Three social forces, meanwhile, had made immense progress in England—regard for public order, the idea of the royal legitimacy, and the spirit of the Reformation. This last power which Northumberland thought to enroll in his service, had taught men to govern themselves, to judge their own affairs freely and rationally, and all the terrors of an ardently Roman Catholic reign were unable to turn them aside from the path of justice. United, the three motives frustrated the ambitious designs,—the plots of the great nobles. Subsequently, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the same influences were destined to place Protestantism in England on a settled basis. The reformed faith had made rapid strides since the death of Henry VIII. The silent struggle between the progressive and the retrogressive parties had continued; Cranmer and Gardiner had continued to confront each other, but Cranmer now had the upper hand. Gardiner had at first been placed by Henry VIII. in the list of the privy council, then his name had been effaced from it from motives of prudence; the Archbishop of Canterbury had all the members of the council at his disposal, with the exception of the Chancellor Wriothesley and the Bishop of Durham, Tunstall. It has been seen how Wriothesley was driven from power. Tunstall was relegated to his diocese. Cranmer, therefore, found the coast clear, but he was determined to proceed with more moderation, for fear of arousing a fresh pilgrimage of grace; he did not completely succeed in averting the discontent which his innovations caused among the populations remaining Catholic.
The first care of the archbishop was to establish in each diocese royal visitors, half lay, half ecclesiastical. Wherever they presented themselves, their authority was supreme; they established in all churches the use of a selection of homilies intended to be read every week, and composed, in great part, by Cranmer; none could preach without the authorization of the Protector or the Metropolitan. This prudent prohibition, intended to favour the extension of the new doctrines, did not escape attention; Gardiner immediately protested against the homilies and the paraphrase of the New Testament by Erasmus, introduced into the Church service in each parish. The reactionary bishop demanded that neither the doctrine nor the practice established by the late king should be interfered with until the majority of the young Edward VI. The intervention of Gardiner was not successful; he was arrested and held in prison during the continuance of the Parliamentary session.
The property which the religious communities, churches and colleges, yet possessed, had been placed at the disposal of the king by Parliament, as a trust-fund for the endowment of schools and livings. Cranmer opposed this fresh spoliation without success, foreseeing that it would turn to the profit of the courtiers; but the measures voted by the two Houses were of a consoling nature; the law against the Lollards, the prohibition against reading the Scriptures and the statutes of the six articles of faith were revoked; marriage was allowed to the clergy; communion of two kinds was granted to the faithful, and soon the order was given for celebrating the service in the English language, without any modification of the mass being yet made in the text itself.
The Corpse Passed Under Her Windows.
Such were the changes already accomplished a year after the death of Henry VIII. The royal power had at the same time extended itself and gathered strength; the election of the bishops had been withdrawn from the deans and chapters, and made to depend solely upon the king, and it was by a simple royal decree that the bishops were invited to suppress in their dioceses certain Catholic observances, while taking care to destroy all images that might be extant. In the month of January, 1549, appeared the great work which the Archbishop of Canterbury had been preparing for some time, the catechism and the prayer book of the Church of England. This latter production, skilfully composed by a commission of bishops and theologians, had for a basis the Catholic missals and breviaries which had been both deprived of all that might clash with the Protestant faith, and carefully adapted to the convictions and sentiments of the Catholics. It was a work of conciliation effected with skill and with the most praiseworthy intentions; but the archbishop did not deceive himself regarding the repugnance which it encountered among the population, and he took care to surround it with an efficatious protection; from Whitsuntide, the use of any other book was prohibited, for Divine service, under severe penalties. The insurrections which shortly afterwards supervened, proved that Cranmer had not been mistaken; the new service was especially the object of the complaints of the rebels of Devonshire. Cranmer soon perceived that it was necessary to attack those prelates who were hostile to the innovations; they were numerous, but the majority were timid and contented themselves with proceeding slowly to adopt the reforms ordained by government; some few were bolder; it was towards these that the efforts of Cranmer were directed.
For two years past already, Gardiner had been confined in the Tower, in consequence of a sermon declared to be seditious, and had not been brought to trial. The Bishop of London, Bonner, reprimanded for his want of zeal, was commissioned by the council to preach at St. Paul's Cross; his text had been chosen, and all the divisions of his discourse settled beforehand, when he appeared before the crowd; he was to overwhelm with ecclesiastical thunders the rebels of Devonshire and Norfolk, to refer to the king and his religious authority, and to point out that, the rights and power of the sovereign not depending upon his age, King Edward VI. was as competent to decide questions of faith as he could be in later years. Bonner completely omitted this last point of the sermon, and was immediately summoned before the council. He excused himself upon the ground of the weakness of his memory, affirmed that he had lost his notes, declaring at the same time that he was prosecuted not for a trifling act of forgetfulness, but because he had firmly maintained the Roman Catholic doctrine of the real presence. Bonner was condemned, deprived of his see and sent to prison. Ridley, bishop of Rochester, was summoned to London in his place; but the bishopric was despoiled of a portion of its possessions, as well as those which soon became vacant by successive deprivations. The court profited by the conscientious obstinacy of the bishops.
Gardiner was more skilful than Bonner, and quite as resolute; he embarrassed his enemies by his self-possession and his intellectual resources, and he refused to sign the formula of submission which was presented to him, so long as he should continue to be unjustly detained. He accumulated so many evidences and called so many witnesses to prove the plot that had long been hatching against him, that Cranmer cut short the proceedings. Gardiner was deprived of his episcopal see, and, like Bonner, he was detained in prison, as well as two other prelates Heath and Day, Bishops of Worcester and Chichester. It was at this period that the great Scottish reformer, John Knox, being in London, preached before the king with so much talent and vigour, that the primate was instrumental in offering him the bishopric of Rochester, which had become vacant by the translation of Poynet to Winchester, where he replaced Gardiner. Knox declined, but the proposal shows upon what path the Church of England, formerly so violent against the friends and partisans of Knox had entered. Some ardent and reforming prelates, Ridley, Latimer, Hooper, replaced the revoked bishops; the latter was so profoundly imbued with Calvinistic principles, that much difficulty was experienced in inducing him to accept the consecration of the primate, and to clothe him in the sacerdotal ornaments.