History of England from the fall of Wolsey to the death of Elizabeth Volume II Part 35

[Sidenote: They will not yield, and are crushed.]

The end of the story is very touching and may be told briefly, that I may not have occasion to return to it. Maurice's account is probably exaggerated, and is written in a tone of strong emotion; but it has all the substantial features of truth. The remaining monks were left in the house; and two secular priests were sent to take charge of the establishment, who starved and ill-used them; and were themselves, according to Maurice, sensual and profligate. From time to time they were called before the privy council. Their friends and relatives were ordered to work upon them. No effort either of severity or kindness was spared to induce them to submit; as if their att.i.tude, so long as it was maintained, was felt as a reproach by the government. At last, four were carried down to Westminster Abbey, to hear the Bishop of Durham deliver his famous sermon against the pope; and when this rhetorical inanity had also failed, and as they were thought to confirm one another in their obstinacy, they were dispersed among other houses the temper of which could be depended upon. Some were sent to the north; others to Sion, where a new prior had been appointed, of zealous loyalty; others were left at home to be disciplined by the questionable seculars. But nothing answered. Two found their way into active rebellion, and being concerned in the Pilgrimage of Grace, were hung in chains at York. Ten were sent to Newgate, where nine died miserably of prison fever and filth;[438] the tenth survivor was executed. The remainder, of whom Maurice was one, went through a form of submission, with a mental reservation, and escaped abroad.

[Sidenote: The necessity was a cruel one, but the government are not to be blamed.]

[Sidenote: The king orders the court into mourning.]

So fell the monks of the London Charterhouse, splintered to pieces--for so only could their resistance be overcome--by the iron sceptre and the iron hand which held it. They were, however, alone of their kind. There were many perhaps who wished to resemble them, who would have imitated their example had they dared. But all bent except these. If it had been otherwise, the Reformation would have been impossible, and perhaps it would not have been needed. Their story claims from us that sympathy which is the due of their exalted courage. But we cannot blame the government. Those who know what the condition of the country really was, must feel their inability to suggest, with any tolerable reasonableness, what else could have been done. They may regret so hard a necessity, but they will regret in silence. The king, too, was not without feeling. It was no matter of indifference to him that he found himself driven to such stern courses with his subjects; and as the golden splendour of his manhood was thus sullenly clouding, "he commanded all about his court to poll their heads," in public token of mourning; "and to give them example, he caused his own head to be polled; and from thenceforth his beard to be knotted, and to be no more shaven."[439]

[Sidenote: May 8. Other martyrs who were not Catholics.]

The friars of Charterhouse suffered for the Catholic faith, as Protestants had suffered, and were still to suffer, for a faith fairer than theirs. In this same month of May, in the same year, the English annals contain another entry of no less sad significance. The bishops, as each day they parted further from their old allegiance, and were called in consequence by the hateful name of heretics, were increasingly anxious to prove by evident tokens their zeal for the true faith; and although the late act of heresy had moderated their powers, yet power enough remained to enable them to work their will upon all extreme offenders. Henry, also, it is likely, was not sorry of an opportunity of showing that his justice was even-handed, and that a schism from the papacy was not a lapse into heterodoxy. His mind was moving. Latimer and Shaxton, who three years before had been on trial for their lives, were soon to be upon the bench; and in the late injunctions, the Bible, and not the decrees of the church, had been held up as the canon of truth.

But heresy, though the definition of it was changing, remained a crime; and although the limits of permitted belief were imperceptibly enlarging, to transgress the recognised boundaries was an offence enormous as ever.

[Sidenote: Popular estimate of the Anabaptists.]

If we can conceive the temper with which the reasonable and practical English at present regard the Socialists of the continent, deepened by an intensity of conviction of which these later ages have had but little experience, we can then imagine the light in which the Anabaptists of the Netherlands appeared in the eyes or orthodox Europe. If some opinions, once thought heretical, were regarded with less agitated repugnance, the heresy of these enemies of mankind was patent to the world. On them the laws of the country might take their natural course, and no voice was raised to speak for them.

[Sidenote: May 25.]

[Sidenote: Fourteen of them are executed.]

[Sidenote: They too did not die in vain.]

We find, therefore, in Stow's _Chronicle_, the following: brief entry: "The five and twentieth day of May were, in St. Paul's church, London, examined nineteen men and six women, born in Holland, whose opinions were--first, that in Christ is not two natures, G.o.d and man; secondly, that Christ took neither flesh nor blood of the Virgin Mary; thirdly, that children born of infidels may be saved; fourthly, that baptism of children is of none effect; fifthly, that the sacrament of Christ's body is but bread only; sixthly, that he who after baptism sinneth wittingly, sinneth deadly, and cannot be saved. Fourteen of them were condemned: a man and a woman were burnt at Smithfield. The remaining twelve were scattered among other towns, there to be burnt."[440] The details are gone,[441]--the names are gone. Poor Hollanders they were, and that is all. Scarcely the fact seemed worth the mention, so shortly it is told in a pa.s.sing paragraph. For them no Europe was agitated, no courts were ordered into mourning, no papal hearts trembled with indignation. At their deaths the world looked on complacent, indifferent, or exulting.

Yet here, too, out of twenty-five common men and women were found fourteen who, by no terror of stake or torture, could be tempted to say that they believed what they did not believe. History for them has no word of praise; yet they, too, were not giving their blood in vain.

Their lives might have been as useless as the lives of most of us. In their deaths they a.s.sisted to pay the purchase-money for England's freedom.

[Sidenote: Fisher and More.]

[Sidenote: Fisher's dangerous imprudence.]

[Sidenote: Treatment and conduct of Fisher and of More in the Tower.]

[Sidenote: Cromwell's charges against them.]

After the execution of the Carthusians, it became a question what should be done with the Bishop of Rochester and Sir Thomas More. They had remained for a year in the Tower, undisturbed; and there is no reason to think that they would have been further troubled, except for the fault of one, if not of both. It appeared, however, on the trial of Father Reynolds, that Fisher's imprudence or zeal had tempted him again to meddle with dangerous matters. A correspondence had pa.s.sed between the bishop and the king,[442] on the Act of Supremacy, or on some subject connected with it. The king had taken no public notice of Fisher's words, but he had required a promise that the letter should not be shown to any other person. The unwise old man gave his word, but he did not observe it; he sent copies both of what he had himself written and of the king's answer to the Sion monks,[443] furnis.h.i.+ng them at the same time with a copy of the book which he had written against the divorce, and two other books, written by Abel, the queen's confessor, and the Spanish amba.s.sador. Whether he was discovered to have held any other correspondence, or whether anything of an a.n.a.logous kind was proved against More, I am unable to discover. Both he and Fisher had been treated with greater indulgence than was usual with prisoners.[444]

Their own attendants had waited on them; they were allowed to receive visits from their relatives within the Tower walls, and to correspond with their families and friends.[445] As a matter of course, under such circ.u.mstances, they must have expressed their opinions on the great subject of the day; and those opinions were made known throughout England, and, indeed, throughout Europe. Whether they did more than this, or whether they had only indirectly allowed their influence to be used against the government, must be left to conjecture. But the language of a doc.u.ment under the king's hand speaks of their having given some cause of provocation, of no common kind; and this is confirmed by Cromwell, who was once deeply attached to More. "When they were in strait keeping," say the instructions to the Bishop of Hereford, "having nevertheless the prison at their liberties, they ceased not both to practise an insurrection within the realm, and also to use all the devices to them possible in outward parts, as well to defame and slander his Majesty, and his most virtuous doings and proceedings, as also to procure the impeachment and other destruction of his most royal person."[446] Cromwell speaks also of their having been engaged in definite schemes, the object of which was rebellion;[447] and although we have here the _ex parte_ statement of the government, and although such a charge would have been held to be justified by a proof that they had spoken generally against the Act of Supremacy, it may be allowed to prove that so far they were really guilty; and it is equally certain that for these two men to have spoken against the act was to have lent encouragement to the party of insurrection, the most powerful which that party could have received.

Thus, by another necessity, Fisher and More, at the beginning of May, were called upon for their submission. It was a hard case, for the bishop was sinking into the grave with age and sickness, and More had the highest reputation of any living man. But they had chosen to make themselves conspicuous as confessors for Catholic truth; though prisoners in the Tower, they were in fact the most effectual champions of the papal claims; and if their disobedience had been pa.s.sed over, the statute could have been enforced against no one.

[Sidenote: May 7. A deputation of the council waits upon them in the Tower. They refuse to admit the supremacy.]

The same course was followed as with the Carthusian monks. On the 7th of May a deputation of the council waited on the prisoners in the Tower, for an acknowledgment of the supremacy. They refused: Fisher, after a brief hesitation, peremptorily; More declining to answer, but also giving an indirect denial. After repeated efforts had been made to move them, and made in vain, their own language, as in the preceding trials, furnished material for their indictment; and the law officers of the crown who were to conduct the prosecution were the witnesses under whose evidence they were to be tried. It was a strange proceeding, to be excused only, if excused at all, by the pressure of the times.[448]

[Sidenote: The government delay their trial.]

Either the king or his ministers, however, were slow in making up their minds. With the Carthusians, nine days only were allowed to elapse between the first examination and the final close at Tyburn. The case against More and Fisher was no less clear than against the monks; yet five weeks elapsed and the government still hesitated. Perhaps they were influenced by the high position of the greater offenders,--perhaps there was some fear of the world's opinion, which, though it might be indifferent to the sacrifice of a few obscure ecclesiastics, yet would surely not pa.s.s over lightly the execution of men who stood out with so marked preeminence. The council board was unevenly composed. Cromwell, who divides with the king the responsibility of these prosecutions, had succeeded, not to the authority only of Wolsey, but to the hatred with which the ign.o.ble plebeian was regarded by the patricians who were compelled to stoop before him. Lord Exeter was already looking with a cold eye on the revolution; and Norfolk and Suffolk, though zealous as the king himself for the independence of England, yet had all the instincts of aristocratic conservatism. Even Cromwell may have desired the triumph of winning over converts so distinguished, or may have shrunk from the odium which their deaths would bring upon him. Whatever was the cause of the delay, the privy council, who had been contented with a single examination of Haughton and his companions, struggled with their present difficulty week after week; and it is possible that, except from an extraneous impulse, some mode of escape might have been discovered. But as the sentence of Clement sealed the fate of the Nun of Kent, so the unwisdom of his successor bore similarly fatal fruits.

[Sidenote: The pope names Fisher a cardinal.]

Paul III. had throughout the spring flattered Henry with expressions of sympathy, and had held out hopes of an approaching change of policy. He chose the present unfortunate juncture to expose the vanity of these professions; and as an intimation of the course which he intended to follow, he named the Bishop of Rochester, the one bishop who remained attached to Catherine's cause, a cardinal. Henry had appealed to a council, which the pope had promised to call; and Fisher, of all Englishmen, was chosen as the person whom the pope desired to represent the nation on its a.s.sembly. Even the very conclave at Rome were taken by surprise, and expressed themselves in no measured terms at the impolicy of this most foolish action. Ca.s.salis, aware of the effect which the news would produce in England, hurried to such friends as he possessed in the conclave to protest against the appointment. The king, he said, would inevitably regard it as injurious to the realm and insulting to himself;[449] and it was madness at such a moment to trifle with Henry's displeasure.

[Sidenote: Ca.s.salis protests, and the pope condescends to falsehood.]

The Pope, alarmed at the expressions which he was told that Ca.s.salis had used, sent in haste to urge him, if possible, to allay the storm. He was not ashamed to stoop to falsehood--but falsehood too awkward to deceive even the most willing credulity. He had thought, he said, of nothing but to please Henry. He had been urged by the King of France to seek a reconciliation with England, and in sending a hat to an English bishop he had meant nothing but a compliment. The general council would be held immediately; and it was desirable, according to the const.i.tution of the church, that a cardinal of every nation should be present. He had no especial reason for choosing the Bishop of Rochester, except that he had a high reputation for learning, and he imagined, therefore, that the king would be gratified.[450] "He implored me," Ca.s.salis wrote, "to make his excuses to his Majesty, and to a.s.sure him how deeply he regretted his mistake, especially when I a.s.sured him that the step was of a kind which admitted of no excuse."[451]

[Sidenote: The appointment seals Fisher's fate.]

[Sidenote: June 17. He is tried at Westminster,]

[Sidenote: And is condemned.]

Ca.s.salis himself was afterwards disposed to believe that the appointment was made in thoughtlessness, and that the pope at the moment had really forgotten Fisher's position.[452] But this could gain no credit in England. The news reached the government in the middle of June, and determined the fate of the unfortunate bishop; and with it the fate, also, of his n.o.bler companion. To the king, the pope's conduct appeared a defiance; and as a defiance he accepted it. In vain Fisher declared that he had not sought his ill-timed honours, and would not accept them. Neither his ignorance nor his refusal could avail him. Once more he was called upon to submit, with the intimation, that if he refused he must bear the consequences. His reply remained what it had been; and on the 17th of June he was taken[453] down in a boat to Westminster Hall, where the special commission was sitting. The proceedings at his trial are thus briefly summed up in the official record:--"Thursday after the feast of St. Barnabas, John Fisher was brought to the bar by Sir William Kingston, Constable of the Tower. Pleads not guilty. Venire awarded.

Verdict--guilty. Judgment as usual in cases of treason."[454]

It was a swift sentence, and swiftly to be executed. Five days were allowed him to prepare himself; and the more austere features of the penalty were remitted with some show of pity. He was to die by the axe.

[Sidenote: June 22. He is beheaded on Tower Hill.]

Mercy was not to be hoped for. It does not seem to have been sought. He was past eighty. The earth on the edge of the grave was already crumbling under his feet; and death had little to make it fearful. When the last morning dawned, he dressed himself carefully--as he said, for his marriage-day. The distance to Tower Hill was short. He was able to walk; and he tottered out of the prison-gates, holding in his hand a closed volume of the New Testament. The crowd flocked about him, and he was heard to pray that, as this book had been his best comfort and companion, so in that hour it might give him some special strength, and speak to him as from his Lord. Then opening it at a venture, he read: "This is life eternal, to know Thee, the only true G.o.d, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent." It was the answer to his prayer; and he continued to repeat the words as he was led forward. On the scaffold he chanted the _Te Deum_, and then, after a few prayers, knelt down, and meekly laid his head upon a pillow where neither care nor fear nor sickness would ever vex it more. Many a spectacle of sorrow had been witnessed on that tragic spot, but never one more sad than this; never one more painful to think or speak of. When a nation is in the throes of revolution, wild spirits are abroad in the storm; and poor human nature presses blindly forward with the burden which is laid upon it, tossing aside the obstacles in its path with a recklessness which, in calmer hours, it would fear to contemplate.

Sir Thomas More followed, his fortunes linked in death as in life to those of his friend. He was left to the last--in the hope, perhaps, that the example might produce an effect which persuasion could not. But the example, if that was the object, worked to far other purpose. From More's high-tempered nature, such terrors fell harmless, as from enchanted armour. Death to him was but a pa.s.sing from one country to another; and he had all along antic.i.p.ated that his prison was the antechamber of the scaffold. He had, indeed, taken no pains to avoid it.

The king, according to the unsuspicious evidence of his daughter, Margaret Roper, had not accused him without cause of exciting a spirit of resistance. He had spent his time in encouraging Catholics to persevere to martyrdom for their faith. In his many conversations with herself, he had expressed himself with all freedom, and to others he had doubtless spoken as plainly as to her.[455]

[Sidenote: June 26. A true bill found against Sir Thomas More.]

[Sidenote: July 1. He is brought to the bar.]

[Sidenote: Substance of the indictment.]

On the 7th of May he was examined by the same persons who examined Fisher; and he was interrogated again and again in subsequent interviews. His humour did not allow him to answer questions directly: he played with his catechists, and did not readily furnish them with materials for a charge.

He had corresponded with Fisher in prison, on the conduct which he meant to pursue. Some of these letters had been burnt; but others were in the hands of the government, and would have been sufficient to sustain the prosecution, but they preferred his own words from his own lips. At length sufficient evidence was obtained. On the 26th of June, a true bill was found against him by the Grand Jury of Middles.e.x; and on the 1st of July the High Commission sat again in Westminster Hall, to try the most ill.u.s.trious prisoner who ever listened to his sentence there.[456] He walked from the Tower--feebly, however, and with a stick, for he was weak from long confinement. On appearing at the bar, a chair was brought for him, and he was allowed to sit. The indictment was then read by the attorney-general. It set forth that Sir Thomas More, traitorously imagining and attempting to deprive the king of his t.i.tle as supreme Head of the Church, did, on the 7th of May, when examined before Thomas Cromwell, the king's princ.i.p.al secretary, and divers other persons, whether he would accept the king as Head on earth of the Church of England, pursuant to the statute, refuse to give a direct answer, but replied, "I will not meddle with any such matters, for I am fully determined to serve G.o.d and to think upon His pa.s.sion, and my pa.s.sage out of this world."[457] He was then charged with having written to Fisher that "The act of parliament was like a sword with two edges; for if a man answered one way it would confound his soul, and if the other way it would confound his body."[458] Finally and chiefly, he had spoken treasonable words in the Tower to Rich, the solicitor-general. Rich had endeavoured to persuade him, as Cranmer had endeavoured in his previous difficulty at Lambeth, that it was his duty as a subject to obey the law of the land. "Supposing it was enacted by act of parliament," the solicitor-general had said, "that I, Richard Rich, should be king, and that it should be treason to deny it, what would be the offence if you, Sir Thomas More, were to say that I was king?" More had answered that, in his conscience, he would be bound by the act of parliament, and would be obliged to accept Rich as king. He would put another case, however. "Suppose it should be enacted by parliament, _quod Deus non esset Deus_, and that opposing the act should be treason, if it were asked of him, Richard Rich, whether he would say _Quod Deus non erat Deus_, according to this statute, and if he were to say No, would he not offend?" Rich had replied, "Certainly, because it is impossible, _quod Deus non esset Deus_; but why, Master More, can you not accept the king as chief Head of the Church of England, just as you would that I should be made king, in which case you agree that you would be obliged to acknowledge me as king?" "To which More, persevering in his treasons, had answered to Rich, that the cases were not similar, because the king could be made by parliament and deprived by parliament;[459] but in the first case the subject could not be obliged, because his consent could not be given for that in parliament."

[Sidenote: The chancellor urges him to submit.]

This was the substance of the indictment. As soon as it was read, the lord chancellor rose, and told the prisoner that he saw how grievously he had offended the king; it was not too late to ask for mercy, however, which his Majesty desired to show.

[Sidenote: He trusts, however, to remain in his opinion till death.]

[Sidenote: The jury find a verdict of guilty.]

"My lord," More replied, "I have great cause to thank your honour for your courtesy, but I beseech Almighty G.o.d that I may continue in the mind that I am in through His grace unto death." To the charges against him he pleaded "not guilty," and answered them at length. He could not say indeed that the facts were not true; for although he denied that he had "practised" against the supremacy, he could not say that he had consented to it, or that he ever would consent; but like the Prior of the Charterhouse, he could not admit himself guilty when he had only obeyed his conscience. The jury retired to consider, and in a quarter of an hour returned with their verdict. The chancellor, after receiving it, put the usual question, what the prisoner could say in arrest of judgment. More replied, but replied with a plea which it was impossible to recognise, by denouncing the statute under which he was tried, and insisting on the obligation of obedience to the see of Rome. Thus the sentence was inevitable. It was p.r.o.nounced in the ordinary form; but the usual punishment for treason was commuted, as it had been with Fisher, to death upon the scaffold; and this last favour was communicated as a special instance of the royal clemency. More's wit was always ready.

"G.o.d forbid," he answered, "that the king should show any more such mercy unto any of my friends; and G.o.d bless all my posterity from such pardons."[460]

The pageant was over, for such a trial was little more. As the procession formed to lead back the "condemned traitor" to the Tower, the commissioners once more adjured him to have pity on himself, and offered to reopen the court if he would reconsider his resolution. More smiled, and replied only a few words of graceful farewell.

[Sidenote: His last words to the commission.]