The
incense of the stake, that was so sweet in ecclesiastical nostrils
three hundred years ago, and also in vulgar nostrils wherever the
vulgar happened to be of the orthodox persuasion, has become an
insufferable stench to the more refined noses of the nineteenth
century, which, nevertheless, are rather partial to the odor of the
gallows. Miss Strickland and other clever historians may dwell upon the
excellence of Mary Tudor's private character with as much force as they
can make, or with much greater force they may show that Gardiner and
other reactionary leaders were the real fire-raisers of her reign; but
the common mind will ever, and with great justice, associate those
loathsome murders with the name and memory of the sovereign in whose
reign they were perpetrated.
The father of Mary I. stands much more in need of defence and apology
than does his daughter. No monarch occupies so strange a position in
history as Henry VIII. A sincere Catholic, so far as doctrine went, and
winning from the Pope himself the title of Defender of the Faith
because of his writing against the grand heresiarch of the age, he
nevertheless became the chief instrument of the Reformation, the man
and the sovereign without whose aid the reform movement of the
sixteenth century would have failed as deplorably as the reform
movements of the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries had failed.
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