The Duke of Northumberland was very
anxious to keep the young King’s death a secret,
in order that he might get the two Princesses into
his power. But, the Princess Mary, being informed
of that event as she was on her way to London to see
her sick brother, turned her horse’s head, and
rode away into Norfolk. The Earl of Arundel was
her friend, and it was he who sent her warning of
what had happened.
As the secret could not be kept, the
Duke of Northumberland and the council sent for the
Lord Mayor of London and some of the aldermen, and
made a merit of telling it to them. Then, they
made it known to the people, and set off to inform
Lady Jane Grey that she was to be Queen.
She was a pretty girl of only sixteen,
and was amiable, learned, and clever. When the
lords who came to her, fell on their knees before her,
and told her what tidings they brought, she was so
astonished that she fainted. On recovering,
she expressed her sorrow for the young King’s
death, and said that she knew she was unfit to govern
the kingdom; but that if she must be Queen, she prayed
God to direct her. She was then at Sion House,
near Brentford; and the lords took her down the river
in state to the Tower, that she might remain there
(as the custom was) until she was crowned. But
the people were not at all favourable to Lady Jane,
considering that the right to be Queen was Mary’s,
and greatly disliking the Duke of Northumberland.
They were not put into a better humour by the Duke’s
causing a vintner’s servant, one Gabriel Pot,
to be taken up for expressing his dissatisfaction
among the crowd, and to have his ears nailed to the
pillory, and cut off. Some powerful men among
the nobility declared on Mary’s side.
They raised troops to support her cause, had her proclaimed
Queen at Norwich, and gathered around her at the castle
of Framlingham, which belonged to the Duke of Norfolk.
For, she was not considered so safe as yet, but that
it was best to keep her in a castle on the sea-coast,
from whence she might be sent abroad, if necessary.
The Council would have despatched
Lady Jane’s father, the Duke of Suffolk, as
the general of the army against this force; but, as
Lady Jane implored that her father might remain with
her, and as he was known to be but a weak man, they
told the Duke of Northumberland that he must take
the command himself. He was not very ready to
do so, as he mistrusted the Council much; but there
was no help for it, and he set forth with a heavy
heart, observing to a lord who rode beside him through
Shoreditch at the head of the troops, that, although
the people pressed in great numbers to look at them,
they were terribly silent.
And his fears for himself turned out
to be well founded. While he was waiting at
Cambridge for further help from the Council, the Council
took it into their heads to turn their backs on Lady
Jane’s cause, and to take up the Princess Mary’s.
This was chiefly owing to the before-mentioned Earl
of Arundel, who represented to the Lord Mayor and aldermen,
in a second interview with those sagacious persons,
that, as for himself, he did not perceive the Reformed
religion to be in much danger which Lord
Pembroke backed by flourishing his sword as another
kind of persuasion. The Lord Mayor and aldermen,
thus enlightened, said there could be no doubt that
the Princess Mary ought to be Queen. So, she
was proclaimed at the Cross by St. Paul’s, and
barrels of wine were given to the people, and they
got very drunk, and danced round blazing bonfires little
thinking, poor wretches, what other bonfires would
soon be blazing in Queen Mary’s name.
After a ten days’ dream of royalty,
Lady Jane Grey resigned the Crown with great willingness,
saying that she had only accepted it in obedience
to her father and mother; and went gladly back to her
pleasant house by the river, and her books.
Mary then came on towards London; and at Wanstead
in Essex, was joined by her half-sister, the Princess
Elizabeth. They passed through the streets of
London to the Tower, and there the new Queen met some
eminent prisoners then confined in it, kissed them,
and gave them their liberty. Among these was
that Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, who had been
imprisoned in the last reign for holding to the unreformed
religion. Him she soon made chancellor.
The Duke of Northumberland had been
taken prisoner, and, together with his son and five
others, was quickly brought before the Council.
He, not unnaturally, asked that Council, in his defence,
whether it was treason to obey orders that had been
issued under the great seal; and, if it were, whether
they, who had obeyed them too, ought to be his judges?
But they made light of these points; and, being resolved
to have him out of the way, soon sentenced him to
death. He had risen into power upon the death
of another man, and made but a poor show (as might
be expected) when he himself lay low. He entreated
Gardiner to let him live, if it were only in a mouse’s
hole; and, when he ascended the scaffold to be beheaded
on Tower Hill, addressed the people in a miserable
way, saying that he had been incited by others, and
exhorting them to return to the unreformed religion,
which he told them was his faith. There seems
reason to suppose that he expected a pardon even then,
in return for this confession; but it matters little
whether he did or not. His head was struck off.
Mary was now crowned Queen.
She was thirty-seven years of age, short and thin,
wrinkled in the face, and very unhealthy. But
she had a great liking for show and for bright colours,
and all the ladies of her Court were magnificently
dressed. She had a great liking too for old customs,
without much sense in them; and she was oiled in the
oldest way, and blessed in the oldest way, and done
all manner of things to in the oldest way, at her
coronation. I hope they did her good.
She soon began to show her desire
to put down the Reformed religion, and put up the
unreformed one: though it was dangerous work as
yet, the people being something wiser than they used
to be. They even cast a shower of stones and
among them a dagger at one of the royal
chaplains who attacked the Reformed religion in a
public sermon. But the Queen and her priests
went steadily on. Ridley, the powerful bishop
of the last reign, was seized and sent to the Tower.
LATIMER, also celebrated among the Clergy of the
last reign, was likewise sent to the Tower, and Cranmer
speedily followed. Latimer was an aged man; and,
as his guards took him through Smithfield, he looked
round it, and said, ’This is a place that hath
long groaned for me.’ For he knew well,
what kind of bonfires would soon be burning.
Nor was the knowledge confined to him. The prisons
were fast filled with the chief Protestants, who were
there left rotting in darkness, hunger, dirt, and
separation from their friends; many, who had time
left them for escape, fled from the kingdom; and the
dullest of the people began, now, to see what was
coming.
It came on fast. A Parliament
was got together; not without strong suspicion of
unfairness; and they annulled the divorce, formerly
pronounced by Cranmer between the Queen’s mother
and King Henry the Eighth, and unmade all the laws
on the subject of religion that had been made in the
last King Edward’s reign. They began their
proceedings, in violation of the law, by having the
old mass said before them in Latin, and by turning
out a bishop who would not kneel down. They also
declared guilty of treason, Lady Jane Grey for aspiring
to the Crown; her husband, for being her husband;
and Cranmer, for not believing in the mass aforesaid.
They then prayed the Queen graciously to choose a
husband for herself, as soon as might be.
Now, the question who should be the
Queen’s husband had given rise to a great deal
of discussion, and to several contending parties.
Some said Cardinal Pole was the man but
the Queen was of opinion that he was not the
man, he being too old and too much of a student.
Others said that the gallant young COURTENAY, whom
the Queen had made Earl of Devonshire, was the man and
the Queen thought so too, for a while; but she changed
her mind. At last it appeared that PHILIP, PRINCE
OF SPAIN, was certainly the man though
certainly not the people’s man; for they detested
the idea of such a marriage from the beginning to the
end, and murmured that the Spaniard would establish
in England, by the aid of foreign soldiers, the worst
abuses of the Popish religion, and even the terrible
Inquisition itself.
These discontents gave rise to a conspiracy
for marrying young Courtenay to the Princess Elizabeth,
and setting them up, with popular tumults all over
the kingdom, against the Queen. This was discovered
in time by Gardiner; but in Kent, the old bold county,
the people rose in their old bold way. SIR THOMAS
WYAT, a man of great daring, was their leader.
He raised his standard at Maidstone, marched on to
Rochester, established himself in the old castle there,
and prepared to hold out against the Duke of Norfolk,
who came against him with a party of the Queen’s
guards, and a body of five hundred London men.
The London men, however, were all for Elizabeth,
and not at all for Mary. They declared, under
the castle walls, for Wyat; the Duke retreated; and
Wyat came on to Deptford, at the head of fifteen thousand
men.
But these, in their turn, fell away.
When he came to Southwark, there were only two thousand
left. Not dismayed by finding the London citizens
in arms, and the guns at the Tower ready to oppose
his crossing the river there, Wyat led them off to
Kingston-upon-Thames, intending to cross the bridge
that he knew to be in that place, and so to work his
way round to Ludgate, one of the old gates of the
City. He found the bridge broken down, but mended
it, came across, and bravely fought his way up Fleet
Street to Ludgate Hill. Finding the gate closed
against him, he fought his way back again, sword in
hand, to Temple Bar. Here, being overpowered,
he surrendered himself, and three or four hundred of
his men were taken, besides a hundred killed.
Wyat, in a moment of weakness (and perhaps of torture)
was afterwards made to accuse the Princess Elizabeth
as his accomplice to some very small extent.
But his manhood soon returned to him, and he refused
to save his life by making any more false confessions.
He was quartered and distributed in the usual brutal
way, and from fifty to a hundred of his followers
were hanged. The rest were led out, with halters
round their necks, to be pardoned, and to make a parade
of crying out, ‘God save Queen Mary!’
In the danger of this rebellion, the
Queen showed herself to be a woman of courage and
spirit. She disdained to retreat to any place
of safety, and went down to the Guildhall, sceptre
in hand, and made a gallant speech to the Lord Mayor
and citizens. But on the day after Wyat’s
defeat, she did the most cruel act, even of her cruel
reign, in signing the warrant for the execution of
Lady Jane Grey.
They tried to persuade Lady Jane to
accept the unreformed religion; but she steadily refused.
On the morning when she was to die, she saw from
her window the bleeding and headless body of her husband
brought back in a cart from the scaffold on Tower
Hill where he had laid down his life. But, as
she had declined to see him before his execution, lest
she should be overpowered and not make a good end,
so, she even now showed a constancy and calmness that
will never be forgotten. She came up to the
scaffold with a firm step and a quiet face, and addressed
the bystanders in a steady voice. They were
not numerous; for she was too young, too innocent
and fair, to be murdered before the people on Tower
Hill, as her husband had just been; so, the place
of her execution was within the Tower itself.
She said that she had done an unlawful act in taking
what was Queen Mary’s right; but that she had
done so with no bad intent, and that she died a humble
Christian. She begged the executioner to despatch
her quickly, and she asked him, ’Will you take
my head off before I lay me down?’ He answered,
‘No, Madam,’ and then she was very quiet
while they bandaged her eyes. Being blinded,
and unable to see the block on which she was to lay
her young head, she was seen to feel about for it
with her hands, and was heard to say, confused, ’O
what shall I do! Where is it?’ Then they
guided her to the right place, and the executioner
struck off her head. You know too well, now,
what dreadful deeds the executioner did in England,
through many, many years, and how his axe descended
on the hateful block through the necks of some of the
bravest, wisest, and best in the land. But it
never struck so cruel and so vile a blow as this.
The father of Lady Jane soon followed,
but was little pitied. Queen Mary’s next
object was to lay hold of Elizabeth, and this was pursued
with great eagerness. Five hundred men were sent
to her retired house at Ashridge, by Berkhampstead,
with orders to bring her up, alive or dead. They
got there at ten at night, when she was sick in bed.
But, their leaders followed her lady into her bedchamber,
whence she was brought out betimes next morning, and
put into a litter to be conveyed to London. She
was so weak and ill, that she was five days on the
road; still, she was so resolved to be seen by the
people that she had the curtains of the litter opened;
and so, very pale and sickly, passed through the streets.
She wrote to her sister, saying she was innocent of
any crime, and asking why she was made a prisoner;
but she got no answer, and was ordered to the Tower.
They took her in by the Traitor’s Gate, to which
she objected, but in vain. One of the lords
who conveyed her offered to cover her with his cloak,
as it was raining, but she put it away from her, proudly
and scornfully, and passed into the Tower, and sat
down in a court-yard on a stone. They besought
her to come in out of the wet; but she answered that
it was better sitting there, than in a worse place.
At length she went to her apartment, where she was
kept a prisoner, though not so close a prisoner as
at Woodstock, whither she was afterwards removed,
and where she is said to have one day envied a milkmaid
whom she heard singing in the sunshine as she went
through the green fields. Gardiner, than whom
there were not many worse men among the fierce and
sullen priests, cared little to keep secret his stern
desire for her death: being used to say that
it was of little service to shake off the leaves,
and lop the branches of the tree of heresy, if its
root, the hope of heretics, were left. He failed,
however, in his benevolent design. Elizabeth
was, at length, released; and Hatfield House was assigned
to her as a residence, under the care of one SIR THOMAS
POPE.
It would seem that Philip, the Prince
of Spain, was a main cause of this change in Elizabeth’s
fortunes. He was not an amiable man, being, on
the contrary, proud, overbearing, and gloomy; but
he and the Spanish lords who came over with him, assuredly
did discountenance the idea of doing any violence
to the Princess. It may have been mere prudence,
but we will hope it was manhood and honour.
The Queen had been expecting her husband with great
impatience, and at length he came, to her great joy,
though he never cared much for her. They were
married by Gardiner, at Winchester, and there was
more holiday-making among the people; but they had
their old distrust of this Spanish marriage, in which
even the Parliament shared. Though the members
of that Parliament were far from honest, and were
strongly suspected to have been bought with Spanish
money, they would pass no bill to enable the Queen
to set aside the Princess Elizabeth and appoint her
own successor.
Although Gardiner failed in this object,
as well as in the darker one of bringing the Princess
to the scaffold, he went on at a great pace in the
revival of the unreformed religion. A new Parliament
was packed, in which there were no Protestants.
Preparations were made to receive Cardinal Pole in
England as the Pope’s messenger, bringing his
holy declaration that all the nobility who had acquired
Church property, should keep it which was
done to enlist their selfish interest on the Pope’s
side. Then a great scene was enacted, which was
the triumph of the Queen’s plans. Cardinal
Pole arrived in great splendour and dignity, and was
received with great pomp. The Parliament joined
in a petition expressive of their sorrow at the change
in the national religion, and praying him to receive
the country again into the Popish Church. With
the Queen sitting on her throne, and the King on one
side of her, and the Cardinal on the other, and the
Parliament present, Gardiner read the petition aloud.
The Cardinal then made a great speech, and was so
obliging as to say that all was forgotten and forgiven,
and that the kingdom was solemnly made Roman Catholic
again.
Everything was now ready for the lighting
of the terrible bonfires. The Queen having declared
to the Council, in writing, that she would wish none
of her subjects to be burnt without some of the Council
being present, and that she would particularly wish
there to be good sermons at all burnings, the Council
knew pretty well what was to be done next. So,
after the Cardinal had blessed all the bishops as a
preface to the burnings, the Chancellor Gardiner opened
a High Court at Saint Mary Overy, on the Southwark
side of London Bridge, for the trial of heretics.
Here, two of the late Protestant clergymen, HOOPER,
Bishop of Gloucester, and ROGERS, a Prebendary of
St. Paul’s, were brought to be tried. Hooper
was tried first for being married, though a priest,
and for not believing in the mass. He admitted
both of these accusations, and said that the mass
was a wicked imposition. Then they tried Rogers,
who said the same. Next morning the two were
brought up to be sentenced; and then Rogers said that
his poor wife, being a German woman and a stranger
in the land, he hoped might be allowed to come to
speak to him before he died. To this the inhuman
Gardiner replied, that she was not his wife.
’Yea, but she is, my lord,’ said Rogers,
’and she hath been my wife these eighteen years.’
His request was still refused, and they were both
sent to Newgate; all those who stood in the streets
to sell things, being ordered to put out their lights
that the people might not see them. But, the
people stood at their doors with candles in their hands,
and prayed for them as they went by. Soon afterwards,
Rogers was taken out of jail to be burnt in Smithfield;
and, in the crowd as he went along, he saw his poor
wife and his ten children, of whom the youngest was
a little baby. And so he was burnt to death.
The next day, Hooper, who was to be
burnt at Gloucester, was brought out to take his last
journey, and was made to wear a hood over his face
that he might not be known by the people. But,
they did know him for all that, down in his own part
of the country; and, when he came near Gloucester,
they lined the road, making prayers and lamentations.
His guards took him to a lodging, where he slept
soundly all night. At nine o’clock next
morning, he was brought forth leaning on a staff; for
he had taken cold in prison, and was infirm.
The iron stake, and the iron chain which was to bind
him to it, were fixed up near a great elm-tree in a
pleasant open place before the cathedral, where, on
peaceful Sundays, he had been accustomed to preach
and to pray, when he was bishop of Gloucester.
This tree, which had no leaves then, it being February,
was filled with people; and the priests of Gloucester
College were looking complacently on from a window,
and there was a great concourse of spectators in every
spot from which a glimpse of the dreadful sight could
be beheld. When the old man kneeled down on the
small platform at the foot of the stake, and prayed
aloud, the nearest people were observed to be so attentive
to his prayers that they were ordered to stand farther
back; for it did not suit the Romish Church to have
those Protestant words heard. His prayers concluded,
he went up to the stake and was stripped to his shirt,
and chained ready for the fire. One of his guards
had such compassion on him that, to shorten his agonies,
he tied some packets of gunpowder about him.
Then they heaped up wood and straw and reeds, and
set them all alight. But, unhappily, the wood
was green and damp, and there was a wind blowing that
blew what flame there was, away. Thus, through
three-quarters of an hour, the good old man was scorched
and roasted and smoked, as the fire rose and sank;
and all that time they saw him, as he burned, moving
his lips in prayer, and beating his breast with one
hand, even after the other was burnt away and had fallen
off.
Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, were
taken to Oxford to dispute with a commission of priests
and doctors about the mass. They were shamefully
treated; and it is recorded that the Oxford scholars
hissed and howled and groaned, and misconducted themselves
in an anything but a scholarly way. The prisoners
were taken back to jail, and afterwards tried in St.
Mary’s Church. They were all found guilty.
On the sixteenth of the month of October, Ridley
and Latimer were brought out, to make another of the
dreadful bonfires.
The scene of the suffering of these
two good Protestant men was in the City ditch, near
Baliol College. On coming to the dreadful spot,
they kissed the stakes, and then embraced each other.
And then a learned doctor got up into a pulpit which
was placed there, and preached a sermon from the text,
’Though I give my body to be burned, and have
not charity, it profiteth me nothing.’
When you think of the charity of burning men alive,
you may imagine that this learned doctor had a rather
brazen face. Ridley would have answered his sermon
when it came to an end, but was not allowed.
When Latimer was stripped, it appeared that he had
dressed himself under his other clothes, in a new
shroud; and, as he stood in it before all the people,
it was noted of him, and long remembered, that, whereas
he had been stooping and feeble but a few minutes before,
he now stood upright and handsome, in the knowledge
that he was dying for a just and a great cause.
Ridley’s brother-in-law was there with bags
of gunpowder; and when they were both chained up,
he tied them round their bodies. Then, a light
was thrown upon the pile to fire it. ’Be
of good comfort, Master Ridley,’ said Latimer,
at that awful moment, ’and play the man!
We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s
grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’
And then he was seen to make motions with his hands
as if he were washing them in the flames, and to stroke
his aged face with them, and was heard to cry, ’Father
of Heaven, receive my soul!’ He died quickly,
but the fire, after having burned the legs of Ridley,
sunk. There he lingered, chained to the iron
post, and crying, ’O! I cannot burn!
O! for Christ’s sake let the fire come unto
me!’ And still, when his brother-in-law had
heaped on more wood, he was heard through the blinding
smoke, still dismally crying, ’O! I cannot
burn, I cannot burn!’ At last, the gunpowder
caught fire, and ended his miseries.
Five days after this fearful scene,
Gardiner went to his tremendous account before God,
for the cruelties he had so much assisted in committing.
Cranmer remained still alive and in
prison. He was brought out again in February,
for more examining and trying, by Bonner, Bishop of
London: another man of blood, who had succeeded
to Gardiner’s work, even in his lifetime, when
Gardiner was tired of it. Cranmer was now degraded
as a priest, and left for death; but, if the Queen
hated any one on earth, she hated him, and it was
resolved that he should be ruined and disgraced to
the utmost. There is no doubt that the Queen
and her husband personally urged on these deeds, because
they wrote to the Council, urging them to be active
in the kindling of the fearful fires. As Cranmer
was known not to be a firm man, a plan was laid for
surrounding him with artful people, and inducing him
to recant to the unreformed religion. Deans and
friars visited him, played at bowls with him, showed
him various attentions, talked persuasively with him,
gave him money for his prison comforts, and induced
him to sign, I fear, as many as six recantations.
But when, after all, he was taken out to be burnt,
he was nobly true to his better self, and made a glorious
end.
After prayers and a sermon, Dr. Cole,
the preacher of the day (who had been one of the artful
priests about Cranmer in prison), required him to
make a public confession of his faith before the people.
This, Cole did, expecting that he would declare himself
a Roman Catholic. ’I will make a profession
of my faith,’ said Cranmer, ‘and with a
good will too.’
Then, he arose before them all, and
took from the sleeve of his robe a written prayer
and read it aloud. That done, he kneeled and
said the Lord’s Prayer, all the people joining;
and then he arose again and told them that he believed
in the Bible, and that in what he had lately written,
he had written what was not the truth, and that, because
his right hand had signed those papers, he would burn
his right hand first when he came to the fire.
As for the Pope, he did refuse him and denounce him
as the enemy of Heaven. Hereupon the pious Dr.
Cole cried out to the guards to stop that heretic’s
mouth and take him away.
So they took him away, and chained
him to the stake, where he hastily took off his own
clothes to make ready for the flames. And he
stood before the people with a bald head and a white
and flowing beard. He was so firm now when the
worst was come, that he again declared against his
recantation, and was so impressive and so undismayed,
that a certain lord, who was one of the directors
of the execution, called out to the men to make haste!
When the fire was lighted, Cranmer, true to his latest
word, stretched out his right hand, and crying out,
’This hand hath offended!’ held it among
the flames, until it blazed and burned away.
His heart was found entire among his ashes, and he
left at last a memorable name in English history.
Cardinal Pole celebrated the day by saying his first
mass, and next day he was made Archbishop of Canterbury
in Cranmer’s place.
The Queen’s husband, who was
now mostly abroad in his own dominions, and generally
made a coarse jest of her to his more familiar courtiers,
was at war with France, and came over to seek the
assistance of England. England was very unwilling
to engage in a French war for his sake; but it happened
that the King of France, at this very time, aided a
descent upon the English coast. Hence, war was
declared, greatly to Philip’s satisfaction;
and the Queen raised a sum of money with which to carry
it on, by every unjustifiable means in her power.
It met with no profitable return, for the French
Duke of Guise surprised Calais, and the English sustained
a complete defeat. The losses they met with in
France greatly mortified the national pride, and the
Queen never recovered the blow.
There was a bad fever raging in England
at this time, and I am glad to write that the Queen
took it, and the hour of her death came. ’When
I am dead and my body is opened,’ she said to
those around those around her, ‘ye shall find
CALAIS written on my heart.’ I should have
thought, if anything were written on it, they would
have found the words JANE GREY, HOOPER,
ROGERS, RIDLEY, LATIMER, CRANMER, AND THREE HUNDRED
PEOPLE BURNT ALIVE WITHIN FOUR YEARS OF MY WICKED
REIGN, INCLUDING SIXTY WOMEN AND FORTY LITTLE CHILDREN.
But it is enough that their deaths were written in
Heaven.
The Queen died on the seventeenth
of November, fifteen hundred and fifty-eight, after
reigning not quite five years and a half, and in the
forty-fourth year of her age. Cardinal Pole
died of the same fever next day.
As BLOODY QUEEN MARY, this woman has
become famous, and as BLOODY QUEEN MARY, she will
ever be justly remembered with horror and detestation
in Great Britain. Her memory has been held in
such abhorrence that some writers have arisen in later
years to take her part, and to show that she was,
upon the whole, quite an amiable and cheerful sovereign!
’By their fruits ye shall know them,’
said OUR SAVIOUR. The stake and the fire were
the fruits of this reign, and you will judge this Queen
by nothing else.