duplicity, and a show of force the rebels were soon dispersed; and when in the spring of 1537 a few fresh outbreaks gave an excuse for the withdrawal of such concessions as had been lion cruelly made, whole districts were given over to military executions. suppressed With his personal enemies among the northern nobles who well. had led the revolt Cromwell dealt without mercy.1 the rebel by Crom Strife of the rival factions at the council board; views of ans; The struggle in which Henry was thus involved from without with the catholic party, who rejected as a whole the new order of things which the separation from Rome had brought about, was scarcely less perplexing than the strife which grew from within out of the conflicts between the two rival factions who were now struggling at the council board for the control of the new ecclesiastical system, whose theology had not yet divergent received from the state authoritative definition. On the one Anglicans hand stood the Anglicans, led by Norfolk, Suffolk, Gardiner, and Luther and Bonner, with whom were the majority of the bishops and the older nobles, who, while they acquiesced in the separation from Rome, were unalterably opposed to any serious departure from the tenets, the forms, the traditions of the past. On the other hand stood the Lutherans, led by Cranmer, supported by such of the newly created peers as Cromwell and the lords Russell and Southampton, and by such of the newly elected bishops as Shaxton, Barlow, Hilsey, and Fox, who, while they adhered to the doctrine of the real presence, and, in a general sense, to the sacraments, accepted Luther's theory of justification by faith, and rejected with him masses, images, pilgrimages, ceremonies, and clerical celibacy with the zeal of the later Puritans.2 Between these two hostile factions, who were warring with each other in the new and broad field of theological controversy with the bitterness characteristic of the age, Henry and Cromwell were forced to mediate with the hope of providing some common ground upon which all could dwell together upon which in peace and concord within the fold of the reorganized national all parties could meet; church. The first effort in that direction was made when, in convocation the convocation which met at St. Paul's in June, 1536, Cromof 1536; well, who presided as vicar-general, delivered to the clergy a Henry's attempt to provide a common ground 1 The history of the rebellion rests upon the accounts contained in Holinshed, Herbert, Stowe, Hall, Speed, State Papers, and Depositions on the Rebellion; Rolls House MS. ceased to exist, developing gradually from the type of Wittenberg to that of Geneva.” - Froude, vol. iii. p. 177. 3 Cromwell first sent Dr. Petre as his deputy. Not until after the convo2 "This party after a few years cation had refused to accept him did Icles of reli ism and the League of Schmal kald, 1586 message in which they were told that "the king studieth day. Cromwell appear himself. Wilkins, Conc., vol. iii. p. 803. When parliament met in June, the convocation as usual assembled with it. 1 Foxe, Acts and Mon., vol. v. pp. 379-384. June 23 the clergy of the Lower House presented a "Protestation" against the growing heresy, consisting of sixty-eight articles, which appear at length in Wilkins, Conc., vol. iii. p. 137, and in Strype, vol. ii. p. 260. The original copy subscribed by Henry Articles into the known as tution of a certain articles drawn up at Wittenberg in 1536; While the English theologians were thus striving to formulate a creed which would prove acceptable at home, the king had sent an embassy abroad to confer with the Lutheran divines with the view of arriving at a common basis of religious belief, and the result was the tentative scheme embodied in certain articles1 drawn up at Wittenberg early in 1536. But nothing came of the negotiation at the time, and the whole matter was permitted to sleep until 1538, when Henry, again anxious to strengthen his hands by an alliance with the "princes of the Augsburg Confession," sent a confidential agent to them with the request that they would send over Melancthon and other divines for the purpose of a conference. In response to this request a German embassy, the chief of which was Burckhardt, was sent to England to confer with a commission with Cranmer at its head, and after actually agreeThirteen ing upon Thirteen Articles,2 the conference of the joint body progressed favorably until the sacraments were reached, when a hopeless disagreement ended rather abruptly the last real effort ever made to unite the Lutherans in one common doctrine with the Church of England. Thus disappointed of his hope of a German alliance, and of his plan of satisfying the Lutheran party within his own realm, Henry, whose catholic instincts had been shocked by the assaults which that small yet aggressive faction were now making upon the shrines, the reliquaries, the ceremonies of the older faith, resolved to hush, Articles of 1538. mandate under the king's order that it was published under the title of 1 An account of these articles is given by Seckendorf, Comment. de Lutheran., lib. iii. § xxxix. "These Articles are said to exist both in Latin and German. Melancthon, Opp., iii. 104, note 2."- Hardwick's Hist. of the Articles, p. 55, note 2. 2 These articles were found by Dr. Jenkyns among the papers of Cranmer, and are printed in his Cranmer, vol. iv. p. 273. They are also printed in Hardwick, Appendix II., where the passages, which are almost identical with the Augsburg Confession, are included between [], and where "the passages or phrases which have reappeared in the Edwardine Articles are denoted by Italics." 8 See Strype's Eccl. Mem., i. chaps. xxxii. and xxxiv., with documents in Appendix; and also Blount, Reform. of the Church of Eng., vol. i. p. 471. The final statement made by the German divines of their views as to the sacrament, the marriage of the priesthood, etc., and Henry's reply thereto are printed in Burnet, Addenda to Part I. (Collectanea, pp. 138 and 140). once for all, religious dissension by a more stern and reactionary policy, for the.definition and enforcement of which was called the parliament which met in London in April, 1539. of 1539 throne; The popular branch of the preceding parliament, which had Parliament been hastily assembled in 1536, was filled by creatures of the called court, some of whom were returned under circumstances of to hush religious the grossest pressure. From the history of the election of discord; 1539 it is clear that the crown did not fail to make every p effort to again secure the same advantage, the attainment of which was in due time certified by Cromwell to the king in a letter in which he said that "your Grace had never more tractable parliament."2 After the speech from the throne had speech been read, announcing to the houses that they had been called from the together to close the religious quarrels by which the kingdom was distracted, the lords were invited to appoint a committee to consider the nature of the evil and to report a remedy.3 A long pause then followed, during which the parliament, while awaiting the report of the committee on religion, passed three memorable statutes, two of which embodied the extremest effort which the estates could possibly make for the exaltation of the royal authority. Upon the complaint of the king that his proclamations were not duly observed, and that statute givoffenders against them could not be punished as law-break- ing king's ers, an act was passed in which the parliament so far abdi- tions the cated its functions as to declare that royal proclamations, law; issued with the consent of the council, should have the same force as its own enactments, and that pains and penalties might be inflicted upon all who violated them, provided the same were duly defined beforehand in each proclamation. A further limitation was also imposed to the effect that the king 5 1 For details, see Froude, vol. iii. pp. 189-193 and notes, special reference being made to the account of the Canterbury election. 2 Cromwell to Henry VIII., State Papers, vol. i. p. 693. The committee was composed of Cromwell, the two archbishops, and ten bishops. Lords' Journal, 31 Hen. VIII. Six questions were submitted to the committee by the king (the six articles in an interrogative form) which are stated in the preamble of the act. The committee failed to agree, and the proclama force of suppression of the greater monas teries; should not by virtue of his new powers set aside either existing statutes or the customary law.1 The unprecedented grant of legislative power thus made to the crown was soon followed by an act 2 confirming the surrender of all the religious houses which had dissolved themselves since the act of 1536, and empowering the king to extend its provisions to all others that "might be hereafter dissolved, suppressed, surrendered, or had or might by any other means come into the hands of the king." Thus at a blow fell the six hundred greater monasteries which had survived the first assault, and with their fall disappear disappeared from the house of lords the twenty-six abbots and parliamen- the two priors who then sat as lords of parliament by virtue tary abbots; of their baronial status, which ended with the destruction of their houses. The fruit of the spoliation of the monasteries was so great that the king promised never again to call upon his people for subsidies. In addition to this promise the hope was held out that from its fresh resources the crown would creation of create twenty-one new bishoprics, and convert a large propornew bishop- tion of the religious houses into chapters of deans and pre ance of the rics; 5 bendaries, which were to be attached both to the old and new sees. In order to facilitate that pious purpose, an act 5 was passed authorizing the crown to make such creations and endowments by letters patent. The number of new bishoprics dwindled down, however, to six, while only seven religious houses were actually converted. And yet apart from the ex 1 As to the prior history of "Delegated Legislation," see Amos, Reformation Parliament, pp. 64, 65. 2 13 Hen. VIII. c. 13. 3 See vol. i. p. 355. After witnessing without opposing the bill offered in May, 1539, for their destruction, the abbots sat for the last time in the upper house on the 28th of June, the last day of the session, the act not having passed until that day. After their retirement the spiritual peerage was reduced to the archbishops and bishops, who, in the next parliament, numbered only twenty-one spiritual as against forty-one temporal peers. To the twenty-one old bishoprics were added the six new ones whose creation grew out of the appropriation by the state of the monastic property as explained below. Thus was the spir itual peerage reduced from a majority to a minority. Blount (Reform. of the Church of Eng., vol. i. p. 371), after a careful computation, concludes that "the property which the king confiscated amounted in value (taking estates, money, plate, and jewels) to at least fifty millions of pounds (£50,000,000), this being probably much below the real state of the case." 5 31 Hen. VIII. c. 9. 6 Oxford, Peterborough, Bristol, Gloucester, Chester, and Westminster, the last named suppressed in 1550. 7 Canterbury, Durham, Winchester, Ely, Carlisle, Norwich, and Worcester. "These thirteen cathedrals are therefore called those of the New Foundation.'"- Blount, vol. i. p. 371, note 7. |