Volume III Part 19 (2/2)

[Sidenote: And is burnt.]

A day at the end of May was fixed for Forest's death. Latimer was selected to preach on the occasion; and a singular letter remains from him from which I try to gather that he accepted reluctantly the ungrateful service. ”Sir,” he addressed Cromwell, ”if it be your pleasure, as it is, that I shall play the fool after my customable manner when Forest shall suffer, I would wish that my stage stood near unto Forest, for I would endeavour myself so to content the people, that therewith I might also convert Forest, G.o.d so helping, or, rather, altogether working. Wherefore, I would that he shall hear what I shall say--_si forte_. If he would yet, with his heart, return to his abjuration, I would wish his pardon. Such is my foolishness.”[363] The gleam of pity, though so faint and feeble that it seemed a thing to be ashamed of, is welcome from that hard time. The preparations were made with a horrible completeness. It was the single supremacy case which fell to the conduct of ecclesiastics; and ecclesiastics of all professions, in all ages, have been fertile in ingenious cruelty. A gallows was erected over the stake, from which the wretched victim was to be suspended in a cradle of chains. When the machinery was complete, and the chips of the idol lay ready, he was brought out and placed upon a platform. The Lord Mayor, the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, Lord Southampton, and Cromwell were present with a pardon, if at the last moment his courage should fail, and he would ask for it. The sermon began. It was of the usual kind--the pa.s.sionate language of pa.s.sionate conviction. When it was over, Latimer turned to Forest, and asked him whether he would live or die. ”I will die” was the gallant answer. ”Do your worst upon me. Seven years ago you durst not, for your life, have preached such words as these; and now, if an angel from heaven should come down and teach me any other doctrine than that which I learnt as a child, I would not believe him. Take me; cut me to pieces, joint from joint. Burn--hang--do what you will--I will be true henceforth to my faith.”[364] It was enough. He was laid upon his iron bed, and slung off into the air, and the flame was kindled. In his mortal agony he clutched at the steps of the ladder, to sway himself out of the blaze; and the pitiless chronicler, who records the scene, could see only in this last weakness an evidence of guilt. ”So impatiently,” says Hall, ”he took his death as never any man that put his trust in G.o.d.”[365]

[Sidenote: The bodies of the saints.]

Still the torrent rolled onward. Monasteries and images were gone, and fancied relics, in endless numbers. There remained the peculiar treasures of the great abbeys and cathedrals--the mortal remains of the holy men in whose memories they had been founded, who by martyrs'

deaths, or lives of superhuman loftiness, had earned the veneration of later ages. The bodies of the saints had been gathered into costly shrines, which a beautiful piety had decorated with choicest offerings.

In an age which believed, without doubt or pretence, that the body of a holy man was incorporated into the body of Christ, that the seeming dust was pure as Christ's body was pure, and would form again the living home of the spirit which had gone away but for awhile, such dust was looked upon with awe and pious fear. Sacred influences were imagined to exhale from it. It was a divine thing, blessed and giving blessing. Alas! that the n.o.blest feelings can pa.s.s so swiftly into their opposites, that reverend simplicity should become the parent of a miserable superst.i.tion! The natural instinct of veneration had ossified into idolatry, and saints' bones became charms and talismans. The saints themselves became invisible under the swathings of lies. The serpent of healing had become a Nehushtan--an accursed thing, and, with the system to which it belonged, was to pa.s.s away and come no more.

[Sidenote: Circulars for the demolition of shrines.]

The sheriffs and magistrates of the various counties received circulars from the vicegerent, directing that ”whereas prayers were offered at the shrines which were due to G.o.d only, that the honour which belonged to the Creator was by a notable superst.i.tion given to the creature, and ignorant people, enticed by the clergy, had fallen thereby into great error and idolatry,” they were to repair severally to the cathedrals, churches, or chapels in which any such shrine might be. The relics, reliquaries, gold, silver, or jewels, which they contained, were to be taken out and sent to the king; and they were to see with their own eyes the shrine itself levelled to the ground, and the pavement cleared of it.[366] The order was fulfilled with or without reluctance. Throughout England, by the opening of the year 1539, there was nothing left to tell of the presence of the saints but the names which clung to the churches which they had built, or the shadowy memories which hung about their desecrated tombs.

Only in one instance was the demolition of a shrine marked by anything peculiar.

[Sidenote: Historical aspect of the English Reformation.]

[Sidenote: Thomas a Becket.]

[Sidenote: August 18.]

[Sidenote: The historical champion of the Church. Sept. 30.]

[Sidenote: October. His shrine at Canterbury is destroyed, and his bones are burnt;]

[Sidenote: And an official narrative is published of his conduct.]

The aim from the beginning of the movement, both of the king and the parliament, had been to represent their measures not as new things, but as a rea.s.sertion of English independence, a revival of the historical policy of the English kings. From the defeat of Henry II., on the death of Becket, to the accession of the house of Lancaster, the Plantagenet princes had fought inch by inch for the recovery of the ground which had been lost. After sleeping a century and a half, the battle had recommenced; and the crown was determined to inaugurate its victories by the disgrace and destruction of the famous champion whose spirit still seemed to linger in the field. On the 18th of August Cranmer informed the vicegerent that he suspected that the blood of St. Thomas of Canterbury shown in the cathedral was an imposture, like the blood of Hales, ”a feigned thing, made of some red ochre, or such like matter.”[367] He desired that there might be an investigation, and mentioned Dr. Legh and his own chaplain as persons fitted for the conduct of it. The request appears to have been granted, and the suspicion about the blood to have been confirmed.[368] The opportunity was taken to settle accounts in full with the hero of the English Church. On the 30th of September the shrine and the relics were shown, perhaps for the last time, to Madame de Montreuil and a party of French ladies.[369] In the following month the bones of the martyr who for centuries had been venerated throughout Europe, which peers and princes had crossed the seas to look upon, which tens of thousands of pilgrims year after year for all those ages had crowded to reverence, were torn from their hallowed resting-place, and burnt to powder, and scattered to the winds. The golden plating of the shrine, the emeralds and rubies, the votive offerings of the whole Christian world, were packed in chests, and despatched to the treasury. The chiselled stone was splintered with hammers. The impressions worn upon the pavement by the millions of knees[370] which had bent in adoration there, alone remained to tell of the glory which had been. Simultaneously with the destruction of his remains, Becket's name was erased out of the service-books, the innumerable church-windows in which his history was painted were broken, the day which commemorated his martyrdom was forbidden to be observed; and in explanation of so exceptional a vehemence an official narrative was published by the government of the circ.u.mstances of his end, in which he was described as a traitor to the state, who had perished in a scuffle provoked by his own violence.[371]

[Sidenote: Agitation of Catholic Christendom.]

The executions of More and Fisher had convulsed Europe; but the second shock was felt as much more deeply than the first as the glory of the saint is above the fame of the highest of living men. The impious tyrant, it now seemed, would transfer his warfare even into heaven, and dethrone the G.o.ds. The tomb of Becket was the property of Christendom rather than of England. There was scarcely a princely or a n.o.ble family on the Continent some member of which had not at one time or other gone thither on pilgrimage, whose wealth had not contributed something to the treasure which was now seized for the royal coffers. A second act had opened in the drama--a crisis fruitful in great events at home and abroad.

[Sidenote: Anxiety in England for the king's marriage.]

[Sidenote: Charles keeps up appearances till the autumn.]

The first immediate effect was on the treaty for the king's marriage.

Notwithstanding the trifling of the commissioners in April,--notwithstanding the pacification of Nice, and the omission of the king's name among the contracting parties,--Charles succeeded in persuading Wyatt that he was as anxious as ever for the completion of the entire group of the proposed connexions; and Henry, on his part, was complacently credulous. The country was impatient to see him provided with a wife who might be the mother of a Duke of York. Day after day the council remonstrated with him on the loss of precious time;[372] and however desirable in itself the imperial alliance appeared, his subjects were more anxious that he should be rapidly married somewhere, than that even for such an object there should be longer delay. But Charles continued to give fair words; and the king, although warned, as he avowed, on all sides, to put no faith in them, refused to believe that Charles would cloud his reputation with so sustained duplicity; and in August he sent Sir Thomas Wriothesley to Flanders, to obtain, if possible, some concluding answer.

[Sidenote: October.]

[Sidenote: He grows cold.]

[Sidenote: November 20.]

[Sidenote: Wriothesley reports a hostile feeling at Brussels.]

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