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Seldom in history have noble qualities and bright opportunities fallen in failure so utter, so terrible and gloomy. The character of Mary was strong and magnanimous: her conduct in the selfish relations of life showed a rare example of feminine delicacy and propriety as a sovereign she was of the great kind: and before her accession there was no person so beloved in the realm. The traces of a large and generous policy may be discerned, if faintly, in the beginnings of her reign. But the contradictory or perverse element, set against the drift of the rest of the qualities, which exists in every nature, and in some is found to influence itself through the whole and to rule the life, in her was acted by external incitements, the misfortunes of her reign, and above all by the Roman predomination and the Spanish marriage. ill directed by her spiritual guides, fed with the oil of ignorance, blazed into miserable superstition. A sanity, ambiguity, by Philips (Life of Pole, ii. 277), to have been written "to the Queen," implying Mary. But there is no doubt that it was sent to Elizabeth. Mr. Froude (vi. 526) remarks that an endorsement "From the Queen's Majesty at Hatfield" decides the question. The vague and ceremonious language used in it would not have been used to Mary. It was sent by the Dean of Worcester, Seth Holland, who was to make further communication. There is nothing particular in the matter, but it was superfluous; it illustrates Pole's curious anxiety to offer explanations and stand well. It is as follows: "It may please your grace to understand that albeit the long continuance and vehemence of my sickness be such as might justly move me, casting away all cares of this world, only to think of that to come, yet, not being convenient for me to determine of life and death, which is only in the Hand of God, I thought it my duty before I should depart, so nigh as I could, to leave all persons satisfied of me, and especially your grace, being of that honour and dignity that the providence of God hath called you unto. For which purpose I do send you at this present mine faithful chaplain, the Dean of Worcester; to whom it may please your grace to give credit, in that he shall say unto you in my behalf. I doubt not but that your grace shall remain satisfied thereby whom Almighty God long prosper to His honour, your comfort, and the wealth of the realm. By your grace's Crator, Reg. Card. Cant. From Lambehith, the 14th of Nov. 1558." Collier, Coll. No. 75. Philips gives a courtly modern version of this: and dates it 4th October.

A boundless addiction to religion,

that was ever menaced, was at length partially overthrown by disease: there is not a more desolate picture than Mary in her latter days. Her dearest friend became her worst adviser: and the religious system, to which they were both devoted, dropped the properties that had rendered it valuable hitherto, and became the enemy of humanity at the very moment when she gave it scope within her dominions. To her belongs, on her unhappily must rest, the main burden of the blame of the deeds that have defiled her name with a dreadful epithet but it has been forgotten too much that it is possible to allow cruelty without being cruel. In Mary cruelty was perverted justice, driven by the same force of heart that made her generous.* If she had granted Cranmer's petition to be permitted to open his mind to her as it regarded religion, the observer of the turns of destiny might sigh to think how different might have been from that which she has left the memory which she might have left. She hearkened to foreign voices from afar from the first: she called foreign voices to her side. Besides all these things, there is something that cannot be made out in her melancholy history.

Her reign justified the Reformation. It proved that there was in the Reformation that for which men might dare to die and that there were men of constancy and courage among those who upheld the Reformation.

*The placid Hume conveys his opinion of Mary by seven nouns substantive: " obstinacy, bigotry, violence, cruelty, malignity, revenge, tryanny." His censurer, the author of the Eclaircissements, remarks, more rationally than the philosopher, "La reine Marie a pu, sans être un monstre de cruauté, employer, pour rétablir l'ancienne religion, les mêmes moyens dont ces grands Princes (Charles V. François I. Jacques V.) entrainés par les préjugés de leur siecle, et par le torrent des exemples, avoient cru devoir se servir pour la conserver. Malgré cette humeur tyrannnique, qui entroit, dit on, dans la trempe de son ame, elle se singula plus d'un fois par des traits de clémence et de générosité, que la plupart des Historiens protestants ont passés sous silence." p. 45.

Before the beginning of the persecution the belief was prevalent that there were none such that the reformers, gospellers, protestants, or what they may be called, were a horde of hypocrites and timeservers, whose only desire was to keep the booty for the sake of which they had canted and whom the threat of severity, or at most the mere exposure to danger, would be enough to drive the Queen's way. From this conviction it was that in the first year of the reign so many priests and justices had the boldness to anticipate the alteration of the laws: or that Gardiner, a statesman, fell in with the persecution, of which he instantly, but too late, learned the futility. In truth, without the purgation of suffering, the English Reformation would have appeared as contemptible a revolution as ever alleged for itself the public good. The persecution set in view the great principles that lay in the Reformation, such as reasonableness in religion, things to be allowed indifferent, enforced customs like priestly celibacy, to be left free, the papal primacy only political. In another matter the reign of Mary was beneficial, not in spite of her, but according to her wishes and efforts, in checking the sacrilegious pillage that had disgraced the days of Henry and Edward. Ravage and spoliation were to stalk forth again, when she was gone but the few years during which she sat upon the throne interposed a merciful respite: and her example proposed even restitution and reparation: not altogether in vain.

I have exhibited the great struggle of this reign from an Anglican aspect, and represented it as a battle between two books. This view, apparent in the narratives of the confessors and martyrs, has been kept out of sight not only by the general historians, who were perhaps little likely to observe or present it, but by the ecclesiastical historians also, whose intelligence in the

subject might be expected to be keener: so that in the three centuries that have elapsed since the historian of the persecution made his collections there is not a writer who has cared to declare with any stress that the English martyrs died in defence of the English Prayer Book.* The doctrinal subject of contention, the Sacramental controversy, has overshadowed all others, and if any of the historians makes mention of the issue on which the whole contest depended, whether the English or the Latin service should prevail, it is in a cursory and unimpressive manner. And yet the Book of Common Prayer was the standard around which the martyrs fought this they held to contain the Catholic faith: and it was because they held it to contain the Catholic faith that they fought for it. Many of them, as it has been seen, fell into their first trouble for using the English service, in spite of the desires of the ruling

* That the English Prayer Book was in question is not mentioned at all by Hume, or by Mr. Froude. Burnet only has it cursorily two or three times as when he says, "There was a private meeting of such as continued to worship God according to the service set out by King Edward, at Islington" or "Bonner objected to him his condemning the doctrine of the Church, and setting out the heresies of Cranmer and Ridley concerning the sacrament, and his using the service set out by King Edward," ii. 560 (Pocock). The same kind of incidental remarks is in Heylin and Collier: as, where one of them tells of a Cambridge clergyman who was troubled "for officiating the Communion in his own parish church in the English tongue," p. 97: and the other says that "the reformed went on with the English Common Prayer": (ii. 21). Fuller has not even so much as that. Strype, who has given the minutes of several martyrs, is a little more emphatic in two or three places as when he says that Gibson " was disliked for approving the English service in King Edward's days" (vi. 47). Soames has scarcely anything of the sort. Lingard merely says that Mary's accession “had suppressed the English service, the idol of their affections, and had re-established the ancient worship, which they deemed antichristian and idolatrous" (v. 101), among the other things that exasperated the reformers. None of all these writers make a point of the manner in which the English service was maintained by the martyrs and confessors, or the extent to which it infused itself into their answers and protestations.

powers, before there had been time to forbid it. Many, like Taylor and Alcock, persisted in the use of it after it had been forbidden. Some, like Saunders, preached upon it, maintaining that it was according to God's word and the primitive Church. Others cheered themselves in prison by the daily repetition of some portion

of it.

I have ventured to use the word Romanensian, rather than Papist or even Romanist, to describe the party in the Church of England which prevailed in this reign a party which was attached to the unreformed religion, which put down the reformed religion for a moment, and which renewed the former connection between the Church of England and the Church of Rome. This party was within the Church of England, not a body outside of it. To call it Papist or Popish would be odious: to call it Romanist or Romish might confuse it with that which it was not. On the other hand it has been difficult, nor have I been able, to select an ensign for the opposite party who conquered by suffering: the more by this, that I have avoided, for reasons that seemed to me not without weight, the convenient term Protestant, which was among those which they themselves allowed. Perhaps it may be pedantic, as it is certainly contrary to the wont of history, to refuse to use for a party one of their contemporary designations accepted by themselves.* In our own days the term Protestant has been disowned for three reasons: that it

The same difficulty in finding satisfactory denominations has been implicitly felt by other historians: for example by Collier and Soames. Collier silently rejects the word Protestant, substituting "the reformed": but he calls the opposite side "Roman Catholics," which is liable to the objection that it is the name commonly given not to a party in the Church of England, but to a religious body outside of her, which came into existence subsequently to the time. On the other hand, Soames uses the word Protestant, but feeling the force of the objection to Roman Catholic, he calls the opposite side Romanist or Romish.

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