surgents were the mere tools in the hands of the priests is evident enough from the fifteen articles in which, to use Mr. Froude's own words, "they demanded the restoration of the catholic faith, and the extinction of protestantism with fire and sword." They demanded the mass in Latin; and yet, they say, "we, the Cornish men, utterly refuse the new English, because certain of us understand no English ;" much less, then, it may fairly be presumed, did they understand Latin, and the Latin mass would be no boon to them. "We will have," they say, "the bible and all books in English called in again," a poor pretext for carrying fire and sword through the country. What they really wanted was the restoration of the abbey and chantry lands and the overthrow of the government. They were treated at first, as the result shows, with far too much forbearance. Sir William Paget gave the protector wise advice. He had seen the peasant wars in Germany, "when they might have been appeased at first with the loss of twenty men. Through a weak forbearance of those who thought it a sore matter to lose so many of their even (fellow) Christians, the matter was suffered to go so far ere it was appeased, it cost at least three-score thousand men's lives. Therefore, Sir," he adds, go to it by times." His advice was wise and moderate when the rebels were already spilling blood, and in arms against the crown. Several pitched battles, and many thousand lives, would have been spared by a little wholesome severity at this early stage of the affair. He adds: "Attach to the number of twenty or thirty of the rankest knaves of the shire; let six be hanged of the ripest of them, and the rest remain in prison. Your Grace may say you shall lose the hearts of the people. Of the good people you shall not, of the ill it maketh no matter." But the protector was for gentle means; and a civil war, much slaughter, and many executions, were the consequence. At the distance of three hundred years we see that the protector's conduct, though weak and impolitic, was overruled for good. It does not, it is true, hinder Mr. Froude, and such writers as he, from repeating the stale slander, that "commissions, arguments, and a prison for those who remained unsatisfied, were expected, without further trouble, to establish religion, and to restore a suffering people to prosperity." But it does more than this; it shews the senseless fatuity of such accusations, and their wild injustice. It shows that the reformation had already breathed into christian governments a spirit of moderation utterly unknown before. Even now the reformation was bearing its good fruit: unripe, indeed, but full of promise. There is no instance in our previous history of a formidable rebellion forborne so long, or crushed with so little severity. There are cases enough where rebellion made head because the sovereign was afraid to move, and a few in which rebellion was extinguished without much bloodshed; but the cases are not parallel. They are instances in which the rebellion was too formidable to be

attacked, or too contemptible to be punished. Some examples it was now necessary to make. The popish priests were the ringleaders; and as rebels, and not as papists, the popish priests were hanged. Mr. Froude does not lose his opportunity. We give his account of the death of one of them, who certainly deserved the halter, if that fate was ever due to a rebel and a murderer, albeit a priest of Rome. He was the vicar of St. Thomas', at Exeter :

"This man, for his sins, had been a great hater of the prayer-book and a special doer in the siege. He had saved life more than once, but he had also taken life. One Kingsmill, a tanner of Chagford, was taken by the rebels with a letter from the mayor to Lord Russell, and brought before him for judgment. The vicar laboured in his priestly calling to make his prisoner a rebel; and, not succeeding, had hanged him on an elm tree outside the west gate of the city. And now his own time was come. It was pity of him, men thought; for he had fine gifts and a fine nature. But there was no help for it; Kingsmill's death lay at his door; a court-martial found it there; and he accepted his fate like a gentleman. A beam was run out from St. Thomas's church tower, from which they swung him off into the air; and there Hooker saw him hanging in chains in his popish apparel, a holy-water bucket and sprinklers, a sacring bell, and a pair of beads dangled about his body; and there he hung, till the clothes rotted away, and the carrion crows had pecked him into a skeleton; and down below in St. Thomas's church order reigned, and a new vicar read the English liturgy." (p. 201)

In July, two brothers, the Ketts, rose in Norfolk, formed a camp, and swept the country. They took no human life, but levied black mail upon the county. "They provided themselves in the way of diet so abundantly that in the time which the camp lasted twenty thousand sheep were consumed there, with 'infinite beefs,' swans, hinds, ducks, capons, pigs, and venison." They were treated with a forbearance which, we are bold to say, they would not have met with in the reign of George the Third, perhaps not even in that of Queen Victoria. Matthew Parker, afterwards archbishop of Canterbury, went out from Norwich to advise them to leave off their enterprise, they listened to him, but scorned his mediation. They had now been more than three weeks in arms, and had even laid the city of Norwich under contributions, when a herald appeared, offering a free pardon to every one of them, without exception, in the king's name, on the sole condition that they would "depart to their houses." Kett insolently refused: pardon was for offenders, and they were no offenders, but good servants of the Commonwealth. They rushed upon Norwich, took the city by storm, killed Lord Sheffield, and forced the King's army with lords Cornwallis and Northampton to fly for their lives. Yet after this, on the 23rd of August, a free pardon was again offered to Kett and his mob of soldiers; nor was it until an army of fifteen thousand men, German and Italian

mercenaries, were brought down upon them that they were utterly routed, leaving three thousand five hundred dead upon the field. Yet even then, in the face of an overpowering force, before the first shot was fired, a general pardon was offered by Warwick the commander, which excepted only one or two persons; and though it was refused with a shout of scorn, it was repeated once more after their defeat. Never were rebels so mercifully treated in England, or probably in any other country. Nine of the ringleaders were hanged, besides the two Ketts; one of whom was hung in chains on Norwich castle, the other on the church tower at Wymondham. Such moderation marked the dawn of a new era; it was, we repeat, the first fruit of the reformation. But Mr. Froude does not seem to have suspected that it had any other source than the weakness of the Protector Somerset. Yet, when it suits his purpose, he insinuates a charge of ferocity even against the meekest men of the reformation. Witness the few sentences in which he describes a skirmish at St. Mary's Clyst. "The half-armed Devonshire peasants were poorly matched against trained and disciplined troops. Few who went up the hill came back again; they fell in the summer gloaming, like stout-hearted, valiant men, for their hearths and altars; and Miles Coverdale, translator of the Bible, and future bishop of Exeter, preached a thanksgiving sermon among their bodies as they lay with stiffened limbs, with their faces to the stars." So again in Oxfordshire; where he tells us the parish priests had been excited to madness by the theological controversy on the eucharist. "They had communicated their irritation to the yeomen and labourers, and the county was in disorder. But the people had no organization which would resist regular troops, and punishment was reserved chiefly for their instigators. The rope was introduced to give force to the arguments of Peter Martyr, and far and wide among the villages the bodies of the rectors and vicars were dangled from their church towers." (p. 186.) (p. 186.) But enough of this. The reformation proceeded, and omitting other matters, we attend upon its course, and note the constant grudge our historian bears it. Joan of Kent is burnt for heresy; a horrible crime, disgracing the reformation; but, as Mr. Froude admits, "she died, being one of the very few victims of the ancient heresy with which the reformed church of England has to charge itself." But even this admission must be qualified. "The doctrine of persecution," he adds, "is nevertheless a part of all dogmatic systems, and the causes which first compelled the reformed churches to toleration have acted more slowly but with equal effect upon their rival. The court of Rome could as little venture at the present day to send an unbeliever to the stake as the court of St. James." This is true in the letter, but false in the spirit. Even the audacity of popery would not probably, just now, venture on an auto-da-fé at Lisbon or Madrid. Over what shrieking victims it may gloat in

the lower tier of dungeons in the Inquisition, even at the present moment, we can merely surmise from the fact that half calcined skeletons, and tresses of human hair, which the quicklime had not had time to consume, were gathered in heaps when those cells of horror were burst open (as our prayer is they may soon be burst again) by an indignant populace in 1848. The veracity of the assertion that "the doctrine of persecution is an essential part of all dogmatic systems," it is not worth while to investigate. It has perhaps as much truth in it as the statement upon which our eye glances on the next page. "On the 11th of June, at night, the altar at St. Paul's was taken down, and a table erected in its place, signifying in the change that the body of the Saviour was no longer broken and offered in the sacrament, but that human beings merely partook together of innocent bread and wine." A marginal note accompanies the paragraph. "A.D. 1550, June. Ridley takes down the altar in St. Paul's." The writer who, professing to give the history of the reformation, can venture to connect the name of Ridley with such a statement of his doctrinal views, must hold historical truth and the understanding of his readers in equal scorn. Ridley had seen the blasphemy of the Romish doctrine, but neither he nor any English Reformer ever held or taught the Zuinglian doctrine, that the sacrament was merely a commemorative rite. We pass over "the persecution of Gardiner"—so the pages are headed-without stopping to contrast it with some other persecutions with which his name is associated just ten years later. He was deposed from his bishoprick, and on hearing his sentence "he reviled his judges as heretics and sacramentaries;" for which insolence the council decided, not that he should be hurried to Smithfield, but merely to the Tower of London, and that "henceforth he should have neither pen, ink, nor paper to work his detestable purposes." And this was "the persecution of bishop Gardiner."

The same year it was that the Surplice controversy, from which the story of the Puritans dates its birth, first broke out. Our readers are, we suppose, acquainted with at least the outline of the story. They may think they know it well, and yet have much to learn from Mr. Froude. They may learn, for instance, "that the omission of the oil in the consecration (of bishops) frightened the Anglicans, for it might impede the transmission of the apostolic powers." They may learn that Hooper, no favorite with our Author, "was the most prominent, but at the same time, by far the best and most high-minded of the fanatical faction;" the faction being thus described :-"The protestant was outraged at the continued use of 'vestments,' which marked the priesthood as a peculiar body; at the oath, by God, the Saints, and the holy Gospel,' which bishops were to swear on admission to their sees, and at a use of the Bible which savoured of magical incantation." In a foot-note we are told, that "the agitation of

the Protestants prevented them from being able to describe accurately what was required of them," and Burcher is cited, as writing to Bullinger this account of the ceremony: "the bishop create must carry the Bible on his shoulders, put on a white vestment, and thus habited, and bearing the book, he is to turn himself round three times." Something, we should have thought, not unaptly described as a use of the Bible "savouring of magical incantation." By a dexterous selection and arrangement of extracts from their letters, Mr. Froude makes it appear that both the foreign reformers, especially Peter Martyr and Bucer, and the leaders of the reformation in England, treated Hooper and his scruples with contempt. The dispute ran high, we know. Hooper would not wear the surplice; Ridley insisted upon its use; and Hooper was for a time imprisoned in his own house for contumacy to the privy council. Truly does Mr. Froude add, the public world of the reformers was shaken to its base. But it is utterly untrue that "Peter Martyr, like Bucer, told the suffering Hooper, and with the same indifference, that the thing was of no consequence at all." They told him, not with indifference, but with the utmost concern, how deeply they sympathized with him in his disgrace, and at the same time how much they regretted the cause of it. They said, and the English reformers one and all said, or left it to be inferred from their silence, that if the matter were entirely in their own hands they would at once, and for ever, have abandoned the surplice. It was in itself a thing indifferent. They would rather be without it; but prudence, and even a wise regard for the glory of God and the success of the reformation, induced them to retain it. These were their opinions a hundred times repeated. We can have little respect for the understanding of any man who cannot see the importance of this controversy, whether he range himself on the side of Hooper or of Hooper's opponents. Both parties then saw that great principles were at stake; both parties felt that the question was not merely of a surplice but of a theological system. Hooper and his friends maintained that the notion of a sacrificial priesthood was inseparable from a surplice. Ridley and even Cranmer abhorred the sacrificial theory as much as Hooper, but they did not admit that there was an inseparable, though there had in fact long been an accidental, connection betwixt the two. Far from treating the subject with contemptuous indifference, there is not one point on which, through the whole of their long correspondence, extending over twenty years, they speak with more anxiety, not one to which they revert so frequently. Nor do we remember anything which elicited warmer congratulations from them than Hooper's cheerful though tardy consent to wear the surplice. He was welcomed back with a burst of joy. Peter Martyr writes to Bullinger on the 1st of June, 1550, "At length Hooper is numbered amongst our bishops, to the great delight of all good