gained time by turning suddenly on the question of the Sacrament; he
cited the appearance of Hooper as a witness in proof that it was really
on this point that he was brought to trial, and he at last succeeded in
arousing Cranmer's love of controversy. A reply of almost incredible
profanity from the Archbishop, if we may trust Foxe's report, rewarded
Bonner's perseverance in demanding a statement of his belief. The Bishop
was not slow to accept the advantage he had gained. "I am right sorry to
hear your Grace speak these words," he said, with a grave shake of his
head, and Cranmer was warned by the silence and earnest looks of his
fellow-commissioners to break up the session.
Three days after, the addition of Sir Thomas Smith, the bitterest of
Reformers, to the number of his assessors emboldened Cranmer to summon
Bonner again. The court met in the chapel, and the Bishop was a second
time commanded to reply to the charge. He objected now to the admission
of the evidence of either Hooper or Latimer on the ground of their
notorious heresy. "If that be the law," Cranmer replied hastily, "it is
no godly law." "It is the King's law used in the realm," Bonner bluntly
rejoined. Again Cranmer's temper gave his opponent the advantage. "Ye be
too full of your law," replied the angry Primate; "I would wish you had
less knowledge in that law and more knowledge in God's law and of your
duty!" "Well," answered the Bishop with admirable self-command, "seeing
your Grace falleth to wishing, I can also wish many things to be in your
person." It was in vain that Smith strove to brush away his objections
with a contemptuous "You do use us thus to be seen a common lawyer."
"Indeed," the veteran canonist coolly retorted; "I knew the law ere you
could read it!" There was nothing for it but a second adjournment of the
court. At its next session all parties met in hotter mood. The Bishop
pulled Hooper's books on the Sacrament from his sleeve and began reading
them aloud. Latimer lifted up his head, as he alleged, to still the
excitement of the people who crowded the chapel; as Bonner believed, to
arouse a tumult. Cries of "Yea, yea," "Nay, nay," interrupted Bonner's
reading. The Bishop turned round and faced the throng, crying out in
humorous defiance, "Ah! Woodcocks! Woodcocks!" The taunt was met with
universal laughter, but the scene had roused Cranmer's temper as well as
his own. The Primate addressed himself to the people, protesting that
Bonner was called in question for no such matter as he would persuade
them. Again Bonner turned to the people with "Well now, hear what the
Bishop of London saith for his part," but the commissioners forbade him
to speak more. The court was at last recalled to a quieter tone, but
contests of this sort still varied the proceedings as they dragged their
slow length along in chapel and hall.
At last Cranmer resolved to make an end. Had he been sitting simply as
Archbishop, he reminded Bonner sharply, he might have expected more
reverence and obedience from his suffragan. As it was, "at every time
that we have sitten in commission you have used such unseemly fashions,
without all reverence or obedience, giving taunts and checks as well
unto us, with divers of the servants and chaplains, as also unto certain
of the ancientest that be here, calling them fools and daws, with such
like, that you have given to the multitude an intolerable example of
disobedience." "You show yourself to be a meet judge!" was Bonner's
scornful reply. It was clear he had no purpose to yield. The real matter
at issue, he contended, was the doctrine of the Sacrament, and from the
very courtroom he sent his orders to the Lord Mayor to see that no
heretical opinions were preached before him. At the close of the trial
he once more addressed Cranmer in solemn protest against his breach of
the law. "I am sorry" he said "that I being a bishop am thus handled at
your Grace's hand, but more sorry that you suffer abominable heretics to
practise as they do in London and elsewhere--answer it as you can!" Then
bandying taunts with the throng, the indomitable bishop followed the
officers to the Marshalsea.
From the degradation of scenes like these Lambeth was raised to new
dignity and self-respect by the primacy of Parker. His consecration in
the same chapel which had witnessed Wyclif's confession was the triumph
of Wyclif's principles, the close of that storm of the Reformation, of
that Catholic reaction, which ceased alike with the accession of
Elizabeth. But it was far more than this. It was in itself a symbol of
the Church of England as it stands to-day, of that quiet illogical
compromise between past and present which Parker and the Queen were to
mould into so lasting a shape. Every circumstance of the service marked
the strange contrasts which were to be blended in the future of the
English Church. The zeal of Edward the Sixth's day had dashed the
stained glass from the casements of Lambeth; the zeal of Elizabeth's day
was soon to move, if it had not already moved, the holy table into the
midst of the chapel. But a reaction from the mere iconoclasm and
bareness of Calvinistic Protestantism showed itself in the tapestries
hung for the day along the eastern wall and in the rich carpet which was
spread over the floor. The old legal forms, the old Ordination Service
reappeared, but in their midst came the new spirit of the Reformation,
the oath of submission to the royal supremacy, the solemn gift no
longer of the pastoral staff but of the Bible. The very dress of the
four consecrating bishops showed the same confusion. Barlow, with the
Archbishop's chaplains who assisted him in the office of the Communion,
wore the silken copes of the older service; Scory and Hodgskins the fair
linen surplice of the new. Yet more noteworthy was the aged figure of
Coverdale, "Father Coverdale," as men used affectionately to call him,
the well-known translator of the Bible, whose life had been so hardly
wrung by royal intercession from Mary. Rejecting the very surplice as
Popery, in his long Genevan cloak he marks the opening of the Puritan
controversy over vestments which was to rage so fiercely from Parker on
to Laud.
The library of Parker, though no longer within its walls, is memorable
in the literary history of Lambeth as the first of a series of such
collections made after his time by each successive Archbishop. Many of
these indeed have passed away. The manuscripts of Parker form the glory
of Corpus College, Cambridge; the Oriental collections of Laud are among
the most precious treasures of the Bodleian. In puerile revenge for his
fall Sancroft withdrew his books from Lambeth, and bequeathed them to
Emmanuel College. The library which the munificence of Tenison
bequeathed to his old parish of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields has been
dispersed by a shameless act of Vandalism within our own memories. An
old man's caprice deposited the papers of Archbishop Wake at Christ
Church. But the treasures thus dispersed are, with the exception of the
Parker MSS., far surpassed by the collections that remain. I cannot
attempt here to enter with any detail into the nature of the history of
the archiepiscopal library. It owes its origin to Archbishop Bancroft,
it was largely supplemented by his successor Abbot, and still more
largely after a long interval by the book-loving Primates Tenison and
Secker. The library of 30,000 volumes still mainly consists of these
collections, though it has been augmented by the smaller bequests of
Sheldon and Cornwallis and in a far less degree by those of later
Archbishops. One has at any rate the repute of having augmented it
during his primacy simply by a treatise on gout and a book about
butterflies. Of the 1,200 volumes of manuscripts and papers, 500 are due
to Bancroft and Abbot, the rest mainly to Tenison, who purchased the
Carew Papers, the collections of Wharton, and the Codices that bear his
name. If Wake left his papers to Christ Church in dread of the
succession of Bishop Gibson the bequest of Gibson's own papers more than
made up the loss. The most valuable addition since Gibson's day has been
that of the Greek Codices collected in the East at the opening of this
century by Dr. Carlyle.
The importance of Parker's primacy however was political and
ecclesiastical rather than literary. The first Protestant Archbishop was
not the man to stoop to servility like Cranmer, nor was Elizabeth the
queen to ask such stooping. But the concordat which the two tacitly
arranged, the policy so resolutely clung to in spite of Burleigh and
Walsingham, was perhaps a greater curse both to nation and to Church
than the meanness of Cranmer. The steady support given by the Crown to
the new ecclesiastical organization which Parker moulded into shape was
repaid by the conversion of every clergyman into the advocate of
irresponsible government. It was as if publicly to ratify this concordat
that the Queen came in person to Lambeth in the spring of 1573. On
either side the chapel in that day stood a greater and lesser cloister.
The last, which lay on the garden side, was swept away by the
demolitions of the eighteenth century, the first still fills the space
between chapel and hall but has been converted into domestic offices by
the "restoration" of our own. Even Mr. Blore might have spared the
cloisters from whose gallery on the side towards the Thames Elizabeth
looked down on the gay line of nobles and courtiers who leaned from the
barred windows beneath and on the crowd of meaner subjects who filled
the court, while she listened to Dr. Pearce as he preached from a pulpit
set by the well in the midst. At its close the Queen passed to dinner in
the Archbishop's chamber of presence, while the noble throng beneath
followed Burleigh and Lord Howard to the hall whose oaken roof told
freshly of Parker's hand. At four the short visit was over, and
Elizabeth again on her way to Greenwich. But, short as it was, it marked
the conclusion of a new alliance between Church and State out of which
the Ecclesiastical Commission was to spring.
Such an alliance would have been deadly for English religion as for
English liberty had not its strength been broken by the obstinate
resistance in wise as well as unwise ways of the Puritan party. There
are few more interesting memorials of the struggle which followed than
the 'Martin Marprelate' tracts which still remain in the collection at
Lambeth, significantly scored in all their more virulent passages by the
red pencil of Archbishop Whitgift. But the story of that controversy
cannot be told here, though it was at Lambeth, as the seat of the High
Commission, that it was really fought out. More and more it parted all
who clung to liberty from the Church, and knit the episcopate in a
closer alliance with the Crown. When Elizabeth set Parker at the head of
the new Ecclesiastical Commission, half the work of the Reformation was
in fact undone.
Under Laud this great engine of ecclesiastical tyranny was perverted to
the uses of civil tyranny of the vilest kind. Under Laud the clerical
invectives of a Martin Marprelate deepened into the national fury of
'Canterburie's Doom.' With this political aspect of his life we have not
now to deal; what Lambeth Chapel brings out with singular vividness is
the strange audacity with which the Archbishop threw himself across the
strongest religious sentiments of his time. Men noted as a fatal omen
the accident that marked his first entry into Lambeth; the overladen
ferry-boat upset in the crossing, and though horses and servants were
saved the Primate's coach remained at the bottom of the Thames. But no
omen brought hesitation to that bold, narrow mind. His first action, he
tells us himself, was the restoration of the chapel, and, as Laud
managed it, restoration was the simple undoing of all that the
Reformation had done.
"I found the windows so broken, and the chapel lay so nastily," he wrote
long after in his Defence, "that I was ashamed to behold, and could not
resort unto it but with some disdain." With characteristic energy the
Archbishop aided with his own hands in the repair of the windows, and
racked his wits "in making up the history of those old broken pictures
by help of the fragments of them, which I compared with the story." In
the east window his glazier was scandalized at being forced by the
Primate's express directions to "repair and new make the broken
crucifix." The holy table was set altar-wise against the wall, and a
cloth of arras hung behind it embroidered with the history of the Last
Supper. The elaborate woodwork of the screen, the richly-embroidered
copes of the chaplains, the silver candlesticks, the credence-table,
the organ and the choir, the genuflexions to the altar, recalled the
elaborate ceremonial of the Royal Chapel.
High-handed however as the Archbishop's course had been, he felt dimly
the approaching wreck. At the close of 1639 he notes in his diary a
great storm that broke even the boats of the Lambeth watermen to pieces
as they lay before his gate. A curious instance of his gloomy
prognostications still exists among the relics in the library--a quarry
of greenish glass, once belonging to the west window of the gallery of
Croydon, and removed when that palace was rebuilt. On the quarry Laud
has written with his signet-ring in his own clear, beautiful hand,
"Memorand. Ecclesiae de Micham, Cheme, et Stone cum aliis fulgure
combustae sunt. Januar. 14, 1638-9. Omen avertat Deus."
The omen was far from averted. The Scottish war, the Bellum Episcopale,
the Bishops' War, as men called it, was soon going against the King.
Laud had been the chief mover in the war, and it was against Laud that
the popular indignation at once directed itself. On the 9th of May he
notes in his diary: "A paper posted upon the Royal Exchange, animating
'prentices to sack my house on the Monday following." On that Monday
night the mob came surging up to the gates. "At midnight my house was
beset with 500 of these rascal routers," notes the indomitable little
prelate. He had received notice in time to secure the house, and after
two hours of useless shouting the mob rolled away. Laud had his revenge;
a drummer who had joined in the attack was racked mercilessly, and then
hanged and quartered. But retaliation like this was useless. The
gathering of the Long Parliament sounded the knell of the sturdy little
minister who had ridden England so hard. At the close of October he is
in his upper study--it is one of the pleasant scholarly touches that
redeem so much in his life--"to see some manuscripts which I was sending
to Oxford. In that study hung my picture taken by the life" (the picture
is at Lambeth still), "and coming in I found it fallen down upon the
face and lying on the floor, the string being broken by which it was
hanged against the wall. I am almost everyday threatened with my ruin in
parliament. God grant this be no omen." On the 18th of December he was
in charge of the gentleman-usher of the Lords on impeachment of high
treason. In his company the Archbishop returned for a few hours to see
his house for the last time, "for a book or two to read in, and such
papers as pertained to my defence against the Scots;" really to burn,
says Prynne, most of his privy papers. There is the first little break
in the boldness with which till now he has faced the popular ill-will,
the first little break too of tenderness, as though the shadow of what
was to come were softening him, in the words that tell us his last
farewell: "I stayed at Lambeth till the evening, to avoid the gaze of
the people. I went to evening prayer in my chapel. The Psalms of the day
(Ps. 93 and 94) and cap. 50 of Isaiah gave me great comfort. God make me
worthy of it, and fit to receive it. As I went to my barge hundreds of
my poor neighbours stood there and prayed for my safety and return to my
house. For which I bless God and them."
So Laud vanished into the dark December night never to return. The house
seems to have been left unmolested for two years. Then "Captain Browne
and his company entered my house at Lambeth to keep it for public
service." The troopers burst open the door "and offered violence to the
organ," but it was saved for the time by the intervention of their
captain. In 1643 the zeal of the soldiers could no longer be restrained.
Even in the solitude and terror of his prison in the Tower Laud still
feels the bitterness of the last blow at the house he held so dear. "May
1. My chapel windows defaced and the steps torn up." But the crowning
bitterness was to come. If there were two men living who had personal
wrongs to avenge on the Archbishop, they were Leighton and Prynne. It
can only have been as a personal triumph over their humbled persecutor
that the Parliament appointed the first custodian of Lambeth and gave
Prynne the charge of searching the Archbishop's house and chambers for
materials in support of the impeachment. Of the spirit in which Prynne
executed his task, the famous 'Canterburie's Doom,' with the Breviat of
Laud's life which preceded it, still gives pungent evidence. By one of
those curious coincidences that sometimes flash the fact upon us through
the dust of old libraries, the copy of this violent invective preserved
at Lambeth is inscribed on its fly-leaf with the clear, bold "Dum spiro
spero, C.R." of the King himself. It is hard to picture the thoughts
that must have passed through Charles's mind as he read the bitter
triumphant pages that told how the man he had twice pilloried and then
flung into prison for life had come out again, as he puts it brutally,
to "unkennel that fox," his foe.
Not even the Archbishop's study with its array of Missals and Breviaries
and Books of Hours, not even the gallery with its "superstitious
pictures," the three Italian masterpieces that he hurried as evidence to
the bar of the House of Lords, so revealed to this terrible detective
"the rotten, idolatrous heart" of the Primate as the sight of the
chapel. It was soon reduced to simplicity. We have seen how sharply even
in prison Laud felt the havoc made by the soldiery. But worse
profanation was to follow. In 1648 the house passed by sale to the
regicide Colonel Scott; the Great Hall was at once demolished, and the
chapel turned into the dining-room of the household. The tomb of Parker
was levelled with the ground; and if we are to believe the story of the
royalists, the new owner felt so keenly the discomfort of dining over a
dead man's bones that the remains of the great Protestant primate were
disinterred and buried anew in an adjoining field.
The story of the library is a more certain one. From the days of
Bancroft to those of Laud it had remained secure in the rooms over the
great cloister where Parker's collection had probably stood before it
passed to Cambridge. There in Parker's day Foxe had busied himself in
work for the later editions of his 'Acts and Monuments;' even in the
present library one book at least bears his autograph and the marginal
marks of his use. There the great scholars of the seventeenth century,
with Selden among them, had carried on their labours. The time was now
come when Selden was to save the library from destruction. At the sale
of Lambeth the Parliament ordered the books and manuscripts to be sold
with the house. Selden dexterously interposed. The will of its founder,
Bancroft, he pleaded, directed that in case room should not be found for
it at Lambeth his gift should go to Cambridge; and the Parliament,
convinced by its greatest scholar, suffered the books to be sent to the
University.
When the Restoration brought the Stuart home again, it flung Scott into
the Tower and set Juxon in the ruined, desecrated walls. Of the deeper
thoughts that such a scene might have suggested few probably found
their way into the simple, limited mind of the new primate. The whole
pathos of Juxon's position lay in fact in his perfect absorption in the
past. The books were reclaimed from their Cambridge Adullam. The chapel
was rescued from desecration, and the fine woodwork of screen and stalls
replaced as Laud had left them. The demolition of the hall left him a
more serious labour, and the way in which he entered on it brought
strikingly out Juxon's temper. He knew that he had but a few years to
live, and he set himself but one work to do before he died, the
replacing everything in the state in which the storm of the rebellion
had found it. He resolved therefore not only to rebuild the hall but to
rebuild it precisely as it had stood before it was destroyed. It was in
vain that he was besieged by the remonstrances of "classical"
architects, that he was sneered at even by Pepys as "old-fashioned";
times had changed and fashions had changed, but Juxon would recognize no
change at all. He died ere the building was finished, but even in death
his inflexible will provided that his plans should be adhered to. The
result has been a singularly happy one. It was not merely that the
Archbishop has left us one of the noblest examples of that strange yet
successful revival of Gothic feeling of which the staircase of Christ
Church Hall, erected at much about the same time, furnishes so exquisite
a specimen. It is that in his tenacity to the past he has preserved the
historic interest of his hall. Beneath the picturesque woodwork of the
roof, in the quiet light that breaks through the quaint mullions of its
windows, the student may still recall without a jar the figures which
make Lambeth memorable, figures such as those of Warham and Erasmus, of
Grocyn and Colet and More. Unhappily there was a darker side to this
conservatism. The Archbishops had returned like the Bourbons, forgetting
nothing and having learned hardly anything. If any man could have
learned the lesson of history it was Juxon's successor, the hard
sceptical Sheldon, and one of the jottings in Pepys' Diary shows us what
sort of lesson he had learned. Pepys had gone down the river at noon to
dine with the Archbishop in company with Sir Christopher Wren, "the
first time," as he notes, "that I ever was there, and I have long longed
for it." Only a few days before he had had a terrible disappointment,
for "Mr. Wren and I took boat, thinking to dine with my Lord of
Canterbury, but when we came to Lambeth the gate was shut, which is
strictly done at twelve o'clock, and nobody comes in afterwards, so we
lost our labour." On this occasion Pepys was more fortunate. He found "a
noble house and well furnished with good pictures and furniture, and
noble attendance in good order, and a great deal of company, though an
ordinary day, and exceeding good cheer, nowhere better or so much that
ever I think I saw." Sheldon with his usual courtesy gave his visitors
kindly welcome, and Pepys was preparing to withdraw at the close of
dinner when he heard news which induced him to remain. The almost
incredible scene that followed must be told in his own words:--"Most of
the company gone, and I going, I heard by a gentleman of a sermon that
was to be there; and so I stayed to hear it, thinking it to be serious,
till by-and-by the gentleman told me it was a mockery by one Cornet
Bolton, a very gentlemanlike man, that behind a chair did pray and
preach like a Presbyter Scot, with all the possible imitation in
grimaces and voice. And his text about the hanging up their harps upon
the willows; and a serious, good sermon too, exclaiming against bishops
and crying up of my good Lord Eglington till it made us all burst. But
I did wonder to hear the Bishop at this time to make himself sport with
things of this kind; but I perceive it was shown to him as a rarity, and
he took care to have the room door shut; but there were about twenty
gentlemen there, infinitely pleased with the 'novelty.'"
It was "novelties" like these that led the last of the Stuarts to his
fatal belief that he could safely defy a Church that had so severed
itself from the English religion in doing the work of the Crown. The pen
of a great historian has told for all time the Trial of the Seven
Bishops, and though their protest was drawn up at Lambeth I may not
venture to tell it here. Of all the seven in fact Sancroft was probably
the least inclined to resistance, the one prelate to whom the cheers of
the great multitude at their acquittal brought least sense of triumph.