ELDER G BEEBE - HISTORY OF PROTESTANT PRIEST-CRAFT IN AMERICA AND EUROPE part 4
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T Adams
Oct 18, 2025, 9:45:56 AM10/18/25
to PREDESTINARIANBAPTIST, Adams, Tom
Dear Brethren and Friends,
Here is the fourth chapter in the book entitled "History of Protestant Priestcraft in America and Europe" by Elder Gilbert Beebe.
A Sinner in Hope,
Tom
Elder Gilbert Beebe
BANNER OF LIBERTY
1865
Edward VI., who was a poor sickly lad, seems to have had no distinctive characteristic, except that of hatred to the Catholics, and their religion, in which hatred, Cranmer and others, had brought him up. His life was not likely to be long, and Northumberland, who was now his keeper, conceived the project of getting the crown into his own family, a project quite worthy of a hero of the “Reformation.” In order to carry this project into effect, he married one of his sons, Lord Guilford Dudley to Lady Jane Gray, who, next after Mary and Elizabeth, and Mary Queen of Scotland, was heiress to the throne. Having done this, he got Edward to make a will, settling the crown on this Lady Jane, to the exclusion of his two sisters. The advocates of the “Reformation,” who, of course, praise this boy king, in whose reign the new church was invented, tell us long stories about the way in which Northumberland persuaded “Saint Edward” to do this act of injustice, but, in all probability, the re is not a word of truth in the story. However, what they say, is this: That Lady Jane was a sincere Protestant; that the young king knew this; and that his anxiety for the security of the Protestant religion induced him to consent to Northumberland’s proposition.
The settlement met with difficulty when it came to be laid before the lawyers, who, some how or other, always contrived to keep their heads out of the halter. Even old Harry’s judges used, when hard pressed, to refer him to the Parliament for the committing of violations of law. The Judges, the Lord Chancellor, the Secretaries of State, the Privy Council, all were afraid to put their names to this transfer of the crown. The thing was, however, at last accomplished, and, with the signature of Cranmer to it, though he, as one of the late king’s executors, and the first upon that list, had sworn in the most solemn manner, to maintain his will, according to which will, the two sisters, in case of no issue by the brother, were to succeed that brother on the throne. Thus, in addition to his fourth act of notorious perjury, this maker of the Book of Common Prayer, became clearly guilty of high treason. He now, at last, in spite of all his craft, had woven his own halter, and that, too, beyond all doubt, for the purpose of preserving his bishopric. The Princess Mary was next heir to the throne. He had divorced her mother, he had been the principal agent in that unjust and most wicked transaction; and, besides, he knew that Mary was immovably a Catholic, and that, of course, her accession must be the death of his office and his church. Therefore, he now committed the greatest crime known to the laws, and that, too, from the very basest of motives.
The king having made this settlement, and being kept wholly in the hands of Northumberland, who had placed his creatures about him, would naturally, as was said at the time, not live long! In short, he died on the 6th of July, 1553, in the sixteenth year of his age, and the seventh of his reign, expiring on the same day of the year that his savage father had brought Sir Thomas More to the block. These were seven of the most miserable and most inglorious years that England had ever known. Fanaticism and roguery, hypocrisy and plunder, divided the country between them. The people were wretched beyond all description; from the plenty of former times, they had been reduced to general beggary; and, then, in order to repress this beggary, laws the most ferocious were passed to prevent even starving creatures from asking alms.
The settlement of the crown had been kept a secret from the people, and so was the death of the king for three whole days. In the meanwhile Northumberland, seeing the death of the young “Saint” approaching, had, in conjunction, observe, with Cranmer, and the rest of his council, ordered the two princesses to come near to London, under the pretense that they might be at hand to comfort their brother; but with the real design of putting them into prison the moment the breath was out of his body. Traitors, foul conspirators, villains of all descriptions, have this in common, that they, when necessary to their own interest, are always ready to betray each other. Thus it happened here; for the Earl of Arundel, who was one of the council, and who went with Dudley, and others, on the 10th of July, to kneel before Lady Jane, as Queen, had on the night of the 6th, sent a secret messenger to Mary, who was no farther off than Hoddesden, informing her of the death of her brother, and of the whole of the plot against her. Thus warned, she set off on horseback, accompanied only by a few servants, to Kinninghall, in Northfolk, whence she proceeded to Framingham, in Suffolk, and thence issued her commands to the council to proclaim her as their sovereign, hinting at, but not positively accusing them with, their treasonable designs. They had, on the day before, proclaimed Lady Jane to be Queen! They had taken all sorts of precautions to ensure their success: army, fleet, treasure, all the powers of government were in their hands. They, therefore, returned her a most insolent answer, and commanded her to submit, as a dutiful subject, to the lawful queen, at the bottom of which command, Cranmer’s name stood first.
Misgivings, in a few hours afterwards, seized this band of almost unparalleled villains. The nobility and gentry had instantly flocked to the standard of Mary; and the people, even in London, who were most infected with the pestiferous principles of the foreign miscreants that had been brought from the continent to teach them the new religion, had native honesty enough left to make them disapprove of this last and most daring robberies. Ridley, the Protestant Bishop of London, preached at Saint Pauls to the Lord Mayor, and a numerous assemblage, for the purpose of persuading them to take part against Mary; but it was seen that he preached in vain. Northumberland himself, marched from London on the 13th of July to attack the Queen. But, in a few days, she was surrounded by twenty or thirty thousand men, all volunteers in her cause, and refusing pay. Before Northumberland reached Bury St. Edmunds, he began to despair; he marched to Cambridge, and wrote to his brother conspirators for reinforcements. Amongst these, dismay first, and then perfidy, began to appear. In a few days, these men who had been so audacious, and who had sworn solemnly to uphold the cause of Queen Jane, sent Northumberland an order to disband his army, while they themselves, proclaimed Queen Mary, amidst the unbounded applause of the people.
The master-plotter had disbanded his army, or, rather, it had deserted him before the order of the council reached him. This was the age of “reformation” and of baseness. Seeing himself abandoned, he, by the advice of Dr. Sands, the Vice-Chancellor of the University, who, only four days before, preached against Mary, went to the market place of Cambridge and preached her Queen, tossing, says Stowe, “his cap into the air, in token of his joy and satisfaction.” In a few hours afterwards, he was arrested by the Queen’s order, and that, too, by his brother conspirator, the Earl of Arundel, who had been one of the very first to kneel before Lady Jane! No reign, no age, no country, ever witnessed rapacity, hypocrisy, meanness, baseness, perfidy, such as England witnessed in those who were the founders of the Protestant English Episcopal Church. This Dudley, who had for years been a plunderer of the church – who had been a promoter of every ruffian-like measure against those who adhered to the religion of his fathers – who had caused a transfer of the crown, because, as he alleged, the accession of Mary would endanger the Protestant religion – this very man, when he came to receive justice on the block, confessed his belief in the Catholic faith; and, which is more, exhorted the nation to return to it. He, according to Dr. Heyleyh, (a Protestant, mind,) exhorted them “To stand to the religion of their ancestors, rejecting that of later day, which had occasioned all the misery of the foregoing thirty years; and that, if they desired to present their souls unspotted before God, and were truly affected to their country, they should expel the preachers of the reformed religion. For himself, he said, “being blinded by ambition, he made a rack of his conscience by temporizing, and so acknowledged the justice of his sentence.” Fox, author of the lying “Book of Martyrs,” of whose lies we shall see more by and bye, asserts that Dudley made this confession in consequence of a promise of pardon. But, when he came on the scaffold, ne knew that he was not to be pardoned; and besides, he himself expressly declared the contrary at his execution; and told the people that he had not been moved by any one to make it, and had not done it from any hpe of saving his life. However, we have yet to see Cranmer himself recant, and to see the whole band of Protestant plunderers on their knees before the Pope’s legate confessing their sins of heresy and sacrilege, and receiving absolution for their offences!
Thus ended this reign of “reformation,” plunder, wretchedness and disgrace. Three times the form of the new worship was changed, and yet those who adhered to the old worship, or who went beyond the new worship, were punished with the utmost severity. The nation became every day more and more despised abroad, and more and more distracted and miserable at home. The church, as by law established,” arose and was enforced under two protectors, or chief ministers, both of whom deservedly suffered death as traitors. Its principal author was a man who had sent both Protestants and Catholics to the stake; who had burnt people for adhering to the Pope, others for not believing in transubstantiation, others for believing in it, and who now burnt others for disbelieving in it for reasons different from his own; a man, who now openly professed to disbelieve in that, for not believing in which, he had burnt many of his fellow creatures, and who, after this, most solemnly declared, that his own belief was that of these very persons! As this church, “by law established,” advanced, all the remains of christian charity vanished before it. The indigent, whom the Catholic church had so tenderly gathered under her wings, were now, merely for asking alms, branded with red hot irons and made slaves, though no provision was made to prevent them from perishing from hunger and cold; and England, so long famed as the land of hospitality, generosity, ease, plenty, and security to person and property, became, under the new State church, a scene of repulsive selfishness, of pack horse toil, of pinching want, and of rapacity and plunder, and tyranny, that made the very names of law and justice a mockery.
Mary professed the Catholic religion, and hence, some Protestant writers have assigned her reign as the reign of “Bloody Queen Mary,” while they call that of her sister the “Golden Days of Good Queen Bess.” They have taken good care never to tell us, that, for every drop of blood Mary shed, Elizabeth shed a pint; that the former gave up every fragment of the plunder of which the deeds of her predecessors had put in her possession, and that the latter resumed this plunder again, and took from the poor, every pittance which had, by oversight, been left them – that the former never changed her religion, and that the latter changed from Catholic to Protestant, then to Catholic again, and then back again to Protestant.
The Queen, having been greeted on the road with the strongest demonstrations of joy at her accession, arrived on the 31st of July, 1553. As she approached London, the throngs thickened; Elizabeth, who had kept cautiously silent while the issue was uncertain, went out out meet her, and the two sisters, riding on horseback, entered the city, the houses being decorated, the streets strewed with flowers, and the people dressed in their gayest clothes. She was crowned soon afterwards, in the most splendid manner, and, after the Catholic ritual, by Gardiner, who had, as we have seen, opposed Cranmer’s new church, and whom she found a prisoner in the Tower, he having been deprived of his Bishopric of Winchester.
Mary began her reign by acts the most just and beneficent. Generously disregarding herself, her case, and her means of splendor, she abolished the debased currency which her father had introduced, and her brother had made still baser; she paid the debts due by the crown; and she largely remitted taxes at the same time. But that which she had most at heart, was the restoration of the Catholic religion. There were in her way great obstacles; for though the principles of the German, and Dutch, and Swiss, reformers had not, even yet, made much progress amongst the people, except in London, which was the grand scene of the operations of those hungry and fanatical adventurers, there were the plunderers the deal with; and these plunderers had power. It is easy to imagine which, indeed, was undoubtedly the fact, that the English people, who had risen in insurrection, in all parts of the kingdom, against Cranmer’s new church: who had demanded the restoration of the mass, and of part, at least, of the monasteries, and who had been silenced only by German bayonets, and halters, and gibbets, following martial law: it is easy to imagine, that this same people would, in only three years afterwards, hail, with joy indescribable, the prospect of seeing the new church put down, and the ancient one restored. But, the plunder had been so immense, the plunderers we so numerous, they were so powerful, and there were so few men of family of any account, who had not participated, in one way or another, in deeds hostile to the Catholic church, that the enterprise of the Queen was full of difficulty. As to Cranmer’s church, “by law established,” that was easily disposed of. The gold and silver, and cups and candlesticks, and other things, of which the altar robbers of young “Saint Edward’s” reign had despoiled the churches, could not, indeed, be restored; but, the altars themselves could, and speedily were. The Catholic Bishops, who had been turned out by Cranmer, were restored, and his new Bishops were, of course, turned out. Cranmer himself was, in a short time, deprived of his ill-gotten See, and was in prison and most justly, as a traitor. The mass was, in all parts of the country, once more celebrated, and the people were no longer burnt with red hot irons and made slaves merely for asking alms, and they began to hope, that England would be England again, and that hospitality and charity would return.
But, there were the plunderers to deal with! Ad, now we are about to witness a scene, which, were not its existence so well attested, must pass for the wildest of romance. What? That Parliament, who had declared Cranmer’s divorce of Catherine to be lawful, and who had enacted that Mary was a bastard, acknowledged that same Mary to be the lawful heir to the throne! That Parliament which had abolished the Catholic worship and created the Protestant worship, on the ground that the former was idolatrous and damnable, and the latter agreeable to the will of God, abolish the latter and restore the former! What? Do these things? And that, too, without any force – without being compelled to do them? No – not exactly so – for it had the people to fear, a vast majority of whom were cordially with the Queen as far as related to these matters, respecting which it is surprising what despatch was made. The late king died only in July, and, before the end of the next November, all the work of Cranmer, as to the divorce as well as to the worship, was completely overset, and that, too, by Acts of the very Parliament who had confirmed the one and “established” the other. The first of these acts declared, that Henry and Catherine had been lawfully married, and it laid all the blame upon Cranmer by name! The second Act called the Protestant Church, “as by law established,” a “new thing imagined by a few singular opinions,” though the Parliament, when it established it, asserted it to have come from “the Holy Ghost.” What was now said of it was true enough: but it might have been added, established by German bayonets. The great inventor, Cranmer, who was, at last, in a fair way of receiving the just reward of his numerous misdeeds, could only hear of the overthrow of his work; for, having though clearly as guilty of high treason as Dudley himself, been, as yet, only confined to his palace at Lambeth, and hearing that mass had been celebrated in his Cathedral Church at Canterbury, he put forth a most inflammatory and abusive declaration, (which, mind, he afterwards recanted,) for which declaration, as well as for his treason, he was committed to the Tower, where he lay at the time when these Acts were passed. Now, the two Houses of Parliament, who had, only about three or four years before, established Cranmer’s Church, and declared it to be “the work of the Holy Ghost,” now these pious “Reformation” men, having first made a firm bargain to keep the plunder, confessed (to use the words of Hume) “That they had been guilty of a most horrible defection from the true Church; professed their sincere repentance for their past transgressions; and declared their resolution to repeal all laws enacted in prejudice of the Pope’s authority!”
The Queen had been married on the 25th of July, 1556, to Philip, Prince of Spain, son and heir of the Emperor Charles V., of which marriage I shall speak more fully, by and bye.
In November, the same year, a Parliament was called, and was opened with a most splendid procession of the two Houses, closed by the King and Queen, the first on horseback, the last in a litter, dressed in robes of purple. Their first act was a repeal of the attainder of Pole, passed in the reign of the cruel Henry VIII. While this was going on, many noblemen and gentlemen had gone to Brussels, to conduct Pole to England.
On the 29th of November the two Houses petitioned the King and queen. In this petition they expressed their deep regret at having been guilty of defection from the Church; and prayed their majesties, who had not participated in the sin, to intercede with the Holy Father, the Pope, for their forgiveness, and for their readmission into the fold of Christ. The next day, the Queen being seated on the throne, having the king on her left, and Pole, the Pope’s legate, on her right, the Lord High Chancellor, Bishop Gardiner, read the petition; the King and Queen then spoke to Pole, and he, at the close of a long speech, gave, in the name of the Pope, to the two Houses and to the whole nation, absolution in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, at which words the members of the two Houses, being on their knees made the hall resound with, Amen!
Thus was England once more a Catholic country. She was restored to the “fold;” but the fold had been plundered of its hospitality and charity; and the plunderers, before the pronounced the “Amen,” had taken care, that the plunder should not be restored. These “Amen” people, while they confessed that they had sinned by that defection, in virtue of which defection, and of that alone, they got the property of the Church and the poor; while they prayed for absolution for that sin; while they rose from their knees to join the Queen in signing Te Deum in thanksgiving for that absolution; while they were doing these things, they enacted, that all the holders of the Church property should keep it, and that any person who should attempt to molest or disturb them therein, should be deemed guilty of præmunire, and be punished accordingly.
Mary had not been many months on the throne before a rebellion was raised against her, instigated by the “Reformation” preachers who had baled in favor of Lady Jane Grey, but who now discovered, amongst other things, that it was contrary to God’s word to be governed by a woman. The fighting rebels were defeated, and the leaders executed, and, at the same time, the Lady Jane herself, who had been convicted of high treason, to the extent of actually proclaiming herself the sovereign. There was another rebellion afterwards, which was quelled in like manner, and was followed by the execution of the principal traitors, who had been abetted by a Protestant faction in France, if not by the government of that country, which was bitterly hostile towards the Queen, on account of her marriage with Philip, the Prince of Spain.
Leaving out Elizabeth, the next heir to the throne was Mary Queen of Scots, and she was betrothed to the Dauphin of France; so that England might fall to the lot of the French King: and, as to Elizabeth, even supposing her to survive the Queen, she now stood bastardized by two acts of Parliament for the Act which had just been passed, declaring Catherine to be the lawful wife of her father, made her mother (what indeed Cranmer had declared her) an adulteress in law, as she was in fact. Besides, if France and Scotland were evidently likely to become the patrimony of one and the same Prince, it was necessary that England should take steps for strengthening herself also in the way of preparation. Such was the policy that dictated this celebrated match, which the historical calumniators of Mary have attributed to the worst and most low and disgusting of motives.
During Mary’s reign, the number of victims burnt at the state, was two hundred and seventy-seven, amongst them, three of Cranmer’s Bishop’s, and himself! For now, justice, at last, overtook this most mischievous of all villains, who had to go to the same stake that he had unjustly caused so many others to be tied to; the three others were Hooper, Latimer and Ridley, each of whom, was indeed, inferior in villainy to Cranmer, but to few other men that have ever existed.
Hooper was a Monk; he broke his vow of celibacy and married a Flandrican; he, being the ready tool of the Protector, Somerset, whom he greatly aided in his plunder of the churches, got two Bishoprics, though he himself had written against “pluralities;” he was a co-operator in all the monstrous cruelties inflicted on the people during the reign of Edward, and was particularly active in recommending the use of German troops to bend the necks of the English to the Protestant yoke. Latimer began his career, not only as a Catholic priest, but as a most furious assailant of the Reformation religion. By this he obtained from Henry VIII., the Bishopric of Worcester. He next changed his opinions; but, he did not give up his Bishopric! Being suspected, he made abjuration of Protestantism; he thus kept his Bishopric for twenty years, while he inwardly reprobated the principles of the Church, and which Bishopric he held in virtue of an oath to oppose, tot he utmost of his power, all dissenters from the Catholic Church; in the reigns of Henry and Edward, he sent tot eh stake, Catholics and Protestants, for holding opinions which he himself had before held openly, or that he held secretly at the time of his so sending them. Lastly, he was a chief tool in the hands of the tyrannical Protector Somerset, in that bland and unnatural act of bringing his brother, Lord Thomas Somerset, to the block. Ridley had been a Catholic Bishop in the reign of Henry VIII., when he sent to the stake Catholics who denied the king’s supremacy, and Protestants who denied transubstantiation. In Edward’s reign he was a Protestant Bishop, and denied transubstantiation himself; and then he sent to the stake Protestants who differed from the creed of Cranmer. He, in Edward’s reign, got the Bishopric of London by a most roguish agreement to transfer the greater part of its possessions to the rapacious ministers and courtiers of that day. Lastly, he was guilty of high treason against the Queen, in openly, and from the pulpit, exhorting the people to stand by the usurper, Lady Jane; and thus endeavoring to produce civil war and the death of his sovereign, in order that he might, by treason, be enabled to keep that Bishopric which he had obtained by Simony, including perjury.
A pretty trio of Protestant “Saints,” quite worth, however of “Saint” Martin Luther, who says, in his own works, that it was by the arguments of the Devil, (who, he says, frequently at, drank, and slept with him,) that he was induced to turn Protestant; three worthy followers of that Luther, who is, by his disciple Melanchton, called “a brutal man, void of piety and humanity, one more a Jew than a christian;” but, black as these are, they bleach the moment Cranmer appears in his true colors. But, alas! where is the pen, or tongue, to give us those colors? Of the sixty-five years of his manhood, twenty-nine years were spent in the commission of a series of acts, which for wickedness in their nature and for mischief in their consequences, are absolutely without anything approaching to a parallel in the annals of human infamy. Being a fellow of a college at Cambridge, and having, of course, made an engagement, (as the fellows do to this day,) not to marry while he was a fellow, he married secretly, and still enjoyed his fellowship. While a married man, he became a priest, and took the oath of celibacy; and, going to Germany, he married another wife, the daughter of a Protestant “saint;” so that now he had two wives at one time, though his oath bound him to have no wife at all. He, as Archbishop, enforced the law of celibacy, while he himself secretly kept his German frow in the palace at Canterbury. He, as ecclesiastical judge, divorced Henry VIII., from three wives, the grounds of his decision in two of the cases being directly the contrary of those which he himself had laid down when he declared the marriages to be valid; and, in the case of Anne Boleyn, he, as ecclesiastical judge, pronounced, that Anne had never been the king’s wife; while, as a member of the House of Peers, he voted for her death s having been an adulteress, and, thereby, guilty of treason to her husband. As Archbishop under Henry (which office he entered upon with a premeditated false oath on his lips) as he sent men and women to the stake because they would not acknowledge the king’s supremacy, and thereby perjure themselves as he had so often done. Become openly a Protestant, in Edward’s reign, and openly professing those very principles, for the professing of which he had burn others, he now burnt his fellow Protestants, because their grounds for protesting were different from his. As executor of the will of his old master, Henry, which gave the crown (after Edward) to his daughters Mary and Elizabeth, he conspired with others to rob those two daughters of their right and to give the crown to Lady Jane, that Queen of nine days, whom he, with others, ordered to be proclaimed. Confined, notwithstanding his many monstrous crimes, merely to the palace at Lambeth, he, in requital of the Queen’s lenity, plotted with traitors in the pay of France to overset her government. Brought, at last, to trial and to condemnation as a heretic, he professed himself ready to recant. He was respited for six weeks, during which time he signed six different forms of recantation, each more ample than the former. He declared that the Protestant religion was false; that the Catholic religion was the only true one; that he now believed in all the doctrines of the Catholic Church; that he had been a horrid blasphemer against the sacrament; that he was unworthy of forgiveness; that he prayed the people, the Queen, and the Pope, to have pity on, and to pray for his wretched soul; and that he had made and signed this declaration without fear, and without hope of favor, and for the discharge of his conscience, and as a warning to others. It was a question in the Queen’s council, whether he should be pardoned, as other recanters had been; but it was resolved, that his crimes were so enormous that it would be unjust to let him escape. Brought, therefore, to the public reading of his recantation, on his way to the stake; seeing the pile ready; now finding that he must die, and carrying in his breast all his malignity undiminished, he recanted his reclamation, thrust into the fire the hand that had signed it, and thus expired, protesting against that very religion in which, only nine hours before, he had called God to witness that he firmly believed.
Here is the fourth chapter in the book entitled "History of Protestant Priestcraft in America and Europe" by Elder Gilbert Beebe.
A Sinner in Hope,
Tom
------------------------
THE HISTORY OF PROTESTANT PRIEST-CRAFT IN
AMERICA AND EUROPE
Elder Gilbert Beebe
BANNER OF LIBERTY
1865
Edward VI., who was a poor sickly lad, seems to have had no distinctive characteristic, except that of hatred to the Catholics, and their religion, in which hatred, Cranmer and others, had brought him up. His life was not likely to be long, and Northumberland, who was now his keeper, conceived the project of getting the crown into his own family, a project quite worthy of a hero of the “Reformation.” In order to carry this project into effect, he married one of his sons, Lord Guilford Dudley to Lady Jane Gray, who, next after Mary and Elizabeth, and Mary Queen of Scotland, was heiress to the throne. Having done this, he got Edward to make a will, settling the crown on this Lady Jane, to the exclusion of his two sisters. The advocates of the “Reformation,” who, of course, praise this boy king, in whose reign the new church was invented, tell us long stories about the way in which Northumberland persuaded “Saint Edward” to do this act of injustice, but, in all probability, the re is not a word of truth in the story. However, what they say, is this: That Lady Jane was a sincere Protestant; that the young king knew this; and that his anxiety for the security of the Protestant religion induced him to consent to Northumberland’s proposition.
The settlement met with difficulty when it came to be laid before the lawyers, who, some how or other, always contrived to keep their heads out of the halter. Even old Harry’s judges used, when hard pressed, to refer him to the Parliament for the committing of violations of law. The Judges, the Lord Chancellor, the Secretaries of State, the Privy Council, all were afraid to put their names to this transfer of the crown. The thing was, however, at last accomplished, and, with the signature of Cranmer to it, though he, as one of the late king’s executors, and the first upon that list, had sworn in the most solemn manner, to maintain his will, according to which will, the two sisters, in case of no issue by the brother, were to succeed that brother on the throne. Thus, in addition to his fourth act of notorious perjury, this maker of the Book of Common Prayer, became clearly guilty of high treason. He now, at last, in spite of all his craft, had woven his own halter, and that, too, beyond all doubt, for the purpose of preserving his bishopric. The Princess Mary was next heir to the throne. He had divorced her mother, he had been the principal agent in that unjust and most wicked transaction; and, besides, he knew that Mary was immovably a Catholic, and that, of course, her accession must be the death of his office and his church. Therefore, he now committed the greatest crime known to the laws, and that, too, from the very basest of motives.
The king having made this settlement, and being kept wholly in the hands of Northumberland, who had placed his creatures about him, would naturally, as was said at the time, not live long! In short, he died on the 6th of July, 1553, in the sixteenth year of his age, and the seventh of his reign, expiring on the same day of the year that his savage father had brought Sir Thomas More to the block. These were seven of the most miserable and most inglorious years that England had ever known. Fanaticism and roguery, hypocrisy and plunder, divided the country between them. The people were wretched beyond all description; from the plenty of former times, they had been reduced to general beggary; and, then, in order to repress this beggary, laws the most ferocious were passed to prevent even starving creatures from asking alms.
The settlement of the crown had been kept a secret from the people, and so was the death of the king for three whole days. In the meanwhile Northumberland, seeing the death of the young “Saint” approaching, had, in conjunction, observe, with Cranmer, and the rest of his council, ordered the two princesses to come near to London, under the pretense that they might be at hand to comfort their brother; but with the real design of putting them into prison the moment the breath was out of his body. Traitors, foul conspirators, villains of all descriptions, have this in common, that they, when necessary to their own interest, are always ready to betray each other. Thus it happened here; for the Earl of Arundel, who was one of the council, and who went with Dudley, and others, on the 10th of July, to kneel before Lady Jane, as Queen, had on the night of the 6th, sent a secret messenger to Mary, who was no farther off than Hoddesden, informing her of the death of her brother, and of the whole of the plot against her. Thus warned, she set off on horseback, accompanied only by a few servants, to Kinninghall, in Northfolk, whence she proceeded to Framingham, in Suffolk, and thence issued her commands to the council to proclaim her as their sovereign, hinting at, but not positively accusing them with, their treasonable designs. They had, on the day before, proclaimed Lady Jane to be Queen! They had taken all sorts of precautions to ensure their success: army, fleet, treasure, all the powers of government were in their hands. They, therefore, returned her a most insolent answer, and commanded her to submit, as a dutiful subject, to the lawful queen, at the bottom of which command, Cranmer’s name stood first.
Misgivings, in a few hours afterwards, seized this band of almost unparalleled villains. The nobility and gentry had instantly flocked to the standard of Mary; and the people, even in London, who were most infected with the pestiferous principles of the foreign miscreants that had been brought from the continent to teach them the new religion, had native honesty enough left to make them disapprove of this last and most daring robberies. Ridley, the Protestant Bishop of London, preached at Saint Pauls to the Lord Mayor, and a numerous assemblage, for the purpose of persuading them to take part against Mary; but it was seen that he preached in vain. Northumberland himself, marched from London on the 13th of July to attack the Queen. But, in a few days, she was surrounded by twenty or thirty thousand men, all volunteers in her cause, and refusing pay. Before Northumberland reached Bury St. Edmunds, he began to despair; he marched to Cambridge, and wrote to his brother conspirators for reinforcements. Amongst these, dismay first, and then perfidy, began to appear. In a few days, these men who had been so audacious, and who had sworn solemnly to uphold the cause of Queen Jane, sent Northumberland an order to disband his army, while they themselves, proclaimed Queen Mary, amidst the unbounded applause of the people.
The master-plotter had disbanded his army, or, rather, it had deserted him before the order of the council reached him. This was the age of “reformation” and of baseness. Seeing himself abandoned, he, by the advice of Dr. Sands, the Vice-Chancellor of the University, who, only four days before, preached against Mary, went to the market place of Cambridge and preached her Queen, tossing, says Stowe, “his cap into the air, in token of his joy and satisfaction.” In a few hours afterwards, he was arrested by the Queen’s order, and that, too, by his brother conspirator, the Earl of Arundel, who had been one of the very first to kneel before Lady Jane! No reign, no age, no country, ever witnessed rapacity, hypocrisy, meanness, baseness, perfidy, such as England witnessed in those who were the founders of the Protestant English Episcopal Church. This Dudley, who had for years been a plunderer of the church – who had been a promoter of every ruffian-like measure against those who adhered to the religion of his fathers – who had caused a transfer of the crown, because, as he alleged, the accession of Mary would endanger the Protestant religion – this very man, when he came to receive justice on the block, confessed his belief in the Catholic faith; and, which is more, exhorted the nation to return to it. He, according to Dr. Heyleyh, (a Protestant, mind,) exhorted them “To stand to the religion of their ancestors, rejecting that of later day, which had occasioned all the misery of the foregoing thirty years; and that, if they desired to present their souls unspotted before God, and were truly affected to their country, they should expel the preachers of the reformed religion. For himself, he said, “being blinded by ambition, he made a rack of his conscience by temporizing, and so acknowledged the justice of his sentence.” Fox, author of the lying “Book of Martyrs,” of whose lies we shall see more by and bye, asserts that Dudley made this confession in consequence of a promise of pardon. But, when he came on the scaffold, ne knew that he was not to be pardoned; and besides, he himself expressly declared the contrary at his execution; and told the people that he had not been moved by any one to make it, and had not done it from any hpe of saving his life. However, we have yet to see Cranmer himself recant, and to see the whole band of Protestant plunderers on their knees before the Pope’s legate confessing their sins of heresy and sacrilege, and receiving absolution for their offences!
Thus ended this reign of “reformation,” plunder, wretchedness and disgrace. Three times the form of the new worship was changed, and yet those who adhered to the old worship, or who went beyond the new worship, were punished with the utmost severity. The nation became every day more and more despised abroad, and more and more distracted and miserable at home. The church, as by law established,” arose and was enforced under two protectors, or chief ministers, both of whom deservedly suffered death as traitors. Its principal author was a man who had sent both Protestants and Catholics to the stake; who had burnt people for adhering to the Pope, others for not believing in transubstantiation, others for believing in it, and who now burnt others for disbelieving in it for reasons different from his own; a man, who now openly professed to disbelieve in that, for not believing in which, he had burnt many of his fellow creatures, and who, after this, most solemnly declared, that his own belief was that of these very persons! As this church, “by law established,” advanced, all the remains of christian charity vanished before it. The indigent, whom the Catholic church had so tenderly gathered under her wings, were now, merely for asking alms, branded with red hot irons and made slaves, though no provision was made to prevent them from perishing from hunger and cold; and England, so long famed as the land of hospitality, generosity, ease, plenty, and security to person and property, became, under the new State church, a scene of repulsive selfishness, of pack horse toil, of pinching want, and of rapacity and plunder, and tyranny, that made the very names of law and justice a mockery.
Mary professed the Catholic religion, and hence, some Protestant writers have assigned her reign as the reign of “Bloody Queen Mary,” while they call that of her sister the “Golden Days of Good Queen Bess.” They have taken good care never to tell us, that, for every drop of blood Mary shed, Elizabeth shed a pint; that the former gave up every fragment of the plunder of which the deeds of her predecessors had put in her possession, and that the latter resumed this plunder again, and took from the poor, every pittance which had, by oversight, been left them – that the former never changed her religion, and that the latter changed from Catholic to Protestant, then to Catholic again, and then back again to Protestant.
The Queen, having been greeted on the road with the strongest demonstrations of joy at her accession, arrived on the 31st of July, 1553. As she approached London, the throngs thickened; Elizabeth, who had kept cautiously silent while the issue was uncertain, went out out meet her, and the two sisters, riding on horseback, entered the city, the houses being decorated, the streets strewed with flowers, and the people dressed in their gayest clothes. She was crowned soon afterwards, in the most splendid manner, and, after the Catholic ritual, by Gardiner, who had, as we have seen, opposed Cranmer’s new church, and whom she found a prisoner in the Tower, he having been deprived of his Bishopric of Winchester.
Mary began her reign by acts the most just and beneficent. Generously disregarding herself, her case, and her means of splendor, she abolished the debased currency which her father had introduced, and her brother had made still baser; she paid the debts due by the crown; and she largely remitted taxes at the same time. But that which she had most at heart, was the restoration of the Catholic religion. There were in her way great obstacles; for though the principles of the German, and Dutch, and Swiss, reformers had not, even yet, made much progress amongst the people, except in London, which was the grand scene of the operations of those hungry and fanatical adventurers, there were the plunderers the deal with; and these plunderers had power. It is easy to imagine which, indeed, was undoubtedly the fact, that the English people, who had risen in insurrection, in all parts of the kingdom, against Cranmer’s new church: who had demanded the restoration of the mass, and of part, at least, of the monasteries, and who had been silenced only by German bayonets, and halters, and gibbets, following martial law: it is easy to imagine, that this same people would, in only three years afterwards, hail, with joy indescribable, the prospect of seeing the new church put down, and the ancient one restored. But, the plunder had been so immense, the plunderers we so numerous, they were so powerful, and there were so few men of family of any account, who had not participated, in one way or another, in deeds hostile to the Catholic church, that the enterprise of the Queen was full of difficulty. As to Cranmer’s church, “by law established,” that was easily disposed of. The gold and silver, and cups and candlesticks, and other things, of which the altar robbers of young “Saint Edward’s” reign had despoiled the churches, could not, indeed, be restored; but, the altars themselves could, and speedily were. The Catholic Bishops, who had been turned out by Cranmer, were restored, and his new Bishops were, of course, turned out. Cranmer himself was, in a short time, deprived of his ill-gotten See, and was in prison and most justly, as a traitor. The mass was, in all parts of the country, once more celebrated, and the people were no longer burnt with red hot irons and made slaves merely for asking alms, and they began to hope, that England would be England again, and that hospitality and charity would return.
But, there were the plunderers to deal with! Ad, now we are about to witness a scene, which, were not its existence so well attested, must pass for the wildest of romance. What? That Parliament, who had declared Cranmer’s divorce of Catherine to be lawful, and who had enacted that Mary was a bastard, acknowledged that same Mary to be the lawful heir to the throne! That Parliament which had abolished the Catholic worship and created the Protestant worship, on the ground that the former was idolatrous and damnable, and the latter agreeable to the will of God, abolish the latter and restore the former! What? Do these things? And that, too, without any force – without being compelled to do them? No – not exactly so – for it had the people to fear, a vast majority of whom were cordially with the Queen as far as related to these matters, respecting which it is surprising what despatch was made. The late king died only in July, and, before the end of the next November, all the work of Cranmer, as to the divorce as well as to the worship, was completely overset, and that, too, by Acts of the very Parliament who had confirmed the one and “established” the other. The first of these acts declared, that Henry and Catherine had been lawfully married, and it laid all the blame upon Cranmer by name! The second Act called the Protestant Church, “as by law established,” a “new thing imagined by a few singular opinions,” though the Parliament, when it established it, asserted it to have come from “the Holy Ghost.” What was now said of it was true enough: but it might have been added, established by German bayonets. The great inventor, Cranmer, who was, at last, in a fair way of receiving the just reward of his numerous misdeeds, could only hear of the overthrow of his work; for, having though clearly as guilty of high treason as Dudley himself, been, as yet, only confined to his palace at Lambeth, and hearing that mass had been celebrated in his Cathedral Church at Canterbury, he put forth a most inflammatory and abusive declaration, (which, mind, he afterwards recanted,) for which declaration, as well as for his treason, he was committed to the Tower, where he lay at the time when these Acts were passed. Now, the two Houses of Parliament, who had, only about three or four years before, established Cranmer’s Church, and declared it to be “the work of the Holy Ghost,” now these pious “Reformation” men, having first made a firm bargain to keep the plunder, confessed (to use the words of Hume) “That they had been guilty of a most horrible defection from the true Church; professed their sincere repentance for their past transgressions; and declared their resolution to repeal all laws enacted in prejudice of the Pope’s authority!”
The Queen had been married on the 25th of July, 1556, to Philip, Prince of Spain, son and heir of the Emperor Charles V., of which marriage I shall speak more fully, by and bye.
In November, the same year, a Parliament was called, and was opened with a most splendid procession of the two Houses, closed by the King and Queen, the first on horseback, the last in a litter, dressed in robes of purple. Their first act was a repeal of the attainder of Pole, passed in the reign of the cruel Henry VIII. While this was going on, many noblemen and gentlemen had gone to Brussels, to conduct Pole to England.
On the 29th of November the two Houses petitioned the King and queen. In this petition they expressed their deep regret at having been guilty of defection from the Church; and prayed their majesties, who had not participated in the sin, to intercede with the Holy Father, the Pope, for their forgiveness, and for their readmission into the fold of Christ. The next day, the Queen being seated on the throne, having the king on her left, and Pole, the Pope’s legate, on her right, the Lord High Chancellor, Bishop Gardiner, read the petition; the King and Queen then spoke to Pole, and he, at the close of a long speech, gave, in the name of the Pope, to the two Houses and to the whole nation, absolution in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, at which words the members of the two Houses, being on their knees made the hall resound with, Amen!
Thus was England once more a Catholic country. She was restored to the “fold;” but the fold had been plundered of its hospitality and charity; and the plunderers, before the pronounced the “Amen,” had taken care, that the plunder should not be restored. These “Amen” people, while they confessed that they had sinned by that defection, in virtue of which defection, and of that alone, they got the property of the Church and the poor; while they prayed for absolution for that sin; while they rose from their knees to join the Queen in signing Te Deum in thanksgiving for that absolution; while they were doing these things, they enacted, that all the holders of the Church property should keep it, and that any person who should attempt to molest or disturb them therein, should be deemed guilty of præmunire, and be punished accordingly.
Mary had not been many months on the throne before a rebellion was raised against her, instigated by the “Reformation” preachers who had baled in favor of Lady Jane Grey, but who now discovered, amongst other things, that it was contrary to God’s word to be governed by a woman. The fighting rebels were defeated, and the leaders executed, and, at the same time, the Lady Jane herself, who had been convicted of high treason, to the extent of actually proclaiming herself the sovereign. There was another rebellion afterwards, which was quelled in like manner, and was followed by the execution of the principal traitors, who had been abetted by a Protestant faction in France, if not by the government of that country, which was bitterly hostile towards the Queen, on account of her marriage with Philip, the Prince of Spain.
Leaving out Elizabeth, the next heir to the throne was Mary Queen of Scots, and she was betrothed to the Dauphin of France; so that England might fall to the lot of the French King: and, as to Elizabeth, even supposing her to survive the Queen, she now stood bastardized by two acts of Parliament for the Act which had just been passed, declaring Catherine to be the lawful wife of her father, made her mother (what indeed Cranmer had declared her) an adulteress in law, as she was in fact. Besides, if France and Scotland were evidently likely to become the patrimony of one and the same Prince, it was necessary that England should take steps for strengthening herself also in the way of preparation. Such was the policy that dictated this celebrated match, which the historical calumniators of Mary have attributed to the worst and most low and disgusting of motives.
During Mary’s reign, the number of victims burnt at the state, was two hundred and seventy-seven, amongst them, three of Cranmer’s Bishop’s, and himself! For now, justice, at last, overtook this most mischievous of all villains, who had to go to the same stake that he had unjustly caused so many others to be tied to; the three others were Hooper, Latimer and Ridley, each of whom, was indeed, inferior in villainy to Cranmer, but to few other men that have ever existed.
Hooper was a Monk; he broke his vow of celibacy and married a Flandrican; he, being the ready tool of the Protector, Somerset, whom he greatly aided in his plunder of the churches, got two Bishoprics, though he himself had written against “pluralities;” he was a co-operator in all the monstrous cruelties inflicted on the people during the reign of Edward, and was particularly active in recommending the use of German troops to bend the necks of the English to the Protestant yoke. Latimer began his career, not only as a Catholic priest, but as a most furious assailant of the Reformation religion. By this he obtained from Henry VIII., the Bishopric of Worcester. He next changed his opinions; but, he did not give up his Bishopric! Being suspected, he made abjuration of Protestantism; he thus kept his Bishopric for twenty years, while he inwardly reprobated the principles of the Church, and which Bishopric he held in virtue of an oath to oppose, tot he utmost of his power, all dissenters from the Catholic Church; in the reigns of Henry and Edward, he sent tot eh stake, Catholics and Protestants, for holding opinions which he himself had before held openly, or that he held secretly at the time of his so sending them. Lastly, he was a chief tool in the hands of the tyrannical Protector Somerset, in that bland and unnatural act of bringing his brother, Lord Thomas Somerset, to the block. Ridley had been a Catholic Bishop in the reign of Henry VIII., when he sent to the stake Catholics who denied the king’s supremacy, and Protestants who denied transubstantiation. In Edward’s reign he was a Protestant Bishop, and denied transubstantiation himself; and then he sent to the stake Protestants who differed from the creed of Cranmer. He, in Edward’s reign, got the Bishopric of London by a most roguish agreement to transfer the greater part of its possessions to the rapacious ministers and courtiers of that day. Lastly, he was guilty of high treason against the Queen, in openly, and from the pulpit, exhorting the people to stand by the usurper, Lady Jane; and thus endeavoring to produce civil war and the death of his sovereign, in order that he might, by treason, be enabled to keep that Bishopric which he had obtained by Simony, including perjury.
A pretty trio of Protestant “Saints,” quite worth, however of “Saint” Martin Luther, who says, in his own works, that it was by the arguments of the Devil, (who, he says, frequently at, drank, and slept with him,) that he was induced to turn Protestant; three worthy followers of that Luther, who is, by his disciple Melanchton, called “a brutal man, void of piety and humanity, one more a Jew than a christian;” but, black as these are, they bleach the moment Cranmer appears in his true colors. But, alas! where is the pen, or tongue, to give us those colors? Of the sixty-five years of his manhood, twenty-nine years were spent in the commission of a series of acts, which for wickedness in their nature and for mischief in their consequences, are absolutely without anything approaching to a parallel in the annals of human infamy. Being a fellow of a college at Cambridge, and having, of course, made an engagement, (as the fellows do to this day,) not to marry while he was a fellow, he married secretly, and still enjoyed his fellowship. While a married man, he became a priest, and took the oath of celibacy; and, going to Germany, he married another wife, the daughter of a Protestant “saint;” so that now he had two wives at one time, though his oath bound him to have no wife at all. He, as Archbishop, enforced the law of celibacy, while he himself secretly kept his German frow in the palace at Canterbury. He, as ecclesiastical judge, divorced Henry VIII., from three wives, the grounds of his decision in two of the cases being directly the contrary of those which he himself had laid down when he declared the marriages to be valid; and, in the case of Anne Boleyn, he, as ecclesiastical judge, pronounced, that Anne had never been the king’s wife; while, as a member of the House of Peers, he voted for her death s having been an adulteress, and, thereby, guilty of treason to her husband. As Archbishop under Henry (which office he entered upon with a premeditated false oath on his lips) as he sent men and women to the stake because they would not acknowledge the king’s supremacy, and thereby perjure themselves as he had so often done. Become openly a Protestant, in Edward’s reign, and openly professing those very principles, for the professing of which he had burn others, he now burnt his fellow Protestants, because their grounds for protesting were different from his. As executor of the will of his old master, Henry, which gave the crown (after Edward) to his daughters Mary and Elizabeth, he conspired with others to rob those two daughters of their right and to give the crown to Lady Jane, that Queen of nine days, whom he, with others, ordered to be proclaimed. Confined, notwithstanding his many monstrous crimes, merely to the palace at Lambeth, he, in requital of the Queen’s lenity, plotted with traitors in the pay of France to overset her government. Brought, at last, to trial and to condemnation as a heretic, he professed himself ready to recant. He was respited for six weeks, during which time he signed six different forms of recantation, each more ample than the former. He declared that the Protestant religion was false; that the Catholic religion was the only true one; that he now believed in all the doctrines of the Catholic Church; that he had been a horrid blasphemer against the sacrament; that he was unworthy of forgiveness; that he prayed the people, the Queen, and the Pope, to have pity on, and to pray for his wretched soul; and that he had made and signed this declaration without fear, and without hope of favor, and for the discharge of his conscience, and as a warning to others. It was a question in the Queen’s council, whether he should be pardoned, as other recanters had been; but it was resolved, that his crimes were so enormous that it would be unjust to let him escape. Brought, therefore, to the public reading of his recantation, on his way to the stake; seeing the pile ready; now finding that he must die, and carrying in his breast all his malignity undiminished, he recanted his reclamation, thrust into the fire the hand that had signed it, and thus expired, protesting against that very religion in which, only nine hours before, he had called God to witness that he firmly believed.
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