Stray Studies from England and Italy

by John Richard Greene

The bitter words must have recalled to Ales words of hardly less bitterness which he had listened to on a visit to Lambeth years before. If there was one person upon earth whom Cranmer loved it was Anne Boleyn. When the royal summons had called him to Lambeth to wait till the time arrived when his part was to be played in the murder of the Queen his affection found vent in words of a strange pathos. "I loved her not a little," he wrote to Henry in fruitless intercession, "for the love which I judged her to bear towards God and His Gospel. I was most bound to her of all creatures living." So he wrote, knowing there was wrong to be done towards the woman he loved, wrong which he alone could do, and knowing too that he would stoop to do it. The large garden stretched away northward from his house then as now, but then thick, no doubt, with the elm rows that vanished some thirty years back as the great city's smoke drifted over them, and herein the early morning (it was but four o'clock) Ales, who had found sleep impossible and had crossed the river in a boat to seek calm in the fresh air and stillness of the place, met Cranmer walking. On the preceding day Anne had gone through the mockery of her trial, but to the world outside the little circle of the court nothing was known, and it was in utter unconsciousness of this that Ales told the Archbishop he had been roused by a dream of her beheading. Cranmer was startled out of his usual calm. "Don't you know then," he asked after a moment's silence, "what is to happen to-day?" Then raising his eyes to heaven he added with a wild burst of tears, "She who has been Queen of England on earth will this day become a queen in heaven!" Some hours afterwards the Queen stood before him as her judge, and passed back to the Tower and the block.

Cranmer was freed by his master's death from this helplessness of terror only to lend himself to the injustice of the meaner masters who followed Henry. Their enemies were at least his own, and, kindly as from many instances we know his nature to have been, its very weakness made him spring eagerly in such an hour of deliverance at the opportunity of showing his power over those who so long held him down. On charges of the most frivolous nature Bishop Gardiner and Bishop Bonner were summoned before the Archbishop at Lambeth, deposed from their sees, and flung into prison. It is only the record of their trials, as it still stands in the pages of Foxe, that can enable us to understand the violence of the reaction under Mary. Gardiner with characteristic dignity confined himself to simply refuting the charges brought against him and protesting against the injustice of the court. But the coarser, bull-dog nature of Bonner turned to bay. By gestures, by scoff, by plain English speech he declared again and again his sense of the wrong that was being done. A temper naturally fearless was stung to bravado by the sense of oppression. As he entered the hall at Lambeth he passed straight by the Archbishop and his fellow-commissioners, still keeping his cap on his head as though in unconsciousness of his presence. One who stood by plucked his sleeve, and bade him do reverence. Bonner turned laughingly round and addressed the Archbishop, "What, my Lord, are you here? By my troth I saw you not." "It was because you would not see," Cranmer sternly rejoined. "Well," replied Bonner, "you sent for me: have you anything to say to me?" The charge was read. The Bishop had been commanded in a sermon to acknowledge that the acts of the King during his minority were as valid as if he were of full age. The command was flatly in contradiction with existing statutes, and the Bishop had no doubt disobeyed it.

But Bonner was too adroit to make a direct answer to the charge. He gained time by turning suddenly on the question of the Sacrament; he cited the appearance of Hooper as a witness in proof that it was really on this point that he was brought to trial, and he at last succeeded in arousing Cranmer's love of controversy. A reply of almost incredible profanity from the Archbishop, if we may trust Foxe's report, rewarded Bonner's perseverance in demanding a statement of his belief. The Bishop was not slow to accept the advantage he had gained. "I am right sorry to hear your Grace speak these words," he said, with a grave shake of his head, and Cranmer was warned by the silence and earnest looks of his fellow-commissioners to break up the session.

Three days after, the addition of Sir Thomas Smith, the bitterest of Reformers, to the number of his assessors emboldened Cranmer to summon Bonner again. The court met in the chapel, and the Bishop was a second time commanded to reply to the charge. He objected now to the admission of the evidence of either Hooper or Latimer on the ground of their notorious heresy. "If that be the law," Cranmer replied hastily, "it is no godly law." "It is the King's law used in the realm," Bonner bluntly rejoined. Again Cranmer's temper gave his opponent the advantage. "Ye be too full of your law," replied the angry Primate; "I would wish you had less knowledge in that law and more knowledge in God's law and of your duty!" "Well," answered the Bishop with admirable self-command, "seeing your Grace falleth to wishing, I can also wish many things to be in your person." It was in vain that Smith strove to brush away his objections with a contemptuous "You do use us thus to be seen a common lawyer." "Indeed," the veteran canonist coolly retorted; "I knew the law ere you could read it!" There was nothing for it but a second adjournment of the court. At its next session all parties met in hotter mood. The Bishop pulled Hooper's books on the Sacrament from his sleeve and began reading them aloud. Latimer lifted up his head, as he alleged, to still the excitement of the people who crowded the chapel; as Bonner believed, to arouse a tumult. Cries of "Yea, yea," "Nay, nay," interrupted Bonner's reading. The Bishop turned round and faced the throng, crying out in humorous defiance, "Ah! Woodcocks! Woodcocks!" The taunt was met with universal laughter, but the scene had roused Cranmer's temper as well as his own. The Primate addressed himself to the people, protesting that Bonner was called in question for no such matter as he would persuade them. Again Bonner turned to the people with "Well now, hear what the Bishop of London saith for his part," but the commissioners forbade him to speak more. The court was at last recalled to a quieter tone, but contests of this sort still varied the proceedings as they dragged their slow length along in chapel and hall.

At last Cranmer resolved to make an end. Had he been sitting simply as Archbishop, he reminded Bonner sharply, he might have expected more reverence and obedience from his suffragan. As it was, "at every time that we have sitten in commission you have used such unseemly fashions, without all reverence or obedience, giving taunts and checks as well unto us, with divers of the servants and chaplains, as also unto certain of the ancientest that be here, calling them fools and daws, with such like, that you have given to the multitude an intolerable example of disobedience." "You show yourself to be a meet judge!" was Bonner's scornful reply. It was clear he had no purpose to yield. The real matter at issue, he contended, was the doctrine of the Sacrament, and from the very courtroom he sent his orders to the Lord Mayor to see that no heretical opinions were preached before him. At the close of the trial he once more addressed Cranmer in solemn protest against his breach of the law. "I am sorry" he said "that I being a bishop am thus handled at your Grace's hand, but more sorry that you suffer abominable heretics to practise as they do in London and elsewhere—answer it as you can!" Then bandying taunts with the throng, the indomitable bishop followed the officers to the Marshalsea.

From the degradation of scenes like these Lambeth was raised to new dignity and self-respect by the primacy of Parker. His consecration in the same chapel which had witnessed Wyclif's confession was the triumph of Wyclif's principles, the close of that storm of the Reformation, of that Catholic reaction, which ceased alike with the accession of Elizabeth. But it was far more than this. It was in itself a symbol of the Church of England as it stands to-day, of that quiet illogical compromise between past and present which Parker and the Queen were to mould into so lasting a shape. Every circumstance of the service marked the strange contrasts which were to be blended in the future of the English Church. The zeal of Edward the Sixth's day had dashed the stained glass from the casements of Lambeth; the zeal of Elizabeth's day was soon to move, if it had not already moved, the holy table into the midst of the chapel. But a reaction from the mere iconoclasm and bareness of Calvinistic Protestantism showed itself in the tapestries hung for the day along the eastern wall and in the rich carpet which was spread over the floor. The old legal forms, the old Ordination Service reappeared, but in their midst came the new spirit of the Reformation, the oath of submission to the royal supremacy, the solemn gift no longer of the pastoral staff but of the Bible. The very dress of the four consecrating bishops showed the same confusion. Barlow, with the Archbishop's chaplains who assisted him in the office of the Communion, wore the silken copes of the older service; Scory and Hodgskins the fair linen surplice of the new. Yet more noteworthy was the aged figure of Coverdale, "Father Coverdale," as men used affectionately to call him, the well-known translator of the Bible, whose life had been so hardly wrung by royal intercession from Mary. Rejecting the very surplice as Popery, in his long Genevan cloak he marks the opening of the Puritan controversy over vestments which was to rage so fiercely from Parker on to Laud.

The library of Parker, though no longer within its walls, is memorable in the literary history of Lambeth as the first of a series of such collections made after his time by each successive Archbishop. Many of these indeed have passed away. The manuscripts of Parker form the glory of Corpus College, Cambridge; the Oriental collections of Laud are among the most precious treasures of the Bodleian. In puerile revenge for his fall Sancroft withdrew his books from Lambeth, and bequeathed them to Emmanuel College. The library which the munificence of Tenison bequeathed to his old parish of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields has been dispersed by a shameless act of Vandalism within our own memories. An old man's caprice deposited the papers of Archbishop Wake at Christ Church. But the treasures thus dispersed are, with the exception of the Parker MSS., far surpassed by the collections that remain. I cannot attempt here to enter with any detail into the nature of the history of the archiepiscopal library. It owes its origin to Archbishop Bancroft, it was largely supplemented by his successor Abbot, and still more largely after a long interval by the book-loving Primates Tenison and Secker. The library of 30,000 volumes still mainly consists of these collections, though it has been augmented by the smaller bequests of Sheldon and Cornwallis and in a far less degree by those of later Archbishops. One has at any rate the repute of having augmented it during his primacy simply by a treatise on gout and a book about butterflies. Of the 1,200 volumes of manuscripts and papers, 500 are due to Bancroft and Abbot, the rest mainly to Tenison, who purchased the Carew Papers, the collections of Wharton, and the Codices that bear his name. If Wake left his papers to Christ Church in dread of the succession of Bishop Gibson the bequest of Gibson's own papers more than made up the loss. The most valuable addition since Gibson's day has been that of the Greek Codices collected in the East at the opening of this century by Dr. Carlyle.

The importance of Parker's primacy however was political and ecclesiastical rather than literary. The first Protestant Archbishop was not the man to stoop to servility like Cranmer, nor was Elizabeth the queen to ask such stooping. But the concordat which the two tacitly arranged, the policy so resolutely clung to in spite of Burleigh and Walsingham, was perhaps a greater curse both to nation and to Church than the meanness of Cranmer. The steady support given by the Crown to the new ecclesiastical organization which Parker moulded into shape was repaid by the conversion of every clergyman into the advocate of irresponsible government. It was as if publicly to ratify this concordat that the Queen came in person to Lambeth in the spring of 1573. On either side the chapel in that day stood a greater and lesser cloister. The last, which lay on the garden side, was swept away by the demolitions of the eighteenth century, the first still fills the space between chapel and hall but has been converted into domestic offices by the "restoration" of our own. Even Mr. Blore might have spared the cloisters from whose gallery on the side towards the Thames Elizabeth looked down on the gay line of nobles and courtiers who leaned from the barred windows beneath and on the crowd of meaner subjects who filled the court, while she listened to Dr. Pearce as he preached from a pulpit set by the well in the midst. At its close the Queen passed to dinner in the Archbishop's chamber of presence, while the noble throng beneath followed Burleigh and Lord Howard to the hall whose oaken roof told freshly of Parker's hand. At four the short visit was over, and Elizabeth again on her way to Greenwich. But, short as it was, it marked the conclusion of a new alliance between Church and State out of which the Ecclesiastical Commission was to spring.

Such an alliance would have been deadly for English religion as for English liberty had not its strength been broken by the obstinate resistance in wise as well as unwise ways of the Puritan party. There are few more interesting memorials of the struggle which followed than the 'Martin Marprelate' tracts which still remain in the collection at Lambeth, significantly scored in all their more virulent passages by the red pencil of Archbishop Whitgift. But the story of that controversy cannot be told here, though it was at Lambeth, as the seat of the High Commission, that it was really fought out. More and more it parted all who clung to liberty from the Church, and knit the episcopate in a closer alliance with the Crown. When Elizabeth set Parker at the head of the new Ecclesiastical Commission, half the work of the Reformation was in fact undone.

Under Laud this great engine of ecclesiastical tyranny was perverted to the uses of civil tyranny of the vilest kind. Under Laud the clerical invectives of a Martin Marprelate deepened into the national fury of 'Canterburie's Doom.' With this political aspect of his life we have not now to deal; what Lambeth Chapel brings out with singular vividness is the strange audacity with which the Archbishop threw himself across the strongest religious sentiments of his time. Men noted as a fatal omen the accident that marked his first entry into Lambeth; the overladen ferry-boat upset in the crossing, and though horses and servants were saved the Primate's coach remained at the bottom of the Thames. But no omen brought hesitation to that bold, narrow mind. His first action, he tells us himself, was the restoration of the chapel, and, as Laud managed it, restoration was the simple undoing of all that the Reformation had done.