“BLOODY MARY”
Mary, the daughter of Henry VIII and Catharine of Aragon, was crowned with great ceremony October 1, 1553, and her first Parliament met four days later. It reversed a decision of the former Parliament, and declared that Henry’s marriage with Catharine had been valid, and that Mary was the legitimate heir to the throne; and it repealed all the religious legislation under Edward VI. On taking the throne Mary promised to force no one’s religion, but as soon as she dared she began to restore Romanism with a zeal that delighted the pope.
Mary was married to Philip of Spain January 1, 1554; but the alliance was very unpopular from the first. Immediately after the marriage “the bloody acts of the tragedy were begun.” Care was taken to elect to Parliament members “of a wise, grave and Catholic sort.” This body obtained the pope’s absolution of the nation for its guilt of schism and abolished all acts which made the sovereign the supreme head of the Church. The Latin service was restored. Fully half of the clergy were thrust out of their offices. Bishop Gardner secured the passage of the terrible edicts and laws, and Bishop Bonner so applied them as to gain the title of “the bloody.” The fires of Smithfield and the ax at the Tower were in such active service during four years that some four hundred “martyrs left their record of faith and triumph as one of painful glories of the English Reformation.”
Among those burned were Latimer and Ridley. Bound to the stake with his friend, Latimer said, when the lighted fagot was applied: “Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day, by God’s grace, light such a candle in England as, I trust, shall never be put out.”
Cranmer had been the decisive agent in the divorce against Catharine, thus branding the birth of her daughter, Mary, as illegitimate. This Mary never forgave. But there were other motives. “To burn the Primate of the English Church for heresy was to shut out meaner victims from all hope of escape.” He was more than any other man the representative of the religious revolution which had passed over the land. In an hour of weakness, and under the entreaties of his friends, he recanted. But in the end he redeemed his momentary weakness by a last act of heroism. He knew that his recantations had been published, and that any further declaration made would probably be suppressed by his unscrupulous antagonists. He resolved by a single action to defeat their calculations and stamp his sincerity on the memories of his countrymen. His dying speech was silenced, as he might well have expected; but he had made up his mind to something that could not be stifled. In his speech he said:
And now I come to the great thing that so troubleth my conscience, more than any other thing that I said or did in my life: and that is my setting abroad of writings contrary to the truth, which here now I renounce and refuse as things written with my hand contrary to the truth which I thought in my heart, and written for fear of death, and to save my life, if it might be; and that is all such bills which I have written or signed with mine own hand since my degradation; wherein I have written many things untrue. And forasmuch as my hand offended in writing contrary to my heart, it shall be first burned. And as for the pope, I refuse him as Christ’s enemy and antichrist, with all his false doctrine and as for the sacrament—
He got no further; his foes had been dumb with amazement, but now their pent-up feelings broke loose. “Stop the heretic’s mouth!” cried one; “Take him away!” cried another; “Remember your recantations and do not dissemble!” cried Lord Williams. “Alas, my lord,” replied Cranmer, “I have been a man that all my life loved plainness, and never dissembled till now against the truth; for which I am sorry;” and he seized the occasion to add that as for the sacrament, he believed that it should be administered in “both kinds.” The tumult redoubled. Cranmer was dragged from the stage and led to the place where Ridley and Latimer had been burned.
The friars ceased not to ply him with exhortations: “Die not in desperation,” cried one; “Thou shalt drag innumerable souls to hell,” cried another. On reaching the appointed place he was bound to the stake with a steel band, and fire was set to the fagots of wood which made his funeral pyre. As the flames leaped up, he stretched up his right hand, saying with a loud voice, “This hand hath offended,” and held it firmly in the fire till it was consumed. No cry escaped his lips and no movement betrayed his pain. If the martyrdom of Ridley and Latimer lighted the torch, Cranmer’s spread the conflagration which in the end burnt up the Roman Catholic reaction and made England a Protestant nation.
The death of Cranmer was followed by a long succession of martyrdoms. Mary tried most desperately to restore Romanism in its fullness, but failed, and died November 17, 1558, “the unhappiest of queens, and wives, and women.” The people who had welcomed her when she was crowned, called her “Bloody Mary”—a name which was, after all, so well deserved that it will always remain. “Each disappointment she took as a warning from heaven that atonement had not yet been paid for England’s crimes, and the fires of persecution were kept burning to appease the God of Roman Catholicism.”