The World's Greatest Books [Volumes 1-15, 17-20]

The unhappy queen, unloved, unlovable, yet with her parched heart thirsting for affection, was flinging herself upon a breast to which an iceberg was warm; upon a man to whom love was an unmeaning word, except as the most brutal of all passions. Mary set about to complete the Catholic reaction. She had restored the Catholic orthodoxy in her own person, and now was resolved to bring over her own subjects. But clouds gathered over the court. The Spaniards were too much in evidence. With the reaction came back the supremacy of the pope, and the ecclesiastical courts were reinstated in authority to check unlicensed extravagance of opinion.

Gardiner, Bonner, Tunstal, and three other prelates formed a court on January 28, 1555, in St. Mary Overy's Church, Southwark, and Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester, and Canon Rogers of St. Paul's, were brought up before them. Both were condemned as Protestants, and both were burnt at the stake, the bishop at Gloucester, the canon at Smithfield. They suffered heroically. The Catholics had affected to sneer at the faith of their rivals. There was a general conviction among them that Protestants would all flinch at the last; that they had no "doctrine that would abide the fire." Many more victims were offered. The enemies of the church were to submit or die. So said Gardiner, and so said the papal legate and the queen, in the delirious belief that they were the chosen instruments of Providence.

The people, whom the cruelty of the party was reconverting to the reformation, while the fires of Smithfield blazed, with a rapidity like that produced by the gift of tongues at Pentecost, regarded the martyrs with admiration as soldiers dying for their country. On Mary, sorrow was heaped on sorrow. Her expectation of a child was disappointed, and Philip refused to stay in England. His unhappy wife was forced to know that he preferred the society of the most abandoned women to hers. The horrible crusade against heretics became the business of the rest of her life. Archbishop Cranmer, Bishops Ridley and Latimer, and many other persons of distinction were amongst the martyrs of the Marian persecution. Latimer was eighty years of age.

Mary's miseries were intensified month by month. War broke out between England and France. For ten years the French had cherished designs, and on January 7, 1558, the famous stronghold fell into their hands. The effect of this misfortune on the queen was to produce utter prostration. She now well understood that both parliament and the nation were badly disposed towards her. But her end was at hand. After much suffering from dropsy and nervous debility, she prepared quietly for what she knew was inevitable. On November 16, at midnight, taking leave of a world in which she had played so evil a part, Mary received the last rites of the church. Towards morning she was sinking, and at the elevation of the Host, as mass was being said, her head sank, and she was gone. A few hours later the pope's legate, Cardinal Pole, at Lambeth, followed her. Thus the reign of the pope in England and the reign of terror closed together.