Lady Jane Grey

Edward VI died on July 7, 1553. By the terms of Henry's will the succession was to go to the Princess Mary; but Northumberland had worked on the young king, persuading him, in the interest of Protestantism, to bequeath the crown to Lady Jane Grey, the wife of his own son, Guilford Dudley, and the granddaughter of Henry VIII's sister Mary, who, after the death of Louis XII, had returned to England and married Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. By this means, under the pretence of defending Protestantism, Warwick hoped to retain power.

But the plot in favor of Lady Jane Grey failed in every particular. In the first place, Edward's will was invalid, not having been sanctioned by act of parliament; in the second place, England would have no more of Warwick, whether as John Dudley or as the duke of Northumberland. The ill-fated claimant, Lady Jane, who lent herself most unwillingly to the scheme, was proclaimed queen of England three days after Edward's death; but her reign lasted only eleven days. The nation rallied to the support of the rightful heir. Northumberland was seized and executed in 1553, and disclosed the hollowness of his entire support of Protestantism by recanting on the scaffold and declaring that the Protestant cause was a sham. The tide of popular enthusiasm which bore Mary to the throne testified to the hatred which all right-minded men had conceived for the heartless, timeserving policy of this basest and most unscrupulous of English ministers.

General Character of the Age of Mary and Elizabeth

The accession of Mary ushered in the inevitable reaction. The reform party in England had been unfortunate both in their leaders and in their methods, and the support which the English gave to Mary's cause was due less to their love for her and the faith she represented than to the hostility they felt for the attempt which had been made to force Protestantism upon England. At the same time they were in large part loyal to the old forms and ceremonies, for habits of centuries cannot be destroyed in one reign by acts of parliament. England would probably have welcomed at this time a moderate reaction. The difficulty with Mary's work was that it was destined to go as far in the other direction as that of Somerset and Northumberland had gone in the direction of reform, and in consequence, to undo whatever good results a policy of moderation at this time might have effected.

The reasons why the reaction was so extreme are clear. Mary herself was an overzealous devotee of the old faith, and could see no stopping-point short of a complete restoration of the old conditions and a punishment of those responsible for the Protestant changes. At the same time she was acting under the advice of the Emperor Charles V, his son Philip, and the pope, who were straining every nerve to check the growth of Protestantism in Europe. Protestantism was gaining steadily in Germany, in France, and even in southern Europe, and was destined to gain for another fifteen years before the tide was to turn. England, under a Catholic queen, promised to be the first country where a victory for the old faith could be obtained. The struggle was to be long and persistent. On one side were those who wished to make England once more subject to the pope and to limit her national independence by forcing her to become a part of a great ecclesiastical empire; on the other were those who wished to make her a powerful, independent kingdom, in which the church should be subordinate to the state and the wealth and energies of the people be employed for England alone. This conflict, which began with the accession of Queen Mary in 1553, was not ended until the defeat of the Armada in 1588, a period of thirty-five years, during which England passed from danger to security, and frown social and economic distress to a condition of national prosperity. These are years of vital importance in the history of England, for they mark the close of a long period of transition, during which the institutions and ideas of the older time were finally compelled to give way before those of the more modern era.

The Catholic Reaction, First Period : Moderation (1553)

Mary came to the throne in 1553, and began immediately to undo the work of the previous reign. She released the bishops and others imprisoned in the Tower; Gardiner, Courtenay, Norfolk, and others,

sent Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer to prison, and drove others of the Protestant clergy to take refuge on the Continent. With Bishop Gardiner as her ally, she began to restore the old forms and dogmas. She set aside the prayer book of Edward VI, and introduced again the Latin mass. A parliament summoned in October, 1553, was composed of members who had been elected under pressure from the crown, and consequently were ready to sanction all the queen's acts. This body declared Mary legitimate, thus annulling all the acts passed during the reign of Henry VIII affecting the divorce of Catherine of Aragon. It repealed at one stroke nine acts passed under Edward VI, thus restoring the church, its doctrine and service, to the position which it had occupied at the death of Henry VIII.