Page:VCH Surrey 1.djvu/446

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

A HISTORY OF SURREY Wyatt meanwhile had advanced to Southwark. Gardiner was the head of the Government against which they had risen, and his house, Winchester House in Southwark, was given over to pillage. Another claimant to Gardiner's see and to Winchester House was with Wyatt. This was Poynet, who had been translated from Rochester to Winchester by a warrant under the privy seal when Gardiner had been deprived in 1551. The queen by her own act had restored Gardiner, and Poynet no doubt hoped that the rebellion might result in a new act of the royal supremacy in his favour. 1 He had now to look on while the library of Winchester House was ransacked by Wyatt's followers, described by Stowe as 'being gentlemen as they said.' They ate and drank the bishop's victuals, and carried away even the locks of the doors. We do not hear of Lambeth Palace being plundered, but it was still nominally Cranmer's who was not deprived. From February 3 to 6 Southwark and Lambeth were in the hands of the sufficiently disorderly rebels. The drawbridge was up on London Bridge, and the guns of the Tower threatened Southwark. Wyatt was learning the usual lesson, that Lon- don was impregnable from the Surrey side. No sympathy incited the Londoners to lower the drawbridge, as they had done to Tyler's rioters, and on the 6th Wyatt marched to Kingston. He repaired the broken bridge and went across, to fail hopelessly on the other side. Gardiner resumed possession of his plundered house, but Rochester House seems to have remained in possession of Thomas Copley, a recusant of the next reign, who held it in 1562.* In 1556 Reginald Pole was installed at Lambeth. The abbey at Sheen opened its doors to some of its old in- mates in 1557. The queen was at Richmond in the summer of 1554 with her newly married husband. Earlier in the year her sister Eliza- beth had come there on her way from the Tower to Woodstock, and either feared or affected to fear that she might be murdered there. The persecution of Mary's reign did not specially affect Surrey. Gardiner sat at St. Mary Overie to examine some of the more notable clergy accused of heresy, and the memorials of their sufferings remain in the painful earlier nineteenth century windows of the Lady Chapel there. But they were not Surrey men in any sense. Three martyrs suffered in the county, in St. George's Fields, Southwark, in May, 1557. Their names were Stephen Gratwicke, William Morant and King. Gratwicke was a Brighton man. The other two were evidently residents in the diocese of Winchester, for they did not complain like Gratwicke that they were not tried by their own ordinary. They were probably Surrey men from the suburbs. White, Gardiner's successor in Winchester, sat as judge of several martyrs in other dioceses, but found no one to punish in his own, at least in Surrey. The strong religious opinions, generally more akin to those of the sectaries of the ensuing reigns than to the 1 The royal supremacy did not die with Edward. Mary reappointed John Voysey, who had resigned, to Exeter, by sign manual warrant (Rymer, xx. 340). She appointed to the livings of East Horsley and Newdigate in Surrey by letters patent (Rymer, xx. 342). 8 Loseley MSS. November 25, 1562, vi. 137. 376