Short Studies on Great Subjects

J >> James Anthony Froude >> Short Studies on Great Subjects

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Nevertheless, for any authentic account of the abbeys at this crisis, we
have hitherto been left to our imagination. A stern and busy
administration had little leisure to preserve records of sentimental
struggles which led to nothing. The Catholics did not care to keep alive
the recollection of a conflict in which, even though with difficulty,
the Church was defeated. A rare accident only could have brought down to
us any fragment of a transaction which no one had an interest in
remembering. That such an accident has really occurred, we may consider
as unusually fortunate. The story in question concerns the abbey of
Woburn, and is as follows:--

At Woburn, as in many other religious houses, there were representatives
of both the factions which divided the country; perhaps we should say of
three--the sincere Catholics, the Indifferentists, and the Protestants.
These last, so long as Wolsey was in power, had been frightened into
silence, and with difficulty had been able to save themselves from
extreme penalties. No sooner, however, had Wolsey fallen, and the
battle commenced with the papacy, than the tables turned, the persecuted
became persecutors--or at least threw off their disguise--and were
strengthened with the support of the large class who cared only to keep
on the winning side. The mysteries of the faith came to be disputed at
the public tables; the refectories rang with polemics; the sacred
silence of the dormitories was broken for the first time by lawless
speculation. The orthodox might have appealed to the Government: heresy
was still forbidden by law, and, if detected, was still punished by the
stake. But the orthodox among the regular clergy adhered to the pope as
well as to the faith, and abhorred the sacrilege of the Parliament as
deeply as the new opinions of the Reformers. Instead of calling in the
help of the law, they muttered treason in secret; and the Reformers,
confident in the necessities of the times, sent reports to London of
their arguments and conversations. The authorities in the abbey were
accused of disaffection; and a commission of enquiry was sent down
towards the end of the spring of 1536, to investigate. The depositions
taken on this occasion are still preserved; and with the help of them,
we can leap over three centuries of time, and hear the last echoes of
the old monastic life in Woburn Abbey dying away in discord.

Where party feeling was running so high, there were, of course,
passionate arguments. The Act of Supremacy, the spread of Protestantism,
the power of the Pope, the state of England--all were discussed; and the
possibilities of the future, as each party painted it in the colours of
his hopes. The brethren, we find, spoke their minds in plain language,
sometimes condescending to a joke.

Brother Sherborne deposes that the sub-prior, 'on Candlemas-day last
past (February 2, 1536), asked him whether he longed not to be at Rome
where all his bulls were?' Brother Sherborne answered that 'his bulls
had made so many calves, that he had burned them. Whereunto the
sub-prior said he thought there were more calves now than there were
then.'

Then there were long and furious quarrels about 'my Lord Privy Seal'
(Cromwell)--who was to one party, the incarnation of Satan; to the
other, the delivering angel.

Nor did matters mend when from the minister they passed to the master.

Dan John Croxton being in 'the shaving-house' one day with certain of
the brethren having their tonsures looked to, and gossiping, as men do
on such occasions, one 'Friar Lawrence did say that the king was dead.'
Then said Croxton, 'Thanks be to God, his Grace is in good health, and I
pray God so continue him;' and said further to the said Lawrence, 'I
advise thee to leave thy babbling.' Croxton, it seems, had been among
the suspected in earlier times. Lawrence said to him, 'Croxton, it
maketh no matter what thou sayest, for thou art one of the new world;'
whereupon hotter still the conversation proceeded. 'Thy babbling
tongue,' Croxton said, 'will turn us all to displeasure at length.'
'Then,' quoth Lawrence, 'neither thou nor yet any of us all shall do
well as long as we forsake our head of the Church, the Pope.' 'By the
mass!' quoth Croxton, 'I would thy Pope Roger were in thy belly, or thou
in his, for thou art a false perjured knave to thy prince.' Whereunto
the said Lawrence answered, saying, 'By the mass, thou liest! I was
never sworn to forsake the Pope to be our head, and never will be.'
'Then,' quoth Croxton, 'thou shalt be sworn spite of thine heart one
day, or I will know why nay.'

These and similar wranglings may be taken as specimens of the daily
conversation at Woburn, and we can perceive how an abbot with the best
intentions would have found it difficult to keep the peace. There are
instances of superiors in other houses throwing down their command in
the midst of the crisis in flat despair, protesting that their subject
brethren were no longer governable. Abbots who were inclined to the
Reformation could not manage the Catholics; Catholic abbots could not
manage the Protestants; indifferent abbots could not manage either the
one or the other. It would have been well for the Abbot of Woburn--or
well as far as this world is concerned--if he, like one of these, had
acknowledged his incapacity, and had fled from his charge.

His name was Robert Hobbes. Of his age and family, history is silent. We
know only that he held his place when the storm rose against the pope;
that, like the rest of the clergy, he bent before the blast, taking the
oath to the king, and submitting to the royal supremacy, but swearing
under protest, as the phrase went, with the outward, and not with the
inward man--in fact, perjuring himself. Though infirm, so far, however,
he was too honest to be a successful counterfeit, and from the jealous
eyes of the Neologians of the abbey he could not conceal his tendencies.
We have significant evidence of the _espionage_ which was established
over all suspected quarters, in the conversations and trifling details
of conduct on the part of the abbot, which were reported to the
Government.

In the summer of 1534, orders came that the pope's name should be rased
out wherever it was mentioned in the Mass books. A malcontent, by name
Robert Salford, deposed that 'he was singing mass before the abbot at
St. Thomas's altar within the monastery, at which time he rased out with
his knife the said name out of the canon.' The abbot told him to 'take a
pen and strike or cross him out.' The saucy monk said those were not the
orders. They were to rase him out. 'Well, well,' the abbot said, 'it
will come again one day.' 'Come again, will it?' was the answer; 'if it
do, then we will put him in again; but I trust I shall never see that
day.' The mild abbot could remonstrate, but could not any more command;
and the proofs of his malignant inclinations were remembered against him
for the ear of Cromwell.

In the general injunctions, too, he was directed to preach against the
pope, and to expose his usurpation; but he could not bring himself to
obey. He shrank from the pulpit; he preached but twice after the
visitation, and then on other subjects, while in the prayer before the
sermon he refused, as we find, to use the prescribed form. He only said,
'You shall pray for the spirituality, the temporality, and the souls
that be in the pains of purgatory; and did not name the king to be
supreme head of the Church in neither of the said sermons, nor speak
against the pretended authority of the Bishop of Rome.'

Again, when Paul the Third, shortly after his election, proposed to call
a general council at Mantua, against which, by advice of Henry the
Eighth, the Germans protested, we have a glimpse how eagerly anxious
English eyes were watching for a turning tide. 'Hear you,' said the
abbot one day, 'of the Pope's holiness and the congregation of bishops,
abbots, and princes gathered to the council at Mantua? They be gathered
for the reformation of the universal Church; and here now we have a book
of the excuse of the Germans, by which we may know what heretics they
be: for if they were Catholics and true men as they pretend to be, they
would never have refused to come to a general council.'

So matters went with the abbot for some months after he had sworn
obedience to the king. Lulling his conscience with such opiates as the
casuists could provide for him, he watched anxiously for a change, and
laboured with but little reserve to hold his brethren to their old
allegiance.

In the summer of 1535, however, a change came over the scene, very
different from the outward reaction for which he was looking, and a
better mind woke in the abbot: he learnt that in swearing what he did
not mean with reservations and nice distinctions, he had lied to heaven
and lied to man; that to save his miserable life he had perilled his
soul. When the oath of supremacy was required of the nation, Sir Thomas
More, Bishop Fisher, and the monks of the Charterhouse--mistaken, as we
believe, in judgment, but true to their consciences, and disdaining
evasion or subterfuge--chose, with deliberate nobleness, rather to die
than to perjure themselves. This is no place to enter on the great
question of the justice or necessity of those executions; but the story
of the so-called martyrdoms convulsed the Catholic world. The pope shook
upon his throne; the shuttle of diplomatic intrigue stood still;
diplomatists who had lived so long in lies that the whole life of man
seemed but a stage pageant, a thing of show and tinsel, stood aghast at
the revelation of English sincerity, and a shudder of great awe ran
through Europe. The fury of party leaves little room for generous
emotion, and no pity was felt for these men by the English Protestants.
The Protestants knew well that if these same sufferers could have had
their way, they would themselves have been sacrificed by hecatombs; and
as they had never experienced mercy, so they were in turn without mercy.
But to the English Catholics, who believed as Fisher believed, but who
had not dared to suffer as Fisher suffered, his death and the death of
the rest acted as a glimpse of the Judgment Day. Their safety became
their shame and terror; and in the radiant example before them of true
faithfulness, they saw their own falsehood and their own disgrace. So it
was with Father Forest, who had taught his penitents in confession that
they might perjure themselves, and who now sought a cruel death in
voluntary expiation; so it was with Whiting, the Abbot of Glastonbury;
so with others whose names should be more familiar to us than they are;
and here in Woburn we are to see the feeble but genuine penitence of
Abbot Hobbes. He was still unequal to immediate martyrdom, but he did
what he knew might drag his death upon him if disclosed to the
Government, and surrounded by spies he could have had no hope of
concealment.

'At the time,' deposed Robert Salford, 'that the monks of the
Charterhouse, with other traitors, did suffer death, the abbot did call
us into the Chapter-house, and said these words:--"Brethren, this is a
perilous time; such a scourge was never heard since Christ's passion. Ye
hear how good men suffer the death. Brethren, this is undoubted for our
offences. Ye read, so long as the children of Israel kept the
commandments of God, so long their enemies had no power over them, but
God took vengeance of their enemies. But when they broke God's
commandments, then they were subdued by their enemies, and so be we.
Therefore let us be sorry for our offences. Undoubted He will take
vengeance of our enemies; I mean those heretics that causeth so many
good men to suffer thus. Alas, it is a piteous case that so much
Christian blood should be shed. Therefore, good brethren, for the
reverence of God, every one of you devoutly pray, and say this Psalm,
'Oh God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple
have they defiled, and made Jerusalem a heap of stones. The dead bodies
of thy servants have they given to be meat to the fowls of the air, and
the flesh of thy saints unto the beasts of the field. Their blood have
they shed like water on every side of Jerusalem, and there was no man to
bury them. We are become an open scorn unto our enemies, a very scorn
and derision unto them that are round about us. Oh, remember not our old
sins, but have mercy upon us, and that soon, for we are come to great
misery. Help us, oh God of our salvation, for the glory of thy name. Oh,
be merciful unto our sins for thy name's sake. Wherefore do the heathen
say, Where is now their God?' Ye shall say this Psalm," repeated the
abbot, "every Friday, after the litany, prostrate, when ye lie upon the
high altar, and undoubtedly God will cease this extreme scourge." And
so,' continues Salford, significantly, 'the convent did say this
aforesaid Psalm until there were certain that did murmur at the saying
of it, and so it was left.'

The abbot, it seems, either stood alone, or found but languid support;
even his own familiar friends whom he trusted, those with whom he had
walked in the house of God, had turned against him; the harsh air of the
dawn of a new world choked him: what was there for him but to die? But
his conscience still haunted him: while he lived he must fight on, and
so, if possible, find pardon for his perjury. The blows in those years
fell upon the Church thick and fast. In February 1536, the Bill passed
for the dissolution of the smaller monasteries; and now we find the
sub-prior with the whole fraternity united in hostility, and the abbot
without one friend remaining.

'He did again call us together,' says the next deposition, 'and
lamentably mourning for the dissolving the said houses, he enjoined us
to sing "Salvator mundi, salva nos omnes," every day after lauds; and we
murmured at it, and were not content to sing it for such cause; and so
we did omit it divers days, for which the abbot came unto the chapter,
and did in manner rebuke us, and said we were bound to obey his
commandment by our profession, and so did command us to sing it again
with the versicle "Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered. Let
them also that hate him flee before him." Also he enjoined us at every
mass that every priest did sing, to say the collect, "Oh God, who
despisest not the sighing of a contrite heart." And he said if we did
this with good and true devotion, God would so handle the matter, that
it should be to the comfort of all England, and so show us mercy as he
showed unto the children of Israel. And surely, brethren, there will
come to us a good man that will rectify these monasteries again that be
now supprest, because "God can of these stones raise up children to
Abraham."'

'Of the stones,' perhaps, but less easily of the stony-hearted monks,
who, with pitiless smiles, watched the abbot's sorrow, which should soon
bring him to his ruin.

Time passed on, and as the world grew worse, so the abbot grew more
lonely. Desolate and unsupported, he was still unable to make up his
mind to the course which he knew to be right; but he slowly strengthened
himself for the trial, and as Lent came on, the season brought with it a
more special call to effort; he did not fail to recognise it. The
conduct of the fraternity sorely disturbed him. They preached against
all which he most loved and valued, in language purposely coarse; and
the mild sweetness of the rebukes which he administered, showed plainly
on which side lay, in the abbey of Woburn, the larger portion of the
spirit of Heaven. Now, when the passions of those times have died away,
and we can look back with more indifferent eyes, how touching is the
following scene. There was one Sir William, curate of Woburn Chapel,
whose tongue, it seems, was rough beyond the rest. The abbot met him one
day, and spoke to him. 'Sir William,' he said, 'I hear tell ye be a
great railer. I marvel that ye rail so. I pray you teach my cure the
Scripture of God, and that may be to edification. I pray you leave such
railing. Ye call the pope a bear and a bandog. Either he is a good man
or an ill. _Domino suo stat aut cadit._ The office of a bishop is
honourable. What edifying is this to rail? Let him alone.'

But they would not let him alone, nor would they let the abbot alone. He
grew 'somewhat acrased,' they said; vexed with feelings of which they
had no experience. He fell sick, sorrow and the Lent discipline weighing
upon him. The brethren went to see him in his room; one Brother Dan
Woburn came among the rest, and asked him how he did; the abbot
answered, 'I would that I had died with the good men that died for
holding with the pope. My conscience, my conscience doth grudge me every
day for it.' Life was fast losing its value for him. What was life to
him or any man when bought with a sin against his soul? 'If the abbot be
disposed to die, for that matter,' Brother Croxton observed, 'he may die
as soon as he will.'

All Lent he fasted and prayed, and his illness grew upon him; and at
length in Passion week he thought all was over, and that he was going
away. On Passion Sunday he called the brethren about him, and as they
stood round his bed, with their cold, hard eyes, 'he exhorted them all
to charity;' he implored them 'never to consent to go out of their
monastery; and if it chanced them to be put from it, they should in no
wise forsake their habit.' After these words, 'being in a great agony,
he rose out of his bed, and cried out and said, "I would to God, it
would please him to take me out of this wretched world; and I would I
had died with the good men that have suffered death heretofore, for
they were quickly out of their pain."'[T] Then, half wandering, he
began to mutter to himself aloud the thoughts which had been working in
him in his struggles; and quoting St. Bernard's words about the pope, he
exclaimed, 'Tu quis es primatu Abel, gubernatione Noah, auctoritate
Moses, judicatu Samuel, potestate Petrus, unctione Christus. Aliae
ecclesiae habent super se pastores. Tu pastor pastorum es.'

Let it be remembered that this is no sentimental fiction begotten out of
the brain of some ingenious novelist, but the record of the true words
and sufferings of a genuine child of Adam, labouring in a trial too hard
for him.

He prayed to die, and in good time death was to come to him; but not,
after all, in the sick bed, with his expiation but half completed. A
year before, he had thrown down the cross when it was offered him. He
was to take it again--the very cross which he had refused. He recovered.
He was brought before the council; with what result, there are no means
of knowing. To admit the papal supremacy when officially questioned was
high treason. Whether the abbot was constant, and received some
conditional pardon, or whether his heart again for the moment failed
him--whichever he did, the records are silent. This only we ascertain of
him: that he was not put to death under the statute of supremacy. But,
two years later, when the official list was presented to the Parliament
of those who had suffered for their share in 'the Pilgrimage of Grace,'
among the rest we find the name of Robert Hobbes, late Abbot of Woburn.
To this solitary fact we can add nothing. The rebellion was put down,
and in the punishment of the offenders there was unusual leniency; not
more than thirty persons were executed, although forty thousand had been
in arms. Those only were selected who had been most signally implicated.
But they were all leaders in the movement; the men of highest rank, and
therefore greatest guilt. They died for what they believed their duty;
and the king and council did their duty in enforcing the laws against
armed insurgents. He for whose cause each supposed themselves to be
contending, has long since judged between them; and both parties perhaps
now see all things with clearer eyes than was permitted to them on
earth.

We also can see more distinctly. We will not refuse the Abbot Hobbes a
brief record of his trial and passion. And although twelve generations
of Russells--all loyal to the Protestant ascendancy--have swept Woburn
clear of Catholic associations, they, too, in these later days, will not
regret to see revived the authentic story of its last abbot.

FOOTNOTES:

[Q] From _Fraser's Magazine_, 1857.

[R] Rolls House MS., _Miscellaneous Papers_, First Series. 356.

[S] Tanner MS. 105, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

[T] Meaning, as he afterwards said, More and Fisher and the Carthusians.

ENGLAND'S FORGOTTEN WORTHIES.[U]

1. _The Observations of Sir Richard Hawkins, Knt., in his Voyage in the
South Sea in 1593._ Reprinted from the Edition of 1622, and Edited by R.
H. Major, Esq., of the British Museum. Published by the Hakluyt Society.

2. _The Discoverie of the Empire of Guiana._ By Sir Walter Ralegh, Knt.
Edited, with copious Explanatory Notes, and a Biographical Memoir, by
Sir Robert H. Schomburgk, Phil. D., &c.

3. _Narratives of Early Voyages undertaken for the Discovery of a
Passage to Cathaia and India by the North-west_; with Selections from
the Records of the Worshipful Fellowship of the Merchants of London,
trading into the East Indies, and from MSS. in the Library of the
British Museum, now first published, by Thomas Rundall, Esq.

The Reformation, the Antipodes, the American Continent, the Planetary
system, and the infinite deep of the Heavens, have now become common and
familiar facts to us. Globes and orreries are the playthings of our
school-days; we inhale the spirit of Protestantism with our earliest
breath of consciousness. It is all but impossible to throw back our
imagination into the time when, as new grand discoveries, they stirred
every mind which they touched with awe and wonder at the revelation
which God had sent down among mankind. Vast spiritual and material
continents lay for the first time displayed, opening fields of thought
and fields of enterprise of which none could conjecture the limit. Old
routine was broken up. Men were thrown back on their own strength and
their own power, unshackled, to accomplish whatever they might dare. And
although we do not speak of these discoveries as the cause of that
enormous force of heart and intellect which accompanied them (for they
were as much the effect as the cause, and one reacted on the other),
yet at any rate they afforded scope and room for the play of powers
which, without such scope, let them have been as transcendant as they
would, must have passed away unproductive and blighted.

An earnest faith in the supernatural, an intensely real conviction of
the divine and devilish forces by which the universe was guided and
misguided, was the inheritance of the Elizabethan age from Catholic
Christianity. The fiercest and most lawless men did then really and
truly believe in the actual personal presence of God or the devil in
every accident, or scene, or action. They brought to the contemplation
of the new heaven and the new earth an imagination saturated with the
spiritual convictions of the old era, which were not lost, but only
infinitely expanded. The planets, whose vastness they now learnt to
recognise, were, therefore, only the more powerful for evil or for good;
the tides were the breathing of Demogorgon; and the idolatrous American
tribes were real worshippers of the real devil, and were assisted with
the full power of his evil army.

It is a form of thought which, however in a vague and general way we may
continue to use its phraseology, has become, in its detailed application
to life, utterly strange to us. We congratulate ourselves on the
enlargement of our understanding when we read the decisions of grave law
courts in cases of supposed witchcraft; we smile complacently over
Raleigh's story of the island of the Amazons, and rejoice that we are
not such as he--entangled in the cobwebs of effete and foolish
superstition. Yet the true conclusion is less flattering to our vanity.
That Raleigh and Bacon could believe what they believed, and could be
what they were notwithstanding, is to us a proof that the injury which
such mistakes can inflict is unspeakably insignificant: and arising, as
they arose, from a never-failing sense of the real awfulness and mystery
of the world, and of the life of human souls upon it, they witness to
the presence in such minds of a spirit, the loss of which not the most
perfect acquaintance with every law by which the whole creation moves
can compensate. We wonder at the grandeur, the moral majesty of some of
Shakespeare's characters, so far beyond what the noblest among ourselves
can imitate, and at first thought we attribute it to the genius of the
poet, who has outstripped nature in his creations. But we are
misunderstanding the power and the meaning of poetry in attributing
creativeness to it in any such sense. Shakespeare created, but only as
the spirit of nature created around him, working in him as it worked
abroad in those among whom he lived. The men whom he draws were such men
as he saw and knew; the words they utter were such as he heard in the
ordinary conversations in which he joined. At the Mermaid with Raleigh
and with Sidney, and at a thousand unnamed English firesides, he found
the living originals for his Prince Hals, his Orlandos, his Antonios,
his Portias, his Isabellas. The closer personal acquaintance which we
can form with the English of the age of Elizabeth, the more we are
satisfied that Shakespeare's great poetry is no more than the rhythmic
echo of the life which it depicts.

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