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met in

influence

the lower

deficit by the creation of all kinds of commissions to raise money, and when that expedient failed he was driven, in January, 1553, to issue writs for a parliament that met on the parliament 1st of March, memorable by reason of the measures which March, the council deemed it expedient to employ in order to check 1553; the growing spirit of independence by dictating the election memorable of such members to the lower house as would be subservi- attempt to ent to its will. In that way a practice, which had prevailed elections to to a greater or less extent since the days of Henry VII., was house; emphasized by a flagrant interference with elections by means of circulars sent directly to the sheriffs of counties or to the the system of royal mayors of towns naming the persons to be chosen, or by royal nominaorders sent to the favored candidates indicating the wish of tions; the crown that they should be elected, or by directions to the electors themselves from individual members of the council.2 Although the nomination parliament thus assembled granted the subsidy asked after much debate, the spirit of resistance spirit of manifested was so marked that it was dissolved on the last so great day of the month in which it met. Edward was able to dis- that parliasolve parliament in person, but immediately thereafter he was dissolved in removed on account of his rapidly increasing infirmity to in which Greenwich, and by the 1st of May it was clear that he was slowly dying. Thus was Northumberland brought face to face Edward's with a catastrophe that threatened not only his personal for- approachtunes, but those of the Reformation. The problem was, how forces to provide an heir to the throne who would be propitious to berland to both. The legal difficulties to be overcome were certainly seri- regulate the ous. By Henry's third and last succession act first Mary and the legal then Elizabeth had been put in the entail in default of issue of difficulties Edward, with a proviso that the succession should be subject come; to such further arrangements as the king by his last will might appoint. Under the power thus given Henry simply supple- claims of Mary and mented the parliamentary entail by providing that on failure Elizabeth;

During the fall and winter of 155253, there were no less than nine such commissions. As to the visitation to glean the last spoils from the churches, see Burnet, Hist. Reform., vol. i. p. 450. 2 See first draft of a circular in British Museum, Lansdowne MSS., p. 3; letter to a candidate, Sir P. Hoby, Harleian MSS., p. 523; Froude, Hist. Eng., vol. v. pp. 125, 126; Hallam,

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resistance

ment was

the month

it met;

ing death

Northum

attempt to

succession ;

to be over

claims of the house

the marriage be

Grey and

Guildford

Dudley;

Edward's

illegal

set aside

all claim

ants prior to Jane by

means of a will;

of issue of his three children, the crown should pass to the heirs of his younger sister Mary, duchess of Suffolk, to the detriment of the heirs of his older sister Margaret of Scotland.1 The representative of the Suffolk claim was Frances, the daughter of Mary, who was herself the mother of three daughters 2 by her marriage with Grey, Lord Dorset, a zealous protestant. Northumberland's complicated conspiracy began with a marriage between Lady Jane Grey, the eldest daughtween Lady ter of Frances, and his fourth son Guildford Dudley. Having thus engrafted a branch of the Suffolk house upon his own stock, the next step was to remove the three prior claimants who stood before Jane in the line of succession. The means attempt to determined upon for the accomplishment of this end was a will to be made by Edward, without parliamentary authority, naming Lady Jane as his immediate successor. This grossly illegal attempt to set aside the succession as settled by parliament by a king still in his minority was earnestly opposed by the judges, the law officers of the crown, and the archbishop, as a desperate measure which would involve all concerned in it in the guilt of treason. But boy as he was, and dying as he was, Edward was immovable. His zeal for the "religion" was such that he felt that everything must yield to the necessities of "his device for the succession," through which he confidently believed he could transmit the crown to a protestant successor. On the 21st of June all the formalities incident to cuted June the execution of the will or letters patent 5 were completed, and on July 6 Edward died. Although Northumberland was reluctantly supported at first by the council backed by the foreign mercenaries and by the extreme protestants, his whole incoherent and impracticable conspiracy collapsed in the presence of a popular outburst in Mary's favor, which sent him to conspiracy. the block, and with him the hapless girl whom he had involved

will exe

21, and Edward died July 6, 1553;

failure of Northumberland's

in the toils of his ambition.

1 See above, p. 108. And also Bailey's Succession to the English Crown, PP. 135, 136.

2 Lady Jane, born in 1537, Lady
Catherine, born in 1539, and Lady
Mary, born in 1545.

8 Celebrated 25th of May, 1553.
4 Burnet, Hist. Reform., vol. i. p. 454.

5 See the copy printed for the Camden Society by Mr. John G. Nichols, Letters Patent for the Limitation of the Crown: Queen Jane and Queen Mary, Appendix. A clear analysis of the letters, showing Edward's leaning to male succession, may be found in Bailey, p. 167.

CHAPTER IV.

MARY AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION.

two stages

formation:

I. WITH the death of Henry VIII. ended the first stage of The first the English Reformation, which consisted of the severance of the Engfrom the Roman See, by a political act, of a people impelled lish Reby a growing sense of nationality to assume absolute independence, without any departure whatever from the Roman dogma and ritual employed by the national church from the earliest times. While, in response to the touch of selfinterest, Henry was prompt to embody in his Act of Supremacy the new Lutheran doctrine1 of national religion that The first, embodying claimed the right for each people to determine the form of only a legal belief which should prevail within its bounds, he as sternly and eccleimposed by his Act of the Six Articles the severest penal- separation ties upon all who dared to dissent from the teachings of the Rome, older faith. Apart from the bitter feeling which the subsequent suppression of the monasteries excited, there can be

siastical

from

fully ac

the nation,

no doubt that the bulk of the nation went with the king, in was cheerhis first great act involving the legal and ecclesiastical sever- cepted by ance of the realm from the Roman dominion. While the the bulk of papal party, which rejected as a whole the new order of things brought about by the separation, included in its ranks such lofty spirits as Fisher and More, its numbers were certainly insignificant when compared with the greater mass of Catholic Anglicans and Lutherans who fully accepted the royal supremacy, while they differed sharply as to what should be the future doctrine of the emancipated national church. So far did the bulk of the nation acquiesce in the change with the which Henry's legislation brought about that when, in the ing that the reign of Edward, organized rebellion broke out in the western ancient counties against the introduction of the new service which the ritual prayer-book inaugurated, the demand was for the retention retained. of the mass and for the reëstablishment of catholicism, not

1 See above, pp. 50, 76.

understand

dogma and

should be

The second

stage, em

accepted at

bulk of the

nation;

the cause greatly

second stage by the greed

and reck

lessness of its leaders;

with the pope as its head, but as the laws of King Henry had left it.1

With the death of Edward VI. ended the second stage, embodying a bracing the changes of dogma and ritual embodied under the change of guidance of Cranmer in the Prayer-book and the Forty-two dogma and ritual, not Articles, which, by virtue of the Acts of Uniformity, were first by the made the standards of orthodoxy. That the changes thus brought about by the authority of the privy council under the presidency first of Somerset and then of Northumberland did not at the time receive the assent of the bulk of the nation is a fact which seems to be settled as well by the consensus of historians as by the sudden reaction in which Cranmer's work was for a time overthrown. Certain it is that the period occuprejudiced pied by the second stage of the English Reformation was a during the period of great want, misery, and administrative disorder, during which the cause was greatly prejudiced by the selfish conduct of the knot of greedy protestant nobles who at Henry's death seized upon the powers of the privy council, by means of which they completed the confiscation of the property of the church in order to enrich themselves, while they permitted the public treasury to become empty, the expenses of the court to increase, the coinage to be debased, and the peasantry to be oppressed by the enforcement of the heartless policy of inclosures which they carried out in the interest of the landlords the nation by the aid of foreign mercenaries. It is not therefore strange finally refused to that when the upstart Northumberland, around whom had support the gathered the hate which such a policy naturally engendered, party attempted to consummate his selfish work by a grossly illegal headed by Northum attempt to transfer the crown itself to his own family, the berland, nation should have risen in arms against him; and that when even in the his puppet queen, protestant as she was, was proclaimed, on interest of the 10th of July, 1553, but "few or none said, God save her."3 As to Mary's religious status there could be neither doubt nor question. So firm had been her insistence during her brother's reign upon her right to reject the new service and to cling to the mass that she was brought into sharp collision with both the king and the privy council, who only yielded to her 4 Privy Council Register, entry of June 16, 1549.

protestant

Jane Grey;

religious status of Mary;

1 See above, p. 121.

2 See above, p. 124.

8 Grey Friars' Chron., p. 79; Holinshed's Chron., p. 1087.

demands under a threat of war from her powerful cousin the emperor. But the fact remained that she was the daughter

2

the crown

ment;

by the

of a king who had never lost his popularity; that her right her right to to the crown had been sanctioned by an act of parliament; sanctioned and that her accession would end at least a period of political by parliaand religious chaos during which the nation had become thoroughly disheartened. So it was that within the ten days. that followed the proclamation of Lady Jane, Northumberland's conspiracy collapsed; and Mary, around whom had gathered an army of thirty thousand men 3 drawn mainly from the eastern counties in which the new religious movement had taken the deepest hold, was proclaimed by order of the council proclaimed in London on the 19th, and in Cambridge on the next day. Council in On August 3 the queen entered London with Elizabeth by Londoth of her side amid the acclaim of the populace, and according to July, 1553; custom she proceeded to the Tower, where she found upon the visits the green, awaiting release at her hands, an historic group of state releases prisoners, among whom were the old duke of Norfolk, and Norfolk Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, who, after a rigid confinement Gardiner. of five years, now came forth to take the first place at Mary's side as the councillor who was to direct the conservative policy that prevailed down to the Spanish marriage, and the subsequent domination of Philip and Pole.

19th

on

Tower and

and

accession:

vative

policy of

as to the

2. Gardiner, an ecclesiastical statesman, trained in the tol- Mary's erant school of Wolsey, and who became secretary of state The conser after his fall, had taken an active part in the measures that culminated in the repudiation of the papal supremacy, which Gardiner; he denounced at the time in a tract in which he said "that no his views new thing was introduced when the king was declared to be supremacy; supreme head." And yet in spite of his well-known advocacy of an independent national church, he was with Norfolk excluded from the list of Henry's executors because they were both known to be unalterably opposed to any further change involving either doctrine or ritual. Upon that ground he was sent to the finally sent to the Tower by Somerset, despite the fact that, Somerset;

1 See Cecil's statement of the matter, MS. Germany, bundle 15, State Paper Office, cited by Froude, vol. iv. P. 538.

2 35 Hen. VIII. c. I. See above, p. 107.

8 Haynes' State Papers, p. 157.
4 Renard to Charles V., Rolls
House MSS.

5 See above, p. 67.

6 In his book De Vera Obediencia. See Brown's Fasciculus, vol. ii. p. 806.

Tower by

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