History of the English People, Volume IVGreen, John Richard
History
History of the English People, Volume IV
Green, John Richard
Great Britain -- History
But Pius was far from abandoning his hopes. After ten years suspension
he had again summoned the Council of Trent. The cry for Church reform,
the threat of national synods in Spain and in France, forced this
measure on the Pope; and Pius availed himself of the assembly of the
Council to make a fresh attempt to turn the tide of the Reformation and
to win back the Protestant Churches to Catholicism. He called therefore
on the Lutheran princes of Germany to send doctors to the Council, and
in May 1561, eight months after Parpaglia's failure, despatched a fresh
nuncio, Martinengo, to invite Elizabeth to send ambassadors to Trent.
Philip pressed for the nuncio's admission to the realm. His hopes of the
Queen's return to the faith were now being fed by a new
marriage-negotiation; for on the withdrawal of the Archduke of Austria
in sheer weariness of Elizabeth's treachery, she had encouraged her old
playfellow, Lord Robert Dudley, to hope for her hand and to amuse Philip
by pledges of bringing back "the religion," should the help of the
Spanish king enable him to win it. Philip gave his help, but Dudley
remained a suitor, and the hopes of a Catholic revolution became fainter
than ever. The Queen would suffer no landing of a legate in her realm.
The invitation to the Council fared no better. The Lutheran states of
North Germany had already refused to attend. The Council, they held, was
no longer a council of reunion. In its earlier session it had formally
condemned the very doctrine on which Protestantism was based; and to
join it now would simply be to undo all that Luther had done. Elizabeth
showed as little hesitation. The hour of her triumph, when a Calvinistic
Scotland and a Calvinistic France proved the mainstays of her policy,
was no hour of submission to the Papacy. In spite of Philip's entreaties
she refused to send envoys to what was not "a free Christian Council."
The refusal was decisive in marking Elizabeth's position. The long
period of hesitation, of drift, was over. All chance of submission to
the Papacy was at an end. In joining the Lutheran states in their
rejection of this Council, England had definitely ranged itself on the
side of the Reformation.
CHAPTER IV
ENGLAND AND MARY STUART
1561-1567
[Sidenote: The English Catholics.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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