hanged in all--in batches of twenty-five or thirty, in each of the
great northern cities; and, to emphasize the example and to show that the
sacerdotal habit would no longer protect treason, the orders were to
select particularly the priests and friars who had been engaged. The
rising was undertaken in the name of religion. The clergy had been the
most eager of the instigators. Chapuys had told the Emperor that of all
Henry's subjects the clergy were the most disaffected, and the most
willing to supply money for an invasion. They were therefore legitimately
picked out for retribution, and in Lincoln, York, Hull, Doncaster,
Newcastle, and Carlisle, the didactic spectacle was witnessed of some
scores of reverend persons swinging for the crows to eat in the sacred
dress of their order. A severe lesson was required to teach a
superstitious world that the clerical immunities existed no longer and
that priests who broke the law would suffer like common mortals; but it
must be clearly understood that, if these men could have had their way,
the hundreds who suffered would have been thousands, and the victims would
have been the poor men who were looking for a purer faith in the pages of
the New Testament.

When we consider the rivers of blood which were shed elsewhere before the
Protestant cause could establish itself, the real wonder is the small cost
in human life of the mighty revolution successfully accomplished by Henry.
With him, indeed, Chapuys must share the honour. The Catholics, if they
had pleased, might have pressed their objections and their remonstrances
in Parliament; and a nation as disposed for compromise as the English
might have mutilated the inevitable changes. Chapuys's counsels tempted
them into more dangerous and less pardonable roads. By encouraging them in
secret conspiracies he made them a menace to the peace of the realm. He
brought Fisher to the block. He forced the Government to pass the Act of
Supremacy as a defence against treason, and was thus the cause also of the
execution of Sir Thomas More and the Charterhouse Monks.

To Chapuys, perhaps, and to his faithful imitators later in the
century--De Quadra and Mendoza--the country owes the completeness of the
success of the Reformation. It was a battle fought out gallantly between
two principles--a crisis in the eternal struggle between the old and the
new. The Catholics may boast legitimately of their martyrs. But the
Protestants have a martyrology