The Eighteen Christian Centuries

The leader of one of the parties which divided France was John, son of Philip the Hardy, prince of the blood royal and Duke of Burgundy. The leader of the other party was Louis of Orleans, brother of the demented king, and the gayest cavalier and most accomplished gentleman of his time. The Burgundian had many advantages in his contest for the reins of government. The wealth and population of the Low Countries made him as powerful as any of the princes of Europe, and he could at all times secure the alliance of England to the most nefarious of his schemes by the bribe of a treaty of trade and navigation. He accordingly brought his great possessions in Flanders to the aid of his French ambition, and secured the almost equally important assistance of the University of Paris, by giving in his adhesion to the Pope it had chosen and denying the authority of the Pope of his rival Orleans. Orleans had also offended the irritable population of Paris by making his vows, on some solemn occasion, by the bones of St. Denis which adorned the shrine of the town called after his name,—whereas it was well known to every Parisian that the real bones of the patron of France were those which were so religiously preserved in the treasury of Notre Dame. The clergy of the two altars took up the quarrel, and as much hostility was created by the rival relics of St. Denis and Paris as by the rival pontiffs of Avignon and Rome. Thus the Church, which in earlier times had been a bond of unity, was one of the chief causes of dissension; and the result in a few years was seen in the attempt made by France to shake off, as much as possible, the supremacy of both the divided Popes, as it managed to shake off entirely the yoke of the divided nobility.

Quarrels and reconciliations among the princes, feasts and festivals among the peerage, and the most relentless treatment of the citizens, were the distinguishing marks of the opening of this century. Isabella of Bavaria, the shameless wife of the hapless Charles, added a great feature of infamy to the state of manners at the time, by the openness of her profligacy, and her neglect of all the duties of wife and queen. Rioting with the thoughtless Orleans, while her husband was left to the misery of his situation, unwashed, unshorn, and clothed in rags and filth, the abandoned woman roused every manly heart in all the land against the cause she aided. Relying on this national disgust, the wily Burgundian waited his opportunity, and revenged his private wrongs by what he afterwards called the patriotic dagger of an assassin. |A.D. 1407.|On the night of the 23d of December, 1407, the gay and handsome Louis was lured by a false message from the queen’s quarters to a distant part of the town, and was walking in his satin mantle, twirling his glove in his hand, and humming the burden of a song, when he was set on by ten or twelve of the adherents of his enemy, stabbed, and beaten long after he lay dead on the pavement, and was then left motionless and uncared-for under the shade of the high house-walls of the Vieille Rue du Temple.

Public conscience was not very acute at that time; and, although no man for a moment doubted the hand that had guided the blow, the Duke of Burgundy was allowed to attend the funeral of his murdered cousin, and to hold the pall in the procession, and to weep louder than any as the coffin was lowered into the vault. But the common feelings of humanity were roused at last. People remembered the handsome, kindly, merry-hearted Orleans thus suddenly struck low, and the ominous looks of the Parisians warned the powerful Burgundy that it was time to take his hypocrisy and his tears out of the sight of honest men. He slipped out of the city, and betook himself to his Flemish states. But the helm was now without a steersman; and, while all were looking for a guide out of the confusion into which the appalling incident had brought the realm, the guilty duke himself, armed cap-à-pie, and surrounded by a body-guard which silenced all opposition, made his solemn entry into the town, and fixed on the door of his hotel the emblematic ornament of two spears, one sharp at the point as if for immediate battle, and one blunted and guarded as if for a friendly joust. Eloquence is never long absent when power is in want of an oration. A great meeting was held, in which, by many brilliant arguments and incontrovertible examples from holy writ and other histories, John Petit proved, to the entire satisfaction of everybody who did not wish to be slaughtered on the spot, that the doing to death of the Duke of Orleans was a good deed, and that the doer was entitled to the thanks of a grateful country. The thanks were accordingly given, and the murderer was at the height of his ambition. As a warning to the worthy citizens of what they had to expect if they rebelled against his authority, he took the opportunity of hurrying northward to his states, where the men of Liege were in revolt, and, having broken their ill-formed squares, committed such slaughter upon them as only the madness of fear and hatred could have suggested. Dripping with the blood of twenty-four thousand artisans, he returned to Paris, where the citizens were hushed into silence, and perhaps admiration, by the terrors of his appearance. They called him John the Fearless,—a noble title, most inadequately acquired; but, in spite of their flattery and their submission, he did not feel secure without the presence of his faithful subjects. He therefore summoned his Flemings and Burgundians to share his triumphs, and a loose was given to all their desires. They pillaged, burned, and destroyed as if in an enemy’s country, encamping outside the walls, and giving evident indications of an intention to force their way into the streets. But the sight of gore, though terrifying at first, sets the tamest of animals wild. The Parisians smelt the bloody odour and made ready for the fray. The formidable incorporation of the Butchers rose knife in hand, and at the command of their governor prepared to preserve the peace of the city. Burgundians and Orleanists were equally to be feared, and by a curious coincidence both those parties were at the gate; for the Count of Armagnac, father-in-law of the orphan Duke of Orleans, had assumed the leadership of the party, and had come up to Paris at the head of his infuriated Gascons and the men of Languedoc. North and South were again ranged in hostile ranks, and inside the walls there was a reign of terror and an amount of misery never equalled till that second reign of terror which is still the darkest spot in the memory of old men yet alive. No man could put faith in his neighbour. The murder of the Duke of Orleans had dissolved all confidence in the word of princes. One half of France was ready to draw against the other. Each half was anxious for support, from whatever quarter it came, and to gain the destruction of their rivals would sacrifice the interests of the nation.

But the same spirit of disunion and extirpation of ancient landmarks was at work in England. The accession of Henry the Fourth was not effected without the opposition of the adherents of the former king and of the supporters, on general principles, of the legitimate line. There were treasons, and plots, and pitiless executions. The feudal chiefs were no longer the compact body which could give laws both to King and Parliament, but ranged themselves in opposite camps and waited for the spoils of the vanquished side. The clergy unanimously came to the aid of the usurper on his faithful promise to exempt them from taxation; and, by thus throwing their own proportion of the public burdens on the body of the people, they sundered the alliance which had always hitherto subsisted between the Church and the lower class. Another bribe was held out to the clerical order for its support to the unlineal crown by the surrender to their vengeance of any heretics they could discover. |A.D. 1401.|In the second year of this reign, accordingly, we find a law enabling the priests to burn, “on some high and conspicuous piece of ground,” any who dissented from their faith. This is the first legal sanction in England to the logic of flame and fagot. How dreadfully this permission was used, we shall see ere many years elapse. In the mean time, it is worth while to remark that in proportion as the Church lost in popularity and affection it gained in legal privilege. While it was strong it did not need to be cruel; and if it had continued its care of the poor and helpless, it would have been able to leave Wickliff to his dissertations on its doctrinal errors undisturbed. A Church which is found to be nationally beneficial, and which endears itself to its adherents by the practical graces of Christianity, will never be overthrown, or even weakened, by any theoretical defects in its creeds or formularies. It was perhaps, therefore, a fortunate circumstance that the Church of Rome had departed as much by this time from the path of honesty and usefulness as from the simplicity of gospel truth. The Bible might have been looked at in vain, even in Wickliff’s translation, if its meanings had not been rendered plain by the lives and principles of the clergy. Henry the Fifth, feeling the same necessity of clerical support which had thrown his father into the hands of the Church, left nothing untried to attach it to his cause. All the opposition which had been offered to its claims had hitherto been confined to men of low rank, and generally to members of its own body. Wickliff himself had been but a country vicar, and had been unnoticed and despised in his small parsonage at Lutterworth. But three-and-twenty years after he was dead, his name was celebrated far and wide as the enemy of constituted authority and a heretic of the most dangerous kind. His guilt consisted in nothing whatever but in having translated the Bible into English; but the fact of his having done so was patent to all. No witnesses were required. The bones of the old man were dug up from their resting-place in the quiet churchyard in Leicestershire, carried ignominiously to Oxford, and burned amid the howls and acclamations of an infuriated mob of priests and doctors. This was in 1409. But, in his character of heretic and unbeliever, Wickliff had high associates in this same year; for the General Council sitting at Pisa declared the two Popes—of Avignon and Rome—who still continued to divide the Christian world, to be “heretics, perjurers, and schismatics.”

Europe, indeed, was ripe for change in almost all the relations both of Church and State. There would seem no close connection between Bohemia and England; yet in a very short time the doctrines of Wickliff penetrated to Prague. There Huss and Jerome preached against the enormities and contradictions of the Romish system, and bitterly paid for their presumption in the fires of Constance before many years had passed. But in England the effects of the new revelation of the hidden gospel had been stronger than even at Prague. Public opinion, however, divided itself into two very different channels; and while the whole nation listened with open ear to the denunciations rising everywhere against the corruption, pride, and sensuality of the priesthood, it rushed at the same time into the wildest excesses of cruelty against the opponents of any of the doctrinal errors or superstitious beliefs in which it had been brought up. In the same year in which several persons were burnt in Smithfield as supporters of Wickliff and the Bible, the Parliament sent up addresses to the Crown, advising the king to seize the temporalities of the Church, and to apply the riches wasted on luxurious monks and nuns to the payment of his soldiers. Henry the Fifth adroitly availed himself of the double direction in which the popular feeling ran. He gained over the priesthood by exterminating the opponents of their ceremonies and faith, and rewarded himself by occasionally confiscating the revenues of a dozen or two of the more notorious monasteries. In 1417 a heavier sacrifice was demanded of him than his mere presence at the burning of a plebeian heretic like John Badby, whose execution he had attended at Smithfield in 1410. He was required to give up into the hands of the Church the great and noble Oldcastle, Lord Cobham. The Church, as if to mark its triumph, did not examine the accused on any point connected with civil or political affairs. It questioned him solely on his religious beliefs; and as it found him unconvinced of the necessity of confession to a priest, of pilgrimages to the shrines of saints, of the worship of images, and of the doctrine of transubstantiation, it delivered him over to the secular arm, and the stout old soldier was taken to St. Giles’s-in-the-Fields, and suspended, by an iron chain round his body, above a fire, to die by the slowest and most painful of deaths. But, in this yielding up of a nobleman to the vengeance of the priesthood, Henry had a double motive: he terrified the proudest of the barons, and attached to himself the other bodies in the State. The people were still profoundly ignorant, and looked on the innovators as the enemies both of God and man. And nothing but this can account for the astonishing spectacle presented by Europe at this date. The Church torn by contending factions—three Popes at one time—and council arrayed against council; every nation disgusted with its own priesthood, and enthusiasm bursting out in the general confusion into the wildest excesses of fanaticism and vice,—and yet a total incapacity in any country of devising means of amendment. Great efforts were made, by wise and holy men within the Church itself, to shake off the impediments to its development and increase. Reclamations were made, more in sorrow than in anger, against the universal depravation of morals and beliefs. The Popes were not unmoved with these complaints, and gave credence to the forebodings of evil which rose from every heart. Yet the network of custom, the authority of tradition, and the unchangeableness of Roman policy marred every effort at self-reformation. An opening was apparently made for the introduction of improvement, by the declaration of the supremacy of general councils, and the cessation of the great schism of the West on the nomination of Martin the Fifth to the undisputed chair. |A.D. 1429.|But the force of circumstances was irresistible. Cardinals who approved of the declaration while members of the council repudiated its acts when, by good fortune, they succeeded to the tiara; and one of them even ventured the astounding statement that in his character of Æneas Sylvius, and approver of the decree of Basle, he was guilty of damnable sin, but was possessed of immaculate virtue in the character of Paul the Second. It was obvious that this unnatural state of things could not last. An establishment conscious of its defects, but unable to throw them off, and finally forced to the awful necessity of defending them by the foulest and most unpardonable means, might have read the inevitable result in every page of history. But worse remained behind. There sat upon the chair of St. Peter, in the year 1492, the most depraved and wicked of mankind. No earthly ruler had equalled him in profligacy and the coarser vices of cruelty and oppression since the death of the Roman Nero. This was a man of the name of Borgia, who fixed his infamous mark on the annals of the Papacy as Alexander the Sixth. While this bloodthirsty ruffian was at the summit of sacerdotal power—this poisoner of his friends, this polluter of his family circle with unimaginable crimes—as the visible representative upon earth of the Church of Christ, what hope could there be of amendment in the lower orders of the clergy, or continuance of men’s belief in the popish claims? Long before this, in 1442, the falsehood of the pretended donation of Constantine, on which the Popes founded their territorial rights, was triumphantly proved by the learned Valla; and at the end of the century the reverence of mankind for the successor of the Prince of the Apostles was exposed to a trial which the authenticity of all the documents in the world could not have successfully stood, in the personal conduct of the Pope and his familiars.

While this was the general state of Europe in the fifteenth century as regards the position of the clergy, high and low, the Church, in all countries, threw itself on the protection of the kings. By the middle, or towards the end, of this period, there was no other patronage to which they could have recourse. The nobility in France and England were practically eradicated. All confidence between baron and baron was at an end, and all belief in knightly faith and honour in the other classes of the people. As if the time for a new state of society was arrived, and instruments were required to clear the way for the approaching form, the nobility and gentry of England first were effectual in overthrowing their noble brethren in France, and then, with infuriate bitterness, turned their swords upon each other. The most rememberable general characteristic of this century is the consolidation of royal power. The king becomes despotic because the great nobility is overthrown and the Church stripped of its authority. Tired of hoping for aid from their ancient protector, the lowest classes cast their eyes of helplessness to the throne instead of to the crozier. They see in the reigning sovereign an ideal of personified Power. All other ideals with which the masses of the people have deluded themselves have passed away. The Church is stripped of the charm which its lofty claims and former kindness gave it. It is detected for the thing it is,—a corporation for the grinding of the poor and the support of tyranny and wrong. The nobility is stripped also of the glitter which covered its harsh outlines with the glow of Christian qualifications. It is found to be selfish, faithless, untrustworthy, and divided against itself. To the king, then, as the last refuge of the unfortunate, as the embodied State, a combination, in his own person, of the manly virtues of the knight with the Christian tenderness of the priest, the public transfers all the romantic confidence it had lavished on the other two. And, as if to prove that this idea came to its completeness without reference to the actual holder of sovereign authority, we find that in France the first really despotic king was Louis the Eleventh, and in England the first king by divine right was Henry the Seventh. Two more unchivalrous personages never disgraced the three-legged stool of a scrivener. Yet they sat almost simultaneously on two of earth’s proudest thrones.

No century had ever witnessed so great a change in manners and position as this. In others we have seen a gradual widening-out of thought and tendencies, all, however, subdued by the universal shadow in which every thing was carried on. But in this the progress was by a sudden leap from darkness into light. In ancient times Europe was held together by certain communities of interest and feeling, of which the chief undoubtedly was the centralization of the spiritual power in Rome. At the Papal Court all the nations were represented, and Stockholm and Saragossa were brought into contact by their common dependence on the successor of St. Peter. The courtly festivals which invited a knight of Scotland to cross blunted spears in a glittering tournament with a knight of Sicily in the court of an emperor of Germany was another bond of union between remotest regions; and in the fourteenth century the indefatigable Froissart, as we remarked, conveyed a knowledge of one nation to another in the entertaining chapters with which he delighted the listeners in the different palaces where he set up his rest. But all these lights, it will be observed, illumined only the hill-tops, and left the valleys still obscure. Ambitious Churchmen encountered their brethren of all kindreds and tongues in the court of the Vatican; tiltings were only for the high-born and rich, and Froissart himself poured forth his treasures only for the delight of lords and ladies. The ballads of the common people, on the other hand, had had a strongly disuniting effect. The songs which charmed the peasant were directed against the exacting priest and oppressive noble. In England they were generally pointed against the Norman baron, with whose harshness and pride were contrasted the kindness and liberality of Robin Hood and his peers. The French ballads were hostile to the English invader; the Scottish poems were commemorative of the heroism of Wallace and the cruelties of the Southern hordes. Literatures were thus condemned to be hostile, because they were not lofty enough to overlook the boundaries of the narrow circles in which they moved. By slow and toilsome process books were multiplied,—carefully copied in legible hand, and then chained up, like inestimable jewels, in monastery or palace, as too valuable to be left at large. A king’s library was talked of as a wonder when it contained six or seven hundred volumes. The writings of controversialists were passed from hand to hand, and the publication of a volume was generally achieved by its being read aloud at the refectory-table of the college and then discussed, in angry disputations, in the University Hall. Not one man in five hundred could read, if the book had been written in the plainest text; and at length the running hand was so indistinct as to be not much plainer than hieroglyphics. The discoveries, therefore, of one age had all to be discovered over again in the next. Roger Bacon, the English monk, in the eleventh century, was acquainted with gunpowder, and had clear intimations of many of the other inventions of more recent times. But what was the use of all his genius? He could only write down his triumph in a book; the book was carefully arranged on the shelf of his monastery; clever men of his own society may have carried the report of his doings to the neighbouring establishments; but time passed on, those clever men died out, the book on the monastery shelf was gradually covered with dust, and Roger Bacon became a conjurer in popular estimation, who foretold future events and took counsel from a supernatural brazen head. But in this century the art of printing was discovered and perfected. A thousand copies now darted off in all directions, cheap enough to be bought by the classes below the highest, portable enough to be carried about the person to the most distant lands, and in a type so large and clear that a very little instruction would enable the most illiterate to master its contents. Here was the lever that lifted the century at its first appearance into the light of modern civilization. And it came at the very nick of time. Men’s minds were disturbed on many subjects; for old unreasoning obedience to authority had passed away. Who was to guide them in their future voyage? Isolated works would no longer be of any use. Great scholars and acute dialecticians had been tried and found wanting. They only acted on the highly-educated class; and now it was the people in mass—the worker, the shopkeeper, the farmer, the merchant—who were anxious to be informed; and what could a monk in a cell, or even Chaucer with his harp in hand, do for the edification of such a countless host? People would no longer be fed on the dry crust of Aristotelianism or be satisfied with the intellectual jugglery of the Schoolmen. Rome had lost its guiding hand, and its restraining sword was also found of no avail. Some rest was to be found for the minds which had felt the old foundation slip away from them; and in this century, thus pining for light, thus thrusting forward eager hands to be warmed at the first ray of a new-risen sun, there were terrible displays of the aberrations of zeal without knowledge.

Almost within hearing of the first motion of the press, incalculable numbers of enthusiasts revived the exploded sect of the Flagellants of former centuries, and perambulated Europe, plying the whip upon their naked backs and declaring that the whole of religion consisted in the use of the scourge. Others, more crazy still, pronounced the use of clothes to be evidence of an unconverted nature, and returned to the nakedness of our first parents as proof of their restoration to a state of innocence. Mortality lost all its terrors in this earnest search for something more than the ordinary ministrations of the faith could bestow; and in France and England the hideous spectacles called the Dance of Death were frequent. In these, under the banner of a grinning skeleton, the population danced with frantic violence, shouting, shrieking, in the exultation of the time,—a scene where the joyous appearance of the occupation contrasted shockingly with the awful place in which the orgies were held, for the catacombs of Paris, filled with the bones and carcasses of many generations, were the chosen site for these frightful exhibitions. Like the unnatural gayety that reigned in the same city when the guillotine had filled every family with terror or grief, they were but an abnormal development of the sentiment of despair. People danced the Dance of Death, because life had lost its charm. Life had lost its security in the two most powerful nations of the time. England was shaken with contending factions, and France exhausted and hopeless of restoration. |A.D. 1451.|The peasantry in both were trampled on without remorse. Jack Cade led up his famishing thousands to lay their sufferings before the throne. They asked for nothing but a slight relaxation of the burdens that oppressed them, and were condemned without mercy to the sword and gallows. The French “Jacques Bonhomme” was even in a worse condition. There was no controlling power on the throne to guard him from the tyrannies of a hundred petty superiors. The Church of his country was as much conquered by the Church of England as its soil by the English arms. A cardinal, bloated and bloody, dominated both London and Paris, and sent his commands from the Palace at Winchester, which were obeyed by both nations. A.D. 1452. A.D. 1483. A.D. 1492.And all this on the very eve of the introduction of the perfected printing-press, the birth of Luther, and the discovery of America! From the beginning of the century till government became assured by the accession of Henry VII. and Louis XI., the whole of Europe was unsettled and apparently on the verge of dissolution. In the absence of the controlling power of the Sovereign, each little baron asserted his own right and privileges, and aimed perhaps at the restoration of his feudal independence, when the spirit of feudalism had passed away. The nobility, even if it had been united, was not now numerous enough to present a ruling body to the State. It became despised as soon as it was seen to be powerless; and at last, in sheer exhaustion, the people, the churches, and the peerage of the two proudest nations in the world lay down helpless and unresisting at the footstool of the only authority likely to protect them from each other or themselves. When we think of the fifteenth century, let us remember it as the period when mankind grew tired of the establishments of all former ages, when feudalism resigned its sword into the hands of monarchy, and when the last days of the expiring state of society were distinguished by the withdrawal of the death-grasp by France and England from each other’s throats, and the establishment of respectful if not friendly sentiments between them. By the year 1451, there was not one of all the conquests of the Edwards and Henrys left to the English except Calais. If that miserable relic had also been restored, it would have prevented many a heart-burning between the nations, and advanced, perhaps by centuries, the happy time when each can look across the narrow channel which divides them without a wish save for the glory and prosperity of the other.