Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/394

Rh 374 ENGLAND [CHURCH. provemeut in both church and state. The tastes of Henry VIII. were decidedly ecclesiastical. He had been well edu cated, and was very fairly learned. He had chosen for his chief minister a churchman who had raised himself by ability from a low origin, and who entertained the highest views of the prerogatives of learning, and the value of edu cation, while he was hampered by no superstitious reverence for effete institutions, nor prepared to condemn and punish as heresy every departure from commonly received opinions. The conjuncture seemed favourable for such a reformation as was desired by Erasmus, Thomas More, and John Colet, who were then living much together, and endeavouring by lectures and writings to bring about some resurrection of learning and intellectual life from the death-like trance in which they were lying. How far the plans of the educa tional reformers might have proved successful cannot be judged, for the opportunity for calm measures rapidly passed away. The Saxon monk Luther threw down the gauntlet before the pope, and proclaimed internecine war. This scattered the ranks of the educational reformers, turn ing some of them into fierce persecutors, and placing even the relentless satirist Erasmus, the determined foe of the monkish superstitions, on the side of those whom he had so violently assailed. Luther s Treatise De Babyloniai captivitate Ecde&ae was published in 1520, and by the next year there is abundant evidence, not only that it was well known in England, but that it had produced much effect. In that year both Archbishop Warham and Bishop Longland write to Cardinal Wolsey, urgently calling upon him to take some steps for the suppressing of the growing Lutheranism of Oxford. Wolsey, thus constrained to act, went through the pageant of a public burning, at St Paul s, of all the Lutheran books which could be collected, some time in August 1521. In the same month (August 25) came forth King Henry s treatise against Martin Luther (Assertio Septeni Sacramentorum advcrsus Martiuum Lutherum, edita ab inviclissimo Anylice et Fraucice rege et domino Hibernice, Henrico, ejus nomiiiis octavo}. This attack, which was very violent, and which elicited equal violence in reply, produced a complete schism between the literary reformers of England and the religious reformers of Germany and Switzerland. Two of the former, Bishop Fisher and Sir T. More, joined in the conflict, the latter with somewhat disgraceful violence, while the king, nattered by the title of Defender of the Faith conferred on him by Pope Clement, was enlisted as a thorough-going partisan against the Lutherans. There is reason to believe, how ever, that this was not the case to anything like the same extent with Cardinal Wolsey. In 1523 he distinctly refused to send a commission to Cambridge to drive out Lutheranism. In his splendid structure and grand concep tion of Cardinal College, which was fast growing towaids completion in Oxford, he nominated as fellows a band of Cambridge men who were known to be pronounced Lutherans. This great man seems to liavo believed in the power of truth to defend itself, and to have been thoroughly averse to coercive punishments for heresy. But in this he stood nearly alone, and the march of events soon transferred to a party of Englishmen that bitter hatred which had been conceived by the king, Sir T. More, and the bishops against the followers of Luther. In 1526 William Tyndale, by birth a Gloucestershire man, by education connected with both Oxford and Cambridge, published his first two editions of the New Testament in English at Worms. The English bishops, who knew that Tyndale had been in communication with Luther, immediately took steps for hindering the circulation of these books in England. Many were burned at Cheapside (1527) ; but the supply was by no means stopped, and in addition a largo number of English works, printed abroad, and all breathing the extreme violence and thoroughness of Luther s spirit, made their way into England. Sir Thomas More was selected by the bishops as the champion of orthodoxy, and urgently pressed to undertake the refutation of these books. Hence commenced the controversy between him, Tyndale, Fryth, and Barnes, which continued for some years. Sir Thomas More was specially angered by a clever but somewhat scurrilous brochure, entitled The Supplication of Beggars, written by Simon Fish, a quondam lawyer of Gray s Inn, in which the doctrine of purgatory is mercilessly satirized. To this he replied in the Supplica tion of Souls, an imaginary appeal of the souls in purgatory against the new doctrines, which were likely to leave them bereft of the aid of prayers and masses. Meanwhile the unfortunate divorce case had proved the ruin of Cardinal Wolsey; and Sir T. More, succeeding him as chancellor, had used his power, with the full concurrence of the king and the bishops, to bring many of those who held with Luther or Tyndale to the stake. But while the authorities were thus embittered against reformation which, under other circumstances, they might have treated more favourably, there had been steadily growing since the commencement of the reign a feeling of bitter dislike and exasperation of the laymen against the clergy, which was destined to pro duce very remarkable results. This had been fostered by several causes, among which the determined attempt made by the clergy to resist an enactment of parliament designed to restrict the privilege of benefit of clergy (-i Henry VIII. c. 2) was one. Another was the case of Richard Hunne, a merchant tailor of London, committed to prison by the bishop, and found hanging dead in his cell. His murder was freely attributed to the bishop s commissary, and the fact of his dead body having been burned on the plea of heresy increased the odium excited by this suspicion. That the king shared in the prevailing feeling is evident by his severe treatment of convocation for their trial of Dr Standish, who had justified the Act of Parliament directed against tlio privileges of the clergy. On this occasion (1516), Henry is said to have clearly claimed and explained that supre macy over the church which was afterwards conceded to him (Keilway s Reports). But that which most tended to exasperate the laity against the clergy at this period was, without question, the state of the church courts, and the vexatious disciplinary proceedings to which, on the informa tion of any disreputable person, the laity were constantly subjected. The evil was admitted by some of the bishops, but it seemed as if they were powerless to remedy it. Arch bishop Warham had called upon his convocation to help him in the matter, but Wolsey unwisely interfered, desiring to show his supreme power as legate. He afterwards sum moned the convocations of the two provinces to meet as a legatine synod (June 1523) to treat of the reformation both of the laity and the clergy. Nothing, however, was dons to remedy the crying grievance, and the laity deter mined to take their cause into their own hands. There were thus two elements at work in the country at this period likely to produce important changes in the ecclesiastical system, viz., the rapid development in England of the re ligious opinions of the foreign reformers, and thegrowing feel ing of bitterness entertained by the laity against the clergy. To these wae added, before the meeting of the famous parlia ment of November 1529, another very important factor, in the disappointed and angry temper of the king. Henry, who had imagined that his will must needs be law, had found himself thwarted in the matter of his divorce by the pope and the Roman curia; and the abortive termination of the trial at the legatine court of Blackfriars had roused him to fury. His anger was directed first of all against Wolsey, but he was inclined to be harshly disposed also against the whole of the clerical body, while he already