was at work in England. The accession of Henry the Fourth was not
effected without the opposition of the adherents of the former king
and of the supporters, on general principles, of the legitimate line.
There were treasons, and plots, and pitiless executions. The feudal
chiefs were no longer the compact body which could give laws both to
King and Parliament, but ranged themselves in opposite camps and waited
for the spoils of the vanquished side. The clergy unanimously came to
the aid of the usurper on his faithful promise to exempt them from
taxation; and, by thus throwing their own proportion of the public
burdens on the body of the people, they sundered the alliance which
had always hitherto subsisted between the Church and the lower class.
Another bribe was held out to the clerical order for its support to
the unlineal crown by the surrender to their vengeance of any heretics
they could discover. [A.D. 1401.] In the second year of this reign,
accordingly, we find a law enabling the priests to burn, "on some
high and conspicuous piece of ground," any who dissented from their
faith. This is the first legal sanction in England to the logic of
flame and fagot. How dreadfully this permission was used, we shall see
ere many years elapse. In the mean time, it is worth while to remark
that in proportion as the Church lost in popularity and affection it
gained in legal privilege. While it was strong it did not need to be
cruel; and if it had continued its care of the poor and helpless, it
would have been able to leave Wickliff to his dissertations on its
doctrinal errors undisturbed. A Church which is found to be nationally
beneficial, and which endears itself to its adherents by the practical
graces of Christianity, will never be overthrown, or even weakened, by
any theoretical defects in its creeds or formularies. It was perhaps,
therefore, a fortunate circumstance that the Church of Rome had
departed as much by this time from the path of honesty and usefulness
as from the simplicity of gospel truth. The Bible might have been
looked at in vain, even in Wickliff's translation, if its meanings had
not been rendered plain by the lives and principles of the clergy.
Henry the Fifth, feeling the same necessity of clerical support which
had thrown his father into the hands of the Church, left nothing
untried to attach it to his cause. All the opposition which had been
offered to its claims had hitherto been confined to men of low rank,
and generally to members of its own body. Wickliff himself had been
but a country vicar, and had been unnoticed and despised in his small
parsonage at Lutterworth. But three-and-twenty years after he was
dead, his name was celebrated far and wide as the enemy of constituted
authority and a heretic of the most dangerous kind. His guilt consisted
in nothing whatever but in having translated the Bible into English;
but the fact of his having done so was patent to all. No witnesses were
required. The bones of the old man were dug up from their resting-place
in the quiet churchyard in Leicestershire, carried ignominiously to
Oxford, and burned amid the howls and acclamations of an infuriated
mob of priests and doctors. This was in 1409. But, in his character of
heretic and unbeliever, Wickliff had high associates in this same year;
for the General Council sitting at Pisa declared the two Popes--of
Avignon and Rome--who still continued to divide the Christian world, to
be "heretics, perjurers, and schismatics."
Europe, indeed, was ripe for change in almost all the relations both
of Church and State. There would seem no close connection between
Bohemia and England; yet in a very short time the doctrines of Wickliff
penetrated to Prague. There Huss and Jerome preached against the
enormities and contradictions of the Romish system, and bitterly
paid for their presumption in the fires of Constance before many
years had passed. But in England the effects of the new revelation
of the hidden gospel had been stronger than even at Prague. Public
opinion, however, divided itself into two very different channels; and
while the whole nation listened with open ear to the denunciations
rising everywhere against the corruption, pride, and sensuality of
the priesthood, it rushed at the same time into the wildest excesses
of cruelty against the opponents of any of the doctrinal errors or
superstitious beliefs in which it had been brought up. In the same
year in which several persons were burnt in Smithfield as supporters
of Wickliff and the Bible, the Parliament sent up addresses to the
Crown, advising the king to seize the temporalities of the Church,
and to apply the riches wasted on luxurious monks and nuns to the
payment of his soldiers. Henry the Fifth adroitly availed himself of
the double direction in which the popular feeling ran. He gained over
the priesthood by exterminating the opponents of their ceremonies
and faith, and rewarded himself by occasionally confiscating the
revenues of a dozen or two of the more notorious monasteries. In 1417
a heavier sacrifice was demanded of him than his mere presence at the
burning of a plebeian heretic like John Badby, whose execution he had
attended at Smithfield in 1410. He was required to give up into the
hands of the Church the great and noble Oldcastle, Lord Cobham. The
Church, as if to mark its triumph, did not examine the accused on
any point connected with civil or political affairs. It questioned
him solely on his religious beliefs; and as it found him unconvinced
of the necessity of confession to a priest, of pilgrimages to the
shrines of saints, of the worship of images, and of the doctrine of
transubstantiation, it delivered him over to the secular arm, and
the stout old soldier was taken to St. Giles's-in-the-Fields, and
suspended, by an iron chain round his body, above a fire, to die by
the slowest and most painful of deaths. But, in this yielding up of a
nobleman to the vengeance of the priesthood, Henry had a double motive:
he terrified the proudest of the barons, and attached to himself the
other bodies in the State. The people were still profoundly ignorant,
and looked on the innovators as the enemies both of God and man. And
nothing but this can account for the astonishing spectacle presented
by Europe at this date. The Church torn by contending factions--three
Popes at one time--and council arrayed against council; every nation
disgusted with its own priesthood, and enthusiasm bursting out in
the general confusion into the wildest excesses of fanaticism and
vice,--and yet a total incapacity in any country of devising means of
amendment. Great efforts were made, by wise and holy men within the
Church itself, to shake off the impediments to its development and
increase. Reclamations were made, more in sorrow than in anger, against
the universal depravation of morals and beliefs. The Popes were not
unmoved with these complaints, and gave credence to the forebodings
of evil which rose from every heart. Yet the network of custom, the
authority of tradition, and the unchangeableness of Roman policy
marred every effort at self-reformation. An opening was apparently
made for the introduction of improvement, by the declaration of the
supremacy of general councils, and the cessation of the great schism
of the West on the nomination of Martin the Fifth to the undisputed
chair. [A.D. 1429.] But the force of circumstances was irresistible.
Cardinals who approved of the declaration while members of the council
repudiated its acts when, by good fortune, they succeeded to the
tiara; and one of them even ventured the astounding statement that
in his character of Æneas Sylvius, and approver of the decree of
Basle, he was guilty of damnable sin, but was possessed of immaculate
virtue in the character of Paul the Second. It was obvious that this
unnatural state of things could not last. An establishment conscious of
its defects, but unable to throw them off, and finally forced to the
awful necessity of defending them by the foulest and most unpardonable
means, might have read the inevitable result in every page of history.
But worse remained behind. There sat upon the chair of St. Peter, in
the year 1492, the most depraved and wicked of mankind. No earthly
ruler had equalled him in profligacy and the coarser vices of cruelty
and oppression since the death of the Roman Nero. This was a man of
the name of Borgia, who fixed his infamous mark on the annals of the
Papacy as Alexander the Sixth. While this bloodthirsty ruffian was at
the summit of sacerdotal power--this poisoner of his friends, this
polluter of his family circle with unimaginable crimes--as the visible
representative upon earth of the Church of Christ, what hope could
there be of amendment in the lower orders of the clergy, or continuance
of men's belief in the popish claims? Long before this, in 1442, the
falsehood of the pretended donation of Constantine, on which the Popes
founded their territorial rights, was triumphantly proved by the
learned Valla; and at the end of the century the reverence of mankind
for the successor of the Prince of the Apostles was exposed to a trial
which the authenticity of all the documents in the world could not
have successfully stood, in the personal conduct of the Pope and his
familiars.
While this was the general state of Europe in the fifteenth century
as regards the position of the clergy, high and low, the Church,
in all countries, threw itself on the protection of the kings. By
the middle, or towards the end, of this period, there was no other
patronage to which they could have recourse. The nobility in France
and England were practically eradicated. All confidence between baron
and baron was at an end, and all belief in knightly faith and honour
in the other classes of the people. As if the time for a new state
of society was arrived, and instruments were required to clear the
way for the approaching form, the nobility and gentry of England
first were effectual in overthrowing their noble brethren in France,
and then, with infuriate bitterness, turned their swords upon each
other. The most rememberable general characteristic of this century is
the consolidation of royal power. The king becomes despotic because
the great nobility is overthrown and the Church stripped of its
authority. Tired of hoping for aid from their ancient protector, the
lowest classes cast their eyes of helplessness to the throne instead
of to the crozier. They see in the reigning sovereign an ideal of
personified Power. All other ideals with which the masses of the people
have deluded themselves have passed away. The Church is stripped of
the charm which its lofty claims and former kindness gave it. It is
detected for the thing it is,--a corporation for the grinding of the
poor and the support of tyranny and wrong. The nobility is stripped
also of the glitter which covered its harsh outlines with the glow
of Christian qualifications. It is found to be selfish, faithless,
untrustworthy, and divided against itself. To the king, then, as the
last refuge of the unfortunate, as the embodied State, a combination,
in his own person, of the manly virtues of the knight with the
Christian tenderness of the priest, the public transfers all the
romantic confidence it had lavished on the other two. And, as if to
prove that this idea came to its completeness without reference to
the actual holder of sovereign authority, we find that in France the
first really despotic king was Louis the Eleventh, and in England the
first king by divine right was Henry the Seventh. Two more unchivalrous
personages never disgraced the three-legged stool of a scrivener. Yet
they sat almost simultaneously on two of earth's proudest thrones.
No century had ever witnessed so great a change in manners and
position as this. In others we have seen a gradual widening-out of
thought and tendencies, all, however, subdued by the universal shadow
in which every thing was carried on. But in this the progress was
by a sudden leap from darkness into light. In ancient times Europe
was held together by certain communities of interest and feeling, of
which the chief undoubtedly was the centralization of the spiritual
power in Rome. At the Papal Court all the nations were represented,
and Stockholm and Saragossa were brought into contact by their common
dependence on the successor of St. Peter. The courtly festivals which
invited a knight of Scotland to cross blunted spears in a glittering
tournament with a knight of Sicily in the court of an emperor of
Germany was another bond of union between remotest regions; and in
the fourteenth century the indefatigable Froissart, as we remarked,
conveyed a knowledge of one nation to another in the entertaining
chapters with which he delighted the listeners in the different
palaces where he set up his rest. But all these lights, it will be
observed, illumined only the hill-tops, and left the valleys still
obscure. Ambitious Churchmen encountered their brethren of all
kindreds and tongues in the court of the Vatican; tiltings were only
for the high-born and rich, and Froissart himself poured forth his
treasures only for the delight of lords and ladies. The ballads of
the common people, on the other hand, had had a strongly disuniting
effect. The songs which charmed the peasant were directed against the
exacting priest and oppressive noble. In England they were generally
pointed against the Norman baron, with whose harshness and pride
were contrasted the kindness and liberality of Robin Hood and his
peers. The French ballads were hostile to the English invader; the
Scottish poems were commemorative of the heroism of Wallace and the
cruelties of the Southern hordes. Literatures were thus condemned
to be hostile, because they were not lofty enough to overlook the
boundaries of the narrow circles in which they moved. By slow and
toilsome process books were multiplied,--carefully copied in legible
hand, and then chained up, like inestimable jewels, in monastery or
palace, as too valuable to be left at large. A king's library was
talked of as a wonder when it contained six or seven hundred volumes.
The writings of controversialists were passed from hand to hand, and
the publication of a volume was generally achieved by its being read
aloud at the refectory-table of the college and then discussed, in
angry disputations, in the University Hall. Not one man in five hundred
could read, if the book had been written in the plainest text; and at
length the running hand was so indistinct as to be not much plainer
than hieroglyphics. The discoveries, therefore, of one age had all to
be discovered over again in the next. Roger Bacon, the English monk,
in the eleventh century, was acquainted with gunpowder, and had clear
intimations of many of the other inventions of more recent times.
But what was the use of all his genius? He could only write down his
triumph in a book; the book was carefully arranged on the shelf of
his monastery; clever men of his own society may have carried the
report of his doings to the neighbouring establishments; but time
passed on, those clever men died out, the book on the monastery shelf
was gradually covered with dust, and Roger Bacon became a conjurer in
popular estimation, who foretold future events and took counsel from
a supernatural brazen head. But in this century the art of printing
was discovered and perfected. A thousand copies now darted off in
all directions, cheap enough to be bought by the classes below the
highest, portable enough to be carried about the person to the most
distant lands, and in a type so large and clear that a very little
instruction would enable the most illiterate to master its contents.
Here was the lever that lifted the century at its first appearance
into the light of modern civilization. And it came at the very nick of
time. Men's minds were disturbed on many subjects; for old unreasoning
obedience to authority had passed away. Who was to guide them in their
future voyage? Isolated works would no longer be of any use. Great
scholars and acute dialecticians had been tried and found wanting. They
only acted on the highly-educated class; and now it was the people
in mass--the worker, the shopkeeper, the farmer, the merchant--who
were anxious to be informed; and what could a monk in a cell, or
even Chaucer with his harp in hand, do for the edification of such
a countless host? People would no longer be fed on the dry crust of
Aristotelianism or be satisfied with the intellectual jugglery of the
Schoolmen. Rome had lost its guiding hand, and its restraining sword
was also found of no avail. Some rest was to be found for the minds
which had felt the old foundation slip away from them; and in this
century, thus pining for light, thus thrusting forward eager hands to
be warmed at the first ray of a new-risen sun, there were terrible
displays of the aberrations of zeal without knowledge.
Almost within hearing of the first motion of the press, incalculable
numbers of enthusiasts revived the exploded sect of the Flagellants of
former centuries, and perambulated Europe, plying the whip upon their
naked backs and declaring that the whole of religion consisted in the
use of the scourge. Others, more crazy still, pronounced the use of
clothes to be evidence of an unconverted nature, and returned to the
nakedness of our first parents as proof of their restoration to a state
of innocence. Mortality lost all its terrors in this earnest search
for something more than the ordinary ministrations of the faith could
bestow; and in France and England the hideous spectacles called the
Dance of Death were frequent. In these, under the banner of a grinning
skeleton, the population danced with frantic violence, shouting,
shrieking, in the exultation of the time,--a scene where the joyous
appearance of the occupation contrasted shockingly with the awful place
in which the orgies were held, for the catacombs of Paris, filled with
the bones and carcasses of many generations, were the chosen site for
these frightful exhibitions. Like the unnatural gayety that reigned in
the same city when the guillotine had filled every family with terror
or grief, they were but an abnormal development of the sentiment of
despair. People danced the Dance of Death, because life had lost its
charm. Life had lost its security in the two most powerful nations
of the time. England was shaken with contending factions, and France
exhausted and hopeless of restoration. [A.D. 1451.] The peasantry in
both were trampled on without remorse. Jack Cade led up his famishing
thousands to lay their sufferings before the throne. They asked
for nothing but a slight relaxation of the burdens that oppressed
them, and were condemned without mercy to the sword and gallows. The
French "Jacques Bonhomme" was even in a worse condition. There was
no controlling power on the throne to guard him from the tyrannies
of a hundred petty superiors. The Church of his country was as much
conquered by the Church of England as its soil by the English arms.
A cardinal, bloated and bloody, dominated both London and Paris, and
sent his commands from the Palace at Winchester, which were obeyed by
both nations. [A.D. 1452.] [A.D. 1483.] [A.D. 1492.] And all this on
the very eve of the introduction of the perfected printing-press, the
birth of Luther, and the discovery of America! From the beginning of
the century till government became assured by the accession of Henry
VII. and Louis XI., the whole of Europe was unsettled and apparently on
the verge of dissolution. In the absence of the controlling power of
the Sovereign, each little baron asserted his own right and privileges,
and aimed perhaps at the restoration of his feudal independence, when
the spirit of feudalism had passed away. The nobility, even if it had
been united, was not now numerous enough to present a ruling body to
the State. It became despised as soon as it was seen to be powerless;
and at last, in sheer exhaustion, the people, the churches, and the
peerage of the two proudest nations in the world lay down helpless and
unresisting at the footstool of the only authority likely to protect
them from each other or themselves. When we think of the fifteenth
century, let us remember it as the period when mankind grew tired
of the establishments of all former ages, when feudalism resigned
its sword into the hands of monarchy, and when the last days of the
expiring state of society were distinguished by the withdrawal of the
death-grasp by France and England from each other's throats, and the
establishment of respectful if not friendly sentiments between them.
By the year 1451, there was not one of all the conquests of the Edwards
and Henrys left to the English except Calais. If that miserable relic
had also been restored, it would have prevented many a heart-burning
between the nations, and advanced, perhaps by centuries, the happy time
when each can look across the narrow channel which divides them without
a wish save for the glory and prosperity of the other.
It is like going back to the time of the Crusades to turn our eyes
from the end of this century to the beginning, so great and essential
is the change that has taken place. Yet it is necessary, having given
the general view of the condition of affairs, to descend to certain
particulars by which the progress of the history may be more vividly
defined. And of these the principal are the battle of Agincourt, the
relief of Orleans, the invention of Guttenberg, and the achievement
of Columbus. These are fixed on, not for their own intrinsic merits,
but for the great results they produced. Agincourt unfeudalized
France; Joan of Arc restored man's faith in human virtue and divine
superintendence; printing preserved forever the conquests of the human
intellect; and the discovery of America opened a new world to the
energies of mankind.