in these her children! How holily your Holiness pronoted this marriage, which truly seems to express the greatest similitude that can be made: a spouse who is a son to a virgin. So behaves he himself towards her: and yet he is indeed a husband. And this Queen, who was a little while ago forsaken of all, has risen as frankincense out of the desert, and as a rod of spice out of a tree of myrrh. Before the day of her delivery, of which we stand in hope, she has brought forth a nation." On the same day Philip also wrote with his own hand a gratulatory letter to the Pope.* This was read in Consistory at Rome: and Supplications of four days were decreed: at the end of which his Holiness celebrated Mass in St. Peter's: a fast of three days followed: and there was granted a Jubilee, or plenary indulgence to all the faithful for fifty years. Thanksgivings were ordered by the French King also in the principal churches of his kingdom.‡

Two days after the reconciliation, being the first Sunday in Advent, December 2, another remarkable scene was enacted in St. Paul's. The Lord Mayor and Aldermen having the day before invited Pole to honour the city with his presence in the capacity of Legate, he came from Lambeth by water to Baynard Castle;

*The letters are translated in Fox. The Latin of Pole's letter is in Wilkins, iv. 110: also in Raynaldus, Anno 1554, § 15.

"Romæ die veneris xiv Decemb. 1554, fuerunt lectæ litteræ sereniss. regis Angliæ unanimi consensu rediisse ad gremium Ecclesiæ, ac etiam ad obedientiam sanctæ Rom. Ecclesiæ: et hac de causa fuerunt decretæ supplicationes quatuor dierum, quibus elapsis Sanctitas sua celebravit missam in Basilica S. Petri, et habitis jejuniis triun dierum, concessit universis Christi fidelibus plenariam indulgentiam et remissionem omnium peccatorum suorum in forma Jubilei." Acta Consistoria ap. Raynald. § 16. A copy of this "Bella Plenarie Indulgentie" is in the Register of the See of Bath and Wells; and is given by Strype, v. 355.

Noailles, Ambassades, iv. 66.

entered the city, all orders and guilds meeting him and proceeded in state, with cross, pillars, and poleaxes before him, to the cathedral church, where at the west door he was met by a company of bishops and clergy headed by Winchester. As the clock struck ten, the King and Court arrived in splendid array; the processions swept together into the choir, and high Mass was celebrated. Then the mingled throng of courtiers and citizens left the church, and gathered round the Cross. The pulpit was ascended by the man who had most consistently supported the measures of Henry the Eighth, and opposed the precipitate doings of the reign of Edward the Sixth: who had stood throughout for the Catholic independence of the realm, whose name was among the most memorable in the history of the English Reformation: but Gardiner was come now to betray his own career, to deprive himself of the honour due to a long life of splendid ability. "In the accustomed place and chair," said the Spanish ambassador Renard, who saw and heard, "in front of the church, the Chancellor preached before such a multitude as overflowed the place and the church, in the presence of the King and the Cardinal. He announced to the people what had been done in Parliament, and publicly retracted the error into which he had been led through fear of the late king Henry, so far as it regarded Rome, that he had consented to the annulling of the authority of the Pope, as he had set forth in his book Of True Obedience."* Such indeed was the sum of the discourse which

* Granville, Papiers d'Etat, iv. 346. On this occasion Noailles, the French ambassador, whose lodgings were in St. Paul's churchyard, applied in vain to Gardiner for a seat at the ceremony. He was told that there would not be room for ambassadors: which was not true: for he beheld all from his own window, and observed that the Venetian ambassador had an honourable seat close to the King and the Legate. Ambassades, iv. 38.

Gardiner pronounced from the text, "It is time to awake out of sleep," of St. Paul, in the Epistle to the Romans. "Compare," said he, "the sleep of the Gentiles and the sleep that we have slept in our times. We have been sleeping under the illusions of an evil dream, full of murder, maiming, drowning, burning, and other nameless horrors. One brother has slain another: half of our money has been swept away at a time; those who would have kept their consciences have been slain or troubled. Men that would sleep separate themselves from company, desiring to be alone: so have we separated ourselves from the Apostolic See of Rome, and have been alone, no realm in Christendom like us. In sleep all the senses are stopped: so all the ceremonies of the Church, that move the mind, having ceased, our senses have been stopped: writers who held with the Apostolic See have been prohibited, images cast down. We have denied the blessed Sacrament of the altar, and pulled down the altar itself, a thing which Luther would not do. For twenty years has this sleep continued: and we all the while without a head. When Henry was head, perhaps there was something to be said for it.* But Edward was but the sign or shadow of a head: the Queen, a woman, could not be head: we have not so much as the two archbishops, for they are deservedly deposed. When the commotion arose in the north, in Henry's days, I assure you that he meant to return to the unity; but the time was not then come. It went not

When King

* Fox, whom I mostly follow here, makes him say, Henry did first take upon him to be head of the Church, it was then no church at all." It seems incredible that he should have said that: and Harpsfield's Latin version of the sermon (of which anon in a note) makes him say rather the opposite: "In persona Henrici regis prima facie aliquid fortasse videbatur dici posse."

+ Here Fox has, "When the tumult was in the north, I am sure that he was minded to have given over the Supremacy again to the Pope."

forward, lest men should have said that he did it for fear. Then, after that, Knevet and I were sent to the Emperor to get him to be a mean to bring the kingdom to the obedience of the See of Rome; but the time was not yet come.* The time was not come at the beginning of the reign of Edward, when the matter was moved again. Nor was it come at the beginning of the Queen's reign: nor when the King came. But now it is

Harpsfield has, "In illa aquilonari seditione multa egit et tentavit ut rediretur ad hanc unitatem." This seems more probable. I may add that Holinshed's brief summary seems to be more like Gardiner than the other accounts: more to uphold the dignity of the realm, admitting the primacy, but not the supremacy or supreme head of the Pope. "He declared that the King and Queen had restored the Pope to his right of primacy and that the three estates assembled in parliament, representing the whole body of the realm, had submitted themselves to his holiness and to his successors for ever. And in the same time he greatly praised the Cardinal, and set forth the passing high authority that he had from the See of Rome, with much other glorious matter in the commendation of the Church of Rome, which he called the See Apostolic."

* This curious allegation is thus described in the Dangerous Practices of Papists, a book of Elizabeth's time. "He declared what ways had been attempted for restitution of the Pope's primacy in England. Wherein he divers ways falsely defamed King Henry with intents of submission, as though he had intended to submit himself and his realm to the Pope again: such was the bishop's impudence." Apud Strype, v. 259. It may be remarked that Gardiner and Knevet were certainly sent on a particular embassy to the Emperor in 1540, which was supposed to have reference to the affair of Anne of Cleves, and perhaps to religion. This is indicated, it is curious to observe, in a letter of no other than Richard Pate, then archdeacon of Lincoln, who was residing at the Emperor's court as ordinary ambassador, and was recalled soon after Gardiner's arrival there. He says, "Your coming is interpreted either to make some new alliance between the Emperor and our Sovereign Lord the King, by the reason of some marriage, or else for some matters touching religion." To Gardiner and Knevet, State Papers of H. VIII, vol. vii. p. 490. Pate was now back in England in Pole's train; and it is possible that he may have called to Gardiner's aged memory more than he knew that it had ever contained. Gardiner was much in the society

of Pole and his train at this time. What he said of submission to Rome being moved afterwards, in Edward's reign, may refer to nothing more important than Pole's importunate letters to Somerset, as to which see Vol. III. p. 126 of this work.

come for peace and quiet reign, and in the condition of the Queen we may build our hopes on a certain succession of the kingdom." He then launched into the praise of the Legate, his sanctity, his past sufferings. He described the ceremonies of the day of reconciliation. For himself he confessed that he shared the national guilt and exhorted his hearers, if he had ever led them astray, to follow him now into the right way. So fell Gardiner.*

Another voice had been struggling to gather volume in the meantime: and perhaps succeeded in making itself heard at this very moment. While "God's enemy and his" was negotiating in the court, the judgment hall, the legislative chamber, and the pulpit, the indignant and inflexible Hooper in his prison composed several letters, treatises, appeals and protestations in vindication. of the opinions for which he was suffering. "Our enemies threaten us daily with death;" he now wrote to an Helvetian friend, "to which we are altogether indifferent. They also treat us ignominiously, and imprison us apart from one another. I have written

Hyperaspismus + touching the true doctrine and use of the Lord's Supper: and have dedicated it to the

* Fox. See also Philips' Pole, ii. 135. There is another account in Strype (v. 259) from an Elizabethan writer (quoted in the last note). There is another by Harpsfield called Excerpta per Archid. Cantuar. ex Concione Ep. Winton, in Pole's Epist. v. 293. This is Latin, and probably touched up. There are some points in it however that seem more like Gardiner than what Fox makes him say: and one or two points omitted by Fox, perhaps purposely. As, the witty touch, "What a supreme head was Edward, for whom they had to provide a Protector!" And the climax, which Fox should not have missed (which is added in the text), which was falsified in being verified, or verified in being falsified, about the time long waited being come because of the condition of the Queen. Harpsfield adds that he bade prayers first for the Pope, the college of cardinals, and the legate: next for the king, queen and council; thirdly for souls departed.

+ A title suggested by the Hyperaspistes of Erasmus.