History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. III

by James Anthony Froude

Thus in all parts of England superstition was attacked in its strongholds, and destroyed there. But the indignation which was the natural recoil from credulity would not be satisfied with the destruction of images. The idol was nothing. The guilt was not with the wood and stone, but in the fraud and folly which had practised with these brute instruments against the souls of men. In Scotland and the Netherlands the work of retribution was accomplished by a rising of the people themselves in armed revolution. In England the readiness of the government spared the need of a popular explosion; the monasteries were not sacked by mobs, or the priests murdered; but the same fierceness, the same hot spirit of anger was abroad, though confined within the restraints of the law. The law itself gave effect, in harsh and sanguinary penalties, to the rage which had been kindled.

And pushed into barbarous extremes.

The punishments under the Act of Supremacy were not wholly frightful. No governments can permit their subjects to avow an allegiance to an alien and hostile power; and the executions were occasioned, I have observed already, by the same necessity, and must be regarded with the same feelings, as the deaths of brave men in battle, who, in questions of life and death, take their side to kill others or be killed. A blind animosity now betrays itself in an act of needless cruelty, for the details of which no excuse can be pleaded by custom or precedent, which clouds the memory of the greatest of the Reformers, and can be endured only, when regarded at a distance, as an instance of the wide justice of Providence, which punishes wrong by wrong, and visits on single men the offences of thousands.

Offenses of Friar Forest.

Forest, the late Prior of the Observants Convent at Greenwich, since the dissolution of his order in consequence of the affair of the Nun of Kent, had halted between a state of concealed disaffection and pretended conformity. In his office of confessor he was found to have instructed his penitents that, for himself, “he had denied the Bishop of Rome in his outward, but not in his inward man;” and he had encouraged them, notwithstanding their oath, to persevere in their old allegiance. He had thus laid himself open to prosecution for treason; and whatever penalty was due to an avowal of being the Pope’s liege-man had been doubly earned by treachery. If he had been tried and had suffered like Sir Thomas More and the monks of the Charterhouse, his sentence would have ranked with theirs. The same causes which explained the executions of honourable men would have applied with greater force to that of one who had deepened his offences by duplicity. But the crown prosecutors, for some unknown reason, bestowed upon him a distinction in suffering.

When first arrested he was terrified: he acknowledged his offences, submitted, and was pardoned. But his conscience recovered its strength: he returned to his loyalty to the Papacy; he declared his belief that, in matters spiritual, the Pope was his proper sovereign, that the Bishop of Rochester was a martyr, as Thomas à Becket had been a martyr. Becket he held up as the pattern of all churchmen’s imitation, courting for himself Becket’s fortunes.[358] Like others, he attempted a distinction in the nature of allegiance. “In matters secular his duty was to his prince.” But, on the threshold of the exception lay the difficulty which no Catholic could evade,—what was the duty of a subject when a king was excommunicated, and declared to have forfeited his crown?

Forest, therefore, fell justly under the treason law. But, inasmuch as Catholic churchmen declared the denial of the Pope’s supremacy to be heresy, so, for a few unfortunate months, English churchmen determined the denial of the king’s supremacy to be heresy; Forest was to be proceeded against for an offence against spiritual truth as well as a crime against the law of the land; and Cranmer is found corresponding with Cromwell on the articles on which he was to be examined.[359] I do not know that the document which I am about to quote was composed for this special occasion. For the first, and happily the last time, the meaning of it was acted upon.

Anglican definition of heresy, which is extended to a denial of the royal supremacy.

Forest is sentenced to death.

In an official paper of about this date, I find “heresy” defined to be “that which is against Scripture.” “To say, therefore, that Peter and his successors be heads of the universal Church, and stand stubbornly in it, is heresy, because it is against Scripture (Ecclesiastes v.); where it is written, ‘Insuper universæ terræ rex imperat servienti’—that is to say, the king commandeth the whole country as his subjects; and therefore it followeth that the Bishop of Rome, which is in Italy where the Emperor is king, is subject to the Emperor, and that the Emperor may command him; and if he should be head of the universal Church, then he should be head over the Emperor, and command the Emperor, and that is directly against the said text, Ecclesiastes v. Wherefore, to stand in it opiniatively is heresy.”[360] In the spirit, if not in the letter of this monstrous reasoning, Forest was indicted for heresy in a court where we would gladly believe that Cranmer did not sit as president. He was found guilty, and was delivered over, in the usual form, to the secular arm.