to declare unto you my sorrowful and penitent heart, for that, being a priest, I have presumed to marry one Amy German, widow; and, under pretence of that matrimony, contrary to the canons and custom of the Universal Church, have kept her as my wife, and lived contrary to the canons and ordinances of the Church, and to the evil example of good Christian people; whereby now, being ashamed of my former wicked living here, I ask Almighty God mercy and forgiveness, and the whole Church, and am sorry and penitent even from the bottom of my heart therefor. And in token hereof, I am here, as you see, to declare and show unto you my repentance: that before God, on the latter day, you may testify with me of the same. And I most heartily and humbly pray and desire you all, whom by this evil example doing I have greatly offended, that for your part you will forgive me, and remember me in your prayers, that God may give me grace, that hereafter I may live a continent life, according to His laws and the godly ordinances of our mother the holy Catholic Church, through and by His grace. And do here, before you all, openly promise for to do during my life." Such scenes as these were well calculated to produce the effect desired upon the people, but we can only guess at the terrorism which was requisite to force educated and respectable men to submit to such degradation. 1 All this was done by the royal authority wielding the ecclesiastical power usurped by Henry VIII. Strictly speaking, it was highly irregular and uncanonical, but as the papal supremacy was yet in abeyance, it could not be accomplished otherwise. At last, however, the kingdom was ripe for reconciliation with Rome. In calling the Parliament of 1554, the Queen issued a circular letter to 1 Strype's Memorials of Cranmer, Bk. III. chap. 8.-Nov. 14, 1554, we find a record of four priests doing penance in white shirts and holding candles at Paul's Cross, London, while Harpsfield preached a sermon.-Strype's Eccles. Memor. III. VOL. IL I the sheriffs commanding them to admonish the people to return members "of the wise, grave, and Catholic sort."1 Her wishes were fulfilled, and ere the year was out Cardinal Pole was installed with full legatine powers, and Julius III. had issued his bull of indulgence, reuniting England to the Church from which she had been violently severed. An obedient Parliament lost no time in repealing all statutes adverse to the claims of the Holy See, but its subserviency had limits, and one class largely interested in the reforms of Henry had sufficient influence to maintain its heretical rights. The Church lands granted or sold to laymen were not restored. Indeed, the Queen, in her call for the Parliament, had felt it necessary to contradict the rumour that she and Philip intended the "alteration of any particular man's possessions." Though the transactions by which they had been acquired were wholly illegal, though no duration of possession could bar the imprescriptible rights of the Church, yet the nobles and country gentlemen enriched by the spoliation were too numerous and powerful, and the reclamation of the kingdom was too important, to incur any peril by unseasonably insisting on reparation for Henry's injustice. The abbatial manors and rich priories, the chantries, hospitals, and colleges, were therefore left in the impious hands of those who had been fortunate enough to secure them,3 and the miserable remnants of the religious orders were left to the conscience of the Queen, who made haste to get rid of 1 Parl. Hist. I. 616. 2 The bull is dated 24 December, 1554 (Wilkins IV. 111).-Parliament repealed the attainder of Cardinal Pole, November 22, and on the 24th he arrived in London as legate (Burnet II. 261-2). 3 1 and 2 Phil. and Mary c. 8 (Parl. Hist. I. 624). The title of the bill shows that, though the Parliament was almost exclusively Catholic, it was disposed to make its obedience to Rome the price for obtaining confirmation of the abbey lands -"A Bill for repealing all statutes, articles, and provisoes made against the See Apostolique of Rome, since the 20th of Henry VIII., and for the establishment of all spiritual and ecclesiastical possessions and hereditaments conveyed to the laity." such fragments of the spoil as had been retained by the Crown.1 Whatever tacit understanding there may have been on this delicate subject between Queen Mary and Pope Julius was not assented to by the imperious Caraffa, who shortly afterwards ascended the chair of St. Peter. Elected 23 May, 1555, he lost no time in proclaiming the imprescriptible rights of the Church, and by his bull "injunctum nobis," issued June 21, he pronounced null and void "de apostolicæ potestatis plenitudine" all transactions by which ecclesiastical possessions had passed into the hands of laymen, who were duly threatened with excommunication for prolonged attempts to hold their unhallowed acquisitions. The effort of course was fruitless, but the spirit in which the English Protestants watched the apparent opening of a breach between England and Rome is well expressed in a letter of 23 August, 1555, from Sir Richard Morrison to Henry Bullinger: "This anti-Paul, Paul of the apostasy, the servant of the devil, this antichrist newly created at Rome, thinks it but a very small plunder that is offered to him, that he is again permitted in England to tyrannise over our consciences, unless the revenues be restored to the monasteries, that is, the pigsties; the patrimony, as he calls it, of the souls that are now serving in the filth of purgatory. Our ambassadors, who went to Rome for the purpose of bringing back the wolf upon the sheep of Christ, are now with the Emperor, and bring us these demands of the chief pontiff: God grant that he may urge them in every possible way.' The hopes of the reformers, however, were disappointed, for Paul IV. gave way, and on the reassembling of Parliament, 23 October, 1555, a bull was read by which the 1 2 and 3 Phil. and Mary, c. 4 (Parl. Hist. pp. 626-8). 2 Mag. Ball. Roman. T. I. p. 809. 3 Original Letters, Parker Scc. Pub. p. 149. Pope assented to the arrangement agreed to by Cardinal Pole, confirming the Church lands to their new possessors.1 Cardinal Pole, indeed, was not remiss in giving the sanction of the papal authority to all that had been done. Convoking a synod, he issued in 1555 his Legatine Constitutions, by which all marriages of those included in the prohibited orders were declared null and void. Such apostates were ordered to be separated by ecclesiastical censures and by whatever legal processes might be required; all who dared to justify such marriages or to remain obstinately in their unholy bonds were to be prosecuted rigorously and punished according to the ancient canons, which were revived and declared to be in full force in order to prevent similar scandals for the future. As the Queen by special warrant had decreed that all canons adopted by synods should have the full effect of laws binding on the clergy, these constitutions at once restored matters to their pristine condition. It was doubtless in order to mark in the most conspicuous manner his detestation of clerical marriage that Pole descended to the pettiness of ordering the body of Peter Martyr's wife to be dug up from its resting-place, near the tomb of St. Frideswide in Christ's Church, Oxford, and to be buried in a dunghill.3 It was easy to pass decrees; it was doubtless gratifying to eject married priests by the thousand and to grant their livings to hungry reactionaries or to the crowd of needy 1 Parl Hist. I. 626; II. 342. 2 Card. Poli Constit. Legat. Decret. v. (Wilkins IV. 800). 3 Strype's Parker, Book II. chap. vi. In 1561 the remains were exhumed from the stables of Dr. Marshall, the previous dean of Christ's Church, and reburied in the church, the precaution being taken of mingling them with the bones of St. Frideswide, so as to prevent any future profanation in case of another revolution of religion. The affair excited considerable attention at the time, and produced the following epigram : "Femineum sexum Romani semper amarunt : Projiciunt corpus cur muliebre foras ? Churchmen whom Italy had ever ready to supply the spiritual wants and collect the tithes of the faithful. All this was readily accomplished, but the difficulty lay in overcoming the eternal instincts of human nature. The struggle to effect this commenced at once. It was, indeed, hardly to be expected that those who had entered into matrimony with the full conviction of its sanctity would willingly abandon all intercourse with their wives, although they might yield a forced assent to the pressure of the laws, the prospect of poverty, and the certainty of infamous punishment. Accordingly, we find that the necessity at once arose of watching the "reconciled" priests, who continued to do in secret what they could no longer practise openly. Some, indeed, found the restrictions so onerous that they endeavoured to release themselves from the bonds of the Church rather than to submit longer to the separation from their wives; and this apparently threatened so great a dearth in the ranks of the clergy that Cardinal Pole, as Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1556 forbade the withdrawal of any one from the mysteries and functions of the altar, under pain of the law.1 Notwithstanding all this legislation, royal, parliamentary, and ecclesiastical, the question refused to settle itself, and the Convocation which assembled on the 1st of January 1557 was obliged to publish an elaborate series of articles, which demonstrated that previous enactments had either not been properly observed, or that they had failed in effecting their purpose. Thus the prohibition of marriage to those in priests' orders was formally renewed. Such of the married clergy, who had undergone penance and had been restored, as still persisted in holding inter 1 "That none of those priests that were, under the pretence of lawfull matrimony, married, and now reconciled, do privilie resorte to their pretensed wives, or suffer the same to resorte unto them. And that those priests do in no wise henceforth withdrawe themselves from the mynisterie and office of priesthodde under the paine of the lawes "-Pole's Injunctions in Diocese of Gloucester (Wilkins IV. 146). |