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The death of Henry put an end to this persecution. He had attempted to establish an Anglican Church which should be neither Protestant nor Roman Catholic, but which should differ from the Roman Catholic system only in the article of the Royal Supremacy. His success was remarkable, and has been ascribed correctly to the extraordinary force of his character, the advantageous position of England with reference to foreign powers, the enormous wealth which the confiscation of the religious houses placed at his disposal, and the support of the neutral, undecided class who embraced neither opinion.1 With the death of Henry, the two parties, as if released from a strong hand, assumed their natural antagonism. The government could maintain its independence of the Papacy only by obtaining the support of the Protestants. Henry, with the assent of Parliament, had determined the order of the succession, giving precedence to Edward, his son by Jane Seymour, over the two princesses, Mary, the daughter of Catharine, and Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn. Edward VI. was less than ten years old at his accession in 1547; but as an example of intellectual precocity he has seldom, if ever, been surpassed. He was firmly attached to the Protestant faith. A Regency was established, in which Somerset, the King's uncle, was chief, and at the head of a Protestant majority. The Six Articles were repealed. It was the period of the home, by the name of cruel; which also hardly can be avoided." Life and Reign of Henry VIII., p. 572. Mr. Froude, in his History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada, has presented a brilliant apology for Henry VIII. But he fails to offer any adequate defense of the execution of More and of Fisher, an act of cruelty that at the time was reprobated everywhere; and still less for the destruction of Cromwell, whom Froude, whether justly or not, praises up to the very foot of the scaffold. Even if Anne Boleyn be supposed to be guilty of the charges brought against her, there was a brutality in the circumstances of her imprisonment and execution, and in the marriage with Jane Seymour the very next day, which it is impossible to excuse. The contemporaries of Henry were right in distinguishing the earlier from the latter portion of his reign. After the fall of Wolsey, he became more and more willful, suspicious, and cruel.

1 Macaulay, History of England, i. 46.

Smalcaldic war and of the Interim in Germany, and the hands of Cranmer and Ridley were strengthened by theologians from the continent. Peter Martyr and Ochino were made professors at Oxford in 1547, and Martin Bucer and Paul Fagius were called to Cambridge in 1549. The "Book of Homilies" appeared in 1547 - expositions of Christian doctrine which were to be read by the clergy in their churches every Sunday. Communion had been ordered to be administered in both kinds. Transubstantiation was now formally abandoned; the second principal step, after the declaration of the Royal Supremacy, in the progress of the English Reformation. These changes gave rise to a new "Order of Communion;" but the latter was superseded, in 1548, by the "Book of Common Prayer," which was revised in 1552, when the use of consecrated oil, prayers for the dead, and auricular confession, were abolished. In 1552, the Articles were framed, at first forty-two in number. Thus the Anglican Church obtained a definite constitution and a ritual. Able and zealous preachers, among whom were Matthew Parker, Latimer, and John Knox, made many converts to the Protestant doctrine. The progress of innovation, however, was somewhat too rapid for the general sense of the nation. The spoliation of Church property for the profit of individuals, in which Somerset was conspicuous, gave just offense. Anxious to carry out the plan of Henry VIII., for the marriage of the young Queen Mary of Scotland to Edward, and desirous of uniting the two countries in one great Protestant power, Somerset invaded Scotland; but, though his arms were successful, the antipathy of the Scots to the domination of the English was too strong to be overcome; and Mary was taken to France, there to be married to the Dauphin. A Catholic rebellion in Cornwall and Devonshire was suppressed; but the opposition to Somerset on various grounds, which was led by the Duke of Northumberland, finally brought

REIGN OF MARY.

327 the Protector to the scaffold; and Northumberland, who was now at the head of affairs, concluded a peace with France, in which the project of a marriage of Edward with Mary was virtually renounced. Under Cranmer's superintendence a revisal of the ecclesiastical statutes, including those for the punishment of heresy, was undertaken; but the work was not finished when the King died, at the age of sixteen (1553).

The reactionary movement that attended the accession of Mary to the throne, was heightened by the abortive attempt of Northumberland to deprive her of it by persuading the dying King to bequeath the crown to Lady Jane Grey, a descendant of Henry's sister, and a Protestant, whom Northumberland had married to his son. The party which thus sought to overthrow the order of succession that had been fixed by act of Parliament, found that it was feebly supported, soon became divided and effected nothing. The insurrection under Wyat was punished by the death of its leaders, and led to the execution of Lady Jane Grey. Mary was narrow, with the obstinate will of her father, and superstitiously attached to the religion of her mother. She proceeded as expeditiously as her more prudent advisers of whom Philip of Spain was the chief -would permit, to restore the Catholic system. She soon dislodged the married clergy from their places. The Prayer Book was abolished. Disdaining the suggestion that she should marry an Englishman, she gave her hand to Philip with a devotion in which zeal for the Catholic faith was indistinguishably mingled with personal regard. The point on which Parliament showed most hesitation was the matter of the Supremacy. The opposition to papal control was more general and better established than the antagonism to Roman Catholic doctrine. Parliament insisted that the guarantee of the abbey lands to their new possessors should be incorporated in the very act which reëstablished papal authority. Reginald Pole,

who was made legate of the Pope in 1554, and succeeded Cranmer in the archbishopric, was the Queen's spiritual counselor. The fourth of the great measures for the destruction of Protestantism was the enforcement of the laws against heresy. Gardiner lost no time in abandoning the doctrine of the King's supremacy, which it is difficult to believe that he ever sincerely held. He and Bonner, the new Bishop of London, were active in persecution. The foreign theologians were driven out of the kingdom, and the foreign congregations dispersed. Not less than eight hundred Englishmen, whose lives were in danger at home, found an asylum among their brethren in Germany and Switzerland. The noble fortitude with which Hooper, Latimer, Ridley, and numerous other martyrs, endured the fire, did much to strengthen the Protestant cause and to break down the popularity of Mary. Cranmer, from the day when he saw from his prison-tower the burning of his companions, Ridley and Latimer, seems to have lost his spirit. He was persuaded to make an abject recantation; but, notwithstanding this act, it was determined that he should die. What course he would have pursued had he been permitted to live, it is impossible to tell; but, in the prospect of certain death, his courage revived, and he exhibited at the end a dignity and constancy which have gone far in the estimation of posterity to atone for his previous infirmities. The fault of Cranmer was a time-serving spirit; an undue subservience to power; a timidity, which is not compatible with the highest type of manly honesty. An example of this is seen in the course he adopted on taking the oaths of canonical obedience to the Pope, at his consecration as Archbishop; when he satisfied his conscience by a protest to the effect that he did not consider himself bound to abstain from measures for the reformation of the Church. His participation in the condemnation of John

1 This protestation was not communicated to the Pope. See Hallam's remarks upon it, Const. Hist., ch. 1. (Harpers' Am. ed., pp. 65, 66 and n.)

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Frith, who was burnt at Smithfield in 1533 for aenying the corporal presence of Christ in the Sacrament; and still more, his part in the execution of Jean Boucher, or Joan of Kent, who was called an Anabaptist, and was burned, in the reign of Edward, for an heretical opinion respecting the Incarnation- not to speak of other examples of a like intolerance are a blot upon his memory. In the last days of Edward, Cranmer and his associates were engaged in shaping laws for the punishment of believers in doctrines which he had himself held not long before, and for disbelieving in which he had assisted in bringing Frith and others to the stake. The Protestant bishops, says Lingard, the Catholic historian, " perished in flames which they had prepared for their adversaries.” 1 Yet Cranmer, as Burnet has justly said, was instigated by no cruelty of temper. He was under the sway of the idea that there must be uniformity, and that the magistrate must be responsible for securing it. This idea it was, in connection with the pliant disposition which belonged to him by nature, which moved him, in the last years of Henry VIII., to an unjustifiable concealment or compromise of his opinions. It must be set down to his credit that he raised his voice against the adoption of the Six Articles, and interceded, when intercession, in however cautious a form, was hazardous, for the lives of Anne Boleyn and Cromwell. But the burning of a man of his venerable age, who had filled so large a space in the public eye, whose hand had been pressed by Henry VIII. when he was dying, and whose own death took place under circumstances so affecting, could not fail to react to the disadvantage of the Queen and of her creed. Various other causes conspired to render her unpopular. In 1555 Paul IV., a violent bigot, and withal hostile to the SpanishAustrian House, became Pope. He insisted on a restora

1 This is somewhat too severe, as the temporal penalties of heresy were to be fixed by Parliament. See Hallam, Const. Hist. of England (later editions) ch. ii.