MR. TURNBULL'S CALENDAR OF STATE PAPERS.* IN their late crusade
of intolerance Lord Shaftesbury and the Pro- testant Alliance have made a great mistake. They should have crushed Mr. Turnbull's calendar, not Mr. Turnbull. They should have persuaded the Premier and the public to have stifled this pro- duct of Mr. Turnbull's brains—have banished it, if possible, to the remotest corners of the earth—not ingloriously cashiered and scotched the man. As it is, they have fallen into the capital blunder:
mprios or rarepa uretvar inoor Kora/mei.
They have left Mr. Turnbull's book to plead his defence to all future ages. And it is not hard to foresee that it will avenge the cause of its author on the memories of Lord Shaftesbury, and of his "friend and genius" Mr. Bird. How far down these memories will extend we are very unwilling to determine—whether they shall be snuffed out in this decade or the next. But, like the cerements of an Egyptian mummy, Mr. Turnbull's calendar will embalm to all future ages the ugly features of religious intolerance associated with the names of his persecutors ;—a vengeance not the less terrible, be- cause, on his part, it was unpremeditated. The book under our notice is the Last instalment of Mr. Turnbull's labours at the Record Office. Impartial readers can now judge for themselves how far the insinuations against Mr. Turnbull' s employ- ment and character were justified by the facts. The work contains an epitome of all the foreign correspondence, relating to the reign of Queen Mary, to be found in the national archives. Unlike his fellow- editors in the same department, Mr. Turnbull has been more than usually minute in his description of these documents. With very little trouble the least experienced student can now gather their contents, and master the whole history of the foreign relations of England during this momentous crisis. The closets of the Secretaries of State can furnish nothing more for the history of the period than is to be found in the calendars of Mr. Lemon and Mr.Turnbull. There are, in- deed, series yet to be searched in that vast lunatic asylum in Fetter-lane —series of documents of the utmost importance to the social, finan- cial, and administrative history of the nation, never yet examined by the historians of the Tudors ; but as they lie entombed in cart-loads, gathered up from century to century to this last moment of recorded time, without calendar or index, they are sealed to all intents and purposes from literary inquiry. So far as the history of Queen Mary and her reign can be drawn from the official correspond- ence of English ambassadors all the materials are before us. The arcana of the reign, if any such there be, are now open to public gaze. What Julius III., Charles V., Philip II., Mary and her Mi-
* Calendar of State Papers Foreign Series of the Reign of Mary, 1553-1558. Edited by W. B. Turnbull, Esq. Longmont; and Co.
nisters did or left undone—what secret devices passed the lips of nuncios, bishops, and cardinals at the table of the privy council— what Pole preached or Gardiner meditated—is here revealed, at least so far as ambassadors and functionaries of State commit their thoughts to paper.
In his preface, Mr. Turnbull has been more than usually abstinent; and we do not wonder at it. The reign of Mary is not a pleasant or gracious field for reaping laurels in ; least of all for the editor of these papers. The ground is too shadowy and debatable ; the at- mosphere too heavy and louring ; the prejudices and mutual hatred of both parties too bitter, for the thoughtful and impartial historian to do justice without incurring offence or suspicion. The Protestant will always point to the gloomy superstitions of Mary, the fires of Smithfield, the disastrous influence of Spain, and the san- guinary of the bishops. The Romanist will retaliate rilte selfishness and ambition of the nobles, their, venality and compliance with all changes, their rapacity in power, their servility in disgrace. He will justify the persecutions of Mary's reign by the conspiracies shamelessly set on foot and fostered by the money of France under the pretext of religious liberty ; he will be at no loss to find ample evidence of bad faith in the most celebrated leaders, lay and ecclesiastic, of the opposite party; and whilst the Protestant his- torian points with scorn to the gloomy asceticism of Mary, which found expansion only in persecution, the Romanist can turn upon his oppo- nent the example of Sir John Cheke, the Protestant tutor of Edward VI., dabbling in astrology, and consulting the stars before he takes a journey, or sitting as a renegade by the side of Bonner to pass sentence on those whose errors he had adopted, then renounced, yet still secretly entertained.
To weave a picturesque tale out of the discordant and jarring elements of the reign is comparatively easy. That has been done already in the striking narratives of Foxe and Holinshed. But to grasp the reign, and present it to the readers, not in its isolated aspect, but in its connexion with preceding and subsequent events —to view it as the last act of a great drama, as the starting. point of a new era, has never been attempted yet. That Mary was the daughter of Henry VIII., half-sister to Edward VI., and her successor Elizabeth ;—that she shared not only in the blood and sinews, but the principles and feelings of the Tudors ;—that under other circumstances, or different training, she might have defied the Pope and forbidden cardinals to land in Ent.,0,1and, — never seems to have occurred to our popular historians. Yet there were glimpses even in her short and transient reign of the same wilfulness and unswerving resolution which nerved her father in his opposition to the Papacy. More than once the conviction and assertion of her royal supremacy prompted her to acts of unconscious boldness, and carried her safe through dangers from which her Mi- nisters shrank appalled. Less popular and less pleasing in manners and person than Elizabeth, she possessed in the same degree as her sister the faculty of stealing the hearts of her people and plucking rebellion from their bosoms in spite of themselves. If the caps of the London 'prentices filled the air when Elizabeth appeared in public, the pre- sence of Mary, whose self-composure nothing could disconcert, was not less impressive on the mob. The sentiment which the more brilliant sister found so efficacious in times of popular discontent, was in reality first bruited by Mary in her unpremeditated address to the mutinous citizens of Guildhall: "Loving subjects ! what I am you right well know. I am your Queen, to whom at my corona- tion, when I was wedded to the realm and to the laws of the same (the spousal ring whereof I have on my finger, which never hitherto was, and never hereafter shall be, taken off), ye promised your alle- giance. I cannot tell how naturally a mother loveth her children, for I was never the mother of any ; but certainly a prince and go- vernor may as naturally and as earnestly love their subjects as a mother doth her child." How regal, yet how womanly ! How skil- fully is the conscious dignity of majesty mingled with that motherly appeal which went home to the hearts of all hearers ! Caesar or Ger- manicus could not have done it better.
I •
But, unfortunately for Mary, such occasions were rare. Like her sister and her father she could better confront than guide the storm. Like them she was of no yielding metal. he knew better how to punish than forgive. Her natural inflexibility, part of her mother's Spanish temperament, part hardened by her mother's wrongs and her father's tyranny, was never softened by friendship or affection. She had no playmates in her childhood, no sister, no brother. Her foes were of her own household. That inhumanity which could compel the daughter to sign a declaration that her mother's marriage was hateful and incestuous, was not likely to swerve from its course of cruelty and neglect and descend to those amenities which supply the place of affeetion if they cannot compensate for its absence. In all the numerous records of Henry's reign there is no indica- tion of remorie for Katharine's wrongs or Mary's forsaken childhood. She was fifteen when Henry brought home Anne Boleyn to live under the same roof with the mother and the daughter ; she was nineteen at her mother's death. Separated from her father, surrounded by those who watched and reported all her movements, when she mounted the throne, uuder very difficult circumstances, she had neither friend nor adviser. She had the old problem to solve, which defied the genius of the Tudors, and seemed by nature or by providence to be their greatest plague :—marriage. With the ex- rience of her predecessors, Elizabeth ingeniously evaded the culty. Mary, in an evil hour, applied for advice to Charles V., and that veteran gambler for empire gave his advice ;—and, as usual, betrayed her.
If there could have been selected from the whole world any match more distasteful to Englishmen than another, that was for Ake Queen of England to marry with a Spaniard; if of all Spaniards ther6, was one specially odious to this country, that man was Philip II. \ He had a bad reputation for cruelty and intolerance, even in these early days ; and we have many curious indications in Mr. Turnbull's volume of the general detestation in which the Spaniards were held throughout Europe, " for their cruelty and their subtilty ;" for "their intolerable pride and unsatiable covetousness." But in fact the real grievance was more deeply imbedded ; the rumour circulated that England should now fall under the dictation of the Spaniard, as the Scotch had fallen under the French. The stigma was intolerable to a people proud of their national independence, and jealous beyond all measure of foreign interference. Spiritual submission to Rome might be tolerable, because it was felt to be nominal ; to become a lackey of Spain, and provide English crowns for Spanish pride and Spanish poverty was utterly unendurable. But unfortunately for Mary, her notions of submission to rightful authority bordered on the fanatic; whoever the adviser, provided he came in accredited form of her own or anothees devising, whether it were Charles V., Philip H., Pole or Julius III., she made a merit of obedience, and too often a merit of sacrificing her better judgment. Two parties divided the cabinet, but the larger disliked the Spanish match, and were supported by the na- tion. The old Chancellor Gardiner, the notorious Bishop of Winchester, influential from his talents, long experience, and past sufferings under Edward VI., temporized; Pole then waiting to cross into England was detained by the wily Emperor. The negotiation was managed by the subtlest of his race, a creature of the Emperor, and Mary walked into the trap, not only unsnspiciously, but eagerly. From that step the whole reign was involved in complica- tions and difficulties. Mary surrendered the cares of empire to Philip, and spent most of her time at her devotions. She had always been sickly, and her married life did not add to her happiness. When Philip withdrew—never to see her again—she resumed her seat at the council-table, with broken health, and ill-concealed sorrow ; not as a queen, but as a wife; for the suspicion or ambition of Philip allowed no measures to pass at the board without his sanction or in- terference. The impossibility of carrying on the government efficiently under such a system, still more of discerning in his absence the real temper of the times, of which he was not an eye-witness, and for the consideration of which Ile could not spare the necessary leisure, plunged the latter years of the unhappy Queen into a series of bitter and blundering measures, not to use harsher terins, from which her own better sense and judgment would have recoiled. Here Philip first tried his " 'prentice-hand" on that system of religious persecu- tion, which he afterwards essayed on a larger and more fatal field. It is not to be doubted that some of the bishops, though by no means all, lent themselves in the first instance to these seventies. But it is not to be doubted also that long before the close of the reign they had grown weary of their work, and saw the utter hope- lessness of forcing back the nation by fire and the stake to the faith it had for ever abandoned. Even Bonner received a reprimand from the council for his backwardness in enforcing the discipline of the Church. In the dioceses of Gardiner and Tunstal no instances of persecution are recorded. Pole had been unfortunately cried up as the Apostle of Orthodoxy, and had been sent into England with expectation of doing great things. He had persuaded himself that all the heresy in the nation had sprang from popular preaching, and that the great wave of opinion might be turned back again by logic and scholastic divinity. He preached Sundays and fast days, restored "the Master of the Sentences" to his former dignity in Oxford, and died contemplating a set of homilies as an antidote for Protestantism !
But one and all—persecutors and no persecutors, Queen, council and bishops, had made this fact apparent, that the Reformation was accomplished. It had taken root and filled the land. No human power could prevail against it. Its divine life and origin had been shown unmistakably. It passed over its persecutors, and consigned to lasting shame and reproach all who had been in any degree instrumental in opposing its progress.
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