silently down the river from his garden steps in the early morning, "I
thank the Lord that the field is won." At Lambeth, Cranmer and his
fellow-commissioners tendered to him the new oath of allegiance; but, as
they expected, it was refused. They bade him walk in the garden, that he
might reconsider his reply. The day was hot, and More seated himself in
a window from which he could look down into the crowded court. Even in
the presence of death, the quick sympathy of his nature could enjoy the
humor and life of the throng below.
"I saw," he said afterward, "Master Latimer very merry in the court, for
he laughed and took one or twain by the neck so handsomely that if they
had been women I should have weened that he waxed wanton." The crowd
below was chiefly of priests, rectors, and vicars, pressing to take the
oath that More found harder than death. He bore them no grudge for it.
When he heard the voice of one who was known to have boggled hard at the
oath, a little while before, calling loudly and ostentatiously for
drink, he only noted him with his peculiar humor. "He drank," More
supposed, "either from dryness or from gladness," or "to show _quod ille
notus erat Pontifici_."
He was called in again at last, but only repeated his refusal. It was in
vain that Cranmer plied him with distinctions which perplexed even the
subtle wit of the ex-chancellor; More remained unshaken and passed to
the Tower. He was followed there by Bishop Fisher of Rochester, the most
aged and venerable of the English prelates, who was charged with
countenancing treason by listening to the prophecies of a religious
fanatic called the "Nun of Kent." But for the moment even Cromwell
shrank from their blood. They remained prisoners, while a new and more
terrible engine was devised to crush out the silent but widespread
opposition to the religious changes.
By a statute passed at the close of 1534 a new treason was created in
the denial of the King's titles; and in the opening of 1535 Henry
assumed, as we have seen, the title of "on earth supreme head of the
Church of England." The measure was at once followed up by a blow at
victims hardly less venerable than More. In the general relaxation of
the religious life, the charity and devotion of the brethren of the
Charter-house had won the reverence even of those who condemned
monasticism. After a stubborn resistance they had acknowledged the royal
supremacy and taken the oath of submission prescribed by the act. But,
by an infamous construction of the statute which made the denial of the
supremacy treason, the refusal of satisfactory answers to official
questions, as to a conscientious belief in it, was held to be equivalent
to open denial.
The aim of the new measure was well known, and the brethren prepared to
die. In the agony of waiting, enthusiasm brought its imaginative
consolations; "when the host was lifted up, there came as it were a
whisper of air which breathed upon our faces as we knelt; and there came
a sweet, soft sound of music." They had not long, however, to wait, for
their refusal to answer was the signal for their doom. Three of the
brethren went to the gallows; the rest were flung into Newgate, chained
to posts in a noisome dungeon, where, "tied and not able to stir," they
were left to perish of jail fever and starvation. In a fortnight five
were dead and the rest at the point of death, "almost despatched,"
Cromwell's envoy wrote to him, "by the hand of God, of which,
considering their behavior, I am not sorry."
Their death was soon followed by that of More. The interval of
imprisonment had failed to break his resolution, and the new statute
sufficed to bring him to the block. With Fisher he was convicted of
denying the King's title as only supreme head of the Church. The old
bishop approached the scaffold with a book of the New Testament in his
hand. He opened it at a venture ere he knelt, and read, "This is life
eternal to know thee, the only true God." In July More followed his
fellow-prisoners to the block. On the eve of the fatal blow he moved his
beard carefully from the reach of the doomsman's axe. "Pity that should
be cut," he was heard to mutter with a touch of the old sad irony, "that
has never committed treason."
Cromwell had at last reached his aim. England lay panic-stricken at the
feet of the "low-born knave," as the nobles called him, who represented
the omnipotence of the crown. Like Wolsey he concentrated in his hands
the whole administration of the state; he was at once foreign minister
and home minister, and vicar-general of the Church, the creator of a new
fleet, the organizer of armies, the president of the terrible star
chamber. His Italian indifference to the mere show of power stood out in
strong contrast with the pomp of the Cardinal. Cromwell's personal
habits were simple and unostentatious; if he clutched at money, it was
to feed the army of spies whom he maintained at his own expense, and
whose work he surveyed with a ceaseless vigilance. For his activity was
boundless.
More than fifty volumes remain of the gigantic mass of his
correspondence. Thousands of letters from "poor bedesmen," from outraged
wives and wronged laborers and persecuted heretics, flowed in to the
all-powerful minister, whose system of personal government turned him
into the universal court of appeal. But powerful as he was, and mighty
as was the work which he had accomplished, he knew that harder blows had
to be struck before his position was secure.
The new changes, above all the irritation which had been caused by the
outrages with which the dissolution of the monasteries was accompanied,
gave point to the mutinous temper that prevailed throughout the country;
for the revolution in agriculture was still going on, and evictions
furnished embittered outcasts to swell the ranks of any rising. Nor did
it seem as though revolt, if it once broke out, would want leaders to
head it. The nobles, who had writhed under the rule of the Cardinal,
writhed yet more bitterly under the rule of one whom they looked upon
not only as Wolsey's tool, but as a low-born upstart. "The world will
never mend," Lord Hussey had been heard to say, "till we fight for it."
"Knaves rule about the King!" cried Lord Exeter; "I trust some day to
give them a buffet!" At this moment, too, the hopes of political
reaction were stirred by the fate of one whom the friends of the old
order looked upon as the source of all their troubles. In the spring of
1536, while the dissolution of the monasteries was marking the triumph
of the new policy, Anne Boleyn was suddenly charged with adultery and
sent to the Tower. A few days later she was tried, condemned, and
brought to the block. The Queen's ruin was everywhere taken as an omen
of ruin to the cause which had become identified with her own, and the
old nobility mustered courage to face the minister who held them at his
feet.
They found their opportunity in the discontent of the North, where the
monasteries had been popular, and where the rougher mood of the people
turned easily to resistance. In the autumn of 1536 a rising broke out in
Lincolnshire, and this was hardly quelled when all Yorkshire rose in
arms. From every parish the farmers marched with the parish priest at
their head upon York, and the surrender of this city determined the
waverers. In a few days Skipton castle, where the Earl of Cumberland
held out with a handful of men, was the only spot north of the Humber
which remained true to the King. Durham rose at the call of the chiefs
of the house of Neville, Lords Westmoreland and Latimer. Though the Earl
of Northumberland feigned sickness, the Percies joined the revolt. Lord
Dacre, the chief of the Yorkshire nobles, surrendered Pomfret, and was
acknowledged as their chief by the insurgents.
The whole nobility of the North were now enlisted in the "Pilgrimage of
Grace," as the rising called itself, and thirty thousand "tall men and
well horsed" moved on the Don demanding the reversal of the royal
policy, a reunion with Rome, the restoration of Catherine's daughter,
Mary, to her rights as heiress of the crown, redress for the wrongs done
to the Church, and above all the driving away of base-born councillors,
or, in other words, the fall of Cromwell. Though their advance was
checked by negotiation, the organization of the revolt went steadily on
throughout the winter, and a parliament of the North, which gathered at
Pomfret, formally adopted the demands of the insurgents. Only six
thousand men under Norfolk barred their way southward, and the Midland
counties were known to be disaffected.
But Cromwell remained undaunted by the peril. He suffered, indeed,
Norfolk to negotiate; and allowed Henry under pressure from his council
to promise pardon and a free parliament at York, a pledge which Norfolk
and Dacre alike construed into an acceptance of the demands made by the
insurgents. Their leaders at once flung aside the badge of the "Five
Wounds" which they had worn, with a cry, "We will wear no badge but that
of our lord the King," and nobles and farmers dispersed to their homes
in triumph. But the towns of the North were no sooner garrisoned and
Norfolk's army in the heart of Yorkshire than the veil was flung aside.
A few isolated outbreaks in the spring of 1537 gave a pretext for the
withdrawal of every concession.
The arrest of the leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace was followed by
ruthless severities. The country was covered with gibbets. Whole
districts were given up to military execution. But it was on the leaders
of the rising that Cromwell's hand fell heaviest. He seized his
opportunity for dealing at the northern nobles a fatal blow. "Cromwell,"
one of the chief among them broke fiercely out as he stood at the
council board, "it is thou that art the very special and chief cause of
all this rebellion and wickedness, and dost daily travail to bring us to
our ends and strike off our heads. I trust that ere thou die, though
thou wouldst procure all the noblest heads within the realm to be
stricken off, yet there shall one head remain that shall strike off thy
head."
But the warning was unheeded. Lord Darcy, who stood first among the
nobles of Yorkshire, and Lord Hussey, who stood first among the nobles
of Lincolnshire, went alike to the block. The Abbot of Barlings, who had
ridden into Lincoln with his canons in full armor, swung with his
brother-abbots of Whalley, Woburn, and Sawley from the gallows. The
abbots of Fountains and of Jervaulx were hanged at Tyburn side by side
with the representative of the great line of Percy. Lady Bulmer was
burned at the stake. Sir Robert Constable was hanged in chains before
the gate of Hull.
The defeat of the northern revolt showed the immense force which the
monarchy had gained. Even among the rebels themselves not a voice had
threatened Henry's throne. It was not at the King that they aimed these
blows, but at the "low-born knaves" who stood about the King. At this
moment, too, Henry's position was strengthened by the birth of an heir.
On the death of Anne Boleyn he had married Jane Seymour, the daughter of
a Wiltshire knight; and in 1537 this Queen died in giving birth to a
boy, the future Edward VI. The triumph of the Crown at home was doubled
by its triumph in the great dependency which had so long held the
English authority at bay across St. George's Channel.
With England and Ireland alike at his feet, Cromwell could venture on a
last and crowning change. He could claim for the monarchy the right of
dictating at its pleasure the form of faith and doctrine to be taught
throughout the land. Henry had remained true to the standpoint of the
New Learning; and the sympathies of Cromwell were mainly with those of
his master. They had no wish for any violent break with the
ecclesiastical forms of the past. They desired religious reform rather
than religious revolution, a simplification of doctrine rather than any
radical change in it, the purification of worship rather than the
introduction of any wholly new ritual. Their theology remained, as they
believed, a Catholic theology, but a theology cleared of the
superstitious growths which obscured the true Catholicism of the early
Church.
In a word, their dream was the dream of Erasmus and Colet. The spirit of
Erasmus was seen in the articles of religion which were laid before
convocation in 1536; in the acknowledgment of justification by faith, a
doctrine for which the founders of the New Learning, such as Contarini
and Pole, were struggling at Rome itself; in the condemnation of
purgatory, of pardons, and of masses for the dead, as it was seen in the
admission of prayers for the dead and in the retention of the ceremonies
of the Church without material change.
A series of royal injunctions which followed carried out the same policy
of reform. Pilgrimages were suppressed; the excessive number of holy
days was curtailed; the worship of images and relics was discouraged in
words which seemed almost copied from the protest of Erasmus. His appeal
for a translation of the Bible which weavers might repeat at their
shuttle and ploughmen sing at their plough received at last a reply. At
the outset of the ministry of Norfolk and More, the King had promised an
English version of the Scriptures, while prohibiting the circulation of
Tyndale's Lutheran translation. The work, however, lagged in the hands
of the bishops; and as a preliminary measure the Creed, the Lord's
Prayer, and the Ten Commandments were now rendered into English, and
ordered to be taught by every schoolmaster and father of a family to his
children and pupils. But the bishops' version still hung on hand; till,
in despair of its appearance, a friend of Archbishop Cranmer, Miles
Coverdale, was employed to correct and revise the translation of
Tyndale; and the Bible which he edited was published in 1538 under the
avowed patronage of Henry himself.
But the force of events was already carrying England far from the
standpoint of Erasmus or More. The dream of the New Learning was to be
wrought out through the progress of education and piety. In the policy
of Cromwell, reform was to be brought about by the brute force of the
monarchy. The story of the royal supremacy was graven even on the
title-page of the new Bible. It is Henry on his throne who gives the
sacred volume to Cranmer, ere Cranmer and Cromwell can distribute it to
the throng of priests and laymen below. Hitherto men had looked on
religious truth as a gift from the Church. They were now to look on it
as a gift from the King. The very gratitude of Englishmen for fresh
spiritual enlightenment was to tell to the profit of the royal power. No
conception could be further from that of the New Learning, from the plea
for intellectual freedom which runs through the life of Erasmus, or the
craving for political liberty which gives nobleness to the speculations
of More. Nor was it possible for Henry himself to avoid drifting from
the standpoint he had chosen. He had written against Luther; he had
persisted in opposing Lutheran doctrine; he had passed new laws to
hinder the circulation of Lutheran books in his realm. But influences
from without as from within drove him nearer to Lutheranism. If the
encouragement of Francis had done somewhat to bring about his final
breach with the papacy, he soon found little will in the French King to
follow him in any course of separation from Rome; and the French
alliance threatened to become useless as a shelter against the wrath of
the Emperor.
Charles was goaded into action by the bill annulling Mary's right of
succession; and in 1535 he proposed to unite his house with that of
Francis by close intermarriage, and to sanction Mary's marriage with a
son of the French King if Francis would join in an attack on England.
Whether such a proposal was serious or no, Henry had to dread attack
from Charles himself and to look for new allies against it. He was
driven to offer his alliance to the Lutheran princes of North Germany,
who dreaded like himself the power of the Emperor, and who were now
gathering in the League of Smalkald.
But the German princes made agreement as to doctrine a condition of
their alliance; and their pressure was backed by Henry's partisans among
the clergy at home. In Cromwell's scheme for mastering the priesthood it
had been needful to place men on whom the King could rely at their head.
Cranmer became primate, Latimer became Bishop of Worcester, Shaxton and
Barlow were raised to the sees of Salisbury and St. David's, Hilsey to
that of Rochester, Goodrich to that of Ely, Fox to that of Hereford. But
it was hard to find men among the clergy who paused at Henry's
theological resting-place; and of these prelates all except Latimer were
known to sympathize with Lutheranism, though Cranmer lagged far behind
his fellows in their zeal for reform.
The influence of these men, as well as of an attempt to comply at least
partly with the demand of the German princes, left its stamp on the
articles of 1536. For the principle of Catholicism, of a universal form
of faith overspreading all temporal dominions, the Lutheran states had
substituted the principle of territorial religion, of the right of each
sovereign or people to determine the form of belief which should be held
within their bounds. The severance from Rome had already brought Henry
to this principle, and the Act of Supremacy was its emphatic assertion.
In England, too, as in North Germany, the repudiation of the papal
authority as a ground of faith, of the voice of the Pope as a
declaration of truth, had driven men to find such a ground and
declaration in the Bible; and the articles expressly based the faith of
the Church of England on the Bible and the three creeds. With such
fundamental principles of agreement it was possible to borrow from the
Augsburg Confession five of the ten articles which Henry laid before the
convocation. If penance was still retained as a sacrament, baptism and
the Lord's Supper were alone maintained to be sacraments with it; the
doctrine of transubstantiation, which Henry stubbornly maintained,
differed so little from the doctrine maintained by Luther that the words
of Lutheran formularies were borrowed to explain it; confession was
admitted by the Lutheran churches as well as by the English. The
veneration of saints and the doctrine of prayer to them, though still
retained, were so modified as to present little difficulty even to a
Lutheran.
However disguised in form, the doctrinal advance made in the articles of
1536 was an immense one; and a vehement opposition might have been
looked for from those of the bishops like Gardiner, who, while they
agreed with Henry's policy of establishing a national church, remained
opposed to any change in faith. But the articles had been drawn up by
Henry's own hand, and all whisper of opposition was hushed. Bishops,
abbots, clergy, not only subscribed to them, but carried out with
implicit obedience the injunctions which put their doctrine roughly into
practice; and the failure of the Pilgrimage of Grace in the following
autumn ended all thought of resistance among the laity.
But Cromwell found a different reception for his reforms when he turned
to extend them to the sister-island. The religious aspect of Ireland was
hardly less chaotic than its political aspect had been. Ever since
Strongbow's landing, there had been no one Irish church, simply because
there had been no one Irish nation. There was not the slightest
difference in doctrine or discipline between the Church without the pale
and the Church within it. But within the pale the clergy were
exclusively of English blood and speech, and without it they were
exclusively of Irish. Irishmen were shut out by law from abbeys and
churches within the English boundary; and the ill-will of the natives
shut out Englishmen from churches and abbeys outside it.
As to the religious state of the country, it was much on a level with
its political condition. Feuds and misrule told fatally on
ecclesiastical discipline. The bishops were political officers, or hard
fighters, like the chiefs around them; their sees were neglected, their
cathedrals abandoned to decay. Through whole dioceses the churches lay
in ruins and without priests. The only preaching done in the country was
done by the begging friars, and the results of the friars' preaching
were small. "If the King do not provide a remedy," it was said in 1525,
"there will be no more Christentie than in the middle of Turkey."
Unfortunately the remedy which Henry provided was worse than the
disease. Politically Ireland was one with England, and the great
revolution which was severing the one country from the papacy extended
itself naturally to the other. The results of it indeed at first seemed
small enough. The supremacy, a question which had convulsed England,
passed over into Ireland to meet its only obstacle in a general
indifference. Everybody was ready to accept it without a thought of the
consequences. The bishops and clergy within the pale bent to the King's
will as easily as their fellows in England, and their example was
followed by at least four prelates of dioceses without the pale.
The native chieftains made no more scruple than the lords of the council
in renouncing obedience to the Bishop of Rome, and in acknowledging
Henry as the "supreme head of the Church of England and Ireland under
Christ." There was none of the resistance to the dissolution of the
abbeys which had been witnessed on the other side of the channel, and
the greedy chieftains showed themselves perfectly willing to share the
plunder of the Church.
But the results of the measure were fatal to the little culture and
religion which even the past centuries of disorder had spared. Such as
they were, the religious houses were the only schools that Ireland
contained. The system of vicars, so general in England, was rare in
Ireland; churches in the patronage of the abbeys were for the most part
served by the religious themselves, and the dissolution of their houses
suspended public worship over large districts of the country. The
friars, hitherto the only preachers, and who continued to labor and
teach in spite of the efforts of the government, were thrown necessarily
into a position of antagonism to the English rule.
Had the ecclesiastical changes which were forced on the country ended
here, however, in the end little harm would have been done. But in
England the breach with Rome, the destruction of the monastic orders,
and the establishment of the supremacy had aroused in a portion of the
people itself a desire for theological change which Henry shared and was
cautiously satisfying. In Ireland the spirit of the Reformation never
existed among the people at all. They accepted the legislative measures
passed in the English Parliament without any dream of theological
consequences, or of any change in the doctrine or ceremonies of the
Church. Not a single voice demanded the abolition of pilgrimages or the
destruction of images or the reform of public worship.
The mission of Archbishop Browne in 1535 "for the plucking down of idols
and extinguishing of idolatry" was a first step in the long effort of
the English government to force a new faith on a people who to a man
clung passionately to their old religion. Browne's attempts at "tuning
the pulpits" were met by a sullen and significant opposition. "Neither
by gentle exhortation," the Archbishop wrote to Cromwell, "nor by
evangelical instruction, neither by oath of them solemnly taken nor yet
by threats of sharp correction, may I persuade or induce any, whether
religious or secular, since my coming over once to preach the Word of
God, nor the just title of our illustrious Prince."
Even the acceptance of the supremacy, which had been so quietly
effected, was brought into question when its results became clear. The
bishops abstained from compliance with the order to erase the Pope's
name out of their mass-books. The pulpits remained steadily silent. When
Browne ordered the destruction of the images and relics in his own
cathedral, he had to report that the prior and canons "find them so
sweet for their gain that they heed not my words."