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CHAPTER X.

EDWARD VI. ADVANCE OF THE REFORMATION. ERASMUS'S PARAPHRASE.

HOMILIES.

CRAN

MER'S CATECHISM. OFFICE OF COMMUNION. BOOK OF COMMON-PRAYER. TIME OF SERVICE, AND LENGTH. PRIMER. ARTICLES OF 1553.

MODERATION OF THE ENGLISH REFORMERS.

THE accession of Edward, the Josiah of his country, as he was commonly called in his own day, reanimated the Reformation; and during his short reign it was that the church of England was constructed, in the main, such as we now see it. The young prince, who was brought up a protestant, was himself eminently calculated to recommend the cause. His own character, both mental and moral, was a most persuasive advocate of the system which had nurtured it. Cardan, who was called into England to prescribe for the Archbishop of St. Andrew's, then sick of a dropsy, and was introduced to the king, now in his fifteenth year, relates the particulars of a short conversation which he had with him on the subject of comets, which won the heart of the philosopher, and, like a journal which has come down to us written in his own hand', certainly argues in him a wit beyond his age. Latin he spoke, says Cardan, who seems to have conversed with him in it, as readily as himself; and in many other languages he is said to have been a pro

1 Burnet, Reform. ii. Append. 3.

ficient, stimulated, perhaps, by an apophthegm of Roger Ascham, his sister's schoolmaster, though not his own, "that as a bird cannot soar unto heaven with one wing, so cannot a man attain unto excellence with one tongue." Indeed, to a study of tongues, we are told by a correspondent of his own, he had more applied than to any matter either of history or of policy, the holy Scriptures excepted; nevertheless, the pains which were taken to render him in all things an accomplished prince may be seen in the questions (eighty-four in number) submitted to him by the clerk of the council, probably at the desire of the Protector Somerset; and which were intended as food for his private speculations and debates with his friends. They are such as embrace nearly all those principles of government upon which he would be afterwards called to act "Whether is better for the commonwealth that the power be in the nobility or the people?" "How easily a weak prince with good order may long be maintained; and how soon a mighty prince with little disorder may be destroyed?" "What causeth an inheritor king to lose his realm?" "Whether religion, besides the honour of God, be not also the greatest stay of civil order?" "How dangerous it is to be the author of a new matter?"1 with many other problems, well

worth the attention of those to whom the education of a sovereign is confided. His heart was as good as his head; and as it is with the latter that we believe, but with the former that we believe unto righteousness, so did its natural dictates

1 Ellis's Original Letters, ii. 187.

2d Series.

rise in arms against those more subtle principles according to which Cranmer had conscientiously persuaded himself, and endeavoured to persuade the king, that the death of Joan of Kent was a duty; and happy would it have been for the memory of that otherwise almost unspotted character, had he submitted his more mature but more sophisticated judgment to the righteous tears of this gifted boy. What he did, however, he did ignorantly; not in any carnal zeal, but after long debate, and, as he writes, in bitterness and sorrow of spirit. He did it in the temper in which Sir Matthew Hale condemned the witches of Leostoff, and suffered judgment to be executed upon them; though he represents himself most unaffectedly, and most truly, as having in general such tenderness in cases of life as almost disqualified him for the bench; and though Sir Thomas Brown, who actually wrote against vulgar errors, was in court at the time, and influenced by his voice the verdict of the jury. 2 But in this case, Cranmer seems to have thought that the honour of Christ himself, which was blasphemed, required an example to be made; and, weak and wicked as it is now allowed to be to condemn to the flames for matters of speculative opinion, which do not directly interfere with the morals of society, and therefore do not demand the interposition of the secular magistrate, it was the dogma of the church in which Cranmer had been born and bred; from which even yet he had not wholly emancipated himself;

but

"Cum animi amaritudine et cordis dolore." Burnet, Reform. ii. 168.

2 Parr's Works, iv. 181.

ADVANCE OF THE REFORMATION.

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to which Edward, happily for himself and his country, had never been enslaved. The case of Van Paris the Dutchman is usually coupled with this of Joan Bocher; but there is no sufficient proof that Cranmer was here a party actively engaged, or that any blame is due to him, unless it be that he did not intercede for his life. It is singular, and characteristic of the force of early prejudice, that, in the touching confession which Cranmer made before he went to the stake, no allusion is found to the case of this poor fanatic.

Such was the child to whose hand Providence committed the sceptre of England for a short season, "Ostendunt terris hunc tantum fata ;" and accordingly the church had rest in those days. The Roman Catholic party, which had so effectually clogged the wheels of the Reformation in the latter years of Henry, did not resign their power without a struggle under Edward. From amongst the guardians of the king, who were also to be the governors of the kingdom during the minority, the Earl of Hertford, afterwards Duke of Somerset, the king's maternal uncle, and a friend of the Reformation, was chosen head of the regency, under the title of Protector; whilst Wriothesley, the lord chancellor, a Catholic, and the leader of his sect, who opposed the elevation of Somerset, hoping that, if all the members were equal in authority, the substantial power would be his own, was deposed from his office, and deprived of the seals. Cranmer was in his own right, as primate, a member of this commission; and finding a cordial coadjutor in the Protector, he now felt himself released from the vexatious restrictions which had hitherto cramped him, and

began for the first time to breathe freely. Now, therefore, his plans for restoring the national church rapidly develope themselves, and to the consideration of these our attention must for the present be directed.

It would be easy to take a more extensive sweep of contemporary history, as others have done, and to adorn our narrative with the spoils,

- for the stirring times here treated of, supply abundant materials for such a purpose; but it is better, perhaps, to follow our subject closely up, putting aside many collateral incidents, not, indeed, as without their influence on the Reformation, but as holding a very subordinate place in it; and thus to keep our eye single, neither distracting it by too much diversity, nor perplexing it by too much detail. For, in general, the most profitable method of treating a complicated subject, perhaps, is, not to open up every particular, great and small, which may bear upon it in its degree; but rather to filter the rush of matter which presents itself, and, striving to make a small book, which is a hard thing, instead of a large one, which is most easy, to place the reader in possession of such events only as served to stamp the times to which they belonged, or serve now to characterise them, and then to leave him to his own reflection or to his own study to fill up the picture.

The first of those successive publications, by the circulation of which Cranmer built up the faith of his country, was Erasmus's Paraphrase of the New Testament, translated into English, a copy of which, as well as of the Bible, was to be set up in every parish church; the next, a volume