"As for that," said the priest, "an oath loosely made may be loosely broken; and by this example be ye in ease. I had an enemy come unto this church, and one of his friends and mine came unto me and said, 'Sir, I pray you let us go drink with yonder man.' And the said friend maketh such importunate suit unto me to drink with my enemy, that I promise him by my faith that I will go and drink with him; and so indeed doth drink with him. But what then," said the priest; "though I go and drink with him upon this promise, trow you that I will forgive him with my heart. Nay, nay, I warrant you. And so in like wise in this oath concerning the abjuration of the pope. I will not abjure him in my heart," said the priest, "for these Reported advice of Cranmer to the confessor of Sion. words were not spoken unto Peter for nought—'I will give thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven'—and the pope is Peter's successor. Of this matter," said the priest, "I communed once with the Bishop of Canterbury,[395] and I told the bishop I would pray for the pope as the chief and papal head of Christ's church. And the bishop told me it was the king's pleasure that I should not. I said unto him I would do it; and though I did it not openly, yet would I do it secretly. And he said I might pray for him secretly, but in any wise do it not openly."[396]
Trifles of this kind may seem unimportant; but at the time they were of moment, for their weight was cumulative; and we can only now recover but a few out of many. Such as they are, however, they show the spirit in which the injunctions were received by a section at least of the English clergy. Nor was this the worst. We find language reported, which shows that many Maitland the Black Friar, by his science of nigromancy, foretells a counter-revolution. among the monks were watching for symptoms of the promised imperial invasion, and the progress of the Irish insurgents. A Doctor Maitland, of the order of Black Friars in London, had been "heard divers times to say, he trusted to see every man's head that was of the new learning, and the maintainers of them, to stand upon a stake, and Cranmer's to be one of them. The king," he hoped, might suffer "a violent and shameful death;" and "the queen, that mischievous whore, might be brent." "He said further, that he knew by his science, which was nigromancy, that all men of the new learning should be suppressed and suffer death, and the people of the old learning should be set up again by the power of the king's enemies from the parts beyond the sea."[397]
Feron and Hale.
In the May weather of 1534, two Middlesex clergy, "walking to and fro in the cloyster garden at Sion, were there overheard compassing sedition and rebellion." John Hale, an eager, tumultuous person, was prompting his brother priest, Robert Feron, with matter for a pamphlet, which Feron was to write against the king.[398] "Syth the realm of England was first a realm," said Hale, "was there never in it so great a robber and piller of the commonwealth read of nor heard of as is our king..... He is the most cruellest capital heretic, defacer and treader under foot of Christ and of Feron hopes that Henry's death may be like that of the manqueller Richard. his church, continually applying and minding to extinct the same; whose death, I beseech God, may be like to the death of the most wicked John, sometime king of this realm, or rather to be called a great tyran than a king; and that his death may be not much unlike to the end of that manqueller Richard, sometime usurper of this imperial realm. And if thou wilt deeply look upon his life, thou shalt find it more foul and more stinking than a sow wallowing and defiling herself in any filthy place."
The Irish will persevere in the quarrel, and the Welsh will join them.
These words were spoken in English; Feron translated them into Latin, and wrote them down. Hale then continued: "Until the king and the rulers of this realm be plucked by the pates, and brought, as we say, to the pot, shall we never live merrily in England, which, I pray God, may chance, and now shortly come to pass. Ireland is set against him, which will never shrink in their quarrel to die in it; and what think ye of Wales? The noble and gentle Ap Ryce,[399] so cruelly put to death, and he innocent, as they say, in the cause. Three parts of England be against the king. I think not contrary, but they will join and take part with the Irish, and so invade our realm. If they do so, doubt ye not but they shall have aid and strength enough in England. For this is truth: three parts of England be against the king, as he shall find if he need. For of truth, they go about to bring this realm into such miserable condition as is France; which the commons see, and perceive well enough a sufficient cause of rebellion and insurrection in this realm. And truly we of the church shall never live merrily until that day come."[400]
The persecuting laws against the Catholics.
These informations may assist us in understanding, if we cannot forgive, the severe enactments—severely to be executed—which were passed in the ensuing parliament.
It is a maxim of sound policy, that actions only are a proper subject of punishment,—that to treat men as offenders for their words, their intentions, or their opinions, is not justice, but tyranny. But there is no rule which is universally applicable. The policy of a state of war is not the policy of a state of peace. And as a soldier in a campaign is not at liberty to criticise openly the cause for which he is fighting; as no general, on his army going into action, can permit a subordinate to decline from his duty in the moment of danger, on the plea that he is dissatisfied with the grounds of the quarrel, and that his conscience forbids him to take part in it; so there are times when whole nations are in a position analogous to that of an army so circumstanced; when the safety of the State depends upon unity of purpose, and when private persons Effect of circumstances upon policy. must be compelled to reserve their opinions to themselves; when they must be compelled neither to express them in words, nor to act upon them in their capacity of citizens, except at their utmost peril. At such times the salus populi overrides all other considerations; and the maxims and laws of calmer periods for awhile consent to be suspended. The circumstances of A modern analogy. the year 1848 will enable us, if we reflect, not upon what those circumstances actually were, but on what they easily might have been, to understand the position of Henry VIII.'s government at the moment of the separation from Rome. If the danger in 1848 had ceased to be imaginary,—if Ireland had broken into a real insurrection,—if half the population of England had been Socialist, and had been in secret league with the leaders of the Revolution in Paris for a combined attack upon the State by insurrection and invasion,—the mere passing of a law, making the use of seditious language an act of treason, would not have been adequate to the danger. Influential persons would have been justly submitted to question on their allegiance, and insufficient answers would have been interpreted as justifying suspicion. Not the expression only, of opinions subversive of society, but the holding such opinions, however discovered, would have been regarded and treated as a crime, with the full consent of what is called the common sense and educated judgment of the nation.[401]
If for "opinions subversive of society," we substitute allegiance to the papacy, the parallel is complete between the year 1848, as it would then have been, and the time when the penal laws which are considered the reproach of the Tudor governments were passed against the Roman Catholics. I assume that the Reformation was in itself right; that the claims of the pope to an English supremacy were unjust; and that it was good and wise to resist those claims. If this be allowed, those laws will not be found to deserve the reproach of tyranny. We shall see in them but the natural The Romanism of the sixteenth century not the Romanism of the nineteenth. resource of a vigorous government placed in circumstances of extreme peril. The Romanism of the present day is a harmless opinion, no more productive of evil than any other superstition, and without tendency, or shadow of tendency, to impair the allegiance of those who profess it. But we must not confound a phantom with a substance; or gather from modern experience the temper of a time when words implied realities, when Catholics really believed that they owed no allegiance to an heretical sovereign, and that the first duty of their lives was to a foreign potentate. This perilous doctrine was waning, indeed, but it was not dead. By many it was actively professed; and among those by whom it was denied there were few except the Protestants whom it did not in some degree embarrass and perplex.