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Barnes the sale of indulgences, and observed that, though the order had been abolished, their sophistries had not been got rid of. ‘Now they be gone with all their trumpery,’ he said; ‘but the devil is not yet gone.’ Men who no longer wore friars' habits offered heaven without works to sinners. This Barnes felt as a home-thrust. Luther's doctrine of justification by faith seems to have been specially popular among those who had belonged, like him, to Luther's own order, the Augustinians; and when his turn came to preach on the third Sunday in Lent he attacked the bishop personally from the same pulpit with much scurrilous abuse and invective. The insult was too gross to be passed over. Urged by his friends, Gardiner complained to the king, who appointed two divines to hear the dispute in private. Putting aside the personal question, Gardiner challenged his opponent to answer his arguments, and gave him a night to prepare his reply. Next morning, after the discussion had lasted two hours, Barnes fell on his knees before him and asked pity, praising the bishop's learning. Gardiner lifted him up and frankly forgave his rudeness, offering to provide a living for him in his own house if he would live ‘fellow-like’ and give no more offence. For two days Barnes seems to have been shaken in his opinions, and even brought one of his own associates to Gardiner to hear his arguments against their favourite heresies. He also signed a retractation; and he and his two friends who had preached in Lent were appointed to preach again in Easter week at St. Mary Spital.

They did so, and Gardiner was present at Barnes's sermon; the preacher appealed to him publicly for forgiveness in a way which rather hurt his feelings, as it seemed calculated to advertise his own humility and cast a doubt upon the genuineness of Gardiner's charity. Yet after the bidding prayer he returned to the old doctrine that he had recanted, or, at least, preached such an ambiguous sermon that the lord mayor, who was present, appealed to the bishop whether he should not at once send him to prison. The sermons of the other two seem to have been equally unsatisfactory, and by order of the council they were all three sent to the Tower. An act of attainder was passed against them in parliament, and they were excepted from the general pardon promulgated this year. On 30 July they were taken to Smithfield, together with three others who had long suffered imprisonment for opinions of a totally opposite description. The latter had been condemned by a bill of attainder in parliament for denying the king's supremacy, and were put to the horrible death then awarded to traitors; while Barnes and his two companions, as heretics, were committed to the flames. Such was the final reward of one whose narrow fanaticism had led him at one time to espouse even with too much warmth the cause of the king, his master. He died a victim to that royal supremacy which he had done his best to promote. Being condemned, moreover, without a hearing, simply by a bill of attainder, no one knew the precise cause for which he suffered. Luther supposed it was for his opposition to the divorce from Anne of Cleves, which may possibly be true. Such biographical notices of Barnes as have hitherto appeared have been founded almost entirely on the statements of puritanical writers like Hall and Foxe, whose well-known prejudice against Bishop Gardiner coloured everything relating to the persecutions of this period. This is the first account of him in which Gardiner's own statements, published at a time when, as he himself repeatedly says, they could all be corroborated by living witnesses, have been even taken into account. They show clearly that it was the supposed persecutor who was forbearing, and that it was the victim who was arrogant, dogmatic, and conceited, far beyond what his real attainments justified.

His principal writings, so far as they are known to us, are as follows: 1. ‘Furnemlich Artickel der Christlichen Kirchen,’ published in German under the name of Antonius Anglus at Nürenberg in 1531. 2. ‘A Supplicacion unto the most gracyous prynce Henry the VIII,’ London, 1534 (an earlier undated edition). 3. Vitæ Romanorum Pontificum,’ Basle, 1535. 4. Various Tracts on Faith and Justification. 5. ‘What the Church is, and who bee thereof.’ The confession of faith which he uttered just before his death was translated into German, and numerous editions of it were published the same year (1540), and shortly afterwards at Augsburg, Wittenberg, and other places in Germany. Barnes's English works, with those of Tyndall and Frith, were issued by Daye, edited by Foxe, in 1573.

[The Supplication of Dr. Barnes; Gardiner's Declaration against Joye; Coverdale's Confutation of Standish; Foxe; Bale's Scriptores; Daye's edition of Tyndall, Frith, and Barnes; Wriothesley's Chronicle; Seckendorf; Strype; Calendar of Henry VIII, vol. v. sq.; Melanchthon's Letters; More's Confutacion of Tyndal (2nd part); Luther's Preface to Barnes's Confession (Erlangen edit. of Luther's Works, lxiii. 396–400); Wilkins, iii. 836; Stat. 32 Hen. VIII, c. 49, s. 10, and c. 60.] 