# Church and State under the Tudors/Chapter 2

CHAPTER II
INTRODUCTION (continued)
We may take the cessation of the anarchy which subsisted under Stephen as the point at which to commence our preliminary sketch of the relations of Church and State in England previously to the Tudor times. We cannot but observe that the power of the Church had in the interval since Henry I.'s time largely increased, for we find that, as Mr. Green points out, what Henry II. endeavoured to do in the Constitutions of Clarendon, was little else than to restore the system of William the Conqueror; but that, though he was a strong man, he was unable to accomplish it successfully.
From his time on we find three contending parties in the State—the king, the baronage, and the Church, and somewhat later a fourth, viz. the people, gradually emerging into importance. The last of these, indeed, did not play any great part until the reign of Edward I., from which time, first as represented in Parliament, and afterwards on more than one occasion by insurrection, the people rose gradually into the position of a power which had to be reckoned with, and in the reign of Edward III. and Richard II. they became for a time very formidable. During the interval, the barons and the Church had between them acted as checks upon the power of the Crown, but each of the three had varied in their relations to one another; each two making ​common cause against the third as their own interests from time to time persuaded them. Then followed the long- agony of the wars of the Roses, and when they were ended a vastly different state of affairs had developed itself. The baronage had almost burnt itself out; not only had it lost its greatest men, but constant battles, defeats, attainders, exiles, and executions had utterly extinguished some of its most powerful families; above all, it had lost its character, and with it its power of revival. The great barons, demoralised by the French wars, had become marauders and mercenaries on a grand scale, more greedy of wealth than of honour, more anxious to increase their own possessions than to do justice or defend right, whether their own or other people's.
The fortunes of the Church, as the subject with which I am more immediately concerned, require more minute examination. Its condition underwent great variation during the long period before us. Its power was somewhat diminished by the end of it, and was soon to undergo a vastly greater diminution; but its decline was not steady or regular, and it is far from being an easy matter to trace the vicissitudes which it underwent, since not only did it ally itself, as we have said, now with one and now with another of the contending parties in the State and outside of it, but it was all the time more or less divided against itself, although its divisions could often suddenly heal up for the purpose of presenting a solid front to a common enemy. It had also always a foreign element in its composition, arising from its intimate relations with the Papacy, the number of foreign ecclesiastics in official positions in England, and from the constitution of the ​monastic orders, which belonged, as already noticed, to all countries alike.
Almost at the beginning of the period with which we are concerned this division became visible. At the very time when Becket was contending with his sovereign almost on equal terms, Walter de Map, himself a churchman, was working up his portrait, or rather his caricature, of the churchmen of his day in his character of Bishop Golias. Nevertheless, we must remember that it was Becket and not Walter de Map who was the representative churchman of the time. Walter was but the clever literary semi-professional man of the world—a sort of twelfth-century 'Saturday Reviewer,' whose churchmanship just supplied him with enough knowledge ab intra to make him a pungent critic, but whose point of view was not that of the man who made history, but of the clever, somewhat cynical bystander; and his pictures those, not of the great portrait-painter, but of the great caricaturist of his day. In those days Church and Crown fought each ' for his own hand,' and, as I have said, almost on equal terms. They sought the alliance, one of the Pope, the other of the baronage; but while the one sought the aid of the Pope as a vassal that of his lord, the other, not always with success, claimed the assistance of the barons as a lord commanding his vassals, and both alike made but little account of the people.
What we are to trace in this chapter is not alone a struggle between the Pope and the Crown, though this is constantly recurring, but there are, besides these two the barons, the clergy, and the people, all more or less parties to the struggle, and shifting in their alliances between the one side and the other as their particular interests at the time persuade them, and the perplexity ​of the situation is still further increased by the division of the Church against itself to which I have just referred—the bishops, the monks, and the secular clergy, and from Henry III.'s reign also the friars—all in a greater or lesser degree jealous of one another, and all ready to enter into a temporary alliance with any of the contending parties, whenever by so doing they could obtain an advantage against one or another of their rivals.
The history of the Church, whether as a whole or in England, is one of much complication and difficulty, and is rendered all the more so by the fact that most of those who have written it, have written party pamphlets in the guise of history. The inordinate power which lay in the hands of the clergy during the middle ages, and which had reached its highest point in this country in the very period with which we are now dealing, arose, no doubt, directly or indirectly from three sources, viz.: (1) the supernatural powers with which they were believed to be invested, and which all the recent developments of the Roman faith had tended to increase; (2) the monopoly which they possessed not only of all the learning (in the modern sense of the word) which then existed in the world, but even of those mere rudiments of knowledge, the tools for the acquirement of learning, which we now understand by the term elementary education; and (3) the vows of the monks and the enforced celibacy of the seculars, which at once marked them out as separate from the rest of mankind and welded them together into a caste by themselves. The first of these was an abundant source of wealth; the second was a direct source of power; and the third, while it did not secure them from internal divisions, gave class interests and esprit de corps, and so made their wealth and their power dangerous to ​the State. To these sources of power and influence another has yet to be added. The power of the Papacy was the band which bound together the bundle of sticks, that is to say, which sufficed for a long time to outweigh all the jealousies between regulars and seculars, between monks and friars, between dignified and lower clergy, and to bind the whole sacerdotal order into one vast army, with the Pope for its emperor and generalissimo. That army, extending into and quartered in every civilised country in the world, was at all times ready to obey orders from headquarters, and though bound by ties of natural feeling and considerations of self-preservation, to keep some sort of terms with the civil government of each of them, yet was ready, always in idea, and very commonly also in practice, to sacrifice those feelings and considerations to the supposed higher law imposed upon them by the Church.
The ideal of the Papacy was perhaps the noblest which has ever entered into the heart of man to conceive. According to it, the Pope was to be the High Priest of God and Vicar of Christ, higher than the kings of the earth. He was to sit above the kings of the earth, surrounded by an atmosphere of tranquillity and holiness, and thence was to act as their visitor, moderator, and peacemaker, swayed by no meaner consideration than the desire to carry out the very law of Christ and the spirit of His Gospel, and thus to make in very deed of the kingdoms of the earth the kingdom of God and His Christ. The contrast presented to this lofty ideal by the spectacle displayed to the world in the courts of the Borgias and the Medici—the swinish sensuality of Alexander VI., the all but undisguised paganism of Leo X., the cowardly and pettifogging politics and unabashed lying of ​Clement VII.—may suffice to make us wonder that the reaction of the Reformation was not far more sweeping than was actually the case, unless, indeed, we are prepared to re-echo the sentiments of Boccaccio's Abraham. Nevertheless the idea was not without its value. It held its ground, no doubt, more easily in various countries in proportion to their remoteness from the monstrous reality, but it served for many generations to nourish the loyalty of innocent and guileless souls. Just as in our own time we have heard of Irish peasants sending hard-earned Peter's-pence to Rome, in the honest hope of mitigating the rigour of the imprisonment which they were taught that Pio Nono was suffering at the hands of the godless Italian Government, so in the middle age, and even up to the very end of it, to all those quiet, honest, homespun souls who have through all our history made up the staple of the English nation, and constituted the very salt and savour of English religion, the Pope remained as at first, the symbol of all that was at once holy and venerable and orthodox, and the rumours of the actuality of the Curia and court of Rome, which could not but reach their ears from time to time, were put aside as the suggestions of mere wicked malice, or at best as the wild exaggerations of disappointed suitors or angry and unscrupulous partisans.
The development of the papal power as a whole from the stage of that of the great spiritual adviser of kings—confessorial power as I may call it—through that of an authoritative visitor, up to the fully developed supremacy which we find claimed and exercised by Gregory VII. or Innocent III., it is beyond my province to trace. It is sufficient for me to show that there is no ground for the assertion, that when so established it ​was less in England than elsewhere in Europe. Dean Milman says on this point, 'With all the Teutonic part of Latin Christendom the belief in the supremacy of the Pope was coeval with their Christianity. It was an article of their original creed as much as the Redemption; their apostles were commissioned by the Pope. To him they humbly looked for instruction and encouragement, even almost for permission to advance upon their sacred adventure. Augustine, Boniface, Ebbo, Anschar, had been papal missionaries.' Almost 100 years before Augustine, Pope Innocent I. had put forward a claim to the filial obedience of the Churches planted by Peter and his successors, and in 347 A.D. the Council of Sardica had countenanced the metropolitan claims of Rome. Thus the Church in England was in every sense a daughter of the Church of Rome, or rather was an extension into England of the one great Catholic Church of the West whose metropolitan seat was Rome. And the papal power remained in England, in varying degrees no doubt, but continuously, until it was abruptly ended by the anti-papal legislation of Henry VIII.
In the century following Augustine, we find Wilfrid obtaining his episcopal authority from Rome, and Theodorus sent direct from Rome to Canterbury. In the seventh century, Bishop Stubbs tells us, Augustine's succession had almost, if not entirely, died out; and towards the end of the eighth, King Offa set up Lichfield as an archbishopric by papal authorisation, obtained, as he suggests, by a 'liberal tribute;' and from that time, or even earlier, until the 25th of Henry VIII. Peter's-pence continued to be paid to Rome. And so we ​might go on tracing a constant connection between the Church in England and Rome, and a constant dependence of the former upon the latter through the intervening times, through the era of Dunstan and that of Edward the Confessor down to the Conquest, and from the Conquest to the times with which we are more immediately concerned, and with one only result, that, though not without checks depending upon the personal characters of individual popes or kings, or the political circumstances of the time, the connection becomes closer and the dependence more plainly visible, until we arrive at that remarkable period when John became a vassal of the Holy See and held his kingdom of Innocent III.
From Innocent III. downwards until we come to the age of the Reformation itself, there is not the slightest ground for maintaining that the Church in England was less papal than elsewhere in Europe. It might even be contended with some show of reason that it was more so. Milman quotes as a common saying in the reign of Henry III. that 'England was the Pope's farm.'
The papal character of the Church in England in the century immediately preceding the Reformation is admitted even by Dean Hook, who asserts, however, that up to the pontificate of Martin V. (1417) it had maintained its independence, and had subsisted under a sort of royal supremacy differing little from that established, or, as he would rather say, re-established under Henry VIII. There is no doubt, indeed, that when the papal power revived under Martin V. its renewed vigour was felt in England as well as elsewhere; ​but the theory of its previous independence may well be called in question. It seems to rest partly upon the long series of antipapal enactments which extended from the 35th of Edward I. to the 9th of Henry IV., and partly upon the weak and degenerate condition of the papacy during the Avignon 'captivity' and the subsequent schism. Of the latter it may at once be said that it is exactly an instance of what I have stated above, viz, of the variation which took place in the stress of papal power in all ages in direct ratio with the capacity and vigour of the individual Pope for the time being, and in inverse ratio to that of the King, and that it affected other countries equally with England. It is further to be remarked that, as Professor Creighton well observes, the Popes at Avignon were partisans, if not dependants, of France; hence during Edward III.'s wars the feeling against them in England, With regard to the antipapal statutes, there is somewhat more to be said.
1. The period during which they were placed upon the statute book coincides almost exactly with the period of general papal depression to which I have just referred.
2. They were in a great measure the mere counters which the King of England used in playing his game for power with the barons, the clergy, or the people, or any of these who happened for the moment to be in alliance.
3. They were constantly broken, and as constantly ​re-enacted, and mostly accompanied with a pardon for the offenders against them in times past, or with provisoes for rendering them dispensable by the King at his pleasure; and, as a fact, they were used or disused in a perfectly arbitrary fashion.
There were thus causes, both general throughout Christendom and others specially appertaining to England, why the papal power should have reached its lowest point during this period.
It would, nevertheless, be a great mistake to suppose that it was small even then. To give but a few instances of what the popes could do in England, and of what English kings could admit that they could do. Henry III., on one occasion, when in want of money, told his Parliament, October 13, 1252, that the Pope had given him an entire tenth of the revenues of the Church of England. Again, years later, the nuncio Raymond raised a tenth for the purpose of a crusade. In Edward I.'s time, Peckham, Archbishop of Canterbury, and William de Wickwar, Archbishop of York, were both appointed by the Pope on his own authority, and the former openly declared that, whatever oaths he had taken, he should feel himself absolved from them if they interfered with his duty to the Pope. Yet, of all the self-relying and independent monarchs who ever reigned in England, Edward I. stands foremost, and Professor Creighton even says that it was under his wise government and patriotic care that ' the spirit of national resistance to the claims of the Papacy to exercise supremacy in temporal matters was first developed.' 'If they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?'
​Dean Hook, whose thorough English honesty and candour is constantly making wild work with his preconceived theory of the Church of England, remarks in regard to another prelate of the same reign. Archbishop Winchelsey, that 'he had only the one object, of introducing a novel assumption of papal power which would have reduced the country to a mere province of Rome.' He makes a very similar remark concerning each of the three immediate predecessors of Winchelsey, viz. Archbishops Peckham, Kilwardly, and Boniface, and accounts for the alleged fact by two of them being friars and the third a Savoyard. Winchelsey was none of these, but an Englishman and a secular; and yet Hook constantly speaks of the English bishops as being opposed to the claims of Rome.
Coming now to the reign of Edward II., we find that king actually applying to the Pope, Clement V., to annul the election by the Chapter of Canterbury of Cobham as archbishop, and to provide for the see by nominating Walter Reynolds, the King's own candidate—a proceeding which affords a good example of the mode in which the kings occasionally allied themselves with the Pope, in order to suppress any attempt at independence on the part of the body with whom the election of a bishop nominally lay. In the same reign also, in 1319, two nominations were made to the vacant see of Winchester—one by the King, and another by the Chapter. The dispute was referred to the Pope, John XXII., who rejected both candidates and nominated his own nuncio. The Archbishop sided with the King, and refused to consecrate the Pope's nominee. In the end, however, he had to yield, and permitted his consecration to be performed by the Bishop of London.
​The reign of Edward III. is remarkable in many ways in connection with the history of the Church. It was, from the causes already specified, a time of the deepest depression of the papal power; and there were especial causes, as we have seen, why greater hostility should be felt towards it in England than elsewhere. We might therefore expect to find it of very slight account in England. Yet even now, the facts with which we meet are hardly of a kind to justify such an expectation. Throughout the reign the bishops were almost all appointed by papal provision, and though in the latter half of the reign several laws were enacted intended to act in restraint of the Pope's power, yet, as we shall shortly see, the King himself was the first to infringe them.
The period at which we are now arrived is one of very great importance in the history of the Church in England. From the middle of Edward III.'s reign to the close of his successor's, a space of about sixty years, was the time when the papal power in England was subject to more depression and opposition than at any other period between the Conquest and the Reformation. It saw by far the greater part of that long series of antipapal legislation which looked so formidable but effected so little, until, long after it had fallen practically out of use, and was almost forgotten, Henry VIII. suddenly revived it to suit his own purposes, and Chapuys wrote of it to his master that it was a 'law no person in England can understand, and its interpretation lies solely in the King's head, who amplifies it and declares it at his pleasure, making it apply to any case he pleases.' It witnessed also the rise of Wycliffe and the Lollards, that premature birth of ​Protestantism which smouldered on for more than a century, but never obtained the upper hand, and seems to have been almost extinct before the Reformation came. It witnessed also a vast rise in importance of the common people, and last, not least, the first preaching in England of those very socialistic doctrines, which, after a lapse of five centuries, are again making themselves heard among us in forms as crude and impracticable as when John Ball preached them.
The Statutes of Provisors were passed in the 25th and 27th years of Edward III., yet we find this very king on the death of Archbishop Stratford applying to Pope Clement VI. to supersede the election of Bradwardine to the archbishopric and appoint John de Ufford by provision. On Bradwardine's death, almost immediately afterwards, the Pope inserted in the bull appointing Simon Islip his successor the words, 'Per provisionem apostolicam spretâ electione facta de eo.' This was but a few months before the passing of the first Act of Provisors. On two other occasions at least did Edward III. disregard his own antipapal legislation, viz. first in the case of Stretton, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, who was elected at the instance of the Prince of Wales, and rejected by Archbishop Islip as incompetent, when the King and Prince concurred in an appeal to Rome; and again at a later time, when Archbishop Langham was made a cardinal and resided at Avignon, Edward, though compelling him to resign lie archbishopric, yet permitted him .o retain a prebend at York, the deanery of Lincoln, and some other preferments in England.
​A year of Jubilee was ordered by Pope Clement VI in 1349, shortly after the visitation of the black death, on which occasion Edward III. prohibited his subjects from making pilgrimages to Rome. The Pope remonstrated, but to no purpose. The King's conduct was probably prudent, and his wisdom was vindicated by a renewed outbreak of the plague on the Continent, from which England was exempt. In connection with this story Hook remarks that it gave rise to a feeling of doubt in the minds of the English people as to the complete infallibility of the Church, and that from this time forth hostility towards Rome became a predominant feeling among them. This led, he thinks, to two important results, viz. to a determination on the part of the laity to compel the clergy to retire from politics and restrict themselves to their proper calling; and, on the other hand, it converted a large part of the superior clergy into partisans of Rome. For these statements Dr. Hook cites no authority whatever. I conclude, therefore, that they are inferences of his own from the facts adduced.
The former of the two is doubtless true. Such a conclusion would be but the reaction natural under the circumstances. The people, brought up in a belief of the infallibility and almost unlimited power of the Church, would certainly be looking forward—would probably be taught by their priests to look forward—to some judgment of God as likely to fall upon the nation for its neglect of the commands of the Vicar of Christ. None such came; so far from it that as they watched they beheld the plague fall on the nations who had obeyed, and saw themselves, though disobedient, escape. Naturally, like the people of Melita, they changed ​their minds, though in this case in the opposite direction. They had looked on the Pope as something very like a god. In this belief they had submitted to his ceremonies and his pilgrimages, sometimes even to his exactions. Now they found that he was not a god, and they were ready naturally to conclude that he was an impostor. Whether there was at this time any great change in the feeling of the superior clergy towards Rome seems to me a more doubtful matter. That after this period the bishops were far from being hostile to or even independent of Rome, is admitted by Hook in the passage here referred to, and also stated by Creighton; but the facts as here cited do not seem to bear out Dean Hook's assertion that they had been so previously. In a note on this subject in his 'Life' of Archbishop Stratford he treats it as a mere delusion of modern times to suppose that the English bishops took sides with the Pope. The Pope, he says, was perpetually encroaching on the bishops' rights, and it is therefore unlikely that they should side with him. The argument is a plausible one, and may be taken for what it is worth, but it can hardly avail against the constant individual instances in which the same author mentions primate after primate as a partisan of the Pope. We may fairly argue that however much a bishop, when made, became the Pope's slave, it was mostly or very often to the Pope that he was indebted for being made a bishop at all, and the Pope was at all times almost as much the fountain of honour in the Church as the King was in the State, and with the difference in his favour that promotion in the Church was possible to a man of any nationality, and might be found in any country by the man who ​proved himself thoroughly useful to the Head of the Church. We have seen in our own day, in the history of Pius IX. and the Vatican Council, how obedient bishops can be to the Pope, even when that obedience appears to be rendered against their own interests and in derogation of their own offices.
The closing years of Edward's reign, and the whole of that of his successor, were a time of intrigue, faction, insurrection, and confusion generally, in which we find the Church involved as well as the State; and they were especially fruitful in those singular changes of alliance between one and another of the contending parties in the State to which I have already referred,
Simon Langham, on his appointment as archbishop, 1366, solemnly renounced all expressions in the Pope's bull which militated against the royal prerogative, or infringed upon the laws lately enacted, viz., of course, the Acts of Provisors. This is a remarkable fact, for on the one hand it affords something very like a precedent for the famous reservation made by Archbishop Cranmer in his oath of obedience to the Pope, which created so much scandal in 1533, though on the present occasion it seems to have passed without remark; and, on the other, it is almost the direct converse of the declaration of John Peckham in Edward I.'s reign, that whatever oaths he might have taken, he should feel himself absolved from them if they interfered with his duty to the Pope.
At a congress held in Bruges in 1374, Pope Gregory XI. undertook to abstain from reservation on condition that the King should so far relax the provisions of the Acts of Provisors as to permit the aliens at that time in possession of benefices in England to retain them. How ​far these acts had really effected their professed purpose may be judged from a petition of the Good Parliament (so called) in 1376, in which they affirm ' that the taxes paid to the Church of Rome amounted to five times as much as those levied for the King; that the Pope disposed of the same bishoprics by reservation four or five times, and received each time the firstfruits; that the brokers of the sinful city of Rome promoted for money unlearned and unworthy caitiffs to benefices of the value of a thousand marks, while the poor and learned hardly obtain one of twenty … that the Pope's revenue from England alone is larger than that of any prince in Christendom … that his collector remits yearly to the Pope 20,000 marks, sometimes more.'
The clergy at the same period complain that ' the tax paid to the Pope of Rome for ecclesiastical dignities doth amount to fourfold as much as the tax of all the profits as appertain to the King by the year of the whole realm.'
The above may serve to represent the condition of the papal power in England in the end of the reign of Edward III. In the intrigues with which its closing years and the whole reign of his successor were filled we find a constant recurrence of change of parties and of alliances between parties. Archbishop Sudbury is attached on the one hand to John of Gaunt, but is also loyal to the Pope, and John of Gaunt himself belongs mostly to the antipapal, but sometimes to the papal party, yet generally has a leaning towards Wycliffe, against whom the Pope is furious.
As in other matters so also in ecclesiastical affairs, ​the reign of Richard II. is something of a puzzle. No period was more fruitful in antipapal legislation. The Statute of Provisors was renewed and strengthened, the mortmain laws were tightened up, and the great statute of Præmunire in 1393 imposed a penalty of forfeiture of goods on the offence of obtaining bulls or other instruments from Rome.
Yet, all this notwithstanding, Bishop Stubbs tells us 'the statutes against Roman aggressions were multiplied but disregarded, and notwithstanding the schisms in the Papacy the Bishop of Rome drew his revenue and promoted his servants in England as he had done so long.' Lollardism so called spread and increased, but underwent curious vicissitudes. Wycliffe himself, who appeared at the beginning of the reign under the patronage of John of Gaunt and the Princess of Wales, died before the end of it—unmolested, indeed, but having lost his royal patrons, though he had increased his influence among the Commons, and especially the Londoners.
After the disturbances which led to the summoning of the Merciless Parliament in 1388, when many of Richard's lay advisers were condemned and executed, the Archbishop of York (Neville) and the Bishop of Chichester were handed over to the Pope (Urban VI.), and by him translated to Scotch or Irish sees—an indirect equivalent for banishment, and which I notice only to show how at this time it was by the Pope alone that a bishop, even though a traitor, could be punished, for treason was the charge under which their lay confederates fell. Archbishop Courtenay, who was primate during the greater part of the reign, was in no way ​remarkable for independence of the Pope. He applied to him for leave to levy a rate on ecclesiastical property to pay the expense of his visitation, and also obtained a bull permitting him to nominate to all such benefices as had by remaining vacant lapsed to the Pope. His own translation from London to Canterbury had also been effected by permission of the Pope.
On this subject Dean Hook remarks that 'notwithstanding the Statute of Provisors the opinion very generally prevailed, and was hardly denied by the Government, that the Pope had the supreme power in what related to translations. The Chapter might elect, but he only could sanction the divorce of a bishop from the see to which in consecration he had been wedded.'
According to the same authority Archbishop Courtenay seems to have inclined much to the papal faction during his later life, though he found it necessary to acquiesce in the passing of the act of Præmunire.
The reign of Henry IV. occupies an almost unique position in relation to ecclesiastical affairs. At home, the Archbishop of Canterbury during the whole reign was Thomas Arundel, brother of the Earl of Arundel, who was one of the foremost of Richard II.'s ministers during his tutelage, but was executed by him in 1347, at which time also the Archbishop was, at the King's request, translated to St. Andrews by Pope Boniface IX. and sent into exile. Arundel had begun his public life by being made Bishop of Ely by papal provision at the age of twenty-two, and he was, while a stern churchman and a bitter persecutor of the Lollards, at least as ​much devoted to the King as to the Pope—when that king was Henry of Lancaster, the author of the statute De Hæretico Comburendo, which first legalised the slaughter of heretics as such. Antipapal statutes continued to be passed in this reign also, and in one instance at least the penalties of a Præmunire were incurred and exacted, viz. that of William de Lynn, Bishop of Chichester, who, having quarrelled with the Earl of Arundel, procured a citation from the Pope ordering the Earl to appear personally at Rome. Arundel was the chief instigator of the bloody suppression of the Lollards, which marked the closing years of Henry IV.'s reign and the commencement of his successor's.
Another domestic transaction of this reign, important from an ecclesiastical point of view, was the punishment of the rising in the North in the year 1405, under Lords Northumberland and Nottingham, Scrope, Archbishop of York, and others. Li this case, for the first time in our history, one measure was dealt out alike to layman and priest, and the Archbishop was treated with the same severity as the rebellious lay lords, and was summarily hanged, as was also, on the renewal of the outbreak three years later, another dignified ecclesiastic, viz. the Abbot of Hales.
It is remarkable that we find no trace of any papal ​censure or remonstrance as having followed upon this flagrant and unprecedented invasion of the immemorial privileges of the Church; but the Papacy was, as we have seen, at its lowest point of depression; Henry IV., like the succeeding Lancastrian princes, was the dutiful and obedient son of the Church, with whom it did not suit the Pope to quarrel; and he had, besides, purchased a right to some indulgence by granting in the Statute of Heresy some four years before, also for the first time in English history, a licence to the bishops and clergy to put men to death for holding erroneous opinions.
Abroad, the Papacy itself had reached its lowest point in the years immediately preceding the assembling of the Council of Constance. The closing years of the reign of Henry IV. saw the Council of Pisa solemnly depose two rival popes, describing them both as notorious schismatics and heretics, guilty of enormous iniquities and excesses, and annulling their official acts; and following upon this the still further scandal of three popes at once, all arrogating to themselves the superhuman dignity of supreme pontiff and vicar of Christ, all denouncing one another as heretics and Anti-christs, and all equally debasing and discrediting the character of the Christian Church.
There is in one respect a curious resemblance between the state of things at this time in England, and that which existed in the later years of Henry VIII. after the enactment of the Six Articles, for in both cases there was a hot persecution of heresy instituted by the King, and existing coincidently with a depreciation of the papal and an exaltation of the royal authority. But the difference is far greater than the similarity, for the depression of papal authority was in the one case slight and temporary, in the other deep and permanent; in ​the one case it arose mainly from the weakness and disgrace of the Papacy itself, in the other from the self-will and determination of the King. Henry IV. persecuted the Lollards chiefly as a matter of policy, because he sought to fortify his precarious tenure of the throne by conciliating the Church, as one of the strongest powers of the State. Henry VIII. persecuted Catholics and Gospellers alike only in carrying out the general scheme of making himself absolute ruler both in Church and State, pope and king at once.
The reign of Henry V., though only nine years in duration, formed a turning-point in ecclesiastical affairs. The King himself, a great soldier, a vigorous governor, a man of strong character, whether for good or for evil, had in him a large element of the fanatic, and the policy which he inherited from his father warned him to stand well with the Church and the priesthood. Within about three years of his accession followed the final acts of the Council of Constance, the deposition of the three scandalous popes, the election of Martin V., and the commencement of the great revival of the Papacy; and following upon it, as might have been expected, the close of the era of antipapal legislation in England, and the gradually more and more complete desuetude of the antipapal laws which remained upon the statute-book.
Throughout what may be called the age of papal depression the English nation had retained its devotion to Christianity and to the Church, mixed up, no doubt, with no small amount of superstition, and would, had it been possible, have retained its loyalty to the Pope also. But the position and conduct of the popes themselves forbade it. When the popes were maintaining an openly dissolute court; when they were throwing aside their impartiality and becoming mere dependants ​on the Kings of France, the open and hereditary foes of England; when there were two or even three popes, bidding against one another with as little scruple or decency as so many rival brokers; and when all these things took place at Avignon, close to the borders of what was for years together English territory, it was little wonder if, while the English nation retained its old attachment to the Christian religion, it had lost in a great degree its loyalty to the popes. The wonder is not that it retained so little but that it retained so much—that when, at so apparently auspicious a time, the great Wycliffian anti-sacerdotal movement began, the old beliefs should have shown the vitality which they did show; and this will appear even a greater wonder when we come to examine some of the relations which subsisted between clergy and laity and among the clergy themselves. No sooner, however, did the Council of Constance remove the worst scandals, and Martin V. once more figure as a pope whom it was possible for decent people to respect, than the natural conservative feeling of the nation reasserted itself, and for another hundred years it remained the acknowledged duty of a Christian man, king or not, to 'obey the Pope.'
The history of Archbishop Chicheley, famous as the founder of All Souls College in Oxford, may serve to illustrate some of the above remarks. Chicheley, like so many of the great churchmen of the period, was a lawyer by profession. In this character he was retained by the Pope in 1402, and in reward for his services was nominated by papal provision to a prebend in Salisbury, and to a canonry in the collegiate church of Wilton, whenever they should become vacant, and, as Dean Hook says, 'in direct contravention of the law.' He ​was afterwards promised the bishopric of St. Davids by the Kino-, but, being in Rome at the time when the vacancy occurred, and being desirous to be consecrated by the Pope, the Pope took the opportunity to appoint him by provision and ignore altogether the royal nomination, so that his appointment may be represented as due either to the King or to the Pope. On a subsequent occasion Chicheley was desirous of resigning some of his preferments. It happened, however, that they were held under a dispensation from the Pope, and therefore could only be resigned with his consent. A bull could easily be had, but to introduce it into England would subject him to the penalties of a Præmunire. Hence a royal mandate had to be obtained containing a non obstante clause with reference to the statute of Præmunire.
Chicheley also, according to the same authority, set the precedent of confiscating the property of the monasteries for the service of the State. This was, however, in the case of alien priories, which had a natural tendency to raise international difficulties, and which obviously stood on a different footing from others.
It is unnecessary for my purpose to follow this subject to a later date. Even so stout a champion of Anglican independence as Dean Hook gives it up at this point. In commenting on the rebukes administered by Martin V. to Archbishop Chicheley he says: 'Henceforth the Church of England, to the time of the Reformation, was to be accounted only as a branch of the Church of Rome; and at the head of what had hitherto been the national Church was to be, not the Archbishop of Canterbury, but the Bishop of Rome.' Coming from such a ​quarter, this is a very full admission, and it is no more than is demanded by the actual state of things. From this time on, the presence of a cardinal or a legate or a cardinal-legate in England is almost continuous, and the antipapal statutes, though still in force, and although their repeal was resolutely refused by the Parliament, fall more and more out of use. There is therefore no dispute as to the correctness of the view which Dean Hook gives of the condition of the Church of England between the time with which we are now dealing and the separation under Henry VIII. The question is, whether the facts known to history, some few of which only I have just passed in review, are such as to justify his assertion as to its previous condition of independence; and the only possible answer is that they are not. It is clearly shown that there was throughout the period which I have reviewed a constant and close relation between the ecclesiastical authorities of England and Rome, and that that relation was one of dependence and deference on the part of England, and of authority on that of Rome.
The general tax of the Peter's-pence, trifling as it was in amount, was not trifling as a principle, and still less so as an evidence of the kind of relation subsisting; and this, be it remembered, continued from the remotest period down to the separation. So also did the much more formidable taxation of the clergy, of which I have given several instances above. Again, we find that the appointment of bishops, although it was formally disputed from time to time between the Pope, the King, and the Chapters, lay for the most part in the hands of the King; yet this was not without exception, and even throughout the period of the lowest depression of the papal power, the Pope's ​consent was still necessary for translation from one see to another, and he was still able to claim the appointment of the successor to any dignitary, bishop or other, who died in Curia, as it was called, i.e. while in attendance on the papal court. The one great fact to be alleged on the other side is to be found in the series of antipapal statutes from the reign of Edward III. to Henry V. inclusive; but while the existence of these statutes is strong evidence of the existence of the state of things which they affected to remedy, yet their constant repetition is equally good proof that they failed to remedy it. Had they been efficient they would not have needed repetition, and when at last they ceased to be repeated, it was, as we have seen, not because the papal power had languished, but because it had revived; not because they had effected their purpose, but because their failure to do so had become manifest. The true account of these statutes I take to be something of this kind. In the mutual jealousies which subsisted between the various parties in the State, the power and influence of the Papacy became from time to time an important makeweight, and to the King especially it was oftentimes of great moment to be able to employ it for his own purposes. At the same time papal exactions, oppressions, and interferences were not popular in the nation at large, and were often not relished by one or other party among the Churchmen themselves, who had to pay dearly for the support and influence which the Papacy afforded them. Thus these statutes came to be passed partly to gratify the popular demand for protection against papal oppression, partly to enhance the power of the Crown, which was always exalted in proportion as that of the Pope was depressed. ​And when they were passed they were, as we have abundantly seen, either employed, or neglected, or the infringements of them condoned, exactly as might suit the convenience of the King or his minister for the time being. The clergy were a very powerful, sometimes the most powerful, body in the State, and it became the interests of the other three parties—the Crown, the Baronage, and the Commons—to enlist them on their own side; while they themselves, on their part, held a divided allegiance. They owed a duty to the Crown and another to the Papacy; and when the two were incompatible, their choice between them was likely to be governed by a more or less enlightened regard to their own corporate interests; and though, as we have seen, these were divided, yet they were probably less so than those of any other party, because their separating interests were those of a few great corporate bodies rather than those of families or individuals. The instances given above of the oaths taken by the primates to the King and the Pope respectively, and of the diverse interpretations given by different primates to the conflicting terms of these oaths, may serve as a good instance of all the three points which I wish to insist upon in regard to the papal power in England, for they show, (1) that the allegiance of the clergy throughout this period was in England, as elsewhere, a divided allegiance; (2) that this division remained a very real and important one even through the period of papal depression; and (3) that its inclination to one side or the other differed from time to time in accordance with the varying circumstances of the times, and with the differing interests, characters, dispositions, and abilities of the kings, the popes, and the prelates concerned.
​It is scarcely necessary to go into a comparison between the condition of the papal power in England and in other countries during the period with which we are now dealing. In its main features it was much the same in most countries; i.e. the Papacy was, in spiritual matters, always in theory, and mostly in fact, the supreme authority. In matters temporal the reverse—again as a rule only—was the case; while in those numerous affairs which could not be classed exclusively as temporal or spiritual, there was a constant liability to dispute, and their actual position varied from time to time with the circumstances and the capacities of the contending parties. In France, certainly, taken as a whole, the papal power was less, and that of the kings was greater, than was the case in England from Louis IX., the contemporary of Henry III., down to Francis I., the contemporary of Henry VIII., when the two countries took new departures in this particular, almost in diametrically opposite directions, and Francis I. sacrificed all that remained of the so-called Gallican liberties to the Pope in order to obtain the surrender of the rest to himself, while Henry VIII. absorbed into his own person the authority of pope and king at once.
The further subject of the social and moral influence of the clergy during this period also need not detain us long in this place. It will be necessary to discuss it at greater length in the body of the work; and there is no reason, so far as I can learn, for supposing that it underwent any sudden or marked alteration at any particular epoch. The condition in which it was found when the great dispute with Rome commenced was but the gradually developed result of the slow growth of centuries. It will be sufficient if I adduce ​the following few statements, all of them from the works of authors themselves clergymen, and none of them disposed to be over-severe judges of the order to which they belong.
Dean Hook says 'the celibacy imposed upon the monks, whether in holy orders or not, had a more demoralising influence upon them than it had upon the secular clergy. The secular clergy took to themselves wives, though in so doing they felt themselves to be lowered in the estimation of their neighbours; but the monks, being in community, could not evade the law in this manner, and the licentiousness of their conduct became proverbial.' Again, he says 'the condemnation of the clergy, regular and secular, is most emphatically proclaimed by the institution of the mendicant orders. The mendicant orders came into existence because in the task of evangelising the people the clergy were unwilling or incompetent to do what the circumstances required. The superior clergy were, as we have seen, absorbed in the world of politics. The inferior clergy were employed in prosecuting rather than instructing their flocks; while those among them who endeavoured conscientiously to discharge the duties of a pastor were involved in a routine of ceremonial observances. The monks were living as country gentlemen, not always of high repute.' Further on in his Life of Archbishop Islip is a noticeable passage. Complaint being made of the abuse of 'benefit of clergy,' and of the inadequacy of the punishment inflicted upon the delinquencies of clerks, the Archbishop says that he and his suffragans are fearful that the abuses (which they, in fact, admit) ​should turn to the prejudice of—'clerical privilege'! Again, at a later time, in the primacy of Kemp, he tells us that 'every act of legislation in the Church tends to show the low condition of morals among the clergy, and their neglect of duty.' They are charged, besides, with constant quarrelling and litigation with one another, with frequenting taverns, shows, cells of suspected women, and unlawful games. And in general terms he says, speaking of the middle of the fifteenth century, 'It is admitted by all persons and by all parties that the Church from this time and a century before till the age of the Reformation was in point of morals and legislation in a very degraded state.'
Professor Creighton also quotes from Von der Hardt a frightful account of the licentiousness of the clergy, and adds: 'Denunciations to the same effect might be quoted from writers of almost every land. … Lamentations over the corruptions of the clergy were not confined to a few enthusiasts: men of high ecclesiastical position and undoubted orthodoxy spoke openly of the abuses which everywhere prevailed.'
Finally, Bishop Stubbs, in a passage to which I will only refer my readers in this place, gives similar evidence.
The same authority has also an interesting passage concerning the effect of the clergy in keeping alive through the darkest period some sparks of learning and education. He says: 'Some forms of intellectual culture were spread everywhere, and although perhaps it would still be as easy to find a clerk who could not read as a layman who could, it is a mistake to regard even so dark a period as the fifteenth century as an age of dense ​ignorance. In all classes above the lowest, and especially in the clerical class, men travelled both in England and abroad more than they did after the Reformation had suspended religious intercommunion and destroyed the usefulness of ecclesiastical Latin as a means of communication.'
* ↑ Green, History of the English People, vol. i. p. 165.
* ↑ Green, vol. ii. pp. 15-16.
* ↑ Lat. Christianity, vol iv. p. 4.
* ↑ Milman, op. cit. vol. i. p. 115.
* ↑ Stubbs's Const. Hist. vol. i. pp. 238, 250, 2-51.
* ↑ Latin Christianity, vol. vi. p. 235.
* ↑ Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, vol. v. p. 100.
* ↑ Creighton's Papacy, vol. ii. p. 28, who remarks that 'Martin V. exercised a more direct authority over the machinery of the English Church than had been permitted to any pope since the days of Innocent III.,' and again that 'his successors had no reason to complain of the independent spirit of the English bishops.'
* ↑ Papacy, vol. i. p. 47.
* ↑ Burnet, vol. i. pp. 185-6.
* ↑ Hook's Archbishops, vol. iii. p. 270.
* ↑ Hook, vol. iii. p. 846.
* ↑ Papacy, vol. i. p. 17.
* ↑ Hook's Archbishops, vol. iii. p. 403.
* ↑ State Papers, Feb. 14. 1531.
* ↑ Hook's Archbishops, vol. iv. p. 103.
* ↑ Ib. p. 114.
* ↑ Ib. p. 148.
* ↑ Ib. p. 214.
* ↑ Hook, vol. X. pp. 126-7.
* ↑ Papacy, vol. ii. p. 28.
* ↑ Hook, vol. x. pp. 71-2, note.
* ↑ Hook's Archbishops, vol. iv. pp. 198-9.
* ↑ Ib. vol. iv. p. 253.
* ↑ Milman's Lat. Christianity, vol. viii. pp. 173-4.
* ↑ Hook's Archbishops, vol. iv. p. 256.
* ↑ Stubbs's Const. Hist. vol. ii. p. 507.
* ↑ Ib. p. 492.
* ↑ Ib. p. 464
* ↑ Hook's Archbishops, vol. iv. p. 374.
* ↑ Op. cit. p. 339.
* ↑ Ib. vol. iv. pp. 50-1
* ↑ Green, vol. i. p. 533. Stubbs's Const. Hist. vol. iii. p. 52. Bishop Stubbs speaks of the execution of Archbishop Scrope as a 'judicial murder,' far more inexcusable, as far as the King was concerned, than the assassination of Becket; because Henry IV. was certainly and directly chargeable with the one, while Henry II. was only secondarily and perhaps doubtfully guilty of the other. That it may have been an unwise, as it seems to have been an unpopular act, no one would probably deny; but it is difficult to see why, from the point of view of strict justice, when three or four men appear as the leaders in an insurrection, and are all as such condemned and executed, the execution of one of them is to be stigmatised as a murder for the sole reason that he is a clerk and the others are laymen.
* ↑ Hook's Archbishops, vol. v. p. 11.
* ↑ Hook's Archbishops, vol. v. p. 43
* ↑ Ib. p. 103
* ↑ Hook's Archbishops, vol. v. p. 279.
* ↑ Hook's Archbishops, vol. iii. pp. 44-7.
* ↑ Ib. vol. iv. p. 131.
* ↑ Hook's Archbishops, vol. v. p. 238.
* ↑ Ib. p. 289, note.
* ↑ Papacy, vol. i. pp. 262-5.
* ↑ Const. Hist. vol. iii. pp. 380-5.