CHAPTER XXVI
Edward VI and Mary Tudor
1547–58

I. THE SOMERSET PROTECTORATE: 1547–49

THE ten-year-old boy who succeeded to the throne of England as Edward VI had been painted by Holbein four years before in one of the most appealing of all portraits: feathered beret, red hair, ermine-collared robe, and a face of such gentleness and wistful delicacy that we should imagine him to be all Jane Seymour, nothing of Henry VIII. Perhaps he inherited the physical frailty that had made her life his ransom; he never gained the strength to rule. Yet he took in noble earnest the obligations falling to him as prince or king: zealously studied languages, geography, government, and war; kept close watch on all affairs of state that were allowed to come under his ken; and showed to all except nonconforming Catholics so much kindness and good will that England thought it had buried an ogre to crown a saint. Educated by Cranmer, he had become an ardent Protestant. He discouraged any severe punishment for heresy, but was unwilling to let his Catholic half-sister Mary hear Mass, for he sincerely believed the Mass to be the most blasphemous idolatry. He accepted gladly the decision of the Royal Council that chose as regent for him his uncle Edward Seymour—soon made Duke of Somerset—who favored a Protestant policy.

Somerset was a man of intelligence, courage, and integrity imperfect but, in his time, outstanding. Handsome, courteous, generous, he shamed by his life the cowardly and self-seeking aristocracy that could forgive him everything but his sympathy for the poor. Though almost absolute in power, he ended the absolutism established by Henry VII and VIII, allowed much greater freedom of speech, reduced the number of actions previously classed as treason or felony, required sounder evidence for conviction, returned their dowries to the widows of condemned men, and repealed the more oppressive laws of the preceding reign concerning religion. The King remained head of the English Church, and to speak irreverently of the Eucharist was still a punishable offense; but the same statute ordered the sacrament to be administered in both kinds, prescribed English as the language of the service, and repudiated purgatory and Masses for the dead. English Protestants who had fled from England returned with the pollen of Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin on them; and foreign reformers, scenting the new freedom, brought their diverse gospels to the troubled isle. Peter Martyr Vermigli and Martin Bucer came from Strasbourg, Bernardino Ochino from Augsburg, Jan Laski from Emden. Anabaptists and Unitarians crossed the Channel to preach in England heresies that shocked Protestants as much as Catholics. Iconoclast crowds in London removed crucifixes, paintings, and statues from the churches; Nicholas Ridley, Principal of Pembroke College, Cambridge, preached powerfully against religious images and holy water; and, to cap it all, Archbishop Cranmer “did eat meat openly in Lent, the like of which was never seen since England was a Christian country.”¹ The Royal Council thought this was going too far, but Somerset overruled it, and gave Reform its head. Under his lead Parliament (1547) ordered that every picture on church wall or window, commemorating a Prophet, Apostle, or saint, should be extirpated “so that there should remain no memory of the same.” Most of the stained glass in the churches was destroyed; most of the statues were crushed; crucifixes were replaced with the royal arms; whitewashed walls and stainless windows took the color out of the religion of England. There was a general scramble in each locality for church silver and gold; and in 1551 the government appropriated what remained. The magnificent medieval cathedrals barely remained.

The leading spirit in these changes was Archbishop Cranmer; their leading opponents were Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, and Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester; Cranmer had them sent to the Fleet.* Meanwhile the Archbishop had been working for years on an attempt to provide in one book a substitute for both the missal and the breviary of the defeated Church. Peter Martyr and other scholars helped him; but this First Book of Common Prayer (1548) was essentially Cranmer’s personal product, in which zeal for the new faith merged with a fine sense for solemn beauty in feeling and phrase; even his translations from the Latin had the spell of genius on them. The Book was not quite revolutionary; it followed some Lutheran leads, as in rejecting the sacrificial character of the Mass, but it neither denied nor affirmed transubstantiation; it retained much Catholic ritual, and could be accepted by not too precise a Romanist. Cranmer submitted it not to Convocation but to Parliament, and that laic body had no qualms of jurisdiction in prescribing religious ritual and belief. The Book was made law of the realm, and every church in England was ordered to adopt it. Bonner and Gardiner, who were released from jail in a general amnesty (1549), were reimprisoned when they rejected the right of Parliament to legislate on religion. Princess Mary was allowed to hear Mass in the privacy of her chambers.

A dangerous international situation quieted for a time the violent debate between Catholics and Protestants. Henry II of France demanded the evacuation of Boulogne; refused, he prepared to besiege it; and at any moment Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, then a girl of five in France, might bring Scotland into the war. Learning that the Scots were arming and were stirring up rebellion in Ireland, Somerset led a force across the border, and defeated them at Pinkie Cleugh (September 10, 1547). The terms that he offered to the Scots were remarkably generous and farseeing: the Scots were not to suffer any forfeiture of liberty or property; Scotland and England were to be merged into one “Empire of Great Britain”; each nation was to have self-government under its own laws, but both were to be ruled, after the current reign, by the offspring of the Queen of Scots. This was precisely the union effected in 1603, except that it would have facilitated a restoration of Catholicism in England, and its continuance in Scotland. The Catholics of Scotland rejected the plan for fear that English Protestantism would infect their own land; besides, Scottish nobles were receiving pensions from the French government, and thought a livre in the hand worth two pounds in the bush.

Frustrated in seeking peace, facing war with France, struggling to establish a compromise among uncompromising faiths at home, and hearing renewed noises of agrarian revolt in England, Somerset drank the cup of power to the dregs when his own brother plotted to overthrow him. Thomas Seymour was not content to be Lord High Admiral and a member of the Privy Council; he would be king. He wooed Princess Mary, then Princess Elizabeth, but in vain. He received money stolen from the mint, and spoils from the pirates whom he allowed in the Channel; and so financed he gathered secret stores of arms and ammunition. His conspiracy was discovered; he was accused by the Earls of Warwick and Southampton; he was almost unanimously condemned by both houses of Parliament; and on March 20, 1549, he was put to death. Somerset tried to protect him, but failed; and the Protector’s prestige fell with his brother’s head.

Somerset’s ruin was completed by Ket’s rebellion. That uprising illustrated the apparent anomaly that whereas in Germany peasant revolt was Protestant, in England it was Catholic; in each case religion was a front for economic discontent, and in England the front was Catholic because the government was now Protestant. “In the experience of the agricultural poor,” wrote the Protestant Froude, “an increase of personal suffering was the chief result of the Reformation.” ² It is to the credit of Protestant divines in this reign—Cranmer, Latimer, Lever, Crowley—that they condemned the sharpened exploitation of the peasantry; and Somerset with hot indignation denounced the merciless exactions of new landowners “sprung from the dunghill” of city wealth.³ Parliament could think of no wiser remedies than to pass ferocious laws against beggary, and instruct the churches to take up weekly a collection for the poor. Somerset sent out a commission to get the facts about enclosures and high rents; it met with subtle or open resistance from the landlords; tenants were terrified into concealing their wrongs; and the modest recommendations of the commission were rejected by the Parliament, in which the agricultural districts were represented by landowning gentry. Somerset opened a private court in his own house to hear the complaints of the poor. More and more nobles, led by John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, joined in a movement to depose him.

But now the peasants, furious with accumulated wrongs and frustrated suits for redress, burst into revolt from one end of England to the other. Somersetshire rose first, then Wilts and Gloucestershire, Dorset and Hampshire, Berks and Oxford and Buckingham, in the west Cornwall and Devon, in the east Norfolk and Kent. At Norwich a minor landlord, Robert Ket, organized the rebels, seized the municipal government, and set up a peasant commune that for a month ruled the town and its hinterland. On Mousehold Hill, north of the city, Ket encamped 16,000 men, and there, under an oak tree, he sat daily in judgment upon offending landlords arrested by the peasants. He was not bloodthirsty; those whom he condemned were imprisoned and fed. But of property rights and title deeds he made small account. He bade his men scour the surrounding country, force entry into the manor houses, confiscate all weapons, and corral for the commune all cattle and provisions wherever found. Sheep—chief rivals of the peasants for the use of the soil—were rounded up to the number of 20,000, and were incontinently consumed, along with “infinite beeves,” swans, hinds, ducks, venison, and pigs. Amid this feasting Ket nevertheless maintained remarkable order, even allowing preachers to exhort the men to abandon the revolt. Somerset felt much sympathy with the rebels, but agreed with Warwick that they must be dispersed lest the whole economic structure of English life should be overturned. Warwick was sent against them with an army recently raised to fight in France. He offered the rebels a general pardon if they would return to their homes. Ket favored acceptance, but hotter heads were for judgment by battle, and Ket yielded to them. On August 17, 1549, the issue was decided; Warwick’s superior tactics won; 3,500 of the rebels were cut down; but when the remnant surrendered Warwick contented himself with nine hangings, and sent Ket and a brother to prison in London. News of the defeat took the heart out of the other rebel groups; one after another laid down its arms on promise of amnesty. Somerset used his influence to have most of the leaders released, and the Ket brothers for a while surviveo.

The Protector was accused of having encouraged the revolt by his outspoken sympathy with the poor. He was branded also with failure in foreign affairs, for France was now besieging Boulogne. He was justly accused of allowing corruption among governmental personnel, of debasing the currency, of augmenting his own fortune, of building his sumptuous Somerset House amid the near-bankruptcy of the nation. Warwick and Southampton led a move to unseat him. The majority of the nobles, who could pardon his wealth but not his tenderness for their peasants, seized the opportunity for revenge. On October 12, 1549, the Duke of Somerset was paraded as a prisoner through the streets of London, and was shut up in the Tower.

II. THE WARWICK PROTECTORATE: 1549–53

By the standards of the time Somerset’s enemies were lenient. He was deprived of such property as he had acquired during his regency; on February 6, 1550, he was released; in May he was restored to membership in the Royal Council. But Warwick was now Protector of the Realm.

He was a frank Machiavellian. Himself inclined to Catholicism, he adopted a Protestant line because his rival Southampton was the accepted leader of the Catholics, and the majority of the nobles were financially wedded to the new creed. He had learned well the art of war, but he knew that with a bankrupt government and an impoverished people he could not hold Boulogne against a France having twice the resources of England. He surrendered the town to Henry II, and signed an ignominious, inescapable peace (1550)

Under the domination of landlords noble or common, Parliament (1549) passed legislation fearfully punishing the rebellion of the peasants. Enclosures were sanctified by express law; the taxes that Somerset had imposed on sheep and wool to discourage enclosures were repealed. Severe penalties were prescribed for workers who combined to raise their wages.⁴ Assemblies gathering to discuss a lowering of rents or prices were declared illegal; persons attending them were to forfeit their property. Robert Ket and his brother were hanged. Poverty increased, but the almshouses that had been swept away by the religious revolution were not replaced. Sickness became endemic, but hospitals were abandoned. The people were famished, but the currency was again debased, and prices soared. The once sturdy yeomanry of England were perishing, and the poorest of the poor were sinking into savagery.⁵

Religious chaos rivaled economic anarchy. The majority of the people remained Catholic,⁶ but the victory of Warwick over Southampton left them leaderless, and they felt the weakness of those who stand for the past. The collapse of the spiritual and moral authority of the priesthood, together with the instability and corruption of the government, allowed not only a growth of immorality but a bedlam of heresies that frightened Catholics and Protestants alike. John Clement (1556) described “the wonderful sort of sects swarming everywhere, not only of papists... but also of Arians, Anabaptists, and all other kind of heretics... some denying the Holy Ghost to be God, some denying original sin, some denying predestination... innumerable such like, too long to be recited.”⁷ Roger Hutchinson (c. 1550) wrote of “Sadducees and Libertines” (freethinkers), who say “that the Devil... is nothing but... a filthy affection of the flesh .... that there is neither place of rest nor pain after this life, that hell is nothing but a tormenting and desperate conscience, and that a joyful, quiet, and merry conscience is heaven.”⁸ And John Hooper, Protestant Bishop of Gloucester, reported that “there are some who say that the soul of man is no better than the soul of a beast, and is mortal and perishable. There are wretches who dare, in their conventicles, not only to deny that Christ is our Saviour, but to call that blessed Child a mischief-maker and deceiver.”⁹

Utilizing the liberty that had been granted by Somerset, a reckless fringe among the Protestants satirized the old religion heartlessly. Oxford students parodied the Mass in their farces, chopped missals to pieces, snatched consecrated bread from the altar and trampled it under foot. London preachers called priests “imps of the whore of Babylon”—i.e., the pope.¹⁰ Businessmen met for conferences in St. Paul’s; young gallants gathered there, fought, and slew. The new protectorate was now definitely Protestant. Reformers were named to bishoprics, usually on condition that they transfer part of the episcopal manor to the courtiers responsible for their appointment.¹¹ Parliament (1550) ruled that all paintings and statues were to be removed from any church in England except “the monumental figures of kings or nobles who had never been taken for saints”; and all prayer books except that of Cranmer were to be destroyed.¹² Vestments, copes, and altar textiles were confiscated, sold, or given away, and soon graced the homes of the nobility.¹³ An order of Council confiscated to the Treasury all plate remaining in the churches after 1550; later Parliament appropriated for the government the coins in the poor boxes of the churches.¹⁴ Further funds were found for the government or its personnel by canceling scholarships for poor students, and suppressing the regius (state-supported) professorships established at the universities by Henry VIII.¹⁵ The Parliament of 1552 recommended celibacy to the clergy, but permitted them to marry if chastity proved irksome.

Religious persecution, so long of heretics by Catholics, was now in England, as in Switzerland and Lutheran Germany, of heretics and Catholics by Protestants. Cranmer drew up a list of heresies which, if not abjured, were to be punished with death; they included affirmation of the Real Presence in the Eucharist, or the ecclesiastical supremacy of the pope, and denial of the inspiration of the Old Testament, or the two natures in Christ, or justification by faith.¹⁶ Joan Bocher of Kent went to the stake for questioning the Incarnation (1550). To Ridley, Protestant Bishop of London, who begged her to recant, she said: “Not long ago you burnt Anne Askew for a piece of bread [for denying transubstantiation], yet came yourselves to believe the doctrine for which you burnt her; and now you will burn me for a piece of flesh [referring to the phrase in the Fourth Gospel—“The Word was made flesh”], and in the end you will believe this also.” ¹⁷ Only two heretics were burned in Edward’s reign; however, many Catholics were imprisoned for hearing Mass, or openly criticizing the currently orthodox creed.¹⁸ Obstinately Catholic priests were deposed from their posts, and some were sent to the Tower.¹⁹ Gardiner, still there, was offered freedom if he would consent to preach the Reformed faith; refusing, he was removed “to a meaner lodging” in the Tower, and was deprived of paper, pen, and books. In 1552 Cranmer issued his Second Book of Common Prayer, which denied the Real Presence, rejected the sacrament of extreme unction, and otherwise revised the First Book in a Protestant direction. Parliament now passed a Second Act of Uniformity, which required all persons to attend regularly, and only, religious services conducted according to this Book of Common Prayer; three violations of this Act were to be punished with death. In 1553 the Royal Council promulgated forty-two “Articles of Religion” drawn up by Cranmer, and made them obligatory on all Englishmen.

While virtue and orthodoxy became law, the Warwick protectorate was distinguishing itself, in a corrupt age, by its corruption. This did not prevent the malleable young Edward from making Warwick Duke of Northumberland (October 4, 1551). A few days later the Duke atoned for an act of political decency—the release of Somerset—by charging his predecessor with an attempt to re-establish himself in power. Somerset was arrested, tried, and convicted, chiefly on evidence given by Sir Thomas Palmer; an order of the King was forged to call for Somerset’s execution; and on January 22, 1552, he met his death with courage and dignity. Northumberland, when he in turn faced execution, confessed that through his means Somerset had been falsely accused; and Palmer, before his death, confessed that the evidence he had sworn to had been invented by Northumberland.²⁰

Rarely in English history had an administration been so unpopular. Protestant clergymen, who had praised the new Protector in gratitude for his support, turned against him as his crimes increased. King Edward was sinking toward death; Mary Tudor, by an act of Parliament, had been named heiress to the throne if Edward remained childless; and Mary, made queen, would soon revenge herself on those who had led England from the old faith. Northumberland felt that his life was in jeopardy. His one comfort was that his agents had formed Edward to his obedience. He induced the dying King to settle the crown upon Lady Jane Grey, daughter of the Duke of Suffolk and granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister; moreover, Jane had recently married Northumberland’s son. Edward had not, like his father, received Parliamentary authority to name his successor; nearly all England took Princess Mary’s accession as inevitable and just; and Jane protested that she did not want to be queen. She was a woman of unusual education: she wrote Greek, studied Hebrew, and corresponded with Bullinger in Latin as good as his own. She was no saint; she could be sharply critical of Catholics, and laughed at transubstantiation; but she was far more sinned against than sinning. At first she took her father-in-law’s scheme as a jest. When her mother-in-law insisted, Jane resisted. Finally her husband commanded her to accept the throne, and she—“not choosing,” she said, “to be disobedient to her husband”—obeyed. Northumberland now prepared to arrest Mary’s leading supporters, and to lodge the Princess herself in the Tower, where she might be taught resignation.

Early in July the King neared his end. He coughed and spat blood, his legs swelled painfully, eruptions broke out over his body, his hair fell out, then his nails. No one could say what this strange disease was; many suspected that Northumberland had poisoned him. At last, after long suffering, Edward died (July 6, 1553), still but fifteen, too young to share the guilt of his reign.

The next morning Northumberland rode out toward Hunsdon to seize the Princess. But Mary, warned, escaped to Catholic friends in Suffolk, and Northumberland returned to London without his prey. By promises, threats, or bribes, he persuaded the Privy Council to join him in proclaiming Jane Grey queen. She fainted. Recovering, she still protested that she was unfit for the perilous honor forced upon her. Her relatives pleaded with her, arguing that their lives depended upon her acceptance. On July 9 she reluctantly acknowledged herself to be Queen of England.

But on July 10 news reached London that Mary had proclaimed herself queen, that the northern nobles were flocking to her support, and that their forces were marching upon the capital. Northumberland hurriedly gathered what troops he could, and led them out to the issue of battle. At Bury his soldiers told him that they would not take another step against their lawful sovereign. Crowning his crimes, Northumberland sent his brother, with gold and jewels and the promise of Calais and Guiñes, to bribe Henry II of France to invade England. The Privy Council got wind of the mission, intercepted it, and announced allegiance to Mary. The Duke of Suffolk went to Jane’s room, and informed her that her ten-day reign was over. She welcomed the news, and asked innocently might she now go home; but the Council, which had sworn to serve her, ordered her confined in the Tower. There, soon, Northumberland too was a prisoner, praying for pardon but expecting death. The Council sent out heralds to proclaim Mary Tudor queen. England received the tidings with wild rejoicing. All through that summer night bells caroled and bonfires blazed. The people brought out tables and food, and picnicked and danced in the streets.

The nation seemed to regret the Reformation, and to look with longing upon a past that could now be idealized since it could not return. And truly the Reformation had as yet shown only its bitterest side to England: not a liberation from dogma, inquisition and tyranny, but their intensification; not a spread of enlightenment but a spoliation of universities and the closing of hundreds of schools; no enlargement of kindness but almost an end to charity and carte blanche to greed; no mitigation of poverty but such merciless grinding of the poor as England had not known for centuries—perhaps had never known.²¹ Almost any change would be welcome that would eliminate Northumberland and his crew. And poor Princess Mary, who had won the secret love of England by her patience in twenty-two years of humiliation—surely this chastened woman would make a gentle queen.

III. THE GENTLE QUEEN: 1553–54

To understand her we should have had to live with her the tragic youth during which she had hardly ever tasted happiness. She was scarcely two (1518) when her father took to mistresses and neglected her grieving mother; eight when he asked for an annulment of his marriage; fifteen when her parents parted, and mother and daughter went into a separate exile. Even when the mother was dying the daughter was forbidden to go to her.²² After the birth of Elizabeth (1533) Mary was declared a bastard, and was shorn of her title of princess. The Imperial ambassador feared that Anne Boleyn would seek the death of her daughter’s rival for the throne. When Elizabeth was moved to Hatfield Mary was compelled to go and serve her there, and to live in “the worst room of the house.”²³ Her servants were taken from her, and were replaced by others subject to Miss Shelton of Hatfield, who, reminding her that she was a bastard, said, “If I were in the King’s place I would kick you out of the King’s house for your disobedience,” and told her that Henry had expressed his intention to have her beheaded.²⁴ All that first winter at Hatfield (1534) Mary was ill, her nerves shattered with contumely and fear, her body and soul not unwillingly near death. Then the King relented and spared her some casual affection, and for the remainder of the reign her position eased. But as the price of this hard graciousness she was required to sign an acknowledgment of Henry’s ecclesiastical supremacy, her mother’s “incestuous marriage,” and her own illegitimate birth.²⁵

Her nervous system was permanently affected by these experiences; “she was subject to a heart complaint,” ²⁶ and she remained in frail health till the end of her life. Her courage returned when, under the Somerset protectorate, Parliament declared her heiress-apparent to the throne. Since her Catholic faith, bred into her childhood with Spanish fervor, and strengthened by her mother’s living and dying exhortations, had been a precious support in her griefs, she refused to abandon it when she hovered on the edge of power; and when the King’s Council bade her cease hearing Mass in her rooms (1549) she would not obey. Somerset connived at her resistance; but Somerset fell, her brother the King approved the order, and three of her servants, for ignoring it, were sent to the Tower (1551). The chaplain who had said Mass for her was taken from her, and she finally agreed to forgo the beloved ritual. Her spirit broken, she begged the Imperial ambassador to arrange her escape to the Continent. The cautious Emperor refused to sanction the plan, and it fell through.

Her moment of triumph came at last when Northumberland could find no man to fight against her, and those who came in arms to uphold her cause asked no pay, but brought their own supplies and offered their personal fortunes to finance the campaign. When she entered London as queen (August 3, 1553) even that half-Protestant city rose almost unanimously to welcome her. Princess Elizabeth came diffidently to meet her at the city gates, wondering whether Mary would hold against her the indignities suffered in Elizabeth’s name; but Mary greeted her with a warm embrace, and kissed all the ladies in her half-sister’s train. England was as happy as when Henry VIII, young and handsome and generous, had mounted the throne.

Mary was now thirty-seven, and heartless time had already crossed her face with omens of decay. She had seldom known an adult year without a serious illness. She was troubled with dropsy, indigestion, and racking headaches; she was treated with repeated bloodlettings, which left her nervous and pale. Her recurrent amenorrhea plunged her at times into hysterical grief with fear that she would never bear a child.²⁷ Now her body was thin and frail, her forehead was wrinkled, her reddish hair was streaked with gray, her eyes were so weak that she could read only with the page held close to her face. Her features were plain, almost masculine; her voice was as deep as a man’s; life had given her all the frailties, none of the charms, of womanhood. She had some womanly accomplishments—she knitted patiently, embroidered skillfully, and played the lute; to which she added a knowledge of Spanish, Latin, Italian, and French. She would have made a good woman had she not been cursed with theological certainty and royal power. She was honest to the point of simplicity, incapable of diplomacy, and pitifully anxious to love and be loved. She had bursts of temper and shrewish speech. She was obstinate, but not proud; she recognized her mental limitations, and listened humbly to advice. She was inflexible only where her faith was concerned; otherwise she was clement and compassionate, liberal to the unfortunate, and eager to redress the wrongs of the law. Frequently she visited incognito the homes of the poor, sat and talked with the housewives, made note of needs and grievances, and gave whatever help she could.²⁸ She restored to the universities the endowments filched from them by her predecessors.

The best side of her character showed in the relative tolerance of her early reign. She not only released Gardiner, Bonner, and others who had been imprisoned for refusing to accept Protestantism, but she pardoned almost all those who had tried to keep her from the throne. Some of these, however, like the Duke of Suffolk, she compelled to pay heavy fines into the treasury; then, the revenue being so aided, she reduced taxes substantially. Peter Martyr and other alien Protestants were allowed safe-conducts to leave the country. The Queen’s Council gave a hasty trial to Northumberland and six others who had conspired to arrest Mary and crown Jane Grey; all seven were condemned to die. Mary wished to pardon even Northumberland, but Simon Renard, now Imperial ambassador, dissuaded her. All the unforgiven three made a last-minute profession of the Roman Catholic faith. Jane Grey called the sentence just, and the confessions cowardly.²⁹ Mary proposed to release her, but yielded so far to her councilors as to order her to be kept in loose confinement within the Tower grounds.³⁰

On August 13 the Queen issued an official declaration that she would not “compel or constrain consciences” in the matter of religious belief;³¹ this was one of the first proclamations of religious tolerance by a modern government. Innocently hopeful of converting Protestants by argument, she arranged a public debate between opposed theologians, but it evaporated in bitter and inconclusive dispute. Shortly thereafter Bishop Bonner’s chaplain had a dagger thrown at him from a crowd that resented his Catholic preaching; he was rescued from death by two Protestant divines.³² Frightened out of her tolerance, Mary ordered (August 18, 1553) that until Parliament could meet and consider the problems raised by the conflict of faiths, no doctrinal sermons should be preached except in the universities. Cranmer, still Archbishop, was bidden keep to his Lambeth palace; he retorted with a blast against the Mass as an “abominable blasphemy”; he and Latimer were committed to the Tower (September 1553). Bishop Ridley of London, who had branded both Mary and Elizabeth as bastards, had gone to the Tower two months before. All in all, Mary’s conduct in these early months of her reign excelled, in lenience and tolerance, that of the other major rulers of her time.

The problems she faced might have overwhelmed one far superior to her in intelligence and tact. She was shocked by the confusion and corruption prevalent in the administration. She ordered the corruption to stop; it hid its head and continued. She gave a good example by reducing the expenses of the royal household, pledging a stable currency, and leaving parliamentary elections free from royal influence; the new elections were “the fairest which had taken place for many years.” ³³ But her reduction of taxes left government income lower than outgo; to make up the difference she levied an export duty on cloth and an import duty on French wines; these measures, which were expected to help the poor, caused a commercial recession. She tried to arrest the growth of capitalism by limiting to one or two the looms that any individual might own. She denounced “rich clothiers” for paying low wages, and forbade the payment of wages in kind.³⁴ But she could not find in her entourage men of the force and integrity required to implement her good will; and economic laws overrode her aims.

Even in religion she met with severe economic obstacles. There was hardly an influential family in England that did not hold property taken from the Church;³⁵ such families, of course, opposed any return to the Roman faith. The Protestants, numerically a minority, financially powerful, might at any moment provide the sinews for a revolt that would place Protestant Elizabeth on the throne. Mary was anxious to restore the right of Catholics to worship according to their own ritual; yet the Emperor, who had been fighting Protestantism for thirty-two years, cautioned her to move slowly, and to be content with having Mass said privately for herself and her immediate circle. But she felt her religion too deeply to be politic with it. The skeptical generation that had grown up in London marveled at the frequency and fervor of her prayers, and the Spanish ambassador probably thought it a nuisance when she asked him to kneel beside her to ask divine guidance. She felt that she had a sacred mission to restore the faith that had become so dear to her because she had suffered for it. She sent a messenger to the Pope begging him to remove the interdict on religious services in England; but when Cardinal Pole wished to come to England as papal legate, she agreed with Charles that the time was not ripe for so bold a move.

The Parliament that met on October 5,1553, was by no means subservient. It agreed to repeal all the legislation of Edward’s reign concerning religion; it reduced to their earlier proportions the severe penalties prescribed in the laws of Henry VIII and Edward VI; and it graciously informed the Queen that “the illegitimation of your most noble person” was now annulled, and she had ceased to be a bastard. But it refused even to consider the restoration of ecclesiastical property, it resisted any hint that papal sovereignty should be acknowledged, and it left Mary the unwilling head of the English Church. By this authority she replaced Protestant bishops with the Catholic prelates that had been expelled; Bonner was again Bishop of London; Gardiner was again Bishop of Winchester, and a close adviser of the Crown. Married priests were dismissed from their parishes. The Mass was again allowed, then encouraged; and (says a Protestant historian) “the eagerness with which the country generally availed itself of the permission to restore the Catholic ritual proved beyond a doubt that except in London and a few large towns, the popular feeling was with the Queen.” ³⁶ By an edict of March 4, 1554, the Catholic worship was completely reinstated, Protestantism and other “heresies” were made illegal, and all Protestant preaching or publication was prohibited.

The nation was much less disturbed by this return of the theological pendulum than by Mary’s marriage plans. She was constitutionally fearful of marriage, but she faced the trial in the hope of having an heir who would prevent the accession of Protestant Elizabeth. Mary claimed to be a virgin, and probably was; perhaps if she had sinned a bit she would have been less somber, tense, and certain. Her Council recommended to her Edward Courtenay, great-grandson of Edward IV, but his debauched ways were not to Mary’s taste. Rejected, he schemed to marry Elizabeth, depose Mary, enthrone Elizabeth, and rule England through her—never dreaming how little chance he had of dominating that virile lady. Charles V offered Mary his son Philip, to whom he was about to bequeath all but the Imperial title; and he pledged the Netherlands as a gift to any male issue of the marriage. Mary thrilled at the thought of having as her husband the ruler of Spain, Flanders, Holland, Naples, and the Americas; and her half-Spanish blood warmed at the prospect of a political and religious union of England with Spain. She modestly suggested that her greater age—ten years above Philip’s—was a barrier; she feared that her faded charms would not suffice his youthful vigor or imagination; she was not even sure that she would know how to make love.³⁷ For his part Philip was reluctant; his English agents reported that Mary was “a perfect saint,” who “dressed badly”;³⁸ could not something more alluring be found among the royal families of Europe? Charles persuaded him by pointing out that the marriage would give Spain a strong ally against France, and precious support in the Netherlands, which were bound to England commercially; perhaps Protestantism in Germany could be suppressed by the united action of Spain, France, and England as Catholic states; and the union of the Hapsburgs and the Tudors would constitute a power capable of giving Western Europe a generation of compulsory peace.

The Queen’s Council and the English people recognized the force of these considerations, but they feared that the marriage would make England an appendage of Spain, and would involve England in recurrent wars against France. Charles countered by offering, in his son’s name, a marriage contract by which Philip should bear the title King of England only so long as Mary lived; she was to retain sole and full royal authority over English affairs; she was to share all of Philip’s titles; and if Don Carlos (Philip’s son by an earlier marriage) died without issue, Mary or her son was to inherit the Spanish Empire; moreover, added the astute Emperor, Mary was to receive £60,000 a year for life from the Imperial revenues. All this seemed generous enough, and with a few minor provisions the English Council sanctioned the marriage. Mary herself, despite her modest timidity, looked forward to it eagerly. How long she had waited for a lover!

But the people of England resented her choice. The Protestant minority, which was bearing up under suppression in the hope that Elizabeth would soon succeed a fragile and barren Mary, feared for its life if the power of Spain should stand beside Mary in enforcing the Catholic restoration. Nobles rich in ecclesiastical property shivered at the thought of disgorging. Even Catholic Englishmen objected to putting upon the throne a dour foreigner who would doubtless use England for his own alien purposes. Protests were voiced everywhere in the land. The city of Plymouth, in panic, asked the King of France to take it under his protection. Four nobles laid plans for an uprising to begin on March 18, 1554. The Duke of Suffolk (pardoned father of Jane Grey) was to raise Warwickshire, Sir James Croft was to lead his Welsh tenants, Sir Peter Carew would rouse Devonshire, and Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger would lead the revolt in Kent. The elder Wyatt—the poet—had secured a mass of Church lands, which his son was loath to surrender. The conspirators made the mistake of confiding their plans to Courtenay, whose task was to secure Elizabeth’s co-operation. Bishop Gardiner, who had kept watch on Courtenay as a rejected and perhaps vengeful suitor for Mary’s hand, had him arrested, and Courtenay, presumably under torture, betrayed the plot.

The conspirators, preferring to die in battle rather than on the block, rose hurriedly to arms, and revolt flared up in four counties at once (February 1554). Wyatt led an army of 7,000 men toward London, and sent out an appeal to all citizens to prevent England from becoming an appanage of Spain. The Protestant part of the London populace set in motion a plan to open the gates to Wyatt. The Queen’s Council hesitated to commit itself, and raised not one soldier in her defense. Mary herself could not understand why the country that had so welcomed her accession should refuse her the happiness and fulfillment that she had dreamed of through so many years of misery. If now she had not taken matters into her own hands with unwonted resolution, her reign and her life would have soon ended. But she went in person to the Guildhall, and faced an excited assemblage that was debating which side to take. She told it that she was quite ready to abandon the Spanish marriage if the Commons so wished, and indeed “to abstain from marriage while I live”; but meanwhile she would not let that issue be made “a Spanish cloak” for a political revolution. “I cannot tell,” she said, “how naturally the mother loveth her child, for I was never the mother of any; but certainly if a queen may as naturally and earnestly love her subjects as the mother doth her child, then assure yourselves that I, being your lady and mistress, do as earnestly and tenderly love and favor you.”³⁹ Her words and spirit were warmly applauded, and the assembly pledged her its support. Agents of the government were able, almost in a day, to muster 25,000 armed men. Suffolk was arrested, Croft and Carew fled into hiding. Wyatt. so abandoned, led his small force to battle in the streets of London, and made his way almost to the Queen’s palace at Whitehall. Mary’s guards begged her to flee; she would not. Finally Wyatt’s men were overcome; he yielded in exhaustion of body and soul, and was taken to the Tower. Mary breathed safely again, but she was never more the gentle Queen.

IV. “BLOODY MARY”: 1554–58

Her advisers had often condemned her policy of pardon. The Emperor and his ambassador had censured her for allowing life, even liberty, to persons who had conspired against her and would be free to do so again. How, she was asked, could Philip trust himself in a land where his enemies were left unhindered to plot his assassination? Bishop Gardiner argued that mercy to the nation required that traitors should be put to death. The Queen, in a panic of fright, veered to the views of her counselors. She ordered the execution of Lady Jane Grey, who had never wanted to be queen, and of Jane’s husband, who had so wanted to be king. Jane, still but seventeen, went to her death stoically, without protest or tears (February 12, 1554). Suffolk, her father, was beheaded, and a hundred lesser rebels were hanged. Some conspirators were spared for a while in the hope of eliciting useful confessions. Wyatt at first incriminated Elizabeth as privy to the plan, but on the scaffold (April 11, 1554) he exonerated her of all cognizance. Courtenay, after a year’s imprisonment, was let off with banishment. Charles advised Mary to put Courtenay and Elizabeth to death as perpetual threats to her life. Mary sent for Elizabeth, kept her in the palace of St. James for a month, then for two months imprisoned her in the Tower. Renard urged her immediate execution, but Mary objected that Elizabeth’s complicity had not been proved.⁴⁰ During these fateful months Elizabeth’s life hung in the balance, and this terror helped to form her character to suspicion and insecurity, and was echoed in the severity of her later reign, when she had the same worry about Mary Stuart that Mary Tudor now had about Elizabeth. On May 18 the future queen was moved to Woodstock, where she lived in loose confinement but under watch. Fear that another plot might raise Elizabeth to the throne urged Mary on to marriage in the hope of motherhood.

Philip was not so eager. Through a proxy in England he married Mary on March 6, 1554, but he did not reach England till July 20. The English were pleasantly surprised to find him physically and socially tolerable: a rather strange triangular face sloping from broad forehead to narrow chin, adorned with yellow hair and beard; but also a gracious manner, a ready wit, gifts for all, and no hint that he and his retinue considered the English to be barbarians. Even for Elizabeth he had a kind word, perhaps foreseeing that Mary might prove childless, that Elizabeth would someday be queen, and that this would be a lesser evil than the accession of Mary Queen of Scotslong since bound to France—to the throne of England. Mary, though so much older than Philip, looked up to him with girlish admiration. Starved for affection through so many years, she rejoiced now to have won so charming and mighty a prince, and she gave herself to him with such unquestioning devotion that her court wondered whether England was not already subject to Spain. To Charles V she wrote humbly that she was now “happier than I can say, as I daily discover in the King my husband so many virtues and perfections that I constantly pray God to grant me grace to please him.”⁴¹

Her desire to give Philip a son and England an heir was so absorbing that she soon conceived herself pregnant. Her amenorrhea was now welcomed as a royal sign, and hope silenced the thought that that condition had often come to her before. Digestive disturbances were accepted as additional proofs of motherhood, and the Venetian ambassador reported that the Queen’s “paps” had swollen and given milk. For a long time Mary rejoiced in the thought that she too, like the poorest woman in her realm, could bear a child; and we cannot imagine her desolation when her doctors finally convinced her that her swelling was dropsy. Meanwhile the rumor of her pregnancy had swept through England; prayers and processions were arranged for her happy delivery; soon gossip said that she had borne a boy. Shops closed for a holiday, men and women feasted in the streets, church bells rang, and a clergyman announced that the child was “fair and beautiful” as became a prince.⁴² Broken with frustration and shame, Mary hid herself for months from the public view.

She was in a measure consoled by the return of Cardinal Pole to England. Charles had detained him at Brussels because Pole had opposed the Spanish marriage; but now that this had been consummated the Imperial objections subsided; the Cardinal, as papal legate, crossed the Channel (November 20, 1554) to the land he had left twenty-two years before; and the warm welcome given him by officials, clergy, and people attested the general satisfaction over renewal of relations with the panacy. He greeted Mary with almost the choicest phrase in his vocabulary: Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum, benedicta tu in mulieribus, and he trusted that he might soon add, “Blessed is the fruit of thy womb.” ⁴³ When Parliament learned that Pole brought papal consent to the retention of confiscated Church property by the present holders, all went merry as a wedding should. Parliament, on its knees, expressed repentance for its offenses against the Church, and Bishop Gardiner, having confessed his own vacillation, gave the penitents absolution. The ecclesiastical supremacy of the pope was acknowledged, his right to annates and “first fruits” was reaffirmed, episcopal courts were re-established, and parish tithes were restored to the clergy. The old statutes against Lollardry were renewed, and censorship of publications was returned from state to Church authorities. After the turmoil of twenty years everything seemed as before.

Philip stayed with Mary thirteen months, hoping with her for a child; when no sure sign of it appeared he begged her to let him go to Brussels, where the planned abdication of his father required his presence. She consented sadly, went with him to the barge that was to take him down the Thames, and watched from a window till the barge disappeared (August 28, 1555). Philip felt that he had done his duty through an arduous year of making love to a sick woman, and he rewarded himself with the full-blooded ladies of Brussels.

Pole was now the most influential man in England. He busied himself with the reorganization and reform of the English Church. With Mary’s help he restored some monasteries and a nunnery. Mary was happy to see the old religious customs live again, to see crucifixes and holy pictures again in the churches, to join in pious processions of priests, children, or guilds, to sit or kneel through long Masses for the quick and the dead. On Maundy Thursday, 1556, she washed and kissed the feet of forty-one old women, shuffling from one to the next on her knees, and gave alms to all.⁴⁴ Now that hope of motherhood had gone, religion was her sustaining solace.

But she could not quite resurrect the past. The new ideas had aroused an exciting ferment in city minds; there were still a dozen sects clandestinely publishing their literature and their creeds. Mary was pained to hear of groups that denied the divinity of Christ, the existence of the Holy Ghost, the transmission of original sin. To her simple faith these heresies seemed mortal crimes, far worse than treason. Could the heretics know better than her beloved Cardinal how to deal with the human soul? Word came to her that one preacher had prayed aloud, before his congregation, that God would either convert her or soon remove her from the earth.⁴⁵ One day a dead dog with a monastically tonsured head, and a rope around its neck, was thrown through a window into the Queen’s chamber.⁴⁶ In Kent a priest had his nose cut off.⁴⁷ It seemed unreasonable to Mary that the Protestant émigrés, to whom she had allowed safe departure from England, should be sending back pamphlets attacking her as a reactionary fool, and speaking of the “lousy Latin service” of an “idolatrous Mass.” ⁴⁸ Some pamphlets urged their readers to rise in revolt and depose the Queen.⁴⁹ A meeting of 17,000 persons at Aldgate (March 14, 1554) heard a call to put Elizabeth on the throne.⁵⁰ Insurrections in England were planned by English Protestants abroad.

Mary was by nature and habit merciful—till 1555. What transformed her into the most hated of English queens? Partly the provocation of attacks that showed no respect for her person, her faith, or her feelings; partly the fear that heresy was a cover for political revolt; partly the sufferings and disappointments that had embittered her spirit and darkened her judgment; partly the firm belief of her most trusted advisers—Philip, Gardiner, Pole—that religious unity was indispensable to national solidarity and survival. Philip was soon to illustrate his principles in the Netherlands. Bishop Gardiner had already (in the spring of 1554) vowed to burn the three Protestant bishops-Hooper, Ridley, Latimer—unless they recanted.⁵¹ Cardinal Pole, like Mary, was of a kindly disposition, but inflexible in dogma; he loved the Church so much that he shuddered at any questioning of her doctrines or authority. He did not take any direct or personal lead in the Marian persecution; he counseled moderation, and once freed twenty persons whom Bishop Bonner had sentenced to the stake.⁵² Nevertheless he instructed the clergy that if all peaceful methods of suasion failed, major heretics should be “removed from life and cut off as rotten members from the body.”⁵³ Mary’s own view was expressed hesitantly. “Touching the punishment of heretics, we think it ought to be done without rashness, not leaving meanwhile to do justice to such as by learning would seek to deceive the simple.”⁵⁴ Her responsibility was at first merely permissive, but it was real. When (1558) the war with France proved disastrous to her and England, she ascribed the failure to God’s anger at her lenience with heresy, and thereafter she positively promoted the persecution.

Gardiner opened the reign of terror by summoning to his episcopal court (January 22, 1555) six clergymen who had refused to accept the re-established creed.* One recanted; four, including John Hooper, deposed Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester, were burned (February 4–8, 1555), Gardiner seems to have had a revulsion of feeling after these executions; he took no further part in the persecution; his health broke down, and he died in November of this year. Bishop Bonner took charge of the slaughter. Philip, still in England, advised moderation; when Bonner condemned six more to the stake the Imperial ambassador, Renard, objected to “this barbarous precipitancy”; ⁵⁷ and Philip’s confessor, a Spanish friar, preaching before the court, denounced the convictions as contrary to the mild and forgiving spirit inculcated by Christ.⁵⁸ Bonner suspended the sentences for five weeks, then ordered them carried out. He thought himself lenient, and indeed was once reprimanded by the Queen’s Council for insufficient zeal in prosecuting heresy.⁵⁹ To each heretic he offered full pardon for recantation, and often added a promise of financial aid or some comfortable employment;⁶⁰ but when such inducements failed he passed sentence grimly. Usually a bag of gunpowder was placed between the legs of the condemned, so that the flames would cause a speedy death; but in Hooper’s case the wood burned too slowly, the powder failed to explode, and the former bishop suffered agonies for almost an hour.

Most of the martyrs were simple workingmen who had learned to read the Bible, and had been encouraged in the Protestant interpretation of it during the previous reign. Perhaps the persecutors thought it justice that the ecclesiastics who had done most to inculcate the Protestant faith should be called upon to testify to it by martyrdom. In September 1555, Cranmer, sixty-six, Ridley, sixty-five, and Latimer, eighty, were brought from the Tower to stand trial at Oxford. Latimer had tarnished his eloquent career by approving the burning of Anabaptists and obstinate Franciscans under Henry VIII. Ridley -had actively supported Jane Grey’s usurpation, had called Mary a bastard, and had assisted in deposing Bonner and Gardiner from their sees. Cranmer had been the intellectual head of the English Reformation: had dissolved the marriage of Henry and Catherine, had married Henry to Anne Boleyn, had replaced the Mass with the Book of Common Prayer, had prosecuted Frith, Lambert, and other Catholics, had signed Edward’s devise of the crown to Jane Grey, and had denounced the Mass as a blasphemy. All these men had now been in the Tower for two years, daily expecting death.

Cranmer was tried at Oxford on September 7. His examiners made every effort to elicit a recantation. He stood his ground firmly, and was judged guilty; but as he was an archbishop his sentence was reserved to the Pope, and he was returned to the Tower. On September 30 Ridley was tried, and stood his ground. On the same day Latimer was led before the ecclesiastical court: a man now quite careless of life, dressed in an old threadbare gown, his white head covered with a cap upon a nightcap over a handkerchief, his spectacles hanging from his neck, a New Testament attached to his belt. He too denied transubstantiation. On October 1 they were condemned; on October 6 they were burned. Before the pyre they knelt and prayed together. They were bound with chains to an iron post, a bag of powder was hung around each man’s neck, the faggots were lit. “Be of good cheer, Master Ridley,” said Latimer, “play the man; we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.” ⁶¹

On December 4 Pope Paul IV confirmed the sentence against Cranmer. For a time the first Protestant archbishop of Canterbury gave way to forgivable fear; no man who could write such sensitive English as the Book of Common Prayer could face these ordeals without exceptional suffering of body and mind. Moved perhaps by Pole’s fervent appeal, Cranmer repeatedly “renounced and abhorred and detested all manner of heresies and errors of Luther and Zwingli,” and professed belief in the seven sacraments, in transubstantiation, purgatory, and all other teachings of the Roman church. By every precedent such recantations should have commuted his sentence to imprisonment, but (according to Foxe) Mary rejected the retractions as insincere, and ordered Cranmer’s execution.⁶²

In St. Mary’s Church, Oxford, on the morning of his death (March 21, 1556), he read his seventh and last recantation. Then, to the astonishment of all present, he added:

On the pyre, as the flames neared his body, he stretched out his hand into them, and held it there, says Foxe, “steadfast and immovable... that all men might see his hand burned before his body was touched. And using often the words of Stephen, ‘Lord, receive my spirit,’ in the greatness of the flame he gave up the ghost.”⁶⁴

His death marked the zenith of the persecution. Some 300 persons died in its course, 273 of them in the last four years of the reign. As the holocaust advanced it became clear that it had been a mistake. Protestantism drew strength from its martyrs as early Christianity had done, and many Catholics were disturbed in their faith, and shamed in their Queen, by the sufferings and fortitude of the victims. Bishop Bonner, though he did not enjoy the work, came to be called “Bloody Bonner” because his diocese saw most of the executions; one woman called him “the common cutthroat and general slaughter-slave to all the bishops in England.”⁶⁵ Hundreds of English Protestants found refuge in Catholic France, and labored there to bring the sorry reign to an end. Henry II, while persecuting French Protestants, encouraged English plots against Catholic Mary, whose marriage with the King of Spain left France surrounded by hostile powers. In April 1556, British agents discovered a conspiracy, led by Sir Henry Dudley, to depose Mary and enthrone Elizabeth. Several arrests were made, including two members of Elizabeth’s household; one confession implicated Elizabeth herself, and the French King. The movement was suppressed, but it left Mary in constant fear of assassination.

One group of fugitives encountered tribulations that reveal the dogmatic temper of the times. Jan Laski, a Polish Calvinist, had come to London in 1548, and had founded there the first Presbyterian church in England. A month after Mary’s accession Laski and part of his congregation left London in two Danish vessels. At Copenhagen they were denied entry unless they signed the official Lutheran confession of faith. As firm Calvinists, they declined. Refused permission to land, they sailed to Wismar, Lübeck, and Hamburg, and in each case met with the same demand and repulse.⁶⁶ The Lutherans of Germany shed no tears over Mary’s victims, but denounced them as detestable heretics and “Devil’s martyrs” for denying the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.⁶⁷ Calvin condemned the merciless sectarianism of the Lutherans, and in that year (1553) burned Servetus at the stake. After buffeting the North Sea through most of the winter, the refugees at last found entry and humanity at Emden.

Mary moved with somber fatality to her end. Her pious husband, now anomalously at war with the papacy as well as with France, came to England (March 20, 1557) and urged the Queen to bring Britain into the war as his ally. To make his mission less hateful to the English, he persuaded Mary to moderate the persecution.⁶⁸ But he could not so easily win public support; on the contrary, a month after his arrival, Thomas Stafford, a nephew of Cardinal Pole, fomented a rebellion with a view to freeing England from both Mary and Philip. He was defeated and hanged (May 28, 1557). To fill the Queen’s cup of misery the Pope in that month repudiated Pole as papal legate, and accused him of heresy. On June 7 Mary, anxious to please Philip, and convinced that Henry II had supported Stafford’s plot, declared war against France. Having accomplished his purpose, Philip left England in July. Mary suspected that she would never see him again. “I will live the rest of my days without the company of men,” she said.⁶⁹ In this unwanted war England lost Calais (January 6, 1558), which it had held for 211 years; and the thousands of Englishmen and women who had lived there, and now fled as penniless fugitives to Britain, spread the bitter charge that Mary’s government had been criminally negligent in defending England’s last possession on the Continent. Philip made a peace favorable to himself, without requiring the restoration of Calais. It was an old phrase that that precious port was “the brightest jewel in the English crown.” Mary added another mot to the tale: “When I am dead and opened you will find Calais lying in my heart.”⁷⁰

Early in 1558 the Queen again thought herself pregnant. She made her will in expectation of a dangerous delivery, and dispatched a message to Philip beseeching his presence at the happy event. He sent his congratulations, but he did not have to come; Mary was mistaken. She was now quite forlorn, perhaps in some measure insane. She sat for hours on the floor with knees drawn up to her chin; she wandered like a ghost through the palace galleries; she wrote tear-blotted letters to a King who, anticipating her death, ordered his agents in England to incline the heart of Elizabeth toward marriage with some Spanish grandee, or with Philip himself.

In Mary’s final summers a plague of ague fever moved through England. In September 1558, it struck the Queen. Combined with dropsy and “a superfluity of black bile,” it so weakened her that her will to live fell away. On November 6 she sent the crown jewels to Elizabeth. It was a gracious act, in which love of the Church yielded to her desire to give England an orderly succession. She suffered long periods of unconsciousness; from one of these she awoke to tell how she had happily dreamed of children playing and singing before her.⁷¹ On November 17 she heard Mass early, and uttered the responses ardently. Before dawn she died.

On the same day died Cardinal Pole, as profoundly defeated as his Queen. In estimating him we must record the bitter fact that at the beginning of his last month he had condemned three men and two women to be burned for heresy. It is true that all parties except the Anabaptists, in those years of mad certainty, agreed that religious unity had to be preserved, even, if necessary, by punishing dissent with death. But nowhere in contemporary Christendom—not even in Spain—were so many men and women burned for their opinions as during Reginald Pole’s primacy of the English Church.

For Mary we may speak a more lenient word. Grief, illness, and many suffered wrongs had warped her mind. Her clemency passed into cruelty only after conspiracies had sought to deprive her of her crown on her head. She listened too trustingly to ecclesiastics who, having themselves been persecuted, sought revenge. Till the end she thought she was fulfilling by murder her obligations to the faith which she loved as the vital medium of her life. She does not quite deserve the name of “Bloody Mary,” unless we are to spread that adjective over all her time; it simolifies pitilessly a character in which there had been much to love. It is her strange distinction that she carried on the work of her father in alienating England from Rome. She showed to an England still Catholic the worst side of the Church she served. When she died England was readier than before to accept the new faith that she had labored to destroy.