James Aitken Wylie - The History of Protestantism (Complete 24 Books in One Volume)

Before entering on any recital of the fortunes of English Protestantism under the new primate, let us pursue to a close the story of Sir John Oldcastle the good Lord Cobham, as the people called him. When he escaped from the Tower, the king offered a reward of 1,000 marks to any one who should bring him to him, dead or alive. Such, however, was the general estimation in which he was held, that no one claimed or coveted the price of blood. During four years Cobham remained undisturbed in his concealment among the mountains of the Welsh Principality. At length Lord Powis, prompted by avarice, or hatred of Lollardism, discovering his hiding-place, betrayed him to his pursuers. The brave old man was not to be taken without resistance. In the scuffle his leg was broken, and, thus maimed, he was laid upon a home-litter, carried to London, and consigned to his former abode in the Tower. The Parliament happened to be at that time sitting in London, and its records tell us the sequel. "On Tuesday, the 14th day of December (1417), and the 29th day of said Parliament, Sir John Oldcastle, of Cowling, in the county of Kent, knight [Lord Cobham], being outlawed (as is before mentioned) in the King's Bench, and excommunicated before by the Archbishop of Canterbury for heresy, was brought before the Lords, and having heard his said convictions, answered not thereto in his excuse. Upon which record and process it was judged that he should be taken, as a traitor to the king and the realm; that he should be carried to the Tower of London, and from thence down through London, unto the new gallows in St. Giles without Temple Bar, and there be hanged, and burned hanging."

When the day came for the execution of this sentence, Lord Cobham was brought out, his hands pinioned behind his back, but his face lighted up with an air of cheerfulness. By this time Lollardism had been made treason by Parliament, and the usual marks of ignominy which accompany the death of the traitor were, in Lord Cobham's case, added to the punishment of which he was judged worthy as a heretic. He was placed on a hurdle, and drawn through the streets of London to St. Giles-in-the-Fields.

On arriving at the place of execution he was assisted to alight, and, falling on his knees, he offered a prayer for the forgiveness of his enemies. He then stood up, and turning to the multitude, he exhorted them earnestly to follow the laws of God as written in the Scriptures; and especially to beware of those teachers whose immoral lives showed that neither had they the spirit of Christ nor loved his doctrine. A new gallows had been erected, and now began the horrible tragedy. Iron chains were put round his waist, · he was raised aloft, suspended over the fire, and subjected to the double torture of hanging and burning. He maintained his constancy and joy amid his cruel sufferings; "consuming alive in the fire," says Bale, "and praising the name of the Lord so long as his life lasted." The priests and friars stood by the while, forbidding the people to pray for one who, as he was departing "not in the obedience of their Pope," was about to be plunged into fiercer flames than those in which they beheld him consuming.

The martyr, now near his end, lifting up his voice for the last time, commended his soul into the hands of God, and "so departed hence most Christianly." "Thus," adds the chronicler, "rested this valiant Christian knight, Sir John Oldcastle, under the Altar of God, which is Jesus Christ; among that godly company which, in the kingdom of patience, suffered great tribulation, with the death of their bodies, for his faithful word and testimony; abiding there with them the fulfilling of their whole number, and the full restoration of his elect.

"Chains, gallows, and fire," as Bale remarks, are no pleasant things, and death by their means is not precious in the eyes of men; and yet some of the noblest spirits that have ever lived have endured these thine — have worn the chain, mounted the gallows, stood at the stake; and in that ignominious guise, arrayed in the garb and enduring the doom of felons, have achieved victories, than which there are none grander or so fruitful in the records of the world. 'What better are we at this hour that Henry V. won Agincourt? To what purpose was that sea of blood — English and French — poured out on the plains of France? To set the trumpet of idle fame a-sounding? — to furnish matter for a ballad? — to blazon a page in history? That is about all when we reckon it up. But the blood of Cobham is yielding its fruits at this day. Had Sawtre, Badby, and Cobham been careful of their name, their honor, their lives; had they blushed to stand before tribunals which they knew were prepared to condemn them as traitors; had they declined to become a gazing-stock to mobs, who waited to scoff at and insult them as heretics; had they shrunk from the cruel torture and the bitter death of the stake — where would have been the Protestantism of England? and, without its Protestantism, where would have been its liberty? — still unborn. It was not the valor of Henry V., it was the grander heroism of Lord Cobham and his fellow-martys that awoke the soul of England, when it was sleeping a dead sleep, and fired it to pluck the bandage of a seven-fold darkness from its eyes, and to break the yoke of a seven-fold slavery from its neck. These are the stars that illuminate England's sky; the heroes whose exploits glorify her annals; the kings whose spirits rule from their thrones, which are their stakes, the hearts and souls of her noblest sons. The multitude lays its homage at the feet of those for whom the world has done much; whose path it has made smooth with riches; whose head it has lifted up with honors; and for whom, while living, it provided a stately palace; and when dead, a marble tomb. Let us go aside from the crowd: let us seek out, not the men for whom the world has done much, but the men who have done much for the world; and let us pay our homage, not indeed to them, but to Him who made them what they were. And where shall we find these men? In kings' houses? in schools and camps? — not oft. In jails, or at the bar of a tyrannical tribunal, or before a bench of Pharisees, or on a scaffold, around which mobs hoot, while the executioner stands by to do his office. These are not pleasant places; and yet it is precisely there that those great examples have been exhibited which have instructed the world, and those mighty services rendered which have ennobled and blessed the race. It was amid such humiliations and sufferings that the Lollards sowed, all through the fifteenth century, the living seed, which the gracious spring-time of the sixteenth quickened into growth; which the following centuries, not unmingled with conflict and the blood of martyrdom, helped to ripen; and the fully matured harvest of which it remains for the generations to come to carry home.

Table of Contents

Thomas Arundel succeeded by Henry Chicheley — The New Primate pursues the Policy of his Predecessor — Parliament at Leicester — More Stringent Ordinances against the Lollards — Appropriation of Ecclesiastical Possessions — Archbishop Chicheley Staves off the Proposal — Diverts the King's Mind to a War with France — Speech of the Archbishop — Henry V. falls into the Snare — Prepares an Expedition — Invades France — Agincourt — Second Descent on France — Henry becomes Master of Normandy — Returns to England — Third Invasion of France — Henry's Death — Dying Protestation — His Magnificent Funeral — His Character — Lollardism — More Martyrs — Claydon — New Edict against the Lollards — Henry VI. — Maltyrs in his Reign — William Taylor — William White — John Huss — Recantations.

THE martyrdom of Lord Cobham has carried us a little way beyond the point to which we had come in tracing the footprints faint and intermittent — of Protestantism in England during the fifteenth century. We saw Arundel carried from the halls of Lambeth to be laid in the sepulchral vaults of Canterbury. His master, Henry IV., had preceded him to the grave by only a few months. More lately Sir Roger Acton and others had expired at the stake which Arundel's policy had planted for them; and, last of all, he went to render his own account to God.