Part 12

The party of Liberty--Castellio, Socinus, Coornhert in the sixteenth century, like Williams and Penn, Locke and Bayle in the seventeenth--were not Protestants on the original foundation. They were Sectaries; and the charge of human freedom was transferred from the churches to the sects, from the men in authority to the men in opposition, to Socinians and Arminians and Independents, and the Society of Friends. By the thoroughness and definiteness of system, and its practical adaptability, Calvinism was the form in which Protestant religion could be best transplanted; and it struck root and flourished in awkward places where Lutheranism could obtain no foothold, in the absence of a sufficient prop. Calvanism spread not only abroad but at home, and robbed Luther of part of Germany, of the Palatinate, of Anhalt, of the House of Brandenburg, and in great part of Hungary. This internal division was a fact of importance later on. It assisted the work of the Counter-Reformation, and became the key to the Thirty Years' War. The same thing that strengthened the Protestant cause abroad weakened it on its own soil. Apart, then, from points of doctrine, the distinctive marks of Calvin's influence are that it promoted expansion, and that it checked the reigning idea that nothing limits the power of the State.

Exactly the reverse of this distinguishes the movement which took place at the same time in England, proceeding from the government before the wave of Reformation struck the shores. Here there were local reminiscences of Lollardry, and a tradition, as old as the Conquest, of resistance to the medieval claims of Rome; but the first impulse did not arise on the domain of religion. From the beginning there was a body of opinion hostile to the king's marriage. The practice was new, it was discountenanced by earlier authorities, and it belonged to the same series of innovations as the recent system of indulgences which roused the resistance of Germany. Precedents were hard to find. Alexander VI had granted the same dispensation to Emmanuel of Portugal, but with misgivings; and had refused it until the king undertook to make war in person against the Moors of Africa. Julius II, coming immediately after, had exacted no such condition from Henry VII, so that he had done what was never done before him. Sixtus V afterwards declared that Clement had deserved the calamities that befell him, because he had not dissolved so unholy a union. Others thought so at the time. No protest could well be heard before 1523, when Adrian censured his predecessors for exceeding their powers. After that it could be no offence to say that Julius was one of those whose conduct was condemned by his next successor but one. But it was still a dangerous point to raise, because any action taken upon it implied a breach with the queen's nephew Charles V, and the loss of the old alliance with the House of Burgundy.

After the triumph of Pavia, the captivity of Francis I, and his defiance of the treaty by which he obtained his deliverance, Wolsey accepted a pension of 10,000 ducats from France, England renounced friendship with the Habsburgs, and the breach was already accomplished. The position of Catharine became intolerable, and she led the opposition to Wolsey, the author of the change. Therefore, from 1526, both the religious and the political motive for silence ceased to operate, and there were, just then, evident motives for speech. There was no hope that Catharine would have a son, and the secret that a queen may reign by her own right, that the nation may be ruled by the distaff, had not been divulged in England. In foreign policy and in home policy alike, there were interests which favoured a new marriage, if its legitimacy could be assured.

Wolsey had an additional inducement to promote what we call the divorce, though it was nothing of the kind, in the fact that the queen was his enemy. He had reasons to hope for success. The armies of Charles had invaded Italy and threatened Rome, and the papal minister, Giberti, enchanted with the zeal of the great English cardinal, wished that he had him at the Vatican in the place of the tremulous and inconstant Clement. Spain was the enemy; England was the ally. It was probable that the Pope would do what he could in the interest of England, to keep up its enmity with Spain. The case was a difficult one, not to be decided on evidence. Something would remain uncertain, and some allowance must be made for good or ill will at Rome. If the invading Imperialists were defeated, the prospects would be good. If they held their ground and made the Pope their dependent, it would be all over with the divorce. Wolsey admitted afterwards that he prompted the attempt, and persuaded the king that he could carry it through. But at first he shifted the responsibility on to the French envoy, Grammont, afterwards a cardinal, who came over to arrange a marriage with Mary Tudor. He said that when he raised some preliminary objection, Grammont lost his temper, and told him that they might be glad of such an offer for a princess who was not legitimate. Another story put into circulation was that Henry had married under protest, and by compulsion, having been warned that if he refused he would be dethroned. Erasmus, who admired Henry, took care to explain that a king of England who lost his throne was likely to lose his life. Wolsey intended to cement the French alliance by a marriage with Renee, daughter of Lewis XII, not believing that Anne Boleyn would be an obstacle. But the friends of Anne, the cluster of English nobles who were weary of being excluded from affairs by the son of the butcher of Ipswich, soon made it clear that she was only to be won by the promise of a crown.

From that moment Wolsey, with all his astuteness, was digging his own pit. If he succeeded, he would fall to make way for the Boleyn faction. If he failed, he involved the Catholic cause in his downfall. The first step in the business was the demand for permission to marry a lady not named, notwithstanding any impediment arising from an intrigue with her sister. With that the secret was out, and they knew at Rome what the king's scruples were worth. This was done behind the cardinal's back. When he took the matter in hand, he asked that the Pope should dissolve the first marriage, on the ground that Julius II had issued a dispensation in terms which could not be justified. That this might not be taken as denying the plenitude of the prerogative, he further asked for a dispensation to marry a second wife without repudiating the first. And he desired that the cause might be judged in this country and not at Rome.

When these negotiations commenced, in the spring and summer of 1527, Rome had been sacked by the Imperialists, and Clement was a prisoner in St. Angelo, or a fugitive at Orvieto, with the strongest motive for resentment against the author of his humiliation. By the summer of 1528, when Lautrec was in Italy at the head of a French army, Clement had conceded virtually the whole of the English demands. He removed every impediment to the marriage with Anne other than the fact that Henry was married already. He authorised the trial of the case in England by Wolsey and Warham; or again, by Wolsey and Campeggio, Archbishop of Bologna, the best jurist of the sacred college. He pronounced on the question of law, leaving questions of fact to the legates, and he pronounced against the terms of the dispensation, intimating that Julius had done what no Pope has a right to do. He promised that judgment as given in England would be final, and that he would not remove the cause to Rome. He was willing that Richmond, the king's son, should marry the king's daughter, Mary Tudor. He did not turn a deaf ear even to the proposal of bigamy. For several years he continued to suggest that Henry should marry Anne Boleyn and renounce the quest of a divorce. In 1530, somebody informed him that this would not do, and that brought him to the last of his resources. He proposed to the Imperialists, in order to prevent a schism, that Henry should live with Anne without marriage and without divorce. That he might not be hopelessly wrong with the Emperor, he required that the most compromising of these documents should be kept secret. His friendliness rose with the French advance and fell with the French disasters. If Lautrec would approach the vicinity of Rome, he said, he would do more, because the Emperor would excuse him on the ground of compulsion. When Campeggio reached England, Lautrec was dead and his army defeated. The papal secretary wrote, "Decide nothing, for the Emperor is victorious, and we cannot afford to provoke him." There was nothing more to be done.

While the Court was sitting in London, the Pope made his peace with Charles; Catharine appealed to him from his legates in England, and he was obliged to call the case before him. The queen's friends demanded the strongest measures, and Aleander wrote that if you resisted Henry VIII he became as gentle as a lamb. Such persuasions did not influence the Pope, who put off action as long as he could, knowing that a breach would inevitably follow. The French Chancellor warned him that he would be known to be acting under pressure of the Emperor, that the censure of Henry would be resented as the victory of Charles. The French defeat in Italy was the ruin of Wolsey, who had caused the breach with Spain without any advantage. A year later, when Campeggio prorogued the Legatine Court, and the divorce had to be given up, he was dismissed.

One further step had to be taken before settling the matter in England. By advice of a Cambridge Don the universities were consulted. They gave various replies, but those that helped the king were not convincing, for they cost him more than L100,000 and he obliged the clergy to give him that sum. As it was obvious for what purpose Henry was arming himself with these opinions, Charles V conceived serious scruples, and thought for a moment that to give way might be the lesser evil. At the same time he sent 450,000 ducats to Rome to facilitate matters; for the divorce was the one pending question which delayed the conclusion of that treaty of Barcelona which laid Italy for centuries at the feet of Spain. The uncertainty in the policy of Rome as the power of the Emperor rose and fell, the open avowal that so much depended on political considerations, besides the strange proposal in respect of two wives, led to a belief in England that the cause was lost by the pressure of interest and fear, not by principle. Therefore, the establishment of the Spanish dominion over Italy was quickly followed by the rejection of papal supremacy in favour of the English state. The bishops themselves were impressed with the danger of allowing the spiritual power to be influenced through the temporal power by an enemy of this country, so that they made no resistance. England broke with the Papacy on these, and not on strictly religious grounds.

Tunstall, coming up to attend Parliament, suffered himself to be stopped by a letter from the king, dispensing with his presence. Fisher alone offered opposition. He caused the royal supremacy to be accepted with the proviso, "so far as the divine law permits." And as this proved only a stepping-stone to the unconditional headship of the Church, he regarded it as his own fault. He refused submission, and put himself in communication with the Imperialists with a view to effective intervention. Sir Thomas More, the most modern and original mind among the men of his time, showed greater caution. He admitted the right of Parliament to determine the succession, and made no struggle for Mary Tudor, as he had made none for her mother. He did not openly contest the royal supremacy until after sentence. Besides these two, a large number of monks were executed during Cromwell's ministry.

Having given up the Pope, the government had no ground for keeping the religious orders. They did not belong to the primitive Church, and some of them, Grey Friars and Black Friars, were an essential part of the medieval system which was rejected with the papal authority. When Rome was taken in 1527, and Clement a prisoner, Wolsey, with some other cardinals, proposed that he should act as his vicar during captivity, so that the Church should not be receiving orders from the Emperor through the Pope. This proposal is a first glimpse of what was now introduced. The idea of a middle course, between Rome and Wittemberg, occurred easily to every constant reader of Erasmus; and many divines of the fifteenth century suggested something similar. What then prevailed was not a theological view, but a political view. The sovereignty of the Modern State, uncontrolled by the opinions of men, commanded the minds both of Cromwell and of Gardiner, rivals though they were. Cromwell is the first public man known to have been a student of Machiavelli's writings; and the first to denounce them was his enemy, Reginald Pole. It is the advent of a new polity. Gardiner believed in it, thinking that nothing else could save Catholicism after the mismanagement of the Church in Germany. And it is the dominant note of the following years, whichever party was prevailing.

That is the broad distinction between the continental Reformation and the contemporary event in England. The one was the strongest religious movement in the history of Christendom; the other was borne onward on the crest of a wave not less overwhelming, the state that admits no division of power. Therefore, when the spirit of foreign Protestantism caught the English people they moved on lines distinct from those fixed by the Tudors; and the reply of the seventeenth century to the sixteenth was not a development, but a reaction. Whereas Henry could exclude, or impose, or change religion at will with various aid from the gibbet, the block, or the stake, there were some among the Puritans who enforced, though they did not discover, the contrary principle, that a man's conscience is his castle, with kings and parliaments at a respectful distance.

VII

PHILIP II, MARY STUART, AND ELIZABETH

THE MONARCHY of Philip II was held by no binding idea, but religious unity. The dynasty was new, and the king was not personally imposing or attractive. The people of Palermo, Milan, Antwerp, had no motive to make sacrifices, except the fact that their king was the one upholder of religion in Europe. Catholics in every country were his natural allies.

Charles V, who accepted inevitable divisions in Germany, had established the Inquisition in the Netherlands. Under Philip that policy was consistent, and promised, in the flood of the Counter-Reformation, to be a source of power. He would not fall behind his father. He drove the Netherlands into rebellion; but his intention was intelligible. In the sixteenth century the pride of state does as much for oppression and intolerance as religious passion. If he succeeded in repressing heresy, he would have a very real political advantage over other powers. In October 1565 he wrote: "As to the Inquisition, my will is that it be enforced by the Inquisitors as of old, and as is required by all law, human and divine. This lies very near my heart, and I require you to carry out my orders. Let all prisoners be put to death, and suffer them no longer to escape through the neglect, weakness, and bad faith of the judges. If any are too timid to execute the edicts, I will replace them by men who have more heart and zeal."

By this scheme of violence Philip II turned the Reformation into revolution. He saw that generally nothing was more striking than the ease with which people changed religious profession; and he believed that what was done with success in Germany and Austria and England, could be done in the seven provinces of the Burgundian crown. The leaders of the popular movement were men of rank, like Egmont and William of Orange, men not likely to go to extremes. And it was an axiom that the masses are always led by few, and cannot act of themselves. But in the Netherlands more than elsewhere the forms, if not the reality, of freedom were preserved, and the sovereign was not absolute. Moreover, he governed from a distance, and, in addition to his constitutional caution and procrastination, correspondence was very slow.

The endeavour of Philip to substitute his will for self-government provoked a Catholic and aristocratic opposition, followed by a democratic and Protestant movement, which proved more difficult to deal with. The nobles were overcome by the strong measures of Alva. The Gueux were defeated by Don Juan and Farnese, after the recall of Alva. And it seemed, for many years, that the movement would fail. It is to the statesmanship of William the Silent, who was neither a great soldier nor a strong churchman, that they owed their success. He failed, indeed, to keep Protestants and Catholics together on a wide basis of toleration. In 1579 the southern provinces returned to Spain, and the northern provinces cast off their allegiance. But, by the union of Utrecht, they founded that confederacy which became one of the foremost powers in the world, and the first of revolutionary origin. The southern provinces remained Catholic. The northern were, in great measure, Protestant, but with a large Catholic population. William, the Stadtholder, was killed by an assassin in 1584, before his work was done. He had brought in Alencon, Elizabeth's suitor, that he might secure the help of France. But Alencon proved a traitor; and during the proconsulate of Farnese, Duke of Parma, the Spaniards gained much ground.

Philip II stood at the height of his power in the middle of the eighties. He had annexed Portugal, with its immense colonial empire. By the death of Alencon, the King of Navarre, who was a Huguenot, became the heir to the crown of France, and the Catholic party looked to Spain for their salvation. Now, after many patient years, he prepared for war with England. For Drake was ravaging Spanish territory; and an English army under Leicester, having occupied the Netherlands after the death of William, though they accomplished little, gave just cause for an open quarrel. Whenever, in the course of the Counter-Reformation, it came to a duel between Spain and England, the fate of Protestantism would be staked on the issue. That conflict was finally brought about, not by the revolt of the Netherlands, but by the most tragic of all histories, that begins at Holyrood with the murder of Riccio and ends twenty-one years later at Fotheringay.

When Mary Stuart came to Scotland the country had just become Protestant. She did not interfere with the settlement, but refused to permit the suppression of Catholicism, and became, in opposition to the most violent of the reformers, a champion of religious toleration. John Knox differed from all the Protestant founders in his desire that the Catholics should be exterminated, root and branch, either by the ministry of State, or by the self-help of all Christian men. Calvin, in his letter to Somerset, went very far in the same direction, but not so far as this. The nobles, or rather the heads of clans, in whom the power of society resided, having secured the Church lands, were not so zealous as their preachers, and the queen succeeded in detaching them. Mary was religious without ferocity, and did not share the passions of her time. She would have been willing to marry Leicester, and to make herself dependent on English policy, but Elizabeth refused to acknowledge her right of succession, and drove her to seek connection with the Catholic Powers. She wished at one time to marry Don Carlos, that, having been Queen of France, she might become Queen of Spain. This was impossible; and so she became the wife of Darnley, who united the blood of the Tudors and the Stuarts. She belonged, on her mother's side, to the house of Guise, whose princes were leaders of the militant Counter-Reformation. The duke, who had slaughtered the Huguenots at Vassy, was now dead. But his brother, the Cardinal, who afterwards claimed the merit of a more signal massacre, was still an important personage in Church and State. Mary, appearing on this background of sanguinary uncles, was believed to be an adherent of their policy, and to take part in all extremes of the Catholic reaction.

Riccio, the Piedmontese secretary, through whom she corresponded with foreign princes, was hated accordingly; and Darnley, who attributed to the Italian's influence his own exclusion from power, consented that he should be made away with. The accomplices who wrought the deed took care that Mary should know that they acted with his approval; and when she found herself the wife of an assassin and a coward, the breach ensued which was sometimes dissembled but never repaired. Three months later their son was born, but Darnley was not present at the christening. His enemies advised the Queen to obtain a divorce, but she objected that it would injure the prospects of her son. Maitland then hinted that there might be other ways of getting rid of him. Mary did not yield consent; but the idea once started was followed up, and the king was doomed to death by what was called the Bond of Craigmillar.

At the end of 1566 he fell seriously ill at his father's house at Glasgow. Mary came, spent three days with him, and an explanation took place, amounting apparently to a reconciliation. Darnley was taken to Edinburgh, and lodged about a mile from Holyrood, at Kirk-o'-Field, where he was repeatedly visited by the queen. On the night of 9th February she went away to attend a ball, and three hours after she had left him his house was blown up, and he was found in the garden, strangled. Nobody doubted at the time, or has ever doubted since, that the crime was committed by the Earl of Bothwell, a rough and resolute soldier, whose ambition taught him to seek fortune as a supporter of the throne. He filled Edinburgh with his troops, stood his trial, and was at once acquitted. Thereupon his friends, and some who were not his friends, acting under pressure, resolved that he should marry the queen. As a widow, she was helpless. Bothwell possessed the energy which Darnley wanted, and, as he was a Protestant, the queen would be less isolated. He had killed her husband; but then her husband was himself a murderer, who deserved his fate. Bothwell, encouraged by many of the Lords, had only executed justice on a contemptible criminal. There was a debt of gratitude owing to him for what he had done.

Public decorum forbade that the queen should ostensibly accept the offer of a man who made her a widow ten weeks before. Therefore Bothwell waylaid the queen at the Brig of Almond, some miles from Edinburgh, dispersed her attendants, and carried her off to Dunbar. There was a difficulty about the marriage, because he was married already. He now procured a divorce, and, ten days after the outrage at Almond Brig, they reappeared at Edinburgh. The queen publicly forgave Bothwell for what he had done, made him a duke, and, on 15th May, three months after the explosion at Kirk-o'-Field, married him according to the Presbyterian rite. The significant sequence of these events gave an irresistible advantage to her enemies. It was an obvious inference that she had been a party to the murder of the king, when she was so eager to marry the man that slew him. The only answer would be by discarding him. Nobody could think the son safe in the hands of his father's murderer.

Either the Lords must get the queen into their power, or they must dethrone her and govern Scotland during the long minority of her son. The forces met at Carberry Hill. There was no fight. Mary hoped, by a temporary parting from her third husband, to save her crown. She passed into captivity, was shut up at Loch Leven, and compelled to abdicate. The Protestant interest was at last supreme.

Mary escaped from her island prison, gathered an army, gave battle at Langside, and lost it, and then, losing courage before her cause was helpless, fled to England, in the belief that Elizabeth would save her.

From the death of Darnley, still more after her Protestant marriage, she had ceased to be the champion of her own Church. That was again her position when she came to England. There, she was heir to the throne, and the centre of all the hopes and efforts to preserve or to restore Catholicism.

The story of Mary Stuart cannot be told without an understanding in regard to the Casket Letters. They are still the object of an incessant controversy, and the problem, although it has made progress of late, and the interest increases with the increase of daylight, remains unsolved. The view to be taken of the events depends essentially on the question of authenticity. If the letters are what they seem to be, the letters of the queen to Bothwell, then she is implicated in the murder of her husband. If they are not authentic, then there is no evidence of her guilt. Everybody must satisfy himself on this point before he can understand the ruin of the Catholic cause in Scotland and in England, and the consequent arrest of the Counter-Reformation in Europe.

At the same time the issue does not seriously affect the judgment of History on the character of the queen herself. She repeatedly expressed her delight in murder, and her gratitude to those who executed or attempted it, and stands on the same level of morality with the queen her mother-in-law, or with the queen her rival. But the general estimate does not throw light on the particular action, and supplies no help in a hanging matter.

The opinion of historians inclines, on the whole, in her favour. About fifty writers have considered the original evidences sufficiently to form something like an independent conclusion. Eighteen of these condemn Mary, thirty pronounce her not guilty; two cannot make up their minds. Most of the Catholics absolve, and among Protestants there is an equal number for and against. The greater names are on the hostile side. They do not carry weight with us, because they decided upon evidence less complete than that which we possess. Four of the greatest, Robertson, Ranke, Burton, Froude, were all misled by the same damaging mistake. The equal division of the Protestants shows how little any religious bias has had to do with the inquiry; so that the overwhelming majority on the Catholic side requires explanation.