42 LOLLARDS. CHAP. II. CHAPTER II. ON THE ENGLISH CHURCH UNDER HENRY VIII., § 1. State of Public Opinion as to Religion. § 2. Henry VIII.'s Controversy with Luther. 3. His Divorce from Catherine. § 4. Separation from the Church of Rome. 5. Dissolution of Monasteries. § 6. Progress of the Reformed Doctrine in England. 7. Its Establishment under Edward. 8. Sketch of the chief Points of Difference between the two Religions. 9. Opposition made by part of the Nation. § 10. Cranmer. His Moderation in introducing Changes not acceptable to the Zealots. 11. Mary. Persecution under her. § 12. Its effect rather favorable to Protestantism. § 1. No revolution has ever been more gradually prepared than that which separated almost one half of Europe from the communion of the Roman see; nor were Luther and Zwingle any more than occasional instruments of that change, which, had they never existed, would at no great distance of time have been effected under the names of some other reformers. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the learned doubtfully and with caution, the ignorant with zeal and eagerness, were tending to depart from the faith and rites which authority prescribed. But probably not even Germany was so far advanced on this course as England. Almost a hundred and fifty years before Luther nearly the same doctrines as he taught had been maintained by Wicliffe, whose disciples, usually called Lollards, lasted as a numerous, though obscure and proscribed sect, till, aided by the confluence of foreign streams, they swelled into the Protestant Church of England. We hear, indeed, little of them during some part of the fifteenth century, for they generally shunned persecution; and it is chiefly through records of persecution that we learn the existence of heretics. But immediately before the name of Luther was known they seem to have become more numerous, or to have attracted more attention; since several persons were burned for heresy, and others abjured their errors, in the first years of Henry VIII.'s reign. Some of these (as usual among ignorant men engaging in religious speculations) are charged with very absurd notions; but it is not so material to observe their particular tenets as the general fact that an inquisitive and sectarian spirit had begun to prevail. Those who took little interest in theological questions, or who retained an attachment to the faith in which they had been educated, were in general not less offended than the Lollards themselves with the inordinate opulence and encroaching temper of the clergy. It had been for two or three centuries the policy of our lawyers to restrain these within some bounds. No ecclesiastical privilege had occasioned such dispute or proved so mischievous as the immunity of all tonsured persons from civil punishment for crimes. It was a material improvement in the law under Henry VI. that, instead of being instantly claimed by the bishop on their arrest for any criminal charge, they were compelled to plead their privilege at their arraignment, or after conviction. Henry VII. carried this much farther, by enacting that clerks convicted of felony should be burned in the hand. And in 1513 (4 H. 8), the benefit of clergy was entirely taken away from murderers and highway robbers. An exemption was still preserved for priests, deacons, and subdeacons. But this was not sufficient to satisfy the church, who had been accustomed to shield under the mantle of her immunity a vast number of persons in the lower degrees of orders, or without any orders at all; and had owed no small part of her influence to those who derived so important a benefit from her protection. Hence, besides violent language in preaching against this statute, the convocation attacked one Dr. Standish, who had denied the divine right of clerks to their exemption from temporal jurisdiction. The temporal courts naturally defended Standish; and the parliament addressed the king to support him against the malice of his persecutors. Henry, after a full debate between the opposite parties in his presence, thought his prerogative concerned in taking the same side, and the clergy sustained a mortifying defeat. About the same time a citizen of London, named Hun, having been confined on a charge of heresy in the bishop's prison, was found hanged in his chamber; and though this was asserted to be his own act, yet the bishop's chancellor was indicted for the murder on such vehement presumptions that he would infallibly have been convicted, had the attorney-general thought fit to proceed in the trial. This occurring at the same time with the af fair of Standish, furnished each party with an argument; for the clergy maintained that they should have no chance of justice in a temporal court; one of the bishops declaring that the London juries were so prejudiced against the church that they would find Abel guilty of the murder of Cain. Such an admission is of more consequence than whether 44 HENRY VIII. AND LUTHER. CHAP. II. Hun died by his own hands or those of a clergyman; and the story is chiefly worth remembering, as it illustrates the popular disposition toward those who had once been the objects of reverence. § 2. Such was the temper of England when Martin Luther threw down his gauntlet of defiance against the ancient hierarchy of the catholic church. But, ripe as a great portion of the people might be to applaud the efforts of this reformer, they were viewed with no approbation by their sovereign. Henry had acquired a fair portion of theological learning, and on reading one of Luther's treatises, was not only shocked at its tenets, but undertook to refute them in a formal answer. Kings who divest themselves of their robes to mingle among polemical writers have not perhaps a claim to much deference from strangers; and Luther, intoxicated with arrogance, and deeming himself a more prominent individual among the human species than any monarch, treated Henry, in replying to his book, with the rudeness that characterized his temper. A few years afterward, indeed, he thought proper to write a letter of apology for the language he had held toward the king; but this letter, a strange medley of abjectness and impertinence, excited only contempt in Henry, and was published by him with a severe commentary. Whatever apprehension, therefore, for the future might be grounded on the humor of the nation, no king in Europe appeared so steadfast in his allegiance to Rome as Henry VIII. at the moment when a storm sprang up that broke the chain forever. § 3. It is certain that Henry's marriage with his brother's widow was unsupported by any precedent, and that although the pope's dispensation might pass for a cure of all defects, it had been originally considered by many persons in a very different light from those unions which are merely prohibited by the canons. He himself, on coming to the age of fourteen, entered a protest against the marriage which had been celebrated more than two years before, and declared his intention not to confirm it; an act which must naturally be ascribed to his father. It is true that in this very instrument we find no mention of the impediment on 1 Burnet is confident that the answer to Luther was not written by Henry (vol. iii., 171), and others have been of the same opinion. The king, however, in his answer to Luther's apologetical letter, where this was insinuated, declares it to be his own. From Henry's general character and proneness to theological disputation, it may be inferred that he had at least a considerable share in the work, though probably with the assistance of some who had more command of the Latin language. 2 Epist. Lutheri ad Henricum regem missa, etc. Lond., 1526. The letter bears date at Wittenberg, Sept. 1, 1525. the score of affinity; yet it is hard to suggest any other objection, and possibly a common form had been adopted in drawing up the protest. He did not cohabit with Catherine during his father's lifetime. Upon his own accession he was remarried to her; and it does not appear manifest at what time his scruples began, nor whether they preceded his passion for Anne Boleyn. This, however, seems the more probable supposition; yet there can be little doubt that weariness of Catherine's person, a woman considerably older than himself, and unlikely to bear more children, had a far greater effect on his conscience than the study of Thomas Aquinas or any other theologian. It by no means follows from hence that, according to the casuistry of the catholic church and the principles of the canon law, the merits of that famous process were so much against Henry, as, out of dislike to him and pity for his queen, we are apt to imagine, and as the writers of that persuasion have subsequently assumed. It would be unnecessary to repeat what is told by so many historians, the vacillating and evasive behavior of Clement VII., the assurances he gave the king, and the arts with which he receded from them, the unfinished trial in England before his delegates, Campeggio and Wolsey, the opinions obtained from foreign universities in the king's favor, not always without a little bribery, and those of the same import at home, not given without a little intimidation, or the tedious continuance of the process after its adjournment to Rome. More than five years had elapsed from the first application to the pope, before Henry, though by nature the most uncontrollable of mankind, though irritated by perpetual chicanery and breach of promise, though stimulated by impatient love, presumed to set at naught the jurisdiction to which he had submitted, by a marriage with Anne. Even this was a furtive step; and it was not till compelled by the consequences that he avowed her as his wife, and was finally divorced from Catherine by a sentence of nullity, which would more decently, no doubt, have preceded his second marriage. But, determined as his mind had become, it was plainly impossible for Clement to have conciliated him by any thing short of a decision which he could not utter without the loss of the emperor's favor, and the ruin of his own family's interests in Italy. And even for less selfish reasons it was an extremely embarrassing measure for the pope, in the critical circumstances of that age, to set aside a dispensation granted by his predecessor; knowing that, however some erroneous allegations of fact contained therein 46 RUPTURE WITH ROME. CHAP. II. might serve for an outward pretext, yet the principle on which the divorce was commonly supported in Europe went generally to restrain the dispensing power of the holy see. It was the aim of Clement to delude Henry once more by his promises; but this was prevented by the more violent measure into which the cardinals forced him, of a definitive sentence in favor of Catherine, whom the king was required under pain of excommunication to take back as his wife. This sentence of the 23d of March, 1534, proved a declaration of interminable war; and the king resolved to break off all intercourse forever, and trust to his own prerogative and power over his subjects for securing the succession to the crown in the line which he designed. § 4. But, long before this final cessation of intercourse. with that court, Henry had entered upon a course of measures which would have opposed fresh obstacles to a renewal of the connection. He had found a great part of his subjects in a disposition to go beyond all he could wish in sustaining his quarrel, not in this instance from mere terror, but because a jealousy of ecclesiastical power and of the Roman court had long been a sort of national sentiment in England. The pope's avocation of the process to Rome, by which his duplicity and alienation from the king's side were made evident, and the disgrace of Wolsey, took place in the summer of 1529. The parliament which met soon afterward was continued through several sessions (an unusual circumstance), till it completed the separation of this kingdom from the supremacy of Rome. In the progress of ecclesiastical usurpation, the papal and episcopal powers had lent mutual support to each other; both consequently were involved in the same odium, and had become the object of restrictions in a similar spirit. Warm attacks were made on the clergy by speeches in the commons, which bishop Fisher severely reprehended in the upper house. This provoked the commons to send á complaint to the king by their speaker, demanding reparation; and Fisher explained away the words that had given offense. An act passed to limit the fees on probates of wills, a mode of ecclesiastical extortion much complained of, and upon mortuaries. The next proceeding was of a far more serious nature. It was pretended that Wolsey's exercise of authority as papal legate contravened a statute of Richard II., and that both himself and the whole body of the clergy, by their submission to him, had incurred the penalties of a præmunire, that is, the forfeiture of their movable estate, besides imprisonment at discretion. These old statutes in re |