freedom which followed the Great Charter this peculiar attitude of the
Archbishops passed necessarily away. When the people itself spoke again,
its voice was heard not in the hall of Lambeth but in the Chapter-house
which gave a home to the House of Commons in its earlier sessions at
Westminster. From the day of Stephen Langton the nation has towered
higher and higher above its mere ecclesiastical organization, till the
one stands dwarfed beside the other as Lambeth now stands dwarfed before
the mass of the Houses of Parliament. Nor was the religious change less
than the political. In the Church as in the State the Archbishops
suddenly fell into the rear. From the days of the first English
Parliament to the days of the Reformation they not only cease to be
representatives of the moral and religious forces of the nation but
stand actually opposed to them. Nowhere is this better brought out than
in their house beside the Thames. The political history of Lambeth lies
spread over the whole of its site, from the gateway of Morton to the
garden where we shall see Cranmer musing on the fate of Anne Boleyn. Its
ecclesiastical interest on the other hand is concentrated in a single
spot. We must ask our readers therefore to follow us beneath the
groining of the Gate-House into the quiet little court that lies on the
river-side of the hall. Passing over its trim grass-plot to a doorway at
the angle of Lollards' Tower, and mounting a few steps, they will find
themselves in a square antechamber, paved roughly with tiles, and with a
single small window looking out towards the Thames. The chamber is at
the base of Lollards' Tower; in the centre stands a huge oaken pillar,
to which the room owes its name of the "Post-room," and to which
somewhat mythical tradition asserts Lollards to have been tied when they
were "examined" by the whip. On its western side a doorway of the purest
Early English work leads us directly into the palace Chapel.
It is strange to stand at a single step in the very heart of the
ecclesiastical life of so many ages, within walls beneath which the men
in whose hands the fortunes of English religion have been placed from
the age of the Great Charter till to-day have come and gone; to see the
light falling through the tall windows with their marble shafts on the
spot where Wyclif fronted Sudbury, on the lowly tomb of Parker, on the
stately screen-work of Laud, on the altar where the last sad communion
of Sancroft originated the Nonjurors. It is strange to note the very
characteristics of the building itself, marred as it is by modern
restoration, and to feel how simply its stern, unadorned beauty, the
beauty of Salisbury and of Lincoln, expressed the very tone of the
Church that finds its centre there.
And hardly less strange is it to recall the odd, roystering figure of
the Primate to whom, if tradition be true, it owes this beauty. Boniface
of Savoy was the youngest of three brothers out of whom their niece
Eleanor, the queen of Henry the Third, was striving to build up a
foreign party in the realm. Her uncle Amadeus was richly enfeoffed with
English lands; the Savoy Palace in the Strand still recalls the
settlement and the magnificence of her uncle Peter. For this third and
younger uncle she grasped at the highest post in the State save the
Crown itself. "The handsome Archbishop," as his knights loved to call
him, was not merely a foreigner as Lanfranc and Anselm had been
foreigners--strange in manner or in speech to the flock whom they
ruled--he was foreign in the worst sense: strange to their freedom,
their sense of law, their reverence for piety. His first visit set
everything on fire. He retreated to Lyons to hold a commission in the
Pope's body-guard, but even Innocent was soon weary of his tyranny. When
the threat of sequestration recalled him after four years of absence to
his see, his hatred of England, his purpose soon to withdraw again to
his own sunny South, were seen in his refusal to furnish Lambeth.
Certainly he went the wrong way to stay here. The young Primate brought
with him Savoyard fashions, strange enough to English folk. His armed
retainers, foreigners to a man, plundered the City markets. His own
archiepiscopal fist felled to the ground a prior who opposed his
visitation. It was the Prior of St. Bartholomew's by Smithfield; and
London, on the King's refusal to grant redress, took the matter into her
own hands. The City bells swung out, and a noisy crowd of citizens were
soon swarming beneath the walls of the palace, shouting threats of
vengeance.
For shouts Boniface cared little. In the midst of the tumult he caused
the sentences of excommunication which he had fulminated to be legally
executed in the chapel of his house. But bravado like this soon died
before the universal resentment, and "the handsome Archbishop" fled
again to Lyons. How helpless the successor of Augustine really was was
shown by a daring outrage perpetrated in his absence. Master Eustace,
his official, had thrown into prison the Prior of St. Thomas's Hospital
for some contempt of court; and the Prior's diocesan, the Bishop of
Winchester, a prelate as foreign and lawless as Boniface himself, took
up the injury as his own. A party of his knights appeared before the
house at Lambeth, tore the gates from their hinges, set Master Eustace
on horseback, and carried him off to the episcopal prison at Farnham. At
last Boniface bowed to submission, surrendered the points at issue,
recalled his excommunications, and was suffered to return. He had learnt
his lesson well enough to remain from that time a quiet, inactive man,
with a dash of continental frugality and wit about him. Whether he built
the chapel or no, he would probably have said of it as he said of the
Great Hall at Canterbury, "My predecessors built, and I discharge the
debt for their building. It seems to me that the true builder is the man
that pays the bill."
But Boniface never learnt to be an Englishman. When under the guidance
of Earl Simon of Montfort the barons wrested the observance of their
Charter from the King the Primate of England found shelter in a fresh
exile. The Church had in fact ceased to be national. The figure of the
first Reformer, as he stands on the chapel floor, is in itself the
fittest comment on the age in which the chapel was built, an age when
the interests of popular liberty and of intellectual freedom had sheered
off from the church which had so long been their protector. With them
the moral and spiritual life of the people sheered off too. The vast
ecclesiastical fabric rested in the days of Archbishop Sudbury solely on
its wealth and its tradition. Suddenly a single man summed up in himself
the national, the mental, the moral power it had lost, and struck at the
double base on which it rested. Wyclif, the keenest intellect of his
day, national and English to the very core, declared its tradition
corrupt and its wealth antichrist. The two forces that above all had
built up the system of mediaeval Christianity, the subtlety of the
schoolman, the enthusiasm of the penniless preacher, united to strike it
down.
It is curious to mark how timidly the Primate of the day dealt with such
a danger as this. Sudbury was acting in virtue of a Papal injunction,
but he acted as though the shadow of the terrible doom that was awaiting
him had already fallen over him. He summoned the popular Bishop of
London to his aid ere he cited the Reformer to his judgment-seat. It was
not as a prisoner that Wyclif appeared in the chapel: from the first his
tone was that of a man who knew that he was secure. He claimed to have
the most favourable construction put upon his words; then, availing
himself of his peculiar subtlety of interpretation, he demanded that
where they might bear two meanings his judges should take them in an
orthodox sense. It was not a noble scene--there was little in it of
Luther's "Here stand I--I can none other;" but both sides were in fact
acting a part. On the one hand the dead pressure of ecclesiastical
fanaticism was driving the Primate into a position from which he sought
only to escape; on the other Wyclif was merely gaining time--"beating
step," as men say--with his scholastic formulae. What he looked for soon
came. There was a rumour in the City that Papal delegates were sitting
in judgment on the Reformer, and London was at once astir. Crowds of
angry citizens flocked round the archiepiscopal house, and already there
was talk of attacking it when a message from the Council of Regency
commanded a suspension of all proceedings in the case. Sudbury dismissed
his prisoner with a formal injunction, and the day was for ever lost to
the Church.
But if in Sudbury the Church had retreated peaceably before Wyclif, it
was not from any doubt of the deadly earnestness of the struggle that
lay before her. Archbishop Chichele's accession to the primacy was the
signal for the building of Lollards' Tower. Dr. Maitland has shown that
the common name rests on a mere error, and that the Lollards' Tower
which meets us so grimly in the pages of Foxe was really a western tower
of St. Paul's. But, as in so many other instances, the popular voice
showed a singular historical tact in its mistake; the tower which
Chichele raised marked more than any other in the very date of its
erection the new age of persecution on which England was to enter. From
a gateway in the northern side of the Post-room worn stone steps lead up
to a dungeon in which many a prisoner for the faith must have lain. The
massive oaken door, the iron rings bolted into the wall, the one narrow
window looking out over the river, tell their tale as well as the broken
sentences scratched or carved around. Some are mere names; here and
there some light-pated youngster paying for his night's uproar has
carved his dice or his "Jesus kep me out of all il compane, Amen." But
"Jesus est amor meus" is sacred, whether Lollard or Jesuit graved it in
the lonely prison hours, and not less sacred the "Deo sit gratiarum
actio" that marks perhaps the leap of a martyr's heart at the news of
the near advent of his fiery deliverance. It is strange to think, as one
winds once more down the stairs that such feet have trodden, how soon
England answered to the challenge that Lollards' Tower flung out over
the Thames. The white masonry had hardly grown grey under the buffetings
of a hundred years ere Lollard was no longer a word of shame, and the
reformation that Wyclif had begun sat enthroned within the walls of the
chapel where he had battled for his life.
The attitude of the primates indeed showed that sooner or later such a
reformation was inevitable. From the moment when Wyclif stood in
Lambeth Chapel the Church sank ecclesiastically as well as politically
into non-existence. It survived merely as a vast landowner, whilst its
primates, after a short effort to resume their older position as real
heads of their order, dwindled into ministers and tools of the Crown.
The Gate-tower of the house, the grand mass of brickwork, whose dark red
tones are (or, alas! were till a year or two since) so exquisitely
brought out by the grey stone of its angles and the mullions of its
broad arch-window, recalls an age--that of its builder, Archbishop
Morton--when Lambeth, though the residence of the first minister of the
crown, had really lost all hold on the nobler elements of political
life. It was raised from this degradation by the efforts of a primate to
whose merits justice has hardly as yet been done. First in date among
the genuine portraits of the Archbishops of Canterbury which hang round
the walls of the Guard-room at Lambeth is the portrait of Archbishop
Warham. The plain, homely old man's face still looks down on us line for
line as the "seeing eye" of Holbein gazed on it three centuries ago. "I
instance this picture," says Mr. Wornum, in his life of the painter, "as
an illustration that Holbein had the power of seeing what he looked on,
and of perfectly transferring to his picture what he saw." Memorable in
the annals of art as the first of that historic series which brings home
to us as no age has ever been brought home to eyes of aftertime the age
of the English Reformation, it is even more memorable as marking the
close of the great intellectual movement which the Reformation swept
away.
It was with a letter from Erasmus in his hands that Hans Holbein stood
before the aged Archbishop, still young as when he sketched himself at
Basel with the fair, frank, manly face, the sweet gentle mouth, the
heavy red cap flinging its shade over the mobile, melancholy brow. But
it was more than the "seventy years" that he has so carefully noted
above it that the artist saw in the Primate's face; it was the still,
impassive calm of a life's disappointment. Only ten years before, at the
very moment when the painter first made his entry into Basel, Erasmus
had been forwarding to England the great work in which he had recalled
theologians to the path of sound biblical criticism. "Every lover of
letters," the great scholar wrote sadly, after the old man had gone to
his rest,--"Every lover of letters owes to Warham that he is the
possessor of my 'Jerome';" and with an acknowledgment of the Primate's
bounty such as he alone in Christendom could give the edition bore in
its forefront his memorable dedication to the Archbishop. That Erasmus
could find protection for such a work in Warham's name, that he could
address him with a conviction of his approval in words so bold and
outspoken as those of his preface, tell us how completely the old man
sympathized with the highest tendencies of the New Learning.
Of the Renascence, that "new birth" of the world--for I cling to a word
so eminently expressive of a truth that historians of our day seem
inclined to forget or to deny--of that regeneration of mankind through
the sudden upgrowth of intellectual liberty, Lambeth was in England the
shrine. With the Reformation which followed it Lambeth, as we shall see,
had little to do. But the home of Warham was the home of the revival of
letters. With a singular fitness, the venerable library which still
preserves their tradition, ousted from its older dwelling-place by the
demolition of the cloister, has in modern days found refuge in the Great
Hall, the successor and copy of that hall where the men of the New
Learning, where Colet and More and Grocyn and Linacre gathered round the
table of Warham.
It was with Grocyn that Erasmus rowed up the river to the Primate's
board. Warham addressed a few kindly words to the poor scholar before
and after dinner, and then drawing him aside into a corner of the hall
(his usual way when he made a present to any one) slipped into his hand
an acknowledgment for the book and dedication he had brought with him.
"How much did the Archbishop give you?" asked his companion as they
rowed home again. "An immense amount!" replied Erasmus, but his friend
saw the discontent on his face, and drew from him how small the sum
really was. Then the disappointed scholar burst into a string of
indignant questions: was Warham miserly, or was he poor, or did he
really think such a present expressed the value of the book? Grocyn
frankly blurted out the true reason for Warham's economy in his shrewd
suspicion that this was not the first dedication that had been prefixed
to the 'Hecuba,' and it is likely enough that the Primate's suspicion
was right. At any rate, Erasmus owns that Grocyn's sardonic comment, "It
is the way with you scholars," stuck in his mind even when he returned
to Paris, and made him forward to the Archbishop a perfectly new
translation of the 'Iphigenia.'
Few men seem to have realized more thoroughly than Warham the new
conception of an intellectual and moral equality before which the old
social distinctions were to vanish away. In his intercourse with this
group of friends he seems utterly unconscious of the exalted station
which he occupied in the eyes of men. Take such a story as Erasmus tells
of a visit of Dean Colet to Lambeth. The Dean took Erasmus in the boat
with him, and read as they rowed along a section called 'The Remedy for
Anger' in his friend's popular 'Handbook of the Christian Soldier.' When
they reached the hall however Colet plumped gloomily down by Warham's
side, neither eating nor drinking nor speaking in spite of the
Archbishop's good-humoured attempt to draw him into conversation. It was
only by starting the new topic of a comparison of ages that the
Archbishop was at last successful; and when dinner was over Colet's
ill-temper had utterly fled. Erasmus saw him draw aside an old man who
had shared their board, and engage in the friendliest greeting. "What a
fortunate fellow you are!" began the impetuous Dean, as the two friends
stepped again into their boat; "what a tide of good-luck you bring with
you!" Erasmus, of course, protested (one can almost see the
half-earnest, half-humorous smile on his lip) that he was the most
unfortunate fellow on earth. He was at any rate a bringer of good
fortune to his friends, the Dean retorted; one friend at least he had
saved from an unseemly outbreak of passion. At the Archbishop's table,
in fact, Colet had found himself placed opposite to an uncle with whom
he had long waged a bitter family feud, and it was only the singular
chance which had brought him thither fresh from the wholesome lessons of
the 'Handbook' that had enabled the Dean to refrain at the moment from
open quarrel, and at last to get such a full mastery over his temper as
to bring about a reconciliation with his kinsman. Colet was certainly
very lucky in his friend's lessons, but he was perhaps quite as
fortunate in finding a host so patient and good-tempered as Archbishop
Warham.
Primate and scholar were finally separated at last by the settlement of
Erasmus at Basel, but the severance brought no interruption to their
friendship. "England is my last anchor," Erasmus wrote bitterly to a
rich German prelate; "if that goes, I must beg." The anchor held as long
as Warham lived. Years go by, but the Primate is never tired of new
gifts and remembrances to the brave, sensitive scholar at whose heels
all the ignorance and bigotry of Europe was yelping. Sometimes indeed he
was luckless in his presents; once he sent a horse to his friend, and,
in spite of the well-known proverb about looking such a gift in the
mouth, got a witty little snub for his pains. "He is no doubt a good
steed at bottom," Erasmus gravely confesses, "but it must be owned he is
not over-handsome; however he is at any rate free from all mortal sins,
with the trifling exception of gluttony and laziness! If he were only a
father confessor now! he has all the qualities to fit him for
one--indeed, he is only _too_ prudent, modest, humble, chaste, and
peaceable!" Still, admirable as these characteristics are, he is not
quite the nag one expected. "I fancy that through some knavery or
blundering on your servant's part, I must have got a different steed
from the one you intended for me. In fact, now I come to remember, I had
bidden my servant not to accept a horse except it were a good one; but
I am infinitely obliged to you all the same." Even Warham's temper must
have been tried as he laughed over such a letter as this; but the
precious work of art which Lambeth contains proves that years only
intensified their friendship. It was, as we have seen, with a letter of
Erasmus in his hands, that on his first visit to England Holbein
presented himself before Warham; and Erasmus responded to his friend's
present of a copy of this portrait by forwarding a copy of his own.
With the Reformation in its nobler and purer aspects Lambeth--as we have
said--had little to do. Bucer, Peter Martyr, and Alasco, gathered there
for a moment round Cranmer, but it was simply as a resting-place on
their way to Cambridge, to Oxford, and to Austin Friars. Only one of the
symbols of the new Protestantism has any connection with it; the
Prayer-Book was drawn up in the peaceful seclusion of Otford. The party
conferences, the rival martyrdoms of the jarring creeds, took place
elsewhere. The memories of Cranmer which linger around Lambeth are
simply memories of degradation, and that the deepest degradation of all,
the degradation of those solemn influences which the Primacy embodies
to the sanction of political infamy. It is fair indeed to remember the
bitterness of Cranmer's suffering. Impassive as he seemed, with a face
that never changed and sleep seldom known to be broken, men saw little
of the inner anguish with which the tool of Henry's injustice bent
before that overmastering will. But seldom as it was that the silent
lips broke into complaint the pitiless pillage of his see wrung
fruitless protests even from Cranmer. The pillage had began on the very
eve of his consecration, and from that moment till the king's death
Henry played the part of sturdy beggar for the archiepiscopal manors.
Concession followed concession, and yet none sufficed to purchase
security. The Archbishop lived in the very shadow of death. At one time
he heard the music of the royal barge as it passed Lambeth, and hurried
to the waterside to greet the King. "I have news for you my chaplain!"
Henry broke out with his rough laugh as he drew Cranmer on board: "I
know now who is the greatest heretic in Kent!" and pulling a paper from
his sleeve he showed him his denunciation by the prebendaries of his own
cathedral. At another time he was summoned from his bed, and crossed the
river to find Henry pacing the gallery at Whitehall and to hear that on
the petition of the Council the King had consented to his committal to
the Tower. The law of the Six Articles parted him from wife and child.
"Happy man that you are" Cranmer groaned to Alexander Ales, whom with
his wonted consideration for others he had summoned to Lambeth to warn
him of his danger as a married priest; "happy man that you are that you
can escape! I would that I could do the same. Truly my see would be no
hindrance to me."
The bitter words must have recalled to Ales words of hardly less
bitterness which he had listened to on a visit to Lambeth years before.
If there was one person upon earth whom Cranmer loved it was Anne
Boleyn. When the royal summons had called him to Lambeth to wait till
the time arrived when his part was to be played in the murder of the
Queen his affection found vent in words of a strange pathos. "I loved
her not a little," he wrote to Henry in fruitless intercession, "for the
love which I judged her to bear towards God and His Gospel. I was most
bound to her of all creatures living." So he wrote, knowing there was
wrong to be done towards the woman he loved, wrong which he alone could
do, and knowing too that he would stoop to do it. The large garden
stretched away northward from his house then as now, but then thick, no
doubt, with the elm rows that vanished some thirty years back as the
great city's smoke drifted over them, and herein the early morning (it
was but four o'clock) Ales, who had found sleep impossible and had
crossed the river in a boat to seek calm in the fresh air and stillness
of the place, met Cranmer walking. On the preceding day Anne had gone
through the mockery of her trial, but to the world outside the little
circle of the court nothing was known, and it was in utter
unconsciousness of this that Ales told the Archbishop he had been roused
by a dream of her beheading. Cranmer was startled out of his usual calm.
"Don't you know then," he asked after a moment's silence, "what is to
happen to-day?" Then raising his eyes to heaven he added with a wild
burst of tears, "She who has been Queen of England on earth will this
day become a queen in heaven!" Some hours afterwards the Queen stood
before him as her judge, and passed back to the Tower and the block.
Cranmer was freed by his master's death from this helplessness of
terror only to lend himself to the injustice of the meaner masters who
followed Henry. Their enemies were at least his own, and, kindly as from
many instances we know his nature to have been, its very weakness made
him spring eagerly in such an hour of deliverance at the opportunity of
showing his power over those who so long held him down. On charges of
the most frivolous nature Bishop Gardiner and Bishop Bonner were
summoned before the Archbishop at Lambeth, deposed from their sees, and
flung into prison. It is only the record of their trials, as it still
stands in the pages of Foxe, that can enable us to understand the
violence of the reaction under Mary. Gardiner with characteristic
dignity confined himself to simply refuting the charges brought against
him and protesting against the injustice of the court. But the coarser,
bull-dog nature of Bonner turned to bay. By gestures, by scoff, by plain
English speech he declared again and again his sense of the wrong that
was being done. A temper naturally fearless was stung to bravado by the
sense of oppression. As he entered the hall at Lambeth he passed
straight by the Archbishop and his fellow-commissioners, still keeping
his cap on his head as though in unconsciousness of his presence. One
who stood by plucked his sleeve, and bade him do reverence. Bonner
turned laughingly round and addressed the Archbishop, "What, my Lord,
are you here? By my troth I saw you not." "It was because you would not
see," Cranmer sternly rejoined. "Well," replied Bonner, "you sent for
me: have you anything to say to me?" The charge was read. The Bishop had
been commanded in a sermon to acknowledge that the acts of the King
during his minority were as valid as if he were of full age. The command
was flatly in contradiction with existing statutes, and the Bishop had
no doubt disobeyed it.