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Preface To American Edition

IN PREPARING this book for the American public, I have made a number of small alterations in correction of mistakes of details which appeared in the English edition. For the corrections I am indebted to my English reviewers, to the Rev. L. Hicks, S.J., of Farm Street, who has been kind enough to give me the benefit of his detailed criticisms, and in one or two instances to my own further research. This book was primarily intended for the general reader, and I therefore did not think it worth while to cumber up the English edition with footnotes. However, in response to many requests, I have here inserted full references.

This book is written frankly from a Catholic point of view. It may perhaps save some misunderstanding if I explain what I mean by that phrase. I am myself a Catholic: yet I do not in this book make any attempt to prove the truth of the Catholic religion. I neither discuss the nature of Christ’s revelation in general, nor do I touch on the question of the validity of Anglican orders or of the claim of the Anglican to be a part of the Catholic Church. The fundamental questions of my faith are, in so far as this book is concerned, quite frankly begged. And the question, which it sets out to answer, is, “In what way can one, who holds the Catholic Church to be the Church of God, explain the apostasy of England from

6 PREFACE TO AMERICAN EDITION

Her at the time of Elizabeth?’ No one, whether he be Catholic, Protestant or agnostic, can possibly understand England or the modern world if he does not understand the answer to that question.

C. H.

Contents

PAGE

Chapter I England Before Elizabeth

ENGLAND was a province of the Roman Empire and became, by consequence, as did all the countries of Western Europe, a province of Catholic Christendom. She, of all Christendom’s provinces, was the one least touched by heresy. She gave birth, it is true, to Pelagius, but the great medieval heresies, which sprang from the attempt to dilute Christian theology with the thought of the Eastern and Mahomedan world, hardly penetrated to her. The Albigensian never reached her. An absurd phrase which has hailed Wyclif as “the morning star of the Reformation” only proves how extremely poor in English ancestry were the reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and how very hard up for morning stars the Reformation was.

On the other hand the English, while averse from theological speculation of any kind and instinctively _ hating heresy, were more vigorous than any of the Continental nations in their resistance to papal financial exactions. For this there are two special reasons. In the first place, the Papacy fell into the habit of discharging obligations to benefactors by a policy of “provisions,” that is, by presenting those benefactors to sees, livings and prebends in far-off lands, which they never visited but II from which they drew their revenues. This policy fell with particular hardness upon England and Scotland, the Papacy’s most distant provinces. Secondly—and more important—during those years of the fourteenth century in which England was first learning from the French Wars to become conscious of her nationality, the popes, resident at Avignon, were politically the allies, if not the subjects, of the French kings. From the fourteenth century onwards, therefore, the patriotic Englishman’s very orthodox Catholicism did not often err upon the side of a too great reverence for the person of the Pope.

Upon such an England fell the tremendous calamity of the Black Death of 1348, followed in the next century by the equally tremendous calamity of the Wars of the Roses. The old order fell and a new emerged. Medieval society had been organized on the assumption that the priest was almost certain to be better educated than the layman. Many privileges had been granted to the priest which were justified not by his priesthood, but by his education. In the society which grew up after the Black Death the priests did not always have this educational superiority; yet many of them, being human, were unwilling to recognize the change of the times and to surrender their privileges.

In 1399 the ancient English monarchy was overthrown by a few rich men. To a superficial judgment that revolution seemed to have put into power a government more vigorously clerical than that of its Yorkist predecessor. In the reign of the first Lancastrian the defense of the Church by persecution was for the first time adopted as a normal policy of government.’ Yet the victory was the victory of clericalism rather than of Catholicism. Examine a list of thirteenth century archbishops, bishops or abbots. You will find from it evidence that the Napoleonic principle of ‘7a carriére ouverte aux talents’ was being applied by the Church of that date as it has never been applied before or since in human history. Examine such a list of fifteenth century dignitaries. You will find constantly recurring certain family names—Arundel, Beaufort and the rest. More and more during the Lancastrian ascendancy, the clerical ‘plums’ came to be annexed by a few rich families who, while they professed to be defending the Church, were often defending little more than an economic arrangement, greatly to their own advantage.

The Church is unique. She is not to be compared and contrasted with other institutions. And whenever the mind allows itself to identify Her cause with some lesser cause—whether it be with an esthetic movement or a social programme, with Conservative politics or with Labor politics—the result is always disastrous. For the Church is made to suffer for the sins of Her ally. Of all such identifications the most dangerous and the most false is that of the free Catholic society with a society in which a clerical oligarchy is allowed to regulate the everyday affairs of the secular majority—the identification, that is to say, of Catholicism with clericalism. The Church is a free society, in which the priest, it is true, has an all-important function, but of which the layman is as much a member as the priest. He has his rights as much as the

priest. His soul is of equal value with that of the priest. The priest can make no claims upon him save those which God has allowed him to make in virtue of his office. Easy though it is to misstate or misunderstand this truth, yet it is of the very essence of Catholicism to insist upon it.

Nowhere can you find the menace of mere clericalism to Catholicism more clearly emphasized than in that great medieval, Catholic play, Everyman.

“There is no emperor, king, duke ne baron,”

says Five Wits,

“That of God hath commission, As hath the least priest in the world being; For of the Blessed Sacraments pure and benign He beareth the keys and thereof hath the cure For Man’s redemption.”

“If priests be good, it is so surely,”

agrees Knowledge, but adds that

“Saint Peter, the Apostle, doth say That Jesu’s curse hath all they Which God, their Saviour, do buy or sell, Or they for any money do take or tell. Their children sitteth by other men’s fires I have heard; Sinful priests giveth the sinners examples bad; And some haunteth women’s company With unclean life, as lusts of lechery. These be with sin made blind.”

Campion himself said that the greatest need of the Church in his day was to bring to an end the rule of “ienorant ecclesiastics, simple preachers and old-fashioned monks.” The Latin epigrams and English works of Sir Thomas More enforce the same lesson. The full possibilities of a Catholic society will never be discovered until there shall appear one which possesses both an educated clergy and an educated laity. It is the tragedy of Europe that such a society has never yet existed. In the Middle Ages the laity was not educated. By the time that the laity had become educated the clergy had become corrupt. By the time that the clergy had reformed themselves the laity had become irreligious.

To the throne of such an England, an England corrupted by the moral havoc of civil war, Henry VII forced his way in 1485. It was an England in which there was plenty of anti-clericalism (most of it combined with unhesitating belief in Catholic doctrine), the beginnings of scepticism, which had come in with the Renaissance, and hardly any heresy. There was too, in England, as in the other countries of Europe, a very evil confidence in clerical circles—a feeling that the unity of Europe, which had survived the scandal of the Great Schism, could survive anything and that therefore there was no need to bother with reform. There was also much genuine piety which was suspicious of the new learning of the Renaissance, and much equally genuine piety which was anxious _ to annex whatever was good in Renaissance learning, and to use it in order to make richer and deeper the Christian philosophy.

When in 1509 Henry VIII succeeded his father, no prophecy could have seemed more ridiculous than the prophecy that during his reign England would cast off her obedience to the see of Rome. Henry, an irreligious theologian, had at least all the normal Englishman’s hatred of such chaotic speculation as was at the time being spread through Northern Germany. His desire for an annulment of his marriage with Catharine of Aragon, who had failed to give him a male heir, first caused him to threaten the Papacy with a repudiation of that authority which he had himself already admitted by his appeal to Rome. As Gray has put it in his cruelly satirical line,

“And Gospel-light first dawned from Boleyn’s eyes ;’’?

and Henry’s sensitive conscience, troubled by the attractions of Anne, was unable to reconcile itself to the sin of continued marriage with a deceased brother’s nominal widow. Henry found himself committed to action where he had at first only intended to threaten.

Yet he had no intention of doing more than transfer to himself that jurisdiction which had previously been exercised by the Pope. Indeed his discipline was stricter than papal discipline. As Bishop Stubbs wittily said of a later king, Henry as Supreme Head of the Church claimed to be ‘“‘the Pope, the whole Pope and something more than the Pope.” He made it a penal offense not to go to confession and said that celibacy of the clergy was not, as the Pope held, merely a disciplinary rule, but a law of God.? In this he was clearly wrong, yet poor Cranmer, who had married the daughter of Osiander, the German Reformer, had to pack her up in a trunk as if she were luggage, in order to keep her dark. Henry wished for no accommodation with Protestantism, and was very willing to prove the impartiality of his mind by ordering that Protestants who denied Catholic doctrine

? Gray’s Alliance of Education and Government. >See Mr. Hilaire Belloc’s How the Reformation Happened.

ENGLAND BEFORE ELIZABETH hg should be dragged to the stake on the same hurdle with Catholics who persisted in maintaining the papal supremacy.

There was some opposition in Parliament to the first dissolution of the monasteries, but when Henry told the House of Commons, “I hear that my bill will not pass. I will have it pass or I will have some of your heads,” * opposition evaporated before the combination of greed and fear. There was one large rising against the changes —that of North England, known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. There are tales, too, of discontent among the poor, -and a More or a Fisher was willing to lay down his life for the old doctrine. Yet on the whole Henry’s policy seems to have shocked public opinion surprisingly little. There are several reasons for this.

First, Henry made no change of any importance in the ritual of the services or in defined doctrine. Quarrels between popes and kings were no novelty and the people did not understand that by this quarrel they had in any way been put outside the Catholic Church. Since the time of William I the kings of England had always possessed a larger power of ecclesiastical patronage than any other Christian monarch, and to most Englishmen the changes no doubt seemed nothing more than a readjustment of relations which were continually being readjusted.

Secondly, the Renaissance’ praise of the self-sufficient, strong man had led to an exaggerated and superstitious monarch-worship, which made people ready to tolerate, and even welcome, an arrogance of conduct in an occu-

*Cobbett’s History of the Reformation. Spillman’s History of Sacrilege, 183.

pant of a throne, greater probably than would have been conceivable either to any earlier or to any later generation. The New Learning had introduced a silly sneering at medieval thought which the Renaissance knew only in its decadence. To the medievalist good had always lain in the mean between two extremes. In reaction from this wisdom the Renaissance thought to find it in extremes. The Middle Ages tried to strike a balance between liberty and order. After the chaos of the Wars of the Roses, in England more even than elsewhere, men were willing to seek for peace at any price—even at the price of liberty—by submitting in all things to the despotism of a single ruler. |

Thirdly, the development of artillery, which the strong, central government could afford but the local rebel could not afford, had smashed feudalism and strengthened the monarchies. Most men so wholly worship success that they very easily come to think that whatever is strong ought to be strong.

Fourthly, to the very crude nationalism of the sixteenth century there was something brave and patriotic in refusing to admit the supremacy of a foreigner.

Fifthly, there was the enormous motive of economic greed. Henry, it is all but certain, had no intention of making permanent the breach with Rome.° There was no reason why that breach should not have been healed after the deaths of Catharine and Anne Boleyn, had it not been for the opposition of those who had profited financially from the change. It is important to understand clearly this capital point.

5 See Gardiner’s Sermon on Queen Mary’s Accession.

The money that used previously to go to Rome now remained in the country. Theoretically it was to go to the Crown, and Mr. Lytton Strachey ° praises the “cunning” of Henry in annexing those revenues to himself. Yet, in truth, he quite failed to do so. The new families were very well aware that they would be able to find means of steering that money into their own pockets. When to the papal dues was added the wealth of the monasteries, it became of desperate importance to this new, rapacious, unscrupulous, irreligious class that the old order should not be restored. The Church property was, in theory at least, public property, property held and administered by the monks in trust for certain public purposes. It was hardly more the personal property of the monks than the income-tax is to-day the personal property of the clerks of the Treasury. The practice, it is true, did not in the fifteenth century wholly conform to the theory, but it conformed a great deal more nearly than popular rhetoric is sometimes inclined to admit. Nor did the dissolution at all compel practice more_ nearly to conform to a theory of common use; it merely abolished the theory of common use. That is to say, by the dissolution this public property passed into private hands. Some estimate that as much as a third of the landed wealth of England changed hands, others say only a seventh. The true figure, which we cannot now discover, must lie somewhere between the two extremes, _ perhaps at about a fifth.

It is common to agree with the argument of Henry’s creatures who, while admitting the existence of “divers

“Elizabeth and Essex, by Lytton Strachey.

great and solemn monasteries of this realm wherein (thanks be to God) religion is right well kept and observed,” * yet claimed that the smaller monasteries were hotbeds of corruption. Abuses there doubtless were, yet Cardinal Gasquet * has adequately shown how completely unsubstantiated are sweeping charges of universal vice; nor must it be forgotten that it was far safer to make accusations against the smaller monasteries, whose representatives were not there to defend themselves, than it was to attack the larger ones, whose mitered abbots were in their places in Parliament. Only later, when they had devoured the weak, did greed embolden the despoilers to attack the strong.

In Edward VI’s reign the first attempt was made to give to the Church of England a definitely Protestant theology. The attempt was begun by one party under Somerset, a Seymour. Then, after Somerset had been betrayed by Cecil, the Secretary of his Council, it was continued by a rival but worse party under Northumberland. Cranmer had written one Prayer Book for Somerset, which he announced to have been “drawn up by the aid of the Holy Ghost.” ° It would not do, and on Somerset’s fall, Northumberland made him write another in the compilation of which he neglected to acknowledge the assistance of any such Collaborator.

“Do ye not know,” explains one of the new grantees of the abbey lands of Sion in Sussex to his tenants,

™From the preamble to the Act for the Suppression of the Smaller Monasteries. :

® See Cardinal Gasquet’s Henry VIII and the Monasteries, The Eve of the Reformation, England under the Old Religion, etc.

°See the preamble to the Act of Parliament enjoining the Prayer- Book of 1548.

ENGLAND BEFORE ELIZABETH at in the record of the Star Chamber proceedings of Henry VIII’s reign, “that the King’s grace hath put down all the houses of monks, friars and nuns? Therefore, now is the time come that we gentlemen will pull down the houses of such poor knaves as ye be.” *° And the reign of Edward VI gave to “us gentlemen” a heavensent opportunity which they were not slow to take. Somerset, a robber of the poor himself, had at least tried to protect the poor against the robberies of others. With Northumberland “the dance of all the dirt began.” The Seymours were perhaps honest Protestants. If so, they were almost the only such among the new families. A writer as little biassed against the Reformation as Macaulay has said that “ of those who had an important share in bringing it about Ridley was perhaps the only person who did not consider it a mere political job.” * The changes were intensely unpopular and were resisted by the people, as the changes of Henry’s reign had never been resisted. In a confidential letter to the Protector Somerset, written on July 7, 1549, Sir William Paget, his chief secretary, admits that “the use of the old religion is forbidden by a law and the use of the new is not yet imprinted in the stomachs of eleven of twelve parts of the realm.” ** The resistance could only be suppressed by the introduction of German mercenaries. On the reason for this Burnet, in his History of the Reformation, is surprisingly frank. ““The bulk of the people of England,” he says, “was still possessed with the old superstition to such a degree that it was visible * Quoted by Mr. R. H. Tawney in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.

* Essay on Hallam’s Constitutional History. * Strype, ii., Rec. 110.

they could not be depended on in any matter that related to the alterations that were made or were designed to be made; whereas the Germans were full of zeal on the other side.”)**

We have the evidence of the reports of the Spanish, the French and the Venetian Ambassadors to prove to us that the great majority of the English governing class during these Tudor times was atheist.’* Many were atheist in open profession. More still were atheist in practice and betrayed their lack of faith in their jests and epigrams. Like the Earl of Arran, they “esteemed religion and worshipping of God but a superstitious terror to the consciences of the people to hold them in awe and obedience.” Hell was ‘a bogle to flee bairns” and Heaven “‘but a conceit to make fools fayne.” 7° Cardinal Bentivoglio reports that four-fifths of the nation would declare themselves Catholic under a Catholic government, but that only one in thirty would demand Mass if the government were heretical. As Essex, the father of Elizabeth’s favorite, said on his deathbed in 1570, ‘““The Gospel has been preached to them, but they were neither Papists nor Protestants, of no religion but full of pride and iniquity. There was nothing but infidelity, infidelity, infidelity; atheism, atheism; no religion, no religion.”’ The fools of each generation imagine themselves to have been the first to see through revealed religion. It is a great mistake, for their folly is more ancient than they think. At the bidding of the sovereign, writes the Venetian Ambassador in the reign of Queen Mary,

*Burnet’s History of the Reformation ii. 329. “ Lingard., V., 220. *° Calderwood, quoted by Froude. XII, 24.

the rich would declare themselves Jews or Mahommedans to-morrow.” *°

Take as an example of the Protestant politician of the time the Duke of Northumberland, a man who cynically supported the Protestant cause during the vigor of his life and while it was to his economic interest to do so, but who, when he saw that the game was up and when the approach of death called him to more serious things, sought the consolations of the Catholic Church... **,/

In words of some importance he exaltéd the people “‘to stand to the religion of their ancestors, rejecting that of later date, which had occasioned all the misery of the foregoing thirty years.”’ Himself, he said, ‘“‘being blinded by ambition, he made a rack of his conscience.” 1"

The motive from which the governing class advocated the changes of Edward’s reign was then not religious but economic. Early in the reign the chantries had followed the way of the monasteries. A small part of their income went to the maintenance of King Edward VI’s Grammar Schools—which are not the schools which King Edward VI founded, but the schools which he did not destroy.** A far larger part went into the pockets of “deserving noblemen.” The next discovery was that Calvinism was an even cheaper religion than Henry’s Anglicanism. It had been profitable to be rid of the Pope and the monks. It would be more profitable still to be rid of the bishops. These truths, which he doubtless held to be self-evident, that very pleasant and villainous courtier,

**MSS. Barber, 1208.

“ Stowe, 615. Strype, App. 168.

“Leach’s English Schools at the Reformation. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, See also J. Ritchie’s Reflections on Scottish Church History, Chap. viii, The Educational Myth.

NE

Hobey, was good enough to explain to the Protector in a letter written on January 19, 1549. He hopes “that the King’s Majesty will appoint unto the good bishops an honest and competent living, sufficient for their maintenance, taking from them the rest of their worldly possessions and dignities and thereby avoid the vain glory that letteth truly and sincerely to do their duty.” He would have the Protector, having dealt with the bishops, go on to the chapters. It would be a good plan, thinks Hobey, “‘if all the prebends within England were converted to the like use for the defense of our country and the maintenance of honest, poor gentlemen.” *°

For such purposes did the “honest, poor gentlemen” of Edward’s court use the small body of genuine reformers upon whom they could lay their hands. As a result of “the King’s godly proceedings” family after family rose from nothing into plutocratic wealth, as article after article of Church property was discovered, like the plate of the poor minor-canons of St. George’s, Windsor, to be “fit for His Majesty’s service and tending to superstitious usages.” 7° The full accomplishment of the courtiers’ purpose was prevented by Edward’s death.

Edward VI was succeeded by his sister, Mary. The new queen was welcomed with rapturous loyalty by the people, and the attempts at treason against her were easily defeated. Her religious policy was a double one— to restore the old forms of service and to restore the papal supremacy. In the first of these there was no difficulty. The second had to be approached more carefully.

” Strype,, i, 88.) 5 : ® Kennedy, Studies in Tudor History, 110.

It had to be made very clear to the governing families that the restoration of the papal supremacy would not imply an attempt to restore to religious uses the Church property which had been seized during the last two reigns. Both the Pope and the Queen were willing to give promises that the new owners should not be disturbed, and the reconciliation of the country with the Holy See was accomplished. It was welcomed by the people who were weary of the excesses of the last two reigns.

Mary has left behind her an evil name in popular history. The overwhelming majority of the country, including Elizabeth, the heir to the throne, and almost the entire governing class, accepted the reconciliation. Yet there was a small sprinkling of genuine reforming fanatics, who, preferring, as it was reasonable to prefer if they were sincere, the interests of truth, as they saw it, to that of their country, persistently intrigued through the French Ambassador, Noailles, with the King of France, their sovereign’s enemy, and with the Ambassador of Venice, the enemy of Spain. These reformers hated Catholicism and the priests. It was their purpose to rob the Christian faith of every practice or doctrine which implied a special priestly clas, Against them Mary turned. ‘

It is necessary to banish from the mind any picture of some gentle, slightly doddering country rector, summoned from his butterfly-collecting to the stake. There were, I do not doubt, such men among those who perished —men who suffered, as is the world’s way, for the sins of their colleagues. Yet gentleness did not flourish easily in the extraordinary violence of sixteenth century Protestantism. The mild, well-mannered Laodiceans did not suffer from the Marian persecutions, for Mary did not burn people, as is sometimes loosely said, merely for not being Catholics. She burnt them only if they refused to admit any truth whatsoever in the Real Presence. “Is there or is there not anything taken and received in the Holy Sacrament besides Bread and Wine?’ ** was the question put to the accused. It was a question which would have brought to the stake nobody who believed what was afterwards to become the doctrine of the Church of England.

A large part of the reformers—those who were allowed to speak for the whole—were, as Gairdner has shown in his Lollardy and the Reformation, of the type that spits at the Blessed Sacrament, blasphemes against Our Lady and makes mock of the holiest things. To such a mind as Mary’s, treason to Queen or country was a small matter beside an insult to the Sacraments. Therefore she did not persecute her enemies, as she might well have done, as traitors; she persecuted them as heretics. During her reign between two and three hundred, it seems, were burned.*” In merely secular justice Mary’s rule was less harsh than that of her predecessors. Witness her reluctance to shed blood after Northumberland’s first rebellion. To her reign we owe the important law that no one can be convicted of high treason except on the evidence of two witnesses. It would have been well if she had followed a milder policy in religion, too. Yet she pre-

™ Introductory History of England, by C. R. L. Fletcher, II, 129.

™ Gairdner’s Lollardy and the Reformation. Lingard V, 239, puts it a bit lower.

ferred to believe with every sovereign of her time, of whatever creed, that it was her duty to compel her subjects to adhere to her own religious opinions. Nor is it unlikely that, as Froude suggests, she suffered during her last years from a touch of hereditary insanity which infected her judgment and goaded it into savagery.

Mary’s violence fell for the most part upon the poor and ignorant fanatics. Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer were among the few people of distinction who perished.

Her blunder in equity was, that by punishing only for heresy she allowed the rich pilferers such as Cecil, the real villains of the piece, to slip through her hands. For they, of course, cheerfully conformed to Catholicism, as they would have conformed to Mormonism or fire worship, if it had suited their purposes to do so. Indeed, much of the most violent of the persecution came from men such as Paulet, the Marquess of Winchester,?* who accomplished the considerable feat of holding the Lord Treasurership from 1550 to 1572 without a break—from men, that is to say, who had been Protestant persecutors under Edward and were to become Protestant persecutors again under Elizabeth. As Dr. Storey was afterwards to lament, her vengeance fell upon “the little twigs and shoots,” but spared “‘the roots and great branches.” ?4

The sixteenth century was a crude and blood-spilling age, and it is neither probable nor proved that the persecutions were at all a large shock to public opinion. Bitterly though they differed from one another upon what constituted a heretic, there were yet very few people in England at that date who did not grant that heretics should in the last resort be burnt. Ridley, Latimer and Cranmer—all had burnt others when they had the chance. Mary’s reign was rife with plots, and men were racking their brains for grievances which they could lay to the charge of her government. Yet they never complained of the fact that she burnt. They complained, it is true, that she burnt too much or that she burnt the wrong people, but they never complained because she punished for religious offenses or because the punishment which she inflicted was the punishment of burning. Politically the burnings were a blunder, but not a very important blunder. That is to say, humane people disliked them and there were protests against them— especially from enlightened priests such as Alfonso de Castro, Philip’s confessor.”° But the notion that the sight of these martyrs’ sufferings in some way turned England Protestant is entirely baseless.