There is a state of transition in society which we usually call a
crisis. A crisis is the most active moment of conflicting principles;
the novel must extirpate the ancient, the ancient must eject the novel;
the one looks to be continued and the other to be settled; it is a
painful state of obstinate resistance, like that of two wrestlers when
neither can cast down the other.
Fortunate are the people who have only to pass through a single crisis.
But in the wrath of Providence there may be reserved another connecting
crisis in the chain of human events, and this we term a reaction,
usually accompanied by a retaliation; then comes the hoarded vengeance
and the day of retribution on which issues no amnesty. In physics,
action and reaction are equal; the reciprocation of any impulse not
being greater than the impulse itself. Nature in her operations thus
preserves an equilibrium; but the human hatreds and the partial
interests which man has contrived for his own misery, can only find that
equilibrium when he submits to a toleration. But a toleration is a
partition of power, and predominance is the vitality of a party. The
Catholic vengeance of Mary in its reaction was out of all proportion
greater than the Protestant docility of Edward. Our nation has been more
subject to this crisis and this reaction than perhaps any other. The
reign of Charles the First was a crisis, that of Charles the Second a
reaction; that of James the Second brought on a crisis, and the
revolution of 1688 was the consequential reaction. But never have the
people suffered more than during the three reigns of Edward the Sixth,
Mary, and Elizabeth; a terrible intolerance disorganized the whole
community: the conflict of old and of new creeds; of reciprocal
persecutions, and alternate triumphs; of abjurations and recantations;
of supple compliers and rabid polemics; and of pugilistic contests of
the ejected with the ejectors--rapid scenes at once tragic and
ludicrous.
Henry the Eighth died in 1547, and the accession of Elizabeth was in
1558. In this short period of eleven years we were governed by two
sovereigns, whose reigns, happily for the English people, were the
shortest in our annals.
A new era was opening under the dominion of Henry, for he was a monarch
of enlarged views. But the intellectual character of England in its
vernacular literature was retarded by the events which occurred in the
reigns of the two successors of this sovereign. The nation indeed
suffered no longer from the civil wars of the rival Roses; but another
war now shook the empire with as merciless a rivalry--it was a universal
conflict of opinions and dogmas. The governing powers themselves
combated each other; and whether in opposing the Reformer to the
Romanist, or in restoring "the papelin" to root out "the gospeller," in
these two mutable reigns, they neutralised or distracted the unhappy
people; and while both maintained that they were proffering "the true
religion," religion itself seemed to have lost its eternal truth. Edward
with an infirm hand established, what from her short reign Mary, with
her barbarous energy, could only imperfectly cast down.
Edward the Sixth, a boy-king, and a puppet-prince, invested with supreme
power, acted without any volition of his own. We are prepossessed in his
favour by his laborious diary. It is, however, remarkable that no
solitary entry made in that book of life, no chance effusion, disturbs
the uninterrupted equanimity. Whether the young king signs for the
decapitation of his two uncles, or jots down the burning of Joan of
Kent, an Arian, and another of a Dutchman, a Socinian, or records how a
live goose suspended had its head sliced off by those who run at the
ring, they seem equally to be matters of course, and by him were only
distinguished by their respective dates. A nation's hope has always been
the flattering painter of every youthful prince who dies immaturely; in
the royal youth is lamented the irreparable loss of the future great
monarch. But his father had been the most glorious youthful prince who
ever adorned a throne; and it would be hard to decide, by the heartless
chronicle of Edward, whether such an imperturbable spirit would have
closed his life as a Nero or a Titus. This unhappy young prince must
have felt the utter misery of his condition, for his was that curse of
power, when in its exercise power itself becomes powerless, while its
hands must be directed by another's. Had the reign of Edward the Sixth
been prolonged, we should have had a polemical monarch, if we may judge
by a collection of texts of Scripture, in proof of the doctrine of
justification by faith, which exists in his own handwriting, written in
French, and dedicated to his uncle.[1]
This was a calamitous period for the nation; we derive little
consolation when we discover that not more than three centuries ago our
ancestors were a semi-barbarous race? We seem to be consulting the
annals of some Asiatic dynasty, when we see a royal nephew tranquilly
affixing his signature to the death-warrants of his uncles; imprisonment
or exile would have been too tender for these state victims; we see one
brother attainted by another, and the scaffold finally receiving both;
and a Queen of England, in the captivity of the Romish superstition,
hailing with a benediction her own _autos da fe_. What we should have
gained had the accomplished prince lived, we cannot conjecture; but what
the nation were spared by the death of the melancholy Mary, is not
doubtful. Edward and Mary were opposite bigots; and both alike presumed
that they were appointed to the work of sanctity; but every reform which
requires to be carried on by coercion will long appear ambiguous to the
better-tempered. The bigotry as well as the puerile taste of the prince
appeared when he composed a comedy or interlude against _The Whore of
Babylon_, and the _The False Gods_; but the brawls of polemics, at
least, are more tolerable than torture and the sacrifice of fire.
It was one of the first evils of the Reformation, that the people were
ill prepared to receive their emancipation. All sense of subordination
rapidly disappeared in society; even the spell of devotion was
dissolved; and the people seemed to consider that, having rid themselves
of one spurious mode of religion, there was no longer any religion in
the world. "Thus for religion ye keep no religion," wrote the learned
Cheke, in once addressing an armed multitude, who cruelly would not
tolerate the Christianity of their neighbours.
An immature reformation is accompanied by certain unavoidable
inconveniences. Its first steps are incomprehensible to the thoughtless,
and too vague for the considerate, doing what it should not do, and
leaving undone what it ought to do, comprehending too much, and omitting
many things. A revolutionary reform breaks out with an ebullition of
popular feelings; but in escaping from one tyranny, men do not
necessarily enter into freedom. The reformer, in abandoning what is
known, looks to an uncertain and distant futurity; the anti-reformer
appeals to precedent, and clings to what is real--his good is positive,
and his evil is not concealed. In the removal of some long-standing
evils in civil society, some portion of good goes with them; for many of
these served as expedients to supply certain wants, and therefore
relatively were or may be beneficial. Even our old prejudices, when
scrutinised, often will be found to have struck their roots in the
common welfare. The complicate interests of civil society were at first
a web woven by strong hands, so that much of the antiquated may retain
its soundness, while the gloss of the new may set off but a loose and
flimsy texture. These are some of the difficulties of an age of
innovation, which may wisely check without stopping the velocity of its
movements. The only unerring reformer who partakes not of human
infirmities, neither deceived by illusions, nor overcome by prejudices,
and whose only wisdom is experience, must be that silent and unceasing
worker of the destinies of man--Time!
At the period now before us, the crisis and the reaction were alike
remarkable. The people who witnessed in four successive reigns four
different systems of religion, mutable with the times, amidst their
incertitude were in fact taught a religious scepticism. One of the great
innovations in divine service was that of preaching from the pulpit,
instead of reading set homilies or other prescribed lessons, by which
the Romanists had reduced their whole devotion to a mumbled ritual and a
mechanical service--formularies and forms which ceased to operate on
the heart, and carried on a religion that was not religious.
The introduction of _preaching_ appears to have been followed by an
unhappy effect. Latimer, in the rude simplicity of his style, complains
of some that went to church for the benefit of being "lulled into a
nap." There was a still greater grievance in this novel custom of
preaching; for from the pulpits the turbulent were rousing the passions
of the people, by declaiming against what some termed "the abuses which
ought to be put away;" while others, persevering in their old doctrine,
were alarming their auditors, for the loss of what had been put away.
Pulpit thundered against pulpit; for it was not only the reformer, but
the anti-reformer, who were the preachers. The fact was, that by an
avaricious policy, "the court of augmentation," which had to pension the
monks of the suppressed houses, filled up the vacant benefices as fast
as they occurred, by appointing these annuitants, to curtail the
pension-list. The enemy was thus settled in the camp of the reformers.
This spirit of division was caught by the rude stage of that day in
their comedies or interludes. This inundation of popular clamour was
only to be stayed by coercion--by proclamations and orders in council.
The Council of State issued their orders, or rather their instructions,
how the preachers were to preach, and that none but the licensed should
be permitted to ascend into the pulpit. Even Latimer himself was
discountenanced for his apostolical freedoms, by inveighing against the
gentry, who sent their sons to college, instead of educating them at
home for the church. Academical degrees were abrogated as
anti-Christian; Greek was heresy; and all human learning was to be vain
and useless to "the gospellers." As the preachers were to be licensed,
it came to the turn of the players and the printers not to enact or
print their interludes, without a special licence from the privy
council; and at length the interludes were actually inhibited for
"containing matter relating to sedition;" and this proclamation more
particularly specifies those that "play in English." The Romanists had
their interludes as well as the Reformers. Bishop Percy once observed
that the excellence of the drama, as every wise man would have it, is
to form a supplement to the pulpit,--this literally occurred in the
present instance; but the pulpit was itself as disorderly, to use the
words of the proclamation, "as any light and fantastical head could list
to invent and devise." Our most skilful delver into dramatic history,
amidst his curious masses of disinterments, has brought up this
proclamation. We must connect the state of these rude players with these
rude preachers; the interludes were nothing more than reflections from
the sermons; player and preacher were the same. By connecting these
together, we form a juster notion of their purpose than we find in the
isolated fact. There was now sedition in religion as well as in
politics.
The prevalent fervour scattered its sparks through all the ranks of
society, and the thoughts of all were concentrated on the sole object of
"the new religion." The Reformation was the great political topic in the
court of Edward the Sixth; discussions in theology were no longer
confined to colleges or to the clergy. Our poets, ever creatures of
their age, reflecting its temper, and who best tell its story, confined
their genius to ballads and interludes, making rough sport for loungers
and for the common people; or, in their quieter moods, were devoted to
metrical versions from the Scriptures. In a history of our vernacular
literature, the introduction of a versified psalter and of psalm-singing
forms an incident; as the passion for psalmody itself is a portion of
the history of the Reformation. "This infectious frenzy of sacred song,"
as Thomas Warton describes what he condemns as puritanic, we adopted
from the practice of Calvin, who had introduced psalm-singing into the
Geneva discipline, but really had himself borrowed it from the
popularity of the first psalms in French metre, by Clement Marot. This
natural and fine genius, as a commutation for an irregular life--and he
had been imprisoned for eating flesh in Lent--was persuaded by the
learned Vatable, the Hebrew Professor, to perform this signal act of
penance. The gay novelty charmed the court, and was equally delightful
to the people; every one chose the psalm which expressed his own
personal feelings or described his own condition, adapted to some
favourite air for the instrument or the voice. At the time it could have
been little suspected that while Calvin was stripping the religious
service of its pageantry, and denuding it even of its decent ceremonies,
he would have condescended to anything so human as a tune and a chorus;
yet the austere reformer of Geneva showed no deficient knowledge of
human nature, when he contrived to make men sing in concert, or carol in
the streets, and shorten their work by a song cheerful or sad; for
psalms there are for joy or for affliction, effusions for all hours,
suitable to all ranks.[2]
Another incident in which our vernacular literature was remotely
connected, was the calling in of the ancient Rituals, Missals, and other
books of the Latin service, and establishing the book of Common Prayer
in the common language. But the people at large seemed reluctant to
alter their antiquated customs, which habit had long endeared to them.
While they had listened to an unintelligible Mass, they had, from their
childhood, contracted a spirit of devotion. Their fathers had bowed to
the Mass as a holy office from time immemorial; and from their childhood
they had attached to it those emotions of holiness which were not the
less so by their erroneous association of ideas. When their religion
became a mere Act of Parliament, and their prayers were in plain
English, all appeared an affair of yesterday. The church service seemed
no longer venerable, the new priesthood no longer apostolical; and the
giddy populace protested against the common dues exacted by their
neighbour the curate, for their marriages and baptisms and funerals.
They forsook their churches, and even refused to pay tithes.
It is in revolutionary periods that we find men adapted for these rare
occasions; who, had they not lived amid the commotions around them, had
probably not emerged out of the sphere of their neighbours. Such minds
quickly sympathise with popular grievances and popular clamours, and
obtain their reformation, often at the sacrifice of their individual
interest, as if the cause were their appointed vocation. They are
advocates who plead, imbued even by all the prejudices of their clients;
they are organs resounding the fulness of the passions around them: a
character of this order is the true representative of the multitude;
and we listen to all their cries in the single voice of such a man.
And such a man was ROBERT CROWLEY, a universal reformer through Church
and State; whose unwearied industry run the pace of his zeal; whose
declarations were as open as his designs were definite; and whose
resolved spirit pursued its object in every variable form which his
imagination could invent, and which incessant toil never found irksome.
Crowley had been a student at Magdalen College at Oxford, and obtained a
fellowship. At the close of the reign of Henry the Eighth, Crowley
appears to have sojourned in "the great city;" and in that of Edward the
Sixth, we must not be surprised to discover the Fellow of Magdalen
established as a printer and bookseller, and moreover combining the
elevated characters of poet and preacher. How it happened that a man of
letters, and not undistinguished by his genius, adopted a mechanical
profession, we may account for from the exigencies of the time. Possibly
Crowley's fellowship was what Swift once called "a beggarly fettleship."
In the hurried reform of the day, "the universal good" was attended by
"a great partial evil." In the dissolution of the abbeys and priories
they had also demolished those useful exhibitions proceeding from them,
by which poor students were maintained at the universities. Many, thus
deprived of the means of existence at college, were compelled to forsake
their Alma-Mater and seek another course of life. It was probably this
incident which had thrown this learned man among the people. How Crowley
contrived to fulfil his fourfold office of printer, bookseller, poet,
and preacher, with eminent success, the scanty notices of his life
disappoint our curiosity. We would gladly enter into the recesses of
this man's arduous life. Did he partition the hours of his day? What
habits harmonised such clashing pursuits? Was he a sage whose wisdom
none of his followers have gathered? Was the shop of the studious man
haunted by learned customers? When we think of the printer's press and
the bookseller's counter, we are disposed to inquire, Where mused the
poet, and where stood the preacher?
Crowley is the author of many controversial pieces, and some satirical
poems reflecting the manners and the passions of his day, all which
enjoyed repeated editions. But he was not less a favourite sermoniser.
He touched a tremulous chord in the hearts of the people, and his
opinions found an echo in their breasts. The pulpit and the press,
perhaps, had been his voluntary choice, to print out what he had spoken
ere it perished, or offer a supplement to a sermon in some awful tome of
theology and reform. His Pulpit and his Press!--"those two prolific
sources of faction," exclaimed Thomas Warton.
As a printer and book-vendor, Crowley is distinguished by that curiosity
of research which led him to be the first publisher of "The Visions of
Piers Ploughman," which had hitherto slept in the dust of its manuscript
state. Warton restricts the merit of his discovery merely to the fervour
of a controversialist eager to propagate his own opinions; and truly the
bold spirit of reform, and the satirical strokes on the ecclesiastics of
the times of Edward the Third, in that remarkable and unknown author,
were in unison with a Reformer in the age of Reformation. It must be
confessed that the historian of our poetry cherished some collegiate
prejudices, and that his native good humour is liable to change when his
pen scourges a puritan and a predestinarian, as was Robert Crowley. But
Warton wrote when he imagined that the suppressed absurdities of Popery
required no longer any strong satire from a Calvinist; and as Crowley,
too, lived to hold many dignities in the reign of Elizabeth, Crowley
appeared to Warton to be the member of "a Church whose doctrines and
polity his undiscerning zeal had a tendency to destroy." Strype has only
ventured to describe Crowley as "an earnest professor of religion." The
meek curate of Low-Leyton could not rise to the magisterial indignation
of one of the "heads of houses," one who, at least, ought to have been,
and who, I understand, probably missed the honour and the profit by his
own ingenuous carelessness.
One of the most striking productions of this earnest Reformer, for its
freedom, was his address to the assembled Parliament. The title is
expressive--"An Information and Petition against the _Oppressors of the
Commoners of this Realm_. Compiled and imprinted for this only purpose,
that among them that have to do in the Parliament, some godly-minded
men may hereat take occasion to speak more in the matter than the author
was able to write." Crowley too modestly alludes to any deficiencies of
his own; his "information" is ample, and doubtless conveyed to the ear
of those "who had to do in the Parliament," what must have startled the
oldest senator.
Who are "the oppressors of the poor commoners?" All the orders in
society! the clergy--the laity--and, above all, "the Possessioners!"
This term, "the Possessioners," was a popular circulating coinage struck
in the Mint of our reformer--and probably included much more than meets
our ear. Every land-owner, every proprietor, was a "Possessioner."
Whether in an orderly primitive commonwealth there should be any
"Possessioners," might be a debateable point in a parliament composed of
"the poor Commons" themselves, with our Robin for their speaker. But
however this might be, "the Possessioners of this realm," as he calls
them, "could only be reformed by God working in their hearts, as he did
in the primitive church, when the _Possessioners_ were contented and
very willing _to sell their possessions, and give the price thereof to
be common to all the faithful believers_." This seems perfectly
intelligible, but our reformer judged it required some explanation--as
thus:--"He would not have any to take him as though he went about to
make all things common." Doubtless, there were some propagators of this
new revelation of a primitive Christian community, and as little doubt
that Robin himself was one; for he adds, "If the Possessioners know how
they ought to bestow their possessions," and he had already instructed
them, in that case "he doubted not _it should not need to have all
things made common_." Such was the logic of this primitive radical
reformer. A bland compromise, and a sturdy menace! This "grievance" of
the "Possessioners" might be reformed, till poverty itself became a test
of patriotism. They had yet to learn that to impoverish the rich is not
to enrich the poor.
At that day they were bewildered in their notions of property, and their
standards of value; they had neither discovered the sources nor the
progress of the wealth of a nation. They murmured at importation, for
which they seemed to pay the penalties, and looked on exportation as a
conveyance of the national property to the foreigner. They fixed the
prices at which all consumable articles were to be sold; the farmer's
garner was inspected; the landlords who became graziers were denounced;
forestallers and regraters haunted the privy councils of the king; the
markets were never better supplied; and the people wondered why every
article was dearer. About this time the prices of all commodities, both
in France and England, had gradually risen. The enterprise of commerce
was probably working on larger capitals. As expenses increased, the
landlords held that they were entitled to higher rents. In Crowley's
denunciations, "God's plague" is invoked against all "lease-mongers,
pilling and polling the poor commoner." The Parliament of Henry the
Eighth had legalized the interest of money at ten per cent.; Robin would
have this "sinful act" repealed: loans should be gratuitous by the
admonition in Luke, "Do ye lend, looking for no gain thereof." In this
manner he applies the text against usury. They seemed to have no notion
that he who bought ever intended to sell. This rude political economist
proposed that all property should be kept stationary. No one should have
a better portion than he was born to. Where then was to be found the
portion of "the poor commoner" not born to any? or him whose loss of
fortune was to be repaired by industry and enterprise? Prices advanced;
double rents! double tithes! Our radical preacher attacks his brother
ecclesiastics. "We can neither come into the world, nor remain in it,
nor go out of it, but they must have a fleece! Let it be lawful to
perform all their ministries by ourselves; we can lay an honest man in
his grave without a set of carrion-crows scenting their prey." The
splendour of the ancient landed aristocracy and the prodigal luxury of
the ecclesiastics more forcibly struck their minds than those silent
arts of enlarged traffic which were perpetuating the wealth of the
nation, and producing its concomitant evils.
While the people were thus agitated, divided, and distracted, the same
state of disorder was shaking the more intelligent classes of society.
Our mutable governments during four successive reigns gave rise to
incidents which had not occurred in the annals of any other people. With
the higher orders it was not only a conflict of the old and the new
religions; public disputations were frequent, creeds were yet to be
drawn from school-divinity, the artificial logic of syllogisms and
metaphysical disputations held before mixed audiences, where the
appellant, when his memory or his acumen failed him, was disconcerted by
the respondent; but when the secular arm was called in, alternately as
each faction predominated, and the lives and properties of men were to
be the result of these opinions, then men knew not what to think, nor
how to act. What had served as argument and axiom within a few years, a
state proclamation condemned as false and erroneous. A dereliction of
principle spread as the general infection of the times, and in despair
many became utterly indifferent to the event of affairs to which they
could apply no other remedy than to fall in with the new course,
whatever that might be.
The history of the universities exhibits this mutable picture of the
nation. There were learned doctors who, under Henry the Eighth, abjured
their papacy--under Edward vacillated, not knowing which side to lean
on--under Mary recanted--and under Elizabeth again abjured. Many an
apostate on both sides seemed converted into zealous penitents;
persecutors of the friends with whom they had consorted, and deniers of
the very opinions which they had so earnestly propagated. The facility
with which some illustrious names are recorded to have given way to the
pressure of events seems almost incredible; but, for the honour of human
nature, on either side there were some who were neither so tractable nor
so infirm.
The heads of houses stood for antiquity, with all its sacred rust of
time; they looked on reform with a suspicious eye, while every man in
his place marked his eager ejector on the watch. Under Edward the Sixth,
Dr. Richard Smith, a potent scholastic, stood forth the stern advocate
of the ancient order of things. However, to preserve his professorship,
this doctor recanted of "his popish errors;" shortly afterwards he
declared that it was no recantation, but a retractation signifying
nothing: to make the doctor somewhat more intelligible, and a rumour
spreading that "Dr. Smith was treading in his old steps," he was again
enforced to read his recantation, with an acknowledgment that "his
distinction was frivolous, both terms signifying the same thing." He did
not recant the professorship till Cranmer invited Peter Martyr from
Germany to the chair of the disguised Romanist. The political Jesuit
attended even the lectures of his obtrusive rival, took notes with a
fair countenance, till suddenly burst the latent explosion. An armed
party menaced the life of Peter Martyr, and a theological challenge was
sent from the late professor to hold a disputation on "the real
presence." Peter Martyr protested against the barbarous and ambiguous
terms of the scholastic logic, and would only consent to explain the
mystery of the sacrament by the terms of _carnaliter_ and
_corporaliter_; for the Scriptures, in describing the Supper, mention
the flesh and the body, not the matter and substance. He would, however,
indulge them to accept the terms of _realiter_ and _substantialiter_.
There was "a great hubbub" at Oxford on this most eventful issue. The
popish party and the reformers were alike hurried and busied; books and
arguments were heaped together; the meanest citizen took his stand. The
reforming visitors of Edward arrived; all met, all but Dr. Smith, who
had flown to Scotland, on his way to Louvain. However, he had left his
able deputies, who were deep in the lore in which it appears Peter
Martyr required frequent aid to get on. Both the adverse parties
triumphed; that is usual in these logomachies; but the Romanists account
for the success of the Reformed by the circumstance that their judges
were Reformers.
Such abstruse subjects connected with religious associations, and
maintained or refuted by the triumph or the levity of some haughty
polemic, produced the most irreverent feelings among the vulgar. As the
Reformation was then to be predominant, the common talk of the populace
was diversified by rhymes and ballads; and it was held, at least by the
wits, that there was "no real presence," since Dr. Smith had not dared
to show himself. The papistical sacrament was familiarly called "Jack in
the Box," "Worm's meat," and other ludicrous terms, one of which has
descended to us in the term which jugglers use of _hocus pocus_. This
familiar phrase, Anthony Wood informs us, originated in derision of the
words, "Hoc est corpus," slovenly pronounced by the mumbling priest in
delivering the emblem as a reality. As opprobrious words with the
populace indicate their furious acts, scandalous scenes soon followed.
The censers were snatched from the hands of the officiating priests;
mass-books were flung at their heads; all red-lettered and illuminated
volumes were chopped in pieces by hatchets: nor was this done always by
the populace, but by students, who in their youth and their reform knew
of no better means to testify their new loyalty to the visitors of
Edward. One of the more ludicrous scenes among so many shameful ones,
was a funereal exhibition of the schoolmen. Peter Lombard, "the master
of sentences," accompanied by Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas, carried on
biers, were tumbled into bonfires!
Five years after these memorable scenes, the same drama was to be
repeated, performed by a different company of actors. Religion assumed a
new face; that which had hardly been established was blasted by the name
of heresy. All who had flourished under Edward were now called in
question. The ancient tenants now ejected the newcomers, and affronted
them by the same means they had themselves been affronted. No one at
first knew how affairs were to turn out; some still clung to the reform;
others were reverting to the old system. There were in fact for some
time two religions at once in the university. The Common Prayer-book in
English was, however, but faintly read, while the Mass was loudly
chanted. Jewel's letter to the Queen was cautiously worded. This zealous
reformer, in an unhappy moment, had yielded to his fears, and subscribed
a recantation, which he soon after abjured before a Protestant
congregation in Germany. When Peter Martyr heard the little bell ring to
Mass, he sighed, and said, "that bell would destroy all the sound
doctrine in the college." Gardiner gave him a safe-conduct homewards,
which saved Peter Martyr from the insolent triumph of his rival, the
scholastic Dr. Smith, and the Spanish friars with whom Mary supplied his
place.
But the Marians also burned books, as likewise men!
The funeral of the schoolmen carried on their biers was too recent to be
forgotten; and in return, all Bibles in English, and all the
commentators on the Bible in the vernacular idiom, and which, we are
told, "for their number seemed almost infinite," were thrown together in
the market-place; and the lighted pyre proclaimed to Oxford the ominous
flames of superstition, which consumed, not long after, opposite to
Baliol College, the great unfortunate victims of reformation. There
Latimer and Ridley bowed their spirits in the fires, while Cranmer, from
the top of the Bocardo, witnessed the immolation, praying to God to
strengthen them, and felt in anticipation his own coming fate. Then
followed expulsions and emigrations. We have a long list of names. Five
years afterwards, such was the rapid change of scenery, these fugitives
returned to re-possess themselves of their seats, and were again and
finally the ejectors under Elizabeth.
The history of this mutable period is remarkably shown in the singular
incident of Catherine, the wife of Peter Martyr, and St. Frideswide.
Peter Martyr, when celibacy was the indispensable virtue of an
ecclesiastic, brought his wife into his college, and also his bawling
children. This spirit of reform was an abhorrence to the conscience and
the quiet of the monks. A brothel, a prostitute, and a race of bastards,
formed, according to the old inmates, the residence of the family of the
reformer. The wife of Martyr died, and was interred near the relics of
St. Frideswide. In the Marian days, it was resolved that the departed
female should be condemned for heresy, and, since the corpse lay not
distant from "that religious virgin, St. Frideswide," it should be
disinterred; and the Dean of Christ Church had the remains of Martyr's
wife dug up and buried in the dunghill of his stable. Five years after,
when Elizabeth reigned, the fate of the disturbed bones of the wife of
Martyr was recollected, and, by command, with patience and ingenuity,
the sub-dean collected from the dunghill the bones which time had
disjointed, and placed them in a coffin in the cathedral till they
should be reburied with greater solemnity. A search was at the same time
made by the sub-dean for the bones of St. Frideswide, which were not
found where they had reposed for centuries. They had been hidden by some
relic-adoring Catholic, to save them from the profane hands of the
triumphant heretics of Edward the Sixth. In the obscurest part of the
church, after much seeking, two silken bags were discovered, which had
carefully preserved the relics of St. Frideswide. The sub-dean, who
seems to have been at once a Romanist and a Reformer, considered that
these bones of Peter Martyr's wife and the female saint should receive
equal honours. He put them in the same coffin, and they were re-interred
together. This incident provoked some scoffs from the witless, and some
grave comments from those who stood more in awe of the corpse of the
saint than of the sinner. Thus they were buried and coupled together;
and a scholar, whether a divine or a philosopher his ambiguous style
will not assure us, inscribed this epitaph:--
_Hic jacet Religio cum Superstitione._
Did the profound writer insinuate a wish that in one grave should lie
mingled together Religion with Superstition? or that they are still as
inseparable as the bones of the wife of Peter Martyr with the bones of
St. Frideswide? Or did he mean nothing more than the idle antithesis of
a scholar's pen?
At this uncertain crisis of the alliance between Church and State, the
history of our English Bible exhibits a singular picture of the Church,
which, from courting the favour of the great, gradually grew into its
own strength, and rested on its own independence. We perceive it first
attracting the royal eye, and afterwards securing the patronage of
ministers. This phenomenon is observable in the Bible commanded to be
printed by Edward the Sixth. There we view his majesty's portrait
printed and illumined in red. Under Elizabeth, in the same Bible,
omitting only the Papistic fish-days, we are surprised by the two
portraits of the Earl of Leicester, placed before the Book of Joshua,
and Cecil Lord Burleigh, adorning the Psalms. This is the first edition
of the Bishops' Bible. But subsequently, in 1574, we discover that the
portraits of the royal favourites are both withdrawn, and a map of the
Holy Land substituted, while the arms of Archbishop Parker seem to have
been let into the vacancy which Lord Burleigh erst so gloriously
occupied. The map of the Holy Land unquestionably is more appropriate
than the portraits of the two statesmen; but the arms of the archbishop
introduced into the Scriptures indicate a more egotistic spirit in the
good prelate than, perhaps, becomes the saintly humility of the pastor.
The whole is an exhibition of that worldliness which in its first
weakness is uncertain of the favour of the higher powers, but which
cannot conceal its triumph in its full-grown strength; the great
ecclesiastic, no longer collecting portraits of ministers, stamps his
own arms on the sacred volume, to ratify his own power!