I. would not be unreasonable to believe it, or at least that a man of CHAP. moderate courage would scarcely care to expose himself to the council's resentment, after a dissolution. A knight was sent Henry VII. to the Tower by Mary, for his conduct in parliament*; and Henry VIII. is reported, not perhaps on very certain authority, to have talked of cutting off the heads of refractory commoners. In the persevering struggles of earlier parliaments against Edward III., Richard II., and Henry IV. it is a very probable conjecture, that many considerable peers acted in union with, and encouraged the efforts of the commons. But in the period now before us, the nobility were precisely the class most deficient in that constitutional spirit, which was far from being extinct in those below them. They knew what havoc had been made among their fathers, by multiplied attainders during the rivalry of the two Roses. They had seen terrible examples of the danger of giving umbrage to a jealous court, in the fate of lord Stanley and the duke of Buckingham, both condemned on slight evidence of treacherous friends and servants, from whom no man could be secure. Though rigour and cruelty tend frequently to overturn the government of feeble princes, it is unfortunately too true that, steadily employed and combined with vigilance and courage, they are often the safest policy of despotism. A single suspicion in the dark bosom of Henry VII., a single cloud of wayward humour in his son, would have been sufficient to send the proudest peer of England to the dungeon and the scaffold. Thus a life of eminent services in the field, and of unceasing compliance in council, could not rescue the duke of Norfolk from the effects of a dislike, which we cannot even explain. Nor were the nobles of this age more held in subjection by terror, than by the still baser influence of gain. Our law of forfeiture was well devised to stimulate, as well as to deter; and Henry VIII., better pleased to slaughter the prey than to gorge himself with the carcass, distri * Burnet, ii. 324. to Mary. I. to Mary. CHAP. buted the spoils it brought him among those who had helped in the chase. The dissolution of monasteries opened a more abunHenry VII. dant source of munificence; every courtier, every peer, looked for an increase of wealth from grants of ecclesiastical estates, and naturally thought that the king's favour would most readily be gained by an implicit conformity to his will. Nothing, however, seems more to have sustained the arbitrary rule of Henry VIII. than the jealousy of the two religious parties formed in his time, and who, for all the latter years of his life, were maintaining a doubtful and emulous contest for his favour. But this religious contest, and the ultimate establishment of the Reformation, are events far too important, even in a constitutional history, to be treated in a cursory manner; and as, in order to avoid transitions, I have purposely kept them out of sight in the present chapter, they will form the proper subject of the next. CHAPTER II. ON THE ENGLISH CHURCH UNDER HENRY VIII., EDWARD VI., AND MARY. State of public Opinion as to Religion-Henry VIII's Controversy with Luther-His Divorce from Catherine-Separation from the Church of Rome-Dissolution of Monasteries--Progress of the Reformed Doctrine in England—Its Establishment under Edward-Sketch of the chief Points of Difference between the two Religions-Opposition made by Part of the Nation-Cranmer-His Moderation in introducing Changes not acceptable to the Zealots-Mary-Persecution under her—Its Effect rather favourable to Protestantism. tion. II. No revolution has ever been more gradually prepared than CHAP. that which separated almost one half of Europe from the communion of the Roman see; nor were Luther and Zuingle any Reforma more than occasional instruments of that change which, had they never existed, would at no great distance of time have been effected under the names of some other reformers. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the learned, doubtfully and with caution, the ignorant with zeal and eagerness, were tending to depart from the faith and rites which authority prescribed. But probably not even Germany was so far advanced on this course as England. Almost a hundred and fifty years before Luther, nearly the same doctrines as he taught had been maintained by Wicliffe, whose disciples, usually called Lollards, lasted as a numerous, though obscure and proscribed sect, till, aided by the confluence of foreign streams, they swelled into the protestant church of England. We hear indeed little of them during some part of the fifteenth century; for they generally shunned II. Reforma tion. CHAP. persecution; and it is chiefly through records of persecution that we learn the existence of heretics; but immediately before the name of Luther was known they seem to have become more numerous, or to have attracted more attention, since several persons were burned for heresy, and others abjured their errors, in the first years of Henry VIII.'s reign. Some of these, as usual among ignorant men engaging in religious speculations, are charged with very absurd notions; but it is not so material to observe their particular tenets as the general fact, that an inquisitive and sectarian spirit had begun to prevail. Those who took little interest in theological questions, or who retained an attachment to the faith in which they had been educated, were in general not less offended than the Lollards themselves with the inordinate opulence and encroaching temper of the clergy. It had been for two or three centuries the policy of our lawyers to restrain these within some bounds. No ecclesiastical privilege had occasioned such dispute, or proved so mischievous, as the immunity of all tonsured persons from civil punishment for crimes. It was a material improvement in the law under Henry VI. that, instead of being instantly claimed by the bishop on their arrest for any criminal charge, they were compelled to plead their privilege at their arraignment, or after conviction. Henry VII. carried this much farther, by enacting that clerks convicted of felony should be burned in the hand. And in 1513, (4 H. 8.) the benefit of clergy was entirely taken away from murderers and highway robbers. An exemption was still made for priests, deacons, and subdeacons. But this was not sufficient to satisfy the church, who had been accustomed to shield under the mantle of her immunity a vast number of persons in the lower degrees of orders, or without any orders at all, and had owed no small part of her influence to those who derived so important a benefit from her protection. Hence, besides violent language in preaching against this statute, the convocation attacked one Doctor Standish, who had denied the divine right of clerks to their tion. II. exemption from temporal jurisdiction. The temporal courts na- CHAP. turally defended Standish ; and the parliament addressed the king to support him against the malice of his persecutors. Henry, Reformaafter a full debate between the opposite parties in his presence, thought his prerogative concerned in taking the same side; and the clergy sustained a mortifying defeat. About the same time, a citizen of London named Hun, having been confined on a charge of heresy in the bishop's prison, was found hanged in his chamber; and though this was asserted to be his own act, yet the bishop's chancellor was indicted for the murder on such vehement presumptions, that he would infallibly have been convicted, had the attorney-general thought fit to proceed in the trial. This occurring at the same time with the affair of Standish, furnished each party with an argument; for the clergy maintained that they should have no chance of justice in a temporal court; one of the bishops declaring, that the London juries were so prejudiced against the church, that they would find Abel guilty of the murder of Cain. Such an admission is of more consequence than whether Hun died by his own hands, or those of a clergyman; and the story is chiefly worth remembering, as it illustrates the popular disposition towards those who had once been the objects of reverence*. Such was the temper of England, when Martin Luther threw down his gauntlet of defiance against the ancient hierarchy of the Catholic church. But, ripe as a great portion of the people might be to applaud the efforts of this reformer, they were viewed with no approbation by their sovereign. Henry had acquired a fair portion of theological learning, and on reading one of Luther's treatises, was not only shocked at its tenets, but undertook to con • Burnet. Reeves's History of the Law, iv. p. 308. The contemporary authority is Keilway's Reports. Collier disbelieves the murder of Hun, on the authority of sir Thomas More; but he was surely a prejudiced apologist of the clergy, and this historian is hardly less so. |