deliver them over to the bishop's officials in order that they might be destroyed as pernicious literature. The list included several works of Luther, three or four of Tyndale, a couple of Zwingli, and several isolated works, such as the Supplication of Beggars, and the Dyalogue between the Father and the Son.

In 1530 the king by proclamation forbade the reading or possession of some eighty-five works of Wycliffe, Luther, Ecolampadius, Zwingli, Pomeranus, Bucer, Wesselius, and indeed the German divines generally, under the heading of "books of the Lutheran sect or faction conveyed into the city of London." Besides these Latin treatises, the prohibition included many English tracts, such as A Book of the Old God and the New, The Burying of the Mass, Frith's Disputation concerning Purgatory, and several prayer-books intended to propagate the new doctrines, such as Godly Prayers, Matins and Evensong, with the Seven Psalms and Other Heavenly Psalms with Commendations, the Hortulus Animæ in English, and the Primer in English.

In his proclamation Henry VIII speaks of the determination of the English nation in times past to be true to the Catholic faith and to defend the country against "wicked sects of heretics and Lollards, who, by perversion of Holy Scripture, do induce erroneous opinions, sow sedition amongst Christian people, and disturb the peace and tranquillity of Christian realms, as lately happened in some parts of Germany, where, by the procurement and sedition of Martin Luther and other heretics, were slain an infinite number of Christian people." To prevent like misfortunes happening in England, he orders prompt measures to be taken to put a stop to the circulation of books in English and other languages, which teach things "intolerable to the clean ears of any good Christian man."

By the king's command, the convocation of Canterbury drew up a list of prohibited heretical books. In the first catalogue of fifty-three tracts and volumes, there is no mention of any work of Wycliffe, and besides some volumes which had come from the pens of Tyndale, Frith, and Roy, who were acknowledged disciples of Luther, the rest are all the compositions of the German Reformers. The same may be said of a supplementary list of tracts, the authors of which were unknown. All these are condemned as containing false teaching, plainly contrary to the Catholic faith, and the bishops add, "Moreover, following closely in the footsteps of our fathers, we prohibit all from selling, giving, reading, distributing, or publishing any tract, booklet, pamphlet, or book, which trans

lates or interprets the Holy Scripture in the vernacular. . . or even knowingly to keep such volumes without the license of their diocesan in writing."

About the same time a committee of bishops, including Archbishop Warham and Bishop Tunstall, was appointed to draw up a list of some of the principal errors contained in the prohibited works of English heretics beyond the sea. The king had heard that "many books in the English tongue containing many detestable errors and damnable opinions, printed in parts beyond the sea," were being brought into England and spread abroad. He was unwilling that "such evil seed sown amongst his people (should) so take root that it might overgrow the corn of the Catholic doctrine before sprung up in the souls of his subjects," and he consequently ordered this examination. This has been done and the errors noted, "albeit many more there be in those books, which books totally do swarm full of heresies and detestable opinions.' The books thus examined and noted were eight in number; The Wicked Mammon, the Obedience of Christian Man, the Revelation of Antichrist, the Sum of Scripture, the Book of Beggars, the Kalendar of the Prymer, the Prymer, and an Exposition unto the Seventh Chapter of I Corinthians. From these some hundreds of propositions were culled which contradicted the plain teaching of the Church in matters of faith and morality. In this condemnation, as the king states in his directions to preachers to publish the same, the commission were unanimous.

The attack on the traditional teachings of the Church, moreover, was not confined to unimportant points. From the first, high and fundamental doctrines, as it seemed to men in those days, were put in peril. The works set forth by the advocates of the change speak for themselves, and, when contrasted with those of Luther, leave no room for doubt that they were founded on them, and inspired by the spirit of the leader of the revolt, although, as was inevitable in such circumstances, in particulars the disciples proved themselves in advance of their master. Writing in 1546, Dr. Richard Smythe contrasts the old times, when the faith was respected, with the then state of mental unrest in religious matters. "In our days," he writes, "not a few things, nor of small importance, but (alack the more is the pity) even the chiefest and most weighty matters of our religion and faith are called in question, babbled, talked, and jangled upon (reasoned I cannot nor ought not to call it). These matters in times past (when reason had place and virtue with learning was duly regarded, yea, and vice with

insolency was generally detested and abhorred) were held in such reverence and honor, in such esteem and dignity, yea, so received and embraced by all estates, that it was not in any wise sufferable that tag and rag, learned and unlearned, old and young, wise and foolish, boys and wenches, master and man, tinkers and tilers, colliers and cobblers, with other such raskabilia might at their pleasure rail and jest (for what is it else they now do?) against everything that is good and virtuous, against all things that are expedient and profitable, not sparing any sacrament of the Church or ordinance of the same, no matter how laudable, decent, or fitting it has been regarded in times past, or how much it be now accepted by good and Catholic men. In this way, both by preaching and teaching (if it so ought to be called), playing, writing, printing, singing, and (oh, good Lord!) in how many other ways besides, divers of our age, being their own schoolmasters, or rather scholars of the devil, have not forborne or feared to speak and write against the most excellent and most blessed sacrament of the altar, affirming that the said sacrament is nothing more than a bare figure, and that there is not in the same sacrament the very body and blood of our blessed Saviour and Redeemer Jesus Christ, but only a naked sign, a token, a memorial and a remembrance only of the same, if they take it for so much even and do not call it (as they are wont to do) an idol and very plain idolatry."

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Froude, History of England, Vol. I, chap. vi. Dixon, History of the Church of England, Vol. III. Green, History of the English People, Vol. II, Book VI, chap. ii. Pocock, Condition of Morals and Religious Belief in the Reign of Edward VI, in the English Historical Review, 1895, pp. 417 ff. Trevelyan, England in the Age of Wycliffe, chap. ix, an argument for the survival of Lollardry which should be compared with Gairdner, History of the English Church in the Sixteenth Century, chaps. iii and iv.

CHAPTER VI

THE LAST DAYS OF ARCHBISHOP CRANMER

AMONG the leaders who worked for the introduction of revolutionary doctrinal changes into the English Church during the sixteenth century there is no more distinguished or striking figure than Thomas Cranmer. His strange and varying fortunes ending in his tragic death have made his character exceedingly difficult to understand. To many he is the great martyr to the Protestant faith of the English Church. On the other hand, a recent Catholic writer, J. M. Stone, in a volume on Queen Mary, renders a summary judgment in the following fashion: "Cranmer suffered according to the notions of his day, on his own principles, and for causes which he had himself judged sufficient for death. He had not only sent men and women to the stake for the very same opinions which he afterwards professed, and had burnt Catholics because they would not acknowledge the king's supreme headship, but had burnt Protestants because their Protestantism differed from his own. All things considered, it was wonderful that he did not receive shorter shrift." Among the favorable estimates of Cranmer, that by Professor Pollard in his Life of Cranmer is both scholarly and judicial.

§ 1. Cranmer and the Appeal to a General Council 1

While the pope was pronouncing him contumacious for taking no care to obey his citation and was condemning him to be deprived and degraded as an obstinate heretic, and while he was being burnt in effigy at Rome, Cranmer was engaged in drawing up an appeal to a general council. The law of nature, he wrote to a legal friend

1 Pollard, Thomas Cranmer, pp. 356 ff. By permission of Professor Pollard and G. P. Putnam's Sons, Publishers.

whose assistance he sought, required every man to defend his own life so far as it might be done without offence to God; and lest he should seem rashly and unadvisedly to cast himself away, he had resolved to follow Luther's example in appealing from Leo X. He was bound by oath, he said, never to consent to the reception of the pope's authority in England; from this came all his trouble, so that the quarrel was personal between him and the pope, and no man could be a lawful and indifferent judge in his own cause; therefore, he had good reason in appealing to a general council. Not that he thought his life would thereby be saved; he was well aware that in 1460, Pius II by his "execrable" Bull had forbidden all such appeals to a general council, and thus made absolute his own jurisdiction. "The chiefest cause in very deed (to tell you the truth)," wrote Cranmer, "of this mine appeal is that I might gain time (if it shall so please God) to live until I have furnished mine answer against Marcus Antonius Constantine, which I now have in hand."

The appeal was a stirring and striking document. Cranmer paid an eloquent tribute therein to Rome's services in early times: "The Church of Rome, as it were, lady of the world, both was, and was also counted worthily, the mother of other churches; forasmuch as she them first begat to Christ, nourished them with the food of pure doctrine, did help them with her riches, succored the oppressed, and was a sanctuary for the miserable, she rejoiced with them that rejoiced and wept with them that wept. Then by the examples of the bishops of Rome riches were despised, worldly glory and pomp were trodden under foot, pleasures and riot nothing regarded. Then this frail and uncertain life, being full of all miseries, was laughed to scorn,whiles through the example of Romish martyrs, men did everywhere press forward to the life to come. But afterward the ungraciousness of damnable ambition never satisfied, avarice and the horrible enormity of vices had corrupted and taken the See of Rome, there followed everywhere almost the deformities of all churches growing out of kind into the manners of the Church, their mother, leaving their former innocency and purity, and slipping into foul and heinous usages. For the aforesaid and many other griefs and abuses, since reformation of the above-mentioned abuses is not to be looked for of the Bishop of Rome; neither can I hope by reason of his wicked abuses and usurped authority to have him an equal judge in his own cause, therefore I do challenge and appeal in these writings from the pope."