III.

ever will possess the effect, of inducing and enabling CHAP. the hearer or reader, to compare the practical system with the written authority."3 An old chronicle tells us, that this vernacular version made the sacred volume more known to illiterate laymen and women, than it was even to the educated clergy."4 His opinions infected the aristocracy of the land, its parochial clergy and the university of Oxford,25 and produced an extensive effect on the public mind;26 but this was chiefly on detached and scattered individuals it led to no social combinations, nor occasioned any political concussions or ecclesiastical changes. All submitted to what many were criticising and secretly laying aside. Yet an extensive harvest appeared from his labors after his decease, which he could not have anticipated, and in a country so remote and so little connected with his own, that he knew it more by the fact of its sovereign having

* See Mr. Baber's re-publication of this valuable relic of the primitiæ of the English Reformation.

* Hist. Mid. Ages, v. 5. p. 192. This is not surprising, as in the year 1828, the Eighth Report of the Commissioners on Education in Ireland states, that among 160 Divinity students in the Roman Catholic college at Maynooth, there are not above half a dozen or a dozen copies of the Old or New Testament, and that very few students ever refer to the original text. It corresponds with such an education, to read in the Courier François, of 14 November 1825, that a prosecution had been instituted by the public officer against 16 women, two children, and one man, for reading the New Testament in a private house at ten o'clock in the forenoon. They were all, including the children, fined in the mitigated penalty of 50 francs each. As this occurred when the Jesuit party in the cabinet, which has been since removed from it, took the command of French education, it will probably not be imitated now.

Hist. Mid. Ages, p. 191. He had been preceded by John Ball in 1366, whose exertions in churchyards and market-places may have been among the causes that excited his own mind to take up the subject. "Hist. Mid. Ages, p. 196, 7. The St. Alban's history characterized the Londoners in 1392, as Male creduli in Deum et traditiones avitas: Lollardorum sustentatores, religiosorum detractores, decimarum de

BOOK

II.

29

28

fallen in the battle with his own king at Cressy" than from any other cause. But it happened that Richard II. selected the princess of Bohemia for his queen; and, adopting the feelings of the English court at that moment, she imbibed, valued and befriended the opinions of Wickliffe, who was alive when she became his sovereign. Her household imitated her example. She lived only ten years after Wickliffe; 20 but one of her countrymen, having studied at Oxford and learnt these new doctrines, took the writings of this enlightened censor with him, when he returned to Bohemia.30 The university of Prague had been founded in 1347, and the nation had become so eager for knowlege, that several thousand scholars were studying at it; from which, part moved to escape oppression, and established a similar seminary at Leipsig.

31

Huss and Jerome of Prague were among the students in that city; and eagerly embraced, defended and propagated the opinions of Wickliffe, which thus became rooted in Bohemia, while the knowlege of them and some regard for them were carried at the same time into Saxony. The arch

27 Foxe, 1. p. 473. Hist. Mid. Ages, v. 2. p. 201.

28 Ib. v. 2. p. 332, and v. 5. p. 198.

29 He died in 1384, and she in 1394. Mid. Ages, 5. p. 196, and v. 2. p. 332. She was married to Richard about the fifth year of his reign, and lived with him eleven years. It is curious that Arundel, the prelate of York and lord chancellor, who afterwards took the lead in persecuting such opinions, preached a funeral sermon, which was formerly in the Worcester library, and in this commended her above all other women, because, tho an alien, she had the Gospels in English, with the doctors upon them. He stated, that she had sent them to him to examine, and that he had found them good and true; and he added a reprehension of the prelates and others for their negligence. Foxe, 1. p. 467. 30 Hist. Mid. Ages, v. 5. p. 198.

31 Ib. v. 5. p. 198, 9.

III.

bishop of Prague opposed the intruding ideas, and CHAP. burnt such of Wickliffe's manuscripts as he could meet with. But as new opinions which have any foundation in truth are diffused by persecution, so most of those of the English reformer became nationalized in Bohemia. They were so far welcomed in Saxony, that Luther read a copy of the sermons of John Huss in his convent's library at Erfurd.33

Thus the seeds and spirit of a new mind against the hierarchy, on all the four topics we have mentioned, were planted in three commanding positions in Europe, as the fifteenth century opened, in England, in Saxony, and in Bohemia ; while a branch of the Waldenses were cherishing similar ones in Hungary, and their parent body also, amid the Alps of Switzerland and Savoy.

They declined in England as to their publicity, while they were vegetating on the Germanic continent. The house of Lancaster wrenched the crown from Richard II. by the invitation and the aid of the English hierarchy, avowedly for his personal misconduct, which had been most culpable; but apparently on the secret compact, with the church for suppressing its Lollard opponents. Henry IV.

35

For the principal opinions of the Bohemians, which chiefly offended their pontifical historian, see Mid. Ages, v. 5. p. 200. The pope Pius II. who was Æneas Sylvius when he wrote, refers them to Wickliffe, and calls them also the impiam Waldensium sectam et insaniam.' Hist. Boh.

33 Ib. 200.

34 Ib. V.

2. p. 305.

This is inferred from the facts, that the archbishop of Canterbury went in disguise to Paris to invite Henry IV., and seconded it by declaring a remission of sins to all who would assent to his invasion, Mid. Äges, v. 2. p. 306, 7; and also, that he and his line became a persecuting dynasty.

II.

36

BOOK performed his part of this nefarious engagement, by pledging himself to destroy all heresies and heretics, and by assenting to that disgraceful statute of murder and impiety, which ordered heretics to be burnt. He promised also in parliament to punish all who should preach, teach, or write against the faith or determinations of the church, or have conventicles or schools, where such opinions were encouraged. Henry V. became a still more cruel persecutor; for he personally witnessed the burning of a poor man who disbelieved transubstantiation, after failing in a kindly meant endeavor to procure his recantation. He enforced severe prosecutions; and after personally upbraiding the gallant soldier and sincere Christian, sir John Oldcastle, for his religious sentiments, allowed him at last to be consumed at the stake.37 Yet altho he supported the clergy in their system and doctrines, that is, in all which lay between them and the people; he desired to abridge that power which they maintained and exercised against the crown and aristocracy of the country, and those habits which most offended the public judgment: He therefore instructed his ambassadors at the council of Basle to obtain some important modifications in this respect, and to recommend a general reformation of the most obnoxious corruptions.

38

The pope John complained in 1414 to the king of Bohemia, that persons in his dominions were follow

36 Hist. Mid. Ages, v. 2. p. 353. W. Sautre, a chaplain, was immediately burnt. ib.

37 Mid. Ages, v. 2. p. 448-53. Oldcastle's, or Lord Cobham's den's Fasciculus, who may be sufferer. 1. p. 513-520.

Foxe has preserved a full detail of opinions and examinations from Walconsidered as a contemporary of the 38 Hist. Mid. Ages, v. p. 118.

3.

III.

ing the errors of that arch heretic Wickliffe, whose CHAP. books had been condemned; and exhorted him to root out this blot.29 At the Council of Constance, the doctrines of Huss were condemned as those of the English reformer.40 This council has made its name repulsively memorable, by causing Huss to be burnt, tho he came to explain his opinions under the safe-conduct of the emperor; and afterwards Jerome of Prague: a species of human sacrifice, which, being aggravated by the wilful and tyrannical perfidy of violating the legal protection to which Huss had trusted, in order to make him a victim, had its natural results of fixing an indelible stain on the hierarchy, of whose chief members that synod consisted, and which still vindicates the deed;"

Foxe, 1. p. 544.

4 The council's sententia damnationis calls Wickliffe the Dux et princeps' of the Bohemian heretics, and condemned 44 of his opinions, and Huss as his disciple, and classes Jerome with them.

See the Sententia, printed by Orthuinus, and reprinted by Browne in his Fasciculus, v. 1. p. 299, 303. The 44 opinions, with their reprobations, are in p. 280-295. A larger quantity of Wickliffe's opinions, between two and three hundred, condemned at this council, occupy 14 folio pages. 266-280.

"I regret that, being one of the heads of the existing Roman Church in France, and possessing an enlightened mind, M. Frayssinous should in 1825 extenuate this abominable deed. He says the council ne viola pas la foi publique.' Why? because le sauf conduit n'etoit que pour garantir la personne de Jean Huss sur la route.' That Huss had sought and obtained it as his protection at the council, and that he stood before the prelates there with his own and the public belief that he had his personal safeguard in his pocket, and that the emperor, when he gave it, meant it to be so, there can be no doubt.

It was only the more atrocious to find out a verbal distinction after he was in their power, which, in order to put a fellow-creature to a cruel death, would evade its general purpose. M. F. adds, that he was punished less as heresiarch,' than as perturbateur.' The burning disproves this. Mary beheaded Wyatt as perturbateur, but she burnt Latimer as heresiarch. So her father on this express difference hung the traitorous priests, while he burnt Ann Askew. Huss was burnt in July 1415: as John Clayton was in our Smithfield in the same year for analogous opinions. 1 Foxe, 588.