in favour of a lady who, however estimable in herself, could only be regarded as a puppet in the hands of the hated Northumberland. Failure of When the duke reached Cambridge he found that the country was rising for Mary, and that his own men would not fight, and at last he himself was obliged to cry, "God save Northumber Queen Mary!" In London the council had taken land's plan. the same line. Northumberland and his friends were soon in prison, and Mary was welcomed with enthusiasm by all but a small knot of reformers. Unfortunately for herself, Mary was misled by her success. The English welcomed her because they thought that she represented the policy which they wanted; but their attachment was not so great that their wishes might safely be disregarded. For the present, however, all went Northumber. Well. Northumberland, as a matter of course, was executed with his son Lord Warwick; but Lady Jane and her husband were merely condemned to death, and sent back to the Tower during her Majesty's pleasure. Execution of land. It was Mary's misfortune to suffer from ill advice. The ablest Englishman in her council was Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, Mary's advisers. who shared her views on religion; but her chief adviser was Renard, who represented the Emperor Charles V. Renard's great wish was to secure the marriage of Mary to Charles' son Philip, and to destroy every one who might be a source of danger to the throne of Mary or her children. this end he advised the execution of Lady Jane Grey, and would gladly have put the Lady Elizabeth to death if he could have secured the opportunity. For Mary herself was well inclined to marry Philip, but her subThe country jects disliked the match with a foreigner, and disapproves of would have preferred Edward Courtenay,1 Earl of match. Devon, son of the Marquis of Exeter executed by the Spanish Henry VIII., and great-grandson of Edward IV. Mary disliked Courtenay, and, though she had never seen him, took a great fancy to Philip. Neither the English Catholics nor the reformers were pleased, but they could not agree to unite against the marriage; and all chance of successful resistance was destroyed when Sir Thomas Wyatt, the Duke of Suffolk, the father of Lady Jane Grey, and some others rose in rebellion. Wyatt reached London, but was there crushed, chiefly by the resolution of the queen herself; and the other rebellions never were serious. The complicity of the Duke of Suffolk inclined Mary to listen to Renard's evil counsels, and she executed Lady Jane Grey and her husband; while Elizabeth was sent to the Tower, and Execution of Attempt to compromise Elizabeth. effort made by threat and promise to induce the every conspirators to compromise her. Happily evidence was not forthcoming, and Elizabeth's life was saved. After this the Spanish match could no longer be prevented; but Parliament was strong enough to have inserted in the marriage settlement clauses which secured that the queen was to have the sole government of the country, and was not to go abroad, and that England was not to be drawn into any foreign wars in consequence of Philip's affairs. The Spanish match concluded. It is now time to go back to ecclesiastical matters. Mary was strongly of opinion that all the evils which had happened to the country were direct punishments for its apostasy, and Mary's she gave her whole soul to an attempt to restore, not religious views. only the system of Henry VIII., but also the state of things which he had swept away. Three great steps must be noted. Ecclesiastical reforms. Countess of The next year In 1553 the religious laws of Edward VI. were repealed. In 1554 all the ecclesiastical laws of King Henry VIII. which had been passed since 1529, except so far as they affected the succession of Elizabeth, were annulled; and the same year Reginald Pole, the son of the executed Salisbury, came back to England as papal legate. the Parliament went further, and revived the Lollard statutes of Henry IV. and Henry V. Thus far they would go, but no further. They would not give up the abbey lands or the other Church property which had passed into the hands of the laity. Mary herself gave up to the pope what remained of the crown's Severity of share of the spoil, with the tenths and firstfruits which Henry had kept, but she could not induce her subjects to follow her example. Had Parliament known what use would be made of the Lollard statutes, they would probably have been more cautious in restoring them. They had no love for the new doctrines Mary towards of the reformers, which had been discredited by the the reformers. character of Northumberland and his friends, and they probably only expected that a few leading heretics would be destroyed. Such, however, was not the view of Cardinal Pole, or of Bonner and Gardiner, and the queen was as eager as they to extirpate the heresy which she looked on as the curse of the land. Mary had just suffered from a terrible disappointment. For months she had expected to have a child. Unhappily she was deceived by the symptoms of an incurable disease, appointment. and when the hope was gone, the most charitable view is that her mind was affected. Had a child been born, the succession of Elizabeth, Mary's greatest dread, would have been averted. Day by day she saw how eagerly the nation watched over her sister, whom she had hated from her cradle, and whose very beauty was an eyesore to the withered queen. But it was not to be, and in her grief the wretched woman gave herself up to carry out her false ideas of propitiating Heaven by a wholesale massacre of the Protestants. Mary's dis Persecution of the Protestants. Accordingly, no sooner were the statutes passed, than in 1555 the persecution began. The first to suffer was Rogers, Canon of St. Paul's, a translator of the Bible. Then followed Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester; Ferrar, Bishop of St. David's; and many more. Soon the troubles of the emperor caused Philip to quit England, and Mary, in her grief, spurred on the bishops to further exertions. Ridley, Bishop of London, and Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, the greatest preacher of his time, were burnt together at Oxford. In 1556 Cranmer was chosen to be the next victim. Unhappily his nerve was not equal to the trial, and he agreed to sign a recantation of his views; but when, in spite of this, his enemies still determined to burn him, he denounced his weakness, and plunged into the flames the unworthy hand which had been the instrument of his fall. Meaner victims followed in scores. But persecution defeated its own end. Men learned to admire the constancy of the victims, and to believe in a faith for which martyrs could die; and the laity as a whole looked on with disgust, and hoped that the hour of Elizabeth would soon come. Miserable condition of the country. Meanwhile Mary was outstripping her predecessors in contempt for the law. Jurors were sent to prison for returning verdicts against the wish of the court. Members of Parliament were imprisoned for their conduct in the House. Customs duties, unsanctioned by Parliament, were laid on merchandise. Forced loans were levied. Everywhere the royal officers were setting the constitution at defiance. The crown was crippled for money, military stores were rotting, fortresses unrepaired, the fleet unseaworthy. England never saw a more wretched time. Such was the state of things when in 1557 Mary, to please her husband, and in defiance of the marriage settlement, plunged the country into war with France. A few troops joined the Spaniards in the Low Countries, and shared the capture of the town of St. Quentin. War with Loss of Calais. This triumph was, however, dearly purchased by the loss of Calais a fortress as dear to the English of that day as Gibraltar is to us. Its fortifications were out of repair, its garrison was wretchedly small; and when the commanders assured the government that it was going to be attacked, Mary's friends could only answer that they had certain intelligence that it was not. But the commanders were right, and an overwhelming force attacked the fortress by sea and land. Then the government lost their heads; they gave contradictory orders; they found that their ships could not sail, that their men had no arms; and within sight of the English coast a fortress, which had been in our hands for two hundred years, was lost in the year 1558. The blow was felt terribly in England, by no one more than by Mary herself. Now Calais had fallen, the government were all energy. But the time for action had passed; the winds Effect of the on Mary. were unfavourable, a storm destroyed the transports, loss of Calais and although some English ships had the honour of assisting the Spaniards at the battle of Gravelines, Calais had passed irrevocably from our grasp. Mary's health was unfitted to bear the blow. Deserted by her husband, disappointed of children, hated by the subjects whom she Mary's illness. Death of saw eagerly awaiting the succession of the child of Anne Boleyn, who would sweep away all she thought most dear; with Cardinal Pole, her only trusted friend, stretched on his death-bed, and under censure of the pope for unsoundness of doctrine,-few people have ever lived to see so many hopes blighted in the course of five years as the unhappy Mary Tudor. Bravely, however, like a Tudor as she was, she faced the inevitable end, sent a message Mary. to Elizabeth, whom she recognized as her successor, and passed away from her sorrows in the early morning of November 17, 1558. A day later died Cardinal Pole, who had succeeded Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury. Gardiner Gardiner and had died in 1555, so that the chief agents and Pole. advisers of Mary in her attempt to restore Roman Catholicism in England and to replace the English Church under the authority of the pope, were removed from the scene about the same time as their mistress. Deaths of |