But the day of portents was not slow in its approach—a stirring age pressed on, an age for books. Under Henry the Eighth, books became the organs of the passions of mankind, and were not only printed, but spread about; for if the presses of England dared not disclose the hazardous secrets of the writers, the people were surreptitiously furnished with English books from foreign presses. It was then that the jealousy of the state opened its hundred eyes on the awful track of the strange omnipotence of the press. Then first began that War against Books which has not ceased in our time.
Perhaps he who first, with a statesman’s prescient view, had contemplated on this novel and unknown power, and, as we shall see, had detected its insidious steps stealing into the cabinet of the sovereign, was the great minister of this great monarch. It has been surmised that the cardinal aimed to crush the head of the serpent, by stopping the printing press in the monastery at St. Albans, of which he was the abbot; for that press remained silent for half a century. In a convocation the cardinal expressed his hostility against printing; assuring the simple clergy that, if they did not in time suppress printing, printing would suppress them.[1] This great statesman, at this early period, had taken into view its remote consequences. Lord Herbert has curiously assigned to the cardinal his ideas as addressed to the pope:—“This new invention of printing has produced various effects of which your Holiness cannot be ignorant. If it has restored books and learning, it has also been the occasion of those sects and schisms which daily appear. Men begin to call in question the present faith and tenets of the church; and the laity read the Scriptures; and pray in their vulgar tongue. Were this suffered, the common people might come to believe that there was not so much use of the clergy. If men were persuaded that they could make their own way to God, and in their ordinary language as well as Latin, the authority of the mass would fall, which would be very prejudicious to our ecclesiastical orders. The mysteries of religion must be kept in the hands of priests—the secret and arcanum of church government. Nothing remains more to be done than to prevent further apostacy. For this purpose, since printing could not be put down, it were best to set up learning against learning; and, by introducing able persons to dispute, to suspend the laity between fears and controversies. Since printing cannot be put down, it may still be made useful.” Thus, the statesman, who could not by a single blow annihilate this monster of all schism, would have wrestled with it with a statesman’s policy.
The cardinal at length was shaken by terrors he had never before felt from the hated press. This minister had writhed under the printed personalities of the rabid Skelton and the merciless Roy; but a pamphlet in the form of “The Supplication of Beggars” is a famed invective, which served as a prelude to the fall of the minister. The author, Simon Fish, had been a student of Gray’s Inn, where, in an Aristophanic interlude, he had enacted his grace the cardinal to the life, and deemed himself fortunate to escape from his native shores to elude the gripe of Wolsey. In this pamphlet all the poverty of the nation,—for our national poverty at all times is the cry of “The Beggars,”—the taxation, and the grievances, are all laid to the oppression of the whole motley prelacy. These were the thieves and the freebooters, the cormorants and the wolves of the state, and the king had nothing more to do than to put them to the cart’s tail, and end all the beggary of England by appropriating the monastic lands.
On a day of a procession at Westminster this seditious tract, aiming at the annihilation of the whole revenues of churchmen, was found scattered in the streets. Wolsey had the copies carefully gathered and delivered to him, to prevent any from reaching the king’s eyes. Merchants, at that day, were often itinerants in their way of trade with their foreign correspondents, and frequently conveyed to England these writings of our fugitive reformers. Two of these merchants, by the favour of Anne Bullen, had a secret interview with the king. They offered to recite to the royal ear the substance of the suppressed libel. “I dare say you have it all by heart,” the king shrewdly observed, and listened. After a pause, Henry let fall this remarkable observation—“If a man should pull down an old stone wall, and begin at the lower part, the upper might chance to fall on his head.” What at that moment was passing in the sagacious mind of the future regal reformer, is now more evident than probably it was to its first hearers. Wolsey, suspicious and troubled, came to warn the king of “a pestilent heretical libel being abroad.” Henry, suddenly drawing the very libel out of his bosom, presented a portentous copy to the startled and falling minister. The book became a court-book; and “the witty atheistical author,” as the Roman Catholic historian designated him, was invited back to England under the safeguard of the royal protection.
But the secret, and, perhaps, the yet obscure influence of the press, must often have been apparent to Henry the Eighth, when the king sat in council. There he marked the alarms of Wolsey, and the terrified remonstrances of the entire body of “the Papelins;” and when the day came that their ejectors filled their seats, the king discovered, that though the objects were changed, the same dread of the press continued. The war against books commenced; an expurgatory index, or a catalogue of prohibited books, chiefly English, was sent forth before Henry had broken with the papal power; subsequently, the fresher proclamation declared the books of the Papelins to be “seditious,” as the use of “the new learning” had been anathematized as “heretical.”
In these rapid events, dates become as essential as arguments. In 1526, anti-popery books, with their dispersers, were condemned as heretical. In 1535, all books favouring popery were decreed to be “seditious books.” There were books on the king’s supremacy, for or against, which cost some of their writers their heads; and there were “injunctions against English books,” frequently renewed as “pestilent and infectious learnings.”[2] All these show that now the press had obtained activity, and betray the uneasy condition of the ruling powers, who were startled by a supernatural voice which they had never before heard.
When the first persecution of “the new religion” occurred, it did not abate the secret importations of Lutheran books.[3] These with the merchant had become an article of commerce; and with the zealous dispensers, an article of faith: both alike ventured their lives in conveying them to London, and other places, and even smuggled them into the universities. They landed their prohibited goods in the most distant places, at Colchester, or in Norfolk. One of these chapmen in this hazardous commodity of free-thinking was at last caught at his bookbinder’s. He suffered at the flaming stake, and others met his fate.
It was now apparent that the secrecy and velocity of conveying the novel projects of reform, which could not otherwise have been communicated to the great body of the people, till this awful instrument had been set to work; the unity of opinion which it might create among the confused multitude; and the passions which a party either in terror, or in triumph, could artfully rouse in the sympathies of men; were felt and acknowledged by the monarch, who had himself staked the possession of his independent dominion on the energy and the eloquence of a single book,[4] to prepare his people for his meditated emancipation from the Tiara; and were any other proof wanting, we discover the terror of the Bishop of Durham, on the appearance of “a little book printed in English, issuing from Newcastle.” His lordship writes in great trepidation to the minister Cromwell, of this portentous little book, “like to do great harm among the people,” and advising that “letters be directed to all havens, towns, and other places, to forbid the book to be sold.” All the ports to be closed against “a little book brought by some folks from Newcastle!” These incidents were certain demonstrations of the political influence of this new sovereignty of the printing-press.