consequences as have left an indelible blot on the history of their reigns.” Michelet declares that nothing can be more curious than to watch the phantasmagoria of the Marian policy, as displayed in the despatches of Renard, the Spanish envoy, who acted as Mary's right-hand counsellor, urged her on, and supported her with adroit zeal. "Marie, ignorante, intrépide de son ignorance, qui ne sait rien, ne comprend rien, croit toute l'Angleterre catholique." She blunders on, blind in the belief of that one blunder, and acting upon it as an axiom in her laws of government, a postulate in her system of politics. She steers her way right onward-va droit, sans avoir peur de rien. She has no fear of losing her kingdom; but even were such a contingency probable, she might think a kingdom not ill lost for a mass. And yet, peril énorme! La première messe fait une sanglante émeute à Londres. † What matter, in comparison with the weal of Mother Church? Mary may be vexed and soured by refractory Protestantism, but she will not desist or be turned aside-for she, too, in her crabbed way, has full purpose of heart to cleave steadfastly to the faith she regards as pure and undefiled-she, too, is wholly resolved to contend earnestly for what she accounts the faith once delivered to the saints. And thus arose, in its baleful horror, what Shenstone calls "The pest gigantic, whose revengeful stroke Tinged the red annals of Maria's reign." ‡ Upon the class character of the persecution, Mr. Froude forcibly remarks, that although Pole and Mary could have laid their hands on earl and baron, knight and gentleman, whose heresy was notorious, although, in the queen's own guard, there were many who never listened to a mass, § they durst not strike where there was danger that they would be struck in return. They went out, as he describes it, into the highways and hedges; they gathered up the lame, the halt, and the blind; they took the weaver from See Tytler's valuable work, Reigns of Edward VI. and Mary. The compilation of this work led its candid author to conclusions eminently favorable to the personal character of Queen Mary.Prescott, History of Philip II., book i. ch. vii. † Histoire de France, t. ix. p. 135. Shenstone, The Ruined Abbey. Underhill's Narrative. his loom, the carpenter from his workshop, the husbandman from his plough; they laid hands on maidens and boys “who had never heard of any other religion than that they were called on to abjure," ," old men tottering into the grave, and children whose lips could but just lisp the articles of their creed; and of these they made their burnt-offerings; of these they crowded their prisons, and when filth and famine killed them, they flung them out to rot. How long England would have endured the repetition of the horrid spectacles is hard to say. The persecution lasted three years, and in that time something less than three hundred persons were burnt at the stake. † "By imprisonment," said Lord Burleigh, "by torment, by famine, by fire, almost the number of four hundred were," in their various ways, 'lamentably destroyed." ‡ 66 It is only your stage Jesuit, ironically personified, who will be found to maintain that "Too sparing was the time, too mild the day, When our great Mary bore the English sway! Unqueenlike pity marred her royal power, Nor was her purple dyed enough in gore. Four or five hundred, such like petty sum, Might fall perhaps a sacrifice to Rome, Scarce worth the naming: had I had the power, Or been thought fit to have been her counsellor, She should have raised it to a nobler score, Big bonfires should have blazed, and shone each day, To tell our triumphs, and make bright our way; And when 'twas dark in every lane and street, Thick flaming heretics should serve to light, And save the needless charge of links by night; Smithfield should still have kept a constant fire, Which never should be quenched, never expire, But with the lives of all the miscreant rout, Till the last gasping breath had blown it out." § The late Lord Nugent had some reason for complaining that, although our histories, up to the time of his writing (1826), had not, 66 he believed, stated what is untrue of Queen Mary, nor, perhaps, had very much exaggerated what is true of her; yet, our arguers, whose only talk is of Smithfield, are generally very uncandid in what they conBurleigh's Execution of Justice. †The number is variously computed at 270, 280, and 290. Froude, VI. 532-3. Oldham, Satires upon the Jesuits. we should find that there was some old quarrel, some malicious neighbor, some Tonyfire-the-fagot at the bottom of it." Elsewhere Hartley affirms, that, in the black list of persecutors, depend upon it, there have been three atheists to one sincere bigot. ceal." It seemed to be commonly ignored, | that could be formidable to no government; that the statutes which enabled Mary to but if it were possible, at this distance of burn those who had conformed to the Church time, to investigate the history of such cases, of her father and brother, were Protestant statutes, declaring the common law against heresy, and framed by her father, Henry the Eighth, and confirmed and acted upon by Order of Council of her brother, Edward the Sixth, enabling that mild and temperate young sovereign to burn divers misbelievers, by sentence of commissioners. "It would appear to be seldom considered, that her zeal might very possibly have been warmed by the circumstance of both her chaplains having been imprisoned for their religion, and herself arbitrarily detained, and her safety threatened during the short but persecuting reign of her brother." His lordship further reminds all whom it concerns, that the sad evidences of the violence of those days are by no means confined to her acts alone; that the fagots of persecution were not kindled by papists only, nor did they cease to blaze when the power of using them as instruments of conversion ceased to be in popish hands. Hartley Coleridge, on this topic, adopts the tactics of those who apologize for the Elizabethan persecution. He asserts that the real grounds of the Marian persecution were political, not religious. Religion, he contends, was only called in to smother the consciences of the persecutors, some of whom would have shrunk from the deadly acts of vengeance which they perpetrated, if they could not have contrived to believe that they were vindicating the true Church against soul-killing heresy. Not that he denies the appearance, here and there, of a Bonner or a Jeffreys, in whom the lust of blood is not a mere metaphor, but a physical appetitethough he believes such to be as rare a phenomenon as the Siamese twins. But he doubts whether Christianity, however corrupted with error, ever urged one human being to oppress or destroy another. "An erring piety may consent to persecution; but the promoters of persecutions are revenge, ambition, avarice, and the other bastards of the world, which the Church adopted when she married the world. It may be said that among the victims in Mary's reign, there were many poor insignificant individuals, *Lord Nugent's Plain Statement on the Catholic Question, 1826. Be that as it may, we have, at any rate, one most sincere bigot in the person of Mary Tudor. It is just this. quality that makes Macaulay exalt her, in this one respect, to the prejudice of her right royal sister. He calls it the great stain on the character of Elizabeth, that being herself an Adiaphorist, having no scruple about conforming to the Romish Church when conformity was necessary to her own safety, retaining to the last moment of her life a fondness for much of the doctrine and much of the ceremonial of that Church, she yet subjected that Church to a persecution even more odious than the persecution with which her sister had harassed the Protestants. "We say more odious. For Mary had at least the plea of fanaticism. She did nothing for her religion which she was not prepared to suffer for it. She had held it firmly under persecution. She fully believed it to be essential to salvation. If she burned the bodies of her subjects, it was in order to rescue their souls." Whereas Elizabeth, as he insists, had no such pretext-being a half Protestant, or wholly a Catholic, as opportunity might offer, or exigency require. In Queen Mary, as the historian of the Tudors not only says but clearly shows, early ill-usage had trampled out the natural woman, and delivered her up to Catholicism, to be moulded by it exclusively and completely. He finely and feelingly pictures her as one who, with a resolute wish to do the will of God, without one bad passion, careless of herself, and only caring for what she believed to be her duty, had no idea of what duty meant, except what she gathered from her creed; and all whose loves, all whose hatreds, submitted to the literal control of the propositions of it, uncounteracted and uninfluenced by a single human emotion. Her life on earth, as he says, was one long mistake, and but for the Hartley Coleridge Life of Roger Ascham. † Essay on Burleigh and his times. (1832). inches, but this only quickened her zeal to work while it was called to-day, the night being so near in which she could work no more. They tell us it was the loss of Calais that broke Mary's heart. It came upon her with the shock of an unforeseen disaster. Calamities had taken such hold upon her that she was not able to look up; and this was the finishing stroke. brief delusive interval, which only served to make her cup more bitter, it was one long misery. "The symptoms which she had mistaken for pregnancy were the approaches of a hideous disease. Her husband, for whom she had sacrificed the hearts of her people, detested her, and, brute as he was, took no pains to conceal his aversion. He insulted her by infamous solicitations of the ladies of her court; when they Here is Michelet's vigorous outline of the turned with disdain from him, he consoled closing scene. "Marie, avec son légat Pole, himself with vulgar debauchery; and mak-dans ses quatre ans de supplice, avait usé la ing no secret of the motives which had induced him to accept her hand, when the policy burst like an air-bubble, he hastened to leave a country which was always execrable to him, and a wife whose presence was a reproach.”* And would he not come again? never again? Give him up, she could not, contemptuous ingrate though he was. One might almost transfer to Mary, in his regard, the language of Lady Frampul Jonson's play : in Terreur catholique. Vaincue par les martyrs, "Thou dost not know my sufferings, what I feel, The Calais coup is assumed to have been her death-blow. Where there were so few to speak comfort to her, Mary can hardly be said to have refused comfort: else might one picture her rejecting the ordinary Console-toi pourtant de ton malheur, in the spirit of Molière's AlcippeQui, moi? J'aurai toujours ce coup-là sur le cœur. † In the spirit, and to the letter too; for we all know what the moribund woman said about Calais and her heart. But she She saw that she was hated by her people, widely and intensely hated. clung to her disastrous mission only the She felt that she was dying by more. Essay on Mary Tudor, in Westminster Review, V. 32. † Ben Jonson. The New Inn, Act V. Sc. 1. Measured by substantial value, Mr. Froude computes the loss of Calais to have been a gain; English princes were never again to lay claim to the crown of France, and the possession of a fortress on French soil was a perpetual irritation. But Calais lish crown." A jewel it was, useless, costly was called the "brightest jewel in the Engbut dearly prized. Over the gate of Calais had once stood the insolent inscription: When iron and lead like cork shall swim;" and the Frenchmen had won it, won it in fair and gallant fight. "If Spain should rise suddenly into her ancient strength and tear Gibraltar from us, our mortification would be faint, compared which the loss of Calais distracted the subto the anguish of humiliated pride with jects of Queen Mary,” ‡ *Guerres de Religion, p. 148. Hear how a jolly Briton, nearly three centuries after the event, expresses his feelings upon it, on a return from perambulating the fortifications of Calais. We quote from Sir Walter Scott's diary, as kept in France, in the autumn of 1826. The extract may serve by way of relief by contrast to the tone and accent of what precedes and follows it. "Lost, as all know, by the bloody papist bitch (one must be vernacular when on French ground) Queen Mary, of red-hot memory. I would rather she had burned a score more of bishops. If she had kept it, her sister Bess would sooner have parted with her virginity." And then the hearty old baronet speculates on the chances of keeping it under the Stuarts. Charles I., he says, had no temptation to part with it-and though it might, indeed, have shuffled out of our hands during the Civil Wars, he is clear that Noll would have as soon let Monsieur draw one of his grinders-then Charles II., he assumes, would hardly have dared to sell such an old possession, as he did Dunkirk; and after that the French had little chance till the revolution. "Even then, I think, we could have held a place that could be supplied from our own element, the sea. Cui bono? None, I think, but to plague the rogues."* The very reason why so many latter-day politicians think it a good riddance, in the cause and interests of peace. But let that pass. Memorable is the saying attributed to Mary, that the name of Calais would be found imprinted on her heart when dead. She could not get the better of this scathing blow. Of the surrendered town she might have said, as Milton's Adam of a merely imagined bereavement,― as "Loss of thee Will never from my heart.” We have seen Michelet's description of her, "furieuse de ses nuits veuves." More tumultuous agitation now afflicted her in the night season. George Buchanan's Latin ode on the taking of Calais, includes a dark sketch of Mary's remorse and shame,-with this among the other woes of her unrest: "Umbræque nocturnæ, quietem Terrificis agitant figuris."† Mary's death was now openly prayed for in the churches; and reverend refugees in Germany were not backward to send over pamphlets to the tune of Killing No Murder, in a case like hers. But she saved their disciples the trouble of summary slaughter, by dying, almost as soon, and quite as miserably, as they could wish. Unwept, un Lockhart's Life of Scott, ch. lxxxii. solaced, she died,-with a last prayer that she might be buried in the garb of a poor religieuse-in which alone, a kindly critic affirms, it would have been well for her if she had lived. † Ad Franciae Regem, Henricum II., post ictos Caletes, Georgius Buchanan. No English sovereign, says Mr. Froude, ever ascended the throne with larger popularity than Mary Tudor. The country was eager to atone to her for her mother's injuries; and the instinctive loyalty of the English towards their natural sovereign was enhanced by the abortive efforts of Northumberland to rob her of her inheritance. She had reigned little more than five years, and she descended into the grave amidst curses deeper than the acclamations which had welcomed her accession. In that brief time she had swathed her name in the horrid epithet which will cling to it forever; and yet from the passions which in general tempt sovereigns into crime, she was entirely free; to the time of her accession she had lived a blameless, and, in many respects, a noble life; and few men or women have lived less capable of doing knowingly a wrong thing. 66 Philip's conduct, which could not extinguish her passion for him, and the collapse of the inflated imaginations which had surrounded her supposed pregnancy, it can Those forlorn hours when she would sit on hardly be doubted, affected her sanity. the ground with her knees drawn to her face; those restless days and nights when, like a ghost, she would wander about the write tear-blotted letters to her husband; palace galleries, rousing herself only to those bursts of fury over the libels dropped in her way; or the marching in procession behind the Host in the London streetsthese are all symptoms of hysterical derangement, and leave little room, as we think of her, for other feelings than pity. But if Mary was insane, the madness was of a kind which placed her absolutely under her spiritual directors; and the responsibility for her cruelties, if responsibility be any thing but a name, rests first with Gardiner, who commenced them, and, secondly, and in a higher degree, with Reginald Pole." All these have gone, long since, every man to his own place; and to their own Master they stand or fall. But let us, who judge none of them, compassionate her who stood forth the most prominently of them all, and who more than either of them bore the burden and heat of the day, the glooms of its wintry morning, and the darkness that might be felt when its even-tide saddened into night. * Froude, History of England, vol. vi. p. 528. 66 From The Economist, 2 March. offering her mediation, while senators at PROGRESS OF AMERICAN DISUNION. Washington are still discussing terms of acTHE great drama of disruption is surely commodation, while the obnoxious Lincoln and not very slowly evolving in the United is still uninstalled and powerless-they have States. There are still some features in the already chosen the style and title of their case which foreigners cannot well under- new Republic, and nominated Mr. Jefferson stand, and which seem not perfectly clear Davis President of the SOUTHERN CONFEDeven to Americans themselves. But two or ERATION. Nay, more, it seems highly probthree points are becoming plainer day by able for without further proof we are unday. It now appears that Secession has not willing to speak with any thing like positive been an act hastily forced upon the seceding conviction that at least three members of States by Mr. Lincoln's election, or by any Mr. Buchanan's Cabinet, in fact all his chief bona fide fears brought home to them by ministers have been for some time traitorthat event, of fresh aggressions upon their ously and fraudulently using their positions peculiar institution;" but that it is an oc- to facilitate separation, and to make the currence which has not only been long fore- North comparatively powerless to resist it seen and prepared for, but resolutely deter- when it came. There is reason to believemined upon. It is obvious that the South indeed, there is something amounting to ofwere ready to remain in the Union, so long ficial proof-that the late Secretary at War, as they could unreservedly dictate its policy the Secretary of the Treasury, and the Secand nominate to all places of power and trust, retary of the Interior have combined with but not one hour longer;-that they had for each other to manipulate the army appointsome time perceived symptoms that this ments and the public chest, with the purpose supremacy was about to be wrested from of impoverishing and disarming the North, them; -and that Mr. Lincoln's election and enriching and organizing the South in merely indicated to them that it was gone, the immediate view of the Secession crisis. and that the expected moment for action It is not easy either, as far as appearances had, therefore, arrived. From that date at present go, to acquit Mr. Buchanan himthere has been neither hesitation nor delay; self of a guilty knowledge and tolerance of they never attempted to make terms; they their proceedings-at all events to some exnever proposed any real scheme of arrange- tent. ment; they never showed the slightest de- With such promptitude, too, have the Sesire or intention of remaining in the Union; cessionists acted, and so resolute do they but, on the contrary, pushed forward their seem not to lose a single hour, that they proceedings with a reckless and indecent have framed their new constitution without haste, as if they dreaded nothing so much a single attempt to improve it in any one as a compromise which would stop the Se- of the particulars in which experience had cession movement at the outset. While the shown it to be defective. They have, in Border States have been concocting schemes fact, merely re-enacted the old Federal inof adjustment, while the Northern politi- stitutions and the old Federal laws. The cians have been bringing forward project truth is-and we do not wonder at it-their after project for what is called "concilia- imaginations have been so fired and their tion," but which in fact is nothing less than cupidity so excited at the prospect of a vast ignominious capitulation, the seceding States Slave Empire, with uncontrolled dominion have not given one moment's attention to and almost illimitable territory, stretching any of these countless propositions, but have over all the magnificent lands which lie berushed at once upon action, in a manner tween Virginia on the North and the Isthmus which betrays three things as clearly as the of Panama on the South, that they are acsun at noonday. First, a violence and in- tually intoxicated by the dream; and are temperate haste which augur ill for the fu- resolved, cost what it may, to shake off the ture wisdom and decency of their govern- incubus of the Northern States, whose citiment, secondly, a resolution that nothing zens they both despise and detest as pedannow shall balk them of their purpose; and tic and shopkeeping quill-drivers, and envy thirdly, the absolute certainty that their as being at once more numerous, more plans have been laid for months if not for wealthy, and more clever than themselves. years, and at least the first steps consequent There is perhaps scarcely a Southerner now upon separation carefully determined on be- who does not fancy himself a member of the forehand. They at once seized, where they ruling class in a Republic exercising absocould, upon the Federal fortresses and lute sway over Central America, Cuba, the stores; they fired on Federal ships; they Antilles, and the whole of the Gulf of Mexobstructed the entrances to their harbors; ico, as well as over the largest portion of the they summoned conventions to meet without old Union itself. The Southerners are a an hour's delay; and-while Virginia is still very excitable race, and usually very igno~ |