Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated)

by Rudyard Kipling

  Thomas More, once the King’s intimate friend,

  and Bishop Fisher of Rochester, both men of

  European fame for their learning and piety,

  were the most distinguished victims. In the

  North of England, in 1536, a fierce insurrection broke out called the “Pilgrimage of Grace”;

  the rebels cried out for the restoration of the monasteries, for in that wild country the monks had been the only doctors and their houseshad been open to all travellers. The rising was put down with great cruelty, for Henry was naturally a cruel man, and he was now drunk with pride and power.

  He had already beheaded his second wife,

  Anne, and married his third, Jane Seymour;

  she bore to him in 1537 a son, afterward

  Edward VI, and died a few days afterward.

  In the last seven years of his life he married three more wives, one of whom he divorced,

  another he beheaded, and the third survived him.

  In, 1539 the remaining monasteries, even the greatest, were dissolved and, as a result,

  the great abbots ceased to attend Parliament.

  Some of their wealth was used to found schools and professorships at Oxford and Cambridge and to create six new bishoprics; but most of it went to the nobles and gentlemen. Thus,

  within three years, nearly a quarter of the land of England had got new owners. All the great offices of state had been wholly taken away from churchmen, and were now in the hands of these new nobles. New “Confessions of

  Faith” (declaring what was the true teaching of the Church of England) were published;

  first the “Ten Articles,” then the “ Six Articles”;

  the former was a step in the direction of the

  German Protestantism; the latter was very

  neany the old Catholic faith but without the

  Pope; and I must repeat that it was this midway position which, as late as Henry’s own death, most people in England preferred.

  But Henry had ordered an English translation of the Bible to be placed in every parish church for every one to read, and in 1544

  he allowed the Litany to be said in English;

  this was really the beginning of our beloved

  Prayer Book. And, once lay Englishmen began to read the Bible for themselves, they would not long be content to believe in confession to a priest or in the miracle of the Mass (both of which were taught in the Six Articles).

  Now all these changes were carried through under continued danger from abroad, for of course the Pope had declared Henry to be deposed, and called on all Catholic princes to go and depose him. Much of the danger was from the old alliance of France and Scotland,

  but far more from the power of Spain, Germany,

  and Flanders, now all in the hands of the.

  Emperor, Charles V. Threats of invasion were incessant, but Henry armed his people to the teeth, and, at the end of his reign, had a navy of seventy ships ready for action. He built castles all round his southern and eastern coasts,

  and was always making great guns to put in them. He knew that the few remaining de-scendants of Edward III were plotting to upset his throne, especially the exiled Reginald Pole,

  a great favourite of the Pope. He had already sliced off the heads of all his royal cousins whom he could catch. With the approval of his Parliament, he had settled that the crown should go after his death to his son Edward;

  if Edward had no children, to Mary; then,

  if Mary had no children, to Elizabeth; lastly,

  if all three of his children died without direct heirs, it was to go to the heirs of his younger sister, Mary, Duchess of Suffolk, not to those of his elder sister, Margaret, Queen of Scotland. He hated Scotland as bitterly as Edward

  I, and continued the Border wars as fiercely until his death in 1547.

  Thus you will say I have drawn for you the picture of a monster of cruelty and selfishness?

  Yes, Henry was just that. But he was also something much more. He was a great patriot,

  a great Englishman. He taught Englishmen to rely on themselves and their ships; and he taught future English kings to rely on their people. He shivered in pieces the foreign yoke that had bound the Church of England since

  Saint Augustine had preached in the open air to the early Kings of Kent. Great suffering accompanied these great changes; and they were thoroughly bad for the moral character

  of the generation which saw them. The new landowners were men who thought only of riches, and turned out the tenants of the old monks by the score, and by the hundred. A

  swarm of beggars were let loose over the country, beggars to whom the monks had given daily doles of bread and beer. Savage laws of whipping and forced labour had to be passed to keep these men in order. Moreover, since the discovery by the Spaniards of rich gold and silver mines in America, money had come into

  Europe in great floods and this had sent up the price of all goods at a fearful rate; all trade seemed uncertain; great fortunes might be suddenly made, and as suddenly lost. So the strong and the clever (and often the wicked)

  prospered, and the weak and the old-fashioned people were ruined.

  The six years’ reign of the boy Edward VI

  (1547 — 53) only made all this social misery worse.

  Every one had been afraid of Henry VIII;

  no one was afraid of a child of ten, though he was a clever and strong-willed child. The result was that the government became a scramble for wealth and power among the new nobles,

  the Seymours, Dudleys, Russells, Herberts,

  Greys, and many more who had been enriched with abbey lands. It was the fear of losing these lands and the desire of confiscating forthemselves what remained of Church property that drove these men, quite against the wishes of sober people, to force on a reformation of the teaching of the Church. The result in the long run was good, because the Protestant faith did then first get a lawful footing in

  England; but the result for the moment was bad, because moderate men began to mistrust a Reformation which seemed to be bound up with greed for spoil and with contempt for all the past traditions of England. At the same time the leaders of the new Protestant

  Church were all men of high character. Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, and Hooper, all bishops of King Edward, all died for their faith in the next reign.

  However much we may rightly abuse the greedy nobles, we can never wholly regret a reign which first gave us the Prayer Book in

  English and substituted the Communion for the Mass. Cranmer prepared two successive

  Prayer Books, the second (1552) somewhat more Protestant than the first of 1549, and it was the second which, with very slight alterations, became our present Prayer Book in the reign of Elizabeth. In Edward’s reign also the marriage of priests was allowed, and the laws about burning heretics were abolished.

  In his reign too, alas, the beautiful stained-glass windows, st^SB and

  moved from most of our churches, whose walls

  were now covered with whitewash.

  Edward’s first Regent or “Protector” was his mother’s brother, Edward Seymour, Duke of

  Somerset; a man of much higher character than most of the nobles, but rash and hotheaded, and quite unfit to lead the nation.

  He continued Henry’s vindictive quarrel with

  Scotland, won a great victory at Pinkie, and drove the Scots once more into the arms of

  France. Their girl-queen, Mary Stuart, who might have been a bride for our boy-king, was sent for safety to France and married to the

  French King’s son. Somerset was soon upset by a much more violent person, the ruffian

  John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, who pushed on the Reformation at greater speed for purely selfish ends, and disgusted all sober men with it. He brought in a lot of foreign

  Protestants and gave them places in the

  English Church; he brought in foreign troops to be his bodyguard, bullied the Pri
ncess

  Mary (who was the natural head of the Catholic party), thrust all the leading Catholics into prison, and tossed the remaining Church lands to his fellow nobles.

  But Edward, who had always been very delicate, began early in 1553 to draw near hisend. Mary’s succession was sure, and, though no one knew exactly what line she would take in religious matters, it was certain that she would stop the violent progress of the Reformation, and quite certain that she would kill

  Northumberland. So the Duke persuaded the dying boy-king, now sixteen, to make a will,

  passing over both his sisters, and leaving the crown to his cousin, Lady Jane Grey, heiress of the Suffolk line and recently^-married to one of Northumberland’s sons. When Ec^ward died in July, Jane was actually proclaimed Queen in

  London.

  But not a cheer was raised by the crowd,

  and the whole nation rose as one man for the injured Princess Mary. Within nine days Jane was a prisoner in the Tower, where a few months afterward she was executed, and Mary rode into London with her sister Elizabeth at her side.

  Mary’s reign of five years and four months is the greatest tragedy in our history. She was a good woman, passionately attached to the Catholic faith and to the memory of her mother. She was learned, clever and of lofty courage. But she was a Spaniard at heart and never an Englishwoman. Like a Spaniard she was vindictive, and, unfortunately, she had deep wrongs to avenge.

  Yet, if Protestantism were to triumph in the long run, something of the fearful cruelty she was going to inflict upon it was necessary;

  for moderate men had hitherto mainly seen it as the religion of a gang of selfish nobles seeking to divide all the riches of England among themselves. Nine tenths of England preferred anything — almost the Pope — to Northumberland and his land-grabbing crew. At the least, they wanted a return to the state of things at the end of Henry’s reign. “No foreigners,” was the cry; “England and English

  Church for the English.”

  But Mary cared little for her countrymen,

  cared only for her Church; she was determined to restore the state of things which had existed at the beginning, not at the end, of her father’s reign; to restore the Pope and all his works,

  and to do this by making the closest alliance with the Emperor Charles and his son Philip,

  whom she determined, against all good advice,

  to marry. In six months she had terrified her people; in two years she had completely lost their hearts; in six years she had wrecked forever the Catholic faith in the minds of intelligent Englishmen.

  She hurled all the leaders of the Reformed

  Church into prison at once, and set about reestablishing the Catholic services everywhere.

  The greedy nobles, one and all, now professed themselves to be good Catholics, and them she dared not touch. The one thing they feared was to lose their new grants of the abbey lands.

  They knew the Queen was bent upon restoring the monasteries, and the laws for burning heretics, which had been abolished in the,

  reign of Edward VI; but she was not able to }

  persuade her Parliaments to do the latter until the end of 1554, and the lands she was never able to touch at all. But Reginald Pole, long an exile and now a Cardinal, came over as

  “Legate” of the Pope, and in the Pope’s name absolved England from the guilt of heresy.

  Mary had already been married to Prince

  Philip of Spain.

  The burnings of the Protestant martyrs began early in 1555, and in less than three years nearly three hundred persons were burned at the stake. The burnings were nearly all in the south-eastern counties, which shows us that Protestantism had got the strongest hold on what were then the richest and most intelligent parts of England; the north and west long remained Catholic. The four great Protestant bishops, Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer and Hooper, were among the victims; but three fourths of these victims were persons in quite humble life. The people

  of those days were well used to look on at all sorts of cruel tortures at executions, and were quite unfeeling on the subject; but the high courage with which these martyrs met their terrible deaths made an impression that has never been forgotten. So it was the reign of “Bloody Mary,” not that of Edward VI,

  that was the true birthday of Protestanism in

  England.

  And no great Englishman approved of the burnings; it was only the Spanish councillors and the Queen herself who urged them on.

  It was felt to be “a foreigners’ job,” and the hatred for Spain and all its works soon came to outweigh the old hatred for France.

  This hatred became much more fierce when

  Philip dragged England into one of his frequent wars with France, and when the cunning

  Frenchmen seized the opportunity to make a spring upon Calais (which we had held since

  Edward III), and captured it. The loss of

  Calais seemed an indelible shame. All the last two years of Mary’s reign revolts were on the point of breaking out. French ships full of English Protestant exiles prowled in the Channel and harried Spanish and English trade. No heir was born to the throne, though

  Mary, who was slowly dying of dropsy, kept hoping for a baby. Philip showed her no loveand little civility. Her reign had been a nightmare of terror, and it closed amid loss, ruin,

  pestilence, and famine.

  The Princess Elizabeth, who then came to the throne in November 1558, was a very different person to her sister. Her life had been several times in great danger during

  Mary’s reign, and the Spanish councillors had often urged Mary to put her to death. She was a woman of the most strangely varied character; extraordinarily stingy and mean,

  extraordinarily brave and fierce (not cruel);

  passionately fond of her country, and English to the backbone; so jealous that she could not bear her courtiers to look at another woman;

  so vain of her beauty that even in old age she covered herself with gorgeous dresses and ridiculous jewels; by turns a scold, a flirt, a cheat and a heroine. But, somehow or other, she made her people follow, obey, and worship her,

  till at last she became a sort of crowned spirit and guardian angel of the whole nation, which felt that it had grown to full manhood and power under her protecting care. Men called her “Gloriana.”

  Her position and that of her people was, at her accession, one of great danger. England was entirely without allies, and, owing to the bad management of the two last reigns, almost

  bankrupt. Catholic Europe and many Catholics in England considered that the Queen had no right to the throne, for they had never approved of her father’s marriage to Anne

  Boleyn. The true Queen of England, they thought, was Mary Queen of Scots. So thought that young and beautiful lady herself, and, in

  Elizabeth’s first year, Mary became Queen of

  France as well. Indeed, the prospect of the union of France, Scotland, and England in one hand thoroughly frightened King Philip of

  Spain, and made him for many years more friend than foe to Elizabeth.

  He, therefore, in 1558, implored Elizabeth to keep England Catholic and to marry some decent Catholic Prince. But her sister’s reign had killed Catholicism in the hearts of all the best and most vigorous of the younger men in

  England; she knew this, and so, though she dreaded the extreme Protestants and loved the gorgeous services of the old Church, she rightly decided that she must reign as a Protestant

  Queen. Yet the difficulties of settling the new

  Church were enormous; she had to make bishops of men who had fled abroad to escape death; ‘

  and many of the most eager Protestants now objected to bishops altogether, while many more disliked even the very moderate services of the Prayer Book of 1552. Such men were

  the germ of the party soon to be called “Puritans,” and, in later days, “Dissenters” or

  “Nonconformists.” Moderation, then, was the


  Queen’s watchword; to build up a Church which should offend as few and please as many as possible. Her great adviser for forty years was the wise William Cecil, afterward Lord

  Burghley, the most far-seeing and moderate of men. And the Queen and Cecil and their

  Parliament had, in five years — say by 1563 —

  built the Church upon such broad foundations that it has remained, with few changes, our own “Church of England” until this day.

  Laws were passed in Parliament making Elizabeth “Supreme Governor” of this Church,

  making the Prayer Book (very slightly altered from the edition of 1552) the only lawful service book, and publishing the present

  “Thirty-nine Articles” as the Confession of

  Faith. Year by year more and more people rallied to this Church, and Parliament was able to pass stronger and stronger laws against those who refused to conform to it, whether

  Catholics or Puritans.

  All her reign, but especially for the first twenty-eight- years of it, the Queen was in constant danger of being murdered by some extreme Catholic agent of the Pope. Such men called her “heretic,” “bastard,” “usurper,”and other ugly names. There was plot after plot, and the Catholics, perhaps not unnaturally, considered the traitors who were executed for these plots to be martyrs, not murderers.

  But, as each plot failed, the main result was to drive all moderate Catholics into the English

  Church; for most of them, much as they had deplored the “heresy” of their Queen, were patriots at heart.

  Elizabeth hated war, partly because she had a shrewd idea that England was hardly strong or rich enough to engage in a great foreign war, but still more because she simply couldn’t bear to pay her soldiers and sailors. In fact,

  she expected her subjects to fight her battles for her by taking service with rebellious Scottish, French or Spanish subjects, while she pretended to be at peace with the sovereigns of those countries. But she was often obliged to send small and almost secret expeditions to help these rebels. Philip of Spain, for instance, was engaged in a long and desperate attempt to suppress Protestantism in the