VII CHAP paring for: and no martyr ever displayed a more thorough spirit of forgiveness towards all who were A.D. 1535 instrumental in his condemnation. He went forth to Tower Hill, a hale man (but for his imprisonment) of fifty-six years of age, on Tuesday, the octave of St. Peter and the eve of St. Thomas of Canterbury (as he himself noticed), July 6, 1535 :3— Anecdote of Anne More's portrait "Immediately after the execution, word was brought thereof to the King; who being then at dice when it was told him, at the hearing thereof seemed to be wonderfully amazed. 'And is it true' (quoth the King); 'is Sir Thomas More, my chancellor, dead?' The messenger answered, Yea, if it may please your Majesty.' He turned to Queen Anne, who then stood by, and, wistfully looking upon her, said, 'Thou, thou art the cause of this man's death.' So presently went to his chamber, and there wept full bitterly." A good portrait of Sir Thomas More, by Holbein, Boleyn and is now in the Louvre, which the first art critic of our day thinks may be the same as that of which Baldinucci, in his "Lives of Painters," tells the following story-King Henry had a fine portrait of the chancellor, which hung in a certain apartment with those of other eminent men. On the day of More's execution, after the King had reproached her with being the cause of his death, Queen Anne Boleyn, casting her eyes on the portrait, fancied that its gaze was fixed on her reproachfully, and seized with a sudden terror of remorse, she flung the picture out of the window, exclaiming, "Oh me! the man seems to be still alive." 3 In Foxe's Acts and Monuments it is curious to find the author placing More in his Calendar of Martyrs on June 19th. It was picked up by a passerby, and eventually carried to Roine, where in Baldinucci's time it still remained, though not now to be found there. For further particu. lars see some account of the "Life and Works of Hans Holbein," by Ralph Nicholson Wornum. VII In this manner passed away two great and good CHAP men, one whose work was done, the other still capable of many years' good service to his country. A.D. 1535 Neither of them did much either in advancing or retarding the Reformation, and yet the names of both are so closely bound up with the transactions of the time that it is impossible to omit this account of their latter days. Their deaths mark, moreover, an epoch of reaction, especially among the clergy. There was a degree of reckless tyranny in those deaths which exhibited in strong colours the intensely cruel disposition of the King, and of his minister, Cromwell. It was felt that no one was safe when men so thoroughly guiltless of any real crime could thus be sacrificed. Still more was it felt that religion had very little to do with the course which the King was taking, and that there was great danger of religion itself being shipwrecked and the Church destroyed if that course were not checked. The reaction thus started went on gaining strength until it overthrew the Reformation for a time, and ended at last by founding the Roman Catholic schism in England. CHAP Narrow ness of older clergy CHAPTER VIII AUTHORITATIVE DEALINGS WITH DOCTRINE IN THE REIGN OF HENRY THE EIGHTH [[A.D. 1536-A.D. 1547] WHEN King Henry the Eighth had established his own authority in the Church of England, his ideas on the subject of its reformation were very nearly exhausted. Those ideas were chiefly confined to the gratification of his wishes in the matter of the divorce, to the acquisition of power in that of the supremacy, and to the resuscitation of his attenuated treasury by the dissolution of the monasteries. There was, however, a great power at work of which the King had not taken an estimate, and that was the power of national thought, deriving its impulse from no visible quarter, but moving forward with an irresistible force. But, perhaps, one great stimulating element in the development of national thought was the persistence with which many of the older clergy adhered to an exceedingly narrow interpretation of the schoolmen, and of the medieval system of the Church in general. The schoolmen were mental giants, whose works could scarcely be despised by any one who has made VIII himself acquainted with them.1 And so also the CHAP religious system of the Middle Ages was grand as the old cathedrals which still record its memory. Intellect and saintliness had full scope in the Medieval Church of England, as full scope as in any age from Constantine to the present time. But great systems require great living exponents if their grandeur is to continue to be an effective force, and the absence of such exponents causes a loss of significance which is next door to a loss of life. Now, it is beyond all manner of doubt that the fifteenth century failed to produce any class of theologians who could properly use the weapons which the twelfth and thirteenth had forged for them. There were as few great Paucity of scholars and theologians as there were great saints, and theoand intellect as well as holiness had sunk down to a level of low mediocrity. The cruel wars of the fifteenth century—especially, as regards our own country, the wars of the Roses-had gone far towards eating out the heart of religion; and it was only when they ceased that men seemed to have time and inclination to think again. scholars logians of Eras mus The great yet vain and petulant Erasmus un- Influence doubtedly deserves the credit of having aroused the educated world of Europe, and especially of our own country, from this torpor. It is an absurd mistake to suppose that he originated the study of Greek in England, for it was at Cambridge that he learned that language; but his enthusiastic love of it stirred the languid scholarship of both our universities, and his enterprise in printing the text of the New up 1 The contempt which used to be expressed for the schoolmen was, in reality, contempt for the way in which they had been used; few, even among learned men, tak- VIII CHAP Testament led many to study the original who would otherwise have been content with the Vulgate. The mind of Erasmus was, too, of a decidedly independent and original character: and to him we must trace the growth of that disposition to search deep into the foundations of received dogmas which had so great an effect upon the theology of the Church of England. Men were in the habit of settling down on a rather superficial tradition, and the habit became so strong that a spirit of inquiry began to be looked upon as identical with a spirit of heresy. Erasmus taught his generation the habit of looking below the surface; and, notwithstanding the tone of irreverence and scornfulness with which his own writings are too much adulterated, and which his followers too often caught up, this habit of research and spirit of inquiry proved a gain to the theological world as well as to the world of thought at large. It may be concluded that although it is difficult to point out any definite work by which Erasmus influenced the English Reformation beyond the publication of his Greek New Testament, he really did influence it in two particulars; first, by the revival of scholarship; and secondly, by stimulating men to the use of their reasoning powers. His influence was directly exerted only upon the higher clergy, and a few of the higher laity; but it was of a kind which would soon extend downwards by these intermediate channels, and thus the results of it were spread over a much wider area than that traversed by the great scholar himself. Dean Colet has been already mentioned in a previous chapter as the preacher of a famous Reformation sermon before the Convocation, and as a |