Archbishop of Canterbury, although he does not represent the
English Reformation in all its phases. He was neither so prominent
nor so great a man as Luther or Calvin, or even Knox. But, taking
him all in all, he was the most illustrious of the English
reformers; and he, more than any other man, gave direction to the
spirit of reform, which had been quietly working ever since the
time of Wyclif, especially among the humbler classes.
The English Reformation--the way to which had been long preparing--
began in the reign of Henry VIII.; and this unscrupulous and
tyrannical monarch, without being a religious man, gave the first
great impulse to an outbreak the remote consequences of which he
did not anticipate, and with which he had no sympathy. He rebelled
against the authority of the Pope, without abjuring the Roman
Catholic religion, either as to dogmas or forms. In fact, the
first great step towards reform was made, not by Cranmer, but by
Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, as the prime minister of Henry
VIII.,--a man of whom we really know the least of all the very
great statesmen of English history. It was he who demolished the
monasteries, and made war on the whole monastic system, and
undermined the papal power in England, and swept away many of the
most glaring of those abuses which disgraced the Papal Empire.
Armed with the powers which Wolsey had wielded, he directed them
into a totally different channel; so far as the religious welfare
of the nation is considered, although in his principles of
government he was as absolute as Richelieu. Like the great French
statesman, he exalted the throne; but, unlike him, he promoted the
personal reign of the sovereign he served with remarkable ability
and devotion.
Thomas Cromwell, the prime minister of Henry VIII., after the fall
of Wolsey, was born in humble ranks, and was in early life a common
soldier in the wars of Italy, then a clerk in a mercantile house in
Antwerp, then a wool merchant in Middleborough, then a member of
Parliament, and was employed by Wolsey in suppressing some of the
smaller monasteries. His fidelity to his patron Wolsey, at the
time of that great cardinal's fall, attracted the special notice of
the King, who made him royal secretary in the House of Commons. He
made his fortune by advising Henry to declare himself Head of the
English Church, when he was entangled in the difficulties growing
out of the divorce of Catharine. This advice was given with the
patriotic view of making the royal authority superior to that of
the Pope in Church patronage, and of making England independent of
Rome.
The great scandal of the times was the immoral lives of the clergy,
especially of the monks, and the immunities they enjoyed. They
were a hindrance to the royal authority, and weakened the resources
of the country by the excessive drain of gold and silver sent to
Rome to replenish the papal treasury. Cromwell would make the
clergy dependent on the King and not on the Pope for their
investitures and promotions; and he abominated the idle and
vagabond lives of the monks, who had degenerated in England,
perhaps more than in any other country in Europe, in consequence of
the great wealth of their monasteries. He was able to render his
master and the kingdom a great service, from the powers lavished
upon him. He presided at convocations as the King's vicegerent;
controlled the House of Commons, and was inquisitor-general of the
monasteries; he was foreign and home secretary, vicar-general and
president of the star-chamber or privy-council. The proud
Nevilles, the powerful Percies, and the noble Courtenays all bowed
before this plebeian son of a mechanic, who had arisen by force of
genius and lucky accidents,--too wise to build a palace like
Hampton Court, but not ecclesiastical enough in his sympathies to
found a college like Christ's Church as Wolsey did. He was a man
simple in his tastes, and hard-working like Colbert,--the great
finance minister of France under Louis XIV., whom he resembled in
his habits and policy.
His great task, as well as his great public service, was the
visitation and suppression of monasteries. He perceived that they
had fulfilled their mission; that they were no longer needed; that
they had become corrupt, and too corrupt to be reformed; that they
were no longer abodes of piety, or beehives of industry, or
nurseries of art, or retreats of learning; that their wealth was
squandered; that they upheld the arm of a foreign power; that they
shielded offenders against the laws; that they encouraged vagrancy
and extortion; that, in short, they were dangerous to the realm.
The monks and friars opposed the new learning now extending from
Italy to France, to Germany, and to England. Colet came back from
Italy, not to teach Platonic mysticism, but to unlock the
Scriptures in the original,--the centre of a group of scholars at
Oxford, of whom Erasmus and Thomas More stood in the foremost rank.
Before the close of the fifteenth century, it is said that ten
thousand editions of various books had been printed in different
parts of Europe. All the Latin authors, and some of the Greek,
were accessible to students. Tunstall and Latimer were sent to
Padua to complete their studies. Fox, bishop of Winchester,
established a Greek professorship at Oxford. It was an age of
enthusiasm for reviving literature,--which, however, received in
Germany, through the influence chiefly of Luther, a different
direction from what it received in Italy, and which extended from
Germany to England. But to this awakened spirit the monks
presented obstacles and discouragements. They had no sympathy with
progress; they belonged to the Dark Ages; they were hostile to the
circulation of the Scriptures; they were pedlers of indulgences and
relics; impostors, frauds, vagabonds, gluttons, worldly, sensual,
and avaricious.
So notoriously corrupt had monasteries become that repeated
attempts had been made to reform them, but without success. As
early as 1489, Innocent VII. had issued a commission for a general
investigation. The monks were accused of dilapidating public
property, of frequenting infamous places, of stealing jewels from
consecrated shrines. In 1511, Archbishop Warham instituted another
visitation. In 1523 Cardinal Wolsey himself undertook the task of
reform. At last the Parliament, in 1535, appointed Cromwell vicar
or visitor-general, issued a commission, and intrusted it to
lawyers, not priests, who found that the worst had not been told,
and reported that two thirds of the monks of England were living in
concubinage; that their lands were wasted and mortgaged, and their
houses falling into ruins. They found the Abbot of Fountains
surrounded with more women than Mohammed allowed his followers, and
the nuns of Litchfield scandalously immoral.
On this report, the Lords and Commons--deliberately, not rashly--
decreed the suppression of all monasteries the income of which was
less than two hundred pounds a year, and the sequestration of their
lands to the King. About two hundred of the lesser convents were
thus suppressed, and the monks turned adrift, yet not entirely
without support. This spoliation may have been a violation of the
rights of property, but the monks had betrayed their trusts. The
next Parliament completed the work. In 1539 all the religious
houses were suppressed, both great and small. Such venerable and
princely retreats as St. Albans, Glastonbury, Reading, Bury St.
Edmunds, and Westminster, which had flourished one thousand years,--
founded long before the Conquest,--shared the common ruin. These
probably would have been spared, had not the first suppression
filled the country with rebels. The great insurrection in
Lincolnshire which shook the foundation of the throne, the
intrigues of Cardinal Pole, the Cornish conspiracy in which the
great house of Neville was implicated, and various other
agitations, were all fomented by the angry monks.
Rapacity was not the leading motive of Henry or his minister, but
the public welfare. The measure of suppression and sequestration
was violent, but called for. Cromwell put forth no such
sophistical pleas as those revolutionists who robbed the French
clergy,--that their property belonged to the nation. In France the
clergy were despoiled, not because they were infamous, but because
they were rich. In England the monks probably suffered injustice
from the severity of their punishment, but no one now doubts that
punishment was deserved. Nor did Henry retain all the spoils
himself: he gave away the abbey lands with a prodigality equal to
his rapacity. He gave them to those who upheld his throne, as a
reward for service or loyalty. They were given to a new class of
statesmen, who led the popular party,--like the Fitzwilliams, the
Russells, the Dudleys, and the Seymours,--and thus became the
foundation of their great estates. They were also distributed to
many merchants and manufacturers who had been loyal to the
government. From one-third to two-thirds of the landed property of
the kingdom,--as variously estimated,--thus changed hands. It was
an enormous confiscation,--nearly as great as that made by William
the Conqueror in favor of his army of invaders. It must have
produced an immense impression on the mind of Europe. It was
almost as great a calamity to the Catholic Church of England as the
emancipation of slaves was to their Southern masters in our late
war. Such a spoliation of the Church had not before taken place in
any country of Europe. How great an evil the monastic system must
have been regarded by Parliament to warrant such an act! Had it
not been popular, there would have been discontents amounting to a
general hostility to the throne.
It must also be borne in mind that this dissolution of the
monasteries, this attack on the monastic system, was not a
religious movement fanned by reformers, but an act of Parliament,
at the instance of a royal minister. It was not done under the
direction of a Protestant king,--for Henry was never a Protestant,
but as a public measure in behalf of morality and for reasons of
State. It is true that Henry had, by his marriage with Anne
Boleyn and the divorce of his virtuous queen, defied the Pope
and separated England from Rome, so far as appointments to
ecclesiastical benefices are concerned. But in offending the Pope
he also equally offended Charles V. The results of his separation
from Rome, during his life, were purely political. The King did
not give up the Mass or the Roman communion or Roman dogmas of
faith; he only prepared the way for reform in the next reign. He
only intensified the hatred between the old conservative party and
the party of reform and progress.
How far Cromwell himself was a Protestant it is difficult to tell.
Doubtless he sympathized with the new religious spirit of the age,
but he did not openly avow the faith of Luther. He was the able
and unscrupulous minister of an absolute monarch, bent on sweeping
away abuses of all kinds, but with the idea of enlarging the royal
authority as much, perhaps, as promoting the prosperity of the
realm.
He therefore turned his attention to the ecclesiastical courts,
which from the time of Becket had been antagonistic to royal
encroachments. The war between the civil power and these courts
had begun before the fall of Wolsey, and had resulted in the
curtailment of probate duties, legacies, and mortuaries, by which
the clergy had been enriched. A limitation of pluralities and
enforcement of residence had also been effected. But a still
greater blow to the privileges of the clergy was struck by the
Parliament under the influence of Cromwell, who had elevated it in
order to give legality to the despotic measures of the Crown; and
in this way a law was passed that no one under the rank of a
subdeacon, if convicted of felony, should be allowed to plead his
"benefit of clergy," but should be punished like ordinary
criminals,--thus re-establishing the constitutions of Clarendon in
the time of Becket. Another act also was passed, by which no one
could be summoned, as aforetime, to the archbishop's court out of
his own diocese,--a very beneficent act, since the people had been
needlessly subject to great expense and injustice in being obliged
to travel considerable distances. It was moreover enacted that men
could not burden their estates beyond twenty years by providing
priests to sing masses for their souls. The Parliament likewise
abolished annats,--a custom which had long prevailed in Europe,
which required one year's income to be sent to the Pope on any new
preferment; a great burden to the clergy; a sort of tribute to a
foreign power. Within fifty years, one hundred and sixty thousand
pounds had thus been sent from England to Rome, from this one
source of papal revenue alone,--equal to three million pounds at
the present time, or fifteen millions of dollars, from a country of
only three millions of people. It was the passage of that act
which induced Sir Thomas More (a devoted Catholic, but a just and
able and incorruptible judge) to resign the seals which he had so
long and so honorably held,--the most prominent man in England
after Cromwell and Cranmer; and it was the execution of this lofty
character, because he held out against the imperious demands of
Henry, which is the greatest stain upon this monarch's reign.
Parliament also called the clergy to account for excessive acts of
despotism, and subjected them to the penalty of a premunire (the
offence of bringing a foreign authority into England), from which
they were freed only by enormous fines.
Thus it would seem that many abuses were removed by Cromwell and
the Parliament during the reign of Henry VIII. which may almost be
considered as reforms of the Church itself. The authority of the
Church was not attacked, still less its doctrines, but only abuses
and privileges the restraint of which was of public benefit, and
which tended to reduce the power of the clergy. It was this
reduction of clerical usurpations and privileges which is the main
feature in the legislation of Henry VIII., so far as it pertained
to the Church. It was wresting away the power which the clergy had
enjoyed from the days of Alfred and Ina,--a reform which Henry II.
and Edward I., and other sovereigns, had failed to effect. This
was the great work of Cromwell, and in it he had the support of his
royal master, since it was a transfer of power from the clergy to
the throne; and Henry VIII. was hated and anathematized by Rome as
Henry IV. of Germany was, without ceasing to be a Catholic. He
even retained the title of Defender of the Faith, which had been
conferred upon him by the Pope for his opposition to the
theological doctrines of Luther, which he never accepted, and which
he always detested.
Cromwell did not long survive the great services he rendered to his
king and the nation. In the height of his power he made a fatal
mistake. He deceived the King in regard to Anne of Cleves, whose
marriage he favored from motives of expediency and a manifest
desire to promote the Protestant cause. He palmed upon the King a
woman who could not speak a word of English,--a woman without
graces or accomplishments, who was absolutely hateful to him.
Henry's disappointment was bitter, and his vengeance was
unrelenting. The enemies of Cromwell soon took advantage of this
mistake. The great Duke of Norfolk, head of the Catholic party,
accused him at the council-board of high treason. Two years
before, such a charge would have received no attention; but Henry
now hated him, and was resolved to punish him for the wreck of his
domestic happiness.
Cromwell was hurried to that gloomy fortress whose outlet was
generally the scaffold, he was denied even the form of trial. A
bill of attainder was hastily passed by the Parliament he had
ruled. Only one person in the realm had the courage to intercede
for him, and this was Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury; but his
entreaties were futile. The fallen minister had no chance of life,
and no one knew it so well as himself. Even a trial would have
availed nothing; nothing could have availed him,--he was a doomed
man. So he bade his foes make quick work of it; and quick work was
made. In eighteen days from his arrest, Thomas Cromwell, Earl of
Essex, Knight of the Garter, Grand Chamberlain, Lord Privy Seal,
Vicar-General, and Master of the Wards, ascended the scaffold on
which had been shed the blood of a queen,--making no protestation
of innocence, but simply committing his soul to Jesus Christ, in
whom he believed. Like Wolsey, he arose from an humble station to
the most exalted position the King could give; and, like Wolsey, he
saw the vanity of delegated power as soon as he offended the source
of power.
"He who ascends the mountain-tops shall find
The loftiest peak most wrapped in clouds and storms.
Though high above the sun of glory shines,
And far beneath the earth and ocean spread,
Round HIM are icy rocks, and loudly blow
Contending tempests on his naked head."
On the disappearance of Cromwell from the stage, Cranmer came
forward more prominently, he was a learned doctor in that
university which has ever sent forth the apostles of great
emancipating movements. He was born in 1489, and was therefore
twenty years of age on the accession of Henry VIII. in 1509, and
was twenty-eight when Luther published his theses. He early
sympathized with the reform doctrines, but was too politic to take
an active part in their discussion. He was a moderate, calm,
scholarly man, not a great genius or great preacher. He had none
of those bold and dazzling qualities which attract the gaze of the
world. We behold in him no fearless and impetuous Luther,--
attacking with passionate earnestness the corruptions of Rome;
bracing himself up to revolutionary assaults, undaunted before
kings and councils, and giving no rest to his hands or slumber to
his eyes until he had consummated his protests,--a man of the
people, yet a dictator to princes. We see no severely logical
Calvin,--pushing out his metaphysical deductions until he had
chained the intellect of his party to a system of incomparable
grandeur and yet of repulsive austerity, exacting all the while the
same allegiance to doctrines which he deduced from the writings of
Paul as he did to the direct declarations of Christ; next to Thomas
Aquinas, the acutest logician the Church has known; a system-maker,
like the great Dominican schoolmen, and their common master and
oracle, Saint Augustine of Hippo. We see in Cranmer no
uncompromising and aggressive reformer like Knox,--controlling by a
stern dogmatism both a turbulent nobility and an uneducated people,
and filling all classes alike with inextinguishable hatred of
everything that even reminded them of Rome. Nor do we find in
Cranmer the outspoken and hearty eloquence of Latimer,--appealing
to the people at St. Paul's Cross to shake off all the trappings of
the "Scarlet Mother," who had so long bewitched the world with her
sorceries.
Cranmer, if less eloquent, less fearless, less logical, less able
than these, was probably broader, more comprehensive in his views,--
adapting his reforms to the circumstances of the age and country,
and to the genius of the English mind. Hence his reforms, if less
brilliant, were more permanent. He framed the creed that finally
was known as the Thirty-nine Articles, and was the true founder of
the English Church, as that Church has existed for more than three
centuries, neither Roman nor Puritan, but "half-way between Rome
and Geneva;" a compromise, and yet a Church of great vitality, and
endeared to the hearts of the English people. Northern Germany--
the scene of the stupendous triumphs of Luther--is and has been,
since the time of Frederick the Great, the hot-bed of rationalistic
inquiries; and the Genevan as well as the French and Swiss churches
which Calvin controlled have become cold, with a dreary and formal
Protestantism, without poetry or life. But the Church of England
has survived two revolutions and all the changes of human thought,
and is still a mighty power, decorous, beautiful, conservative, yet
open to all the liberalizing influences of an age of science and
philosophy. Cranmer, though a scholastic, seems to have perceived
that nothing is more misleading and uncertain and unsatisfactory
than any truth pushed out to its severest logical conclusions
without reference to other truths which have for their support the
same divine authority. It is not logic which has built up the most
enduring institutions, but common-sense and plain truths, and
appeals to human consciousness,--the cogito, ergo sum, without
whose approval most systems have perished. In mediis tutissimus
ibis, is not indeed an agreeable maxim to zealots and partisans and
dialectical logicians, but it seems to be induced from the varied
experiences of human life and the history of different ages and
nations, and applies to all the mixed sciences, like government and
political economy, as well as to church institutions.
As Cromwell made his fortune by advising the King to assume the
headship of the Church in England, so Cranmer's rise is to be
traced to his advice to Henry to appeal to the decision of
universities whether or not he could be legally divorced from
Catharine, since the Pope--true to the traditions, of the Catholic
Church, or from fear of Charles V.--would not grant a dispensation.
All this business was a miserable quibble, a tissue of scholastic
technicalities. But it answered the ends of Cranmer. The schools
decided for the King, and a great injustice and heartless cruelty
was done to a worthy and loyal woman, and a great insult offered to
the Church and to the Emperor Charles of Germany, who was a nephew
of the Spanish Princess and English Queen. This scandal resulted
in a separation from Rome, as was foreseen both by Cromwell and
Cranmer; and the latter became Archbishop of Canterbury, a prelate
whose power and dignity were greater then than at the present day,
exalted as the post is even now,--the highest in dignity and rank
to which a subject can aspire,--higher even than the Lord High
Chancellorship; both of which however, pale before the position of
a Prime Minister so far as power is concerned.
The separation from Rome, the suppression of the monasteries, and
the curtailment of the powers of the spiritual courts were the only
reforms of note during the reign of Henry VIII., unless we name
also the new translation of the Bible, authorized through Cranmer's
influence, and the teaching of the creed, the commandments, and the
Lord's prayer in English. The King died in 1547. Cranmer was now
fifty-seven, and was left to prosecute reforms in his own way as
president of the council of regency, Edward VI. being but nine
years old,--"a learned boy," as Macaulay calls him, but still a boy
in the hands of the great noblemen who composed the regency, and
who belonged to the progressive school.
I do not think the career of Cranmer during the life of Henry
is sufficiently appreciated. He must have shown at least
extraordinary tact and wisdom,--with his reforming tendencies and
enlightened views,--not to come in conflict with his sovereign as
Becket did with Henry II. He had to deal with the most capricious
and jealous of tyrants; cruel and unscrupulous when crossed; a man
who rarely retained a friendship or remembered a service; who never
forgave an injury or forgot an affront; a glutton and a sensualist;
although prodigal with his gifts, social in his temper, enlightened
in his government, and with very respectable abilities and very
considerable theological knowledge. This hard and exacting master
Cranmer had to serve, without exciting his suspicions or coming in
conflict with him; so that he seemed politic and vacillating, for
which he would not be excused were it not for his subsequent
services, and his undoubted sincerity and devotion to the
Protestant cause. During the life of Henry we can scarcely call
Cranmer a reformer. The most noted reformer of the day was old
Hugh Latimer, the King's chaplain, who declaimed against sin with
the zeal and fire of Savonarola, and aimed to create a religious
life among the people, from whom he sprung and whom he loved,--a
rough, hearty, honest, conscientious man, with deep convictions and
lofty soul.