ELDER G BEEBE - HISTORY OF PROTESTANT PRIEST-CRAFT IN AMERICA AND EUROPE part 2
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T Adams
Oct 5, 2025, 10:40:25 AM10/5/25
to PREDESTINARIANBAPTIST, Adams, Tom
Dear Brethren and Friends,
Here is the second chapter of the book entitled "History of Protestant Priest-Craft in America and Europe" written by Elder Gilbert Beebe.
I hope you enjoyed the first part! It definitely puts a new spin on what I have heard and been taught of the "Reformation".
I still ask for your assistance in catching any spelling errors that might have occurred as I was typing this out. When I went to copy this chapter into the email I noticed two so I if I had to guess I would say that there are more that I have missed.
Also, I wanted to clarify something that I believe I mistakenly stated. I believe I stated at one time in the past that the "Banner of Liberty" was edited by Gilbert's son William. I now don't believe that to be true and I have no idea why I thought that. But Elder Gilbert Beebe is the editor of the "Banner of Liberty" along with being the editor of the "Signs of the Times." My apologies for giving you all incorrect information.
A Sinner in Hope,
Tom
P.S., just to let you know of my total progress so far. I am currently on page 22 of 68 in the original and page 71 in the typed out version with using 12pt for the font size. I have a copy of an old two-year compilation of the "SIGNS OF THE TIMES" that is 15" x 11" with four columns on each page and very tiny print (maybe 8pt?). I would assume that is the same size as the original that I am copying from which also has four columns. So, there is a lot of content on each page. I know there are easier ways to do this like utilizing software (OCR) that converts the image to text. But, I am enjoying reading it as I am typing.
The bishops, all but one, whom we shall presently see dying on the scaffold rather than abandon his integrity, were terrified into acquiescence, or, at least, into silence. But there were many of the parochial clergy, and a large part of the monks and friars, who were not thus acquiescent or silent. These, by their sermons, and by their conversations, made the truth pretty generally known to the people at large; though they did not succeed in preventing the Calamites which they saw approaching, they rescued the character of their country from the infamy of silent submission.
Of all the duties of the historian, the most sacred is that of recording the conduct of those who have stood forward to defend helpless innocence against the attacks of powerful guilt. This duty calls on me to make particular mention of the conduct of two friars, Peyto and Elstow. The former, preaching before the King at Greenwhich, just previous to his marriage with Anne, and, taking for his text the passage in the first book of Kings, where Micaiah prophesies against Ahab, who was surrounded with flatterers and lying prophets, said, “I am that Michaiah whom you will hate because I must tell truly, that the marriage is unlawful; and I know that I shall eat the bread of affliction, and drink the waters of sorrow; yet because our Lord hath put it in my mouth I must speak it. Your flatterers are the four hundred prophets, who, in the spirit of lying, seek to deceive you. But take heed, lest you, being seduced, find Ahab’s punishment, which was to have his blood licked up by dogs. It is one of the greatest miseries in princes to be daily abused by flatterers.” The King took this reproof in silence; but the next Sunday, a Doct. Curwin preached in the same place before the King, and having called Peyto a dog, slanderer, base, beggarly friar, rebel, and traitor, and having said that he fled for fear and shame, Elstow, who was present, and who was a fellow friar of Peyto, called out aloud to Curwin, and said, “Good sir, you know that father Peyto is now gone to a provincial council at Canterbury, and not fled to fear of you; for to-morrow he will return. In the meanwhile, I am here, as an Micaiah, and will lay down my life to prove all those things true, which he hath taught out of holy scripture; and to this combat I challenge thee, before God and all equal judges; even unto thee, Curwin, I say, which art one of the four hundred false prophets, into whom the spirit of lying is entered, and seeketh by adultery, to establish a succession, betraying the King into endless perdition.”
Stowe, who relates this in his Chronicle, says that Elstow “waxed hot, so that they could not make him cease his speech, until the King himself bade him hold his peace.” The two friars were brought the next day before the King’s council, who rebuked them, and told them that they deserved to be put into a sack and thrown into the Thames. “Whereupon, Elstow said, smiling, Threaten these things to rich and dainty persons, who are clothed in purple, far deliciously, and have their chiefest hope in this world; for we esteem not, but are joyful, that for the discharge our duty, we are driven hence, and, with thanks to God, we know the way to heaven to be as ready by water as by land.”
The stand made against him by these two poor friars was the only instance of bold and open resistance until he had actually got into his murders and robberies; and seeing that there never was yet found even a Protestant pen, except the vile pen of Burnet, to offer so much as an apology for the deeds of this tyrant, one would think that the heroic virtue of Peyto and Elstow ought to be sufficient to make us hesitate before we talk of “monkish ignorance and superstition.” Recollect, that there was no wild fanaticism in the conduct of those men; that they could not be actuated by any selfish motive; that they stood forward in the cause of morality, and in defence of a person whom they had never personally known, and that too, with the certainty of incurring the most severe punishments, if not death itself. Before their conduct, how the heroism of the Hampdens and the Russells sinks from our sight!
To deny the King’s supremacy, was made high treason, and to refuse to take an oath acknowledging that supremacy, was deemed a denial of it. Sir Thomas More, who was the Lord Chancellor, and John Fisher, who was Bishop of Rochester, were put to death for refusing to take this oath. Of all men in England, these were the two most famed for learning, for integrity, for piety, and for long and faithful services to the King and his father. It is the refusal of our Catholic fellow subjects to take this same oath, rather than take which, More and Fisher died; it is the cause of all that cruel treatment which the Irish people have so long endured, and to put an end to which ill treatment they are now so arduously struggling; knowing that it is on this very point that the fate of England herself may rest in case of another war.
We shall presently see that unity and what peace there were in England the moment that the King became the heard of the church.
To give this supremacy to a King, is, to give it occasionally to a woman; and still more frequently to a child, even to a baby. We shall very soon see it devolve on a boy, nine years of age, and we shall see the monstrous effects that it produced. But if his present majesty, and all his royal brothers were to die to-morrow, (and they are all mortal,) we should see it devolve on a little girl, only five years old. She would be the “one shepherd;” she, according to the “established” creed, repeated every Sunday, would be head of the holy Catholic church! She would have a council of regency. Oh! then there would be a whole troop of shepherds.
As to the Pope’s interference with the authority of the king or state, the sham plea set up was, that he divided the government with the King, to whom belonged the sole supremacy with regard to every thing within his realm. This doctrine pushed home would shut out Jesus Christ himself, and make the King an object of adoration. Spiritual and temporal authority are perfectly distinct in their nature, and ought so to be kept in their exercise; and that, too, not only for the sake of religion, but also for the sake of civil liberty.
Before the “Reformation,” England never knew, and never dreamed of such a thing, as a standing soldier; since that event she has never, in reality, known what it was to be without such soldiers: till, at last, a standing army, even in time of profound peace, is openly avowed to be necessary to the “preservation of our happy constitution in Church and State.”
The false pretense of Protestant Priestcraft that was was called “the Reformation” rescued England from the tyranny of the dark ages and gave rise to free institutions, is thus exploded by Cobbett:
Whence came those laws of England, which Lord Coke calls “the birth-right” of Englishmen, and which each of the States of America, declare, in their constitutions, to be, “the birth-right of the people thereof?” Whence came these laws? Are thy of Protestant origin? Did Protestants establish the three courts and the twelve judges, to which establishment, though, like all other institutions, it has sometimes worked evil, England owes so large a portion of her fame and her greatness? Oh, no! This institution arose when the Pope’s supremacy was in full vigor. It was not a gift from Scotchmen nor Dutchmen nor Hessians; from Lutherans, Calvinists, or Hugenots; but was the work of our Catholic ancestors.
If, however, we still insist, that Romanism produced ignorance, superstition and slavery, let us act the part of sincere, consistent and honest men. Let us knock down, or blow up, the cathedrals and colleges, and old churches; let us sweep away the three courts, the twelve judges, the circuits and the jury boxes; let us demolish all that we inherit from those whose religion we so unrelentingly persecute, and whose memory we affect so heartily to despise; let us demolish all this, and we shall have left, all our own, the capacious jails, and penitentiaries; the stock exchange; the hot and ankle and knee-swelling and lung-swelling cotton factories; the whiskered standing army and its splendid barracks; the parson-captains, parson-lieutenants, parson-ensigns, and parson-justices; the poor-rates and the pauper houses; and, by no means forgetting, that blessing which is peculiarly and doubly, and “gloriously” Protestant, the National Debt. Ah! people of England, how have you been deceived!
Yet, how long have we had “Papal usurpation and tyranny” dinned in our ears! How as the Pope to be an usurper, or tyrant, in England? He had no fleet, no army, no judge, no sheriff, no justice of the peace, not even a single constable or beadle at his command. We have been told of “the thunders of the Vatican,” till we have almost believed, that the Pope’s residence as in the skies; and, if we had believed it quite, the belief would not have surpassed in folly our belief in numerous other stories, hatched by the gentry of the “Reformation.” The truth is, that the Pope had no power (in England) but that which e derived from the free will of the people.
Amongst the first victims of the “Reformation” under Henry VIII., were Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher, as previously stated. The former had been the Lord High Chancellor for many years. The character given of him by his contemporaries, and by every one to the present day, is that of as great perfection, for learning, integrity, and piety, as it is possible for a human being to possess. He was the greatest lawyer of his age, a long tried, and most faithful servant of the king and his father, and was, besides, so highly distinguished beyond men in general, for his gentleness and humility of manners, as well as for his talents and abilities, that his murder gave a shock to all Europe. Fisher was equally eminent in point of learning, piety, and integrity. He was the only surviving privy councilor of the late King, whose mother (the grandmother of Henry VIII.) having outlived her son and daughter, besought, with her dying breath, the young King, to listen particularly to the advice of this learned pious and venerable prelate; and, until that advice thwarted his brutal passions, he was in the habit of saying, that no other prince he could boast of a subject to be compared with Fisher. He used, at the council-board, to take him by the hand, and call him father; marks of favor and affection which the bishop repaid by zeal and devotion which knew no bounds other than those prescribed by his duty to God, his King, and his country. But, that sacred duty bade him object to the divorce, and to the King’s supremacy; and then, the tyrant, forgetting at once all his services, all his devotion, all his unparalleled attachment, sent him to the block, after fifteen months’ imprisonment, during which he lay, worse than a common felon, buried in filth, and almost destitute of food; sent him, who had been his boast and whom he called his father, to perish under the axe; dragged him forth, with limbs tottering under him, his venerable face and hoary locks begrimed, and his nakedness scarcely covered with the rags left on his body; dragged him thus forth to the scaffold, and, even when the life was gone, left hi to lie on that scaffold like a dead dog! Savage monster!
And yet, the calculating, cold-blooded and brazen Burnet has the audacity to say, that “such a man as Henry VIII., was necessary to being about the Reformation!” He means, of course, that such measures as those of Henry VIII., were necessary; and, if they were necessary, what must be the nature and tendency of that “Reformation!”
The work was now begun, and it proceeded with steady pace. All who refused to take the oath of supremacy, were considered, and treated as traitors, and made to suffer death, accompanied with every possible cruelty and indignity. As a specimen of the works of Burnet’s necessary reformer, and to spare the reader repetition on the subject, let us take the treatment of John Houghton, Prior of the Charter-house in London, which was then a convent of Carthusian monks. This prior, for having refused to take the oath, which, observe, he could not take, without committing perjury, was dragged to Tyburn. He was scarcely suspended, when the rope was cut, and he fell alive on the ground. His clothes were then ripped off; his bowels were ripped up; his heart and entrails were torn from his body, and flung into a fire; his head was cut from his body; the body was divided into four quarters and par-boiled; the quarters were then sub-divided and hung up in different parts of the city; and one arm was nailed to the wall, over the entrance into the monastery!
Such were the means, which Burnet says, were necessary to introduce the Protestant religion into England! These horrid butcheries were perpetrated, mind, under the primacy of Fox’s great martyr, Cranmer, and with the active agency of another great ruffian, named Thomas Cromwell, whom we shall soon see sharing with Cranmer the work of plunder, and finally sharing, too, in his disgraceful end.
Before we enter on the grand subject of plunder, which was the mainspring of the “Reformation,” we must follow the King and his primate through their murders of Protestants as well as Catholics. Protestant was a name given tot hose who declared, or protested against the Catholic church. This work of protesting was begun in Germany, in the year 1517, by a friar, whose name was Martin Luther, and who belonged to a convent of Augustin friars in the electorate of Saxony. At this time, the Pope had authorized the preaching of certain indulgences, and this business had been entrusted to the order of Domincians, and not to the order to which Luther belonged, and to which it had been usual to commit such trust. Here was one of the motives from which Luther’s opposition to the Pope provided. He found a protector in his sovereign, the Elector of Saxony, who appears to have had as strong a relish for plunder as that with which our English Tyrant, and his courtiers and Parliament were seized a few years afterwards.
All accounts agree that Luther was a most profligate man. To change his religion he might have thought himself called by his conscience; but conscience could not call upon him to be guilty of all the abominable deeds of which he stands convicted, even by his own confessions, of which I shall speak more fully, when I come to the proper place for giving an account of the numerous sects into which the Protestants were divided. But, just observing, that the Protestant sects had, at the time we are speaking of, spread themselves over a part of Germany, and got into Switzerland, and some other states of the continent, we must now, before we state more particulars relating to Luther, see how the King of England dealt with those of his Protestant subjects who did not acknowledge his spiritual supremacy.
We naturally at first thought, think it strange, that Henry VIII., did not instantly become a zealous Protestant; did not become one of the most devoted disciples of Luther. He would certainly; but Luther began his “Reformation” a few years too soon for the King. In 1517, when Luther began his works, the King had been married to his first wife only eight years; and he had not then conceived any project of divorce. If Luther had begun twelve years later, the King would have been a Protestant at once, especially after seeing that this new religion allowed Luther and seven others of his brother leaders in the “Reformation” to grant under their hands, a license to the Langrave of Hesse to have two wives at one and the same time! So complaisant a religion would have been, and doubtless was, at the time of the divorce, precisely to the King’s taste; but, as I have just observed, it came twelve years too soon for him; for not only had he not adopted this religion, but had opposed it as a sovereign; and, which was a still more serious affair, had opposed it as an author! He had, in 1521, written a book against it. His vanity, his pride, were engaged in the contest; to which may be added, that Luther, in answering his book, had called him “a pig, an ass, a dunghill, the spawn of an adder, a basilisk, a lying buffoon dressed in a king’s robes, a mad fool with a frothy mouth and a whorish face;” and had afterwards said to him, “you lie, you stupid and sacrilegious king.”
Therefore, though the tyrant was bend on destroying the Catholic church, he was not less bent on the extirpation of the followers of Luther and his new sect. Always under the influence of some selfish and base motive or other, he was with regard to the Protestants, set to work by revenge, as in the case of the Catholics he had been set to work by lust, if not lust to be gratified by incest. To follow him step by step, and in minute detail, throughout all his butcheries and all his burnings would be to familiarize one’s mind to a human slaughter-house, and a cookery of cannibals. I shall, therefore, confine myself to a general view of his works in this way.
His book against Luther had acquired him the title of “Defender of the Faith.” of which we shall see more by-and-by. He could not, therefore, without recantation, be a protestant, and, indeed, his pride would not suffer him to become the proselyte of a man who had, in print, too, proclaimed him to be a pig, an ass, a fool and a liar. Yet he could not pretend to be a Catholic. He was, therefore, compelled to make a religion of his own. This was doing nothing, unless he enforced its adoption by what he called law. Laws were made by him and by his servile and plundering Parliament, making it heresy in, and condemning to the flames, all who did not expressly conform, by acts, as well as by declarations, to the faith and worship, which, as head of the church, he invented and ordained. Amongst his tenets, there were such as neither Catholics nor Protestants could consistently with their creeds adopt. He, therefore, sent both to the stake, and sometimes, in order to add mental pangs to those of the body, he dragged them to the fire on the same hurdle, tied together in pairs, back to back, each pair containing a Catholic and a Protestant. Yet, such is the malignity of Burnet, and of many, many others called Protestant “divines,” that they apologize for, if they do not absolutely applaud this execrable tyrant, at the very moment that they are compelled to confess that he soaked the earth with Protestant blood, and filled the air with the fumes of their roasting flesh.
Throughout the whole of this bloody work, Cranmer, who was the primate of the king’s religion, was consenting to, sanctioning, and aiding and abetting in, the murdering of Protestants as well as of Catholics; although, and I pray you to mark it well, Hume, Tillotson, Burnet, and all his long lists of eulogists, say, and make it a matter of merit in him, that all this while, he was himself, a sincere Protestant in his heart! And, indeed, we shall by-and-by see him openly avowing those very tenets, for the holding of which he had been instrumental in sending, without regard to age or sex, others to perish in the flames. The progress of this man in the paths of infamy, needed incontestable proof to reconcile the human mind to a belief in it. Before he became a pries, he had married; after he became a priest, and had taken the oath of celibacy, he, then being in Germany, and having become a Protestant, married another wife, while the first was still alive. Being the primate of Henry’s church, was still forbade the clergy to have wives, and which held them to their oath of celibacy, he had his wife brought to England, in a chest, with holes bored in it to give her air! As the cargo was destined for Canterbury, it was landed at Gravesend, where the sailors, not apprised of the contents of the chest, set it up one end, and the wrong end downwards, and had nearly broken the neck of the poor frow! Here is quite enough to fill us with disgust; but, when we reflect, that this same primate, while he had under his “frow” and her litter, was engaged in assisting to send Protestants to the flames, because they dissented from a system that forbade the clergy to have wives, we swell with indignation, not against Cranmer, for though there are so many of his atrocious deeds yet to come, he has exhausted our store; not against those who are called “divines,” and who are the eulogists of Cranmer; against Burnet, who says, that Cranmer, “did all with a good conscience;” and against Dr. Sturges, or rather the Dean and Chapter of Winchester, who clubbed their “talents” in getting up the “Reflections on Popery,” who talk of the “respectable Cranmer,” and who have the audacity to put him, in point of integrity, upon a level with Sir Thomas More! As Dr. Milner, in his answer to Sturges, observes, they resembled each other in that the name of both was Thomas; but, in all other things, the dissimilarity was as great as that which the most vivid imagination can ascribe to the dissimilarity between hell and heaven.
The infamy of Cranmer in assisting in sending people to the flames for entertaining opinions, which he afterwards professed that he himself entertained at the time that he was so sending them, can be surpassed by nothing of which human depravity is capable; and it can be equaled by nothing but that of the king, who, while he was laying the axe to the root of the Catholic faith, still styled himself its defender! He was not, let it be borne in mind, defender of what he might, as others have, since his day, and in his day, called the Christian faith. He received the title from the Pope, as a reward for his written defence of the Catholic faith against Luther. The Pope conferred on him this title which was to descend to his posterity. The title was give by Pope Leo X., in a bull, or edict, beginning with these words: “Leo, servant of the servants of the Lord, to his most dear son, Henry, King of England, Defender of the Faith, all health and happiness.” The bull then goes on to say, that the king, having, in defense of the faith of the Catholic church written a book against Martin Luther, the Pope and his council had determined to confer on him, and his successors, the title of “Defender of the Faith.” “We,” says the bull, “sitting in this Holy See, having, with mature deliberation, considered the business with our brethren, do, with unanimous council and consent, grant unto your Majesty, your heirs and successors, the title of Defender of the Faith; which we do, by these presents, confirm unto you; commanding all the faithful to give your Majesty this title.”
What are we to think, then, of the man who could continue to wear this title, while he was causing to be acted before him, a farce in which the Pope and his council were exposed to derision, and was burning and ripping up the bowels of people by the scores, only because they remained firm in that faith of which he had still the odious effrontery to call himself the Defender! All justice, every thing like law, every moral thought must have been banished before such monstrous enormity could have been suffered to exist. They were all banished from the seat of power. An iron despotism had, as we shall see, in the next chapter, come to supply the place of the papal supremacy. Civil liberty was wholly gone; no man had anything that he could call property; and no one could look upon his life as safe for twenty-four hours.
But there is a little more to be said about this title of Defender of the Faith, which, for some reason or other that one can hardly discover, seems to have been, down to our time, a singularly great favorite. Edward VI., though his two “Protectors” who succeeded each other in that office, and whose guilty heads we shall gladly see succeeding each other on the block, abolished the Catholic faith by law; though the Protestant faith was, with the help of foreign troops, established, in its stead, and though the greedy ruffians of his time, robbed the very altars, under the pretext of extirpating that very faith, of which this title called him the Defender, continued to wear this title throughout his reign. Elizabeth continued to wear this title during her long reign of “mischief and misery,” as Whitaker justly calls it, though, during the whole of that reign, she was busily employed in persecuting, in ruining, in ripping up the bowels of those who entertained that faith, of which she styled herself the Defender, in which she herself had been born, in which she had lived for many years, and to which she adhered, openly and privately, till her self-interest called upon her to abandon it. She continued to wear this title while she was tearing the bowls out of her subjects for hearing mass; while she was refusing the last comforts of the Catholic religion to her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scotland, whom she put to death by mockery of law and justice, after, as Whitaker has fully proved, having long endeavored, in vain, to find amongst her subjects, a man base and bloody enough to take her victim off by assassination. This title was worn by that mean creature, James I., who took, as his chief councilor, the right worthy son of that father who had been the chief contriver of the murder of his innocent mother, and whose reign was one unbroken series of base plots and cruel persecutions of all who professed the Catholic faith. But, not to anticipate further matter, which will, hereafter, find a more suitable place, we may observe, that, amongst all English kings, the only real Defender of the Faith since the reign of Mary, have been Georges II.I, and IV., the former by assenting to a repeal of a part of the penal code and by his appointing a special commission to try, condemn, and execute the leaders of the ferocious mob who set fire to, and who wished to sack London, in 1780, with the cry of “No Popery” in their mouths, and from pretended zeal for the Protestant religion; and the latter, by his sending, in 1814, a body of English troops to assist as a guard of honor at the re-installment of the Pope.
It is time, now, after giving a rapid sketch of the progress which the tyrant had made in prostrating the liberties of his people, and in dispatching more of his wives, to enter on the grand scene of plunder, and to recount the miseries which immediately followed.
We have seen, then, that the “Reformation” was engendered in a beastly lust, brought forth in hypocrisy and perfidy, and we have had some specimens of the acts by which it caused innocent blood to be shed. We shall now see how it devastated and plundered the country, what pverty and misery it produced, and how it laid the sure foundation for that pauperism, that disgraceful immorality, that fearful prevalence of crimes of all sorts, which now so strongly mark the character of this nation, which was formerly the land of virtue and of plenty.
When we left the king and Cranmer at their bloody work, we had come to the year 1536, and to the 27th year of the king’s reign. In the year 1528, an act had been passed to exempt the king from paying any sum of money that he might have borrowed; another act followed this, for a similar purpose, and thus thousands were ruined. His new queen, Jane Seymour, brought him, in 1537, a son, who was afterwards king, under the title of Edward VI.; but this mother died in child-birth, and according to Sir Richard Baker, “had her body ripped up to preserve the child!” In this great “Reformation” man all was of a piece; all was consistent; he seemed never to have any compassion for the suffering of any human being; and this is a characteristic which Whitaker gives to his daughter Elizabeth.
Having a son for a successor, he, with his Parliament, enacted, in 1537, that Mary and Elizabeth, his two daughters, were bastards, and that, in case of a want of lawful issue, the king should be enabled by letters patent, or by his last will, to give the crown to whomsoever he pleased! To cap the whole, to complete a series of acts of tyranny such as was never before heard of, it was enacted in 1537, and in the twenty-eighth year of his reign, that, except in cases of mere private right, “the king’s Proclamations should be of the same force as Acts of Parliament!1 Thus, then, all law and justice were laid prostrated at the feet of a single man, and that man a man with whom law was a mockery, on whom the name of justice was a libel, and to whom mercy was wholly unknown.
It is easy to imagine that no man’s property or life could have security with power like this in the hands of such a man. Magna Charta had been trampled under foot. The famous act of Edward III., for the security of the people against unfounded charges of high treason, [“Habeas Corpus,”] was wholly set aside. Numerous things were made high treason, which were never before thought criminal at all. The trials were for a long while a mere mockery; and, at last they were altogether, in many cases laid aside, and the accused were condemned to death, not only without being arraigned and heard in their defense; but in numer-case without being apprized of the crimes, or pretended crimes, for which they were executed. We have read of Deys of Algiers, and of Beys of Tunis; but never heard of them, even in the most exaggerated accounts, deeds to be, in point of injustice and cruelty, compared with those of him, whom Burnet calls “the first-born son of the English ‘Reformation.’” The objects of his bloody cruelty generally were, as they naturally would be, chosen from amongst the most virtuous of his subjects; because from them, such a man had the most to dread. Of these, his axe hewed down whole families and circles of friends. He spared neither sex nor age, if the parties possessed, or were suspected of possessing that integrity which made them disapprove of his deeds. To look awry excited his suspicion, and his suspicion, was death. England, before his bloody reign, so happy, so free, knowing so little of crime as to present, to the judges of assize, scarcely three criminals in a county in a year, now saw upwards of sixty thousand persons shut up in her jails at one and the same time. The purlieus of the court of this “first-born of the Reformation” were a great human slaughter-house, his people, deserted by their natural leaders, who had been bribed by plunder, or the hope of plunder, were the terrified and trembling flock, while he, the master butcher, fat and jocose, sat in his palace issuing orders for the slaughter, while his High Priest, Cranmer, stood ready to sanction and to sanctify all his deeds.
A detail of these butcheries could only disgust and weary the reader. One instance, however, must not be omitted; namely, the slaughtering of the relations, and particularly the mother of Cardinal Pole. The Cardinal, who had, when very young and before the king’s first divorce had been agitated, been a great favorite with the king, and pursued his studies and travels on the Continent at the king’s expense, disapproved of the divorce, and of all the acts that followed it; and, though called home by the king, he refused to obey. He was a man of great learning, talent, and virtue, and his opinions had great weight in England. His mother the Countess of Salisbury, was descended from the Plantagenets, and was the last living descendant of that long race of English kings. So that the Cardinal, who had been by the Pope raised to that dignity, on account of his great learning and eminent virtues, was thus a relation of the king, as his mother was of course, and she was, too, the nearest of all his relations. But the Cardinal was opposed to the kings proceedings; and that was enough to excite and put in motion, the deadly vengeance of the latter. Many were the arts that he made use of, and great in amount was the treasure of his people that he expended, in order to bring the Cardinal’s person within his grasp; and these having failed, he resolved to wreak his ruthless vengeance on his kindred and his aged mother. She was charged by the base Thomas Cromwell, (of whom we shall soon see enough) with having persuaded her tenants not to read the new translations of the Bible, and also with having received bulls from Rome, which, the accuser said, were found at Courdray House, her seat in Sussex. Cromwell also showed a banner, which had, he said, been used by certain rebels in the North, and which he said he found in her house. All this was, however, so very barefaced, that it was impossible to think of a trial. The judges were then asked, whether the Parliament could not attaint her; that is to say condemn her, without a hearing? The judges said that it was a dangerous matter; that they could not, in their courts, act in this manner, and that they thought the Parliament never would. But, being asked, whether, if the Parliament were to do it, it would remain good in law, they answered in the affirmative. That we enough. A bill was brought in, and thus was the Countess, together with the Marchioness of Exter and two gentlemen, relations of the Cardinal, condemned to death. The two latter were executed, the Marchioness was pardoned, and the Countess shut up in prison of a sort of hostage for the conduct of her son. In a few months, however, an insurrection having broken out on account of his tyrannical acts, the king chose to suspect, that the rebels had been instigated by Cardinal Pole, and forth he dragged his mother to the scaffold. She, who was upwards of seventy years of age, though worn down in body by her imprisonment, maintained to the last, a true sense of her character and noble descent. When bidden to lay her head upon the block: “No,” answered she, “my head shall never bow to tyranny; it never committed treason; and, if you will have it, you must get it as you can.” The executioner struck at her neck with his axe, and, as she ran about the scaffold with her grey locks hanging down her shoulders and breast, he pursued, giving her repeated chops, till at last he brought her down!
It is a scene in Turkey or Tripoli that we are contemplating? No; but in England, where Magna Charta had been so lately in force, where nothing could have been done contrary to law; but all power, ecclesiastical, as well as lay, being placed in the hands of one man, bloody butcheries like that which would have roused even a Turkish populace to resistance, could be perpetrated without the smallest danger to the perpetrator. Hume, in his remarks upon the state of the people in this reign, pretends, that the people never hated the king, and “that he he seems, even, in some degree, to have possessed to the last, their love and affection.” He adds, that it may be said with truth, that the “English, in that age, were so thoroughly subdued, that, like eastern slaves, they were inclined to admire even those acts of violence and tyranny, which were exercised over themselves, and at their own expense.” This lying historian every where endeavors to gloss over the deeds of those who were prominent in the “Reformation,” both in England and Scotland. Too cunning, however, to applaud the bloody Henry himself, he would have us believe that after all , there was something amiable about him, and this belief he would have us found on the fact of his having been to the last, seemingly blessed by his people.
Nothing can be more false than this assertion, if repeated insurrections against him, accompanied with the most bitter complaints and reproaches, be not to be taken as marks of popular affection. And, as to the remark, that the English, “in that age were so thoroughly subdued,” while it seems to refute the assertion as to their affection for the tyrant, it is a slander, which the envious Scotch writers all delight to put forth and repeat. It did not occur to him, that this sanguinary tyrant was not effectually resisted, as king John and other bad kings had been, because this tyrant had the means of bribing the natural leaders o the people to take part against them; or, at the least, to neutralize those leaders. It did not occur to him to tell us, that Henry VIII., found the English as gallant and just a people as his ancestors had found them; but that, having divided them, having, by holding out to the great, an enormous mass of plunder as a reward for abandoning the rights of the people, the people became, as every people without leaders must become, a mere flock, or herd, to be dealt with at pleasure. The malignity and envy of this Scotchman blinded him to this view of the matter, and induced him to ascribe to the people’s admiration of tyranny, that submission, which, after repeated struggles, they yielded, merely from the want of those leaders, of whom they were not, for the first time, wholly deprived. What! have we never known any country, consisting of several millions of people, oppressed and insulted, even for ages, by a mere handful of men? And are we to conclude, that such a country submits, from the admiration of the tyranny under which they groan? Did the English submit to Cromwell from admiration; and, was it from admiration that the French submitted to Robespierre? The latter was punished, but Cromwell was not; he, like Henry, died in his bed; but, to what mind, except to that of the most malignant and perverse, would it occur, that Cromwell’s impunity arose from the willing submission, and the admiration of the people?
Of the means by which the natural leaders of the people were seduced from them; of the kind and the amount of the prize of plunder, we are now going to take a view. The “Reformation” was cherished and fed by plunder and devastation. It was not a Reformation, but a devastation of England; and this devastation impoverished and degraded the main body of the people.
We have seen how monasteries arose, and what sort of institutions they were. They were, in England, at the time we are speaking of, six hundred and forty-five of these institutions, besides ninety colleges, one hundred and ten hospitals, and two thousand three hundred and seventy-four chanteries and free chapels. The whole were seized on, first and last, taken into the hands of the king, and by him granted to those who aided and abetted him in the work of plunder.
This was a great mass of landed property; not by any means used for the sole benefit of monks, friars, and nuns; for the far greater part, its rents flowed immediately back amongst the people at large; and if it had never been an object of plunder, England never would, and never could have heard the hideous sound of the words pauper and poor rate.
Here is the second chapter of the book entitled "History of Protestant Priest-Craft in America and Europe" written by Elder Gilbert Beebe.
I hope you enjoyed the first part! It definitely puts a new spin on what I have heard and been taught of the "Reformation".
I still ask for your assistance in catching any spelling errors that might have occurred as I was typing this out. When I went to copy this chapter into the email I noticed two so I if I had to guess I would say that there are more that I have missed.
Also, I wanted to clarify something that I believe I mistakenly stated. I believe I stated at one time in the past that the "Banner of Liberty" was edited by Gilbert's son William. I now don't believe that to be true and I have no idea why I thought that. But Elder Gilbert Beebe is the editor of the "Banner of Liberty" along with being the editor of the "Signs of the Times." My apologies for giving you all incorrect information.
A Sinner in Hope,
Tom
P.S., just to let you know of my total progress so far. I am currently on page 22 of 68 in the original and page 71 in the typed out version with using 12pt for the font size. I have a copy of an old two-year compilation of the "SIGNS OF THE TIMES" that is 15" x 11" with four columns on each page and very tiny print (maybe 8pt?). I would assume that is the same size as the original that I am copying from which also has four columns. So, there is a lot of content on each page. I know there are easier ways to do this like utilizing software (OCR) that converts the image to text. But, I am enjoying reading it as I am typing.
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THE HISTORY OF PROTESTANT
PRIEST-CRAFT IN AMERICA AND EUROPE
Elder Gilbert Beebe
BANNER OF LIBERTY
1865
Elder Gilbert Beebe
BANNER OF LIBERTY
1865
The bishops, all but one, whom we shall presently see dying on the scaffold rather than abandon his integrity, were terrified into acquiescence, or, at least, into silence. But there were many of the parochial clergy, and a large part of the monks and friars, who were not thus acquiescent or silent. These, by their sermons, and by their conversations, made the truth pretty generally known to the people at large; though they did not succeed in preventing the Calamites which they saw approaching, they rescued the character of their country from the infamy of silent submission.
Of all the duties of the historian, the most sacred is that of recording the conduct of those who have stood forward to defend helpless innocence against the attacks of powerful guilt. This duty calls on me to make particular mention of the conduct of two friars, Peyto and Elstow. The former, preaching before the King at Greenwhich, just previous to his marriage with Anne, and, taking for his text the passage in the first book of Kings, where Micaiah prophesies against Ahab, who was surrounded with flatterers and lying prophets, said, “I am that Michaiah whom you will hate because I must tell truly, that the marriage is unlawful; and I know that I shall eat the bread of affliction, and drink the waters of sorrow; yet because our Lord hath put it in my mouth I must speak it. Your flatterers are the four hundred prophets, who, in the spirit of lying, seek to deceive you. But take heed, lest you, being seduced, find Ahab’s punishment, which was to have his blood licked up by dogs. It is one of the greatest miseries in princes to be daily abused by flatterers.” The King took this reproof in silence; but the next Sunday, a Doct. Curwin preached in the same place before the King, and having called Peyto a dog, slanderer, base, beggarly friar, rebel, and traitor, and having said that he fled for fear and shame, Elstow, who was present, and who was a fellow friar of Peyto, called out aloud to Curwin, and said, “Good sir, you know that father Peyto is now gone to a provincial council at Canterbury, and not fled to fear of you; for to-morrow he will return. In the meanwhile, I am here, as an Micaiah, and will lay down my life to prove all those things true, which he hath taught out of holy scripture; and to this combat I challenge thee, before God and all equal judges; even unto thee, Curwin, I say, which art one of the four hundred false prophets, into whom the spirit of lying is entered, and seeketh by adultery, to establish a succession, betraying the King into endless perdition.”
Stowe, who relates this in his Chronicle, says that Elstow “waxed hot, so that they could not make him cease his speech, until the King himself bade him hold his peace.” The two friars were brought the next day before the King’s council, who rebuked them, and told them that they deserved to be put into a sack and thrown into the Thames. “Whereupon, Elstow said, smiling, Threaten these things to rich and dainty persons, who are clothed in purple, far deliciously, and have their chiefest hope in this world; for we esteem not, but are joyful, that for the discharge our duty, we are driven hence, and, with thanks to God, we know the way to heaven to be as ready by water as by land.”
The stand made against him by these two poor friars was the only instance of bold and open resistance until he had actually got into his murders and robberies; and seeing that there never was yet found even a Protestant pen, except the vile pen of Burnet, to offer so much as an apology for the deeds of this tyrant, one would think that the heroic virtue of Peyto and Elstow ought to be sufficient to make us hesitate before we talk of “monkish ignorance and superstition.” Recollect, that there was no wild fanaticism in the conduct of those men; that they could not be actuated by any selfish motive; that they stood forward in the cause of morality, and in defence of a person whom they had never personally known, and that too, with the certainty of incurring the most severe punishments, if not death itself. Before their conduct, how the heroism of the Hampdens and the Russells sinks from our sight!
To deny the King’s supremacy, was made high treason, and to refuse to take an oath acknowledging that supremacy, was deemed a denial of it. Sir Thomas More, who was the Lord Chancellor, and John Fisher, who was Bishop of Rochester, were put to death for refusing to take this oath. Of all men in England, these were the two most famed for learning, for integrity, for piety, and for long and faithful services to the King and his father. It is the refusal of our Catholic fellow subjects to take this same oath, rather than take which, More and Fisher died; it is the cause of all that cruel treatment which the Irish people have so long endured, and to put an end to which ill treatment they are now so arduously struggling; knowing that it is on this very point that the fate of England herself may rest in case of another war.
We shall presently see that unity and what peace there were in England the moment that the King became the heard of the church.
To give this supremacy to a King, is, to give it occasionally to a woman; and still more frequently to a child, even to a baby. We shall very soon see it devolve on a boy, nine years of age, and we shall see the monstrous effects that it produced. But if his present majesty, and all his royal brothers were to die to-morrow, (and they are all mortal,) we should see it devolve on a little girl, only five years old. She would be the “one shepherd;” she, according to the “established” creed, repeated every Sunday, would be head of the holy Catholic church! She would have a council of regency. Oh! then there would be a whole troop of shepherds.
As to the Pope’s interference with the authority of the king or state, the sham plea set up was, that he divided the government with the King, to whom belonged the sole supremacy with regard to every thing within his realm. This doctrine pushed home would shut out Jesus Christ himself, and make the King an object of adoration. Spiritual and temporal authority are perfectly distinct in their nature, and ought so to be kept in their exercise; and that, too, not only for the sake of religion, but also for the sake of civil liberty.
Before the “Reformation,” England never knew, and never dreamed of such a thing, as a standing soldier; since that event she has never, in reality, known what it was to be without such soldiers: till, at last, a standing army, even in time of profound peace, is openly avowed to be necessary to the “preservation of our happy constitution in Church and State.”
The false pretense of Protestant Priestcraft that was was called “the Reformation” rescued England from the tyranny of the dark ages and gave rise to free institutions, is thus exploded by Cobbett:
Whence came those laws of England, which Lord Coke calls “the birth-right” of Englishmen, and which each of the States of America, declare, in their constitutions, to be, “the birth-right of the people thereof?” Whence came these laws? Are thy of Protestant origin? Did Protestants establish the three courts and the twelve judges, to which establishment, though, like all other institutions, it has sometimes worked evil, England owes so large a portion of her fame and her greatness? Oh, no! This institution arose when the Pope’s supremacy was in full vigor. It was not a gift from Scotchmen nor Dutchmen nor Hessians; from Lutherans, Calvinists, or Hugenots; but was the work of our Catholic ancestors.
If, however, we still insist, that Romanism produced ignorance, superstition and slavery, let us act the part of sincere, consistent and honest men. Let us knock down, or blow up, the cathedrals and colleges, and old churches; let us sweep away the three courts, the twelve judges, the circuits and the jury boxes; let us demolish all that we inherit from those whose religion we so unrelentingly persecute, and whose memory we affect so heartily to despise; let us demolish all this, and we shall have left, all our own, the capacious jails, and penitentiaries; the stock exchange; the hot and ankle and knee-swelling and lung-swelling cotton factories; the whiskered standing army and its splendid barracks; the parson-captains, parson-lieutenants, parson-ensigns, and parson-justices; the poor-rates and the pauper houses; and, by no means forgetting, that blessing which is peculiarly and doubly, and “gloriously” Protestant, the National Debt. Ah! people of England, how have you been deceived!
Yet, how long have we had “Papal usurpation and tyranny” dinned in our ears! How as the Pope to be an usurper, or tyrant, in England? He had no fleet, no army, no judge, no sheriff, no justice of the peace, not even a single constable or beadle at his command. We have been told of “the thunders of the Vatican,” till we have almost believed, that the Pope’s residence as in the skies; and, if we had believed it quite, the belief would not have surpassed in folly our belief in numerous other stories, hatched by the gentry of the “Reformation.” The truth is, that the Pope had no power (in England) but that which e derived from the free will of the people.
Amongst the first victims of the “Reformation” under Henry VIII., were Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher, as previously stated. The former had been the Lord High Chancellor for many years. The character given of him by his contemporaries, and by every one to the present day, is that of as great perfection, for learning, integrity, and piety, as it is possible for a human being to possess. He was the greatest lawyer of his age, a long tried, and most faithful servant of the king and his father, and was, besides, so highly distinguished beyond men in general, for his gentleness and humility of manners, as well as for his talents and abilities, that his murder gave a shock to all Europe. Fisher was equally eminent in point of learning, piety, and integrity. He was the only surviving privy councilor of the late King, whose mother (the grandmother of Henry VIII.) having outlived her son and daughter, besought, with her dying breath, the young King, to listen particularly to the advice of this learned pious and venerable prelate; and, until that advice thwarted his brutal passions, he was in the habit of saying, that no other prince he could boast of a subject to be compared with Fisher. He used, at the council-board, to take him by the hand, and call him father; marks of favor and affection which the bishop repaid by zeal and devotion which knew no bounds other than those prescribed by his duty to God, his King, and his country. But, that sacred duty bade him object to the divorce, and to the King’s supremacy; and then, the tyrant, forgetting at once all his services, all his devotion, all his unparalleled attachment, sent him to the block, after fifteen months’ imprisonment, during which he lay, worse than a common felon, buried in filth, and almost destitute of food; sent him, who had been his boast and whom he called his father, to perish under the axe; dragged him forth, with limbs tottering under him, his venerable face and hoary locks begrimed, and his nakedness scarcely covered with the rags left on his body; dragged him thus forth to the scaffold, and, even when the life was gone, left hi to lie on that scaffold like a dead dog! Savage monster!
And yet, the calculating, cold-blooded and brazen Burnet has the audacity to say, that “such a man as Henry VIII., was necessary to being about the Reformation!” He means, of course, that such measures as those of Henry VIII., were necessary; and, if they were necessary, what must be the nature and tendency of that “Reformation!”
The work was now begun, and it proceeded with steady pace. All who refused to take the oath of supremacy, were considered, and treated as traitors, and made to suffer death, accompanied with every possible cruelty and indignity. As a specimen of the works of Burnet’s necessary reformer, and to spare the reader repetition on the subject, let us take the treatment of John Houghton, Prior of the Charter-house in London, which was then a convent of Carthusian monks. This prior, for having refused to take the oath, which, observe, he could not take, without committing perjury, was dragged to Tyburn. He was scarcely suspended, when the rope was cut, and he fell alive on the ground. His clothes were then ripped off; his bowels were ripped up; his heart and entrails were torn from his body, and flung into a fire; his head was cut from his body; the body was divided into four quarters and par-boiled; the quarters were then sub-divided and hung up in different parts of the city; and one arm was nailed to the wall, over the entrance into the monastery!
Such were the means, which Burnet says, were necessary to introduce the Protestant religion into England! These horrid butcheries were perpetrated, mind, under the primacy of Fox’s great martyr, Cranmer, and with the active agency of another great ruffian, named Thomas Cromwell, whom we shall soon see sharing with Cranmer the work of plunder, and finally sharing, too, in his disgraceful end.
Before we enter on the grand subject of plunder, which was the mainspring of the “Reformation,” we must follow the King and his primate through their murders of Protestants as well as Catholics. Protestant was a name given tot hose who declared, or protested against the Catholic church. This work of protesting was begun in Germany, in the year 1517, by a friar, whose name was Martin Luther, and who belonged to a convent of Augustin friars in the electorate of Saxony. At this time, the Pope had authorized the preaching of certain indulgences, and this business had been entrusted to the order of Domincians, and not to the order to which Luther belonged, and to which it had been usual to commit such trust. Here was one of the motives from which Luther’s opposition to the Pope provided. He found a protector in his sovereign, the Elector of Saxony, who appears to have had as strong a relish for plunder as that with which our English Tyrant, and his courtiers and Parliament were seized a few years afterwards.
All accounts agree that Luther was a most profligate man. To change his religion he might have thought himself called by his conscience; but conscience could not call upon him to be guilty of all the abominable deeds of which he stands convicted, even by his own confessions, of which I shall speak more fully, when I come to the proper place for giving an account of the numerous sects into which the Protestants were divided. But, just observing, that the Protestant sects had, at the time we are speaking of, spread themselves over a part of Germany, and got into Switzerland, and some other states of the continent, we must now, before we state more particulars relating to Luther, see how the King of England dealt with those of his Protestant subjects who did not acknowledge his spiritual supremacy.
We naturally at first thought, think it strange, that Henry VIII., did not instantly become a zealous Protestant; did not become one of the most devoted disciples of Luther. He would certainly; but Luther began his “Reformation” a few years too soon for the King. In 1517, when Luther began his works, the King had been married to his first wife only eight years; and he had not then conceived any project of divorce. If Luther had begun twelve years later, the King would have been a Protestant at once, especially after seeing that this new religion allowed Luther and seven others of his brother leaders in the “Reformation” to grant under their hands, a license to the Langrave of Hesse to have two wives at one and the same time! So complaisant a religion would have been, and doubtless was, at the time of the divorce, precisely to the King’s taste; but, as I have just observed, it came twelve years too soon for him; for not only had he not adopted this religion, but had opposed it as a sovereign; and, which was a still more serious affair, had opposed it as an author! He had, in 1521, written a book against it. His vanity, his pride, were engaged in the contest; to which may be added, that Luther, in answering his book, had called him “a pig, an ass, a dunghill, the spawn of an adder, a basilisk, a lying buffoon dressed in a king’s robes, a mad fool with a frothy mouth and a whorish face;” and had afterwards said to him, “you lie, you stupid and sacrilegious king.”
Therefore, though the tyrant was bend on destroying the Catholic church, he was not less bent on the extirpation of the followers of Luther and his new sect. Always under the influence of some selfish and base motive or other, he was with regard to the Protestants, set to work by revenge, as in the case of the Catholics he had been set to work by lust, if not lust to be gratified by incest. To follow him step by step, and in minute detail, throughout all his butcheries and all his burnings would be to familiarize one’s mind to a human slaughter-house, and a cookery of cannibals. I shall, therefore, confine myself to a general view of his works in this way.
His book against Luther had acquired him the title of “Defender of the Faith.” of which we shall see more by-and-by. He could not, therefore, without recantation, be a protestant, and, indeed, his pride would not suffer him to become the proselyte of a man who had, in print, too, proclaimed him to be a pig, an ass, a fool and a liar. Yet he could not pretend to be a Catholic. He was, therefore, compelled to make a religion of his own. This was doing nothing, unless he enforced its adoption by what he called law. Laws were made by him and by his servile and plundering Parliament, making it heresy in, and condemning to the flames, all who did not expressly conform, by acts, as well as by declarations, to the faith and worship, which, as head of the church, he invented and ordained. Amongst his tenets, there were such as neither Catholics nor Protestants could consistently with their creeds adopt. He, therefore, sent both to the stake, and sometimes, in order to add mental pangs to those of the body, he dragged them to the fire on the same hurdle, tied together in pairs, back to back, each pair containing a Catholic and a Protestant. Yet, such is the malignity of Burnet, and of many, many others called Protestant “divines,” that they apologize for, if they do not absolutely applaud this execrable tyrant, at the very moment that they are compelled to confess that he soaked the earth with Protestant blood, and filled the air with the fumes of their roasting flesh.
Throughout the whole of this bloody work, Cranmer, who was the primate of the king’s religion, was consenting to, sanctioning, and aiding and abetting in, the murdering of Protestants as well as of Catholics; although, and I pray you to mark it well, Hume, Tillotson, Burnet, and all his long lists of eulogists, say, and make it a matter of merit in him, that all this while, he was himself, a sincere Protestant in his heart! And, indeed, we shall by-and-by see him openly avowing those very tenets, for the holding of which he had been instrumental in sending, without regard to age or sex, others to perish in the flames. The progress of this man in the paths of infamy, needed incontestable proof to reconcile the human mind to a belief in it. Before he became a pries, he had married; after he became a priest, and had taken the oath of celibacy, he, then being in Germany, and having become a Protestant, married another wife, while the first was still alive. Being the primate of Henry’s church, was still forbade the clergy to have wives, and which held them to their oath of celibacy, he had his wife brought to England, in a chest, with holes bored in it to give her air! As the cargo was destined for Canterbury, it was landed at Gravesend, where the sailors, not apprised of the contents of the chest, set it up one end, and the wrong end downwards, and had nearly broken the neck of the poor frow! Here is quite enough to fill us with disgust; but, when we reflect, that this same primate, while he had under his “frow” and her litter, was engaged in assisting to send Protestants to the flames, because they dissented from a system that forbade the clergy to have wives, we swell with indignation, not against Cranmer, for though there are so many of his atrocious deeds yet to come, he has exhausted our store; not against those who are called “divines,” and who are the eulogists of Cranmer; against Burnet, who says, that Cranmer, “did all with a good conscience;” and against Dr. Sturges, or rather the Dean and Chapter of Winchester, who clubbed their “talents” in getting up the “Reflections on Popery,” who talk of the “respectable Cranmer,” and who have the audacity to put him, in point of integrity, upon a level with Sir Thomas More! As Dr. Milner, in his answer to Sturges, observes, they resembled each other in that the name of both was Thomas; but, in all other things, the dissimilarity was as great as that which the most vivid imagination can ascribe to the dissimilarity between hell and heaven.
The infamy of Cranmer in assisting in sending people to the flames for entertaining opinions, which he afterwards professed that he himself entertained at the time that he was so sending them, can be surpassed by nothing of which human depravity is capable; and it can be equaled by nothing but that of the king, who, while he was laying the axe to the root of the Catholic faith, still styled himself its defender! He was not, let it be borne in mind, defender of what he might, as others have, since his day, and in his day, called the Christian faith. He received the title from the Pope, as a reward for his written defence of the Catholic faith against Luther. The Pope conferred on him this title which was to descend to his posterity. The title was give by Pope Leo X., in a bull, or edict, beginning with these words: “Leo, servant of the servants of the Lord, to his most dear son, Henry, King of England, Defender of the Faith, all health and happiness.” The bull then goes on to say, that the king, having, in defense of the faith of the Catholic church written a book against Martin Luther, the Pope and his council had determined to confer on him, and his successors, the title of “Defender of the Faith.” “We,” says the bull, “sitting in this Holy See, having, with mature deliberation, considered the business with our brethren, do, with unanimous council and consent, grant unto your Majesty, your heirs and successors, the title of Defender of the Faith; which we do, by these presents, confirm unto you; commanding all the faithful to give your Majesty this title.”
What are we to think, then, of the man who could continue to wear this title, while he was causing to be acted before him, a farce in which the Pope and his council were exposed to derision, and was burning and ripping up the bowels of people by the scores, only because they remained firm in that faith of which he had still the odious effrontery to call himself the Defender! All justice, every thing like law, every moral thought must have been banished before such monstrous enormity could have been suffered to exist. They were all banished from the seat of power. An iron despotism had, as we shall see, in the next chapter, come to supply the place of the papal supremacy. Civil liberty was wholly gone; no man had anything that he could call property; and no one could look upon his life as safe for twenty-four hours.
But there is a little more to be said about this title of Defender of the Faith, which, for some reason or other that one can hardly discover, seems to have been, down to our time, a singularly great favorite. Edward VI., though his two “Protectors” who succeeded each other in that office, and whose guilty heads we shall gladly see succeeding each other on the block, abolished the Catholic faith by law; though the Protestant faith was, with the help of foreign troops, established, in its stead, and though the greedy ruffians of his time, robbed the very altars, under the pretext of extirpating that very faith, of which this title called him the Defender, continued to wear this title throughout his reign. Elizabeth continued to wear this title during her long reign of “mischief and misery,” as Whitaker justly calls it, though, during the whole of that reign, she was busily employed in persecuting, in ruining, in ripping up the bowels of those who entertained that faith, of which she styled herself the Defender, in which she herself had been born, in which she had lived for many years, and to which she adhered, openly and privately, till her self-interest called upon her to abandon it. She continued to wear this title while she was tearing the bowls out of her subjects for hearing mass; while she was refusing the last comforts of the Catholic religion to her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scotland, whom she put to death by mockery of law and justice, after, as Whitaker has fully proved, having long endeavored, in vain, to find amongst her subjects, a man base and bloody enough to take her victim off by assassination. This title was worn by that mean creature, James I., who took, as his chief councilor, the right worthy son of that father who had been the chief contriver of the murder of his innocent mother, and whose reign was one unbroken series of base plots and cruel persecutions of all who professed the Catholic faith. But, not to anticipate further matter, which will, hereafter, find a more suitable place, we may observe, that, amongst all English kings, the only real Defender of the Faith since the reign of Mary, have been Georges II.I, and IV., the former by assenting to a repeal of a part of the penal code and by his appointing a special commission to try, condemn, and execute the leaders of the ferocious mob who set fire to, and who wished to sack London, in 1780, with the cry of “No Popery” in their mouths, and from pretended zeal for the Protestant religion; and the latter, by his sending, in 1814, a body of English troops to assist as a guard of honor at the re-installment of the Pope.
It is time, now, after giving a rapid sketch of the progress which the tyrant had made in prostrating the liberties of his people, and in dispatching more of his wives, to enter on the grand scene of plunder, and to recount the miseries which immediately followed.
We have seen, then, that the “Reformation” was engendered in a beastly lust, brought forth in hypocrisy and perfidy, and we have had some specimens of the acts by which it caused innocent blood to be shed. We shall now see how it devastated and plundered the country, what pverty and misery it produced, and how it laid the sure foundation for that pauperism, that disgraceful immorality, that fearful prevalence of crimes of all sorts, which now so strongly mark the character of this nation, which was formerly the land of virtue and of plenty.
When we left the king and Cranmer at their bloody work, we had come to the year 1536, and to the 27th year of the king’s reign. In the year 1528, an act had been passed to exempt the king from paying any sum of money that he might have borrowed; another act followed this, for a similar purpose, and thus thousands were ruined. His new queen, Jane Seymour, brought him, in 1537, a son, who was afterwards king, under the title of Edward VI.; but this mother died in child-birth, and according to Sir Richard Baker, “had her body ripped up to preserve the child!” In this great “Reformation” man all was of a piece; all was consistent; he seemed never to have any compassion for the suffering of any human being; and this is a characteristic which Whitaker gives to his daughter Elizabeth.
Having a son for a successor, he, with his Parliament, enacted, in 1537, that Mary and Elizabeth, his two daughters, were bastards, and that, in case of a want of lawful issue, the king should be enabled by letters patent, or by his last will, to give the crown to whomsoever he pleased! To cap the whole, to complete a series of acts of tyranny such as was never before heard of, it was enacted in 1537, and in the twenty-eighth year of his reign, that, except in cases of mere private right, “the king’s Proclamations should be of the same force as Acts of Parliament!1 Thus, then, all law and justice were laid prostrated at the feet of a single man, and that man a man with whom law was a mockery, on whom the name of justice was a libel, and to whom mercy was wholly unknown.
It is easy to imagine that no man’s property or life could have security with power like this in the hands of such a man. Magna Charta had been trampled under foot. The famous act of Edward III., for the security of the people against unfounded charges of high treason, [“Habeas Corpus,”] was wholly set aside. Numerous things were made high treason, which were never before thought criminal at all. The trials were for a long while a mere mockery; and, at last they were altogether, in many cases laid aside, and the accused were condemned to death, not only without being arraigned and heard in their defense; but in numer-case without being apprized of the crimes, or pretended crimes, for which they were executed. We have read of Deys of Algiers, and of Beys of Tunis; but never heard of them, even in the most exaggerated accounts, deeds to be, in point of injustice and cruelty, compared with those of him, whom Burnet calls “the first-born son of the English ‘Reformation.’” The objects of his bloody cruelty generally were, as they naturally would be, chosen from amongst the most virtuous of his subjects; because from them, such a man had the most to dread. Of these, his axe hewed down whole families and circles of friends. He spared neither sex nor age, if the parties possessed, or were suspected of possessing that integrity which made them disapprove of his deeds. To look awry excited his suspicion, and his suspicion, was death. England, before his bloody reign, so happy, so free, knowing so little of crime as to present, to the judges of assize, scarcely three criminals in a county in a year, now saw upwards of sixty thousand persons shut up in her jails at one and the same time. The purlieus of the court of this “first-born of the Reformation” were a great human slaughter-house, his people, deserted by their natural leaders, who had been bribed by plunder, or the hope of plunder, were the terrified and trembling flock, while he, the master butcher, fat and jocose, sat in his palace issuing orders for the slaughter, while his High Priest, Cranmer, stood ready to sanction and to sanctify all his deeds.
A detail of these butcheries could only disgust and weary the reader. One instance, however, must not be omitted; namely, the slaughtering of the relations, and particularly the mother of Cardinal Pole. The Cardinal, who had, when very young and before the king’s first divorce had been agitated, been a great favorite with the king, and pursued his studies and travels on the Continent at the king’s expense, disapproved of the divorce, and of all the acts that followed it; and, though called home by the king, he refused to obey. He was a man of great learning, talent, and virtue, and his opinions had great weight in England. His mother the Countess of Salisbury, was descended from the Plantagenets, and was the last living descendant of that long race of English kings. So that the Cardinal, who had been by the Pope raised to that dignity, on account of his great learning and eminent virtues, was thus a relation of the king, as his mother was of course, and she was, too, the nearest of all his relations. But the Cardinal was opposed to the kings proceedings; and that was enough to excite and put in motion, the deadly vengeance of the latter. Many were the arts that he made use of, and great in amount was the treasure of his people that he expended, in order to bring the Cardinal’s person within his grasp; and these having failed, he resolved to wreak his ruthless vengeance on his kindred and his aged mother. She was charged by the base Thomas Cromwell, (of whom we shall soon see enough) with having persuaded her tenants not to read the new translations of the Bible, and also with having received bulls from Rome, which, the accuser said, were found at Courdray House, her seat in Sussex. Cromwell also showed a banner, which had, he said, been used by certain rebels in the North, and which he said he found in her house. All this was, however, so very barefaced, that it was impossible to think of a trial. The judges were then asked, whether the Parliament could not attaint her; that is to say condemn her, without a hearing? The judges said that it was a dangerous matter; that they could not, in their courts, act in this manner, and that they thought the Parliament never would. But, being asked, whether, if the Parliament were to do it, it would remain good in law, they answered in the affirmative. That we enough. A bill was brought in, and thus was the Countess, together with the Marchioness of Exter and two gentlemen, relations of the Cardinal, condemned to death. The two latter were executed, the Marchioness was pardoned, and the Countess shut up in prison of a sort of hostage for the conduct of her son. In a few months, however, an insurrection having broken out on account of his tyrannical acts, the king chose to suspect, that the rebels had been instigated by Cardinal Pole, and forth he dragged his mother to the scaffold. She, who was upwards of seventy years of age, though worn down in body by her imprisonment, maintained to the last, a true sense of her character and noble descent. When bidden to lay her head upon the block: “No,” answered she, “my head shall never bow to tyranny; it never committed treason; and, if you will have it, you must get it as you can.” The executioner struck at her neck with his axe, and, as she ran about the scaffold with her grey locks hanging down her shoulders and breast, he pursued, giving her repeated chops, till at last he brought her down!
It is a scene in Turkey or Tripoli that we are contemplating? No; but in England, where Magna Charta had been so lately in force, where nothing could have been done contrary to law; but all power, ecclesiastical, as well as lay, being placed in the hands of one man, bloody butcheries like that which would have roused even a Turkish populace to resistance, could be perpetrated without the smallest danger to the perpetrator. Hume, in his remarks upon the state of the people in this reign, pretends, that the people never hated the king, and “that he he seems, even, in some degree, to have possessed to the last, their love and affection.” He adds, that it may be said with truth, that the “English, in that age, were so thoroughly subdued, that, like eastern slaves, they were inclined to admire even those acts of violence and tyranny, which were exercised over themselves, and at their own expense.” This lying historian every where endeavors to gloss over the deeds of those who were prominent in the “Reformation,” both in England and Scotland. Too cunning, however, to applaud the bloody Henry himself, he would have us believe that after all , there was something amiable about him, and this belief he would have us found on the fact of his having been to the last, seemingly blessed by his people.
Nothing can be more false than this assertion, if repeated insurrections against him, accompanied with the most bitter complaints and reproaches, be not to be taken as marks of popular affection. And, as to the remark, that the English, “in that age were so thoroughly subdued,” while it seems to refute the assertion as to their affection for the tyrant, it is a slander, which the envious Scotch writers all delight to put forth and repeat. It did not occur to him, that this sanguinary tyrant was not effectually resisted, as king John and other bad kings had been, because this tyrant had the means of bribing the natural leaders o the people to take part against them; or, at the least, to neutralize those leaders. It did not occur to him to tell us, that Henry VIII., found the English as gallant and just a people as his ancestors had found them; but that, having divided them, having, by holding out to the great, an enormous mass of plunder as a reward for abandoning the rights of the people, the people became, as every people without leaders must become, a mere flock, or herd, to be dealt with at pleasure. The malignity and envy of this Scotchman blinded him to this view of the matter, and induced him to ascribe to the people’s admiration of tyranny, that submission, which, after repeated struggles, they yielded, merely from the want of those leaders, of whom they were not, for the first time, wholly deprived. What! have we never known any country, consisting of several millions of people, oppressed and insulted, even for ages, by a mere handful of men? And are we to conclude, that such a country submits, from the admiration of the tyranny under which they groan? Did the English submit to Cromwell from admiration; and, was it from admiration that the French submitted to Robespierre? The latter was punished, but Cromwell was not; he, like Henry, died in his bed; but, to what mind, except to that of the most malignant and perverse, would it occur, that Cromwell’s impunity arose from the willing submission, and the admiration of the people?
Of the means by which the natural leaders of the people were seduced from them; of the kind and the amount of the prize of plunder, we are now going to take a view. The “Reformation” was cherished and fed by plunder and devastation. It was not a Reformation, but a devastation of England; and this devastation impoverished and degraded the main body of the people.
We have seen how monasteries arose, and what sort of institutions they were. They were, in England, at the time we are speaking of, six hundred and forty-five of these institutions, besides ninety colleges, one hundred and ten hospitals, and two thousand three hundred and seventy-four chanteries and free chapels. The whole were seized on, first and last, taken into the hands of the king, and by him granted to those who aided and abetted him in the work of plunder.
This was a great mass of landed property; not by any means used for the sole benefit of monks, friars, and nuns; for the far greater part, its rents flowed immediately back amongst the people at large; and if it had never been an object of plunder, England never would, and never could have heard the hideous sound of the words pauper and poor rate.
1The reader
cannot have failed to perceive the analogy between the times
three centuries ago and the present. Thus “history repeats
itself.”
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