[Sidenote: Moderate Reaction]

There was immediate alarm, when it was known that Mary intended her brother to be buried with the old rites; and though she was with difficulty dissuaded from carrying out that intention she nevertheless did celebrate a requiem Mass. It was however only natural that her first step was to release and restore the old Duke of Norfolk, young Edward Courtenay, [Footnote: Courtenay, a boy of eleven at the time, had been sent to the Tower when his father was executed in 1538.] son of the Marquis of Exeter, and the imprisoned bishops, making Gardiner her Chancellor: though London did not welcome Bonner. Mary frankly professed her desire that religion should return to the position at her father's death, but she was equally definite about exercising no compulsion without parliamentary sanction. The reinstated bishops had been suspended in the most arbitrary manner; those now dispossessed had been appointed under the new theory that they held office only during the royal pleasure. The prompt departure of the foreign preachers and their English allies was facilitated and encouraged. The imprisonment of Ridley was a legitimate reward for his activity on behalf of Lady Jane, in August, Latimer was arrested for seditious demeanour, but was carefully allowed the opportunity of flight. Cranmer was not touched till the draft of a letter he wrote, courageously repudiating the libel that he had restored the Mass, had been copied and widely disseminated. Then he was removed to the Tower, ostensibly for his support of Northumberland. He, like Latimer, was given ample opportunity to fly, but also like Latimer stood to his colours. In all this there was no savour of injustice, though it filled the Protestants with apprehension: as also did the removal of sundry bishops on the ground that they were married. Mary, like Gardiner, had always denied the validity of legislation during the minority; but to take action on that hypothesis without waiting for parliament was hardly consistent with her declarations. Great pressure was also brought to bear on Elizabeth, to induce her to recant her protestantism; but while she declared herself open to argument, and actually presented herself at Mass though with patent reluctance, she steadily refused to pronounce herself converted—which Renard at least attributed to political not to say treasonable intentions.

These events took place during August, and in the meantime Mary reopened communications with the Pope, resulting in the appointment of Cardinal Pole as legate—though more than a twelvemonth elapsed before he reached England. A matter of still greater importance was the Emperor's proposal, not at first openly put forward, that Mary should marry his son Philip.

[Sidenote: Proposed Spanish Marriage]

Now, the sequence of events of which the Peace of Passau between Charles and the Lutherans was a part had resulted in war between France and the Empire. To Charles, the projected marriage might obviously be of immense value. The French on the other hand desired not Mary's marriage but her deposition to make way for Mary Stewart. National sentiment in England demanded her union with an Englishman, pointing to Courtenay, now restored to the earldom of Devon; he and Reginald Pole being the representatives of the House of York. [Footnote: See Genealogical Table. Front.] Pole, though a Cardinal, had never taken priest's orders, so was also eligible as a husband, but had no desire for the position, recommending Mary to remain unwedded. Mary herself was already inclining towards the Spanish marriage, though Paget was almost the only prominent Englishman who favoured it; Gardiner being in strong opposition, and pressing for Courtenay. Noailles intrigued against it; but his object was to use Elizabeth as a stalking-horse for Mary Stewart. Finally, before anything could be done, parliament must meet to give its sanction; and before parliament could meet, the seal must be set on Mary's authority by her coronation. It is curious to note that Mary felt it necessary to obtain the Papal pardon for herself and Gardiner for the performance of the ceremony while the nation was still excommunicate. The Coronation took place on October 1st, and four days later parliament assembled.

[Sidenote: Oct. Parliament revokes Edward's legislation]

It began by abolishing once more all new treasons created since the ancient Act of Edward III., and new felonies since the accession of Henry VIII. It proceeded to declare Mary legitimate, though by so doing it did not invalidate Elizabeth's title as heir presumptive, since that rested on Henry's will, which had ignored equally the illegitimacy of both his daughters. It repealed the whole of the ecclesiastical legislation of the last reign, reverting to the position at Henry's death. As originally submitted, these two bills asserted the validity of the papal dispensation, and repealed Henry's ecclesiastical legislation as well as his son's: but in this form the Commons would not accept them. Some past attainders were also reversed, and the Archbishop, as well as Lady Jane, her husband, and one of his brothers, were attainted, though not, it would seem, with any present intention of inflicting the full penalty. Early in December, parliament was dissolved.

In the meantime the Queen definitely made up her mind that she would marry Philip, and was extremely indignant when the Commons petitioned her to wed, but not to wed a foreigner. So far, parliament at any rate did not ratify the Spanish connexion, though the Lords—including Gardiner—had practically lost all hope of resisting it, and were giving their attention to introducing into the treaty stipulations for the safe-guarding of English interests.

[Sidenote: 1554 Wyatt's rebellion]

Enough however had been done to raise the anti-Spanish sentiment to a painful pitch; the national nerves being already over-strung with excitement and uncertainty as to the coming course of events, deliberately aggravated by the subtle manipulation of the French ambassador. The marriage treaty was signed on January 12th: within a week, there was a rising in Devon—the Courtenay country—a premature movement in the great conspiracy known as Wyatt's rebellion. The leaders were all strong protestants, and it is likely enough that fear of the reaction was with them the primary motive; but their cry was anti-Spanish, not anti-Catholic, they appealed to the national not the religious sentiment. The rising in Devon forced the hand of the other conspirators, before they were really ready to act. Suffolk, pardoned for his share in Northumberland's plot, ill requited the Queen's clemency by an attempt—futile though it was—to raise the Midlands; but for a time it seemed that Sir Thomas Wyatt, who headed the rebellion in Kent—a county prolific of popular movements against the Government—might actually succeed in dethroning Mary.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth]

Ostensibly, the cry was against foreigners. There is very little doubt that Wyatt really intended to marry Elizabeth to Courtenay, and set her on the throne. Whether Elizabeth herself, now twenty years of age, was in the plot, remains uncertain. There were suspicious circumstances, but no proofs, and Wyatt himself ultimately exonerated her. But the atmosphere was thick with suspicions which later historians have crystallised into facts according to their sympathies. Mary is charged with having desired her sister's death, but on insufficient evidence; [Footnote: Stone, Mary I. Queen of England, p. 270. The historian asserts Elizabeth's complicity without proof, while criticising Froude for inventing a proof of Mary's culpability.] double-dealing was not the Queen's way, and her behaviour towards her sister points rather to a desire to believe in her innocence coupled with something like a conviction of her actual guilt. Renard certainly did his best to blacken Elizabeth's character, even while he urged her arrest—a measure to which both Gardiner and Paget were opposed.

[Sidenote: Progress of the rebellion]

The news of Wyatt's own rising arrived on January 26th, some days after Gardiner had frightened Courtenay into betraying at least the existence of the plot. Elizabeth had been summoned from Hatfield to London, but declared herself too ill to travel. While it was believed that the only aim was to stop the Spanish marriage, feeling favoured Wyatt, and it seems as if even Gardiner and his supporters were in no haste to put down the rising. Wyatt and his followers were at Rochester: Norfolk was sent down with guns and a company of Londoners to deal with him, but the men deserted to Wyatt crying "we are all English," and the Duke had to ride for safety. London was in a panic: the Council could only quarrel among themselves. Wyatt advanced towards the Capital. Mary rose to the occasion, and herself addressed the populace, her speech going far to allay the panic. Wyatt found the bridge at Southwark impassable, and after some hesitation marched up the river, crossing at Kingston. The loyalists however had plucked up heart. The insurgents' column, in the advance to London, was cut in two. Wyatt at the head of the leading section made a desperate effort to reach Ludgate with ever dwindling numbers; but when he arrived at the City gates, though he did indeed in his own words "keep touch," his small and exhausted following was in no condition for prolonged fighting. He was taken prisoner without difficulty. Many of his followers were captured. The whole affair was over in less than a fortnight from the first rising.

[Sidenote: Subsequent severities]

The leniency previously shown could not be repeated. It seemed dangerous to leave Lady Jane any longer as a possible centre for plots, and she was executed with her husband and father. Wyatt was beheaded; about a hundred of the rebels were hanged. Elizabeth and Courtenay were both committed to the Tower, but were liberated after some two months. At the worst the punishment meted out may be compared favourably with the proceedings after the Pilgrimage of Grace. It was severe, but could not reasonably be called cruel.

[Sidenote: The Marriage Treaty]

Neither the expectation of leniency nor the experience of severity allayed the antagonism to the Spanish marriage. The treaty however, which came up for ratification in Mary's second parliament—summoned to meet in London at the beginning of April—conceded every safeguard against Spanish domination which could be secured by words; and in addition the succession to Burgundy for the offspring of the union, in priority to Philip's son, born to him of his first wife. The terms could not have been more favourable, but the unpopular fact remained that the connexion would inevitably influence Mary's policy in Europe. It was not till July that it was considered that Philip could safely entrust his person in England, when the wedding was completed.

[Sidenote: Pole, Renard, and Gardiner]

Up to this point at least, the Emperor's influence had been exercised in favour of toleration, and in restraint of any disturbance of the subsisting religious conditions. On the other hand he had taken pains to impress upon Mary that the union itself was a practical step towards reconciliation with Rome, which he knew to be her ideal. But he was afraid of the protestants being so much alarmed as to make opposition to the marriage irresistible. For this reason he raised constant obstacles to the arrival in England of Cardinal Pole, believing that the legate's presence would be an irritant. Pole being also entrusted with the task of endeavouring to reconcile Charles with Henry II., it had not been difficult to find imperative reasons for occupying him on the Continent. But when the marriage was safely accomplished, an effective counterpoise secured to the betrothal of the young Queen of Scots to the Dauphin, and time allowed for the English to become accustomed to the new state of affairs and to settle down, it was no longer so important to exercise a restraining influence. Mary was eager for the country to be once more received into the bosom of the Church: and Gardiner, who was bent on the restoration of the old worship, had now come fully to the conclusion that the maintenance of it was conditioned by the restoration of the Roman obedience, although twenty years before at the time of the schism he had been one of Henry's most useful supporters. Still however it was necessary to ensure that the Pope would consent to leave the holders of former Church lands in undisturbed possession, as they might otherwise be relied on to become ardent protestants. It was not till these conditions were assured that the legate was allowed, in November, to set sail for England.

[Sidenote: Public tension]

Between the Wyatt rebellion which collapsed in February and the arrival of Pole in November, the great event was the royal marriage, but there were several other occurrences not without significance. Sir Nicholas Throgmorton, who had certainly been in communication with Wyatt, was nevertheless unanimously acquitted by a jury, and the result was hailed with acclamation by the populace though the jurymen were summoned before the Star-Chamber and fined. Renard, and, if Renard's accusations and the general tongue of rumour are to be trusted, Gardiner also, did their best to persuade Mary to strike at her sister; but Paget and the Council generally were stoutly opposed to the idea, and Mary herself declared that Elizabeth should not be condemned without full legal proof, which was not forthcoming. After some two months she was released from the Tower but kept under surveillance at Woodstock. A Romanising preacher at St. Paul's Gross was fired at, and the culprit was not given up. On the other hand, not only married Bishops but married clergy in general were deprived, though some were restored on doing penance and parting with their wives. These are said to have numbered about one-fifth of the beneficed clergy, a computation which does not seem excessive as Convocation had itself petitioned for the permission of marriage. Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, were taken from London to Oxford to hold a disputation on those doctrines as to which their views were held to be heretical. The ecclesiastical condemnation of their argument was of course a foregone conclusion. The parliament, however, which ratified the marriage treaty, was chiefly remarkable for following Paget in refusing assent to bills excluding Elizabeth from the succession and restoring the Six Articles Act and the old Act against Lollards. Paget acquired considerable strength from the fact that William, Lord Howard of Effingham, who was in command of the fleet, was known to be in agreement with his views. The parliament was dissolved in May. It is noteworthy also that France was affording harbourage to many gentlemen of the West Country who had been more or less implicated in the January rising.

[Sidenote: Nov. Reconciliation with Rome]

Mary's third parliament—in which the nation by its representatives was to be formally reconciled to Rome—was called in November. Its first task was to reverse the attainder against Pole which was of ancient date. The Cardinal had distinguished himself in Henry's time by the vehemence of his opposition (from abroad) to the divorce and to the King's subsequent ecclesiastical proceedings, and his brothers as well as his mother had all been found guilty of treason in connexion with real or manufactured conspiracies. The reversal of the attainder was required to legalise his position. On the 25th he landed with official pomp at Westminster. On the 29th, the Houses agreed—with but one dissentient in the Commons—to a "supplication" entreating for pardon and the restoration of the nation to communion with Rome. The next day was performed the ceremony of presenting the supplication to the Legate and receiving his solemn Absolution. Two days later, Gardiner from the pulpit confessed the sin of which he in common with the nation in general had been guilty in the great schism, and declared himself a loyal and repentant son of the Church. Since loyalty and repentance did not involve restitution of Church property, most of his countrymen were equally ready to declare themselves loyal and repentant. Yet were there not a few who would by no means repent.

[Sidenote 1: Reaction consummated] [Sidenote 2: 1555]

The Reconciliation of the Authorities to Rome was complete. It remained to compel her erring children to return to the fold. During the month following the submission, two fateful Acts were passed; one, almost without discussion, reviving the old acts, "De heretico comburendo" and others, which had been restricted under Henry and abolished under Somerset; the other repealing all the anti-Roman legislation since the twentieth year of Henry (1529), with a proviso, however, securing the alienated wealth of the Church to its present holders. On this there was more debate, and it was not actually passed till January 3rd. The former authority of the bishops and of the canon law was restored. It is to be observed that in all this legislation, the Commons were a good deal more amenable than the Lords; and this was even more markedly the case with the purely political measures. An Act was passed to secure the regency to Philip if there should be a child and Mary herself died, it being supposed at the time that the Queen was enceinte. But the suggestion that the succession should be secured to Philip was emphatically rejected, and the regency was by the Lords made conditional on his residence in England. He bore the title of King of England, but his Coronation was refused. Parliament was dissolved on January 16th.



CHAPTER XV

MARY (ii), 1555-58—THE PERSECUTION

Here we reach the turning point of the reign; the point at which the great persecution began. If anything like justice is to be rendered to the leading actors in the ensuing tragedy, it is necessary to differentiate between these two divisions of Mary's rule.

[Sidenote: Mary's policy, 1553-4]

We must remark that throughout these first eighteen months, Mary had proved herself to be the reverse of a vindictive woman. Her leniency in the case of Northumberland's accomplices had been almost unparalleled. A second rebellion when she had been barely six months on the throne was treated with no more than ordinary severity, though a very few of those implicated with Northumberland, who would otherwise have been spared, were executed in consequence. The advocates of the old religion had come into power, but their power had certainly not been used more oppressively than that of the opposition party under Warwick or even under Somerset: and there was more excuse for the treatment of Cranmer and Ridley at least than there had been for that of Gardiner and Bonner. If Latimer and Hooper, Ferrar and Coverdale, were imprisoned, it was no more than Heath and Day and Tunstal had suffered. The deprivation of the married clergy was certainly a harsh measure, since the marriages had been made under the aegis of the law; but that appears to be the one measure which had hitherto savoured of bigotry—at least, which had gone beyond the bounds of even-handed retaliation. What, then, was the change which now took place? And how may we account for it?

[Sidenote: 1555 The persecution]

The sanction of parliament had at last been obtained by the Acts just passed for the enforcement of the old religion by the old methods. There was nothing novel about the procedure or the penalties; but practically a reversion to the pre-latitudinarian line of demarcation between heresy and orthodoxy. All or very nearly all of the martyrs of the Marian persecution would have been sent to the stake under Henry for making the same profession of faith. The crucial question was acceptance of Transubstantiation, for the denial of which several victims had perished within the last twenty years, whose doom both Cranmer and Latimer had at the time held to be justified. But in the interval, the conditions had changed. A large proportion of the most learned scholars had adopted the new doctrine, and the legislature had sanctioned it. The methods which were usually efficacious in stamping out sporadic heresy, methods which only involved an execution here and there, lost their efficacy when the heresy had ceased to be sporadic. Hecatombs were required instead of occasional victims; and even the sacrifice of occasional victims had already begun to revolt the public conscience before Henry's career was closed. But this did not alter the vital postulate. Falsehood was none the less falsehood because it had been sanctioned for a time, none the less demanded drastic excision. Gardiner, standing for the old order, saw nothing revolting in applying again the principles which had been consistently applied before he became an old man. It is probable also that he expected immediate success to result from striking fearlessly and ruthlessly at the most prominent offenders—the rule of action habitually adopted by Henry and Cromwell—a rule generally maintained while Gardiner himself lived: that he never anticipated the holocaust which followed. It is remarkable that in his own diocese of Winchester there were no burnings. Mary had already sufficiently proved her own freedom from vindictiveness; it cannot fairly be questioned that she was moved entirely by a sense of duty however distorted.

[Sidenote: Whose was the responsibility?]

From the Spaniards [Footnote: See Renard's correspondence, passim. But the numerous citations therefrom alike in the Anti-Catholic Froude and the Catholic Stone (Mary I.) are sufficiently conclusive on the point.] there was no incitement to persecution, but the contrary—not that Philip had any abstract objection, but both he and Renard were concerned entirely with the present pacification of the country and its reconciliation to the Spanish marriage; both were aware that persecution would have the opposite effect. The demand for the suppression of heresy did not take its rise among the lay nobility, of whom the majority were prepared to accept whatever formulae might be most convenient. The theory [Footnote: Moore, p. 221, asserts this view.] that they rather than a section of the clergy were the moving cause has no foundation in the evidence, beyond the fact that the Council officially as a body urged Bonner and others forward. Paget and his associates certainly resisted the enactments at first. Still neither they nor the Commons can be freed from responsibility. The persecution was not however a move of one political party against the other; no section was so committed to protestantism as to be exposed to serious injury: no political motive can be even formulated. Vindictiveness, or a moral conviction of the duty of stamping out heresy, alone can make the proceedings intelligible. Of the former there is no fair proof, while the latter is entirely consistent with the prevailing spirit among the zealots on both sides, and with the known character of the persons who must be regarded as the principal instigators. Its source lay with Mary herself, a passionately devoted daughter of the old Church, and with a few ecclesiastics. Since there is no doubt that from the time of Pole's arrival, his influence predominated with her personally, he, more than Gardiner, must share with her the ultimate responsibility.

[Sidenote: Comparison with other persecutions]

Of old, an occasional example had sufficed to hold heresy in check; the changed conditions were not now realised. The case had ceased to be one of checking; nothing short of up-rooting would now be of any avail. For Mary, with her intense conviction of the soul-destroying effect of heresy, no sufferings in the flesh would have seemed too severe to inflict if thereby souls might be saved. But a persecution such as she initiated was absolutely the most fatal of all courses for the end she had in view. Tens of thousands among her subjects had assimilated the new ideas, and were prepared to die rather than surrender their hope of Heaven. These the martyrdom of a few hundreds could not terrify; and the heroic endurance of the martyrs changed popular indifference into passionate sympathy. Applied on this scale, the theory of conversion by fire, hitherto generally acquiesced in, brought about its own condemnation. Such a persecution, on the simple issue of opinion, has never again been possible in England. Catholics or Covenanters might be doomed to death, but the excuse had to be political. Religious opinions as such might be penalised by fines, imprisonment, the boot or the thumbscrew, the imposition of disabilities; still the ultimate penalty had to be associated at least with the idea of treason. In Mary's time, heresy as such was the plain issue. The status of all but some half dozen of the early clerical victims precludes any other view: and the first movement against the heretics in January 1555 was contemporaneous with an amnesty for the surviving prisoners of the Wyatt rebellion. The immediate practical effect was that every martyrdom brought fresh adherents to protestantism, and intensified protestant sentiment while extending the conviction that persecution was part and parcel of the Roman creed. That any of those responsible, from Mary down, took an unholy joy in the sufferings of the victims, appears to be a libel wholly without foundation; for the most part they honestly believed themselves to be applying the only remedy left for the removal of a mortal disease from the body politic; Bonner, perhaps the best abused of the whole group, constantly went out of his way to give the accused opportunities of recanting and receiving pardon. The fundamental fact which must not be forgotten in judging the authors of the persecution is, that the general horror of death as the penalty for a false opinion was not antecedent to but consequent upon it. What they did was on an unprecedented scale in England because heresy existed on an unprecedented scale; and the result was that the general conscience was awakened to the falseness of the principle. The same ghastly error for which Christendom has forgiven Marcus Aurelius was committed by Mary and endorsed by Pole, both of them by nature little less magnanimous and no whit less conscientious than the Roman emperor, though the moral horizon of both was infinitely more restricted.

[Sidenote: Gardiner]

The Marian persecution lasted for nearly four years. During that time, the number of victims fell little if at all short of three hundred, of whom one-fourth perished in the first year. The striking feature of the year is the distinction of the sufferers. One only of high position went to the stake after Gardiner's death—which took place only a few days after the burning of Ridley and Latimer, in November—that one, the highest of all, the whilom head (under the King) of the English Church. And he had then already been doomed. These facts point to the definite policy pursued by the Chancellor—the application of the principles which had proved so effective under Henry and Cromwell. Every prominent leader of the Reformation party who had not elected to conform was either dead or doomed or in exile within a twelve-month of the revival of the Heresy acts. After his time there was no process of selection; the victims were simply taken as they came. To find a sort of excuse in the conviction of an imperative duty to crush out the poison of heresy at any cost is in some degree possible. The attempt to explain the matter as in fact a crusade against Anabaptism [Footnote: Cf. Moore, P. 220.] as a social and political crime makes the thing not better but incomparably worse; while the endeavour to compare it with any other persecution in England is absurd. Henry before and Elizabeth afterwards could be ruthless; but while one reigned thirty-eight years and the other forty-five, yet in neither reign was the aggregate of burnings or executions for religion so great as in these four years of Mary's.

[Sidenote: Some characteristics]

In London itself, in Essex, and in the dioceses of Norwich and Canterbury, many informations were laid. Some five-sixths of the deaths were suffered within this restricted area, nearly half of these falling under the jurisdiction of Bonner; so that he was naturally looked upon as the moving spirit, and his conduct was imagined in the most lurid colours. As a matter of fact there is little sign that he initiated prosecutions—indeed he received a fairly strong hint from the Queen and Council that he was less active than he might have been; he certainly tried hard to persuade the accused to recant and escape condemnation; in several cases where he had hopes he deferred handing them over to the secular arm. But protestants were very disproportionately numerous in his diocese; if the accepted principle were sound at all, he of all men was most bound to strictness with the persistently recalcitrant, and that fact of itself sufficed to encourage heresy-hunters. Moreover in London, it must also be remarked, heresy was particularly defiant and audacious, and was not infrequently accompanied by acts of gross public disorder which merited the sharpest penalties quite apart from questions of orthodoxy. Acts of ruffianism were done in the name of true religion, [Footnote: E.g. the notorious cases of William Branch or Flower, and John Tooley.] and the doers thereof were enrolled among the martyrs. Moreover among the genuine martyrs for conscience' sake—by far the majority of those who suffered—not a few were zealots who took up their parable against the judges when under examination in a fashion calculated to enrage persons of a far less choleric disposition than the bishop of London. In short if once the postulate be granted that to teach persistently doctrines regarded by authority as false is deserving of the death penalty, the manner [Footnote: The popular impression is derived mainly from accounts based on Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Stripped of picturesque adjectives and reduced to a not superfluously accurate statement of facts resting on easily accepted stories by a strongly biased reporter, his evidence against Bonner and Gardiner is not very damnatory.] in which Bonner and his colleagues conducted their task is not to be greatly censured. In Ireland, and in several English dioceses, there were no actual martyrdoms.

[Sidenote: The first Martyrs]

The new year, 1555 had barely begun before the revived heresy laws were set in operation. For Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, all now at Oxford, there was to be some delay; for the chief prisoners elsewhere there was none. These were headed by Hooper and Ferrar, both bishops; Rogers, commonly identified with the "Matthew" of Matthew's Bible; Rowland Taylor of Hadley, a man generally beloved; Bradford, who had begun life as a rogue, but becoming converted, had lived to make restitution, so far as was possible, for the wrong doings of his youth, a very genuine instance of a striking reformation. Most of them belonged to the school of Ridley rather than of Hooper; but on the question of Transubstantiation, all were equally firm—and all were now in the eye of the law undoubtedly heretics. Had they recanted, they would have suffered but lightly. They were urged to do so, but steadfastly refused. It must even be admitted that they challenged martyrdom, for before they were brought to trial, the London group, including most of those above named, had issued an appeal which was practically a solemn reproof to those whose opinions differed from their own. Rogers was the first to suffer; after brief intervals all of those named went to the stake.

[Sidenote 1: Trial of Cranmer (Sept.)] [Sidenote 2: Martyrdom of Ridley and Latimer (Oct.)]

Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, were all condemned as a result of the disputation held at Oxford in 1554: but since this preceded the reconciliation with Rome, it was not accounted sufficient. On the old Catholic theory, the Metropolitan of England could only be condemned by the authority of the Pope himself—direct, or delegated ad hoc. The first move was made against him in September, before a court whose business was not to adjudicate, but to lay its conclusions before the Pope himself. Cranmer declined to recognise the authority, answering the charges brought against him not as a defendant on trial but as making a public profession of his views. Judgment however could not be passed till the results were submitted to the Pope. In the meantime, Ridley and Latimer were condemned under legatine authority, and were burnt at Oxford in November. Cranmer is said to have witnessed the martyrdom from his prison. The aged Latimer's exhortation to his companion at the stake rang like a trumpet note through the Protestant world. Ridley was the learned theologian and keen controversialist who more than any other man had moulded the plastic mind of the Archbishop since he had been released from the thraldom of Henry's moral and intellectual domination: who had led the campaign against "idolatry" but stood fast against the extravagances of the Nonconformists: who had without hesitation opposed Mary's accession. No one could have murmured against his punishment for treason two years before; but he died a martyr, for denying Transubstantiation and the Papal authority. Latimer was no theologian; but he was a pulpit orator of extraordinary power, an enthusiastic if erratic moralist, who had suffered for his own freely expressed opinions in the past and shown scant consideration for false teachers—a quixotic but heroic figure.

[Sidenote: Fate of the Archbishop 1555-56]

The condemnation by the court which tried the Archbishop carried with it no penalty; that was reserved for the Pope to pronounce—by implication, in handing him over to the secular arm, and explicitly by sentence of degradation, which was notified in December. Until this time Cranmer remained steadfast; but about the new year, he displayed signs of wavering, and was said to have been influenced by the arguments of a Spanish friar, Garcia. Possibly he attended Mass; certainly, about the end of January and beginning of February (1556) he wrote three "submissions" recognising the papal authority. These did not avail to save him from public degradation, in the course of which ceremony he produced a written appeal to a General Council, which was ignored. Two more "submissions" followed, but in neither did he go beyond the admission that the papal authority was now valid, since the Sovereign had so enacted. Nevertheless, on February 24th the writ committing him to the flames was issued. There is no reason to suppose that the idea of sparing him was ever entertained; but, wherever the blame lay, he was led to believe that a recantation might save him; and he did now at last break down utterly, and recant in the most abject terms. Had this won a pardon, the blow would have been crushing; the Court in its blindness suffered him to retrieve the betrayal. His doom was unaltered. While the fagots were prepared, he was taken to St. Mary's Church to hear his own funeral sermon and make his last public confession; but that confession, to the sore amazement and dismay of the authorities, proved to be the cry of the humble and self-abasing sinner repenting not his heresies but his recantations. And in accordance with his last utterance, when he came to the fire he was seen to thrust forth his right hand into the flame, crying aloud "this hand hath offended"; and so held it steadfastly till it was consumed. The chief prelate of the English Church was struck down at the bidding of a foreign Ecclesiastic; the recusant had been gratuitously glorified with the martyr's crown. It is likely enough that he won less personal popular sympathy than his fellows; but the moral effect must have been tremendous.

[Sidenote: Cranmer's record]

It is natural but hardly just that Cranmer should be judged on the basis of the impression created by his last month of life. That the protagonist in a great Cause should recant in the face of death seems to argue an almost incredible degree of pusillanimity, and suggests that pusillanimity and subservience are the key to his career. Nevertheless, but for that short hour of abasement nobly and humbly retrieved, the general judgment would probably be altogether different. And that breakdown does not appear to have been characteristic. Twice in the reign of Henry he had bowed to the King's judgment, acknowledging that Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell must be guilty since Henry was convinced: but there was no man in the country who took the part of either. To have defied the King would have been heroic, and there is a wide interval between failing of heroism and being pusillanimous. He withdrew his resistance to Northumberland's plot; but he resisted on the ground that it was illegal and withdrew only when he was assured that the Judges had unanimously affirmed its legality. He changed his views on Transubstantiation; but to surrender an abstruse dogma is not a crime. He repeatedly maintained opinions in opposition to Henry as well as to Mary at the risk of losing royal support and favour—which loss would certainly have meant delivering himself into the hands of his enemies. In practice he conformed to the restrictions laid upon him, but it was only on points of expediency that he personally gave way, though he would fain have allowed to others a larger latitude of opinion than he required for himself.

[Sidenote: His character]

Yet the virtues of Thomas Cranmer fail of recognition. The extreme Anglican joins with the Roman Catholic in condemning the ecclesiastical leader of the Schism; the puritan condemns the advocate of compromise; and the advocate of compromise, at least within the clerical ranks, condemns the Erastian cleric. In his day, and in Elizabeth's, the lay statesmen were Erastians to a man; that is forgiven to them; but the ecclesiastic who adopts and preaches without reservation the theory that the Church—its organisation, its administration, even its doctrines—is ultimately subject to the secular sovereign, essentially and not owing to the accidental sanction of force—such a one is inevitably regarded as a traitor to his order; that he was guided by honest conviction seems incredible. Cranmer was a man of peace, driven to do battle in the front rank; an academic, forced to take a leading part in exceedingly practical affairs; a student, compelled so far as he might to control a revolution. Yet to him, more than any other single man, it is due that the Church of England allows a larger latitude of opinion within her borders than any other, and that she possesses a liturgy of unsurpassed beauty. A man so weak, so lacking in self-reliance, can hardly be called great; yet one who, despite his weakness, has carved himself so noble and so lasting a monument can hardly be denied the epithet.

For the rest of the persecution it is sufficient to say that year by year the number of victims did not diminish; neither sex nor age brought immunity; but as they were of less standing, an attempt was made to intensify the effect by putting them to death in larger batches—which increased the horror. The laymen of station, it may be remarked, with one accord conformed, at least outwardly.

[Sidenote: 1555 Philip's policy]

The Parliament which passed the Heresy Acts was dissolved before the end of January. Rogers was burnt some three weeks later. Symptoms of unrest were quickly apparent, and Philip felt it necessary to dissociate himself publicly from the persecution. On this point Renard was urgent, and he was also anxious about the succession. If the Queen's hopes of a child should be disappointed, neither Mary Stewart nor Elizabeth would be satisfactory. The only thing to be done was to secure a convenient husband for the latter, and a project was on foot (not with her approval) for marrying her to the Prince of Savoy, which might incidentally make the English more disposed to join in the war with France, which was in occupation of Savoy. But by April the belligerents were thinking of holding a conference to discuss terms of peace, with an English Commission to mediate.

[Sidenote 1: Pope Paul IV.] [Sidenote 2: Mary has no child]

The death of Pope Julius, however, promptly followed by that of his immediate successor Marcellus, caused the election of the Cardinal Caraffa who became Paul IV. On both occasions, Reginald Pole had been perhaps the favourite candidate: but the election of Paul was a victory for the French, the new Pope being an austere zealot with a violent anti-imperial prejudice. Having thus secured the papal alliance, Henry of France was by no means disposed to so easy a compromise as had been looked for. The conference collapsed. If Philip really had hoped, as rumour said, to be enabled by the peace to introduce Spanish troops into England for his own ends, he was doomed to disappointment. So it was also with his hopes of an heir to secure him the English succession. Mary had been misled partly by the symptoms of what proved to be a fatal disease and partly by hysterical hallucinations. It became certain that there was no prospect of her ever having a child at all; which necessitated a complete reconsideration of the Spanish prince's policy. Possibly also the expectation that the Queen's life could not be a long one led the nobles with protestant inclinations to acquiesce in the prolonged persecution rather than countenance a danger of civil war. Neither they nor Elizabeth could be implicated in any of the abortive conspiracies which cropped up periodically during the remainder of the reign.

[Sidenote: Effect on Philip]

In August, Philip left the country, not to return again till more than eighteen months had passed; and then only for a very brief sojourn. Already his father was meditating abdication in his favour, and Philip was pondering how he might secure at least a preponderating influence with Elizabeth, whose ultimate accession he regarded as inevitable. Thus the Spanish counsels were now directed largely to securing favourable treatment for her—a complete reversal of Renard's earlier policy. It may be that the idea of marrying her himself after her sister's death was even now present in Philip's mind.

[Sidenote: Oct. A new parliament]

In October, about the time of the martyrdom of Ridley and Latimer at Oxford, a fresh parliament was summoned, which was called upon to grant a subsidy. The diminution in the royal revenues from normal sources, which had been growing steadily more serious throughout the last twenty years, made the appeal necessary; the more so as the Queen had been honestly struggling to pay off the debts bequeathed to her. The subsidy was granted in part at least owing to the exertions of Gardiner, who in spite of mortal illness attended the opening of parliament.

[Sidenote: Nov. Gardiner's death and character]

It was his last public act. A few days later he followed Ridley and Latimer to the grave; dying stoutly, in harness almost to the last. He was of the old school of ecclesiastical statesmen. Five and twenty years before, he had been statesman first, churchman afterwards; but when he found that the ecclesiastical organisation as well as the Pope was the objective of Henry's attack, he took his stand by his Order, though stubbornly loyal to the King. In Henry's later years, he tried a fall with Cranmer and was worsted through the King's favour. All through the reign of Edward, he watched with continual protest—mostly from prison—the toppling over of the fabric which Henry had established; himself, as he judged, the victim of unconstitutional oppression. Released and restored to power by Mary, he repented what he conceived to have been his initial error, the repudiation of Roman authority, and was not averse to exacting the full penalty from those who had dealt hardly with him; was zealous to restore the power of the Church and to stamp out heresy. But to the last, he stood for the Law, and for English freedom from foreign domination, and to the last he fought for his Queen. His wildest panegyrist would not call him a saint; but according to his lights he was rarely cruel or even unjust, though often harsh; the records of his life have been written almost entirely by bitterly hostile critics; [Footnote: This applies not only to the Protestant historians, but also to the correspondence of Renard (on account of the Chancellor's anti-Spanish attitude), and of Noailles who detested him personally.] and his name deserves more honour and less obloquy than is usually attached to it.

[Sidenote: Mary's difficulties]

An embassy to Rome earlier in the year, which had been charged with the formal announcement of the reconciliation, had also intimated Mary's intention of restoring to the Church such of the alienated property as still remained in the hands of the Crown. The new Pope was with difficulty restrained from demanding more. Parliament however, when a bill was proposed for the restoration of "first-fruits and tenths" displayed so much resentment at the suggestion that it was so modified as only to authorise the Queen to dispose personally of the "tenths" actually remaining in her hands. Even this was not carried without vehement opposition. An impoverished exchequer which required replenishment by a subsidy could not afford to surrender a solid portion of revenue to Rome. The hostility to any such tribute was no less active than it had been twenty-five years ago: and the Pope's attitude served only to intensify the feeling, and to stir up general animosity towards the Papacy. The Opposition was so outspoken that some of the members were sent to the Tower. Parliament was dissolved before Christmas.

[Sidenote: 1556; The Dudley conspiracy; Foreign complications]

In January, Charles abdicated—his Burgundian possessions he had resigned to his son three months before—and Philip became King of Spain. Next month, the peace of Vaucelles was signed between France and Spain; but with a consciousness that war was likely to be renewed at the first convenient opportunity. Philip's hands were full, and the French King did not cease from intrigues in England, while French soil continued to be an asylum for English conspirators. In March, Cranmer closed the tragedy of his life, and Pole, who had long ago been nominated to the Archbishopric, was immediately installed. Before Easter, a plot on the old lines was discovered. Elizabeth was to be made Queen and married to Courtenay (now in Italy where he died soon after); France was to help. A number of the conspirators were taken and put to death after protracted examination; others escaped to France, including a Dudley, a connexion of the dead Northumberland, who gave his name to the plot. Most of them were hotheaded young men, who did not appreciate, as did their shrewder elders, the danger of relying on French assistance which would only be granted for ulterior ends. As the year went on, the violent temper of Paul IV. involved him in war with Philip; France naturally took up his cause; and it was more difficult than ever for Mary to escape being dragged into the imbroglio—a singularly painful position for so fervent a daughter of Rome; while the English refugees checkmated their own party at home by their readiness to pay any price-even to the betrayal of Calais-for French support. But for timely reinforcements, the English foothold in France would probably have been captured by a coup de main before the close of 1556. Meantime in England the severity of the persecutions was increased.

[Sidenote 1: 1557, June: the War with France] [Sidenote 2: 1558, Jan: The loss of Calais]

In the spring of 1557, France and Spain were again at open war, and Philip paid his last brief visit to his wife to obtain English co-operation. Anti-Spanish feeling was strong; but when one of the refugees, Sir Thomas Stafford, [Footnote: A grandson of Buckingham] starting from France, landed in Yorkshire, captured Scarborough Castle, and attempted to raise a rebellion, jealousy of French interference proved an effective counterpoise. The rebellion collapsed at once, and war with France was declared in summer. The success of Philip's troops, which included a considerable English contingent, at St. Quentin in Picardy compelled the French to withdraw from Italy; and the Pope, thus deserted, was forced to a reconciliation with Philip. His animosity however, now aroused against England, was not easy to remove: and it was an additional source of grief to Mary and a great vexation to the Cardinal that Paul deprived him of his Legatine authority. The contest between Philip and Henry of France continued. It is curious that after the experience of the previous year the English authorities still did not realise the precarious position of Calais, and allowed the garrison to be weakened again—though the strain of maintaining its strength with the depleted exchequer would have been almost impossible. The natural result followed. At the end of December, Guise appeared before its walls: on January 6th 1558 it surrendered. Calais was lost for ever. A fortnight later, Guisnes, after a desperate resistance by its commandant, Lord Grey de Wilton, was forced to surrender also.

[Sidenote: National depression]

Whatever else was won or lost in France, the maintenance of the English grip on Calais had been a point of military honour for centuries—like the retention of its colours by a regiment. Nothing substantial was lost with its fall; but the wound to the national honour was deep and bitter. For Mary herself it was the bitterest portion in a cup that was filled with little else than bitterness. Talk of recapture was vain. A subsidy was demanded and granted, but only on the theory that the whole was required not for expeditions but to set the home defences in order against invasion. More could not be done without taxation, which the country could not support. In the attempt to fulfil what Mary and Pole deemed a pious and supreme duty—the restoration to the Church of the property whereof it had been sacrilegiously robbed—political considerations had been ignored and the absolutely necessary expenditure on national objects had been diverted into ecclesiastical channels, at a time when the national revenue was already desperately impoverished. The loss of Calais was reckoned as one more item in the account against Rome.

[Sidenote: Mary's death Nov.]

The whole country was in fact in a condition of irritated despondency, sick of persecution, sick of disaster, disheartened by epidemics and bad harvests; without the spirit or the material means to attempt a whole- hearted prosecution of the war, yet too sore to be willing to make peace till Calais should be recovered. And so in despair and gloom dragged out the last months of Mary Tudor's life. The last message she received from her husband was to beg her to make no difficulties about the succession of the sister who, she knew, would seek to reverse her policy. It was not till November that she passed away—to be followed in a few hours by her one trused friend, Cardinal Pole: the most disastrous example on record of one who with conscientious and destructive persistence aimed at an ideal which her own methods made for ever impossible of attainment.

[Sidenote: and character]

From the time of her childhood she was exposed to unceasing harshness; a princess born, she was treated as a bastard; despite it all, her natural generosity survived. Royally courageous, loyal and straightforward; to her personal enemies almost magnanimous; to the poor and afflicted pitiful; loving her country passionately: she was blind to the forces at work in the world, obsessed with the idea of one supreme duty, and she set herself, as she deemed, to do battle with Antichrist by the only methods she knew, though they were alien to her natural disposition, facing hatred and obloquy. She whose life was one long martyrdom, for conscience' sake offered up a whole holocaust of martyrs: she who thirsted for love died clothed with a nation's hate. Where in all history is a tragedy more piteous than that of Mary Tudor?



CHAPTER XVI

ELIZABETH (i), 1558-61—A PASSAGE PERILOUS

[Sidenote: 1558 Accession of Elizabeth]

On November 17th 1558, the sun had not yet risen when Mary passed away; within a few hours, Elizabeth had been proclaimed Queen. No dissentient voice was raised in England. Heath, Mary's Chancellor and Archbishop of York, announced her accession to the Houses of Parliament; the proclamation was drawn up by Sir William Cecil, the Council's Secretary under Edward VI. From one quarter, and only one, could a colourable challenge come. In the legitimate course of succession by blood, the claim lay with Mary Stewart, Queen of Scots and now Dauphiness of France. But the Will of Henry VIII., authorised by Parliament, was paramount. That Will had given priority to the two children of his body who had both been declared illegitimate—not born in wedlock—by the national courts. The Papal pronouncement in an opposite sense in Mary's case would have made nugatory any attempt on the part of a Catholic to question her rights; but that difficulty did not apply in the case of Elizabeth. As a matter of practical politics, the Scots Queen might waive her claim; as a matter of high theory, no personal disclaimers could cancel the validity of her title; as a matter of English Constitutional theory, Elizabeth's legal title rested on the superior validity of a Parliamentary enactment as compared with the divine right of inheritance. And in the minds of the entire English nation, there was unanimity as to the acceptable doctrine. But the rejected doctrine remained to fall back on if discontent should arise.

[Sidenote: The claim of Mary Stewart]

The English people might settle the antagonistic claims of Mary and Elizabeth to their own satisfaction: but the rivalry also of the very strongest interest to the European Powers. was actually queen of Scotland; prospectively she was also queen of France. If to these two crowns she united that of England, the hegemony of the empire thus formed would inevitably fall to France, and France would become the premier European Power. That position was now occupied by Spain, [Footnote: See Appendix A, ii.] which, in the face of such a combination, would lose its naval ascendancy, and be cut off from the Netherlands both by sea and land. For Philip therefore it was absolutely imperative to support Elizabeth at ail costs.

[Sidenote: Strength of Elizabeth's position]

Here then lay the strength of Elizabeth's position, which she and her chosen counsellors were quick to grasp. The only alternative to Elizabeth was the Queen of Scots; her accession would mean virtually the conversion of England into an appanage of France. Of Elizabeth's subjects none— whatever their creed might be, or whatever creed she might adopt—would be prepared to rebel at the price of subjection to France; the few hot-heads who had ventured on that line when Mary Tudor was at the height of her unpopularity had found themselves utterly without support. For the same reason, do what she would, Philip could not afford to act against her—more than that, he had no choice but to interfere on her behalf if Henry of France acted against her. He might advise—dictate—threaten—but he must, as against France, remain her champion, whether she submitted or no. As long as she kept her head, this young woman of five and twenty, with an empty treasury, with no army, a wasted navy, and with counsellors whose reputation for statesmanship was still to make, was nevertheless mistress of the situation. Mary Stewart's claim presented no immediate danger, though it might become dangerous enough in the future.

There were two things then on which Elizabeth knew she could count; her own ability to keep her head, and the capacity for loyalty of the great bulk of her subjects. If either of those failed her, she would have no one but herself to blame. The former had been shrewdly tested during her sister's reign, when a single false step would have ruined her. The latter had borne the strain even of the Marian persecution—nay, of the alarm engendered by the Spanish marriage, which showed incidentally that fear of domination by a foreign power was the most deeply rooted of all popular sentiments; a sentiment now altogether in Elizabeth's favour, unless she should threaten a dangerous marriage.

But the cool head and the clear brain, and unlimited self-reliance, were necessary to realise how much might be dared in safety; to distinguish also the course least likely to arouse the one incalculable factor in domestic politics—religious fanaticism; which, if it once broke loose, might count for more than patriotic or insular sentiment. And these were precisely the qualities in which the queen herself excelled, and which marked also the man whom from the first she distinguished with her father's perspicacity as her chief counsellor.

[Sidenote: Cecil]

Throughout the last reign, Cecil had carefully effaced himself. In matters of religion, though he had been previously associated with the Protestant leaders, he had never personally committed himself to any extreme line, and under the reaction he conformed; as did Elizabeth herself, and practically the whole of the nobility. He had walked warily, keeping always on the safe side of the law, never seeking that pre-eminence which in revolutionary times is apt to become so dangerous. He was not the man to risk his neck for a policy which he could hope to achieve by waiting, and he was quite willing to subordinate religious convictions to political expediency. On the other hand, he never betrayed confidences; he was not to be bought; and he was not to be frightened. Further, he was endowed with a penetrating perception of character, immense powers of organisation, and industry which was absolutely indefatigable. It was an immediate mark of the young queen's singular sagacity that even before her accession she had selected Cecil to lean upon, in preference to any of the great nobles, and even to Paget who had for many years been recognised as the most astute statesman in England.

[Sidenote: Finance]

Secure of her throne, Elizabeth was confronted by the great domestic problem of effecting a religious settlement; the diplomatic problem of terminating the French war; and what may be called the personal problem of choosing—or evading—a husband, since no one, except it may be the Queen herself, dreamed for a moment that she could long remain unwedded. To these problems must be added a fourth, less conspicuous but vital to the continuance of good government—the rehabilitation of the finances, of the national credit. A strict and lynx-eyed economy, a resolute honesty of administration, and a prompt punctuality in meeting engagements, took the place of the laxity, recklessness, and peculation which had prevailed of recent years. The presence of a new tone in the Government was immediately felt in mercantile circles, and the negotiation of necessary loans became a reasonable business transaction instead of an affair of usurious bargaining, both in England and on the continent. Finally, before Elizabeth had been two years on the throne, measures were promulgated for calling in the whole of the debased coinage which had been issued during the last fifteen years, and putting in circulation a new and honest currency. It seems to have been owing to a miscalculation, not to sharp practice, that the Government did in fact make a small profit out of this transaction.

[Sidenote: Marriage proposals: Philip II.]

Philip of Spain and his representatives in England had not realised the true strength of Elizabeth's position, and certainly had no suspicion that she and her advisers were entirely alive to it. On this point they had absolutely no misgivings. They took it for granted that the English queen must place herself in their hands and meekly obey their behests, if only in order to secure Spanish support against France. Philip began operations by proposing him self as her husband, expecting thereby to obtain for himself a far greater degree of power than he had derived from his union with her sister, while inviting her to share the throne of the first Power in Europe. But Elizabeth and Cecil were alive to the completeness of the hold on Philip they already possessed; and Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn, would have utterly stultified her own position by marrying her dead sister's husband, since it would be necessary to obtain a papal dispensation, acknowledge the Pope's authority, and recognise by implication the validity of her father's marriage with Katharine of Aragon. To the ambassador's amazed indignation, the Queen with the support of the Council, decisively rejected the honour. Paget, who had in the last reign stood almost alone in commending the Spanish match, would have repeated his counsel now; but he had been displaced, while Cecil and his mistress were entirely at one.

The Queen's argument that the marriage, however attractive to herself or desirable politically, was, from her point of view out of the question, was unanswerable. The Spaniards had to cast about for some other candidate for her hand, whose success would still be likely to attach England to the chariot-wheels of Spain; besides seeking another bride for their own King.

When Philip's hand was definitely declined, three months after Elizabeth's accession, the most pressing danger arising out of the Marriage question was at an end. Thenceforward, dalliance with would-be suitors became simply one of the tactical tricks of Elizabeth's diplomacy, employed by her perhaps not less to the torment of her own advisers than to the perturbation of foreign chancelleries; seeing that whether she knew her own mind or not, up to the last she invariably took very good care that no one else should know it.

[Sidenote: The Religious Question]

One of Philip's main objects was as a matter of course to secure England, through its queen, for Catholicism; and there is very little doubt that at this time the majority of Englishmen—at any rate outside the dioceses of London, Norwich and Canterbury—would have acquiesced much more readily in the maintenance of the old forms of worship than in institutions modelled after Geneva. Elizabeth however, with her trusted advisers, leaned neither to the one nor to the other. They were guided by considerations not of creed but of politics. They had realised that the repudiation of the authority of the Holy See, and the assertion of the supremacy of the sovereign in matters ecclesiastical, were essential. If they were determined not to submit to Papal claims, they were equally disinclined to submit to the claims of a Calvinistic Ministry, posing as the mouth-pieces of the Almighty, demanding secular obedience on the analogy of Samuel or Elijah. As to creed, what the statesmen saw was that the utmost latitude of dogmatic belief must be recognised; provided that it was consistent with the supremacy of the secular sovereign, and with a moderately elastic uniformity of ritual. The personal predilections of Elizabeth might be in favour of what we call the Higher doctrines, or those of Cecil might lean to the Lower; but neither was willing to impose penalties or disabilities for opinions or practices which did not tend either to the anarchism of the Anabaptists, or to the Sacerdotalism of Rome on the one hand or Geneva on the other hand; both were even disposed to remain in official unconsciousness of such individual transgressors as could conveniently be ignored.

[Sidenote: A Protestant policy]

While the Spanish ambassador, De Feria, like his master, had almost taken it for granted that if Philip offered to marry Elizabeth he would be accepted, he was from the first greatly perturbed as to the attitude of the new Government towards the religious question. That Cecil was going to be chief minister, and that he was, in the political sense, a Protestant, were both manifest facts. All the extreme Catholics, and some of the moderate ones, were displaced from the Council; those who were left might prefer the Mass to the Communion, but only as King Henry had done. The new members were definitely Protestants. Heath, Archbishop of York, Mary's Chancellor, though personally esteemed, gave place to Nicholas Bacon (as "Lord Keeper"), whose wife and Cecil's were sisters, and measures were being taken to secure a Protestant House of Commons when Parliament should meet. The number of lay peers was increased by four Protestants; among the twenty-seven bishoprics, Archbishop Pole had omitted to fill up several vacancies, while a sudden mortality was afflicting the episcopal bench. Around the queen, Protestant influences were immensely predominant. It is quite unnecessary to turn to an injudicious letter from Pope Paul to find a motive for the anti-Roman attitude which from the very outset was so obvious to De Feria. [Footnote: MSS. Simancas, apud Froude, vii., p. 27. De Feria to Philip.] Whatever prevarications or ambiguities Elizabeth might indulge in to him, it is quite clear that, whether she liked it or not, she felt that her position required an anti-Roman policy, if her independence was to be secured and the prestige of England among the nations was to be restored.

[Sidenote: 1559 Parliament: The Act of Supremacy]

The methods of the new Government however were to be strictly legal; changes must have parliamentary sanction. At the coronation, the authorised forms obtained. But at the end of January, the Houses met; and during the following four months the whole of the Marian legislation was wiped out, as Mary had wiped out the legislation of the preceding reign. The first measures brought forward were financial—as the first step Cecil had taken was to dispatch an agent to the Netherland cities to negotiate a loan—a Tonnage and Poundage bill, a Subsidy, and a First-fruits bill which marked the revival of the claims of the Crown against ecclesiastical revenues. These bills were skilfully introduced, and well-received; for it was expected that the money would be expended where it was needed, on national defence. Next, the new Act of Supremacy was introduced, against which the small phalanx of bishops fought with determination, supported by the protest of Convocation. It was not in fact carried till April; and then the actual title of "Supreme Head," which Mary and Philip had surrendered, was not revived, but a different formula was used, the Crown being declared "Supreme in all causes as well ecclesiastical as civil". The Act once more repealed the lately revived heresy Acts, and forbade proceedings on the ground of false opinions, except where these were opposed to the decisions of the first four General Councils or the plain words of Scripture. Moreover, the refusal of the Oath was not to be treason, as under Henry VIII.; it merely precluded the recusant from office. All save one of the Marian bishops did refuse it and were deprived; most of them doubtless would have done so even in the face of the old penalties. Incidentally it authorised the appointment of a Commission to deal with ecclesiastical offences, which took shape five and twenty years later as the Court of High Commission. But taken altogether, the measure was a long step in the direction of a much wider toleration than had ever been practised before.

[Sidenote: The Prayer-book, etc.]

In the meantime, the Prayer-book had been undergoing a final revision; and here Elizabeth's own wish would undoubtedly have been to revert to that of 1549. The disciples however of the Swiss school were too strong, and the last Prayer-book of Edward was the basis of the new one, though some sentences were so modified as to cause them dissatisfaction, and higher practices in the matter of ornaments and ceremonial were enjoined. The Act of Uniformity, imposing the use of the Prayer-book on the clergy, resulted in resignations which according to the records did not exceed two hundred. To account for so small a number, we must suppose that the regulations were to a considerable extent evaded; if not, the clergy must have been singularly obsequious.

The only remaining Act of importance was that for the Recognition of the Queen, which declared her to be the lawful sovereign by blood, and repealed in general terms all Acts or judgments [Footnote: Cf. Moore, p. 241.] passed in a contrary sense, legitimating her without examining the grounds on which her mother's marriage had been declared invalid—a method of settling the question entirely sufficient on the theory of parliamentary sovereignty, but wholly inadequate on the theory of Divine Right.

It was not till some months later that the depletion of the bench of Bishops by deaths or deprivations was remedied. Matthew Parker, a man of moderation and ability, was selected as Archbishop of Canterbury, the consecration being performed by Barlow—who had resigned Bath and Wells under Mary—with Coverdale, Scory, and Hodgekins. The question whether the Apostolic Succession was duly conveyed at the hands of these prelates belongs rather to ecclesiastical history—even to theological controversy—than to general history. It is sufficient here to observe that it turns mainly on the doubt which has been thrown without real justification on Barlow's own ordination as a Bishop. [Footnote: See the Lives of Parker by Strype and Hook; and a brief summary in Moore, pp. 245-247.] After the Archbishop's consecration, the vacant sees were filled up, generally with moderate men, with a leaning towards Zurich or even Lutheranism rather than the old Catholicism or Calvinism, but always in accord with the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity.

In point of time, however, the story of these last events has carried us a year forward, and we have to return to the first six months of the new reign and the relations of Elizabeth to France.

[Sidenote: France and Peace]

Before Mary's death, an armistice was in operation. England did not mean to conclude peace with France, unless Calais was restored, and Philip could not desert England lest an effort should be made to place Mary Stewart on the throne—on which Henry could not venture while Spain supported Elizabeth. Unsuccessful diplomatic attempts were made to negotiate separately with the allied Powers, and to induce Elizabeth formally to recognise the Queen of Scots as heir presumptive—which however she stoutly declined to do, being aware that the obvious effect of such a course would be to invite her own immediate assassination, to secure Mary's immediate accession. Moreover, Philip was not without a direct interest in England's recovery of Calais, because of its position on the border of the Netherlands. In the event, however, the English felt that, since the Spanish marriage was rejected, the claims on Philip must not be pressed too hard; and in the final terms of the Peace of Cateau Cambresis, France was allowed to retain Calais under promise to restore it after eight years, while she was formally to recognise Elizabeth as lawful queen of England, with the adhesion of Mary and her husband.

Now however, parties and persons in Scotland become so inextricably interwoven with the English queen's policy and her relations with parties and persons in France, that Scottish affairs demand close attention.

[Sidenote: State of Scotland]

In December, 1542, James V. of Scotland had died leaving a daughter just a week old. When Elizabeth ascended the English throne, the Northern country had for sixteen years been governed or misgoverned by regents and Councils of regency. From early childhood, the little queen had been brought up at the French court, under the more particular tutelage of her uncles, the Duke of Guise and his brothers. In 1558, at the age of fifteen, she was married to the Dauphin. Now (and for some time past) her mother, Mary of Guise—not the least able member of a very able family—was Regent of Scotland, supported in that position against the Protestant factions by a French garrison. In the natural course of events, the Scottish Protestant party looked to England for support, and favoured in the abstract the idea of uniting the English and Scottish crowns, though in the concrete they would not admit an English King. All Scottish sentiment, without distinction of party, rebelled against any prospect of Scotland becoming an appanage of any foreign Power, and the idea of subordination to France was only less unpopular than that of subordination to England. Moreover, with their young queen married to the Heir Apparent of France, and with a Guise supported by French troops as Regent in Scotland, this latter danger seemed the less pressing.

Now the extremes of religious partisanship were more general and more deeply rooted in Scotland than in England; partly because the corruption of the clergy had been more flagrant; partly because in a country where deeds of violence were comparatively ordinary, they had been freely committed under the cloak of religion. The French influence had been cast against the Reformation. The Reformers had murdered Cardinal Beton; John Knox had been taken from St. Andrews to the French galleys; and the Preachers were at war with the Regency. The two men who were about to prove themselves along with Knox the ablest statesmen in Scotland—James Stewart, afterwards famous as the Regent Murray, and young Maitland of Lethington—were on the side of the Preachers, and of what was the same thing, now that a Protestant government was restored in England, the English alliance. Moreover it has to be borne in mind that whereas in England the Reformation was imposed, whether willingly or unwillingly, on the Nation by the Government; in Scotland it was a popular movement which a Government, itself half French, endeavoured to repress. Whatever the sincerity of the aristocratic leaders might be, the Scottish Reformers felt themselves to be fighting for their liberties against an alien domination.

[Sidenote: 1559 Religious parties in Scotland]

In the spring of 1559 the quarrel between the party of the Preachers and the Regency assumed a very threatening aspect. After the peace of Cateau Cambresis, in March, the French King decided in favour of an anti-Protestant policy. In spite of the promise to recognise the title of the English queen, the Dauphin and his wife were allowed to assume the Arms of England, and it seemed that Mary of Guise in Scotland was about to wage a more active war than of late against the heretics; also that more French troops would be sent to help her. On the other hand, Knox, who on his retirement from England had withdrawn to Geneva, to await an opportunity when his presence might be effective, now returned to Scotland in a very unconciliatory spirit. For the party who desired union with England, it was unfortunate that the great preacher while in exile had issued a tract entitled The Monstrous Regiment of Women, aimed against the two Maries, but inferentially (though not of set purpose) condemning Elizabeth; who entirely refused to forgive him, while he on the other hand refused to eat his words. The fact undoubtedly increased the difficulty of harmonious accord between the English Government and the Scottish "Lords of the Congregation," as the Protestant leaders entitled themselves collectively.

[Sidenote: Arran as a suitor to Elizabeth]

The situation however produced a new candidate for the hand of Elizabeth in the person of the Earl of Arran, son of the quondam Earl of Arran now Duke of Chatelherault. The Duke was head of the house of Hamilton, and was in fact at this time heir presumptive [Footnote: As descending from the daughter of James II., sister of James III, Albany was now dead.] to the throne of Scotland. If then a legitimate ground could be devised for dethroning Mary—as for instance, if she employed foreign (i.e. French) troops against her subjects lawfully maintaining their constitutional rights—the succession would fall to the Hamiltons; and if Arran and Elizabeth were married, the crowns of the two kingdoms would be united. Thus this marriage became a primary object with the Lords of the Congregation; and the Earl was included in the list of those with whose aspirations Elizabeth coquetted.

In July, the French King was killed in a tournament. Francis and Mary became king and queen of France and Scotland, and Mary's uncles the Guises immediately became decisively predominant with the French Government.

[Sidenote: The Archduke Charles]

The Spanish ambassador was in the greatest anxiety. The one thing his master could not afford was to see the queen of France and Scotland established as queen of England also. But it was only less necessary to avoid war with France on that issue. If the Arran marriage were in serious contemplation, Mary would have very strong justification for asserting her claim to England as a counter-move. What Philip wanted was that Elizabeth should marry his cousin the Archduke Charles, a younger son of his uncle the Emperor Ferdinand who had succeeded Charles V. Then Philip would practically have control of England; France would not venture to grasp at the crown; and Elizabeth would of course have to leave the Scots to themselves. Elizabeth saw her advantage. She prevaricated with the Scots about the Arran marriage, and with Philip about the Austrian marriage. She did her best to make the Lords of the Congregation fight their own battles, a task which they were equally bent on transferring to England. And meantime, Cecil never wavered in his determination of at least maintaining the Scottish Protestants against active French intervention: while the whole body of Elizabeth's more Conservative Counsellors favoured the Austrian marriage and non-intervention in Scotland.

[Sidenote: Wynter sails for the Forth; 1560]

Elizabeth's own procedure was entirely characteristic. She had, it would seem, no sort of intention of marrying either Charles or Arran; but she worked her hardest to persuade their respective partisans of the contrary. Her officers were in secret communication with the Scots, and were supplying them with money, while she was openly vowing that she was rendering them no assistance whatever. Neither Scots nor Spaniards trusted her, but neither altogether disbelieved. Finally—having devoted the parliamentary grants and all available funds to the equipment of her fleet—when it was evident that a French expedition was on the point of sailing for the Forth, she allowed Admiral Wynter to put to sea; with orders to act if opportunity offered, but to declare when he did so that he had transgressed his instructions on his own responsibility. In January, 1560, Wynter appeared in the Forth, seduced the French into firing on him from the fort of Inch Keith, and blew the fort to pieces—in self-defence. Meantime, D'Elboeuf, brother of Guise, had sailed with a powerful flotilla, which was however almost annihilated by a storm. For a time then at least there was no danger of another French expedition to Scotland. Wynter's fleet commanded the Firth of Forth, and the French soon found that, except for an occasional raid, they would have to confine their efforts to making their position at Leith impregnable.

[Sidenote: Difficulties of France]

Wynter's protestations that he was not acting under orders can hardly have deceived any one, though the Queen, Cecil, and Norfolk [Footnote: Grandson of the old duke, and son of the Earl of Surrey executed by Henry VIII.]— who had accepted the command on the Border, after refusing it—confirmed his story. The Spaniards were intensely annoyed. Philip proposed that he should himself send an army to Scotland, to put affairs straight; but this was equally little to the taste of the French and the English. Moreover, Philip had not yet grasped the fact that the one way to make Elizabeth definitely defiant was, to threaten her. Hitherto she had repudiated Wynter's action, and refused to allow Norfolk to march in support of the Congregation, though she had secretly given them encouragement and hard cash; now she came to a definite agreement with them, and by the end of March Norfolk was over the Border. The Queen had doubtless drawn encouragement from the latest turn of affairs in France. D'Elboeufs disaster had greatly diminished the present danger of attack from that quarter; while now the conspiracy of Amboise revealed such a dangerous development of party antagonisms in France as to make it unlikely that she would be able to spare her energies for broils beyond her own borders. The aim of the plot was to overthrow the Guises, and place the young king and queen under the control of the Protestant Bourbon princes, Conde and Anthony King of Navarre. [Footnote: See Appendix A, vi.] The conspiracy itself collapsed, but it served as a very effective danger-signal.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth's vacillations]

Elizabeth had no sooner allowed the advance into Scotland than she was again seized with her usual desire to avoid becoming involved in active hostilities; and she continued the exasperating practice—for her servants —of sending them contradictory and hampering instructions. The very men who, like Norfolk, had been flatly opposed to the policy of interference were now convinced that, being once committed to it, there must be no turning back. Vacillation would presently drive the Congregation to such a pitch of distrust that they would break with England in despair; whereas the primary object of interference had been to make sure of a powerful party which would be inevitably committed to forwarding Elizabeth's interests. However, Philip again stiffened her by dictatorial messages, which failed to frighten because the essential fact remained true that he dared not facilitate the substitution of Mary for Elizabeth on the English throne. The Queen refused to recall her troops, and explained elaborately that she was not taking part with rebels against their sovereign, but with loyal subjects who were resisting the abuse by the Guises of authority filched from Mary, who in her turn would approve as soon as she came to Scotland and saw the true state of affairs.

[Side note: The English at Leith]

And so the English army sat down before Leith and set about starving it and bombarding it; till the process appeared to be too slow, and Lord Grey de Wilton, who was in command of the operations, was forced by urgent messages against his own judgment to attempt an assault which was repulsed with very severe loss. Elizabeth was shaken, but her Council remained resolute. Then, if she had really been afraid that Philip might actually mean what he threatened, her fears were dispelled by a disaster to his fleet in a battle with the Turks. She became aggressively inclined once more. The position of Leith, despite the valour of its garrison, was becoming hopeless; and in June the central figure of the French and Catholic party was removed by the death of the Regent Mary of Guise—an able woman, who had played her part with unfailing courage, no little skill, and quite as much moderation as could reasonably be expected, under extraordinarily difficult conditions.

[Sidenote: the Treaty of Edinburgh July 6th]

Cecil had already been sent north to negotiate. The terms required were the entire withdrawal of French troops from Scotland, the recognition of Elizabeth's right to the throne of England, the recognition of her compact with the Congregation as legitimate, and the confirmation of their demands for toleration. It was not till after the Regent's death that the arrangement known as the Treaty of Edinburgh was signed; by this instrument the French gave the promise that the demands of the Congregation should be conceded, but without formally admitting that Elizabeth was ever entitled to make a compact with Mary's subjects. The other two points were allowed, and the French departed for ever. Fortunately a dispatch from Elizabeth requiring more stringent terms (which would have been refused) arrived a day too late, after the treaty was signed. It was comparatively of little consequence that Mary declined to ratify the treaty. When the French had gone, the Congregation were masters of the situation; and before the year was out, the French and Scottish crowns were separated by the death of Francis. The Guise domination in France was checked, and while Mary's accession to the English throne remained desirable to the Catholic party in that country, the hope of combining the three crowns under the hegemony of France came to an end.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth's methods]

The whole episode deserves to be dwelt on at length, because it very forcibly illustrates the strength and the weakness of Elizabeth's methods and the character of her entourage. She saw the sound policy; she maintained her confidence in the men who also saw it. Yet she perpetually wavered and hesitated till the eleventh hour to authorise the steps necessary to carrying it out. At the eleventh hour, she did authorise them; and that, repeatedly, because at the last moment an injudicious threat stirred her to defiance. For herself, she could have secured inglorious ease by simply accepting Philip's patronage, but she elected to play the daring game, and won. Her methods were tortuous. She lied unblushingly, but she was an adept at avoiding acts which palpably would prove beyond a doubt that she was lying. The Spanish ambassador lived under a perpetual conviction that she was rushing on her own ruin—that she would drive his master to choose between the deplorable alternatives of fighting on her behalf or allowing the Queen of France and Scotland to become Queen of England also—that the Catholics would rise to dethrone her. But her calculations were sound, and Norfolk himself commanded her armies and served her loyally in a policy which, in his opinion, ought never to have been initiated. She never allowed herself to be bullied or cajoled; but she perpetually kept alive the impression that a little more bullying or a little more cajolery might turn the scale. And she drove the French out of Scotland.

[Sidenote: The Dudley Imbroglio]

All the intriguing at this time about suitors for the hand of Elizabeth is mixed up with the scandals associated with the name of Lord Robert Dudley (afterwards made Earl of Leicester), a son of the traitor Duke of Northumberland. Lord Robert, although a married man, was allowed an intimacy with the Queen which not only points conclusively to an utter absence of delicacy in the daughter of Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn, but filled the entire Court circle with the gravest apprehensions. It was the current belief that if Dudley could get free of his wife, Elizabeth would marry him, and that this desire was at the back of her vacillation. The affair was brought to an acute stage by the sudden death of Amy Robsart, Dudley's wife, in September; when already for some time past, his innumerable enemies had been hinting that he meant to make away with her. The facts are obscure; but the impression given by the evidence is that she was murdered, though not with the direct connivance of her husband. Still, the suspicion of his guilt was so strong that if the Queen had married him she would have strained the loyalty of her most loyal subjects probably to breaking point. Yet so keen was her delight in playing with fire that it was many months before English statesmen began to feel that the danger was past; while overtures were certainly made on Dudley's behalf to the Spanish Ambassador, De Quadra, to obtain Philip's sanction and support, in return for a promise that the Old Religion should be restored. Sussex alone expressed a conviction that Elizabeth would find her own salvation in marrying for Love. Every one else was convinced that, whatever might be her infatuation for Dudley, marriage with him would spell total ruin for her: and there was a general belief that Norfolk and others would interfere in arms if necessary; while the secret marriage of Lady Katharine Grey (who stood next in succession under Henry's will) to Lord Hertford, son of the Protector Somerset, was suspected of being a move to which even Cecil was privy, for placing her on the throne should the worst befall. At last, when the limit of endurance was almost reached, Elizabeth finally declared that she was not going to marry the favourite. Judging her conduct by her whole career, it would seem that she never really contemplated the commission of so fatal a blunder, but could not resist the temptation of tormenting her best friends, and torturing politicians of every kind with uncertainty—perhaps even of half believing herself that she actually would set all adverse opinion at defiance if she chose.

[Sidenote: The Huguenots]

From one suitor at any rate Elizabeth felt herself freed by the death of the young French King in December. The main interest of France in the Scottish Crown was thereby ended; more than that, the Huguenot Bourbons, who stood in France next in succession to the sons of Katharine de Medici, recovered for the time much of their power. The political arguments in favour of the Arran marriage lost enough of their force to enable the English Queen to brave the wrath of the Congregation and finally decline the Hamilton alliance. It is of interest to find Paget, once again called in to her Counsels, declaring in favour of a Huguenot alliance, in despite of Spain.

[Sidenote: The Pope]

The position of the Huguenots in France, and the proposed resuscitation of the Council of Trent under the auspices of Pope Pius IV., who had succeeded Paul in 1559, had revived ideas of Protestant representation therein; and Elizabeth, after her fashion, played with the hopes of the Catholic party, at home and abroad, that she might be drawn into participation. It was only when it had become perfectly clear that the admission of the Papal Supremacy was a condition precedent, that these hopes were dashed, and the proposal that a papal Nuncio should be received in England, with which the Queen had been coquetting, was definitely declined; while Philip was obliged to intimate to the Pope that he must not launch against the recalcitrant England ecclesiastical thunderbolts which would involve him in war, whether against or on behalf of Elizabeth.

[Sidenote: 1561 Mary sails for Scotland]

In the meantime however, both the Catholic party in Scotland and the Congregation were hoping to bring Mary back from France, and to control her policy when she should arrive. For the Protestants felt now that without foreign interference they could hold their own. Elizabeth had rejected their scheme for bringing the union of the crowns in reach by the Arran marriage: they were now bent on the alternative course of inducing Elizabeth to acknowledge their own Queen as her heir presumptive. Mary herself was more than ready for the adventure. Elizabeth refused her a passage through England which might easily have been utilised, especially in the North, for the organisation of a Stewart party within the realm; while on the other hand it would obviously be an easy thing for an "accident" to happen while the Scots Queen was running the gauntlet of her ships on the seas. But Mary was nothing if not daring. In August, accompanied by her Guise uncle, D'Elboeuf, she set sail from the "pleasant land of France," and four days later, without disaster, the Queen of Scots landed at Leith.



CHAPTER XVII

ELIZABETH (ii), 1561-68—QUEENS AND SUITORS

[Sidenote: 1561 The Situation]

On August 19th, 1561, Mary Stewart returned to Scotland; in May 1568, she left her kingdom for ever. During those seven years, what she did, what she was accused of doing, what she was expected to do, what she intended to do, formed the subject of the keenest interest and anxiety in England at the time; and the problems and mysteries of those years, never unravelled to this day, never with any certainty to be unravelled at all, continued to perplex English statesmen and to complicate the situation in England for nearly nineteen years more. We shall have to follow them therefore in much greater detail than would a priori seem justifiable in a volume ostensibly dealing not with Scottish but with English History.

During these same years it may be said that the great antagonisms were formulated, which were to rend the two great Continental monarchies for forty years to come. Thus in order to follow the subsequent story efficiently even from the purely English point of view, we must devote what may seem somewhat disproportionate attention to foreign affairs, which do not appear at first sight to have a very intimate connexion with events in England. For France these events may be summed up as the opening of the set struggle between Catholics and Huguenots; for Spain, as the preliminaries to the revolt of the Netherlands: while for all Europe, the effective sessions of the Council of Trent laid down finally the sharp dividing line between Protestant and Catholic—terms which have a well defined political meaning, in neither case identical with their original or correct theological import, in which latter sense half the Protestant world continued to assert its claim to membership in the Catholic Church.

[Sidenote: (1) The Council of Trent]

That Council reassembled under the auspices of Paul's successor, Pius IV., in January 1562. While the Protestants could not recognise it as a Catholic Council, in the sense of representing the whole Catholic Church, it claimed that character for itself, and those who maintained its authority appropriated the name, which thus became a party title. In the course of its sessions, it rejected doctrines, notably that of Justification by Faith, which had been strongly favoured even by such men as Pole and Contarini, so narrowing the bounds of orthodoxy. But while cutting off all possibility of reconciliation with the Protestants, it marked a strong tendency to reformation not of dogma but of practice; while an increased intolerance of what was stigmatised as error, an intensification of the spirit which demanded the most merciless repression of heresy, was accompanied in other respects by an elevation of the standard of ecclesiastical morals, and a zeal for the Faith more pure and less influenced by worldly considerations, if narrower, than in the past. From this time, as the exemplar both of the new discipline, and of the new warfare against heresy, the Order of Jesuits takes its place as the dominating force. The Council terminated in 1563; in 1566 the Pope died and was succeeded by Pius V., the nominee of the most rigid section of the Church.

[Sidenote: (2) France: Catholics, Huguenots, and Politiques]

In France, from the days of Francis I., the tendency had been to persecute the followers of the reformed doctrines, who were for the most part disciples of Calvin rather than of Luther. On the other hand, the political attraction of alliance with the German Lutherans had served to keep the mind of the court open, and throughout the sittings of the Council of Trent there had been and continued to be threats that the Gallican Church might follow the Anglican in claiming independence of the Pope. In France however the opposition lay between the Catholics and the Calvinists, who by 1561 had acquired the general name of Huguenots: in England, the Reformation was carried through under the auspices of a middle ecclesiastical party. In France the middle party was purely political, not aiming at a compromise tending to amalgamation, but rather at holding the two parties balanced.

Before the death of Henry II., the Guise brothers were recognised as the heads of the Catholic faction. The Duke, Francis, was the popular and successful soldier who won back Calais from England: his brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine, was one of the ablest of living ecclesiastics and statesmen. There were four more brothers, all men of mark; and their sister was the mother of Mary Stewart. On the other hand, the family came from Lorraine only in the time of Francis I., and though the first Duke of Guise married a daughter of the house of Bourbon, they were regarded with jealousy by a considerable body of the French nobility, who, partly in consequence, threw their weight in favour of the Protestants. At the head of these now were Anthony of Bourbon, nominal King of Navarre in right of his wife, his brother Conde, and Admiral Coligny, with his brother the Cardinal Chatillon. When Henry II. died, the Guises—uncles of the new Queen (Mary Stewart)—assumed unmistakable supremacy; but when Francis also died, and was succeeded by his younger brother Charles IX., the Queen-mother, Katharine de Medici, obtained for herself the regency, which would naturally have fallen to Navarre as next Prince of the Blood, and the control passed not to the Huguenots but to the "Politiques". [Footnote: The name for the "Middle" Party, which was not however generally adopted till a later date.] It may be remarked that this century is noteworthy for the number of women who made their mark in history as politicians; for Isabella of Castile was still living when it opened, and Elizabeth of England when it closed; Katharine de Medici and Mary Stewart were of ability not much inferior; while Mary of Guise, regent of Scotland, and Mary Tudor in England, were both striking figures; and the women of Charles V.'s family were conspicuous as Governors of the Netherlands.