CHAPTER VII.
I. CONVOCATION FOR THE EXTIRPATION OF HERESY (1512).
Lollards go to hear Colet’s sermons.
Two heretics burned at Smithfield.
Colet’s labours in connection with his school did not interfere with his ordinary duties. He was still, Sunday after Sunday, preaching those courses of sermons on ‘the Gospels, the Apostles’ Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer,’ which attracted by their novelty and unwonted earnestness so many listeners. The Dean was no Lollard himself, yet those whose leanings were toward Lollard views naturally found, in Colet’s simple Scripture teaching from his pulpit at St. Paul’s, what they felt to be the food for which they were in search, and which they did not get elsewhere. They were wont, it seems, to advise one another to go and hear Dr. Colet; and it was not strange if, in the future examination of heretics, a connection should be traced between Colet’s sermons and the increase of heresy.[392] That heresy was on the increase could not be doubted. Foxe has recorded that several Lollards suffered in 1511 under Archbishop Warham, and, strange to say, Colet’s name appears on the list of judges.[393] Foxe also mentions no fewer than twenty-three heretics who were compelled by Fitzjames, Bishop of London, to abjure during 1510 and 1511. And so zealous was the Bishop in his old age against them that he burned at least two of them in Smithfield during the autumn of 1511.[394] So common, indeed, were these martyr-fires, that Ammonius, Latin secretary to Henry VIII., writing from London, a few weeks after, to Erasmus at Cambridge, could jestingly say, that ‘he does not wonder that wood is so scarce and dear, the heretics cause so many holocausts; and yet (he said) their numbers grow—nay, even the brother of Thomas, my servant, dolt as he is, has himself founded a sect, and has his disciples!’[395]
It was under these circumstances that a royal mandate was issued, in November 1511, to the Archbishop of Canterbury, to summon a convocation of his province to meet in St. Paul’s Cathedral, February 6, 1512.[396]
Convocation summoned.
The King—under the instigation, it was thought, of Wolsey[397]—was just then entering into a treaty with the Pope and other princes with a view to warlike proceedings against France; and the King’s object in calling this convocation was doubtless to procure from the clergy their share of the taxation necessary to meet the expenses of equipping an army, which it was convenient to represent as required ‘for the defence of the Church as well as the kingdom of England;’ but there was another object for which a convocation was required besides this of taxation—one more palatable to Bishop Fitzjames and his party—that of the ‘extirpation of heresy.’[398]