CHAPTER II.

THE HISTORY OF RELIGION.

THE history both of the changes that took place during this period in the constitution of the national church, and also, to some extent, of the new opinions, the controversies, and the persecutions out of which they arose, or by which they were accompanied, has necessarily been given in the preceding chapter. The task that remains to us here is little more than to fill up the outline that has been already drawn.

Throughout the reign of Henry VII., however, and the first half of that of his son and successor, that is to say, for rather more than a third of the present period,— the ancient Roman faith was still both the all but universal belief of the people, and the yet unmodified and omnipotent religion of the law. As often happens with institutions in the last stage of their existence, the power and glory of the church of Rome, in England, seemed to blaze out to a new and unprecedented height immediately before its downfall. It is enough to remark that this was the age of Wolsey, the most gorgeous and puissant prelate that had arisen since Becket. All the highest and most influential officers of the state were still, for the most part, in the hands of churchmen: while they monopolised, of course, the management of ecclesiastical affairs, the civil affairs of the kingdom were also, to a large extent, under their conduct and direction;-they were generally both the ministers of the crown at home, and its ambassadors and most trusted agents abroad. This preference, which they had formerly demanded and struggled for so obstinately as their right, was now more fully accorded to them on the more reasonable ground of their superior qualifications, a ground which the ablest

and wisest kings-those from whom they would have experienced the most determined resistance to their pretensions of a more absolute kind-were the readiest to admit. Thus, the politic, circumspect, and acquisitive character of Henry VII. made him a favourer both of the church and of religion, without being either really religious or superstitious. This great king was a distinguished upholder of the authority of the laws in ordinary cases. Among his other legal improvements, Henry attempted at one time "to pare a little," as Bacon expresses it," the privilege of clergy, ordaining that clerks convict should be burned in the hand, both because they might taste of some corporal punishment, and that they might carry a brand of infamy.' But all his known favour for, and patronage of, the church, did not prevent this innovation from being denounced as a daring infringement of the rights of the ecclesiastical order. The very circumstances of the time that in reality and in their ultimate result tended to bring down the ancient church, had the effect for the present of raising it to greater authority and seeming honour. The unaccustomed murmurs of irreverence and opposition with which it was assailed afforded a pretext for suffering it to exercise its recognised rights with a high hand, and even for endowing it with some new powers: the laws against heresy, for instance, were now stretched to a degree of severity never before known, and the church added to its ancient assumptions that of holding men's lives in its hands, and actually putting to death those of whose opinions it disapproved. These fires of martyrdom were more easily lighted than quenched.

It was in 1494, the ninth year of Henry VII., that the first English female martyr suffered. This was a widow named Joan Boughton, a woman of above eighty years of age. "She was," says Fox, "a disciple of Wycliffe, whom she accounted for a saint, and held so fast and firmly eight of his ten opinions, that all the doctors of London could not turn her from one of them." was burned in Smithfield on the 28th of April.* Mrs.

* Fox, Acts and Monuments, p. 671 (edit. of 1570).

She

Boughton was mother to the Lady Young, who was also suspected of holding the same opinions, and who afterwards suffered the same death. In the course of the next two or three years a few old men and priests went with like heroism to the stake; but in general the persons charged with heresy at this time, when there was as yet little general excitement to animate and sustain them, shrunk from that dreadful death on a mere view of it, and purchased, by a recantation, the privilege of satisfying the law by an exposure to the fagots without the fire. The venerable historian of our martyrs has some curious notices of the fashion in which this ceremony was performed.* On other occasions, however, the commuted punishment was not entirely formal. In 1506, at the same time that William Tylsworth was burned in Amersham, his only daughter being compelled to set fire to him with her own hands,-this daughter, with her husband, and, according to one account, more than sixty persons besides, all bore fagots, and were afterwards not only sent from town to town over the county of Buckingham to do penance with certain badges affixed to them, but were several of them burned in the cheek, and other

66

wise severely treated. "Divers of them,' says Fox, were enjoined to bear and wear fagots at Lincoln the space of seven years, some at one time, some at another.†

Among others who suffered in this reign was one Laurence Ghest, "who was burned in Salisbury for the matter of the Sacrament. He was of a comely and tall personage, and otherwise, as appeareth, not unfriended, for the which the bishop and the close (that is, the canons) were the more loth to burn him, but kept him in prison the space of two years. This Laurence had a wife and seven children."+

Some notion of the peculiar opinions which were commonly held by the English heretics of this age may be gathered from the charges against some of those apprehended and examined by John Arundel, bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, from 1496 to 1502, as *Fox, Acts and Monuments, p. 671 (edit. of 1570). Ibid. p. 711.

† Ibid. p. 710.

In

recorded in the registers of that diocese. They were for the most part the same with the leading doctrines soon after proclaimed by Luther and the other Protestant reformers, embracing a denial of the merit of good works, of the warrantableness of the worship of images, of the efficacy of penance and pilgrimage, of the duty of praying to the saints or the Virgin, of the claims of the pope as successor of St. Peter, of purgatory, and of the transformation of the bread and wine in the sacrament. some cases, however, we find, as might be expected, the contempt for the old belief breaking out with a curious acerbity or irreverence of expression in the enunciation of the new. There were of course varieties of faith, or want of faith, among the dissenters from the church; some went farther than others; and some seem to have stopped at the rejection of image-worship, without advancing so far as to question the worshipping of the Virgin.

The internal history of the established church in the period immediately preceding the downfall of the ancient religion is marked by few events. The successive archbishops of Canterbury during the reign of Henry VII. were, Cardinal Bourchier, whose long primacy of thirtytwo years terminated in 1486; John Morton, the active and useful friend of Henry before he came to the crown, who was also invested with a cardinal's hat, and who survived till 1502; Henry Deane, who was archbishop only for a few months; and, lastly, William Warham, whose translation from London appears not to have taken place till towards the close of the year 1504, more than two years after the death of Deane.* The admonitory murmur of the coming storm of Reformation now made itself heard, among other ways, in the louder popular outcry that arose against the dissolute lives of many of the clergy; and the church authorities were led to make some efforts both to put down the outcry and to correct the evil. At a synod or council of the province of Canterbury, held in St. Paul's in February, 1487, com

*Nicholas, Synopsis of Peerage, p. 820.

plaints having been made that the preachers of the order of St. John of Jerusalem were accustomed in their sermons at Paul's Cross to inveigh against their secular brethren in the hearing of the laity,—who, it was affirmed, all hated the clergy, and delighted to hear their vices exposed, -the Prior of St. John was, on the one hand, directed to prevent this great abuse for the future, and, on the other, a severe reprimand was administered to certain of the London clergy, who were accused of not only spending their whole time in taverns and alehouses, but even imitating the laity in their dress, and allowing their hair to grow long, so as to conceal their tonsure. The censure of the convocation was followed by a pastoral letter of the primate, in which the clergy were solemnly charged not to wear liripoops, or hoods, of silk, nor gowns open in front, nor embroidered girdles, nor daggers, and to keep their hair always so short that everybody might see their ears.* A few words were added in recommendation of residence; but the burthen of the exhortation was spent upon these matters of mere show and profession. Considerable alarm, however, was also excited at this time in the heads of the church by either the actual increase of immorality among the clergy, or the sharper eyes and more earnest inquisition with which the people now began to look into what had long existed. The monks, or regular clergy, were to the full as much as their secular brethren, the parish priests, the objects of this popular outcry. A bull was issued by Pope Innocent VIII. in 1490, in which his holiness, after setting forth-apparently without any doubt of its truth -the information he had received respecting the reprobate lives led by all the English monastic orders, directed Archbishop Morton to admonish the heads of all the convents in his province to reform themselves and those under them, and gave him authority, if his admonitions were neglected, to proceed to more decided measures. In consequence of the papal edict Morton appears to have sent letters to the superiors of all the religious

*Wilkins, Concilia.