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Barnes like that of the day following, and put forth various other unconventional opinions. It was a sermon of a highly puritanical character, well calculated to raise a stir; but when brought before the vice-chancellor at Clare Hall he declined to repudiate sentiments which he had not precisely uttered, or to give any satisfactory explanation. The result was that he was sent up to London to appear before Wolsey as legate. The substance of his examination, both at Cambridge and before Wolsey, is recorded by himself, and gives us, what was certainly not intended by the writer, rather a favourable impression of the cardinal's real humility. Wolsey read over to him the catalogue of articles charged against him, asking his reasons occasionally on one or other point. At last he came to the 22nd article, by which it appeared that Barnes had attacked his pomp and splendour as a cardinal. ‘How think ye?’ said Wolsey. ‘Were it better for me, being in the honour and dignity that I am, to coin my pillars and poleaxes and give the money to five or six beggars than for to maintain the commonwealth by them as I do?’ Barnes answered that he thought it would be more conducive to the honour of God and the salvation of the cardinal's soul that the pillars and poleaxes should be coined and given away in alms; as for the commonwealth, it did not depend on them. Wolsey seems to have thought him a foolish fellow, and to have been anxious to put an end to the proceedings against him. ‘Will you be ruled by us,’ he asked him, ‘and we will do all things for your honesty and for the honesty of the university?’ ‘I thank your grace,’ replied Barnes, ‘for your good will. I will stick to the holy scripture and to God's book, according to the simple talent that God hath lent me.’ ‘Well,’ said the cardinal, ‘thou shalt have thy learning tried to the uttermost, and thou shalt have the law.’

He was accordingly examined in February 1526 by the bishops of London, Rochester, Bath, and St. Asaph's, on twenty-five articles objected to him. In preparing his answers Coverdale and two other of his Cambridge friends acted as his secretaries. He would have been sent to the Tower, but, at the intercession of Wolsey's secretary, Gardiner, and Edward Fox, he was committed to the custody of a serjeant-at-arms till produced at the chapter-house at Westminster before the bishops. The result of his examination was that he was called on to abjure or burn, and he is said to have had serious thoughts of enduring the latter alternative; but Gardiner and Fox persuaded him to accept the former. Gardiner, who had known him at Cambridge, himself describes him as having been ‘beloved of many as a good fellow in company,’ though ‘of a merry scoffing wit;’ and he could not but befriend him. He and four German merchants of the Steelyard, who had been condemned at the same time for propagating Luther's writings, were sentenced to carry faggots at St. Paul's. On the day appointed the cathedral was crowded. The cardinal, with six-and-thirty abbots, mitred priors and bishops in full pomp, sat enthroned on a scaffold at the top of the stairs, and Bishop Fisher, of Rochester, preached a sermon against Lutheranism; after which Barnes and the others knelt down, asked forgiveness of God, the church, and the cardinal, and then were conducted to the rood at the north door of the cathedral, where, a fire being lighted, they cast in their faggots. They were then absolved by Bishop Fisher.

Nevertheless Barnes, who had been previously committed to the Fleet, was sent back thither, and remained half a year in prison. Afterwards he was given up to his own order and placed in the Austin Friars in London, where he continued ‘a free prisoner,’ as Foxe calls him, for some time; but upon further complaints being made against him he was transferred to the Austin Friars at Northampton, where he once more stood in danger of being burned as a relapsed heretic. How he had merited such treatment we are not informed by sympathising biographers; but a Lollard examined for heresy some time afterwards distinctly states that he had visited Friar Barnes at the Austin Friars in London at Michaelmas 1526, and that Barnes had surreptitiously sold him a New Testament, and promised to write to a clergyman in Essex to encourage him in heresy ( Eccl. Mem. I. ii. 55). This in itself, after a recantation of former errors, was enough to place him in considerable danger; but he contrived, probably in 1528 (in the third year of his imprisonment, says Bale), to escape beyond sea to Antwerp. He pretended to be mad; wrote a letter saying he meant to drown himself, and left his clothes where they might appear to give evidence of the fact. He spent the next two or three years in Germany, where, to avoid detection, he assumed the name of Anthonius Amarius, or Antonius Anglus, became acquainted with Luther and the other German reformers (he even lodged with Luther), and obtained some influence with Frederic I of Denmark and the Duke of Saxony. In this exile he wrote a treatise in defence of some articles of the Lutheran faith, which was published in German, with a translation by Bugenhagen, in 1531. During