Sketch of the Reformation in England

by John J. Blunt

With these and other words to the same effect, the king gave him his ring, which in case of extremity he might produce at the council, and by virtue of it appeal to Cæsar. He did so, and thus Cranmer escaped out of their hands. But all had not the same friend, nor therefore the same fortune; for it is to be observed, that the commissioners appointed to carry the Six Articles into execution did not confine their investigations to offences coming directly under the act, but, erecting themselves into a kind of inquisition-general, they took cognisance of all that was done after a manner which they called heresy, whatever it might be; and neglect of confession in Lent, absence from church, forbearing to creep to the cross on Good Friday, neglecting the use of the rosary, eating meat at interdicted seasons, and the like, were all misdemeanors fetched within the compass of this cruel dragnet of the Six Articles. Accordingly, the prisons of London were gorged with culprits;[309] for now an opportunity was afforded of raking up old suspicions, and putting all upon their purgation. Many are the affecting stories of those days which have come down to us; glimpses of the domestic troubles of an age called so loudly to bear the cross. The meetings by stealth amongst the friends of the common cause, amongst the brethren (as they named themselves, after the manner of the early Christians); a fraternity, for instance, of students at Oxford, not, like Wesley’s little society in the same place, taking joyfully the persecution of a tolerant age, which conferred distinction at an easy rate; but adopting every precaution to walk unseen, and all not enough; trusting their lives to each other’s hands; abetting the escape; supplying the disguise; recommending the fugitive to some distant and less suspected brother; kneeling with him before he went his way, to beg God’s blessing upon his enterprise, bidding him farewell with sorrowful heart and sad foreboding that they should see his face in the flesh no more; baffling the inquiry of the pursuer; risking the character and fate of an accomplice; braving the rack rather than betray the innocent blood; dying by inches in the dungeon, the feet in the stocks, or the neck and legs trussed together by some devilish engine (“the devil on the neck”) which contracted with the writhings of the sufferer, till his frame was crushed within its iron grasp;[310]—these are some of the silent horrors of those dreadful days, of which it is impossible to read, without thankfulness to Providence that our lot has been cast on times of greater charity; and without confessing that, grievous as the evil is of capricious division upon religious questions, it is far less than that of barbarous coercion to unanimity; and bad as the spirit is, wherever it exists, which would preach Christ only of envy and strife, it is after all better than that which would make a way for his reception by fire from heaven.

But though many of the reformers thus kept their opinions to themselves, or only communicated them to their confidential companions, and when the doors were shut; there were others of a more intrepid spirit, who saved the commissioners the necessity of resorting to force or fraud for their conviction by publicly contending for the faith, and even carrying the war into the enemy’s borders. A martyr of this kind was Dr. Barnes; he preached openly at Paul’s Cross, where he upheld the doctrine of justification by faith only, (a tenet that seems to have been almost as unpalatable to the Roman catholics as a renunciation of transubstantiation itself,) and challenged Gardiner to the controversy, against whom indeed this sermon was directed, in reply to one which he had delivered from the same popular pulpit shortly before. There is a passage in his discourse very expressive of the rude style of preaching which in those days prevailed, and which the friars in Italy, and probably elsewhere, have not yet entirely abandoned. Barnes calls upon Stephen Gardiner by name to answer him; alluding in “a pleasaunt allegory” (as John Fox expresses it—an opinion to which the priests in Spanish America would still subscribe) to a cock-fight, wherein he likens Gardiner to a fighting cock, and himself to another, and reproaches his antagonist with lacking good spurs, as being a garden-cock; then shifting his joke, he taxes him with being a bad gardener, as having set evil herbs in the garden of God’s Scriptures; and once more changing his weapon, he accuses him of a want of logic and grammar-rules; alleging, in reference to the act of the Six Articles, that if he had expressed himself in the schools as he had done at the Cross, he would have given him six stripes.[311] Latimer’s sermons, almost the only complete specimens we have of the pulpit oratory of that time, are full of the same familiar, not to say mean, images,—tales of Robin Hood, or of the Godwin Sands, or of an execution at Oxford, or of the woman going to church at St. Thomas of Acres, because she could not get a wink of sleep in any other place—mixed up with puns the most idle and similes the most unsavoury.[312] Two other sermons we have seen of the same date, by one Thomas Lewer, a master of St John’s College, Cambridge, preached the one at Paul’s Cross, the other before the king, and both in the year 1550, and these are not much less conversational in their tone than those of Latimer. The coarse material of hortatory theology at the Reformation and before it, imparts its character in a degree to our Homilies, which, however full of sound doctrine and wholesome advice, would often not a little shock the sense of ears polite, were they to be faithfully delivered in our churches. And later still, Fuller tells us, in his History of the University of Cambridge, of a country parson in his time who preached at St. Mary’s on the words, “God hath dealt to every one the measure of faith” (Rom. xii. 3.;) when, in a fond imitation, as he says, of Latimer’s famous card sermons, he followed out the metaphor of dealing; that men should play above-board, or avoid dissimulation; not pocket the cards, or improve their gifts; follow suit, that is, wear the surplice, and conform to ceremonies.[313] Jeremy Taylor sometimes narrowly escapes the like extravagance. South approaches it still more frequently, and almost with as little ceremony as would have been used a century earlier; and even in the majestic and sober Barrow, expressions, if not figures, occasionally startle us, as below the dignity of the pulpit and the gravity of the Christian teacher. Even he does not scruple to talk of “time rendering God’s goodness more precious, as it doth gold and wine,”—of the difficulty of curing a wounded reputation, and “spreading the plaster so far as the sore hath reached,”—of “the fox who said that the grapes were sour, because he could not reach them; and that the hare was dry meat because he could not catch it,”—of the man who would have his sickle in another’s corn, or an oar in another’s boat, being in no condition to wonder if his fingers be rapped,”—of “liberality being the most beneficial traffic that can be, seeing that it is bringing our wares to the best market, and letting out our money to the best hands; God repaying us with vast usury, an hundred to one being the rate he allows at present, and above a hundred millions to one the rate he will render hereafter, so that if we will be merchants this way, we shall be sure to thrive.”[314] Soon after this time pulpit oratory began to go upon stilts; and, becoming more remote from the conceptions and phraseology of the vulgar, lost much of its interest with them, and influence over them, and at length made way for the field preacher, who spoke to them once again, as it were, in the Hebrew tongue, to which they gave the more silence. Whilst, however, we may regret the want of the nervous asperity of style and profusion of matter of the days of Barrow, we may congratulate ourselves upon our escape from the old-wives’ tales of the days of Latimer. They had their origin in a very different state of society, and a very different condition of the church. Something must be ascribed to the general rudeness of an age when bear-baiting was the amusement which a queen provided for the foreign ambassadors, and of which herself and her court were willing spectators;—when a fool was a part of the establishment even of the most refined households, and his uncouth jokes were paid for by the year;—when the martyr in prison could in all sober sadness address words of comfort to his fellow-sufferer, “Green,” as a dainty dish for the Lord’s own tooth; or to Philpot, as “a pot filled with the most precious liquor;”—and when at the stake, not think it out of character, or out of season, to crack a jest upon his own dress or his own corpulence. Something, again, must be imputed to the circumstances under which a preacher before the Reformation, and indeed for many years subsequent to it, delivered his sermon. It was very frequently in the open air that he spake—from the steps of a cross, as at Paul’s Cross, the most famous of the day; the congregation assembling around it, and only adjourning to the “shrouds” (as some of the vaults of the church were called) when the weather was unfavourable. Latimer’s sermons before Edward VI. were preached in a garden of the palace of Westminster, the people having admission, and the king hearing them from one of his windows.[315] The effect of such an arrangement was, to divest sermons of all form; to render them vernacular and colloquial: they were, in fact, what their name indicates—not harangues, nor orations, but unwritten discourses, or at most from notes,[316] and partook of all the characteristics of ordinary discourse; the preaching from “bosom sermons,” or from writing, being considered a lifeless practice before the Reformation, and a fit subject of reproach; and the origin of it was, perhaps, no other than an apprehension of the preacher in those days of jealousy, lest he should be caught in his words, and misrepresented to those in power, which induced him to commit his thoughts to paper; or a determination of his superiors that he should be held to whatever he uttered from the pulpit, which compelled him to do so.[317] Something again, is to be referred to the connection which subsisted in Roman Catholic times between the church and the stage. The Bible histories were dramatised; a generation which had not the Scriptures to read, and could not have read them if they had, were taught by theatrical representation. It was upon this principle that the use of images was defended: they were said to be the poor man’s books; and miracle plays were actually performed in the churches. This ill-omened union, however, without exalting the theatre, debased theology, and constantly justified the apprehensions which Andrew Marvel expressed in the particular instance of Paradise Lost, lest the poet

“Should ruin (for he saw him strong)

The sacred truths to fable and old song;”—

or lest,

——“if a work so infinite be spann’d,

Jealous he was that some less skilful hand

(Such as disquiet always what is well,

And by ill imitating would excel)

Might hence presume the whole creation’s day,