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Things were in this critical position as the The married clergy were silenced from their functions, and exposed to the storm that was soon to overtake them. The nation at large was ready to accept with indifference or satisfaction the restoration of the abolished rites and observances. Many of the former

professors and instruments of the Reformation were fled beyond seas. There remained the resolute men who were prepared to stand by the Reformation and to suffer for it. Of them many were already in prison, some without trial, upon various suspicions. The arrogance of success was beginning to mark the demeanour of the other side, when moderation and patience might have won a lasting victory. If the former things could have been forgiven: if discrimination had been applied to select and preserve whatever was valuable in the Reformation: if liberty of conscience had been allowed in the manner of holding and understanding the great disputed doctrines, and the distinction maintained of things necessary and indifferent, then all might have been well. Above all to be lamented was the false conception that now gained ground, that the contest lay not between two parties in one church, but between two churches between the Church of Rome, the communion of which had been rejected by England, and another church composed of those who had rejected. the Roman communion in every nation. This conception, pertinaciously advanced on the one side, on the other was too frequently accepted, or even arrogated, although England had never entered into communion with any foreign body. Heresy and schism were the reproaches that were ignorantly hurled against a movement that had never ceased to be catholic in the midst of all calamities and excesses: and though these accusations were steadfastly denied, yet it must be confessed that

there was an inadequate conception of the church in some of the men who laid down their lives denying themselves guilty of heresy and schism. This is not to be wondered at in men so situated. On the other hand, however, it has never been sufficiently brought out that the struggle lay between the old and new service books of the Church of England. Heretical and schismatical were the terms applied to the literary monuments of the Reformation, often by men who had shared in it. The liturgical reformation, which we have seen to have been the work of the clergy, and to have been carried out well upon the whole, was now to be rejected, and the principles thereof refused: the former worship and the reformed worship, the Latin language and the English language, the Latin services and the English Prayer Book, confronted one another. This Anglican character, so to call it, maintained itself even when the whole contest seemed to be between Rome and freedom from Rome.

An absolute retrogression, doing away the work of a quarter of a century, was about to be attempted: as if tnere had been no Reformation: as if the mighty revolution, whose furrows ridged every field, had been a dream to vanish without trace. This attempt to obliterate the past, which is without parallel in history, gives a melancholy fascination to the name of the only ruler who ever essayed so impossible a task: nor would Mary have ventured on it, if from the beginning she had not been listening to foreign voices.

Rome, from the day of the death of Edward, had turned her eyes with new hope towards England. As soon as the news was known, a Congregation of cardinals was held, July 29: and the affairs of England were discussed with regard to the sending thither of a legate.*

*Turnbull's Cal. of State Pap. Foreign, Mary, p. 3.

For such an office there was but one man and Pope Julius appealed to Pole. "The young king of England is dead," said he, "if king he may be called, who was begotten contrary to all laws human and divine, and imposed by violence on the necks of a Christian people: now, hearing of the disputed succession, we think the time good for the recovery of a noble province to piety and religious discipline."* A second Consistory was held, and Reginald, deacon of St. Mary Cosmedin, cardinal Pole, was deputed legate, to proceed to the erring realm itself, to the Emperor, to the French king, or to all or any, as it might be expedient:† and on the next day letters or breves were made out to all those powers. To the French king the High Pontiff wrote, "God shews us the way of reducing to the sheepfold of the Lord a most noble province that has been rent from the body of the Christian name: to you we send our legate because of the contiguity of your dominions; that a Catholic nation, compelled by the impiety of a few to wander from the right way, may be restored to faith, religion, the obedience of God and of the holy laws: Most Christian King, assist." To the Emperor he wrote that "the death of Edward, who gave himself out to be king of England, had opened the way to the recovery of a noble province; and that Pole would be the messenger of peace." He wrote to Mary a long epistle to the same

*The letter is of Aug. 2. See Raynaldus, Annales, anno 1553, § 4.

"Romæ, die Sabbathi apud S. Marcum, 5 Aug. 1553, fuit facta congregatio coram Sanctitate sua, hora xx, super rebus Angliæ, et deputati legati et nuntii ad regnum Angliæ, cum significatum esset populum filiam antiqui regis in eorum reginam elegisse : et fuit deputatus legatus ad principes Christianos et precipue ad ipsam reginam reverendissimus dominus Reginaldus S. Mariæ in Cosmedin diaconus cardinalis Polus, cum facultatibus, et modo, et forma, in Brevi expressis." Acta Consistorialia in Raynaldus, anno 1553, § 3. Pole's Bulls of Institution and Faculties are printed in Tierney's Dodd, II. App. CVIII. They are all dated this same day, August 5.

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effect.* Thus the last of the genial popes, the former rival of Pole for the tiara, lifted his eyes for a moment from the banquets which he was wont to season with jests that called up the blushes of his guests, from the plans of his architects and the building of his villa, to contemplate the distractions of the Christian world.

Pole, who since his last attempt to intervene in English affairs had been rendered more independent of the papal coffers by an annuity drawn out of a Spanish bishopric, which the Emperor gave him, had withdrawn himself from public view to the retirement of the monastery of Maguzzano on the lake of Garda. As Cardinal Protector of the Benedictine Order, he there reposed, gazing upon the waters that have been celebrated by the muse of Virgil and of a restorer of Virgilian numbers. The Renascent glories of Italy were beginning now to verge to their decline: and if Pole murmured the verses of Bembo on the sea-like Benacus, he may at the same time have sighed over the memory of the poet, of his beloved Contarini, of Sadolet, of the noble Vittoria Colonna, of others, who had shared with him the hopes of youth.

*These letters are all of August 6: and on the same day there was a letter or breve of instructions to Pole. Raynaldus, Annales 1553, § 5, 6, 7, 8. The papacy seems to have felt the loss of the exercise of the pontifical canon law in England. The repeated formula in these letters is to restore "religionis cultum et sanctarum legum observantiam." + Vol. III. p. 126 huj, oper.

The Benacus of Bembo, the reader may be reminded, was an eclogue, which appeared about 1527 in the same volume with the celebrated Piscatorial Eclogues of Sannazarius, and the Verona of Beatinus. It is a stately and operose performance. Benacus summons his attendant rivers, and bids them, "Volvite majores, vaga flumina, volvite lymphas," on account of the coming of Ghiberti to the see of Verona. Ghiberti was a prodigy of goodness: in whose history that Pole took interest may be gathered from Quirinus (Epist. Poli, v. p. 11), who relates that his life was written by Zinus of Verona, a friend of Pole's, and that he sent his book (aureum libellum) to Stella when he departed for England with Pole, feeling sure that Pole himself would be pleased with the subject.

When the letters of Julius reached him, he may have reflected on the condition of that strange monarchy for which he had sacrificed his natural allegiance and trembled to think that at the moment when she reclaimed England with every lofty pretext, Rome could send no other than a decrepid legate from the side of an unreverend pope. The letters that recalled him to political life could not restore his vigour. They seemed to set before him the native country to which he had so often cried that he would fly; and to offer him honours that would render his return triumphant. But indolence grows with years: irresolution is not cured by time: it is possible to have experience without gaining wisdom. Pole was not so very old, but he was prematurely broken. His futilely excitable nature prompted him to accept the formidable task with which he dallied, in which he was destined to repeat the conduct that had marked him at several important moments of his life, which shortened the days that might have been prolonged by peace. As for the pope who sent him forth, whose term on earth was to be of even briefer date, Julius might be contemptible, but Pole was doomed, not without hurt, to behold, before he died, a new, a strange and terrible spirit upspringing into the papacy.

All

He began by writing an eloquent letter to Queen Mary. "The hand of the Almighty has fulfilled the long expectation of your Majesty and the hopes of all good men for it has placed you on the throne. hearts are filled with joy incredible, not only by the fact, but the manner of the fact: that without bloodshed, where slaughter was to be feared, without new forces, by the might that heaven alone can give, is your kingdom established. Such manifest experience of divine intervention was necessary to lay again among your people the foundation of belief. Your Majesty is more than

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