A.D. 1530.

away, and cannot be palliated; and when a judge Cн. 6. permits himself to commit an act of arbitrary tyranny, we argue from the known to the unknown, and refuse reasonably to give him credit for equity where he was so little careful of law.

between

More in

ment of

heretics.

field fires

mence.

Yet a few years of misery in a prison was but an insignificant misfortune when compared with the fate under which so many other poor men were at this time overwhelmed. Under Contrast Wolsey's chancellorship the stake had been com- Wolsey and paratively idle; he possessed a remarkable power the treatof making recantation easy; and there is, I believe, no instance in which an accused heretic was brought under his immediate cognisance, where he failed to arrange some terms by which submission was made possible. With Wolsey heresy was an error-with More it was a crime. No The Smithsooner had the seals changed hands than the recomSmithfield fires recommenced; and, encouraged by the chancellor, the bishops resolved to obliterate, in these edifying spectacles, the recollection of their general infirmities. The crime of the offenders varied-sometimes it was a denial of the corporal presence, more often it was a reflection too loud to be endured on the character and habits of the clergy; but whatever it was, the alternative lay only between abjuration humiliating as ingenuity could make it, or a dreadful death. The hearts of many failed them in the trial, and of all the confessors those perhaps do not deserve the least compassion whose weakness betrayed them, who sank and died broken-hearted. Of these silent sufferers history knows nothing. A

CH. 6. few, unable to endure the misery of having, as they supposed, denied their Saviour, returned to

A.D. 1530. the danger from which they had fled, and washed

Bilney.

out their fall in martyrdom. Latimer has told Troubles of us the story of his friend Bilney-little Bilney, or Saint Bilney,* as he calls him, his companion at Cambridge, to whom he owed his own conversion. Bilney, after escaping through Wolsey's hands in 1527, was again cited in 1529 before the Bishop of London. Three times he refused to recant. He was offered a fourth and last chance. The temptation was too strong, and he fell. For two years he was hopelessly miserable; at length his braver nature prevailed. There was no pardon for a relapsed heretic, and if he was again in the bishop's hands he knew well the fate which awaited him.

He 'goes

salem.'

He told his friends, in language touchingly up to Jeru- significant, that 'he would go up to Jerusalem;' and began to preach in the fields. The journey which he had undertaken was not to be a long one. He was heard to say in a sermon, that of his personal knowledge certain things which had been offered in pilgrimage had been given to abandoned women. The priests, he affirmed, 'take away the offerings, and hang them about their women's necks; and after that they take them off the women, if they please them not, and hang them again upon the images.'t This was Bilney's heresy, or formed the ground of his arrest; he

* Seventh Sermon before King Edward. First Sermon before the Duchess of Suffolk.

was orthodox on the mass, and also on the power Сн. 6. of the keys; but the secrets of the sacred order A.D. 1531. were not to be betrayed with impunity. He was seized, and hurried before the Bishop of Norwich; and being found heterodox on the papacy and the mediation of the saints, by the Bishop of Norwich he was sent to the stake.

Bainham,

Another instance of recovered courage, and of James martyrdom consequent upon it, is that of James Bainham, a barrister of the Middle Temple. This story is noticeable from a very curious circumstance connected with it.

Bainham had challenged suspicion by marrying the widow of Simon Fish, the author of the famous Beggars' Petition, who had died in 1528; and, soon after his marriage, was challenged to give an account of his faith. He was charged with denying transubstantiation, with questioning the value of the confessional, and the power of the keys; and the absence of authoritative protestant dogma had left his mind free to expand to a yet larger belief. He had ventured to assert, that if a The latituTurk, a Jew, or a Saracen do trust in God and martyr. keep his law, he is a good Christian_man,'*—a conception of Christianity, a conception of protestantism, which we but feebly dare to whisper even at the present day. The proceedings against him commenced with a demand that he should give up his books, and also the names of other barristers with whom he was suspected to have held intercourse. He refused; and in conse

* Articles against James Bainham: FoxE, vol. iv. p. 703.

dinarian

A.D. 1531-2

CH. 6. quence his wife was imprisoned, and he himself was racked in the Tower by order of Sir Thomas More. Enfeebled by suffering, he was then brought before Stokesley, and terrified by the cold merciless eyes of his judge, he gave way, not about his friends, but about himself: On his first he abjured, and was dismissed heartbroken. trial he re- This was on the seventeenth of February. He

cants.

He recovers

was only able to endure his wretchedness for a month. At the end of it, he appeared at a secret meeting of the Christian brothers, in 'a warehouse in Bow Lane,' where he asked forgiveness of God and all the world for what he had done; and then went out to take again upon his shoulders the heavy burden of the cross.

The following Sunday, at the church of St. his courage, Augustine, he rose in his seat with the fatal

And is arrested again.

English Testament in his hand, and 'declared

openly, before all the people, with weeping tears, that he had denied God,' praying them all to forgive him, and beware of his weakness; for if I should not return to the truth,' he said, 'this Word of God would damn me, body and soul, at the day of judgment.' And then he prayed 'everybody rather to die than to do as he did, for he would not feel such a hell again as he did feel for all the world's good."

*

Of course but one event was to be looked for; he knew it, and himself wrote to the bishop, telling him what he had done. No mercy was possible: he looked for none, and he found

none.

* FOXE, vol. iv. p. 702.

A.D. 1523.

of the

thorities.

Yet perhaps he found what the wise autho- CH. 6. rities thought to be some act of mercy. They could not grant him pardon in this world upon The mercy any terms; but they would not kill him till they church au had made an effort for his soul. He was taken to the Bishop of London's coal cellar at Fulham, the favourite episcopal penance chamber, where he was ironed and put in the stocks; and there was left for many days, in the chill March weather, to bethink himself. This failing to work conviction, he was carried to Sir Thomas More's house at Chelsea, where for two nights he was chained to a post and whipped; thence, again, he was taken back to Fulham for another week of torture; and finally to the Tower, for a further fortnight, again with ineffectual whippings.

April 20,

The demands of charity were thus satisfied. The pious bishop and the learned chancellor had exhausted their means of conversion; they had discharged their consciences; and the law was allowed to take its course. The prisoner was brought to trial on the 20th of April, as a re- Heis burnt, lapsed heretic. Sentence followed; and on the 1532. last of the month the drama closed in the usual manner at Smithfield. Before the fire was lighted Bainham made a farewell address to the people, laying his death expressly to More, whom he called his accuser and his judge.*

It is unfortunately impossible to learn the feelings with which these dreadful scenes were

*FOXE, vol. iv. p. 705.