Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1108 page)

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
“Low Countries” (the modern Belgium and
Holland), and our Queen was constantly sending aid to the Protestants there, though never openly till 1585, by which time the “Dutch
Republic” had been born there, and had become the most valuable ally of England.

It was the same story in France, where a strong
Protestant party, continually fed by underhand help from England, kept up a civil war for thirty years. All this weakened the two great Catholic powers, and made Elizabeth stand out more and more as the Champion of European Protestantism.

On the whole, however, her reign is mainly occupied with two long duels, that with Mary,
Queen of Scots, 1560-87, and that with Philip of Spain, which began to be severe about 1570
and lasted till her death.

The beautiful Mary Stuart returned, a widowed Queen, to Scotland in 1561 to find that
Elizabeth had already helped the Scottish nobles to overthrow the French power and the Catholic
Church at one blow. The new Church that was then set up in Scotland was called the “Presbyterian” from its government
by
“presbyters” or elders instead of bishops, and was far more violently Protestant than ours. This is important to remember because, to those English Puritans who wanted to abolish bishops and the Prayer
Book in our own Church, the example of Scotland was always present. Mary was a clever woman, but quite without principles, and far more reckless than her English rival. She honestly believed herself to be rightful Queen of England, but she found it hard work to keepher own crown, and in six years she had lost it. For she was always an object of suspicion to the Scottish nobles, both as a Catholic and as a Frenchwoman at heart. She married her cousin, Lord Darnley, in 1565, and bore him a son, who afterward, as James I, united the two crowns of Britain. Then, in 1587, Mary allowed her husband to be murdered and married his murderer, the Earl of Bothwell.
Scotland rose in wrath, deposed and imprisoned her, crowned her baby son, and had him brought up as a Protestant King. A year later Mary escaped from prison and fled to
England, demanding aid from her rival
Elizabeth.

That clever lady pretended to pity Mary,
but kept her safe, at first as a sort of guest,
soon as a prisoner for nineteen dreary years.
No wonder that Mary soon began to plot against Elizabeth’s life, and to implore the aid of every Catholic power in Europe. The one insurrection of Elizabeth’s reign, that of the North of England in 1569, was got up in order to put Mary on the throne. At last,
in despair, Elizabeth’s wisest councillors implored her to bring Mary to trial; and in 1587,
the Scottish Queen was tried, condemned and beheaded in Fotheringay Castle.

This was an open challenge on the part of

England to Catholic Europe. Mary had made a will in which she passed over her son, left
Philip of Spain heir to both her crowns and implored him to avenge her. He was ready to do so, for he had long been tired of Elizabeth’s secret aid to his rebels, and exasperated at the failure of the plotters to kill the English Queen.
So he prepared to send against us a great fleet,
known to history as the “Spanish Armada.”