CHAPTER 7.
Her virtuous sentiments, the good behavior which she resolved to
maintain, filled him with delight; and he was ever expressing his happiness in ‘having obtained such a jewel of womanhood.’ f364 He had no foreboding of the terrible blow which was soon to shatter all this happiness.
The new queen was distinguished from the former chiefly by the difference in religion, with a corresponding difference in morality. The niece of the duke of Norfolk, Gardiner’s friend, was of course an adherent of the Catholic faith; and the Catholic party hailed her as at once the symbol and the instrument of reaction. They had had plenty of Protestant queens, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, and Anne of Cleves. Now that they had a Catholic queen, Catholicism — many said popery — would recover its power. Henry was so much enamored of his new spouse that, in honor of her, he once more became a fervent Catholic. He celebrated all the Saints’ days, frequently received the holy sacrament, and offered publicly thanksgiving to God for this happy union which he hoped to enjoy for a long time. f365 The conversion of Henry, for the change was nothing less, brought with it a change of policy. He now abandoned France and the German Protestants in order to ally himself with the empire; and we find him ere long busily engaged in a project; for the marriage of his daughter Mary to the emperor Charles V. This project, however, came to nothing.
f366 Gardiner, Norfolk, and the other leaders of the Catholic party, rejoicing in the breeze which bore their vessel onward, set all sails to the wind. Just after the divorce of Anne of Cleves, and by way of a first boon to the Romish party, the penalties for impure living imposed on priests and nuns were mitigated. f367 In contempt of the authority of Holy Scripture as well as of that of parliament itself, Henry got an Act passed by virtue of which every determination concerning faith, worship, and ceremonies, adopted with the sanction of the king by a Commission of archbishops, bishops, and other ecclesiastics nominated by him, was to be received, believed, and observed by the whole nation, just as if parliament had approved every one of these articles, even if this decree were contrary to former usages and ordinances. f368 This was a proclamation of infallibility in England, for the benefit of the pope-king, under cover of which he might found a religion to his own taste. Cranmer had established in all cathedral churches professors entrusted with the teaching of Hebrew and Greek, in order that students might become well acquainted with sacred literature, and that the church
might never want ministers capable of edifying it. But the enemies of the Reformation, who now enjoyed royal favor, lettered or abolished this institution and other similar ones, to the great damage both of religion and the country. f369 The Catholic ceremonies, on the other hand, abrogated by Cranmer and Cromwell — the consecration of bread and of water, the embers with which the priest marked the foreheads of the faithful, the palm-branches blessed on Palm-Sunday, the tapers carried at Candlemas, and other like customs — were re-established; and penalties were imposed on those who should neglect them. f370 A new edition of the Institution of a Christian Man explained to the people the king’s doctrine. It treated of the seven sacraments, the mass, transubstantiation, the salutation of the Virgin, and other doctrines of the kind to which conformity was required.
f371 At length, as if with a view to ensure the permanence of this system, Bonner was made bishop of London; and this man, who had been the most abject flatterer and servant of Cromwell during his life, turned about after his death and became the persecutor of those whom Cromwell had protected.
At the spectacle of this reaction, so marvelous in their eyes, the Anglican Catholics and even the papists broke out with joy, and awaited with impatience ‘the crowning of the edifice.’ England, in their view, was saved.
The church was triumphant. But while there was rejoicing on the one side, there was mourning on the other. The establishment of superstitious practices, the prospect of the penalties contained in the bloody statute of the Six Articles, penalties which had not yet been enforced but were on the point of being so spread, distress and alarm among the evangelicals. Those who did not add to their faith manly energy shut up their convictions in their own breasts, carefully abstained from conversation on religious subjects, and looked with suspicion upon every stranger, fearing that he might be one of Gardiner’s spies.
Bonner was active and eager, going forward in pursuit of his object and allowing nothing to check him. Cromwell and Cranmer, to whom he used to make fair professions, believed that he was capable of being of service to the Reformation, and therefore gave him promotion in ecclesiastical offices. But no sooner had Cromwell been put in prison than his signal deceitfulness showed itself. Grafton, who printed the Bible under the patronage of the vicegerent, having met Bonner, to whom Cromwell had