Cassell's History of England, Vol. 2 (of 8) / From the Wars of the Roses to the Great Rebellion

by Anonymous

STATE TRIAL IN WESTMINSTER HALL IN THE TIME OF ELIZABETH.

To the honour of Edward VI. and his counsellors, all these arbitrary Acts of his father were repealed by him: the law of treason was restored to its state under the Statute of 25 Edward III.; religion was again set free, and proclamations by the king in council were declared to have no longer the force of Acts of Parliament. A few years, however, introduced Queen Mary, and a reversal of the State religion and all its laws. That dreadful persecution which we have narrated, and which is one of the darkest spots in the history of the world, was carried on to force the human mind into its former thraldom; and an attempt was made by the Spanish power which was then introduced to restore arbitrary rule by a singular suggestion. Charles V. presented, through his ambassador, a book to the queen, in which the principle was laid down that as she was the first queen regnant, none of the limitations which had been set to the prerogative of her ancestors the kings of England, applied to her, but to kings only; and that by consequence she was free and absolute. This book Mary showed to Gardiner, and asked his opinion of it, which was that it was a pernicious book, and could work her no good. Thereupon Mary threw the book into the fire; and Gardiner, on the plea of defining and establishing her authority, brought in an Act which, giving her the same powers as the kings before her possessed, consequently restrained her within the same limits.

Mary confirmed the Act of her late brother, confining the law of treason to the Statute of the 25th of Edward III.; nor does she seem to have created fresh treasons, except in one instance—making it treasonable to counterfeit not merely the coin of the realm, but also such coins as circulated there by Royal consent.

On the accession of Elizabeth the Reformed religion was once more restored; and, like her father, she was not only declared supreme head of the Church, but she assumed all his claims of supreme authority in the State. She frequently told her Parliament that it existed entirely by her will and pleasure; and when the members entered on matters disagreeable to her, she snubbed them in language which sounds oddly enough in these days of high Parliamentary privilege. By the very first Statute passed in her reign, she proceeded to set up a new Court, ignored everything like Magna Charta and the right of jury, making her own will the entire law, and placing every subject, with his life and property, at her mercy. This was the Court of High Commission, which assumed all the pretensions of the Star Chamber, but was directed more especially to ecclesiastical affairs. The queen was empowered to appoint by letters patent, whenever she thought proper, such persons, being natural-born subjects, as she pleased, to execute all jurisdiction concerning spiritual matters, and to visit, reform, and redress all errors, heresies, schisms, abuses, offences, &c., which by any ecclesiastical authority might be lawfully ordered or corrected. The Reformers were only too eager to put this formidable engine into her hands, because it was to crush the Romish hierarchy; but they did not reflect that it could on occasion be employed against themselves, as Laud and Strafford afterwards demonstrated to their children. This inquisitorial court was armed with authority to employ torture to effect the necessary confessions, and its jurisdiction was extended to the punishment of breaches of the marriage vow, and all misdemeanours and disorders in that state. It was, therefore, sanctioned in forcing its operations into the very bosom of social and domestic life.

Elizabeth, indeed, was fully as arrogant and despotic as her father; and nothing but her lion-like resolution, her choice of able and unscrupulous ministers, and the cunning of her Government, could have enabled her to maintain her sway so successfully as she did. The homage due to her sex no doubt also contributed essentially to this result. Yet not all these circumstances could prevent her from perceiving that her power was silently and even rapidly waning before that of the people. She frequently had to tell persons that they dared not have done or said certain things in her father's time. She had repeatedly to concede the point to the pertinacity of her Parliament; especially so when, towards the end of her reign, the House of Commons called so boldly upon her to abolish the monstrous list of monopolies which had been granted to her favourites, commencing from the seventeenth year of her reign. Amongst these monopolies were those for the exclusive sale of salt, currants, iron, powder, cards, calf-skins, felts, poledavy (a kind of canvas), ox shin-bones, train-oil, lifts of cloth, potash, anise-seed, vinegar, sea-coal, steel, aqua-vitæ, brushes, pots, bottles, saltpetre, lead, accidences (or books of the rudiments of Latin grammar), oil, calamine stone, oil of blubber, glasses, paper, starch, tin, sulphur, new drapery, dried pilchards; the exportation of iron, ham, beer, and leather; the importation of Spanish wool and Irish linen; such an astonishing list, in fact, that when it was read over in the Commons in 1601, but two years before her death, a member in amazement asked, as already stated, whether bread was not of the number.

These grants had been obtained from her by her courtiers through the weak side of the woman; but in the expenses of her government, considering the aid she had to render to her Protestant allies in Scotland, France, and the Netherlands, and the enemies she had to contend with, necessitating costly armaments and navies, her administration shows most favourably. She would never incur debt, but paid off that incurred by her predecessors, Edward and Mary. Instead of debasing the coin, like her father, she increased its purity; and the annual outlay of her government averaged only about £65,000 per annum.

In fact, the more we recede from the personal history of Elizabeth, and approach her great political measures, the more we perceive the true evidences of her glory. She was courageous, beyond the power of a world in arms to terrify her; she was moderate in her demands on her subjects, though vain in her person and showy in her court; shrewd in her choice of ministers, though weak in her indulgence of favourites; she was ambitious of the reputation of her country; and she rendered to the labouring people their birthright in the land, which her father had stripped them of in levelling the monastic institutions by enacting the Poor Law, the celebrated Statute of the forty-third of her reign (1601), on which yet rests the whole fabric of parochial right to support in age and destitution. In nothing did she display her sagacity so much as in her repeated declaration that money in her subjects' purse was as good as in her own exchequer. It was better, for there it would be growing tenfold in the ordinary augmentation of traffic, ready to yield the State proportionate interest on any real emergency.

The great struggle between the Papacy and the growing Protestant forces was nearly ended, but complete and terrible as was the overthrow of the ancient hierarchy in England and Scotland, it came at last with a rapidity which astonished even the friends of the change. From the time of Richard II. hatred of the Papacy had been afloat among the people, and even in his day had availed to shake the throne, and fill the public mind with prognostics of Papal decay. Yet reign after reign had passed, and the Church had not only maintained its position, but had seemed to crush with a successful hand the Protestant schismatics. The fires which consumed the more daring advocates of the new opinions seemed to scare the rest into obscurity. The triumphant Church of Rome still presented a front of determined strength, and lorded it over the land with a magnificence which seemed destined to endure for ever.

Henry VII. was a firm upholder of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. "He advanced churchism," says Bacon; "he was tender of the privileges of sanctuaries, though they did him much mischief; he built and endowed many religious foundations, besides his memorable hospital of the Savoy; and yet he was a great alms-giver in secret, which showed that his works in public were rather dedicated to God's glory than his own." The fact was that Henry VII. was too cautious a man to become a reformer. He was too fond of money to risk its loss by the most distant chance of an unsuccessful enterprise, and he was too recently placed on the throne of a vanquished dynasty to venture on so bold a measure of ecclesiastical revolution had he been thus inclined, which he was far enough from being. On the contrary, his ministers were almost all great and able churchmen. Cardinals Bourchier and Morton, Archbishops Deane and Warham, were the accomplished churchmen who conducted the governmental affairs of Henry; and when the public outcry against the worldly and dissolute lives of the clergy, both secular and regular, became too loud to be disregarded, these clerical ministers of the king endeavoured with one hand to reduce the corruption by advice and remonstrance, and to check the progress of heresy by the stake and fagot. Henry VII. permitted this mode of extinguishing opinion by destroying the entertainers of it. In the ninth year of his reign Joan Boughton was burnt in Smithfield, and this auto-da-fé was followed by that of William Tylsworth, at Amersham, whose daughter was compelled to set fire to the pile which destroyed her father, and that of Laurence Guest at Salisbury. In addition to the victims of these odious crimes, many persons were burnt in the cheek, imprisoned, and otherwise cruelly treated. These atrocities so far from diminishing the heresy, only excited the abhorrence of the people and weakened their attachment to the Church.