History of England from the fall of Wolsey to the death of Elizabeth Volume III Part 44

[351] Fuller's _Church History_, Vol. III. p. 398.

[352] "According to your commission, we have viewed a certain supposed relic, called the blood of Hales, which was enclosed within a round beryll, garnished and bound on every side with silver, which we caused to be opened in the presence of a great mult.i.tude of people. And the said supposed relic we caused to be taken out of the said beryll, and have viewed the same, being within a little gla.s.s, and also tried the same according to our powers, by all means; and by force of the view and other trials, we judge the substance and matters of the said supposed relic to be an unctuous gum, coloured, which, being in the gla.s.s, appeared to be a glistening red, resembling partly the colour of blood.

And after, we did take out part of the said substance out of the gla.s.s, and then it was apparent yellow colour, like amber or base gold, and doth cleave as gum or bird-lime. The matter and feigned relic, with the gla.s.s containing the same, we have enclosed in red wax, and consigned it, with our seals."--Hugh Bishop of Worcester, with the other Commissioners, to Cromwell: Latimer's _Remains_, p. 407.

The Abbot of Hales subsequently applied for permission to destroy the case in which the blood had been.

"It doth stand yet in the place where it was, so that I am afraid lest it should minister occasion to any weak person looking thereupon to abuse his conscience therewith; and therefore I beseech for license that I may put it down every stick and stone, so that no manner of token or remembrance of that forged relict shall remain."--Abbot of Hales to Cromwell: _MS. Tanner_ 105.

[353] Barlow to Cromwell: _Suppression of the Monasteries_, p. 183.

[354] Latimer to Cromwell: _Remains_, p. 395.

[355] Geoffrey Chambers to Cromwell: _MS. State Paper Office_, second series.

[356] Ibid.

[357] "Invisit aulam regis, regem ipsum novus hospes. Conglomerant ipsum risu aulico barones duces marchiones comites. Agit ille, minatur oculis, aversatur ore, distorquet nares; mitt.i.t deorsum caput, incurvat dorsum, annuit aut renuit. Rex ipse incertum gavisusne magis ob patefactam imposturam an magis doluerit ex animo tot seculis miserae plebi fuisse impositum."--Hooker to Bullinger: _Original Letters on the Reformation._

[358] "He said that blessed man St. Thomas of Canterbury suffered death for the rights of the Church; for there was a great man--meaning thereby King Harry the Second--which, because St. Thomas of Canterbury would not grant him such things as he asked, contrary to the liberties of the Church, first banished him out of this realm; and at his return he was slain at his own church, for the right of Holy Church, as many holy fathers have suffered now of late: as that holy father the Bishop of Rochester: and he doubteth not but their souls be now in heaven.

"He saith and believeth that he ought to have a double obedience: first, to the King's Highness, by the law of G.o.d; and the second to the Bishop of Rome, by his rule and profession.

"He confesseth that he used and practised to induce men in confession to hold and stick to the old fas.h.i.+on of belief, that was used in the realm of long time past."--_Rolls House MS._

[359] "The Bishop of Worcester and I will be to-morrow with your lords.h.i.+p, to know your pleasure concerning Friar Forest. For if we should proceed against him according to the order of the law, there must be articles devised beforehand which must be ministered unto him; and therefore it will be very well done that one draw them against our meeting."--Cranmer to Cromwell: Cranmer's _Works_, Vol. I. p. 239.

[360] _Rolls House MS._ A 1, 7, fol. 213.

[361] Ellis Price to Cromwell: _MS. Cotton. Cleopatra_, E 4.

[362] _MS. State Paper Office_, second series, Vol. x.x.xIV.

[363] Latimer to Cromwell: _MS. State Paper Office_, second series, Vol.

XLIX. Latimer's _Letters_, p. 391.

[364] Stow's _Chronicle_, p. 575.

[365] Hall, p. 875, followed by Foxe.

[366] _MS. State Paper Office_, unarranged bundle. The command was obeyed so completely, that only a single shrine now remains in England; and the preservation of this was not owing to the forbearance of the government. The shrine of Edward the Confessor, which stands in Westminster Abbey, was destroyed with the rest. But the stones were not taken away. The supposed remains of St. Edward were in some way preserved; and the shrine was reconstructed, and the dust replaced, by Abbot f.e.c.kenham, in the first year of Queen Mary.--Oration of Abbot f.e.c.kenham in the Parliament House: _MS. Rawlinson, Bodleian Library._

[367] Cranmer to Cromwell: _State Papers_, Vol. I.

[368] "The abuses of Canterbury" are placed by the side of those of Boxley in one of the official statements of the times.--Sir T.

Wriothesley to Henry VIII., Nov. 20. 1538: _State Papers_, Vol. VIII.

[369] Madame de Montreuil, though a Frenchwoman and a good Catholic, had caught the infection of the prevailing unbelief in saints and saintly relics. "I showed her St. Thomas's shrine," writes an attendant, "and all such other things worthy of sight, of the which she was not little marvelled of the great riches thereof, saying it to be innumerable, and that if she had not seen it all the men in the world could never have made her to believe it. Thus overlooking and viewing more than an hour as well the shrine as St. Thomas's head, being at both set cus.h.i.+ons to kneel, the prior, opening St. Thomas's head, said to her three times, this is St. Thomas's head, and offered her to kiss it, but she neither kneeled nor would kiss it, but (stood), still viewing the riches thereof."--p.e.n.i.son to Cromwell: _State Papers_, Vol. I. p. 583.

[370] These marks are still distinctly visible.

[371] Burnet's _Collectanea_, p. 494. A story was current on the Continent, and so far believed as to be alluded to in the great bull of Paul the Third, that an apparitor was sent to Canterbury to serve a citation at Becket's tomb, summoning "the late archbishop" to appear and answer to a charge of high treason. Thirty days were allowed him. When these were expired a proctor was charged with his defence. He was tried and condemned--his property, consisting of the offerings at the shrine, was declared forfeited--and he himself was sentenced to be exhumed and burnt. In the fact itself there is nothing absolutely improbable, for the form said to have been observed was one which was usual in the Church, when dead men, as sometimes happened, were prosecuted for heresy; and if I express my belief that the story is without foundation, I do so with diffidence, because negative evidence is generally of no value in the face of respectable positive a.s.sertion. All contemporary English authorities, however, are totally silent on a subject which it is hard to believe that they would not at least have mentioned. We hear generally of the destruction of the shrine, but no word of the citation and trial. A long and close correspondence between Cromwell and the Prior of Canterbury covers the period at which the process took place, if it took place at all, and not a letter contains anything which could be construed into an allusion to it.--Letters of the Prior of Canterbury to Cromwell: _MS. State Paper Office_, second series.

So suspicious a silence justifies a close scrutiny of the authorities on the other side. There exist two doc.u.ments printed in Wilkins's _Concilia_, Vol. III. p. 835, and taken from Pollini's _History of the English Reformation_, which profess to be the actual citation and actual sentence issued on the occasion. If these are genuine, they decide the question; but, unfortunately for their authenticity, the dates of the doc.u.ments are, respectively, April and May, 1538, and in both of them Henry is styled, among his official t.i.tles, Rex Hiberniae. Now Henry did not a.s.sume the t.i.tle of Rex Hiberniae till two years later. Dominus Hiberniae, or Lord of Ireland, is his invariable designation in every authentic doc.u.ment of the year to which these are said to belong. This itself is conclusively discrediting. If further evidence is required, it may be found in the word "Londini," or London, as the date of both citation and sentence. Official papers were never dated from London, but from Westminster, St. James's, Whitehall; or if in London, then from the particular place in London, as the Tower. Both mistakes would have been avoided by an Englishman, but are exceedingly natural in a foreign inventor.

[372] "We be daily instructed by our n.o.bles and council to use short expelition in the determination of our marriage, for to get more increase of issue, to the a.s.surance of our succession; and upon their oft admonition of age coming fast on, and (seeing) that the time flyeth and slippeth marvellously away, we be minded no longer to lose time as we have done, which is of all losses the most irrecuperable."--Henry VIII. to Sir T. Wriothesley: _State Papers_, Vol. VIII. p. 116.

"Unless his Highness bore a notable affection to the Emperor, and had a special remembrance of their antient amity, his Majesty could never have endured to have been kept thus long in balance, his years, and the daily suits of his n.o.bles and council well pondered."--Wriothesley to Cromwell: ibid, p. 160.

[373] See the Wriothesley Correspondence: _State Papers_, Vol. VIII.

[374] Wriothesley to Henry VIII., November 20, 1538: Ibid.

[375] Bull of Paul III. against Henry VIII: printed in Burnet's _Collectanea_.

[376] Wriothesley Correspondence: _State Papers_, Vol. VIII.

[377] Wriothesley to Cromwell: Ibid.

[378] Stephen Vaughan to Cromwell, Feb. 21, 1539: _State Papers_, Vol.

VIII.

[379] "Of the evils which now menace Christendom those are held most grievous which are threatened by the Sultan. He is thought most powerful to hurt: he must first be met in arms. My words will bear little weight in this matter. I shall be thought to speak in my own quarrel against my personal enemy. But, as G.o.d shall judge my heart, I say that, if we look for victory in the East, we must a.s.sist first our fellow Christians, whom the adversary afflicts at home. This victory only will ensure the other."--_Apol. ad Car. Quint._

[380] He speaks of Cromwell as "a certain man," a "devil's amba.s.sador,"

"the devil in the human form". He doubts whether he will defile his pages with his name. As great highwaymen, however, murderers, parricides, and others, are named in history for everlasting ignominy, as even the devils are named in Holy Scripture, so he will name Cromwell.--_Apol. ad Car. Quint._

[381] Ibid.

[382] Instructions to Reginald Pole: _Epist._ Vol. II. p. 279, &c.

Pole's admiring biographer ventures to say that "he was declared a traitor for causes which do not seem to come within the article of treason."--Philips's _Life of Reginald Pole_, p. 277.

[383] News which was sent from Rome unto the Cardinal Bishop of Seville: _Rolls House MS._

[384] "There is much secret communication among the king's subjects, and many of them in the s.h.i.+res of Cornwall and Devons.h.i.+re be in great fear and mistrust what the King's Highness and his council should mean, to give in commandment to the parsons and vicars of every parish, that they should make a book wherein is to be specified the names of as many as be wedded and buried and christened. Their mistrust is, that some charges more than hath been in times past shall grow to them by this occasion of registering."--Sir Piers Edgecombe to Cromwell: _State Papers_, Vol. I.

p. 612.

[385] "George Lascelles shewed me that a priest, which late was one of the friars at Bristol, informed him that harness would yet be occupied, for he did know more than the king's council. For at the last council whereat the Emperor, the French king, and the Bishop of Rome met, they made the King of Scots, by their counsel, _Defensor fidei_, and that the Emperor raised a great army, saying it was to invade the Great Turk, which the said Emperor meaned by our sovereign lord."--John Babington to Cromwell: MS. _State Paper Office_, second series, Vol. III.

[386]

[Sidenote: Renewed agitation among the people.]

I attach specimens from time to time of the "informations" of which the Record Office contains so many. They serve to keep the temper of the country before the mind. The king had lately fallen from his horse and broken one of his ribs. A farmer of Walden was accused of having wished that he had broken his neck, and "had said further that he had a bow and two sheaves of arrows, and he would shoot them all before the king's laws should go forward." An old woman at Aylesham, leaning over a shop-window, was heard muttering a chant, that "there would be no good world till it fell together by the ears, for with clubs and clouted shoon should the deed be done." Sir Thomas Arundel wrote from Cornwall, that "a very aged man" had been brought before him with the reputation of a prophet, who had said that "the priests should rise against the king, and make a field; and the priests should rule the realm three days and three nights, and then the white falcon should come out of the north-west, and kill almost all the priests, and they that should escape should be fain to hide their crowns with the filth of beasts, because they would not be taken for priests."--"A groom of Sir William Paget's was dressing his master's horse one night in the stable in the White Horse in Cambridge," when the ostler came in and began "to enter into communication with him." "The ostler said there is no Pope, but a Bishop of Rome. And the groom said he knew well there was a Pope, and the ostler, moreover, and whosoever held of his part, were strong heretics.

Then the ostler answered that the King's Grace held of his part; and the groom said that he was one heretic, and the king was another; and said, moreover, that this business had never been if the king had not married Anne Boleyn. And therewith they multiplied words, and waxed so hot, that the one called the other knave, and so fell together by the ears, and the groom broke the ostler's head with a f.a.ggot stick."--Miscellaneous Depositions: _MSS. State Paper Office_, and _Rolls House_.

[387] Her blood was thought even purer than Lord Exeter's. A cloud of doubtful illegitimacy darkened all the children of Edward IV.

[388] "At my lord marquis being in Exeter at the time of the rebellion he took direction that all commissions for the second subsidy should stay the levy thereof for a time."--Sir Piers Edgecombe to Cromwell: _MS. State Paper Office_, second series, Vol. X.