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over, and they would have it brought fairly and fully before the council.

The arguments on both sides were not a little curious. The French protested that they had not the slightest intention of offering any offence to England, having only in view the welfare and union of the church, the happy progress of the council, the general advantage of Christendom, and the particular interest of France. But it was most unfitting, they argued, that England should, on this occasion, vote as a fourth or fifth part of Christendom, thus making its voice equivalent to that of all Italy, or all France, or all Spain, or all Germany, each of which nations contained within it kingdoms and nations equipollent to England. When Benedict XII. divided the pope's obedience, as it was called, into four nations, he reckoned England with Germany as one. When the same pope divided Christendom into provinces, for the purpose of regulating the chapters of the Benedictines, he allowed in that division six provinces to France, and only two to England, to wit, those of York and Canterbury. Evidently, therefore, there was no justice in setting England upon a par with France, which surpassed it so far in the number of its provinces, cathedrals, bishoprics and archbishoprics, universities, and all other characters which distinguish a nation. It was contrary to justice, they maintained, that so small a part of Christendom should have a voice equal to France, much less to Germany, Italy and Spain; and they required either that England, renouncing her pretensions to be a separate nation, should be reckoned in subordinate connection with the German nation, or that the other nations should be subdivided into several, proportioned to the English, or that the council should vote not by nations, but by persons;-the mode for which the Popes and those who were opposed to any effectual reform in the church, always strenuously contended.

The English began their reply by premising that it was not their intention ever to refer a right so indisputable as theirs to arbitration; and that they answered merely to prevent ill-disposed persons from taking an advantage of the silence which they had hitherto observed for the sake of peace. The argument concerning the number of provinces they proved to be futile, showing that the distribution in question was made solely for the convenience of the prelates in their visitations, and for holding the chapter of the Benedictines. Then as to the antiquity and extent of their nation, they argued that Wales, Scotland, and Ireland ought to be accounted with England, just as Provence, Dauphiny, Savoy, Burgundy, Lorraine, and other provinces, which did not obey the king of France, were nevertheless included in the French nation. Eight kingdoms, they averred, were comprized in the

English

English nation: England, Scotland, and Wales, composing Great Britain, were three; Ireland four; and for the four others they went to the Orkney Islands, which they said were sixty in number, evidently including under that appellation the Shetlands, as well as all the other Scotch islands, and the Isle of Man. Even in extent, they said, England, which extended 800 English miles from north to south, that is forty days' journey, exceeded France; and it contained 52,000 parish churches, whereas France had not above 6,000. As to the antiquity of their respective churches, the memorialist gave sufficient credit to both: for while he claimed Joseph of Arimathea for the first apostle of England, he allowed that Dionysius, the Areopagite, stood in the same relation to France. But England could boast the honour of having given birth to Constantine, the greatest benefactor of the church of Rome; England could boast its constant submission to that church, never from earliest times having been involved in any schism; and England enjoyed the privilege of having two perpetual legates a latere. One language only was spoken within the French dominions, and in the English, there were, besides its own, Scotch, Welsh, Cornish, Irish, and Gascon. But they rested, finally, upon an argument creditable to that moderation from which the English government has never departed in its conduct towards other nations. If it were deemed necessary, they said, for the purposes of the council that Christendom must be divided into four parts, a geographical division, according to the four quarters of the world, was the most commodious, as well as the most natural: in this the east should comprize Hungary, Bohemia, Poland, and Germany; the west, France and Spain; the north, England with its dependencies, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway; and the south, Italy, with those countries who were of the Pope's obedience, as the inhabitants of Candia and Cyprus. A fourfold division could not be made by languages, there being so many; nor by kingdoms for the same reason; and if four kingdoms were preferred, the distinction would be arrogant and ambitious, and must produce ill feelings, if not ill consequences. For themselves they would consent to any arrangement, provided no wrong were thereby done to any nation or kingdom, and that they voted by nations, not by persons, as those would have it to be who had neither the reformation, nor the peace and union of the church at heart.

The English carried their point in this dispute, having not only reason on their side, but the authority of the Emperor also, who was very much influenced by the Bishop of Salisbury. That prelate is said to have been his right hand in all the measures of reformation which he began and seriously intended, but which

then,

then, as in earlier and later councils, were effectually baffled by. the intrigues of papal policy. Hallam died shortly after this decision, and was buried in the cathedral of Constance with such honours as have seldom been paid to any one in a foreign land,the Emperor, the princes, the cardinals, and all the clergy attending his funeral. If this English prelate was well qualified both by his ability and moderation for the service in which he was employed, the Castilians had among their representatives a person not less eminently endowed with another qualification, less episcopal indeed, but which he found occasion to display at the expense of one of the English ambassadors. The Englishman happened to be diminutive in stature, whereas the Spaniard, D. Diego de Anaya, bishop of Cuenca, was a person of great bodily strength, in whose hands a battle-axe would have seemed more appropriate than a crosier. These persons one day disputed at the council for precedency, high words ensued, and the bishop put an end to the contest by taking his adversary round the waist, carrying him like a child to the lower end of the church, and then throwing him into an open grave. Well pleased with what he had done, and yet not satisfied with it, as soon as he had returned to his place he said to his colleague, D. Martin Fernandes de Cordova, As a priest I have just committed the ambassador of England to the dust. See you to what remains as an hidalgo and a knight!' This bishop might have been characteristically employed in smiting the Moors for the love of charity; but as a person who was to partake the gift of infallibility, and receive his part of that inspiration by which the errors of the Christian church were to be rectified and its troubles composed, he seems to have been oddly chosen.

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Bishop Hallam's mission to Constance is remarkable in literary history, inasmuch as the first dramatic piece which is known to have been exhibited in Germany, was represented under the direction of him and his colleagues, by the persons of their retinue, before the Emperor. It was a Mystery, comprizing the various events of the nativity, the arrival of the wise men of the East, and the massacre of the Innocents. This was fourscore years before Reuchlen's Latin imitation of the farce of Patheline, which has been supposed to be the first dramatic exhibition in Germany, was represented at Heidelberg.

William Aiscough, the third bishop in succession after Hallam, was one of the victims who perished in Jack Cade's insurrection. The populace at that time broke loose in many parts of the kingdom, and this prelate, then residing at Eddington in Wiltshire, was dragged from the high altar of that collegiate church when he was celebrating mass, and murdered. The cause

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of his unpopularity is said to have been, that, being clerk of the council and confessor to the king, he was so much occupied about the court as to neglect his see. Lionel Woodville, his second successor, died more pitiably of a broken heart. This member of a conspicuous and unhappy family was brother to Edward the Fourth's queen, the most unfortunate in English history. His fortunes (being a churchman) were not overthrown in the wreck of that family, but he was unable to bear up against such repeated and cruel bereavements, and when Buckingham, who had married one of his sisters, was beheaded in the market-place at Salisbury, the bishop did not long survive the grief of this last affliction. His successor, Thomas Langton, was a man for whom it had been better if he had lived earlier or later, before the principles by which the Reformation was brought about began to work in this country, or after that great and happy change had been effected. For with a disposition to employ his wealth munificently and beneficially in adorning his churches, and in the encouragement of literature, we find him bearing a part, whether willingly or not, in the prevailing system of persecution. Allix, one of the many eminent men who have been beneficed in that cathedral, has preserved, from an old register, the abjuration of six persons' greatly noted, defamed, and detected' for heretics in the diocese of Sarum, made before the bishop as their ordinary and judge, and the sentence which he past upon Augustine Stere, who appears to have been considered the most guilty. The said Augustine had said, that the church was made a synagogue and a house of merchandize, and that the priests were but scribes and pharisees, not profiting the Christian people, but deceiving them. He had denied that the very body of our Lord was in the wafer, and had, moreover, said that the priests might buy thirty such gods for one penny, and would not sell one of them under two-pence. Harry Bennet, another of these unlucky men, confessed that he had not stedfastly believed in the sacrament of the altar, and had justified his unbelief by this argument, that if there were three hosts in one pix, one of them having been consecrated, and the others not, a mouse would just as readily eat the transubstantiated wafer as those which were mere flour and water, which he thought the mouse could not possibly have done if the actual body of our Saviour had been there. Gage, the Dominican, tells us that an accident of this kind which he witnessed, led him first to doubt the truth of this monstrous doctrine, and, finally, to withdraw from the Romish church. The illustration, however, was commonly used among the early reformers, and afforded them an argument which it was easier to silence by faggot and fire, than to confute. He maintained also that those persons who spent their money in performing pilgrimages

might have employed it better at home; that if a sinner repented heartily before God, he might be saved as well as if he had been shriven by a priest; and that as for the guidance which they could get from their priests, it was as if blind William Harper should be leading another blind man to Newbury,—they might both fall into the ditch.

These poor men, rather than be burnt alive for maintaining their opinions, (which was the alternative proposed to them,) confessed them to be contrary to the common doctrine and determination of the universal church; acknowledged themselves to have been learners and teachers of heresies, errors, opinions, and false doctrines, contrary to the Christian faith; and

'Forasmuch,' they were made to say, 'as it is so that the laws of the Church of Christ and holy canons of saints be grounded in mercy, and God wol not the death of a sinner, but that he be converted and live; and also the church closeth not her lap to him that wol return, we therefore, and every one of us, willing to be partiners of this foresaid mercy, forsake and renounce all these articles; and now contrite and fully repenting them all,-judicially and solemnly them forsake, abjure, and wilfully renounce for evermore; and not only them, but all other heresies, errors, and damnable doctrines contrary to the determination of the universal church of Christ. Also that we shall never hereafter be to any such persons, or person, favorers, counsellors, maintainers, or of any such, privily or openly; but if we know any such hereafter, we and every one of us, shall denounce and disclose them to you Reverend Father in God, your successors, or officers of the same, or else to such persons of the church as hath jurisdiction on the persons so faulty, so help me God and all holy Evangels; submitting us, and every of us, openly, not coacte, but of our free will, to the pain, rigour, and sharpness of the law that a man relapsed ought to suffer in such case, if we, or any of us, ever do or hold contrary to this our abjuration in part, or the whole thereof.' The record appears to have been imperfect, but it contains the sentence passed upon Augustine Stere in parte pœnitentiæ suæ. Bare-headed, bare-legged, and bare-footed, in his shirt, cloak, and linen drawers, he was to do penance with a faggot on his shoulder, and a firebrand in his hand, at Windsor, Reading, Newbury, Salisbury, Cerne, Milton, Abbotsbury, Abingdon, and Sherburne, on market-days and Sundays, when there was the greatest concourse of people, before whom he was to read his abjuration, after having been marched in procession, as a public spectacle, in this plight. Every day of his life he was to repeat the Pater-noster and Ave Maria five times, and the Creed once, before the crucifix kneeling; and he was never to go to Newbury, (the place of his former residence,) nor to any place within seven miles of it, without the bishop's license. This, it must be remembered, was part

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