The Reign of Henry the Eighth | Page 3

Edinburgh: Knox behaved, said Randolph, "as though he were of God's privy council."
It is certain, at least, that other reformers, who were not greatly inferior to Knox in capacity, and not at all in piety and honesty, have not met the same generous treatment at his hands. He sneers at Hooper because he had scruples about wearing episcopal robes at his consecration as Bishop of Worcester, though he himself in a famous passage asserts the anomalous position of bishops in the Church of England. Hooper, as a Calvinist, was in the right in objecting, and though the point upon which he took his stand was nominally one of form, there lay behind it a protest against the Anglican conception of a bishop. He speaks slightingly of Ridley and Ferrars, though he makes ample amends to them and to Hooper, when he comes to describe the manner of their death. To the reformers who fled from the Marian persecution, including men like Jewel and Grindal, he refers with scornful contempt, though he has no word of criticism to apply to Knox for retiring to England and to the continent when the flame of persecution was certainly not more fierce. Latimer is one of his favourites,--a plain, practical man, not given to abstract speculation or theological subtleties, but one who was content to do his duty day by day without the fear of man before his eyes. Latimer, though he was looked upon as a Protestant in the earliest years of the English Reformation, believed in the Real Presence up to a short time before his death. But of all English ecclesiastics Thomas Cranmer was perhaps most to Froude's liking. Cranmer was, like Froude himself, an artist in words. The English liturgy owes its charm and beauty to his sense of style, his grace of expression, and his cultured piety. That he was a great man few will be found in these days to maintain; fewer still will believe that he deserved the scathing invective of Macaulay. But no one can read the account given by Froude of his last years without feeling that the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury was neither saint nor martyr. If ever there was one, he was a timeserver. He pronounced the divorce of Catherine of Arragon, though he had sworn fealty to the Pope. He never raised a protest against any of the political murders of Henry VIII.--with the notable exception of his courageous attempt to save his friend, Thomas Cromwell. Even in that case, however, he lies under the suspicion of having interfered through fear that his own fate was involved in that of the malleus monachorum. In the days of Edward VI. he aimed at the liberty, if not at the life, of Bonner and Gardiner, without semblance of legal right: He recanted in the reign of Mary when he thought he could purchase his miserable life. It was only when all hope of pardon was past that he re-affirmed his belief in the reformed faith. Indeed, he waited until the day of his execution before withdrawing his recantation, and confounded his enemies on the way to the stake. To a master of dramatic narrative the last scene of Cranmer's life came as a relief and an inspiration. "So perished Cranmer," wrote Froude, in a memorable passage: "he was brought out, with the eyes of his soul blinded, to make sport for his enemies, and in his death he brought upon them a wider destruction than he had effected by his teaching while alive. Pole was appointed the next day to the See of Canterbury; but in other respects the court had over-reached themselves by their cruelty. Had they been contented to accept the recantation, they would have left the archbishop to die broken-hearted, pointed at by the finger of pitying scorn; and the Reformation would have been disgraced in its champion. They were tempted, by an evil spirit of revenge, into an act unsanctioned even by their own bloody laws; and they gave him an opportunity of writing his name in the roll of martyrs. The worth of a man must be measured by his life, not by his failure under a single and peculiar peril. The Apostle, though forewarned, denied his Master on the first alarm of danger; yet that Master, who knew his nature in its strength and its infirmity, chose him for the rock on which he would build his Church."
With this conscious and avowed bias in favour of undogmatic Christianity, Froude came to write the story of the transition of England from a Catholic to a Protestant country. He was not without sympathy with the old order of things. We cannot but feel a thrill as we read his incomparable description of the change which was effected in men's