A Child's History of England

by Dickens, Charles

  comforted him, at that pass, to have assisted in reforming the

  national religion, a member of the Council was seen riding up on

  horseback. They again thought that the Duke was saved by his

  bringing a reprieve, and again shouted for joy. But the Duke

  himself told them they were mistaken, and laid down his head and

  had it struck off at a blow.

  Many of the bystanders rushed forward and steeped their

  handkerchiefs in his blood, as a mark of their affection. He had,

  indeed, been capable of many good acts, and one of them was

  discovered after he was no more. The Bishop of Durham, a very good

  man, had been informed against to the Council, when the Duke was in

  power, as having answered a treacherous letter proposing a

  rebellion against the reformed religion. As the answer could not

  be found, he could not be declared guilty; but it was now

  discovered, hidden by the Duke himself among some private papers,

  in his regard for that good man. The Bishop lost his office, and

  was deprived of his possessions.

  It is not very pleasant to know that while his uncle lay in prison

  under sentence of death, the young King was being vastly

  entertained by plays, and dances, and sham fights: but there is no

  doubt of it, for he kept a journal himself. It is pleasanter to

  know that not a single Roman Catholic was burnt in this reign for

  holding that religion; though two wretched victims suffered for

  heresy. One, a woman named JOAN BOCHER, for professing some

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  opinions that even she could only explain in unintelligible jargon.

  The other, a Dutchman, named VON PARIS, who practised as a surgeon

  in London. Edward was, to his credit, exceedingly unwilling to

  sign the warrant for the woman's execution: shedding tears before

  he did so, and telling Cranmer, who urged him to do it (though

  Cranmer really would have spared the woman at first, but for her

  own determined obstinacy), that the guilt was not his, but that of

  the man who so strongly urged the dreadful act. We shall see, too

  soon, whether the time ever came when Cranmer is likely to have

  remembered this with sorrow and remorse.

  Cranmer and RIDLEY (at first Bishop of Rochester, and afterwards

  Bishop of London) were the most powerful of the clergy of this

  reign. Others were imprisoned and deprived of their property for

  still adhering to the unreformed religion; the most important among

  whom were GARDINER Bishop of Winchester, HEATH Bishop of Worcester,

  DAY Bishop of Chichester, and BONNER that Bishop of London who was

  superseded by Ridley. The Princess Mary, who inherited her

  mother's gloomy temper, and hated the reformed religion as

  connected with her mother's wrongs and sorrows - she knew nothing

  else about it, always refusing to read a single book in which it

  was truly described - held by the unreformed religion too, and was

  the only person in the kingdom for whom the old Mass was allowed to

  be performed; nor would the young King have made that exception

  even in her favour, but for the strong persuasions of Cranmer and

  Ridley. He always viewed it with horror; and when he fell into a

  sickly condition, after having been very ill, first of the measles

  and then of the small-pox, he was greatly troubled in mind to think

  that if he died, and she, the next heir to the throne, succeeded,

  the Roman Catholic religion would be set up again.

  This uneasiness, the Duke of Northumberland was not slow to

  encourage: for, if the Princess Mary came to the throne, he, who

  had taken part with the Protestants, was sure to be disgraced.

  Now, the Duchess of Suffolk was descended from King Henry the

  Seventh; and, if she resigned what little or no right she had, in

  favour of her daughter LADY JANE GREY, that would be the succession

  to promote the Duke's greatness; because LORD GUILFORD DUDLEY, one

  of his sons, was, at this very time, newly married to her. So, he

  worked upon the King's fears, and persuaded him to set aside both

  the Princess Mary and the Princess Elizabeth, and assert his right

  to appoint his successor. Accordingly the young King handed to the

  Crown lawyers a writing signed half a dozen times over by himself,

  appointing Lady Jane Grey to succeed to the Crown, and requiring

  them to have his will made out according to law. They were much

  against it at first, and told the King so; but the Duke of

  Northumberland - being so violent about it that the lawyers even

  expected him to beat them, and hotly declaring that, stripped to

  his shirt, he would fight any man in such a quarrel - they yielded.

  Cranmer, also, at first hesitated; pleading that he had sworn to

  maintain the succession of the Crown to the Princess Mary; but, he

  was a weak man in his resolutions, and afterwards signed the

  document with the rest of the council.

  It was completed none too soon; for Edward was now sinking in a

  rapid decline; and, by way of making him better, they handed him

  over to a woman-doctor who pretended to be able to cure it. He

  speedily got worse. On the sixth of July, in the year one thousand

  five hundred and fifty-three, he died, very peaceably and piously,

  praying God, with his last breath, to protect the reformed

  religion.

  This King died in the sixteenth year of his age, and in the seventh

  of his reign. It is difficult to judge what the character of one

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  so young might afterwards have become among so many bad, ambitious,

  quarrelling nobles. But, he was an amiable boy, of very good

  abilities, and had nothing coarse or cruel or brutal in his

  disposition - which in the son of such a father is rather

  surprising.

  CHAPTER XXX - ENGLAND UNDER MARY

  THE Duke of Northumberland was very anxious to keep the young

  King's death a secret, in order that he might get the two

  Princesses into his power. But, the Princess Mary, being informed

  of that event as she was on her way to London to see her sick

  brother, turned her horse's head, and rode away into Norfolk. The

  Earl of Arundel was her friend, and it was he who sent her warning

  of what had happened.

  As the secret could not be kept, the Duke of Northumberland and the

  council sent for the Lord Mayor of London and some of the aldermen,

  and made a merit of telling it to them. Then, they made it known

  to the people, and set off to inform Lady Jane Grey that she was to

  be Queen.

  She was a pretty girl of only sixteen, and was amiable, learned,

  and clever. When the lords who came to her, fell on their knees

  before her, and told her what tidings they brought, she was so

  astonished that she fainted. On recovering, she expressed her

  sorrow for the young King's death, and said that she knew she was

  unfit to govern the kingdom; but that if she must be Queen, she

  prayed God to direct her. She was then at Sion House, near

  Brentford; and the lords took her down the river in state to th
e

  Tower, that she might remain there (as the custom was) until she

  was crowned. But the people were not at all favourable to Lady

  Jane, considering that the right to be Queen was Mary's, and

  greatly disliking the Duke of Northumberland. They were not put

  into a better humour by the Duke's causing a vintner's servant, one

  Gabriel Pot, to be taken up for expressing his dissatisfaction

  among the crowd, and to have his ears nailed to the pillory, and

  cut off. Some powerful men among the nobility declared on Mary's

  side. They raised troops to support her cause, had her proclaimed

  Queen at Norwich, and gathered around her at the castle of

  Framlingham, which belonged to the Duke of Norfolk. For, she was

  not considered so safe as yet, but that it was best to keep her in

  a castle on the sea-coast, from whence she might be sent abroad, if

  necessary.

  The Council would have despatched Lady Jane's father, the Duke of

  Suffolk, as the general of the army against this force; but, as

  Lady Jane implored that her father might remain with her, and as he

  was known to be but a weak man, they told the Duke of

  Northumberland that he must take the command himself. He was not

  very ready to do so, as he mistrusted the Council much; but there

  was no help for it, and he set forth with a heavy heart, observing

  to a lord who rode beside him through Shoreditch at the head of the

  troops, that, although the people pressed in great numbers to look

  at them, they were terribly silent.

  And his fears for himself turned out to be well founded. While he

  was waiting at Cambridge for further help from the Council, the

  Council took it into their heads to turn their backs on Lady Jane's

  cause, and to take up the Princess Mary's. This was chiefly owing

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  to the before-mentioned Earl of Arundel, who represented to the

  Lord Mayor and aldermen, in a second interview with those sagacious

  persons, that, as for himself, he did not perceive the Reformed

  religion to be in much danger - which Lord Pembroke backed by

  flourishing his sword as another kind of persuasion. The Lord

  Mayor and aldermen, thus enlightened, said there could be no doubt

  that the Princess Mary ought to be Queen. So, she was proclaimed

  at the Cross by St. Paul's, and barrels of wine were given to the

  people, and they got very drunk, and danced round blazing bonfires

  - little thinking, poor wretches, what other bonfires would soon be

  blazing in Queen Mary's name.

  After a ten days' dream of royalty, Lady Jane Grey resigned the

  Crown with great willingness, saying that she had only accepted it

  in obedience to her father and mother; and went gladly back to her

  pleasant house by the river, and her books. Mary then came on

  towards London; and at Wanstead in Essex, was joined by her halfsister,

  the Princess Elizabeth. They passed through the streets of

  London to the Tower, and there the new Queen met some eminent

  prisoners then confined in it, kissed them, and gave them their

  liberty. Among these was that Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, who

  had been imprisoned in the last reign for holding to the unreformed

  religion. Him she soon made chancellor.

  The Duke of Northumberland had been taken prisoner, and, together

  with his son and five others, was quickly brought before the

  Council. He, not unnaturally, asked that Council, in his defence,

  whether it was treason to obey orders that had been issued under

  the great seal; and, if it were, whether they, who had obeyed them

  too, ought to be his judges? But they made light of these points;

  and, being resolved to have him out of the way, soon sentenced him

  to death. He had risen into power upon the death of another man,

  and made but a poor show (as might be expected) when he himself lay

  low. He entreated Gardiner to let him live, if it were only in a

  mouse's hole; and, when he ascended the scaffold to be beheaded on

  Tower Hill, addressed the people in a miserable way, saying that he

  had been incited by others, and exhorting them to return to the

  unreformed religion, which he told them was his faith. There seems

  reason to suppose that he expected a pardon even then, in return

  for this confession; but it matters little whether he did or not.

  His head was struck off.

  Mary was now crowned Queen. She was thirty-seven years of age,

  short and thin, wrinkled in the face, and very unhealthy. But she

  had a great liking for show and for bright colours, and all the

  ladies of her Court were magnificently dressed. She had a great

  liking too for old customs, without much sense in them; and she was

  oiled in the oldest way, and blessed in the oldest way, and done

  all manner of things to in the oldest way, at her coronation. I

  hope they did her good.

  She soon began to show her desire to put down the Reformed

  religion, and put up the unreformed one: though it was dangerous

  work as yet, the people being something wiser than they used to be.

  They even cast a shower of stones - and among them a dagger - at

  one of the royal chaplains who attacked the Reformed religion in a

  public sermon. But the Queen and her priests went steadily on.

  Ridley, the powerful bishop of the last reign, was seized and sent

  to the Tower. LATIMER, also celebrated among the Clergy of the

  last reign, was likewise sent to the Tower, and Cranmer speedily

  followed. Latimer was an aged man; and, as his guards took him

  through Smithfield, he looked round it, and said, 'This is a place

  that hath long groaned for me.' For he knew well, what kind of

  bonfires would soon be burning. Nor was the knowledge confined to

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  him. The prisons were fast filled with the chief Protestants, who

  were there left rotting in darkness, hunger, dirt, and separation

  from their friends; many, who had time left them for escape, fled

  from the kingdom; and the dullest of the people began, now, to see

  what was coming.

  It came on fast. A Parliament was got together; not without strong

  suspicion of unfairness; and they annulled the divorce, formerly

  pronounced by Cranmer between the Queen's mother and King Henry the

  Eighth, and unmade all the laws on the subject of religion that had

  been made in the last King Edward's reign. They began their

  proceedings, in violation of the law, by having the old mass said

  before them in Latin, and by turning out a bishop who would not

  kneel down. They also declared guilty of treason, Lady Jane Grey

  for aspiring to the Crown; her husband, for being her husband; and

  Cranmer, for not believing in the mass aforesaid. They then prayed

  the Queen graciously to choose a husband for herself, as soon as

  might be.

  Now, the question who should be the Queen's husband had given rise

  to a great deal of discussion, and to several contending parties.

  Some said Cardinal Pole was the man - but the Queen was of opinion

  that he was NOT t
he man, he being too old and too much of a

  student. Others said that the gallant young COURTENAY, whom the

  Queen had made Earl of Devonshire, was the man - and the Queen

  thought so too, for a while; but she changed her mind. At last it

  appeared that PHILIP, PRINCE OF SPAIN, was certainly the man -

  though certainly not the people's man; for they detested the idea

  of such a marriage from the beginning to the end, and murmured that

  the Spaniard would establish in England, by the aid of foreign

  soldiers, the worst abuses of the Popish religion, and even the

  terrible Inquisition itself.

  These discontents gave rise to a conspiracy for marrying young

  Courtenay to the Princess Elizabeth, and setting them up, with

  popular tumults all over the kingdom, against the Queen. This was

  discovered in time by Gardiner; but in Kent, the old bold county,

  the people rose in their old bold way. SIR THOMAS WYAT, a man of

  great daring, was their leader. He raised his standard at

  Maidstone, marched on to Rochester, established himself in the old

  castle there, and prepared to hold out against the Duke of Norfolk,

  who came against him with a party of the Queen's guards, and a body

  of five hundred London men. The London men, however, were all for

  Elizabeth, and not at all for Mary. They declared, under the

  castle walls, for Wyat; the Duke retreated; and Wyat came on to

  Deptford, at the head of fifteen thousand men.

  But these, in their turn, fell away. When he came to Southwark,

  there were only two thousand left. Not dismayed by finding the

  London citizens in arms, and the guns at the Tower ready to oppose

  his crossing the river there, Wyat led them off to Kingston-upon-

  Thames, intending to cross the bridge that he knew to be in that

  place, and so to work his way round to Ludgate, one of the old

  gates of the City. He found the bridge broken down, but mended it,

  came across, and bravely fought his way up Fleet Street to Ludgate

  Hill. Finding the gate closed against him, he fought his way back

  again, sword in hand, to Temple Bar. Here, being overpowered, he

  surrendered himself, and three or four hundred of his men were

  taken, besides a hundred killed. Wyat, in a moment of weakness

  (and perhaps of torture) was afterwards made to accuse the Princess

  Elizabeth as his accomplice to some very small extent. But his