History of England, Part II From the Accession of Henry VIII to the Revolution of 1689
Tout, T. F. --Powell, F. York
1898
CHAPTER V. The Reformation Settlement in England and Scotland.
1. The daughter of . and Anne Boleyn was just over five-and-twenty when the death of her sister [1] called her to the English throne, in accordance with her father's will. She was above the middle height, with strong features, a broad brow, a great hooked nose, hazel eyes, fair complexion and masses of light auburn hair. She had a magnificent constitution, and seemed almost incapable of fatigue, working nearly as hard as her father at the business of ruling her kingdom yet always finding time for the endless frivolities of her court. She delighted in hunting, was proud of her skill in dancing, and was never weary of watching plays, masques, and shows. Nothing pleased her better than going on progress, visiting the houses of the nobles and gentry, and making herself popular with all classes. She was as careful as her father in upholding the ceremonial side of her office, and, like him, she was hearty, kindly, and affable when she was pleased, but terrible in her anger. With her father's kingly qualities came also a good deal of his coarseness and insensibility. She had few scruples, was utterly regardless of the truth, and sometimes a touch of ferocity showed that she was Henry's true daughter. Even in smaller matters there was little that was womanly about her. She spoke freely, swore good round oaths, ate and drank heartily, kissed her friends if she were pleased, and beat them when she was angry. She was as self-centred as Henry himself, and if she did her best for her country, it was only because, with fine Tudor instinct, she could not separate its interests from her own. She had, like all Henry's children, been carefully educated. Her schoolmaster, Roger Ascham, tells us that she spoke French and Italian as well as she talked English, that she was fluent in Latin, and had a fair knowledge of Greek. She wrote an exquisite hand, and was a good musician. But she had more information than culture; and her somewhat practical education did little to supply her lack of softness, imagination, and sympathy. She preferred action to reading, and was almost as much outside the wonderful literary movement that marked the end of her reign, as she was unaffected | |
73 | by the deeper religious emotions of her age. She was at bottom a cold, clear-headed, far-seeing politician, without sentiment or deep feeling, but strong, courageous, and persistent, and well able by her regal bearing to inspire enthusiasm to which she herself was a stranger. Yet there was a lighter and more frivolous side to her nature, which showed that there was something that she had inherited from her mother. Her vanity was colossal, and no flattery was too gross to be unacceptable to her. As she grew old, she concealed the ravages of time by paint, false hair, and gorgeous millinery, setting herself off with many-coloured dresses of barbaric design, and delighting in wearing monstrous farthingales, and towering ruffs, "supposing haply that the eyes of her people (being dazzled by the glittering aspect of those her outward adornments) would not so easily discover the marks of age and the decay of natural beauty." She was very undecided, especially in little matters, and in writing and speaking she affected an obscure style "that she might not write in such phrases as were commonly used." But however hard it seemed for her to make up her mind, she showed rare constancy of purpose in pursuing for nearly forty-five years the policy that she had marked out for herself at the beginning of her reign. She had no near kinsfolk and few real friends, and was too greedy of power to share it with any one, even with a husband, so that, though few queens were more faithfully served, she grew terribly lonely in her old age. She was excessively mean and parsimonious, knowing that she could only keep herself independent of her Parliaments by carefully husbanding her resources. She was shrewd enough to use her little vanities to conceal the strength of her purpose and the force of her will. But those have much misread her character who have made a weak queen, aimlessly swayed by conflicting impulses, and only kept to high resolves by the unflinching self-sacrifice of her advisers. |
2. had a great admiration for her father, and her real ambition was to follow as closely as possible in his footsteps. Like her father, she kept her [2] ministers as long as they were useful, and, as she never changed her policy as Henry did, or sent off the exponents of a former phase of feeling to the block, her statesmen grew grey and died in her service. Though she was niggardly in assigning rewards or honours to her most trusted helpers, and utterly unscrupulous | |
74 [3] | in making them the scapegoats of her risky or unpopular acts, she clave to them with strange fidelity. Sir William [4] Cecil, who had already done good service to both Edward and Mary, was her Secretary of State from her accession to , from which date to his death, in , he acted as Lord Treasurer of England. He is the typical statesman of her reign, shrewd, cautious, methodical, and wise, with nothing heroic about him, but prudently ruling both his own household and the realm of England, always quietly striving to screw up the hesitating queen to take up a more defiant and Protestant policy, but ever faithful to the state and uncorrupted by gifts, steering the crooked and devious policy of his mistress with admirable dexterity, simplicity, and cheerfulness, and receiving no higher reward than the barony of Burghley, which made him "the poorest lord in England." [5] His brother-in-law, Sir Nicholas Bacon, "a plain man, direct and constant," was Lord Keeper of the Great Sealfrom to his death in , without so much as receiving the higher dignity of the Chancellorship as the reward of his faithful service. [6] Office went almost by heredity, Sir Robert Cecil, Burghley's second son, becoming Secretary before his father's death, and taking as prominent a position in the queen's declining years as William Cecil had done in an earlier generation. Another chief helper of was Sir Francis Walsingham, Secretary from [7] to his death in , the most reserved yet dexterous and insinuating of politicians, whose spies wormed out the secrets of England's enemies, and who, for all his unswerving and unscrupulous devotion, died so poor that he left hardly enough to pay for his funeral. |
Beyond the small circle of plain and unostentatious workers, stood the great ring of courtiers who amused 's leisure and glorified her beauty and wisdom. To this motley crew she showed a liberality never manifested towards her responsible advisers. Many were mere pleasure-seekers; others intrigued against the ministers and upheld the King of or hardly concealed their sympathy with the Catholics, while others, like Lord Robert Dudley, were [8] ostentatious patrons of extreme Protestantism, though there was little that was Puritan in their life or manners. Robert Dudley, younger son of the wretched Duke of Northumberland, was conspicuous | |
75 | for his goodly person, showy dress, and skill in the tactics of a courtier. He was about 's own age and her greatest friend. She called him her "sweet Robin," made him Earl of Leicester, and would have married him, had she not resolved to live and rule alone. Though not without ability, he was a worthless fellow, gluttonous, cruel, overbearing, and vain, and believed, on suggestive but insufficient evidence, to have murdered his first wife, Amy Robsart, that he might be free to marry the queen. Down to his death in , the queen never altogether lost her affection for him, and marred at least one of her boldest enterprises by entrusting it to his incompetent hands. |
3. The utter failure of the reigns of her brother and sister could not but convince of the excellence of the middle way which . had so reso- [9] utely pursued. Her first great care was to apply it to the settlement of religion. Though she had cheerfully attended Mass under Mary, she was known to be disaffected to her sister's policy, and a swarm of Protestant exiles, driven away by Mary's persecution, had now hurried back to England clamouring for a reformation more thoroughgoing and complete than even that of Edward VI. At the same time the ministers and bishops of Mary were still in power, and any sudden change must at once excite their hostility. thus stood in a very difficult position, but she was shrewd enough to steer her way round the many quicksands and reefs that beset her. She had no decided personal feelings to warp her judgment. She had very little religious sentiment, and cared nothing for the theology of the rival churches, though she loved a stately worship and reverenced ancient forms. Candles gleamed and a silver crucifix glittered on her chapel altar, and until Parliament altered the law, she upheld the Mass as the legal service of the realm. But she had a strong English feeling, and strove to rise above the sectional policy of the last two reigns, and re-establish religion on a broad national basis, reforming so far as would give some satisfaction to the reformers, but retaining so much of the old as would encourage the lovers of old ways. | |
4. If had been left to herself, she would probably have brought things back to the state they were in in , or in the first year of Mary's reign. But [10] a national church with the Mass and the Six Articles, but without the Pope, was not at the moment practicable. Christendom was hopelessly divided between the | |
76 [11] | Roman and anti-Roman camps; and though most plain Englishmen would have preferred King Henry's policy, saw that the papal party could only be fought with the help of the Protestants, and that their support was only to be obtained by going back largely to the system of . Finding Convocation opposed to all change, at once had recourse to the Commons. In January , her first Parliament met, and despite the unanimous opposition of the bishops, passed new Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity. |
The Act of Supremacy of was styled an "act restoring to the Crown the ancient jurisdiction over the state, ecclesiastical and spiritual, and abolishing all foreign power repugnant [12] to the same." It renounced the papal jurisdiction as emphatically as the Act of ., but it dropped the title of Supreme Head of the Church, which had proved so offensive to ecclesiastical sentiment, and described the queen as the "only Supreme Governor of this Realm, as well in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things or causes as temporal." The Oath of Supremacy imposed by the act was to be taken by all ecclesiastics, all temporal officers and by all graduates of the universities, and the penalty for upholding foreign jurisdiction was, on the third offence, the death of a traitor. A royal proclamation further admonished "simple men," that the queen only claimed such authority " as anciently belonged to the crown," and did not "challenge power of ministry of divine service," i.e. distinctly clerical power. By the Act of Uniformity of , the Second Prayer Book of . was in substance restored, as the only lawful form of [13] church service. Several significant alterations were however made, calculated to disarm resistance, like the modifications in the Act of Supremacy. The most important change was the one that ordered that both the forms employed in the two Prayer Books of . in the administration of the Communion should be amalgamated so that both the Zwinglian and the traditional views of the Eucharist might seem to be allowed. An offensive petition in the Litany, praying for deliverance from the "Bishop of Rome and all his detestable enormities" was also omitted : while the famous Ornaments Rubric was added, enjoining that " all ornaments of the Church and of the ministers thereof shall be retained as were in the Church of England by authority of Parliament in the second year of ., until other order shall be taken by the Queen's Majesty." | |
By other acts of the same Parliaments, the queen's title to the crown was recognised, First Fruits and Tenths restored to the Crown, and the monasteries, restored by Mary, suppressed. It is significant that no proposals were at once made to bring hack a Protestant system of doctrine by reviving .'s Forty-Two Articles, or that draft code of Protestant Canon Law, the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum. | |
5. By these broad measures restored Protestantism in England. But the Elizabethan Settlement, | |
77 | though clothed for the most part in the forms of Edward VI., was inspired by the spirit of ., rather than that of Somerset or Northumberland. Under [14] Edward there had been constant changes, but no finality. No one knew what would go next, and everything seemed unsettled. now took Edward's system, and, making important modifications in it, set up what had been but a temporary halting-stage, in a time of unending change, as a final and permanent constitution for the English Church. Henceforth the queen's policy was simple. She had fixed the form of the Church, and had now to enforce obedience to it. With all its Protestant trappings, it was the Vita Media of . over again, with a stately Liturgy, the traditional form of episcopal government, and the aspiration after continuity with earlier times. But it was the settlement of a statesman, not of a churchman. The most religious people in the country were either Romanists or Calvinists, and disliked it. Such a politic compromise could inspire little enthusiasm. Nevertheless upheld her policy with admirable courage and consistency. Though not wholly pleasing to her most active subjects, it interpreted pretty faithfully the wishes of the inert and easy-going majority, who were well content with her position. Before died, she had the gratification of knowing that her settlement was accepted by the great mass of her people, and that the Elizabethan Via Media had power to excite religious zeal and spiritual emotion, as real and effective as the extremes which at one time seemed to attract all enthusiasts to them. And after her death her spirit lived on, so that the Elizabethan Settlement, which even the armed Puritanism of the seventeenth century could not finally overcome, remained, and remains, under many changes of government, and many fluctuations of religious feeling, the ordered form of the Church of England. |
6. The settlement had been steadily opposed by the clergy, headed by the bishops. It was with difficulty that had found a prelate willing to crown [15] her, and all the bishops, with one exception, refused the Oath of Supremacy, and were deprived of their sees. In most cases they spent the end of their lives in prison, like Bishop Bonner, though some escaped to the Continent, while others were released by the clemency of the new government. 's course had been made | |
78 [16] | easier by the death of Cardinal Pole leaving the see of Canterbury vacant. In September , she chose as [17] his successor Matthew Parker, a learned Cambridge scholar, who had been Dean of Lincoln under ., and, when deprived as a married man under Mary, had preferred to live quietly in England to escaping to the Continent with the advanced reformers. He was a grave, wise, and sober man, a great student of the Fathers, and a lover of the Middle Ages, a bountiful patron of scholars, and a liberal benefactor of his university, delighting in collecting old manuscripts, editing chronicles and writing on the ecclesiastical antiquities of Britain. Parker, like , looked on things from a purely English stand-point, and, after the queen, he was at first almost the only prominent upholder of the middle way. Down to his death in , he laboured with great energy and tact in seeing that the Elizabethan Settlement was made a reality. The queen showed more confidence in him than in her other prelates, though all his exertions could not prevent her appropriating ecclesiastical property, bullying the bishops, and generally ruling the Church with almost as [18] high a hand as Henry himself. In , set up a permanent Court of Ecclesiastical Commission, or High Commission Court, which was empowered to exercise on her behalf her supremacy over the Church. Parker was first on the commission, and the new court gave him and his mistress the means of enforcing the law. |
7. At first Parker found little difficulty in dealing with the avowed friends of the Pope. They were few in number [19] and destitute of leaders. The main difficulties he had to face were with the disloyal and careless who inclined to the old school, and with the hasty and zealous champions of a more thorough reformation than had permitted. A mere handful of Queen Mary's clergy had followed the example of the bishops, and given up their livings. The great majority remained on, reading the Prayer Book instead of the Mass, but showing in their sluggish fashion no love for new ways, and a great horror of Protestant heresy. Among the laity, even avowed Catholics largely conformed and attended the English services. Parker did what he could to impress his opinions upon this inert mass. Here time was his greatest friend, for it replaced the lukewarm by better-educated and more active friends of the New Faith. The real problem | |
79 | was that while the old-fashioned clergy were only passively hostile, the ardent Protestants were fiercely opposed to the policy of . |
8. The chief trouble was with the returned exiles from and Switzerland. When driven abroad for their devotion to their faith, they had found but a cold welcome from the stiff and pedantic Lutherans, but had been warmly received [20] by the great French Protestant, John Calvin, who up to his death in reigned like a despot over both Church and State in the free city of Geneva. He had there set up a model church with clearly-defined and rigid doctrines, that taught that God was a stern just task-master as inexorable as nature, and dealing out salvation and reprobation in accordance with His predestined decrees. Side by side with this dogmatic system, which was called Calvinism, he had established a system of church-organisation and discipline as rigid and inexorable as the gospel which he expounded. Rejecting the office of bishops, he made presbyters all of one order, though some, the ministers, were set apart to teach and preach, and others, the elders, simply to bear rule. Individual congregations were joined together into larger aggregations, and, over each of these, councils, called synods and presbyteries, held authority. This system was called Presbyterianism. Calvin's churches worshipped God with the utmost simplicity, rejecting all forms and ordinances they did not find in the New Testament. The Church dominated the State as strictly as the church of Hildebrand or Becket had ruled the kingdoms of the Middle Ages, and enforced a strict moral discipline over the whole community. From their profession of purity in life, doctrine, and worship the English followers of this school were called Puritans. | |
9. The influence of Calvin convinced the English exiles that even the system they had accepted under . was far removed from apostolic purity. In [21] some of their churches they scrupled to read .'s Prayer Book, and the famous dispute known as the Troubles of Frankfurt broke their little band into hostile camps, of which the larger and more energetic was opposed to the use of the English Liturgy. On their return gave bishoprics to the leaders of the more moderate party, such as John Jewel, made [22] Bishop of Salisbury, and Edmund Grindal, who succeeded Bonner at London. Even these moderate men were Calvinist in doctrine, and had little love for the forms and ceremonies that delighted and Parker. The more extreme section of the exiles re- [23] garded the Elizabethan church as little better than the Roman, and merely gave an unwilling allegiance to it because they hoped that, as in Edward's days, fresh | |
80 [24] | changes would quickly follow, until the English Church became just like the Church of Geneva. |
It was only from this energetic, high-minded, but narrow and intolerant band that the English Church could derive sufficient active teachers and preachers to wage war against Rome. But they were very unfit agents for carrying out 's ideas. Their very activity led to incessant religious controversy. Their scruples made them refuse to wear surplices or conform to the ceremonies enjoined by the Prayer Book. Instead of thinking and teaching as ordered them, they obstinately insisted on thinking for themselves. It was in vain that the queen and her archbishop tried to reduce their unruly spirits to order. | |
In the sixteenth century everybody believed that the true Church must be one, and that all men must be forced to belong to it. prided herself on her liberality when she allowed people what she called "liberty of conscience," which meant that she permitted them to think as they liked, as long as they went to church every Sunday and did not attack the established system. Moreover, no party would have been content with toleration, each one wished to dominate. If a few Roman Catholics withdrew from 's church and held services of their own, the Puritans did not as yet aspire to follow their example, being warned by Calvin himself that though the Common Prayer "contained much that was antiquated and foolish," yet they were bound to accept it and hope for better times. | |
For the first few years of 's reign the Puritans had it all their own way. The ceremonies which they hated [25] were seldom enforced, and they so far prevailed in Convocation that that body pressed for the restoration of King Edward's Articles. In these Articles were reduced to thirty-nine in number and carefully revised with a view to making them less offensive to friends of the old faith. did her best to prevent their acceptance by Parliament, and it was not till that she allowed the bill which forced the clergy to subscribe to them. Before this period the steady repression of Puritanism had begun. In Parker issued a series of [26] directions to the clergy called Parker's Advertisements, which ordered that the minister in all parish churches should wear "a comely surplice with sleeves," and insisted on a stricter observance of the forms enjoined by the Act of Uniformity. The Advertisements did not change but rather relaxed the existing law, and | |
81 | with characteristic caution never gave a formal assent to them. Nevertheless, they were received with a storm of protest from the Puritan clergy. However, the ceremonies were rigidly enforced, and in about thirty London clergymen were deprived of their benefices for their obstinate refusal to wear the prescribed vestments. Persecution embittered the struggle, and before long the ardent Puritans shifted the ground of their attack. Instead of simply rejecting vestments and ceremonies, they condemned the whole episcopal system and demanded that the Church of England should be made Presbyterian like the Church of Geneva. In Thomas Cartwright, who had been expelled for his Puritan views from his professorship of divinity at Cambridge, gave voice to this opinion. He took up and defended a book called An Ad- [27] monition to Parliament, written by two of his friends, and supplemented it by a Second Admonition, in which he denounced the Prayer Book as "an unperfect book, picked out of that popish dung-hill the Mass Book," and declared that the episcopal system was "Anti-Christian and devilish and contraryto the Scriptures." |
10. Parker died in , and Edmund Grindal his successor was friendly to the moderate Puritans. He soon came into conflict with the queen by refusing [28] to put down clerical meetings for the discussion of the Scriptures called Prophesyings. The Puritans approved of these assemblies as "a notable spur unto all the ministers to apply to their books, which otherwise would give themselves to hawking, hunting, cards, tippling at the ale-house, and other such-like vanities." , however, hated these [29] discussions as leading to divisions and disorders, and peremptorily ordered the archbishop to stop them. On Grindal's refusing, he was suspended from his functions, and died in in disgrace. | |
11. chose as her next archbishop John Whitgift, an old rival of Cartwright's at Cambridge, who, though a zealous Calvinist, strenuously upheld the [30] ceremonies, and through the High Commission Court dealt with the Puritans with great severity. He defeated the attempt of Cartwright to superimpose the Genevan system on the English [31] Church, and was fiercely attacked by the Puritans in what are called the Martin Marprelate Tracts, in which the episcopal system was denounced | |
82 [32] |
with extraordinary violence. In John Penry, a fanatical
Welshman, who was convicted of having a large share
[33]
in writing these tracts, was executed for libel
and for inciting rebellion. Penry was an honest
enthusiast who made a noble end. A popular rime
showed the bitterness of the conservative North against
his teaching:
|
12. Despite persecution, the mass of the Puritans remained discontented conformists, or became what were called Nonconformists, that is, they found devices for remaining in the Church without conforming to the cere[3] monies, still believing that Presbyterianism was the better way. A few of the bolder spirits broke from the Church altogether, and learnt from their leader, Robert Brown, a distant kinsman of the Cecils, that the "kingdom of God was not to be begun by whole parishes, but rather by the worthiest, be they never so few," and that "the people of every parish ought to choose their bishop, and that the precise who refuse the ceremonies and yet preach in the Church strain at a gnat and swallow a camel, and are hypocrites like Master Cartwright." They set up particular congregations of their own and maintained that each of these was a separate self-governing Christian church. They denounced all national organisation of religion, and said that the magistrates ought to have no concern with the Church. They were the first Protestant Dissenters, and gradually got the name of Independents, because of their theory that each congregation should form a church by itself. They were also called Brownists from their first leader, and Sectaries or Separatists, because they formed distinct sects, which openly separated from the communion of the Church. But they were very few and were bitterly persecuted. Even harder was the lot of the Anabaptists, mainly fugitives from the Continent, who took their name from their belief that those christened as infants ought to be baptized over again as adults. These | |
83 | were the Protestant extremists, and were disliked, not only for their religious, but also for their civil and social doctrines which led to Socialism. Several Anabaptists were burnt as heretics during this reign. Parliament, though sympathising with the moderate Puritans, emphatically showed its dislike of the Separatists by passing, in , an act which punished with banishment and death "frequenters of conventicles and seditious sectaries." |
13. The faint beginnings of Independency and the continued discontent of the Puritans within the Church showed that a united Protestantism was an impossible [34] dream. Before the end of 's reign, a new school of divines had grown up, whose teach ing tended to draw a deeper line between [35] Churchmen and Puritans. The greatest of these was Richard Hooker, Master of the Temple, who published in his famous book on the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, in which, in stately and noble prose, he defended the Church-system against the Puritans, by showing that practices sanctioned by long use, and beautiful and seemly in themselves, were not to be rejected because they were not directly enjoined in the Scriptures, since the law of God was to be sought, not only in the precepts of the Bible, but also in the natural laws of heaven and earth. Before long, some went further than Hooker, and taught that a church without bishops was no church at all. The policy of had triumphed, though at great cost. The great mass of the population was heartily attached to her Church. Yet, with all their narrowness, the Puritans, whom she persecuted, were among the staunchest and most upright of her subjects, and their expulsion deprived the Church of much that was strong and high-minded. However, the strife between and the Puritans was no mere contest about names and forms, but involved the whole question of the future of the Church. It was only through the strenuous and often violent warfare, which and her bishops waged against the Puritans, that the Church of England remained different from the Church of Geneva. | |
14. While thus successfully combated Genevan ideals in England, the violent outbreak of the long-deferred Reformation of testified [36] to the full force of Calvin's influence. Since the little Queen Mary had been sent to France for her education, her mother, Mary of Guise, the | |
84 [37] | sister of the conqueror of Calais, Duke Francis of Guise, had striven to uphold a French and Catholic policy in , where the inordinate wealth of the bishops and abbots powerfully attracted the cupidity of a poor and unscrupulous nobility, while the Church, with its carelessness and corruption, had utterly lost hold over the people. Mary of Guise kept back the reforming tide for many years, but the only result of her careful policy was to make the inevitable flood more overwhelming and destructive. In the evil days that followed the capture of St. Andrews, and the battle of Pinkie, the first leaders of Scottish Protestantism had sought refuge in [38] England. Among them was a priest named John Knox, the son of a poor burgher of Haddington, who, when more than forty years of age, had thrown in his lot with the reformers, and joined the murderers of Beaton at St. Andrews, glorifying their "godly act," though he had had no part in it. In his fervid sermons he taught the defenders of the castle, that "the Pope was Anti-Christ, the Mass an abominable idolatry, and that there was no Purgatory." When the French took the castle, he was sent as a galley-slave to France, whence he escaped to England in . There he became a popular preacher of extreme Protestantism, and one of King Edward's chaplains, refusing a bishopric, and drawing up, as was believed, the Black Rubric of Edward's Second Prayer Book, which explains that kneeling at the Communion involves no adoration of the elements. On Edward's death he fled to Geneva, where he became an ardent disciple of Calvin, and thence went to Frankfurt as minister of the English exiles in that city. His refusal to read Edward's Prayer Book led to the troubles that split in twain the exiled congregation. Indignant at the persecution which the two Marys were dealing out to the Protestants of England and , he wrote a wild denunciation of all female rule, in his Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. On Mary's death he sought to return to England, but stopped the way, and Knox lamented that his "Blast hath blown from me all my friends in England." In he boldly returned to , where Rome was still ascendant. From that moment, until his death in , he devoted all his masterful energy and unconquerable will to the establishment of a Genevan reformation in . Stern, hard and rigid, a cruel bigot, and a fierce reckless |
85 | partisan, he redeemed his narrower qualities by his highsouled unselfishness, his absolute straightforwardness, and his utter fearlessness. He was the only great man among all the reformers that spoke theEnglish tongue. He stamped the deep impress of his character on all future history of the Scottish people, who rightly admire him as the chief creator of Modern , He brought with him the last and the greatest fruit of the close connection between and, when he set up in his native land the complete and logical structure of French Protestantism. But he was the first Scot to see that the Reformation had ended the old alliance of and, and the first Scot to welcome a close union with the English, as the only means of securing the reforming cause in his own country. His policy triumphed when, at 's death, the union of the English and Scottish crowns, which Henry VIII. had thought impossible, was peacefully accomplished, and it triumphed even more signally, when in the next century the Puritans of England, with Scottish help, almost succeeded in destroying 's Reformation Settlement and in uniting the two churches, as well as the two states. 15. About the time of Knox's return, the Scots nobles |
had formed a league against the bishops. Under the leadership of the Lords of the Congregation- [39] this was the name given to them-the Scots people exhausted their pent-up fury against the old Church. The Mass was put down; churches and monasteries were burnt to the ground, and the lands of the Church appropriated by the victorious nobles. Mary of Guise, though broken in health and spirits, struggled hard against the rebels, and, obtaining help from, she soon made such a brave show, that the Lords of the Congregation were forced to appeal to for assistance. | |
The English queen was in a difficulty. She hated rebels, and believed that any ruler had the right to make his subjects worship in his own way. Moreover, [40] she detested the author of the Blast against the Regiment of Women, and feared lest the establishment of Calvinism in might unduly encourage her English Puritans. But there was an obvious political advantage in detaching the Scots from and the Papacy, and her ministers, stronger Protestants than she was herself, did not fail to press this on her. At last her interests got the better of her principles, and | |
86 [41] | early in she sent a fleet to , though she still professed to look with disfavour on the Scots rebels. The English joined hands with the Lords of the Congregation, shut up the French in Leith, and straitly besieged it. [42] In June the heroic regent died ; and with her perished the best hopes of the French and Catholic cause in . Next month the defenders of Leith signed the Treaty of Edinburgh, by which both the English and the French troops were to quit . |
16. The Scottish Protestants profited by the absence of settled government to complete the work of reformation. In August , the Scottish Parliament met, and at once [43] abolished the power of the Pope, and imposed the penalty of death on all who for a third time celebrated or attended " the idolatry of the Mass." It accepted a body of Calvinistic doctrine which Knox had rapidly drawn up, and empowered him to draw up a scheme for discipline and Church organisation. The result was Knox's First Book of Discipline, which set up the Presbyterian system with its parity of all ministers, and its rigid system of councils and synods, culminating in the General Assembly of the whole church in a single representative ecclesiastical Parliament, which soon reduced all to dependence on the Kirk. He also brought in the bare and austere worship of Geneva. The nobles rejected Knox's further scheme for devoting all the ancient ecclesiastical revenues to the maintenance of the new ministers, the relief of the poor, and the setting up a system of parish schools, that the whole population might be taught God's Word. The Protestant lords kept a tight hold of the monastery lands which they had seized, and even insisted on keeping up nominal bishops, who might continue as the formal possessors of those Church lands which they were not strong enough to seize outright. They let Knox do what he liked in regard to doctrine and discipline; but he found it hard to secure for his new clergy a bare subsistence from teinds or tithes. All his other proposals were carried out. Though the absent Queen Mary vouchsafed no assent either to the Treaty of Edinburgh or to the acts of the reforming Parliament, no heed was paid to her action. had become for all practical purposes a Calvinistic Republic. | |
17. Thus was the Scottish Reformation accomplished in these very years in which the English Reformation assumed | |
87 | its final form. Never were two movements more strongly contrasted. The greediness of the nobles for Church lands is almost the only feature that is comon to them. In England the Reformation [44] had been carried out by a despotic sovereign, and was political, hesitating, compromising, half-hearted, and imposed on a reluctant and indifferent nation by royal authority. But, being the work of the state, it became a national movement, so moderately and judiciously conducted as to keep the reformed church in touch with the best traditions of the ancient ecclesiastical system. Like most English revolutions, it was carried out piecemeal and slowly, with the result that the old and the new ran so imperceptibly into each other that it was hard to say where began the break of continuity, if there were a break at all. In the Reformation came as a revolution imposed on a reluctant sovereign by rebel nobles and fiery ministers. The Reformers prided themselves on digging a deep trench of separation between their own perfect system and "the blind old days of Papistry." Every vestige of the past was swept away. The fate of the ruined abbeys of England was meted out to nearly every great church in , and every wave of religious enthusiasm was marked by the destruction of some ancient shrine by "the rascal multitude," which thought thus to carry out the teaching of Knox himself. The Scots Reformation was systematic, logical, thoroughgoing, and destructive. In time it became a movement even more intensely national than its English parallel. But the modern Scots nation was itself the creation of the Reformation, while the English nation shaped the course of the English movement to its own likeness. Yet different as were the two events, common Protestantism soon brought the two nations together, and the Great Britain of modern times must honour Knox and his companions, as well as . and his great daughter, among its founders. |
18. While Knox and the Congregation were utterly destroying the ancient , its young queen grew up to womanhood as a Catholic and a Frenchwoman. [45] She had been carefully brought up, among the royal children of, and knew Latin, Greek and Italian, though she was studiously kept from any knowledge of the English tongue either in its northern or southern form. | |
88 [46] | She was well instructed in poetry and literature, and sang well, accompanying herself on the lute. Her famous beauty consisted, not so much in any exceptional regularity of features, as in the extraordinary brilliancy of her colour and the exquisite grace and charm of her manner. She was tall and well made, was as strong as a man and enjoyed perfect health. Her brow was broad and ample, her chin square and fully developed; her eyelids were heavy, and her lips were commonly closely compressed; her hair was of that shade of brown which ripples like gold in the sun, and her hazel eyes were clear and bright. Though brought up amid the luxury and corruption of the Valois Court, her personal habits were of the simplest. She delighted in hunting, hawking, and in open-air life; and wished that she was a man " to know what life it was to lie all night in the field, or to walk on the causeway with a buckler and broadsword." Yet at times she would lounge idly in bed all day, only rising at night for a ball or a revel. Naturally hot-tempered and outspoken, she learnt to discipline her emotions to obey her strong will, so that, save in the one supreme crisis of her life, she hardly allowed herself to be dominated by her passions. "She seemeth," wrote an observant opponent, "to regard no ceremonious honour besides the acknowledgment of her estate royal. She showeth a disposition to speak much, to be bold, to be pleasant, to be very familiar. She showeth a great desire to be revenged on her enemies, and readiness to expose herself to all perils in hope of victory. She desireth much to hear of hardiness and valiancy, commending by name all approved hardy men, although they be her enemies. The thing she most thirsteth after is victory, so that for victory's sake pain and peril seem pleasant to her. Surely she is a rare woman; for as no flattery can lightly abuse her, so no plain speech seemeth to offend her." It is the fashion to contrast the graceful, beautiful, passionate Queen of Scots with the astute, cold, cruel . But, in truth, there were more points of comparison than contrast between their real dispositions. Mary was as hard, as unscrupulous, and as cruel as her great rival. As with , ambition and love of power were her great motive forces. Both allowed caprice and wilfulness to impair the results of their wonted tact and caution, though in this respect the deeper, more womanly nature of Mary, brought up in a more tropical and unhealthy atmosphere and exposed to worse difficulties and more real |
89 | temptations, was less controlled by the dictates of her policy, and she never worked so hard, or showed such persistent tact, as . Neither did she ever identify herself with her people as did the English queen. Like , Mary was born the leader of a religious party, and yet few women of the time, except , had less real religious feeling. But Mary, though driven, more than once, to open dissembling, was unswervingly faithful to the Catholic cause, upholding the traditional faith as a good soldier maintains against the enemy a strong position entrusted to his charge. As a mere girl, she struggled hard to obtain ascendency over her wretched husband, Francis II., that through him she and her mother's kinsfolk might rule. Driven from her early home by his death, she heroically strove to undo the work of the Reformation in , and sacrificed her domestic happiness to the prospect of leading the Romanists of England. In her efforts to carry out these impossible tasks, she knew how to win loyal and enthusiastic support, and incurred many bitter and unscrupulous enmities. The real Mary Stuart is neither the suffering saint of her worshippers, nor the graceful tigress of her foes, but a strong, vigorous, hard-hearted though very human figure, well capable of exciting admiration, though undeserving of the deep affection and sympathy she was able, like others of her selfwilled, ill-fated race, to inspire. With her return to in began the personal contest between her and , that was only finally determined by her death twenty-six years later. |
Footnotes: [1] Character of Queen Elizabeth. [2] Elizabeth's statesmen and courtiers. [3] [1558--1603.] [4] William Cecil,1520-1598. [5] Sir Nicholas Bacon, 1509-1579 [6] Sir Robert Cecil, 1563-1612. [7] Sir Francis Walsingham,1536-1590. [8] Robert Dudley,EarlofLeicester,1532-1588. [9] Elizabeth and the Via Media Anglicana. [10] The Parliament of 1559. [11] [1558--1559.] [12] The Act of Supremacy 1559. [13] The Act of Uniformity 1559. [14] General character of the Elizabethan religious Settlement [15] The oldand the new bishops. [16] [1555--1559.] [17] Archbishop Parker,1559-1575. [18] The High Commission Court, 1559. [19] Parker and the Roman Catholics. [20] The MarianExiles and Calvinism [21] The Troubles of Frankfurt, 1555. [22] The Puritan Bishops. [23] Elizabeth and the Puritans. [24] [1559--1588.] [25] The Thirty-nine Articles, 1563. [26] Parker's Advertisements. [27] The Admonition to the Parliament, 1572. [28] Archbishop Grindal,1576-1583. [29] The Prophesyings suppressed. [30] Archbihop Whitgift, 1583-1604. [31] The Martin MarprelateTracts, 1588. [32] [1593--1603.] [33] Death of Penry,1593. [3] The Brownists and thebeginnings of Protestant dissent [34] Beginnings of Anglican theology. [35] Hooker's EcclesiasticalPolity, 1593. [36] Beginnings of the Reformation in Scotland. [37] [1549--1560.] [38] Character and early history of John Knox, 1505-1572 [39] The Lords of the Congregation and Mary of Guise, 1551-1560 [40] Elizabethhelps theScots, 1560. [41] [1560--1561.] [42] The deathof Mary of Guise, and the Treaty of Edinburgh. [43] Establishment of Presbyterianism in Scotland, 1560. [44] Contrast betweenthe English and Scottish Reformation [45] Character and early history ofMary Queen ofScots, 1542 -1561 [46] [1560--1561.] |
