and scourgings, nay, moreover, with bonds and imprisonments.
The mob derided it; power frowned upon it; and lordly Churchmen branded it as heresy, and pursued it with sword and faggot. Let us draw around its cradle, placed under no gorgeous roof, but in a prison-cell, with jailers and executioners waiting beside it. Let us forget, if only for awhile, the denominational names, and ecclesiastical classifications, that separate us; let us lay aside, the one his lawn and the other his Genevan cloak, and, simply in our character of Christians and Protestants, come hither, and contemplate the lowliness of our common origin. It seems as if the "young child" had been cast out to perish; the Roman Power stands before it ready to destroy it, and yet it has been said to it, "To thee will I give England."
There is a lesson here which, could we humble ourselves, and lay it duly to heart, would go far to awaken the love and bring back the union and strength of our first days.
CHAPTER 4
EFFORTS FOR THE REDISTRIBUTION OF ECCLESIASTICAL PROPERTY
The Burning Bush — Petition of Parliament — Redistribution of Ecclesiastical Property — Defence of Archbishop Arundel — The King stands by the Church — The Petition Presented a Second Time — Its Second Refusal — More Powerful Weapons than Royal Edicts — Richard II. Deposed — Henry IV. — Edict De Haeretico Comburendo — Griefs of the King — Calamities of the Country — Projected Crusade — Death of Henry IV.
IN the former chapter we saw the Protestants of England stigmatised as Lollards, proscribed by edicts, and haled to prisons, which they left, the many to read their recantation at cathedral doors and market crosses, and the few to fulfill their witnessbearing at the stake. The tempest was growing in violence every hour, and the little company on whom it beat so sorely seemed doomed to extinction. Yet in no age or country, perhaps, has the Church of God more perfectly realised the promise wrapped up in her earliest and most significant symbol, than in England at the present time. As amid the granite peaks of Horeb, so here in England, "The bush burned and was not consumed."
This way of maintaining their testimony by suffering, was a surer path to victory than that which the English Protestants had fondly chalked out for themselves. In the sixth year of Henry IV., they had moved the king, through Parliament, to take possession of the temporalities of the Church, and redistribute them in such a manner as would make them more serviceable to both the crown and the nation.
The Commons represented to the king that the clergy possessed a third of the lands in the realm, that they contributed nothing to the public burdens, and that their riches disqualified them from the due performance of their sacred functions. Archbishop Arundel was by the king's side when the petition was presented by the Speaker of the house, Sir John Cheney. He was not the man to stand silent when such an accusation was preferred against his order. True it was, said the archbishop, that the clergy did not go in person to the wars, but it was not less true that they always sent their vassals and tenants to the field, and in such numbers, and furnished with such equipments, as corresponded to the size of their estates; and further, the archbishop maintained that as regarded the taunt that the clerics were but drones, who lived idly at home while their countrymen were serving abroad, the Speaker had done them injustice. If they donned the surplice or betook them to their breviary, when their lay brethren buckled on the coat of mail, and grasped rapier or cross-bow, it was not because they were chary of their blood, or enamoured of ease, but because they wished to give their days and nights to prayer for theft country's welfare, and especially for the success of its arms. While the soldiers of England were fighting, her priests were supplicating; the latter, not less than the former, contributed to those victories which were shedding such luster on the arms of England.
The Speaker of the Commons, smiling at the primate's enthusiasm, replied that "he thought the prayers of the Church but a slender supply." Stung by this retort, Arundel quickly turned on Sir John, and charged him with profaneness. "I perceive, sir," said the prelate, "how the kingdom is likely to thrive, when the aids of devotion, and the favor of Heaven, are thus slighted and ridiculed."
The king "hung, as it were, in a balance of thought." The archbishop, perceiving his indecision, dropped on his knees before him, and implored Henry to remember the oath he had sworn on coming to the crown, to maintain the rights of the Church and defend the clergy; and he counselled him, above all, to beware incurring the guilt of sacrilege, and the penalties thereto annexed. The king was undecided no longer; he bade the archbishop dismiss his fears, and assured him that the clergy need be under no apprehensions from such proposals as the present, while he wore the crown; that he would take care to leave the Church in even a better condition than that in which he had found it. The hopes of the Lollards were thus rudely dashed.
But their numbers continued to increase; by-and-by there came to be a "Lollard party," as Walsingham calls it, in Parliament, and in the eleventh year of Henry's reign they judged the time ripe for bringing forward their proposal a second time,. They made a computation of the ecclesiastical estates, which, according to their showing, amounted to 485,000 merks of yearly value, and contained 18,400 ploughs of land. This property, they suggested, should be divided into three parts, and distributed as follows: one part was to go to the king, and would enable him to maintain 6,000 men-at-arms, in addition to those he had at present in his pay; it would enable him besides to make a new creation of earls and knights. The second was to be divided, as an annual stipend, among the 15,000 priests who were to conduct the religious services of the nation; and the remaining third was to be appropriated to the founding of 100 new hospitals. But the proposal found no favor with the king, even though it promised to augment considerably his military following. He dared not break with the hierarchy, and he might be justly suspicious of the changes which so vast a project would draw after it.
Addressing the Commons in a tone of great severity, he charged them never again, so long as he lived, to come before the throne with any such proposal. He even refused to listen to the request with which they had accompanied their petition, that he would grant a mitigation of the edict against heresy, and permit convicted Lollards to be sent to his own prisons, rather than be immured in the more doleful strongholds of the bishops. Even these small favors the Protestants could not obtain, and lest the clergy should think that Henry had begun to waver between the two faiths, he sealed his devotion to the Church by anew kindling the pile for the Lollards.
By other weapons were the Wicliffites to win England than by royal edicts and Parliamentary petitions. They must take slow and laborious possession of it by their tears and their martyrdom. Although the king had done as they desired, and the edict had realised all that they expected from it, it would after all have been but a fictitious and barren acquisition, liable to be swept away by every varying wind that blew at court. But when, by their painful teachings, by their holy lives, and their courageous deaths, they had enlightened the understandings and won the hearts of their countrymen to the Protestant doctrine, then would they have taken possession of England in very deed, and in such fashion that they would hold it for ever. These early disciples did not yet clearly see wherein lay the great strength of Protestantism. The political activity into which they had diverged was an attempt to gather fruit, not only before the sun had ripened it, but even before they had well sowed the seed. The fabric of the Roman Church was founded on the belief, in the minds of Englishmen, that the Pope was heaven's delegate for conferring on men the pardon of their sins and the blessings of salvation. That belief must first be exploded. So long as it kept its hold, no material force, no political action, could suffice to overthrow the domination of Rome. Amid the scandals of the clergy and the decay of the nation, it would have continued to flourish to our day, had not the reforming and spiritual forces come to the rescue. We can the more easily pardon the mistake of the English Protestants of the fifteenth century when we reflect that, even yet, the sole efficacy — the omnipotency — of these forces finds only partial belief in the general mind of even the religious world.
From the hour that the stake for Protestantism was planted in England, neither the king nor the nation had rest. Henry Plantagenet (Bolingbroke) had returned from exile, on his