John Tulloch · 20 of 27

III. Latimer. · Part 3

More prosperous days, however, were about to dawn on Latimer. Old Warham, the Archbishop of Canterbury, died this year; and in the following year (1533) Cranmer was elevated to the primacy. This distinguished prelate, destined to take so active a lead in the progress of the Reformation, to carry it on with his own advance of opinion to a higher and more Scriptural expression, and finally to crown the labours of his life by martyrdom along with Latimer and Ridley, had been a Cambridge student of about the same standing as our reformer. Whether or not early friends, they were clearly known to each other. Cranmer understood well Latimer’s worth; and when raised to his exalted position, he extended towards him his protection as Primate, and entered into the most confidential relations with him. It was now no longer, therefore, a time of persecution with the unresting rector of West Kington; the frown of episcopal authority lay on him no more, and friars and priests, Hubberdin and Dr Powel of Salisbury, and all his other enemies, were forced to retreat, or yield to the powers now intrusted to him. At the instance and request of Latimer, we are told that “Cranmer was in the habit of licensing divers to preach within his province”; and in his own district the reformer was empowered to deal with preachers, and even to withdraw their licences if he saw fit to do so. Latimer, moreover, was recalled to the discharge of his previous duties at the court, and admitted to preach before the King on all the Wednesdays of Lent 1534.

This renewed intercourse with his sovereign probably served to strengthen Henry’s liking for him, and to bring about the important result which followed in the subsequent year. Cromwell is mentioned by Foxe as particularly concerned in Latimer’s promotion to a bishopric, and we may well believe so. The astute secretary and vicar-general, the enemy of monks and the intrepid friend of the new movement in all its directions, must have recognised a congenial spirit and fellow-labourer in the great preacher. They were worthy allies, and trode with equal courage, although swayed by somewhat different impulses, the same perilous path terminating in death—as noble work commonly did in that unhappy time.

Latimer was consecrated Bishop of Worcester in the autumn of 1535, and in the June of the following year we behold him in a position, perhaps, save the last of all, the grandest and most trying in his whole life. The Convocation assembled on the 9th of June 1536, the nation heaving with the excitement of coming change; the clergy sullen with feelings of affront and injury; the great question of reform in all its branches staring them in the face. The fabric of ecclesiastical abuse had been already rudely shaken, but it was obvious that things could not remain as they were, and that further and more extensive invasions of clerical privilege must come. It was at the request of Cranmer that Latimer, in these circumstances, undertook the office of opening the Convocation with two sermons, which have been preserved; and which, viewed in the light of the situation in which they were uttered, are among the boldest sermons ever preached. They ring fresh and powerful in our hearts as we read them now, and think of the scowling faces that must have looked upon the preacher from priest’s hood and abbot’s mitre. Mr Froude has pictured the scene with such rare spirit and grouping of impressive effects, that we cannot venture to touch it save in his words.

“There were assembled in St Paul’s on this occasion, besides the bishops,” he says, “mitred abbots, meditating the treason for which, before many months were past, their quartered limbs would be rotting by the highways; earnest sacramentarians making ready for the stake; the spirits of the two ages, the past and the future, in fierce collision; and above them all, in his vicar-general’s chair, sat Cromwell, the angry waters lashing round him, but, proud and powerful, lording over the storm. The present hour was his. The enemies’ turn in due time would come also. . . . The mass had been sung; the roll of the organ had died away. It was the time for the sermon, and Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, rose into the pulpit. Nine-tenths of all those eyes which were then fixed on him, would have glistened with delight could they have looked instead upon his burning. The whole crowd of passionate men were compelled by a changed world to listen quietly while he shot his bitter arrows at them. His object on the present occasion was to tell the clergy what especially he thought of themselves; and Latimer was a plain speaker. They had no good opinion of him. His opinion of them was very bad. His text was from the 16th chapter of St Luke’s Gospel: The children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light.’” He then presents his readers with a summary of the sermons, which, however, we shall not attempt to do. Latimer’s words, when they are telling, do not bear to be summarised, however they may be extracted. One must read them in their natural quaintness and colour in order to feel their right force—the vivid and rapid impress which they make upon the mind—like a rain of rattling hail upon the ground.

The conclusion of the second and longer sermon, rising into a strain of sweeping ironical urgency that must at once have awed and galled the hearts of many who heard him, will afford a good specimen of their boldness and power. “If there be nothing to be amended and redressed, my lords, be of good cheer—be merry—and at the least, because we have nothing else to do. Let us reason the matter how we may be richer; let us fall to some pleasant communication. After, let us go home even as good as we came hither—that is, right-begotten children of the world, and utterly worldlings. And while we live here, let us all make bone cheer (bonne chère); for after this life there is small pleasure, little mirth for us to hope for, if now there be nothing to be changed in our fashions. Let us not say, as St Peter did, ‘Our end approacheth nigh’: this is an heavy hearing; but let us say as the evil servant said, ‘It will be long ere my master come.’ This is pleasant. Let us beat our fellows; let us eat and drink with drunkards. Surely as oft as we do not take away the abuse of things, so oft we beat our fellows. As oft as we give not the people their true food, so oft we beat our fellows. As oft as we let them die in superstition, so oft we beat them. To be short, as oft as we blind lead them blind, so oft we beat, and grievously beat, our fellows. When we welter in pleasures and idleness, then we eat and drink with drunkards. But God will come, God will come; He will not tarry long away. He will come upon such a day as we nothing look for Him, and at such hour as we know not. He will come and cut us in pieces; He will reward us as He doth the hypocrites. He will set us where wailing shall be, my brethren; where gnashing of teeth shall be, my brethren. And let here be the end of our tragedy, if ye will. . . . But if ye will not thus be vexed, be ye not the children of the world. If ye will not die eternally, live not worldly. Come, go to, leave the love of your profit, study for the glory and profit of Christ: seek in your consultations such things as pertain to Christ, and bring forth at the last somewhat that may please Christ. Feed ye tenderly, with all diligence, the flock of Christ. Preach truly the Word of God. Love the light, walk in the light, and so be ye the children of the light while ye are in the world, that ye may shine in the world that is to come, bright as the Son with the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, to whom be all honour, praise, and glory.—Amen.”

The work of the Convocation thus opened was in many respects memorable. In this year of 1536, the same year in which Calvin entered Geneva, the English Reformation touched its highest point under Henry VIII. Cranmer and the King were now united hand in hand, and notwithstanding the gloomy displeasure of many of the clergy, a great advance was made. The opening sermons were indeed followed up by a memorial to the King on the subject of prevailing heresies, containing several thrusts at Latimer’s supposed opinions. This sufficiently showed the temper of the Convocation; but it met in Henry, for the moment, a temper equally excited and far more authoritative. He addressed to them in reply a series of articles of religion, imposed with a view to the settlement of differences. These Articles (the King’s own composition, it has been supposed) mark a decided progress of opinion. They still retain the cherished doctrine of the corporeal presence in the Eucharist, to which Henry’s mind clung with a faithful tenacity, and in which both Cranmer and Latimer were as yet contented to rest; but the great Protestant doctrine of justification by faith is plainly and comprehensively asserted; purgatory, in any special sense, and as the basis of the gross papal corruption which had so widely prevailed, denied; while prayer for souls departed is merely commended as a good and charitable deed. “The Articles were debated in Convocation, and passed, because it was the King’s will. No party was pleased. The Protestants exclaimed against the countenance given to superstition; the Anglo-Catholics lamented the visible taint of heresy, the reduced number of the sacraments, the doubtful language upon purgatory, and the silence, dangerously significant, on the nature of the priesthood.” They were signed, however, by all sides, and remain of great interest to this day, as the “first authoritative statement of doctrine in the Anglican Church.”

Besides the Articles thus passed, the power of the Pope to call general councils was expressly denied; directions were issued for the instruction of the people in the Paternoster, the Apostles’ Creed, and the Commandments, lately published in England; and as the crowning and most important act of all, the English Bible was authorised in every parish. Every church was “to provide a book of the whole Bible in Latin and English, and lay the same in the quire for every man that will to read and look thereon.”

Onwards from the point that we have now reached.—where we see Latimer in a distinct attitude of authority, as it were, heading the Anglican reform movement—it might be supposed that we would be able to trace his career in a clear light. This, however, is not the case. After his appearance in the Convocation of 1536, he withdraws again from public view, and his activity is mainly traceable in quiet works of reform. within his own diocese. It is characteristic of him, in comparison with all the other reformers, that he nowhere takes an active part in the political changes which attended the course of the Reformation. There is some reason to think that, not only now, but afterwards, he was a chief friend and counsellor of Cranmer, as he was a frequent resident at Lambeth; while his letters to Cromwell show what a lively interest he cherished in all that was going on, and what constant and ready service he continued to render to the Secretary. Still he does not, even during the time that he continued to hold his bishopric, stand out in any sense as a political leader. His influence seems everywhere present, but it does not obtrude itself, save at isolated points, upon public notice. We are the less reluctant, therefore, to be obliged to sum up in a very brief space the main facts of his future life, and to characterise them in general terms.

First of all, we see him devoting himself with great zeal and diligence to his special duty as Bishop of Worcester. This is mainly the view we get of him in the vague and desultory notices of Foxe. His life is represented as a constant round of “study, readiness, and continual carefulness in teaching, preaching, exhorting, writing, correcting, and reforming, either as his ability would serve, or else the time would bear.” This was his true nature; he was eminently practical, wise, and prudent, doing what he could, although “the days then were so dangerous and variable that he could not in all things do that he would.” His zeal he reserved for the pulpit. All his episcopal acts were characterised by a cautious wisdom and moderation. Where he could not remove corruptions altogether, he did his best to amend them: he so wrought that they should be used with as little hurt and as much profit as might be. Holy water and holy bread, for example, must still be dispensed. Neither the priestly nor the popular feeling could understand or tolerate their disuse. But he prepared a few plain verses, embodying a significant Christian lesson in each case, which he instructed the clergy of his diocese to repeat to the people on delivering the old symbols.

In such sort of work we see the genuine spirit of the English Reformation—proceeding not from any dogmatic or comprehensive principle of an ideal right or good in the Church, but simply working onwards under a practical Christian impulse. The “sparkling relics” of the old superstition are got rid of for the most part gradually; and where, as in the case of some of the most flagrant ecclesiastical impostures, we see them fall violently, even the violence is legalised—there is an order preserved in it; and the popular feeling, where it comes into play, is stimulated by a just indignation at the grossness of the delusion practised upon it, rather than by any polemical and anti-idolatrous excitement.

Latimer’s cheerful labours in his diocese were no doubt most to his heart. A shadow falls upon him so soon as we begin to contemplate him in any other capacity. He is in trouble, but ill-satisfied with his work; and, worse than all, he is a sharer—we gather from his own letter on the subject—a reluctant sharer in one, at least, of the most tragic and pathetic of the miserable and contradictory martyrdoms which signalise the period.

In 1537 he was engaged, along with his brethren of the Episcopal bench and other divines, in the publication of the book known as ‘The Institution of a Christian Man’—a book designed as a religious manual for the times. It consisted of an exposition of the Creed, the Sacraments, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer, and was characterised by a mild and temperate spirit of devotion and great beauty of composition. Latimer, however, was but indifferently pleased with its doctrines, which formed a reaction rather than an advance upon the articles of the previous year. The bishops were obviously, from the manner in which he writes on the subject to Cromwell, greatly divided about it. “It is a troublous thing,” he says, “to agree upon a doctrine in things of such controversy with judgment of such diversity, every man (I trust) meaning well, and yet not all meaning one way. . . . If there be anything either uncertain or impure, I have good hope that the King’s highness will separare quicquid est veteris fermenti; at least, may give it some note that it may appear he perceiveth, though he do tolerate it for a time—so giving place for a season to the frailty and gross capacity of his subjects.”

It is in the following year (1538) that we find him associated with the martyrdom of Friar Forrest. Forrest had been Prior of the Observants’ Convent at Greenwich. His main offence, like that of Sir Thomas More and others, was resistance to the Royal Supremacy Act. He appears to have submitted, and been pardoned, and then to have recanted his submission. The peculiarity in his case was, that he was finally condemned, not under the treason law, according to which his sentence might have had some show of justice, but under the law of heresy. Certain monstrous articles were devised against him by Cranmer, and he was adjudged to the fate of heretics in its most aggravated form. The judgment was carried out with unmitigated severity. He was literally roasted alive in an iron cage. One shudders to read the account of it, and to think that the names of both Cranmer and Latimer remain associated with so foul an atrocity. For Cranmer’s share in it there can be found no excuse, save the usual one of the spirit of the times. Latimer’s connection with it appears to have been more accidental. He was appointed by Cromwell to preach the sermon on the occasion; and there is a strange sadness in the way he writes about it, his unrelenting humour playing, like a wintry gleam, around the tragic story. “And, sir, if it be your pleasure, as it is, that I shall play the fool after my customable manner when Forrest shall suffer, I would wish that my stage stood near unto Forrest; for I would endeavour myself so to content the people that therewith I might also convert Forrest, God so helping, or rather altogether working. Wherefore I would that he should hear what I shall say, si forte, &c. If he could yet with heart return to his abjuration, I would wish his pardon: such is my foolishness.” He is moved obviously for the unhappy wretch, and the work is painful to him; but he cannot help himself, and the utterance of pity almost dies on his lips, as if it were something to be ashamed of. “Hard times,” indeed! (as Foxe complains), which could so lock up the warm impulses in Latimer’s honest heart.

An ecclesiastical system which sought to prop itself by such means, was plainly in a very fluctuating and unstable condition. It was moved to and fro, in fact, by every changing impulse of the royal temper; and this temper reflected the agitated spirit of the times. To regard Henry’s changes as mere brutal caprice, according to the long-prevailing traditionary views of his character, is probably what few would now do; but to recognise in them throughout a clear principle of conviction or intelligent guidance, seems no less absurd, on any fair construction of the facts. Henry was true to one thing, and one thing alone—his own supposed interest. This, in conjunction with his strong national feeling, was in many cases a sufficiently equitable rule of statecraft; but we cannot, without an amazing stretch of credulity, identify the royal will at all points with the national interest, and presume that the King acted from the higher principle. Henry is not the monster of the old and uncritical tradition; but he is not, even on his historian’s own evidence, in the least the hero that he has been supposed to be.

On the present occasion it is easy to understand how a reaction set in. The northern insurrections had proved how strong was the hold which the old superstitions still had upon the hearts of the people. The King himself, having secured his object against Rome, was disposed to cling to the Catholic doctrine in its completeness. It was very natural, therefore, that a party should spring up, attaching itself, on the one hand, to the Royal Supremacy Act, and, on the other hand, very strongly to the old ecclesiastical tradition—a party which has received the distinctive title of Anglo-Catholic, and which may be briefly characterised as doctrinally Romanist, but ecclesiastically Anglican. This party evidently represented a strong national feeling. The “Pilgrimage of grace,” the insurrections in Yorkshire and Lancashire, testified to the strength of this feeling; it was such even as seriously to affect the stability of the throne; and Henry, true to the instinct of serving himself by a proper balance of parties, saw fit at this crisis to throw the weight of his influence into the rising party, headed in the Church by the well-known names of Gardiner and Bonner. The result of this was the six articles of 1539, which undid as far as possible the work of the fourteen articles previously passed, and sought to check the reforming impulse communicated by them. Cranmer laboured with all his might to defeat them, but in vain; and so soon as they were confirmed, Latimer resigned his bishopric.

During the remainder of Henry’s reign, Latimer lived in great privacy. At first, indeed, he suffered a mild imprisonment in the house of Dr Sampson, the Bishop of Chichester: he then appears to have been permitted to retire to the country, where he received an injury from the fall of a tree, and, coming up to London for medical advice, “he was molested and troubled by the bishops”; and finally, in 1546, just before the close of Henry’s reign, he was brought before the Privy Council, and cast into the Tower, where he remained prisoner till the time that “blessed King Edward entered his crown.” Such is the brief sum of all we know of this period of his life. Whether, during the time he was at liberty, he continued to preach, is not indicated; probably he did not. His imprisonment, his growing infirmities, and the dangers around him, may have damped his old ardour and kept him quiet. That he considered his own life in danger during his confinement, he himself tells us. He had a great interest, he says, to hear of the executions in the City, while he was in ward with the Bishop of Chichester, “because I looked that my part should have been herein. I looked every day to be called to it myself.”

With the accession of Edward VI. he again emerged into public view. He remained, however, true to his old character, and not only did not mix himself up with political affairs, but declined to receive back his bishopric, which was offered to him in the second year of Edward’s reign. The fact that this offer was made at the instance of the House of Commons, gives us a touching glimpse of the popularity of the great preacher. His honest character and eloquence had made a deep impression on the mind of the country, and it found a voice in this notable matter. We can only guess at his reasons for declining an offer so honourable to him. The state of his health, and his conscientious feeling of inadequacy to the multiplied duties that would devolve upon him, probably form the explanation. He felt also that preaching was his peculiar vocation, and that he could do more good to the cause of the Reformation in this way than in any other. He devoted himself, therefore, to the pulpit, and to practical works of benevolence on behalf of the poor and the oppressed. Leaving the public ordering of the affairs of the Reformation to others, he made it his aim to arouse in all classes a practical spirit of reform. He found his most natural and powerful source of influence in the eloquence which moved congregated thousands, and by his sermons more than anything, his name remains memorably associated with the reign of Edward VI. Among the other actors of the time, he stands forth as the great reforming preacher. The old picture represents him with uplifted arm preaching in Whitehall Gardens in front of the young monarch, who is seated at a window, while a dense crowd in various attitudes testifies to the lively interest which greeted his sermons. “In the same place of the inward garden,” says Foxe, “which was before applied to lascivious and courtly pastimes, there he dispensed the fruitful word of the glorious Gospel of Jesus Christ, preaching there before the King and his whole court, to the edification of many.” We trace him besides at Stamford, delivering a series of sermons on the Lord’s Prayer before the Duchess of Suffolk; and again in Lincolnshire, and at Grimsthorpe. “In this his painful travail he occupied himself all King Edward’s days, preaching for the most part every Sunday twice, to no small shame of all other loitering and unpreaching prelates, which occupy great rooms and do little good; and that so much more to their shame, because he being a sore bruised man, and above sixty-seven years of age [this is an exaggeration], took so little care and sparing of himself to do the people good. Not to speak of here his indefatigable travail, and diligence in his own private studies; who, notwithstanding both his years and other pains in preaching, every morning ordinarily, winter and summer, about two of the clock in the morning was at his book most diligently. So careful was his heart of the preservation of the Church, and the good success of the Gospel.”

Thus Latimer spent those years of blessing to England ere the evil days came, whose approach he seems to have foreseen; for, according to Foxe, he did “most evidently prophesy all these kinds of plagues which afterwards ensued.”

With the lamented death of Edward he felt that his work was done, and that he had only to prepare himself for the fate to which he had long looked forward. So soon as Mary was settled upon the throne, and the reactionary party, headed by their old leaders, had once more triumphed, he and the other chief agents of the Reformation were sought out, summoned to London before the Privy Council, and committed to the Tower. Latimer appears to have been in Worcestershire when a “pursuivant,” in the language of the chronicler, was sent down into the country to call him up. He was duly apprised of his danger; and, to do the Government justice, they seem to have afforded him the fair means of escape, if he had been disposed to flee out of the country, like so many others. But flight was far from his thoughts. The one strength that remained to him was to bear the crown of martyrdom and passing through Smithfield on his way to the Council, he was heard, in his usual cheerful manner, to say that it “had long groaned for him.” His health, already greatly weakened, was further injured by the hardships of his confinement in the Tower. He was kept “without fire in the frosty winter,” and the picture is a bitterly touching one of the suffering old man, “wellnigh starved with cold,” and jesting with his keeper on his chances of cheating his persecutors, “if they did not look better to him.”

In the April of the following year (1554) he was conveyed to Oxford, along with Cranmer and Ridley, for the purpose of holding disputations on the subject of the mass before certain commissioners appointed to examine them. We find him, on the 18th of April, in the presence of these commissioners, declining to dispute. He pleaded that he was an old man, and that he had not, during these twenty years, much used the Latin tongue. “Then replied to him Master Smith of Oriel College; Doctor Cartwright, Master Harpsfield, and divers others, had snatches at him, and gave him bitter taunts. He did not escape hisses and scornful laughing. He was very faint, and desired that he might not long tarry.” It is miserable spectacle: insolence and brutality on the one side, and weakness and old age on the other. If we could wonder at any disgrace perpetrated in the name of religion, we might wonder at the singular debasement which could prompt such conduct on the part of learned men towards one who, amidst the widest differences of opinion, had such claims upon their sympathy and respect. The disputation, as in all such cases, led to nothing. Latimer was permitted to give in a lengthened protestation of his faith, upon which there followed some discussion, terminating in a curiously emphatic denunciation of the Protestants by Dr Weston, who took the lead in the argument on behalf of the commissioners: “A sort of fling-brains and light-heads,” he said they were, “which were never constant in any one thing; as it was to be seen in the turning of the table, where, like a sort of apes, they could not tell which way to turn their tails, looking one day west, and another day east—one that way, and another this way.”

After this examination, Latimer was transferred to Bocardo, the common jail in Oxford, and there he lay, with his companions, imprisoned for more than a year. During this long imprisonment “they were most godly occupied either with brotherly conference, or with fervent prayer, or with fruitful writing, albeit Master Latimer, by reason of the feebleness of his age, wrote least of them all in this last time. But in prayer he was fervently occupied, wherein oftentimes so long he continued kneeling, that he was not able to rise without help.” At length, on the 30th of September 1555, he was again summoned before the commissioners. Ridley had preceded him in examination, and in the meantime he was kept waiting, as he complains, “gazing upon the cold walls.” Suffering and poverty were depicted in his appearance as he bowed before them, “holding his hat in his hand, with a kerchief bound round his head, and upon it a nightcap or two, and a great cap, such as horsemen used in those days, with two broad flaps to button under the chin. He wore an old threadbare Bristol frieze gown, girded to his body with a penny leather girdle; his Testament was suspended from this girdle by a leather sling, and his spectacles, without a case, hung from his neck upon his breast.” He was exhorted to consider his estate, to remember his age and infirmity, and to spare his body by admitting the claims of the Papacy. He replied with something of his old spirit, taking up the special arguments urged by the Bishop of Lincoln, who had addressed him. Especially he exposed the unfairness of a book recently published by the Bishop of Gloucester, in which it was argued that the clergy possessed the same authority as the Levites; and whereas the Bible said that the Levites, if there arose any controversy among the people, should decide the matter according to the law of God, these words were left out in the book in question, and the text quoted as saying that as the priests should decide the matter, so it ought to be taken of the people—“A large authority, I assure you!” he exclaimed. “What gelding of Scripture is this? what clipping of God’s coin?" The Bishop of Gloucester, who happened to be one of the commissioners, came forward to defend his book and Latimer acknowledged that he did not know him, and was not aware of his presence. A scene of laughter ensued in the old brutal fashion. The bishop reproached him with his want of learning. “Lo!” he exclaimed, in just indignation at the unworthy taunt, “you look for learning at my hand, which have gone so long to the school of oblivion, making the bare walls my library; keeping me so long in prison without book, or pen, or ink; and now you let me loose to come and answer to articles. You deal with me as though two were appointed to fight for life and death; and overnight the one, through friends and favour, is cherished and hath good counsel given him how to encounter with his enemy; the other, for envy or lack of friends, all the whole night is set in the stocks. In the morning, when they shall meet, the one is in strength and lively; the other is stark of his limbs, and almost dead for feebleness. Think you that to run through this man with a spear is not a goodly victory?"