860 TERROR OF THEIR EXECUTION [1535. remained in their desolated house. But there were supernatural terrors around them, in which we may see the prevailing thoughts of their lonely watchings. John Darley relates that father Raby, a very old man, had died in 1534; and that he had said to the dying monk, "good father Raby, if the dead man come to the quick I beseech you to come to me," and he answered "yea." The story thus continues: "And since that I never did think upon him till Saint John day, Baptist, last past. Item, the same day at five of the clock at afternoon, I being in contemplation in our entry in our cell, suddenly he appeared to me in a monk's habit, and said to me,' why do ye not follow our father ?' [the late prior] And I said, ' wherefore ?' He said, 'for he is a martyr in heaven, next unto angels.' And I said, 'where be all our other fathers which died as well as he?' He answered and said, 'they be well, but not so well as he.'"* Such were the imaginations that lingered round the cells and cloisters of the stricken house, more consolatory, in their tender glimpses of the world of spirits, than the thoughts of those scoffers and time-servers, who were as yet unprepared to give any safer anchorage for earnest minds than in the old havens which they were destroying-dilapidated and unsafe harbours of refuge, but better than the stormy seas upon which men were driven out, without compass or beacon. This was not a time when the execution of men for denying the king's right to be head of the church implied that there would be any relaxation * "Suppression of the Monasteries," p. 34. 1535.] HOLLANDERS BURNT FOR HERESY. 361 of the old system of persecution for doctrinal opinions. One of the spies who denounced the poor brethren of the Charterhouse, a certain Jasper Fyloll, writes to Cromwell, "It is no great marvel though many of these monks have heretofore offended God and the king by their foul errors, for I have found in the prior's and proctor's cells three or four sundry printed books from beyond the sea, of as foul heresies and errors as may be; and not one or two books be now printed alone, but hundreds of them." The Act "for the punishment of heresy," passed in 1534, is immediately followed in the statute-book by "An Act for Printers and Binders of Books." * By this act the statute of Richard III., which allowed the free importation of printed and written books, is repealed. There is nothing said about the suppression of dangerous opinions; but it is merely stated that, as there are enough of printers and binders in England, no foreign books are to be sold. by retail. The Dutch printing-offices, then in full activity, were unpleasant neighbours to a government which undertook to regulate every man's opinion. It was a time of fear; for the Lutheran doctrines had been carried to an excess by religious and political fanatics; and the political tenets which bore any resemblance to those of the Anabaptists, might be spread to the danger *25 Hen. VIII. c. 15. 362 FISHER AND MORE ACCUSED OF TREASON. [1535. of all civil society. Within three weeks of the execution of the Carthusians, nineteen men and six women, born in Holland, were examined in St. Paul's church as to their opinions. Stow, who records this in his Chronicle, speaks only of their confessions as to the more abstruse points of doctrine, especially of infant and adult baptism; nothing of those principles as to society and government which led to the excesses of 1532, when the baker of Haarlem and the tailor of Leyden made themselves masters of the city of Munster, and there preached and practised the wildest extravagances. Of the nineteen men and six women who were apprehended in London, fourteen were condemned and were burnt. Latimer, who had known what persecution for heresy was, when he was examined in 1532 before six bishops, and "heard a pen walking behind the arras"-the pen of one appointed to write his answers-even he dismisses the Hollanders with these words: "The Anabaptists that were burnt here in divers towns in England (as I heard of credible men, I saw them not myself) went to their death, even intrepide, as ye will say, without any fear in the world, cheerfully. Well, let them go." He argues, and justly, that it was not to be inferred that he who so dies "dieth in a just cause.' **** He omitted to say that such fortitude is a proof that the men believed their cause to be just; and that the stake was no test of its error. The parliament is prorogued. The king is moving from palace to palace in that midsummer of 1535. There are two prisoners in the Tower under attainder for misprision of treason. John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, would have soon ceased from troubling the government; for he had seen eighty summers. It was mercy, however, to remove him from his hard fare and scant clothing-" only some old rags were left to cover him."† Under the roof of the same prison was Sir Thomas More. He was of a more vigorous age; but long confinement had bent his body and weakened his emaciated limbs. There came into the Tower, on the 14th of June, certain commissioners, deputed to interrogate these two prisoners; and to the question whether he had received or written any letters during his imprisonment, More gave one answer which sufficiently indicates the sympathy between these doomed men: "since he came to the Tower he wrote divers scrolls or letters to Mr. Doctor Fisher, and received from him some other again; whereof the most part contained nothing else but comforting words from either to other; and declaration of the state that they were in, in their bodies; and giving of thanks for such meat or drink that the one had sent to the other."‡ But More had been subjected to previous interrogatories, to which he alluded in another answer on the 14th of June: "Also saith that since the last examination of him, this examinant did send Mr. Fisher word, by a letter that Mr. Solicitor had shewed him, that it was all one not to answer, and to say against the statute what a man would, as all the learned men of England would justify, as he [Mr. Solicitor] said then. And therefore he said he could reckon upon nothing else but the uttermost."§ He had written, he said, to his daughter, Mr. Roper's wife, that what the end should be, he could not tell; "but whatsoever it were, better or worse, he desired her to take it patiently, *Sermons. Fourth Sermon before King Edward VI. State Papers, vol. i. p. 433. +Burnet's "Reformation." § Ibid., p. 434. 1535.] THEIR CONDEMNATION. 363 and take no thought therefor, but only pray for him." Margaret, the best beloved of his children, did not take it patiently, but "used great vehemence and obsecration, to persuade him to incline to the king's desire." And thus, More, upon hearing the interrogatories of the commissioners touching the king's supremacy, incurred the peril which Mr. Solicitor had pointed out— "he sayeth that he can make no answer." At this crisis of their fate an incident occurred which hurried Fisher to the scaffold, and, as a natural consequence, More followed. Clement VII. died on the 25th of September, 1534. He was no more to be troubled with the threats of Charles or Francis; no more to hesitate about excommunicating Henry, and placing England under interdict. His successor, Paul III., probably thought that the government of the stubborn islanders might be won back by courtesy ; and in this desire, as he protested, he sent a cardinal's hat to bishop Fisher. "He shall have no head to wear it," exclaimed the indignant king. Fisher declared that he would not accept the honour which he had never sought. On the 17th of June he was taken before a special commission at Westminster Hall. The official record of this trial is a brief one: "Pleads not guilty. Venire awarded. Verdict, guilty. Judgment as usual in cases of treason." He died, by simple beheading, on the 22nd of June. On the 1st of July, the special commission again sat. More tottered into the hall, leaning upon his staff-into that hall which he had often entered, in the pomp of chancellor, with mace and seal borne before him. The axe now marshalled him on his certain road. His robes of office were now exchanged for a coarse woollen gown. He stood at the bar before his successor, Audley, as his judge. He was charged not only with refusing to acknowledge the king's supremacy, but that he had positively denied it. We have seen that "Mr. Solicitor" had been with him in the Tower. By "Mr. Solicitor" was the charge to be proved, in the betrayal of a confidential communication, and the distortion of the prisoner's words into a meaning beyond his intention. That man, Robert Rich, had played the same infamous part in the trial of Fisher. One who fills the office of Chief Justice of England, with the honesty that is an attribute of the judges of our time, speaks of Rich as "one who has brought a greater stain upon the bar of England than any member of the profession to which I am proud to belong."* No inquisitor of the Holy Office ever abused the frankness of a prisoner more than this base fellow, Rich, who was afterwards lord chancellor. He went to the Tower with another person to remove More's books. The great scholar, seeing his daily solace thus taken from him, preserves his equanimity while the cherished volumes are being packed up. Rich, with the apparent friendliness that has always marked the intercourse of lawyers, however different their opinions, begins to talk about the great cause of dispute for which More was a prisoner. 'Suppose there were an act of parliament that all men should take me for king," said Rich, "would not you take me for king?" More, who knew something of the history of the English monarchy, replied, "Yes, sir, that I would. A parliament may make a king and depose him."+ Rich * Lord Campbell's "Lives of the Chancellors," vol. i. p. 570. Mr. Froude says, "If this was the constitutional theory, divine right was a Stuart fiction." It was. In another place he holds, from this, that More had "republican opinions." That does not follow. 364 DEATH OF FISHER AND MORE. [1535. then said, "suppose there were an act of parliament that all the realm should take me for pope, would not you then take me for pope ?" More answered, "your first question applied to temporal government-but suppose the parliament should make a law that God should not be God, would you then, Mr. Rich, say so?" It was this conversation that "Mr. Solicitor" betrayed and exaggerated. More was moved to anger against this treachery, and told Rich, in the course of his defence, that he "always lay under the odium of a lying tongue;" and that he had trusted no secret of his conscience respecting the king's supremacy to one of whom he had so mean an opinion. The verdict of guilty was pronounced. He returned in a boat to the Tower; and there, when he landed, his daughter Margaret fell upon his neck, and lovingly kissed him, again and again. On the 6th of July he was beheaded. His composure and his harmless pleasantries, even when his head was on the block, have been held by some as indicating a levity incompatible with true piety. One who himself knew how a Christian should die, has thus spoken of More's demeanour: "That innocent mirth which had been so conspicuous in his life, did not forsake him to the last. He maintained the same cheerfulness of heart upon the scaffold which he used to show at his table. His death was of a piece with his life. There was nothing in it new, forced, or affected. He did not look upon the severing of his head from his body as a circumstance that ought to produce any change in the disposition of his mind; and as he died under a fixed and settled hope of immortality, he thought any unusual degree of sorrow or concern improper on such an occasion as had nothing in it which could deject or terrify him."* That Henry would show any mercy to Fisher, the friend of his infancy, or to More, his able minister in many high offices, was not to be expected from his nature. He felt towards his ex-chancellor as he felt towards the old soldier whom the earl of Sussex desired to spare, after his condemnation for having been engaged in the Lancashire insurrection. Thus Henry decided in 1537: "Concerning the old man, whom you wrote to have respited, upon the lamentation he made at the bar, and the allegation of his service, thrice heretofore against the Scots, and otherwise, done unto Us: Albeit we cannot but take your stay [respite] of him in good part, yet, considering he hath so often received our wages, and would nevertheless at the last be corrupted against Us, we think him for an example more worthy to suffer than the rest, that before had none experience of our princely puissance, nor had received any benefit of Us; and so remit him unto you to be executed, according to his judgment given for his offences committed against Us."+ We desire no truer illustration of the character of this king. We must seek for its parallel in Dante's "stream of blood," "Where tyrants their appointed doom receive." + *Addison, "Spectator," No. 349. State Papers, vol. i. p. 541. "Inferno," canto xii. Wright's translation. |