The question of the king’s divorce soon became inextricably confused with another problem, whose first beginnings go back to a slightly earlier date. What was to be the attitude of England towards the Reformation? It was nowEngland and the Reformation.nearly ten years since Martin Luther had posted up his famous theses on the church door at Wittenberg, and since he had testified to his faith before the diet of Worms. All Germany was now convulsed with the first throes of the revolt against the papacy, and the echoes of the new theological disputes were being heard in England. King Henry himself in 1521 had deigned to write an abusive pamphlet against Luther, for which he had been awarded the magnificent title ofFidei Defensorby that cultured sceptic Pope Leo X. About the same time we begin to read of orders issued by the bishops for the discovery and burning of all Lutheran books—a clear sign that they were reaching England in appreciable quantities. Hitherto it had been only the works of Wycliffe that had merited this attention on the part of inquisitors. In the Wycliffite remnant, often persecuted but never exterminated, there already existed in England the nucleus of a Protestant party. All through the reign of Henry VII. and the early years of Henry VIII. the intermittent burning of “heretics,” and their far more frequent recantations, had borne witness to the fact that the sect still lingered on. The Wycliffites were a feeble folk, compelled to subterraneous ways, and destitute of learned leaders or powerful supporters. But they survived to see Luther’s day, and to merge themselves in one body with the first English travelling scholars and merchants who brought back from the continent the doctrines of the German Reformation. The origins of a Protestant party, who were not mere Wycliffites, but had been first interested in dogmatic controversy by coming upon the works of Luther, can be traced back to the year 1521 and to the university of Cambridge. There a knot of scholars, some of whom were to perish early at the stake, while others were destined to become the leaders of the English Reformation, came together and encouraged each other to test the received doctrines of contemporary orthodoxy by searching the Scriptures and the works of the Fathers. The sect spread in a few years to London, Oxford and other centres of intellectual life, but for many years its followers were not numerous; like the old Lollardy, Protestantism took root only in certain places and among certain classes—notably the lesser clergy and the merchants of the great towns.
King Henry and those who wished to please him professed as great a hatred and contempt for the new purveyors of German doctrines as for the belated disciples of Wycliffe. But there was another movement, whose origins went back for many centuries, which they were far from discouraging, and were prepared to utilize when it suited their convenience. This was the purely political feeling against the tyranny of the papacy, and the abuses of the national church, which in early ages had given supporters to William the Conqueror and Henry II., which had dictated the statutes of Mortmain and of Praemunire. Little had been heard of the old anti-clerical party in England since the time of Henry IV.; it had apparently been identified in the eyes of the orthodox with that Lollardy with which it had for a time allied itself, and had shared in its discredit. But it had always continued to exist, and in the early years of Henry VIII. had been showing unmistakable signs of vitality. The papacy of the Renaissance was a fair mark for criticism. It was not hard to attack the system under which Rodrigo Borgia wore the tiara, while Girolamo Savonarola went to the stake; or in which Julius II. exploited the name of Christianity to serve his territorial policy in Italy, and Leo X. hawked his indulgences round Europe to raise funds which would enable him to gratify his artistic tastes. At no period had the official hierarchy of the Western Church been more out of touch with common righteousness and piety. Moreover, they were sinning under the eyes of a laity which was far more intelligent and educated, more able to think and judge for itself, less the slave of immemorial tradition, than the old public of the middle ages. In Italy the Renaissance might be purely concerned with things intellectual or artistic, and seem to have little or no touch with things moral. Beyond the Alps it was otherwise; among the Teutonic nations at least the revolt against the scholastic philosophy, the rout of the obscurantists, the eager pursuit of Hellenic culture, had a religious aspect. The same generation which refused to take thrice-translated and thrice-garbled screeds from Aristotle as the sum of human knowledge, and went back to the original Greek, was also studying the Old and New Testaments in their original tongues, and drawing from them conclusions as unfavourable to the intelligence as to the scholarship of the orthodox medieval divines. Such a discovery as that which showed that the “False Decretals,” on which so much of the power of the papacy rested, were mere 9th-century forgeries struck deep at the roots of the whole traditional relation between church and state.
The first English scholars of the Renaissance, like Erasmus on the continent, did not see the logical outcome of their own discoveries, nor realize that the campaign against obscurantism would develop into a campaign against Roman orthodoxy. Sir Thomas More, the greatest of them, was actually driven into reaction by the violence of Protestant controversialists, and the fear that the new doctrines would rend the church in twain. He became himself a persecutor, and a writer of abusivepamphlets unworthy of the author of theUtopia. But to the younger generation the irreconcilability of modern scholarship and medieval formulae of faith became more and more evident. One after another all the cardinal doctrines were challenged by writers who were generally acute, and almost invariably vituperative. For the controversies of the Reformation were conducted by both sides, from kings and prelates down to gutter pamphleteers, in language of the most unseemly violence.
But, as has been already said, the scholars and theologians had less influence in the beginning of the English Reformation than the mere lay politicians, whose anti-clerical tendencies chanced to fit in with King Henry’s convenience when he quarrelled with the papacy. It is well to note that the first attacks of parliament on the church date back to two years before Luther published his famous theses. The contention began in 1515 with the fierce assault by the Commons on the old abuse of benefit of clergy, and the immunity of clerical criminals from due punishment for secular crimes—a question as old as the times of Henry II. and Becket. But the discussion spread in later years from this particular point into a general criticism of the church and its relations to the state, embracing local grievances as well as the questions which turned on the dealings of the papacy with the crown. The old complaints which had been raised against the Church of England in the days of Edward I. or Richard II. had lost none of their force in 1526. The higher clergy were more than ever immersed in affairs of state, “Caesarean” as Wycliffe would have called them. It was only necessary to point to the great cardinal himself, and to ask how far his spiritual duties at York were properly discharged while he was acting as the king’s prime minister. The cases of Foxe and Morton were much the same; the former passed for a well-meaning man, yet had been practically absent from his diocese for twenty years. Pluralism, nepotism, simony and all the other ancient abuses were more rampant than ever. The monasteries had ceased to be even the nurseries of literature; their chronicles had run dry, and secular priests or laymen had taken up the pens that the monks had dropped. They were wealthier than ever, yet did little to justify their existence; indeed the spirit of the age was so much set against them that they found it hard to keep up the numbers of their inmates. Truculent pamphleteers like Simon Fish, who wroteBeggars’ Supplication, were already demanding “that these sturdy boobies should be set abroad into the world, to get wives of their own, and earn their living by the sweat of their brows, according to the commandment of God; so might the king be better obeyed, matrimony be better kept, the gospel better preached, and none should rob the poor of his alms.” It must be added that monastic scandals were not rare; though the majority of the houses were decently ordered, yet the unexceptionable testimony of archiepiscopal and episcopal visitations shows that in the years just before the Reformation there was a certain number of them where chastity of life and honesty of administration were equally unknown. But above all things the church was being criticized as animperium in imperio, a privileged body not amenable to ordinary jurisdiction, and subservient to a foreign lord—the pope. And it was true that, much as English churchmen might grumble at papal exactions, they were generally ready as a body to support the pope against the crown; the traditions of the medieval church made it impossible for them to do otherwise. That there would in any case have been a new outbreak of anti-clerical and anti-papal agitation in England, under the influence of the Protestant impulse started by Luther in Germany, is certain. But two special causes gave its particular colour to the opening of the English Reformation; the one was that the king fell out with the papacy on the question of his divorce. The other was that the nation at this moment was chafing bitterly against a clerical minister, whom it (very unjustly) made responsible for the exorbitant taxation which it was enduring, in consequence of the king’s useless and unsuccessful foreign wars. The irony of the situation lay in the facts that Henry was, so far as dogmatic views were concerned, a perfectly orthodox prince; he had a considerable knowledge of the old theological literature, as he had shown in his pamphlet against Luther, and though he was ready to repress clerical immunities and privileges that were inconvenient to the crown, he had no sympathy whatever with the doctrinal side of the new revolt against the system of the medieval church. Moreover, Wolsey, whose fall was to synchronize with the commencement of the reforming movement, was if anything more in sympathy with change than was his master. He was an enlightened patron of the new learning, and was inclined to take vigorous measures in hand for the pruning away of the abuses of the church. It is significant that his great college at Oxford—“Cardinal’s College” as he designed to call it, “Christ Church” as it is named to-day—was endowed with the revenues of some score of small monasteries which he had suppressed on the ground that they were useless or ill-conducted. His master turned the lesson to account a few years later; but Henry’s wholesale destruction of religious houses was carried out not in the interests of learning, but mainly in those of the royal exchequer.
(C. W. C. O.)
VII. The Reformation and the Age of Elizabeth (1528-1603)
Wolsey did not fall through any opposition to reform; nor was he opposed to the idea of a divorce. Indeed, both in France and Spain he was credited with the authorship of the project. But he differed from Henry on the questionFall of Wolsey.of Catherine’s successor. Wolsey desired a French marriage to consummate the breach upon which he was now bent with the emperor; and war, in fact, was precipitated with Spain in 1528. This is said to have been done without Henry’s consent; he certainly wished to avoid war with Charles V., and peace was made after six months of passive hostility. Nor did Henry want a French princess; his affections were fixed for the time on Anne Boleyn, and she was the hope of the anti-clerical party. The crisis was brought to a head by the failure of Wolsey’s plan to obtain a divorce. Originally it had been suggested that the ecclesiastical courts in England were competent without recourse to Rome. Wolsey deprecated this procedure, and application was made to Clement VII. Wolsey relied upon his French and Italian allies to exert the necessary powers of persuasion; and in 1528 a French army crossed the Alps, marched through Italy and threatened to drive Charles V. out of Naples. Clement was in a position to listen to Henry’s prayer; and Campeggio was commissioned with Wolsey to hear the suit and grant the divorce.
No sooner had Campeggio started than the fortunes of war changed. The French were driven out of Naples, and the Imperialists again dominated Rome; the Church, wrote Clement to Campeggio, was completely in theQuestion of the divorce.power of Charles V. The cardinal, therefore, must on no account pronounce against Charles’s aunt; if he could not persuade Henry and Catherine to agree on a mutual separation, he must simply pass the time and come to no conclusion. Hence it was June 1529 before the court got to work at all, and then its proceedings were only preparatory to an adjournment and revocation of the suit to Rome in August. Clement VII. had, in his own words, made up his mind to live and die an imperialist; the last remnants of the French army in Italy had been routed, and the pope had perforce concluded the treaty of Barcelona, a sort of family compact between himself and Charles, whereby he undertook to protect Charles’s aunt, and the emperor to support the Medici dynasty in Florence. This peace was amplified at the treaty of Cambrai (August 1529) into a general European pacification in which England had no voice. So far had it fallen since 1521.
In every direction Wolsey had failed, and his failure involved the triumph of the forces which he had opposed. The fate of the papal system in England was bound up with his personal fortunes. It was he and he alone who had kept parliament at arm’s length and the enemies of the church at bay. He had interested the king, and to some extent the nation, in a spiritedforeign policy, had diverted their attention from domestic questions, and had staved off that parliamentary attack on the church which had been threatened fifteen years before. Now he was doomed, and both Campeggio and Cardinal du Bellay were able to send their governments accurate outlines of the future policy of Henry VIII. The church was to be robbed of its wealth, its power and its privileges, and the papal jurisdiction was to be abolished. In October Wolsey was deprived of the great seal, and surrendered many of his ecclesiastical preferments, though he was allowed to retain his archbishopric of York which he now visited for the first time. The first lay ministry since Edward the Confessor’s time came into office; Sir Thomas More became lord chancellor, and Anne Boleyn’s father lord privy seal; the only prominent cleric who remained in office was Stephen Gardiner, who succeeded Wolsey as bishop of Winchester.
Parliament met in November 1529 and passed many acts against clerical exactions, mortuaries, probate dues and pluralities, which evoked a passionate protest from Bishop Fisher: “Now, with the Commons,” he criedAttack on the church in parliament.in the House of Lords, “is nothing but ‘Down with the Church.’” During 1530 Henry’s agents were busy abroad making that appeal on the divorce to the universities which Cranmer had suggested. In 1531 the clergy in convocation, terrified by the charge ofpraemunirebrought against them for recognizing Wolsey’s legatine authority, paid Henry a hundred and eighteen thousand pounds and recognized him as supreme head of the church so far as the law of Christ would allow. The details of this surrender were worked out by king and Commons in 1532; but Gardiner and More secured the rejection by the Lords of the bill in which they were embodied, and it was not till 1533, when More had ceased to be chancellor and Gardiner to be secretary, that a parliamentary statute annihilated the independent legislative authority of the church. An act was, however, passed in 1532 empowering the king, if he thought fit, to stop the payment of annates to Rome. Henry suspended his consent in order to induce the pope to grant Cranmer his bulls as archbishop of Canterbury where he succeeded Warham late in 1532. The stratagem was successful, and Henry cast off all disguise. The act of annates was confirmed; another prohibiting appeals to Rome and providing for the appointment of bishops without recourse to the papacy was passed; and Cranmer declared Henry’s marriage with CatherineHenry VIII. marries Anne Boleyn.null and void and that with Anne Boleyn, which had taken place about January 25, 1533, valid. Anne was crowned in June, and on the 7th of September the future Queen Elizabeth was born. At length in 1534 Clement VII. concluded the case at Rome, pronouncing in favour of Catherine’s marriage, and drawing up a bull of excommunication against Henry and his abettors. But he did not venture to publish it; public opinion in England, while hostile to the divorce, was not in favour of the clergy or the pope, and the rivalry between Charles V. and Francis I. was too bitter to permit of joint, or even isolated, action against Henry. Charles was only too anxious to avoid the duty of carrying out the pope’s commands, and a year later he was once more involved in war with France. Henry was able to deal roughly with such manifestations as Elizabeth Barton’s visions, and in the autumnThe Act of Supremacy.of 1534 to obtain from parliament the Act of Supremacy which transferred to him the juridical, though not the spiritual, powers of the pope. No penalties were attached to this act, but another passed in the same session made it treason to attempt to deprive the king of any of his titles, of which supreme head of the church was one, being incorporated in the royal style by letters patent of January 1535. Fisher and More were executed on this charge; they had been imprisoned in the previous year for objecting to take the form of oath to the succession as vested in Anne Boleyn’s children which the commissioners prescribed. But their lives could only be forfeit on the supposition that they sought to deprive the king of his royal supremacy. Many of the friars observant of Greenwich and monks of the Charterhouse were involved in a similar fate, but there was no general resistance, and Henry, now inspired or helped by Thomas Cromwell, was able to proceed with the next step in the Reformation, the dissolution of the monasteries.
It was Cecil’s opinion twenty-five years later that, but for the dissolution, the cause of the Reformation could not have succeeded. Such a reason could hardly be avowed, and justification had to be sought in the condition ofDissolution of the monasteries.the monasteries themselves. The action of Wolsey and other bishops before 1529, the report of a commission of cardinals appointed by Paul III. in 1535, the subsequent experience of other, even Catholic, countries give collateral support to the conclusions of the visitors appointed by Cromwell, although they were dictated by a desire not to deal out impartial justice, but to find reasons for a policy already adopted in principle. That they exaggerated the evils of monastic life hardly admits of doubt; but even a Henry VIII. and a Thomas Cromwell would not have dared to attack, or succeeded in destroying, the monasteries had they retained their original purity and influence. As it was their doubtful reputation and financial embarrassments enabled Henry to offer them as a gigantic bribe to the upper classes of the laity, and the Reformation parliament met for its last session early in 1536 to give effect to the reports of the visitors and to the king’s and their own desires.
But it had barely been dissolved in April when it became necessary to call another. In January the death of Catherine had rejoiced the hearts of Henry and Anne Boleyn, but Anne’s happiness was short-lived. Two miscarriages and the failure to produce the requisite male heir linked her in Henry’s mind and in misfortune to Catherine; unlike Catherine she was unpopular and not above suspicion. The story of her tragedy is still one of the most horrible and mysterious pages in English history. It is certain that Henry was tired and wanted to get rid of her; but if she were innocent, why were charges brought against her which were not brought against Catherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves? and why were four other victims sacrificed when one would have been enough? The peers a year before could acquit Lord Dacre; would they have condemned the queen without some show of evidence? and unless there was suspicious evidence, her daughter was inhuman in making no effort subsequently to clear her mother’s character. However that may be,Execution of Queen Anne Boleyn.Anne was not only condemned and executed, but her marriage was declared invalid and her daughter a bastard. Parliament was required to establish the succession on the new basis of Henry’s new queen, Jane Seymour. It also empowered the king to leave the crown by will if he had no legitimate issue; but the illegitimate son, the duke of Richmond, in whose favour this provision is said to have been conceived, died shortly afterwards.
Fortunately for Henry, Queen Jane roused no domestic or foreign animosities; Charles V. and Francis I. were at war; and the pope’s and Pole’s attempt to profit by the Pilgrimage of Grace came too late to produce any effectThe Pilgrimage of Grace.except the ruin of Pole’s family. The two risings of 1536 in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire were provoked partly by the dissolution of the monasteries, partly by the collection of a subsidy and fears of fresh taxation on births, marriages and burials, and partly by the protestantizing Ten Articles of 1536 and Cromwell’sInjunctions. They were conservative demonstrations in favour of a restoration of the old order by means of a change of ministry, but not a change of dynasty. The Lincolnshire rising was over before the middle of October, the more serious revolt in Yorkshire under Aske lasted through the winter. Henry’s lieutenants were compelled to temporize and make concessions. Aske was invited to come to London and hoodwinked by Henry into believing that the king was really bent on restoration and reform. But an impatient outburst of the insurgents and a foolish attempt to seize Hull and Scarborough gave Henry an excuse for repudiating the concessions made in his name. He could afford to do so because England south of the Trent remained stauncher to him than England north of it did to the Pilgrimage. Aske and other leaders weretried and executed, and summary vengeance was wreaked on the northern counties, especially on the monasteries. The one satisfactory outcome was the establishment of the Council of the North, which gave the shires between the Border and the Trent a stronger and more efficient government than they had ever had before.
Probably the Pilgrimage had some effect in moderating Henry’s progress. The monasteries did not benefit and in 1538-1539 the greater were involved in the fate which had already overtaken the less. But no further advancesThe “Six Articles.”were made towards Protestantism after the publication and authorization of the “Great” Bible in English. The Lutheran divines who came to England in 1538 with a project for a theological union were rebuffed; the parliament elected in 1539 was Catholic, and only the reforming bishops in the House of Lords offered any resistance to the Six Articles which reaffirmed the chief points in Catholic doctrine and practice. The alliance between pope, emperor and French king induced Henry to acquiesce in Cromwell’s scheme for a political understanding with Cleves and the Schmalkaldic League, which might threaten Charles V.’s position in Germany and the Netherlands, but could not be of much direct advantage to England. Cromwell rashly sought to wed Henry to this policy, proposed Anne of Cleves as a bride for Henry, now once more a widower, and represented the marriage as England’s sole protection against a Catholic league. Henry put his neck under the yoke, but soon discovered that there was no necessity; for Charles and Francis were already beginning to quarrel and hadFall of Thomas Cromwell.no thought of a joint attack on England. The discovery was fatal to Cromwell; after a severe struggle in the council he was abandoned to his enemies, attainted of treason and executed. Anne’s marriage was declared null, and Henry found a fifth queen in Catherine Howard, a niece of Norfolk, a protégée of Gardiner, and a friend of the Catholic church.
Nevertheless there was no reversal of what had been done, only a check to the rate of progress. Cranmer remained archbishop and compiled an English Litany, while Catherine Howard soon ceased to be queen; charges of loose conduct, which in her case at any rate were not instigated by the king, were made against her and she was brought to the block; she was succeeded by Catherine Parr, a mild patron of the new learning. The Six Articles were only fitfully put in execution, especially in 1543 and 1546: all the plots against Cranmer failed; and before he died Henry was even considering the advisability of further steps in the religious reformation, apart from mere spoliation like the confiscation of the chantry lands.
But Scotland, Ireland and foreign affairs concerned him most. Something substantial was achieved in Ireland; the papal sovereignty was abolished and Henry received from the Irish parliament the title of king instead of lord ofPolicy in Ireland and Scotland.Ireland. The process was begun of converting Irish chieftains into English peers which eventually divorced the Irish people from their natural leaders; and principles of English law and government were spread beyond the Pale. In Scotland Henry was less fortunate. He failed to win over James V. to his anti-papal policy, revived the feudal claim to suzerainty, won the battle of Solway Moss (1542), and then after James’s death bribed and threatened the Scots estates into concluding a treaty of marriage between their infant queen and Henry’s son. The church in Scotland led by Beaton, and the French party led by James V.’s widow, Mary of Guise, soon reversed this decision, and Hertford’s heavy hand was (1544) laid on Edinburgh in revenge. France was at the root of the evil, and Henry was thus induced once more to join Charles V. in war (1543). The joint invasion of 1544 led to the capture of Boulogne, but the emperor made peace in order to deal with the Lutherans and left Henry at war with France. The French attempted to retaliate in 1545, and burnt some villages in the Isle of Wight and on the coast of Sussex. But their expedition was a failure, and peace was made in 1546, by which Henry undertook to restore Boulogne in eight years’ time on payment of eight hundred thousand crowns. Scotland was not included in the pacification, and when Henry died (January 28, 1547) he was busy preparing to renew his attempt on Scotland’s independence.
He left a council of sixteen to rule during his son’s minority. The balance of parties which had existed since Cromwell’s fall had been destroyed in the last months of the reign by the attainder of Norfolk and his son Surrey, andEdward VI.the exclusion of Gardiner and Thirlby from the council of regency. Men of the new learning prevailed, and Hertford (later duke of Somerset), as uncle to Edward VI., was made protector of the realm and governor of the king’s person. He soon succeeded in removing the trammels imposed upon his authority, and made himself king in everything but name. He used his arbitrary power to modify the despotic system of the Tudors; all treason laws since Edward III., all heresy laws, all restrictions upon the publication of the Scriptures were removed in the first parliament of the reign, and various securities for liberty wereProgress of the Reformation.enacted. The administration of the sacrament of the altar in both elements was permitted, the Catholic interpretation of the mass was rendered optional, images were removed, and English was introduced into nearly the whole of the church service. In the following session (1548-1549) the first Act of Uniformity authorized the first Book of Common Prayer. It met with strenuous resistance in Devon and in Cornwall, where rebellions added to the thickening troubles of the protector.
His administration was singularly unsuccessful. In 1547 he won the great but barren victory of Pinkie Cleugh over the Scots, and attempted to push on the marriage and union by a mixture of conciliation and coercion. HeAdministration of the protector Somerset.made genuine and considerable concessions to Scottish feeling, guaranteeing autonomy and freedom of trade, and suggesting that the two realms should adopt the indifferent style of the empire of Great Britain. But he also seized Haddington in 1548, held by force the greater part of the Lowlands, and, when Mary was transported to France, revived the old feudal claims which he had dropped in 1547. France was, as ever, the backbone of the Scots resistance; men and money poured into Edinburgh to assist Mary of Guise and the French faction. The protector’s offer to restore Boulogne could not purchase French acquiescence in the union of England and Scotland; and the bickerings on the borders in France and open fighting in Scotland led the French to declare war on England in August 1549. They were encouraged by dissensions in England. Somerset’s own brother, Thomas Seymour, jealous of the protector, intrigued against the government; he sought to secure the hand of Elizabeth, the favour of Edward VI. and the support of the Suffolk line, secretly married Catherine Parr, and abused his office as lord high admiral to make friends with pirates and other enemies of order. Foes of the family, such as Warwick and Southampton, saw in his factious conduct the means of ruining both the brothers. Seymour was brought to the block, and the weak consent of the protector seriously damaged him in the public eye. His notorious sympathy with the peasantry further alienated the official classes and landed gentry, and his campaign against enclosures brought him into conflict with the strongest forces of the time. The remedial measures which he favoured failed; and the rising of Ket in Norfolk and others less important in nearly all the counties of England, made Somerset’s position impossible. Bedford and Herbert suppressed the rebellion in the west, Warwick that in Norfolk (July-August 1549). They then combined with the majority of the council and the discontented Catholics to remove the protector from office and imprison him in the Tower (October).
The Catholics hoped for reaction, the restoration of the mass, and the release of Gardiner and Bonner, who had been imprisoned for resistance to the protector’s ecclesiastical policy. But Warwick meant to rely on the ProtestantAdministration of the duke of Northumberland.extremists; by January 1550 the Catholics had been expelled from the council, and the pace of the Reformation increased instead of diminishing. Peace was made with France by the surrender of Boulogne and abandonmentof the policy of union with Scotland (March 1550); and the approach of war between France and the emperor, coupled with the rising of the princes in Germany, relieved Warwick from foreign apprehensions and gave him a free hand at home. Gardiner, Bonner, Heath, Day and Tunstall were one by one deprived of their sees; a new ordinal simplified the ritual of ordination, and a second Act of Uniformity and Book of Common Prayer (1552) repudiated the Catholic interpretation which had been placed on the first and imposed a stricter conformity to the Protestant faith. All impediments to clerical marriage wereEstablishment of Protestantism.removed, altars and organs were taken down, old service books destroyed and painted windows broken; it was even proposed to explain away the kneeling at the sacrament. The liberal measures of the protector were repealed, and new treasons were enacted; Somerset himself, who had been released and restored to the council in 1550, became an obstacle in Warwick’s path, and was removed by means of a bogus plot, being executed in January 1552; while Warwick had himself made duke of Northumberland, his friend Dorset duke of Suffolk, and Herbert earl of Pembroke.
But his ambition and violence made him deeply unpopular, and the failing health of Edward VI. opened up a serious prospect for Northumberland. He was only safe so long as he controlled the government, and prevented the administration of justice, and the knowledge that not only power but life was at stake drove him into a desperate plot for the retention of both. He could trade upon Edward’s precocious hatred of Mary’s religion, he could rely upon French fears of her Spanish inclinations, and the success which had attended his schemes in England deluded him into a belief that he could supplant the Tudor with a Dudley dynasty. His son Guilford Dudley was hastily married to Lady Jane Grey, the eldest granddaughter of Henry VIII.’s younger sister Mary. Henry’s two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, the descendants of his elder sister Margaret, and Lady Jane’s mother, the duchess of Suffolk, were all to be passed over, and the succession was to be vested in Lady Jane and her heirs male. Edward was persuaded that he could devise the crown by will, the council and the judges were browbeaten into acquiescence, and three days after Edward’s death (July 6, 1553), Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed queen in London. Northumberland had miscalculated the temper of the nation, and failed to kidnap Mary. She gathered her forces in Norfolk and Suffolk, Northumberland rode out from London to oppose her, but defection dogged his steps, and even in London Mary was proclaimed queen behind his back by his fellow-conspirators. Mary entered London amid unparalleled popular rejoicings, and Northumberland was sent to a well-deserved death on the scaffold.
Mary was determined from the first to restore papalism as well as Catholicism, but she had to go slowly. The papacy had few friends in England, and even Charles V., on whom Mary chiefly relied for guidance, was not eagerQueen Mary. Restoration of the old religion.to see the papal jurisdiction restored. He wanted England to be first firmly tied to the Habsburg interests by Mary’s marriage with Philip. Nor was it generally anticipated that Mary would do more than restore religion as it had been left by her father. She did not attempt anything further in 1553 than the repeal of Edward VI.’s legislation and the accomplishment of the Spanish marriage. The latter project provoked fierce resistance; various risings were planned for the opening months of 1554, and Wyat’s nearly proved successful. Only his arrogance and procrastination and Mary’s own courage saved her throne. But the failure of this protest enabled Mary to carry through the Spanish marriage, which was consummated in July; and in the ensuing parliament (Oct.-Jan. 1554-1555) all anti-papal legislation was repealed; Pole was received as legate; the realm was reconciled to Rome; and, although the holders of abbey lands were carefully protected against attempts at restitution, the church was empowered to work its will with regard to heresy. The Lollard statutes were revived, and between February 1555 and November 1558 some three hundred Protestants were burnt at the stake. They began with John Rogers and Rowland Taylor, and Bishops Ferrar of St Davids and Hooper of Gloucester. Ridley and Latimer were not burnt until October 1555, and Cranmer not till March 1556. London, Essex, Hertfordshire, East Anglia, Kent and Sussex provided nearly all the victims; only one was burnt north of the Trent, and only one south-west of Wiltshire. But in the Protestant districts neither age nor sex was spared; even the dead were dug up and burnt. The result was to turn the hearts of Mary’s people from herself, her church and her creed. Other causes helped to convert their enthusiastic loyalty into bitterUnpopularity of the Spanish marriage. Philip II.hatred. The Spanish marriage was a failure from every point of view. In spite of Mary’s repeated delusions, she bore no child, and both parliament and people resisted every attempt to deprive Elizabeth of her right to the succession. Philip did all he could to conciliate English affections, but they would not have Spanish control at any price. They knew that his blandishments were dictated by ulterior designs, and that the absorption of England in the Habsburg empire was his ultimate aim. As it was, the Spanish connexion checked England’s aspirations; her adventurers were warned off the Spanish Main, and even trade with the colonies of Philip’s ally Portugal was prohibited. They had to content themselves with the Arctic Ocean and Muscovy; and they soon found themselves at war in Philip’s interests. Philip himself refused to declare war on Scotland on England’s behalf, but he induced Mary to declare war on France on his own (1557). The glory of the war fell to the Spaniards at St Quentin (1557) and Gravelines (1558), but the shame to England by the loss of Calais (Jan. 1558). Ten months later Mary died (Nov. 17), deserted by her husband and broken-hearted at the loss of Calais and her failure to win English hearts back to Rome.
The Spanish and Venetian ambassadors in London were shocked at what they regarded as the indecent rejoicings over Elizabeth’s accession. The nation, indeed, breathed a new life. Papal control of its ecclesiastical, andAccession of Elizabeth. English national struggle with Spain.Spanish control of its foreign policy ceased, and it had a queen who gloried in being “mere English.” There was really no possible rival sovereign, and no possible alternative policy. The English were tugging at the chain and Elizabeth had to follow; her efforts throughout were aimed at checking the pace at which her people wanted to go. She could not have married Philip had she wished to, and she could not have kept her sea-dogs off the Spanish Main. They were willing to take all the risks and relieve her of all responsibility; they filled her coffers with Spanish gold which they plundered as pirates, knowing that they might be hanged if caught; and they fought Elizabeth’s enemies in France and in the Netherlands as irregulars, taking their chance of being shot if taken prisoners. While Elizabeth nursed prosperity in peace, her subjects sapped the strength of England’s rivals by attacks which were none the less damaging because they escaped the name of war.
It required all Elizabeth’s finesse to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds; but she was, as Henry III. of France said,la plus fine femme du monde, and she was ably seconded by Cecil who had already proved himself an adept in the art of taking cover. Nevertheless, English policy in their hands was essentially aggressive. It could not be otherwise if England was to emerge from the slough in which Mary had left it. The first step was to assert the principle of England for the English; the queen would have no foreign husband, though she found suitors useful as well as attractive. Spanish counsels were applauded and neglected, and the Spaniards soon departed. Elizabeth was glad of Philip’s support at the negotiations for peace at Cateau Cambrésis (1559), but she took care to assert the independenceTriumph of the new religion. The Act of Uniformity.of her diplomacy and of England’s interests. At home the church was made once more English. All foreign jurisdiction was repudiated, and under the style “supreme governor” Elizabeth reclaimed nearly all the power which Henry VIII. had exercised as “supreme head.” The Act of Uniformity (1559) restored with a few modifications the second prayer-book ofEdward VI. The bishops almost unanimously refused to conform, and a clean sweep was made of the episcopal bench. An eminently safe and scholarly archbishop was found in Matthew Parker, who had not made himself notorious by resistance to authority even under Mary. The lower clergy were more amenable; the two hundred who alone are said to have been ejected should perhaps be multiplied by five; but even so they were not one in seven, and these seven were clergy who had been promoted in Mary’s reign, or who had stood the celibate and other tests of 1553-1554. Into the balance must be thrown the hundreds, if not thousands, of zealots who had fled abroad and returned in 1558-1559. The net result was that a few years later the lower house of convocation only rejected by one vote a very puritanical petition against vestments and other “popish dregs.”
The next step was to expand the principle of England for the English into that of Britain for the British, and Knox’s reformation in 1559-1560 provided an opportunity for its application. By timely and daring interventionElizabeth and Scotland.in Scotland Elizabeth procured the expulsion of the French bag and baggage from North Britain, and that French avenue to England was closed for ever. The logic of this plan was not applied to Ireland; there it was to be Ireland for the English for many a generation yet to come; and so Ireland remained Achilles’ heel, the vulnerable part of the United Kingdom. The Protestant religion was forced upon the Irish in a foreign tongue and garb and at the point of foreign pikes; and national sentiment supported the ancient faith and the ancient habits in resistance to the Saxon innovations. In other directions the expansion of England, the third stage in the development of Elizabeth’s policy, was more successful. The attractions of the Spanish Main converted the seafaring folk of south-west EnglandStruggle against the Spanish dominion at sea.into hardy Protestants, who could on conscientious as well as other grounds contest a papal allocation of new worlds to Spain and Portugal. Their monopoly was broken up by Hawkins, Drake, Frobisher, Raleigh, and scores of others who recognized no peace beyond the line; and although, as far as actual colonies went, the results of Elizabeth’s reign were singularly meagre, the idea had taken root and the ground had been prepared. In every direction English influence penetrated, and Englishmen before 1603 might be found in every quarter of the globe, following Drake’s lead into the Pacific, painfully breaking the ice in search of a north-east or a north-west passage, hunting for slaves in the wilds of Africa, journeying in caravans across the steppes of Russia into central Asia, bargaining with the Turks on the shores of the Golden Horn, or with the Greeks in the Levant, laying the foundations of the East India Company, or of the colonies of Virginia and Newfoundland.
This expansion was mainly at the expense of Spain; but at first Spain was regarded as Elizabeth’s friend, not France. France had a rival candidate for Elizabeth’s throne in Mary Stuart, the wife of the dauphin who soonMary, queen of Scots.(1559) became king as Francis II.; and Spanish favour was sought to neutralize this threat. Fortunately for Elizabeth, Francis died in 1560, and the French government passed into the hands of Catherine de’ Medici, who had no cause to love her daughter-in-law and the Guises. France, too, was soon paralysed by the wars of religion which Elizabeth judiciously fomented with anything but religious motives. Mary Stuart returned to Scotland with nothing but her brains and her charms on which to rely in her struggle with her people and her rival. She was well equipped in both respects, but human passions spoilt her chance; her heart turned her head. Elizabeth’s head was stronger and she had no heart at all. When Mary married Darnley she had the ball at her feet; the pair had the best claims to the English succession and enjoyed the united affections of the Catholics. But they soon ceased to love one another, and could not control their jealousies. There followed rapidly the murders of Rizzio and Darnley, the Bothwell marriage, Mary’s defeat, captivity, and flight into England (1568). It was a difficult problem for Elizabeth to solve; to let Mary go to France was presenting a good deal more than a pawn to her enemies; to restore her by force to her Scottish throne might have been heroic, but it certainly was not politics; to hand her over to her Scottish foes was too mean even for Elizabeth; and to keep her in England was to nurse a spark in a powder-magazine. Mary was detained in the hope that the spark might be carefully isolated.
But there was too much inflammable material about. The duke of Norfolk was a Protestant, but his convictions were weaker than his ambition, and he fell a victim to Mary’s unseen charms. The Catholic north of EnglandRebellion of 1569 and excommunication of Elizabeth.was to rise under the earls of Westmorland and Northumberland, who objected to Elizabeth’s seizure of their mines and jurisdictions as well as to her proscription of their faith; and the pope was to assist with a bull of deposition. Norfolk, however, played the coward; the bull came nearly a year too late, and the rebellion of the earls (1569) was easily crushed. But the conspiracies did not end, and Spain began to take a hand. Elizabeth, partly in revenge for the treatment of Hawkins and Drake at San Juan de Ulloa, seized some Spanish treasure on its way to the Netherlands (Dec. 1569). Alva’s operations were fatally handicapped by this disaster, but Philip was too much involved in the Netherlands to declare war on England. But his friendship for ElizabethPlots against Elizabeth. Relations with France and Spain.had received a shock, and henceforth his finger may be traced in most of the plots against her, of which the Ridolfi conspiracy was the first. It cost Norfolk his head and Mary more of her scanty liberty. Elizabeth also began to look to France, and in 1572, by the treaty of Blois, France instead of Spain became England’s ally, while Philip constituted himself as Mary’s patron. The massacre of St Bartholomew placed a severe strain upon the new alliance, but was not fatal to it. A series of prolonged but hollow marriage negotiations between Elizabeth and first Anjou (afterwards Henry III.) and then Alençon (afterwards duke of Anjou) served to keep up appearances. But the friendship was never warm; Elizabeth’s relations with the Huguenots on the one hand and her fear of French designs on the Netherlands on the other prevented much cordiality. But the alliance stood in the way of a Franco-Spanish agreement, limited Elizabeth’s sympathy with the French Protestants, and enabled her to give more countenance than she otherwise might have done to the Dutch.
Gradually Philip grew more hostile under provocation; slowly he came to the conclusion that he could never subdue the Dutch or check English attacks on the Spanish Main without a conquest of England. SimultaneouslyThe Jesuit missions.the counter-Reformation began its attacks; the “Jesuit invasion” took place in 1580, and Campion went to the block. A papal and Spanish attempt upon Ireland in the same year was foiled at Smerwick. But more important was Philip’s acquisition of the throne of Portugal with its harbours, its colonies and its marine. This for the first time gave him a real command of the sea, and at least doubled the chances of a successful attack upon England. But Philip’s mind moved slowly and only on provocation. It took a year or two to satisfy him that Portugal was really his; not until 1583 was the fleet of the pretender Don Antonio destroyed in the Azores. The victor, Santa Cruz, then suggested an armada against England, but the English Catholics could not be brought into line with a Spanish invasion. The various attempts to square James VI. of Scotland had not been successful, and events in the Netherlands and in France disturbed Philip’s calculations. But his purpose was now probably fixed. After the murder of William the Silent (1584) Elizabeth sided more openly with the Dutch; the Spanish ambassador Mendoza was expelled from EnglandExecution of Mary, queen of Scots, 1587.for his intrigues with Elizabeth’s enemies (1586); and on the discovery of Babington’s plot Elizabeth yielded to the demand of her parliament and her ministers for Mary’s execution (1587); her death removed the only possible centre for a Catholic rebellion in case of a Spanish attack. It also removed Philip’s last doubts;Mary had left him her claims to the English throne, and he might, now that she was out of his path, hope to treat England like Portugal. Drake’s “singeing of Philip’s beard” in Cadiz harbour in 1587 delayed the expedition for a year, and a storm again postponed it in the early summer of 1588. At length the armada sailed in July under the incompetent duke of Medina Sidonia; its object was to secure command of the narrow seas and facilitate the transport of Parma’s army from the Netherlands to England. But Philip after his twenty years’ experience in the Netherlands can hardly have hoped to conquer a bigger and richer country with scantier means and forces. He reliedThe Great Armada, 1588.in fact upon a domestic explosion, and the armada was only to be the torch. This miscalculation made it a hopeless enterprise from the first. Scarcely an English Catholic would have raised a finger in Philip’s favour; and when he could not subdue the two provinces of Holland and Zeeland, it is absurd to suppose that he could have simultaneously subdued them and England as well. English armies were not perhaps very efficient, but they were as good as the material with which William of Orange began his task. Philip, however, was never given the opportunity. His armada was severely handled in a week’s fighting on its way up the Channel, and was driven off the English ports into the German Ocean; there a south-west gale drove it far from its rendezvous, and completed the havoc which the English ships had begun. A miserable remnant alone escaped destruction in its perilous flight round the north and west of Scotland.
The defeat of the armada was the beginning and not the end of the war; and there were moments between 1588 and 1603 when England was more seriously alarmed than in 1588. The Spaniards seized Calais in 1596; at another time they threatened England from Brest, and the “invisible” armada of 1599 created a greater panic than the “invincible” armada of 1588. It was not till the very end of the reign that what was in some ways the most dangerous of Spanish aggressions was foiled at Kinsale. Nor were the English counter-attacks very happy; the attempt on Portugal in 1589 under Drake and Norris proved a complete failure. The raid on Cadiz under Essex and Raleigh in 1596 was attended with better results, but the “Islands” voyage to the Azores in 1597 was a very partial success. Still it was now a war upon more or less equal terms, and there was little more likelihood that it would end with England’s than with Spain’s loss of national independence. The subjection of the Netherlands was now almost out of the question, and although Elizabeth’s help had not enabled the Protestant cause to win in France, Henry IV. built up a national monarchy which would be quite as effectual a bar to the ambitions of Spain.
Elizabeth had in fact safely piloted England through the struggle to assert its national independence in religion and politics and its claim to a share in the new inheritance which had been opened up for the nations of Europe;Last years of Elizabeth.and the passionate loyalty which had supported her as the embodiment of England’s aspirations somewhat cooled in her declining years. She herself grew more cautious and conservative than ever, and was regarded as an obstacle by the hotheads in war and religion. She sided with the “scribes,” Burghley and Sir Robert Cecil, against the men of war, Essex and Raleigh; and she abetted Whitgift’s rigorous persecution of the Puritans whose discontent with hervia mediawas rancorously expressed in the Martin Marprelate tracts. Essex’s folly and failure to crush Hugh O’Neill’s rebellion (1599), the most serious effort made in the reign to throw off the English yoke in Ireland, involved him in treason and brought him to the block. Parliament was beginning to quarrel with the royal prerogative, particularly when expressed in the grant of monopolies, and even Mountjoy’s success in Ireland (1602-1603) failed to revive popular enthusiasm for the dying queen. Strange as it may seem, the accession of James I. was hailed as heralding a new and gladder age by Shakespeare, and minor writers (March 24, 1603).