John Tulloch · 18 of 27

III. Latimer. · Part 1

IN the English Reformation we contemplate a state of things peculiar and unexampled: we do not see, as in Germany, a mighty spiritual movement sweeping for the moment all before it, and headed by one who gives voice and direction and triumph to it; nor yet, as in the Calvinistic Reformation, a great reconstructive organisation of the doctrinal and social elements which had been disturbed and set in motion; but a complicated action of distinctly political as well as religious forces, the former frequently crossing and impeding the latter, rather than contributing with them to one great result. This characteristic of double action—of the working of political as well as religious influences against the Papacy—goes far back into English history; and the political opposition is, in truth, the earlier and in some respects the more powerful influence. All along from the Conquest, such an opposition marks like a line of light the proud history of England, the grandest, because the richest in diverse historical elements, that the world has ever seen. From the memorable struggles of the reign of Henry II., when political and ecclesiastical interests stamped the impress of their fierce contention so strongly on the English character, Rome appears as an alien and antagonistic power in the country—as the threatening shadow of a concealed enemy, against which the higher and healthier national life is continually directing itself. With the reign of Edward III. and the rise of Wickliffe, the religious element attains for the first time to clear and impressive prominence, working alongside of, and even outbalancing, the political action.

Wickliffe himself, in the earlier and later phases of his career, represents both sides of the national movement against the Papacy—his primary position as the friend of John of Gaunt being mainly political, and his final position as the Theologian of the Scriptures and Rector of Lutterworth being mainly religious. We find in his words the powerful echo of the feelings then stirring the heart of England; the protesting vehemence of both nobles and people as they raised the cry, “No! England belongs not to the Pope; the Pope is but a man, subject to sin;” the awakening breath of an earnest Christian activity as he bade his followers “Go and preach; it is the sublimest work: but imitate not the priests, whom we see after the sermon sitting in the ale-houses, or at the gaming-table, or wasting their time in hunting. After your sermon is ended, do you visit the sick, the aged, the poor, the blind, and the lame, and succour them according to your ability.” The same principles which afterwards triumphed in the sixteenth century were now everywhere operating. It is singular, indeed, how even to its extravagances this earlier Reform movement in England mirrored the various features of the later and more powerful movement—the royal moderation, the parliamentary indignation, the spiritual revival among the lower classes, the communistic exaggerations, into which the plain truth of the Gospel, crudely apprehended, so fastly ran. This latter result, in the comparative swiftness with which it came in the fourteenth century, was a sufficient indication that the time was not yet ripe for a successful insurrection against Popery. The national mind was still too unenlightened, the popular feeling too unsteady for such an event, as the armed tumult of Wat Tyler with his hundred thousand followers proved. The hierarchy, moreover, was as yet very powerful; its intelligence and moral strength outmatched any opposition that could be brought against it.

With the death of Wickliffe in 1384 the moving energy of his principles and teaching very much died out. Their unfortunate association with the anarchy which characterised the earlier years of Richard II.’s weak and disgraceful reign, contributed to lessen and deteriorate their influence, and to provoke against them severe parliamentary penalties. The spirit, however, which the great proto-reformer had kindled, lived on through the fifteenth century in Lollardism, and various obscure forms of religious life. It penetrated, as a secret and quiet influence, whole districts, binding poor families together by a spiritual bond such as they could no longer find in the corrupt formalism of the Church, and cherished by the private reading and transmission from hand to hand of portions of Wickliffe’s translation of the Scriptures. We can trace in the language of the parliamentary acts directed against “divers false and perverse people of a certain new sect, damnably thinking of the faith of the sacraments of the Church, and of the authority of the same,” how widely religious disaffection had spread, and with what unceasing and secret acting—"by holding and exercising schools, by making and writing books”—the Wickliffites sought to keep alive a pure faith hidden in many hearts, long after they had ceased to be a formidable power in the country. They spread into Scotland, carrying with them their precious books, and kindling wherever they went a divine light in the darkness—a peaceful and holy gleam amid the wild contentions and miseries of that unhappy time.

With the dawn of the sixteenth century, and especially as we near the great crisis of 1517, we are met by an awakening religious life in England as elsewhere; and what mainly strikes us is the varied character which it presents. It proceeds from diverse sources, and shows itself in very different classes. There is a comparative complexity in the Anglican Reformation, even on its purely religious side, and altogether apart from the great political agencies at work, which are out of the sphere of our present consideration.

There is first of all a marked Christian revival among the poorer classes, alike among the tradesmen of the metropolis and the peasantry on the banks of the Humber, the “Christian brethren” of London, and the “just men” of Lincolnshire. It seems most natural to connect this revival with the still unextinguished spirit of Lollardism, and to recognise in it accordingly a fresh outburst from the long-choked-up source of Wickliffe’s influence. The influence had perished in any definite national expression, but there seems no reason to question that it lived on as a hidden life; that persecution did not absolutely destroy it, but only drove it underground into obscure channels no longer traceable, from which it now again, under fresh excitement, began to emerge. In any case, we discern at this time abundant manifestations of a fresh religious interest among the poor, and it appears very much to be characterised by the old Wickliffite spirit of contempt and derision of the clergy. Some of the stories preserved by Foxe show a proud and bitter cynicism naturally bred by the circumstances of these humble people, and the stern repression of all the earnest feeling awakened in them. As a. man of the name of John Brown was descending the Thames in a passage-boat to Gravesend, he fell into conversation with a priest, who insolently admonished him that he stood too near to his sacred person. “Do you know who I am?” demanded the priest. “No, sir,” said Brown. “Well, then, you must know that I am a priest.” “Indeed, sir!” said Brown; “and pray are you a parson, or vicar, or lady’s chaplain?” “No; I am a soul priest; I sing masses for souls,” he pompously replied. “Do you, sir?” remarked Brown; “that is well done: and can you tell me where you find the soul when you begin mass, and where you leave it when the mass is ended?” “Go thy ways,” said the priest; “thou art a heretic, and I will be even with you.” And straightway, on reaching their destination, he communicated his suspicions of Brown to two of his companions and together they set off to Canterbury, to denounce the poor man to the archbishop. The result was, that after many sufferings Brown expiated his free speech at the stake. The story is minutely told by Foxe, and repeated by D’Aubigné; and the contrasts of the happy English home, with its quiet cheerful domesticities, and the rude seizure, torture, and death of the poor man, make a deeply touching picture. Then again, amid the fens of Lincolnshire, we are introduced to a peasant threshing his corn in his barn as a neighbour passes by and salutes him cheerfully. “Good morrow! you are hard at work.” “Yes,” replied the man, in allusion to the priestly doctrine of transubstantiation, “I am threshing God Almighty out of the straw.” A very deep and intense feeling expresses itself in these as in many other incidents of the time. The Catholic authority might seem scarcely weakened in outward appearance, but with such a spirit slumbering amongst the people, and now constantly gathering strength, that authority was really impaired in its very foundation, and no longer presented its old capacity of resistance.

While such a spirit lurked among the people, there had appeared in the Church itself a marked revival of Christian and literary interest. A group of notable men, with Erasmus in the midst of them, meet us at the opening of the sixteenth century in the Church of England—viz., Colet, Grocyn, Linacre, Lilly, and More. All, with the exception of More, had recently returned from Italy, and some of them from Florence itself, where they had been in the very centre, not merely of the literary excitement which was then moving the Court of the Medici, but of the reformatory movement of Savonarola. The prophetic denunciations of the famous preacher of San Marco, which had converted the great scholar Pico della Mirandola, and even reached the conscience of Lorenzo de’ Medici, were not likely to leave the hearts of the young Englishmen unimpressed. The scandals of the Papacy, with a Borgia (Alexander VI.) at its head, were brought immediately under their notice, and every ecclesiastical abuse seen in its full and original enormity.

It was no wonder if they brought back to England a spirit of reforming zeal as well as of intellectual enthusiasm. This spirit was greatly promoted by the arrival of Erasmus. Invited by Lord Mountjoy, who had been one of his pupils at Paris, and who had listened with delight to his opening sallies on the monks, the rising Dutchman came to England first in 1497 or 1498. He immediately formed an intimacy with Colet, and the circle of enthusiastic scholars of which he was the chief. He was in raptures with the friendly reception he everywhere met, with the country, even with its climate, and especially with the ladies, and their easy manners. He retired for a time to Oxford, where he devoted himself, in company with Grocyn, and Colet, and More, to the study of Greek. In this delightful seclusion, and amid such companionship, he was already laying the foundation of his future labours on the Greek Testament.

Twelve years afterwards, when Henry VIII. had ascended the throne, Erasmus came for the third time to England, and prolonged his stay for nearly five years. On his first visit he had been introduced to the young Henry, then only nine years of age, and was greatly charmed by his intelligence, vivacity, and beauty of person; above all, by a certain decision and aptitude in everything he undertook. Few boys could have been more captivating in all the pride of his youthful agility and grace, and with such a rare capacity that his father had already destined him to fill the see of Canterbury. Erasmus credited him with the highest powers. He proclaimed him the Octavius of England; and when the death of his brother and father had raised the young Duke of York to the throne, and amidst all the adulation that had greeted his accession, it was reported that he had sighed, “Ah! how I should like to be a scholar,” we can understand the eagerness with which Erasmus once more responded to the invitation of his friend Mountjoy, “Come, behold the new star; our young Octavius is on the throne.” He renewed his intimacy with Colet and More. In the house of the latter he concluded his famous satire, “Morias Encomium” (Praise of Folly). He assisted the former in founding the great school of St Paul’s, and composed text-books for it. Colet and his friends were encouraged by the example of Erasmus, while he in his turn received no small good from them. They defended his attacks upon the monks: he learned from their teaching a nobler zeal and more Christian use of his powers than he had yet shown. While the satires of the great Humanist connect him with Paris, Germany, and Italy, his Greek studies and Greek New Testament connect him especially with England.

Of all this band of men that ushered in the Anglican Reformation, none is more illustrious than Colet himself. Scholar, Christian, and patriot, the faithful preacher, the earnest worker, his name is among the most respected, if not the brightest, in the religious annals of England. Unlike Erasmus, whose faith, according to his own confession, was never such as would lead him to expose his life to danger for it, Colet was ready for any sacrifice to maintain the truth. Unlike More, his piety was free from that dark tinge of asceticism which so readily develops into cruelty and the love of persecution. He did not hesitate to proclaim before Henry VIII., in all the first excitement of his power and thirst for glory, the injustice of his intended war with France. “Whoever takes up arms from ambition,” he said, “fights not under the standard of Christ, but of Satan.” When he became Dean of St Paul’s, he set the example of preaching from Scripture instead of from the Schoolmen. He explained to the people, who came in crowds to hear him, the Gospel of St Matthew, and translated into English, and distributed among them, certain portions of Scripture, such as the Lord’s Prayer. At the opening of the Convocation of 1511, he preached a famous sermon on Conformation and Reformation, choosing for his text the words, “Be ye not conformed to this world, but be ye reformed,” &c. In this sermon he inveighed strongly against the worldly love of the clergy, their “feasts and banquetings,” their “hunting and hawking,” their covetousness and ambition. “There is no heresy more dangerous to the Church,” he said, “than the vicious lives of its priests. A reformation is needed; and that reformation must begin with the bishops and be extended to the priests.” Many of the clergy took alarm, and sought to silence him; but, strong in his integrity and moderation, as well as in the truth he preached, he maintained his position and influence till his death in 1519.

In the meantime a new and more vigorous reforming influence was beginning in the universities. The publication of Erasmus’s Greek Testament, and the news from Germany, started a spirit of inquiry in both universities almost simultaneously. Students, wearied with the subtleties of the schools, felt a fresh world opened to them in the original pages of the Gospels and Epistles. They read; and as they read, a new impulse came to them from their own quiet study. It was impossible that, amid the religious excitement everywhere astir, young and earnest and aspiring minds could be brought into contact with the divine Word without catching the life that in every page appealed to them, and being drawn under its stimulating power. Luther’s opinions, propagated to the very centres of the old Catholicism of England, helped this awakening. His writings passed from hand to hand under every attempt to suppress them; and the enthusiasm of his great example gave effect to his daring words. The reform movement in the English universities, however, retained a distinctive spirit of its own. Although indebted to the writings of Luther, it was still more indebted to the Greek Testament, and in its whole spirit was characteristically English. There was an earnestness and yet moderation in it—an intensity practical rather than doctrinal,—a simplicity and purity of Christian apprehension which, without lacking vigour, shrank sensitively from all violence—eminently notable, and corresponding to its source in the ancient seats of learning, and in the original soil of Scripture, rather than in the cloister, and in the solitary struggles of any one great and vehement soul.

The three names that may be said to represent the earlier phase of this movement are those of Tyndale, Bilney, and Frith, whom we find associated at Cambridge in the year 1520. Tyndale was a native of Gloucestershire, and descended from an old family which had suffered greatly in the Wars of the Roses. He was early sent to Oxford, where he became the pupil of Grocyn and Linacre, and imbibed their liberal principles, and especially their love of the Greek New Testament. Gradually his mind opened to the great truths which it revealed; and, collecting around him “certain students and fellows, he read privily to them, and instructed them in the knowledge and truths of the Scriptures.” The monks arose against him, denounced his Greek learning and the doctrines that he taught; and he fled to Cambridge. Here he found Bilney, who, like himself, had been some time before drawn to the study of Erasmus’s Testament, and, after much struggle, had reached the same truth in which he rested. Weary with fasting and vigils, and buying of masses and indulgences, in which he could find no peace, he at length lighted on the precious words of St Paul, “This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” “This one sentence,” he says, “through the power of God working on my heart, in a manner at that time unknown to me, rejoiced my soul, then deeply wounded by a sight and sense of my sins, and almost in the depths of despair, so that I felt an inward comfort and quietness which I cannot describe, but it caused my broken heart to rejoice.” Frith was the worthy associate of these two men. He was distinguished in mathematics as Tyndale was in classics. He was not only a “lover of learning,” Foxe says, but “an exquisite learned man;” of which we need no higher proof than Wolsey’s appointment of him to be one of the masters of the new college which he had instituted at Oxford. Through his acquaintance with Tyndale, he first received into his heart the seed of the Gospel, and of sincere godliness; and together with Bilney, they laboured to promote the good cause in Cambridge.

These men, and especially Tyndale, exercised a powerful influence in awakening the religious life of England. After leaving Cambridge Tyndale retired to his native country, and resided for some time as tutor in the house of Sir John Walsh. Here he was in the habit of holding disputations with the various clergy—“abbots, deans, archdeacons, with divers other doctors and great beneficed men” that resorted to the house. He appealed openly to Scripture in confutation of their errors and in support of his own opinions. At the same time he was busy preparing his ‘Christian Soldier’s Manual,’ which had the effect of fully converting his host and hostess to his views, so that the “doctorly prelates” were no more so often invited to the house, nor received the same welcome as before. Tyndale, it may be imagined, soon became an object of hatred to the clergy, and felt that he was no longer safe in the country. He was burning, moreover, with desire to enter upon his great work of translating the Scriptures into the English tongue. He could find “no place in all England” to do this, and accordingly he repaired to Hamburg, and there set about his design. At length, in 1524, his version of the New Testament appeared at Worms, and copies found their way rapidly into England. Tonstall, Bishop of London, employed a person to buy them all up; but the presses of the Low Countries supplied them more swiftly than they could be bought and consumed. The volumes circulated widely, and the light thus kindled spread throughout the country.

In the universities the movement continued to strengthen and grow into prominence. New Testaments and heretical tracts passed numerously from hand to hand. All the vigilance of the authorities failed to check the inroads of a literature which was fast sapping their power, and the effects of which some of them fully discerned. They seized and burned volumes without number; but new agents, with increased supplies of the prohibited volumes, arose on all sides. A very minute and interesting narrative has been preserved of the search instituted at Oxford for Master Garret, who had come down to the university loaded with Greek Testaments and other “mischievous books.” By the help of a friend, Anthony Delaber, he contrived for the time to escape; but subsequently he was captured, and, along with Delaber himself, Clarke, Farrar, and others, imprisoned and threatened with the stake. Clarke died in prison, a confessor to the truth that he had maintained, declaring with his last breath that the “true sacrament is faith.” The courage of the others gave way under their sufferings—they recanted, and bore fagots as Barnes had done at St Paul’s. The Oxford authorities breathed for a while in their labours of persecution; but the number of names mentioned in Delaber’s narrative shows how widely extended were the ramifications of heresy, and how deeply the “poison” had penetrated the minds of many of the most promising youth.

In Cambridge the movement had taken even deeper root. The labours of Tyndale and Bilney had not been without their reward; and, passing over names of lesser note, such as Barnes, we find a group of men like Cranmer and Ridley and Latimer, rising into prominence during the years that succeeded the conversion of Frith in 1520. These were all Cambridge students, and about the same period. There is no evidence of concert or of any special friendship between them thus early; but the spirit which afterwards united them, and the faith for which they suffered in common, are to be traced back beyond doubt, in the case of all of them, to this period of remarkable excitement in Cambridge. They are the three chief names of the English Reformation, so far as we are able to contemplate it distinctly as a religious movement. They did more than any others to advance it, and in their lives and in their deaths they reflect its character, and constitute its tragedy and glory.

Of the three it may be a question which is most entitled singly to represent it. Cranmer is historically the most prominent: he stood most in the light of the great public events of his time, and was the official leader, we may say, of the movement, upon which he impressed somewhat of his own hesitating and timid, but practical and modest character. He was not a lofty nor far-seeing man, and by no means a hero; but his difficulties were peculiar and his instincts honest, and by his very weakness he accomplished what perhaps another’s strength could not have done. Ridley presents a more pure, elevated, and consistent character—“wise of counsel, deep of wit, benevolent in spirit.” His gentleness wins us, while his scholarly and calm intrepidity fills us with admiration. Latimer is in many respects the most remarkable of the three. Less prominent than Cranmer, less learned than Ridley, his life possessed a broader interest, while his labours excited a more general enthusiasm than theirs. He connected far more than either of them the religious spirit moving the lower and the citizen ranks of society, with the spirit at work in the universities. Academic in education, he was in heart and mind a man of the people: to some extent a leader in the ranks of the Episcopate, he of all the bishops most influenced and led the popular feeling. We have selected him, therefore, to stand as the representative hero of the English Reformation. His claims to this position, indeed, are very different from those which place Luther and Calvin and Knox at the head of their respective movements; and with such names it may seem somewhat out of place to associate that of Latimer. But no single name in England possesses the glory of a primary and paramount leadership in the religious movement of the age. We do not find, as in Germany and Switzerland and Scotland, any single figure towering above all the others in mental and moral greatness, but groups of figures such as we have noticed, each with their own claims to distinction and notice; and as we must make a selection, Latimer appears, upon the whole, the most typical in combined display of character, and of popular activity, and in the real influence which he exercised upon the course of the Reformation.

The life of Latimer remains unwritten, and there are probably no longer materials for any adequate biography. We shall endeavour, however, in the light of such facts as exist in Foxe’s ‘Acts’ and Strype’s ‘Memorials,’ and particularly in the light of the vivid picture-work of his own sermons, to furnish as complete a sketch as we can of his career and labours. There are in these many graphic and not a few grotesque etchings, giving us the very life of the man; but it is difficult to catch throughout a clear view and any continuous thread of narrative, tracing the whole and binding it in order.

Latimer was born at Thurcaston in Leicestershire in the year 1490, some say 1491. His father was an honest yeoman, and it is his own hand, in the first sermon which he preached before King Edward VI., that has drawn for us the paternal character and homestead. “My father,” he says, “was a yeoman, and had no lands of his own, only he had a farm of three or four pounds by the year at the uttermost, and hereupon he tilled so much as kept half-a-dozen men. He had walk for a hundred sheep, and my mother milked thirty kine. He was able and did find the King in harness, with himself and his horse, while he came to the place that he should receive the King’s wages. . . . He kept me to school, else I had not been able to preach before the King’s majesty now. He married my sisters with five pounds or twenty nobles apiece; so that he brought them up in godliness and fear of the Lord. He kept hospitality for his poor neighbours, and some alms he gave to the poor. All this he did of the said farm"—evidently a worthy, solid, and able man, fit to do his work in this world, and leave the memory of his worth, if not much more, to his children.

Latimer grew up in this old English household a vigorous, pure, and happy boy; health and manly life and a joyous feeling of home breathe in all the hints he has given us of his youth. When only six or seven years old, he tells us that he helped to buckle on his father’s armour when he went to the field of Blackheath, where the King’s forces were encamped against the Cornish rebels. It was a time of stir. Henry VII. had been at this period about ten years upon the throne, but the embers of a century’s internecine strife were still only dying out. Latimer’s father was stanch in his devotion to the new government, as this event shows; he had all a yeoman’s devotion to fighting, and to the grand old art of cross-shooting—“God’s gift to the English nation above all other nations, and the instrument whereby He had given them many victories against their enemies.” He was careful to train his children in the love of the same soldierly arts; and the reformer afterwards recalled these exercises of his youth with pride, in contrast with the degenerate and vicious recreations of his own age. “My father,” he says, “was as diligent to teach me to shoot as to learn any other thing: he taught me how to draw, how to lay my body in my bow, and not to draw with strength of arms as other nations do, but with strength of the body. I had my bows bought me according to my age and strength: as I increased in them, so my bows were made bigger and bigger; for,” he adds, in a quaint didactic vein not uncommon with him, as to the affairs of the present life as well as of that to come, “men shall never shoot well except they be brought up in it: it is a goodly art, a wholesome kind of exercise, and much commended in physic.”

So Latimer grew up, hardily trained in body as well as in mind. An atmosphere of reality surrounded his boyhood; he looked at life and nature in the fresh and rough yet beautiful forms in which they surrounded him in the old Leicestershire farmhouse, and the impressions then gathered never left him, and long afterwards helped to deliver him from the falsehoods of his scholastic training, when the higher quickening came to stir the true heart in him.

About fourteen years of age he was sent to Cambridge; and D’Aubigné has noticed that the year 1505, when he entered the university, was the same year in which Luther entered the Augustine convent at Erfurt. He is said to have been a very diligent and industrious student. In 1509, whilst yet an undergraduate, he was chosen Fellow of Clare Hall. In the following January he took his degree of Bachelor of Arts, and proceeded to that of Master of Arts in July 1514. Up to this period, when he had attained his twenty-fourth year, we do not learn anything of his religious views—for the best of all reasons, probably, that there was nothing to learn. He fell into the habits of the place in this as in other things, and probably had as yet few serious thoughts about the matter. He seems to have carried into his college life the heartiness and cheerfulness of the yeoman’s son—for it is to this earlier period, most likely, that the following description and story apply: “There was a merry monk in Cambridge in the college that I was in, and it chanced a great company of us to be together, intending to make good cheer and to be merry, as scholars will be merry when they are disposed. One of the company brought out this sentence—‘Nil melius quam lætari et facere bene’ There is nothing better than to be merry and to do well. ‘A vengeance of that bene,’ quoth the monk; I would that bene had been banished beyond the sea: and that bene were out it were well, for I could be merry, but I love not to do well.’”