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two volumes "The Dark Ages" and "The Reformation." In 1838 Archbishop Howley made him Librarian at Lambeth, and conferred on him the honorary degree of D.D.; and the year following, when he succeeded Rose (Newman's friend) as editor of the British Magazine, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society; but he never received any benefice or other recognition of his labours and his ability. He retired from the editorship in 1849, the year in which the volume now reprinted was published; and, apart from a small volume of Essays which appeared in 1852, little else came from his pen. He died in 1866.

In 1850 he had published "A Plea for a Church-History Society"; and his proposals show so much business-like common sense, united with a keen appreciation of the need for patient study of original documents, if the outcome is to have serious value, that we may well regret he was never placed in a position in which he could carry out his scheme. But the work he had done had left him too little a persona grata with the dominant parties in the Church to permit any but a very powerful patron to give him a berth, such as that of a Dean, in which he would have found full independence for literary work. He had shattered the idols of the Evangelicals, and he was also "an object of suspicion to the Tractarians, whom he declined to follow in their later developments." In 1841 he had denounced Keble's tract, "On the Mysticism attributed to the early Fathers of the Church," with a fierceness that betrayed some lack of appreciation of the poetic aspect of Scripture. Had Dr. Maitland lived fifty years longer he would probably have viewed the matter differently, and would have admitted that, where the literal and historical interpretation (which he assumed as certain) is impossible, the allegorical and poetical interpretation is not only allowable but necessary. But although he was a man of many talents—he was brilliant in conversation, a skilled musician, and a draughtsman in black and white with so delicate a touch that his pen-and-ink drawings were often mistaken for engravings-he seems to have been too matter-of-fact in his literary criticism to be able to appreciate spiritual fancies that Keble could view with sympathy. More to his taste was it to show up popular but ill-founded traditions, and to insist that something more vertebrate than a pious sentiment should stand behind men's conceptions of the religious changes in the sixteenth century.

This is the rightful temper of an historical critic; and it is satisfactory to learn that his influence, both direct and indirect, on historical studies at Cambridge has been very great. In the "Dictionary of National Biography" it is well said of him that, "animated by a rare desire after simple truth, generously candid and free from all pretence or pedantry, he wrote in a style which was peculiarly sparkling, lucid, and attractive," and that "few men of his generation were more stimulating and suggestive."

That the volume now offered to the public is a reprint, and not a new and revised edition, is a matter that hardly requires explanation. Since 1849, when the book was published, so much fresh light has been thrown on the Reformation period by the publication of State Papers and other historical manuscripts, and by the labours of Brewer, Dixon, Gairdner, Gasquet, Pocock, and others, that there would literally be no end to the new matter that it might seem desirable to add by way of notes, not to speak of the temptation an editor would be under to give at length his reasons for differing from his author on points where he would almost necessarily differ. The work is therefore given here precisely as Maitland published it, apart from the correction of a few obvious misprints. But the question may then very pertinently be asked, Why reprint at all a work that is confessedly in some respects old-fashioned and obsolete? The answer, I think, is that, whatever faults the book may have, it was nevertheless an epoch-making work, and must always remain a book that needs to be read. Possibly it may be rating it too highly to say of it as absolutely as it was said of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," that you must read it to understand the period, whatever else you may read. But it is certainly a book that no student of the Reformation can afford to be without. It is an indispensable introduction, even though it may need correction from subsequent investigations. The new light that has been thrown on the period during the last fifty years has very largely confirmed the view that Maitland indicated; certainly it has made it impossible for men to be content with the older tradition which he discredited.

But there is another side to all this; and I trust I shall not be accused of unduly disparaging Maitland's work if I proceed to point out how he must also be read with caution. An example or two will suffice to illustrate the criticisms that

I think should be made. In the Fourth Essay, entitled "Puritan Style, No. II." (pp. 54-66) he sets to work to prove, by extracts from Traheron and others, that the Reformers were foul-mouthed; and so no doubt they were. It may have been worth while to establish this fact fifty years ago, when a false tradition as to the moral superiority of Protestants over Catholics, at the date of the Reformation, prevailed; but it would be easy to cap every quotation given by Maitland with one in equally bad taste from a contemporary Catholic writer. For, indeed, the strong language, which he rightly holds up to reprobation, is characteristic of the time, and not of any particular religious party. Mr. Law has shown us how, in the reign of Elizabeth, Jesuits and seculars indulged in similarly odious recriminations. If therefore any one should rise from the perusal of these Essays with the impression that the Reformers were in this respect a depraved body of controversialists, it would be an unfortunate result of that one-sided exposition of the history of the period which our author fifty years ago thought it necessary to present. In truth, the sixteenth century was an unlovely era; and it may be questioned whether any of its personages demand our unstinted admiration, save the great and glorious Sir Thomas More.

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Again, Maitland must not be followed slavishly in his estimate of the political aspect of the Reformation. He is shocked by the disloyalty of such protests as that against the monstrous regiment of women," made in the reign of Mary; and he makes merry over the shifts to which the maintainers of such a protest were driven when the accession of Elizabeth put the novel notion of a queen-regnant in a wholly different light. His tenth Essay, entitled "The Puritan Palinodia," deals with this subject. That there was plenty of moral cowardice among the advocates of reform may be true enough; the flight of so many over the seas may be accepted as sufficient proof of this. But is it fair to hold up to ridicule and I must say, though it is only a small detail, that his pedantic adherence to the obsolete spelling of these quaint Protestants seems designed to make their protests look the more ludicrous -men who were fighting with their lives in their hands against tremendous odds, and were fighting in great measure for dimly discerned principles of political if not yet of religious liberty, which have since been accepted as just and necessary by nearly all the civilised nations of the world? I think that

Maitland, in his intelligible contempt for the then dominant unhistorical estimate of the Reformation as a religions movement, was somewhat blind to its significance as an era in which the seeds of a most necessary political revolution were sown. This aspect of it has in later years been admirably sketched by Mr. F. Seebohm, in his "Era of the Protestant Revolution," published in 1874.

Further, Dr. Maitland's keen critical instinct sometimes led him into an excessive historical scepticism. Bishop Bonner's reputation for fiendish cruelty he did indeed definitely expose as a wholly unjust estimate. But when he was dealing with Bonner's Preface to the second edition of Gardiner's treatise "De Vera Obedientia," he allowed his sense of the unlikeliness of Bonner's having written such a Preface to get the better of his recognition of the soundness of the historical evidence on which the fact rests. He discusses the matter with much fulness and fairness in his seventeenth and eighteenth Essays; but I do not think that the conclusion he suggests, that the Preface was a forgery, has been accepted by any historian qualified to pronounce a judgment in the case. No doubt it is difficult to understand how a Catholic Bishop like Bonner, who had spent some time in Rome, and had had personal relations with the Pope, should, under pressure, of which there is nothing recorded to show that it was specially severe, have backed up Gardiner's repudiation of the Pope's authority over the Church in England, and have amplified it by a good deal of coarse abuse (see pp. 302, 303); but many things in the sixteenth century are difficult to understand; while the positive evidence for this having come from Bonner's pen is not seriously shaken by the criticisms, painstaking and ingenious as these are, which Maitland adduces.

So too as to his attacks on Foxe, the martyrologist. On this point I am permitted to use a communication from Mr. A .F. Pollard, author of numerous articles in the " Dictionary of National Biography" that are concerned with the Reformation period, of which he has made a close and careful study:

"I think Maitland's attack on the veracity of Foxe is overdone. No doubt Foxe made mistakes and was unduly credulous; but I don't think he was any worse than Sanders, for instance. In one or two cases which I have examined I have found indications in State Papers and elsewhere pointing to at least a substratum of fact in Foxe's stories which Mait

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land denounces as ridiculous; and Mr. James Gairdner has declared that there is no reason to doubt the essential truth' of the story of the intrigue against Catherine Parr, about which Maitland is particularly contemptuous."

So much then may be said by way of criticism and caution in regard to the work now reprinted; while its many and great merits, as an opening-up of an ever-interesting period, will not escape the notice of any attentive reader. Maitland certainly succeeds in making the Reformation live before our

eyes.

I shall perhaps be presuming on the indulgence of the readers of this Introduction if I venture on any suggestions of my own as to how the history of this period may most profitably be studied; but it occurs to me to say that, while the tendency is just now to minimise the significance of what occurred between the years 1531 and 1560, and to include the succeeding hundred years as a part of the Reformation period, so that the Church of England may get the benefit of the reaction which stamped a somewhat different character on the Prayer-book as revised in 1662, the truer method would be to concentrate attention on the short period that elapsed between the death of Henry VIII. and the death of Somerset the Protector, as being that during which the great and decisive changes were consummated. Notice must, of course, be taken of Henry's breach with Rome so as to secure his marriage with Anne Boleyn, for without this the Reformation that was accomplished would not have been accomplished; and notice must also be taken of the settlement under Elizabeth, as the definite establishment of England as a Protestant State. But the Catholic reaction under Mary was apparently so superficial (as it was certainly transient), that the Elizabethan settlement may fairly be regarded as based on the earlier settlement in 1552, from which the Marian incident did not really divide it; and thus the supreme importance of the period 1547-52 is indicated as that in which the English Reformation was effected. A fully detailed account of these momentous years is still a desideratum, as is also a full biography of Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, the best summary of whose career is at present to be found in the "Dictionary of National Biography." We very naturally shrink from ascribing the religious emancipation of England to either Henry, or Edward, or Elizabeth; but there need be no such feeling of shame in ascribing it to Somerset,

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