St. Alphonsus Liguori: The History of Heresies and Their Refutation

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CHAPTER XII. THE HERESIES OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY-(CONTINUED)

II- MARY’S REIGN

21. Mary refuses the title of Head of the Church; repeals her Father’s and Brother’s Laws; Cranmer is condemned to be burned, and dies a heretic; Mary sends off all heretics from her Court.
22. Cardinal Pole reconciles England with the Church; her marriage with Philip II., and death.


21. The good Queen Mary, on her accession to the throne. refused to take the impious title of Head of the Church, and immediately sent ambassadors to Rome, to pay obedience to the Pope. She repealed all the decrees of her father and brother, and re-established the public exercise of the Catholic Religion (1). She imprisoned Elizabeth, who twice conspired against her, and, it is said, she owed her life to the intercession of King Philip. She opened the prisons, and gave liberty to the Bishops and other Catholics who were confined; and on the 5th of October, 1553, the Parliament rescinded the iniquitous sentence of Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, by which he declared the marriage of Catherine and Henry null and void, and he was condemned to be burned as a heretic. When the unfortunate man found that he was condemned to death, he twice retracted his errors; but when all this would not save him from being burned, he cancelled his retractation, and died a Calvinist (2). By the Queen’s orders, the remains of Bucer and Fagius, who died heretics, were caused to be exhumed and burned; and thirty thousand heretics were banished the kingdom, comprising Lutherans, Calvinists, Zuinglians, Anabaptists, Socinians, Seekers, and such like. The Seekers are those who are seeking the true religion, but have not yet found it, nor ever will out of the Catholic Church alone; because in every other religion, if they trace it up to the author, they will find some impostor, whose imagination furnished a mass of sophisms and errors.


22. Mary, likewise, proclaimed the innocence of Cardinal Pole, and requested Julius III. to send him to England as his Legate, a latere. He arrived soon after, and, at the request of the Queen, reconciled the kingdom again to the Church, and absolved it from schism, on the Vigil of St. Andrew, 1554. He next restored Ecclesiastical discipline, reformed the Universities, and re-established the practices of Religion. He absolved all the laymen from the censures they incurred by laying hands on the property of the Church during the time of the schism; remitted the tithes and first fruits due to the Clergy; confirmed in their Sees the Catholic Bishops, though installed in the time of the schism, and recognized the new Sees established by Henry. All this was subsequently confirmed by Paul IV.; but, unfortunately for England, Mary died on the 15th of November, 1558, in the forty-fourth year of her age, and fifth of her reign. She was married to Philip II., King of Spain, and at first mistook her sickness, which was dropsy, for pregnancy. The Faithful all over the world mourned for her death (4).


(1) Bartol. l. 1, c. 3; Nat. Alex. loc. cit.; Hermant, c. 269; Varillas, t. 2, l. 20, p. 212; Gotti, c. 114, sec 2, a1.
(2)Varillas, l 21, p. 232; Gotti, ibid, n. 4; Hermant, loc. cit.; Bossuet,  1st. l. 7, n. 103. 
(3) Nat. Alex, ibid; Gotti, loc. cit. n. 4.
(4) Nat. Alex. art. 5, -in fin.; Varillas, I. 21, p. 229; Gotti, sec. 2, n 5, ad 7.