Note (Back to Main Text) — Chapter IV · THE MARTYRS.

Deep in the hearts of both queen and cardinal lay the conviction that if she would please God, she must avoid the sin of Saul. Saul had spared the Amalekites, and God had turned his face from him. God had greater enemies in England than the Amalekites. Historians have affected to exonerate Pole from the crime of the Marian persecution; although, without the legate's sanction, not a bishop in England could have raised a finger, not a bishop's court could have been opened to try a single heretic. If not with Pole, with whom did the guilt rest? Gardiner was jointly responsible for the commencement, but after the first executions, Gardiner interfered no further; he died, and the bloody scenes continued. Philip's confessor protested; Philip himself left the country; Renard and Charles were never weary of advising moderation, except towards those who were politically dangerous. Bonner was an instrument whose zeal more than once required the goad; and Mary herself, when she came to the throne, was so little cruel, that she would have spared even Northumberland himself. When the persecution assumed its ferocious aspect, she was exclusively under the direction of the dreamer who believed that he was born for England's regeneration. All evidence concurs to show that, after Philip's departure, Cardinal Pole was the single adviser on whom Mary relied. Is it to be supposed that, in the horrible crusade which thenceforward was the business of her life, the papal legate, the sovereign director of the ecclesiastical administration of the realm, was not consulted, or, if consulted, that he refused his sanction? But it is not a question of conjecture or probability. From the legate came the first edict for the episcopal inquisition; under the legate every bishop held his judicial commission; while, if Smithfield is excepted, the most frightful scenes in the entire frightful period were witnessed under the shadow of his own metropolitan cathedral. His apologists have thrown the blame on his archdeacon and his suffragan: the guilt is not with the instrument, but with the hand which holds it. An admiring biographer[496] has asserted that the cruelties at Canterbury preceded the cardinal's consecration as archbishop, and the biographer has been copied by Dr. Lingard. The historian and his authority have exceeded the limits of permitted theological misrepresentation. The administration of the see belonged to Pole as much before his consecration as after it; but it will be seen that eighteen men and women perished at the stake in the town of Canterbury alone,—besides those who were put to death in other parts of the diocese—and five were starved to death in the gaol there—after the legate's installation. He was not cruel; but he believed that, in the catalogue of human iniquities, there were none greater than the denial of the Roman Catholic Faith, or the rejection of the Roman bishop's supremacy; and that he himself was chosen by Providence for the re-establishment of both. Mary was driven to madness by the disappointment of the grotesque imaginations with which he had inflated her; and where two such persons were invested by the circumstances of the time with irresponsible power, there is no occasion to look further for the explanation of the dreadful events of the three ensuing years.