Jane Dudley.* Gardiner no doubt felt that a sharp lesson was needful, and he was capable of giving it. He sanctioned the indignation which had been awakened in the Queen, and he added his voice to the Spanish ambassador Renard, who strongly counselled vengeance. But it may be considered that the number of persons executed was not, after all, so very great: † that the

* "On Sunday the xi day of February the bishop of Winchester preached in the chapel before the queen, beginning at III of the clock with Exhortemur, 2 Cor. vi: wherein he treated first that man had free will next that Lent was necessarily appointed by the church for Christian men: thirdly, that works were a means or way to heaven, and thereby we might the sooner obtain the fruition of our redemption by Christ fourthly, that the preachers for the seven years last past, by dividing of words and other their own additions had brought in many errors detestable unto the Church of Christ: fifthly and lastly, he axed a boon of the queen's highness, that like as she had before time extended her mercy, particularly and privately, so through her lenity and gentleness much conspiracy and open rebellion was grown, according to the proverb, nimia familiaritas parit contemptum; which he brought then in for the purpose that she would now be merciful to the body of the commonwealth and conservation thereof, which could not be unless the rotten and hurtful members thereof were cut off and consumed. And thus he ended soon after whereby all the audience did gather that there should shortly follow sharp and cruel execution. Next he prayed for king Edward VI in his sermon, and for the souls departed." Chron. of Q. Mary, 54. Fox notices this sermon briefly, that Gardiner told the Queen to use no mercy. Strype says of it that "according to the fierceness of his disposition he exhorted her to use no mercy, but extreme justice, to these Kentish rebels: to which sermon and counsel all those bloody doings that followed the very next day and week after must be attributed, and that plenty of gallowses set up two days after in and about the city." v. 140. This is hardly fair. Gardiner exhorted the Queen not to use no mercy, but to use true mercy by punishing the guilty. Mr. Froude oddly enough attributes his advice concerning the punishment of traitors to his hatred of heretics. "She had Gardiner, who, always pitiless towards heretics, was savage at the frustration of his own schemes. Renard in the closet, Gardiner in the pulpit, alike told her that she must show no more mercy." vi. 181.

† Lingard has remarked, not without force, that though sixty persons (it would have been nearer to have said eighty or a hundred) were executed after Wyat's rebellion, this was a far less expensive offering to the public safety than followed in Elizabeth's time a rebellion of less formidable extent and that if the rebellions that occurred in the eigh

ostentation of horror which marked the executions was wisely designed to strike the deepest impression in the sacrifice of life: and that four times as many as were hanged were pardoned, though with circumstances of ceremony that wrought the like effect.* When it was proposed to have over a foreign army to quell the rebellion (as it had been done in the late reign), it was Gardiner who refused to tread the bloody path of the councillors of Edward the Sixth. This commotion was nearly bloodless, but it would have been of another hue if Flemish fighting men had been employed to put it down. If it was followed by a sharp chastisement, it must be remembered, again, that the very ease with which it had been carried out, to the sound of the cry, "We are all Englishmen," constituted the danger of it to the Queen who was about to marry a foreigner.

The most lamentable part of the vengeance taken was that which fell on the family of the Greys. In the midst of the machinations of Wyat and Carew, the unfortunate Duke of Suffolk started on a sudden from London to raise the midland counties. He succeeded only in gathering a few score horse: the town of Coventry shut its gates against him: he was taken in his own park of Astley, carried to London, tried, and executed, one of his brothers after an interval sharing his fate. On the scaffold he rejected with violence the ministrations of Doctor Weston, and laid down his life after an unseemly scuffle.†

teenth century be compared, the palm of lenity cannot be given to modern times.

Some four hundred Kentish men with halters round their necks and cords round their wrists were marched two and two through London to Westminster to the palace, where they knelt down, and the Queen looking over the gate gave them their pardon : whereat they cried, God save Queen Mary; and went to Westminster Hall, where they flung their halters and their caps about the hall and in the streets with cries of God save the Queen. Machyn, p. 56. Strype, v. 145.

+ "When the duke went up to the scaffold, the said Weston being on

It is difficult to determine whether Suffolk, in his unfortunate activity, meant to add to the complications of the hour by renewing the Dudleian plot.* But whether or not so, the father of Jane Dudley regarded not the danger into which he cast his daughter and her youthful husband by his attempt. Their well known tragedy ensued; and has left a stain on the name of Mary.

On the day of Suffolk's execution, February 28, the princess Elizabeth entered London in obedience to the summons of her sister, to which for a month she had avoided compliance. The pale and haughty countenance which she disclosed to the eyes of the gazers might indicate the fatigue of the illness which had hitherto prevented the journey: nor less perchance the indignation of innocence aroused by the suspicions that connected her name with the plot of Wyat or the hopes of Courteney. The daughter of Anne Boleyn had been well treated by her sister. In the statute declaring the legitimacy of the Queen care had been taken to shield her from reproach: and the mention of her name, the mention of her mother, had been avoided. At the Queen's coronation she had been allowed the place and honours of second person of the realm. But inexorable truth told

his left hand, pressed to go up with him. The duke with his hand put him down again off the stairs, and Weston, taking hold of the duke, forced him down likewise. And as they ascended the second time, the duke again put him down. Then Weston said it was the Queen's pleasure that he should do so." Weston was not popular. The duke, in his dying speech asking forgiveness of the Queen, Weston interposed that the Queen had already forgiven him. "Such forgiveness may God give thee," audibly answered some of the bystanders. However the two said a psalm together. Holinshed and Stow.

* He did not, at any rate, proclaim Jane as Queen in the towns through which he passed, though this has been asserted and was indeed rumoured at the time. Nichols has disproved this: see his "Second Insurrection of the Duke of Suffolk," Chron. of Queen Jane and Mary, p. 122.

her that it was not possible to right Mary without wronging Elizabeth. Her private discontent was fed by

the secret counsels of the Frenchman Noailles: she saw herself singled by the hopes of that part of the Reformation who were more ready for crimes than for sufferings; she listened to dangerous propositions: and the Council had collected considerable presumptive evidence of her complicity with Wyat and Carew at the time when she was summoned to the court to explain herself. A lamentable story has been written about the brutality with which she was awakened in the night, and carried up by a troop of horse, who were under orders to bring her "quick or dead" of her sojourn of a fortnight at Westminster without sight of her sister: of her committal to the Tower, of her removal to the palace of Woodstock, to Hampton Court, and lastly to her own house under a guard, and of the perils and hardships that she endured. in these successive transportations.* And on the theory that any act savouring of severity or precaution, performed by any government under any circumstances, is tyrannical and cruel, it may be that Elizabeth was badly used: for she was summoned and committed. The blame has been cast, as usual, upon Gardiner. The vigorous imprecations with which the princess protested her innocency that she had never received a letter that Wyat might have written, nor written a letter that the French king might have received, may strike and convince a

It is Fox who has this terrible story (which seems modelled on the murder of Thomas Becket) of the three knights charged by the infuriate Queen to bring her sister "quick or dead," with a troop of horse: the violated bedchamber: the hasty morning departure, the rapid stages, and all the rest of it. His story is confuted in every particular by Tytler (ii. 421) who shows from originals that Mary's conduct was most considerate and gentle. The litter which Elizabeth threw open to show herself to the people when she got to London was the Queen's own litter, which she had sent for her to travel in.

credulous reader: * and the exculpation which Wyat is said to have made of her upon the scaffold the scaffold may be weighed against his alleged accusation of her in his cell. But that neither she nor Courteney were brought to trial was matter of marvel to those who knew the case: and was attributed at the time to the preservative hand of the maligned Lord Chancellor. Elizabeth's actual incarceration was brief and as easy as it could be made, though her detention in several of the royal houses was longer and from the Tower she owed her deliverance to the man who certainly held that there was evidence to warrant her committal, and who perhaps suppressed evidence that might have brought her to Westminster Hall and to the block.t

* "As for the traitor Wyat, he might peradventure write me a letter, but on my faith I never received any from him: and as for the copy of my letter sent to the French king, I pray God confound me eternally, if ever I sent him word, message, token, or letter by any means." Elizabeth to the Queen, on being commanded to go to the Tower. Ellis, 2nd Series, i. 255. Mr. Froude has also printed in full this letter, as a sort of sacred writing, and tells us that "the very lines traced by Elizabeth in that bitter moment may still be read in the State Paper Office, and her hand was more than usually firm." (vi. 206.) Cursing and swearing in the matter was not confined to her. As soon as the Frenchman Noailles heard that a letter from her to his master which he had enclosed in one of his own despatches had been taken, and formed part of the case against Elizabeth, he came forward to deny that she had given him it: "jurant et blasphémant tous les sermens du monde pour la justification de la dicte dame Elizabeth." Renard to Charles V. Froude, vi. 208. Mr. Froude, I may observe, shares the apprehensions of Fox as to the danger of Elizabeth. “The chief danger was of murder,—of some swift desperate act which could not be undone." As to the other part of the case, the letter from Wyat, Lord Russell, Bedford's son, who was arrested in his father's house, confessed that he had received letters from Wyat, addressed to Elizabeth, and had delivered these letters to her. Renard to the Emperor, 8 Mar. ap. Tytler, ii. 321.

+ Fox, followed by Holinshed, has a story that Wyat in his cell asked to see the imprisoned Courteney, and told him that he had falsely accused him and Elizabeth of being privy to the plot: and that he repeated this at his execution. This report got wind: and the story goes on that the lieutenant of the Tower contradicted it in the presence of Gardiner in the