 CHAPTER XXVIII. The Pope was thrown into a very angry state of mind when he heard of the king's marriage and fumed exceedingly. Many of the English monks and friars, seeing that their order was in danger, did the same. Some even declaimed against the king in church before his face, and were not to be stopped until he himself roared out, Silence! The king, not much the worse for this, took it pretty quietly, and was very glad when his queen gave birth to a daughter, who was christened Elizabeth and declared Princess of Wales as her sister Mary had already been. One of the most atrocious features of this reign was that Henry VIII was always trimming between the reformed religion and the unreformed one, so that the more he quarreled with the pope, the more of his own subjects he roasted alive for not holding the pope's opinions. Thus an unfortunate student named John Frith and a poor simple tailor named Andrew Hewitt who loved him very much, and said that whatever John Frith believed he believed, were burnt in Smithfield, to show what a capital Christian the king was. But these were speedily followed by two much greater victims, Sir Thomas Moore and John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester. The latter, who was a good and amiable old man, had committed no greater offence than believing in Elizabeth Barton, called the maid of Kent, another of those ridiculous women who pretended to be inspired and to make all sorts of heavenly revelations, though they indeed uttered nothing but evil nonsense. For this offence, as it was pretended, but really for denying the king to be the supreme head of the church, he got into trouble, and was put in prison, but even then he might have been suffered to die naturally, short work having been made of executing the Kentish maid and her principal followers, but that the pope, despite the king, resolved to make him a cardinal. Upon that the king made a ferocious joke to the effect that the pope might send Fisher a red hat, which is the way they make a cardinal, but he should have no head on which to wear it, and he was tried with all unfairness and injustice and sentence to death. He died like a noble and virtuous old man and left a worthy name behind him. The king supposed, I daresay, that Sir Thomas Moore would be frightened by this example, but as he was not to be easily terrified, and thoroughly believing in the pope, had made up his mind that the king was not the rightful head of the church. He positively refused to say that he was. For this crime he too was tried and sentenced after having been in prison a whole year. When he was doomed to death and came away from his trial with the edge of the executioner's axe turned towards him, as was always done in those times when a state prisoner came to that hopeless pass, he bore it quite serenely and gave his blessing to his son, who pressed through the crowd in Westminster Hall and kneeled down to receive it. But when he got to the tower wharf on his way back to his prison and his favorite daughter, Margaret Roper, a very good woman, rushed through the guards again and again to kiss him and to weep upon his neck, he was overcome at last. He soon recovered and nevermore showed any feeling but cheerfulness and courage. When he was going up the steps of the scaffold to his death, he said jokingly to the lieutenant of the tower, observing that they were weak and shook beneath his tread, I pray you, Master Lieutenant, see me safe up, and for my coming down, I can shift for myself. Also, he said to the executioner, after he had laid his head upon the block, let me put my beard out of the way, for that, at least, has never committed any treason. Then his head was struck off at a blow. These two executions were worthy of King Henry VIII. Sir Thomas More was one of the most virtuous men in his dominions and the bishop was one of his oldest and truest friends. But to be a friend of that fellow was almost as dangerous as to be his wife. When the news of these two murders got to Rome, the Pope raged against the murderer more than ever. Pope raged since the world began and prepared a bull ordering his subjects to take arms against him and dethrone him. The king took all possible precautions to keep that document out of his dominions and set to work in return to suppress a great number of the English monasteries and abbeys. This destruction was begun by a body of commissioners of whom Cromwell, whom the king had taken into great favor, was the head and was carried on through some few years to its entire completion. There is no doubt that many of these religious establishments were religious in nothing but in name, and were crammed with lazy, indolent, and sensual monks. There is no doubt that they imposed upon the people in every possible way, that they had images moved by wires which they pretended were miraculously moved by heaven, that they had among them a whole ton measure full of teeth, all purporting to have come out of the head of one saint, who must indeed have been a very extraordinary person with that enormous allowance of grinders, that they had bits of coal which they said had fried St. Lawrence and bits of toenails which they said belonged to other famous saints, pen knives and boots and girdles which they said belonged to others, and that all these bits of rubbish were called relics and adored by the ignorant people. But on the other hand there is no doubt either that the king's officers and men punished the good monks with the bad, did great injustice, demolished many beautiful things and many valuable libraries, destroyed numbers of paintings, stained glass windows, fine pavements and carvings, and that the whole court were ravenously greedy and rapacious for the division of this great spoil among them. The king seems to have grown almost mad in the ardor of this pursuit, for he declared Thomas a becket a traitor, though he had been dead so many years and had his body dug up out of his grave. He must have been as miraculous as the monks pretended, if they had told the truth, for he was found with one head on his shoulders and they had shown another as his undoubted and genuine head ever since his death. It had brought them vast sums of money, too. The gold and jewels on his shrine filled two great chests and eight men tottered as they carried them away. How rich the monasteries were you may infer from the fact that, when they were all suppressed, one hundred and thirty thousand pounds a year in those days an immense sum came to the crown. These things were not done without causing great discontent among the people. The monks had been good landlords and hospitable entertainers of all travelers, and had been accustomed to give away a great deal of corn and fruit and meat and other things. In those days it was difficult to change goods into money in consequence of the roads being very few and very bad, and the carts and wagons of the worst description, and they must either have given away some of the good things they possessed in enormous quantities or have suffered them to spoil and molder. So many of the people missed what it was more agreeable to get idly than to work for, and the monks who were driven out of their homes and wandered about encouraged their discontent, and there were consequently great risings in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. These were put down by terrific executions from which the monks themselves did not escape, and the king went on grunting and growling in his own fat way like a royal pig. I have told all this story of the religious houses at one time to make it plainer and to get back to the king's domestic affairs. The unfortunate queen Catherine was by this time dead, and the king was by this time as tired of his second queen as he had been of his first. As he had fallen in love with Anne when she was in the service of Catherine, so now he fell in love with another lady in the service of Anne. See how wicked deeds are punished, and how bitterly and self-approachfully the queen must have thought of her own rise to the throne. The new fancy was a Lady Jane Seymour, and the king no sooner set his mind on her than he resolved to have Anne Boleyn's head. So he brought a number of charges against Anne, accusing her of dreadful crimes which she had never committed, and implicating in them her own brother and certain gentlemen in her service, among whom one Norris and Mark Smeaton a musician are best remembered. As the lords and councillors were as afraid of the king and as subservient to him as the meanest peasant in England was, they brought in Anne Boleyn guilty, and the other unfortunate persons accused with her guilty, too. Those gentlemen died like men, with the exception of Smeaton, who had been tempted by the king into telling lies, which he called confessions, and who had expected to be pardoned, but who, I am very glad to say, was not. There was then only the queen to dispose of. She had been surrounded in the tower with women's spies, had been monstrously persecuted and foully slandered, and had received no justice. But her spirit rose with her afflictions, and, after having in vain tried to soften the king by writing an affectionate letter to him which still exists, from her doleful prison in the tower, she resigned herself to death. She sent to those about her very cheerfully that she had heard say the executioner was a good one, and that she had a little neck. She laughed and clasped it with her hands as she said that, and would soon be out of her pain. And she was soon out of her pain, poor creature, on the green inside the tower, and her body was flung into an old box and put away in the ground under the chapel. There is a story that the king sat in his palace listening very anxiously for the sound of the cannon, which was to announce this new murder, and that when he heard it come booming on the air he rose up in great spirits and ordered out his dogs to go a hunting. He was bad enough to do it, but whether he did it or not it is certain that he married Jane Seymour the very next day. I have not much pleasure in recording that she lived just long enough to give birth to a son who was christened Edward, and then to die of a fever, for I cannot but think that any woman who married such a ruffian and knew what innocent blood was on his hands deserved the acts that would assuredly have fallen on the neck of Jane Seymour if she had lived much longer. Cranmer had done what he could to save some of the church property for purposes of religion and education, but the great families had been so hungry to get hold of it that very little could be rescued for such objects. Even Miles Coverdale, who did the people the inestimable service of translating the Bible into English, which the unreformed religion never permitted to be done, was left in poverty while the great families clutched the church lands and money. The people had been told that when the crown came into possession of these funds it would not be necessary to tax them, but they were taxed afresh directly afterwards. It was fortunate for them indeed that so many nobles were so greedy for this wealth, since if it had remained with the crown there might have been no end to tyranny for hundreds of years. One of the most active writers on the church's side against the king was a member of his own family, a sort of distant cousin, Reginald Pol by name, who attacked him in the most violent manner, though he received a pension from him all the time, and fought for the church with his pen day and night. As he was beyond the king's reach, being in Italy, the king politely invited him over to discuss the subject, but he, knowing better than to come, and wisely staying where he was, the king's rage fell upon his brother Lord Montague, the Marquis of Exeter, and some other gentlemen, who were tried for high treason in corresponding with him and aiding him, which they probably did, and all were executed. The pope made Reginald Pol a cardinal, but so much against his will that it is thought he even aspired in his own mind to the vacant throne of England, and had hopes of marrying the princess Mary. His being made a high priest, however, put an end to all that. His mother, the venerable Countess of Salisbury, who was, unfortunately for herself, within the tyrant's reach, was the last of his relatives on whom his wrath fell. When she was told to lay her gray head upon the block, she answered the executioner, No, my head never committed treason, and if you want it, you shall seize it. So she ran round and round the scaffold with the executioner striking at her, and her gray hair bedabbled with blood, and even when they held her down upon the block she moved her head about to the last, resolved to be no party to her own barbarous murder. All this the people bore as they had borne everything else. Indeed, they bore much more, for the slow fires of Smithfield were continually burning, and people were constantly being roasted to death, still to show what a good Christian the king was. He defied the pope and his bull which was now issued, and had come into England, but he burned innumerable people whose only offense was that they differed from the pope's religious opinions. There was a wretched man named Lambert, among others, who was tried for this before the king, and with whom six bishops argued one after another. When he was quite exhausted, as well he might be after six bishops, he threw himself on the king's mercy, but the king blustered out that he had no mercy for heretics. So he too fed the fire. All this the people bore, and more than all this yet. The national spirit seems to have been banished from the kingdom at this time. The very people who were executed for treason, the very wives and friends of the bluff king, spoke of him on the scaffold as a good prince, and a gentle prince, just as serfs in similar circumstances have been known to do, under the sultan and bishops of the east, or under the fierce old tyrants of Russia, who poured boiling and freezing water on them alternately until they died. The parliament were as bad as all the rest, and gave the king whatever he wanted, among other vile accommodations, they gave him new powers of murdering, at his will and pleasure, anyone whom he might choose to call a traitor. But the worst measure they passed was an act of six articles, commonly called at the time the whip with six strings, which punished offenses against the pope's opinions without mercy, and enforced the very worst parts of the monkish religion. Cranmer would have modified it if he could, but being overborn by the Romish party had not the power. As one of the articles declared that priests should not marry, and as he was married himself, he sent his wife and children into Germany and began to tremble at his danger, none the less because he was, and had long been, the king's friend. This whip of six strings was made under the king's own eye. It should never be forgotten of him how cruelly he supported the worst of the popish doctrines, when there was nothing to be got by opposing them. This amiable monarch now thought of taking another wife. He proposed to the French king to have some of the ladies of the French court exhibited before him that he might make his royal choice, but the French king answered that he would rather not have his ladies trotted out to be shown like horses at a fair. He proposed to the Dowager Duchess of Milan who replied that she might have thought of such a match if she had two heads, but that only owning one she must beg to keep it safe. At last Cromwell represented that there was a Protestant princess in Germany. Those who held the reformed religion were called Protestants because their leaders had protested against the abuses and impositions of the unreformed church, named Anne of Cleves, who was beautiful and who would answer the purpose admirably. The king said, was she a large woman because he must have a fat wife. Oh yes, said Cromwell, she was very large, just the thing. On hearing this the king sent over his famous painter Hans Holbein to take her portrait. Hans made her out to be so good looking that the king was satisfied and the marriage was arranged. But whether anybody had paid Hans to touch up the picture or whether Hans, like one or two other painters, flattered a princess in the ordinary way of business, I cannot say. All I know is that when Anne came over and the king went to Rochester to meet her, and first saw her without her seeing him, he swore she was a great Flanders' mare and said he would never marry her. Being obliged to do it, now matters had gone so far, he would not give her the presence he had prepared, and would never notice her. He never forgave Cromwell his part in the affair. His downfall dates from that time. It was quickened by his enemies in the interest of the unreformed religion, putting in the king's way at a state dinner a niece of the Duke of Norfolk, Catherine Howard, a young lady of fascinating manners, though small in stature and not particularly beautiful. Falling in love with her on the spot, the king soon divorced Anne of Cleves after making her the subject of much brutal talk, on pretense that she had been previously betrothed to someone else, which would never do for one of his dignity and married Catherine. It is probable that on his wedding day, of all the days in the year, he sent his faithful Cromwell to the scaffold, and had his head struck off. He further celebrated the occasion by burning at one time and causing to be drawn into the fire on the same hurdles, some Protestant prisoners for denying the pope's doctrines, and some Roman Catholic prisoners for denying his own supremacy. Still the people bore it, and not a gentleman in England raised his hand. But by a just retribution it soon came out that Catherine Howard, before her marriage, had been really guilty of such crimes as the king falsely attributed to his second wife, Anne Boleyn. So, again, the dreadful acts made the king a widower, and this queen passed away as so many in that rain had passed away before her. As an appropriate pursuit under the circumstances, Henry then applied himself to superintending the composition of a religious book called Unnecessary Doctrine for Any Christian Man. He must have been a little confused in his mind, I think, at this period, for he was so false to himself as to be true to some one, that some one being Cranmer, whom the Duke of Norfolk and others of his enemies tried to ruin, but to whom the king was steadfast, and to whom he one night gave his ring, charging him when he should find himself next day accused of treason, to show it to the council-board. This Cranmer did to the confusion of his enemies. I suppose the king thought he might want him a little longer. He married yet once more. Yes, strange to say, he found in England another woman who would become his wife, and she was Catherine Parr, widow of Lord Latimer. She leaned towards the reformed religion, and it is some comfort to know that she tormented the king considerably by arguing a variety of doctrinal points with him on all possible occasions. She had very nearly done this to her own destruction. After one of these conversations, the king in a very black mood actually instructed Gardner, one of his bishops who favored the Pope's opinions, to draw a bill of accusation against her, which would have inevitably brought her to the scaffold where her predecessors had died, but that one of her friends picked up the paper of instructions which had been dropped in the palace, and gave her timely notice. She fell ill with terror, but managed the king so well when he came to entrap her into further statements, by saying that she had only spoken on such points to divert his mind and to get some information from his extraordinary wisdom, that he gave her a kiss and called her his sweetheart. And, when the chancellor came next day actually to take her to the tower, the king sent him about his business and honored him with the epithets of a beast, a nave, and a fool. So near was Catherine Parr to the block, and so narrow was her escape. There was war with Scotland in this reign, and a short, clumsy war with France for favoring Scotland, but the events at home were so dreadful and leaving such an enduring stain on the country that I need say no more of what happened abroad. A few more horrors in this reign is over. There was a lady, Anne, asked you, in Lincolnshire, who inclined to the Protestant opinions, and whose husband, being a fierce Catholic, turned her out of his house. She came to London and was considered as offending against the six articles, and was taken to the tower and put upon the rack. Probably because it was hoped that she might, in her agony, criminate some obnoxious persons, if falsely so much the better. She was tortured without uttering a cry until the lieutenant of the tower would suffer his men to torture her no more, and then two priests who were present actually pulled off their robes and turned the wheels of the rack with their own hands, so rending and twisting and breaking her that she was afterwards carried to the fire in a chair. She was burned with three others, a gentleman, a clergyman, and a tailor, and so the world went on. Either the king became afraid of the power of the Duke of Norfolk and his son the Earl of Surrey, or they gave him some offence, but he resolved to pull them down to follow all the rest who were gone. The son was tried first, of course, for nothing, and defended himself bravely, but of course he was found guilty, and of course he was executed. Then his father was laid hold of, and left for death too. But the king himself was left for death by a greater king, and the earth was to be rid of him at last. He was now a swollen, hideous spectacle, with a great hole in his leg, and so odious to every sense that it was dreadful to approach him. When he was found to be dying Cranmer was sent for from his palace at Croydon, and came with all speed but found him speechless. Happily in that hour he perished. He was in the fifty-sixth year of his age and the thirty-eighth of his reign. Henry VIII. has been favored by some Protestant writers, because the Reformation was achieved in his time. But the mighty merit of it lies with other men and not with him, and it can be rendered none the worse by this monster's crimes and none the better by any defense of them. The plain truth is that he was a most intolerable Ruffian, a disgrace to human nature, and a blot of blood and grease upon the history of England. Henry VIII. had made a will, appointing a council of sixteen to govern the kingdom for his son while he was under age. He was now only ten years old, and another council of twelve to help them. The most powerful of the first council was the Earl of Hartford, the young king's uncle, who lost no time in bringing his nephew with great state up to Enfield, and thence to the tower. It was considered at the time a striking proof of virtue in the young king that he was sorry for his father's death. But, as common subjects have that virtue too, sometimes we will say no more about it. There was a curious part of the late king's will requiring his executors to fulfill whatever promises he had made. Some of the court wondering what these might be, the Earl of Hartford and the other noblemen interested, said that they were promises to advance and enrich them. So the Earl of Hartford made himself Duke of Somerset, and made his brother Edward Seymour a baron, and there were various similar promotions, all very agreeable to the party's concerned, and very dutiful, no doubt, to the late king's memory. To be more dutiful still they made themselves rich out of the church lands, and were very comfortable. The new Duke of Somerset caused himself to be declared protector of the kingdom, and was, indeed, the king. As young Edward VI had been brought up in the principles of the Protestant religion, everybody knew that they would be maintained. But Cranmer, to whom they were chiefly entrusted, advanced them steadily and temporarily. Many superstitious and ridiculous practices were stopped, but practices which were harmless were not interfered with. The Duke of Somerset, the protector, was anxious to have the young king engaged in marriage to the young queen of Scotland, in order to prevent that princess from making an alliance with any foreign power. But, as a large party in Scotland were unfavorable to this plan, he invaded that country. His excuse for doing so was that the bordermen, that is, the Scotch who lived in that part of the country where England and Scotland joined, troubled the English very much. But there were two sides to this question, for the English bordermen troubled the Scotch, too. And, through many long years, there were perpetual border quarrels which gave rise to numbers of old tales and songs. However, the protector invaded Scotland and Iran, the Scottish regent, with an army twice as large as his, advanced to meet him. They encountered on the banks of the river Est, within a few miles of Edinburgh, and there, after a little skirmish, the protector made such moderate proposals in offering to retire if the Scotch would only engage not to marry their princess to any foreign prince, that the regent thought the English were afraid. But in this he made a horrible mistake. For the English soldiers on land and the English sailors on the water, so set upon the Scotch that they broke and fled, and more than ten thousand of them were killed. It was a dreadful battle for the fugitives were slain without mercy. The ground, for four miles all the way to Edinburgh, was strewn with dead men, and with arms and legs and heads. Some hid themselves in streams and were drowned. Some threw away their armor and were killed running, almost naked. But in this battle of Pinky the English lost only two or three hundred men. They were much better clothed than the Scottish at the poverty of whose appearance and country they were exceedingly astonished. A parliament was called when Somerset came back, and it repealed the whip with six strings, and did one or two other good things, though it unhappily retained the punishment of burning, for those people who did not make believe to believe, in all religious matters, what the government had declared that they must and should believe. It also made a foolish law meant to put down beggars that any man who lived idly and loitered about for three days together, should be burned with a hot iron, made a slave and wear an iron fetter. But this savage absurdity soon came to an end, and went the way of a great many other foolish laws. The Protector was now so proud that he sat in Parliament before all the nobles on the right hand of the throne. Many other noblemen, who only wanted to be as proud if they could get a chance, became his enemies, of course, and it is supposed that he came back suddenly from Scotland because he had received news that his brother, Lord Seymour, was becoming dangerous to him. This Lord was now High Admiral of England, a very handsome man and a great favourite with the court ladies, even with the young Princess Elizabeth, who romped with him a little more than young princesses in these times do with any one. He had married Catherine Parr, the late King's widow, who was now dead, and to strengthen his power he secretly supplied the young King with money. He may have even engaged with some of his brother's enemies in a plot to carry the boy off. On these and other accusations at any rate he was confined in the Tower, impeached and found guilty, his own brother's name being unnatural and sad to tell, the first sign to the warrant of his execution. He was executed on Tower Hill and died denying his treason. One of his last proceedings in this world was to write two letters, one to the Princess Elizabeth and one to the Princess Mary, which a servant of his took charge of and concealed in his shoe. These letters are supposed to have urged them against his brother and to revenge his death. What they truly contained is not known, but there is no doubt that he had, at one time, obtained great influence over the Princess Elizabeth. All this while the Protestant religion was making progress. The images which the people had gradually come to worship were removed from the churches. The people were informed that they need not confess themselves to priests unless they chose. A common prayer-book was drawn up in the English language, which all could understand, and many other improvements were made, still moderately. For Cranmer was a very moderate man, and even restrained the Protestant clergy from violently abusing the unreformed religion, as they very often did and which was not a good example. But the people were at this time in great distress. The rapacious nobility who had come into possession of the church lands were very bad landlords. They enclosed great quantities of ground for the feeding of sheep, which was then more profitable than the growing of crops, and this increased the general distress. So the people who still understood little of what was going on about them, and still readily believed what the homeless monks told them, many of whom had been their good friends in their better days, took it into their heads that all this was owing to the Reformed religion, and therefore rose in many parts of the country. The most powerful risings were in Devonshire and Norfolk. In Devonshire the rebellion was so strong that ten thousand men united within a few days and even laid siege to Exeter. But Lord Russell, coming to the assistance of the citizens who defended that town, defeated the rebels and, not only hanged the mayor of one place, but hanged the vicar of another from his own church, Steeple. What with hanging and killing by the sword, four thousand of the rebels are supposed to have fallen in that one county. In Norfolk, where the rising was more against the enclosure of open lands than against the Reformed religion, the popular leader was a man named Robert Kett, a tanner of womenham. The mob were, in the first instance, excited against the tanner by one John Flowerdew, a gentleman who owed him a grudge, but the tanner was more than a match for the gentleman, since he soon got the people on his side and established himself near Norwich with quite an army. There was a large oak tree in that place on a spot called Mousehold Hill, which Kett named the Tree of Reformation, and under its green boughs he and his men sat, in the mid-summer weather, holding courts of justice and debating affairs of state. They were even impartial enough to allow some rather tiresome public speakers to get up into this Tree of Reformation and point out their errors to them in long discourses, while they lay listening, not always without some grumbling and growling, in the shade below. At last, one sunny July day, a herald appeared below the tree and proclaimed Kett and all his men traitors, unless from that moment they dispersed and went home, in which case they were to receive a pardon. But Kett and his men made light of the herald and became stronger than ever, until the Earl of Warwick went after them with a sufficient force and cut them all to pieces. A few were hanged, drawn, and quartered as traitors, and their limbs were sent into various country places to be a terror to the people. Nine of them were hanged upon nine green branches of the oak of Reformation, and so for the time that tree may be said to have withered away. The Protector, though a haughty man, had compassion for the real distresses of the common people and a sincere desire to help them. But he was too proud and too high in degree to hold even their favour steadily, and many of the nobles always envied and hated him, because they were as proud and not as high as he. He was at this time building a great palace in the Strand to get the stone for which he blew up church steeples with gunpowder and pulled down Bishop's houses, thus making himself still more disliked. At length his principal enemy, the Earl of Warwick, Dudley by name, and the son of that Dudley who had made himself so odious with Empson in the reign of Henry the Seventh, joined with seven other members of the Council against him, formed a separate Council, and, becoming stronger in a few days, sent him to the Tower under twenty-nine articles of accusation. After being sentenced by the Council to the forfeiture of all his offices and lands, he was liberated and pardoned on making a very humble submission. He was even taken back into the Council again after having suffered this fall, and married his daughter, Lady Anne Seymour, to Warwick's eldest son. But such a reconciliation was little likely to last and did not outlive a year. Warwick, having got himself made Duke of Northumberland, and having advanced the more important of his friends, finished the history by causing the Duke of Somerset and his friend Lord Gray and others to be arrested for treason, in having conspired to seize and dethrone the King. They were also accused of having intended to seize the new Duke of Northumberland, with his friends Lord Northampton and Lord Pembroke, to murder them if they found need, and to raise the city to revolt. All this the fallen protector positively denied, except that he confessed to having spoken of the murder of those three noblemen, but having never designed it. He was acquitted of the charge of treason and found guilty of the other charges. So when the people who remembered his having been their friend, now that he was disgraced and in danger, saw him come out from his trial with the acts turned from him, they thought he was altogether acquitted and sent up a loud shout of joy. But the Duke of Somerset was ordered to be beheaded on Tower Hill. At eight o'clock in the morning and proclamations were issued bidding the citizens keep home until after ten. They filled the streets, however, and crowded the place of execution as soon as it was light, with sad faces and sad hearts, saw the once powerful protector ascend the scaffold to lay his head upon the dreadful block. While he was yet saying his last words to them with manly courage, and telling them in particular how it comforted him at that pass to have assisted in reforming the national religion, a member of the council was seen riding up on horseback. They again thought that the Duke was saved by his bringing a reprieve and again shouted for joy. But the Duke himself told them that they were mistaken and laid down his head and had it struck off at a blow. Many of the bystanders rushed forward and steeped their handkerchiefs in his blood as a mark of their affection. He had, indeed, been capable of many good acts, and one of them was discovered after he was no more. The Bishop of Durham, a very good man, had been informed against to the council, when the Duke was in power, as having answered a treacherous letter proposing a rebellion against the reformed religion. As the answer could not be found, he could not be declared guilty, but it was now discovered hidden by the Duke himself among some private papers in his regard for that good man. The Bishop lost his office and was deprived of his possessions. It is not very pleasant to know that while his uncle lay in prison under sentence of death, the young king was being vastly entertained by plays and dances and sham fights, but there is no doubt of it for he kept a journal himself. It is pleasanter to know that not a single Roman Catholic was burnt in this rain for holding that religion, though two wretched victims suffered for heresy. One, a woman named Joan Boucher, for professing some opinions that even she could only explain an unintelligible jargon. The other, a Dutchman named von Paris, who practiced as a surgeon in London. Edward was, to his credit, exceedingly unwilling to sign the warrant for the woman's execution, shedding tears before he did so and telling Cranmer, who urged him to do it, though Cranmer really would have spared the woman at first, but for her own determined obstinacy, that the guilt was not his, but that of the man who so strongly urged the dreadful act. We shall see too soon whether the time ever came when Cranmer is likely to have remembered this with sorrow and remorse. Cranmer and Ridley, at first Bishop of Rochester and afterwards Bishop of London, were the most powerful of the clergy of this rain. Others were imprisoned and deprived of their property for still adhering to the unreformed religion, the most important among whom were Gardner Bishop of Winchester, Heath Bishop of Worcester, Day Bishop of Chichester, and Bonner, that Bishop of London who was superseded by Ridley. The Princess Mary, who inherited her mother's gloomy temper and hated the Reformed religion as connected with her mother's wrongs and sorrows, she knew nothing else about it, always refusing to read a single book in which it was truly described, held by the unreformed religion too, and was the only person in the kingdom for whom the old mass was allowed to be performed. Nor would the young king have made that exception even in her favor, but for the strong persuasions of Cranmer and Ridley. He always viewed it with horror, and when he fell into a sickly condition, after having been very ill, first of the measles and then of the smallpox, he was greatly troubled in mind to think that if he died, and she the next heir to the throne succeeded, the Roman Catholic religion would be set up again. This uneasiness, the Duke of Northumberland, was not slow to encourage. For if the Princess Mary came to the throne, he who had taken part with the Protestants was sure to be disgraced. Now the Duchess of Suffolk was descended from King Henry VII, and if she resigned what little or no right she had in favor of her daughter, Lady Jane Gray, that would be the secession to promote the Duke's greatness, because Lord Guilford Dudley, one of his sons, was, at this very time, newly married to her. So he worked upon the king's fears, and persuaded him to set aside both the Princess Mary and the Princess Elizabeth, and assert his right to appoint his successor. Accordingly the young king handed the crown lawyers a writing signed half a dozen times over by himself, appointing Lady Jane Gray to succeed to the crown, and requiring them to have his will made out according to law. They were much against it at first, and told the king so, but the Duke of Northumberland, being so violent about it that the lawyers even expected him to beat them, and hotly declaring that, stripped to his shirt, he would fight any man in such a quarrel, they yielded. Cranmer also at first hesitated, pleading that he had sworn to maintain the secession of the crown to the Princess Mary, but he was a weak man in his resolutions, and afterwards signed the document with the rest of the council. It was completed none too soon, for Edward was now sinking in a rapid decline, and, by way of making him better, they handed him over to a woman doctor who pretended to be able to cure it. He speedily got worse. On the 6th of July in the year 1553 he died, very peaceably and piously, praying God with his last breath to protect the reformed religion. This king died in the sixteenth year of his age, and in the seventh of his reign. It is difficult to judge what the character of one so young might afterwards have become among many so bad, ambitious, and quarreling nobles. But he was an amiable boy of very good abilities, and had nothing coarse or cruel or brutal in his disposition, which in the son of such a father is rather surprising. CHAPTER 30 England under Mary 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 Arendelle 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 tell 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 dukes 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 Framleyham, 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 dispatched 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 short itch 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 in Alderman, 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 Alderman, 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 Gray 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 Wonstead, 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 gardener, 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 the Council, in his defense, 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 had made but a poor show, as might be expected, when he himself lay low. He entreated gardener 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 fate. 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 colors, 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, too, 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. Lattimer, also celebrated among the clergy of the last reign, was likewise sent to the tower, and Cranmer speedily followed. Lattimer 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 grown 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 VIII, 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 Pol was the man, but the Queen was of the opinion that he was not the man, he being too old and too much of a student. Others said that the gallant young Courtney, 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 Courtney to the Princess Elizabeth and setting them up with popular tumults all over the kingdom against the Queen. This was discovered in time by Gardner, but in Kent, the old bold county, the people rose in their old bold way. Sir Thomas Wyatt, 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 Wyatt, the Duke retreated and Wyatt came on to Deppford 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, Wyatt 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. Wyatt, 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 let 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 Wyatt's defeat she did the most cruel act, even of her cruel reign, in signing the warrant for the execution of Lady Jane Gray. 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 even now she 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 she had done so with no bad intent and that she died a humble Christian. She begged the executioner to dispatch her quickly, as 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 her to say, confused, "'Oh, 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 acts 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 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 Burkhamstead, 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, when she was brought out be times 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 courtyard 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 Woodstock, whether 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. Gardener, then 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 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 Gardener 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 Gardener 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 splendor 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 Pope's 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, Gardener 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 be good sermons at all 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 Gardener opened a high court at St. Mary Overy on the South Exide of London Bridge for the Trial of Heretics. Here two of the late Protestant clergymen, Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester and Rogers, a Preventory 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 Gardener replied that she was not his wife. Ye, 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. Then 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 pray and to preach, 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 men 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 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 Baleo 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 rather a 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 in 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 daylight 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 received my soul. He died quickly but the fire, after having burned the legs of Ridley, sunk. Before he lingered chained to the iron post and crying, Oh, I cannot burn! Oh, 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, Oh, I cannot burn! I cannot burn! At last the gunpowder caught fire and ended his miseries. Five days after this fearful scene Gardner 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 one more examining and trying by Bonner, the Bishop of London, another man of blood who had succeeded to Gardner's work, even in his lifetime when Gardner 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 assign, 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 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 recitation 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 in tire among the 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 course just 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 open, she said to those around her, you shall find Calais written on my heart. I should have thought if anything were written upon it they would have found the words Jane Gray, 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 fruit she 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.