While the crisis lasted the Council were in permanent session. Timid Peers were alarmed at the King’s peremptoriness, and said that it might cost him his throne. The secret process by which Mary had been brought to yield may have been conjectured, and her resistance was not forgotten, but she had signed what was demanded, and it was enough. In the Court there was universal delight. Chapuys congratulated Cromwell, and Cromwell led him to believe that the crown would be settled as he wished. The King and Queen drove down to Richmond to pay the Princess a visit. Henry gave her a handsome present of money and said that now she might have anything that she pleased. The Queen gave her a diamond. She was to return to the court and resume her old station. One cloud only remained. If it was generally understood that the heir presumptive in her heart detested the measures in which she had formally acquiesced, the country could no longer be expected to support a policy which would be reversed on the King’s death. Mary’s conduct left little doubt of her real feelings, and therefore it was not held to be safe to give her by statute the position which her friends desired for her. The facility with which the Pope could dispense with inconvenient obligations rendered a verbal acquiescence an imperfect safeguard. Parliament, therefore, did not, after all, entail the crown upon her, in the event of the King’s present marriage being unfruitful, but left her to deserve it and empowered the King to name his own successor.
Chapuys, however, was able to console himself with the reflection that the Bastard, as he called Elizabeth, was now out of the question. The Duke of Richmond was ill—sinking under the same weakness of constitution which had been so fatal in the Tudor family and of which he, in fact, died a few weeks later. The prevailing opinion was that the King could never have another child. Mary’s prospects, therefore, were tolerably “secure. I must admit,” Chapuys wrote on the 8th of July, “that her treatment improves every day. She never had so much liberty as now, or was served with so much state even by the little Bastard’s waiting-women. She will want nothing in future but the name of Princess of Wales,[445] and that is of no consequence, for all the rest she will have more abundantly than before.”
Mary, in fact, now wanted nothing save the Pope’s pardon for having abjured his authority. Chapuys had undertaken that it would be easily granted. The Emperor had himself asked for it, yet not only could not Cifuentes obtain the absolution, but he did not so much as dare to speak to Paul on the subject. The absolution for the murder of an Archbishop of Dublin had been bestowed cheerfully and instantly on Fitzgerald. Mary was left with perjury on her conscience, and no relief could be had. There appeared to be some technical difficulty. “Unless she retracted and abjured in the presence of the persons before whom she took the oath, it was said that the Pope’s absolution would be of no use to her.” There was, perhaps, another objection. Cifuentes imperfectly trusted Paul. He feared that if he pressed the request the secret would be betrayed and that Mary’s life would be in danger.[446]
Time, perhaps, and reflection alleviated Mary’s remorse and enabled her to dispense with the Papal anodyne, while Cromwell further comforted the Ambassador in August by telling him that the King felt he was growing old, that he was hopeless of further offspring, and was thinking seriously of making Mary his heir after all.[447]
Age the King could not contend with, but for the rest he had carried his policy through. The first act of the Reformation was closing, and he was left in command of the situation. The curtain was to rise again with the Lincolnshire and Yorkshire rebellion, to be followed by the treason of the Poles. But there is no occasion to tell a story over again which I can tell no better than I have done already, nor does it belong to the subject of the present volume. The Pilgrimage of Grace was the outbreak of the conspiracy encouraged by Chapuys to punish Henry, and to stop the progress of the Reformation; Chapuys’s successors in the time of Elizabeth followed his example; and with them all the result was the same—the ruin of the cause which with such weapons they were trying to maintain, and the deaths on the scaffold of the victims of visionary hopes and promises which were never to be made good.
All the great persons whom Chapuys names as willing to engage in the enterprise—the Peers, the Knights, who, with the least help from the Emperor, would hurl the King from his throne, Lord Darcy and Lord Hussey, the Bishop of Rochester, as later on, the Marquis of Exeter, Lord Montague, and his mother—sank one after another into bloody graves. They mistook their imaginations for facts, their passions for arguments, and the vain talk of an unscrupulous Ambassador for solid ground on which to venture into treason. In their dreams they saw the phantom of the Emperor coming over with an army to help them. Excited as they had been, they could not part with their hopes. They knew that they were powerful in numbers. Their preparations had been made, and many thousands of clergy and gentlemen and yeomen had been kindled into crusading enthusiasm. The flame burst out sporadically and at intervals, without certain plan or purpose, at a time when the Emperor could not help them, even if he had ever seriously intended it, and thus the conflagration, which at first blazed through all the northern counties, was extinguished before it turned to civil war. The common people who had been concerned in it suffered but lightly. But the roots had penetrated deep; the conspiracy was of long standing; the intention of the leaders was to carry out the Papal censures, and put down what was called heresy. The rising was really formidable, for the loyalty of many of the great nobles was not above suspicion, and, if not promptly dealt with, it might have enveloped the whole island. Those who rise in arms against Governments must take the consequences of failure, and the leaders who had been the active spirits in the sedition were inexorably punished. In my History of the time I have understated the number of those who were executed. Care was taken to select only those who had been definitely prominent. Nearly three hundred were hanged in all—in batches of twenty-five or thirty, in each of the great northern cities; and, to emphasize the example and to show that the sacerdotal habit would no longer protect treason, the orders were to select particularly the priests and friars who had been engaged. The rising was undertaken in the name of religion. The clergy had been the most eager of the instigators. Chapuys had told the Emperor that of all Henry’s subjects the clergy were the most disaffected, and the most willing to supply money for an invasion. They were therefore legitimately picked out for retribution, and in Lincoln, York, Hull, Doncaster, Newcastle, and Carlisle, the didactic spectacle was witnessed of some scores of reverend persons swinging for the crows to eat in the sacred dress of their order. A severe lesson was required to teach a superstitious world that the clerical immunities existed no longer and that priests who broke the law would suffer like common mortals; but it must be clearly understood that, if these men could have had their way, the hundreds who suffered would have been thousands, and the victims would have been the poor men who were looking for a purer faith in the pages of the New Testament.
When we consider the rivers of blood which were shed elsewhere before the Protestant cause could establish itself, the real wonder is the small cost in human life of the mighty revolution successfully accomplished by Henry. With him, indeed, Chapuys must share the honour. The Catholics, if they had pleased, might have pressed their objections and their remonstrances in Parliament; and a nation as disposed for compromise as the English might have mutilated the inevitable changes. Chapuys’s counsels tempted them into more dangerous and less pardonable roads. By encouraging them in secret conspiracies he made them a menace to the peace of the realm. He brought Fisher to the block. He forced the Government to pass the Act of Supremacy as a defence against treason, and was thus the cause also of the execution of Sir Thomas More and the Charterhouse Monks.
To Chapuys, perhaps, and to his faithful imitators later in the century—De Quadra and Mendoza—the country owes the completeness of the success of the Reformation. It was a battle fought out gallantly between two principles—a crisis in the eternal struggle between the old and the new. The Catholics may boast legitimately of their martyrs. But the Protestants have a martyrology longer far and no less honourable, and those who continue to believe that the victory won in England in the sixteenth century was a victory of right over wrong, have no need to blush for the actions of the brave men who, in the pulpit or in the Council Chamber, on the scaffold or at the stake, won for mankind the spiritual liberty which is now the law of the world.