dice of his predecessors. To bind the clergy and the schoolmasters to their duty, the sheriff of every county was ordered to keep a close eye upon them, and to report to the council all who not merely neglected this duty, but who were even lukewarm in discharging it. He also called upon the prelates to write as well as preach in support of his new power; and Sampson, Stokesley, Tunstall, and Gardiner obeyed the summons.
If Henry had been a zealous Reformer, a disciple of the new creed, we might have attributed his proceedings to an arbitrary and uncharitable earnestness for what he deemed the truth; but he was just as bigoted in the old faith as ever. His Bloody Statute, as it was called, the Statute of Six Articles, maintained that the actual presence was in the sacramental bread and wine; that priests were forbidden to marry; that vows of chastity were to be observed; and that mass and auricular confession were indispensable. Those who opposed any of these dogmas were to suffer death; no doctrine was to be believed contrary to the Six Articles; no persons were to sing or rhyme contrary to them; no book was to be possessed by any one against the Holy Sacrament; no annotations or preambles were to exist in Bibles or Testaments in English; and nothing was to be taught contrary to the king's command. In fact, the country had only got rid of an Italian Pope and got an English one—Pope Henry VIII.
The terrible example which Henry had made of Wolsey awed the clergy, for the most part, into obedience; and such was now the horrible influence of unlimited power upon him, that the tiger appetite for blood became every day developed, and soon led him on to a monstrous indulgence of cruelty and oppression, which made his name a terror through the whole world. He dealt out royal murders without stint; the highest, the noblest, the wisest, the best fell before him; and men, famed for genius and learning, were butchered one after another, as if they were the vilest malefactors. He attainted sixteen persons at once, at this time, and executed them without trial; and all opinions that were not his opinions, were alike fatal to men. He burnt six persons together, half Papists half Protestants, tying a Protestant and a Papist arm in arm. The Papists he killed because they did not go far enough, the Protestants because they would go too far; and he opened a stream of blood and kindled a destroying fire, which raged on through the succeeding reigns to such an extent, that 100,000 persons were calculated to have perished under the Royal determination of succeeding kings and queens to allow nobody but themselves to think, ere toleration was wrested from them.
The first-fruits of this awful concession, to a vain and selfish man, of the usurpation of God's own dominion in the soul, were an indiscriminating mass of Lollards, Lutherans, Anabaptists, and Roman Catholics committed to the flames. On the 22nd of July, during the prorogation of Parliament, a young man of singular learning, who had written a book against purgatory and transubstantiation and consubstantiation, was burnt in Smithfield; and a poor tailor, Andrew Hewett, who simply affirmed that he thought Firth was right, was burnt with him. Several Anabaptists underwent the same fate.
As that year closed in blood, so the next opened. Some of the monks, and especially the Carthusian, Franciscan, and Brigittin Observants, secluded from the world, and more obedient to their consciences than their fears, steadily refused to take the oath, or to proclaim in their churches and chapels that the Pope was Antichrist. All the Friar Observants were ejected from their monasteries, and dispersed. Some were thrust into prisons, others were confined in the houses of the Friars Conventuals. About fifty perished from the rigour of this treatment, and the rest were exiled to France and Scotland. Others of them were hanged, and were told that they were mildly treated, for the Lutherans and other Protestants were burned. The priors of the then Charter-houses of London, Axholm, and Belleval, waited on Cromwell to explain their conscientious scruples; but Cromwell, who was become the harsh and unhesitating instrument of Henry's despotism, instead of listening to them, committed them to the Tower on a charge of high treason, for refusing the king "the dignity, style, and name of his Royal estate." When he brought them to trial the jury shrunk from giving such a verdict against men of their acknowledged virtue and character. Cromwell hastened to the court in person, and threatened to hang them instead of the prisoners, if they did not without further delay pronounce them guilty. Five days later, these three dignitaries were executed at Tyburn, with Richard Reynolds, a doctor of divinity and monk of Sion, and John Hailes, Vicar of Thistleworth. They were all treated with savage barbarity, being hanged, cut down alive, embowelled, and dismembered. On the 18th of June, nearly a fortnight afterwards, Exmew, Middlemore, and Nudigate, three Carthusian monks from the Charter-house, were executed, with the same atrocities.
Whilst these horrors struck with consternation all at home, Henry proceeded to a deed which extended the feeling of abhorrence over all Europe. He shed the blood of Fisher and More. We have stated that Parliament had not enacted the precise oath for the refusal of which Fisher and More were arraigned. But this made no difference: the king willed it, and the submissive legislature passed a bill of attainder for misprision of treason against them both. On this they and their families were stripped of everything they had. The poor old bishop was left in a complete state of destitution, and had not even clothes to cover his nakedness. Sir Thomas More was dependent wholly for the support of his life on his married daughter, Margaret Roper. They were repeatedly called up after their attainder, and treacherously examined as to any act or word that they might have done or uttered contrary to the king's supremacy, as if to aggravate their crime and justify a more rigorous sentence. The Pope Clement was dead, and was succeeded by Paul III., who, hearing of the sad condition of the venerable Fisher, sent him a cardinal's hat, thinking it might make Henry less willing to proceed to extremities with him. But the effect on the tyrant was quite the contrary. On hearing of the Pope's intention, he exclaimed, "Ha! Paul may send him a hat, but I will take care that he have never a head to wear it on."
Accordingly, the aged prelate was brought out of the Tower, on the 22nd of June, beheaded, and his head stuck
