CHAPTER XI.
HOOPER.—PURITANS.—EXPECTATIONS OF THE ROMAN CATHOLICS.—EDWARD’S DEATH.—LADY JANE GREY.
But though the leading Reformers were men of moderation, there was a party now growing up in the church of another temper, and a more rigid mould. Hooper, the type of it at that time, had resided for some years amongst the foreign Protestants of Germany and Switzerland, where the promulgation of the Interim, a half measure, uniting something of Popish forms with something of Protestant principles; had put men upon considering the question concerning the use of things indifferent. He took the side of the more rigorous casuists; and, accordingly, when the bishopric of Gloucester was offered him, (for he was one of the most sharp and searching preachers of his day, and of a conscience above fear or favour, sometimes, perhaps, above reason too,) he alleged certain scruples, in which he was seconded by John à Lasco, and the churches of the strangers in England, chiefly touching the episcopal habits, which then consisted, besides the rochet of white linen as still worn, of a chimere or robe, to which the lawn sleeves are attached, of scarlet silk; the latter gorgeous article of dress, which was not superseded by the black satin at present worn, till the reign of Elizabeth, seems to have been the chief offence to Hooper, who accordingly for a while declined the mitre. Here was the beginning of those troubles which; however respectable in their origin, were soon destined to make havoc of the Church’s peace; and Hooper isone of the few bishops (for a bishop he eventually became) on whom the Puritans of every age, not excepting even Neal himself, have looked with an eye of favour. It seems a strange thing to us, that men should have been ever found ready to make shipwreck of charity, and to risk the Reformation altogether (for the Roman Catholics were on the alert to profit by the divisions) upon matters so unimportant in themselves as the colour or material of a coat; or that such precisians should have been met with as expected, and required the actual warrant of Scripture for every trivial matter which they did throughout the day, to the utter extinction of Christian liberty:[397]yet the number of such persons grew and prevailed: and though Hooker in his great work, now but little read, because to our apprehensions so large a portion of it is occupied in fighting with shadows, no shadows however then, did his best, as did Sanderson his most learned contemporary,[398]to stave off the crisis; it came with the rebellion nevertheless, when a morbid conscience gave place, as it often does, to fanaticism or hypocrisy, and the substantial fruits of the Spirit were lost in real or pretended paroxysms. Surely the kingdom of God is not meat and drink. St. Paul in all his epistles deals boldly with such beggarly elements; nor does the example of our Lord himself sanction scruples merely fastidious. He did not listen to the accusations against his disciples that they had plucked the ears of corn on the Sabbath day, or that they had eaten with unwashen hands; and it is remarkablethat, though according to the strict letter of the Levitical law the Passover was to be partaken of with loins girded, and shoes on the feet, and a staff in the hand, and in haste, Jesus appears to have acquiesced in a custom long established, and to have sat down with his disciples, and to have conversed with them at his leisure, one of them leaning upon his bosom.
An attempt has been made by some to claim Cranmer as belonging to the same party in his heart, howbeit restrained by force of circumstances from fully declaring himself. They would persuade us that he was prepared to have gone much further in his Book of Common Prayer, (such, say they, was the report amongst the English exiles at Frankfort,)[399]but that a wicked clergy and convocation held his hand; and that more was meant than met the ear, even when under the cruel mockery of his accusers, as they stripped him of the canvass pontificals in which they had arrayed him, he observed, “that it needed not; for he had done with that gear long before.”[400]That he set no greater store by the innocent trappings of his office than was due to them from a man of sense and piety may be well believed; he had already said as much: “If the bishops of this realm,” he remarks in a letter to Cromwell, “pass no more of their names, styles, and titles, than I do of mine, the King’s Highness shall soon order the matter betwixt us.... For I pray God never to be merciful to me at the general judgment if I perceive in my heart that I set more by any title, name, or style, that I write, than I do by the paring of an apple, further than it shall be to the setting forth of God’s word and will.” Let it, however, be remembered, that these words were written by Cranmer in vindication of himself againstthe idle but malicious charge of Gardiner, that by assuming the title of “Primate of all England” he had trenched upon the King’s supremacy, and that the period at which they were written was the year 1535, when as yet the Puritan question had not been stirred.[401]But though the general character of the Archbishop’s mind, which was averse from extremes of every kind, is enough to oppose to any claim of this description, there are, besides, some distinct particulars in his history, which argue clearly enough that if he did not foresee the danger of the Puritan principle, he at least had no inclination to lend himself to its advancement. To Hooper’s imaginations he did not give place, no not for an hour, resolutely opposing even the King’s letter of recommendation that the ceremonies used in consecration might in his particular case be dispensed with;[402]a degree of obduracy this, at which the martyrologist (whose bias is well known) significantly hints, “for he will name nobody,” as culpable in the Archbishop, and such as called for the Cross to put an end by a real and terrible visitation to unworthy contentions, and to unite men who ought never to have been divided, by making them partners in bonds and in death. Nor is this all; a trifle it may be, but still it is a trifle to our present purpose, and characteristic of the temper of Cranmer, a straw which tells the wind better than a stone, that a short passage which stands in the Latin text of his catechism, reflecting on the mysteries and other such mummeries as were then greatly followed by the English, and which at a very early time were caviare to the Puritan, is altogether omitted in the translation.[403]But, perhaps, the most decisive evidenceof all is the spirit which pervades the whole sermon “of the Keys” in this same catechism; a sermon otherwise worth perusing, as setting a difficult subject in a satisfactory light. That preachers there must be, else how shall the people hear? that they must not of themselves “run to this high honour,” else how are they “sent?” But if they be not sent, how shall they fruitfully teach; for it is not enough that the seed be sown, since God must also give the increase? Yet how can the blessing of God be looked for on means which he has not sanctioned? What surety is there that though the self-appointed minister work well, God will choose to work with him? But if not, what virtue can go out of the sacraments which he handles; what do baptism, absolution, and the Supper of the Lord become, but dead forms, Christ not being present with such preachers? That the right of ministration, therefore, derived from the apostles at first, who, in their turn, made “bishops and priests,” (“sacerdotes,” only, is the expression in the Latin,) is to continue unto the end of the world; but in the line appointed; and, accordingly, that good heed is to be taken of “false and privy preachers, which privily creep into cities, and preach in corners, having none authority, nor being called to this office.” This is not the language of the Puritan; yet was Cranmer certainly opposed to many of the remnants of the Church of Rome, in themselves indifferent; to the use of the old altars instead of tables, which it was proposed to substitute for them; to candles at Candlemas; to ashes on Ash Wednesday, and the like; all, matters for which the people were still clamorous, but with which he saw that they were not to be trusted; and thus did he lay himself open to alternate charges of over-much and over-little scrupulosity, according to the quarter from which the objection came, sufficient in themselves to argue that he chose out a path between either extreme, which was the safest andbest of all. There is something probably very significant of Cranmer’s own temper as a reformer, in the terms of a letter which he addresses to Cromwell, soliciting preferment for one John Wakefield, “gentleman,” as he is called, comptroller of his own household. The qualities which, according to the Archbishop’s notions, recommend him to the King’s patronage are these:—“A good judgment and affection towards God’s word, which for the space of twelve years” (the term of Cranmer’s acquaintance with him) “he had always been ready to promote in his country, not rashly nor seditiously, but gently and soberly;so that his own country could neither greatly hate him nor love him. They could not hate him, for his kindness and gentleness, being ready to do every man good as much as in his power was; and yet they could not heartily love him, because he ever commended the knowledge of God’s word, studied it himself diligently, and exhorted them unto the same; and spake many times against the abusions of the clergy, for which he had all the hate that most of the clergy could procure against him.”[404]A character of this complexion, moderation the leading feature of it, was not the one to win upon a patron, himself prepared to rush into the extremes of the Puritans.
But the reign of a minor, which was favourable to the growth of that party, indeed Edward had himself, perhaps, a leaning to their opinions, was not unfriendly to the further pillage of the church. Here, therefore, Cranmer had again to interpose, that in this instance he might protect the temporalities, as in the other he had protected the doctrines, of the Establishment. The division of the abbey-lands amongst the nobles seems to have begot a general tasteamongst the upper classes for expense, and consequent appetite for spoil—it grew by what it fed on. Rents were raised to an extravagant height; the farm for which Latimer’s father paid from three to four pounds a year; and which enabled him to send a man and horse to the King’s service, and to portion his daughters with five pounds a-piece, was, in Latimer’s own time, let for sixteen pounds or more, to the utter impoverishment of the occupier.[405]The waste lands were every where enclosed for sheep-walks (the wool trade having now become considerable), to the annihilation of those ancient rights of pasturage which the neighbouring peasantry enjoyed, and to the fomentation of fierce rebellions throughout the country.[406]Now it happened that the chantries or chapels endowed by individuals for private masses had survived the spoliation of Henry: these it was proposed should be given to the King (which was another word for the nobles through the King), and an act of parliament to that effect was passed in 1547, in spite of the opposition of the bishops, and of Cranmer above all, who had been in hopes of reserving these endowments till Edward should come of age, and then inducing him to assign them to the relief of the numerous poor clergy whom the sale of tithes had left almost pennyless. He had already resisted encroachments of the same kind under Henry; beseeching him that there should be no alienation of church lands without the production, at least, of the royal warrant; many of the nobles being in the habit of seizing them in the King’s name, though without any intention of appropriating them to the King’s use. Moreover, in those exchanges with the see of Canterbury, which the King himself proposed, Cranmer endeavoured to protect it in its just rights by solicitingCromwell’s opinion of the terms, “forasmuch as he himself was a man that had small experience in such cases, and had no mistrust at all in his prince;”[407]and thus did he dexterously contrive to uphold and transmit to his successors an ample revenue in most dangerous times; and under a most despotic monarch. But the name of Edward could not be interposed with the same success between the nobles and their pleasure, and accordingly the see of Canterbury, nor that alone, is said to have suffered more under Edward than under Henry himself; for the old cry was raised of the luxury and covetousness of churchmen, and the old precedents of dispensing half a dozen prebends to one earl, and a deanery to another, (such had been the predicament of the Earl of Hertford, and of Cromwell,)[408]were again acted upon; and laymen were pensioned out of the bishoprics as they successively fell vacant;[409]and many of the best estates were taken away, so that the wealthiest sees could scarcely maintain their diocesans;[410]and scholars were supplanted in the rewards of learning by their superiors in birth, to the decay of the universities and of letters in general; so that Ridley, now Bishop of London, Bonner having been deposed, being about to give Grindal a prebend in St. Paul’s, is prevented by the council, it being their pleasure that the King should have it for the furniture of his stable, an indignity of which he loudly complains to Cheke, the King’s tutor, urging him to speak out upon it in the proper quarter, or to let that his letter speak.[411]Nor was this all; commissioners were despatched into every part of England in the last year of Edward, to gather such gleanings as were stillleft in the shape of chantry-lands unsold, and furniture of churches; they were themselves, however, commonly forestalled by the people, so that, according to Heylyn, “many private men’s parlours were now hung with altar-cloths, their tables and beds covered with copes instead of carpets and coverlids, and many made carousing cups of the sacred chalices, as once Belshazzar celebrated his drunken feast in the sanctified vessels of the Temple.”[412]Thus the locusts took what had escaped from the hail. How much further this dissipation of church property would have been carried had Edward continued longer to fill the throne, it is impossible to tell; certain it is, that it received a check from the restoration of the Roman Catholic religion, for a season, under Mary; and amongst the mysterious ways in which Providence works out its own ends, that otherwise fatal reign might be the appointed barrier for securing a reasonable provision still for the Church of England, and thereby an efficient, because an intelligent and independent, clergy. For the Roman Catholic party began now to be enlisted by the dictates of common prudence on the conservative side. The signs of the times, which were watched by all men with extreme anxiety, were seen to be in their favour. The Princess Mary was a rallying point for the partisans of the Church of Rome during the whole of Edward’s reign, moresuited to the office than a much cleverer woman less firm of purpose. Her brother had reluctantly winked at the use of the mass in her own chapel when it was forbidden elsewhere, hoping to win her to a different mind, till the permission being abused, was at length withdrawn, not, however, abruptly, for the affair was pending, out of delicacy to her scruples, from June, 1549, to September, 1551; when the council at length wrote to her, that her Grace’s example “hindered the good weal of the realm,which thing they thought was not unknown to her.”[413]But the spirits of the Romanists were not to be thus broken down. For the three last years of Edward’s reign their confidence was perpetually on the increase. The life of the Princess was seen to be of fairer promise than the King’s, and an eye to the character of the next in the succession is a striking political feature of the times of which we are treating, when the balance between contending factions was as yet scarcely struck either way. The nobles who espoused the cause of the Reformers were at strife amongst themselves; Somerset contending with his brother, the admiral, even to the death; himself beheaded in his turn, and succeeded as Protector by the Earl of Warwick, afterwards Duke of Northumberland, a man unpopular and suspected. The adversaries of the Reformation were not slow to take advantage of the disorder. Whilst the government was united, many leading persons amongst them had recanted, and even Bonner and Gardiner “began to condescend,” as Fox expresses it, “to good conformity;” but they now took heart, turned about, and braved a persecution which was likely to be short, and which was sure to recommend them to the future sovereign.
On the other hand, the friends of the Reformation, readingthese prognostics the other way, had fearful forebodings of evils to come, and were naturally cast down. The feverish condition of the public mind is seen in the restless solicitude with which they treasured such omens up. The execution of the Protector; the death of the Duke of Suffolk and his brother by the sweating sickness, the sons of a father who was Cranmer’s good friend, and themselves children of great hope; the loss of Fagius and Bucer at a critical moment, were all accounted harbingers of ill.[414]John Knox, too, like another son of Ananus, lifted up his voice in various parts of England; and as he marked the tide again setting in towards Rome, foretold for England unquiet times, hiemem instare:[415]and, indeed, the general agitation of those days, that feeling so forcibly expressed in the language of Scripture by “distress of nations with perplexity,” is strongly portrayed by an act of parliament which was passed in 1550, “Against spreading of Prophecies,” as well as by the numbers of idle stories of unnatural births and sea-monsters which were then propagated, and which are faithfully preserved in the pages of the Chroniclers.[416]Charity leads us to trust that the dark insinuations against the Duke of Northumberland (as though he hastened the end of Edward for the purpose of setting the crown on the head of Lady Jane Grey, who had married his son,) had no other foundation than the intense anxiety with which the life of the King was thus regarded by multitudes of his subjects, who saw no other hope for themselves or for their cause than the frail one its continuance afforded. Certain it is, that the extracts given by Strype from Cranmer’s letters, to Cecil, who was in attendanceupon the court in a progress to England, the year before the King’s death, cannot be fairly interpreted (though the honest annalist is of a contrary opinion) as implying that the Archbishop was then under any apprehensions for Edward’s personal safety.[417]And it is very possible, that when the “wise woman” was called in at last (the case becoming desperate,) the patient should have grown rapidly worse, without any further imputation upon the empiric than presumption for having attempted the cure, or upon the Protector than folly for having permitted the attempt to be made.[418]But if we acquit Northumberland of treason, it is not so easy to acquit him of treachery; for that the dying prince should have made a will, not merely withholding the crown from its rightful owner, the Princess Mary, (for considering the hearty desire he entertained for the maintenance of the Protestant cause this might have been his own act and deed,) but from his sister Elizabeth, herself a Protestant, and to settle it upon a cousin who happened to be the duke’s daughter-in-law, this looks like the machination of another head than his own. This will Cranmer long refused to subscribe; but at last, over-persuaded by the authority of the judges, all of whom except Judge Hales, concurred in it, and above all, by the entreaties of Edward himself, who represented the hopeless condition to which the Reformation would be reduced by acquiescing in the natural descent of the crown, (as if the wrath of man was to work the righteousness of God,) in an evil hour he took the pen and signed the document and what was tantamount to his own death-warrant together.
And now Edward, having finished his short but saintly course, his sixteenth year not yet completed, commended his people to God, especially beseeching him that he“would defend his realm from papistry;” and then as he sunk in the arms of Sir Henry Sidney, he exclaimed, “I am faint; Lord, have mercy on me; and receive my spirit;” and so he departed. Thus ended this reign of mercy: for ill as the principle of toleration was in those days understood, violently as it had been outraged by Henry, who preceded, and as it was destined to be by Mary, who followed him, during the six years that Edward sat upon the throne, neither in Smithfield, nor in any other quarter of the realm did any man suffer for religious opinion, whether Catholic or Protestant, save the two of whom mention has been made already—the Dutchman and Joan of Kent.[419]And even in cases of imprisonment and deprivation, as in those of Bonner, Bishop of London, and Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, the parties were proceeded against rather as political than religious delinquents, rather as rebels than heretics; a doctrine being sedulously taught by these and other leaders of the Catholic party, and echoed back both by the Princess Mary and by the insurgents of Devon, that neither were the decrees of the council binding, the regal power not being transferable, nor yet those of the King, he being still a minor; wherefore, that the laws of the land, as Henry left them, were those which were to be obeyed until the king should come of age, and none other.[420]It is obvious that such a principle, generally acknowledged and acted upon, would have ended in leaving the country without any government at all; for if the old statutes should prove inapplicable to an unforseen emergency, and there were no authority adequate to supply the defect, anarchy must ensue. It is true that advantage was sometimes taken of overt acts of non-conformity on which to prosecute, because wherethere might be moral, there might not be legal, evidence of disaffection, the offence being difficult of proof; still here the gravamen no doubt lay of many of the charges preferred against the Roman Catholic dignitaries, and of the penalties inflicted on them in the reign of Edward; and the necessity which lay upon the council of seeing that the commonwealth took no damage at their hands in those dangerous times, may be thought to excuse proceedings which, however, were attended by some aggravating circumstances of rigour but too common in those days.
It is impossible to contemplate the death of Edward without feeling for Cranmer and his colleagues in the Reformation. Their hearts might well sink within them in that hour. They had gone boldly forward in their great enterprise, beholding the danger before their eyes, for they could not be blind to it, but determined to do their duty and fear not; exasperating the Catholic party, headed as it was by a most bigoted princess, then the presumptive, now the actual, possessor of the throne, nor shrinking from incurring her personal displeasure, where the interests of religion required the risk, by the honest counsel they gave with respect to the concessions due to her, or the privileges which it was fitting to deny or to resume. Now they were in a situation which they must have long foreseen was likely to be their lot—at the mercy of an implacable foe. And the days and nights of anxiety which they must have spent at this crisis waiting for the policy of Mary to disclose itself, must be carried to the account of those silent sufferings which formed no small part of the purchase-money paid for the church they bequeathed to us, and which were more insupportable, perhaps, however less imposing, than the fire and the faggot itself.