England (Before the Reformation)

This term England is here restricted to one constituent, the largest and most

populous, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

Thus understood, England (taken at the same time as including the Principality

of Wales) is all that part of the Island of Great Britain which lies south of the

Solway Firth, the River Liddell, the Cheviot Hills, and the River Tweed; its area is

57,668 square miles, i.e. 10,048 square miles greater than that of the State of

New York, but 11,067 square miles less than that of Missouri; its total resident

population in 1901 was 23,386,593, or 78.2 percent of the population of the

United Kingdom.

For the history of England down to the Norman Conquest the reader may be

referred to the article ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH; its later history is treated in the

article ENGLAND SINCE THE REFORMATION. We begin our present account of

pre-Reformation England with the new order of things created by William the

Conqueror.

Although the picture of the degradation of the English Church in the first half of

the eleventh century which has been drawn by some authorities (notably by H.

Boehmer, "Kirche und Staat", 79) is very exaggerated, it is nevertheless certain

that even King Edward the Confessor, with all his saintliness, had not been able

to repair the damage caused partly by the anarchy of the last ten years of Danish

rule, but not less surely, if remotely, by the disorders which for many generations

past had existed at the centre of Christendom. Of the prevalence of simoniacal

practices, of a scandalous and widespread neglect of the canons enjoining

clerical celibacy, and of a general subordination of the ecclesiastical order to

secular influences, there is no room for doubt. These evils were at that time

almost universal. In 1065, the year of St. Edward's death, things were no better in

England than on the Continent of Europe. Probably they were rather worse. But

the forces which were to purify and renovate the Church were already at work.

The monastic reform begun in the tenth century at Cluny had spread to many

religious houses of France and among other places had been cordially taken up

in the Norman Abbey of Fécamp, and later at Bec. On the other hand this same

ascetical discipline had done much to form the character both of Brun, Bishop of

Toul, who in 1049 became pope, and is known as St. Leo IX, and of Hildebrand

his chief counsellor, afterwards still more famous as St. Gregory VII. Under the

auspices of these two popes a new era dawned for the Church. Effective action

was at last taken to restrain clerical incontinence and avarice, while a great

struggle began to rescue the bishops from the imminent danger of becoming

mere feudatories to the emperor and other secular princes.

William the Conqueror had established intimate relations with the Holy See. He

came to England armed with the direct authorization of a papal Bull, and his

expedition, in the eyes of many earnest men, and probably even his own, was

identified with the cause of ecclesiastical reform. The behaviour of Normans and

Saxons on the night preceding the battle of Hastings, when the former prayed

and prepared for Communion while the latter caroused, was in a measure

significant of the spirit of the two parties. Taken as a whole, the Conqueror's

dealings with the English Church were worthy of a great mission. All the best

elements in the Saxon hierarchy he retained and supported. St. Wulstan was

confirmed in the possession of the See of Worcester. Leofric of Exeter and

Siward of Rochester, both Englishmen, as well as some half-dozen prelates of

foreign birth who had been appointed in Edward's reign, were not interfered with.

On the other hand, Stigand, the intriguing Archbishop of Canterbury, and one or

two other bishops, probably his supporters, were deposed. But in this there was

no indecent haste. It was done at the great Council of Winchester (Easter, 1070),

at which three papal legates were present. Shortly afterwards the vacant sees

were filled up, and, in procuring Lanfranc for Canterbury and Thomas of Bayeux

for York, William gave to his new kingdom the very best prelates that were then

available.

The results were undoubtedly beneficial to the Church. The king himself directly

enjoined the separation of the civil and ecclesiastical courts, for these

jurisdictions in the old shiremoots and hundredmoots had hardly been

distinguished. It was probably partly as a consequence of this division that

ecclesiastical synods now began to be held regularly by Lanfranc, with no small

profit to discipline and piety. Strong legislation was adopted (e.g. at Winchester

in 1176) to secure celibacy among the clergy, though not without some

temporary mitigation for the old rural priests, a mitigation which proves perhaps

better than anything else that in the existing generation a sudden and complete

reform seemed hopeless. Further, several episcopal sees were removed from

what were then mere villages to more populous centres. Thus bishops were

transferred from Sherborne to Salisbury, from Selsey to Chichester, from Lichfield

to Chester, and not many years after from Dorchester to Lincoln, and from

Thetford to Norwich. These and the like changes, and, not perhaps least of all,

the drafting of Lanfranc's new constitutions for the Christ Church monks, were all

significant of the improvement introduced by the new ecclesiastical regime.

With regard to Rome, the Conqueror seems never to have been wanting in

respect for the Holy See, and nothing like a breach with the pope ever took place

during his lifetime. The two archbishops went to Rome in 1071 to receive their

pallia, and when (c. 1078) a demand was made through the papal legate, Hubert,

for the payment of arrears of Peter's-pence, the claim was admitted, and the

contribution was duly sent.

Gregory, however, seems at the same time to have called upon the King of

England to do homage for his kingdom, regarding the payment of Romescot as

an acknowledgment of vassalage, as in some cases, e.g. that of the Normans in

Apulia (See Jensen, "Der englische Peterspfennig", p. 37), it undoubtedly was.

But on this point William's reply was clear. "One claim [Peter's-pence] I admit,"

he wrote, "the other I do not admit. To do fealty I have not been willing in the

past, nor am I willing now, inasmuch as I have never promised it, nor do I

discover that my predecessors ever did it to your predecessors." It is plain that

all this had nothing whatever to do with the recognition of the pope's spiritual

supremacy, and in fact the king says in the concluding sentence of the letter:

"Pray for us and for the good estate of our realm, for we have loved your

predecessors and desire to love you sincerely and to hear you obediently before

all" (et vos præ omnibus sincere diligere et obedienter audire desideramus).

Possibly the incident led to some slight coolness, reflected, for example, in the

rather negative attitude of Lanfranc towards the antipope Wibert at a later date

(see Liebermann in "Eng. Hist. Rev.", 1901, p. 328), but it is also likely that

William and his archbishop were only careful not to get entangled in the strife

between Gregory and the Emperor Henry IV. In any case, the more strictly

ecclesiastical policy of the great pontiff was cordially furthered by them, so that

St. Gregory, writing to Hugh, Bishop of Die, remarked that although the King of

England does not bear himself in all things as religiously as might be wished,

still, inasmuch as he does not destroy or sell the churches, rules peaceably and

justly, refuses to enter into alliance with the enemies of the Cross of Christ (the

partisans of Henry IV), and has compelled the priests to give up their wives and

laymen to pay arrears of tithe, he has proved himself worthy of special

consideration. As has been recently pointed out by an impartial authority (Davis,

"England under Normans and Angevins", p. 54) "Lanfranc's correspondence and

career prove that he and his master conceded important powers to the Pope not

only in matters of conscience and faith but also in administrative questions. They

admitted for example the necessity of obtaining the pallium for an archbishop and

the Pope's power to invalidate episcopal elections. They were scrupulous in

obtaining the Pope's consent when the deposition or resignation of a bishop was

in question and they submitted the time-honoured quarrel of York and Canterbury

to his decision."

No doubt a strong centralized government was then specially needed in Church

as well as State, and we need not too readily condemn Lanfranc as guilty of

personal ambition because he insisted on the primacy of his own see and

exacted a profession of obedience from the Archbishop of York. The recent

attempt that has been made to fasten a charge of forgery upon Lanfranc in

connection with this incident (see Boehmer, "Falschungen Erzbischof

Lanfranks") breaks down at the point where the personal responsibility of the

great archbishop is involved. Undoubtedly many of the documents upon which

Canterbury's claims to supremacy was based were forgeries, and forgeries of

that precise period, but there is no proof that Lanfranc was the forger or that he

acted otherwise than in good faith (see Walter in "Götting gelehrte Anzeigen",

1905, 582; and Saltet in "Revue des Sciences Ecclés.", 1907, p. 423).

Well was it for England that William and Lanfranc, without any violent overthrow

of the existing order of things, either in Church or State, had nevertheless

introduced systematic reforms and had provided the country with good bishops.

A struggle was now at hand which ecclesiastically speaking was probably more

momentous than any other event in history down to the time of the Reformation.

The struggle is known as that about Investitures, and we may note that it had

already been going on in Central Europe for some years before the question,

through the action of William II and Henry I, sons of the Conqueror, reached an

acute phase in England. Down to the eleventh century it may be said that,

though the election of bishops always supposed the free choice, or at least the

acceptance, of their flocks, the procedure was very variable. In these earlier ages

bishops were normally chosen by an assembly of the clergy and people, the

neighbouring bishops and the king or civil magnates exercising more or less of

influence in the selection of a suitable candidate (see Imbart de la Tour, "Les

élections épiscopales"). But from the seventh and eighth century onwards it

became increasingly common for the local Churches to find themselves in some

measure of bondage. From the ancient principle of "no land without a lord" it was

easy to pass to that of "no church without a lord", an whether the bishopric was

situated upon the royal domain or within the sphere of influence of one of the

great feudatories, men came to regard each episcopal see as a mere fief which

the lord was free to bestow upon whom he would, and for which he duly exacted

homage. This development was no doubt much helped by the fact that as the

parochial system grew up, it was the oratory of the local magnate which in rural

districts became the parish church, and it was his private chaplain who was

transformed into the parish priest. Thus the great landowner became the

patronus ecclesi , claiming the right to present for ordination any cleric of his own

choice. Now the relation of a sovereign towards his bishops came in time to be

regarded as precisely analogous. The king was held to be the lord of the lands

from which the bishop derived his revenues. Instead of the possession of these

lands being regarded as the apanage of the spiritual office, the acceptance of

episcopal consecration was looked upon as the special condition or service upon

which these lands were held from the king. Thus the temporal sovereign claimed

to make the bishop, and, to show that he did so, he "invested" the new spiritual

vassal with his fief by presenting to him the episcopal ring and crosier. The

episcopal consecration was a subordinate matter which the king's nominee was

left to arrange for himself with his metropolitan and the neighbouring bishops.

Now, as long as the supreme authority was wielded by religiously-minded men,

princes who took thought for the spiritual well being of their kingdoms, no great

harm necessarily resulted from this perversion of right order. But when, as too

often happened during the iron age, the monarch was godless and unprincipled,

he either kept the see vacant, in order to enjoy the revenues, or else sold the

office to the highest bidder. It must be obvious that such a system, if allowed to

develop unchecked could only lead in the course of a few generations to the utter

demoralization of the Church. When the bishops, the shepherds of the flock,

were themselves licentious and corrupt, it would have been a moral miracle if the

rank and file of the clergy had not degenerated in an equal or even greater

degree. Upon the bishop depended ultimately the admission of candidates to

ordination and he also was ultimately responsible for their education and for the

maintenance of ecclesiastical discipline.

Now the fact cannot he disputed that in the tenth century a very terrible laxity

had come to prevail almost everywhere throughout Western Christendom. The

great monastic reform of Cluny and many individual saints like Ulric, at

Augsburg, and Dunstan and Æthelwold, in England, did much to stem the tide,

but the times were very evil. Worldly minded men, often morally corrupt, were

promoted by sovereigns and territorial magnates to some of the most important

sees of the Church, many of them obtaining that promotion by the payment of

money or by simoniacal compacts. The lower clergy as a rule were grossly

ignorant and in many cases unchaste, but under such bishops they enjoyed

almost complete immunity from punishment. No doubt the corruptions of the age

have been exaggerated by writers of the stamp of H. C. Lea, Michelet, and

Gregorovius, but nothing could more conclusively prove the gravity of the evil than

the fact that for two centuries the Church had to struggle with the abuse by which

benefices threatened to become hereditary, descending from the priest to his

children. Happily help was at hand. Many individual reformers strove to introduce

higher religious ideals and met with partial success, but it was the merit of the

great pontiff, St. Gregory VII, to go straight to the root of the evil. It was useless

to fulminate decrees against the concubinage of priests and against their neglect

of their spiritual functions if the great feudal lords could still nominate unworthy

bishops, bestowing investiture by ring and crosier and enforcing their

consecration at the hands of other bishops as unworthy as the candidates.

Gregory saw that no permanent good could be effected until this system of lay

investitures was utterly overthrown. Those who have accused Gregory of

insufferable arrogance, of a desire to exalt without measure the spiritual authority

of the Church and to humble all secular rulers to the dust, make little allowance

for the gravity of the evils he was combating and for the desperate nature of the

struggle. When feudalism seemed on the point of so completely swallowing up

all ecclesiastical organization, it was pardonable that St. Gregory should have

believed that the remedy lay not in any compromise or balance of power, but in

the unqualified acceptance of the principle that the Church was above the State.

If, on the one hand, he considered that it was the function of the Vicar of Christ to

direct and, if need be, chastise the princes of the earth, it is also clear from the

history of his life that he designed to use that power impartially and well.

In England the struggle over investitures developed somewhat later than on the

Continent. If, in the matter of the election of bishops, Gregory VII forbore to press

the claims of the Church to extremities under such a ruler as William the

Conqueror, this was surely not to be attributed to pusillanimity. The pope's

forbearance was due quite as much to the fact that he was satisfied that the king

made good appointments, as to the circumstance that his own energies were for

the time absorbed in the greater struggle with the emperor. Even under the rule of

William Rufus no great abuses declared themselves before the death of Lanfranc

(1089). It is very noteworthy that William of St. Calais, Bishop of Durham, in

1088, having been accused of treason before the King's Court, questioned the

competence of the Court and appealed to the pope. Practically speaking, his

appeal was allowed, and he was granted a safe-conduct out of the kingdom,

though only after the surrender of his fief. This was virtually an admission that a

bishop held only the temporalities of his see from the crown, and that as a

spiritual person he was free to challenge the decision of any national tribunal.

Such an incident can with difficulty be reconciled with those theories of the

independence of the English Church which commonly prevail among modern

Anglicans.

With the death of Lanfranc, however, all that was evil in the nature of William

Rufus seems to have come to the surface. Under the influence of the man who

was his evil genius, Ralph Flambard, a cleric whom he eventually made Bishop of

Durham, the king during nearly the whole of his reign set himself to undo the

good effected by his father and Lanfranc. In the words of the chronicler, "God's

Church was brought very low". Whenever a bishop or abbot died, one of the

king's clerks was sent to take possession of all the rents for the use of the

crown, leaving but a bare pittance to the monks or canons. The prelacies whose

revenues were thus confiscated were long kept vacant, and no new appointment

was made except upon payment of a large sum of money by way of a "relief".

For the credit of one or two really good men like Ralph Luffa and Herbert Losinga,

who during these bad times became respectively Bishops of Chichester and

Norwich (the latter paying a thousand pounds for his nomination), it should be

pointed out that a certain pretext of feudal custom lent a decent veil to the

simony involved in these transactions. The obsolete doctrine that a fief was a

precarious estate, and granted only for a lifetime, was revived by Flambard, and,

as a corollary, large sums of money, as "reliefs" (from relevare, "to take up

again"), were demanded, when any fief, lay or spiritual, was conceded to a new

possessor. But bishops and abbots were made to pay proportionately more than

earls or barons, and a relief was exacted in some cases even from all the

subordinate tenants of episcopal sees the moment the estate came into the

king's hands (see Round, "Feudal England", p. 309). All this only illustrates

further the evils inherent in the system of regarding a spiritual office as a fief held

from the king. In the case of the metropolitan See of Canterbury, no successor

was appointed until four years after Lanfranc's death. Even then William Rufus

only yielded to the solicitations made to him because he had fallen grievously ill

and was lying at the point of death. Most providentially, this illness coincided

with the presence in England of Anselm, Abbot of Bec, whom all men regarded

as marked out for the primacy alike by his learning and his holiness of life. The

king summoned Anselm to his bedside, and the latter extorted a solemn promise

of radical reform in the administration of both Church and State. Shortly

afterwards, in spite of all his protests, Anselm himself was invested, literally by

force, with the insignia of the primacy, and he was consecrated archbishop

before the end of the year. But though the saint's firmness secured the

restoration of all the possessions which belonged to the See of Canterbury at the

time of Lanfranc's death, the king soon returned to his evil ways. In particular he

still clung to the theory that by accepting investiture Anselm had become his

liege man (ligeus homo), liable to all the incidents of vassalage. When an aid

was demanded for the war in Normandy, Anselm at first refused. Then, not

wantonly to provoke a conflict, he offered 500 marks; but when this sum was

rejected as insufficient, he distributed the money to the poor. Early in 1095 the

archbishop asked permission to go to the pope to receive the pallium. Rufus

objected that, while the antipope Clement III was still disputing the title, it was for

him and his Great Council to decide which pope should be recognized. When

asked to recognize the jurisdiction of this council, Anselm replied: "In the things

that are God's I will tender obedience to the Vicar of St. Peter; in things touching

the earthly dignity of my lord the King I will to the best of my ability give him

faithful counsel and help." The other bishops seem to have been cowed by Rufus

and to have supported the king's claim to decide which of the rival popes he

should recognize. But Anselm refused in any way to surrender the allegiance

which, when Abbot of Bec, he had sworn to Urban. He recognized no right of king

or bishops to interfere, and he declared he would give his answer "as he ought

and where he ought". These words, writes Dean Stephens (History of The

English Church, II, 99), were understood to mean, that, as Archbishop of

Canterbury, Anselm "refused to be judged by any one save the pope himself, a

doctrine which it seems no one was prepared to deny". Through the saint's

firmness Urban was recognized, and the pallium brought from him to England;

but a little later Anselm again asked leave to go to Rome, and when it was

refused he declared in the plainest terms that he must go without leave, for God

was to be obeyed rather than man. Pope Urban received him with all possible

respect, and publicly spoke of him as "alterius orbis papa", a phrase much

quoted by Anglicans, as though it implied the recognition in the Archbishop of

Canterbury of a jurisdiction independent of Rome.

But the whole lesson of Anselm's life centred in his belief that it lay with the pope

to decide what course was to be followed in matters affecting the Church even at

the risk of the king's displeasure, and despite any pretended national customs.

Neither does it appear that the rest of the English bishops maintained the

contrary as a matter of principle, though they considered that Anselm's attitude

was needlessly provocative and uncompromising. There are not wanting signs

that Eadmer's desire to exalt his own beloved master has led him to be

somewhat less than just to Anselm's suffragans and to the Holy See itself. The

archbishop remained in exile until after the death of Rufus, when Henry, who

succeeded, made generous promises of freedom to the Church, explicitly

renouncing any sort of payment or relief for the appointment of new bishops or

abbots, and promising that church revenues should not be seized during

vacancies. He recalled Anselm to England, but came into conflict with him

almost immediately over the same old question of investitures. At the Councils of

Bari (1098) and Rome (1099), at which the saint had personally assisted,

anathema had been pronounced on those bishops or abbots who received

investiture at the hands of laymen. Anselm accordingly refused either to do

homage himself for the restitution of the possessions of the archbishopric or to

consecrate other bishops who had received ring and crosier from the king.

Eventually, by the consent of both parties, the matter was referred to Rome. In

three different embassies that were sent, the pope upheld Anselm's view, despite

the efforts made by Henry's envoys to extort some concession. Then Anselm

himself went to Rome (1103) while a fresh set of royal emissaries were

dispatched to work against him at the Curia. Nothing was settled, for Henry still

held out, and Anselm accordingly remained abroad. But at last, when Anselm

was on the point of launching an excommunication against the king, the latter,

being in political straits, accepted such modified terms as his envoys could

obtain from the Holy See. Anselm was allowed to consecrate those who had

previously received investiture, but the king at a great council (1107) renounced

for the future the claim to invest bishop or abbot by ring and crosier. On the other

hand it was tacitly admitted that bishops might do homage to the king for the

temporal possessions of their sees. This settlement of the investiture question in

England was fifteen years earlier than that arrived at on very similar lines between

Pope Callistus II and the Emperor Henry V. The importance of the struggle can

hardly be exaggerated, for, as already pointed out, the whole ecclesiastical order

was in danger of being reduced to the status of vassals sharing all the vices of

secular princes. Moreover this resolute stand made by St. Anselm and the popes

was not without its political importance. The clergy as a body had now become

sufficiently independent to take a leading part in that resistance to despotism to

which the people during the next two centuries were to owe their most

fundamental liberties. During all this time England as a whole was in no wise in

sympathy with the monarch in his quarrel with the pope. As Dr. Gairdner writes

of a later period, "It was a contest not of the English people, but of the King and

his government with Rome. . . . As regards national feeling, the people evidently

regarded the cause of the Church as the cause of liberty" (Lollards and the

Reformation, I, 6). Nothing contributed so much to win the confidence of the

nation as the independence shown by the Church in such struggles as those that

are associated with the names of St. Anselm, St. Thomas Becket, and Cardinal

Stephen Langton.

St. Anselm died peacefully at Canterbury in 1109, but Henry I lived on until 1135.

During the remainder of Henry's reign and throughout the anarchy which prevailed

under the rule of Stephen (1135-1154), good bishops were for the most part

elected. The chapters were ostensibly left free in their choice, though they no

doubt responded in some measure to the known preferences of the king. In any

case simoniacal compacts are no longer heard of, while the Holy See had

generally much to say to the final acceptance of the archbishops and of the more

important prelates. A certain impatience of dictation from Rome, shown, for

example, in occasional unwillingness to receive a legate or to allow appeals to

the pope, may be noted at this as at other periods, but the principle of papal

authority was never disputed. For example, the pallium, "taken from the body of

Blessed Peter", a symbol of archiepiscopal jurisdiction which still appears in the

arms of the English Sees of Canterbury and York, was personally fetched from

Rome or at least petitioned for by every archbishop, as it had been in the

Anglo-Saxon Church from the very beginning. In cases when the pall was brought

to England instead of being conferred at the papal court, archbishops like St.

Anselm and Ralph d'Escures went to meet it bare foot. To legates of the Holy

See, notwithstanding the fact that their presence was not always desired,

extreme deference was shown. Even a mere priest like Cardinal John of Crema,

when he came to the country as papal legate, took precedence of the two

archbishops in the Council of Westminster (1125). More over, when protests

were made against the sending of legates, it was not so much that the presence

of a papal representative in England was resented, as because men believed that

such legatine powers, by old tradition, ought to be conferred on the Archbishop of

Canterbury, as had been done, for example, in the case of Tatwine, Plegmund,

and Dunstan. As Eadmer reports (Historia Novorum, p. 58), "Inauditum scilicet in

Britanniâ . . . , quemlibet hominem supra se vices apostolicas gerere nisi solum

archiepiscopum Cantuariæ" (It was surely an unheard-of thing in Britain . . . that

any man should bear the Apostolic delegation over him except only the

Archbishop of Canterbury). In the spirit of this protest Archbishop William de

Corbeil almost immediately after Crema's departure eagerly sought the office of

legate for himself, and from that time, though Henry, Bishop of Winchester, was

made legate by Innocent II in 1129, the Archbishop of Canterbury was usually

constituted legatus natus (native, or ordinary, legate), a term used in

contradistinction to the legatus a latere dispatched on extraordinary occasions

"from the side" of the sovereign pontiff in Rome. But in any case the significance

of the ordinary legatine appointment, first associated with the person of William

de Corbeil (d. 1136), is unmistakable. It was, as Dean Stephens truly observes,

"an acknowledgment of the supreme authority of the Pope. The primate shone

with a reflected glory, his preeminence was not inherent but derivative" (Hist. of

the Eng. Church, II, 142).

Evil as were the times during the first half of the twelfth century the English

Church was by no means lacking in vivifying influences. This was the period of

the chief development in England of the Cluniac Order (see CLUNY,

CONGREGATION OF), a great Benedictine reform already alluded to, of which

the first English house, that of Lewes, had been established by William de

Warrenne and Gundrada his wife c. 1077. But the priory of Lewes later on

became the mother of several other Cluniac priories, of which the best known are

those of Wenlock, Thetford, Bermondsey, and Pontefract. Still more intimately

associated with England was the Cistercian Order, another Benedictine reform of

which the virtual founder was a Somersetshire man, St. Stephen Harding. His

fame has been eclipsed by the glory of St. Bernard, the last of the Fathers and

the founder of the Abbey of Clairvaux, but it was Stephen who received St.

Bernard and his comrades at Citeaux in 1113, and who gave them the white habit

prescribed by the Cistercian rule. The first abbey of the order in England was that

of Waverley in Surrey (1128), which itself became the mother of several other

foundations. But Waverley was eclipsed by the Yorkshire Abbey of Rivaulx

established (c. 1133) by monks sent directly from Clairvaux by St. Bernard.

Among the earliest recruits of Rivaulx was St. Ælred, perhaps the most eloquent

of pre-Reformation English preachers. The foundations of the white monks throve

and multiplied exceedingly. By the year 1152 there were fifty Cistercian houses

in England (Cooke in "Eng. Hist. Rev.", Oct., 1893), of which the best known are

Fountains, Tintern, and Meaux. Unfortunately, this rapid development seems to

have been followed before long by some relaxation of primitive austerity and

fervour, but the movement while it lasted must have contributed greatly to the

diffusion of more spiritual ideals and to the correction of the manifold moral evils

of the times. The Carthusian rule, the most austere of all, was not introduced into

England until somewhat later -- the first house, that of Witham in Somerset, was

founded by Henry II in 1180, one of the indirect results of the martyrdom of St.

Thomas. Probably the extreme rigour of the life prevented the Carthusian

foundations from ever becoming numerous. But the Charterhouse at Witham gave

to England one of her greatest and holiest bishops, St. Hugh of Lincoln (d. 1200),

and the Charterhouse of London at a later date played a noble part in the

resistance it offered to the first stages of Henry VIII's revolt from Rome.

The houses of the Austin Canons, or "Black Canons", were more numerous and

of earlier date than those of the Carthusians. Their first foundation was that of

Colchester, in 1105, and they possessed two great establishments in London:

St. Bartholomew's Smithfield, and St. Saviour's Southwark. At Carlisle they

formed the cathedral chapter, the only exception to the rule that all the

cathedrals which were not served by Benedictines were in the hands of secular

canons. And here we may conveniently notice the fact that, owing, probably, to

the initial impulse of St. Dunstan and the monastic sympathies of Lanfranc, who

virtually reorganized the English Church after the Conquest, England stood

almost alone among the nations of Europe in the number of her cathedrals that

were served by monks. Canterbury, Durham, Winchester, Rochester, Worcester,

Norwich, Ely, Coventry, and Bath all had Benedictine chapters. If this

arrangement led to some gain in point of piety, there was also a proportionate

disadvantage in the additional friction that was likely to result when it came to the

election by religious of successors to the see. The Benedictines, the "Black

Monks", were of course always the most numerous monastic body in England,

and, while they had been firmly established in the country from the very

beginning, there was at all times a pretty steady increase in the number of

abbeys and cells which belonged to them. Bound specially by their rule to show

hospitality to strangers, and being for the most part good farmers and good

landlords, they formed a great element of stability and peace throughout the

country, helping to bind district with district through their relations with their

dependent cells and with one another. They were also the great centres of

learning, more particularly in the collection and multiplication of books, and they

were not only patrons of art but they provided in many cases the nearest

approach to schools for architecture, painting, sculpture, embroidery, and other

useful works. If their revenues were vast, so, it must be also remembered, were

their charities. Neither would it be easy to imagine a more worthy object upon

which to expend the superfluous wealth of the country than in the erecting of

those magnificent abbeys and churches which the monastic builders left to

posterity. Speaking of the religious orders generally, it may be said that no more

misplaced charge was ever made than that which describes their members as

idle and useless. Of all the sections of the community they almost alone in that

day were profitably busy. The industrious man-at-arms, the industrious lawyer,

the industrious forester, huntsman, or jongleur were too often only a scourge to

the land in which they lived. For this reason we conceive that a quite

unnecessary outcry has been raised by a number of Anglican writers against a

practice which undoubtedly became very prevalent in the twelfth century, namely

that of making over -- technically called "impropriating" -- to religious houses the

tithes or other sources of revenue of the parish churches. By this arrangement

the monastery so benefited received nearly all the funds properly belonging to the

parish, but supplied for the religious needs of the parishioners, either by deputing

one of the monks to act as parish priest or by paying a small stipend to some

secular vicar. No doubt this practice was open to abuse, and various synodal

decrees were passed to keep it under control accordingly. Thus as early as 1102

the Council of Westminster laid down the principle that monasteries were not to

impropriate churches without the consent of the bishop, and required that

churches should not be stripped so bare of revenue as to reduce the priests who

served them to penury. Later synodal legislation insisted that "perpetual vicars"

should be appointed (i.e. priests who would not be liable to removal, and who

would consequently have a permanent interest in their cure), and that "competent

stipends", for which a minimum amount was determined, should be paid them for

their services. Where, however, these and similar precautions were observed it is

certain that many of the wisest and holiest of the English prelates regarded the

impropriations of churches to religious communities with no disfavour. St. Hugh

of Lincoln made many such grants (see Thurston, "Life of St. Hugh", p. 463), and

it seems indisputable that in the then condition of the secular clergy, who were

far, as yet, from having recovered completely from the state of ignorance and

demoralization into which they had fallen in the preceding century, the churches

for which some monastic community made themselves responsible were likely to

be spiritually better cared for than those livings to which the crown or some

secular magnate presented at will. Strange to say, it is precisely those writers

who declaim against the degradation of the medieval clergy, and against their

general neglect of the canons enjoining celibacy, who also are loudest in

denunciation of the scandal that monks should enjoy the revenues intended for

the parish priests. -- Can it be supposed that the possession of larger incomes

would have tended to make the secular clergy more zealous or more continent?

-- That there were two sides to the question has, however, been recognized by

more thoughtful Anglicans and one such writer, for example, remarks with point:

"The secular priests living in solitude on a remote country benefice had more

temptations to sink into ignorance and indolence, if not vice, than the member of

a brotherhood, who was responsible to it for the discharge of his trust, and might

from time to time be refreshed by a visit to the monastic house, or by visitors

from it." (Stephens, Hist. Eng. Church, II, 272.)

With the accession of Henry II, in 1154, England, after years of strife, once more

passed into the hands of a strong and capable ruler. Without being a whit less

selfish or more patriotic than other princes of that age, Henry had the sense to

see that good government meant stable government. His legal reforms and the

new machinery of justice which he brought into being are of the highest possible

importance to the jurist and to the student of constitutional history, but they do

not specially concern us here. Henry at the beginning of his reign seems to have

been well viewed in Rome, and believing, as the present writer does, that the Bull

"Laudabiliter" is unquestionably genuine (see ADRIAN IV, and cf. "The Month",

May and June, 1906), the religious mission entrusted to the king, no doubt upon

his own representations, in the proposed conquest of Ireland, bears a close

resemblance to the pretext advanced for William the Conqueror's invasion of

Great Britain. In both cases, also, the Roman pontiff seems to have claimed

dominion, granting the land to the invader as a fief upon payment of a certain

tribute. The fact, that, according to the Bull "Laudabiliter", Henry himself had

admitted (quod tua etiam nobilitas recognoscit) that "Ireland and all other islands

upon which Christ, the Sun of Justice, has shone belong to the prerogative of St.

Peter and the Holy Roman Church", deserves to be borne in mind in connection

with King John's formal surrender of his kingdom to the Holy See at a later date.

But what specially interests us here in the reign of Henry II is the disputes

between the king and Thomas, his archbishop, culminating, in 1170, in the

martyrdom of the latter. Thomas Becket, a clerk in the household of Theobald,

Archbishop of Canterbury, having been strongly recommended to Henry, had

been taken into his intimate friendship and made Chancellor of the Kingdom, an

office which he had discharged with splendid ability for seven years. After the

death of Theobald, Thomas, at the instance of the king himself, was elected

Archbishop of Canterbury. He vainly tried to escape from the proposed dignity,

but, once appointed, his consecration marked the beginning of a complete

change of life. He renounced the chancellorship and all secular pursuits, while he

devoted himself to the practice of rigorous asceticism. It was not long before he

found himself in conflict with the king, as indeed he had foreseen from the first.

The first question which caused an open breach between them was a purely

secular one. Henry demanded that a certain tax called "the sheriff's aid" should

be paid directly into the Exchequer. Thomas, in a Great Council, declared that he

was willing to make his contribution to the sheriffs, as had been customary, but

absolutely refused to pay if the money was to be added to the revenue of the

Crown. Whether this tax was really the Danegeld, as Bishop Stubbs supposes,

is very questionable, but in any case we may share his admiration for this, "the

first instance of any opposition to the King's will in the matter of taxation which is

recorded in our national history", and, as he adds, "it would seem to have been,

formally at least, successful" (Const. Hist., I, 463). This incident, however, was

soon thrown into the shade by the more serious quarrel over the Constitutions of

Clarendon. What was put by the king in the forefront of the dispute was the

alleged inadequacy of the punishment meted out to clerics who were guilty of

criminal offences. The statement then made that a hundred homicides had been

committed by clerics within ten years rests on no adequate evidence, neither are

the cases of which we have definite particulars much more satisfactory (see

Morris, "Life of St. Thomas", pp. 114 sqq.). It may be that the king was honestly

intent on a scheme of judicial reform, and that he found that the growing

jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts (the publication of the "Decretum Gratiani"

and the increased study of the canon law had made them very popular) was an

obstacle in his way. But Becket, who knew him well, suspected that Henry was

deliberately striking at the privileges of the Church, and the manner in which a

promise was extorted from the bishops to observe the "avitæ con suetudines"

before anyone knew what these were, as well as the pretence that the

Constitutions of Clarendon represented nothing but the customs said to have

been observed in the time of Henry I, do not leave the impression of

straightforward dealing. The general purport of the Constitutions, when they were

at last made known, was to transfer certain causes -- for example, those

regarding presentations to benefices -- from the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical

to that of the King's Courts, to restrain appeals to Rome, to prevent the

excommunication of the king's officers and great vassals, and to sanction the

king's appropriation of the revenues of bishoprics and abbacies. On one clause,

that dealing with criminous clerks, much misapprehension has prevailed. It was

formerly supposed that Henry wanted all clerks accused of crimes to be tried in

the King's Courts. But this impression, as F. W. Maitland has shown (Roman

Canon Law, pp. 132-147), is certainly wrong. A rather complicated arrangement

was proposed by which cognizance of the case was first to be taken in the

King's Court; if the culprit proved to be a clerk, the case was to be tried in the

ecclesiastical court, but an officer of the King's Court was to be present, who, if

the accused were found guilty, was to conduct him back to the King's Court after

degradation, where he would be dealt with as an ordinary criminal and adequately

punished. The king's contention was that flogging, fines, degradation, and

excommunication, beyond which the spiritual courts could not go, were

insufficient as punishment. The archbishop urged that, apart from the principle of

clerical privilege, to degrade a man first and to hang him afterwards was to

punish him twice for the same offence. Once degraded, he lost all his rights, and

if he committed another crime he might then be punished with death like any

other felon. And here also it must not be forgotten that "the forces at the back of

St. Thomas represented not only the respect which men feel for a bold fight for

principle, but also that blind struggle against the hideous punishments of the

age, of which the assertion of ecclesiastical privilege, covering widows and

orphans as well as clerks and those that injured them, was a natural expression"

(W. H. Hutton in "Social England", I, 394). After a moment of weakness in the

earlier stage of the discussion, St. Thomas, in spite of Henry's fury, refused to

have anything to say to the Constitutions. Among the rest of the bishops he met

with little help, but the pope, Alexander III, loyally supported him. The rest of the

story is well known. The archbishop soon found himself compelled to leave the

kingdom. For nearly six years he remained abroad, an exile and bereft of his

revenues. In 1170 a hollow reconciliation was patched up with the king, and

Becket returned to Canterbury. But in a few weeks fresh cause of offence was

given, and the king in a fit of passion uttered the rash words which led to the

terrible tragedy of the martyrdom. St. Thomas fell in the transept of his cathedral,

close beside the steps leading to the high altar, in the late afternoon of 29

December 1170. All Christendom was horrified, and Henry II, whether from policy

or genuine remorse, surrendered his former pretensions while, in 1174, he

performed humiliating penance at the martyr's tomb. Within a very few years

Canterbury had become a place of pilgrimage celebrated throughout Europe. No

one who studies carefully the history of the times can fail to see the immense

moral force which such an example lent to the cause of the weak and to the

liberties both of the Church and the people, against all forms of absolutism and

tyranny. The precise quarrel for which St. Thomas gave his life was relatively a

small matter. What was of supreme importance was the lesson that there was

something higher, stronger, and more enduring than the will of the most powerful

earthly despot.

The life of the Carthusian, St. Hugh, whom Henry II himself caused to be elected

Bishop of Lincoln in 1186, forms an admirable pendant to that of St. Thomas. It

may be noted in the first place, in view of the outcry raised a little later against

the provision of foreigners to English sees, that St. Hugh was a Burgundian, who

even at the end of his life hardly understood the language of the people. But no

man ruled his diocese better, no man was more beloved alike by his own secular

canons of Lincoln and by the numerous religious in his diocese; while, owing to

his holiness, his fearlessness, and his merry humour, he was the only bishop

who without yielding an inch of his high principles, preserved the respect and

even the friendship of three such monarchs as Henry II, Richard C ur de Lion, and

John. Very memorable was his firm refusal in the national council to grant

Richard an aid in knights and money for foreign warfare. Though the reign of

Richard, like that of his predecessor Henry II, still continued to be a period of

reform in law, it was also a period of unparalleled exactions in money. In this

case the great Justiciar, Hubert Walter, who was also Archbishop of Canterbury,

had made himself the instrument of the king's designs. Though all the temporal

lords submitted, St. Hugh offered an uncompromising and successful resistance.

"This", says Bishop Stubbs, "which was done not on ecclesiastical but on

constitutional grounds, is an act which stands out prominently by the side of St.

Thomas's protest against Henry's proposal to appropriate the sheriffs' share of

Danegeld" (Select Charters, p. 28).

Richard's extreme need of money had no doubt been caused in part by his

participation in the Crusades and by the huge ransom he had had to pay when

captured on his way home by Duke Leopold of Austria. Englishmen, both now

and at an earlier date, had played their part in the Crusades. Baldwin,

Archbishop of Canterbury, who accompanied Richard, and who had been a most

earnest preacher of the holy war, left his bones in Palestine, and Bishop Hubert

Walter, who was destined to succeed him in the archbishopric, became the

virtual commander of the English forces upon his death. But the Crusades

exercised no great influence upon the national life of England. For our present

purpose they are chiefly memorable as emphasizing the truth, so often ignored

by Anglican writers, that medieval Christendom, while recognizing many different

peoples and many different governments, conceived of the Church of God not as

manifold, but as one. According to that "political theory of the Middle Age" which,

founded by Gregory VII, had already imposed itself almost universally upon the

speculative philosophy of Europe, the Church, embracing and controlling every

form of civil government, was cosmopolitan and all-pervading. It was precisely the

fact that she was not identified with any country or people, and that she appealed

for her sanctions to forces outside of this visible world, that gave to the head of

the Church his great position as the arbiter of nations. In principle no temporal

ruler disputed the supremacy of the Vicar of Christ so long as the question

remained in the abstract and so long as it was some other sovereign who was

the sufferer. It was only when his own will was thwarted that active resistance

was made, and then it was nearly always on some side issue, some technicality

of law that the monarch and his advisers sought to evade the force of an

unwelcome pronouncement. The very persistence with which monarchs at times

sought to prevent the introduction into England of papal Bulls, provisions, or

excommunications, was an acknowledgment rather than a repudiation of the

papal authority; just as a man who barricades himself in his house that a writ

may not be served on him is really giving proof of his supreme respect for the

majesty of the law. This point of view is one that has carefully to be borne in mind

in connection with the resistance to the papal exactions of the thirteenth century

and with such apparently unfriendly legislation as the Statutes of Præmunire and

Provisors which we shall have to consider later on.

The reign of John (1199-1216) was a time of terrible suffering for the country, but

it had results of untold importance in the consolidation of England as a nation.

The very loss of her foreign possessions -- for in Henry II's day more than half

France had recognized the suzerainty of the King of England -- contributed to

that result. But within Great Britain itself, ever since the Norman Conquest, the

political constituents of the nation had been divided between two strongly marked

parties more or less in opposition. The first, or feudal, element consisted of the

great nobles of the Conquest, with their vassals and the influences they wielded.

The tendency of this party was centrifugal or disruptive, and they looked upon the

country and its people as their lawful prey. The second, which for convenience'

sake may be called the national element, was less homogeneous. It comprised

the king, the newer nobility which represented mainly the great officials of the

Crown appointed under Henry I and Henry II, and with these the bishops and

clergy almost to a man. Taken as a whole, all these recognized the advantage of

a centralized government and sympathized with the native population, wishing

their rights to be respected and justice to be done. Now it was the work of John's

lawless and despotic rule, especially after the restraining influence of Hubert

Walter was withdrawn by death, to break up this combination and to unite all

parties against himself. In this the action of Pope Innocent III, culminating in the

Interdict and the sentence of deposition pronounced against John, played a most

vital part. It is needless to recapitulate the story of the election of Stephen

Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury, over which John's quarrel with the Holy

See practically began. But it is well to recall that Langton, who rendered such

splendid service to the liberties of his country, and whose name is imperishably

associated with Magna Charta, was the pope's own nominee, elected at his

instance by the Christ Church monks who had been dispatched to Rome. Under

stress of the Interdict and of John's exactions, the old feudal lords, the clergy,

and the new "ministerial" nobility gradually drew together. John found that he had

none but a few personal partisans upon whom he could count, and Philip of

France with a great following threatened invasion to enforce the pope's sentence

of deposition. Under these circumstances John made his submission to the

legate, Pandulf, promising to receive all the exiled bishops and to make

restitution for the injuries and losses the Church had sustained. A few days later,

on 13 May, the vigil of the Ascension, 1213, he went even further, for he

surrendered his crown and kingdom into the hands of the legate to be received

back from him as a fief which he and his successors were to hold of the pope for

an annual rent of one thousand marks. It is not unnatural, perhaps, that this

transaction should have been denounced by historians in the language of

unmeasured indignation. Even Lingard in his day described it as "heaping

everlasting infamy on the memory of John", but the considerations he puts

forward in extenuation of the act have not been without weight with later students.

It may be said to be now generally acknowledged that the idea of such a

surrender probably did not originate with the pope, but with John himself (see

Davis, "England under the Normans and Angevins", 1905, p. 368; Norgate, "John

Lackland ", 1902, p. 181). As the second of these two writers explains, there is a

quite intelligible motive for such an act: "John felt that he must bind the Pope to

his personal interest by some special tie of such a nature that the interest of the

papacy itself would prevent Innocent from casting it off or breaking it." But

secondly, the statement formerly made about the cry of indignation heard in

England when the news was known has little or no foundation. The vehement

denunciation of the act by the partisan Matthew Paris, as "a thing to be detested

for all time", was written many years afterwards. "Some", says Davis,

"stigmatised the transaction as ignominious, but the most judicial chronicler of

his day calls it a prudent move, for, he adds, there was hardly any other way in

which John could escape from all his dangers. Even the hostile barons whose

plans received an unexpected check did not venture either now or later to dispute

the validity of the transaction" (cf. Adams, "Political Hist. of Eng.", II, 315). For

such vassalage there were abundant precedents, both within and without the

British Isles. Only twenty years earlier, as Hoveden states, Richard C ur de Lion

resigned his crown to the Emperor Henry, engaging to receive it as a fief of the

empire for an annual payment of five thousand pounds; while the Scottish patriots

a century later, to defeat the claims of Edward I, acknowledged the pope as their

feudal lord and pretended that Scotland had always been a fief of the Holy See. It

would be most misleading to interpret these and other similar transactions

merely in the light of modern sentiment. Perhaps one of the most regrettable

features in the incident of John's submission and absolution is the

encouragement which the sense of papal protection seems to have given him to

proceed in his career of wrongdoing. His later action toward his subjects was no

more straightforward or constitutional than before, and he seems to have

deceived or gained over the legate to his side. But Archbishop Langton and his

barons by this time knew him well, and by inflexible persistence they forced John

to accept their terms. Taking as their foundation an earlier document granted by

Henry I at the beginning of his reign, they drew up a charter of liberties, many

times confirmed with slight variations in the course of the next century, and

destined to be famous through all time as Magna Charta. This great treaty

between the king and his people, which Stubbs has described (Const. Hist., II, p.

1) as "the consummation of the work for which unconsciously kings, prelates and

lawyers had been labouring for a century, the summing up of one period of

national life and the starting point of another", begins with a religious preamble

declaring that John was moved to issue this charter out of reverence for God, for

the benefit of his own soul, for the exaltation of Holy Church, and for the

amendment of his kingdom, and, further, that he had acted therein by the advice

of Stephen, Archbishop of Canterbury, of the other bishops, and of Pandulf

"subdeacon of the Lord Pope and member of his household", as also of the

secular lords, the more important of whom are mentioned by name. As in the

charter of Henry I, so here, the first article promises freedom to the Church in

England (quod ecelesia Anglicana libera sit et habeat jura sua integra et

libertates suas illæsas) and specifies in particular the freedom of election of

bishops, which, as the document further explains, had already been promised by

the king and ratified by Pope Innocent. For the rest it will be sufficient to say that

Magna Charta in substance lays down the principle that the king has no right to

violate the law, and, if he attempts to do so, may be constrained by force to obey

it. In particular, justice is not to be sold, or delayed, or refused to any man. No

freeman is to be taken or imprisoned or outlawed except by the lawful judgment

of his peers. No scutage or tax, other than the three regular aids, is to be

imposed except by the consent of the common council of the kingdom.

Twenty-five barons were appointed to watch over the execution of the Charter, but

they were far from retaining the sympathy of all. "Before the conference at

Runnymede came to an end", says Mackechnie, "confidence in the good

intentions of the 25 executors, drawn it must be remembered entirely from the

section of the baronage most unfriendly to John, seems to have been completely

lost" (Mackechnie, "Magna Carta", p. 53). The indignation, therefore, formerly

expressed at the subsequent action of Innocent III in declaring the charter null

and void is now generally admitted to be unreasonable. The barons had

themselves claimed the credit of making England a papal fief (Lingard, II, 333;

Rymer, I, 185), and it was certainly contrary to feudal usage for a vassal to

contract obligations of this serious kind without reference to the overlord.

That the papal condemnation was not directed in principle against English

popular liberties, may be inferred from the fact that the Charter was confirmed in

November, 1216, upon the accession of the child king, Henry III, at a time when

the papal legate Gualo was all-powerful, and was strongly supported by the new

pope, Honorius III. The long reign which then began with a regency, despite the

personal piety of Henry, was a period of much distress in England. The king's

weakness and his partiality for foreign favourites involved him in a vast

expenditure, while, on the other hand, the taxation thus necessitated could only

have been carried through without disturbance by a strong central government,

which was here entirely lacking. Cabals and intrigues of all kinds abounded, and

the situation was complicated by constant demands for money made by the Holy

See. The exactions of the various legates and the never ending "provisions" of

papal nominees to canonries and rich livings were undoubtedly the cause of very

bitter feeling at the time, and have formed the favourite theme of historians ever

since. It would be useless to deny the existence of very serious abuses, more

especially the fact that a large number of French and Italian clergy provided to

English benefices never visited the country at all, and were content with simply

drawing the revenues. But on the other hand there is much to be said in

extenuation of the papal action, which unfortunately has been set before English

readers in the most unfavourable light, owing to the bitter antipapalist feeling of

the great St. Albans chronicler, Matthew Paris. How much Paris's judgment was

warped by his prejudices, may be clearly seen in his unfriendly references to the

friars, though they were then, at least relatively, in their first fervour. Lingard says

of him that he seems to have collected and preserved every scandalous anecdote

that would gratify his censorious disposition, and he adds a very strong personal

expression of opinion regarding Paris's untrustworthiness (Hist. of Eng., II, 479).

It is not wonderful that in that outspoken age Matthew Paris and others like him,

finding their pockets touched by the papal demands, should have raised an

outcry which went a good deal beyond the actual damage inflicted. This very

period, when England, it is alleged, was ground under the heel of papal tyranny,

"was in all other fields of action, except the political, an epoch of unexampled

progress" (Tout in "Polit. Hist. of England", III, 81). Again, the pope's need of

money, owing to the life-and-death struggle with the Hohenstaufen, was real

enough. In the eyes of Gregory IX and Innocent IV the wars with the

excommunicated German emperor were as genuine a crusade in behalf of the

Church of God as that undertaken against the Turks. Moreover, with regard to the

provision of foreigners to English benefices, even after making all allowances for

the bitter feeling against aliens which manifested itself so often in the reign of

Henry III, it is impossible to deny that the world in the thirteenth and fourteenth

centuries, and especially the ecclesiastical world, was cosmopolitan to a degree

of which we can now form no conception. In the early part of the thirteenth

century nearly all the oldest and most influential men in England had made at

least part of their studies in Paris. The two Archbishops of Canterbury, Stephen

Langton and St. Edmund Rich, both men of pure English descent, might be

instanced as conspicuous examples, and if Englishmen had to complain of the

many foreign ecelesiastics provided for in England, it must not be forgotten that

there was quite a considerable number of Englishmen occupying foreign sees

and other positions of emolument on the Continent. The fact is indisputable -- as

indisputable as the fact that Englishmen formed a large proportion of the

freebooters who roamed through Italy a century later and accepted the pay of

anyone who would hire them -- but it is interesting to find it proudly insisted upon

by Matthew Paris, who in his indignatlon at the nomination of foreign

ecclesiastics to English benefices, declares that England has no occasion to go

abroad to beg for suitable candidates, seeing that she herself was rather

accustomed to supply dignitaries for other distant lands ("Nec indiget Anglia

extra fines suos in remotis regionibus personas regimini ecelesiarum idoneas

mendicare, quæ solet tales aliis sæpius miristrare". -- Historia Major, IV, 61).

The cosmopolitan tendencies just alluded to were very much increased in the

thirteenth century by one of the greatest religious revivals which the world has

seen, viz., that resulting from the foundation and rapid development of the

mendicant orders. There is no reason to suppose that the effects produced by

the preaching of the Franciscan and Dominican friars, who first came to England

in 1224 and 1221 respectively, were more remarkable in this country than

abroad, but all historians are agreed that the impressions produced by this

popularizing of religion were very marked. The work of spiritual regeneration which

they performed at the first was wonderful, and they were warmly encouraged by

such holy men and patriotic prelates as the great Bishop Grosseteste. It is

perhaps more important to note that, despite the accusations of idleness and

worldliness made against them at a later date, their zeal was not extinguished,

even if it flagged. An impartial historian who has given special attention to the

subject says: "For more than three hundred years the mendicant Friars in

England were on the whole a power for good up and down the land, the friends of

the poor and the evangelisers of the masses. During all that long time they were

supported only by the voluntary offerings of the people at large -- just as the

hospitals for the sick and incurable are supported now, -- and when they were

driven out of their houses and their churches were looted in common with those

of the monks and nuns, the Friars had no broad acres and no manors, no real

property to seize, and very little was gained by the spoiling of their goods, but

inasmuch as they were at all times the most devoted servants and subjects of

the Pope of Rome, they had to go at last, when Henry VIII had made up his mind

to rule over his own kingdom and to be supreme head over State and Church"

(Jessopp, "History of England", 34).

It was during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that the relations between

the medieval English Church and the Holy See may be considered to have

assumed their final shape. At least this was the period when with such an

outspoken champion as the great Bishop Robert of Lincoln (Grosseteste), or

later, under so masterful a ruler as Edward I, or, again, amid the growing

independence of Parliament, encouraged by such promoters of ecclesiastical

disaffection as Wyclif and John of Gaunt in the reign of Edward III, the "Ecclesia

Anglicana", according to the theory recently most prevalent, began to assert

herself and resolutely set to work to put the pope in his place. And here it may

be said once for all that the not unnatural impatience of papal supervision and

papal interference which was often shown by strong kings like Edward I, and also

at times by the clergy themselves, proves absolutely nothing against the

acceptance of the pope's supreme authority as head of the Church. That

subordinates should wish to be left free to enjoy a large measure of

independence is a law of human nature. England's colonies, for example, may be

quite loyal. They may fully recognize in principle the supreme right of the imperial

Government, and yet any dictation from home which goes beyond what is

customary,and especially when it is of a kind which touches the colonial pocket,

provokes resentment and is apt to be angrily resisted. Even in a fervent religious

order a proposed visitation of some outlying house or province may be met with

remonstrance and an appeal to precedent on the part of those who, how ever

docile, are doubtful of the ability of a foreign authority to understand local

conditions. An entire acceptance of the spiritual supremacy of the Holy See is

not in the least inconsistent with the belief that an individual pontiff, and still more

the officials who form the entourage of that pontiff, may be influenced by

mercenary or unworthy motives. There is not any form of authority in the world

which is not at times disobeyed and defied under more or less specious pretexts

by those who fully recognize in principle their own subordination. Thus it happens

that the supporters of "Anglican Continuity" theories are able to quote many

utterances of medieval writers that sound disaffected or rebellious in tone, they

are able to appeal to many individual acts of disobedience, but they fail

altogether in producing any, even the faintest, repudiation in principle of the

pope's spiritual supremacy by the accredited representatives of the

pre-Reformation Church. By no historian has this truth been more clearly

recognized than by the distinguished jurist, F. W. Maitland. Challenging the

statement of the Ecclesiastical Courts Commission of 1883, which, largely under

the guidance of the eminent historian, Bishop Stubbs, reported that "papal law

was not binding in [medieval] England even in questions of faith and morals

unless it had been accepted by the national authorities", Professor Maitland, with

an irrefragable array of illustrations drawn mainly from the classical canon-law

book of the English pre-Reformation Church, the "Provinciale" of Bishop

Lyndwood (1435), maintains the exact contrary. According to Lyndwood, as Dr.

Maitland clearly proves, "The Pope is above the law, . . . to dispute the authority

of a papal decretal is to be guilty of heresy, at a time when deliberate heresy was

a capital crime". "The last", Dr. Maitland continues, "is no private opinion of a

glossator, it is a principle to which archbishops, bishops and clergy of the

province of Canterbury have adhered by solemn words" (Roman Canon Law, 17).

As the same authority goes on to show, not only did the pope claim and obtain

recognition of his right to take into his own hands the judgment of every

ecclesiastical cause over the head of the bishop, but it was largely through the

questions and appeals of English bishops to Rome, asking for decisions, that the

fabric of Roman canon law was built up (loc. cit., 53, 66, etc.). In full accord with

this we find Archbishop Peckham telling such a monarch as Edward I that the

emperor of all has given authority to the decrees of the popes, and that all men,

all kings are bound by those decrees. So we find the Archbishop of Canterbury

with all his suffragans writing a joint letter to the pope and telling him that all

bishops derived their authority from him as rivulets from the fountainhead

(Sandale's "Register", 90-98). We find the pope carving a big slice from the

jurisdiction of English bishoprics, as in the case of the Abbey of St. Albans or of

Bury St. Edmunds, and making it absolutely and entirely exempt from episcopal

authority. We find the very kings who are supposed by their Statutes of Provisors

and Præmunire to have shaken off their allegiance to Rome, begging the

sovereign pontiff in most respectful language to issue letters of provision or Bulls

of confirmation in favour of such and such an ecclesiastic who enjoys the royal

favour. No doubt these statutes of Provisors and Præmunire do in some sense

play an important part in the history of the English Church during the fourteenth

century, though it is admitted that they were so continually set aside that the

permanent result of the legislation was greatly to strengthen the development of

the king's dispensing power. The Statutes of Provisors, of which the first was

passed in 1351, claimed for all electing bodies and patrons the right to elect or to

present freely to the benefices in their gift, and moreover declared invalid all

appointments brought about by way of papal "provision", i.e. nomination. Two

years later this legislation was supplemented by the first Statute of Præmunire,

which enacted that those who brought matters cognizable in the King's Courts

before foreign courts should be liable to forfeiture and outlawry. It has been

maintained that these acts prove that the English Church did not acknowledge

any providing power in the Holy See. To this we may reply:

that, like all the other English bishops, even Grosseteste, who is so

constantly represented as the champion of English resistance to papal

authority, in this matter fully recognized the right in principle, though he

protested against abuses in the use of it;

that the legislation at least professed to be passed not in a spirit of

hostility to Rome, but as a remedy for manifold abuses caused by

"Rome-runners" -- priests thronging to Rome and importuning the Holy

See for benefices. It was the lay patrons of livings whose interests

suffered by the papal provisions who were the chief promoters of the Acts;

That the bishops refused to consent to the Acts (Stubbs, "Const. Hist.",

III, 340) and caused their formal protest to be entered on the rolls of

Parliament;

that the bishops and clergy petitioned spontaneously and repeatedly for

their repeal (ibid., 342), that the universities, in 1399, declared that the

Acts operated to the detriment of learning, and that in 1416 the Commons

also petitioned the king for the abolition of the Statute of Provisors;

that the kings themselves disregarded the Acts and constantly asked the

popes to provide to the sees;

that it is universally admitted that papal provisions were more numerous

after the passing of the Acts than before.

In the 300 years preceding the Reformation 313 bishops are known to have been

provided by the popes; of these 47 were before the passing of the Statute, 266

after it (see Moyes in "The Tablet", 2 Dec., 1893). One thing is certain, that

England in several instances owed some of her best and holiest prelates to the

action of the popes in providing to English sees in opposition to the known

wishes of the king. Stephen Langton, in 1205, St. Edmund Rich, in 1232, and

John Peckham, in 1279, are conspicuous examples. We have already said above

that a reaction against current Anglican theories regarding the position of the

pope in the medieval English Church has been steadily growing during the last

quarter of a century. The complete agreement of such writers as Professor F. M.

Maitland, Dr. James Gairdner, and Mr. H. Rashdall, approaching the subject

along quite different lines of research, is very remarkable. The following passage

from one of the most distinguished of the younger school of English historians,

Prof. Tout, of Manchester, states the case as frankly as it could have been

stated by Lingard himself. After insisting that the Statutes of Provisors and

Præmunire, like that of Labourers, or the sumptuary laws, remained a dead letter

in practice, and after declaring that to the average clergy man or theologian of the

day the pope was the one Divinely appointed source of ecclesiastical authority,

the shepherd to whom the Lord had given commission to feed His sheep, Prof.

Tout continues: "The anti-papal laws of the fourteenth century were the acts of

the secular not of the ecclesiastical power. They were not simply antipapal, they

were also anticlerical in their tendency, since to the man of the age an attack on

the Pope was an attack on the Church. . . . The clergyman, though his soul grew

indignant against the curialists, still believed that the Pope was the divinely

appointed autocrat of the Church universal. Being a man, a Pope might be a bad

Pope; but the faithful Christian, though he might lament and protest, could not

but obey in the last resort. The papacy was so essentially interwoven with the

whole Church of the Middle Ages that few figments have less historical basis

than the notion that there was an antipapal Anglican Church in the days of the

Edwards" (Polit. Hist. of Eng., III, 379). No one who carefully studies the

language and acts of such a man as Grosseteste can fail to realize the truth that

in spite of all his fearless criticism of the Roman Curia, his attitude of mind is

thoroughly reverential to papal authority. The most famous, as being the least

temperately worded, of all his pronouncements is now known to have been

addressed, not, as formerly thought, to Pope Innocent IV himself, but to one of

his subordinates. On the other hand, as Maitland points out, Grosseteste

throughout his life proclaimed in the strongest terms his belief in the plenitude of

the papal power. "I know", he says, "and I affirm without any reserve that there

belongs to our lord the Pope, and to the Holy Roman Church, the power of

disposing freely of all ecclesiastical benefices." And this and similar language,

acknowledging, for example, the pope to be the sun from which other bishops,

like the moon and stars, receive whatever powers they have to illuminate and

fructify the Church, was not only maintained by Grosseteste to the end (see "The

Month", March, 1895), but re-echoed by Bishop Arundel nearly two centuries

afterwards.

So again the occurrences which followed the publication by Boniface VIII of the

Bull "Clericis laicos", in the days of Edward I and Archbishop Winchelsea, tend

to show that even when the pope took up a position which was too extreme and

from which he was forced ultimately to retire, the English Church was not less,

but more, loyal to the Apostolic See than other, Continental, nations. Nothing

could be less true to the facts of history than the idea that England stood apart

from the rest of Christendom, with an ecclesiastical law, a theology, or in any

essential matter even a ritual, of her own. The cosmopolitanism of the religious

orders, especially the mendicants, and of the universities, would alone have

sufficed to render this isolation impossible. England's isolation began when she

broke away from the Roman obedience, suppressed the religious orders,

banished every Catholic priest, and adopted a pronunciation of Latin which no

Continental scholar could understand.

The great disturbing force in the ecclesiastical life of England during the

fourteenth century, much more than the Statutes of Provisors or even the Black

Death, was the rise and spread of Lollardy. We may perhaps doubt if the

significance of the movement in this country was by any means as great as that

which historians, partly on account of the Bohemian upheaval under John Hus

which grew out of Wyclif's doctrines, partly through the favourite modern theory

that Lollardy produced the Reformation, have generally attributed to it. Dr. James

Gairdner, however, who has recently investigated the whole movement and its

sequelæ with a thoroughness and knowledge of original materials to which no

previous writer can lay claim, has arrived at conclusions which tend very

seriously to modify the views hitherto very commonly received. In his idea the

novelty and the socialistic tendency of the opinions so boldly proclaimed by

Wyclif did constitute a grave political danger, a danger which was not, perhaps,

so acute in the reformer's lifetime because the most startling of his views

developed late, only ten years or less before his death (1384), but which were

eagerly caught up and even exaggerated by ignorant disciples at a time of weak

rule and political unrest. The fact that the Great Schism of the West broke out

only six years before Wyclif's death added to the complications by leaving the

greater part of Christendom in a state of uncertainty as to which of the rival popes

had the better claim to men's allegiance, and to this cause most probably is due

the fact that Wyclif was left during his last years to propagate his doctrines

practically undisturbed. That his doctrines were utterly revolutionary, as judged

by any standard of opinion tolerated up to that time it would be absurd to deny.

No one can fail to see the danger of teaching that there was no real dominion, no

real authority, no real ownership of property without the grace of God. >From this

he deduced the conclusions that a man in mortal sin had no right to anything at

all, that among Christians there ought to be community of goods, and that, as to

the clergy having property of their own, it was a gross abuse. Similarly he held

that every layman had Christ Himself for priest, bishop, and pope; that a pope

was only to be obeyed when he taught according to Scripture, and that a king

might take away all the endowments of the Church. With these were combined in

his later years theological opinions regarding the sacraments and

Transubstantiation which were offensive in the extreme to the Christian sense of

that day. Wyclif, no doubt, in his philosophical teaching provided safeguards

which mitigated the practical consequences of the principles he held, but these

were subtilties which were lost upon the more ignorant and fanatical of his

followers, more especially after their master's death. The points that they clearly

understood were that tithes were pure alms, and that if the parish priests were

not good men the tithes need not be paid; that a priest receiving any annual

allowance by compact was simoniacal and excommunicated; that a priest who

said Mass in mortal sin did not validly consecrate, but rather committed idolatry;

that any priest could hear confessions (without faculties), and in fact that any

holy layman predestined by God was competent to administer the sacraments

without ordination. Such opinions as these, debated among the ignorant and

uninstructed, and reinforced by a constant railing against devotional practices,

such as pilgrimages, and against the Roman Court, the friars and all

ecclesiastical authority, were obviously full of danger to social order at a time

when the Black Death and the question of villeinage which resulted from it, had

already provided many elements of disturbance.

Speaking of the proceedings against the foremost representative of Lollard

opinions, Sir John Oldcastle, in 1413, Dr. Gairdner says: "It seems to have been

a life-and-death struggle between established order and heresy"; and Bishop

Stubbs, while doing too much honour by far to the fanatic creed of the Wyclifite

leader, remarks: "Perhaps we shall most safely conclude from the tenor of

history that his doctrinal creed was far sounder than the principles which guided

either his moral or his political conduct." These comments really sum up the

situation. The Wyclifite heresy became for a while a real danger to the peace of

the country, as Oldcastle's insurrection proved. On the other hand, there was

very little that was either sane or ennobling in the dreams which inspired the

leaders, and which were imparted to their often very ignorant followers. Given the

ideas then, and long after, universally prevalent in regard to heresy and the

measures of repression necessary to prevent infection from spreading, there was

nothing exceptionally cruel or intolerant about the statute "De hæretico com

burendo" of 1401, which provided that heretics convicted before a spiritual court,

and refusing to recant, were to be handed over to the secular arm and burnt.

There can be no doubt that before this extreme measure was resorted to much

provocation had been given by the preaching of doctrines which all Christians

then deemed blasphemous, and which were not confined to the vilifying of the

Holy Eucharist, the pope, and the clergy, but touched upon the sanctity of

marriage and the observance of Sunday as a day of rest. Dr. Gairdner, after a

very careful survey of all the evidence, is satisfied that Archbishop Arundel and

his suffragans acted in the interests of public order and showed no inclination to

enforce the statute either intemperately or tyrannically. In point of fact after the

suppression of Oldcastle's insurrection and his execution at the stake, Lollardy

was no longer to be feared as a political power. Wyclif's ideas had little hold in

England upon men of any weight or consideration. They lingered on for awhile

and perhaps never entirely died down, though prosecutions for heresy became

very rare long before the end of the fifteenth century, but they certainly cannot be

regarded as a direct and primary cause of the religious changes which took place

in the reign of Henry VIII.

Perhaps the most important in its ultimate consequences of all Wyclif's tenets

was the supreme importance which he attributed to Holy Scripture. In his treatise

"De Veritate Sacræ Scripturæ", written about 1378, he practically adopts the

position that Scripture is the sole rule of faith. It followed in his idea that the word

of God ought to become accessible to all, and that all men were free to interpret

it for themselves. We are told, moreover, by a contemporary and hostile

authority, the chronicler Knighton, that Wyclif himself translated the Gospel into

English. Upon this and other evidence it has been commonly supposed that

Wyclif was the first to bring the Bible to the knowledge of English readers and

that the medieval Church uniformly adopted the practice of withholding the

Scriptures from the laity. It is to the credit of modern students of medieval history

that the grave misrepresentations involved in this traditional Protestant view are

now generally abandoned (see e.g. Gairdner, "Lollardy", I, 100-17; "Cambridge

Hist. of Eng. Literature", II, 56-62). We may summarize from the former of these

writers the following conclusions, which represent what is best worth recalling

upon this subject. The Church was not opposed in principle to the use of

vernacular translations. Undoubtedly, translations into English of separate books

of Scripture existed as far back as in the days of Bede. It is improbable, however,

that a whole Bible in English, as distinct from Anglo-Saxon, existed before

Wyclif's time; neither was it much required, for nearly all who could read, could

read the Bible either in the Latin of the Vulgate, which the Church preferred, or in

French. There was, however, no express prohibition to translate the Scriptures

into English until the prohibition of the Provincial Synod of Oxford published in

1409. This prohibition was not seemingly occasioned by corrupt renderings or

anything liable to censure in the text, but simply by the fact that it was

composed for the general use of the laity, who were encouraged to interpret it in

their own way without reference to the tradition and teaching of the Church. In

fine, Dr. Gairdner concludes: "To the possession by worthy laymen of licensed

translations the Church was never opposed, but to place such a weapon as an

English Bible in the hands of men who had no regard for authority, and who

would use it without being instructed to use it properly, was dangerous not only

to the souls of those who read, but to the peace and order of the Church." The

view has of late years been strongly urged by Abbot Gasquet, that the English

version (or versions, for there are really two) commonly known as the Wyclifite

Bible, has no connection with Wyclif, but is simply the fourteenth-century

translation approved by ecclesiastical authority and existing probably before

Wyclif's time. There are not wanting arguments in support of such a contention,

but the difficulties are also serious, and the theory cannot be said to have found

general acceptance.

The fifteenth century, owing mainly to the long minority of King Henry VI, and to

the Wars of the Roses, was a period of political disturbance, and it does not add

much to the ecclesiastical history of the country. We shall do well, however, to

note that the invention of printing in England, as elsewhere, was cordially

welcomed by the Church, and that it was under the shadow of the English

Abbeys of Westminster and St. Albans that the earliest presses were erected.

Despite the religious indifference which is supposed to have heralded the

Reformation, the tone of the literature given to the world at these presses seems

to bear witness to the prevalence of a very genuine spirit of piety.

As the story of the English Reformation is more fully told in the second part of

this article, while many separate articles are to be found in THE CATHOLIC

ENCYCLOPEDIA dealing with particular phases and leading personalities of that

period, a brief outline of the great change will suffice to conclude this sketch of

pre-Reformation England. Catholic historians and all others, except a small

minority representing a particular school of Anglicanism, are agreed that, so far

as England was concerned, even after the Wyclif movement, the Great Schism of

the West, and the humanist revival of learning had done their worst, the position

of the Church under the jurisdiction of Rome remained as secure as it had ever

been. Lollardy no doubt had inoculated a certain section of the nation, and there

were here and there stirrings indicative of a doctrinal revolt even during the early

days of Henry VIII's reign, but with an episcopate thoroughly loyal to the Holy

See and with the support of the king's strong government, these rumblings

threatened no danger to the religious peace of the kingdom at large. Neither does

there seem to have been any great decay of morals among clergy or laity. The

public opinion of the learned world has in all substantial respects endorsed Abbot

Gasquet's vindication of the discipline observed in the religious houses prior to

the suppression. Occasional scandals there probably were, and even a great

abbey like St. Alban's may possibly have given some cause for the very grievous

charges rehearsed against it in 1491 by Archbishop Morton, though the matter is

seriously contested (see bibliography), but there is not the least reason to

believe that any wave of moral indignation at ecclesiastical corruption or any

resentment of Roman authority had made themselves felt amongst the people of

England until many years after Luther had thrown down the gauntlet in Germany.

What produced the English Reformation was simply the passion of an able and

unscrupulous despot who had the cleverness to turn to his own account certain

revolutionary forces which are always inherent in human nature and which are

always especially liable to be awakened into activity by the dogmatic teaching

and the stern censures of the Church of Rome. Of course the movement was

much helped forward by the wider distribution of a modicum of learning which had

been effected by the invention of the printing press, and which, while enabling

people to read and interpret the text of Scripture for themselves, had too often

filled them with conceit and with contempt for all scholastic traditions. The age

was, at least relatively, an age of novelties and of unrest. The discovery of

America had fired the imagination; the humanism of a coterie of scholars had in a

measure spread to the masses. There was general talk of the "New Learning" --

by which, however, as Abbot Gasquet has pointed out, men meant not the revival

of classical studies, but rather the bold and often heretical speculations about

religion which were agitating so many minds. A great part of Germany was

already in revolt, and England was not so isolated but that the echoes of

controversy reached her shores. All these things made Henry's task easier, but

for the severance of England from the obedience of the pope he, and he alone,

was responsible. So far as Parliament had any share in the matter, the

Parliament was Henry's tool. This estimate of the situation, which was long ago

put forward by such writers as Dodd and Lingard, has impressed itself of late

years with ever-increasing force upon Anglican opinion and will nowhere be found

more clearly enunciated than in the writings of Dr. Brewer and Dr. James

Gairdner, who, by their intimate first-hand acquaintance with all the manuscript

materials for the reign of Henry VIII, are entitled to speak with supreme authority.

The fact that Henry was himself an amateur theologian and had vindicated

against Luther the Catholic doctrine of the sacraments, thereby earning from Leo

X the title of "Defender of the Faith", was probably fraught with tremendous

consequences in the situation created by his attempted divorce from Queen

Catherine. Profoundly impressed with his own dialectical skill, he persuaded

himself that his case was thoroughly sound in law, and this probably carried him,

almost without his being aware of it, into positions from which no retreat was

possible to a man of his temperament. It was in 1529 that the papal commission

to Wolsey and Campeggio, to pronounce upon the validity of the dispensation

granted to Henry many years before to marry his deceased brother's wife,

terminated by the pope's revocation of the cause to Rome. The failure of the

divorce commission was quickly followed by the disgrace and death of Wolsey,

and Wolsey's removal allowed all that was least amiable in Henry's nature to

come to the surface. Two very able men, Thomas Cranmer and Thomas

Cromwell, were ready at hand to second his designs, skilfully anticipating and

furthering the king's wishes. To Cranmer is undoubtedly due the suggestion that

Henry might obtain sufficient authority for treating his marriage as null if only he

procured a number of opinions to that effect from the universities of Christendom.

This was acted upon, and, by various arts and after the expenditure of a good

deal of money, a collection of highly favourable answers was obtained. From

Cromwell, on the other hand, the idea came that the king should make himself

supreme head of the Church in England and thus get rid of the imperium in

imperio. This was ingeniously contrived by the outrageous pretence that the

clergy had collectively incurred the penalties of Præmunire by recognizing

Wolsey's legislative jurisdiction; though this, of course, had been exercised with

the royal knowledge and authority. Upon this preposterous pretext the clergy in

convocation were compelled to make a huge grant of money and to insert a

clause in the preamble of the vote acknowledging the King as "Protector and

Supreme Head of the Church of England, as far as the law of Christ allows". This

last qualification was only inserted after much debate, though it seems that at

that period Henry was willing that the phrase "Supreme Head" should be

understood in a way that was not inconsistent with the supremacy of the pope.

At any rate, even after this, bishops still continued to receive their Bulls from

Rome, and the royal divorce still continued to be pleaded there. Early in 1532

another move was made. The Commons were persuaded to frame a supplication

against the Clergy of which drafts remain in the handwriting of Cromwell, showing

from whom it emanated. This, after various negotiations and a certain amount of

pressure, resulted in the "Submission of the Clergy", by which they promised not

to legislate for the future without submitting their enactments for the approval of

the king and a mixed committee of Parliament. To bring pressure to bear on the

pope, the king caused Parliament to leave it in Henry's power to withhold from

the Holy See altogether the payment of annates, or first-fruits of bishoprics,

which consisted in the amount of the first year's revenue. By such gradual steps

the breach with Rome was brought about, though even as late as January, 1533,

application in a form most discreditably insincere was still made to Rome for the

Bulls of the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Cranmer, who had been elected on

Warham's death, and who took the oaths of obedience to the pope, though he

had previously declared that he regarded them as null and void. Almost

immediately afterwards Cranmer pronounced sentence of divorce between Henry

and Catherine. The king then had Anne Boleyn crowned, and an Act of

Succession was passed next year with a preamble and an oath to be taken by

every person of lawful age. Parliament all submitted and took the oath, but More

and Fisher refused and were sent to the Tower. The climax of the whole work of

disruption may be considered to have been reached in November, 1534, by the

passing of the Act of Supremacy, which declared the king Supreme Head of the

Church of England, this time without any qualification, and which annexed the

title to his imperial crown.

A reign of terror now began for all who were unwilling to accept exactly that

measure of teaching about matters religious and political which the king thought

fit to impose. Fisher and More had been sent to the block, and others, like the

Carthusians, who rivalled them in their firmness, were dispatched by that ghastly

and more ignominious death-penalty assigned to cases of high treason. In virtue

of this martyrdom these and many more are now venerated upon our altars as

beatified servants of God. The rising in the North known as the Pilgrimage of

Grace followed, and, when this dangerous movement had been frustrated by the

astuteness and unscrupulous perjury of the king's representatives, fresh horrors

were witnessed in a repression which knew no mercy. Previous to this had taken

place the suppression of the smaller monasteries; and that of the larger houses

soon followed, while an Act for the dissolution of chantries and free hospitals was

passed in 1545, which there was not time to carry entirely into execution before

the king's death. Probably all these things, even the destruction of shrines and

images, reflect a certain rapacity in the king's nature rather than hostility to what

would now be called popish practices. In his sacramental theology he still clung

to the positions of the "Assertio septem sacramentorum", the book he had

written to refute Luther. Both in the Six Articles and in the "Necessary Doctrine"

the dogma of Transubstantiation is insisted upon; and indeed more than one

unfortunate reformer who denied the Real Presence was sent to the stake. It was

on this side that Henry's task was hardest. Against the Papalist sympathizers

amongst his own subjects he consistently maintained a ruthless severity, neither

did he relent until all were cowed into submission. Towards men of Calvinist and

Lutheran tendencies, who were represented in high places by Cranmer,

Cromwell, and many more, the king had intermittently shown favour. He had used

them to do his work. They had been of the greatest assistance in prejudicing the

cause of the pope, and even the most violent and scurrilous had rendered him

service. True, the railing translation of the New Testament by Tyndale, which had

been printed and brought to England as early as 1526, was prohibited, as was

Coverdale's Bible later on, in 1546, very near the close of his reign. It is plain that

the scurrility of the more revolutionary led him to regard such teaching as

dangerous to public order. Very remarkable are the words used by Henry in his

last speech in Parliament, when he deplored the results of promiscuous

Bible-reading: "I am very sorry to know how that most precious jewel, the Word

of God, is disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every alehouse. I am equally

sorry that readers of the same follow it so faintly and coldly in living; of this I am

sure, that charity was never so faint among you, and virtuous and godly living

was never less used, and God Himself among Christians was never less

reverenced, honoured and served." If ever a moral and religious cataclysm was

the work of one man, most assuredly the first stage of the Reformation in

England was the work of Henry VIII. One could wish we knew that the sense of

his own personal responsibility for the evils he deplored had come home to him

before the hour when, on 28 January, 1547, he was summoned to his account.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature in the religious condition of England during

the last year of Henry's reign was the fact that, besides the king himself, there

were probably not a score of persons who were contented with the existing

settlement. One large section of the nation was in complete sympathy with the

doctrines of the German reformers, and to them the Mass, confession,

communion in one kind, etc., which had been preserved untouched throughout all

the changes, were simply as gall and wormwood. The great numerical majority,

on the other hand, especially in the more remote and thinly populated districts,

longed for the restoration of the old order of things. They wished to see the

monks back, St. Thomas of Canterbury and the shrines of Our Lady once more

in honour, and the pope recognized as the common father of Christendom.

During the two short reigns which intervened before Elizabeth came to the throne

each of these parties alternately gained the ascendant. Under Edward VI, the

Protector Somerset, and after him the Duke of Northumberland, in full harmony

with Cranmer, Hooper, and other bishops even more Calvinistically minded,

abolished all remnants of popery. Chantries and guilds were suppressed, and

their revenues confiscated, images in the churches, and then altars and

vestments were removed and destroyed, while the material desecration was only

typical of the outrages done to the ancient liturgy of Catholic worship in the first

and second Books of Common Prayer. (See ANGLICANISM; ANGLICAN

ORDERS; BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER.) The bishops who were more

Catholically minded, like Bonner and Gardiner, were sent to the Tower. Princess

Mary was subjected to the meanest and most petty forms of persecution. Neither

can it be maintained that those in power were animated by any disinterested

devotion to Reformation principles. Spoliation in its most vulgar form was the

order of the day. It is only of late years that fuller historical research has done

justice to what seemed the one redeeming feature in the general work of

destruction -- the foundation of the grammar schools which are known by the

name of King Edward VI. We have now learned that not one of these schools

was originally of Edwardian creation (see Leach, "English Schools at the

Reformation"). Educational resources had already been seriously impaired under

Henry VIII, and "the schools which bear the name of Edward VI owe nothing to

him or his government but a more economic establishment. A good many of

them had been chantry sebools, for if the chantry priest of old wasted his time in

singing for souls he not infrequently did good work as a school master." So says

a judicious summarizer of Mr. Leach's researches.

There can be no doubt that these violent measures provoked a reaction. Already

in 1549 there had been serious insurrections all over the country, and more

particularly in Devonshire and in Norfolk. On the death of the boy king, in July,

1553, an attempt was made by Northumberland to secure the succession for

Lady Jane Grey but Mary at least for the time, had the people completely with

her, and now it was the turn of Bonner, Gardiner, and the Catholic reaction.

Overtures were made to the reigning pope, Julius III, and eventually Cardinal

Pole, whose mission as legate was unfortunately delayed by the Emperor

Charles V for diplomatic reasons connected with the marriage of Queen Mary to

his son Philip II, reached England in November, 1554, where he was warmly

received. After the Houses of Parliament through the king and queen had

petitioned humbly for reconciliation with the Holy See, Pole, on St. Andrew's day,

30 November, 1554, formally pronounced absolution, the king and queen and all

present kneeling to receive it. The restoration of ecclesiastical property

confiscated during the previous reign was not insisted upon.

The reign of Mary is, unfortunately, chiefly remembered by the severity with

which the statutes against heresy, now revived by Parliament, were put into

force. Cranmer had been previously sentenced to death for high treason, and the

sentence seems to have been politically just, but it was not at once executed.

There seems to have been no desire upon the part of Mary or any of her chief

advisers for cruel reprisals, but the reactionary forces always at work seem to

have frightened them into sterner measures, and, as a result, Cranmer, Latimer,

Ridley, and a multitude of less conspicuous offenders, most of them only after

refusal to recant their heresies, were condemned and executed at the stake. No

one has judged this miserable epoch of persecution more leniently than the

historian who of all others has made himself live in the spirit of the times. Dr.

James Gairdner, stanch Anglican as he is, in his recent work, "Lollardy and the

Reformation", seems only to press farther the apology which he has previously

offered for their terrible measures of repression. Thus he says: "With all this one

might imagine that it was not easy for Mary to be tolerant of the new religion, and

yet tolerant she was at first, as far as she well could be. . . . The case was

simply that there were a number of persons determined not to demand mere

toleration for themselves, but to pluck down what they called idolatry everywhere

and to keep the Edwardine service in the parish churches in defiance of all

authority, and even of the feelings of their fellow parishioners. In short, there was

a spirit of rebellion still in the land which had its root in religious bitterness; and if

Mary was to reign in peace, and order to be upheld, that spirit must be

repressed. Two hundred and seventy- seven persons are recorded to have been

burnt in various parts of England during those sad three years and nine months,

from the time the persecution began to the death of Mary. But the appalling

number of the sufferers must not blind us altogether to the provocation. Nor must

it be forgotten that if it be once judged right to pass an Act of Parliament it is

right to put it in force." And as the same authority elsewhere says, "Amongst the

victims no doubt, there were many true heroes and really honest men, but many

of them would have been persecutors if they had had their way." Queen Mary

died 17 November, 1558, and Cardinal Pole passed away on the same day

twelve hours later.

Herbert Thurston

Transcribed by Douglas J. Potter

Dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary