FOOTNOTE:
[31] Lady Jane Grey, granddaughter and heiress of Charles and Mary.
CHAPTER XXII.
THE ENGLISH REFORMATION.
1536-1553.
The breach between England and Rome had become irreparable when Henry executed More and Fisher, and when Pope Paul had declared the king deposed. The Church of England had now seceded from the Roman obedience, and organized herself as an independent body with the sovereign as her Supreme Head. The secession had been carried out entirely on the king's initiative, but the nation had acquiesced in it because of the old and long-felt abuses of which the papacy had always been the maintainer. King and people alike wished to make an end of the customs by which the Pope had profited,—his vast gains from the annates of English sees and benefices; his habit of appointing non-resident Italians to the richest English preferments; his power of summoning litigants on ecclesiastical matters before the distant, costly, and corrupt Church courts at Rome. It was generally thought that when England freed herself from the Roman obedience, she would be able to reform in peace all the faults and abuses which disfigured her ecclesiastical system. Further than this the majority of the nation did not at first wish to go; they had not ceased to be Catholics, though they were no longer Roman Catholics. Only a comparatively small section of the English people had yet been affected by the later developments of Continental Protestantism.
German Protestantism.
But the conditions of the English and the Germans at the moment when both threw off the yoke of Rome, were sufficiently similar to make it inevitable that the theories of the Continental Reformers would ere long begin to act upon English minds. The German protest against the papacy had taken shape in the declaration that the Bible alone was the rule by which Christian men should order their lives—that the tradition of the mediaeval Church, which supplemented the teaching of the Gospels, was dangerous, full of errors and superstitions, and often directly opposed to scriptural precept. Mediaeval traditions were the bulwark of the Roman see, and ere long we find King Henry and his bishops following the Germans into this position, and basing the reform of the English Church on the Bible, and the Bible alone. But when tradition was rejected and the Scriptures taken as the sole test of all doctrines, further development became inevitable. There soon arose Reformers in England, as on the Continent, who could not find in their Bibles any justification for some of the doctrines to which King Henry clung most obstinately, and most of all for the dogma of Transubstantiation, round which the Roman Church had built up its main claim to rule the souls of men.
Doctrine of transubstantiation.
This doctrine concerning "the Sacrifice of the Mass," as commonly held at this time in the Western Church, taught that, at the celebration of the Holy Communion, when the priest had consecrated the sacramental bread and wine, the very flesh and blood of Christ became carnally and corporeally present in the chalice and patten—that the bread and wine were no longer bread and wine, but had been transubstantiated into Christ's own body, which was day by day offered up in sacrifice for the sins of the world. The Pope and the priesthood, by their power of granting or refusing the sacrament to the laity, stood as the sole mediators between God and man. The Continental Protestants, cut off from the main body of the Western Church by the Pope's ban, had formulated theories which struck at the roots of the power of the clergy. Many of them treated the sacrament of the Lord's Supper as no more than a solemn ceremony, denying any sacramental character to the rite. The majority of the early English Protestants fell into this extreme view.
Attitude of the king.
Now Henry VIII. to the end of his days stood firm to the mediaeval doctrine of the sacrament, and fully accepted Transubstantiation, though he denied the deduction which the Roman Church had drawn from it—that by it the Pope and clergy are the despotic masters of the souls of men. He merely desired to place himself in the position which the Pope had hitherto held, as head of the spiritual hierarchy of England. With the pliant Cranmer and other bishops of his own to serve him, he wished to become as despotic a sovereign over the souls of Englishmen as he already was over their bodies. To a great extent he succeeded, and for the last twelve years of his reign he exercised a hateful spiritual tyranny over his subjects, drawing a hard-and-fast line of submission to his own views, which no man was allowed to overstep in either direction. Roman Catholics who denied his power to supersede the Pope's authority were hung as traitors. Protestants who refused to accept his theory of the Sacraments were burnt as heretics.
The monasteries.
The turning-point of Henry's reign was the turbulent and boisterous year 1536-7. In pursuance of his plan of a campaign against the papacy, disguised under the shape of a reform of abuses, Henry had resolved to attack the monasteries. The monks had long been an unpopular class: the impulse towards monasticism, which had been so vigorous in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, had long died away, and ever since the time of Wicliffe men had been asking each other what was the use of the monasteries? There were no less than 619 of them in England. They were enormously wealthy, and they did little to justify their existence; they had long ceased to be centres of learning or of teaching. Beyond going through their daily round of mechanical Church services, their inmates did absolutely nothing. Their wealth had led to much luxury, both of splendid building and of high living. To this day the traveller who measures the ruins of enormous and sumptuous abbeys planted in the wilderness—like Tintern or Fountains—and learns that they served no public or spiritual end save the sheltering of a few dozen monks, wonders at the magnificence of the husk which contained so small and withered a kernel. But the monasteries were worse than useless—they were absolutely harmful; their worst habit was to acquire rich country livings, draw all the tithes from them, and work them with a vicar on starvation wages. If we see a poor living in modern England, we generally find that the monks sucked the marrow out of it in the Middle Ages, to rear their colossal chapels and their magnificent refectories. It was the monasteries, too, which by their indiscriminate doles and charities, reared and fostered the horde of itinerant beggars who, under the name of pilgrims, tramped from abbey to abbey all the year round. Worse than this, there is no doubt that a considerable amount of evil living prevailed in some of the monasteries. Before the Reformation had been heard of, we find Archbishop Warham and Cardinal Wolsey storming at the immorality of certain religious houses. It was but natural that idleness, luxury, and high living should breed such results among the grosser souls in the monastic corporations. In public esteem the better houses suffered for the sins of the worse.
Inquiry into their condition.
The monks had always been the faithful allies of the Popes, and Henry determined to suppress this "papal militia," as they have been called, and at the same time to fill his pockets from their plunder. Accordingly, he sent commissioners round England, to report on the state of the religious houses. These officials—as the king had wished—drew up a very gloomy report. They declared that they found nothing but idleness and corruption among the smaller monasteries, and that many of the greater were no better. There can be no doubt that they grossly exaggerated the blackness of the picture, knowing that the king would welcome all possible justification for the action which he was meditating. But it is equally certain that in most parts of England the monks were deservedly unpopular, and that the commissioners' report only reflected the nation's belief.
The lesser monasteries suppressed.
Henry laid the report before his Parliament, and at his suggestion an act was passed suppressing the lesser monasteries—all such as had an income of less than £200 per annum. Their goods were confiscated to the Crown, but an allowance was made to such of the monks as did not find places in the surviving monasteries of the larger sort (1536).
Henry and Anne Boleyn.
The year of the dissolution of small monasteries was notable for a tragedy in the palace, which shows Henry's unlovely character at its worst. He had been growing cold to the fair and ambitious queen who had brought on him his quarrel with Rome. She had disappointed his hope of a male heir—only the Princess Elizabeth had sprung from the marriage. Henry had tired of her voluptuous airs and graces, and was beginning to feel vexed at the want of dignity and decorum which she displayed among his courtiers. Anne's light words and unseemly familiarity with many of the gentlemen of his household roused his anger. But what was most fatal to the unfortunate queen was that his eye had caught another face about the court, which now seemed to him more attractive than his wife's.
Anne's execution.—Marriage with Jane Seymour.
Suddenly and unexpectedly the storm burst. On May 2, 1536, the king sent Anne to the Tower, and charged her with misconduct with several members of his household. Protesting her innocence and amazement to the last, the unhappy young wife was tried, condemned, and executed, within a space of less than three weeks from her arrest. Her own father and uncle sat on the bench of peers which declared her an adulteress; but the fact witnesses to their shame and cowardice rather than to her criminality. In all probability she was guilty of nothing more than unwise levity; her real crime was not adultery, but standing in the way of Henry's lawless desires. With the most unseemly haste, the king wedded Jane Seymour, the lady who had already attracted his notice, the moment that his wretched second wife had breathed her last.
Rebellion in Ireland and the North.
But he had small leisure to spend on his wedding, for the year 1536 was one of great peril to him. A rebellion in Ireland, led by the Fitzgeralds, the greatest of the Anglo-Irish nobles, was already in progress. A still more dangerous phenomenon was the stir which was arising in the North of England. The Northern counties were always a generation behind the rest of England in their politics. There the monks were more powerful and less disliked than in any other part of the land, and the nobles still retained much of their old feudal power over their vassals, and some of their old turbulence. The North had beheld the breach with Rome with dismay and dislike, and remained strongly Papist in its sympathies. The dissolution of the monasteries moved it to an active protest against the king's religious action.
The Pilgrimage of Grace.
Rioting suddenly broke out in Lincolnshire, and then in Yorkshire. The insurgents gathered in great bands, and at last no less than 30,000 men mustered at Doncaster, under Robert Aske, a lawyer, and Lord Darcy. They called themselves the army of the Church, raised a banner displaying the five wounds of Christ as their standard, and demanded a reconciliation with the Pope, the restoration of the religious houses, and the dismissal of the king's impious minister Cromwell, and the "heretic bishops" who had favoured the breach with Rome. The gentry of the North and the priors and abbots of the great abbeys of Yorkshire joined the rising, which men called "the Pilgrimage of Grace," because the rebels wished to go to meet the king, and to submit their demands to his personal judgment. Henry was caught unprepared, but he managed to extricate himself from the peril by his unscrupulous double-dealing. He sent the Duke of Norfolk, whose dislike of Protestantism was well known, to treat with the rebels. Norfolk pledged his word that the king would pardon the insurgents, and take all their demands into favourable consideration. The simple Northerners dispersed, trusting to Henry's good faith; but the king employed the time he had gained in raising an army, and getting together a great train of artillery. He then marched into Yorkshire as an invader, and made no further pretence of listening to the claims of the insurgents. In consequence, the more vehement of the partisans of the old faith again took arms. This was as Henry desired, for he wanted an excuse to terrorize the North. He easily put down the second rising, and hung all the leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace: Aske, Lord Darcy, Lord Hussey, and the abbots of all the greatest monastic establishments of the North—Whalley, Fountains, Jervaulx, Barlings, and Sawley (March-May, 1537).
Execution of the Marquis of Exeter and Henry Pole.
This fearful blow cowed most of the partisans of the papacy, and no more open revolts followed. But a little later the last representatives of the house of York were detected in paths which the king suspected to be treasonable. They thought, it seems, that the indignation of the Catholics against the king's doings might be turned into a dynastic revolution in favour of the old royal line. Edward Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, a grandson of Edward IV., and Henry Pole, Lord Montagu, a grandson of George of Clarence, were the persons implicated in this intrigue, which never got beyond the stage of treasonable talk. Nevertheless, the king beheaded them both, though the evidence against them was most imperfect; but Henry never stayed his hand for want of legal proof, and slew all whom he suspected. He even imprisoned, and some years afterwards executed, the aged mother of Lord Montagu—Margaret of Clarence, Countess of Salisbury, sister of the unfortunate Edward of Clarence, whom his father had slain forty-one years back.
The Irish rebellion crushed.
The insurrection in Ireland, which had been raging at the same time as the Pilgrimage of Grace, ended in a way no less profitable to the king. Not only did he capture and hang well-nigh the whole family of the Fitzgeralds of Kildare, the heads of the rising, but his armies, under Lord-Deputy Grey, pushed out from the English Pale, and compelled most of the chiefs of Munster and Connaught to do homage to the Crown, though the king's writ had not run in those provinces for two centuries. This was the first step towards the conquest of Ireland afterwards carried out by Queen Elizabeth.
Growth of Protestantism. Tyndale's Bible.
Meanwhile Henry's determination to strike at all the roots of papal power in England, had been carrying him further than he himself realized on the road towards Protestantism. The "Articles of 1536," drawn up by his own hand, declared that all doctrines and ceremonies for which authority could not be found in the Bible, were superstitious and erroneous. As a logical consequence of this declaration, the Bible itself, translated into English, was issued to the people by royal order in 1538, and ordered to be placed in every church. The translation used was that made by a zealous Protestant, William Tyndale, who had printed it in Antwerp some years before; the unfortunate translator had been caught and burnt by the Emperor Charles V., only a short time before his book became the rule of life for Englishmen.
The greater monasteries suppressed.
When the Bible had once been placed in the hands of the people, Protestantism in England began to advance by leaps and bounds. It was secretly favoured both by Archbishop Cranmer and by the king's great minister Cromwell. The latter, more logical than his master, wished to see all traces of Roman Catholicism removed from England, and tried to guide the king towards a frank recognition of Protestantism, and an alliance with the Lutheran princes of Germany. But it was dangerous work to endeavour to govern or persuade Henry, as Cromwell was to find to his cost. One more step at least he did induce his master to take—the final destruction of all the remaining monasteries. The plunder of the lesser houses had been so profitable, that Henry was easily induced to doom the greater to the same fate. In the course of 1538-9-40 all were swept away; in many cases, the abbots and monks were induced to surrender their estates peaceably into the king's hands, in return for pensions or promotion. But where persuasion failed, force was used; an Act of Parliament was passed by Henry's submissive Commons, bestowing on him the lands of all monastic foundations. Then they were suppressed—the harmless and well-ordered ones no less than the worst and most corrupt. When the monks offered obstinate resistance, the king dealt very cruelly with them—the wealthy abbots of Glastonbury, Reading, and Colchester, were all hung, really for reluctance to surrender their houses, nominally for treason in refusing to acknowledge the king's complete spiritual supremacy as head of the Church. The enormous plunder of the monasteries brought the king little permanent good; he had promised to use it for ecclesiastical purposes, and had broached a scheme for founding many new churches and schools, and creating twenty fresh bishoprics. But in the end he lavished most of the lands of the religious houses upon those of the nobles and gentry whom he thought worth bribing. The Church only benefited by the endowing of the six new bishoprics—Oxford, Chester, Peterborough, Bristol, Gloucester, and the short-lived see of Westminster.
The Six Articles.
But Henry was resolved to show the Protestants that they must not expect his countenance, in spite of the blows which he was dealing at the Roman Catholics. In the very year in which the majority of the greater monasteries fell, he forced his Parliament to pass the cruel "Bill of the Six Articles." This odious measure condemned to forfeiture on the first offence, and to death on the second, all who should write or speak against certain of the ancient doctrines of the mediaeval Church, of which Transubstantiation in the Sacrament, the celibacy of the clergy, and auricular confession were the chief (1539).
Birth of a son. Death of Jane Seymour.
Meanwhile the king had at last obtained the male heir for whom he had so much longed. His third wife, Jane Seymour, bore him a son, Prince Edward, in 1537, though she died at the child's birth. On this boy all Henry's fondness was lavished: he was to be the sole heir to the throne, and his sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, were both stigmatized as illegitimate.
Marriage with Anne of Cleves.
After he had mourned Queen Jane for two years, Henry wished to marry again. By Cromwell's persuasion he sought a wife among the Protestant princes of Germany, thinking so to strengthen himself against the Emperor Charles, who never to his death forgave him the matter of Catherine of Aragon's divorce. To his own ruin, Cromwell persuaded the king to choose Anne, sister of Duke William of Cleves, as his fourth spouse. The lady was plain and stupid—facts which Cromwell carefully concealed from his master till she had been solemnly betrothed to him and brought over to England. Henry was bitterly provoked when he was confronted with his new queen, and could not behave with ordinary civility to her. When he learnt that the German alliances which he was to buy with his marriage had fallen through, he repudiated the unfortunate Anne. She was fortunately of a philosophic mood, and readily consented to be bought off for a large annual pension and a handsome residence at Chelsea.
Execution of Cromwell.
Henry at once wreaked his vengeance on Cromwell for deceiving him as to Anne and for failing in his negotiations with the German princes. He had him arrested, and accused him of receiving bribes and of having favoured the Protestants by "dispersing heretical books and secretly releasing heretics from prison." Both charges were probably true, but they form no excuse for Henry's cruel treatment of the faithful and intrepid minister who had helped him through all the troubles of 1536-40. Cromwell was attainted and beheaded, to the great joy of the Roman Catholics, who thought that he had been the king's tempter and evil genius, whereas in truth he had been no more than his tool.
Marriages with Catherine Howard and Catherine Parr.
Cromwell's end greatly encouraged the Roman Catholic party, and they were still more elated when the king married a lady known to incline towards the old faith. This was Catherine Howard, a cousin of Anne Boleyn and, like her, a niece of the Duke of Norfolk (1540). Henry had been caught by her beauty, and had not discovered that she was a person of abandoned manners, whose amours were known to many persons about the court. Within eighteen months of her marriage, she was detected in misconduct with one of her old lovers, and sent to the block. In her case Henry had much more excuse for his ruthless cruelty than in that of Anne Boleyn; but what kind of wives could a monarch of such manners expect to find? He was undeservedly fortunate in his sixth marriage, with Catherine Parr, the dowager Lady Latimer, whom he wedded a year after Catherine Howard's execution. She was a young widow of twenty-six, a person of piety and discretion, who gave no opportunity of offence to the king, and nursed him faithfully through the infirmities of his later years. For Henry, who had now reached the age of fifty-two, was growing grossly corpulent and developing a complication of diseases which racked him fearfully during the last five years of his life, and partly explain the frantic exhibitions of cruelty to which he often gave way.
Scottish war.—Battle of Solway Moss.
The time was a very evil one for England. Not only was the king persecuting Romanist and Protestant indifferently, but he had added external to internal troubles. A war with Scotland had broken out in 1540, and was always keeping the northern frontier unquiet, though the English had the better in the fighting. James V. allied himself to France, and Henry had to keep guard against attacks on the south as well as the north. The victory of Solway Moss (November, 1542) put an end to any danger from Scotland; the news of it killed King James, who left his throne to his infant daughter Mary, the celebrated "Queen of Scots." Her minority gave rise to factious struggles among the Scottish nobles, and Henry, by buying over one party, was able to keep the rest in check. In 1544 a great English army, under the Earl of Hertford, Jane Seymour's brother, laid waste the whole of the Lowlands and burnt Edinburgh, but did not succeed in driving the enemy to sue for peace.
War with France.
The French war was far more dangerous. King Francis collected a great fleet in Normandy, and threatened an invasion of England. Henry was forced to arm and pay a vast array of shire levies to meet the attack, but when it came (1545) the French were only able to land and make a raid in the Isle of Wight. They drew back after fruitlessly demonstrating against Portsmouth and burning a few English ships. The balance of gain in the war was actually in favour of Henry, who had taken Boulogne (1544), and proved able to retain it against all attempts, till it was ceded to him by France at the peace of 1546.
Debasement of the currency.
But the struggles with France and Scotland had the most disastrous effects on the finances of the realm. Henry had wasted all the wealth that he had wrested from the monasteries, and now, to fill his pockets, tried the unrighteous expedient of debasing the currency. English money, which had been hitherto the best and purest in Europe, was horribly misused by him. He put one-sixth of copper into the gold sovereign, and one-half and afterwards two-thirds of copper into the silver shilling, to the lamentable defrauding of his subjects, who found that English money would no longer be accepted by Continental traders, though previously it had been more esteemed than that of any other country.
Growth of pauperism.
The debasement of the coinage was only one of the many symptoms of misgovernment which embittered the end of Henry's reign. The general upheaval of society caused by the overthrow of the monasteries, and the sudden transfer of their enormous estates to new holders, had given rise to much distress. Not only were the paupers who had lived on the monks' doles, and the pilgrims who had been wont to wander from abbey to abbey, thrown on the world to beg, but many of the old tenant farmers were displaced. For the new owners often preferred sheep-breeding to agriculture, and drove out the cottiers who had been wont to hold a few acres under the old-fashioned management of the monastic bodies. Contemporary writers speak bitterly of the plague of "sturdy and valiant beggars" who flooded the land—unfrocked monks, pilgrims whose trade was over, disbanded soldiers, and evicted peasantry. The king and his Parliament issued the most ferocious laws against these vagrants—when apprehended they were to be branded, and given as serfs for two years to any one who chose to ask for their services. If caught a second time, they were liable to be hung as incorrigible.
Execution of the Earl of Surrey.
To complete this gloomy picture, there only remains to be added the story of the king's last outburst of suspicion and cruelty. Conceiving that the Duke of Norfolk and his son, the Earl of Surrey, were counting on his approaching death to make an attempt to seize the regency, he had them both apprehended, though nothing definite could be alleged against them, save that of late they had taken to quartering the royal arms in their family shield—a distinction to which they were entitled as descended from Edward III. Surrey, a soldier of great promise and a poet of considerable power, was beheaded; his father was doomed to follow him, had not the king's death intervened. It is even said that Henry, in one of his more irritable moods, was threatening to try his blameless wife, Queen Catherine, for concealed Protestantism.
Death of Henry.—Condition of England.
But to the general relief of England, Henry died before this last crime could be consummated (January 28, 1547). He left his realm in a condition of great misery, and for all its troubles he was personally responsible. His breach with the papacy had been the result of private pique, not of conscience or principle. When committed to the anti-Roman cause, he had refused to move forward with the one half of his subjects, or to remain behind with the other. He had anchored the English Church for a time in a middle position, intolerable alike to Protestant Reformers and to the Partisans of the Papacy and subjection to Rome. If the nation owed him a certain debt of gratitude for not committing England to some of the excesses of Continental Protestantism, yet it owed him no thanks for officering the Church with a hierarchy of bishops, some of whom, like Cranmer, were meanly timid and pliant, while others were men of low ideals and unworthy lives, the mere creatures of court favour. Nor is it possible to view with equanimity the way in which Henry wasted on pageants, foreign intrigues, and fawning courtiers, the vast sums which the State had acquired by the very proper and necessary abolition of the monasteries.
Of Henry's unbounded selfishness, of his ingratitude to those who had served him best, of his ruthless cruelty to all who stood in his way, we need not further speak. The story of his reign develops each of these traits in its own particular blackness.
Henry's foreign policy.
Some historians have endeavoured to justify Henry's wavering foreign policy, and all his forcible-feeble wars with Continental powers, by the plea that, if he got no gain in land or gold thereby, yet he raised England to a higher place among European nations than she had held in his father's day. But this statement seems unwise. Henry, though much flattered and courted at times, was in fact the mere dupe of Francis I. and Charles V., each of whom cheated him again and again, and left him hopelessly in the lurch. England's growing wealth and power would have won her back her proper place in Europe far better than Henry's chaotic intrigues. His whole foreign policy was a mistake and a tangle from first to last.
The regency.—The Duke of Somerset Protector.
It remained to be seen who would now sway the sword and sceptre that the dead tyrant had gripped so firmly. In his last years Henry had surrounded himself by ministers less notable and less capable than Wolsey or Cromwell. The chief place was held by his brother-in-law, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, the brother of the unfortunate Queen Jane, and the uncle of Prince Edward, the heir to the crown. It was natural that the charge of the young king—a bright and promising, but delicate lad, now in his tenth year—should fall to his uncle; but the late king, distrusting Hertford's wisdom, had left the regency, not to him individually, but to a council of sixteen members, of which he was but the president. Seymour, however, succeeded in getting a more complete control over his colleagues than had been intended, mainly by bribing them to consent with titles and large gifts of money. They allowed him to make himself "Protector of the realm and of the king's person," and to create himself Duke of Somerset. In return he made the two chief members of the council earls; Wriothsley, head of the Anglo-Catholic party, became Earl of Southampton; Dudley—son of that Dudley who had paid with his head for serving Henry VII. too well—was created Earl of Warwick.
Protestantism of Somerset.—First English Prayer-book.
Having seized the reins of power, the Duke of Somerset soon showed himself a man of a character very different from the late king's expectation. Instead of pursuing the middle course of Anglo-Catholic policy which Henry had always marked out, he threw himself at once into the hands of the Protestants. His first actions were directed towards the completion of the Reformation, by sweeping away all those remnants of the old faith which the late king had retained himself and imposed upon his subjects. Henry VIII. had issued the Bible in English, and caused the Litany and certain other parts of the Church service to be said in the national tongue. But Somerset abolished the use of the Latin language altogether, and caused the Communion Service and all the rest of the rites of the Church to be celebrated in English. By the end of 1548 he had authorized the issue of the "First Book of Common Prayer," the earliest form of our own Anglican Prayer-book. Cranmer had the chief part in its compilation, and his great gifts of expression are borne witness to by many of the most spiritual and beautiful prayers of our splendid and sonorous liturgy. When the fear of Henry had been removed from his mind, Cranmer showed himself an undoubted Protestant; but he was a moderate man, and spared many old rites and customs, harmless in themselves, from a love of conservatism. The Prayer-book was well received by all save the extreme Romanists, and the few partisans of Continental Protestantism who complained that it did not go far enough.
If the introduction of the English Prayer-book was both popular and necessary, it was far otherwise with the measures which accompanied it. Somerset's first year of rule was the time of the demolition of all the old church ornaments and furniture, which the Protestants condemned as mere idols and lumber. Not only were the images and pictures removed, but much beautiful carved work and stained glass was ruthlessly broken up. This was done with an irreverence and violence which deeply shocked the majority of the nation, and Somerset's agents made no distinction between monuments of superstition and harmless works of religious art. Two of the bishops, Bonner of London and Gardiner of Winchester, who ventured to oppose the Protector's doings, were placed in honourable confinement.
Invasion of Scotland.—Battle of Pinkie.
While England was disturbed with these changes, many of them rational and necessary, but all of them hasty and rash, Somerset had succeeded in plunging the realm into two foreign wars. The English party north of the Tweed had promised the hand of their little five-year-old Queen Mary to King Edward, but when they proved unable to fulfil their promise, owing to the hatred of the majority of the Scots for England, the Protector resolved to use coercive measures. He declared war, and invaded the Lowlands in the autumn of 1547, wasting the country before him till he was met by the whole levy of Scotland on the hillside of Pinkie, near Musselborough. There he inflicted on them a bloody defeat, but gained no advantage thereby; for the Scots sent their child-queen over to France, to keep her safe from English hands, and when she reached the court of Henry II. she was wedded to his son, the Dauphin Francis. Thus Somerset entirely lost the object of his campaign, and only earned the desperate hate of the Scots for the carnage of Pinkie.
Plots and Rebellions in England.
The war with Scotland brought about a war with France, in which the Protector wasted much money. The struggle went against the English, and ultimately led to the loss of Boulogne, the sole conquest of Henry VIII. While this war was in progress, Somerset was involved in serious troubles within the bounds of England itself. He detected his own brother, Lord Seymour of Sudely, plotting to marry the Princess Elizabeth, and oust him from the regency. Seymour was pardoned once, but, on renewing his conspiracy, was apprehended and beheaded. But domestic plots were less to be feared than popular risings. In 1548-49 two dangerous rebellions broke out in West and East. In Devonshire the old Catholic party rose in arms, clamouring for the restoration of the Mass and the suppression of Protestantism. In the Eastern Counties an insurrection of another sort was seen; the peasantry banded themselves together under the tanner Robert Ket, who called himself the "King of Norfolk and Suffolk." They dreamed of a social revolution such as that which Wat Tyler had demanded in an earlier age, though their grievances were not the same as those of the fourteenth century. They complained of the rapacity of the new landholders who had superseded the old monastic bodies, and who were evicting the old peasantry right and left, and turning farms into sheep-runs, because wool paid better than corn. The enclosure of common lands, the debasement of the coinage, and the slowness and inefficacy of the law when used by the poor man, were also denounced. Ket and his fellows began seizing and trying unpopular landholders, and spoke of making a clean sweep of the upper classes.
Ket's rebellion put down.
Now, the Protector had no scruple in putting down the rising of the Devonshire Papists with great severity, but he felt that the Norfolk men had great excuses for their anger, and did not deal promptly and sternly with them. Ket's rising became very dangerous, and it seemed as if anarchy would set in all over the Eastern Counties. The rebels defeated the Marquis of Northampton, and stormed Norwich; they were only dispersed at last by Dudley, the Earl of Warwick, who marched against them with a mercenary force which had been collected for the Scottish war, and routed them on Mousehold Heath. Ket was then hung, and the rebellion subsided.
Deposition of Somerset.
Somerset's mismanagement and weakness had so disgusted his colleagues in the regency that, after the eastern rebellion, they resolved to depose him from the Protectorship. Finding that he could count on small support, and that the council would be able to turn against him the armies which had pacified Norfolk and Devon, he wisely laid down his power. He was sent for a short time to the Tower, but soon the council released him, and gave him a place among them (1550).
Earl of Warwick Protector.
Somerset's place was taken by John Dudley, the Earl of Warwick, son of the extortionate minister of Henry VII. The new Protector was far more unscrupulous and corrupt than his predecessor. Somerset had been a well-meaning if an incapable ruler. Warwick was purely self-seeking, and cared nothing for national ends. He showed himself not much more competent as a ruler than the man he had overthrown, but he kept his power more firmly than Somerset, because he never hesitated to strike down all who opposed him, without any regard for justice or mercy.
His religious policy.—Second Book of Common Prayer.
Warwick, finding the Protestant party in the ascendant, used them for his own ends, though in reality he was perfectly indifferent to religion. His tendencies were shown by the appointment of several bishops of ultra-Protestant views, and by the issuing of the "Second Book of Common Prayer," to supersede the first. In this volume strong signs of the influence of Continental Protestantism are found, and the many traces of the pre-Reformation ritual were swept away.
Warwick's administration (1550-53) was no happier than Somerset's. He was forced to make a humiliating peace with France, and to surrender Boulogne. Though he began to reform the coinage by issuing good silver money, yet he made the change harmful to the people by refusing to take back the old base money at the rate at which it had been issued, [32] and by actually uttering a considerable amount of debased money himself.
Marriage of his son and Lady Jane Grey.
But reckless self-seeking was the main key-note of Warwick's rule. He employed his power unscrupulously to enrich both himself and his family. He took for himself the title of Duke of Northumberland, and ere long allied himself to the royal house by marrying his younger son, Guildford Dudley, to the king's cousin, Lady Jane Grey, the granddaughter of the Princess Mary, the favourite sister of Henry VIII. This alliance led him into schemes which were to prove his ruin. The young king was a bright and precocious boy, showing signs of capacity and strength of will beyond his years. If he had lived, he would have been a man of mark, for already in his sixteenth year he was showing a keen interest in politics and religion, and a tendency to think for himself. But he was incurably delicate, and by 1553 was obviously falling into consumption.
The succession to the crown.—Will of Henry VIII.
Dudley saw that his power was bound to vanish on the king's death, if the law of succession was maintained, and the king's eldest sister Mary, the child of Catherine of Aragon, allowed to succeed. The late king had drawn up a will, in which he indicated that, if Edward died, he should be followed first by Mary, and then by her younger sister Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn. Henry had then added that, if all his children died heirless, he left the crown to the issue of his favourite sister Mary, the Duchess of Suffolk, and not to the descendants of his elder sister, Margaret of Scotland.
Edward VI. bequeaths the crown to Lady Jane Grey.
Now, Lady Jane Grey, the heiress of Mary of Suffolk, was in Northumberland's hands, through her marriage with his son. Accordingly, the duke resolved to persuade the young king to cut his sisters out of the succession, and leave the crown by will to his cousin. The pretext used was that both Mary and Elizabeth were illegitimate, the marriages of Catherine and of Anne to Henry VIII. having both been declared void at different times by the obsequious Parliaments of the last reign. It was, of course, utterly absurd that a boy of sixteen should have the power to make a will transferring the crown, for by English usage the king's title depended on hereditary right and Parliamentary sanction, not on the arbitrary decision of his predecessor. It was entirely unconstitutional to think of disinheriting the two princesses by a mere private document drawn up by their brother. But the young king was persuaded to grant his guardian's request, mainly because he feared the Romanist reaction which he knew would follow on the accession of his elder sister, who had always remained an obstinate adherent of the papacy.
Execution of Somerset.
Long before the king's death, Northumberland had taken all the measures which he thought necessary for carrying out this arbitrary change in the succession. He had packed the council with his hired partisans, and swept away the only man that he feared, his predecessor Somerset. For noting that the late Protector was regaining popularity, and might prove a check upon him, he suddenly laid against him charges of treason and felony, alleging that he was plotting to regain the regency by force of arms. The unfortunate Somerset was condemned and executed, to the great indignation of the people, who esteemed his good heart, though they had doubted his judgment (1552).
All through the following year King Edward's health was failing, and Dudley was perfecting his plans. In the summer of 1553 the young king wasted away, and slowly sank into his grave. His cousin, Lady Jane, was at once proclaimed queen by the unscrupulous Protector.