[1535 A.D.] The The influence of the Carthusians, with that of the two great men who were following the same road to the same goal, determined multitudes in the attitude which they would assume and in the duty which they would choose. Carthusians, therefore, were to be made to bend; or, if they could not be bent, to be made examples in their punishment as they had made themselves examples in their resistance. They were noble and good; but there were others in London good and noble as they, who were not of their fold, and whose virtues, thenceforward more required by England than cloistered asceticisms, had been blighted under the shadow of the papacy. The Catholics had chosen the alternative either to crush the free thought which was bursting from the soil, or else to be crushed by it; and the future of the world could not be sacrificed to preserve the exotic graces of medieval saints. They fell, gloriously and not unprofitably. They were not allowed to stay the course of the Reformation, but their sufferings, nobly borne, sufficed to recover the sympathy of after-ages for the faith which they professed. On the 4th of May the execution took place at Tyburn, under circumstances which marked the occasion with peculiar meaning. The punishment in case of high treason was very terrible. The English were a hard, fierce people, and with these poor sufferers the law of the land took its course without alleviation or interference. But another feature distinguished the present execution. For the first time in English history, ecclesiastics were brought out to suffer in their habits, without undergoing the previous ceremony of degradation. Thenceforward the world to know that, as no sanctuary any more should protect traitors, so the sacred office should avail as little; and the hardest blow which it had yet received was thus dealt to superstition, shaking from its place in the minds of all men the key-stone of the whole system. To the last moment escape was left open, if the prisoners would submit. As one by one they went to their death, the council, at each fresh horrible spectacle, urged the survivors to have pity on themselves; but they urged them in vain. The faces of these men did not grow pale; their voices did not shake; they declared themselves liege subjects of the king and obedient children of holy church, "giving God thanks that they were held worthy to suffer for the truth." All died without a murmur. The stern work was ended with quartering the bodies; and the arm of Houghton was hung up as a bloody sign over the archway of the Charterhouse, to awe the remaining brothers into submission. So fell the monks of the London Charterhouse, splintered to pieces-for so only could their resistance be overcome-by the iron sceptre and the iron hand which held it. They were, however, alone of their kind. There were many, perhaps, who wished to resemble them, who would have imitated their example had they dared. But all bent except these. If it had been otherwise, the Reformation would have been impossible, and perhaps it would not have been needed. The king was not without feeling. It was no matter of indifference to him that he found himself driven to such stern courses with his subjects; and as the golden splendour of his manhood was thus suddenly clouding, "he commanded all about his court to poll their heads," in public token of mourning; and to give them example, he caused his own head to be polled, and from thenceforth his beard to be knotted, and to be no more shaven." The friars of Charterhouse suffered for their Catholic faith, as Protestants had suffered and were still to suffer for theirs. In this same month of May in the same year the English annals contain another entry of no less sad significance. [1535 A.D.] THE EXECUTION OF FISHER AND MORE After the execution of the Carthusians it became a question what should be done with Fisher, the bishop of Rochester, and Sir Thomas More. They had remained for a year in the Tower undisturbed. It was a hard case, for the bishop was sinking into the grave with age and sickness, and More had the highest reputation of any living man. But they had chosen to make themselves conspicuous as confessors for Catholic truth; though prisoners in the Tower, they were in fact the most effectual champions of the papal claims, and if their disobedience had been passed over, the statute could have been enforced against no one. The same course was followed as with the Carthusian monks. On the 7th of May a deputation of the council waited on the prisoners in the Tower for an acknowledgment of the supremacy. They refused: Fisher, after a brief hesitation, peremptorily; More declining to answer, but also giving an indirect denial. After repeated efforts had been made to move them, and made in vain, their own language, as in the preceding trials, furnished material for their indictment; and the law officers of the crown who were to conduct the prosecution were the witnesses under whose evidence they were to be tried. It was a strange proceeding, to be excused only, if excused at all, by the pressure of the times. Yet five weeks elapsed and the government still hesitated. Once more Fisher was called upon to submit, with the intimation that if he refused he must bear the consequences. His reply remained what it had been, and on the 17th of June he was taken down in a boat to Westminster Hall, where the special commission was sitting. The proceedings at his trial are thus briefly summed up in the official record: "Thursday, after the feast of St. Barnabas, John Fisher was brought to the bar by Sir William Kingston, constable of the Tower. Pleads not guilty. Venire awarded. Verdict-guilty. Judgment as usual in cases of treason." It was a swift sentence, and swiftly to be executed. Five days were allowed him to prepare himself; and the more austere features of the penalty were remitted with some show of pity. He was to die by the axe. Mercy was not to be hoped for. It does not seem to have been sought. He was past eighty. The earth on the edge of the grave was already crumbling under his feet, and death had little to make it fearful. When the last morning dawned, he dressed himself carefully-as he said, for his marriage day. The distance to Tower Hill was short. He was able to walk, and he tottered out of the prison gates, holding in his hand a closed volume of the New Testament. The crowd flocked about him, and he was heard to pray that, as this book had been his best comfort and companion, so in that hour it might give him some special strength and speak to him as from his Lord. Then opening it at a venture, he read: "This is life eternal, to know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent." It was the answer to his prayer, and he continued to repeat the words as he was led forward. On the scaffold he chanted the Te Deum, and then, after a few prayers, knelt down, and meekly laid his head upon a pillow where neither care nor fear nor sickness would ever vex it more. Many a spectacle of sorrow had been witnessed on that tragic spot, but never one more sad than this, never one more painful to think or speak of. When a nation is in the throes of revolution, wild spirits are abroad in the storm; and poor human nature presses blindly forward with the burden which is laid upon it, tossing aside [1535 A.D.] the obstacles in its path with a recklessness which, in calmer hours, it would fear to contemplate. Sir Thomas More followed, his fortunes linked in death, as in life, to those of his friend. He was left to the last-in the hope, perhaps, that the example would produce an effect which persuasion could not. But the example, if that was the object, worked to far other purpose. From More's high-tempered nature such terrors fell harmless, as from enchanted armour. Death to him was but a passing from one country to another, and he had all along anticipated that his prison was the ante-chamber of the scaffold. He had indeed taken no pains to avoid it. On the 7th of May he was examined by the same persons who examined Fisher, and he was interrogated again and again in subsequent interviews. His humour did not allow him to answer questions directly: he played with his catechists, and did not readily furnish them with materials for a charge. At length sufficient evidence was obtained. On the 26th of June a true bill was found against him by the grand jury of Middlesex; and on the 1st of July the high commission sat again in Westminster Hall, to try the most illustrious prisoner who ever listened to his sentence there. The sentence was inevitable. It was pronounced in the ordinary form, but the usual punishment for treason was commuted, as it had been with Fisher, to death upon the scaffold; and this last favour was communicated as a special instance of the royal clemency. More's wit was always ready. "God forbid," he answered, "that the king show any more such mercy unto any of my friends; and God bless all my posterity from such pardons. The pageant was over, for such a trial was little more. As the procession formed to lead back the "condemned traitor" to the Tower, the commissioners once more adjured him to have pity on himself, and offered to reopen the court if he would reconsider his resolution. More smiled, and replied only a few words of graceful farewell. He then left the hall, and to spare him the exertion of the walk he was allowed to return by water. [1535 A.D.] At the Tower steps one of those scenes occurred which have cast so rich a pathos round the closing story of this illustrious man. "When Sir Thomas," writes the grandson, William Roper, "was now come to the Tower wharf, his best beloved child, my aunt Roper, desirous to see her father, whom she feared she should never see in this world after, to have his last blessing, gave there attendance to meet him; whom as soon as she had espied she ran hastily unto him, and without consideration or care for herself, passing through the midst of the throng and guard of men, who with bills and halberts compassed him around, there openly in the sight of them all embraced him, and took him about the neck and kissed him, not able to say any word but 'Oh, my father! oh, my father!' He, liking well her most natural and dear affection towards him, gave her his fatherly blessing; telling her that whatsoever he should suffer, though he were innocent, yet it was not without the will of God; and that He knew well enough all the secrets of her heart, counselling her to accommodate her will to God's blessed pleasure, and to be patient for his loss. "She was no sooner parted from him and had gone scarce ten steps, when she, not satisfied with the former farewell, like one who had forgot herself, ravished with the entire love of so worthy a father, having neither respect to herself nor to the press of people about him, suddenly turned back and ran hastily to him, and took him about the neck and divers times together kissed him; whereat he spoke not a word, but, carrying still his gravity, tears fell also from his eyes; yea, there were very few in all the troop who could refrain hereat from weeping, no, not the guards themselves. Yet at last with a full heart she was severed from him, at which time another of our women embraced him; and my aunt's maid Dorothy Collis did the like, of whom he said after, it was homely but very lovingly done." More's relation with his daughter forms the most beautiful feature in his history. His letters to her in early life are of unequalled grace, and she was perhaps the only person whom he very deeply loved. He never saw her again. The four days which remained to him he spent in prayer and in severe bodily discipline. On the night of the 5th of July, although he did not know the time which had been fixed for his execution, yet with an instinctive feeling that it was near, he sent her his hair shirt and whip, as having no more need of them, with a parting blessing of affection. About nine of the clock, July 6th, he was brought by the lieutenant out of the Tower, his beard being long, which fashion he had never before used, his face pale and lean, carrying in his hands a red cross, casting his eyes often towards heaven. He had been unpopular as a judge, and one or two persons in the crowd were insolent to him; but the distance was short and soon over, as all else was nearly over now. The scaffold had been awkwardly erected, and shook as he placed his foot upon the ladder. "See me safe up," he said to Kingston. "For my coming down I can shift for myself." He began to speak to the people, but the sheriff begged him not to proceed, and he contented himself with asking for their prayers, and desiring them to bear witness for him that he died in the faith of the holy Catholic church, and a faithful servant of God and the king. He then repeated the Miserere psalm on his knees. When he had ended and risen, the executioner, with an emotion which promised ill for the manner in which his part in the tragedy would be accomplished, begged his forgiveness. More kissed him. "Thou art to do me the greatest benefit that I can receive," he said. "Pluck up thy spirit, man, and be not afraid to do thine office. My neck is very short. Take [1535 A.D.] The heed, therefore, that thou strike not awry for saving of thine honesty." executioner offered to tie his eyes. "I will cover them myself," he said; and binding them in a cloth which he had brought with him, he knelt and laid his head on the block. The fatal stroke was about to fall, when he signed for a moment's delay while he moved aside his beard. Pity that should be cut," he murmured; "that has not committed treason." With which strange words, the strangest perhaps uttered at such a time, the lips most famous through Europe for eloquence and wisdom closed forever.b THE AFTERMATH OF MORE'S DEATH The love of Margaret Roper continued to display itself in those unavailing tokens of tenderness to her father's remains by which affection seeks to perpetuate itself; ineffectually, indeed, for the object, but effectually for the softening of the heart and for the exalting of the soul. She procured the head to be taken down from London Bridge, where odious passions had struggled in pursuit of an infernal immortality by placing it. She kept it during her life as a sacred relic, and was buried with this object of fondness in her arms nine years after. Erasmus called her the ornament of Britain, and the flower of the learned matrons of England, at a time when education consisted only of the revived study of ancient learning. This great scholar survived More only a few months, but composed a beautiful account of his martyrdom, though, with his wonted timidity, under an imaginary name. Perhaps the death of no individual ever produced, merely on account of his personal qualities, so much sorrow and horror as that of Sir Thomas More. A general cry sounded over Europe. The just fame of the sufferer, the eloquent pen of his friend Erasmus, the excusable pride of the Roman church in so glorious a martyr, and the atrocious effrontery of the means used to compass his destruction, contributed to spread the utmost indignation. The more considerate portion of men began to pause at the sight of the first illustrious blood spilt in religious divisions already threatening part of the horrors of which they soon after became the occasion. Giovio, w an Italian historian, compared the tyranny of Henry to that preternatural wickedness which the Grecian legends had embodied under the appellation of Phalaris. Cardinal Pole lashed the frenzy of his kinsman with vehement eloquence, bewailing the fate of the martyr in the most affecting strains of oratory. Englishmen abroad everywhere found their country the object of execration. Harvey, the resident at Venice, reported the anger of the Italians at the death of men of such honour and virtue. "They openly speak," he says, "of Catherine being put to death, and of the princess Mary speedily following her mother." He declares that all he hears disgusts him with public life, and disposes him to retire from such scenes. Had Henry VIII died in the twentieth year of his reign, his name might have come down to us as that of a festive and martial prince, with much of the applause which is lavished on gaiety and enterprise, and of which some fragments, preserved in the traditions of the people, too long served to screen the misrule of his later years from historical justice. But the execution of In the month of August Erasmus wrote to a friend that the English were now living in such a state of terror that they durst not write to foreigners or receive letters from them. In fact, in all foreign countries where civilisation had made progress, the fate of Fisher, and still more of that admirable wit and scholar, the author of the Eutopia, excited universal execration; and there, at least, men could speak their minds loudly.t |