The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3)

by James Anthony Froude

This incident, and it was perhaps but one of many, is not likely to have softened the disposition of the Commons, or induced them to entertain more respectfully the bishops' own estimate of their privileges. The convocation and the parliament met simultaneously, on the 15th of January, and the conflict, which had been for two years in abeyance, recommenced. The initial measure was taken by convocation, and this body showed a spirit still unsubdued, and a resolution to fight in their own feebly tyrannical manner to the last. A gentleman in Gloucestershire had lately died, by name Tracy. In his last testament he had bequeathed his soul to God through the

mercies of Christ, declining the mediatorial offices of the saints; and leaving no money to be expended in masses.[³⁴⁰] Such notorious heresy could not be passed over with impunity, and the first step of the assembled clergy[³⁴¹] was to issue a commission to raise the body and burn it. Their audacity displayed at once the power which they possessed, and the temper in which they were disposed to use it. The Archbishop of Canterbury seems to have been responsible for this monstrous order, which unfortunately was carried into execution before Henry had time to interfere.[³⁴²] It was the last act of the kind, however, in which he was permitted to indulge, and the legislature made haste to take away such authority from hands so incompetent to use it. From their debates upon burning the dead Tracy, convocation were proceeding to discuss the possibility of burning the living Latimer,[³⁴³] when they were recalled to their senses by a summons to prepare some more reasonable answer than that which the bishops had made for them on their privilege of making laws. Twenty more years of work were to be lived by Latimer before they were to burn him, and their own delinquencies were for the present of a more pressing nature. The House of Commons at the same time proceeded to frame necessary bills on the other points of their complaint.

The first act upon the roll recalls the Constitutions of Clarendon and the famous quarrel between Becket and the Crown. When Catholicism was a living belief, when ordained priests were held really and truly to possess those awful powers which the mystery of transubstantiation assigns to them, they were acknowledged by common consent to be an order apart from the rest of mankind, and being spiritual men, to be amenable only to spiritual jurisdiction. It was not intended that, if they committed crimes, they should escape the retributive consequences of those crimes: offenders against the law might (originally at least) be degraded, if the bishops thought good, and stripped of their commission be delivered thus to the secular arm. But the more appropriate punishment for such persons was of a more awful kind, proportioned to the magnitude of the fault; and was conveyed or held to be conveyed in the infliction of the spiritual death of excommunication. Excommunication

was, in real earnest, the death of the soul, at a time when communion with the church was the only means by which the soul could be made partaker of the divine life; and it was a noble thing to believe that there was something worse for a man than legal penalties on his person or on his mortal body; it was beautiful to recognise in an active living form, that the heaviest ill which could befall a man was to be cut off from God. But it is only for periods that humanity can endure the atmosphere of these high altitudes of morality. The early Christians attempted a community of goods, but they were unequal to it for more than a generation. The discipline of Catholicism was assisted by superstition,—it remained vigorous for many hundreds of years, but it languished at last; and although there was so great virtue in a living idea, that its forms preserved the reverence of mankind unabated, even when in their effect and working they had become as evil as they once were noble; yet reverence and endurance were at length exhausted, and these forms were to submit to alteration in conformity with the altered nature of the persons whom they affected.

I have already alluded to the abuse of "benefit of clergy;"[³⁴⁴] we have arrived at the first of those many steps by which at length it was finally put away,—a step which did not, however, as yet approach the heart of the evil, but touched only its extreme outworks. The clergy had monopolised the learning of the middle ages, and few persons external to their body being able to read or write, their privileges became co-extensive, as I above stated, with these acquirements. The exemption from secular jurisdiction, which they obtained in virtue of their sacred character, had been used as a protection in villainy for every scoundrel who could write his name. Under this plea, felons of the worst kind might claim, till this time, to be taken out of the hands of the law judges, and to be tried at the bishops' tribunals; and at these tribunals, such a monstrous solecism had Catholicism become, the payment of money was ever welcomed as the ready expiation of crime. To prevent the escape of the Bishop of Rochester's cook, who was a "clerk," parliament had specially interfered, and sentenced him without trial, by attainder. They now passed a general act, remarkable alike in what it provided as in what, for the present, it omitted to provide.[³⁴⁵] The preamble related the nature of the evil which was to be remedied, and the historical position of it. It dwelt

upon the assurances which had been given again and again by the ordinaries that their privileges should not be abused; but these promises had been broken as often as they had been made; so that "continually manifest thieves and murderers, indicted and found guilty of their misdeeds by good and substantial inquests, and afterwards, by the usages of the common lawes of the land, delivered to the ordinaries as clerks convict, were speedily and hastily delivered and set at large by the ministers of the said ordinaries for corruption and lucre; or else because the ordinaries enclaiming such offenders by the liberties of the church would in no wise take the charges in safe keeping of them, but did suffer them to make their purgation by such as nothing knew of their misdeeds, and by such fraud did annull and make void the good and provable trial which was used against such offenders by the king's law; to the pernicious example, increase, and courage of such offenders, if the King's Highness by his authority royal put not speedy remedy thereto."

To provide such necessary remedy, it was enacted that thenceforward no person under the degree of subdeacon, if guilty of felony, should be allowed to plead "his clergy" any more, but should be proceeded against by the ordinary law. So far it was possible to go—an enormous step if we think of what the evil had been; and in such matters to make a beginning was the true difficulty—it was the logical premise from which the conclusion could not choose but follow. Yet such was the mystical sacredness which clung about the ordained clergy, that their patent profligacy had not yet destroyed it—a priest might still commit a murder, and the profane hand of the law might not reach to him.

The measure, however, if imperfect, was excellent in its degree; and when this had been accomplished, the House proceeded next to deal with the Arches Court—the one enormous grievance of the time. The petition of the Commons has already exhibited the condition of this institution; but the act by which the power of it was limited added more than one particular to what had been previously stated, and the first twenty lines of the statute which was now passed[³⁴⁶] may be recommended to the consideration of the modern censors of the Reformation. The framer of the resolution was no bad friend to the bishops, if they had possessed the faculty of knowing who their true friends were, for the statement of complaint was limited, mild, and moderate. Again, as with the "benefit of

clergy," the real ground for surprise is that any fraction of a system so indefensible should have been permitted to continue. The courts were nothing else but the vicious sources of unjust revenue; and with the opportunity so fairly offered, it is strange indeed that they were not swept utterly away. But sweeping measures have never found favour in England. There has ever been in English legislation, even when most reforming, that temperate spirit of equity which has refused to visit the sins of centuries upon a single generation. The statute limited its accusations to the points which it was designed to correct, and touched these with a hand firmly gentle.

"Whereas great numbers of the king's subjects," says the preamble, "as well men, wives, servants, or others dwelling in divers dioceses of the realm of England and Wales, heretofore have been at many times called by citations and other processes compulsory to appear in the Arches, Audience, and other high Courts of the archbishops of this realm, far from and out of the dioceses where such persons are inhabitant and dwelling; and many times to answer to surmised and feigned causes and matters, which have been sued more for vexation and malice than from any just cause of suit; and when certificate hath been made by the sumners, apparitors, or any such light litterate persons, that the party against whom such citations have been awarded hath been cited or summoned; and thereupon the same party so certified to be cited or summoned hath not appeared according to the certificate, the same party therefore hath been excommunicated, or, at the least, suspended from all divine service; and thereupon, before that he or she could be absolved, hath been compelled, not only to pay the fees of the court whereunto he or she was so called, amounting to the sum of two shillings, or twenty pence at the least; but also to pay to the sumner, for every mile distant from the place where he or she then dwelled unto the same court whereunto he or she was summoned to appear, twopence; to the great charge and impoverishment of the king's subjects, and to the great occasion of misbehaviour of wives, women, and servants, and to the great impairment and diminution of their good names and honesties—be it enacted——" We ask what?—looking with impatience for some large measure to follow these solemn accusations; and we find parliament contenting itself with forbidding the bishops, under heavy penalties, to cite any man out of his own diocese, except for specified causes (heresy being one of them), and with limiting the fees which were to be taken by