Catholic Reaction, Third Period : Persecutions (1554- 1558)

The year 1554 marks the height of the reaction so far as the outward act of submission was concerned. Yet in reality the reaction was far from complete. The lands were not restored, parliament refused to revive the payment of annates, and the statutes of Pr munire remained in force as before. Furthermore, the effects of the work of Henry VIII and Edward VI could not be destroyed by acts of parliament or by words of submission. The temper of the English people was seen when in 1555 Mary and chancellor Gardiner began the work of persecution for heresy. First John Rogers was sent to the stake (February, 1555) for denying the doctrine of transubstantiation; then Bishop Hooper ; and finally, in November, Latimer and Ridley were burnt at Oxford. The next year Cranmer, whom Mary especially hated because he had sanctioned the divorce of her mother from Henry VIII, suffered a like fate. The majority of the executions were in Kent, in the neighborhood of the archbishopric of Canterbury, and it is estimated that in all nearly three hundred persons were put to death.

The effect of this cruel policy was exactly the reverse of what Mary had intended it should be. The mass of the people, admiring the courage of the martyrs, viewed the persecution with increasing horror. Thousands who had been loyal to the old faith were driven into a position of hostility to the government and the Roman party, and gradually southern England became Protestant.

Relations with France : the Loss of Calais

The discontent thus aroused found outward expression not in England, where men had resolved to wait for Mary's death, but in France, where a body of exiles had been conspiring for several years against Philip and Mary. Mary claimed that Henry II, the king of France, was aiding the conspirators with men and money, and undoubtedly exaggerated the danger from them in order that she might have a pretext for putting to death such of them as fell into her hands. She caused Sir Thomas Uvedale, governor of the isle of Wight, to be executed in 1556, the next year sent to the scaffold Thomas Stafford, a relative of the royal family and a claimant of the throne, who had foolishly seized Scarborough Castle.

But the most disastrous outcome of these intrigues was the war that England entered into with France in 1557. Charles V of Germany had been warring with France for thirty years, and though he had abdicated his throne in 1556, he still continued to urge his son Philip, now king of Spain, to prevail upon Mary to join the alliance. Hitherto Mary had not been able to accede to her husband's request on account of the resistance at home and the terms of her marriage contract' But the Stafford conspiracy gave Philip his opportunity, and in 1557 Mary declared war. The one great result of this war was the capture of Calais, which was seized by the duke of Guise in the autumn of the same year. The loss of this town came as a terrible shock to the English and enormously increased Mary's unpopularity. In a military sense Calais was regarded as of vital importance to England in guarding her from invasion. In a commercial sense it was deemed the key to the Continental trade, because it was the staple town through which all English goods had to pass to reach the markets of the Continent. Little wonder that when it fell men foresaw military and commercial ruin for England; and that Mary, in horror, cried that after her death Calais would be found graven on her heart.

In fact, however, the loss of Calais was a gain to England. It severed the last connection of the island kingdom with the Continent, and compelled Englishmen to give up plans of conquest in France and of political interference in foreign affairs. It rendered an army less important than a navy, and forced England to depend more and more upon her ships and her sailors. It completed the downfall of the Merchant Staplers, and gave a new impetus to the Merchant Adventurers, who were already trading in all parts of the world and cared no more for Calais than for any other Continental town. With the loss of Calais, England was thrown back upon her own resources ; and how splendidly she employed those resources in developing a navy, a native commerce, and a colonial empire, the history of the ensuing century will show.