The Greatest Works of Charles Carleton Coffin. Charles Carleton Coffin
sake. He goes with a brave heart His life has been sweet and pure. The scaffold stairs are weak.
"See me safe up, Mr. Sheriff. As for the coming down, I can take care of myself," he says, with a smile on his face.
"I ask your prayers, good people. I die in the faith of the Holy Catholic Church. I am a faithful servant to God and to the king."
He kneels, and repeats a Psalm.
The sheriff kneels to him, and asks forgiveness for what he is about to do.
"Pluck up spirit, man, and be not afraid to do thine office. My neck is short. Take heed how yon strike."
He himself ties a handkerchief over his eyes, and lays aside his white beard.
"Pity it should be cut; it never has committed treason."
They are his last words. He lays his head upon the block, and all is over.
"What measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again."
Many times those lips, motionless now, have sentenced men and women to death for reading the New Testament — for not believing that the bread of the sacrament is Christ's body. They were heretics, and died for conscience' sake. Sir Thomas dies for conscience' sake, not as a heretic, but as a rebel, disobedient to government.
The king goes on burning Catholics who will not recognize him as head of the Church, and heretics who say that there is no purgatory. But amidst all this burning and hanging a great revolution is going on. The people have lost confidence in the Church. There are more than six hundred monasteries and nunneries in England, and the country is overrun by a set of lazy monks and priests and nuns, who own immense estates. The Pope has always had control of the monasteries; but now he has no authority in England. The king is the head of the Church; and commissioners are appointed to visit the monasteries. They report them rich, and that the monks,friars, and abbots lead scandalous lives. Parliament makes a law suppressing them. The lands, jewels, and estates are seized; and the men and women, who have been living on the people so long, are turned adrift, to get their living as they can. The king fills his coffers, the nobles, dukes, earls, and baronets take good care to fill their own pockets, with the spoils. One woman, Widow Cornwallis, makes a pudding for the king, which is so good, with so many plums in it, that he, in return, makes her a present of all the lands of an abbey.
Workmen tear down the monasteries to get the lead and iron; and the stately stone edifices, which have stood so long, soon are heaps of ruins.
Though Stephen Gardiner and Edmund Bonner, the nobles, the king, are spoiling the abbeys, they are at the same time burning heretics.
Anne Askew is arrested fur not believing that the bread of the sacrament is the flesh of Christ. She is brought before the Lord Mayor of London.
"You do not believe that the bread becomes Christ's body?"
"No, your honor."
"What if a mouse should eat the bread after it is consecrated?" the mayor asks.
"What say you to it, my lord?" Anne asks, in return.
"I say that the mouse is damned."
"Alas! poor mouse!"
The Lord Mayor sees that he has made a little mistake. Anne is put upon the rack in the Tower, and two of the questioners throw off their gowns, and work the winches till her limbs are all but torn from her body. They carry her in a chair to the place of burning, at the Muck-heap of Smithfield, and bind her to the stake with a chain. Two others are to suffer with her. The executioner fastens bags of powder to their bodies. The Lord Mayor, the Duke of Norfolk, and the Earl of Bedford sit upon a seat by St. Bartholomew's Church, but, though several rods away, are afraid that the powder will hurt them.
Anne Askew has a countenance like that of an angel. She smiles upon the executioners.
"Here is a pardon if you will recant," says the sheriff.
"I came not here to deny my Lord."
With these heroic words upon her lips, she gives her life for liberty.
But notwithstanding all these I burnings, liberty is advancing. The king has ordered that the Bible, in English, shall be in every church in England. Desks have been put up, and the books chained to them. All day long the people stand there hearing them read, and as the reading goes on they think for themselves, and heretics are multiplying.
The woman who sits by the bedside of the king — Katherine Parr — secretly befriends those whom Stephen Gardiner and Edmund Bonner have thrust into prison, and they resolve that she too shall suffer; but she finds out what is going on, and cares for Henry very tenderly. Gardiner comes with his accusation.
"Get out, you knave!" is the salutation which he receives when he makes his business known.
Henry knows that he cannot get well. Jane Seymour's son, Edward, is ten years old. Who shall conduct affairs till he is old enough to wear the crown? There are two great parties in England now — the old party and the new. The old party do not wish to have the Bible in the churches, and they believe that the Pope is their head of the Church. The new party accept the king as head of the Church, and the Bible, and not the Pope, as authority in matters of religion. Henry selects men of the new party to direct affairs. Edward is to be king, and after him Mary and Elizabeth are to be heirs to the throne.
On the 28th of January, 1547, the despot who through life has been trampling upon the rights of men, who has cut off the heads of his wives and nobles, who has plundered the people at will through an obsequious and time-serving Parliament, yields his sceptre to one mightier than himself. He has been a wicked man, a tyrant; yet, through his wickedness and tyranny, liberty shall dawn upon the oppressed and suffering people of England, and, through them, upon all the world.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE QUEEN WHO BURNED HERETICS
ON the 1st of October, 1553, Mary Tudor, daughter of Henry VIII. and Katherine of Aragon, is crowned Queen of England. There is a grand procession, and Mary rides in a gilded coach drawn by six horses. She is thirty-seven years old, small in stature, thin and pale. Her eyes are bright and sparkling, but she has a voice deep and resonant like a man's. She wears a blue-velvet dress trimmed with ermine, and a richly embroidered mantle ornamented with pearls. A golden fillet encircles her brow, set with diamonds and precious stones, and so heavy that she has to support her head with her hand.
Mary is very religious. She counts her beads, and repeats her Pater-nosters and Ave-Marias regularly, and never fails to attend mass.
In the procession is her half-sister Elizabeth, Anne Boleyn's daughter. She is twenty years old, the picture of health.
There have been stirring times in England since midsummer. Mary's half-brother Edward, Jane Seymour's son, died on the 6th of July. He had been king six years. He had no children to succeed him. Then came the question as to who was entitled to the crown. Henry made a will, and declared that after Edward, Mary was to have it; and after Mary, Elizabeth; and after Elizabeth, the descendants of his sister Mary — the Mary whom he compelled to marry the old Louis XII. of