“that the captains of the said erroneous doctrines be punished to the fearful example of all other. One or two cankered members,” he explains, “have induced no small number of young and incircumspect fools to give ear unto them,” and he proposes that the Cardinal should give “in commission to some sad father which was brought up in the University to sit and examine them.”
Active measures were now taken to stamp out the heresy in Oxford. Wolsey ordered the arrest of a certain Thomas Garret of Magdalen, a pernicious heretic who had been busy selling Tyndale’s Bible and the German reformer’s treatises, not only to Oxford students, but even to the Abbot of Reading. His friends managed to get him safely out of Oxford, but for some reason or other he returned after three days. The same night he was arrested in bed in the house of one Radley, a singing-man, where it was well known that the little Lutheran community was wont to meet. Garret was not detained in Bocardo, but in a cellar underneath the lodgings of the commissary, Dr Cottisford, Rector of Lincoln. Whilst the commissary was at evensong he managed to escape, and made his way to the rooms of Anthony Dalaber, one of the “brotherhood,” at Gloucester College. Dalaber has left an account—it is a most tearful tale—of the events which ensued. He had previously had some share in getting Garret away from Oxford, and was greatly surprised to see him back. He provided him with a coat in place of his tell-tale gown and hood, and sent him off with tears and prayers to Wales, whence he hoped to escape to Germany. After reading the tenth chapter of S. Matthew’s Gospel with many a deep sigh and salt tear, Dalaber went to Cardinal College to give Master Clarke, a leading brother, notice of what had occurred. On his way he met William Eden, a fellow of Magdalen, who with a pitiful countenance explained to him that they were all undone. Dalaber was able to give him the joyful news of Garret’s escape, and proceeded to S. Frideswide’s.
“Evensong,” he says, “was begun, and the Dean and the other Canons were there in their grey amices; they were almost at Magnificat before I came thither. I stood at the Choir door and heard Master Taverner play, and others of the Chapel there sing, with and among whom I myself was wont to sing also. But now my singing and music were turned into sighing and musing. As I thus and there stood, in cometh Dr Cottysford, as fast as ever he could go, bareheaded, as pale as ashes—I knew his grief well enough, and to the Dean he goeth into the Choir, where he was sitting in his stall, and talked with him very sorrowfully.” Dalaber describes the interview which followed, outside the choir, between these two and Dr London, the Warden of New College, “puffing, blustering and blowing, like a hungry and greedy lion seeking his prey.” The commissary was so much blamed, that he wept for sorrow. Spies were sent out in every direction; and when Dalaber returned to his rooms next morning, he found that they had been thoroughly searched. He had spent the night with the “brethren,” supping at Corpus (“at which supper we were not very merry”), sleeping at S. Alban Hall, consulting together and praying for the wisdom of the serpent, and the harmlessness of the dove. This request would appear to have been in some measure vouchsafed to him, for, when he was interrogated by the prior as to his own movements and those of Garret, he was enabled to furnish forth a tale full of circumstantial detail but wholly untrue. “This tale,” he observes, “I thought meetest, but it was nothing so.” Although it were nothing so, he repeated his convincing narrative on oath, when he was examined at Lincoln College by Cottisford, Higdon (Dean of Cardinal’s College) and London. He had sworn on a great Mass book laid before him to answer truly, but, as he complacently observes, “in my heart nothing so meant to do.” Nor, perhaps, did he mean to betray twenty-two of his associates, and the storehouse of Garret’s books, when examined by Dr London, whom he calls the “rankest, papistical Pharisee of them all”—at any rate he omits to mention the fact in his narrative.
Of Garret himself, however, no trace could be found; and the commissary, being “in extreme pensyfness,” consulted an astrologer, who made a figure for him, and told him, with all the cheerful certainty of an eastern astrologer in these days, that Garret, having fled south-eastward in a tawny coat, was at that time in London, on his way to the sea-side. Consulting the stars was strictly forbidden by the Catholic Church, but the Warden of New College, though a Doctor of Divinity, was not ashamed to inform the bishop of the astrologer’s saying, or afraid to ask him to inform the Cardinal, Archbishop of York, concerning it. Luckily for him the commissary did not rely wholly on the information either of Dalaber or the astrologer. The more practical method of watching the seaport towns resulted a few days later in Garret’s recapture near Bristol. Many of the Oxford brotherhood were also imprisoned and excommunicated. Garret, who had written a piteous letter to Wolsey, praying for release, not from the iron bonds which he said he justly deserved, but from the more terrible bonds of excommunication, and who had also made a formal recantation of all his heresies, was allowed to escape. But first he took part in a procession, in which most of the other prisoners also appeared, carrying faggots from S. Mary’s Church to S. Frideswide’s, and on the way casting into a bonfire made at Carfax for the purpose certain books which had most likely formed part of Garret’s stock.
At least three of the prisoners, however, died in prison without having been readmitted to Communion, either from the sweating sickness then raging, or, as Foxe asserts, from the hardships they endured. For they were kept, he says, for nearly six months in a deep cave under the ground, on a diet of salt fish. By Higdon’s orders they did at least receive a Christian burial.
The heretics were crushed in Oxford, but elsewhere the movement grew apace. The printing press scattered wide-cast books and pamphlets which openly attacked the corruption of the Church and the monastic orders. Henry determined to proscribe all books that savoured of heresy. A joint committee of Oxford and Cambridge theologians was summoned to meet in London. They examined and condemned the suspected books which were submitted to them. The publication of English treatises upon Holy Scripture without ecclesiastical sanction was forbidden by royal proclamation. Versions of the Bible in the vulgar tongue were at the same time proscribed.
Yet this orthodox king, to whom as “Defender of the Faith,” Leo X. had sent a sword still preserved in the Ashmolean, was on the brink of a breach with Rome. For Henry, with his curious mania for matrimony, had determined to marry Anne Boleyn, but he failed to obtain from the Papal Legates in England a decree for the dissolution of his marriage. It was a failure fraught with enormous consequences. The fortunes of Oxford were involved in it. The King gladly availed himself of the suggestion of a Cambridge scholar, Thomas Cranmer, that the Universities should be called on for their judgment. They were thus placed in a position analogous to that of an œcumenical council with power to control a pontifical decree. For the Pope’s predecessor had granted a dispensation for Henry’s marriage with Catherine, his brother’s wife. Every learned man in Europe, but for bribery or threats, would have condemned Henry’s cause on its merits. But it was evident that the question would not be decided on its merits.
From a packed commission at Cambridge a decision favourable to a divorce was with difficulty extorted; but even so it was qualified by an important reservation. The marriage was declared illegal, if it could be proved that Catherine’s marriage with Prince Arthur had been consummated. Cambridge was praised by the King for her “wisdom and good conveyance.” Yet that reservation, if the testimony of the Queen herself was to go for anything, amounted to a conclusion against the divorce.
It was not expected that a favourable verdict would be obtained so easily from Oxford. At the end of his first letter, in which the King called upon the University to declare their minds “sincerely and truly without any abuse,” a very plain threat is added, which left no doubt as to the royal view of what could be considered “sincere and true”:
“And in case ye do not uprightly according to divine learning handle yourselves herein, ye may be assured that we, not without great cause, shall so quickly and sharply look to your unnatural misdemeanour therein that it shall not be to your quietness and ease hereafter.”