As one knows
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 39 
 
 not," wrote his adherent, "seeing the marriage is made 
 in this way, what purpose the King may have to go on 
 with the other two points, truce or peace, the opinion of 
 the Council is that my Lord of Warwick will not pass the 
 sea till one learns the King's will and pleasure on that 
 point." Even Warwick indeed might have paused before 
 the new aspect of affairs across the Channel. For at this 
 moment the growing weakness of Duke Philip enabled 
 Charles of Charolais to overthrow the Croys, and to be- 
 come the virtual ruler of the Burgundian states. At the 
 close of 1464 the League of the Public Weal drew fast to 
 a head, and Charles dispatched the Chancellor of Bur- 
 gundy to secure the aid of England. But the English 
 Council met the advances of the League with coldness. 
 Edward himself could have seen little save danger to his 
 throne from its triumph. Count Charles, proud of his con- 
 nection with the House of Lancaster through his Portu- 
 guese mother, a descendant of John of Gaunt, was known 
 to be hostile to the Yorkist throne. The foremost of his col- 
 leagues, John of Calabria, was a son of Rene of Anjou and 
 a brother of Margaret. Another of the conspirators, the 
 Count of Maine, was Margaret's uncle. It was significant 
 that the Duke of Somerset had found a place in the train 
 of Charles the Bold. On, the other hand the warmest ad- 
 vocates of the French alliance could hardly press for closer 
 relations with a King whose ruin seemed certain, and even 
 Warwick must have been held back by the utter collapse 
 of the royal power when the League attacked Lewis in 
 1465. Deserted by every great noble, and cooped up within 
 the walls of Paris, the French King could only save him- 
 self by a humiliating submission to the demands of the 
 Leaguers. 
 
 The close of the struggle justified Edward's policy of 
 inaction, for the terms of the peace told strongly for Eng- 
 lish interests. The restoration of the towns on the Somme 
 to Burgundy, the cession of Normandy to the King's 
 brother, Francis, the hostility of Brittany, not only de-
 
 40 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BoOK V. 
 
 tached the whole western coast from the hold of Lewis, 
 but forced its possessors to look for aid to the English 
 King who lay in their rear. But Edward had little time 
 to enjoy this piece of good luck. No sooner had the army 
 of the League broken up than its work was undone. The 
 restless genius of Lewis detached prince from prince, won 
 over the houses of Brittany and Anjou to friendship, 
 snatched back Normandy in January, 1466, and gathered 
 an army in Picardy to meet attack either from England or 
 Count Charles. From neither, however, was any serious 
 danger to be feared. Charles was held at home till the 
 close of the year by revolts at Liege and Dinant, while a 
 war of factions within Edward's court distracted the en- 
 ergies of England. The young King had rapidly followed 
 up the blow of his marriage by raising his wife's family 
 to a greatness which was meant to balance that of the 
 Nevilles. The Queen's father, Lord Rivers, was made 
 treasurer and constable; her brothers and sisters were 
 matched with great nobles and heiresses ; the heiress of the 
 Duke of Exeter, Edward's niece, whose hand Warwick 
 sought for his brother's son, was betrothed to Elizabeth's 
 son by her former marriage. The King's confidence was 
 given to his new kinsmen, and Warwick saw himself 
 checked even at the council-board by the influence of the 
 Woodvilles. Still true to an alliance with France, he was 
 met by their advocacy of an alliance with Burgundy where 
 Charles of Charolais through his father's sickness and 
 age was now supreme. Both powers were equally eager 
 for English aid. Lewis despatched an envoy to prolong 
 the truce from his camp on the Somme, and proposed to 
 renew negotiations for a marriage treaty by seeking the 
 hand of Edward's sister, Margaret, for a French prince. 
 Though " the thing which Charles hated most, " as Corn- 
 mines tells us, "was the house of York," the stress of 
 politics drew him as irresistibly to Edward. His wife, 
 Isabella of Bourbon, had died during the war of the 
 League, and much as such a union was "against his
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 41 
 
 heart," the activity of Lewis forced him at the close of 
 1466 to seek to buy English aid by demanding Margaret's 
 hand in marriage. 
 
 It is from this moment that the two great lines of our 
 foreign policy become settled and defined. In drawing 
 together the states of the Low Countries into a single po- 
 litical body, the Burgundian Dukes had built up a power 
 which has ever since served as a barrier against the ad- 
 vance of France to the north or its mastery of the Rhine. 
 To maintain this power, whether in the hands of the 
 Dukes or their successors, the Spaniard or the Emperor, 
 has always been a foremost object of English statesman- 
 ship ; and the Burgundian alliance in its earlier or later 
 shapes has been the constant rival of the alliance with 
 France. At this moment indeed the attitude of Burgundy 
 was one rather of attack than of defence. If Charles did 
 not aim at the direct conquest of France, he looked to 
 such a weakening of it as would prevent Lewis from hin- 
 dering the great plan on which he had set his heart, the 
 plan of uniting his scattered dominions on the northern 
 and eastern frontier of his rival by the annexation of Lor- 
 raine, and of raising them into a great European power by 
 extending his dominion along the whole course of the 
 Rhine. His policy was still to strengthen the great feuda- 
 tories against the Crown. "I love France so much," he 
 laughed, " that I had rather it had six kings than one ;" 
 and weak as the League of the Public Weal had proved he 
 was already trying to build up a new confederacy against 
 Lewis. In this confederacy he strove that England should 
 take part. Throughout 1466 the English court was the 
 field for a diplomatic struggle between Charles and Lewis. 
 Warwick pressed Margaret's marriage with one of the 
 French princes. The marriage with Charles was backed 
 by the Wcodvilles. Edward bore himself between the 
 two parties with matchless perfidy. Apparently yielding 
 to the counsels of the Earl, he despatched him in 1467 to 
 treat for peace with Lewis at Rouen. Warwick was re-
 
 43 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. IBoOK V. 
 
 ceived with honors which marked the importance of his 
 mission in the French King's eyes. Bishops and clergy 
 went out to meet him, his attendants received gifts of 
 velvet robes and the rich stuffs of Rouen, and for twelve 
 days the Earl and Lewis were seen busy in secret confer- 
 ence. But while the Earl was busy with the French King 
 the Great Bastard of Burgundy crossed to England, and 
 a sumptuous tourney, in which he figured with one of the 
 Woodvilles, hardly veiled the progress of counter-negotia- 
 tions between Charles and Edward himself. The young 
 King seized on the honors paid to Warwick as the pretext 
 for an outburst of jealousy. The seals were suddenly taken 
 from his brother, the Archbishop of York, and when the 
 Earl himself returned with a draft-treaty stipulating a 
 pension from France and a reference of the English claims 
 on Normandy and Guienne to the Pope's decision Edward 
 listened coldly and disavowed his envoy. 
 
 Bitter reproaches on his intrigues with the French King 
 marked even more vividly the close of Warwick's power. 
 He withdrew from court to his castle of Middleham, while 
 the conclusion of a marriage-treaty between Charles and 
 Margaret proved the triumph of his rivals. The death of 
 his father in the summer of 1467 raised Charles to the 
 Dukedom of Burgundy, and his diplomatic success in Eng- 
 land was followed by preparations for a new struggle with 
 the French King. In 1468 a formal league bound Eng- 
 land, Burgundy, and Brittany together against Lewis. 
 While Charles gathered an army in Picardy Edward 
 bound himself to throw a body of troops into the strong 
 places of Normandy which were held by the Breton Duke ; 
 and six thousand mounted archers under the Queen's 
 brother, Anthony, Lord Scales, were held ready to cross 
 the Channel. Parliament was called together in May, 
 and the announcement of the Burgundian alliance and of 
 the King's purpose to recover his heritage over sea was 
 met by a large grant of supplies from the Commons. In 
 June the pompous marriage of Margaret with the Bur-
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 43 
 
 gundian Duke set its seal on Edward's policy. How 
 strongly the current of national feeling ran in its favor 
 was seen in Warwick's humiliation. The Earl was help- 
 less. The King's dextrous use of his conference with 
 Lewis and of the honors he had received from him gave 
 him the color of a false Englishman and of a friend to 
 France. The Earl lost power over the Yorkists. The 
 war party, who formed the bulk of it, went hotly with thei 
 King; the merchants, who were its most powerful sup- 
 port, leaned to a close connection with the master of 
 Flanders and the Lower Rhine. The danger of his posi- 
 tion drove Warwick further and further from his old 
 standing ground ; he clung for aid to Lewis ; he became 
 the French king's pensioner and dependant. At the 
 French court he was looked upon already as a partisan of 
 the House of Lancaster. Edward dextrously seized on 
 the rumor to cut him off more completely from his old 
 party. He called on him to confront his accusers; and 
 though Warwick purged himself of the charge, the stigma 
 remained. The victor of Towton was no longer counted 
 as a good Yorkist. But triumphant as he was, Edward 
 had no mind to drive the Earl into revolt, nor was War- 
 wick ready for revenge. The two subtle enemies drew 
 together again. The Earl appeared at court; he was-for- 
 mally reconciled both to the King and to the Woodvilles; 
 as though to announce his conversion to the Burgundian 
 alliance he rode before the new Duchess Margaret on her 
 way to the sea. His submission removed the last obstacle 
 to the King's action, and Edward declared his purpose to 
 take the field in person against the King of France. 
 
 But at the moment when the danger seemed greatest the 
 quick, hard blows of Lewis paralyzed the League. He 
 called Margaret from Bar to Harfleur, where Jasper Tudor, 
 the Earl of Pembroke, prepared to cross with a small force 
 of French soldiers into Wales. The dread of a Lancastrian 
 rising should Margaret land in England hindered Lord 
 Scales from crossing the sea ; and marking the slowness
 
 44 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. (BooK v. 
 
 with which the Burgundian troops gathered in Picardy 
 Lewis flung himself in September on the Breton Duke, re- 
 duced him to submission, and exacted the surrender of the 
 Norman towns which offered an entry for the English 
 troops. His eagerness to complete his work by persuading 
 Charles to recognize his failure in a personal interview 
 threw him into the Duke's hands ; and though he was re- 
 leased at the end of the year it was only on humiliating 
 terms. But the danger from the triple alliance was over; 
 he had bought a fresh peace with Burgundy, and Ed- 
 ward's hopes of French conquest were utterly foiled. We 
 can hardly doubt that this failure told on the startling 
 revolution which marked the following year. Master of 
 Calais, wealthy, powerful as he was, Warwick had shown 
 by his feigned submission his sense that single-handed he 
 was no match for the King. In detaching from him the 
 confidence of the Yorkist party which had regarded him 
 as its head, Edward had robbed him of his strength. But 
 the King was far from having won the Yorkist party to 
 himself. His marriage with the widow of a slain Lan- 
 castrian, his promotion of a Lancastrian family to the 
 highest honors, estranged him from the men who had 
 fought his way to the Crown. Warwick saw that the 
 Yorkists could still be rallied round the elder of Edward's 
 brothers, the Duke of Clarence; and the temper of Clar- 
 ence, weak and greedy of power, hating the Woodvilles, 
 looking on himself as heir to the crown yet dreading the 
 claims of Edward's daughter Elizabeth, lent itself to his 
 arts. The spring of 1469 was spent in intrigues to win 
 over Clarence by offering him the hand of Warwick's elder 
 daughter and co-heiress, and in preparations for a rising 
 in Lancashire. So secretly were these conducted that 
 Edward was utterly taken by surprise when Clarence aiid 
 the Earl met in July at Calais and the marriage of the 
 Duke proved the signal for a rising at home. 
 
 The revolt turned out a formidable one. The first force 
 ent against it was cut to pieces at Edgecote near Banbury,
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 45 
 
 and its leaders, Earl Rivers and one of the queen's brothers, 
 taken and beheaded. Edward was hurrying to the sup- 
 port of this advanced body when it was defeated; but on 
 the news his force melted away and he was driven to fall 
 back upon London. Galled as he had been by his brother's 
 marriage, he saw nothing in it save the greed of Clarence 
 for the Earl's heritage, and it was with little distrust that 
 he summoned Warwick with the trained troops who 
 formed the garrison of Calais to his aid. The Duke and 
 Earl at once crossed the Channel. Gathering troops as 
 they moved, they joined Edward near Oxford, and the 
 end of their plot was at last revealed. No sooner had the 
 armies united than Edward found himself virtually a pris- 
 oner in Warwick's hands. But 'the bold scheme broke 
 down. The Yorkist nobles demanded the King's libera- 
 tion. London called for it. The Duke of Burgundy 
 "practised secretly," says Commines, "that Bang Edward 
 might escape," and threatened to break off all trade with 
 Flanders if he were not freed. Warwick could look for 
 support only to the Lancastrians, but the Lancastrians 
 demanded Henry's restoration as the price of their aid. 
 Such a demand was fatal to the plan for placing Clarence 
 on the throne, and Warwick was thrown back on a. formal 
 reconciliation with the King. Edward was freed, and 
 Duke and Earl withdrew to their estates for the winter. 
 But the impulse which Warwick had given to his adherents 
 brought about a new rising in the spring of 1470. A force 
 gathered in Lincolnshire under Sir Robert Welles with 
 the avowed purpose of setting Clarence on the throne, and 
 Warwick and the Duke though summoned to Edward's 
 camp on pain of being held for traitors remained sullenly 
 aloof. The King, however, was now ready for the strife. 
 A rapid march to the north ended in the rout of the in- 
 surgents, and Edward turned on the instigators of the 
 rising. But Clarence and the Earl could gather no force 
 to meet him. Yorkist and Lancastrian alike held aloof, 
 and they were driven to flight. Calais, though held by
 
 46 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 Warwick's deputy, repulsed them from its walls, and the 
 Earl's fleet was forced to take refuge in the harbors of 
 France. 
 
 The long struggle seemed at last over. In subtlety, as 
 in warlike daring, the young King had proved himself 
 more than a match for the " subtlest man of men now liv- 
 ing." He had driven him to throw himself on " our ad- 
 versary of France." Warwick's hold over the Yorkists 
 was all but gone. His own brothers, the Earl of North- 
 umberland and the Archbishop of York, were with the 
 King, and Edward counted on the first as a firm friend. 
 Warwick had lost Calais. Though he still retained his 
 fleet he was forced to support it by making prizes of Flem- 
 ish ships, and this involved him in fresh difficulties. The 
 Duke of Burgundy made the reception of these ships in 
 French harbors the pretext for a new strife with Lewis; 
 he seized the goods of French merchants at Bruges and 
 demanded redress. Lewis was in no humor for risking 
 for so small a matter the peace he had won, and refused 
 to see or speak with Warwick till the prizes were restored. 
 But he was soon driven from this neutral position. The 
 violent language of Duke Charles showed his desire to 
 renew the war with France in the faith that Warwick's 
 presence at the French court would insure Edward's sup- 
 port ; and Lewis resolved to prevent such a war by giving 
 Edward work to do at home. He supplied Warwick with 
 money and men, and pressed him to hasten his departure 
 for England. "You know," he wrote to an agent, "the 
 desire I have for Warwick's return to England, as well 
 because I wish to see him get the better of his enemies as 
 that at least through him the realm of England may be 
 again thrown into confusion, so as to avoid the questions 
 which have arisen out of his residence here." But War- 
 wick was too cautious a statesman to hope to win England 
 with French troops only. His hopes of Yorkist aid were 
 over with the failure of Clarence; and, covered as he was 
 with Lancastrian blood, he turned to the House of Lancas-
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE MONARCHY. 1461-1540. 47 
 
 ter. Margaret was summoned to the French court; the me- 
 diation of Lewis bent her proud spirit to a reconciliation on 
 Warwick's promise to restore her husband to the throne, 
 and after a fortnight's struggle she consented at the close 
 of July to betroth her son to the earl's second daughter, 
 Anne Neville. Such an alliance shielded Warwick, as he 
 trusted, from Lancastrian vengeance, but it at once 
 detached Clarence from his cause. Edward had already 
 made secret overtures to his brother, and though Warwick 
 strove to reconcile the Duke to his new policy by a provi- 
 sion that in default of heirs to the son of Margaret Clarence 
 should inherit the throne, the Duke's resentment drew him 
 back to his brother's side. But whether by Edward's coun- 
 sel or no his resentment was concealed ; Clarence swore 
 fealty to the house of Lancaster, and joined in the prepara- 
 tions which Warwick was making for a landing in Eng- 
 land. 
 
 What the Earl really counted on was not so much 
 Lancastrian aid as Yorkist treason. Edward reckoned on 
 the loyalty of Warwick's brothers, the Archbishop of 
 York and Lord Montagu. The last indeed he "loved,*' 
 and Montagu's firm allegiance during his brother's de 
 fection seemed to justify his confidence in him. But in 
 his desire to redress some , of the wrongs of the civil war 
 Edward had utterly estranged the Nevilles. In 1469 he 
 released Henry Percy from the Tower, and restored to him 
 the title and estates of his father, the attainted Earl of 
 Northumberland. Montagu had possessed both as his 
 share of the Yorkist spoil, and though Edward made him a 
 marquis in amends he had ever since nursed plans of re- 
 venge. From after-events it is clear that he had already 
 pledged himself to betray the King. But his treachery 
 was veiled with consummate art, and in spite of repeated 
 warnings from Burgundy Edward remained unconcerned 
 at the threats of invasion. Of the Yorkist party he held 
 himself secure since Warwick's desertion of their cause; 
 of the Lancastrian, he had little fear: and the powerful 
 
 3 YOL. 2
 
 48 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 fleet of Duke Charles prisoned the Earl's ships in the 
 Norman harbors. Fortune, however, was with his foes. 
 A rising called Edward to the north in September, and 
 while he was engaged in its suppression a storm swept the 
 Burgundian ships from the Channel. Warwick seized 
 the opportunity to cross the sea. On the thirteenth of 
 September he landed with Clarence at Dartmouth, and 
 with an army which grew at every step pushed rapidly 
 northward to meet the King. Taken as he was by sur- 
 prise, Edward felt little dread of the conflict. He relied 
 on the secret promises of Clarence and on the repeated oaths 
 of the two Nevilles, and called on Charles of Burgundy 
 to cut off Warwick's retreat by sea after the victory on 
 which he counted. But the Earl's army no sooner drew 
 near than cries of " Long live King Henry !" from Mon- 
 tagu's camp announced his treason. Panic spread through 
 the royal forces ; and in the rout that followed Edward 
 could only fly to the shore, and embarking some eight hun- 
 dred men who still clung to him in a few trading vessels 
 which he found there set sail for the coast of Holland. 
 
 In a single fortnight Warwick had destroyed a throne. 
 The work of Towton was undone. The House of Lancas- 
 ter was restored. Henry the Sixth was drawn from the 
 Tower to play again the part of King, while his rival could 
 only appeal as a destitute fugitive to the friendship of 
 Charles the Bold. But Charles had small friendship to 
 give. His disgust at the sudden overthrow of his plans 
 for a joint attack on Lewis was quickened by a sense of 
 danger. England was now at the French King's dis- 
 posal, and the coalition of England and Burgundy against 
 France which he had planned seemed likely to become a 
 coalition of France and England against Burgundy. 
 Lewis indeed was quick to seize on the new turn of affairs. 
 Thanksgivings were ordered in every French town. Mar- 
 garet and her son were feasted royally at Paris. An em- 
 bassy crossed the sea to conclude a treaty of alliance, and 
 Warwick promised that an immediate force of four thott
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 49 
 
 sand men should be dispatched to Calais. With English 
 aid the King felt he could become assailant in his turn ; 
 he declared the King of Burgundy a rebel, and pushed his 
 army rapidly to the Somme. How keenly Charles felt 
 his danger was seen in his refusal to receive Edward at 
 his court, and in his desperate attempts to conciliate the 
 new English government. His friendship, he said, was 
 not for this or that English King but for England. He 
 Again boasted of his Lancastrian blood. He despatched 
 the Lancastrian Dukes of Somerset and Exeter, who had 
 found refuge ever since Towton at his court, to carry fair 
 words to Margaret. The Queen and her son were still at 
 Paris, detained as it was said by unfavorable winds, but 
 really by the wish of Lewis to hold a check upon Warwick 
 and by their own distrust of him. Triumphant indeed as 
 he seemed, the Earl found himself alone in the hour of his 
 triumph. The marriage of Prince Edward with Anne 
 Neville, which had been promised as soon as Henry was 
 restored, was his one security against the vengeance of the 
 Lancastrians, and the continued delays of Margaret showed 
 little eagerness to redeem her promise. The heads of the 
 Lancastrian party, the Dukes of Somerset and Exeter, had 
 pledged themselves to Charles the Bold at their departure 
 from his court to bring about Warwick's ruin. From 
 Lewis he could look for no further help, for the remon- 
 strances of the English merchants compelled him in spita 
 of the treaty he had concluded to keep the troops he had 
 promised against Burgundy at home. Of his own main, 
 supporters Clarence was only waiting for an opportunity 
 of deserting him. Even his brother Montagu shrank fron\ 
 striking fresh blows to further the triumph of a party which 
 aimed at the ruin of the Nevilles, and looked forward with 
 dread to the coming of the Queen. 
 
 The preparations for her departure in March brought 
 matters to a head. With a French Queen on the throne 
 a French alliance became an instant danger for Burgundy c 
 and Charles was driven to lend a secret ear to Edward's
 
 50 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 prayer for aid. Money and ships were placed at his ser- 
 vice, and on the fourteenth of March, 1471, the young 
 King landed at Ravenspur on the estuary of the Humber 
 with a force of two thousand men. In the north all re- 
 mained quiet. York opened its gates when Edward pro* 
 fessed to be seeking not the crown but his father's dukedom. 
 Montagu lay motionless at Pomfret as the little army 
 marched by him to the south. Routing at Newark a force 
 which had gathered on his flank, Edward pushed straight 
 for Warwick, who had hurried from London to raise an 
 army in his own county. His forces were already larger 
 than those of his cousin, but the Earl cautiously waited 
 within the walls of Coventry for the reinforcements under 
 Clarence and Montagu which he believed to be hastening 
 to his aid. The arrival of Clarence, however, was at once 
 followed by his junction with Edward, and the offer of 
 " good conditions" shows that Warwick himself was con- 
 templating a similar treason when the coming of two Lan- 
 castrian leaders, the Duke of Exeter and the Earl of Ox- 
 ford, put an end to the negotiation. The union of Montagu 
 with his brother forced Edward to decisive action; he 
 marched upon London, followed closely by Warwick's 
 army, and found its gates opened by the perfidy of Arch- 
 bishop Neville. Again master of Henry of Lancaster, 
 who passed anew to the Tower, Edward sallied afresh from 
 the capital two days after his arrival with an army strongly 
 reinforced. At early dawn on the fourteenth of April the 
 two hosts fronted one another at Barnet. A thick mist 
 covered the field, and beneath its veil Warwick's men 
 fought fiercely till dread of mutual betrayal ended the strife. 
 Montagu's followers attacked the Lancastrian soldiers of 
 Lord Oxford, whether as some said through an error which 
 sprang from the similarity of his cognizance to that of 
 Edward's, or as the Lancastrians alleged while themselves 
 in the act of deserting to the enemy. Warwick himself 
 was charged with cowardly flight. In three hours the 
 medley of carnage and treason was over. Four thousand
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 51 
 
 men lay on the field ; and the Earl and his brother were 
 found among the slain. 
 
 But the fall of the Nevilles was far from giving rest to 
 Edward. The restoration of Henry, the return of their 
 old leaders, had revived the hopes of the Lancastrian party ; 
 and in the ruin of Warwick they saw only the removal of 
 an obstacle to their cause. The great Lancastrian lords 
 had been looking forward to a struggle with the Earl on 
 Margaret's arrival, and their jealousy of him was seen in 
 the choice of the Queen's landing-place. Instead of join- 
 ing her husband and the Nevilles in London she disem- 
 barked from the French fleet at Weymouth, to find the men 
 of the western counties already flocking to the standards 
 of the Duke of Somerset and of the Courtenays, the Welsh 
 arming at the call of Jasper Tudor, and Cheshire and Lan- 
 cashire only waiting for her presence to rise. A march 
 upon London with forces such as these would have left 
 Warwick at her mercy and freed the Lancastrian throne 
 from the supremacy of the Nevilles. The news of Barnet 
 which followed hard on the Queen's landing scattered these 
 plans to the winds; but the means which had been de- 
 signed to overawe Warwick might still be employed against 
 his conqueror. Moving to Exeter to gather the men of 
 Devonshire and Corn wall,, Margaret turned through Taun- 
 ton on Bath to hear that Edward was already encamped 
 in her front at Cirencester. The young King's action 
 showed his genius for war. Barnet was hardly fought 
 when he was pushing to the west. After a halt at Abing- 
 don to gain news of Margaret's movements he moved 
 rapidly by Cirencester and Malmesbury toward the Lan- 
 castrians at Bath. But Margaret was as eager to avoid a 
 battle before her Welsh reinforcements reached her as Ed- 
 ward was to force one on. Slipping aside to Bristol, and 
 detaching a small body of troops to amuse the King by a 
 feint upon Sodbury, her army reached Berkeley by a night- 
 march and hurried forward through the following day to 
 Tewkesbury. But rapid us their movements had been,
 
 52 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 they had failed to outstrip Edward. Marching on an inner 
 line along the open Cotswold country while his enemy was 
 struggling through the deep and tangled lanes of the Sev- 
 ern valley, the King was now near enough to bring Mar- 
 garet to bay; and the Lancastrian leaders were forced to 
 take their stand on the slopes south of the town, in a posi- 
 tion approachable only through "foul lanes and deep 
 dykes." Here Edward at once fell on them at daybreak 
 of the fourth of May. His army, if smaller in numbers, 
 was superior in military quality to the motley host gath- 
 ered round the Queen, for as at Barnet he had with him a 
 force of Germans armed with hand-guns, then a new 
 weapon in war, and a fine train of artillery. It was prob- 
 ably the fire from these that drew Somerset from the strong 
 position which he held, but his repulse and the rout of the 
 force he led was followed up with quick decision. A gen- 
 eral advance broke the Lancastrian lines, and all was over. 
 Three thousand were cut down on the field, and a large 
 number of fugitives were taken in the town and abbey. 
 To the leaders short shrift was given. Edward was reso- 
 lute to make an end of his foes. The fall of the Duke of 
 Somerset extinguished the male branch of the House of 
 Beaufort. Margaret was a prisoner; and with the mur- 
 der of her son after his surrender on the field and the mys- 
 terious death of Henry the Sixth in the Tower which fol- 
 lowed the King's return to the capital the direct line of 
 Lancaster passed away. 
 
 Edward was at last master of his realm. No noble was 
 likely to measure swords with the conqueror of the Ne- 
 villes. The one rival who could revive the Lancastrian 
 claims, the last heir of the House of Beaufort, Henry Tu- 
 dor, was a boy and an exile. The King was free to display 
 his genius for war on nobler fields than those of Barnet 
 and Tewkesbury, and for a while his temper and the pas- 
 sion of his people alike drove him to the strife with France. 
 But the country was too exhausted to meddle in the attack 
 on Lewis which Charles, assured at any rate against Eng-
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 53 
 
 lish hostility, renewed in 1472 in union with the Dukes of 
 Guienne and Brittany, and which was foiled as of old 
 through the death of the one ally and the desertion of the 
 other. The failure aided in giving a turn to his policy, 
 which was to bring about immense results on the after 
 history of Europe. French as he was in blood, the nature 
 of his possessions had made Charles from the first a Ger- 
 man prince rather than a French. If he held of Lewis his 
 duchy of Burgundy, his domain on the Somme, and Flan- 
 ders west of the Scheldt, the mass of his dominions was 
 held of the Empire. While he failed too in extending his 
 power on the one side it widened rapidly on the other. In 
 war after war he had been unable to gain an inch of French 
 ground beyond the towns of the Somme. But year after 
 year had seen new gains on his German frontier. Elsass 
 and the Breisgau passed into his hands as security for a 
 loan to the Austrian Duke Sigismund; in 1473 he seized 
 Lorraine by force of arms, and inherited from its Duke 
 Gelderland and the county of Cleves. Master of the Upper 
 Rhine and Lower Rhine, as well as of a crowd of German 
 princedoms, Charles was now the mightiest among the 
 princes of the Empire, and in actual power superior to the 
 Emperor himself. The house of Austria, in which the Im- 
 perial crown seemed to be becoming hereditary, was weak- 
 ened by attacks from without as by divisions within, by 
 the loss of Bohemia and Hungary, by the loss of its hold 
 over German Switzerland, and still more by the mean and 
 spiritless temper of its Imperial head, Frederick the Third. 
 But its ambition remained boundless as ever ; and in the 
 Burgundian dominion, destined now to be the heritage of 
 a girl, for Mary was the Duke's only child, it saw the 
 means of building up a greatness such as it had never 
 known. Its overtures at once turned the Duke's ambition 
 from France to Germany. He was ready to give his 
 daughter's hand to Frederick's son, Maximilian ; but his 
 price was that of succession to the Imperial crown, and 
 his election to the dignity of King of the Romans. In such
 
 54 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 an event the Empire and his vast dominions would pass 
 together at his death to Maximilian, and the aim of the 
 Austrian House would be realized. It was to negotiate 
 this marriage, a marriage which in the end was destined 
 to shape the political map of modern Europe, that Duke 
 and Emperor met in 1473 at Trier. 
 
 But if Frederick's policy was to strengthen his house 
 the policy of the princes of the Empire lay in keeping it 
 weak ; and their pressure was backed by suspicions of the 
 Duke's treachery and of the possibility of a later marriage 
 whose male progeny might forever exclude the house of 
 Austria from the Imperial throne. Frederick's sudden 
 flight broke up the conference; but Charles was far from 
 relinquishing his plans. To win the mastery of the whole 
 Rhine valley was the first step in their realization, and at 
 the opening of 1474 he undertook the siege of Neuss, whose 
 reduction meant that of Koln and of the central district 
 which broke his sway along it. But vast as were the new 
 dreams of ambition which thus opened before Charles, he 
 had given no open sign of his change of purpose. Lewis 
 watched his progress on the Rhine almost as jealously as 
 his attitude on the Somme ; and the friendship of England 
 was still of the highest value as a check on any attempt 
 of France to interrupt his plans. With this view the Duke 
 maintained his relations with England and fed Edward's 
 hopes of a joint invasion. In the summer of 1474, on the 
 eve of his march upon the Rhine, he concluded a treaty for 
 an attack on France which was to open on his return after 
 the capture of Neuss. Edward was to recover Normandy 
 and Aquitaine as well as his " kingdom of France" ; Cham- 
 pagne and Bar were to be the prizes of Charles. Through 
 the whole of 1474 the English king prepared actively for 
 war. A treaty was concluded with Brittany. The na- 
 tion was wild with enthusiasm. Large supplies were 
 granted by Parliament : and a large army gathered for the 
 coming campaign. The plan of attack was a masterly one. 
 While Edward moved from Normandy on Paris, the f o*se
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 55 
 
 of Burgundy and of Brittany on his right hand and his 
 left were to converge on the same point. But the aim of 
 Charles in these negotiations was simply to hold Lewis 
 from any intervention in his campaign on the Rhine. The 
 siege of Neuss was not opened till the close of July, and 
 its difficulties soon unfolded themselves. Once master of 
 the whole Rhineland, the house of Austria saw that Charles 
 would be strong enough to wrest from it the succession to 
 the Empire ; and while Sigismund paid back his loan and 
 roused Elsass to revolt the Emperor Frederick brought the 
 whole force of Germany to the relief of the town. From 
 that moment the siege was a hopeless one, but Charles 
 clung to it with stubborn pride through autumn, winter, 
 and spring, and it was only at the close of June, 1475, that 
 the menace of new leagues against his dominions on the 
 upper Rhineland forced him to withdraw. So broken was 
 his army that he could not, even if he would, have aided 
 in carrying out the schemes of the preceding year. But 
 an English invasion would secure him from attack by 
 Lewis till his forces could be reorganized ; and with the 
 same unscrupulous selfishness as of old Charles pledged 
 himself to co-operate and called on Edward to cross the 
 Channel. In July Edward landed with an army of twenty- 
 four thousand men at Calais. In numbers and in com- 
 pleteness of equipment no such force had as yet left English 
 shores. But no Burgundian force was seen on the Somme ; 
 and after long delays Charles proposed that Edward should 
 advance alone upon Paris on his assurance that the for- 
 tresses of the Somme would open their gates. The English 
 army crossed the Somme and approached St. Quentin, but 
 it was repulsed from the walls by a discharge of artillery. 
 It was now the middle of August, and heavy rains pre- 
 vented further advance ; while only excuses for delay came 
 from Brittany and it became every day clearer that the 
 Burgundian Duke had no real purpose to aid. Lewis 
 seized the moment of despair to propose peace on terms 
 which a conqueror might have accepted, the security of
 
 56 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. .(BOOK V. 
 
 Brittany, the payment of what the English deemed a trib- 
 ute of fifty thousand crowns a year, and the betrothal of 
 Edward's daughter to the Dauphin. A separate treaty 
 provided for mutual aid in case of revolt among the sub- 
 jects of either king, and for mutual shelter should either 
 be driven from his realm. In spite of remonstrances from 
 the Duke of Burgundy this truce was signed at the close 
 of August and the English soldiers recrossed the sea. 
 
 The desertion of Charles threw Edward whether he 
 would or no on the French alliance; and the ruin of the 
 Duke explains the tenacity with which he clung to it. 
 Defeated by the Swiss at Morat in the following year, 
 Charles fell in the opening of 1477 on the field of Nanci, 
 and his vast dominion was left in his daughter's charge. 
 Lewis seized Picardy and Artois. the Burgundian duchy 
 and Franche Comte : and strove to gain the rest by forc- 
 ing on Mary of Burgundy the hand of the Dauphin. But 
 the Imperial dreams which had been fatal to Charles had 
 to be carried out through the very ruin they wrought. 
 Pressed by revolt in Flanders and by the French king's 
 greed, Mary gave her hand to the Emperor's son, Maxi- 
 milian; 'and her heritage passed to the Austrian house. 
 Edward took no part in the war between Lewis and Maxi- 
 milian which followed on the marriage. The contest be- 
 tween England and France had drifted into a mightier 
 European struggle between France and the House of Aus- 
 tria ; and from this struggle the King wisely held aloof. 
 He saw what Henry the Seventh saw after him and what 
 Henry the Eighth learned at last to see, that England could 
 only join in such a contest as the tool of one or other of the 
 combatants, a tool to be used while the struggle lasted and 
 to be thrown aside as soon as it was over. With the 
 growth of Austrian power England was secure from French 
 aggression; and rapidly as Lewis was adding province 
 after province to his dominions his loyalty to the pledge 
 he had given of leaving Brittany untouched and his anx- 
 iety to conclude a closer treaty of amity in 1478 showed
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 57 
 
 the price he set on his English alliance. Nor was Ed- 
 ward's course guided solely by considerations of foreign 
 policy. A French alliance meant peace ; and peace was 
 needful for the plans which Edward proceeded steadily to 
 carry out. With the closing years of his reign the Mon- 
 archy took a new color. The introduction of an elaborate 
 spy system, the use of the rack, and the practice of inter- 
 ference with the purity of justice gave the first signs of 
 an arbitrary rule which the Tudors were to develop. It 
 was on his creation of a new financial system that the 
 King laid the foundation of a despotic rule. Rich, and 
 secure at home as abroad, Edward had small need to call 
 the Houses together; no parliament met for five years, 
 and when one was called at last it was suffered to do little 
 but raise the custom duties, which were now granted to 
 the King for life. Sums were extorted from the clergy ; 
 monopolies were sold; the confiscations of the civil war 
 filled the royal exchequer ; Edward did not disdain to turn 
 merchant on his own account. The promise of a French 
 war had not only drawn heavy subsidies from the Com- 
 mons, much of which remained in the royal treasury 
 through the abrupt close of the strife, but enabled the King 
 to deal a deadly blow at the liberty which the Commons 
 had won. Edward set aside the usage of contracting loans 
 by authority of parliament ; and calling before him the 
 merchants of London, begged from each a gift or " benev- 
 olence" in proportion to the royal needs. How bitterly 
 this exaction was resented even by the classes with whom 
 the King had been most popular was seen in the protest 
 which the citizens addressed to his successor against these 
 " extortions and new impositions against the laws of Gcd 
 and man and the liberty and laws of this realm." But for 
 the moment resistance was fruitless, and the " benevolence" 
 of Edward was suffered to furnish a precedent for the f oread 
 loans of Wolsey and of Charles the First. 
 
 In the history of intellectual progress his reign takes a 
 brighter color. The founder of a aew despotism presents
 
 J8 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 a claim to our regard as the patron of Caxton. It is in the 
 life of the first English printer that we see the new up- 
 growth of larger and more national energies which were to 
 compensate for the decay of the narrower energies of the 
 Middle Age. Beneath the mouldering forms of the old 
 world a new world was bursting into life ; if the fifteenth 
 century was an age of death it was an age of birth as well, 
 of that new birth, that Renascence, from which the after 
 life of Europe was to flow. The force which till now con- 
 centrated itself in privileged classes was beginning to dif- 
 fuse itself through nations. The tendency of the time 
 was to expansion, to diffusion. The smaller gentry and 
 the merchant class rose in importance as the nobles fell. 
 Religion and morality passed out of the hands of the priest- 
 hood into those of the laity. Knowledge became vulgar- 
 ized, it stooped to lower and meaner forms that it might 
 educate the whole people. England was slow to catch the 
 intellectual fire which was already burning brightly across 
 the Alps, but even amid the turmoil of its wars and revo- 
 lutions intelligence was being more widely spread. While 
 the older literary class was dying out, a glance beneath 
 the surface shows us the stir of a new interest in knowl- 
 edge among the masses of the people itself. The very 
 character of the authorship of the time, its love of com- 
 pendiums and abridgments of such scientific and histori- 
 cal knowledge as the world believed it possessed, its dra- 
 matic performances or mysteries, the commonplace 
 morality of its poets, the popularity of its rhymed chronicles, 
 are proof that literature was ceasing to be the possession 
 of a purely intellectual class and was beginning to appeal 
 to the nation at large. The correspondence of the Paston 
 family not only displays a fluency and grammatical cor- 
 rectness which would have been impossible a few years 
 before, but shows country squires discussing about books 
 and gathering libraries. The increased use of linen paper 
 in place of the costlier parchment helped in the populari- 
 zation of letters. In no former age had finer copies of
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE MONARCHY. 1461-1540. 59 
 
 books been produced ; in none had so many been transcribed. 
 This increased demand for their production caused the pro- 
 cesses of copying and illuminating manuscripts to be trans- 
 ferred from the scriptoria of the religious houses into the 
 hands of trade guilds like the Guild of St. John at Bruges 
 or the Brothers of the Pen at Brussels. It was in fact this 
 increase of demand for books, pamphlets, or fly-sheets, es- 
 pecially of a grammatical or religious character, in the 
 middle of the fifteenth century that brought about the in- 
 troduction of printing. We meet with the first records of 
 the printer's art in rude sheets struck off from wooden 
 blocks, " block-books" as they are now called. Later on 
 came the vast advance of printing from separate and mov- 
 able types. Originating at Maintz with the three famous 
 printers, Gutenberg, Fust, and Schoeffer, this new process 
 travelled southward to Strassburg, crossed the Alps to 
 Venice, where it lent itself through the Aldi to the spread 
 of Greek literature in Europe, and then floated down the 
 Rhine to the towns of Flanders. 
 
 It was probably at the press of Colard Mansion, in a lit- 
 tle room over the porch of St. Donat's at Bruges, that Wil- 
 liam Caxton learned the art which he was the first to in- 
 troduce into England. A Kentish boy by birth, but 
 apprenticed to a London mercer, Caxton had already spent 
 thirty years of his manhood in Flanders as Governor of 
 the English guild of Merchant Adventurers there when we 
 find him engaged as copyist in the service of Edward's 
 sister, Duchess Margaret of Burgundy. But the tedious 
 process of copying was soon thrown aside for the new art 
 which Colard Mansion had introduced into Bruges. " For 
 as much as in the writing of the same," Caxton tells us in 
 the preface to his first printed work, the Tales of Troy, 
 " my pen is worn, my hand weary and not steadfast, mine 
 eyes dimmed with over much looking on the white paper, 
 and my courage not so prone and ready to labor as it hath 
 been, and that age creepeth on me daily and feebleth all 
 the body, and also because I have promised to divers gen-
 
 60 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 tlemen and to my friends to address to them as hastily as 
 I might the said book, therefore I have practised and learned 
 at my great charge and dispense to ordain this said book 
 in print after the manner and form as ye may see, and is 
 not written with pen and ink as other books be, to the end 
 that every man may have them at once, for all the books 
 of this story here emprynted as ye see were begun in one 
 day and also finished in one day." The printing-press 
 was the precious freight he brought back to England in 
 1476 after an absence of five-and- thirty years. Through 
 the next fifteen, at an age when other men look for ease 
 and retirement, we see him plunging with characteristic 
 energy into his new occupation. His " red pale" or her- 
 aldic shield marked with a red bar down the middle in- 
 vited buyers to the press he established in the Almonry at 
 Westminster, a little enclosure containing a chapel and 
 almshouses near the west front of the church, where the 
 alms of the abbey were distributed to the poor. " If it 
 please any man, spiritual or temporal," runs his advertise- 
 ment, " to buy any pyes of two or three commemorations of 
 Salisbury all emprynted after the form of the present let- 
 ter, which be well and truly correct, let him come to West- 
 minster into the Almonry at the red pale, and he shall have 
 them good chepe." Caxton was a practical man of busi- 
 ness, as this advertisement shows, no rival of the Venetian 
 Aldi or of the classical printers of Rome, but resolved to 
 get a living from his trade, supplying priests with service 
 books and preachers with sermons, furnishing the clerk 
 with his "Golden Legend" and knight and baron with 
 "joyous and pleasant histories of chivalry." But while 
 careful to win his daily bread, he found time to do much 
 for what of higher literature lay fairly to hand. He printed 
 all the English poetry of any moment which was then in 
 existence. His reverence for that " worshipful man, Geof- 
 frey Chaucer," who "ought to be eternally remembered," 
 is shown not merely by his edition of the " Canterbury 
 Tales," but by his reprint of them when a purer text of the
 
 CHAP. l.J THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 61 
 
 poem offered itself. The poems of Lydgate and Gower 
 were added to those of Chaucer. The Chronicle of Brut 
 and Higden's " Polychronicon" were the only available 
 works of an historical character then existing in the Eng- 
 lish tongue, and Caxton not only printed them but himself 
 continued the latter up to his own time. A translation of 
 Boethius, a version of the Eneid from the French, and a 
 tract or two of Cicero, were the stray first-fruits of the 
 classical press in England. 
 
 Busy as was Caxton 's printing-press, he was even busier 
 as a translator than as a printer. More than four thousand 
 of his printed pages are from works of his own rendering. 
 The need of these translations shows the popular drift of 
 literature at the time; but keen as the demand seems to 
 have been, there is nothing mechanical in the temper with 
 which Caxton prepared to meet it. A natural, simple- 
 hearted taste and enthusiasm, especially for the style and 
 forms of language, breaks out in his curious prefaces. 
 " Having no work in tiand," he says in the preface to his 
 Eneid, " I sitting in my study where as lay many divers 
 pamphlets and books, happened that to my hand came a 
 little book in French, which late was translated out of 
 Latin by some noble clerk of France which book is named 
 Eneydos, and made in Latin by that noble poet and great 
 clerk Vergyl in which book I had great pleasure by rea- 
 son of the fair and honest termes and wordes in French 
 which I never saw to-fore-like, none so pleasant nor so 
 well ordered, which book as me seemed should be much 
 requisite for noble men to see, as well for the eloquence as 
 the histories ; and when I had advised me to this said book 
 I deliberated and concluded to translate it into English, 
 and forthwith took a pen and ink and wrote a leaf or 
 twain." But the work of translation involved a choice of 
 English which made Caxton 's work important in the his- 
 tory of our language. He stood between two schools of 
 translation, that of French affectation and English ped- 
 antry. It was a moment when the character of our liter-
 
 62 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 ary tongue was being settled, and it is curious to see in 
 his own words the struggle over it which was going on in 
 Caxton's time. " Some honest and great clerks have been 
 with me and desired me to write the most curious terms 
 that I could find ;" on the other hand, " some gentlemen of 
 late blamed me, saying that in my translations I had over 
 many curious terms which could not be understood of com- 
 mon people, and desired me to use old and homely terms 
 in my translations." "Fain would I please every man," 
 comments the good-humored printer, but his sturdy sense 
 saved him alike from the temptations of the court and the 
 schools. His own taste pointed to English, but "to the 
 common terms that be daily used" rather than to the Eng- 
 lish of his antiquarian advisers. " I took an old book and 
 read therein, and certainly the English was so rude and 
 broad I could not well understand it," while the Old-Eng- 
 lish charters which the Abbot of Westminster lent as 
 models from the archives of his house seemed " more like 
 to Dutch than to English." To adopt current phraseology 
 however was by no means easy at a time when even the 
 speech of common talk was in a state of rapid flux. " Our 
 language now used varieth far from that which was used 
 and spoken when I was born. " Not only so, but the tongue 
 of each shire was still peculiar to itself and hardly intelli- 
 gible to men of another county. " Common English that 
 is spoken in one shire varieth from another so much, that 
 in my days happened that certain merchants were in a 
 ship in Thames for to have sailed over the sea into Zea- 
 land, and for lack of wind they tarred at Foreland and 
 went on land for to refresh them. And one of them, named 
 Sheffield, a mercer, came into a house and asked for meat, 
 and especially he asked them after eggs. And the good 
 wife answered that she could speak no French. And the 
 merchant was angry, for he also could speak no French, 
 but would have eggs, but he understood him not. And 
 then at last another said he would have eyren, then the 
 good wife said she understood him well. Lo ! what should
 
 . 1.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 63 
 
 a man in thesp days now write," adds the puzzled printer, 
 "eggs or eyren? certainly it is hard to please every man 
 by cause of diversity and change of language." His own 
 mother-tongue too was that of " Kent in the Weald, where 
 I doubt not is spoken as broad and rude English as in any 
 place in England ;" and coupling this with his long absence 
 in Flanders we can hardly wonder at the confession he 
 makes over his first translation, that "when all these things 
 came to fore me, after that I had made and written a five 
 or six quires I fell in despair of this work, and purposed 
 never to have continued therein, and the quires laid apart, 
 and in two years after labored no more in this work. " 
 
 He was still, however, busy translating when he died. 
 All difficulties in fact were lightened by the general interest 
 which his labors aroused. When the length of the " Gol- 
 den Legend" makes him " half desperate to have accom- 
 plish it" and ready to "lay it apart," the Earl of Arundel 
 solicits him in no wise to leave it and promises a yearly 
 fee of a buck in summer and a doe in winter, once it were 
 done. " Many noble and divers gentle men of this realm 
 came and demanded many and often times wherefore I 
 have not made and imprinted the noble hi story of the 'San 
 Graal. ' " We see his visitors discussing with the sagacious 
 printer the historic existence of Arthur, Duchess Marga- 
 ret of Somerset lent him her " Blanchardine and Eglan- 
 tine ;" an Archdeacon of Colchester brought him his trans- 
 lation of the work called "Cato;" a mercer of London 
 pressed him to undertake the " Royal Book" of Philip le 
 Bel. Earl Rivers chatted with him over his own transla- 
 tion of the "Sayings of the Philosophers." Even kings 
 showed their interest in his work; his " Tully" was printed 
 under the patronage of Edward the Fourth, his " Order of 
 Chivalry" dedicated to Richard the Third, his " Facts of 
 Arms" published at the desire of Henry the Seventh. Cax- 
 ton profited in fact by the wide literary interest which was 
 a mark of the time. The fashion of large and gorgeous 
 libraries had passed from the French to the English prince
 
 64 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 of his day : Henry the Sixth had a valuable collection of 
 books ; that of the Louvre was seized by Duke Humphrey 
 of Gloucester and formed the basis of the fine library which 
 he presented to the University of Oxford. Great nobles 
 took an active and personal part in the literary revival. 
 The warrior, Sir John Fastolf , was a well-known lover of 
 books. Earl Rivers was himself one of the authors of the 
 day ; he found leisure in the intervals of pilgrimages and 
 politics to translate the " Sayings of the Philosophers" and 
 a couple of religious tracts for Caxton's press. A friend 
 of far greater intellectual distinction, however, than these 
 was found in John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester. He had 
 wandered during the reign of Henry the Sixth in search of 
 learning to Italy, had studied at her universities and be- 
 come a teacher at Padua, where the elegance of his Latinity 
 drew tears from the most learned of the Popes, Pius the 
 Second, better known as JEneas Sylvius. Caxton can find 
 no words warm enough to express his admiration of one 
 " which in his time flowered in virtue and cunning, to 
 whom I know none like among the lords of the temporal- 
 ity in science and moral virtue." But the ruthlessness of 
 the Renascence appeared in Tiptoft side by side with its 
 intellectual vigor, and the fall of one whose cruelty had 
 earned him the surname of " the Butcher" even amid the 
 horrors of civil war was greeted with sorrow by none but 
 the faithful printer. "What great loss was it," he says 
 in a preface printed long after his fall, " of that noble, vir- 
 tuous, and well-disposed lord ; when I remember and ad- 
 vertise his life, his science, and his virtue, me thinketh 
 (God not displeased) over great the loss of such a man con- 
 sidering his estate and cunning." 
 
 Among the nobles who encouraged the work of Caxton 
 was the King's youngest brother, Richard Duke of Glou- 
 cester. Edward had never forgiven Clarence his desertion ; 
 and his impeachment in 1478 on a. charge of treason, a 
 charge soon followed by his death in the Tower, brought 
 Richard nearer to the throne. Ruthless and subtle as Ed-
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 65 
 
 ward himself, the Duke was already renowned as a war- 
 rior; his courage and military skill had been shown at 
 Barnet and Tewkesbury; and at the close of Edward's 
 reign an outbreak of strife with the Scots enabled him to 
 march in triumph upon Edinburgh in 1482. The sudden 
 death of his brother called Richard at once to the front. 
 Worn with excesses, though little more than forty years 
 old, Edward died in the spring of 1483, and his son Ed- 
 ward the Fifth succeeded peacefully to the throne. The 
 succession of a boy of thirteen woke again the fierce rival- 
 ries of the court. The Woodvilles had the young King in 
 their hands ; but Lord Hastings, the chief adviser of his 
 father, at once joined with Gloucester and the Duke of 
 Buckingham, the heir of Edward the Third's youngest son 
 and one of the greatest nobles of the realm, to overthrow 
 them. The efforts of the Queen-mother to obtain the re- 
 gency were foiled, Lord Rivers and two Woodvilles were 
 seized and sent to the block, and the King transferred to 
 the charge of Richard, who was proclaimed by a great 
 council of bishops and nobles Protector of the Realm. But 
 if he hated the Queen's kindred Hastings was as loyal as 
 the Woodvilles themselves to the children of Edward the 
 Fourth ; and the next step of the two Dukes was to remove 
 this obstacle. Little more than a month had passed after 
 the overthrow of the Woodvilles when Richard suddenly 
 entered the Council-chamber and charged Hastings with 
 sorcery and attempts upon his life. As he dashed his 
 hand upon the table the room filled with soldiery. " I will 
 not dine," said the Duke, turning to the minister, "till they 
 have brought me your head." Hastings was hurried to 
 execution in the court-yard of the Tower, his fellow-coun- 
 sellors thrown into prison, and the last check on Richard's 
 ambition was removed. Buckingham lent him his aid in 
 a claim of the crown ; and on the twenty-fifth of June the 
 Duke consented after some show of reluctance to listen to 
 the prayer of a Parliament hastily gathered together, 
 which, setting aside Edward's children as the fruit of an
 
 66 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 unlawful marriage and those of Clarence as disabled by 
 his attainder, besought him to take the office and title of 
 King. 
 
 Violent as his acts had been, Richard's career had as 
 yet jarred little with popular sentiment. The Woodvilles 
 were unpopular, Hastings was detested as the agent of 
 Edward's despotism, the reign of a child-king was gener- 
 ally deemed impossible. The country, longing only fop 
 peace after all its storms, called for a vigorous and active 
 ruler; and Richard's vigor and ability were seen in his 
 encounter with the first danger that threatened his throne. 
 The new revolution had again roused the hopes of the 
 Lancastrian party. With the deaths of Henry the Sixth 
 and his son all the descendants of Henry the Fourth passed 
 away ; but the line of John of Gaunt still survived in the 
 heir of the Beauforts. The legality of the royal act which 
 barred their claim to the crown was a more than question- 
 able one; the Beauforts had never admitted it, and the 
 conduct of Henry the Sixth in his earlier years points to 
 a belief in their right of succession. Their male line was 
 extinguished by the fall of the last Duke of Somerset at 
 Tewkesbury, but the claim of the house was still main- 
 tained by the son of Margaret Beaufort, the daughter of 
 Duke John and great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt. 
 While still but a girl Margaret had become both wife and 
 mother. She had wedded the Earl of Richmond, Edmund 
 Tudor, a son of Henry the Fifth's widow, Katharine of 
 France, by a marriage with a Welsh squire, Owen Tudor ; 
 and had given birth to a son, the later Henry the Seventh. 
 From very childhood the life of Henry had been a troubled 
 one. His father died in the year of his birth ; his uncle 
 and guardian, Jasper, Earl of Pembroke, was driven from 
 the realm on the fall of the House of Lancaster ; and the 
 boy himself, attainted at five years old, remained a pris- 
 oner till the restoration of Henry the Sixth by Lord War- 
 wick. But Edward's fresh success drove him from the 
 realm, and escaping to Brittany he was held there, halt-
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 6? 
 
 guest, half -prisoner, by its Duke. The extinction of the 
 direct Lancastrian line had given Henry a new importance. 
 Edward the Fourth never ceased to strive for his surren- 
 der, and if the Breton Duke refused to give him up, his 
 alliance with the English King was too valuable to be im- 
 perilled by suffering him to go free. The value of such a 
 check on Richard was seen by Lewis of France ; and his 
 demands for Henry's surrender into his hands drove the 
 Duke of Brittany, who was now influenced by a minister 
 in Richard's pay, to seek for aid from England. In June 
 the King sent a thousand archers to Brittany; but the 
 troubles of the Duchy had done more for Henry than 
 Lewis could have done. The nobles rose against Duke 
 and minister ; and in the struggle that followed the young 
 Earl was free to set sail as he would. 
 
 He found unexpected aid in the Duke of Buckingham, 
 whose support had done much to put Richard on the throne. 
 Though rewarded with numerous grants and the post of 
 Constable, Buckingham's greed was still unsated; and on 
 the refusal of his demand of the lands belonging to the 
 earldom of Hereford the Duke lent his ear to the counsels 
 of Margaret Beaufort, who had married his brother, Henry 
 Stafford, but still remained true to the cause of her boy. 
 Buckingham looked no doubt to the chance of fooling 
 Yorkist and Lancastrian alike, and of pressing his own 
 claims to the throne on Richard's fall. But he was in the 
 hands of subtler plotters. Morton, the exiled Bishop of 
 Ely, had founded a scheme of union on the disappearance 
 of Edward the Fifth and his brother, who had been im- 
 prisoned in the Tower since Richard's accession to the 
 throne, and were now believed to have been murdered by 
 his orders. The death of the boys left their sister Eliza- 
 beth, who had taken sanctuary at Westminster with her 
 mother, the heiress of Edward the Fourth ; and the scheme 
 of Morton was to unite the discontented Yorkists with 
 what remained of the Lancastrian party by the marriage 
 of Elizabeth with Henry Tudor. The Queen-mother and
 
 68 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 her kindred gave their consent to this plan, and a wide 
 revolt was organized under Buckingham's leadership. In 
 October, 1483, the Woodvilles and the iradherente rose in 
 Wiltshire, Kent, and Berkshire, the Courtenays in Devon, 
 while Buckingham marched to their support from Wales. 
 Troubles in Brittany had at this moment freed Henry 
 Tudor, and on the news of the rising he sailed with a strong 
 fleet and five thousand soldiers on board. A proclamation 
 of the new pretender announced to the nation what seems 
 as yet to have been carefully hidden, the death of the princes 
 in the Tower. But, whether the story was believed or no, 
 the duration of the revolt was too short for it to tell upon 
 public opinion. Henry's fleet was driven back by a storm, 
 Buckingham was delayed by a flood in the Severn, and the 
 smaller outbreaks were quickly put down. Richard showed 
 little inclination to deal roughly with the insurgents. 
 Buckingham indeed was beheaded, but the bulk of his fol- 
 lowers were pardoned, and the overthrow of her hopes rec- 
 onciled the Queen-mother to the King. She quitted the 
 sanctuary with Elizabeth, and thus broke up the league on 
 which Henry's hopes hung. But Richard was too wary 
 a statesman to trust for safety to mere force of arms. He 
 resolved to enlist the nation on his side. During his 
 brother's reign he had watched the upgrowth of public 
 discontent as the new policy of the monarchy developed 
 itself, and he now appealed to England as the restorer of 
 its ancient liberties. "We be determined," said the citi- 
 zens of London in a petition to the King, " rather to ad- 
 venture and to commit us to the peril of our lives and jeop- 
 ardy of death than to live in such thraldom and bondage 
 as we have lived some time heretofore, oppressed and in- 
 jured by extortions and new impositions against the laws 
 of God and man and the liberty and laws of this realm 
 wherein every Englishman is inherited." Richard met 
 the appeal by convoking Parliament in January, 1484, and 
 by sweeping measures of reform. The practice of extort- 
 ing money by benevolences was declared illegal, while
 
 CEAP. 1.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 69 
 
 grants of pardons and remissions of forfeitures reversed in 
 some measure the policy of terror by which Edward at 
 once held the country in awe and filled his treasury. Nu- 
 merous statutes broke the slumbers of Parliamentary leg- 
 islation. A series of mercantile enactments strove to protect 
 the growing interests of English commerce. The King's 
 love of literature showed itself in a provision that no stat- 
 utes should act as a hindrance " to any artificer or merchant 
 stranger, of what nation or country he be, for bringing 
 into this realm or selling by retail or otherwise of any 
 manner of books, written or imprinted." His prohibition 
 of the iniquitous seizure of goods before conviction of 
 felony which had prevailed during Edward's reign, his 
 liberation of the bondmen who still remained unenfran- 
 chised on the royal domain, and his religious foundations 
 show Richard's keen anxiety to purchase a popularity in 
 which the bloody opening of his reign might be forgotten. 
 It was doubtless the same wish to render his throne pop- 
 ular which led Richard to revive the schemes of a war with 
 France. He had strongly remonstrated against his brother's 
 withdrawal and alliance in 1475, and it must have been 
 rather a suspicion of his warlike designs than any horror 
 at the ruthlessness of his ambition which led Lewis the 
 Eleventh on his death-bed to refuse to recognize his ac- 
 cession. At the close of Edward the Fourth's reign the 
 alliance which- had bound the two countries together was 
 brought to an end by the ambition and faithlessness of the 
 French King. The war between Lewis and Maximilian 
 ended at the close of 1482 through the sudden death of 
 Mary of Burgundy and the reluctance of the Flemish towns 
 to own Maximilian's authority as guardian of her son, 
 Philip, the heir of the Burgundian states. Lewis was able 
 to conclude a treaty at Arras, by which Philip's sister, 
 Margaret, was betrothed to the Dauphin Charles, and 
 brought with her as dower the counties of Artois and Bur- 
 gundy. By the treaty with England Charles was already 
 betrothed to Edward's daughter, Elizabeth; and this open
 
 70 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 breach of treaty was followed by the cessation of the sub- 
 sidy which had been punctually paid since 1475. France 
 in fact had no more need of buying English neutrality. 
 Galled as he was, Edward's death but a few months later 
 hindered any open quarrel, but the refusal of Lewis to rec- 
 ognize Richard and his attempts to force from Brittany 
 the surrender of Henry Tudor added to the estrangement 
 of the two courts ; and we can hardly wonder that on the 
 death of the French King only a few months after his ac- 
 cession Richard seized the opportunity which the troubles 
 at the French court afforded him. Charles the Eighth 
 was a minor; and the control of power was disputed as of 
 old between the Regent, Anne of Beaujeu, and the Duke 
 of Orleans. Orleans entered into correspondence with 
 Richard and Maximilian, whom Anne's policy was pre- 
 venting from gaining the mastery over the Low Countries, 
 and preparations were making for a coalition which would 
 have again brought an English army and the young Eng- 
 lish King on to the soil of France. It was to provide 
 against this danger that Anne had received Henry Tudor 
 at the French court when the threat of delivering him up 
 to Richard forced him to quit Brittany after the failure 
 of his first expedition ; and she met the new coalition by 
 encouraging the Earl to renew his attack. Had Richard 
 retained his popularity the attempt must have ended in a 
 failure even more disastrous than before. But the news 
 of the royal children's murder had slowly spread through 
 the nation, and even the most pitiless shrank aghast before 
 this crowning deed of blood. The pretence of a constitu- 
 tional rule too was soon thrown off, and in the opening of 
 1485 a general irritation was caused by the levy of benev- 
 olences in defiance of the statute which had just been 
 passed. The King felt himself safe; the consent of the 
 Queen-mother to his contemplated marriage with her 
 daughter Elizabeth appeared to secure him against any 
 danger from the discontented Yorkists ; and Henry, alone 
 and in exile, seemed a small danger. Henry however had
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 71 
 
 no sooner landed at Milford Haven than a wide conspiracy 
 revealed itself. Lord Stanley had as yet stood foremost 
 among Richard's adherents; he had supported him in the 
 rising of 1483 and had been rewarded with Buckingham's 
 post of Constable. His brother too stood high in the King's 
 confidence. But Margaret Beaufort, again left a widow, 
 wedded Lord Stanley ; and turned her third marriage, as 
 she had turned her second, to the profit of her boy. A 
 pledge of support from her husband explains the haste with 
 which Henry pressed forward to his encounter with the 
 King. The treason, however, was skilfully veiled; and 
 though defection after defection warned Richard of his 
 danger as Henry moved against him, the Stanleys still re- 
 mained by his side and held command of a large body of 
 his forces. But the armies no sooner met on the twenty- 
 second of August at Bosworth Field in Leicestershire than 
 their treason was declared. The forces under Lord Stan- 
 ley abandoned the King when the battle began ; a second 
 body of troops under the Earl of Northumberland drew 
 off as it opened. In the crisis of the fight Sir William 
 Stanley passed over to Henry's side. With a cry of " Trea- 
 son ! treason !" Richard flung himself into the thick of the 
 battle, and in the fury of his despair he had already dashed 
 the Lancastrian standard to the ground and hewed his way 
 into the presence of his rival when he fell overpowered 
 with numbers, and the crown which he had worn and 
 which was found as the struggle ended lying near a haw- 
 thorn bush was placed on the head of the conqueror. 
 
 VOL. 2
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING. 
 
 14851514. 
 
 STILL young, for he was hardly thirty when his victory 
 at Bosworth placed him on the throne, the temper of Henry 
 the Seventh seemed to promise the reign of a poetic dreamer 
 rather than of a statesman. The spare form, the sallow 
 face, the quick eye, lit now and then with a fire that told 
 of his Celtic blood, the shy, solitary humor which was only 
 broken by outbursts of pleasant converse or genial sarcasm, 
 told of an inner concentration and enthusiasm ; and to the 
 last Henry's mind remained imaginative and adventurous. 
 He dreamed of crusades, he dwelt with delight on the 
 legends of Arthur which Caxton gave to the world in the 
 year of his accession. His tastes were literary and artistic. 
 He called foreign scholars to his court to serve as secreta- 
 ries and historiographers; he trained his children in the 
 highest cult ire of their day ; he was a patron of the new 
 printing press, a lover of books and of art. The chapel at 
 Westminster which bears his name reflects his passion for 
 architecture. But life gave Henry little leisure for dreams 
 or culture. From the first he had to struggle for sheer life 
 against the dangers that beset him. A battle and treason 
 had given him the throne ; treason and a battle might dash 
 him from it. His claim of blood was an uncertain and 
 disputable one even by men of his own party. He stood 
 attainted by solemn Act of Parliament ; and though the 
 judges ruled that the possession of the crown cleared all 
 attaint the stigma and peril remained. His victory had 
 been a surprise; he could not trust the nobles; of fifty-two
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 73 
 
 peers he dared summon only a part to the Parliament which 
 assembled after his coronation and gave its recognition to 
 his claim of the crown. The act made no mention of hered- 
 itary right, or of any right by conquest, but simply declared 
 " that the inheritance of the crown should be, rest, remain, 
 and abide in the most royal person of their sovereign Lord, 
 King Henry the Seventh, and the heirs of his body law- 
 fulty ensuing." Such a declaration gave Henry a true 
 Parliamentary title to his throne; and his consciousness 
 of this was shown in a second act which assumed him to 
 have been King since the death of Henry the Sixth and 
 attainted Richard and his adherents as rebels and traitors. 
 But such an act was too manifestly unjust to give real 
 strength to his throne; it was in fact practically undone 
 in 1495 when a new statute declared that no one should 
 henceforth be attainted for serving a de facto king ; and 
 BO insecure seemed Henry's title that no power acknowl- 
 edged him as King save France and the Pope, and the 
 support of France gained as men believed by a pledge to 
 abandon the English claims on Normandy and Guienne 
 was as perilous at home as it was useful abroad. 
 
 It was in vain that he carried out his promise to Morton 
 and the Woodvilles by marrying Elizabeth of York; he 
 had significantly delayed the marriage till he was owned 
 as King in his own right, and a purely Lancastrian claim 
 to the throne roused wrath in every Yorkist which no afte* 
 match could allay. During the early years of his reign 
 the country was troubled with local insurrections, some so 
 obscure that they have escaped the notice of our chroni- 
 clers, some, like that of Lovel and of the Staffords, general 
 and formidable. The turmoil within was quickened by 
 encouragement from without. The Yorkist sympathies of 
 the Earl of Kildare, the deputy of Ireland, offered a start- 
 ing-point for a descent from the west ; while the sister of 
 Edward the Fourth, the Duchess Margaret of Burgundy, 
 a fanatic in the cause of her house, was ready to aid any 
 Yorkist attempt from Flanders. A trivial rising in 1486
 
 74 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 proved to be the prelude of a vast conspiracy in the follow- 
 ing year. The Earl of Warwick, the son of the Duke of 
 Clarence and thus next male heir of the Yorkist line, had 
 been secured by Henry as by Richard in the Tower; but 
 in the opening of 1487 Lambert Simnel, a boy carefully 
 trained for the purpose of this imposture, landed under his 
 name in Ireland. The whole island espoused Simnel's 
 cause, the Lord Deputy supported him, and he was soon 
 joined by the Earl of Lincoln, John de la Pole, the son of 
 a sister of Edward the Fourth by the Duke of Suffolk, and 
 who on the death of Richard's son had been recognized by 
 that sovereign as his heir. Edward's queen and the Wood- 
 villes seem to have joined in the plot, and Margaret sent 
 troops which enabled the pretender to land in Lancashire. 
 But Henry was quick to meet the danger, and the impos- 
 tor's defeat at Stoke near Newark proved fatal to the hopes 
 of the Yorkists. Simnel was taken and made a scullion 
 in the King's kitchen, Lincoln fell on the field. 
 
 The victory of Stoke set Henry free to turn to the inner 
 government of his realm. He took up with a new vigor 
 and fulness the policy of Edward the Fourth. Parliament 
 was only summoned on rare and critical occasions. It 
 was but twice convened during the last thirteen years of 
 Henry's reign. The chief aim of the King was the accu- 
 mulation of a treasure which should relieve him from the 
 need of ever appealing for its aid. Subsidies granted for 
 the support of wars which Henry evaded formed the base 
 of a royal treasure which was swelled by the revival of 
 dormant claims of the crown, by the exaction of fines for 
 the breach of forgotten tenures, and by a host of petty ex- 
 tortions. Benevolences were again revived. A dilemma 
 of Henry's minister, which received the name of "Mor- 
 ton's fork," extorted gifts to the exchequer from men who 
 lived handsomely on the ground that their wealth was 
 manifest, and from those who lived plainly on the plea that 
 economy had made them wealthy. Still greater sums were 
 drawn from those who were compromised in the revolts
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 75 
 
 which chequered the King's rule. It was with his own 
 hand that Henry indorsed the rolls of fines imposed after 
 every insurrection. So successful were these efforts that 
 at the end of his reign the King bequeathed a hoard of two 
 millions to his successor. The same imitation of Edward's 
 policy was seen in Henry's civil government. Broken as 
 was the strength of the baronage, there still remained lords 
 whom the new monarch watched with a jealous solicitude. 
 Their power lay in the hosts of disorderly retainers who 
 swarmed round their houses, ready to furnish a force in 
 case of revolt, while in peace they became centres of out- 
 rage and defiance to the law. Edward had ordered the 
 dissolution of these military households in his Statute of 
 Liveries, and the statute was enforced by Henry with the 
 utmost severity. On a visit to the Earl of Oxford, one of 
 the most devoted adherents of the Lancastrian cause, the 
 King found two long lines of liveried retainers drawn up 
 to receive him. "I thank you for your good cheer, my 
 Lord," said Henry as they parted, "but I may not endure 
 to have my laws broken in my sight. My attorney must 
 speak with you." The Earl was glad to escape with a 
 fine of 10,000. It was with a special view to the suppres- 
 sion of this danger that Henry employed the criminal ju- 
 risdiction of the royal Council. The King in his Council 
 had always asserted a right in the last resort to enforce 
 justice and peace by dealing with offenders too strong to 
 be dealt with by his ordinary courts. Henry systematized 
 this occasional jurisdiction by appointing in 1486 a com- 
 mittee of his Council as a regular court, to which the place 
 where it usually sat gave the name of the Court of Star 
 Chamber. The King's aim was probably little more than 
 a purpose to enforce order on the land by bringing the great 
 nobles before his own judgment seat; but the establish- 
 ment of the court as a regular and no longer an exceptional 
 tribunal, whose traditional powers were confirmed by Par- 
 liamentary statute, and where the absence of a jury can- 
 celled the prisoner's right to be tried by his peers, furnished
 
 76 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 his son with an instrument of tyranny which laid justice 
 at the feet of the monarchy. 
 
 In his foreign policy Henry like Edward clung to a 
 system of peace. His aim was to keep England apart, 
 independent of the two great continental powers which 
 during the Wars of the Roses had made revolutions at 
 their will. Peace indeed was what Henry needed, whether 
 for the general welfare of the land, or for the building up 
 of his own system of rule. Peace, however, was hard to 
 win. The old quarrel with France seemed indeed at an 
 end ; for it was Henry's pledge of friendship which had 
 bought the French aid that enabled him to mount the 
 throne. But in England itself hatred of the French burned 
 fiercely as ever; and the growth of the French monarchy 
 in extent and power through the policy of Lewis the Elev- 
 enth, his extinction of the great feudatories, and the admin- 
 istrative centralization he introduced, made even the cool- 
 est English statesman look on it as a danger to the realm. 
 Only Brittany broke the long stretch of French coast which 
 fronted England ; and the steady refusal of Edward the 
 Fourth to suffer Lewis to attack the Duchy showed the 
 English sense of its value. Under its new King, however, 
 Charles the Eighth, France showed her purpose of annex- 
 ing Brittany. Henry contented himself for a while with 
 sending a few volunteers to aid in resistance; but when 
 the death of the Duke left Brittany and its heiress, Anne, 
 at the mercy of the French King the country called at 
 once for war. Henry was driven to find allies in the states 
 which equally dreaded the French advance, in the house 
 of Austria and in the new power of Spain, to call on Par- 
 liament for supplies, and to cross the Channel in 1492 
 with twenty-five thousand men. But his allies failed him ; 
 a marriage of Charles with Anne gave the Duchy irretriev- 
 ably to the French King; and troubles at home brought 
 Henry to listen to terms of peace on payment of a heavy 
 subsidy. 
 
 Both kings indeed were eager for peace. Charles was
 
 CHAP. .] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 77 
 
 anxious to free his hands for the designs he was forming 
 against Italy. What forced Henry to close the war was 
 the appearance of a new pretender. At the opening of 
 1492, at the moment when the King was threatening a de- 
 scent on the French coast, a youth calling himself Richard, 
 Duke of York, landed suddenly in Ireland. His story of 
 an escape from the Tower and of his bringing up in Por- 
 tugal was accepted by a crowd of partisans ; but he was 
 soon called by Charles to France, and his presence there 
 adroitly used to wring peace from the English King as the 
 price of his abandonment. At the conclusion of peace the 
 pretender found a new refuge with Duchess Margaret ; his 
 claims were recognized by the House of Austria and the 
 King of Scots; while Henry, who declared the youth's true 
 name to be Perkin Warbeck, weakened his cause by con- 
 flicting accounts of his origin and history. Fresh York- 
 ist plots sprang up in England. The Duchess gathered a 
 fleet, Maximilian sent soldiers to the young claimant's aid, 
 and in 1495 he sailed for England with a force as large as 
 that which had followed Henry ten years before. But he 
 found a different England. Though fierce outbreaks still 
 took place in the north, the country at large had tasted the 
 new s weets of order and firm government, and that reac- 
 tion of feeling, that horror of civil wars, which gave their 
 strength to the Tudors had already begun to show its force. 
 The pretender's troops landed at Deal, only to be seized by 
 the country folk and hung as pirates. Their leader sailed 
 on to Ireland. Here too, however, iie found a new state of 
 things. Since the recall of Richard and his army in 1399 
 English sovereignty over the island had dwindled to a 
 shadow. For a hundred years the native chieftains had 
 ruled without check on one side the Pale, and the lords of 
 the Pale had ruled with but little check on the other. But 
 in 1494 Henry took the country in hand. Sir Edward 
 Poynings, a tried soldier, was dispatched as deputy to 
 Ireland with troops at his back. English officers, English 
 judges were quietly sent over. The lords of the Pale were
 
 78 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 scared by the seizure of their leader, the Earl of Kildare. 
 The Parliament of the Pale was bridled by a statute passed 
 at the Deputy's dictation ; the famous Poynings' Act, by 
 which it was forbidden to treat of any matters save those 
 first approved of by the English King and his Council. 
 It was this new Ireland that the pretender found when he 
 appeared off its coast. He withdrew in despair, and Henry 
 at once set about finishing his work. The time had not 
 yet come when England was strong enough to hold Ireland 
 by her own strength. For a while the Lords of the Pale 
 must still serve as the English garrison against the uncon- 
 quered Irish, and Henry called his prisoner Kildare to his 
 presence. "All Ireland cannot rule this man," grumbled 
 his ministers. "Then shall he rule all Ireland," laughed 
 the King, and Kildare returned as Lord Deputy to hold 
 the country loyally in Henry's name. 
 
 The same political forecast, winning from very danger 
 the elements of future security, was seen in the King's 
 dealings with Scotland. From the moment when England 
 finally abandoned the fruitless effort to subdue it the story 
 of Scotland had been a miserable one. Whatever peace 
 might be concluded, a sleepless dread of the old danger 
 from the south tied the country to an alliance with France, 
 and this alliance dragged it into the vortex of the Hundred 
 Years' War. But after the final defeat and capture of 
 David on the field of Neville's Cross the struggle died down 
 on both sides into marauding forays and battles, like those 
 of Otterburn and Homildon Hill, in which alternate victo- 
 ries were won by the feudal lords of the Scotch or English 
 border. The ballad of " Chevy Chase" brings home to us 
 the spirit of the contest, the daring and defiance which 
 stirred Sidney's heart "like a trumpet." But the effect 
 of the struggle on the internal development of Scotland 
 was utterly ruinous. The houses of Douglas and of March 
 which it raised into supremacy only interrupted their strife 
 with England to battle fiercely with one another or to co- 
 erce their King. The power of the Crown sank in fact
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 79 
 
 into insignificance under the earlier sovereigns of the line 
 of Stuart which succeeded to the throne on the extinction 
 of the male line of Bruce in 1371. Invasions and civil 
 feuds not only arrested but even rolled back the national 
 industry and prosperity. The country was a chaos of dis- 
 order and misrule, in which the peasant and the trader 
 were the victims of feudal outrage. The Border became 
 a lawless land, where robbery and violence reigned utterly 
 without check. So pitiable seemed the state of the king- 
 dom that at the opening of the fifteenth century the clans 
 of the Highlands drew together to swoop upon it as a cer- 
 tain prey ; but the common peril united the factions of the 
 nobles, and the victory of Harlaw saved the Lowlands 
 from the rule of the Celt. 
 
 A great ns*me at last broke the line of the Scottish kings. 
 Schooled by a long captivity in England, James the First 
 returned to his realm in 1424 to be the ablest of her rulers 
 as he was th first of her poets. In the twelve years of a 
 wonderful r*.ign justice and order were restored for the 
 while, the !3otch Parliament organized, the clans of the 
 Highlands assailed in their own fastnesses and reduced 
 to swear fealty to the " Saxon" king. James turned to as- 
 sail the great houses ; but feudal violence was still too strong 
 for the hand of the law, and a band of ruffians who burst 
 into his chamber left the King lifeless with sixteen stabs 
 in his body. His death in 1437 was the signal for a strug- 
 gle between the House of Douglas and the Crown which 
 lasted through half a century. Order however crept grad- 
 ually in ; the exile of the Douglases left the Scottish mon- 
 arch supreme in the Lowlands; while their dominion over 
 the Highlands was secured by the ruin of the Lords of 
 the Isles. But in its outer policy the country still followed 
 in the wake of France ; every quarrel between French King 
 and English King brought danger with it on the Scottish 
 border; and the war of Brittany at once set James the 
 Fourth among Henry's foes. James welcomed the fugitive 
 pretender at his court after his failure in Ireland, wedded
 
 80 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 him to his cousin, and in 1497 marched with him to the 
 south. Not a man however greeted the Yorkist claimant, 
 the country mustered to fight him ; and an outbreak among 
 his nobles, many of whom Henry had in his pay, called 
 the Scot-King back again. Abandonment of the pretender 
 was the first provision of peace between the two countries. 
 Forced to quit Scotland the youth threw himself on the 
 Cornish coast, drawn there by a revolt in June, only two 
 months before his landing, which had been stirred up by 
 the heavy taxation for the Scotch war, and in which a force 
 of Cornishmen had actually pushed upon London and only 
 been dispersed by the King's artillery on Blackheath. 
 His temper however shrank from any real encounter; and 
 though he succeeded in raising a body of Cornishmen and 
 marched on Taunton, at the approach of the royal forces 
 he fled from his army, took sanctuary at Beaulieu, and 
 surrendered on promise of life. But the close of this dan- 
 ger made no break in Henry's policy of winning Scotland 
 to a new attitude toward his realm. The lure to James 
 was the hand of the English King's daughter, Margaret 
 Tudor. For five years the negotiations dragged wearily 
 along. The bitter hate of the two peoples blocked the way, 
 and even Henry's ministers objected that the English 
 crown might be made by the match the heritage of a Scot- 
 tish king. " Then," they said, " Scotland will annex Eng- 
 land. " " No," said the King with shrewd sense ; " in such 
 a case England would annex Scotland, for the greater al- 
 ways draws to it the less. " His steady pressure at last won 
 the day. In 1502 the marriage treaty with the Scot- King 
 was formally concluded ; and quiet, as Henry trusted, se- 
 cured in the north. 
 
 The marriage of Margaret was to bring the House of 
 Stuart at an after time to the English throne. But results 
 as momentous and far more immediate followed on the 
 marriage of Henry's sons. From the outset of his reign 
 Henry had been driven to seek the friendship and alliance 
 of Spain. Though his policy to the last remained one of
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 81 
 
 peace, yet the acquisition of Brittany forced him to guard 
 against attack from France and the mastery of the Channel 
 which the possession of the Breton ports was likely to give 
 to the French fleet. The same dread of French attack 
 drew Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabel of Castile, whose 
 marriage was building up the new monarchy of Spain, to 
 the side of the English King; and only a few years after 
 his accession they offered the hand of their daughter Cath- 
 arine for his eldest son. But the invasion of Italy by 
 Charles the Eighth drew French ambition to a distant 
 strife, and once delivered from the pressure of immediate 
 danger Henry held warily back from a close connection 
 with the Spanish realms which might have involved him 
 in continental wars. It was not till 1501 that the mar- 
 riage-treaty was really carried out. The Low Countries 
 had now passed to the son of Mary of Burgundy by her 
 husband Maximilian, the Austrian Archduke Philip. The 
 Yorkist sympathies of the Duchess Margaret were shared 
 by Philip, and Flanders had till now been the starting- 
 point of the pretenders who had threatened Henry's crown 
 But Philip's marriage with Juana, the daughter of Ferdi- 
 nand and Isabel, bound him to the cause of Spain, and it 
 was to secure his throne by winning Philip's alliance, as 
 well as to gain in the friendship of the Low Countries a 
 fresh check upon French attack, that Henry yielded to Fer- 
 dinand's renewed demand for the union of Arthur and 
 Catharine. The match was made in blood. Henry's own 
 temper was merciful and even generous; he punished re- 
 bellion for the most part by fines rather than bloodshed, 
 and he had been content to imprison or degrade his rivals. 
 But the Spanish ruthlessness would see no living claimant 
 left to endanger Catharine's throne, and Perkin Warbeck 
 and the Earl of Warwick were put to death on a charge 
 of conspiracy before the landing of the bride. 
 
 Catharine, however, was widow almost as soon as wife, 
 for only three months after his wedding Arthur sickened 
 and died. But a contest with France for Southern Italy,
 
 82 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 which Ferdinand claimed as king of Aragon, now made 
 the friendship of England more precious than ever to the 
 Spanish sovereigns; and Isabel at once pressed for her 
 daughter's union with the King's second son, Henry, 
 whom his brother's death left heir to the throne. Such 
 a union with a husband's brother startled the English sov- 
 ereign. In his anxiety, however, to avoid a breach with 
 Spain he suffered Henry to be betrothed to Catharine, and 
 threw the burden of decision on Rome. As he expected, 
 Julius the Second declared that if the first marriage had 
 been completed to allow the second was beyond even the 
 Papal power. But the victories of Spain in Southern Italy 
 enabled Isabel to put fresh pressure on the Pope, and on a 
 denial being given of the consummation of the earlier mar- 
 riage Julius was at last brought to sign a bull legitimating 
 the later one. Henry, however, still shrank from any real 
 union. His aim was neither to complete the marriage, 
 which would have alienated France, nor to wholly break 
 it off and so alienate Spain. A balanced position between 
 the two battling powers allowed him to remain at peace, to 
 maintain an independent policy, and to pursue his system 
 of home-government. He met the bull therefore by com- 
 pelling his son to enter a secret protest against the validity 
 of his betrothal ; and Catharine remained through the later 
 years of his reign at the English court betrothed but un- 
 married, sick with love-longing and baffled pride. 
 
 But great as were the issues of Henry's policy, it shrinks 
 into littleness if we turn from it to the weighty movements 
 which were now stirring the minds of men. The world 
 was passing through changes more momentous than any 
 it had witnessed since the victory of Christianity and the 
 fall of the Roman Empire. Its physical bounds were sud- 
 denly enlarged. The discoveries of Copernicus revealed to 
 man the secret of the universe. Portuguese mariners 
 doubled the Cape of Good Hope 'and anchored their mer- 
 chant fleets in the harbors of India. Columbus crossed 
 ths untraversed ocean to add a New World to the Old,
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 83 
 
 Sebastian Cabot, starting from the port of Bristol, threaded 
 his way among the icebergs of Labrador. This sudden 
 contact with new lands, new faiths, new races of men 
 quickened the slumbering intelligence of Europe into a 
 strange curiosity. The first book of voyages that told of 
 the Western World, the travels of Amerigo Vespucci, 
 were soon "in everybody's hands." The "Utopia" of 
 More, in its wide range of speculation on every subject of 
 human thought and action, tells us how roughly and ut- 
 terly the narrowness and limitation of human life had been 
 broken up. At the very hour when the intellectual energy 
 of the Middle Ages had sunk into exhaustion the capture 
 of Constantinople by the Turks and the flight of its Greek 
 scholars to the shores of Italy opened anew the science and 
 literature of an older world. The exiled Greek scholars 
 were welcomed in Italy ; and Florence, so long the hom 
 of freedom and of art, became the home of an intellectual 
 Kevival. The poetry of Homer, the drama of Sophocles, 
 the philosophy of Aristotle and of Plato woke again to life 
 beneath the shadow of the mighty dome with which Bru- 
 nelleschi had just crowned the City by the Arno. All the 
 restless energy which Florence had so long thrown into 
 the cause of liberty she flung, now that her liberty was 
 reft from her, into the cause of letters. The galleys of her 
 merchants brought back manuscripts from the East as the 
 most precious portion of their freight. In the palaces of 
 her nobles fragments of classic sculpture ranged themselves 
 beneath the frescoes of Ghirlandajo. The recovery of a 
 treatise of Cicero's or a tract of Sallust's from the dust of a 
 monastic library was welcomed by the group of statesmen 
 and artists who gathered in the Rucellai gardens with a 
 thrill of enthusiasm. Foreign scholars soon flocked over 
 the Alps to learn Greek, the key of the new knowledge, from 
 the Florentine teachers. Grocyn, a fellow of New College, 
 was perhaps the first Englishman who studied under the 
 Greek exile, Chancondylas ; and the Greek lectures which 
 he delivered in Oxford on his return in 1491 mark the open-
 
 84 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 ing of a new period in our history. Physical as well as 
 literary activity awoke with the re-discovery of the teach- 
 ers of Greece; and the continuous progress of English sci- 
 ence may be dated from the day when Linacre, another 
 Oxford student, returned from the lectures of the Florentine 
 Politian to revive the older tradition of medicine by his 
 translation of Galen. 
 
 But from the first it was manifest that the revival of let- 
 ters would take a tone in England very different from the 
 tone it had taken in Italy, a tone less literary, less largely 
 human, but more moral, more religious, more practical in 
 its bearings both upon society and politics. The awaken- 
 ing of a rational Christianity, whether in England or in 
 the Teutonic world at large, begins with the Italian studies 
 of John Colet ; and the vigor and earnestness of Colet were 
 the best proof of the strength with which the new move- 
 ment was to affect English religion. He came back to 
 Oxford utterly untouched by the Platonic mysticism or 
 the semi -serious infidelity which characterized the group 
 of scholars round Lorenzo the Magnificent. He was hardly 
 more influenced by their literary enthusiasm. The knowl- 
 edge of Greek seems to have had one almost exclusive end 
 for him, and this was a religious end. Greek was the key 
 by which he could unlock the Gospels and the New Testa- 
 ment, and in these he thought that he could find a new 
 religious standing-ground. It was this resolve of Colet to 
 throw aside the traditional dogmas of his day and to dis- 
 cover a rational and practical religion in the Gospels them- 
 selves which gave its peculiar stamp to the theology of the 
 Renascence. His faith stood simply on a vivid realization 
 of the person of Christ. In the prominence which such a 
 view gave to the moral life, in his free criticism of the 
 earlier Scriptures, in his tendency to simple forms of doc- 
 trine and confessions of faith, Colet struck the keynote of 
 a mode of religious thought as strongly in contrast with 
 that of the later Reformation as with that of Catholicism 
 itself. The allegorical and mystical theology on which
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 85 
 
 the Middle Ages had spent their intellectual vigor to such 
 little purpose fell before his rejection of all but the histori- 
 cal and grammatical sense of the Biblical text. In his 
 lectures on the Romans we find hardly a single quotation 
 from the Fathers or the scholastic teachers. The great 
 fabric of belief built up by the mediaeval doctors seemed 
 to him simply "the corruptions of the Schoolmen." In 
 the life and sayings of its Founder he saw a simple and 
 rational Christianity, whose fittest expression was the 
 Apostles' creed. "About the rest," he said with charac- 
 teristic impatience, "let divines dispute as they will." 
 Of his attitude toward the coarser aspects of the current re- 
 ligion his behavior at a later time before the famous shrine 
 of St. Thomas at Canterbury gives us a rough indication. 
 As the blaze of its jewels, its costly sculptures, its elabo- 
 rate metal- work burst on Colet's view, he suggested with 
 bitter irony that a saint so lavish to the poor in his life- 
 time would certainly prefer that they should possess the 
 wealth heaped round him since his death. With petulant 
 disgust he rejected the rags of the martyr which were 
 offered for his adoration and the shoe which was offered 
 for his kiss. The earnestness, the religious zeal, the very 
 impatience and want of sympathy with the past which we 
 see in every word and act of the man burst out in the lec- 
 tures on St. Paul's Epistles which he delivered at Oxford 
 in 1496. Even to the most critical among his hearers he 
 seemed " like one inspired, raised in voice, eye, his whole 
 countenance and mien, out of himself." 
 
 Severe as was the outer life of the new teacher, a severity 
 marked by his plain black robe and the frugal table which 
 he preserved amidst his later dignities, his lively conver- 
 sation, his frank simplicity, the purity and nobleness of 
 his life, even the keen outbursts of his troublesome temper, 
 endeared him to a group of scholars, foremost among whom 
 stood Erasmus and Thomas More. " Greece has crossed 
 the Alps," cried the exiled Argyropulos on hearing a trans- 
 lation of Thucydides by the German Reuchlin; but the
 
 86 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 glory, whether of Reuchlin or of the Teutonic scholars 
 who followed him, was soon eclipsed by that of Erasmus. 
 His enormous industry, the vast store of classical learning 
 which he gradually accumulated, Erasmus shared with 
 others of his day. In patristic study he may have stood 
 beneath Luther ; in originality and profoundness of thought 
 he was certainly inferior to More. His theology, though 
 he made a greater mark on the world by it than even by 
 his scholarship, he derived almost without change from 
 Colet. But his combination of vast learning with keen 
 observation, of acuteness of remark with a lively fancy, of 
 genial wit with a perfect good sense his union of as sin- 
 cere a piety and as profound a zeal for rational religion as 
 Colet's with a dispassionate fairness towards older faiths, 
 a large love of secular culture, and a genial freedom and 
 play of mind this union was his own, and it was through 
 this that Erasmus embodied for the Teutonic peoples the 
 quickening influence of the New Learning during the long 
 scholar life which began at Paris and ended amid sorrow 
 and darkness at Basle. At the time of Colet's return from 
 Italy Erasmus was young and comparatively unknown, 
 but the chivalrous enthusiasm of the new movement breaks 
 out in his letters from Paris, whither he had wandered as 
 a scholar. " I have given up my whole soul to Greek 
 learning," he writes, "and as soon as I get any money I 
 shall buy Greek books and then I shall buy some clothes." 
 It was in despair of reaching Italy that the young scholar 
 made his way in 1499 to Oxford, as the one place on this 
 side the Alps where he would be enabled through the teach- 
 ing of Grocyn to acquire a knowledge of Greek. But he 
 had no sooner arrived there than all feeling of regret van- 
 ished away. "I have found in Oxford," he writes, "so 
 much polish and learning that now I hardly care about 
 going to Italy at all, save for the sake of having been there. 
 When I listen to my friend Colet it seems like listening to 
 Plato himself. Who does not wonder at the wide range 
 of Grocyn's knowledge? What can be more searching,
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 87 
 
 deep, and refined than the judgment of Linacre? When 
 did Nature mould a temper more gentle, endearing, and 
 happy than the temper of Thomas More?" 
 
 But the new movement was far from being bounded by 
 the walls of Oxford. The printing press was making let- 
 ters the common property of all. In the last thirty years 
 of the fifteenth century ten thousand editions of books and 
 pamphlets are said to have been published throughout 
 Europe, the most important half of them of course in Italy. 
 All the Latin authors were accessible to every student be- 
 fore the century closed. Almost all the more valuable 
 authors of Greece were published in the twenty years that 
 followed. The profound influence of this burst of the two 
 great classic literatures on the world at once made itself 
 felt. "For the first time," to use the picturesque phrase 
 of M. Taine, " men opened their eyes and saw. " The hu- 
 man mind seemed to gather new energies at the sight of 
 the vast field which opened before it. It attacked every 
 province of knowledge, and in a few years it transformed 
 all. Experimental science, the science of philology, the 
 science of politics, the critical investigation of religious 
 truth, all took their origin from this Renascence this 
 " New Birth" of the world. Art, if it lost much in purity 
 and propriety, gained in scope and in the fearlessness of 
 its love of Nature. Literature if crushed for the moment 
 by the overpowering attraction of the great models of 
 Greece and Rome, revived with a grandeur of form, a large 
 spirit of humanity, such as it has never known since their 
 day. In England the influence of the new movement ex- 
 tended far beyond the little group in which it had a few 
 years before seemed concentrated. The great churchmen 
 became its patrons. Langton, Bishop of Winchester, took 
 delight in examining the young scholars of his episcopal 
 family every evening, and sent all the most promising of 
 them to study across the Alps. Learning found a yet 
 warmer friend in the Archbishop of Canterbury. 
 
 Immersed as Archbishop Warham was in the business
 
 88 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 of the state, he was no mere politician. The eulogies 
 which Erasmus lavished on him while he lived, his praises 
 of the Primate's learning, of his ability in business, his 
 pleasant humor, his modesty, his fidelity to friends, may 
 pass for what eulogies of living men are commonly worth. 
 But it is difficult to doubt the sincerity of the glowing pic- 
 ture which he drew of him when death had destroyed all 
 interest in mere adulation. The letters indeed which passed 
 between the great churchman and the wandering scholar, 
 the quiet, simple-hearted grace which amid constant in- 
 stances of munificence preserved the perfect equality of lit- 
 erary friendship, the enlightened piety to which Erasmus 
 could address the noble words of his preface to St. Jerome, 
 confirm the judgment of every good man of Warham's 
 day. The Archbishop's life was a simple one; and an 
 hour's pleasant reading, a quiet chat with some learned 
 new-comer, alone broke the endless round of civil and ec- 
 clesiastical business. Few men realized so thoroughly as 
 Warham the new conception of an intellectual and moral 
 equality before which the old social distinctions of the 
 world were to vanish away. His favorite relaxation was 
 to sup among a group of scholarly visitors, enjoying their 
 fun and retorting with fun of his own. Colet, who had 
 now become Dean of St. Pauls and whose sermons were 
 stirring all London, might often be seen with Grocyn and 
 Linacre at the Primate's board. There too might proba- 
 bly have been seen Thomas More, who, young as he was, 
 was already famous through his lectures at St. Lawrence 
 on " The City of God." But the scholar- world found more 
 than supper or fun at the Primate's board. His purse was 
 ever open to relieve their poverty. " Had I found such a 
 patron in my youth," Erasmus wrote long after, "I too 
 might have been counted among the fortunate ones." It 
 was with Grocyn that Erasmus on a second visit to Eng- 
 land rowed up the river to Warham's board at Lambeth, 
 and in spite of an unpromising beginning the acquaintance 
 turned out wonderfully well. The Primate loved him,
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 89 
 
 Erasmus wrote home, as if he were his father or his brother, 
 and his generosity surpassed that of all his friends. He 
 offered him a sinecure, and when he declined it he be- 
 stowed on him a pension of a hundred crowns a year. 
 When Erasmus wandered to Paris it was Warham's invi- 
 tation which recalled him to England. When the rest of 
 his patrons left him to starve on the sour beer of Cambridge 
 it was Warham who sent him fifty angels. " I wish there 
 were thirty legions of them," the Primate puns in his good- 
 humored way. 
 
 Real however as this progress was, the group of schol- 
 ars who represented the New Learning in England still re- 
 mained a little one through the reign of Henry the Seventh. 
 But the King's death in 1509 wholly changed their position. 
 A "New Order," to use their own enthusiastic phrase, 
 dawned on them in the accession of his son. Henry the 
 Eighth had hardly completed his eighteenth year when 
 he mounted the throne; but his manly beauty, his bodily 
 vigor, and skill in arms, seemed matched by a frank and 
 generous temper and a nobleness of political aims. Pole, 
 his bitterest enemy, owned in later days that at the begin- 
 ning of his reign Henry's nature was one " from which all 
 excellent things might have been hoped. " Already in stat- 
 ure and strength a king among his fellows, taller than 
 any, bigger than any, a mighty wrestler, a mighty hunter, 
 an archer of the best, a knight who bore down rider after 
 rider in the tourney, the young monarch combined with 
 this bodily lordliness a largeness and versatility of mind 
 which was to be the special characteristic of the age that 
 had begun. His fine voice, his love of music, his skill on 
 lute or organ, the taste for poetry that made him delight 
 in Surrey's verse, the taste for art which made him delight 
 in Holbein's canvas, left room for tendencies of a more 
 practical sort, for dabbling in medicine, or for a real skill 
 in shipbuilding. There was a popular fibre in Henry's 
 nature which made him seek throughout his reign the love 
 of his people; and at its outset he gave promise of a more
 
 90 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 popular system of government by checking the extortion 
 which had been practised under color of enforcing forgot- 
 ten laws, and by bringing his father's financial ministers, 
 Empson and Dudley, to trial on a charge of treason. His 
 sympathies were known to be heartily with the New Learn- 
 ing; he was a clever linguist, he had a taste that never left 
 him for theological study, he was a fair scholar. Even 
 as a boy of nine he had roused by his wit and attainments 
 the wonder of Erasmus, and now that he mounted the 
 throne the great scholar hurried back to England to pour 
 out his exultation in the "Praise of Folly," a song of tri- 
 umph over the old world of ignorance and bigotry that 
 was to vanish away before the light and knowledge of the 
 new reign. Folly in his amusing little book mounts a pul- 
 pit in cap and bells, and pelts with her satire the absurdi- 
 ties of the world around her, the superstition of the monk, 
 the pedantry of the grammarian, the dogmatism of the 
 doctors of the schools, the selfishness and tyranny of Kings. 
 The irony of Erasmus was backed by the earnest effort 
 of Colet. He seized the opportunity to commence the work 
 of educational reform by devoting in 1510 his private for- 
 tune to the foundation of a Grammar School beside St. 
 Pauls. The bent of its founder's mind was shown by the 
 image of the Child Jesus over the master's chair with the 
 words " Hear ye Him" graven beneath it. " Lift up your 
 little white hands for me," wrote the Dean to his scholars 
 in words which prove the tenderness that lay beneath the 
 stern outer seeming of the man, "for me which prayeth 
 for you to God." All the educational designs of the re- 
 formers were carried out in the new foundation. The old 
 methods of instruction were superseded by fresh grammars 
 com posed by Erasmus and other scholars for its use. Lilly, 
 an Oxford student who had studied Greek in the East, 
 was placed at its head. The injunctions of the founder 
 aimed at the union of rational religion with sound learn- 
 ing, at the exclusion of the scholastic logic, and at the 
 steady diffusion of the two classical literatures. The more
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 91 
 
 bigoted of the clergy were quick to take alarm. "No 
 wonder," More wrote to the Dean, "your school raises a 
 storm, for it is like the wooden horse in which armed 
 Greeks were hidden for the ruin of barbarous Troy." But 
 the cry of alarm passed helplessly away. Not only did 
 the study of Greek creep gradually into the schools which 
 existed, but the example of Colet was followed by a crowd 
 of imitators. More grammar schools, it has been said, 
 were founded in the latter years of Henry than in the three 
 centuries before. The impulse only grew the stronger as 
 the direct influence of the New Learning passed away. 
 The grammar schools of Edward the Sixth and of Eliza- 
 beth, in a word the system of middle-class education which 
 by the close of the century had changed the very face of 
 England, were the outcome of Colet's foundation of St. 
 Pauls. 
 
 But the " armed Greeks" of More's apologue found a yet 
 wider field in the reform of the higher education of the 
 country. On the Universities the influence of the New 
 Learning was like a passing from death to life. Erasmus 
 gives us a picture of what happened in 1516 at Cambridge 
 where he was himself for a time a teacher of Greek. 
 " Scarcely thirty years ago nothing was taught here but 
 the Parva Logicalia, Alexander, those antiquated exer- 
 cises from Aristotle, and the Qucestiones of Scotus. As 
 time went on better studies were added, mathematics, a 
 new, or at any rate a renovated, Aristotle, and a knowl- 
 edge of Greek Literature. What has been the result? The 
 University is now so flourishing that it can compete with 
 the best universities of the age." William Latimer and 
 Croke returned from Italy and carried on the work of Eras- 
 mus at Cambridge, where Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, 
 himself one of the foremost scholars of the new movement, 
 lent it his powerful support. At Oxford the Revival met 
 with a fiercer opposition. The contest took the form of 
 boyish frays, in which the youthful partisans and oppo- 
 nents of the New Learning took sides as Greeks and Tro-
 
 93 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 jans. The young King himself had to summon one of its 
 fiercest enemies to Woodstock, and to impose silence on the 
 tirades which were delivered from the University pulpit. 
 The preacher alleged that he was carried away by the 
 Spirit. "Yes," retorted the King, "by the spirit, not of 
 wisdom, but of folly." But even at Oxford the contest 
 was soon at an end. Fox, Bishop of Winchester, estab- 
 lished the first Greek lecture there in his new college of 
 Corpus Christi, and a Professorship of Greek was at a later 
 time established by the Crown. " The students," wrote an 
 eye-witness in 1520, "rush to Greek letters, they endure 
 watching, fasting, toil, and hunger in the pursuit of them." 
 The work was crowned at last by the munificent founda- 
 tion of Cardinal College, to share in whose teaching Wol- 
 sey invited the most eminent of the living scholars of Eu- 
 rope, and for whose library he promised to obtain copies of 
 all the manuscripts in the Vatican. 
 
 From the reform of education the New Learning pressed 
 on to the reform of the Church. It was by Warham's 
 commission that Colet was enabled in 1512 to address the 
 Convocation of the Clergy in words which set before them 
 with unsparing severity the religious ideal of the new 
 movement. "Would that for once," burst forth the fiery 
 preacher, " you would remember your name and profession 
 and take thought for the reformation of the Church! 
 Never was it more necessary, and never did the state of 
 the Church need more vigorous endeavors." "We are 
 troubled with heretics," he went on, "but no heresy of 
 theirs is so fatal to us and to the people at large as the vi- 
 cious and depraved lives of the clergy. That is the worst 
 heresy of all. " It was the reform of the bishops that must 
 precede that of the clergy, the reform of the clergy that 
 would lead to a general revival of religion in the people at 
 large. The accumulation of benefices, the luxury and 
 worldliness of the priesthood, must be abandoned. The 
 prelates ought to be busy preachers, to forsake the Court 
 and labor in their own dioceses. Care should be taken for
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 93 
 
 the ordination and promotion of worthy ministers, resi- 
 dence should be enforced, the low standard of clerical mo- 
 rality should be raised. It is plain that the men of the 
 New Learning looked forward, not to a reform of doctrine 
 but to a reform of life, not to a revolution which should 
 sweep away the older superstitions which they despised 
 but to a regeneration of spiritual feeling before which these 
 superstitions would inevitably fade away. Colet was soon 
 charged with heresy by the Bishop of London. Warham 
 however protected him, and Henry to whom the Dean was 
 denounced bade him go boldly on. " Let every man have 
 his own doctor," said the young King after a long inter- 
 view, " but this man is the doctor for me !" 
 
 But for the success of the new reform, a reform which 
 could only be wrought out by the tranquil spread of knowl- 
 edge and the gradual enlightenment of the human con- 
 science, the one thing needful was peace; and peace was 
 already vanishing away. Splendid as were the gifts with 
 which Nature had endowed Henry the Eighth, there lay 
 beneath them all a boundless selfishness. " He is a prince, " 
 said Wolsey as he lay dying, " of a most royal courage ; 
 sooner than miss any part of his will he will endanger one- 
 half of his kingdom, and I do assure you I have often 
 kneeled to him, sometimes for three hours together, to 
 persuade him from his appetite and could not prevail. " It 
 was this personal will and appetite that was in Henry the 
 Eighth to shape the very course of English history, to over- 
 ride the highest interests of the state, to trample under foot 
 the wisest counsels, to crush with the blind ingratitude of 
 a fate the servants who opposed it. Even Wolsey, while 
 he recoiled from the monstrous form which had revealed 
 itself, could hardly have dreamed of the work which that 
 royal courage and yet more royal appetite was to accom- 
 plish in the years to come. As yet however Henry was 
 far from having reached the height of self-assertion which 
 bowed all constitutional law and even the religion of his 
 realm beneath his personal will. But one of the earliest
 
 94 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 acts of his reign gave an earnest of the part which the new 
 strength of the crown was to enable an English king to 
 play. Through the later years of Henry the Seventh Cath- 
 arine of Aragon had been recognized at the English court 
 simply as Arthur's widow and Princess Dowager of Wales. 
 Her betrothal to Prince Henry was looked upon as cancelled 
 by his protest, and though the King was cautious not to 
 break openly with Spain by sending her home, he was res- 
 olute not to suffer a marriage which would bring a break 
 with France and give Ferdinand an opportunity of drag- 
 ging England into the strife between the two great powers 
 of the west. 
 
 But with the young King's accession this policy of cau- 
 tious isolation was at once put aside. There were grave 
 political reasons indeed for the quick resolve which bore 
 down the opposition of counsellors like Warham. As cool 
 a head as that of Henry the Seventh was needed to watch 
 without panic the rapid march of French greatness. In 
 mere extent France had grown with a startling rapidity 
 since the close of her long strife with England. Guienne 
 had fallen to Charles the Seventh. Provence, Rousillon, 
 and the Duchy of Burgundy had successively swelled the 
 realm of Lewis the Eleventh. Brittany had been added 
 to that of Charles the Eighth. From Calais to Bayonne, 
 from the Jura to the Channel, stretched a wide and highly 
 organized realm, whose disciplined army and unrivalled 
 artillery lifted it high above its neighbors in force of war. 
 The efficiency of its army was seen in the sudden invasion 
 and conquest of Italy while England was busy with the 
 pretended Duke of York. The passage of the Alps by 
 Charles the Eighth shook the whole political structure of 
 Europe. In wealth, in political repute, in arms, in let- 
 ters, in arts, Italy at this moment stood foremost among 
 the peoples of Western Christendom, and the mastery 
 which Charles won over it at a single blow lifted France at 
 once above the states around her. Twice repulsed from 
 Naples, she remained under the successor of Charles, Lewis
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 95 
 
 the Twelfth, mistress of the Duchy of Milan and of the 
 bulk of northern Italy ; the princes and republics of central 
 Italy grouped themselves about her; and at the close of 
 Henry the Seventh's reign the ruin of Venice in the League 
 of Cambray crushed the last Italian state which could op- 
 pose her designs on the whole peninsula. It was this new 
 and mighty power, a France that stretched from the At- 
 lantic to the Mincio, that fronted the young King at his 
 accession and startled him from his father's attitude of 
 isolation. He sought Ferdinand's alliance none the less 
 that it meant war, for his temper was haughty and adven- 
 turous, his pride dwelt on the older claims of England to 
 Normandy and Guienne, and his devotion to the papacy 
 drew him to listen to the cry of Julius the Second and to 
 long like a crusader to free Rome from the French pres- 
 sure. Nor was it of less moment to a will such as the 
 young King's that Catharine's passionate love for him had 
 roused as ardent a love in return. 
 
 Two months therefore after his accession the Infanta 
 became the wife of Henry the Eighth. The influence of 
 the King of Aragon became all-powerful in the English 
 council chamber. Catharine spoke of her husband and 
 herself as Ferdinand's subjects. The young King wrote 
 that he would obey Ferdinand as he had obeyed his own 
 father. His obedience was soon to be tested. Ferdinand 
 seized on his new ally as a pawn in the great game which 
 he was playing on the European chess-board, a game 
 which left its traces on the political and religious map of 
 Europe for centuries after him. It was not without good 
 ground that Henry the Seventh faced so coolly the menac- 
 ing growth of France. He saw what his son failed to see, 
 that the cool, wary King of Aragon was building up as 
 quickly a power which was great enough to cope with it, 
 and that grow as the two rivals might they were matched 
 too evenly to render England's position a really dangerous 
 one. While the French Kings aimed at the aggrandize- 
 ment of a country, Ferdinand aimed at the aggrandizement 
 
 5 VOL. 2
 
 96 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 of a House. Through the marriage of their daughter and 
 heiress Juana with the son of the Emperor Maximilian, 
 the Archduke Philip, the blood of Ferdinand and Isabel 
 had merged in that of the House of Austria, and the aim 
 of Ferdinand was nothing less than to give to the Austrian 
 House the whole world of the west. Charles of Austria, 
 the issue of Philip's marriage, had been destined from his 
 birth by both his grandfathers, Maximilian and Ferdinand, 
 to succeed to the Empire; Franche Comte and the state 
 built up by the Burgundian Dukes in the Netherlands had 
 already passed into his hands at the death of his father ; 
 the madness of his mother left him next heir of Castile ; 
 the death of Ferdinand would bring him Aragon and the 
 dominion of the Kings of Aragon in southern Italy; that 
 of Maximilian would add the Archduchy of Austria, with 
 the dependencies in the south and its hopes of increase by 
 the winning through marriage of the realms of Bohemia 
 and Hungary. A share in the Austrian Archduchy indeed 
 belonged to Charles's brother, the Archduke Ferdinand; 
 but a kingdom in northern Italy would at once compensate 
 Ferdinand for his abandonment of this heritage and extend 
 the Austrian supremacy over the Peninsula, for Rome and 
 central Italy would be helpless in the grasp of the power 
 which ruled at both Naples and Milan. A war alone could 
 drive France from the Milanese, but such a war might be 
 waged by a league of European powers which would re- 
 main as a check upon France, should she attempt to hinder 
 this vast union of states in the hand of Charles or to wrest 
 from him the Imperial Crown. Such a league, the Holy 
 League as it was called from the accession to it of the 
 Pope, Ferdinand was enabled to form at the close of 1511 
 by the kinship of the Emperor, the desire of Venice and 
 Julius the Second to free Italy from the stranger, and the 
 warlike temper of Henry the Eighth. 
 
 Dreams of new Cregys and Agincourts roused the ardor 
 of the young King ; and the campaign of 1512 opened with 
 his avowal of the old claims on his "heritage of France.**
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 97 
 
 But the subtle intriguer in whose hands he lay pushed 
 steadily to his own great ends. The League drove the 
 French from the Milanese. An English army which landed 
 under the Marquis of Dorset at Fontarabia to attack Gui- 
 enne found itself used as a covering force to shield Ferdi- 
 nand's seizure of Navarre, the one road through which 
 France could attack his grandson 's heritage of Spain . The 
 troops mutinied and sailed home ; Scotland, roused again 
 by the danger of France, threatened invasion ; the world 
 scoffed at Englishmen as useless for war. Henry's spirit, 
 however, rose with the need. In 1513 he landed in person 
 in the north of France, and a sudden rout of the French 
 cavalry in an engagement near Guinegate, which received 
 from its bloodless character the name of the Battle of the 
 Spurs, gave him the fortresses of Terouenne and Tournay. 
 A victory yet more decisive awaited his arms at home. 
 A Scotch army crossed the border, with James the Fourth 
 at its head ; but on the ninth of September it was met by an 
 English force under the Earl of Surrey at Flodden in Nor- 
 thumberland. James " fell near his banner, " and his army 
 was driven off the field with heavy loss. Flushed with 
 this new glory, the young King was resolute to continue 
 the war when in the opening of 1514 he found himself left 
 alone by the dissolution of the League. Ferdinand had 
 gained his ends, and had no mind to fight longer simply 
 to realize the dreams of his son-in-law. Henry had indeed 
 gained much. The might of France was broken. The 
 Papacy was restored to freedom. England had again fig- 
 ured as a great power in Europe. But the millions left by 
 his father were exhausted, his subjects had been drained 
 by repeated subsidies, and, furious as he was at the treach- 
 ery of his Spanish ally, Henry was driven to conclude a 
 
 To the hopes of the New Learning this sudden outbreak 
 of the spirit of war, this change of the monarch from whom 
 they had looked for a " new order" into a vulgar conqueror, 
 proved a bitter disappointment. Colet thundered from the
 
 98 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 pulpit of St. Pauls that " an unjust peace is better than the 
 justest war," and protested that "when men out of hatred 
 and ambition fight with and destroy one another, they fight 
 under the banner, not of Christ, but of the Devil." Eras- 
 mus quitted Cambridge with a bitter satire against the 
 "madness" around him. "It is the people," he said, in 
 words which must have startled his age, "it is the people 
 who build cities, while the madness of princes destroys 
 them." The sovereigns of his time appeared to him like 
 ravenous birds pouncing with beak and claw on the hard- 
 won wealth and knowledge of mankind. " Kings who are 
 scarcely men," he exclaimed in bitter irony, "are called 
 'divine;' they are 'invincible' though they fly from every 
 battle-field; 'serene' though they turn the world upside 
 down in a storm of war; 'illustrious' though they grovel 
 in ignorance of all that is noble; 'Catholic' though they 
 follow anything rather than Christ. Of all birds the Eagle 
 alone has seemed to wise men the type of royalty, a bird 
 neither beautiful nor musical nor good for food, but mur- 
 derous, greedy, hateful to all, the curse of all, and with its 
 great powers of doing harm only surpassed by its desire to 
 do it." It was the first time in modern history that reli- 
 gion had formally dissociated itself from the ambition of 
 princes and the horrors of war, or that the new spirit of 
 criticism had ventured not only to question but to deny 
 what had till then seemed the primary truths of political 
 order. 
 
 But the indignation of the New Learning was diverted 
 to more practical ends by the sudden peace. However he 
 had disappointed its hopes, Henry still remained its friend. 
 Through all the changes of his terrible career his home 
 was a home of letters. His boy, Edward the Sixth, was a 
 fair scholar in both the classical languages. His daughter 
 Mary wrote good Latin letters. Elizabeth began every 
 day with an hour's reading in the Greek Testament, the 
 tragedies of Sophocles, or the orations of Demosthenes. 
 The ladies of the court caught the royal fashion and were
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 99 
 
 found poring over the pages of Plato. Widely as Henry's 
 ministers differed from each other, they all agreed in shar- 
 ing and fostering the culture around them. The panic of 
 the scholar-group therefore soon passed away. Colet toiled 
 on with his educational efforts; Erasmus forwarded to 
 England the works which English liberality was enabling 
 him to produce abroad. Warham extended to him as gen- 
 erous an aid as the protection he had afforded to Colet. 
 His edition of the works of St. Jerome had been begun 
 under the Primate's encouragement during the great schol- 
 ar's residence at Cambridge, and it appeared with a dedi- 
 cation to the Archbishop on its title-page. That Erasmus 
 could find protection in Warham 's name for a work which 
 boldly recalled Christendom to the path of sound Biblical 
 criticism, that he could address him in words so outspoken 
 as those of his preface, shows how fully the Primate sym- 
 pathized with the highest efforts of the New Learning. 
 Nowhere had the spirit of inquiry so firmly set itself against 
 the claims of authority. " Synods and decrees, and even 
 councils," wrote Erasmus, "are by no means in my judg- 
 ment the fittest modes of repressing error, unless truth de- 
 pend simply on authority. But on the contrary, the more 
 dogmas there are, the more fruitful is the ground in pro- 
 ducing heresies. Never was the Christian faith purer or 
 more undefiled than when the world was content with a 
 single creed, and that the shortest creed we have." It is 
 touching even now to listen to such an appeal of reason and 
 of culture against the tide of dogmatism which was soon 
 to flood Christendom with Augsburg Confessions and 
 Creeds of Pope Pius and Westminster Catechisms and 
 Thirty-nine Articles. 
 
 But the principles which Erasmus urged in his " Jerome" 
 were urged with far greater clearness and force in a work 
 that laid the foundation of the future Reformation, the 
 edition of the Greek Testament on which he had been en- 
 gaged at Cambridge and whose production was almost 
 wholly due to the encouragement and assistance he re-
 
 100 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 ceived from English scholars. In itself the book was a 
 bold defiance of theological tradition. It set aside the 
 Latin version of the Vulgate which had secured universal 
 acceptance in the Church. Its method of interpretation 
 was based, not on received dogmas, but on the literal mean- 
 ing of the text. Its real end was the end at which Colet 
 had aimed in his Oxford lectures. Erasmus desired to set 
 Christ himself in the place of the Church, to recah 1 men 
 from the teaching of Christian theologians to the teach- 
 ing of the Founder of Christianity. The whole value of 
 the Gospels to him lay in the vividness with which they 
 brought home to their readers the personal impression of 
 Christ himself. "Were we to have seen him with our 
 own eyes, we should not have so intimate a knowledge as 
 they give us of Christ, speaking, healing, dying, rising 
 again, as it were in our very presence." All the supersti- 
 tions of mediaeval worship faded away in the light of this 
 personal worship of Christ. " If the footprints of Christ 
 are shown us in any place, we kneel down and adore them. 
 Why do we not rather venerate the living and breathing 
 picture of him in these books? We deck statues of wood 
 and stone with gold and gems for the love of Christ. Yet 
 they only profess to represent to us the outer form of his 
 body, while these books present us with a living picture of 
 his holy mind." In the same way the actual teaching of 
 Christ was made to supersede the mysterious dogmas of the 
 older ecclesiastical teaching. " As though Christ taught 
 such subtleties," burst out Erasmus: "subtleties that can 
 scarcely be understood even by a few theologians or as 
 though the strength of the Christian religion consisted in 
 man's ignorance of it! It may be the safer course," he 
 goes on with characteristic irony, "to conceal the state 
 mysteries of kings, but Christ desired his mysteries to be 
 spread abroad as openly as was possible." In the diffu- 
 sion, in the universal knowledge of the teaching of Christ 
 the foundation of a reformed Christianity had still, he 
 Urged, to be laid. With the tacit approval of the Pri-
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 101 
 
 mate of a Church which from the time of Wyclif had held 
 the translation and reading of the Bible in the common 
 tongue to be heresy and a crime punishable with the fire, 
 Erasmus boldly avowed his wish for a Bible open and in- 
 telligible to all. " I wish that even the weakest woman 
 might read the Gospels and the Epistles of St. Paul. I 
 wish that they were translated into all languages, so as to 
 be read and understood not only by Scots and Irishmen, 
 but even by Saracens and Turks. But the first step to their 
 being read is to make them intelligible to the reader. I 
 long for the day when the husbandman shall sing portions 
 of them to himself as he follows the plough, when the 
 weaver shall hum them to the tune of his shuttle, when 
 the traveller shall while away with their stories the weari- 
 ness of his journey. " From the moment of its publication 
 in 1516 the New Testament of Erasmus became the topic 
 of the day; the Court, the Universities, every household 
 to which the New Learning had penetrated, read and dis- 
 cussed it. But bold as its language may have seemed, 
 Warham not only expressed his approbation, but lent the 
 work as he wrote to its author "to bishop after bishop." 
 The most influential of his suffragans, Bishop Fox of Win- 
 chester, declared that the mere version was worth ten com- 
 mentaries ; one of the most learned, Fisher of Rochester, 
 entertained Erasmus at his house. 
 
 Daring and full of promise as were these efforts of the 
 New Learning in the direction of educational and relig- 
 ious reform, its political and social speculations took a far 
 wider rage in the <c Utopia" of Thomas More. Even in the 
 household of Cardinal Morton, where he had spent his child- 
 hood, More's precocious ability had raised the highest 
 hopes. "Whoever may live to see it," the gray-haired 
 statesman used to say, " this boy now waiting at table will 
 turn out a marvellous man. " We have seen the spell which 
 his wonderful learning and the sweetness of his temper 
 threw at Oxford over Colet and Erasmus ; and young as he 
 was, More no sooner quitted the University than he was
 
 102 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 known throughout Europe as one of the foremost figures in 
 the new movement. The keen, irregular face, the gray rest- 
 less eye, the thin mobile lips, the tumbled brown hair, the 
 careless gait and dress, as they remain stamped on the can- 
 vas of Holbein, picture the inner soul of the man, his vi- 
 vacity, his restless, all-devouring intellect, his keen and 
 even reckless wit, the kindly, half-sad humor that drew its 
 strange veil of laughter and tears over the deep, tender rev- 
 erence of the soul within. In a higher, because in a sweeter 
 and more lovable form than Colet, More is the representa- 
 tive of the religious tendency of the New Learning in Eng- 
 land. The young law-student who laughed at the super- 
 stition and asceticism of the monks of his day wore a hair 
 shirt next his skin, and schooled himself by penances for 
 the cell he desired among the Carthusians. It was char- 
 acteristic of the man that among all the gay, profligate 
 scholars of the Italian Renascence he chose as the object 
 of his admiration the disciple of Savonarola, Pico di Mi- 
 randola. Free-thinker as the bigots who listened to his 
 daring speculations termed him, his eye would brighten 
 and his tongue falter as he spoke with friends of heaven 
 and the after-life. When he took office, it was with the 
 open stipulation "first to look to God, and after God to 
 the King." 
 
 In his outer bearing indeed there was nothing of the 
 monk or recluse. The brightness and freedom of the New 
 Learning seemed incarnate in the young scholar with his 
 gay talk, his winsomeness of manner, his reckless epi- 
 grams, his passionate love of music, his omnivorous read- 
 ing, his paradoxical speculations, his gibes at monks, his 
 schoolboy fervor of liberty. But events were soon to prove 
 that beneath this sunny nature lay a stern inflexibility of 
 conscientious resolve. The Florentine scholars penned dec- 
 lamations against tyrants while they covered with their 
 flatteries the tyranny of the house of Medici. More no 
 sooner entered Parliament in 1504 than his ready argu- 
 ment and keen sense of justice led to the rejection of the
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 103 
 
 demand for a heavy subsidy. " A beardless boy," said the 
 courtiers, and More was only twenty-six, "has disap- 
 pointed the King's purpose;" and during the rest of Henry 
 the Seventh's reign the young lawyer found it prudent to 
 withdraw from public life. But the withdrawal had little 
 effect on his buoyant activity. He rose at once into re- 
 pute at the bar. He wrote his K Life of Edward the Fifth," 
 the first work in which what we may call modern English 
 prose appears written with purity and clearness of style 
 and a freedom either from antiquated forms of expression 
 or classical pedantry. His ascetic dreams were replaced 
 by the affections of home. It is when we get a glimpse of 
 him in his house at Chelsea that we understand the en- 
 dearing epithets which Erasmus always lavishes upon 
 More. The delight of the young husband was to train the 
 girl he had chosen for his wife in his own taste for letters 
 and for music. The reserve which the age exacted from 
 parents was thrown to the winds in More's intercourse 
 with his children. He loved teaching them, and lured 
 them to their deeper studies by the coins and curiosities 
 he had gathered in his cabinet. He was as fond of their 
 pets and their games as his children themselves, and would 
 take grave scholars and statesmen into the garden to see 
 his girls' rabbit-hutches or to watch the gambols of their 
 favorite monkey. "I have given you kisses enough," he 
 wrote to his little ones in merry verse when far away on 
 political business, "but stripes hardly ever." 
 
 The accession of Henry the Eighth drew More back into 
 the political current. It was at his house that Erasmus 
 penned the "Praise of Folly," and the work, in its Latin 
 title, "Moria3 Encomium," embodied in playful fun his 
 love of the extravagant humor of More. He was already 
 in Henry's favor; he was soon called to the royal court and 
 used in the King's service. But More " tried as hard to 
 keep out of court, " says his descendant, " as most men try 
 to get into it." When the charm of his conversation gave 
 so much pleasure to the young sovereign " that he could
 
 104 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 not once in a month get leave to go home to his wife or 
 children, whose company he much desired, ... he began 
 thereupon to dissemble his nature, and so, little by little, 
 from his former mirth to dissemble himself." He shared 
 to the full the disappointment of his friends at the sudden 
 outbreak of Henry's warlike temper, but the Peace again 
 brought him to Henry's side and he was soon in the King's 
 confidence both as a counsellor and as a diplomatist. It was 
 on one of his diplomatic missions that More describes him- 
 self as hearing news of the Kingom of " Nowhere." " On 
 a certain day when I had heard mass in Our Lady's 
 Church, which is the fairest, the most gorgeous and curi- 
 ous church of building in all the city of Antwerp and also 
 most frequented of people, and service being over I was 
 ready to go home to my lodgings, I chanced to espy my 
 friend Peter Gilles talking with a certain stranger, a man 
 well stricken in age, with a black sun-burnt face, a large 
 beard, and a cloke cast trimly about his shoulders, whom 
 by his favor and apparell forthwith I judged to be a mar- 
 iner." The sailor turned out to have been a companion of 
 Amerigo Vespucci in those voyages to the New World 
 "that be now in print and abroad in every man's hand," 
 and on More's invitation he accompanied him to his house, 
 and " there in my garden upon a bench covered with green 
 turves we sate down, talking together" of the man's mar- 
 vellous adventures, his desertion in America by Vespucci, 
 his wanderings over the country under the equinoctial 
 line, and at last of his stay in the Kingdom of " Nowhere." 
 It was the story of "Nowhere," or Utopia, which More 
 began in 1515 to embody in the wonderful book which re- 
 veals to us the heart of the New Learning. As yet the 
 movement had been one of scholars and divines. Its plans 
 of reform had been almost exclusively intellectual and re- 
 ligious. But in More the same free play of thought which 
 had shaken off the old forms of education and faith turned 
 to question the old forms of society and politics. From a 
 world where fifteen hundred years of Christian teaching'
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 105 
 
 had produced social injustice, religious intolerance, and 
 political tyranny the humorist philosopher turned to a 
 " Nowhere" in which the mere efforts of natural human 
 virtue realized those ends of security, equality, brother- 
 hood, and freedom for which the very institution of society 
 seemed to have been framed. It is as he wanders through 
 this dreamland of the new reason that More touches the 
 great problems which were fast opening before the modern 
 world, problems of labor, of crime, of conscience, of gov- 
 ernment. Merely to have seen and to have examined ques- 
 tions such as these would prove the keenness of his intel- 
 lect, but its far-reaching originality is shown in the solu- 
 tions which he proposes. Amidst much that is the pure 
 play of an exuberant fancy, much that is mere recollec- 
 tion of the dreams of bygone dreamers, we find again and 
 again the most important social and political discoveries 
 of later times anticipated by the genius of Thomas More. 
 
 In some points, such as his treatment of the question of 
 Labor, he still remains far in advance of current opinion. 
 The whole system of society around him seemed to him 
 "nothing but a conspiracy of the rich against the poor." 
 Its economic legislation from the Statute of Laborers to 
 the statutes by which the Parliament of 1515 strove to fix 
 a standard of wages was simply the carrying out of such 
 a conspiracy by process of law. " The rich are ever striv- 
 ing to pare away something further from the daily wages 
 of the poor by private fraud and even by public law, so 
 that the wrong already existing (for it is a wrong that 
 those from whom the State derives most benefit should re- 
 ceive least reward) is made yet greater by means of the 
 law of the State. " " The rich devise every means by which 
 they may in the first place secure to themselves what they 
 have amassed by wrong, and then take to their own use 
 and profit at the lowest possible price the work and labor 
 of the poor. And so soon as the rich decide on adopting 
 these devices in the name of the public, then they become 
 law." The result was the wretched existence to which
 
 106 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 the labor class was doomed, " a life so wretched that even 
 a beast's life seems enviable." No such cry of pity for 
 the poor, of protest against the system of agrarian and 
 manufacturing tyranny which found its expression in the 
 Statute-book had been heard since the days of Piers Plough- 
 man. But from Christendom More turns with a smile to 
 "Nowhere." In "Nowhere" the aim of legislation is to 
 secure the welfare, social, industrial, intellectual, relig- 
 ious, of the community at large, and of the labor-class as 
 the true basis of a well-ordered commonwealth. The end 
 of its labor-laws was simply the welfare of the laborer. 
 Goods were possessed indeed in common, but work was 
 compulsory with all. The period of toil was shortened to 
 the nine hours demanded by modern artisans, and the ob- 
 ject of this curtailment was the intellectual improvement 
 of the worker. " In the institution of the weal public this 
 end is only and chiefly pretended and minded that what 
 time may possibly be spared from the necessary occupa- 
 tions and affairs of the commonwealth, all that the citizens 
 should withdraw from bodily service to the free liberty of 
 the mind and garnishing of the same. For herein they 
 conceive the felicity of this life to consist." A public sys- 
 tem of education enabled the Utopians to avail themselves 
 of their leisure. While in England half of the population 
 could read no English, every child was well taught in 
 "Nowhere." The physical aspects of society were cared 
 for as attentively as its moral. The houses of Utopia " in 
 the beginning were very low and like homely cottages or 
 poor shepherd huts made at all adventures of every rude 
 piece of timber that came first to hand, with mud walls 
 and ridged roofs thatched over with straw." The picture 
 was really that of the common English town of More's 
 day, the home of squalor and pestilence. In Utopia how- 
 ever they had at last come to realize the connection between 
 public morality and the health which springs from light, 
 air, comfort, and cleanliness. " The streets were twenty 
 feet broad ; the houses backed by spacious gardens, and,
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 107 
 
 curiously builded after a gorgeous and gallant sort, with 
 their stories one after another. The outsides of the walls 
 be made either of hard flint, or of plaster, or else of brick; 
 and the inner sides be well strengthened by timber work. 
 The roofs be plain and flat, covered over with plaster, so 
 tempered that no fire can hurt or perish it, and withstand- 
 ing the violence of the weather better than lead. They 
 keep the wind out of their windows with glass, for it is 
 there much used, and sometimes also with fine linen cloth 
 dipped in oil or amber, and that for two commodities, for 
 by this means more light cometh in and the wind is bet- 
 ter kept out." 
 
 The same foresight which appears in More's treatment 
 of the questions of Labor and the Public Health is yet 
 more apparent in his treatment of the question of Crime. 
 He was the first to suggest that punishment was less effect- 
 ive in suppressing it than prevention. " If you allow your 
 people to be badly taught, their morals to be corrupted 
 from childhood, and then when they are men punish them 
 for the very crimes to which they have been trained in child- 
 hood what is this but to make thieves, and then to pun- 
 ish them?" He was the first to plead for proportion be- 
 tween the punishment and the crime, and to point out the 
 folly of the cruel penalties of his day. " Simple theft is 
 not so great an offence as to be punished with death." If 
 a thief and a murderer are sure of the same penalty, More 
 shows that the law is simply tempting the thief to secure 
 his theft by murder. " While we go about to make thieves 
 afraid, we are really provoking them to kill good men." 
 The end of all punishment he declares to be reformation, 
 " nothing else but the destruction of vice and the saving 
 of men." He advises "so using and ordering criminals 
 that they cannot choose but be good ; and what harm so- 
 ever they did before, the residue of their lives to make 
 amends for the same." Above all he urges that to be re- 
 medial punishment must be wrought out by labor and hope, 
 so that " none is hopeless or in despair to recover again his
 
 108 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 former state of freedom by giving good tokens and likeli- 
 hood of himself that he will ever after that live a true and 
 honest man." It is not too much to say that in the great 
 principles More lays down he anticipated every one of the 
 improvements in our criminal system which have distin- 
 guished the last hundred years. 
 
 His treatment of the religious question was even more 
 in advance of his age. If the houses of Utopia were 
 strangely in contrast with the halls of England, where the 
 bones from every dinner lay rotting in the dirty straw 
 which strewed the floor, where the smoke curled about the 
 rafters, and the wind whistled through the unglazed win- 
 dows ; if its penal legislation had little likeness to the gal- 
 lows which stood out so frequently against our English 
 sky ; the religion of " Nowhere" was in yet stronger con- 
 flict with the faith of Christendom. It rested simply on 
 nature and reason. It held that God's design was the hap- 
 piness of man, and that the ascetic rejection of human de- 
 lights, save for the common good, was thanklessness to 
 the Giver. Christianity indeed had already reached Uto- 
 pia, but it had few priests ; religion found its centre rather 
 in the family than in the congregation : and each house- 
 hold confessed its faults to its own natural head. A yet 
 stranger characteristic was seen in the peaceable way in 
 which it lived side by side with the older religions. More 
 than a century before William of Orange More discerned 
 and proclaimed the great principle of religious toleration. 
 In " Nowhere" it was lawful to every man to be of what 
 religion he would. Even the disbelievers in a Divine Be- 
 ing or in the immortality of man, who by a single excep- 
 tion to its perfect religious indifference were excluded from 
 public office, were excluded, not on the ground of their re- 
 ligious belief, but because their opinions were deemed to 
 be degrading to mankind and therefore to incapacitate 
 those who held them from governing in a noble temper. 
 But they were subject to no punishment, because the people 
 of Utopia were " persuaded that it is not in a man's power
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 109 
 
 to believe what he list." The religion which a man held 
 he might propagate by argument, though not by violence 
 or insult to the religion of others. But while each sect 
 performed its rites in private, all assembled for public 
 worship in a spacious temple, where the vast throng, clad 
 in white, and grouped round a priest clothed in fair rai- 
 ment wrought marvellously out of bird's plumage, joined 
 in hymns and prayers so framed as to be acceptable to all. 
 The importance of this public devotion lay in the evidence 
 it afforded that liberty of conscience could be combined 
 with religious unity. 
 
 But even more important than More's defence of relig- 
 ious freedom was his firm maintenance of political liberty 
 against the monarchy. Steady and irresistible as was the 
 growth of the royal power, it was far from seeming to 
 the keenest political thinker of that day so natural and 
 inevitable a development of our history as it seems to 
 some writers in our own. In political hints which lie 
 scattered over the whole of the Utopia More notes with a 
 bitter irony the advance of the new despotism. It was 
 only in " Nowhere" that a sovereign was " removeable on 
 suspicion of a design to enslave his people." In Eng- 
 land the work of slavery was being quietly wrought, 
 hints the great lawyer, through the law. " There will 
 never be wanting some pretence for deciding in the king's 
 favor ; as that equity is on his side, or the strict letter of 
 the law, or some forced interpretation of it : or if none of 
 these, that the royal prerogative ought with conscientious 
 judges to outweigh all other considerations." We are 
 startled at the precision with which More describes the 
 processes by which the law courts were to lend themselves 
 to the advance of tyranny till their crowning judgment 
 in the case of ship-money. But behind these judicial ex- 
 pedients lay great principles of absolutism, which partly 
 from the example of foreign monarchies, partly from 
 the sense of social and political insecurity, and yet more 
 from the isolated position o* the Crown, were gradually
 
 110 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 winning their way in public opinion. "These notions* 
 More goes boldly on in words written, it must be re- 
 membered, within the precincts of Henry's court and be- 
 neath the eye of Wolsey " these notions are fostered by 
 the maxim that the king can do no wrong, however much 
 he may wish to do it ; that not only the property but the 
 persons of his subjects are his own ; and that a man has a 
 right to no more than the king's goodness thinks fit not to 
 take from him." It is only in the light of this emphatic 
 protest against the king-worship which was soon to over- 
 ride liberty and law that we can understand More's later 
 career. Steady to the last in his loyalty to Parliaments, 
 as steady in his resistance to mere personal rule, it was 
 with a smile as fearless as the smile with which he penned 
 the half -jesting words of his Utopia that he sealed them 
 with his blood on Tower HilL
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 WOLSEY. 
 1514^1529. 
 
 " THERE are many things in the Commonwealth of No- 
 where that I rather wish than hope to see embodied in our 
 own." It was with these words of characteristic irony 
 that More closed the first work which embodied the dreams 
 of the New Learning. Destined as they were to fulfilment 
 in the course of ages, its schemes of social, religious, and 
 political reform broke in fact helplessly against the tem- 
 per of the time. At the moment when More was pleading 
 the cause of justice between rich and poor social discontent 
 was being fanned by new exactions and sterner laws into 
 a fiercer flame. While he was advocating toleration and 
 Christian comprehension Christendom stood on the verge 
 of a religious strife which was to rend it forever in pieces. 
 While he aimed sarcasm after sarcasm at king-worship 
 the new despotism of the Monarchy was being organized 
 into a vast and all-embracing system by the genius of 
 Thomas Wolsey. Wolsey was the son of a wealthy towns- 
 man of Ipswich whose ability had raised him into notice 
 at the close of the preceding reign, and who had been taken 
 by Bishop Fox into the service of the Crown. The activ- 
 ity which he showed in organizing and equipping the royal 
 army for the campaign of 1513 won for him a foremost 
 place in the confidence of Henry the Eighth. The young 
 King lavished dignities on him with a profusion that 
 marked the completeness of his trust. From the post of 
 royal almoner he was advanced in 1513 to the see of Tour- 
 nay. At the opening of 1514 he became bishop of Lincoln ; 
 at its close he was translated to the archbishopric of
 
 112 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 York. In 1515 Henry procured from Rome his elevation 
 to the office of cardinal and raised him to the post of chan- 
 cellor. So quick a rise stirred envy in the men about him ; 
 and his rivals noted bitterly the songs, the dances, and 
 carousals which had won, as they believed, the favor of 
 the king. But sensuous and worldly as was Wolsey's 
 temper, his powers lifted him high above the level of a 
 court favorite. His noble bearing, his varied ability, his 
 enormous capacity for toil, the natural breadth and grand- 
 eur of his mind, marked him naturally out as the minister 
 of a king who showed throughout his reign a keen eye for 
 greatness in the men about him. 
 
 Wolsey's mind was European rather than English; it 
 dwelt little on home affairs but turned almost exclusively 
 to the general politics of the European powers and of Eng- 
 land as one of them. Whatever might be Henry's disap- 
 pointment in the issue of his French campaigns the young 
 King might dwell with justifiable pride on the general re- 
 sult of his foreign policy. If his direct gains from the 
 Holy League had been little, he had at any rate won se- 
 curity on the side of France. The loss of Navarre and of 
 the Milanese left Lewis a far less dangerous neighbor than 
 he had seemed at Henry's accession, while the appearance 
 of the Swiss soldiery during the war of the League de- 
 stroyed the military supremacy which France had enjoyed 
 from the days of Charles the Eighth. But if the war had 
 freed England from the fear of French pressure Wolsey 
 was as resolute to free her from the dictation of Ferdinand, 
 and this the resentment of Henry at his unscrupulous de- 
 sertion enabled him to bring about. Crippled as she was, 
 France was no longer formidable as a foe; and her alli- 
 ance would not only break the supremacy of Ferdinand 
 over English policy but secure Henry on his northern bor- 
 der. Her husband's death at Flodden and the infancy of 
 their son raised Margaret Tudor to the Scotch regency, 
 and seemed to promise Henry a hold on his troublesome 
 neighbors. But her marriage a year later with the Earl
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 113 
 
 of Angus, Archibald Douglas, soon left the Regent power- 
 less among the factions of warring nobles. She appealed 
 to her brother for aid, while her opponents called on the 
 Duke of Albany, the son of the Albany who had been 
 driven to France in 1484 and heir to the crown after the in- 
 fant king to return and take the regency. Albany held 
 broad lands in France ; he had won fame as a French gen- 
 eral ; and Scotland in his hands would be simply a means 
 of French attack. A French alliance not only freed Henry 
 from dependence on Ferdinand but would meet this dan- 
 ger from the north; and in the summer of 1514 a treaty 
 was concluded with the French King and ratified by his 
 marriage with Henry's youngest sister, Mary Tudor. 
 
 The treaty was hardly signed when the death of Lewis 
 in January 1515 undid this marriage and placed his young 
 cousin, Francis the First, upon the throne. But the old 
 king's death brought no change of policy. Francis at once 
 prepared to renew the war in Italy, and for this purpose 
 he needed the friendship of his two neighbors in the west 
 and the north, Henry and the ruler of the Netherlands, 
 the young Charles of Austria. Both were willing to give 
 their friendship. Charles, jealous of Maximilian's desire 
 to bring him into tutelage, looked to a French alliance as 
 a security against the pressure of the Emperor, while 
 Henry and Wolsey were eager to dispatch Francis on a 
 campaign across the Alps, which would at any rate while 
 it lasted remove all fear of an attack on England. A yet 
 stronger ground in the minds of both Charles and Henry 
 for facilitating the French King's march was their secret 
 belief that his invasion of the Milanese would bring the 
 young king to inevitable ruin, for the Emperor and Fer- 
 dinand of Aragon were leagued with every Italian state 
 against Francis, and a Swiss army prepared to dispute 
 with him the possession of the Milanese. Charles there- 
 fore betrothed himself to the French King's sister, and 
 Henry concluded a fresh treaty with him in the spring of 
 1515. But the dreams of both rulers were roughly broken.
 
 114 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 Francis succeeded both in crossing the Alps and in beat- 
 ing the Swiss army. His victory in the greatest battle of 
 the age, the battle of Marignano, at once gave him the 
 Milanese and laid the rest of Italy at his feet. The work 
 of the Holy Alliance was undone, and the dominion which 
 England had dreaded in the hands of Lewis the Twelfth 
 was restored in the younger and more vigorous hands of 
 his successor. Neither the King nor the Cardinal could 
 hide their chagrin when the French minister announced 
 his master's victory, but it was no time for an open breach. 
 Ah 1 Wolsey could do was to set himself secretly to hamper 
 the French King's work. English gold hindered any re- 
 conciliation between France and the Swiss, and enabled 
 Maximilian to lead a joint army of Swiss and Imperial 
 soldiers in the following year over the Alps. 
 
 But -the campaign broke down. At this juncture indeed 
 the death of Ferdinand in January 1516 changed the whole 
 aspect of European politics. It at once opened to Charles of 
 Austria his Spanish and Neapolitan heritage. The pres- 
 ence of the young King was urgently called for by the trou- 
 bles that followed in Castile, and Charles saw that peace was 
 needed for the gathering into his hands of realms so widely 
 scattered as his own. Maximilian too was ready to set 
 aside all other aims to secure the aggrandizement of his 
 house. After an inactive campaign therefore the Emperor 
 negotiated secretly with France, and the treaty of Noyon 
 which Charles concluded with Francis in August 1516 
 was completed in March 1517 by the accession of Maxi- 
 milian to their alliance in the Treaty of Cambray. To all 
 outer seeming the Treaty of Cambray left Francis supreme 
 in the west, unequalled in military repute, a soldier who 
 at twenty had withstood and broken the league of all 
 Europe in arms, master of the Milanese, and through his 
 alliances with Venice, Florence, and the Pope virtually 
 master of all Italy save the Neapolitan realm. On the 
 other hand the treaty left England exposed and alone, 
 should France choose this moment for attack. Francis
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 115 
 
 was well aware of Wolsey's efforts against him, and the 
 state of Scotland offered the ready means of bringing about 
 a quarrel. While Henry, anxious as he was to aid his 
 sister, was fettered by the fear that English intervention 
 would bring French intervention in its train and endanger 
 the newly concluded alliance, Albany succeeded in evad- 
 ing the English cruisers and landing in the May of 1515. 
 He was at once declared Protector of the realm by the 
 Parliament at Edinburgh. Margaret on the other hand 
 was driven into Stirling, and after a short siege forced to 
 take refuge in England. The influence of Albany and the 
 French party whom he headed secured for Francis in any 
 struggle the aid of Scotland. But neither Henry nor his 
 minister really dreaded danger from the Treaty of Cam- 
 bray; on the contrary it solved all their difficulties. So 
 well did they understand the aim of Charles in concluding 
 it that they gave him the gold which enabled him to reach 
 Spain. Master of Castile and Aragon, of Naples and the 
 Netherlands, the Spanish King rose into a check on the 
 French monarchy such as the policy of Henry or Wolsey 
 had never been able to construct before. Instead of tow- 
 ering over Europe, Francis found himself confronted in 
 the hour of his pride by a rival whom he was never to 
 overcome; while England, deserted and isolated as she 
 seemed for the moment, was eagerly sought in alliance by 
 both princes. In October 1518 Francis strove to bind her 
 to his cause by a new treaty of peace, in which England 
 sold Tournay to France and the hand of the French dau- 
 phin was promised to Henry's daughter Mary, now a child 
 of two years old. 
 
 At the close of 1518 therefore the policy of Wolsey 
 seemed justified by success. He had found England a 
 power of the second order, overawed by France and dictated 
 to by Ferdinand of Spain. She now stood in the forefront 
 of European affairs, a state whose alliance was desired 
 alike by French King and Spanish King, and which dealt 
 on equal terms with Pope or fimperor. In European cabi-
 
 116 BISTORT? OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 nets Wolsey was regarded as hardly less a power to be 
 conciliated than his royal master. Both Charles and Fran- 
 cis sought his friendship ; and in the years which followed 
 his official emoluments were swelled by pensions from both 
 princes. At home the King loaded him with new proofs 
 of favor. The revenues of two sees whose tenants were 
 foreigners fell into his hands; he held the bishopric of 
 Winchester and the abbacy of St. Albans. He spent this 
 vast wealth with princely ostentation. His pomp was al- 
 most royal. A train of prelates and nobles followed him 
 as he moved ; his household was composed of five hundred 
 persons of noble birth, and its chief posts were occupied 
 by knights and barons of the realm. Two of the houses 
 he built, Hampton Court and York House, the later White- 
 hall, were splendid enough to serve at his fall as royal pal- 
 aces. Nor was this magnificence a mere show of power. 
 The whole direction of home and foreign affairs rested with 
 Wolsey alone. His toil was ceaseless. The morning was 
 for the most part given to his business as chancellor in 
 Westminster Hall and at the Star-Chamber; but nightfall 
 still found him laboring at exchequer business or home 
 administration, managing Church affairs, unravelling the 
 complexities of Irish misgovernment, planning schools and 
 colleges, above all drawing and studying dispatches and 
 transacting the whole diplomatic correspondence of the 
 state. Greedy as was his passion for toil, Wolsey felt the 
 pressure of this enormous mass of business, and his impe- 
 rious tones, his angry outbursts of impatience showed him 
 to be overworked. Even his vigorous frame gave way. 
 Still a strong and handsome man in 1518 at the age of forty- 
 seven, Wolsey was already an old man, broken by disease, 
 when he fell from power at fifty-five. But enormous as 
 was the mass of work which he undertook, it was thor- 
 oughly done. His administration of the royal treasury 
 was rigidly economical. The number of his dispatches 
 is hardly less remarkable than the care he bestowed on 
 each. Even More, an avowed enemy, owns that as Chan-
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 117 
 
 cellor lie surpassed all men's expectations. The court of 
 Chancery indeed became so crowded through the character 
 for expedition and justice which it gained under his rule 
 that subordinate courts had to be created for its relief. 
 
 But not even with this concentration of authority in a 
 single hand was Henry content. At the close of 1517 he 
 procured from the Pope the Cardinal's appointment as 
 Legate a later e in the realm. Such a Legate was entrusted 
 with powers almost as full as those of the Pope himself; 
 his jurisdiction extended over every bishop and priest, it 
 overrode every privilege or exemption of abbey or celL 
 while his court superseded that of Rome as the final court 
 of ecclesiastical appeal for the realm. Already wielding 
 the full powers of secular justice in his capacity of Chan- 
 cellor and of president of the royal Council, Wolsey wielded 
 the full power of spiritual justice in his capacity of Legate. 
 His elevation was no mere freak of royal favor ; it was the 
 result of a distinct policy. The moment had come when 
 the Monarchy was to gather up all government into the 
 personal grasp of the King. The checks which had been 
 imposed on the action of the sovereign by the presence of 
 great prelate' and lords at his council were practically re- 
 moved. His fellow councillors learned to hold their peace 
 when the haughty minister " clapped his rod on the board." 
 The restraints of public justice were equally done away. 
 Even the distant check of Rome was gone. All secular 
 all ecclesiastical power was summed up in a single hand. 
 It was this concentration of authority in Wolsey which 
 accustomed England to a system of personal government 
 under Henry and his successors. It was the Cardinal's 
 long tenure of the whole Papal authority within the realm, 
 and the consequent suspension of appeals to Rome, that 
 led men to acquiesce at a later time in Henry's own claim 
 of religious supremacy. For proud as was Wolsey 's bear- 
 ing and high as were his natural powers he stood before 
 England as the mere creature of the King. Greatness, 
 wealth, authority he held, and owned he held, simply at
 
 118 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 the royal will. In raising his low-born favorite to the 
 head of church and state Henry was gathering all religious 
 as well as all civil authority into his personal grasp. The 
 nation which trembled before Wolsey learned to tremble 
 before the master who could destroy Wolsey with a breath. 
 The rise of Charles of Austria gave a new turn to Wol- 
 sey's policy. Till now France had been a pressing danger, 
 and the political scheme both of Henry and his minister 
 lay in organizing leagues to check her greatness or in di- 
 verting her activity to the fields of Lombardy. But from 
 the moment of Ferdinand's death this power of Francis 
 was balanced by the power of Charles. Possessor of the 
 Netherlands, of Franche Comte, of Spain, Charles already 
 pressed France on its northern, eastern, and southern bor- 
 ders when the death of his grandfather Maximilian in the 
 spring of 1519 added to his dominions the heritage of the 
 House of Austria in Swabia and on the Danube. It did 
 yet more for him in opening to him the Empire. The in- 
 trigues of Maximilian had secured for Charles promises of 
 support from a majority of the Electors, and though Fran- 
 cis redoubled his efforts and Henry the Eighth sent an 
 envoy to push his own succession the cry of Germany for 
 a German head carried all before it. In June 1519 Charles 
 was elected Emperor ; and France saw herself girt in on 
 every side by a power whose greed was even greater than 
 her own. For, boy of nineteen as he was, Charles from 
 the first moment of his rule meant to make himself master 
 of the world ; and France, thrown suddenly on the defen- 
 sive, nerved herself for the coming struggle. Both needed 
 the gold and friendship of England. Convinced as he 
 was of Henry's treachery in the Imperial election, where 
 the English sovereign had promised Francis his support, 
 the French King clung to the alliance which Wolsey in 
 his uncertainty as to the actual drift of Charles had con- 
 cluded in 1518, and pressed for an interview with Henry 
 himself. But the need of France had woke dreams of 
 more than mere safety or a balanced neutrality in Wolsey
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 119 
 
 and his master. The time seemed come at last for a bolder 
 game. The claim on the French crown had never been 
 waived ; the dream of recovering at least Guienne and Nor- 
 mandy still lived on in the hearts of English statesmen; 
 and the subtle, unscrupulous youth who was now planning 
 his blow for the mastery of the world knew well how to 
 seize upon dreams such as these. Nor was Wolsey for- 
 gotten. If Henry coveted France, his minister coveted 
 no less a prize than the Papacy ; and the young Emperor 
 was lavish of promises of support in any coming election. 
 The result of his seductions was quickly seen. While 
 Henry deferred the interview with Francis till the sum- 
 mer of 1520, Charles had already planned a meeting with 
 his uncle in the opening of the year. 
 
 What importance Charles attached to this meeting was 
 seen in his leaving Spain ablaze with revolt behind him 
 to keep his engagement. He landed at Dover in the end 
 of May, and King and Emperor rode along to Canterbury, 
 but of the promises or pledges which passed we know lit- 
 tle save from the after-course of English politics. Noth- 
 ing could have differed more vividly from this simple ride 
 than the interview with Francis which followed in June. 
 A camp of three hundred white tents surrounded a faery 
 palace with gilded posterns and brightly colored oriels 
 which rose like a dream from the barren plain of Guisnes, 
 its walls hung with tapestry, its roof embossed with roses, 
 its golden fountain spouting wine over the greensward. 
 But all this pomp and splendor, the chivalrous embraces 
 and tourneys of the Kings, the gorgeous entry of Wojsey 
 in his crimson robe on a mule trapped with gold, the fresh 
 treaty which ratified the alliance, hardly veiled the new 
 English purpose. A second interview between Charles 
 and his uncle as he returned from the meeting with Fran- 
 cis ended in a secret confederacy of the two sovereigns and 
 the promise of the Emperor to marry his cousin, Henry's 
 one child, Mary Tudor. With her hand passed the heri- 
 tage of the English Crown. Henry had now ceased to hope 
 6 YOL. 2
 
 120 HISTOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 for a son from Catharine, and Mary was his destined suc- 
 cessor. Her right to the throne was asserted by a deed 
 which proved how utterly the baronage now lay at the 
 mercy of the King. The Duke of Buckingham stood first 
 in blood as in power among the English nobles; he was 
 the descendant of Edward the Third's youngest son, and 
 if Mary's succession were denied he stood heir to the throne. 
 His hopes had been fanned by prophets and astrologers, 
 and wild words told his purpose to seize the Crown on 
 Henry's death in defiance of every opponent. But word 
 and act had for two years been watched by the King ; and 
 in 1521 the Duke was arrested, condemned as a traitor by 
 his peers, and beheaded on Tower Hill. His blood was a 
 pledge of Henry's sincerity which Charles could not mis- 
 take. Francis on the other hand had never for a moment 
 been deceived by the profuse assurances of friendship 
 which the King and Wolsey lavished on him. A revolt 
 of the Spanish towns offered a favorable opportunity for 
 an attack on his rival, and a French army passed over the 
 Pyrenees into Navarre while Francis himself prepared to 
 invade the Netherlands. Both princes appealed for aid 
 under their separate treaties to Henry ; and the English 
 sovereign, whom the quick stroke of the French had taken 
 by surprise, could only gain time by a feigned mediation 
 in which Wolsey visited both Emperor and King. But 
 at the close of the year England was at last ready for ac- 
 tion, and Wolsey's solemn decision that Francis was the 
 aggressor was followed in November by a secret league 
 which was concluded at Calais between the Pope, the Em- 
 peror, and Henry. 
 
 The conquest of the Milanese by the imperial generals 
 turned at this moment the balance of the war, and as the 
 struggle went on the accession of Venice and the lesser 
 Italian republics, of the King of Hungary and Ferdinand 
 of Austria, to whom Charles had ceded his share in the 
 hereditary duchy of their house, to the alliance for the re- 
 covery of Italy from the French, threatened ruin to the
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 121 
 
 cause of Francis. In real power however the two com- 
 batants were still fairly matched. If she stood alone, 
 France was rich and compact, while her opponents were 
 scattered, distracted by warring aims, and all equally poor. 
 The wealth which had given Henry his weight in the 
 counsels of Europe at the opening of his reign had been 
 exhausted by his earlier wars, and Wolsey's economy had 
 done nothing more than tide the crown through the past 
 years of peace. But now that Henry had promised to raise 
 forty thousand men for the coming campaign the ordinary 
 resources of the treasury were utterly insufficient. With 
 the instinct of despotism Wolsey shrank from reviving 
 the tradition of the Parliament. Though Henry had thrice 
 called the Houses together to supply the expenses of his 
 earlier struggle with France his minister had governed 
 through seven years of peace without once assembling 
 them. War made a Parliament inevitable, but for a while 
 Wolsey strove to delay its summons by a wide extension 
 of the practice which Edward the Fourth had invented of 
 raising money by forced loans or "Benevolences," to be 
 repaid from the first subsidy of a coming Parliament. 
 Large sums were assessed upon every county. Twenty 
 thousand pounds were exacted from London, and its wealth- 
 ier citizens were summoned before the Cardinal and re- 
 quired to give an account of the value of their estates. 
 Commissioners were sent into each shire for the purposes 
 of assessment, and precepts were issued on their informa- 
 tion, requiring in some cases supplies of soldiers, in others 
 a tenth of a man's income, for the King's service. So 
 poor however was the return that the Earl of Surrey, who 
 was sent as general to Calais, could muster only a force of 
 seventeen thousand men ; and while Charles succeeded in 
 driving the French from Milan, the English campaign 
 dwindled into a mere raid upon Picardy, from which the 
 army fell back, broken with want and disease. 
 
 The Cardinal was driven to call the Estates together in 
 April 1523 ; and the conduct of the Commons showed how
 
 122 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [Booz V. 
 
 little the new policy of the Monarchy had as yet done to 
 change the temper of the nation or to break its loyalty to 
 the tradition of constitutional freedom. Wolsey needed 
 the sum of eight hundred thousand pounds, and proposed 
 to raise it by a property tax of twenty per cent. Such a 
 demand was unprecedented, but the Cardinal counted on 
 his presence to bear down all opposition, and made the de- 
 mand in person. He was received with obstinate silence. 
 It was in vain that he called on member after member to 
 answer; and his appeal to More, who had been elected to 
 fill the chair of the House of Commons, was met by the 
 Speaker's falling on his knees and representing his power- 
 lessness to reply till he had received instructions from the 
 House itself. The effort to overawe the Commons had in 
 fact failed, and Wolsey was forced to retire. He had no 
 sooner withdrawn than aai angry debate began, and the 
 Cardinal returned to answer the objections which were 
 raised to the subsidy. But the Commons again foiled the 
 minister's attempt to influence their deliberations by refus- 
 ing to discuss the matter in his presence. The struggle 
 continued for a fortnight ; and though successful in pro- 
 curing a grant the court party were forced to content them- 
 selves with less than half of Wolsey 's original demand. 
 The Church displayed as independent a spirit. Wolsey's 
 aim of breaking down constitutional traditions was shown, 
 as in the case of the Commons, by his setting aside the old 
 assembly of the provincial convocations, and as Legate 
 summoning the clergy to meet in a national synod. But 
 the clergy held as stubbornly to constitutional usage as the 
 laity, and the Cardinal was forced to lay his demand be- 
 fore them in their separate convocations. Even here how- 
 ever the enormous grant he asked was disputed for four 
 months, and the matter had at last to be settled by a com- 
 promise. 
 
 It was plain that England was far from having sunk to 
 a slavish submission to the monarchy. But galled as 
 Wolsey was by the resistance, his mind was too full of
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 123 
 
 vast schemes of foreign conquest to turn to any resolute 
 conflict with opposition at home. The treason of the Duke 
 of Bourbon stirred a new hope of conquering France. 
 Bourbon was Constable of France, the highest of the 
 French nobles both from his blood and the almost inde- 
 pendent power he wielded in his own duchy and in Pro- 
 vence. But a legal process by which Francis sought to re- 
 call his vast possessions to the domain of the crown threat- 
 ened him with ruin ; and driven to secret revolt, he pledged 
 himself to rise against the King on the appearance of the 
 allied armies in the heart of the realm. His offer was 
 eagerly accepted, and so confident were the conspirators 
 of success that they at once settled the division of their 
 spoil. To Henry his hopes seemed at last near their real- 
 ization ; and while Burgundy fell naturally to Charles, his 
 ally claimed what remained of France and the French 
 crown. The departure of Francis with his army for Italy 
 was to be the signal for the execution of the scheme, a 
 joint army of English and Imperialists advancing to Bour- 
 bon's aid from the north while a force of Spaniards and 
 Germans marched to the same point from the south. As 
 the French troops moved to the Alps a German force pen- 
 etrated in August into Lorraine, an English army disem- 
 barked at Calais, and a body of Spaniards descended from 
 the Pyrenees. But at the moment of its realization the 
 discovery of the plot and an order for his arrest foiled 
 Bourbon's designs; and his precipitate flight threw these 
 skilful plans into confusion. Francis remained in his 
 realm. Though the army which he sent over the Alps was 
 driven back from the walls of Milan it still held to Pied- 
 mont, while the allied force in northern France under the 
 command of the Duke of Suffolk advanced to the Oise only 
 to find itself unsupported and to fall hastily back, and the 
 slow advance of the Spaniards frustrated the campaign in 
 Guienne. In Scotland alone a gleam of success lighted 
 on the English arms. At the close of the former war Al- 
 bany had withdrawn to France and Margaret regained
 
 124 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 her power ; but a quarrel both with her husband and the 
 English King brought the Queen-mother herself to invite 
 the Duke to return. On the outbreak of the new struggle 
 with Francis Henry at once insisted on his withdrawal, 
 and though Albany marched on England with a large and 
 well-equipped army, the threats of the English commander 
 so wrought on him that he engaged to disband it and fled 
 over sea. Henry and his sister drew together again ; and 
 Margaret announced that her son, James the Fifth, who 
 had now reached his twelfth year, assumed the govern- 
 ment as King, while Lord Surrey advanced across the bor- 
 der to support her against the French party among the 
 nobles. But the presence of an English army roused the 
 whole people to arms. Albany was recalled ; and Surrey 
 saw himself forced to retreat while the Duke with sixty 
 thousand men crossed the border and formed the siege of 
 Wark. But again his cowardice ruined all. No sooner 
 did Surrey, now heavily reinforced, advance to offer bat- 
 tle than Albany fell back to Lauder. Laying down the 
 regency he set sail for France, and the resumption of her 
 power by Margaret relieved England from its dread of a 
 Scotch attack. 
 
 Baffled as he had been, Henry still clung to his schemes 
 of a French crown ; and the defeat of the French army in 
 Lombardy in 1524, the evacuation of Italy, and the ad- 
 vance of the Imperialist troops into France itself revived 
 his hopes of success. Unable to set an army on foot in 
 Picardy, he furnished the Emperor with supplies which 
 enabled his troops to enter the south. But the selfish pol- 
 icy of Charles was at once shown by the siege of Mar- 
 seilles. While Henry had gained nothing from the alli- 
 ance Charles had gained the Milanese, and he was now 
 preparing by the conquest of Provence and the Mediterra- 
 nean coast to link his possessions in Italy with his posses- 
 sions in Spain. Such a project was more practical and 
 statesmanlike than the visions of a conquest of France; 
 but it was not to further the Emperor's greatness that
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 126 
 
 England had wasted money and men. Henry felt that 
 he was tricked as he had been tricked in 1523. Then as 
 now it was clearly the aim of Charles to humble Francis, 
 but not to transfer the French crown to his English ally. 
 Nor was the resentment of Wolsey at the Emperor's treach- 
 ery less than that of the King. At the death of Leo the 
 Tenth, as at the death of his successor, Charles had ful- 
 filled his pledge to the Cardinal by directing his party in 
 the Sacred College to support his choice. But secret direc- 
 tions counteracted the open ones; and "Wolsey had seen 
 the tutor of the Emperor, Adrian the Sixth, and his par- 
 tisan, Clement the Seventh, successively raised to the 
 papal chair. The eyes of both King and minister were at 
 last opened, and Henry drew cautiously from his ally, sus- 
 pending further payments to Bourbon 'sai my, and opening 
 secret negotiations with France. But the face of affairs 
 was changed anew by the obstinate resistance of Marseilles, 
 the ruin and retreat of the Imperialist forces, and the sud- 
 den advance of Francis with a new army over the Alps. 
 Though Milan was saved from his grasp, the Imperial 
 troops were surrounded and besieged in Pavia. For three 
 months they held stubbornly out, but famine at last forced 
 them to a desperate resolve; and in February 1525, at a 
 moment when the French army was weakened by the dis- 
 patch of forces to Southern Italy, a sudden attack of the 
 Imperialists ended in a crushing victory. The French 
 were utterly routed and Francis himself remained a pris- 
 oner in the hands of the conquerors. The ruin as it seemed 
 of France roused into fresh life the hopes of the English 
 King. Again drawing closely to Charles he offered to join 
 the Emperor in an invasion of France with forty thousand 
 men, to head his own forces, and to furnish heavy subsi- 
 dies for the cost of the war. Should the allies prove suc- 
 cessful and Henry be crowned King of France, he pledged 
 himself to cede to Bourbon Dauphiny and his duchy, to 
 surrender Burgundy, Provence, and Languedoc to the 
 Emperor, and to give Charles the hand of his daughter,
 
 126 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [Boca V. 
 
 Mary, and with it the heritage of two crowns which would 
 in the end make him master of the world. 
 
 Though such a project seemed hardly perhaps as pos- 
 sible to Wolsey as to his master it served to test the sincer- 
 ity of Charles in his adhesion to the alliance. But whether 
 they were in earnest or no in proposing it, King and min- 
 ister had alike to face the difficulty of an empty treasury. 
 Money was again needed for action, but to obtain a new 
 grant from parliament was impossible, nor was Wolsey 
 eager to meet fresh rebuffs from the spirit of the Commons 
 or the clergy. He was driven once more to the system of 
 Benevolences. In every county a tenth was demanded 
 from the laity and a fourth from the clergy by the royal 
 commissioners. But the demand was met by a general 
 resistance. The political instinct of the nation discerned 
 as of old that in the question of self -taxation was involved 
 that "of the very existence of freedom. The clergy put 
 themselves in the forefront of the opposition, and preached 
 from every pulpit that the commission was contrary to 
 the liberties of the realm and that the King could take no 
 man's goods but by process of law. Archbishop Warham, 
 who was pressing the demand in Kent, was forced to write 
 to the court that " there was sore grudging and murmur- 
 ing among the people." " If men should give their goods 
 by a commission," said the Kentish squires, "then it would 
 be worse than the taxes of France, and England should be 
 bond, not free." So stirred was the nation that Wolsey 
 bent to the storm and offered to rely on the voluntary loans 
 of each subject. But the statute of Richard the Third 
 which declared all exaction of Benevolences illegal was re- 
 called to memory; the demand was evaded by London, 
 and the Commissioners were driven out of Kent. A revolt 
 actually broke out among the weavers of Suffolk ; the men 
 of Cambridge banded for resistance; the Norwich cloth- 
 iers, though they yielded at first, soon threatened to rise. 
 "Who is your captain?" the Duke of Norfolk asked the 
 crowd. " His name is Poverty," was the answer, " for he
 
 CHAP, 3.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 127 
 
 and his cousin Necessity have brought us to this doing." 
 There was in fact a general strike of the employers. 
 Clothmakers discharged their workers, farmers put away 
 their servants. " They say the King asketh so much that 
 they be not able to do as they have done before this time." 
 Such a peasant insurrection as was raging in Germany was 
 only prevented by the unconditional withdrawal of the 
 royal demand. 
 
 The check was too rough a one not to rouse both Wolsey 
 and the King. Henry was wroth at the need of giving way 
 before rebels, and yet more wroth at the blow which the 
 strife had dealt to the popularity on which he set so great 
 a store. Wolsey was more keenly hurt by the overthrow 
 of his hopes for a decisive campaign. Without money 
 it was impossible to take advantage of the prostration of 
 France or bring the Emperor to any serious effort for its 
 subjection and partition. But Charles had no purpose in 
 any case of playing the English game, or of carrying out 
 the pledges by which he had lured England into war. He 
 concluded an armistice with his prisoner, and used Wolsey's 
 French negotiations in the previous year as a ground for 
 evading fulfilment of his stipulations. The alliance was 
 in fact at an end ; and the schemes of winning anew " our 
 inheritance of France,", had ended in utter failure. So 
 sharp a blow could hardly fail to shake Wolsey's power. 
 The popular clamor against him on the score of the Be- 
 nevolences found echoes at court ; and it was only by a 
 dexterous gift to Henry of his newly built palace at Hamp- 
 ton Court that Wolsey again won his old influence over 
 the King. Buried indeed as both Henry and his minister 
 were in schemes of distant ambition, the sudden and gen- 
 eral resistance of England woke them to an uneasy con- 
 sciousness that their dream of uncontrolled authority was 
 yet to find hindrances in the temper of the people they 
 ruled. And at this moment a new and irresistible power 
 began to quicken the national love of freedom and law. 
 It was the influence of religion which was destined to ruin
 
 128 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 the fabric of the Monarchy ; and the year which saw the 
 defeat of the Crown in its exaction of Benevolences saw 
 the translation of the English Bible. 
 
 While Charles and Francis were struggling for the lord- 
 ship of the world, Germany had been shaken by the out- 
 burst of the Reformation. " That Luther has a fine 
 genius!" laughed Leo the Tenth when he heard in 1517 
 that a German Professor had nailed some Propositions de- 
 nouncing the abuse of Indulgences, or of the Papal power 
 to remit certain penalties attached to the commission of 
 sins, against the doors of a church at Wittemberg. But 
 the "Quarrel of Friars," as the controversy was termed 
 contemptuously at Rome, soon took larger proportions. If 
 at the outset Luther flung himself " prostrate at the feet" 
 of the Papacy and owned its voice as the voice of Christ, 
 the sentence of Leo no sooner confirmed the doctrine of 
 Indulgences than their opponent appealed to a future 
 Council of the Church. In 1520 the rupture was com- 
 plete. A Papal Bull formally condemned the errors of the 
 Reformer, and Luther publicly consigned the Bull to the 
 flames. A second condemnation expelled him from the 
 bosom of the Church, and the ban of the Empire was soon 
 added to that of the Papacy. Charles the Fifth had 
 bought Leo's alliance with himself and England by a 
 promise of repressing the new heresy ; and its author was 
 called to appear before him in a Diet at Worms. " Here 
 stand I; I can none other," Luther replied to the young 
 Emperor as he pressed him to recant ; and from a hiding- 
 place in the Thuringian forest where he was sheltered after 
 his condemnation by the Elector of Saxony he denounced 
 not merely, as at first, the abuses of the Papacy, but the 
 Papacy itself. The heresies of Wyclif were revived ; the 
 infallibility, the authority of the Roman See, the truth of 
 its doctrines, the efficacy of its worship, were denied and 
 scoffed at in vigorous pamphlets which issued from his re- 
 treat and were dispersed throughout the world by the new 
 printing-press. Germany welcomed them with enthusi-
 
 CHAP. 8.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 129 
 
 asm. Its old resentment against the oppression of Rome, 
 the moral revolt in its more religious minds against the 
 secularity and corruption of the Church, the disgust of the 
 New Learning at the superstition which the Papacy now 
 formally protected, combined to secure for Luther a wide- 
 spread popularity and the protection of the northern princes 
 of the Empire. 
 
 In England his protest seemed at first to find no echo. 
 The King himself was both on political and religious 
 grounds firm on the Papal side. England and Rome were 
 drawn to a close alliance by the identity of their political 
 position. Each was hard pressed between the same great 
 powers ; Rome had to hold its own between the masters of 
 southern and the masters of northern Italy, as England 
 had to hold her own between the rulers of France and of 
 the Netherlands. From the outset of his reign to the actual 
 break with Clement the Seventh the policy of Henry is al- 
 ways at one with that of the Papacy. Nor were the king's 
 religious tendencies hostile to it. He was a trained theo- 
 logian and proud of his theological knowledge, but to the 
 end his convictions remained firmly on the side of the 
 doctrines which Luther denied. In 1521 therefore he en- 
 tered the lists against Luther with an " Assertion of the 
 Seven Sacraments" for which he was rewarded by Leo 
 with the title of "Defender of the Faith." The insolent 
 abuse of the Reformer's answer called More and Fisher 
 into the field. The influence of the New Learning was 
 now strong at the English Court. Colet and Grocyn were 
 among its foremost preachers ; Linacre was Henry's phy- 
 sician ; More was a privy councillor ; Pace was one of the 
 Secretaries of State; Tunstall was Master of the Rolls. 
 And as yet the New Learning, though scared by Luther's 
 intemperate language, had steadily backed him in his 
 struggle. Erasmus pleaded for him with the Emperor. 
 Ulrich von Hutten attacked the friars in satires and invec- 
 tives as violent as his own. But the temper of the Re- 
 nascence was even more antagonistic to the temper of
 
 130 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 Luther than that of Rome itself. From the golden dream 
 of a new age wrought peaceably and purely by the slow 
 progress of intelligence, the growth of letters, the develop- 
 ment of human virtue, the Reformer of Wittemberg turned 
 away with horror. He had little or no sympathy with 
 the new culture. He despised reason as heartily as any 
 Papal dogmatist could despise it. He hated the very 
 thought of toleration or comprehension. He had been 
 driven by a moral and intellectual compulsion to declare 
 the Roman system a false one, but it was only to replace 
 it by another system of doctrine just as elaborate, and 
 claiming precisely the same infallibility. To degrade hu- 
 man nature was to attack the very base of the New Learn- 
 ing ; and his attack on it called the foremost of its teachers 
 to the field. But Erasmus no sooner advanced to its de- 
 fence than Luther declared man to be utterly enslaved by 
 original sin and incapable through any efforts of his own 
 of discovering truth or of arriving at goodness. Such a 
 doctrine not only annihilated the piety and wisdom of the 
 classic past, from which the New Learning had drawn its 
 larger views of life and of the world ; it trampled in the 
 dust reason itself, the very instrument by which More and 
 Erasmus hoped to regenerate both knowledge and religion. 
 To More especially, with his keener perception of its future 
 effect, this sudden revival of a purely theological and dog- 
 matic spirit, severing Christendom into warring camps and 
 ruining all hopes of union and tolerance, was especially 
 hateful. The temper which hitherto had seemed so " en- 
 dearing, gentle, and happy," suddenly gave way. His 
 reply to Luther's attack upon the King sank to the level 
 of the work it answered ; and though that of Bishop Fisher 
 was calmer and more argumentative the divorce of the 
 New Learning from the Reformation seemed complete. 
 
 But if the world of scholars and thinkers stood aloof from 
 the new movement it found a warmer welcome in the larger 
 world where men are stirred rather by emotion than by 
 thought. There was an England of which even More and
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 131 
 
 Colet knew little in which Luther's words kindled a fire 
 that was never to die. As a great social and political 
 movement Lollardry had ceased to exist, and little re- 
 mained of the directly religious impulse given by Wyclif 
 beyond a vague restlessness and discontent with the system 
 of the Church. But weak and fitful as was the life of 
 Lollardry the prosecutions whose records lie scattered over 
 the bishops' registers failed wholly to kill it. We see 
 groups meeting here and there to read " in a great book of 
 heresy all one night certain chapters of the Evangelists in 
 English," while transcripts of Wyclif 's tracts passed from 
 hand to hand. The smouldering embers needed but a 
 breath to fan them into flame, and the breath came from 
 William Tyndale. Born among the Cotswolds when Bos- 
 worth Field gave England to the Tudors, Tyndale passed 
 from Oxford to Cambridge to feel the full impulse given 
 by the appearance there of the New Testament of Erasmus. 
 From that moment one thought was at his heart. He 
 " perceived by experience how that it was impossible to 
 establish the lay people in any truth except the scripture 
 were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother-tongue." 
 "If God spare my life," he said to a learned controver- 
 sialist, "ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth 
 the plough shall know more of the scripture than thou 
 dost." But he was a man of forty before his dream be- 
 came fact. Drawn from his retirement in Gloucestershire 
 by the news of Luther's protest at Wittemberg, he found 
 shelter for a year with a London Alderman, Humfrey 
 Monmouth. " He studied most part of the day at his book, " 
 said his host afterwards, " and would eat but sodden meat 
 by his good will and drink but small single beer." The 
 book at which he studied was the Bible. But it was soon 
 needful to quit England if his purpose was to hold. " I 
 understood at the last not only that there was no room in 
 my lord of London's palace to translate the New Testa- 
 ment, but also that there was no place to do it in all Eng- 
 land." From Hamburg, where he took refuge in 1524, he
 
 132 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 probably soon found his way to the little town which had. 
 suddenly become the sacred city of the Reformation. 
 Students of all nations were flocking there with an enthu- 
 siasm which resembled that of the Crusades. " As they 
 came in sight of the town," a contemporary tells us, " they 
 returned thanks to God with clasped hands, for from Wit- 
 temberg, as heretofore from Jerusalem, the light of evan- 
 gelical truth had spread to the utmost parts of the earth." 
 Such a visit could only fire Tyndale to face the " poverty, 
 exile, bitter absence from friends, hunger and thirst and 
 ccld, great dangers, and innumerable other hard and sharp 
 fightings," which the work he had set himself was to bring 
 with it. In 1525 his version of the New Testament was 
 completed, and means were furnished by English merchants 
 for printing it at Koln. But Tyndale had soon to fly with 
 his sheets to Worms, a city whose Lutheran tendencies 
 made it a safer refuge, and it was from Worms that six 
 thousand copies of the New Testament were sent in 1526 
 to English shores. The King was keenly opposed to a 
 book which he looked on as made " at the solicitation and 
 instance of Luther ;" and even the men of the New Learn- 
 ing from whom it might have hoped for welcome were 
 estranged from it by its Lutheran origin. We can only 
 fairly judge their action by viewing it in the light of the 
 time. What Warham and More saw over sea might well 
 have turned them from a movement which seemed break- 
 ing down the very foundations of religion and society. 
 Not only was the fabric of the Church rent asunder and 
 the centre of Christian unity denounced as "Babylon," 
 but the reform itself seemed passing into anarchy. Lu- 
 ther was steadily moving onward from the denial of one 
 Catholic dogma to that of another ; and what Luther still 
 clung to his followers were ready to fling away. Carlstadt 
 was denouncing the reformer of Wittemberg as fiercely as 
 Luther himself had denounced the Pope, and meanwhile 
 the religious excitement was kindling wild dreams of so- 
 cial revolution, and men stood aghast at the horrors of a
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 133 
 
 Peasant- War which broke out in Southern Germany. It 
 was not therefore as a mere translation of the Bible that 
 Tyndale's work reached England. It came as a part of 
 the Lutheran movement, and it bore the Lutheran stamp 
 in its version of ecclesiastical words. " Church" became 
 "congregation," "priest" was changed into "elder." It 
 came too in company with Luther's bitter invectives and 
 reprints of the tracts of Wyclif , which the German traders 
 of the Steelyard were importing in large numbers. We 
 can hardly wonder that More denounced the book as heret- 
 ical, or that Warham ordered it to be given up by all who 
 possessed it. 
 
 Wolsey took little heed of religious matters, but his pol- 
 icy was one of political adhesion to Rome, and he presided 
 over a solemn penance to which some Steelyard men sub- 
 mitted in St. Pauls. " With six and thirty abbots, mitred 
 priors, and bishops, and he in his whole pomp mitred" the 
 Cardinal looked on while " great baskets full of books . . . 
 were commanded after the great fire was made before the 
 Rood of Northen," the crucifix by the great north door of 
 the cathedral, " thus to be burned, and those heretics to go 
 thrice about the fire and to cast in their fagots. But 
 scenes and denunciations such as these were vain in the 
 presence of an enthusiasm which grew every hour. " Eng- 
 lishmen," says a scholar of the time, " were so eager for the 
 gospel as to affirm that they would buy a New Testament 
 even if they had to give a hundred thousand pieces of 
 money for it." Bibles and pamphlets were smuggled over 
 to England and circulated among the poorer and trading 
 classes through the agency of an association of " Christian 
 Brethren," consisting principally of London tradesmen and 
 citizens, but whose missionaries spread over the country 
 at large. They found their way at once to the Universi- 
 ties, where the intellectual impulse given by the New 
 Learning was quickening religious speculation. Cam- 
 bridge had already won a name for heresy; Barnes, one 
 of its foremost scholars, had to carry his fagot before Wol-
 
 134 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 aey at St. Paul's; two other Cambridge teachers, Bilney 
 and Latimer, were already known as "Lutherans." The 
 Cambridge scholars whom Wolsey introduced into Cardi- 
 nal College which he was founding spread the contagion 
 through Oxford. A group of " Brethren" was formed in 
 Cardinal College for the secret reading and discussion of 
 the Epistles; and this soon included the more intelligent 
 and learned scholars of the University. It was in vain 
 that Clark, the centre of this group, strove to dissuade 
 fresh members from joining it by warnings of the impend- 
 ing dangers. " I fell down on my knees at his feet," says 
 one of them, Anthony Dalaber, " and with tears and sighs 
 besought him that for the tender mercy of God he should 
 not refuse me, saying that I trusted verily that he who had 
 begun this on me would not forsake me, but would give 
 me grace to continue therein to the end. When he heard 
 me say so he came to me, took me in his arms, and kissed 
 me, saying, 'The Lord God Almighty grant you so to do, 
 and from henceforth ever take me for your father, and I 
 will take you for my son in Christ.'" 
 
 In 1528 the excitement which followed on this rapid 
 diffusion of Tyndale's works forced Wolsey to more vig- 
 orous action ; many of the Oxford Brethren were thrown 
 into prison and their books seized. But in spite of the 
 panic of the Protestants, some of whom fled over sea, little 
 severity was really exercised. Henry's chief anxiety in- 
 deed was lest in the outburst against heresy the interest 
 of the New Learning should suffer harm. This was re- 
 markably shown in the protection he extended to one who 
 was destined to eclipse even the fame of Colet as a popular 
 preacher. Hugh Latimer was the son of a Leicestershire 
 yeoman, whose armor the boy had buckled on in Henry 
 the Seventh's days ere he set out to meet the Cornish in- 
 surgents at Blackheath field. Latimer has himself de- 
 Tcribed the soldierly training of his youth. " My father 
 was delighted to teach me to shoot with the bow. He 
 taught me how to draw, how to lay my body to the bow,
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE MONARCHY. 1461-1540. 135 
 
 not to draw with strength of arm as other nations do but 
 with the strength of the body." At fourteen he was at 
 Cambridge, flinging himself into the New Learning which 
 was winning its way there with a zeal that at last told on 
 his physical strength. The ardor of his mental efforts left 
 its mark on him in ailments and enfeebled health from 
 which, vigorous as he was, his frame never wholly freed 
 itself. But he was destined to be known, not as a scholar, 
 but as a preacher. In his addresses from the pulpit the 
 sturdy good sense of the man shook off the pedantry of the 
 schools as well as the subtlety of the theologian. He had 
 little turn for speculation, and in the religious changes of 
 the day we find him constantly lagging behind his brother 
 reformers. But he had the moral earnestness of a Jewish 
 prophet, and his denunciations of wrong had a prophetic 
 directness and fire. "Have pity on your soul," he cried 
 to Henry, " and think that the day is even at hand when 
 you shall give an account of your office, and of the blood 
 that hath been shed by your sword." His irony was yet 
 more telling than his invective. "I would ask you a 
 strange question;" he said once at Paul's Cross to a ring 
 of Bishops, " who is the most diligent prelate in all Eng- 
 land, that passeth all the rest in doing of his office? I will 
 tell you. It is the Devil ! of all the pack of them that have 
 cure, the Devil shall go for my money; for he ordereth 
 his business. Therefore, you unpreaching prelates, learn 
 of the Devil to be diligent in your office. If you will not 
 learn of God, for shame learn of the Devil." But Latimer 
 was far from limiting himself to invective. His homely 
 humor breaks in with story and apologue ; his earnestness 
 is always tempered with good sense ; his plain and simple 
 style quickens with a shrewd mother- wit. He talks to his 
 hearers as a man talks to his friends, telling stories such 
 as we have given of his own life at home, or chatting about 
 the changes and chances of the day with a transparent 
 simplicity and truth that raises even his chat into gran- 
 deur. His theme is always the actual world about him,
 
 136 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 and in his simple lessons of loyalty, of industry, of pity 
 for the poor, he touches upon almost every subject from 
 the plough to the throne. No such preaching had been 
 heard in England before his day, and with the growth of 
 his fame grew the danger of persecution. There were 
 moments when, bold as he was, Latimer's heart failed 
 him. If I had not trust that God will help me," he wrote 
 once, " I think the ocean sea would have divided my Lord 
 of London and me by this day." A citation for heresy at 
 last brought the danger home. " I intend," he wrote with 
 his peculiar medley of humor and pathos, to " make merry 
 with my parishioners this Christmas, for all the sorrow, 
 lest perchance I may never return to them again." But 
 he was saved throughout by the steady protection of the 
 Court. Wolsey upheld him against the threats of the 
 Bishop of Ely ; Henry made him his own chaplain ; and 
 the King's interposition at this critical moment forced 
 Latimer's judges to content themselves with a few vague 
 words of submission. 
 
 What really sheltered the reforming movement was 
 Wolsey's indifference to all but political matters. In spite 
 of the foundation of Cardinal College in which he was 
 now engaged, and of the suppression of some lesser mon- 
 asteries for its endowment, the men of the New Learning 
 looked on him as really devoid of any interest in the re- 
 vival of letters or in their hopes of a general enlighten- 
 ment. He took hardly more heed of the new Lutheran- 
 ism. His mind had no religious turn, and the quarrel of 
 faiths was with him simply one factor in the political game 
 which he was carrying on and which at this moment be- 
 came more complex and absorbing than ever. The victory 
 of Pavia had ruined that system of balance which Henry 
 the Seventh and in his earlier days Henry the Eighth had 
 striven to preserve. But the ruin had not been to Eng- 
 land's profit, but to the profit of its ally. While the Em- 
 peror stood supreme in Europe Henry had won nothing 
 from the war, and it was plain that Charles meant him to
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 137 
 
 win nothing. He set aside all projects of a joint invasion ; 
 he broke his pledge to wed Mary Tudor and married a prin- 
 cess of Portugal ; he pressed for a peace with France which 
 would give him Burgundy. It was time for Henry and 
 his minister to change their course. They resolved to 
 withdraw from all active part in the rivalry of the two 
 powers. In June, 1525, a treaty was secretly concluded 
 with France. But Henry remained on fair terms with 
 the Emperor ; and though England joined the Holy League 
 for the deliverance of Italy from the Spaniards which was 
 formed between France, the Pope, and the lesser Italian 
 states on the release of Francis in the spring of 1526 by 
 virtue of a treaty which he at once repudiated, she took no 
 part in the lingering war which went on across the Alps. 
 Charles was too prudent to resent Henry's alliance with 
 his foes, and from this moment the country remained vir- 
 tually at peace. No longer spurred by the interest of great 
 events, the King ceased to take a busy part in foreign poli- 
 tics, and gave himself to hunting and sport. Among the 
 fairest and gayest ladies of his court stood Anne Boleyn. 
 She was sprung of a merchant family which had but lately 
 risen to distinction through two great marriages, that of 
 her grandfather with the heiress of the Earls of Ormond, 
 and that of her father,. Sir Thomas Boleyn, with a sister 
 of the Duke of Norfolk. It was probably through his 
 kinship with the Duke, who was now Lord Treasurer and 
 high in the King's confidence, that Boleyn was employed 
 throughout Henry's reign in state business, and his diplo- 
 matic abilities had secured his appointment as envoy both 
 to France and to the Emperor. His son, George Boleyn, 
 a man of culture and a poet, was among the group of young 
 courtiers in whose society Henry took most pleasure. 
 Anne was his youngest daughter; born in 1507, she was 
 still but a girl of sixteen when the outbreak of war drew 
 her from a stay in France to the English court. Her 
 beauty was small, but her bright eyes, her flowing hair, 
 he/ gayety and wit, soon won favor with the King, and
 
 138 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 only a month after her return in 1522 the grant of honors 
 to her father marked her influence over Henry. Fresh 
 gifts in the following years showed that the favor contin- 
 ued; but in 1524 a new color was given to this intimacy 
 by a resolve on the King's part to break his marriage with 
 the Queen. Catharine had now reached middle age ; her 
 personal charms had departed. The death of every child 
 gave Mary may have woke scruples as to the lawfulness 
 of a marriage on which a curse seemed to rest ; the need 
 of a male heir for public security may have deepened this 
 impression. But whatever were the grounds of his action 
 we find Henry from this moment pressing the Roman see 
 to grant him a divorce. 
 
 It is probable that the matter was already mooted in 
 1525, a year which saw new proof of Anne's influence in 
 the elevation of Sir Thomas Boleyn to the baronage as 
 Lord Rochford. It is certain that it was the object of se- 
 cret negotiation with the Pope in 1526. - No sovereign 
 stood higher in the favor of Rome than Henry, whose alli- 
 ance had ever been ready in its distress and who was even 
 now prompt with aid in money. But Clement's consent 
 to his wish meant a break with the Emperor, Catharine's 
 nephew; and the exhaustion of France, the weakness of 
 the league in which the lesser Italian states strove to main- 
 tain their independence against Charles after the battle of 
 Pavia, left the Pope at the Emperor's mercy. While the 
 English envoy was mooting the question of divorce in 1526 
 the surprise of Rome by an Imperial force brought home 
 to Clement his utter helplessness. It is hard to discover 
 what part Wolsey had as yet taken in the matter or whether 
 as in other cases Henry had till now been acting alone, 
 though the Cardinal himself tells us that on Catharine's 
 first discovery of the intrigue she attributed the proposal 
 of divorce to "my procurement and setting forth." But 
 from this point his intervention is clear. As legate he 
 took cognizance of all matrimonial causes, and in May 
 1527 a collusive action was brought in his court against
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 139 
 
 Henry for cohabiting with his brother's wife. The King 
 appeared by proctor; but the suit was suddenly dropped. 
 Secret as were the proceedings, they had now reached 
 Catharine's ear ; and as she refused to admit the facts on 
 which Henry rested his case her appeal would have carried 
 the matter to the tribunal of the Pope and Clement's de- 
 cision could hardly be a favorable one. 
 
 The Pope was now in fact a prisoner in the Emperor's 
 hands. At the very moment of the suit Rome was stormed 
 and sacked by the army of the Duke of Bourbon. " If the 
 Pope's holiness fortune either to be slain or taken," Wol- 
 sey wrote to the King when the news of this event reached 
 England, "it shall not a little hinder your Grace's affairs." 
 But it was needful for the Cardinal to find some expedient 
 to carry out the King's will, for the group around Anne 
 were using her skilfully for their purposes. A great party 
 had now gathered to her support. Her uncle, the Duke 
 of Norfolk, an able and ambitious man, counted on her rise 
 to set him at the head of the council-board ; the brilliant 
 group of young courtiers to which her brother belonged 
 saw in her success their own elevation; and the Duke of 
 Suffolk with the bulk of the nobles hoped through her 
 means to bring about the ruin of the statesman before 
 whom they trembled. What most served their plans was 
 the growth of Henry's passion. "If it please you," the 
 King wrote at this time to Anne Boleyn, " to do the office 
 of a true, loyal mistress, and give yourself body and heart 
 to me, who have been and mean to be your loyal servant, 
 I promise you not only the name but that I shall make you 
 my sole mistress, remove all others from my affection, and 
 serve you only." What stirred Henry's wrath most was 
 Catharine's " stiff and obstinate" refusal to bow to his will. 
 Wolsey's advice that " your Grace should handle her both 
 gently and doulcely" only goaded Henry's impatience. 
 He lent an ear to the rivals who charged his minister with 
 slackness in the cause, and danger drove the Cardinal to 
 a bolder and yet more unscrupulous device. The entire
 
 140 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 subjection of Italy to the Emperor was drawing closer the 
 French alliance ; and a new treaty had been concluded in 
 April. But this had hardly been signed when the sack of 
 Rome and the danger of the Pope called for bolder meas- 
 ures. Wolsey was dispatched on a solemn embassy to 
 Francis to promise an English subsidy on the dispatch of 
 a French army across the Alps. But he aimed at turning 
 the Pope's situation to the profit of the divorce. Clement 
 was virtually a prisoner in the Castle of St. Angelo ; and 
 as it was impossible for him to fulfil freely the function of 
 a Pope, Wolsey proposed in conjunction with Francis to 
 call a meeting of the College of Cardinals at Avignon 
 which should exercise the papal powers till Clement's lib- 
 eration. As Wolsey was to preside over this assembly, it 
 would be easy to win from it a favorable answer to Henry's 
 request. 
 
 But Clement had no mind to surrender his power, and 
 secret orders from the Pope prevented the Italian Cardi- 
 nals from attending such an assembly. Nor was Wolsey 
 more fortunate in another plan for bringing about the same 
 end by inducing Clement to delegate to him his full powers 
 westward of the Alps. Henry's trust in him was fast 
 waning before these failures and the steady pressure of 
 his rivals at court, and the coldness of the King on his re- 
 turn in September was an omen of his minister's fall. 
 Henry was in fact resolved to take his own course ; and 
 while Wolsey sought from the Pope a commission ena- 
 bling him to try the case in his legatine court and pronounce 
 the marriage null and void by sentence of law, Henry had 
 determined at the suggestion of the Boleyns and appar- 
 ently of Thomas Cranmer, a Cambridge scholar who was 
 serving as their chaplain, to seek without Wolsey's knowl- 
 edge from Clement either his approval of a divorce, or if 
 a divorce could not be obtained a dispensation to re-marry 
 without any divorce at all. For some months his envoys 
 could find no admission to the Pope; and though in De- 
 cember Clement succeeded in escaping to Orvieto and drew
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 141 
 
 some courage from the entry of the French army into Italy, 
 his temper was still too timid to venture on any decided 
 course. He refused the dispensation altogether. Wolsey's 
 proposal for leaving the matter to a legatine court found 
 better favor; but when the commission reached England 
 it was found to be "of no effect or authority." What 
 Henry wanted was not merely a divorce but the express 
 sanction of the Pope to his divorce, and this Clement stead- 
 ily evaded. A fresh embassy with Wolsey's favorite and 
 secretary, Stephen Gardiner, at its head reached Orvieto 
 in March 1528 to find in spite of Gardiner's threats hardly 
 better success ; but Clement at last consented to a legatine 
 commission for the trial of the case in England. In this 
 commission Cardinal Campeggio, who was looked upon as 
 a partisan of the English King, was joined with Wolsey. 
 Great as the concession seemed, this gleam of success 
 failed to hide from the minister the dangers which gath- 
 ered round him. The great nobles whom he had practi- 
 cally shut out from the King's counsels were longing for 
 his fall. The Boleyns and the young courtiers looked on 
 him as cool in Anne's cause. He was hated alike by men 
 of the old doctrine and men of the new. The clergy had 
 never forgotten his extortions, the monks saw him sup- 
 pressing small monasteries. The foundation of Cardinal 
 College failed to reconcile to him the scholars of the New 
 Learning; their poet, Skelton, was among his bitterest 
 assailants. The Protestants, goaded by the persecution 
 of this very year, hated him with a deadly hatred. His 
 French alliances, his declaration of war with the Emperor, 
 hindered the trade with Flanders and secured the hostility 
 of the merchant class. The country at large, galled with 
 murrain and famine and panic-struck by an outbreak of 
 the sweating sickness which carried off two thousand in 
 London alone, laid all its suffering at the door of the Car- 
 dinal. % And now that Henry's mood itself became uncer- 
 tain Wolsey knew his hour was come. Were the marriage 
 once made, he told the French ambassador, and a male
 
 142 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 heir born to the realm, he would withdraw from state 
 affairs and serve God for the rest of his life. But the di- 
 vorce had still to be brought about ere marriage could be 
 made or heir be born. Henry indeed had seized on the 
 grant of a commission as if the matter were at an end. 
 Anne Boleyn was installed in the royal palace, and hon- 
 ored with the state of a wife. .The new legate, Campeggio, 
 held the bishopric of Salisbury, and had been asked for as 
 judge from the belief that he would favor the King's cause. 
 But he bore secret instructions from the Pope to bring 
 about if possible a reconciliation between Henry and the 
 Queen, and in no case to pronounce sentence without ref- 
 erence to Rome. The slowness of his journey presaged 
 ill; he did not reach England till the end of September, 
 and a month was wasted in vain efforts to bring Henry to 
 a reconciliation or Catharine to retirement into a monas- 
 tery. A new difficulty disclosed itself in the supposed ex- 
 istence of a brief issued by Pope Julius and now in the 
 possession of the Emperor, which overruled all the objec- 
 tions to the earlier dispensation on which Henry relied. 
 The hearing of the cause was delayed through the winter, 
 while new embassies strove to induce Clement to declare 
 this brief also invalid. Not only was such a demand glar- 
 ingly unjust, but the progress of the Imperial arms brought 
 vividly home to the Pope its injustice. The danger which 
 he feared was not merely a danger to his temporal domain 
 in Italy. It was a danger to the Papacy itself. It was 
 in vain that new embassies threatened Clement with the 
 loss of his spiritual power over England. To break with 
 the Emperor was to risk the loss of his spiritual power 
 over a far larger world. Charles had already consented 
 to the suspension of the judgment of his diet at Worms, 
 a consent which gave security to the new Protestantism in 
 North Germany. If he burned heretics in the Netherlands, 
 he employed them in his armies. Lutheran soldiers had 
 played their part in the sack of Rome. Lutheranism had 
 spread from North Germany along the Rhine, it was now
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE MONAKCHY. 1461-1540. 143 
 
 pushing fast into the hereditary possessions of the Austrian 
 house, it had all but mastered the Low Countries. France 
 itself was mined with heresy; and were Charles once to 
 give way, the whole continent would be lost to Kome. 
 
 Amidst difficulties such as these the Papal court saw no 
 course open save one of delay. But the long delay told 
 fatally for Wolsey's fortunes. Even Clement blamed him 
 for having hindered Henry from judging the matter in 
 his own realm and marrying on the sentence of his own 
 courts, and the Boleyns naturally looked upon his policy 
 as dictated by hatred to Anne. Norfolk and the great 
 peers took courage from the bitter tone of the girl ; and 
 Henry himself charged the Cardinal with a failure in ful- 
 filling the promises he had made him. King and minister 
 still clung indeed passionately to their hopes from Rome. 
 But in 1529 Charles met their pressure with a pressure of 
 his own ; and the progress of his arms decided Clement 
 to avoke the cause to Rome. Wolsey could only hope to an- 
 ticipate this decision by pushing the trial hastily forward, 
 and at the end of May the two Legates opened their court 
 in the great hall of the Blackfriars. King and Queen were 
 cited to appear before them when the court again met on 
 the eighteenth of June. Henry briefly announced his re- 
 solve to live no longer in mortal sin. The queen offered 
 an appeal to Clement, and on the refusal of the Legates to 
 admit it flung herself at Henry's feet. " Sire," said Catha- 
 rine, " I beseech you to pity me; a woman and a stranger, 
 without an assured friend and without an indifferent coun- 
 sellor. I take God to witness that I have always been to 
 you a true and loyal wife, that I have made it my constant 
 duty to seek your pleasure, that I have loved all whom you 
 loved, whether I have reason or not, whether they are 
 friends to me or foes. I have been your wife for years; 
 I have brought you many children. God knows that when 
 I came to your bed I was a virgin, and I put it to your 
 own conscience to say whether it was not so. If there be 
 any offence which can be alleged against me I consent to 
 
 7 VOL. iJ
 
 144 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 depart with infamy ; if not, then I pray you to do me jus- 
 tice." The piteous appeal was wasted on a King who was 
 already entertaining Anne Boleyn with royal state in his 
 own palace; the trial proceeded, and on the twenty-third 
 of July the court assembled to pronounce sentence. Henry 's 
 hopes were at their highest when they were suddenly 
 dashed to the ground. At the opening of the proceedings 
 Campeggio rose to declare the court adjourned to the fol- 
 lowing October. 
 
 The adjournment was a mere evasion. The pressure 
 of the Imperialists had at last forced Clement to summon 
 the cause to his own tribunal at Rome, and the jurisdic- 
 tion of the Legates was at an end. "Now see I," cried 
 the Duke of Suffolk as he dashed his hand on the table, 
 " that the old saw is true, that there was never Legate or 
 Cardinal that did good to England!" The Duke only 
 echoed his master's wrath. Through the twenty years of 
 his reign Henry had known nothing of opposition to his 
 will. His imperious temper had chafed at the weary ne- 
 gotiations, the subterfuges and perfidies of the Pope. 
 Though the commission was his own device, his pride 
 must have been sorely galled by the summons to the Leg- 
 ates' court. The warmest adherents of the older faith 
 revolted against the degradation of the crown. " It was 
 the strangest and newest sight and device," says Caven- 
 dish, "that ever we read or heard of in any history or 
 chronicle in any region that a King and Queen should be 
 convented and constrained by process compellatory to ap- 
 pear in any court as common persons, within their own 
 realm and dominion, to abide the judgment and decree of 
 their own subjects, having the royal diadem and preroga- 
 tive thereof." Even this degradation had been borne in 
 vain. Foreign and Papal tribunal as that of the Legates 
 really was, it lay within Henry's kingdom and had the air 
 of an English court. But the citation to Rome was a 
 summons to the King to plead in a court without his realm. 
 Wolsey had himself warned Clement of the hopelessness
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE MONARCHY. 1461-1540. 145 
 
 of expecting Henry to submit to such humiliation as this. 
 " If the King be cited to appear in person or by proxy and 
 his prerogative be interfered with, none of his subjects 
 will tolerate the insult. ... To cite the King to Rome, 
 to threaten him with excommunication, is no more toler- 
 able than to deprive him of his royal dignity. ... If he 
 were to appear in Italy it would be at the head of a for- 
 midable army." But Clement had been deaf to the warn- 
 ing, and the case had been avoked out of the realm. 
 
 Henry's wrath fell at once on Wolsey. Whatever fur- 
 therance or hindrance the Cardinal had given to his re- 
 marriage, it was Wolsey who had dissuaded him from 
 acting at the first independently, from conducting the 
 cause in his own courts and acting on the sentence of his 
 own judges. Whether to secure the succession by a more 
 indisputable decision or to preserve uninjured the pre- 
 rogatives of the Papal see, it was Wolsey who had coun- 
 selled him to seek a divorce from Rome and promised him 
 success in his suit. And in this counsel Wolsey stood 
 alone. Even Clement had urged the King to carry out 
 his original purpose when it was too late. All that the 
 Pope sought was to be freed from the necessity of med- 
 dling in the matter at all. It was Wolsey who had forced 
 Papal intervention on him, as he had forced it on Henry, 
 and the failure of his plans was fatal to him. From the 
 close of the Legatine court Henry would see him no more, 
 and his favorite, Stephen Gardiner, who had become chief 
 Secretary of State, succeeded him in the King's confidence. 
 If Wolsey still remained minister for a while, it was be- 
 cause the thread of the complex foreign negotiations which 
 he was conducting could not be roughly broken. Here 
 too however failure awaited him. His diplomacy sought 
 to bring fresh pressure on the Pope and to provide a fresh 
 check on the Emperor by a closer alliance with France. 
 But Francis was anxious to recover his children who had 
 remained as hostages for his return ; he was weary of the 
 long struggle, and hopeless of aid from his Italian allies.
 
 146 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 At this crisis of his fate therefore Wolsey saw himself de- 
 ceived and outwitted by the conclusion of peace between 
 France and the Emperor in a new treaty at Cambray. 
 Not only was his French policy no longer possible, but a 
 reconciliation with Charles was absolutely needful, and 
 such a reconciliation could only be brought about by Wol- 
 sey's fall. In October, on the very day that the Cardinal 
 took his place with a haughty countenance and all his 
 former pomp in the Court of Chancery, an indictment was 
 preferred against him by the King's attorney for receiving 
 bulls from Rome in violation of the Statute of Provisors. 
 A few days later he was deprived of the seals. Wolsey 
 was prostrated by the blow. In a series of abject appeals 
 he offered to give up everything that he possessed if the 
 King would but cease from his displeasure. " His face, " 
 wrote the French ambassador, "is dwindled to half its 
 natural size. In truth his misery is such that his enemies, 
 Englishmen as they are, cannot help pitying him." For 
 the moment Henry seemed contented with his disgrace. 
 A thousand boats full of Londoners covered the Thames 
 to see the Cardinal's barge pass to the Tower, but he was 
 permitted to retire to Esher. Although judgment of for- 
 feiture and imprisonment was given against him in the 
 King's Bench at the close of October, in the following Feb- 
 ruary he received a pardon on surrender of his vast pos- 
 sessions to the Crown and was permitted to withdraw to 
 his diocese of York, the one dignity he had been suffered 
 to retain.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THOMAS CROMWELL. 
 15291540. 
 
 THE ten years which follow the fall of Wolsey are among 
 the most momentous in our history. The Monarchy at 
 last realized its power, and the work for which Wolsey 
 had paved the way was carried out with a terrible thor- 
 oughness. The one great institution which could still offer 
 resistance to the royal will was struck down. The Church 
 became a mere instrument of the central despotism. The 
 people learned their helplessness in rebellions easily sup- 
 pressed and avenged with ruthless severity. A reign of 
 terror, organized with consummate and merciless skill, 
 held England panic-stricken at Henry's feet. The noblest 
 heads rolled from the block. Virtue and learning could 
 not save Thomas More ; royal descent could not save Lady 
 Salisbury. The putting away of one queen, the execution 
 of another, taught England that nothing was too high for 
 Henry's " courage" or too sacred for his " appetite." Par- 
 liament assembled only to sanction acts of unscrupulous 
 tyranny, or to build up by its own statutes the fabric of 
 absolute rule. All the constitutional safeguards of Eng- 
 lish freedom were swept away. Arbitrary taxation, ar- 
 bitrary legislation, arbitrary imprisonment were powers 
 claimed without dispute and unsparingly used by the 
 Crown. 
 
 The history of this great revolution, for it is nothing 
 less, is the history of a single man. In the whole line of 
 English statesmen there is no one of whom we would will- 
 ingly know so much, no one of whom we really know so 
 little, as of Thomas Cromwell. When he meets us in
 
 148 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 Henry's service he had already passed middle life; and 
 during his earlier years it is hardly possible to do more 
 than disentangle a few fragmentary facts from the mass 
 of fable which gathered round them. His youth was one 
 of roving adventure. Whether he was the son of a poor 
 blacksmith at Putney or no, he could hardly have been 
 more than a boy when he was engaged in the service of 
 the Marchioness of Dorset, and he must still have been 
 young when he took part as a common soldier in the wars 
 of Italy, a "ruffian," as he owned afterward to Cranmer, 
 in the most unscrupulous school the world contained. But 
 it was a school in which he learned lessons even more dan- 
 gerous than those of the camp. He not only mastered the 
 Italian language but drank in the manners and tone of the 
 Italy around him, the Italy of the Borgias and the Medici. 
 It was with Italian versatility that he turned from the 
 camp to the counting-house ; he was certainly engaged as 
 a commercial agent to one of the Venetian traders; tradi- 
 tion finds him as a clerk at Antwerp; and in 1512 history 
 at last encounters him as a thriving wool merchant at 
 Middelburg in Zealand. 
 
 Returning to England, Cromwell continued to amass 
 wealth as years went on by adding the trade of scrivener, 
 something between that of a banker and attorney, to his 
 other occupations, as well as by advancing money to the 
 poorer nobles ; and on the outbreak of the second war with 
 France we find him a busy and influential member of the 
 Commons in Parliament. Five years later, in 1528, the 
 aim of his ambition was declared by his entering into 
 Wolsey's service. The Cardinal needed a man of busi- 
 ness for the suppression of the smaller monasteries which 
 he had undertaken as well as for the transfer of their rev- 
 enues to his foundations at Oxford and Ipswich, and he 
 showed his usual skill in the choice of men by finding such 
 an agent in Cromwell. The task was an unpopular one, 
 and it was carried out with a rough indifference to the 
 feelings it aroused which involved Cromwell in the hate
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 149 
 
 that was gathering round his master. But his wonderful 
 self-reliance and sense of power only broke upon the world 
 at Wolsey's fall. Of the hundreds of dependents who 
 waited on the Cardinal's nod, Cromwell, hated and in dan- 
 ger as he must have known himself to be, was the only 
 one who clung to his master at the last. In the lonely 
 hours of his disgrace a,t Esher Wolsey "made his moan 
 unto Master Cromwell, who comforted him the best he 
 could, and desired my Lord to give him leave to go to 
 London, where he would make or mar, which was always 
 his common saying." His plan was to purchase not only 
 his master's safety but his own. Wolsey was persuaded 
 to buy off the hostility of the courtiers by giving his per- 
 sonal confirmation to the prodigal grants of pensions and 
 annuities which had been already made from his revenues, 
 while Cromwell acquired importance as the go-between in 
 these transactions. "Then began both noblemen and 
 others who had patents from the King," for grants from 
 the Cardinal's estate, "to make earnest suit to Master 
 Cromwell for to solicit their causes, and for his pains 
 therein they promised not only to reward him, but to show 
 him such pleasure as should be in their power." But if 
 Cromwell showed his consummate craft in thus serving 
 himself as well as his master, he can have had no personal 
 reasons for the stand he made in the Parliament which 
 was summoned in November against a bill for disqualify- 
 ing the Cardinal for all after employment, which was in- 
 troduced by Norfolk and More. It was by Cromwell that 
 this was defeated and it was by him that the negotiations 
 were conducted which permitted the fallen minister to 
 withdraw pardoned to York. 
 
 A general esteem seems to have rewarded this rare in- 
 stance of fidelity to a ruined patron. " For his honest be- 
 havior in his master's cause he was esteemed the most 
 faithfullest servant, and was of all men greatly com- 
 mended." Cromwell however had done more than save 
 himself from ruin. The negotiations for Wolsey's pen-
 
 150 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 sions had given him access to the King, and " by his witty 
 demeanor he grew continually in the King's favor." But 
 the favor had been won by more than "witty demeanor." 
 In a private interview with Henry Cromwell boldly ad- 
 vised him to cut the knot of the divorce by the simple exer- 
 cise of his own supremacy. The advice struck the key- 
 note of the later policy by which the daring counsellor was 
 to change the whole face of Church and State ; but Henry 
 still clung to the hopes held out by the new ministers who 
 had followed Wolsey, and shrank perhaps as yet from the 
 bare absolutism to which Cromwell called him. The ad- 
 vice at any rate was concealed ; and, though high in the 
 King's favor, his new servant waited patiently the progress 
 of events. 
 
 The first result of Wolsey's fall was a marked change in 
 the system of administration. Both the Tudor Kings had 
 carried on their government mainly through the agency of 
 great ecclesiastics. Archbishop Morton and Bishop Fox 
 had been successively ministers of Henry the Seventh. 
 Wolsey had been the minister of Henry the Eighth. But 
 with the ruin of the Cardinal the rule of the churchmen 
 ceased. The seals were given to Sir Thomas More. The 
 real direction of affairs lay in the hands of two great 
 nobles, of the Duke of Suffolk who was President of the 
 Council, and of the Lord Treasurer, .Thomas Howard, the 
 Duke of Norfolk. From this hour to the close of the age 
 of the Tudors the Howards were to play a prominent part 
 in English history. They had originally sprung from the 
 circle of lawyers who rose to wealth and honor through 
 their employment by the crown. Their earliest known 
 ancestor was a judge under Edward the First ; and his de- 
 scendants remained wealthy landowners in the eastern 
 counties till early in the fifteenth century they were sud- 
 denly raised to distinction by the marriage of Sir Robert 
 Howard with a wife who became heiress of the houses of 
 Arundel and Norfolk, the Fitz- Alans and the Mowbrays. 
 John Howard, the issue of this marriage, was a prominent
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 151 
 
 Yorkist and stood high in the favor of the Yorkist kings. 
 He was one of the councillors of Edward the Fourth, and 
 received from Richard the Third the old dignities of the 
 house of Mowbray, the office of Earl Marshal and the 
 Dukedom of Norfolk. But he had hardly risen to great- 
 ness when he fell fighting by Richard's side at Bosworth 
 Field. His son was taken prisoner in the same battle and 
 remained for three years in the Tower. But his refusal to 
 join in the rising of the Earl of Lincoln was rewarded by 
 Henry the Seventh with his release, his restoration to the 
 Earldom of Surrey, and his employment in the service of 
 the crown where he soon took rank among the king's most 
 trusted councillors. His military abilities were seen in 
 campaigns against the Scots which won back for him the 
 office of Earl Marshal, and in the victory of Flodden which 
 restored to him the Dukedom of Norfolk. The son of this 
 victor of Flodden, Thomas, Earl of Surrey, had already 
 served as lieutenant in Ireland and as general against Al- 
 bany on the Scottish frontier before his succession to the 
 dukedom in 1524. His coolness and tact had displayed 
 themselves during the revolt against Benevolences, when 
 his influence alone averted a rising in the Eastern Coun- 
 ties. Since Buckingham's death his house stood at the 
 head of the English nobility : his office of Lord Treasurer 
 placed him high at the royal council board ; and Henry's 
 love for his niece, Anne Boleyn, gave a fresh spur to the 
 duke's ambition. But his influence had till now been 
 overshadowed by the greatness of Wolsey. With the 
 Cardinal's fall however he at once came to the front. 
 Though he had bowed to the royal policy, he was known 
 as the leader of the party which clung to alliance with the 
 Emperor, and now that such an alliance was needful Henry 
 counted on Norfolk to renew the friendship with Charles. 
 An even greater revolution was seen in the summons of 
 a Parliament which met in November 1529. Its assembly 
 was no doubt prompted in part by the actual needs of the 
 Crown, for Henry was not only penniless but overwhelmed
 
 152 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 with debts and Parliament alone could give him freedom 
 from these embarrassments. But the importance of the 
 questions brought before the Houses, and their repeated 
 assembly throughout the rest of Henry's reign, point to a 
 definite change in the royal system. The policy of Ed- 
 ward the Fourth, of Henry the Seventh, and of Wolsey 
 was abandoned. Instead of looking on Parliament as a 
 danger the monarchy now felt itself strong enough to use 
 it as a tool. The obedience of the Commons was seen in 
 the readiness with which they at once passed a bill to re- 
 lease the crown from its debts. But Henry counted on 
 more than obedience. He counted, and justly counted, on 
 the warm support of the Houses in his actual strife with 
 Rome. The plan of a divorce was no doubt unpopular. 
 So violent was the indignation against Anne Boleyn that 
 she hardly dared to stir abroad. But popular feeling ran 
 almost as bitterly against the Papacy. The sight of an 
 English King and an English Queen pleading before a 
 foreign tribunal revived the old resentment against the 
 subjection of Englishmen to Papal courts. The helpless- 
 ness of Clement in the grasp of the Emperor recalled the 
 helplessness of the Popes at Avignon in the grasp of the 
 Kings of France. That Henry should sue for justice to 
 Rome was galling enough, but the hottest adherent of the 
 Papacy was outraged when the suit of his King was 
 granted or refused at the will of Charles. It was against 
 this degradation of the Crown that the Statutes of Pro- 
 visors and Praemunire had been long since aimed. The 
 need of Papal support to their disputed title which had 
 been felt by the houses of Lancaster and York had held 
 these statutes in suspense, and the Legatine Court of Wol- 
 sey had openly defied them. They were still however 
 legally in force; they were part of the Parliamentary 
 tradition; and it was certain that Parliament would be as 
 ready as ever to enforce the independent jurisdiction of 
 the Crown. 
 Not less significant was the attitude of the New Learn-
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 153 
 
 ing. On Wolsey's fail the seals had been offered to War- 
 ham, and it was probably at his counsel that they were 
 finally given to Sir Thomas More. The chancellor's dream, 
 if we may judge it from the acts of his brief ministry, 
 seems to have been that of carrying out the religious ref- 
 ormation which had been demanded by Colet and Erasmus 
 while checking the spirit of revolt against the unity of the 
 Church. His severities against the Protestants, exagger- 
 ated as they have been by polemic rancor, remain the 
 one stain on a memory that knows no other. But it was 
 only by a rigid severance of the cause of reform from what 
 seemed to him the cause of revolution that More could 
 hope for a successful issue to the projects of reform which 
 the council laid before Parliament. The Petition of the 
 Commons sounded like an echo of Colet 's famous address 
 to the Convocation. It attributed the growth of heresy 
 not more to " frantic and seditious books published in the 
 English tongue contrary to the very true Catholic and 
 Christian faith" than to "the extreme and uncharitable 
 behavior of divers ordinaries." It remonstrated against 
 the legislation of the clergy in Convocation without the 
 King's assent or that of his subjects, the oppressive pro- 
 cedure of the Church Courts, the abuses of ecclesiastical 
 patronage, and the excessive number of holydays. Henry 
 referred the Petition to the bishops, but they could devise 
 no means of redress, and the ministry persisted in pushing 
 through the Houses their bills for ecclesiastical reform. 
 The importance of the new measures lay really in the ac- 
 tion of Parliament. They were an explicit announcement 
 that church-reform was now to be undertaken, not by the 
 clergy, but by the people at large. On the other hand it 
 was clear that it would be carried out in a spirit of loyalty 
 to the church. The Commons forced from Bishop Fisher 
 an apology for words which were taken as a doubt thrown 
 on their orthodoxy. Henry forbade the circulation of 
 Tyndale's translation of the Bible as executed in a Protes- 
 tant spirit. The reforming measures however were pushed
 
 154 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 resolutely on. Though the questions of Convocation and 
 the Bishops' courts were adjourned for further considera- 
 tion, the fees of the courts were curtailed, the clergy re- 
 stricted from lay employments, pluralities restrained, and 
 residence enforced. In spite of a dogged opposition from 
 the bishops the bills received the assent of the House of 
 Lords, " to the great rejoicing of lay people, and the great 
 displeasure of spiritual persons." 
 
 Not less characteristic of the New Learning was the in- 
 tellectual pressure it strove to bring to bear on the wavering 
 Pope. Cranmer was still active in the cause of Anne 
 Boleyn ; he had just published a book in favor of the di- 
 vorce ; and he now urged on the ministry an appeal to the 
 learned opinion of Christendom by calling for the judgment 
 of the chief universities of Europe. His counsel was 
 adopted ; but Norfolk trusted to coarser means of attaining 
 his end. Like most of the English nobles and the whole 
 of the merchant class, his sympathies were with the House 
 of Burgundy ; he looked upon Wolsey as the real hindrance 
 to the divorce through the French policy which had driven 
 Charles into a hostile attitude ; and he counted on the Car- 
 dinal's fall to bring about a renewal of friendship with the 
 Emperor and to insure his support. The father of Anne 
 Boleyn, now created Earl of Wiltshire, was sent in 1530 
 on this errand to the Imperial Court. But Charles re- 
 mained firm to Catharine's cause, and Clement would do 
 nothing in defiance of the Emperor. Nor was the appeal 
 to the learned world more successful. In France the pro- 
 fuse bribery of the English agents would have failed with 
 the university of Paris but for the interference of Francis 
 himself, eager to regain Henry's goodwill by this office of 
 friendship. As shameless an exercise of the King's own 
 authority was needed to wring an approval of his cause 
 from Oxford and Cambridge. In Germany the very Prot- 
 estants, then in the fervor of their moral revival and hop- 
 ing little from a proclaimed opponent of Luther, were dead 
 against the King. So far as could be seen from Cranmer's
 
 "' CHAP. 4.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 155 
 
 test every learned man in Christendom but for bribery and 
 threats would have condemned the royal cause. Henry 
 was embittered by failures which he attributed to the un- 
 skilful diplomacy of his new counsellors; and it was ru- 
 mored that he had been heard to regret the loss of the more 
 dexterous statesman whom they had overthrown. Wolsey 
 who since the beginning of the year had remained at York, 
 though busy in appearance with the duties of his see, was 
 hoping more and more as the months passed by for his re- 
 call. But the jealousy of his political enemies was roused 
 by the King's regrets, and the pitiless hand of Norfolk 
 was seen in the quick and deadly blow which he dealt at 
 his fallen rival. On the fourth of November, on the eve 
 of his installation feast, the Cardinal was arrested on a 
 charge of high treason and conducted by the Lieutenant 
 of the Tower toward London. Already broken by his 
 enormous labors, by internal disease, and the sense of his 
 fall, Wolsey accepted the arrest as a sentence of death. 
 An attack of dysentery forced him to rest at the abbey of 
 Leicester, and as he reached the gate he said feebly to the 
 brethren who met him, "I am come to lay my bones 
 among you." On his death-bed his thoughts still clung 
 to the prince whom he had served. " Had I but served 
 God as diligently as I have served the king," murmured 
 the dying man, " He would not have given me over in my 
 gray hairs. But this is my due reward for my pains and 
 study, not regarding my service to God, but only my duty 
 to my prince." 
 
 No words could paint with so terrible a truthfulness the 
 spirit of the new despotism which Wolsey had done more 
 than any of those who went before him to build up. From 
 tempers like his all sense of loyalty to England, to its free- 
 dom, to its institutions, had utterly passed away, and the 
 one duty which the statesman owned was a duty to his 
 "prince." To what issues such a conception of a states- 
 man's duty might lead was now to be seen in the career 
 of a greater than Wolsey. The two dukes had stmck
 
 156 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 down the Cardinal only to set up another master in his 
 room. Since his interview with Henry Cromwell had re- 
 mained in the King's service, where his steady advance 
 in the royal favor was marked by his elevation to the post 
 of secretary of state. His patience was at last rewarded 
 by the failure of the policy for which his own had been set 
 aside. At the close of 1530 the college of cardinals for- 
 mally rejected the King's request for leave to decide the 
 whole matter in his own spiritual courts ; and the defeat 
 of Norfolk's project drove Henry nearer and nearer to the 
 bold plan from which he had shrunk at Wolsey's fall 
 Cromwell was again ready with his suggestion that the 
 King should disavow the Papal jurisdiction, declare him- 
 self Head of the Church within his realm, and obtain a di- 
 vorce from his own Ecclesiastical Courts. But he looked 
 on the divorce as simply the prelude to a series of changes 
 which the new minister was bent upon accomplishing. In 
 all his checkered life what had left its deepest stamp on 
 him was Italy. Not only in the rapidity and ruthlessness 
 of his designs, but in their larger scope, their clearer pur- 
 pose, and their admirable combination, the Italian state- 
 craft entered with Cromwell into English politics. He is 
 in fact the first English minister in whom we can trace 
 through the whole period of his rule the steady working 
 out of a great and definite aim, that of raising the King 
 to absolute authority on the ruins of every rival power 
 within the realm. It was not that Cromwell was a mere 
 slave of tyranny. Whether we may trust the tale that 
 carries him in his youth to Florence or no, his statesman- 
 ship was closely modelled on the ideal of the Florentine 
 thinker whose book was constantly in his hand. Even as 
 a servant of Wolsey he startled the future Cardinal, Regi- 
 nald Pole, by bidding him take for his manual in politics 
 the " Prince" of Machiavelli. Machiavelli hoped to find in 
 Ca3sar Borgia or in the later Lorenzo de' Medici a tyrant 
 who after crushing all rival tyrannies might unite and re- 
 generate Italy; and terrible and ruthless as his policy was,
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE MONAKCHY. 1461-1540. 157 
 
 the final aim of Cromwell seems to have been that of Machi- 
 avelli, an aim of securing enlightenment and order for 
 England by the concentration of all authority in the crown. 
 The first step toward such an end was the freeing the 
 monarchy from its spiritual obedience to Rome. What 
 the first of the Tudors had done for the political independ- 
 ence of the kingdom, the second was to do for its ecclesi- 
 astical independence. Henry the Seventh had freed Eng- 
 land from the interference of France or the House of 
 Burgundy; and in the question of the divorce Cromwell 
 saw the means of bringing Henry the Eighth to free it 
 from the interference of the Papacy. In such an effort re- 
 sistance could be looked for only from the clergy. But 
 their resistance was what Cromwell desired. The last 
 check on royal absolutism which had survived the Wars 
 of the Roses lay in the wealth, the independent synods and 
 jurisdiction, and the religious claims of the church ; and 
 for the success of the new policy it was necessary to reduce 
 the great ecclesiastical body to a mere department of the 
 State in which all authority should flow from the sove- 
 reign alone, his will be the only law, his decision the only 
 test of truth. Such a change however was hardly to be 
 wrought without a struggle ; and the question of national 
 independence in all ecclesiastical matters furnished ground 
 on which the crown could conduct this struggle to the best 
 advantage. The secretary's first blow showed how un- 
 scrupulously the struggle was to be waged. A year had 
 passed since Wolsey had been convicted of a breach of the 
 Statute of Provisors. The pedantry of the judges declared 
 the whole nation to have been formally involved in the 
 same charge by its acceptance of his authority. The legal 
 absurdity was now redressed by a general pardon, but from 
 this pardon the clergy found themselves omitted. In the 
 spring of 1531 Convocation was assembled to be told that 
 forgiveness could be bought at no less a price than the 
 payment of a fine amounting to a million of our present 
 money and the acknowledgment of the King as "the chief
 
 158 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 protector, the only and supreme lord, and Head of the 
 Church and Clergy of England." Unjust as was the first 
 demand, they at once submitted to it ; against the second 
 they struggled hard. But their appeals to Henry and 
 Cromwell met only with demands for instant obedience. 
 A compromise was at last arrived at by the insertion of a 
 qualifying phrase " So far as the law of Christ will allow ;" 
 and with this addition the words were again submitted by 
 Warham to the Convocation. There was a general silence. 
 " Whoever is silent seems to consent," said the Archbishop. 
 "Then are we all silent," replied a voice from among the 
 crowd. 
 
 There is no ground for thinking that the " Headship of 
 the Church" which Henry claimed in this submission was 
 more than a warning addressed to the independent spirit 
 of the clergy, or that it bore as yet the meaning which 
 was afterward attached to it. It certainly implied no in- 
 dependence of Rome, for negotiations were still being car- 
 ried on with the Papal Court. But it told Clement plainly 
 that in any strife that might come between himself and 
 Henry the clergy were in the King's hand, and that he 
 must look for no aid from them in any struggle with the 
 crown. The warning was backed by an address to the 
 Pope from the Lords and some of the Commons who as- 
 sembled after a fresh prorogation of the Houses in the 
 spring. " The cause of his Majesty," the Peers were made 
 to say, "is the cause of each of ourselves." They laid be- 
 fore the Pope what they represented as the judgment of 
 the Universities in favor of the divorce ; but they faced 
 boldly the event of its rejection. "Our condition," they 
 ended, " will not be wholly irremediable. Extreme reme- 
 dies are ever harsh of application ; but he that is sick will 
 by all means be rid of his distemper." In the summer the 
 banishment of Catharine from the King's palace to a house 
 at Ampthill showed the firmness of Henry's resolve. Each 
 of these acts were no doubt intended to tell on the Pope's 
 decision, for Henry still clung to the hope of extorting from
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 159 
 
 Clement a favorable answer, and at the close of the year 
 a fresh embassy with Gardiner, now Bishop of Winches- 
 ter, at its head was dispatched to the Papal Court. But 
 the embassy failed like its predecessors, and at the opening 
 of 1532 Cromwell was free to take more decisive steps in 
 the course on which he had entered. 
 
 What the nature of his policy was to be had already 
 been detected by eyes as keen as his own. More had seen 
 in Wolsey's fall an opening for the realization of those 
 schemes of religious and even of political reform on which 
 the scholars of the New Learning had long been brooding. 
 The substitution of the Lords of the Council for the auto- 
 cratic rule of the Cardinal-minister, the break-up of the 
 great mass of powers which had been gathered into a sin- 
 gle hand, the summons of a Parliament, the ecclesiastical 
 reforms which it at once sanctioned, were measures which 
 promised a more legal and constitutional system of govern- 
 ment. The question of the divorce presented to More no 
 serious difficulty. Untenable as Henry's claim seemed to 
 the new Chancellor, his faith in the omnipotence of Par- 
 liament would have enabled him to submit to any statute 
 which named a new spouse as Queen and her children as 
 heirs to the crown. But as Cromwell's policy unfolded 
 itself he saw that more than this was impending. The 
 Catholic instinct of his mind, the dread of a rent Chris- 
 tendom and of the wars and bigotry that must come of its 
 rending, united with More's theological convictions to re* 
 sist any spiritual severance of England from the Papacy. 
 His love for freedom, his revolt against the growing autoc- 
 racy of the crown, the very height and grandeur of his 
 own spiritual convictions, all bent him to withstand a sys- 
 tem which would concentrate in the King the whole power 
 of Church as of State, would leave him without the one 
 check that remained on his despotism, and make him ar- 
 biter of the religious faith of his subjects. The later re- 
 volt of the Puritans against the King- worship which Crom- 
 well established proved the justice of the provision which
 
 160 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 forced More in the spring of 1532 to resign the post of 
 Chancellor. 
 
 But the revolution from which he shrank was an inevi- 
 table one. Till now every Englishman had practically 
 owned a double life and a double allegiance. As citizen 
 of a temporal state his life was bounded by English shores 
 and his loyalty due exclusively to his English King. But 
 as citizen of the state spiritual he belonged not to England, 
 but to Christendom. The law which governed him was 
 not a national law but a law that embraced every Euro- 
 pean nation, and the ordinary course of judicial appeals in 
 ecclesiastical cases proved to him that the sovereignty in 
 all matters of conscience or religion lay not at Westmin- 
 ster but at Rome. Such a distinction could scarcely fail 
 to bring embarrassment with it as the sense of national 
 life and national pride waxed stronger ; and from the reign 
 of the Edwards the problem of reconciling the spiritual 
 and temporal relations of the realm grew daily more diffi- 
 cult. Parliament had hardly risen into life when it be- 
 came the organ of the national jealousy, whether of any 
 Papal jurisdiction without the realm or of the separate 
 life and separate jurisdiction of the clergy within it. The 
 movement was long arrested by religious reaction and civil 
 war. But the fresh sense of national greatness which 
 sprang from the policy of Henry the Eighth, the fresh 
 sense of national unity as the Monarchy gathered all power 
 into its single hand, would have itself revived the contest 
 even without the spur of the divorce. What the question 
 of the divorce really did was to stimulate the movement 
 by bringing into clearer view the wreck of the great Chris- 
 tian commonwealth of which England had till now formed 
 a part, and the impossibility of any real exercise of a spir- 
 itual sovereignty over it by the weakened Papacy, as well 
 as by outraging the national pride through the summons 
 of the King to a foreign bar and the submission of Eng- 
 lish interests to the will of a foreign Emperor. 
 
 With such a spur as this the movement which More
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE MONARCHY. 1461-1540. 161 
 
 dreaded moved forward as quickly as Cromwell desired. 
 The time had come when England was to claim for her- 
 self the fulness of power, ecclesiastical as well as temporal, 
 within her bounds ; and in the concentration of all author- 
 ity within the hands of the sovereign which was the polit- 
 ical characteristic of the time to claim this power for the 
 nation was to claim it for the King. The import of that 
 headship of the Church which Henry had assumed in the 
 preceding year was brought fully out in one of the propo- 
 sitions laid before the Convocation of 1532. " The King's 
 Majesty," runs this memorable clause, "hath as well the 
 care of the souls of his subjects as their bodies ; and may 
 by the law of God by his Parliament make laws touching 
 and concerning as well the one as the other." The princi- 
 ple embodied in these words was carried out in a series of 
 decisive measures. Under strong pressure the Convoca- 
 tion was brought to pray that the power of independent 
 legislation till now exercised by the Church should come 
 to an end, and to promise " that from henceforth we shall 
 forbear to enact, promulge, or put into execution any such 
 constitutions and ordinances so by us to be made in time 
 coming, unless your Highness by your royal assent shall 
 license us to make, promulge, and execute them, and the 
 same so made be approved by your Highness' authority." 
 Rome was dealt with in the same unsparing fashion. The 
 Parliament forbade by statute any further appeals to the 
 Papal Court ; and on a petition from the clergy in Convo- 
 cation the Houses granted power to the King to suspend 
 the payments of first-fruits, or the year's revenue which 
 each bishop paid to Rome on his election to a see. All 
 judicial, all financial connection with the Papacy was 
 broken by these two measures. The last indeed was as 
 yet but a menace which Henry might use in his negotia- 
 tions with Clement. The hope which had been entertained 
 of aid from Charles was now abandoned ; and the overthrow 
 of Norfolk and his policy of alliance with the Empire was 
 een at the midsummer of 1632 in the conclusion of a
 
 162 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 league with France. Cromwell had fallen back on Wol- 
 sey's system ; and the divorce was now to be looked for 
 from the united pressure of the French and English Kings 
 on the Papal Court. 
 
 But the pressure was as unsuccessful as before. In 
 November Clement threatened the King with excommuni- 
 cation if he did not restore Catharine to her place as Queen 
 and abstain from all intercourse with Anne Boleyn till the 
 case was tried. But Henry still refused to submit to the 
 judgment of any court outside his realm ; and the Pope, 
 ready as he was with evasion and delay, dared not alienate 
 Charles by consenting to a trial within it. The lavish 
 pledges which Francis had given in an interview during 
 the preceding summer may have aided to spur the King 
 to a decisive step which closed the long debate. At the 
 opening of 1533 Henry was privately married to Anne 
 Boleyn. The match however was carefully kept secret 
 while the Papal sanction was being gained for the appoint- 
 ment of Cranmer to the see of Canterbury, which had 
 become vacant by Archbishop Warham's death in the 
 preceding year. But Cranmer's consecration at the close 
 of March was the signal for more open action, and Crom- 
 well's policy was at last brought fairly into play. The 
 new primate at once laid the question of the King's mar- 
 riage before the two Houses of Convocation, and both 
 voted that the license of Pope Julius had been beyond the 
 Papal powers and that the marriage which it authorized 
 was void. In May the King's suit was brought before 
 the Archbishop in his court at Dunstable; his judgment 
 annulled the marriage with Catharine as void from the 
 beginning, and pronounced the marriage with Anne 
 Boleyn, which her pregnancy had forced Henry to reveal, 
 a lawful marriage. A week later the hand of Cranmer 
 placed upon Anne's brow the crown which she had coveted 
 so long. 
 
 "There was much murmuring" at measures such as 
 these. Many thought "that the Bishop of Boss* would
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE MONAECHY. 14611540. 163 
 
 curse all Englishmen, and that the Emperor and he would 
 destroy all the people." Fears of the overthrow of religion 
 told on the clergy ; the merchants dreaded an interruption 
 of the trade with Flanders, Italy and Spain. But 
 Charles, though still loyal to his aunt's cause, had no mind 
 to incur risks for her ; and Clement, though he annulled 
 Cranmer's proceedings, hesitated as yet to take sterner 
 action. Henry, on the other hand, conscious that the die 
 was thrown, moved rapidly forward in the path that 
 Cromwell had opened. The Pope's reversal of the Pri- 
 mate's judgment was answered by an appeal to a General 
 Council. The decision of the cardinals to whom the case 
 was referred in the spring of 1534, a decision which as- 
 serted the lawfulness of Catharine's marriage, was met by 
 the enforcement of the long suspended statute forbidding 
 the payment of first-fruits to the Pope. Though the King 
 was still firm in his resistance to Lutheran opinions and at 
 this moment endeavored to prevent by statute the importa- 
 tion of Lutheran books, the less scrupulous hand of his 
 minister was seen already striving to find a counterpoise 
 to the hostility of the Emperor in an alliance with the 
 Lutheran princes of North Germany. Cromwell was now 
 fast rising to a power which rivalled Wolsey's. His ele- 
 vation to the post of Lord Privy Seal placed him on a level 
 with the great nobles of the Council board ; and Norfolk, 
 constant in his hopes of reconciliation with Charles and 
 the Papacy, saw his plans set aside for the wider and more 
 daring projects of "the blacksmith's son." Cromwell still 
 clung to the political engine whose powers he had turned 
 to the service of the Crown. The Parliament which had 
 been summoned at Wolsey's fall met steadily year after 
 year; and measure after measure had shown its accord- 
 ance with the royal will in the strife with Rome. It was 
 now called to deal a final blow. Step by step the ground 
 had been cleared for the great Statute by which the new 
 character of the English Church was defined in the session 
 of 1534. By the Act of Supremacy authority in all mat-
 
 164 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 ters ecclesiastical was vested solely in the Crown. The 
 courts spiritual became as thoroughly the King's courts as 
 the temporal courts at Westminster. The Statute ordered 
 that the King " shall be taken, accepted, and reputed the 
 only supreme head on earth of the Church of England, 
 and shall have and enjoy annexed and united to the Im- 
 perial Crown of this realm as well the title and state there- 
 of as all the honors, jurisdictions, authorities, immunities, 
 profits, and commodities to the said dignity belonging, 
 with full power to visit, repress, redress, reform, and 
 amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, contempts, and 
 enormities, which by any manner of spiritual authority 
 or jurisdiction might or may lawfully be reformed. " 
 
 The full import of the Act of Supremacy was only seen 
 in the following year. At the opening of 1535 Henry 
 formally took the title of " on earth Supreme Head of the 
 Church of England," and some months later Cromwell 
 was raised to the post of Vicar-General, or Vicegerent of 
 the King in all matters ecclesiastical. His title, like his 
 office, recalled the system of Wolsey. It was not only as 
 Legate, but in later years as Vicar-general of the Pope, 
 that Wolsey had brought all spiritual causes in England 
 to an English court. The supreme ecclesiastical jurisdic- 
 tion in the realm passed into the hands of a minister who 
 as Chancellor already exercised its supreme civil juris- 
 diction. The Papal power had therefore long seemed 
 transferred to the Crown before the legislative measures 
 which followed the divorce actually transferred it. It was 
 \in fact the system of Catholicism itself that trained men 
 to look without surprise on the concentration of all spirit- 
 ual and secular authority in Cromwell. Successor to 
 Wolsey as Keeper of the Great Seal, it seemed natural 
 enough that Cromwell should succeed him also as Vicar- 
 General of the Church and that the union of the two 
 powers should be restored in the hands of a minister of 
 the King. But the mere fact that these powers were 
 united in the hands not of a priest but of a layman showed
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE MONARCHY. 1461-1540. 165 
 
 the new drift of the royal policy. The Church was no 
 longer to be brought indirectly under the royal power; in 
 the policy of Cromwell it was to be openly laid prostrate 
 at the foot of the throne. 
 
 And this policy his position enabled him to carry out 
 with a terrible thoroughness. One great step toward its 
 realization had already been taken in the statute which 
 annihilated the free legislative powers of the convocations 
 of the Clergy. Another followed in an act which under 
 the pretext of restoring the free election of bishops turned 
 every prelate into a nominee of the King. The election 
 of bishops by the chapters of their cathedral churches had 
 long become formal, and their appointment had since the 
 time of the Edwards been practically made by the Papacy 
 on the nomination of the Crown. The privilege of free 
 election was now with bitter irony restored to the chapters, 
 but they were compelled on pain of pra3munire to choose 
 whatever candidate was recommended by the King. This 
 strange expedient has lasted till the present time, though 
 its character has wholly changed with the development of 
 constitutional rule. The nomination of bishops has ever 
 since the accession of the Georges passed from the King in 
 person to the Minister who represents the will of the peo- 
 ple. Practically therefore an English prelate, alone among 
 all the prelates of the world, is now raised to his episcopal 
 throne by the same popular election which raised Ambrose 
 to his episcopal chair at Milan. But at the moment of the 
 change Cromwell's measure reduced the English bishops to 
 absolute dependence on the Crown. Their dependence 
 would have been complete had his policy been thoroughly 
 carried out, and the royal power of deposition put in force, 
 as well as that of appointment. As it was Henry could 
 warn the Archbishop of Dublin that if he persevered in 
 his " proud folly, we be able to remove you again and to 
 put another man of more virtue and honesty in your place. " 
 By the more ardent partisans of the Reformation this de- 
 pendence of the bishops on the Crown was fully recognized.
 
 166 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 On the death of Henry the Eighth Cranmer took out a new 
 commission from Edward for the exercise of his office. 
 Latimer, when the royal policy clashed with his belief, 
 felt bound to resign the See of Worcester. If the power 
 of deposition was quietly abandoned by Elizabeth, the 
 abandonment was due not so much to any deference for 
 the religious instincts of the nation as to the fact that the 
 steady servility of the bishops rendered its exercise unnec- 
 essary. 
 
 A second step in Cromwell's policy followed hard on 
 this enslavement of the episcopate. Master of Convocation, 
 absolute master of the bishops, Henry had become master 
 of the monastic orders through the right of visitation over 
 them which had been transferred by the Act of Supremacy 
 from the Papacy to the Crown. The monks were soon to 
 know what this right of visitation implied in the hands of 
 the Vicar-General. As an outlet for religious enthusiasm, 
 monasticism was practically dead. The friar, now that 
 his fervor of devotion and his intellectual energy had 
 passed away, had sunk into a mere beggar. The monks 
 had become mere landowners. Most of the religious 
 houses were anxious only to enlarge their revenues and to 
 diminish the number of those who shared them. In the 
 general carelessness which prevailed as to the spiritual 
 objects of their trust, in the wasteful management of their 
 estates, in the indolence and self-indulgence which for the 
 most part characterized them, the monastic establishments 
 simply exhibited the faults of all corporate bodies that 
 have outlived the work which they were created to per- 
 form. They were no more unpopular, however, than such 
 corporate bodies generally are. The Lollard cry for their 
 suppression had died away. In the north, where some of 
 the greatest abbeys were situated, the monks were on good 
 terms with the country gentry and their houses served as 
 schools for their children ; nor is there any sign of a differ- 
 ent feeling elsewhere. 
 
 But they had drawn on themselves at once the hatred of
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE MONARCHY. 1461-1540. 167 
 
 the New Learning and of the Monarchy. In the early 
 days of the revival of letters Popes and bishops had joined 
 with princes and scholars in welcoming the diffusion of 
 culture and the hopes of religious reform. But though an 
 abbot or a prior here or there might be found among the 
 supporters of the movement, the monastic orders as a 
 whole repelled it with unswerving obstinacy. The quarrel 
 only became more bitter as years went on. The keen sar- 
 casms of Erasmus, the insolent buffoonery of Hutten, 
 were lavished on the " lovers of darkness" and of the clois- 
 ter. In England Colet and More echoed with greater re- 
 serve the scorn and invective of their friends. The Mon- 
 archy had other causes for its hate. In Cromwell's system 
 there was no room for either the virtues or the vices of 
 monasticism, for its indolence and superstition, or for its 
 independence of the throne. The bold stand which the 
 monastic orders had made against benevolences had never 
 been forgiven, while the revenues of their foundations 
 offered spoil vast enough to fill the royal treasury and 
 secure a host of friends for the new reforms. Two royal 
 commissioners therefore were dispatched on a general vis- 
 itation of the religious houses, and their reports formed a 
 " Black Book" which was laid before Parliament in 1536. 
 It was acknowledged that about a third of the houses, in- 
 cluding the bulk of the larger abbeys, were fairly and de- 
 cently conducted. The rest were charged with drunken- 
 ness, with simony, and with the foulest and most revolting 
 crimes. The character of the visitors, the sweeping 
 nature of their report, and the long debate which followed 
 on its reception, leaves little doubt that these charges were 
 grossly exaggerated. But the want of any effective disci- 
 pline which had resulted from their exemption from all but 
 Papal supervision told fatally against monastic morality 
 even in abbeys like St. Alban's; and the acknowledgment 
 of Warham, as well as a partial measure of suppression 
 begun by Wolsey, go some way to prove that in the smaller 
 houses at least indolence had passed into crime. A cry 
 
 8.. VOL. 2
 
 168 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 of " Down with them" broke from the Commons as the 
 report was read. The country, however, was still far from 
 desiring the utter downfall of the monastic system, and a 
 long and bitter debate was followed by a compromise 
 which suppressed all houses whose income fell below 2*0 
 a year. Of the thousand religious houses which then ex- 
 isted in England nearly four hundred were dissolved under 
 this Act and their revenues granted to the Crown. 
 
 The secular clergy alone remained ; and injunction after 
 injunction from the Vicar-General taught rector and vicar 
 that they must learn to regard themselves as mere mouth- 
 pieces of the royal will. The Church was gagged. With 
 the instinct of genius Cromwell discerned the part which 
 the pulpit, as the one means which then existed of speak- 
 ing to the people at large, was to play in the religious and 
 political struggle that was at hand; and he resolved to 
 turn it to the profit of the Monarchy. The restriction of 
 the right of preaching to priests who received licenses 
 from the Crown silenced every voice of opposition. Even 
 to those who received these licenses theological controversy 
 was forbidden ; and a high-handed process of " tuning the 
 pulpits" by express directions as to the subject and tenor 
 of each special discourse made the preachers at every 
 crisis mere means of diffusing the royal will. As a first 
 step in this process every bishop, abbot, and parish priest, 
 was required by the new Vicar-General to preach against 
 the usurpation of the Papacy and to proclaim the king as 
 supreme Head of the Church on earth. The very topics 
 of the sermon were carefully prescribed ; the bishops were 
 held responsible for the compliance of the clergy with 
 these orders ; and the sheriffs were held responsible for the 
 obedience of the bishops. 
 
 While the great revolution which struck down the 
 Church was in progress England looked silently on. In 
 all the earlier ecclesiastical changes, in the contest over 
 the Papal jurisdiction and Papal exactions, in the reform 
 of the Church courts, even in the curtailment of the legis-
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 169 
 
 lative independence of the clergy, the nation as a whole 
 had gone with the King. But from the enslavement of 
 the priesthood, from the gagging of the pulpits, from the 
 suppression of the monasteries, the bulk of the nation 
 stood aloof. There were few voices indeed of protest. As 
 the royal policy disclosed itself, as the Monarchy trampled 
 under foot the tradition and reverence of ages gone by, as 
 its figure rose bare and terrible out of the wreck of old in- 
 stitutions, England simply held her breath. It is only 
 through the stray depositions of royal spies that we catch 
 a glimpse of the wrath and hate which lay seething under 
 this silence of the people. For the silence was a silence of 
 terror. Before Cromwell's rise and after his fall from 
 power the reign of Henry the Eighth witnessed no more 
 than the common tyranny and bloodshed of the time. But 
 the years of Cromwell's administration form the one 
 period in our history which deserves the name that men 
 have given to the rule of Robespierre. It was the English 
 Terror. It was by terror that Cromwell mastered the 
 King. Cranmer could plead for him at a later time with 
 Henry as " one whose surety was only by your Majesty, 
 who loved your Majesty, as I ever thought, no less than 
 God." But the attitude of Cromwell toward the King 
 was something more than that of absolute dependence and 
 unquestioning devotion. He was " so vigilant to preserve 
 your Majesty from all treasons," adds the Primate, "that 
 few could be so secretly conceived but he detected the same 
 from the beginning." Henry, like every Tudor, was fear- 
 less of open danger, but tremulously sensitive to the 
 lightest breath of hidden disloyalty ; and it was on this 
 dread that Cromwell based the fabric of his power. He 
 was hardly secretary before spies were scattered broadcast 
 over the land. Secret denunciations poured into the open 
 ear of the minister. The air was thick with tales of plots 
 and conspiracies, and with the detection and suppression 
 of each Cromwell tightened his hold on the King. 
 
 As it was by terror that he mastered the King, so it was
 
 170 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 by terror that he mastered the people. Men felt in Eng- 
 land, to use the figure by which Erasmus paints the time, 
 "as if a scorpion lay sleeping under every stone." The 
 confessional had no secrets for Cromwell. Men's talk 
 with their closest friends found its way to his ear. 
 "Words idly spoken," the murmurs of a petulant abbot, 
 the ravings of a moon-struck nun, were, as the nobles 
 cried passionately at his fall, "tortured into treason." 
 The only chance of safety lay in silence. " Friends who 
 used to write and send me presents," Erasmus tells us, 
 " now send neither letter nor gifts, nor receive any from 
 any one, and this through fear." But even the refuge of 
 silence was closed by a law more infamous than any that 
 has ever blotted the Statute-book of England. Not only 
 was thought made treason, but men were forced to reveal 
 their thoughts on pain of their very silence being punished 
 with the penalties of treason. All trust in the older bul- 
 warks of liberty was destroyed by a policy as daring as it 
 was unscrupulous. The noblest institutions were degraded 
 into instruments of terror. Though Wolsey had strained 
 the law to the utmost he had made no open attack on the 
 freedom of justice. If he shrank from assembling Parlia- 
 ments it was from his sense that they were the bulwarks 
 of liberty. But under Cromwell the coercion of juries and 
 the management of judges rendered the courts mere mouth- 
 pieces of the royal will : and where even this shadow of 
 justice proved an obstacle to bloodshed, Parliament was 
 brought into play to pass bill after bill of attainder. " He 
 shall be judged by the bloody laws he has himself made," 
 was the cry of the Council at the moment of his fall, and 
 by a singular retribution the crowning injustice which he 
 sought to introduce even into the practice of attainder, 
 the condemnation of a man without hearing his defence, 
 was only practised on himself. 
 
 But ruthless as was the Terror of Cromwell it was of a 
 nobler type than the Terror of France. He never struck 
 uselessly or capriciously, or stooped to the meaner victims
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 171 
 
 of the guillotine. His blows were effective just because 
 he chose his victims from among the noblest and the best. 
 If he struck at the Church, it was through the Carthu- 
 sians, the holiest and the most renowned of English 
 Churchmen. If he struck at the baronage, it was through 
 Lady Salisbury, in whose veins flowed the blood of kings. 
 If he struck at the New Learning, it was through the 
 murder of Sir Thomas More. But no personal vindictive- 
 ness mingled with his crime. In temper indeed, so far as 
 we can judge from the few stories which lingered among 
 his friends, he was a generous, kindly-hearted man, with 
 pleasant and winning manners which atoned for a certain 
 awkwardness of person, and with a constancy of friend- 
 ship which won him a host of devoted adherents. But no 
 touch either of love or hate swayed him from his course. 
 The student of Machiavelli had not studied the " Prince" 
 in vain. He had reduced bloodshed to a system. Frag- 
 ments of his papers still show us with what a business- 
 like brevity he ticked off human lives among the casual 
 " remembrances" of the day. " Item, the Abbot of Read- 
 ing to be sent down to be tried and executed at Reading." 
 "Item, to know the King's pleasure touching Master 
 More." " Item, when Master Fisher shall go to his execu- 
 tion, and the other." It is indeed this utter absence of all 
 passion, of all personal feeling, that makes the figure of 
 Cromwell the most terrible in our history. He has an ab- 
 solute faith in the end he is pursuing, and he simply hews 
 his way to it as a woodman hews his way through the 
 forest, axe in hand. 
 
 The choice of his first victim showed the ruthless preci- 
 sion with which Cromwell was to strike. In the general 
 opinion of Europe the foremost Englishman of the time 
 was Sir Thomas More. As the policy of the divorce ended 
 in an open rupture with Rome he had withdrawn silently 
 from the ministry, but his silent disapproval of the new 
 policy was more telling than the opposition of obscurer 
 foes. To Cromwell there must have been something spe-
 
 172 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [Boos V. 
 
 cially galling in More's attitude of reserve. The religious 
 reforms of the New Learning were being rapidly carried 
 out, but it was plain that the man who represented the 
 very life of the New Learning believed that the sacrifice 
 of liberty and justice was too dear a price to pay even for 
 religious reform. In the actual changes which the divorce 
 brought about there was nothing to move More to active 
 or open opposition. Though he looked on the divorce and 
 re-marriage as without religious warrant, he found no 
 difficulty in accepting an Act of Succession passed in 1534 
 which declared the marriage of Anne Boleyn valid, 
 annulled the title of Catharine's child, Mary, and declared 
 the children of Anne the only lawful heirs to the crown. 
 His faith in the power of Parliament over all civil matters 
 was too complete to admit a doubt of its competence to 
 regulate the succession to the throne. But by the same 
 Act an oath recognizing the succession as then arranged 
 was ordered to be taken by all persons ; and this oath con- 
 tained an acknowledgment that the marriage with Catha- 
 rine was against Scripture and invalid from the begin- 
 ning. Henry had long known More's belief on this point ; 
 and the summons to take this oath was simply a summons 
 to death. More was at his house at Chelsea when the 
 summons called him to Lambeth, to the house where he 
 had bandied fun with Warham and Erasmus or bent over 
 the easel of Holbein. For a moment there may have been 
 some passing impulse to yield. But it was soon over. 
 Triumphant in all else, the monarchy was to find its power 
 stop short at the conscience of man. The great battle of 
 spiritual freedom, the battle of the Protestant against 
 Mary, of the Catholic against Elizabeth, of the Puritan 
 against Charles, of the Independent against the Presby- 
 terian, began at the moment when More refused to bend 
 or to deny his convictions at a king's bidding. 
 
 "I thank the Lord," More said with a sudden start as 
 the boat dropped silently down the river from his garden 
 steps in the early morning, " I thank the Lord that the
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 173 
 
 field is won." At Lambeth Cranmer and his fellow com- 
 missioners tendered to him the new oath of allegiance; 
 but, as they expected, it was refused. They bade him 
 walk in the garden that he might reconsider his reply. 
 The day was hot and More seated himself in a window 
 from which he could look down into the crowded court. 
 Even in the presence of death the quick sympathy of his 
 nature could enjoy the humor and life of the throng below. 
 "I saw," he said afterward, "Master Latimer very merry 
 in the court, for he laughed and took one or twain by the 
 neck so handsomely that if they had been women I should 
 have weened that he waxed wanton." The crowd below 
 was chiefly of priests, rectors, and vicars, pressing to take 
 the oath that More found harder than death. He bore 
 them no grudge for it. When he heard the voice of one 
 who was known to have boggled hard at the oath a little 
 while before calling loudly and ostentatiously for drink, 
 he only noted him with his peculiar humor. " He drank," 
 More supposed, " either from dryness or from gladness" or 
 " to show quod ille notus erat Pontifici." He was called 
 in again at last, but only repeated his refusal. It was in 
 vain that Cranmer plied him with distinctions which per- 
 plexed even the subtle wit of the ex-chancellor ; More re- 
 mained unshaken and passed to the Tower. He was fol- 
 lowed there by Bishop Fisher of Rochester, the most aged 
 and venerable of the English prelates, who was charged 
 with countenancing treason by listening to the prophecies 
 of a religious fanatic called " The Nun of Kent." But for 
 the moment even Cromwell shrank from their blood. 
 They remained prisoners while a new and more terrible 
 engine was devised to crush out the silent but widespread 
 opposition to the religious changes. 
 
 By a statute passed at the close of 1534 a new treason 
 was created in the denial of the King's titles ; and in the 
 opening of 1535 Henry assumed as we have seen the title 
 of "on earth supreme head of the Church of England." 
 The measure was at once followed up by a blow at victims
 
 174 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 hardly less venerable than More. In the general relaxa- 
 tion of the religious life the charity and devotion of the 
 brethren of the Charter-house had won the reverence even 
 of those who condemned monasticism. After a stubborn 
 resistance they had acknowledged the royal Supremacy 
 and taken the oath of submission prescribed by the Act. 
 But by an infamous construction of the statute which 
 made the denial of the Supremacy treason, the refusal of 
 satisfactory answers to official questions as to a conscien- 
 tious belief in it was held to be equivalent to open deniaL 
 The aim of the new measure was well known, and the 
 brethren prepared to die. In the agony of waiting enthu- 
 siasm brought its imaginative consolations; "when the 
 Host was lifted up there came as it were a whisper of air 
 which breathed upon our faces as we knelt; and there 
 came a sweet soft sound of music." They had not long 
 however to wait, for their refusal to answer was the sig- 
 nal for their doom. Three of the brethren went to the 
 gallows; the rest were flung into Newgate, chained to 
 posts in a noisome dungeon where, " tied and not able to 
 stir," they were left to perish of jail-fever and starvation. 
 In a fortnight five were dead and the rest at the point of 
 death, "almost dispatched," Cromwell's envoy wrote to 
 him, "by the hand of God, of which, considering their 
 behavior, I am not sorry." Their death was soon followed 
 by that of More. The interval of imprisonment had failed 
 to break his resolution, and the new statute sufficed to 
 bring him to the block. With Fisher he was convicted of 
 denying the king's title as only supreme head of the 
 Church. The old Bishop approached the scaffold with 
 a book of the New Testament in his hand. He opened 
 it at a venture ere he knelt, and read, "This is life 
 eternal to know Thee, the only true God." In July 
 More followed his fellow-prisoner to the block. On 
 the eve of the fatal blow he moved his beard care- 
 fully from the reach of the doomsman's axe. "Pity 
 that should be cut," he was heard to mutter with a
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 175 
 
 touch of the old sad irony, "that has never committed 
 treason." 
 
 Cromwell had at last reached his aim. England lay 
 panic-stricken at the feet of the "low-born knave," as the 
 nobles called him, who represented the omnipotence of the 
 crown. Like Wolsey he concentrated in his hands the 
 whole administration of the state ; he was at once foreign 
 minister and home minister, and vicar-general of the 
 Church, the creator of a new fleet, the organizer of armies, 
 the president of the terrible Star Chamber. His Italian 
 indifference to the mere show of power stood out in strong 
 contrast with the pomp of the Cardinal. Cromwell's per- 
 sonal habits were simple and unostentatious ; if he clutched 
 at money, it was to feed the army of spies whom he main- 
 tained at his own expense, and whose work he surveyed 
 with a ceaseless vigilance. For his activity was bound- 
 less. More than fifty volumes remain of the gigantic mass 
 of his correspondence. Thousands of letters from "poor 
 bedesmen," from outraged wives and wronged laborers and 
 persecuted heretics flowed in to the all-powerful minister 
 whose system of personal government turned him into the 
 universal court of appeal. But powerful as he was, and 
 mighty as was the work which he had accomplished, he 
 knew that harder blows had to be struck before his posi- 
 tion was secure. The new changes, above all the irrita- 
 tion which had been caused by the outrages with which 
 the dissolution of the monasteries was accompanied, gave 
 point to the mutinous temper that prevailed throughout 
 the country; for the revolution in agriculture was still 
 going on, and evictions furnished embittered outcasts to 
 swell the ranks of any rising. Nor did it seem as though 
 revolt, if it once broke out, would want leaders to head it. 
 The nobles who had writhed under the rule of the Cardinal, 
 writhed yet more bitterly under the rule of one whom they 
 looked upon not only as Wolsey's tool, but as a low-born 
 upstart. " The world will never mend," Lord Hussey had 
 been heard to say, "till we fight for it." "Knaves rule
 
 176 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 about the king !" cried Lord Exeter, " I trust some day to 
 give them a buffet !" At this moment too the hopes of 
 political reaction were stirred by the fate of one whom the 
 friends of the old order looked upon as the source of all 
 their troubles. In the spring of 1536, while the dissolu- 
 tion of the monasteries was marking the triumph of the 
 new policy, Anne Boleyn was suddenly charged with 
 adultery, and sent to the Tower. A few days later she 
 was tried, condemned, and brought to the block. The 
 Queen's ruin was everywhere taken as an omen of ruin to 
 the cause which had become identified with her own, and 
 the old nobility mustered courage to face the minister who 
 held them at his feet. 
 
 They found their opportunity in the discontent of the 
 north, where the monasteries had been popular, and where 
 the rougher mood of the people turned easily to resistance. 
 In the autumn of 1536 a rising broke out in Lincolnshire, 
 and this was hardly quelled when all Yorkshire rose in 
 arms. From every parish the farmers marched with the 
 parish priest at their head upon York, and the surrender 
 of this city determined the waverers. In a few days Skip- 
 ton Castle, where the Earl of Cumberland held out with a 
 handful of men, was the only spot north of the Humber 
 which remained true to the King. Durham rose at the 
 call of the chiefs of the house of Neville, Lords Westmore- 
 land and Latimer. Though the Earl of Northumberland 
 feigned sickness, the Percies joined the revolt. Lord 
 Dacre, the chief of the Yorkshire nobles, surrendered 
 Pomfret, and was acknowledged as their chief by the in- 
 surgents. The whole nobility of the north were now ea- 
 listed in the "Pilgrimage of Grace," as the rising called 
 itself, and thirty thousand "tall men and well horsed" 
 moved on the Don demanding the reversal of tke royal 
 policy, a reunion with Rome, the restoration of Catharine's 
 daughter, Mary, to her rights as heiress of the Crown, re- 
 dress for the wrongs done to the Church, and above all the 
 driving away of base-born councillors, or in other words,
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 177 
 
 the fall of Cromwell. Though their advance was checked 
 by negotiation, the organization of the revolt went steadily 
 on throughout the winter, and a Parliament of the North 
 which gathered at Pomfret formally adopted the demands 
 of the insurgents. Only six thousand men under Norfolk 
 barred their way southward, and the Midland counties 
 were known to be disaffected. 
 
 But Cromwell remained undaunted by the peril. He 
 suffered indeed Norfolk to negotiate ; and allowed Henry 
 under pressure from his Council to promise pardon and a 
 free Parliament at York, a pledge which Norfolk and 
 Dacre alike construed into an acceptance of the demands 
 made by the insurgents. Their leaders at once flung aside 
 the badge of the Five Wounds which they had worn with 
 a cry, " We will wear no badge but that of our Lord the 
 King," and nobles and farmers dispersed to their homes 
 in triumph. But the towns of the North were no sooner 
 garrisoned and Norfolk's army in the heart of Yorkshire 
 than the veil was flung aside. A few isolated outbreaks 
 in the spring of 1537 gave a pretext for the withdrawal of 
 every concession. The arrest of the leaders of the " Pil- 
 grimage of Grace" was followed by ruthless severities. 
 The country was covered with gibbets. Whole districts 
 were given up to military execution. But it was on the 
 leaders of the rising that Cromwell's hand fell heaviest. 
 He seized his opportunity for dealing at the northern no- 
 bles a fatal blow. "Cromwell," one of the chief among 
 them broke fiercely out as he stood at the Council board, 
 " it is thou that art the very special and chief cause of all 
 this rebellion and wickedness, and dost daily travail to 
 bring us to our ends and strike off our heads. I trust that 
 ere thou die, though thou wouldst procure all the noblest 
 heads within the realm to be stricken off, yet there shall 
 one head remain that shall strike off thy head." But the 
 warning was unheeded. Lord Darcy, who stood first 
 among the nobles of Yorkshire, and Lord Hussey, who 
 stood first among the nobles of Lincolnshire, went alike to
 
 178 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 the block. The Abbot of Barlings, who had ridden into 
 Lincoln with his canons in full armor, swung with his 
 brother Abbots of Whalley, Woburn, and Sawley from the 
 gallows. The Abbots of Fountains and of Jervaulx were 
 hanged at Tyburn side by side with the representative of 
 the great line of Percy. Lady Bulmer was burned at the 
 stake. Sir Robert Constable was hanged in chains before 
 the gate of Hull. 
 
 The defeat of the northern revolt showed the immense 
 force which the monarchy had gained. Even among the 
 rebels themselves not a voice had threatened Henry's 
 throne. It was not at the King that they aimed these 
 blows, but at the " low-born knaves" who stood about the 
 King. At this moment too Henry's position was strength- 
 ened by the birth of an heir. On the death of Anne 
 Boleyn he had married Jane Seymour, the daughter of a 
 Wiltshire knight; and in 1537 this Queen died in giving 
 birth to a boy, the future Edward the Sixth. The triumph 
 of the Crown at home was doubled by its triumph in the 
 great dependency which had so long held the English 
 authority at bay, across St. George's Channel. Though 
 Henry the Seventh had begun the work of bridling Ireland 
 he had no strength for exacting a real submission; and 
 the great Norman lords of the Pale, the Butlers and Geral- 
 dines, the De la Poers and the Fitzpatricks, though sub- 
 jects in name, remained in fact defiant of the royal au- 
 thority. In manners and outer seeming they had sunk 
 into mere natives; their feuds were as incessant as those 
 of the Irish septs; and their despotism combined the hor- 
 rors of feudal oppression with those of Celtic anarchy. 
 Crushed by taxation, by oppression, by misgovernment, 
 plundered alike by native marauders and by the troops 
 levied to disperse them, the wretched descendants of the 
 first English settlers preferred even Irish misrule to Eng- 
 lish "order," and the border of the Pale retreated steadily 
 toward Dublin. The towns of the seaboard, sheltered by 
 their walls and their municipal self-government, formed
 
 CHAP. 4,] THE MONARCHY. 1461-1540. 179 
 
 the only exceptions to the general chaos ; elsewhere through- 
 out its dominions the English Government, though still 
 strong enough to break down any open revolt, was a mere 
 phantom of rule. From the Celtic tribes without the Pale 
 even the remnant of civilization and of native union which 
 had lingered on to the time of Strongbow had vanished 
 away. The feuds of the Irish septs were as bitter as their 
 hatred of the stranger; and the Government at Dublin 
 found it easy to maintain a strife which saved it the neces- 
 sity of self-defence among a people whose "nature is such 
 that for money one shall have the son to war against the 
 father, and the father against his child." During the first 
 thirty years of the sixteenth century the annals of the 
 country which remained under native rule record more 
 than a hundred raids and battles between clans of the 
 north alone. 
 
 But the time came at last for a vigorous attempt on the 
 part of England to introduce order into this chaos of tur- 
 bulence and misrule. To Henry the Eighth the policy of 
 forbearance, of ruling Ireland through the great Irish lords, 
 was utterly hateful. His purpose was to rule in Ireland 
 as thoroughly and effectively as he ruled in England, and 
 during the latter half of his reign he bent his whole ener- 
 gies to accomplish this aim. From the first hour of his 
 accession indeed the Irish lords felt the heavier hand of a 
 master. The Geraldines, who had been suffered under 
 the preceding reign to govern Ireland in the name of the 
 Crown, were quick to discover that the Crown would no 
 longer stoop to be their tool. Their head, the Earl of Kil- 
 dare, was called to England and thrown into the Tower. 
 The great house resolved to frighten England again into a 
 conviction of its helplessness; and a rising of Lord Thomas 
 Fitzgerald in 1534 followed the usual fashion of Irish re- 
 volte. A murder of the Archbishop of Dublin, a capture 
 of the city, a repulse before its castle, a harrying of the 
 Pale, ended in a sudden disappearance of the rebels among 
 the bogs and forests of the feprdgr on the advance of the
 
 180 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 English forces. It had been usual to meet such an onset 
 as this by a raid of the same character, by a corresponding 
 failure before the castle of the rebellious noble, and a re- 
 treat like his own which served as a preliminary to negotia- 
 tions and a compromise. Unluckily for the Fitzgeralds 
 Henry resolved to take Ireland seriously in hand, and he 
 had Cromwell to execute his will. Skeffington, a new 
 Lord Deputy who was sent over in 1535, brought with 
 him a train of artillery which worked a startling change 
 in the political aspect of the island. The castles that had 
 hitherto sheltered rebellion were battered into ruins. 
 Maynooth, a stronghold from which the Geraldines threat- 
 ened Dublin and ruled the Pale at their will, was beaten 
 down in a fortnight. So crushing and unforeseen was the 
 blow that resistance was at once at an end. Not only was 
 the power of the great Norman house which had towered 
 over Ireland utterly broken, but only a single boy was left 
 to preserve its name. 
 
 With the fall of the Fitzgeralds Ireland felt itself in a 
 master's grasp. "Irishmen," wrote one of the Lord Jus- 
 tices to Cromwell, " were never in such fear as now. The 
 King's sessions are being kept in five shires more than 
 formerly." Not only were the Englishmen of the Pale at 
 Henry's feet but the kerns of Wicklow and Wexford sent 
 in their submission; and for the first time in men's mem- 
 ory an English army appeared in Munster and reduced 
 the south to obedience. The border of the Pale was 
 crossed, and the wide territory where the Celtic tribes had 
 preserved their independence since the days of the An- 
 gevins was trampled into subjection. A castle of the 
 O'Briens which guarded the passage of the Shannon was 
 taken by assault, and its fall carried with it the submis- 
 sion of Clare. The capture of Athlone brought about the 
 reduction of Connaught, and assured the loyalty of the 
 great Norman house of the De Burghs or Bourkes who 
 had assumed an almost royal authority in the west. The 
 resistance of the tribes of the north was broken in a vie-
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 181 
 
 tory at Bellahoe. In seven years, partly through the vigor 
 of Skeffington's successor, Lord Leonard Grey, and still 
 more through the resolute will of Henry and Cromwell, 
 the power of the Crown, which had been limited to the 
 walls of Dublin, was acknowledged over the length and 
 breadth of the land. 
 
 But submission was far from being all that Henry de- 
 sired. His aim was to civilize the people whom he had 
 conquered to rule not by force but by law. But the only 
 conception of law which the King or his ministers could 
 frame was that of English law. The customary law which 
 prevailed without the Pale, the native system of clan gov- 
 ernment and common tenure of land by the tribe, as well 
 as the poetry and literature which threw their lustre over 
 the Irish tongue, were either unknown to the English 
 statesmen or despised by them as barbarous. The one 
 mode of civilizing Ireland and redressing its chaotic mis- 
 rule which presented itself to their minds was that of de- 
 stroying the whole Celtic tradition of the Irish people 
 that of " making Ireland English" in manners, in law, and 
 in tongue. The Deputy, Parliament, Judges, Sheriffs, 
 which already existed within the Pale, furnished a faint 
 copy of English institutions ; and it was hoped that these 
 might be gradually extended over the whole island. The 
 English language and mode of life would follow, it was 
 believed, the English law. The one effectual way of 
 bringing about such a change as this lay in a complete 
 conquest of the island, and in its colonization by English 
 settlers; but from this course, pressed on him as it was by 
 his own lieutenants and by the settlers of the Pale, even 
 the iron will of Cromwell shrank. It was at once too 
 bloody and too expensive. To win over the chiefs, to torn 
 *hem by policy and a patient generosity into English no- 
 bles, to use the traditional devotion of their tribal de- 
 pendents as a means of diffusing the new civilization 
 />f their chiefs to trust to time and steady govern- 
 ment for the gradual reformation of the country, was a
 
 182 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 policy safer, cheaper, more humane, and more statesman- 
 like. 
 
 It was this system which, even before the fall of the 
 Geraldines, Henry had resolved to adopt ; and it was this 
 that he pressed on Ireland when the conquest laid it at his 
 feet. The chiefs were to be persuaded of the advantages 
 of justice and legal rule. Their fear of any purpose to 
 " expel them from their lands and dominions lawfully pos- 
 sessed" was to be dispelled by a promise " to conserve them 
 as their own." Even their remonstrances against the in- 
 troduction of English law were to be regarded, and the 
 course of justice to be enforced or mitigated according to 
 the circumstances of the country. In the resumption of 
 lands or rights which clearly belonged to the Crown " sober 
 ways, politic shifts, and amiable persuasions" were to be 
 preferred to rigorous dealing. It was this system of con- 
 ciliation which was in the main carried out by the English 
 Government under Henry and his two successors. Chief- 
 tain after chieftain was won over to the acceptance of the 
 indenture which guaranteed him in the possession of his 
 lands and left his authority over his tribesmen untouched 
 on condition of a pledge of loyalty, of abstinence from ille- 
 gal wars and exactions on his fellow-subjects, and of ren- 
 dering a fixed tribute and service in war-time to the 
 Crown. The sole test of loyalty demanded was the ac- 
 ceptance of an English title and the education of a son at 
 the English court; though in some cases, like that of the 
 O'Neills, a promise was exacted to use the English lan- 
 guage and dress, and to encourage tillage and husbandry. 
 Compliance with conditions such as these was procured 
 not merely by the terror of the royal name but by heavy 
 bribes. The chieftains in fact profited greatly by the 
 change. Not only were the lands of the suppressed abbeys 
 granted to them on their assumption of their new titles, 
 but the English law-courts, ignoring the Irish custom by 
 which the land belonged to the tribe at large, regarded the 
 chiefs as the sole proprietors of the soil. The merits of 

 
 CHAP. 4.'] THE MONARCHY. 1461-1540. 183 
 
 the system were unquestionable ; its faults were such as 
 a statesman of that day could hardly be expected to per- 
 ceive. The Tudor politicians held that the one hope for 
 the regeneration of Ireland lay in its absorbing the civili- 
 zation of England. The prohibition of the national dress, 
 customs, laws, and language must have seemed to them 
 merely the suppression of a barbarism which stood in the 
 way of all improvement. 
 
 With England and Ireland alike at his feet Cromwell 
 could venture on a last and crowning change. He could 
 claim for the monarchy the right of dictating at its pleasure 
 the form of faith and doctrine to be taught throughout the 
 land. Henry had remained true to the standpoint of the 
 New Learning; and the sympathies of Cromwell were 
 mainly with those of his master. They had no wish for 
 any violent break with the ecclesiastical forms of the past. 
 They desired religious reform rather than religious revo- 
 lution, a simplification of doctrine rather than any radical 
 change in it, the purification of worship rather than the 
 introduction of any wholly new ritual. Their theology 
 remained, as they believed, a Catholic theology, but a the- 
 ology cleared of the superstitious growths which obscured 
 the true Catholicism of the early Church. In a word their 
 dream was the dream of Erasmus and Colet. The spirit 
 of Erasmus was seen in the Articles of religion which 
 were laid before Convocation in 1536, in the acknowledg- 
 ment of Justification by Faith, a doctrine for which the 
 founders of the New Learning, such as Contarini and Pole, 
 were struggling at Rome itself, in the condemnation of pur- 
 gatory, of pardons, and of masses for the dead, as it was 
 seen in the admission of prayers for the dead and in the 
 retention of the ceremonies of the church without material 
 change. A series of royal injunctions which followed 
 carried out the same policy of reform. Pilgrimages were 
 suppressed ; the excessive number of holy days was cur- 
 tailed ; the worship of images and relics was discouraged 
 in words which seem almost copied from the protest of
 
 184 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 Erasmus. His appeal for a translation of the Bible which 
 weavers might repeat at their shuttle and ploughmen sing 
 at their plough received at last a reply. At the outset of 
 the ministry of Norfolk and More the King had promised 
 an English version of the scriptures, while prohibiting the 
 circulation of Tyndale's Lutheran translation. The work 
 however lagged in the hands of the bishops ; and as a pre- 
 liminary measure the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the 
 Ten Commandments were now rendered into English, and 
 ordered to be taught by every schoolmaster and father of 
 a family to his children and pupils. But the bishops' ver- 
 sion still hung on hand ; till in despair of its appearance a 
 friend of Archbishop Cranmer, Miles Coverdale, was em- 
 ployed to correct and revise the translation of Tyndale ; 
 and the Bible which he edited was published in 1538 under 
 the avowed patronage of Henry himself. 
 
 But the force of events was already carrying England 
 far from the standpoint of Erasmus or More. The dream 
 of the New Learning was to be wrought out through the 
 progress of education and piety. In the policy of Crom- 
 well reform was to be brought about by the brute force of 
 the Monarchy. The story of the royal supremacy was 
 graven even on the titlepage of the new Bible. It is 
 Henry on his throne who gives the sacred volume to Cran- 
 mer, ere Cranmer and Cromwell can distribute it to the 
 throng of priests and laymen below. Hitherto men had 
 looked on religious truth as a gift from the Church. They 
 were now to look on it as a gift from the King. The very 
 gratitude of Englishmen for fresh spiritual enlightenment 
 was to tell to the profit of the royal power. No conception 
 could be further from that of the New Learning, from the 
 plea for intellectual freedom which runs through the life 
 of Erasmus or the craving for political liberty which gives 
 nobleness to the speculations of More. Nor was it possible 
 for Henry himself to avoid drifting from the standpoint he 
 had chosen. He had written against Luther ; he had per- 
 sisted in opposing Lutheran doctrine; he had passed new
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE MONARCHY. 1481-1540. 185 
 
 laws to hinder the circulation of Lutheran books in his 
 realm. But influences from without as from within drove 
 him nearer to Lutheranism. If the encouragemsnt of 
 Francis had done somewhat to bring about his final Dreach 
 with the Papacy, he soon found little will in the French 
 King to follow him in any course of separation from 
 Rome ; and the French alliance threatened to become use- 
 less as a shelter against the wrath of the Emperor. 
 Charles was goaded into action by the bill annulling 
 Mary's right of succession; and in 1535 he proposed to 
 unite his house with that of Francis by close intermarriage 
 and to sanction Mary's marriage with a son of the French 
 King, if Francis would join in an attack on England. 
 Whether such a proposal was serious or no, Henry had to 
 dread attack from Charles himself and to look for new 
 allies against it. He was driven to offer his alliance to 
 the Lutheran princes of North Germany, who dreaded 
 like himself the power of the Emperor, and who were now 
 gathering in the League of Schmalkald. 
 
 But the German Princes made agreement as to doctrine 
 a condition of their alliance ; and their pressure was backed 
 by Henry's partisans among the clergy at home. In 
 Cromwell's scheme for mastering the priesthood it had 
 been needful to place men on whom the King could rely 
 at their head. Cranmer became Primate, Latimer became 
 Bishop of Worcester, Shaxton and Barlow were raised to 
 the sees of Salisbury and St. David's, Hilsey to that of 
 Rochester, Goodrich to that of Ely, Fox to that of Here- 
 ford. But it was hard to find men among the clergy who 
 paused at Henry's theological resting-place; and of these 
 prelates all except Latimer were known to sympathize 
 with Lutheranism, though Cranmer lagged far behind his 
 fellows in their zeal for reform. The influence of these 
 men as well as of an attempt to comply at least partly with 
 the demand of the German Princes left its stamp on the 
 Articles of 1536. For the principle of Catholicism, of a 
 universal form of faith overspreading all temporal domin-
 
 186 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 ions, the Lutheran states had substituted the principle of 
 territorial religion, of the right of each sovereign or people 
 to determine the form of belief which should be held within 
 their bounds. The severance from Rome had already 
 brought Henry to this principle; and the Act of Supre- 
 macy was its emphatic assertion. In England too, as in 
 North Germany, the repudiation of the Papal authority as 
 a ground of faith, of the voice of the Pope as a declaration 
 of truth, had driven men to find such a ground and dec- 
 laration in the Bible ; and the Articles expressly based the 
 faith of the Church of England on the Bible and the three 
 Creeds. With such fundamental principles of agreement 
 it was possible to borrow from the Augsburg Confession 
 five of the ten articles which Henry laid before the Convo- 
 cation. If penance was still retained as a sacrament, bap- 
 tism and the Lord's Supper were alone maintained to be 
 sacraments with it; the doctrine of Tran substantiation 
 which Henry stubbornly maintained differed so little from 
 the doctrine maintained by Luther that the words of Lu- 
 theran formularies were borrowed to explain it; Confession 
 was admitted by the Lutheran Churches as well as by the 
 English. The veneration of saints and the doctrine of 
 prayer to them, though still retained, was so modified as 
 to present little difficulty even to a Lutheran. 
 
 However disguised in form, the doctrinal advance made 
 in the Articles of 1536 was an immense one; and a vehe- 
 ment opposition might have been looked for from those of 
 the bishops like Gardiner, who while they agreed with 
 Henry's policy of establishing a national Church remained 
 opposed to any change in faith. But the Articles had 
 been drawn up by Henry's own hand, and all whisper of 
 opposition was hushed. Bishops, abbots, clergy, not only 
 subscribed to them, but carried out with implicit obedience 
 the injunctions which put their doctrine roughly into 
 practice ; and the failure of the Pilgrimage of Grace in 
 the following autumn ended all thought of resistance 
 among the laity. But Cromwell found a different recep-
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 187 
 
 tion for his reforms when he turned to extend them to the 
 sister island. The religious aspect of Ireland was hardly 
 less chaotic than its political aspect had been. Ever since 
 Strongbow's landing there had been no one Irish Church, 
 simply because there had been no one Irish nation. There 
 was not the slightest difference in doctrine or discipline 
 between the Church without the Pale and the Church 
 within it. But within the Pale the clergy were exclu- 
 sively of English blood and speech, and without it they 
 were exclusively of Irish. Irishmen were shut out by law 
 from abbeys and churches within the English boundary ; 
 and the ill- will of the natives shut out Englishmen from 
 churches and abbeys outside it. As to the religious state 
 of the country, it was much on a level with its political 
 condition. Feuds and misrule told fatally on ecclesiastical 
 discipline. The bishops were political officers, or hard 
 fighters like the chiefs around them; their sees were 
 neglected, their cathedrals abandoned to decay. Through 
 whole dioceses the churches lay in ruins and without 
 priests. The only preaching done in the country was done 
 by the begging friars, and the results of the friars' preach- 
 ing were small. " If the King do not provide a remedy," 
 it was said in 1525, "there will be no more Christentie 
 than in the middle of Turkey." 
 
 Unfortunately the remedy which Henry provided was 
 worse than the disease. Politically Ireland was one with 
 England, and the great revolution which was severing the 
 one country from the Papacy extended itself naturally to 
 the other. The results of it indeed at first seemed small 
 enough. The Supremacy, a question which had convulsed 
 England, passed over into Ireland to meet its only obstacle 
 in a general indifference. Everybody was ready to accept 
 it without a thought of the consequences. The bishops 
 and clergy within the Pale bent to the King's will as 
 easily as their fellows iH England, and their example was 
 followed by at least four prelates of dioceses without the 
 Pale. The native chieftains made no more scruple than
 
 188 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 the Lords of the Council in renouncing obedience to the 
 Bishop of Rome, and in acknowledging Henry as the 
 41 Supreme Head of the Church of England and Ireland 
 under Christ." There was none of the resistance to the 
 dissolution of the abbeys which had been witnessed on the 
 other side of the Channel, and the greedy chieftains showed 
 themselves perfectly willing to share the plunder of the 
 Church. But the results of the measure were fatal to the 
 little culture and religion which even the past centuries of 
 disorder had spared. Such as they were, the religious 
 houses were the only schools that Ireland contained. The 
 system of vicars, so general in England, was rare in Ire- 
 land ; churches in the patronage of the abbeys were for the 
 most part served by the religious themselves, and the dis- 
 solution of their houses suspended public worship over 
 large districts of the country. The friars, hitherto the 
 only preachers, and who continued to labor and teach in 
 spite of the efforts of the Government, were thrown neces- 
 sarily into a position of antagonism to the English rule. 
 
 Had the ecclesiastical changes which were forced on the 
 country ended here however, in the end little harm would 
 have been done. But in England the breach with Rome, 
 the destruction of the monastic orders, and the establish- 
 ment of the Supremacy, had roused in a portion of the 
 people itself a desire for theological change which Henry 
 shared and was cautiously satisfying. In Ireland ihe 
 spirit of the Reformation never existed among the people 
 at all. They accepted the legislative measures passed in 
 the English Parliament without any dream of theological 
 consequences or of any change in the doctrine or ceremo- 
 nies of the Church. Not a single voice demanded the 
 abolition of pilgrimages, or the destruction of images, or 
 the reform of public worship. The mission of Archbishop 
 Browne in 1535 "for the plucking down of idols and ex- 
 tinguishing of idolatry" was a first step in the long effort 
 of the English Government to force a new faith on a peo- 
 ple who to a man clung passionately to their old religion.
 
 CHAP. 4.) THE MONARCHY. 14611540. 189 
 
 Browne's attempts at " tuning the pulpits" were met by a 
 sullen and significant opposition. " Neither by gentle ex- 
 hortation," the Archbishop wrote to Cromwell, "nor by 
 evangelical instruction, neither by oath of them solemnly 
 taken, nor yet by threats of sharp correction may I per- 
 suade or induce any whether religious or secular since my 
 coming over once to preach the Word of God nor the just 
 title of our illustrious Prince." Even the acceptance of 
 the Supremacy, which had been so quietly effected, was 
 brought into question when its results became clear. The 
 bishops abstained from compliance with the order to erase 
 the Pope's name out of their mass-books. The pulpits re- 
 mained steadily silent. When Browne ordered the de- 
 struction of the images and relics in his own cathedral, he 
 had to report that the prior and canons " find them so sweet 
 for their gain that they heed not my words." Cromwell 
 however was resolute for a religious uniformity between 
 the two islands, and the Primate borrowed some of his 
 patron's vigor. Recalcitrant priests were thrown into 
 prison, images were plucked down from the rood-loft, and 
 the most venerable of Irish relics, the staff of St. Patrick, 
 was burned in the market-place. But he found no sup- 
 port in his vigor save from across the Channel. The Irish 
 Council looked coldly on ; even the Lord Deputy still knelt 
 to say prayers before an image at Trim. A sullen dogged 
 opposition baffled Cromwell's efforts, and their only result 
 was to unite all Ireland against the Crown. 
 
 But Cromwell found it easier to deal with Irish inaction 
 than with the feverish activity which his reforms stirred 
 in England itself. It was impossible to strike blow after 
 blow at the Church without rousing wild hopes in the 
 party who sympathized with the work which Luther was 
 doing over-sea. Few as these " Lutherans " or " Protes- 
 tants " still were in numbers, their new hopes made them a 
 formidable force ; and in the school of persecution they had 
 learned a violence which delighted in outrages on the faith 
 which had so long trampled them under foot At the
 
 190 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 very outset of Cromwell's changes four Suffolk youths 
 broke into a church at Dovercourt, tore down a wonder- 
 working crucifix, and burned it in the fields. The sup- 
 pression of the lesser monasteries was the signal for a new 
 outburst of ribald insult to the old religion. The rough- 
 ness, insolence, and extortion of the Commissioners sent? 
 to effect it drove the whole monastic body to despair. 
 Their servants rode along the road with copes for doublets 
 or tunicles for saddle-cloths, and scattered panic among 
 the larger houses which were left. Some sold their jewels 
 and relics to provide for the evil day they saw approach- 
 ing. Some begged of their own will for dissolution. It 
 was worse when fresh ordinances of the Vicar-General 
 ordered the removal of objects of superstitious veneration. 
 Their removal, bitter enough to those whose religion twined 
 itself around the image or the relic which was taken away, 
 was embittered yet more by the insults with which it was 
 accompanied. A miraculous rood at Boxley, which bowed 
 its head and stirred its eyes, was paraded from market to 
 market and exhibited as a juggle before the Court. Im- 
 ages of the Virgin were stripped of their costly vestments 
 and sent to be publicly burned at London. Latimer for- 
 warded to the capital the figure of Our Lady, which he 
 had thrust out of his cathedral church at Worcester, with 
 rough words of scorn : " She with her old sister of Wal- 
 singham, her younger sister of Ipswich, and their two 
 other sisters of Doncaster and Penrice, would make a jolly 
 muster at Smithfield." Fresh orders were given to fling 
 all relics from their reliquaries, and to level every shrine 
 with the ground. In 1538 the bones of St. Thomas of 
 Canterbury were torn from the stately shrine which had 
 been the glory of his metropolitan church, and his name 
 was erased from the service-books as that of a traitor. 
 
 The introduction of the English Bible into churches 
 gave a new opening for the zeal of the Protestants. In 
 spite of royal injunctions that it should be read decently 
 and without comment, the young zealots of the party
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE MONARCHY. 1461-1540. 191 
 
 prided themselves on shouting it out to a circle of excited 
 hearers during the service of mass, and accompanied their 
 reading with violent expositions. Protestant maidens 
 took the new English primer to church with them and 
 studied it ostentatiously during matins. Insult passed 
 into open violence when the Bishops' Courts were invaded 
 and broken up by Protestanft mobs ; and law and public 
 opinion were outraged at once when priests who favored 
 the new doctrines began openly to bring home wives to 
 their vicarages. A fiery outburst of popular discussion 
 compensated for the silence of the pulpits. The new 
 Scriptures, in Henry's bitter words of complaint, were 
 " disputed, rhymed, sung, and jangled in every tavern and 
 alehouse." The articles which dictated the belief of the 
 English Church roused a furious controversy. Above all, 
 the Sacrament of the Mass, the centre of the Catholic sys- 
 tem of faith and worship, and which still remained sacred 
 to the bulk of Englishmen, was attacked with a scurrility 
 and profaneness which passes belief. The doctrine of 
 Transubstantiation, which was as yet recognized by law, 
 was held up to scorn in ballads and mystery plays. In 
 one church a Protestant lawyer raised a dog in his hands 
 when the priest elevated the Host. The most sacred words 
 of the old worship, the words of consecration, " Hoc est 
 corpus," were travestied into a nickname for jugglery as 
 "Hocus-pocus." 
 
 It was by this attack on the Mass, even more than by 
 the other outrages, that the temper both of Henry and the 
 nation was stirred to a deep resentment. With the Prot- 
 estants Henry had no sympathy whatever. He was a 
 man of the New Learning; he was proud of his orthodoxy 
 and of his title of Defender of the Faith. And above all 
 he shared to the utmost his people's love of order, their 
 clinging to the past, their hatred of extravagance and ex- 
 cess. The first sign of reaction was seen in the Parliament 
 of 1539. Never had the Houses shown so little care for 
 political liberty. The Monarchy seemed to free itself from 
 
 9 VOL. 2
 
 192 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 all parliamentary restrictions whatever when a formal 
 statute gave the King's proclamations the force of parlia- 
 mentary laws. Nor did the Church find favor with them. 
 No word of the old opposition was heard when a bill was 
 introduced granting to the King the greater monasteries 
 which had been saved in 1536. More than six hundred 
 religious houses fell at a blow, and so great was the spoil 
 that the King promised never again to call on his people 
 for subsidies. But the Houses were equally at one in 
 withstanding the new innovations of religion, and an act 
 for "abolishing diversity of opinions in certain articles 
 concerning Christian religion" passed with general assent. 
 On the doctrine of Transubstantiation, which was re- 
 asserted by the first of six Articles to which the Act owes 
 its usual name, there was no difference of feeling or belief 
 between the men of the New Learning and the older Cath- 
 olics. But the road to a further instalment of even moder- 
 ate reform seemed closed by the five other articles which 
 sanctioned communion in one kind, the celibacy of the 
 clergy, monastic vows, private masses, and auricular con- 
 fession. A more terrible feature of the reaction was the 
 revival of persecution. Burning was denounced as the 
 penalty for a denial of transubstantiation ; on a second 
 offence it became the penalty for an infraction of the other 
 five doctrines. A refusal to confess or to attend Mass was 
 made felony. It was in vain that Cranmer, with the five 
 bishops who partially sympathized with the Protestants, 
 struggled against the bill in the Lords : the Commons were 
 "all of one opinion," and Henry himself acted as spokes- 
 man on the side of the articles. In London alone five 
 hundred Protestants were indicted under the new act. 
 Latimer and Shaxton were imprisoned, and the former 
 forced into a resignation of his see. Cranmer himself was 
 only saved by Henry's personal favor. 
 
 But the first burst of triumph was no sooner spent than 
 the hand of Cromwell made itself felt. Though his opin- 
 ions remained those of the New Learning and differed
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE MONARCHY. 1461-1540. 193 
 
 little from the general sentiment which found itself repre- 
 sented in the act, he leaned instinctively to the one party 
 which did not long for his fall. His wish was to restrain 
 the Protestant excesses, but he had no mind to ruin the 
 Protestants. In a little time therefore the bishops were 
 quietly released. The London indictments were quashed. 
 The magistrates were checked in their enforcement of the 
 law, while a general pardon cleared the prisons of the 
 heretics who had been arrested under its provisions. A 
 few months after the enactment of the Six Articles we 
 find from a Protestant letter that persecution had wholly 
 ceased, "the Word is powerfully preached and books of 
 every kind may safely be exposed for sale." Never indeed 
 had Cromwell shown such greatness as in his last struggle 
 against Fate. "Beknaved" by the King, whose confi- 
 dence in him waned as he discerned the full meaning of 
 the religious changes which Cromwell had brought about, 
 met too by a growing opposition in the Council as his 
 favor declined, the temper of the man remained indomi- 
 table as ever. He stood absolutely alone. Wolsey, hated 
 as he had been by the nobles, had been supported by the 
 Church ; but Churchmen hated Cromwell with an even 
 fiercer hate than the nobles themselves. His only friends 
 were the Protestants, and their friendship was more fatal 
 than the hatred of his foes. But he showed no signs of 
 fear or of halting in the course he had entered on. So 
 long as Henry supported him, however reluctant his sup- 
 port might be, he was more than a match for his foes. 
 He was strong enough to expel his chief opponent, Bishop 
 Gardiner of Winchester, from the royal Council. He met 
 the hostility of the nobles with a threat which marked his 
 power. " If the lords would handle him so, he would give 
 them such a breakfast as never was made in England, and 
 that the proudest of them should know." 
 
 He soon gave a terrible earnest of the way in which he 
 could fulfil his threat. The opposition to his system 
 gathered above all round two houses which represented
 
 194 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 what yet lingered of the Yorkist tradition, the Courtenays 
 and the Poles. Courtenay, the Marquis of Exeter, was of 
 royal blood, a grandson through his mother of Edward the 
 Fourth. He was known to have bitterly denounced the 
 " knaves that ruled about the King ; " and his threats to 
 "give them some day a buffet" were formidable in the 
 mouth of one whose influence in the western counties was 
 supreme. Margaret, the Countess of Salisbury, a daugh- 
 ter of the Duke of Clarence by the heiress of the Earl of 
 Warwick, and a niece of Edward the Fourth, had married 
 Sir Richard Pole, and became mother of Lord Montacute 
 as of Sir Geoffry and Reginald Pole. The temper of her 
 house might be guessed from the conduct of the younger 
 of the three brothers. After refusing the highest favors 
 from Henry as the price of his approval of the divorce, 
 Reginald Pole had taken refuge at Rome, where he had 
 bitterly attacked the King in a book on " The Unity of the 
 Church." "There may be found ways enough in Italy," 
 Cromwell wrote to him in significant words, " to rid a 
 treacherous subject. When Justice can take no place by 
 process of law at home, sometimes she may be enforced to 
 take new means abroad." But he had left hostages in 
 Henry's hands. " Pity that the folly of one witless fool," 
 Cromwell wrote ominously, "should be the ruin of so 
 great a family. Let him follow ambition as fast as he 
 can, those that little have offended (saving that he is of 
 their kin), were it not for the great mercy and benignity 
 of the prince, should and might feel what it is to have such 
 a traitor as their kinsman." The "great mercy and be- 
 nignity of the prince" was no longer to shelter them. In 
 1538 the Pope, Paul the Third, published a bull of excom- 
 munication and deposition against Henry, and Pole 
 pressed the Emperor vigorously though ineffectually to 
 carry the bull into execution. His efforts only brought 
 about, as Cromwell had threatened, the ruin of his house. 
 His brother Lord Montacute and the Marquis of Exeter, 
 with other friends of the two great families, were arrested
 
 CHAP. 4] THE MONARCHY. 1461-1540. 195 
 
 on a charge of treason and executed in the opening of 1539, 
 while the Countess of Salisbury was attainted in Parlia- 
 ment and sent to the Tower. 
 
 Almost as terrible an act of bloodshed closed the year. 
 The abbots of Glastonbury, Reading, and Colchester, men 
 who had sat as mitred abbots among the lords, were 
 charged with a denial of the King's supremacy and hanged 
 as traitors. But Cromwell relied for success on more than 
 terror. His single will forced on a scheme of foreign policy 
 whose aim was to bind England to the cause of the Refor- 
 mation while it bound Henry helplessly to his minister. 
 The daring boast which his enemies laid afterward to 
 Cromwell's charge, whether uttered or not, is but the ex- 
 pression of his system, " In brief time he would bring 
 things to such a pass that the King with all his power 
 should not be able to hinder him." His plans rested, like 
 the plan which proved fatal to Wolsey, on a fresh mar- 
 riage of his master; Henry's third wife, Jane Seymour, 
 had died in child-birth; and in the opening of 1540 Crom- 
 well replaced her by a German consort, Anne of Cleves, a 
 sister-in-law of the Lutheran elector of Saxony. He dared 
 even to resist Henry's caprice when the King revolted on 
 their first interview from the coarse features and unwieldy 
 form of his new bride. , For the moment Cromwell had 
 brought matters " to such a pass" that it was impossible 
 to recoil from the marriage, and the minister's elevation 
 to the Earldom of Essex seemed to proclaim his success. 
 The marriage of Anne of Cleves however was but the first 
 step in a policy which, had it been carried out as he de- 
 signed it, would have anticipated the triumphs of Riche- 
 lieu. Charles and the House of Austria could alone bring 
 about a Catholic reaction strong enough to arrest and roll 
 back the Reformation ; and Cromwell was no sooner united 
 with the princes of North Germany than he sought to 
 league them with France for the overthrow of the Emperor. 
 
 Had he succeeded, the whole face of Europe would have 
 been changed, Southern Germany would have been secured
 
 196 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK V. 
 
 for Protestantism, and the Thirty Years' War averted. 
 But he failed as men fail who stand ahead of their age. 
 The German princes shrank from a contest with the Em- 
 peror, France from a struggle which would be fatal to 
 Catholicism ; and Henry, left alone to bear the resentment 
 of the House of Austria and chained to a wife he loathed, 
 turned savagely on his minister. In June the long strug- 
 gle came to an end. The nobles sprang on Cromwell with 
 a fierceness that told of their long-hoarded hate. Taunts 
 and execrations burst from the Lords at the Council table 
 as the Duke of Norfolk, who had been entrusted with the 
 minister's arrest, tore the ensign of the Garter from his 
 neck. At the charge of treason Cromwell flung his cap 
 on the ground with a passionate cry of despair. " This 
 then," he exclaimed, "is my guerdon for the services I 
 have done ! On your consciences, I ask you, am I a trai- 
 tor?" Then with a sudden sense that all was over he bade 
 his foes make quick work, and not leave him to languish 
 in prison. Quick work was made. A few days after his 
 arrest he was attainted in Parliament, and at the close of 
 July a burst of popular applause hailed his death on the 
 scaffold.
 
 BOOK VI. 
 THE REFORMATION. 
 
 15401603.
 
 AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK VL 
 
 15401603. 
 
 For the close of Henry the Eighth's reign as for the reigns of 
 Edward and Mary we possess copious materials. Strype covers this 
 period in his " Memorials" and in his lives of Cranmer, Cheke, and 
 Smith; Hayward's "Life of Edward the Sixth" may be supple- 
 mented by the young King's own Journal ; "Machyn's Diary" gives 
 us the aspect of affairs as they presented themselves to a common 
 Englishman ; while Holinshed is near enough to serve as a contem- 
 porary authority. The troubled period of the Protectorate is illus- 
 trated by Mr. Tytler in the correspondence which he has published 
 in his " England under Edward the Sixth and Mary, " while much 
 light is thrown on its close by Mr. Nicholls in the " Chronicle of 
 Queen Jane, " published by the Camden Society. In spite of count- 
 less errors, of Puritan prejudices, and some deliberate suppressions 
 of the truth, its mass of facts and wonderful charm of style will 
 always give importance to the " Acts and Monuments" or " Book of 
 Martyrs" of John Foxe, as a record of the Marian persecution. 
 Among outer observers, the Venetian Soranzo throws some light on 
 the Protectorate ; and the dispatches of Giovanni Michiel, published 
 by Mr. Friedmann, give us a new insight into the events of Mary's 
 reign. 
 
 For the succeeding reign we have a valuable contemporary ac- 
 count in Camden's "Life of Elizabeth." The "Annals" of Sir John 
 Hay ward refer to the first four years of the Queen's rule. Its polit- 
 ical and diplomatic side is only now being fully unveiled in the 
 Calendar of State Papers for this period, which are being issued by 
 the Master of the Rolls, and fresh light has yet to be looked for from 
 the Cecil Papers and the documents at Simancas, some of which are 
 embodied in the history of this reign by Mr. Froude. Among the 
 published materials for this time we have the Burleigh Papers, the 
 Sidney Papers, the Sadler State Papers, much correspondence in the 
 Hardwicke State Papers, the letters published by Mr. Wright in his 
 " Elizabeth and her Times, " the collections of Murdin, the Egerton 
 Papers, the "Letters of Elizabeth and James the Sixth" published 
 by Mr. Bruce. Harrington' s"Nugae Antiquse" contain some details 
 of value. Among foreign materials as yet published the " Papiers 
 d'Etat" of Cardinal Granvelle and the series of French dispatches 
 published by M. Teulet are among the more important. Mr. Motley 
 in his "Rise of the Dutch Republic" and "History of the United 
 Netherlands" has used the State Papers of the countries concerned in 
 this struggle to pour a flood of new light on the diplomacy and outer 
 policy of Burleigh and his mistress. His wide and independent re- 
 search among the same class of documents gives almost an original
 
 200 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 
 
 value to Ranke's treatment of this period in his English History. 
 The earlier religious changes in Scotland have been painted with 
 wonderful energy, and on the whole with truthfulness, by Knox 
 himself in his "History of the Reformation." Among the contem- 
 porary materials for the history of Mary Stuart we have the well- 
 known works of Buchanan and Leslie, Lebanon's "Lettres et 
 Memoires de Marie Stuart, " the correspondence appended to Mignet's 
 biography, Stevenson's "Illustrations of the Life of Queen Mary," 
 Melville's Memoirs, and the collections of Keith and Anderson. 
 
 For the religious history of Elizabeth's reign Strype, as usual, 
 gives us copious details in his " Annals, " his lives of Parker, Grin- 
 dal, and Whitgift. Some light is thrown on the Queen's earlier 
 steps by the Zurich Letters published by the Parker Society. The 
 strife with the later Puritans can only be fairly judged after reading 
 the Martin Marprelate Tracts, which have been reprinted by Mr. 
 Maskell, who has given a short abstract of the more important in 
 his "History of the Martin Marprelate Controversy." Her policy 
 toward the Catholics is set out in Burieigh's tract, " The Execution of 
 Justice in England, not for Religion, but for Treason, " which was 
 answered by Allen in his " Defence of the English Catholics. " On 
 the actual working of the penal laws much new information has 
 been given us in the series of contemporary narratives published by 
 Father Morris under the title of " The Troubles of our Catholic Fore- 
 fathers ;" the general history of the Catholics may be found in the 
 work of Dodd ; and the sufferings of the Jesuits in More's " Historia 
 Provincise Anglicanse Societatis Jesu. " To these may be added Mr. 
 Simpson's biography of Campion. For our constitutional history 
 during Elizabeth's reign we have D'Ewes' Journals and Townshend's 
 "Journal of Parliamentary Proceedings from 1580 to 1601," the 
 first detailed account we possess of the proceedings of the House of 
 Commons. Macpherson in his Annals of Commerce gives details of 
 the wonderful expansion of English trade during this period, and 
 Hackluyt's collection of Voyages tells of its wonderful activity. 
 Amid a crowd of biographers, whose number marks the new im- 
 portance of individual life and action at the time, we may note as 
 embodying information elsewhere inaccessible the lives of Hatton 
 and Davison by Sir Harris Nicolas, the three accounts of Raleigh by 
 Oldys, Tytler, and Mr. Edwards, the Lives of the two Devereux, 
 Earls of Essex, Mr. Spedding's "Life of Bacon," and Barrow's "Life 
 of Sir Francis Drake. "
 
 CHAPTER I . 
 
 THE PROTESTANT REVOLUTION. 
 15401553. 
 
 AT the death of Cromwell the success of his policy wag 
 complete. The Monarchy had reached the height of its 
 power. The old liberties of England lay prostrate at the 
 feet of the King. The Lords were cowed and spiritless ; 
 the House of Commons was filled with the creatures of the 
 Court and degraded into an engine of tyranny. Royal 
 proclamations were taking the place of parliamentary leg- 
 islation ; royal benevolences were encroaching more and 
 more on the right of parliamentary taxation. Justice was 
 prostituted in the ordinary courts to the royal will, while 
 the boundless and arbitrary powers of the royal Council 
 were gradually superseding the slower processes of the 
 Common Law. The religious changes had thrown an 
 almost sacred character over the " majesty" of the King. 
 Henry was the Head of ,the Church. From the primate 
 to the meanest deacon every minister of it derived from him 
 his sole right to exercise spiritual powers. The voice of 
 its preachers was the echo of his will. He alone could 
 define orthodoxy or declare heresy. The forms of its wor- 
 ship and belief were changed and rechanged at the royal 
 caprice. Half of its wealth went to swell the royal treas- 
 ury, and the other half lay at the King's mercy. It was 
 this unprecedented concentration of all power in the hands 
 of a single man that overawed the imagination of Henry's 
 subjects. He was regarded as something high above the 
 laws which govern common men. The voices of states- 
 men and priests extolled his wisdom and authority as more 
 than human. The Parliament itself rose and bowed to
 
 202 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [Boos VI. 
 
 the vacant throne when his name was mentioned. An 
 absolute devotion to his person replaced the old loyalty to 
 the law. When the Primate of the English Church de- 
 scribed the chief merit of Cromwell, it was by asserting 
 that he loved the King "no less than he loved God." 
 
 It was indeed Cromwell who more than any man had 
 reared this fabric of King-worship. But he had hardly 
 reared it when it began to give way. The very success of 
 his measures indeed brought about the ruin of his policy. 
 One of the most striking features of Cromwell's system 
 had been his development of parliamentary action. The 
 great assembly which the Monarchy had dreaded and si- 
 lenced from the days of Edward the Fourth to the days of 
 Wolsey had been called to the front again at the Cardinal's 
 fall. Proud of his popularity, and conscious of his people's 
 sympathy with him in his protest against a foreign juris- 
 diction, Henry set aside the policy of the Crown to deal a 
 heavier blow at the Papacy. Both the parties represented 
 in the ministry that followed Wolsey welcomed the change, 
 for the nobles represented by Norfolk and the men of the 
 New Learning represented by More regarded Parliament 
 with the same favor. More indeed in significant though 
 almost exaggerated phrases set its omnipotence face to 
 face with the growing despotism of the Crown. The 
 policy of Cromwell fell in with this revival of the two 
 Houses. The daring of his temper led him not to dread 
 and suppress national institutions, but to seize them and 
 master them, and to turn them into means of enhancing 
 the royal power. As he saw in the Church a means of 
 raising the King into the spiritual ruler of the faith and 
 consciences of his people, so he saw in the Parliament a 
 means of shrouding the boldest aggressions of the mon- 
 archy under the veil of popular assent, and of giving to 
 the most ruthless acts of despotism the stamp and sem- 
 blance of law. He saw nothing to fear in a House of 
 Lords whose nobles cowered helpless before the might of 
 the Crown, and whose spiritual members his policy was
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE REFORMATION. 1540-160a 203 
 
 degrading into mere tools of the royal will. Nor could he 
 find anything to dread in a House of Commons which was 
 crowded with members directly or indirectly nominated 
 by the royal Council. With a Parliament such as this 
 Cromwell might well trust to make the nation itself 
 through its very representatives an accomplice in the work 
 of absolutism. 
 
 His trust seemed more than justified by the conduct of 
 the Houses. It was by parliamentary statutes that the 
 Church was prostrated at the feet of the Monarchy. It 
 was by bills of attainder that great nobles were brought to 
 the block. It was under constitutional forms that freedom 
 was gagged with new treasons and oaths and questionings. 
 One of the first bills of Cromwell's Parliaments freed 
 Henry from the need of paying his debts, one of the last 
 gave his proclamations the force of laws. In the action 
 of the two Houses the Crown seemed to have discovered a 
 means of carrying its power into regions from which a 
 bare despotism has often had to shrink. Henry might 
 have dared single-handed to break with Rome or to send 
 Sir Thomas More to the block. But without Parliament 
 to back him he could hardly have ventured on such an 
 enormous confiscation of property as was involved in the 
 suppression of the monasteries or on such changes in the 
 national religion as were brought about by the Ten Arti- 
 cles and the Six. It was this discovery of the use to which 
 the Houses could be turned that accounts for the immense 
 development of their powers, the immense widening of 
 their range of action, which they owe to Cromwell. Now 
 that the great engine was at his own command he used it 
 as it had never been used before. Instead of rare and 
 short assemblies of Parliament, England saw it gathered 
 year after year. All the jealousy with which the Crown 
 had watched its older encroachments on the prerogative 
 was set aside. Matters which had even in the days of 
 their greatest influence been scrupulously withheld from 
 the cognizance of the Houses were now absolutely forced
 
 204 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 on their attention. It was by Parliament that England 
 was torn from the great body of Western Christendom. 
 It was by parliamentary enactment that the English 
 Church was reft of its older liberties and made absolutely 
 subservient to the Crown. It was a parliamentary statute 
 that defined the very faith and religion of the land. The 
 vastest confiscation of landed property which England had 
 ever witnessed was wrought by Parliament. It regulated 
 the succession to the throne. It decided on the validity of 
 the King's marriages and the legitimacy of the King's 
 children. Former sovereigns had struggled against the 
 claim of the Houses to meddle with the royal ministers or 
 with members of the royal household. Now Parliament 
 was called on by the King himself to attaint his ministers 
 and his Queens. 
 
 The fearlessness and completeness of such a policy as 
 this brings home to us more than any other of his plans 
 the genius of Cromwell. But its success depended wholly 
 on the absolute servility of Parliament to the will of the 
 Crown, and Cromwell's own action made the continuance 
 of such a servility impossible. The part which the Houses 
 were to play in after years shows the importance of cling- 
 ing to the forms of constitutional freedom, even when 
 their life is all but lost. In the inevitable reaction against 
 tyranny they furnish centres for the reviving energies of 
 the people, while the returning tide of liberty is enabled 
 through their preservation to flow quietly and naturally 
 along its traditional channels. And even before Crom- 
 well passed to his doom the tide of liberty was returning. 
 On one occasion during his rule a " great debate" on the 
 suppression of the lesser monasteries showed that elements 
 of resistance still survived ; and these elements developed 
 rapidly as the power of the Crown declined under the 
 minority of Edward and the unpopularity of Mary. To 
 this revival of a spirit of independence the spoliation of 
 the Church largely contributed. Partly from necessity, 
 partly from a desire to build up a faction interested in the
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 205 
 
 maintenance of their ecclesiastical policy, Cromwell and 
 the King squandered the vast mass of wealth which flowed 
 into the Treasury from the dissolution of the monasteries 
 with reckless prodigality. Three hundred and seventy- 
 six smaller houses had been suppressed in 1536; six hun- 
 dred and forty-five greater houses were surrendered or 
 seized in 1539. Some of the spoil was devoted to the erec- 
 tion of six new bishoprics ; a larger part went to the for- 
 tification of the coast. But the bulk of these possessions 
 were granted lavishly away to the nobles and courtiers 
 about the King, and to a host of adventurers who " had 
 become gospellers for the abbey lands." Something like 
 a fifth of the actual land in the kingdom was in this way 
 transferred from the holding of the Church to that of no- 
 bles and gentry. Not only were the older houses enriched, 
 but a new aristocracy was erected from among the de- 
 pendants of the Court. The Russells and the Cavendishes 
 are familiar instances of families which rose from obscu- 
 rity through the enormous grants of Church-land made 
 to Henry's courtiers. The old baronage was thus hardly 
 crushed before a new aristocracy took its place. " Those 
 families within or without the bounds of the peerage," 
 observes Mr. Hallam, " who are now deemed the most con- 
 siderable, will be found, with no great number of excep- 
 tions, to have first become conspicuous under the Tudor 
 line of kings and, if we could trace the title of their estates, 
 to have acquired no small portion of them mediately or 
 immediately from monastic or other ecclesiastical founda- 
 tions. " The leading part which these freshly created peers 
 took in the events which followed Henry's death gave 
 strength and vigor to the whole order. But the smaller 
 gentry shared in the general enrichment of the landed 
 proprietors, and the new energy of the Lords was soon 
 followed by a display of political independence among the 
 Commons themselves. 
 
 While the prodigality of Cromwell's system thus brought 
 into being a new check upon the Crown by enriching tho
 
 206 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 nobles and the lesser gentry, the religious changes it 
 brought about gave fire and vigor to the elements of oppo- 
 sition which were slowly gathering. What did most to 
 ruin the King-worship that Cromwell set up was Crom- 
 well's ecclesiastical policy. In reducing the Church to 
 mere slavery beneath the royal power he believed himself 
 to be trampling down the last constitutional force which 
 could hold the Monarchy in check. What he really "did 
 was to give life and energy to new forces which were 
 bound from their very nature to battle with the Monarchy 
 for even more than the old English freedom. When 
 Cromwell seized on the Church he held himself to be seiz- 
 ing for the Crown the mastery which the Church had 
 wielded till now over the consciences and reverence of 
 men. But the very humiliation of the great religious 
 body broke the spell beneath which Englishmen had 
 bowed. In form nothing had been changed. The outer 
 constitution of the Church remained utterly unaltered. 
 The English bishop, freed from the papal control, freed 
 from the check of monastic independence, seemed greater 
 and more imposing than ever. The priest still clung to 
 rectory and church. If images were taken out of churches, 
 if here and there a rood-loft was pulled down or a saint's 
 shrine demolished, no change was made in form of ritual 
 or mode of worship. The mass was untouched. Every 
 hymn, every prayer was still in Latin; confession, pen- 
 ance, fastings and f eastings, extreme unction, went on as 
 before. There was little to show that any change had 
 taken place; and yet every ploughman felt that all was 
 changed. The bishop, gorgeous as he might be in mitre 
 and cope, was a mere tool of the King. The priest was 
 trembling before heretics he used to burn. Farmer or 
 shopkeeper might enter their church any Sunday morning 
 to find mass or service utterly transformed. The spell of 
 tradition, of unbroken continuance, was over ; and with it 
 the power which the Church had wielded over the souls of 
 men was in great part done away.
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 207 
 
 It was not that the new Protestantism was as yet for- 
 midable, for, violent and daring as they were, the adherents 
 of Luther were few in number, and drawn mostly from 
 the poorer classes among whom Wyclifite heresy had lin- 
 gered or from the class of scholars whose theological studies 
 drew their sympathy to the movement over sea. It was 
 that the lump was now ready to be leavened by this petty 
 leaven, that men's hold on the firm ground of custom was 
 broken and their minds set drifting and questioning, that 
 little as was the actual religious change, the thought of 
 religious change had become familiar to the people as a 
 whole. And with religious change was certain to come 
 religious revolt. The human conscience was hardly likely 
 to move everywhere in strict time to the slow advance of 
 Henry's reforms. Men who had been roused from im- 
 plicit obedience to the Papacy as a revelation of the Divine 
 will by hearing the Pope denounced in royal proclamations 
 as a usurper and an impostor were hardly inclined to take 
 up submissively the new official doctrine which substituted 
 implicit belief in the King for implicit belief in the 
 "Bishop of Rome." But bound as Church and King now 
 were together, it was impossible to deny a tenet of the one 
 without entering on a course of opposition to the other. 
 Cromwell had raised against the Monarchy the most fatal 
 of all enemies, the force of the individual conscience, the 
 enthusiasm of religious belief, the fire of religious fanati- 
 cism. Slowly as the area of the new Protestantism ex- 
 tended, every man that it gained was a possible opponent 
 of the Crown. And should the time come, as the time 
 was soon to come, when the Crown moved to the side of 
 Protestantism, then in turn every soul that the older faith 
 retained was pledged to a lifelong combat with the 
 Monarchy. 
 
 How irresistible was the national drift was seen* on 
 Cromwell's fall. Its first result indeed promised to be a 
 reversal of all that Cromwell had done. Norfolk returned 
 to power, and his influence over Henry seemed secured by
 
 208 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 the King's repudiation of Anne of Cleves and his marriage 
 in the summer of 1540 to a niece of the Duke, Catharine 
 Howard. But Norfolk's temper had now become wholly 
 hostile to the movement about him. " I never read the 
 Scripture nor never will!" the Duke replied hotly to a 
 Protestant arguer. " It was merry in England afore the 
 new learning came up; yea, I would all things were as 
 hath been in times past." In his preference of an Impe- 
 rial alliance to an alliance with Francis and the Lutherans 
 Henry went warmly with his minister. Parted as he had 
 been from Charles by the question of the divorce, the 
 King's sympathies had remained true to the Emperor; 
 and at this moment he was embittered against France by 
 the difficulties it threw in the way of his projects for gain- 
 ing a hold upon Scotland. Above all the King still clung 
 to the hope of a purification of the Church by a Council, 
 as well as of a reconciliation of England with the general 
 body of this purified Christendom, and it was only by the 
 Emperor that such a Council could be convened or such a 
 reconciliation brought about. An alliance with him was 
 far from indicating any retreat from Henry's position of 
 independence or any submission to the Papacy. To the 
 men of his own day Charles seemed no Catholic bigot. 
 On the contrary the stricter representatives of Catholicism 
 such as Paul the Fourth denounced him as a patron of her- 
 etics, and attributed the upgrowth of Lutheranism to his 
 steady protection and encouragement. Nor was the charge 
 without seeming justification. The old jealousy between 
 Pope and Emperor, the more recent hostility between 
 them as rival Italian powers, had from the beginning 
 proved Luther's security. At the first appearance of the 
 reformer Maximilian had recommended the Elector of 
 Saxony to suffer no harm to be done to him ; " there might 
 come a time," said the old Emperor, "when he would be 
 needed." Charles had looked on the matter mainly in the 
 same political way. In his earliest years he bought Leo's 
 aid in his recovery of Milan from the French king by
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 209 
 
 issuing the ban of the Empire against Luther in the Diet 
 of Worms ; but every Italian held that in suffering the re- 
 former to withdraw unharmed Charles had shown not so 
 much regard to his own safe-conduct as a purpose still " to 
 keep the Pope in check with that rein." And as Charles 
 dealt with Luther so he dealt with Lutheranism. The 
 new faith profited by the Emperor's struggle with Clement 
 the Seventh for the lordship over Italy. It was in the 
 midst of this struggle that his brother and representative, 
 Ferdinand, signed in the Diet of Spires an Imperial decree 
 by which the German States were left free to arrange their 
 religious affairs " as each should best answer to God and 
 the Emperor." The decree gave a legal existence to the 
 Protestant body in the Empire which it never afterward 
 lost. 
 
 Such a step might well encourage the belief that Charles 
 was himself inclining to Lutheranism; and the belief 
 gathered strength as he sent Lutheran armies over the 
 Alps to sack Rome and to hold the Pope a prisoner. The 
 belief was a false one, for Charles remained utterly un- 
 touched by the religious movement about him ; but even 
 when his strife with the Papacy was to a great extent 
 lulled by Clement's submission, he still turned a deaf ear 
 to the Papal appeals for dealing with Lutheranism by fire 
 and sword. His political interests and the conception 
 which he held of his duty as Emperor alike swayed him 
 to milder counsels. He purposed indeed to restore relig- 
 ious unity. His political aim was to bring Germany to 
 his feet as he had brought Italy ; and he saw that the relig- 
 ious schism was the great obstacle in the way of his real- 
 izing this design. As the temporal head of the Catholic 
 world he was still more strongly bent to heal the breaches 
 of Catholicism. But he had no wish to insist on an un- 
 conditional submission to the Papacy. He believed that 
 there were evils to be cured on the one side as on the 
 other ; and Charles saw. the high position which awaited 
 him if as Emperor he could bring about a reformation of
 
 210 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK Vt 
 
 the Church and a reunion of Christendom. Violent as 
 Luther's words had been, the Lutheran princes and the 
 bulk of Lutheran theologians had not yet come to look on 
 Catholicism as an irreconcilable foe. Even on the papal 
 side there was a learned and active party, a party headed 
 by Contarini and Pole, whose theological sympathies went 
 in many points with the Lutherans, and who looked to the 
 winning back of the Lutherans as the needful prelude to 
 any reform in the doctrine and practice of the Church ; 
 while Melancthon was as hopeful as Contarini that such a 
 reform might be wrought and the Church again become 
 universal. In his proposal of a Council to carry on the 
 double work of purification and reunion therefore Charles 
 stood out as the representative of the larger part both of 
 the Catholic and the Protestant world. Against such a 
 proposal however Rome struggled hard. All her tradition 
 was against Councils, where the assembled bishops had in 
 earlier days asserted their superiority to the Pope, and 
 where the Emperor who convened the assembly and car- 
 ried out its decrees rose into dangerous rivalry with the 
 Papacy. Crushed as he was, Clement the Seventh 
 throughout his lifetime held the proposal of a Council 
 stubbornly at bay. But under his successor, Paul the 
 Third, the influence of Contarini and the moderate Catho- 
 lics secured a more favorable reception of plans of recon- 
 ciliation. In April, 1541, conferences for this purpose 
 were in fact opened at Augsburg in which Contarini, as 
 Papal legate, accepted a definition of the moot question of 
 justification by faith which satisfied Bucer and Melanc- 
 thon. On the other side, the Landgrave of Hesse and the 
 Elector of Brandenburg publicly declared that they be- 
 lieved it possible to come to terms on the yet more vexed 
 questions of the Mass and the Papal supremacy. 
 
 Never had the reunion of the world seemed so near; and 
 the hopes that were stirring found an echo in England as 
 well as in Germany. We can hardly doubt indeed that it 
 was the revival of these hopes which had brought about
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 211 
 
 the fall of Cromwell and the recall of Norfolk to power. 
 Norfolk, like his master, looked to a purification of the 
 Church by a Council as the prelude to a reconciliation of 
 England with the general body of Catholicism ; and both 
 saw that it was by the influence of the Emperor alone that 
 such a Council could be brought about. Charles on the 
 other hand was ready to welcome Henry's advances. The 
 quarrel over Catharine had ended with her death ; and the 
 wrong done her had been in part atoned for by the fall of 
 Anne Boleyn. The aid of Henry too was needed to hold 
 in check the opposition of France. The chief means 
 which France still possessed of holding the Emperor at 
 bay lay in the disunion of the Empire, and it was resolute 
 to preserve this weapon against him at whatever cost 
 to Christendom. While Francis remonstrated at Rome 
 against the concessions made to the Lutherans by the 
 Legates, he urged the Lutheran princes to make no terms 
 with the Papacy. To the Protestants he held out hopes 
 of his own conversion, while he promised Pope Paul that 
 he would defend him with his life against Emperor and 
 heretics. His intrigues were aided by the suspicions of 
 both the religious parties. Luther refused to believe in 
 the sincerity of the concessions made by the Legates ; Paul 
 the Third held aloof from them in sullen silence. Mean- 
 while Francis was preparing to raise more material obsta- 
 cles to the Emperor's designs. Charles had bought his 
 last reconciliation with the King by a promise of restoring 
 the Milanese, but he had no serious purpose of ever fulfil- 
 ling his pledge, and his retention of the Duchy gave the 
 French King a fair pretext for threatening a renewal of 
 the war. 
 
 England, as Francis hoped, he could hold in check 
 through his alliance with the Scots. After the final ex- 
 pulsion of Albany in 1524 Scottish history became little 
 more than a strife between Margaret Tudor and her hus- 
 band, the Earl of Angus, for power; but the growth of 
 James Uhe Fifth to manhood at last secured rest for the
 
 212 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI 
 
 land. James had all the varied ability of his race, and he 
 carried out with vigor its traditional policy. The High- 
 land chieftains, the great lords of the Lowlands, were 
 brought more under the royal sway; the Church was 
 strengthened to serve as a check on the feudal baronage ; 
 the alliance with France was strictly preserved, as the one 
 security against English aggression. Nephew as he was 
 indeed of the English King, James from the outset of his 
 reign took up an attitude hostile to England. He was 
 jealous of the influence which the two Henries had estab- 
 lished in his realm by the marriage of Margaret and by 
 the building up of an English party under the Douglases ; 
 the great Churchmen who formed his most trusted advisers 
 dreaded the influence of the religious changes across the 
 border ; while the people clung to their old hatred of Eng- 
 land and their old dependence on France. It was only by 
 two inroads of the border lords that Henry checked the 
 hostile intrigues of James in 1532; his efforts to influence 
 his nephew by an interview and alliance were met by the 
 King's marriage with two French wives in succession, 
 Magdalen of Valois, a daughter of Francis, and Mary, a 
 daughter of the Duke of Guise. In 1539 when the pro- 
 jected coalition between France and the Empire threatened 
 England, it had been needful to send Norfolk with an 
 army to the Scotch - frontier, and now that France was 
 again hostile Norfolk had to move anew to the border in 
 the autumn of 1541. 
 
 While the Duke was fruitlessly endeavoring to bring 
 James to fresh friendship a sudden blow at home weakened 
 his power. At the close of the year Catharine Howard 
 was arrested on a charge of adultery ; a Parliament which 
 assembled in January, 1542, passed a Bill of Attainder; 
 and in February the Queen was sent to the block. She 
 was replaced by the widow of Lord Latimer, Catharine 
 Parr; and the influence of Norfolk in the King's counsels 
 gradually gave way to that of Bishop Gardiner of Win- 
 chester. But Henry clung to the policy which the Duke
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE REFORMATION. 1540-1603. 213 
 
 favored. At the end of 1541 two great calamities, the loss 
 of Hungary after a victory of the Turks and a crushing 
 defeat at Algiers, so weakened Charles that in the summer 
 of the following year Francis ventured to attack him. 
 The attack served only to draw closer the negotiations be- 
 tween England and the Emperor; and Francis was forced, 
 as he had threatened, to give Henry work to occupy him 
 at home. The busiest counsellor of the Scotch King, 
 Cardinal Beaton, crossed the seas to negotiate a joint at- 
 tack, and the attitude of Scotland became so menacing 
 that in the autumn of 1542 Norfolk was again sent to the 
 border with twenty thousand men. But terrible as were 
 his ravages, he could not bring the Scotch army to an en- 
 gagement, and want of supplies soon forced him to fall 
 back over the border. It was in vain that James urged 
 his nobles to follow him in a counter-invasion. They 
 were ready to defend their country ; but the memory of 
 Flodden was still fresh, and success in England would 
 only give dangerous strength to a King in whom they 
 saw an enemy. But James was as stubborn in his pur- 
 pose as the lords. Anxious only to free himself from their 
 presence, he waited till the two armies had alike with- 
 drawn, and then suddenly summoned his subjects to meet 
 him in arms on the western border. A disorderly host 
 gathered at Lochmaben and passed into Cumberland ; but 
 the English borderers followed on them fast, and were 
 preparing to attack when at nightfall on the twenty-fifth 
 of November a panic seized the whole Scotch force. Lost 
 in the darkness and cut off from retreat by the Solway 
 Firth, thousands of men with all the baggage and guns 
 fell into the hands of the pursuers. The news of this rout 
 fell on the young King like a sentence of death. For a 
 while he wandered desperately from palace to palace till at 
 the opening of December the tidings met him at Falkirk 
 that his queen, Mary of Guise, had given birth to a child. 
 His two boys had both died in youth, and he was longing 
 passionately for an heir to the crown which was slipping
 
 214 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 from his grasp. But the child was a daughter, the Mary 
 Stuart of later history. "The deil go with it," muttered 
 the dying king, as his mind fell back to the close of the 
 line of Bruce and the marriage with Robert's daughter 
 which brought the Stuarts to the Scottish throne. " The 
 deil go with it! It will end as it began. It came with a 
 lass, and it will end with a lass." A few days later he 
 died. 
 
 The death of James did more than remove a formidable 
 foe. It opened up for the first time a prospect of that 
 union of the two kingdoms which was at last to close their 
 long hostility. Scotland, torn by factions and with a babe 
 for queen, seemed to lie at Henry's feet : and the King 
 seized the opportunity of completing his father's work by 
 a union of the realms. At the opening of 1543 he proposed 
 to the Scotch regent, the Earl of Arran, the marriage of 
 the infant Mary Stuart with his son Edward. To insure 
 this bridal he demanded that Mary should at once be sent 
 to England, the four great fortresses of Scotland be placed 
 in English hands, and a voice given to Henry himself in 
 the administration of the Scotch Council of Regency. 
 Arran and the Queen-mother, rivals as they were, vied 
 with each other in apparent good will to the marriage ; 
 but there was a steady refusal to break the league with 
 France, and the "English lords," as the Douglas faction 
 were called, owned themselves helpless in face of the na- 
 tional jealousy of English ambition. The temper of the 
 nation itself was seen in the answer made by the Scotch 
 Parliament which gathered in the spring. If they con- 
 sented to the young Queen's betrothal, they not only re- 
 jected the demands which accompanied the proposal, but 
 insisted that in case of such a union Scotland should have 
 a perpetual regent of its own, and that this office should 
 be hereditary in the House of Arran. Warned by his 
 very partisans that the delivery of Mary was impossible, 
 that if such a demand were pressed " there was not so little 
 a boy but he would hurl stones against it, the wives would
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE REFORMATION. 15401608. 215 
 
 handle their distaffs, and the commons would universally 
 die in it," Henry's proposals dropped in July to a treaty 
 of alliance, offensive and defensive, he suffered France to 
 be included among the allies of Scotland named in it, he 
 consented that the young Queen should remain with her 
 mother till the age of ten, and offered guarantees for the 
 maintenance of Scotch independence. 
 
 But modify it as he might, Henry knew that such a 
 project of union could only be carried out by a war with 
 Francis. His negotiations for a treaty with Charles had 
 long been delayed through Henry's wish to drag the Em- 
 peror into an open breach with the Papacy, but at the mo- 
 ment of the King's first proposals for the marriage of Mary 
 Stuart with his son the need of finding a check upon France 
 forced on a formal alliance with the Emperor in February, 
 1543. The two allies agreed that the war should be con- 
 tinued till the Duchy of Burgundy had been restored to 
 the Emperor and till England had recovered Normandy 
 and Guienne ; while the joint fleets of Henry and Charles 
 held the Channel and sheltered England from any danger 
 of French attack. The main end of this treaty was doubt- 
 less to give Francis work at home which might prevent 
 the dispatch of a French force into Scotland and the over- 
 throw of Henry's hopes of a Scotch marriage. These 
 hopes were strengthened as the summer went on by the 
 acceptance of his later proposals in a Parliament which 
 was packed by the Regent, and by the actual conclusion 
 of a marriage treaty. But if Francis could spare neither 
 horse nor man for action in Scotland his influence in the 
 northern kingdom was strong enough to foil Henry's plans. 
 The Churchmen were as bitterly opposed to such a marriage 
 as the partisans of France; and their head, Cardinal 
 Beaton, who had held aloof from the Regent's Parliament, 
 suddenly seized the Queen-mother and her babe, crowned 
 the infant Mary, called a Parliament in December which 
 annulled the marriage treaty, and set Henry at defiance. 
 
 The King's wrath at this overthrow of his hopes showed 
 
 AO VOL. 5
 
 216 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 itself in a brutal and impolitic act of vengeance. He was 
 a skilful shipbuilder; and among the many enterprises 
 which the restless genius of Cromwell undertook there was 
 probably none in which Henry took so keen an interest as 
 in his creation of an English fleet. Hitherto merchant 
 ships had been impressed when a fleet was needed; but 
 the progress of naval warfare had made the maintenance 
 of an armed force at sea a condition of maritime power, 
 and the resources furnished by the dissolution of the ab- 
 beys had been devoted in part to the building of ships of 
 war, the largest of which, the Mary Rose, carried a crew 
 of seven hundred men. The new strength which England 
 was to wield in its navy was first seen in 1544. An army 
 was gathered under Lord Hertford; and while Scotland 
 was looking for the usual advance over the border the 
 Earl's forces were quietly put on board and the English 
 fleet appeared on the third of May in the Frith of Forth. 
 The surprise made resistance impossible. Leith was seized 
 and sacked; Edinburgh, then a town of wooden houses, 
 was given to the flames, and burned for three days and 
 three nights. The country for seven miles round was 
 harried into a desert. The blow was a hard one, but it 
 was little likely to bring Scotchmen round to Henry's 
 projects of union. A brutal raid of the English borderers 
 on Melrose and the destruction of his ancestors' tombs es- 
 tranged the Earl of Angus, and was quickly avenged by 
 his overthrow of the marauders at Ancrum Moor. Henry 
 had yet to learn the uselessness of mere force to compass 
 his ends. " I shall be glad to serve the King of England, 
 with my honor," said the Lord of Buccleugh to an Eng- 
 lish envoy, " but I will not be constrained thereto if all 
 Teviotdale be burned to the bottom of hell." 
 
 Hertford's force returned in good time to join the army 
 which Henry in person was gathering at Calais to co-oper- 
 ate with the forces assembled by Charles on the north- 
 eastern frontier of France. Each sovereign found himself 
 at the head of forty thousand men, and the Emperor's
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 217 
 
 military ability was seen in his proposal for an advance of 
 both armies upon Paris. But though Henry found no 
 French force in his front, his cautious temper shrank from 
 the risk of leaving fortresses in his rear ; and while their 
 allies pushed boldly past Chalons on the capital, the Eng- 
 lish troops were detained till September in the capture of 
 Boulogne, and only left Boulogne to form the siege of 
 Montreuil. The French were thus enabled to throw then 
 whole force on the Emperor, and Charles found himself in 
 a position from which negotiation alone could extricate 
 him. 
 
 His ends were in fact gained by the humiliation of 
 France, and he had as little desire to give England a 
 strong foothold in the neighborhood of his own Nether- 
 lands as in Wolsey's days. The widening of English ter- 
 ritory there could hardly fail to encourage that upgrowth 
 of heresy which' the Emperor justly looked upon as the 
 greatest danger to the hold of Spain upon the Low Coun- 
 tries, while it would bring Henry a step nearer to the chain 
 of Protestant states which began on the Lower Rhine. 
 The plans which Charles had formed for uniting the Cath- 
 olics and Lutherans in the conferences of Augsburg had 
 broken down before the opposition both of Luther and the 
 Pope. On both sides indeed the religious contest was 
 gathering new violence. A revival had begun in the 
 Church itself, but it was the revival of a militant and un- 
 compromising orthodoxy. In 1542 the fanaticism of Car- 
 dinal Caraffa forced on the establishment of a supreme 
 Tribunal of the Inquisition at Rome. The next year saw 
 the establishment of the Jesuits. Meanwhile Lutheran- 
 ism took a new energy. The whole north of Germany be- 
 came Protestant. In 1539 the younger branches of the 
 house of Saxony joined the elder in a common adherence 
 to Lutheranism ; and their conversion had been followed 
 by that of the Elector of Brandenburg. Southern Ger- 
 many seemed bent on following the example of the north. 
 The hereditary possessions of Charles himself fell away
 
 218 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VL 
 
 from Catholicism. The Austrian duchies were overrun 
 with heresy. Bohemia promised soon to become Hussite 
 again. Persecution failed to check the triumph of the new 
 opinions in the Low Countries. The Empire itself threat- 
 ened to become Protestant. In 1540 the accession of the 
 Elector Palatine robbed Catholicism of Central Germany 
 and the Upper Rhine ; and three years later, at the open- 
 ing of the war with France, that of the Archbishop of 
 Koln gave the Protestants not only the Central Rhineland 
 but a majority in the College of Electors. It seemed im- 
 possible for Charles to prevent the Empire from repudiat- 
 ing Catholicism in his lifetime, or to hinder the Imperial 
 Crown from falling to a Protestant at his death. 
 
 The great fabric of power which had been built up by 
 the policy of Ferdinand of Aragon was thus threatened 
 with utter ruin, and Charles saw himself forced into the 
 struggle he had so long avoided, if not for the interests of 
 religion, at any rate for the interests of the House of Aus- 
 tria. He still hoped for a reunion from the Council which 
 was assembled at Trent, and from which a purified Cath- 
 olicism was to come. But he no longer hoped that the 
 Lutherans would yield to the mere voice of the Council. 
 They would yield only to force, and the first step in such 
 a process of compulsion must be the breaking up of their 
 League of Schmalkald. Only France could save them; 
 and it was to isolate them from France that Charles availed 
 himself of the terror his march on Paris had caused, and 
 concluded a treaty with that power in September, 1544. 
 The progress of Protestantism had startled even France 
 itself ; and her old policy seemed to be abandoned in her 
 promises of co-operation in the task of repressing heresy in 
 the Empire. But a stronger security against French in- 
 tervention lay in the unscrupulous dexterity with which, 
 while withdrawing from the struggle, Charles left Henry 
 and Francis still at strife. Henry would not cede Bou- 
 logne, and Francis saw no means of forcing him to a peace 
 save by a threat of invasion. While an army closed round
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE REFORMATION. 1540--1608. 219 
 
 Boulogne, and a squadron carried troops to Scotland, a 
 hundred and fifty French ships were gathered in the Chan- 
 nel and crossed in the summer of 1545 to the Isle of Wight. 
 But their attacks were feebly conducted, and the fleet at 
 last returned to its harbors without striking any serious 
 blow, while the siege of Boulogne dragged idly on through 
 the year. Both kings however drew to peace. In spite of 
 the treaty of Crepy it was impossible for France to abandon 
 the Lutherans, and Francis was eager to free his hands 
 for action across the Rhine. Henry, on the other hand, de- 
 serted by his ally and with a treasury ruined by the cost of 
 the war, was ready at last to surrender his gains in it. In 
 June, 1546, a peace was concluded by which England en- 
 gaged to surrender Boulogne on payment of a heavy ran- 
 som, and France to restore the annual subsidy which had 
 been promised in 1525. 
 
 What aided in the close of the war was a new aspect of 
 affairs in Scotland. Since the death of James the Fifth 
 the great foe of England in the north had been the Arch- 
 bishop of St. Andrews, Cardinal Beaton. In despair of 
 shaking his power his rivals had proposed schemes for his 
 assassination to Henry, and these schemes had been ex- 
 pressly approved. But plot after plot broke down ; and it 
 was not till May, 1546, that a group of Scotch nobles who 
 favored the Reformation surprised his castle at St. An- 
 drews. Shrieking miserably, " I am a priest ! I am a 
 priest ! Fie ! Fie ! All is gone !" the Cardinal was brutally 
 murdered, and his body hung over the castle walls. His 
 death made it easy to include Scotland in the peace with 
 France which was concluded in the summer. But in 
 England itself peace was a necessity. The Crown was 
 penniless. In spite of the confiscation of the abbey lands 
 in 1539 the treasury was found empty at the very opening 
 of the war : the large subsidies granted by the parliament 
 were expended; and conscious that a fresh grant could 
 hardly be expected even from the servile Houses the gov- 
 ernment in 1545 fell back on its old resource of benevo-
 
 820 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI 
 
 lences. Of two London merchants who resisted this 
 demand as illegal, one was sent to the Fleet, the second 
 ordered to join the army on the Scotch border; but it was 
 significant that resistance had been offered, and the failure 
 of the war-taxes which were voted at the close of the year 
 to supply the royal needs drove the Council to fresh acts 
 of confiscation. A vast mass of Church property still re- 
 mained for the spoiler, and by a bill of 1545 more than 
 two thousand chantries and chapels, with a hundred and 
 ten hospitals, were suppressed to the profit of the Crown. 
 Enormous as this booty was, it could only be slowly real- 
 ized; and the immediate pressure forced the Council to 
 take refuge in the last and worst measure any government 
 can adopt, a debasement of the currency. The evils of 
 such a course were felt till the reign of Elizabeth. But it 
 was a course that could not be repeated ; and financial ex- 
 haustion played its part in bringing the war to an end. 
 
 A still greater part was played by the aspect of affairs 
 in the Empire. Once freed from the check of the war 
 Charles had moved fast to his aim. In 1545 he had ad- 
 justed all minor differences with Paul the Third, and Pope 
 and Emperor had resolved on the immediate convocation 
 of the Council, and on the enforcement of its decisions by 
 weight of arms. Should the Emperor be driven to war 
 with the Lutheran princes, the Pope engaged to support 
 him with all his power. " Were it needful, " Paul promised, 
 "he would sell his very crown in his service." In De- 
 cember the Council was actually opened at Trent, and its 
 proceedings soon showed that no concessions to the Luther- 
 ans could be looked for. The Emperor's demand that the 
 reform of the Church should first be taken in hand was 
 evaded ; and on the two great questions of the authority 
 of the Bible as a ground of faith, and of justification, the 
 sentence of the Council directly condemned the Protestant 
 opinions. The Lutherans showed their resolve to make 
 no submission by refusing to send representatives to Trent ; 
 and Charles carried out his pledges to the papacy by tak-
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE REFORMATION. 1540-1603. 221 
 
 ing the field in the spring of 1546 to break up the League 
 of Schmalkald. But the army gathered under the Elector 
 of Saxony and the Landgrave of Hesse so far outnumbered 
 the Imperial forces that the Emperor could not venture on 
 a battle. Henry watched the course of Charles with a 
 growing anxiety. The hopes of a purified and united 
 Christendom which has drawn him a few years back to 
 the Emperor's side faded before the stern realities of th* 
 Council. The highest pretensions of the Papacy had been 
 sanctioned by the bishops gathered at Trent ; and to the 
 pretensions of the Papacy Henry was resolved not to bow. 
 He was driven, whether he would or no, on the policy of 
 Cromwell ; and in the last months of his life he offered aid 
 to the League of Schmalkald. His offers were rejected ; 
 for the Lutheran princes had no faith in his sincerity, and 
 believed themselves strong enough to deal with the Em- 
 peror without foreign help. 
 
 But his attitude without told on his policy at home. To 
 the hotter Catholics as to the hotter Protestants the years 
 since Cromwell's fall had seemed years of a gradual return 
 to Catholicism. There had been a slight sharpening of 
 persecution for the Protestants, and restrictions had been 
 put on the reading of the English Bible. The alliance 
 with Charles and the hope of reconciling England anew 
 with a pacified Christendom gave fresh cause for suppress- 
 ing heresy. Neither Norfolk nor his master indeed de- 
 sired any rigorous measure of reaction, for Henry re- 
 mained proud of the work he had done. His bitterness 
 against the Papacy only grew as the years went by ; and 
 at the very moment that heretics were suffering for a de- 
 nial of the mass, others were suffering by their side for a 
 denial of the supremacy. But strange and anomalous as 
 its system seemed, the drift of Henry's religious govern- 
 ment had as yet been in one direction, that of a return to 
 and reconciliation with the body of the Catholic Church. 
 With the decision of the Council and the new attitude of 
 the Emperor this drift was suddenly arrested. It was not
 
 222 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 that Henry realized the revolution that was opening before 
 him or the vast importance of the steps which his policy 
 now led him to take. His tendency, like that of his peo- 
 ple, was religious rather than theological, practical rather 
 than speculative. Of the immense problems which were 
 opening in the world neither he nor England saw any- 
 thing. The religious strife which was to break Europe 
 asunder was to the King as to the bulk of Englishmen a 
 quarrel of words and hot temper ; the truth which Chris- 
 tendom was to rend itself to pieces in striving to discover 
 was a thing that could easily be found with the aid of 
 God. There is something humorous as there is something 
 pathetic in the warnings which Henry addressed to the 
 Parliament at the close of 1545. The shadow of death as 
 it fell over him gave the King's words a new gentleness 
 and tenderness. " The special foundation of our religion 
 being charity between man and man, it is so refrigerate 
 as there never was more dissension and lack of love be- 
 tween man and man, the occasions whereof are opinions 
 only and names devised for the continuance of the same. 
 Some are called Papists, some Lutherans, and some Ana- 
 baptists; names devised of the devil, and yet not fully 
 without ground, for the severing of one man's heart by 
 conceit of opinion from the other." But the remedy was 
 a simple one. Every man was "to travail first for his 
 own amendment." Then the bishops and clergy were to 
 agree in their teaching, " which, seeing there is but one 
 truth and verity, they may easily do, calling therein for 
 the grace of God." Then the nobles and laity were to be 
 pious and humble, to read their new Bibles "reverently 
 and humbly . . . and in any doubt to resort to the learned 
 or at best the higher powers." " I am very sorry to know 
 and hear how unreverendly that precious jewel, the Word 
 of God, is disputed, rhymed, sung, and jangled in every 
 alehouse and tavern. This kind of man is depraved and 
 that kind of man, this ceremony and that ceremony." All 
 this controversy might be done away by simple charity.
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 223 
 
 " Therefore be in charity one with another like brother and 
 brother. Have respect to the pleasing of God ; and then 
 I doubt not that love I spoke of shall never be dissolved 
 between us." 
 
 There is something wonderful in the English coolness 
 and narrowness, in the speculative blindness and practical 
 good sense which could look out over such a world at such 
 a moment, and could see nothing in it save a quarrel of 
 "opinions, and of names devised for the continuance of 
 the same." But Henry only expressed the general feeling 
 of his people. England indeed was being slowly leavened 
 with a new spirit. The humiliation of the clergy, the 
 Lutheran tendencies of half the bishops, the crash of the 
 abbeys, the destruction of chantries and mass-chapels, a 
 measure which told closely on the actual worship of the 
 day, the new articles of faith, the diffusion of bibles, the 
 "jangling" and discussion which followed on every step 
 in the King's course, were all telling on the thoughts of 
 men. But the temper of the nation as a whole remained 
 religiously conservative. It drifted rather to the moderate 
 reforms of the New Learning than to any radical recon- 
 struction of the Church. There was a general disinclina- 
 tion indeed to push matters to either extreme, a general 
 shrinking from the persecution which the Catholic called 
 for as from the destruction which the Protestant was de- 
 siring. It was significant that a new heresy bill which 
 passed through the Lords in 1545 quietly disappeared when 
 it reached the Commons. But this shrinking rested rather 
 on national than on theological grounds, on a craving for 
 national union which Henry expressed in his cry for 
 "brotherly love," and on an imperfect appreciation of the 
 real nature or consequence of the points at issue which 
 made men shrink from burning their neighbors for " opin- 
 ions and names devised for the continuance of the same." 
 What Henry and what the bulk of Englishmen wanted 
 was, not indeed wholly to rest in what had been done, but 
 to do little more save the remedying of obvious abuses or
 
 224 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 the carrying on of obvious improvements. One such im- 
 provement was the supplying men with the means of pri- 
 vate devotion in their own tongue, a measure from which 
 none but the fanatics of either side dissented. This pro- 
 cess went slowly on in the issuing of two primers in 1535 
 and 1539, the rendering into English of the Creed, the 
 Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments, the publica- 
 tion of an English Litany for outdoor processions in 1544, 
 and the adding to this of a collection of English prayers 
 in 1545. 
 
 But the very tone of Henry shows his consciousness 
 that this religious truce rested on his will alone. Around 
 him as he lay dying stood men who were girding them- 
 selves to a fierce struggle for power, a struggle that could 
 not fail to wake the elements of religious discord which he 
 had striven to lull asleep. Adherents of the Papacy, ad- 
 vocates of a new submission to a foreign spiritual juris- 
 diction there were few or none ; for the most conservative 
 of English Churchmen or nobles had as yet no wish to re- 
 store the older Roman supremacy. But Norfolk and Gar- 
 diner were content with this assertion of national and 
 ecclesiastical independence; in all matters of faith they 
 were earnest to conserve, to keep things as they were, and 
 in front of them stood a group of nobles who were bent on 
 radical change. The marriages, the reforms, the profu- 
 sion of Henry had aided him in his policy of weakening 
 the nobles by building up a new nobility which sprang 
 from the Court and was wholly dependent on the Crown. 
 Such were the Russells, the Cavendishes, the Wriothesieys, 
 the Fitzwilliams. Such was John Dudley, a son of the 
 Dudley who had been put to death for his financial oppres- 
 sion in Henry the Seventh's days, but who had been re- 
 stored in blood, attached to the court, raised to the peerage 
 as Lord Lisle, and who, whether as adviser or general, 
 had been actively employed in high stations at the close 
 of this reign. Such above all were the two brothers of 
 Jane Seymour. The elder of the two, Edward Seymour,
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 225 
 
 had been raised to the earldom of Hertford, and entrusted 
 with the command of the English army in its operations 
 against Scotland. As uncle of Henry's boy Edward, he 
 could not fail to play a leading part in the coming reign ; 
 and the nobles of the "new blood," as their opponents 
 called them in disdain, drew round him as their head. 
 Without any historical hold on the country, raised by the 
 royal caprice, and enriched by the spoil of the monasteries, 
 tbese nobles were pledged to the changes from which they 
 had sprung and to the party of change. Over the mass of 
 the nation their influence was small ; and in the strife for 
 power with the older nobles which they were anticipating 
 they were forced to look to the small but resolute body of 
 men who, whether from religious enthusiasm or from greed 
 of wealth or power, were bent on bringing the English 
 Church nearer to conformity with the reformed Churches 
 of the Continent. As Henry drew to his grave the two 
 factions faced each other with gathering dread and gather- 
 ing hate. Hot words betrayed their hopes. "If God 
 should call the King to his mercy," said Norfolk's son, 
 Lord Surrey, " who were so meet to govern the Prince as 
 my lord my father?" "Rather than it should come to 
 pass," retorted a partisan of Hertford's, "that the Prince 
 should be under the governance of your father or you, I 
 would abide the adventure to thrust a dagger in you !" 
 
 In the history of English poetry the name of Lord 
 Surrey takes an illustrious place. An Elizabethan writer 
 tells us how at this time " sprang up a new company of 
 courtly makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder and 
 Henry, Earl of Surrey, were the two chieftains; who 
 having travelled to Italy, and there tasted the sweet and 
 stately measures and style of the Italian poesy, as novices 
 newly crept out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Pe- 
 trarch, they greatly polished our rude and homely manner 
 of vulgar poesy from what it had been before, and for that 
 cause may justly be said to be the first reformers of our 
 English metre and style." The dull moralizings of the
 
 226 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 rhymers who followed Chaucer, the rough but vivacious 
 doggerel of Skelton, made way in the hands of Wyatt and 
 Surrey for delicate imitations of the songs, sonnets, and 
 rondels of Italy and France. With the Italian conceits 
 came an Italian refinement whether of words or of thought ; 
 and the force and versatility of Surrey's youth showed it- 
 self in whimsical satires, in classical translations, in love- 
 sonnets, and in paraphrases of the Psalms. In his version 
 of two books of the Mneid he was the first to introduce into 
 England the Italian blank verse which was to play so 
 great a part in our literature. But with the poetic taste 
 of the Renascence Surrey inherited its wild and reckless 
 energy. Once he was sent to the Fleet for challenging a 
 gentleman to fight. Release enabled him to join his father 
 in an expedition against Scotland, but he was no sooner 
 back than the Londoners complained how at Candlemas 
 the young lord and his comrades " went out with stone 
 bows at midnight," and how next day "there was great 
 clamor of the breaking of many glass windows both of 
 houses and churches, and shooting at men that might be 
 in the streets." In spite of his humorous excuse that the 
 jest only purposed to bring home to men that " from jus- 
 tice's rod no fault is free, but that all such as work unright 
 in most quiet are next unrest," Surrey paid for this out- 
 break with a fresh arrest which drove him to find solace 
 in paraphrases of Ecclesiastes and the Psalms. Soon he 
 was over sea with the English troops in Flanders, and in 
 1544 serving as marshal of the camp to conduct the retreat 
 after the siege of Montreuil. Sent to relieve Boulogne, 
 he remained in charge of the town till the spring of 1546, 
 when he returned to England to rhyme sonnets to a fair 
 Geraldine, the daughter of the Earl of Kildare, and to 
 plunge into the strife of factions around the dying King. 
 
 All moral bounds had been loosened by the spirit of the 
 Renascence, and, if we accept the charge of his rivals, 
 Surrey now aimed at gaining a hold on Henry by offering 
 him his sister as a mistress. It is as possible that the
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 227 
 
 young Earl was aiming simply at the displacement of 
 Catharine Parr, and at the renewal by his sister's eleva- 
 tion to the throne of that matrimonial hold upon Henry 
 which the Howards had already succeeded in gaining 
 through the unions with Anne Boleyn and Catharine 
 Howard. But a temper such as Surrey's was ill-matched 
 against the subtle and unscrupulous schemers who saw 
 their enemy in a pride that scorned the " new men" about 
 him and vowed that when once the King was dead " they 
 should smart for it." The turn of foreign affairs gave a 
 fresh strength to the party which sympathized with the 
 Protestants and denounced that alliance with the Emperor 
 which had been throughout the policy of the Howards. 
 Henry's offer of aid to the Lutheran princes marked the 
 triumph of this party in the royal councils ; and the new 
 steps which Cranmer was suffered to make toward an 
 English Liturgy showed that the religious truce of Henry's 
 later years was at last abandoned. Hertford, the head of 
 the "new men," came more to the front as the waning 
 health of the King brought Jane Seymour's boy, Edward, 
 nearer to the throne. In the new reign Hertford, as the 
 boy's uncle, was sure to play a great part; and he used his 
 new influence to remove the only effective obstacle to his 
 future greatness. Surrey's talk of his royal blood, the 
 Duke's quartering of the royal arms to mark his Planta- 
 genet descent, and some secret interviews with the French 
 ambassador were adroitly used to wake Henry's jealousy 
 of the dangers which might beset the throne of his child. 
 Norfolk and his son were alike committed to the Tower 
 at the close of 1546. A month later Surrey was condemned 
 and sent to the block, and his father was only saved by 
 the sudden death of Henry the Eighth in January, 1547. 
 
 By an Act passed in the Parliament of 1544 it had been 
 provided that the crown should pass to Henry's son Ed- 
 ward, and on Edward's death without issue to his sister 
 Mary. Should Mary prove childless it was to go to Eliza- 
 beth, the child of Anne Boleyn. Beyond this point the
 
 228 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 Houses would make no provision, but power was given to 
 the King to make further dispositions by will. At his 
 death it was found that Henry had passed over the line of 
 his sister Margaret of Scotland, and named as next in the 
 succession to Elizabeth the daughters of his younger sis- 
 ter Mary by her marriage with Charles Brandon, Duke of 
 Suffolk. As Edward was but nine years old Henry had 
 appointed a carefully balanced Council of Regency ; but 
 the will fell into Hertford's keeping, and when the list of 
 regents was at last disclosed Gardiner, who had till now 
 been the leading minister, was declared to have been ex- 
 cluded from the number of executors. Whether the ex- 
 clusion was Henry's act or the act of the men who used 
 his name, the absence of the bishop with the imprisonment 
 of Norfolk threw the balance of power on the side of the 
 " new men" who were represented by Hertford and Lisle. 
 Their chief opponent, the Chancellor Wriothesley, strug- 
 gled in vain against their next step toward supremacy, the 
 modification of Henry's will by the nomination of Hert- 
 ford as Protector of the realm and governor of Edward's 
 person. Alleged directions from the dying King served 
 as pretexts for the elevation of the whole party to higher 
 rank in the state. It was to repair " the decay of the old 
 English nobility" that Hertford raised himself to the 
 dukedom of Somerset and his brother to the barony of 
 Seymour, the queen's brother Lord Parr to the marquisate 
 of Northampton, Lisle to the earldom of Warwick, Russell 
 to that of Bedford, Wriothesley to that of Southampton. 
 Ten of their partisans became barons, and as the number 
 of peers in spite of recent creations still stood at about 
 fifty such a group constituted a power in the Upper House. 
 Alleged directions of the King were conveniently remem- 
 bered to endow the new peers with public money, though 
 the treasury was beggared and the debt pressing. The 
 expulsion of Wriothesley from the Chancellorship and 
 Council soon left the "new men" without a check; but 
 they were hardly masters of the royal power when & bold
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE REFORMATION. 15401608. 229 
 
 stroke of Somerset laid all at his feet. A new patent of 
 Protectorate, drawn out in the boy-King's name, em- 
 powered his uncle to act with or without the consent of 
 his fellow executors, and left him supreme in the realm. 
 
 Boldly and adroitly as the whole revolution had been 
 managed, it was none the less a revolution. To crush 
 their opponents the Council had first used, and then set 
 aside, Henry's will. Hertford in turn by the use of his 
 nephew's name set aside both the will and the Council. 
 A country gentleman, who had risen by the accident of his 
 sister's queenship to high rank at the Court, had thus by 
 sheer intrigue and self-assertion made himself ruler of the 
 realm. But daring and self-confident as he was, Somerset 
 was forced by his very elevation to seek support for the 
 power he had won by this surprise in measures which 
 marked the retreat of the Monarchy from that position of 
 pure absolutism which it had reached at the close of 
 Henry's reign. The Statute that had given to royal proc- 
 lamations the force of law was repealed, and several of the 
 new felonies and treasons which Cromwell had created 
 and used with so terrible an effect were erased from the 
 Statute Book. The popularity however which such meas- 
 ures won was too vague a force to serve in the strife of the 
 moment. Against the pressure of the conservative party 
 who had so suddenly found themselves jockeyed out of 
 power Somerset and the " new men" could look for no help 
 but from the Protestants. The hope of their support 
 united with the new Protector's personal predilections in 
 his patronage of the innovations against which Henry had 
 battled to the last. Cranmer had now drifted into a purely 
 Protestant position; and his open break with the older 
 system followed quickly on Seymour's rise to power. 
 "This year," says a contemporary, "the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury did eat meat openly in Lent in the Hall of 
 Lambeth, the like of which was never seen since England 
 was a Christian country." This notable act was followed 
 by a rapid succession of sweeping changes. The legal
 
 230 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 prohibitions of Lollardry were rescinded ; the Six Articles 
 were repealed ; a royal injunction removed all pictures and 
 images from the churches. A formal Statute gave priests 
 the right to many. A resolution of convocation which 
 was confirmed by Parliament brought about the significant 
 change which first definitely marked the severance of the 
 English Church in doctrine from the Roman, by ordering 
 that the sacrament of the altar should be administered in 
 both kinds. 
 
 A yet more significant change followed. The old tongue 
 of the Church was not to be disused in public worship. 
 The universal use of Latin had marked the Catholic and 
 European character of the older religion ; the use of Eng- 
 lish marked the strictly national and local character of the 
 new system. In the spring of 1548 a new Communion 
 Service in English took the place of the Mass ; an English 
 book of Common Prayer, the Liturgy which with slight 
 alterations is still used in the Church of England, soon re- 
 placed the Missal and Breviary from which its contents 
 are mainly drawn. The name "Common Prayer," which 
 was given to the new Liturgy, marked its real import. 
 The theory of worship which prevailed through Medieval 
 Christendom, the belief that the worshipper assisted only 
 at rites wrought for him by priestly hands, at a sacrifice 
 wrought through priestly intervention, at the offering of 
 prayer and praise by priestly lips, was now set at naught. 
 " The laity," it has been picturesquely said, " were called up 
 into the Chancel. " The act of devotion became a " common 
 prayer" of the whole body of worshippers. The Mass be- 
 came a " communion" of the whole Christian fellowship. 
 The priest was no longer the offerer of a mysterious sacri- 
 fice, the mediator between God and the worshipper; he 
 was set on a level with the rest of the Church, and brought 
 down to be the simple mouthpiece of the congregation. 
 
 What gave a wider importance to these measures was 
 their bearing on the general politics of Christendom. The 
 adhesion of England to the Protestant cause came at a
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE REFORMATION. 15401608. 231 
 
 moment when Protestantism seemed on the verge of ruin. 
 The confidence of the Lutheran princes in their ability to 
 resist the Emperor had been seen in their refusal of succor 
 from Henry the Eighth. But in the winter of Henry's 
 death the secession of Duke Maurice of Saxony with many 
 of his colleagues from the League of Schmalkald so weak- 
 ened the Protestant body that Charles was able to put its 
 leaders to the ban of the Empire. Hertford was hardly 
 Protector when the German princes called loudly for aid ; 
 but the fifty thousand crowns which were secretly sent by 
 the English Council could scarcely have reached them 
 when in April, 1547, Charles surprised their camp at Muhl- 
 berg and routed their whole army. The Elector of Saxony 
 was taken prisoner; the Landgrave of Hesse surrendered 
 in despair. His victory left Charles master of the Empire. 
 The jealousy of the Pope indeed at once revived with the 
 Emperor's success, and his recall of the bishops from Trent 
 forced Charles to defer his wider plans for enforcing relig- 
 ious unity ; while in Germany itself he was forced to reckon 
 with Duke Maurice and the Protestant princes who had 
 deserted the League of Schmalkald, but whose one object 
 in joining the Emperor had been to provide a check on his 
 after movements. For the moment therefore he was driven 
 to prolong the religious truce by an arrangement called the 
 "Interim." But the Emperor's purpose was now clear. 
 Wherever his power was actually felt the religious reaction 
 began; and the Imperial towns which held firmly to the 
 Lutheran creed were reduced by force of arms. It was of 
 the highest moment that in this hour of despair the Prot- 
 estants saw their rule suddenly established in a new quarter, 
 and the Lutheranism which was being trampled under foot 
 in its own home triumphant in England. England became 
 the common refuge of the panic-struck Protestants. Bucer 
 and Fagius were sent to lecture at Cambridge, Peter 
 Martyr advocated the anti-sacrarnentarian views of Cal- 
 vin at Oxford. Cranmer welcomed refugees from every 
 country, Germans, Italians, French, Poles, and Swiss, to
 
 232 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 his palace at Lambeth. When persecution broke out in 
 the Low Countries the fugitive Walloons were received at 
 London and Canterbury, and allowed to set up in both 
 places their own churches. 
 
 But Somerset dreamed of a wider triumph for " the re- 
 ligion." On his death-bed Henry was said to have en- 
 forced on the Council the need of carrying out his policy 
 of a union of Scotland with England through the marriage 
 of its Queen with his boy. A wise statesmanship would 
 have suffered the Protestant movement which had been 
 growing stronger in the northern kingdom since Beaton's 
 death to run quietly its course ; and his colleagues warned 
 Somerset to leave Scotch affairs untouched till Edward was 
 old enough to undertake them in person. But these coun- 
 sels were set aside ; and a renewal of the border warfare 
 enforced the Protector's demands for a closer union of the 
 kingdoms. The jealousy of France was roused at once, 
 and a French fleet appeared off the Scottish coast to reduce 
 the castle of St. Andrews, which had been held since 
 Beaton's death by the English partisans who murdered 
 him. The challenge called Somerset himself to the field ; 
 and crossing the Tweed with a fine army of eighteen 
 thousand men in the summer of 1547 the Protector pushed 
 along the coast till he found the Scots encamped behind 
 the Esk on the slopes of Musselburgh, six miles eastward 
 of Edinburgh. The English invasion had drawn all the 
 factions of the kingdom together against the stranger, and 
 a body of " Gospellers" under Lord Angus formed the ad- 
 vance-guard of the Scotch army as it moved by its right 
 on the tenth of September to turn the English position and 
 drive Somerset into the sea. The English horse charged 
 the Scottish front, only to be flung off by it spikemen ; but 
 their triumph threw the Lowlanders into disorder, and as 
 they pushed forward in pursuit their advance was roughly 
 checked by the fire of a body of Italian musketeers whom 
 Somerset had brought with him. The check was turned 
 into a defeat by a general charge of the English line, a
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE REFORMATION. 1540-1603. 233 
 
 fatal panic broke the Scottish host, and ten thousand men 
 fell in its headlong flight beneath the English lances. 
 
 Victor as he was at Pinkie Cleugh, Somerset was soon 
 forced by famine to fall back from the wasted country. 
 His victory had been more fatal to the interests of England 
 than a defeat. The Scots in despair turned as of old to 
 France, and bought its protection by consenting to the 
 child-queen's marriage with the son of Henry the Second, 
 who had followed Francis on the throne. In the summer 
 of 1548 Mary Stuart sailed under the escort of a French 
 fleet and landed safely at Brest. Not only was the Tudor 
 policy of union foiled, as it seemed, forever, but Scotland 
 was henceforth to be a part of the French realm. To north 
 as to south England would feel the pressure of the French 
 King. Nor was Somerset's policy more successful at home. 
 The religious changes he was forcing on the land were car- 
 ried through with the despotism, if not with the vigor, of 
 Cromwell. In his acceptance of the personal supremacy 
 of the sovereign, Gardiner was ready to bow to every 
 change which Henry had ordered, or which his son, when 
 of age to be fully King, might order in the days to come. 
 But he denounced all ecclesiastical changes made during 
 the King's minority as illegal and invalid. Untenable as 
 it was, this protest probably represented the general mind 
 of Englishmen ; but the bishop was committed by Council 
 to prison in the Fleet, and though soon released was sent 
 by the Protector to the Tower. The power of preaching 
 was restricted by the issue of licenses only to the friends of 
 the Primate. While all counter arguments were rigidly 
 suppressed, a crowd of Protestant pamphleteers flooded the 
 country with vehement invectives against the Mass and its 
 superstitious accompaniments. The suppression of chan- 
 tries and religious guilds which was now being carried out 
 enabled Somerset to buy the assent of noble and landowner 
 to his measures by glutting their greed with the last spoils 
 of the Church. 
 
 But it was impossible to buy off the general aversion of
 
 234 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 the people to the Protector's measures ; and German and 
 Italian mercenaries had to be introduced to stamp out the 
 popular discontent which broke out in the east, in the west, 
 and in the midland counties. Everywhere men protested 
 against the new changes and called for the maintenance of 
 the system of Henry the Eighth. The Cornishmen refused 
 to receive the new service " because it is like a Christmas 
 game." In 1549 Devonshire demanded by open revolt the 
 restoration of the Mass and the Six Articles as well as a 
 partial re-establishment of the suppressed abbeys. The 
 agrarian discontent woke again in the general disorder. 
 Enclosures and evictions were going steadily on, and the 
 bitterness of the change was being heightened by the re- 
 sults of the dissolution of the abbeys. Church lands had 
 always been underlet, the monks were easy landlords, and 
 on no estates had the peasantry been as yet so much ex- 
 empt from the general revolution in culture. But the new 
 lay masters to whom the abbey lands fell were quick to 
 reap their full value by a rise of rents and by the same 
 processes of eviction and enclosure as went on elsewhere. 
 The distress was deepened by the change in the value of 
 money which was now beginning to be felt from the mass 
 of gold and silver which the New World was yielding to 
 the Old, and still more by a general rise of prices that fol- 
 lowed on the debasement of the coinage which had begun 
 with Henry and went on yet more unscrupulously under 
 Somerset. The trouble came at last to a head in the man- 
 ufacturing districts of the eastern counties. Twenty thou- 
 sand men gathered round an " oak of Reformation" near 
 Norwich, and repulsing the royal troops in a desperate 
 engagement renewed the old cries for a removal of evil 
 counsellors, a prohibition of enclosures, and redress for the 
 grievances of the poor. 
 
 The revolt of the Norfolk men was stamped out in blood 
 by the energy of Lord Warwick, as the revolt in the west 
 had been put down by Lord Russell, but the risings had 
 given a fatal blow to Somerset's power. It had already
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 235 
 
 been weakened by strife within his own family. His 
 brother Thomas had been created Lord Seymour and raised 
 to the post of Lord High Admiral ; but glutted as he was 
 with lands and honors, his envy at Somerset's fortunes 
 broke out in a secret marriage with the Queen-dowager, 
 Catharine Parr, in an attempt on her death to marry Eliza- 
 beth, and in intrigues to win the confidence of the young 
 King and detach him from his brother. Seymour's dis- 
 content was mounting into open revolt when in the Janu- 
 ary of 1549 he was arrested, refused a trial, attainted, and 
 sent to the block. The stain of a brother's blood, however 
 justly shed, rested from that hour on Somerset, while the 
 nobles were estranged from him by his resolve to enforce 
 the laws against enclosures and evictions, as well as by the 
 weakness he had shown in the presence of the revolt. 
 Able indeed as Somerset was, his temper was not that of a 
 ruler of men ; and his miserable administration had all but 
 brought government to a standstill. While he was dream- 
 ing of a fresh invasion of Scotland the treasury was empty, 
 not a servant of the state was paid, and the soldiers he had 
 engaged on the Continent refused to cross the Channel in 
 despair of receiving their hire. It was only by loans raised 
 at ruinous interest that the Protector escaped sheer bank- 
 ruptcy when the revolts in east and west came to swell the 
 royal expenses. His weakness in tampering with the 
 popular demands completed his ruin. The nobles dreaded 
 a communistic outbreak like that of the Suabian peasantry, 
 and their dread was justified by prophecies that monarchy 
 and nobility were alike to be destroyed and a new rule set 
 up under governors elected by the people. They dreaded 
 yet more the being forced to disgorge their spoil to appease 
 the discontent. At the close of 1549 therefore the Council 
 withdrew openly from Somerset, and forced the Protector 
 to resign. 
 
 His office passed to the Earl of Warwick, to whose ruth- 
 less severity the suppression of the revolt was mainly due. 
 The change of governors however brought about no change
 
 236 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [Boos VI. 
 
 of system. Peace indeed was won from France by the 
 immediate surrender of Boulogne ; but the misgovernment 
 remained as great as ever, the currency was yet further 
 debased, and a wild attempt made to remedy the effects of 
 this measure by a royal fixing of prices. It was in vain 
 that Latimer denounced the prevailing greed, and bade the 
 Protestant lords choose " either restitution or else damna- 
 tion." Their sole aim seemed to be that of building up 
 their own fortunes at the cost of the state. All pretence 
 of winning popular sympathy was gone, and the rule of 
 the upstart nobles who formed the Council of Regency be- 
 came simply a rule of terror. " The grea part of the peo- 
 ple," one of their creatures, Cecil, avowed, "is not in favor 
 of defending this cause, but of aiding its adversaries ; on 
 that side are the greater part of the nobles, who absent 
 themselves from Court, ah 1 the bishops save three or four, 
 almost all the judges and lawyers, almost all the justices 
 of the peace, the priests who can move their flocks any 
 way, for the whole of the commonalty is in such a state of 
 irritation that it will easily follow any stir toward 
 change." But united as it was in its opposition the na- 
 tion was helpless. The system of despotism which Crom- 
 well built up had been seized by a knot of adventurers, and 
 with German and Italian mercenaries at their disposal 
 they rode roughshod over the land. 
 
 At such a moment it seemed madness to provoke foes 
 abroad as well as at home, but the fanaticism of the young 
 King was resolved to force on his sister Mary a compliance 
 with the new changes, and her resistance was soon backed 
 by the remonstrances of her cousin, the Emperor. Charles 
 was now at the height of his power, master of Germany, 
 preparing to make the Empire hereditary in the person of 
 his son, Philip, and . preluding a wider effort to suppress 
 heresy throughout the world by the establishment of the 
 Inquisition in the Netherlands and a fiery persecution 
 which drove thousands of Walloon heretics to find a refuge 
 in England. But heedless of dangers from without or of
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE REFORMATION. 15401608. 237 
 
 dangers from within Cranmer and his colleagues advanced 
 more boldly than ever in the career of innovation. Four 
 prelates who adhered to the older system were deprived of 
 their sees and committed on frivolous pretexts to the Tower. 
 A new Catechism embodied the doctrines of the reformers, 
 and a book of Homilies which enforced the chief Protes- 
 tant tenets was ordered to be read in Churches. A 
 crowning defiance was given to the doctrine of the Mass 
 by an order to demolish the stone altars and replace them 
 by wooden tables, which were stationed for the most part 
 in the middle of the church. In 1 552 a revised Prayer-book 
 was issued, and every change made in it leaned directly 
 toward the extreme Protestantism which was at this time 
 finding a home at Geneva. On the cardinal point of dif- 
 ference, the question of the sacrament, the new formularies 
 broke away not only from the doctrine of Rome but from 
 that of Luther, and embodied the anti-sacramentarian 
 tenets of Zuingli and Calvin. Forty-two Articles of Re- 
 ligion were introduced; and though since reduced by 
 omissions to thirty-nine these have remained to this day 
 the formal standard of doctrine in the English Church. 
 Like the Prayer-book, they were mainly the work of Cran- 
 mer ; and belonging as they did to the class of Confessions 
 which were now being framed in Germany to be presented 
 to the Council of Christendom which Charles was still 
 resolute to re-assemble, they marked the adhesion of Eng- 
 land to the Protestant movement on the Continent. Even 
 the episcopal mode of government which still connected the 
 English Church with the old Catholic Communion was 
 reduced to a form ; in Cranmer's mind the spiritual powers 
 of the bishops were drawn simply from the King's com- 
 mission as their temporal jurisdiction was exercised in the 
 King's name. They were reduced therefore to the position 
 of royal officers, and called to hold their offices simply at the 
 royal pleasure. The sufferings of the Protestants had failed 
 to teach them the worth of religious liberty ; and a new code 
 of ecclesiastical laws, which was ordered to be drawn up
 
 238 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 by a body of Commissioners as a substitute for the Canon 
 Law of the Catholic Church, although it shrank from the 
 penalty of death, attached that of perpetual imprisonment 
 or exile to the crimes of heresy, blasphemy, and adultery, 
 and declared excommunication to involve a severance of 
 the offender from the mercy of God and his deliverance into 
 the tyranny of the devil. Delays in the completion of this 
 Code prevented its legal establishment during Edward's 
 reign ; but the use of the new Liturgy and attendance at 
 the new service was enforced by imprisonment, and sub- 
 scription to the Articles of Faith was demanded by royal 
 authority from all clergymen, churchwardens, and school- 
 masters. 
 
 The distaste for changes so hurried and so rigorously 
 enforced was increased by the daring speculations of the 
 more extreme Protestants. The real value of the religious 
 revolution of the sixteenth century to mankind lay, not in 
 its substitution of one creed for another, but in the new 
 spirit of inquiry, the new freedom of thought and of dis- 
 cussion, which was awakened during the process of change. 
 But however familiar such a truth may be to us, it was 
 absolutely hidden from the England of the time. Men 
 heard with horror that the foundations of faith and morality 
 were questioned, polygamy advocated, oaths denounced as 
 unlawful, community of goods raised into a sacred obliga- 
 tion, the very Godhead of the Founder of Christianity de- 
 nied. The repeal of the Statute of Heresy left indeed the 
 powers of the Common Law intact, and Cranmer availed 
 himself of these to send heretics of the last class without 
 mercy to the stake. But within the Church itself the 
 Primate's desire for uniformity was roughly resisted by 
 the more ardent members of his own party. Hooper, who 
 had been named Bishop of Gloucester, refused to wear the 
 episcopal habits, and denounced them as the livery of the 
 "harlot of Babylon," a name for the Papacy which was 
 supposed to have been discovered in the Apocalypse. Ec- 
 clesiastical order came almost to an end. Priests flung
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE REFORMATION. 1540-1603. 239 
 
 aside the surplice as superstitious. Patrons of livings pre- 
 sented their huntsmen or gamekeepers to the benefices in 
 their gift, and kept the stipend. All teaching of divinity 
 ceased at the Universities : the students indeed had fallen 
 off in numbers, the libraries were in part scattered or 
 burned, the intellectual impulse of the New Learning died 
 away. One noble measure indeed, the foundation of 
 eighteen Grammar Schools, was destined to throw a lustre 
 over the name of Edward, but it had no time to bear fruit 
 in his reign. 
 
 While the reckless energy of the reformers brought 
 England to the verge of chaos, it brought Ireland to the 
 brink of rebellion. The fall of Cromwell had been followed 
 by a long respite in the religious changes which he was 
 forcing on the conquered dependency ; but with the acces- 
 sion of Edward the Sixth the system of change was re- 
 newed with all the energy of Protestant zeal. In 1551 the 
 bishops were summoned before the deputy, Sir Anthony 
 St. Leger, to receive the new English Liturgy which, 
 though written in a tongue as strange to the native Irish 
 as Latin itself, was now to supersede the Latin service- 
 book in every diocese. The order was the signal for an 
 open strife. " Now shall every illiterate fellow read mass," 
 burst forth Dowdall, the Archbishop of Armagh, as he 
 flung out of the chamber with all but one of his suffragans 
 at his heels. Archbishop Browne of Dublin on the other 
 hand was followed in his profession of obedience by the 
 Bishops of Meath, Limerick, and Kildare. The govern- 
 ment however was far from quailing before the division of 
 the episcopate. Dowdall was driven from the country; 
 and the vacant sees were filled with Protestants, like Bale, 
 of the most advanced type. But no change could be 
 wrought by measures such as these in the opinions of the 
 people themselves. The new episcopal reformers spoke no 
 Irish, and of their English sermons not a word was un- 
 derstood by the rude kernes around the pulpit. The native 
 priests remained silent. " As for preaching we have nona, " 
 
 U VOL. 2
 
 240 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 reports a zealous Protestant, " without which the ignorant 
 can have no knowledge. " The prelates who used the new 
 Prayer-book were simply regarded as heretics. The B ishop 
 of Meath was assured by one of his flock that, "if the 
 country wist how, they would eat you." Protestantism 
 had failed to wrest a single Irishman from his older con- 
 victions, but it succeeded in uniting all Ireland against 
 the Crown. The old political distinctions which had been 
 produced by the conquest of Strongbow faded before the 
 new struggle for a common faith. The population within 
 the Pale and without it became one, " not as the Irish na- 
 tion," it has been acutely said, " but as Catholics." A new 
 sense of national identity was found in the identity of re- 
 ligion. "Both English and Irish begin to oppose your 
 Lordship's orders," Browne had written to Cromwell at 
 the very outset of these changes, " and to lay aside their 
 national old quarrels." 
 
 Oversea indeed the perils of the new government passed 
 suddenly away. Charles had backed Mary's resistance 
 with threats, and as he moved forward to that mastery of 
 the world to which he confidently looked his threats might 
 any day become serious dangers. But the peace with 
 England had set the French government free to act in 
 Germany, and it found allies in the great middle party of 
 princes whose secession from the League of Schmalkald 
 had seemed to bring ruin to the Protestant cause. The 
 aim of Duke Maurice in bringing them to desert the 
 League had been to tie the Emperor's hands by the very 
 fact of their joining him, and for a while this policy had 
 been successful. But the death of Paul the Third, whose 
 jealousy had till now foiled the Emperor's plans, and the 
 accession of an Imperial nominee to the Papal throne, en- 
 abled Charles to move more boldly to his ends, and at the 
 close of 1551 a fresh assembly of the Council at Trent, and 
 an Imperial summons of the Lutheran powers to send di- 
 vines to its sessions and to submit to its decisions, brought 
 matters to an issue. Maurice was forced to accept the aid
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 241 
 
 of the stranger and to conclude a secret treaty with France. 
 He was engaged as a general of Charles in the siege of Mag- 
 deburg; but in the spring of 1552 the army he had then at 
 command was suddenly marched to the south, and through 
 the passes of the Tyrol the Duke moved straight on the 
 Imperial camp at Innspruck. Charles was forced to flee 
 for very life while the Council at Trent broke hastily up, 
 and in a few months the whole Imperial design was in 
 ruin. Henry the Second was already moving on the Rhine ; 
 to meet the French King Charles was forced to come to terms 
 with the Lutheran princes ; and his signature in the sum- 
 mer of a Treaty at Passau secured to their states the free 
 exercise of the reformed religion and gave the Protestant 
 princes their due weight in the tribunals of the empire. 
 
 The humiliation of the Emperor, the fierce warfare 
 which now engaged both his forces and those of France, 
 removed from England the danger of outer interference. 
 But within the misrule went recklessly on. All that men 
 saw was a religious and political chaos, in which ecclesi- 
 astical order had perished and in which politics were dy< 
 ing down into the squabbles of a knot of nobles over the 
 spoils of the Church and the Crown. Not content with 
 Somerset's degradation, the Council charged him in 1551 
 with treason, and sent him to the block. Honors and 
 lands were lavished as ever on themselves and their ad- 
 herents. Warwick became Duke of Northumberland, 
 Lord Dorset was made Duke of Suffolk, Paulet rose to the 
 Marquisate of Winchester, Sir William Herbert was 
 created Earl of Pembroke. The plunder of the chantries 
 and the gilds failed to glut the appetite of this crew of 
 spoilers. Half the lands of every see were flung to them 
 in vain; an attempt was made to satisfy their greed by a 
 suppression of the wealthy see of Durham ; and the whole 
 endowments of the Church were threatened with confisca- 
 tion. But while the courtiers gorged themselves with 
 manors, the Treasury grew poorer. The coinage was 
 again debased. Crown lands to the value of five millions
 
 242 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 of our modern money had been granted away to the friends 
 of Somerset and Warwick. The royal expenditure 
 mounted in seventeen years to more than four times its 
 previous total. In spite of the brutality and bloodshed 
 with which revolt had been suppressed, and of the foreign 
 soldiery on whom the Council relied, there were signs of 
 resistance which would have made less reckless statesmen 
 pause. The temper of the Parliament had drifted far from 
 the slavish subservience which it showed at the close of 
 Henry's reign. The House of Commons met Northumber- 
 land's project for the pillage of the bishopric of Durham 
 with opposition, and rejected a new treason bill. In 1552 
 the Duke was compelled to force nominees of his own on 
 the constituencies by writs from the Council before he 
 could count on a house to his mind. Such writs had been 
 often issued since the days of Henry the Seventh ; but the 
 ministers of Edward were driven to an expedient which 
 shows how rapidly the temper of independence was grow- 
 ing. The summons of new members from places hitherto 
 unrepresented was among the prerogatives of the Crown, 
 and the Protectorate used this power to issue writs to 
 small villages in the west which could be trusted to retain 
 members to its mind. 
 
 This " packing of Parliament" was to be largely extended 
 in the following reigns; but it passed as yet with little 
 comment. What really kept England quiet was a trust 
 that the young King, who would be of age in two or three 
 years, would then set all things right again. " When he 
 comes of age," said a Hampshire squire, "he will see an- 
 other rule, and hang up a hundred heretic knaves." Ed- 
 ward's temper was as lordly as that of his father, and had 
 he once really reigned he would probably have dealt as 
 roughly with the plunderers who had used his name as 
 England hoped. But he was a fanatical Protestant, and 
 his rule would almost certainly have forced on a religious 
 strife as bitter and disastrous as the strife which broke the 
 strength of Germany and France. From this calamity
 
 CHAP. 1.) THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 243 
 
 the country was saved by his waning health. Edward 
 was now fifteen, but in the opening of 1553 the signs 
 of coming death became too clear for Northumberland 
 and his fellows to mistake them. By the Statute of 
 the Succession the death of the young King would bring 
 Mary to the throne ; and as Mary was known to have re- 
 fused acceptance of all changes in her father's system, and 
 was looked on as anxious only to restore it, her accession 
 became a subject of national hope. But to Northumberland 
 and his fellows her succession was fatal. They had per- 
 sonally outraged Mary by their attempts to force her into 
 compliance with their system. Her first act would be to 
 free Norfolk and the bishops whom they held prisoners in 
 the Tower, and to set these bitter enemies in power. With 
 ruin before them the Protestant lords were ready for a fresh 
 revolution ; and the bigotry of the young King fell in with 
 their plans. 
 
 In his zeal for "the religion," and in his absolute faith 
 in his royal autocracy, Edward was ready to override will 
 and statute and to set Mary's rights aside. In such a case 
 the crown fell legally to Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne 
 Boleyn, who had been placed by the Act next in succession 
 to Mary, and whose training under Catharine Parr and the 
 Seymours gave good hopes of her Protestant sympathies. 
 The cause of Elizabeth would have united the whole of the 
 11 new men" in its defence, and might have proved a for- 
 midable difficulty in Mary's way. But for the mainte- 
 nance of his personal power Northumberland could as little 
 count on Elizabeth as on Mary ; and in Edward's death 
 the Duke saw a chance of raising, if not himself, at any 
 rate his own blood to the throne. He persuaded the young 
 King that he possessed as great a right as his father to 
 settle the succession of the Crown by will. Henry had 
 passed by the children of his sister Margaret of Scotland, 
 and had placed next to Elizabeth in the succession the chil- 
 dren of his younger sister Mary, the wife of Charles Bran- 
 don, the Duke of Suffolk. Frances, Mary's child by this
 
 244 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 marriage, was still living, the mother of three daughters 
 by her marriage with Grey, Lord Dorset, a hot partisan 
 of the religious changes, who had been raised under the 
 Protectorate to the Dukedom of Suffolk. Frances was a 
 woman of thirty-seven; but her accession to the Crown 
 squared as little with Northumberland's plans as that of 
 Mary or Elizabeth. In the will therefore which the young 
 King drew up Edward was brought to pass over Frances, 
 and to name as his successor her eldest daughter, the Lady 
 Jane Grey. The marriage of Jane Grey with Guildford 
 Dudley, the fourth son of Northumberland, was all that 
 was needed to complete the unscrupulous plot. It was the 
 celebration of this marriage in May which first woke a 
 public suspicion of the existence of such designs, and the 
 general murmur which followed on the suspicion might 
 have warned the Duke of his danger. But the secret was 
 closely kept, and it was only in June that Edward's " plan" 
 was laid in the same strict secrecy before Northumberland's 
 colleagues. A project which raised the Duke into a virtual 
 sovereignty over the realm could hardly fail to stir resist- 
 ance in the Council. The King however was resolute, 
 and his will was used to set aside all scruples. The judges 
 who represented that letters patent could not override a 
 positive statute were forced into signing their assent by 
 Edward's express command. To their signatures were 
 added those of the whole Council with Cranmer at its 
 head. The primate indeed remonstrated, but his remon- 
 strances proved as fruitless as those of his fellow councillors. 
 The deed was hardly done when on the sixth of July 
 the young King passed away. Northumberland felt little 
 anxiety about the success of his design. He had won over 
 Lord Hastings to his support by giving him his daughter 
 in marriage, and had secured the help of Lord Pembroke 
 by wedding Jane's sister, Catharine, to his son. The 
 army, the fortresses, the foreign soldiers, were at his com- 
 mand; the hotter Protestants were with him; France, in 
 dread of Mary's kinship with the Emperor, offered sup-
 
 CHAP. 1.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 245 
 
 port to his plans. Jane therefore was at once proclaimed 
 Queen on Edward's death, and accepted as their sovereign 
 by the Lords of the Council. But the temper of the whole 
 people rebelled against so lawless a usurpation. The eastern 
 counties rose as one man to support Mary; and when 
 Northumberland marched from London with ten thousand 
 at his back to crush the rising, the Londoners, Protestant as 
 they were, showed their ill-will by a stubborn silence. " The 
 people crowd to look upon us," the Duke noted gloomily, 
 " but not one calls 'God speed ye. ' " While he halted for 
 reinforcements his own colleagues struck him down. 
 Eager to throw from their necks the yoke of a rival who 
 had made himself a master, the Council no sooner saw 
 the popular reaction than they proclaimed Mary Queen ; 
 and this step was at once followed by a declaration of the 
 fleet in her favor, and by the announcement of the levies 
 in every shire that they would only fight in her cause. As 
 the tidings reached him the Duke's courage suddenly gave 
 way. His retreat to Cambridge was the signal for a general 
 defection. Northumberland himself threw his cap into 
 the air and shouted with his men for Queen Mary. But 
 his submission failed to avert his doom ; and the death of 
 the Duke drew with it the imprisonment in the Tower of 
 the hapless girl whom he had made the tool of his ambi- 
 tion
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE CATHOLIC REACTION. 
 15531558. 
 
 THE triumph of Mary was a fatal blow at the system of 
 despotism which Henry the Eighth had established. It 
 was a system that rested not so much on the actual strength 
 possessed by the Crown as on the absence of any effective 
 forces of resistance. At Henry's death the one force of 
 opposition which had developed itself was that of the 
 Protestants, but whether in numbers or political weight 
 the Protestants were as yet of small consequence, and their 
 resistance did little to break the general drift of both nation 
 and King. For great as were the changes which Henry 
 had wrought in the severance of England from the Papacy 
 and the establishment of the ecclesiastical supremacy of 
 the Crown, they were wrought with fair assent from the 
 people at large ; and when once the discontent roused by 
 Cromwell's violence had been appeased by his fall England 
 as a whole acquiesced in the conservative system of the 
 King. This national union however was broken by the 
 Protectorate. At the moment when it had reached its 
 height the royal authority was seized by a knot of nobles 
 and recklessly used to further the revolutionary projects of 
 a small minority of the people. From the hour of this 
 revolution a new impulse was given to resistance. The 
 older nobility, the bulk of the gentry, the wealthier mer- 
 chants, the great mass of the people, found themselves 
 thrown by the very instinct of conservatism into opposi- 
 tion to the Crown. It was only by foreign hirelings that 
 revolt was suppressed ; it was only by a reckless abuse of 
 the system of packing the Houses that Parliament could
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 347 
 
 be held in check. At last the Government ventured on an 
 open defiance of law ; and a statute of the realm was set 
 aside at the imperious bidding of a boy of fifteen. Master 
 of the royal forces, wielding at his will the royal authority, 
 Northumberland used the voice of the dying Edward to 
 set aside rights of succession as sacred as his own. But 
 the attempt proved an utter failure. The very forces on 
 which the Duke relied turned against him. The whole 
 nation fronted him in arms. The sovereign whom tke 
 voice of the young King named as his successor passed 
 from the throne to the Tower, and a sovereign whose title 
 rested on parliamentary statute took her place. 
 
 At the opening of August Mary entered London in 
 triumph. Short and thin in figure, with a face drawn 
 and colorless that told of constant ill-health, there was 
 little in the outer seeming of the new queen to recall her 
 father; but her hard, bright eyes, her manlike voice, her 
 fearlessness and self-will, told of her Tudor blood, as her 
 skill in music, her knowledge of languages, her love of 
 learning, spoke of the culture and refinement of Henry's 
 Court. Though Mary was thirty-seven years old, the strict 
 retirement in which she had lived had left her as ignorant 
 of the actual temper of England as England was ignorant 
 of her own. She had founded her resistance to the changes 
 of the Protectorate on a resolve to adhere to her father's 
 system till her brother came of age to rule, and England 
 believed her to be longing like itself simply for a restora- 
 tion of what Henry had left. The belief was confirmed 
 by her earlier actions. The changes of the Protectorate 
 were treated as null and void. Gardiner, Henry's minis- 
 ter, was drawn from the Tower to take the lead as Chan- 
 cellor at the Queen's Council-board. Bonner and the de- 
 posed bishops were restored to their sees. Ridley with the 
 others who had displaced them were again expelled. Lati- 
 mer, as a representative of the extreme Protestants, was 
 sent to the Tower; and the foreign refugees, as anti-sacra- 
 mentarians, were ordered to leave England. On an indig-
 
 248 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. ' m [BOOK VI. 
 
 nant protest from Cranmer against reports that he was 
 ready to abandon the new reforms the Archbishop was sent 
 for his seditious demeanor to the Tower, and soon put on 
 his trial for treason with Lady Jane Grey, her husband, 
 and two of his brothers. Each pleaded guilty; but no at- 
 tempt was made to carry out the sentence of death. In all 
 this England went with the Queen. The popular enthusi- 
 asm hardly waited in fact for the orders of the Govern- 
 ment. The whole system which had been pursued during 
 Edward's reign fell with a sudden crash. London indeed 
 retained much of its Protestant sympathy, but over the 
 rest of the country the tide of reaction swept without 
 a check. The married priests were driven from their 
 churches, the images were replaced. In many parishes 
 the new Prayer-book was set aside and the mass restored. 
 The Parliament which met in October annulled the laws 
 made respecting religion during the past reign, and re- 
 established the form of service as used in the last year of 
 Henry the Eighth. 
 
 Up to this point the temper of England went fairly with 
 that of the Queen. But there were from the first signs of 
 a radical difference between the aim of Mary and that of 
 her people. With the restoration of her father's system 
 the nation as a whole was satisfied. Mary on the other 
 hand looked on such a restoration simply as a step toward 
 a complete revival of the system which Henry had done 
 away. Through long years of suffering and peril her 
 fanaticism had been patiently brooding over the hope of 
 restoring to England its older religion. She believed, as 
 she said at a later time to the Parliament, that " she had 
 been predestiaed and preserved by God to the succession of 
 the Crown for no other end save that He might make use 
 of her above all else in the bringing back of the realm to 
 the Catholic faith." Her zeal however was checked by the 
 fact that she stood almost alone in her aim, as well as by 
 cautious advice from her cousin, the Emperor; and she 
 assured the Londoners that "albeit her own conscience
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 242 
 
 was stayed in matters of religion, yet she meant not to 
 compel or strain men's consciences otherwise than God 
 should, as she trusted, put in their hearts a persuasion of 
 the truth that she was in, through the opening of his word 
 unto them by godly, and virtuous, and learned preachers." 
 She had in fact not ventured as yet to refuse the title of 
 " Head of the Church next under God" or to disclaim the 
 powers which the Act of Supremacy gave her; on the 
 contrary she used these powers in the regulation of preach- 
 ing as her father had used them. The strenuous resistance 
 with which her proposal to set aside the new Prayer Book 
 was met in Parliament warned her of the difficulties that 
 awaited any projects of radical change. The proposal was 
 carried, but only after a hot conflict which lasted over six 
 days and which left a third of the Lower House still op- 
 posed to it. Their opposition by no means implied ap- 
 proval of the whole series of religious changes of which 
 the Prayer Book formed a part, for the more moderate 
 Catholics were pleading at this time for prayers in the 
 vulgar tongue, and on this question followers of More and 
 Colet might have voted with the followers of Cranmer. 
 But it showed how far men's minds were from any spirit 
 of blind reaction or blind compliance with the royal will. 
 
 The temper of the Parliament indeed was very different 
 from that of the Houses which had knelt before Henry the 
 Eighth. If it consented to repeal the enactment which 
 rendered her mother's marriage invalid and to declare 
 Mary "born in lawful matrimony," it secured the aboli- 
 tion of all the new treasons and felonies created in the two 
 last reigns. The demand for their abolition showed that 
 jealousy of the growth of civil tyranny had now spread 
 from the minds of philosophers like More to the minds of 
 common Englishmen. Still keener was the jealousy of 
 any marked revolution in the religious system which 
 Henry had established. The wish to return to the obedi- 
 ence of Rome lingered indeed among some of the clergy 
 and in the northern shires. But elsewhere the system of
 
 250 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 a national Church was popular, and it was backed by the 
 existence of a large and influential class who had been en- 
 riched by the abbey lands. Forty thousand families had 
 profited by the spoil, and watched anxiously any approach 
 of danger to their new possessions, such as submission to 
 the Papacy was likely to bring about. On such a submis- 
 sion however Mary was resolved: and it was to gain 
 strength for such a step that she determined to seek a hus- 
 band from her mother's house. The policy of Ferdinand 
 of Aragon, so long held at bay by adverse fortune, was 
 now to find its complete fulfilment. To one line of the 
 house of Austria, that of Charles the Fifth, had fallen not 
 only the Imperial Crown but the great heritage of Bur- 
 gundy, Aragon, Naples, Castile, and the Castilian de- 
 pendencies in the New World. To a second, that of the 
 Emperor's brother Ferdinand, had fallen the Austrian 
 duchies, Bohemia and Hungary. The marriage of Cath- 
 arine was now, as it seemed, to bear its fruits by the union 
 of Mary with a son of Charles, and the placing a third 
 Austrian line upon the throne of England. The gigantic 
 scheme of bringing all western Europe together under the 
 rule of a single family seemed at last to draw to its realiza- 
 tion. 
 
 It was no doubt from political as well as religious mo- 
 tives that Mary set her heart on this union. Her rejection 
 of Gardiner's proposal that she should marry the young 
 Courtenay, Earl of Devon, a son of the Marquis of Exeter 
 whom Henry had beheaded, the resolve which she ex- 
 pressed to wed "no subject, no Englishman," was founded 
 in part on the danger to her throne from the pretensions of 
 Mary Stuart, whose adherents cared little for the exclusion 
 of the Scotch line from the succession by Henry's will and 
 already alleged the illegitimate births of both Mary Tudor 
 and Elizabeth through the annulling of their mothers' 
 marriages as a ground for denying their right to the throne. 
 Such claims became doubly formidable through the mar- 
 riage of Mary Stuart with the heir of the French Crown.
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE REFORMATION. 15401608. 251 
 
 and the virtual union of both Scotland and France in this 
 claimant's hands. It was only to Charles that the Queen 
 could look for aid against such a pressure as this, and 
 Charles was forced to give her aid. His old dreams of a 
 mastery of the world had faded away before the stern 
 realities of the Peace of Passau and his repulse from the 
 walls of Metz. His hold over the Empire was broken. 
 France was more formidable than ever. To crown his 
 difficulties the growth of heresy and of the spirit of inde^ 
 pendence in the Netherlands threatened to rob him of the 
 finest part of the Burgundian heritage. With Mary Stu- 
 art once on the English throne, and the great island of the 
 west knit to the French monarchy, the balance of power 
 would be utterly overthrown, the Low Countries lost, and 
 the Imperial Crown, as it could hardly be doubted, reft 
 from the house of Austria. He was quick therefore to 
 welcome the Queen's advances, and to offer his son Philip, 
 who though not yet thirty had been twice a widower, as a 
 candidate for her hand. 
 
 The offer came weighted with a heavy bribe. The keen 
 foresight of the Emperor already saw the difficulty of hold- 
 ing the Netherlands in union with the Spanish monarchy ; 
 and while Spain, Naples, and Franche Comte descended to 
 Philip's eldest son, Charles promised the heritage of the 
 Low Countries with England to the issue of Philip and 
 Mary. He accepted too the demand of Gardiner and the 
 Council that in the event of such a union England should 
 preserve complete independence both of policy and action. 
 In any case the marriage would save England from the 
 grasp of France, and restore it, as the Emperor hinted, to 
 the obedience of the Church. But the project was hardly 
 declared when it was met by an outburst of popular in- 
 dignation. Gardiner himself was against a union that 
 would annul the national independence which had till now 
 been the aim of Tudor policy, and that would drag Eng- 
 land helplessly in the wake of the House of Austria. The 
 mass of conservative Englishmen shrank from the relig-
 
 252 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 ious aspects of the marriage. For the Emperor had now 
 ceased to be an object of hope of confidence as a mediator 
 who would at once purify the Church from abuses, and 
 restore the unity of Christendom ; he had ranged himself 
 definitely on the side of the Papacy and of the Council of 
 Trent ; and the cruelties of the Inquisition which he had 
 introduced into Flanders gave a terrible indication of the 
 bigotry which he was to bequeath to his House. The 
 marriage with Philip meant, it could hardly be doubted, a 
 submission to the Papacy, and an undoing not only of the 
 religious changes of Edward but of the whole system of 
 Henry. Loyal and conservative as was the temper of the 
 Parliament, it was at one in its opposition to a Spanish 
 marriage and in the request which it made through a 
 deputation of its members to the Queen that she would 
 marry an Englishman. The request was a new step for- 
 ward on the part of the Houses to the recovery of their older 
 rights. Already called by Cromwell's policy to more than 
 their old power in ecclesiastical matters, their dread of 
 revolutionary change pushed them to an intervention in 
 matters of state. Mary noted the advance with all a 
 Tudor's jealousy. She interrupted the speaker; she re- 
 buked the Parliament for taking too much on itself ; she 
 declared she would take counsel on such a matter " with 
 God and with none other." But the remonstrance had 
 been made, the interference was to serve as a precedent in 
 the reign to come, and a fresh proof had been given that 
 Parliament was no longer the slavish tool of the Crown. 
 
 But while the nation grumbled and the Parliament re- 
 monstrated, one party in the realm was filled with absolute 
 panic by the news of the Spanish match. The Protestants 
 saw in the marriage not only the final overthrow of their re- 
 ligious hopes, but a close of the religious truce, and an open- 
 ing of persecution. The general opposition to the match, 
 with the dread of the holders of Church lands that their 
 possessions were in danger, encouraged the more violent to 
 plan a rising; and France, naturally jealous of an increase
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 253 
 
 of power by its great opponent, promised to support them 
 by an incursion from Scotland and an attack on Calais. 
 The real aim of the rebellion was, no doubt, the displace- 
 ment of Mary, and the setting either of Jane Grey, or, as 
 the bulk of the Protestants desired, of Elizabeth, on the 
 throne. But these hopes were cautiously hidden ; and the 
 conspirators declared their aim to be that of freeing the 
 Queen from evil counsellors, and of preventing her union 
 with the Prince of Spain. The plan combined three simul- 
 taneous outbreaks of revolt. Sir Peter Carew engaged to 
 raise the west, the Duke of Suffolk to call the midland coun- 
 ties to arms, while Sir Thomas Wyatt led the Kentishmen 
 on London. The rising was planned for the spring of 
 1554. But the vigilance of the Government drove it to a 
 premature explosion in January, and baffled it in the centre 
 and the west. Carew fled to France; Suffolk, who ap* 
 peared in arms at Leicester, found small response from 
 the people and was soon sent prisoner to the Tower. The 
 Kentish rising however proved a more formidable danger. 
 A cry that the Spaniards were coming "to conquer the 
 realm" drew thousands to Wyatt's standard. The ships 
 in the Thames submitted to be seized by the insurgents. 
 A party of the train-bands of London, who marched with 
 the royal guard under the old Duke of Norfolk against 
 them, deserted to the rebels in a mass with shouts of " A 
 Wyatt ! a Wyatt ! we are all Englishmen !" 
 
 Had the Kentishmen moved quickly on the capital, its 
 gates would have been flung open and success would have 
 been assured. But at the critical moment Mary was saved 
 by her queenly courage. Riding boldly to the Guildhall 
 she appealed with " a man's voice" to the loyalty of the 
 citizens, and denounced the declaration of Wyatt's follow- 
 ers as " a Spanish cloak to cover their purpose against our 
 religion." She pledged herself, "on the word of a Queen, 
 that if it shall not probably appear to all the nobility and 
 commons in the high court of Parliament that this mar- 
 riage shall be for the high benefit and commodity of all the
 
 254 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 whole realm, then will I abstain from marriage while I 
 live." The pledge was a momentous one, for it owned the 
 very claim of the two Houses which the Queen had till now 
 haughtily rejected ; and with the remonstrance of the Par- 
 liament still fresh in their ears the Londoners may well 
 have believed that the marriage-project would come quietly 
 to an end. The dread too of any change in religion by the 
 return of the violent Protestantism of Edward's day could 
 hardly fail to win Mary support among the citizens. The 
 mayor answered for their loyalty, and when Wyatt ap- 
 peared on the Southwark bank the bridge was secured 
 against him. But the rebel leader knew that the issue of 
 the revolt hung on the question which side London would 
 take, and that a large part of the Londoners favored his 
 cause. Marching therefore up the Thames he seized a 
 bridge at Kingston, threw his force across the river, and 
 turned rapidly back on the capital. But a night march 
 along miry roads wearied and disorganized his men ; the 
 bulk of them were cut off from their leader by a royal fore 
 which had gathered in the fields at what is now Hyde 
 Park Corner, and only Wyatt himself with a handful of 
 followers pushed desperately on past the palace of St. 
 James, whence the Queen refused to fly even while the 
 rebels were marching beneath its walls, along the Strand 
 to Ludgate. " I have kept touch," he cried as he sank ex- 
 hausted at the gate. But it was closed: his adherents 
 within were powerless to effect their promised diversion in 
 his favor ; and as he fell back the daring leader was sur- 
 rounded at Temple Bar and sent to the Tower. 
 
 The failure of the revolt was fatal to the girl whom par] 
 at least of the rebels would have placed on the throne. 
 Lady Jane Grey, who had till now been spared and treated 
 with great leniency, was sent to the block ; and her father, 
 her husband, and her uncle, atoned for the ambition of the 
 House of Suffolk by the death of traitors. Wyatt and his 
 chief adherents followed them to execution, while the 
 bodies of the poorer insurgents were dangling on gibbets
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE REFORMATION. 15401608. 255 
 
 round London. Elizabeth, who had with some reason 
 been suspected of complicity in the insurrection, was sent 
 to the Tower ; and only saved from death by the interposi- 
 tion of the Council. The leading Protestants fled in terror 
 over sea. But the failure of the revolt did more than crush 
 the Protestant party ; it enabled the Queen to lay aside the 
 mask of moderation which had been forced on her by the 
 earlier difficulties of her reign. An order for the expulsion 
 of all married clergy from their cures, with the deprivation 
 of nine bishops who had been appointed during the Pro- 
 tectorate and who represented its religious tendencies, 
 proved the Queen's resolve to enter boldly on a course of 
 reaction. ^Her victory secured the Spanish marriage. It 
 was to prevent Philip's union to Mary that Wyatt had 
 risen, and with his overthrow the Queen's policy stood 
 triumphant. The whole strength of the conservative op- 
 position was lost when opposition could be branded as dis- 
 loyalty. Mary too was true to the pledge she had given 
 that the match should only be brought about with the as- 
 sent of Parliament. But pressure was unscrupulously used 
 to secure compliant members in the new elections, and 
 a reluctant assent to the marriage was wrung from the 
 Houses when they assembled in the spring. Philip was 
 created king of Naples by his father to give dignity to his 
 union ; and in the following July Mary met him at Win- 
 chester and became his wife. 
 
 As he entered London with the Queen, men noted curi- 
 ously the look of the young King whose fortunes were to 
 be so closely linked with those of England for fifty years 
 to come. Far younger than his bride, for he was but 
 twenty-six, there was little of youth in the small and 
 fragile frame, the sickly face, the sedentary habits, the 
 Spanish silence and reserve, which estranged Englishmen 
 from Philip as they had already estranged his subjects in 
 Italy and his future subjects in the Netherlands. Here 
 however he sought by an unusual pleasantness of demeanor 
 as well as by profuse distributions of gifts to win the na-
 
 256 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 tional good will, for it was only by winning it that he could 
 accomplish the work he came to do. His first aim was to 
 reconcile England with the Church. The new Spanish 
 marriage was to repair the harm which the earlier Spanish 
 marriage had brought about by securing that submission 
 to Rome on which Mary was resolved. Even before 
 Philip's landing in England the great obstacle to reunion 
 had been removed by the consent of Julius the Third un- 
 der pressure from the Emperor to waive the restoration of 
 the Church-lands in the event of England's return to 
 obedience. Other and almost as great obstacles indeed 
 seemed to remain. The temper of the nation had gone 
 with Henry in his rejection of the Papal jurisdiction. 
 Mary's counsellors had been foremost among the men who 
 advocated the change. Her minister, Bishop Gardiner, 
 seemed pledged to oppose any submission to Rome. As 
 secretary of state after Wolsey's fall he had taken a promi- 
 nent part in the measures which brought about a severance 
 between England and the Papacy ; as Bishop of Winchester 
 he had written a famous tract " On True Obedience" in 
 which the Papal supremacy had been expressly repudiated ; 
 and to the end of Henry's days he had been looked upon 
 as the leading advocate of the system of a national and in- 
 dependent Church. Nor had his attitude changed in Ed- 
 ward's reign. In the process for his deprivation he avowed 
 himself ready as ever to maintain as well " the supremacy 
 and supreme authority of the King's majesty that now is 
 as the abolishing of the usurped power of the Bishop of 
 Rome." 
 
 But with the later changes of the Protectorate Gardiner 
 had seen his dream of a national yet orthodox Church 
 vanish away. He had seen how inevitably severance 
 from Rome drew with it a connection with the Protestant 
 Churches and a repudiation of Catholic belief. In the 
 hours of imprisonment his mind fell back on the old ec- 
 clesiastical order with which the old spiritual order seemed 
 inextricably entwined, and he was ready now to submit to
 
 CHA1-. 2.] THE REFORMATION. 1540-1608. 257 
 
 the Papacy as the one means of preserving the faith to 
 which he clung. His attitude was of the highest signifi- 
 cance, for Gardiner more than any one was a representative 
 of the dominant English opinion of his day. As the 
 moderate party which had supported the policy of Henry 
 the Eighth saw its hopes disappear, it ranged itself, like 
 the Bishop, on the side of a unity which could now only 
 be brought about by reconciliation with Rome. The effort 
 of the Protestants in Wyatt's insurrection to regain their 
 power and revive the system of the Protectorate served 
 only to give a fresh impulse to this drift of conservative 
 opinion. Mary therefore found little opposition to her 
 plans. The peers were won over by Philip through the 
 pensions he lavished among them, while pressure was un- 
 scrupulously used by the Council to secure a compliant 
 House of Commons. When the Parliament met in No- 
 vember these measures were found to have boen successful. 
 The attainder of Reginald Pole, who had been appointed 
 by the Pope to receive the submission of the realm, was 
 reversed ; and the Legate entered London by the river with 
 his cross gleaming from the prow of his barge. He was 
 solemnly welcomed in full Parliament. The two Houses 
 decided by a formal vote to return to the obedience of the 
 Papal See; on the assurance of Pole in the Pope's name 
 that holders of church-lands should not be disturbed in 
 their possession the statutes abolishing Papal jurisdiction 
 in England were repealed ; and Lords and Commons re- 
 ceived on their knees an absolution which freed the realm 
 from the guilt incurred by its schism and heresy. 
 
 But, even in the hour of her triumph, the temper both 
 of Parliament and the nation warned the Queen of the 
 failure of her hope to bind England to a purely Catholic 
 policy. The growing independence of the two Houses was 
 seen in the impossibility of procuring from them any 
 change in the order of succession. The victory of Rome 
 was incomplete so long as its right of dispensation was 
 implicitly denied by a recognition of Elizabeth's legiti-
 
 258 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 macy, and Mary longed to avenge her mother by humbling 
 the child of Anne Boleyn. But in spite of Pole's efforts 
 and the Queen's support a proposal to oust her sister from 
 the line of succession could not even be submitted to the 
 Houses, nor could their assent be won to the postponing 
 the succession of Elizabeth to that of Philip. The temper 
 of the nation at large was equally decided. In the first 
 Parliament of Mary a proposal to renew the laws against 
 heresy had been thrown out by the Lords, even after the 
 failure of Wyatt's insurrection. Philip's influence secured 
 the re-enactment of the statute of Henry the Fifth in the 
 Parliament which followed his arrival ; but the sullen dis- 
 content of London compelled its Bishop, Bonner, to with- 
 draw a series of articles of inquiry, by which he hoped to 
 purge his diocese of heresy, and even the Council was di- 
 vided on the question of persecution. In the very interests 
 of Catholicism the Emperor himself counselled prudence 
 and delay. Philip gave the same counsel. From the mo- 
 ment of his arrival the young King exercised a powerful 
 influence over the Government, and he was gradually 
 drawing into his hands the whole direction of affairs. But 
 bigot as he was in matters of faith, Philip's temper was 
 that of a statesman, not of a fanatic. If he came to Eng- 
 land resolute to win the country to union with the Church 
 his conciliatory policy was already seen in the concessions 
 he wrested from the Papacy in the matter of the Church- 
 lands, and his aim was rather to hold England together 
 and to give time for a reaction of opinion than to revive 
 the old discord by any measures of severity. It was in- 
 deed only from a united and contented England that he 
 could hope for effective aid in the struggle of his house 
 with France, and in spite of his pledges Philip's one aim 
 in marrying Mary was to secure that aid. 
 
 But whether from without or from within warning was 
 wasted on the fierce bigotry of the Queen. It was, as 
 Gardiner asserted, not at the counsel of her ministers but 
 by her own personal will that the laws against heresy had
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE REFORMATION. 1540-1603. 259 
 
 been laid before Parliament ; ar.d now that they were en- 
 acted Mary pressed for their execution. Her resolve was 
 probably quickened by the action of the Protestant zealots. 
 The failure of Wyatt's revolt was far from taming the en- 
 thusiasm of the wilder reformers. The restoration of the 
 old worship was followd by outbreaks of bold defiance. A 
 tailor of St. Giles in the Fields shaved a dog with a priestly 
 tonsure. A cat was found hanging in the Cheap " with 
 her head shorn, and the likeness of a vestment cast over 
 her, with her forefeet tied together and a round piece of 
 paper like a singing cake between them." Yet more gall- 
 ing were the ballads which were circulated in mockery of 
 the mass, the pamphlets which came from the exiles over 
 sea, the seditious broadsides dropped in, the streets, the in- 
 terludes in which the most sacred acts of the old religion 
 were flouted with ribald mockery. All this defiance only 
 served to quicken afresh the purpose of the Queen. But it 
 was not till the opening of 1555, when she had already 
 been a year and a half on the throne, that the opposition 
 of her councillors was at last mastered and the persecution 
 began. In February the deprived bishop of Gloucester, 
 Hooper, was burned in his cathedral city, a London vicar, 
 Lawrence Saunders, at Coventry, and Rogers, a preben- 
 dary of St. Paul's, at London. Ferrar, the deprived 
 bishop of St. David's, who was burned at Caermarthen, 
 was one of eight victims who suffered in March. Four 
 followed in April and May, six in June, eleven in July, 
 eighteen in August, eleven in September. In October 
 Ridley, the deprived bishop of London, was drawn with 
 Latimer from their prison at Oxford. "Play the man, 
 Master Ridley !" cried the old preacher of the Reformation 
 as the flames shot up around him; "we shall this day 
 light up such a candle by God's grace in England as I 
 trust shall never be put out." 
 
 If the Protestants had not known how to govern indeed 
 they knew how to die ; and the cause which prosperity had 
 ruined revived in the dark hour of persecution. The
 
 260 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 memory of their violence and greed faded away as they 
 passed unwavering to their doom. Such a story as that 
 of Rowland Taylor, the Vicar of Hadleigh, tells us more 
 of the work which was now begun, and of the effect it was 
 likely to produce, than pages of historic dissertation. 
 Taylor, who as a man of mark had been one of the first vic- 
 tims chosen for execution, was arrested in London, and con- 
 demned to suffer in his own parish. His wife, " suspect- 
 ing that her husband should that night be carried away," 
 had waited through the darkness with her children in the 
 porch of St. Botolph's beside Aldgate. " Now when the 
 sheriff his company came against St. Botolph's Church 
 Elizabeth cried, saying, 'O my dear father! Mother! 
 mother ! here is my father led away !' Then cried his wife, 
 * Rowland, Rowland, where art thou?' for it was a very 
 dark morning, that the one could not see the other. Dr. 
 Taylor answered, 'lam here, dear wife,' and stayed. The 
 sheriff's men would have led him forth, but the sheriff said, 
 'Stay a little, masters, I pray you, and let him speak to his 
 wife.' Then came she to him, and he took his daughter 
 Mary in his arms, and he and his wife and Elizabeth knelt 
 down and said the Lord's prayer. At which sight the 
 sheriff wept apace, and so did divers others of the com- 
 pany. Aftei they had prayed he rose up and kissed his 
 wife and shook her by the hand, and said, 'Farewell, my 
 dear wife, be of good comfort, for I am quiet in my con- 
 science! God shall still be a father to my children. ' . . . 
 Then said his wife, 'God be with thee, dear Rowland! I 
 will, with God's grace, meet thee at Hadleigh.' 
 
 " All the way Dr. Taylor was merry and cheerful as one 
 that accounted himself going to a most pleasant banquet 
 or bridal. . . . Coming within two miles of Hadleigh he 
 desired to light off his horse, which done he leaped and set 
 a frisk or twain as men commonly do for dancing. 'Why, 
 master Doctor,' quoth the Sheriff, 'how do you now?' He 
 answered, 'Well, God be praised, Master Sheriff, never 
 better; for now I know I am almost at home. I lack not
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE REFORMATION. 1540-1603. 261 
 
 past two stiles to go over, and I am even at my Father's 
 house!' . . . The streets of Hadleigh were beset on both 
 sides with men and women of the town and country who 
 waited to see him ; whom when they beheld so led to death* 
 with weeping eyes and lamentable voices, they cried, 'Ah, 
 good Lord! there goeth our good shepherd from us!'" The 
 journey was at last over. " 'What place is this, ' he asked, 
 'and what meaneth it that so much people are gathered to- 
 gether?' It was answered, 'It is Oldham Common, the 
 place where you must suffer, and the people are come to 
 look upon you.' Then said he, 'Thanked be God, I am 
 even at home!' . . . But when the people saw his rev- 
 erend and ancient face, with a long white beard, they burst 
 out with weeping tears and cried, saying, 'God save thee, 
 good Dr. Taylor ; God strengthen thee and help thee ; the 
 Holy Ghost comfort thee!' He wished, but was not suf- 
 fered, to speak. When he had prayed, he went to the 
 stake and kissed it, and set himself into a pitch -barrel 
 which they had set for him to stand on, and so stood with 
 his back upright against the stake, with his hands folded 
 together and his eyes toward heaven, and so let himself 
 be burned." One of the executioners " cruelly cast a fagot 
 at him, which hit upon his head and brake his face that 
 the blood ran down his visage. Then said Dr. Taylor, 'O 
 friend, I have harm enough what needed that?' " One 
 more act of brutality brought his sufferings to an end. 
 " So stood he still without either crying or moving, with 
 his hands folded together, till Soyce with a halberd struck 
 him on the head that the brains fell out, and the dead 
 corpse fell down into the fire." 
 
 The terror of death was powerless against men like these. 
 Bonner, the Bishop of London, to whom, as bishop of the 
 diocese in which the Council sat, its victims were gener- 
 ally delivered for execution, but who, in spite of the nick- 
 name and hatred which his official prominence in the work 
 of death earned him, seems to have been naturally a good- 
 humored and merciful man, asked a youth who was brought
 
 262 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 before him whether he thought he could bear the fire. The 
 boy at once held his hand without flinching in the flame 
 of a candle that stood by. Rogers, a fellow- worker with 
 Tyndale in the translation of the Bible, and one of the 
 foremost among the Protestant preachers, died bathing his 
 hands in the flame " as if it had been in cold water. " Even 
 the commonest lives gleamed for a moment into poetry at 
 the stake. "Pray for me," a boy, William Brown, who 
 had been brought home to Brentwood to suffer, asked of 
 the bystanders. "I will pray no more for thee," one of 
 them replied, "than I will pray for a dog." " 'Then,' said 
 William, 'Son of God, shine upon me;' and immediately 
 the sun in the elements shone out of a dark cloud so full in 
 his face that he was constrained to look another way; 
 whereat the people mused because it was so dark a little 
 time before." Brentwood lay within a district on which 
 the hand of the Queen fell heavier than elsewhere. The 
 persecution was mainly confined to the more active and 
 populous parts of the country, to London, Kent, Sussex, 
 and the Eastern Counties. Of the two hundred and eighty 
 whom we know to have suffered during the last three years 
 and a half of Mary's reign more than forty were burned 
 in London, seventeen in the neighboring village of Strat- 
 ford-le-Bow, four in Islington, two in Southwark, and one 
 each at Barnet, St. Albans, and Ware. Kent, at that time 
 a home of mining and manufacturing industry, suffered 
 as heavily as London. Of its sixty martyrs more than forty 
 were furnished by Canterbury, which was then but a city 
 of some few thousand inhabitants, and seven by Maidstone. 
 The remaining eight suffered at Rochester, Ashford, and 
 Dartford. Of the twenty -five who died in Sussex the little 
 town of Lewes sent seventeen to the fire. Seventy were 
 contributed by the Eastern Counties, the seat of the woollen 
 manufacture. Beyond these districts executions were 
 rare. Westward of Sussex we find the record of but a 
 dozen martyrdoms, six of which were at Bristol, and four 
 at Salisbury. Chester and Wales contributed but four
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 263 
 
 sufferers to the list. In the Midland Counties between 
 Thames and the Humber only twenty-four suffered martyr- 
 dom. North of the Humber we find the names of but two 
 Yorkshiremen burned at Bedale. 
 
 But heavily as the martyrdoms fell on the district within 
 which they were practically confined, and where as we 
 may conclude Protestantism was more dominant than else 
 where, the work of terror failed in the very ends for which 
 it was wrought. The old spirit of insolent defiance, of 
 outrageous violence, rose into fresh life at the challenge of 
 persecution. A Protestant hung a string of puddings 
 round a priest's neck in derision of his beads. The restored 
 images were grossly insulted. The old scurrilous ballads 
 against the mass and relics were heard in the streets. Men 
 were goaded to sheer madness by the bloodshed and violence 
 about them. One miserable wretch, driven to frenzy, 
 stabbed the priest of St. Margaret's as he stood with the 
 chalice in his hand. It was a more formidable sign of the 
 times that acts of violence such as these no longer stirred 
 the people at large to their former resentment. The hor- 
 ror of the persecution swept away all other feelings. Every 
 death at the stake won hundreds to the cause for which 
 the victims died. " You have lost the hearts of twenty 
 thousands that were rank Papists within these twelve 
 months," a Protestant wrote triumphantly to Bonner. 
 Bonner indeed, who had never been a very zealous per- 
 secutor, was sick of his work ; and the energy of the bishops 
 soon relaxed. But Mary had no thought of hesitation in 
 the course she had entered on, and though the Imperial 
 ambassador noted the rapid growth of public discontent 
 "rattling letters" from the council pressed the lagging 
 prelates to fresh activity. Yet the persecution had hardly 
 begun before difficulties were thickening round the Queen. 
 In her passionate longing for an heir who would carry on 
 her religious work Mary had believed herself to be with 
 child ; but in the summer of 1555 all hopes of any child- 
 birth passed away, and the overthrow of his projects for 
 
 J 12 ^ J VOL. 2
 
 264 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 the permanent acquisition of England to the House of 
 Austria at once disenchanted Philip with his stay in the 
 realm. But even had all gone well it was impossible for 
 the King to remain longer in England. He was needed in 
 the Netherlands to play his part in the memorable act 
 which was to close the Emperor's political life. Already 
 King of Naples and Lord of Milan, Philip received by his 
 father's solemn resignation on the twenty-fifth of October 
 the Burgundian heritage ; and a month later Charles ceded 
 to him the crowns of Castile and Aragon with their de- 
 pendencies in the New World and in the Old. The Em- 
 pire indeed passed to his uncle Ferdinand of Austria ; but 
 with this exception the whole of his father's vast domin- 
 ions lay now in the grasp of Philip. Of the realms which 
 he ruled, England was but one and far from the greatest 
 one, and even had he wished to return his continued stay 
 there became impossible. 
 
 He was forced to leave the direction of affairs to Car- 
 dinal Pole, who on the death of Gardiner in November 
 1555 took the chief place in Council. At once Papal Le- 
 gate and chief minister of the Crown, Pole carried on that 
 union of the civil and ecclesiastical authority which had 
 been first seen in Wolsey and had formed the groundwork 
 of the system of Cromwell. But he found himself ham- 
 pered by difficulties which even the ability of Cromwell 
 or Wolsey could hardly have met. The embassy which 
 carried to Rome the submission of the realm found a fresh 
 Pope, Paul the Fourth, on the throne. His accession 
 marked the opening of a new era in the history of the Pa- 
 pacy. Till now the fortunes of Catholicism had been 
 steadily sinking to a lower ebb. With the Peace of Pas- 
 sau the Empire seemed lost to it. The new Protestant 
 faith stood triumphant in the north of Germany, and it was 
 already advancing to the conquest of the south. The 
 nobles of Austria were forsaking the older religion. A 
 Venetian ambassador estimated the German Catholics at 
 little more than a tenth of the whole population of Ger-
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 265 
 
 many. Eastward the nobles of Hungary and Poland 
 became Protestants in a mass. In the west France was 
 yielding more and more to heresy, and England had hardly 
 been rescued from it by Mary's accession. Only where 
 the dead hand of Spain lay heavy, in Castile, in Aragon, 
 or in Italy, was the Reformation thoroughly crushed out ; 
 and even the dead hand of Spain failed to crush heresy in 
 the Low Countries. But at the moment when ruin seemed 
 certain the older faith rallied to a new resistance. While 
 Protestantism was degraded and weakened by the prostitu- 
 tion of the Reformation to political ends, by the greed and 
 worthlessness of the German princes who espoused its 
 cause, by the factious lawlessness of the nobles in Poland 
 and the Huguenots in France, while it wasted its strength 
 in theological controversies and persecutions, in the bitter 
 and venomous discussions between the Churches which 
 followed Luther and the Churches which followed Zwingli 
 or Calvin, the great communion which it assailed felt at 
 last the uses of adversity. The Catholic world rallied 
 round the Council of Trent. In the very face of heresy 
 the Catholic faith was anew settled and denned. The 
 Papacy was owned afresh as the centre of Catholic union. 
 The enthusiasm of the Protestants was met by a counter 
 enthusiasm among their opponents. New religious orders 
 rose to meet the wants of the day; the Capuchins became 
 the preachers of Catholicism, the Jesuits became not only 
 its preachers but its directors, its schoolmasters, its mis- 
 sionaries, its diplomatists. Their organization, their blind 
 obedience, their real ability, their fanatical zeal, galvanized 
 the pulpit, the school, the confessional, into a new life. 
 
 It was this movement, this rally of Catholicism, which 
 now placed its representative on the Papal throne. At the 
 moment when Luther was first opening his attack on the 
 Papacy Giovanni Caraffa had laid down his sees of Chieti 
 and Brindisi to found the order of Theatines in a little 
 house on the Pincian Hill. His aim was the reformation 
 of the clergy, but the impulse which he gave told on the
 
 266 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 growing fervor of the Catholic world, and its issue was 
 seen in the institution of the Capuchins and the Jesuits. 
 Created Cardinal by Paul the Third, he found himself face 
 to face with the more liberal theologians who were longing 
 for a reconciliation between Lutheranism and the Papacy, 
 such as Contarini and Pole, but his violent orthodoxy foiled 
 their efforts in the conference at Ratisbon, and prevailed 
 on the Pope to trust to the sterner methods of the Inqui- 
 sition. As Caraffa wielded its powers, the Inquisition 
 spread terror throughout Italy. At due intervals groups 
 of heretics were burned before the Dominican Church at 
 Rome ; scholars like Peter Martyr were driven over sea ; 
 and the publication of an index of prohibited books gave 
 a death-blow to Italian literature. On the verge of eighty 
 the stern Inquisitor became Pope as Paul the Fourth. His 
 conception of the Papal power was as high as that of 
 Hildebrand or Innocent the Third, and he flung con- 
 temptuously aside the system of compromise which his 
 predecessor had been brought to adopt by the caution of the 
 Emperor. " Charles," he said, was a " favorer of heretics," 
 and he laid to his charge the prosperity of Lutheranism in 
 the Empire. That England should make terms for its re- 
 turn to obedience galled his pride, while his fanaticism 
 would hear of no surrender of the property of the Church. 
 Philip, who had wrested the concession from Julius the 
 Third, had no influence over a Pope who hoped to drive 
 the Spaniards from Italy, and Pole was suspected by Paul 
 of a leaning to heresy. 
 
 The English ambassadors found therefore a rough greet- 
 ing when the terms of the submission were laid before the 
 Pope. Paul utterly repudiated the agreement which had 
 been entered into between the Legate and the Parliament ; 
 he demanded the restoration of every acre of Church prop- 
 erty ; and he annulled all alienation of it by a general bull. 
 His attitude undid all that Mary had done. In spite of the 
 pompous reconciliation in which the Houses had knelt at 
 the feet of Pole, England was still unreconciled to the
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE REFORMATION. 1540-1603. 267 
 
 Papacy, for the country and the Pope were at issue on a 
 matter where concession was now impossible on either side. 
 The Queen's own heart went with the Pope's demand. 
 ' But the first step on which she ventured toward a compli- 
 ance with it showed the difficulties she would have to meet. , 
 The grant of the first-fruits to Henry the Eighth had un- 
 doubtedly rested on his claim of supremacy over the 
 Church ; and now that this was at an end Mary had grounds 
 for proposing their restoration to church purposes. But 
 the proposal was looked on as a step toward the resump- 
 tion of the monastic lands, and after a hot and prolonged 
 debate at the close of 1555 the Commons only assented to 
 it by a small majority. It was plain that no hearing 
 would be given to the Pope's demand for a restoration of 
 all Church property; great lords were heard to threaten 
 that they would keep their lands so long as they had a 
 sword by their side ; and England was thus left at hopeless 
 variance with the Papacy. 
 
 But difficult as Mary's task became, she clung as tena- 
 ciously as ever to her work of blood. The martyrdoms went 
 steadily on, and at the opening of 1556 the sanction of 
 Rome enabled the Queen to deal with a victim whose death 
 woke all England to the reality of the persecution. Far as 
 he stood in character beneath many who had gone before 
 him to the stake, Cranmer stood high above all in his ec- 
 clesiastical position. To burn the Primate of the English 
 Church for heresy was to shut out meaner victims from 
 all hope of escape. And on the position of Cranmer none 
 cast a doubt. The other prelates who had suffered had 
 been placed in their sees after the separation from Rome, 
 and were hardly regarded as bishops by their opponents. 
 But, whatever had been his part in the schism, Cranmer 
 had received his Pallium from the Pope. He was, in the 
 eyes of all, Archbishop of Canterbury, the successor of St. 
 Augustine and of St. Thomas in the second see of Western 
 Christendom. Revenge however and religious zeal alike 
 urged the Queen to bring Cranmer to the stake. First
 
 268 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 among the many decisions in which the Archbishop had 
 prostituted justice to Henry's will stood that by which he 
 had annulled the King's marriage with Catharine and de- 
 clared Mary a bastard. The last of his political acts had 
 been to join, whether reluctantly or no, in the shameless 
 plot to exclude Mary from the throne. His great position 
 too made Cranmer more than any man a representative of 
 the religious revolution which had passed over the land. 
 His figure stood with those of Henry and of Cromwell on 
 the frontispiece of the English Bible. The decisive change 
 which had been given to the character of the Reformation 
 under Edward was due wholly to Cranmer. It was his 
 voice that men heard and still hear in the accents of the 
 English Liturgy. 
 
 As an Archbishop, Cranmer's judgment rested with no 
 meaner tribunal than that of Rome, and his execution had 
 been necessarily delayed till its sentence could be given. 
 It was not till the opening of 1556 that the Papal see con- 
 victed him of heresy. As a heretic he was now condemned 
 to suffer at the stake. But the courage which Cranmer 
 had shown since the accession of Mary gave way the mo- 
 ment his final doom was announced. The moral cowardice 
 which had displayed itself in his miserable compliance 
 with the lust and despotism of Henry displayed itself again 
 in six successive recantations by which he hoped to pur- 
 chase pardon. But pardon was impossible ; and Cranmer's 
 strangely mingled nature found a power in its very weak- 
 ness when he was brought into the church of St. Mary at 
 Oxford on the twenty-first of March to repeat his recanta- 
 tion on the way to the stake. "Now," ended his address 
 to the hushed congregation before him, " now I come to 
 the great thing that troubleth my conscience more than 
 any other thing that ever I said or did in my life, and that 
 is the setting abroad of writings contrary to the truth; 
 which here I now renounce and refuse as things written 
 by my hand contrary to the truth which I thought in my 
 heart, and written for fear of death to save my life, i it
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 269 
 
 might be. And, forasmuch as my hand offended in writ- 
 ing contrary to my heart, my hand therefore shall be the 
 first punished; for if I come to the fire, it shall be the first 
 burned." "This was the hand that wrote it," he again 
 exclaimed at the stake, "therefore it shall suffer first pun- 
 ishment;" and holding it steadily in the flame "he never 
 stirred nor cried" till life was gone. 
 
 It was with the unerring instinct of a popular movement 
 that, among a crowd of far more heroic sufferers, the 
 Protestants fixed, in spite of his recantations, on the mar- 
 tyrdom of Cranmer as the death-blow to Catholicism in 
 England. For one man who felt within him the joy of 
 Rowland Taylor at the prospect of the stake, there were 
 thousands who felt the shuddering dread of Cranmer. 
 The triumphant cry of Latimer could reach only hearts as 
 bold as his own, while the sad pathos of the Primate's 
 humiliation and repentance struck chords of sympathy and 
 pity in the hearts of all. It is from that moment that we 
 may trace the bitter remembrance of the blood shed in the 
 cause of Rome; which, however partial and unjust it must 
 seem to an historic observer, still lies graven deep in the 
 temper of the English people. But the Queen struggled 
 desperately on. She did what was possible to satisfy the 
 unyielding Pope. In the face of the Parliament's signifi- 
 cant reluctance even to restore the first-fruits to the Church, 
 she refounded all she could of the abbeys which had been 
 suppressed. One of the greatest of these, the Abbey of 
 Westminster, was re-established before the close of 1556, 
 and John Feckenham installed as its abbot. Such a step 
 could hardly fail to wake the old jealousy of any attempt 
 to reclaim the Church-lands, and thus to alienate the nobles 
 and gentry from the Queen. They were soon to be alien- 
 ated yet more by her breach of the solemn covenant on 
 which her marriage was based. Even the most reckless 
 of her counsellors felt the unwisdom of aiding Philip in 
 his strife with France. The accession of England to the 
 vast dominion which the Emperor had ceded to his son in
 
 870 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VL 
 
 1555 alllrat realized the plans of Ferdinand the Catholic for 
 making the house of Austria master of Western Christen- 
 dom. France was its one effective foe; and the overthrow 
 of France in the war which was going on between the two 
 powers would leave Philip without a check. How keenly 
 this was felt at the English council-board was seen in the 
 resistance which was made to Philip's effort to drag his 
 new realm into the war. Such an effort was in itself a 
 crowning breach of faith, for the King's marriage had 
 been accompanied by a solemn pledge that England should 
 not be drawn into the strifes of Spain. But Philip knew 
 little of good faith when his interest was at stake. The 
 English fleet would give him the mastery of the seas, 
 English soldiers would turn the scale in Flanders, and at 
 the opening of 1557 the King again crossed the Channel 
 and spent three months in pressing his cause on Mary and 
 her advisers. 
 
 " He did more," says a Spanish writer of the time, " than 
 any one would have believed possible with that proud and 
 indomitable nation." What he was most aided by was 
 provocation from France. A body of refugees who had 
 found shelter there landed in Yorkshire in the spring : and 
 their leader, Thomas Stafford, a grandson of the late Duke 
 of Buckingham, called the people to rise against the tyranny 
 of foreigners and "the satanic designs of an unlawful 
 Queen." The French King hoped that a rising would 
 give the Queen work at home ; but the revolt was easily 
 crushed, and the insult enabled Mary to override her coun- 
 sellors' reluctance and to declare war against France. The 
 war opened with triumphs both on land and at sea. The 
 junction of the English fleet made Philip master of the 
 Channel. Eight thousand men, "all clad in their green," 
 were sent to Flanders under Lord Pembroke, and joined 
 Philip's forces in August in time to take part in the great 
 victory of St. Quentin. In October the little army re- 
 turned home in triumph, but the gleam of success vanished 
 suddenly away. In the autumn of 1557 the English ships
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 271 
 
 were defeated in an attack on the Orkneys. In January 
 1558 the Duke of Guise flung himself with characteristic 
 secrecy and energy upon Calais and compelled it to sur- 
 render before succor could arrive. "The chief jewel of 
 the realm," as Mary herself called it, was suddenly reft 
 away ; and the surrender of Guisnes, which soon followed, 
 left England without a foot of land on the Continent. 
 
 Bitterly as the blow was felt, the Council, though pas- 
 sionately pressed by the Queen, could find neither money 
 nor men for any attempt to recover the town. The war 
 indeed went steadily for Spain and her allies ; and Philip 
 owed his victory at Gravelines in the summer of 1558 
 mainly to the opportune arrival of ten English ships of war 
 which opened fire on the flank of the French army that 
 lay open to the sea. But England could not be brought to 
 take further part in the contest. The levies which were 
 being raised mutinied and dispersed. The forced loan to 
 which Mary was driven to resort came in slowly. The 
 treasury was drained not only by the opening of the war 
 with France but by the opening of a fresh strife in Ireland. 
 To the struggle of religion which had begun there under 
 the Protectorate the accession of Mary had put an end. 
 The shadowy form of the earlier Irish Protestantism melted 
 quietly away. There were in fact no Protestants in Ireland 
 save the new bishops ; and when Bale had fled over sea 
 from his diocese of Ossory and his fellow-prelates had been 
 deprived the Irish Church resumed its old appearance. No 
 attempt indeed was made to restore the monasteries ; and 
 Mary exercised her supremacy, deposed or appointed 
 bishops, and repudiated Papal interference with her ec- 
 clesiastical acts as vigorously as her father. But the Mass 
 was restored, the old modes of religious worship were 
 again held in honor, and religious dissension between the 
 Government and its Irish subjects came for the time to an 
 end. With the close however of one danger came the rise 
 of another. England was growing tired of the policy of 
 conciliation which had been steadily pursued by Henry
 
 272 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 the Eighth and his successor. As yet it had been'rewarded 
 with precisely the sort of success which Wolsey and Crom- 
 well anticipated. The chiefs had come quietly in to the 
 plan, and their septs had followed them in submission to 
 the new order. " The winning of the Earl of Desmond 
 was the winning of the rest of Munster with small charges. 
 The making O'Brien an Earl made all that country obedi- 
 ent." The Macwilliam became Lord Clanrickard, and the 
 Fitzpatricks Barons of Upper Ossory. A visit of the great 
 northern chief who had accepted the title of Earl of Tyrone 
 to the English Court was regarded as a marked step in the 
 process of civilization. 
 
 In the south, where the system of English law was 
 slowly spreading, the chieftains sat on the bench side by 
 side with the English justices of the peace ; and something 
 had been done to check the feuds and disorder of the wild 
 tribes between Limerick and Tipperary. " Men may pass 
 quietly throughout these countries without danger of rob- 
 bery or other displeasure." In the Clanrickard county, 
 once wasted with war, "ploughing increaseth daily." In 
 Tyrone and the north however the old disorder reigned 
 without a check ; and everywhere the process of improve- 
 ment tried the temper of the English Deputies by the slow- 
 ness of its advance. The only hope of any real progress 
 lay in patience ; and there were signs that the Government 
 at Dublin found it hard to wait. The " rough handling" 
 of the chiefs by Sir Edward Bellingham, a Lord Deputy 
 under the Protector Somerset, roused a spirit of revolt that 
 only subsided when the poverty of the Exchequer forced 
 him to withdraw the garrisons he had planted in the heart 
 of the country. His successor in Mary's reign, Lord Sus- 
 sex, made raid after raid to no purpose on the obstinate 
 tribes of the north, burning in one the Cathedral of Armagh 
 and three other churches. A far more serious breach in 
 the system of conciliation was made when the project of 
 English colonization which Henry had steadily rejected 
 was adopted by the same Lord Deputy, and when the
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 273 
 
 country of the O'Connors was assigned to English settlers 
 and made shire-land under the names of King's and 
 Queen's Counties in honor of Philip and Mary. A savage 
 warfare began at once between the planters and the dis- 
 possessed septs, a warfare which only ended in the follow- 
 ing reign in the extermination of the Irishmen, and com- 
 missioners were appointed to survey waste lands with the 
 aim of carrying the work of colonization into other dis- 
 tricts. The pressure of the war against France put an end 
 to these wider projects, but the strife in Meath went sav- 
 agely on and proved a sore drain to the Exchequer. 
 
 Nor was Mary without difficulties in the North. Re- 
 ligiously as well as politically her reign told in a marked 
 way on the fortunes of Scotland. If the Queen's policy 
 failed to crush Protestantism in England, it gave a new 
 impulse to it in the northern realm. In Scotland the wealth 
 and worldliness of the great churchmen had long ago spread 
 a taste for heresy among the people ; and Lollardry sur- 
 vived as a power north of the border long after it had al- 
 most died out to the south of it. The impulse of the Luth- 
 eran movement was seen in the diffusion of the new opin- 
 ions by a few scholars, such as Wishart and Hamilton ; 
 but though Henry the Eighth pressed his nephew James 
 the Fifth to follow him in the work he was doing in Eng- 
 land, it was plain that the Scotch reformers could look for 
 little favor from the Crown. The policy of the Scottish 
 kings regarded the Church as their ally against the turbu- 
 lent nobles, and James steadily held its enemies at bay. 
 The Regent, Mary of Guise, clung to the same policy. 
 But stoutly as the whole nation withstood the English 
 efforts to acquire a political supremacy, the religious revo- 
 lution in England told more and more on the Scotch nobles. 
 No nobility was so poor as that of Scotland, and nowhere 
 in Europe was the contrast between their poverty and the 
 riches of the Church so great. Each step of the vast 
 spoliation that went on south of the border, the confisca- 
 tion of the lesser abbeys, the suppression of the greater,
 
 274 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 the secularization of chantries and hospitals, woke a fresh 
 greed in the baronage of the north. The new opinions 
 soon found disciples among them. It was a gronp of 
 Protestant nobles who surprised the Castle of St. Andrews 
 and murdered Cardinal Beaton. The " Gospellers" from the 
 Lowlands already formed a marked body in the army that 
 fought at Pinkie Cleugh. As yet however the growth of 
 the new opinions had been slow, and there had been till now 
 little public show of resistance to the religion of the State. 
 With the accession of Mary however all was changed. 
 Under Henry and Edward the Catholicism of Scotland had 
 profited by the national opposition to a Protestant England ; 
 but now that Catholicism was again triumphant in Eng- 
 land Protestantism became far less odious to the Scotch 
 statesmen. A still greater change was wrought by the 
 marriage with Philip. Such a match, securing as it did 
 to England the aid of Spain in any future aggression upon 
 Scotland, became a danger to the northern realm which not 
 only drew her closer to France but forced her to give shelter 
 and support to the sectaries who promised to prove a check 
 upon Mary. Many of the exiles therefore who left England 
 for the sake of religion found a refuge in Scotland. Among 
 these was John Knox. Knox had been one of the fol- 
 lowers of Wishart; he had acted as pastor to the Protest- 
 ants who after Beaton's murder held the Castle of St. An- 
 drews, and had been captured with them by a French force 
 in the summer of 1547. The Frenchmen sent the heretics 
 to the galleys ; and it was as a galley slave in one of their 
 vessels that Knox next saw his native shores. As the 
 vessel lay tossing in the bay of St. Andrews, a comrade 
 bade him look to the land, and asked him if he knew it. 
 " I know it well," was the answer; " for I see the steeple of 
 that place where God first in public opened my mouth to 
 His glory; and I am fully persuaded, how weak that ever 
 I now appear, I shall not depart this life till mv tongue 
 glorify His holy name in the same place !" It was long 
 however before he could return. Released at the opening
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 275 
 
 of 1549, Knox found shelter in England, where he became 
 one of the most stirring among the preachers of the day, 
 and was offered a bishopric by Northumberland. Mary's 
 accession drove him again to France. But the new policy 
 of the Regent now opened Scotland to the English refugees, 
 and it was as one of these that Knox returned in 1555 to 
 his own country. Although he soon withdrew to take 
 charge of the English congregation at Frankfort and 
 Geneva his energy had already given a decisive impulse to 
 the new movement. In a gathering at the house of Lord 
 Erskine he persuaded the assembly to " refuse all society 
 with idolatry, and bind themselves to the uttermost of their 
 power to maintain the true preaching of the Evangile, as 
 God should offer to their preachers an opportunity." The 
 confederacy woke anew the jealousy of the government, 
 and persecution revived. But some of the greatest nobles 
 now joined the reforming cause. The Earl of Morton, the 
 head of the house of Douglas, the Earl of Argyle, the 
 greatest chieftain of the west, and above all a bastard son 
 of the late King, Lord James Stuart, who bore as yet the 
 title of prior of St. Andrews, but who was to be better 
 known afterwards as the Earl of Murray, placed them- 
 selves at the head of the movement. The remonstrances 
 of Knox from his exile at Geneva stirred them to interfere 
 in behalf of the persecuted Protestants ; and at the close of 
 1557 these nobles united with the rest of the Protestant 
 leaders in an engagement which became memorable as the 
 first among those Covenants which were to give shape and 
 color to Scotch religion. 
 
 " We," ran this solemn bond, "perceiving how Satan in 
 his members, the Antichrists of our time, cruelly doth 
 rage, seeking to overthrow and to destroy the Evangel of 
 Christ, and His Congregation, ought according to out 
 bounden duty to strive in our Master's cause even unto the 
 death, being certain of our victory in Him. The which 
 our duty being well considered, we do promise before the 
 Majesty of God and His Congregation that we, by His
 
 276 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VL 
 
 grace, shall with all diligence continually apply our whole 
 power, substance, and our very lives to maintain, set for- 
 ward, and establish the most blessed Word of God and His 
 Congregation, and shall labor at our possibility to have 
 faithful ministers, purely and truly to minister Christ's 
 Evangel and sacraments to His people. We shall main- 
 tain them, nourish them, and defend them, the whole Con- 
 gregation of Christ and every member thereof, at our whole 
 power and wearing of our lives, against Satan and all 
 wicked power that does intend tyranny or trouble against 
 the foresaid Congregation. Unto the which Holy Word 
 and Congregation we do join us, and also do forsake and 
 renounce the congregation of Satan with all the supersti- 
 tious abomination and idolatry thereof : and moreover shall 
 declare ourselves manifestly enemies thereto by this our 
 faithful promise before God, testified to His Congregation 
 by our subscription at these presents." 
 
 The Covenant of the Scotch nobles marked a new epoch 
 in the strife of religions. Till now the reformers had op- 
 posed the doctrine of nationality to the doctrine of Cathol- 
 icism. In the teeth of the pretensions which the Church 
 advanced to a uniformity of religion in every land, what- 
 ever might be its differences of race or government, the 
 first Protestants had advanced the principle that each prince 
 or people had alone the right to determine its form of faith 
 and worship. "Cujus regio" ran the famous phrase 
 which embodied their theory, "ejus religio." It was the 
 acknowledgment of this principle that the Lutheran 
 princes obtained at the Diet of Spires ; it was on this prin- 
 ciple that Henry based his Act of Supremacy. Its strength 
 lay in the correspondence of such a doctrine with the 
 political circumstances of the time. It was the growing 
 feeling of nationality which combined with the growing 
 development of monarchical power to establish the theory 
 that the political and religious life of each nation should 
 be one and that the religion of the people should follow the 
 faith of the prince. Had Protestantism, as seemed at one
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 277 
 
 time possible, secured the adhesion of all the European 
 princes, such a theory might well have led everywhere as 
 it led in England to the establishment of the worst of 
 tyrannies, a tyranny that claims to lord alike over both 
 body and soul. The world was saved from this danger by 
 the tenacity with which the old religion still held its power. 
 In half the countries of Europe the disciples of the new 
 opinions had soon to choose between submission to their 
 conscience and submission to their prince; and a move- 
 ment which began in contending for the religious suprem- 
 acy of Kings ended in those wars of religion which ar- 
 rayed nation after nation against their sovereigns. In 
 this religious revolution Scotland led the way. Her Prot- 
 estantism was the first to draw the sword against earthly 
 rulers. The solemn " Covenant" which bound together her 
 " Congregation" in the face of the regency, which pledged 
 its members to withdraw from all submission to the re' 
 ligion of the State and to maintain in the face of the State 
 their liberty of conscience, opened that vast series of 
 struggles which ended in Germany with the Peace of 
 Westphalia and in England with the Toleration Act of 
 William the Third. 
 
 The " Covenant" of the lords sounded a bold defiance to 
 the Catholic reaction across the border. While Mary re- 
 placed the Prayer-book by the Mass, the Scotch lords re- 
 solved that whenever their power extended the Common 
 Prayer should be read in all churches. While hundreds 
 were going to the stake in England the Scotch nobles 
 boldly met the burning of their preachers by a threat of 
 war. "They trouble our preachers," ran their bold re- 
 monstrance against the bishops in the Queen-mother's 
 presence; "they would murder them and us! shall we 
 suffer this any longer? No, madam, it shall not be !" and 
 therewith every man put on his steel bonnet. The Regent 
 was helpless for the moment and could find refuge only in 
 fair words, words so fair that for a while the sternest of 
 the reformers believed her to be drifting to their faith.
 
 278 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 She was in truth fettered by the need of avoiding civil 
 strife at a time when the war of England against France 
 made a Scotch war against England inevitable. The 
 nobles refused indeed to cross the border, but the threat of 
 a Scotch invasion was one of the dangers against which 
 Mary Tudor now found herself forced to provide. Nor 
 was the uprise of Protestantism in Scotland the only result 
 of her policy in giving fire and strength to the new re- 
 ligion. Each step in the persecution had been marked 
 by a fresh flight of preachers, merchants, and gentry across 
 the seas. "Some fled into France, some into Flanders, 
 and some into the high countries of the Empire." As 
 early as 1554 we find groups of such refugees at Frankfort, 
 Emden, Zurich, and Strassburg. Calvin welcomed some of 
 them at Geneva; the "lords of Berne" suffered a group to 
 settle at Aarau; a hundred gathered round the Duchess of 
 Suffolk at Wesel. Among the exiles we find many who 
 were to be bishops and statesmen in the coming reign. 
 Sir Francis Knollys was at Frankfort, Sir Francis Wal- 
 singham travelled in France ; among the divines were the 
 later archbishops Grindal and Sandys, and the later bishops 
 Home, Parkhurst, Aylmer, Jewel, and Cox. Mingled 
 with these were men who had already played their part 
 in Edward's reign, such as Poinet, the deprived Bishop of 
 Winchester, Bale, the deprived Bishop of Ossory, and the 
 preachers Lever and Knox. 
 
 Gardiner had threatened that the fugitives should gnaw 
 their fingers from hunger, but ample supplies reached them 
 from London merchants and other partisans in England, 
 and they seem to have lived in fair comfort while their 
 brethren at home were "going to the fire." Their chief 
 troubles sprang from strife among themselves. The hotter 
 spirits among the English Protestants had seen with dis- 
 content the retention of much that they looked on as super- 
 stitious and Popish in even the last liturgy of Edward's 
 reign. That ministers should still wear white surplices, 
 that litanies should be sung, that the congregation should 

 
 CHAP. 2.] THE REFORMATION. 1540-1603. 279 
 
 respond to the priest, that babes should be signed in baptism 
 with the sign of the cross, that rings should be given in 
 marriage, filled them with horror. Hooper, the leader of 
 this party, refused when made bishop to don his rochet ; and 
 had only been driven by imprisonment to vest himself in 
 "the rags of Popery." Trivial indeed as such questions 
 seemed in themselves, an issue lay behind them which was 
 enough to make men face worse evils than a prison. The 
 royal supremacy, the headship of the Church, which Henry 
 the Eighth claimed for himself and his successors, was, as 
 we have seen, simply an application of the principle which 
 the states of North Germany had found so effective in 
 meeting the pretensions of the Emperor or the Pope. The 
 same sentiment of national life took a new form in the 
 preservation of whatever the change of religious thought 
 left it possible to preserve in the national tradition of faith 
 and worship. In the Lutheran churches, though the Mass 
 was gone, reredos and crucifix remained untouched. In 
 England the whole ecclesiastical machinery was jealously 
 preserved. Its Church was still governed by bishops who 
 traced their succession to the Apostles. The words of its 
 new Prayer-book adhered as closely as they might to the 
 words of Missal and Breviary. What made such an ar- 
 rangement possible was the weakness of the purely relig- 
 ious impulse in the earlier stages of the Reformation. In 
 Germany indeed or in England, the pressure for theological 
 change was small ; the religious impulse told on but a small 
 part, and that not an influential part of the population ; it 
 did in fact little more than quicken and bring into action 
 the older and widely-felt passion for ecclesiastical inde- 
 pendence. 
 
 But the establishment of this independence at once gave 
 fresh force to the religious movement. From denouncing 
 the Pope as a usurper of national rights men passed easily 
 to denounce the Papal system as in itself anti -Christian. 
 In setting aside the voice of the Papacy as a ground of 
 faith the new churches had been forced to find a ground of
 
 380 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 faith in the Bible. But the reading and discussion of the 
 Bible opened up a thousand questions of belief and ritual, 
 and the hatred of Rome drew men more and more to find 
 answers to such questions which were antagonistic to the 
 creed and usages of a past that was identified in their eyes 
 with the Papacy. Such questions could hardly fail to find 
 an echo in the people at large. To the bulk of men ec- 
 clesiastical institutions are things dim and remote; and 
 the establishment of ecclesiastical independence, though it 
 gratified the national pride, could have raised little personal 
 enthusiasm. But the direct and personal interest of every 
 man seemed to lie in the right holding of religious truth, 
 and thus the theological aspect of the Reformation tended 
 more and more to supersede its political one. All that is 
 generous and chivalrous in human feeling told in the same 
 direction. To statesmen like Gardiner or Paget the ac- 
 ceptance of one form of faith or worship after another as 
 one sovereign after another occupied the throne seemed, no 
 doubt, a logical and inevitable result of their acceptance 
 of the royal supremacy. But to the people at large there 
 must have been something false and ignoble in the sight 
 of a statesman or a priest who had cast off the Mass undei 
 Edward to embrace it again under Mary, and who was 
 ready again to cast it off at the will of Mary's successor. 
 If worship and belief were indeed spiritual things, if they 
 had any semblance of connection with divine realities, men 
 must have felt that it was impossible to put them on and 
 off at a king's caprice. It was this, even more than the 
 natural pity which they raised, that gave their weight to 
 the Protestant martyrdoms under Mary. They stood out 
 in emphatic protest against the doctrine of local religion, 
 of a belief dictated by the will of kings. From the Primate 
 of the Church to the "blind girl" who perished at Col- 
 chester, three hundred were found in England who chose 
 rather to go to the fire than to take up again at the Queen's 
 will what their individual conscience had renounced as a 
 lie against God.
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 281 
 
 But from the actual assertion of such a right of the in- 
 dividual conscience to find and hold what was true, even 
 those who witnessed for it by their death would have 
 shrunk. Driven by sheer force of fact from the theory of 
 a national and royal faith, men still shuddered to stand 
 alone. The old doctrine of a Catholic Christianity flung 
 over them its spell. Rome indeed they looked on as anti- 
 Christ, but the doctrine which Rome had held so long and 
 so firmly, the doctrine that truth should be coextensive 
 with the world and not limited by national boundaries, 
 that the Church was one in all countries and among all 
 peoples, that there was a Christendom which embraced all 
 kingdoms and a Christian law that ruled peoples and kings, 
 became more and more the doctrine of Rome's bitterest 
 opponents. It was this doctrine which found its embodi- 
 ment in John Calvin, a young French scholar, driven in 
 early manhood from his own country by the persecution 
 of Francis the First. Calvin established himself at Basle, 
 and produced there in 1535 at the age of twenty-six a book 
 which was to form the theology of the Huguenot churches, 
 his "Institutes of the Christian Religion." What was 
 really original in this work was Calvin's doctrine of the 
 organization of the Church and of its relation to the State. 
 The base of the Christian republic was with him the 
 Christian man, elected and called of God, preserved by 
 his grace from the power of sin, predestinate to eternal life. 
 Every such Christian man is in himself a priest, and every 
 group of such men is a Church, self-governing, independ- 
 ent of all save God, supreme in its authority over all mat- 
 ters ecclesiastical and spiritual. The constitution of such 
 a church, where each member as a Christian was equal 
 before God, necessarily took a democratic form. In Cal- 
 vin's theory of Church government it is the Church which 
 itself elects its lay elders and lay deacons for purposes of 
 administration; it is with the approval and consent of the 
 Church that elders and deacons with the existing body of 
 pastors elect new ministers. It is through these officers 

 
 282 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI 
 
 that the Church exercises its power of the keys, the power 
 of diffusing the truth and the power of correcting error. 
 To the minister belongs the preaching of the word and the 
 direction of all religious instruction ; to the body of min- 
 isters belongs the interpretation of scripture and the de- 
 cision of doctrine. On the other hand the administration 
 of discipline, the supervision of the moral conduct of each 
 professing Christian, the admonition of the erring, the ex- 
 communication and exclusion from the body of the Church 
 of the unbelieving and the utterly unworthy, belongs to the 
 Consistory, the joint assembly of ministers and elders. To 
 this discipline princes as well as common men are alike 
 subject; princes as well as common men must take their 
 doctrine from the ministers of the Church. 
 
 The claims of the older faith to spiritual and ecclesiastical 
 supremacy over the powers of earth reappeared in this 
 theory. Calvin like the Papacy ignored all national inde- 
 pendence, all pretensions of peoples as such to create their 
 own system of church doctrine or church government. 
 Doctrine and government he held to be already laid down 
 in the words of the Bible, and all questions that rose out of 
 those words came under the decision of the ecclesiastical 
 body of ministers. Wherever a reformed religion ap- 
 peared, there was provided for it a simple but orderly or- 
 ganization which in its range and effectiveness rivalled 
 that of the older Catholicism. On the other hand this or- 
 ganization rested on a wholly new basis; spiritual and 
 ecclesiastical power came from below, not from above ; the 
 true sovereign in this Christian state was not Pope or 
 Bishop but the Christian man. Despotic as the authority 
 of pastor and elders seemed, pastor and elders were alike 
 the creation of the whole congregation, and their judg- 
 ment could in the last resort be adopted or set aside by it. 
 Such a system stood out in bold defiance against the ten- 
 dencies of the day. On its religious side it came into con- 
 flict with that principle of nationality, of ecclesiastical as 
 well as civil subjection to the prince, on which the re-
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 283 
 
 formed Churches and above all the Church of England had 
 till now been built up. As a vast and consecrated democ- 
 racy it stood in contrast with the whole social and political 
 framework of the European nations. Grave as we may 
 count the faults of Calvinism, alien as its temper may in 
 many ways be from the temper of the modern world, it is 
 in Calvinism that the modern world strikes its roots, for 
 it was Calvinism that first revealed the worth and dignity 
 of Man. Called of God, and heir of heaven, the trader at 
 his counter and the digger in his field suddenly rose into 
 equality with the noble and the king. 
 
 It was this system that Calvin by a singular fortune was 
 able to put into actual working in the little city of Geneva, 
 where the party of the Reformation had become master and 
 called him in 1536 to be their spiritual head. Driven out 
 but again recalled, his influence made Geneva from 1541 
 the centre of the Protestant world. The refugees who 
 crowded to the little town from persecution in France, in 
 the Netherlands, in England, found there an exact and 
 formal doctrine, a rigid discipline of manners and faith, a 
 system of church government, a form of church worship, 
 stripped, as they held, of the last remnant of the supersti- 
 tions of the past. Calvin himself with his austere and 
 frugal life, his enormous industry, his power of govern- 
 ment, his quick decision, his undoubting self-confidence, 
 his unswerving will, remained for three and twenty years 
 till his death in 1564 supreme over Protestant opinion. His 
 influence told heavily on England. From the hour of 
 Cromwell's fall the sympathies of the English reformers 
 had drawn them not to the Lutheran Churches of North 
 Germany but to the more progressive Churches of the 
 Rhineland and the Netherlands; and, on the critical ques- 
 tion of the Lord's Supper which mainly divided the two 
 great branches of the Reformation, Cranmer and his parti- 
 sans became more definitely anti-sacramentarian as the 
 years went by. At Edward's death the exiles showed their 
 tendencies by seeking refuge not with the Lutheran
 
 284 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 Churches of North Germany but with the Calvinistic 
 Churches of Switzerland or the Rhine ; and contact with 
 such leaders as Bullinger at Zurich or Calvin at Geneva 
 could hardly fail to give fresh vigor to the party which 
 longed for a closer union with the foreign churches and 
 a more open breach with the past. 
 
 The results of this contact first showed themselves at 
 Frankfort. At the instigation of Wittingham, who in 
 Elizabeth's days became Dean of Durham, a body of Eng- 
 lish exiles that had found shelter there resolved to reform 
 both worship and discipline. The obnoxious usages were 
 expunged from the Prayer-book, omissions were made in 
 the communion service, a minister and deacons chosen, 
 and rules drawn up for church government after the Gene- 
 van model. Free at last " from all dregs of superstitious 
 ceremonies" the Frankfort refugees thanked God "that 
 had given them such a church in a strange land wherein 
 they might hear God's holy word preached, the sacraments 
 rightly ministered, and discipline used, which in their own 
 country could never be obtained." But their invitation to 
 the other English exiles to join them in the enjoyment of 
 these blessings met with a steady repulse. Lever and 
 the exiles at Zurich refused to come unless they might " al- 
 together serve and praise God as freely and uprightly as 
 the order last taken in the Church of England permitteth 
 and presenteth, for we are fully determined to admit and 
 use no other." The main body of the exiles who were 
 then gathered at Strassburg echoed the refusal. Knox, 
 however, who had been chosen minister by the Frankfort 
 congregation, moved rapidly forward, rejecting the com- 
 munion service altogether as superstitious, and drawing up 
 a new " order" of worship after the Genevan model. But 
 in the spring of 1555 these efforts were foiled by the arrival 
 of fresh exiles from England of a more conservative turn : 
 the reformers were outvoted ; Knox was driven from the 
 town by the magistrates " in fear of the Emperor" whom he 
 had outraged in an " Admonition" to the English people,
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 285 
 
 which he had lately issued ; and the English service was 
 restored. Wittingham and his adherents, still resolute, 
 as Bale wrote, " to erect a Church of the Purity" (we may 
 perhaps trace in the sneer the origin of their later name of 
 Puritans), found a fresh refuge at Basle and Geneva, where 
 the leaders of the party occupied themselves in a metrical 
 translation of the Psalms which left its traces on English 
 psalmody and in the production of what was afterward 
 known as the Geneva Bible. 
 
 Petty as this strife at Frankfort may seem, it marks the 
 first open appearance of English Puritanism, and the open- 
 ing of a struggle which widened through the reign of 
 Elizabeth till under the Stuarts it broke England in pieces. 
 But busy as they were in strife among themselves, the 
 exiles were still more busy in fanning the discontent at 
 home. Books, pamphlets, broadsides, were written and 
 sent for distribution to England. The violence of their 
 language was incredible. No sooner had Bonner issued 
 his injunctions than Bale denounced him in a fierce reply 
 as "a beastly belly-god and damnable dunghill." With a 
 spirit worthy of the " bloody bitesheeps" whom he attacked, 
 the ex-Bishop of Ossory regretted that when Henry plucked 
 down Becket's shrine he had not burned the idolatrous 
 priests upon it. It probably mattered little to Bale that at 
 the moment when he wrote not a single Protestant had as 
 yet been sent to the stake ; but language such as this was 
 hardly likely to stir Mary to a spirit of moderation. The 
 Spanish marriage gave the refugees a fairer opportunity 
 of attack, and the Government was forced to make inquiries 
 of the wardens of city guilds " whether they had seen or 
 heard of any of these books which had come from beyond 
 seas." The violence of the exiles was doubled by the sup- 
 pression of Wyatt's revolt. Poinet, the late Bishop of 
 Winchester, who had taken part in it, fled over sea to write 
 a " Sharp Tractate of political power" in which he discussed 
 the question " whether it be lawful to depose an evil gov- 
 ernor and kill a tyrant."
 
 286 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 But with the actual outbreak of persecution and the death 
 of Cranmer all restraint was thrown aside. In his " First 
 Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of 
 Women" Knox denounced Mary as a Jezebel, a traitress, 
 and a bastard. He declared the rule of women to be 
 against the law of Nature and of God. The duty, whether 
 of the estates or people of the realm, was " first to remove 
 from honor and authority that monster in nature ; second- 
 arily, if any presume to defend that impiety, they ought 
 not to fear first to pronounce, then after to execute against 
 them the sentence of death." To keep the oath of alle- 
 giance was "nothing but plain rebellion against God." 
 "The day of vengeance," burst out the writer, "which 
 shall apprehend that horrible monster, Jezebel of England, 
 and such as maintain her monstrous cruelty is already ap- 
 pointed in the counsel of the Eternal ; and I verily believe 
 that it is so nigh that she shall not reign so long in tyranny 
 as hitherto she hath done, when God shall declare himself 
 her enemy." Another exile, Goodman, inquired "how 
 superior powers ought to be obeyed of their subjects ; and 
 wherein they may lawfully by God's word be disobeyed 
 and resisted. " His book was a direct summons to rebellion. 
 "By giving authority to an idolatrous woman," Goodman 
 wrote to his English fellow-subjects, " ye have banished 
 Christ and his Gospel. Then in taking the same authority 
 from her you shall restore Christ and his word, and shall do 
 well. In obeying her you have disobeyed God ; then in 
 disobeying her you shall please God." " Though it should 
 appear at the first sight," he urged, "a great disorder that 
 the people should take unto them the punishment of trans- 
 gressions, yet when the magistrates and other officers cease 
 to do their duties they are as it were without officers, yea, 
 worse than if they had none at all, and then God giveth 
 the sword into the people's hand." And what the people 
 were to do with the sword Poinet had already put very 
 clearly. It was the "ungodly serpent Mary" who was 
 " the chief instrument of all this present misery in Eng-
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 287 
 
 land." "Now both by God's laws and man's," concluded 
 the bishop, " she ought to be punished with death, as an 
 open idolatress in the sight of God, and a cruel murderer of 
 His saints before men, and merciless traitress to her own 
 native country." 
 
 Behind the wild rhetoric of words like these lay the new 
 sense of a prophetic power, the sense of a divine commis- 
 sion given to the preachers of the Word to rebuke nobles 
 and kings. At the moment when the policy of Cromwell 
 crushed the Church as a political power and freed the grow- 
 ing Monarchy from the constitutional check which its in- 
 dependence furnished, a new check offered itself in the 
 very enthusiasm which sprang out of the wreck of the 
 great religious body. Men stirred with a new sense of 
 righteousness and of a divine government of the world, 
 men too whose natural boldness was quickened and fired 
 by daily contact with the older seers who rebuked David 
 or Jezebel, could not hold their peace in the presence of 
 wrong. While nobles and statesmen were cowering in 
 silence before the dreaded power of the Kingship the 
 preachers spoke bluntly out. Not only Latimer, but 
 Knox, Grindal, and Lever had uttered fiery remonstrances 
 against the plunderers of Edward's reign. Bradford had 
 threatened them with the divine judgment which at last 
 overtook them. "'The judgment of the Lord! The 
 judgment of the Lord !' cried he, with a lamentable voice 
 and weeping tears." Wise or unwise, the pamphlets of 
 the exiles only carried on this theory to its full develop- 
 ment. The great conception of the mediaeval Church, that 
 of the responsibility of Kings to a spiritual power, was 
 revived at an hour when Kingship was trampling all re- 
 sponsibility to God or man beneath its feet. Such a re- 
 vival was to have large and beneficial issues in our later 
 history. Gathering strength under Elizabeth, it created 
 at the close of her reign that moral force of public opinion 
 which under the name of Puritanism brought the acts and 
 policy of our kings to the tests of reason and the Gospel. 
 
 13 VOL. 2
 
 288 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VL 
 
 However ill directed that force might be, however errone- 
 ously such tests were often applied, it is to this new force 
 that we owe the restoration of liberty and the establish- 
 ment of religious freedom. As the voice of the first Chris- 
 tian preachers had broken the despotism of the Roman 
 ISmpire, so thp voice of the preachers of Puritanism broke 
 the despotism of the English Monarchy. 
 
 But great as their issues were to be, for the moment 
 these protests only quickened the persecution at home. 
 We can hardly wonder that the arrival of Goodman's book 
 in England in the summer of 1558 was followed by stern 
 measures to prevent the circulation of such incentives to 
 revolt. " Whereas divers books, " ran a royal proclamation, 
 " filled with heresy, sedition, and treason, have of late and 
 be daily brought into the realm out of foreign countries 
 and places beyond seas, and some also covertly printed 
 within this realm and cast abroad in sundry parts thereof, 
 whereby not only God is dishonored but also encourage- 
 ment is given to disobey lawful princes and governors," 
 any person possessing such books " shall be reported and 
 taken for a rebel, and shall without delay be executed for 
 that offence according to the order of martial law." But 
 what really robbed these pamphlets of all force for harm 
 was the prudence and foresight of the people itself. Never 
 indeed did the nation show its patient good sense more 
 clearly than in the later years of Mary's reign. While 
 fires blazed in Smithfield, and news of defeat came from 
 over sea, while the hot voices of Protestant zealots hounded 
 men on to assassination and revolt, the bulk of English- 
 men looked quietly from the dying Queen . to the girl who 
 in a little while must wear her crown. What nerved men 
 to endure the shame and bloodshed about them was the 
 certainty of the speedy succession of the daughter of Anne 
 Boleyn. Elizabeth was now in her twenty-fifth yeai. 
 Personally she had much of her mother's charm with more 
 than her mother's beauty. Her figure was commanding, 
 her face long but queenly and intelligent, her eyes quick
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE REFORMATION. 1540-1603. 289 
 
 and fine. She had grown up amid the liberal culture of 
 Henry's court a bold horsewoman, a good shot, a graceful 
 dancer a skilled musician, and an accomplished scholar. 
 Even among the highly-trained women who caught the 
 impulse of the New Learning she stood in the extent of 
 her acquirements without a peer. Ascham, who succeeded 
 Grindal and Cheke in the direction of her studies, tells us 
 how keen and resolute was Elizabeth's love of learning, 
 even in her girlhood. At sixteen she already showed "a 
 man's power of application" to her books. She had read 
 almost the whole of Cicero and a great part of Livy. Sha 
 began the day with the study of the New Testament in 
 Greek, and followed this up by reading selected orations 
 of Isocrates and the tragedies of Sophocles. She could 
 speak Latin with fluency and Greek moderately well. 
 Her love of classical culture lasted through her life. 
 Amid the press and cares of her later reign we find Ascham 
 recording how " after dinner I went up to read with the 
 Queen's majesty that noble oration of Demosthenes against 
 ^schines." At a later time her Latin served her to re- 
 buke the insolence of a Polish ambassador, and she could 
 " rub up her rusty Greek" at need to bandy pedantry with 
 a Vice-Chancellor. But Elizabeth was far as yet from 
 being a mere pedant. She could already speak French 
 and Italian as fluently as her mother-tongue. In later 
 days we find her familiar with Ariosto and Tasso. The 
 purity of her literary taste, the love for a chaste and sim- 
 ple style, which Ascham noted with praise in her girlhood, 
 had not yet perished under the influence of euphuism. 
 But even amidst the affectation and love of anagrams and 
 puerilities which sullied her later years Elizabeth remained 
 a lover of letters and of all that was greatest and purest in 
 letters. She listened with delight to the " Faery Queen" 
 and found a smile for " Master Spenser" when he appeared 
 in her presence. 
 
 From the bodily and mental energy of her girlhood, the 
 close of Edward's reign drew Elizabeth at nineteen to face
 
 290 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 the sterner problems of religion and politics. In the daring 
 attempt of Northumberland to place Jane Grey on the 
 throne Elizabeth's rights were equally set aside with 
 those of Mary ; and the first public act of the girl was to 
 call the gentry to her standard and to join her sister with 
 five hundred followers in her train. But the momentary 
 union was soon dissolved. The daughter of Catharine 
 could look with little but hate on the daughter of Anne 
 Boleyn. Elizabeth's tendency to the " new religion" jarred 
 with the Queen's bigotry ; and the warnings of the impe- 
 rial ambassador were hardly needful to spur Mary to 
 watch jealously a possible pretender to her throne. The 
 girl bent to the Queen's will in hearing mass, but her 
 manner showed that the compromise was merely a matter 
 of obedience, and fed the hopes of the Protestant zealots, 
 who saw in the Spanish marriage a chance of driving 
 Mary from the throne. The resolve which the Queen 
 showed to cancel her sister's right of succession only 
 quickened the project for setting Elizabeth in her place ; 
 and it was to make Elizabeth their sovereign that Suffolk 
 rose in Leicestershire and Wyatt and his Kentishmen 
 marched against London Bridge. The failure of the rising 
 seemed to insure her doom. The Emperor pressed for her 
 death as a security for Philip on his arrival ; and the de- 
 tection of a correspondence with the French King served 
 as a pretext for her committal to the Tower. The fierce 
 Tudor temper broke through Elizabeth's self-control as she 
 landed at Traitor's Gate. " Are all these harnessed men 
 there for me?" she cried as she saw the guard, "it needed 
 not for me, being but a weak woman !" and passionately 
 calling on the soldiers to " bear witness that I come as no 
 traitor !" she flung herself down on a stone in the rain and 
 refused to enter her prison. "Better sitting here than in 
 a worse place," she cried; "I know not whither you will 
 bring me." But Elizabeth's danger was less than it 
 seemed. Wyatt denied to the last her complicity in the 
 fevoit, *nd in spite of Gardiner's will to " go roundly to
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 291 
 
 work" with her the Lords of the Council forced Mary to 
 set her free. The Queen's terrors however revived with 
 her hopes of a child in the summer of 1555. To Mary her 
 sister seemed the one danger which threatened the succes- 
 sion of her coming babe and the vast issues which hung 
 upon it, and Elizabeth was summoned to her sister's side 
 and kept a close prisoner at Hampton Court. Philip 
 joined in this precaution, for "holding her in his power 
 he could depart safely and without peril" in the event of 
 the Queen's death in childbirth ; and other plans were per- 
 haps already stirring his breast. Should Mary die, a fresh 
 match might renew his hold on England; "he might 
 hope," writes the Venetian ambassador, "with the help of 
 many of the nobility, won over by his presents and favors, 
 to marry her (Elizabeth) again, and thus succeed anew to 
 the crown." 
 
 But whatever may have been Philip's designs, the time 
 had not as yet come for their realization ; the final disap- 
 pointment of the Queen's hopes of childbirth set Elizabeth 
 free, and in July she returned to her house at Ashridge. 
 From this moment her position was utterly changed. 
 With the disappearance of all chance of offspring from 
 the Queen and the certainty of Mary's coming death her 
 sister's danger passed away. Elizabeth alone stood be- 
 tween England and the succession of Mary Stuart; and, 
 whatever might be the wishes of the Queen, the policy of 
 the House of Austria forced it to support even the daughter 
 of Anne Boleyn against a claimant who would bind Eng- 
 land to the French monarchy. From this moment there- 
 fore Philip watched jealously over Elizabeth's safety. On 
 his departure for the Continent he gave written instruc- 
 tions to the Queen to show favor to her sister, and the 
 charge was repeated to those of his followers whom he left 
 behind him. What guarded her even more effectually 
 was the love of the people. When Philip at a later time 
 claimed Elizabeth's gratitude for his protection she told 
 him bluntly that her gratitude was really due neither to
 
 292 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 him nor her nobles, though she owned her obligations to 
 both, but to the English people. It was they who had 
 saved her from death and hindered all projects for barring 
 her right to the throne. " It is the people, " she said, " who 
 have placed me where I am now." It was indeed their 
 faith in Elizabeth's speedy succession that enabled Eng- 
 lishmen to bear the bloodshed and shame of Mary's later 
 'years, and to wait patiently for the end. 
 
 Nor were these years of waiting without value for Eliza- 
 beth herself. The steady purpose, the clear perception of 
 a just policy which ran through her wonderful reign, were 
 formed as the girl looked coolly on at the chaos of bigotry 
 and misrule which spread before her. More and more she 
 realized what was to be the aim of her after life, the aim 
 of reuniting the England which Edward and Mary alike 
 had rent into two warring nations, of restoring again that 
 English independence which Mary was trailing at the feet 
 of Spain. With such an aim she could draw to her the 
 men who, indifferent like herself to purely spiritual con- 
 siderations, and estranged from Mary's system rather by 
 its political than its religious consequences, were anxious 
 for the restoration of English independence and English 
 order. It was among these "Politicals," as they were 
 soon to be called, that Elizabeth found at this moment 
 a counsellor who was to stand by her side through the long 
 years of her after reign. William Cecil sprang from the 
 smaller gentry whom the changes of the time were bring- 
 ing to the front. He was the son of a Yeoman of the 
 Wardrobe at Henry's court; but his abilities had already 
 raised him at the age of twenty-seven to the post of secre- 
 tary to the Duke of Somerset, and through Somerset's 
 Protectorate he remained high in his confidence. He was 
 seized by the Lords on the Duke's arrest, and even sent to 
 the Tower; but he was set at liberty with his master, and 
 his ability was now so well known that a few months later 
 saw him Secretary of State under Northumberland. The 
 post and the knighthood which accompanied it hardly
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 293 
 
 compensated for the yoke which Northumberland's pride 
 laid upon all who served him, or for the risks in which his 
 ambition involved them. Cecil saw with a fatal clearness 
 the silent opposition of the whole realm to the system of 
 the Protectorate, and the knowledge of this convinced 
 him that the Duke's schemes for a change in the succes- 
 sion were destined to failure. On the disclosure of the 
 plot to set Mary aside he withdrew for some days from the 
 Court, and even meditated flight from the country, till 
 fear of the young King's wrath drew him back to share in 
 the submission of his fellow-counsellors and to pledge him- 
 self with them to carry the new settlement into effect. 
 But Northumberland had no sooner quitted London than 
 Cecil became the soul of the intrigues by which the royal 
 Council declared themselves in Mary's favor. His deser- 
 tion of the Duke secured him pardon from the Queen, and 
 though he was known to be in heart " a heretic" he con- 
 tinued at court, conformed like Elizabeth to the established 
 religion, confessed and attended mass. Cecil was em- 
 ployed in bringing Pole to England and in attending him 
 in embassies abroad. But his caution held him aloof from 
 any close connection with public affairs. He busied him- 
 self in building at Burghley and in the culture of the 
 Church lands he had won from Edward the Sixth, while 
 he drew closer to the girl who alone could rescue England 
 from the misgovernment of Mary's rule. Even before the 
 Queen's death it was known that Cecil would be the chief 
 counsellor of the coming reign. "I am told for certain," 
 the Spanish ambassador wrote to Philip after a visit to 
 Elizabeth during the last hours of Mary's life, " that Cecil 
 who was secretary to King Edward will be her secretary 
 also. He has the character of a prudent and virtuous 
 man, although a heretic." But it was only from a belief 
 that Cecil retained at heart the convictions of his earlier 
 days that men could call him a heretic. In all outer mat^ 
 ters of faith or worship he conformed to the religion of the 
 state.
 
 294 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 It is idle to charge Cecil, or the mass of Englishmen 
 who conformed with him in turn to the religion of Henry, 
 of Edward, of Mary, and of Elizabeth, with baseness or 
 hypocrisy. They followed the accepted doctrine of the 
 time that every realm, through its rulers, had the sole 
 right of determining what should be the form of religion 
 within its bounds. What the Marian persecution was 
 gradually pressing on such men was a conviction, not of 
 the falsehood of such a doctrine, but of the need of limit- 
 ing it. Under Henry, under Edward, under Mary, no 
 distinction had been drawn between inner belief and outer 
 conformity. Every English subject was called upon to 
 adjust his conscience as well as his conduct to the varying 
 policy of the state. But the fires of Smithfield had proved 
 that obedience such as this could not be exacted save by a 
 persecution which filled all England with horror. Such a 
 persecution indeed failed in the very end for which it was 
 wrought. Instead of strengthening religious unity, it 
 gave a new force to religious separation ; it enlisted the 
 conscience of the zealot in the cause of resistance ; it se- 
 cured the sympathy of the great mass of waverers to those 
 who withstood the civil power. To Cecil, as to the purely 
 political statesmen of whom he was the type, such a perse- 
 cution seemed as needless as it was mischievous. Con- 
 formity indeed was necessary, for men could as yet con- 
 ceive of no state without a religion or of civil obedience 
 apart from compliance with the religious order of the state. 
 But only outer conformity was needed. That no man 
 should set up a worship other than that of the nation at 
 large, that every subject should duly attend at the national 
 worship, Cecil believed to be essential to public order. 
 But he saw no need for prying into the actual beliefs of 
 those who conformed to the religious laws of the realm, 
 nor did he think that such beliefs could be changed by the 
 fear of punishment. While refusing freedom of worship 
 therefore, Cecil, like Elizabeth, was ready to concede free- 
 dom of conscience. And in this concession we can hardly
 
 CHAP. 2.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 295 
 
 doubt that the bulk of Englishmen went with him. 
 Catholics shared with Protestants the horror of Mary's 
 persecution. To Protestantism indeed the horror of the 
 persecution had done much to give a force such as it had 
 never had before. The number of Protestants grew with 
 every murder done in the cause of Catholicism. But they 
 still remained a small part of the realm. What the bulk 
 of Englishmen had been driven to by the martyrdoms was 
 not a change of creed, but a longing for religious peace 
 and for such a system of government as, without destroy- 
 ing the spiritual oneness of the nation, would render a re- 
 ligious peace possible. And such a system of government 
 Cecil and Elizabeth were prepared to give. 
 
 We may ascribe to Cecil's counsels somewhat of the 
 wise patience with which Elizabeth waited for the coming 
 crown. Her succession was assured, and the throng of 
 visitors to her presence showed a general sense that the 
 Queen's end was near. Mary stood lonely and desolate in 
 her realm. " I will not be buried while I am living, as 
 my sister was," Elizabeth said in later years. " Do I not 
 know how during her life every one hastened to me at 
 Hatfield?" The bloodshed indeed went on more busily 
 than ever. It had spread now from bishops and priests to 
 the people itself, and the sufferers were sent in batches to 
 the flames. In a single day thirteen victims, two of them 
 women, were burned at Stratford- le-Bow. Seventy-three 
 Protestants of Colchester were dragged through the streets 
 of London tied to a single rope. A new commission for 
 the suppression of heresy was exempted by royal authority 
 from all restrictions of law which fettered its activity. 
 But the work of terror broke down before the silent revolt 
 of the whole nation. The persecution failed even to put 
 an end to heretical worship. Not only do we find ministers 
 moving about in London and Kent to hold " secret meet- 
 ings of the Gospellers," but up to the middle of 1555 four 
 parishes in Essex still persisted in using the English 
 Prayer-book. Open marks of sympathy at last began to
 
 296 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 be offered to the victims at the stake. " There were seven 
 men burned in Smithfield the twenty-eighth day of July," 
 a Londoner writes in 1558, "a fearful and a cruel procla- 
 mation being made that under pain of present death no 
 man should either approach nigh unto them, touch them, 
 neither speak to them nor comfort them. Yet were they 
 so comfortably taken by the hand and so goodly comforted, 
 notwithstanding that fearful proclamation and the present 
 threatenings of the sheriffs and sergeants, that the ad- 
 versaries themselves were astonished." The crowd round 
 the fire shouted "Amen" to the martyrs' prayers, and 
 prayed with them that God would strengthen them. 
 What galled Mary yet more was the ill will of the Pope. 
 Paul the Fourth still adhered to his demand for full 
 restoration of the Church lands, and held England as only 
 partly reconciled to the Holy See. He was hostile to 
 Philip ; he was yet more hostile to Pole. At this moment 
 he dealt a last blow at the Queen by depriving Pole of his 
 legatine power, and was believed to be on the point of call- 
 ing him to answer a charge of heresy. Even when she 
 was freed from part of her troubles in the autumn of 1558 
 by the opening of conferences for peace at Cambray a 
 fresh danger disclosed itself. The demands of the Queen's 
 envoys for the restoration of Calais met with so stubborn 
 a refusal from France that it seemed as if England would 
 be left alone to bear the brunt of a future struggle, for 
 Mary's fierce pride, had she lived, could hardly have 
 bowed to the surrender of the town. But the Queen was 
 dying. Her health had long been weak, and the miseries 
 and failure of her reign hastened the progress of disease. 
 Already enfeebled, she was attacked as winter drew near 
 by a fever which was at this time ravaging the country, 
 and on the seventeenth of November, 1558, she breathed 
 her last
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE ENGLAND OF ELIZABETH. 
 15581561. 
 
 TRADITION still points out the tree in Hatfield Park b*- 
 neath which Elizabeth was sitting when she received the 
 news of her peaceful accession to the throne. She fell on 
 her knees and drawing a long breath, exclaimed at last, 
 " It is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes." 
 To the last these words remained stamped on the golden 
 coinage of the Queen. The sense never left her that her 
 preservation and her reign were the issues of a direct in- 
 terposition of God. Daring and self-confident indeed as 
 was her temper, it was awed into seriousness by the 
 weight of responsibility which fell on her with her sister's 
 death. Never had the fortunes of England sunk to a lower 
 ebb. Dragged at the heels of Philip into a useless and 
 ruinous war, the country was left without an ally save 
 Spain. The loss of Calais gave France the mastery of the 
 Channel, and seemed to English eyes "to introduce the 
 French King within the threshold of our house." "If 
 God start not forth to the helm," wrote the Council in an 
 appeal to the country, "we be at the point of greatest 
 misery that can happen to any people, which is to become 
 thrall to a foreign nation." The French King, in fact, 
 " bestrode the realm, having one foot in Calais and the 
 other in Scotland." Ireland too was torn with civil war, 
 while Scotland, always a danger in the north, had become 
 formidable through the French marriage of its Queen. In 
 presence of enemies such as these, the country lay helpless, 
 without army or fleet, or the means of manning one, for 
 the treasury, already drained by the waste of Edward's
 
 298 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 reign, had been utterly exhausted by the restoration of the 
 church-lands in possession of the Crown and by the cost 
 of the war with France. But formidable as was the dan- 
 ger from without, it was little to the danger from within. 
 The country was humiliated by defeat and brought to the 
 verge of rebellion by the bloodshed and misgovernment of 
 Mary's reign. The social discontent which had been 
 trampled down for a while by the horsemen of Somerset 
 remained a menace to further order. Above all, the relig- 
 ious strife had passed beyond hope of reconciliation now 
 that the reformers were parted from their opponents by the 
 fires of Smithfield and the party of the New Learning all 
 but dissolved. The more earnest Catholics were bound 
 helplessly to Home. The temper of the Protestants, 
 burned at home or driven into exile abroad, had become a 
 fiercer thing, and the Calvinistic refugees were pouring 
 back from Geneva with dreams of revolutionary changes 
 in Church and State. 
 
 It was with the religious difficulty that Elizabeth was 
 called first to deal ; and the way in which she dealt with 
 it showed at once the peculiar bent of her mind. The 
 young Queen was not without a sense of religion ; at mo- 
 ments of peril or deliverance throughout her reign her 
 acknowledgments of a divine protection took a strange 
 depth and earnestness. But she was almost wholly desti- 
 tute of spiritual emotion, or of any consciousness of the 
 vast questions with which theology strove to deal. While 
 the world around her was being swayed more and more 
 by theological beliefs and controversies, Elizabeth was ab- 
 solutely untouched by them. She was a child of the Italian 
 Renascence rather than of the New Learning of Colet or 
 Erasmus, and her attitude toward the enthusiasm of her 
 time was that of Lorenzo de' Medici toward Savonarola. 
 Her mind was untroubled by the spiritual problems which 
 were vexing the minds around her; to Elizabeth indeed 
 they were not only unintelligible, they were a little ridicu- 
 lous. She had been brought up under Henry amid the
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 299 
 
 ritual of the older Church ; under Edward she had sub- 
 mitted to the English Prayer-book, and drunk in much of 
 the Protestant theology ; under Mary she was ready after 
 a slight resistance to conform again to the mass. Her 
 temper remained unchanged through the whole course of 
 her reign. She showed the same intellectual contempt for 
 the superstition of the Romanist as for the bigotry of the 
 Protestant. While she ordered Catholic images to be 
 flung into the fire, she quizzed the Puritans as " brethren 
 in Christ." But she had no sort of religious aversion 
 from either Puritan or Papist. The Protestants grumbled 
 at the Catholic nobles whom she admitted to the presence. 
 The Catholics grumbled at the Protestant statesmen whom 
 she called to her council board. To Elizabeth on the other 
 hand the arrangement was the most natural thing in the 
 world. She looked at theological differences in a purely 
 political light. She agreed with Henry the Fourth that a 
 kingdom was well worth a mass. It seemed an obvious 
 thing to her to hold out hopes of conversion as a means of 
 deceiving Philip, or to gain a point in negotiation by re- 
 storing the crucifix to her chapel. The first interest in her 
 own mind was the interest of public order, and she never 
 could understand how it could fail to be the first in every 
 one's mind. 
 
 One memorable change marked the nobler side of the 
 policy she brought with her to the throne. Elizabeth's 
 accession was at once followed by a close of the religious 
 persecution. Whatever might be the changes that awaited 
 the country, conformity was no longer to be enforced by 
 the penalty of death. At a moment when Philip was pre- 
 siding at autos-da-fe and Henry of Franca plotting a 
 massacre of his Huguenot subjects, such a resolve was a 
 gain for humanity as well as a step toward religious toler- 
 ation. And from this resolve Elizabeth never wavered. 
 Through all her long reign, save a few Anabaptists whom 
 the whole nation loathed as blasphemers of God and dreaded 
 as enemies of social order, no heretic was " sent to the
 
 300 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 fire." It was a far greater gain for humanity when the 
 Queen declared her will to meddle in no way with the con- 
 sciences of her subjects. She would hear of no inquisi- 
 tion into a man's private thoughts on religious matters or 
 into his personal religion. Cecil could boldly assert in her 
 name at a later time the right of every Englishman to 
 perfect liberty of religious opinion. Such a liberty of 
 opinion by no means implied liberty of public worship. 
 On the incompatibility of freedom of worship with public 
 order Catholic and Protestant were as yet at one. The 
 most advanced reformers did not dream of contending for 
 a right to stand apart from the national religion. What 
 they sought was to make the national religion their own. 
 The tendency of the reformation had been to press for the 
 religious as well as the political unity of every state. 
 Even Calvin looked forward to the winning of the nations 
 to a purer faith without a suspicion that the religious 
 movement which he headed would end in establishing the 
 right even of the children of " antichrist" to worship as 
 they would in a Protestant commonwealth. If the Protes- 
 tant lords in Scotland had been driven to assert a right of 
 nonconformity, if the Huguenots of France were follow- 
 ing their example, it was with no thought of asserting 
 the right of every man to worship God as he would. 
 From the claim of such a right Knox or Coligni would 
 have shrunk with even greater horror than Elizabeth. 
 What they aimed at was simply the establishment of a 
 truce till by force or persuasion they could win the realms 
 that tolerated them for their own. In this matter there- 
 fore Elizabeth was at one with every statesman of her day. 
 While granting freedom of conscience to her subjects, she 
 was resolute to exact an outward conformity to the estab- 
 lished religion. 
 
 But men watched curiously to see what religion the 
 Queen would establish. Even before her accession the 
 keen eye of the Spanish ambassador had noted her " great 
 admiration for the king her father's mode of carrying on 

 
 CHAP. 3.] THE REFORMATION. 1540-1603. 301 
 
 matters," as a matter of ill omen for the interests of Cath- 
 olicism. He had marked that the ladies about her and 
 the counsellors on whom she seemed about to rely were, 
 like Cecil, "held to be heretics." "I fear much," he 
 wrote, "that in religion she will not go right." As keen 
 an instinct warned the Protestants that the tide had turned. 
 The cessation of the burnings, and the release of all per- 
 sons imprisoned for religion, seemed to receive their inter- 
 pretation when Elizabeth on her entry into London kissed 
 an English Bible which the citizens presented to her and 
 promised "diligently to read therein." The exiles at 
 Strassburg or Geneva flocked home with wild dreams of a 
 religious revolution and of vengeance upon their foes. 
 But hopes and fears alike met a startling check. For 
 months there was little change in either government or 
 religion. If Elizabeth introduced Cecil and his kinsman, 
 Sir Nicholas Bacon, to her council board, she retained as 
 yet most of her sister's advisers. The Mass went on as 
 before, and the Queen was regular in her attendance at it. 
 As soon as the revival of Protestantism showed itself in 
 controversial sermons and insults to the priesthood it was 
 bridled by a proclamation which forbade unlicensed preach- 
 ing and enforced silence on the religious controversy. 
 Elizabeth showed indeed a distaste for the elevation of the 
 Host, and allowed the Lord's Prayer, Creed, and Ten 
 Commandments to be used in English. But months 
 passed after her accession before she would go further than 
 this. A royal proclamation which ordered the existing 
 form of worship to be observed " till consultation might be 
 had in Parliament by the Queen and the Three Estates" 
 startled the prelates ; and only one bishop could be found 
 to assist at the coronation of Elizabeth. But no change 
 was made in the ceremonies of the coronation ; the Queen 
 took the customary oath to observe the liberties of the 
 Church, and conformed to the Catholic ritual. There was 
 little in fact to excite any reasonable alarm among the 
 adherents of the older faith, or any reasonable hope among
 
 302 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 the adherents of the new. "I will do," the Queen said, 
 "as my father did." Instead of the reforms of Edward 
 and the Protectorate, the Protestants saw themselves 
 thrown back on the reforms of Henry the Eighth. Even 
 .Henry's system indeed seemed too extreme for Elizabeth. 
 Her father had at any rate broken boldly from the Papacy. 
 But the first work of the Queen was to open negotiations 
 for her recognition with the Papal Court. 
 
 What shaped Elizabeth's course in fact was hard neces- 
 sity. She found herself at war with France and Scotland, 
 and her throne threatened by the claim of the girl who 
 linked the two countries, the claim of Mary Stuart, at 
 once Queen of Scotland and wife of the Dauphin Francis. 
 On Elizabeth's accession Mary and Francis assumed by 
 the French King's order the arms and style of English 
 sovereigns : and if war continued it was clear that their 
 pretensions would be backed by Henry's forces as well as 
 by the efforts of the Scots. Against such a danger Philip 
 of Spain was Elizabeth's only ally. Philip's policy was 
 at this time a purely conservative one. The vast schemes 
 of ambition which had so often knit both Pope and Protes- 
 tants, Germany and France, against his father were set 
 aside by the young King. His position indeed was very 
 different from that of Charles the Fifth. He was not 
 Emperor. He had little weight in Germany. Even in 
 Italy his influence was less than his father's. He had lost 
 with Mary's death the crown of England. His most valu- 
 able possessions outside Spain, the provinces of the Nether- 
 lands, were disaffected to a foreign rule. All the King 
 therefore aimed at was to keep his own. But the Nether- 
 lands were hard to keep: and with France mistress of 
 England as of Scotland, and so mistress of the Channel, to 
 keep them would be impossible. Sheer necessity forbade 
 Philip to suffer the union of the three crowns of the west 
 on the head of a French King ; and the French marriage 
 of Mary Stuart pledged him to oppose her pretensions and 
 support Elizabeth's throne. For a moment he even
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE REFORMATION. 1540-1608. 303 
 
 dreamed of meeting the union of France and Scotland by 
 that union of England with Spain which had been seen 
 under Mary. He offered Elizabeth his hand. The match 
 was a more natural one than Philip's union with her sis- 
 ter, for the young King's age was not far from her own. 
 The offer however was courteously put aside, for Eliza- 
 beth had no purpose of lending England to the ambftion 
 of Spain, nor was it possible for her to repeat her sister's 
 unpopular experiment. But Philip remained firm in his 
 support of her throne. He secured for her the allegiance of 
 the Catholics within her realm, who looked to him as their 
 friend while they distrusted France as an ally of heretics. 
 His envoys supported her cause in the negotiations at 
 Gateau Cambresis; he suffered her to borrow money and 
 provide herself with arms in his provinces of the Nether- 
 lands. At such a crisis Elizabeth could not afford to 
 alienate Philip by changes which would roughly dispel his 
 hopes of retaining her within the bounds of Catholicism. 
 
 Nor is there any sign that Elizabeth had resolved on a 
 defiance of the Papacy. She was firm indeed to assert her 
 father's claim of supremacy over the clergy and her own 
 title to the throne. But the difficulties in the way of an 
 accommodation on these points were such as could be set- 
 tled by negotiation; and, acting on Cecil's counsel, Eliza- 
 beth announced her accession to the Pope. The announce- 
 ment showed her purpose of making no violent break in 
 the relations of England with the Papal See. But be- 
 tween Elizabeth and the Papacy lay the fatal question of 
 the Divorce. To acknowledge the young Queen was not 
 only to own her mother's marriage, but to cancel the 
 solemn judgment of the Holy See in Catharine's favor and 
 its solemn assertion of her own bastardy. The temper of 
 Paul the Fourth took fire at the news. He reproached 
 Elizabeth with her presumption in ascending the throne, 
 recalled the Papal judgment which pronounced her illegiti- 
 mate, and summoned her to submit her claims to his tri- 
 bunal. Much of this indignation was no doubt merely
 
 304 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 diplomatic. If the Pope listened to the claims of Mary 
 Stuart, which were urged on him by the French Court, it 
 was probably only with the purpose of using them to bring 
 pressure to bear on Elizabeth and on the stubborn country 
 which still refused to restore its lands to the Church and 
 to make the complete submission which Paul demanded. 
 But Cecil and the Queen knew that, even had they been 
 willing to pay such a price for the crown, it was beyond 
 their power to bring England to pay it. The form too in 
 which Paul had couched his answer admitted of no com- 
 promise. The summons to submit the Queen's claim of 
 succession to the judgment of Rome produced its old effect. 
 Elizabeth was driven, as Henry had been driven, to assert 
 the right of the nation to decide on questions which af- 
 fected its very life. A Parliament which met in January, 
 1559, acknowledged the legitimacy of Elizabeth and her 
 title to the crown. 
 
 Such an acknowledgment in the teeth of the Papal re- 
 pudiation of Anne Boleyn's marriage carried with it a re- 
 pudiation of the supremacy of the Papacy. It was in vain 
 that the clergy in convocation unanimously adopted five 
 articles which affirmed their faith in transubstantiation, 
 their acceptance of the supreme authority of the Popes as 
 "Christ's vicars and supreme rulers of the Church," and 
 their resolve " that the authority in all matters of faith 
 and discipline belongs and ought to belong only to the pas- 
 tors of the Church, and not to laymen." It was in vain 
 that the bishops unanimously opposed the Bill for restor- 
 ing the royal supremacy when it was brought before the 
 Lords. The " ancient jurisdiction of the Crown over the 
 Estate ecclesiastical and spiritual" was restored ; the Acts 
 which under Mary re-established the independent jurisdic- 
 tion and legislation of the Church were .repealed ; and the 
 clergy were called on to swear to the supremacy of the 
 Crown and to abjure ah 1 foreign authority and jurisdiction. 
 Further Elizabeth had no personal wish to go. A third 
 of the Council and at least two-thirds of the people were as
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 305 
 
 opposed to any radical changes in religion as the Queen. 
 Among the gentry the older and wealthier were on the 
 conservative side, and only the younger and meaner on the 
 other. In the Parliament itself Sir Thomas White pro- 
 tested that " it was unjust that a religion begun in such a 
 miraculous way and established by such grave men should 
 be abolished by a set of beardless boys. " Yet even this 
 "beardless" parliament had shown a strong conservatism. 
 The Bill which re-established the royal supremacy met 
 with violent opposition in the Commons, and only passed 
 through Cecil's adroit manoeuvring. 
 
 But the steps which Elizabeth had taken made it neces- 
 sary to go further. If the Protestants were the less nu- 
 merous, they were the abler and the more vigorous party, 
 and the break with Rome threw Elizabeth, whether she 
 would or no, on their support. It was a support that could 
 only be bought by theological concessions, and above all 
 by the surrender of the Mass ; for to every Protestant the 
 Mass was identified with the fires of Smithfield, while the 
 Prayer-book which it had displaced was hallowed by the 
 memories of the Martyrs. The pressure of the reforming 
 party indeed would have been fruitless had the Queen still 
 been hampered by danger from France. Fortunately for 
 their cause the treaty of Cateau Cambresis at this juncture 
 freed Elizabeth's hands. By this treaty, which was prac- 
 tically concluded in March, 1559, Calais was left in French 
 holding on the illusory pledge of its restoration to England 
 eight years later ; but peace was secured and the danger of 
 a war of succession, in which Mary Stuart would be 
 backed by the arms of France, for a while averted. Se- 
 cure from without, Elizabeth could venture to buy the sup- 
 port of the Protestants within her realm by the restoration 
 of the English Prayer-book. Such a measure was far in- 
 deed from being meant as an open break with Catholicism. 
 The use of the vulgar tongue in public worship was still 
 popular with a large part of the Catholic world ; and the 
 Queen did her best by the alterations she made in Ed-
 
 306 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VL 
 
 ward's Prayer-book to strip it of its more Protestant tone. 
 To the bulk of the people the book must have seemed 
 merely a rendering of the old service in their own tongue. 
 As the English Catholics afterward represented at Rome 
 when excusing their own use of it, the Prayer-book " con- 
 tained neither impiety nor false doctrine; its prayers were 
 those of the Catholic Church, altered only so far as to omit 
 the merits and intercession of the saints." On such con- 
 cession as this the Queen felt it safe to venture in spite of 
 the stubborn opposition of the spiritual estate. She or- 
 dered a disputation to be held in Westminster Abbey be- 
 fore the Houses on the question, and when the disputation 
 ended in the refusal of the bishops to proceed an Act of 
 Uniformity, which was passed in spite of their strenuous 
 opposition, restored at the close of April the last Prayer- 
 book of Edward, and enforced its use on the clergy on pain 
 of deprivation. 
 
 At Rome the news of these changes stirred a fiercer 
 wrath in Paul the Fourth, and his threats of excommuni- 
 cation were only held in check by the protests of Philip. 
 The policy of the Spanish King still bound him to Eliza- 
 beth's cause, for the claims of Mary Stuart h#d been re- 
 served in the treaty of Gateau Cambresis, and the refusal 
 of France to abandon them held Spain to its alliance with 
 the Queen. Vexed as he was at the news of the Acts 
 which re-established the supremacy, Philip ordered his 
 ambassador to assure Elizabeth he was as sure a friend as 
 ever, and to soothe the resentment of the English Catholics 
 if it threatened to break out into revolt. He showed the 
 same temper in his protest against action at Rome. Paul 
 had however resolved to carry out his threats when his 
 death and the interregnum which followed gave Elizabeth 
 a fresh respite. His successor, Pius the Fourth, was of 
 milder temper and leaned rather to a policy of conciliation. 
 Decisive indeed as the Queen's action may seem in modern 
 eyes, it was far from being held as decisive at the time. 
 The Act of Supremacy might be regarded as having been
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 307 
 
 forced upon Elizabeth by Paul's repudiation of her title 
 to the crown. The alterations which were made by the 
 Queen's authority in the Prayer-book showed a wish to 
 conciliate those who clung to the older faith. It was clear 
 that Elizabeth had no mind merely to restore the system 
 of the Protectorate. She set up again the royal suprem- 
 acy, but she dropped the words " Head of the Church" 
 from the royal title. The forty-two Articles of Protestant 
 doctrine which Cranmer had drawn up were left in abey- 
 ance. If the Queen had had her will, she would have re- 
 tained the celibacy of the clergy and restored the use of 
 crucifixes in the churches. 
 
 The caution and hesitation with which she enforced on 
 the clergy the oath required by the Act of Supremacy 
 showed Elizabeth's wish to avoid the opening of a relig- 
 ious strife. The higher dignitaries indeed were unspar- 
 ingly dealt with. The bishops, who with a single excep- 
 tion refused to take the oath, were imprisoned and deprived. 
 The same measure was dealt out to most of the archdea- 
 cons and deans. But with the mass of the parish priests 
 a very different course was taken. The Commissioners 
 appointed in May, 1559, were found to be too zealous in 
 October, and several of the clerical members were replaced 
 by cooler laymen. The great bulk of the clergy seem 
 neither to have refused nor to have consented to the oath, 
 but to have left the Commissioners' summons unheeded 
 and to have stayed quietly at home. Of the nine thousand 
 four hundred beneficed clergy only a tenth presented them- 
 selves before the Commissioners. Of those who attended 
 and refused the oath a hundred and eighty-nine were de- 
 prived, but many of the most prominent went unharmed. 
 At Winchester, though the dean and canons of the cathe- 
 dral, the warden and fellows of the college, and the master 
 of St. Cross, refused the oath, only four of these appear in 
 the list of deprivations. Even the few who suffered proved 
 too many for the purpose of the Queen. In the more re- 
 mote parts of the kingdom the proceedings of the visitors
 
 308 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VL 
 
 threatened to wake the religious strife which she was en- 
 deavoring to lull to sleep. On the northern border, where 
 the great nobles, Lord Dacres and the Earls of Cumber- 
 land and Westmoreland, were zealous Catholics, and re- 
 fused tq let the bishop "meddle with them," the clergy- 
 held stubbornly aloof. At Durham a parson was able to 
 protest without danger that the Pope alone had power in 
 spiritual matters. In Hereford the town turned out to re- 
 ceive in triumph a party of priests from the west who had 
 refused the oath. The University of Oxford took refuge 
 in sullen opposition. In spite of pressure from the Protes- 
 tant prelates, who occupied the sees vacated by the de- 
 prived bishops, Elizabeth was firm in her policy of pa- 
 tience, and in December she ordered the Commissioners 
 In both provinces to suspend their proceedings. 
 
 In part indeed of her effort she was foiled by the bitter- 
 ness of the reformers. The London mob tore down the 
 crosses in the streets. Her attempt to retain the crucifix, 
 or to enforce the celibacy of the priesthood fell dead before 
 the opposition of the Protestant clergy. But to the mass 
 of the nation the compromise of Elizabeth seems to have 
 been fairly acceptable. They saw but little change. Their 
 old vicar or rector in almost every case remained in his 
 parsonage and ministered in his church. The new Prayer- 
 book was for the most part an English rendering of the old 
 service. Even the more zealous adherents of Catholicism 
 held as yet that in complying with the order for attendance 
 at public worship " there could be nothing positively un- 
 lawful." Where party feeling ran high indeed the matter 
 was sometimes settled by a compromise. A priest would 
 celebrate mass at his parsonage for the more rigid Catho- 
 lics, and administer the new communion in church to the 
 more rigid Protestants. Sometimes both parties knelt 
 together at the same altar-rails, the one to receive hosts 
 consecrated by the priest at home after the old usage, the 
 other wafers consecrated in Church after the new. In 
 many parishes of the north no change of service was made
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 309 
 
 at all. Even where priest and people conformed it was 
 often with a secret belief that better times were soon to 
 bring back the older observances. As late as 1569 some 
 of the chief parishes in Sussex were still merely bending 
 to the storm of heresy. " In the church of Arundel certain 
 altars do stand yet, to the offence of the godly, which 
 murmur and speak much against the same. In the town 
 of Battle when a preacher doth come and speak anything 
 against the Pope's doctrine they will not abide but get 
 them out of the church. They have yet in the diocese in 
 many places thereof images hidden and other popish orna- 
 ments ready to set up the mass again within twenty -four 
 hours warning. In many places they keep yet their 
 chalices, looking to have mass again." Nor was there 
 much new teaching as yet to stir up strife in those who 
 clung to the older faith. Elizabeth had no mind for con- 
 troversies which would set her people by the ears. " In 
 many churches they have no sermons, not one in seven 
 years, and some not one in twelve." The older priests of 
 Mary's days held their peace. The Protestant preachers 
 were few and hampered by the exaction of licenses. In 
 many cases churches had "neither parson, vicar, nor 
 curate, but a sorry reader." Even where the new clergy 
 were of higher intellectual stamp they were often un- 
 popular. Many of those who were set in the place of the 
 displaced clergy roused disgust by their violence and greed. 
 Chapters plundered their own estates by leases and fines 
 and by felling timber. The marriages of the clergy became 
 a scandal, which was increased when the gorgeous vest- 
 ments of the old worship were cut up into gowns and bod- 
 ices for the priests' wives. The new services sometimes 
 turned into scenes of utter disorder where the ministers 
 wore what dress they pleased and the communicant stood 
 or sat as he liked ; while the old altars were broken down 
 and the communion-table was often a bare board upon 
 trestles. Only in a few places where the more zealous of 
 the reformers had settled was there any religious instruc-
 
 310 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VL 
 
 tion. "In many places," it was reported after ten years 
 of the Queen's rule, " the people cannot yet say their com- 
 mandments, and in some not the articles of their belief. 
 Naturally enough, the bulk of Englishmen were found to 
 be " utterly devoid of religion," and came to church " as to 
 a May game." 
 
 To modern eyes the Church under Elizabeth would seem 
 little better than a religious chaos. But England was 
 fairly used to religious confusion, for the whole machinery 
 of English religion had been thrown out of gear by the 
 rapid and radical changes of the last two reigns. And to 
 the Queen's mind a religious chaos was a far less difficulty 
 than a parting of the nation into two warring Churches 
 which would have been brought about by a more rigorous 
 policy. She trusted to time to bring about greater order ; 
 and she found in Matthew Parker, whom Pole's death at 
 the moment of her accession enabled her to raise to the see 
 of Canterbury, an agent in the reorganization of the Church 
 whose patience and moderation were akin to her own. To 
 the difficulties which Parker found indeed in the temper of 
 the reformers and their opponents new difficulties were 
 sometimes added by the freaks of the Queen herself. If 
 she had no convictions, she had tastes ; and her taste re- 
 volted from the bareness of Protestant ritual and above all 
 from the marriage of priests. "Leave that alone," she 
 shouted to Dean Nowell from the royal closet as he de- 
 nounced the use of images " stick to your text, Master 
 Dean, leave that alone!" When Parker was firm in re- 
 sisting the introduction of the crucifix or of celibacy, Eliza- 
 beth showed her resentment by an insult to his wife. Mar- 
 ried ladies were addressed at this time as "Madam," un- 
 married ladies as " Mistress ;" but the marriage of the clergy 
 was still unsanctioned by law, for Elizabeth had refused 
 to revive the statute of Edward by which it was allowed, 
 and the position of a priest's wife was legally a very doubt- 
 ful one. When Mrs. Parker therefore advanced at the 
 close of a sumptuous entertainment at Lambeth to take
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE REFORMATION. 1540-1603. 311 
 
 leave of the Queen, Elizabeth feigned a momentary hesita- 
 tion. "Madam," she said at last, "I may not call you, 
 and Mistress I am loath to call you ; however, I thank you 
 for your good cheer." But freaks of this sort had little 
 weight beside the steady support which the Queen gave 
 to the Primate in his work of order. The vacant sees were 
 filled with men from among the exiles, for the most part 
 learned and able, though far more Protestant than the 
 bulk of their flocks; the plunder of the Church by the 
 nobles was checked; and at the close of 1559 England 
 seemed to settle quietly down in a religious peace. 
 
 But cautious as had been Elizabeth's movements and 
 skilfully as she had hidden the real drift of her measures 
 from the bulk of the people, the religion of England was 
 changed. The old service was gone. The old bishops 
 were gone. The royal supremacy was again restored. 
 .All connection with Rome was again broken. The repudi- 
 ation of the Papacy and the restoration of the Prayer-book 
 in the teeth of the unanimous opposition of the priest- 
 hood had established the great principle of the Reforma- 
 tion, that the form of a nation's faith should be determined 
 not by the clergy but by the nation itself. Different there- 
 fore as was the temper of the government, the religious at- 
 titude of England was once more what it had been under 
 the Protectorate. At the most critical moment of the strife 
 between the new religion and the old England had ranged 
 itself on the side of Protestantism. It was only the later 
 history of Elizabeth's reign which was to reveal or what 
 mighty import this Protestantism of Lngland was to prove. 
 Had England remained Catholic the freedom of the Dutch 
 Republic would have been impossible. No Henry the 
 Fourth would have reigned in France to save French 
 Protestantism by the Edict of Nantes. No struggle over 
 far-off seas would have broken the power of Spain and 
 baffled the hopes which the House of Austria cherished of 
 whining a mastery over the western world. Nor could 
 
 Calvinism have found a home across the northern border. 
 
 ii VOL. 2
 
 312 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 The first result of the religious change in England was to 
 give a new impulse to the religious revolution in Scotland. 
 In the midst of anxieties at home Elizabeth had been 
 keenly watching the fortunes of the north. We have seen 
 how the policy of Mary of Guise had given life and force 
 to the Scottish Reformation. Not only had the Regent 
 given shelter to the exiled Protestants and looked on at the 
 diffusion of the new doctrines, but her " fair words" had 
 raised hopes that the government itself would join the 
 ranks of the reformers. Mary of Guise had looked on the 
 religious movement in a purely political light. It was as 
 enemies of Mary Tudor that she gave shelter to the exiles, 
 and it was to avoid a national strife which would have left 
 Scotland open to English attack in the war which closed 
 Mary's reign that the Regent gave " fair words" to the 
 preachers. But with the first Covenant, with the appear- 
 ance of the Lords of the Congregation in an avowed league 
 in the heart of the land, with their rejection of the state 
 worship and their resolve to enforce a change of religion, 
 her attitude suddenly altered. To the Regent the new re- 
 ligion was henceforth but a garb under which the old 
 quarrel of the nobles was breaking out anew against the 
 Crown. Smooth as were her words, men knew that Mary 
 of Guise was resolute to withstand religious change. But 
 Elizabeth's elevation to the throne gave a new fire to the 
 reformers. Conservative as her earlier policy seemed, the 
 instinct of the Protestants told them that the new queen's 
 accession was a triumph for Protestantism. The Lords at 
 once demanded that all bishops should be chosen by the 
 nobles and gentry, each priest by his parish, and that divine 
 service should be henceforth in the vulgar tongue. These 
 demands were rejected by the bishops, while the royal 
 court in May 1559 summoned the preachers to its bar and 
 on their refusal to appear condemned them to banishment 
 as rebels. The sentence was a signal for open strife. The 
 Protestants, whose strength as yet lay mainly in Fife, had 
 gathered in great numbers at Perth, and the news stirred
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 313 
 
 them to an outbreak of fury. The images were torn down 
 from the churches, the monasteries of the town were sacked 
 and demolished. The riot at Perth was followed by a 
 general rising. The work of destruction went on along 
 the east coast and through the Lowlands, while the " Con- 
 gregation" sprang up everywhere in its train. The Mass 
 came to an end. The Prayer-book of Edward was heard 
 in the churches. The Lords occupied the capital and found 
 its burghers as zealous in the cause of reformation as 
 themselves. Throughout all these movements the Lords 
 had been in communication with England, for the old 
 jealousy of English annexation was now lost in a jealousy 
 of French conquest. Their jealousy had solid grounds. 
 The marriage of Mary Stuart with the Dauphin of France 
 had been celebrated in April 1558 and three days before the 
 wedding the girl-queen had been brought to convey her 
 kingdom away by deed to the House of Valois. The deed 
 was kept secret ; but Mary's demand of the crown matri- 
 monial for her husband roused suspicions. It was known 
 that the government of Scotland was discussed at the 
 French council-board, and whispers came of a suggestion 
 that the kingdom should be turned into an appanage for 
 a younger son of the French King. Meanwhile French 
 money was sent to the Regent, a body of French troops 
 served as her body-guard, and on the advance of the Lords 
 in arms the French Court promised her the support of a 
 larger army. 
 
 Against these schemes of the French Court the Scotch 
 ; Lords saw no aid save in Elizabeth. Their aim was to 
 drive the Frenchmen out of Scotland ; and this could only 
 be done by help both in money and men from England. 
 Nor was the English Council slow to promise help. To 
 Elizabeth indeed the need of supporting rebels against their 
 sovereign was a bitter one. The need of establishing a 
 Calvinistic Church on her frontier was yet bitterer. It 
 was not a national force which upheld the fabric of the 
 monarchy, as it had been built up by the Houses of York
 
 314 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 and of Tudor, but a moral force. England held that safety 
 against anarchy within and against attacks on the national 
 independence from without was to be found in the Crown 
 alone, and that obedience to the Crown was the first ele- 
 ment of national order and national greatness. In their 
 religious reforms the Tudor sovereigns had aimed at giving 
 a religious sanction to the power which sprang from this 
 general conviction, and at hallowing their secular suprem- 
 acy by blending with it their supremacy over the Church. 
 Against such a theory, either of Church or State, Calvin- 
 ism was an emphatic protest, and in aiding Calvinism to 
 establish itself in Scotland the Queen felt that she was deal- 
 ing a heavy blow to her political and religious system at 
 home. But struggle as she might against the necessity, 
 she had no choice but to submit. The assumption by 
 Francis and Mary of the style of King and Queen of Eng- 
 land, the express reservation of this claim, even in the 
 treaty of Cateau Cambresis, made a French occupation of 
 Scotland a matter of life and death to the kingdom over 
 the border. The English Council believed " that the French 
 mean, after their forces are brought into Scotland, first to 
 conquer it, which will be neither hard nor long and 
 next that they and the Scots will invade this realm." 
 They were soon pressed to decide on their course. The 
 Regent used her money to good purpose, and at the ap- 
 proach of her forces the Lords withdrew from Edinburgh 
 to the west. At the end of August two thousand French 
 soldiers landed at Leith, as the advance guard of the 
 promised forces, and entrenched themselves strongly. It 
 was in vain that the Lords again appeared in the field, de- 
 manded the withdrawal of the foreigners, and threatened 
 Mary of Guise that as she would no longer hold them for 
 her counsellors " we also will no longer acknowledge you 
 as our Regent." They were ordered to disperse as traitors, 
 beaten off from the fortifications of Leith, and attacked by 
 the French troops in Fife itself. 
 
 The Lords called loudly for aid from the English Queen.
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE REFORMATION. 15401608. 315 
 
 To give such assistance would have seemed impossible but 
 twelve months back. But the appeal of the Scots found a 
 different England from that which had met Elizabeth on 
 her accession. The Queen's diplomacy had gained her a 
 year, and her matchless activity had used the year to good 
 purpose. Order was restored throughout England, the 
 Church was reorganized, the debts of the Crown were in 
 part paid off, the treasury was recruited, a navy created, 
 and a force made ready for action in the north. Neither 
 religiously nor politically indeed had Elizabeth any sym- 
 pathy with the Scotch Lords. Knox was to her simply a 
 firebrand of rebellion; her political instinct shrank from 
 the Scotch Calvinism with its protest against the whole 
 English system of government, whether in Church or 
 State ; and as a Queen she hated revolt. But the danger 
 forced her hand. Elizabeth was ready to act, and to act 
 even in the defiance of France. As yet she stood almost 
 alone in her self-reliance. Spain believed her ruin to be 
 certain. Her challenge would bring war with France, and 
 in a war with France the Spanish statesmen held" that only 
 their master's intervention could save her. " For our own 
 sake," said one of Philip's ministers, "we must take as 
 much care of England as of the Low Countries." But 
 that such a care would be needed Grenville never doubted ; 
 and Philip's councillors solemnly debated whether it might 
 not be well to avoid the risk of a European struggle by 
 landing the six thousand men whom Philip was now with- 
 drawing from the Netherlands on the English shore, and 
 coercing Elizabeth into quietness. France meanwhile 
 despised her chances. Her very Council was in despair. 
 The one minister in whom she dared to confide throughout 
 these Scotch negotiations was Cecil, the youngest and 
 boldest of her advisers, and even Cecil trembled for her 
 success. The Duke of Norfolk refused at first to take com- 
 mand of the force destined as he held for a desperate enter- 
 prise. Arundel, the leading peer among the Catholics, 
 denounced the supporters of a Scottish war as traitors. But
 
 316 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 lies and hesitation were no sooner put aside than the 
 Queen's vigor and tenacity came fairly into play. In 
 January, 1560, at a moment when D'Oysel, the French 
 commander, was on the point of crushing the Lords of the 
 Congregation, an English fleet appeared suddenly in the 
 Forth and forced the Regent's army to fall back upon 
 Leith. 
 
 Here however it again made an easy stand against the 
 Protestant attacks, and at the close of February the Queen 
 was driven to make a formal treaty with the Lords by 
 which she promised to assist them in the expulsion of the 
 strangers. The treaty was a bold defiance of the power 
 from whom Elizabeth had been glad to buy peace only a 
 year before, even by the sacrifice of Calais. But the 
 Queen had little fear of a counter-blow from France. The 
 Reformation was fighting for her on the one side of the 
 sea as on the other. From the outset of her reign the rapid 
 growth of the Huguenots in France had been threatening 
 a strife between the old religion and the new. It was to 
 gird himself for such a struggle that Henry the Second 
 concluded the treaty of Gateau Cambresis; and though 
 Henry's projects were foiled by his death, the Duke of 
 Guise, who ruled his successor, Francis the Second, pressed 
 on yet more bitterly the work of persecution. It was be- 
 lieved that he had sworn to exterminate " those of the re- 
 ligion." But the Huguenots were in no mood to bear ex- 
 termination. Their Protestantism, like that of the Scots, 
 was the Protestantism of Calvin. As they grew in num- 
 bers, their churches formed themselves on the model of 
 Geneva, and furnished in their synods and assemblies a 
 political as well as a religious organization ; while the doc- 
 trine of resistance even to kings, if kings showed them- 
 selves enemies to God, found ready hearers, whether among 
 the turbulent French noblesse, or among the traders of the 
 towns who were stirred to new dreams of constitutional 
 freedom. Theories of liberty or of resistance to the crown 
 were as abhorrent to Elizabeth as to the Guises, but again
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 317 
 
 necessity swept her into the current of Calvinism. She 
 was forced to seize on the religious disaffection of France 
 as a check on the dreams of aggression which Francis and 
 Mary had shown in assuming the style of English Sover- 
 eigns. The English ambassador, Throckmorton, fed the 
 alarms of the Huguenots and pressed them to take up arms. 
 It is probable that the Huguenot plot which broke out in 
 the March of 1560 in an attempt to surprise the French 
 Court at Amboise was known beforehand by Cecil ; and, 
 though the conspiracy was ruthlessly suppressed, the Queen 
 drew fresh courage from a sense that the Guises had hence- 
 forth work for their troops at home. 
 
 At the end of March therefore Lord Grey pushed ovei 
 the border with 8,000 men to join the Lords of the Con- 
 gregation in the siege of Leith. The Scots gave little aid ; 
 and an assault on the town signally failed. Philip too in 
 a sudden jealousy of Elizabeth's growing strength de- 
 manded the abandonment of the enterprise, and offered to 
 warrant England against any attack from the north if its 
 forces were withdrawn. But eager as Elizabeth was to 
 preserve Philip's alliance, she preferred to be her own 
 security. She knew that the Spanish King could not 
 abandon her while Mary Stuart was Queen of France, and 
 that at the moment of his remonstrances Philip was menac- 
 ing the Guises with war if they carried out their project 
 of bringing about Catholic rising by a descent on the 
 English coast. Nor were the threats of the French Court 
 more formidable. The bloody repression of the conspiracy 
 of Amboise had only fired the temper of the Huguenots ; 
 southern and western France were on the verge of revolt; 
 the House of Bourbon had adopted the reformed faith, and 
 put itself at the head of the Protestant movement. In the 
 face of dangers such as these the Guises could send to 
 Leith neither money nor men. Elizabeth therefore re- 
 mained immovable while famine did its work on the town. 
 At the crisis of the siege the death of Mary of Guise threw 
 the direct rule over Scotland into the hands of Francis and
 
 318 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 Mary Stuart; and the exhaustion of the garrison forced 
 the two sovereigns to purchase its liberation by two treaties 
 which their envoys concluded at Edinburgh in June 1560. 
 That with the Scotch pledged them to withdraw forever 
 the French from the realm, and left the government of 
 Scotland to a Council of the Lords. The treaty with Eng- 
 land was a more difficult matter. Francis and Mary had 
 forbidden their envoys to sign any engagement with Eliza- 
 beth as to the Scottish realm, or to consent to any aban- 
 donment of their claims on the royal style of England. It 
 was only after long debate that Cecil wrested from them 
 the acknowledgment that the realms of England and Ire- 
 land of right appertained to Elizabeth, and a vague clause 
 by which the French sovereigns promised the English 
 Queen that they would fulfil their pledges to the Scots. 
 
 Stubborn however as was the resistance of the French 
 envoys the signature of the treaty proclaimed Elizabeth's 
 success. The issue of the Scotch war revealed suddenly to 
 Europe the vigor of the Queen and the strength of her 
 throne. What her ability really was no one, save Cecil, 
 had as yet suspected. There was little indeed in her out- 
 ward demeanor to give any indication of her greatness. 
 To the world about her the temper of Elizabeth recalled in 
 its strange contrasts the mixed blood within her veins. 
 She was at once the daughter of Henry and of Anne 
 Boleyn. From her father she inherited her frank and 
 hearty address, her love of popularity and of free inter- 
 course with the people, her dauntless courage and her 
 amazing self-confidenee. Her harsh, manlike voice, her 
 impetuous will, her pride, her furious outbursts of anger 
 came to her with her Tudor blood. She rated great nobles 
 as if they were schoolboys; she met the insolence of Lord 
 Essex with a box on the ear ; she broke now and then into 
 the gravest deliberations to swear at her ministers like a 
 fishwife. Strangely in contrast with these violent outlines 
 of her father's temper stood the sensuous, self-indulgent 
 nature she drew from Anne Boleyn. Splendor and pleasure
 
 CHAP. 8.] THE REFORMATION. 15401608. 319 
 
 were with Elizabeth the very air she breathed. Her de- 
 light was to move in perpetual progresses from caatle to 
 castle through a series of gorgeous pageants, fanciful and 
 extravagant as a caliph's dream. She loved gayety and 
 laughter and wit. A happy retort or a finished compliment 
 never failed to win her favor. She hoarded jewels. Her 
 dresses were innumerable. Her vanity remained, even to 
 old age, the vanity of a coquette in her teens. No adula- 
 tion was too fulsome for her, no flattery of her beauty too 
 gross. She would play with her rings that her courtiers 
 might note the delicacy of her hands ; or dance a coranto 
 that an ambassador, hidden dexterously behind a curtain, 
 might report her sprightliness to his master. Her levity, 
 her frivolous laughter, her unwomanly jests gave color to 
 a thousand scandals. Her character in fact, like her por- 
 traits, was utterly without shade. Of womanly reserve or 
 self-restraint she knew nothing. No instinct of delicacy 
 veiled the voluptuous temper which broke out in the romps 
 of her girlhood and showed itself almost ostentatiously 
 through her later life. Personal beauty in a man was a 
 sure passport to her liking. She patted handsome young 
 squires on the neck when they knelt to kiss her hand, and 
 fondled her "sweet Robin," Lord Leicester, in the face of 
 the Court. 
 
 It was no wonder that the statesmen whom she outwitted 
 held Elizabeth to be little more than a frivolous woman, 
 or that Philip of Spain wondered how " a wanton" could 
 hold in check the policy of the Escurial. But the Eliza- 
 beth whom they saw was far from being all of Elizabeth. 
 Wilf ulness and triviality played over the surface of a na- 
 ture hard as steel, a temper purely intellectual, the very 
 type of reason untouched by imagination or passion. 
 Luxurious and pleasure-loving as she seemed, the young 
 Queen lived simply and frugally, and she worked hard. 
 Her vanity and caprice had no weight whatever with her 
 in state affairs. The coquette of the presence-chamber be- 
 came the coolest and hardest of politicians at the council-
 
 320 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 board. Fresh from the flattery of her courtiers, she would 
 tolerate no flattery in the closet ; she was herself plain and 
 downright of speech with her counsellors, and she looked 
 for a corresponding plainness of speech in return. The 
 very choice of her advisers indeed showed Elizabeth's 
 ability. She had a quick eye for merit of any sort, and a 
 wonderful power of enlisting its whole energy in her ser- 
 vice. The sagacity which chose Cecil and Walsingham 
 was just as unerring in its choice of the meanest of her 
 agents. Her success indeed in securing from the begin- 
 ning of her reign to its end, with the single exception of 
 Leicester, precisely the right men for the work she set 
 them to do sprang in great measure from the noblest char- 
 acteristic of her intellect. If in loftiness of aim the Queen's 
 temper fell below many of the tempers of her time, in the 
 breadth of its range, in the universality of its sympathy it 
 stood far above them all. Elizabeth could talk poetry with 
 Spenser and philosophy with Bruno; she could discuss 
 Euphuism with Lilly, and enjoy the chivalry of Essex ; 
 she could turn from talk of the last fashions to pore with 
 Cecil over dispatches and treasury books ; she could pas? 
 from tracking traitors with Walsingham to settle points of 
 doctrine with Parker, or to calculate with Frobisher the 
 chances of a northwest passage to the Indies. The ver- 
 satility and many-sidedness cf her mind enabled her to 
 understand every phase of the intellectual movement about 
 her, and to fix by a sort of instinct era its higher represen' 
 tatives. 
 
 It was only on its intellectual side indeed that Elizabeth 
 touched the England of her day. All its moral aspects 
 were simply dead to her. It was a time when men were 
 being lifted into nobleness by the new moral energy which 
 seemed suddenly to pulse through the whole people, when 
 honor and enthusiasm took colors of poetic beauty, and re- 
 ligion became a chivalry. But the finer sentiments of the 
 men about her touched Elizabeth simply as the fair tints 
 of a picture would have touched her. She made hca
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 321 
 
 market with equal indifference out of the heroism of 
 William of Orange or the bigotry of Philip. The noblest 
 aims and lives were only counters on her board. She was 
 the one soul in her realm whom the news of St. Bartholo- 
 mew stirred to no thirst for vengeance ; and while England 
 was thrilling with the triumph over the Armada, its Queen 
 was coolly grumbling over the cost, and making her profit 
 out of the spoiled provisions she had ordered for the fleet 
 that saved her. No womanly sympathy bound her even 
 to those who stood closest to her life. She loved Leicester 
 indeed ; she was grateful to Cecil. But for the most part 
 she was deaf to the voices either of love or gratitude. She 
 accepted such services as were never rendered to any other 
 English sovereign without a thought of return. Walsing- 
 ham spent his fortune in saving her life and her throne, 
 and she left him to die a beggar. But, as if by a strange 
 irony, it was to this very lack of womanly sympathy that 
 she owed some of the grandest features of her character. 
 If she was without love she was without hate. She cher- 
 ished no petty resentments ; she never stooped to envy or 
 suspicion of the men who served her. She was indifferent 
 to abuse. Her good humor was never ruffled by the 
 charges of wantonness and cruelty with which the Jesuits 
 filled every Court in Europe. She was insensible to fear. 
 Her life became at last a mark for assassin after assassin, 
 but the thought of peril was the thought hardest to bring 
 home to her. Even when Catholic plots broke out in her 
 very household she would listen to no proposals for the re- 
 moval of Catholics from her court. 
 
 If any trace of her sex lingered in the Queen's actual 
 statesmanship, it was seen in the simplicity and tenacity 
 of purpose that often underlies a woman's fluctuations of 
 feeling. It was the directness and steadiness of her aims 
 which gave her her marked superiority over the statesmen 
 of her time. No nobler group of ministers ever gathered 
 round a council-board than those who gathered round the 
 council-board of Elizabeth. But she was the instrument
 
 322 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 of none. She listened, she weighed, she used or put by 
 the counsels of each in turn, but her policy as a whole was 
 her own. It was a policy, not of genius, but of good sense. 
 Her aims were simple and obvious : to preserve her throne, 
 to keep England out of war, to restore civil and religious 
 order. Something of womanly caution and timidity per- 
 haps backed the passionless indifference with which she 
 set aside the larger schemes of ambition which were ever 
 opening before her eyes. In later days she was resolute 
 in her refusal of the' Low Countries. She rejected with a 
 laugh the offers of the Protestants to make her " head of 
 the religion" and " mistress of the seas. " But her amaz- 
 ing success in the end sprang mainly from this wise limita- 
 tion of her aims. She had a finer sense than any of her 
 counsellors of her real resources; she knew instinctively 
 how far she could go and what she could do. Her cold, 
 critical intellect was never swayed by enthusiasm or by 
 panic either to exaggerate or to under-estimate her risks 
 or her power. Of political wisdom indeed in its larger 
 and more generous sense Elizabeth had little or none ; but 
 her political tact was unerring. She seldom saw her course 
 at a glance, but she played with a hundred courses, fitfully 
 and discursively, as a musician runs his fingers over the 
 keyboard, till she hit suddenly upon the right one. Her 
 nature was essentially practical and of the present. She 
 distrusted a plan in fact just in proportion to its specula- 
 tive range or its outlook into the future. Her notion of 
 statesmanship lay in watching how things turned out 
 around her, and in seizing the moment for making the 
 best of them. 
 
 Such a policy as this, limited, practical, tentative as it 
 always was, had little of grandeur and originality about 
 it; it was apt indeed to degenerate into mere trickery and 
 finesse. But it was a policy suited to the England of her 
 day, to its small resources and the transitional character of 
 its religious and political belief, and it was eminently suited 
 to Elizabeth's peculiar powers. It was a policy of detail,
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 323 
 
 and in details her wonderful readiness and ingenuity found 
 scope for their exercise. " No War, my Lords," the Queen 
 used to cry imperiously at the council-board, " No War 1" 
 but her hatred of war sprang not so much from aversion 
 to blood or to expense, real as was her aversion to both, as 
 from the fact that peace left the field open to the diplomatic 
 manoeuvres and intrigues in which she excelled. Her 
 delight in the consciousness of her ingenuity broke out in 
 a thousand puckish freaks, freaks in which one can hardly 
 see any purpose beyond the purpose of sheer mystification. 
 She revelled in "by-ways" and "crooked ways." She 
 played with grave cabinets as a cat plays with a mouse, 
 and with much of thA same feline delight in the mere em- 
 barrassment of her victims. When she was weary of 
 mystifying foreign statesmen she turned to find fresh sport 
 in mystifying her own ministers. Had Elizabeth written 
 the story of her reign she would have prided herself, not 
 on the triumph of England or the ruin of Spain, but on 
 the skill with which she had hoodwinked and outwitted 
 every statesman in Europe during fifty years. Nothing is 
 more revolting, but nothing is more characteristic of the 
 Queen than her shameless mendacity. It was an age of 
 political lying, but in the profusion and recklessness of her 
 lies Elizabeth stood without a peer in Christendom. ^A 
 falsehood was to her simply an intellectual means of meet- 
 ing a difficulty ; and the ease with which she asserted or 
 denied whatever suited her purpose was only equalled by 
 the cynical indifference with which she met the exposure 
 of her lies as soon as their purpose was answered. Her 
 trickery in fact had its political value. Ignoble and weari- 
 some as the Queen's diplomacy seems to us now, tracking 
 it as we do through a thousand dispatches, it succeeded in 
 its main end, for it gained time, and every year that was 
 gained doubled Elizabeth's strength. She made as dexter- 
 ous a use of the foibles of her temper. Her levity carried 
 her gayly over moments of detection and embarrassment 
 where better women would have died of shame. She
 
 324: HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 screened her tentative and hesitating statesmanship under 
 the natural timidity and vacillation of her sex. She turned 
 her very luxury and sports to good account. There were 
 moments of grave danger in her reign when the country 
 remained indifferent to its perils, as it saw the Queen give 
 her days to hawking and hunting, and her nights to danc- 
 ing and plays. Her vanity and affectation, her womanly 
 fickleness and caprice, all had their part in the diplomatic 
 comedies she played with the successive candidates for her 
 hand. If political necessities made her life a lonely one, 
 she had at any rate the satisfaction of averting war and 
 conspiracies by love sonnets and romantic interviews, or 
 of gaining a year of tranquillity by the dexterous spinning 
 out of a flirtation. 
 
 As we track Elizabeth through her tortuous mazes of 
 lying and intrigue, the sense of her greatness is almost 
 lost in a sense of contempt. But wrapped as they were in 
 a cloud of mystery, the aims of her policy were throughout 
 temperate and simple, and they were pursued with a rare 
 tenacity. The sudden acts of energy which from time to 
 time broke her habitual hesitation proved that it was no 
 hesitation of weakness. Elizabeth could wait and finesse; 
 but when the hour was come she could strike, and strike 
 hard. Her natural temper indeed tended to a rash self- 
 confidence rather than to self -distrust. " I have the heart 
 of a King," she cried at a moment of utter peril, and it 
 was with a kingly unconsciousness of the dangers about 
 her that she fronted them for fifty years. She had, as 
 strong natures always have, an unbounded confidence in 
 her luck. "Her Majesty counts much on Fortune," 
 Walsingham wrote bitterly; " I wish she would trust more 
 in Almighty God." The diplomatists who censured at 
 one moment her irresolution, her delay, her changes of 
 front, censure at the next her "obstinacy," her iron will, 
 her defiance of what seemed to them inevitable ruin. " This 
 woman," Philip's envoy wrote after a wasted remon- 
 strance, " this woman is possessed by a hundred thousand
 
 CHAP. 8.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 325 
 
 devils." To her own subjects, who knew nothing of her 
 manoeuvres and flirtations, of her " by-ways" and " crooked 
 ways," she seemed the embodiment of dauntless resolution. 
 Brave as they were, the men who swept the Spanish Main 
 or glided between the icebergs of Baffin's Bay never 
 doubted that the palm of bravery lay with their Queen. 
 
 It was this dauntless courage which backed Elizabeth's 
 good luck in the Scottish war. The issue of the war 
 wholly changed her position at home and abroad. Not 
 only had she liberated herself from the control of Philip 
 and successfully defied the threats of the Guises, but at a 
 single blow she had freed England from what had been its 
 sorest danger for two hundred years. She had broken the 
 dependence of Scotland upon France. That perpetual 
 peace between England and the Scots which the policy of 
 the Tudors had steadily aimed at was at last sworn in the 
 Treaty of Edinburgh. If the Queen had not bound to her 
 all Scotland, she had bound to her the strongest and most 
 vigorous party among the nobles of the north. The Lords 
 of the Congregation promised to be obedient to Elizabeth 
 in all such matters as might not lead to the overthrow of 
 their country's rights or of Scottish liberties. They were 
 bound to her not only by the war but by the events that fol- 
 lowed the war. A Parliament at Edinburgh accepted the 
 Calvinistic confession of Geneva as the religion of Scotland, 
 abolished the temporal jurisdiction of the bishops, and 
 prohibited the celebration of the Mass. The Act and the 
 Treaty were alike presented for confirmation to Francis 
 and Mary. They were roughly put aside, for the French 
 King would give no sanction to a successful revolt, and 
 Mary had no mind to waive her claim to the English 
 throne. But from action the two sovereigns were held back 
 by the troubles in France. It was in vain that the Guisea 
 strove to restore political and religious unity by an assembly 
 of the French notables : the notables met only to receive a 
 demand for freedom of worship from the Huguenots of the 
 west, and to force the Government to promise a national
 
 326 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 council for the settlement of the religious disputes as well 
 as a gathering of the States- General. The counsellors of 
 Francis resolved to anticipate this meeting by a sudden 
 stroke at the heretics; and as a preliminary step the chiefs 
 of the House of Bourbon were seized at the court and the 
 Prince of Conde threatened with death. The success of 
 this measure roused anew the wrath of the young King at 
 the demands of the Scots, and at the close of 1560 Francis 
 was again nursing plans of vengeance on the Lords of the 
 Congregation. But Elizabeth's good fortune still proved 
 true to her. The projects of the Guises were suddenly 
 foiled by the young King's death. The power of Mary 
 Stuart and her kindred came to an end, for the childhood 
 of Charles the Ninth gave the regency over France to the 
 Queen-mother, Catharine of Medicis, and the policy of 
 Catharine secured England and Scotland alike from 
 danger of attack. Her temper, like that of Elizabeth, was 
 a purely political temper ; her aim was to balance Catholics 
 against Protestants to the profit of the throne. She needed 
 peace abroad to preserve this political and religious balance 
 at home, and though she made some fruitless efforts to re- 
 new the old friendship with Scotland, she had no mind to 
 intrigue like the Guises with the English Catholics nor to 
 back Mary Stuart's pretensions to the English throne. 
 
 With Scotland as an ally and with France at peace 
 Elizabeth's throne at last seemed secure. The outbreak 
 of the strife between the Old Faith and the New indeed, 
 if it gave the Queen safety abroad, somewhat weakened 
 her at home. The sense of a religious change which her 
 caution had done so much to disguise broke slowly on 
 England as it saw the Queen allying herself with Scotch 
 Calvinists and French Huguenots; and the compromise 
 she had hoped to establish in matters of worship became 
 hourly less possible as the more earnest Catholics discerned 
 the Protestant drift of Elizabeth's policy. But Philip still 
 held them back from any open resistance. There was 
 much indeed to move him from his old support of the
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 327 
 
 Queen. The widowhood of Mary Stuart freed him from 
 his dread of a permanent annexation of Scotland by France 
 as well as of a French annexation of England, while the 
 need of holding England as a check on French hostility to 
 the House of Austria grew weaker as the outbreak of civil 
 war between the Guises and their opponents rendered 
 French hostility less possible. Elizabeth's support of the 
 Huguenots drove the Spanish King to a burst of passion., 
 A Protestant France not only outraged his religious bigotry, 
 . but, as he justly feared, it would give an impulse to heresy 
 throughout his possessions in the Netherlands which would 
 make it hard to keep his hold upon them. Philip noted 
 that the success of the Scotch Calvinists had been followed 
 by the revolt of the Calvinists in France. He could hardly 
 doubt that the success of the French Huguenots would be 
 followed by a rising of the Calvinists in the Low Countries, 
 "Religion," he told Elizabeth angrily, "was being made a 
 cloak for anarchy and revolution." But vexed as Philip 
 was with her course both abroad and at home, he was still 
 far from withdrawing his support from Elizabeth. Even 
 now he could not look upon the Queen as lost to Catholi- 
 cism. He knew how her course both at home and abroad 
 had been forced on her not by religious enthusiasm but by 
 political necessity, and he still " trusted that ere long God 
 would give us either a general council or a good Pope who 
 would correct abuses and then all would go well. That 
 God would allow so noble and Christian a realm as Eng- 
 land to break away from Christendom and run the risk of 
 perdition he could not believe." 
 
 What was needed, Philip thought, was a change of 
 policy in the Papacy. The bigotry of Paul the Fourth 
 had driven England from the obedience of the Roman see. 
 The gentler policy of Pius the Fourth might yet restore 
 her to it. Pius was as averse from any break with Eliza- 
 beth as Philip was. He censured bitterly the harshnew 
 of his predecessor. The loss of Scotland and the threat- 
 ened loss of France he laid to the charge of the wars which
 
 828 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 Paul had stirred up against Philip and which had opened 
 a way for the spread of Calvinism in both kingdoms. 
 England, he held, could have been easily preserved for 
 Catholicism but for Paul's rejection of the conciliatory 
 efforts of Pole. When he ascended the Papal throne at 
 the end of 1559 indeed the accession of England to the Ref- 
 ormation seemed complete. The royal supremacy was 
 re-established : the Mass abolished : the English Liturgy 
 restored. A new episcopate, drawn from the Calvinistic 
 refugees, was being gathered round Matthew Parker. But 
 Pius would not despair. He saw no reason why England 
 should not again be Catholic. He knew that the bulk of 
 its people clung to the older religion, if they clung also to 
 independence of the Papal jurisdiction and to the seculari- 
 zation of the Abbey-lands. The Queen, as he believed, 
 had been ready for a compromise at her accession, and he 
 was ready to make terms with her now. In the spring of 
 1560 therefore he dispatched Parpaglia, a follower of Pole, 
 to open negotiations with Elizabeth. The moment which 
 the Pope had chosen was a critical one for the Queen. She 
 was in the midst of the Scotch war, and her forces had just 
 been repulsed in an attempt to storm the walls of Leith. 
 Such a repulse woke fears of conspiracy among the Catho- 
 lic nobles of the northern border, and a refusal to receive 
 the legate would have driven them to an open rising. On 
 the other hand the reception of Parpaglia would have 
 alienated the Protestants, shaken the trusts of the Lords 
 of the Congregation in the Queen's support, and driven 
 them to make terms with Francis and Mary. In either 
 case Scotland fell again under the rule of France, and the 
 throne of Elizabeth was placed in greater peril than ever. 
 So great was the Queen's embarrassment that she availed 
 herself of Cecil's absence in the north to hold out hopes of 
 the legate's admission to the realm and her own reconcilia- 
 tion with the Papacy. But she was freed from these dif- 
 ficulties by the resolute intervention of Philip. If he dis- 
 approved of her policy in Scotland he had no mind that
 
 CHAP. 3.] THE REFORMATION. 1540-1603. 329 
 
 Scotland should become wholly French or Elizabeth be 
 really shaken on her throne. He ordered the legate there- 
 fore to be detained in Flanders till his threats had obtained 
 from the Pope an order for his recall. 
 
 But Pius was far from abandoning his bishops. After 
 ten years' suspension he had again summoned the Council 
 of Trent. The cry for Church reform, the threat of na- 
 tional synods in Spain and in France, forced this message 
 on the Pope ; and Pius availed himself of the assembly of 
 the Council to make a fresh attempt to turn the tide of the 
 Reformation and to win back the Protestant Churches to 
 Catholicism. He called therefore on the Lutheran princes 
 of Germany to send doctors to the Council, and in May 
 1561, eight months after Parpaglia's failure, dispatched a 
 fresh nuncio, Martinengo, to invite Elizabeth to send 
 ambassadors to Trent. Philip pressed for the nuncio's 
 admission to the realm. His hopes of the Queen's return 
 to the faith were now being fed by a new marriage-nego- 
 tiation ; for on the withdrawal of the Archduke of Austria 
 in sheer weariness of Elizabeth's treachery, she had en- 
 couraged her old playfellow, Lord Robert Dudley, to hope 
 for her hand and to amuse Philip by pledges of bringing 
 back "the religion," should the help of the Spanish king 
 enable him to win it. Philip gave his help, but Dudley 
 remained a suitor, and the hopes of a Catholic revolution 
 became fainter than ever. The Queen would suffer no 
 landing of a legate in her realm. The invitation to the 
 Council fared no better. The Lutheran states of North 
 Germany had already refused to attend. The Council, 
 they held, was no longer a council of reunion. In its 
 earlier session it had formally condemned the very doc- 
 trine on which Protestantism was based ; and to join it 
 now would simply be to undo all that Luther had done. 
 Elizabeth showed as little hesitation. The hour of her 
 triumph, when a Calvinistic Scotland and a Calvinistic 
 France proved the mainstays of her policy, was no hour of 
 submission to the Papacy. In spite of Philip's entreaties
 
 330 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 she refused to send envoys to what was not " a free Chris- 
 tian Council." The refusal was decisive in marking Eliza- 
 beth's position. The long period of hesitation, of drift, 
 was over. All chance of submission to the Papacy was at 
 an end. In joining the Lutheran states in their rejection 
 of this Council, England had definitely ranged itself on 
 the side of the Reformation.
 
 .. CHAPTER IV. 
 
 ENGLAND AND MARY STUART. 
 15611567. 
 
 WHAT had hitherto kept the bulk of Elizabeth's subjects 
 from opposition to her religious system was a disbelief ID 
 its permanence. Englishmen had seen English religion 
 changed too often to believe that it would change no more. 
 When the Commissioners forced a Protestant ritual on St. 
 John's College at Oxford, its founder, Sir Thomas White, 
 simply took away its vestments and crucifixes, and hid 
 them in his house for the better times that every zealous 
 Catholic trusted would have their turn. They believed 
 that a Catholic marriage would at once bring such a turn 
 about; and if Elizabeth dismissed the offer of Philip's 
 hand she played long and assiduously with that of a son 
 of the Emperor, an archduke of the same Austrian house. 
 But the alliance with the Scotch heretics proved a rough 
 blow to this trust: and after the repulse at Leith there 
 were whispers that the two great Catholic nobles of the 
 border, the Earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland, 
 were only waiting for the failure of the Scotch enterprise 
 to rise on behalf of the older faith. Whatever their pro- 
 jects were, they were crushed by the Queen's success. 
 With the Lords of the Congregation masters across the 
 border the northern Earls lay helpless between the two 
 Protestant realms. In the mass of men loyalty was still 
 too strong for any dream of revolt ; but there was a grow- 
 ing uneasiness lest they should find themselves heretics 
 after all, which the failure of the Austrian match and the 
 help given to the Huguenots was fanning into active dis- 
 content. It was this which gave such weight to the
 
 333 HISTORY OF THti ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI 
 
 Queen's rejection of the summons to Trent. Whatever 
 color she might strive to put upon it, the bulk of her sub- 
 jects accepted the refusal as a final break with Catholicism, 
 as a final close to all hope of their reunion with the Cath- 
 olic Church. 
 
 The Catholic disaffection which the Queen was hence- 
 forth to regard as her greatest danger was thus growing 
 into life when in August 1561, but a few months after the 
 Queen's refusal to acknowledge the Council, Mary Stuart 
 landed at Leith. Girl as she was, and she was only nine- 
 teen, Mary was hardly inferior in intellectual power to 
 Elizabeth herself, while in fire and grace and brilliancy of 
 temper she stood high above her. She brought with her 
 the voluptuous refinement of the French Renascence ; she 
 would lounge for days in bed, and rise only at night for 
 dances and music. But her frame was of iron, and in- 
 capable of fatigue; she galloped ninety miles after her last 
 defeat without a pause save to change horses. She loved 
 risk and adventure and the ring of arms ; as she rode in a 
 foray to the north the swordsmen beside her heard her 
 wish she was a man " to know what life it was to lie all 
 night in the fields, or to walk on the cawsey with a jack 
 and knapschalle, a Glasgow buckler and a broadsword." 
 But in the closet she was as cool and astute a politician as 
 Elizabeth herself ; with plans as subtle, and of a far wider 
 and bolder range than the Queen's. " Whatever policy is 
 in all the chief and best practised heads of France," wrote 
 an English envoy, " whatever craft, falsehood, and deceit 
 is in all the subtle brains of Scotland, is either fresh in 
 this woman's memory, or she can fetch it out with a wet 
 finger." Her beauty, her exquisite grace of manner, her 
 generosity of temper and warmth of affection, her frank- 
 ness of speech, her sensibility, her gayety, her womanly 
 tears, her manlike courage, the play and freedom of her 
 nature, the flashes of poetry that broke from her at every 
 intense moment of her life, flung a spell over friend or foe 
 which has only deepened with the lapse of years. Even
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE REFORMATION. 1640 108. 33? 
 
 to Knollys, the sternest Puritan of his day, she seemed in 
 her later captivity to be " a notable woman. " " She seemeth 
 to regard no ceremonious honor besides the acknowledg- 
 ment of her estate royal. She showeth a disposition to 
 speak much, to be bold, to be pleasant, to be very familiar. 
 She showeth a great desire to be avenged on her enemies, 
 She showeth a readiness to expose herself to all perils in 
 hope of victory. She desireth much to hear of hardiness 
 and valiancy, commending by name all approved hardy 
 men of her country though they be her enemies, and she 
 concealeth no cowardice even in her friends." 
 
 Of the stern bigotry, the intensity of passion, which lay 
 beneath the winning surface of Mary's womanhood, met, 
 as yet knew nothing. But they at once recognized her 
 political ability. Till now she had proved in her own de- 
 spite a powerful friend to the Reformation. It was her 
 claim of the English crown which had seated Elizabeth on 
 the throne, had thrown her on the support of the Protes- 
 tants, and had secured to the Queen in the midst of her re- 
 ligious changes the protection of Philip of Spain. It was 
 the dread of Mary's ambition which had forced Elizabeth 
 to back the Lords of the Congregation, and the dread of 
 her husband's ambition which had driven Scotland to 
 throw aside its jealousy of England and ally itself with 
 the Queen. But with the death of Francis Mary's position 
 had wholly changed. She had no longer the means of 
 carrying out her husband's threats of crushing the Lords 
 of the Congregation by force of arms. The forces of 
 France were in the hands of Catharine of Medicis ; and 
 Catharine was parted from her both by her dread of the 
 Guises and by a personal hate. Yet the attitude of the 
 lords .became every day more threatening. They were 
 pressing Elizabeth to marry the Earl of Arran, a chief of 
 the house of Hamilton and near heir to the throne, a mar- 
 riage which pointed to the complete exclusion of Mary from 
 her realm. Even when this project failed, they rejected 
 with stern defiance the young (jueen's proposal of restoring
 
 834 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI, j 
 
 _ i 
 
 the old religion as a condition of her return. If they in- 
 vited her to Scotland, it was in the name of the Parliament 
 which had set up Calvinism as the law of the land. Bitter 
 as such terms must have been Mary had no choice but to 
 submit to them. To accept the offer of the Catholic lords 
 of Northern Scotland with the Earl of Huntly at their 
 head, who proposed to welcome her in arms as a champion 
 of Catholicism, was to risk a desperate civil war, a war 
 which would in any case defeat a project far dearer to her 
 than her plans for winning Scotland, the project she was 
 nursing of winning the English realm. In the first months 
 of her widowhood therefore her whole attitude was re- 
 versed. She received the leader of the Protestant Lords, 
 her half brother, Lord James Stuart, at her court. She 
 showed her favor to him by creating him Earl of Murray. 
 She adopted his policy of accepting the religious changes 
 in Scotland and of bringing Elizabeth by friendly pressure 
 to acknowledge her right, not of reigning in her stead, but 
 of following her on the throne. But while thus in form 
 adopting Murray's policy Mary at heart was resolute to 
 carry out her own policy too. If she must win the Scots 
 by submitting to a Protestant system in Scotland, she 
 would rally round her the English Catholics by remaining 
 a Catholic herself. If she ceased to call herself Queen of 
 England and only pressed for her acknowledgment as 
 rightful successor to Elizabeth, she would not formally 
 abandon her claim to reign as rightful Queen in Elizabeth's 
 stead. Above all she would give her compliance with 
 Murray's counsels no legal air. No pressure either from 
 her brother or from Elizabeth could bring the young Queen 
 to give her royal confirmation to the Parliamentary Acts 
 which established the new religion in Scotland, or her 
 signature to the Treaty of Edinburgh. In spite of her 
 habitual caution the bold words which broke from Mary 
 Stuart on Elizabeth's refusal of a safe-conduct betrayed 
 her hopes. " I came to France in spite of her brother's 
 opposition," she said, "and I will return in spite of her
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE REFORMATION. 15401608. 335 
 
 own. She has combined with rebel subjects of mine : but 
 there are rebel subjects in England too who would gladly 
 listen to a call from me. I am a Queen as well as she, 
 and not altogether friendless. And perhaps I have as 
 great a soul too !" 
 
 She saw indeed the new strength which was given her 
 by her husband's death. Her cause was no longer ham- 
 pered, either in Scotland or in England, by a national 
 jealousy of French interference. It was with a resolve to 
 break the league between Elizabeth and the Scotch Protes- 
 tants, to unite her own realm around her, and thus to give 
 a firm base for her intrigues among the English Catholics, 
 that Mary Stuart landed at Leith. The effect of her pres- 
 ence was marvellous. Her personal fascination revived 
 the national loyalty, and swept all Scotland to her feet. 
 Knox, the greatest and sternest of the Calvinistic preach- 
 ers, alone withstood her spell. The rough Scotch nobles 
 owned that there was in Mary " some enchantment whereby 
 men are bewitched." It was clear indeed from the first 
 that, loyal as Scotland might be, its loyalty would be of 
 little service to the Queen if she attacked the new religion. 
 At her entry into Edinburgh the children of the pageant 
 presented her with a Bible and "made some speech con- 
 cerning the putting away of the Mass, and thereafter sang 
 a psalm." It was only with difficulty that Murray won 
 for her the right of celebrating Mass at her court. But 
 for the religious difficulty Mary was prepared. While 
 steadily abstaining from any legal confirmation of the new 
 faith, and claiming for her French followers freedom of 
 Catholic worship, she denounced any attempt to meddle 
 with the form of religion she found existing in the realm. 
 Such a toleration was little likely to satisfy the more 
 fanatical among the ministers; but even Knox was con- 
 tent with her promise "to hear the preaching," and 
 brought his brethren to a conclusion, as " she might be 
 won," "to suffer her for a time." If the preachers indeed 
 maintained that the Queen's liberty of worship " should be
 
 336 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 their thraldom," the bulk of the nation was content with 
 Mary's acceptance of the religious state of the realm. Nor 
 was it distasteful to the secular leaders of the reforming 
 party. The Protestant Lords preferred their imperfect 
 work to the more complete reformation which Knox and 
 his fellows called for. They had no mind to adopt the 
 whole Calvinistic system. They had adopted the Genevan 
 Confession of Faith ; but they rejected a book of discipline 
 which would have organized the Church on the Huguenot 
 model. All demands for restitution of the church property 
 which they were pillaging they set aside as a " fond imagi- 
 nation. " The new ministers remained poor and dependent, 
 while noble after noble was hanging an abbot to seize his 
 estates in forfeiture, or roasting a commendator to wring 
 from him a grant of abbey -lands in fee. 
 
 The attitude of the Lords favored the Queen's designs. 
 She was in effect bartering her toleration of their religion 
 in exchange for her reception in Scotland and for their 
 support of her claim to be named Elizabeth's successor. 
 With Mary's landing at Leith the position of the English 
 Queen had suddenly changed. Her work seemed utterly 
 undone. The national unity for which she was struggling 
 was broken. The presence of Mary woke the party of the 
 old faith to fresh hopes and a fresh activity, while it roused 
 a fresh fear and fanaticism in the party of the new. Scot- 
 land, where Elizabeth's influence had seemed supreme, was 
 struck from her hands. Not only was it no longer a sup- 
 port; it was again a danger. Loyalty, national pride, a 
 just and statesmanlike longing for union with England, 
 united her northern subjects round the Scottish Queen in her 
 claim to be recognized as Elizabeth's successor. Even Mur- 
 ray counted on Elizabeth's consent to this claim to bring 
 Mary into full harmony with his policy, and to preserve 
 the alliance between England and Scotland. But the ques- 
 tion of the succession, like the question of her marriage, 
 was with Elizabeth a question of life and death. Her 
 wedding with a Catholic or a Protestant suitor would have
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 337 
 
 equally the end of her system of balance and national 
 union, a signal for the revolt of the party which she disap- 
 pointed and for the triumphant dictation of the party which 
 she satisfied. "If a Catholic prince come here," wrote a 
 Spanish ambassador while pressing her marriage with an 
 Austrian archduke, " the first Mass he attends will be the 
 signal for a revolt." It was so with the question of the 
 succession. To name a Protestant successor from the 
 House of Suffolk would have driven every Catholic to in- 
 surrection. To name Mary was to stir Protestantism to a 
 rising of despair, and to leave Elizabeth at the mercy of 
 every fanatical assassin who wished to clear the way for a 
 Catholic ruler. Yet to leave both unrecognized was to 
 secure the hostility of both, as well as the discontent of the 
 people at large, who looked on the settlement of the succes- 
 sion as the primary need of their national life. From the 
 moment of Mary's landing therefore Elizabeth found her- 
 self thrown again on an attitude of self-defence. Every 
 course of direct action was closed to her. She could satisfy 
 neither Protestant nor Catholic, neither Scotland nor Eng- 
 land. Her work could only be a work of patience ; the one 
 possible policy was to wait, to meet dangers as they rose, 
 to watch for possible errors in her rival's course, above all 
 by diplomacy, by finesse, by equivocation, by delay, to 
 gain time till the dark sky cleared. 
 
 Nothing better proves Elizabeth's political ability than 
 the patience, the tenacity, with which for the six years 
 that followed she played this waiting game. She played 
 it utterly alone. Even Cecil at moments of peril called 
 for a policy of action. But his counsels never moved the 
 Queen. Her restless ingenuity vibrated ceaselessly, like 
 the needle of a compass, from one point to another, now 
 stirring hopes in Catholic, now in Protestant, now quiver- 
 ing toward Mary's friendship, then as suddenly trembling 
 off to incur her hate. But tremble and vibrate as it might, 
 Elizabeth's purpose returned ever to the same unchanging 
 point. It was in vain that Mary made a show of friend-
 
 338 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 ship, and negotiated for a meeting at York, where the 
 question of the succession might be settled. It was in 
 vain that to prove her lack of Catholic fanaticism she even 
 backed Murray in crushing the Earl of Huntly, the fore- 
 most of her Catholic nobles, or that she held out hopes to 
 the English envoy of her conformity to the faith of the 
 Church of England. It was to no purpose that, to meet 
 the Queen's dread of her marriage with a Catholic prince 
 when her succession was once acknowledged, a marriage 
 which would in such a case have shaken Elizabeth on her 
 throne, Mary listened even to a proposal for a match with 
 Lord Leicester, and that Murray supported such a step, if 
 Elizabeth would recognize Mary as her heir. Elizabeth 
 promised that she would do nothing to impair Mary's 
 rights ; but she would do nothing to own them. " I am 
 not so foolish," she replied with bitter irony to Mary's en- 
 treaties, " I am not so foolish as to hang a winding-sheet 
 before my eyes." That such a refusal was wise time was 
 to show. But even then it is probable that Mary's in- 
 trigues were not wholly hidden from the English Queen. 
 Elizabeth's lying paled indeed before the cool duplicity 
 of this girl of nineteen. While she was befriending Prot- 
 estantism in her realm, and holding out hopes of her 
 mounting the English throne as a Protestant Queen, 
 Mary Stuart was pledging herself to the Pope to restore 
 Catholicism on either side the border, and pressing Philip 
 to aid her in this holy work by giving her the hand of his 
 son Don Carlos. It was with this design that she was 
 fooling the Scotch Lords and deceiving Murray : it was 
 with this end that she strove in vain to fool Elizabeth and 
 Knox. 
 
 But pierce through the web of lying as she might, the 
 pressure on the English Queen became greater every day. 
 What had given Elizabeth security was the adhesion of 
 the Scotch Protestants and the growing strength of the 
 Huguenots in France. But the firm government of Mur- 
 ray and her own steady abstinence from any meddling
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 339 
 
 with the national religion was giving Mary a hold upon 
 Scotland which drew Protestant after Protestant to her 
 side; while the tide of French Calvinism was suddenly 
 rolled back by the rise of a Catholic party under the lead- 
 ership of the Guises. Under Catharine of Medicis France 
 had seemed to be slowly drifting to the side of Protestant- 
 ism. While the Queen-mother strove to preserve a relig- 
 ious truce the attitude of the Huguenots was that of men 
 sure of success. Their head, the King of Navarre, boasted 
 that before the year was out he would have the Gospel 
 preached throughout the realm, and his confidence seemed 
 justified by the rapid advance of the new opinions. They 
 were popular among the merchant class. The noblesse 
 was fast becoming Huguenot. At the court itself the 
 nobles feasted ostentatiously on the fast days of the Church 
 and flocked to the Protestant preachings. The clergy 
 themselves seemed shaken. Bishops openly abjured the 
 older faith. Coligni's brother, the Cardinal of Chatillon, 
 celebrated the communion instead of mass in his own epis- 
 copal church at Beauvais, and married a wife. So irre- 
 sistible was the movement that Catharine saw no way of 
 preserving France to Catholicism but by the largest con- 
 cessions; and in the summer of 1561 she called on the Pope 
 to allow the removal of images, the administration of the 
 sacrament in both kinds, and the abolition of private 
 masses. Her demands were outstripped by those of an 
 assembly of deputies from the states which met at Pon- 
 tofee. These called for the confiscation of Church prop- 
 erty, for freedom of conscience and of worship, and above 
 all for a national Council in which every question should 
 be decided by " the Word of God." France seemed on the 
 verge of becoming Protestant; and at a moment when 
 Protestantism had won England and Scotland, and ap- 
 peared to be fast winning southern as well as northern 
 Germany, the accession of France would have determined 
 the triumph of the Reformation. The importance of its 
 attitude was seen in its effect on the Papacy. It was the
 
 340 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 call of France for a national Council that drove Rome once 
 more to summon the Council of Trent. It was seen too in 
 the policy of Mary Stuart. With France tending to Cal- 
 vinism it was no time for meddling with the Calvinism of 
 Scotland; and Mary rivalled Catharine herself in her 
 pledges of toleration. It was seen above all in the anxiety 
 of Philip of Spain. To preserve the Netherlands was still 
 the main aim of Philip's policy, and with France as well 
 as England Protestant, a revolt of the Netherlands against 
 the cruelties of the Inquisition became inevitable. By 
 appeals therefore to religious passion, by direct pledges of 
 aid, the Spanish King strove to rally the party of the 
 Guises against the system of Catharine. 
 
 But Philip's intrigues were hardly needed to rouse the 
 French Catholics to arms. If the Guises had withdrawn 
 from court it was only to organize resistance to the Hugue- 
 nots. They were aided by the violence of their opponents. 
 The Huguenot lords believed themselves irresistible ; they 
 boasted that the churches numbered more than three hun- 
 dred thousand men fit to bear arms. But the mass of the 
 nation was hardly touched by the new Gospel; and the 
 Guises stirred busily the fanaticism of the poor. The 
 failure of a conference between the advocates of either 
 faith was the signal for a civil war in the south. Catha- 
 rine strove in vain to allay the strife at the opening of 1562 
 by an edict of pacification ; Guise struck his counter-blow 
 by massacring a Protestant congregation at Vassy, by en- 
 tering Paris with two thousand men, and by seizing the 
 Regent and the King. Conde and Coligni at once took up 
 arms ; and the fanaticism of the Huguenots broke out in a 
 terrible work of destruction which rivalled that of the 
 Scots. All Western France, half Southern France, the 
 provinces along the Loire and the Rhone, rose for the 
 Gospel. Only Paris and the north of France held firmly 
 to Catholicism. But the plans of the Guises had been 
 ably laid. The Huguenots found themselves girt in by a 
 ring of foes. Philip sent a body of Spaniards into Gas-
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 341 
 
 cony, Italians and Piedmontese in the pay of the Pope and 
 the Duke of Savoy marched upon the Rhone. Seven 
 thousand German mercenaries appeared in the camp of 
 the Guises. Panic ran through the Huguenot forces; 
 they broke up as rapidly as they had gathered ; and resist- 
 ance was soon only to be found in Normandy and in tha 
 mountains of the Cevennes. 
 
 Conde appealed for aid to the German princes and to 
 England : and grudge as she might the danger and cost of 
 such a struggle, Elizabeth saw that her aid must be given, 
 She knew that the battle with her opponent had to be 
 fought abroad rather than at home. The Guises were 
 Mary's uncles; and their triumph meant trouble in Scot- 
 land and worse trouble in England. In September there- 
 fore she concluded a treaty with the Huguenots at Hamp- 
 ton Court, and promised to supply them with six thousand 
 men and a hundred thousand crowns. The bargain she 
 drove was a hard one. She knew that the French had no 
 purpose of fulfilling their pledge to restore Calais, and she 
 exacted the surrender of Havre into her hands as a security 
 for its restoration. Her aid came almost too late. The 
 Guises saw the need of securing Normandy if English in- 
 tervention was to be hindered, and a vigorous attack 
 brought about the submission of the province. But the 
 Huguenots were now reinforced by troops from the German 
 princes; and at the close of 1562 the two armies met on 
 the field of Dreux. The strife had already widened into 
 a general war of religion. It was the fight, not of French 
 factions, but of Protestantism and Catholicism, that was 
 to be fought out on the fields of France. The two warring 
 elements of Protestantism were represented in the Hugue- 
 not camp where German Lutherans stood side by side with 
 the French Calvinists. On the other hand the French 
 Catholics were backed by soldiers from the Catholic can- 
 tons of Switzerland, from the Catholic states of Germany, 
 from Catholic Italy, and from Catholic Spain. The en- 
 counter was a desperate one, but it ended in a virtual
 
 342 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [Boos VI. 
 
 triumph for the Guises. While the German troops of 
 Coligni clung to the Norman coast in the hope of sub- 
 sidies from Elizabeth, the Duke of Guise was able to 
 march at the opening of 1563 on the Loire, and form the 
 siege of Orleans. 
 
 In Scotland Mary Stuart was watching her uncle's pro- 
 gress with ever-growing hope. The policy of Murray had 
 failed in the end to which she mainly looked. Her accept- 
 ance of the new religion, her submission to the Lords of 
 the Congregation, had secured her a welcome in Scotland 
 and gathered the Scotch people round her standard. But 
 it had done nothing for her on the other side of the border. 
 Two years had gone by, and any recognition of her right 
 of succession to the English crown seemed as far off as 
 ever. But Murray's policy was far from being Mary's 
 only resource. She had never surrendered herself in more 
 than outer show to her brother's schemes. In heart she 
 had never ceased to be a bigoted Catholic, resolute for the 
 suppression of Protestantism as soon as her toleration of it 
 had given her strength enough for the work. It was this 
 that made the strife between the two Queens of such ter- 
 rible moment for English freedom. Elizabeth was fight- 
 ing for more than personal ends. She was fighting for 
 more than her own occupation of the English throne. 
 Consciously or unconsciously she was struggling to avert 
 from England the rule of a Queen who would have undone 
 the whole religious work of the past half-century, who 
 would have swept England back into the tide of Catholi- 
 cism, and who in doing this would have blighted and crip- 
 pled its national energies at the very moment of their 
 mightiest development. It was the presence of such a 
 danger that sharpened the eyes of Protestants on both sides 
 the border. However she might tolerate the reformed re- 
 ligion or hold out hopes of her compliance with a reformed 
 worship, no earnest Protestant either in England or in 
 Scotland could bring himself to see other than an enemy 
 in the Scottish Queen. Within a few months of her ar-
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE REFORMATION. 15401608. 343 
 
 rival the cool eye of Knox had pierced through the veil of 
 Mary's dissimulation. " The Queen," he wrote to Cecil, 
 " neither is nor shall be of our opinion. " Her steady re- 
 fusal to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh or to confirm the 
 statutes on which the Protestantism of Scotland rested was 
 of far.greater significance than her support of Murray or 
 her honeyed messages to Elizabeth. While the young 
 Queen looked coolly on at the ruin of the Catholic house 
 of Huntly, at the persecution of Catholic recusants, at so 
 strict an enforcement of the new worship that " none within 
 the realm durst more avow the hearing or saying of Mass 
 than the thieves of Liddesdale durst avow their stealth in 
 presence of an upright judge," she was in secret corre- 
 spondence with the Guises and the Pope. Her eye was 
 fixed upon France. While Catharine of Medicis was all 
 powerful, while her edict secured toleration for the Hugue- 
 nots on one side of the sea, Mary knew that it was impos- 
 sible to refuse toleration on the other. But with the first 
 movement of the Duke of Guise fiercer hopes revived. 
 Knox was " assured that the Queen danced till after mid- 
 night because that she had received letters that persecu- 
 tion was begun in France, and that her uncles were be- 
 ginning to stir their tail, and to trouble the whole realm 
 of France." Whether she gave such open proof of her joy 
 or no, Mary woke to a new energy at the news of Guise's 
 success. She wrote to Pope Pius to express her regret that 
 the heresy of her realm prevented her sending envoys to 
 the Council of Trent. She assured the Cardinal of Lor- 
 raine that she would restore Catholicism in her dominions, 
 even at the peril of her life. She pressed on Philip of 
 Spain a proposal for her marriage with his son, Don Car- 
 los, as a match which would make her strong enough to 
 restore Scotland to the Church. 
 
 The echo of the French conflict was felt in England as 
 in the north. The English Protestants saw in it the ap 
 proach of a struggle for life and death at home. The 
 English Queen saw in it a danger to her throne. So great
 
 344 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 was Elizabeth's terror at the victory of Dreux that she re- 
 solved to open her purse-strings and to hire fresh troops 
 for the Huguenots in Germany. But her dangers grew at 
 home as abroad. The victory of Guise dealt the first heavy 
 blow at her system of religious conformity. Rome had 
 abandoned its dreams of conciliation on her refusal* to own 
 the Council of Trent, and though Philip's entreaties 
 brought Pius to suspend the issue of a Bull of Deposition, 
 the Papacy opened the struggle by issuing in August 1562 
 a brief which pronounced joining in the Common Prayer 
 schismatic and forbade the attendance of Catholics at 
 church. On no point was Elizabeth so sensitive, for on 
 no point had her policy seemed so successful. Till now, 
 whatever might be their fidelity to the older faith, few 
 Englishmen had carried their opposition to the Queen's 
 changes so far as to withdraw from religious communion 
 with those who submitted to them. But with the issue of 
 the brief this unbroken conformity came to an end. A 
 few of the hotter Catholics withdrew from church. Heavy 
 fines were laid on them as recusants ; fines which, as their 
 numbers increased, became a valuable source of supply for 
 the royal exchequer. But no fines could compensate for 
 the moral blow which their withdrawal dealt. It was the 
 beginning of a struggle which Elizabeth had averted 
 through three memorable years. Protestant fanaticism 
 met Catholic fanaticism, and as news of the massacre at 
 Vassy spread through England the Protestant preachers 
 called for the death of "Papists." The tidings of Dreux 
 spread panic through the realm. The Parliament which 
 met again in January 1563 showed its terror by measures 
 of a new severity. There had been enough of words, cried 
 one of the Queen's ministers, Sir Francis Knollys, " it was 
 time to draw the sword." 
 
 The sword was drawn in the first of a series of penal 
 statutes which weighed upon English Catholics for two 
 hundred years. By this statute an oath of allegiance to 
 the Queen and of abjuration of the temporal authority of
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 345 
 
 the Pope was exacted from all holders of office, lay or 
 spiritual, within the realm, with the exception of peers. 
 Its effect was to place the whole power of the realm in the 
 hands either of Protestants or of Catholics who accepted 
 Elizabeth's legitimacy and her ecclesiastical jurisdiction 
 in the teeth of the Papacy. The oath of supremacy was 
 already exacted from every clergyman and every member 
 of the universities. But the obligation of taking it was 
 now widely extended. Every member of the House of 
 Commons, every officer in the army or the fleet, every 
 schoolmaster and private tutor, every justice of the peace, 
 every municipal magistrate, to whom the oath was tendered, 
 was pledged from this moment to resist the blows which 
 Rome was threatening to deal. Extreme caution indeed 
 was used in applying this test to the laity, but pressure 
 was more roughly put on the clergy. A great part of the 
 parish priests, though they had submitted to the use of the 
 Prayer-book, had absented themselves when called on to 
 take the oath prescribed by the Act of Uniformity, and were 
 known to be Catholics in heart. As yet Elizabeth had 
 cautiously refused to allow any strict inquiry into their 
 opinions. But a commission was now opened by her 
 order at Lambeth, to enforce the Act of Uniformity in 
 public worship ; while thirty-nine of the Articles of Faith 
 drawn up under Edward the Sixth, which had till now 
 been left in suspense by her Government, were adopted in 
 Convocation as a standard of faith, and acceptance of them 
 demanded from all the clergy. 
 
 With the Test Act and the establishment of the High 
 Commission the system which the Queen had till now 
 pursued in great measure ceased. Elizabeth had " drawn 
 the sword." It is possible she might still have clung to 
 her older policy had she foreseen how suddenly the danger 
 which appalled her was to pass away. At this crisis, as 
 ever, she was able to "count on Fortune." The Test Act 
 was hardly passed when in February 1563 the Duke of 
 Guise was assassinated by a Protestant zealot, and with
 
 346 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 his murder the whole face of affairs was changed. The 
 Catholic army was paralyzed by its leader's loss, while 
 Coligni, who was now strengthened with money and 
 forces from England, became master of Normandy. The 
 war however came quietly to an end; for Catharine of 
 Medicis regained her power on the Duke's death, and her 
 aim was still an aim of peace. A treaty with the Hugue- 
 nots was concluded in March, and a new edict of Amboise 
 restored the truce of religion. Elizabeth's luck indeed was 
 checkered by a merited humiliation. Now that peace 
 was restored Huguenot and Catholic united to demand 
 the surrender of Tours ; and an outbreak of plague among 
 its garrison compelled the town to capitulate. The new 
 strife in which England thus found itself involved with 
 the whole realm of France moved fresh hopes in Mary 
 Stuart. Mary had anxiously watched her uncle's progress, 
 for his success would have given her the aid of a Catholic 
 France in her projects on either side of the border. But 
 even his defeat failed utterly to dishearten her. The war 
 between the two Queens which followed it might well 
 force Catharine of Medicis to seek Scottish aid against 
 England, and the Scottish Queen would thus have secured 
 that alliance with a great power which the English Cath- 
 olics demanded before they would rise at her call. At 
 home troubles were gathering fast around her. Veil her 
 hopes as she might, the anxiety with which she had fol- 
 lowed the struggle of her kindred had not been lost on the 
 Protestant leaders, and it is probable that Knox at any 
 rate had learned something of her secret correspondence 
 with the Pope and the Guises. The Scotch Calvinists 
 were stirred by the peril of their brethren in France, and 
 the zeal of the preachers was roused by a revival of the old 
 worship in Clydesdale and by the neglect of the Govern- 
 ment to suppress it. In the opening of 1563 they resolved 
 " to put to their own hands," and without further plaint to 
 Queen or Council to carry out " the punishment that God 
 had appointed to idolaters in his law." In Mary's eyes
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE REFORMATION. 15401602. 347 
 
 such a resolve was rebellion. But her remonstrances only 
 drew a more formal doctrine of resistance from Knox. 
 "The sword of justice, madam, is God's," said the stern 
 preacher, " and is given to princes and rulers for an end ; 
 which, if they transgress, they that in the fear of God ex- 
 ecute judgments when God has commanded offend not 
 God. Neither yet sin they that bridle kings who strike 
 innocent men in their rage." The Queen was forced to 
 look on while nearly fifty Catholics, some of them high 
 ecclesiastics, were indicted and sent to prison for cele- 
 brating mass in Paisley and Ayrshire. 
 
 The zeal of the preachers was only heightened by the 
 coolness of the Lords. A Scotch Parliament which as- 
 sembled in the summer of 1563 contented itself with secur- 
 ing the spoilers in their possession of the Church lands, 
 but left the Acts passed in 1560 for the establishment of 
 Protestantism unconfirmed as before. Such a silence 
 Knox regarded as treason to the faith. He ceased to 
 have any further intercourse with Murray, and addressed 
 a burning appeal to the Lords, "Will ye betray God's 
 cause when ye have it in your hands to establish it as ye 
 please? The Queen, ye say, will not agree with you. Ask 
 ye of her that which by God's word ye may justly require, 
 and if she will not agree with ye in God, ye are not bound 
 to agree with her in the devil !" The inaction of the nobles 
 proved the strength which Mary drew from the attitude of 
 France. So long as France and England were at war, so 
 long as a French force might at any moment be dispatched 
 to Mary's aid, it was impossible for them to put pressure 
 on the Queen; and bold as was the action of the preachers 
 the Queen only waited her opportunity for dealing them a 
 fatal blow . But whatever hopes Mary may have founded on 
 the strife, they were soon brought to an end. Catharine 
 used her triumph only to carry out her system of balance, 
 and to resist the joint remonstrance of the Pope, the Em- 
 peror, and the King of Spain against her edict of tolera- 
 tion. The policy of Elizabeth, on the other hand, was too
 
 348 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VL 
 
 much identified with Catharine's success to leave room 
 for further hostilities ; and a treaty of peace between the 
 two countries was concluded in the spring of 1564. 
 
 The peace with France marked a crisis in the struggle 
 between the rival Queens. It left Elizabeth secure against 
 a Catholic rising and free to meet the pressure from the 
 north. But it dashed the last hopes of Mary Stuart to the 
 ground. The policy which she had pursued from her 
 landing in Scotland had proved a failure in the end at 
 which it aimed. Her religious toleration, her patience, 
 her fair speeches, had failed to win from Elizabeth a 
 promise of the succession. And meanwhile the Calvinism 
 she hated was growing bolder and bolder about her. The 
 strife of religion in France had woke a fiercer bigotry in 
 the Scotch preachers. Knox had discovered her plans of 
 reaction, had publicly denounced her designs of a Catholic 
 marriage, and had met her angry tears, her threats of 
 vengeance, with a cool defiance. All that Murray's policy 
 seemed to have really done was to estrange from her the 
 English Catholics. Already alienated from Mary by her 
 connection with France, which they still regarded as a 
 half -heretic power, and by the hostility of Philip, in whom 
 they trusted as a pure Catholic, the adherents of the older 
 faith could hardly believe in the Queen's fidelity to their 
 religion when they saw her abandoning Scotland to heresy 
 and holding out hopes of her acceptance of the Anglican 
 creed. Her presence had roused them to a new energy, 
 and they were drifting more and more as the strife waxed 
 warmer abroad to dreams of forcing on Elizabeth a Cath- 
 olic successor. But as yet their hopes turned not so much 
 to Mary Stuart as to the youth who stood next to the Scot- 
 tish Queen in the line of blood. Henry Stuart, Lord Darn- 
 ley, was a son of the Countess of Lennox, Margaret 
 Douglas, a daughter of Margaret Tudor by her second 
 marriage with.the Earl of Angus. Lady Lennox was the 
 successor whom Mary Tudor would willingly have chosen 
 in her sister's stead, had Philip and the Parliament suf-
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 349 
 
 fered her; and from the moment of Elizabeth's accession 
 the Countess had schemed to drive her from the throne. 
 She offered Philip to fly with her boy to the Low Countries 
 and to serve as a pretender in his hands. She intrigued 
 with the partisans of the old religion. Though the house of 
 Lennox conformed to the new system of English worship, 
 its sympathies were known to be Catholic, and the hopes 
 of the Catholics wrapped themselves round its heir. 
 "Should any disaster befall the Queen," wrote a Spanish 
 ambassador in 1560, "the Catholics would choose Lord 
 Darnley for King." " Not only," he adds in a later letter, 
 " would all sides agree to choose him were the Queen to 
 die, but the Catholic Lords, if opportunity offer, may de- 
 clare for him at once." 
 
 His strongest rival was Mary Stuart, and before Mary 
 landed in Scotland Lady Lennox planned the union of both 
 their claims by the marriage of her son with the Scottish 
 Queen. A few days after her landing Mary received a 
 formal offer of his hand. Hopes of yet greater matches, 
 of a marriage with Philip's son, Don Carlos, or with the 
 young French King, Charles the Ninth, had long held the 
 scheme at bay ; but as these and her policy of conciliation 
 proved alike fruitless Mary turned to the Lennoxes. The 
 marriage was probably planned by David Rizzio, a young 
 Piedmontese who had won the Scotch Queen's favor, and 
 through whom she conducted the intrigues, both in Eng- 
 land and abroad, by which she purposed to free herself 
 from Murray's power and to threaten Elizabeth. Her 
 diplomacy was winning Philip to her cause. The Spanish 
 King had as yet looked upon Mary's system of toleration 
 and on her hopes from France with equal suspicion. But 
 he now drew slowly to her side. Pressed hard in the 
 Mediterranean by the Turks, he was harassed more than 
 ever by the growing discontent of the Netherlands, where 
 the triumph of Protestantism in England and Scotland 
 and the power of the Huguenots in France gave fresh 
 vigor to the growth of Calvinism, and where the nobles
 
 350 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 were stirred to new outbreaks against the foreign rule of 
 Spain by the success of the Scottish Lords in their rising 
 and by the terms of semi-independence which the French 
 nobles wrested from the Queen. It was to hold the 
 Netherlands in check that Philip longed for Mary's suc- 
 cess. Her triumph over Murray and his confederates 
 would vindicate the cause of monarchy ; her triumph over ' 
 Calvinism would vindicate that of Catholicism both in her 
 own realm and in the realm which she hoped to win. He 
 sent her therefore assurances of his support, and assur- 
 ances as strong reached her from the Vatican. The dis- 
 pensation which was secretly obtained for her marriage 
 with Darnley was granted on the pledge of both to do 
 their utmost for ihe restoration of the old religion. 
 
 Secret as was the pledge, the mere whisper of the match 
 revealed their danger to the Scotch Protestants. The 
 Lords of the Congregation woke with a start from their 
 confidence in the Queen. Murray saw that the policy to 
 which he had held his sister since her arrival in the realm 
 was now to be abandoned. Mary was no longer to be the 
 Catholic ruler of a Protestant country, seeking peaceful ac- 
 knowledgment of her right of succession to Elizabeth's 
 throne ; she had placed herself at the head of the English 
 Catholics, and such a position at once threatened the safety 
 of Protestantism in Scotland itself. If once Elizabeth 
 were overthrown by a Catholic rising, and a Catholic 
 policy established in England, Scotch Protestantism was 
 at an end. At the first rumor of the match therefore 
 Murray drew Argyle and the Hamiltons round him in a 
 band of self-defence, and refused his signature to a paper 
 recommending Darnley as husband to the Queen. But 
 Mary's diplomacy detached from him lord after lord, till 
 his only hope lay in the opposition of Elizabeth. The 
 marriage with Darnley was undoubtedly a danger even 
 more formidable to England than to Scotland. It put an 
 end to the dissensions which had till now broken the 
 strength of the English Catholics. It rallied them round
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 351 
 
 Mary and Darnley as successors to the throne. It gathered 
 to their cause the far greater mass of cautious conserva- 
 tives who had been detached from Mary by her foreign 
 blood and by dread of her kinship with the Guises. Darn- 
 ley was reckoned an Englishman, and with an English 
 husband to sway her policy Mary herself seemed to be- 
 come an Englishwoman. But it was in vain that the 
 Council pronounced the marriage a danger to the realm, 
 that Elizabeth threatened Mary with war, or that she 
 plotted with Murray for the seizure of Mary and the driv- 
 ing Darnley back over the border. Threat and plot were 
 too late to avert the union, and at the close of July, 1565, 
 Darnley was married to Mary Stuart and proclaimed King 
 of Scotland. Murray at once called the Lords of the Con- 
 gregation to arms. But the most powerful and active 
 stood aloof. As heir of the line of Angus, Darnley was 
 by blood the head of the house of Douglas, and Protestants 
 as they were, the Douglases rallied to their kinsman. 
 Their actual chieftain, the Earl of Morton, stood next to 
 Murray himself in his power over the Congregation ; he 
 was chancellor of the realm ; and his strength as a great 
 noble was backed by a dark and unscrupulous ability. By 
 waiving their claim to the earldom of Angus and the lands 
 which he held, the Lennoxes won Morton to his kinsman's 
 cause, and the Earl was followed in his course by two of 
 the sternest and most active among the Protestant Lords, 
 Darnley's uncle, Lord Kuthven, and Lord Lindesay, who 
 had married a Douglas. Their desertion broke Murray's 
 strength ; and his rising was hardly declared when Mary 
 marched on his little force with pistols in her belt, and 
 drove its leaders over the border. 
 
 The work which Elizabeth had done in Scotland had 
 been undone in . an hour. Murray was a fugitive. The 
 Lords of the Congregation were broken or dispersed. The 
 English party was ruined. And while Scotland was lost 
 it seemed as if the triumph of Mary was a signal for the 
 general revival of Catholicism. The influence of the
 
 352 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PfiOPLE. [BOOK VL 
 
 Guises had again become strong in Franee, and though 
 Catherine of Medici held firmly to her policy of tolera- 
 tion, an interview which she held with Alva at Bayonne 
 led every Protestant to believe in the conclusion of a league 
 between France and Spain for a common war on Protestant- 
 ism. To this league the English statesmen held that Mary 
 Stuart had become a party, and her pressure upon Eliza- 
 beth was backed by the suspicion that the two great mon- 
 archies had pledged her their support. No such league 
 existed, nor had such a pledge been given, but the dread 
 served Mary's purpose as well as the reality could have 
 done. Girt in, as she believed, with foes, Elizabeth took 
 refuge in the meanest dissimulation, while Mary Stuart 
 imperiously demanded a recognition of her succession as 
 the price of peace. But her aims went far beyond this 
 demand. She found herself greeted at Rome as the 
 champion of the Faith. Pius the Fifth, who mounted the 
 Papal throne at the moment of her success, seized on the 
 young Queen to strike the first blow in the crusade against 
 Protestantism on which he was set. He promised her 
 troops and money. He would support her, he said, so 
 long as he had a single chalice to sell. " With the help of 
 God and your Holiness," Mary wrote back, "I will leap 
 over the wall." In England itself the marriage and her 
 new attitude rallied every Catholic to Mary's standard; 
 and the announcement of her pregnancy which followed 
 gave her a strength that swept aside Philip's counsels of 
 caution and delay. The daring advice of Rizzio fell in 
 with her natural temper. She resolved to restore Cathol- 
 icism in Scotland. Yield as she might to Murray's 
 pressure, she had dextrously refrained from giving legal 
 confirmation to the resolutions of the Parliament by which 
 Calvinism had been set up in Scotland ; and in the Parlia- 
 ment which she summoned for the coming spring she 
 trusted to do " some good anent restoring the old religion." 
 The appearance of the Catholic lords, the Earls of Huntly, 
 Athol, and Both well, at Mary's court showed her purpose
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE REFORMATION. 15401608. 353 
 
 to attempt this religious revolution. Nor were her polit- 
 ical schemes less resolute. She was determined to wring 
 from the coming Parliament a confirmation of the banish- 
 ment of the lords who had fled with Murray which would 
 free her forever from the pressure of the Protestant nobles. 
 Mistress of her kingdom, politically as well as religiously, 
 Mary could put a pressure on Elizabeth which might win 
 for her more than an acknowledgment of her right to the 
 succession. She still clung to her hopes of the crown ; and 
 she knew that the Catholics of Northumberland and York- 
 shire were ready to revolt as soon as she was ready to aid 
 them. 
 
 No such danger had ever threatened Elizabeth as this. 
 But again she could " trust to fortune. " Mary had staked 
 all on her union with Darnley, and yet only a few months 
 had passed since her wedding-day when men saw that she 
 " hated the King. " The boy turned out a dissolute, insolent 
 husband; and Mary's scornful refusal of his claim of the 
 "crown matrimonial," which would have given him an 
 equal share of the royal power with herself, widened the 
 breach between them. Darnley attributed this refusal to 
 Rizzio's counsels; and his father, Lord Lennox, joined 
 with him in plotting vengeance against the minister. 
 They sought aid from the very party whom Darnley's 
 marriage had been planned to crush. Though the strength 
 of the Protestant nobles had been broken by the flight of 
 Murray, the Douglases remained at the court. Morton had 
 no purpose of lending himself to the ruin of the religion he 
 professed, and Ruthven and Lindesay were roused to action 
 when they saw themselves threatened with a restoration of 
 Catholicism, and with a legal banishment of Murray and 
 his companions in the coming Parliament, which could 
 only serve as a prelude to their own ruin. Rizzio was the 
 author of this policy; and when Darnley called on his 
 kinsmen to aid him in attacking Rizzio, the Douglases 
 grasped at his proposal. Their aid and their promise of 
 the crown matrimonial was bought by Darnley's consent
 
 354 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [Boos VI. 
 
 to the recall of the fugitive lords and of Murray. The plot 
 of the Douglases was so jealously hidden that no whisper 
 of it reached the Queen. Her plans were on the brink of 
 success. The Catholic nobles were ready for action at her 
 court. Huntly and Bothwell were called into the Privy 
 Council. At the opening of March, 1566, the Parliament 
 which was to carry out her projects was to assemble ; and 
 the Queen prepared for her decisive stroke by naming men 
 whom she could trust as Lords of the Articles a body 
 with whom lay the proposal of measures to the Houses 
 and by restoring the bishops to their old places among the 
 peers. But at the moment when Mary revealed the extent 
 of her schemes by her dismissal of the English ambassador, 
 the young King, followed by Lord Ruthven, burst into her 
 chamber, dragged Rizzio from her presence, and stabbed 
 him in an outer chamber, while Morton and Lord Lindesay 
 with their followers seized the palace gate. Mary found 
 herself a prisoner in the hands of her husband and his con- 
 federates. Her plans were wrecked in an hour. A procla- 
 mation of the King dissolved the Parliament which she 
 had called for the ruin of her foes; and Murray, who was 
 on his way back from England when the deed was done, 
 was received at Court and restored to his old post at the 
 Council-board . 
 
 Terrible as the blow had been, it roused the more ter- 
 rible energies which lay hid beneath the graceful bearing 
 of the Queen. The darker features of her character were 
 now to develop themselves. With an inflexible will she 
 turned to build up again the policy which seemed shattered 
 in Rizzio's murder. Her passionate resentment bent to the 
 demands of her ambition. "No more tears," she said 
 when they brought her news of Rizzio's murder; "I will 
 think upon revenge." But even revenge was not suffered 
 to interfere with her political schemes. Keen as was 
 Mary's thirst for vengeance on him, Darnley was needful 
 to the triumph of her aims, and her first effort was to win 
 him back. He was already grudging at the supremacy of
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 355 
 
 the nobles and his virtual exclusion from power, when 
 Mary masking her hatred beneath a show of affection suc- 
 ceeded in severing the wretched boy from his fellow-con- 
 spirators, and in gaining his help in an escape to Dunbar. 
 Once free, a force of eight thousand men under the Earl 
 of Bothwell quickly gathered round her, and with these 
 troops she marched in triumph on Edinburgh. An offer 
 of pardon to all save those concerned in Rizzio's murder 
 broke up the force of the Lords ; Glencairn and Argyle 
 joined the Queen, while Morton, Ruthven, and Lindesay 
 fled in terror over the border. But Mary had learned by a 
 terrible lesson the need of dissimulation. She made no 
 show of renewing her Catholic policy. On the contrary, 
 she affected to resume the system which she had pursued 
 from the opening of her reign, and suffered Murray to re- 
 main at the court. Rizzio's death had in fact strengthened 
 her position. With him passed away the dread of a Cath- 
 olic reaction. Mary's toleration, her pledges of extending 
 an equal indulgence to Protestantism in England, should 
 she mount its throne, her marriage to one who was looked 
 upon as an English noble, above all the hope of realizing 
 through her succession the dream of a union of the realms, 
 again told on the wavering body of more Conservative 
 statesmen, like Norfolk, and even drew to her side some of 
 the steadier Protestants who despaired of a Protestant suc- 
 cession. Even Elizabeth at last seemed wavering toward 
 a recognition of her as her successor. But Mary aimed at 
 more than the succession. Her intrigues with the English 
 Catholics were never interrupted. Her seeming reconcilia- 
 tion with the young King preserved that union of the whole 
 Catholic body which her marriage had brought about and 
 which the strife over Rizzio threatened with ruin. Her 
 court was full of refugees from the northern counties. 
 "Your actions," Elizabeth wrote in a sudden break of 
 fierce candor, " are as full of venom as your words are of 
 honey." Fierce words however did nothing to break the 
 clouds that gathered thicker and thicker round England :
 
 356 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 and in June the birth of a boy, the future James the Sixth 
 of Scotland and First of England, doubled Mary's strength. 
 Elizabeth felt bitterly the blow. "The Queen of Scots," 
 she cried, "has a fair son, and I am but a barren stock." 
 The birth of James in fact seemed to settle the long strug- 
 gle in Mary's favor. The moderate Conservatives joined 
 the ranks of her adherents. The Catholics were wild with 
 hope. "Your friends are so increased," her ambassador, 
 Melville, wrote to her from England, " that many whole 
 shires are ready to rebel, and their captains named by 
 election of the nobility." On the other hand, the Protes- 
 tants were filled with despair. It seemed as if no effort 
 could avert the rule of England by a Catholic Queen. 
 
 It was at this moment of peril that the English Parlia- 
 ment was again called together. Its action showed more 
 than the natural anxiety of the time ; it showed the growth 
 of those national forces which far more than the schemes 
 of Mary or the counter-schemes of Elizabeth were to de- 
 termine the future of England. While the two queens 
 were heaping intrigue on intrigue, while abroad and at 
 home every statesman held firmly that national welfare or 
 national misery hung on the fortune of the one or the suc- 
 cess of the other, the English people itself was steadily 
 moving forward to a new spiritual enlightenment and a 
 new political liberty. ' The intellectual and religious im- 
 pulses of the age were already combining with the influ- 
 ence of its growing wealth to revive a spirit of indepen- 
 dence in the nation at large. It was impossible for Eliza- 
 beth to understand this spirit, but her wonderful tact 
 enabled her from the first to feel the strength of it. Long 
 before any open conflict arose between the people and the 
 Crown we see her instinctive perception of the changes 
 which were going on around her in the modifications, 
 conscious or unconscious, which she introduced into the 
 system of the monarchy. Of its usurpations upon English 
 liberty she abandoned none. But she curtailed and softened 
 down almost all. She tampered, as her predecessors had
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 357 
 
 tampered, with personal freedom; there was the same 
 straining of statutes and coercion of juries in political 
 trials as before, and an arbitrary power of imprisonment 
 was still exercised by the Council. The duties she imposed 
 on cloth and sweet wines were an assertion of her right of 
 arbitrary taxation. Proclamations in Council constantly 
 assumed the force of law. But, boldly as it was asserted, 
 the royal power was practically wielded with a caution and 
 moderation that showed the sense of a growing difficulty 
 in the full exercise of it. The ordinary course of justice 
 was left undisturbed. The jurisdiction of the Council was 
 asserted almost exclusively over the Catholics; and de- 
 fended in their case as a precaution against pressing dan- 
 gers. The proclamations issued were temporary in char- 
 acter and of small importance. The two duties imposed 
 were so slight as to pass almost unnoticed in the general 
 satisfaction at Elizabeth's abstinence from internal taxa- 
 tion. She abandoned the benevolences and forced loans 
 which had brought home the sense of tyranny to the sub- 
 jects of her predecessors. She treated the Privy Seals, 
 which on emergencies she issued for advances to her Ex- 
 chequer, simply as anticipations of her revenue (like our 
 own Exchequer Bills), and punctually repaid them. The 
 monopolies with which she fettered trade proved a more 
 serious grievance ; but during her earlier reign they were 
 looked on as a part of the system of Merchant Associations, 
 which were at that time regarded as necessary for the 
 regulation and protection of the growing commerce. 
 
 The political development of the nation is seen still more 
 in the advance of the Parliament during Elizabeth's reign. 
 The Queen's thrift enabled her in ordinary times of poace 
 to defray the current expenses of the Crown from its ordi- 
 nary revenues. But her thrift was dictated not so much 
 by economy as by a desire to avoid summoning fresh 
 Parliaments. We have seen how boldly the genius of 
 Thomas Cromwell set aside on this point the tradition of 
 the New Monarchy. His confidence in the power of the
 
 358 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 Crown revived the Parliament as an easy and manageable 
 instrument of tyranny. The old forms of constitutional 
 freedom were turned to the profit of the royal despotism, 
 and a revolution which for the moment left England ab- 
 solutely at Henry's feet was wrought out by a series of 
 parliamentary statutes. Throughout Henry's reign Crom- 
 well's confidence was justified by the spirit of slavish sub- 
 mission which pervaded the Houses. But the effect of the 
 religious change for which his measures made room began 
 to be felt during the minority of Edward the Sixth ; and 
 the debates and divisions on the religious reaction which 
 Mary pressed on the Parliament were many and violent. 
 A great step forward was marked by the effort of the 
 Crown to neutralize by "management" an opposition 
 which it could no longer overawe. Not only was the Par- 
 liament packed with nominees of the Crown but new con- 
 stituencies were created whose members would follow 
 implicitly its will. For this purpose twenty-two new 
 boroughs were created under Edward, fourteen under 
 Mary; some, indeed, places entitled to representation by 
 their wealth and population, but the bulk of them small 
 towns or hamlets which lay wholly at the disposal of the 
 Koyal Council. 
 
 Elizabeth adopted the system of her two predecessors 
 both in the creation of boroughs and the recommendation 
 of candidates ; but her keen political instinct soon perceived 
 the inutility of both expedients. She saw that the " man- 
 agement" of the Houses, so easy under Cromwell, was be- 
 coming harder every day. The very number of the mem- 
 bers she called up into the Commons from nomination 
 boroughs, sixty-two in all, showed the increasing difficulty 
 which the government found in securing a working major- 
 ity. The rise of a new nobility enriched by the spoils of 
 the Church and trained to political life by the stress of 
 events around them was giving fresh vigor to the House 
 of Lords. The increased wealth of the country gentry as 
 well aa the growing desire to obtain a seat among the
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE REFORMATION. 15401608. 359 
 
 Commons brought about the cessation at this time of the 
 old payment of members by their constituencies. A 
 change too in the borough representation, which had long 
 been in progress but was now for the first time legally 
 recognized, tended greatly to increase the vigor and inde- 
 pendence of the Lower House. By the terms of the older 
 writs borough members were required to be chosen from 
 the body of the burgesses ; and an act of Henry the Fifth 
 gave this custom the force of law. But the passing of such 
 an act shows that the custom was already widely infringed, 
 and by Elizabeth's day act and custom alike had ceased to 
 have force. Most seats were now filled by representatives 
 who were strange to the borough itself, and who were often 
 nominees of the great landowners round. But they were 
 commonly men of wealth and blood whose aim in entering 
 parliament was a purely political one, and whose attitude 
 toward the Crown was far bolder and more independent 
 than that of the quiet tradesmen who preceded them. 
 Elizabeth saw that " management" was of little avail with 
 a house of members such as these; and she fell back as far 
 as she could on Wolsey's policy of practical abolition. She 
 summoned Parliaments at longer and longer intervals. 
 By rigid economy, by a policy of balance and peace, she 
 strove, and for a long time successfully strove, to avoid 
 the necessity of assembling them at all. But Mary of 
 Scotland and Philip of Spain proved friends to English 
 liberty in its sorest need. The struggle with Catholicism 
 forced Elizabeth to have more frequent recourse to her 
 Parliaments, and as she was driven to appeal for increas- 
 ing supplies the tone of the Houses rose higher and higher. 
 What made this revival of Parliamentary independence 
 more important was the range which Cromwell's policy 
 had given to Parliamentary action. In theory the Tudor 
 statesman regarded three cardinal subjects, matters of 
 trade, matters of religion, and matters of State, as lying 
 exclusively within the competence of the Crown. But in 
 
 actual fact such subjects had been treated by Parliament 
 
 16 YOL. 2
 
 360 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VL 
 
 after Parliament. The whole religious fabric of the realm 
 rested on Parliamentary enactments. The very title of 
 Elizabeth rested in a Parliamentary statute. When the 
 Houses petitioned at the outset of her reign for the declara- 
 tion of a successor and for the Queen's marriage it was 
 impossible for her to deny their right to intermeddle with 
 these "matters of State," though she rebuked the demand 
 and evaded an answer. But the question of the succession 
 was a question too vital for English freedom and English 
 religion to remain prisoned within Elizabeth's council- 
 chamber. It came again to the front in the Parliament 
 which the pressure from Mary Stuart forced Elizabeth to 
 assemble after six prorogations and an interval of four 
 years in September, 1566. The Lower House at once re- 
 solved that the business of supply should go hand in hand 
 with that of the succession. Such a step put a stress on 
 the monarchy which it had never known since the War of 
 the Roses. The Commons no longer confined themselves 
 to limiting or resisting the policy of the Crown; they 
 dared to dictate it. Elizabeth's wrath showed her sense 
 of the importance of their action. " They had acted like 
 rebels !" she said ; " they had dealt with her as they dared 
 not have dealt with her father." "I cannot tell," she 
 broke out angrily to the Spanish ambassador, " what these 
 devils want!" "They want liberty, madam," replied the 
 Spaniard, " and if princes do not look to themselves and 
 work together to put such people down they will find be- 
 fore long what all this is coming to !" But Elizabeth had 
 to front more than her Puritan Commons. The Lords 
 joined with the Lower House in demanding the Queen's 
 marriage and a settlement of the succession, and after a 
 furious burst of anger Elizabeth gave a promise of marriage, 
 which she was no doubt resolved to evade as she had 
 evaded it before. But the subject of the succession was 
 one which could not be evaded. Yet any decision on it 
 meant civil war. It was notorious that if the Commons 
 were resolute to name the Lady Catharine Grey, the heiress
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE REFORMATION. 15401808. 361 
 
 of the House of Suffolk, successor to the throne, the Lords 
 were as resolute to assert the right of Mary Stuart. To 
 settle such a matter was at once to draw the sword. The 
 Queen therefore peremptorily forbade the subject to be ap- 
 proached. But the royal message was no sooner delivered 
 than Wentworth, a member of the House of Commons, 
 rose to ask whether such a prohibition was not " against 
 the liberties of Parliament." The question was followed 
 by a hot debate, and a fresh message from the Queen 
 commanding " that there should be no further argument" 
 was met by a request for freedom of deliberation while the 
 subsidy bill lay significantly unnoticed on the table. A 
 new strife broke out when another member of the Com- 
 mons, Mr. Dalton, denounced the claims put forward by 
 the Scottish Queen. Elizabeth at once ordered him into 
 arrest. But the Commons prayed for leave "to confer 
 upon their liberties," and the Queen's prudence taught her 
 that it was necessary to give way. She released Dalton ; 
 she protested to the Commons that " she did not mean~ to 
 prejudice any part of the liberties heretofore granted them ;" 
 she softened the order of silence into a request. Won by 
 the graceful concession, the Lower House granted the sub- 
 sidy and assented loyally to her wish. But the victory was 
 none the less a real one. No such struggle had taken place 
 between the Crown and the Commons since the beginning 
 of the New Monarchy ; and the struggle had ended in the 
 virtual defeat of the Crown. 
 
 The strife with the Parliament hit Elizabeth hard. It 
 was " secret foes at home," she told the House as the quar- 
 rel passed away in a warm reconciliation, " who thought 
 to work me that mischief which never foreign enemies 
 could bring to pass, which is the hatred of my Commons. 
 Do you think that either I am so unmindful of your surety 
 by succession, wherein is all my care, or that I went about 
 to break your liberties? No! it never was my meaning; 
 but to stay you before you fell into the ditch." But it was 
 impossible for her to explain the real reasons for her course,
 
 362 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VL 
 
 and the dissolution of the Parliament in January, 1567, 
 left her face to face with a national discontent added to the 
 ever-deepening peril from without. To the danger from 
 the north and from the east was added a danger from the 
 west. The north of Ireland was in full revolt. From the 
 moment of her accession Elizabeth had realized the risks 
 of the policy of confiscation and colonization which had 
 been pursued in the island by her predecessor: and the 
 prudence of Cecil fell back on the safer though more tedi- 
 ous policy of Henry the Eighth. But the alarm at English 
 aggression had already spread among the natives ; and its 
 result was seen in a revolt of the north, and in the rise of 
 a leader more vigorous and able than any with whom the 
 Government had had as yet to contend. An acceptance 
 of the Earldom of Tyrone by the chief of the O'Neills 
 brought about the inevitable conflict between the system of 
 succession recognized by English and that recognized by 
 Irish law. On the death of the Earl of Tyrone England 
 acknowledged his eldest son as the heir of his Earldom ; 
 while the sept of which he was the head maintained their 
 older right of choosing a chief from among the members 
 of the family, and preferred Shane O'Neill, a younger 
 son of less doubtful legitimacy. The Lord Deputy, the 
 Earl of Sussex, marched northward to settle the question 
 by force of arms ; but ere he could reach Ulster the activ- 
 ity of Shane had quelled the disaffection of his rivals, the 
 O'Donnells of Donegal, and won over the Scots of Antrim. 
 "Never before," wrote Sussex, "durst Scot or Irishman 
 look Englishman in the face in plain or wood since I came 
 here ;" but Shane fired his men with a new courage, and 
 charging the Deputy's army with a force hardly half its 
 number drove it back in rout on Armagh. A promise of 
 pardon induced the Irish chieftain to visit London, and 
 make an illusory submission, but he was no sooner safe 
 home again than its terms were set aside; and after a 
 wearisome struggle, in which Shane foiled the efforts of 
 the Lord Deputy to entrap or to poison him, he remained
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 363 
 
 virtually master of the north. His success stirred larger 
 dreams of ambition. He invaded Connaught, and pressed 
 Clanrickard hard ; while he replied to the remonstrances 
 of the Council at Dublin with a bold defiance. " By the 
 sword I have won these lands," he answered, "and by the 
 sword will I keep them." But defiance broke idly against 
 the skill and vigor of Sir Henry Sidney, who succeeded 
 Sussex as Lord Deputy. The rival septs of the north were 
 drawn into a rising against O'Neill, while the English 
 army advanced from the Pale; and in 1567 Shane, defeated 
 by the O'Donnells, took refuge in Antrim, and was hewn 
 to pieces in a drunken squabble by his Scottish enter- 
 tainers. 
 
 The victory of Sidney marked the turn of the tide which 
 had run so long against Elizabeth. The danger which 
 England dreaded from Mary Stuart, the terror of a Catholic 
 sovereign and a Catholic reaction, reached its height 
 only to pass irretrievably away. At the moment when 
 the Irish revolt was being trampled under foot a terrible 
 event suddenly struck light through the gathering clouds 
 in the north. Mary had used Darnley as a tool to bring 
 about the ruin of his confederates and to further her policy ; 
 but from the moment that she discovered his actual com- 
 plicity in the plot for Rizzio's murder she had loathed and 
 avoided him. Ominous words dropped from her lips. 
 " Unless she were free of him some way," Mary was 
 heard to mutter, " she had no pleasure to live." The lords 
 whom he had drawn into his plot only to desert and betray 
 them hated him with as terrible a hatred, and in their 
 longing for vengeance a new adventurer saw the road to 
 power. Of all the border nobles James Hepburn, the Earl 
 of Bothwell, was the boldest and the most unscrupulous. 
 But, Protestant as he was, he had never swerved from the 
 side of the Crown; he had supported the Regent, and 
 crossed the seas to pledge as firm a support to Mary ; and 
 his loyalty and daring alike appealed to the young Queen's 
 heart. Little as he was touched by Mary's passion, it
 
 364 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 stirred in the Earl dreams of a union with the Queen; and 
 great as were the obstacles to such a union which presented 
 themselves in Mary's marriage and his own, Bothwell was 
 of too desperate a temper to recoil before obstacles such as 
 these. Divorce would free him from his own wife. To 
 free himself from Darnley he seized on the hatred which 
 the lords whom Darnley had deserted and betrayed bore 
 to the King. Bothwell joined Murray and the English 
 ambassador in praying for the recall of Morton and the 
 exiles. The pardon was granted; the nobles returned to 
 court, and the bulk of them joined readily in a conspiracy 
 to strike down one whom they still looked on as their bit- 
 terest foe. 
 
 Morton alone stood aloof. He demanded an assurance 
 of the Queen's sanction to the deed ; and no such assurance 
 was given him. On the contrary Mary's mood seemed 
 suddenly to change. Her hatred to Darnley passed all at 
 once into demonstration of the old affection. He had 
 fallen sick with vice and misery, and she visited him on 
 his sick-bed, and persuaded him to follow her to Edin- 
 burgh. She visited him again in a ruinous and lonely 
 house near the palace in which he was lodged by her order, 
 on the ground that its pare air would further his recovery, 
 kissed him as she bade him farewell, and rode gayly back 
 to a wedding-dance at Holyrood. If Mary's passion had 
 drawn her to share Bothwell 's guilt, these acts were but 
 awful preludes to her husband's doom. If on the other 
 hand her reconciliation was a real one, it only drove Both- 
 well to hurry on his deed of blood without waiting for the 
 aid of the nobles who had sworn the King's death. The 
 terrible secret is still hid in a cloud of doubt and mystery 
 which will probably never be wholly dispelled. But Mary 
 had hardly returned to her palace when, two hours after 
 midnight on the ninth of February, 1567, an awful ex- 
 plosion shook the city. The burghers rushed out from the 
 gates to find the house of Kirk o' Field destroyed and 
 Darnley's body dead beside the ruins.
 
 CHAP. 4.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 365 
 
 The murder was undoubtedly the deed of Both well. It 
 was soon known that his servant had stored the powder 
 beneath the King's bed-chamber and that the Earl had 
 watched without the walls till the deed was done. But, 
 in spite of gathering suspicion and of a charge of murder 
 made formally against Bothwell by Lord Lennox no seri- 
 ous steps were taken to investigate the crime ; and a rumor 
 that Mary purposed to marry the murderer drove her 
 friends to despair. Her agent in England wrote to her 
 that " if she married that man she would lose the favor of 
 God, her own reputation, and the hearts of all England, 
 Ireland, and Scotland." But whatever may have been the 
 ties of passion or guilt which united them, Mary was now 
 powerless in Bothwell's hands. While Murray withdrew 
 to France on pretext of travel, the young Earl used the 
 plot against Darnley into which he had drawn the lords to 
 force from them a declaration that he was guiltless of the 
 murder and their consent to his marriage with the Queen. 
 He boasted that he would marry Mary, whether she would 
 or no. Every stronghold in the kingdom was placed in 
 his hands, and this step was the prelude to a trial and 
 acquittal which the overwhelming force of his followers 
 in Edinburgh turned into a bitter mockery. The Protes- 
 tants were bribed by the assembling of a Parliament in 
 which Mary for the first time gave her sanction to the laws 
 which established the reformation in Scotland. A shame- 
 less suit for his divorce removed the last obstacle to Both- 
 well's ambition ; and a seizure of the Queen as she rode to 
 Linlithgow, whether real or fictitious, was followed three 
 weeks later by their union on the fifteenth of May. Mary 
 may have yielded to force; she may have yielded to pas- 
 sion ; it is possible that in Bothwell's vigor she saw the 
 means of at last mastering the kingdom and wreaking her 
 vengeance on the lords. But whatever were her hopes or 
 fears, in a month more all was over. The horror at the 
 Queen's marriage with a man fresh from her husband's 
 blood drove the whole nation to revolt. The Catholic
 
 366 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 party held aloof from a Queen who seemed to have for- 
 saken them by a Protestant marriage and by her acknowl- 
 edgment of the Protestant Church. The Protestant lords 
 seized on the general horror to free themselves from a 
 master whose subtlety and bloodshed had placed them at 
 his feet. Morton and Argyle rallied the forces of the Con- 
 gregation at Stirling, and were soon joined by the bulk of 
 the Scottish nobles of either religion. Their entrance into 
 Edinburgh roused the capital into insurrection. On the 
 fifteenth of June Mary and her husband advanced with a 
 fair force to Seton to encounter the Lords ; but their men 
 refused to fight, and Bothwell galloped off into lifelong 
 exile, while the Queen was brought back to Edinburgh in 
 a frenzy of despair, tossing back wild words of defiance to 
 the curses of the crowd.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 ENGLAND AND THE PAPACY. 
 15671576. 
 
 THE fall of Mary freed Elizabeth from the most terrible 
 of her outer dangers. But it left her still struggling with 
 ever-growing dangers at home. The religious peace for 
 which she had fought so hard was drawing to an end. 
 Sturdily as she might aver to her subjects that no change 
 had really been made in English religion, that the old faith 
 had only been purified, that the realm had only been freed 
 from Papal usurpation, jealously as she might preserve the 
 old episcopate, the old service, the old vestments and usages 
 of public worship, her action abroad told too plainly its 
 tale. The world was slowly drifting to a gigantic conflict 
 between the tradition of the past and a faith that rejected 
 the tradition of the past ; and in this conflict men saw that 
 England was ranging itself not on the side of the old belief 
 but of the new. The real meaning of Elizabeth's attitude 
 was revealed in her refusal to own the Council of Trent. 
 From that moment the hold which she had retained on all 
 who still clung strongly to Catholic doctrine was roughly 
 shaken. Her system of conformity received a heavy blow 
 from the decision of the Papacy that attendance at the 
 common prayer was unlawful. Her religious compromise 
 was almost destroyed by the victory of the Guises. In the 
 moment of peril she was driven on Protestant support, and 
 Protestant support had to be bought by a Test Act which 
 excluded every zealous Catholic from all share in the gov- 
 ernment or administration of the realm, while the re-en- 
 actment of Edward's Articles by the Convocation of the 
 clergy was in avowal of Protestantism which none could
 
 868 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 mistake. Whatever in fact might be Elizabeth's own 
 predilections, even the most cautious of Englishmen could 
 hardly doubt of the drift of her policy. The hopes which 
 the party of moderation had founded on a marriage with 
 Philip, or a marriage with the Austrian Archduke, or a 
 marriage with Dudley, had all passed away. The con- 
 ciliatory efforts of Pope Pius had been equally fruitless. 
 The last hope of a quiet undoing of the religious changes 
 lay in the succession of Mary Stuart. But with the fall of 
 Mary a peaceful return to the older faith became impos- 
 sible; and the consciousness of this could hardly fail to 
 wake new dangers for Elizabeth, whether at home or 
 abroad. 
 
 It was in fact at this moment of seeming triumph that 
 the great struggle of her reign began. In 1565 a pontiff 
 was chosen to fill the Papal chair whose policy was that 
 of open war between England and Rome. At no moment 
 in its history had the fortunes of the Roman See sunk so 
 low as at the accession of Pius the Fifth. The Catholic 
 revival had as yet done nothing to arrest the march of the 
 Reformation. In less than half a century the new doc- 
 trines had spread from Iceland to the Pyrenees and from 
 Finland to the Alps. When Pius mounted the throne 
 Lutheranism was firmly established in Scandinavia and in 
 Northern Germany. Along the eastern border of the Em- 
 pire it had conquered Livonia and Old Prussia ; its adhe- 
 rents formed a majority of the nobles of Poland ; Hungary 
 seemed drifting toward heresy ; and in Transylvania the 
 Diet had already confiscated aU Church lands. In Central 
 Germany the great prelates whose princedoms covered so 
 large a part of Franconia opposed in vain the spread of 
 Lutheran doctrine. It seemed as triumphant in Southern 
 Germany, for the Duchy of Austria was for the most part 
 Lutheran, and many of the Bavarian towns with a large 
 part of the Bavarian nobles had espoused the cause of the 
 Reformation. In Western Europe the fiercer doctrines of 
 Calvinism took the place of the faith of Luther. At the
 
 CHAP. 3.j THE REFORMATION. 15401608. 369 
 
 death of Henry the Second Calvin's missionaries poured 
 from Geneva over France, and in a few years every 
 province of the realm was dotted with Calvinistic churches. 
 The Huguenots rose into a great political and religious 
 party which struggled openly for the mastery of the realm 
 and wrested from the Crown a legal recognition of its ex- 
 istence and of freedom of worship. The influence of 
 France told quickly on the regions about it. The Rhine- 
 land was fast losing its hold on Catholicism. In the 
 Netherlands, where the persecutions of Charles the Fifth 
 had failed to check the upgrowth of heresy, his successor 
 saw Calvinism win state after state, and gird itself to a 
 desperate struggle at once for religious and for civil in- 
 dependence. Still further west a sudden revolution had 
 won Scotland for the faith of Geneva; and a revolution 
 hardly less sudden, though marked with consummate sub- 
 tlety, had in effect added England to the Churches of the 
 Reformation. Christendom in fact was almost lost to the 
 Papacy ; for only two European countries owned its sway 
 without dispute. " There remain firm to the Pope," wrote 
 a Venetian ambassador to his State, " only Spain and Italy 
 with some few islands, and those countries possessed by 
 your Serenity in Dalmatia and Greece." 
 
 It was at this moment of defeat that Pius the Fifth 
 mounted the Papal throne. His earlier life had been that 
 of an Inquisitor; and he combined the ruthlessness of a 
 persecutor with the ascetic devotion of a saint. Pius had 
 but one end, that of re-conquering Christendom, of restor- 
 ing the rebel nations to the fold of the Church, and of 
 stamping out heresy by fire and sword. To his fiery faith 
 every means of warfare seemed hallowed by the sanctity of 
 his cause. The despotism of the prince, the passion of the 
 populace, the sword of the mercenary, the very dagger of 
 the assassin, were all seized without scruple as weapons in 
 the warfare of God. The ruthlessness of the Inquisitor 
 was turned into the world-wide policy of the Papacy. 
 Wljen Philip doubted how to deal w_ith the troubles in the
 
 370 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [Boon VI. 
 
 Netherlands, Pius bade him deal with them by force of 
 arms. When the Pope sent soldiers of his own to join the 
 Catholics in France he bade their leader " slay instantly 
 whatever heretic fell into his hands." The massacres of 
 Alva were rewarded by a gift of the consecrated hat and 
 sword, as the massacre of St. Bartholomew was hailed by 
 the successor of Pius with a solemn thanksgiving. The 
 force of the Pope's effort lay in its concentration of every 
 energy on a single aim. Rome drew in fact a new power 
 from the ruin of her schemes of secular aggrandizement. 
 The narrower hopes and dreads which had sprung from 
 their position as Italian princes told no longer on the 
 Popes. All hope of the building up of a wider princedom 
 passed away. The hope of driving the stranger from Italy 
 came equally to an end. But on the other hand Rome was 
 screened from the general conflicts of the secular powers. 
 It was enabled to be the friend of every Catholic State, 
 and that at a moment when every Catholic State saw in 
 the rise of Calvinism a new cause for seeking its friend- 
 ship. Calvinism drew with it a thirst for political liberty, 
 and religious revolution became the prelude to political 
 revolution. From this moment therefore the cause of the 
 Papacy became the cause of kings, and a craving for self- 
 preservation rallied the Catholic princes round the Papal 
 throne. The same dread of utter ruin rallied round it the 
 Catholic Church. All strife, all controversy was hushed 
 in the presence of the foe. With the close of the Council 
 of Trent came a unity of feeling and of action such as had 
 never been seen before. Faith was defined. The Papal 
 authority stood higher than ever. The bishops owned 
 themselves to be delegates of the Roman See. The clergy 
 were drawn together into a disciplined body by the institu- 
 tion of seminaries. The new religious orders carried 
 everywhere the watchword of implicit obedience. As the 
 heresy of Calvin pressed on to one victory after another, 
 the Catholic world drew closer and closer round the stand- 
 ard of Rome.
 
 CHAP. 5.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 371 
 
 What raised the warfare of Pius into grandeur was the 
 scale upon which he warred. His hand was everywhere 
 throughout Christendom. Under him Rome became the 
 political as well as the religious centre of Western Europe. 
 The history of the Papacy widened again, as in the Middle 
 Ages, into the history of the world. Every scheme of the 
 Catholic resistance was devised or emboldened at Rome. 
 While her Jesuit emissaries won a new hold in Bavaria 
 and Southern Germany, rolled back the tide of Protestant- 
 ism in the Rhine-land, and by school and pulpit labored to 
 re-Catholicize the Empire, Rome spurred Mary Stuart to 
 the Darnley marriage, urged Philip to march Alva on the 
 Netherlands, broke up the religious truce which Catharine 
 had won for France, and celebrated with solemn pomp the 
 massacre of the Huguenots. England above all was the 
 object of Papal attack. The realm of Elizabeth was too 
 important for the general Papal scheme of re-conquering 
 Christendom to be lightly let go. England alone could 
 furnish a centre to the reformed communions of Western 
 Europe. The Lutheran states of North Germany were 
 too small. The Scandinavian kingdoms were too remote. 
 Scotland hardly ranked as yet as a European power. Even 
 if France joined the new movement her influence would 
 long be neutralized by the strife of the religious parties 
 within her pale. But England was to outer seeming a 
 united realm. Her government held the country firmly in 
 hand. Whether as an island or from her neighborhood to 
 the chief centres of the religious strife, she was so placed 
 as to give an effective support to the new opinions. Prot- 
 estant refugees found a safe shelter within her bounds. 
 Her trading ships diffused heresy in every port they 
 touched at. She could at little risk feed the Calvinistic 
 revolution in France or the Netherlands. In the great 
 battle of the old faith and the new England was thus the 
 key of the reformed position. With England Protestant 
 the fight against Protestantism could only be a slow and 
 doubtful one. On the other hand a Catholic England
 
 372 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VL 
 
 would render religious revolution in the west all but hope- 
 less. Hand in hand with Philip religiously, as she al- 
 ready was politically, the great island might turn the tide 
 of the mighty conflict which had so long gone against the 
 Papacy. 
 
 It was from this sense of the importance of England in 
 the world- wide struggle which it was preparing that Rome 
 had watched with such a feverish interest the effort of Mary 
 Stuart. Her victory would have given to Catholicism the 
 two westernmost realms of the Reformation, England and 
 Scotland; it would have aided it in the re-conquest of the 
 Netherlands and of France. No formal bond indeed, such 
 as the Calvinists believed to exist, bound Mary and Pius 
 and Philip and Catharine of Medicis together in a vast 
 league for the restoration of the Faith ; the difference of 
 political aim held France and Spain obstinately apart both 
 from each other and from Mary Stuart, and it was only at 
 the Vatican that the great movement was conceived as a 
 whole. But practically the policy of Mary and Philip 
 worked forward to the same end. While the Scottish 
 Queen prepared her counter-reformation in England and 
 Scotland, Philip was gathering a formidable host which 
 was to suppress Calvinism as well as liberty in the Nether- 
 lands. Of the seventeen provinces which Philip had in- 
 nerited from his father, Charles, in this part of his domin- 
 ions, each had its own constitution, its own charter and 
 privileges, its own right of taxation. All clung to their 
 local independence ; and resistance to any projects of cen- 
 tralization was common to the great nobles and the 
 burghers of the towns. Philip on the other hand was 
 resolute to bring them by gradual steps to the same level 
 of absolute subjection and incorporation in the body of the 
 monarchy as the provinces of Castile. The Netherlands 
 were the wealthiest part of his dominions. Flanders alone 
 contributed more to his exchequer than all his kingdoms in 
 Spain. With a treasury drained by a thousand schemes 
 Philip longed to have this wealth at his unfettered dis-
 
 CHAP. 5.] THE REFORMATION. 1540 108. 373 
 
 posal, while his absolutism recoiled from the independence 
 of the States, and his bigotry drove him to tread their 
 heresy under foot. Policy backed the impulses of greed 
 and fanaticism. In the strangely mingled mass of the 
 Spanish monarchy, the one bond which held together its 
 various parts, divided as they were by blood, by tradition, 
 by tongue, was their common faith. Philip was in more 
 than name the " Catholic King. " Catholicism alone united 
 the burgher of the Netherlands to the nobles of Castile, 
 or Milanese and Neapolitan to the Aztec of Mexico and 
 Peru. With such an empire heresy meant to Philip polit- 
 ical chaos, and the heresy of Calvin, with its ready or- 
 ganization and its doctrine of resistance, promised not only 
 chaos but active revolt. In spite therefore of the growing 
 discontent in the Netherlands, in spite of the alienation of 
 the nobles and the resistance of the Estates, he clung to a 
 system of government which ignored the liberties of every 
 province, and to a persecution which drove thousands of 
 skilled workmen to the shores of England. 
 
 At last the general discontent took shape in open resist- 
 ance. The success of the French Huguenots in wresting 
 the free exercise rf their faith from the monarchy told on 
 the Calvinists 01 the Low Countries. The nobles gathered 
 in leagues. Riots broke out in the towns. The churches 
 were sacked, and heretic preachers preached in the open 
 fields to multitudes who carried weapons to protect them. 
 If Philip's system was to continue it must be by force of 
 arms, and the King seized the disturbances as a pretext 
 for dealing a blow he had long meditated at the growing 
 heresy of this portion of his dominions. Pius the Fifth 
 pressed him to deal with heresy by the sword, and in 1567 
 an army of ten thousand men gathered in Italy under the 
 Duke of Alva for a march on the Low Countries. Had 
 Alva reached the Netherlands while Mary was still in the 
 flush of her success, it is hard to see how England could 
 have been saved. But again Fortune proved Elizabeth's 
 friend. The passion of Mary shattered the hopes of Ca-
 
 374 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 tholicism, and at the moment when Alva led his troops 
 over the Alps Mary passed a prisoner within the walls of 
 Lochleven. Alone however the Duke was a mighty- 
 danger : nor could any event have been more embarrass- 
 ing to Elizabeth than his arrival in the Netherlands in 
 the autumn of 1567. The terror he inspired hushed all 
 thought of resistance. The towns were occupied. The 
 heretics were burned. The greatest nobles were sent to the 
 block or driven, like William of Orange, from the country. 
 The Netherlands lay at Philip's feet; and Alva's army 
 lowered like a thundercloud over the Protestant West. 
 
 The triumph of Catholicism and the presence of a Cath- 
 olic army in a country so closely connected with England 
 at once revived the dreams of a Catholic rising against 
 Elizabeth's throne, while the news of Alva's massacres 
 stirred in every one of her Protestant subjects a thirst for 
 revenge which it was hard to hold in check. Yet to strike 
 a blow at Alva was impossible. Antwerp was the great 
 mart of English trade, and a stoppage of the trade with 
 Flanders, such as war must bring about, would have 
 broken hah 5 the merchants in London. Elizabeth could 
 only look on while the Duke trod resistance and heresy 
 under foot, and prepared in the Low Countries a securer 
 starting-point for his attack on Protestantism in the West. 
 With Elizabeth indeed or her cautious and moderate 
 Lutheranism Philip had as yet little will to meddle, how- 
 ever hotly Rome might urge him to attack her. He knew 
 that the Calvinism of the Netherlands looked for support 
 to the Calvinism of France; and as soon as Alva's work 
 was done in the Low Countries the Duke had orders to aid 
 the Guises in assailing the Huguenots. But the terror of 
 the Huguenots precipitated the strife, and while Alva was 
 still busy with attacks from the patriots under the princes 
 of the house of Orange a fresh rising in France woke the 
 civil war at the close of 1567. Catharine lulled this strife 
 for the moment by a new edict of toleration ; but the pres- 
 ence of Alva was stirring hopes and fears in other lands
 
 CHAP. 5.] THE REFORMATION. 15401608. 375 
 
 than France. Between Mary Stuart and the lords who 
 had imprisoned her in Lochleven reconciliation was im- 
 possible. Elizabeth, once lightened of her dread from 
 Mary, would have been content with a restoration of Mur- 
 ray's actual supremacy. Already alarmed by Calvinistic 
 revolt against monarchy in France, she was still more 
 alarmed by the success of Calvinistic revolt against mon- 
 archy in Scotland ; and the presence of Alva in the Nether- 
 lands made her anxious above all to settle the troubles in 
 the north and to devise some terms of reconciliation be- 
 tween Mary and her subjects. But it was in vain that she 
 demanded the release of the Queen. The Scotch Protest- 
 ants, with Knox at their head, called loudly for Mary's 
 death as a murderess. If the lords shrank from such ex- 
 tremities, they had no mind to set her free and to risk 
 their heads for Elizabeth's pleasure. As the price of her 
 life they forced Mary to resign her crown in favor of her 
 child, and to name Murray, who was now returning from 
 France, as regent during his minority. In July, 1567, the 
 babe was solemnly crowned as James the Sixth. 
 
 But Mary had only consented to abdicate because she 
 felt sure of escape. With an infant king the regency of 
 Murray promised to be a virtual sovereignty ; and the old 
 factions of Scotland. woke again into life. The house of 
 Hamilton, which stood next in succession to the throne, 
 became the centre of a secret league which gathered to it 
 the nobles and prelates who longed for the re-establishment 
 of Catholicism, and who saw in Alva's triumph a pledge 
 of their own. The regent's difficulties were doubled by 
 the policy of Elizabeth. Her wrath at the revolt of sub- 
 jects against their Queen, her anxiety that " by this ex- 
 ample none of her own be encouraged," only grew with 
 the disregard of her protests and threats. In spite of 
 Cecil she refused to recognize Murray's government, re- 
 newed her demands for the Queen's release, and encour- 
 aged the Hamiltons in their designs of freeing her. She 
 was in fact stirred by more fears than her dread of Calvin-
 
 376 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 ism and of Calvinistic liberty. Philip's triumph in the 
 Netherlands and the presence of his army across the sea 
 was filling the Catholics of the northern counties with new 
 hopes, and scaring Elizabeth from any joint action with 
 the Scotch Calvinists which might call the Spanish forces 
 over sea. She even stooped to guard against any possible 
 projects of Philip by fresh negotiations for a marriage 
 with one of the Austrian archdukes. But the negotiations 
 proved as fruitless as before, while Scotland moved boldly 
 forward in its new career. A Parliament which assembled 
 at the opening of 1568 confirmed the deposition of the 
 Queen, and made Catholic worship punishable with the 
 pain of death. The triumph of Calvinistic bigotry only 
 hastened the outbreak which had long been preparing, and 
 at the beginning of May an escape of Mary from her prison 
 was a signal for civil war. Five days later six thousand 
 men gathered round her at Hamilton, and Argyle joined the 
 Catholic lords who rallied to her banner. The news found 
 different welcomes at the English court. Elizabeth at 
 once offered to arbitrate between Mary and her subjects. 
 Cecil, on the other hand, pressed Murray to strike quick 
 and hard. But the regent needed little pressing. Sur- 
 prised as he was, Murray was quickly in arms ; and cut- 
 ting off Mary's force as it moved on Dumbarton, he 
 brought it to battle at Langside on the Clyde on the thir- 
 teenth of May, and broke it in a panicstricken rout. Mary 
 herself, after a fruitless effort to reach Dumbarton, fled 
 southward to find a refuge in Galloway. A ride of ninety 
 miles brought her to the Solway, but she found her friends 
 wavering in her support and ready to purchase pardon 
 from Murray by surrendering her into the regent's hands. 
 From that moment she abandoned all hope from Scotland. 
 She believed that Elizabeth would in the interests of mon- 
 archy restore her to the throne ; and changing her designs 
 with the rapidity of genius, she pushed in a light boat 
 across the Solway, and was safe before the evening fell in 
 the castle of Carlisle.
 
 CHAP. 5.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 877 
 
 The presence of Alva in Flanders was a far less peril 
 than the presence of Mary in Carlisle. To restore her, as 
 she demanded, by force of arms was impossible. If Eliza- 
 beth was zealous for the cause of monarchy, she had no 
 mind to crush the nobles who had given her security 
 against her rival simply to seat that rival triumphantly 
 on the throne. On the other hand to retain her in Eng- 
 land was to furnish a centre for revolt. Mary herself in- 
 deed threatened that " if they kept her prisoner they should 
 have enough to do with her." If the Queen would not aid 
 in her restoration to the throne, she demanded a free pas- 
 sage to France. But compliance with such a request would 
 have given the Guises a terrible weapon against Elizabeth 
 and have insured French intervention in Scotland. Foi 
 a while Elizabeth hoped to bring Murray to receive Mary 
 back peaceably as Queen. But the regent refused to sacri- 
 fice himself and the realm to Elizabeth's policy. When 
 the Duke of Norfolk with other commissioners appeared 
 at York to hold a formal inquiry into Mary's conduct with 
 a view to her restoration, Murray openly charged the 
 Queen with a share in the murder of her husband, and he 
 produced letters from her to Bothwell, which if genuine 
 substantiate!: the charge. , Till Mary was cleared of guilt, 
 Murray would hear nothing of her return, and Mary re- 
 fused to submit to such a trial as would clear her. So 
 eager however was Elizabeth to get rid of the pressing 
 peril of her presence in England that Mary's refusal to 
 submit to any trial only drove her to fresh devices for her 
 restoration. She urged upon Murray the suppression of 
 the graver charges, and upon Mary the leaving Murray in 
 actual possession of the royal power as the price of her re- 
 turn. Neither however would listen to terms which sacri- 
 ficed both to Elizabeth's self-interest. The Regent per- 
 sisted in charging the Queen with murder and adultery. 
 Mary refused either to answer or to abdicate in favor of 
 her infant son. 
 
 The triumph indeed of her bold policy was best advanced,
 
 878 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK Vt 
 
 as the Queen of Scots had no doubt foreseen, by simple in- 
 action. Her misfortunes, her resolute denials were gradu- 
 ally wiping away the stain of her guilt and winning back 
 the Catholics of England to her cause. Already there 
 were plans for her marriage with Norfolk, the head of the 
 English nobles, as for her marriage with the heir of the 
 Hamiltons. The first match might give her the English 
 crown, the second could hardly fail to restore her to the 
 crown of Scotland. In any case her presence, rousing as 
 it did fresh hopes of a Catholic reaction, put pressure on 
 her sister Queen. Elizabeth "had the wolf by the ears," 
 while the fierce contest which Alva's presence roused in 
 France and in the Netherlands was firing the temper of 
 the two great parties in England. In the Court, as in the 
 country, the forces of progress and of resistance stood at 
 last in sharp and declared opposition to each other. Cecil 
 at the head of the Protestants demanded a general alliance 
 with the Protestant churches throughout Europe, a war 
 in the Low Countries against Alva, and the unconditional 
 surrender of Mary to her Scotch subjects for the punish- 
 ment she deserved. The Catholics on the other hand, 
 backed by the mass of the Conservative party with the 
 Duke of Norfolk at its head, and supported by the wealth- 
 ier merchants who dreaded the ruin of the Flemish trade, 
 were as earnest in demanding the dismissal of Cecil and 
 the Protestants from the council-board, a steady peace 
 with Spain, and, though less openly, a recognition of 
 Mary's succession. Elizabeth was driven to temporize as 
 before. She refused Cecil's counsels; but she sent money 
 and arms to Conde, and hampered A.va by seizing treasure 
 on its way to him, and by pushing ,he quarrel even to a 
 temporary embargo on shipping either side the sea. She 
 refused the counsels of Norfolk; but she would hear 
 nothing of a declaration of war, or give any judgment 
 on the chai-ges against the Scottish Queen, or recognize 
 the accession of James in her stead. 
 
 But to the pressure of Alva and Mary was now added
 
 CHAP. 5.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 379 
 
 the pressure of Rome. With the triumph of Philip in the 
 Netherlands and of the Guises in France Pius the Fifth 
 held that the time had come for a decisive attack on Eliz- 
 abeth. If Philip held back from playing the champion 
 of Catholicism, if even the insults to Alva failed to stir 
 him to active hostility, Rome could still turn to its adhe- 
 rents within the realm. Pius had already sent two envoys 
 in 1567 with powers to absolve the English Catholics who 
 had attended church from their schism, but to withdraw 
 all hope of future absolution for those who continued to 
 conform. The result of their mission however had been 
 so small that it was necessary to go further. The triumph 
 of Alva in the Netherlands, the failure of the Prince of 
 Orange in an attempt to rescue them from the Spanish 
 army, the terror-struck rising of the French Huguenots, 
 the growing embarrassments of Elizabeth both at home 
 and abroad, seemed to offer Rome its opportunity of deliv- 
 ering a final blow. In February, 1569, the Queen was de- 
 clared a heretic by a Bull which asserted in their strong- 
 est form the Papal claims to a temporal supremacy over 
 princes. As a heretic and excommunicate, she was " de- 
 prived of her pretended right to the said kingdom," her 
 subjects were absolved from allegiance to her, commanded 
 "not to dare to obey her," and anathematized if they did 
 obey. The Bull was not as yet promulgated, but Dr. Mor- 
 ton was sent into England to denounce the Queen as fallen 
 from her usurped authority, and to promise the speedy 
 issue of the sentence of deposition. The religious pressure 
 was backed by political intrigue. Ridolfi, an Italian mer- 
 chant settled in London, who had received full powers and 
 money from Rome, knit the threads of a Catholic revolt 
 in the north, and drew the Duke of Norfolk into corre- 
 spondence with Mary Stuart. The Duke was the son of 
 Lord Surrey and grandson of the Norfolk who had headed 
 the Conservative party through the reign of Henry the 
 Eighth. Like the rest of the English peers, he had acqui- 
 esced in the religious compromise of the Queen. It was
 
 380 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK YL 
 
 as a Protestant that the more Conservative among his fel- 
 low nobles now supported a project for his union with the 
 Scottish Queen. With an English and Protestant hus- 
 band it was thought that Murray and the lords might 
 safely take back Mary to the Scottish throne, and Eng- 
 land again accept her as the successor to her crown. But 
 Norfolk was not contented with a single game. From 
 the Pope and Philip he sought aid in his marriage-plot as 
 a Catholic at heart, whose success would bring about a 
 restoration of Catholicism throughout the realm. With 
 the Catholic lords he plotted the overthrow of Cecil and 
 the renewal of friendship with Spain. To carry out 
 schemes such as these however required a temper of sub- 
 tler and bolder stamp than the Duke's : Cecil found it easy 
 by playing on his greed to part him from his fellow no- 
 bles; his marriage with Mary as a Protestant was set 
 aside by Murray's refusal to accept her as Queen; and 
 Norfolk promised to enter into no correspondence with 
 Mary Stuart but with Elizabeth's sanction. 
 
 The hope of a crown, whether in Scotland or at home, 
 proved too great however for his good faith, and Norfolk 
 was soon wrapped anew in the net of papal intrigue. But 
 it was not so much on Norfolk that Rome counted as on 
 the nobles of the North. The three great houses of the 
 northern border the Cliffords of Cumberland, the Ne- 
 villes of Westmoreland, the Percies of Northumberland 
 had remained Catholics at heart; and from the moment 
 of Mary's entrance into England they had been only wait- 
 ing for a signal of revolt. They looked for foreign aid, 
 and foreign aid now seemed assured. In spite of Eliza- 
 beth's help the civil war in France went steadily against 
 the Huguenots. In March, 1569, their army was routed at 
 Jarnac, and their leader, Conde, left dead on the field. 
 The joy with which the victory was greeted by the Eng- 
 lish Catholics sprang from a consciousness that the victors 
 looked on it as a prelude to their attack on Protestantism 
 across the sea. No sooner indeed was this triumph won
 
 CHAP. 5.] THE REFORMATION. 15401608. 381 
 
 than Mary's uncle, the Cardinal of Lorraine, as the head 
 of the house of Guise, proposed to Philip to complete the 
 victory of Catholicism by uniting the forces of France and 
 Spain against Elizabeth. The moment was one of peril 
 such as England had never known. Norfolk was still 
 pressing forward to a marriage with Mary ; he was backed 
 by the second great Conservative peer, Lord Arundel, and 
 supported by a large part of the nobles. The Northern 
 Earls with Lords Montague and Lumley and the head of 
 the great house of Dacres were ready to take up arms, and 
 sure as they believed of the aid of the Earls of Derby 
 and Shrewsbury. Both parties of plotters sought Philip's 
 sanction and placed themselves at his disposal. A descent 
 of French and Spanish troops would have called both to 
 the field. But much as Philip longed for a triumph of re- 
 ligion he had no mind for a triumph of France. France 
 now meant the Guises, and to set their niece Mary Stuart 
 on the English throne was to insure the close union of 
 England and the France they ruled. Though he suffered 
 Alva therefore to plan the dispatch of a force from the 
 Netherlands should a Catholic revolt prove successful, he 
 refused to join in a French attack. 
 
 But the Papal exhortations and the victories of the 
 Guises did their work without Philip's aid. The conspir- 
 ators of the north only waited for Norfolk's word to rise 
 in arms. But the Duke dissembled and delayed, while 
 Elizabeth, roused at last to her danger, struck quick and 
 hard. Mary Stuart was given in charge to the Puritan 
 Lord Huntingdon. The Earls of Arundel and Pembroke, 
 with Lord Lumley, were secured. Norfolk himself, sum- 
 moned peremptorily to court, dared not disobey ; and found 
 himself at the opening of October a prisoner in the Tower. 
 The more dangerous plot was foiled, for whatever were 
 Norfolk's own designs, the bulk of his Conservative parti- 
 sans were good Protestants, and their aim of securing the 
 succession by a Protestant marriage for Mary was one 
 with which the bulk of the nation would have sympathized,
 
 382 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 But the Catholic plot remained ; and in October the hopes 
 of its leaders were stirred afresh by a new defeat of the 
 Huguenots at Montcontour; while a Papal envoy, Dr. 
 Morton, goaded them to action by news that a Bull of 
 Deposition was ready at Rome. At last a summons to 
 court tested the loyalty of the Earls, and on the tenth of 
 November, 1569, Northumberland gave the signal for a 
 rising. He was at once joined by the Earl of Westmore- 
 land, and in a few days the Earls entered Durham and 
 called the North to arms. They shrank from an open re- 
 volt against the Queen, and demanded only the dismissal 
 of her ministers and the recognition of Mary's right of 
 succession. But with these demands went a pledge to re- 
 establish the Catholic religion. The Bible and Prayer- 
 book were torn to pieces, and Mass said once more at the 
 altar of Durham Cathedral, before the Earls pushed on to 
 Doncaster with an army which soon swelled to thousands 
 of men. Their cry was " to reduce all causes of religion 
 to the old custom and usage ;" and the Earl of Sussex, her 
 general in the North, wrote frankly to Elizabeth that 
 " there were not ten gentlemen in Yorkshire that did allow 
 [approve] her proceedings in the cause of religion." But 
 he was as loyal as he was frank, and held York stoutly 
 while the Queen ordered Mary's hasty removal to a new 
 prison at Coventry. The storm however broke as rapidly 
 as it had gathered. Leonard Dacres held aloof. Lord 
 Derby proved loyal. The Catholic lords of the south re- 
 fused to stir without help from Spain. The mass of the 
 Catholics throughout the country made no sign ; and the 
 Earls no sooner halted irresolute in presence of this unex- 
 pected inaction than their army caught the panic and dis- 
 persed. Northumberland and Weslpioreland fled in the 
 middle of December, and were followed in their flight by 
 Leonard Dacres of Naworth, while their miserable adhe- 
 rents paid for their disloyalty in bloodshed and ruin. 
 
 The ruthless measures of repression which followed this 
 revolt were the first breach in the clemency of Elizabeth's
 
 CHAP. 5.] THE REFORMATION. 15401608. 383 
 
 rule. But they were signs of terror which were not lost 
 on her opponents. It was the general inaction of the 
 Catholics which had foiled the hopes of the northern Earls; 
 and Pope Pius resolved to stir them to activity by publish- 
 ing in March, 1570, the Bull of Excommunication and 
 Deposition which had been secretly issued in the preced- 
 ing year. In his Bull Pius declared that Elizabeth had 
 forfeited all right to the throne, released her subjects from 
 their oath of allegiance to her, and forbade her nobles and 
 people to obey her on pain of excommunication. In spite 
 of the efforts of the Government to prevent the entry of 
 any copies of this sentence into the realm the Bull was 
 found nailed in a spirit of ironical defiance on the Bishop 
 of London's door. Its effect was far from being what 
 Rome desired. With the exception of one or two zealots 
 the English Catholics treated the Bull as a dead letter. 
 The duty of obeying the Queen seemed a certain thing to 
 them, while that of obeying the Pope in temporal matters 
 was denied by most and doubted by all. Its spiritual 
 effect indeed was greater. The Bull dealt a severe blow 
 to the religious truce which Elizabeth had secured. In 
 the North the Catholics withdrew stubbornly from the na- 
 tional worship, and everywhere throughout the realm an 
 increase in the number of recusants showed the obedience 
 of a large body of Englishmen to the Papal command. 
 To the minds of English statesmen such an obedience to 
 the Papal bidding in matters of religion only heralded an 
 obedience to the Papal bidding in matters of state. In 
 issuing the Bull of Deposition Pius had declared war upon 
 the Queen. He had threatened her throne. He had called 
 on her subjects to revolt. If his secret pressure had stirred 
 the rising of the Northern Earls, his open declaration of 
 war might well rouse a general insurrection of Catholics 
 throughout the realm, while the plots of his agents threat- 
 ened the Queen's life. 
 
 How real-was the last danger was shown at this moment 
 by the murder of Murray. ^In January 1570 a Catholic
 
 384 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 partisan, James Hamilton, shot the Regent in the streets 
 of Linlithgow; and Scotland plunged at once into war 
 between the adherents of Mary and those of her son. The 
 blow broke Elizabeth's hold on Scotland at a moment when 
 conspiracy threatened her hold on England itself. The de- 
 feat of the Earls had done little to check the hopes of the 
 Roman court. Its intrigues were busier than ever. At 
 the close of the rising Norfolk was released from the Tower, 
 but he was no sooner free than he renewed his correspond- 
 ence with the Scottish Queen. Mary consented to wed 
 him, and the Duke, who still professed himself a Protes- 
 tant, trusted to carry the bulk of the English nobles with 
 him in pressing a marriage which seemed to take Mary 
 out of the hands of French and Catholic intriguers, to 
 make her an Englishwoman, and to settle the vexed ques- 
 tion of the succession to the throne. But it was only to 
 secure this general adhesion that Norfolk delayed to de- 
 clare himself a Catholic. He sought the Pope's approval 
 of his plans, and appealed to Philip for the intervention of 
 a Spanish army. At the head of this appeal stood the 
 name of Mary; while Norfolk's name was followed by 
 those of many lords of "the old blood," as the prouder 
 peers styled themselves. The significance of the request 
 was heightened by gatherings of Catholic refugees at Ant- 
 werp in the heart of Philip's dominions in the Low Coun- 
 tries round the fugitive leaders of the Northern Revolt. 
 The intervention of the Pope was brought to quicken 
 Philip's slow designs. Ridolfi, as the agent of the conspir- 
 ators, appeared at Rome and laid before Pius their plans 
 for the marriage of Norfolk and Mary, the union of both 
 realms under the Duke and the Scottish Queen, and the 
 seizure of Elizabeth and her counsellors at one of the royal 
 country houses. Pius backed the project with his warm 
 approval, and Ridolfi hurried to secure the needful aid from 
 Philip of Spain. 
 
 Enough of these conspiracies was discovered to rouse a 
 fresh ardor in the menaced Protestants. While Ridolfi
 
 CHAP. 5.] THE REFORMATION. 15401608, 385 
 
 was negotiating at Rome and Madrid, the Parliament met 
 to pass an act of attainder against the Northern Earls, 
 and to declare the introduction of Papal Bulls into the 
 country an act of high treason. It was made treason to 
 call the Queen heretic or schismatic, or to deny her right 
 to the throne. The rising indignation against Mary, as 
 "the daughter of Debate, who discord fell doth sow," was 
 shown in a statute, which declared any person who laid 
 claim to the Crown during the Queen's lifetime incapable 
 of ever succeeding to it. The disaffection of the Catholics 
 was met by imposing on all magistrates and public officers 
 the obligation of subscribing to the Articles of Faith, a 
 measure which in fact transferred the administration of 
 justice and public order to their Protestant opponents, by 
 forbidding conversions to Catholicism or bringing into 
 England of Papal absolutions or objects consecrated by the 
 Pope. Meanwhile Ridolfi was struggling in vain against 
 Philip's caution. The King made no objection to the 
 seizure or assassination of Elizabeth. The scheme secured 
 his fullest sympathy ; no such opportunity, he held, would 
 ever offer again ; and he longed to finish the affair quickly 
 before France should take part in it. But he could not be 
 brought to send troops to England before Elizabeth was 
 secured. If troops were once sent, the failure of the plot 
 would mean war with England ; and with fresh troubles 
 threatening Alva's hold on the Netherlands Philip had no 
 mind to risk an English war. Norfolk on the other hand 
 had no mind to risk a rising before Spanish troops were 
 landed, and Ridolfi's efforts failed to bring either Duke or 
 King to action. But the clew to these negotiations had 
 long been in Cecil's hands ; and at the opening of 1571 
 Norfolk's schemes oi' ambition were foiled by his arrest. 
 He was convicted of treason, and after a few months' delay 
 executed at the Tower. 
 
 With the death of Norfolk and that of Northumberland, 
 who followed him to the scaffold, the dread of revolt within 
 the realm which had so long hung over England passed
 
 386 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI 
 
 quietly away. The failure of the two attempts not only 
 showed the weakness and disunion of the party of discon- 
 tent and reaction, but it revealed the weakness of all party 
 feeling before the rise of a national temper which was 
 springing naturally out of the peace of Elizabeth's [reign, 
 and which a growing sense of danger to the order and 
 prosperity around it was fast turning into a passionate 
 loyalty to the Queen. It was not merely against Cecil's 
 watchfulness or Elizabeth's cunning that Mary and Philip 
 and the Percies dashed themselves in vain ; it was against 
 a new England. And this England owed its existence to 
 the Queen. "I have desired," Elizabeth said proudly to 
 her Parliament, " to have the obedience of my subjects by 
 love, and not by compulsion. " Through the fourteen years 
 which had passed since she mounted the throne, her sub- 
 jects' love had been fairly won by justice and good gov- 
 ernment. The current of political events had drawn 
 men's eyes chiefly to the outer dangers of the country, to 
 the policy of Philip and of Rome, to the revolutions of 
 France, to the pressure from Mary Stuart. No one had 
 watched these outer dangers so closely as the Queen. But 
 buried as she seemed in foreign negotiations and intrigues, 
 Elizabeth was above all an English sovereign. She devoted 
 herself ably and energetically to the task of civil adminis- 
 tration. At the first moment of relief from the pressure of 
 outer troubles, after the treaty of Edinburgh, she faced the 
 two main causes of internal disorder. The debasement of 
 the coinage was brought to an end in 1560. In 1561 a 
 commission was issued to inquire into the best means of 
 facing the problem of social pauperism. 
 
 Time, and the natural development of new branches of 
 industry, were working quietly for the relief of the glutted 
 labor market ; but a vast mass of disorder still existed in 
 England, which found a constant ground of resentment in 
 the enclosures and evictions which accompanied the pro- 
 gress of agricultural change. It was on this host of 
 " broken men" that every rebellion could count for support;
 
 v,iiAP. 5.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 387 
 
 their mere existence was an encouragement to civil war ; 
 while in peace their presence was felt in the insecurity of 
 life and property, in bands of marauders which held whole 
 counties in terror, and in " sturdy beggars" who stripped 
 travellers on the road. Under Elizabeth as under her 
 predecessors the terrible measures of repression, whose 
 uselessness More had in vain pointed out, went pitilessly 
 on. We find the magistrates of Somersetshire capturing 
 a gang of a hundred at a stroke, hanging fifty at once on 
 the gallows, and complaining bitterly to the Council of 
 the necessity for waiting till the Assizes before they could 
 enjoy the spectacle of the fifty others hanging beside them. 
 But the Government were dealing with the difficulty in a 
 wiser and more effectual way. The old powers to enforce 
 labor on the idle and settlement on the vagrant class which 
 had been given by statutes of Henry the Eighth were con- 
 tinued ; and each town and parish was held responsible for 
 the relief of its indigent and disabled poor, as well as for 
 the employment of able-bodied mendicants. But a more 
 efficient machinery was gradually devised for carrying out 
 the relief and employment of the poor. Funds for this 
 purpose had been provided by the collection of alms in 
 church; but by an Act of 1562 the mayor of each town 
 and the churchwardens of each country parish were 
 directed to draw up lis*<s of all inhabitants able to con- 
 tribute to such a fund, and on a persistent refusal the 
 justices in session were empowered to assess the offender 
 at a fitting sum end to enforce its payment by imprison- 
 ment. 
 
 The principles embodied in these measures, that of local 
 responsibility for local distress, and that of a distinction 
 between the pauper and the vagabond, were more clearly 
 defined in a statute of 1572. By this Act the justices in 
 the country districts and mayors and other officers in 
 towns were directed to register the impotent poor, to settle 
 them in fitting habitations and to assess all inhabitants for 
 thir support. Overseers were appointed to enforce and
 
 $88 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [Boos VI. 
 
 superintend their labor, for which wool, hemp, flax, or 
 other stuff was to be provided at the expense of the in- 
 habitants; and houses of correction were established in 
 every county for obstinate vagabonds or for paupers re- 
 fusing to work at the overseers' bidding. A subsequent 
 Act transferred to these overseers the collection of the poor 
 rate, and powers were given to bind poor children as ap- 
 prentices, to erect buildings for the improvident poor, and 
 to force the parents and children of such paupers to main- 
 tain them. The well-known Act which matured and 
 finally established this system, the 43d of Elizabeth, re- 
 mained the base of our system of pauper-administration 
 until a time within the recollection of living men. What- 
 ever flaws a later experience has found in these measures, 
 their wise and humane character formed a striking contrast 
 to the legislation which had degraded our statute-book 
 from the date of the Statute of Laborers ; and their efficacy 
 at the time was proved by the cessation of the social danger 
 against which they were intended to provide. 
 
 \ts cessation however was owing, not merely to law, but 
 to the natural growth of wealth and industry throughout 
 the country. A middle class of wealthier landowners and 
 merchants was fast rising into importance. " The wealth 
 of the meaner sort," wrote one to Cecil, " is the very fount 
 of rebellion, the occasion of their indolence, of the con- 
 tempt of the nobility, and of the hatred they have con- 
 ceived against them." But Cecil and his mistress could 
 watch the upgrowth of national wealth with cooler eyeso 
 In the country its effect was to undo much of the evil 
 which the diminution of small holdings had done. What- 
 ever social embarrassment it might bring about, the revo- 
 lution in agriculture which Latimer deplored undoubtedly 
 favored production. Not only was a larger capital brought 
 to bear upon the land, but the mere change in the system 
 of cultivation introduced a taste for new and better modes 
 of farming; the breed of horses and of cattle was improved 
 and a far greater use made of manure and dressings. One
 
 CHAP. 5.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 389 
 
 acre under the new system produced, it was said, as much 
 as two under the old. As a more careful and constant 
 cultivation was introduced, a greater number of hands 
 came to be required on every farm ; and much of the sur- 
 plus labor which had been flung off the land in the com- 
 mencement of the new system was thus recalled to it. 
 
 A yet more efficient agency in absorbing the unemployed 
 was found in the development of manufactures. The linen 
 trade was as yet of small value, and that of silk- weaving 
 was only just introduced. But the woollen manufacture 
 was fast becoming an important element in the national 
 wealth. England no longer sent her fleeces to be woven 
 in Flanders and to be dyed at Florence. The spinning of 
 yarn, the weaving, fulling, and dyeing of cloth, were 
 spreading rapidly from the towns over the countryside. 
 The worsted trade, of which Norwich was the centre, ex- 
 tended over the whole of the Eastern counties. Farmers' 
 wives began everywhere to spin their wool from their own 
 sheeps' backs into a coarse "home-spun." The South and 
 the West however still remained the great seats of industry 
 and of wealth, for they were the homes of mining and 
 manufacturing activity. The iron manufacturers were 
 limited to Kent and Sussex, though their prosperity in 
 this quarter was already threatened by the growing 
 scarcity of the wood which fed their furnaces, and by the 
 exhaustion of the forests of the Weald. Cornwall was 
 then, as now, the sole exporter of tin ; and the exportation 
 of its copper was just beginning. The broadcloths of the 
 West claimed the palm among the woollen stuffs of Eng- 
 land. The Cinque Ports held almost a monopoly of the 
 commerce of the Channel. Every little harbor from the 
 Foreland to the Land's End sent out its fleets of fishing 
 boats, manned with bold seamen who were to furnish 
 crews for Drake and the Buccaneers. Northern England 
 still lagged far behind the rest of the realm in its industrial 
 activity. But in the reign of Elizabeth the poverty and 
 inaction to which it had been doomed for so many centuries
 
 390 HISTORY OP THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VL 
 
 began at last to be broken. We see the first sign of the 
 revolution which has transferred English manufacturers 
 and English wealth to the north of the Mersey and of the 
 Humber in the mention which now meets us of the friezes 
 of Manchester, the coverlets of York, the cutlery of Shef- 
 field, and the cloth-trade of Halifax. 
 
 The growth however of English commerce far out- 
 stripped as yet that of its manufactures. We must not 
 judge of it by any modern standard ; for the whole popula- 
 tion of the country can hardly have exceeded five or six 
 millions, and the burden of all the vessels engaged in or- 
 dinary commerce was estimated at little more than fifty 
 thousand tons. The size of the vessels employed in it 
 would nowadays seem insignificant; a modern collier brig 
 is probably as large as the biggest merchant vessel which 
 then sailed from the port of London. But it was under 
 Elizabeth that English commerce began the rapid career 
 of development which has made us the carriers of the 
 wojld. The foundation of the Royal Exchange at London 
 by Sir Thomas Gresham in 1566 was a mark of the com- 
 mercial progress of the time. By far the most important 
 branch of our trade was the commerce with Flanders. 
 Antwerp and Bruges were in fact the general marts of the 
 world in the early part of the sixteenth century, and the 
 annual export of English wool and drapery to their markets 
 was estimated at a sum of more than two millions in value. 
 But the religious troubles of the Netherlands were already 
 scaring capital and industry from their older seats. As 
 early as 1560 Philip's envoy reported to his master that 
 "ten thousand of your Majesty's servants in the Low 
 Countries were already in England with their preachers 
 and ministers." Alva's severities soon raised the number 
 of refugees to fifty thousand ; and the outbreak of war 
 which followed drove trade as well as traders from the 
 Low Countries. It was with the ruin of Antwerp at the 
 time of its siege and capture by the Duke of Parma that 
 the commercial supremacy of our own capital was first
 
 CHAP. 5.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 391 
 
 established. A third of the merchants and manufacturers 
 of the ruined city are said to have found a refuge on the 
 banks of the Thames. The export trade to Flanders died 
 away as London developed into the general mart of Europe, 
 where the gold and sugar of the New World were found 
 side by side with the cotton of India, the silks of the East, 
 and the woollen stuffs of England itself. 
 
 Not only was much of the world's older trade transferred 
 by this change to English shores, but the burst of national 
 vigor which characterized the time found new outlets for 
 its activity. The fisheries grew more and more valuable. 
 Those of the Channel and the German Ocean gave occupa- 
 tion to the ports which lined the coast from Yarmouth to 
 Plymouth Haven ; while Bristol and Chester were rivals 
 in the fisheries of Ulster. The merchant-navy of England 
 was fast widening its sphere of commerce. The Venetian 
 carrying fleet still touched at Southampton; but as far 
 back as the reign of Henry the Seventh a commercial 
 treaty had been concluded with Florence, and the trade 
 with the Mediterranean which began under Richard the 
 Third constantly took a wider development. The trade 
 between England and the Baltic ports had hitherto been 
 conducted by the Hanseatic merchants ; but the extinction 
 at this time of their London depot, the Steel Yard, was a 
 sign that this trade too had now passed into English hands. 
 The growth of Boston and Hull marked an increase of com- 
 mercial intercourse with the Scandinavian states. The 
 prosperity of Bristol, which depended in great measure on 
 the trade with Ireland, was stimulated by the conquest and 
 colonization of that island at the close of the Queen's reign 
 and the beginning of her successor's. The dream of a 
 northern passage to India opened up a trade with a land 
 as yet unknown. Of three ships which sailed in the reign 
 of Mary under Hugh Willoughby to discover this passage, 
 two were found frozen with their crews and their hapless 
 commander on the coast of Lapland ; but the third, under 
 Richard Chancellor, made its way safely to the White Sea
 
 392 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 and by the discovery of Archangel created the trade with 
 Russia. A more lucrative traffic had already begun with 
 the coast of Guinea, to whose gold dust and ivory the 
 merchants of Southampton owed their wealth. The guilt 
 of the Slave Trade which sprang out of it rests with John 
 Hawkins. In 1562 he returned from the African coast 
 with a cargo of negroes ; and the arms, whose grant re- 
 warded this achievement (a demi-moor, proper, bound 
 with a cord), commemorated his priority in the transport 
 of slaves to the labor-fields of the New World. But the 
 New World was already furnishing more honest sources of 
 wealth. The voyage of Sebastian Cabot from Bristol to 
 The mainland of North America had called English vessels 
 lo the stormy ocean of the North. From the time of 
 Henry the Eighth the number of English boats engaged 
 on the cod-banks of Newfoundland steadily increased, and 
 at the close of Elizabeth's reign the seamen of Biscay found 
 English rivals in the whale-fishery of the Polar seas. 
 
 Elizabeth lent a ready patronage to the new commerce, 
 she shared in its speculations, she considered its extension 
 and protection as a part of public policy, and she sanc- 
 tioned the formation of the great Merchant Companies 
 which could alone secure the trader against wrong or in- 
 justice in distant countries. The Merchant- Adventurers 
 of London, a body which had existed long before, and had 
 received a charter of incorporation under Henry the 
 Seventh, furnished a model for the Russia Company and 
 the Company which absorbed the new commerce to the 
 Indies. But it was not wholly with satisfaction that 
 dther the Queen or her ministers watched the social 
 change which wealth was producing around them. They 
 feared the increased expenditure and comfort which neces- 
 sarily followed it, as likely to impoverish the land and to 
 eat out the hardihood of the people. " England spendeth 
 more on wines in one year," complained Cecil, " than it did 
 in ancient times in four years." In the upper classes the 
 lavishness of a new wealth combined with a lavishness of
 
 CHAP. 5.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 393 
 
 life, a love of beauty, of color, of display, to revolutionize 
 English dress. Men "wore a manor on their backs.'* 
 The Queen's three thousand robes were rivalled in their 
 bravery by the slashed velvets, the ruffs, the jewelled pur- 
 points of the courtiers around her. But signs of the 
 growing wealth were as evident in the lower class as in the 
 higher. The disuse of salt-fish and the greater consump- 
 tion of meat marked the improvement which had taken 
 place among the country folk. Their rough and wattled 
 farm-houses were being superseded by dwellings of brick 
 and stone. Pewter was replacing the wooden trenchers of 
 the early yeomanry, and there were yeomen who could 
 boast of a fair show of silver plate. It is from this period 
 indeed that we can first date the rise of a conception which 
 seems to us now a peculiarly English one, the conception 
 of domestic comfort. The chimnev-corner, so closely asso- 
 ciated with family life, came into existence with the gen- 
 eral introduction of chimneys, a feature rare in ordinary 
 houses at the beginning of this reign. Pillows, which had 
 before been despised by the farmer and the trader as fit 
 only "for women in child-bed," were now in general use. 
 Carpets superseded the filthy flooring of rushes. The 
 loftier houses of the wealthier merchants, their parapeted 
 fronts and costly wainscoting, their cumbrous but elabo- 
 rate beds, their carved staircases, their quaintly figured 
 gables, not only contrasted with the squalor which had till 
 then characterized English towns, but marked the rise 01 
 a new middle class which was to play its part in later 
 history. 
 
 A transformation of an even more striking kind marked 
 the extinction of the feudal character of the noblesse. 
 Gloomy walls and serried battlements disappeared from 
 the dwellings of the gentry. The strength of the mediaeval 
 fortress gave way to the pomp and grace of the Elizabethan 
 Hall. Knole, Longleat, Burleigh and Hatfield, Hardwick 
 and Audley End, are familiar instances of a social as well 
 as an architectural change which covered England with
 
 394 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 buildings where the thought of defence was abandoned for 
 that of domestic comfort and refinement. We still gaze 
 with pleasure on their picturesque line of gables, their 
 fretted fronts, their gilded turrets and fanciful vanes, their 
 castellated gateways, the jutting oriels from which the 
 great noble looked down on his new Italian garden, on its 
 stately terraces and broad flights of steps, its vases and 
 fountains, its quaint masses, its formal walks, its lines of 
 yews cut into grotesque shapes in hopeless rivalry of the 
 cypress avenues of the South. Nor was the change less 
 within than without. The life of the Middle Ages con- 
 centrated itself in the vast castle hall, where the baron 
 looked from his upper dais on the retainers who gathered 
 at his board. But the great households were fast break- 
 ing up ; and the whole feudal economy disappeared when 
 tin lord of the household withdrew with his family into 
 his " parlor" or " withdra wing-room" and left the hall to 
 his dependants. The Italian refinement of life which told 
 on pleasance and garden told on the remodelling of the 
 house within, raised the principal apartments to an upper 
 floor a change to which we owe the grand staircases of 
 the time surrounded the quiet courts by long " galleries 
 of the presence," crowned the rude hearth with huge 
 chimney-pieces adorned with fauns and cupids, with 
 quaintly interlaced monograms and fantastic arabesques, 
 hung tapestries on the walls, and crowded each chamber 
 with quaintly carved chairs and costly cabinets. The 
 prodigal use of glass became a marked feature in the 
 domestic architecture of the time, and one whose influence 
 on the general health of the people can hardly be over-rated. 
 Long lines of windows stretched over the fronts of the new 
 manor halls. Every merchant's house had its oriel. 
 "You shall have sometimes," Lord Bacon grumbled, 
 " your houses so full of glass, that we cannot tell where to 
 oome to be out of the sun or the cold." 
 
 What Elizabeth contributed to this upgrowth of national 
 prosperity was the peace and social order from which it 

 
 CHAP. 5.] THE REFORMATION 15401608. 396 
 
 sprang. While autos-da-fe were blazing at Rome and 
 Madrid, while the Inquisition was driving the sober 
 traders of the Netherlands to madness, while Scotland 
 was tossing with religious strife, while the policy of 
 Catharine secured for France but a brief respite from the 
 horrors of civil war, England remained untroubled and at 
 peace. Religious order was little disturbed. Recusants 
 were few. There was little cry as yet for freedom of wor- 
 ship. Freedom of conscience was the right of every man. 
 Persecution had ceased. It was only as the tale of & 
 darker past that men recalled how ten years back heretics 
 had been sent to the fire. Civil order was even more pro- 
 found than religious order. The failure of the northern 
 revolt proved the political tranquillity of the country. The 
 social troubles from vagrancy and evictions were slowly 
 passing away. Taxation was light. The country was 
 firmly and steadily governed. The popular favor which 
 had met Elizabeth at her accession was growing into a 
 passionate devotion. Of her faults indeed England be- 
 yond the circle of her court knew little or nothing. The 
 shiftings of her diplomacy were never seen outside the 
 royal closet. The nation at large could only judge her 
 foreign policy by its main outlines, by its temperance and 
 good sense, and above all by its success. But every Eng- 
 lishman was able to judge Elizabeth in her rule at home, 
 in her love of peace, her instinct of order, the firmness and 
 moderation of her government, the judicious spirit of con- 
 ciliation and compromise among warring factions which 
 gave the country an unexampled tranquillity at a time when 
 almost every other country in Europe was torn with civil 
 war. Every sign of the growing prosperity, the sight of 
 London as it became the mart of the world, of stately 
 mansions as they rose on every manor, told, and justly 
 told, in the Queen's favor. Her statue in the centre of 
 the London Exchange was a tribute on the part of the 
 merchant class to the interest with which she watched and 
 shared personally in its enterprises. Her thrift won a
 
 396 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 general gratitude. The memories of the Terror and of the 
 Martyrs threw into bright relief the aversion from blood- 
 shed which was conspicuous in her earlier reign, and never 
 wholly waning through its fiercer close. Above all, there 
 was a general confidence in her instinctive knowledge of 
 the national temper. Her finger was always on the public 
 pulse. She knew exactly when she could resist the feeling 
 of her people, and when she must give way before the new 
 sentiment of freedom which her policy unconsciously fos- 
 tered. But when she retreated, her defeat had all the grace ' 
 of victory; and the frankness and unreserve of her sur- 
 render won back at once the love that her resistance lost. 
 Her attitude at home in fact was that of a woman whose 
 pride in the well-being of her subjects and whose longing 
 for their favor was the one warm touch in the coldness of 
 her natural temper. If Elizabeth could be said to love 
 anything, she loved England. "Xothing," she said to her 
 first Parliament in words of unwonted fire, "nothing, no 
 worldly thing under the sun, is so dear to me as the love 
 and good-will of my subjects." And the love and good-will 
 which were so dear to her she fully won. 
 
 It was this personal devotion that enabled Elizabeth to 
 face the religious difficulties of her reign. Formidable as 
 these had been from its outset, they were now growing 
 into actual dangers. The attack of the Papacy from with- 
 out had deepened the tide of religious fanaticism within. 
 For the nation at large Elizabeth's system was no doubt 
 a wise and healthy one. Single-handed, unsupported by 
 any of the statesmen or divines about her, the Queen had 
 forced on the warring religions a sort of armed truce. 
 While the main principles of the Reformation were accepted 
 the zeal of the ultra-reformers was held at bay. Outer 
 conformity, attendance at the common prayer, was exacted 
 from all, but changes in ritual which would have drawn 
 attention to the change in religion were steadily resisted. 
 The Bible was left open. Public discussion was unre- 
 strained. On the other hand, the warfare of pulpit against
 
 CHAP. 5.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 397 
 
 pulpit was silenced by the licensing of preachers. In 1567 
 Elizabeth gave the Protestant zealots a rough proof that 
 she would not suffer them to draw the Catholics into con- 
 troversy and rouse the opposition to her system which 
 controversy could not fail to bring with it. Parker's suc- 
 cessor, Archbishop Grindal, who had been one of the 
 Marian exiles and returned with much of the Calvinistio 
 fanaticism, showed favor to a " liberty of prophesying" or 
 preaching which would have flooded the realm with Prot- 
 estant disputants. Elizabeth at once interposed. The 
 " liberty of prophesying" was brought to an end ; even the 
 number of licensed preachers was curtailed ; and the Pri- 
 mate himself was suspended from the exercise of his func- 
 tions. 
 
 No stronger proof could have been given of the Queen's 
 resolve to watch jealously over the religious peace of her 
 realm. In her earlier years such a resolve went fairly 
 with the general temper of the people at large. The mass 
 of Englishmen remained true in sentiment to the older 
 creed. But they conformed to the new worship. They 
 shrank from any open defiance of the government. They 
 shrank from reawakening the fierce strife of religions, of 
 calling back the horsemen of Somerset or the fires of Mary. 
 They saw little doctrinal difference between the new prayer 
 atod the old. Above all they trusted to patience. They 
 had seen too many religious revolutions to believe that 
 any revolution would be lasting. They believed that the 
 changes would be undone again as they had been undone 
 before. They held that Elizabeth was only acting under 
 pressure, and that her real inclination was toward the old 
 religion. They trusted in Philip's influence, in an Aus- 
 trian marriage, in the Queen's dread of a breach with the 
 Papacy, in the pressure of Mary Stuart. And meanwhile 
 the years went by, and as the memories of the past became 
 dimmer, and custom laid a heavier and heavier hand on 
 the mass of men, and a new generation grew up that 
 had never known the spell of Catholicism, the nation drifted
 
 398 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 from its older tradition and became Protestant in its own 
 despite. 
 
 It was no doubt a sense that the religious truce was do- 
 ing their work, as well as a dread of alienating the Queen 
 and throwing her into the hands of their opponents by a 
 more violent pressure, which brought the more zealous re- 
 formers to acquiesce through Elizabeth's earlier years in 
 this system of compromise. But it was no sooner de- 
 nounced by the Papacy than it was attacked by the Puri- 
 tans. The rebellion of the Northern Earls, the withdrawal 
 from the public worship, the Bull of Deposition, roused a 
 fanatical zeal among the Calvinistic party which predomi- 
 nated in the Parliament of 1571. The movement in favor 
 of a more pronounced Protestantism, of a more utter break 
 with the Catholic past, which had slowly spread from the 
 knot of exiles who returned to Geneva, now gathered a 
 new strength ; and a bill was brought in for the reform of 
 the book of Common Prayer by the omission of the prac- 
 tices which displeased the Genevan party among the clergy. 
 A yet closer approach to the theocratic system of Calvin 
 was seen when the Lower House refused its assent to a 
 statute that would have bound the clergy to subscribe to 
 those articles which recognized the royal supremacy, the 
 power of the Church to ordain rites and ceremonies, and 
 the actual form of church government. At such a crisis 
 even the weightiest statesmen at Elizabeth's council-board 
 believed that in the contest with Rome the Crown would 
 have to rely on Protestant zeal, and the influence of Cecil 
 and Walsingham backed the pressure of the Parliament. 
 But the Queen was only stirred to a burst of anger; she 
 ordered Strickland, who had introduced the bill for litur- 
 gical reform, to appear no more in Parliament, and though 
 she withdrew the order as soon as she perceived the House 
 was bent on his restoration, she would hear nothing of 
 the changes on which the Commons were set. 
 
 Her resistance showed the sagacity with which the 
 Queen caught the general temper of her people. The
 
 CHAP. 5.] THE REFORMATION. 15401608. 399 
 
 Catholic pressure had made it needful to exclude Catholics 
 from the Commons and from the council-board, but a 
 Protestant Council and a Protestant Parliament were by 
 no means fair representatives of the general drift of Eng- 
 lish opinion. Her religious indifference left Elizabeth a 
 better judge of the timid and hesitating advance of relig- 
 ious sentiment, of the stubborn clinging to the past, of the 
 fear of change, of the dread of revolution, which made the 
 winning of the people as a whole to the Reformation a 
 slow and tedious process. The Protestants were increas- 
 ing in number, but they were still a minority of the na- 
 tion. The zealous Catholics, who withdrew from church 
 at the Pope's bidding, were a still smaller minority. The 
 bulk of Englishmen were striving to cling to their relig- 
 ious prejudice and to loyalty as well, to obey their con- 
 science and their Queen at once, and in such a temper of 
 men's minds any sudden and decisive change would have 
 fallen like a thunderbolt. Elizabeth had no will to follow 
 in the track of Rome, and to help the Pope to drive every 
 waverer into action. Weakened and broken as it was, she 
 clung obstinately to her system of compromise ; and the 
 general opinion gave her a strength which enabled her to 
 resist the pressure of her council and her Parliament. So 
 difficult however was her position that a change might 
 have been forced on her had she not been aided at this mo- 
 ment by a group of clerical bigots who gathered under the 
 banner of Presbyterianism. 
 
 Of these Thomas Cartwright was the chief. He had 
 studied at Geneva ; he returned with a fanatical faith in 
 Calvinism, and in the system of Church government 
 which Calvin had devised ; and as Margaret Professor of 
 Divinity at Cambridge he used to the full the opportuni- 
 ties which his chair gave him of propagating his opinions. 
 No leader of a religious party ever deserved less of after 
 sympathy. Cartwright was unquestionably learned and 
 devout, but his bigotry was that of a mediaeval inquisitor. 
 The relics of the old ritual, the cross in baptism, the sur-
 
 400 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 plice, the giving of a ring in marriage, were to him not 
 merely distasteful, as they were to the Puritans at large, 
 they were idolatrous and the mark of the beast. His dec- 
 lamation against ceremonies and superstition however had 
 little weight with Elizabeth or her Primates ; what scared 
 them was his reckless advocacy of a scheme of ecclesias- 
 tical government which placed the State beneath the feet 
 of the Church. The absolute rule of bishops indeed Cart- 
 wright denounced as begotten of the devil ; but the abso- 
 lute rule of Presbyters he held to be established by the 
 word of God. For the Church modelled after the fashion 
 of Geneva he claimed an authority which surpassed the 
 wildest dreams of the masters of the Vatican. All spiritual 
 authority and jurisdiction, the decreeing of doctrine, the 
 ordering of ceremonies, lay wholly in the hands of the 
 ministers of the Church. To them belonged the super- 
 vision of public morals. In an ordered arrangement of 
 classes and synods, these Presbyters were to govern their 
 flocks, to regulate their own order, to decide in matters of 
 faith, to administer " discipline. " Their weapon was ex- 
 communication, and they were responsible for its use to 
 none but Christ. The province of the civil ruler in such 
 a system of religion as this was simply to carry out the 
 decisions of the Presbyters, " to see their decrees executed 
 and to punish the contemners of them." Nor was this 
 work of the civil power likely to be a light work. The 
 spirit of Calvinistic Presbyterianism excluded all toleration 
 of practice or belief. Not only was the rule of ministers 
 to be established as the one legal form of Church govern- 
 ment, but all other forms, Episcopalian and Separatist, 
 were to be ruthlessly put down. For heresy there was the 
 punishment of death. Never had the doctrine of persecu- 
 tion been urged with such a blind and reckless ferocity. 
 "I deny," wrote Cartwright, "that upon repentance there 
 ought to follow any pardon of death. . . . Heretics 
 ought to be put to death now. If this be bloody and ex- 
 treme, I am content to be so counted with the Holy Ghost."
 
 CHAP. 5.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 401 
 
 The violence of language such as this was as unlikely as 
 the dogmatism of his theological teaching to commend 
 Cartwright's opinions to the mass of Englishmen. Popu- 
 lar as the Presbyterian system became in Scotland, it never 
 took any popular hold on England. It remained to the 
 last a clerical rather than a national creed, and even in the 
 moment of its seeming triumph under the Commonwealth 
 it was rejected by every part of England save London and 
 Lancashire. But the bold challenge which Cartwright's 
 party delivered to the Government in 1572 in an "admoni- 
 tion to the Parliament," which denounced the government 
 of bishops as contrary to the word of God and demanded 
 the establishment in its place of government by Presby- 
 ters, raised a panic among English statesmen and prelates 
 which cut off all hopes of a quiet treatment of the merely 
 ceremonial questions which really troubled the conscience 
 of the more advanced Protestants. The natural progress 
 of opinion abruptly ceased, and the moderate thinkers who 
 had pressed for a change in ritual which would have satis- 
 fied the zeal of the reformers withdrew from union with a 
 party which revived the worst pretensions of the Papacy. 
 But the eyes of Elizabeth as of her subjects were drawn 
 from difficulties at home to the conflict which took fresh 
 fire oversea. In Europe, as in. England, the tide of relig- 
 ious passion which had so long been held in check was 
 now breaking over the banks which restrained it; and 
 with this outbreak of forces before which the diplomacy 
 and intrigues of its statesmen fell powerless the political 
 face of Europe was changed. In 1572 the power of the 
 King of Spain had reached its height. The Netherlands 
 were at his feet. In the East his troubles from the pressure 
 of the Turks seemed brought to an end by a brilliant vic- 
 tory at Lepanto in which his fleet with those of Venice 
 and the Pope annihilated the fleet of the Sultan. He could 
 throw his whole weight upon the Calvinism of the West, 
 and above all upon France, where the Guises were fast 
 sinking into mere partisans of Spain. The common danger
 
 402 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 drew France and England together; and Catharine of 
 Medicis strove to bind the two countries in one political 
 action by offering to Elizabeth the hand of her son Henry, 
 the Duke of Anjou. But at this moment of danger the 
 whole situation was changed by the rising of the Nether- 
 lands. Driven to despair by the greed and persecution of 
 Alva, the Low Countries rose in a revolt which after 
 strange alternations of fortune gave to the world the Re- 
 public of the United Provinces. Of the Protestants driven 
 out by the Duke's cruelties, many had taken to the seas 
 and cruised as pirates in the Channel, making war on 
 Spanish vessels under the flag of the Prince of Orange. 
 Like the Huguenot privateers who had sailed under Conde's 
 flag, these freebooters found shelter in the English ports. 
 But in the spring of 1572 Alva demanded their expulsion; 
 and Elizabeth, unable to resist, sent them orders to put to 
 sea. The Duke's success proved fatal to his master's 
 cause. The "water-beggars," a little band of some two 
 hundred and fifty men, were driven by stress of weather 
 into the Meuse. There they seized the city of Brill, and 
 repulsed a Spanish force which strove to re-capture it. 
 The repulse was the signal for a general rising. All the 
 great cities of Holland and Zealand drove out their garri- 
 sons. The northern Provinces of Gelderland, Overyssel, 
 and Friesland, followed their example, and by the summer 
 half of the Low Countries were in revolt. 
 
 A yet greater danger threatened Alva in the south, where 
 Mons had been surprised by Lewis of Nassau, and where 
 the Calvinists were crying for support from the Huguenots 
 of France. The opening which their rising afforded was 
 seized by the Huguenot leaders as a political engine to 
 break the power which Catharine of Medicis exercised 
 over Charles the Ninth, and to set aside her policy of re- 
 ligious balance by placing France at the head of Protest- 
 antism in the West. Weak and passionate in temper, 
 jealous of the warlike fame which his brother, the Dke 
 of Anjou, had won at Montcontour, dreading above all
 
 CHAP. 5.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 403 
 
 the power of Spain and eager to grasp the opportunity of 
 breaking it by a seizure of the Netherlands, Charles lis- 
 tened to the counsels of Coligni, who pressed for war upon 
 Philip and promised the support of the Huguenots in an 
 invasion of the Low Countries. Never had a fairer pros- 
 pect opened to French ambition. But Catharine had no 
 mind to be set aside. To her cool political temper the 
 supremacy of the Huguenots seemed as fatal to the Crown 
 as the supremacy of the Catholics. A triumph of Calvin- 
 ism in the Netherlands, wrought out by the swords of the 
 French Calvinists, would decide not only the religious but 
 the political destinies of France ; and Catharine saw ruin 
 for the monarchy in a France at once Protestant and free. 
 She suddenly united with the Guises and suffered them to 
 rouse the fanatical mob of Paris, while she won back the 
 King by picturing the royal power as about to pass into 
 the hands of Coligni. On the twenty-fourth of August, 
 St. Bartholomew's day, the plot broke out in an awful 
 massacre. At Paris the populace murdered Coligni and al- 
 most all the Huguenot leaders. A hundred thousand Prot- 
 estants fell as the fury spread from town to town. In that 
 awful hour Philip and Catholicism were saved. The 
 Spanish King laughed for joy. The new Pope, Gregory 
 the Thirteenth, ordered a Te Deum to be sung. Instead 
 of conquering the Netherlands France plunged madly back 
 into a chaos of civil war, and the Low Countries were left 
 to cope single-handed with the armies of Spain. 
 
 They could look for no help from Elizabeth. Whatever 
 enthusiasm the heroic struggle of the Prince of Orange for 
 their liberties excited among her subjects, it failed to move 
 Elizabeth even for an instant from the path of cold self- 
 interest. To her the revolt of the Netherlands was simply 
 "a bridle of Spain, which kept war out of our own gate." 
 At the darkest moment of the contest, when Alva had won 
 back all but Holland and Zealand and even William of 
 Orange despaired, the Queen bent her energies to prevent 
 him from finding succor in France. That the Low Coun-
 
 404 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 tries could in the end withstand Philip, neither she nor 
 any English statesmen believed. They held that the 
 struggle must close either in their subjection to him, or in 
 their selling themselves for aid to France: and the acces- 
 sion of power which either result must give to one of her 
 two Catholic foes the Queen was eager to avert. Her plan 
 for averting it was by forcing the Provinces to accept the 
 terms which were now offered by Alva's successor, Re- 
 quesens, a restoration of their constitutional privileges on 
 condition of their submission to the Church. Peace on 
 such a footing would not only restore English commerce, 
 which suffered from the war ; it would leave the Nether- 
 lands still formidable as a weapon against Philip. The 
 freedom of the Provinces would be saved ; and the relig- 
 ious question involved in a fresh submission to the yoke of 
 Catholicism was one which Elizabeth was incapable of ap- 
 preciating. To her the steady refusal of William the 
 Silent to sacrifice his faith was as unintelligible as the 
 steady bigotry of Philip in demanding such a sacrifice. 
 It was of more immediate consequence that Philip's anxi- 
 ety to avoid provoking an intervention on the part of Eng- 
 land left Elizabeth tranquil at home. The policy of Re- 
 quesens after Alva's departure at the close of 1573 was a 
 policy of pacification ; and with the steady resistance of 
 the Netherlands still foiling his efforts Philip saw that his 
 one hope of success rested on the avoidance of intervention 
 from without. The civil war which followed the massacre 
 of St. Bartholomew removed all danger of such an inter- 
 vention on the side of France. A weariness of religious 
 strife enabled Catharine again to return to her policy of 
 toleration in the summer of 1573; but though the death of 
 Charles the Ninth and accession of his brother Henry the 
 'Third in the following year left the Queen-mother's power 
 unbroken, the balance she preserved was too delicate to 
 leave room for any schemes without the realm. 
 
 English intervention it was yet more needful to avoid ; 
 and the hopes of an attack upon England which Rome had
 
 CHAP. 5.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 405 
 
 drawn from Philip's fanaticism were thus bitterly blasted. 
 To the fiery exhortations of Gregory the Thirteenth the 
 King only answered by counsels of delay. But Rome 
 could not delay her efforts. All her hopes of recovering 
 England lay in the Catholic sympathies of the mass of 
 Englishmen, and every year that went by weakened her 
 chance of victory. The firm refusal of Elizabeth to suffer 
 the Puritans to break in with any violent changes on her 
 ecclesiastical policy was justified by its slow but steady 
 success. Silently, almost unconsciously, England became 
 Protestant as the traditionary Catholicism which formed 
 the religion of three-fourths of the people at the Queen's 
 accession died quietly away. At the close of her reign the 
 only parts of England where the old faith retained any- 
 thing of its former vigor were the north and the extreme 
 west, at that time the poorest and least populated parts of 
 the kingdom. One main cause of the change lay in the 
 gradual dying out or removal of the Catholic priesthood 
 and the growth of a new Protestant clergy who supplied 
 their place. The older parish priests, though they had al 
 most to a man acquiesced in the changes of ritual and doc- 
 trine which the various phases of the Reformation imposed 
 upon them, remained in heart utterly hostile to its spirit. 
 As Mary had undone the changes of Edward, they hoped 
 for a Catholic successor to undo the changes of Elizabeth ; 
 and in the mean time they were content to wear the sur- 
 plice instead of the chasuble, and to use the Communion 
 office instead of the Mass-book. But if they were forced 
 to read the Homilies from the pulpit the spirit of their 
 teaching remained unchanged; and it was easy for them 
 to cast contempt on the new services, till they seemed to 
 old-fashioned worshippers a mere " Christmas game. " But 
 the lapse of years did its work in emptying parsonage after 
 parsonage. In 1579 the Queen felt strong enough to en- 
 force for the first time a general compliance with the Act 
 of Uniformity ; and the jealous supervision of Parker and 
 the bishops insured an inner as well as an outer conformity
 
 40fc HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [BOOK VL 
 
 to the established faith in the clergy who took the place of 
 the dying priesthood. The new parsons were for the most 
 part not merely Protestant in belief and teaching, but 
 ultra- Protestant. The old restrictions on the use of the 
 pulpit were silently removed as the need for them passed 
 away, and the zeal of the young ministers showed itself in 
 an assiduous preaching which moulded in their own fashion 
 the religious ideas of the new generation. But their char- 
 acter had even a greater influence than their preaching. 
 Under Henry the priests had in large part been ignorant 
 and sensual men ; and the character of the clergy appointed 
 by the greedy Protestants under Edward or at the opening 
 of Elizabeth's reign was even worse than that of their 
 Catholic rivals. But the energy of the successive Pri- 
 mates, seconded as it was by the general increase of zeal 
 and morality at the time, did its work ; and by the close 
 of the Queen's reign the moral temper as well as the social 
 character of the clergy had greatly changed. Scholars 
 like Hooker could now be found in the ranks of the priest- 
 hood, and the grosser scandals which disgraced the clergy 
 as a body for the most part disappeared. It was impossi- 
 ble for a Puritan libeller to bring against the ministers of 
 Elizabeth's reign the charges of drunkenness and immo- 
 rality which Protestant libellers had been able to bring 
 against the priesthood of Henry's. 
 
 But the influence of the new clergy was backed by a 
 general revolution in English thought. The grammar 
 schools were diffusing a new knowledge and mental energy 
 through the middle classes and among the country gentry. 
 The tone of the Universities, no unfair test of the tone of 
 the nation at large, changed wholly as the Queen's reign 
 went on. At its opening Oxford was "a nest of Papists" 
 and sent its best scholars to feed the Catholic seminaries. 
 At its close the University was a hot-bed of Puritanism, 
 where the fiercest tenets of Calvin reigned supreme. The 
 movement was no doubt hastened by the political circum- 
 stances of the time. Under the rule of Elizabeth loyalty
 
 CHAP. 5.] THE REFORMATION. 15401608. 407 
 
 became more and more a passion among Englishmen; and 
 the Bull of Deposition placed Rome in the forefront of 
 Elizabeth's foes. The conspiracies which festered around 
 Mary were laid to the Pope's charge ; he was known to be 
 pressing on France and on Spain the invasion and conquest 
 of the heretic kingdom ; he was soon to bless the Armada. 
 Every day made it harder for a Catholic to reconcile 
 Catholicism with loyalty to his Queen or devotion to his 
 country ; and the mass of men, who are moved by a senti- 
 ment rather than by reason, swung slowly round to the 
 side which, whatever its religious significance might be, 
 was the side of patriotism, of liberty against tyranny, of 
 England against Spain. A new impulse was given to this 
 silent drift of religious opinion by the atrocities which 
 marked the Catholic triumph on the other side of the 
 Channel. The horror of Alva's butcheries or of the mas- 
 sacre in Paris on St. Bartholomew's day revived the mem- 
 ories of the bloodshed under Mary. The tale of Protestant 
 suffering was told with a wonderful pathos and pictur- 
 esqueness by John Foxe, an exile during the persecution ; 
 and his "Book of Martyrs," which was set up by royal 
 order in the churches for public reading, passed from the 
 churches to the shelves of every English household. The 
 trading classes of the towns had been the first to embrace 
 the doctrines of the Reformation, but their Protestantism 
 became a passion as the refugees of the Continent brought 
 to shop and market their tale of outrage and blood. 
 Thousands of Flemish exiles found a refuge in the Cinque 
 Ports, a third of the Antwerp merchants were seen pacing 
 the new London Exchange, and a Church of French 
 Huguenots found a home which it still retains in the crypt 
 of Canterbury Cathedral. 
 
 But the decay of Catholicism appealed strongly to the 
 new spirit of Catholic zeal which, in its despair of aid 
 from Catholic princes, was girding itself for its own bitter 
 struggle with heresy. Pius the Fifth had now passed 
 away, but the policy of the Papal court remained un- 
 
 9 18 VOL. 2
 
 408 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [Boos VI. 
 
 changed. His successor, Gregory the Thirteenth, showed 
 the same restless zeal, the same world-wide energy in the 
 work of winning back the nations to the Catholic Church. 
 Rome was still the centre of the Catholic crusade. It 
 wielded material as well as spiritual arms. If the Papacy 
 had ceased to be a military power, it remained a financial 
 power. Taxes were multiplied, expenses reduced, estates 
 confiscated, free towns reduced to servitude, with the one 
 aim of enabling Gregory and his successors to build up a 
 vast system of loans which poured the wealth of Europe 
 into the treasury of Catholicism. It was the treasure of 
 the Vatican which financed the Catholic movement. Sub- 
 sidies from the Papacy fitted out the fleet that faced the 
 Turk at Lepanto, and gathered round the Guises their 
 lance-knights from the Rhine. Papal supplies equipped 
 expeditions against Ireland, and helped Philip to bear the 
 cost of the Armada. It was the Papal exchequer which 
 supported the world-wide diplomacy that was carrying on 
 negotiations in Sweden and intrigues in Poland, goading 
 the lukewarm Emperor to action or quickening the sluggish 
 movements of Spain, plotting the ruin of Geneva or the 
 assassination of Orange, stirring up revolt in England and 
 civil war in France. It was the Papacy that bore the cost 
 of the religious propaganda that was fighting its stubborn 
 battle with Calvinist and Lutheran on the Rhine and the 
 Elbe, or sending its missionaries to win back the lost isle 
 of the west. As early as 1568 Dr. Allen, a scholar who 
 had been driven from Oxford by the test prescribed in the 
 Act of Uniformity, had foreseen the results of the dying 
 out of the Marian priests, and had set up a seminary at 
 Douay to supply their place. The new college was liber- 
 ally supported by the Catholic peers and supplied with 
 pupils by a stream of refugees from Oxford and the Eng- 
 lish grammar schools. Three years after its opening the 
 college numbered a hundred and fifty members. It was 
 in these " seminary priests" that Gregory the Thirteenth 
 saw the means of reviving Catholic zeal in England, and
 
 CHAP. 5.] THE REFORMATION. 15401608. 409 
 
 at the Pope's bidding they began in 1576 to pass over to 
 English shores. 
 
 Few as the new-comers were at first, their presence was 
 at once felt in the check which it gave to the gradual re- 
 concilation of the Catholic gentry to the English Church. 
 No check could have been more galling to Elizabeth, and 
 her resentment was quickened by the sense of danger. 
 Rome had set itself in the forefront of her foes. She had 
 accepted the issue of the Bull of Deposition as a declara- 
 tion of war on the part of the Papacy, and she viewed 
 the Douay priests with some justice as its political emis- 
 saries. The comparative security of the Catholics from 
 active persecution during the early part of her reign had 
 arisen, partly from the sympathy and connivance of the 
 gentry who acted as justices of the peace, and still more 
 from her own religious indifference. But the Test Act 
 placed the magistracy in Protestant hands; and as Eliz- 
 abeth passed from indifference to suspicion and from sus- 
 picion to terror she put less restraint on the bigotry around 
 her. In quitting Eaton Hall which she had visited in one 
 of her pilgrimages the Queen gave its master, young Rook 
 wood, thanks for his entertainment and her hand to kisa 
 "But my Lord Chamberlain nobly and gravely under 
 standing that Rookwood was excommunicate" for non-at- 
 tendance at church " called him before him, demanded of 
 him how he durst presume to attempt her royal presence, he 
 unfit to accompany any Christian person, forthwith said 
 that he was fitter for a pair of stocks, commanded him out 
 of Court, and yet to attend the Council's pleasure." The 
 Council's pleasure was seen in his committal to the town 
 prison at Norwich, while " seven more gentlemen of wor- 
 ship" were fortunate enough to escape with a simple sen- 
 tence of arrest at their own homes. The Queen's terror 
 became a panic in the nation at large. The few priests 
 who landed from Douay were multiplied into an army of 
 Papal emissaries dispatched to sow treason and revolt 
 throughout the land. Parliament, which the working of
 
 410 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 the Test Act had made a wholly Protestant body, save for 
 the presence of a few Catholics among the peers, was sum- 
 moned to meet the new danger, and declared by formal 
 statute the landing of these priests and the harboring of 
 them to be treason. The Act proved no idle menace ; and 
 the execution of Cuthbert Mayne, a young priest who was 
 arrested in Cornwall with the Papal Bull of Deposition 
 hidden about him, gave a terrible indication of the char- 
 acter of the struggle upon which Elizabeth was about to 
 enter. 
 
 The execution of Cuthbert Mayne was far from being 
 purposed as the opening of a religious persecution. To 
 modern eyes there is something even more revolting than 
 open persecution in a policy which branded every Catholic 
 priest as a traitor and all Catholic worship as disloyalty \ 
 but the first step toward toleration was won when the 
 Queen rested her system of repression on purely political 
 grounds. If Elizabeth was a persecutor, she was the first 
 English ruler who felt the charge of religious persecution 
 to be a stigma on her rule. Nor can it be denied that 
 there was a real political danger in the new missionaries. 
 Allen was a restless conspirator, and the work of his semi- 
 nary priests was meant to aid a new plan of the Papacy 
 for the conquest of England. In 1576, on the death of 
 Requesens, the Spanish governor of the Low Countries, a 
 successor was found for him in Don John of Austria, a 
 natural brother of Philip, the victor of Lepanto, and ihe 
 most famous general of his day. The temper of Don John 
 was daring and ambitious ; his aim was a crown ; and he 
 sought in the Netherlands the means of winning one. His 
 ambition lent itself easily to the schemes of Mary Stuart 
 and of Rome ; and he resolved to bring about by quick con- 
 cessions a settlement in the Low Countries, to cross with 
 the Spanish forces employed there to England, to raise the 
 Catholics in revolt, to free and marry Mary Stuart, and 
 reign in her right as an English king. The plan was an 
 able one; but it was foiled ere he reached his post. The
 
 CHAP. 5.] THE REFORMATION. 16401608. 411 
 
 Spanish troops had mutinied on the death of Requesens ; 
 and their sack of Antwerp drew the States of the Nether- 
 lands together in a " Pacification of Ghent. " All differences 
 of religion were set aside in a common purpose to drive 
 out the stranger. Baffled as he was, the subtlety of Don 
 John turned even this league to account. Their demand 
 for the withdrawal of the Spanish troops, though fatal to 
 Philip's interests in the Low Countries, could be made to 
 serve the interests of Don John across the seas. In Feb- 
 ruary, 1577, therefore he ratified the Pacification of Ghent, 
 consented to the maintenance of the liberties of the States, 
 and engaged to withdraw the army. He stipulated only 
 for its withdrawal by sea, and for a delay of three months, 
 which was needful for the arrangement of his descent on 
 the English coast. Both demands however were refused ; 
 he was forced to withdraw his troops at once and by land, 
 and the scheme of the Papacy found itself utterly foiled. 
 
 Secret as were the plans of Don John, Elizabeth had 
 seen how near danger had drawn to her. Fortune again 
 proved her friend, for the efforts of Don John to bring 
 about a reconciliation of the Netherlands proved fruitless, 
 and negotiations soon passed again into the clash of arms. 
 But the Queen was warned at last. On the new outbreak 
 of war in 1577 she allied herself with the States and sent 
 them money and men. Such a step, though not in form 
 an act of hostility against Philip, for the Provinces with 
 which she leagued herself still owned themselves as Philip's 
 subjects, was a measure which proved the Queen's sense 
 of her need of the Netherlands. Though she had little 
 sympathy with their effort for freedom, she saw in them 
 " the one bridle of Spain to keep war out of our own gate. " 
 But she was to see the war drift nearer and nearer to her 
 shores. Now that the Netherlands were all but lost Philip's 
 slow stubborn temper strung itself to meet the greatness of 
 the peril. The Spanish army was reinforced; and in 
 January, 1578, it routed the army of the States on the 
 field of Gemblours. The sickness and death of Don John
 
 412 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BouK VI. 
 
 arrested its progress for a few months; but his successor, 
 Philip's nephew, Alexander Farnese, the Prince of Parma, 
 soon proved his greatness whether as a statesman or a gen- 
 eral. He seized on the difference of faith between the 
 Catholic and Protestant States as a means of division. 
 The Pacification of Ghent was broken at the opening of 
 1579 by the secession of the Walloon provinces of the 
 southern border. It was only by a new league of the 
 seven northern provinces where Protestantism was domi- 
 nant, in the Union of Utrecht that William of Orange 
 could meet Parma's stroke. But the general union of the 
 Low Countries was fatally broken, and from this moment 
 the ten Catholic states passed one by one into the hands of 
 Spain. 
 
 The new vigor of Philip in the West marked a change 
 in the whole policy of Spain. Till now, in spite of endless 
 provocations, Philip had clung to the English alliance. 
 Fear of Elizabeth's union with France, dread of her help 
 to the Xetherlands, had steeled him to bear patiently her 
 defiance of his counsels, her neglect of his threats, her 
 seizure of his treasure, her persecution of the Catholic 
 party which looked to him as its head. But patience had 
 only been met by fresh attacks. The attempt of Don John 
 had spurred Elizabeth to ally herself to France. She was 
 expected every hour to marry the Duke of Anjou. She 
 had given friendship and aid to the revolted provinces. 
 Above all her freebooters were carrying war into the far 
 Pacific, and challenging the right of Spain to the 'New 
 World of the West. Philip drifted whether he would or 
 no into a position of hostility. He had not forbidden the 
 projects of Don John; he at last promised aid to the pro- 
 jects of Home. In 1579 the Papacy planned the greatest 
 and most comprehensive of its attacks upon Elizabeth. If 
 the Catholic powers still hesitated and delayed, Rome was 
 resolute to try its own strength in the West. The spiritual 
 reconciliation of England was not enough. However suc- 
 cessful the efforts of the seminary priests might prove they
 
 CHAP. 5.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 413 
 
 would leave Elizabeth on the throne, and the reign of 
 Elizabeth was a defeat to the Papacy. In issuing its Bull 
 of Deposition Rome had staked all on the ruin of the Queen, 
 and even if England became Catholic Gregory could not 
 suffer his spiritual subjects to obey a ruler whom his sen- 
 tence had declared an unlawful possessor of the throne. 
 And now that the temper of Spain promised more vigorous 
 action Rome could pave the way for a landing of Philip's 
 troops by stirring up a threefold danger for Elizabeth. 
 While fresh and more vigorous missionaries egged on the 
 English Catholics to revolt the Pope hastened to bring 
 about a Catholic revolution in Scotland and a Catholic in- 
 surrection in Ireland. 
 
 In Ireland Sidney's victory had been followed by ten 
 years of peace. Had the land been left to itself there 
 would have been nothing more than the common feuds 
 and disturbances of the time. The policy of driving its 
 people to despair by seizing their lands for English settle- 
 ments had been abandoned since Mary's day. The relig- 
 ious question had hardly any practical existence. On the 
 Queen's accession indeed the ecclesiastical policy of the 
 Protestants had been revived in name ; Rome was again 
 renounced ; the Act of Uniformity forced on the island the 
 use of the English Prayer-book and compelled attendances 
 at the services where it was used. There was as before a 
 general air of compliance with the law. Even in the dis- 
 tricts without the Pale the bishops generally conformed ; 
 and the only exceptions of which we have any information 
 were to be found in the extreme south and in the north, 
 where resistance was distant enough to be safe. But the 
 real cause of this apparent submission to the Act of Uni- 
 formity lay in the fact that it remained, and necessarily 
 remained, a dead letter. It was impossible to find any 
 considerable number of English ministers, or of Irish 
 priests acquainted with English. Meath was one of the 
 most civilized dioceses of the island, and out of a hundred 
 curates in it hardly ten knew any tongue save their own.
 
 414 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 The promise that the service-book should be translated 
 into Irish was never carried out, and the final clause of 
 the Act itself authorized the use of a Latin rendering of it 
 till further order could be taken. But this, like its other 
 provisions, was ignored ; and throughout Elizabeth's reign 
 the gentry of the Pale went unquestioned to Mass. There 
 was in fact no religious persecution, and in the many 
 complaints of Shane O'Neill we find no mention of a re- 
 ligious grievance. 
 
 But this was far from being the view of Rome or of 
 Spain, of the Catholic missionaries, or of the Irish exiles 
 abroad. They represented and perhaps believed the Irish 
 people to be writhing under a religious oppression which 
 it was burning to shake off. They saw in the Irish loyalty 
 to Catholicism a lever for overthrowing the heretic Queen. 
 Stukely, an Irish refugee, had pressed on the Pope and 
 Spain as early as 1571 the policy of a descent on Ireland; 
 and though a force gathered in 1578 by the Pope for this 
 purpose was diverted to a mad crusade against the Moors, 
 his plans were carried out in 1579 by the landing of a small 
 force under the brother of the Earl of Desmond, James 
 Fitzmaurice, on the coast of Kerry. The Irish however 
 held aloof, and Fitzmaurice fell in a skirmish; but the re- 
 volt of the Earl of Desmond gave fresh hope of success, 
 and the rising was backed by the arrival in 1580 of two 
 thousand Papal soldiers "in five great ships." These 
 mercenaries were headed by an Italian captain, San 
 Giuseppe, and accompanied by a Papal Legate, the Jesuit 
 Sanders, who brought plenary indulgence for all who 
 joined the sacred enterprise and threats of damnation for 
 all who resisted it. " What will you answer to the Pope's 
 treatment," ran his letter to the Irish, "when he, bringing 
 us the Pope's and other Catholic princes' aid, shall charge 
 you with the crime and pain of heretics for maintaining 
 an heretical pretenced Queen against the public sentence 
 of Christ's vicar? Can she with her feigned supremacy 
 absolve and acquit you from the Pope's excommunication
 
 CHAP. 5.] THE REFORMATION. 15401608. 416 
 
 and curse ?" The news of the landing of this force stirred 
 in England a Protestant frenzy that foiled the scheme for 
 a Catholic marriage with the Duke of Anjou; while Eliza- 
 beth, panic-stricken, urged the French King to save her 
 from Philip by an invasion of the Netherlands. But the 
 danger passed quickly away. The Papal attempt ended 
 in a miserable failure. The fort of Smenvick, in which 
 the invaders intrenched themselves, was forced to sur- 
 render, and its garrison put ruthlessly to the sword. The 
 Earl of Desmond, who after long indecision rose to support 
 them, was defeated and hunted over his own country, 
 which the panic-born cruelty of his pursuers harried into 
 a wilderness. 
 
 Pitiless as it was, the work done in Minister spread a 
 terror over Ireland which served England in good stead 
 when the struggle of Catholicism culminated in the fight 
 with the Armada ; and not a chieftain stirred during that 
 memorable year save to massacre the miserable men who 
 were shipwrecked along the coast of Bantry or Sligo. But 
 the Irish revolt did much to give fresh strength to the 
 panic which the efforts of the seminary priests had roused 
 in England. This was raised to frenzy by news that to 
 the efforts of the seminary priests were now added those 
 of Jesuit missionaries. Pope Gregory had resolved to 
 support his military effort in Ireland by a fresh missionary 
 effort in England itself. Philip would only promise to in- 
 vade England if the co-operation of its Catholics was 
 secured ; and the aim of the new mission was to prepare 
 them for revolt. While the force of San Giuseppe was 
 being equipped for Kerry a young convert, William Gil- 
 bert, was dispatched to form a Catholic association in Eng- 
 land; among whose members the chief were hereafter 
 found engaged in conspiracies for the death of Elizabeth 
 or sharing in the Gunpowder Plot. As soon as this was 
 organized, as many as fifty priests, if we may trust Allen 
 statement, were sent to land secretly on the coast. They 
 were headed by two men of remarkable talents and energy.
 
 416 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 A large number of the Oxford refugees at Douay had 
 joined the Order of Jesus, whose members were already 
 famous for their blind devotion to the will and judgments 
 of Rome ; and the two ablest and most eloquent of these 
 exiles, Campian, once a fellow of St. John's, and Parsons, 
 once a fellow of Balliol, were dispatched in the spring of 
 1580 as the heads of a Jesuit mission in England. Their 
 special aim was to win the nobility and gentry to the 
 Church, and for the moment their success seemed over- 
 whelming. "It is supposed," wrote Allen triumphantly, 
 " that there are twenty thousand more Catholics this year 
 than last." The eagerness shown to hear Campian was so 
 great that in spite of the rewards offered for his arrest by 
 the Government he was able to preach with hardly a show 
 of concealment to a large audience at Smithfield. From 
 London the Jesuits wandered in the disguise of captains 
 or serving-men, sometimes even in the cassocks of the 
 English clergy, through many of the counties ; and wher- 
 ever they went the zeal of the Catholic gentry revived. 
 The list of nobles won back to the older faith by these 
 wandering apostles was headed by the name of Lord Ox- 
 ford, Cecil's own son-in-law, and the proudest among 
 English peers. 
 
 Their success in undoing the Queen's work of compro- 
 mise was shown in a more public way by the growing 
 withdrawal of the Catholics from attendance at the wor- 
 ship of the English Church. It was plain that a fierce re- 
 ligious struggle was at hand, and men felt that behind this 
 lay a yet fiercer political struggle. Philip's hosts were 
 looming over sea, and the horrors of foreign invasion 
 seemed about to be added to the horrors of civil war. The 
 panic of the Protestants and of the Parliament outran even 
 the real greatness of the danger. The little group of mis- 
 sionaries was magnified by popular fancy into a host of dis- 
 guised Jesuits ; and the invasion of this imaginary host was 
 met by the seizure and torture of as many priests as the 
 government could lay hands on, the imprisonment of 

 
 CHAP. 5.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 417 
 
 recusants, the securing of the prominent Catholics 
 throughout the country, and by the assembling of Parlia- 
 ment at the opening of 1581. An Act "to retain the 
 Queen's Majesty's subjects in due obedience" prohibited 
 the saying of Mass even in private houses, increased the 
 fine on recusants to twenty pounds a month, and enacted 
 that "all persons pretending to any power of absolving 
 subjects from their allegiance, or practising to withdraw 
 them to the Romish religion, with all persons after the 
 present session willingly so absolved or reconciled to the 
 See of Rome, shall be guilty of High Treason." The way 
 in which the vast powers conferred on the Crown by this 
 statute were used by Elizabeth was not only characteristic 
 in itself, but important as at once denning the policy to 
 which, in theory at least, her successors adhered for more 
 than a hundred years. No layman was brought to the bar 
 or to the block under its provisions. The oppression of the 
 Catholic gentry was limited to an exaction, more or less 
 rigorous at different times, of the fines for recusancy or 
 non-attendance at public worship. The work of bloodshed 
 was reserved wholly for priests, and under Elizabeth this 
 work was done with a ruthless energy which for the mo- 
 ment crushed the Catholic reaction. The Jesuits were 
 tracked by pursuivants and spies, dragged from their hid- 
 ing-places, and sent in batches to the Tower. So hot was 
 the pursuit that Parsons was forced to fly across the Chan- 
 nel; while Campian was arrested in July, 1581, brought a 
 prisoner through the streets of London amid the howling 
 of the mob, and placed at the bar on the charge of treason. 
 "Our religion only is our crime," was a plea which galled 
 his judges ; but the political danger of the Jesuit preaching 
 was disclosed in his evasion of any direct reply when ques- 
 tioned as to his belief in the validity of the excommunica 
 tion or deposition of the Queen by the Papal See, and after 
 much hesitation he was executed as a traitor. 
 
 Rome was now at open war with England. Even tl 
 more conservative Englishmen looked on the Papacy as the
 
 418 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 first among England's foes. In striving to enforce the 
 claims of its temporal supremacy, Rome had roused against 
 it that national pride which had battled with it even in the 
 middle ages. From that hour therefore the cause of Cath- 
 olicism was lost. England became Protestant in heart and 
 soul when Protestantism became identified with patriot- 
 ism. But it was not to Protestantism only that this atti- 
 tude of Rome and the policy it forced on the Government 
 gave a new impulse. The death of Campian was the pre- 
 lude to a steady, pitiless effort at the extermination of his 
 class. If we adopt the Catholic estimate of the time, the 
 twenty years which followed saw the execution of two hun- 
 dred priests, while a yet greater number perished in the 
 filthy and fever-stricken jails into which they were 
 plunged. The work of reconciliation to Rome was ar- 
 rested by this ruthless energy ; but, on the other hand, the 
 work which the priests had effected could not be undone. 
 The system of quiet compulsion and conciliation to which 
 Elizabeth had trusted for the religious reunion of her sub- 
 jects was foiled ; and the English Catholics, fined, impris- 
 oned at every crisis of national danger, and deprived of 
 their teachers by the prison and the gibbet, were severed 
 more hopelessly than evef from the national Church. A 
 fresh impulse was thus given to the growing current of 
 opinion which was to bring England at last to recognize 
 the right of every man to freedom both of conscience and 
 of worship. " In Henry's days, the father of this Eliza- 
 beth," wrote a Catholic priest at this time, "the whole 
 kingdom with all its bishops and learned men abjured 
 their faith at one word of the tyrant. But now in his 
 daughter's days boys and women boldly profess the faith 
 before the judge, and refuse to make the slightest conces 
 sion even at the threat of death." What Protestantism 
 had first done under Mary, Catholicism was doing under 
 Elizabeth. It was deepening the sense of personal religion. 
 It was revealing in men who had till now cowered before 
 the might of kingship a power greater than the might of
 
 CHAP. 5.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 419 
 
 kings. It was breaking the spell which the monarchy 
 had laid on the imagination of the people. The Crown 
 ceased to seem irresistible when " boys and women" dared 
 to resist it : it lost its mysterious sacredness when half the 
 nation looked on their sovereign as a heretic. The " di- 
 vinity that doth hedge a king" was rudely broken in upon 
 when Jesuit libellers were able to brand the wearer of the 
 crown not only as a usurper but as a profligate and aban- 
 doned woman. The mighty impulse of patriotism, of na- 
 tional pride, which rallied the whole people round Eliz- 
 abeth as the Armada threatened England or Drake threat- 
 ened Spain, shielded indeed Elizabeth from much of the 
 natural results of this drift of opinion. But with her death 
 the new sentiment started suddenly to the front. The di- 
 vine right of kings, the divine right of bishops, found 
 themselves face to face with a passion for religious and 
 political liberty which had gained vigor from the dungeon 
 of the Catholic priest as from that of the Protestant zealot.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 ENGLAND AND SPAIN. 
 15821593. 
 
 THE work of the Jesuits, the withdrawal of the Catho- 
 lics from the Churches, the panic of the Protestants, were 
 signs that the control of events was passing from the 
 hands of statesmen and diplomatists. The long period of 
 suspense which Elizabeth's policy had won was ending in 
 the clash of national and political passions. The rising 
 fanaticism of the Catholic world was breaking down the 
 caution and hesitation of Philip ; while England was set- 
 ting aside the balanced neutrality of her Queen and push- 
 ing boldly forward to a contest which it felt to be inevi- 
 table. The public opinion, to which Elizabeth was so sen- 
 sitive, took every day a bolder and more decided tone. 
 Her cold indifference to the heroic struggle in Flanders 
 was more than compensated by the enthusiasm it roused 
 among the nation at large. The earlier Flemish refugees 
 found a home in the Cinque Ports. The exiled merchants 
 of Antwerp were welcomed by the merchants of London. 
 While Elizabeth dribbled out her secret aid to the Prince 
 of Orange, the London traders sent him half-a-million 
 from their own purses, a sum equal to a year's revenue of 
 fthe Crown. Volunteers stole across the Channel in in- 
 creasing numbers to the aid of the Dutch, till the five 
 hundred Englishmen who fought in the beginning of the 
 struggle rose to a brigade 1 of five thousand, whose bravery 
 turned one of the most critical battles of the war. Dutch 
 privateers found shelter in English ports, and English 
 vessels hoisted the flag of the States for a dash at the 
 Spanish traders. Protestant fervor rose steadily among
 
 . 6.] THE REFORMATION. 15401608. 421 
 
 Englishmen as " the best captains and soldiers" returned 
 from the campaigns in the Low Countries to tell of Alva's 
 atrocities, or as privateers brought back tales of English 
 seamen who had been seized in Spain and the New World, 
 to linger amid the tortures of the Inquisition, or to die 
 in its fires. In the presence of this steady drift of popular 
 passion the diplomacy of Elizabeth became of little mo- 
 ment. If the Queen was resolute for peace, England was 
 resolute for war. A new daring had arisen since the be- 
 ginning of her reign, when Cecil and Elizabeth stood alone 
 in their belief in England's strength, and when the diplo- 
 matists of Europe regarded her obstinate defiance of 
 Philip's counsels as " madness. " The whole English people 
 had caught the self-confidence and daring of their Queen. 
 It was the instinct of liberty as well as of Protestantism 
 that drove England forward to a conflict with Philip of 
 Spain. Spain was at this moment the mightiest of Euro- 
 pean powers. The discoveries of Columbus had given it 
 the New World of the West ; the conquests of Cortes and 
 Pizarro poured into its treasury the plunder of Mexico and 
 Peru ; its galleons brought the rich produce of the Indies, 
 their gold, their jewels, their ingots of silver, to the harbor 
 of Cadiz. To the New World the Spanish King added the 
 fairest and wealthiest portions of the Old ; he was master 
 of Naples and Milan, the richest and most fertile districts 
 of Italy; in spite of revolt he was still lord of the busy 
 provinces of the Low Countries, of Flanders, the great 
 manufacturing district of the time, and of Antwerp, which 
 had become the central mart for the commerce of the world. 
 His native kingdom, poor as it was, supplied him with the 
 Steadiest and the most daring soldiers that Europe had 
 seen since the fall of the Eoman Empire. The renown of 
 the Spanish infantry had been growing from the day when 
 it flung off the onset of the French chivalry on the fi 
 Kavenna; and the Spanish generals stood without nvali 
 in their military skill, as they stood without rivals in then 
 ruthless cruelty.
 
 422 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [Boos: VL 
 
 The whole too of this enormous power was massed in 
 the hands of a single man. Served as he was by able 
 statesmen and subtle diplomatists, Philip of Spain was his 
 own sole minister; laboring day after day, like a clerk, 
 through the long years of his reign, amid the papers 
 whicb crowded his closet ; but resolute to let nothing pass 
 without his supervision, and to suffer nothing to be done 
 save by his express command. His scheme of rule dif- 
 fered widely from that of his father. Charles had held 
 the vast mass of his dominions by a purely personal bond. 
 He chose no capital, but moved ceaselessly from land to 
 land; he was a German in the Empire, a Spaniard in 
 Castile, a Netherlander in the Netherlands. But in the 
 hands of Philip his father's heritage became a Spanish 
 realm. His capital was fixed at Madrid. The rest of his 
 dominions sank into provinces of Spain, to be governed by 
 Spanish viceroys, and subordinated to the policy and in- 
 terests of a Spanish minister. All local liberties, all 
 varieties of administration, all national' differences were 
 set aside for a monotonous despotism which was wielded 
 by Philip himself. It was his boast that everywhere in 
 the vast compass of his dominions he was " an absolute 
 king." It was to realize this idea of unshackled power 
 that he crushed the liberties of Aragon, as his father had 
 crushed the liberties of Castile, and sent Alva to tread 
 under foot the constitutional freedom of the Low Coun- 
 tries. His bigotry went hand in hand with his thirst for 
 rule. Catholicism was the one common bond that knit his 
 realms together, and policy as well as religious faith made 
 Philip the champion of Catholicism. Italy and Spain lay 
 hushed beneath the terror of the Inquisition while Flan- 
 ders was being purged of heresy by the stake and the sword. 
 
 The shadow of this gigantic power fell like a deadly 
 blight over Europe. The new Protestantism, like the new 
 spirit of political liberty, saw its real foe in Philip. It 
 was Spain, rather than the Guises, against wnich Coligni 
 and the Huguenots struggled in vain ; it was Spain with
 
 CHAP. 6.] THE REFORMATION. 15401608. 423 
 
 which William of Orange was wrestling for religious and 
 civil freedom; it was Spain which was soon to plunge 
 Germany into the chaos of the Thirty Years' War, and to 
 which the Catholic world had for twenty years been look- 
 ing, and looking in vain, for a victory over heresy in Eng- 
 land. Vast in fact as Philip's resources were, they were 
 drained by the yet vaster schemes of ambition into which 
 his religion and his greed of power, as well as the wide 
 distribution of his dominions, perpetually drew him. To 
 coerce the weaker States of Italy, to command the Medi- 
 terranean, to keep a hold on the African coast, to preserve 
 his influence in Germany, to support Catholicism in 
 France, to crush heresy in Flanders, to dispatch one 
 Armada against the Turk and another against England, 
 were aims mighty enough to exhaust even the power of 
 the Spanish monarchy. But it was rather on tLe char- 
 acter of Philip than on the exhaustion of his treasury that 
 Elizabeth counted for success in the struggle which had 
 so long been going on between them. The King's temper 
 was slow, cautious even to timidity, losing itself continu- 
 ally in delays, in hesitations, in anticipating remote perils, 
 in waiting for distant chances ; and on the slowness and 
 hesitation of his temper his rival had been playing ever 
 since she mounted the throne. The agility, the sudden 
 changes of Elizabeth, her lies, her mystifications, though 
 they failed to deceive Philip, puzzled and impeded his 
 mind. The diplomatic contest between the two was like 
 the fight which England was soon to see between the 
 ponderous Spanish galleon and the light pinnace of the 
 buccaneers. 
 
 But amid all the cloud of intrigue which disguised 
 their policy, the actual course of their relations had been 
 clear and simple. In the earlier years of Elizabeth Philip 
 had been driven to her alliance by his fear of France and 
 his dread of the establishment of a French supremacy over 
 England and Scotland through the accession of Mary 
 Stuart. As time went on, the discontent and rising of the
 
 424 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [Boos VI. 
 
 Netherlands made it of hardly less import to avoid a strife 
 with the Queen. Had revolt in England prospered, or 
 Mary Stuart succeeded in her countless plots, or Elizabeth 
 fallen beneath an assassin's knife, Philip was ready to 
 have struck in and reaped the fruits of other men's labors. 
 But his stake was too vast to risk an attack while the 
 Queen sat firmly on her throne ; and the cry of the Eng- 
 lish Catholics, or the pressure of the Pope, failed to drive 
 the Spanish King into strife with Elizabeth. But as the 
 tide of religious passion which had so long been held in 
 check broke over its banks the political face of Europe 
 changed. Philip had less to dread from France or from an 
 English alliance with France. The abstinence of Eliza- 
 beth from intervention in the Netherlands was neutralized 
 by the intervention of the English people. Above all, the 
 English hostility threatened Philip in a quarter where he 
 was more sensitive than elsewhere, his dominion in the 
 West. 
 
 Foiled as the ambition of Charles the Fifth had been in 
 the Old World, his empire had widened with every year 
 in the New. At his accession to the throne the Spanish 
 rule had hardly spread beyond the Island of St. Domingo, 
 which Columbus had discovered twenty years before. But 
 greed and enterprise drew Cortes to the mainland, and in 
 1521 his conquest of Mexico added a realm of gold to the 
 dominions of the Empire. Ten years later the great empire 
 of Peru yielded to the arms of Pizarro. With the conquest 
 of Chili the whole western coast of South America passed 
 into the hands of Spain ; and successive expeditions planted 
 the Spanish flag at point upon point along the coast of the 
 Atlantic from Florida to the river Plate. A Papal grant 
 had conveyed the whole of America to the Spanish crown, 
 and fortune seemed for long years to ratify the judgment 
 of the Vatican. No European nation save Portugal dis- 
 puted the possession of the New World, and Portugal was 
 too busy with its discoveries in Africa and India to claim 
 more than the territory of Brazil. Though Francis the
 
 CHAP. .] THE REFORMATION. 1540-1603. 425 
 
 First sent seamen to explore the American coast, his am- 
 bition found other work at home; and a Huguenot colony 
 which settled in Florida was cut to pieces by the Spaniards. 
 Only in the far north did a few French settlers find rest 
 beside the waters of the St. Lawrence. England had 
 reached the mainland even earlier than Spain, for before 
 Columbus touched its shores Sebastian Cabot, a seaman of 
 Genoese blood but born and bred in England, sailed with 
 an English crew from Bristol in 1497, and pushed along 
 the coast of America to the south as far as Florida, and 
 northward as high as Hudson's Bay. But no Englishman 
 f ollowed on the track of this bold adventurer ; and while 
 Spain built up her empire in the New World, the English 
 seamen reaped a humbler harvest in the fisheries of New- 
 foundland. 
 
 There was little therefore in the circumstances which 
 attended the first discovery of the western continent that 
 promised well for freedom. Its one result as yet was to 
 give an enormous impulse to the most bigoted and tyran- 
 nical among the powers of Europe, and to pour the gold of 
 Mexico and Peru into the treasury of Spain. But as the 
 reign of Elizabeth went on the thoughts of Englishmen 
 turned again to the New World. A happy instinct drew 
 them from the first not to the southern shores that Spain 
 was conquering, but to the ruder and more barren districts 
 of the north. In 1576 the dream of finding a passage to 
 Asia by a voyage round the northern coast of the Ameri- 
 can continent drew a west-country seaman, Martin Fro- 
 bisher, to the coast of Labrador ; and, foiled as he was in 
 his quest, the news he brought back of the existence of 
 gold mines there set adventurers cruising among the ice- 
 bergs of Baffin's Bay. Elizabeth herself joined in the 
 venture ; but the settlement proved a failure, the ore which 
 the ships brought back turned out to be worthless, and 
 England was saved from that greed of gold which was to 
 be fatal to the energies of Spain. But failure as it was, 
 Frobisher's venture had shown the readiness of English-
 
 426 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 men to defy the claims of Spain to the exclusive possession 
 of America or the American seas. They were already de- 
 fying these claims in a yet more galling way. The sea- 
 men of the southern and southwestern coasts had long 
 been carrying on a half -piratical war on their own account. 
 Four years after Elizabeth's accession the Channel swarmed 
 with "sea-dogs," as they were called, who sailed under 
 letters of marque from Conde and the Huguenot leaders, 
 and took heed neither of the complaints of the French 
 Court nor of their own Queen's efforts at repression. Her 
 efforts broke against the connivance of every man along the 
 coast, of the very port officers of the Crown, who made 
 profit out of the spoil which the plunderers brought home, 
 and of the gentry of the west, whose love of venture made 
 them go hand in hand with the sea-dogs. They broke 
 above all against the national craving for open fight with 
 Spain, and the Protestant craving for open fight with 
 Catholicism. If the Queea held back from any formal 
 part in the great war of religions across the Channel, her 
 subjects were keen to take their part in it. Young Eng- 
 lishmen crossed the sea to serve under Conde or Henry of 
 Navarre. The war in the Netherlands drew hundreds of 
 Protestants to the field. Their passionate longing for a 
 religious war found a wider sphere on the sea. When 
 the suspension of the French contest forced the sea-dogs to 
 haul down the Huguenot flag, they joined in the cruises 
 of the Dutch " sea-beggars." From plundering the vessels 
 of Havre and Rochelle they turned to plunder the galleons 
 of Spain. 
 
 Their outrages tried Philip's patience ; but his slow re- 
 sentment only quickened into angry alarm when the sea- 
 dogs sailed westward to seek a richer spoil. The Papal 
 decree which gave the New World to Spain, the threats 
 of the Spanish King against any Protestant who should 
 visit its seas, fell idly on the ears of English seamen. 
 Philip's care to save his new dominions from the touch of 
 heresy was only equalled by his resolve to suffer no trade
 
 CHAP. 6.] THE REFORMATION. 1540-1603. 427 
 
 between them and other lands than Spain. But the sea 
 dogs were as ready to traffic as to fight It was in vain 
 that their vessels were seized, and the sailors flung into 
 the dungeons of the Inquisition, "laden with irons, with- 
 out sight of sun or moon." The profits of the trade were 
 large enough to counteract its perils; and the bigotry of 
 Philip was met by a bigotry as merciless as his own. The 
 Puritanism of the sea-dogs went hand in hand with their 
 love of adventure. To break through the Catholic mo- 
 nopoly of the New World, to kill Spaniards, to sell negroes, 
 to sack gold-ships, were in these men's mind a seemly work 
 for "the elect of God." The name of Francis Drake be- 
 came the terror of the Spanish Indies. In Drake a Prot- 
 estant fanaticism went hand in hand with a splendid dar- 
 ing. He conceived the design of penetrating into the 
 Pacific, whose waters had till then never seen an English 
 flag ; and backed by a little company of adventurers, he set 
 sail in 1577 for the southern seas in a vessel hardly as big 
 as a Channel schooner, with a few yet smaller companions, 
 who fell away before the storms and perils of the voyage. 
 But Drake, with his one ship and eighty men, held boldly 
 on ; and, passing the Straits of Magellan, untraversed as 
 yet by any Englishman, swept the unguarded coast of 
 Chili and Peru, loaded his bark with the gold dust and 
 silver ingots of Potosi, as well as with the pearls, emeralds, 
 and diamonds which formed the cargo of the great galleon 
 that sailed once a year from Lima to Cadiz. With spoils 
 of above half-a-million in value the daring adventurer 
 steered undauntedly for the Moluccas, rounded the Cape 
 of Good Hope, and, in 1580, after completing the circuit of 
 the globe, dropped anchor again in Plymouth harbor. 
 
 The romantic daring of Drake's voyage as well as the 
 vastness of his spoil roused a general enthusiasm through- 
 out England. But the welcome which he received from 
 Elizabeth on his return was accepted by Philip as an out- 
 rage which could only be expiated by war. Sluggish as 
 it was, the blood of the Spanish King was fired at last by
 
 428 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI 
 
 the. defiance with which the Queen listened to all demands 
 for redress. She met a request for Drake's surrender by 
 knighting the freebooter and by wearing in her crown the 
 jewels he offered her as a present. When the Spanish 
 ambassador threatened that " matters would come to the 
 cannon," she replied "quietly, in her most natural voice, 
 as if she were telling a common story," wrote Mendoza, 
 "that" if 'I used threats of that kind she would fling me 
 into a dungeon." Outraged indeed as Philip was, she be- 
 lieved that with the. Netherlands still in revolt and France 
 longing for -her alliance to enable it to seize them, the King 
 could not, afford to quarrel with her. But the victories 
 and diplomacy of Parma were already reassuring Philip 
 in the Netherlands ; while the alliance of Elizabeth with 
 the revolted Provinces convinced him at last that their re- 
 duction could best be brought about by an invasion of 
 England and the establishment of Mary Stuart on its 
 throne. With this conviction he lent himself to the plans 
 of Rome, and waited only for the rising in Ireland and 
 the revolt of the English Catholics which Pope Gregory 
 promised him to dispatch forces from both Flanders and 
 Spain. But the Irish rising was over before Philip could 
 act; and before the Jesuits could rouse England to rebel- 
 lion the Spanish King himself was drawn to a new scheme 
 of ambition by the death of King Sebastian of Portugal in 
 1580. Philip claimed the Portuguese crown; and in less 
 than two months Alva laid the kingdom at his feet. The 
 conquest of Portugal was fatal to the Papal projects against 
 England, for while the armies of Spain marched on Lisbon 
 Elizabeth was able to throw the leaders of the future re- 
 volt into prison and to send Campian to the scaffold. On 
 the other hand it raised Philip into a far more formidable 
 foe. The conquest almost doubled his power. His gain 
 was far more than that of Portugal itself. While Spain 
 had been winning the New World her sister-kingdom had 
 been winning a wide though scattered dominion on the 
 African coast, the coast of India, and the islands of the
 
 CHAP. 6.] THE REFORMATION. 1540-1603. 429 
 
 Pacific. Less in extent, the Portuguese settlements were 
 at the moment of even greater value to the mother country 
 than the colonies of Spain. The gold of Guinea, the silks 
 of Goa, the spices of the Philippines made Lisbon one of 
 the marts of Europe. The sword of Alva had given Philip 
 a hold on the richest trade of the world. It had given him 
 the one navy that as yet rivalled his own. His flag claimed 
 mastery in the Indian and the Pacific seas, as it claimed 
 mastery in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. 
 
 The conquest of Portugal therefore wholly changed 
 Philip's position. It not only doubled his power and re- 
 sources, but it did this at a time when fortune seemed 
 everywhere wavering to his side. The provinces of the 
 Netherlands, which still maintained a struggle for their 
 liberties, drew courage from despair; and met Philip's 
 fresh hopes of their subjection by a solemn repudiation of 
 his sovereignty in the summer of 1581. But they did not 
 dream that they could stand alone, and they sought the 
 aid of France by choosing as their sovereign the Duke of 
 Alengon, who on his brother Henry's accession to the 
 throne had become Duke of Anjou. The choice was only 
 part of a political scheme which was to bind the whole of 
 Western Europe together against Spain. The conquest of 
 Portugal had at once drawn France and England into close 
 relations, and Catharine of Medicis strove to league the 
 two countries by a marriage of Elizabeth with the Duke 
 of Anjou. Such a match would have been a purely polit- 
 ical one, for Elizabeth was now forty-eight, and Francis 
 of Anjou had no qualities either of mind or body to recom- 
 mend him to the Queen. But the English ministers pressed 
 for it, Elizabeth amid all her coquetries seemed at last ready 
 to marry, and the States seized the moment to lend them- 
 selves to the alliance of the two powers by choosing the 
 Duke as their lord. Anjou accepted their offer, and cross- 
 ing to the Netherlands, drove Parma from Cambray ; then 
 sailing again to England, he spent the winter in a fresh 
 wooing.
 
 430 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 But the Duke's wooing still proved fruitless. The 
 schemes of diplomacy found themselves shattered against 
 the religious enthusiasm of the time. While Orange and 
 Catharine and Elizabeth saw only the political weight of 
 the marriage as a check upon Philip, the sterner Protes- 
 tants in England saw in it a victory for Catholicism at 
 home. Of the difference between the bigoted Catholicism 
 of Spain and the more tolerant Catholicism of the court of 
 France such men recked nothing. The memory of St. 
 Bartholomew's day hung around Catharine of Medicis; 
 and the success of the Jesuits at this moment roused the 
 dread of a general conspiracy against Protestantism. A 
 Puritan lawyer named Stubbs only expressed the alarm of 
 his fellows in his " Discovery of a Gaping Gulf" in which 
 . England was to plunge through the match with Anjou. 
 When the hand of the pamphleteer was cut off as a penalty 
 for his daring, Stubbs waved his hat with the hand that 
 was left, and cried " God save Queen Elizabeth." But the 
 Queen knew how stern a fanaticism went with his un- 
 flinching loyalty, and her dread of a religious conflict 
 within her realm must have quickened the fears which the 
 worthless temper of her wooer cannot but have inspired. 
 She gave however no formal refusal of her hand. So long 
 as coquetry sufficed to hold France and England together, 
 she was ready to play the coquette; and it was as the 
 future husband of the Queen that Anjou again appeared in 
 
 1582 in the Netherlands and received the formal submis- 
 sion of the revolted States, save Holland and Zealand. 
 But the subtle schemes which centred in him broke down 
 before the selfish perfidy of the Duke. Resolved to be 
 ruler in more than name, he planned the seizure of the 
 greater cities of the Netherlands, and at the opening of 
 
 1583 made a fruitless effort to take Antwerp by surprise. 
 It was in vain that Orange strove by patient negotiation 
 to break the blow. The Duke fled homeward, the match 
 and sovereignty were at an end, the alliance of the three 
 powers vanished like a dream. The last Catholic provinces 

 
 CHAP. 6.] THE REFORMATION. 1540-1608. 431 
 
 passed over to Parma's side; the weakened Netherlands 
 found themselves parted from France; and at the close of 
 1583 Elizabeth saw herself left face to face with Philip of 
 Spain. 
 
 Nor was this all. At home as well as abroad troubles 
 were thickening around the Queen. The fanaticism of the 
 Catholic world without was stirring a Protestant fanati- 
 cism within the realm. As Rome became more and more 
 the centre of hostility to England, patriotism itself stirred 
 men to a hatred of Rome ; and their hatred of Rome passed 
 easily into a love for the fiercer and sterner Calvinism 
 which looked on all compromise with Rome, or all accept- 
 ance of religious traditions or usages which had been as- 
 sociated with Rome, as treason against God. Puritanism, 
 as this religious temper was called, was becoming the creed 
 of every earnest Protestant throughout the realm ; and the 
 demand for a further advance toward the Calvinistic 
 system and a more open breach with Catholicism which 
 was embodied in the suppression of the "superstitious 
 usages" became stronger than ever. But Elizabeth was 
 firm as of old to make no advance. Greatly as the Prot- 
 estants had grown, she knew they were still a minority in 
 the realm. If the hotter Catholics were fast decreasing, 
 they remained a large and important body. But the mass 
 of the nation was neither Catholic nor Protestant. It had 
 lost faith in the Papacy. It was slowly drifting to a new 
 faith in the Bible. But it still clung obstinately to the 
 past ; it still recoiled from violent change ; its temper was 
 religious rather than theological, and it shrank from the 
 fanaticism of Geneva as it shrank from the fanaticism of 
 Rome. It was a proof of Elizabeth's genius that alone 
 among her counsellors she understood this drift of opinion, 
 and withstood measures which would have startled the 
 mass of Englishmen into a new resistance. 
 
 But her policy was wider than her acts. The growing 
 Puritanism of the clergy stirred her wrath above measure, 
 and she met the growth of " nonconf onning" ministers by
 
 432 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 conferring new powers in 1583 on the Ecclesiastical Com- 
 mission. From being a temporary board which repre- 
 sented the Royal Supremacy in matters ecclesiastical, the 
 Commission was now turned into a permanent body wield- 
 ing the almost unlimited powers of the Crown. All opin- 
 ions or acts contrary to the Statutes of Supremacy and 
 Uniformity fell within its cognizance. A right of de- 
 privation placed the clergy at its mercy. It had power to 
 alter or amend the statutes of colleges or schools. Not 
 only heresy and schisms and nonconformity, but incest or 
 aggravated adultery were held to fall within its scope ; its 
 means of inquiry were left without limit, and it might fine 
 or imprison at its will. By the mere establishment of such 
 a court half the work of the Reformation was undone. 
 The large number of civilians on the board indeed seemed 
 to furnish some security against the excess of ecclesiastical 
 tyranny. Of its forty-four commissioners however few 
 actually took any part in its proceedings ; and the powers 
 of the Commission were practically left in the hands of 
 the successive Primates. No Archbishop of Canterbury 
 since the days of Augustine had wielded an authority so 
 vast, so utterly despotic, as that of Whitgift and Bancroft 
 and Abbot and Laud. The most terrible feature of their 
 spiritual tyranny was its wholly personal character. The 
 old symbols of doctrine were gone, and the lawyers had 
 not yet stepped in to protect the clergy by defining the ex- 
 act limits of the new. The result was that at the commis- 
 sion-board at Lambeth the Primates created their own 
 tests of doctrine with an utter indifference to those created 
 by law. In one instance Parker deprived a vicar of his 
 benefice for a denial of the verbal inspiration of the Bible. 
 Nor did the successive Archbishops care greatly if the test 
 was a varying or a conflicting one. Whitgift strove to 
 force on the Church the Calvinistic supralapsarianism of 
 his Lambeth Articles. Bancroft, who followed him, was 
 as earnest in enforcing his anti-Calvinistic dogma of the 
 divine right of the episcopate. Abbot had no mercy for
 
 CHAP. 6.] THE REFORMATION. 1540-1603. 433 
 
 Erastians. Laud had none for anti-Erastians. It is no 
 wonder that the Ecclesiastical Commission, which these 
 men represented, soon stank in the nostrils of the English 
 clergy. Its establishment however marked the adoption 
 of a more resolute policy on the part of the Crown, and its 
 efforts were backed by stern measures of repression. All 
 preaching or reading in private houses was forbidden ; and 
 in spite of the refusal of Parliament to enforce the require- 
 ment of them by law, subscription to the Three Articles 
 was exacted from every member of the clergy. For the 
 moment these measures were crowned with success. The 
 movement which Cartwright still headed was checked; 
 Cartwright himself was driven from his Professorship; 
 and an outer uniformity of worship was more and more 
 brought about by the steady pressure of the Commission. 
 The old liberty which had been allowed in London and the 
 other Protestant parts of the kingdom was no longer per- 
 mitted to exist. The leading Puritan clergy, whose non- 
 conformity had hitherto been winked at, were called upon 
 to submit to the surplice, and to make the sign of the cross 
 in baptism. The remonstrances of the country gentry 
 availed as little as the protest of Lord Burleigh himself to 
 protect two hundred of the best ministers from being 
 driven from their parsonages on a refusal to subscribe to 
 the Three Articles. 
 
 But the political danger of the course on which the 
 Crown had entered was seen in the rise of a spirit of vig 
 orous opposition, such as had not made its appearance 
 since the accession of the Tudors. The growing power of 
 public opinion received a striking recognition in the strug- 
 gle which bears the name of the " Martin Marprelate con- 
 troversy." The Puritans had from the first appealed by 
 their pamphlets from the Crown to the people, and Arch- 
 bishop Whitgift bore witness to their influence on opinion 
 by his efforts to gag the Press. The regulations made by 
 th Star-Chamber in 1585 for this purpose are memorable 
 66 the first step in the >.ong struggle of government after
 
 434 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 government to check the liberty of printing. The irregular 
 censorship which had long existed was now finally organ- 
 ized. Printing was restricted to London and the two 
 Universities, the number of printers was reduced, and all 
 applicants for license to print were placed under the super- 
 vision of the Company of Stationers. Every publication, 
 too, great or small, had to receive the approbation of the 
 Primate or the Bishop of London. The fi>st result of this 
 system of repression was the appearance, in the very year 
 of the Armada, of a series of anonymous pamphlets bear- 
 ing the significant name of "Martin Marprelate," and 
 issued from a secret press which found refuge from the 
 Royal pursuivants in the country-houses of the gentry. 
 The press was at last seized ; and the suspected authors of 
 these scurrilous libels, Penry, a young Welshman, and a 
 minister named Udall, died, the one in prison, the other 
 on the scaffold. But the virulence and boldness of their 
 language produced a powerful effect, for it was impossible 
 under the system of Elizabeth to "mar" the bishops with- 
 out attacking the Crown ; and a new age of political liberty 
 was felt to be at hand when Martin Marprelate forced the 
 political and ecclesiastical measures of the Government 
 into the arena of public discussion. 
 
 The strife between Puritanism and the Crown was to 
 grow into a fatal conflict, but at the moment the Queen's 
 policy was in the main a wise one. It was no time for 
 scaring and disuniting the mass of the people when the 
 united energies of England might soon hardly suffice to 
 withstand the onset of Spain. On the other hand, strike 
 as she might at the Puritan party, it was bound to support 
 Elizabeth in the coming struggle with Philip. For the 
 sense of personal wrong and the outcry of the Catholic 
 world against his selfish reluctance to avenge the blood 
 of its martyrs had at last told on the Spanish King, and 
 in 1584 the first vessels of an armada which was destined 
 for the conquest of England began to gather in the Tagus. 
 Resentment and fanaticism indeed were backed by a cool
 
 CHAP. 6.] THE KEFORMATION. 1540-1608. 435 
 
 policy. The gain of the Portuguese dominions made it 
 only the more needful for Philip to assert his mastery of 
 the seas. He had now to shut Englishman and heretic 
 not only out of the New World of the West but out of the 
 lucrative traffic with the East. And every day showed a 
 firmer resolve in Englishmen to claim the New World for 
 their own. The plunder of Drake's memorable voyage 
 had lured fresh freebooters to the "Spanish Main." The 
 failure of Frobisher's quest for gold only drew the nobler 
 spirits engaged in it to plans of colonization. North 
 America, vexed by long winters and thinly peopled by 
 warlike tribes of Indians, gave a rough welcome to the 
 earlier colonists; and after a fruitless attempt to forma 
 settlement on its shores Sir Humphrey Gilbert, one of the 
 noblest spirits of his time, turned homeward again to find 
 his fate in the stormy seas. " We are as near to heaven 
 by sea as by land," were the famous words he was heard 
 to utter ere the light of his little bark was lost forever in 
 the darkness of the night. But an expedition sent by his 
 brother-in-law, Sir Walter Raleigh, explored Pamlico 
 Sound ; and the country they discovered, a country where 
 in their poetic fancy " men lived after the manner of the 
 Golden Age," received from Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, 
 the name of Virginia. 
 
 It was in England only that Philip could maintain his 
 exclusive right to the New World of the West; it was 
 through England only that he could strike a last and fatal 
 blow at the revolt of the Netherlands. And foiled as his 
 plans had been as yet by the overthrow of the Papal 
 schemes, even their ruin had left ground for hope in Eng- 
 land itself. The tortures and hangings of the Catholic 
 priests, the fining and imprisonment of the Catholic gentry, 
 had roused a resentment which it was easy to mistake for 
 disloyalty. The Jesuits with Parsons at their head pictured 
 the English Catholics as only waiting to rise in rebellion 
 at the call of Spain, and reported long lists of nobles and 
 squires who would muster their tenants to join Parma's
 
 436 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [Boon VI. 
 
 legions on their landing. A Spanish victory would be 
 backed by insurrection in Ireland and attack from Scot- 
 land. For in Scotland the last act of the Papal conspiracy 
 against Elizabeth was still being played. Though as yet 
 under age, the young King, James the Sixth, had taken 
 on himself the government of the realm, and had sub- 
 mitted to the guidance of a cousin, Esme Stuart, who had 
 been brought up in France and returned to Scotland a 
 Catholic and a fellow-plotter with the Guises. He suc- 
 ceeded in bringing Morton to the block ; and the death of 
 the great Protestant leader left him free to enlist Scotland 
 in the league which Home was forming for the ruin of 
 Elizabeth. The revolt in Ireland had failed. The work 
 of the Jesuits in England had just ended in the death of 
 Campian and the arrest of his followers. But with the 
 help of the Guises Scotland might yet be brought to rise 
 in arms for the liberation of Mary Stuart, and James 
 might reign as co-regent with his mother, if he were con- 
 verted to the Catholic Church. The young King, anxious 
 to free his crown from the dictation of the nobles, lent 
 himself to his cousin's schemes. For the moment they 
 were foiled. James was seized by the Protestant lords, 
 and the Duke of Lennox, as Esme Stuart, was now called, 
 driven from the realm. But James was soon free again, 
 and again in correspondence with the Guises and with 
 Philip. The young King was lured by promises of the 
 hand of an archduchess and the hope of the crowns of 
 both England and Scotland. The real aim of the intriguers 
 who guided him was to set him aside as soon as the victory 
 was won and to restore his mother to the throne. But 
 whether Mary were restored or no it seemed certain that 
 in any attack on Elizabeth Spain would find helpers from 
 among the Scots. 
 
 Nor was the opportunity favorable in Scotland alone. 
 In the Netherlands and in France all seemed to go well 
 for Philip's schemes. From the moment of his arrival in 
 the Low Countries the Prince of Parma had been steadily
 
 CHAP. 6.] THE REFORMATION. 1540-1603. 437 
 
 winning back what Alva had lost. The Union of Ghent 
 had been broken. The ten Catholic provinces were being 
 slowly brought anew under Spanish rule. Town after 
 town was regained. From Brabant Parma had penetrated 
 into Flanders; Ypres, Bruges, and Ghent had fallen into 
 his hands. Philip dealt a more fatal blow at his rebellious 
 subjects in the murder of the man who was the centre of 
 their resistance. For years past William of Orange had 
 been a mark for assassin after assassin in Philip's pay, 
 and in 1584 the deadly persistence of the Spanish King 
 was rewarded by his fall. Reft indeed as they were of 
 their leader, the Netherlands still held their ground. The 
 union of Utrecht stood intact ; and Philip's work of re- 
 conquest might be checked at any moment by the inter- 
 vention of England or of France. But at this moment all 
 chance of French intervention passed away. Henry the 
 Third was childless, and the death of his one remaining 
 brother, Francis of Anjou, in 1584 left the young chief of 
 the house of Bourbon, King Henry of Navarre, heir to the 
 crown of France. Henry was the leader of the Huguenot 
 party, and in January, 1585, the French Catholics bound 
 themselves in a holy league to prevent such a triumph of 
 heresy in the realm as the reign of a Protestant would 
 bring about by securing the succession of Henry's uncle, 
 the cardinal of Bourbon. The Leaguers looked to Philip 
 for support; they owned his cause for their own; and 
 pledged themselves not only to root out Protestantism in 
 France, but to help the Spanish King in rooting it out 
 throughout the Netherlands. The League at once over- 
 shadowed the Crown; and Henry the Third could only 
 meet the blow by affecting to put himself at its head, and 
 by revoking the edicts of toleration in favor of the Hugue- 
 nots. But the Catholics disbelieved in his sincerity; they 
 looked only to Philip; and as long as Philip could supply 
 the Leaguers with men and money, he felt secure on the 
 side of France. 
 
 The vanishing of all hope of French aid was the more
 
 438 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 momentous to the Netherlands that at this moment Parma 
 won his crowning triumph in the capture of Antwerp. 
 Besieged in the winter of 1584, the city surrendered after 
 a brave resistance in the August of 1585. But heavy as 
 was the blow, it brought gain as well as loss to the Nether- 
 landers. It forced Elizabeth into action. She refused in- 
 deed the title of Protector of the Netherlands which the 
 States offered her, and compelled them to place Brill and 
 Flushing in her hands as pledges for the repayment of her 
 expenses. But she sent aid. Lord Leicester was hurried 
 to the Flemish coast with eight thousand men. In a yet 
 bolder spirit of defiance Francis Drake was suffered to set 
 sail with a fleet of twenty-five vessels for the Spanish Main. 
 The two expeditions had very different fortunes. Drake's 
 voyage was a series of triumphs. The wrongs inflicted on 
 English seamen by the Inquisition were requited by the 
 burning of the cities of St. Domingo and Carthagena. 
 The coasts of Cuba and Florida were plundered, and though 
 the gold fleet escaped him, Drake returned in the summer 
 of 1586 with a heavy booty. Leicester on the other hand 
 was paralyzed by his own intriguing temper, by strife with 
 the Queen, and by his military incapacity. Only one dis- 
 astrous skirmish at Zutphen broke the inaction of his 
 forces, while Elizabeth strove vainly to use the presence 
 of his army to force Parma and the States alike to a peace 
 which would restore Philip's sovereignty over the Nether- 
 lands, but leave them free enough to serve as a check on 
 Philip's designs against herself. 
 
 Foiled as she was in securing a check on Philip in the 
 Low Countries, the Queen was more successful in robbing 
 him of the aid of the Scots. The action of King James 
 had been guided by his greed of the English Crown, and 
 a secret promise of the succession sufficed to lure him from 
 the cause of Spain. In July, 1586, he formed an alliance, 
 defensive and offensive, with Elizabeth, and pledged him- 
 self not only to give no aid to revolt in Ireland, but to 
 suppress any Catholic rising in the northern counties. The
 
 CHAP. 6.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 439 
 
 pledge was the more important that the Catholic resent- 
 ment Deemed passing into fanaticism. Maddened by con- 
 fiscation and persecution, by the hopelessness of rebellion 
 within or of deliverance from without, the fiercer Catholics 
 listened to schemes of assassination to which the murder 
 of William of Orange lent a terrible significance. The 
 detection of Somerville, a fanatic who had received the 
 host before setting out for London "to shoot the Queen 
 with his dag," was followed by measures of natural se- 
 verity, by the flight and arrest of Catholic gentry and 
 peers, by a vigorous purification of the Inns of Court 
 where a few Catholics lingered, and by the dispatch of 
 fresh batches of priests to the block. The trial and death 
 of Parry, a member of the House of Commons who had 
 served in the royal household, on a similar charge, fed the 
 general panic. The leading Protestants formed an asso- 
 ciation whose members pledged themselves to pursue to the 
 death all who sought the Queen's life, and all on whose 
 behalf it was sought. The association soon became na- 
 tional, and the Parliament met together in a transport of 
 horror and loyalty to give it legal sanction. All Jesuits 
 and seminary priests were banished from the realm on 
 pain of death, and a bill for the security of the Queen dis- 
 qualified any claimant of the succession who instigated 
 subjects to rebellion or hurt to the Queen's person from 
 ever succeeding to the Crown. 
 
 The threat was aimed at Mary Stuart. Weary of her 
 long restraint, of her failure to rouse Philip or Scotland to 
 her aid, of the baffled revolt of the English Catholics and 
 the baffled intrigues of the Jesuits, Mary had bent for a 
 moment to submission. "Let me go," she wrote to Eliza- 
 beth; "let me retire from this island to some solitude 
 where I may prepare my soul to die. Grant this and 1 
 will sign away every right which either I or mine can 
 claim." But the cry was useless, and in 1586 her despair 
 found a new and more terrible hope in the plots against 
 Elizabeth's life. She knew and approved the vow of An-
 
 440 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VL 
 
 thony Babington and a band of young Catholics, for the 
 most part connected with the royal household, to kill the 
 Queen and seat Mary on the throne ; but plot and approval 
 alike passed through Walsingham's hands, and the seizure 
 of Mary's correspondence revealed her connivance in the 
 scheme. Babington with his fellow-conspirators were at 
 once sent to the block, and the provisions of the act passed 
 in the last Parliament were put in force against Mary. In 
 spite of her protest a Commision of Peers sat as her judges 
 at Fotheringay Castle, and their verdict of " guilty" an- 
 nihilated under the provisions of the statute her claim to 
 the Crown. The streets of London blazed with bonfires, 
 and peals rang out from steeple to steeple at the news of 
 Mary's condemnation ; but in spite of the prayer of Par- 
 liament for her execution and the pressure of the Council 
 Elizabeth shrank from her death. The force of public 
 opinion however was now carrying all before it, and after 
 three months of hesitation the unanimous demand of her 
 people wrested a sullen consent from the Queen. She flung 
 the warrant signed upon the floor, and the Council took on 
 themselves the responsibility of executing it. On the 8th 
 of February, 1587, Mary died on a scaffold which was 
 erected in the castle-hall at Fotheringay as dauntlessly as 
 she had lived. "Do not weep," she said to her ladies, " I 
 have given my word for you." "Tell my friends," she 
 charged Melville, "that I die a good Catholic." 
 
 The blow was hardly struck before Elizabeth turned 
 with fury on the ministers who had forced her hand. 
 Cecil, who had now become Lord Burghley, was for a 
 while disgraced, and Davison, who carried the warrant to 
 the Council, was sent to the Tower to atone for an act 
 which shattered the policy of the Queen. The death of 
 Mary Stuart in fact seemed to have removed the last ob- 
 etacle out of Philip's way. It had put an end to the divi- 
 sions of the English Catholics. To the Spanish King, as 
 to the nearest heir in blood who was of the Catholic Faith, 
 Mary bequeathed her rights to the Crown, and the hopes
 
 CHAP. 6.J THE REFORMATION. 1540-1608. 441 
 
 of her more passionate adherents were from that moment 
 bound up in the success of Spain. The blow too kindled 
 afresh the fervor of the Papacy, and Sixtus the Fifth 
 offered to aid Philip with money in his invasion of the 
 heretic realm. But Philip no longer needed pressure to 
 induce him to act. Drake's triumph had taught him that 
 the conquest of England was needful for the security of 
 his dominion in the New World, and for the mastery of 
 the seas. The presence of an English army in Flanders 
 convinced him that the road to the conquest of the States 
 lay through England itself. Nor did the attempt seem a 
 very perilous one. Allen and his Jesuit emissaries assured 
 Philip that the bulk of the nation was ready to rise as soon 
 as a strong Spanish force was landed on English shores 
 They numbered off the great lords who would head the re 
 volt, the Earls of Arundel and Northumberland, who wer* 
 both Catholics, the Earls of Worcester, Cumberland, Ox 
 ford, and Southampton, Viscount Montacute, the Lords 
 Dacres, Morley, Vaux, Wharton, Windsor, Lumley, and 
 Stourton. " All these," wrote Allen, " will follow our party 
 when they see themselves supported by a sufficient foreign 
 force." Against these were only "the new nobles, who 
 are hated in the country, "and the towns. " But the strength 
 of England is not in its towns." All the more warlike 
 counties were Catholic in their sympathies ; and the per- 
 secution of the recusants had destroyed the last traces of 
 their loyalty to the Queen. Three hundred priests had 
 been sent across the sea to organize the insurrection, and 
 they were circulating a book which Allen had lately pub- 
 lished " to prove that it is not only lawful but our bounden 
 duty to take up arms at the Pope's bidding and to fight 
 for the Catholic faith against the Queen and other here- 
 tics." A landing in the Pope's name would be best, but 
 a landing in Philip's name would be almost as secure of 
 success. Trained as they were now by Allen and his 
 three hundred priests, English Catholics " would let in 
 Catholic auxiliaries of any nation, for they have learned
 
 442 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 to hate their domestic heretic more than any foreign 
 power." 
 
 What truth there was in the Jesuit view of England 
 time was to prove. But there can be no doubt that Philip 
 believed it, and that the promise of a Catholic rising was 
 his chief inducement to attempt an invasion. The opera- 
 tions of Parma therefore were suspended with a view to 
 the greater enterprise, and vessels and supplies for the fleet 
 which had for three years been gathering in the Tagus 
 were collected from every port of the Spanish coast. Only 
 France held Philip back. He dared not attack England 
 till all dread of a counter-attack from France was removed ; 
 and though the rise of the League had seemed to secure this, 
 its success had now become more doubtful. The King, 
 who had striven to embarrass it by placing himself at its 
 head, gathered round him the politicians and the moderate 
 Catholics who saw in the triumph of the new Duke of 
 Guise the ruin of the monarchy ; while Henry of Navarre 
 took the field at the head of the Huguenots, and won in 
 1587 the victory of Coutras. Guise restored the balance 
 by driving the German allies of Henry from the realm ; 
 but the Huguenots were still unconquered, and the King, 
 standing apart, fed a struggle which lightened for him the 
 pressure of the League. Philip was forced to watch the 
 wavering fortunes of the struggle, but while he watched, 
 another blow fell on him from the sea. The news of the 
 coming Armada called Drake again to action. In ApriL 
 1587, he set sail with thirty small barks, burned the store- 
 ships and galleys in the harbor of Cadiz, stormed the ports 
 of the Faro, and was only foiled in his aim of attacking 
 the Armada itself by orders from home. A descent upon 
 Corunna however completed what Drake called his " singe- 
 ing of the Spanish king's beard." Elizabeth used the dar- 
 ing blow to back some negotiations for peace which she 
 was still conducting in the Netherlands. But on Philip's 
 side at least these negotiations were simply delusive. The 
 Spanish pride had been touched to the quick. Amid
 
 CHAP. 6.] THE REFORMATION. 1540-1608. 443 
 
 the exchange of protocols Parma gathered seventeen thou- 
 sand men for the coming invasion, collected a fleet of flat 
 bottomed transports at Dunkirk, and waited impatiently 
 for the Armada to protect his crossing. The attack of 
 Drake however, the death of its first admiral, and the 
 winter storms delayed the fleet from sailing. What held 
 it back even more effectually was the balance of parties in 
 France. But in the spring of 1588 Philip's patience was 
 rewarded. The League had been baffled till now not so 
 much by the resistance of the Huguenots as by the attitude 
 of the King. So long as Henry the Third held aloof from 
 both parties and gave a rallying point to the party of 
 moderation the victory of the Leaguers was impossible. 
 The difficulty was solved by the daring of Henry of Guise. 
 The fanatical populace of Paris rose at his call; the royal 
 troops were beaten off from the barricades; and on the 
 12th of May the King found himself a prisoner in the 
 hands of the Duke. Guise was made lieutenant-general 
 of the kingdom, and Philip was assured on the side of 
 France. 
 
 The revolution was hardly over when at the end of May 
 the Armada started from Lisbon. But it had scarcely put 
 to sea when a gale in the Bay of Biscay drove its scattered 
 vessels into Ferrol, and it was only on the nineteenth of 
 July, 1588, that the sails of the Armada were seen from the 
 Lizard, and the English beacons flared out their alarm 
 along the coast. The news found England ready. An 
 army was mustering under Leicester at Tilbury, the militia 
 of the midland counties were gathering to London, while 
 those of the south and east were held in readiness to meet 
 a descent on either shore. The force which Parma hoped 
 to lead consisted of forty thousand men, for the Armada 
 brought nearly twenty-two thousand soldiers to be added 
 to the seventeen thousand who were waiting to cross from 
 the Netherlands. Formidable as this force was, it was far 
 too weak by itself to do the work which Philip meant it to 
 do. Had Parma landed on the earliest day he purposed,
 
 444 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 he would have found his way to London barred by a force 
 stronger than his own, a force, too, of men in whose ranks 
 were many who had already crossed pikes on equal terras 
 with his best infantry in Flanders. "When I shall have 
 landed," he warned his master, "I must fight battle after 
 battle, I shall lose men by wounds and disease, I must 
 leave detachments behind me to keep open my communica- 
 tions; and in a short time the body of my army will be- 
 come so weak that not only I may be unable to advance in 
 the face of the enemy, and time may be given to the 
 heretics and your Majesty's other enemies to interfere, but 
 there may fall out some notable inconveniences, with the 
 loss of everything, and I be unable to remedy it." What 
 Philip really counted on was the aid which his army 
 would find within England itself. Parma's chance of 
 victory, if he succeeded in landing, lay in a Catholic 
 rising. But at this crisis patriotism proved stronger than 
 religious fanaticism in the hearts of the English Catholics. 
 The news of invasion ran like fire along the English coasts. 
 The whole nation answered the Queen's appeal. Instinct 
 told England that its work was to be done at sea, and the 
 royal fleet was soon lost among the vessels of the volun- 
 teers. London, when Elizabeth asked for fifteen ships 
 and five thousand men, offered thirty ships and ten thou- 
 sand seamen, while ten thousand of its train-bands drilled 
 in the Artillery ground. Every seaport showed the same 
 temper. Coasters put out from every little harbor. Squires 
 and merchants pushed off in their own little barks for a 
 brush with the Spaniards. In the presence of the stranger 
 all religious strife was forgotten. The work of the Jesuits 
 was undone in an hour. Of the nobles and squires whose 
 tenants were to muster under the flag of the invader not 
 one proved a traitor. The greatest lords on Allen's list of 
 Philip's helpers, Cumberland, Oxford, and Northumber- 
 land, brought their vessels up alongside of Drake and Lord 
 Howard as soon as Philip's fleet appeared in the Channel. 
 The Catholic gentry who had been painted as longing for
 
 CHAP. 6.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 44fl 
 
 the coming of the stranger, led their tenantry, when the 
 stranger came, to the muster at Tilbury. 
 
 The loyalty of the Catholics decided the fate of Philip's 
 scheme. Even if Parma's army succeeded in landing, its 
 task was now an impossible one. Forty thousand Spaniards 
 were no match for four millions of Englishmen, banded 
 together by a common resolve to hold England against the 
 foreigner. But to secure a landing at all, the Spaniards 
 had to be masters of the Channel. Parma might gather 
 his army on the Flemish coast, but every estuary and inlet 
 was blocked by the Dutch cruisers. The Netherlands 
 knew well that the conquest of England was planned only 
 as a prelude to their own reduction ; and the enthusiasm 
 with which England rushed to the conflict was hardly 
 greater than that which stirred the Hollanders. A fleet 
 of ninety vessels, with the best Dutch seamen at their 
 head, held the Scheldt and the shallows of Dunkirk, and 
 it was only by driving this fleet from the water that 
 Parma's army could be set free to join in the great enter- 
 prise. The great need of the Armada therefore was to 
 reach the coast of Flanders. It was ordered to make for 
 Calais, and wait there for the junction of Parma. But 
 even if Parma joined it, the passage of his force was im- 
 possible without a command of the Channel ; and in the 
 Channel lay an English fleet resolved to struggle hard for 
 the mastery. As the Armada sailed on in a broad crescent 
 past Plymouth, the vessels which had gathered under Lord 
 Howard of Effingham slipped out of the bay and hung 
 with the wind upon their rear. In numbers the two forces 
 were strangely unequal, for the English fleet counted only 
 eighty vessels against the hundred and thirty-two which 
 composed the Armada. In size of ships the disproportion 
 was even greater. Fifty of the English vessels, including 
 the squadron of the Lord Admiral and the craft of the 
 volunteers, were little bigger than yachts of the present 
 day. Even of the thirty Queen's ships which formed i 
 main body, there were but four which equalled in tonnage
 
 446 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VL 
 
 the smallest of the Spanish galleons. Sixty-five of these 
 galleons formed the most formidable half of the Spanish 
 fleet ; and four galleasses, or gigantic galleys, armed with 
 fifty guns apiece, fifty-six armed merchantmen, and twenty 
 pinnaces made up the rest. The Armada was provided 
 with 2,500 cannons, and a vast store of provisions ; it had 
 on board 8,000 seamen and more than 20,000 soldiers ; and 
 if a court-favorite, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, had been 
 placed at its head, he was supported by the ablest staff of 
 naval officers which Spain possessed. 
 
 Small however as the English ships were, they were in 
 perfect trim; they sailed two feet for the Spaniards' one, 
 they were manned with 9,000 hardy seamen, and their 
 Admiral was backed by a crowd of captains who had won 
 fame in the Spanish seas. With him was Hawkins, who 
 had been the first to break into the charmed circle of the 
 Indies; Frobisher, the hero of the Northwest passage; 
 and, above all, Drake, who held command of the privateers. 
 They had won, too, the advantage of the wind ; and, closing 
 in or drawing off as they would, the lightly-handled Eng- 
 lish vessels, which fired four shots to the Spaniards' one, 
 hung boldly on the rear of the great fleet as it moved along 
 the Channel. "The feathers of the Spaniard," in the 
 phrase of the English seamen, were "plucked one by one." 
 Galleon after galleon was sunk, boarded, driven on shore ; 
 and yet Medina Sidonia failed in bringing his pursuers to 
 a close engagement. Now halting, now moving slowly on, 
 the running fight between the two fleets lasted throughout 
 the week, till on Sunday, the twenty-eighth of July, the 
 Armada dropped anchor in Calais roads. The time had 
 come for sharper work if the junction of the Armada with 
 Parma was to be prevented ; for, demoralized as the Span- 
 iards had been by the merciless chase, their loss in ships 
 had not been great, and their appearance off Dunkirk 
 might drive off the ships of the Hollanders who hindered 
 the sailing of the Duke. On the other hand, though the 
 numbers of English ships had grown, their supplies of food
 
 CHAP. 6.] THE REFORMATION. 1640-1008. 447 
 
 and ammunition were fast running out. Howard there- 
 fore resolved to force an engagement; and, lighting eight 
 fire-ships at midnight, sent them down with the tide upon 
 the Spanish line. The galleons at once cut their cables 
 and stood out in panic to sea, drifting with the wind in a 
 long line off Gravelines. Drake resolved at all costs to 
 prevent their return. At dawn on the twenty-ninth the 
 English ships closed fairly in, and almost their last car- 
 tridge was spent ere the sun went down. 
 
 Hard as the fight had been, it seemed far from a decisive 
 one. Three great galleons indeed had sunk in the engage- 
 ment, three had drifted helplessly on to the Flemish coast, 
 but the bulk of the Spanish vessels remained, and even to 
 Drake the fleet seemed "wonderful great and strong." 
 Within the Armada itself however all hope was gone. 
 Huddled together by the wind and the deadly English fire, 
 their sails torn, their masts shot away, the crowded gal- 
 leons had become mere slaughter-houses. Four thousand 
 men had fallen, and bravely as the seamen fought, they 
 were cowed by the terrible butchery. Medina himself was 
 in despair. "We are lost, Senor Oquenda," he cried to 
 his bravest captain; "what are we to do?" "Let others 
 talk of being lost," replied Oquenda, "your Excellency has 
 only to order up fresh cartridge. " But Oquenda stood alone, 
 and a council of war resolved on retreat to Spain by the one 
 course open, that of a circuit round the Orkneys. " Never 
 anything pleased me better," wrote Drake, "than seeing 
 the enemy fly with a southerly wind to the northward. 
 Have a good eye to the Prince of Parma, for, with the 
 grace of God, I doubt not ere it be long so to handle the 
 matter with the Duke of Sidonia, as he shall wish himself 
 at St. Mary Port among his orange trees." But the work 
 of destruction was reserved for a mightier foe than Drake. 
 The English vessels were soon forced to give up the chase 
 by the running out of their supplies. But the Spanish 
 ships had no sooner reached the Orkneys than the storms 
 of the northern seas broke on them with a fury before
 
 448 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 which all concert and union disappeared. In October fifty 
 reached Corunna, bearing ten thousand men stricken with 
 pestilence and death. Of the rest some were sunk, some 
 dashed to pieces against the Irish cliffs. The wreckers of 
 the Orkneys and the Faroes, the clansmen of the Scottish 
 Isles, the kernes of Donegal and Galway, all had their part 
 in the work of murder and robbery. Eight thousand 
 Spaniards perished between the Giant's Causeway and the 
 Blaskets. On a strand near Sligo an English captain 
 numbered eleven hundred corpses which had been cast up 
 by the sea. The flower of the Spanish nobility, who had 
 been sent on the new crusade under Alonzo da Leyva, 
 after twice suffering shipwreck, put a third time to sea to 
 founder on a reef near Dunluce. 
 
 " I sent my ships against men," said Philip when the 
 news reached him, "not against the seas." It was in 
 nobler tone that England owned her debt to the storm that 
 drove the Armada to its doom. On the medal that com- 
 memorated its triumph were graven the words, " The Lord 
 sent his wind, and scattered them." The pride of the 
 conquerors was hushed before their sense of a mighty de- 
 liverance. It was not till England saw the broken host 
 " fly with a southerly wind to the north" that she knew 
 what a weight of fear she had borne for thirty years. The 
 victory over the Armada, the deliverance from Spain, the 
 rolling away of the Catholic terror which had hung like a 
 cloud over the hopes of the new people, was like a passing 
 from death unto life. Within as without, the dark sky 
 suddenly cleared. The national unity proved stronger 
 than the religious strife. When the Catholic lords flocked 
 to the camp at Tilbury, or put off to join the fleet in the 
 Channel, Elizabeth could pride herself on a victory as 
 great as the victory over the Armada. She had won it by 
 her patience and moderation, by her refusal to lend herself 
 to the fanaticism of the Puritan or the reaction of the 
 Papist, by her sympathy with the mass of the people, by 
 her steady and unflinching preference of national unity to 

 
 CHAP. 6.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 449 
 
 any passing considerations of safety or advantage. For 
 thirty years, amid the shock of religious passions at home 
 and abroad, she had reigned not as a Catholic or as a 
 Protestant Queen, but as a Queen of England, and it was 
 to England, Catholic and Protestant alike, that she could 
 appeal in her hour of need. "Let tyrants fear," she ex- 
 claimed in words that still ring like the sound of a trumpet, 
 as she appeared among her soldiers. "Let tyrants fear! 
 I have always so behaved myself that under God I have 
 placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal 
 hearts and good-will of my subjects And therefore I am 
 come among you, as you see, resolved in the midst and 
 heat of the battle to live and die among you all." The 
 work of Edward and of Mary was undone, and the strife 
 of religions fell powerless before the sense of a common 
 country. 
 
 IsTor were the results of the victory less momentous to 
 Europe at large. What Wolsey and Henry had struggled 
 for, Elizabeth had done. At her accession England was 
 scarcely reckoned among European powers. The wisest 
 statesmen looked on her as doomed to fall into the hands 
 of France, or to escape that fate by remaining a depend- 
 ency of Spain. But the national independence had grown 
 with the national life. France was no longer a danger, 
 Scotland was no longer a foe. Instead of hanging on the 
 will of Spain, England had fronted Spain and conquered 
 her. She now stood on a footing of equality with the 
 greatest powers of the world. Her military weight indeed 
 was drawn from the discord which rent the peoples about 
 her, and would pass away with its close. But a new and 
 lasting greatness opened on the sea. She had sprung at a 
 bound into a great sea-power. Her fleets were spreading 
 terror through the New World as through the Old. When 
 Philip by his conquest of Portugal had gathered the two 
 greatest navies of the world into his single hand, England 
 had faced him and driven his fleet from the seas. But 
 the rise of England was even less memorable than the fall
 
 460 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VL 
 
 of Spain. That Spain had fallen few of the world's states- 
 men saw then. Philip thanked God that he could easily, 
 if he chose, "place another fleet upon the seas," and the 
 dispatch of a second armada soon afterward showed that 
 his boast was a true one. But what had vanished was his 
 mastery of the seas. The defeat of the Armada was the 
 first of a series of defeats at the hands of the English and 
 the Dutch. The naval supremacy of Spain was lost, and 
 with it all was lost. An empire so widely scattered over 
 the world, and whose dominions were parted by interven- 
 ing nations, could only be held together by its command 
 of the seas. One century saw Spain stripped of the bulk of 
 the Netherlands, another of her possessions in Italy, a 
 third of her dominions in the New World. But slowly as 
 her empire broke, the cause of ruin was throughout the 
 same. It was the loss of her maritime supremacy that 
 robbed her of all, and her maritime supremacy was lost in 
 the wreck of the Armada. 
 
 If Philip met the shock with a calm patience, it at once 
 ruined his plans in the West. France broke again from 
 his grasp. Since the day of the Barricades Henry the 
 Third had been virtually a prisoner in the hands of the 
 Duke of Guise ; but the defeat of the Armada woke him 
 to a new effort for the recovery of power, and at the close 
 of 1588 Guise was summoned to his presence and stabbed 
 as he entered by the royal body-guard. The blow broke 
 the strength of the League. The Duke of Mayenne, a 
 brother of the victim, called indeed the Leaguers to arms; 
 and made war upon the King. But Henry found help in 
 his cousin, Henry of Navarre, who brought a Huguenot 
 force to his aid ; and the moderate Catholics rallied as of 
 old round the Crown. The Leaguers called on Philip for 
 aid, but Philip was forced to guard against attack at home. 
 Elizabeth had resolved to give blow for blow. The Portu- 
 guese were writhing under Spanish conquest; and a 
 claimant of the crown, Don Antonio, who had found 
 refuge in England, promised that on his landing the coun-
 
 CHAP. 6.] THE REFORMATION. 1540-1603. 451 
 
 try would rise in arms. In the spring of 1589 therefor 
 an expedition of fifty vessels and 15,000 men was sent 
 under Drake and Sir John Norris against Lisbon. Its 
 chances of success hung on a quick arrival in Portugal, 
 but the fleet touched at Corunna, and after burning the 
 ships in its harbor the army was tempted to besiege the 
 town. A Spanish army which advanced to its relief was 
 repulsed by an English force of half its numbers. Corunna 
 however held stubbornly out, and in the middle of May 
 Norris was forced to break the siege and to sail to Lisbon. 
 But the delay had been fatal to his enterprise. The coun- 
 try did not rise; the English troops were thinned with 
 sickness; want of cannon hindered a siege; and after a 
 fruitless march up the Tagus Norris fell back on the fleet. 
 The coast was pillaged, and the expedition returned baffled 
 to England. Luckless as the campaign had proved, the 
 bold defiance of Spain and the defeat of a Spanish army 
 on Spanish ground kindled a new daring in Englishmen 
 while they gave new heart to Philip's enemies. In the 
 summer of 1589 Henry the Third laid siege to Paris. The 
 fears of the League were removed by the knife of a priest, 
 Jacques Clement, who assassinated the King in August ; 
 but Henry of Navarre, or, as he now became, Henry the 
 Fourth, stood next to him in line of blood, and Philip saw 
 with dismay a Protestant mount the throne of France. 
 
 From this moment the thought of attack on England, 
 even his own warfare in the Netherlands, was subordinated 
 in the mind of the Spanish King to the need of crushing 
 Henry the Fourth. It was not merely that Henry's Prot- 
 estantism threatened to spread heresy over the West. 
 Catholic or Protestant, the union of France under an active 
 and enterprising ruler would be equally fatal to Philip's 
 designs. Once gathered round its King, France was a 
 nearer obstacle to the re-conquest of the Netherlands than 
 ever England could be. On the other hand, the religious 
 strife, to which Henry's accession gave a fresh life and 
 vigor, opened wide prospects to Philip's ambition. Far
 
 45 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 from proving a check upon Spain, it seemed as if France 
 might be turned into a Spanish dependence. While the 
 Leaguers proclaimed the Cardinal of Bourbon King, under 
 the name of Charles the Tenth, they recognized Philip as 
 Protector of France. Their hope indeed lay in his aid, 
 and their army was virtually his own. On the other band 
 Henry the Fourth was environed with difficulties. It was 
 only by declaring his willingness to be " further instructed" 
 in matters of faith, in other words by holding out hopes of 
 his conversion, that he succeeded in retaining the moder- 
 ate Catholics under his standard. His desperate bravery 
 alone won a victory at Yvry over the forces of the League, 
 which enabled him to again form the siege of Paris in 1590. 
 All recognized Paris as the turning-point in the struggle, 
 and the League called loudly for Philip's aid. To give it 
 was to break the work which Parma was doing in the 
 Netherlands, and to allow the United Provinces a breath- 
 ing space in their sorest need. But even the Netherlands 
 were of less moment than the loss of France ; and Philip's 
 orders forced Parma to march to the relief of Paris. The 
 work was done with a skill which proved the Duke to be 
 a master in the art of war. The siege of Paris was raised ; 
 the efforts of Henry to bring the Spaniards to an engage- 
 ment were foiled; and it was only when the King's army 
 broke up from sheer weariness that Parma withdrew un- 
 harmed to the north. 
 
 England was watching the struggle of Henry the Fourth 
 with a keen interest. The failure of the expedition against 
 Lisbon had put an end for the time to any direct attacks 
 upon Spain, and the exhaustion of the treasury forced 
 Elizabeth to content herself with issuing commissions to 
 volunteers. But the war was a national one, and the na- 
 tion waged it for itself. Merchants, gentlemen, nobles 
 fitted out privateers. The sea-dogs in ever-growing 
 numbers scoured the Spanish Main. Their quest had its 
 ill chances as it had its good, and sometimes the prizes 
 made were far from paying for the cost of the venture.
 
 CHAP. 6.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 453 
 
 "Paul might plant, and Apollos might water," John 
 Hawkins explained after an unsuccessful voyage, " but it 
 is God only that giveth the increase!" But more often 
 the profit was enormous. Spanish galleons, Spanish mer- 
 chant-ships, were brought month after month to English 
 harbors. The daring of the English seamen faced any 
 odds. Ten English trading vessels beat off twelve Spanish 
 war-galleys in the Straits of Gibraltar. Sir Richard 
 Grenville in a single bark, the Revenge, found himself 
 girt in by fifty men-of-war, each twice as large as his 
 own. He held out from afternoon to the following day- 
 break, beating off attempt after attempt to board him ; and 
 it was not till his powder was spent, more than half his 
 crew killed, and the rest wounded, that the ship struck its 
 flag. Grenville had refused to surrender, and was carried 
 mortally wounded to die in a Spanish ship. " Here die I, 
 Richard Grenville," were his last words, "with a joyful 
 and a quiet mind, for that I have ended my life as a good 
 soldier ought to do, who has fought for his country and 
 his queen, for honor and religion." But the drift of the 
 French war soon forced Elizabeth back again into the 
 strife. In each of the French provinces the civil war 
 went on : and in Brittany, where the contest raged fiercest, 
 Philip sent the Leaguers a supply of Spanish troops. Nor- 
 mandy was already in Catholic hands, and the aim of the 
 Spanish King was to secure the western coast for future 
 operations against England. Elizabeth pressed Henry the 
 Fourth to foil these projects, and in the winter of 1591 she 
 sent money and men to aid him in the siege of Rouen. 
 
 To save Rouen Philip was again forced to interrupt his 
 work of conquest in the Netherlands. Parma marched 
 anew into the heart of France, and with the same consum- 
 mate generalship as of old relieved the town without giv- 
 ing Henry a chance of battle. But the day was fast going 
 against the Leaguers. The death of the puppet-king, 
 Charles the Tenth, left them without a sovereign to oppose 
 to Henry of Navarre; and their scheme of conferring the
 
 454 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VL 
 
 crown on Isabella, Philip's daughter by Elizabeth of 
 France, with a husband whom Philip should choose, 
 awoke jealousies in the house of Guise itself, while it 
 gave strength to the national party who shrank from lay- 
 ing France at the feet of Spain. Even the Parliament of 
 Paris, till now the centre of Catholic fanaticism, protested 
 against setting the crown of France on the brow of a 
 stranger. The politicians drew closer to Henry of Navarre, 
 and the moderate Catholics pressed for his reconciliation 
 to the Church as a means of restoring unity to the realm. 
 The step had become so inevitable that even the Protes- 
 tants were satisfied with Henry's promise of toleration ; and 
 in the summer of 1593 he declared himself a Catholic. 
 With his conversion the civil war came practically to an 
 end. It was in vain that Philip strove to maintain the 
 zeal of the Leaguers, or that the Guises stubbornly kept 
 the field. All France drew steadily to the King. Paris 
 opened her gates in the spring of 1594, and the chief of 
 the Leaguers, the Duke of Mayenne, submitted at the close 
 of the year. Even Rome abandoned the contest, and at 
 the end of 1595 Henry received solemn absolution from 
 Clement the Eighth. From that moment France rose 
 again into her old power, and the old national policy of 
 opposition to the House of Austria threw her weight into 
 the wavering balance of Philip's fortunes. The death of 
 Parma had already lightened the peril of the United Prov- 
 inces, but though their struggle in the Low Countries was 
 to last for years, from the moment of Henry the Fourth's 
 conversion their independence was secure. Nor was the 
 restoration of the French monarchy to its old greatness of 
 less moment to England. Philip was yet to send an armada 
 against her coasts ; he was again to stir up a fierce revolt 
 in northern Ireland. But all danger from Spain was over 
 with the revival of France. Even were England to shrink 
 from a strife in which she had held Philip so gloriously at 
 bay, French policy would never suffer the island to fall 
 unaided under the power of Spain. The fear of foreign
 
 CHAP. 6.] THE REFORMATION. 1540-1608. 455 
 
 conquest passed away. The long struggle for sheer exist- 
 ence was over. What remained was the Protestantism, 
 the national union, the lofty patriotism, the pride in Eng- 
 land and the might of Englishmen, which had drawn life 
 more vivid and intense than they had ever known before 
 from the long battle with the Papacy and with Spain. 
 
 20 VOL. 2
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 ENGLAND OP SHAKSPEBE. 
 15831603. 
 
 THE defeat of the Armada, the deliverance from Cathol- 
 icism and Spain, marked the critical moment in our polit- 
 ical development. From that hour England's destiny was 
 fixed. She was to be a Protestant power. Her sphere of 
 action was to be upon the seas. She was to claim her part 
 in the New World of the West. But the moment was as 
 critical in her intellectual development. As yet English 
 literature had lagged behind the literature of the rest of 
 Western Christendom. It was now to take its place among 
 the greatest literatures of the world. The general awaken- 
 ing of national life, the increase of wealth, of refinement, 
 and leisure that characterized the reign of Elizabeth, was 
 accompanied by a quickening of intelligence. The Renas- 
 cence had done little for English letters. The overpower- 
 ing influence of the new models both of thought and style 
 which it gave to the world in the writers of Greece and 
 Rome was at first felt only as a fresh check to the revival 
 of English poetry or prose. Though England shared more 
 than any European country in the political and ecclesias- 
 tical results of the New Learning, its literary results were 
 far less than in the rest of Europe, in Italy, or Germany, 
 or France. More alone ranks among the great classical 
 scholars of the sixteenth century. Classical learning in- 
 deed all but perished at the Universities in the storm of 
 the Reformation, nor did it revive there till the close of 
 Elizabeth's reign. Insensibly however the influences of 
 the Renascence fertilized the intellectual soil of England 
 for the rich harvest that was to come. The court poetry
 
 CHAP. 7.] THE REFORMATION. 15401608. 457 
 
 which clustered round Wyatt and Surrey, exotic and imi- 
 tative as it was, promised a new life for English verse. 
 The growth of grammar-schools realized the dream of Sir 
 Thomas More, and brought the middle-classes, from the 
 squire to the petty tradesman, into contact with the 
 masters of Greece and Rome. The love of travel, which 
 became so remarkable a characteristic of Elizabeth's age, 
 quickened the temper of the wealthier nobles. "Home- 
 keeping youths," says Shakspere in words that mark the 
 time, " have ever homely wits ;" and a tour over the Con- 
 tinent became part of the education of a gentleman. Fair- 
 fax's version of Tasso, Harrington's version of Ariosto, 
 were signs of the influence which the literature of Italy, 
 the land to which travel led most frequently, exerted on 
 English minds. The classical writers told upon England 
 at large when they were popularized by a crowd of trans- 
 lations. Chapman's noble version of Homer stands high 
 above its fellows, but all the greater poets and historians 
 of the ancient world were turned into English before the 
 close of the sixteenth century. 
 
 It is characteristic of England that the first kind of 
 literature to rise from its long death was the literature of 
 history. But the form in which it rose marked the differ- 
 ence between the world in which it had perished and that 
 in which it reappeared. During the Middle Ages the 
 world had been without a past, save the shadowy and un- 
 known past of early Rome ; and annalist and chronicler 
 told the story of the years which went before as a preface 
 to their tale of the present without a sense of any differ- 
 ence between them. But the religious, social, and political 
 change which passed over England under the New Mon- 
 archy broke tho continuity of its life ; and the depth of the 
 rift between the two ages is seen by the way in which 
 History passes on its revival under Elizabeth from the 
 medisBval form of pure narrative to its modern form of an 
 investigation and reconstruction of the past. The new 
 interest which attached to the bygone world led to the col-
 
 458 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VL 
 
 lection of its annals, their reprinting and embodiment in 
 an English shape. It was his desire to give the Elizabethan 
 Church a basis in the past, as much as any pure zeal for 
 letters, which induced Archbishop Parker to lead the way 
 in the first of these labors. The collection of historical 
 manuscripts which, following in the track of Leland, he 
 rescued from the wreck of the monastic libraries created a 
 school of antiquarian imitators, whose research and in- 
 dustry have preserved for us almost every work of per- 
 manent historical value which existed before the Dissolu- 
 tion of the Monasteries. To his publication of some of our 
 earlier chronicles we owe the series of similar publications 
 which bear the name of Camden, Twysden, and Gale. 
 But as a branch of literature, English History in the new 
 shape which we have noted began in the work of the poet 
 Daniel. The chronicles of Stowe and Speed, who preceded 
 him, are simple records of the past, often copied almost 
 literally from the annals they used, and utterly without 
 style or arrangement ; while Daniel, inaccurate and super- 
 ficial as he is, gave his story a literary form and embodied 
 it in a pure and graceful prose. Two larger works at the 
 close of Elizabeth's reign, the " History of the Turks" by 
 Knolles and Raleigh's vast but unfinished plan of the 
 "History of the World," showed a widening of historic in- 
 terest beyond national bounds to which it had hitherto 
 been confined. 
 
 A far higher development of our literature sprang from 
 the growing influence which Italy was exerting, partly 
 through travel and partly through its poetry and romances, 
 on the manners and taste of the time. Men made more 
 account of a story of Boccaccio's, it was said, than of a 
 story from the Bible. The dress, the speech, the manners 
 of Italy became objects of almost passionate imitation, and 
 of an imitation not always of the wisest or noblest kind. 
 To Ascham it seemed like "the enchantment of Circ 
 brought out of Italy to mar men's manners in England." 
 " An Italianate Englishman," ran the harder proverb of 

 
 CHAP. 7.] THE REFORMATION. 1540-1606. 459 
 
 Italy itself, "is an incarnate devil." The literary form 
 which this imitation took seemed at any rate ridiculous. 
 John Lyle, distinguished both as a dramatist and a poet, 
 laid aside the tradition of English style for a style modelled 
 on the decadence of Italian prose. Euphuism, as the new 
 fashion has been named from the prose romance of Euphues 
 which Lyle published in 1579, is best known to modern 
 readers by the pitiless caricature in which Shakspere 
 quizzed its pedantry, its affection, the meaningless monot- 
 ony of its far-fetched phrases, the absurdity of its extrava- 
 gant conceits. Its representative, Armado in "Love's 
 Labor's Lost," is "a man of fire-new words, fashion's own 
 knight," "that hath a mint of phrases in his brain; one 
 whom the music of his own vain tongue doth ravish like 
 enchanting harmony." But its very extravagance sprang 
 from the general burst of delight in the new resources of 
 thought and language which literature felt to be at its dis- 
 posal ; and the new sense of literary beauty which it dis- 
 closed in its affectation, in its love of a "mint of phrases," 
 and the "music of its ever vain tongue," the new sense of 
 pleasure which it revealed in delicacy or grandeur of ex- 
 pression, in the structure and arrangement of sentences, in 
 what has been termed the atmosphere of words, was a 
 sense out of which style was itself to spring. 
 
 For a time Euphuism had it all its own way. Elizabeth 
 was the most affected and detestable of Euphuists; and 
 "that beauty in Court which could not parley Euphuism," 
 a courtier of Charles the First's time tells us, "was as 
 little regarded as she that now there speaks not French." 
 The fashion however passed away, but the " Arcadia" of 
 Sir Philip Sidney shows the wonderful advance which 
 prose had made under its influence. Sidney, the nephew 
 of Lord Leicester, was the idol of his time, and perhaps 
 no figure reflects the age more fully and more beautifully. 
 Fair as he was brave, quick of wit as of affection, noble 
 and generous in temper, dear to Elizabeth as to Spenser, 
 the darling of the Court and of the camp, his learning and
 
 460 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 his genius made him the centre of the literary world which 
 was springing into birth on English soil. He had trav- 
 elled in France and Italy, he was master alike of the older 
 learning and of the new discoveries of astronomy. Bruno 
 dedicated to him as to a friend his metaphysical specula- 
 tions ; he was familiar with the drama of Spain, the poems 
 of Ronsard, the sonnets of Italy. Sidney combined the 
 wisdom of a grave councillor with the romantic chivalry 
 of a knight-errant. " I never heard the old story of Percy 
 and Douglas," he says, "that I found not my heart moved 
 more than with a trumpet." He flung away his life to 
 save the English army in Flanders, and as he lay dying 
 they brought a cup of water to his fevered lips. He bade 
 them give it to a soldier who was stretched on the ground 
 beside him. "Thy necessity," he said, "is greater than 
 mine." The whole of Sidney's nature, his chivalry and 
 his learning, his thirst for adventures, his freshness of 
 tone, his tenderness and childlike simplicity of heart, his 
 affectation and false sentiment, his keen sense of pleasure 
 and delight, pours itself out in the pastoral medley, forced, 
 tedious, and yet strangely beautiful, of his " Arcadia. " In 
 his " Defence of Poetry" the youthful exuberance of the 
 romancer has passed into the earnest vigor and grandiose 
 stateliness of the rhetorician. But whether in the one 
 work or the other, the flexibility, the music, the luminous 
 clearness of Sidney's style remains the same. 
 
 But the quickness and vivacity of English prose was 
 first developed in a school of Italian imitators which ap- 
 peared in Elizabeth's later years. The origin of English 
 fiction is to be found in the tales and romances with which 
 Greene and Nash crowded the market, models for which 
 they found in the Italian novels. The brief form of these 
 novelettes soon led to the appearance of the " pamphlet ;" 
 and a new world of readers was seen in the rapidity with 
 which the stories or scurrilous libels that passed under this 
 name were issued, and the greediness with which they 
 were devoured. It was the boast of Greene that in the 

 
 CHAP. 7.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 461 
 
 eight years before his death he had produced forty pam- 
 phlets. " In a night or a day would he have yarked up a 
 pamphlet, as well as in seven years, and glad was that 
 printer that might be blest to pay him dear for the very 
 dregs of his wit." Modern eyes see less of the wit than of 
 the dregs in the books of Greene and his compeers ; but 
 the attacks which Nash directed against the Puritans and 
 his rivals were the first English works which shook utterly 
 off the pedantry and extravagance of Euphuism. In his 
 lightness, his facility, his vivacity, his directness of speech, 
 we have the beginning of popular literature. It had de- 
 scended from the closet to the street, and the very change 
 implied that the street was ready to receive it. The abun- 
 dance indeed of printers and of printed books at the close of 
 the Queen's reign shows that the world of readers and 
 writers had widened far beyond the small circle of scholars 
 and courtiers with which it began. 
 
 But to the national and local influences which were tell- 
 ing on English literature was added that of the restlessness 
 and curiosity which characterized the age. At the moment 
 which we have reached the sphere of human interest was 
 widened as it has never been widened before or since by 
 the revelation of a new heaven and a new earth. It was 
 only in the later years of the sixteenth century that the 
 discoveries of Copernicus were brought home to the gen- 
 eral intelligence of mankind by Kepler and Galileo, or that 
 the daring of the Buccaneers broke through the veil which 
 greed of Spain had drawn across the New World of 
 Columbus. Hardly inferior to these revelations as a 
 source of intellectual impulse was the sudden and pictur- 
 esque way in which the various races of the world were 
 brought face to face with one another through the uni- 
 versal passion for foreign travel. While the red tribes of 
 the West were described by Amerigo Vespucci, and the 
 strange civilization of Mexico and Peru disclosed by Cortes 
 and Pizarro, the voyages of the Portuguese threw open the 
 older splendors of the East, and the story of India and
 
 463 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [Boos VI. 
 
 China was told for the first time to Christendom by Maffei 
 and Mendoza. England took her full part in this work of 
 discovery. Jenkinson, an English traveller, made his way 
 to Bokhara. Willoughby brought back Muscovy to the 
 knowledge of Western Europe. English mariners pene- 
 trated among the Esquimaux, or settled in Virginia. 
 Drake circumnavigated the globe. The "Collection of 
 Voyages" which was published by Hakluyt in 1582 dis- 
 closed the vastness of the world itself, the infinite number 
 of the races of mankind, the variety of their laws, their 
 customs, their religions, their very instincts. We see the 
 influence of this new and wider knowledge of the world, 
 not only in the life and richness which it gave to the im- 
 agination of the time, but in the immense interest which 
 from this moment attached itself to Man. Shakspere's 
 conception of Caliban, like the questioning of Montaigne, 
 marks the beginning of a new and a truer, because a more 
 inductive, philosophy of human nature and human history. 
 The fascination exercised by the study of human character 
 showed itself in the essays of Bacon, and yet more in the 
 wonderful popularity of the drama. 
 
 And to these larger and world-wide sources of poetic 
 power was added in England, at the moment which we 
 have reached in its story, the impulse which sprang from 
 national triumph, from the victory over the Armada, the 
 deliverance from Spain, the rolling away of the Catholic 
 terror which had hung like a cloud over the hopes of the 
 new people. With its new sense of security, its new sense 
 of national energy and national power, the whole aspect of 
 England suddenly changed. As yet the interest of Eliza- 
 beth's reign had been political and material; the stage had 
 been crowded with statesmen and warriors, with Cecils and 
 Walsinghams and Drakes. Literature had hardly found 
 a place in the glories of the time. But from the moment 
 when the Armada drifted back broken to Ferrol the figures 
 of warriors and statesmen were dwarfed by the grander 
 figures of poets and philosophers. Amid the throng in
 
 CHAP. 7.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 463 
 
 Elizabeth's antechamber the noblest form is that of the 
 singer who lays the " Faerie Queen" at her feet, or of the 
 young lawyer who muses amid the splendors of the pres- 
 ence over the problems of the "Novum Organum." The 
 triumph at Cadiz, the conquest of Ireland, pass unheeded 
 as we watch Hooker building up his " Ecclesiastical Polity" 
 among the sheepfolds, or the genius of Shakspere rising 
 year by year into supremer grandeur in a rude theatre be- 
 side the Thames. 
 
 The glory of the new literature broke on England with 
 Edmund Spenser. We know little of his life ; he was born 
 in 1552 in East London, the son of poor parents, but linked 
 in blood with the Spencers of Althorpe, even then as he 
 proudly says " a house of ancient fame. " He studied as 
 a sizar at Cambridge, and quitted the University while 
 still a boy to live as a tutor in the north ; but after some 
 years of obscure poverty the scorn of a fair " Rosalind" 
 drove him again southward. A college friendship with 
 Gabriel Harvey served to introduce him to Lord Leicester, 
 who sent him as his envoy into France, and in whose ser- 
 vice he first became acquainted with Leicester's nephew, 
 Sir Philip Sidney. From Sidney's house at Penshurst 
 came in 1579 his earliest work, the " Shepherd's Calendar ;" 
 in form, like Sidney's own "Arcadia," a pastoral where 
 love and loyalty and Puritanism jostled oddly with the 
 fancied shepherd life. The peculiar melody and profuse 
 imagination which the pastoral disclosed at once placed its 
 .author in the forefront of living poets, but a far greater 
 'work was already in hand; and from some words of 
 Gabriel Harvey's we see Spenser bent on rivalling Ariosto, 
 and even hoping " to overgo" the " Orlando Furioso" in 
 his "Elvish Queen." The ill-will or the indifference of 
 Burleigh however blasted the expectations he had drawn 
 from the patronage of Sidney of Leicester, and from the 
 favor^with which he had been welcomed by the Queen. 
 Sidney, in disgrace with Elizabeth through his opposition 
 to the marriage with Anjou, withdrew to Wilton to write
 
 464 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 the "Arcadia" by his sister's side; and "discontent of my 
 long fruitless stay in princes' courts," the poet tells us, 
 " and expectation vain of idle hopes" drove Spenser into 
 exile. In 1580 he followed Lord Grey as his secretary 
 into Ireland and remained there on the Deputy's recall in 
 the enjoyment of an office and a grant of land from the 
 forfeited estates of the Earl of Desmond. Spenser had 
 thus enrolled himself among the colonists to whom Eng- 
 land was looking at the time for the regeneration of Mun- 
 ster, and the practical interest he took in the " barren soil 
 where cold and want and poverty do grow" was shown by 
 the later publication of a prose tractate on the condition 
 and government of the island. It was at Dublin or in his 
 castle of Kilcolman, two miles from Doneraile, " under the 
 foot of Mole, that mountain hoar," that he spent the ten 
 years in which Sidney died and Mary fell on the scaffold 
 and the Armada came and went ; and it was in the latter 
 home that Walter Raleigh found him sitting " alwaies idle, " 
 a8 it seemed to his restless friend, " among the cooly shades 
 of the green alders by the Mulla's shore" in a visit made 
 memorable by the poem of "Colin Clout's come home 
 again." 
 
 But in the " idlesse" and solitude of the poet's exile the 
 great work begun in the two pleasant years of his stay at 
 Penshurst had at last taken form, and it was to publish the 
 first three books of the " Faerie Queen" that Spenser re- 
 turned in Raleigh's company to London. The appearance 
 of the u Faerie Queen" in 1590 is the one critical event in 
 the annals of English poetry ; it settled in fact the question 
 whether there was to be such a thing as English poetry or 
 no. The older national verse which had blossomed and 
 died in Caedmon sprang suddenly into a grander life in 
 Chaucer, but it closed again in a yet more complete death. 
 Across the Border indeed the Scotch poets of the fifteenth 
 century preserved something of their master's vivacity 
 and color, and in England itself the Italian poetry of the 
 Renascence had of late found echoes in Surrey and Sidney.
 
 CHAP. 7.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 46* 
 
 The new English drama too was beginning to display ite 
 wonderful powers, and the work of Marlowe had already 
 prepared the way for the work of Shakspere. But bright 
 as was the promise of coming song, no great imaginative 
 jpoem had broken the silence of English literature for nearly 
 two hundred years when Spenser landed at Bristol with 
 the "Faerie Queen." From that moment the stream of 
 English poetry has flowed on without a break. There 
 have been times, as in the years which immediately fol- 
 lowed, when England has " become a nest of singing birds ;" 
 there have been times when song was scant and poor ; but 
 there never has been a time when England was wholly 
 without a singer. 
 
 The new English verse has been true to the source from 
 which it sprang, and Spenser has always been " the poet's 
 poet." But in his own day he was the poet of England 
 at large. The " Faerie Queen" was received with a burst 
 of general welcome. It became " the delight of every ac- 
 complished gentleman, the model of every poet, the solace 
 of every soldier." The poem expressed indeed the very 
 life of the time. It was with a true poetic instinct that 
 Spenser fell back for the framework of his story on the 
 fairy world of Celtic romance, whose wonder and mystery 
 had in fact become the truest picture of the wonder and 
 mystery of the world around him. In the age of Cortes 
 and of Raleigh dreamland had ceased to be dreamland, and 
 no marvel or adventure that befell lady or knight was 
 stranger than the tales which weatherbeaten mariners 
 from the Southern Seas were telling every day to grave 
 merchants upon 'Change. The very incongruities of the 
 story of Arthur and his knighthood, strangely as it had been 
 built up out of the rival efforts of bard and jongleur and 
 priest, made it the fittest vehicle for the expression of the 
 world of incongruous feeling which we call the Renascence. 
 To modern eyes perhaps there is something grotesque 
 in the strange medley of figures that crowd the canvas 
 of the "Faerie Queen," in its fauns dancing on the sward
 
 466 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 where knights have hurtled together, in its alternation of 
 the savage men from the New World with the satyrs of 
 classic mythology, in the giants, dwarfs, and monsters of 
 popular fancy who jostle with the nymphs of Greek legend 
 and the damosels of mediaeval romance. But, strange as 
 the medley is, it reflects truly enough the stranger medley 
 of warring ideals and irreconcilable impulses which made 
 up the life of Spenser's contemporaries. It was not in the 
 u Faerie Queen" only, but in the world which it portrayed, 
 that the religious mysticism of the Middle Ages stood face 
 to face with the intellectual freedom of the Revival of Let- 
 ters, that asceticism and self-denial cast their spell on im- 
 aginations glowing with the sense of varied and inexhaus- 
 tible existence, that the dreamy and poetic refinement of 
 feeling which expressed itself in the fanciful unrealities of 
 chivalry co-existed with the rough practical energy that 
 sprang from an awakening sense of human power, or the 
 lawless extravagance of an idealized friendship and love 
 lived side by side with the moral sternness and elevation 
 which England was drawing from the Reformation and 
 the Bible. 
 
 But strangely contrasted as are the elements of the poem, 
 they are harmonized by the calmness and serenity which 
 is the note of the " Faerie Queen." The world of the Re- 
 nascence is around us, but it is ordered, refined, and calmed 
 by the poet's touch. The warmest scenes which he bor- 
 rows from the Italian verse of his day are idealized into 
 purity ; the very struggle of the men around him is lifted 
 out of its pettier accidents and raised into a spiritual one- 
 ness with the struggle in the soul itself. There are allu- 
 sions in plenty to contemporary events, but the contest be- 
 tween Elizabeth and Mary takes ideal form in that of Una 
 and. the false Duessa, and the clash of arms between Spain 
 and the Huguenots comes to us faint and hushed through 
 the serene air. The verse, like the story, rolli on as by its 
 own natural power, without haste or effort or delay, Th 
 gorgeous coloring, the profuse and often complex imagery
 
 CHAP. 7.] THE REFORMATION. 1540-1608. 467 
 
 which Spenser's imagination lavishes, leave no sense of 
 confusion in the reader's mind. Every figure, strange as 
 it may be, is seen clearly and distinctly as it passes by. 
 It is in this calmness, this serenity, this spiritual elevation 
 of the "Faerie Queen," that we feel the new life of the 
 coming age moulding into ordered and harmonious form 
 the life of the Renascence. Both in its conception, and in 
 the way in which this conception is realized in the portion 
 of his work which Spenser completed, his poem strikes the 
 note of the coming Puritanism. In his earlier pastoral, 
 the "Shepherd's Calendar," the poet had boldly taken his 
 part with the more advanced reformers against the Church 
 policy of the Court. He had chosen Archbishop Grindal, 
 who was then in disgrace for his Puritan sympathies, as 
 his model of a Christian pastor ; and attacked with sharp 
 invective the pomp of the higher clergy. His "Faerie 
 Queen" in its religious theory is Puritan to the core. The 
 worst foe of its " Red-cross Knight" is the false and scarlet- 
 clad Duessa of Rome, who parts him for a while from 
 Truth and leads him to the house of Ignorance. Speuser 
 presses strongly and pitilessly for the execution of Mary 
 Stuart. No bitter word ever breaks the calm of his verse 
 save when it touches on the perils with which Catholicism 
 was environing England, perils before which his knight 
 must fall " were not that Heavenly Grace doth him uphold 
 and steadfast Truth acquite him out of all." But it is yet 
 more in the temper and aim of his work that we catch the 
 nobler and deeper tones of English Puritanism. In his 
 earlier musings at Penshurst the poet had purposed to sur- 
 pass Ariosto, but the gayety of Ariesto's song is utterly 
 absent from his own. Not a ripple of laughter breaks the 
 calm surface of Spenser's verse. He is habitually serious, 
 and the seriousness of his poetic tone reflects the serious- 
 ness of his poetic purpose. His aim, he tells us, was to 
 represent the moral virtues, to assign to each its knightly 
 patron, so that its excellence might be expressed and it 
 contrary vice trodden under foot by deeds of arms and
 
 468 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 chivalry. In knight after knight of the twelve he pur- 
 posed to paint, he wished to embody some single virtue of 
 the virtuous man in its struggle with the faults and errors 
 which specially beset it; till in Arthur, the sum of the 
 whole company, man might have been seen perfected, in 
 his longing and progress toward the "Faerie Queen," the 
 jDivine Glory which is the true end of human effort. 
 
 The largeness of his culture indeed, his exquisite sense 
 of beauty, and above all the very intensity of his moral 
 enthusiasm, saved Spenser from the narrowness and exag- 
 geration which often distorted goodness into unloveliness 
 in the Puritan. Christian as he is to the core, his Chris- 
 tianity is enriched and fertilized by the larger temper of 
 the Renascence, as well as by a poet's love of the natural 
 world in which the older mythologies struck their roots. 
 Diana and the gods of heathendom take a sacred tinge 
 from the purer sanctities of the new faith ; and in one of 
 the greatest songs of the " Faerie Queen" the conception of 
 love widens, as it widened in the mind of a Greek, into the 
 mighty thought of the productive energy of Nature. 
 Spenser borrows in fact the delicate and refined forms of 
 the Platonist philosophy to express his own moral enthu- 
 siasm. Not only does he love, as others have loved, all 
 that is noble and pure and of good report, but he is fired as 
 none before or after him have been fired with a passionate 
 sense of moral beauty. Justice, Temperance, Truth, are 
 no mere names to him, but real existences to which his 
 whole nature clings with a rapturous affection. Outer 
 beauty he believed to spring, and loved because it sprang 
 from the beauty of the soul within. There was much in 
 such a moral protest as this to rouse dislike in any age, 
 but it is the glory of the age of Elizabeth that, " mad world" 
 as in many ways it was, all that was noble welcomed the 
 "Faerie Queen." Elizabeth herself, says Spenser, "to 
 mine oaten pipe inclined her ear," and bestowed a pension 
 on the poet. In 1595 he brought three more books of hia 
 poem to England. He returned to Ireland to commemo- 

 
 CHAP. 7.] THE REFORMATION. 15401608. 4S9 
 
 rate his marriage in Sonnets and the most beautiful of 
 bridal songs, and to complete the " Faerie Queen" among 
 love and poverty and troubles from his Irish neighbors. 
 But these troubles soon took a graver form. In 1599 Ire- 
 land broke into revolt, and the poet escaped from his burn- 
 ing house to fly to England and to die broken-hearted in 
 an inn at Westminster. 
 
 If the " Faerie Queen" expressed the higher elements of 
 the Elizabethan age, the whole of that age, its lower ele- 
 ments and its higher alike, was expressed in the English 
 drama. We have already pointed out the circumstances 
 which throughout Europe were giving a poetic impulse to 
 the newly-aroused intelligence of men, and this impulse 
 everywhere took a dramatic shape. The artificial French 
 tragedy which began about his time with Garnier was not 
 indeed destined to exert any influence over English poetry 
 till a later age ; but the influence of the Italian comedy, 
 which had begun half a century earlier with Machiavelli 
 and Ariosto, was felt directly through the Novelle, or 
 stories, which served as plots for our dramatists. It left 
 its stamp indeed on some of the worst characteristics of 
 the English stage. The features of our drama that startled 
 the moral temper of the time and won the deadly hatred of 
 the Puritans, its grossness and profanity, its tendency to 
 scenes of horror and crime, its profuse employment of 
 cruelty and lust as grounds of dramatic action, its daring 
 use of the horrible and the unnatural whenever they en- 
 abled it to display the more terrible and revolting sides of 
 human passion, were derived from the Italian stage. It 
 is doubtful how much the English playwrights may have 
 owed to the Spanish drama, which under Lope and Cer- 
 vantes sprang suddenly into a grandeur that almost 
 rivalled their own. In the intermixture of tragedy and 
 comedy, in the abandonment of the solemn uniformity of 
 poetic diction for the colloquial language of real life, the 
 use of unexpected incidents, the complication of their plots 
 and intrigues, the dramas of England and Spain are re-
 
 470 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 markably alike; but the likeness seems rather to have 
 sprung from a similarity in the circumstances to which 
 both owed their rise, than to any direct connection of the 
 one with the other. The real origin of the English drama, 
 in fact, lay not in any influence from without but in the 
 influence of England itself. The temper of the nation was 
 dramatic. Ever since the Reformation, the Palace, the 
 Inns of Court, and the University had been vying with 
 one another in the production of plays; and so early was 
 their popularity that even under Henry the Eighth it was 
 found necessary to create a " Master of the Revels" to super- 
 vise them. Every progress of Elizabeth from shire to shire 
 was a succession of shows and interludes. Diana with her 
 nymphs met the Queen as she returned from hunting; 
 Love presented her with his golden arrow as she passed 
 through the gates of Norwich. From the earlier years of 
 her reign the new spirit of the Renascence had been pour- 
 ing itself into the rough mould of the Mystery Plays, 
 whose allegorical virtues and vices, or scriptural heroes 
 and heroines, had handed on the spirit of the drama 
 through the Middle Ages. Adaptations from classical 
 pieces began to alternate with the purely religious " Moral- 
 ities;" and an attempt at a livelier style of expression and 
 invention appeared in the popular comedy of " Gammar 
 Gurton's Needle;" while Sackville, Lord Dorset, in his 
 tragedy of " Gorboduc" made a bold effort at sublimity of 
 diction, and introduced the use of blank verse as the vehicle 
 of dramatic dialogue. 
 
 But it was not to these tentative efforts of scholars and 
 nobles that the English stage was really indebted for the 
 amazing outburst of genius which dates from the year 
 1576, when "the Earl of Leicester's servants" erected the 
 first public theatre in Blackfriars. It was the people it- 
 self that created its Stage. The theatre indeed was com- 
 monly only the courtyard of an inn, or a mere booth such 
 as is still seen at a country fair. The bulk of the audience 
 sat beneath the open sky in the "pit" or yard; a few
 
 CHAP. 7.] THE REFORMATION. 1540-1608. 471 
 
 covered seats in the galleries which ran round it formed 
 the boxes of the wealthier spectators, while patrons and 
 nobles found seats upon the actual boards. All the appli- 
 ances were of the roughest sort : a few flowers served to 
 indicate a garden, crowds and armies were represented by 
 a dozen scene-shifters with swords and bucklers, heroes 
 rode in and out on hobby-horses, and a scroll on a post told 
 whether the scene was at Athens or London. There were 
 no female actors, and the grossness which startles us in 
 words which fell from women's lips took a different color 
 when every woman's part was acted by a boy. But dif- 
 ficulties such as these were more than compensated by the 
 popular character of the drama itself. Rude as the theatre 
 might be, all the world was there. The stage was crowded 
 with nobles and courtiers. Apprentices and citizens 
 thronged the benches in the yard below. The rough mob 
 of the pit inspired, as it felt, the vigorous life, the rapid 
 transitions, the passionate energy, the reality, the lifelike 
 medley and confusion, the racy dialogue, the chat, the 
 wit, the pathos, the sublimity, the rant and buffoonery, 
 the coarse horrors and vulgar bloodshedding, the immense 
 range over all classes of society, the intimacy with the 
 foulest as well as the fairest developments of human temper, 
 which characterized the English stage. The new drama 
 represented " the very age and body of the time, his form 
 and pressure." The people itself brought its nobleness and 
 its vileness to the boards. No stage was ever so human, 
 no poetic life so intense. Wild, reckless, defiant of all 
 past tradition, of all conventional laws, the English dram- 
 atists owned no teacher, no source of poetic inspiration, 
 but the people itself. 
 
 Few events in our literary history are so startling as this 
 sudden rise of the Elizabethan drama. The first public 
 theatre was erected only in the middle of the Queen's 
 reign. Before the close of it eighteen theatres existed in 
 London alone. Fifty dramatic poets, many of the first 
 order, appeared in the fifty years which preceded the clos-
 
 472 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 ing of the theatres by the Puritans ; and great as is the 
 number of their works which have perished, we still possess 
 a hundred dramas, all written within this period, and of 
 which at least a half are excellent. A glance at their 
 authors shows us that the intellectual quickening of the 
 age had now reached the mass of the people. Almost all 
 of the new playwrights were fairly educated, and many 
 were university men. But instead of courtly singers of 
 the Sidney and Spenser sort we see the advent of the " poor 
 scholar." The earlier dramatists, such as Nash, Peele, 
 Kyd, Greene, or Marlowe, were for the most part poor, 
 and reckless in their poverty ; wild livers, defiant of law 
 or common fame, in revolt against the usages and religion 
 of their day, " atheists" in general repute, " holding Moses 
 for a juggler," haunting the brothel and the alehouse, and 
 dying starved or in tavern brawls. But with their appear- 
 ance began the Elizabethan drama. The few plays which 
 have reached us of an earlier date are either cold imita- 
 tions of the classical and Italian comedy, or rude farces 
 like "Ralph Roister Doister," or tragedies such as "Gor- 
 buduc" where, poetic as occasional passages may be, there 
 is little promise of dramatic development. But in the year 
 which preceded the coming of the Armada the whole aspect 
 of the stage suddenly changes, and the new dramatists 
 range themselves around two men of very different genius, 
 Robert Greene and Christopher Marlowe. 
 
 Of Greene, as the creator of our lighter English prose, 
 we have already spoken. But his work as a poet was of 
 yet greater importance, for his perception of character and 
 the relations of social life, the playfulness of his fancy, and. 
 the liveliness of his style, exerted an influence on his con- 
 temporaries which was equalled by that of none but Mar^ 
 lowe and Peele. In spite of the rudeness of his plots and 
 the unequal character of his work Greene must be regarded 
 as the creator of our modern comedy. No figure better 
 paints the group of young playwrights. He left Cam- 
 bridge to travel through Italy and Spain, and to bring
 
 CHAP. 7.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 473 
 
 back the debauchery of the one and the scepticism of the 
 other. In the words of remorse he wrote before his death 
 he paints himself as a drunkard and a roysterer, winning 
 money only by ceaseless pamphlets and plays to waste it 
 on wine and women, and drinking the cup of life to the 
 dregs. Hell and the after-world were the butts of his 
 ceaseless mockery. If he had not feared the judges of the 
 Queen's Courts more than he feared God, he said in bitter 
 jest, he should often have turned cutpurse. He married, 
 and loved his wife, but she was soon deserted; and the 
 wretched profligate found himself again plunged into ex- 
 cesses which he loathed, though he could not live without 
 them. But wild as was the life of Greene, his pen was 
 pure. He is steadily on virtue's side in the love pam- 
 phlets and novelettes he poured out in endless succession, 
 and whose plots were dramatized by the school which 
 gathered round him. 
 
 The life of Marlowe was as riotous, his scepticism even 
 more daring, than the life and scepticism of Greene. His 
 early death alone saved him in all probability from a pros- 
 ecution for atheism. He was charged with calling Moses 
 a juggler, and with boasting that, if he undertook to write 
 a new religion, it should be a better religion than the 
 Christianity he saw around him. But he stood far ahead 
 of his fellows as a creator of English tragedy. Born in 
 1564 at the opening of Elizabeth's reign, the son of a 
 Canterbury shoemaker, but educated at Cambridge, Mar- 
 lowe burst on the world in the year which preceded the 
 triumph over the Armada with a play which at once 
 wrought a revolution in the English stage. Bombastic 
 and extravagant as it was, and extravagance reached its 
 height in a scene where captive kings, the "pampered 
 jades of Asia," drew their conqueror's car across the stage, 
 " Tamburlaine" not only indicated the revolt of the new 
 drama against the timid inanities of Euphuism, but gave 
 an earnest of that imaginative daring, the secret of which 
 Marlowe was to bequeath to the playwrights who followed
 
 474 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 him. He perished at thirty in a shameful brawl, but in 
 his brief career he had struck the grander notes of the 
 coming drama. His Jew of Malta was the herald of Shy- 
 lock. He opened in " Edward the Second" the series of 
 historical plays which gave us " Csesar" and " Richard the 
 Third." His "Faustus" is riotous, grotesque, and full of 
 a mad thirst for pleasure, but it was the first dramatic at- 
 tempt to touch the problem of the relations of man to the 
 unseen world. Extravagant, unequal, stooping even to 
 the ridiculous in his cumbrous and vulgar buffonery, there 
 is a force in Marlowe, a conscious grandeur of tone, a range 
 of passion, which sets him above all his contemporaries 
 save one. In the higher qualities of imagination, as in 
 the majesty and sweetness of his "mighty line," he is in- 
 ferior to Shakspere alone. 
 
 A few daring jests, a brawl, and a fatal stab, make up 
 the life of Marlowe; but even details such as these are 
 wanting to the life of William Shakspere. Of hardly any 
 great poet indeed do we know so little. For the story of 
 his youth we have only one or two trifling legends, and 
 these almost certainly false. Not a single letter or char- 
 acteristic saying, not one of the jests " spoken at the Mer- 
 maid," hardly a single anecdote, remain to illustrate his 
 busy life in London. His look and figure in later age 
 have been preserved by the bust over his tomb at Strat- 
 ford, and a hundred years after his death he was still re- 
 membered in his native town ; but the minute diligence of 
 the inquirers of the Georgian time was able to glean 
 hardly a single detail, even of the most trivial order, which 
 could throw light upon the years of retirement before his 
 death. It is owing perhaps to the harmony and unity of 
 his temper that no salient peculiarity seems to have left its 
 trace on the memory of his contemporaries ; it is the very 
 grandeur of his genius which precludes us from discover- 
 ing any personal trait in his work. His supposed self- 
 revelation in the Sonnets is so obscure that only a few out- 
 lines can be traced even by the boldest conjecture. In hia 

 
 CHAP. 7.] THE REFORMATION. 1540^1803. 475 
 
 dramas he is all his characters, and his characters range 
 over all mankind. There is not one, or the act or word of 
 one that we can identify personally with the poet himself. 
 He was born in 1564, the sixth year of Elizabeth's reign, 
 twelve years after the birth of Spenser, three years later 
 than the birth of Bacon. Marlowe was of the same age 
 with Shakspere : Greene probably a few years older. His 
 father, a glover and small farmer of Stratford-on-Avon, 
 was forced by poverty to lay down his office of alderman 
 as his son reached boyhood ; and stress of poverty may 
 have been the cause which drove William Shakspere, who 
 was already married at eighteen to a wife older than him- 
 self, to London and the stage. His life in the capital can 
 hardly have begun later than in his twenty-third year, the 
 memorable year which followed Sidney's death, which 
 preceded the coming of the Armada, and which witnessed 
 the production of Marlowe's "Tamburlaine." If we take 
 the language of the Sonnets as a record of his personal 
 feeling, his new profession as an actor stirred in him only 
 the bitterness of self-contempt. He chides with Fortune 
 " that did not better for my life provide than public means 
 that public manners breed;" he writhes at the thought 
 that he has " made himself a motley to the view" of the 
 gaping apprentices in a pit of Blackfriars. " Thence comes 
 it," he adds, "that my name receives a brand, and almost 
 thence my nature is subdued to that it works in." But the 
 application of the words is a more than doubtful one. In 
 spite of petty squabbles with some of his dramatic rivals 
 at the outset of his career, the genial nature of the new- 
 comer seems to have won him a general love among his 
 fellows. In 1592, while still a mere actor and fitter of old 
 plays for the stage, a fellow-playwright, Chettle, answered 
 Greene's attack on him in words of honest affection : " My- 
 self have seen his demeanor no less civil than he excellent 
 in the quality he professes: besides, divers of worship 
 have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his 
 honesty, and his facetious grace in writing, that approves
 
 476 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK YL 
 
 his art." His partner Burbage spoke of him after death 
 as a " worthy friend and fellow ;" and Jonson handed down 
 the general tradition of his time when he described him as 
 "indeed honest, and of an open and free nature." 
 
 His profession as an actor was at any rate of essential 
 service to him in the poetic career which he soon under- 
 took. Not only did it give him the sense of theatrical 
 necessities which makes his plays so effective on the boards, 
 but it enabled him to bring his pieces as he wrote them to 
 the test of the stage. If there is any truth in Jonson's 
 statement that Shakspere never blotted a line, there is no 
 justice in the censure which it implies on his carelessness 
 or incorrectness. The conditions of poetic publication 
 were in fact wholly different from those of our own day. 
 A drama remained for years in manuscript as an acting 
 piece, subject to continual revision and amendment ; and 
 every rehearsal and representation afforded hints for change 
 which we know the young poet was far from neglecting. 
 The chance which has preserved an earlier edition of his 
 " Hamlet" shows in what an unsparing way Shakspere 
 could recast even the finest products of his genius. Five 
 years after the supposed date of his arrival in London he 
 was already famous as a dramatist. Greene speaks bit- 
 terly of him under the name of " Shakescene" as an " up- 
 start crow beautified with our feathers," a sneer which 
 points either to his celebrity as an actor or to his prepara- 
 tion for loftier flights by fitting pieces of his predecessors 
 for the stage. He was soon partner in the theatre, actor, 
 and playwright ; and another nickname, that of " Johannes 
 Factotum" or Jack-of -all- Trades, shows his readiness k> 
 take all honest work which came to hand. 
 
 With his publication in 1593 of the poem of "Venus and 
 Adonis," "the first heir of my invention" as Shakspere 
 calls it, the period of independent creation fairly began. 
 The date of its publication was a very memorable one. 
 The " Faerie Queen" had appeared only three years before, 
 and had placed Spenser without a rival at the head of
 
 CHAP. 7.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 477 
 
 English poetry. On the other hand the two leading dram- 
 atists of the time passed at this moment suddenly away. 
 Greene died in poverty and self-reproach in the house of a 
 poor shoemaker. "Doll," he wrote to the wife he had 
 abandoned, " I charge thee, by the love of our youth and 
 by my soul's rest, that thou wilt see this man paid ; for if 
 he and his wife had not succored me I had died in the 
 streets." " Oh, that a year were granted me to live," cried 
 the young poet from his bed of death, " but I must die, of 
 every man abhorred ! Time, loosely spent, will not again 
 be won ! My time is loosely spent and I undone !" A 
 year later the death of Marlowe in a street brawl removed 
 the only rival whose powers might have equalled Shak- 
 spere's own. He was now about thirty ; and the twenty- 
 three years which elapsed between the appearance of the 
 " Adonis" and his death were filled with a series of master- 
 pieces. Nothing is more characteristic of his genius than 
 its incessant activity. Through the five years which fol- 
 lowed the publication of his early poem he seems to have 
 produced on an average two dramas a year. When we 
 attempt however to trace the growth and progress of the 
 poet's mind in the order of his plays we are met in the 
 case of many of them by an absence of certain information 
 as to the dates of their appearance. The facts on which 
 inquiry has to build are extremely few. "Venus and 
 Adonis," with the "Lucrece," must have been written 
 before their publication in 1593-94 ; the Sonnets, though 
 not published till 1609, were known in some form among 
 his private friends as early as 1598. His earlier plays are 
 defined by a list given in the " Wit's Treasury" of Francis 
 Meres in 1598, though the omission of a play from a casual 
 catalogue of this kind would hardly warrant us in assum- 
 ing its necessary non-existence at the time. The works 
 ascribed to him at his death are fixed in the same approxi- 
 mate fashion through the edition published by his fellow- 
 actors. Beyond these meagre facts and our knowledge of 
 the publication of a few of his dramas in his lifetime all is
 
 478 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VL 
 
 uncertain; and the conclusions which have been drawn 
 from these, and from the dramas themselves, as well as 
 from the assumed resemblances with, or references to, 
 other plays of the period can only be accepted as approxi- 
 mations to the truth. 
 
 The bulk of his lighter comedies and historical dramas 
 can be assigned with fair probability to a period from 
 about 1593, when Shakspere was known as nothing more 
 than an adapter, to 1598, when they are mentioned in the 
 list of Meres. They bear on them indeed the stamp of 
 youth. In " Love's Labor's Lost" the young playwright, 
 fresh from his own Stratford, its " daisies pied and violets 
 blue," with the gay bright music of its country ditties still 
 in his ears, flings himself into the midst of the brilliant 
 England which gathered round Elizabeth, busying himself 
 as yet for the most part with the surface of it, with the 
 humors and quixotisms, the wit and the whim, the un- 
 reality, the fantastic extravagance, which veiled its inner 
 nobleness. Country-lad as he is, Shakspere shows himself 
 master of it all; he can patter euphuism and exchange 
 quip and repartee with the best; he is at home in their ped- 
 antries and affectations, their brag and their rhetoric, their 
 passion for the fantastic and the marvellous. He can 
 laugh as heartily at the romantic vagaries of the courtly 
 world in which he finds himself as at the narrow dulness, 
 the pompous triflings, of the country world which he has 
 left behind him. But he laughs frankly and without 
 malice ; he sees the real grandeur of soul which underlies 
 all this quixotry and word-play ; and owns with a smile 
 that when brought face to face with the facts of human 
 life, with the suffering of man or the danger of England, 
 these fops have in them the stuff of heroes. He shares the 
 delight in existence, the pleasure in sheer living, which 
 was so marked a feature of the age ; he enjoys the mis- 
 takes, the contrasts, the adventures, of the men about him ; 
 his fun breaks almost riotously out in the practical jokes 
 of the " Taming of the Shrew" and the endless blunderings
 
 CHAP. 7.] THE REFORMATION. 1540-1608. 479 
 
 of the "Comedy of Errors." In these earlier efforts his 
 work had been marked by little poetic elevation or by pas- 
 sion. But the easy grace of the dialogue, the dextrous 
 management of a complicated story, the genial gayety of 
 his tone, and the music of his verse promised a master of 
 social comedy as soon as Shakspere turned from the su- 
 perficial aspects of the world about him to find a new de- 
 light in the character and actions of men. The interest of 
 human character was still fresh and vivid ; the sense of 
 individuality drew a charm from its novelty ; and poet and 
 essayist were busy alike in sketching the "humors" of 
 mankind. Shakspere sketched with his fellows. In the 
 " Two Gentlemen of Verona" his painting of manners was 
 suffused by a tenderness and ideal beauty which formed an 
 effective protest against the hard though vigorous char- 
 acter-painting which the first success of Ben Jonson in 
 " Every Man in his Humor" brought at the time into fash- 
 ion. But quick on these lighter comedies followed two in 
 which his genius started fully into life. His poetic power, 
 held in reserve till now, showed itself with a splendid pro- 
 fusion in the brilliant fancies of the " Midsummer Night's 
 Dream ;" and passion swept like a tide of resistless delight 
 through " Romeo and Juliet." 
 
 Side by side however with these .passionate dreams, 
 these delicate imaginings and piquant sketches of man- 
 ners, had been appearing during this short interval of in- 
 tense activity a series of dramas which mark Shakspere's 
 relation to the new sense of patriotism, the more vivid 
 sense of national existence, national freedom, national 
 greatness, which gives its grandeur to the age of Eliza- 
 beth. England itself was now becoming a source of liter- 
 ary interest to poet and prose-writer. Warner in his 
 "Albion's England," Daniel in his "Civil Wars," em- 
 balmed in verse the record of her past; Drayton in his 
 " Polyolbion" sang the fairness of the land itself, the 
 "tracts, mountains, forests, and other parts of this re- 
 nowned isle of Britain." The national pride took its 
 
 21 VOL. 2
 
 480 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VX 
 
 highest poetic form in the historical drama. No plays 
 seem to have been more popular from the earliest hours of 
 the new stage than dramatic representations of our history. 
 Marlowe had shown in his "Edward the Second" what 
 tragic grandeur could be reached in this favorite field; 
 and, as we have seen, Shakspere had been led naturally 
 toward it by his earlier occupation as an adapter of stock 
 pieces like " Henry the Sixth" for the new requirements of 
 the stage. He still to some extent followed in plan the 
 older plays on the subjects he selected, but in his treatment 
 of their themes he shook boldly off the yoke of the past. 
 A larger and deeper conception of human character than 
 any of the old dramatists had reached displayed itself in 
 Richard the Third, in Falstaff, or in Hotspur; while in 
 Constance and Richard the Second the pathos of human 
 suffering was painted as even Marlowe had never dared to 
 paint it. 
 
 No dramas have done so much for Shakspere's enduring 
 popularity with his countrymen as these historical plays. 
 They have done more than all the works of English histo- 
 rians to nourish in the minds of Englishmen a love of and 
 reverence for their country's past. When Chatham was 
 asked where he had read his English history he answered, 
 " In the plays of Shakspere." Nowhere could he have read 
 it so well, for nowhere is the spirit of our history so nobly 
 rendered. If the poet's work echoes sometimes our na- 
 tional prejudice and unfairness of temper, it is instinct 
 throughout with English humor, with our English love 
 of hard fighting, our English faith in goodness, and in the 
 doom that waits upon triumphant evil, our English pity 
 for the fallen. Shakspere is Elizabethan to the core. He 
 stood at the meeting-point of two great epochs of our his- 
 tory. The age of the Renascence was passing into the age 
 of Puritanism. Rifts which were still little were widen- 
 ing every hour, and threatening ruin to the fabric of 
 Church and State which the Tudors had built up. A new 
 political world was rising into being; a world healthier,
 
 CHAP. 7.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 481 
 
 more really national, but less picturesque, less wrapped in 
 the mystery and splendor that poets love. Great as were 
 the faults of Puritanism, it may fairly claim to be the first 
 political system which recognized the grandeur of the peo- 
 ple as a whole. As great a change was passing over the 
 spiritual sympathies of men. A sterner Protestantism 
 was invigorating and ennobling life by its morality, its 
 seriousness, its intense conviction of God. But it was at 
 the same time hardening and narrowing it. The Bible 
 was superseding Plutarch. The " obstinate questionings'* 
 which haunted the finer souls of the Renascence were be- 
 ing stereotyped into the theological formulas of the Puritan. 
 The sense of a divine omnipotence was annihilating man. 
 The daring which turned England into a people of " ad- 
 venturers," the sense of inexhaustible resources, the buoy- 
 ant freshness of youth, the intoxicating sense of beauty 
 and joy, which created Sidney and Marlowe and Drake, 
 were passing away before the consciousness of evil and the 
 craving to order man's life aright before God. 
 
 From this new world of thought and feeling Shakspere 
 stood aloof. Turn as others might to the speculations of 
 theology, man and man's nature remained with him an 
 inexhaustible subject of interest. Caliban was among his 
 latest creations. It is impossible to discover whether his 
 religious belief was Catholic or Protestant. It is hard in- 
 deed to say whether he had any religious belief or no. 
 The religious phrases which are thinly scattered over his 
 works are little more than expressions of a distant and im- 
 aginative reverence. But on the deeper grounds of relig- 
 ious faith his silence is significant. He is silent, and the 
 doubt of Hamlet deepens his silence, about the after world. 
 " To die," it may be, was to him as it was to Claudio, " to 
 go we know not whither." Often as his questionings turn 
 to the riddle of life and death he leaves it a riddle to the last 
 without heeding the common theological solutions around 
 him. " We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our 
 little life is rounded with a sleep."
 
 482 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 Nor were the political sympathies of the poet those of 
 the coming time. His roll of dramas is the epic of civil 
 war. The Wars of the Roses fill his mind, as they filled 
 the mind of his contemporaries. It is not till we follow 
 him through the series of plays from " Richard the Second" 
 to " Henry the Eighth" that we realize how profoundly the 
 memory of the struggle between York and Lancaster had 
 moulded the temper of the people, how deep a dread of civil 
 war, of baronial turbulence, of disputes over the succession 
 to the throne, it had left behind it. Men had learned the 
 horrors of the time from their fathers; they had drunk in 
 with their childhood the lesson that such a chaos of weak- 
 ness and misrule must never be risked again. From such 
 a risk the Crown seemed the one security. With Shak- 
 spere as with his fellow-countrymen the Crown is still the 
 centre and safeguard of the national life. His ideal Eng- 
 land is an England grouped around a noble king, a king 
 such as his own Henry the Fifth, devout, modest, simple 
 as he is brave, but a lord in battle, a born ruler of men, 
 with a loyal people about him and his enemies at his feet. 
 Socially the poet reflects the aristocratic view of social life 
 which was shared by all the nobler spirits of the Eliza- 
 bethan time. Coriolanus is the embodiment of a great 
 noble ; and the taunts which Shakspere hurls in play after 
 play at the rabble only echo the general temper of the Re- 
 nascence. But he shows no sympathy with the struggle of 
 feudalism against the Crown. If he paints Hotspur with 
 a fire which proves how thoroughly he could sympathize 
 with the rough, bold temper of the baronage, he suffers 
 him to fall unpitied before Henry the Fourth. Apart 
 however from the strength and justice of its rule, royalty 
 has no charm for him. He knows nothing of the " right 
 divine of kings to govern wrong" which became the doc- 
 trine of prelates and courtiers in the age of the Stuarts. 
 He shows in his "Richard the Second" the doom that 
 waits on a lawless despotism, as he denounces in his 
 " Richard the Third" the selfish and merciless ambition
 
 CHAP. 7.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 483 
 
 that severs a ruler from his people. But the dread of mis- 
 rule was a dim and distant one. Shakspere had grown up 
 under the reign of Elizabeth ; he hao known no ruler save 
 one who had cast a spell over the hearts of Englishmen. 
 His thoughts were absorbed, as those of the country were 
 absorbed, in the struggle for national existence which 
 centred round the Queen. " King John" is a trumpet-call 
 to rally round Elizabeth in her fight for England. Again 
 a Pope was asserting his right to depose an English sov- 
 ereign and to loose Englishmen from their bond of alle- 
 giance. Again political ambitions ana civil discord woke 
 at the call of religious war. Again a foreign power was 
 threatening England at the summons of Rome, and hoping 
 to master her with the aid of revolted Englishmen. The 
 heat of such a struggle as this left no time for the thought 
 of civil liberties. Shakspere casts aside the thought of the 
 Charter to fix himself on the strife of the stranger for 
 England itself. What he sang was the duty of patriotism, 
 the grandeur of loyalty, the freedom of England from Pope 
 or Spaniard, its safety within its " water- walled bulwark," 
 if only its national union was secure. And now that the 
 nation was at one, now that he had seen in his first years 
 of London life Catholics as well as Protestants trooping to 
 the muster at Tilbury and hasting down Thames to the 
 fight in the Channel, he could thrill his hearers with the 
 proud words that sum up the work of Elizabeth : 
 
 "This England never did, nor never shall, 
 Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror, 
 But when it first did help to wound itself. 
 Now that her princes are come home again, 
 Come the three corners of the world in arms, 
 And we shall shock them ! Naught ehall make us rue 
 If England to itself do rest but true. " 
 
 With this great series of historical and social dramas 
 Shakspere had passed far beyond his fellows whether as a 
 tragedian or as a writer of comedy. "The Muses," said 
 Meres in 1598, "would speak with Shakspere's fine-filed
 
 484 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VL 
 
 phrase, if they would speak English." His personal pop- 
 ularity was now at its height. His pleasant temper and 
 the vivacity of his wit had drawn him early into contact 
 with the young Earl of Southampton, to whom his 
 " Adonis" and " Lucrece" are dedicated ; and the different 
 tone of the two dedications shows how rapidly acquaint- 
 ance ripened into an ardent friendship. Shakspere's 
 wealth and influence too were growing fast. He had 
 property both in Stratford and London, and his fellow- 
 townsmen made him their suitor to Lord Burleigh for 
 favors to be bestowed on Stratford. He was rich enough 
 to aid his father, and to buy the house at Stratford which 
 afterward became his home. The tradition that Elizabeth 
 was so pleased with Falstaff in " Henry the Fourth" that 
 she ordered the poet to show her Falstaff in love an order 
 which produced the " Merry Wives of Windsor" whether 
 true or false, proves his repute as a playwright. As the 
 group of earlier poets passed away, they found successors 
 in Marston, Dekker, Middleton, Heywood, and Chapman, 
 and above all in Ben Jonson. But none of these could 
 dispute the supremacy of Shakspere. The verdict of Meres 
 that " Shakspere among the English is the most excellent 
 in both kinds for the stage," represented the general feel- 
 ing of his contemporaries. He was at last fully master of 
 the resources of his art. The "Merchant of Venice" 
 marks the perfection of his development as a dramatist in 
 the completeness of its stage effect, the ingenuity of its in- 
 cidents, the ease of its movement, the beauty of its higher 
 passages, the reserve and self-control with which its poetry 
 is used, the conception and unfolding of character, and 
 above all the mastery with which character and event is 
 grouped round the figure of Shylock. Master as he is of 
 his art, the port's temper is still young ; the " Merry Wivei 
 of Windsor" is a burst of gay laughter ; and laughter more 
 tempered, yet full of a sweeter fascination, rings round us 
 in "As You Like It." 
 But in the melancholy and meditative Jaques of the last
 
 CHAP. 7.] THE REFORMATION. 15401608. 485 
 
 drama we feel the touch of a new and graver mood. 
 Youth, so full and buoyant in the poet till now, seems to 
 have passed almost suddenly away. Though Shakspere 
 had hardly reached forty, in one of his Sonnets which can- 
 not have been written at a much later time than this there 
 are indications that he already felt the advance of prema- 
 ture age. And at this moment the outer world suddenly 
 darkened around him. The brilliant circle of young nobles 
 whose friendship he had shared was broken up in 1601 by 
 the political storm which burst in a mad struggle of the 
 Earl of Essex for power. Essex himself fell on the scaf- 
 fold ; his friend and Shakspere's idol, Southampton, passed 
 a prisoner into the Tower; Herbert Lord Pembroke, 
 a younger patron of the poet, was banished from the Court. 
 While friends were thus falling and hopes fading without, 
 Shakspere's own mind seems to have been going through a 
 phase of bitter suffering and unrest. In spite of the in- 
 genuity of commentators, it is difficult and even impossible 
 to derive any knowledge of Shakspere's inner history from 
 the Sonnets; "the strange imagery of passion which 
 passes over the magic mirror," it has been finely said, 
 "has no tangible evidence before or behind it." But its 
 mere passing is itself an evidence of the restlessness and 
 agony within. The change in the character of his dramas 
 gives a surer indication of his change of mood. The fresh 
 joyousness, the keen delight in life and in man, which 
 breathes through Shakspere's early work disappears in 
 comedies such as "Troilus" and "Measure for Measure." 
 Disappointment, disillusion, a new sense of the evil and 
 foulness that underlies so much of human life, a loss of the 
 old frank trust in its beauty and goodness, threw their 
 gloom over these comedies. Failure seems everywhere. 
 In " Julius Caesar" the virtue of Brutus is foiled by its 
 ignorance of and isolation from mankind ; in Hamlet even 
 penetrating intellect proves helpless for want of the capacity 
 of action ; the poison of lago taints the love of Desdemona 
 and the grandeur of Othello; Lear's mighty passion battles
 
 486 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 helplessly against the wind and the rain ; a woman's weak- 
 ness of frame dashes the cup of her triumph from the hand 
 of Lady Macbeth ; lust and self-indulgence blast the hero- 
 ism of Antony; pride ruins the nobleness of Coriolanus. 
 
 But the very struggle and self -introspection that these 
 dramas betray were to give a depth and grandeur to Shak- 
 spere's work such as it had never known before. The age 
 was one in which man's temper and powers took a new 
 range and energy. Sidney or Raleigh lived not one but a 
 dozen lives at once; the daring of the adventurer, the 
 philosophy of the scholar, the passion of the lover, the fan- 
 aticism of the saint, towered into almost superhuman 
 grandeur. Man became conscious of the immense re- 
 sources that lay within him, conscious of boundless powers 
 that seemed to mock the narrow world in which they 
 moved. All through the age of the Renascence one feels 
 this impress of the gigantic, this giant-like activity, this 
 immense ambition and desire. The very bombast and ex- 
 travagance of the times reveal cravings and impulses be- 
 fore which common speech broke down. It is this gran- 
 deur of humanity that finds its poetic expression in the later 
 work of Shakspere. As the poet penetrated deeper and 
 deeper into the recesses of the soul, he saw how great and 
 wondrous a thing was man. " What a piece of work is a 
 man," cries Hamlet; "how noble in reason; how infinite 
 in faculty ; in form and moving how express and admirable ; 
 in action how like an angel ; in apprehension how like a 
 god ; the beauty of the world ; the paragon of animals !" 
 It is the wonder of man that spreads before us as the poet 
 pictures the wide speculation of Hamlet, the awful convul- 
 sion of a great nature in Othello, the terrible storm in the 
 soul of Lear which blends with the very storm of the 
 heavens themselves, the awful ambition that nerved a 
 woman's hand to dabble itself with the blood of a murdered 
 king, the reckless lust that "flung away a world for love." 
 Amid the terror and awe of these great dramas we learn 
 something of the vast forces of the age from which they
 
 CHAP. 7.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 487 
 
 sprang. The passion of Mary Stuart, the ruthlessness of 
 Alva, the daring of Drake, the chivalry of Sidney, the 
 range of thought and action in Kaleigh or Elizabeth, come 
 better home to us as we follow the mighty series of trag- 
 edies which began in " Hamlet" and ended in " Coriolanus." 
 Shakspere's last dramas, the three exquisite works in 
 which he shows a soul at rest with itself and with the 
 world, "Cymbeline," "The Tempest," "Winter's Tale," 
 were written in the midst of ease and competence, in a 
 house at Stratford to which he withdrew a few years after 
 the death of Elizabeth. In them we lose all relations with 
 the world or the time and pass into a region of pure poetry. 
 It is in this peaceful and gracious close that the life of 
 Shakspere contrasts most vividly with that of his greatest 
 contemporary. If the imaginative resources of the new 
 England were seen in the creators of Hamlet and the 
 Faerie Queen, its purely intellectual capacity, its vast 
 command over the stores of human knowledge, the amaz- 
 ing sense of its own powers with which it dealt with them, 
 were seen in the work of Francis Bacon. Bacon was born 
 in 1561, three years before the birth of Shakspere. He 
 was the younger son of a Lord Keeper, as well as the 
 nephew of Lord Burleigh, and even in childhood his 
 quickness and sagacity won the favor of the Queen. 
 Elizabeth "delighted much to confer with him, and to 
 prove him with questions : unto which he delivered himself 
 with that gravity and maturity above his years that her 
 Majesty would of ten term him 'the young Lord Keeper.' " 
 Even as a boy at college he expressed his dislike of the 
 Aristotelian philosophy, as a " philosophy only strong for 
 disputations and contentions but barren of the production of 
 works for the benefit of the life of man. " As a law student 
 of twenty-one he sketched in a tract on the " Greatest Birth 
 of Time" the system of inductive inquiry which he was 
 already prepared to substitute for it. The speculations of 
 he young thinker however were interrupted by his hopes 
 it Court success. But these were soon dashed to the
 
 488 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [Boos VI. 
 
 ground. He was left poor by his father's death; the ill- 
 will of the Cecils barred his advancement with the Queen: 
 and a few years before Shakspere's arrival in London 
 Bacon entered as a barrister at Gray's Inn. He soon be- 
 came one of the most successful lawyers of the time. At 
 twenty-three Bacon was a member of the House of Com- 
 mons and his judgment and eloquence at once brought 
 him to the front. " The fear of every man that heard him 
 was lest he should make an end," Ben Jonson tells us. 
 The steady growth of his reputation was quickened in 1597 
 by the appearance of his " Essays," a work remarkable, not 
 merely for the condensation of its thought and its felicity 
 and exactness of expression, but for the power with which 
 it applied to human life that experimental analysis which 
 Bacon was at a later time to make the key of Science. 
 
 His fame at once became great at home and abroad, but 
 with this nobler fame Bacon could not content himself. 
 He was conscious of great powers as well as great aims 
 for the public good : and it was a time when such aims 
 could hardly be realized save through the means of the 
 Crown. But political employment seemed farther off 
 than ever. At the outset of his career in Parliament he 
 irritated Elizabeth by a firm opposition to her demand of 
 a subsidy ; and though the offence was atoned for by pro- 
 fuse apologies and by the cessation of all further resistance 
 to the policy of the Court, the law offices of the Crown 
 were more than once refused to him, and it was only after 
 the publication of his " Essays" that he could obtain some 
 slight promotion as a Queen's Counsel. The moral weak- 
 ness which more and more disclosed itself is the best justi- 
 fication of the Queen in her reluctance a reluctance so 
 greatly in contrast with her ordinary course to bring the 
 wisest head in her realm to her Council-board. The men 
 whom Elizabeth employed were for the most part men 
 whose intellect was directed by a strong sense of public 
 duty. Their reverence for the Queen, strangely exagger- 
 ated as it may seem to us, was guided and controlled by
 
 CHAP. 7.] THE REFORMATION. 15401608. 489 
 
 an ardent patriotism and an earnest sense of religion ; and 
 with all their regard for the royal prerogative, they never 
 lost their regard for the law. The grandeur and origin- 
 ality of Bacon's intellect parted him from men like these 
 quite as much as the bluntness of his moral perceptions. In 
 politics, as in science, he had little reverence for the past. 
 Law, constitutional privileges, or religion, were to him 
 simply means of bringing about certain ends of good gov* 
 ernment; and if these ends could be brought about in 
 shorter fashion he saw only pedantry in insisting on more 
 cumbrous means. He had great social and political ideas 
 to realize, the reform and codification of the law, the civil- 
 ization of Ireland, the purification of the Church, the union 
 at a later time of Scotland and England, educational 
 projects, projects of material improvement, and the like ; 
 and the direct and shortest way of realizing these ends 
 was, in Bacon's eyes, the use of the power of the Crown. 
 But whatever charm such a conception of the royal power 
 might have for her successor, it had little charm for Eliza- 
 beth ; and to the end of her reign Bacon was foiled in his 
 efforts to rise in her service. 
 
 Political activity however and court intrigue left room 
 in his mind for the philosophical speculation which had 
 begun with his earliest years. Amid debates in parlia- 
 ment and flatteries in the closet Bacon had been silently 
 framing a new philosophy. It made its first decisive ap- 
 pearance after the final disappointment of his hopes from 
 Elizabeth in the publication of the "Advancement of 
 Learning." The close of this work was, in his own 
 words, " a general and faithful perambulation of learning, 
 with an inquiry what parts thereof lie fresh and waste 
 and not improved and converted by the industry of man ; 
 to the end that such a plot, made and recorded to memory, 
 may both minister light to any public designation and also 
 serve to excite voluntary endeavors." It was only by such 
 a survey, he held, that men could be turned from useless 
 studies, or ineffectual means of pursuing more useful ones,
 
 490 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [Boos VI. 
 
 and directed to the true end of knowledge as " a rich store- 
 house for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's 
 estate." The work was in fact the preface to a series of 
 treatises which were intended to be built up into an " In- 
 stauratio Magna," which its author was never destined to 
 complete, and of which the parts that we possess were 
 published in the following reign. The " Cogitata et Visa" 
 was a first sketch of the "Novum Organum," which in its 
 complete form was presented to James in 1621. A year 
 later Bacon produced his- " Natural and Experimental His- 
 tory." This, with the "Novum Organum" and the "Ad- 
 vancement of Learning," was all of his projected "In- 
 stauratio Magna" which he actually finished; and even 
 of this portion we have only part of the last two divisions. 
 The "Ladder of the Understanding," which was to have 
 followed these and led up from experience to science, the 
 "Anticipations," or provisional hypotheses for the inqui- 
 ries of the new philosophy, and the closing account of 
 " Science in Practice" were left for posterity to bring to 
 completion. "We may, as we trust," said Bacon, "make 
 no despicable beginnings. The destinies of the human race 
 must complete it, in such a manner perhaps as men look- 
 ing only at the present world would not readily conceive. 
 For upon this will depend, not only a speculative good, 
 but all the fortunes of mankind, and all their power. " 
 
 When we turn from words like these to the actual work 
 which Bacon did, it is hard not to feel a certain disap- 
 pointment. He did not thoroughly understand the older 
 philosophy which he attacked. His revolt from the waste 
 of human intelligence which he conceived to be owing to 
 the adoption of a false method of investigation blinded 
 him to the real value of deduction as an instrument of dis- 
 covery ; and he was encouraged in his contempt for it as 
 much by his own ignorance of mathematics as by the non- 
 existence in his day of the great deductive sciences of 
 physics and astronomy. Nor had he a more accurate pre- 
 vision of the method of modern science. The inductive
 
 CHAP. 7.] THE REFORMATION. 1540-1608. 491 
 
 process to which he exclusively directed men's attention 
 bore no fruit in Bacon's hands. The " art of investigating 
 nature" on which he prided himself has proved useless for 
 scientific purposes, and would be rejected by modern in- 
 vestigators. Where he was on a more correct track he 
 can hardly be regarded as original. " It may be doubted," 
 says Dugald Stewart, "whether any one important rule 
 with regard to the true method of investigation be con- 
 tained in his works of which no hint can be traced in those 
 of his predecessors." Not only indeed did Bacon fail to 
 anticipate the methods of modern science, but he even re- 
 jected the great scientific discoveries of his own day. He 
 set aside with the same scorn the astronomical theory of 
 Copernicus and the magnetic investigations of Gilbert. 
 The contempt seems to have been fully returned by the 
 scientific workers of his day. "The Lord Chancellor 
 wrote on science," said Harvey, the discoverer of the cir- 
 culation of the blood, "like a Lord Chancellor." 
 
 In spite however of his inadequate appreciation either 
 of the old philosophy or the new, the almost unanimous 
 voice of later ages has attributed, and justly attributed, to 
 the "Nbvum Organum" a decisive influence on the de- 
 velopment of modern science. If he failed in revealing the 
 method of experimental research, Bacon was the first to 
 proclaim the existence of a Philosophy of Science, to insist 
 on the unity of knowledge and inquiry throughout the 
 physical world, to give dignity by the large and noble 
 temper in which he treated them to the petty details of 
 experiment in which science had to begin, to clear a way 
 for it by setting scornfully aside the traditions of the past, 
 to claim for it its true rank and value, and to point to the 
 enormous results which its culture would bring in increas- 
 ing the power and happiness of mankind. In one respect 
 his attitude was in the highest degree significant. The age 
 in which he lived was one in which theology was absorb- 
 ing the intellectual energy of the world. He was the ser- 
 vant too of a king with whom theological studies super-
 
 492 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPI. [BOOK VI. 
 
 seded all others. But if he bowed in all else to James, 
 Bacon would not, like Casaubon, bow in this. He would 
 not even, like Descartes, attempt to transform theology by 
 turning reason into a mode of theological demonstration. 
 He stood absolutely aloof from it. Though as a politician 
 he did not shrink from dealing with such subjects as 
 Church Reform, he dealt with them simply as matters of 
 civil polity. But from his exhaustive enumeration of the 
 branches of human knowledge he excluded theology, and 
 theology alone. His method was of itself inapplicable to 
 a subject where the premises were assumed to be certain, 
 and the results known. His aim was to seek for unknown 
 results by simple experiment. It was against received 
 authority and accepted tradition in matters of inquiry that 
 his whole system protested ; what he urged was the need 
 of making belief rest strictly on proof, and proof rest on 
 the conclusions drawn from evidence by reason. But in 
 theology all theologians asserted reason played but a 
 subordinate part. "If I proceed to treat of it," said 
 Bacon, " I shall step out of the bark of human reason, and 
 enter into the ship of the Church. Neither will the stars 
 of philosophy, which have hitherto so nobly shone on us, 
 any longer give us their light." 
 
 The certainty indeed of conclusions on such subjects was 
 out of harmony with the grandest feature of Bacon's work, 
 his noble confession of the liability of every inquirer to 
 error. It was his especial task to warn men against the 
 "vain shows" of knowledge which had so long hindered 
 any real advance in it, the " idols" of the Tribe, the Den, 
 the Forum, and the Theatre, the errors which spring from 
 the systematizing spirit which pervades all masses of men, 
 or from individual idiosyncrasies, or from the strange 
 power of words and phrases over the mind, or from the 
 traditions of the past. Nor were the claims of theology 
 easily to be reconciled with the position which he was 
 resolute to assign to natural science. " Through all those 
 ages," Bacon says, "wherein men of genius or learning
 
 CHAP. 7.] THE REFORMATION. 16401608. 493 
 
 principally or even moderately flourished, the smallest 
 part of human industry has been spent on natural phil- 
 osophy, though this ought to be esteemed as the great 
 mother of the sciences ; for all the rest, if torn from this 
 root, may perhaps be polished and formed for use, but can 
 receive little increase." It was by the adoption of the 
 method of inductive inquiry which physical science was 
 to make its own, and by basing inquiry on grounds which 
 physical science could supply, that the moral sciences, 
 ethics and politics, could alone make any real advance. 
 "Let none expect any great promotion of the sciences, 
 especially in their effective part, unless natural philosophy 
 be drawn out to particular sciences; and, again, unless 
 these particular sciences be brought back again to natural 
 philosophy. From this defect it is that astronomy, optics, 
 music, many mechanical arts, and (what seems stranger) 
 even moral and civil philosophy and logic rise but little 
 above the foundations, and only skim over the varieties 
 and surfaces of things." It was this lofty conception of 
 the position and destiny of natural science which Bacon 
 was the first to impress upon mankind at large. The age 
 was one in which knowledge was passing to fields of in- 
 quiry which had till then been unknown, in which Kepler 
 and Galileo were creating modern astronomy, in which 
 Descartes was revealing the laws of motion, and Harvey 
 the circulation of the blood. But to the mass of men this 
 great change was all but imperceptible; and it was the 
 energy, the profound conviction, the eloquence of Bacon 
 which first called the attention of mankind as a whole to 
 the power and importance of physical research. It was he 
 who by his lofty faith in the results and victories of the 
 new philosophy nerved its followers to a zeal and confi- 
 dence equal to his own. It was he above all who gave dig- 
 nity to the slow and patient processes of investigation, of 
 experiment, of comparison, to the sacrifice of hypothesis 
 to fact, to the single aim after truth, which was to be tht 
 law of modern science.
 
 494 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [Boos VL 
 
 While England thus became "a nest of singing birds," 
 while Bacon was raising the lofty fabric of his philosoph- 
 ical speculation, the people itself was waking to a new 
 sense of national freedom. Elizabeth saw the forces, polit- 
 ical and religious, which she had stubbornly held in check 
 for half a century pressing on her irresistibly. In spite of 
 the rarity of its assemblings, in spite of high words and 
 imprisonment and dextrous management, the Parliament 
 had quietly gained a power which, at her accession, the 
 Queen could never have dreamed of its possessing. Step 
 by step the Lower House had won the freedom of its 
 members from arrest save by its own permission, the right 
 of punishing and expelling members for crimes committed 
 within its walls, and of determining all matters relating 
 to elections. The more important claim of freedom of 
 speech had brought on fro n time to time a series of petty 
 conflicts in which Elizabeth generally gave way. But on 
 this point the Commons still shrank from any consistent 
 repudiation of the Queen's assumption of control. A bold 
 protest of Peter Wentworth against her claim to exercise 
 such a control in 1575 was met indeed by the House itself. 
 with his committal to the Tower; and the bolder questions 
 which he addressed to the Parliament of 1588, "Whether 
 this Council is not a place for every member of the same 
 freely and without control, by bill or speech, to utter any 
 of the griefs of the Commonwealth," brought on him a 
 fresh imprisonment at the hands of the Council, which 
 lasted till the dissolution of the Parliament and with which 
 the Commons declined to interfere. But while vacillating 
 in its assertion of the rights of individual members, the 
 House steadily claimed for itself a right to discuss even 
 the highest matters of State. Three great subjects, the 
 succession, the Church, and the regulation of trade, had 
 been regarded by every Tudor sovereign as lying ex- 
 clusively within the competence of the Crown. But Par- 
 liament had again and again asserted its right to consider 
 the succession. It persisted in spite of censure and rebuff
 
 CHAP. 7.] THE REFORMATION. 15401608. 495 
 
 in presenting schemes of ecclesiastical reform. And three 
 years before Elizabeth's death it dealt boldly with matters 
 of trade. Complaints made in 1571 of the licenses and 
 monopolies by which internal and external commerce were 
 fettered were repressed by a royal reprimand as matters 
 neither pertaining to the Commons nor within the com- 
 pass of their understanding. When the subject was again 
 stirred nearly twenty years afterward, Sir Edward Hoby 
 was sharply rebuked by " a great personage" for his com- 
 plaint of the illegal exactions made by the Exchequer. 
 But the bill which he promoted was sent up to the Lords 
 in spite of this, and at the close of Elizabeth's reign the 
 storm of popular indignation which had been roused by 
 the growing grievance nerved the Commons, in 1601, to a 
 decisive struggle. It was in vain that the ministers op- 
 posed a bill for the Abolition of Monopolies, and after four 
 days of vehement debate the tact of Elizabeth taught her 
 to give way. She acted with her usual ability, declared 
 her previous ignorance of the existence of the evil, thanked 
 the House for its interference, and quashed at a single blow 
 every monopoly that she had granted. 
 
 Dextrous as was Elizabeth's retreat, the defeat was 
 none the less a real one. Political freedom was proving it- 
 self again the master in the long struggle with the Crown. 
 Nor in her yet fiercer struggle against religious freedom 
 could Elizabeth look forward to any greater success. The 
 sharp suppression of the Martin Marprelate pamphlets 
 was far from damping the courage of the Presbyterians. 
 Cartwright, who had been appointed by Lord Leicester to 
 the mastership of an hospital at Warwick, was bold enough 
 to organize his system of Church discipline among the 
 clergy of that country and of Northamptonshire. His ex- 
 ample was widely followed ; and the general gatherings of 
 the whole ministerial body of the clergy and the smaller 
 assemblies for each diocese or shire, which in the Presby- 
 terian scheme bore the name of Synods and Classes, began 
 to be held in many parts of England for the purposes of de-
 
 496 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 bate and consultation. The new organization was quickly 
 suppressed, but Cartwright was saved from the banish- 
 ment which Whitgift demanded by a promise of submis- 
 sion, and his influence steadily widened. With Presby< 
 terianism itself indeed Elizabeth was strong enough to deal. 
 Its dogmatism and bigotry was opposed to the better 
 temper of the age, and it never took any popular hold on 
 England. But if Presbyterianism was limited to a few, 
 Puritanism, the religious temper which sprang from a 
 deep conviction of the truth of Protestant doctrines and of 
 the falsehood of Catholicism, had become through the 
 struggle with Spain and the Papacy the temper of three- 
 fourths of the English people. Unluckily the policy of 
 Elizabeth did its best to give to the Presbyterians the sup- 
 port of Puritanism. Her establishment of the Ecclesias- 
 tical Commission had given fresh life and popularity to 
 the doctrines which it aimed at crushing by drawing to- 
 gether two currents of opinion which were in themselves 
 perfectly distinct. The Presbyterian platform of Church 
 discipline had as yet been embraced by the clergy only, 
 and by few among the clergy. On the other hand, the 
 wish for a reform in the Liturgy, the dislike of " supersti- 
 tious usages," of the use of the surplice, the sign of the 
 cross in baptism, the gift of the ring in marriage, the pos- 
 ture of kneeling at the Lord's Supper, was shared by a large 
 number of the clergy and the laity alike. At the opening 
 of Elizabeth's reign almost all the higher Churchmen savo 
 Parker were opposed to them, and a motion for their abo- 
 lition in Convocation was lost but by a single vote. The 
 temper of the country gentlemen on this subject was in- 
 dicated by that of Parliament ; and it was well known 
 that the wisest of the Queen's Councillors, Burleigh, 
 Walsingham, and Knollys, were at one time in this mat- 
 ter with the gentry. If their common persecution did 
 not wholly succeed in fusing these two sections of relig- 
 ious opinion into one, it at any rate gained for the Pres- 
 byterians a general sympathy on the part of the Puritans,
 
 CHAP. 7.] THE REFORMATION. 1540-1608. 497 
 
 which raised them from a clerical clique into a popular 
 party. 
 
 But if Elizabeth's task became more difficult at home, 
 the last years of her reign were years of splendor and 
 triumph abroad. The overthrow of Philip's hopes in 
 France had been made more bitter by the final overthrow 
 of his hopes at sea. In 1596 his threat of a fresh Armada 
 was met by the daring descent of an English force upon 
 Cadiz. The town was plundered and burned to the 
 ground ; thirteen vessels of war were fired in its harbor, 
 and the stores accumulated for the expedition utterly de- 
 stroyed. In spite of this crushing blow a Spanish fleet 
 gathered in the following year and set sail for the English 
 coast ; but as in the case of its predecessor storms proved 
 more fatal than the English guns, and the ships were 
 wrecked and almost destroyed in the Bay of Biscay. 
 Meanwhile whatever hopes remained of subjecting the 
 Low Countries were destroyed by the triumph of Henry 
 of Navarre. A triple league of France, England, and the 
 Netherlands left Elizabeth secure to the eastward ; and the 
 only quarter in which Philip could now strike a blow at 
 her was the great dependency of England in the west. 
 Since the failure of the Spanish force at Smerwick the 
 power of the English government had been recognized 
 everywhere throughout Ireland. But it was a power 
 founded solely on terror, and the outrages and exactions 
 of the soldiery who had been flushed with rapine and 
 bloodshed in the south sowed during the years which fol- 
 lowed the reduction of Munster the seeds of a revolt more 
 formidable than any which Elizabeth had yet encountered 
 The tribes of Ulster, divided by the policy of Sidney, were 
 again united by a common hatred of their oppressors ; and 
 in Hugh O'Neill they found a leader of even greater ability 
 than Shane himself. Hugh had been brought up at the 
 English court and was in manners and bearing an Eng- 
 lishman. He had been rewarded for his steady loyalty in 
 previous contests by a grant of the earldom of Tyrone, and
 
 498 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI. 
 
 in his contest with a rival chieftain of his clan he had se- 
 cured aid from the government by an offer to introduce the 
 English laws and shire-system into his new country. But 
 he was no sooner undisputed master of the north than his 
 tone gradually changed. Whether from a long-formed 
 plan, or from suspicion of English designs upon himself, 
 he at last took a position of open defiance. 
 
 It was at the moment when the Treaty of Vervins and 
 the wreck of the second Armada freed Elizabeth's hands 
 from the struggle with Spain that the revolt under Hugh 
 O'Neill broke the quiet which had prevailed since the vic- 
 tories of Lord Grey. The Irish question again became 
 the chief trouble of the Queen. The tide of her recent 
 triumphs seemed at first to have turned. A defeat of the 
 English forces in Tyrone caused a general rising of the 
 northern tribes, and a great effort made in 1599 for the 
 suppression of the growing revolt failed through the vanity 
 and disobedience, if not the treacherous complicity, of the 
 Queen's lieutenant, the young Earl of Essex. His suc- 
 cessor, Lord Mount-joy, found himself master on his ar- 
 rival of only a few miles round Dublin. But in three 
 years the revolt was at an end. A Spanish force which 
 landed to support it at Kinsale was driven to surrender; a 
 line of forts secured the country as the English mastered 
 it; all open opposition was crushed out by the energy and 
 the ruthlessness of the new Lieutenant; and a famine 
 which followed on his ravages completed the devastating 
 work of the sword. Hugh O'Neill was brought in triumph 
 to Dublin ; the Earl of Desmond, who had again roused 
 Munster into revolt, fled for refuge to Spain ; and the work 
 of conquest was at last brought to a close. 
 
 The triumph of Mountjoy flung its lustre over the last 
 days of Elizabeth, but no outer triumph could break the 
 gloom which gathered round the dying Queen. Lonely as 
 she had always been, her loneliness deepened as she drew 
 toward the grave. The statesmen and warriors of her 
 earlier days had dropped one by one from her Council-
 
 CHAP. 7.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 499 
 
 board. Leicester had died in the year of the Armada; 
 two years later Walsingham followed him to the grave; 
 in 1598 Burleigh himself passed away. Their successors 
 were watching her last moments, and intriguing for favor 
 in the coming reign. Her favorite, Lord Essex, not only 
 courted favor with James of Scotland, but brought him to 
 suspect Robert Cecil, who had succeeded his father at the 
 Queen's Council-board, of designs against his succession. 
 The rivalry between the two ministers hurried Essex into 
 fatal projects which led to his failure in Ireland and to an 
 insane outbreak of revolt which brought him in 1601 to 
 the block. But Cecil had no sooner proved the victor in 
 this struggle at court than he himself entered into a secret 
 correspondence with the King of Scots. His action was 
 wise : it brought James again into friendly relations with 
 the Queen; and paved the way for a peaceful transfer of 
 the crown. But hidden as this correspondence was from 
 Elizabeth, the suspicion of it only added to her distrust. 
 The troubles of the war in Ireland brought fresh cares to 
 the aged Queen. It drained her treasury. The old 
 splendor of her Court waned and disappeared. Only offi- 
 cials remained about her, " the other of the Council and 
 nobility estrange themselves by all occasions." The love 
 and reverence of the people itself lessened as they felt the 
 pressure and taxation of the war. Of old men had pressed 
 to see the Queen as if it were a glimpse of heaven. " In 
 the year 1588," a bishop tells us, who was then a country 
 boy fresh come to town, " I did live at the upper end of the 
 Strand near St. Clement's church, when suddenly there 
 came a report to us (it was in December, much about five 
 of the clock at night, very dark) that the Queen was gone 
 to Council, 'and if you will see the Queen you must come 
 quickly.' Then we all ran, when the Court gates were set 
 open, and no naan did hinder us from coming in. There 
 we came, where there was a far greater company than was 
 usually at Lenten sermons ; and when we had stayed there 
 an hour and that the yard was full, there being a number
 
 500 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK VI 
 
 of torches, the Queen came out in great state. Then we 
 cried 'God save your Majesty! God save your Majesty!' 
 Then the Queen turned to us and said 'God bless you all, 
 my good people!' Then we cried again 'God bless your 
 Majesty ! God bless your Majesty !' Then the Queen said 
 again to us, 'You may well have a greater prince, but you 
 shall never have a more loving prince.' And so looking 
 one upon another a while the Queen departed. This 
 wrought such an impression on us, for shows and pag- 
 eantry are ever best seen by torchlight, that all the way 
 long we did nothing but talk what an admirable Queen 
 she was, and how we would adventure our lives to do her 
 service." But now, as Elizabeth passed along in her prog- 
 resses, the people whose applause she courted remained 
 cold and silent. The temper of the age in fact was chang- 
 ing, and isolating her as it changed. Her own England, 
 the England which had grown up around her, serious, 
 moral, prosaic, shrank coldly from this brilliant, fanciful, 
 unscrupulous child of earth and the Renascence. 
 
 But if ministers and courtiers were counting on her 
 death, Elizabeth had no mind to die. She had enjoyed 
 life as the men of her day enjoyed it, and now that they 
 were gone she clung to it with a fierce tenacity. She 
 hunted, she danced, she jested with her young favorites, 
 she coquetted and scolded and frolicked at sixty-seven as 
 she had done at thirty. "The Queen," wrote a courtier a 
 few months before her death, " was never so gallant these 
 many years nor so set upon jollity." She persisted, in 
 spite of opposition, in her gorgeous progresses from coun- 
 try-house to country-house. She clung to business as of 
 old, and rated in her usual fashion " one who minded not 
 to giving up some matter of account." But death crept 
 on. Her face became haggard, and her frame shrank al- 
 most to a skeleton. At last her taste for finery disap- 
 peared, and she refused to change her dresses for a week 
 together. A strange melancholy settled down on her. 
 "She held in her hand," says one who saw her in her last
 
 CHAP. 7.] THE REFORMATION. 15401603. 501 
 
 days, " a golden cup, which she often put to her lips : but 
 in truth her heart seemed too full to need more filling." 
 Gradually her mind gave way. She lost her memory, the 
 violence of her temper became unbearable, her very courage 
 seemed to forsake her. She called for a sword to lie con- 
 stantly beside her and thrust it from time to time through 
 the arras, as if she heard murderers stirring there. Food 
 and rest became alike distasteful. She sat day and night 
 propped up with pillows on a stool, her finger on her lip, 
 her eyes fixed on the floor, without a word. If she once 
 broke the silence, it was with a flash of her old queenliness. 
 When Robert Cecil declared that she " must" go to bed the 
 word roused her like a trumpet. " Must !" she exclaimed ; 
 " is must a word to be addressed to princes? Little man, 
 little man : thy father, if he had been alive, durst not have 
 used that word." Then, as her anger spent itself, she sank 
 into her old dejection. " Thou art so presumptuous, " she 
 said, "because thou knowest I shall die." She rallied once 
 more when the ministers beside her bed named Lord Beau- 
 champ, the heir to the Suffolk claim, as a possible successor. 
 "I will have no rogue's son," she cried hoarsely, "in my 
 seat." But she gave no sign, save a motion of the head, 
 at the mention of the King of Scots. She was in fact fast 
 becoming insensible ; and early the next morning, on the 
 twenty-fourth of March, 1603, the life of Elizabeth, a life 
 so great, so strange and lonely in its greatness, ebbed 
 quietly away. 
 
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