Singularly enough, the fire lighted by Wolsey in St. Paul's Churchyard had failed to totally burn up Luther and all his works; and on Shrove Tuesday, 1527, Wolsey made another attempt to reduce the new-formed Bible to ashes. In the great procession that came on this day to St. Paul's there were six Lutherans in penitential dresses, carrying terribly symbolical fagots and huge lighted tapers. On a platform in the nave sat the portly and proud cardinal, supported by thirty-six zealous bishops, abbots, and priests. At the foot of the great rood over the northern door the heretical tracts and Testaments were thrown into a fire. The prisoners, on their knees, begged pardon of God and the Catholic Church, and were then led three times round the fire, which they fed with the fagots they had carried.
Four years later, after Wolsey's fall, the London clergy were summoned to St. Paul's Chapter-house (near the south side). The king, offended at the Church having yielded to Wolsey's claims as a papal legate, by which the penalty of præmunire had been incurred, had demanded from it the alarming fine of £100,000. Immediately six hundred clergy of all ranks thronged riotously to the chapter-house, to resist this outrageous tax. The bishop was all for concession; their goods and lands were forfeit, their bodies liable to imprisonment. The humble clergy cried out, "We have never meddled in the cardinal's business. Let the bishops and abbots, who have offended, pay." Blows were struck, and eventually fifteen priests and four laymen were condemned to terms of imprisonment in the Fleet and Tower, for their resistance to despotic power.
In 1535 nineteen German Anabaptists were examined in St. Paul's, and fourteen of them sent to the stake. Then came plain signs that the Reformation had commenced. The Pope's authority had been denied at Paul's Cross in 1534. A miraculous rood from Kent was brought to St. Paul's, and the machinery that moved the eyes and lips was shown to the populace, after which it was thrown down and broken amid contemptuous laughter. Nor would this chapter be complete if we did not mention a great civic procession at the close of the reign of Henry VIII. On Whit Sunday, 1546, the children of Paul's School, with parsons and vicars of every London church, in their copes, went from St. Paul's to St. Peter's, Cornhill, Bishop Bonner bearing the sacrament under a canopy; and at the Cross, before the mayor, aldermen, and all the crafts, heralds proclaimed perpetual peace between England, France, and the Emperor. Two months after, the ex-bishop of Rochester preached a sermon at Paul's Cross recanting his heresy, four of his late fellow-prisoners in Newgate having obstinately perished at the stake.
In the reign of Edward VI. St. Paul's witnessed far different scenes. The year of the accession of the child-king, funeral service was read to the memory of Francis I., Latin dirges were chanted, and eight mitred bishops sang a requiem to the monarch lately deceased. At the coronation, while the guilds were marshalled along Cheapside, and tapestries hung from every window, an acrobat descended by a cable from St. Paul's steeple to the anchor of a ship near the Deanery door. In November of the next year, at night, the crucifixes and images in St. Paul's were pulled down and removed, to the horror of the faithful, and all obits and chantreys were confiscated, and the vestments and altar cloths were sold. The early reformers were backed by greedy partisans. The Protector Somerset, who was desirous of building rapidly a sumptuous palace in the Strand, pulled down the chapel and charnel-house in the Pardon churchyard, and carted off the stones of St. Paul's cloister. When the good Ridley was installed Bishop of London, he would not enter the choir until the lights on the altar were extinguished. Very soon a table was substituted for the altar, and there was an attempt made to remove the organ. The altar, and chapel, and tombs (all but John of Gaunt's) were then ruthlessly destroyed.
During the Lady Jane Grey rebellion, Ridley denounced Mary and Elizabeth as bastards. The accession of gloomy Queen Mary soon turned the tables. As the Queen passed to her coronation, a daring Dutchman stood on the cross of St. Paul's waving a long streamer, and shifting from foot to foot as he shook two torches which he held over his head.
But the citizens were Protestants at heart. At the first sermon preached at St. Paul's Cross, Dr. Bourne, a rash Essex clergyman, prayed for the dead, praised Bonner, and denounced Ridley. The mob, inflamed to madness, shouted, "He preaches damnation! Pull him down! pull him down!" A dagger, thrown at the preacher, stuck quivering in a side-post of the pulpit. With difficulty two good men dragged the rash zealot safely into St. Paul's School. For this riot several persons were sent to the Tower, and a priest and a barber had their ears nailed to the pillory at St. Paul's Cross. The crosses were raised again in St. Paul's, and the old ceremonies and superstitions revived. On St. Katherine's Day (in honour of the queen's mother's patron saint) there was a procession with lights, and the image of St. Katherine, round St. Paul's steeple, and the bells rang. Yet not long after this, when a Dr. Pendleton preached old doctrines at St. Paul's Cross, a gun was fired at him. When Bonner was released from the Marshalsea and restored to his see, the people shouted, "Welcome home;" and a woman ran forward and kissed him. We are told that he knelt in prayer on the Cathedral steps.
In 1554, at the reception in St. Paul's of Cardinal Pole, King Philip attended with English, Spanish, and German guards, and a great retinue of nobles. Bishop Gardiner preached on the widening heresy till the audience groaned and wept. Of the cruel persecutions of the Protestants in this reign St. Paul's was now and then a witness, and likewise of the preparations for the execution of Protestants, which Bonner's party called "trials." Thus we find Master Cardmaker, vicar of St. Bride's, and Warne, an upholsterer in Walbrook, both arraigned at St. Paul's before the bishop for heresy, and carried back from there to Newgate, to be shortly after burned alive in Smithfield.
In the midst of these horrors, a strange ceremony took place at St. Paul's, more worthy, indeed, of the supposititious temple of Diana than of a Christian cathedral, did it not remind us that Popery was always strangely intermingled with fragments of old paganism. In June, 1557 (St. Paul's Day, says Machyn, an undertaker and chronicler of Mary's reign), a fat buck was presented to the dean and chapter, according to an annual grant made by Sir Walter le Baud, an Essex knight, in the reign of Edward I. A priest from each London parish attended in his cope, and the Bishop of London wore his mitre, while behind the burly, bullying, persecutor Bonner came a fat buck, his head with his horns borne upon a pole; forty huntsmen's horns blowing a rejoicing chorus.
The last event of this blood-stained reign was the celebration at St. Paul's of the victory over the French at the battle of St. Quintin by Philip and the Spaniards. A sermon was preached to the city at Paul's Cross, bells were rung, and bonfires blazed in every street.
At Elizabeth's accession its new mistress soon purged St. Paul's of all its images: copes and shaven crowns disappeared. The first ceremony of the new reign was the performance of the obsequies of Henry II. of France. The empty hearse was hung with cloth of gold, the choir draped in black, the clergy appearing in plain black gowns and caps. And now, what the Catholics called a great judgment fell on the old Cathedral. During a great storm in 1561, St. Martin's Church, Ludgate, was struck by lightning; immediately after, the wooden steeple of St. Paul's started into a flame. The fire burned downwards furiously for four hours, the bells melted, the lead poured in torrents; the roof fell in, and the whole Cathedral became for a time a ruin. Soon after, at the Cross, Dean Nowell rebuked the Papists for crying out "a judgment." In papal times the church had also suffered. In Richard I.'s reign an earthquake shook down the spire, and in Stephen's time fire had also brought destruction. The Crown and City were roused by this misfortune. Thrifty Elizabeth gave 1,000 marks in gold, and 1,000 marks' worth of timber; the City gave a great benevolence, and the clergy subscribed £1,410. In one month a false roof was erected, and by the end of the year the aisles were leaded in. On the 1st of November, the same year, the mayor, aldermen, and crafts, with eighty torch-bearers, went to attend service at St. Paul's. The steeple, however, was never re-erected, in spite of Queen Elizabeth's angry remonstrances.