History of the English People, Volume IV

by John Richard Green

England and the Papacy.

The English ambassadors found therefore a rough greeting when the terms of the submission were laid before the Pope. Paul utterly repudiated the agreement which had been entered into between the Legate and the Parliament; he demanded the restoration of every acre of Church property; and he annulled all alienation of it by a general bull. His attitude undid all that Mary had done. In spite of the pompous reconciliation in which the Houses had knelt at the feet of Pole, England was still unreconciled to the Papacy, for the country and the Pope were at issue on a matter where concession was now impossible on either side. The Queen's own heart went with the Pope's demand. But the first step on which she ventured towards a compliance with it showed the difficulties she would have to meet. The grant of the first-fruits to Henry the Eighth had undoubtedly rested on his claim of supremacy over the Church; and now that this was at an end Mary had grounds for proposing their restoration to church purposes. But the proposal was looked on as a step towards the resumption of the monastic lands, and after a hot and prolonged debate at the close of 1555 the Commons only assented to it by a small majority. It was plain that no hearing would be given to the Pope's demand for a restoration of all Church property; great lords were heard to threaten that they would keep their lands so long as they had a sword by their side; and England was thus left at hopeless variance with the Papacy.

Cranmer.

But, difficult as Mary's task became, she clung as tenaciously as ever to her work of blood. The martyrdoms went steadily on, and at the opening of 1556 the sanction of Rome enabled the Queen to deal with a victim whose death woke all England to the reality of the persecution. Far as he stood in character beneath many who had gone before him to the stake, Cranmer stood high above all in his ecclesiastical position. To burn the Primate of the English Church for heresy was to shut out meaner victims from all hope of escape. And on the position of Cranmer none cast a doubt. The other prelates who had suffered had been placed in their sees after the separation from Rome, and were hardly regarded as bishops by their opponents. But, whatever had been his part in the schism, Cranmer had received his Pallium from the Pope. He was, in the eyes of all, Archbishop of Canterbury, the successor of St. Augustine and of St. Thomas in the second see of Western Christendom. Revenge however and religious zeal alike urged the Queen to bring Cranmer to the stake. First among the many decisions in which the Archbishop had prostituted justice to Henry's will stood that by which he had annulled the king's marriage with Catharine and declared Mary a bastard. The last of his political acts had been to join, whether reluctantly or no, in the shameless plot to exclude Mary from the throne. His great position too made Cranmer more than any man a representative of the religious revolution which had passed over the land. His figure stood with those of Henry and of Cromwell on the frontispiece of the English Bible. The decisive change which had been given to the character of the Reformation under Edward was due wholly to Cranmer. It was his voice that men heard and still hear in the accents of the English Liturgy.

His death.

As an Archbishop, Cranmer's judgment rested with no meaner tribunal than that of Rome, and his execution had been necessarily delayed till its sentence could be given. It was not till the opening of 1556 that the Papal see convicted him of heresy. As a heretic he was now condemned to suffer at the stake. But the courage which Cranmer had shown since the accession of Mary gave way the moment his final doom was announced. The moral cowardice which had displayed itself in his miserable compliance with the lust and despotism of Henry displayed itself again in six successive recantations by which he hoped to purchase pardon. But pardon was impossible; and Cranmer's strangely mingled nature found a power in its very weakness when he was brought into the church of St. Mary at Oxford on the twenty-first of March to repeat his recantation on the way to the stake. "Now," ended his address to the hushed congregation before him, "now I come to the great thing that troubleth my conscience more than any other thing that ever I said or did in my life, and that is the setting abroad of writings contrary to the truth; which here I now renounce and refuse as things written by my hand contrary to the truth which I thought in my heart, and written for fear of death to save my life, if it might be. And, forasmuch as my hand offended in writing contrary to my heart, my hand therefore shall be the first punished; for if I come to the fire, it shall be the first burned." "This was the hand that wrote it," he again exclaimed at the stake, "therefore it shall suffer first punishment"; and holding it steadily in the flame "he never stirred nor cried" till life was gone.

War with France.

It was with the unerring instinct of a popular movement that, among a crowd of far more heroic sufferers, the Protestants fixed, in spite of his recantations, on the martyrdom of Cranmer as the death-blow to Catholicism in England. For one man who felt within him the joy of Rowland Taylor at the prospect of the stake, there were thousands who felt the shuddering dread of Cranmer. The triumphant cry of Latimer could reach only hearts as bold as his own, while the sad pathos of the Primate's humiliation and repentance struck chords of sympathy and pity in the hearts of all. It is from that moment that we may trace the bitter remembrance of the blood shed in the cause of Rome; which, however partial and unjust it must seem to an historic observer, still lies graven deep in the temper of the English people. But the Queen struggled desperately on. She did what was possible to satisfy the unyielding Pope. In the face of the Parliament's significant reluctance even to restore the first-fruits to the Church, she refounded all she could of the abbeys which had been suppressed. One of the greatest of these, the Abbey of Westminster, was re-established before the close of 1556, and John Feckenham installed as its abbot. Such a step could hardly fail to wake the old jealousy of any attempt to reclaim the Church lands, and thus to alienate the nobles and gentry from the Queen. They were soon to be alienated yet more by her breach of the solemn covenant on which her marriage was based. Even the most reckless of her counsellors felt the unwisdom of aiding Philip in his strife with France. The accession of England to the vast dominion which the Emperor had ceded to his son in 1555 all but realized the plans of Ferdinand the Catholic for making the house of Austria master of Western Christendom. France was its one effective foe; and the overthrow of France in the war which was going on between the two powers would leave Philip without a check. How keenly this was felt at the English council-board was seen in the resistance which was made to Philip's effort to drag his new realm into the war. Such an effort was in itself a crowning breach of faith, for the king's marriage had been accompanied by a solemn pledge that England should not be drawn into the strifes of Spain. But Philip knew little of good faith when his interest was at stake. The English fleet would give him the mastery of the seas, English soldiers would turn the scale in Flanders, and at the opening of 1557 the king again crossed the Channel and spent three months in pressing his cause on Mary and her advisers.

Loss of Calais.

"He did more," says a Spanish writer of the time, "than any one would have believed possible with that proud and indomitable nation." What he was most aided by was provocation from France. A body of refugees who had found shelter there landed in Yorkshire in the spring; and their leader, Thomas Stafford, a grandson of the late Duke of Buckingham, called the people to rise against the tyranny of foreigners and "the satanic designs of an unlawful Queen." The French king hoped that a rising would give the Queen work at home; but the revolt was easily crushed, and the insult enabled Mary to override her counsellors' reluctance and to declare war against France. The war opened with triumphs both on land and at sea. The junction of the English fleet made Philip master of the Channel. Eight thousand men, "all clad in their green," were sent to Flanders under Lord Pembroke, and joined Philip's forces in August in time to take part in the great victory of St. Quentin. In October the little army returned home in triumph, but the gleam of success vanished suddenly away. In the autumn of 1557 the English ships were defeated in an attack on the Orkneys. In January 1558 the Duke of Guise flung himself with characteristic secrecy and energy upon Calais and compelled it to surrender before succour could arrive. "The chief jewel of the realm," as Mary herself called it, was suddenly reft away; and the surrender of Guisnes, which soon followed, left England without a foot of land on the Continent.