Volume II Part 5 (2/2)
The weight of guilt in this instance presses essentially on Stokesley; yet a portion of the blame must be borne also by the chancellor, who first placed Philips in Stokesley's hands; who took part in the illegal private examinations, and who could not have been ignorant of the prisoner's ultimate fate. If, however, it be thought unjust to charge a good man's memory with an offence in which his part was only secondary, the following iniquity was wholly and exclusively his own. I relate the story without comment in the address of the injured person to More's successor.[97]
[Sidenote: Case of John Field.]
”_To the Right Hon. the Lord Chancellor of England (Sir T. Audeley) and other of the King's Council._
[Sidenote: Illegally imprisoned by More.]
”In most humble wise showeth unto your goodness your poor bedeman John Field, how that the next morrow upon twelfth day,[98] in the twenty-first year of our sovereign lord the King's Highness, Sir Thomas More, Knight, then being Lord Chancellor of England, did send certain of his servants, and caused your said bedeman, with certain others, to be brought to his place at Chelsea, and there kept him (after what manner and fas.h.i.+on it were now long to tell), by the s.p.a.ce of eighteen days;[99] and then set him at liberty, binding him to appear before him again the eighth day following in the Star Chamber, which was Candlemas eve; at which day your said bedeman appeared, and was then sent to the Fleet, where he continued until Palm Sunday two years after, [in violation of both the statutes,] kept so close the first quarter that his keeper only might visit him; and always after closed up with those that were handled most straitly; often searched, sometimes even at midnight; besides snares and traps laid to take him in. Betwixt Michaelmas and Allhalloween tide next after his coming to prison there was taken from your bedeman a Greek vocabulary, price five s.h.i.+llings; Saint Cyprian's works, with a book of the same Sir Thomas More's making, named the _Supplication of Souls_. For what cause it was done he committeth to the judgment of G.o.d, that seeth the souls of all persons.
The said Palm Sunday, which was also our Lady's day, towards night there came two officers of the Fleet, named George Porter and John Butler, and took your bedeman into a ward alone, and there, after long searching, found his purse hanging at his girdle; which they took, and shook out the money to the sum of ten s.h.i.+llings, which was sent him to buy such necessaries as he lacked, and delivered him again his purse, well and truly keeping the money to themselves, as they said for their fees; and forthwith carried him from the Fleet (where he lost such poor bedding as he then had, and could never since get it), and delivered him to the Marshalsea, under our gracious sovereign's commandment and Sir Thomas More's. When the Sunday before the Rogation week following, your bedeman fell sick; and the Whitsun Monday was carried out on four men's backs, and delivered to his friends to be recovered if it so pleased G.o.d. At which time the keeper took for your bedeman's fees other ten s.h.i.+llings, when four s.h.i.+llings should have sufficed if he had been delivered in good health.
”Within three weeks it pleased G.o.d to set your bedeman on his feet, so that he might walk abroad. Whereof when Sir Thomas More heard (who went out of his chancellors.h.i.+p about the time your bedeman was carried out of prison), although he had neither word nor deed which he could ever truly lay to your bedeman's charge, yet made he such means by the Bishops of Winchester and London, as your bedeman heard say, to the Hon. Lord Thomas Duke of Norfolk, that he gave new commandment to the keeper of the Marshalsea to attach again your said bedeman; which thing was speedily done the Sunday three weeks after his deliverance. And so he continued in prison again until Saint Lawrence tide following; at which time money was given to the keeper, and some things he took which were not given, and then was your bedeman re-delivered through the king's goodness, under sureties bound in a certain sum, that he should appear the first day of the next term following, and then day by day until his dismission. And so hath your bedeman been at liberty now twelve months waiting daily from term to term, and nothing laid to his charge as before.
”Wherefore, the premises tenderly considered, and also your said bedeman's great poverty, he most humbly beseecheth your goodness that he may now be clearly discharged; and if books, money, or other things seem to be taken or kept from him otherwise than justice would, eftsoons he beseecheth you that ye will command it to be restored.
”As for his long imprisonment, with other griefs thereto appertaining, he looketh not to have recompense of man; but committeth his whole cause to G.o.d, to whom your bedeman shall daily pray, according as he is bound, that ye may so order and govern the realm that it may be to the honour of G.o.d and your heavenly and everlasting reward.”
I do not find the result of this pet.i.tion, but as it appeared that Henry had interested himself in the story, it is likely to have been successful. We can form but an imperfect judgment on the merits of the case, for we have only the sufferer's _ex parte_ complaint, and More might probably have been able to make some counter-statement. But the illegal imprisonment cannot be explained away, and cannot be palliated; and when a judge permits himself to commit an act of arbitrary tyranny, we argue from the known to the unknown, and refuse reasonably to give him credit for equity where he was so little careful of law.
[Sidenote: Contrast between Wolsey and More in the treatment of heretics.]
[Sidenote: The Smithfield fires recommence.]
[Sidenote: Troubles of Bilney.]
Yet a few years of misery in a prison was but an insignificant misfortune when compared with the fate under which so many other poor men were at this time overwhelmed. Under Wolsey's chancellors.h.i.+p the stake had been comparatively idle; he possessed a remarkable power of making recantation easy; and there is, I believe, no instance in which an accused heretic was brought under his immediate cognizance, where he failed to arrange some terms by which submission was made possible. With Wolsey heresy was an error--with More it was a crime. Soon after the seals changed hands the Smithfield fires recommenced; and, the chancellor acting in concert with them, the bishops resolved to obliterate, in these edifying spectacles, the recollection of their general infirmities. The crime of the offenders varied,--sometimes it was a denial of the corporal presence, more often it was a reflection too loud to be endured on the character and habits of the clergy; but whatever it was, the alternative lay only between abjuration humiliating as ingenuity could make it, or a dreadful death. The hearts of many failed them in the trial, and of all the confessors those perhaps do not deserve the least compa.s.sion whose weakness betrayed them, who sank and died broken-hearted. Of these silent sufferers history knows nothing. A few, unable to endure the misery of having, as they supposed, denied their Saviour, returned to the danger from which they had fled, and washed out their fall in martyrdom. Latimer has told us the story of his friend Bilney--little Bilney, or Saint Bilney,[100] as he calls him, his companion at Cambridge, to whom he owed his own conversion. Bilney, after escaping through Wolsey's hands in 1527, was again cited in 1529 before the Bishop of London. Three times he refused to recant. He was offered a fourth and last chance. The temptation was too strong, and he fell. For two years he was hopelessly miserable; at length his braver nature prevailed. There was no pardon for a relapsed heretic, and if he was again in the bishop's hands he knew well the fate which awaited him.
[Sidenote: He ”goes up to Jerusalem.”]
He told his friends, in language touchingly significant, that ”he would go up to Jerusalem”; and began to preach in the fields. The journey which he had undertaken was not to be a long one. He was heard to say in a sermon, that of his personal knowledge certain things which had been offered in pilgrimage had been given to abandoned women. The priests, he affirmed, ”take away the offerings, and hang them about their women's necks; and after that they take them off the women, if they please them not, and hang them again upon the images.”[101] This was Bilney's heresy, or formed the ground of his arrest; he was orthodox on the ma.s.s, and also on the power of the keys; but the secrets of the sacred order were not to be betrayed with impunity. He was seized, and hurried before the Bishop of Norwich; and being found heterodox on the papacy and the mediation of the saints, by the Bishop of Norwich he was sent to the stake.
[Sidenote: James Bainham,]
Another instance of recovered courage, and of martyrdom consequent upon it, is that of James Bainham, a barrister of the Middle Temple. This story is noticeable from a very curious circ.u.mstance connected with it.
[Sidenote: The lat.i.tudinarian martyr.]
[Sidenote: On his first trial he recants.]
Bainham had challenged suspicion by marrying the widow of Simon Fish, the author of the famous _Beggars' Pet.i.tion_, who had died in 1528; and, soon after his marriage, was challenged to give an account of his faith. He was charged with denying transubstantiation, with questioning the value of the confessional, and the power of the keys; and the absence of authoritative Protestant dogma had left his mind free to expand to a yet larger belief. He had ventured to a.s.sert, that ”if a Turk, a Jew, or a Saracen do trust in G.o.d and keep his law, he is a good Christian man,”[102]--a conception of Christianity, a conception of Protestantism, which we but feebly dare to whisper even at the present day. The proceedings against him commenced with a demand that he should give up his books, and also the names of other barristers with whom he was suspected to have held intercourse. He refused; and in consequence his wife was imprisoned, and he himself was racked in the Tower by order of Sir Thomas More. Enfeebled by suffering, he was then brought before Stokesley, and terrified by the cold merciless eyes of his judge, he gave way, not about his friends, but about himself: he abjured, and was dismissed heartbroken. This was on the seventeenth of February. He was only able to endure his wretchedness for a month. At the end of it, he appeared at a secret meeting of the Christian Brothers, in ”a warehouse in Bow Lane,” where he asked forgiveness of G.o.d and all the world for what he had done; and then went out to take again upon his shoulders the heavy burden of the cross.
[Sidenote: He recovers his courage,]
The following Sunday, at the church of St. Augustine, he rose in his seat with the fatal English Testament in his hand, and ”declared openly, before all the people, with weeping tears, that he had denied G.o.d,”
praying them all to forgive him, and beware of his weakness; ”for if I should not return to the truth,” he said, ”this Word of G.o.d would d.a.m.n me, body and soul, at the day of judgment.” And then he prayed ”everybody rather to die than to do as he did, for he would not feel such a h.e.l.l again as he did feel for all the world's good.”[103]
[Sidenote: And is arrested again.]
Of course but one event was to be looked for: he knew it, and himself wrote to the bishop, telling him what he had done. No mercy was possible: he looked for none, and he found none.
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