*

were on the other side. The election was held at Shrewsbury, and the inhabitants assembled riotously, overawed the voters, and earried the opposition member by intimidation. On the present occasion, Lord Southampton went in person round Surrey, Sussex, and Hampshire, where his own property was situated. The election for Surrey he reported himself able to carry with certainty. At Guildford he ma noeuvred to secure both seats, but was only able to obtain one. He was anticipated for the other by a Guildford townsman, whom the mayor and burgesses told him that they all desired. Sir William Goring and Sir John Gage were standing on the Court interest for Sussex. Sir John Dawtry, of Petworth, and Lord Maltravers, had promised their support, and Southampton hoped that they might le considered safe. Farnham was the Bishop of Winchester's town, where he 'spared to meddle' without Cromwell's express orders. If the bishop's good intentions could be relied upon, interference might provoke gratuitous ill-feeling. and he could make a party if Cromwell thought it necessary. In Portsmouth, and Southampton the Government influence was, naturally paramount, through the dockyards, and the establishments maintained in them. So far nothing can be detected more irregular than might have been found in the efforts of any prime minister before the Reform Bill to secure a manageable House of Commons. At Oxford, however, we find Cromwell positively dictating the choice of a member; and at Canterbury a case occurred too remarkable for its arbitrary character to be passed over without particular mention. The suppression of the two great abbeys had, for the moment, left the crown the absolute proprietor of the larger portions of the town, Christchurch had not yet been converted into a chapter; the lands of St. Augustine had not yet been, disposed of; all the strength, therefore, which property could confer, with the further irresponsibility in the use of it, which he gained from his position, was wielded by Cromwell, and with noticeable despotism. Directions had been sent downswer from London for ticeable despotism. election of two Government nominees. An answer was returned stating humbly that the order had come too late that two members of the corporation of Canterbury were already returned. I have failed to discover Cromwell's rejoinder; but a week later the following letter was addressed to him by the mayor and burgesses in good bal

He had friends in the town, hoth and

In humble wise we certify you that the 20th day of the present month, at six o'clock in the morning, I, John Alcock, Mayor of Canterbury, received your letter directed to me, the said mayor, sheriff, and commonalty of the said city, signifying to us thereby the king's pleasure and commandment, that Robert Sacknell and John Bridges should be burgesses of the Parliament for the same city of Canterbury; by virtue whereof, according to our bounden duty, immediately upon the sight of your said letter, and contents thereof perceived, we caused the commonalty of the said city to assemble in the court-hall, where appeared the number of fourscore and seventeen persons-citizens and inhabitants of the

Struggle between the Anglo-Catholic party and Cromwell. 305

said city; and according to the king's pleasure and commandment, freely with one voice, and without any contradiction, have elected and chosen the said Robert Sacknell and John Bridges to be burgesses of the Parliament for the same city, which shall be duly certified by indenture under the seal of the said citizens and inhabitants, by the grace of the blessed Trinity, addig yrs of oldi. Forma pottor The previous election, therefore, had been set aside by the absolute will of the crown, and the hope that so violent a proceeding might be explained tolerably through some kind of decent resignation, is set aside by a further letter stating that one of the persons originally chosen, having presumed to affirm that he was a true land proper burgess of the city,' he had been threatened into submission by a prospect of the loss of a lucrative office which he held under the corporation.

But all Cromwell's efforts to save himself proved in vain. The German alliance of Henry led to a momentary reconciliation between the Emperor and the French king, and although no coalition against England appears to have been contemplated, it probably increased the danger of the tottering minister. The mar riage of Anne of Cleves proved singularly unfortunate; it had been the work of Cromwell, and was dissolved suddenly by Conyocation, to the eternal disgrace of all parties concerned; and the measure of its projector was now overflowing. The Protestant party had recently been indulging in some excesses, and were chafing under their Anglo-Catholic persecutors; and an opportunity was taken to entangle Cromwell in a charge of hightreason, on account of some words he had incautiously spoken with regard to them. Accusations of heresy were easily made forthcoming; the whole weight of the Anglo-Catholic party, headed by Norfolk and Gardiner, was thrown into the scale against their victim; and soon a ruthless Parliamentary attainder had closed the career of one of the greatest of the ministers of England. On Tower-green he perished by the same death which he had prepared for Sir Thomas More and Lady Salisbury, abandoned, as Wolsey had been abandoned before, by the king, to whom he had been only too exact a servant. Mr. Froude judiciously keeps out of sight Henry's conduct on this occasion, which reveals all his selfish and hard nature; and he thus glosses over the end of Cromwell

The curtain now rises on the closing act of the Cromwell tragedy.

This is almost the only passage in his history in which Mr. Froude gives us his idea of the Tudor polity, And to us this despotic interference with the election of Canterbury, undertaken as a matter of course, accomplished without resistance, and not protested against in Parliament or elsewhere, seems conclusive as to the dependence of the Houses upon the crown. Indeed, the slavish temper of the House of Lords is sufficiently evident from many authorities of the period.

In the condemned cells in the Tower, the three Catholics for whose sentence he was himself answerable the three Protestants whom his fall had left exposed to their enemies-were the sad companions of the broken minister; and there for six weeks he himself, the central figure, whose will had made many women childless, had sat waiting his own unpitied doom. Twice the king had sent to him 'honourable persons' to receive such explanations as he could offer. He had been patiently and elaborately heard. Twice he had himself written once, by Henry's desire on account of the Anne of Cleves marriage once a letter which his faithful friend Sir Ralph Sadler carried to Henry for him; and this last the king caused the bearer three times to read over, and 'seemed to be moved therewith. Yet what had Cromwell to say ? That he had done his best in the interest of the commonwealth. But his best was better than the laws of the commonwealth. He had endeavoured faithfully to serve the king; but he had endeavoured also to serve One higher than the king. He had thrown himself in the breach against king and people where they were wrong. He had. used the authority with which he had been so largely trusted, to thwart the Parliament and suspend statutes of the realm. He might plead his services; but what would his services avail him? An offence in the king's eyes was ever proportioned to the rank, the intellect, the character of the offender. The via media Anglicana, on which Henry had planted his foot, prescribed an even justice; and as Cromwell, in the name of the via media, had struck down without mercy the adherents of the Church of Rome, there was no alternative but to surrender him to the same equitable rule, or to declare to the world, and to himself, that he no longer held that middle place which he so vehemently claimed. To sustain the Six Articles and to pardon the vicegerent was impossible. If the consent to the attainder cost the king any pang, we do not know; only this we know, that a passionate appeal for mercy, such as was rarely heard in those days of haughty endurance, found no response; and on the 28th of July the most despotic minister that ever governed England passed from the Tower to the scaffold.'

From this period until the close of Henry's reign, the AngloCatholic party remained triumphant, and marked their authority by cruel persecution. The prelates struggled to prove to Europe that a schism with Rome was consistent with fanatic intolerance; and the tragedy of Anne Askew, as late as 1546, was only one of a long series of Protestant martyrdoms. The king again entered the marriage state, and once more his wife became his victim; but though Catherine Howard belonged to the dominant faction, her fall did not involve its power. Erastianism and despotism were now indeed paramount. The submissive Church bowed to the imperious monarch, and appeared to have forgotten its Roman sympathies. It had lost a chief source of independence in the abolition of the monastic orders, and it began to evince that pecu

Anglo-Catholicism triumphant-Fall of Cromwell.

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liar devotion to the crown-a source alike of strength and of weakness which has always characterized the Church of England. The Houses of Lords and Commons were equally pliable; the new aristocracy, which had been formed out of the holders of the abbey-lands, were always ready at the sovereign's bidding; and Henry was enabled to exact a benevolence, to debase the currency, and to send noble victims to Tower-green with no check upon him. But just before his death symptoms of a religious and political change began to show themselves. As the young generation which had been born during the Reformation became men, and was made familiar with gospel teaching in its native tongue, it seems to have somewhat advanced in notions of tolerance; and the contest between Gardiner, Cranmer, and Hertford, in 1545-6, and the attainders of Norfolk and Surrey, in 1547, betrayed the decline of the Anglo-Catholic party. Mr. Froude thus notices this slow revolution :

'Sixteen years had now elapsed since the memorable meeting of Parliament in 1529; and in those years the usurpation of Rome had. been abolished; the phantom which overshadowed Europe had become a laughing-stock; the clergy for four centuries had been the virtual rulers in State and Church; their authority had extended over castle and cottage; they had monopolized the learned professions, and every man who could read was absorbed under the privileges of their order; supreme in the cabinet, in the law courts, and in the legislature, they had treated the Parliament as a shadow of convocation, and the House of Commons as an instrument to raise a revenue, the administration of which was theirs: their gigantic prerogatives had now passed away from them; the convocation which had prescribed laws to the State, endured the legislation of the Commons, even on the Articles of the Faith; the religious houses were swept away; their broad lands had relapsed to the laity with the powers which the ownership conveyed with it; the mitred abbots had ceased to exist; the temporal lords had a majority in the House of Peers; and the bishops battled ineffectually to maintain the last fragment of their independent grandeur.

Tremendous as the outward overthrow must have seemed to those who remembered the old days, the inward changes were yet more momentous. A superstition which was but the counterpart of magic and witchcraft, which buried the Father of heaven and earth in the coffins of the saints, and trusted the salvation of the soul to the efficacy of mumbled words, had given place to a real, though indistinct religion. Copies of the Bible were spread over the country in tens of thousands. Every English child was taught in its own tongue the Lord's prayer, and the Creed, and the Commandments. Idolatry existed no longer; and the remaining difficulties lay only in the interpretation of the Sacred Text, and in the clinging sense which adhered to all sides alike, that to misunderstand it was not an error but

a crime. Here, although Catholic doctrine, not only in its practical corruptions, but in its purest f developments, shook at the contact with the Gospels, yet the most thoughtful had been compelled to pause embarrassed. If mistake was fatal, and if the divine nature and the divine economy could not be subject to change, to reject the interpres tations on which that doctrine had maintained itself, was to condemn the Christian Church to have been deserted for a thousand years by the spirit of truth, and this was a conclusión too frightful, too incredible to be endured. The laity, sa bold against the Pope and the monasteries, turned their faces from it, into the dogmatism of the Six Articles!obrenog stom bus spp etdmom alt seot mme sult A . Yet still the stream flowed on, caring little for human oppositione To swim with it,s or to swim against it, affected little the velocity with which the English world was swept into the new era. The truth stole into men's minds they knew not how. The king, as we have seen, began to shrink from persecution, and to shelter-suspected per sons from orthodox cruelty. The Parliament which would not yet alter the heresy law, tempered the action of it, and was rather contented to retard a movement which threatened to be too widely precipitate than attempt any more to arrest it.' uw depom bid to Intibus mið

1

But if the internal features of the latter part of Henry's reign disclose much of despotism and misgovernment, there is much to admire in its external relations. The king reduced Ireland to something like obedience and order, and foreshadowed the policy which eventually was carried out under Elizabeth and James I. in a far less scrupulous manner,, Although there is much to condemn in his conduct towards Scotland, it is impossible to deny its vigour and capacity, and its statesmanlike tendency in many particulars. He, first of English sovereigns, steadily projected the Union, and for years devoted his energy and craft to accomplish it. And we see the full Tudor ability in his bold attitude towards Charles V.when deserted by him at the peace of Crepy, and in his defence of England from the French invasion of 1516. Mr. Froude is entitled to great commendation for his narrative of these most important events. His account of the different factions of Scotland, and of the cautious but steadfast policy of Henry, in such marked contrast with the vacillation of James V., is very superior to that of any other historian; and his narrative of the great French attack is quite a masterpiece of description. Let us hope that he may yet give us a picture of the great Armada; for his sea-pieces have a peculiar beauty. Here is that of the sack of Edinburgh in 1544/ by the English fleet : wit guided on that

'Looking now through the eyes of Knox, let us imagine ourselves at Edinburgh on the morning of Saturday the 3rd of May, 1544, The regent and Beton were at Holyrood, in enjoyment of the confi-,