Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/360

Rh 340 ENGLAND [HISTORY. Keconci- liatiou with Koine. The per secution. Burning of Crati- next year, by the abdication of Charles V., Philip succeeded to the Spanish, Italian, and Burgundian possessions of his father. The difference between the position of Philip and that of Charles is to be noticed. Charles V. was emperor ; alliance with an emperor was simply the continuation of a policy older than tha Norman Conquest. But Philip was not emperor ; his policy was not imperial but Spanish. The marriage made England for a moment, in an European point of view, a mere tool of Spain. At home it no doubt strengthened the movement for complete reconciliation with Rome, and for the persecution of those who, after being dominant in the last reign, were deemed heretics in this. In the year of Mary s marriage Reginald Pole, now cardinal, came back to England as legate, and the Lords and Commons of England knelt to receive his absolution for the national schism. He confirmed by papal authority various acts done during the time of the separation, and it does not appear that the ordinations of bishops and priests which had been made during Edward s reign were ever called in question. And, to quiet a doubt which made many minds uneasy, the actual owners of church lands were confirmed in their possession. An act of parliament followed, by which the papal authority was restored as it had stood before the changes of Henry. Gardiner and Bonner, the strenuous opponents of the pope in Henry s days, and Thirlby, who had gone a long way with the changes under Edward, were now bishops of a Church in full communion with Rome. That is doubtless, they had seen that, at all events with a Spanish king con sort, the middle system could not be kept, and that those who clave to the mass must accept the pope with it. From this time we have two distinct religious parties, the party of the pope and the party of the Reformation. These last were now deemed heretics, and the old heresy laws were revived for their destruction. In 1555 the persecution began, and it lasted till the end of Mary s reign. It. differed from the two-edged persecution of Henry s reign in two points. Henry s victims of either faith were com paratively few, and they were mostly persons of some importance. In the three years of the persecution of Mary, more victims were burned than in all the reigns before and after put together. And it was a persecution which, as far as the laity were concerned, fell mainly on victims whom Henry would have scorned to destroy, on the poor, the halt, and the blind. No layman of any distinction suffered ; but on the Reformed clergy the hand of the destroyer fell heavily. Five bishops perished. Of these were Ridley and Latimer true martyrs on one side, as More and Fisher on the other Hooper, the professor of a istraiter sect of Protestantism, and the less famous Farrar of St David s. The primate followed the next year. He had been lawfully condemned to death for his treason in the usurpation of Jane ; and his execution under that sentence, though it would have been a harsh measure, would have been a small matter compared with many an execution of the days of Henry. He was spared, probably in mercy; but he was spared only to bring on Mary and her government the deeper infamy of burning one who had recanted his heresies. The persecution was throughout more the work of the council by whom Bonner was blamed for slackness than of the bishops. No one was more zealous for slaughter than William Paulet, marquess of Winchester, one of the new men who conformed to every change, and who died in honour under Elizabeth. After the burning of Cranmer, and not till then, though the see had been for some while vacant by his deprivation, Pole succeeded to the see of Canterbury, the last archbishop in communion with Rome. The last clays of Mary showed the impolicy of the Spanish match. Strange to say, one of the first acts of Philip, so pre-eminently the Catholic king, was a war with the pope, Paul IV., in his temporal character. Henry of &quot;War i France broke his truce with Spain, and encouraged English * riUK traitors to attempt the betrayal of Calais, and to make an actual landing in England. Mary declared war in 1557, and English troops shared in the victory of St Quintin. But at the beginning of the next year, the last of Mary s reign, the French took Calais, and England ceased to be a continental power. She has won back that character in later times by the momentary possession of Dunkirk and the more lasting possession of Gibraltar; but the last relic Loss of the conquests of Edward III. now passed away, as the ^ ala i last relics of the inheritance of Eleanor had passed away 105 years before. For a few months Mary bore up against sickness and neglect, against sorrow and national discontent. On November 1 7, 1558, she died, and the cardinal followed her, having been for a few hours the subject of Elizabeth. beth This last fact brings us to the great reign which ends the Eeig period with which we are now dealing. Under Elizabeth that which was wanting to complete the character of England and of Englishmen was added. The religious character of the nation was now fixed ; and its religious character had no small share in fixing its political position at home and abroad. The national Church retained so much of the Posi middle system of Henry as to hold in some sort a middle of ** place between Rome and the Protestant Churches of the ^^ continent. But this middle position at no time extended to more than strictly religious points of doctrine, discipline, and ceremony. As a nation, as a power, England has been essentially Protestant from the time of Elizabeth. But the fact of the middle position of the English Church led to the formation of religious bodies at home which parted off from it in opposite directions. And from Elizabeth s day onwards the party of further religious reform has also been the party of political freedom. The Puritan party, it must be Beg remembered, had no more notion of toleration than any ning other party of those days. Its object, like that of every* 1 &quot; 5 ; other party, was not the mere toleration, but the exclusive establishment, of its own system. But, on the one hand, every change, every debate, helped to bring about religious toleration in the end. And, as the Puritan movement was largely a movement against arbitrary authority, it was necessarily a movement in favour of freedom. But in England a movement in favour of freedom did not mean the establishment of anything new, but the restoration of what was old. It meant the carrying out of existing laws which Tudor despotism had trampled under foot. In any new legislation that might be needed, it meant the falling back on the old constitutional principles which had been always acknowledged, if not always carried out in practice, from Edward I. to Henry VI. Politically the struggle of the seventeenth century, which had its root in the controver sies of the sixteenth, was the repetition of the struggle of the thirteenth. Even in the religious element in both cases there is a likeness. Earl Simon and his friends did not swerve from the received orthodoxy of their day ; for tho time for strictly religious controversy had not yet come. But they were none the less the Puritans of their own day. A revived spirit of independence marks the parliaments of Elizabeth, and marks them in proportion as the Puritan element grows stronger. Elizabeth loved arbitrary power as well as any sovereign that ever reigned ; but she knew that one condition of holding any power was to know how to yield, and, when she yielded, she yielded gracefully. Whatever may have been Elizabeth s personal religious Ecc! convictions, there can be little doubt that the middle system ^ of Henry was that to which she was herself inclined. But she found that its complete restoration was impossible. If it had ever been possible, it was impossible now, after the reconciliation with Rome and the persecution. Her reform