Cobham there; there were no armed men present. In short, instead of conspirators in rank and file, ready to sustain the onset of the royal troops, the king encountered only a congregation of citizens, who had chosen this hour and place as the fittest for a field preaching. Such, in sober truth, appears to have been the character of the assembly. When the king rode in among them with his men-at-arms, he met absolutely with no resistance. Without leaders and without arms, the multitude broke up and fled. Some were cut down on the spot, the rest were pursued, and of these many were taken.
The gates of the city had been closed, and why? "To prevent the citizens joining the rebels," say the accusers of the Lollards, who would fain have us believe that this was an organised conspiracy. The men of London, say they, were ready to rush out in hundreds to support the Lollards against the king's troops. But where is the evidence of this? We do not hear of a single citizen arming himself. Why did not the Londoners sally forth and join their friends outside before night had fallen and they were attacked by the soldiery? Why did they not meet them the moment they arrived on Ficket Field? Their coming was known to their foes, why not also to their friends? No; the gates of London were shut for the same reason, doubtless, which led, at an after-period, to the closing of the gates of Paris when a conventicle was held outside its walls — even that the worshippers, when attacked, might not find refuge in the city.
The idea that this was an insurrection, planned and organised, for the overthrow of Government, and the entire subversion of the whole ecclesiastical and political estate of England, appears to us too absurd to be entertained. Such revolutionary and sanguinary schemes were not more alien to the character and objects of the Lollards than they were beyond their resources. They sought, indeed, the sequestration or redistribution of the ecclesiastical property, but they employed for this end none but the legitimate means of petitioning Parliament. Rapine, bloodshed, revolution, were abhorrent to them. If the work they now had in hand was indeed the arduous one of overturning a powerful Government, how came they to assemble without weapons? Why, instead of making a display of their numbers and power, as they would have done had their object been what their enemies alleged, did they cover themselves with the darkness of the night? While so many circumstances throw not only doubt, but ridicule, upon the idea of conspiracy, where are the proofs of such a thing? When searched to the bottom, the matter rests only on the allegations of the priests. The priests said so to the king. Thomas Walsingham, monk of St. Albans, reported it in his Chronicles; and one historian after another has followed in his wake, and treated us to an account of this formidable rebellion, which they would have us believe had so nearly plunged the kingdom into revolution, and extinguished the throne in blood. No the epithet of heresy alone was not enough to stigmatize the young Protestantism of England. To heresy must be joined treason, in order to make Lollardism sufficiently odious; and when this double-headed monster should be seen by the terrified imaginations of statesmen, stalking through the land, striking at the throne and the altar, trampling on law as well as on religion, confiscating the estate of the noble as well as the glebe of the bishop, and wrapping castle and hamlet in flames, then would the monarch put forth all his power to crush the destroyer and save the realm. The monks of Paris a hundred and twenty years after drew the same hideous picture of Protestantism, and frightened the King of France into planting the stake for the Huguenots. This was the game which had begun to be played in England. Lollardism, said the priests, means revolution. To make such a charge is an ancient device. It is long since a certain city was spoken of before a powerful monarch as "the rebellious and the bad," within which they had "moved sedition of old time." The calumny has been often repeated since; but no king ever yet permitted himself to be deceived by it, who had not cause to rue it in the tarnishing of his throne and the impoverishing of his realm, and it might be in the ruin of both.
CHAPTER 7
MARTYRDOM OF LORD COBHAM
Imprisonments and Martyrdoms — Flight of Lollards to other Countries — Death of Archbishop Arundel-His Character — Lord Cobham — His Seizure in Wales by Lord Powis — Brought to London — Summoned before Parliament — Condemned on the Former Charge — Burned at St. Giles-in-the-Fields — His Christian Heroism — Which is the Greater Hero, Henry V. or Lord Cobham? — The World's True Benefactors — The Founders of England's Liberty and Greatness -The Seeds Sown -The Full Harvest to Come.
THE dispersion of this unarmed assembly, met in the darkness of the night, on the then lonely and thicket-covered field of St. Giles, to listen, it might be, to some favourite preacher, or to celebrate an act of worship, was followed by the execution of several Lollards. The most distinguished of these was Sir Roger Acton, known to be a friend of Lord Cobham. He was seized at the midnight meeting on St. Giles' Field, and was inlmediately thereafter condemned and executed. The manner of his death has been variously reported. Some chroniclers say he was burned, others that he was drawn on a hurdle to Tyburn, and there hanged. Two other Lollards were put to death at the same time — Master John Brown, and John Beverly, formerly a priest, but now a Wicliffite preacher. "So many persons were apprehended," says Holinshed, "that all the prisons in and about London were full." The leaders only, however, were put to death, "being condemned," says the chronicler, "for heresy by the clergy, and attainted of high treason in the Guildhall of London, and adjudged for that offense to be drawn and hanged, and for heresy to be consumed with fire, gallows and all, which judgment was executed the same month on the said Sir Roger Acton, and twenty-eight others." The chronicler, however, goes on to say, what strongly corroborates the view we have taken of this affair, even that the overthrow of the Government formed no part of the designs of these men, that their only crime was attachment to Protestant truth, and that their assembling, which has been magnified into a dark and diabolical plot, was simply a peaceful meeting for worship. "Certain affirm," says Holinshed, "that it was for reigned causes, surmised by the spirituality, more upon displeasure than truth; and that they were assembled to hear their preacher (the aforesaid Beverly) in that place there, out of the way from resort of people, since they might not come together openly about any such matter, without danger to be apprehended." Other martyrdoms followed. Of these sufferers some were burned in Smithfield, others were put to death in the provinces; and not a few, to escape the stake, fled into exile, as Bale testifies. "Many fled out of the land into Germany, Bohemia, France, Spain, Portugal, and into the wilds of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland." Such terror had the rigor of the archbishop infused into the now numerous adherents of the Protestant doctrines.
We pause to record another death, which followed, at the distance of less than a month, those of which we have just made mention. This death takes us, not to Smithfield, where the stake glorifies those whom it consumes, but to the archiepiscopal Palace of Lambeth. There on his bed, Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, together with his life, was yielding up his primacy, which he had held for seventeen years.
Thomas Arundel was of noble birth, being the son of Richard Fitz-Alan, Earl of Arundel. His talents, naturally good, had been improved by study and experience; he was fond of pomp, subtle, resolute, and as stern in his measures as he was suave in his manners. A devoted son of his mother the Church, he was an uncompromising foe of Protestantism, which bore in his days the somewhat concealing name of Lollardism, but which his instincts as a Churchman taught him to regard as the one mortal enemy of that system, wherewith were bound up all dignities, titles, and happiness. He had experienced great diversity of fortune. He shared the exile of Henry Plantagenet, and he returned with him to assist in dethroning the man who had condemned and banished him as a traitor, and in elevating in his room Henry IV., whom he anointed with oil from the sacred vial which fell down from Mary out of heaven. He continued to be the evil genius of the king. His stronger will and more powerful intellect asserted an easy supremacy over Henry, who never felt quite sure of the ground on which he stood.
When at last the king was carried to Canterbury, and laid in marble, Arundel took his place by the side of his son, Henry V., and kept it during the first year of his reign.
