The death of Gardiner, falling in the middle of the session, November 13, deprived the Queen of her only resolute and able counsellor. With what astonishing efforts Gardiner resisted to the last the advances of the disabling diseases under which he laboured, how the fiery pride of a nature that knew not to yield rose the higher through the reluctance of a statesman to drop the reins of power in the midst of a desperate contest, it has been indicated. The struggle evoked the wonder of those who witnessed it. "I called upon him," said Noailles, "six weeks before his death, and found him livid with jaundice and bursting with dropsy: but for two hours he held discourse with me calmly and graciously, without a sign of discomposure and at parting he must needs take my arm and walk through three saloons, on purpose to show himself to the people, because they said that he was dead." * The removal of his repressive strength was felt at once. "Impiety and injustice," cried Pole, "have taken fresh growth." + Cruel handbills about the Queen † 3 Dec. "The Bill for release of firstfruits and tenths and impropriation of benefices-per divisionem Domus cum Billa 193, contra Billam, 126." Commons' Journ. "The Bill touching the firstfruits and tenths, with a schedule annexed unto it by the Commons, requiring certain things to be amended in it, whereunto the Lords upon debating thereof assented." Lords' Journ. Lingard denies that the Queen sought to procure the restoration of Church property in whose soever hands it might be. There seems no doubt that she really entertained the design, which was no discredit to her, but that Parliament kept it confined to herself. The Act is 2 and 3 P. and M. c. 4. The Queen resigned about £60,000 a year by it, to be placed at the disposal of the Legate for the augmentation of small livings, &c. : subject however to the payment of the pensions and corrodies of the surviving religious persons, and saving other rights. Dodd has a long dissertation to prove that the see of Rome never contemplated the restoration of lands. Ch. Hist. of Engl. I. 563. * Ambassades, v. 150. + "Nos quidem experimur a morte Cancellarii, vel potius ab ejus morbo ingravescente, quanto quisque factus sit audacior: quo autem ejusmodi homines sint, et quo spectent eorum consilia, libellus famosus is, qui nuper were sown through London. A swarm of books against the King suddenly appeared, so furiously invective as to cause a magisterial inquiry.* The Spaniards began to withdraw themselves, and their King recalled them, from the dangerous country: and Mary was left, with Pole and the inferior bigots, to face the bitter toils of the senseless persecution that had lost her the hearts of her subjects. The obsequies of the deceased Chancellor were conducted with due solemnity. The knell for him began the day after his death, when at St. Paul's the Mass ad requiem was sung by Bonner and the sermon was preached by White: all the bishops, the lords and gentlemen of Parliament attended: and afternoon there was a dirge in every parish church in London. He lay in state in St. Mary's Overy, the church in which for two days he had so disastrously confronted the first band of hic clam est emissus satis indicat," &c. Pole to Philip. Epist. v. 54 or Ven. Cal. 257. What libel he refers to is uncertain, unless to the one mentioned in the next note. * "Of late a great quantity of books printed in England have been distributed clandestinely throughout London, concerning the King individually and his mode of government, vituperating the acts of extortion and oppression exercised in his realms, principally in the kingdom of Naples, and the Milanese, &c.-warning the English, to whom the book is dedicated, that the like will befall them, &c.-Yesterday, on account of this book, all the city companies by order of the Lord Mayor met separately in their halls to make diligent inquisition of the place whence this book can have come, and orders were given that all persons having copies should take them to the Lord Mayor, &c.-The book is supposed to come from Strasburg, from the English who are there." Michiel to the Doge, 3 Dec. Ven. Cal. 269. "The Spaniards complain that both Lords and Commons have displayed the worst possible will towards them in printed books, to the dishonour of the King and of the Spanish nation." Badoer to Doge, 6 Dec. Ib. p. 272. "The King's confessor has arrived here (Brussels) and repeats a variety of foul language uttered by the English, indicating their ill will towards his Majesty and the Spanish nation: narrating that on seeing him and the rest of the royal attendants depart, they made great rejoicing well-nigh universally. And he says that the Queen's desire to see the King again is very great, nay boundless: and the order sent for the chapel establishment to go to Spain, pained her intensely." The same to the same, 18 Dec. Ib. p. 385. the Anglican martyrs: until his body was carried to his final resting-place in his own cathedral church of Winchester. His memory was encrusted with dreadful legends by the ignorant: by some of the learned his epitaph was written in gall.* If Gardiner had died in the prisons of Edward the Sixth, he would have descended to posterity in a blaze of glory. His defence of the liberties of the Church of England against Rome, his resistance of the excesses of the Reformation, would have shone forth as great public services his voice would have been the one voice that never faltered: his mind would have been the only mind that opposed originality to the currents of the age. The tergiversation, by which in part at least he falsified himself, shewed in this remarkable character some flaw * Take for instance a few couplets of the long and ignoble elegy "by an Englishman who knew him well," which Bale has preserved. Nunc patriæ pestis, fato sublata secundo Frons audax, os impurum, et tum labra nefanda Toward the end there is a flight in which the poet imagines the deceased Nunc cum sit nostris fato sublatus ab oris Atque Erebi nigri tristia regna colat, Terribilem forsan Rhadamanthum sede movebit, By the same poet there is another strain. Angliæ pestis, scelerum minister, which it is not easy to apprehend. Certainly it was not a vulgar motive that made him inconsistent. He was disinterested in his most worldly days, when he frequented the galleries of Henry the Eighth and went upon his embassies. Nor was he so weak, though this was thought, as to have become exasperated by his sufferings in the succeeding reign. He might perhaps have remained opposed to Rome to the end, if it had not been for his controversy with Cranmer on the Sacrament. It had greatly stirred or shocked him to see the doctrines of the Corporal Presence and Transubstantiation, which he held most firmly, brought in question and denied. He may have become convinced that those doctrines would not long stand, though they were reasserted on Mary's accession, without the Roman See: and therefore the author of True Obedience prepared himself to accept the strange hypothesis on which the Roman claims are built that the Divine Founder of Christianity came to appoint to himself a vicar on earth; that he chose one of His disciples for that high office, and caused him to found a church in a certain city, and preside over it for many years: that the church, that is the see, thus founded is coextensive, coincident, conterminous, and identical with the Catholic and Apostolic Church, so that any community that is not obedient thereto is schismatic. Accepting this, he threw in his lot with the Romanensian Queen, not forgetting however, to his honour be it said, to guard the realm by all the forms that had been invented to preserve it against encroachment. It may be that he went through no conscious mental change: but fell into the inevitable with his own good will. But if he had stood by his Henrician principles, Pole might perhaps never have returned to England, and Mary might have been protected from herself. The place of president was taken by Bonner, who was now Dean of the Province of Canterbury: the sermon was preached by Boxhall, Warden of Winchester: Christopherson was the prolocutor chosen, in the Convocation that was begun October 11. The speaker of the clergy, a scholar, a Latin poet, and a consistent if severe theologian, fresh from the affair of Wolsey and Pigott, in an elegant oration besought the Fathers to use the acceptable time, to raise the ruins, and restore the former glory. He was answered by the commendations of Bonner, who bade him disappear and reappear with eight or ten grave men to receive a secret communication touching the state of the Church. He came back. accompanied by Weston, Harpsfield, Pye, Cole, Mallet, Jeffrey, Cottrell, Blaxton, and Rixman: to whom the Bishop of Ely communicated the cause of the Convocation to be the extreme poverty of the King and Queen: and a subsidy to be granted worthy of the gratitude owing to the favours shown to the clergy, a subsidy of six or eight in the pound for three years. The Bishop then proposed that they should appoint some learned men to examine all the canons of the Church, to find which of them were still useful, and where the old ones were insufficient, to make new ones. This advance to undo the first great measure of Henry the Eighth, the Submission of the Clergy, and recover the forfeited power of making canonical sanctions, showed the altered state of the times.* But it disappeared, the Convocation itself was presently merged in the vaster undertaking, which now swelled the breast of Pole, of a legatine synod, a general assembly of the clergy of England, of both the Provinces of Canterbury and York, to be held under himself as president. * Wilkins, iv. 120, gives more particulars of this Convocation: and (126) a paper about residence from the Acts. Heylin gives some particulars, 163, Robertson's Ed. |