Chapter X. The Downfall of English Protestantism

THE Second Book of Common Prayer was ushered into the world amid signs and portents which boded ill for its long life and prosperity. It was imposed on the nation by a new Act of Uniformity which for the first time threatened penalties against the “great number of people in divers parts of the realm” who did “wilfully and damnably refuse to come to their parish churches”¹; and the reluctance of the nation to accept moderate reforms was to be cured by passing more radical measures and increasing the rigour with which they were to be enforced. The remains of the liberal system which Somerset had established were to be swept away; the Protector himself was sent to the block,² and the Council began to pack the House of Commons.¹ Even so, it proved too independent for Northumberland’s purpose. It rejected a treason bill designed to replace the expiring act of 1549, and passed another which re-enacted in a limited form some of the precautions against injustice which the Protector had introduced in 1547.² It also threw out a bill of attainder against Tunstall, Bishop of Durham; but Northumberland would not be baulked of the bishopric, and so Tunstall, who had been confined to the Tower on a bogus charge of treason, was deprived by a civil commission—a novel extension of secular jurisdiction.

Dimly the nation was beginning to feel that its ruler was bent on reckless and selfish aggrandisement. As early as October, 1551, tales were told of a new coinage to be minted at Dudley Castle bearing on its face the bear and ragged staff, Northumberland’s badge³; and in 1552 behind closed doors men freely ascribed to him the design of aiming at the crown⁴; while a few may perhaps have perceived that the chief motive in his zeal for religion was to make the Romanist Mary an impossible candidate for the throne of a Protestant kingdom, and thus to pave the way for his own advancement. The most sincere Reformers began to think it was time to slacken the pace.

“Your Sacred Majesty,” wrote Bucer to Edward VI.,¹ “has already found by experience how grave are the evils which ensued on taking away by force false worship from your people, without sufficient preliminary instruction. The instruments of impiety have been snatched from them by proclamations, and the observance of true religion has been imposed by royal command. Some have on this account made horrible sedition, others have raised perilous dissensions in the State, and to this very day wherever they can they either cause new trouble or increase what has already been excited. … The example of our Lord and of all pious princes shows that it is first of all necessary to explain to men the mysteries of the kingdom and by holy persuasion to exhort them to take up the yoke of Christ. Your Sacred Majesty will perceive that to this end all your thoughts and care must be directed, and that those are not to be listened to who will that the religion of Christ be thrust upon men only by proclamations and by laws, and who say that it is enough if the sacred services of Christ are said to the people it matters not how. It is greatly to be feared that the enemy actuates men of this mind, who strive to hand the government of the religion of Christ to men who are both unfit for it and who do not suffer themselves to be advised, and who thus make way for the greed of men to seize the wealth of the Church, and little by little to do away altogether with Christ’s religion. For those led by this spirit hope that when once the church property is confiscated there will be none found voluntarily to consecrate themselves to her ministry.”

Bucer’s words were written at the end of 1550, and within two years Cranmer was driven into a similarly hostile attitude. His opposition to the confiscation of the chantry lands profoundly irritated Northumberland, who now regarded John Knox as the godliest of divines. Knox did not prove compliant enough to suit as Bishop of Rochester and whetstone for Cranmer; but it was owing to Knox’s exhortations that Cranmer and the Council came into conflict over the yet unpublished Second Book of Common Prayer. Knox had apparently been appointed one of the six royal chaplains,¹ four of whom were to be always employed on evangelical circuits; and before setting out for his sphere on the Scottish borders he was commanded to preach before the King. He took the opportunity to denounce the practice of kneeling at the sacrament, and so impressed the Council that the printing of the new Prayer Book, in which that posture was enjoined, was stopped. Cranmer was hastily ordered to consult with Ridley and Peter Martyr as to whether it would not be better to omit the rubric. The Archbishop was ready enough to take advice, but protested earnestly against the change. Kneeling had commended itself to the Bishops and other learned men who had deliberated on the Book, and it had been prescribed by the authority of Parliament. Was it wise, he asked, for the Council to reverse a decision of Parliament at the bidding of turbulent spirits who would find fault with the Book were it altered every year? Kneeling, they say, is not commanded by Scripture; neither is standing, nor sitting, he replied.¹ Cranmer’s firmness saved the custom of kneeling, but he could not prevent the Council from inserting on their own and the King’s authority what is known as the Black Rubric in such copies of the Second Book of Common Prayer as had not already issued from the press. This declaration explained that, although the gesture of kneeling was retained, there was no superstitious adoration of the sacrament implied in such an attitude.²

Another project at which Cranmer had long and anxiously laboured was brought to naught by the opposition of Northumberland and the tendencies of the time, and that was the reformation of the laws of the church. The mediaeval canon law was an elaborate edifice, with the Papacy as the keystone of the arch.¹ When the Papal jurisdiction in England was abolished Canon Law fell into ruin, from which it has never recovered. Its decrepit state and the absence of any substitute introduced the greatest confusion into the legal and moral codes; the marriage laws,² for instance, were subject to the wildest interpretations, of which Henry VIII. had not been slow to avail himself. The confusion of the Canonists was viewed with ill-concealed satisfaction by civilians, by common lawyers, and by a large section of the community which had no desire to see ecclesiastical discipline re-established on a firm and lasting basis. But such a state of things could scarcely commend itself to churchmen, and least of all to the Archbishop, who was, under the King, the highest authority in the law of the Church.

The various Acts passed, empowering the King to appoint a commission for the reform of the Canon Law, had hitherto borne no fruit³; but Cranmer had not been idle. As early as 1544 he had made a collection of passages from the Canon Law¹; but these were of little constructive use, as they were mainly passages asserting the supremacy of the Pope over temporal sovereigns and the immunity of the clergy from lay tribunals. In October, 1551, however, a selection of thirty-two commissioners was actually made, and in the following month a committee of eight was nominated “to rough hew the Canon Law, the rest to conclude it afterwards.”² Even then the commission was not formally made out, and it was not till February, 1552, that Cranmer and his colleagues received authority to proceed with the work. As usual, the chief burden fell upon the Archbishop, and his principal advisers were Peter Martyr, Walter Haddon, the Latin scholar, and Sir John Cheke, Edward VI.’s tutor. Their labours were not completed when the three-years’ term, imposed by the Act of 1549, expired, and the bill introduced in 1552 to renew the commission failed to become law, largely owing to Northumberland’s opposition.²

Yet the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum, as the work of the commissioners was called, is an important illustration of Cranmer’s ideas, and its contents explain why it never received official sanction. Both its good and its bad points were repugnant to the spirit of the age, and it is doubtful which of the two qualities contributed the more to its unpopularity. It began with an exposition of the Catholic faith, and enacted the punishment of forfeiture and death against those who denied or blasphemed the Christian religion; for the Church was claimed the exclusive right of jurisdiction in such matters, the action of the civil magistrate being limited, as in the Middle Ages, to the execution of its decrees; and excommunication was said to deprive sinners of the protection of God and to consign them to everlasting damnation. The Church of England aspired to hurl those thunderbolts which Popes had so often launched in vain.¹ Reformers commonly work in the spirit of the abuses they seek to remove, and few churches have willingly abandoned the weapons of persecution; but such a pretension ran counter to the spirit of Tudor times, not because sixteenth-century statesmen² were averse to persecution, but because they wanted it done by the State and not by the Church.

In other respects the code was both too liberal and too drastic for that or the present time. To restore and invigorate the action of the Church, which had suffered so much from the encroachments of the State in Henry’s reign, Cranmer proposed to revive the diocesan synods from which he would not have excluded the laity. Divorce was allowed to both parties not only on the ground of adultery but of desertion, long absence, and cruel treatment; the innocent party was permitted to marry again; and confirmed incompatibility of temper justified separation but not divorce. Marriage was thus made less rigid, but its sanctity, so long as it lasted, was guarded by stringent penalties. Adultery was to be punished with imprisonment or transportation for life; if the wife be the offender she forfeits her jointure; if the husband, he restores his wife’s dower and adds to it half his own fortune. The clergy as guardians of morality were threatened with special severity: if a married cleric committed adultery he forfeited his benefice and surrendered his whole estate for the support of his wife and children; if unmarried he gave all up to his bishop for charitable uses. So that if Cranmer claimed for his order great powers, he saddled it also with burdens.¹

The other great scheme with which Cranmer was busily occupied during these last years of his power did not prove abortive. He had endowed the Church with a Bible in English, with her own English liturgy, and had sought to establish her jurisdiction; he now brought forth a confession of faith which she and none other professed. As early as 1549 he had drawn up a series of articles which he compelled applicants for licence to lecture and preach to subscribe²; and in 1551 he submitted these or another list to his fellow-bishops for their opinion. On 2 May, 1552, the Council ordered him to produce these articles and to show whether they had been “set forth by any public authority or no.”³ This was, no doubt, a rebuke such as Northumberland liked to administer to the Archbishop for presumption in acting without his permission. The articles were returned to Cranmer for revision, a task which he completed by the middle of September. He then sent them to Cheke and also requested Cecil to consider them well.¹ A month later the Council directed six divines—Harley, Bill, Horne, Grindal, Perne, and John Knox to reexamine them.² On 20 November they were returned with amendments to Cranmer,³ who four days later sent them back with the request that they might now be authorised by the King, and submitted to all the clergy for subscription. “And then I trust that such a concord and quietness in religion shall shortly follow thereof, as else is not to be looked for many years.”⁴

So wrote Cranmer in the incurable optimism of his soul; but he was not more deceived when he hoped to rebuild the jurisdiction of the Church than when he thought to bring peace by a creed. At the first attempt to enforce the Articles, in May, 1553, there were many resisters¹; and from that day to this the roll of dissidents has swelled. That the Forty-two Articles of Religion or something like them should have been evolved was perhaps inevitable, for every Church like every party must have its platform; nor need the Articles have been a root of bitterness and the seed of strife but for the attempt to make them a perpetual bond to shackle the minds of men for ever. For, however irksome a yoke they may appear, they were not in 1552 an illiberal interpretation of the English faith; and there is this at least to be said for Cranmer and his colleagues, that the Forty-two Articles were more comprehensive and less dogmatic than any subsequent edition of them.

“The broad soft touch of Cranmer,” says Canon Dixon, “lay upon them when they came from the furnace; a touch which was not retained wholly in the recension which reduced them afterwards to Thirty-Nine. Nearly half of them are such as are common to all Christians; but even in these the brevity of statement and the avoidance of controversy is to be admired.”²

The first controversial article came not first but fifth in place. Freedom of the Will was explicitly asserted, and Justification by Faith only was affirmed in brief and moderate terms, while the much-contested Good Works were undefined. It was admitted that General Councils might err, but contention was not provoked by specifying the errors of other Churches. With regard to the sacraments there was less circumspection, and here the Articles seem to be directed against the decrees of the Council of Trent.¹ It was no ordinance of Christ that the Eucharist should be reserved, carried about, elevated, or adored; “sacrifices of masses” are pronounced “figments and dangerous impostures”; and five of the mediæval sacraments are not maintained as such. On the other hand, it is affirmed that the sacraments are not merely marks of profession but effectual signs of grace, and there was no article requiring communion in both kinds.

For the crooked and disingenuous way in which the Articles were presented to the nation the Archbishop was not responsible. Their title-page bore a legend to the effect that they had been “agreed upon by the bishops and other learned and godly men in the last Convocation at London”—a statement which was inaccurate in itself and can only have been designed to create a false impression.² They had not as a matter of fact been submitted to Convocation, and Cranmer, who had not been consulted in the matter of this title, rebelled against its dishonest implication. He complained to the Council, and was told that all the title meant was that the Articles were set forth in the time of Convocation,¹ —an assertion which seems to have been no more true than the other. They were, in fact, published by the sole authority of the King; and although that was perhaps legally sufficient, it was more than ever necessary to pretend an ecclesiastical sanction when Northumberland’s government was most obnoxious to the great majority of the nation and the Church, and when the crisis of his fortunes was obviously at hand. For the Articles did not receive the royal signature until 12 June, 1553, and within a month the King was dead.

It needed more than sleight of hand to carry Northumberland through the storm which he himself had raised. His overbearing temper, unscrupulous ambition, and unprincipled government had alienated the nation, the Parliament, the Church, and even the Duke’s own favourite preachers. Knox afterwards spoke of him as “ruling the roost by stout courage and proudness of stomach,” and claimed to have rebuked him to his face.² Dean Horne wrote that he could not tell whether Northumberland was or was not a dissembler in religion¹. and

“as for Latimer, Lever, Bradford, and Knox,” wrote Ridley, “their tongues were so sharp they ripped in so deep in their galled backs to have purged them no doubt of that filthy matter that was festered in their hearts of insatiable covetousness, of filthy carnality and voluptuousness, of intolerable ambition and pride, of ungodly loathsomeness to hear poor men’s causes and to hear God’s words; that these men of all others, these magistrates then could never abide. Others there were, very godly men, and well learned, that went about by the wholesome plasters of God’s Word, howbeit after a more soft manner of handling the matter; but, alas! all sped alike.”²

Of these latter, no doubt, was Cranmer. In December, 1551, he was suggested as a possible Keeper of the Great Seal during the sickness which Lord Chancellor Rich feigned in order to escape liability for the Duke’s illegal acts¹; but the appointment was given to the more pliant Bishop Goodrich, of Ely. In March, 1552, the Archbishop provoked Northumberland’s wrath by opposing almost alone in the House of Lords an unconstitutional bill for the deprivation of Tunstall²; and a year later, in the last Parliament of Edward VI., he again came into collision with the Duke when he endeavoured to obtain the sanction of the legislature for his Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum. Northumberland, with his usual arrogance, bade Cranmer mind his own business, and threatened the Bishops with dire consequences unless they stopped the presumption of preachers who had dared in their sermons to reflect upon the deeds of their superiors.

So strong was the popular discontent that Northumberland feared to meet a freely elected Parliament, and the House of Commons which gathered in March, 1553, was little more than an assembly of the Duke’s nominees. To it he thought he might safely address language such as Henry VIII. had never employed. A year earlier he had threatened to confiscate the liberties of the City of London, because he thought prices too high; and now he proposed to hector the members of Parliament in much the same tone. “We need not seem,” he wrote to the Lord Chamberlain,¹ “to make account to the Commons of His Majesty’s liberality and bountifulness, in augmenting of his nobles or his benevolence shewed to any of his good servants, lest you might thereby make them wanton.” He had excellent reasons for concealing the extent to which he and his friends had helped themselves from the royal domain; and with characteristic meanness he attributed the financial deficit to the administration of his rival, Somerset, who had been dead twelve months and had fallen from power three and a half years before.² Few of the bills which he hoped to pass became law, and Parliament was dismissed within a month of its meeting.

A subsidy was, indeed, granted after much debate,³ but it was only to be paid in two years, and meanwhile the Duke attempted to fill the exchequer by seizing what church plate he could find. The excuse was that much of it had been rendered useless by the greater simplicity of ritual now pervading religion, and on 15 February, 1553, an order was issued for the appointment of commissioners to seize church goods in every shire.⁴ In April and May they went forth on their labour of pillage. “All such goods,” says a contemporary chronicler,¹ “were taken away to the King’s use; that is to say, all the jewels of gold and silver, as crosses, candlesticks, censers, chalices, and all other gold and silver, and ready money … and all copes and vestments of cloth of gold, cloth of tissue, and cloth of silver.” Cranmer had sought to prevent this spoliation, for a previous commission had been issued in July, 1552,² and in the following November he had been charged with neglecting the King’s business, because he made no haste in the matter. Now a more potent safeguard intervened. On 6 July, 1553, Edward VI. died at Greenwich, and the triumph of Mary checked a campaign which had been designed to provide the sinews of war for her overthrow.

That Northumberland had long foreseen this event scarcely admits of doubt. Years before Edward came to the throne men had spoken of him as not likely to live long: an attack of measles and small-pox in April, 1552, further weakened an originally sickly and consumptive frame: and in March, 1553, he was too ill to go down to Westminster Palace to open Parliament. The worse the health of Edward grew, the wider spread the rumour that Northumberland had designs on the crown for himself and his family: for the most secretive of governments cannot long keep its schemes completely hidden, and in May and June the Tower of London was gradually filling with prisoners accused of seditious language against the Duke. His first nibble at royalty appears to have been a proposal that his only unmarried son, Guilford Dudley, should wed Lady Margaret Clifford, a granddaughter of Henry VIII.’s sister Mary, but she was too distant in the line of succession¹ and was passed over to the Duke’s brother, Andrew. Guilford Dudley was reserved for Lady Jane Grey, of the elder branch of the Suffolk line, for which Henry VIII. had destined the crown if all his children died without issue: Lady Jane’s sister was at the same time betrothed to Lord Herbert, son of Northumberland’s ally, the Earl of Pembroke: and the Duke’s daughter was married to Lord Hastings, who might also have claims on the throne as a descendant of Edward IV.’s brother Clarence. Northumberland’s design was to unite all interests and all claims against those of Mary and Elizabeth who were to be excluded from the throne on the ground of their illegitimate birth.

Lady Jane, he determined, should be the new Queen, and his son, her husband, should have the crown matrimonial, while he himself remained the power behind the throne before which all men should bow. Never did ambition o’erleap itself in so hopelessly illogical, illegal, and unconstitutional a fashion. Edward VI., he said, might bequeath the crown by will as well as Henry VIII.; but Henry had been expressly given this power by Act of Parliament, whereas Edward VI. had not. Moreover, the succession of Mary and Elizabeth did not depend only on Henry’s will; for another Act of Parliament had provided that unless Henry willed otherwise, Mary and Elizabeth should succeed, if Edward had no issue. Henry did not will otherwise, and therefore Mary’s succession was doubly established by Act of Parliament as well as by Henry’s will. Edward had no authority to set aside his father’s will, still less to override an Act of Parliament. But, putting Henry’s will and the Act of Parliament aside, and assuming that Mary and Elizabeth were illegitimate, the next claimant was not Lady Jane, but Mary Queen of Scots. Eliminating her, Lady Jane was not even then the heir, but her mother, Frances, Duchess of Suffolk. Had the Duchess succeeded, the crown matrimonial must have gone to the Duke of Suffolk, and not to Northumberland’s son, and so she was induced or compelled to waive her claims in her daughter’s favour.

Northumberland’s career had, indeed, landed him in a quandary from which there was only a desperate means of escape. His ambition had led him into so many crimes and had made him so many enemies that he was safe only so long as he controlled the government and prevented the administration of justice. He could expect no mercy when once his foes were in a position to bring him to book; and the prospect drove him to make one last frantic bid for life and for power. There were other temptations which led him to stake his all on a single throw. No immediate interference need be feared from abroad. The Emperor had too much on his hands with war in France and Germany to come to the help of his cousin Mary in England. France would welcome the success of Northumberland’s plot, for Mary’s accession would mean an alliance between England and Spain, and possibly a repetition of the disasters of 1521–25, when the same combination had produced the rout of Pavia; and Scotland was now little more than a province of France. No woman, moreover, had yet reigned over England, and the popular impression was that none could—at least unless she married and shared the throne with a man. Lady Jane was, indeed, as much a woman as Mary; but Mary would marry a foreigner, and reduce England to dependence like that of the Netherlands on Spain, or Hungary on Austria; whereas Lady Jane had married an Englishman.

These were not the arguments with which the Duke won Edward’s consent. “Consider also,” he said to the Council, “that God’s cause, which is the preferment of His word, and fear of Papists’ entrance hath been (as ye have here before always known) laid the original ground, whereupon ye, even at the first motion, granted your good wills and consents thereunto.”¹ These were the motives which appealed to the King. To him the Duke painted the horrors of a Romanist reaction, the undoing of the glorious work of the Reformation on which Edward VI. prided himself more than any one else in the kingdom. Should they rebuild the altars of Baal and restore the idolatrous mass? Should the elect be handed over to the minions of Antichrist ? The dying King would not bequeath such woes to his kingdom, and without any resistance he concurred in Northumberland’s scheme. The majority of the Council, consisting as it did mainly of the Duke’s nominees, and ruled, as Chief-Justice Montague¹ said, by the Duke as he pleased, had no doubt already consented; and the judges and lawyers were now called in to give Edward’s “devise” a legal form. On the 12th of June they were brought into the young King’s presence at Greenwich. They declared the attempt to be treason. Northumberland, on hearing of their decision, burst into the Council-chamber trembling with rage and fury; he called the Chief-Justice a traitor to his face, and said he would fight in his shirt with any man in that quarrel. The lawyers departed in fear of their lives. On the 14th they were again summoned before the King. With sharp words and angry countenance he demanded the reason for their disobedience to his commands; and as he upbraided them, the lords of the Council muttered “Traitors” in their ears.

Terrorised by threats, the judges and lawyers snatched at the excuse offered by the King’s promise to call a Parliament to ratify whatever they did. Edward, they considered, would not punish them for a crime committed at his behest; and no such offence was known to the law as treason to a future sovereign. Parliament would, if it met before Edward died, enact their indemnity, while if they refused it might attaint them of treason. They preferred the devil to the deep sea, and sorrowfully did as Northumberland wished, receiving a formal commission and pardon for their proceedings. On the 21st the “devise” was completed; it was signed by the judges and lawyers who drew it up, by the greater part of the Council, and eventually by a hundred and one prominent personages.

Cranmer’s name stands first on the list, but he was the last of the Council to sign.¹ To no one was Northumberland less likely to confide his secrets; “his heart,” wrote Cranmer, “was not such toward me (seeking long time my destruction) that he would either trust me in such matter, or think that I would be persuaded by him.”¹ Cranmer had never taken a very keen interest in politics, and, since the fall of Somerset, had gradually withdrawn more and more from secular affairs. He does not appear to have attended the Council after the 8th of June, 1553, and he knew nothing of the Duke’s intrigues. He was, however, the first subject of the Crown, and his signature was regarded as necessary. So, “when the whole council and chief judges had set their hands to the King’s will, last of all they sent for the Archbishop, requiring him also to subscribe the will, as they had done.”² Cranmer refused: such a deed would be perjury, for he had sworn to Mary’s succession. They, replied the Council, had consciences as well as he; yet they had subscribed the will, although they were sworn to Mary; he must not be more particular. Cranmer held out and demanded leave to speak with the King in private. This was denied him: the Councillors feared he might turn the King from his purpose, and Northampton and Darcy were sent to counteract his arguments. To their presence Cranmer ascribed his failure; and his attempt to dissuade Edward again brought down the wrath of the Duke; before the whole Council, Northumberland declared that it became not the Archbishop to speak to the King as he did.

The scene between King and Archbishop was painful to both. Cranmer was not told of the judges’ scruples, but no doubt he used much the same arguments. He made no impression; Edward had all the Tudor obstinacy. He informed the Archbishop that the judges and his learned counsel were of opinion that the Act of his father entailing the crown could not be prejudicial to him, but that he being in possession of the crown could leave it by will. “This seemed very strange unto me,” writes Cranmer, “tut being the sentence of the judges and other learned counsel in the laws of the realm (as both he and his counsel informed me) methought it became not me, being unlearned in the law, to stand against my prince therein.” Still he demurred till the King appealed to him not to “be more repugnant to his will than the rest of the Council were.” This reflection on his loyalty in the mouth of a dying King grieved Cranmer sore, and then at last he yielded.

The die was now cast, and the Council set to work to secure the Tower, raise troops to overawe London, and man the fleet. On the 2nd of July, Dr. Hodgkin, suffragan Bishop of Bedford, preaching at St. Paul’s, omitted to pray for the ladies Mary and Elizabeth; and on the following Sunday, Ridley, to the disgust of his audience, pronounced them bastards. The death of Edward on the 6th was concealed in the hope of securing the person of Mary, by inveigling her to London. She came as far as Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire, when on the 7th she received secret news of her brother’s death. Instantly she mounted on horseback and rode full speed for Kenninghall in Norfolk, whence she wrote to the Council, indignantly asking why they had not proclaimed her Queen. The stratagem had failed; there was no longer need for concealment, and on the 10th the heralds announced the accession of Queen Jane. To Mary the Council wrote a letter, which they all, including Cranmer, signed, declaring that she was illegitimate and requiring her submission to her lawful sovereign.

For nine days and no more that ill-fated Queen was to reign, and she never ruled. Scarcely had the Council replied to Mary’s letter when tidings arrived that she had been joined by the Earls of Bath and of Sussex and proclaimed Queen amid universal rejoicings in various parts of the kingdom. On the 12th Northumberland took the field against her, amid the blackest of omens; “the people press to see us,” he said to a comrade as he rode through Shoreditch, “but not one saith ‘God speed.’” Northumberland out of the way, the Council began to turn with the tide. While the Duke advanced to Bury St. Edmunds, and then, finding that no succours reached him, while Mary’s forces had swollen to thirty thousand men, fell back upon Cambridge, his friends and victims in London perceived that the game was up. On the 19th they proclaimed Queen Mary. “Great was the triumph here in London,” writes an eyewitness; “for my time I never saw the like, and by the report of others the like was never seen. The number of caps that were thrown up at the proclamation were not to be told…. I myself saw money was thrown out at windows for joy. The bonfires were without number, and what with shouting and crying of the people, and ringing of the bells, there could no one almost hear what another said, besides banquetings and singing in the street for joy.”

Yet this was Protestant London, where three weeks later an attempt to say mass caused a riot; and of the thirty thousand who flocked to Mary’s standard in Norfolk, most came from East Anglia, next to London the most Protestant part of the kingdom. The Catholic parts of the realm had no time to make their voice heard; it was Protestants who declared against Jane and bore Mary in triumph to her throne, and one of them, strange to say, thought the Gospel would be plucked away unless Queen Mary succeeded ! Indeed it was no question between the new and the old religion; it was not for the mass nor the Pope that men threw up their caps and lost their ears in the pillory. The sentiment of legality, and affection for the Tudor family contributed to the result; but neither stirred the people to the depths. The passion that moved them was detestation of the Duke; no ruler of England has been more bitterly or more deservedly hated. The “great devil,” “a cruel Pharaoh,” “that false Duke,” “the ragged bear most rank,” “with whom is neither mercy, pity, nor compassion,” are some of the epithets hurled at him in a Protestant tract printed in London on 13th of July when his triumph was still quite possible. His own daughter-in-law, Lady Jane Grey, avowed that he was “hated and evil spoken of by the commons,” and that “his life was odious to all men.” If he succeeded, they said, he will “pull and poll us, spoil us, and utterly destroy us, and bring us in great calamities and miseries.” His failure, writes another contemporary, was due “partly to the right of Queen Mary’s title, and partly to the malice that the people bore him, as well for the death of the Duke of Somerset and other cruelty by him used.” And in more measured terms the French ambassador ascribed Mary’s victory less to love for her than to the great hatred which people felt for the Duke who had sought to rule by a reign of terror. That the cause of the Reformation in England was once linked with his fate was perhaps the greatest misfortune that ever attended its history, for that association was a stain which could only be cleansed in the blood of the Marian martyrs.

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¹ If they neglected to attend Common Prayer on Sundays and holy days they were to be punished with ecclesiastical censures and excommunication; if they attended any but the authorised form of worship they were liable to six months’ imprisonment for the first offence, a year’s imprisonment for the second, and lifelong imprisonment for the third.

² 22 January, 1552.

¹ At first this method was only applied to filling up vacancies caused by the death of members (see Acts P. C., 1550–2, pp. 400, 457, 459, 470).

² The best-known of these was the clause requiring two witnesses in cases of treason.

³ Acts P. C., 1550–52, p. 377; Lit. Remains of Edward VI., pp. clxvi., 374; Greyfriars’ Chron., p. 73.

⁴ Harleian M S., 353, ff. 120–121.

¹ Bucer, De Regno Christi, lib. ii., cap v., pp. 60–61; Gasquet and Bishop, pp. 299–301.

¹ Canon Dixon (iii., 478–479 note) denies that Knox was ever royal chaplain and disputes the arguments of Lorimer and Perry; but the references in the Privy Council Register and Edward VI.’s Journal show that two royal chaplains were to preach in 1552 on the Scottish borders; that Knox was employed in this work, receiving £40 as a reward at the end of his year’s service on 27 October, 1552, and being officially commended for his zeal; he and the five other chaplains also revised Cranmer’s articles for subscription by candidates for ordination. (Lit. Remains of Edward VI., pp. 377–378 notes, 464; Acts of the Privy Council, 1552–54, pp. 148, 154, 190.)

¹ This letter is not in any edition of Cranmer’s Works; it is extant dated 7 October, 1552, among the Domestic State Papers in the Record Office (Ed. VI., vol. xv., No. 15; see Calendar, 1547–80, p. 45), and is printed by Perry (Declaration on Kneeling, p. 77), and by Lorimer (Knox in England, p. 103). See also Canon Dixon, iii., 477, note.

² “A runagate Scot,” said Dr. Weston to Latimer in 1554, “did take away the adoration of worshipping of Christ in the sacrament, by whose procurement that heresy was put into the last Communion Book; so much prevailed that one man’s authority at that time” (Foxe, ed. Townsend, vi., 510.) Townsend and others refer this to Alexander Aless, but undoubtedly Knox is meant.

¹ See Professor F. W. Maitland’s Roman Canon Law in England, 1899.

² Every variety of opinion was held at this time on the subject of divorce, and Henry VIII.’s matrimonial adventures were by no means peculiar to himself, except in so far as he was in a unique position for getting rid of his encumbrances.

³ The Act of 1533 declared that such canons as were not “contrarient to the laws, customs and statutes of this realm, nor to the damage and hurt of the King’s prerogative royal,” should remain in force; but the “customs” were sometimes too strange, and the “King’s prerogative royal” capable of too liberal an interpretation to make this proviso very definite.

¹ This collection is extant in Lambeth MS., 1107, and Corpus Christi Coll., Cambridge, MS. cccxl., and is printed in Burnet, iv., 520, and in Cranmer’s Works, i., 68–75; several of the passages were used by Cranmer in his answer to the Devonshire rebels in 1549.

² Edward VI.’s Journal, p. 398.

³ The greatest confusion exists with regard to the history of this matter, from which even Canon Dixon and that most accurate of writers, Dr. Gairdner, are not free. Canon Dixon states that the bill introduced in 1552 became law, but it is not on the Statute Book; and Dr. Gairdner (History of the Church, p. 300) concludes his account by saying that after all, on 6 October, 1552, the whole thirty-two commissioners were appointed and divided into four companies; but this appointment is really of 6 October, 1551 (Acts P. C.; 1551–52, p. 382). Both mistakes are derived from Strype’s Cranmer (i., 388–389). The most accurate statement of the affair is in Nichols’s Literary Remains of Edward VI., pp. 397–399. The commission was thus abortive, and, although a remarkable document entitled Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum was compiled, and although Edward in his will urged the completion of the project, the accession of Mary put an end to it and the document remained in MS. until 1571, when, having been edited by Foxe, the Martyrologist, it was at length printed; but it never received any legal authorisation either by Parliament or Convocation. It was edited in 1850 by Dr. Edward Cardwell. One of the MS. drafts (Harleian MS. 426) contains numerous corrections in Cranmer’s hand.

¹ Ref. Legum Eccl., ed. Cardwell, pp. 167–188.

² Edward VI. himself objected to the bishops, being entrusted with these powers of persecution not, as Froude implies (v., 197), because a bishop is naturally incapable of justice, but because the bishops of that day were some papists, some ignorant, some too old, some of bad repute, etc. (Lit. Remains, pp. 478–479).

¹ See Dixon, iii., 352–382; Cranmer’s scheme was based upon the Roman Canon Law, and interwoven with the “agitated formularies of the sixteenth century.” The attempt to pour new wine into old bottles was not successful, though Canon Dixon thinks that if the Reformatio had been carried out “the activity and vigour of the Church of England would have been raised to a height which it has never reached,” and “the modern history of the Church of England would have been altogether different.”

² Orig. Letters, i., 71, 76; Nichols (Lit. Rem. of Edward VI., p. 377) doubts whether these articles were the same as the later Forty-two. There is no certainty about the matter, but they were probably the germ.

³ Acts P. C., 1552–54, p. 32.

¹ Cranmer, Works, ii., 439.

² Acts P. C., 1552–54, p. 148. All these divines were men of eminence whose lives are recorded in the D. N. B. Harley became Bishop of Hereford, Bill, Dean of Westminster, Home, Bishop of Winchester, Grindal, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Perne, Dean of Ely, while Knox was greater than most bishops or deans. The Scottish Reformer had before this denounced the rubric on Kneeling in the Book of Common Prayer, and now took exception to the Thirty-eighth Article, which declared the ritual of the Book to be agreeable to the liberty of the Gospel.

³ Ibid., p. 173, where, curiously enough, the Editor inserts a marginal note, “changes in the Prayer Book”; the articles were, of course, not yet a part of the Prayer Book.

⁴ Cranmer, Works, ii., 141.

¹ Greyfriars’ Chron., p. 77.

² iii., 520. The literature of the Forty-two and Thirty-nine Articles, is of course, enormous. See Dixon, iii., 520–527, and his references.

¹ These decrees were published at various times during the prolonged existence of the Council, some as early as 1547, much to the disgust of Charles V. who was endeavouring to pacify the Lutherans in Germany. See Cambridge Modern History, vol. ii., cp. viii.

² A long array of writers from Heylyn (1661) to Hardwicke (1851) have sought to invest these articles with some sort of synodical authority, but until fresh evidence is produced, the arguments of Canon Dixon (iii., 514 et sqq.) against this view must be regarded as conclusive. They were published with Bishop Ponet’s Catechism, and at the same time there were in existence Fifty-four Articles designed to enforce unity of ritual, as the Forty-two were to enforce unity of doctrine; these Fifty-four have entirely disappeared, leaving scarcely a trace behind them.

¹ Foxe, vi., 468.

² Knox’s Faithful Admonition, 1554, p. 53. “Was David, said I, and Hezekiah abused by crafty counsellors and dissembling hypocrites ? What wonder is it that a young and innocent king be deceived by crafty, covetous, wicked, and ungodly councillors? I am greatly afraid that Ahithophel is councillor and that Judas bears the purse and that Shebna is scribe, controller, and treasurer.” There is probably imagination as well as recollection here.

¹ Froude (v., 136) erroneously attributes this saying to Knox; it is recorded in Northumberland’s letter to Cecil, 7 December, 1552 (Tytler, ii., 148), when the Duke protests that he had “for twenty years stood to one kind of religion, in the same which I do now profess”; less than a year later he explained that he had always been a Catholic at heart.

² Ridley, Works, p. 59; Foxe, vii., 573.

¹ Cal. of Hatfield MSS., i., 94; cf. England under Protector Somerset, p. 290; the measure to which Rich particularly objected was a resolution of the Council that the King’s signature alone was sufficient to give documents validity; Edward was only just fourteen, and completely under Northumberland’s influence.

² Lord Stourton was the only peer who supported Cranmer in this act of justice and independence, although there were fourteen bishops present—another curious instance of Cranmer’s “servility.”

¹ Northumberland to Darcy (not to Northampton, as Froude says, v., 127), on 14 January, 1553, Domestic State Papers, Edward VI., vol. xvi., No. 6; Tytler, ii., 161.

² The preamble to the Act for a subsidy, drawn up by Northumberland, conveniently expatiates on the dead man’s misdeeds to cover those of the living.

³ See Commons’ Journals, 7 and 11 March, 1553.

⁴ Acts P. C., 1552–54, p. 265.

¹ Wriothesley, Chron., ii., 83; Greyfriars’ Chron., p. 77.

² Acts P. C., 1552–54, p. 219; Cranmer, Works, ii., 440.

¹ Henry VII.

¹ Chronicle of Queen Jane, pp. 6–7. Holinshed, iii., 1068.

¹ Montague’s narrative is the authority for the following description; it was first printed in Fuller’s Church History, Bk. VIII., section 2.

¹ Many pitfalls await even those students who use original documents, and one of them consists in attaching too much value to signatures. Documents were not signed in the order in which the signatures read, but spaces were left for the signatures which might be added later but would in order of precedence stand first. Thus Somerset’s original signature appears to acts of the Privy Council passed in London during his absence in Scotland, the explanation being that a space was left for his name, and he signed up these acts on his return; this happened in Cranmer’s case above. There is even an instance in which signatures were added to a document two years after the document was drawn up,—two years after Gardiner’s committal to the Tower (30 June, 1548) St. John and Russell were required to sign the order of committal. In the meantime they had been created Earls of Wiltshire and Bedford, and they began to sign under those styles; then, recollecting that such were not their legal signatures in 1548, they crossed them out, and signed as St. John and Russell (see the present writer in English Hist. Rev., xviii. 567–568).

¹ Works, ii., 444.

² Narratives of the Ref., p. 225. For a refutation of Cecil’s claim to have signed last, and for an exposure of the methods in which he shifted responsibility from himself to his brother-in-law and other intimates, see Tytler, ii., 202–206. The original authorities for this extraordinary plot are for the most part printed in Tytler, in John Gough Nichols’s Literary Remains of Edward VI, pp 561–576, and in Chronicle of Queen Jane and Queen Mary (Camden Soc.). Some additional light is shown by the transcripts in the Record Office, occasional fragments of which are printed in Froude.

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