11. BOOK V, CHAPTER V

CHAPTER V.

The THIRTEENTH Century characterized—SIXTH, SEVENTH, and EIGHTH Crusades to the Holy Land and Egypt—Fall of the Latin Kingdom in the East—Fruitless Negotiations between the Latin, Greek, and Roman Churches—Crusades against reputed Heretics in France and Spain—Spanish Preachers in Africa—Crusades against Pagans in Livonia and Prussia—Political and religious Opponents of the Papacy persecuted throughout Europe—State of England, Scotland, and Ireland—Jubilees invented—Series of Events in the FOURTEENTH Century—Quarrels and Schism of the Papacy—Monasticism—Disaffection of Laity—State of Society—Persecutions in Italy—Germany—France—England—Wycliffe and the Lollards—Conclusion.

By fire and sword the hierarchy of Christendom now endeavour to destroy every opposer of their ambition, whether at home or abroad. The Church, falsely so called, takes the world as its patrimony, to be subdued for the gratification of the priesthood, rather than won for Christ. From the Dead Sea to the Baltic, against Moslem, heretic, and Pagan, the leaders of the people rage, breathing threatening and slaughter. In former centuries we have read of devoted men, who counted not their lives dear unto them, but suffered martyrdom in pagan lands, while endeavouring to convert the savage inhabitants; but now the fashion is altogether changed. With one slight and even doubtful exception, that of some zealous Spaniards, who preached and were put to death in northern Africa, there is no record of an endeavour to spread the Gospel by persuasion only. The human mind began to be aroused in the last century, and in this is awakened to fury rather than to manly action. The schools afforded means and opportunity for study, and are now multiplied; but new generations of disputants arise to multiply again sects in philosophy, and heresies in religion. The populations of Europe supply a general militia for the service of Pope and Popelings. Thus are blind serfs either impressed into that service by force of an imperious necessity, or they waste away before the edge of the sword, or they "wander in deserts and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth." Papal and clerical authority are absolute, reason is prostrated, and there is not a Prince nor a nation within the compass of western Christendom that can dare to be independent. Efforts after independence are sometimes made, but fail without one exception. "They give their kingdom unto the Beast, until the words of God shall be fulfilled." If the

* Mant's History of the Church of Ireland, chap. I., sect. 1.

hand of God were not seen in the events of the thirteenth century, as in those of every age, we should hasten on to later times; but that hand is visible; there are still some testimonies to the truth; and the assurance that the mercy of the Saviour is as really exerted amidst the horrors of persecution as in times of peace, alone enables us to invite the reader's attention through this chapter.

A succession of calamities had reduced the Latin kingdom in the East to a mere wreck; and the fragments remaining would have been swept away, but for incursions of the Tartars which diverted the forces of the Saracens, and quarrels of the Saracens themselves which prevented them from extirpating the Frankish intruders. Encouraged by this respite, the Christians of Palestine wrote to Rome for succour. Innocent III. caught at the occasion for gathering gold into his coffers, if not for adding to the territory and power of his Church, promised to march at the head of an army to the gates of Jerusalem, infused new zeal into the Prelates and Princes assembled in a great Council at Rome, and dispersed over Europe zealots who preached and begged for men and money. Perhaps the sixth Crusade so raised withdrew the military strength of France for a time from consummating a threatened destruction of the Albigenses. A mingled host, directed by the domineering counsels of a Legate, landed at the mouths of the Nile, and proceeded to besiege Damietta, in full confidence that both that city and Cairo would fall before them, that Egypt would be theirs, although Palestine was almost invincible, and that the Moslem power which had withstood the Cross in the Holy Land, would be crushed on the graves of the Ptolemies. Damietta fell, after the majority of its inhabitants had perished with hunger, and the Christians, laden with spoil, and fainting in the pestilential stench of unburied corpses, returned to their camp, and might have made good use of conquest, had not the Legate forced them, first by importunity and then by curses, to advance on Cairo; which they attempted, but could not reach the city, for the waters of the Nile had overflowed the banks of a canal, and a remnant only of the deluded army was permitted to retreat by the Saracens, who had rallied their forces, and magnanimously opened the granaries of Egypt to save that remnant from perishing with hunger, like their fellow-citizens of Damietta. The valour of the defeated Crusaders was extolled in the West, and contempt only was rendered to the prudent forbearance of the people whose territory they had unjustly invaded. Pope Honorius III. emulated the zeal of his predecessors in moving Europe to holy war, and distributed with incessant diligence indulgences, blessings, and anathemas, to entice the indifferent, and to compel the tardy. The Emperor Frederic II. was among the latter, until, finding himself excommunicated, and therefore forbidden to wear the Cross, he embarked in good earnest, despite the prohibition, treated first with the Sultan of Egypt, then landed in Palestine, claimed the kingdom of Jerusalem, endured the insolence of the Clergy, who loaded him with disrespect as excommunicate, obtained an armistice honourable for the Christians, and returned to Europe. Yet suspension of hostilities could scarcely be observed in a country where independent tribes were not restrained by the remote authority, and a seventh, an eighth, and a

END OF CRUSADES TO THE LEVANT.

ninth Crusade were distinguished by deeds of arms most brilliant in the estimation of the soldier, but affording no satisfaction to the Christian. In Europe, and especially in England, those wars were the pretext for arbitrary and exorbitant taxation, as people were excited, when under the influence of the prevailing mania, to cross themselves, and could only be released from the obligation by paying money, the Priests determining the amount according to the supposed ability of the person bound. In Palestine, Syria, and Egypt, the name of Christ was dishonoured by immorality, perfidy, and jealousies. Hospitallers and Templars often frustrated each other in the very war which they professed to regard as meritorious and holy, and turned their swords against their brethren, or betrayed them to the common enemy. Nothing could be more empty than their boasting of chivalrous honour; and, even while desperately courageous, they were often overwhelmed by inundations of Tartars or Chorasmians, who poured by myriads from the further East, in migrations like those which had wearied out the Roman hosts, and were not to be resisted by the disunited occupiers of Jerusalem. Town after town was lost. The Christians were shut up in Acre, covered with disgrace on account of internal strife and habitual injustice towards the natives of the country; and, on the 18th day of April, 1291, Acre was stormed by the besiegers, the town was soon in flames, a tempest hindered the flight of those who sought refuge on board ship, the swords of the Mussulmans were bathed in blood: and so ended the holy war, that had been prosecuted for two centuries in the name of Christ, with the commission of every folly and every crime that could dishonour that blessed name, and cover Christianity with infamy throughout the Moslem world. Popery, maddened under final discomfiture, as it had been infatuated throughout the enterprise, turned upon its own agents; and the suppression of the order of the Templars stands in history as a perpetual accusation of ingratitude and ferocious cruelty against the Romish priesthood. Their Grand Master, Jacques de Molai, was burnt alive in Paris (A.D. 1313). During these wars the attention of the elder oriental Christians was drawn towards the Church that could spare so much wealth and exert such gigantic efforts for the attainment of its objects on the western shores of Asia; and both Kings and Patriarchs entered into correspondence with the Popes, soliciting, in reality, military co-operation against the Mohammedans, and amusing them with feints of submission to Papal authority. Embassies were accordingly sent to Armenia and Russia; and the Tartars, who then wielded resistless power in central Asia, to the terror of all their neighbours, being utterly latitudinarian in religion, made no difficulty on account of diversity of creed, welcomed and amused an ostentatious commission from Innocent IV., as they had previously received one from Louis IX., King of France, but retained possession of Hungary, where their descendants are still known by their original name of Magyar.

Having made this brief note of the Crusades in the East, we now proceed to describe the persecutions of dissenters from the Church of Rome within the boundaries of Christendom. Those persecutions were also called Crusades.

3 Y

Nowhere did persecution rage more fiercely than in France. Although the principal scene of those events was the south of France and the neighbouring provinces of Spain, or, as that territory was then called, Narbonese Gaul, reputed heretics were everywhere exposed to extreme danger. Evraud, a gentleman of Nivernois, intrusted with the management of the estates of Henry, Count of Nevers, had incurred the enmity of some of the tenants, who revenged themselves by charging him with heresy. Octavian, the Papal Legate at Paris, lost no time in proceeding against the heretic. On an appointed day, Evraud appeared before an assemblage of the Archbishops and Bishops of the kingdom, together with the Doctors of Paris, to answer the accusation. The Bishop of Auxerre undertook to act as accuser: many witnesses and some written documents substantiated the accusation. None could plead for an alleged heretic in that place. He was summarily convicted, handed over to the secular power, conducted back to Nevers, and burnt alive, "to the great contentment of the people." A nephew of his, William, Canon of Nevers, having been confirmed, by witnessing his uncle's martyrdom, in adherence to his principles, left the city, and, under another name, no more a Priest, was welcomed and honoured by the Christians of Narbonne.* Meanwhile the zealous Bishop had much to do in his own diocese with persons suspected of heresy, or of favouring heretics; but the work of inquisition soon began in earnest in Toulouse, (A.D. 1204,) although the Inquisition itself was not yet established. Two Monks, Peter of Castelnau, and Raoul, or Ralph, of Fontfroide, received powers from the Pope to act as his Inquisitors of heresy, independently of all episcopal authority or interference. Invested with these powers, they made their appearance in Toulouse, "stronghold of heresy," where the professors of evangelical doctrine enjoyed the patronage of the Count himself, Raymond VI., as well as of a neighbouring chief, Raymond Roger, Count of Foix. The two Monks condescended to preach and exhort the inhabitants to expel the heretics, among whom, of course, were to be numbered the liege Lords of that and the adjacent country. Finding, however, that the citizens were inaccessible to persuasion, they tried threats; and many—hoping to avoid the wrath of the King, and of the Emperor too, should his intervention be required, with consequent destruction of their property by pillage and confiscation—signed, by deputation, a document promissory of their best efforts to favour the Catholic religion, and contribute to the extirpation of heresy. In compensation for this trifling concession, (trifling, because the extent and application of the very term Catholic were perpetually contested,) the emissaries promised that they should be regarded and treated as Catholics. The Pope, encouraged by their report, added to this legation the Abbot of Citeaux; gave the three a copious letter of instructions wherein the Bishops were said to have neglected their duty, and allowed heresy to grow up without restraint; and the Legates—for they were not yet called Inquisitors—were to recover heretics to the Catholic faith, if they could, or, if they could not, were to deliver over the pertinacious excommunicates to the secular arm,

* Fleury, lxxv., 35.

THE LEGATES INQUISITORIAL.

for confiscation of goods and infamy for ever, besides the punishment of death. They were to exhort Philip II., King of France, his eldest son, and the Counts, Viscounts, and Barons of the kingdom to proceed with firmness against the heretics, offering them the same indulgences as they would gain by going personally to the Holy Land to fight against infidels. And, that the three messengers might suffer no obstruction, Innocent gave them full pontifical authority to destroy, disperse, uproot, build and plant whatever should be necessary or convenient, to punish contradictors canonically, and to act, if even one of their number should be absent, throughout the ecclesiastical provinces of Aix, Arles, and Narbonne, or wherever heretics were to be found in France. Under the same date the indefatigable Pontiff wrote to the King, charging him to protect and help the three Legates, and presented a golden motive in the shape of an exhortation to confiscate the property of Counts, Viscounts, Barons, and any other citizens who should fail to contribute to the extirpation of heretics; and, if that did not suffice, to send Louis, his eldest son, to head an army for their destruction, that they who did not fear the spiritual sword, might feel the temporal. Notwithstanding all this, the King was unwilling to lend himself to the Pope; the Counts and other men of influence were generally reluctant to persecute, or even to leave unprotected, a people whom they esteemed for loyalty, peaceableness, and honesty, and in whose convictions some of them participated. The Abbot gladly accepted preferment to an archbishopric; the Friars would have preferred monkish seclusion to the prosecution of so difficult an undertaking; and the lingering zeal of the two remaining members of the legation was insufficient, because unsupported. The Pope, however, administered the cordial of encouragement, to revive their drooping strength, and sent a fatherly reproof to the King for his indifference, not sparing the Bishops, although they far better knew the strength of the Waldenses and their friends than the Bishop of Rome could know it. But one French Ecclesiastic manifested his loyalty to the Holy Father, who had made him Archbishop of Rheims, at that time no little dignity, and signalized the first month of his elevation by burning some persons at the little town of Braine. One of them was an artist, called Nicholas, famous throughout France (A.D. 1205). The inhabitants of Braine were, no doubt, intimidated by the murder of their townsmen; but the terror of that execution was not felt in Languedoc. The Monks were still dispirited, when a Spanish Bishop, Diego de Acebes, Bishop of Osma, having just visited Rome, and passing by on his way homeward, found them at Montpellier. Being a person of great energy and talent, but dissatisfied with confinement to the narrow circle of a diocese, and unable to obtain from the Pope a release from his obligation as Bishop, he gladly volunteered his services to assist them in a resumption of their work. After careful observation, he found that the Missionaries sent to recover the wanderers to their Church were exceedingly unpopular. People contrasted their splendid equipages, the trains of servants and cavalry that attended them, and their general extravagance and stateliness, with the poverty of the Waldensian and Albigensian Pastors, and

3 x 2 the simplicity of their followers. Frequently, when Peter and Ralph had finished their harangues, they reproached them with the licentiousness and cupidity of their brethren the Priests. Diego insisted that it was useless for them to attempt the conversion of heretics, unless they would preach by actions rather than by words, display frugality and austerity, keep their money out of sight, walk on foot, and imitate the Apostles. The Legates feared they should be accused of innovation if they took upon themselves, while representatives of Papal majesty, to lead such a mean life; but, considering the exigency of the occasion, said that if any person of authority would begin, they would follow. Diego, being a Bishop, and having been a courtier, too, but one that had lately assumed the monastic habit, offered to set the first example, as a man of authority; and accordingly sent away his body-guard of horsemen with his servants and luggage to Osma, retaining only one companion, a regular Canon and Sub-Prior of his cathedral, Domingo de Guzman, afterwards badly eminent in a career of persecution, and eventually known as St. Dominic. The Spaniard received the submission of his new colleagues as chief over the renewed enterprise, and established himself in France as a propagator of the faith. With the two Legates, transformed into poor mendicants, he made a journey of experiment. At the little town of Carmain they spent a few days in disputation with Baldwin, a Pastor, and William, the former Canon of Nevers, who had fled thence after the burning of his uncle; and contrived, if their adventures are correctly related, to excite a popular feeling to the prejudice of those persons, but could not deprive them of the protection of the lord of that place. Thence they went to Beziers, a town long pervaded with anti-Romish doctrine, and already visited by persecution. There were few there who bore the name of Catholic; and Peter was so hateful to the population, that Diego and his colleague advised him to go elsewhere, lest he should suffer violence. In short, the whole party left Beziers exceedingly discomforted. The Albigenses,* on the contrary, felt increasing confidence; and, as the Preachers professed to use argument only, and appeared as poor men, begging for alms from door to door, their Ministers proposed a conference for arguing out the questions of doctrine; which then, as now, divided the believers in holy Scripture from the followers of tradition and ecclesiastical authority. The challenge was accepted; moderators were appointed on both sides, men of authority, who should protect both parties against any tumult of the people; the place of conference was to be free and safe; the subjects of controversy should be agreed on beforehand; the debate was to be continued until the question in dispute was settled; the word of God was to be the only standard of appeal. On one side were the three Preachers, an Abbot, two Priors, and a train of Priests and Monks, with the Bishops of Villanueva and Auxerre, as moderators; and, on the other, Arnold Hot, an Albigensian Pastor, with some others not named, having on their part two men of influence named Bot and Riviere. Arnold delivered a paper

* Albigenses we say for the sake of brevity. It is often impossible to determine with certainty how far the name "Albigense" or "Waldense" is to be preferred, or whether both may not be employed.

FAILURE OF THE LEGATION.

to the Bishop of Osma, containing three propositions: 1. That the mass and transubstantiation are the invention of men, and not the ordinance of Christ and the Apostles. 2. That the Church of Rome is not the spouse of Christ, but the Church of confusion, drunk with the blood of the martyrs. 3. That the polity of the Church of Rome is neither good nor holy, nor established by Jesus Christ. The Bishop asked a fortnight to prepare his answer, which was granted; and, at the expiration of that time, the company assembled, and the Bishop, producing a large paper, read a carefully elaborated reply. To this Arnold answered without further preparation, speaking, during long sessions, on four successive days; and then demanded proofs of the Romish doctrine, drawn from the holy Bible only. This was a challenge not to be fairly met; and, after vain attempts to parry the strokes of scriptural truth, the whole company of Bishops, Priests, Legates, and Monks precipitately withdrew, complaining of unfair dealing, in order to cover the disgrace of their retreat. The Bishop of Osma having remained in France but a short time after this conference, returned to Spain, (A.D. 1206,) yet stopping by the way at Pamiers to hold another, which led to no result beyond mortification at the patronage afforded to heretics by Raymond Roger, Count of Foix, who shocked the Bishop and his brethren by entertaining them and their antagonists in his palace with equal hospitality, the Countess being a Waldense.* The Papal emissaries were evidently perplexed. They could not command sufficient force for the attainment of their object; the public mind was alienated from their Church; their opponents in controversy were unmanageable; and, in taking the last resort of conference with those whom they came to silence by authority, they had utterly miscalculated their ability. The Bishop of Osma quitted the field, and died soon afterwards. His attendant Dominic remained in France, to await an opportunity for resuming hostility against heretics. Ralph had no courage left for the difficult crusade, and retired to a monastery, where he died; but Peter, irritated by the contempt he had so deservedly incurred by arrogance and cruelty, stood his ground; and, being stimulated to fresh exertions by communications from Rome, applied for help to the nobility of Provence; some of whom formally abjured heresy, in the usual manner, and swore to cleanse the country from those who were infected by it. The Count of Toulouse had hitherto refused to take any part in persecution; and, being known to entertain the same opinions as those whom he protected, was solemnly excommunicated, treated by the Popish nobles as an enemy; and they were actually waging war against him, at the instigation of Peter, together with the Abbot of Vaux Sernai, who had succeeded the Spanish Bishop as his colleague, and chief of that mission, when he gave way to fear, and made some overtures to the Legates, which, however, did not satisfy them, and the negotiation ended in a quarrel with Peter, whose insolence became unbearable. This quarrel took place at St. Gilles. Peter instantly left the town with his colleague, and is said to have been

* Fleury, lxxvi., 12, 14, 27; Llorente, Inquisicion, &c., cap. ii., art. 2; Allix, Abigences, chap. xvii.

followed by some one who avenged the Count by stabbing him as he was about to cross the Rhone. The blame of the murder was, of course, laid on Raymond, who could not be proved to have had any complicity in the crime; but it was a sufficient pretext to bring on him the dreadful consequences, and to deluge his country with blood. The Pope wrote a long letter to the principal persons of the provinces of Narbonne, Arles, Embrun, Aix, and Vienne, exhorting them to inflict vengeance on the delinquent. He styled Peter a martyr; assured them that miracles would have been wrought at his tomb, but for the unbelief of the people; and that he had commanded the Archbishops and Bishops to renew their diligence in extirpating heresy, and display greater zeal in preaching faith and reconciliation to the Church. The reputed murderer of "that holy man" was denounced as excommunicate, with all his accomplices, abettors, and defenders; and all places where such persons might be found were placed under interdict, until they should be driven out. That sentence was to be read from the altars every Sunday, until the criminals should be put out of the way by death, or, having gone to Rome, should have there received absolution. The obedient Bishops promised remission of sins to whomsoever should undertake to avenge the innocent blood of the new martyr, by making war upon heretics, destroying their bodies, to hasten the perdition of their souls. Two Bishops, Foulques of Toulouse, and Navarre of Couserans, made speed to Rome, where they besought the Pope to succour the Church, exposed to extreme danger in the disaffected provinces. Raymond also sent messengers to exculpate himself, and gave the Pontiff an opportunity to gain his point the more certainly, by sending back emissaries to Toulouse with confidential instructions to employ soft language, but make no concession; as also to proceed to Paris, and endeavour to persuade the King to make war upon the Count. In the latter part of their commission they were not successful; but the spirit of the age favoured the military enterprise; a new set of Crusaders made their appearance, wearing the Cross on the breast, instead of the shoulder, to distinguish them from pilgrims to the Holy Land; and the persecuted Count, apprehending that he would be the first victim, negotiated a reconciliation with the Pope, and, having done this, even consented to wear the Cross. Reconciliation was purchased by a shameful penance. Stripped to his shirt, he came into the church at St. Gilles, and, in the presence of the Legate, with about twenty Archbishops and Bishops, swore obedience to the Pope, received absolution, and engaged to destroy heretics and persecute the Jews. Two gentlemen only brooked the indignity of taking the Cross with their liege; and that no time might be lost in making use of the new Crusaders, who might sympathize with the persons whom they had sworn to murder, if allowed opportunity for intercourse, an assemblage of them was convened to be at Lyons from all parts of France on St. John's day, or about that time (A.D. 1209). An immense multitude of horse and foot encamped there; and, having been reviewed by the Legate and other Ecclesiastics, marched under their blessing upon the beautiful city of Beziers, which was chiefly inhabited by Albigenses. After taking

BURNING OF BEZIERS.

their position before the city, they sent to the Bishop a list of persons whom he was to require the inhabitants to give up as heretics; and invited any who might still regard themselves as Catholics to accept deliverance from impending destruction, by coming out of the city. But the inhabitants despised the summons to surrender their fellow-citizens to certain death; none accepted the favour offered to Catholics, in distinction from others; and when the Crusaders expected to see a multitude of timid folk abandon the city to their arms, a strong party of bowmen made their appearance and provoked battle by a shower of arrows. The challenge was accepted, and the champions of that murderous apostasy which vaunted itself in the name of Catholic, stormed the city, gave no quarter, but slaked their vengeance in the blood of its inhabitants. Not one escaped. Men, women, and children were put to instant death; and, despite the privilege of sanctuary which even an assassin might enjoy at any altar in Rome, seven thousand persons were butchered in one church at Beziers. "Kill away," said a Monk to some soldiers who were beginning to relent: "the Lord knoweth them that are his." Cupidity itself sickened at the view of so much carnage: the Priests could not allow burial to the countless corpses of the excommunicate; therefore pestilence might return, as an avenging angel, upon themselves, from so great a mass of putrefaction; a city, defiled so thoroughly with heresy seemed unfit to continue any longer; it was therefore determined to finish the exploit by the semblance of a burnt-offering, and Beziers was accordingly burnt down on the same day, leaving the ashes of sixty thousand victims under smoking ruins. This done, the horde retired; and the Romish historian, ashamed and shuddering as he places on record so foul a deed, incredibly declares that the soldiers did all without permission, and even contrary to the wishes of their leaders; yet relates that the worshippers of St. Magdalene, on whose day the massacre took place, must have been signally avenged of the blasphemies those heretics had pronounced against her. From the site of Beziers the zealots marched to Carcassone, where they took a suburb, by way of intimidating those within the city, and then continued their operations of siege; while the Bishops, the Abbots, and all the Clergy, whose hands were deemed too sacred to handle steel, formed themselves into order of procession, and, keeping beyond the range of bow-shot, blasphemously chanted the hymn, Veni, Sancte Spiritus, "Come, Holy Ghost, our hearts inspire." Carcassone might have been annihilated also; but as the leaders of the attack considered that a deletion of that place also would discourage the soldiers by again depriving them of booty, and leave the future Lord of the land without a sufficient place of residence for himself and followers, they determined to act otherwise, and imposed capitulation on the inhabitants, with the hard condition that they should all quit the city, carrying nothing away, but should walk out with nothing more than a single under-garment. This condition was fulfilled on the 15th of August, 1209, and Carcassone became, until the fall of Toulouse, the capital of the conquered territory, while its citizens were dispersed without shelter, to be branded as heretics or to perish by starvation.* The Crusaders now found themselves in possession of a conquered territory, small in extent, indeed, but likely to be enlarged, as no small portion of the neighbouring inhabitants were under the displeasure of the Church, and therefore to be treated as outlaws; and it appeared necessary to constitute some one liege Lord of the new domain. The Cross-bearing Barons, therefore, having met in council to deliberate on whom the honour and revenue should be bestowed, offered them to the Count of Nevers. But he refused their homage, as did the Duke of Burgundy. They must have shrunk with dread from a dignity on which the execration of millions was already poured, and from a responsibility which in itself implied the violation of humanity under the pretext of religion. The work of election was then confided to a committee, consisting of the Legate, two Bishops, and four Knights, who chose Simon, Count of Montfort, already distinguished by those martial qualities which, joined with inexorable bigotry, marked him as an efficient servant of the Roman See. Either from modesty or fear, he refused at first. The Legate and the Duke of Burgundy entreated him on bended knees to accept the gift; but when he still appeared to be irresolute, the Legate changed his posture, and commanded him, with pontifical authority, to undertake the charge. For a short time he was surrounded by the troops of his most powerful allies, and reigned at Carcassone as representative of Romanism for the suppression of dissent. Heretics were brought before him to receive sentence at his pleasure, and the faggots were instantly kindled at his word. At Castres, for example, two persons were set before him as convicted of disaffection to the Church, although the case of one was doubtful; but he commanded them both to be bound to the stake, observing of the one who denied the accusation, that if he were an honest man, the fire would expiate his sins, but if a liar, he would but suffer the penalty due to his imposture. Perhaps, however, the scene was prepared for the sake of effect; for matters were so managed that "the Catholic" escaped from the stake as soon as the flame began to rise. As he ran away the soldiers shouted, "A miracle!" and the other, as an undoubted heretic, was burnt to death.

About three weeks after the occupation of Carcassone, Hughes, Bishop of Riez, and Milon, Notary of the Pope, both accredited Legates, held a Council at Avignon, where about twenty-four Archbishops and Bishops, and a sufficient number of Abbots and other dignitaries, consulted on the affairs of the Church in France. The canons of that Council conveyed strict injunction on all Bishops to preach more frequently and with greater care, or at least to employ others to preach in their stead, if unable to occupy the pulpits with convenience, or, as we may be permitted to suspect, with credit. They were censured for having allowed heresy to spread by their negligence. Various regulations against Albigenses and other Christian Nonconformists, and against Jews, were there renewed. Immodest dances and lewd songs in churches were forbidden, showing that the charge of clerical negligence was not unfounded. The relatives of the

* Fleury, lxxvi., 36, 37, 44, 45; Llorente, cap. ii., art. 2, 3; Hallam, Europe during the Middle Ages, chap. i., part 1.

THE POOR CATHOLICS.

murderers of Pierre de Castelnau, and another Ecclesiastic who had met with a similar end, were excluded, down to the third generation, from every ecclesiastical benefice; the citizens of Toulouse were excommunicated because they had failed to expel all reputed heretics from their territory; and the Count himself, notwithstanding his submission and humiliation at St. Gilles, was threatened with excommunication if he should presume to recover some civil rights of which he had been divested. About the same time the Papacy found, or, at least, seemed to find, a new agency for the maintenance of its interests. A Spaniard, Durando of Huesca, and a few others, having cleared themselves from suspicion of heresy, went to Rome, and solicited the sanction of the Pope on a project for extending the doctrine of the Church of Rome in France. Aspiring, as they said, towards Christian perfection, they renounced the world, sold their property and distributed the price among the poor, lived in voluntary poverty, without caring for the morrow; refused alms in any other form than that of daily food or clothing; and, most of them being Priests, wished to devote themselves to study, preaching, and controversy with sectarians of all sorts, but always under direction of the Bishops. Innocent III. gladly accepted their proposal, and sanctioned their constitution into a fraternity, bearing the designation of "Poor Catholics," by two bulls, one addressed to the Bishop of Tarragona, and the other to Durando himself, and his poor brethren. For a time they spread rapidly, both in the south of France and in Italy, labouring hard to bring over the Albigenses, Waldenses, and others to their opinions; but either these opinions were from the first different, on some points, from those of Rome, or they became so by disputation with more enlightened persons, many Bishops complained against them to Innocent himself, who was reluctant to confess fallibility by cancelling his bulls within three months; but the experiment failed; and the priesthood learned by that failure to hold by the only tenable position, that their system could not be upheld by argument, but must be maintained by fire and sword. The additional apparatus of racks and dungeons was not yet quite ready; but the men were living who would prepare that also. Another society of relapsed Vaudois, or of persons holding opinions resembling theirs, yet in communion with the dominant Church, also came into existence in Italy, and fell into oblivion. We therefore close this digression concerning the Council and the Societies, and return to scenes where the ecclesiastical spirit of that age found freer scope and greater appearance of success in warring against the Gospel.

The persecuted Count of Toulouse, finding himself impoverished by the loss of tolls, and threatened with excommunication if he should proceed to enforce their payment, applied to the King for redress; but in vain, for the King would scarcely venture to offend the Pope. To the Pope himself, therefore, Raymond appealed in person; but was assailed with hard words, and required to purify himself canonically from suspicion of the murder of Peter of Castelnau, and of heresy. He then applied to the Emperor Otho for assistance against Simon de Montfort, who threatened to attack Toulouse; but he could obtain no

3 z earthly succour. Meanwhile Simon de Montfort carried onward his hostilities against those places where heretics were in possession or found refuge. Together with the Abbot of Citeaux and a Dr. Theodise, he laid siege to the castle of Minerbe; and when the besieged proposed to capitulate, consulted his clerical authorities before answering their proposal. Count Simon appealed to the Abbot, as chief of the whole enterprise: the Abbot was exceeding angry, for, being a Monk, it became him to compass the death of heretics, and heretics would be suffered to live if the castle were occupied by capitulation; yet, being a Monk, and Priest besides, not permitted so much as to let blood by a lancet, how could he, even as chief of that enterprise, openly direct what his heart longed for, a massacre of all the heretics? However, he granted their lives to all the inhabitants, heretics included, if they would conform to the Church; and comforted a zealous brother who objected to that condition through fear that most of them would conform, and the pleasure of killing them would be missed, by expressing his conviction that few conformists would be found. Nor was he mistaken; for when both he and the Count went from house to house to offer the heretics life on the condition prescribed, not one would sacrifice his conscience. "Why," said they, "do you preach to us? We want none of your religion. We reject the Roman Church. You labour in vain: we will not deny our faith for the fear of death, nor for the hope of life." There was no difficulty in finding those persons: they were assembled in their usual places of meeting, no doubt met together to encourage each other to prepare for entrance into the congregation of the blessed; not fewer than a hundred and forty of *the Perfect*, as they were called, were led out of the place; and, so far from recanting, or even offering resistance, many of them, without waiting for executioners, threw themselves upon a huge burning pile prepared for their martyrdom. Misled by the reports of persecutors, historians not unfrequently disparage the Albigenses, and concede to the slander that they were Manicheans. As well might the Moravians, or the earlier Methodists, be called Manicheans, on account of their men and women meeting in distinct companies on some occasions, as the confessors of Minerbe were found by Simon de Montfort and his Abbot. We recognise, not the asceticism of an unscriptural sect, but the calm devotedness of persons who lived in a communion distinct from the fallen Church of Rome, who were so esteemed by their fellow-citizens over an extensive tract of the French dominions, that they were protected and defended by armed resistance against the Crusaders, and who, for Christ's sake, counted not their lives dear to them. What language of evangelical confidence they uttered as Christian martyrs, it is impossible to say, because the only historians were their murderers or the abettors of their murder, and no conclusion unfavourable to their memory should be drawn from the absence of a distinct and honest narrative. During the siege of Minerbe, Raymond of Toulouse was endeavouring to persuade the Papal commissioners to allow him to purify himself, according to the Pope's order, from the suspicion of murder and heresy. But they

BURNINGS AT PARIS, LAVAUR, AND CASSER.

would not suffer him to do so; fearing that if the discredit cast on him by their own party should be removed, it would be impossible by any other pretext to keep up the flame of popular fanaticism in France, and bring Crusaders to extend the conquests of the Church. They therefore commanded him to expel the heretics forthwith from his country, and, after having done that, to apply again for the fulfilment of the Pope's orders. With tears he declared himself unable to expel the heretics, and was again excommunicated, together with all his abettors (A.D. 1210). A similar conference was shortly afterwards held at Narbonne, where Peter, King of Arragon, was present, but without any effect, it being the only object of the Priests to prolong the war, not only for the extirpation of heresy, but also for extending the temporal dominion of the Church. For the sake of prosecuting these objects, no method was rejected, however dishonourable in the sight of men, or wicked in the sight of God. Some peculiar opinions had found their way into the University of Paris. Amauri, (or Amalric,) who first gave them currency, had indeed recanted; but, as the recantation was known to be compulsory, died in disgrace, and his bones were dug up and burnt. Others perpetuated the opinions; and however erroneous some of them might have been, for we cannot easily ascertain how far they departed from the scriptural standard, it is certain that the anger of the priesthood was aroused by contempt of image-worship and of relics, denial of transubstantiation, neglect of the fathers of the church, and a declaration that Rome was Babylon, and the Pope Antichrist. To make out a strong case against the sect, it was necessary to collect unguarded expressions and opinions of individuals, for which purpose the Bishop of Paris employed one Raoul de Nemours as a spy; who, professing to be one of their number, obtained sufficient information of the kind required, and fourteen persons were duly examined, condemned, brought to Paris, delivered to the King to be dealt with according to his pleasure, and finally burnt alive. A few others were sentenced to perpetual imprisonment; and the writings of Aristotle, hitherto read in the University, were thenceforth prohibited, as tending to corrupt the faith. Whoever did not contribute, in some way, to the extirpation of heresy, was himself suspected. Bishops hastened to the seat of war, and signalized themselves in the work of fratricide. The Bishops of Chartres and Beauvais sat down with the troops before the castle of Thermes, and the Archdeacon of Paris, an excellent engineer in those days, directed the operations of the siege. The Bishop of Paris, with two other mitred brethren, enjoyed the siege of Lavaur, which was taken by assault under their eye: eighty of the principal inhabitants were brought out and killed by the sword, and about three hundred heretics burnt. By the hands of the pilgrims another company of sixty was put to death in a place called Casser, after the Bishops had in vain endeavoured to convert them, as they said, and the devotees were delighted to commit them to the flames (A.D. 1211). After several other lesser conquests, Simon led all his pilgrim army to besiege the city of Toulouse; and, being aided by an accession of Germans, who came to kill "the Beghards," he might have suc-

3 z 2 ceeded, if provisions had not failed, and he therefore gladly accepted an invitation brought by the Bishop of Cahors, to take possession of that place, which was ready to withdraw fealty from Raymond. The career of conquest was, however, checked by the return to their homes of a great part of his volunteers, who said that they had only vowed to fight for forty days, and by the revolt of several of the places taken. The Priests, on the contrary, had not so limited their vows. The Archbishop of Narbonne, as Legate, pressed the war with indefatigable diligence, scarcely allowing himself time enough for sleep or food, and a crowd of Prelates quitted their sees to wait upon him in the camp; yet the zeal of others for the Crusade to the Holy Land diverted the streams of fanaticism into another channel; the war against Albigenses languished, and would have utterly failed, if Louis, son of the King of France, had not crossed himself for that enterprise, and brought with him considerable reinforcements (A.D. 1213). Raymond, on his part, appealed to his brother-in-law, Peter of Arragon, for succour, representing the wrongs done to him by the Crusaders, and the injustice of the Priests, who would not allow him opportunity to clear away the stain of heresy. He placed his wife, Peter's sister, under the protection of the King of Arragon, with his son, and the territory yet remaining. Peter espoused his cause, and wrote to the Pope, saying that when the Crusaders, following the orders of His Holiness, had entered on the lands of the Viscount of Beziers, his vassal, he did not afford him due assistance, lest he should oppose the intentions of the Church, and that, consequently, the Viscount lost his lands, and at last his life. He complained that the Legate and Simon of Montfort had not only taken those places within his dominions which were occupied by heretics, but many others where the inhabitants were not under the least suspicion of heresy, and carried their usurpation so far that Montauban and Toulouse were the only places remaining to him. He said that, during his absence in a war with the Moors in Spain, they had seized the lands of the Counts of Foix and Comminges, and of the Viscount of Bearn, all three his vassals, although he was at that time giving his blood, and that of his subjects, for the faith; and he concluded by praying the Pope to preserve the county of Toulouse for the son of the Count, and promised that the youth, then fifteen years of age, should be educated with great care under his own direction. The Pope could scarcely disoblige a Sovereign who had been second to none in honouring the Roman See, and in persecuting nonconformists; and therefore directed his Legates to convene a Council of Clergy and laity, investigate the proposals of the King of Arragon, and send him their opinion in writing. He also commanded them to endeavour to put an end to the war in their legation, in order that nothing might divert Princes and people from fighting against the Saracens; and charged Simon of Montfort to render to the King the dues he had been accustomed to receive from the Viscount of Beziers, and restore to him and his vassals the lands that had been taken from them. Peter of Arragon went to Toulouse; a Council was at the same time assembled at Lavaur, and, after unsatisfactory negotiations

DEATH OF PETER OF ARRAGON.

between him and them, they proclaimed a crusade against him for protecting heretics, and the war was resumed with as much vigour as the resources of the priestly party would allow. Encouraged by success in resisting their attacks, the King called more troops out of Spain, and proceeded to act offensively. Simon grew desperate, marched on him as he was besieging the castle of Muret, and gave him battle (A.D. 1213). Peter was left dead on the field; and so one of the most zealous champions of the Papacy, because he would not go into the excess of injustice of which Romish Ecclesiastics only could be capable, was confounded with those whom he had once thought it pious to destroy, and was slain by Ministers of the Church for which his blood, and the blood of his subjects, had been so freely shed. And this arose from the pertinacious resolution of those men to make every other consideration bend before this one,—the destruction of heretics for the enriching of the Church.

Their excessive zeal had outrun the better policy of the Pope, who would fain have retained the services of Peter of Arragon; and he therefore sent a new Legate into Provence with fresh instructions, to obviate, if possible, the mischief he foresaw as likely to recoil on his cause from the death, in the very bosom of heresy, of one of his best friends. The Legate arrived in the beginning of the year, (1214,) and brought many letters to the Clergy, and one to Simon de Montfort, requiring him to give up to the Papal representative the son of the King of Arragon, whom he had taken prisoner at the battle of Muret. The Legate was also empowered to absolve the Count of Comminges, the Viscount of Bearn, and the people of Toulouse, who were all under anathema. Political reasons only induced the Pope to make those concessions to the Princes; but with heretics no measures were to be kept. The Bishop of Carcassone had spent a year in preaching this Crusade in France, and returned to Provence about the middle of April, at the head of a formidable company of armed pilgrims; the Cardinal Legate at Paris, and the Archdeacon of Paris, already famous as an engineer and soldier, came at the same time with reinforcements; the united companies met at Beziers, now peopled with Catholics, and this army was further increased by the arrival of the Duke of Burgundy and the Archbishops of Lyons and Vienne, leading numerous trains of dependents and volunteers to help in holy war. The new Legate fulfilled his instructions by reconciling the Counts and other noblemen to the Church; but the Bishops, headed by Simon de Montfort, pursued their vocation of taking castles, robbing proprietors of their estates under the same pretext of religion, and burning the more eminent of the Waldenses as they fell into their hands. Seven such persons being brought to the Parisian Legate, freely acknowledged themselves to be followers of the Waldensian doctrine, and were given over to the Crusaders, who burnt them with great glee. But the suppression of heresy was not the only object contemplated by the Church. Visions of temporal grandeur, no doubt, rose to the imagination of Pope and Prelates, who began to look on the provinces of Provence and Languedoc as added to the states of the Church. The Kings of Arragon and France might be expected to oppose a sudden annexation of the conquered country to the patrimony of St. Peter; and therefore the only question that could be safely discussed as yet was, who should be temporal ruler. To this end a Council was assembled at Montpellier, (A.D. 1215,) consisting chiefly of Ecclesiastics, with laymen enough to give the decision a colour of legality. Simon de Montfort, who aspired after the sovereignty, was not present in the assembly, because the inhabitants hated him so thoroughly that he durst not enter the city; but stayed in the neighbourhood, and met some of the Bishops daily at the house of the Knights Templars outside the walls. Business commenced in the form of a sermon delivered by the Legate in the church of Notre Dame, and proceeded in a meeting of the Bishops only, at his lodgings, where they consulted as to the person to whom the city of Toulouse, and the other places conquered by the Crusaders, should be given. Their choice fell on Simon; and he would probably have been invested with the honours of lordship at once, if it had not been found, on reference to the Legate's commission, that so much could not be done without the sanction of the Pope himself. An Archbishop was immediately despatched with letters to Rome to supplicate His Holiness to confirm their vote, and quickly returned with letters appointing Simon as Protector of the conquests made by the Crusaders, until a General Council, soon to assemble in the Lateran, should decide respecting the lordship. The Protector was exhorted to persevere in the service of Christ, and the Barons were instructed to obey him in all things relating to peace and faith; in a solemn assemblage of the principal personages present, he was inducted into the new dignity, and his first act was to proceed to Toulouse, attended by the pilgrims, and dismantle the city of its walls. Prince Louis, son of the King of France, took part in that expedition; but only as a servant of the Legate, who had forbidden him to take any step without his authority, because his royal father had not been sufficiently zealous in the holy war, nor extirpated all sinners from his realms, and because he came not as a Prince, but only as a pilgrim. The gentle Prince obeyed; and having fulfilled forty days, the period required by his vow, he returned to Paris, wiser than when he came. The expected fourth Council of Lateran was holden at the time appointed; and a concourse of four hundred Bishops of all grades, eight hundred Abbots and Priors, with proxies of many that could not be there in person, Ambassadors of both Emperors, and the Kings of England, France, Hungary, Jerusalem, and Cyprus, and of a multitude of lesser Princes, were all managed by the clever and imperious Pontiff, Innocent III. Raymond, Count of Toulouse, was there as a supplicant, imploring the Council to restore him the territory and power of which he had been deprived. Simon de Montfort also sent his messengers to solicit the title and prerogatives of Count of Toulouse; and although several Prelates, constrained by a sense of justice and humanity, favoured the suit of Raymond, the majority applauded Innocent when he haughtily gave sentence that Raymond, under whose government faith and peace had never been kept, should be for ever excluded from his possessions, and make his abode in

SIMON DE MONTFORT KILLED.

some suitable place, with a pension of four hundred marks of silver, to do penance until death. His wife, whose brother, Peter of Arragon, had fallen while fighting in his defence, should be permitted to retain her dowry, in consideration of her acknowledged orthodoxy. All the country that the Crusaders had conquered from the heretics should be given to the Count of Montfort, saving ecclesiastical privileges, of course, because he had laboured more than any one else in "the service of Christ." The rest of the country, as yet unconquered, should be preserved, under the orders of the Church, by persons able to maintain peace and faith, until the son of Raymond should be of age. This monstrous usurpation was not submitted to by the vassals of Count Raymond. Many of them revolted against Simon, and the country was involved in civil war, not only for religion, but for territorial rights; the Priests were treated, in many places, with every mark of contempt; and although crowds of vagrant Preachers came from various parts of France to earn, as they were told, plenary remission of their sins by endeavouring to convert heretics, the force of popular disgust was found to be insuperable. Avignon, Marseilles, St. Gilles, Beaucaire, and Tarascon renounced allegiance to Simon; and when a new Legate came from Rome, he was obliged to cross the Rhone, and lodge, as inoffensively as possible, in Orange (A.D. 1217). On the other hand, the new Pope, Honorius III., availing himself of the services of Dominic, urged the preaching Friars to give the people of France and Spain no rest, until the supremacy of the Church should be established. A new order, "the militia of Christ," was instituted; the members of which, living in their own houses, were to conduct the business of domestic persecution; * and another order of women, as a branch of the Dominicans, was charged, by sedulity of devout and earnest speech, to quicken the zeal of men in the prosecution of the same object. Raymond, who had retired to Spain, encouraged by the position of affairs in his own country, returned secretly to Toulouse, and was welcomed by the inhabitants: Simon was perplexed, the Legate was desperate, the Pope wrote letters to the Kings of France and Arragon, exhorting them to take up arms on his behalf, and even threatened the latter with a foreign invasion if he would not consent. It does not appear that any very large number of Crusaders was obtained by this means, for people had spent nearly all their zeal, and the Papal Count sat down nine months before the rebuilt walls of Toulouse without being able to take the city. Between the sallies of the besieged, and the reproaches of the Legate, who taunted him with incapacity and negligence, Simon's spirit sank; in that state he was when killed by a stone from an engine, and he left his son to inherit an empty title. The young man spent a month in fruitless attempts to take the city, and then abandoned it to its rightful Lord (A.D. 1218). Provisions failed, money was exhausted, pilgrims deserted the camp, and many of the people of the country, hearing that Simon, whose valour had commanded respect, was dead, refused to acknowledge his son Amauri. During about seven years the war continued between this second

* Hence came the "Familiars" of the Inquisition.

Count of Toulouse, so called, and the real Count Raymond, and his son and successor, Raymond VII. At last the Pope contrived to engage the influence of the Emperor and the King of France to induce Raymond to solicit or accept reconciliation with the Church. The ceremony was performed at Paris; where the Legate, Conrad, declared him to be a Catholic, and pronounced the Crusade against the Albigenses at an end. A Council was then convened at Montpellier; the Prelates condescended to restore him his earldom; and he engaged to keep the Catholic faith as taught by the Roman Church, to enforce the same observance on all his vassals, and to purify his lands from heresy by executing the judgment of the Church on heretics by fines and corporal punishment (A.D. 1224).

All this, and much besides, was more easily promised than performed. The faith and peace of the Roman Church could not be kept in Narbonese Gaul. After so much suffering, with the remembrance of innumerable injuries, and with a confirmed hatred of the whole system of Popery, the people were not likely to submit to the sway of priestcraft in mere compliance with the negotiation of Raymond the younger, who could not bring the towns to submission, and was therefore, like his father, treated as an enemy of the Church. In a national Council at Paris, (A.D. 1226,) the Legate excommunicated him, and confirmed, as he pretended, the right of Louis VIII., King of France, and his heirs, to the lands held by the Count of Toulouse, a condemned heretic. Amauri, unable to govern the towns conquered by his father, surrendered them to the King, who received the Cross from the Pope's representative, and vowed to exterminate heresy in his new dominions. Again Preachers were sent forth to stir up the French to fight for their religion; the Clergy engaged to give the King a subsidy for the maintenance of his troops; all who owed him military service were commanded to appear at Bourges on an appointed day, and eventually marched thence, with Louis at their head, and met with no resistance until they reached Avignon, which stood a long siege. At last, hunger and disease compelled the inhabitants to capitulate; and the Crusaders, after seeing two thousand of their companions perish with sickness under the walls of Avignon, gladly struck their tents. The war thus ended, Louis died shortly afterwards; and a Council at Narbonne made various enactments for the punishment of heretics, and offered the persons and the goods of the Counts of Toulouse and Foix, the Viscount of Beziers and the Albigenses, to any who could take them (A.D. 1227). Still the conquest was incomplete, and Raymond did not make final submission until two years later, when he appeared before the King at Paris, and was permitted to retain his lands for life; but they were to be transferred after that to the King and his heirs, and he was to do penance by five years' service in the wars against the Saracens beyond sea, and contribute four thousand marks of silver for the establishment of a University in Toulouse. That city was relieved from interdict; and a Council was shortly afterwards held there, (A.D. 1229,) which is marked as exerting great influence in the subsequent proceedings of the priesthood. The Archbishops and Bishops were to swear in one

COUNCIL OF TOULOUSE.

Priest, and two or three laymen at least, in every parish, both in and out of cities, who should diligently, faithfully, and frequently seek out heretics by searching all houses and other places that might lie under suspicion, and giving notice of such places to the Bishop, the Lord of the place, or his Bailiff. The Lords were also to be careful to have search made for heretics in villages, houses, and woods; and if any one should be convicted of having sheltered a heretic for money, or otherwise allowed him to remain on his land, he should lose that land, and his person should be delivered to his Lord to suffer justice. The Bailiff that should neglect to search for heretics in his neighbourhood should lose his property, and never be Bailiff again. The house in which a heretic was found should be pulled down, and the site confiscated. Any one might hunt heretics in any place, and the Bailiff of that place should be bound to render assistance. Those who had voluntarily abandoned heresy should not reside any longer in the town where they had previously dwelt, if that town was suspected of heresy; and, to mark detestation of their ancient error, they should wear two conspicuous crosses of a different colour from their garments, and not be allowed to discontinue the mark without letters testimonial from the Bishop. Neither should they be intrusted with any public office, nor admitted in any matters of law, until they had been restored to unity by the Pope or his Legate. Heretics converted through fear of death, or from any other cause, and not voluntarily, should be imprisoned by the Bishop, notwithstanding their conversion, so that they might not corrupt any one. They were to be maintained in prison by those who had got their property, or, if they had no property, by the Bishop. A list of all the inhabitants was to be kept in every parish; and all males at the age of fourteen years, and all females at twelve, should swear before the Bishop or his delegates to renounce all heresy, hold the Catholic faith, and persecute and denounce heretics. Every one should communicate at Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide, or be suspected of heresy. "We also prohibit that the laity should be permitted to have books of the Old and New Testament, unless any one should desire to have a Psalter, or a Breviary for the Divine Offices, or the Hours of the blessed Virgin, for the sake of devotion. But they must not have any of the aforesaid books translated into a vulgar language." Whoever should be defamed or suspected of heresy, might not exercise the profession of a Physician; and when any sick person should have received the host from the hand of a Priest, he was to be carefully looked after until the time of his death or recovery, lest any heretic, or person suspected of heresy, should get access to him, as enormous evils had happened in consequence of such interviews. Wills were to be made in the presence of a Priest, or be invalid. All heads of families were to attend church, and hear the entire service and sermon on Sundays and fast-days, except prevented by some sufficient cause, or be fined twelve tournois pence, half to the Lord of the land, and half to the poor. Many of these regulations will be recognised as afterwards continued by the Inquisition; and the prohibition of the holy Scripture in vernacular

VOL. 11.

4 A languages, is remarkable as the first officially published by any part of the Church of Rome, but afterwards adopted by the whole. The universal adoption and subsequent relaxation of this rule will be related as the events arise. And it will occur to the reader that the canons of the Council of Toulouse are only an enlargement of those of Lateran III. and Verona.*

When Toulouse became a University-town, and an appanage of France, it was also a stronghold of ecclesiastical power, the Albigenses were no longer in a condition to defend themselves by taking up arms, nor was it necessary to wage war against them, or to preach crusade. A system was organized for the suppression of religious liberty, not only in those provinces, but over a great part of Europe; and we only read of the followers of Waldo and other nonconformists throughout the remainder of the thirteenth century as helpless sufferers of a searching and ruthless persecution more malignant, and unspeakably more artful, than that inflicted by the Pagans on the early Christians. Councils at Melun, Beziers, (A.D. 1233,) and Arles, (A.D. 1234,) followed up the determinations of Toulouse, adding some stringent regulations which the Priests thought necessary, in order to arm themselves and their familiars with more ample power to vex and to destroy. The same thing was done in Spain and Italy; but we must continue to trace the rise of the Inquisition in Languedoc and Provence. There, as elsewhere, the Dominicans were the chosen instruments for its establishment; and the Bishops were strictly required to aid, but by no means to direct, them in all their operations. Yet some deference was necessarily rendered to the Bishops to obviate or to appease their jealousy; and accordingly the arrangements for the first or ancient Inquisition were all made in Councils. The three Archbishops of Narbonne, Arles, and Aix, with many other Ecclesiastics, being assembled at Narbonne, were consulted by the Friars, who received, not direction, but advice, to the following effect:—

"We advise you to impose the following penance on those heretics whom you may have exempted from imprisonment, because they came to you of their own accord within the appointed time, and declared to you the truth, as well against others as themselves. Let them come to church every Sunday, wearing the Cross on their dress, and present themselves to the Curate between the Epistle and the Gospel, carrying rods in their hands with which they shall receive discipline, and they shall suffer the same in every procession. On the first Sunday of each month let them visit, with the rods in their hands, all the houses in the town where they have formerly seen heretics. Let them be present every Sunday at mass, vespers, and sermon. Let them bear arms, at their own expense, for the defence of the faith and of the Church against Saracens, heretics, or other rebels, during an appointed time, as the Pope may command; but let them not be required any more to go beyond sea, lest they should rally together there, and pervert the Catholics. The Inquisitors may add to, or

* Fleury, lxxvii.—lxxix; Allix, Albigenses, xxi.; Mariana, Hist. de Espana, xii., 2; Llorente, Hist. de la Inquisicion, ii., 4, 5; Maitland, Albigenses and Waldenses, sect. vii.

ALBIGENSES BURNT.

diminish from, those periods of penance, according to circumstances, and the parish Priests shall see that the penance be performed. The heretics who shall not have presented themselves within the time of grace, or who shall in any other way have rendered themselves unworthy of indulgence, and yet submit to the Church, ought to be imprisoned for life; but as the number is so great that it is impossible to build prisons for them, you might defer imprisonment until the Pope has been consulted. As for the rebels that refuse to obey, whether to submit to imprisonment or any other penance, you should abandon them to the secular Judge without hearing them any more, and treat them in the same manner as the relapsed after abjuration. It is enough that they have deceived the Church once." They also advised the Dominicans not to allow any one who had been subject to discipline on account of heresy to turn Monk, lest he should corrupt the simple Monks; and not to let any one be exempted from imprisonment on any account, not the husband for the sake of his wife, nor the wife for the sake of her husband, nor fathers nor mothers for the sake of their children, nor others on account of old age or infirmity. "No one," they said, "should be condemned without proof, or on his own confession; for it were better to leave crime unpunished, than to condemn the innocent." Here is a faint gleam of justice, or perhaps, to speak more truly, a simulation of justice, in the absence of common humanity; and while we peruse the above sentences, replete with artifice and cruelty, it is impossible to forget that the framers of these and other rules already cited were not the Inquisitors themselves, but Bishops, Abbots, parochial Priests, and Monks in Council assembled, often with Popes and Legates a latere at their head, resistlessly disproving the empty excuse of those who say that the Inquisition is not the Church, and that therefore the Church has not been responsible for its atrocities, but may disclaim them as acts of an independent institution.

Fulminations against heresy resounded from the centre, throughout the whole area of Popedom. Gregory IX. and Innocent IV. issued Bulls and Briefs to give uniformity to persecution, and impart one directive spirit to all its agents, adding to the unbloody sacrifice on the altars immolation at the stake, not as a rare act of zeal, but as an appointed solemnity. In France, of which country we are now speaking, no time was lost in obeying the sanguinary mandates; and one instance must serve, out of many, to illustrate the progress of the system. At the town of Monthemé, in Champagne, a company of Albigenses was detected and proceeded against canonically. Handed over to the secular authority, they were reserved for execution on a convenient day. On the Friday before Whitsuntide, (May 13th, 1239,) when the improved state of the roads, and beauty of the vernal landscape, invited citizens and Barons to quit their workshops and their castles, and enjoy the country, a multitude of not fewer than a hundred thousand persons was gathered from all parts to the neighbourhood of that town, there to witness the vengeance of the Church. The Archbishop of Rheims, a large company of Bishops, and all the Ecclesiastics of every degree in the district, encircled the

1 A 2 hearths. At their head the King of Navarre, attended by a long train of Barons, gave royal sanction, and added to the attractions of the spectacle. One hundred and eighty-three victims were consumed in their presence, and the Monk who recorded the event pronounces that it was a holocaust agreeable to God. One Friar Robert is said to have been the active person in detecting and burning them, himself formerly one of the Bulgarians, as those people were sometimes called. At that time he was in favour as a successful Inquisitor; but carried his ferocity so far as to displease his employers, who found that he was persecuting as many as he could lay hands on, not for conservation of the faith, but in order to make himself feared, or to extort money. He was at last convicted of many crimes, and condemned to perpetual imprisonment. But the Inquisitors were frequently resisted; many of them in several countries lost their lives in endeavouring to establish the tribunal; and in Toulouse, during an interval of political change, the inhabitants rose on them, and put them to death; and eleven Dominicans, Franciscans, and Clerks, were instantly added to the catalogue of martyrs on the intelligence of their death reaching Rome, in consideration, it was said, of the holiness of the cause for which they suffered * (A.D. 1242). Councils were holden at Beziers and Alby, for the sake of keeping alive inquisitorial discipline; and Louis the Saint, the Popes, and the Prelates gave the entire weight of their respective dignities to the same cause; but a recitation of their doings would add nothing varied to that delineation of Romish intolerance in France during the thirteenth century which has been already given. Yet Councils and armies, Popes and Kings, could not prevail against the word of God; and, despite the prohibition of vernacular versions by the Council of Toulouse in the year 1229, a Canon of Aire laboured for about two years and eight months on a translation of the Old and New Testaments, interspersed with the glosses and postils of Peter Comestor: this work was republished in the dialects of Picardy and the Walloons, and copies are said to be still extant in the libraries of France. About the same time, (A.D. 1291 to 1294,) or shortly afterwards, another French version, but without note or comment, was also published; and if it originated, as Le Long conjectures, in an order of Louis IX., one of the most devoted supporters that ever led crusade in the service of the Roman See, the work may fairly be regarded as a practical disavowal of that part of the policy of Romanism. This view might seem incompatible with the entire current of history, if we were not to remember that Toulouse was a feud of the King of Arragon; and that therefore the Sovereigns of France were not required to abide by its decisions. And the disapprobation excited by ecclesiastical proscription of the sacred Scriptures was further expressed in Spain. James I. of Arragon had followed up the Council of Toulouse by presiding at another in Tarragona, (A.D. 1233,) and issuing a constitution to the following effect:—"In the name of the holy and indivisible Trinity, who holds the world in his fist, commands the commanders, and rules over the rulers, &c., &c. By an irrefragable decree, we determine

* Fleury, lxxxi., 29, 54.

KING OF ARRAGON EXCOMMUNICATED.

and firmly inhibit that it shall not be lawful for any lay person to dispute publicly or privately concerning the Catholic faith; and whose shall do the contrary, it being proved, shall be excommunicated by his Bishop, and, unless he shall purify himself, shall be had as one suspected of heresy. It is also appointed that no one shall have books of the Old or New Testament in Romance. And if any one has them, he must deliver them to the Bishop within eight days after the publication of this constitution, made at the time of the sentence, in order that they may be burnt." But as the sentences of these Arragonian Councils were neglected in France, so were they on the other side the Pyrenees, in Castile, where Alonso X., surnamed the Wise, afterwards commanded a version to be made of the canonical books; * (A.D. 1269;) a proceeding which the Jesuit Mariana endeavours to account for by the well-known desire of Alonso to polish and improve the Spanish language. But this was done in many other ways; and considering that dissidents from the Church of Rome had been the first translators of the Bible, that their work had been again and again denounced as heretical and dangerous, and that every Sovereign in Europe who did not aid in the suppression of religious liberty was exposed to the utmost peril of losing his kingdom, if not his life, it is impossible to read of translations of the Scriptures made by order of French and Spanish Kings, and of their reproduction in provincial dialects, without discerning the hand of God, who would not allow the last morsel of the bread of life to be snatched from the lips of his children, already perishing for lack of knowledge.

Having passed from France into Spain, we may pause for a moment to observe the conduct of the Popes there towards those who differed from them. It is certain that the Spanish priesthood and people had not yet imbibed the spirit of intolerance prevalent elsewhere. Although the kingdom of Arragon was politically Spanish, as the scene of persecution was chiefly in Languedoc and Provence, north of the Pyrenees, it would have perplexed the reader to have spoken of it as taking place elsewhere than in France. A great part of the thirteenth century was occupied in reconquering from the Saracens all the principalities of the Peninsula except Granada. But the court of Rome quarrelled with Don Pedro, King of Arragon, whose dominion comprehended Catalonia, Arragon, and Valencia, the King of Majorca, his brother, also doing him homage for Narbonne. Sicily was added to his dominions by conquest, to the grief of the Pope, who claimed that island for himself. He therefore excommunicated Pedro, and offered his kingdom to the French King, Philip, who, by taking the Cross for holy war against his neighbour, and daring to invade Spain, (A.D. 1285,) earned the surname of "Bold," but nothing more. The whole affair is one of secular politics; but the conduct of the Pope and his Legates in France was so infamous for suggestion and prosecution of treasonable intrigues and perjuries, for sanction and instigation of the utmost outrages of barbarian warfare on a defenceless people, and their brave, and ultimately victorious,

* Villanueva, De la Leccion de la sagrada Escritura en Lenguas vulgares, cap. I.

Monarch, that, if space allowed, a distinct narration might afford a perfect example of those political wars which were frequently waged under the standard of the Church, for the purpose of promoting designs of aggrandizement, and, if successful, would have gone far to realize the idea of the Pontiffs, that the world should acknowledge them as its liege lords. It can hardly be necessary to state that the uniform accompaniment of a promise of eternal salvation to the licentious army was not forgotten, and that the profaners of churches, and violators of humanity, were blessed by the irritated Pope as worthy to be occupants of Paradise.* The King of Arragon was called a heretic, and not absolved until his last moments; but, although his kingdom was placed under interdict, the Clergy disobeyed the Pope, and proceeded with their ceremonies as usual. Other interdicts in Spain and Portugal were repeatedly enforced; and whenever the High Priest of Rome was angry, the churches were shut up, the bells hung silent, the altars were unvisited, the dead often lay unburied, except by trembling relatives of the departed, all religious observances were suspended, and prayer itself was declared unlawful. When people became thoroughly terrified by the denial of what seemed necessary for present comfort and eternal salvation, they usually withdrew obedience from their rulers, and compelled them to make fatal submissions to the Roman tyrant. The Inquisition was by this time nominally established in Spain; but, with the exception already marked, made little progress. But persecution was unrelenting; and when the Inquisition had overcome the open resistance of the people, and nearly silenced every expression of dissent from the dominant religion, the King, James II., commanded that all heretics, of whatever sect, should quit his dominions; (A.D. 1292;) and ordered the Justices to render full assistance to the Dominican Friars in character of Papal Inquisitors, to imprison whomsoever they might desire, to execute all their sentences, to remove every obstacle that hindered the free exercise of their office, and to furnish them with lodgings, horses, and provisions when on their inquisitorial journeys. Alonso II. had published a similar edict in 1194, and thus began the practice of expulsion which is still carried out to the extreme injury of that country.†

Some remaining zeal for the extension of Christianity deserves honourable mention. St. Francis, who has not been mentioned sooner, because not guilty of persecution, like Dominic, his contemporary, sent a party of six Missionaries from Spain to Mo-

* Every word of this statement is borne out by an eye-witness. Bernardo Desclot, Historia de sus Tiempos. Libro III. reimpreso en Madrid, 1793.

† Llorente, iii, 1. The writer of this chapter possesses documents in proof. One is an officially-published decree of the Queen of Spain, the other an order of the chief authority of one of the cities of Spain, countersigned by his own hand, for the expulsion of Wesleyan Methodists, as such. These documents were issued in the years 1839 and 1840, and therefore are sufficient to support the assertion that the practice of expulsion is continued; although the change which has latterly taken place in the policy of continental legislatures, and in the general opinion of continental Europe, in respect to religious liberty, as well as the constant advance of better political principles in Spain itself, warrants the hope that Alonso II. of Arragon, and Christina of Spain, will have been the first and the last Sovereigns so to fight against God, and bring dishonour on the inhabitants of that peninsula.

CRUSADE IN LIVONIA.

rocco. Zeal for the Church was more conspicuous than meekness or love for souls in their discharge of the mission. They mistook invective for fidelity, and after having been allowed so to preach for some time, they were sent out of the country; but returned, resumed the same mistaken method of denouncing Mohammedanism, rather than preaching Christ; and five of the six were put to death, one having died before the party sailed from Portugal. They have since been canonized. Seven other Spaniards went to the little island of Ceuta, entered the town early one morning, contrary to a prohibition which excluded all Christians, walked through the streets with ashes on their heads, crying that none could be saved without faith in Christ. They were soon seized, and, having refused to renounce Christianity, were instantly beheaded.* An order, or fraternity, for the redemption of captives from the Moors, and styled "the Order of Mercy," was instituted with great solemnity, and greater superstition, at Barcelona (A.D. 1224). The object was admirable, but does not seem to have been attained. Christian slaves and renegades multiplied in Africa; but the brethren of the order also multiplied in Spain, and by their zeal accelerated the downfal of the Caliphs of Cordova.†

Great stir was frequently made in Italy about heresy, dissatisfaction with the Papal government was general, and many persons were treated as heretics; but it is not easy to discover traces of Christian martyrdom, although it is more than probable that many of the Vaudois would have been distinguished as witnesses of Gospel truth, had any record of their confession and suffering been preserved. It is enough to know that the Inquisition was fully established.

Conrad of Marpurg, a Dominican Monk, was first Inquisitor in Germany, where, indulging in the barbarous habits of the people rather than conforming to the milder professions of his Church, he examined persons accused of heresy by the ordeal of red-hot iron. As they were not likely to understand the means employed by Monks for enduring fiery trials without injury, they were, of course, convicted, and perished accordingly, at least as to their bodies, while Conrad was spared the trouble of distinguishing between tenets orthodox and heterodox. The Emperor, Frederic II., who was then on good terms with the Pope, having been invited to the imperial throne from which an excommunication had hurled his predecessor, Otho, as an enemy of the Church, confirmed the Inquisitors in plenary authority, (A.D. 1225,) by a famous decree, containing the usual enactments, and inflicting death on heretics, and infamy on their survivors and descendants.‡ Meanwhile the Pagans of Livonia, and those of Prussia, who are charged with licentiousness resembling that of Paris, especially in the habitual criminalities of prostitution and infanticide, combined with the ferocity that is found among savages in general, were invaded by Crusaders to whom heaven was promised after they should have washed away their sins in pagan blood. The indefatigable Dr. Conrad discovered a people on the banks of the Weser, who did not acknowledge the supremacy of Rome, but lived

* Fleury, Ixxviii., 25, 44.

† Limborch, Hist. Inquisition, book I., chap. 12.

† Mariana, Hist. Esp., xli., 8.

in perfect ecclesiastical independence. According to the Monkish annalists, they were exceedingly wicked. Their deepest guilt seems to have lain in a refusal to pay tithes, and an excommunication marked them as fit objects of hostility; attacked by their neighbours, they bravely defended themselves, and generally had the advantage; it became necessary to proclaim a crusade against them, and the Archbishop of Bremen, supported by the Duke of Brabant, and the Count of Holland, led a little army of Cross-bearers into the accursed province. The Stadings, for so they were called, gave battle with their accustomed courage; but the invaders were too strong for them. The Count charged vigorously, while the Clergy, at a convenient distance, chanted hymns, the martial music of their Church; the heretics were soon transfixed by consecrated swords; and, trampled under the horses' hoofs, six thousand fell in one day; many were dispersed, preferring expatriation to bondage, although liberty was no more to be found wherever they might go, and the remnant are said to have submitted to the Prelate * (A.D. 1231). The history of Germany and the empire during the former part of this century is full of the quarrel between the same Frederic, who mounted the throne under the patronage of the Pope, and the Popes themselves, Gregory and Innocent. His services were forgotten as soon as he displayed a disposition to resist encroachments on his imperial rights; and, like his predecessor, he was anathematized. His party, the Ghibellines, or Imperialists, in perpetual hostility with the Guelphs, or Papists, long divided Germany and Italy; and he might have triumphed, together with the cause of civil liberty, but for the extreme ignorance of the people, who heard him described by their Priests as a monster of iniquity. In a Council at Lyons, holden under Innocent IV., (A.D. 1245,) he was finally excommunicated by the Pontiff himself with the utmost solemnity; many of his subjects refused allegiance, and he died oppressed with grief. On this excommunication an author of high authority observes, that it is "the most pompous act of usurpation in all the records of the Church of Rome; and the tacit approbation of a General Council seemed to incorporate the pretended right of deposing Kings, which might have passed as a mad vaunt of Gregory VII. and his successors, with the established faith of Christendom."† Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland were ravaged by crusading Bishops. So were the Netherlands. Indeed, all Europe was overrun with Crusaders and Inquisitors; and if there be a province not mentioned as the seat of religious war or inquisition, we may suppose the silence to indicate the poverty of history, rather than any happy exemption from the universal scourge.

England in the thirteenth century affords no materials for our history. Scarcely is a voice raised to witness for the truth; or, if there were such witnesses, their names are shrouded under the darkness of that age. The principal event, an unequal contest of King John with the Pope, related to regal rights, not to the interests of Christian doctrine, belongs to another class of history, and cannot be adequately related

* Fleury, lxxx., 24, 43; Moreri, s. v.

† Hallam, Europe during the Middle Ages, chap. iii., part 1.

INSOLENCE OF BONIFACE VIII.

here; but sources of information in our own language are easily accessible. The independence of Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, is admirable, yet not singular. Scotland and Ireland are passing under the Papal yoke, and a few Irish suffer for sorcery and witchcraft; but as yet there are no Christian martyrs. The pride and cupidity of Rome have reached their highest point, and the year 1300 is marked in the capital of the Popedom as the year of Jubilee. The notion of a great festivity, solemnized at the expiration of each fifty or hundred years might have been suggested by recollection of such an institution in the law of Moses, or of the secular games (ludi seculares) of the ancient Romans. The object was to bring pilgrims to Rome, whose offerings should enrich the priesthood. The pretext was one of custom: there was no credible testimony by which that pretext could be established; but the cupidity of Pope and Clergy, the willingness of the Roman population to make gain of the multitudes of devotees who might be expected to crowd into their city, the passion of the populace everywhere for spectacle, and the willingness of a numerous class to make a safe pilgrimage to Rome, instead of hazarding their lives in a perilous "passage" to the Holy Land, combined to move the idle and superstitious gentry of that age in a new direction, and tended, under the good providence of God, to make the reigning vices of the Papacy yet more generally conspicuous, and provoke the salutary re-action which followed, and in no country more vigorously than in England. Fifty years afterwards, the lucrative experiment was repeated with yet greater splendour and success: subsequently, it was overdone by reducing the jubilee period, for the second time, to twenty-five years, and devout pilgrimages to Rome may be now pronounced as ended.

The Romish Church had risen to the utmost elevation over the temporal sovereignties and lesser States within its boundary. There were no longer any bodies of independent Clergy. Heresy, so called, was not extinguished; but it was driven deeper beneath the surface of society, and one might pass through the provinces recently subdued by the Crusaders, without perceiving any trace of its existence; just as the stranger would tread on the green turf covering the subterranean galleries of troglodytes, without supposing that a living and watchful population swarmed beneath his feet. The Grecian Patriarch, on the frontiers of the Popedom, barely retained the allegiance of a Clergy envious of the power of their western brethren, and ever trembling in the presence of Tartarian, Turkish, or Saracen invaders. Never did the Italian Antichrist boast greater things, indulge in greater confidence, or exercise so reckless provocation. An imperious Pontiff, and, if the charges of his enemies were not altogether unfounded, one that exceeded most of his predecessors in profligacy and impiety, carried those pretensions to the last extreme. This man, under the title of Boniface VIII., seemed to delight in pouring contempt on Princes, and especially on Philip the Fair, King of France, who had dared to resist his encroachment on regal power, as well as on the wealth and liberties of the kingdom. Surrounded by Priests who participated in the spoils of all churches and states out of Italy,

4 B and who combined all their powers to resist the political claims of both the Emperor and the French King on their side the Alps, he professed to hold a Council at Rome, (A.D. 1302,) wherein every thought yielded subservience to his principles, and every voice re-echoed his commands. In that assemblage he produced a Bull (Unam Sanctam) expository of the doctrine which all the ultramontanes, and almost all other members of the priesthood, entertained, but did not always venture to put forth so undisguisedly. "We believe," recited the Council, speaking at his dictation, "We believe and confess one holy Catholic and apostolic Church, out of which there can be no salvation. We acknowledge her alone to be the Church, and as there is but one body, so is there only one head; for, having two heads, she would be a monster. This only head is Jesus Christ, with St. Peter his Vicar, and the successor of St. Peter. Whether they be Greeks, or whoever else, that say they are not subject to this successor, they must confess themselves to be part of the flock of Christ, who hath said that there is only one flock, and one shepherd. We learn that in this Church, and under her power, there are two swords, the spiritual and the temporal; but the former must be wielded by the hand of the Pontiff; the other by the Church, and by the hands of Kings and warriors following the order or the permission of the Pontiff. Let one sword be subject to the other, that is to say, the temporal power to the spiritual; for otherwise there could be no subordination to the higher powers, according to the command of St. Paul. Following the testimony of truth, the spiritual power should institute and judge the temporal; and thus is fulfilled, in the Church, the prophecy of Jeremiah: 'I have set thee over the nations, and over the kingdoms, to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down, to build, and to plant.' Therefore, if the temporal power do err, it must be judged by the spiritual, or if a lesser spiritual power offends, it must be judged by the greater; but it is God alone who judges the sovereign spiritual power, since the Apostle says, 'He that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man.' Then 'whosoever resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God,' and sets up two principles, as did Manes, a doctrine which we judge to be false and heretical. And we farther declare and define that it is absolutely necessary to salvation that every human creature be subject to the Pope." * The Pope did not, indeed, mention Philip, but he published a claim of superiority over all Princes, a superiority that all should acknowledge, by granting to his priesthood absolute emancipation from temporal control, licence for perpetration of all crimes, without fear of punishment, or even recognition of any tribunal on earth, except that of Boniface or his representative. There should be a universal revolt of the most influential part of every population, and the Magistrate was everywhere to be controlled and even punished by the Priest. The French King grasped his sword, resolved to try its temper with the sword of Boniface, and burnt copies of the Bull at Paris in sight of the people, who were soon made to understand who handled the more potent weapon.

* Extraragantes communes, lib. I., tit. De Majoritate et Obedientia.

BENEDICT XI. POISONED.

Nogaret, a French Lawyer, espoused the cause of his royal master and of his country; and, as if commissioned of God to wrest power from the pretended successor of Peter, the undaunted opponent of the foreign tyrant went to Italy, made common cause with the family of the Colonne, then suffering persecution in consequence of their adherence to the imperial party, or Ghibellines, attacked the Pope at a time when, not apprehending any danger, he had gone without guards to the town of Anagni, and there treated him with such violence that he died soon afterwards. So did he perish by the very sword which he had claimed the right to use for the death either of rebel or saint. The terrible retribution did not finish there. His successor was promptly, perhaps hastily, elected by the conclave, and took the name of Benedict XI. He seems to have paid too little deference to the wishes of the Cardinals, and to have provoked the jealousy of the secular Clergy by patronizing the Mendicant Friars at their expense. The pontificate of Benedict was therefore very short. One day as he was sitting at dinner at Perugia, where he sometimes resided, a boy, disguised as a woman, was introduced into his apartment. He assumed the character of conversa, or servant of a nunnery, and presented a silver basin full of confectionary as a present from the Abbess, a devoted admirer of the Pontiff. The fatal present was accepted without suspicion, the pretended nun was not required to taste first; but Benedict soon felt the effects of poison, and died a few days afterwards. With Boniface the French quarrel had not passed away, nor had the rancorous antipathy of the Guelph and Ghibelline factions abated in the least. These factions were represented and balanced in the conclave; but the ultramontanes were outwitted by a Cardinal in the French interest, who proposed a nomination of three persons, all of them known to be zealous advocates of every Italian claim, one to be elected after forty days. One of these was Archbishop of Bourdeaux, at that time in open opposition to his Sovereign, and therefore most unlikely to make him any concession unfavourable to the Papacy. But the wily Cardinal despatched couriers to Paris, proposing to Philip that he should represent to the Archbishop that his election to the Holy See depended on his royal favour, and negotiate with him in order to a good understanding for the future. The King welcomed the proposal, and desired the Archbishop to meet him at a monastery in the heart of a forest, at night, and under cover of profoundest secrecy. Satisfied by the tenor of the royal letters that he might trust himself to so mysterious an interview, the Prelate proceeded thither at the appointed time; and, after reviewing the secret correspondence, threw himself at his feet, blessed him for the unexpected boon of the tiara, and professed his readiness to repay the gift by entire acquiescence in the King's desires. Philip raised up the man who was already his political convert, and so soon to be his spiritual Chief, kissed him, and demanded six favours. First. Perfect reconciliation with the Church, and pardon for whatever wrong he was presumed to have done to Boniface. Second. Communion then to be given to the King and his suite in sign of reconciliation. Third. All the tithes

4 ■ 2 of the kingdom during five years. Fourth. Annihilation of the memory of Boniface by the annulling of his acts. Fifth. The promotion of two nominees of the King to the dignity of Cardinal, in the first instance, and similar promotions as they might be desired afterwards. Sixth.—Here the King reserved the final condition to be declared at a proper time and place, leaving the expectant Archbishop in utter ignorance of the ulterior demand. But with the honours of the Popedom so near in prospect, he could not hesitate to place himself and it at the disposal of the King, and therefore used the precious moment for giving unqualified consent. Mass was instantly celebrated with great solemnity; and, as representatives of the two great parties which then divided Europe, they both at the altar professed reconciliation, swore fidelity to each other, and then parted: the King also having sworn to make him Pope; but taking with him his brother and two of his "nephews" as hostages, the obligation of an oath alone being notoriously insufficient to bind a Pope. Thus fell the Papal power and independence, after an almost uninterrupted series of triumphs and encroachments, during six centuries at least. Thus gave way that antichristian power which, in the name of Christ, had fought against the truth more cruelly than Nero; for there had been a quinquennium Neronis, a period of clemency and justice, even in the reign of that tyrant; but no such period can be found in the reign of Papal tyranny. Signal, indeed, was the retribution. On the ruins of a French dynasty the Bishop of Rome had reared his fabric of European power and territorial sovereignty; but here is a successor elect, of the third Boniface, at the feet of a successor of Charles Martel. The predecessors of this abject postulant for the triple crown had hurled interdicts and anathemas on France; but here, in France, and at the demand of the anathematized Monarch, lie abjured the enmity, the pride, the terrors of a long hostile Papacy. But observe the sequel. The intriguing Cardinal receives a satisfactory reply from King Philip, five days before the expiration of the stipulated time; Bertrand de Got, or D'Agost, is declared Pope; a Te Deum is chanted with unusual exultation by the Guelph Cardinals; Bertrand is visiting his diocese, seeming to be disengaged from every other care, when intelligence of the election reaches him; he returns to Bourdeaux, and commands the Cardinals to come from Rome to France to crown him. Startled at so unexpected a summons, they suspect that it is intended to transfer the chair of Peter beyond the Alps, yet cannot now prevent it; the Frenchman being Pope, crowned or uncrowned, matters nothing. The Kings of France and England, with other Princes, and a large concourse of Ecclesiastics, assembled in the church of St. Just, in Lyons, November 14th, 1305, and were met by the reluctant Cardinals, who placed the triple emblem of temporal and spiritual power on his head. The Italians misgave themselves; the French had triumphed; yet all saluted him as Clement V.; and every circumstance of the pageant was watched with superstitious anxiety. Perhaps it pleases God to overrule even trifling events in such times of ignorance, and thereby to divert the thoughts of the multitude into some new channel. So it was on that

"CAPTIVITY" OF THE POPES.

day. After the ceremony the Pope mounted a charger that had been kept in waiting at the church-door. He wore the sacred crown, brought by a Chamberlain from Rome for the occasion, and glittering with jewels. A compact crowd of spectators filled every spot available, and covered every eminence. The procession moved slowly onward, on the way to the Pope's lodgings: the King of France first holding the bridle, then other Princes, walking on foot, took the same place in succession, ostensibly signifying that they did homage; but really, that they led the Pope. Passing near an old wall, covered with spectators, the whole mass gave way, and, as it fell, the Pope's horse shied. Not even Kings could save him. Unhorsed, his Holiness lay in the dust; the crown forsook his head, and by the shock lost a rich carbuncle, valued at six thousand florins. Portents, if such they were, did not end there; for when, on the festival of St. Clement, the new Pope had given a dinner to his friends, in an after-dinner quarrel among the servants several lives were lost; and the Pope's brother, becoming involved in the confusion, was also killed. Thus began what the Italians called "the captivity;" their visible head being removed from Italy to France, and enthroned at Avignon.* Then France, "eldest daughter of the Church," became prouder than ever of her so-called Catholicity. A realm, hallowed by the presence of the Vicar of Christ, was not to be desecrated by that of a people of whom, according to the flesh, Christ came: as the Pope had paid so high a price for his dignity, their expulsion might mitigate the bitterness of subsequent regret; and the royal purse, as it was enriched by a donative of tithes, and should soon, as Philip too hastily expected, receive the spoils of the Templars, might also have the earnings of the Jews. In pursuance of a secret order, almost every Jew or Jewess, old or young, was arrested on the same day. Scarcely one was known to have escaped. All their property was confiscated, except sufficient to pay expenses to the frontier or the sea-coast. A few avoided temporal ruin by submitting to baptism; and many perished with fatigue, hunger, and grief (A.D. 1306). Encouraged by the temporary revival of his influence in a kingdom which had so long been alienated from Rome, and stimulated by the presence of a noble Armenian at the court of Avignon, Clement seriously thought of renewing the Crusades to Palestine. Haython, of Armenia, was related to the King of that country, had sustained the dignity of Viceroy over a province, and risen into celebrity as a soldier; but, imbued with the spirit of that age, and following the example of some members of his family, had betaken himself to a monastery of white Canons, or Præmonstratenses, on the island of Cyprus, that "as he had fought for the world in his youth, he might spend the residue of his days in the service of God, leaving the pomps of this life," or, to speak more correctly, that he might take a safer way to fame. The royal Monk presented himself at Poitiers, where the Pope, the King, and a select but numerous company of Princes and Prelates were holding a conference on the political affairs of England and

* Fleury, xc. 32-35, 41, 49-52.

France, and on the reports got up for the crimination of the Templars. He exerted himself to awaken an interest in those personages for the conquest of the "perfidious Saracens," and the recovery of the holy sepulchre. Amidst that rudely brilliant circle he shone as an oracle on all oriental affairs; answered questions suggested by his enumeration of barbaric realms, heard of for the first time by most of those present; and his descriptions and counsels, as those of an eye-witness and actor on the distant scene, gave him an undisputed authority. He told of Cathay, or northern China, the greatest kingdom that could be found, filled with people and with boundless wealth, extending to the shores of an ocean as yet unseen by any traveller from the west; and comprehending islands that no man could number. It was the emporium of the most precious works of art and fruits of nature; and "although the men were of the most perspicacious genius, and skilful in all corporeal works and exercises, no notion of spiritual things could be found among them." He told of Taras, whence came, said he, the Kings who visited the infant Saviour at Bethlehem; and where traditions of Christ were mingled with the figments and insensate ceremonies of idolatry. He told of the wandering herdsmen of Turquistan, the robust husbandmen and fierce warriors of Chorasmia, devoid of letters, yet obedient to the Patriarch of Antioch, and "making the body of Christ after the manner of the Greeks." While his hearers shuddered at hearing of the perpetual frosts and desolate snowy steppes of the Caucasian regions, he refreshed them with pictures of Indian magnificence, in a land where the blessed Apostle Thomas had preached the faith of Christ, now lost. To the longing imagination of Philip he displayed the gems, and pearls, and gold, and spices, and drugs abounding on the Indian main, and in the Archipelago; with the rubies and sapphires of Ceylon. Persia, Media, Armenia, Georgia, the realm of the Chaldees, Mesopotamia, Turkey, and Syria, with their customs and their heresies, passed under his familiar review. He described the history and polity of the Saracens in general; but dwelt with most assiduous particularity on all that related to the Tartars, with whom he was most anxious that Christendom should form alliance for the general conquest of the "perfidious Saracens," from Cordova, even to Mecca. "Now," cried he, "is the acceptable time, now is the day of salvation. Now, indeed, is the very time acceptable, the time for imparting succour to the Holy Land, which hath so long lain ravaged by perfidious dogs. Now is the acceptable time, when the hearts of the faithful ought to be inflamed. Now to the passage of the Holy Land. Now let us recover the holy sepulchre of the Lord, fountain and source of our hope, out of the hands of his enemies." On this theme he descanted incessantly. The Pope commanded Salconi, a Secretary, to write down the sum of those communications from the lips of the accomplished stranger, together with his Counsels, as an old soldier and statesman; and the French manuscript, revised and authenticated in his presence, (A.D. 1307,) was immediately translated into the low Latin of that age, and is now one of the most valuable fragments of the medieval history of the eastern

CRUSADES GIVE WAY TO MISSIONS.

world.* The disclosures and eloquence of Haython led to no immediate result; the crusading mania could not be revived; and the wanton pillage of Alexandria a few years afterwards, and a disastrous expedition to Smyrna, (A.D. 1344,) only brought greater dishonour on the Christian name. But whoever peruses the reports of the Mission in Tartary, perhaps the most ancient systematic Missionary undertaking of which the Church of Rome can boast, reports which were presented to Clement V. at the same time and place, by a person then returned from Cambalú, will be satisfied that, although the notion of crusading could not be suddenly relinquished, the zealous Armenian, and the bearer of intelligence from Montecorvino, founder of the Tartarian churches, did more happily for Missions what Peter the hermit had done for Crusades. And when, fourteen years afterwards, Sanuto the Venetian solicited an audience of the Pope John XXII., at Avignon, and presented him with "two books for the recovery and preservation of the Holy Land, one covered with red, and the other with yellow;" and also put into his hands charts and maps of the Mediterranean, Palestine, and Egypt, literature and geography began (A.D. 1321) to contribute towards the propagation of Christianity; and even warlike propagandists were constrained to seek for rational and humane methods of doing what Knights, carrying the Cross, as Haython said, on their shoulders and in their hearts, had never been able to effect. Let us pause, then, and admire the sovereignty of God, who, in the worst of times, gently deposits elements of intelligence and peace amidst prevailing turbulence, hate, and fraudulent political and papistical intrigue. The books and charts of Haython and Sanuto were the earliest contributions to that immense Missionary library which comprehends some of the mightiest achievements of human learning, and still affords indispensable assistance to the evangelists of the world. But we are lured away from the history of persecutions, this via dolorosa, over which fidelity to truth in an age of mistaken liberality requires us to continue our weary steps.

Thanks be to God, that as ages of Protestant martyrdom approach, the power that has persecuted saints during every stage of its existence, visibly declines. When Clement V. was crowned at Lyons, the "captivity" of the Popes began, and like that of Babylon, to which the writers of Italy compare it, lasted about seventy years. "The majority of the Cardinals was always French, and the Popes were uniformly of the same nation. Timidly dependent upon the court of France, they neglected the interests, and lost the affections, of Italy. Rome, forsaken by her Sovereign, nearly forgot her allegiance; what remained of Papal authority in the ecclesiastical territories was exercised by Cardinal Legates, little to the honour or advantage of the Holy See." † Neither was the policy of the new race of Popes and

* The title of this rare and precious little volume is, "Liber Historiarum Partium Orientis, sive Passagium Terræ Sanctæ, Haythono, Ordinis Præmonstratensis, Authore, Scriptus anno Redemptoris nostri, M.CCC. Haganom, per Johan., Sec. Anno M.D.XXIX." The true date of the work is in the preface, 1307.

† Hallam, Middle Ages, chap. vii., part 2.

Cardinals so independent and masterly as that of their Italian predecessors. The details of the suppression of the Red-Cross Knights, or Templars, by whomsoever written, can scarcely be read without indignation. Wicked as many of them no doubt were, they could hardly be worse than other bodies, although some of their sins might be gross and flagrant, and therefore more severely censured than the covert abominations of mendicants and hermits; and by throwing away those auxiliaries, for the sake of their possessions, Clement committed a mistake injurious to his successors, but beneficial to the world. John XXII. quarrelled with the Emperor Louis of Bavaria, and by his intemperance provoked Germany to a formal and legislative resistance which irrecoverably impaired the influence of the Pontiffs. The same error aroused England to effectual defence, of which our parliamentary statutes of the reign of Edward III. afford evidence. Poets, satirists, and Divines in Italy, resented the alienation of the supreme Pontiff from that classic land; but the pressure of his presence being removed, bold spirits arose with almost unrestrained freedom, to lash the venal courtiers of Avignon, and to disclose the enormities of Popery, religious and secular, by desperately rending the veil that covered both. The insatiate cupidity of the Avignon Popes also goaded the inferior Clergy into hostility all over Europe, and thereby weakened their loyalty, as we shall observe when speaking of Wycliffe, at the very time when an earnest and combined defence of their Roman master might have retarded, or even destroyed, the beginnings of reformation.* This "captivity" led to the schism of the Papacy, which was distinctly seen to be the beginning of its downfal.

Weary of the exactions and oppression of the Governors appointed over them by the Popes of Avignon, the Italian states, at that time under their temporal sovereignty, manifested a spirit of resistance. The Legates were driven out of some of the cities, officers of the pontifical government were killed by the populace, and the right of a foreigner to exercise regal power in Italy was denied. Florence, the greatest commercial city of that peninsula, headed a league against the Pope; a new banner, bearing the Latin word Libertas, floated over the battlements of the confederate places; and LIBERTY became the magic word wherewith the people clamorously answered to exorbitant demands of obedience and revenue, and aroused themselves to cast off the yoke. Gregory XI., then on the throne, tried the usual expedients of bulls and interdicts; but the indignant population treated them with scorn. Still there was a strong ecclesiastical party who contrived to sow strife in the municipalities, and strengthen some nobles who, in the style of those times, were familiarly called tyrants.† Foreign mercenary troops were also marched into the country to subdue the insurgents. Florentine merchants resident abroad were

* Hallam, chap. vii., part 2, with his authorities, will enable the student to investigate this highly interesting part of Papal history.

† The Italian tiranno, like the Greek τύραντος, was used in a mild acceptation, and signified, in the free states, "a leading man." Undefined power is always abused, and the word has again become odious in modern, as in ancient, Italy.

CATHERINE OF SIENNA.

ruined; for Kings, especially the King of England, confiscated their property, every anathematized person being regarded as an outlaw. Traders ceased to carry their commodities to Florence, and to other places in the league, because it was thought sinful to buy or sell with any from whom the Beast had withdrawn the mark of his protection; and the Florentines found themselves entangled in a most unequal contest. But it fell to a woman to placate the fury of the contending parties, at least, for a time. Catherine, a native of Sienna, a nun, a sister of penance of the observance of St. Dominic, was the heroine of the day. She had not earned glory by any work of active charity, but by a daring mysticism, the more welcome to the multitude as it overshot the widest boundary of sense and reason. She acknowledged no other master than Christ himself; and perpetually related conversations with which she pretended to have been favoured by Him. During her ecstasies she addressed Him, and answered and put questions to her Lord, invisible, of course, to every other person. One day she exhibited a gold ring, enriched with a diamond and four pearls, which she said He had given her in the presence of his mother, and a train of saints, to signify a spiritual espousal. Her confessor doubted many of her tales; but his incredulity was silenced when, awaiting a reply to some expression of his mistrust, her severe countenance suddenly assumed new features; and as he saw her face change into that of a middle-aged man, furnished with a becoming beard, he confessed himself persuaded of the truth of those wonderful communications. This confessor, humbly participating in the reputation of his confitent, was deputed to go to Avignon first, and endeavour, by submissive approaches, to moderate the anger of the Pope. Then Catherine, invited from Sienna to Florence, and received with reverential solemnity by the Priors * of the city, was implored to intercede with the Holy Father. She undertook the mission, and appeared before Gregory to supplicate for clemency, or, if necessary, to use her authority as being a subject of supernatural revelation. The Florentines had promised to send a deputation who should receive her commands, which, however, they failed to do; but the Pope empowered her to negotiate for him, a message from the Romans invited him to return to the city of Peter, as they chose to call it, and Catherine employed her masculine eloquence on the same behalf. Influenced by various political reasons, the Pope removed to Rome, attended by the Cardinals, who foresaw and predicted evil in the change. From Pisa, where the party landed, to Rome, Gregory and his train proceeded amidst a succession of pageantries, but slowly, and under the incessant anxiety of negotiations with the states. The "eternal city" welcomed him with every expression of joy; and succeeding festivals were marked with the highest pontifical solemnity. The Veronica, that is to say, the kerchief of the holy face, was spread out on the altar of St. Peter; the Romans were glad, and might have fancied that the veritable features of the Saviour smiled upon them; but, in

* The democratic Magistrates of Florence were then called Priors, perhaps in imitation of the monastic style: afterwards the secular title Signori, "Lorde," was given them in preference.

4 C reality, those days were fatal to the Popedom. It now became a question whether the Pope and his court should be French or Italian. By a noiseless and secret contrivance, Philip the Fair had managed to retain the Pope in his neighbourhood merely, for Avignon was not then subject to the French crown; but now the return of that most important body, the court of Cardinals, was made with so much parade, and surrounded by so many circumstances of political importance, that it was impossible to deliver the Papacy out of the dilemma. While the Italian laity had been aggrieved by the misconduct of Papal governors, both Clergy and laity had seen with indignation the honours and influence of the Pontificate monopolized by foreigners, and only awaited the demise of Gregory for attempting to recover the alienated right. That event soon took place (A.D. 1378). The majority of the Cardinals, however, on whom devolved the election of a successor, had no sympathy with the Italians. Of eighteen Cardinals then in Rome, only four were natives of the country; one was a Spaniard, thirteen were Frenchmen. No sooner were they shut up in conclave, than the Romans, reasonably apprehending that a Frenchman would be chosen, and fearing that the Holy See would be returned to Avignon, assembled tumultuously, took arms, surrounded the conclave by thousands, and shouted, Romano lo volemo lo Papa, "We will have a Roman for Pope." Intimidated by the demonstration, they conferred the fatal honour on the Archbishop of Bari, a native of Naples, thus transformed into Urban VI. Between him and his involuntary electors there was never a good understanding. After a few months the dissatisfied majority, with some others, withdrew to Anagni, under pretence of avoiding the heat of Rome in summer, there formed themselves into conclave again, declared that the election of Urban had not been free, wrote him a contemptuous letter, addressed to him not as Pope, but as Bartolomeo di Pregnano, and elected a Genoese, who assumed the title of Clement VII. These two were thus constituted Antipopes, a circumstance by no means novel, but in the present instance extremely important, because then began "the great schism of the West," the division of the house, which continued during more than half a century, and preceded a gradual, but irrecoverable, fall. The Popedom could not endure the confusion, expense, and bloodshed arising out of the wars between the Antipopes and their partisans; and a numerously attended Council at Pisa (A.D. 1409) endeavoured to terminate the schism. After solemn and protracted deliberation, sentence was published that the holy universal Council, representing all the Church, to which it belonged to take cognizance and pronounce decision in that cause; after having examined all that had been done touching the union of the Church, and the schism between Pedro de Luna, called Benedict XIII., and Angelo Corrario, called Gregory XII., declared that they were both notoriously schismatic, abettors of schism, heretics, guilty of perjury, and of having violated their oaths; that they had scandalized the whole Church by their obstinacy; that they had fallen from all dignity, and were, ipso facto, separated from the Church. The Council forbade all the faithful to own them, or to favour them, under pain of excommunica-

SCRISM OF THE PAPACY.

tion; and annulled all their acts. But it was easier to pronounce the sentence than to enforce it. All the adherents of the two Antipopes would not submit to the authority of the Council. Alexander V., although duly elected by the Cardinals during the Council, did not receive universal obedience; and John XXIII., his successor, was prevailed on to convoke another assembly of the same kind, to meet at Constance, and institute further proceedings against his contumacious rivals. But no sooner was the Council assembled than he was surprised by solicitations to abdicate, for the sake, it was said, of the peace and union of the Church, the one great object which engaged the solicitude of all parties, who thought that if he would lead the way by such an example of self-denial, the other Antipopes might reasonably be urged to follow, or compelled to quit the field by the defection of the nations in their "obediences." With extreme reluctance, John gave a solemn promise of resignation in a meeting of the Council; but, after evading the fulfilment, secretly withdrew from the city in the disguise of a servant, wandered from place to place, was solemnly deposed, and afterwards imprisoned. The deposition of a Pope was a measure bold beyond the times, and excited a strong, but transient, feeling of indignation, even in many who had been clamorous for abdication by his own act. Gregory XII., reduced again to Angelo di Corrario, gladly accepted the inferior dignity and emolument of a Cardinal: but Benedict XIII., desperately tenacious of the forlorn Pontificate, first promised to lay down his tiara, then delayed; and, when pressed to compliance, held fast on punctilious objections. The Emperor himself went to Spain to enforce, by his presence, the persuasions of the King of Arragon, who then lay in his last sickness, and was even carried in a litter into the presence of the stubborn Priest, that he might entreat him to restore peace and concord to Christendom, by following the example of Gregory, and submitting to the fate of John. But all entreaty was in vain. The Emperor journeyed back again in anger; the King was enraged beyond description; Spain withdrew obedience from the impracticable Spaniard; the King Don Juan II. satisfied his "pure conscience" by a decision of Doctors, that obedience was no longer due; and having declared that Pedro de Luna was not a Pope, which Pedro retorted with a declaration that Juan was not a Christian, he calmly bore the harmless anathema, and left the deserted pretender to the Pontificate to end his days in voluntary banishment at Peñíscola, confident to the last that he was a true Pope. When on his death-bed, he made two Cardinals, his companions in exile, swear that they would elect a successor, and, faithful to their oath, they shut themselves up, as in conclave; and neither being able to elect the other by plurality of votes, they unanimously chose one Gil Muñoz, a Canon of Barcelona, to that dignity. Muñoz accepted their acclamation, created some new Cardinals, and played the Pope for a year or two, until he thought it prudent to lay aside the ridiculous pretension, condescended to absolve Martin V., whom the Council of Constance had elevated to the Roman See, after the deposition of John XXIII.; and then, abdicating the throne of Peñíscola, humbly kissed the slipper of the Holy Father whom he had

4 c 2 formerly discomforted with anathemas. Thus ended the last and longest schism of the Papacy; (A.D. 1429;)* but neither did the effects of the schism terminate in the elevation of Martin V., nor was the division itself confined to the persons and jurisdiction of the Antipopes. The introduction of a new ecclesiastical principle, and the memorable quarrel with the Mendicant Friars, also contributed to the establishment of those antagonistic influences which opened a way for the Protestant Reformation.

When the Council of Constance would have deposed John XXIII., they issued an apologetic address to Christendom, justificatory of so extraordinary a proceeding; and before consummating the act of deposition, they endeavoured to prove that a Council, duly convened, was superior to a Pope, thus resuming the discussion which had begun in the Council of Pisa, which Council, by the deposition of two Antipopes, had assumed that superiority, although, the legitimacy of both being disputed, the precedent of deposition became of little value. John XXIII., however, was acknowledged as a true Pope by the majority of Christendom; and those who would consider a Council competent to proceed against mere pretenders to the pontifical dignity, might yet demur to its deposition of a person canonically elected. The controversy was fully opened by Gerson, Chancellor of the Church and University of Paris, one of the most eminent theologians and canonists of his day, at the desire of the majority of the Council and of the Princes, but contrary to the wish of the Cardinals, who absented themselves during his delivery of a discourse pronounced expressly to establish the claim of the Council to exercise jurisdiction over the Pope. After maintaining some propositions relative to the headship of the Church, the orator proceeded to prove that, although the union between Christ and the Church cannot be dissolved, the union of the Vicar of Christ with his spouse, the Church, is not indissoluble; and that the Church, or a General Council representing the body of the faithful, is appointed by Christ to judge all persons, not excepting the Pope himself, who must hear and obey, under pain of being treated as a Heathen and a publican. The visible head, according to the doctrine of Gerson, could not repeal nor alter laws enacted in a General Council convened by a legal authority; and although the Church could not take away the fulness of the Papal power supernaturally conferred by Jesus Christ, she could restrain the use of it; and this maxim he strenuously recommended to the assembled fathers, as the solid foundation of all ecclesiastical reform. He specified cases in which it would be lawful for a Council to assemble without the summons, and even in spite of the prohibition, of a Pope, who would be bound to execute the decisions of such an assembly, under penalty of deposition. The University of Paris supported their Chancellor by sending a written judgment to Constance, drawn up in language of the utmost independence. They deemed the Church to be more necessary than the Pope, because there could not be salvation out of

* L'Enfant, History of the Councils of Pisa and of Constance; Fabre, Discours Préliminaire, servant d'Introduction à l'Histoire Ecclésiastique du 18me Siècle. Cronica del Señor Rey Don Juan II., &c. Valencia, 1779. Años 1414-1416.

ULTRAMONTANISM.

the Church; but without the Pope salvation might be certainly obtained. The Pope, they affirmed, was for the Church, not the Church for the Pope. She has the greater dignity, as being the spouse, not the Vicar, of Jesus Christ; greater power, because the gates of hell cannot prevail against her, whereas Popes have been often subdued by vice and heresy; greater wisdom, because she is endued with manifold gifts which were never found in any single Pontiff. The Church, they said, is the fountain of power, and depository of the keys of the kingdom of heaven, which she delivers to her temporal chief, and may take out of his hands again, when she sees them to be misemployed, as a sword should be wrested from the grasp of a madman; and the whole argument is wound up with the inevitable conclusion that, in many cases, a Council is above the Pope. Nothing could be more contrary to Papal pretensions, and Papal practice too; for it had become common for Popes to bring decrees into Councils, ready prepared, and only read for the purpose of being adopted by obsequious assent; and the custom was at length taken to be law. The Patriarch of Antioch, supported by a minority, prepared and defended the thesis that the Pope is superior to the Council, and that decrees are to be formed in the name of the Pope, and not in the name of the Council. Pierre d'Ailly, Cardinal Bishop of Cambray, maintained the opposite; and the subject was brought into the light of a vigorous controversy. Nor did the controversy terminate at Constance. D'Ailly composed an elaborate treatise, in which he endeavoured to define the relative rights of the Church and of the Pope, avoiding, as he said, the extreme opinions of the Vaudois, Wycliffe, and Huss, who would divest him of all temporal power; and those of "the Herodians," equally extreme, who imagined that the Messiah was to be a temporal Monarch, having a Vicar invested with authority over temporal estates. This work, written a few years before the invention of printing, was soon committed to the press, and contributed to give permanence to what Mr. Hallam not inappropriately calls the Whig politics,—political phraseology, however unsuitable to these pages, is more descriptive of that earthly system than religious,—the Whig politics of the Catholic Church. Then the advocates of principles which had been received all over Europe with mute acquiescence, began to be distinguished as Ultramontanes, because they were chiefly found beyond the Alps, the only region where the assumed divinity of the Pope could be taught without encountering general contradiction. Rome and Avignon were no longer the seats of antagonist jurisdictions; but Italy and the rest of Europe were the fields whereon adverse principles prevailed, not less fatal to the unity and consequent power of the system than had been the alternate maledictions and battles of the Antipopes.* The two parties have subsisted to the present day; but the notion of a necessity of Papal presence and consent is borne away on the tide of events; the Pope is less and less prominent in ecclesiastical proceedings; and a careful observer may now see the fruit of the doctrine of Pisa and Constance

* I. Enfant, Council of Constance, book II., sect. 3—5, 45, 46; iv. 195.

in the independent action of the episcopate in different nations, and the obvious disintegration of the Church itself.*

Both before and during the removal of the Popes to Avignon, and the schism of the Pontificate, another cause of decay existed in the bosom of the Church, and in that section of the Clergy which had been most subservient to the ambition of their chief. The independent origin of the dioceses of Christendom provided the secular Clergy with reasons for withstanding the encroachments of the Bishop of Rome; and in each nation, both civil and ecclesiastical authorities, even when submitting to such encroachments, could look back to times when their fathers had not bowed under the yoke of an alien. Not so the monastic orders. They had been created by Papal Bulls, and might be dissolved by the same authority. In return for their existence, and with constant prevision of danger from the jealousy of the secular Clergy, or rival institutions of the same kind, they professed loyalty to the supreme Pontiff, and became increasingly valuable as instruments of his power. Of all others, the Mendicant Friars were most intimately united to him, and seemed least likely to manifest disaffection. They were professedly poor, the pauperes Christi, who lived on the alms of the people, having nothing of their own. Professing to imitate Christ, who was undoubtedly poor, and received the offerings of those who loved him, they violated his precept by leading a life of abject beggary,† and yet evaded the rules of their

* At this time (1849) some eminent Preachers and writers of the Church of Rome (P. Ventura, for example, the most eloquent Preacher in Italy) are declaring that the Pope should resign his temporal sovereignty; and a Synod of Bishops of the United States of America have solemnly pronounced a similar judgment. Yet to maintain this sovereignty for him, Rome has been besieged, at his request, and occupied, after much bloodshed, by the French.

† The writer of these pages believes that our Lord, implicitly, at least, prohibited mendicity under pretext of religion, in the instructions which he gave to the twelve when he sent them forth to preach; and takes leave to translate for the English reader part of a note on Matt. x. 9, 10, written for a country where swarms of begging Friars were to be seen everywhere.—“Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses, nor scrip for your journey; neither two coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves; for the workman is worthy of his meat.” Μὴ κτήσησθε, “provide not” for this journey. The verb κτάομαι signifies to “acquire,” or “provide,” either by purchase or in any other way. (Compare Gen. iv. 1; xii. 5, et passim, in the Septuagint.) So Hesychius explains it, and an ancient Latin glossary has κτάομαι, acquiro; κτησόμενος, adeptus. The Vulgate translates incorrectly, by nolite possidere, “possess not,” a version suited to the cloisters, where they teach that the religious should consign their gold and silver to the common stock of the fraternity, maintaining the individual members in an affluent beggary.

Hrass, χαλκάν, money of the lowest value.

Purses, ζώνας, “girdles.” They carried money in the girdle, in order to keep it with the greater security; and, according to Livy, (xxxiii. 29,) “negotiandi ferme saussâ argentum in zoois habentes;” “carrying money in their girdles in order to lay it out in trade.” But Jesus Christ would not have his servants to appear like merchants, and manifest desire after temporal riches; but devote themselves entirely to calling sinners to repentance. They should not take στήραν εἰς ὁδόν, “a scrip for the journey.” While they carried not money, and lived above temporal interests, they were to trust in the care of Divine Providence: yet, poor as they were, the Apostles were to be free from everything like meanness; and if they were not merchants, carrying money in their girdles, neither were they permitted to conduct themselves like persons that with scrip or wallet go begging food.

“Ne mendica ferat barbati prandia nudi

Dormiat et tetrico cum cane, pera rogat.”—(Mart. Epig., xiv., 91.)

SCHISM OF THE MENDICANTS.

founders, Dominic and Francis, especially the latter, by an ostentation of rapidly acquired wealth. Splendid monasteries, wide domains, granaries and cellars abundantly stored with the offerings of superstitious multitudes, betrayed an utter departure from the first idea of poverty which had characterized the birth of their institutions; and to sanction, if not to hide, the fraud, the Popes had declared that Monks were but the usufructuaries of that property, and the Pope for the time being, the proprietor. Under this fiction the mendicants wallowed in luxury, and scandalized both Priests and people by their pride and ostentation. The field, therefore, lay open to a monastic reformer; and one made his appearance in the latter part of the thirteenth century. The Minorites, or begging Franciscan Friars, held a general chapter at Strasburg in the year 1282, attended by thirty-three provincials, and seven hundred brethren. In that chapter Friar Pierre Jean d'Olive was accused of having spoken too freely against the lax observance of his order, and of having composed and circulated writings replete with error, and even tinged with heresy. In his vehement censures none were spared, not even the superiors, whom he would have to be corrected or expelled; and with equal severity he declaimed against the indolence, sensuality, and pride of the Prelates of the Church. D'Olive was not present in the chapter; but having acquired considerable influence by the austere purity of his manners, with learning and eloquence, cultivated during a long course of study in his cell as a Franciscan, from the twelfth year of his age, the General, Bonne-Grace, was directed to go into the province of France, and examine the brother and his writings. The accused Friar hastened to Avignon, where he met the General, and pleaded his own cause with some apparent success. But the cry of reproach raised by the severe ascetic could not be suppressed. His invectives were echoed throughout all the provinces of the order; and every one who desired to attain either the experience or the credit of what was strangely called evangelical perfection, joined in the outcry against the less rigid members of the Franciscan communities. When D'Olive was on his death-bed, he professed entire attachment

"The wallet begs that it may not carry the dinner of a naked and unshaven beggar, nor lie with a grim dog." The satirist alludes to the Cynic philosophers, who, affecting poverty, used to go about among the poor, begging alms. In another place he seems to picture to the life a Capuchin or Franciscan Friar,

"Cui dat latratos obvis turba cibos

Esse putas Cynicum, deceptus imagine falsè."—Lib. iv., Ep. 53.

"To whom people give victuals in the street, when he begs them like a dog. You think him a Cynic, but are deceived by a false appearance." Our Lord, then, in his infinite wisdom, took from his messengers the occasion of mendicity, by forbidding them to carry a scrip, or wallet, which might be taken for a sign of beggary.

The labourer is worthy of his meat.—Among Jews, Arabs, and other Orientals, it was customary to render hospitality to strangers, as in fulfilment of a religious duty. The Apostles were worthy of the utmost hospitality, in return for the benefit they conferred on those who gave them welcome; "for the labourer is worthy of his meat." And well said St. Paul, that "if any one will not work, let him not eat." The Ministers of God, when they perform their sacred duties faithfully and diligently, are worthy of their meat, because they labour for the welfare of their fellow-men, both in this world and that which is to come. But to them, as to others, must be applied the apostolic rule: "If any one will not work, let him not eat."—Los Cuatro Kranjellos traducidos del Oriego al Español, é ilustrados con notas, per Don O. H. Rale.

to the Church of Rome, but solemnly delivered a declaration of the convictions he had avowed through life. It was essential, he said, to the evangelical life of the Franciscan, that he should renounce all temporal right, and content himself with the simple use of things. It was a mortal sin to persist in justifying laxity and transgressions of the order of St. Francis, and to coerce and persecute those who endeavoured to conform to its original simplicity. As scandals were more sinful in proportion to their greater publicity, so were the builders of huge and magnificent monasteries eminently criminal. And the contrivances of the Friars to obtain money from the living and the dying, together with some other unbecoming customs, deserved unmeasured condemnation. The sayings of the ascetic were remembered after his decease; his writings circulated, and were compared with those of St. Francis himself, who was thought to have been divinely inspired. These authorities not only contradicted the practice of the majority, but a decretal of Pope Nicholas III., inserted in the body of canon law, and therefore acknowledged as binding by the Church. Fortified by the example, as they fancied, of the Saviour, and by the law of St. Francis, thought to be hardly second in authority, as well as by that of the Church, they hotly contended against the notion that Friars could call food or raiment their own; and denounced, as mortally sinful, the practice of storing provisions in granaries or cellars, with a thousand other things inveterately accustomed; and they carried their dissent so far, as to secede from their monasteries, elect new superiors, and a new General, establish themselves with him chiefly in Sicily, and organize an entire system of provincial government. This aroused John XXII., who annulled the Bull of Nicholas, poured contempt on their sorry habits and scant cowls, cursed them as heretics, and exhorted the King of Sicily to banish them from that island. They saved themselves by flight at first, but were persecuted wherever found. Yet many stood undaunted, and denied that the Pope had power to set aside the law of the Church. His power, however, was vindicated by the Inquisitors, and four brethren were soon burnt at Marseilles (A.D. 1318) to overawe the contumacious. Persecution on the one side, and resistance on the other, rose higher and higher. The General of the original order became involved in the political quarrel with the Pope and the Emperor, joined the latter, acknowledged an Antipope, went into Germany, patronised the discontented, and, together with the Emperor and Antipope, gave them the full benefit of his patronage. The Fratricelli, or Beghards and Beguines, as they were variously called, multiplied there with extraordinary rapidity, and decried the dogma of Papal infallibility so effectually, that the world ceased to reverence the pretenders to that attribute, and was prepared to receive higher lessons from Wycliffe, Huss, Jerome, Savonarola, Luther, and the whole host of Protestant Reformers. But meanwhile, John XXII. employed the Prelates and Inquisitors throughout his "obedience," to extirpate the heresy; and was zealously obeyed in Italy, Sicily, and the south of France. In Germany, also, (A.D. 1347,) the Emperor Charles IV. and the Pope Clement VI. being friends, the schismatic

DECLINE OF CLERICAL POWER.

Minorites were delivered over to persecution, and many suffered death. Those severities confirmed the survivors in their ideas respecting the meritoriousness of absolute poverty, and in their abhorrence of Roman pomp: each sufferer was regarded as a martyr, and some of them produced a powerful impression by the display of indomitable constancy. So at Avignon, a Priest named Jean de Chastillon made this public declaration, just before his execution: "I say that Pope John was a heretic, and enemy of the holy Church, by the errors contained in his four constitutions, Ad conditorem, Cum inter nonnullos, Quia quorumdam, and Quia vir reprobus,* which are evidently contrary to the holy Scriptures, and the life of the Apostles. And I maintain that the Popes his successors, Benedict XII., Clement VI., and Innocent VI., who have encouraged and maintained the same heretics, were heretical and excommunicate, and ought to have been deprived of all dignity. I say the same of all those Prelates and others who are appointed to maintain the Catholic faith." England partook largely in the spirit of this monastic schism; the secular Clergy strenuously resisted encroachments on their rights committed by the original mendicants; and Richard, Archbishop of Armagh, having signalized himself in the affair, was deputed to solicit redress at the Papal court, and accordingly presented himself to Innocent VI. as the advocate of his discontented brethren. But neither the fanaticism of the strait-coated Franciscan beggars, nor the reasonable dissatisfaction of the priesthood, could induce the Popes to withhold protection from their militia, the rich mendicants, who retained their honours and possessions, while the malecontents, who chose so to do, were suffered to establish themselves under a more strict observance; but a numerous party, still known as Beghards or Fratricelli, who would not submit to any reconciliation, were treated as heretics, haunted out of every refuge, and melted away under the rigour of persecution.†

From the thirteenth century onward, the laity grew increasingly opposed to the demands of the Clergy. The general history of Europe abounds in evidence of this important fact. Everywhere efforts were made to restrain the accumulation of wealth by the Church, whether in the form of revenue or donation. Many decrees and statutes against mortmain are cited by jurists from the records of those ages; and the struggles between civil and ecclesiastical corporations, between Popes and Princes, constitute a great part of European history after the cessation of Crusades. The moral influence of the Clergy could not but be weakened during such conflicts; and when people saw that their dissoluteness was equal to their rapacity, they could not but listen with favour to every teacher who brought doctrines adverse to the Church. All this was but worldly, yet it opened the way for something better; and we may now bestow a few moments in marking the introduction of evangelical truth. While

* Such documents were distinguished by the first words in them, like the Magnificat, Ilocum, &c.

† Fleury, lxxxvii., 64; lxxxix., 54; xci., 42, 43, 62-64; xciii., 53; xciv., 24; xcvi., 25; Mosheim, cent. xiv., part ii., sect. 17-24; Foxe, Acts and Monuments, book v.

4 D the public mind was aroused, and often exasperated, Clergy against laity, and laity against Clergy, conscience was troubled by some alarming natural visitations, and by the horrors of a general pestilence; and such a turn was given to the thoughts of men as could scarcely have resulted from the discussion of questions more political than religious. First of all, a great comet (A.D. 1337) seemed to portend calamities which actually followed. Then swarms of locusts, in some parts of Europe, devoured the fruits of the land, and induced scarcity, if not famine. Amidst the sufferings of dearth, a tremendous earthquake overwhelmed with terror the populations of Cyprus, Greece, Italy, and the Alpine valleys as far as Basle. Mountains sank, villages were swallowed up, or buried the inhabitants under their ruins. The air was turbid, unusual meteors were regarded as messengers of Divine wrath, while both man and beast languished for want of sufficient or healthful food. In China or Tartary a plague broke out, sweeping away myriads, passed westward, leaving towns depopulated in its track through Asia, visited Egypt, and, being conveyed, as it was thought, by merchant-ships, re-appeared in some of the ports of Europe, but first in Italy. Florence, a chief mart of the west, suffered under the scourge during five months, until, it was said, three-fifths of the inhabitants had perished. None of the great cities were spared within the broad area of devastation. The dead were often laid in the streets to be carried away by any who had strength or spirit left for performing the perilous duty of interment, or corpses putrified in the deserted houses. The living, hardened by familiarity with death, or stupified with terror, abandoned the sufferers to the rapid progress of disease, forgetting the endearments of nearest kindred. Priests fled; Monks, having little hope of life, sought meritorious death, and plunged into the pest, vainly offering an absolution that could not be given, and as vainly seeking for themselves a reward that could not be found. Others attributed the calamity to Turks and Jews, who were supposed to have poisoned the waters; and multitudes of Jews were massacred, despite the exhortations and threats of the Pope, who declared that the murderers should be excommunicated; and innocent blood called for vengeance, when penitential prayer might have prevailed to turn aside the destroying angel. Panic-stricken populations saw the tide of death approaching, knew of no human means to avert or mitigate the visitation, but either awaited it in stupid silence, or wasted their strength in litanies and penance. Beasts as well as men perished. The labours of agriculture and trade were suspended. In England, the Parliament was prorogued, because members, even if alive, durst not venture into any place of meeting. For the same reason warfare ceased: God imposed an awful truce on dying armies. No complete history of that pestilence could possibly be written, nor any computation of the victims be depended on. The vulgar calculation was, that nine-tenths of the human race had perished: a cooler estimate sets down the mortality as one-half of the infected populations, which is probably too low. One hundred thousand are said to have been buried in London, an immense proportion of inhabitants in the year

FLAGELLANTS.

1348. Although despair and apathy had assumed most revolting forms during the plague itself, a deep religious feeling appeared afterwards in many places, but was unhappily perverted by fraud and fanaticism. "The devout," a sect of voluntary penitents who had gained notoriety in Italy in the preceding century, now taking the new and more descriptive name of Flagellants, abounded in Italy, Germany, and Hungary. They professed to believe that a flagellation, performed publicly during thirty-four days, would turn away the wrath of God. Their custom was to walk in procession through the streets of the town where they intended to undergo the penance; and the exhibition at Spire may be taken as an example of their manner of proceeding. About the middle of June, (A.D. 1349,) some two hundred of them visited that city, conducted by one chief and two companions, to whom they paid entire obedience. They entered Spire in the morning, and, amidst a large concourse of spectators, proceeded towards the cathedral, formed a circle before the building, made their feet bare, and stripped themselves naked to the waist. Then they entered the circle, solemnly walked round, and, after having made the circuit, knelt down, with arms across, each holding a knotted leather thong, laden with pieces of iron. The hindermost then rose, passed along the circle, gently striking each fellow-penitent with his thong in passing, and knelt in front, each rising in turn and doing the same, until the mutual flagellation was completed; the whole company chanting prayers in German during that part of the ceremony. Three of them, having strong voices, then stood up, chanting aloud, and lashing their bare sides with those heavy thongs, adapting the strokes to the measure and cadence of the hymn. The others accompanied with voice and action. After this, at a given signal, they all knelt down, bleeding and praying, the three leaders pronouncing a bidding, which was to implore the pity of God on the people, and to intercede for their friends, their foes, all sinners, and the souls in purgatory. The task being accomplished, they dressed themselves, and those who had kept their clothes and baggage took possession of the ground and underwent scourging after the same fashion. The savage penance was followed by the reading, in a loud voice, of a letter, which was said to have been delivered by an angel in the church of St. Peter at Jerusalem. It set forth that Jesus Christ was angry with the world for its crimes, especially for the desecration of the Lord's day, breaking of the Friday fast, blasphemics, usuries, and adulteries; that the Virgin Mary and the angels had asked the Saviour to show mercy, and he had answered that every one should set himself apart to be flogged for thirty-four days. More than a hundred persons obeyed the letter at Spire, about a thousand at Strasburg, and the elements of a new sect were rapidly collecting; but the Pope suppressed the Flagellants by a Bull before six months were over.* Yet while a religious feeling possessed the minds of many, inquirers found none who could tell them what they should do to be saved, except here and there a solitary remnant of the

* FIFTH. ACT., 44, 49; Menzel, History of Germany, Second Period, CLXXVIII.; Moreri, Flagellantes.

4 D 2

BOOK V. CHATTER V.

old heretics, for most of them had been martyred, or forced to apostatize, by the Crusaders and Inquisitors of the preceding century; and whoever should confess any portion of Gospel truth not admitted by the Clergy, was instantly marked and put to silence. Fears remained to be subdued, questions to be answered; and as nothing was at hand on which the soul could repose with confidence, a strong desire to look into futurity laid hold on the more intelligent, and brought out a testimony to the prevalent persuasion that some great crisis was approaching. Joachim, Abbot of Flora, in the kingdom of Naples, who had flourished during the latter half of the twelfth, and a few years of the thirteenth, century, was believed to have possessed "an infused knowledge" of divine mysteries, and thereby, through a lower kind of inspiration, to have perceived the true interpretation of prophecy. This gift was long thought to be attainable by devout meditation; and Papists, who despise our claim to the right of private judgment, and treat scornfully our confidence in divine assistance while prayerfully endeavouring to exercise that judgment, may be referred to the history of a multitude of persons in their own communion who pretended, or aspired, to an immeasurably higher participation in spiritual wisdom than any of us ever presume to seek. During the earlier part of the excitement above described, general attention was drawn to the prophecies, or prophetical interpretations, of the Cistercian, which were studied with unspeakable avidity, and so famous did he become, that the Monks of his order endeavoured (A.D. 1346) to have him canonized. His prophecies displeased the Clergy, because they foretold the revolution or destruction of their Church. But the expectation of such an event sank deep into the mind of all who ventured to approach the subject. Nicholas Oresme, an eminent Frenchman, in an elaborate sermon delivered before Urban V. and his Cardinals, on Issi. lvi. 1: "Thus saith the Lord, Keep ye judgment, and do justice; for my salvation is near to come, and my righteousness to be revealed;" descanting with bold fidelity on the corruption of the Romish Church, warned them of tribulation and affliction near at hand; and exhorted them to avert these by repentance, following the example of the Ninevites. Bridget, canonized as a saint and Prophetess, affirmed, out of the Apocalypse, that the Papal throne should be thrown into the depths of the sea, like a millstone; and that the Cardinals, assessors of the Pope, should burn with brimstone. Catherine of Sienna, fanatic though she was, gathered from the word of God that He would purify his church, arouse the spirit of the elect, raise up a set of holy Pastors, to the universal gladness of the faithful, and convert the Heathen to the Shepherd and Bishop of their souls. Militz of Prague, professing to be constrained by the Holy Spirit, went to Rome, preached there publicly, and affirmed, before the Inquisitor, that Antichrist was come, the Church desolate, and iniquity abounding. Wycliffe, Huss, and many others, adopted the predictions of Hildegarde, that God would strip the Clergy of their wealth, and that the people would desert them, saying, "Go, ye teachers of wickedness, subverters of the truth, brethren of the Shunammite, fathers of heresies, false Apostles, who have feigned your-

ORIENTAL LITERATURE.

selves to follow the life of the Apostles, and yet have not fulfilled it in any part: sons of iniquity! we will not follow the knowledge of your ways, for pride and presumption have deceived you, and insatiable concupiscence hath subverted your erroneous hearts; and when ye would yet ascend higher than was meet or comely for you, by the just judgment of God, ye are fallen back into perpetual disgrace and shame!" *

The Albigenses long seemed to have been almost extirpated from the subalpine provinces of France, and the Inquisition overawed all except a few, very few, bold confessors; heresy, so called, made few advances; but while earthquake, pestilence, and famine retributed on Europe the wrongs inflicted upon Asia, and provinces, polluted by persecution, trembled under the avenging scourge, an appeal to divine revelation, and an ardent longing after prophetic knowledge within the Church of Rome itself, brought that apostasy to the test of Scripture, and induced a new habit of appealing to the word of God.

When Christendom had learned that the nations of Islam were not to be conquered by the sword, and began to suspect that Judaism could not be destroyed by oppression, expatriation, and massacre, the Head of the church raised up men to give the first hints, and to supply materials for conducting the labour of evangelization on better principles. Raymond Lully, born a Jew, on the island of Majorca, was converted to Christianity; but never consented to its last corruptions, nor was imbued with the bigotry and bitterness of its degenerate priesthood. Preferring the milder spirit of the Franciscans, he became a Minorite, and was branded with the mark of heresy by the Dominicans, who thought themselves to be the chosen propagators of the Christian faith. But Lully was occupied by one desire, that of propagating Christianity among the Moors, by fair argument and liberal instruction. He wrote books in Arabic, or translated them into that language, then the medium of history and science in southern Europe, Africa, and the Levant. He travelled to acquire knowledge, and everywhere advised the Clergy to lay aside the sword and the firebrand, and employ their pens for the conversion of Mohammedans and Jews. For this end he visited Rome, and endeavoured, but without immediate success, to obtain the Papal sanction of oriental studies. At length, in the Council of Vienne, (A.D. 1312,) he carried his point. That Council, failing every endeavour to establish their faith by violence, ordered that masters should be appointed to teach Hebrew, Arabic, and Chaldee in the court of Rome, and the Universities of Paris, Oxford, Bologna, and Salamanca, among the choicest youth of France, England, Italy, and Spain, and made provision for two such Professors in each place. Raymond then applied himself with redoubled zeal to controversy with the Moors, and was consequently stoned to death in Africa; (A.D. 1315;) but his work abides; and eastern literature, most valuable of all human contributions to the understanding of the sacred text, began to be cultivated, to some small extent, under the highest ecclesiastical sanction, in those seats of learning. Next came Nicholas de Lyra, a native of Normandy, also

* Foxe, Acts and Monuments, books v. and vi.

born a Jew; but, to use the false and inflated language of a biographer, born again in the water of baptism, and invested with the sacred habit of the seraphic religion in the convent of Verneuil. He consecrated his Hebrew and Rabbinical knowledge to the exposition of the holy Scriptures both of the Old and New Testament, intending to facilitate the conversion of his brethren; but, in fact, providing materials for the better instruction of Gentile students who had hitherto bowed to the exclusive authority of patristical expositors, men almost ignorant of the original language of the Old Testament, and the Hebrew element of conception and language in the New. As a commentator, he opened the way for the masters of learning in the Reformation of the sixteenth century; and of him it has been pleasantly said, that if he had not harped, Luther would never have danced.

" Si Lyra non lyrasset,

Lutherus non saltasset."

His Commentary was completed in Paris, (A.D. 1330,) where he had expounded the Scriptures in his convent, not failing to expose the ignorance and even the errors of his contemporaries. Thus were the stores of academic learning enriched. Those new chairs raised the Universities into higher estimation; nations regarded them as necessary to their honour; and of this an example is afforded in the zeal of Charles IV., King of the Romans, who, on his accession to the throne of Bohemia, (A.D. 1346,) solicited and obtained of the Pope sanction for the establishment of a University at Prague, soon to be the seat of an illustrious Reformer, and of doctrines utterly hostile to the Church of Rome.* But we must proceed to consider how the confessors and martyrs of that age, as heralds of the Protestant Reformation, maintained and suffered for the truth.

During the schism of the Papacy, and quarrels of the Popes and Clergy with the European Sovereigns, Italy, in its utmost extent, from Nice to Trieste, and from the Tyrolese to Calabria, was least troubled by persecution. The political condition of the Italian states was unfavourable to the aggrandizement of the Church. In those days the Waldenses enjoyed some degree of rest. Their humble worship was conducted in conjunction with a godly discipline. On producing sufficient testimonials, the candidate for the office of Barbe, or Minister, was admitted to a course of scriptural instruction, and set apart by imposition of hands to the holy ministry. Their children were carefully taught the elements of Christian doctrine; and a Catechism is yet extant in proof of their care to reduce the saving truths of the Gospel to a certain form, and to supply the memory with material for constant meditation. Following a custom of the apostolic churches, they not only maintained their Pastors by free offerings, but gave them alms, which were carried by them into a Council holden annually; and then, as by a Committee of distribution, placed into the hands of stewards to be divided among travellers and the poor. In those

* Fleury, lxxxviii., 45; lxxxix., 59; xci., 60; xci., 8; xci., 36; Moreri, Dict., under the names Lully and Nicholas de Lyra; Mosheim, cent. xiv., part ii., chap. 1, 3.

BLAUGHTER OF WALDENSES.

Councils the Pastors alone assembled, to treat of ecclesiastical affairs, and especially of the government of their widely-scattered flocks.* Their law of discipline required the correction of such as walked ungodly, erred in doctrine, transgressed the rules of charity, or sinned away their hope of heaven. Private sins were corrected by private admonition; but public offences were visited with public censure. When these methods failed, the incorrigible were expelled. Those Waldenes, striving to keep themselves unspotted from the world, shunned public spectacles and entertainments with a strictness that has brought on their memory the contempt of some modern writers. By habitual perusal of the word of God, and of devotional writings of a highly scriptural character, they cherished holy affections, while the circulation of controversial tracts kept alive a just abhorrence of Romanism. Undismayed by terror of enemies, and superior to motives of mere expediency, the Barbes maintained the purity of their church by first watching against unfaithfulness in themselves, of which the suspension of one of their number, Giovanni of Lucerne, for seven years, is an eminent proof.† But as all that will live godly in Christ Jesus must suffer persecution, they were not permitted to continue unmolested. The Pope appointed one Jean de Badis, a French Inquisitor, to suppress the sect (A.D. 1332). Their assemblies were numerous, so many as five hundred persons often meeting in the same place; and when assaulted, they scrupled not to defend themselves, so that Friar Jean retreated from a work in which he could not be sufficiently supported. Yet persecution continued, and one of his successors, Francesco Borelli, could boast of having delivered, during thirteen years, one hundred and fifty persons to be burned at Grenoble. From the valley of Fraissiniere eighty were carried to the stake, and their property, being confiscated, was equally divided between the Inquisitors themselves, and the temporal

* It would seem, from passages in Morland's manuscripts, that spiritual and secular functions were not intended to be exercised by the same person. "Regidors son colegi del poble & Freire segond la diversita de l'obrement en l'unita de Christ." "Rectors, or managers, are elected from the people and Elders, according to the diversity of the work in the unity of Christ." They all met together once a year, and first transacted their temporal business. "Las pecunias lasquals son domas a nos del poble son porta de nos el predict Concili General, & horas en commun devant tuit nos, lasquals son cendlius de li nostre Major, & part de lor es despurtia en aquilli que an a far camin ensima est vist esser beseguivel a lor, & part de la dicta pecunia es dona a li paure." "The moneys which are given to us by the people, are carried by us to the aforesaid General Council, and delivered in common before us all, the which are collected by our Stewards, and part of them is distributed among those who have to travel, when it appears to be necessary for them, and part of the said money is given to the poor." They are said to have propagated their doctrine throughout Italy by travelling, and thus gaining access to persons of all classes, and enjoying hospitality in the houses of their brethren on presenting credentials, like the triennial convivial, "letters commendatory," of the early churches. The lay Elders, or managers, having performed their part of the work, proceeded no farther in the assembly; but "nos Pastor nos nissten tuit ensemp una vez l'an, azo que ensemp tratten las nostras facendas per Concili General." "We that are Pastors meet all together once in the year, in order that we may together treat of our affairs in a General Council." One might almost say, that after the mixed financial Committee, they held their conference of Ministers alone. The difference is only in the phraseology, not in the fact, which exhibits a remarkable resemblance to Wesleyan Methodism.

† Morland, History of the Evangelical Churches of the Valley of Piedmont, chapters v. to viii. inclusive.

Lords.* For nearly seventy years the Italian Inquisition could not find strength enough to hunt them to death, as it had hunted the Albigenses of Languedoc, and the neighbouring provinces of France; but, at last, (A.D. 1400,) a troop of persecutors appeared in the valley of Pragela, where was one of their most flourishing settlements, murdered some, and drove the bulk of the population into the mountains. It was Christmas, the mountain heights were laden with snow, and there, at an elevation beyond any human dwelling, and where the rigour of winter was untempered even by a noon-day sun, men and women, mothers clasping their babes to bosoms no longer capable of affording warmth, faint, famished, frozen, sank together on the snow; snow-storms covered them; and when the returning sun melted away the wintry grave, their putrid corpses were exposed to view, and told the shuddering goatherd that from ruthless Priests no pity could be had, not even by woman or babe not brought under the power of his Church, no compassion shown to them who feared God more than death. And so did the Waldenses fear Him.† Their constancy was honoured, and, for more than seventy years, they not only maintained the ground in those Alpine valleys, but propagated their doctrine throughout Italy by means of Barbes, who usually travelled by two and two; and, even in Rome itself, were hospitably received by brethren established there. The Romish Clergy of the diocese of Turin vainly endeavoured to put down the heresy, and at last the Pope, Xystus IV., appointed an Inquisitor to institute proceedings against them; (A.D. 1473;) but the only result of his labour seems to have been an official report, containing proof that the inhabitants generally were in a state of separation from his Church, both as to doctrine and discipline,—a fact which had been notorious for many centuries. After another pause of ten years, the Archbishop of the province undertook a similar investigation, and with the like result; finding all the people of the valleys of Fraissiniere, Argenteria, and Loisia to be "most infamous and suspected." But during that interval, methods of intimidation were often tried, and sufficient show of violence was made to induce many to emigrate into foreign countries. In most of the towns and cities of Piedmont there were martyrs to the faith; and from the scanty records accessible, a few names have been gathered of those which are eternally written in heaven. Giordano Tertian was burnt at Susa, and Hippolito Roussiere at Turin. In the same city, Hugo Chiamp de Fenestrelles was disembowelled, and his mutilated body exposed to public insult. In one valley three thousand persons were murdered, either by the sword, or smothered by fires lighted at the mouths of the caves into which they had gone for refuge. Still the Waldenses withstood their persecutors, and Rome was compelled to acknowledge herself vanquished by the faith and patience of heretics, or hazard an open contest. The latter alternative was taken. The Lord Innocent VIII., by divine Providence Pope, and servant of the servants of God, issued a Bull, (A.D. 1487,) appointing Albertus de Capitanie his Legate, and Commissioner-General for the extirpation of heretics out of the dominions of his

* Milner, cent. xiii., chap. 4.

† Morland, book ii., chap. I.

SLAUGHTER OF WALDENSES.

beloved son, Charles, Duke of Savoy. After reciting the damnable errors of those people, he confessed that one Inquisitor after another had tried in vain to overcome their obstinacy, that they had shut their ears like the deaf adder, refused to lay aside their most evil and perverse errors, going on from bad to worse, that they had dared to preach publicly, drawing aside many from the faith, despised the excommunications and interdicts of the Inquisitor, pulled down his house, destroyed the furniture, killed one of his servants, and resisted the authority of their temporal Lords. In other words, that when they had been attacked in their dwellings, driven to hide themselves in caverns, and hunted like wild beasts over the mountains; and when "the secular arm" had been extended against them at the bidding of cowardly Priests who dared not execute their own sentences; they manfully took up arms in self-defence. The Commissioner was instructed to enforce the authority of the Inquisitor, and see that the Bishops did their duty for the extermination of the heretics. The King of France and the Princes of the German confederacy were summoned by this Bull to join their forces with those of the Duke of Savoy, to take up the shield of that holy faith which they had received in baptism, and attack in every seasonable manner those detestable enemies of holy Church. Or, if the Commissioner should think it expedient,—that is to say, if the Princes should hesitate to raise troops for this purpose,—the Legate was authorized to have a crusade preached, that people, independently of their governors, might take the saving sign of the Cross upon their hearts and garments, and thereby obtain a plenary indulgence for all their sins. The Ecclesiastic who would not preach death to heretics, and the secular person, of whatever rank, who would not inflict it, should be degraded from priestly dignity and office, or deprived of all his worldly honours, titles, and privileges, according to their guilt of disobedience and rebellion, and be thenceforth persecuted with all the terrors and weapons that the Church had at her command. As for the Legate, Innocent offered him heaven as a future reward; but stimulated him to diligence in the execution of the horrible commission by hope of preferment in the Church. The Legate set to work with great zeal, obtained a list of principal persons, whom he caused to be cited by proclamation to appear before himself, which they would not submit to do; and were therefore declared to be excommunicate, and delivered over to the secular arm, to be dealt with as stubborn and rebellious heretics. Two noblemen of Dauphiny were engaged to head an army, and invade the valleys; but the inhabitants had already fled, and were dispersed among the caverns and fastnesses of the mountains where no army could act. Messages were therefore sent, offering mercy if they would return to their dwellings, and abjure their faith. Some, pressed by hunger, accepted the overture; twelve or fifteen of them, smitten with remorse, fled again secretly; but the greater number submitted to pronounce a solemn abjuration, and promised to do penance. Others, who had defended themselves in their hiding-places for two years, and others also, who had held out for so long as five years, yielded to the summons, until at last almost all who had survived the rigour of persecution returned to their

4 2 long-deserted homes, and engaged to wear crosses on their garments in sign of penitence. But when the soldiery were withdrawn, and only Priests remained to occupy the churches, the penitential crosses were laid aside, mass was deserted, Waldensian worship was again performed, and the report reached Rome that the crusade had been ineffectual, after all. An army of eighteen thousand men was then collected, and with a multitude of volunteer crusaders rushed into the country. But as the fugitive inhabitants dispersed, the force was broken into small companies; and when those companies had wandered over the valleys for about a year, subsisting on plunder, the Duke of Savoy, weary of the affair, interposed his influence, and obtained peace for his persecuted subjects. He even yielded to an impulse of compassion, and pleaded in their favour; and when Vaudois fathers brought their children into his presence to prove that the offspring of heretics were not monsters, as the Priests had told him, he encouraged the infants to approach, returned their smiles, and bade the men go home, and be assured of liberty and protection. But in those days Princes had little power: the promises of the Duke were set at nought by the Inquisitors, who again and again brought crusaders to spread burning and bloodshed through Piedmont; until the Waldenses, finding human succour to be in vain, cast themselves on the help of God, ran to arms, repelled and overcame the enemy, and their descendants occupied the country without suffering invasion, for another hundred years. Thus did the Head of the church preserve his witnesses hereafter to unite in the glorious labours of the Protestant Reformation.*

As if to maintain by terror an authority which Rome could no longer exercise by any other means, the Inquisition failed not to commit heretics to the flames in almost every country of Europe; or Bishops, acting as Inquisitors, where that tribunal was not established, did the same. No doubt many of the victims were fanatics, mere revolters against the Clergy, political offenders, or objects of private hatred. The poverty of history, and the malice of the murderers, leaves them in obscurity; and, after having related the sufferings of the Waldenses of Piedmont, and promised to relate the revival of religion in England by means of Wycliffe, little remains to be narrated here; except, indeed, as regards the Waldensian emigrants, who were everywhere pursued by the common enemy of all righteousness. The "fourteen men and women" whom Limborch, on the authority of Bzovius, briefly states to have been burnt in Bohemia, were probably Waldenses; and Walter, burnt at Cologne, (A.D. 1322,) is described as Chief of the sect of Lollards, or praying people.† By sentence of a Council holden at Mentz, (A.D. 1387,) thirty-six citizens of that city, convicted of the Waldensian heresy, were burned to death at Bingen, a town on the Rhine, between Mentz and Coblentz. They declared that the Pope was Antichrist; ‡ and if they died in the faith of Christ, like many of their brethren in the Alps, they are worthily numbered with the mar-

* Morland, book ii., chap. 1.

† Limborch, Inquisition, chap. 18.

‡ Foxe, Acts and Monuments, book v., anno 1370.

"THE PLOUGHMAN'S COMPLAINT."

tyrs' host. In the diocese and province of Embrun, in Dauphiny, there was "a great multitude of persons" who held the same doctrine as the Christians of Piedmont, and spread their tenets among the population. A Papal Bull was issued, requiring all Bishops, Abbots, and Clergy, the Lords, Judges, and communities, to aid the Inquisitor in cleansing that and the neighbouring provinces from the taint of heresy. Such Bulls were not usually issued until the probability that they would be executed had been ascertained; and we may therefore take it for granted that many perished in the flames, or were slaughtered by the soldiery of the Sovereigns of France and Naples, to whom also letters were addressed.* But the affairs of England now demand our most careful observation.

Although the evangelical doctrines of the Waldenses made little progress in this country at the time when those who entertained them were most numerous, and while they suffered severest persecution on the Continent, the imperishable seed of revealed truth had not lost its vitality. From the days of Aldhelm,† Englishmen had heard the word of God in Anglo-Saxon versions: long after the Norman conquest that language was but an antiquated form of the vernacular; and it must not be inferred that England had no knowledge of the holy Scriptures, because an interval of nearly three hundred years may have elapsed between the recorded dates of the last Anglo-Saxon and the first English translation. The former had not ceased to be intelligible when the latter appeared; and, independently of those works, there were earnest Preachers, and writers too, who quoted Scripture largely in the language of the people. Perhaps it is owing to this fact, under the gracious care of God, that the doctrines of our early Reformers were so near the standard by which we estimate doctrine at this day. Early in the fourteenth century ‡ an anonymous tract was circulated, bearing the title of "the Ploughman's Complaint." The document is intrinsically good, and sufficiently full to afford material for a judgment of the state of religious opinion in England at the time of its composition. Whoever the writer was, he must have been a well-informed and active opponent of the prevailing superstition, and of the pretensions of the Pope, then so unpopular in this island; for, speaking of Papal wars and curses, he observes: "Of what thing that I knowe, I may beare true witness." Personating a ploughman, he may be presumed to represent the sentiments entertained by many in the humbler classes of society, with whom he entirely agreed in expounding an evangelical precept to require "poorenes in spirite; but not to ben a begger," referring to the awarms of begging Friars who had risen into popularity by the profession of poverty, and then become hateful for inordinate love

* Fleury, xcvi., 10.

† About the year 706.

‡ Foxe dates this work at 1360; but conjecturally. He altered "not many words of the phrase thereof," to make it more intelligible in his day; but even after this alteration, which extended to the more antiquated words, and therefore despoils it of some of its antiquity, the style is evidently more ancient, for more strongly Saxon, than that of Wycliffe, whose Bible is dated "about 1378." "The Ploughman's Complaint," therefore, presents a highly important example of English quotation and practical use of Scripture many years before Wycliffe.

4 E 2 of wealth and luxury. Like the author of "the Noble Lesson," * the Ploughman gives a compendium of some chief points of sacred history, and passes by the Fathers and other ecclesiastical authorities without the slightest notice, except some incidental expressions of marked rejection. He mourns for the flock of Christ, from whom wicked shepherds hide the pure water of doctrine, and give them to drink only water troubled and defouled by their feet, until there is dread that the sheep will die of thirst. He charges false Prophets with beguiling the people, taking away the worship of God, and substituting a worship of themselves. The worship of God consists, as he maintains, in loving, dreading, and trusting in God above all other things; but the Priests have broken the law of love and fear and trust. God should be prayed to absolve men from sin, as he forgave Peter and Mary Magdalene, without shrivings to Priests; and God is as mighty now as he was then. The Apostles taught not that sinners should confess to Priests, nor did they assert any power to cleanse men from the leprosy of guilt, which Christ alone can do: "for there nis but one Priest, that is, Christ, that may knowe in certaine the lepre of the soule." God ordained not that his Priests should set men penances for their sins, penances which cause them to trust in the shrift rather than in Christ's absolutions. He sorrows that people are thus led away from God, and argues, from scriptural examples, against the sale of those fictitious graces. In a strain of mingled lamentation and invective, he attacks the whole system of Monkery, and the exorbitant pride of the Clergy. The Priest forsakes a poor estate and labour, to become a lord of his brethren, and sing Latin prayers; but, "Ah! Lord!" he exclaims, "if they be thy servants, whose servants are we that cannot pray as they do? And, Lord, we laymen have a belief that thy goodness is endless; and if we keep thy commands, then are we thy true servants; and though we pray thee a little, and short, thou wilt think on us, and grant us what we need; for so thou didst promise. And, Lord, I trow that pray a man never so many quaint prayers, if he keep not thy commands, he is not thy good servant. And, Lord, our hope is, that thou wilt as soon hear a ploughman's prayer, and he keep thy commands, as thou wilt do a man's of religion, though the ploughman may not have so much silver for his prayer as men of religion. For they know not so well how to price their prayers as these other chapmen; but, Lord, our hope is, that our prayers be never the worse, though not so well sold as other men's prayers." These allusions to the custom still prevalent of selling masses, indicate more than disapprobation of that single abuse: they express a state of popular feeling that will soon be developed more distinctly. In common with other Reformers, the Ploughman inveighs against singing in churches: "They singin merelich thy words, and that singing they clepen thy service." He judges that weeping for sin is more acceptable to God than turning his words into songs. Transubstantiation is condemned at considerable length. The pretence of Priests to make Christ's body is contrasted with their wicked practices, and the setting up of mawmets, or images, in great stone

* Quoted and described at p. 494, supra.

JOHN DE WYCLIFFE.

houses with glass windows, there to be privily worshipped, is denounced as gross idolatry. He complains that if a layman attempts to teach the people the truth of God's words, as bounden by the commandment of charity to do, he is forbidden and imprisoned. Such observations are repeated again and again, showing that, as in the primitive church, lay-Preachers had endeavoured to edify the people; but that the Priests, unlike the men of the apostolic age, persecuted the Lord's people that were Prophets. This also will have to be borne in mind when we come to speak of those lay-Preachers who assisted Wycliffe. Opposition to the payment of tithes is also frequently expressed; an opposition which soon became prominent in the followers of that eminent man, and was inseparable from the re-action of those times against the cupidity of the Clergy, the encroachments of the Popes, and the rapacity of the nobles. The Ploughman describes the manner in which Priests proceeded against persons accused of heresy, with a minuteness that confirms the fact that although the tribunal of the Inquisition was not formally established in England, its forms were observed, in compliance with the wish of the Pope, as communicated to Edward III., (A.D. 1335,) on occasion of the discovery of some heretics in Ireland.* He objects to the canon-law, as different from that of the Old and New Testaments, and partly taken from "heathen men's laws." Frequent allusions to the sufferings of his brethren, then put in bodily thralldom, and even suffering death by fire, and to the cruelty of Priests, exceeding the severity of laymen that were Lords, exactly coincide with other evidences that even then the number of dissentients from the Church of Rome, and of confessors, perhaps also of martyrs to the truth, was far from inconsiderable.† He even speaks as if there were an open secession of persons who recognised each other as brethren, but without any Minister at their head. "But, Lord," he says, "we laymen know no God but thee, and we, with thine help, and thy grace, forsake Nebuchadnezzar, (the Pope,) and his laws." The celibacy and luxury of the Priests, and their alliance with the rich to oppress the poor, are so described within the same paragraphs, as to indicate that the seceders were generally poor persons, and the wealthy indifferent to the doctrinal corruptions of the Church.‡

Such were the dawnings of divine truth in England when it pleased God to raise up John de Wycliffe. A native of Yorkshire, and student at Oxford, he was early distinguished as a scholar, and acknowledged even by his enemies to be a skilful dialectician. With unanswerable argument he unmasked the errors of Churchmen; but the Mendicants chiefly dreaded the force of his invective. Superior to the prejudices of his age, and willing to be counted a fool for Christ's sake, he soon renounced the prospect of honours which must have been awarded to him, had he cultivated the unprofitable learning then in vogue; and he applied himself to the exposition of holy Scripture, a work which was thought beneath the dignity of a scholar by those who had been taught to esteem the traditions of men more than the

* Raynaldi Annales Ecclesiastici, an. 1335, num. 60.

† Idem, An. 1355, num. 28. I Foxe, Acts and Monuments, book v., an. 1360.

revelation of God. But many there were among the laity who appreciated his diligence in teaching them the way of life, and who gave him the familiar appellation of "Gospel Doctor." In the spirit of those few predecessors to whom we have alluded, he inveighed against the avarice and hypocrisy of the begging Friars; but, having thrown himself into constant controversy with them, and profoundly studied some questions of right which were involved in the dispute between the Sovereign of England and the Pope, he gained a clearer view of the absolute supremacy of Jesus Christ over both Church and State, and of the sufficiency of the merits of the Saviour to deliver souls from death, and maintained that the word of God alone suffices to teach men the way of salvation. For several years he was supported by the temporal power, a power which he always defended against the encroachments of the Papacy; and, even when most hotly persecuted, was so far shielded from the fury of his adversaries as neither to suffer imprisonment nor death. In the heat of his earlier disputation with those Monkish beggars he was in high favour at Oxford, and received from the Master and scholars of Baliol College the living of a country parish, Fylingham,* in the diocese of Lincoln, said to have been a valuable benefice (A.D. 1361). He was then elected Warden of that College, and afterwards occupied the same station at Canterbury-Hall. Thus did members of the University of Oxford avow their respect for a man soon to be regarded as a heretic by the Bishops. He maintained and taught that the Pope had no power to exclude any one from the kingdom of heaven; but that if the power of binding and loosing were committed to sinful men, then might any simple Priest absolve even him whom the Pope had thought proper to condemn. This he enforced with no less eloquence than reason, proving it out of the Bible; and yet with so great modesty, and with such a simplicity of demeanour and purity of conversation, that his opinions took root beyond the power of the priesthood to eradicate them from the heart and mind of Englishmen. Admiring a state of true poverty as much as he abhorred the dissembling of those who professed to follow it, he went barefoot and poorly clad, as did several who associated themselves with him, and began to preach after his example. Passing from points of discipline to articles of doctrine, he became convinced that the fable of transubstantiation was contrary to God's word, and boldly declared that the host, after consecration as before, was no more than bread, yet reverently acknowledged the sacramental presence of the Saviour. Having taken away their god, he embittered the hatred of the Clergy against himself, by teaching that if Priests sinned habitually, as unquestionably they did with but few exceptions, the temporal Lord was bound, under pain of damnation, to take away their living. Affirming that the Gospel alone was sufficient to rule the life of any Christian man, he denied at once the whole system of domination over conscience by Confessors; and declaring that the divers rules by which "religious persons" were governed, added no more perfection to the Gospel than doth the white colour to the wall, he lifted the finger of scorn

* Now spelt Fillingham.

JOHN DE WYCLIFFE.

against the Monks, those whited sepulchres, whose inward corruption had become notorious. And while Popes were labouring to establish the Inquisition on this island, and Bishops did actually imprison heretics, so called, he preached that neither the Pope, nor any other Prelate of the Church, ought to have prisons wherein to punish transgressors. He even went so far as to declaim against the supremacy of the Pope, and against monasticism, as an ecclesiastical institution; and contended that tithes were pure alms, not to be exacted by any human authority, but freely given, if given at all. Many extreme opinions were laid to his charge; but although it was to have been expected that a mind suddenly emancipated from its bondage would fall into some opposite error, the colouring of fanaticism thrown over his character by Popish historians is, to say the least, considerably removed by candid examination of his writings; and it is demonstrated that eminent ecclesiastical historians have been misled in their notions of his doctrine by the false representations of Monkish writers, who published, as propositions of Wycliffe, errors and extravagances contradicted by the general tenor and express testimony of his works.* Many circumstances contributed to bring him to these bold conclusions. His predecessor in the Wardenship of Canterbury-Hall had been displaced, together with three Friars who were expelled from that foundation in consequence of their proceedings in opposition to the other Fellows, who were secular Priests, and with whom Regulars could not possibly agree. Islep, Archbishop of Canterbury, himself the founder, removed the Monk, Woodhall, and put our Reformer in his place; but no sooner did the aged Archbishop die, than Langham, his successor, restored the Monk, and ejected Wycliffe. Wycliffe appealed to the Pope, but unsuccessfully; and, after the lapse of about three years, his ejection was confirmed (A.D. 1370). But the sentence of the Pope raised him higher in the estimation of Edward III., who had already made him a royal Chaplain; and in the quarrel with Rome, that Sovereign, together with his son, John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, gladly availed themselves of the antagonist of Monkish impostors, and subject of Papal suspicion, to prosecute their cause. One year after his definitive ejection, (A.D. 1371,) when the English Parliament petitioned the King to remove Ecclesiastics from the administration of the high offices of State, which had been entirely in their hands, Wycliffe's judgment was given in favour of the measure: he was necessitated to defend himself by argument, and, in doing so, became daily more decided in dissent from Romanism. Then it was that he took his degree of Doctor of Divinity, and began to teach a reformed theology in the University of Oxford (A.D. 1372). At the same time Edward, as we have just observed, was engaged in a dispute of long standing with the Court of Rome, whose abstraction of an immense revenue from England could no longer be allowed without endangering the kingdom; a con-

* Since Lewis, his elder biographer, and Foxe, Le Bas, in his Memoir, and especially Dr. Vaughan, in his "Life and Opinions of John de Wycliffe, D.D.," and his introductory Memoir to the tracts and treatises of Wycliffe, have placed the real principles of that holy man in clear light, and enabled modern readers to judge of him for themselves.

ference was to be holden with Papal representatives by Commissioners from the King, and among them Wycliffe occupied the second place. The diplomatists met at Bruges, in Flanders, and the demand of England was for nothing less than that the Pontiff should desist, in future, from the reservation of benefices in the Anglican Church; that the Clergy should freely enjoy the right of electing their Bishops; and that Bishops thus elected should be confirmed by their own Metropolitan. Had those demands been successful, had Gregory XI. done anything better than temporize, a disciplinary reformation, and the independence of the Anglican Church, would have been the immediate consequences. Wycliffe, however, was rewarded by the King with a pre-bend in the collegiate church of Westbury, and with the rectory of Lutterworth, in Leicestershire, (A.D. 1375,) where he afterwards found a retreat from persecution, and leisure for the preparation of his most valuable works.

But he had yet to take part in the great quarrel between the Church of Rome and the State, and to suffer open persecution in the cause of national and Christian liberty. Utterly dissatisfied with the issue of the tedious negotiations at Bruges, which were protracted through two years, the Parliament assumed a posture of hostility to the Pope and higher Clergy; and Wycliffe, faithful to Christ and to his country, gave the full weight of his learning and eloquence to the side of justice. Thus identified with the secular power, he could not be injured by priestly adversaries, until, in consequence of the infirmities of age, the King could no longer discharge the functions of royalty, and, the Duke of Lancaster, his younger son, Regent, and friend of Wycliffe, becoming unpopular, and the court itself distracted with jealousies, the Bishops felt reviving power, and resolved to crush him, if possible. But, unable to find any occasion against him, except concerning the law of his God, they incited the Archbishop, Simon Sudbury, who had already enforced the sentence of deprivation from the Wardenship of Canterbury-Hall, and had endeavoured to put him to silence, but without effect, now to proceed against him as a heretic. Readily did he command him to appear at St. Paul's, before the Bishop of London, and other Prelates, to answer to charges of heresy. On the day appointed, the Bishops took their places in the church, a crowd of Londoners filled and surrounded the sacred building, and all waited to behold the client of royalty, the patriot Priest, the flower of Oxford, the popular Preacher that should appear as a culprit before a tribunal that acknowledged but one superior on earth, and he an alien, and one from whose rigorous jurisdiction no mortal could expect mercy. He came. But he came preceded by no less a personage than Lord Percy, Earl Marshal of England, attended by the Duke of Lancaster, the first subject in the realm, and followed by four Friars, selected for their skill in theology, to aid him, if necessary, in his defence. My Lord Percy elbowed his way through the skirts of the crowd, pressed into the thickest, with great difficulty effected an entrance into the church, and went up to the presence of the Clergy. Lancaster had encouraged Wycliffe, as they came by the way, to face his Judges boldly. The Bishops, he said, were

WYCLIFFE'S "POOR PRIESTS."

all unlearned in comparison with himself; and, as for the concourse of people, he and the Earl would protect him against any violence from them. Animated by his supporters, and, no doubt, trusting in God, Wycliffe kept close to the Marshal; and the company, nothing daunted, presented themselves in the Lady Mary's chapel, where sat the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, with several other Bishops, Dukes, and Barons. Disturbed by the appearance, probably unexpected, of the royal and noble protectors of the heretic, and by the stir made in the promiscuous and excited assemblage, Courtney, Bishop of London, could not conceal his impatience. As Wycliffe stood, waiting "to know what should be laid unto him," the friendly Earl bade him sit down, saying, "that he had many things to answer to, and therefore had need of some softer seat." The Bishop of London, "cast eftsoons into a furnish chafe," (as Foxe words it,) said, that he should not sit there; that it was not fitting for one to sit who was cited there to answer before his Ordinary; and haughtily commanded him to stand. The fire that had been smouldering so long, now burst forth: neither the temporal nor spiritual Lord would be beaten in hard words; and the quarrel was taken up by the people, who shouted, some in anger and others in alarm. At this moment the Duke took Lord Percy's part, and assailed the haughty Bishop with as reproachful language as he could find. The Bishop retorted, and with such mastery of words, that the Duke was fairly overpowered by a stronger torrent of railing; and, reddening with anger, threatened that he would bring down his pride, and not only his, but the pride of all the prelacy of England. Suddenly the Bishop changed his tone, and, putting on an air of forbearance, that provoked the unwelcome visitors so much the more, drew forth a menace of personal violence, and so caught the sympathy of the Londoners, that the whole company began to fear for their lives. The sequel of this affair was a riotous attack on the house of Lord Percy, who narrowly escaped death, together with Lancaster, by taking boat and going down the Thames to Kingston, where the young Prince, grandson of the King, afterwards Richard II., resided. The citizens, however, were pacified by the interposition of the Princess, his mother; and Wycliffe was no more meddled with for that time, except that a prohibition to preach the offensive doctrine was laid on him by the Bishops.

In partial obedience to their authority, he endeavoured to withhold from the public ear such propositions as were deemed heretical; but to repress the ardour of a spirit intent on reformation was impossible. The voice that for seventeen years had been raised in testimony to God's truth, could not be silenced; neither could its effects be lost. The caution of the master was not requisite in the disciples; and while Doctor Wycliffe was considering how he might best shape his future course, a multitude of "poor Priests," who had profited by his instructions, dispersed themselves all over England. Clad in threadbare russet gowns, and barefooted, having no licence from their Ordinaries, but conscious of an obligation to preach against prevalent corruptions,—possessing no benefices, nor yet receiving any stipend,—

4 F they went forth like the first disciples, from town to town, and from county to county, preaching the Gospel, or as much of it as they knew; never without a congregation, nor ever without a welcome. In the castle of the Baron as in the cottage of the poor man, they gladly took the common fare; led conversation on the unfaithfulness of the Church, the pride of Prelates, the licentiousness of the Clergy, simony, idolatry, persecution, sinners perishing for lack of knowledge, and the nation impoverished and oppressed by Rome. The Priests raged and cursed; they threatened the itinerant innovators with canonical censure, excommunication, imprisonment, and death; but the congregations stood like centinels around the undaunted evangelists; and until the population of England should have heard their testimony, God protected them from harm. Excepting the Mendicant Friars, they were the first itinerant Preachers; and were properly so called, for they had no local charge. England was their circuit; and although they travelled but for a short time, they established a precedent to be followed again and again, sometimes by ecclesiastical direction, and sometimes under the impulse of the constraining love of Christ.* Then Papal thunder rolled over the land. Erewhile the human herd had been affrighted at the sound, and had fled for refuge to the confessional and the altar; but now Gregory XI. launched his fulminations with reiterated zeal, without awakening any terror,—for the public mind was not susceptible. Men were suddenly isolated from the source of dread; and the thunderer saw his flashes wasted in empty air. To the University of Oxford, to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Sudbury, to the Bishop of London, William

* The resemblance of these "poor Priests" to the Travelling Preachers who were appointed by Mr. Wesley to preach in their wide Circuits all over England, is too close to escape observation. Mr. Le Bas (chap. x.) justly observes, that Wycliffe, at the head of his poor Priests, might, in some respects, be styled the Wesley of his day. "He did not, it is true, itinerate himself, neither does it appear that he encouraged laymen to take upon themselves the office of public religious instruction. But he gave his express and deliberate sanction to the practice of itinerancy and field-preaching; though without pretending to supersede the regular and faithful ministrations of the parochial Clergy. In one particular, indeed, he had clearly the advantage of Wesley. The modern Reformer lived in times when the law and practice of the Church gave no countenance to this species of Missionary proceeding. Whereas Wiclif had constantly before his eyes the phenomenon of itinerant mendicancy, and might, therefore, think himself excused for wishing to convert to salutary purposes an usage which had the avowed sanction of Christ's Vicar upon earth." Certainly Wycliffe had always been familiar with the practice of itinerant and field preaching, and, so far, did not innovate. But both Wycliffe and Wesley had the equal advantage of understanding the higher obligation of obedience to the supreme law of Christ. Wesley never went farther in setting aside canonical restraint than did his predecessor, when he lectured the Pope on the sinfulness of holding temporal authority; nor so far as when he appealed to the secular power to support him in defiance of his ecclesiastical superiors. The conduct of Wesley was the reverse of this. Wycliffe had reasons for that procedure of which, doubtless, Wesley would have felt the force in like circumstances; but Mr. Le Bas must surely have remembered that Wycliffe encouraged his travelling Preachers to proceed, in spite of a prohibition of the Archbishop. Wesley, in his utmost zeal, could not have done more, and never did so much. Neither did Mr. Wesley encourage laymen to take upon themselves the office of public religious instruction. As lay Preachers, they were not instituted to any ministerial office, but on some of them Mr. Wesley conferred ordination; and his successors fully recognise and act on the principle of ecclesiastical order that Mr. Le Bas inaccurately conceives the "modern Reformer" to have violated. Both Wycliffe and Wesley maintained that the law of the Church was only binding so far as it was in agreement with the law of God, that law being always acknowledged as supreme.

JOHN DE WYCLIFFE.

Courtney, again to the same Archbishop and the same Bishop, and to the young Richard II., who had by this time ascended his throne, came letters from the Fisherman of St. Peter's; and whatever zeal they quickened in the rulers of the Church, whatever fear they may have awakened in the mind of the young King and his uncles, they moved not the Commons of England; and Wycliffe again threw his energies into the work. The first Parliament under that reign assembled; and measures proposed for delivering this country from Romish exactions were the subject of anxious deliberation. "As a remedy against the evils which have hitherto resisted every influence opposed to them, it is urged that the procuring of a benefice by Papal provision shall be punished with outlaw; and that the same penalty shall be incurred by the man who farms any of the livings in the English Church that have been conferred upon foreigners. It is also urged, that the Pope shall be prevented making reservations to dignities elective, the same being done against his treaty taken with Edward III.; that all aliens, as well religious as others, avoid the realm; and that, during the war with France and Scotland, all their lands and goods shall be applied thereto." * In short, it was debated whether the Papal authority in England should be abolished, as, in effect, it would have been, and a very large amount of Church property confiscated to the State. And in order to justify such a statute, application was made for judgment to the very man who was regarded by the Clergy as at the head of a sect,† and was at that moment obnoxious to prosecution as a heretic. It was demanded of him, "Whether the kingdom of England may lawfully, in case of necessity, for its own defence, detain, and keep back, the treasure of the kingdom, that it be not carried away to foreign and strange nations, the Pope himself demanding and requiring the same, under pain of censure, and by virtue of obedience." Wycliffe, in a written answer addressed to his Sovereign, persuaded and proved the affirmative by the principles of God's law. It is, therefore, no matter of surprise that he was cited to appear again, not at St. Paul's, but at Lambeth, to answer to charges of heresy, in the presence of the same Bishops who declared that they would do "justice" on him in obedience to the Pope, without fear or favour, even if they should die for it. He obeyed the citation, went to the Archbishop's chapel at Lambeth, at the appointed time, and was expecting to be placed on his defence, when a messenger came from the Queen-mother, and commanded them not to proceed with any definitive sentence against him. Astounded and crest-fallen, they instantly submitted, and Wycliffe was again delivered.‡ But thenceforth he had less human patronage,

* Vaughan, Life and Opinions of Wycliffe, i., 360.

† "Comites unius sectæ," is the expression of Walsingham in describing his followers.

‡ Before leaving that court, Wycliffe presented a written declaration of his doctrine on points relating to the controversy between the civil and ecclesiastical powers. There is little or nothing in the eighteen conclusions therein defended, that relates to theological opinion; but his silence is accounted for by the fact, that the document was a defence of his position, not a confession of his faith, and, therefore, not a partial retraction, as some have represented.

4 F 2 and became less conspicuous in secular affairs, as the troubles of that unhappy reign increased. During the next three years we hear little of him. The Bishops desisted from open persecution; Gregory XI. died about the time of the summons to Lambeth; the Antipopes were too busy in contention to trouble themselves about heretics; popular discontent, and, at last, a general insurrection in England, in which the Archbishop of Canterbury was murdered, withdrew the attention of court and Parliament from the controversy with Rome; and as Wycliffe was not so much needed by his patrons, nor could so easily be persecuted by his enemies, he was left at liberty to pursue his vocation as Rector of Lutterworth, and to use his pen for the propagation of sounder doctrines. But although there is the most explicit evidence that the rebellion was excited by the wrongs of the people, who were disaffected to the higher classes, as well as alienated from the Clergy; Romish writers, both then and since, have endeavoured to blame the Reformer for an event with which he had not the slightest conscious relation. The Chancellor of Oxford then appeared against him, and threatened excommunication and imprisonment to Wycliffe and his followers, unless they would "repent and amend," as he chose to say. Against this edict he wished to appeal to the King; but the Duke of Lancaster, who had hitherto supported him, saw fit to change, and bid him submit to his Ordinary, and say nothing to the King. Thenceforth he stood alone, and devoted himself with redoubled earnestness to the study and defence of doctrinal truths. Yet his influence over the public was undiminished, and still turned to good account. A singular evidence of the effect of his teaching appeared in London, (A.D. 1381,) when the citizens, to rebuke the indifference of the Clergy to the state of public morals, somewhat rudely took the matter into their own hands, imprisoned immoral persons, or subjected them to a sort of open penance, by cutting off their hair, making them stand in market-places, or carrying them through the streets with bag-pipes and trumpets blown, "to the intent that they should be better known, and their companies avoided." In this eccentric, however well meant, proceeding, they said that they were following a suggestion of Master Wycliffe, who had encouraged them "to perpetrate the act, to the reproach of the Prelates of the Clergy." The truth appears to be, that John of Northampton, who for that year was Mayor, and a zealous follower of Wycliffe, was at the head of the movement, probably conceiving that it thus became him, as chief Magistrate, to show himself a terror to evil-doers. The last act of the Ecclesiastical authorities against him, was a summons to appear before the Convocation; but he did not think it necessary or prudent to attend. It is related, that just as the members of Convocation were assembled, and about to proceed to the censure of Wycliffe's writings, (A.D. 1382, St. Dunstan's day,) "a wonderful and terrible earthquake fell throughout all England; whereupon divers of the Suffragans, being feared by the strange and wonderful demonstration, doubting what it should mean, thought it good to leave off from their determinate purpose. But the Archbishop, (as chief Captain of that army, more rash and bold than wise,) interpreting the chance which

COUNTERFEIT ACT OF PARLIAMENT.

had happened clean contrary to another meaning or purpose, did confirm and strengthen their hearts and minds, which were almost daunted with fear, stoutly to proceed and go forward in their attempted enterprise; who then, discoursing Wycliffe's articles, not according to the sacred canons of the holy Scripture, but unto their own private affections, and men's traditions, pronounced and gave sentence, that some of them were simply and plainly heretical, other some half erroneous, others irreligious, some seditious, and not consonant to the Church of Rome." The articles being classified, ten as heretical, and fourteen as erroneous, were published with a mandate of the Archbishop, addressed to the Bishop of London, as well as to the other Bishops, enjoining them to have it admonished and warned in their cathedral and other churches, "that no man henceforth, of what state or condition whatever, do hold, teach, preach, or defend the aforesaid heresies and errors, or any of them; nor that he admit to preach any one that is prohibited, or not sent to preach, or any one else of whom there is any doubt; nor that he hear or hearken to any one preaching the said heresies or errors, or any of them; nor that he favour or adhere to him, either publicly or privily; but that immediately he shun and avoid him, as he would avoid a serpent putting forth pestiferous poison, under pain of the greater curse;" and this curse should be inflicted on the contumacious after three days' canonical monition. The Archbishop further commanded his brethren, "by the eprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ," to be inquisitors of heretical pravity in all their cities and dioceses; thus too successfully attempting to introduce the Inquisition into England under the mitigated form of an episcopal court. The Clergy in general were quite ready to act on this mandate. By the University of Oxford, indeed,—where the doctrines taught by Wycliffe were still entertained by many, including the Chancellor, and perhaps favourably regarded by all,—it was at first resisted; but the Chancellor yielded abject submission, being awed by the threatenings of the Archbishop. But the Clergy well knew that they had no power to enforce this mandate. The law of England did not yet authorize a Bishop to imprison heretics; and as for the office of Inquisitor, it was utterly incompatible with the constitution of this country. A form of statute was therefore drawn up privately, and the signature of the young King obtained without the knowledge of the House of Commons, and entered in the statute-book, as if it had been regularly carried through that House. This counterfeit Act of Parliament set forth, that forasmuch as it was openly known that there were divers evil persons (the poor Priests of Wycliffe) within the realm, going from county to county, and from town to town, in certain habits, under dissimulation of great holiness, and without licence, preaching daily in churches and church-yards, markets, fairs, and other open places where there were great congregations of people; and that their sermons contained heresies and notorious errors, to the great emblemishing of the Christian faith, destruction of the laws and estate of the Church of England, and peril of souls, &c.:—after a long preamble in the same strain, it was said to be "ordained and asserted in this present Parliament, that the King's commissions be made and directed to the Sheriffs and other ministers of our Sovereign Lord the King, or other sufficient persons learned, and according to the certifications of the Prelates thereof to be made in the Chancery from time to time, to arrest all such Preachers, and also their factors, maintainers, and abettors, and to hold them in arrest and strong prison, till they will justify themselves according to reason and the law of holy Church. And the King willeth and commandeth that the Chancellor make such commissions at all times that he, by the Prelates, or any of them, shall be certified, and thereto required, as is aforesaid." The Commons were indignant on discovering the humiliation to which they had been fraudulently made to appear a party, and in their next session (A.D. 1382) sent a petition to the King for its repeal, stating that the statute had not had their assent, and that "it was never anywise their intent to be justified to the Prelates, nor to bind their successors to be so, more than their ancestors had been in times past." The petition, or, as we should now say, the bill, received the royal assent, but was not published. The fraudulent statute, however, continued to be acted on, and passed for law until the Reformation; a perfect example of Romish truth! Having gained young Richard, they obtained from him letters patent addressed to the Archbishop, empowering him and the other Clergy, by a distinct act of royal authority, to arrest and imprison in their own prisons, if they so pleased, the Preachers of heretical doctrine, and their abettors (A.D. 1382, June 28th). From that time the persecutors had a legal pretext under which to imprison, and even put to death, reputed heretics. Then began in England the era of persecution.

But God was graciously pleased to preserve his servant, who had always trusted in Him; and the faith of Wycliffe is powerfully illustrated by the only familiar anecdote of him that has been preserved. When at Oxford (A.D. 1379) he fell sick, his life was despaired of by his friends, and a company of Friars, with some laymen of the city, went to his chamber, hoping to extort a recantation from their adversary in his last moments. They talked earnestly and at length; but he calmly lay in silence, until, suddenly rising in the bed, he exclaimed with a loud voice, "I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord." "Of the Friars," say some, and the perversion passes current; but Foxe, the first narrator, did not find the witticism in his authority; nor does it sound like the words of such a man as Wycliffe, speaking at such a time under the influence of holy confidence in his Redeemer, and must therefore be rejected. While several of his friends forsook him,—for they recanted under terror of excommunication,—he stood firm; and in the peaceful retreat of Lutterworth, preached and wrote with unabated diligence. Some of his principal treatises are said to have been composed there; but no other work could equal a translation of the entire Bible from the Latin Vulgate, which is said to have been completed while he was at Oxford, (A.D. 1378,) and with the assistance of some of his friends in that University; although others assign its publication to the year 1383, when the whole may have been completed. "By this means," says an

LAST DAYS OF WYCLIFFE.

author of that time, "the Scripture is made common, and more clear to laymen and women who can read, than it generally has been to the most learned Clerks; and thus the pearl of the Gospel is thrown to swine, who trample it under foot, and it becomes a plaything to the people." These most learned Clerks were, after all, notoriously deficient in literary attainment; and so negligent of the word of God, that when Richard Fitz-Ralph, the celebrated Archbishop of Armagh, sent four Priests from his diocese to study divinity at Oxford, they were obliged to return to Ireland as they went, because not even a Latin Bible could be found in that place of study.* And the Clergy were so mortified at seeing the sacred volume in the hands of the laity, that they endeavoured, a few years afterwards, to get an Act of Parliament to suppress the book. They were prevented from gaining their point in the House of Lords by the opposition of the Duke of Lancaster, but carried it in the Convocation holden at Oxford in the year 1408, where it was decreed, that no one should thenceforth translate the Bible into English, nor read it in an English translation. The laborious Wycliffe, exhausted by toil, banished from Oxford, and enfeebled by the disease which his enemies hoped would have been fatal, could no longer engage in public duties with the vigour those duties demanded. A slight attack of paralysis had probably impaired his utterance, and made the assistance of a Curate necessary, when a summons came from Urban VI., requiring him to appear at the threshold of the Apostles at Rome, where the Pontiff knew that neither popular sympathy nor royal protection would cover him from the vengeance of the Church. For a grey old man, already prostrated by disease, to journey thither by land and sea, and then to endure the pitiless treatment of that court, with certainty of ending his days in a dungeon, if not at the stake, was not to be attempted; but he replied to the citation in a respectful, but faithful, epistle. Rejoicing, he said, to open and declare to every man the faith he held, but especially to the Bishop of Rome, who would most willingly confirm his faith, if true, and correct it, if erroneous; he gave his confession, to this effect:— Christ, very God and man, gave his Gospel, which is the body of God's law, and of all parts of divine revelation the most excellent. The Bishop of Rome, as Vicar of Christ, is, of all men, most bound to submit to the law of the Gospel. For the greatness of this Vicar does not consist in dignities and honours, but in an exact imitation of our Lord, who, during his pilgrimage in this world, divested himself of all worldly rule and honour. Therefore, no faithful man should follow the Pope, except as far as the Pope follows Christ, nor offend, like Peter and the sons of Zebedee, by desiring worldly honours. And, therefore, the Pope ought to "leave unto the secular power all temporal dominion and rule, and thereunto effectually to move and exhort his whole Clergy." He then offered, if he had erred in any of these points, to submit to correction, even by death, if necessity should so require. He would surely have presented himself before the Bishop of Rome, if he could labour according to his will and desire in his own person; but the Lord had other-

* Mant, History of the Church of Ireland, chap. I., sec. 3.

wise visited him to the contrary, and taught him rather to obey God than man. Finally, giving Urban credit for good dispositions and right intentions, but under an attribution of all that was evil to his advisers,—a plea which may justly be made in behalf of constitutional Princes, but can never be other than a fiction in respect to the Roman Chief Priest,—he exhorted him to amend his ways. Thus closed his personal conflict with the powers of Antichrist, and he was thenceforth free to prepare for eternity without distraction. There is no record of his inward experience; but neither is there any ill report of his daily life. His counsel to Priests had been that they should live holily, surpassing other men in holy prayer, desire, thinking, speaking, counselling, and true teaching; that God's commandments and Gospel should be ever in their mouth, to draw men from sin thereby; that their actions in private and in public should be exemplary and above reproach, example being more powerful than precept to draw rude men; and that living thus, with frugality, humility, and charity, they would be true Priests both to God and man. In the absence of a sentence to the contrary, even from the most unfriendly biographer, we might allow to the memory of so honest and simple-minded a confessor, that his exhortations exhibit the standard to which he would endeavour to attain. And there is evidence extant, that he was universally revered as a most godly and virtuous man.* It was either in the pulpit or at the altar of the parish-church of Lutterworth, that he received the stroke of death, on St. Thomas of Canterbury's day, December 29th; and on St. Silvester's day, the last day of the year 1384, he rested from his labours. The Romish historians describe with malignant pleasure the distortion of countenance, loss of speech, and trembling of the head; and will have it that he was smitten, as by an avenging angel, for having spoken blasphemously of those two saints. We leave them with their own notions of blasphemy and retribution, and rather trust that he has outflown the shafts of malice, as well as the arrows of death, and now rejoices in the paradise of God.† After more than a quarter of a century had elapsed, and the friends and followers of Wycliffe at Oxford had passed away, search was made in the University for copies of his books, which were burnt; (A.D. 1410;) but the display of enmity to his doctrine was as impotent as tardy, for those writings had been copied and circulated, not only throughout England, but in many parts of Europe. Dutch and Flemish merchantmen conveyed them to their homes, where they were read with avidity. Lombards and Florentines did the same. In Bohemia, more than in any other country, they wrought an indelible impression, and were solemnly defended by John Huss in the University of Prague (A.D. 1412). The Council of Constance (A.D. 1415) condemned articles extracted from his writings, or framed out of them

* Thorpe's examination by the Archbishop of Canterbury; Foxe, A.D. 1407.

† Foxe's Acts and Monuments, rich in documentary material; Vaughan's and Le Bas's Lives of Wycliffe; Vaughan's Tracts and Treatises, with several other sources of information, have been used in preparing this brief sketch of the father of the Reformation in England.

THE LOLLARDS.

by its own members; and, to show greater abhorrence of a man whom they declared to have died impenitent and obstinate, they decreed that "his body and bones, if they might be discerned from the bodies of other faithful people, should be taken out of the ground, and thrown far away from the burial of any church." This notwithstanding, his remains rested there, until, in lingering obedience to a similar mandate from the Council of Sienna, (A.D. 1421-2,) hands were at last found (A.D. 1428) in Lutterworth to break the grave, take up and burn his bones, and throw the ashes into the Swift, forty-four years after their interment.

The ashes of Wycliffe were dispersed; but his spiritual descendants never became extinct. Against them persecution began to rage during his life-time, as we have already seen. John Ashton, for example, one of his poor Priests, remarkable for zeal and self-denial, is said to have died in prison, even after a retractation had been extorted from him under the influence of terror.* After the death of the master, the disciples continued to pursue their labours, and were called "Lollards," a name which was first heard as the designation of a sect early in the century, in Holland, and soon extended to all persons in that country, in Germany, and in England, who dissented from the dominant Church, and were reputed to be pious or fanatical by friends or foes. According to Mosheim, whose elaborate account of the origin of the name appears to be indisputable,† the brethren and sisters of the Cellite or Alexian order distinguished themselves in Antwerp by diligent attendance on the sick and dying during the prevalence of epidemic diseases, when the secular Clergy were afraid to enter the chambers, or to receive the dead into the churches. Some compassionate inhabitants of the city followed their example, and, like them, took care of the burials, and were accustomed to sing hymns as they proceeded towards the grave. From this custom they were familiarly called "Lollards," or "singers," from the old German word, lullen, tollen, or lallen, "to sing," found also in the English lull, "to compose to sleep by a pleasing sound;"‡ and the name at first given to those funebrial singers was transferred to others who, caring for the living rather than the dead, laboured to instruct the ignorant, frequently sang the praises of God, and, because of their abstinence from worldly merriment, were reputed to be sad. The epithet then became contemptuous. Instead, therefore, of giving the followers of Wycliffe his name, we shall now call them "Lollards;" and under that epithet they were universally known. During four or five years after his death, we hear of no severe persecution; but, on the contrary, it would seem that London swarmed, as they would say, with Lollards, and that the doctrines of "Lollardie" were preached in many pulpits. A sermon of that time is still extant.§ A certain learned

* This is affirmed, incidentally, by Foxe, book v., A.D. 1401, who places his imprisonment in the year 1382. Le Bas, who dislikes the poor Priests, supposes that he was reconciled.

† Mosheim, Ecclesiastical History, cent. xlv., part ii., chap. 2, note.

‡ Johnson.

§ There are manuscript copies in the Royal and Cambridge Libraries, and in the Bed leian. It has been repeatedly printed, and is to be found in Foxe, A.D. 1368.

4 6

Clerk, at Paul's-Cross, then the chief preaching-station in London, took for his text the words, "Redde rationem villicationis tuae," "Give an account of thy stewardship." The parable of the labourers in the vineyard suggested the introduction. The "spiritual understanding" was represented thus. Jesus Christ the householder, Head of the household of holy Church, called men to labour therein in divers ages of the world, as in the time of the law of nature, the time of the Law and the Prophets, and the time of grace, and in all times he has called men of divers ages. The Preacher conceived of the world as comprehended in the church, and under the law of Christ; and described, under the figure of culture, the care of society intrusted to Priests, Knights, and common labourers. To each of these classes he addressed the discourse, portraying the prevalent wickedness of Priests, Magistrates, and people, in the style of one who had studied books and men with equal care, gathering authority and illustration from inspired Scripture, and the writings of the Fathers, and unveiling the sins of all classes of his hearers. He had not learned to offer mercy through faith in the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world; but preached the law in such a manner as to convince the congregation of their guilt. The unfaithful Clerk was likened to a candle newly-quenched that stencheth all the house, instead of a bright lantern; a smoke that blindeth men's eyes, instead of clean fire. The King, Prince, Mayor, Sheriff, or Justice, who had sought power for the sake of the profit, and the desire of winning worldly worship, and not for the help of the people, was shown to be a tyrant. The people also were exhorted with unsparing fidelity, reminded of the day of judgment, and of sickness, old age, and death, as the forerunners of judgment. The world, too, was said to be drawing towards its end, the night of death to be advancing, the gloom of ignorance and guilt resting, not only on the low valleys of the commonalty, but on the most elevated portions of society, on "the high tops of spiritual dignity," where there should be some light, if any yet remained, showing the near approach of the world's night, and the coming of God in vengeance. Abbot Joachim, and Hildegard, the maiden Prophetess, had foretold the doom; and although the Preacher did not presume to say at what day or hour it would be consummated, he gathered from "the book of secrets," (the Revelation,) and from the history of the church, that the sixth seal was open, and the word of St. John fulfilled as to the "four angels standing on the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree." Those four angels he interpreted to be the devil's ministers, that, for the pleasure of their Lord, Antichrist, stopped the four winds, the four Gospels from being preached, and so kept the breath of the grace of the Holy Ghost from falling upon men mourning for sin, from calling them to amendment, and from quickening those that would increase in virtue. Then, as if in a prophetic rapture, he described the opening of the books of conscience, and of doctrine, so long closed, and the gathering of men together before the bar of God, and, raising his voice, denounced a triple woe on the trembling

THE LOLLARDS.

multitude. And then, said he, "when these damned men bee in this woe, they shullen sing this reuful song, that is ywritten in the booke of mourning,—

'The joy of our hart is a go,

Our quiet is turned into woe,

The crowne of our beade is fallen as fro!

Alas, for since that we have doe!'

But joye and joye and joye to them that be saved!" Profound was the impression produced by this sermon of Thomas Wimbelden, and the excitement spread far and wide as copies were multiplied and distributed. People thought that indeed the end of all things was at hand. The Lollards were not less active in England than the Flagellants had been in Germany; but instead of bodily discipline, they endeavoured to arouse men's consciences to dread of sin, and the endeavour was not made in vain. One thing alone was wanting,—a clear exhibition of Christ the Saviour of sinners by faith in his blood, the truth which gave completeness and permanence to the Reformation of the sixteenth century, and would have given an entirely different character to that of the fourteenth. The undeniable defect of English Lollardism was its falling short of the true end of religious excitement. Earnest and even pious men were so intent on demolishing the fabric of Romanism, as to be sometimes diverted from building up the church of Christ, and were betrayed into the indulgence of party-spirit, when they ought to have been occupied in the work of turning sinners from the error of their way. But as the Lollards had their failings, so have many who profess to write their history, and spare no pains to cover their memory with contempt; who borrow the misrepresentations of Walsingham and Knyghton, and injuriously describe them as coarse, hypocritical, and cowardly fanatics. William Swinderby, a Priest of the diocese of Lincoln, is one of those who has been honoured most largely with Monkish contumely. He was presented before the Bishop of Lincoln, and examined in the cathedral as to a string of articles perversely extracted from his writings. His accusers were a company of Friars, representing three distinct orders, and attended by a crowd of brothers, who brought dry wood on their shoulders to burn him. Surrounded by those ferocious zealots, and overawed by the menaces of the Bishop and his assessors, he submitted to do penance, and swear to a form of revocation which they put into his hand, renouncing conclusions and articles attributed to him, and promising never to teach, preach, or affirm publicly or privily the same, nor to preach within the diocese of Lincoln without a licence from the Bishop. Stung with remorse, he soon left that diocese, and removed to the county of Hereford, where he was again persecuted; but, instead of yielding as before, answered to the articles alleged against him, and explained, justified, or denied them as they severally required. Within that county he preached incessantly; but refused to appear before his persecutors, and was therefore pronounced to be a heretic, and excommunicated (A.D. 1391). Despite the excommunication, the people favoured him; he appealed to the King and his Council, and sent a letter to the Nobles and Burgesses of Parliament,

4 G 2 soliciting their attention to the truths for which he suffered. Richard afforded him no redress; but issued a writ to the Sheriff and others for his apprehension and imprisonment. Still he remained at large. Walter Brute, a layman, and Stephen Bell, described as a learned man, openly espoused his cause; and were, like him, both persecuted and protected during the reign of Richard, who strove to please the Bishops; the Parliament, however, being hostile to the high pretensions of the Clergy, who could do no more than terrify the weaker Lollards into submission, and make them do penance. One of those sorry triumphs is described by Archbishop Courtney, (Nov. 17th, 1389,) as it was to be exhibited in the city of Leicester, in the persons of one William Smith, with Roger Dexter, and Alice Dexter his wife. These three involuntary penitents were to be restored to the bosom of holy Mother Church after public humiliation thus performed. William was to carry an image of St. Catherine, Roger and Alice each a crucifix, in their right hands, and in their left hands each one of them a taper of wax, weighing half a pound. The men in shirts and breeches, and Alice in her chemise alone, were to walk before the procession of the collegiate church of the Newarks at Leicester, and thrice during the procession were to bow their knees and kneel devoutly, reverently to kiss the said images, and then entering the church to stand, during mass, with the images and crosses in their hands. Then, on the following Saturday, they were to stand in the full and public market-place barefoot, bareheaded, with no more clothing than on the Sunday, devout and reverent withal, holding the images and tapers, and kissing the images with reverential genuflexion thrice. On the following Sunday the same penance was to be done in their own parish-church, and they should receive, during the mass on those days, as a mark of special clemency, permission to wrap cloaks around them, but so that the feet were still bare, lest peradventure they should take hurt by standing so long naked during cold November and December days. Holy Church! The men of Leicester must have adored thee for thy clemency; and specially honest Roger Dexter's heart must have glowed in filial affection towards thee, now reconciled, as he saw his wife Alice, weary, ashamed, shivering, with her bare feet on the cold pavement of his parish-church! But the penitential discipline of those days was not less ridiculous than cruel. "Ignorance, the mother of error, had so much blinded and deceived certain persons, to wit, Hugh Pennie, John Forstall, John Boy, John Wanderton, William Hayward, and John White, tenants of the Lord of Wingham," that when this same William Courtney, Archbishop of Canterbury, came to his palace on Palm-Sunday even, (A.D. 1390,) those farmers did not send waggons laden with hay and straw for the horses of his retinue, as bound by the tenure of their land; but sent it in privily, in bags and sacks, in derogation of the right and title of the see of Canterbury. Courtney's ingenuity covered his insulted honour; and before the procession on Palm-Sunday those six farmers marched, bare-legged from toe to knee, and heads uncovered, each carrying a sack of straw, the mouth of the sack being open, that the straw, hanging out, might tell

LOLLARDS IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS.

the nature of their delinquency. As yet, however, the Parliament of England had not been humbled by the enactment of any act that would place the lives of Englishmen at the mercy of Priests.* That indignity was reserved to the reign of the usurper, Henry IV.†

Meanwhile the Pope grew sorely dissatisfied with the Prelates of the Church in England because of their negligence and sluggishness, as he was pleased to say, in not courageously addressing themselves to the extirpation of heresy, and despatched two Bulls of equal date (Sept. 17th, 1395) to the King, and to the Bishop of Hereford; according to which documents it evidently appears that the new Preachers ranged over the country with little restraint, and were so far supported by popular sympathy, in most places, that the Diocesans could not prevail against them. He therefore required, exhorted, and besought his princely Highness to enjoin the Magistrates more straitly to execute justice against those "damned men;" to expel, banish, imprison them, and keep them imprisoned, until condign sentence should pronounce them worthy to suffer punishment, or, in other words, to be burnt to death. As these Bulls were on the way hither, the King was in Ireland, and the spirit of England was aroused more than ever against the Church of Rome. Twelve conclusions were presented to the House of Commons, where theological matters were not unfrequently discussed, tending to establish that the Roman Church was only a step-mother of the Anglican; that the priesthood, as it then was, was not such as the Apostles had ordained; that Monkery and transubstantiation were sinful and idolatrous; that the Pope should have no temporal power; and that the whole system of worship and sacraments was unscriptural. The multitude of arts used in this realm was also censured as unnecessary and wasteful; and it is worthy of observation that the same dislike of art and luxury prevailed amongst all the dissentients from Popery throughout Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, arising, perhaps, from their exclusive possession by the Clergy and the aristocracy, who were alike devoid of sympathy with the humbler classes of the laity. Yet these conclusions were strongly supported in Parliament by some of the nobles; and the friends of Romanism, alarmed at the unprecedented boldness of the Lollards, and their growing influence, sent over to Ireland to entreat Richard to return. He did so, and on reaching England summoned those noblemen into his presence, and even made one of them swear not to favour or defend such opinions any more. "And I swear," said he, "to thee, that if thou dost ever break thine oath, thou shalt die for it a shameful death." Still the Lollards multiplied: their principal idea of humbling the Church of Rome was popular; and even Richard wrote a letter to the Pope, Boniface IX., exhorting him to cease from struggling with his antagonist for lordship over the Church, in language which might have been dictated by a Lollard (A.D. 1398).

* It will be remembered that what passed for a Parliamentary Statute only went to imprisonment of heretics. And that counterfeit statute, although still acted on, had been disclaimed and repealed by the Commons, with the sanction of the King.

† This brief notice of the Lollards is gathered from the Acts and Monuments preserved by John Foxe, compared with the records of Raynaldus, Rymer, &c.

We now enter on the reign of Henry IV. (A.D. 1399.) He soon obtained a great advantage over his subjects by the suppression of a revolt. The throne was not his; but in the usurpation of it the high Clergy were his abettors, and he gratified them by engaging the Parliament to pass a law, enacting that any heretic refusing to abjure, or relapsed, and delivered over to the secular arm by the Bishop, or his Commissaries, should be burnt alive by the civil Magistrate before the whole people.* Nothing more was necessary to complete the horrid ceremonial of Popery in England, nor could the humiliation of England be more abject, nor the power of an inexorable and sanguinary priesthood over the lives of Englishmen be more assuredly established. Only a victim was wanting whose pyre should serve as a beacon to warn the nation of a vengeance that would consume whomsoever should dare to dispute the authority now to be made paramount over Scripture, conscience, and humanity. Many, seeing the danger which had come suddenly to view, and astounded at the prospect, abjured; many had saved themselves, for the time, by keeping silence. Yet for the Lord there were witnesses, and a victim was soon found, to be the proto-martyr of England. William Sautre, (or Chatris,) parish Priest of St. Margaret's of Lynn, in Norfolk, and of Tilney, a parish in the neighbourhood, known to preach against the worship of images, the adoration of the cross, and transubstantiation, had been cited to appear before the Bishop of Norwich, and in his presence had been terrified into recantation of his opinions (April and May, 1399). "In a certain chamber within the Manor-House of the said Bishop," at South Helingham,† the Prelate himself, his Archdeacon, John de Derlington, a Canonist; Friar Walter Dish, and John Rikinghal, Professors of Theology; and William Carlton, Doctor of Civil and Canon Laws, with two Notaries, had "Sir William" into their presence, and required him to answer to the articles alleged against him. Two days were spent in disputation; threatenings were not usually spared; and although not recorded, since no record but their own remains to disclose the proceedings of that court, they were no doubt resorted to in this case. After two days of close contest, and seventeen more of anxiety and suspense, his confidence gave way; and then, in the chapel of the Manor-House, he took his oath upon a book, in the presence of the Bishop and of a congregation of the villagers, that from that time forward he would never preach, affirm, or hold, privily or openly, the heretical conclusions; and that he would solemnly renounce them in the parish churches of Lynn and Tilney, and such other places as the Bishop might appoint. "Then, next after this, upon the 25th day of May, in the year of our Lord aforesaid, in the church-yard of the chapel of St. James, within the town of Lynn, the aforesaid William, in the presence of the aforesaid Bishop and Clergy, and the people of the said town of Lynn standing round about, publicly declared in the English tongue" that the obnoxious conclusions were erroneous and heretical. The same ceremony was exhibited in the

* 2 Henry IV., chap. vii., happily expunged from our statute-books.

† The three parishes of Ellingham, in Norfolk, are now otherwise distinguished; they are Ellingham, and Great and Little Ellingham.

SAUTRE, PROTO-MARTYR OF ENGLAND.

church of St. John's hospital in the same town, as no doubt at Tilney also. He was deprived of his office of Confessor in that diocese, and, for some reason not known, removed to London, and became parish Priest of the church of St. Osyth, then standing in Size-Lane. But his conviction of the sinfulness of image-worship and the mass deepened; he could not conceal the truth; and being known as a Lollard, and marked as one that had relapsed, was just such a subject as Arundel, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was pleased to find ready for his purpose. Threatened with death, he appealed to the Parliament to be heard at their bar in justification of himself, and "for the commodity of the whole realm." But the Parliament no longer represented the realm. Its independence was crushed. It could not now protect life. The Archbishop called him into his own presence, and he appeared before him in the Chapter-House; but after one sitting, Arundel repaired to the Parliament, there to watch that House, and left a deputy to go through the formalities of a mock trial. These accomplished, the Primate set his hand to a sentence, which declared Sautre to be a heretic, and a heretic to be punished. A few days afterwards my Lord of Canterbury took the Bishop's chair in St. Paul's, attended by six Bishops, performed on Sautre the tedious process of degradation in the presence of the multitude, put a coloured cap on his head, and handed him over, as a layman, to the High Constable and Marshal of England there present, with other civil authorities, "beseeching them that they would regard favourably the said William, unto them thus recommended." But that recommendation was the established form in which Inquisitors on the Continent demanded of the civil authorities that they should put heretics to death; to burn the body being considered as a deed of mercy to the soul. This was done accordingly, by virtue of an order bearing the royal signature, and ready written, being of equal date with the sentence of degradation (Feb. 26th, 1401). He was forthwith committed to the flames in Smithfield, being the first person judicially put to death for Christ's sake in this country.* It must be observed, that when standing before his Judges in the Chapter-House, he attempted not any defence, neither denied nor qualified any of his opinions, but meekly smiled with acquiescence in the will

* As this is the first writ for burning a heretic that was issued by a King of England, was the model of all that followed, and is exceedingly characteristic of those by whom it was dictated, a translation (excepting the preamble) may be interesting. "We therefore, keeper (sellator) of justice, and preserver (cultur) of the Catholic faith, desiring to maintain and defend Holy Church, and the rights and liberties of the same, and to extirpate heretics and errors of this kind out of our kingdom of England, and to punish heretics thus convicted with condign animadversion; and bearing in mind that heretics of this kind, convicted and condemned in the aforesaid form, ought, according to divine and human law, canonical institutes, and, in this part, customarily, to be burned with burning of fire: We command you as strictly as possibly we can, and firmly enjoin, that ye cause the aforesaid William (Sautre), who is now in your custody, in some public and open place, within the liberty of the aforesaid city, (London,) the cause above recited being published before the people, to be committed to fire, and himself in the same fire to be really burned, in detestation of such a crime, and for a manifest example to other Christians. And this, at your peril, you will not fail to do. Given at Westminster, the King being witness, on the 26th day of February."—Rymed Fodder, tom. viii., p. 178.

of God. That smile was registered as a sign of derision and contempt.*

During nine years following the Prelates did not venture to burn another Lollard. Even Arundel, first in murderous zeal, as well as in worldly dignity, found it necessary to repress his passion, and impose no other penalty than imprisonment on those who could not be moved by intimidation, or by promises, to swear unlimited submission to the authority of the Church. The poor Priests of Wycliffe still prosecuted their labours, welcomed by the common people, and often concealed by them from the knowledge of persecutors. But many persons, both Priests and laymen, without favour shown to age or sex, were wearied into recantation by the dread or the suffering of incarceration in loathsome dungeons; and many others perished in such places. This state of things continued until the year 1409, when the Primate and his Clergy renewed their efforts. A set of Constitutions of his, then issued, conveyed through the province of Canterbury his command, that no person unlicensed should preach, under penalty of excommunication and confiscation of all his goods; that no Clergyman or other person should admit an unlicensed Preacher into church, church-yard, or any other place, under penalty of interdict on the place. The Preacher who scandalized his hearers by too great freedom of speech, was to be sharply punished by the Ordinary, who might use unlimited discretion. A breath of dissent from authorized doctrine respecting the sacraments, brought down excommunication; a second utterance of the kind was to be visited with confiscation of goods, but might be atoned for by penance and open recantation. Schoolmasters were to refrain from teaching anything contrary to what was called "catholic faith," and to prevent their pupils from expounding or disputing about the words of Scripture; every negligent Schoolmaster should be "grievously punished" by the Ordinary of the place, as a favourer of errors and schisms. Wycliffe's books were to be excluded from schools, halls, hospitals, until expurgated by twelve censors then appointed; and transgressors were to be dealt with as sowers of heresy. Under the same penalty, no man should dare to translate the text of holy Scripture into English or any other tongue, or read any such book, libel, or treatise, set forth in the time of Wycliffe, or since. Formal propositions, even if but apparently repugnant to authorized doctrine, and sayings unfavourable to image-worship, pilgrimages, crossings, holy-water, and other like superstitions, were marked as criminal, and were to be avenged according to the laws against heresy. No Chaplain should be admitted to say mass in any diocese, of whom it should not be duly certified that he was untainted by any suspicion of having favoured the new doctrines; otherwise both he and he that suffered him should be "sharply punished." Because Oxford was defiled with "the new and damnable name of Lollardy," and the students' teeth were set on edge by eating the sour grapes left there by their predecessors,—those sour grapes, the writings of Wycliffe; the heads of houses were instructed how to make inquisition of heresy, or, failing

* Foxe, Acts and Monuments.

JOHN BADBY.

obedience, to be deprived and excommunicated. On that Constitution Foxe pithily notes in the margin: "I would the like were used now, for the banishment of Papiatry." Suspected Clerks were to be made incapable of preferment for three years. And, finally, for the easier punishment of offenders, all persons not appearing on citation before the Ordinary, or other superior, should be presumed guilty, and dealt with accordingly.* The zeal of the Clergy was necessarily quickened, and the Church appeared more terrible than ever, domineering over all speech and all thought, except where the spirit of Christ had set men free from the fear of man. There were a few thus emancipated; and, among them, John Badby, a tailor of Evesham, in the diocese of Worcester, was found ready to surrender his life for Christ's sake. We find him first at Worcester, in the chapel of the charnel-house of St. Thomas (à Becket) the Martyr, in the cathedral. The Bishop of Worcester sat as his chief Judge, attended by the Prior and Sub-Prior of the Church, and a full company of "Parsons," Friars, Knights, and Esquires, chosen for their learning and rank, to give a shadow of credit to the prosecution. The Evesham tailor stood manfully before them, and, in the course of a "diligent" examination conducted by the Bishop, answered without hesitation, that it was impossible for any Priest to make the body of Christ, and that he would never believe it until "he saw manifestly the like body of Christ to be handled in the hands of the Priest upon the altar, in his corporal form;" but if that body could so be made, any good man might do it as well as a Priest. And he argued against the mass with a severity so unsparing, that the Friars exclaimed that his words were horrible and out of order. The "reverend father" admonished him to abjure utterly that heresy, and to believe all other things, as the holy mother the Church believed; but the good man was nothing moved, and said expressly, that "he would never believe otherwise than before he had said, taught, and answered." That was enough. The company were not troubled with discussion of any more articles. Thomas of Worcester subscribed an accusation of him as a heretic, two Notaries set their hands and seals to the document, and it was forwarded, forthwith, to the Primate. The Commons of England were not insensible to the condition of the tailor of Evesham. The abbey of that town, alone, endowed so richly, that it was in itself a principality, might have suggested the measure that they resolved on taking. The country was impoverished by the diversion of its wealth from the State to the Church, and they renewed the complaint, already so often, but so ineffectually, made. The Parliament, therefore, sent up a petition to the King, containing, by way of preamble, a calculation of the value of property wasted by Ecclesiastics, to the amount of 322,000 marks annually for the Priests, and 105,000 for the Friars, and asking for the impropriation of that wealth to secular use.† The

* These Constitutions, published by Foxe, may be found in the appendix to Lyndwood's Provincial, at the year 1408.

† The comparative value of these 427,000 marks may be conjectured from the fair income of a Knight being 100, of an Esquire 40, and of a Priest 7 marks per annum, according to the same preamble.

4 H

King answered, that he would consider of the matter, but did no more. But they also petitioned that such persons as might be arrested by force of the statute made against the Lollards nine years before, might be bailed, and freely clear themselves; and that none but the civil authority might be allowed to arrest them, nor any havoc be made of their goods. This would have delivered Badby out of the hands of the Bishop of Worcester; but the King gave no answer; and in a few weeks the confessor was taken up to London, and presented to Arundel, not at St. Paul's nor Lambeth, but in a monastery of the preaching Friars; and, as before, and like Sautre in the Bishop's Manor-House, not in open court. Their failure in the case of Wycliffe, for want of the like precaution, could not have been forgotten. There (March 1st, 1410) the inexorable Archbishop, assisted by the Archbishop of York, eight Bishops, the Duke of York, the Chancellor of England, the Clerk of the Rolls, and a great number of other Lords, heard the record of the meeting at Worcester, received the accusation of the Bishop, who, however, was not present, and asked Badby whether he would renounce and forsake those conclusions. It was a question of life or death. The humble tailor stood alone before the rulers of the kingdom; men who held the Sovereign himself in their hands. No John of Gaunt protected him. No Earl Marshal bade him sit down. No shout from a sympathizing multitude, nor any message from royalty, demanded justice, or interposed authority. To remonstrate, to argue, to implore, would have been vain. He might have denied the truth: yet by seeking to save his life he would have lost it; therefore, mindful of his Master's command and promise, he calmly accepted the alternative, and said, in few words, that to his life's end he would never retract the same. That answer sealed his doom; but "his countenance was stout and his heart confirmed:" Canterbury pronounced him an incorrigible heretic, and, as usual, very instantly desired the temporal Lords there present, that they would not put John Badby to death, nor deliver him to be put to death. Nor did they. The Archbishop and the Bishop of London agreed together that he should be kept safe, and sent him to a cell in the same monastery; the Archbishop took the key into his own charge; and on the following Wednesday,* arrangements being complete, re-assembled the Prelates and nobles in St. Paul's, brought up Badby again, read over the proceedings, repeated the demand for retractation, heard his determination never to retract repeated, reiterated the anathema, and sent him back in custody to the Black Friars. In the afternoon the King issued a writ for burning the heretic, and he was instantly taken to Smithfield, where preparations were made for executing the sentence. He was chained to a stake, with dry wood underneath a sort of grating at the foot, and a large barrel, open at both ends, put over him, to hide the burning sacrifice from the eyes of Englishmen, not yet accustomed to look on such objects. The fire was not yet kindled, and while the executioners waited for the Priests, whose presence was deemed necessary at so religious and important a solemnity, the Prince of Wales, a young man of twenty, capable of

* The trial, if it may be so called, took place on a Saturday.

LORD COBHAM.

humane and generous emotions, notwithstanding habits of great profligacy, was on the ground, went up to the spot, had the barrel removed, essayed to save him during a long conversation, uttering in one breath the kindest expressions of compassion, and in another the most boisterous threatenings; but it was all in vain. Then came Courtney, Chancellor of Oxford, and preached to him the faith of holy Church, but still without effect. Then the Prior of St. Bartholomew's in Smithfield came in procession, with the host, preceded by twelve torches, showed him the wafer, and asked him if he believed in it. "I know," he replied, "that it is hallowed bread; but it is not God's body." At this word the barrel was put over him, and the fire kindled underneath. When the martyr felt the fire, he cried, "Mercy!" The Prince, thinking the prayer such an one as he could answer, commanded the fire to be quenched, and the barrel taken off; asked him if he would forsake heresy, and return to holy Church; and offered him, under that condition, a yearly stipend from the King's treasury. But he was unmoved; and the Prince, offended, ordered the barrel to be replaced, and the flames re-kindled. It was done, and the martyr was translated into paradise (March 5th, 1410). It was impossible that the deed of that evening should not excite horror throughout England, and the Priests were therefore placed on their defence. But the King had commanded it, they could say, and the like had been done before, under the Act of 1401. That Act, which Henry had just refused to repeal, was read in Convocation five days afterwards; and the Crown, the Church, and the nobility being all on the side of persecution, the Lollards could find no human succour.

Ostensibly to deliberate on a reformation of discipline, but really to prosecute the suppression of Lollardism, the Primate assembled a national Synod at St. Paul's (A. D. 1413). Reports of the Inquisitors of heretical writings were laid before the Synod, and information was collected of the proceedings of the Lollards, whose numbers multiplied throughout the land; and the hierarchy of England felt bold to strike higher than they had hitherto presumed. Sir John Oldcastle, Earl of Cobham, was either known or suspected to have originated bills for reducing the temporalities of the Church in two Parliaments,* and had openly espoused the cause of evangelical truth. If the law against heresy could be inflicted on him, the Priests imagined that their triumph would be great; and Arundel himself went to the young King, who, when Prince of Wales, had seen Badby burnt, to solicit permission to indict Lord Cobham on a charge of heresy. Henry felt unwilling to offend the nobility by giving a hasty sanction to such a proceeding; desired the Archbishop to wait until he should have conversed with Cobham, and endeavoured to bring him to submission; and, having summoned his Lordship into his presence, earnestly admonished him to submit to his mother, holy Church, and, as an obedient child, acknowledge himself to be in error. The Christian nobleman had counted the cost of his confession, and instantly addressed the King in such words as these: "You, most worthy Prince, I am always prompt and willing to obey; forasmuch as I know

* 18 Richard II., and 11 Henry IV.

4 H 2 you to be a Christian King, and the appointed minister of God, bearing the sword to the punishment of evil-doers, and for safeguard of them that be virtuous. Unto you, next my eternal God, I owe my whole obedience, and submit thereunto, as I have ever done, all that I have, either of fortune or nature, ready at all times to fulfil whatever ye shall, in the Lord, command me. But touching the Pope and his spirituality, I owe them neither suit nor service; forasmuch as I know him, by the Scriptures, to be the great Antichrist, the son of perdition, the open adversary of God, and the abomination standing in the holy place." Henry, finding his influence no greater than it had been with the martyr in Smithfield, angrily gave him up, and granted full authority to the Archbishop to proceed against him. Then the chief summer of my Lord of Canterbury appeared before the gate of Cowling Castle to summon the Earl into his master's presence; but the man's courage failed him; and not daring to enter the gates of so noble a person without licence, he returned home without delivering his message. Accompanied, however, by the door-keeper of the King's Privy Chamber, who pretended to be sent with a verbal order from the Sovereign, he came back to Cowling, and delivered the summons; but Lord Cobham refused to acknowledge the competence of any Ecclesiastic to cite him thus. Letters citatory were then nailed to the gates of Rochester Cathedral, but the people tore them down; and he, expressing a just contempt of their proceedings, went to ask an audience of the King, and presented a written confession of his faith. But Henry was inexorable; and, after a second interview, commanded him to be imprisoned in the Tower of London, in order to answer at the ecclesiastical tribunal. From the Tower he was carried to the Chapter-house of St. Paul's, (September 23d, 1413,) and informed by Arundel, at whose side were the Bishops of London and Winchester, and some other Doctors, that he had been convicted of heresy and excommunicated, but might even then find mercy if he would recant, and ask to be absolved. Scorning controversy, yet ready to give an answer of the hope that was in him, he drew a paper from his bosom, containing a brief statement of his belief respecting the sacrament of the eucharist, penance, (which he described as penitence before God,) images, and pilgrimages, so drawn up as to exhibit only so much on those points as consists with the word of God; but the confession was inadmissible by the Prelates, because it tacitly excluded Popish innovations. After talking, aside, with his assessors, Arundel called him up again, acknowledged that the confession was good as far as it went, but demanded his opinion on other points not therein mentioned. Such interrogatories he would not answer; and, after long conversation, declared that he would stand to his written confession, and to no other, until death. Gladly would he believe and observe whatever Christ's holy church had determined, and what God willed; but as for the Pope of Rome, with his Cardinals and Prelates, he would not affirm that they had lawful power to determine such matters as stood not thoroughly with the word of God. If they would send him their determination in writing, he would consider it, but would not be ensnared in oral controversy. Sir Robert

LORD COBHAM.

Morley, Lieutenant of the Tower, took him back thither, and the next day, Sunday, a paper was sent to him containing four articles of Romish faith, with the question, "How believe ye this article?" or, "How feel ye this article?" attached to each. In his belief and feeling of Christian verity he stood unmoved: the day was passed in prayer and resignation to God, at whose mercy-seat he freely offered up his life, and sought help from the Holy Spirit to bear a faithful testimony to the doctrines of the Gospel. On the Monday he was again hurried from the Tower, not to the Chapter-house, but to the church of the Dominican monastery, where Badby had been condemned, and found himself before the same Judges as before, with the addition of the Bishop of Bangor, and a large company of select Ecclesiastics, with Notaries to make a record of what should be said or done. The Archbishop opened the proceedings by addressing him in such words as these: "Lord Cobham, ye be advised, I am sure, of the words and process which we had unto you upon Saturday last past, in the Chapter-house of Paul's, which process is too long to be rehearsed again now. I said unto you then, that you were accursed for your contumacy and disobedience to the holy Church, thinking that ye should with meekness have desired your absolution." With a cheerful meekness the noble prisoner replied: "God said by his holy Prophet Malachy, 'Maledicam benedictionibus vestris.'" At hearing these words, "I will curse your blessings," Arundel made as though he heard not, and continued to proffer absolution, and urge him to ask for pardon. Then said the Lord Cobham, "Nay, forsooth, will I not. I never yet trespassed against you, and therefore I will not do it." Then, kneeling on the pavement, he raised both his hands towards heaven, and said, "I shrive me here unto thee, my eternal, living God, that in my frail youth I offended thee, O Lord, most grievously, in pride, wrath, and gluttony, in covetousness, and in uncleanness. Many men have I hurt in mine anger, and done many other horrible sins; good Lord, I ask thee mercy." Weeping with contrition, not with cowardice, he rose on his feet, and with a loud voice addressed the people who filled the place: "Lo, good people, lo! for the breaking of God's law, and his great commandments, they never yet cursed me; but for their own laws and traditions, most cruelly do they handle both me and other men; and therefore both they and their laws, by the promise of God, shall be utterly destroyed." As God heard the prayer, so did the people respond to the appeal; a murmur expressive of compassion rose in the congregation, the Bishops and their company were overawed, even Arundel was abashed, and, for a few moments, betrayed embarrassment by an ungraceful effort after exculpation. However, he soon rallied, and a long dispute followed on the articles sent to Lord Cobham on the preceding day, throughout which the prisoner displayed an immeasurable superiority to his accusers. At the close, the Archbishop repeated the demand of submission; and Cobham said expressly, "I will no otherwise believe in these points than what I have told you here before. Do with me what you will." A sentence, ready prepared, was then read by Arundel, declaring him to be a heretic, and another consigning him to the temporal power to be put to death. When the reading was finished, he briefly exhorted the people to beware of those blind guides, knelt down again and prayed aloud that God would forgive his persecutors, and was forthwith reconducted to the Tower. The secular power, however, durst not precipitate the burning of such a man as Lord Cobham, whom every one respected, and whom many thousands loved and venerated as a holy man. His friends, too, circulated a short statement of his faith in regard to the eucharist, in order to counteract the tales of his enemies; but Priests were employed by their Superiors to circulate a report that he had recanted. They even exhibited an abjuration forged in his name, hoping to make him pass for a penitent, and save themselves the disgrace and danger of putting him to death. That expedient failed; but another was found. The Clergy presented a complaint to the King, that in every quarter of the realm, by reason of Wycliffe's opinions, and the said Lord Cobham, were wonderful contentions, rumours, tumults, uproars, confederations, dissensions, divisions, differences, discords, harms, slanders, schisms, sects, seditions, perturbations, perils, unlawful assemblies, variances, stripes, fightings, rebellious agitations, and daily insurrections. They complained that the Church was hated, (as well it might be,) and its dignitaries, Ministers, and summers, (constables or familiars,) everywhere despised, and laughed to scorn. All spiritual jurisdiction, they said, was had in utter contempt, and all that was good come to nought. The truth seems to be that the Lollards persevered in preaching and in worship. They had schools of their own, wrote books, which were read by zealous persons who could not preach, in companies of such as could not read, had their own forms of praise, like the old Waldenses, and met together like them in fields, forests, and caves, when driven from houses. A few persons were committed to the Tower; and Henry, with an affectation of magnanimity, published a general pardon of those who had been betrayed by the subtle enemy of mankind into error, and had gone so far as to plot the death of himself, and certain Lords spiritual and temporal. But he excepted from the pardon John Oldcastle, (Lord Cobham,) Richard Colfox, William Parchemyner, Robert Shene, Clerk, Thomas Drayton, Rector of Drayton-Beauchamp, in Lincolnshire, John Hoper, Thomas Sernes—, (the name is incomplete,) Thomas, younger son of Robert Cheyne, Thomas Eston, a merchant of London, and another, as well as some who had sought refuge in sanctuaries, or were elsewhere imprisoned on the same account, or had escaped from prison, or were out on bail.* Thus, it would seem, most of the leading Lollards were within the grasp of their persecutors, in one way or another; and, this point being gained, the King summoned a Parliament, which met at Leicester, (April 30th, 1414,) and therein gave the Priests a statute setting forth that whosoever should read the Scriptures in the vulgar tongue should forfeit land, cattle, body, life, and goods from their heirs for ever; and so be condemned as heretics to God, enemies to the Crown, and most arrant traitors to the land. Persons

* Rymeri Fœders, tom. ix., pp. 119, 120.

LORD COBHAM.

accused of "Wycliffe's learning" were to have no privilege of sanctuary, and, when taken, were to be first hanged as traitors to the King, and then burnt as heretics. Pardon was extended to a few, who probably submitted to the Church.* Many suffered cruel death, many fled into Germany, Bohemia, France, Spain, and Portugal; and many hid themselves in remote and uncultivated parts of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Their flight was in winter; a circumstance at which the mass-Priest would, no doubt, be all the better pleased.

There is some indistinct, yet undoubted, account of several persons having been previously burnt in the month of January (1414); and on the 20th of February, Arundel himself was called to answer for his deeds. His death-stroke was sudden. Like Wycliffe, he suffered paralysis, a visitation which should suffice to silence those Papistical writers who mark the affliction of the Reformer as if it were the effect of God's displeasure. But Arundel had missed the pleasure of numbering Lord Cobham with his victims. In a Parliament holden at Westminster, (January 10th, 1414,) that eminent Lollard was charged with a treasonable conspiracy against the King, a charge which careless or hostile historians have copied into their books; but which is utterly at variance with every known fact; and the King gave a commission for the arrest and punishment of him, and the persons alleged to be his accomplices. The fact was, that he had escaped from the Tower, and, like others, had fled into Wales. There he remained for some time in concealment, while persecution raged in England, and some more were put to death. Henry Chichesley, successor of Arundel in the see of Canterbury, hotly prosecuted the work of extirpation, as his Constitutions (A.D. 1416) witness; and multitudes of imprisoned Lollards, with long lists of abjurations and of exiles, attest the continued power of the truth, and the relentless wrath of those who ought to have maintained and taught the truth they laboured to suppress. One effect of their wicked perseverance was the discovery of Lord Cobham. Lord Powis, a Welsh nobleman, who had, for four years, assisted in protecting his peer from persecution, now, attracted by the proclamation of a large reward to whomsoever should present him to the King, either "quick or dead," or else weary of incurring danger on account of a religion he did not enjoy, basely brought his outlawed guest to London, and delivered him, bound, in the House of Lords (December 14th, 1417). In that assembly, the sentences of his excommunication and outlawry were again read. He heard them in silence, and, after once more entering the Tower-gate as a prisoner, rendering thanks to God that he was counted worthy to suffer for His name's sake, he prepared for the long-expected martyrdom; calmly expecting the day when, to borrow a prediction of his own, he should be taken up to heaven, like Elijah, in a fiery chariot. On the day appointed, he was led out of the Tower, with his hands bound behind him, placed on a hurdle, and drawn through London. Yet his countenance betrayed neither fear

* Their names are preserved in a royal writ, De pardonatione pro Lollardis, in Rymar, tom. ix., pp. 129, 130.

nor shame as he was dragged through the mire to St. Giles's Field, where a new gallows was erected for the twofold execution. When taken from the hurdle, he fell on his knees, and devoutly prayed Almighty God to forgive his enemies. Then standing up, he looked around, with an air of conscious integrity, on the multitude who had come to see him hanged as a traitor, and exhorted them at some length to follow the laws of God as written in the Scriptures, and to beware of such teachers as they saw to be contrary to Christ in their conversation and living. Then, in obedience to the letter of the law, he was hanged; but the manner of that hanging was so contrived that he should still be burnt to death as a heretic; for all knew him to be innocent of treason. Suspended by chains, he was swung on the gallows, a fire was kindled under him, and he was roasted in the flames, but heard praising God as long as life lasted.*

Chichesley, not less diligent than his predecessor in uprooting heresy, which yet outgrew his labours, imprisoned (A.D. 1421) Thomas Purvey, author of numerous treatises, "gravely and exactly written," on the chief points of doctrine, discipline, and practices of Romanism; and designated "the Library of Lollards, and Glosser upon Wycliffe." But these manuscript instructions found their way into the chamber of the Priest, and to the hearths of lewd men,† despite the searchings of inquisitors. William Tailor, a Priest, after long endeavouring to expound his views in such a manner as might not violently shock the zealots, and after having suffered various acts of discipline, was drawn into controversy; and, being too honest to deny what he believed to be true, was degraded and then burnt (A.D. 1423). Some of the opinions for which he suffered, were precisely those which the Council of Trent afterwards adopted, in order to palliate the absurdity of their system; such, for example, as the distinction between the higher worship (latria) which he, as they, denied to images, and the inferior veneration (dulia) which he allowed, and they have pretended to be that alone which is rendered to the "mawmets" in their temples. The Bishop of Norwich was second to none in fanaticism that would persecute, even unto death. The records of that diocese during seven years abound in accounts of abjurations, and lists of penitents. There, as elsewhere, the practice seems to have been to imprison, fine, and subject to humiliating public penances, the more active Lollards; and now and then to burn one for the sake of maintaining authority, and spreading terror. William White, a Priest, gave up his benefice, married, preached the Gospel, read good books to the people, and added others by his own pen. He was therefore made an example of, being burnt at Norwich, to the horror and "grief of all the good men of Norfolk" (A.D. 1428). About the same time, Father Abraham, of Colchester, and John Waddon, a Priest, were consumed to ashes. Indeed, several other names might be recorded; but little is known of the circumstances of their martyrdom, and the mere recitation of names would be rather tedious than instructive. But the

* Foxn, Acts and Monuments; Rymeri Fader, tom. ix., pp. 119, 129, 193.

† Laymen were so called in common language.

ARROGANCE OF PRIESTS.

martyrs were often honoured by the multitude, who had revered them for their piety, and beheld their constancy with admiration; and when the Bishop of London had caused a poor Priest, Richard Wiche, to be burned on Tower-Hill, people crowded to the place of martyrdom, raised on it a mound of stones surmounted by a cross, offered up prayers around it, as if the spot had been consecrated by the translation of a saint to glory, and the excitement became so great, and the mortification of the Clergy so profound, that they applied to the King for help, and obtained a writ from His Majesty to the Sheriffs of London and Middlesex, and not to them only, but, because persons from all parts of the country began to join the crowds on Tower-Hill, to all the Sheriffs of England, setting forth the royal desire to abolish idolatry, charging the Londoners with having been guilty of that sin in worshipping the ashes of Richard Wiche; "whereas it is not lawful to worship any manner of person, be he ever so holy, before he is canonized by the Bishop of Rome;" and prohibiting all persons from resorting thither, under pain of being taken and punished as favourers of heretics. Even a word spoken in favour of Richard Wiche, a syllable of censure on the Prelate who sent him to the stake, was to be thus avenged * (A.D. 1440).

The power and arrogance of the Clergy were now raised to the highest pitch. The Bishop of Winchester, made Cardinal against the will of Henry V., and still holding that bishopric contrary to the common law of the realm, and in contempt of the statute præmunire facias, had managed, together with the Archbishop of York, to get the government of the infant King Henry VI., after the death of his father, so that England was, for a time, prostrate under ecclesiastical predominance. "The good Duke Humphrey," brother of the deceased King, endeavoured to resist the usurpation and fraudulent practices of the Cardinal; but without success. Accused of heresy, his Duchess was compelled to undergo a shameful penance; and the citizens of London passively saw the aunt of their Sovereign walk through Cheapside thrice as a penitent, carrying a taper in her hand, and then separated from her royal husband, outlawed, and placed in the custody of an appointed keeper in the Isle of Man (A.D. 1440). As for the Duke of Gloucester himself, he was found murdered in his bed, (A.D. 1447,) and his memory was tainted with the reproach of heresy. The tale of Reynold Peacock, Bishop of Chichester, could not be very briefly told; but the summary is, that he entertained some correct views of discipline and doctrine, and desired that the Church in England should be released from some of the bonds imposed thereon by the Bishop of Rome; and that for this offence he was charged with heresy, cited to appear before the Archbishop of Canterbury, and compelled to make a public retractation of his opinions. Notwithstanding this humiliation, he was confined as a prisoner to his house, thence taken to a monastery, and never heard of more. And so onward, to the time of the Reformation, persons were commonly burned for heresy, without respect to age or sex, or perished in dungeons. There even seemed to be a thirst for noble

* Foxe, Acts and Monuments.

4 1 blood, a pride in outraging the last notions of humanity, an abject submission of all ranks to the terrors of the priesthood. Had it not been so, Henry VII. and the nobles of England would not have allowed Joan Boughton, mother of the Lady Young, an aged and holy woman, for she was upwards of eighty, to have been dragged into Smithfield, and openly burnt to death. Public opinion had no utterance in those days. The Commons, indeed, revered her as a saint. A trembling multitude heard her declare that she feared not the fire, that God loved her, and that angels would attend her spirit into heaven. They wept silently around the stake; treasured in their memory her last prayer, while burning, that God would take her soul into his holy hands; and some of them came, in the dead of the night, to steal away her ashes from the embers (A.D. 1496). Confessions and martyrdoms are no longer described by chroniclers as rare events. A sentence, or even a name, suffices for the record, and the coldness of an incidental note shows that the obduracy of the Priest, and the degradation of England, had become complete; while, on the other hand, the frequency of public penances, public burnings, or secret deaths, confirms the statement of later historians, that the doctrines of Wycliffe continued to spread and to deepen, and serves to fill up the series of evidence that the truth of God is immortal, and the kingdom of Christ a kingdom that cannot be moved.

At this point of our history, the witnesses are nearly put to silence; and almost throughout Europe the priesthood seem to domineer over Sovereigns and people; yet the beginnings and the means of Reformation are established. We have marked those beginnings and observed those means latent in infant institutions and in new principles of social and national existence. Beside the thrones and professorial chairs of Christendom, there now stand ready monitors of independence. Hidden in the walls and buried under the floors of our fathers' violated habitations, lie the Lollards' books; and in the monastic cells and inquisitorial chambers are laid up, in manuscript, the first elements of a new moral science, a divine literature, that shall soon be taught in schools, debated in Parliaments, and, in a yet higher and holier form, proclaimed from pulpits, and poured from the press. Christendom, nearly lifeless, has fallen under the temporary triumph of a Church making her last grand effort after the undisputed sovereignty of mankind, and utter suppression of the Gospel; but we are only in the chill and darkness that precedes the dawn. The morning star is up; and in a subsequent volume, if the Lord will guide the hand that undertakes to write it, we shall hail its appearance, and humbly emulate the gladness of the sons of God who shouted together for joy while He laid down the foundations of a new and beauteous world to be the object of a Redeemer's love.

END OF VOLUME II.

LONDON: PRINTED BY JAMES NICHOLS, HOXTON-SQUARE.

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