Chapter II: The Catholic Reaction (2)

"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.

[Sidenote: Mary and Ireland.]

Bitterly as the blow was felt, the Council, though passionately pressed by the Queen, could find neither money nor men for any attempt to recover the town. The war indeed went steadily for Spain and her allies; and Philip owed his victory at Gravelines in the summer of 1558 mainly to the opportune arrival of ten English ships of war which opened fire on the flank of the French army that lay open to the sea. But England could not be brought to take further part in the contest. The levies which were being raised mutinied and dispersed. The forced loan to which Mary was driven to resort came in slowly. The treasury was drained not only by the opening of the war with France but by the opening of a fresh strife in Ireland. To the struggle of religion which had begun there under the Protectorate the accession of Mary had put an end. The shadowy form of the earlier Irish Protestantism melted quietly away. There were in fact no Protestants in Ireland save the new bishops; and when Bale had fled over sea from his diocese of Ossory and his fellow-prelates had been deprived the Irish Church resumed its old appearance. No attempt indeed was made to restore the monasteries; and Mary exercised her supremacy, deposed or appointed bishops, and repudiated Papal interference with her ecclesiastical acts as vigorously as her father. But the Mass was restored, the old modes of religious worship were again held in honour, and religious dissension between the Government and its Irish subjects came for the time to an end. With the close however of one danger came the rise of another. England was growing tired of the policy of conciliation which had been steadily pursued by Henry the Eighth and his successor. As yet it had been rewarded with precisely the sort of success which Wolsey and Cromwell anticipated. The chiefs had come quietly in to the plan, and their septs had followed them in submission to the new order. "The winning of the Earl of Desmond was the winning of the rest of Munster with small charges. The making O'Brien an Earl made all that country obedient." The Macwilliam became Lord Clanrickard, and the Fitzpatricks Barons of Upper Ossory. A visit of the great northern chief who had accepted the title of Earl of Tyrone to the English Court was regarded as a marked step in the process of civilization.

[Sidenote: The Irish War.]

In the south, where the system of English law was slowly spreading, the chieftains sate on the bench side by side with the English justices of the peace; and something had been done to check the feuds and disorder of the wild tribes between Limerick and Tipperary. "Men may pass quietly throughout these countries without danger of robbery or other displeasure." In the Clanrickard county, once wasted with war, "ploughing increaseth daily." In Tyrone and the north however the old disorder reigned without a check; and everywhere the process of improvement tried the temper of the English Deputies by the slowness of its advance. The only hope of any real progress lay in patience; and there were signs that the Government at Dublin found it hard to wait. The "rough handling" of the chiefs by Sir Edward Bellingham, a Lord Deputy under the Protector Somerset, roused a spirit of revolt that only subsided when the poverty of the Exchequer forced him to withdraw the garrisons he had planted in the heart of the country. His successor in Mary's reign, Lord Sussex, made raid after raid to no purpose on the obstinate tribes of the north, burning in one the Cathedral of Armagh and three other churches. A far more serious breach in the system of conciliation was made when the project of English colonization which Henry had steadily rejected was adopted by the same Lord Deputy, and when the country of the O'Connors was assigned to English settlers and made shire-land under the names of King's and Queen's Counties in honour of Philip and Mary. A savage warfare began at once between the planters and the dispossessed septs, a warfare which only ended in the following reign in the extermination of the Irishmen, and commissioners were appointed to survey waste lands with the aim of carrying the work of colonization into other districts. The pressure of the war against France put an end to these wider projects, but the strife in Meath went savagely on and proved a sore drain to the Exchequer.

[Sidenote: Scotland and Protestantism.]

Nor was Mary without difficulties in the North. Religiously as well as politically her reign told in a marked way on the fortunes of Scotland. If the Queen's policy failed to crush Protestantism in England, it gave a new impulse to it in the northern realm. In Scotland the wealth and worldliness of the great churchmen had long ago spread a taste for heresy among the people; and Lollardry survived as a power north of the border long after it had almost died out to the south of it. The impulse of the Lutheran movement was seen in the diffusion of the new opinions by a few scholars, such as Wishart and Hamilton; but though Henry the Eighth pressed his nephew James the Fifth to follow him in the work he was doing in England, it was plain that the Scotch reformers could look for little favour from the Crown. The policy of the Scottish kings regarded the Church as their ally against the turbulent nobles, and James steadily held its enemies at bay. The Regent, Mary of Guise, clung to the same policy. But stoutly as the whole nation withstood the English efforts to acquire a political supremacy, the religious revolution in England told more and more on the Scotch nobles. No nobility was so poor as that of Scotland, and nowhere in Europe was the contrast between their poverty and the riches of the Church so great. Each step of the vast spoliation that went on south of the border, the confiscation of the lesser abbeys, the suppression of the greater, the secularization of chauntries and hospitals, woke a fresh greed in the baronage of the north. The new opinions soon found disciples among them. It was a group of Protestant nobles who surprised the Castle of St. Andrews and murdered Cardinal Beaton. The "Gospellers" from the Lowlands already formed a marked body in the army that fought at Pinkie Cleugh. As yet however the growth of the new opinions had been slow, and there had been till now little public show of resistance to the religion of the State.

[Sidenote: Knox.]

With the accession of Mary however all was changed. Under Henry and Edward the Catholicism of Scotland had profited by the national opposition to a Protestant England; but now that Catholicism was again triumphant in England Protestantism became far less odious to the Scotch statesmen. A still greater change was wrought by the marriage with Philip. Such a match, securing as it did to England the aid of Spain in any future aggression upon Scotland, became a danger to the northern realm which not only drew her closer to France but forced her to give shelter and support to the sectaries who promised to prove a check upon Mary. Many of the exiles therefore who left England for the sake of religion found a refuge in Scotland. Amongst these was John Knox. Knox had been one of the followers of Wishart; he had acted as pastor to the Protestants who after Beaton's murder held the Castle of St. Andrews, and had been captured with them by a French force in the summer of 1547. The Frenchmen sent the heretics to the galleys; and it was as a galley slave in one of their vessels that Knox next saw his native shores. As the vessel lay tossing in the bay of St. Andrews, a comrade bade him look to the land, and asked him if he knew it. "I know it well" was the answer; "for I see the steeple of that place where God first in public opened my mouth to His glory; and I am fully persuaded, how weak that ever I now appear, I shall not depart this life till my tongue glorify His holy name in the same place!" It was long however before he could return. Released at the opening of 1549, Knox found shelter in England, where he became one of the most stirring among the preachers of the day, and was offered a bishoprick by Northumberland. Mary's accession drove him again to France. But the new policy of the Regent now opened Scotland to the English refugees, and it was as one of these that Knox returned in 1555 to his own country. Although he soon withdrew to take charge of the English congregation at Frankfort and Geneva his energy had already given a decisive impulse to the new movement. In a gathering at the house of Lord Erskine he persuaded the assembly to "refuse all society with idolatry, and bind themselves to the uttermost of their power to maintain the true preaching of the Evangile, as God should offer to their preachers an opportunity." The confederacy woke anew the jealousy of the government, and persecution revived. But some of the greatest nobles now joined the reforming cause. The Earl of Morton, the head of the house of Douglas, the Earl of Argyle, the greatest chieftain of the west, and above all a bastard son of the late king, Lord James Stuart, who bore as yet the title of prior of St. Andrews, but who was to be better known afterwards as the Earl of Murray, placed themselves at the head of the movement. The remonstrances of Knox from his exile at Geneva stirred them to interfere in behalf of the persecuted Protestants; and at the close of 1557 these nobles united with the rest of the Protestant leaders in an engagement which became memorable as the first among those Covenants which were to give shape and colour to Scotch religion.

[Sidenote: The First Covenant.]

"We," ran this solemn bond, "perceiving how Satan in his members, the Antichrists of our time, cruelly doth rage, seeking to overthrow and to destroy the Evangel of Christ, and His Congregation, ought according to our bounden duty to strive in our Master's cause even unto the death, being certain of our victory in Him. The which our duty being well considered, we do promise before the Majesty of God and His Congregation that we, by His grace, shall with all diligence continually apply our whole power, substance, and our very lives to maintain, set forward, and establish the most blessed Word of God and His Congregation, and shall labour at our possibility to have faithful ministers, purely and truly to minister Christ's Evangel and sacraments to His people. We shall maintain them, nourish them, and defend them, the whole Congregation of Christ and every member thereof, at our whole power and wearing of our lives, against Satan and all wicked power that does intend tyranny or trouble against the foresaid Congregation. Unto the which Holy Word and Congregation we do join us, and also do forsake and renounce the congregation of Satan with all the superstitious abomination and idolatry thereof: and moreover shall declare ourselves manifestly enemies thereto by this our faithful promise before God, testified to His Congregation by our subscription at these presents."

[Sidenote: Scotland and Protestantism.]

The Covenant of the Scotch nobles marked a new epoch in the strife of religions. Till now the reformers had opposed the doctrine of nationality to the doctrine of Catholicism. In the teeth of the pretensions which the Church advanced to a uniformity of religion in every land, whatever might be its differences of race or government, the first Protestants had advanced the principle that each prince or people had alone the right to determine its form of faith and worship. "Cujus regio" ran the famous phrase which embodied their theory, "ejus religio." It was the acknowledgement of this principle that the Lutheran princes obtained at the Diet of Spires; it was on this principle that Henry based his Act of Supremacy. Its strength lay in the correspondence of such a doctrine with the political circumstances of the time. It was the growing feeling of nationality which combined with the growing developement of monarchical power to establish the theory that the political and religious life of each nation should be one, and that the religion of the people should follow the faith of the prince. Had Protestantism, as seemed at one time possible, secured the adhesion of all the European princes, such a theory might well have led everywhere as it led in England to the establishment of the worst of tyrannies, a tyranny that claims to lord alike over both body and soul. The world was saved from this danger by the tenacity with which the old religion still held its power. In half the countries of Europe the disciples of the new opinions had soon to choose between submission to their conscience and submission to their prince; and a movement which began in contending for the religious supremacy of kings ended in those wars of religion which arrayed nation after nation against their sovereigns. In this religious revolution Scotland led the way. Her Protestantism was the first to draw the sword against earthly rulers. The solemn "Covenant" which bound together her "Congregation" in the face of the regency, which pledged its members to withdraw from all submission to the religion of the State and to maintain in the face of the State their liberty of conscience, opened that vast series of struggles which ended in Germany with the Peace of Westphalia and in England with the Toleration Act of William the Third.

[Sidenote: The Exiles.]

The "Covenant" of the lords sounded a bold defiance to the Catholic reaction across the border. While Mary replaced the Prayer-Book by the Mass, the Scotch lords resolved that wherever their power extended the Common Prayer should be read in all churches. While hundreds were going to the stake in England the Scotch nobles boldly met the burning of their preachers by a threat of war. "They trouble our preachers," ran their bold remonstrance against the bishops in the Queen-mother's presence; "they would murder them and us! shall we suffer this any longer? No, madam, it shall not be!" and therewith every man put on his steel bonnet. The Regent was helpless for the moment and could find refuge only in fair words, words so fair that for a while the sternest of the reformers believed her to be drifting to their faith. She was in truth fettered by the need of avoiding civil strife at a time when the war of England against France made a Scotch war against England inevitable. The nobles refused indeed to cross the border, but the threat of a Scotch invasion was one of the dangers against which Mary Tudor now found herself forced to provide. Nor was the uprise of Protestantism in Scotland the only result of her policy in giving fire and strength to the new religion. Each step in the persecution had been marked by a fresh flight of preachers, merchants, and gentry across the seas. "Some fled into France, some into Flanders, and some into the high countries of the Empire." As early as 1554 we find groups of such refugees at Frankfort, Emden, Zuerich, and Strassburg. Calvin welcomed some of them at Geneva; the "lords of Berne" suffered a group to settle at Aarau; a hundred gathered round the Duchess of Suffolk at Wesel. Amongst the exiles we find many who were to be bishops and statesmen in the coming reign. Sir Francis Knollys was at Frankfort, Sir Francis Walsingham travelled in France; among the divines were the later archbishops Grindal and Sandys, and the later bishops Horne, Parkhurst, Aylmer, Jewel, and Cox. Mingled with these were men who had already played their part in Edward's reign, such as Poinet, the deprived Bishop of Winchester, Bale, the deprived Bishop of Ossory, and the preachers Lever and Knox.

[Sidenote: The Extreme Protestants.]

Gardiner had threatened that the fugitives should gnaw their fingers from hunger, but ample supplies reached them from London merchants and other partizans in England, and they seem to have lived in fair comfort while their brethren at home were "going to the fire." Their chief troubles sprang from strife among themselves. The hotter spirits among the English Protestants had seen with discontent the retention of much that they looked on as superstitious and Popish in even the last liturgy of Edward's reign. That ministers should still wear white surplices, that litanies should be sung, that the congregation should respond to the priest, that babes should be signed in baptism with the sign of the cross, that rings should be given in marriage, filled them with horror. Hooper, the leader of this party, refused when made bishop to don his rochet; and had only been driven by imprisonment to vest himself in "the rags of Popery." Trivial indeed as such questions seemed in themselves, an issue lay behind them which was enough to make men face worse evils than a prison. The royal supremacy, the headship of the Church, which Henry the Eighth claimed for himself and his successors, was, as we have seen, simply an application of the principle which the states of North Germany had found so effective in meeting the pretensions of the Emperor or the Pope. The same sentiment of national life took a new form in the preservation of whatever the change of religious thought left it possible to preserve in the national tradition of faith and worship. In the Lutheran churches, though the Mass was gone, reredos and crucifix remained untouched. In England the whole ecclesiastical machinery was jealously preserved. Its Church was still governed by bishops who traced their succession to the Apostles. The words of its new Prayer-Book adhered as closely as they might to the words of Missal and Breviary. What made such an arrangement possible was the weakness of the purely religious impulse in the earlier stages of the Reformation. In Germany indeed or in England, the pressure for theological change was small; the religious impulse told on but a small part, and that not an influential part, of the population; it did in fact little more than quicken and bring into action the older and widely-felt passion for ecclesiastical independence.

[Sidenote: Protestantism and the Supremacy.]

But the establishment of this independence at once gave fresh force to the religious movement. From denouncing the Pope as a usurper of national rights men passed easily to denounce the Papal system as in itself Antichristian. In setting aside the voice of the Papacy as a ground of faith the new churches had been forced to find a ground of faith in the Bible. But the reading and discussion of the Bible opened up a thousand questions of belief and ritual, and the hatred of Rome drew men more and more to find answers to such questions which were antagonistic to the creed and usages of a past that was identified in their eyes with the Papacy. Such questions could hardly fail to find an echo in the people at large. To the bulk of men ecclesiastical institutions are things dim and remote; and the establishment of ecclesiastical independence, though it gratified the national pride, could have raised little personal enthusiasm. But the direct and personal interest of every man seemed to lie in the right holding of religious truth, and thus the theological aspect of the Reformation tended more and more to supersede its political one. All that is generous and chivalrous in human feeling told in the same direction. To statesmen like Gardiner or Paget the acceptance of one form of faith or worship after another as one sovereign after another occupied the throne seemed, no doubt, a logical and inevitable result of their acceptance of the royal supremacy. But to the people at large there must have been something false and ignoble in the sight of a statesman or a priest who had cast off the Mass under Edward to embrace it again under Mary, and who was ready again to cast it off at the will of Mary's successor. If worship and belief were indeed spiritual things, if they had any semblance of connexion with divine realities, men must have felt that it was impossible to put them on and off at a king's caprice. It was this, even more than the natural pity which they raised, that gave their weight to the Protestant martyrdoms under Mary. They stood out in emphatic protest against the doctrine of local religion, of a belief dictated by the will of kings. From the Primate of the Church to the "blind girl" who perished at Colchester, three hundred were found in England who chose rather to go to the fire than to take up again at the Queen's will what their individual conscience had renounced as a lie against God.

[Sidenote: Calvin.]

But from the actual assertion of such a right of the individual conscience to find and hold what was true, even those who witnessed for it by their death would have shrunk. Driven by sheer force of fact from the theory of a national and royal faith, men still shuddered to stand alone. The old doctrine of a Catholic Christianity flung over them its spell. Rome indeed they looked on as Antichrist, but the doctrine which Rome had held so long and so firmly, the doctrine that truth should be coextensive with the world and not limited by national boundaries, that the Church was one in all countries and among all peoples, that there was a Christendom which embraced all kingdoms and a Christian law that ruled peoples and kings, became more and more the doctrine of Rome's bitterest opponents. It was this doctrine which found its embodiment in John Calvin, a young French scholar, driven in early manhood from his own country by the persecution of Francis the First. Calvin established himself at Basle, and produced there in 1535 at the age of twenty-six a book which was to form the theology of the Huguenot churches, his "Institutes of the Christian Religion." What was really original in this work was Calvin's doctrine of the organization of the Church and of its relation to the State. The base of the Christian republic was with him the Christian man, elected and called of God, preserved by His grace from the power of sin, predestinate to eternal life. Every such Christian man is in himself a priest, and every group of such men is a Church, self-governing, independent of all save God, supreme in its authority over all matters ecclesiastical and spiritual. The constitution of such a church, where each member as a Christian was equal before God, necessarily took a democratic form. In Calvin's theory of Church government it is the Church which itself elects its lay elders and lay deacons for purposes of administration; it is with the approval and consent of the Church that elders and deacons with the existing body of pastors elect new ministers. It is through these officers that the Church exercises its power of the keys, the power of diffusing the truth and the power of correcting error. To the minister belong the preaching of the word and the direction of all religious instruction; to the body of ministers belong the interpretation of scripture and the decision of doctrine. On the other hand the administration of discipline, the supervision of the moral conduct of each professing Christian, the admonition of the erring, the excommunication and exclusion from the body of the Church of the unbelieving and the utterly unworthy, belong to the Consistory, the joint assembly of ministers and elders. To this discipline princes as well as common men are alike subject; princes as well as common men must take their doctrine from the ministers of the Church.

[Sidenote: Calvinism.]

The claims of the older faith to spiritual and ecclesiastical supremacy over the powers of earth reappeared in this theory. Calvin like the Papacy ignored all national independence, all pretensions of peoples as such to create their own system of church doctrine or church government. Doctrine and government he held to be already laid down in the words of the Bible, and all questions that rose out of those words came under the decision of the ecclesiastical body of ministers. Wherever a reformed religion appeared, there was provided for it a simple but orderly organization which in its range and effectiveness rivalled that of the older Catholicism. On the other hand this organization rested on a wholly new basis; spiritual and ecclesiastical power came from below not from above; the true sovereign in this Christian state was not Pope or Bishop but the Christian man. Despotic as the authority of pastor and elders seemed, pastor and elders were alike the creation of the whole congregation, and their judgement could in the last resort be adopted or set aside by it. Such a system stood out in bold defiance against the tendencies of the day. On its religious side it came into conflict with that principle of nationality, of ecclesiastical as well as civil subjection to the prince, on which the reformed Churches and above all the Church of England had till now been built up. As a vast and consecrated democracy it stood in contrast with the whole social and political framework of the European nations. Grave as we may count the faults of Calvinism, alien as its temper may in many ways be from the temper of the modern world, it is in Calvinism that the modern world strikes its roots, for it was Calvinism that first revealed the worth and dignity of Man. Called of God, and heir of heaven, the trader at his counter and the digger in his field suddenly rose into equality with the noble and the king.

[Sidenote: Calvin and the Exiles.]

It was this system that Calvin by a singular fortune was able to put into actual working in the little city of Geneva, where the party of the Reformation had become master and called him in 1536 to be their spiritual head. Driven out but again recalled, his influence made Geneva from 1541 the centre of the Protestant world. The refugees who crowded to the little town from persecution in France, in the Netherlands, in England, found there an exact and formal doctrine, a rigid discipline of manners and faith, a system of church government, a form of church worship, stripped, as they held, of the last remnant of the superstitions of the past. Calvin himself with his austere and frugal life, his enormous industry, his power of government, his quick decision, his undoubting self-confidence, his unswerving will, remained for three-and-twenty years till his death in 1564 supreme over Protestant opinion. His influence told heavily on England. From the hour of Cromwell's fall the sympathies of the English reformers had drawn them, not to the Lutheran Churches of North Germany, but to the more progressive Churches of the Rhineland and the Netherlands: and on the critical question of the Lord's Supper which mainly divided the two great branches of the Reformation Cranmer and his partizans became more definitely anti-sacramentarian as the years went by. At Edward's death the exiles showed their tendencies by seeking refuge not with the Lutheran Churches of North Germany but with the Calvinistic Churches of Switzerland or the Rhine; and contact with such leaders as Bullinger at Zuerich or Calvin at Geneva could hardly fail to give fresh vigour to the party which longed for a closer union with the foreign churches and a more open breach with the past.

[Sidenote: The troubles at Frankfort.]

The results of this contact first showed themselves at Frankfort. At the instigation of Whittingham, who in Elizabeth's days became Dean of Durham, a body of English exiles that had found shelter there resolved to reform both worship and discipline. The obnoxious usages were expunged from the Prayer-Book, omissions were made in the communion service, a minister and deacons chosen, and rules drawn up for church government after the Genevan model. Free at last "from all dregs of superstitious ceremonies" the Frankfort refugees thanked God "that had given them such a church in a strange land wherein they might hear God's holy word preached, the sacraments rightly ministered, and discipline used, which in their own country could never be obtained." But their invitation to the other English exiles to join them in the enjoyment of these blessings met with a steady repulse. Lever and the exiles at Zuerich refused to come unless they might "altogether serve and praise God as freely and uprightly as the order last taken in the Church of England permitteth and presenteth, for we are fully determined to admit and use no other." The main body of the exiles who were then gathered at Strassburg echoed the refusal. Knox however, who had been chosen minister by the Frankfort congregation, moved rapidly forward, rejecting the communion service altogether as superstitious, and drawing up a new "order" of worship after the Genevan model. But in the spring of 1555 these efforts were foiled by the arrival of fresh exiles from England of a more conservative turn: the reformers were outvoted; Knox was driven from the town by the magistrates "in fear of the Emperor" whom he had outraged in an "Admonition" to the English people which he had lately issued; and the English service was restored. Whittingham and his adherents, still resolute, as Bale wrote, "to erect a Church of the Purity" (we may perhaps trace in the sneer the origin of their later name of Puritans), found a fresh refuge at Basle and Geneva, where the leaders of the party occupied themselves in a metrical translation of the Psalms which left its traces on English psalmody and in the production of what was afterwards known as the Geneva Bible.

[Sidenote: The seditious books.]

Petty as this strife at Frankfort may seem, it marks the first open appearance of English Puritanism, and the beginning of a struggle which widened through the reign of Elizabeth till under the Stuarts it broke England in pieces. But busy as they were in strife among themselves, the exiles were still more busy in fanning the discontent at home. Books, pamphlets, broadsides, were written and sent for distribution to England. The violence of their language was incredible. No sooner had Bonner issued his injunctions than Bale denounced him in a fierce reply as "a beastly belly-god and damnable dung-hill." With a spirit worthy of the "bloody bitesheeps" whom he attacked, the ex-Bishop of Ossory regretted that when Henry plucked down Becket's shrine he had not burned the idolatrous priests upon it. It probably mattered little to Bale that at the moment when he wrote not a single Protestant had as yet been sent to the stake; but language such as this was hardly likely to stir Mary to a spirit of moderation. The Spanish marriage gave the refugees a fairer opportunity of attack, and the Government was forced to make enquiries of the wardens of city gilds "whether they had seen or heard of any of these books which had come from beyond seas." The violence of the exiles was doubled by the suppression of Wyatt's revolt. Poinet, the late Bishop of Winchester, who had taken part in it, fled over sea to write a "Sharp Tractate of political power" in which he discussed the question "whether it be lawful to depose an evil governor and kill a tyrant."

[Sidenote: Knox and Goodman.]

But with the actual outbreak of persecution and the death of Cranmer all restraint was thrown aside. In his "First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women" Knox denounced Mary as a Jezebel, a traitress, and a bastard. He declared the rule of women to be against the law of Nature and of God. The duty, whether of the estates or people of the realm, was "first to remove from honour and authority that monster in nature; secondarily, if any presume to defend that impiety, they ought not to fear first to pronounce, then after to execute against them the sentence of death." To keep the oath of allegiance was "nothing but plain rebellion against God." "The day of vengeance," burst out the writer, "which shall apprehend that horrible monster, Jezebel of England, and such as maintain her monstrous cruelty is already appointed in the counsel of the Eternal; and I verily believe that it is so nigh that she shall not reign so long in tyranny as hitherto she hath done, when God shall declare himself her enemy." Another exile, Goodman, enquired "how superior powers ought to be obeyed of their subjects; and wherein they may lawfully by God's word be disobeyed and resisted." His book was a direct summons to rebellion. "By giving authority to an idolatrous woman" Goodman wrote to his English fellow-subjects, "ye have banished Christ and his Gospel. Then in taking the same authority from her you shall restore Christ and his word, and shall do well. In obeying her you have disobeyed God; then in disobeying her you shall please God." "Though it should appear at the first sight," he urged, "a great disorder that the people should take unto them the punishment of transgressions, yet when the magistrates and other officers cease to do their duties they are as it were without officers, yea, worse than if they had none at all, and then God giveth the sword into the people's hand." And what the people were to do with the sword Poinet had already put very clearly. It was the "ungodly serpent Mary" who was "the chief instrument of all this present misery in England." "Now both by God's laws and man's," concluded the bishop, "she ought to be punished with death, as an open idolatress in the sight of God, and a cruel murderer of His saints before men, and merciless traitress to her own native country."

Behind the wild rhetoric of words like these lay the new sense of a prophetic power, the sense of a divine commission given to the preachers of the Word to rebuke nobles and kings. At the moment when the policy of Cromwell crushed the Church as a political power and freed the growing Monarchy from the constitutional check which its independence furnished, a new check offered itself in the very enthusiasm which sprang out of the wreck of the great religious body. Men stirred with a new sense of righteousness and of a divine government of the world, men too whose natural boldness was quickened and fired by daily contact with the older seers who rebuked David or Jezebel, could not hold their peace in the presence of wrong. While nobles and statesmen were cowering in silence before the dreaded power of the kingship the preachers spoke bluntly out. Not only Latimer, but Knox, Grindal, and Lever had uttered fiery remonstrances against the plunderers of Edward's reign. Bradford had threatened them with the divine judgement which at last overtook them. "'The judgement of the Lord! The judgement of the Lord!' cried he, with a lamentable voice and weeping tears." Wise or unwise, the pamphlets of the exiles only carried on this theory to its full developement. The great conception of the mediaeval Church, that of the responsibility of kings to a spiritual power, was revived at an hour when kingship was trampling all responsibility to God or man beneath its feet. Such a revival was to have large and beneficial issues in our later history. Gathering strength under Elizabeth, it created at the close of her reign that moral force of public opinion which under the name of Puritanism brought the acts and policy of our kings to the tests of reason and the Gospel. However ill directed that force might be, however erroneously such tests were often applied, it is to this new force that we owe the restoration of liberty and the establishment of religious freedom. As the voice of the first Christian preachers had broken the despotism of the Roman Empire, so the voice of the preachers of Puritanism broke the despotism of the English Monarchy.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth.]

But great as their issues were to be, for the moment these protests only quickened the persecution at home. We can hardly wonder that the arrival of Goodman's book in England in the summer of 1558 was followed by stern measures to prevent the circulation of such incentives to revolt. "Whereas divers books" ran a royal proclamation, "filled with heresy, sedition, and treason, have of late and be daily brought into the realm out of foreign countries and places beyond seas, and some also covertly printed within this realm and cast abroad in sundry parts thereof, whereby not only God is dishonoured but also encouragement is given to disobey lawful princes and governors," any person possessing such books "shall be reported and taken for a rebel, and shall without delay be executed for that offence according to the order of martial law." But what really robbed these pamphlets of all force for harm was the prudence and foresight of the people itself. Never indeed did the nation show its patient good sense more clearly than in the later years of Mary's reign. While fires blazed in Smithfield and news of defeat came from over sea, while the hot voices of Protestant zealots hounded men on to assassination and revolt, the bulk of Englishmen looked quietly from the dying Queen to the girl who in a little while must wear her crown. What nerved men to endure the shame and bloodshed about them was the certainty of the speedy succession of the daughter of Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth was now in her twenty-fifth year. Personally she had much of her mother's charm with more than her mother's beauty. Her figure was commanding, her face long but queenly and intelligent, her eyes quick and fine. She had grown up amidst the liberal culture of Henry's court a bold horsewoman, a good shot, a graceful dancer, a skilled musician, and an accomplished scholar. Even among the highly-trained women who caught the impulse of the New Learning she stood in the extent of her acquirements without a peer. Ascham, who succeeded Grindal and Cheke in the direction of her studies, tells us how keen and resolute was Elizabeth's love of learning, even in her girlhood. At sixteen she already showed "a man's power of application" to her books. She had read almost the whole of Cicero and a great part of Livy. She began the day with the study of the New Testament in Greek, and followed this up by reading selected orations of Isocrates and the tragedies of Sophocles. She could speak Latin with fluency and Greek moderately well. Her love of classical culture lasted through her life. Amidst the press and cares of her later reign we find Ascham recording how "after dinner I went up to read with the Queen's majesty that noble oration of Demosthenes against AEschines." At a later time her Latin served her to rebuke the insolence of a Polish ambassador, and she could "rub up her rusty Greek" at need to bandy pedantry with a Vice-Chancellor. But Elizabeth was far as yet from being a mere pedant. She could already speak French and Italian as fluently as her mother-tongue. In later days we find her familiar with Ariosto and Tasso. The purity of her literary taste, the love for a chaste and simple style, which Ascham noted with praise in her girlhood, had not yet perished under the influence of euphuism. But even amidst the affectation and love of anagrams and puerilities which sullied her later years Elizabeth remained a lover of letters and of all that was greatest and purest in letters. She listened with delight to the "Faery Queen," and found a smile for "Master Spenser" when he appeared in her presence.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth and Mary.]

From the bodily and mental energy of her girlhood, the close of Edward's reign drew Elizabeth at nineteen to face the sterner problems of religion and politics. In the daring attempt of Northumberland to place Jane Grey on the throne Elizabeth's rights were equally set aside with those of Mary; and the first public act of the girl was to call the gentry to her standard and to join her sister with five hundred followers in her train. But the momentary union was soon dissolved. The daughter of Catharine could look with little but hate on the daughter of Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth's tendency to the "new religion" jarred with the Queen's bigotry; and the warnings of the imperial ambassador were hardly needful to spur Mary to watch jealously a possible pretender to her throne. The girl bent to the Queen's will in hearing mass, but her manner showed that the compromise was merely a matter of obedience, and fed the hopes of the Protestant zealots who saw in the Spanish marriage a chance of driving Mary from the throne. The resolve which the Queen showed to cancel her sister's right of succession only quickened the project for setting Elizabeth in her place; and it was to make Elizabeth their sovereign that Suffolk rose in Leicestershire and Wyatt and his Kentishmen marched against London Bridge. The failure of the rising seemed to ensure her doom. The Emperor pressed for her death as a security for Philip on his arrival; and the detection of a correspondence with the French king served as a pretext for her committal to the Tower. The fierce Tudor temper broke through Elizabeth's self-control as she landed at Traitor's Gate. "Are all these harnessed men there for me?" she cried as she saw the guard; "it needed not for me, being but a weak woman!" and passionately calling on the soldiers to "bear witness that I come as no traitor!" she flung herself down on a stone in the rain and refused to enter her prison. "Better sitting here than in a worse place," she cried; "I know not whither you will bring me." But Elizabeth's danger was less than it seemed. Wyatt denied to the last her complicity in the revolt, and in spite of Gardiner's will to "go roundly to work" with her the Lords of the Council forced Mary to set her free. The Queen's terrors however revived with her hopes of a child in the summer of 1555. To Mary her sister seemed the one danger which threatened the succession of her coming babe and the vast issues which hung on it, and Elizabeth was summoned to her sister's side and kept a close prisoner at Hampton Court. Philip joined in this precaution, for "holding her in his power he could depart safely and without peril" in the event of the Queen's death in childbirth; and other plans were perhaps already stirring his breast. Should Mary die, a fresh match might renew his hold on England; "he might hope," writes the Venetian ambassador, "with the help of many of the nobility, won over by his presents and favours, to marry her (Elizabeth) again, and thus succeed anew to the crown."

[Sidenote: Elizabeth and Philip.]

But whatever may have been Philip's designs, the time had not as yet come for their realization; the final disappointment of the Queen's hopes of childbirth set Elizabeth free, and in July she returned to her house at Ashridge. From this moment her position was utterly changed. With the disappearance of all chance of offspring from the Queen and the certainty of Mary's coming death her sister's danger passed away. Elizabeth alone stood between England and the succession of Mary Stuart; and, whatever might be the wishes of the Queen, the policy of the House of Austria forced it to support even the daughter of Anne Boleyn against a claimant who would bind England to the French monarchy. From this moment therefore Philip watched jealously over Elizabeth's safety. On his departure for the Continent he gave written instructions to the Queen to show favour to her sister, and the charge was repeated to those of his followers whom he left behind him. What guarded her even more effectually was the love of the people. When Philip at a later time claimed Elizabeth's gratitude for his protection she told him bluntly that her gratitude was really due neither to him nor her nobles, though she owned her obligations to both, but to the English people. It was they who had saved her from death and hindered all projects for barring her right to the throne. "It is the people," she said, "who have placed me where I am now." It was indeed their faith in Elizabeth's speedy succession that enabled Englishmen to bear the bloodshed and shame of Mary's later years, and to wait patiently for the end.

Nor were these years of waiting without value for Elizabeth herself. The steady purpose, the clear perception of a just policy which ran through her wonderful reign, were formed as the girl looked coolly on at the chaos of bigotry and misrule which spread before her. More and more she realized what was to be the aim of her after life, the aim of reuniting the England which Edward and Mary alike had rent into two warring nations, of restoring again that English independence which Mary was trailing at the feet of Spain. With such an aim she could draw to her the men who, indifferent like herself to purely spiritual considerations, and estranged from Mary's system rather by its political than its religious consequences, were anxious for the restoration of English independence and English order. It was among these "Politicals," as they were soon to be called, that Elizabeth found at this moment a counsellor who was to stand by her side through the long years of her after reign. William Cecil sprang from the smaller gentry whom the changes of the time were bringing to the front. He was the son of a Yeoman of the Wardrobe at Henry's court; but his abilities had already raised him at the age of twenty-seven to the post of secretary to the Duke of Somerset, and through Somerset's Protectorate he remained high in his confidence. He was seized by the Lords on the Duke's arrest, and even sent to the Tower; but he was set at liberty with his master, and his ability was now so well known that a few months later saw him Secretary of State under Northumberland. The post and the knighthood which accompanied it hardly compensated for the yoke which Northumberland's pride laid upon all who served him, or for the risks in which his ambition involved them. Cecil saw with a fatal clearness the silent opposition of the whole realm to the system of the Protectorate, and the knowledge of this convinced him that the Duke's schemes for a change in the succession were destined to failure. On the disclosure of the plot to set Mary aside he withdrew for some days from the court, and even meditated flight from the country, till fear of the young king's wrath drew him back to share in the submission of his fellow-counsellors and to pledge himself with them to carry the new settlement into effect. But Northumberland had no sooner quitted London than Cecil became the soul of the intrigues by which the royal Council declared themselves in Mary's favour. His desertion of the Duke secured him pardon from the Queen, and though he was known to be in heart "a heretic" he continued at court, conformed like Elizabeth to the established religion, confessed and attended mass. Cecil was employed in bringing Pole to England and in attending him in embassies abroad. But his caution held him aloof from any close connexion with public affairs. He busied himself in building at Burghley and in the culture of the Church lands he had won from Edward the Sixth, while he drew closer to the girl who alone could rescue England from the misgovernment of Mary's rule. Even before the Queen's death it was known that Cecil would be the chief counsellor of the coming reign. "I am told for certain," the Spanish ambassador wrote to Philip after a visit to Elizabeth during the last hours of Mary's life, "that Cecil who was secretary to King Edward will be her secretary also. He has the character of a prudent and virtuous man, although a heretic." But it was only from a belief that Cecil retained at heart the convictions of his earlier days that men could call him a heretic. In all outer matters of faith or worship he conformed to the religion of the state.

[Sidenote: The Politicals.]

It is idle to charge Cecil, or the mass of Englishmen who conformed with him in turn to the religion of Henry, of Edward, of Mary, and of Elizabeth, with baseness or hypocrisy. They followed the accepted doctrine of the time--that every realm, through its rulers, had the sole right of determining what should be the form of religion within its bounds. What the Marian persecution was gradually pressing on such men was a conviction, not of the falsehood of such a doctrine, but of the need of limiting it. Under Henry, under Edward, under Mary, no distinction had been drawn between inner belief and outer conformity. Every English subject was called upon to adjust his conscience as well as his conduct to the varying policy of the state. But the fires of Smithfield had proved that obedience such as this could not be exacted save by a persecution which filled all England with horror. Such a persecution indeed failed in the very end for which it was wrought. Instead of strengthening religious unity, it gave a new force to religious separation; it enlisted the conscience of the zealot in the cause of resistance; it secured the sympathy of the great mass of waverers to those who withstood the civil power. To Cecil, as to the purely political statesmen of whom he was the type, such a persecution seemed as needless as it was mischievous. Conformity indeed was necessary, for men could as yet conceive of no state without a religion or of civil obedience apart from compliance with the religious order of the state. But only outer conformity was needed. That no man should set up a worship other than that of the nation at large, that every subject should duly attend at the national worship, Cecil believed to be essential to public order. But he saw no need for prying into the actual beliefs of those who conformed to the religious laws of the realm, nor did he think that such beliefs could be changed by the fear of punishment. While refusing freedom of worship therefore, Cecil, like Elizabeth, was ready to concede freedom of conscience. And in this concession we can hardly doubt that the bulk of Englishmen went with him. Catholics shared with Protestants the horror of Mary's persecution. To Protestantism indeed the horror of the persecution had done much to give a force such as it had never had before. The number of Protestants grew with every murder done in the cause of Catholicism. But they still remained a small part of the realm. What the bulk of Englishmen had been driven to by the martyrdoms was not a change of creed, but a longing for religious peace and for such a system of government as, without destroying the spiritual oneness of the nation, would render a religious peace possible. And such a system of government Cecil and Elizabeth were prepared to give.

[Sidenote: Mary's death.]