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 {p.224} of the grotesque imaginations wit