B ARBARITY towards the dead bodies of heretics is one of the countless forms in which Popish cruelty has displayed itself. To deposit the human body, when divested of life, with respect in the earth, is at once an act of decency and humanity. This recommends itself so strongly to the instinctive feelings of the mind of man that, even in heathen countries, he has shrunk with horror at the idea of depriving any of his fellow-creatures, even an enemy, of the honour of interment. But the Popish Church has shrunk neither from the idea nor from the practice of this atrocity. The canon law, an infallible authority with Papists, denies the rites of sepulture to the mortal remains of heretics,' and history tells us 1 Decr. Cap. Sacris de Sepultis. how well this law has been obeyed. How often has the wail of anguish proceeded from the Christian church, as from the Jews of old, while she thought, under her persecutions, of her murdered martyrs lying unburied, the prey of ravenous animals: "O God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance; the dead bodies of thy servants have they given to be meat unto the fowls of heaven, the flesh of thy saints unto the beasts of the earth!" (Psalm lxxix. 1, 2). To this, as the fate of many of the Waldenses, Milton refers in his well-known and touching sonnet upon the persecutions they endured: "Avenge, O Lord! thy slaughtered saints, whose bones In the reign of Queen Mary, "the bodies of those who died in prison, either of natural disease or in consequence of hunger, were cast out as carrion in the fields, all persons being forbidden to bury them."1 But Popish persecutors have carried their barbarity against the dead bodies of heretics even further than by leaving them to lie unburied, or not permitting their burial. They have treated them with every conceivable mark of indignity. They have cast them into ditches, or covered them with heaps of stones, dragged them about, kicked them, and trampled them under foot, mangled them, thrown them into pits, cast them forth to dogs and birds of prey, roasted them upon spits, yea, what is almost incredible and horrible to relate, some of these savage cannibals have fricasseed and actually eaten them. The French Papists, as we learn from a Roman Catholic historian, during the period of the league, made rosaries of the ears of slaughtered Huguenots, on which they might repeat their Ave Marias and Pater Nosters; and in the time of the Irish massacre in the reign of Charles I., when cruelties almost unequalled in the history of depraved human nature were perpetrated, the Irish Papists carried their barbarities, in this respect, to a still greater extent.' 1 Southey's Book of the Church, vol. ii, p. 248. 2 Mathieu, Hist., liv. i., p. 119. Bruce's Free Thoughts on the Toleration of Popery, p. 123. The frenzy of Popish persecutors has also driven them to open the graves of heretics, or of persons suspected of heresy, who had been fortunate enough during life to escape their fury, to take out their bones and burn them; an outrage which, though the dead body is insensible, excites almost as strong a sensation of horror as the casting of the living into the burning pile, for it evinces, as we at once feel, not less malignity and cruelty of heart. Councils and popes have decreed that such persons should be tried, condemned, excommunicated, and that their dust and bones should be committed to the flames; and often have these decrees been carried into effect. Many of the Waldenses, after having been interred twenty-five or thirty years, were dug up, and publicly burned, partly from malice, and partly as a pretext for confiscating their property. Thus also was the dead body of John Wickliffe treated, after it had lain many years in the grave. No man before his time had done so much to undermine the Papacy as Wickliffe, and we can easily imagine the "leer malign" with which his resurrectionists would, like the grave-digger in Hamlet, "jowl his skull to the ground, as if it had been Cain's jaw-bone that did the first murder," and when all the fragments were collected, cast them into the devouring element. Similar was the treatment of the dead bodies of Martin Bucer and Paul Fagius (the former professor of divinity in the university of Cambridge, the latter professor of Hebrew in the same university), which, in the reign of Queen Mary, were dug up and publicly burned in the market-place at Cambridge, on the 6th of February, 1556-7. This scene was enacted at a time when the principal cities of England exhibited the horrible spectacle of the burning of living holy martyrs, and it showed that, had these learned Reformers been then alive, they would have shared the same fate as Rogers, Bradford, Ridley, Latimer, and Cranmer. We have been led to make these remarks from their bearing upon the following narrative, which relates not to the life of Mrs. Martyr, but chiefly to the ignominious exhumation of her corpse by Cardinal Pole and his coadjutors, during the reign of Queen Mary, and to the honourable re-interment of her remains in the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth.' KATHARINE VERMILIA, who was originally a nun, was married to Peter Martyr, an Italian Reformer of honourable family, during his residence at Strasburg, whither he had gone upon the invitation of Bucer, and where he had obtained a situation as professor in the academy, on his being obliged, in 1542, to leave his native country to escape the dangers to which his heretical sentiments, and his usefal labours in opening the eyes of many to the knowledge of the truth, particularly at Naples and Lucca, had exposed him. They continued at Strasburg till the end of the year 1547, when Martyr having received an invitation from Archbishop Cranmer to come to England, they came to this country, where Martyr was appointed professor of divinity in the university of Oxford. During her residence in England, Mrs. Martyr was distinguished for her good works, especially for her liberality towards the poor. But her life was not spared many years. She died on the 15th of February, 1553-4. *She was dangerously attacked by quartan ague," says Martyr, in a letter to a friend after her death, "to which she had for a long time been subject, and departed to be with Christ. God enabled her to exercise such faith, piety, fortitude and constancy in the confession of the truth, even to the last hour, that it was in a manner a miracle to all who were present. Although I rejoice in her felicity, The source from which we chiefly derive our materials is a rare contemporary Latin volume, containing an account of the whole proceedings, written by James Calfhill, sub-dean of Christ Church College, and addressed to Edmund Grindal, Bishop of London. Calfhill was a learned man, and took a very active part in putting honour upon the memory of Mrs. Martyr. Foxe, in his Acts and Monuments, vol. viii., pp. 296, 297, and Strype, in his Life of Archbishop Parker, vol. i., pp. 198-201, have brey noticed the circumstances. In the volume referred to there are also various documents illustrative of the life, death, burial, accnsation, condemnation, exhumation, barning, and honourable restoration of Martin Bucer aud Paul Fagius, collected by Conrad Hubert, a learned reformned minister of Strasburg. The whole work was printed at Strasburg, in 12mo, in 1561, by John Oporinus, under the superintendence of Hubert, whose dedication, which is addressed to Michael Dillerus, a learned divine, dated 15th February, 1562. * Courad Hubert. yet I cannot but feel great anguish of spirit in having been so unexpectedly left behind by her at this particular time. On account of the great charity which she always showed towards the poor, she was deeply regretted by almost all the citizens, who regarded her with no common affection; but to me her death has caused a desolation scarcely supportable." She was buried within the church belonging to Christ Church College, Oxford, near the tomb of St. Frideswide, to whom that church had been originally dedicated. Cardinal Pole having appointed commissioners to visit the universities of Cambridge and Oxford, to restore to the colleges the Popish constitutions which had been made void in the time of Edward VI., to make diligent inquiry as to all in the colleges who had not conformed to the Romish religion, now the established faith of the kingdom, and, without delay, to eject every individual on whom the slightest suspicion of heresy rested; this appointment led to the exhumation and burning of the remains of Bucer and Fagius at Cambridge, and to the exhumation and ignominious treatment of Mrs. Martyr's at Oxford. In the work to which we have referred as our principal authority, it is not said that the commissioners had received instructions to perpetrate either of these barbarities. The Cambridge commissioners, as is asserted in that work, having taken up the case of Bucer and Fagius in consequence of a petition presented to them, praying that the dead bodies of these arch heretics, who during life had corrupted many by their pernicious doctrine, should be dug up, it may perhaps be inferred, though not with perfect certainty, that their commission did not contain specific instructions to that effect, but that they acted in the exercise of the large discretionary powers with which their commission invested them. The visitation of the university of Oxford being subsequently to the visitation of the university of Cambridge, the intention formed by the Oxford commissioners to exhumate the corpse of Mrs. Martyr and burn it, was perhaps suggested by the proceedings of the commissioners at Cambridge in reference to the dead bodies of Bucer and Fagius. |