CHAPTER II

THE REFORMATION

LADY JANE GREY; THE DUCHESS OF SOMERSET; KATHARINE, DUCHESS OF SUFFOLK; MARY, DUCHESS OF RICHMOND; MILDRED, LADY BURGHLEY; ANNE, LADY BACON ; QUEEN ELIZABETH.

THE Succession of Jane Seymour's son-Edward VI.brought about assertions of Protestant principles and declarations of Puritan views that militated not only against the abuses of tradition, but against tradition itself. Yet it was a strength to the Church of England at this time, that men and women belonged to it who were fearless to inquire into origins and bold to abandon customs hallowed only by long use.

Of these timely iconoclasts none was more inveterate, yet of purer intention, than the King's cousin—designed in the minds of many for the King's consort the Lady Jane Grey. Her early drilling in the Latin and the Greek was peculiarly severe. She had been instructed also in Hebrew, Italian and French. Yet so much harsher and more punctilious had been her moral training, so "pinched " and "nipped" and "bobbed " had she been into dutiful subjection and good manners, that from infancy she had turned to the study of classic literature with that gladness wherewith an ordinary child springs to a game of play. The result of this severe education was a being mercilessly pure and singleminded. Her discernment of pretences was peculiarly keen. In particular, religious shams were abhorrent to her.

When on a visit to her elder cousin, the Princess Mary, she derided the action of a lady of the household in curtsying to the altar of the private chapel.

Is the Lady Mary's grace here?" Jane inquired in affected innocence.

"I curtsy to my Maker," replied the lady.

"I thought the baker made him!" quoth Lady Jane. This manner of speaking of the reserved Sacrament must have been extraordinarily repugnant to the Catholic mind. Repeated to Mary, who was hospitably entertaining her young cousin, the remark would inevitably rankle. The jest was crude; its irreverence no less offensive because it came of reaction from too much pretence. It revealed the width of the chasm that separated Catholics from Protestants in King Edward's time. It gives us the clue also to the feeling in the younger woman that led her at last to justify to herself her usurpation of Mary's right to the crown. In Jane's view it was a woeful matter that an idolater of the Mass should follow the puritanical Edward on England's throne. Rigid as Jane was in virtue, in principle and in opinion, it was not an impossible task for scheming Protestant lords to persuade her that she, the Protestant, was the ruler needed for England's good, and that an insurmountable bar-sinister excluded Mary from the throne. She paid the penalty of her presumption, and humbly acknowledged the justice of her punishment. But she did not recant her faith. She was of the true stuff whereof saints and martyrs are fashioned. The blood that flowed from her decapitated body on Tower Hill sank deep into the soil of England. From the seeds of such honesty and tenacity as were hers, the English Church uprose. It was inevitable that her vision was blurred as to the ultimate form of the Church she helped to rear. It was the task of her soul in the stormy times she dwelt in, only to abhor the evils in the alien edifice imposed upon the faithful of her nation. These evils-the roots of themshe very clearly defined in her debate with Mr. John Feckenham, Dean of St. Paul's, four days before her death. This ecclesiastic, sent from Queen Mary to instruct Jane in "the true doctrine of the right faith," found more than his match in argument in the youthful martyr-designate. They had a long discussion on the Sacraments, in

which Lady Jane maintained that the words, "This is My body," were to be understood after the same fashion as “I am the Vine" and "I am the Door." Dean Feckenham objected that his disputant did not ground her faith upon the Church. Jane's reply was memorable.

"No; I ground my faith on God's Word and not upon the Church. For if the Church be a good Church, the faith of the Church must be tried by God's Word; and not God's Word by the Church, neither yet my faith. Shall I believe the Church because of antiquity, or shall I give credit to the Church that taketh away from me the half part of the Lord's Supper, and will not let any man receive it in both kinds?-which things, if they deny to us, then deny they to us part of our salvation. And I say that it is an evil Church, and not the spouse of Christ, but the spouse of the devil, that altereth the Lord's Supper and both taketh from it and addeth to it. To that Church, say I, God will add plagues; and from that Church will He take their part out of the book of life. Do they learn that of St. Paul, when he ministered to the Corinthians in both kinds? Shall I believe this Church? God forbid!"

The dean had no better answer to the impassioned question of Jane than "That was done for a good intent of the Church, to avoid a heresy that sprang on it."

The martyr's scorn did not abate.

"Why, shall the Church alter God's will and ordinance for good intent? How did King Saul? The Lord God defend!"

The Lady Jane certainly gathered her notions of Church constitution more from the Lord-Protector Somerset, who wrote the introduction to the Communion Service, than from the more flexible and wider-viewed Cranmer. Allied with her husband, in all he did for the Church, was Anne (Stanhope), the Protector's wife. She was a lady of manners no less haughty and of mind no less opinionative than her lord. She presumed much upon her own royal descent (from Edward III.), and upon her husband's rank as first subject of the land, and contended with the Queen-Dowager -Katharine Parr-for precedence at Court. She was a

Protestant by nature as well as by profession. Yet she went to the Tower, in the reign of Edward VI., for Somerset's failure to maintain his political status, and she was liberated by the kiss of Mary, upon that Queen's accession, because her husband had been the victim of the Dudley interest that interest which had prevailed to set up Jane for her nine days' reign.

In the days of her imprisonment the Duchess of Somerset desired the spiritual consolation of Bishop Hooper. Hooper was a prelate of the hard-working and aggressive type. His reforms were thorough, and despite his own dignity, ran on non-episcopal lines. He was, moreover, a married man. Not as Cranmer had been, a married man and ashamed to own his wife, but glorying in the blessing of a helpmeet. He had been the chosen chaplain of the Protector in his days of power. Hooper's uncompromising spirit made him, at all times, for the Seymours, peculiarly their man of God. He was greatly opposed to the wearing of vestments, and contended with Archbishop Cranmer that they were impious and idolatrous. Although advised by the foreign and Calvinistic Reformers-Peter Martyr and Martin Bucer-that vestments might be legally worn, Hooper would not put on episcopal garments until he had been transferred from the custody of the Primate to Fleet prison. Then he came to the conclusion that the wearing or not wearing a special form of ministerial costume was not a vital point of religion, and he was consecrated Bishop of Gloucester. So much has been written of Hooper, because the views and the character of the man are indicative of the views and the character of his patroness the Duchess of Somerset. She, too, was of an uncompromising nature, and did not greatly reverence forms and ceremonies. But she could not lay down her life for the gospel, as did Hooper. She lived quietly during the Bloody Reign," and doubtless participated in the Romish ritual to the point required to save her body from burning. Her second husband, Mr. Francis Newdigate, was the late steward to her former lord. The Princess

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Elizabeth laughed over the lady who had been so high falling to the low estate of Mrs. Newdigate. What mattered it to one who had been purged of pride? God granted to the duchess at last a certain happiness. Her virtues made her deserve that happiness. She had always lived purely and walked advisedly. What though she had sometimes exceeded her wifely office, and prevented the Protector from granting suits of other pious dames who desired preferment for favourite preachers? She was always a true wife. The ode of the Earl of Surrey On a Lady who refused to dance with him, memorializes a rebuff of the Duchess of Somerset-then Lady Seymour-to certain addresses the poet had no right to pay her. That such a rebuff had to be administered explains the active part taken by Seymour to obtain the punishment of Surrey for eating flesh in Lent and for leading a troop of boon companions in an assault upon certain houses of ill-fame in the city of London, whereof Bishop Gardiner gathered the rents. The foray took place in King Henry's reign, but even so early Seymour's sympathies were with the Protestant party. And Surrey, inspired by the "New Learning," warred on superstition and on corrupt practices among ecclesiastics. But Seymour had knowledge of sins in Surrey, in particular of that sin of attempting to deprave his wife, that made the poet wholly unfit to act as a Reformer. And there was another whose spirit Surrey's turbulence and ambition grieved.

Like the Mary of old, Surrey's sister Mary chose the better part. Married when but a child to Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, the illegitimate but highly honoured son of Henry VIII., she became a maiden-widow in 1536, and was never afterwards persuaded to become to any man a wife indeed.

In 1546 her father and brother were arrested on charges of conspiring to secure the succession to the throne, and Duchess Mary was summarily brought from Keninghall to London to give evidence against them. No charge against her father could be wrung from her, but she had promised the royal commissioners, upon the shock of her first seizure,