compelled by his barons, to accept the Great Charter and solemnly to
swear to observe it. He appealed to the pope Innocent III. to release
him from that oath, and the pontiff consented on condition that John
should cede to him in fee the kingdom of England and receive it back
in tenancy as a fief of the Holy See, subject to an annual tribute of
money as token of vassalage. The bargain was consummated: John was
empowered to violate his oath, and his Holiness became Lord paramount
of England. He received the tribute in silver and gold during the life
of John and during the long reign of his son Henry III. the father of
Edward. But when he, Edward, came to the throne he resolved not to be
outdone by his incomparable brother-in-law, and refused to continue the
tribute. The pope, Boniface VIII., did not follow up the claim with
his usual tenacity. Perhaps because he already had his hands full with
Philip; and perhaps because there supervened between him and Edward a
negotiation of a different character. Edward at the head of an army,
was pursuing his claim to the crown of Scotland. The Scotch appealed
to the pope giving him a correct history of the transactions between
the two kingdoms, by which the independence of Scotland was fully
recognised. Boniface ordered Edward to withdraw his troops, alleging
that Scotland belonged to him, Boniface--a new pretence little to the
taste of the Scotch themselves. Edward denied the Scotch version,
and told the pope that the English monarchy was founded by Brutus
the Trojan in the time of the prophet Samuel, and that Scotland was
subjugated and annexed by his Edward’s ancestor king Arthur, a prince
for whose existence there was the same authority then as now, namely
the rhymes of the nursery. Boniface was struck with the antiquity of
the English monarchy and the deeds of the valorous Arthur, and he
changed sides: he commanded the Scotch no longer to resist his beloved
son in the Lord, king Edward.
Some years later we find Edward brought by his subjects to the verge
of dethronement for his tyranny, and forced to ratify anew the Great
Charter and swear to observe it; and then applying to Clement V.
the French pope, Philip’s pope, first pope of the Captivity, for a
dispensation from his oath. Great as Edward is made to appear to us
in English histories, it is clear he was not the man to redeem his
kingdom from the thraldom into which his grandsire had sold it. It was
the paralysis of the political power of the Church effected by Philip
IV., which gave scope to the innovations of Wiclif and led towards the
emancipation of England.
We pass over the reign of Edward’s worthless son, and come to that of
his grandson in the early part of whose reign Wiclif was born. The
day of his birth is not known. The third Edward came honestly by his
qualities moral and immoral. He was the grandson not only of Edward
I. but of the terrible Philip. He was not an Englishman--the English
blood in his veins was just a two hundred and fifty-sixth part. He was
a French Spaniard with a taint of the Moor. He ground his subjects to
powder by unprecedented taxation. He put the crown itself in pawn and
left it there eight years. But he had inherited the unfailing sagacity
of his maternal grandsire, and his people never brought _him_ to terms
by threatening to dethrone him.
If he himself did not turn upon the Church and rend her like Philip,
he was ready to see others do it. For aught he cared, Wiclif and the
other neologists of the day, might have gone over to the faith of his
Saracenic ancestors, and translated into English the Koran instead
of the Bible. Nor were his subjects much more true to the hierarchy:
loyalty to the pope was no longer the vogue. Now-a-days not one Roman
Catholic in a thousand knows that the see of Rome was ever anywhere
else than in Rome: the Church has been remiss in disseminating
information on that point; but at that time every Englishman not
idiotic, knew that the pope was a Frenchman seated down on the Rhone;
that the cardinals were French; that it was a Frenchman in London who
received the tribute of king John when he could get it; that in fine
the Church was a French industry which every honest Briton was bound to
look upon with distrust.
In the previous century begging had been proclaimed as a means of
grace, and this new road to heaven was eagerly seized upon by the
religious orders. Even men of rank and wealth turned Franciscan or
Dominican and worked out their own salvation by standing barefoot, a
rope around the waist, at the corners of the streets, holding out a
box for the contributions of the devout. The widow’s mite entitled her
only to the formal and general prayers of the convent; but those who
would make a handsome gift, were presented with a document on vellum
called a _letter of fraternity_ which gained for them special masses
for the success of their schemes in this world, and for the tempering
of purgatorial fires in the next. This traffic was profitable enough
to attract a brisk competition among the different orders, for the
monopoly; and each succeeding pontiff granted it to those who by their
faith or works--chiefly the latter--had risen highest in his esteem.
England swarmed with these sturdy beggars, and this gave handle to
Wiclif’s attacks not only upon them but upon monks in general. He
himself was a secular priest, that is a priest belonging to no monastic
order; and Roman Catholic writers aver that Wiclif’s hostility to
the monks arose from party spirit; and even protestant historians do
not wholly exculpate him in that regard. We know that feelings quite
mundane went for something occasionally in the measures of Luther and
of Calvin; and it is not improbable that Wiclif had a touch of human
nature as well as they. He had been made warden of Canterbury in
the place of a monk named Woodhall. The archbishop from whom Wiclif
had received this appointment died, and his successor dismissed him
and reinstated the monk. Wiclif appealed to the pope at Avignon,
who decided against him, saying that none but monks were entitled
to such preferment. Wiclif sounded the charge. He denied the pope’s
infallibility; he denied his right to excommunicate except for crime;
his right to extend absolution except to the penitent; his right to any
temporal power, especially his claim to be Lord paramount of England
by the cession of king John. He admitted that the pontiff was Christ’s
vicar on earth so far as he conformed to Christ’s precept and example
and no farther. As for the monks, not only their begging but some
other of their short-comings more questionable were the subject of his
invective; and to show them what they ought to be and to do he sent
forth his _poor priests_ as he called them, who clad in monkish garb,
went into the streets and highways, not to beg but to preach the gospel
and to read it to the people in English in the translation he was
already making.
I have sketched the events which prepared the way for Wiclif, and it is
proof of how well they had worked together for him that this opposition
to the Church instead of losing for him the favor of the king, gained
it. The tribute of John was in arrears, and pope Urban summoned Edward
to appear before him at Avignon as his vassal, and give an account
of himself. Edward was not disposed to make so long a journey for so
little profit; but he agreed to send commissioners to meet those of
his Holiness, at Bruges in Flanders. Wiclif had the honor of being
appointed on this commission. A compromise was the result. Wiclif was
rewarded for the skill he had shown as a diplomat, by being made rector
of Lutterworth, and in that incumbency he spent the rest of his days.
William of Wykeham bishop of Winchester was a prelate of learning,
talent and excellence. He deplored as earnestly as Wiclif the
ecclesiastical abuses which reigned, and the objectionable ways of the
monks. He was of a broad spirit: nice theological points never troubled
him. He recked as little as Wiclif whether the Frenchman Grimoard,
Urban V. was infallible or not, or whether he was entitled to the
tribute of king John so long as he did not get it.[18]
But he idolised the Church and to maintain her dignity, her prerogative
and even her wealth was what he lived for. Both these men were in
advance of their age: the one by indifference to the prevailing
superstitions, the other by a desire to blot them out. They ought have
been friends; but one was a high churchman, the other a low churchman.
William of Wykeham had been chancellor of England and had resigned.
In the next reign, that of Richard II., he was once more raised to
that high office. In the meantime he had fallen out with John of Gaunt
duke of Lancaster uncle of Richard, and that quarrel brought about an
alliance between the duke and Wiclif. John was the fourth son of Edward
III. and possessed the qualities of his race. He is supposed to have
aimed to succeed his father on the throne, in contempt of the rights of
his nephew, son of his illustrious brother the Black prince; but the
boy had not yet displayed the unworthy traits which finally cost him
his crown; and the memory of his father proved sufficient to guarantee
the succession of one of England’s weakest sovereigns.
Finding the English throne impracticable, John attempted that of
Castile, but here he met a rival whose claim was but little more
valid than his, but who had got the start of him. Later the progeny
of John of Gaunt and of Henry of Trastamara intermarried; and the
present Houses of Hapsburg and Bourbon are descended from both of these
adventurers.
Foiled in Castile duke John returned to England and plunged into
politics. What the contention was between him and William of Wykeham,
is not clear. It is probable that duke John was out of money, and
remembering him of the manner in which his great-grandfather Philip
had replenished his coffers, he was trying to defraud the Church, and
that the chancellor frustrated those designs. Wiclif who was of the
opinion of Agur, with a leaning towards poverty, considered the wealth
of the Church as one of its abuses, and he sided with the duke. He
did not serve an ingrate, for when at length he was arraigned before
the bishop of London to explain his opinions, he walked into court
accompanied by John of Gaunt on one side, and John’s friend Percy earl
marshal of England on the other. Wiclif was feeble in body, and lord
Percy told him to sit down. Not with my permission, said the bishop.
Then without it, growled John of Gaunt, and he added that if the bishop
put on airs he would drag him from his seat by the hair of his head.
The session broke up in disorder; and one of the many inexplicable
circumstances connected with Wiclif’s history, is that the populace who
took the part of the bishop, vented their discontent not on Wiclif but
on his lordly abettors.
Later, duke John abandoned Wiclif but not wantonly or without an
effort to fetch him round to what he regarded a common sense view of
the case. Politics had shifted, and the duke was on the side of the
Church. He suggested to Wiclif that it was time for him to turn his
coat also, and finding him obstinate he left him to his own devices
for a pragmatical disturber of the public peace. It was inconceivable
to John of Gaunt that a man of genius could be in earnest about what he
considered as nothing more than the futilities of the schools.
Wiclif’s greatest work was his translation of the scriptures into
English; but his version was not one that we would accept to-day
for our guidance. It was the translation of the translation of a
translation. Let us look a little into its pedigree: Some years before
the birth of Christ, the old testament was translated into Greek. This
version is called the Septuagint, because, according to the legend,
seventy-two learned doctors were shut up in seventy-two separate cells
and set to making seventy-two separate translations of the Hebrew
scriptures. They accomplished the task in seventy-two days, and when
they came to compare notes their seventy-two versions all agreed word
for word letter for letter. There could be no doubt of the inspiration
of a work so miraculous; and such was the authority of the Septuagint
that the citations of the old testament in the new, are taken from it.
The Church of Rome at an early day translated the Septuagint and the
Apocrypha into its adopted tongue the latin, and this version is known
as the old Vulgate. In the course of ages, and they were dark ages, by
careless transcription and by the foisting in of strange theological
ideas, the Vulgate had become corrupt, and such was its condition when
Wiclif translated it. Two hundred years later the Council of Trent
revised it and brought it into its present form. It is now the ultimate
Bible of the Church Catholic Apostolic and Roman, from which there
is no appeal: the original Hebrew and Greek go for nothing when they
differ from it. Do you ask why? I answer that the Church is inspired
as well as the Bible, and inspiration for inspiration, the later must
supercede the earlier. You protestants have merely gone back and picked
up the exhausted material of the Church, and made out of it a sort
of Bible of your own, instead of accepting the better provision she
offers you; and it distresses me to add that the Council of Trent has
consigned you all to perdition for rejecting the Apocrypha.
Scripture in Wiclif’s day was a new revelation for the people, and the
reading of his Bible was eagerly listened to; but some enthusiastic
writers dilate upon its wide spread circulation, forgetting that
the art of printing was then unknown, and that every copy was in
manuscript, and that too not in the facile running hand of the present
era, but in _black-letter_ printed out, so to speak, with the pen. Le
Bas estimates that a New Testament alone cost the equivalent of thirty
pounds sterling money of his day which was early in this century--say
two hundred dollars of our time, at which rate the whole Bible would
cost say one thousand dollars. There were but few persons in the
fourteenth century who could buy such books and but few who could read
them.
The style of Wiclif’s Bible is simpler and clearer than the rest of
his English. Green says that Wiclif’s style is a model, and that he
was the father of our modern vernacular; but this is disposed of by
better authority. Sharon Turner says that Wiclif’s style was inferior
to that of some of his cotemporaries. Vaughn[19] whose biography of
Wiclif is an almost continuous panegyric, says his style is repulsive
and unintelligible. Le Bas says it is barbarous. Knight’s history says
it is so obscure as to defy interpretation. The truth is, Wiclif like
many another man of genius, had not the minor gift of phrase-making;
and the better English of his Bible was owing to his collaborators
who possessed that gift. Wiclif with the rest of his knowledge, had
self-knowledge: he knew his own defects and how to obviate them.
As for his opinions they were fluctuating; and different writers give
different accounts of them. His eulogists say they were progressive;
his enemies that he recanted. Hume says he had not the spirit of a
martyr, and was ready to explain away his doctrines whenever they put
him in danger; but it is probable that such was the unpopularity of the
French hierarchy that he ran no risk of martyrdom. He was not only left
undisturbed in his cure of Lutterworth, but in spite of his opinions he
was made one of the royal chaplains at the accession of Richard II.
We find him at one time appealing to the pope against the archbishop
of Canterbury; at another, calling his Holiness a _purse-kerver_ that
is a pick pocket. Some of his expressions seem to call in doubt the
existence of purgatory; but he upholds masses for the dead. He adheres
to the seven sacraments, but he not only condemns the restrictions of
the Church on the marriage of relatives, he approves of that connection
between those more nearly allied in blood than is now sanctioned by
modern legislation. He was no doubt betrayed at times by the sharpness
of his own dialectics. His was the logic of the schools, the logic of
the nominalists and the realists, of Abelard, Aquinus and Dun Scotus, a
logic by which anything might be proved or disproved at choice.
The most important and most difficult question is what were his
opinions of the Eucharist. It is commonly said that he denied
Transubstantiation. But how far did he deny it?
The term transubstantiation was not known till the twelfth century.
For eleven hundred years, Christian theology had subsisted without it;
and when it came, it came as all words come--the product of evolution.
It is not known at what time the idea was first formulated that when
Christ said _this is my body; this is the blood of the new testament_,
he taught that there was no longer any distinction of entity or
identity between himself and the bread and wine he held in his
hand--that he was they, and they were he. This dogma, shadowy at first,
grew more and more palpable till it developed into a word to express
itself. But the theologians still imagined a difference. Did Christ
on that occasion annihilate the bread and the wine, and substitute
for them himself so utterly that the physical qualities of bread and
wine still apparent to the senses, were a delusion? If he did, it
was unqualified or major transubstantiation; if he did not, it was
qualified or minor transubstantiation which after a time took the name
of Consubstantiation. The latter was the creed of Wiclif. He admitted
the Real presence; he declared that the bread after consecration, was
the very body that hung upon the cross; but he held that the inner
_somethingness_ of bread, as he expressed it, still remained. Thus far
and no farther did he deny transubstantiation. Archbishop Trench says
Wiclif escaped one danger only to fall into another equally great.
The distinction between the two was a mere logomachy which had no
practical effect on his conduct. He cleaved to the Mass; and it was at
the celebration of that rite in his own church at Lutterworth that he
received his death shock.
Can the Mass exist without transubstantiation major or minor? Let
us see. The Mass is not a mere church service, it is a sacrifice, a
renewal of the Atonement, a rehearsal of Calvary. The consecrated Bread
is the body and blood which suffered crucifixion; it is the Host, the
victim. The priest raises it on high, and the people fall and worship
it; Wiclif worshipped it. Is this idolatry? Not if God himself lies on
that silver paten.
Had Wiclif been born sixty years later, we never should have heard of
him: such a career as his would have been impossible. The House of
Lancaster had then usurped the throne, and sought to strengthen its
claim by subservience to the see of _Rome_. I say _Rome_ in italics
because the Captivity had lapsed into the Great Schism--a pope at Rome
and a pope at Avignon--England was of the obedience of the former,
France of the latter. The odium theologicum was reënforced by the odium
politicum; and while any English priest might vent one or both, with
impunity and applause, upon his Holiness at Avignon, he would risk his
life if he tried it upon his rival Holiness at Rome.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] NOTE: Green throws light on the fall of James’s father Charles I.
He says it was Villiers, duke of Buckingham, “who was destined to drag
down in his fatal career the throne of the Stuarts.” His fatal career
was posthumous: he had been assassinated twenty-one years previous.
[2] NOTE: Such is Berwick’s own story. See his memoirs. Macaulay’s
account of the matter is one of his boldest perversions, inasmuch as he
cites Berwick at the head of the list of his authorities. See Macaulay,
Lippincott edition, Vol. IV, pages 325, 326, 327.
[3] One of the largest pictures in the museum in Central Park, New
York, represents or rather misrepresents this scene.
[4] The papal crown was not originally a tiara: it was single like any
other crown. Boniface VIII. added the second crown. It is not known who
added the third: it has been attributed to John XXII., to Urban V., and
to Benedict XIII.
[5] Capet was a nickname given to Hugh the founder of the dynasty, and
was not borne by any of his descendants, excepting that the line is
called the capetien. The meaning of Capet is uncertain.
[6] We shall throw some light upon this want of credit in princes of
the blood, when we come to speak of Louis of Orleans.
[7] Of the two grandmothers of Edward III., one, Eleanor of Castile,
was pure Spanish, and the other, Joanna of Navarre, was half or more.
[8] Had the male line of Burgundy survived, it would have inherited the
crown instead of the House of Bourbon.
[9] This low opinion of Scotch valor was still rife in Shakspeare’s
time. The poet in describing the lovers of Portia, makes the German a
drunkard, the Frenchman a montebank and the Scotchman a coward.
[10] Green calls this prelate sometimes bishop of Winchester and
sometimes bishop of Chichester. He was so swept along by his own
rhetoric that he forgot men’s names like the Bastard in King John.
[11] Malone whose researches had been standard authority fifty years
when Green wrote, says that two lines only of that incomparable scene
were thus taken. But let us be just to Green; his incapacity to discern
the touch of Shakspeare, and his inadequate knowledge of Shaksperean
literature, are after all, among the least defects of his histories.
[12] The order of the Golden Fleece is still extant. The emperor of
Austria and the king of Spain, both descendants of Philip, share
between them the Grandmastership of the order.
[13] Philip’s third wife was Isabella of Portugal, granddaughter of
John of Gaunt, and therefore niece of the cardinal and cousin of
Bedford. Isabella was the mother of Charles-the-rash, and it is thus
that the Hapsburgs and the Bourbons trace descent from the Plantagenets.
[14] Louis XII. was grandson of Louis of Valentina. Their
great-grand-daughter; grand-mother hyphenated below Margaret of Valois
was grand-mother of Henry IV. from whom have descended all the branches
of the House of Bourbon.
[15] Dunois took his title, count of Dunois, from an estate given him
by his half-brother the duke of Orleans, one of those who had stood by
his side at the dying bed of Valentina.
[16] Byng was defeated by a French fleet in the Mediterranean. There
was no question of his courage or loyalty, but he was none the less
condemned to be shot; and the barbarous sentence was carried into
effect, Voltaire said it was “pour encourager les autres.”
[17] Dumouriez did not wait for a second embassy; he fled and there
fled with him a young prince who had fought by his side for republican
France--the duke of Chartres, afterwards duke of Orleans, afterwards
Louis Philippe king of the French.
[18] Infallibility of the pope and Immaculate conception of the Virgin
were in that age and long after, points in dispute. The Church had not
yet erected them into cardinal doctrines which we may question only at
the peril of our salvation. Those additional burthens upon our faith
were reserved for the present century.
[19] Green cites Vaughn for his authority. The recurrence of such cases
justifies E. A. Freeman in saying that Green was not in the habit of
reading the authors he quotes; and that he should be judged rather by
his essays than by his histories.