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

by James Anthony Froude

Henry must have been compelled to listen to many such invectives. He left the chapel without noticing what had passed; and in the course of the week Peto went down from Greenwich to attend a provincial council at Canterbury, and perhaps to

communicate with the Nun of Kent. Meantime a certain Dr. Kirwan was commissioned to preach on the other side of the question the following Sunday.

Kirwan was one of those men of whom the preacher spoke prophetically, since by the present and similar services he made his way to the archbishopric of Dublin and the bishopric of Oxford, and accepting the Erastian theory of a Christian's duty, followed Edward VI. into heresy, and Mary into popery and persecution. He regarded himself as an official of the state religion; and his highest conception of evil in a Christian was disobedience to the reigning authority. We may therefore conceive easily the burden of his sermon in the royal chapel. "He most sharply reprehended Peto," calling him foul names, "dog, slanderer, base beggarly friar, rebel, and traitor," saying "that no subject should speak so audaciously to his prince:" he "commended" Henry's intended marriage, "thereby to establish his seed in his seat for ever;" and having won, as he supposed, his facile victory, he proceeded with his peroration, addressing his absent antagonist. "I speak to thee, Peto," he exclaimed, "to thee, Peto, which makest thyself Micaiah, that thou mayest speak evil of kings; but now art not to be found, being fled for fear and shame, as unable to answer my argument." In the royal chapel at Greenwich there was more reality than decorum. A voice out of the rood-loft cut short the eloquent declamation. "Good sir," it said, "you know Father Peto is gone to Canterbury to a provincial council, and not fled for fear of you; for to-morrow he will return again. In the meantime I am here as another Micaiah, and will lay down my life to prove those things true which he hath taught. And to this combat I challenge thee; thee Kirwan, I say, who art one of the four hundred into whom the spirit of lying is entered, and thou seekest by adultery to establish the succession, betraying thy king for thy own vain glory into endless perdition."

A scene of confusion followed, which was allayed at last by the king himself, who rose from his seat and commanded silence. It was thought that the limit of permissible licence had been transcended, and the following day Peto and Elstowe, the other speaker, were summoned before the council to receive a reprimand. Lord Essex told them they deserved to be sewn into a sack and thrown into the Thames. "Threaten such things to rich and dainty folk, which have their hope in this world," answered Elstowe, gallantly, "we fear them not; with thanks to God we know the way to heaven to be as ready by water as

by land."[³⁷²] Men of such metal might be broken, but they could not be bent. The two offenders were hopelessly unrepentant and impracticable, and it was found necessary to banish them. They retired to Antwerp, where we find them the following year busy procuring copies of the Bishop of Rochester's book against the king, which was broadly disseminated on the continent, and secretly transmitting them into England; in close correspondence also with Fisher himself, with Sir Thomas More, and for the ill fortune of their friends, with the court at Brussels, between which and the English Catholics the intercourse was dangerously growing.[³⁷³]

The Greenwich friars, with their warden, went also a bad way. The death of the persecuted brother was attended with circumstances in a high degree suspicious.[³⁷⁴] Henry ordered an enquiry, which did not terminate in any actual exposure; but a cloud hung over the convent, which refused to be dispelled; the warden was deposed, and soon after it was found necessary to dissolve the order.

If the English monks had shared as a body the character of the Greenwich Observants, of the Carthusians of London and Richmond, and of some other establishments,—which may easily be numbered,—the resistance which they might have offered to the government, with the sympathy which it would have commanded, would have formed an obstacle to the Reformation

that no power could have overcome. It was time, however, for the dissolution of the monasteries, when the few among them, which on other grounds might have claimed a right to survive, were driven by their very virtues into treason. The majority perished of their proper worthlessness; the few remaining contrived to make their existence incompatible with the safety of the state.

Leaving for the present these disorders to mature themselves, I must now return to the weary chapter of European diplomacy, to trace the tortuous course of popes and princes, duping one another with false hopes; saying what they did not mean, and meaning what they did not say. It is a very Slough of Despond, through which we must plunge desperately as we may; and we can cheer ourselves in this dismal region only by the knowledge that, although we are now approaching the spot where the mire is deepest, the hard ground is immediately beyond.

We shall, perhaps, be able most readily to comprehend the position of the various parties in Europe, by placing them before us as they stood severally in the summer of 1532, and defining briefly the object which each was pursuing.