TUNG by shame for the ferocious cruelty of their ancestors, STUNG and dismayed by the horrors of the period of religious contention that opened with William Sawtre's fiery death and closed with the lurid flames and agonizing cries of the Marian persecution, Englishmen of the present generation are wont to seek relief, from the anguish of their pity for the victims and their disgust at the instigators of the futile barbarities, in the inadequate consolations of two somewhat contradictory theories. Whilst the one of these theories strives to soften the repulsive features of the ghastly retrospect by urging that human flesh was less sensitive of pain four centuries since than now, the other offers the comfort of a flattering assurance that the progressive civilization of these later generations has wrought such changes in the moral nature of our race as render it incapable of reviving the horrors of English martyrology. By those who maintain the former of these comfortable theories it is urged that, in the absence of the luxury and enervating refinements which distinguish modern society from feudal life, our ancestors of the fifteenth century enjoyed a degree of physical hardihood and a comparative insensibility to inflictions of bodily suffering, which preserved them, whilst under the hands of their torturers, from such excruciating agonies as their more delicate and fragile descendants would endure from the punishments of the whip, the rack, and the stake. Flogging that would result in death to a Victorian Englishman was nothing worse than a rather disagreeable stimulant to the nervous system of a Marian yeoman. The Lollard of Henry the Fourth's reign experienced, no doubt, a transient discomfort from the discipline which stretched his body with cords and rollers till his principal joints were dislocated, and his consciousness of the temporary inconvenience terminated in a deathlike swoon; but it would be most absurd to suppose that men, who, from pure delight in giving and tasting pain, used to beat each other once a-week with thick quarter-staves, regarded the muscular disarrangements of the rack with more dread and repugnance than qualify the feelings with which a schoolboy of to-day anticipates a smart caning. Whilst they found familiar pastime in the infliction and endurance of such moderate degrees of pain as they were capable of causing and feeling, the men of the Feudal epoch are also said to have held human life as a thing of scarcely greater moment than human suffering. Shedding each other's blood in trivial quarrels, they would often exchange fatal blows in perfect good-fellowshipfriend killing friend for the sake of the pure excitement of danger, and because they could find no more congenial occupation for their leisure time and surplus energy. Cruelty and tenderness are such variable and relative qualities that the cruelty of one state of society may differ little from the tenderness of another; and it is clear that a generation which found diversion in bloodshed must have had a standard of cruelty altogether different from any scale by which the moral sense of a gentler and softer age estimates the humanity of contemporary actors. It would therefore, urges the theory, be most unjust to attribute to the Feudal Churchmen who endeavoured to suppress Lollardy by the branding iron, the scourge, and the fire, the same degree of ferocious vindictiveness that it would be fair to impute to any rulers who should attempt to extirpate dangerous opinions by the same revolting means at the present time, when the general sentiment of mankind is so averse to penal inflictions of bodily torture that we have abolished the lash from the ordinary discipline of our army and are reluctant to use it for the correction of the most odious criminals, and when our repugnance to capital punishments makes us slow to terminate by force the lives of the most heinous offenders against human and Divine law. It would be difficult to decide how far ascertained facts are in accordance with the hypothesis that the average Englishman of the feudal period was less sensible of bodily pain than the average Englishman of our more luxurious time; but against those who use the hypothesis to palliate the atrocities of the old religious persecutors, it may be fairly urged that an immediate object of those angry zealots was the infliction of intense agony on their wretched victims, and that nothing which is known of their temper justifies the opinion that they would have been less sparing in their exhibitions of physical torture, had the heretics been more susceptible of corporeal anguish. Nor is it by any means clear that pain and death were more lightly regarded in medieval society than they are in the nineteenth century, when warfare, without being less fashionable, is far more productive of death and bodily suffering than it was in the days of the Plantagenets and Tudors, and when no kinds of inventive labour are more promptly and liberally rewarded than those exertions of human ingenuity from which we derive new contrivances for rendering martial conflict more destructive of life, and more fruitful of bodily torment. That we have purged our penal system of the atrocious provisions which formerly disfigured our criminal code, is perhaps a fact more creditable to our intelligence than our clemency; for, though the merciful amendments of our criminal law may from one point of view be regarded as concessions to the humane instincts of our nature, and though the workers of those amendments were chiefly actuated by compassion for the victims of cruel legislation, it may be questioned whether the beneficent labours of Buxton and Romilly were more indebted for their success to the growing abhorrence for barbarous punishments, than to the discovery that mental torture was in fact a sharper punishment than bodily discomfort, however acute to the sufferer, and however revolting to spectators, that there were privations which malefactors regarded with stronger dread than deprivation of existence. Far from concurring with those who think that death and coporeal pain were less repugnant to human sensibility in the days of Lollardy than in our own time, I believe that recent philosophy, whilst mitigating the horrors of death, has inspired the majority of and living Englishmen with such an indifference to mere physical torture as their ancestors never enjoyed, and that the present century-lavish of human life for the attainment of even trivial ends, and no less careless of whatever human pain seems requisite for the achievement of its purposes-is remarkable amongst the centuries of English story for the low price that it sets on mere existence, and the unconcernedness with which it purchases the objects of its desires with incalculable sums of bodily suffering and mental anguish. This statement is so directly opposed to current opinion, that it will probably be derided as fanciful; but to those who are disposed to accord respectful attention to paradoxical utterances, an assurance may be given that it is not propounded in thoughtless levity. Yet, further, I would venture to suggest, that inflictions of bodily pain and death are common and popular punishments in proportion as men are apt to regard death with the coward's horror, and to shrink from pain with servile fear; that human legislation does not have recourse to what are ordinarily termed milder punishments until human experience has ascertained that the dread of death and the prospect of corporeal anguish are comparatively inefficacious on the minds of persons disposed to do ill; and that a criminal code more surely reflects the fears of the persons whom it is designed to terrify, than the cruelty or the mercifulness of its framers. That the reformers of our criminal law were impelled by merciful motives, no one is likely to question; but it is no less certain that the milder punishments of our almost bloodless code indicate more precisely the corrections which we most strongly dread, than the penal system of our grandfathers represented the experiences most keenly feared by the generation that expunged its most repulsive provisions. The other of the two theories is so flattering to our selflove, that it costs us a struggle to recognise its untruth; but in spite of the numerous facts which give it a specious appearance of justice, no candid inquirer can do otherwise than admit its fallaciousness, when he has considered separately and attentively each of the three kinds of malevolent passion that simultaneously inflamed the breasts of the persecutors of Lollardy, and has compared the actions of those intolerant zealots with the stern and vindictive measures to which Englishmen, of more than ordinary kindliness, and wanting none of the graces of civilization, sometimes have recourse at the instigation of only one of those three disturbing influences. To estimate rightly the moral condition of the persecutors, who committed the fifteenth-century Lollards to agonizing deaths, and of the later enemies of religious reform, who exulted at the glare of the flames that reduced Latimer's aged body to a little pile of ashes, the reader must remember that the hatred, which animated the enemies of Lollardy against the objects of their implacable wrath, comprised the rancour of domestic feud, the blind vehemence of political contention, and the rage of fanaticism. To the disdainful antagonism which men of refinement and fairly amiable dispositions are wont to exhibit in this age of charity and forbearance to those who offend their taste by actions and sentiments that violate no higher laws than the conventional rules of civil behaviour and polite breeding, the reader must add the fierce anger which we are still capable of cherishing for political opponents, and the resentful abhorrence that pious natures cherish for the habitual contemners of the objects of their religious veneration; and when he has thus combined the consuming heats and poisonous agitations of these different animosities, he will still fail to realize all the sources of tempestuous emotion, and all the incitements to cruelty, that deprived the old persecutor of reason and pity— filling his brain with madness and his heart with fire. - How completely men of our time and race- -men of gentle nurture and chivalrous generosity, reared from childhood under the softening influences of the Christian faith, and disposed no less by constitutional goodness than by noble training to shape their course with conscientious regard to sacred principlescan divest themselves of all the restraints which religion imposes on human passion, and through fatal misconceptions of their duty to their fellow-creatures can stifle pity in their breasts, and surrender themselves to the brutalising phrensy of Pagan vindictiveness, we have had in recent times several no less painful than instructive illustrations; and if we would understand how our forefathers--many of them, like Sir Thomas More, marvels of domestic gentleness and fireside amiability, so tender of heart, that they shrank from the thought of subject |