DEATH OF EDWARD.

249

all of whom, except Judge Hales, concurred in it, and above all, by the entreaties of Edward himself, who represented the hopeless condition to which the Reformation would be reduced by acquiescing in the natural descent of the crown (as if the wrath of man was to work the righteousness of God), in an evil hour, he took the pen and signed the document and what was tantamount to his own death-warrant together.

And now Edward, having finished his short but saintly course, his sixteenth year not yet completed, commended his people to God, especially beseeching him that he "would defend his realm from papistry;" and then, as he sunk in the arms of Sir Henry Sidney, he exclaimed, "I am faint; Lord, have mercy on me, and receive my spirit;" and so he departed. Thus ended this reign of mercy for ill as the principle of toleration was in those days understood, violently as it had been outraged by Henry, who preceded, and as it was destined to be by Mary, who followed him, during the six years that Edward sat upon the throne, neither in Smithfield, nor in any other quarter of the realm, did any man suffer for religious opinion, whether Catholic or Protestant, save the two of whom mention has been made already—the Dutchman and Joan of Kent. And even in cases of imprisonment and deprivation, as in those of Bonner, Bishop of London, and Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, the parties were proceeded against rather as political than religious delinquents, rather as rebels than

1 Fox, ii. 554.

heretics; a doctrine being sedulously taught by these and other leaders of the Catholic party, and echoed back both by the Princess Mary and by the insurgents of Devon, that neither were the decrees of the council binding, the regal power not being transferable, nor yet those of the King, he being still a minor; wherefore, that the laws of the land, as Henry left them, were those which were to be obeyed until the king should come of age, and none other. It is obvious that such a principle, generally acknowledged and acted upon, would have ended in leaving the country without any government at all; for if the old statutes should prove inapplicable to an unforeseen emergency, and there were no authority adequate to supply the defect, anarchy must ensue. It is true that advantage was sometimes taken of overt acts of non-conformity on which to prosecute, because where there might be moral, there might not be legal, evidence of disaffection, the offence being difficult of proof; still here the gravamen no doubt lay of many of the charges preferred against the Roman Catholic dignitaries, and of the penalties inflicted on them in the reign of Edward; and the necessity which lay upon the council of seeing that the commonwealth took no damage at their hands in those dangerous times, may be thought to excuse proceedings which, however, were attended by some aggravating circumstances of rigour but too common in those days.

It is impossible to contemplate the death of

1 Burnet, ii. 127. 165.

THE REFORMERS IN DANGER.

251

Edward without feeling for Cranmer and his colleagues in the Reformation. Their hearts might well sink within them in that hour. They had gone boldly forward in their great enterprise, beholding the danger before their eyes, for they could not be blind to it, but determined to do their duty and fear not; exasperating the Catholic party, headed as it was by a most bigoted princess, then the presumptive, now the actual, possessor of the throne; nor shrinking from incurring her personal displeasure, where the interests of religion required the risk, by the honest counsel they gave with respect to the concessions due to her, or the privileges which it was fitting to deny or to resume. Now they were in the situation which they must have long foreseen was likely to be their lot at the mercy of an implacable foe. And the days and nights of anxiety which they must have spent at this crisis, waiting for the policy of Mary to disclose itself, must be carried to the account of those silent sufferings which formed no small part of the purchase-money paid for the church they bequeathed to us, and which were more insupportable, perhaps, however less imposing, than the fire and the faggot itself.

CHAPTER XII.

MARY.-SUPPRESSION OF THE REFORMATION. - PERSECUTION OF THE REFORMERS.-FOX'S ACTS AND MONUMENTS.

THAT God seeth not as man seeth, is a truth which he, who reads history aright, must soon be taught. Cranmer, overcome by his apprehensions for the safety of the reformed church under a Catholic queen, had acted from a principle of expediency, and placed, as far as an individual could, the Lady Jane Grey on a throne which did not belong to her. Had the event turned out as he hoped, had her seat been established, and Mary been set aside for ever, it is probable that the Protestant cause, the very object which this act of injustice was meant to serve, would never have been so successful as it proved; for it would have been still further stripped of its temporal supports, and it would not have been consecrated by the blood of the martyr. God therefore ordained for it the fiery trial; and the Lady Jane was deposed almost as soon as she was proclaimed, to make way for her sincere but narrow-minded successor.

Cranmer has fallen upon evil tongues, both in his life and in his memory. A report was spread that he had declared for the mass; and, indeed, that it had been actually restored, under his sanction,

in his own cathedral at Canterbury; a charge which he repelled in terms the most indignant, saying, that it was not he that set it up there, but "a false, flattering, lying, and dissembling monk," one Dr. Thornden, whilst at the same time he challenged the adversaries of the Reformation to a public discussion of its principles, the soundness of which he undertook, to maintain. Yet Neal, who was not ignorant of these facts, ungenerously keeps them back till he has indulged in the repetition of the slander1; thus doling out reluctant and compulsive justice to a man whose character Protestants ought surely to protect with jealousy, be their denomination what it may. The challenge, however, though it was not accepted was not overlooked; and Cranmer was cited before the Queen's commissioners, whether upon the charge of heresy or treason or both, and was ordered to keep his house at Lambeth. In the interval which elapsed before he was finally committed to the Tower, he had probably ample opportunity to escape, and was urged by his friends to profit by it, but a sense of what was due to himself, and to those who looked up to him as the leader of the Reformation in England, constrained him; and whilst he advised the less conspicuous persons of his party to flee for their lives, as not being so deeply pledged, as not in the same degree prejudicing their cause by the abandonment of their country, and as having Scripture for their warrant if they fled, he determined for himself to

1 Hist. of the Puritans, part i. chap. iii. at the beginning.