§ 3. The English Evolution
In England as in France the intellectual life undergoes visible retrogression in the fifteenth century, while in Italy, with the political problem rapidly developing towards catastrophe, it flourished almost riotously. From the age of Chaucer, considered on its intellectual side and as represented mainly by him, there is a steep fall to almost the time of Sir Thomas More, around whom we see as it were the sudden inrush of the Renaissance upon England. The conquest of France by Henry V and the Wars of the Roses, between them, brought England to the nadir of mental and moral life. But in the long and ruinous storm the Middle Ages, of which Wiclif is the last powerful representative, were left behind, and a new age begins to be prepared.
Of a very different type from Wiclif is the remarkable personality of the Welshman Reginald (or Reynold) Pecock (1395?–1460?), who seems divided from Wiclif by a whole era of intellectual development, though born within about ten years of his death. It is a singular fact that one of the most rationalistic minds among the serious writers of the fifteenth century should be an English bishop,[180] and an Ultramontane at that. Pecock was an opponent at once of popular Bibliolatry and of priestly persecution, declaring that “the clergy would be condemned at the last day if they did not draw men into consent to the true faith otherwise than by fire and sword and hanging.”[181] It was as the rational and temperate defender of the Church against the attacks of the Lollards in general that he formulated the principle of natural reason as against scripturalism. This attitude it is that makes his treatise, the Repressor of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy, the most modern of theoretic books before More and Hooker and Bacon. That he was led to this measure of rationalism rather by the exigencies of his papalism than by a spontaneous skepticism is suggested by the fact that he stands for the acceptance of miraculous images, shrines, and relics, when the Lollards are attacking them.[182] On the other hand, it is hard to be certain that his belief in the shrines was genuine, so ill does it consist with his attitude to Bibliolatry. In a series of serenely argued points he urges his thesis that the Bible is not the basis of the moral law, but merely an illustration thereof, and that the natural reason is obviously presupposed in the bulk of its teaching. He starts from the formulas of Thomas Aquinas, but reaches a higher ground. It is the position of Hooker, anticipated by a hundred years; and this in an age of such intellectual backwardness and literary decadence that the earlier man must be pronounced by far the more remarkable figure. In such a case the full influence of the Renaissance seems to be at work; though in the obscurity of the records we can do no more than conjecture that the new contacts with French culture between the invasion of France by Henry V in 1415 and the expulsion of the English in 1451 may have introduced forces of thought unknown or little known before. If indeed there were English opponents of scripture in Wiclif’s day, the idea must have ripened somewhat in Pecock’s. Whether, however, the victories of Jeanne D’Arc made some unbelievers as well as many dastards among the English is a problem that does not seem to have been investigated.
Pecock’s reply to the Lollards creates the curious situation of a churchman rebutting heretics by being more profoundly heretical than they. In his system, the Scriptures “reveal” only supernatural truths not otherwise attainable, a way of safeguarding dogma not likely to reassure believers. There is reason, indeed, to suspect that Pecock held no dogma with much zeal; and when in his well-named treatise (now lost), The Provoker, he denied the authenticity of the Apostles’ Creed, “he alienated every section of theological opinion in England.”
See Miss A. M. Cooke’s art. Reginald Pecock in Dict. of Nat. Biog. This valuable notice is the best short account of Pecock; though the nature of his case is most fully made out by Hook, as cited below. It is characteristic of the restricted fashion in which history is still treated that neither in the Student’s History of Professor Gardiner nor in the Short History of Green is Pecock mentioned. Earlier ideas concerning him were far astray. The notion of Foxe, the martyrologist, that Pecock was an early Protestant, is a gross error. He held not a single Protestant tenet, being a rationalizing papist. A German ecclesiastical historian of the eighteenth century (Werner, Kirchengeschichte des 18ten Jahrhunderts, 1756, cited by Lechler) calls Pecock the first English deist. See a general view of his opinions in Lewis’s Life of Dr. Reynold Pecock (rep. 1820), ch. v. The heresies charged on him are given on p. 160; also in the R. T. S. Writings and Examinations, 1831, pp. 200–201. While rejecting Bibliolatry, he yet argued that Popes and Councils could make no change in the current creed; and he thus offended the High Churchmen. Cp. Massingberd, The English Reformation, 4th ed. pp. 206–209.
The main causes of the hostility he met from the English hierarchy and Government appear to have been, on the one hand, his change of political party, which put him in opposition to Archbishop Bourchier, and on the other his zealous championship of the authority of the papacy as against that of the Councils of the Church. It was expressly on the score of his denunciation of the Councils that he was tried and condemned.[183] Thus the reward of his effort to reason down the menacing Lollards and rebut Wiclif[184] was his formal disgrace and virtual imprisonment. Had he not recanted, he would have been burned: as it was, his books were; and it is on record that they consisted of eleven quartos and three folios of manuscript. Either because of his papalism or as a result of official intrigue, Church and lords and commons were of one mind against him; and the mob would fain have burned him with his books.[185] In that age of brutal strife, when “neither the Church nor the opponents of the Church had any longer a sway over men’s hearts,”[186] he figures beside the mindless prelates and their lay peers somewhat as does More later beside Henry VIII, as Reason versus the Beast; and it was illustrative of his entire lack of fanaticism that he made the demanded retractations—avowing his sin in “trusting to natural reason” rather than to Scripture and the authority of the Church—and went his way in silence to solitude and death. The ruling powers disposed of Lollardism in their own way; and in the Wars of the Roses every species of heretical thought seems to disappear. The bribe held out to the nation by the invasion of France had been fatally effectual to corrupt the spirit of moral criticism which inspired the Lollard movement at its best; and the subsequent period of rapine and strife reduced thought and culture to the levels of the Middle Ages.
A hint of what was possible in the direction of freethought in the England of Henry V and Henry VI emerges in some of the records concerning Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, the youngest son of Henry IV. Gifted but ill-balanced, Humphrey was the chief patron of learning in England in his day; and he drank deeply of the spirit of Renaissance scholarship.[187] Sir Thomas More preserves the story—reproduced also in the old play, The First Part of the Contention of the two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster—of how he exposed the fraud of a begging impostor who pretended to have recovered his sight through the virtue of a saint’s relics; and a modern pietistic historian decides that the Duke “had long ceased to believe in miracles and relics.”[188] But if this be true, it is the whole truth as to Humphrey’s freethinking. It was the highest flight of rationalism permissible in his day and sphere.
On the view that Humphrey was a freethinker, the pious Pauli, who says (as cited, p. 337) of the Renaissance of letters, “The weak and evil side of this revived form of literature is that its disciples should have elevated the morality, or rather the immorality, of classical antiquity above Christian discipline and virtue,” sees fit further to pronounce that the bad account of Gloucester’s condition of body drawn up eleven years before his death by the physician Kymer is a proof of the “wild unbridled passions by which the duke was swayed,” and throws a lurid light upon “the tendencies and disposition of his mind.” Humphrey lived till 55, and died suddenly, under circumstances highly suggestive of poisoning by his enemies. His brothers Henry and John died much younger than he; but in their case the religious historian sees no ground for imputation. But the historian’s inference is overstrained. In reality Humphrey never indicated any lack of theological faith. The poet Lydgate, no unbeliever, described him as “Chose of God to be his owne knyghte,” and so rigorous “that heretike dar not comen in his sihte” (verses transcribed in Furnivall’s Early English Meals and Manners, 1868, pp. lxxxv–vi).
His most comprehensive biographer decides that he was “essentially orthodox,” despite his uncanonical marriage with his second wife and his general reputation for sexual laxity. “He was punctilious in the performance of his religious duties” and “a stern opponent of the Lollards”; he “countenanced the extinction of heresy by being present at the burning at Smithfield of an old priest who denied the validity of the sacraments of the Church”; and an Archbishop of Milan pronounced him to be “known everywhere as the chiefest friend and preserver of Holy Church” (K. H. Vickers, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester: A Biography, 1907, pp. 223, 321–23). Of such a personage no exegesis can make a rationalist.