that account, mounted the pulpit on this occasion, and delivered a vehement discourse on the text, "Though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing." When the sermon was over Ridley stripped himself for the fire, giving away his apparel, a new groat, some nutmegs and bits of ginger, a dial, and such other few things as he had about him; and among the by-standers were men too happy to get any rag of him. In the helplessness of old age Latimer had left it to his keeper to strip him; but when he stood up in his shroud, erect and fearless, by the side of the fagots, he seemed, in the eyes of some of the beholders, to be no longer the withered and decrepit old man, "but as comely a father as one might lightly behold." Ridley was tied first to the stake, and a kindled fagot was laid at his feet, and matches were applied to other parts of the pyre. As they were chaining Latimer to the reverse of the stake, the hardy old man exclaimed, "Be of good comfort, master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out." Then the flames arose, and Latimer was soon seen to expire in the midst of them; but Ridley's sufferings were long and dreadful. The Lord Williams of Thame, the vice-chancellor of the university, the other commissioners appointed by the court, and a multitude of Oxford scholars and gentlemen, stood by and witnessed the whole, for the most part with pious and complacent countenances, like men that felt the happy assurance that they were doing God service. But there were other spectators who looked on with very different eyes. The fortitude of the sufferers confirmed Protestants in their faith; every execution made some converts, and went to awaken a thorough and most lasting abhorrence of the persecuting church.*

About six weeks before these executions at Oxford, King Philip passed over to the continent, in no very good humour with our island, for his residence in England had given him slender hopes of being able to bend the country to his purposes; and he was soon afterwards made to feel, by the whole course of public proceedings in parliament and elsewhere, that he had in a manner thrown himself away in a marriage with a disagreeable woman. Mary's uncomfortable fondness seemed to increase with his absence: she wrote him tender letters, to which he seldom replied, except when he wished her to obtain money for his use from her parliament; and he entertained his courtiers (if not a mistress) with unmanly criticisms on his wife's person and manners. On the 21st of October, five days after the death of Ridley and Latimer, the parliament met in a mood less obsequious than usual, and the queen, in her anxiety to serve the Church of Rome, excited a somewhat stormy opposition. Some months before, in her ardent zeal for the pope, she had the imprudence to consult certain members of the privy council

Strype.-Fox.-Godwin.-Blunt.

touching the restoration of all the abbey lands in England, which she told them she considered had been taken away from their proper owners in time of schism, and that by unlawful means, and such as were contrary both to the interests of God and of the church. She told them that, for her own part, she considered an immediate surrender of what the crown had received essential to salvation, and that she set more value on the salvation of her soul than on the possession of ten kingdoms such as England. From her vehemence it was expected that she would press for the surrender of the lands by whomsoever held, and on this head the sensitive parliament were never at their ease during the short remainder of her reign. But during the present session she only required them to legalise her restoring the first-fruits and tenths, and the impropriations vested in the crown. Even to this parliament objected; and when the commons came to vote supplies, it was asked with some violence what justice there was in taxing the subject to relieve the sovereign's necessities when she refused to avail herself of funds legally at her disposal?and it was also suggested that the Catholic clergy, who were growing rich by the royal liberality, ought to make large sacrifices for the relief of their benefactress. The clergy, it should seem, had not been backward in so doing, or at least it was stated in reply, that the convocation had agreed to pay the queen a subsidy of six shillings in the pound. At last the House passed the supplies, but with a considerable deduction from the amount originally proposed; and they also passed the bills about the first-fruits, and tenths, and impropriations, but in such a spirit as showed that it would be unsafe to urge them to further concessions in that direction. When ministers had brought up a bill of penalties, and for the sequestering of the property of the Duchess of Suffolk (first cousin of the queen, and mother of Lady Jane Grey), "and others contemptuously gone over the seas," * the Commons rejected it on the third reading; and they showed no more respect to another bill for incapacitating certain persons, who were not sufficiently diligent in the detecting and prosecuting of heretics, from acting as justices of the peace. After a short session, the queen dissolved parliament on the 9th of December. During the session Bishop Gardiner, the chancellor, had gone to his final account. He attended at the opening of the Houses, and displayed his usual ability and energy; but on the third day his bodily sufferings obliged him to quit his post, and he expired of a painful disease on the 12th of November. The great seal was given to another ecclesiastic-to Heath, Archbishop of York; but, though keen in the persecuting of Protestants, the new chancellor had not the talent and address of the old one.

Journals.-The duchess had been more guilty than her husband in the usurpation of Lady Jane; but at a very early stage she made her peace with the court, and was even entertained for a while in a friendly manner by Queen Mary. It was alleged that she had fled abroad for her religion.

Journals.-Holinshed.-Stow.

more money.

Meanwhile (A.D. 1556) Mary's unthankful husband kept pressing her for money, and still To make up for the scanty supplies voted by parliament, she and her new chancellor had recourse to a variety of illegal and violent expedients. At first one thousand persons were named on account of their wealth and their real or supposed affection to the queen, and upon these was levied a loan of sixty thousand pounds: then a general loan was exacted from every person in the kingdom possessed of twenty pounds a-year,—a burden that fell heavily on the country gentry, who were obliged to pay: then sixty thousand marks were levied on seven thousand yeomen who had not paid their quota to the former loan; and thirty-six thousand pounds more were exacted from the merchants. In the blind eagerness of this insane government the commerce of the country was checked and embarrassed in all kinds of ways; and even the goods of foreigners, which they had bought and paid for in the London market, were seized or put under embargo, that some unheard-of duty might be raised upon them. On one occasion the queen prohibited for four months the exporting of any English cloth to the Netherlands, in order that certain merchant adventurers of London, with whom she had bargained for a large sum, might have the opportunity of selling at a great advantage the goods which they had already exported to that country. When the English company settled in Antwerp refused her a loan of forty thousand pounds, she concealed her resentment till immense quantities of their cloth and kerseys were shipped for Antwerp fair, and she then laid an embargo on the whole,-ships and goods, and obliged the merchants to agree to lend her sixty thousand pounds, and to submit to an imposition of twenty shillings on each piece of goods. On another occasion she prohibited the foreign merchants in England from making any exportation, receiving a large sum from the English merchants for the monopoly they acquired by this iniquitous and most absurd interposition. All the money was spent as soon as got; the mass of it went to her husband or to Rome; and Mary then attempted to borrow money abroad from the great trading cities, but her credit was so low, that, though she offered fourteen per cent., none would lend, until she compelled the city of London to be security for her.*

It appears that the court calculated that when Cranmer should be no longer supported by the more courageous spirit of Ridley and Latimer he would temporise, as he had done before, and, in the fear of death, take such steps as would cover himself with infamy and bring discredit on the whole Protestant party; and that for these express reasons he was left alive. It should be mentioned, however, that there were other reasons, and that, as a metropolitan, his case was reserved for the pope himself, the tribunal which had dispatched Cowper, Chron.-Godwin.-Strype,

the two suffragan bishops not being competent, in canonical law, to take cognizance of it. By a grievous mockery the pope cited this close prisoner at Oxford to appear at Rome and answer for his heresies. At the end of the eighty days, having taken no care, as it was said in the papal instrument, to appear at Rome, he was pronounced guilty, and Bonner, Bishop of London, and Thirlby, Bishop of Ely, were appointed commissioners to degrade him, and to see the sentence executed upon him. Bonner, in the process of degradation, is said to have insulted his victim in the grossest manner, and to have testified great joy and exultation. Cranmer, who was delivered over to the secular power, for by a delicate fiction the persecuting church was never the executor of its own sentences, trembled at the near approach of a horrible death, and betrayed that weakness upon which his enemies had calculated. He had written in abject terms to the queen before, and, by receiving the visits in his cell, and listening to the arguments, of a learned Spanish monk,-a certain friar Soto-and other Catholics, he seems to have wished that it should be believed he was still open to conviction. He now renewed his applications for mercy, and turned a ready ear to those who suggested that mercy might be obtained, but only by recantation. It was a vital point with his enemies to lead him to this; and, if the truth is told, they proceeded with a dexterity and malice truly infernal, softening the hardships of his captivity, which might have rendered death less terrible, and giving him again to taste of the pleasures of life. They removed him to the house of the Dean of Christchurch, where he fared delicately, and was allowed to play at bowls and walk about at his pleasure: they told him that the queen loved him and only wished for his conversion; that the council were rather his friends than enemies, and would be glad to see him among them in honour and dignity. But the argument which probably had most weight of all, and which was likely to suggest itself to such a mind daily and nightly, was that he was not so advanced in life but that many years might in the course of nature remain to him of a lusty old age. Latimer, who had met death so boldly, was an aged, a very aged, man, sick and infirm, and so he only threw away, for conscience' sake, a few months, or weeks, or days, of a suffering life; but he, Cranmer, was only in his sixty-seventh year, and sound in bodily health! Not to dwell upon this miserable scene, in which, after all, Cranmer excites rather pity and compassion than contempt, and in which he is far more easily excused than in many others of his preceding career, he formally renounced the faith he had taught, and, as his enemies were not satisfied with his signature to one scroll, he signed recantation after recantation until the number amounted to six!* But if we make a charitable

Strype has published them all. See Eccles. Memor. iv. 40%, &c. A part of Strype's Preface to these papers is worth quoting:"Our writers mention only one recantation, and that Fox hath set down, wherein they follow him. But this is but an imperfect rela

and a proper allowance for the weakness of human nature in the case of the victim, we can make none for the diabolical malice of his persecutors, who, when they had thus, as they conceived, loaded him with eternal obloquy, led him to the stake. While the monks and the learned doctors at Oxford were in great jubilee at having brought down to the very mire one of the proudest columns of the reformed church, Mary sent secret orders to Dr. Cole, provost of Eton College, to prepare his condemned sermon. On the 21st of March the prisoner was brought up to St. Mary's Church, where Cole explained in the sermon that' repentance does not avert all punishment, as examples in the bible proved; that Cranmer had done the church and the Roman Catholics so much mischief that he must die; and that their majesties had, besides, other good reasons for burning him. The fallen primate of England had learned the day before what was intended for him, and, having no longer the slightest hope of life, he seems to have summoned up resolution to meet his inevitable doom like a man. It is said that a prescribed speech was expected from him, in which he should publicly repeat his renunciation of Protestantism; but this appears to us rather doubtful, for the persecuting clergy knew their business too well to count even upon a simple recantation, except as the price of pardon or of life; and they had told Cranmer that he must burn. Some few mentheir number was wonderfully small considering that death of torture-had recanted when brought to the stake and offered the queen's pardon on that condition; but it was not to be expected that any one would do so when there was no offer of pardon, but, on the contrary, a certain assurance of death. Accordingly, Cranmer acted as every man would have done in the like situation: he renounced the pope and all his doctrines, he gave a brief summary of his real faith,―he protested against the atrocious means which had been used,-he accused himself of having, from fear of death, sacrificed truth and his conscience by subscribing the recantations. It was not convenient to permit him to make a long address: he was soon pulled down from the platform in the church on which he stood, and hurried away to the same ditch, over against Baliol College, where his more fortunate friends, Ridley and Latimer, had suffered five months before. He was stripped to the shirt, and tied to the stake he made no moan or useless prayer for tion of this good man's frailty; I shall therefore endeavour here to set down this piece of his history more distinctly. There were several recanting writings, to which Cranmer subscribed, one after another; for after the unhappy bishop, by over-persuasion, wrote one paper with his subscription set to it, which he thought to pen so favourably and dexterously for himself that he might evade both the danger from the state and the danger of his conscience too, that would not serve, but another was required as explanatory of that; and, when he had complied with that, yet, either because writ too briefly or too ambiguously, neither would that serve, but drew on a third, yet fuller and more expressive than the former. Nor could he escape so, but still a fourth and a fifth paper of recantation was demanded of him, to be more large and more particular; nay, and lastly, a sixth, which was very prolix, containing an acknowledg ment of all the forsaken and detested errors and superstitions of Rome, an abhorrence of his own books, and a vilifying of himself as a persecutor, a blasphemer, a mischief-maker, nay, and as the wickedest wretch that lived."

mercy in this world: the death which he had so dreaded, and for so long a time, seemed less dreadful when he saw it face to face. As soon as the flames began to rise he thrust into them his right hand, that erring hand which had signed the recantations. "When the fire raged more fiercely his body abided as immoveable as the stake whereto he was fastened, and, lifting up his eyes towards heaven, he exclaimed, Lord receive my spirit!' and soon expired." ."* The Romish church

of England, with all its absolute hopes, may almost be said to have perished in the flames that consumed Cranmer. The impression made by his martyrdom was immense, and as lasting as it was wide and deep. On the side of the Catholics, the putting him to death was as gross an error in policy as it was atrocious and detestable as a crime. "Had the malignity of his enemies been directed rather against his reputation than his life, had the reluctant apostate been permitted to survive his shame, a prisoner in the Tower,-it must have been a more arduous task to defend the memory of Cranmer; but his fame was brightened in the fire that consumed him."+

On the very day after Cranmer's death, Cardinal Pole, who had now taken priest's orders, was consecrated and installed Archbishop of Canterbury. But, though primate and papal legate, and fully convinced of the atrocity and worse than uselessness of persecution, he could not change the temper of the queen, nor stay the bloody hands of her favourites and ministers. Paul IV., who now wore the tiara, had been his personal enemy; and Pole, who apparently had not more courage than Cranmer, seems to have stood in awe of his fierce and intolerant spirit. On the 27th of June thirteen persons, being condemned for opinions concerning the sacrament, were burnt at Stratford-le-Bow. In all, eighty-four persons of both sexes are said to have been martyred this year by fire. "Neither did their cruelty exercise itself on the living only: the bones of Martin Bucer and Paul Phagius, long since dead, were dug up, formally accused of heresy, and, no man undertaking their cause (as who durst?), condemned, and publicly burned in the market-place at Cambridge. And Peter Martyr's wife, who died at Oxford, was disinterred, and with barbarous and inhuman spite buried in a dunghill."§

In order that we may not have to return to this revolting subject, we will here throw together a few other incidents, in completion of the picture of Mary's persecutions. From the martyrdom of John Rogers, who suffered on the 4th of February, 1555, about six months after Mary's accession, to the five last victims, who were burned at Canterbury on the 10th of November, 1558, only seven days before her death, not fewer than two hundred and eighty-eight individuals, among whom were five bishops, twenty-one clergymen, fifty-five

Godwin.-Burnet.-Strype.-Blunt, Sketch of the Reformation.
Hallam, Constitutional History of England.
Stow.
§ Godwin,

women, and four children, were burned in different places for their religious opinions; and, in addition. to these, there were several hundreds who were tortured, ruined in their goods and estates, and many poor and friendless victims that were left to die of hunger in their prisons. With the exception of some few of the churchmen, these individuals were almost entirely of the middling or humbler classes, the rich and great, as we have noticed, and as has been observed by several writers before us, showing little disposition to martyrdom. Only eight laymen of the rank of gentlemen are named; but it would be unjust to represent all the aristocracy as supple hypocrites, though they did not expose themselves voluntarily to persecution. The earls of Oxford and Westmoreland and Lord Willoughby got into trouble, and were censured by the council for religion; and the second earl of Bedford suffered a short imprisonment. Among those who were said to have "contemptuously gone over the seas," there were several persons of rank, whose property and interests suffered during their forced travels on the continent. Other individuals, who held profitable places under government, voluntarily resigned them, and retired to the obscurity of a country life. Even Sir Ralph Sadler, the unscrupulous diplomatist, gave up his appointments and withdrew to the then quiet little village of Hackney, his native place, and there remained till the accession of Elizabeth, when his craft and talents were again brought into play for the support of the Protestant interests. In his case, no doubt, there was a reasonable apprehension of the odium and malice which the Catholics must have borne to him as one who had grown wealthy on the spoils of the church; and this feeling may have had its influence on many others in the like circumstances. But yet there were some, who had partaken far more largely than Sadler in the spoils of the abbeys, and who yet remained about the court, and even obtained a certain degree of royal favour by entering zealously into the spirit of Mary's persecution. The politic Cecil, who in heart and in head detested the course pursued, which he saw to be as bad in a political as in a religious light, conformed outwardly to what he could not resist; and it is said that he drew the line of conduct for the Princess Elizabeth, recommending humility and obedience, and certain compliances with the times. But it is quite certain that Elizabeth possessed a natural turn both for simulation and dissimulation, and that she scarcely stood in need of a guide and instructor in these particulars. She opened a chapel in her house, as commanded; she entertained mass-priests; she kept a large crucifix constantly suspended in her chamber; she worked with her own hands garments for saints and Madonnas; and, when permitted to visit the court, and take part in the entertainments, she also, as a price paid therefore, accompanied the queen in her religious processions, which were conducted with great pomp, and in her visits to the re-Catholicized churches, which were in part

VOL. II.

restored to more than their antient magnificence. If Elizabeth entertained in her heart a contempt for these ceremonials and observances, it was essential to her safety that she should keep it there, though it was not very easy for her to preserve that dangerous secret, and her other secrets of a political nature; for, though she enjoyed apparent liberty, she was in fact surrounded with spies and guards, so that it was supposed that nobody could come or go to her house, that nothing could be done or spoken there, but it was made known to the queen. Elizabeth suffered more annoyance

*

and persecution in the way of matrimony than on account of religion. Philip, who was most anxious to remove her by marriage out of the kingdom, proposed, and in fact insisted, that she should give her hand to the Duke of Savoy, who came into England to press his own suit; but the princess obstinately refused, and had the art or good fortune to gain over to her side her sister Mary, who rarely opposed the wishes of her husband. Soon after the King of Sweden tried to obtain her hand for his eldest son Eric. The Swedish ambassador intrusted with this delicate mission was directed by his sovereign to make his application directly to Elizabeth herself, by a message in which neither the queen nor her council was at present to participate. Elizabeth, who confidently looked to the succession of the English crown, as one well aware of the state of Mary's health and of her own great popularity with a large portion of the nation, not only rejected the suit, but resolved to turn the gallant and generous mode in which it was opened by the Swede to her own immediate advantage. She declared that she could never listen to any overtures of this nature which had not previously received the sanction of her majesty. Her majesty was charmed at this declaration, and the two sisters thenceforward lived in tolerable friendship. Elizabeth, who lavished her protestations of gratitude for her majesty's goodness,her acknowledgments that she was bound to honour, serve, love, and obey her highness in all things,passed the greater part of the remainder of her sister's reign at her pleasant manor of Hatfield, with few privations and no personal hardships to endure, but not without an almost constant dread of being implicated by the discovery of plots in which it seems almost certain that she secretly partook, or ruined by the rashness of some of her friends. A tender heart might have been racked and tortured by the fate of others; and in one particular case the royally dull feelings of Elizabeth must have been touched. Sir John Cheke, one of the finest scholars of that period, one of the best of men if he had risen above the intolerance and persecuting spirit of his age, had been preceptor to her brother King Edward, and had assisted in her own education. Sir John got free from the Tower, into which he was thrown for the part he had taken

• Relazione, by Michele, the Venetian ambassador.-Dispatches of Noailles, the French ambassador.-The Venetian says that, though Elizabeth was living Catholically (vivendo Cattolicamente), yet it was thought that she was only dissimulating.

in the affair of Lady Jane Grey, but all his landed property was confiscated. Having obtained her majesty's permission to travel on the continent for a limited period, he went to Switzerland, and stayed some time at Basil, where an English congregation was established. Led by his love of classical lore, he crossed the Alps into Italy, and even visited Rome, the head-quarters of the religion which he had attacked, without molestation, and apparently without risk. In the beginning of 1556 he reached Strasburgh, whence he addressed a letter to his dear friend and brother-in-law, Sir William Cecil, imploring him to hold fast his Protestant faith, and "take heed how he did in the least warp or strain his conscience by any compliance for his worldly security. From Strasburgh Sir John Cheke privately repaired on a visit to his two learned friends Lord Paget and Sir John Mason, who were then Mary's ambassadors in Flanders. Both these men were recent court converts to Catholicism, and Paget had testified great zeal. The fact is not clear, but it appears probable that his lordship betrayed his old friend, for on his return, between Brussels and Antwerp, Cheke, with his companion Sir Peter Carew, was arrested by a provost marshal of King Philip, bound hand and foot, thrown into a cart, and conveyed to a vessel which was about to sail for England. It seems that his leave of absence had expired, and that there was no new political offence to be alleged against him except his not returning home at the time fixed. But in these cruel proceedings the queen and her husband, and the zealots of their party, aimed at a high object. Cheke, though a layman, had done almost as much as Cranmer in consolidating the Protestant church, and it was resolved to force him to recant like Cranmer. Gagged and muffled, he was thrown into the Tower, and, to escape the stake and the miseries to which he was subjected, he signed three ample recantations, and publicly proclaimed his acceptance of all the tenets and doctrines of the Roman church. But this was not deemed price enough for a liberation from prison to shame and obloquy: he was made to applaud the heavenly mercy of his persecutors; nay, it is said that he was obliged to take his seat on the bench by the side of Bishop Bonner and assist that English inquisitor in sentencing his brother Protestants to the flames at Smithfield. Shame, remorse, and affliction caused this accomplished man to die in the forty-seventh year of his age, of a death more terrible than burning.

Although that institution never obtained a name or formal establishment in England, all the worst practices of the Inquisition were adopted. An ecclesiastical commission was appointed, without authority of parliament, for the effectual extirpation of heresy. The commissioners were empowered to inquire into all heresies, either by presentments, by witnesses, or by any other political way they could devise,-to seize the bringers in, the sellers, the readers of all heretical books,-to examine and

punish all misbehaviour in any church or chapel, and negligence in attending mass, confession, and the rest, to try all priests that did not preach pure Roman orthodoxy, and if they found any that did obstinately persist in their heresies, they were to put them into the hands of their ordinaries, to be punished according to the spiritual laws. The commissioners had also full power to break open houses, to search premises, to compel the attendance of witnesses, "and to force them to make oath of such things as might discover what they sought after."* It appears, from letters

written to Lord North and others, that there was a standing order "to put to the torture such obstinate persons as would not confess." Informers were encouraged and courted; so that nearly every villain could gratify his spite on his personal enemies by accusing them of heresy or of disrespectful words; and, at the same time, secret spies were retained, who not only frequented public places, but also invaded the sacred privacy of domestic life. The justices of the peace received instructions to call secretly before them one or two honest persons within their districts, or more, at their discretion, and impose on them, by oath or otherwise, the duty of secretly learning and searching out such persons as "evil behaved themselves" in church, or that spoke against the king's or queen's proceedings. And it was set down in the same diabolical instructions, "that the information shall be given secretly to the justices; and the same justices shall call the accused persons before them, and examine them, without declaring by whom they are accused."+ Although the character of the upper classes of society had been wofully deteriorated, the naturally frank and generous spirit of the English people revolted at such practices; and not the hundredth part of the mischief was done which might have been expected from the establishing of such a system. Many-perhaps most -of the justices of the peace avoided the execution of the queen's orders, and the parliament would not assist her in enforcing them. This was the period of persecution for religious opinions; the efforts and the success of Luther, Calvin, and the other Reformers, had excited a fury among the Catholics which nothing short of blood and life could allay. The penal fires were blazing from one end of Europe to the other; and, terrible as was the brief rage of Mary's reign, England, as compared with most other Christian countries, was singularly fortunate. Mary's care for the souls of her subjects did not improve their morals. Without going to the full length of some Protestant writers, we may assert, upon good evidence, that crime was on the increase, and that capital offences,

• Burnet.

+ Ibid.

According to Fra Paolo, in the Netherlands alone fifty thousand persons were hanged, beheaded, buried alive, or burned, on account of religion; and in France, even before the massacre of St. Bartholomew, the number of victims who suffered death in the same cause was to be stated, not, as in England, by hundreds, but by thousands. In Germany, besides the happier tens of thousands who perished in battle fighting for the privilege of worshipping God in their own way, thousands died on the scaffold, in the flames, and in dungeons; and, as yet, the liberty of conscience was insecure.