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HISTORY OF ENGLAND
FROM
THE FALL OF WOLSEY
TO
THE DEATH OF ELIZABETH.
BY
JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, M.A.
LATE FELLOW OF EXETER COLLEGE, OXFORD.
VOLUME II.
NEW YORK:
CHARLES SCRIBNER AND COMPANY.
1872.
[Illustration:
Charles Scribner and Co of No 654 Broadway New York have authority from
me to publish all works which I have chiefly written and may hereafter
write. J A Froude.
London. Jan. 29. 1871.]
CONTENTS OF VOLUME II.
CHAPTER VI.
THE PROTESTANTS.
PAGE
The Lollards 16
Presentation to Religious Benefices in the Fourteenth Century 17
Statutes of Provisors 21
Rise of the Lollards 25
John Wycliffe 26
Theory of Property 28
Insurrection of Wat Tyler 29
Wycliffe's Influence declines 30
Death of Wycliffe 31
Insurrection of Oldcastle 34
Close of the Lollard Movement 35
New Birth of Protestantism 37
The Christian Brothers 38
Luther 39
Multiplication of Testaments 40
William Tyndal 41
The Antwerp Printing-Press 42
The Christian Brothers 43
Wolsey's Persecutions 49
Story of Anthony Dalaber 57
Escape of Garret 69
Perplexity of the Authorities 70
The Ports are set for Garret's Capture 71
Garret goes to Bristol, and is taken 72
The Investigation at Oxford 73
Doctor London's Intercession 74
The Bishop of Lincoln 75
Oxford is Purged 76
Temper of the Protestants 77
The Fall of Wolsey brings no Relief 78
Sir Thomas More as Chancellor 79
Contrast between Wolsey and More 88
Martyrdom of Bilney 89
Martyrdom of James Bainham 90
Feelings of the People 92
Pavier the Town Clerk 93
The Worship of Relics 94
Roods and Relics 95
The Rood of Dovercourt 96
The Paladins 97
Early Life of Latimer 98
He goes to Cambridge 100
Latimer's Education 101
His Fame as a Preacher 102
He is appointed Chaplain to the King 103
His Defence of the Protestants 104
He is cited before the Bishops 105
Latimer before the Bishops 106
Thomas Cromwell 109
Will of Thomas Cromwell 116
CHAPTER VII.
THE LAST EFFORTS OF DIPLOMACY.
Mary of Hungary 125
The King is cited to Rome 127
Clement refuses further Delay 128
Isolation of England 129
Henry urgent against the Interview 130
He appeals to a Council 132
Terms of the Appeal 134
Legal Value of the Appeal 136
Cranmer's Sentence known at Rome 137
Measures of the Consistory 138
Henry again calls on Francis 140
He will not surrender his Marriage 141
He will not repeal his Legislation 142
He urges the Rupture of the Interview 143
Recal of the Embassy 144
England and Germany 145
Birth of Elizabeth 149
Clement arrives at Marseilles 150
The Interview 151
Bonner at Marseilles 152
Bonner and the Pope 153
The Pope rejects the Appeal 157
Proposal for a Court to sit at Cambray 158
Francis implores Henry to consent 159
Henry refuses to revoke the Laws against the Papacy 160
State of England 162
The Princess Mary 165
Queen Catherine 168
The Nun of Kent 170
State of Feeling in England 178
Proposed Marriage of the Princess Mary 181
The Nun of Kent 183
Disgrace of Mary 184
The Countess of Salisbury 185
The Nevilles 187
General Superstition 191
Proposals for a Protestant League used as a Menace to Francis 192
The Protestant League 194
The Court of Brussels 196
Meeting of Parliament 197
Perils of the Reformation 198
Cromwell 199
Opening Measures 200
The Conge d'Elire 201
Abolition of Exactions 204
Closing Protest 205
Apology of Sir Thomas More accepted by the King 206
Obstinate Defence of Fisher 208
The Bill proceeds 209
Execution of the Nun 210
Her last Words 211
The Act of Succession 212
The first Oath of Allegiance 216
Clement gives final Sentence against the King 218
Obscurity of the Pope's Conduct 222
Mission of the Duke of Guise 223
The French Fleet watch the Channel 224
The Commission sits to receive the Oath 225
More and Fisher 226
More before the Commission 227
He refuses to Swear 228
Debate in Council 229
The Government are peremptory 230
Concession not possible 231
Royal Proclamation 232
Circular to the Sheriffs 233
Death of Clement VII. 236
CHAPTER VIII.
THE IRISH REBELLION.
State of Ireland 237
The Norman Conquest 238
Absentees 239
The Norman Irish 241
Weakness of the English Rule 248
Distribution of the Irish Clans 249
The Irish Reaction 251
Condition of the People 253
English and Irish Estimates 254
Ireland for the Irish 255
Coyne and Livery 256
The Geraldines of Kildare 257
Deputation of Lord Surrey 261
Return of Kildare 265
Foreign Intrigues 266
Desmond intrigues with the Emperor 267
Geraldine Conspiracy 268
Kildare sent to the Tower 270
The Irish Rise 271
The Duke of Richmond Viceroy 272
Third Deputation to Kildare 273
Ireland in its Ideal State 274
New Aspects of Irish Rebellion 275
Ireland and the Papacy 276
Kildare is sent to the Tower 277
Desmond and the Emperor 278
Corny O'Brien 279
The Holy War of the Geraldines 280
General Rebellion 281
Siege of Dublin 282
Murder of Archbishop Allen 284
Fitzgerald writes to the Pope 285
Dublin saved by the Earl of Ormond 286
A Truce agreed to 287
Delay of the English Deputy 288
Ormond again saves Dublin 289
The Deputy sails from Beaumaris 290
Mismanagement of Skeffington 291
Delay and Incapacity 292
Burning of Trim and Dunboyne 293
Skeffington will not move 294
General Despondency 295
Disorganization of the English Army 296
The Campaign opens 297
Siege of Maynooth 298
Storming of the Castle 299
The Pardon of Maynooth 300
The Rebellion collapses 301
Lord Leonard Grey 302
Fitzgerald surrenders 303
Dilemma of the Government 304
Execution of Fitzgerald 305
End of the Rebellion 306
CHAPTER IX.
THE CATHOLIC MARTYRS.
State of England in 1534 307
Temper of the Clergy 308
Order for Preaching 310
Secret Disaffection among the Clergy 312
The Confessional 313
Treasonable Intrigues 317
Catholic Treasons 318
Persecuting Laws against the Catholics 319
The Act of Supremacy 322
The Oath of Allegiance 326
Election of Paul the Third 328
Anxiety of the Emperor 330
Proposals for a Catholic Coalition 331
Counter-Overtures of Francis to Henry 332
Attitude of Henry 333
Distrust of France 335
England and the Papacy 336
The Penal Laws 337
The Battle of the Faiths 338
The Charterhouse Monks 339
The Anabaptist Martyrs 357
Fisher and More 359
Fisher named Cardinal 364
The Pope condescends to Falsehood 365
Fisher Tried and Sentenced 366
Execution of Fisher 367
Sir Thomas More 368
Effect upon Europe 377
Letter to Cassalis 382
Reply of the Pope 385
Bull of Deposition 386
Intrigues of Francis in Germany 388
England and Germany 390
CHAPTER X.
THE VISITATION OF THE MONASTERIES.
Visitation of the Monasteries 396
The Abbey of St. Albans 402
Commission of 1535 407
The Visitors at Oxford 409
Progress of the Visitors 413
Visit to Langden Abbey 415
Fountains Abbey 417
The Monks at Fordham 419
The Monks of Pershore 421
Rules to be observed in all Abbeys 423
The Black Book in Parliament 427
Discussion in Parliament 429
Conflicting Opinions 431
Smaller Houses suppressed 433
The Protestant Bishops 435
State of London 437
The Vagrant Act 439
Remission of Firstfruits 440
Dissolution of Parliament 441
The Work accomplished by Parliament 442
CHAPTER XI.
TRIAL AND DEATH OF ANNE BOLEYN.
Death of Queen Catherine 443
Anne Boleyn 446
Anne Boleyn committed to the Tower 454
The Tower 457
Cranmer's Letter to the King 459
Cranmer's Postscript 461
Preparations for the Trial 468
True Bills found by the Grand Juries 469
The Indictment 470
The Trials 476
The opposite Probabilities 480
Execution of the five Gentlemen 483
The Divorce 484
The Execution 486
The Succession 488
The King's Third Marriage 490
Opinions of Foreign Courts 491
Meeting of Parliament 492
Speech of the Lord Chancellor 493
Second Act of Succession 495
CHAPTER VI.
THE PROTESTANTS.
Where changes are about to take place of great and enduring moment, a
kind of prologue, on a small scale, sometimes anticipates the true
opening of the drama; like the first drops which give notice of the
coming storm, or as if the shadows of the reality were projected
forwards into the future, and imitated in dumb show the movements of the
real actors in the story.
[Sidenote: Prelude to the Reformation in the fourteenth century.]
Such a rehearsal of the English Reformation was witnessed at the close
of the fourteenth century, confused, imperfect, disproportioned, to
outward appearance barren of results; yet containing a representative of
each one of the mixed forces by which that great change was ultimately
effected, and foreshadowing even something of the course which it was to
run.
[Sidenote: The Lollards forerunners, not fathers, of the Reformation.]
There was a quarrel with the pope upon the extent of the papal
privileges; there were disputes between the laity and the
clergy,--accompanied, as if involuntarily, by attacks on the sacramental
system and the Catholic faith,--while innovation in doctrine was
accompanied also with the tendency which characterized the extreme
development of the later Protestants--towards political republicanism,
the fifth monarchy, and community of goods. Some account of this
movement must be given in this place, although it can be but a sketch
only. "Lollardry"[1] has a history of its own; but it forms no proper
part of the history of the Reformation. It was a separate phenomenon,
provoked by the same causes which produced their true fruit at a later
period; but it formed no portion of the stem on which those fruits
ultimately grew. It was a prelude which was played out, and sank into
silence, answering for the time no other end than to make the name of
heretic odious in the ears of the English nation. In their recoil from
their first failure, the people stamped their hatred of heterodoxy into
their language; and in the word _miscreant_, misbeliever, as the synonym
of the worst species of reprobate, they left an indelible record of the
popular estimate of the followers of John Wycliffe.
[Sidenote: Changes in the mode of presentation to bishopricks.]
[Sidenote: Right of free election conceded in the great charter to the
chapters and the religious houses.]
The Lollard story opens with the disputes between the crown and the see
of Rome on the presentation to English benefices. For the hundred and
fifty years which succeeded the Conquest, the right of nominating the
archbishops, the bishops, and the mitred abbots, had been claimed and
exercised by the crown. On the passing of the great charter, the church
had recovered its liberties, and the privilege of free election had been
conceded by a special clause to the clergy. The practice which then
became established was in accordance with the general spirit of the
English constitution. On the vacancy of a see, the cathedral chapter
applied to the crown for a conge d'elire. The application was a form;
the consent was invariable. A bishop was then elected by a majority of
suffrages; his name was submitted to the metropolitan, and by him to the
pope. If the pope signified his approval, the election was complete;
consecration followed; and the bishop having been furnished with his
bulls of investiture, was presented to the king, and from him received
"the temporalities" of his see. The mode in which the great abbots were
chosen was precisely similar; the superiors of the orders to which the
abbeys belonged were the channels of communication with the pope, in the
place of the archbishops; but the elections in themselves were free, and
were conducted in the same manner. The smaller church benefices, the
small monasteries or parish churches, were in the hands of private
patrons, lay or ecclesiastical; but in the case of each institution a
reference was admitted, or was supposed to be admitted, to the court of
Rome.
[Sidenote: Privilege of the pope and of the superiors of the religious
orders in controlling the elections.]
[Sidenote: A.D. 1306-7.]
There was thus in the pope's hand an authority of an indefinite kind,
which it was presumed that his sacred office would forbid him to abuse,
but which, however, if he so unfortunately pleased, he might abuse at
his discretion. He had absolute power over every nomination to an
English benefice; he might refuse his consent till such adequate
reasons, material or spiritual, as he considered sufficient to induce
him to acquiesce, had been submitted to his consideration. In the case
of nominations to the religious houses, the superiors of the various
orders residing abroad had equal facilities for obstructiveness; and the
consequence of so large a confidence in the purity of the higher orders
of the Church became visible in an act of parliament which it was found
necessary to pass in 1306-7.[2]
[Sidenote: Act to prevent the superiors resident abroad from laying
taxes on the English houses.]
"Of late," says this act, "it has come to the knowledge of the king, by
the grievous complaint of the honourable persons, lords, and other
noblemen of his realm, that whereas monasteries, priories, and other
religious houses were founded to the honour and glory of God, and the
advancement of holy church, by the king and his progenitors, and by the
said noblemen and their ancestors; and a very great portion of lands and
tenements have been given by them to the said monasteries, priories, and
religious houses, and the religious men serving God in them; to the
intent that clerks and laymen might be admitted in such houses, and that
sick and feeble folk might be maintained, hospitality, almsgiving, and
other charitable deeds might be done, and prayers be said for the souls
of the founders and their heirs; the abbots, priors, and governors of
the said houses, _and certain aliens their superiors_, as the abbots and
priors of the Cistercians, the Premonstrants, the orders of Saint
Augustine and of Saint Benedict, and many more of other religions and
orders have at their own pleasure set divers heavy, unwonted heavy and
importable tallages, payments, and impositions upon every of the said
monasteries and houses subject unto them, in England, Ireland, Scotland,
and Wales, without the privity of the king and his nobility, contrary to
the laws and customs of the said realm; and thereby the number of
religious persons being oppressed by such tallages, payments, and
impositions, the service of God is diminished, alms are not given to the
poor, the sick, and the feeble; the healths of the living and the souls
of the dead be miserably defrauded; hospitality, almsgiving, and other
godly deeds do cease; and so that which in times past was charitably
given to godly uses and to the service of God, is now converted to an
evil end, by permission whereof there groweth great scandal to the
people." To provide against a continuance of these abuses, it was
enacted that no "religious" persons should, under any pretence or form,
send out of the kingdom any kind of rent, tax, or tallage; and that
"priors aliens" should not presume to assess any payment, charge, or
other burden whatever upon houses within the realm.[3]
The language of this act was studiously guarded. The pope was not
alluded to; the specific methods by which the extortion was practised
were not explained; the tax upon presentations to benefices, either
having not yet distinguished itself beyond other impositions, or the
government trusting that a measure of this general kind might answer the
desired end. Lucrative encroachments, however, do not yield so easily to
treatment; nearly fifty years after it became necessary to reenact the
same statute; and while recapitulating the provisions of it, the
parliament found it desirable to point out more specifically the
intention with which it was passed.
The popes in the interval had absorbed in their turn from the heads of
the religious orders, the privileges which by them had been extorted
from the affiliated societies. Each English benefice had become the
fountain of a rivulet which flowed into the Roman exchequer, or a
property to be distributed as the private patronage of the Roman bishop:
and the English parliament for the first time found itself in collision
with the Father of Christendom.
[Sidenote: Statute of provisors forbidding the attempts of the popes to
present to benefices in England.]
"The pope," says the fourth of the twenty-fifth of Edward III.,
"accroaching to himself the signories of the benefices within the realm
of England, doth give and grant the same to aliens which did never dwell
in England, and to cardinals which could not dwell here, and to others
as well aliens as denizens, whereby manifold inconveniences have
ensued." "Not regarding" the statute of Edward I., he had also continued
to present to bishopricks, abbeys, priories, and other valuable
preferments: money in large quantities was carried out of the realm from
the proceeds of these offices, and it was necessary to insist
emphatically that the papal nominations should cease. They were made in
violation of the law, and were conducted with simony so flagrant that
English benefices were sold in the papal courts to any person who would
pay for them, whether an Englishman or a stranger. It was therefore
decreed that the elections to bishopricks should be free as in time
past, that the rights of patrons should be preserved, and penalties of
imprisonment, forfeiture, or outlawry, according to the complexion of
the offence, should be attached to all impetration of benefices from
Rome by purchase or otherwise.[4]
[Sidenote: The statute fails, and is again enacted in fresh forms.]
If statute law could have touched the evil, these enactments would have
been sufficient for the purpose; but the influence of the popes in
England was of that subtle kind which was not so readily defeated. The
law was still defied, or still evaded; and the struggle continued till
the close of the century, the legislature labouring patiently, but
ineffectually, to confine with fresh enactments their ingenious
adversary.[5]
[Sidenote: The popes threaten the censures of the church.]
[Sidenote: The parliament declares that to bring any such censures into
the realm shall be punished with death and forfeiture.]
At length symptoms appeared of an intention on the part of the popes to
maintain their claims with spiritual censures, and the nation was
obliged to resolve upon the course which, in the event of their
resorting to that extremity, it would follow. The lay lords[6] and the
House of Commons found no difficulty in arriving at a conclusion. They
passed a fresh penal statute with prohibitions even more emphatically
stringent, and decided that "if any man brought into this realm any
sentence, summons, or excommunication, contrary to the effect of the
statute, he should incur pain of life and members, with forfeiture of
goods; and if any prelate made execution of such sentence, his
temporalities should be taken from him, and should abide in the king's
hands till redress was made."[7]
[Sidenote: A "great council" addresses the pope, with a desire for an
arrangement.]
[Sidenote: The question is brought to an issue by the excommunication of
the bishops.]
So bold a measure threatened nothing less than open rupture. The act,
however, seems to have been passed in haste, without determined
consideration; and on second thoughts, it was held more prudent to
attempt a milder course. The strength of the opposition to the papacy
lay with the Commons.[8] When the session of parliament was over, a
great council was summoned to reconsider what should be done, and an
address was drawn up, and forwarded to Rome, with a request that the
then reigning pope would devise some manner by which the difficulty
could be arranged.[9] Boniface IX. replied with the same want of
judgment which was shown afterwards on an analogous occasion by Clement
VII. He disbelieved the danger; and daring the government to persevere,
he granted a prebendal stall at Wells to an Italian cardinal, to which a
presentation had been made already by the king. Opposing suits were
instantly instituted between the claimants in the courts of the two
countries. A decision was given in England in favour of the nominee of
the king, and the bishops agreeing to support the crown were
excommunicated.[10] The court of Rome had resolved to try the issue by a
struggle of force, and the government had no alternative but to
surrender at discretion, or to persevere at all hazards, and resist the
usurpation.
[Sidenote: A.D. 1392-3.]
[Sidenote: The House of Commons declare that they will stand with the
Crown to live and die,]
[Sidenote: And desire the king to examine the lords spiritual and
temporal how they will stand.]
[Sidenote: The lay lords answer directly, and the spiritual lords
indirectly, to the same effect with the Commons.]
The proceedings on this occasion seem to have been unusual, and
significant of the importance of the crisis. Parliament either was
sitting at the time when the excommunication was issued, or else it was
immediately assembled; and the House of Commons drew up, in the form of
a petition to the king, a declaration of the circumstances which had
occurred. After having stated generally the English law on the
presentation to benefices, "Now of late," they added, "divers processes
be made by his Holiness the Pope, and censures of excommunication upon
certain bishops, because they have made execution of the judgments
[given in the king's courts], to the open disherison of the crown;
whereby, if remedy be not provided; the crown of England, which hath
been so free at all times, that it has been in no earthly subjection,
should be submitted to the pope; and the laws and statutes of the realm
by him be defeated and avoided at his will, in perpetual destruction of
the sovereignty of the king our lord, his crown, his regality, and all
his realm." The Commons, therefore, on their part, declared, "That the
things so attempted were clearly against the king's crown and his
regality; used and approved or in the time of all his progenitors, and
therefore they and all the liege commons of the realm would stand with
their said lord the king, and his said crown, in the cases aforesaid, to
live and die."[11] Whether they made allusion to the act of 1389 does
not appear,--a measure passed under protest from one of the estates of
the realm was possibly held unequal to meet the emergency,--at all
events they would not rely upon it. For after this peremptory assertion
of their own opinion, they desired the king, "and required him in the
way of justice," to examine severally the lords spiritual and temporal
how they thought, and how they would stand.[12] The examination was
made, and the result was satisfactory. The lay lords replied without
reservation that they would support the crown. The bishops (they were in
a difficulty for which all allowance must be made) gave a cautious, but
also a manly answer. They would not affirm, they said, that the pope had
a right to excommunicate them in such cases, and they would not say that
he had not. It was clear, however, that legal or illegal, such
excommunication was against the privileges of the English crown, and
therefore that, on the whole, they would and ought to be with the crown,
_loialment_, like loyal subjects, as they were bound by their
allegiance.[13]
In this unusual and emphatic manner, the three estates agreed that the
pope should be resisted; and an act passed "that all persons suing at
the court of Rome, and obtaining thence any bulls, instruments,
sentences of excommunication which touched the king, or were against
him, his regality, or his realm, and they which brought the same within
the realm, or received the same, or made thereof notification, or any
other execution whatever, within the realm or without, they, their
notaries, procurators, maintainers and abettors, fautors and
counsellors, should be put out of the king's protection, and their lands
and tenements, goods and chattels, be forfeited."
[Sidenote: The pope yields.]
The resolute attitude of the country terminated the struggle. Boniface
prudently yielded, and for the moment, and indeed for ever under this
especial form, the wave of papal encroachment was rolled back. The
temper which had been roused in the contest might perhaps have carried
the nation further. The liberties of the crown had been asserted
successfully. The analogous liberties of the church might have
followed; and other channels, too, might have been cut off, through
which the papal exchequer fed itself on English blood. But at this
crisis the anti-Roman policy was arrested in its course by another
movement, which turned the current of suspicion, and frightened back the
nation to conservatism.
[Sidenote: Analogous agitation among the laity against the corruption of
the clergy.]
While the crown and the parliament had been engaged with the pope, the
undulations of the dispute had penetrated down among the body of the
people, and an agitation had been commenced or an analogous kind against
the spiritual authorities at home. The parliament had lamented that the
duties of the religious houses were left unfulfilled, in consequence of
the extortions of their superiors abroad. The people, who were equally
convinced of the neglect of duty, adopted an interpretation of the
phenomenon less favourable to the clergy, and attributed it to the
temptations of worldliness, and the self-indulgence generated by
enormous wealth.
[Sidenote: John Wycliffe.]
This form of discontent found its exponent in John Wycliffe, the great
forerunner of the Reformation, whose austere figure stands out above the
crowd of notables in English history, with an outline not unlike that of
another forerunner of a greater change.
[Sidenote: His early career.]
The early life of Wycliffe is obscure. Lewis, on the authority of
Leland,[14] says that he was born near Richmond, in Yorkshire. Fuller,
though with some hesitation, prefers Durham.[15] He emerges into
distinct notice in 1360, ten years subsequent to the passing of the
first Statute of Provisors, having then acquired a great Oxford
reputation as a lecturer in divinity, and having earned for himself
powerful friends and powerful enemies. He had made his name
distinguished by attacks upon the clergy for their indolence and
profligacy: attacks both written and orally delivered,--those, written,
we observe, being written in English, not in Latin.[16] In 1365, Islip,
Archbishop of Canterbury, appointed him Warden of Canterbury Hall; the
appointment, however, was made with some irregularity, and the following
year, Archbishop Islip dying, his successor, Langham, deprived Wycliffe,
and the sentence was confirmed by the king. It seemed, nevertheless,
that no personal reflection was intended by this decision, for Edward
III. nominated the ex-warden one of his chaplains immediately after, and
employed him on an important mission to Bruges, where a conference on
the benefice question was to be held with a papal commission.
Other church preferment was subsequently given to Wycliffe; but Oxford
remained the chief scene of his work. He continued to hold his
professorship of divinity; and from this office the character of his
history took its complexion. At a time when books were rare and
difficult to be procured, lecturers who had truth to communicate fresh
drawn from the fountain, held an influence which in these days it is as
difficult to imagine as, however, it is impossible to overrate. Students
from all Europe flocked to the feet of a celebrated professor, who
became the leader of a party by the mere fact of his position.
[Sidenote: Simplicity of his life and habits.]
[Sidenote: The poor priests.]
[Sidenote: His doctrines.]
[Sidenote: The translation of the Bible.]
The burden of Wycliffe's teaching was the exposure of the indolent
fictions which passed under the name of religion in the established
theory of the church. He was a man of most simple life; austere in
appearance, with bare feet and russet mantle.[17] As a soldier of
Christ, he saw in his Great Master and his Apostles the patterns whom he
was bound to imitate. By the contagion of example he gathered about him
other men who thought as he did; and gradually, under his captaincy,
these "poor priests," as they were called--vowed to poverty because
Christ was poor--vowed to accept no benefice, lest they should misspend
the property of the poor, and because, as apostles, they were bound to
go where their Master called them,[18] spread out over the country as an
army of missionaries, to preach the faith which they found in the
Bible--to preach, not of relics and of indulgences, but of repentance
and of the grace of God. They carried with them copies of the Bible
which Wycliffe had translated, leaving here and there, as they
travelled, their costly treasures, as shining seed points of light; and
they refused to recognise the authority of the bishops, or their right
to silence them.
[Sidenote: He is protected by John of Gaunt.]
If this had been all, and perhaps if Edward III. had been succeeded by a
prince less miserably incapable than his grandson Richard, Wycliffe
might have made good his ground; the movement of the parliament against
the pope might have united in a common stream with the spiritual move
against the church at home, and the Reformation have been antedated by a
century. He was summoned to answer for himself before the Archbishop of
Canterbury in 1377. He appeared in court supported by the presence of
John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, the eldest of Edward's surviving sons,
and the authorities were unable to strike him behind so powerful a
shield.
[Sidenote: Theory that the laity had a right to deprive the clergy of
their property.]
But the "poor priests" had other doctrines besides those which they
discovered in the Bible, relating to subjects with which, as apostles,
they would have done better if they had shrunk from meddling. The
inefficiency of the clergy was occasioned, as Wycliffe thought, by their
wealth and by their luxury. He desired to save them from a temptation
too heavy for them to bear, and he insisted that by neglect of duty
their wealth had been forfeited, and that it was the business of the
laity to take it from its unworthy possessors. The invectives with which
the argument was accompanied produced a widely-spread irritation. The
reins of the country fell simultaneously into the weak hands of Richard
II., and the consequence was a rapid spread of disorder. In the year
which followed Richard's accession, consistory judges were assaulted in
their courts, sanctuaries were violated, priests were attacked and
ill-treated in church, churchyard, and cathedral, and even while engaged
in the mass;[19] the contagion of the growing anarchy seems to have
touched even Wycliffe himself, and touched him in a point most deeply
dangerous.
[Sidenote: Tendencies to anabaptism.]
[Sidenote: Theory of the tenure of property.]
[Sidenote: Wat Tyler's insurrection.]
[Sidenote: A mischievous comment on Wycliffe's teaching.]
His theory of property, and his study of the character of Christ, had
led him to the near confines of Anabaptism. Expanding his views upon the
estates of the church into an axiom, he taught that "charters of
perpetual inheritance were impossible;" "that God could not give men
civil possessions for ever;"[20] "that property was founded in grace,
and derived from God;" and "seeing that forfeiture was the punishment of
treason, and all sin was treason against God, the sinner must
consequently forfeit his right to what he held of God." These
propositions were nakedly true, as we shall most of us allow; but God
has his own methods of enforcing extreme principles; and human
legislation may only meddle with them at its peril. The theory as an
abstraction could be represented as applying equally to the laity as to
the clergy, and the new teaching received a practical comment in 1381,
in the invasion of London by Wat, the tyler of Dartford, and 100,000
men, who were to level all ranks, put down the church, and establish
universal liberty.[21] Two priests accompanied the insurgents, not
Wycliffe's followers, but the licentious counterfeits of them, who trod
inevitably in their footsteps, and were as inevitably countenanced by
their doctrines. The insurrection was attended with the bloodshed,
destruction, and ferocity natural to such outbreaks. The Archbishop of
Canterbury and many gentlemen were murdered; and a great part of London
sacked and burnt. It would be absurd to attribute this disaster to
Wycliffe, nor was there any desire to hold him responsible for it; but
it is equally certain that the doctrines which he had taught were
incompatible, at that particular time, with an effective repression of
the spirit which had caused the explosion. It is equally certain that he
had brought discredit on his nobler efforts by ambiguous language on a
subject of the utmost difficulty, and had taught the wiser and better
portion of the people to confound heterodoxy of opinion with sedition,
anarchy, and disorder.
[Sidenote: Measure for the repression of the poor priests passed in the
House of Lords.]
[Sidenote: Rejected by the Commons at Wycliffe's petition.]
So long as Wycliffe lived, his own lofty character was a guarantee for
the conduct of his immediate disciples; and although his favour had far
declined, a party in the state remained attached to him, with sufficient
influence to prevent the adoption of extreme measures against the "poor
priests." In the year following the insurrection, an act was passed for
their repression in the House of Lords, and was sent down by the king to
the Commons. They were spoken of as "evil persons," going from place to
place in defiance of the bishops, preaching in the open air to great
congregations at markets and fairs, "exciting the people," "engendering
discord between the estates of the realm." The ordinaries had no power
to silence them, and had therefore desired that commissions should be
issued to the sheriffs of the various counties, to arrest all such
persons, and confine them, until they would "justify themselves" in the
ecclesiastical courts.[22] Wycliffe petitioned against the bill, and it
was rejected; not so much perhaps out of tenderness for the reformer, as
because the Lower House was excited by the controversy with the pope;
and being doubtfully disposed towards the clergy, was reluctant to
subject the people to a more stringent spiritual control.
[Sidenote: Wycliffe's position, however, declines. He makes his
submission,]
[Sidenote: And dies Dec. 31, 1384.]
But Wycliffe himself meanwhile had received a clear intimation of his
own declining position. His opposition to the church authorities, and
his efforts at reinvigorating the faith of the country, had led him into
doubtful statements on the nature of the eucharist; he had entangled
himself in dubious metaphysics on a subject on which no middle course is
really possible; and being summoned to answer for his language before a
synod in London, he had thrown himself again for protection on the Duke
of Lancaster. The duke (not unnaturally under the circumstances)
declined to encourage what he could neither approve nor understand;[23]
and Wycliffe, by his great patron's advice, submitted. He read a
confession of faith before the bishops, which was held satisfactory; he
was forbidden, however, to preach again in Oxford, and retired to his
living of Lutterworth, in Leicestershire, where two years later he died.
[Sidenote: Wycliffe's followers continue unmolested till the revolution
of 1400 when they fall under the ban as disturbers of order.]
With him departed all which was best and purest in the movement which he
had commenced. The zeal of his followers was not extinguished, but the
wisdom was extinguished which had directed it; and perhaps the being
treated as the enemies of order had itself a tendency to make them what
they were believed to be. They were left unmolested for the next twenty
years, the feebleness of the government, the angry complexion which had
been assumed by the dispute with Rome, and the political anarchy in the
closing decade of the century, combining to give them temporary shelter;
but they availed themselves of their opportunity to travel further on
the dangerous road on which they had entered; and on the settlement of
the country under Henry IV. they fell under the general ban which struck
down all parties who had shared in the late disturbances.
[Sidenote: A.D. 1400-1.]
They had been spared in 1382, only for more sharp denunciation, and a
more cruel fate; and Boniface having healed, on his side, the wounds
which had been opened, by well-timed concessions, then, was no reason
left for leniency. The character of the Lollard teaching was thus
described (perhaps in somewhat exaggerated language) in the preamble of
the act of 1401.[24]
[Sidenote: Act _de Heretico comburendo_.]
[Sidenote: Political character of the teaching.]
"Divers false and perverse people," so runs the act _De Heretico
comburendo_, "of a certain new sect, damnably thinking of the faith of
the sacraments of the church, and of the authority of the same, against
the law of God and of the church, usurping the office of preaching, do
perversely and maliciously, in divers places within the realm, preach
and teach divers new doctrines, and wicked erroneous opinions, contrary
to the faith and determination of Holy Church. And of such sect and
wicked doctrines they make unlawful conventicles, they hold and exercise
schools, they make and write books, they do wickedly instruct and inform
people, and excite and stir them to sedition and insurrection, and make
great strife and division among the people, and other enormities
horrible to be heard, daily do perpetrate and commit. The diocesans
cannot by their jurisdiction spiritual, without aid of the King's
Majesty, sufficiently correct these said false and perverse people, nor
refrain their malice, because they do go from diocese to diocese, and
will not appear before the said diocesans; but the jurisdiction
spiritual, the keys of the church, and the censures of the same, do
utterly contemn and despise; and so their wicked preachings and
doctrines they do from day to day continue and exercise, to the
destruction of all order and rule, right and reason."
Something of these violent accusations is perhaps due to the horror
with which false doctrine in matters of faith was looked upon in the
Catholic church, the grace by which alone an honest life was made
possible being held to be dependent upon orthodoxy. But the Lollards had
become political revolutionists as well as religious reformers; the
revolt against the spiritual authority had encouraged and countenanced a
revolt against the secular; and we cannot be surprised, therefore, that
these institutions should have sympathized with each other, and have
united to repress a danger which was formidable to both.
[Sidenote: Power conferred upon the bishops of arresting _ex officio_.]
[Sidenote: The stake and the orthodox faith.]
The bishops, by this act, received arbitrary power to arrest and
imprison on suspicion, without check or restraint of law, at their will
and pleasure. Prisoners who refused to abjure their errors, who
persisted in heresy, or relapsed into it after abjuration, were
sentenced to be burnt at the stake,--a dreadful punishment, on the
wickedness of which the world has long been happily agreed. Yet we must
remember that those who condemned teachers of heresy to the flames,
considered that heresy itself involved everlasting perdition; that they
were but faintly imitating the severity which orthodoxy still ascribes
to Almighty God Himself.
[Sidenote: The Commons petition the Crown for a secularization of church
property.]
[Sidenote: Accession of Henry V.]
The tide which was thus setting back in favour of the church did not
yet, however, flow freely, and without a check. The Commons consented to
sacrifice the heretics, but they still cast wistful looks on the lands
of the religious houses. On two several occasions, in 1406, and again
1410, spoliation was debated in the Lower House, and representations
were made upon the subject to the king.[25] The country, too, continued
to be agitated with war and treason; and when Henry V. became king, in
1412, the church was still uneasy, and the Lollards were as dangerous as
ever. Whether by prudent conduct they might have secured a repeal of the
persecuting act is uncertain; it is more likely, from their conduct,
that they had made their existence incompatible with the security of any
tolerable government.
[Sidenote: Insurrection of Sir John Oldcastle.]
[Sidenote: Oldcastle tried and executed.]
[Sidenote: Fresh act against heresy.]
A rumour having gone abroad that the king intended to enforce the laws
against heresy, notices were found fixed against the doors of the London
churches, that if any such measure was attempted, a hundred thousand men
would be in arms to oppose it. These papers were traced to Sir John
Oldcastle, otherwise called Lord Cobham, a man whose true character is
more difficult to distinguish, in the conflict of the evidence which has
come down to us about him, than that of almost any noticeable person in
history. He was perhaps no worse than a fanatic. He was certainly
prepared, if we may trust the words of a royal proclamation (and Henry
was personally intimate with Oldcastle, and otherwise was not likely to
have exaggerated the charges against him), he was prepared to venture a
rebellion, with the prospect of himself becoming the president of some
possible Lollard commonwealth.[26] The king, with swift decisiveness,
annihilated the incipient treason. Oldcastle was himself arrested. He
escaped out of the Tower into Scotland; and while Henry was absent in
France he seems to have attempted to organize some kind of Scotch
invasion; but he was soon after again taken on the Welsh Border, tried
and executed. An act which was passed in 1414 described his proceedings
as an "attempt to destroy the king, and all other manner of estates of
the realm as well spiritual as temporal, and also all manner of policy,
and finally the laws of the land." The sedition was held to have
originated in heresy, and for the better repression of such mischiefs in
time to come, the lord chancellor, the judges, the justices of the
peace, the sheriffs, mayors, bailiffs, and every other officer having
government of people, were sworn on entering their office to use their
best power and diligence to detect and prosecute all persons suspected
of so heinous a crime.[27]
[Sidenote: Final termination of the Lollard movement.]
Thus perished Wycliffe's labour,--not wholly, because his translation of
the Bible still remained a rare treasure; a seed of future life, which
would spring again under happier circumstances. But the sect which he
organized, the special doctrines which he set himself to teach, after a
brief blaze of success, sank into darkness; and no trace remained of
Lollardry except the black memory of contempt and hatred with which the
heretics of the fourteenth century were remembered by the English
people, long after the actual Reformation had become the law of the
land.[28]
[Sidenote: Causes of Wycliffe's failure,]
[Sidenote: Which is not to be regretted, for the times were not ripe.]
So poor a close to a movement of so fair promise was due partly to the
agitated temper of the times; partly, perhaps, to a want of judgment in
Wycliffe; but chiefly and essentially because it was an untimely birth.
Wycliffe saw the evil; he did not see the remedy; and neither in his
mind nor in the mind of the world about him had the problem ripened
itself for solution. England would have gained little by the premature
overthrow of the church, when the house out of which the evil spirit was
cast out could have been but swept and garnished for the occupation of
the seven devils of anarchy.
[Sidenote: The reaction.]
[Sidenote: New birth of Protestantism.]
The fire of heresy continued to smoulder, exploding occasionally in
insurrection,[29] occasionally blazing up in nobler form, when some poor
seeker for the truth, groping for a vision of God in the darkness of the
years which followed, found his way into that high presence through the
martyr's fire. But substantially, the nation relapsed into
obedience,--the church was reprieved for a century. Its fall was delayed
till the spirit in which it was attacked was winnowed clean of all
doubtful elements--until Protestantism had recommenced its enterprise
in a desire, not for a fairer adjustment of the world's good things, but
in a desire for some deeper, truer, nobler, holier insight into the will
of God. It recommenced not under the auspices of a Wycliffe, not with
the partial countenance of a government which was crossing swords with
the Father of Catholic Christendom, and menacing the severance of
England from the unity of the faith, but under a strong dynasty of
undoubted Catholic loyalty, with the entire administrative power,
secular as well as spiritual, in the hands of the episcopate. It sprung
up spontaneously, unguided, unexcited, by the vital necessity of its
nature, among the masses of the nation.
[Sidenote: Association of Christian Brethren enrolled in London.]
[Sidenote: Spirit of the country.]
Leaping over a century, I pass to the year 1525, at which time, or about
which time, a society was enrolled in London calling itself "The
Association of Christian Brothers."[30] It was composed of poor men,
chiefly tradesmen, artisans, a few, a very few of the clergy; but it was
carefully organized, it was provided with moderate funds, which were
regularly audited; and its paid agents went up and down the country
carrying Testaments and tracts with them, and enrolling in the order all
persons who dared to risk their lives in such a cause. The harvest had
been long ripening. The records of the bishops' courts[31] are filled
from the beginning of the century with accounts of prosecutions for
heresy--with prosecutions, that is, of men and women to whom the
masses, the pilgrimages, the indulgences, the pardons, the effete
paraphernalia of the establishment, had become intolerable; who had
risen up in blind resistance, and had declared, with passionate anger,
that whatever was the truth, all this was falsehood. The bishops had not
been idle; they had plied their busy tasks with stake and prison, and
victim after victim had been executed with more than necessary cruelty.
But it was all in vain: punishment only multiplied offenders, and "the
reek" of the martyrs, as was said when Patrick Hamilton was burnt at St.
Andrews, "infected all that it did blow upon."[32]
[Sidenote: Absence of definite guidance.]
[Sidenote: Difficulty from the want of books.]
There were no teachers, however, there were no books, no unity of
conviction, only a confused refusal to believe in lies. Copies of
Wycliffe's Bible remained, which parties here and there, under death
penalties if detected, met to read:[33] copies, also, of some of his
tracts[34] were extant; but they were unprinted transcripts, most rare
and precious, which the watchfulness of the police made it impossible to
multiply through the press, and which remained therefore necessarily in
the possession of but a few fortunate persons.
The Protestants were thus isolated in single groups or families, without
organization, without knowledge of each other, with nothing to give them
coherency as a party; and so they might have long continued, except for
an impulse from some external circumstances. They were waiting for
direction, and men in such a temper are seldom left to wait in vain.
[Sidenote: General condition of the Teutonic nations.]
[Sidenote: The theses on the church-door at Wittenberg,]
[Sidenote: And the kindling of Europe.]
[Sidenote: The gathering under the banner of the Cross.]
[Sidenote: Tyndal's first appearance and character.]
[Sidenote: The translation of the Bible, and the press at Antwerp.]
The state of England did but represent the state of all Northern Europe.
Wherever the Teutonic language was spoken, wherever the Teutonic nature
was in the people, there was the same weariness of unreality, the same
craving for a higher life. England rather lagged behind than was a
leader in the race of discontent. In Germany, all classes shared the
common feeling; in England it was almost confined to the lowest. But,
wherever it existed, it was a free, spontaneous growth in each separate
breast, not propagated by agitation, but springing self-sown, the
expression of the honest anger of honest men at a system which had
passed the limits of toleration, and which could be endured no longer.
At such times the minds of men are like a train of gunpowder, the
isolated grains of which have no relation to each other, and no effect
on each other, while they remain unignited; but let a spark kindle but
one of them, and they shoot into instant union in a common explosion.
Such a spark was kindled in Germany, at Wittenberg, on the 31st of
October, 1517. In the middle of that day Luther's denunciation of
Indulgences was fixed against the gate of All Saints church, Wittenberg,
and it became, like the brazen serpent in the wilderness, the sign to
which the sick spirits throughout the western world looked hopefully and
were healed. In all those millions of hearts the words of Luther found
an echo, and flew from lip to lip, from ear to ear. The thing which all
were longing for was done, and in two years from that day there was
scarcely perhaps a village from the Irish Channel to the Danube in
which the name of Luther was not familiar as a word of hope and promise.
Then rose a common cry for guidance. Books were called for,--above all
things, the great book of all, the Bible. Luther's inexhaustible
fecundity flowed with a steady stream, and the printing-presses in
Germany and in the Free Towns of the Netherlands multiplied Testaments
and tracts in hundreds of thousands. Printers published at their own
expense as Luther wrote.[35] The continent was covered with disfrocked
monks who had become the pedlars of these precious wares;[36] and as the
contagion spread, noble young spirits from other countries, eager
themselves to fight in God's battle, came to Wittenberg to learn from
the champion who had struck the first blow at their great enemy how to
use their weapons. "Students from all nations came to Wittenberg," says
one, "to hear Luther and Melancthon. As they came in sight of the town
they returned thanks to God with clasped hands; for from Wittenberg, as
heretofore from Jerusalem, proceeded the light of evangelical truth, to
spread thence to the utmost parts of the earth."[37] Thither came young
Patrick Hamilton from Edinburgh, whose "reek" was of so much potency, a
boy-enthusiast of nature as illustrious as his birth; and thither came
also from England, which is here our chief concern, William Tyndal, a
man whose history is lost in his work and whose epitaph is the
Reformation. Beginning life as a restless Oxford student, he moved
thence to Cambridge, thence to Gloucestershire, to be tutor in a
knight's family, and there hearing of Luther's doings, and expressing
himself with too warm approval to suit his patron's conservatism,[38]
he fell into disgrace. From Gloucestershire he removed to London, where
Cuthbert Tunstall had lately been made bishop, and from whom he looked
for countenance in an intention to translate the New Testament. Tunstall
showed little encouragement to this enterprise; but a better friend rose
where he was least looked for; and a London alderman, Humfrey Monmouth
by name, hearing the young dreamer preach on some occasion at St.
Dunstan's, took him to his home for half a year, and kept him there:
where "the said Tyndal," as the alderman declared, "lived like a good
priest, studying both night and day; he would eat but sodden meat, by
his good will, nor drink but small single beer; nor was he ever seen to
wear linen about him all the time of his being there."[39] The half year
being passed, Monmouth gave him ten pounds, with which provision he went
off to Wittenberg; and the alderman, for assisting him in that business,
went to the Tower--escaping, however, we are glad to know, without worse
consequences than a short imprisonment. Tyndal saw Luther,[40] and under
his immediate direction translated the Gospels and Epistles while at
Wittenberg. Thence he returned to Antwerp, and settling there under the
privileges of the city, he was joined by Joy, who shared his great work
with him. Young Frith from Cambridge came to him also, and Barnes, and
Lambert, and many others of whom no written record remains, to concert a
common scheme of action.
In Antwerp, under the care of these men, was established the
printing-press, by which books were supplied, to accomplish for the
teaching of England what Luther and Melancthon were accomplishing for
Germany. Tyndal's Testament was first printed, then translations of the
best German books, reprints of Wycliffe's tracts or original
commentaries. Such volumes as the people most required were here
multiplied as fast as the press could produce them; and for the
dissemination of these precious writings the brave London Protestants
dared, at the hazard of their lives, to form themselves into an
organized association.
[Sidenote: The London Protestants.]
[Sidenote: The opposing powers.]
[Sidenote: The Protestant armoury.]
It is well to pause and look for a moment at this small band of heroes;
for heroes they were, if ever men deserved the name. Unlike the first
reformers who had followed Wycliffe, they had no earthly object,
emphatically none; and equally unlike them, perhaps, because they had
no earthly object, they were all, as I have said, poor men--either
students, like Tyndal, or artisans and labourers who worked for their
own bread, and in tough contact with reality had learnt better than the
great and the educated the difference between truth and lies. Wycliffe
had royal dukes and noblemen for his supporters--knights and divines
among his disciples--a king and a House of Commons looking upon him, not
without favour. The first Protestants of the sixteenth century had for
their king the champion of Holy Church, who had broken a lance with
Luther; and spiritual rulers over them alike powerful and imbecile,
whose highest conception of Christian virtue was the destruction of
those who disobeyed their mandates. The masses of the people were
indifferent to a cause which promised them no material advantage; and
the Commons of Parliament, while contending with the abuses of the
spiritual authorities, were laboriously anxious to wash their hands of
heterodoxy. "In the crime of heresy, thanked be God," said the bishops
in 1529, "there hath no notable person fallen in our time;" no chief
priest, chief ruler, or learned Pharisee--not one. "Truth it is that
certain apostate friars and monks, lewd priests, bankrupt merchants,
vagabonds and lewd idle fellows of corrupt nature, have embraced the
abominable and erroneous opinions lately sprung in Germany, and by them
have been some seduced in simplicity and ignorance. Against these, if
judgment have been exercised according to the laws of the realm, we be
without blame. If we have been too remiss or slack, we shall gladly do
our duty from henceforth."[41] Such were the first Protestants in the
eyes of their superiors. On one side was wealth, rank, dignity, the
weight of authority, the majority of numbers, the prestige of centuries;
here too were the phantom legions of superstition and cowardice; and
here were all the worthier influences so preeminently English, which
lead wise men to shrink from change, and to cling to things established,
so long as one stone of them remains upon another. This was the army of
conservatism. Opposed to it were a little band of enthusiasts, armed
only with truth and fearlessness; "weak things of the world," about to
do battle in God's name; and it was to be seen whether God or the world
was the stronger. They were armed, I say, with the truth. It was that
alone which could have given them victory in so unequal a struggle. They
had returned to the essential fountain of life; they reasserted the
principle which has lain at the root of all religions, whatever their
name or outward form, which once burnt with divine lustre in that
Catholicism which was now to pass away: the fundamental axiom of all
real life, that the service which man owes to God is not the service of
words or magic forms, or ceremonies or opinions; but the service of
holiness, of purity, of obedience to the everlasting laws of duty.
[Sidenote: The early Protestants did not bring forward any new scheme of
doctrine,]
[Sidenote: But protested only against a false superstition, and insisted
on the principle of obedience.]
When we look through the writings of Latimer, the apostle of the English
Reformation, when we read the depositions against the martyrs, and the
lists of their crimes against the established faith, we find no opposite
schemes of doctrine, no "plans of salvation;" no positive system of
theology which it was held a duty to believe; these things were of later
growth, when it became again necessary to clothe the living spirit in a
perishable body. We find only an effort to express again the old
exhortation of the Wise Man--"Will you hear the beginning and the end of
the whole matter? Fear God and keep his commandments; for that is the
whole duty of man."
Had it been possible for mankind to sustain themselves upon this single
principle without disguising its simplicity, their history would have
been painted in far other colours than those which have so long
chequered its surface. This, however, has not been given to us; and
perhaps it never will be given. As the soul is clothed in flesh, and
only thus is able to perform its functions in this earth, where it is
sent to live; as the thought must find a word before it can pass from
mind to mind; so every great truth seeks some body, some outward form in
which to exhibit its powers. It appears in the world, and men lay hold
of it, and represent it to themselves, in histories, in forms of words,
in sacramental symbols; and these things which in their proper nature
are but illustrations, stiffen into essential fact, and become part of
the reality. So arises in era after era an outward and mortal expression
of the inward immortal life; and at once the old struggle begins to
repeat itself between the flesh and the spirit, the form and the
reality. For a while the lower tendencies are held in check; the meaning
of the symbolism is remembered and fresh; it is a living language,
pregnant and suggestive. By and bye, as the mind passes into other
phases, the meaning is forgotten; the language becomes a dead language;
and the living robe of life becomes a winding-sheet of corruption. The
form is represented as everything, the spirit as nothing; obedience is
dispensed with; sin and religion arrange a compromise; and outward
observances, or technical inward emotions, are converted into jugglers'
tricks, by which men are enabled to enjoy their pleasures and escape
the penalties of wrong. Then such religion becomes no religion, but a
falsehood; and honourable men turn away from it, and fall back in haste
upon the naked elemental life.
[Sidenote: The last form of the corruption of Catholicism.]
This, as I understand it, was the position of the early Protestants.
They found the service of God buried in a system where obedience was
dissipated into superstition; where sin was expiated by the vicarious
virtues of other men; where, instead of leading a holy life, men were
taught that their souls might be saved through masses said for them, at
a money rate, by priests whose licentiousness disgraced the nation which
endured it; a system in which, amidst all the trickery of the pardons,
pilgrimages, indulgences,--double-faced as these inventions are, wearing
one meaning in the apologies of theologians, and quite another to the
multitude who live and suffer under their influence,--one plain fact at
least is visible. The people substantially learnt that all evils which
could touch either their spirits or their bodies might be escaped by
means which resolved themselves, scarcely disguised, into the payment of
moneys.
[Sidenote: The Protestants turn to the Bible and to the life of Christ.]
The superstition had lingered long; the time had come when it was to pass
away. Those in whom some craving lingered for a Christian life turned to
the heart of the matter, to the book which told them who Christ was, and
what he was; and finding there that holy example for which they longed,
they flung aside in one noble burst of enthusiastic passion the disguise
which had concealed it from them. They believed in Christ, not in the
bowing rood, or the pretended wood of the cross on which he suffered; and
when that saintly figure had once been seen,--the object of all love, the
pattern of all imitation,--thenceforward neither form nor ceremony should
stand between them and their God.
[Sidenote: The dangers which they had to encounter.]
[Sidenote: Henry VIII. their only and very doubtful friend.]
[Sidenote: Two thousand books out against transubstantiation.]
Under much confusion of words and thoughts, confusion pardonable in all
men, and most of all in them, this seems to me to be transparently
visible in the aim of these "Christian Brothers"; a thirst for some
fresh and noble enunciation of the everlasting truth, the one essential
thing for all men to know and believe. And therefore they were strong;
and therefore they at last conquered. Yet if we think of it, no common
daring was required in those who would stand out at such a time in
defence of such a cause. The bishops might seize them on mere suspicion;
and the evidence of the most abandoned villains sufficed for their
conviction.[42] By the act of Henry V., every officer, from the lord
chancellor to the parish constable, was sworn to seek them out and
destroy them; and both bishops and officials had shown no reluctance to
execute their duty. Hunted like wild beasts from hiding-place to
hiding-place, decimated by the stake, with the certainty that however
many years they might be reprieved, their own lives would close at last
in the same fiery trial; beset by informers, imprisoned, racked, and
scourged; worst of all, haunted by their own infirmities, the flesh
shrinking before the dread of a death of agony,--thus it was that they
struggled on; earning for _themselves_ martyrdom,--for _us_, the free
England in which we live and breathe. Among the great, until Cromwell
came to power, they had but one friend, and he but a doubtful one, who
long believed the truest kindness was to kill them. Henry VIII. was
always attracted towards the persons of the reformers. Their open
bearing commanded his respect. Their worst crime in the bishops'
eyes--the translating the Bible--was in his eyes not a crime, but a
merit; he had himself long desired an authorized English version, and at
length compelled the clergy to undertake it; while in the most notorious
of the men themselves, in Tyndal and in Frith, he had more than once
expressed an anxious interest.[43] But the convictions of his early
years were long in yielding. His feeling, though genuine, extended no
further than to pity, to a desire to recover estimable heretics out of
errors which he would endeavour to pardon. They knew, and all the
"brethren" knew, that if they persisted, they must look for the worst
from the king and from every earthly power; they knew it, and they made
their account with it. An informer deposed to the council, that he had
asked one of the society "how the King's Grace did take the matter
against the sacrament; which answered, the King's Highness was extreme
against their opinions, and would punish them grievously; also that my
Lords of Norfolk and Suffolk, my Lord Marquis of Exeter, with divers
other great lords, were very extreme against them. Then he (the
informer) asked him how he and his fellows would do seeing this, the
which answered they had two thousand books out against the Blessed
Sacrament, in the commons' hands; and if it were once in the commons'
heads, they would have no further care."[44]
[Sidenote: Resolution to persecute systematically.]
Tyndal then being at work at Antwerp, and the society for the dispersion
of his books thus preparing itself in England, the authorities were not
slow in taking the alarm. The isolated discontent which had prevailed
hitherto had been left to the ordinary tribunals; the present danger
called for measures of more systematic coercion. This duty naturally
devolved on Wolsey, and the office of Grand Inquisitor, which he now
assumed, could not have fallen into more competent hands.
[Sidenote: The conduct of the persecution undertaken by Wolsey; who,
however, used his powers with unusual leniency.]
[Sidenote: Heretics outlawed by a common consent of the great Powers.]
Wolsey was not cruel. There is no instance, I believe, in which he of
his special motion sent a victim to the stake:--it would be well if the
same praise could be allowed to Cranmer. There was this difference
between the cardinal and other bishops, that while they seemed to desire
to punish, Wolsey was contented to silence; while they, in their conduct
of trials, made escape as difficult as possible, Wolsey sought rather to
make submission easy. He was too wise to suppose that he could cauterize
heresy, while the causes of it, in the corruption of the clergy,
remained unremoved; and the remedy to which he trusted, was the infusing
new vigour into the constitution of the church.[45] Nevertheless, he was
determined to repress, as far as outward measures could repress it, the
spread of the contagion; and he set himself to accomplish his task with
the full energy of his nature, backed by the whole power, spiritual and
secular, of the kingdom. The country was covered with his secret police,
arresting suspected persons and searching for books. In London the
scrutiny was so strict that at one time there was a general flight and
panic; suspected butchers, tailors, and carpenters, hiding themselves in
the holds of vessels in the river, and escaping across the Channel.[46]
Even there they were not safe. Heretics were outlawed by a common
consent of the European governments. Special offenders were hunted
through France by the English emissaries with the permission and
countenance of the court,[47] and there was an attempt to arrest Tyndal
at Brussels, from which, for that time, he happily escaped.[48]
[Sidenote: Barnes and Latimer summoned before Wolsey.]
Simultaneously the English universities fell under examination, in
consequence of the appearance of dangerous symptoms among the younger
students. Dr. Barnes, returning from the continent, had used violent
language in a pulpit at Cambridge; and Latimer, then a neophyte in
heresy, had grown suspect, and had alarmed the heads of houses.
Complaints against both of them were forwarded to Wolsey, and they were
summoned to London to answer for themselves.
[Sidenote: Latimer is dismissed.]
[Sidenote: Barnes is committed to the Fleet and abjures.]
Latimer, for some cause, found favour with the cardinal, and was
dismissed, with a hope on the part of his judge that his accusers might
prove as honest as he appeared to be, and even with a general licence to
preach.[49] Barnes was less fortunate; he was far inferior to Latimer; a
noisy, unwise man, without reticence or prudence. In addition to his
offences in matters of doctrine, he had attacked Wolsey himself with
somewhat vulgar personality; and it was thought well to single him out
for a public, though not a very terrible admonition. His house had been
searched for books, which he was suspected, and justly suspected, of
having brought with him from abroad. These, however, through a timely
warning of the danger, had been happily secreted,[50] or it might have
gone harder with him. As it was, he was committed to the Fleet on the
charge of having used heretical language. An abjuration was drawn up by
Wolsey, which he signed; and while he remained in prison preparations
were made for a ceremony, in which he was to bear a part, in St. Paul's
church, by which the Catholic authorities hoped to produce some salutary
effect on the disaffected spirits of London.
[Sidenote: Preparation for a ceremony in St. Paul's church.]
Vast quantities of Tyndal's publications had been collected by the
police. The bishops, also, had subscribed among themselves[51] to buy up
the copies of the New Testament before they left Antwerp;--an
unpromising method, like an attempt to extinguish fire by pouring oil
upon it; they had been successful, however, in obtaining a large
immediate harvest, and a pyramid of offending volumes was ready to be
consumed in a solemn _auto da fe_.
[Sidenote: Procession from the Fleet.]
[Sidenote: Barnes and five Stillyard men taken to St. Paul's.]
In the morning of Shrove Sunday, then, 1527, we are to picture to
ourselves a procession moving along London streets from the Fleet prison
to St. Paul's Cathedral. The warden of the Fleet was there, and the
knight marshal, and the tipstaffs, and "all the company they could
make," "with bills and glaives;" and in the midst of these armed
officials, six men marching in penitential dresses, one carrying a
lighted taper five pounds' weight, the others with symbolic fagots,
signifying to the lookers-on the fate which their crimes had earned for
them, but which this time, in mercy, was remitted. One of these was
Barnes; the other five were "Stillyard men," undistinguishable by any
other name, but detected members of the brotherhood.
It was eight o'clock when they arrived at St. Paul's. The people had
flocked in crowds before them. The public seats and benches were filled.
All London had hurried to the spectacle. A platform was erected in the
centre of the nave, on the top of which, enthroned in pomp of purple and
gold and splendour, sate the great cardinal, supported on each side with
eighteen bishops, mitred abbots, and priors--six-and-thirty in all; his
chaplains and "spiritual doctors" sitting also where they could find
place, "in gowns of damask and satin." Opposite the platform, over the
north door of the cathedral, was a great crucifix--a famous image, in
those days called the Rood of Northen; and at the foot of it, inside a
rail, a fire was burning, with the sinful books, the Tracts and
Testaments, ranged round it in baskets, waiting for the execution of
sentence.
[Sidenote: And exposed for a public penance.]
Such was the scene into the midst of which the six prisoners entered. A
second platform stood in a conspicuous place in front of the cardinal's
throne, where they could be seen and heard by the crowd; and there upon
their knees, with their fagots on their shoulders, they begged pardon of
God and the Holy Catholic Church for their high crimes and offences.
When the confession was finished, Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, preached
a sermon: and the sermon over, Barnes turned to the people, declaring
that "he was more charitably handled than he deserved, his heresies were
so heinous and detestable."
[Sidenote: They are led round a fire, and throw in their fagots. The
Bible burning.]
There was no other religious service: mass had perhaps been said
previous to the admission into the church of heretics lying under
censure; and the knight marshal led the prisoners down from the stage to
the fire underneath the crucifix. They were taken within the rails, and
three times led round the blazing pile, casting in their fagots as they
passed. The contents of the baskets were heaped upon the fagots, and the
holocaust was complete. This time, an unbloody sacrifice was deemed
sufficient. The church was satisfied with penance, and Fisher pronounced
the prisoners absolved, and received back into communion.[52]
So ended this strange exhibition, designed to work great results on the
consciences of the spectators. It may be supposed, however, that men
whom the tragedies of Smithfield failed to terrify, were not likely to
be affected deeply by melodrame and blazing paper.
[Sidenote: Story of Anthony Dalaber.]
A story follows of far deeper human interest, a story in which the
persecution is mirrored with its true lights and shadows, unexaggerated
by rhetoric; and which, in its minute simplicity, brings us face to face
with that old world, where men like ourselves lived, and worked, and
suffered, three centuries ago.
[Sidenote: Cardinal's College founded by Wolsey,]
[Sidenote: Who introduces into Oxford a number of Cambridge students of
unusual promise, but lying under suspicion of heresy.]
Two years before the time at which we have now arrived, Wolsey, in
pursuance of his scheme of converting the endowments of the religious
houses to purposes of education, had obtained permission from the pope
to suppress a number of the smaller monasteries. He had added largely to
the means thus placed at his disposal from his own resources, and had
founded the great college at Oxford, which is now called Christ
church.[53] Desiring his magnificent institution to be as perfect as art
could make it, he had sought his professors in Rome, in the Italian
universities, wherever genius or ability could be found; and he had
introduced into the foundation several students from Cambridge, who had
been reported to him as being of unusual promise. Frith, of whom we have
heard, was one of these. Of the rest, John Clark, Sumner, and Taverner
are the most noticeable. At the time at which they were invited to
Oxford, they were tainted, or some of them were tainted, in the eyes of
the Cambridge authorities, with suspicion of heterodoxy;[54] and it is
creditable to Wolsey's liberality, that he set aside these
unsubstantiated rumours, not allowing them to weigh against ability,
industry, and character. The church authorities thought only of crushing
what opposed them, especially of crushing talent, because talent was
dangerous. Wolsey's noble anxiety was to court talent, and if possible
to win it.
[Sidenote: They infect Oxford; and the first Protestant divinity class
is formed at Wolsey's college.]
The young Cambridge students, however, ill repaid his confidence (so, at
least, it must have appeared to him), and introduced into Oxford the
rising epidemic. Clark, as was at last discovered, was in the habit of
reading St. Paul's Epistles to young men in his rooms; and a gradually
increasing circle of undergraduates, of three or four years'
standing,[55] from various colleges, formed themselves into a spiritual
freemasonry, some of them passionately insisting on being admitted to
the lectures, in spite of warnings from Clark himself, whose wiser
foresight knew the risk which they were running, and shrank from
allowing weak giddy spirits to thrust themselves into so fearful
peril.[56]
[Sidenote: Garret, fellow of Magdalen, and member of the London
Society,]
[Sidenote: Introduces into Oxford the forbidden books from Germany.]
This little party had been in the habit of meeting for about six
months,[57] when at Easter, 1527, Thomas Garret, a fellow of
Magdalen,[58] who had gone out of residence, and was curate at All
Hallows church, in London, reappeared in Oxford. Garret was a secret
member of the London Society, and had come down at Clark's instigation,
to feel his way in the university. So excellent a beginning had already
been made, that he had only to improve upon it. He sought out all such
young men as were given to Greek, Hebrew, and the polite Latin;[59] and
in this visit met with so much encouragement, that the Christmas
following he returned again, this time bringing with him treasures of
forbidden books, imported by "the Christian Brothers"; New Testaments,
tracts and volumes of German divinity, which he sold privately among the
initiated.
[Sidenote: Orders for his arrest are sent down from London.]
He lay concealed, with his store, at "the house of one Radley,"[60] the
position of which cannot now be identified; and there he remained for
several weeks, unsuspected by the university authorities, till orders
were sent by Wolsey to the Dean of Christchurch for his arrest. Precise
information was furnished at the same time respecting himself, his
mission in Oxford, and his place of concealment.[61]
[Sidenote: Tuesday, Feb. 17, 1528. He is warned by a proctor to escape.]
The proctors were put upon the scent, and directed to take him; but one
of them, Arthur Cole, of Magdalen, by name, not from any sympathy with
Garret's objects, as the sequel proved, but probably from old
acquaintance, for they were fellows at the same college, gave him
information of his danger, and warned him to escape.
His young friends, more alarmed for their companion than for themselves,
held a meeting instantly to decide what should be done; and at this
meeting was Anthony Dalaber, an undergraduate of Alban Hall, and one of
Clark's pupils, who will now tell the story of what followed.
[Sidenote: Dalaber's narrative.]
"The Christmas before that time, I, Anthony Dalaber, the scholar of
Alban Hall, who had books of Master Garret, had been in my country, at
Dorsetshire, at Stalbridge, where I had a brother, parson of this
parish, who was very desirous to have a curate out of Oxford, and willed
me in any wise to get him one there, if I could. This just occasion
offered, it was thought good among the brethren (for so we did not only
call one another, but were indeed one to another), that Master Garret,
changing his name, should be sent forth with my letters into
Dorsetshire, to my brother, to serve him there for a time, until he
might secretly convey himself from thence some whither over the sea.
According hereunto I wrote my letters in all haste possible unto my
brother, for Master Garret to be his curate; but not declaring what he
was indeed, for my brother was a rank papist, and afterwards was the
most mortal enemy that ever I had, for the Gospel's sake.
[Sidenote: Feb. 18. Garret leaves Oxford.]
"So on Wednesday (Feb. 18), in the morning before Shrovetide, Master
Garret departed out of Oxford towards Dorsetshire, with my letter, for
his new service."
[Sidenote: Anthony Dalaber, of Alban Hall, who has been concerned in the
escape, takes measures to avoid suspicion,]
[Sidenote: And moves to Gloucester College.]
The most important person being thus, as was supposed, safe from
immediate danger, Dalaber was at leisure to think a little about
himself; and supposing, naturally, that the matter would not end there,
and that some change of residence might be of advantage for his own
security, he moved off from Alban Hall (as undergraduates it seems were
then at liberty to do) to Gloucester College,[62] under pretence that he
desired to study civil law, for which no facilities existed at the hall.
This little matter was effected on the Thursday; and all Friday and
Saturday morning he "was so much busied in setting his poor stuff in
order, his bed, his books, and such things else as he had," that he had
no leisure to go forth anywhere those two days, Friday and Saturday.
[Sidenote: Garret returns to Oxford, Friday, Feb. 20.]
"Having set up my things handsomely," he continues, "that same day,
before noon, I determined to spend that whole afternoon, until evensong
time, at Frideswide College,[63] at my book in mine own study; and so
shut my chamber door unto me, and my study door also, and took into my
head to read Francis Lambert upon the Gospel of St. Luke, which book
only I had then within there. All my other books written on the
Scriptures, of which I had great numbers, I had left in my chamber at
Alban's Hall, where I had made a very secret place to keep them safe
in, because it was so dangerous to have any such books. And so, as I was
diligently reading in the same book of Lambert upon Luke, suddenly one
knocked at my chamber door very hard, which made me astonished, and yet
I sat still and would not speak; then he knocked again more hard, and
yet I held my peace; and straightway he knocked again yet more fiercely;
and then I thought this: peradventure it is somebody that hath need of
me: and therefore I thought myself bound to do as I would be done unto;
and so, laying my book aside, I came to the door and opened it, and
there was Master Garret, as a man amazed, whom I thought to have been
with my brother, and one with him."
[Sidenote: He is taken, and shut up at Lincoln.]
[Sidenote: From whence he escapes, Saturday, Feb. 21,]
Garret had set out on his expedition into Dorsetshire, but had been
frightened, and had stolen back into Oxford on the Friday, to his old
hiding-place, where, in the middle of the night, the proctors had taken
him. He had been carried to Lincoln, and shut up in a room in the
rector's house, where he had been left all day. In the afternoon the
rector went to chapel, no one was stirring about the college, and he had
taken advantage of the opportunity to slip the bolt of the door and
escape. He had a friend at Gloucester College, "a monk who had bought
books of him;" and Gloucester lying on the outskirts of the town, he had
hurried down there as the readiest place of shelter. The monk was out;
and as no time was to be lost, Garret asked the servant on the staircase
to show him Dalaber's rooms.
[Sidenote: And goes to Dalaber's rooms.]
As soon as the door was opened, "he said he was undone, for he was
taken." "Thus he spake unadvisedly in the presence of the young man,
who at once slipped down the stairs," it was to be feared, on no good
errand. "Then I said to him," Dalaber goes on, "alas, Master Garret, by
this your uncircumspect coming here and speaking so before the young
man, you have disclosed yourself and utterly undone me. I asked him why
he was not in Dorsetshire. He said he had gone a day's journey and a
half; but he was so fearful, his heart would none other but that he must
needs return again unto Oxford. With deep sighs and plenty of tears, he
prayed me to help to convey him away; and so he cast off his hood and
gown wherein he came to me, and desired me to give him a coat with
sleeves, if I had any; and he told me that he would go into Wales, and
thence convey himself, if he might, into Germany. Then I put on him a
sleeved coat of mine. He would also have had another manner of cap of
me, but I had none but priestlike, such as his own was.
[Sidenote: Dalaber lends him a disguise, and he again leaves Oxford.]
"Then kneeled we both down together upon our knees, and lifting up our
hearts and hands to God our heavenly Father, desired him, with plenty of
tears, so to conduct and prosper him in his journey, that he might well
escape the danger of all his enemies, to the glory of His Holy Name, if
His good pleasure and will so were. And then we embraced and kissed the
one the other, the tears so abundantly flowing out from both our eyes,
that we all bewet both our faces, and scarcely for sorrow could we speak
one to another. And so he departed from me, apparelled in my coat, being
committed unto the tuition of our Almighty and merciful Father.
"When he was gone down the stairs from my chamber, I straightways did
shut my chamber door, and went into my study; and taking the New
Testament in my hands, kneeled down on my knees, and with many a deep
sigh and salt tear, I did, with much deliberation, read over the tenth
chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel,[64] praying that God would endue his
tender and lately-born little flock in Oxford with heavenly strength by
his Holy Spirit; that quietly to their own salvation, with all godly
patience, they might bear Christ's heavy cross, which I now saw was
presently to be laid on their young and weak backs, unable to bear so
huge a burden without the great help of his Holy Spirit.
[Sidenote: Dalaber goes to Frideswide.]
"This done, I laid aside my book safe, folded up Master Garret's gown
and hood, and so, having put on my short gown, and shut my doors, I went
towards Frideswide (Christchurch), to speak with that worthy martyr of
God, Master Clark. But of purpose I went by St. Mary's church, to go
first unto Corpus Christi College, to speak with Diet and Udal, my
faithful brethren and fellows in the Lord. By chance I met by the way a
brother of ours, one Master Eden, fellow of Magdalen, who, as soon as he
saw me, said, we were all undone, for Master Garret was returned, and
was in prison. I said it was not so; he said it was. I heard, quoth he,
our Proctor, Master Cole, say and declare the same this day. Then I told
him what was done; and so made haste to Frideswide, to find Master
Clark, for I thought that he and others would be in great sorrow.
[Sidenote: Vespers at the cathedral.]
"Evensong was begun; the dean and the canons were there in their grey
amices; they were almost at Magnificat before I came thither. I stood in
the choir door and heard Master Taverner play, and others of the chapel
there sing, with and among whom I myself was wont to sing also; but now
my singing and music were turned into sighing and musing. As I there
stood, in cometh Dr. Cottisford,[65] the commissary, as fast as ever he
could go, bareheaded, as pale as ashes (I knew his grief well enough);
and to the dean he goeth into the choir, where he was sitting in his
stall, and talked with him, very sorrowfully: what, I know not; but
whereof I might and did truly guess. I went aside from the choir door to
see and hear more. The commissary and dean came out of the choir,
wonderfully troubled as it seemed. About the middle of the church, met
them Dr. London,[66] puffing, blustering, and blowing like a hungry and
greedy lion seeking his prey. They talked together awhile, but the
commissary was much blamed by them, insomuch that he wept for sorrow.
[Sidenote: The brothers meet.]
"The doctors departed, and sent abroad their servants and spies
everywhere. Master Clark, about the middle of the compline,[67] came
forth of the choir. I followed him to his chamber, and declared what had
happened that afternoon of Master Garret's escape. Then he sent for one
Master Sumner and Master Bets, fellows and canons there. In the meantime
he gave me a very godly exhortation, praying God to give us all the
wisdom of the serpent and the harmlessness of doves, for we should
shortly have much need thereof. When Master Sumner and Master Bets came,
he caused me to declare again the whole matter to them two. Then
desiring them to tell our other brethren in that college, I went to
Corpus Christi College, to comfort our brethren there, where I found in
Diet's chamber, looking for me, Fitzjames, Diet, and Udal. They all knew
the matter before by Master Eden, whom I had sent unto Fitzjames. So I
tarried there and supped with them, where they had provided meat and
drink for us before my coming; and when we had ended, Fitzjames would
needs have me to lie that night with him in my old lodging at Alban's
Hall. But small rest and little sleep took we both there that night."
[Sidenote: Sunday, Feb. 22.]
[Sidenote: Dalaber's rooms searched by the commissary and the police.]
The next day, which was Sunday, Dalaber rose at five o'clock, and as
soon as he could leave the Hall, hastened off to his rooms at
Gloucester. The night had been wet and stormy, and his shoes and
stockings were covered with mud. The college gates, when he reached
them, were still closed, an unusual thing at that hour; and he walked up
and down under the walls in the bleak grey morning, till the clock
struck seven, "much disquieted, his head full of forecasting cares,"
but resolved, like a brave man, that come what would, he would accuse no
one, and declare nothing but what he saw was already known. The gates
were at last opened; he went to his rooms, and for some time his key
would not turn in the door, the lock having been meddled with. At length
he succeeded in entering, and found everything in confusion, his bed
tossed and tumbled, his study-door open, and his clothes strewed about
the floor. A monk who occupied the opposite rooms, hearing him return,
came to him and said that the commissary and the two proctors had been
there looking for Garret. Bills and swords had been thrust through the
bed-straw, and every corner of the room searched for him. Finding
nothing, they had left orders that Dalaber, as soon as he returned,
should appear before the prior of the students.
[Sidenote: Dalaber is arrested. He is examined about his friend's
escape, and tells a lie.]
"This so troubled me," Dalaber says, "that I forgot to make clean my
hose and shoes, and to shift me into another gown; and all bedirted as I
was, I went to the said prior's chamber." The prior asked him where he
had slept that night. At Alban's Hall, he answered, with his old
bedfellow, Fitzjames. The prior said he did not believe him, and asked
if Garret had been at his rooms the day before. He replied that he had.
Whither had he gone, then? the prior inquired; and where was he at that
time? "I answered," says Dalaber, "that I knew not, unless he was gone
to Woodstock; he told me that he would go there, because one of the
keepers had promised him a piece or venison to make merry with at
Shrovetide. This tale I thought meetest, though it were nothing so."[68]
[Sidenote: He is taken to Lincoln College, and reexamined by the
commissary and two other heads of houses.]
At this moment the university beadle entered with two of the
commissary's servants, bringing a message to the prior that he should
repair at once to Lincoln, taking Dalaber with him. "I was brought into
the chapel," the latter continues, "and there I found Dr. Cottisford,
commissary; Dr. Higdon, Dean of Cardinal's College; and Dr. London,
Warden of New College; standing together at the altar. They called for
chairs and sate down, and then [ordered] me to come to them; they asked
me what my name was, how long I had been at the university, what I
studied," with various other inquiries: the clerk of the university,
meanwhile, bringing pens, ink, and paper, and arranging a table with a
few loose boards upon tressels. A mass book, he says, was then placed
before him, and he was commanded to lay his hand upon it, and swear that
he would answer truly such questions as should be asked him. At first he
refused; but afterwards, being persuaded, "partly by fair words, and
partly by great threats," he promised to do as they would have him; but
in his heart he "meant nothing so to do." "So I laid my hand on the
book," he goes on, "and one of them gave me my oath, and commanded me to
kiss the book. They made great courtesy between them who should examine
me; at last, the rankest Pharisee of them all took upon him to do it.
[Sidenote: He again tells a lie.]
[Sidenote: He is threatened with the rack,]
"Then he asked me again, by my oath, where Master Garret was, and
whither I had conveyed him. I said I had not conveyed him, nor yet wist
where he was, nor whither he was gone, except he were gone to Woodstock,
as I had before said. Surely, they said, I brought him some whither this
morning, for they might well perceive by my foul shoes and dirty hosen
that I had travelled with him the most part of the night. I answered
plainly, that I lay at Alban's Hall with Sir Fitzjames, and that I had
good witness thereof. They asked me where I was at evensong. I told them
at Frideswide, and that I saw, first, Master Commissary, and then Master
Doctor London, come thither to Master Dean. Doctor London and the Dean
threatened me that if I would not tell the truth I should surely be sent
to the Tower of London, and there be racked, and put into
Little-ease.[69]
[Sidenote: And is put in the stocks.]
"At last when they could get nothing out of me whereby to hurt or accuse
any man, or to know anything of that which they sought, they all three
together brought me up a long stairs, into a great chamber, over Master
Commissary's chamber, wherein stood a great pair of very high stocks.
Then Master Commissary asked me for my purse and girdle, and took away
my money and my knives; and then they put my legs into the stocks, and
so locked me fast in them, in which I sate, my feet being almost as high
as my head; and so they departed, locking fast the door, and leaving me
alone.
"When they were all gone, then came into my remembrance the worthy
forewarning and godly declaration of that most constant martyr of God,
Master John Clark, who, well nigh two years before that, when I did
earnestly desire him to grant me to be his scholar, said unto me after
this sort: 'Dalaber, you desire you wot not what, and that which you
are, I fear, unable to take upon you; for though now my preaching be
sweet and pleasant to you, because there is no persecution laid on you
for it, yet the time will come, and that, peradventure, shortly, if ye
continue to live godly therein, that God will lay on you the cross of
persecution, to try you whether you can as pure gold abide the fire. You
shall be called and judged a heretic; you shall be abhorred of the
world; your own friends and kinsfolk will forsake you, and also hate
you; you shall be cast into prison, and none shall dare to help you; you
shall be accused before bishops, to your reproach and shame, to the
great sorrow of all your friends and kinsfolk. Then will ye wish ye had
never known this doctrine; then will ye curse Clark, and wish that ye
had never known him because he hath brought you to all these troubles.'
"At which words I was so grieved that I fell down on my knees at his
feet, and with tears and sighs besought him that, for the tender mercy
of God, he would not refuse me; saying that I trusted, verily, that he
which had begun this in me would not forsake me, but would give me grace
to continue therein to the end. When he heard me say so, he came to me,
took me in his arms and kissed me, the tears trickling from his eyes;
and said unto me: 'The Lord God Almighty grant you so to do; and from
henceforth for ever, take me for your father, and I will take you for my
son in Christ.'"
[Sidenote: He still refuses to confess where Garret is gone.]
In these meditations the long Sunday morning wore away. A little before
noon the commissary came again to see if his prisoner was more amenable;
finding him, however, still obstinate, he offered him some dinner--a
promise which we will hope he fulfilled, for here Dalaber's own
narrative abruptly forsakes us,[70] leaving uncompleted, at this point,
the most vivid picture which remains to us of a fraction of English life
in the reign of Henry VIII. If the curtain fell finally on the little
group of students, this narrative alone would furnish us with rare
insight into the circumstances under which the Protestants fought their
way. The story, however, can be carried something further, and the
strangest incident connected with it remains to be told.
[Sidenote: Monday, Feb. 23.]
[Sidenote: But acknowledges his own heresies.]
Dalaber breaks off on Sunday at noon. The same day, or early the
following morning, he was submitted once more to examination: this time,
for the discovery of his own offences, and to induce him to give up his
confederates. With respect to the latter he proved "marvellous
obstinate." "All that was gotten of him was with much difficulty;" nor
would he confess to any names as connected with heresy or heretics
except that of Clark, which was already known. About himself he was more
open. He wrote his "book of heresy," that is, his confession Of faith,
"with his own hand,"--his evening's occupation, perhaps, in the stocks
in the rector of Lincoln's house; and the next day he was transferred to
prison.[71]
[Sidenote: Search for books.]
This offender being thus disposed of, and strict secresy being observed
to prevent the spread of alarm, a rapid search was set on foot for books
in all suspected quarters. The fear of the authorities was that "the
infect persons would flee," and "convey" their poison "away with
them."[72] The officials, once on the scent of heresy, were skilful in
running down the game. No time was lost, and by Monday evening many of
"the brethren" had been arrested, their rooms examined, and their
forbidden treasures discovered and rifled. Dalaber's store was found
"hid with marvellous secresy;" and in one student's desk a duplicate of
Garret's list--the titles of the volumes with which the first "Religious
Tract Society" set themselves to convert England.
[Sidenote: The heads of houses consult one expert in astronomy to
discover the track of Garret.]
Information of all this was conveyed in haste by Dr. London to the
Bishop of Lincoln, as the ordinary of the university; and the warden
told his story with much self-congratulation. On one point, however, the
news which he had to communicate was less satisfactory. Garret himself
was gone--utterly gone. Dalaber was obstinate, and no clue to the track
of the fugitive could be discovered. The police were at fault; neither
bribes nor threats could elicit anything; and in these desperate
circumstances, as he told the bishop, the three heads of houses
conceived that they might strain a point of propriety for so good a
purpose as to prevent the escape of a heretic. Accordingly, after a full
report of the points of their success, Doctor London went on to relate
the following remarkable proceeding:
"After Master Garret escaped, _the commissary being in extreme
pensiveness, knew no other remedy but this extraordinary, and caused a
figure to be made by one expert in astronomy--and his judgment doth
continually persist upon this, that he fled in a tawny coat
south-eastward, and is in the middle of London, and will shortly to the
sea side_. He was curate unto the parson of Honey Lane.[73] It is likely
he is privily cloaked there. Wherefore, as soon as I knew the judgment
of this astronomer, I thought it expedient and my duty with all speed to
ascertain your good lordship of all the premises; that in time your
lordship may advertise my lord his Grace, and my lord of London. It will
be a gracious deed that he and all his pestiferous works, which he
carrieth about, might be taken, to the salvation of his soul, opening of
many privy heresies, and extinction of the same."[74]
[Sidenote: Tuesday, Feb. 24.]
We might much desire to know what the bishop's sensations were in
reading this letter--to know whether it occurred to him that in this
naive acknowledgment, the Oxford heresy hunters were themselves
confessing to an act of heresy; and that by the law of the church, which
they were so eager to administer, they were liable to the same death
which they were so zealous to secure for the poor vendors of Testaments.
So indeed they really were. Consulting the stars had been ruled from
immemorial time to be dealing with the devil; the penalty of it was the
same as for witchcraft; yet here was a reverend warden of a college
considering it his duty to write eagerly of a discovery obtained by
these forbidden means, to his own diocesan, begging him to communicate
with the Cardinal of York and the Bishop of London, that three of the
highest church authorities in England might become _participes
criminis_, by acting on this diabolical information.
[Sidenote: The principal ports set for Garret's capture.]
Meanwhile, the commissary, not wholly relying on the astrologer, but
resolving prudently to make use of the more earthly resources which were
at his disposal, had sent information of Garret's escape to the
corporations of Dover, Rye, Winchester, Southampton, and Bristol, with
descriptions of the person of the fugitive; and this step was taken with
so much expedition, that before the end of the week no vessel was
allowed to leave either of those harbours without being strictly
searched.
[Sidenote: Garret goes to Bristol, and is taken by the father-in-law of
the Oxford proctor.]
The natural method proved more effectual than the supernatural, though
again with the assistance of a singular accident. Garret had not gone to
London; unfortunately for himself, he had not gone to Wales as he had
intended. He left Oxford, as we saw, the evening of Saturday, February
21st. That night he reached a village called Corkthrop,[75] where he lay
concealed till Wednesday; and then, not in the astrologer's orange-tawny
dress, but in "a courtier's coat and buttoned cap," which he had by some
means contrived to procure, he set out again on his forlorn journey,
making for the nearest sea-port, Bristol, where the police were looking
out to receive him. His choice of Bristol was peculiarly unlucky. The
"chapman" of the town was the step-father of Cole, the Oxford proctor:
to this person, whose name was Master Wilkyns, the proctor had written a
special letter, in addition to the commissary's circular; and the family
connexion acting as a spur to his natural activity, a coast-guard had
been set before Garret's arrival, to watch for him down the Avon banks,
and along the Channel shore for fifteen miles. All the Friday night "the
mayor, with the aldermen, and twenty of the council, had kept privy
watch," and searched suspicious houses at Master Wilkyns's instance; the
whole population were on the alert, and when the next afternoon, a week
after his escape, the poor heretic, footsore and weary, dragged himself
into the town, he found that he had walked into the lion's mouth.[76] He
quickly learnt the danger to which he was exposed, and hurried off again
with the best speed which he could command; but it was too late. The
chapman, alert and indefatigable, had heard that a stranger had been
seen in the street; the police were set upon his track, and he was taken
at Bedminster, a suburb on the opposite bank of the Avon, and hurried
before a magistrate, where he at once acknowledged his identity.
[Sidenote: Saturday, Feb. 28.]
[Sidenote: Master Wilkyns's triumph, hopes, and disappointment.]
[Sidenote: Garret is sent to Ilchester, and thence to London,]
With such happy success were the good chapman's efforts rewarded. Yet in
this world there is no light without shadow; no pleasure without its
alloy. In imagination, Master Wilkyns had thought of himself conducting
the prisoner in triumph into the streets of Oxford, the hero of the
hour. The sour formality of the law condemned him to ill-merited
disappointment. Garret had been taken beyond the liberties of the city;
it was necessary, therefore, to commit him to the county gaol, and he
was sent to Ilchester. "Master Wilkyns offered himself to be bound to
the said justice in three hundred pounds to discharge him of the said
Garret, and to see him surely to Master Proctor's of Oxford; yet could
he not have him, for the justice said that the order of the law would
not so serve."[77] The fortunate captor had therefore to content himself
with the consciousness of his exploit, and the favourable report of his
conduct which was sent to the bishops; and Garret went first to
Ilchester, and thence was taken by special writ, and surrendered to
Wolsey.
[Sidenote: Where he abjures.]
Thus unkind had fortune shown herself to the chief criminal, guilty of
the unpardonable offence of selling Testaments at Oxford, and therefore
hunted down as a mad dog, and a common enemy of mankind. He escaped for
the present the heaviest consequences, for Wolsey persuaded him to
abjure. A few years later we shall again meet him, when he had recovered
his better nature, and would not abjure, and died as a brave man should
die. In the mean time we return to the university, where the authorities
were busy trampling out the remains of the conflagration.
[Sidenote: The investigation at Oxford continues.]
Two days after his letter respecting the astrologer, the Warden of New
College wrote again to the Diocesan, with an account of his further
proceedings. He was an efficient inquisitor, and the secrets of the poor
undergraduates had been unravelled to the last thread. Some of "the
brethren" had confessed; all were in prison; and the doctor desired
instructions as to what should be done with them. It must be said for
Dr. London, that he was anxious that they should be treated leniently.
Dalaber described him as a roaring lion, and he was a bad man, and came
at last to a bad end. But it is pleasant to find that even he, a mere
blustering arrogant official, was not wholly without redeeming points of
character; and as little good will be said for him hereafter, the
following passage in his second letter may be placed to the credit side
of his account. The tone in which he wrote was at least humane, and must
pass for more than an expression of natural kindness, when it is
remembered that he was addressing a person with whom tenderness for
heresy was a crime.
[Sidenote: Doctor London writes to the Bishop of Lincoln, advising a
general pardon.]
"These youths," he said, "have not been long conversant with Master
Garret, nor have greatly perused his mischievous books; and long before
Master Garret was taken, divers of them were weary of these works, and
delivered them to Dalaber. I am marvellous sorry for the young men. If
they be openly called upon, although they appear not greatly infect, yet
they shall never avoid slander, because my Lord's Grace did send for
Master Garret to be taken. I suppose his Grace will know of your good
lordship everything. Nothing shall be hid, I assure your good lordship,
an every one of them were my brother; and I do only make this moan for
these youths, for surely they be of the most towardly young men in
Oxford; and as far as I do yet perceive, not greatly infect, but much to
blame for reading any part of these works."[78]
[Sidenote: The bishop insists on punishment.]
Doctor London's intercession, if timid, was generous; he obviously
wished to suggest that the matter should be hushed up, and that the
offending parties should be dismissed with a reprimand. If the decision
had rested with Wolsey, it is likely that this view would have been
readily acted upon. But the Bishop of Lincoln was a person in whom the
spirit of humanity had been long exorcised by the spirit of an
ecclesiastic. He was staggering along the last years of a life against
which his own register[79] bears dreadful witness, and he would not
burden his conscience with mercy to heretics. He would not mar the
completeness of his barbarous career. He singled out three of the
prisoners--Garret, Clark, and Ferrars[80]--and especially entreated that
they should be punished. "They be three perilous men," he wrote to
Wolsey, "and have been the occasion of the corruption of youth. They
have done much mischief, and for the love of God let them be handled
thereafter."[81]
[Sidenote: Clark dies in prison.]
[Sidenote: His last words.]
Wolsey had Garret in his own keeping, and declined to surrender him.
Ferrars had been taken at the Black Friars, in London,[82] and making
his submission, was respited, and escaped with abjuration. But Clark was
at Oxford, in the bishop's power, and the wicked old man was allowed to
work his will upon him. A bill of heresy was drawn, which the prisoner
was required to sign. He refused, and must have been sent to the stake,
had he not escaped by dying prematurely of the treatment which he had
received in prison.[83] His last words only are recorded. He was
refused the communion, not perhaps as a special act of cruelty, but
because the laws of the church would not allow the holy thing to be
profaned by the touch of a heretic. When he was told that it would not
be suffered, he said "_crede et manducasti_"--"faith is the communion;"
and so passed away; a very noble person, so far as the surviving
features of his character will let us judge; one who, if his manhood had
fulfilled the promise of his youth, would have taken no common part in
the Reformation.
[Sidenote: Dalaber and his friends carry fagots in High-street.]
The remaining brethren were then dispersed. Some were sent home to their
friends,--others, Anthony Dalaber among them, were placed on their
trial, and being terrified at their position, recanted, and were
sentenced to do penance. Ferrars was brought to Oxford for the occasion,
and we discern indistinctly (for the mere fact is all which survives) a
great fire at Carfax; a crowd of spectators, and a procession of
students marching up High-street with fagots on their shoulders, the
solemn beadles leading them with gowns and maces. The ceremony was
repeated to which Dr. Barnes had been submitted at St. Paul's. They were
taken three times round the fire, throwing in each first their fagot,
and then some one of the offending books, in token that they repented
and renounced their errors.
[Sidenote: Oxford is purged.]
Thus was Oxford purged of heresy. The state of innocence which Dr.
London pathetically lamented[84] was restored, and the heads of houses
had peace till their rest was broken by a ruder storm.
[Sidenote: The early history of Protestantism is the history of its
martyrs and confessors,]
[Sidenote: And its evidences, their endurance and suffering.]
In this single specimen we may see a complete image of Wolsey's
persecution, as with varying details it was carried out in every town
and village from the Tweed to the Land's End. I dwell on the stories of
individual suffering, not to colour the narrative, or to reawaken
feelings of bitterness which may well rest now and sleep for ever, but
because, through the years in which it was struggling for recognition,
the history of Protestantism is the history of its martyrs. No rival
theology, as I have said, had as yet shaped itself into formulas. We
have not to trace any slow growing elaboration of opinion.
Protestantism, before it became an establishment, was a refusal to live
any longer in a lie. It was a falling back upon the undefined
untheoretic rules of truth and piety which lay upon the surface of the
Bible, and a determination rather to die than to mock with unreality any
longer the Almighty Maker of the world. We do not look in the dawning
manifestations of such a spirit for subtleties of intellect. Intellect,
as it ever does, followed in the wake of the higher virtues of manly
honesty and truthfulness. And the evidences which were to effect the
world's conversion were no cunningly arranged syllogistic
demonstrations, but once more those loftier evidences which lay in the
calm endurance by heroic men of the extremities of suffering, and which
touched, not the mind with conviction, but the heart with admiring
reverence.
[Sidenote: Wolsey falls, but the persecution is continued by the
bishops.]
In the concluding years of his administration, Wolsey was embarrassed
with the divorce. Difficulties were gathering round him, from the
failure of his hopes abroad and the wreck of his popularity at home; and
the activity of the persecution was something relaxed, as the guiding
mind of the great minister ceased to have leisure to attend to it. The
bishops, however, continued, each in his own diocese, to act with such
vigour as they possessed. Their courts were unceasingly occupied with
vexatious suits, commenced without reason, and conducted without
justice. They summoned arbitrarily as suspected offenders whoever had
the misfortune to have provoked their dislike; either compelling them to
criminate themselves by questions on the intricacies of theology,[85] or
allowing sentence to be passed against them on the evidence of abandoned
persons, who would not have been admissible as witnesses before the
secular tribunals.[86]
[Sidenote: The House of Commons, in checking causeless prosecutions, has
no wish to protect those who are really heretical.]
[Sidenote: The Protestants rather lose than gain in the revolution which
followed on the fall of Wolsey.]
[Sidenote: Sir Thomas More's chancellorship.]
[Sidenote: The true test of sincerity in a Catholic.]
It might have been thought that the clear perception which was shown by
the House of Commons of the injustice with which the trials for heresy
were conducted, the disregard, shameless and flagrant, of the provisions
of the statutes under which the bishops were enabled to proceed, might
have led them to reconsider the equity of persecution in itself; or, at
least, to remove from the office of judges persons who had shown
themselves so signally unfit to exercise that office. It would have been
indecent, however, if not impossible, to transfer to a civil tribunal
the cognizance of opinion; and, on the other hand, there was as yet
among the upper classes of the laity no kind of disposition to be
lenient towards those who were really unorthodox. The desire so far was
only to check the reckless and random accusations of persons whose
offence was to have criticised, not the doctrine, but the moral conduct
of the church authorities. The Protestants, although from the date of
the meeting of the parliament and Wolsey's fall their ultimate triumph
was certain, gained nothing in its immediate consequences. They suffered
rather from the eagerness of the political reformers to clear themselves
from complicity with heterodoxy; and the bishops were even taunted with
the spiritual dissensions of the realm as an evidence of their indolence
and misconduct.[87] Language of this kind boded ill for the "Christian
Brethren"; and the choice of Wolsey's successor for the office of
chancellor soon confirmed their apprehensions: Wolsey had chastised them
with whips; Sir Thomas More would chastise them with scorpions; and the
philosopher of the _Utopia_, the friend of Erasmus, whose life was of
blameless beauty, whose genius was cultivated to the highest attainable
perfection, was to prove to the world that the spirit of persecution is
no peculiar attribute of the pedant, the bigot, or the fanatic, but may
coexist with the fairest graces of the human character. The lives of
remarkable men usually illustrate some emphatic truth. Sir Thomas More
may be said to have lived to illustrate the necessary tendencies of
Romanism in an honest mind convinced of its truth; to show that the test
of sincerity in a man who professes to regard orthodoxy as an essential
of salvation, is not the readiness to endure persecution, but the
courage which will venture to inflict it.