HOOPER.--PURITANS.--EXPECTATIONS OF THE ROMAN
CATHOLICS.--EDWARD’S DEATH.--LADY JANE GREY.
But though the leading Reformers were men of moderation, there was a
party now growing up in the church of another temper, and a more rigid
mould. Hooper, the type of it at that time, had resided for some years
amongst the foreign Protestants of Germany and Switzerland, where the
promulgation of the Interim, a half measure, uniting something of
Popish forms with something of Protestant principles; had put men upon
considering the question concerning the use of things indifferent. He
took the side of the more rigorous casuists; and, accordingly, when
the bishopric of Gloucester was offered him, (for he was one of the
most sharp and searching preachers of his day, and of a conscience
above fear or favour, sometimes, perhaps, above reason too,) he
alleged certain scruples, in which he was seconded by John à Lasco,
and the churches of the strangers in England, chiefly touching the
episcopal habits, which then consisted, besides the rochet of white
linen as still worn, of a chimere or robe, to which the lawn sleeves
are attached, of scarlet silk; the latter gorgeous article of dress,
which was not superseded by the black satin at present worn, till the
reign of Elizabeth, seems to have been the chief offence to Hooper,
who accordingly for a while declined the mitre. Here was the beginning
of those troubles which; however respectable in their origin, were
soon destined to make havoc of the Church’s peace; and Hooper is one
of the few bishops (for a bishop he eventually became) on whom the
Puritans of every age, not excepting even Neal himself, have looked
with an eye of favour. It seems a strange thing to us, that men should
have been ever found ready to make shipwreck of charity, and to risk
the Reformation altogether (for the Roman Catholics were on the alert
to profit by the divisions) upon matters so unimportant in themselves
as the colour or material of a coat; or that such precisians should
have been met with as expected, and required the actual warrant of
Scripture for every trivial matter which they did throughout the day,
to the utter extinction of Christian liberty:[397] yet the number of
such persons grew and prevailed: and though Hooker in his great work,
now but little read, because to our apprehensions so large a portion of
it is occupied in fighting with shadows, no shadows however then, did
his best, as did Sanderson his most learned contemporary,[398] to stave
off the crisis; it came with the rebellion nevertheless, when a morbid
conscience gave place, as it often does, to fanaticism or hypocrisy,
and the substantial fruits of the Spirit were lost in real or pretended
paroxysms. Surely the kingdom of God is not meat and drink. St. Paul
in all his epistles deals boldly with such beggarly elements; nor does
the example of our Lord himself sanction scruples merely fastidious.
He did not listen to the accusations against his disciples that they
had plucked the ears of corn on the Sabbath day, or that they had eaten
with unwashen hands; and it is remarkable that, though according
to the strict letter of the Levitical law the Passover was to be
partaken of with loins girded, and shoes on the feet, and a staff in
the hand, and in haste, Jesus appears to have acquiesced in a custom
long established, and to have sat down with his disciples, and to have
conversed with them at his leisure, one of them leaning upon his bosom.
An attempt has been made by some to claim Cranmer as belonging to the
same party in his heart, howbeit restrained by force of circumstances
from fully declaring himself. They would persuade us that he was
prepared to have gone much further in his Book of Common Prayer, (such,
say they, was the report amongst the English exiles at Frankfort,)[399]
but that a wicked clergy and convocation held his hand; and that more
was meant than met the ear, even when under the cruel mockery of his
accusers, as they stripped him of the canvass pontificals in which they
had arrayed him, he observed, “that it needed not; for he had done
with that gear long before.”[400] That he set no greater store by the
innocent trappings of his office than was due to them from a man of
sense and piety may be well believed; he had already said as much: “If
the bishops of this realm,” he remarks in a letter to Cromwell, “pass
no more of their names, styles, and titles, than I do of mine, the
King’s Highness shall soon order the matter betwixt us.... For I pray
God never to be merciful to me at the general judgment if I perceive in
my heart that I set more by any title, name, or style, that I write,
than I do by the paring of an apple, further than it shall be to the
setting forth of God’s word and will.” Let it, however, be remembered,
that these words were written by Cranmer in vindication of himself
against the idle but malicious charge of Gardiner, that by assuming
the title of “Primate of all England” he had trenched upon the King’s
supremacy, and that the period at which they were written was the year
1535, when as yet the Puritan question had not been stirred.[401]
But though the general character of the Archbishop’s mind, which was
averse from extremes of every kind, is enough to oppose to any claim
of this description, there are, besides, some distinct particulars in
his history, which argue clearly enough that if he did not foresee the
danger of the Puritan principle, he at least had no inclination to lend
himself to its advancement. To Hooper’s imaginations he did not give
place, no not for an hour, resolutely opposing even the King’s letter
of recommendation that the ceremonies used in consecration might in his
particular case be dispensed with;[402] a degree of obduracy this, at
which the martyrologist (whose bias is well known) significantly hints,
“for he will name nobody,” as culpable in the Archbishop, and such as
called for the Cross to put an end by a real and terrible visitation
to unworthy contentions, and to unite men who ought never to have
been divided, by making them partners in bonds and in death. Nor is
this all; a trifle it may be, but still it is a trifle to our present
purpose, and characteristic of the temper of Cranmer, a straw which
tells the wind better than a stone, that a short passage which stands
in the Latin text of his catechism, reflecting on the mysteries and
other such mummeries as were then greatly followed by the English, and
which at a very early time were caviare to the Puritan, is altogether
omitted in the translation.[403] But, perhaps, the most decisive
evidence of all is the spirit which pervades the whole sermon “of the
Keys” in this same catechism; a sermon otherwise worth perusing, as
setting a difficult subject in a satisfactory light. That preachers
there must be, else how shall the people hear? that they must not of
themselves “run to this high honour,” else how are they “sent?” But
if they be not sent, how shall they fruitfully teach; for it is not
enough that the seed be sown, since God must also give the increase?
Yet how can the blessing of God be looked for on means which he has
not sanctioned? What surety is there that though the self-appointed
minister work well, God will choose to work with him? But if not, what
virtue can go out of the sacraments which he handles; what do baptism,
absolution, and the Supper of the Lord become, but dead forms, Christ
not being present with such preachers? That the right of ministration,
therefore, derived from the apostles at first, who, in their turn,
made “bishops and priests,” (“sacerdotes,” only, is the expression in
the Latin,) is to continue unto the end of the world; but in the line
appointed; and, accordingly, that good heed is to be taken of “false
and privy preachers, which privily creep into cities, and preach in
corners, having none authority, nor being called to this office.”
This is not the language of the Puritan; yet was Cranmer certainly
opposed to many of the remnants of the Church of Rome, in themselves
indifferent; to the use of the old altars instead of tables, which it
was proposed to substitute for them; to candles at Candlemas; to ashes
on Ash Wednesday, and the like; all, matters for which the people
were still clamorous, but with which he saw that they were not to be
trusted; and thus did he lay himself open to alternate charges of
over-much and over-little scrupulosity, according to the quarter from
which the objection came, sufficient in themselves to argue that he
chose out a path between either extreme, which was the safest and best
of all. There is something probably very significant of Cranmer’s own
temper as a reformer, in the terms of a letter which he addresses to
Cromwell, soliciting preferment for one John Wakefield, “gentleman,” as
he is called, comptroller of his own household. The qualities which,
according to the Archbishop’s notions, recommend him to the King’s
patronage are these:--“A good judgment and affection towards God’s
word, which for the space of twelve years” (the term of Cranmer’s
acquaintance with him) “he had always been ready to promote in his
country, not rashly nor seditiously, but gently and soberly; _so that
his own country could neither greatly hate him nor love him_. They
could not hate him, for his kindness and gentleness, being ready to
do every man good as much as in his power was; and yet they could not
heartily love him, because he ever commended the knowledge of God’s
word, studied it himself diligently, and exhorted them unto the same;
and spake many times against the abusions of the clergy, for which
he had all the hate that most of the clergy could procure against
him.”[404] A character of this complexion, moderation the leading
feature of it, was not the one to win upon a patron, himself prepared
to rush into the extremes of the Puritans.
But the reign of a minor, which was favourable to the growth of
that party, indeed Edward had himself, perhaps, a leaning to their
opinions, was not unfriendly to the further pillage of the church.
Here, therefore, Cranmer had again to interpose, that in this instance
he might protect the temporalities, as in the other he had protected
the doctrines, of the Establishment. The division of the abbey-lands
amongst the nobles seems to have begot a general taste amongst the
upper classes for expense, and consequent appetite for spoil--it
grew by what it fed on. Rents were raised to an extravagant height;
the farm for which Latimer’s father paid from three to four pounds
a year; and which enabled him to send a man and horse to the King’s
service, and to portion his daughters with five pounds a-piece, was,
in Latimer’s own time, let for sixteen pounds or more, to the utter
impoverishment of the occupier.[405] The waste lands were every
where enclosed for sheep-walks (the wool trade having now become
considerable), to the annihilation of those ancient rights of pasturage
which the neighbouring peasantry enjoyed, and to the fomentation of
fierce rebellions throughout the country.[406] Now it happened that
the chantries or chapels endowed by individuals for private masses had
survived the spoliation of Henry: these it was proposed should be given
to the King (which was another word for the nobles through the King),
and an act of parliament to that effect was passed in 1547, in spite
of the opposition of the bishops, and of Cranmer above all, who had
been in hopes of reserving these endowments till Edward should come of
age, and then inducing him to assign them to the relief of the numerous
poor clergy whom the sale of tithes had left almost pennyless. He had
already resisted encroachments of the same kind under Henry; beseeching
him that there should be no alienation of church lands without the
production, at least, of the royal warrant; many of the nobles being
in the habit of seizing them in the King’s name, though without any
intention of appropriating them to the King’s use. Moreover, in those
exchanges with the see of Canterbury, which the King himself proposed,
Cranmer endeavoured to protect it in its just rights by soliciting
Cromwell’s opinion of the terms, “forasmuch as he himself was a man
that had small experience in such cases, and had no mistrust at all in
his prince;”[407] and thus did he dexterously contrive to uphold and
transmit to his successors an ample revenue in most dangerous times;
and under a most despotic monarch. But the name of Edward could not be
interposed with the same success between the nobles and their pleasure,
and accordingly the see of Canterbury, nor that alone, is said to
have suffered more under Edward than under Henry himself; for the old
cry was raised of the luxury and covetousness of churchmen, and the
old precedents of dispensing half a dozen prebends to one earl, and
a deanery to another, (such had been the predicament of the Earl of
Hertford, and of Cromwell,)[408] were again acted upon; and laymen were
pensioned out of the bishoprics as they successively fell vacant;[409]
and many of the best estates were taken away, so that the wealthiest
sees could scarcely maintain their diocesans;[410] and scholars were
supplanted in the rewards of learning by their superiors in birth,
to the decay of the universities and of letters in general; so that
Ridley, now Bishop of London, Bonner having been deposed, being about
to give Grindal a prebend in St. Paul’s, is prevented by the council,
it being their pleasure that the King should have it for the furniture
of his stable, an indignity of which he loudly complains to Cheke, the
King’s tutor, urging him to speak out upon it in the proper quarter,
or to let that his letter speak.[411] Nor was this all; commissioners
were despatched into every part of England in the last year of
Edward, to gather such gleanings as were still left in the shape of
chantry-lands unsold, and furniture of churches; they were themselves,
however, commonly forestalled by the people, so that, according to
Heylyn, “many private men’s parlours were now hung with altar-cloths,
their tables and beds covered with copes instead of carpets and
coverlids, and many made carousing cups of the sacred chalices, as
once Belshazzar celebrated his drunken feast in the sanctified vessels
of the Temple.”[412] Thus the locusts took what had escaped from the
hail. How much further this dissipation of church property would have
been carried had Edward continued longer to fill the throne, it is
impossible to tell; certain it is, that it received a check from the
restoration of the Roman Catholic religion, for a season, under Mary;
and amongst the mysterious ways in which Providence works out its own
ends, that otherwise fatal reign might be the appointed barrier for
securing a reasonable provision still for the Church of England, and
thereby an efficient, because an intelligent and independent, clergy.
For the Roman Catholic party began now to be enlisted by the dictates
of common prudence on the conservative side. The signs of the times,
which were watched by all men with extreme anxiety, were seen to
be in their favour. The Princess Mary was a rallying point for the
partisans of the Church of Rome during the whole of Edward’s reign,
more suited to the office than a much cleverer woman less firm of
purpose. Her brother had reluctantly winked at the use of the mass
in her own chapel when it was forbidden elsewhere, hoping to win her
to a different mind, till the permission being abused, was at length
withdrawn, not, however, abruptly, for the affair was pending, out
of delicacy to her scruples, from June, 1549, to September, 1551;
when the council at length wrote to her, that her Grace’s example
“hindered the good weal of the realm, _which thing they thought was
not unknown to her_.”[413] But the spirits of the Romanists were
not to be thus broken down. For the three last years of Edward’s reign
their confidence was perpetually on the increase. The life of the
Princess was seen to be of fairer promise than the King’s, and an eye
to the character of the next in the succession is a striking political
feature of the times of which we are treating, when the balance
between contending factions was as yet scarcely struck either way. The
nobles who espoused the cause of the Reformers were at strife amongst
themselves; Somerset contending with his brother, the admiral, even to
the death; himself beheaded in his turn, and succeeded as Protector by
the Earl of Warwick, afterwards Duke of Northumberland, a man unpopular
and suspected. The adversaries of the Reformation were not slow to
take advantage of the disorder. Whilst the government was united, many
leading persons amongst them had recanted, and even Bonner and Gardiner
“began to condescend,” as Fox expresses it, “to good conformity;” but
they now took heart, turned about, and braved a persecution which was
likely to be short, and which was sure to recommend them to the future
sovereign.
On the other hand, the friends of the Reformation, reading these
prognostics the other way, had fearful forebodings of evils to come,
and were naturally cast down. The feverish condition of the public
mind is seen in the restless solicitude with which they treasured
such omens up. The execution of the Protector; the death of the Duke
of Suffolk and his brother by the sweating sickness, the sons of a
father who was Cranmer’s good friend, and themselves children of great
hope; the loss of Fagius and Bucer at a critical moment, were all
accounted harbingers of ill.[414] John Knox, too, like another son of
Ananus, lifted up his voice in various parts of England; and as he
marked the tide again setting in towards Rome, foretold for England
unquiet times, hiemem instare:[415] and, indeed, the general agitation
of those days, that feeling so forcibly expressed in the language
of Scripture by “distress of nations with perplexity,” is strongly
portrayed by an act of parliament which was passed in 1550, “Against
spreading of Prophecies,” as well as by the numbers of idle stories
of unnatural births and sea-monsters which were then propagated, and
which are faithfully preserved in the pages of the Chroniclers.[416]
Charity leads us to trust that the dark insinuations against the Duke
of Northumberland (as though he hastened the end of Edward for the
purpose of setting the crown on the head of Lady Jane Grey, who had
married his son,) had no other foundation than the intense anxiety
with which the life of the King was thus regarded by multitudes of
his subjects, who saw no other hope for themselves or for their cause
than the frail one its continuance afforded. Certain it is, that the
extracts given by Strype from Cranmer’s letters, to Cecil, who was in
attendance upon the court in a progress to England, the year before
the King’s death, cannot be fairly interpreted (though the honest
annalist is of a contrary opinion) as implying that the Archbishop was
then under any apprehensions for Edward’s personal safety.[417] And it
is very possible, that when the “wise woman” was called in at last (the
case becoming desperate,) the patient should have grown rapidly worse,
without any further imputation upon the empiric than presumption for
having attempted the cure, or upon the Protector than folly for having
permitted the attempt to be made.[418] But if we acquit Northumberland
of treason, it is not so easy to acquit him of treachery; for that the
dying prince should have made a will, not merely withholding the crown
from its rightful owner, the Princess Mary, (for considering the hearty
desire he entertained for the maintenance of the Protestant cause this
might have been his own act and deed,) but from his sister Elizabeth,
herself a Protestant, and to settle it upon a cousin who happened to be
the duke’s daughter-in-law, this looks like the machination of another
head than his own. This will Cranmer long refused to subscribe; but
at last, over-persuaded by the authority of the judges, all of whom
except Judge Hales, concurred in it, and above all, by the entreaties
of Edward himself, who represented the hopeless condition to which the
Reformation would be reduced by acquiescing in the natural descent of
the crown, (as if the wrath of man was to work the righteousness of
God,) in an evil hour he took the pen and signed the document and what
was tantamount to his own death-warrant together.
And now Edward, having finished his short but saintly course, his
sixteenth year not yet completed, commended his people to God,
especially beseeching him that he “would defend his realm from
papistry;” and then as he sunk in the arms of Sir Henry Sidney, he
exclaimed, “I am faint; Lord, have mercy on me; and receive my spirit;”
and so he departed. Thus ended this reign of mercy: for ill as the
principle of toleration was in those days understood, violently as it
had been outraged by Henry, who preceded, and as it was destined to be
by Mary, who followed him, during the six years that Edward sat upon
the throne, neither in Smithfield, nor in any other quarter of the
realm did any man suffer for religious opinion, whether Catholic or
Protestant, save the two of whom mention has been made already--the
Dutchman and Joan of Kent.[419] And even in cases of imprisonment and
deprivation, as in those of Bonner, Bishop of London, and Gardiner,
Bishop of Winchester, the parties were proceeded against rather as
political than religious delinquents, rather as rebels than heretics;
a doctrine being sedulously taught by these and other leaders of the
Catholic party, and echoed back both by the Princess Mary and by the
insurgents of Devon, that neither were the decrees of the council
binding, the regal power not being transferable, nor yet those of the
King, he being still a minor; wherefore, that the laws of the land,
as Henry left them, were those which were to be obeyed until the king
should come of age, and none other.[420] It is obvious that such a
principle, generally acknowledged and acted upon, would have ended
in leaving the country without any government at all; for if the old
statutes should prove inapplicable to an unforseen emergency, and
there were no authority adequate to supply the defect, anarchy must
ensue. It is true that advantage was sometimes taken of overt acts of
non-conformity on which to prosecute, because where there might be
moral, there might not be legal, evidence of disaffection, the offence
being difficult of proof; still here the gravamen no doubt lay of many
of the charges preferred against the Roman Catholic dignitaries, and
of the penalties inflicted on them in the reign of Edward; and the
necessity which lay upon the council of seeing that the commonwealth
took no damage at their hands in those dangerous times, may be thought
to excuse proceedings which, however, were attended by some aggravating
circumstances of rigour but too common in those days.
It is impossible to contemplate the death of Edward without feeling for
Cranmer and his colleagues in the Reformation. Their hearts might well
sink within them in that hour. They had gone boldly forward in their
great enterprise, beholding the danger before their eyes, for they
could not be blind to it, but determined to do their duty and fear not;
exasperating the Catholic party, headed as it was by a most bigoted
princess, then the presumptive, now the actual, possessor of the
throne, nor shrinking from incurring her personal displeasure, where
the interests of religion required the risk, by the honest counsel they
gave with respect to the concessions due to her, or the privileges
which it was fitting to deny or to resume. Now they were in a situation
which they must have long foreseen was likely to be their lot--at the
mercy of an implacable foe. And the days and nights of anxiety which
they must have spent at this crisis waiting for the policy of Mary
to disclose itself, must be carried to the account of those silent
sufferings which formed no small part of the purchase-money paid for
the church they bequeathed to us, and which were more insupportable,
perhaps, however less imposing, than the fire and the faggot itself.