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STRICTURES 
 
 ON THE 
 
 POET LAUREATE'S 
 
 BOOK OF THE CHURCH." 
 
STRICTURES 
 
 ON THE 
 
 (( 
 
 POET LAUREATE'S 
 
 Eoofc of t&e e&tttck" 
 
 Omnia transformat scse in miracula rerum. 
 
 V1RG. G. IT. 
 
 By JOHN MERLIN. 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 Printed by and for Keating and Brown, 38, Duke Street, Grosvenor 
 
 Square, and 9, Ivy Lane, Paternoster Row ; sold also by J. Booker, 
 
 A. Cuddon, W. Andrews, and Sherwood and Jones. 
 
 And by R. Coyne, 4, Capel Street, DUBLIN. 
 
 1824. 
 

 LOAN STAOB^ 
 
SKsoss 
 Skiff 
 
 STRICTURES 
 
 THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH/ 3 
 
 A degree of enthusiasm is requisite to con- 
 stitute the character of a Poet ; but no quality 
 is more at variance with it than religious fana- 
 ticism. This confuses the imagination, mis- 
 leads the judgment,, and hardens the heart ; in 
 so much, that a man of real genius and 
 talents for the Muses, on falling into this 
 fanaticism, would be found too dull in his com- 
 positions to gain for them a patient reading. 
 Such have been the late aberrations of our Lau- 
 reat's mind. After writing D'Esperilla's Letters 
 in commendation of the Catholic Religion, and 
 Wat Tyler's Drama, to excite popular tumults 
 against Government, he has latterly celebrated 
 and recommended the chief and most dangerous 
 schismatics from the Establishment, the Wes- 
 leys, Whitfields, and their associates ; and now, 
 in the frantic style, and with the lying memo- 
 rials of another such schismatic, John Fox, he 
 
 568 
 
* STRICTURES ON 
 
 raves, through the history of many centuries, in 
 abusing and calumniating the common source 
 of Christianity, in order to court the heads of 
 the present Establishment, under pretence of 
 vindicating- it. 
 
 Mr. Southey, it has been stated, is a Poet ; 
 that is, as the original Greek word signifies, a 
 maker or inventor. Hence we are not to be 
 surprised if he makes use of his poetical licence 
 or faculty in writing history, rather than weary 
 himself in hunting outand bringing forward dusty 
 records for the many extraordinary things he 
 describes and tells. It is true, he says, he (C can 
 <c refer to authorities for them among his col- 
 " lections/' but that he does not give these, 
 Ci because the scale of his work is not one which 
 (t would require or justify a display of re- 
 {l search." But it may be truly said of the case 
 in question : De non apparentibus et de non ex- 
 istentibus eadem est ratio : on the other hand, his 
 tedious quotations from John Fox, and other 
 writers of John Fox's standard, prove that he has 
 not been sparing of ink or paper. While the Poet 
 confines himself to the mythology of the Britons, 
 Saxons, and Danes, no one can feel an interest 
 in investigating his authorities ; but when he 
 indulges his fancy with the truths of Revelation, 
 or facts connected with those truths, he ought 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." O 
 
 to be dragged down to the solid ground of au- 
 thentic documents. 
 
 Speaking of the first conversion of this Island 
 to Christianity by the envoys of Pope Eleutheri us, 
 under the subordinate British King, Lucius, he 
 says that " it rests on legends of doubtful au- 
 " thority/' and yet it is recorded by every 
 writer of character, who treats of the matter, 
 whether British, Saxon, or Roman, whether 
 Protestant or Catholic, from Nennius down to 
 Parker, God win, and Usher; nor can any motive 
 be assigned for his affected doubts on the sub- 
 ject, except his unwillingness to ascribe so great 
 a benefit, as the conversion of the Britons, lo 
 the See of Rome. The conversion, however, 
 of our immediate ancestors, the Anglo-Saxons, 
 together with their civilization and instruction 
 in literature and the useful arts, by monks sent 
 from Rome on the part of Pope St. Gregory, is 
 a fact too notorious to be called in question by 
 him. But he takes care to suppress two other 
 facts of the greatest importance in the present 
 case, though acknowledged by Bale, the Cen- 
 turiators, and other learned Protestants; name- 
 ly, that the Apostles of our ancestors, these 
 envoys from Pope Gregory, brought along 
 with them from Rome, the same Christianity 
 which is professed in it at the present day ; 
 
 b2 
 
6 STRICTURES ON 
 
 namely, the Mass, the Real Presence, the Su- 
 premacy of the Pope, Prayers to the Saiuts and 
 for the Dead, Relicks, Crucifixes, and Holy Wa- 
 ter. The second fact is, that the Roman Mis- 
 sionaries arriving here, at the end of the sixth 
 century, found the Britons or Welsh, who had 
 been converted in the second century, professing 
 the self-same religion with themselves. For had 
 it been otherwise, these Roman Missionaries 
 never would have allowed, much less have 
 required them, as St. Augustine of Canterbury 
 did, to join with him and his companions in 
 converting the remaining Pagan Saxons. 
 This important fact is further confirmed by the 
 previous missions of St. Germanus, Lupus, and 
 Severus, continental Bishops,in communion with, 
 and deriving their authority from the Pope, who, 
 nevertheless, when they visited the Christian 
 Britons above a century before the arrival of 
 St. Augustine, confined their efforts to the 
 extirpation of the Pelagian heresy t In vain do 
 many Protestants harp on the difference that 
 was found in the British and the Roman com- 
 putation of Easter Day, since every one sees 
 that this regarded a mere secondary point of 
 discipline, not the essential points of Religion. 
 In vain also do some others alledge that the 
 Britons would not receive St. Augustine for 
 
-THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH.'* 7 
 
 their Archbishop; in tact, he neither claimed to 
 be such, nor would the maintenance of their 
 ancient Sees, on the part of the Britons, have 
 proved in any sort their Religion to have been 
 different from that of Rome. It is then a mere 
 fiction of the Poet, that the faith of the Welsh 
 was if purer than that of the Christian 
 iC Saxons," as is also the assertion that the 
 Apostles of the latter " were little scrupulous 
 ce concerning the measures they employed, 
 " being persuaded that any measures were 
 " justifiable, if they conduced to bring about 
 ct the good end which was their aim," 
 
 It is of little consequence noticing the au- 
 thor's errors that are not of a practical tendency, 
 as when he says, " there was but one Pope 
 " Gregory, besides the one who is deservedly 
 '1 styled the Great, distinguished by the rank 
 " of Saint," and when he calls St. Benedict, who 
 was of a noble family, and had received a learn- 
 ed education in the schools of Rome, " an Ita- 
 ' lian -peasant ;" but when he commends the 
 Primate Theodore for having, as he expresses 
 it, {C prohibited divorce for any other cause 
 " than the one which is allowed by the Gos- 
 " pel," p. 81, he falsifies a sy nodical decree, in 
 order to decide an important controversy be- 
 tween Catholics and Protestants. It is false, 
 
8 STRICTURES ON 
 
 then, that Theodore, or rather the Council of 
 Herudford, over which he presided, mentioned, 
 or so much as alluded to the unlawful practice 
 of divorce. What it decreed is the same that 
 the Catholic Church has taught in every age and 
 country ; namely, that " no one is to leave his 
 (i wife unless as the Gospel teaches, on account 
 " of fornication. But if any one shall have ex- 
 " pelled his wife, let him marry no other, but 
 " remain as he is, or be reconciled to his own 
 '' wife."* 
 
 Mr. Southey, indeed, attributes merit to the 
 Catholic Clergy for building churches, and 
 getting them endowed with rates, and glebes, 
 and tithes ; benefits which descend to his pre- 
 sent clients, who most assuredly would never 
 have gained them from the religious feelings of 
 their contemporary laity ; in other respects he 
 hardly ever speaks of them, but to charge them 
 with the grossest ignorance, superstition, and 
 religious corruptions charges which cost no- 
 thing to advance. He goes so far as even to 
 advance that " Christianity, in the days of 
 
 * Nullus conjugem propriam, nisi ut Sanctum Evangelium docet 
 fornicationis causa relinquet. Quod si quisquam propriam ex- 
 pulerit conjugem nulli alteri copuletur, sed ita permaneat, aut 
 propria? reconcilietur conjugi. Concil. Herud. A.D. 673. Spelman 
 Concil. p. 153. 
 
"THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH/' 9 
 
 iC Dunstan, was as much a system of priest- 
 " craft as that which, at the present day, pre- 
 <c vails in Hindostau and Tibet." It is true 
 the wide-wasting ravages of the barbarous 
 Danes were a great obstacle to the progress of 
 literature, which the clergy, and particularly the 
 monks, during the middle ages, ever cultivated 
 and promoted ; but the very names of a Bede, 
 an Aldhelm, an Alcuin, and an Ingulph, with 
 those of a hundred other scholars who might be 
 named, together with the existing decrees of 
 the councils held in those times, prove that 
 there was much more learning and cultivated 
 genius in them than superficial moderns are 
 willing to allow. As to the charge of supersti- 
 tion and the corruption of Christianity, it is 
 what every sect of modern reformers brings 
 against the others who have not advanced so 
 far as themselves in the career of irreligion. 
 The Presbyterians accuse the Church of Eng- 
 land of numerous superstitions and corruptions. 
 The Baptists bring the same charge against 
 the Calvinists for baptizing mere infants, 
 as the Quakers do against all other denomi- 
 nations, for baptizing persons at all. So things 
 must be till the end of time, and Christ must 
 blasphemously be said not to have provided for 
 the peace and truth of his Church, unless we 
 
10 STRICTURES ON 
 
 admit that he has left a faculty and an authority 
 in it to pronounce what is, and what is not super 
 stition and corruption. Appealing then to the 
 unerring decisions of this living tribunal, we 
 know and are sure that the Real Presence, for 
 example, and the Sacrifice of the Mass, and the 
 Confession of Sins, and Prayers for the Dead, 
 and the other doctrines and practices of the 
 Catholics, which we otherwise prove to have 
 come down to us from the Apostles, are not 
 corruptions, but constituent parts of genuine 
 Christianity.* 
 
 I have been speaking of the avowed doctrine 
 and practices of the Church, which are known by 
 her Councils and authorized publications, such 
 as the Pastoral of St. Gregory, the Sum of St. 
 Thomas, and The Following of Christ, byaKem- 
 pis, not by the particular factsor opinions of indi- 
 viduals, much less by the dreams of mere legen- 
 dary writers, and still less by the bigotted fic- 
 tions of modern Protestants. Let Mr. Southey 
 make out his charge from the authorities here 
 referred to, if he can ; in the mean time I wish 
 to ask him what he would say or think of the 
 honesty of a Catholic writer, who, giving an 
 
 * See all this proved in Bellarmine's Controversies, in Hawarden's 
 True Church of Christy in The End of Controversy, and other 
 works of the same description. 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." I I 
 
 account of the state of the English Church in 
 the last century, was to assert, on the authority 
 of his late Life of Wesley, that its clergy be- 
 lieved themselves to have power over the ele- 
 ments, and even the celestial spirits ;* that they 
 taught their hearers to lay aside prayer and 
 good works, and to believe themselves tree from 
 every law human and divine, + and professedly 
 worked them up to paroxysms of frantic mad- 
 ness, or utter despair. J 
 
 The name of St. Dunstan, to whom the pro- 
 motion of the superstitions and corruptions in 
 question is more particularly attributed, has 
 been disgraced by his biographers in the vision- 
 ary scenes in which they have involved him. 
 This has been the fate of other the most illus- 
 trious characters : Pope Silvester II. and Friar 
 Bacon, because they so much excelled their 
 cotemporaries in Chemistry and Mathematics, 
 and produced such then unknown physical 
 effects, were reported to deal with the devil. At 
 
 * The Rev. G. Whitfield believed that the angel Gabriel attended 
 on his congregation ; accordingly he pretended to call him back as 
 he was ascending to heaven, in order to bear a particular message, 
 thus: Stop, Gabriel/ stop ! Wesley's Life, vol. ii. p. 239. 
 
 t See Southey's Account of the Moravians, whose fundamental 
 fanaticism of instantaneous conversion he himself avows. Vol. i. 
 p. 159. 
 
 % See the account of Messrs. Berridge, Hicks, &c. regular clergy- 
 men. Vol. ii. c, 24. 
 
 C 
 
12 STRICTURES ON 
 
 all events, St. Dunstan's unquestionable talents 
 and actions made him by far the first character 
 of his age. Besides being an illustrious ascetic, 
 a restorer of clerical and monastic discipline, 
 and a model of prelatic virtues, he was a learned 
 scholar, an exquisite mechanic in the most deli- 
 cate kinds of works, a complete musician, and, 
 what was of most consequence to his king and 
 country, an accomplished Statesman and Prime 
 Minister. Before and after his time, as is well 
 known, the kingdom was over-run and laid waste 
 by the Northern pirates ; whereas, by his wise 
 measures, and particularly by his keeping a 
 well-provided fleet on each of our three coasts, 
 his pupil Edgar kept them in peace and order, 
 without a battle, during the whole of his reign ; 
 and in proof of his sovereignty, he obliged eight 
 of their kings, in quality of his boatmen, to row 
 him in state down the river Dee. The former qua- 
 lities, however, among those mentioned above, 
 were sure to draw down on this illustrious cha- 
 racter the obloquy and calumnies of modern 
 infidel and Protestant historians. John Fox, 
 and Carte and Hume had broached them, but 
 Mr. Southey has enlarged them and set them off 
 with his fanciful decorations. I can only here 
 take notice of the weightier of these charges. 
 He is accused then of tearing away King Edwy 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." 13 
 
 from his wife by brutal force, on the day of this 
 Prince's coronation. The truth is, the woman 
 was not his wife, but his near relation,* and the 
 wife of one of his Thanes. The fact of her not 
 being his wife, but an infamous prostitute, is tes- 
 tified by all ancient authors: Malmsbury, Hun- 
 tingdon, Wallingford,Gervase, Brompton, Hid- 
 den, &c. ;f and the conduct of the royal youth, 
 not then fourteen years of age, was such as 
 could not be tolerated by Christians or civi- 
 lized men in any age or country. Leaving his 
 Thanes and Bishops who were assembled to 
 do him honour, he betook himself to the com- 
 pany of that abandoned woman, and her equally 
 guilty daughter, and was found by his kins- 
 man, the Bishop of Litchfield, Kinsey, and his 
 tutor Dunstan, then Abbot of Glastonbury, 
 whom the Thanes had deputed to expos- 
 tulate with him, in a situation that was an 
 outrage to public morality, as well as to the 
 kingly dignity. J None but the profligate 
 
 * W. Malmsbury. f Brompton. 
 
 % " Invenerunt coronam de capite ejus, et ipsum medium inter 
 duas, matrem Ethelgivam nomine, et filiam, alternatim eas lascive, 
 Coronam capiti imponentes potius invitum quam voluntarium re- 
 duxerunt. Chronica Wallingford apud Galo." p. 542. u Ipso die 
 quo (EdwinusJ in regem sacratus fuerat frequentissimo consessu 
 procerum, dum de rebus seriis et regno necessariis inter eos 
 ageretur e medio quasi ludibundus prorupit et in complexum 
 ganae devolutus, &c." Gul. Malm, de Gest. Reg. 1. ii. c.7. 
 
 c2 
 
14 STRICTURES ON 
 
 youth's enemies, who sought his ruin, which, in 
 fact, soon after followed, could connive at such 
 sceues. That the Primate Odo pronounced 
 between Edwy and Elgiva, whom he believed 
 to have been never married together, and that 
 he caused a sentence of divorce the former 
 to be dethroned, and the latter to be put to 
 death, are circumstances utterly destitute of his- 
 torical authority, and mere fictions of the Poet. 
 Auother of Mr. Southey's alleged corruptions 
 of the Church in the time of S. Dunstan, and for 
 which he brings him in as particularly guilty, 
 was the enforcing of clerical celibacy. He says 
 that f? nothing in ecclesiastical history is more 
 (C certain than that no such obligation was im- 
 " posed during the three first centuries, and 
 " that the Scripture affords not the slightest 
 " pretext for it." Let the great Origen, who 
 flourished at the end of the second century 
 and the beginning of the third, speak to these 
 points. He says : (i It belongs to him alone 
 " to offer up the never failing sacrifice, who 
 " has devoted himself to a never failing and 
 cc perpetual chastity. "* To the saaw) effect 
 Venerable Bede observes : ff In the old law, 
 " priests were required to be continent during 
 " the stated times of their ministry : but now an 
 
 * Horn. 23 in Num. 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." 15 
 
 " injunction is laid upon priests to observe 
 " chastity continually, and ever to abstain from 
 " the use of marriage, that they may always 
 < assist at the altar." # St. Jeroin testifies, that in 
 the three great Patriarchates namely Rome, 
 Alexandria, and Antioch, no persons were re- 
 ceived among the clergy but such as were sin- 
 gle, or who had separated themselves from their 
 wives.t The tragical event of the assembly at 
 Caine in Wiltshire, where Beornelm, and his 
 party, arguing for clerical marriages, the beams 
 of the room on which they rested gave way, and 
 they were killed or maimed by the fall ; while 
 the beam which supported St. Dunstan remain- 
 ing firm, he escaped unhurt : this is ascribed 
 by Mr. Southey and modern Protestants to a 
 malicious contrivance of the Primate, while their 
 predecessors, John Fox and the Lutheran Cen- 
 turiators, attributed it to his skill in majric. 
 
 Passing on to the Norman period, the Poet 
 aims many mortal stabs at his mother Church, 
 through the sides of her sainted Pontiff Gre- 
 gory VII., and our learned Primate, St. Anselm. 
 The former he calls " a restless spirit who has 
 
 * Expos, c. 1, Luc. 
 
 f Advers. Vigilant St. Epiphanius testifies to the same effect. 
 Hores. 59. See Concil. Eliber. can. 33. 2. Cone. Carthag, 
 can. 2. Concil. Nicen. can. '3.2. Cone. Arelat. can. 2. 
 
16 STRICTURES ON 
 
 "obtained an opprobrious renown in history ;" 
 while equitable judges, who are possessed of 
 the genuine spirit of Christianity, pronounce, 
 that he has acquired glory to himself for time 
 and eternity, by extirpating that system of 
 simony and that wide spreading incontinency, 
 which undermined the sanctity of the Church at 
 the time in which he lived. The book-maker 
 admits that it was a right thing to oppose 
 simony, though practised by Kings and Em- 
 perors, as it certainly was at that period, to a 
 scandalous degree ; # but he ridicules the claim 
 of he Church to be ' f the door of the sheep- 
 fold," that is, to claim an exclusive power of 
 granting spiritual investitures, or the divine 
 jurisdiction necessary for Bishops and Priests to 
 administer the sacraments and the word of God 
 to their respective flocks. This arises from the 
 Poet's ignorance of the matter, and from the 
 utter want of such jurisdiction, in the Church 
 to which he professes to belong. The Catholic 
 Church, however, has at all times, been equally 
 jealous of her jurisdiction and her doctrine, and 
 therefore when she found that temporal Princes 
 fancied, that by conferring the temporalities of a 
 
 * " Dei ecclesias expiiavit (Rex) et Episcopatus, Abbatiasque 
 sive pretio vendidit, sive sua possessione retinuit atque elocavit." 
 Sax. Chron. A. D. 1100. 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." 17 
 
 Bishopric, for example, they really gave jurisdic- 
 tion and made the Bishop, and insisted on con- 
 ferring the same by the ecclesiastical emblems 
 of jurisdiction and faith, the crosier and the ring, 
 the Church necessarily condemned the usage. 
 In this decision the temporal Princes at length 
 acquiesced, contenting themselves with their 
 Prelates swearing fealty to them and doing 
 homage for their temporal possessions. St. An- 
 selm's cause was precisely the same as the Pope's 
 in this respect, and is quite distinct from the 
 latter's claim of pronouncing when Princes, by 
 their misconduct had forfeited their right to the 
 obedience of their subjects : a claim which has 
 at all times and in all countries been denied and 
 withstood, and this, without the reproof of the 
 Pontiff himself, by the most orthodox and con- 
 scientious Catholics. 
 
 But it is on the celebrated champion of the 
 Church, St. Thomas Becket, that the Poet 
 more copiously discharges his bile. To this 
 end, contracted as he says his scale is, he 
 devotes a hundred pages of his first volume. 
 Nevertheless, by distinguishing the three differ- 
 ent stages of the Primate's contention with his 
 King, it is possible to give a succinct yet clear 
 account of the whole matter. In the first of these 
 stages then, the question was about the exemption 
 
18 STRICTURES ON 
 
 of the clergy from the jurisdiction of civil tribu- 
 nals. The origin of this was not such as is des- 
 cribed by Mr.Southey,but arose from the special 
 grants of Constantine, Valentinian and other 
 Christian Emperors, who thought itbetter that the 
 legal offences of clergymen, when they occurred, 
 should be judged and punished privately by 
 their Bishops, than that an order of men should 
 be degraded whose reputation was so essentially 
 connected with that of morality and Religion. 
 This part of the public law, with the other 
 parts of it, and with literature itself, was in- 
 troduced among our unlettered ancestors, by 
 their Christian Apostles, and, at the time we 
 are speaking of, was the undoubted law of the 
 land. This being so, was it not the Primate's 
 duty to maintain the exemption rather than sell 
 it for his own personal advantage, as some of 
 his cotemporary Prelates did ; especially when 
 he knew to what lengths of injustice and 
 cruelty the King's unbounded anger was ca- 
 pable of driving him ? And shall those moderns 
 who applaud Primate Langton for asserting 
 this, among the other privileges of the clergy, 
 in the first article of Magna Ckarta, sword in 
 hand, condemn St. Thomas Becket for claim- 
 ing it in a peaceable and legal manner ? The 
 second of these stages regarded the Constitu- 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." 19 
 
 tions of Clarendon which, under the false name 
 of ancient usages, were recent inventions con- 
 certed by the flatterers of Henry, not only for the 
 destruction of those and the other privileges of 
 the clergy, but also for the subjugation and 
 oppression of the Catholic Religion itself, then 
 the sworn Religion of England. In proof of 
 this, it is sufficient to refer to the seventh of 
 these new invented articles, which goes to take 
 the most important department of spiritual 
 jurisdiction out of the hands of the Bishops, 
 and to place it in the hands of the King and 
 his civil ministers.* A Thomas Cranmer, in- 
 deed, would, in these circumstances, have 
 surrendered the divine jurisdiction of the 
 Church, but not a conscientious Catholic 
 Bishop. The third scene of the contest was one 
 of a pure, unmixed ecclesiastical nature : two 
 of the Primates suffragan Bishops, those of 
 London and Salisbury, had concurred in the 
 invasion of the rights of his Metropolitical 
 See by the coronation of the young King, in 
 his province and in his despight. It was his 
 unquestionable duty to maintain the rights of 
 the archbishopric and the discipline of the 
 
 * " Nullus qui de Rege tenet in capite, nee aliquis Dominicorum 
 ministrorum ejus excommunicatur, nee alicujus eorum terras, su 1 
 interdicto ponnatur nisi prius D. Rex, si in regno fuerit, conveniatur 
 vel justiciarius ejus, si fuerit extra regnum, &c." Mat. Paris, 
 A.D. llf> r. 
 
20 STRICTURES ON 
 
 English Church : accordingly, he excom- 
 municated those suffragans, till they should 
 acknowledge their fault. Instead of their doing 
 this, four armed ruffians rush forward, and with 
 uplifted swords, require the Primate, then 
 officiating in his Cathedral, to absolve the 
 censured Prelates : he meekly answers, " They 
 have given no satisfaction. " cc Then you shall 
 die," they fiercely exclaimed. " / am. ready to 
 Uie/* is his answer, "in the cause of God and 
 his Church/' at the same time bowing his head 
 to their murderous weapons. 
 
 What civil judge, that had been assassinated 
 in his court for refusing to let armed ruffians 
 take the law into their own hands, would not 
 have been immortalized by all good men ? By 
 the same rule the Church is never more clearly 
 justified in the language of her Liturgy, than 
 when she prays as follows: < Oh God! for 
 whose Church the glorious Pontiff] Thomas, 
 died by the sivords of the impious/* #c. 
 
 Preparing now to bring on the stage characters 
 widely different from those of the Saints and 
 Martyrs of past ages, the Poet exhibits the 
 most hideous caricature of the religion of the 
 latter, that his imagination can frame, under 
 the title of A View of the Papal System. In 
 this chapter, and in other parts of his book, 
 he works up every legendary tale and every 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." 21 
 
 vulgar superstition into an avowed doctrine or 
 a practice of the Catholic Church ! and yet he 
 has before his eyes the canons and decrees of 
 the numerous Councils that were held in the 
 ages he refers to, as likewise the voluminous 
 works of the great St. Bernard, the acknow- 
 ledged light of his age, the books of the 
 Master of Sentences, Peter Lombard, which were 
 commented upon by all the doctors, and the 
 Summa Theologice of St. Thomas of Aquin, 
 which was studied by all the divines of his own 
 and succeeding ages. From these sources, if 
 he meant to combat the Catholic Religion 
 honourably and conscientiously, and not from 
 his own imagination and such collections as he 
 is afraid to bring forward, he would have 
 drawn the articles he meant to impugn and 
 ridicule.* The learned reader will form some 
 idea of the Poet's collection and of his 
 learning from his affirming that " the Popes 
 
 * In proof that the Catholics had transferred their worship of 
 Christ to the martyr Becket, he mentions that the offerings at the 
 altar of the latter in Canterbury Cathedral at a certain time, 
 were found to be of great value, while nothing at all was given at 
 Christ's altar. With equal justice might a Catholic argue, that the 
 Protestants of London prefer poor Byrne to Christ, because 
 they have lately subscribed a large sum for this victim of the in- 
 famous Bishop Joscelyn's perjury, and not a shilling to Christ- 
 Church Hospital in their city. 
 
 d2 
 
22 STRICTURES ON 
 
 <s long* hesitated to sanction what he calls the 
 <c corruption of Transubstantiation, and that 
 " Hildebrand, S. Gregory VII, not only in- 
 " clined to the opinion of Berenger, by whom 
 ec it was opposed, but pretended to consult the 
 Virgin Mary, and then declared that she had 
 " pronounced against it !" The Poet pretends 
 to account for the reception of this doctrine, 
 and that of the sacrifice connected with it, by 
 the Church of Rome, but he never thinks of 
 explaining how the several Churches of Greece, 
 Russia, Armenia and Ethiopia, nor how the 
 Nestorians and Eutychians, who had been in 
 open opposition to the Roman Church for so 
 many centuries before the period in question, 
 came to adopt the same alleged corruptions. 
 The same argument holds good with respect to 
 invoking the prayers of the Saints, venerating 
 their remains, the confession of sins, praying 
 for the dead, and the other Catholic tenets and 
 practices; all which the Poet first misrepresents 
 and then ridicules.* If his object be to raise a 
 no-popery persecution, as his hero Wesley did in 
 1780, he goes the ready way to effect it : but, 
 if it be to withdraw the members of the Church 
 of eighteen centuries from her communion, 
 experience proves that he will utterly fail, as 
 they are conscious of believing in a Religion 
 
 * See a detailed refutation of them in the End of Controversy. 
 
THE BOOK OF TriE CHURCH." 23 
 
 the reverse of what he represents it to be. On 
 the other hand, many upright members of his 
 own communion, on discovering the utter 
 falsehood of his charges against her, as so many 
 others have already done, will not hesitate to 
 throw themselves into her bosom. Nothing so 
 easy as to calumniate. Accordingly the Poet, 
 by a fiction of his own, says, " the corrupt lives 
 <e of the clergy provoked inquiry into their doc- 
 e( trine, and caused the first Reformers, meaning 
 " the Wickliffitesand Hussites, to fraternize with 
 " the inhabitants of the Alpine and Pyrenean 
 " countries, who," he says, c: had preserved the 
 ce truth of better ages," meaning, the obscene 
 Manicheans, called Albigenses, and the se- 
 ditious fanatics, the Vaudois. But will even 
 Mr. Southey venture to compare, in point of 
 Christian morality and piety, a Peter Bruys with 
 his great opponent St. Bernard ? a Tanchelin 
 with St. Norbert ? or a Wickliflfe, with his 
 enemy William of Wykeham ? Will he com- 
 pare Thomas Cranmer with Sir Thomas More ? 
 or Ann Boleyn with Catharine of Arragon ? or 
 Queen Elizabeth with the Queen of Scots ? 
 Conscious that no miracles have ever illustrated 
 any other church than that to which its Divine 
 founder promised a continuation of them,* the 
 Poet on every occasion treats these supernatural 
 
 * Mark xvi. 17. John xiv. 12. 
 
24 STRICTURES ON 
 
 events, however strongly attested, as refuted 
 impostures. He is particularly indignant at 
 the stigmata of the devout contemplative St. 
 Francis, which, though witnessed by numerous 
 persons of the highest credit, he, on his own 
 personal credit, pronounces to be " atrocious 
 " effrontery and blasphemous impiety." Refer- 
 ring afterwards to a book called, The Confor- 
 mities of St. Francis with Christ, which he 
 knows was condemned by the Church, he also 
 quotes at considerable length, another absurd 
 legend, The Eternal Gospel, in order to render 
 the Church odious and ridiculous ; at the same 
 time that he himself acknowledges it to have 
 been condemned by her. 
 
 The Poet begins his account of the noted 
 John Wickliffe with saying, ec The Roman 
 si Church has stigmatized him as a heretic of 
 e< the first class ; but England and the Pro- 
 cc testant world, while there is any virtue, while 
 <c there is any praise, will regard him with 
 e< veneration and gratitude.'' He ends his 
 panegyric with pronouncing of him as follows : 
 et A great and admirable man he was ; his fame, 
 tc high as it is, is not above his deserts ; and 
 cc it suffers no abatement upon comparison 
 cc with the most illustrious of those who have 
 ei followed in the path which he opened." 
 In the meantime, though he pursues the history 
 
THE HOOK OF THE CHURCH." 25 
 
 of this innovator through a detail of fourteen 
 pages, he never acquaints his readers with the 
 particulars of his new doctrines, further than 
 that he denied Transubstantiation and the 
 Pope's Supremacy, which other heretics and 
 scholastics of his description had done some cen- 
 turies before him. Is it not plain then that the 
 Poet is ashamed of his hero, and afraid to exhibit 
 hirn in his natural shape? To say nothing then of 
 Wickliffe's speculative errors, he was condemn- 
 ed by a Synod of eight Bishops aud near forty 
 Doctors, held id London, of holding the fol- 
 lowing seditious no less than impious doctrines, 
 that " no Bishop or Priest, being in mortal sin, 
 " can ordain, consecrate, or baptize; that it is 
 " contrary to holy scripture for ecclesiastics to 
 hold temporal property ; that no one is a 
 ie temporal Lord, or a Bishop, while he is in 
 " mortal sin ; that temporal Lords can at 
 " their pleasure take away any temporal pos- 
 <( sessions from ecclesiastics who are habitual 
 *' sinners, and that the people can punish, at 
 ** their discretion, their masters who act 
 (t wrong ; that tythes are mere alms, which 
 if the parishioners may hold or give to others 
 " by reason of the sius of their curates."* 
 It is worth while inquiring whether the dig- 
 
 * Sec Labbe's Council, t. ix. p. ii. p. 2058 ; also Walsingham 
 Historia, edit. Gul Camden, and Harpsfield's His. Wicliffiana. 
 
26 STRICTURES ON 
 
 nitaries, whose favour the Poet courts, will 
 echo back his applause of this forerunner of the 
 Anabaptists, and Regicides. Regardless, how- 
 ever, of the consequences that might follow from 
 this levelling system, and unappalled by those 
 which did immediately follow it, when a frantic 
 rebellion, headed by Wat Tyler,* and guided by 
 the Wickliffite priest, John Ball,f beheaded the 
 King's Chancellor, Archbishop Sudbury, and 
 his Treasurer, Robert de Hales, and when even 
 they raised their swords over his, their Mouarch's 
 head, our Poet goes on to celebrate as mar- 
 tyrs all who suffered death in this cause, what- 
 ever their guilt might otherwise be ; We might 
 sympathize with him at the execution of the 
 fanatic Sawtry, who would worship a saint, be- 
 cause Christ took human flesh, but not an angel. 
 When, however, he canonizes the daring en- 
 thusiastic rebel, Sir John Oldcastle, merely 
 because he impugned some articles of the esta- 
 blished Religion, he betrays both the Church 
 
 * Mr. Southey has celebrated this fatal rebellion, and held it up 
 to the imitation of the radical levellers, particularly in the speeches 
 of the Wicklimte priest, John Ball, in his dramatic poem of Wat 
 Tyler, one of his best publications. 
 
 t Knighton expressly states that Ball was a disciple of Wicklifte. 
 Indeed his sermon on Blackheath proves him to have been one. 
 Jack Straw, who had murdered the Chancellor, confessed at his 
 death, that his party had resolved to put all noblemen and gentle- 
 men to death, and dispossess all clergymen of their property, leav- 
 ing the begging friars to supply their place. Walsing. 
 
"THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." 27 
 
 and the Government, which he professes to 
 support. Sir John was surprized and taken 
 with a large party of his Lollard adherents, at 
 the time and place he had, by proclamation, 
 appointed for the commencement of his rebel- 
 lion, by our glorious Henry V., and was con- 
 victed and condemned in open Parliament. He 
 was afterwards hanged with an iron collar 
 round his neck, and then burnt, after conjuring 
 Sir T. Erpingham, there present, to obtain a to- 
 leration for his sect, in case he should see him 
 rise to life on the third day after his execu- 
 tion.* The Poet proceeds with his list 
 of rebel martyrs, but says nothing of Old- 
 castle's fellow captain, Sir Roger Acton, who 
 was with him at the rendezvous in St. Giles's- 
 fields ; nor of William Murle, the maltman, who 
 came thither with two horses richly caparisoned 
 and a pair of gilt spurs, expecting to be knighted 
 on the field by the new king, Sir John Old- 
 castle ; nor of William Claydon, the currier, 
 who, though he was so ignorant as to be unable 
 to read, undertook to ordain his son a priest, 
 and to make him say mass, all of whom suf- 
 fered death on this occasion. 
 
 Having finished the first Volume of his Book 
 of the Church, with the execution of the Fana- 
 
 * Walsing. 
 E 
 
28 STRICTURES ON 
 
 tics and Rebels who suffered under the Plan- 
 tagenets. Mr. Southey, very early in his Second 
 Volume, resumes his favourite subject, with 
 an account of persons of the same description 
 who were put to death under the first Tudors. 
 It is evident that his motive for often repeating 
 this subject, and dwelling so much upon it, is 
 to excite the feelings of the Protestant public 
 against their Catholic fellow subjects, knowing 
 well that no other is so directly calculated for 
 this purpose. Candour, however, should have 
 led him to observe that the laws, under which the 
 Protestants suffered, were not made against 
 them, but against the Albigensian Manichees, 
 who were monsters of impiety and immorality, 
 rather than heretics ; that if those horrible laws 
 were employed against Protestants, it was from 
 a foresight of the civil commotions and blood- 
 shed which would arise from any attempts to 
 change the established religion ; finally, that 
 the Catholic Religion, so far from requiring 
 sanguinary punishments, forbids her clergy, at 
 least, under severe penalties, to take part in 
 them, on any pretext whatsoever. The Poet's 
 authority for the whole of his martyrologyisthat 
 of the lying Puritan John Fox, whom he re- 
 peatedly calls Good Fox, but whose notorious 
 falsehoods have been repeatedly exposed, and 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCfl:" 29 
 
 sometimes even in Courts of Justice,* and who 
 himself was the advocate of the most perfidious 
 murder committed in hatred of the Catholic 
 Religion, upon record. f 
 
 The first of Mr. Southey's martyrs under 
 Henry VIII. is Thomas Bilney, who, in more 
 than thirty points out of thirty-four, on which 
 he was examined, according- to Fox himself, gave 
 orthodox Catholic answers. Amongst the rest, 
 he declared that the assertions of Luther were 
 justly condemned, and that Luther and his ad- 
 herents were wicked and detestable heretics. 
 The errors which he actually held, he publicly 
 recanted ; but relapsing into them, and offering' 
 again to retract them, as Sir Thomas More 
 
 * Collier Ch. Hist ; Wood Athen, Oxon ; Parsons' Three Convers. 
 Fox relates the execution of some persons who were alive and 
 well when he wrote. Being detected and exposed respecting one 
 of these, Marbick, he in a later edition of his book, calls those who 
 detected him, " carpers, wranglers, exclaimers, depravers, whis- 
 perers, railers, quarrel-pickers, corner-creepers, fault-finders, spider- 
 catchers, &c." Among other revolting lies, he tells of the death 
 of one Grimshaw, by his bowels falling out of his body j which 
 pretended judgment of God, Grimshaw hearing read out of Fox's 
 book from the pulpit, he brought an action against the parson. 
 Wood's Athen. 
 
 f Speaking of the horrible murder of Archbishop Beaton, he 
 writes : " He was slain in his own castle of St. Andrews, by the just 
 revenge of God's mighty judgment, by the hands of Lech and other 
 gentlemen, who, by the Lord stirred up, brake in suddenly into his 
 castle upon him, and in his bed murdered him, crying out : * Alas ! 
 slay me not; 1 am a priest.' " Acts and Monum., p. 1272. 
 
 e2 
 
30 STRICTURES ON 
 
 testifies, his offer could not be accepted. The 
 Poet's second martyr, at this period, is James 
 Bay nam, who, though he professed Catholic 
 doctrine on the trying question of the Sacra- 
 ment, declaring that in it there is the very God 
 and Man in the form of bread, yet being found 
 heterodox on other points, and teaching, in 
 particular, the heresy of Sabellius, namely, 
 that Christ is all the three Divine persons in 
 one, he was adjudged to the stake. He was 
 evidently no Protestant martyr, for if Cranmer 
 had examined him instead of Stokesley, his 
 sentence would infallibly have been the same 
 that it was. 
 
 Baynam recanted, as the former had done, 
 but relapsing and being committed to the 
 flames, a miracle, exceeding that of the three 
 children in the Babylonian furnace, was wrought 
 upon him, according to Fox, whom Southey 
 follows : when his arms and legs were half con- 
 sumed, they tell us, he cried out from the 
 midst of the flames : " Ye Papists, see a mi- 
 " racle : I feel no more pain than if I were in 
 n a bed of down ! " William Tyndal, who 
 stands next in the Poet's martyrology, was a 
 dissolute vagrant Priest, who lived iu the 
 open violation of his vow of celibacy, as well 
 as of his other obligations. Undertaking to 
 translate the Holy Scriptures into English, he 
 
" THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." 31 
 
 notoriously corrupted them in numberless 
 passages,, as Sir Thomas More has demon- 
 strated.* In conclusion, he was apprehended 
 and executed by the Imperial Government of 
 the Low Countries, in which Tyndal had fixed 
 his residence, not for his English translation, nor 
 for any offence against the English Government, 
 with which the Emperor was then at variance, 
 but for offences against his adopted country. 
 
 It is matter of surprise that, in the choice 
 which our Poet makes among Fox's pretended 
 martyrs, to be celebrated in his book, he should 
 pitch upon Frith, Lambert, and the woman 
 Askew ; since it is notorious that his prime 
 martyr, Cranmer, was principally concerned in 
 bringing these, among other Protestants, to 
 the fiery stake. Fox unwillingly admits the 
 fact where, speaking of this unhappy man's sub- 
 sequent death by the flames, he says : <e He 
 " purged away by it his offence in standing 
 " against Lambert and Allen, or if there were 
 t( others, with whose burning and blood his 
 " hands were polluted. "t Mr. Southey's fa- 
 
 * See Sir Thomas More's Confutation of Tyndal, or the cita- 
 tions from it in the Vindication of the End of Controversy, p. 97, 
 &c. In the statute of the 34th and 35th of Henry VIII., the ver- 
 sion in question is termed : " The crafty, false, and untrue trans- 
 lation of the Old and New Testament of Tyndal." 
 
 t Fox, Acts and Monum. 
 
32 STRICTURES ON 
 
 vourite historian. Fuller, says, still more ex- 
 pressly : " It cannot be denied that he had a 
 "hand in the execution of Frith and other 
 u godly martyrs " adding " I will leave him 
 " to sink or swim by himself where he is 
 fi guilty."* With respect to Askew, Cranmer 
 was publicly reproached with causing her death, 
 by her companion and friend, Joan Knell, 
 when, subsequently, he was on the point of 
 pronouncing the same sentence on the latter 
 woman. " It is not long ago/' she said, tf since 
 ce you condemned Ann Askew for a piece of 
 n bread; and now you are ready to con- 
 " demn me for a piece of flesh. "f The Poet 
 devises a lame excuse for Cranmer, by pre- 
 tending that he had not made up his mind 
 against the Catholic Doctrine, when he per- 
 secuted the Protestants to death for opposing 
 it ; but his author, Fuller, expressly says that 
 he i{ argued against Lambert, contrary to his 
 " own private judgment." Indeed it is univer- 
 sally acknowledged, that he was a thorough- 
 paced Lutheran, or Zuinglian, when he tra- 
 velled through Germany, and married Osian- 
 der's sister for his second wife, in 1529. It 
 must be admitted, however, that Mr. Southey 
 has shewn prudence in leaving out of his Mar- 
 
 Eccl. Hist. f Dr. Heylin's Hist, of Reform. 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." S3 
 
 tyrology some of Fox's choice martyrs. 
 Among these are Robert King, Robert Deb- 
 nam, and Nicholas Marsh, " hanged," says Fox, 
 *' for taking down the Rood at Dovercourt 
 <<r being moved thereto/' he adds, ei by the 
 ' spirit of God.' 3 He accordingly honours them 
 with a large wood-plate, that represents them 
 hanging on three gibbets.* The fact is, they 
 were dissolute fellows, who, with a fourth 
 associate, robbed a church by night in Kent, 
 taking from it, as Fox acknowledges, a cru- 
 cifix, a coat, some shoes, and some wax candles. 
 Other writers say they stole offerings of great 
 value. Being detected, they were tried and 
 executed for felony, and their bodies hung in 
 chains. 
 
 The Poet takes care, however, to relieve his 
 tragical composition with episodes of a less 
 melancholy nature. He tells us of a fanatical 
 nun in Kent, who pretended to foretell King 
 Henry's death, as likewise that Bishop Fisher 
 and Sir Thomas More gave credit to the pre- 
 diction : to which story he is sensible that of 
 Elizabeth Croft, who uttered protestant pro- 
 phecies and threats from the interior of a wall 
 at Aldgate, and the conventicle prayer for 
 Queen Mary's death,f may be successfully 
 
 * Acts and Mon., p. 1081. f Stow's Chron. Dr. Heylin's Hist. 
 
34 STRICTURES ON 
 
 opposed. He next declaims against the nur- 
 series of our literature and morality, the mo- 
 nasteries, with all the virulence and effrontery 
 of a field-preacher ; charging their inhabitants 
 with the corruptions of Manichean errors and 
 practices, that is, with unnatural crimes. Other 
 Protestant writers, however, of a different cha- 
 racter from Fox and Southey, have vindicated 
 the religious from the villainous calumnies of 
 their interested enemies,* who made fortunes 
 for themselves, as well as for their rapacious 
 master and his courtiers, out of the spoils of the 
 monasteries. The perfidy, and indeed the per- 
 jury of one of these inquisitors, Dr. John 
 London, was so flagrant that it could not be 
 screened by his employer, the unprincipled 
 Cromwell. Accordingly he was left to the 
 course of the law, and confined for life, after a 
 disgraceful exhibition of his person on a horse 
 with his face to its tail, and with papers declar- 
 ing his guilt, tied about his head. 
 
 That there were popular superstitions in the 
 reign of the last Henry, as there are also in the 
 reign of King George IV. (if any one will take 
 the pains to collect them from vergers, and 
 clerks of cathedrals and other churches, and 
 
 * Dugdale, Warwickshire, Monasticon. Spelman, Collier, 
 Heylin, Fuller, &c. 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH.' 35 
 
 such like ignorant people) may be easily be- 
 lieved, but that the Prelates of the Church or the 
 Superiors of our schools of literature, as the Mo- 
 nasteries then certainly were, propagated them, 
 is a foul calumuy, unsupported by any plausible 
 argument. It is a still fouler calumny to 
 charge them with practising and promoting re- 
 ligious imposture of any kind ; but, as this ca- 
 lumny suits Mr. Southey's purpose of inflaming 
 ignorant readers against the Catholics, he 
 scruples not to publish it. Having gratified his 
 prejudices on these subjects, he returns to that 
 which, on the same account, is his favourite 
 one, the execution of Protestants : unluckily, 
 however, for him, the sufferers whom he here 
 treats of, are those whom his great saint, Cran- 
 mer, was principally concerned in burning. 
 The latter's conduct, in these tragical scenes, as 
 well as in all the rest of his public transactions, 
 was directed by the will of his unrelenting mas- 
 ter, Henry V1IL, a tyrant who, as his contem- 
 poraries used to say of him, " never spared wo- 
 " man in his lust, nor man in his wrath ; so 
 " that, if all the patterns of a merciless prince 
 cc had been lost in the world, they might have 
 " been found in him alone."* Yet even 
 
 * Dr. Heylin, in his History, p. 15, quoting Sir Walter Raleigh. 
 F 
 
36 STRICTURES ON 
 
 Henry VIII. has found an apologist and partially 
 a panegyrist in our present Poet-Laureatl* 
 
 The Poet begins his account of the child 
 Edward's reign with that of the Reformation, 
 so called : but both accounts, and especially the 
 latter, is notoriously defective and false. Injus- 
 tice tohis readers he should have informed them 
 that the religious changes in question did not 
 originate in England, but were imported from 
 Germany, where a turbulent Friar, by name Lu- 
 ther, having quarrelled with the Pope on the 
 subject of Indigencies, studied how he could 
 most annoy him by contradicting the Catholic 
 doctrine, in every particular ;f that he professed 
 to have learnt his first and most important 
 change from the father oflies,X Satan, and that 
 his, Luther's followers, in adopting his pretend- 
 ed Reformation, became, by his own confession, 
 worse, instead of better Christians ; finally, that 
 
 * Vol.ii.p. 104. 
 
 \ Writing in defence of the real corporal presence of Christ in 
 the sacrament, Luther says, that he had taken great pains to ex- 
 plain away those texts of Scripture which prove this doctrine, be- 
 cause, he says, " I saw how much I should thereby have incommoded 
 " Popery ; but," he adds, " there was no way of escaping ; the 
 " text of the Gospel was too strong against me." Epist. ad Ar- 
 gentin. Opera Luth. torn. vii. fol. 502. 
 
 X " I happened to wake before midnight, when Satan argued 
 " with me as follows, &c." On Private Mass, vol. vii. fol. 228. 
 See the substance of the conference in Letters to a Prebendary, 
 Letter V. 
 
 " Men are more revengeful, avaricious, and much worse than 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH/' SI 
 
 professing, as the Protestants did, and as they 
 still do, to be guided by the word of God, con- 
 tained in the Holy Scriptures, which word they 
 also maintain to be as clear as it is unerring, 
 they quickly split intohundreds of different sects, 
 that condemned and persecuted each other, no 
 less than the Catholics.* If the real truth is 
 to be told, the same account of the rise and 
 progress of Protestancy in this island is to be 
 given, as of the same events on the continent. 
 The important change was devised and carried 
 on by wicked men for the gratification of their 
 passions, not from any motive of religion or 
 reference to revealed truths ; but having been 
 
 " they were under Popery ." Luth. in Postil. Evang. 1. Advent. 
 Bucer, Calvin, Erasmus, &c. testify to the same effect. 
 
 * See Bossuet's celebrated work on the Variations of the Pro- 
 testants. Calvin wrote thus to Melancthon, Luther's head disciple : 
 " It is of the greatest importance that no account of the divisions 
 " that are amongst us (Protestants) should go down to future ages : 
 " for it is worse than ridiculous that, after breaking off from all 
 " the world, we should have agreed so little among ourselves, 
 " ever since the beginning of the Reformation." Calvin Epist. 
 Another leading Protestant writes : " Our people are carried away 
 " by every wind of doctrine. If you know what their belief is to- 
 " day, you cannot tell what it will be to-morrow. Is there one 
 " article of religion, in which the churches that are at war with the 
 " Pope, agree together ? If you run over all the articles, from the 
 " first to the last, you will not find one which is not held by some 
 " of them as an article of faith, and rejected by others as an im- 
 " piety." Dudith inter Epist. Bega. 
 
 f2 
 
38 STRICTURES ON 
 
 once established, and other persons of better 
 principles being engaged to support it, they 
 naturally turned over the inspired pages to 
 draw from them some plausible arguments in 
 favour of their respective systems. It may well 
 be supposed that King Henry's courtiers, who 
 had participated in all his crimes, were not 
 more virtuous or religious than he himself was- 
 This king therefore being dead and his son 
 and successor being only nine years old, the 
 chief of the courtiers, being sixteen in number, 
 and Lords of the Council, assembled to raise 
 themselves to higher honours than they had 
 hitherto possessed, and to property adequate 
 to such new dignities. The first point was 
 soon settled, each one choosing, for the most 
 part, such titles and offices as were most grati- 
 fying to his ambition, and the young King's 
 uncle, in particular, Sir Edward Seymour, con- 
 triving to be named Duke of Somerset and 
 Lord Protector : but as to encreasing the for- 
 tune of these hungry courtiers, in a degree 
 equal to their common avarice, there was an 
 almost insuperable difficulty. In the end, no 
 resource was found but in the remaining spoils 
 of the ancient religion, which they accordingly 
 proceeded to alter, in conformity with this inte- 
 rested purpose. The monasteries had been 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH.'' 39 
 
 universally destroyed and their property swal- 
 lowed up ; but there remained between two 
 and three thousand chantries,, in which prayers 
 were daily offered up for their deceased foun- 
 ders; the endowments of these, it was plain, 
 might contribute largely to the above-men- 
 tioned project ; and though Henry had, by his 
 last will, founded a chantry for himself at 
 Windsor, and though Cranmer, with eight 
 other bishops, had just before performed a 
 public Mass for the deceased King of Prance, 
 yet the council resolved and caused the people 
 to be taught that prayers for the dead are 
 vain and superstitious. Conformably with this 
 resolution the chantries, together with the 
 colleges, to the number of ninety, and a still 
 greater number of hospitals, were disposed of 
 for the benefit of Somerset and his rapacious 
 associates. Not content with the largest share 
 of this booty, nor with the numerous ecclesias- 
 tical livings which the Poet himself reproaches 
 the Protector with having usurped, he fleeced 
 most of the bishoprics of their best manors, in 
 doing which he found no prelates more sub- 
 servient to his sacrileges than Ridley and 
 Cranmer.* He had suppressed the rich bishopric 
 
 * Ridley surrendered four of the best manors of the see of London 
 in one day; Cranmer parted with more than half of the possessions 
 
 of 
 
40 STRICTURES ON 
 
 of Durham,, and he would shortly have sup* 
 pressed the rest of them, in conformity with the 
 system of his confidential adviser, Calvin, had 
 not his career, together with his life, been cut 
 short by his fellow-counsellor, Dudley, Earl of 
 Warwick. Another resource of these interested 
 reformers were the shrines, rich with jewels and 
 the precious metals, of the martyrs and other 
 saints, together with their images, and the 
 ordinary one of Christ on the cross, consisting 
 often of silver or gold, or at least ornamented 
 with those metals. To furnish a pretext for 
 seizing and melting them down, the Council 
 pretended in their proclamations, that every 
 degree of respect for relics and other memorials 
 of departed saints, and every prayer invoking 
 their prayers, is idolatry. In support of this, the 
 English Bibles were corrupted, by substituting 
 the word idol for image, wherever it occurs 
 in the sacred text. We have in Burnet part of 
 one of the royal infant's scholastic exercises, 
 addressed to his uncle, Somerset, and prefacing 
 
 of that of Canterbury. Collier's Records, 67. Somerset aimed 
 at getting Lambeth Palace and Westminster Abbey into his pos- 
 session, and actually set his men to pull down St. Margaret's beau- 
 tiful church, when they were driven away by the parishioners. 
 He afterwards demolished several churches and ecclesiastical 
 buildings in the Strand, to make room and furnish materials for 
 his palace of Somerset House. 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." 41 
 
 a collection of such corruptions and misappli- 
 cations of the Old Testament.* A third fund 
 of spoils were the decorations of altars, and 
 other furniture of the ancient church service, 
 consisting of gold and silver chalices, cibo- 
 riums, altars, tabernacles candlesticks, censors 
 and other articles, too numerous to be enume- 
 rated, with which every church and chapel 
 throughout the kingdom was furnished. The 
 use and magnificence of these were connected 
 with the doctrine of the corporal presence of 
 Christ in the sacrament, and of the sacrifice of 
 the mass. Somerset therefore, with his fellow- 
 counsellors, of course, rejected this doctrine, 
 and sent agents throughout the kingdom to 
 seize upon all church plate, leaving a single 
 chalice and a plain wooden table instead of an 
 altar for each church. Together with the plate 
 the priestly vestments of gold tissue were 
 carried off: these were either burnt to extract 
 the metal, or were seen as domestic furniture 
 in the houses of the plunderers. In the mean 
 time, the most efficacious means were taken 
 for repressing the ancient doctrine respecting 
 the sacrament, and instilling contrary tenets 
 into the minds of the people. 
 
 Mr. Southey, with other Protestant writers, 
 
 * Records, p. ii, n. 2. 
 
42 STRICTURES ON 
 
 seems to agree in the justice of the above de- 
 scription, as far as relates to the ambition, 
 avarice, and irreligion of Protector Somerset 
 and the council in general ; but, he speaks in 
 high terms of the religious views and conduct of 
 Archbishop Cranmer and his clerical associates. 
 But, alas ! Cranmer has left upon record his 
 solemn decision, that bishops are nothing more 
 than the king's officers for executing his eccle- 
 siastical business, as magistrates are for execut- 
 ing his temporal concerns.* Accordingly, he 
 set an example at the beginning of this in- 
 fant's reign, of taking out a new episcopal 
 commission from Edward to govern his diocese, 
 during his good pleasure, that is to say, during 
 the good pleasure of Somerset ;f and he issued 
 his pastoral mandates in the affairs of religion, 
 not by his own authority, or that of scripture, 
 but by the resolution of the Lord Protector and 
 the privy council.'^ That the clergy, from the 
 
 * Burn's Rec, b. iii. n. 21. Collier's Rec, n. 49. 
 
 f Burn, p. ii. p. 6. Collier. 
 
 J " This is to advertise your Lordship, that my Lord Protector, 
 with advice of other of the king's council, hath fully resolved that 
 no candles be borne on Candlemas Day, nor ashes or palms used 
 any longer : wherefore I beseech you to cause admonition thereof 
 to be given in all parish churches throughout your diocese." 
 Archbishop Cranmer's Letter to, the Bishop of London. Collier, 
 p. ii. p. 241. 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH.'' 49 
 
 highest to the lowest,, had no power or judg- 
 ment in the religious changes of Edward's 
 reign, is manifest from the prohibition of preach- 
 ing, while the royal commissioners, almost all 
 of them laymen, made their spiritual visitation 
 for judging of all doctrines and religious 
 practices throughout the kingdom then issued ; 
 and from the arbitrary punishment of those 
 bishops, such as Heath of Worcester, Day of 
 Chichester, and Gardiner of Winchester, who 
 ventured to oppose these decisions of the coun- 
 cil.* Somerset carried this so far as to send his 
 secretary, Cecil, to the last named Bishop, re- 
 quiring him to send him the notes of a sermon 
 which he was to preach at court, for his the 
 Protector's examination, and sentenced him to 
 prison for uttering tenets when he preached it, 
 which he, Somerset, disapproved of.f No doubt 
 the Duke acted in the name of his royal 
 nephew ; and accordingly, in the proclamation 
 respecting certain changes in the liturgy, he 
 introduced the child, then barely ten years of 
 age, declaring thus : <c We would not have our 
 subjects so much mistake our judgment, or so 
 
 * The Bishops of Winchester, Worcester, and Chichester were 
 imprisoned, and the Bishop of Durham turned out of the Council 
 for objecting to the proposed changes. 
 
 i Collier, p. 249, &c. Dodd. 
 
 (i 
 
44 STRICTURES ON 
 
 much mistrust our zeal, as though we could 
 not discern what ought to be done. God be 
 praised, we know what, by his icord, is meet to 
 be redressed, and have an earnest mind, with 
 all convenient speed, to set forth the same."* 
 
 Such were the causes, and such was the com- 
 mencement of those changes which took place 
 about the middle of the sixteenth century, in 
 the original Christianity of this country! The 
 effects of them on the morals of the inhabi- 
 tants soon became manifest. To begin with 
 the head Reformers, those in the Privy Coun- 
 cil : their intrigues and contests with each 
 other are recorded in characters of blood. 
 The Lord Protector Somerset got his brother. 
 Thomas Seymour, Lord High Admiral, con- 
 demned and beheaded on frivolous charges, 
 but in reality to gratify his Duchess, who was 
 jealous of the Queen Dowager, now married to 
 Lord Thomas. In return, Dudley, Earl of 
 Warwick, and afterwards Duke of Northum- 
 berland, uniting most of the other counsellors 
 against Somerset, caused him to be arraigned 
 and publicly executed with another of their col- 
 leagues, Sir Henry Arundel. Proceeding in 
 his towering ambition, he got the royal lady, 
 Jane Grey, to marry one of his sons, with a 
 view to their succeeding to the throne, in place 
 
 * Collier, p. 246. 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." 45 
 
 of King Henry's daughters, and then, as was 
 generally believed, took off young Edward by 
 poison ; in all these scenes of iniquity and 
 bloodshed, Archbishop Cranmer, siding as usual 
 with the stronger party, took his full share of 
 guilt. With respect to the morals of the people 
 at large ; the very advocates of Protestantism 
 draw the most frightful picture of them, when 
 this began to produce its effect upon them. 
 Even Burnet says that c< The sins of England 
 did, at that time, call down from heaven heavy 
 curses on the land."* The ecclesiastical col* 
 lector, Strype, speaking of that period, bewails 
 " The covetousness of the nobility and gentry, 
 the oppression of the poor, the want of redress 
 at law, the venality of the judges, the impunity 
 for murder, increase of adultery and whoredom, 
 and the depravity of the clergy, from the 
 bishops down to the curates. "f Camden adds: 
 " The sacrilegious avarice of the times seized 
 upon colleges, chantries, and hospitals, under 
 pretence of superstition : whilst ambition and 
 jealousy among the great, and insolence and 
 sedition among the people swelled to such a 
 pitch that England seemed to be raving mad. "J 
 The young King Edward being no more, our 
 
 , * Hist. Ref., p. ii. p. 226. f Manor. Ecdes., b. ii. c. 23. 
 X Camden. Appatat. ad Annal. Eliz. 
 
 G 2 
 
*fl STRICTURES ON 
 
 Poet says nothing of the nine days' wonder, as 
 it was called, of Lady Jane Grey's reign, except 
 to extenuate the treason of Cranmer, who was 
 deeply involved in that usurpation. He alleges 
 that, " believing, like the late young King, that 
 cc it was necessary for the preservation of the 
 (C Protestant faith, he still opposed the measure, 
 <e but yielded when the dying Edward told him 
 " he hoped he alone would not stand out and 
 ce be more repugnant to his will than all the 
 ce rest of his Council was."* What an excuse is 
 this alleged request of a child for the treason and 
 perjury of his aged Guardian and Archbishop ! 
 Was the latter ignorant of the rightful order of 
 succession ? Was he forgetful of his obliga- 
 tions to Henry and to the mother of Elizabeth ? 
 Or was he indifferent to the sacred duty of the 
 Oath which he had taken as executor of Henry's 
 will, to observe the injunctions of it? The fact, 
 however, is, that every other Protestant of dis- 
 tinction, no less than Cranmer, and the Pre- 
 lates Ridley, Latimer, Jewel, Sandys, Poynet, 
 Goodrich, Coverdale, &c. took partf with 
 
 * Vol.ii. p. 141. 
 
 \ Stow says, " Ridley vehemently persuaded the people in the 
 title of the Lady Jane, and inveighed earnestly against the title of 
 the Lady Mary. Poynet, Bishop of Winchester, appeared in arms 
 against the latter. Goodrich, Bishop of Ely, Sandys, Archbishop 
 of York, &c, were deeply embarked in the same cause." 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH. ' 47 
 
 Jane against Mary and Elizabeth, at the 
 critical moment in question, because Jane was 
 an avowed Protestant. Hence, if Elizabeth had 
 succeeded to the crown in the first instance, in- 
 stead of Mary, Cranmer would, in all proba- 
 bility, have suffered death, even more speedily 
 than he actually did, from the former's resent- 
 ment. The difference would have been that he 
 would have suffered the penalties of high-trea- 
 son instead of petty treason. Mary is, however, 
 at length, seated on her rightful throne ; and now 
 our Poet has another opportunity of indulging 
 his taste and exercising his fancy in describing 
 the sufferings of Fox's martyrs. But, though 
 he is diffusive and eloquent on this melancholy 
 subject, he overlooks the important observation 
 which Catholic writers have suggested to him ; 
 namely, that, notwithstanding the sufferers were 
 persecuted for their Religion, it was not pre- 
 cisely on this account, but from a persuasion, 
 whether well or ill founded, of the Queen's 
 Council, that the peace of the country never 
 could be restored, while the then still encreasing 
 sects of Protestants had a holding in it. In proof 
 of this, it has been observed, that no Protestants 
 were molested during almost the two first 
 years of Mary's reign, nor till the second Pro- 
 
48 STRICTURES ON 
 
 testant rebellion, that of Sir Thomas Wyat/ 
 broke out, which latter threatened her life, and 
 nearly overturned her Government; that neither 
 the Pope, in his instructions to the Queen, nor 
 his Legate, Cardinal Pole, in the Episcopal 
 Synod which he held, inculcated a word in 
 favour of persecution ;f and that in the Royal 
 Council, in which this measure was unhappily 
 resolved upon, the arguments of its chief advo- 
 cate, Gardiner, were of a political, not a reli- 
 gious cast. I 
 
 The Poet's selections from the ponderous 
 volumes of the lying" Fox, are, of course, those 
 
 * The pretext for this rebellion was the match with Philip ; but 
 Dr. Heylin owns, that the restoration of Protestancy was the prin- 
 cipal matter aimed at. Fox owns that Wyat's party ' conspired 
 for religion." 
 
 t See the Pope's Instructions in Dodd's Church History, vol. i. 
 and an account of Cardinal Pope's Synod in Burnet's History. 
 
 J Burnet, p. xi. p. 299. 
 
 The following specimen of Fox's falsehood is exhibited by the 
 Church Historian, Collier. Fox relates that the old Duke oi' 
 Norfolk being to dine with the Chancellor, Gardiner, on the day 
 of Latimer and Ridley's execution, he would not sit down to 
 table till he learnt by express that the tragedy had been per- 
 formed ; that, being struck with a mortal disease of a suppression 
 of urine, he was carried to bed, and died within a fortnight. To 
 refute this fabrication, Collier, who was a high-church Protestant, 
 shews, that the Chancellor took his seat in the House of Lords 
 twice after this pretended mortal disease, and died at last, not of that 
 
 disease, 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." 49 
 
 which, with the help of his own embellishments, 
 are the best calculated to inflame the public 
 mind against his Catholic countrymen. It may 
 well be supposed that he says nothing of many 
 of Pox's favourite martyrs, such as William 
 Flower, who stabbed a priest at the altar of 
 St. Margaret's Church, William Gardiner, who 
 attacked Cardinal Henry, King of Portugal, as 
 he was saying Mass in the Cathedral of Lisbon, 
 and seized upon the host and the chalice; 
 George Eccles, alias Trudge-over- the- world, 
 and the other Preacher, Rose, who publicly 
 prayed for the Queen's death; the three Guern- 
 sey women, who are proved to have been 
 thieves, and many others who were amenable to 
 the laws for their actions and doctrines, inde- 
 pendently of those connected with the new 
 religion. Neither does the writer set forth the 
 divisions in point of doctrine which existed 
 among the sufferers, and which were carried to 
 such a length, that one of his favourite martyrs, 
 Philpot, spit in the face of another associate, 
 calling him and those of his opinion, " flaming 
 " fyerbronnes of Hell, membres of the Divell, 
 
 disease, but of the gout. Finally, that the Duke of Norfolk had 
 been dead above ayear before this dinner-party could have taken place. 
 Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain, folio, vol. ii. p. 386. Not- 
 withstanding the disproof of this falsehood, Mr. Southey relates it 
 in detail, set off with his own poetical inventions, vol. ii. p. 209. 
 
50 STRICTURES ON 
 
 " &c."* Those unfortunate men, whom lie 
 picks out of the Protestant martyrology for the 
 imitation of other Christians, Rogers, Saunders, 
 Taylor, &c., were apostate Catholic Priests, 
 who, wanting grace and self-denial to keep 
 their vows of continence, exchanged their own 
 Religion for another, which allowed them to 
 take wives, and which gave them Church-liv- 
 ings into the bargain. The Poet has displayed 
 their attachment to the married state, and the 
 advantage, according to his notion, of mis- 
 sionary clergymen, in particular, having wives 
 to accompany them ; f but he has not attempted 
 to disprove the obligation Christians are under 
 of keeping their voluntary vows; nor has he 
 ventured to explain away the emphatical decla- 
 ration of the Apostle, which purports, that they 
 who violate this obligation, render themselves 
 liable to eternal reprobation J. 
 
 * Strype's Mem. Eccl. vol. ii. rec. 48. 
 
 f " In our days, when Protestant Missions have been under- 
 " taken upon a great scale, it has been found that the wives of the 
 ** Missionaries have contributed their full share to the success 
 " which has been obtained " Vol. ii. p. 214. On the other hand, 
 it appears that the Preachers who went out in the ship Duff, to 
 the South Sea Islands, found themselves obliged to take muskets 
 on shore with them, to protect their wives from the brutality of the 
 savages. 
 
 X The younger widows refuse ; for when they have begun to wax 
 wanton against Christ, they will marry ; having damnation, because 
 then they have cast off' their first faith. Tim. v. 11 1. 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." M 
 
 It may be worth while here to exhibit the 
 real portraits of John Pox's head-martyrs, 
 meaning those of the Prelatic order, which, 
 though less pleasing than his pictures of them, 
 especially after they have been retouched and 
 varnished by the Laureate's pencil, are far 
 nlore like the sketches which have been left us 
 by the ancient masters. To begin, then, with 
 John Hooper : he was an apostate Cistercian 
 Monk, who, having married a Dutch woman, 
 lived in the open breach of his other religious 
 vows, no less than that of chastity. He appears 
 to have been first a Lutheran ; but, flying abroad, 
 to escape the persecution of Henry's Six Articles, 
 he became intimate with Bullinger, the head 
 disciple of Zuinglius, whose Ultra- Calvinism 
 he brought with him into this country and esta- 
 blished here,* for its confusion and misery, 
 during the two ensuing centuries. Being a 
 vehement advocate for that sacrilege and rapine 
 in which the late King's Council, as has been 
 described, was so deeply involved, he became a 
 prime favourite, first, with the sacrilegious So- 
 
 * " A controversy, unhappily, moved by Bishop Hooper, was 
 " presently propagated among the rest of the clergy, touching caps 
 " and surplices." Dr. Ileylin, Hist. p. 92. The latter was the chap- 
 lain and biographer of Archbishop Laud. Cranmer maligned him for 
 worse than " Calvinistical principles." Wood's Athen. Oxon. 
 
52 STRICTURES ON 
 
 merset, and then with his successor and destroy- 
 er, Northumberland. The latter promoted him 
 first to the See of Gloucester, and next to that 
 of Worcester; and, though he filled all England 
 with his invectives against the alleged Popery 
 and anti-christianism of surplices and square 
 college-caps,* yet, when he found that he could 
 not get ordained without wearing them, he dis- 
 pensed with himself, on the occasion, yet, with- 
 out abandoning his system concerning them. In 
 like manner, though he had been a violent de- 
 claimer against clerical pluralities, he could re- 
 concile it to his conscience, for the sake of his 
 family, to hold at the same time, both the above- 
 mentioned Bishoprics. Among his Puritan dis- 
 ciples were several of Fox's martyrs, who himself 
 was a Puritan, and never would subscribe the 
 Articles. Mr. Southey's " protomartyr," Rogers, 
 and his "leader of noble martyrs/' Philpot, were 
 among these. Fox relates, that the former of 
 these, when in prison, foretold to the printer of 
 his Acts and Monuments, that he would live to 
 see the Gospel restored, at which time he was 
 directed to enjoin the ministers to observe a 
 certain Puritanical form of Church-government, 
 which, he said, had been concerted between 
 
 * Heylln, &c. 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." 58 
 
 him and Master Hooper: adding, that " if they 
 iC will not do so, their end will be worse than 
 " ours." He proceeds to the dispute about 
 Priests' caps and other attire, adding, that he, 
 Rogers, wore a round cap, " and never would 
 and never did wear the (square) cap." * 
 Hooper was charged, not only with heresy, but 
 also with encouraging those who prayed for the 
 Queen's death. t Latimer was named to the 
 Bishopric of Worcester by Henry VIII. ; but, 
 being a Lutheran in principle, he was four dif- 
 ferent times summoned to give an account of 
 his faith, by Wolsey, Wareham, or the King 
 himself, on all which occasions he dissembled 
 and <c subscribed such articles as they pro- 
 <e pounded to him." This is said by Pox, who 
 also publishes extracts from his sermons at Cam- 
 bridge and at Court, fitter for the mouth of a 
 buffoon than a Bishop. He chimed in, in all the 
 changes of Edward's reign; and, as he had 
 acted a part in the tragedy of Lambert's 
 burning, J for holding the self-same doctrine, 
 concerning the Sacrament, which he himself 
 held, so he now joined with Cranmer and 
 Ridley in signing the condemnation of Joan 
 Butcher, who was burnt for maintaining the 
 singular opinion of Valentinian concerning the 
 
 * Act. and Mon. p. 1492. f Dodd's Ch. Hist. vol. i. p. 377. 
 X Collier, Fox, &c. Burnet's Records. 
 
 H2 
 
|ft STRICTURES ON 
 
 formation of Christ's body. He had before all 
 this prostituted his preaching in seconding the 
 Protector's unnatural and groundless jealousy 
 of his brother, the Lord Admiral,* whom he 
 brought to the block, without allowing him to 
 make his defence. 
 
 As if conscious that he had concealed the 
 defects and crimes of his other pseudo-martyrs, 
 while he paints in glowing colours their suf- 
 ferings, in order to engage the feelings of his 
 readers, our Poet, when he comes to exhibit 
 the portrait of the first Protestant Bishop of 
 London, says of him : fl the excellent Prelate, 
 <c Nicholas Ridley's memory is without spot or 
 ce stain ;*' and yet, in the very next paragraph 
 to that in which he asserts this, he says: c< Rid- 
 " ley might have been proceeded against for 
 fC treason; for he had, by order of the Council, 
 <c preached in favour of the Lady Jane." The 
 fact is, he had exerted himself in the most vio- 
 lent manner, to get the usurper, Dudley's step- 
 daughter, placed on the throne, f because she 
 was a Protestant, as appears by the arguments 
 
 * Heylin and Stow, A. D. 1553, speak of Latimer's invective 
 against the sufferer a few days after his execution ; but Saunders, 
 who was present on the occasion, says that he paved the way for it 
 by a previous sermon, charging the Admiral with treason. 
 
 f Stow writes : " Dr. Ridley vehemently persuaded the people 
 in the title of the Lady Jane, and inveighed earnestly against the 
 title of the Lady Mary." 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." 55 
 
 he made use of on the occasion.* Hence we are 
 left to conclude, that treason itself, according 
 to Mr. Sou they 's creed, is no spot or stain in 
 the character of a Protestant martyr, provided 
 it be committed against a Catholic Sovereign ! 
 We know, with equal certainty, that, within 
 nine days after his promotion to the See of 
 London, he alienated four of its best manors to 
 the King, and among others, Stepney and 
 Hackney, " in order to gratify some of the 
 courtiers. " f Was this flagrant simony in 
 selling the best property of his Bishoprick, 
 for the gratification of avaricious courtiers, 
 however, it was sanctioned by the practice of 
 the other Protestant Bishops, at the beginning 
 of the Reformation, so called, no spot or stain 
 on the memory of a Protestant martyr? J Fi- 
 nally, is there no guilt or disgrace in one Pro- 
 testant martyr taking part in burning at the 
 stake other Protestant martyrs, as Bishop Rid- 
 ley, no less than his brethren, Cranmer, Latimer, 
 and Coverdale did, in the cases of the over- 
 righteous Van Parre and the ready-spoken Mrs. 
 Botcher ? What brilliant and moving stories of 
 this man and this woman's barbarous martyr- 
 
 * See these arguments in Collier's Eccl. Hist. vol. ii. p. 343. 
 t Strype's Mem. Eccl. vol. iii. p. 234. 
 X Burnet's Ref. part ii. rec. 35, &c. 
 
56 STRICTURES ON 
 
 doms would not Mr. Southey have worked up, 
 had it suited his purpose, to display the perse- 
 cutions exercised by the Church of England ! 
 
 But Fox's and the Poet's martyr by excel- 
 lence, is the celebrated Cranmer ; accordingly, 
 they bestow much more pains in setting off his 
 character, as a model of Christian virtue, than 
 upon any others whom they mention. Let a few 
 undenied, well-known, and incontrovertible 
 facts, speak to the merits of this boasted saint 
 and martyr. He became first known by being 
 expelled from his fellowship at Jesus College, 
 Cambridge, for marrying, contrary to the college 
 statutes and his own oath, though he concealed 
 his wife as long as he could at an obscure inn. 
 He became better known by suggesting the ex- 
 pedient which King Henry afterwards followed 
 for getting rid of his lawful wife, and marrying 
 her maid, Anne Boleyn. He, therefore, was em- 
 ployed to put it in execution, by procuring the 
 judgments of foreign divines, as to the natural 
 unlawfulness of marrying a brother's widow in 
 any case whatever; and he was rewarded for his 
 pains with the See of Canterbury. In Germany, 
 he became a confirmed Lutheran, * whatever 
 his religion was before ; as also a bigamist, by 
 marrying Osiander's sister. Thus, again, he 
 
 * Fox. 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." 57 
 
 violated the Church-law and that of the coun- 
 try. So strict was the latter, under the jealous 
 lecher, Henry, that Cranmer was reduced to 
 smuggle his German wife on shore in a chest.* 
 To obtain consecration, together with the pri- 
 vileges of his Metropolitical See, as Legate and 
 Penitentiary of the Pope, it was necessary he 
 should take an oath of fealty and obedience to 
 him : he, accordingly, took the oath publicly, 
 but, retiring apart, made a private protestation 
 against it, thus recording his prevarication and 
 perjury. Being seated in his chair of Primacy, he 
 steadily went through all the scandalous work 
 which his master's lawless passions imposed 
 upon him. He began with an hypocritical and 
 collusive letter to the King, dated March II, 
 1533, representing to him the scandal taken at 
 the undecided state of the divorce, and de- 
 manding of him, as Supreme Head of the Church, 
 the necessary power to pronounce upon it. 
 Accordingly, on the 20th of the following May, 
 he decided that Henry's marriage with Queen 
 Catharine was invalid, and that therefore he 
 was free to marry another woman ; in the mean- 
 
 * For the truth of this story, Parsons appealed to Cran- 
 mer's daughter-in-law, then living; and it is rendered probable by 
 Henry's interrogating the Archbishop, whether his chamber would 
 stand the test of the six articles ? and by his answer, that he had sent 
 back his wife to her friends in Germany, Collier, vol. ii. p. 200. 
 
58 STRICTURES ON 
 
 time he himself had stood witness to the mo- 
 narch's nuptials with Ann Boleyn six months 
 previously, namely, on Nov. 14, J 532.* In 
 less than three years afterwards, the King be- 
 coming tired or jealous of Ann Boleyn, and 
 enamoured of Lady Jane Seymour, Cranmer 
 first gave sentence of invalidity against her 
 marriage with Henry, on account of an alleged 
 precontract with a different person, and then 
 divorced her from him, on the charge of adul- 
 tery! f Ann of Cleves was Henry's fourth wife, 
 who, being reported to have been under a 
 previous contract to the Duke of Lorrain's son, 
 Cranmer took official cognizance of the case, 
 and pronounced that no such contract existed. 
 But the Kin* becoming within a few months dis- 
 gusted with his German bride, the ever-accom- 
 modating Primate took it upon his conscience 
 to set his master once more at liberty from his 
 nuptial bonds, by pronouncing that the above- 
 mentioned pre-contract of his wife was in actual 
 existence! Henry being dead, Cranmer proved 
 just as obsequious to the Duke of Somerset as 
 he had been to the former. He took out a fresh 
 commission for holding his See during the good 
 
 * HeyhVs Hist. 
 
 f Burnet says, " The two sentences, one for adultery, the other 
 " of divorce, for a pre-contract, did so contradict one another, that 
 " one, if not both, must be false." 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." 59 
 
 pleasure of the child, Edward, that is, of Somer- 
 set himself, and he surrendered to his use, or 
 rather, to that of Somerset, the better half of 
 the possessions of his See. * He even gratified 
 the Protector with signing the warrant for the 
 execution of his brother, the Admiral, though 
 the Prelate's character would have excused 
 him from the deed of blood, had he been 
 desirous of it. 
 
 When the Protector was supplanted by 
 Dudley, he readily transferred his homage to 
 the latter ; and, forgetful of his duty as executor 
 of Henry's will, and of his personal obligations 
 to him and to Ann Boleyn, he concurred in 
 violating his trust and in altering the legal order 
 of succession to the crown, by transferring the 
 right of the Princesses, Mary and Elizabeth, to 
 Dudley's step-daughter, Jane Grey ; for which 
 act of high treason he was arraigned, and justly 
 sentenced to death. 
 
 Mr. Southey admits that Cranmer condemned 
 the heretical woman, Jane Bocher, and prevailed 
 on the young King, then only fourteen years 
 old, and who shed a ilood of tears on the 
 occasion, to sign the warrant for burning her ; 
 adding, " this is the only passage in Cranmer's 
 " life, for which no palliation can be offered ;"f 
 
 * Henry Wharton apud Collier. f Vol. ii p. 137. 
 
60 STRICTURES ON 
 
 but was he not equally active in bringing the 
 poor Dutch hiereftlCi Van Parr, to the stake?* 
 Did not he take part in burning John Lambert, 
 Ann Askew, William Allen, John Frith,Tyndal's 
 assistant in translating the Bible, and other 
 Protestants, during Henry's reign, for denying 
 the corporal presence of Christ in the sacrament, 
 to say nothing of a whole crowd of Anabap- 
 tists, condemned by him, in that and in 
 Edward's reign ? The Poet excuses Cranmer 
 for the former executions, by asserting, but 
 without the least authority, that this Reformer 
 then believed in the corporal presence ; f 
 but his favourite author, Fuller, charges him, 
 Cranmer, with arguing against Lambert, at his 
 trial, " contrary to his own private judgment;" 
 and adds, that, as Lambert was burnt for deny- 
 " ing the corporal presence, so Cranmer himself 
 " was afterwards condemned and died at Oxford 
 " for maintaining the same opinion." When it 
 came to his own turn to suffer that cruel death, to 
 which he had condemned so many others, and se- 
 veral of them on the same charge, he was very far 
 from imitating their constancy. In a word, he 
 signed six different retractations of Protestantism, 
 
 * Burnet's Records, p. ii. n. 35. 
 
 t P. 80. Fox says he became a Protestant in 1529, before his. 
 promotion. 
 
 % Book v. sect. 6. 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." 61 
 
 each one more express than that which preceded 
 it, within the same number of weeks, and thus 
 continued, till the very hour of his execution, 
 either a sincere Catholic or an unprincipled 
 hypocrite.* Finding*, however, that, in spite of 
 these he must suffer, he in a fit of desperate fury 
 retracted them all, and threatened that his 
 hand, which had signed them, should be burnt 
 before the rest of his body, which deed of des- 
 peration, in the spirit of Judas Iscariot, he is 
 said to have effected ! Is there in ecclesiastical 
 history so unprincipled a Prelate as this boasted 
 Apostle and Martyr of John Fox and Mr. 
 Southey ? After all, it is a circumstance to be 
 for ever lamented, that Gardiner's opinion in 
 the Queen's Council, as to the efficacy of perse- 
 cution in producing uniformity of Religion, 
 prevailed ; and there is reason to believe, 
 that those numerous bands (though far less 
 numerous than Southey and Fox pretend) of 
 tailors, weavers, labourers, and spinsters, who 
 offered themselves to execution for their diver- 
 sified opinions, would, for the most part, have 
 acquiesced in the national faith, had they not 
 been provoked to deny it by the flames that 
 were lighted up for its preservation. 
 
 * See Strype's Mem. Eccl. vol. iii. p. 234, from the Lambeth 
 Records. 
 
 i 9 
 
62 STRICTURES ON 
 
 The four years of Mary's persecution of Pro- 
 testants were succeeded by above two centuries 
 of a Protestant persecution of Catholics, more 
 than half of which is recorded in characters of 
 blood; but this it suits Mr, Southey's purpose 
 to suppress for the most part ; and, when he does 
 mention it, to misrepresent it in the grossest 
 manner. Entering on his story of Elizabeth, 
 he describes the Catholic Bishops as having 
 been " gaping to see the day when they might 
 <s wash their white rochets in her innocent 
 " blood ;" and, yet, when the day did arrive, in 
 which they might, at least, have hindered her 
 from reigning, the people being Catholic, and 
 every place in Church and State being filled with 
 Catholics, not a finger, nor a tongue, nor a pen, 
 did they move to exclude her from her inheri- 
 tance. It had not been so, as has been said, at 
 the accession of her Catholic sister; for then, not 
 only Cranmer and Ridley, and Latimer, but 
 all other Protestant clergymen and laymen of 
 note broke into open rebellion against their 
 Sovereign, merely because she was a Catholic* 
 The writer extols the new Queen for her mild- 
 ness and toleration towards the Catholics ; and 
 yet he confesses that she deprived all the 
 Catholic Bishops of their Sees, except the des- 
 picable conformist, Kitchen of LandafF; but 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." 63 
 
 lie should have added, that she equally dispos- 
 sessed the greater part of the other Church dig- 
 nitaries, Heads of Colleges, and other respectable 
 clergy, because they would not acknowledge, 
 upon oath, her pretended spiritual supremacy. 
 This sacrilegious claim, which could be sup- 
 ported on no principle but such as would have 
 made Tiberius and Nero Heads of the Christian 
 Church, in their respective reigns, equally 
 scandalized thinking Protestants and sincere 
 Catholics. * Nor was it a mere title that 
 Elizabeth affected ; on the contrary, she as- 
 serted, both in her speeches from the throne | 
 
 * The learned Protestant, Centuriator, Chemnitius, accused 
 Elizabeth, as follows: " Fcemineo fastu, Papissam et Caput 
 Ecclesiae se fecit." 
 
 f The following is an extract from the Queen's speech in 
 Parliament, March 29, 1586 : One matter toucheth me so near, 
 " as I may not overskip. The Church, whose overlooker God hath 
 " made me, whose negligence cannot be excused if any schisms or 
 " errors heretical were suffered. Some faults and negligences may 
 " grow and be, all which, if you, my Lords of the Clergy, do not 
 " amend, I mind to depose you. I am supposed to have many 
 " studies, but most philosophical ; I must yield this to be true, 
 " that I suppose few that be not professors have read more; yet, 
 " among my many volumes, I hope God's book hath not been my 
 " seldomest lectures. I see many over bold with God Almighty, 
 " making too many subtile scannings of his blessed will. The 
 " presumption is so great, as I may not suffer it, yet mind I not 
 " to animate Romanists nor tolerate newfangledness, and I mean to 
 " guide them both by God's true rule, &c." Stow's Annals. 
 
0*4 STRICTURES ON 
 
 and in her public acts, an unlimited right to 
 pronounce in doctrinal matters, and to dictate 
 in those of discipline, not only without the 
 Bishops, but also in direct opposition to them. 
 The reader may, indeed, smile at this vain 
 female's claim to infallibility and unbounded 
 spiritual power, if he be a Christian ; but he 
 must blush and feel indignant at the grovelling 
 submission to it which those Prelates whom 
 Mr. Southey so highly commends paid on every 
 occasion.* 
 
 In order to justify the bloody persecution 
 which the remorseless Elizabeth and her un- 
 principled ministry commenced on the unoffend- 
 ing Catholics, our Poet descants on the perse- 
 cutions, real or pretended, of different Catholic 
 Princes abroad, and on the alledged plots of 
 English Catholics at home. On both these 
 subjects I wish the reader to consult the unan- 
 swerable LETTERS TO A PREBENDARY, 
 and THE END OP RELIGIOUS CON- 
 TROVERSY, by Dr. Milner. This author 
 proves, in his detailed account of different 
 
 * See the style of Archbishop Parker's homage to Elizabeth, 
 Collier's Rec.21, and the submission of his successor, Grindal, with 
 his brethren, to her, in the controversy concerning the exercise of 
 prophecying, as it was called, which he and they had pronounced to 
 be " set down in the Holy Scriptures," but which she condemned 
 " as leading to schism."- Collier, p. ii. p. 596. 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." 65 
 
 Kingdoms and States from Prance and Geneva 
 to Scotland and Holland,* that the professors of 
 the ancient faith never practised such prompt 
 and severe cruelty to preserve it,f as the new 
 
 * Bayle and Rousseau, who were brought up Protestants, ac- 
 knowledge that Protestancy was intolerant from its birth. Ber- 
 gier defies its professors to name a province or town in which they 
 did not exercise persecution during the sixteenth century, when 
 they had the power to do so. De Hoof reproaches his country- 
 men thus : " Crudelitatis odio in crudelitatem ruitis et antequam 
 " liberi estis dominari vultis." Ger. de Brandt. Dr. Robertson ex- 
 presses his abhorrence of the declaration of the Presbyterian Clergy 
 to King James, namely, that it would be sinful in him to spare the 
 lives of the Catholic Earls of Huntly, Errol, &c. Mr. Southey 
 speaks with horror of the numerous executions of rebels by the 
 Duke of Alva in the Low Countries, but the learned Feller maintains 
 that the Prince of Orange's Lieutenant Vandermerck killed more 
 unoffending Catholics in those provinces during the year 1572 than 
 Alva caused to be executed during the whole period of his govern- 
 ment. This writer refers to judicial documents, still extant, shew- 
 ing that the Protestants in North Holland exercised such horrible 
 and refined cruelty on the Catholics in their power, as were never 
 heard of before. They destroyed them by preventing them, with 
 tortures, from ever sleeping ; they fed them with salt herrings 
 without allowing them a drop of water, till they died of thirst; they 
 scorched them to death with the flames of spirituous liquors, in 
 which their clothes had been steeped ; they buried them alive in 
 chests filled with rats. Let. to Preb., chap. Persecution. 
 
 f In disproof of Mr. Southey's pretensions to mildness and tole- 
 ration, in favour of Elizabeth and her government, it is sufficient to 
 refer to their persecution of different Protestants for not agreeing 
 with them in faith. In 1575 twenty-seven heretics were at one 
 time, eleven at a second time, and five at a third, condemned for 
 their errors by Sandys, then Bishop of London. Of these twenty 
 
66 STRICTURES ON 
 
 religionists did to eradicate it., and to force their 
 own opinions on the Christian world. In 
 attempting this, as he shews, they filled every 
 individual Kingdom, State, and City, in which 
 they gained a footing, with tumults, rebellion, 
 and bloody persecution. He also proves, that 
 the several plots charged upon the English 
 Catholics were either fabrications of their 
 enemies, or conspiracies of those enemies 
 against the Catholics, with the exception of 
 Babington's attempt to free Mary of Scotland 
 from her unjust confinement; an attempt, under 
 all its circumstances, that was severely cen- 
 sured by the Catholics, and especially by their 
 clergy both at home and in their seminaries 
 abroad.* The Poet descants repeatedly on 
 the Bull of Excommunication published by 
 the Pope, but never once notified to, much less 
 
 were whipped, others bore their faggots, and two, Peterson and 
 Turwort, were burnt in Smithfield. In 1583 John Lewes, " for 
 denying the Godhead of Christ," says Stow, was burnt at Norwich, 
 where Francis Kett, M.A., suffered death for the same error six 
 years later. In 1591 Hacket was hanged for heresy in Cheapside. 
 The following Brownists or Independents suffered death in the 
 same reign for their opinions, Thacker, Copping, Greenwood, Bar- 
 row, and Perry. See Stow, Brant, Limborch, Neal, &c. 
 
 * The seminary of Douay published a Letter to the Catholics of 
 England on the occasion, strongly recommending to them submis- 
 sion and fidelity to Government. The same is the whole tenor of 
 Cardinal Allen's answer to Cecil's Execution of English Justice. 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." 67 
 
 accepted of by the English Catholics. It was 
 worded in the usual style, to satisfy the Princes 
 and States of Christendom; who were scan- 
 dalized and alarmed at the conspiracies and 
 rebellions which Elizabeth was continually 
 exciting in their dominions, at the piracies 
 she publicly exercised, and particularly at the 
 Regicide she had, with equal perfidy and cruelty, 
 committed on the Queen of Scots, Still they 
 are pure calumnies of the Poet that the Catholic 
 Martyrs who were slaughtered in Elizabeth's 
 reign, were Bull Papists, as he terms them, and 
 that they were so much as charged with having 
 abetted the Bull. On the contrary, they con- 
 tinned to profess their fidelity to the Queen, at 
 their death and under the gallows,* as well as 
 on their missions, and in their seminaries, and 
 to perform every duty of allegiance to her, as 
 was particularly and heroically demonstrated, 
 when the Spanish Armada appeared off the 
 coast. 
 
 But, though the Poet takes so much pains 
 to vindicate this Protestant persecution, he 
 never gives any information as to its nature or 
 the number or quality of those who suffered in 
 
 * The learned and pious F. Campion gave a signal proof of this 
 in his dialogue with Lord C. Howard under the gallows. See Mem. 
 of Miss. Priests, vol. i. p. 55. 
 
 K 
 
81 STRICTURES ON 
 
 it. It is Sufficient, however, to open the Statute 
 Book, in order to learn that the very first Act 
 of Elizabeth's reign, (confirmed in c. 1. of her 
 5th,) the most severe punishment the law is 
 acquainted with, that of hanging, cutting up 
 and bowelling alive, was enacted against all 
 those who should maintain the spiritual Supre- 
 macy of the Pope, or deny that of the Queen, 
 which horrible sentence was indicted on fifteen 
 Catholics, on that sole charge, during the hitter's 
 reign. Indeed, all those Catholics who then 
 suffered in consequence of the other persecut- 
 ing statutes, might have redeemed their lives 
 by taking the oath of Supremacy. To be brief : 
 besides the above-mentioned sufferers, 126 
 Priests, several of whom had been graduates 
 of Oxford, underwent the horrible butchery, 
 merely for being Priests and exercising their 
 spiritual functions,* and about sixty other 
 Catholics for being reconciled to the Catholic 
 
 Among these sufferers only eleven were so much as accused of 
 any treason, and the falsehood of their pretended plot, that "of 
 Rheims, was so glaring that even Camden, one of Elizabeth's offi- 
 cial writers, acknowledges them to have been political victims, 
 sacrificed to appease the popular fury excited by the proposal of 
 the Queen's marriage with the Duke of Anjou. He adds of the 
 Queen : " Plerosque et his misellis sacerdotibus exitii in patriam 
 " conflandi conscios fuisse non crcdidit."> Annales Eliz. A. D. 
 1582. 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." 69 
 
 Religion, hearing Mass, or harbouring or aid- 
 ing, &c. some or other of their clergymen. 
 The names of several of the sufferers, together 
 with their respective indictments, may be found 
 in Stow's Annals, Wood's Atheuae, and other 
 Protestant Works, no less than in Dodd's 
 Church History and Dr. Challoner's accurate 
 and edifying History of Missionary Priests. 
 Besides these victims of public execution, all 
 of whom acknowledged the Queen's temporal 
 authority, we have the names of one hundred 
 and five other priests, who were exiled from their 
 homes and country, merely for being Priests, 
 and of ninety other Catholic Priests or laymen, 
 who perished in prison, during this persecut- 
 ing reign. In the meantime the most horrible 
 tortures were exercised on the Catholic prisoners, 
 at the pleasure of Sir Owen Hop ton. Lieutenant 
 of the Tower, and other jailors,* and the fine 
 
 * Among these torments are reckoned by Rishton and Saunders, 
 the Dungeon, resembling the prophet Jeremy's pit ; the hole called 
 Little Ease, so contrived that the prisoner could neither stand nor 
 lie down in it ; the Scavenger's Daughter , being an iron hoop, in 
 which the prisoner's head and feet were made to meet the iron 
 manacles, by which the prisoner was hung up in the air, for four, 
 six, or eight hours at a time ; the common Stretching Rack, by 
 means of which the body was drawn out to the length of two feet 
 beyond its natural size. To these must be added the torture of 
 the needles, thrust under the finger nails, which several of them 
 endured. 
 
 K 2 
 
70 STRICTURES ON 
 
 of twenty pounds each month for not attending 
 the Protestant service, was rigorously exacted 
 from those Catholics who were able to pay it. 
 With what a collection of fiction and falsehood 
 has not the Poet veiled the second, no less thati 
 the first formation of his Church! 
 
 Among those who were put to death at 
 different times for aiding- Priests, were three 
 ladies, Margaret Middleton, by marriage Cli- 
 thero, Ann Line, and Margaret Ward. The 
 first mentioned of these was of an honourable 
 family in Yorkshire, where her house was the 
 general resort of the Priests in her neighbour- 
 hood. Being arraigned for this hospitality, and 
 knowing that she could not answer the questions 
 that would be put to her on her trial, without 
 exposing the lives of those faithful Ministers* 
 she persisted in standing dumb at the bar, iu 
 consequence of which she was condemned to 
 be pressed to death. This sentence was carried 
 into execution on York bridge, her hands and 
 feet being fastened to four stakes, and a large 
 board, loaded with heavy weights, being placed 
 on her body, and left there till she expired. 
 But neither the length of; her torments nor the 
 tears of her friends, husband and children could 
 shake her resolution. What she said at the time 
 was, " It is as well to go to Heaven this way 
 
"THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." 71 
 
 as any other." The most illustrious,, however, 
 of the female Catholic victims, undoubtedly, 
 was the Queen of Scots. After being treacher- 
 ously invited by Elizabeth into England, and 
 perfidiously confined there during eighteen 
 years, she was in a mock trial condemned, and 
 then beheaded, for pretended crimes against 
 Elizabeth, which were as much out of her power 
 as they were remote from her disposition to 
 commit. But the commissioners who super- 
 intended the bloody work, more than once, 
 betrayed the real motive of it. ef Your life/' 
 said the Earl of Kent to her, " would be death 
 " to our religion, and your death will be life 
 " to it !" * Her earnest request to be allowed 
 the consolations of her religion, was denied her 
 at her death,f as these ever had been during her 
 long imprisonment : so false are the assertions 
 of the Poet concerning Elizabeth's toleration 
 and regard for conscience! Speaking elsewhere 
 of the rival Queens, he says of them : (C They 
 " were both women of saintly piety!" That 
 such is the character of Mary, but that the 
 reverse is that of Elizabeth, the world is now 
 satisfied, since Goodall, Stuart, and Whi taker, 
 have exposed the forgeries of the Apostate 
 Friar, Buchanan. The contrast between the 
 
 * Camden Annal. f Ibid, 
 
72 STRICTURES ON 
 
 rivals was particularly striking at their respec- 
 tive deaths. That of the former was truly 
 worthy of a martyr that of the latter charac- 
 teristic of a reprobate.* 
 
 No sooner had the church of England received 
 a being' from young Edward's uncle, the Pro- 
 tector Somerset, than she was found pregnant 
 with an Esau and a Jacob, two hostile people 
 who struggled together even in the womb. 
 The one was bent on destroying every vestige 
 of the ancient religion the other aimed at 
 retaining as much of this as suited its ideas 
 and purposes. To the former belonged Rogers, 
 Hooper, Coverdale, Knox, with all the Scotch 
 Reformers, and Somerset himself. These were 
 afterwards joined by Leicester, Cecil, Walsing- 
 ham, John Fox, Cartwright, &c. The latter 
 consisted of Cranmer, Ridley, with most of the 
 Clergy, and Elizabeth herself. These were 
 certainly more rational and moral the others 
 more ardent and consistent with their prin- 
 ciples ; for, whereas, both parties professed to 
 be guided by Scripture alone, when the more 
 moderate Protestants were called upon by their 
 adversaries to produce chapter and verse for the 
 use of surplices, tippets, square caps, Deans 
 and Chapters, the sign of the cross in baptism, 
 
 * See the narrations of Collier, Camden, Whitaker, and Parsons, 
 cited in Letters to a Prebendary, p. 246, sixth edition. 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." 13 
 
 festival days, and a hundred other observances;* 
 they were unable to do so, and, therefore, were 
 stigmatized as Papists by their adversaries ; and 
 separate conventicles were, of course, set up 
 against them. The pretenders to Pure Re- 
 ligion were, indeed, kept down by the strong 
 hand of Elizabeth ; but, when James, who had 
 been educated by their Scotch brethren, as- 
 cended the throne, they loudly called for the 
 redress of the alledged superstitions and idolatry, 
 in an address to him, signed by almost a thou- 
 sand officiating Ministers of the establishment. 
 Accordingly, he appointed a conference to be 
 held between the parties at Lambeth, in which 
 he put forth his newly acquired spiritual supre- 
 macy, in a much higher tone than it had ever 
 been claimed by Innocent III. or any other 
 Pope in or out of a Synod. He decided every 
 point in debate, whether for or against the 
 Puritans, by his own authority, threatening 
 to " hurry out of the land*' those who opposed 
 it, f all which acts of unbounded Supremacy 
 were lauded by the Bishops there present, who 
 
 * The Presbyterian Admonition to Parliament declares that " The 
 " kingdom of Archbishops, Bishops, &c. cannot stand with Christ's 
 " kingdom ; and that the offices of Bishops, Deans, &c. are forbidden 
 " by the word of God." <Madox. Examin. of Neale's Hist, of 
 Puritans, vol. i. p. 111. 
 
 + See Collier's and Fuller's relation of the Conference. 
 
7| STRICTURES ON 
 
 never delivered their opinions but upon their 
 knees; while their Primate himself, Whit gift, 
 pronounced that the King spoke by the special 
 inspiration of God's spirit ! 
 
 The contending parties were agreed upon the 
 speculative points of Predestination and Repro- 
 bation,, * though the Poet insinuates the con- 
 trary ; but, upon the abovementioned practical 
 points of discipline they became more hostile to 
 each other than ever; and it was easy to foresee 
 that the party which maintained the funda- 
 mental principle of the Reformation, to what- 
 ever lengths and subdivisions these might con- 
 duct,, would prevail. Accordingly, the Church 
 of England, from the period in question,, became 
 formally divided into the Church, henceforward 
 so called, and the Puritans, as they were deno- 
 minated. It suits Mr. Southey's views to take 
 part with the former; hence the remaining part 
 of his book is more taken up with opposing the 
 
 * That the Archbishop and Bishops were rigid Calvinists, there 
 is infallible evidence, says Fuller, in the Lambeth Articles approved 
 of by them. Barret, fellow of a college in Cambridge, having in a 
 Sermon censured Calvin and his doctrine, was constrained to retract 
 what he had advanced in the most explicit terms. See Fuller's 
 Hist, of Univ. of Camb. p. 150. See also the proposal of the Prelates 
 to imprison for life, in solitary confinement, " all incorrigible 
 FREE-WILL men." Strype Annal of Ref. vol. i. p. 214. These 
 Free-will men, Mr. Southey calls Pelagians, and thereby intimates 
 that he himself does not admit of Free-will. 
 
"THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." 75 
 
 Puritans than calumniating the Catholics, which 
 will shorten the task of the present writer. The 
 Poet says little of the Powder-plot, conscious that 
 it was a bungling imitation of the Protestant-plot, 
 by which James's father, King Henry Darnley, 
 a Catholic, with his family, had been blown up 
 and killed at Kirk-a-field by the Protestants. He 
 also knew, that all the measures of the few des- 
 perate wretches concerned in it, were, in fact, 
 under the direction of Cecil, Lord Salisbury, a 
 man practised in the invention of plots, and in 
 drawing those, whom he wished to destroy, into 
 them.* The little he does say on this subject, 
 contains, however, two revolting falsehoods, 
 namely, that the ec scruples of the conspirators 
 " were quieted by their confessor;'' whereas, it 
 has been proved, that directly the contrary was 
 the case, and that " Garnet received the honour 
 cc of beatification from the Pope." To dis- 
 prove this egregious falsehood, it is sufficient 
 to inspect the catalogue of the deceased Ca- 
 tholics who have been so honoured. Jn like 
 manner, all is false that the Poet writes con- 
 cerning the moderation of James and his Church, 
 and of his aversion to " making martyrs." 
 So far from this being true, he is proved to 
 have sacrificed a hecatomb of poor old women, 
 
 * See this proved in Letters to a Prebendary, Letter VII. ' 
 L 
 
76 STRICTURES ON 
 
 under pretence of their being witches. In like 
 manner, he sent his Bishops and Divines to the 
 Calvinistic Synod of Dort, (saying it was his 
 duty, as Defender of the Faith, to drive the 
 Arminian doctrine to hell), where they concurred 
 with the other Calvinist deputies in deciding that 
 the grace of God in the Predestinate is not lost 
 by the greatest crimes that man is capable of 
 perpetrating. Again, hecommitted to the flames, 
 not only Whitman and Legat, Protestant Arians, 
 but he also sent to the butchery eighteen Catho- 
 lic Priests and seven laymen* merely on account 
 of their religion. In several of these executions, 
 the Bishops, particularly King, of London, and 
 Neale, of Litchfield, were chiefly conspicuous. 
 In the mean time the Primate, Abbott, wrote to 
 James against tolerating what he called " the 
 tc damnable heretical doctrine of the whore of 
 u Babylon, as hateful to God," f &c. ; while 
 Archbishop Usher, with twelve other Irish 
 Bishops, protested, from the Pulpit, against 
 tolerating Catholics, J and both Houses of Par- 
 liament addressed the King to execute the laws 
 with increased severity against them, which work 
 they added te would greatly advance the glory of 
 " Almighty God and your Majesty's honour." 
 
 * See their names and history. Mem. Miss. Pr. and in Dodd. 
 
 f Rushworth'sCollect. vol. i. p. 4. 
 
 % Currie's Hist. Review, vol. . . 109. Rushworth, vol i. 
 
"THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." 77 
 
 The schism which had divided the Church of 
 England during the reign of James into two 
 hostile parties, the Episcopalians and the Puri- 
 tans,, growing wider and wider, produced, under 
 his son, Charles, its natural effect in a bloody 
 and destructive civil war. The Poet of course 
 sides with the party which, though vanquished 
 at first, in the end proved victorious: and as 
 the pretext for beginning it was the same which 
 had produced insurrection and rebellion in 
 every Christian country into which Protestancy 
 had gained an entry, the alleged dread of un- 
 scripturaland superstitious Popery, it is natural 
 for Catholics to take the same side, and to 
 join with him in reprobating the folly, hypo- 
 crisy and multifarious wickedness of the Pres- 
 byterians, Independents, Erastians and other 
 sectaries, comprehended under the general 
 name of Puritans. Still it must be confessed, 
 that they barely acted up to the grand prin- 
 ciple of the Reformation ; that is to say, as 
 they could not find out in their Bible, surplices, 
 tippets, square caps, deans, chapters, chancels, 
 bowing to the sacred name, and to the commu- 
 nion table, with a thousand other practices and 
 things which they objected to, they felt war- 
 ranted in condemning them as unscriptural 
 superstitions, and as sinful. On the other hand, 
 
 l2 
 
78 STRICTURES 0N T 
 
 as they understood themselves to be called 
 upon in the inspired text, to bind their kings in 
 chains, and their nobles in iron links * so, upon 
 the same principle, they conceived it to be 
 their duty to lay hands upon Laud, and Straf- 
 ford, and upon the King himself, for not a crime 
 was then committed, as Clarendon remarks, 
 without ; scripture, as explained by individuals, 
 to justify it. With respect to the first of the 
 above-mentioned victims, the Primate Laud, 
 whose praises the Poet sings through the greater 
 part of a hundred pages of his book, it is unde- 
 niable that he introduced many novelties into 
 the establishment, which had till then passed 
 for superstitions, such as auricular confession, 
 assuming the title of His Holiness, and some 
 that were considered as idolatrous, such as 
 bowing to the communion table, surmounting 
 it with a crucifix, &c. On the other hand, the 
 Poet himself confesses that Laud maintained 
 such slavish principles, respecting the despotic 
 power of the Sovereign, that, if his enemies, 
 Pym, Hampden, and Cromwell, had been suf- 
 fered to transport themselves, as they wished 
 to do, civil liberty would have been annihilated. 
 The other tc most illustrious martyr of the 
 '\ Church of England," as Mr. Southey calls 
 
 * Psalm cxlix. 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." 79 
 
 him, King* Charles I.", was far from being so 
 firm in its support as this title would imply. 
 He certainly passed an Act to deprive the 
 Bishops of their chief ornament and protection, 
 their votes in Parliament ; and he offered,, in 
 the Treaty of the Isle of Wight, to pass another 
 for substituting Presbyterianism to Episcopacy, 
 during the ensuing three years. Nor is this 
 surprising, when we find the most learned and 
 able of his Bishops assuring him that Presbyters 
 can, not only ordain Priests, but also consecrate 
 Bishops.* In fact, we know that Luther pre- 
 tended to make Amsdorf Bishop of Naumburg, 
 as the Poet's hero, John Wesley, did Dr. Coke, 
 Bishop of North America. As to his loyal 
 Catholics, who had exhausted their fortunes, 
 and spilt their blood in his defence,t he con- 
 sented, by the terms of that treaty, to give 
 them up to the bigotry of his and their unre- 
 lenting enemies. The Poet says, " that Charles 
 
 * Usher. See Neal's History. 
 
 f When the war broke out, the Catholic Nobility and Gentry 
 flew to arms universally, in defence of their Sovereign. Lord 
 Castlemain has collected the names of two Noblemen, twelve 
 Knights, fifteen Colonels, and one hundred and fifty-nine other 
 Catholic Officers and Gentlemen, who lost their lives in the cause 
 of loyalty. The same author gives an account of property seques- 
 trated by the rebels ; by which it apj>ears that more than half of it 
 belonged to Catholics. See Cath. Apology, &c. 
 
80 STRICTURES ON 
 
 " made known his resolution, that no Catholic; 
 " under his reign, should suffer death ou the 
 iS score of religion ;" and yet eleven Priests 
 were hanged and bowelled* in his reign, before 
 his power was taken from him, as thirteen 
 others were during the usurpation. f He asserts 
 that " the sanguinary laws had never been 
 if executed except in cases of treasonable prac- 
 " tices ;" and yet it appears, that above two 
 hundred Catholics had been put to death under 
 Elizabeth and James I., unaccused of treason or 
 any other offence, except the practice of their 
 religion. He gives it as a proof of the intole- 
 rance of the Parliament, that " the Catholics 
 " were, during its reign, compelled to perform 
 " their service at midnight, in fear and danger ;" 
 whereas it is notorious that such had been their 
 condition, in this respect, for near a century 
 before, that is ever since the beginning of 
 Elizabeth's reign. 
 
 The greater part of the Poet's book is made 
 up of those fanciful and inconsistent theories 
 
 * One of these, Lady Arundel's chaplain, Hugh Green, con- 
 demned, barely for being a priest, was a full half hour under the 
 executioner's hands, who was raking in his bowels all the time to 
 find his heart, while he himself was devoutly calling on Jesus. 
 See Miss. Pr., vol. ii. p. 215. 
 
 f See their names and history in Dodd, Miss. Pr., &c. 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." 81 
 
 which characterize the Quarterly Review, and 
 which therefore are undeserving of notice. What 
 he says positively of the Catholics of this period, 
 is, that, after the regicide, " they evi need a willing- 
 (( ness to commence another such persecution 
 " (as that under Queen Mary ) , that they slighted 
 (t the King in his exile, and treated with Crom- 
 ce well for taking an oath of submission to his 
 u government, as the price of that indulgence, 
 " which he in his true spirit of toleration was 
 (< willing to have granted." The facts are, that 
 the Catholics, broken and diminished as they 
 were in number and in fortune by the former 
 war, adhered to the son with the same disin- 
 terested loyalty as they had to the royal father; 
 they fought for him while he had a regiment 
 in his service, and they guarded him after his 
 defeat at Worcester, with a fidelity not to be 
 moved by the bribes or the threats held out by 
 the enemy. The names of fifty-two Catholics, 
 three of them priests, are upon record, who 
 were acquainted with the important secret of 
 Charles's quality, while he was wandering about 
 Boscobel, Moseley, and White Ladies ; and the 
 priest's hiding holes are still shewn at the two 
 first named places, where he was concealed, 
 when he ventured down from the Royal Oak. 
 As to " the true spirit of toleration " which 
 
2 STRICTURES ON 
 
 this Poet attributes to the Usurper, his con* 
 tinued robbery of the Catholic laity,, and his 
 butchery of the priests prove what this was in 
 England, whilst the war of extermination, 
 which he proclaimed and carried on in Ireland, 
 still more forcibly demonstrates what it was 
 there.* 
 
 At the beginning of the second Charles's 
 reign, the Puritans acquired the less offensive 
 denomination of Non- conformists, and various 
 plans were devised to re- unite them to the 
 Established Church. These, however, were 
 quashed by the Act of Uniformity, tc some 
 " clauses of which/' Mr. Southey writes, ec the 
 " wisest statesmen and truest friends of the Church 
 " disapproved. One oftheseexcluded all persons 
 " from the ministry, who had not received epis- 
 " copal ordination. All, therefore, who had re- 
 (C ceived Presbyterian orders, were to quit their 
 <f benefices, or submit to be re-ordained/' 
 Thus it is seen that this champion of theChurch 
 is a Presbyterian or Methodist at heart ; or, at 
 
 * He led his fanatic soldiers to believe that God required of 
 them to extirpate the Irish population, in the same manner as the 
 Israelites heretofore destroyed the tribes of Canaan. Accordingly, 
 they murdered infants as well as men (sometimes even before they 
 were born) exclaiming at the same time, "Nits will be lice." 
 General Coots' cry of battle was, " Jesus, and no merry." See 
 Dr. Curry's Civil Wars of Ireland: 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." 83 
 
 least, that he makes Episcopacy, with its 
 various ordinations and consecrations, conse- 
 quent on priestly orders, a matter of indif- 
 ference, contrary to the decision of the Bishops 
 at the aforesaid period, and on a later occa- 
 sion,* and to the Church rubricks and uniform 
 discipline. The writer, it seems, scouts the 
 revolting calumny, that the Catholics burnt 
 down London. What then must he think of 
 the Protestants, who twice over recorded this 
 infamous lie on their city monument, and who 
 leave it standing there at the present day ? In 
 like manner he acquits them of the plot to 
 murder the King, whose life they had saved in 
 their priest's hiding holes, at the imminent 
 danger of their own ! How dreadful then must 
 have been Protestant bigotry at that period, 
 which could, twice over, elicit resolutions in 
 Parliament as to the reality of this trumped- 
 up plot ! This, we know sent eighteen Catho- 
 lics, one of them a peer, to the butchery, 
 under pretence of its reality ! This excluded, 
 and does still exclude all Catholic peers from 
 
 * In 1662, the King having nominated four Presbyterian Minis- 
 ters to Bishoprics in Scotland, the consecrating Prelates in England 
 obliged them to renounce their former pretended orders, and to be 
 ordained Deacons and Priests. Collier, vol. ii. p. 887. Conform* 
 able to this was the doctrine even of Tillotson, Burnet, &c, on 
 a later occasion See Birch's Life of Tillotson, p. 41, &c. 
 
 M 
 
84 STRICTURES ON 
 
 their hereditary seats in Parliament, on the 
 same refuted and abandoned calumny 1 
 
 The unbounded bigotry, which had brought 
 the Royal Father to the block, drove his 
 second son from the throne ; the determining 
 causes of which catastrophe were the tolera- 
 tion of the King, and the intolerance of his 
 Bishops. They had sworn to his spiritual, as 
 well as his temporal supremacy ; they had 
 recently abjured the position, that it is lawful 
 to resist the King on any pretext whatever ; 
 but when he barely called upon them to join 
 him in a general disavowal of all religious 
 persecution whatsoever, whether of Dissenters, 
 or of Quakers, or of Catholics, they called in 
 the Prince of Orange to dethrone him, under 
 a pretence, which first and last he solemnly 
 disavowed, that he was bent on subverting 
 the Protestant religion.* How widely dif- 
 ferent was the conduct of the Catholic Bishops 
 at Queen Elizabeth's accession to the throne ! 
 
 Here the Poet drops his quill, and shuts up 
 his phantasmagoria of a Church establishment, 
 
 * The sincerity of James's Declaration for universal toleration 
 is proved by the pains he took, in his brother's reign, to get the 
 Act De Hceretico Comburendo repealed, and to protect and support 
 the French Huguenots, driven from their own country by the repeal 
 of the Edict of Nantz. 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH.'' 85 
 
 conducted, through the savage Britons, the 
 barbarous Saxons, the Pope's Catholic mission- 
 aries, and the apostate monks and priests of 
 Edward's and Elizabeth's reigns. He should 
 have continued his narrative till the alteration 
 of the established faith, in the important article 
 of non-resistance, was practically denied by 
 its former advocate, the Arian Primate, Tillot- 
 son ; till " the damnable heresy of Socinianism," 
 as this Church had defined it,* was publicly 
 preached up by the famous Bishop Hoadley, 
 and effectually protected by Government ;f 
 till the same doctrine was taught in the Divinity 
 lectures of the University ;J and till a learned 
 Bishop and Professor had proclaimed, without 
 contradiction, that the Protestant Religion 
 consists in cc speaking what you think, and 
 thinking what you please." If the writer 
 might advise the Poetical Historian, for the 
 purpose of effectually vindicating and securing 
 the Church he courts, it would be in these or 
 in similar words : In vain, Mr. Southey, do 
 
 * In the canons of the Synod of 1 640. 
 
 t The Convocation having threatened to censure Hoadley, it 
 was dissolved by Government, in virtue of the Supremacy, and 
 has never been allowed to assemble since. 
 
 X See the Divinity Lectures of Professor Hey, delivered at 
 Cambridge. 
 
 Bishop Watson in his Apology, p. 3. 
 
 m a 
 
86 STRICTURES ON 
 
 you rake together every kind of calumny and 
 misrepresentation for aspersing the One Holy 
 Catholic Church, which you profess to believe 
 in when you repeat the creed. The charges 
 confute themselves ! and, when exposed, fail 
 not to draw over converts of the best descrip- 
 tion to her communion. It is equally vain 
 in you to join with Primate Sancroft in dis- 
 suading dying Protestants from reconciling 
 themselves to the Catholic Church, as Charlesll, 
 and innumerable other Protestants have done, 
 in that trying situation : while not an instance 
 can be produced of any Catholic who ever wished 
 to die in any other communion than his own. 
 The fact is, if a Christian has any conscience, 
 it will speak out at that last extremity. Instead 
 then, of such vain attempts, exert your best 
 means to induce the majority of your Clergy to 
 believe in, and openly to profess their own 
 articles, and especially the great fundamental 
 articles of the Unity and Trinity of the God- 
 bead, and the Incarnation and Death of the 
 Second Person of it. Without this, they 
 are not Christians, and would have been burnt 
 at the stake by Cranmer and Ridley, had 
 they lived in their days. In the next place, 
 Sir, I must observe to you, that it ill becomes 
 a professing- champion of the Established 
 
THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." 8? 
 
 Church to celebrate and extol sectaries and 
 schismatics, who have broken off from her com- 
 munion ; who maintain doctrines and usages 
 at variance with hers, and who ordain (without 
 an atom of authority of any kind) Priests and 
 Bishops to perpetuate their schism. Now this 
 you are conscious of having recently done in 
 your two volumes of The Life of John Wesley, 
 in which also, you afford too strong proofs of 
 your chiming with that fanatic on his funda- 
 mental principle of justification. You have 
 constant evidence before your eyes of the con- 
 quests which the Methodists, who are the Puri- 
 tans of the present times, are making of your 
 people by thousands and myriads in every part 
 of the British dominions, to the evident danger 
 of leaving your Cathedrals and Parish Churches 
 empty: yet you aid them in their attempt, as 
 far as lies in your power, Lastly, I hesitate 
 not to warn you, Sir, of what your most clear- 
 sighted politicians and divines are now fully 
 sensible, namely, of the fatal consequences to 
 be expected, both to Religion and the State,, 
 from forcing the Sacred Writings into the 
 hands of the young and the ignorant, without 
 qomment or oral instruction. For is there a 
 man so blindly bigotted as to believe that 
 
88 STRICTURES ON 
 
 any such person will collect tlie Thirty -nine 
 Articles, or any other system of Religion what- 
 ever, from the mere perusal of the Bible? or 
 that he will learn a sacred regard for truth 
 from the mere scriptural account of Abraham 
 and Jacob, or of mercy from the wars of 
 Joshua, or of chastity from the history of 
 David and Solomon ? I mean without a com- 
 ment, or an interpreter. Is there not danger 
 that he may draw from this unaided lecture, as 
 so many others have done, an approval of the 
 opposite vices, and particularly those of pre- 
 sumption, impiety, lust, rebellion, and regicide? 
 In fact, Lord Clarendon, Maddox and other 
 writers, as I have mentioned, observe to us, 
 that there was not a folly or a crime, which 
 took place during the Grand Rebellion, which 
 the perpetrators of it did not pretend to justify 
 by texts of Scripture; nor do the advocates 
 of religious instruction by the mere Bible, take 
 up so absurd a system, at the present day, but 
 from opposition to the Catholic Church, which 
 always has taught, and always must teach, that 
 there is a twofold revelation of God's word, 
 one written, the other unwritten; in other 
 words, Scripture and Tradition. From this 
 twofold Revelation, the Pastors of the Church 
 
" THE BOOK OF THE CHURCH." 89 
 
 fail not to select and deliver to the body of the 
 faithful such portions of God's word as are 
 necessary for their belief and practice, broken, 
 and prepared for their digestions, in her cate- 
 chisms and oral instructions. The word of 
 God, thus distributed to Catholics, is found to 
 be one and the same in different ages and coun- 
 tries ; whereas Protestants, while they read, 
 most inconsistently, the written without paying 
 attention to the unwritten word of God, or to 
 the authority of the Church in the interpreta- 
 tion of either, are found to be at endless 
 variance one with another, and to be tossed to 
 and fro, and carried about xoith every wind of 
 doctrine. Ephes. iv. 14. 
 
 NOTES, 
 

 NOTE S. 
 
 It may seem not only strange, but also treacherous, in a 
 professed defender of the Established. Episcopal Church, to find 
 fault with the laws which require her Clergy to subscribe to her 
 Articles of Faith, and to receive their Orders from her; to the 
 exclusion of the Conventicle and self-appointed Preachers of the 
 Commonwealth and of Cromwell's reign, as Mr. Southey does in 
 Vol. ii. p. 481 of his Book of the Church. This latitudinarian doc- 
 trine, however, accords with what he had before taught in his 
 Life of Wesley, Vol. ii. p. 2, where he writes : " Wesley displayed 
 " his consummate prudence in not requiring any confession of 
 " faith from any person, who desired to become a member of his 
 " Religion. Hence the door was left open to the orthodox of all 
 " descriptions, Churchmen, Dissenters, Baptists, Paedobaptists, 
 " Presbyterians, Independents, Calvinists, or Arminians No pro- 
 " fession, no sacrifice of any kind was exacted." Hence it is 
 evident that, according to Mr. Southey's theology, all the above- 
 mentioned heterogeneous and contradictory sects may not only 
 be of one Religion, but also be all of the true Religion, that is, may 
 be all orthodox ! This inconsistency, however, is not much greater 
 than in Mr. Southey's pronouncing the panegyric of John Wick- 
 liffe, and singing the praises of Wat. Tyler. 
 
NOTES. 91 
 
 Note to Vol. ii. p. 151, of " The Book of the Church." 
 
 Mr. Southey must greatly have changed his opinion concerning 
 the marriage of the clergy, in case he has any settled opinion of the 
 matter, since he published what follows. " London is never with- 
 " out a certain number of popular preachers. I am not now speak- 
 " ing of those who are popular among the Sectarians, or because 
 " they introduce sectarian doctrines into the Church; but of that 
 " specific character among the regular English clergy, which is 
 " here denominated a popular preacher The popular preacher 
 " of London curls his forelock, studies gestures at his looking- 
 " glass, takes lessons in his chamber from some stage-player, and 
 " displays his white hand and white handkerchief in the pulpit. 
 " The discourse is in character with the orator : nothing to rouse 
 " a slumbering conscience ; nothing to alarm the soul to a sense 
 " of its danger ; no difficulties expounded to confirm the 
 " wavering ; no mighty truths enforced, to rejoice the faithful : 
 " to look for theology here would be seeking pears from the elm : 
 " only a little smooth morality, such as Turk, Jew, or Infidel, 
 " may listen to without offence, sparkling with metaphors and 
 " similes, and rounded off with a text of scripture, a scrap of 
 " poetry, or, better than either, a quotation from Ossian. 
 " These gentlemen have two ends in view : the main one is to 
 " make a fortune by marriage, one of the evils this of a married 
 " clergy. It was formerly a doubt whether the red coat or the 
 " black one had the best chance with the ladies ; but, since 
 " volunteering has made scarlet so common, black carries the 
 " day. The customs of England do not exclude the clergyman 
 " from any species of amusement ; the popular preacher is to be 
 " seen at the theatre, and at the horse race, bearing his part at 
 " the concert and the ball, making his court to the old ladies at 
 " the card-table, and to the young at the harpsichord : and, in 
 " this way, if he does but steer clear of any flagitious crime or 
 " irregularity he generally succeeds in finding some widow, or 
 " waning spinster, with weightier charms than youth and beauty." 
 Southei/s Espriella's Letters, Vol. i. p.- 210. 
 
 N 
 
92 NOTES. 
 
 Final Note. 
 
 The spirit and tendency of the Poet Laureate's Dramatic Poem 
 of Wat Tyler may be judged of by the following extracts 
 from it. 
 
 SCENE. Blackheath. 
 
 Tyler, Hob, &c. 
 
 Song. 
 
 When Adam delv'd, and Eve span, 
 Who was then the gentleman ? 
 Wretched is the infant's lot, 
 Born within the straw-roof'd cot 1 
 Be he gen'rous, wise, and brave, 
 He must only be a slave. 
 Drain'd by taxes of his store, 
 Punish'd next for being poor. 
 
 While the peasant works, to sleep ; 
 What the peasant sows, to reap ; 
 Be he villain, be he fool, 
 Still to hold despotic rule; 
 Trampling on his slaves with scorn: 
 This is to be nobly born ! 
 When Adam delv'd, and Eve span, 
 Who was then the gentleman? 
 
 Hob. 
 Curse on these taxes, one succeeds another ; 
 Our ministers, panders of a king's will, 
 Drain all our wealth away, waste it in revels. 
 
 Jack Straw. 
 
 I only wonder we lay quiet so long. 
 
 We had always the same strength, and we deserved 
 
 The ills, we met with, for not using it. 
 
NOTES. 93 
 
 Hob. 
 
 Why do we fear those animals call'd Lords ? 
 Is not my arm as mighty as a Baron's ? 
 
 John Ball, the Wickliffite Priest. 
 
 Ye all are equal, Nature made you so ; 
 Equality is your birth-right. When I gaze 
 On the proud palace, and behold one man 
 In the blood-purpled robes of royalty, 
 Feasting at ease, and lording over millions : 
 Then turn me to the hut of poverty, 
 And see the wretched labourer, worn with toil, 
 Divide his scanty morsel with his infants ; 
 I sicken, and, indignant at the sight, 
 Blush for the patience of humanity ! 
 
 Wat Tyler. King of England! 
 Petitioning for pity is most weak, 
 The Sovereign People ought to demand justice. 
 
 John Ball- 
 Tell me, Sir Judge, 
 
 What does the Government avail the Peasant ? 
 Would not he plough his field and sow the corn, 
 Aye, and in peace, enjoy the harvest too ; 
 Would not the sunshine and the dews descend, 
 Though neither King nor Parliament existed ? 
 
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