still both the all but universal belief of the people, says Fox, "a disciple of Wyckliffe, whom she acand the yet unmodified religion of the law. As counted for a saint, and held so fast and firmly often happens with institutions in the last stage, eight of his ten opinions, that all the doctors of of their existence, the power and glory of the London could not turn her from one of them." Church of Rome, in England, seemed to blaze She was burned in Smithfield on the 28th of out afresh immediately before its downfall. It April.' Mrs. Boughton was mother to the Lady is enough to remark that this was the age of Young, who was also suspected of holding the Wolsey, the most gorgeous and puissant prelate same opinions, and who afterwards suffered the that had arisen since Becket. All the highest same death. In the course of the next two or and most influential offices of the state were still, three years a few old men and priests went with for the most part, in the hands of churchmen, like heroism to the stake; but in general the perwho, while they monopolized, of course, the man- sons charged with heresy at this time, when there agement of ecclesiastical affairs, were generally was as yet little general excitement to animate both the ministers of the crown at home, and its and sustain them, shrunk from that dreadful ambassadors and most trusted agents abroad. death on a mere view of it, and purchased, by a This preference, which they had formerly de- recantation, the privilege of satisfying the law manded as their right, was now accorded to them by an exposure to the fagots without the fire. on the more reasonable ground of their superior The venerable historian of our martyrs has some qualifications, a ground which the ablest and curious notices of the fashion in which this cerewisest kings-those from whom they would have mony was performed. On other occasions, howexperienced the most determined resistance to ever, the commuted punishment was not entirely their pretensions of a more absolute kind-were formal. In 1506, at the same time that William the readiest to admit. Thus, the politic, circum- Tylsworth was burned in Amersham-his only spect, and acquisitive character of Henry VII. daughter being compelled to set fire to him with made him a favourer both of the church and of her own hands-this daughter, with her husband, religion, without being either really religious or and, according to one account, more than sixty. superstitious. This great king was a distin- persons besides, all bore fagots, and were afterguished upholder of the authority of the laws in wards not only sent from town to town over the ordinary cases. Among his other legal improve- county of Buckingham to do penance with certain ments, Henry attempted at one time "to pare a badges affixed to them, but were several of them little," as Bacon expresses it, "the privilege of burned in the cheek, and otherwise severely clergy, ordaining that clerks convict should be treated. "Divers of them," says Fox, "were enburned in the hand, both because they might joined to bear and wear fagots at Lincoln the taste of some corporal punishment, and that they space of seven years, some at one time, some at might carry a brand of infamy." But all his another."3 known favour for, and patronage of the church, did not prevent this innovation from being denounced as a daring infringement of the rights of the ecclesiastical order. The very circumstances of the time that in reality and in their ultimate result tended to bring down the ancient church, had the effect for the present of raising it to greater authority and seeming honour. The unaccustomed murmurs of irreverence and opposition with which it was assailed afforded a pretext for suffering it to exercise its recognized rights with a high hand, and even for endowing it with some new powers:-the laws against heresy, for instance, were now stretched to a degree of severity never before known, and the church added to its ancient assumptions that of holding men's lives in its hands, and actually putting to death those of whose opinions it disapproved. These fires of martyrdom were more easily lighted than quenched. It was in 1494, the ninth year of Henry VII., that the first English female martyr suffered. This was a widow named Joan Boughton, a woman of above eighty years of age. "She was," Among others who suffered in this reign was one Laurence Ghest, "who was burned in Salisbury for the matter of the sacrament. He was of a comely and tall personage, and otherwise, as appeareth, not unfriended, for the which the bishop and the close (that is, the canons), were the more loath to burn him, but kept him in prison the space of two years. This Laurence had a wife and seven children." Some notion of the peculiar opinions which were commonly held by the English heretics of this age may be gathered from the charges against some of those apprehended and examined by John Arundel, Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, from 1496 to 1502, as recorded in the registers of that diocese. They were for the most part the same with the leading doctrines soon after proclaimed by Luther and the other Protestant Reformers, embracing a denial of the merit of good works, of the warrantableness of the worship of images, of the efficacy of penance and pilgrimage, of the duty of praving to the saints or the Virgin, Fox, Acts and Monuments, p. 671 (edition of 1570). 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. p. 710. 4 Ibid. p. 711. of the claims of the pope as successor of St. Peter, of purgatory, and of the transformation of the bread and wine in the sacrament. In some cases, however, we find, as might be expected, the contempt for the old belief breaking out with a curious acerbity or irreverence of expression in the enunciation of the new. There were of course varieties of faith, or want of faith, among the dissenters from the church; some went farther than others; and some seem to have stopped at the rejection of image-worship, without advancing so far as to question the worshipping of the Virgin. The internal history of the established church in the period immediately preceding the downfall of the ancient religion is marked by few events. The successive Archbishops of Canterbury during the reign of Henry VII. were, Cardinal Bourchier, whose long primacy of thirty-two years terminated in 1486; John Morton, the active and useful friend of Henry before he came to the crown, who was also invested with a cardinal's hat, and who survived till 1502; Henry Deane, who was archbishop only for a few months; and, lastly, William Warham, whose translation from London appears not to have taken place till towards the close of the year 1504, more than two years after the death of Deane.' The admonitory murmur of the coming storm of reformation now made itself heard, among other ways, in the louder popular outcry that arose against the dissolute lives of many of the clergy; and the church authorities were led to make some efforts both to put down the outcry and to correct the evil. At a synod or council of the province of Canterbury, held in St. Paul's, in February, 1487, complaints having been made that the preachers of the order of St. John of Jerusalem were accustomed, in their sermons at Paul's Cross, to inveigh against their secular brethren in the hearing of the laity-who, it was affirmed, all hated the clergy, and delighted to hear their vices exposed-the prior of St. John was, on the one hand, directed to prevent this great abuse for the future, and, on the other, a severe reprimand was administered to certain of the London clergy, who were accused of not only spending their whole time in taverns and alehouses, but even imitating the laity in their dress, and allowing their hair to grow long, so as to conceal their tonsure. The censure of the convocation was followed by a pastoral letter of the primate, in which the clergy were solemnly charged not to wear liripoops, or hoods, of silk, nor gowns open in front, nor embroidered girdles, nor daggers, and to keep their hair always so short that everybody might see their ears. A few words were added in recom 1 Nicholas, Synopsis of Peerage, p. 820. mendation of residence; but the burden of the exhortation was spent upon these matters of mere show and profession. Considerable alarm, however, was also excited at this time in the heads of the church by either the actual increase of im morality among the clergy, or the sharper eyes and more earnest inquisition with which the people now began to look into what had long existed. The monks, or regular clergy, were to the full as much as their secular brethren, the parish priests, the objects of this popular outcry. A bull was issued by Pope Innocent VIII in 1490, in which, after setting forth-apparently without any doubt of its truth-the information he had receiv ed respecting the reprobate lives led by all the English monastic orders, he directed Archbishop Morton to admonish the heads of all the convents in his province to reform themselves and those under them, and gave him authority, if his admonitions were neglected, to proceed to more decided measures. In consequence of the Papal edict Morton appears to have sent letters to the superiors of all the religious houses in his province, of which one that has been preserved, addressed to the abbot of St. Alban's, describes the monks of that abbey as notoriously guilty, not only of libertinism in all its forms, but of almost every other kind of enormity.' PRIEST WEARING LIRIPOOP AND There is no reason to suppose that either Papal or episcopal admonitions produced any amendment of this state of things during the reign of Henry VII. The date of the accession of Henry VIII. was marked in the history of the church by the termination of a fierce controversy, which had long raged between two great bodies of ecclesiastics on a very delicate point of doctrine. The Franciscans, or Gray Friars, maintained that the Virgin Mary had been conceived and born wholly without original sin; their rivals, the Dominicans, or Black Friars, on the contrary, held that she had been conceived in the same manner with every other child of Adam, although 3 The hood and liripoop (the long tail or tippet of the hood! was worn by the laity of both sexes as well as by the clergy The above figure, from the Royal MSS. 14. E. 4, represents the ordinary walking dress of a monk about the end of the fifteenth century; and shows, besides the liripoop, the purse suspended at the girdle, and the inkhorn and penner for holding writing materials. 4 Wilkins, Concilia. they admitted that while still in her mother's | just law," says Burnet, "yet, to make it pass womb she had been sanctified and cleansed from through the House of Lords, they added two all original sin, in the same manner as, they said, provisions to it; the one, for excepting all such John the Baptist and certain other privileged as were within the holy orders of bishop, priest, persons had been. "This frivolous question," or deacon; the other, that the act should only says old Fox, "kindling and gendering betwixt be in force till the next parliament. With these these two sects of friars, brast out in such a flame provisoes it was unanimously assented to by the of parts and sides taking, that it occupied the lords on the 26th of January, 1513, and being heads and wits, schools and universities, almost agreed to by the commons, the royal assent made through the whole church, some holding one part it a law; pursuant to which many murderers and with Scotus, some the other part with Thomas felons were denied their clergy, and the law Aquinas." But besides these scandalous rival- passed on them, to the great satisfaction of the ries and quarrels among themselves, the clergy whole nation." Neither the general popularity were imprudent or unfortunate enough about of the new statute, however, nor its manifest this time to get involved in some other contests, equity, sufficed to mitigate the aversion with both with the civil authorities and with public which it was regarded by the clergy; they saw opinion and the spirit of the age, out of which in it only an encroachment upon the privileges they did not come without still further damage of holy church, to which no consideration should to their reputations and their interests. Ever induce them to submit. It was an injury and since the abrogation of the Constitutions of Cla- an insult neither to be endured nor forgiven. rendon in the latter part of the reign of Henry II., Accordingly, not satisfied with preventing the the old clerical claim of immunity from the juris- renewal of the act at the expiration of the short diction of the civil courts had been considered as term to which their influence had caused it in settled in favour of ecclesiastical persons. But the first instance to be limited, they set themthis was deservedly the subject of great and selves to fix such a mark of reprobation upon it universal complaint; "for," as Burnet remarks, as should, they hoped, put down any similar at"it was ordinary for persons, after the greatest tempt for ever after. crimes, to get into orders; and then not only what was past must be forgiven them, but they were not to be questioned for any crime after holy orders given till they were first degraded; and, till that was done, they were the bishop's prisoners." In fact, the difficulties which were thus interposed in the way of the conviction and punishment of ecclesiastical persons were such as to enable them, to a great extent, to commit crimes of all sorts, without incurring the risk of any penalty at all adequate to the offence. In 1487, the fourth year of Henry VII., a statute had been passed enacting that, "whereas upon trust of the privilege of the church, divers persons lettered have been the more bold to commit murder, rape, robbery, theft, and all other mischievous deeds, because they have been continually admitted to the benefit of the clergy as oft as they did offend in any of the premises "-a startling enough exposition, it must be admitted, of the state to which things had been broughtfor the future, to persons not actually in holy orders, clergy should be allowed but once, and those convicted of murder should be marked with an M upon the brawn of the left thumb, and those convicted of any other felony with a T. In this state the law remained till the fourth year of Henry VIII., when a bill was brought into parliament, carrying out the principle of the late act so far as to ordain that the benefit of clergy should be wholly denied to all murderers and robbers. "But though this seemed a very In the year 1514, a citizen of London, named Richard Hunne, a merchant tailor, fell into a dispute with the parson of a country parish in Middlesex, about a gift of a bearing-sheet, which the clergyman demanded as a mortuary, in consequence of an infant child of Hunne's having died in his parish, where it had been sent to be nursed. Hunne made some objection to the legality of the demand; but it is probable that he was secretly inclined to the new doctrines, and that this was the true cause of his refusal. Being sued in the spiritual court by the parson, he took out a writ of premunire against his pursuer for bringing the king's subjects before a foreign jurisdiction, the spiritual court sitting under the authority of the pope's legate. This daring procedure of the London citizen threw the clergy into a fury, and, as the most effectual way of crushing him, recourse was had to the terrible charge of heresy, upon which Hunne was apprehended and consigned to close imprisonment in the Lollards' Tower at St. Paul's. After a short time, being brought before Fitzjames, Bishop of London, he was there interiogated respecting certain articles alleged against him, which imputed to him, in substance, that he had denied the obligation of paying tithes that he had read and spoken generally against bishops and priests, and in favour of heretics-and, lastly, that he had "in his keeping divers English books prohibited and damned by the law, as the Apocalypse in English. Epistles and Gospels in English, had asserted the claims of the civil power in a debate before the king, and put him upon his defence for what he had said on that occasion; and an appeal was made to the conscience of Henry, that he would not interpose to shield the delinquent from justice, as he regarded his coronation oath, and would himself escape the cen Wyckliffe's damnable works, and other books containing infinite errors, in the which he hath been long time accustomed to read, teach, and study daily." It appears that Hunne was frightened into a qualified admission of the truth of these charges; he confessed that although he had not said exactly what was asserted, yet he had "unadvisedly spoken words somewhat sound-sures of holy church. Henry's headstrong and ing to the same; for the which," he added, "I am sorry, and ask God mercy, and submit me unto my lord's charitable and favourable correction." He ought upon this, according to the usual course, to have been enjoined penance, and set at liberty; but, as he still persisted in his suit against the parson, he was the same day sent back to his prison, where, two days after, | namely, on the 4th of December, he was found suspended from a hook in the ceiling, and dead. The persons in charge of the prison gave out that he had hanged himself; but a coroner's inquest came to a different conclusion. According to the account in Burnet, the jury "did acquit the dead body, and laid the murder on the officers that had the charge of that prison; and, by other proofs, they found the bishop's sumner and the bell-ringer guilty of it. The excited feelings and strong prejudices of the coroner's jury had perhaps as much share as the weight of circumstantial evidence in winning them to the belief of this not very probable story. While the inquest was still going on, the Bishop of London and his clergy began a new process of heresy against Hunne's dead body. The new charges alleged against Hunne were comprised in thirteen arti- | cles, the matter of which was collected from the prologue or preface by Wyckliffe to the English Bible that had been found in his possession. He, or rather his dead body, was condemned of heresy by sentence of the Bishop of London, assisted by the Bishops of Durham and Lincoln, and by many doctors of divinity and the canon law; and the senseless carcass was actually, on the 20th of December, committed to the flames in Smithfield. This piece of barbarity, however, shocked instead of overawing the public sentiment. The affair now came before the parliament, and a bill, which had originated in the commons, was passed, restoring to Hunne's children the goods of their father, which had been forfeited by his conviction. This, however, did not put an end to the contest. When the Bishop of London's chancellor and sumner had been charged, on the finding of the coroner's jury, as both principals in the murder, the convocation, in the hope probably of drawing off attention to another part of the case, called before them Dr. Standish, who 1 Fox, p. 737. 2 Or summoner, the officer employed to cite parties before the ecclesiastical courts, more commonly called the apparitor. despotic character had scarcely yet begun to develope itself; his pride as a true son of the church had received no check from coming into collision with any of his other selfish and overmastering passions: when the convocation, therefore, assailed him in this manner on the one hand, and the parliament, on the other, likewise addressed him “to maintain the temporal jurisdiction, according to his coronation oath, and to protect Standish from the malice of his enemies," he was thrown into great perplexity. So, to free his conscience, he commanded all the judges, and the members both of his temporal and his spiritual councils, together with certain persons from both houses of parliament, to meet at Blackfriars, and to hear the matter argued. This was done accordingly; and the discussion was terminated by the unanimous declaration of the judges, that all those of the convocation who had awarded the citation against Standish had made themselves liable to a premunire. Soon after, the whole body of the lords spiritual and temporal, with all the judges and the king's council, and many members also of the House of Commons, having been called before the king at Baynard's Castle. Cardinal Wolsey, in the name of the clergy, humbly begged that the matter should be referred to the final decision of the pope at Rome. To this request, however, Henry made answer, with much spirit," By the permission and ordinance of God, we are King of England; and the Kings of England in times past had never any superior but God only. Therefore, know you well that we will maintain the right of our crown, and of our temporal jurisdiction, as well in this as in all other points, in as ample a manner as any of our progenitors have done before our time." The renewed solicitations of the Archbishop of Canterbury, that the matter might at least be respited till a communication could be had with the court of Rome, had no effect in moving the king from his resolution; and Dr. Horsey, the Bishop of London's chancellor, against whom warrants were out, on the finding of the inquest, for his trial as one of the murderers of Hunne, seemed to be left to his fate. At this point, however, the clergy, or perhaps both parties, saw fit to make advances towards an accommodation: it was agreed that Horsey should surrender to take his trial; that he should not stand upon his benefit of clergy, but plead not guilty: and that, satisfied with this concession, the attorney-general should admit the plea, and the prisoner be discharged. This form was gone through, and Horsey immediately left London, where, it is said, he never again showed his face. Dr. Standish, however, was also, by the king's command, dismissed from his place in the court of convocation, so that the issue of the business by no means went altogether against the clergy. But, besides the augmented popular odium to which they were exposed, from the strong suspicion which was entertained that Hunne had been murdered, a heavy blow had been undoubtedly dealt at their favourite pretension of exemption from the jurisdiction of the civil courts in criminal cases. In the unsettled state of men's minds, at this time, upon the subject of religion, the part taken by any king, and especially by a king of Henry's temper, could not fail to act with powerful effect either in steadying for a space the tremulous mass of the popular thought and feeling, or in swaying it in the direction of his own passions and convictions. Yet the planet that so far ruled the tides of this great moral ocean was for many years undoubtedly influenced in its own movements by another more lordly spirit, that drew it along, perhaps without suffering it to feel its bondage, but not on that account with less potent control. For nearly the whole of the first half of Henry's reign the real King of England was his minister Wolsey, a man whose greatness was linked to the ascendency of the ancient church. So long as Wolsey's favour lasted, his royal master was wholly in his hands. With one at the head of affairs personally interested to so deep an extent in its support, the church was secure from any attack-from any alidgment of its wealth or power, by the king or the government. Yet even the greatness of Wolsey, while it thus threw a temporary protection over the church, perhaps contributed also to hasten its downfall. The ruin of this magnificent ecclesiastic himself was in part brought about by the arrogance and rapacity to which he gave way in the giddiness of his towering fortunes. But if by his oppressive proceedings he made all men his enemies, and when the support of the royal favour was withdrawn, left himself without either any foundation on which to stand, or friendly arm to break his fall, we may be satisfied that so odious an exhibition of priestly insolence could not but also have its effect in widening the general alienation from the whole order to which he belonged. The Reformation was very far from being completed under Henry VIII.—indeed, the English church, as he left it, was scarcely reformed at all except in regard to a few points of its external or political constitution-but still the work, in being merely begun, was already more than half finished. Henry, in having set as it were the wheel of change in motion, is justly esteemed the true author of the whole mighty result of that part of it which he resisted or did not contemplate at all, as well as of that which he urged on and actually saw realized. The Reformation in England was his doing, infinitely more than that of any other person who in any way took part in the work-of his successors Edward and Elizabeth, for instance, who built upon the ground that he had cleared and the foundation that he had laid—or even of such men as Wyckliffe, who helped, by their preachings and writings, to draw men away from the old church; or as Cranmer and his follow-labourers, who, by the like exertions, endeavoured to bring them over and attach them to the new. Yet in all that Henry did, and all that he would not do, in the matter of religion, throughout his reign, it is curious to observe how he was acted upon by the changing circumstances of his own personal position-how the despot, so potent alike to destroy, and, for the moment at least, to preserve from destruction, was driven along the whole of his furious and contradictory course by the pettiest of private interests, vanities, and passions. The history of the English Reformation is the history of this king's fits of temper; of his likings and dislikings; of the flatteries addressed to him from one quarter, and the provocations he received from another; of his pecuniary difficulties; of his amours, jealousies, and suspicions; of the swellings and ebbings of his pedantry and self-conceit; of the very fluctuations of his bodily distempers and sores. Eight years after Henry came to the throne the first movement was made, unconsciously, by Martin Luther, in that great rebellion against the ancient church which has made his name immortal. It does not appear that Luther, at the commencement of his career, had any acquaintance with the writings of Wyckliffe, Huss, Jerome of Prague, and the other remarkable men by whom the Roman church had been assailed in the two preceding centuries; indeed, at this stage he would have felt little sympathy with the greater part of those writings, for he was as yet a good Catholic, and had not for a moment doubted either the authority of the pope or any of the commonly received doctrines of the church. He was a believer in the real presence, in purgatory, in the efficacy of penances, of pilgrimages, of prayers for the dead, of prayers to the saints, in the warrantableness of the adoration of the Virgin, of the crucifix, and of images, in the virtue of relics, in the authority of tradition, in the duty of auricular confession, and in all those other dogmas of the ancient faith which at a later |