THE REIGN OF MARY 'TUDOR.* CANON Dixon, in the fourth
volume of his mighty History of the Church of England, has displayed the same industry and patience in accumulation of materials as in his earlier volumes. But 737 pages devoted to five years of a period of reaction, or nearly 150 pages a year, are rather overwhelming. The reign of Mary is not an exhilarating subject. Periods of reaction after great revolutions seldom are. But of all the periods of reaction which history records, that of Mary is. surely one of the dullest and the most ignoble. The White Terror is generally worse than the Red ; and if it is not
a History of the Church of England. By Richard Watson Dickson. Vol. IV. London : George Rontledge and Sons.
always the bloodiest, it is at all events the most cold-blooded in its cruelty. Whatever bloodshed there may be, is always the more revolting in that it is exercised under the name of law and order, and with the deliberation of Governmental action.
.In the Terror under Mary, there was wanting no element of meanness and cruelty ; and it is not to be wondered at that its repetition of odious details has been too much even for the robust liveliness of narration which Canon Dixon ex- hibited in his earlier volumes. No human being can be expected to sustain his interest in the details of three hundred eases of " martyrs " which, for the most part, varied only in name and place. Even that most tragically effective of all martyrdoms, that of the gentle, aged, and timid Cranmer, is lost in an abyss of notes and comments as to the divergency of detail in the various versions of it.
The free course of Canon Dixon's narrative is also some- what hampered by his excessive desire to establish the " Anglican " character of the victims, and the catholicity of the " Anglican " Church. For him, the important point too often seems to be, not whether the victims died for an intelli- gent religious worship in the vulgar tongue, and in protest against the Papacy, but whether in their utterances they specifically referred to Edward VI.'s Prayer-Book. And similarly, we are always being diverted from the clash of words in an argumentative battle between a burner and a burned, on the respective merits of the Roman Church and Protestant, or, as they called it, "Christ's Church ; " while the Canon care- fully points out to us that when the combatants talked of their " Churches " as different and opposed, they did not mean what they said, or at least did not know what they were talking about, and meant two " schools " of the same Church. Not perceiving," be says in one place, "that the faith might be variously apprehended and yet remain one ; or convinced the one as much as the other that the differences were too great for mutual allowance." Great in these days are the powers of compromise ; but we were not aware that the faith might be so variously apprehended that the Real Presence in the Sacrament could be believed as both true and not true, or the supremacy of the Pope be both allowed and disallowed in the same things in tlie same Church, at the same time.
Canon Dixon, however, is one of that school of historians who seem to regard it as the greatest of achievements to make a show of reconciling contradictories. He is so anxious to exculpate his hero Gardiner, and even Bonner, that he tries his best to throw the odium of the burnings on Mary and the Spaniards of Philip. But when he is talking of Mary and the Spaniards, then the blame is thrown back on the Bishops and the Justices. In fact, nobody was to blame for the fires of Smithfield, only somehow or other they were lit, and somehow or other were fed with living and human fuel.
There is no doubt that Mary was the prime mover and instigator of the burnings, as directions to her Council, drawn up by her own hand in 1554, sufficiently prove. If ever a Sovereign deserved a derogatory epithet, she deserved her appellation of Bloody Mary. She combined the overbearing despotism of her father, who slaughtered his way to his im- mediate object with relentless ferocity indeed, but not with deliberate cruelty, with the malignant, sullen, and deliberate cruelty of the Spaniard which came to' her through her mother, and which she adored in her cousin Philip. If Eng- land did not become the theatre of scenes like the Spanish furies of the Low Countries and the wholesale slaughters of the Inquisition in Spain, that was not Mary's fault. And she was goaded by a perfectly natural feeling of revenge for those who had ruined her mother's life, and done their best to ruin hers. But Mary would have done little unless she had found some willing instruments, and she found them in the fierce Gardiner, and in her co-partner in her sanguinary title, "Bloody" Bonner. Gardiner under Henry had been one of the most active agents for the divorce, one of the earliest supporters of the Royal Supremacy against the Pope, and had remained one of the chief Ministers of State through all the successive advances of Henry on the path of Reformation. And to crown all, he had written a mighty book, On the True Obedience, in support of the " schism " and against the Papal Supremacy. Bonner, who was a creature of Gardiner's, as Gardiner had been of Wolsey, had written a preface to this same book. In the time of the Edwardian Reformation, or Revolution, the worst that had happened to them was to be deprived of their bishoprics
and left in honourable captivity. Yet Gardiner, as Chancellor, was responsible for the revival of the statutes against the Lollards, under which the, persecution began. He "showed himself among the first in welcoming" the Papacy back again ; and he began the persecution in his own diocese two days after the new statute for the punishment of heretics came into force. It is true that when Rogers, Canon of St. Paul's, the first to be burnt, in the course of examination said the Queen would have done well enough but for G-ardiner's coundel,.Gardiner replied : "I deny that; the Queen went before me, and it was her own motion." But why did he, of all men, aid and abet, and take the initiative in burning people for holding what he had himself professed till within six months before P As for Bonner, " brutal" and " bloody" are mild epithets for his performances. He thought nothing of calling Archdeacon Philpot, of Winchester, the "veriest beast be ever knew," when he was examining him judicially for heresy, a matter of life and death. He boxed his prisoners' ears when they bested him in argument; he had them flogged in his own garden at Fulham (therein, however, merely taking example from "Blessed" Thomas More), and he burnt more assiduously than all. Our worthy Canon tries to put a partial whitewash on him, in that in the cases of persons of position, like Archdeacon Philpot, he tried many interviews to get him to recant before burning him. We may concede that Bonner, having no personal vengeance to wreak on most of his prisoners, was probably not desirous of burning if he could get a recantation. But that he burnt with a zest where he could not terrify into submission, there seems no reasonable doubt. Whether he was, in fact, worse than Cardinal Pole, who laid low and burnt by deputy in Canterbury diocese as many as Bonner did personally in London, may, indeed, be doubted.
Pole, the Cardinal Legate, who celebrated his first mass as a priest the day of Cranmer's burning, that he might be admitted Archbishop the day after (in emulation of Henry VIII., who married Jane Seymour the day but one after Anne Boleyn's beheading), deserves, indeed, a far worse reputation than he commonly enjoys. But in his case retribution overtook him speedily. He, the reconciler of the realm to the Pope, was deprived of his legateship, and died under the censure of the Pope, himself accused of heresy. If his own and Mary's life had been prolonged, he would perhaps, like Curranza, one of the Spanish friars in Philip's train, who greatly assisted in the burnings in Canterbury and became Archbishop of Toledo, himself have fallen a victim. As it is, Canon Dixon has quite established Pole's claim to share with Mary and Bonner their sanguinary title, and be ranked eminent among those who have shown quantum religio poi nit suadere malorum.
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