CHAPTER III.
ENGLISH ALLIANCE.
Condition of England.—Character of Mary.—Philip's Proposals of Marriage.—Marriage Articles.—Insurrection in England.
1553, 1554.
In the summer of 1553, three years after Philip's return to Spain, occurred an event which was to exercise a considerable influence on his fortunes. This was the death of Edward the Sixth of England,—after a brief but important reign. He was succeeded by his sister Mary, that unfortunate princess, whose sobriquet of "Bloody" gives her a melancholy distinction among the sovereigns of the house of Tudor.
The reign of her father, Henry the Eighth, had opened the way to the great revolution in religion, the effects of which were destined to be permanent. Yet Henry himself showed his strength rather in unsettling ancient institutions than in establishing new ones. By the abolition of the monasteries, he broke up that spiritual militia which was a most efficacious instrument for maintaining the authority of Rome; and he completed the work of independence by seating himself boldly in the chair of St. Peter, and assuming the authority of head of the Church. Thus, while the supremacy of the pope was rejected, the Roman Catholic religion was maintained in its essential principles unimpaired. In other words, the nation remained Catholics, but not Papists.
CONDITION OF ENGLAND.
The impulse thus given under Henry was followed up to more important consequences under his son, Edward the Sixth. The opinions of the German Reformers, considerably modified, especially in regard to the exterior forms and discipline of worship, met with a cordial welcome from the ministers of the young monarch. Protestantism became the religion of the land; and the Church of England received, to a great extent, the peculiar organization which it has preserved to the present day. But Edward's reign was too brief to allow the new opinions to take deep root in the hearts of the people. The greater part of the aristocracy soon showed that, whatever religious zeal they had affected, they were not prepared to make any sacrifice of their temporal interests. On the accession of a Catholic queen to the throne, a reaction soon became visible. Some embarrassment to a return to the former faith was found in the restitution which it might naturally involve of the confiscated[{31}] property of the monastic orders. But the politic concessions of Rome dispensed with this severe trial of the sincerity of its new proselytes; and England, after repudiating her heresies, was received into the fold of the Roman Catholic Church, and placed once more under the jurisdiction of its pontiff.
After the specimens given of the ready ductility with which the English of that day accommodated their religious creeds to the creed of their sovereign, we shall hardly wonder at the caustic criticism of the Venetian ambassador, resident at the court of London, in Queen Mary's time. "The example and authority of the sovereign," he says, "are everything with the people of this country in matters of faith. As he believes, they believe; Judaism or Mahometanism,—it is all one to them. They conform themselves easily to his will, at least so far as the outward show is concerned; and most easily of all where it concurs with their own pleasure and profit."[48]
The ambassador, Giovanni Micheli, was one of that order of merchant-princes employed by Venice in her foreign missions; men whose acquaintance with affairs enabled them to comprehend the resources of the country to which they were sent, as well as the intrigues of its court. Their observations were digested into elaborate reports, which, on their return to Venice, were publicly read before the doge and the senate. The documents thus prepared form some of the most valuable and authentic materials for the history of Europe in the sixteenth century. Micheli's report is diffuse on the condition of England under the reign of Queen Mary; and some of his remarks will have interest for the reader of the present day, as affording a standard of comparison with the past.[49]