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THE POPE'S LETTERS TO ENGLISH DIGNITARIES.

further back and deeper down, and get at the root of that spirit of rebellion which had actuated England from the days of Edward III., and which had come to a head in the Statutes of Provisors and Præmunire.'

We have seen the primate commanded to go to the Privy Council, and also to Parliament, and demand the repeal of these statutes. Excommunication was to be the penalty of refusal. But the Pope went further. In virtue of his own supremacy he made void these laws. He wrote to the Archbishops of York and Canterbury-for the Pope names York before Canterbury, as if he meant to mortify the latter-commanding them to give no obedience to the Statutes of Provisors and Præmunire-that is, to offer no resistance to English causes being carried for adjudication to the courts of Rome, or to the appointment of foreigners to English livings, and the transport beyond sea of their revenues and declaring that should they themselves, or any others, submit to these laws, they would ipso facto be excommunicated, and denied absolution, except at the point of death and from the Pope himself." About the same time the Pope pronounced a censure upon the archbishop, and it serves to illustrate the jealousy with which the encroachments of the Vatican were watched by the English sovereign and his council, to find the primate complaining to the Pope that he could not be informed of the sentence in the regular way, that he knew it only by report, "for he had not so much as opened the bulls that contained the censure, because he was commanded by the king to bring these instruments, with the seals whole, and lodge them in the paper-office till the Parliament sat."

The Pope did not rest with enjoining the clergy to hold the obnoxious statutes null and void; he took the extraordinary step of writing four letterstwo to the king, one to the Parliament, and another to the Duke of Bedford, then Regent of France

1 It may be viewed, perhaps, as collateral evidence of the reviving power of Christianity in England, that about this time it was enacted that fairs and markets should not be held in cathedrals and churches, save twice in the year (Collier); that no commodities or victuals should be exposed for sale in London on Sabbath, and that artificers and handicraftsmen should not carry home their wares to their employers on the sacred day. "But this ordinance was too good," says the author from whom Holinshed quotes, "for so bad an age, and therefore died within a short time after the magistrate had given it life." (Vol. iii., p. 206.)

2 Collier, vol. i., bk. vii., p. 655. The letter is dated 8th December, the tenth year of his Popedom. Collier supposes that this is a mistake for the eleventh year of Martin's Pontificate, which would make the year 1427. 3 Burnet, Hist. Reform., vol. i., p. 111. Collier, vol. i.,

p. 656.

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urging and commanding them, as they valued the salvation of their souls, to repeal the Act of Præmunire.

The Pope's letter to the Duke of Bedford is a specimen of the spirit that animated the Popedom under Martin V. It is fair to state, however, that the Pope at that moment had received a special provocation which explains so far, if it does not excuse, the heat of his language. His nuncio had been lately imprisoned in England for delivering his briefs and letters. It may be supposed, although the bull does not acknowledge it, that they contained matter prejudicial to the crown. The Pope, in his letter to the Duke of Bedford, appears to strike only at the Act of Præmunire, but he does so with all his might. He calls it "an execrable statute," that was contrary to all reason and religion; that in pursuance of this Act the law of nations and the privilege of ambassadors were violated, and his nuncios much more coarsely used in a Christian country than those of that character among Saracens and Turks; that it was a hideous reproach to the English to fall thus short of infidels in justice and humanity; and that, without speedy reformation, it was to be feared some heavy judgment would be drawn down upon them. He concludes by desiring the Duke of Bedford to use his interest to wipe off the imputation from the Government, to retrieve the honour of the Church, and "chain up the rigour of these persecuting statutes." It is an old trick of Rome to raise the cry of "persecution," and to demand "justice," whenever England has withstood her encroachments, and tried to bind up her hands from meddling with the gold or violating the laws of the nation.

When Parliament assembled, the two archbishops, Canterbury and York, accompanied by several bishops and abbots, presented themselves in the Refectory of the Abbey of Westminster, where the Commons were sitting, and, premising that they intended nothing to the prejudice of the king's prerogative or the integrity of the Constitution, they craved Parliament to satisfy the Pope by repealing the Act of Præmunire. Chicheley had begun to quail before the storm gathering at Rome. Happily the Commons were more jealous of the nation's honour and independence than the hierarchy. Rejecting the archbishops' advice to "serve two masters," they refused to repeal the Act.1

The Pope, notwithstanding that he had been

4 Burnet, Collection of Records, vol. i., p. 100; apud Collier, vol. i., p. 656. In 1438, Charles VII. established the Pragmatic Sanction in his Parliament at Bourges. The Pragmatic Sanction was very much in France what the Act of Præmunire was in England.

baulked in his attempts to bend the Parliament of England to his will, continued his aggressions upon the privileges of the English Church. He sustained

himself its chief bishop, and conducted himself as if the Act of Præmunire did not exist. Paying no respect to the right of the chapters to elect, and the power of the king to grant his congé d'élire, he issued his provisors appointing to vacant livings, not on the ground of piety or learning, but of riches and interest. The highest price in the market of Rome commanded the benefice. Pope Martin V., on the termination of the Council of Constance, promoted not less than fourteen persons to various bishoprics in the province of Canterbury alone. The Pope empowered his favourites to hold sees in commendam that is, to draw their temporalities, while another discharged or professed to discharge the duty. Pope Eugene (1438) gave the bishopric of Ely in commendam to the Archbishop of Rouen, and after some resistance this Frenchman was

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allowed to enjoy the revenues. He ventured on other stretches of his supremacy in the matter of pluralities, of non-residence, and of exemptions in favour of minors, as the holders of ecclesiastical livings. We find the Pope, further, issuing bulls empowering his nuncios to impose taxes upon the elergy, and collect money. We trace, in short, in the ecclesiastical annals of the time, a steady and persistent effort on the one side to encroach, and a tolerably steady and continuous effort on the other to repel. The Ven. Henry Edward Manning, Archdeacon of Chichester, with strict historical truth, says: "If any man will look down along the line of early English history, he will see a standing contest between the rulers of this land and the Bishops of Rome. The Crown and Church of England with a steady opposition resisted the entrance and encroachment of the secularised power of the Pope in England." * From the days of King John the shadow of the Vatican had begun to go back on England; it was still shortening in the fifteenth century, and its lessening line gave promise of a time, for the advent of which the good Lord Cobham had expressed an ardent wish, when that ominous penumbra, terminating at Calais, would no longer be projected across the sea to the English shore.

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While the English hierarchy were fighting against the Papal supremacy with the one hand, they were persecuting Lollardism with the other. At the

of Provisors and Præmunire, to defend the canons of the Church, and the constitution of the State, from the utter demolition with which both were threatened by a foreign tyranny, they were enacting edicts for the conviction of Lollards, and planting stakes to burn them. This does not surprise us. It is ever so in the earliest stage of a great reform. The good which has begun to stir in the quiet depths below, sends the evil to the surface in quickened activity. Hence such contradictions as that before us. To a casual eye, matters appear to be getting worse; whereas the very effervescence and violence of the old powers is a sign that the new are not far off, and that a reformation has already set in. The Jews have a proverb to this effect" When the tale of bricks is doubled, then Moses will come," which saying, however, if it were more exactly to express the truth of the fact and the law of the Divine working, should run— The tale of bricks has been doubled, therefore Moses is come.

We trace in the England of the fifteenth century two powerful currents, and both are, in a sense, Protestant.

Lollardism, basing itself upon the Word of God and the rights of conscience, was essentially and wholly Protestant. The fight against the Roman supremacy, basing itself upon the canons of the Church and the laws of the kingdom, was also so far Protestant. It was a protest against a power that was lifting its seat above all law, and crushing every right. And what, we ask, engendered this spirit of opposition? Little did the party who were fighting against the supremacy dream whence their movement drew its existence. They would have been ashamed to own it, even if made aware of it. And yet it is true that the very Lollardism which they were seeking to trample out had originated the spirit that was now shown in defence of national independence and against Papal encroachments. The Lollard, or Protestant, or Christian principle --for it matters not by which one of these three names we designate it--had all along through the Dark Ages been present in the bosom of European Christendom, preserving to the conscience some measure of action and power, to the intellect some degree of energy and expansion, and to the soul the desire and the hope of liberty. Ordinarily this principle attested its presence by the piety with which it nourished the heart, and the charity and

very time that they were framing such Acts as those purity with which it enriched the lives of individual

1 Collier, vol. i., bk. vii., p. 666.

2 Created a Cardinal of the Church of Rome, March, 1875.

3 The Unity of the Church, p. 361; Lond., 1842.

men and women, scattered up and down in monasteries, or in cathedral chapters, or in rural vicarages, or in hidden places where history passed them by. At other times it forced itself to the surface, and

TROUBLES OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.

revealed its power on a large scale, as in the Albigensian revival. But the powers of evil were then too strong, to permit of its keeping the footing it had momentarily obtained Beaten down, it again became torpid. But in the great spring-time which came along with Wicliffe it was effectually roused never again to slumber. Taking now its place in the front, it found itself supported by a host of agencies, of which itself was the real although the indirect creator. For it was the Lollard or Christian spirit, never, amid all the barbarism and strifes and superstitions that overlaid Mediæval society, eliminated or purged out, that hailed letters in that early morning, that tasted their sweetness, that prompted to the cultivation of them, that panted for a wider sphere, for a greater liberty, for a purer state of society, and never

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rested till it had achieved it. This despised principle for in the fifteenth century it is seen at the bar of tribunals, in prisons, at stakes, in the guise of a felon-was in truth the originator of these activities; it communicated to them the first impulse. Without it they never would have been night, not morning, would have succeededthe Dark Ages. It was the day-spring to Christendom. And this is certified to us when, tracing the course of the two contemporary currents which we find flowing in England in the century under review, we see them, at a point a little way only in advance of that at which we are now arrived, uniting their streams, and forming one combined movement, known as the English Reformation. But before that point could be reached England had to pass through a terrible conflict.

CHAPTER XI.

INFLUENCE OF THE WARS OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY ON THE PROGRESS OF PROTESTANTISM.

Convulsions of the Fifteenth Century-Fall of Constantinople-Wars in Bohemia-in Italy-in Spain-in Switzerland-Wars of the Papal Schism-Was it Peace or War which the Popes gave to Christendom?-Wars originated by the Popes: the Crusades; the War of Investitures; the Albigensian and Waldensian Crusades; the Wars in Naples, Poland, &c.; the Feuds in Italy; the Hussite Campaigns, &c.--War of the Roses-Traced to the Council of Archbishop Chicheley-Providential End of the Wars of the Fifteenth Century-The Nobility Weakened-The Throne made Powerful-Why?-Hussitism and Lollardism.

THE Day that was hastening towards the world sent terrible tempests before it as the heralds of its approach. Than the middle of the fifteenth century there is, perhaps, no point in modern history that presents a scene of more universal turmoil and calamity, if we except the period that witnessed the fall of the Western Empire. Nowhere is there stability or rest. All around, as far as the eye can reach, appears a sea whose waters, swollen into huge billows by the force of the mighty winds, are assailing the very foundations of the earth. The Christian of that day, when he cast his eyes around on a world rocked and tossed by these great tempests, must have despaired, had he not remembered that there is One who "sits King upon the floods."

The armies of the Turk were gathering round Constantinople, and the Queen of the East was about to bow her head and sink in a tempest of pillage, of rapine, and of slaughter. The land of Bohemia, watered, as with a plenteous rain, once, again, and a third time, with German blood, was

gloomy and silent. Germany had suffered far more than she had inflicted. From the Rhine to the Elbe, from the Black Forest to the Baltic, her nations were lamenting their youth slaughtered in the ill-fated campaigns into which Rome had drawn them against the Hussites. Italy, split up into principalities, was ceaselessly torn by the ambitions and feuds of its petty rulers, and if for a moment the din of these intestine strifes was hushed, it was in presence of some foreign invader whom the beauty of that land had drawn with his armies across the Alps. The magnificent cities of Spain, adorned by the art and enriched by the industry of the Moors, were being emptied of their inhabitants by the crusades of bigotry; the Moslem flag was being torn down on the walls of Grenada, and the race which had converted the Vega around the Moorish capital into a garden, watering it with the icy torrents of the Sierra Nevada, and clothing it with corn-fields and orange-groves, were fleeing across the Straits to form new seats on the northern shores of Africa. The Swiss, who had looked for centuries

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THE ARCHBISHOPS OF YORK AND CANTERBURY BEFORE THE PARLIAMENT AT WESTMINSTER ABBEY.

them; for Austria and France, in their desire to enlarge their territories, had become forgetful that in levelling the Alps of the Swiss, they but effaced the barrier between themselves, which prevented the two nations mingling their blood on fierce and frequent battle-fields.

As if the antipathies of race, and the ambition of princes, were not enough to afflict an unhappy age, another element of contention was imported into the strife by the Papal schism. The rival Popes The rival Popes and their supporters brought their cause into the battle-field, and torrents of Christian blood were shed to determine the question which was the true Vicar. The arguments from piety, from wisdom, from learning were but dust in the balance against the unanswerable argument of the sword, and the

on the other, let us put to history the question, How many are the years of peace, and how many are the years of war, which have come out of the Papal chair, and what proportion does the one bear to the other?

To put, then, a few plain questions touching matters of fact, let us ask, from whom came the crusades which for two centuries continued to waste the treasure and the blood of both Europe and Asia? History answers, from the Popes. Monks preached the crusades, monks enlisted soldiers to fight them, and when the host was marshalled and all was ready, monks placed themselves at their head, and led them onward, their track marked by devastation, to the shores of Syria, where their furious fanaticism exploded in scenes

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