PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
BLACKWOOD'S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
No. CCCCXXIV. FEBRUARY, 1851. Vol. LXIX.
LATIMER AND RIDLEY
BURNED AT THE STAKE IN OXFORD, A.D. 1555.
[The fires of Smithfield and the massacre of Bartholomew are truly events of little consequence in history, if they fail to convince us of the aggressive and unscrupulous policy of the Roman Catholic Church. The claim of the Pope, which never has undergone or can undergo any modification whatever, is nothing less than one of universal supremacy. That claim is asserted now as broadly and boldly as it was three hundred years ago; when, at the accession of Mary, Cardinal Pole was sent over as legate to England, for the reduction of that realm to the obedience of the See of Rome, and for the extirpation of heresy.
It matters not what may have been the private character of the Cardinal. He has been represented as a man of mild nature, humane disposition, and averse to the infamous cruelties which were then perpetrated, the odium of which has been commonly thrown upon Bishops Gardiner and Bonner. This much at least is plain, that, whatever may have been his opinion as to the methods which were employed for the suppression of Protestantism, he did not deem it expedient to exercise his great power in mitigating the fury or tempering the cruelty of the persecution. He was a passive witness of the enormities, and allowed the mandates of the Church to supersede the dictates of humanity and the merciful teaching of the Saviour.
The records of the reign of Mary ought, especially at the present time, to be studied by those who, in their zeal for toleration, forget that they have to contend with most bitter and uncompromising enemies. Not only the sufferings and fortitude of the martyrs, (among whom were numbered five bishops, and twenty-one clergymen of the Reformed faith of England,) but the charges on which they were condemned, and the noble testimony which they bore, will be found detailed in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments. Next to that of Archbishop Cranmer, the names of Latimer and Ridley can never be forgotten in this land, so long as the voice of Protestantism is heard against Papal superstition and supremacy. Political and ecclesiastical dominion are things inseparable from each other in the eye of Rome; and wherever she has succeeded in planting her foot, she has attempted to enforce spiritual submission, and to extinguish liberty of conscience, by the power of the secular arm. The following extract, from the work already referred to, narrates the close of the terrible tragedy which consigned two English prelates to the flames at Oxford:—