by Will Durant
In St. Mary’s Church, Oxford, on the morning of his death (March 21, 1556), he read his seventh and last recantation. Then, to the astonishment of all present, he added:
And now I come to the great thing, which so much troubleth my conscience more than anything that ever I did or said in my whole life, and that is the setting abroad of a writing contrary to the truth; which now here I renounce and refuse... as written for fear of death... and that is, all such bills and papers which I have written or signed with my hand since my degradation.... And forasmuch as my hand offended, writing contrary to my heart, my hand shall first be punished therefor, for... it shall be first burned. And as for the pope, I refuse him as Christ’s enemy and Antichrist.63
On the pyre, as the flames neared his body, he stretched out his hand into them, and held it there, says Foxe, “steadfast and immovable... that all men might see his hand burned before his body was touched. And using often the words of Stephen, ‘Lord, receive my spirit,’ in the greatness of the flame he gave up the ghost.”64
His death marked the zenith of the persecution. Some 300 persons died in its course, 273 of them in the last four years of the reign. As the holocaust advanced it became clear that it had been a mistake. Protestantism drew strength from its martyrs as early Christianity had done, and many Catholics were disturbed in their faith, and shamed in their Queen, by the sufferings and fortitude of the victims. Bishop Bonner, though he did not enjoy the work, came to be called “Bloody Bonner” because his diocese saw most of the executions; one woman called him “the common cutthroat and general slaughter-slave to all the bishops in England.”65 Hundreds of English Protestants found refuge in Catholic France, and labored there to bring the sorry reign to an end. Henry II, while persecuting French Protestants, encouraged English plots against Catholic Mary, whose marriage with the King of Spain left France surrounded by hostile powers. In April 1556, British agents discovered a conspiracy, led by Sir Henry Dudley, to depose Mary and enthrone Elizabeth. Several arrests were made, including two members of Elizabeth’s household; one confession implicated Elizabeth herself, and the French King. The movement was suppressed, but it left Mary in constant fear of assassination.
One group of fugitives encountered tribulations that reveal the dogmatic temper of the times. Jan Laski, a Polish Calvinist, had come to London in 1548, and had founded there the first Presbyterian church in England. A month after Mary’s accession Laski and part of his congregation left London in two Danish vessels. At Copenhagen they were denied entry unless they signed the official Lutheran confession of faith. As firm Calvinists, they declined. Refused permission to land, they sailed to Wismar, Lübeck, and Hamburg, and in each case met with the same demand and repulse.66 The Lutherans of Germany shed no tears over Mary’s victims, but denounced them as detestable heretics and “Devil’s martyrs” for denying the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.67 Calvin condemned the merciless sectarianism of the Lutherans, and in that year (1553) burned Servetus at the stake. After buffeting the North Sea through most of the winter, the refugees at last found entry and humanity at Emden.
Mary moved with somber fatality to her end. Her pious husband, now anomalously at war with the papacy as well as with France, came to England (March 20, 1557) and urged the Queen to bring Britain into the war as his ally. To make his mission less hateful to the English, he persuaded Mary to moderate the persecution.68 But he could not so easily win public support; on the contrary, a month after his arrival, Thomas Stafford, a nephew of Cardinal Pole, fomented a rebellion with a view to freeing England from both Mary and Philip. He was defeated and hanged (May 28, 1557). To fill the Queen’s cup of misery the Pope in that month repudiated Pole as papal legate, and accused him of heresy. On June 7 Mary, anxious to please Philip, and convinced that Henry II had supported Stafford’s plot, declared war against France. Having accomplished his purpose, Philip left England in July. Mary suspected that she would never see him again. “I will live the rest of my days without the company of men,” she said.69 In this unwanted war England lost Calais (January 6, 1558), which it had held for 211 years; and the thousands of Englishmen and women who had lived there, and now fled as penniless fugitives to Britain, spread the bitter charge that Mary’s government had been criminally negligent in defending England’s last possession on the Continent. Philip made a peace favorable to himself, without requiring the restoration of Calais. It was an old phrase that that precious port was “the brightest jewel in the English crown.” Mary added another mot to the tale: “When I am dead and opened you will find Calais lying in my heart.”70
Early in 1558 the Queen again thought herself pregnant. She made her will in expectation of a dangerous delivery, and dispatched a message to Philip beseeching his presence at the happy event. He sent his congratulations, but he did not have to come; Mary was mistaken. She was now quite forlorn, perhaps in some measure insane. She sat for hours on the floor with knees drawn up to her chin; she wandered like a ghost through the palace galleries; she wrote tear-blotted letters to a King who, anticipating her death, ordered his agents in England to incline the heart of Elizabeth toward marriage with some Spanish grandee, or with Philip himself.
In Mary’s final summers a plague of ague fever moved through England. In September 1558, it struck the Queen. Combined with dropsy and “a superfluity of black bile,” it so weakened her that her will to live fell away. On November 6 she sent the crown jewels to Elizabeth. It was a gracious act, in which love of the Church yielded to her desire to give England an orderly succession. She suffered long periods of unconsciousness; from one of these she awoke to tell how she had happily dreamed of children playing and singing before her.71 On November 17 she heard Mass early, and uttered the responses ardently. Before dawn she died.
On the same day died Cardinal Pole, as profoundly defeated as his Queen. In estimating him we must record the bitter fact that at the beginning of his last month he had condemned three men and two women to be burned for heresy. It is true that all parties except the Anabaptists, in those years of mad certainty, agreed that religious unity had to be preserved, even, if necessary, by punishing dissent with death. But nowhere in contemporary Christendom—not even in Spain—were so many men and women burned for their opinions as during Reginald Pole’s primacy of the English Church.
For Mary we may speak a more lenient word. Grief, illness, and many suffered wrongs had warped her mind. Her clemency passed into cruelty only after conspiracies had sought to deprive her of her crown on her head. She listened too trustingly to ecclesiastics who, having themselves been persecuted, sought revenge. Till the end she thought she was fulfilling by murder her obligations to the faith which she loved as the vital medium of her life. She does not quite deserve the name of “Bloody Mary,” unless we are to spread that adjective over all her time; it simolifies pitilessly a character in which there had been much to love. It is her strange distinction that she carried on the work of her father in alienating England from Rome. She showed to an England still Catholic the worst side of the Church she served. When she died England was readier than before to accept the new faith that she had labored to destroy.
CHAPTER XXVII
From Robert Bruce to John Knox
1300–1561
I. THE INDOMITABLE SCOTS
THE warm and genial south generates civilization; the cold and hardy north repeatedly conquers the lax and lazy south, and absorbs and transforms civilization. The extreme north—Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Finland—fights the almost Arctic elements to provide some welcome to civilization, and to contribute to it in the face of a thousand obstacles.
In Scotland the sterile, roadless Highlands encouraged feudalism and discouraged culture, while the green and fertile Lowlands invited invasion after invasion by Englishmen who could not understand why Scotland should not receive their overflow and their kings. The Scots, anciently Celtic, medievally mingled with Irish, Norse, Angles, Saxons, and Normans, had by 1500 merged into a people narrow as th
eir peninsula in feelings and ideas, deep as their mists in superstition and mythology, proud as their promontories, rough as their terrain, impetuous as their torrents; at once ferocious and tender, cruel and brave, and always invincible. Poverty seemed rooted in geography, and manners in poverty; so parsimony grew out of the grudging soil. The peasants were too burdened with toil to have time for letters, and the nobles who kept them in bondage prided themselves on illiteracy, finding no use for the alphabet in their feuds or wars. The mountains and clans divided the sparse population into passionate jealousies that gave no quarter in war, no security in peace. The nobles, having nearly all the military power in their private bands, dominated the Parliament and the kings; the Douglases alone had 5,000 retainers, and revenues rivaling the Crown’s.
Before 1500 industry was primitive and domestic, commerce was precarious, cities were few and small. All Scotland had then some 600,000 inhabitants—half of Glasgow’s number today. Glasgow was a minor fishing town; Perth was, till 1452, the capital; Edinburgh had 16,000 souls. The individual, local, and national spirit of independence expressed itself in village and township institutions of self-government within the framework of feudalism and monarchy. The burghers—the enfranchised citizens of the towns—were allowed representatives in the Parliament or Assembly of Estates, but they had to sit, not in their own Commons as in England, but amid the feudal landowners, and their voice and vote were lost in the noble majority. Unable to buttress their power against the nobles by an alliance, as in France, with rich merchants and populous cities, the kings sought support in the affluence and influence of the Church. The nobles, always at odds with the kings, learned to hate the Church and love her property, and joined in the universal cry that national wealth was being siphoned to Rome. In Scotland it was the nobles—not, as in England, the kings and merchants—who made the Reformation, i.e., freed secular from ecclesiastical power.1
Through its hold on the piety of the people the Scottish Church achieved opulence amid dulling poverty and transmundane hopes. A papal envoy, toward the end of the fifteenth century, reported to the pope that ecclesiastical income in Scotland equaled all other income combined.2 The preachers and the burghers almost monopolized literacy. The Scottish clergy were already in the sixteenth century noted for scholarship, and it was the Church, of course, that founded and maintained the universities of St. Andrews and Aberdeen. After 1487 the bishops and abbots were “nominated”—in effect appointed—by the kings, who used these offices as rewards for political services or as sinecures for their illegitimate sons. James V endowed three of his bastards with the ecclesiastical revenues of Kelso, Melrose, Holyrood, and St. Andrews. The worldly tastes of these royal appointees were in a measure responsible for the deterioration of the clergy in the sixteenth century.
But the general laxity of morals and discipline that marked the Church in the later Middle Ages was evident in Scotland long before the royal nomination of the prelacy. “The corruption of the Church, bad everywhere throughout Europe in the fifteenth century,” writes the strongly Catholic Hilaire Belloc, “had in Scotland reached a degree hardly known elsewhere”;3 hence, in part, the indifference with which the common people, though orthodox in creed, would look upon the replacement of Catholic with Protestant clergymen. In 1425 King James I complained of monastic dissoluteness and sloth; in 1455 a chaplain at Linlithgow, before receiving his appointment, had to give bond that he would not pawn the property of his church, and would not keep a “continual concubine.”4 Cardinal Beaton had eight bastards, and slept with Marion Ogilvy on the night before he went to meet his Maker;5 John, Archbishop Hamilton, obtained from divers sessions of the Scottish Parliament letters of legitimation for his increasing brood. The pre-Reformation poets of Scotland spared no words in satirizing the clergy; and the clergy themselves, in the Catholic provincial synod of 1549, ascribed the degradation of the Church in Scotland to “corruption in morals and profane lewdness of life in churchmen of almost all ranks.”6 We should add, however, that the morals of the clergy merely reflected those of the laity—above all, of the nobles and the kings.
II. ROYAL CHRONICLE: 1314–1554
The basic fact in the history of the Scottish state is fear of England. English kings, for England’s safety from rear attack, time and again tried to annex Scotland to the English crown. Scotland, to protect itself, accepted alliance with England’s perennial enemy, France. Thereby hangs this chronicle.
With bows and arrows and battle-axes the Scots won freedom from England at Bannockburn (1314). Robert Bruce, having there led them to victory, ruled them till his death by leprosy (1329). His son David II, like Scottish kings from time beyond memory, was crowned on the sacred “Stone of Destiny” in the abbey of Scone. When Edward III of England began the Hundred Years’ War with France he thought it wise first to secure his northern front; he defeated the Scots at Halidon Hill, and set up Edward Balliol as his puppet on the Scottish throne (1333). David II regained the crown only by paying the English a ransom of 100,000 marks ($6,667,000?). As he left no direct heir at his death (1371), the kingdom passed to his nephew Robert Stuart, with whom the fateful Stuart dynasty began.
The war of Britain’s two halves against the whole was soon resumed. The French sent an army to Scotland; Scots and French ravaged the border counties of England, took Durham, and put to death all its inhabitants—men, women, children, nuns, monks, priests. Playing the next move in this royal chess, the English invaded Scotland, burned Perth and Dundee, and destroyed Melrose Abbey (1385). Robert III carried on; but when the English captured his son James (1406) he died of grief. England kept the boy king in genteel imprisonment until the Scots signed the “Perpetual Peace” (1423), renouncing all further co-operation with France.
James I had picked up, in captivity, considerable education, and an English bride. In honor of this “milk-white dove” he composed, in the Scots tongue, The King’s Quair (i.e., book), an allegorical poem of surprising merit for a king. Indeed James was remarkable in a dozen ways. He was one of the best wrestlers, runners, riders, archers, spearmen, craftsmen, and musicians in Scotland, and he was a competent and beneficent ruler. He imposed penalties upon dishonest commerce and negligent husbandry, built hospitals, required taverns to close at nine, turned the energies of youth from football to martial exercises, and demanded a reform of ecclesiastical discipline and monastic life. When his active feign began (1424) he pledged himself to put down chaos and crime in Scotland, and to end the private wars of the nobles and their feudal despotism; “if God gives me but a dog’s life I will make the key keep the castle and the bracken keep the cow”—i.e., end robbery of homes and cattle—“through all Scotland.”7 A Highland thief robbed a woman of two cows; she vowed that she would ne’er wear shoon till she had walked to the King to denounce the weakness of the law. “You lie,” said the thief; “I will have you shod”; and he nailed horseshoes to her naked feet. She found her way to the King nevertheless. He had the robber hunted down, had him led about Perth with a canvas picture of the crime, and saw to it that the brute was safely hanged. Meanwhile he quarreled opportunely with obstructive barons, brought a few to the scaffold, confiscated excess holdings, taxed the lords as well as the burgesses, and gave the government the funds it needed to replace many tyrannies with one. He called to the Parliament the lairds—proprietors of the lesser estates—and made them and the middle class an offset to the nobles and the clergy. In 1437 a band of nobles killed him.
The sons of the nobles whom he had cut down in life or property continued against James II their struggle against the centralizing monarchy. While the new king was still a lad of seven his ministers invited the young Earl of Douglas, and a younger brother, to be the King’s guests; they came, were given a mock trial, and were beheaded (1440). Twelve years later James II himself invited William, Earl of Douglas, to his court at Stirling, gave him a safe-conduct, entertained him royally, and slew him on the charge that he had had treasonable correspondence with England. The Kin
g captured all English strongholds in Scotland but one, and was blown to bits by the accidental explosion of his own cannon. James III paid the penalty of his father’s lawlessness; after many ferocious encounters he was captured by nobles and summarily killed (1488). James IV married Margaret Tudor, sister of Henry VIII; through that marriage Mary Queen of Scots would later claim the English throne. Nevertheless, when Henry joined Spain, Austria, Venice, and the papacy in attacking France (1511), James felt bound to help Scotland’s old ally, now so imperiled, by invading England. On Flodden Field he fought with mad courage while many of his men turned and fled; and in that disaster he died (1513).
James V was then but a year old. An involved struggle ensued for the regency. David Beaton—an ecclesiastic distinguished by ability, courage, and appreciation of women—secured the prize, was made Archbishop of St. Andrews, then Cardinal, and trained the young King in fervent allegiance to the Church. In 1538 James married Mary of Lorraine, sister of Francis, Duke of Guise, the leader of the Catholic party in dogma-divided France. The Scottish nobility, increasingly anticlerical, looked with interest at the current divorce of England from the papacy, envied English lords appropriating or receiving church property, and took “wages” from Henry VIII to oppose their King’s alliance with France. When James V waged war on England the nobles refused to support him. Defeated at Solway Moss (1542), he fled in shame to Falkland, and died there on December 14. On December 8 his wife had given birth to Mary, who, six days old, became Queen of Scots.