and unseasonable summons could be got together, he went out during a Christmas night, to the place stated by his informer, and found only a few persons there, who being asked what they wanted there, said, . . . the Lord Cobham. It is said, that unless the precaution had been taken of guarding the city gates, these people were to have been joined by fifty thousand servants and apprentices. In opposition to this most improbable story, it is asserted, that the persons whom the King found in the fields were collected there to hear a midnight preaching, because they could not assemble without danger by day; . . . and this tale, considering the season of the year, is as little credible as the former. It is not unlikely that a conspiracy may have been formed for raising the rightful family to the throne, and that the Lollards had embarked in it as a party, in the expectation of obtaining toleration at least, if not the triumph of their doctrines. What secret information there may have been of this does not appear; open evidence there is none. The prisons in and about London were filled; and nine and thirty persons, the chief of whom was Sir Roger Acton, who is described as a man of great ability and possessions, were suspended by chains from a gallows in Ficket Field, and in that manner burnt alive, for heresy and treason. A large reward was offered for taking Lord Cobham alive or dead; so faithfully, however, was he sheltered, notwithstanding all who harboured him incurred the same danger as himself, that he eluded his persecutors for four years, till he was discovered by means of the Lord Powis, in Wales. He stood resolutely upon his defence, and would probably not have been taken alive, if a woman had not broken his legs with a stool. In this condition he was carried to London in a horse-litter; and there being hung by the middle in chains, was consumed in the flames, praising God with his latest breath. . . . It was not in England only that this noble martyr prepared the way for the Reformation. Apprehending that the writings of Wicliffe, by which, through the grace of God, his own heart had been changed, might be destroyed by the diligence with which they were now sought out and burnt, he was careful to have them multiplied, and therefore had copies made "at his own great

1 He suffered as a heretic, not as a traitor. His indictment for high treason is a forgery. See HOWELL'S State Trials, vol. i. 254, 265.

cost and charge," which he found means of sending to Bohemia, where this work was understood, and where Huss had now appeared as the precursor of Luther.

A new statute was enacted upon the pretext of these " great rumours, congregations, and insurrections," which, it was said, were designed to destroy the Christian faith, the King, and all other estates, spiritual and temporal, all manner of policy, and finally the laws of the land. That the words may not seem to imply more falsehood than was intended, it should be remarked, that by Christian faith, faith in Transubstantiation was meant. That there were, among the Lollards, some fanatics who held levelling opinions in their utmost extent, may be well believed: it is the extreme stage of enthusiasm, and that extremity the circumstances of the times were likely to produce. But it is worthy of notice, that in all the records which remain of this persecution, in no one instance has the victim been charged with such principles. In every case, they were questioned upon those points which make the difference between the reformed and the Romish religion; in every case they were sacrificed as burntofferings to the Mass. For the more effectual punishment and suppression of their opinions, the statute enjoined that all persons employed in civil offices, from the Chancellor downwards, should swear, upon their admission to office, that they would put forth their whole power and diligence to destroy Lollardy.

The cruelties in England must not be ascribed to the personal character of Arundel and the other persons who instigated them; though, beyond all doubt, these men, had they been of a more Christian temper, might have prevented them: they proceeded from the system which the Papal Church had adopted, of supporting its authority and its abuses by fire and sword. The Council of Constance, by whose execrable sentence Huss and Jerome of Prague were burnt alive, condemned Wicliffe also as an obstinate heretic, and ordered that his remains, if they could be discerned from the bodies of other faithful people, should be dug up and consumed by fire. Accordingly, by order of the Bishop of Lincoln, as Diocesan of Lutterworth, his grave, which was in the chancel of the church, was opened, forty years after

1 Bale, Conclusyon to Leland's New Year's Gift. Lives of the Oxford Antiquaries, vol. i.

his death; the bones were taken out and burnt to ashes, and the ashes thrown into a neighbouring brook, called the Swift. “This brook," says Fuller, "conveyed his ashes into Avon, Avon into Severn, Severn into the narrow seas, they into the main ocean : and thus the ashes of Wicliffe are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world over." "So," says Fox,

was he resolved into three elements, earth, fire, and water, thinking thereby utterly to extinguish and abolish both the name and doctrine of Wicliffe for ever. But as there is no counsel against the Lord, so there is no keeping down of verity; it will spring and come out of dust and ashes, . . . as appeared right well in this man. For though they digged up his body, burnt his bones, and drowned his ashes, yet the word of God and truth of his doctrines, with the fruit and success thereof, they could not burn. These, to this day, remain."

The Papal Church, by its pretensions to infallibility, had precluded itself from retrieving any error into which it had fallen; or reforming any abuses and corruptions which it had sanctioned: and therefore, even those persons who conscientiously maintained its doctrines upon all other points, and even zealously defended them, were, if they ventured to express the slightest hesitation upon this main article, regarded and treated as heretics. Proof of this was given in the treatment of Reynold Pecock, Bishop of Chichester, a man of great ability and rare moderation, who perceiving errors and evils on both sides, would fain have held an even course between the extremes, and have conciliated the Lollards, by conceding to them what was untenable, while he argued against them convincingly upon some of their most popular, but least reasonable, tenets. He reasoned against a preposterous tenet which the Bible-men, as he called them, advanced, that nothing was lawful unless it were appointed in the Scriptures, by which we were to be absolutely guided, as a rule of life, even in things indifferent. This error was not derived from Wicliffe; for he expressly affirmed that human ordinances might be accepted, when they were grounded in good reason, and were for the common profit of Christian people; and Pecock justly maintained, that it was not the purport of revelation to teach any thing which might be discovered without it. That there were abuses

1 B. iv. p. 171.

さ

in the adoration of images among the simple and ignorant, he admitted; but insisted that they were remediable harms; . differing in this from Wicliffe, who thought that, though not unlawful in themselves, they gave such occasion of idolatry, that they ought to be destroyed. With regard to pilgrimages, he affirmed it was not true that all places are alike in God's sight, since God chooses to dispense his favours in one place rather than in another, and in the manner of his own approving, rather than of man's advising; but he recommended those who sought for spiritual improvement, rather to seek it in reading and hearing the word of God, than by "haunting, as it were, alway the exercise in such visible signs." He agreed with the Lollards, in reprehending such preaching as that of the ignorant and superstitious Friars, whose sermons were filled with absurd legends, and who inculcated nothing so zealously as the duty of employing their order to say masses for the deliverance of souls from Purgatory. But though he censured these pulpit-bawlers, as he called them, he nevertheless maintained, that by means of such itinerants as the Friars, the people were made better than they would have been without them; and he showed the utility of monasteries, were it only for the effect they produced, as places whither the great sometimes withdrew for the purpose of religious retirement. The charges which were brought against the Bishops for not preaching, he answered openly and fairly, by maintaining that they were not bound by their office to preach to the common people, but rather were free from that burthen; their business was to have knowledge of those matters which the inferior clergy should preach for themselves, they had higher duties, and more useful work. He insisted also, that they were not bound to residence, when they might be better employed elsewhere.

Bishop Pecock did not, like Arundel and too many other prelates, hunt out the Lollards, for the purpose of bringing them to the stake. Many of the chief persons among them conversed familiarly with him upon subjects which it had been death to touch upon before a persecutor; he deserved their confidence, and even won their affection, by the patience with which he listened to them; . . . he could always, he says, have made their case stronger than they did themselves. But while he was thus serving his own Church effectually, by unexceptionable means, he

fell under its censure himself, for declaring that the pretension of infallibility could not be maintained, and that Holy Writ was the only standard of revealed truth. The implicit faith which the Church upon this ground required in all its institutions, as he saw that it shocked the understanding of reasonable and conscientious men, so he perceived that it was deeply prejudicial to religion, and expressed his strong feeling concerning it in this prayer: "O thou Lord Jesus, God and Man, head of thy Christian Church, and teacher of Christian belief, I beseech thy mercy, thy pity, and thy charity; far be this said peril from the Christian Church, and from each person therein contained; and shield thou that this venom be never brought into thy Church: and if thou suffer it to be any while brought in, I beseech thee that it be soon again outspit. But suffer thou, ordain, and do, that the law and the faith which thy Church at any time keepeth be received, and admitted to fall under this examination, whether it be the same very faith which thou and thine Apostles taught or no, and whether it hath sufficient evidences for it to be very faith or no."

A charge of heresy was therefore brought against him, for teaching that the Church was fallible: other accusations were added, some of which seem intended to excite a popular cry against him, and also to bring him into disgrace with the Government. Duke Humphrey had been his patron, and they who had brought about the murder of the Duke extended their hatred to him. That which should have been a merit in the eyes of the Papal Court, was imputed to him as a crime, . . . his assertion, that the Pope, having a right to all benefices, might, in the disposal of them, reserve to himself what part of the revenues he thought fit, without being guilty of simony; since, as rightful lord, he sold only what was his own. Another imputed crime was, his opinion that the goods of Churchmen are not the goods of the poor, but are as much their own property as are the temporal estates of those who have them by inheritance. Another, that it was not necessary to salvation to believe that our Saviour descended into Hell. There were other charges, which were merely frivolous, turning wholly upon verbal subtleties. He was condemned, however, upon all, and had then to choose between abjuration and martyrdom.