The Reign of Mary Tudor

by James Anthony Froude

Taking courage from the apparent disposition of the House, the friends of the court proposed that, should the queen die childless, the crown should devolve absolutely upon him for his life.[432] But in this they were going too far. The suggestion was listened to coldly; and Philip, who had really calculated on obtaining from parliament, in some form or other, a security for his succession, despatched Ruy Gomez to Brussels, to consult the emperor on the course which should be pursued.[433] On the whole, however, could the bill of the House of Commons be carried, Renard was disposed to be contented; the queen was confident in her hopes of an heir, and it might not be worth while to irritate the people unnecessarily about Elizabeth.[434] The clause empowering Philip to govern by deputy in his absence was especially satisfactory.[435]

But the peers, whom the Commons had refused to consult on the new form of the measure, would not part so easily with their own opinions; they adopted the phraseology of the Lower House, but this particular and precious feature in it they pared away. The bill, as it eventually passed, declared Philip regent till his child should be of age, and so long as he continued in the realm; but, at the same time, fatally for the objects at which he was aiming, it bound him again to observe all the articles of the marriage treaty, "which, during the time that he should hold the government, should remain and continue in as full force and strength, as if they were newly inserted and rehearsed in the present act."[436]

The disposition of the House of Lords was the more dangerous, because the bishops, of course, voted with the government, and the strength of the opposition, therefore, implied something like unanimity in the lay peers. The persecuting act had been carried with difficulty, and in the reconciliation with Rome the legate had been studiously mortified. On the succession and the coronation the court had been wholly baffled; and in the Regency Bill they had obtained but half of what they had desired. At the least Mary had hoped to secure for the king the free disposal of the army and the finances, and she had not been able so much as to ask for it. Compelled to rest contented with such advantages as had been secured, the court would not risk the results of further controversy by prolonging the session; and on the 16th of January, at four o'clock in the afternoon, the king and queen came to the House of Lords almost unattended, and with an evident expression of dissatisfaction dissolved the parliament.[437]

I have been particular in relating the proceedings of this parliament, because it marks the point where the flood tide of reaction ceased to ascend, and the ebb recommenced. From the beginning of the Reformation in 1529, two distinct movements had gone on side by side—the alteration of doctrines, and the emancipation of the laity from papal and ecclesiastical domination. With the first, the contemporaries of Henry VIII., the country gentlemen and the peers, who were the heads of families at the period of Mary's accession, had never sympathised; and the tyranny of the Protestants while they were in power had converted a disapproval which time would have overcome, into active and determined indignation. The papacy was a mixed question; the Pilgrims of Grace in 1536, and the Cornish rebels in 1549, had demanded the restoration of the spiritual primacy to the See of St. Peter, and Henry himself, until Pole and Paul III. called on Europe to unite in a crusade against him, had not determined wholly against some degree of concession. In the pope, as a sovereign who claimed reverence and tribute, who interfered with the laws of the land, and maintained at Rome a supreme court of appeal—who pretended a right to depose kings and absolve subjects from their allegiance—who held a weapon in excommunication as terrible to the laity as Premunire was terrible to ecclesiastics—in the pope under this aspect, only a few insignificant fanatics entertained any kind of interest.

But experience had proved that to a nation cut off from the centre of Catholic union, the maintenance of orthodoxy was impossible: the supremacy of the pope, therefore, came back as a tolerated feature in the return to the Catholic faith, and the ecclesiastical courts were reinstated in authority to check unlicensed extravagance of opinion. Their restored power, however, was over opinion only; wherever the pretensions of the church would come in collision with the political constitution, wherever they menaced the independence of the temporal magistrate or the tenure of property, there the progress of restoration was checked by the rock, and could eat no further into the soil. The pope and the clergy recovered their titular rank, and in one direction unhappily they recovered the reality of power. But the temporal spoils of the struggle remained with the laity, and if the clergy lifted a hand to retake them, their weapons would be instantly wrenched from their grasp.

If the genuine friends of human freedom had acquiesced without resistance in this conclusion, if the nobility had contented themselves with securing their worldly and political interests, and had made no effort to restrain or modify the exercise of the authority which they were giving back, they might be accused of having accepted a dishonourable compromise. But they did what they could. They worked with such legal means as were in their power, and for two parliaments they succeeded in keeping persecution at bay; they failed in the third, but failed only after a struggle. The Protestants themselves had created, by their own misconduct, the difficulty of defending them; and armed unconstitutional resistance was an expedient to be resorted to, only when it had been seen how the clergy would conduct themselves. English statesmen may be pardoned if they did not anticipate the passions to which the guardians of orthodoxy were about to abandon themselves. Parliament had maintained the independence of the English courts of law. It had maintained the Premunire. It had forbidden the succession to be tampered with. If this was not everything, it was something—something which in the end would be the undoing of all the rest.

The court and the bishops, however, were for the present absolute in their own province. The persecuting acts were once more upon the Statute Book; and when the realities of the debates in parliament had disappeared, the cardinal and the queen could again give the rein to their imagination. They had called up a phantom out of its grave, and they persuaded themselves that they were witnessing the resurrection of the spirit of truth, that heresy was about to vanish from off the English soil, like an exhalation of the morning, at the brightness of the papal return. The chancellor and the clergy were springing at the leash like hounds with the game in view, fanaticism and revenge lashing them forward. If the temporal schemes of the court were thwarted, it was, perhaps, because Heaven desired that exclusive attention should be given first to the salvation of souls.

For all past political offences, therefore, there was now an amnesty, and such prisoners as remained unexecuted for Wyatt's conspiracy were released from the Tower on the 18th of January. On the 25th a hundred and sixty priests walked in procession through the London streets, chanting litanies, with eight bishops walking after them, and Bonner carrying the host. On the 28th the cardinal issued his first general instructions. The bishops were directed to call together their clergy in every diocese in England, and to inform them of the benevolent love of the Holy Father, and of the arrival of the legate with powers to absolve them from their guilt. They were to relate the acts of the late parliament, with the reconciliation and absolution of the Lords and Commons; and they were to give general notice that authority had been restored to the ecclesiastical courts, to proceed against the enemies of the faith, and punish them according to law.

A day was then to be fixed on which the clergy should appear with their confessions, and be received into the church. In the assignment of their several penances, a distinction was to be made between those who had taught heresy and those who had merely lapsed into it.

When the clergy had been reconciled, they were again in turn to exhort the laity in all churches and cathedrals, to accept the grace which was offered to them; and that they might understand that they were not at liberty to refuse the invitation, a time was assigned to them within which their submissions must be all completed. A book was to be kept in every diocese, where the names of those who were received were to be entered. A visitation was to be held throughout the country at the end of the spring, and all who had not complied before Easter day, or who, after compliance, "had returned to their vomit", would be proceeded against with the utmost severity of the law.[438]