The Age of the Reformation Part 21

[Sidenote: Reformation Parliament, November 3, 1529]

In the meantime there had already met that Parliament that was to pa.s.s, in the seven years of its existence, the most momentous and revolutionary laws as yet placed upon the statute-books. The elections were free, or nearly so; the franchise varied from a fairly democratic one in London to a highly oligarchical one in some boroughs.

Notwithstanding the popular feeling that Catharine was an injured woman and that war with the Empire might ruin the valuable trade with Flanders, the "government," as would now be said, that is, the king, received hearty support by the majority of members. The only possible explanation for this, apart from the king's acknowledged skill as a parliamentary leader, is the strength of the anti-clerical feeling.

The rebellion of the laity against the clergy, and of the patriots against the Italian yoke, needed but the example of Germany to burst all the d.y.k.es and barriers of medieval custom. The significance of the revolution was that it was a forcible reform of the church by the state. The wish of the people was to end ecclesiastical abuses without much regard to doctrine; the wish of the king was to make himself {289} "emperor and pope" in his own dominions. While Henry studied Wyclif's program, and the people read the English Testament, the lessons they derived from these sources were at first moral and political, not doctrinal or philosophic.

[Sidenote: Submission of the clergy, December 1530]

The first step in the reduction of the church was taken when the attorney-general filed in the court of King's Bench an information against the whole body of the clergy for violating the statutes of Provisors and Praemunire by having recognized Wolsey's legatine authority. Of course there was no justice in this; the king himself had recognized Wolsey's authority and anyone who had denied it would have been punished. But the suit was sufficient to accomplish the government's purposes, which were, first to wring money from the clergy and then to force them to declare the king "sole protector and supreme head of the church and clergy of England." Reluctantly the Convocation of Canterbury accepted this demand in the form that the king was, "their singular protector, only and supreme lord and, as far as the law of Christ allows, even Supreme Head." Henry further proposed that the oaths of the clergy to the pope be abolished and himself made supreme legislator. [Sidenote: May 15, 1532] Convocation accepted this demand also in a doc.u.ment known as "the submission of the clergy."

If such was the action of the spiritual estate, it was natural that the temporal peers and the Commons in parliament should go much further.

[Sidenote: 1532] A pet.i.tion of the Commons, really emanating from the government and probably from Thomas Cromwell, complained bitterly of the tyranny of the ordinaries in ecclesiastical jurisdiction, of excessive fees and vexations and frivolous charges of heresy made against unlearned laymen. [Sidenote: May 1532] Abuses of like nature were dealt with in statutes limiting the fees exacted by priests and regulating {290} pluralities and non-residence. Annates were abolished with the proviso that the king might negotiate with the pope,--the intention of the government being thus to bring pressure to bear on the curia. No wonder the clergy were thoroughly frightened. Bishop Fisher, their bravest champion, protested in the House of Lords: "For G.o.d's sake, see what a realm the kingdom of Boheme was, and when the church fell down, there fell the glory of the kingdom. Now with the Commons is nothing but 'Down with the church,' and all this meseemeth is for lack of faith only."

[Sidenote: Marriage with Anne Boleyn]

It had taken Henry several years to prepare the way for his chief object, the divorce. His hand was at last forced by the knowledge that Anne was pregnant; he married her on January 25, 1533, without waiting for final sentence of annulment of marriage with Catharine. In so doing he might seem, at first glance, to have followed the advice so freely tendered him to discharge his conscience by committing bigamy; but doubtless he regarded his first marriage as illegal all the time and merely waited for the opportunity to get a court that would so p.r.o.nounce it. The vacancy of the archbishopric of Canterbury enabled him to appoint to it Thomas Cranmer, [Sidenote: Cranmer] the obsequious divine who had first suggested his present plan. Cranmer was a Lutheran, so far committed to the new faith that he had married; he was intelligent, learned, a wonderful master of language, and capable at last of dying for his belief. But that he showed himself pliable to his master's wishes beyond all bounds of decency is a fact made all the more glaring by the firm and honorable conduct of More and Fisher. His worst act was possibly on the occasion of his nomination to the province of Canterbury; wishing to be confirmed by the pope he concealed his real views and took an oath of obedience to the Holy See, having previously signed {291} a protest that he considered the oath a mere form and not a reality.

The first use he made of his position was to p.r.o.nounce sentence that Henry and Catharine had never been legally married, though at the same time a.s.serting that this did not affect the legitimacy of Mary because her parents had believed themselves married. Immediately afterwards it was declared that Anne was a lawful wife, and she was crowned queen, [Sidenote: 1533] amid the smothered execrations of the populace, on June 1. On September 7, the Princess Elizabeth was born. Catharine's cause was taken up at Rome; Clement's brief forbidding the king to remarry was followed by final sentence in Catharine's favor. Her last years were rendered miserable by humiliation and acts of petty spite.

When she died her late husband, with characteristic indecency, [Sidenote: January 1536] celebrated the joyous event by giving a ball at which he and Anne appeared dressed in yellow.

[Sidenote: March 1534]

The feeling of the people showed itself in this case finer and more chivalrous than that prevalent at court. The treatment of Catharine was so unpopular that Chapuis wrote that the king was much hated by his subjects. [Sidenote: January, 1536] Resolved to make an example of the murmurers, the government selected Elizabeth Barton, the "Holy Maid of Kent." After her hysterical visions and a lucky prophecy had won her an audience, she fell under the influence of monks and prophesied that the king would not survive his marriage with Anne one month, and proclaimed that he was no longer king in the eyes of G.o.d. [Sidenote: April 1, 1534] She and her accomplices were arrested, attainted without trial, and executed. She may pa.s.s as an English Catholic martyr.

[Sidenote: Act in Restraint of Appeals, February 1533]

Continuing its course of making the king absolute master the Parliament pa.s.sed an Act in Restraint of Appeals, the first const.i.tutional break with Rome. {292} The theory of the government was set forth in the preamble:

Whereas by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles, it is manifestly declared and expressed, that this realm of England is an Empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one supreme head and king . . . unto whom a body politic compact of all sorts and degrees of people, divided in terms, and by names of spirituality and temporally, be bounden and ought to bear, next to G.o.d, a natural and humble obedience. . . .

therefore all jurisdiction of foreign powers was denied.

[Sidenote: January 15, 1534]

When, after a recess, Parliament met again there were forty vacancies to be filled in the Lower House, and this time care was taken that the new members should be well affected. Scarcely a third of the spiritual lords a.s.sembled, though whether their absence was commanded, or their presence not required, by the king, is uncertain. As, in earlier Parliaments, the spiritual peers had outnumbered the temporal, this was a matter of importance. Another sign of the secularization of the government was the change in the character of the chancellors. Wolsey was the last great ecclesiastical minister of the reign; More and Cromwell who followed him were laymen.

The severance with Rome was now completed by three laws. In the first place the definite abolition of the annates meant that henceforth the election of archbishops and bishops must be under licence by the king and that they must swear allegiance to him before consecration. A second act forbade the payment of Peter's pence and all other fees to Rome, and vested in the Archbishop of Canterbury the right to grant licences previously granted by the pope. A third act, for the subjection of the clergy, put convocation under the royal power and forbade all privileges inconsistent with this. The new pope, Paul III, struck back, though {293} with hesitation, excommunicating the king, [Sidenote: 1535-8] declaring all his children by Anne Boleyn illegitimate, and absolving his subjects from their oath of allegiance.

[Sidenote: 1534]

Two acts entrenched the king in his despotic pretensions. The Act of Succession, [Sidenote: Act of Succession] notable as the first a.s.sertion by crown and Parliament of the right to legislate in this const.i.tutional matter, vested the inheritance of the crown in the issue of Henry and Anne, and made it high treason to question the marriage.

The Act of Supremacy [Sidenote: Act of Supremacy] declared that the king's majesty "justly and rightfully is and ought to be supreme head of the church of England," pointedly omitting the qualification insisted on by Convocation,--"as far as the law of Christ allows."

Exactly how far this supremacy went was at first puzzling. That it extended not only to the governance of the temporalities of the church, but to issuing injunctions on spiritual matters and defining articles of belief was soon made apparent; on the other hand the monarch never claimed in person the power to celebrate ma.s.s.

That the abrogation of the papal authority was accepted so easily is proof of the extent to which the national feeling of the English church had already gone. An oath to recognize the supremacy of the king was tendered to both convocations, to the universities, to the clergy and to prominent laymen, and was with few exceptions readily taken.

Doubtless many swallowed the oath from mere cowardice; others took it with mental reservations; and yet that the majority complied shows that the subst.i.tution of a royal for a papal despotism was acceptable to the conscience of the country at large. Many believed that they were not departing from the Catholic faith; but that others welcomed the act as a step towards the Reformation cannot be doubted. How strong was the hold of Luther on the country will presently be shown, but here {294} only one instance of the exuberance of the will for a purely national religion need be quoted. "G.o.d hath showed himself the G.o.d of England, or rather an English G.o.d," wrote Hugh Latimer, [Sidenote: 1537] a leading Lutheran; not only the church but the Deity had become insular!

[Sidenote: Fisher]

But there were a few, and among them the greatest, who refused to become accomplices in the break with Roman Christendom. John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, a friend of Erasmus and a man of admirable steadfastness, had long been horrified by the tyranny of Henry. He had stoutly upheld the rightfulness of Catharine's marriage, and now ho refused to see in the monarch the fit ruler of the church. So strongly did he feel on these subjects that he invited Charles to invade England and depose the king. This was treason, though probably the government that sent him to the tower was ignorant of the act. When Paul III rewarded Fisher by creating him a cardinal [Sidenote: May 20, 1535]

Henry furiously declared he would send his head to Rome to get the hat.

[Sidenote: June 22] The old man of seventy-six was accordingly beheaded.

[Sidenote: Sir Thomas More executed, July 6]

This execution was followed by that of Sir Thomas More, the greatest ornament of his country. As More has been remembered almost entirely by his n.o.ble _Utopia_ and his n.o.ble death, it is hard to estimate his character soberly. That his genius was polished to the highest perfection, that in a hard age he had an altogether lovely sympathy with the poor, and in a servile age the courage of his convictions, would seem enough to excuse any faults. But a deep vein of fanaticism ran through his whole nature and tinctured all his acts, political, ecclesiastical, and private. Not only was his language violent in the extreme, but his acts were equally merciless when his pa.s.sions were aroused. Appointed chancellor after the fall of Wolsey, he did not scruple to hit the man who was down, describing {295} him, in a scathing speech in Parliament, as the scabby wether separated by the careful shepherd from the sound sheep. In his hatred of the new opinions he not only sent men to death and torture for holding them, but reviled them while doing it. "Heretics as they be," he wrote, "the clergy doth denounce them. And as they be well worthy, the temporality doth burn them. And after the fire of Smithfield, h.e.l.l doth receive them, where the wretches burn for ever."

As chancellor he saw with growing disapproval the course of the tyrant.

He opposed the marriage with Anne Boleyn. The day after the submission of the clergy he resigned the great seal. He could not long avoid further offence to his master, and his refusal to take the oath of supremacy was the crime for which he was condemned. His behaviour during his last days and on the scaffold was perfect. He spent his time in severe self-discipline; he uttered eloquent words of forgiveness of his enemies, messages of love to the daughter whom he tenderly loved, and brave jests.

[Sidenote: Anabaptist martyrs, 1536]

But while More's pa.s.sion was one that any man might envy, his courage was shared by humbler martyrs. In the same year in which he was beheaded thirteen Dutch Anabaptists were burnt, as he would have approved, by the English government. Mute, inglorious Christs, they were led like sheep to the slaughter and as lambs dumb before their shearers. They had no eloquence, no high position, to make their words ring from side to side of Europe and echo down the centuries; but their meek endurance should not go unremembered.

To take More's place as chief minister Henry appointed the most obsequious tool he could find, Thomas Cromwell. [Sidenote: Thomas Cromwell, 1485?-1540] To good purpose this man had studied Machiavelli's _Prince_ as a practical manual of tyranny. His most important service to the crown was the {296} next step in the reduction of the medieval church, the dissolution of the monasteries. [Sidenote: Dissolution of the monasteries] Like other acts tending towards the Reformation this was, on the whole, popular, and had been rehea.r.s.ed on a small scale on several previous occasions in English history. The pope and the king of France taught Edward II to dissolve the preceptories, to the number of twenty-three, belonging to the Templars; in 1410 the Commons pet.i.tioned for the confiscation of all church property; in 1414 the alien priories in England fell under the animadversion of the government; their property was handed over to the crown and they escaped only by the payment of heavy fines, by incorporation into English orders, and by partial confiscation of their land. The idea prevailed that mortmain had failed of its object and that therefore the church might rightfully be relieved of her ill-gotten gains. These were grossly exaggerated, a pamphleteer believing that the wealth of the church amounted to half the property of the realm. In reality the total revenue of the spirituality amounted to only L320,000; that of the monasteries to only L140,000.

There had been few endowments in the fifteenth century; only eight new ones, in fact, in the whole period 1399-1509. Colleges, schools, and hospitals now attracted the money that had previously gone to the monks.

Moreover, the monastic life had fallen on evil days. The abbeys no longer were centers of learning and of the manufacture of books. The functions of hospitality and of charity that they still exercised were not sufficient to redeem them in the eyes of the people for the "gross, carnal, and vicious living" with which they were commonly and quite rightly charged. Visitations undertaken not by hostile governments but by bishops in the fifteenth century prove that much immorality obtained within the cloister walls. By 1528 {297} they had become so intolerable that a popular pamphleteer, Simon Fish, in his _Supplication of Beggars_, proposed that the mendicant friars be entirely suppressed.

[Sidenote: January 21, 1535]

A commission was now issued to Thomas Cromwell, empowering him to hold a general visitation of all churches, monasteries, and collegiate bodies. The evidence gathered of the shocking disorders obtaining in the cloisters of both s.e.xes is on the whole credible and well substantiated. Nevertheless these disorders furnished rather the pretext than the real reason for the dissolutions that followed.

Cromwell boasted that he would make his king the richest in Christendom, and this was the shortest and most popular way to do it.

[Sidenote: 1536]

Accordingly an act was pa.s.sed for the dissolution of all small religious houses with an income of less than L200 a year. The rights of the founders were safe-guarded, and pensions guaranteed to those inmates who did not find shelter in one of the larger establishments.

By this act 376 houses were dissolved with an aggregate revenue of L32,000, not counting plate and jewels confiscated. Two thousand monks or nuns were affected in addition to about eight thousand retainers or servants. The immediate effect was a large amount of misery, but the result in the long run was good. Perhaps the princ.i.p.al political importance of this and the subsequent spoliations of the church was to make the Reformation profitable and therefore popular with an enterprising cla.s.s. For the lion's share of the prey did not go to the lion, but to the jackals. From the king's favorites to whom he threw the spoils was founded a new aristocracy, a cla.s.s with a strong vested interest in opposing the restoration of the papal church. To the Protestant citizens of London was now added a Protestant landed gentry.

{298} [Sidenote: Union with Wales, 1536]

Before the "Reformation Parliament" had ceased to exist, one more act of great importance was pa.s.sed. Wales was a wild country, imperfectly governed by irregular means. By the first Act of Union in British history, Wales was now incorporated with England and the anomalies, or distinctions, in its legal and administrative system, wiped out. By severe measures, in the course of which 5000 men were sent to the gallows, the western mountaineers were reduced to order during the years 1534-40; and in 1543 their union with England was completed. The measure was statesmanlike and successful; it was undoubtedly aided by the loyalty of the Welsh to their own Tudor dynasty.

[Sidenote: April 14, 1536]

When Parliament dissolved after having accomplished, during its seven years, the greatest permanent revolution in the history of England, it had snapped the bands with Rome and determined articles of religious belief; it had given the king more power in the church than the pope ever had, and had exalted his prerogative in the state to a pitch never reached before or afterwards; it had dissolved the smaller monasteries, abridged the liberties of the subject, settled the succession to the throne, created new treasons and heresies; it had handled grave social problems, like enclosures and mendicancy; and had united Wales to England.

[Sidenote: Execution of Anne Boleyn]

And now the woman for whose sake, one is tempted to say, the king had done it all--though of course his share in the revolution does not represent the real forces that accomplished it--the woman he had won with "such a world of charge and h.e.l.l of pain," was to be cast into the outer darkness of the most hideous tragedy in history. Anne Boleyn was not a good woman. And yet, when she was accused of adultery [Sidenote: May 19, 1536] with four men and of incest with her own brother, {299} though she was tried by a large panel of peers, condemned, and beheaded, it is impossible to be sure of her guilt.

[Sidenote: Jane Seymour]

On the day following Anne's execution or, as some say, on May 30, Henry married his third wife, Jane Seymour. On October 12, 1537, she bore him a son, Edward. Forced by her husband to take part in the christening, an exhausting ceremony too much for her strength, she sickened and died soon afterwards.

[Sidenote: Lutheran tracts]

In the meantime the Lutheran movement was growing apace in England. In the last two decades of Henry's reign seven of Luther's tracts and some of his hymns were translated into English. Five of the tracts proved popular enough to be reprinted. One of them was _The Liberty of a Christian Man_, turned into English by John Tewkesbury whom, having died for his faith, More called "a stinking martyr." The hymns and some of the other tracts were Englished by Miles Coverdale. In addition to this there was translated an account of Luther's death in 1546, the Augsburg Confession and four treatises of Melanchthon, and one each of Zwingli, Oecolampadius and Bullinger,--this last reprinted.

Of course these versions are not a full measure of Lutheran influence, but a mere barometer. The party now numbered powerful preachers like Latimer and Ridley; Thomas Cranmer the Archbishop of Canterbury and Thomas Cromwell, since May, 1534, the king's princ.i.p.al secretary. The adherence of the last named to the Reforming party is perhaps the most significant sign of the times. As his only object was to be on the winning side, and as he had not a bit of real religious interest, it makes it all the more impressive that, believing the cat was about to jump in the direction of Lutheranism, he should have tried to put himself in the line of its trajectory {300} by doing all he could to foster the Reformers at home and the Protestant alliance abroad.