Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/389

A.D. 1555.] of annual Parliaments; the majority of the persons composing the Houses of Peers and Commons were dishonest, indifferent to all religions, and willing to establish the most opposing rituals so that they might retain their grasp on the accursed thing with which their very souls were corrupted—for corrupted they were, though not by the unfortunate queen. The Church lands with which Henry VIII. had bribed his aristocracy, titled and untitled, into co-operation with his enormities, both personal and political, had induced national depravity. The leaders of the Marian persecution, Gardiner and Bonner, were of the apostate class of persecutors. 'Flesh bred in murder,' they had belonged to the Government of Henry VIII., which sent the zealous Roman Catholic and the pious Protestant to the same stake. For the sake of worldly advantage, either for ambition or power, Gardiner and Bonner had, for twenty years, promoted the burning or quartering of the advocates of Papal supremacy; they now turned with the tide, and burnt, with the same degree of conscientiousness, the opposers of Papal supremacy.

"The persecution appears to have been greatly aggravated by the caprice or the private vengeance of these prelates; for a great jurist of our times (Sir James Macintosh), who paid unprejudiced attention to the facts, has thus summed up the case:—'Of fourteen bishoprics, the Catholic prelates used their influence so successfully as altogether to prevent bloodshed in nine, and to reduce it within limits in the remaining five. Bonner, "whom all generations call bloody," raged so furiously in the diocese of London, as to be charged with burning half the martyrs in the kingdom.' Cardinal Pole, the queen's relative and familiar friend, took no part in these horrible condemnations. He considered that his vocation was the reformation of manners; he used to blame Gardiner for his reliance on the arm of flesh, and was known to rescue from Bonner's crowded pile of martyrs the inhabitants of his own district. It is more probable that the queen's private opinion leaned rather to her cousin, who had retained the religion she loved unchanged, than to Gardiner, who had been its persecutor; but Gardiner was armed with the legislative powers of the kingdom, unworthy as its time-serving legislators were to exercise them. Yet all ought not to be included in one sweeping censure; a noble minority of good men, disgusted at the detestable penal laws which lighted the torturing fires for Protestants, seceded bodily from the House of Commons, after vainly opposing them. This glorious band, for the honour of human nature, was composed of Catholics as well as Protestants; it was headed by the great jurist Plowden, a Catholic so firm as to refuse the chancellorship when persuaded to take it by Queen Elizabeth, because he would not change his religion. This secession was the first indication of a principle of merciful toleration to be found among any legislators in England. Few were the numbers of these good men (thirty-seven in all), and it was long before their principles gained ground; for, truly, the world had not made sufficient advance in Christian civilisation at that time to recognise any virtue in religious toleration."

We are now called upon to pass through a reign of terror, a time of fire and blood, such as has no parallel in the history of England. With the Spaniards had come to England, if not the Inquisition in its bodily form, yet the spirit of the Inquisition. The first burst of the storm fell upon the married priests, who were insulted and driven from their livings. In London, a number of them were made to march in procession round St. Paul's Church, wrapped in white sheets, and bearing in their hands scourges and tapers. They were then publicly whipped, and this was a precedent for the same indignities in other parts of the kingdom. The wives of these priests were treated with the utmost contumely. The statutes against the Lollards enacted in the reigns of Richard II., Henry IV., and Henry V., were revived and were to come into force on the 20th of January. Bonner, accompanied by eight bishops and 160 priests, made a grand procession through the streets of London, and had services of public thanksgiving for the happy restoration of Catholicism. A commission was then held in the Church of St. Mary Overy, in Southwark, for the trial of heretics. The first man brought before this court, over which Gardiner presided, was John Rogers, a prebendary of St. Paul's, who had nobly distinguished himself by defending the first priest sent by Mary to preach Papacy at St. Paul's Cross. He had been lying in a vile prison amongst thieves for more than a year. He now came forth prepared for death, with a bravery that nothing could daunt. He boldly asked Gardiner, who was brow-beating and insulting him, whether he himself did not for twenty years renounce the Pope, and put up prayers for his eternal exclusion from England. Gardiner endeavoured to parry this home-thrust by saying that he was forced to it by cruelty. "And," rejoined Rogers, "does it become you to practise this same cruelty on us?" He not only thus addressed Gardiner but appealed to the whole Court, whether they had not sworn, year after year under Henry and Edward, to maintain the laws which they introduced on the subject of religion, and how could they now condemn others for persisting conscientiously in that course? He vindicated his marriage as being originally contracted in Germany, where the marriages of clergymen were legal, and as being since allowed also in this country, and reminded them that he had not brought his wife into this country until such marriages were made lawful here.

The Court condemned him to be burnt, and on the 4th of February this horrible sentence was executed in the most barbarous manner. The day of his death was kept a profound secret from him, and early that morning he was suddenly awakened out of a sound sleep, and informed that he was to be burnt that day. The condemned man, so far from sinking under the appalling announcement, only calmly observed, "Then I need not truss my points." He requested to be permitted to take leave of his wife and children, of whom he had eleven—one still at the breast—but this Bonner refused. As he was led by the sheriffs towards Smithfield, where he was to suffer, he sang the "Miserere." His wife and children were placed where he would have a full view of them at the stake, and it was expected that this would induce him to recant and save his life, and thus induce others to follow his example; but outwardly unmoved, he maintained the