The Reign of Mary Tudor

by James Anthony Froude

Cranmer alone hitherto had suffered after recantation; to others, pardon had continued to be offered to the last moment. But this poor mercy was now extinguished. A man in Hampshire, named Bembridge, exclaimed at the point of execution that he would submit; a form was produced on the spot, which Bembridge signed, and the sheriff, Sir Richard Pexall, reprieved him by his own authority. But a letter of council came instantly to Pexall, that "the queen's majesty could not but find it very strange" that he had saved from punishment a man condemned for heresy: the execution was to proceed out of hand; and "if the prisoner continued in the Catholic faith, as he pretended," "some discreet and learned man might be present with him in his death, for the aiding of him to die God's servant."[649] Bembridge was accordingly burnt, and the sheriff, for the lenity which he had dare to show, was committed to the Fleet. Whole detachments of men and women were again slaughtered in London; and the queen, exasperated at the determination with which the populace cheered the sufferers with their sympathy, sent out a proclamation forbidding her subjects to approach, touch, speak to, or comfort heretics on their way to execution, under pain of death. Shortly after, a congregation of Protestants were detected at a prayer-meeting in a field near the city; thirteen were taken as prisoners before Bonner, and seven were burnt at Smithfield together on the 28th of June. The people replied to the queen's menaces by crowding about the stake with passionate demonstrations of affection, and Thomas Bentham, a friend of Lever the preacher, when the faggots were lighted, stood out in the presence of the throng, and cried:

"We know that they are the people of God, and therefore we cannot choose but wish well to them and say, God strengthen them. God almighty, for Christ's sake, strengthen them."

The multitude shouted, in reply, "Amen, Amen."[650]

Alarmed himself, this time, at the display of emotion, Bonner dared not outrage the metropolis with the deaths of the remaining six. Yet, not to let them escape him, he tried them privately in his own house at Fulham, and burnt them at Brentford at night in the darkness.[651]

So fared the Protestants, murdered to propitiate Providence, and, if possible, extort for the queen a return of the Divine favour. The alarm of invasion diminished as summer advanced. England had again a fleet upon the seas which feared no enemy, and could even act on the offensive. In May, two hundred and forty ships, large and small, were collected at Portsmouth;[652] and on the day of the burning at Brentford, accident gave a small squadron among them a share in a considerable victory.

Lord Clinton, who was now admiral in the place of Howard, after an ineffectual cruise in the south of the Channel, returned to Portsmouth on the 8th of July. A few vessels remained in the neighbourhood of Calais, when M. de Thermes, whom the Duke of Guise left in command there, with the garrison of Boulogne, some levies collected in Picardy, and his own troops, in all about 9000 men, ventured an inroad into the Low Countries, took Dunkirk, and plundered it. Not caring to penetrate further, he was retreating with his booty, when Count Egmont, with a few thousand Burgundians and Flemings, cut in at Gravelines between the French and their own frontiers. They had no means of passing, except at low water, between the town of Gravelines and the sea, and the English ships, which were in communication with Egmont, stood in as near as they could venture, so as to command the sands.

De Thermes, obliged to advance when the tide would permit him, dashed at the dangerous passage; the guns of Gravelines on one side, the guns of the English vessels on the other, tore his ranks to pieces, and Egmont charging when their confusion was at its worst, the French were almost annihilated. Five thousand were killed, De Thermes himself, Senarpont of Boulogne, the Governor of Picardy, and many other men of note, were taken. If Clinton had been at hand with the strength of the fleet, and a dash had been made at Calais by land and sea, it would have been recovered more easily than it had been lost. But fortune had no such favour to bestow on Queen Mary. Clinton was still loitering at Spithead, and when news of the action came it was too late.

The plan of the naval campaign for the season was to attack Brest with the united strength of England and Flanders, and hold it as a security for the restoration of Calais at the peace. It was for the arrival of his allies that Clinton had been waiting, and it was only at the end of the month that the combined fleet, a hundred and forty sail, left Portsmouth for the coast of Brittany. They appeared duly off Brest; yet, when their object was before them, they changed their minds on the feasibility of their enterprise; and leaving their original design they landed a force at Conquêt, which they plundered and burnt, and afterwards destroyed some other villages in the neighbourhood. The achievement was not a very splendid one. Four or five hundred Flemings who ventured too far from the fleet were cut off; and as the Duke d'Estampes was said to be coming up with 20,000 men, Clinton re-embarked his men in haste, returned to Portsmouth, after an ineffectual and merely mischievous demonstration, and then reported the sickness in the fleet so considerable, that the operations for the season must be considered at an end.[653]

In the meantime, the contending princes in their own persons, Philip with the powers of the Low Countries and Spain, Henry with the whole available strength of France, sate watching each other in entrenched camps upon the Somme. The French king, with the recollection of St. Quentin fresh upon him, would not risk a second such defeat. Philip would not hazard his late advantage by forcing an action which might lose for him all that he had gained. In the pause, the conviction came slowly over both, that there was no need for further bloodshed, and that the long, weary, profitless war might at last have an end. A mighty revolution had passed over Europe since Francis first led an army over the Alps. The world had passed into a new era; and the question of strength had to be tried, not any more between Spaniard and Frenchman, but between Protestant and Catholic. Already the disciples of Calvin threatened the Church of France; Holland was vexing the superstition of Philip, and the Protestants in Scotland were breaking from the hand of Mary of Guise: more and more the Catholic princes felt the want of a general council, that the questions of the day might be taken hold of firmly, and the Inquisition be set to work on some resolute principle of concert.

On September 21, the emperor passed away in his retirement at St. Just. With him perished the traditions and passions of which he was the last representative, and a new page was turning in the history of mankind. Essential ground of quarrel between Henry and Philip there was none; the outward accidental ground—the claims on Milan and Naples, Savoy and Navarre—had been rendered easy of settlement by the conquest of Calais, and by the marriage which was consummated a few weeks after Guise's victory, between the Dauphin and the Queen of Scots.