which had fallen on the Eternal City was immense. John da Casale, in the
letter cited above, says that it would have been better for Rome to have
been taken by the Turks, when they were in Hungary, as the infidels
would have perpetrated less odious outrages and less horrible sacrilege.
Clerk, Bishop of Bath, writes to Wolsey from Paris on May 28th
following: "Please it, your Grace, after my most humble recommendation,
to understand that about the fifteenth of this moneth, by letters sent
from Venyce, it was spoken, that the Duke of Burbon with the armye
imperyall by vyolence shold enter Rome as the 6th of this moneth; and
that in the same entree the said Duke should be slayne; and that the
Pope had savyd Himself with the Cardynalls in Castell Angell; whiche
tydinges bycause they ware not written unto Venyce, but upon relation of
a souldier, that came from Rome to Viterbe, and bycause ther cam hither
no maner of confirmation thereof unto this day, thay war not belevyd.
This day ther is come letters from Venyce confyrming the same tydinges
to be true. They write also that they have sackyd and spoylyd the town,
and slayne to the nombre of 45,000, _non parcentes nec etati nec sexui
nec ordini_; amongst other that they have murdyrd a marveillous sorte of
fryars, and agaynst pristes and churchis they have behavyd thymselfes
as it doth become Murranys and Lutherans to do."
How deeply Wolsey himself was moved by the news is seen by a letter from
him to Henry VIII, written on June 2d following. He forwards to the King
the letters "nowe arryved, as wel out of Fraunce as out of Italy,
confirming the piteous and lamentable spoiles, pilages, with most cruel
murdres, committed by the Emperialls in the citie of Rome, _non
parcentes sacris, etati, sexui, aut relioni_; and the extreme daungier
that the Poopes Holines and Cardinalles, who fled into the Castel Angel,
wer in, if by meane of the armye of the liege, they should not be
shortly socoured and releved. Which, sire, is matier that must nedes
commove and stire the hartes of al good christen princes and people to
helpe and put their handes with effecte to reformacion thereof, and the
repressing of such tirannous demenour."
Even Charles himself affected at least to mourn the success of his own
army. Nowhere did this terrible Italian misfortune fail to awaken
sympathy and compassion save in a rival Italian city. Florence heard the
tidings, says Varchi, with the utmost delight. The same historian
expresses his own opinion, that the sack of Rome was at once the most
cruel and the most merited chastisement ever inflicted by heaven. And
another Florentine writer piously accounts for the failure of all means
adopted to avert the calamity, by supposing that it was God's eternal
purpose then and thus to chastise the crimes of the Roman prelates--a
theory, it may occur to some minds, somewhat damaged by the unfortunate
fact that the greater part of the miseries suffered in those awful days
were inflicted on the unhappy flocks of those purple shepherds.
FOOTNOTES:
[36] These troops entered Rome in October, 1526. They were disbanded in
March, 1527.
[37] Cellini here refers to the attack made upon Rome by the great
Ghibelline house of Colonna, led by their chief captain, Pompeo, in
September, 1526. They took possession of the city and drove Clement into
the castle of St. Angelo, where they forced him to agree to terms
favoring the Imperial cause. It was customary for Roman gentlemen to
hire bravoes for the defence of their palaces when any extraordinary
disturbance was expected, as, for example, upon the vacation of the
papal chair.
[38] All historians of the sack of Rome agree in saying that Bourbon was
shot dead while placing ladders against the outworks near the shop
Cellini mentions. But the honor of firing the arquebuse which brought
him down cannot be assigned to anyone in particular. Very different
stories were current on the subject.
[39] Renzo di Ceri was a captain of adventurers, who had conquered
Urbino for the Pope in 1515, and afterward fought for the French in the
Italian wars. Orazio Baglioni, of the semiprincely Perugian family, was
a distinguished _condottiere_. He subsequently obtained the captaincy of
the Bande Nere, and died fighting near Naples in 1528. Orazio murdered
several of his cousins in order to acquire the lordship of Perugia. His
brother Malatesta undertook to defend Florence in the siege of 1530, and
sold the city by treason to Clement.
[40] Giovio, in his _Life of the Cardinal Prospero Colonna_, relates how
he accompanied Clement in his flight from the Vatican to the castle.
While passing some open portions of the gallery, he threw his violet
mantle and cap of a monseigneur over the white stole of the Pontiff, for
fear he might be shot at by the soldiers in the streets below.
[41] The short autobiography of Raffaello da Montelupo, a man in many
respects resembling Cellini, confirms this part of our author's
narrative. It is one of the most interesting pieces of evidence
regarding what went on inside the castle during the sack of Rome.
Montelupo was also a gunner and commanded two pieces.
[42] This is an instance of Cellini's exaggeration. He did more than
yeoman's service, no doubt, but we cannot believe that, without him, the
castle would have been taken.
GREAT RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT IN ENGLAND
FALL OF WOLSEY
A.D. 1529
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
The "New Learning" which had been slowly spreading from
Italy over all Europe, did not markedly affect England until
the sixteenth century. There the long Wars of the Roses had
not only gone nigh to exterminating the old nobility, but
had so distracted men's minds from more peaceful pursuits
that little note was taken of the intellectual movement
abroad. Under Henry VII and Henry VIII all this changed.
These Tudor monarchs were indeed tyrants over England, but
they brought her peace--and time for thought. Under the
leadership of the celebrated Dutch scholar Erasmus, and the
almost equally renowned Englishmen, Sir Thomas More and Dean
Colet, the land awakened about 1500 to a new life of study
and of culture, whose principles spread rapidly among the
upper classes.
When news of Luther's religious revolt reached England, the
leaders of the New Learning were at first inclined to favor
his ideas. But the two movements, one scholarly and calm,
the other impassioned and intense, soon parted company, as
Green shows in his justly famous account.
The true ruler of England at the time was the "great
cardinal," Wolsey, whose brain long enabled him to play upon
King Henry as a toreador does upon a bull, guiding at will
the frenzied rushes of the mighty brute. In 1521, the period
when the following account begins, Wolsey was fifty years
old. He had risen from being the studious son of a grazier
and wool merchant to be a dean of the Church under Henry
VII, and a bishop, cardinal and lord chancellor, of England
under Henry VIII. His ambition to be pope was thwarted by
the emperor Charles V, but he was "cardinal legate," having
control of the Catholic Church throughout England; and it
was said of him that in all European affairs he was "seven
times more powerful than the Pope."
In England Luther's protest seemed at first to find no echo. King Henry
VIII was, both on political and on religious grounds, firm on the papal
side. England and Rome were drawn to a close alliance by the identity of
their political position. Each was hard pressed between the same great
powers; Rome had to hold its own between the masters of Southern and the
masters of Northern Italy, as England had to hold her own between the
rulers of France and of the Netherlands. From the outset of his reign to
the actual break with Clement VII the policy of Henry is always at one
with that of the papacy. Nor were the King's religious tendencies
hostile to it. He was a trained theologian and proud of his theological
knowledge, but to the end his convictions remained firmly on the side of
the doctrines which Luther denied. In 1521, therefore, he entered the
lists against Luther with an "Assertion of the Seven Sacraments," for
which he was rewarded by Leo with the title of "Defender of the Faith."
The insolent abuse of the reformer's answer called More and Fisher into
the field.
The influence of the "New Learning" was now strong at the English court.
Colet and Grocyn were among its foremost preachers; Linacre was Henry's
physician; More was a privy councillor; Pace was one of the secretaries
of state; Tunstall was master of the rolls. And as yet the New Learning,
though scared by Luther's intemperate language, had steadily backed him
in his struggle. Erasmus pleaded for him with the Emperor. Ulrich von
Hutten attacked the friars in satires and invectives as violent as his
own. But the temper of the Renaissance was even more antagonistic to the
temper of Luther than that of Rome itself.
From the golden dream of a new age wrought peaceably and purely by the
slow progress of intelligence, the growth of letters, the development of
human virtue, the reformer of Wittenberg turned away with horror. He had
little or no sympathy with the new cult. He despised reason as heartily
as any papal dogmatist could despise it. He hated the very thought of
toleration or comprehension. He had been driven by a moral and
intellectual compulsion to declare the Roman system a false one, but it
was only to replace it by another system of doctrine just as elaborate
and claiming precisely the same infallibility. To degrade human nature
was to attack the very base of the New Learning; and his attack on it
called the foremost of its teachers to the field. But Erasmus no sooner
advanced to its defence than Luther declared man to be utterly enslaved
by original sin and incapable, through any efforts of his own, of
discovering truth or of arriving, at goodness.
Such a doctrine not only annihilated the piety and wisdom of the classic
past, from which the New Learning had drawn its larger views of life and
of the world; it trampled in the dust reason itself, the very instrument
by which More and Erasmus hoped to regenerate both knowledge and
religion. To More especially, with his keener perception of its future
effect, this sudden revival of a purely theological and dogmatic spirit,
severing Christendom into warring camps and ruining all hopes of union
and tolerance, was especially hateful. The temper which hitherto had
seemed so "endearing, gentle, and happy," suddenly gave way. His reply
to Luther's attack upon the King sank to the level of the work it
answered; and though that of Bishop Fisher was calmer and more
argumentative, the divorce of the New Learning from the Reformation
seemed complete.
But if the world of scholars and thinkers stood aloof from the new
movement it found a warmer welcome in the larger world where men are
stirred rather by emotion than by thought. There was an England of which
even More and Colet knew little, in which Luther's words kindled a fire
that was never to die. As a great social and political movement
Lollardry had ceased to exist, and little remained of the directly
religious impulse given by Wycliffe beyond a vague restlessness and
discontent with the system of the Church. But weak and fitful as was the
life of Lollardry the prosecutions whose records lie scattered over the
bishops' registers failed wholly to kill it. We see groups meeting here
and there to read "in a great book of heresy all one night certain
chapters of the Evangelists in English," while transcripts of Wycliffe's
tracts passed from hand to hand.
The smouldering embers needed but a breath to fan them into flame, and
the breath came from William Tyndale. Born among the Cotswolds when
Bosworth Field gave England to the Tudors, Tyndale passed from Oxford to
Cambridge to feel the full impulse given by the appearance there of the
New Testament of Erasmus. From that moment one thought was at his heart.
He "perceived by experience how that it was impossible to establish the
lay people in any truth except the Scripture were plainly laid before
their eyes in their mother tongue."
"If God spare my life," he said to a learned controversialist, "ere many
years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the
Scripture than thou dost." But he was a man of forty before his dream
became fact. Drawn from his retirement in Gloucestershire by the news of
Luther's protest at Wittenberg, he found shelter for a year with a
London alderman, Humfrey Monmouth. "He studied most part of the day at
his book," said his host afterward, "and would eat but sodden meat by
his good-will and drink but small single beer." The book at which he
studied was the Bible. But it was soon needful to quit England if his
purpose was to hold. "I understood at the last not only that there was
no room in my lord of London's palace to translate the New Testament,
but also that there was no place to do it in all England."
From Hamburg, where he took refuge in 1524, he probably soon found his
way to the little town which had suddenly become the sacred city of the
Reformation. Students of all nations were flocking there with an
enthusiasm which resembled that of the crusades. "As they came in sight
of the town," a contemporary tells us, "they returned thanks to God with
clasped hands, for from Wittenberg, as heretofore from Jerusalem, the
light of evangelical truth had spread to the utmost parts of the earth."
Such a visit could only fire Tyndale to face the "poverty, exile, bitter
absence from friends, hunger and thirst and cold, great dangers, and
innumerable other hard and sharp fightings," which the work he had set
himself was to bring with it. In 1525 his version of the New Testament
was completed, and means were furnished by English merchants for
printing it at Cologne. But Tyndale had soon to fly with his sheets to
Worms, a city whose Lutheran tendencies made it a safer refuge, and it
was from Worms that six thousand copies of the New Testament were sent
in 1526 to English shores. The King was keenly opposed to a book which
he looked on as made "at the solicitation and instance of Luther"; and
even the men of the New Learning from whom it might have hoped for
welcome were estranged from it by its Lutheran origin. We can only
fairly judge their action by viewing it in the light of the time. What
Warham and More saw over sea might well have turned them from a
movement which seemed breaking down the very foundations of religion
and society. Not only was the fabric of the Church rent asunder and the
centre of Christian unity denounced as "Babylon," but the reform itself
seemed passing into anarchy.
Luther was steadily moving onward from the denial of one Catholic dogma
to that of another; and what Luther still clung to, his followers were
ready to fling away. Carlstadt was denouncing the reformer of Wittenberg
as fiercely as Luther himself had denounced the Pope, and meanwhile the
religious excitement was kindling wild dreams of social revolution, and
men stood aghast at the horrors of a peasant war which broke out in
Southern Germany. It was not therefore as a mere translation of the
Bible that Tyndale's work reached England. It came as a part of the
Lutheran movement, and it bore the Lutheran stamp in its version of
ecclesiastical words. "Church" became "congregation," "priest" was
changed into "elder." It came too in company with Luther's bitter
invectives and reprints of the tracts of Wycliffe, which the German
traders of the Steelyard were importing in large numbers. We can hardly
wonder that More denounced the book as heretical, or that Warham ordered
it to be given up by all who possessed it.
Wolsey took little heed of religious matters, but his policy was one of
political adhesion to Rome, and he presided over a solemn penance to
which some Steelyard men submitted in St. Paul's. "With six-and-thirty
abbots, mitred priors, and bishops, and he in his whole pomp mitred,"
the Cardinal looked on while "great baskets full of books were
commanded; after the great fire was made before the Rood of Northen (the
crucifix by the great north door of the cathedral), thus to be burned,
and those heretics to go thrice about the fire and to cast in their
fagots."
But scenes and denunciations such as these were vain in the presence of
an enthusiasm which grew every hour. "Englishmen," says a scholar of the
time, "were so eager for the Gospel as to affirm that they would buy a
New Testament even if they had to give a hundred thousand pieces of
money for it." Bibles and pamphlets were smuggled over to England and
circulated among the poorer and trading classes through the agency of an
association of "Christian Brethren," consisting principally of London
tradesmen and citizens, but whose missionaries spread over the country
at large. They found their way at once to the universities, where the
intellectual impulse given by the New Learning was quickening religious
speculation.
Cambridge had already won a name for heresy; Barnes, one of its foremost
scholars, had to carry his fagot before Wolsey at St. Paul's; two other
Cambridge teachers, Bilney and Latimer, were already known as
"Lutherans." The Cambridge scholars whom Wolsey introduced into Cardinal
College, which he was founding, spread the contagion through Oxford. A
group of "brethren" was formed in Cardinal College for the secret
reading and discussion of the Epistles; and this soon included the more
intelligent and learned scholars of the university. It was in vain that
Clark, the centre of this group, strove to dissuade fresh members from
joining it by warnings of the impending dangers. "I fell down on my
knees at his feet," says one of them, Anthony Dalaber, "and with tears
and sighs besought him that for the tender mercy of God he should not
refuse me, saying that I trusted verily that he who had begun this on me
would not forsake me, but would give me grace to continue therein to the
end. When he heard me say so, he came to me, took me in his arms, and
kissed me, saying, 'The Lord God Almighty grant you so to do, and from
henceforth ever take me for your father, and I will take you for my son
in Christ.'"
In 1528 the excitement which followed on this rapid diffusion of
Tyndale's works forced Wolsey to more vigorous action; many of the
Oxford Brethren were thrown into prison and their books seized. But in
spite of the panic of the Protestants, some of whom fled over sea,
little severity was really exercised. Henry's chief anxiety, indeed, was
lest in the outburst against heresy the interest of the New Learning
should suffer harm. This was remarkably shown in the protection he
extended to one who was destined to eclipse even the fame of Colet as a
popular preacher. Hugh Latimer was the son of a Leicestershire yeoman,
whose armor the boy had buckled on in the days of Henry VII, ere he set
out to meet the Cornish insurgents at Blackheath Field. Latimer has
himself described the soldierly training of his youth.
"My father was delighted to teach me to shoot with the bow. He taught
me how to draw, how to lay my body to the bow, not to draw with strength
of arm as other nations do, but with the strength of the body."
At fourteen he was at Cambridge, flinging himself into the New Learning
which was winning its way there with a zeal that at last told on his
physical strength. The ardor of his mental efforts left its mark on him
in ailments and enfeebled health from which, vigorous as he was, his
frame never wholly freed itself. But he was destined to be known, not as
a scholar, but as a preacher. In his addresses from the pulpit the
sturdy good-sense of the man shook off the pedantry of the schools as
well as the subtlety of the theologian. He had little turn for
speculation, and in the religious changes of the day we find him
constantly lagging behind his brother-reformers. But he had the moral
earnestness of a Jewish prophet, and his denunciations of wrong had a
prophetic directness and fire. "Have pity on your soul," he cried to
Henry, "and think that the day is even at hand when you shall give an
account of your office, and of the blood that hath been shed by your
sword."
His irony was yet more telling than his invective. "I would ask you a
strange question," he said once at Paul's Cross to a ring of bishops;
"who is the most diligent prelate in all England, that passeth all the
rest in doing of his office? I will tell you. It is the Devil! Of all
the pack of them that have cure, the Devil shall go for my money; for he
ordereth his business. Therefore, you unpreaching prelates, learn of the
Devil to be diligent in your office. If you will not learn of God, for
shame learn of the Devil." But Latimer was far from limiting himself to
invective. His homely humor breaks in with story and apologue; his
earnestness is always tempered with good-sense; his plain and simple
style quickens with a shrewd mother-wit. He talks to his hearers as a
man talks to his friends, telling stories such as we have given of his
own life at home, or chatting about the changes and chances of the day
with a transparent simplicity and truth that raise even his chat into
grandeur. His theme is always the actual world about him, and in his
simple lessons of loyalty, of industry, of pity for the poor, he touches
upon almost every subject from the plough to the throne. No such
preaching had been heard in England before his day, and with the growth
of his fame grew the danger of persecution. There were moments when,
bold as he was, Latimer's heart failed him. "If I had not trust that God
will help me," he wrote once, "I think the ocean sea would have divided
my lord of London and me by this day."
A citation for heresy at last brought the danger home. "I intend," he
wrote with his peculiar medley of humor and pathos, to "make merry with
my parishioners this Christmas, for all the sorrow, lest perchance I may
never return to them again." But he was saved throughout by the steady
protection of the court. Wolsey upheld him against the threats of the
Bishop of Ely; Henry made him his own chaplain; and the King's
interposition at this critical moment forced Latimer's judges to content
themselves with a few vague words of submission.
What really sheltered the reforming movement was Wolsey's indifference
to all but political matters. In spite of the foundation of Cardinal
College in which he was now engaged, and of the suppression of some
lesser monasteries for its endowment, the men of the New Learning looked
on him as really devoid of any interest in the revival of letters or in
their hopes of a general enlightenment. He took hardly more heed of the
new Lutheranism. His mind had no religious turn, and the quarrel of
faiths was with him simply one factor in the political game which he was
carrying on and which at this moment became more complex and absorbing
than ever. The victory of Pavia had ruined that system of balance which
Henry VII, and, in his earlier days, Henry VIII, had striven to
preserve. But the ruin had not been to England's profit, but to the
profit of its ally. While the Emperor stood supreme in Europe, Henry had
won nothing from the war, and it was plain that Charles meant him to win
nothing. He set aside all projects of a joint invasion; he broke his
pledge to wed Mary Tudor and married a princess of Portugal; he pressed
for a peace with France which would give him Burgundy. It was time for
Henry and his minister to change their course. They resolved to withdraw
from all active part in the rivalry of the two powers.
In June, 1525, a treaty was secretly concluded with France. But Henry
remained on fair terms with the Emperor; and though England joined the
Holy League for the deliverance of Italy from the Spaniards which was
formed between France, the Pope, and the lesser Italian states on the
release of Francis in the spring of 1526 by virtue of a treaty which he
at once repudiated, she took no part in the lingering war which went on
across the Alps. Charles was too prudent to resent Henry's alliance with
his foes, and from this moment the country remained virtually at peace.
No longer spurred by the interest of great events, the King ceased to
take a busy part in foreign politics, and gave himself to hunting and
sport. Among the fairest and gayest ladies of his court stood Anne
Boleyn. She was sprung of a merchant family which had but lately risen
to distinction through two great marriages, that of her grandfather with
the heiress of the earls of Ormond, and that of her father, Sir Thomas
Boleyn, with a sister of the Duke of Norfolk.