"At length knowing that they had incurred the king's displeasure, and fearing lest they might fail of accomplishing their purposes, they chose out persons on whose courage, readiness, and devotion to themselves they could depend; and taking these men into their councils, they fed them with the poison which they had conceived, forgetting their allegiance to their king, and their duty to their And had organized seditious opposition in the country. country.[470] Thus were their seditious opinions scattered over the country. And when his Highness began to trace this impious conspiracy to its source, Sir Thomas More and the Bishop of Rochester were found to be the undoubted authors of the same; and their guilt was proved against them by the evidence of their own handwrit, and the confessions of their own lips. For these causes, therefore, and for many others of like kind, our most gracious sovereign was compelled to imprison them as rebellious subjects, as disturbers of the public peace, and as movers of sedition and tumult. Nor was it possible for him to do They had in consequence been committed to the Tower, where they were treated with the utmost kindness.
Kindness had, however, produced no effect; they had continued to obstruct the government; and had therefore been tried and condemned by the ordinary laws of the realm. other than punish them, unless, after their crimes had been detected, he had so far forgotten his duty as to leave the contagion to spread unchecked, to the utter destruction of the nation. They were in consequence thrown into the Tower, where, however, their treatment was far different from what their demerits had deserved; they were allowed the society of their friends; their own servants were admitted to attend upon them, and they received all such indulgences in food and dress as their families desired. Clemency, however, produced no effect on persons in whom duty and allegiance had given place to treason and malice. They chose rather to persist in their wicked courses than to make trial by repentance of the king's goodness. For after that certain laws had been decreed by authority of parliament, and had been by the whole nation admitted and accepted as expedient for the realm, and agreeable to true religion, they alone refused their consent to these laws, hoping that something might occur to sustain them in their impiety; and while professing to have left all care and thought for human things, they were considering by what arguments, in furtherance of their seditious purposes, they might, to the common hurt, elude, refute, and disturb the said laws.
"Of this their treason there are proofs extant—letters written, when ink failed them, with chalk or charcoal, and passed secretly from one to the other. Our most merciful king could therefore no longer tolerate their grievous faults. He allowed them to be tried by process of ordinary law. They were found guilty of high treason, and sentenced to death. Their punishment was milder than that which the law prescribed, or which their crimes had deserved; and many persons have by this example been brought to a better mind."[471]
To Cromwell evidently the case appeared so clear as to require no apology. To modern writers it has appeared so clear as to admit of none. The value of the defence turns upon the point of the actual danger to the state, and the extent to which the conduct of the sufferers imperilled the progress of the Reformation. As written for the eyes of the pope and cardinals, however, such a letter could be understood only as daring them to do their worst. It ignored the very existence of such rules of judgment as the heads of the Roman church would alone acknowledge, and represented the story as it appeared from the position which England had assumed on its revolt from its old allegiance.
The reply of the pope.
There were no more false efforts at conciliation, and open war thenceforth appeared to be the only possible relation between the papacy and Henry VIII. Paul III. replied, or designed to reply, with his far-famed bull of interdict and deposition, which, though reserved at the moment in deference to Francis of France, and not issued till three years later, was composed in the first burst of his displeasure.[472] The substance of his voluminous anathemas may be thus briefly epitomized.
The bull of interdict and deposition.
The pope, quoting and applying to himself the words of Jeremiah, "Behold, I have set thee over nations and kingdoms, that thou mayest root out and destroy, and that thou mayest plant and build again," addressed Henry as a disobedient vassal. Already lying under the censures of the church, he had gone on to heap crime on crime; and therefore, a specific number of days being allowed him to repent and make his submission, at the expiration of this period of respite the following sentence was to take effect.
The king, with all who abetted him in his crimes, was pronounced accursed—cut off from the body of Christ, to perish. When he died, his body should lie without burial; his soul, blasted with anathema, should be cast into hell for ever. The lands of his subjects who remained faithful to him were laid under an interdict: their children were disinherited, their marriages illegal, their wills invalid; only by one condition could they escape their fate—by instant rebellion against the apostate prince. All officers of the crown were absolved from their oaths; all subjects, secular or ecclesiastic, from their allegiance. The entire nation, under penalty of excommunication, was commanded no longer to acknowledge Henry as their sovereign.[473] No true son of the church should hold intercourse with him or his adherents. They must neither trade with them, speak with them, nor give them food. The clergy, leaving behind a few of their number to baptize the new-born infants, were to withdraw from the accursed land, and return no more till it had submitted. If the king, trusting to force, persevered in his iniquity, the lords and commons of England, dukes, marquises, earls, and all other persons, were required, under the same penalty of excommunication, to expel him from the throne; and the Christian princes of Europe were called on to show their fidelity to the Holy See, by aiding in so godly a work.
In conclusion, as the king had commanded his clergy to preach against the pope in their churches, so the pope commanded them to retaliate upon the king, and with bell, book, and candle declare him cursed.
This was loud thunder; nor, when abetted by Irish massacres and English treasons, was it altogether impotent. If Henry's conceptions of the royal supremacy were something imperious, the papal supremacy was not more modest in its self-assertion; and the language of Paul III. went far to justify the rough measures by which his menaces were parried. If any misgiving had remained in the king's mind on the legitimacy of the course which he had pursued, the last trace of it must have been obliterated by the perusal of this preposterous bombast.