CHAPTER IV. THE ENGLISH AND IRISH REFORMATION. ENGLAND. and Luther. IN 1521 the English monarch forwarded to Rome a copy ENGLAND. of the treatise he had just completed in refutation of Henry VIII. Martin Luther the heresiarch2. On this occasion, Clerk, the envoys who presented the sumptuous manuscript to Leo X. expatiated on the perfect orthodoxy of his countrymen and their entire devotion to the Roman pontiff;-little dreaming that in the course of the next thirty years an era fatal to the old opinions would have dawned on every shire of England as on other parts of Western Christendom, and least of all anticipating that one of the prime movers in the changes then accomplished would be Henry VIII. Above, p. 33, n. 8: cf. Audin's narrative in his Hist. de Henri VIII. I. 259 sq. Paris, 1847. The zeal of the monarch was inflamed and his arguments supported by the leading prelates of the day. Thus Fisher bp. of Rochester preached at St Paul's (May 12, 1521) again ye pernicious doctryn of Martin Luther;' his sermon professing to have been 'made by ye assyngnement of ye moost reuerend fader in God ye lord Thomas cardinal of York' [i. e. Wolsey]. Two years later appeared the same prelate's more elaborate defence of Henry VIII. entitled Adsertionis Lutheranc Confutatio, and also Powel's Propugnaculum, the title of which cha comparatively [CHAP. ENGLAND. himself, who in return for his chivalrous vindication of the schoolmen had been dubbed 'Defender of the Faith'.' Lollardism There is good reason for concluding that throughout inoperative. the dark and troublous period called the 'wars of the roses,' a few scattered seeds of Lollardism continued to bear fruit in the remoter parts of England; nor after the accession of Henry VII., when the authorities in Church and State obtained more leisure for pursuing their repressive policy, could the beginnings of a better life infused into society by Wycliffe and his colleagues be entirely trodden out3. It is remarkable, however, that the rise, the progress, and the final triumphs of the English Reformation, were not sensibly affected by his principles. They may have, doubtless, given birth to certain undercurrents of religious feeling which predisposed one fraction of the English people to accept the new opinions: the circulation also of the Wycliffite versions of Holy Scripture, and of tracts like those preserved in the 'Poor Caitif,' may have shaken here and there the confidence which men had formerly reposed in the established errors and abuses: yet the impulses by which this country was aroused to vindicate its independence of all foreign jurisdictions, to assert the ancient faith and to recast the liturgy and other forms 1 See the bull of Leo X. by which this title was conferred (Oct. 11, 1521) in Wilkins, Concil. 111. 693. The title itself, however, was not new, having been applied to previous kings, e.g. to Henry IV. (1411); Ibid. III. 334. 2 The fullest, if not always the fairest and most critical, account is that of Fox, Booke of Martyrs, pp. 658 sq. Lond. 1583. Many of his examples in the reign of Henry VI. are taken from the diocese of Norwich. 3 Thus in 1485 several persons were burned at Coventry for holding Lollard doctrines (Ibid. pp. 777, 778) and in 1521 (to pass by other cases of persecution in the interval) a considerable number of what were of public worship, are not traceable to any of the feverish ENGLAND. agitations which the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries produced. The real causes of the change, however mixed and Agencies at multiform they may have been, are all resolvable into ducing the three descriptions: First, the feelings of distrust, and ultimately of resentment, which had been awakened and exasperated by the follies, schisms and usurpations of the papacy,—a class of feelings frequently appearing in transactions of the older English parliaments, but never suffered to explode until the crown, on its emancipation from the feudal aristocracy, had found itself in a position to withstand the judgments of the spiritual courts and fix a limit to the vast predomidance obtained by the superior ecclesiastics". Secondly, the higher standards of intelligence and piety prevailing in the English universities, especially among 5 See above, pp. 4-6, and Middle Age, pp. 343 sq. Numerous instances have been collected by Twysden, Hist. Vindication of the Church, pp. 79 sq. Camb. 1847. 7 See above, p. 7. In 1516 a sermon was preached by Kederminster, abbot of Winchcombe, in which he endeavoured to establish the exemption of the clergy from the punishment of the secular judicature,- -an effort which after some controversy induced the king to reassert his own supremacy in most decided language: cf. the account in Burnet, I. 13 sq., who is mistaken, however, where he says that the abbot published a book ('mist avant un lieu d'un décret' is the language of the Law Report to which the historian himself refers). Another illustration of the way in which the jurisdiction of the temporal courts was reasserted may be seen in the case of Richard Hunne (1516); Burnet, Ibid. The same tendency is still more manifest in a scarce tract (? written at first in Latin by bishop Fox in 1534), which seems 8 Erasmus himself visited Oxford work in pro English re formation. ENGLAND. that class of students who imbibed the literary tastes and with them the reformatory spirit propagated by Erasmus. Their modes of operation. Thirdly, the direct influence which had been exerted by the circulation in England of Lutheran tracts1 and other publications tending to produce analogous results. The first of these three causes would naturally operate most in the immediate atmosphere of the court. It was, however, by no means restricted to that narrow circle: it affected also a large knot of bishops2, who, while they abandoned their belief in the papal supremacy almost without a scruple, could see nothing to amend in other dogmas authorized, or commonly advocated, in the whole of Western Christendom. The second cause was felt especially among the thoughtful and more earnest class of as early as 1497 where he made the 1 As early as 1520 Polydore Ver- presse this newe sorte of Lutherans:' Cavendish, Life of Wolsey, p. 272, new ed. Lond. 1852. The bishops with the exception of Fisher acquiesced in all the earlier changes brought about under Henry VIII. In the words of Pugin, Earnest Address on the Establishment of the Hierarchy (Lond. 1851) the remonstrance' of Fisher was 'unsupported by his colleagues' (p. 2), and a catholic nation' was 'betrayed by a corrupted catholic hierarchy.' Some of them evinced no ordinary share of zeal and learning in defence of their new opinions. See, for instance, Bp. Gardiner's 'oration' (1535) De Vera Obedientia (in Brown's Fasciculus, II. 802 sq.: cf. Maitland's Essays on the Reformation, No. xvii. No. xviii. respecting the Preface), and Bp. Tonstall's remarkable sermon against the papal supremacy (1539), reprinted in 1823. The former of these prelates very stoutly defends the title 'summum in terris caput Ecclesiæ Anglicana' as applied to Henry VIII. laying special stress however, (p. 810), on the phrase in terris, and also on the epithet Anglicana. academics, whose extended knowledge of antiquity had ENGLAND. strengthened their distaste for mere scholasticism, had widened the horizon of their theological studies, and impelled them to more sedulous investigation of the Bible and the Early Fathers. Such pursuits, however, had not seriously weakened their attachment to the hierarchy, the service-books, or ritual institutions of the English Church. The third of these causes, harmonizing it would seem with trains of thought and feeling already generated by the Lollard movement, was more popular in its form and sometimes threatened to be democratic in its growth and operation. It would act most beneficially indeed so long as it gave prominence to sacred truths which had been grievously displaced or half-forgotten during the inertness of the Middle Ages; but its balance was destroyed, and therefore it became the parent of disorder and confusion, when it afterwards endeavoured to effect the violent eradication of whatever had been associated in the public mind with superstitions and abuses. racteristics of Church of Out of these threefold agencies, combined as they General cha have been and modified through combination, rose the the Reformed complex structure known as the Reformed Church of England. England,' whose eventful history has therefore ever since exhibited the operation of various elements, instinct with life and spirit, but imperfectly adapted and attempered to each other. The Reformers based their work upon the principle that Christian nations, and consequently national churches, do not owe allegiance, as a matter of Divine right, to any foreign potentate whatever';-thus recover 3 Above, p. 181, n. 8. At the close of the 15th century, Dean Colet, whose life by Knight presents an excellent picture of this class of minds, revived the practice of lecturing at Oxford on Holy Scripture instead of the Schoolmen (cf. Luther's method, p. 17, n. 7). He was also tho roughly Erasmian in his advocacy 4 See above, p. 8. |