FRASER'S MAGAZINE. JULY, 1860. FROUDE'S HISTORY OF THE REIGNS OF EDWARD VI. THERE are periods in the history of nations which melancholy seems to mark for her own. Athens, after the Macedonian had extinguished her liberties at Charoneia; Rome, during the last century of senatorian government; Turkey, since the death of Suliman the Magnificent; France, under the Regency and the next two Bourbon kings; and Italy, from the date at which Guicciardini begins his narrative of her divisions and decline to the 'resurgam' of the present hour; are each of them examples of the misery of subjects, and the folly or vices of rulers. But of such periods, none are to Englishmen sadder in the retrospect, or can have been more disheartening to the men who lived in them, than the reigns of Edward VI and his sister Mary. Apparently, the real deliverance which Henry had wrought for the Church was fruitless, and inasmuch as in those days civil progress was inextricably bound up with religious freedom, barren for the State also. The old order, with all its vices and imperfections, was illexchanged for a new anarchy. In the room of general superstition stood general irreligion. For inevitable waste and ruin, the hour of compensation had not arrived; from a church in ruins, no church of the future had arisen. At home, England was divided by hollow factions and delivered over to unprincipled men; abroad, her high position among nations was lowered. Invasion by Spain or France was at any moment a possibility, and * History of England from the Fall J. Anthony Froude. Volumes V. and VI. VOL. LXII. NO. CCCLXVII. was averted by their intestine schisms, and not by her bold front or power to repel it. Even if her ancient spirit were not dead, England then lacked both the sinews of war and the strength and security of union. The government was bankrupt, living from day to day on usurious loans and base expedients in finance; the middle class, and no small portion of the nobility also, were impoverished; while the labouring classes, from causes presently to be mentioned, were rapidly sinking into pauperism. On the track of poverty stalked the spectre of crime. All the might, if not all the wisdom of the realm, seemed to have expired with Henry, since the few honest and provident men who would have continued and matured his policy were too feeble or too perplexed to steer in such a storm, while the violent men who seized the helm neither knew nor cared for the course that would have righted the vessel. They who had most deplored the late king's caprices and arbitrary rule, were now compelled to allow that he had been a daring pilot in extremity; that his rod was preferable to scorpions; that his sceptre, heavy as it may have been, was more tolerable than the bauble held by a boy and a woman, themselves the victims of intrigue, divided counsels, and conflicting interests. In assigning due weight to the evil and the good of such an era as is described in Mr. Froude's recently published volumes, more than ordinary sagacity and tempe- of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. By London: John W. Parker and Son. 1860. A rance in judging are needful for the historian. If he measure men and events by any standard adjusted on the scale of happier times, he will exaggerate the one and underrate the other. In the conservative party of this period, he will see none but bigots and persecutors; in the reformers, none but headstrong destructives. Henry's work he will either denounce as evil at the root, or the hindrances to it as the machinations of men utterly given over to wicked devices. In such a spirit have most of our narratives of these reigns been composed. Lingard insinuates, can grapes grow on thorns; Soames asserts, with as much passion as dulness is capable of, that Rome was the deadly upas; Sharon Turner drifts helplessly along the tide. In no one of their narratives of this era of confusion is there a restingplace for the reader's foot. There is a Romanist chaos and there is a Protestant chaos, in either of which Frigida pugnabant calidis, humentia siccis, Mollia cum duris, sine pondere habentia pondus. And, for these causes, more rash judgments have been pronounced on the leaders and movements of the factions in this era, than even on the questions debated in the next century between Charles and the Commons of England. It would be unjust to Mr. Froude to compare his version of the story with that of any one of the abovementioned writers. For strength and grace of language, Lingard perhaps may divide the crown with him; but not only has the more recent historian consulted authorities unknown to the earlier one, but he also brings to his task a judgment less fettered by the prejudices of caste. The name of 'Presbyter' is to Mr. Froude, as it was to Milton, but old Priest writ large.' He is blind to the tyranny neither of innovators nor conservators. He sees clearly where progress or permanence was respectively at fault. He does not blacken Gardiner in order to blanch Cranmer ; neither confound the errors of Somerset with the guilt of Northumberland. Mary, in his eyes, is quite as much an unfortunate as a guilty queen: weak rather than wicked: estimable in her private character: but linked to a severe destiny without the power to control or modify it. Had she never reigned, the daughter of Henry would have gone to her grave attended by the compassion of her own and future times: but seated on a throne, the good that was in her-her patience and fortitude in adversity-hardened into the opposite, but not inconsistent vices of sullenness and obstinacy; and a tragic epithet was branded on a name that, under other circumstances, might have been respected, if not honoured. As some, though it is probable and to be hoped very few, of our readers may be unacquainted with Mr. Froude's earlier volumes, we shall briefly recapitulate, before we follow him through some passages of the reigns of Edward and Mary, the last phases of Henry's regulations in spiritual and temporal affairs-Henry's regulations, we say, for though the more liberal and progressive portion of England cheerfully assented to them, they were devised and shaped in all material respects by his own will and pleasure. For partly by hard blows, and partly by knowing when to soothe, he had so welded the English nation to his ends, that in the later years of his rule, 'le Roi le veut, was formulary enough for his Parliament and his people. In the sixteen years that elapsed since the memorable Parliament of 1529, the usurpation of Rome had been abolished. It had once held in its hands 'the Gospel and the laws.' It had been supreme in the Cabinet, the law courts, and the Legislature: the House of Commons had been merely its publicans, or tax-collectors: nor was the cottage more exempt from its jurisdiction than the castle. But now all things had become new: profane laymen, if they wrote M.P. after their names, not only voted supplies and redressed or exaggerated grievances (just as they sometimes do unto this day), but even dictated articles of faith to both spiritual and secular persons. If owls and satyrs did not inhabit fallen Babylon, royal inquisitors had taken inventories of their plate and looked into their rent-rolls after a most sacrilegious sort: their broad lands, tenements, and appurtenances had passed into the hands of the untonsured: the alb was in the dust: the crown was exalted above the mitre; and though bishops still sat in the Upper House, their glory, in comparison with that of the Lords Abbot, was but the glory of the second Temple compared with that of the first. Swiftly indeed did the English world sweep through the new era. The book that hitherto for centuries had been a sealed volume to the mass was spread over the land in tens of thousands of copies. The people no longer committed to the priest the trust of praying for them, nor listened with ignorant awe to the sounds of an unknown tongue. Much heady enthusiasm indeed prevailed: young men saw visions, and women, old and young, dreamed dreams. Yet provision was made for reasonable devotion and effectual prayer, since 'every English child was taught in its own tongue the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, and the Commandments,'* If we In our have just cause to mourn for the wanton destruction of many a venerable pile, of many a precious work of medieval art, of many a charter and record that now might be worth a king's ransom, we have as just reason to rejoice that the blind idolatrous spirit which 'buried the Father of heaven and earth in the coffins of the saints,'t was cast out of the land. imperfect condition, even the remedies of evils are often for the time evils themselves. Before reconstruction there must be demolition, and all demolition, like all suffering, is grievous. We do not wish to extenuate the persecutions which Henry originated and his Parliaments authorized; yet, in comparison with the weight of the 3 yoke they lifted from the necks of the people, the tribulation was but for a moment in the nation's life, the deliverance was a new birth full of hopes to become realities in due season. There was much to sadden the dying hours of Henry. Great and beneficent as was the change of which he had been the instrument, he could not be unaware that it had seriously maimed the comeliness of his realm. He had found and long governed a united kingdom, he left to his heir a divided one: he had come to the throne young, needing indeed the discipline of experience, but yet in possession of all the energies of manhood, and with most of the accomplishments befitting his station. His next successor was a boy, precocious in mind but not robust in body, who would be for years under the tutelage of guardians of various tempers and interests. No injunctions nor forethought on his part could secure to his heir the advantages of united counsels or consistent policy: when his hand ceased to hold the balance, he could not but foresee that either the conservative scale or the reforming scale would preponderate. There was blood too on his hands (we do not now pause to ask whether the shedding of it were a hard condition coupled with greatness') in the closing months of his life. The noble family of Howard, in the person of its most accomplished representative, had stained the block: the head of that house was attainted and a prisoner, and both the execution and the imprisonment enkindled deep heartburnings in the old conservative party. The dislocation of property inseparable from the sale and confiscation of monastic lands was only skinned over by the royal rescripts: violence on the highway, misery in the streets, uncertainty for the morrow in all who retained lands or houses, and grasping avarice in most of those who had goods to hold or money to use or abuse, pervaded the realm; and though the king *Froude, chap. 23, vol. iv. p. 480. Ibid. |