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

The Pope, notwithstanding that he had been balked in his attempts to bend the Parliament of England to his will, continued his aggressions upon the privileges of the English Church. He sustained himself its chief bishop, and conducted himself as if the Act of Praemunire did not exist. Paying no respect to the right of the chapters to elect, and the power of the king to grant his conge d'elire, he issued his provisors appointing to vacant livings, not on the ground of piety or learning, but of riches and interest. The highest price in the market of Rome commanded the benefice. Pope Martin V., on the termination of the Council of Constance, promoted not less than fourteen persons to various bishoprics in the province of Canterbury alone. The Pope empowered his favorites to hold sees in commendam, that is, to draw their temporalities, while another discharged the duty, or professed to do so. Pope Eugene IV. (1438)gave the bishopric of Ely in cornmendam to the Archbishop of Rouen, and after some resistance this Frenchman was allowed to enjoy the revenues. He ventured on other stretches of his supremacy in the matter of pluralities, of non-residence, and of exemptions in favor of minors, as the holders of ecclesiastical livings. We find the Pope, further, issuing bulls empowering his nuncios to impose taxes upon the clergy, and collect money. We trace, in short, in the ecclesiastical annals of the time, a steady and persistent effort on the one side to encroach, and a tolerably steady and continuous effort on the other to repel. The Ven. Henry Edward Manning, Archdeacon of Chichester, with strict historical truth, says: "If any man will look down along the line of early English history, he will see a standing contest between the rulers of this land and the Bishops of Rome. The Crown and Church of England with a steady opposition resisted the entrance and encroachment of the secularised power of the Pope in England." From the days of King John the shadow of the Vatican had begun to go back on England; it was still shortening in the fifteenth century, and its lessening line gave promise of a time, for the advent of which the good Lord Cobham had expressed an ardent wish, when that ominous penumbra, terminating at Calais, would no longer be projected across the sea to the English shore.

While the English monarchs were fighting against the Papal supremacy with the one hand, they were persecuting Lollardism with the other. At the very time that they were framing such Acts as those of Provisors and Praemunire, to defend the canons of the Church, and the constitution of the State, from the utter demolition with which both were threatened by a foreign tyranny, they were enacting edicts for the conviction of Lollards, and planting stakes to burn them. This does not surprise us. It is ever so in the earliest stage of a great reform. The good which has begun to stir in the quiet depths below, sends the evil to the surface in quickened activity.

Hence such contradictions as that before us. To a casual eye, matters appear to be getting worse; whereas the very effervescence and violence of the old powers is a sign that the new are not far off, and that a reformation has already set in. The Jews have a proverb to this effect — "When the tale of bricks is doubled, then Moses will come," which saying, however, if it were more exactly to express the truth of the fact and the law of the Divine working, should run — The tale of bricks has been doubled, therefore Moses is come.

We trace in the England of the fifteenth century two powerful currents, and both are, in a sense, Protestant.

Lollardism, basing itself upon the Word of God and the rights of conscience, was essentially and wholly Protestant. The fight against the Roman supremacy, basing itself upon the canons of the Church and the laws of the kingdom, was also so far Protestant. It was a protest against a power that was lifting its seat above all law, and crushing every right. And what, we ask, engendered this spirit of opposition? Little did the party who were fighting against the supremacy dream whence their movement drew its existence. They would have been ashamed to own it, even if made aware of it. And yet it is true that the very Lollardism which they were seeking to trample out had originated the spirit that was now shown in defense of national independence and against Papal encroachments. The Lollard, or Protestant, or Christian principle — for it matters not by which one of these three names we designate it — had all along through the Dark Ages been present in the bosom of European Christendom, preserving to the conscience some measure of action and power, to the intellect some degree of energy and expansion, and to the soul the desire and the hope of liberty. Ordinarily this principle attested its presence by the piety with which it nourished the heart, and the charity and purity with which it enriched the lives of individual men and women, scattered up and down in monasteries, or in cathedral chapters, or in rural vicarages, or in hidden places where history passed them by. At other times it forced itself to the surface, and revealed its power on a large scale, as in the Albigensan revival. But the powers of evil were then too strong, to permit of its keeping the footing it had momentarily obtained. Beaten down, it again became torpid. But in the great spring-time which came along with Wicliffe it was effectually roused never again to shunber. Taking now its place in the front, it found itself supported by a host of agencies, of which itself was the real although the indirect creator. For it was the Lollard or Christian spirit, never, amid all the barbarism and strifes and superstitions that overlaid Mediaeval society, eliminated or purged out, that hailed letters in that early morning, that tasted their sweetness, that prompted to the cultivation of them, that panted for a wider sphere, for a greater liberty, for a purer state of society, and never rested till it had achieved it. This despised principle — for in the fifteenth century it is seen at the bar of tribunals, in prisons, at stakes, in the guise of a felon — was in truth the originator of these activities; it communicated to them the first impulse. Without it they never would have been: night, not morning, would have succeeded the Dark Ages. It was the day-spring to Christendom. And this is certified to us when, tracing the course of the two contemporary currents which we find flowing in England in the century under review, we see them, at a point a little way only in advance of that at which we are now arrived, uniting their streams, and forming one combined movement, known as the English Reformation.

But before that point could be reached England had to pass through a terrible conflict.

Table of Contents

Convulsions of the Fifteenth Century — Fall of Constantinople — Wars in Bohemia — in Italy — in Spain — in Switzerland — Wars of the Papal Schism — Was it Peace or War which the Popes gave to Christendom? — Wars originated by the Popes: the Crusades; the War of Investitures; the Albigensian and Waldensian Crusades; the Wars in Naples, Poland, etc.; the Feuds in Italy; the Hussite Campaigns, etc. — Wars of the Roses — Traced to the Council of Archbishop Chicheley — Providential End of the Wars of the Fifteenth Century — The Nobility Weakened — The Throne made Powerful — Why? — Hussitism and Lollardism.

THE Day that was hastening towards the world sent terrible tempests before it as the heralds of its approach. Than the middle of the fifteenth century there is, perhaps, no point in modern history that presents a scene of more universal turmoil and calamity, if we except the period that witnessed the fall of the Western Empire. Nowhere is there stability or rest. All around, as far as the eye can reach, appears a sea whose waters, swollen into huge billows by the force of the mighty winds, are assailng the very foundations of the earth. The Christian of that day, when he cast his eyes around on a world rocked and tossed by these great tempests, must have despaired, had he not remembered that there is One who "sits King upon the floods."