Books Condemned to be Burnt

A few years later Sir Walter Raleigh's first volume of his History of the World was called in at the King's command, "especially for being too saucy in censuring princes." This fate its wonderful author took greatly to heart, as he had hoped thereby to please the King extraordinarily;6 and, considering the terms wherewith in his preface he pointed the contrast between James and our previous rulers, one cannot but share his astonishment.

This would seem to indicate that the King grew more sensitive about his position as time went on; and this conclusion is corroborated by his extraordinary conduct in reference to the works of David Paræus, the learned Protestant Professor of Divinity at Heidelberg. One can conceive no mortal soul ever reading those three vast folios of closely printed Latin in which Paræus commented on the Old and New Testament; but in those days people must have read everything. At all events, it was discovered that in his commentary on Romans xiii. Paræus had contended at great length and detail in favour of the people's right to restrain, even by force of arms, tyrannical violence on the part of the superior magistrate. On March 22nd, 1622, therefore, the Archbishop of Canterbury and twelve bishops, at the King's request, represented this doctrine to be most dangerous and seditious; and accordingly, on July 1st, the books of Paræus were publicly burnt after a sermon by the Bishop of London; and about the same time the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, ever on the side of the divine right, proved their loyalty by condemning and burning the book, perhaps the only book whose condemnation never tempted to its perusal. But that very same year (August 22nd, 1622) the King found it necessary to issue directions concerning preaching and preachers, so freely was the Puritanical side of the community then beginning to express itself about the royal prerogative.

As connected with the question of the prerogative must be mentioned, as burnt by James' order, the Doctrina et Politia Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ (1616), a Latin translation of the English Prayer Book, as well as of Jewell's Apology and Newell's Catechism, by Richard Mocket, then Warden of All Souls'. Mocket was chaplain to Archbishop Abbot, and wished to recommend the formularies and doctrines of the Church of England to foreign nations. History does not, indeed, record any deep impression as made on foreign nations by the book; though Heylin asserts that it had given no small reputation to the Church of England beyond the seas (Laud, 70); but it does record the fact of its being publicly burnt, as well as give some intimations of the reason. Fuller says that the main objection to it was, that Mocket had proved himself a better chaplain than subject, touching James in one of his tenderest points in contending for the right of the Archbishop of Canterbury to confirm the election of bishops in his province. Mocket also gave such extracts from the Homilies as seemed to have a Calvinistic leaning; and treated fast days as only of political institution. For such reasons the book was burnt by public edict, a censure which the writer took so much to heart that, as Fuller says, being "so much defeated in his expectation to find punishment where he looked for preferment, as if his life were bound up by sympathy in his book, he ended his days soon after." Poor Mocket was only forty when he died, succumbing, like Cowell, to the rough reception accorded to his book.

Mocket's book is less one to read than to treasure as a sort of lusus naturæ in the literary world; for it would certainly have seemed safe antecedently to wager a million to one that no Warden of All Souls' would ever write a book that would be subjected to the indignity of fire; and, in spite of his example, I would still wager a million to one that a similar fate will never befall any literary work of Mocket's successors. Mocket's book, therefore, has a certain distinction which is all its own; but those who do not love the Church of England without it will hardly be led to such love by reading Mocket. And Mocket himself, if we follow Fuller, seems to have wished to make his love for the Church a vehicle to his own preferment; but as, perhaps, in that respect he does not stand alone, I should be sorry that the implied reproach should rest as any stain upon his memory.

Next to the question of the rights of kings over their subjects, the most important one of that time was concerning the rights of popes over kings – a question which, having been intensified by the Reformation, naturally came to a crisis after the Gunpowder Plot. James I. then instituted an oath of allegiance as a test of Catholic loyalty, and many Catholics took the oath without scruple, including the Archpriest Blackwell. Cardinal Bellarmine thereupon wrote a letter of rebuke to the latter, and Pope Paul V. sent a brief forbidding Catholics either to take the oath or to attend Protestant churches (October 1606). But it is remarkable that, so little did the Catholics believe in the authenticity of this brief, another – and an angry one – had to come from Rome the following September, to confirm and enforce it. King James very fairly took umbrage at the action and claims of the Pope, and spent six days in making notes which he wished the Bishop of Winchester to use in a reply to the Pope and the Cardinal. But when the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely saw the King's notes, they thought them answer enough, and so James's Apology for the Oath of Allegiance came to light, but without his name, the author, among other reasons, deeming it beneath his dignity to contend in argument with a cardinal. As the Cardinal responded, the King took a stronger measure, and under his own name wrote, in a single week, his Premonition to all most Mighty Monarch, wherein he exposed with great force the danger to all states from the pretensions of the Papacy. Thereupon, at Paul's invitation, Suarez penned that vast folio (778 pp.), the Defensio Catholicæ Fidei contra Anglicanæ Sectæ Errores (1613), as a counterblast to James's Apology. Considering the subject, it was certainly written with singular moderation; and James would have done better to have left the book to the natural penalty of its immense bulk. As it was, he ordered it to be burnt at London, and at Oxford and Cambridge; forbade his subjects to read it, under severe penalties; and wrote to Philip III. of Spain to complain of his Jesuit subject. But Philip, of course, only expressed his sympathy with Suarez, and exhorted James to return to the Faith. The Parlement of Paris also consigned the book to the flames in 1614, as it had a few years before Bellarmine's Tractatus de Potestate summi Pontificis in Temporalibus, in which the same high pretensions were claimed for the Pope as were claimed by Suarez.

The question at issue remains, of course, a burning one to this day. To James I., however, is due the credit of having been one of the earliest and ablest champions against the Temporal Power; and therefore side by side on our shelves with Bellarmine and Suarez should stand copies of the Apology and the Premonition– both of them works which can scarcely fail to raise the King many degrees in the estimation of all who read them.

But we have yet to see James as a theologian, for on his divinity he prided himself no less than on his king-craft. The burnings of Legatt at Smithfield and of Wightman at Lichfield for heretical opinions are sad blots on the King's memory; for it would seem that he personally pressed the bishops to proceed to this extremity, in the case of Legatt at least. Nor in the case of poor Conrad Vorst did he manifest more toleration or dignity. It was no concern of his if Vorst was appointed by the States to succeed Arminius as Professor of Theology at Leyden; yet, deeming his duty as Defender of the Faith to be bound by no seas, he actually interfered to prevent it, and rendered Vorst's life a burden to him, when he might just as reasonably have protested against the choice of a Grand Lama of Thibet.

Vorst's book – the Tractatus Theologicus de Deo, an ugly, square, brown book of five hundred pages – is as unreadable as it is unprepossessing. Bayle says that it was shown to the King whilst out hunting, and that he forthwith read it with such energy as to be able to despatch within an hour to his resident at the Hague a detailed list of its heresies. Nothing in his reign seems to have excited him so much. Not only did he have it publicly burnt in St. Paul's Churchyard (October 1611), and at Oxford and Cambridge, but he entreated the States, under the pain of the loss of his friendship, to banish Vorst from their dominions altogether. No heretic, he said, ever better deserved to be burnt, but that he would leave to their Christian wisdom. "Such a Disquisition deserved the punishment of the Inquisition." If Vorst remained, no English youths should repair to "so infected a place" as the University of Leyden.

The States resented at first the interference of the King of England, and supported Vorst, but the ultimate result of James's prolonged agitation was that in 1619 the National Synod of Dort declared Vorst's works to be impious and blasphemous, and their author unworthy to be an orthodox professor. He was accordingly banished from the University and from Holland for life, and died three years afterwards, fully justified by his persecution in his original reluctance to exchange his country living for the dignity of a professorship of theology.

Bayle thinks he was fairly chargeable with Socinian views, but what most offended James was his metaphysical speculations on the Divine attributes. I will quote from Vorst two passages which vexed the royal soul, and should teach us to rejoice that the reign of such discussions shows signs of passing away: —

"Is there a quantity in God?There is; but not a physical quantity,But a supernatural quantity;One nevertheless that is plainly imperceptible to us,And merely spiritual."

Or again: —

"Hath God a body? If we will speak properly, He has none; yet is it no absurdity, speaking improperly, to ascribe a body unto God, that is, as the word is taken improperly and generally (and yet not very absurdly) for a true substance, in a large signification, or, if you will, abusive."

The above are the principal books whose names have come down to us as burnt in the reign of James, and the initiation of such burning seems always to have come from the King himself. As yet, the Star Chamber and Court of High Commission do not appear to have assumed the direction of this lesser but not unimportant department of government. Nor is there yet any mention of the hangman: the mere burning by any menial official being, thought stigma enough. It is also remarkable that the books which chiefly roused James's anger to the burning point were the works of foreigners – of Paræus, Suarez, and Vorst. After James our country was too much occupied in burning its own books and pamphlets to burden itself with the additional labour of burning its neighbours'; the instances that occur are comparatively few and far between. But it is clear that, whatever were James's real views as to the limits of his political prerogative, in the field of literature he meant to play and did play the despot. Pity that one who could so deftly wield his pen should have rested his final argument on the bonfire!

CHAPTER III

Charles the First's Book-Fires

FEW things now seem more surprising than the sort of fury with which in the earlier part of the seventeenth century the extreme rights of monarchs were advocated by large numbers of Englishmen. Political servitude was then the favourite dream of thousands. The Church made herself especially prominent on the side of prerogative; the pulpits resounded with what our ancestors called Crown Divinity; and in the reign of Charles I. the rival principles, ultimately fought for on the battlefield, first came into conflict over sermons, the immediate cause, indeed, of so many of the greatest political movements of our history.

The first episode in this connection is the important case of Dr. Roger Manwaring, one of Charles's chaplains, who, at the time when the King was pressing for a compulsory loan, preached two sermons before him, advocating the King's right to impose any loan or tax without consent of Parliament, and, in fact, making a clean sweep of all the liberties of the subject whatsoever. At Charles's request, Manwaring published these sermons under the title of Religion and Allegiance (1627). But the popular party in Parliament resolved to make an example of him, and a long speech on the subject by Pym is preserved in Rushworth. The Commons begged the Lords to pronounce judgment upon him, and a most severe one they did pronounce. He was to be imprisoned during the House's pleasure; to be fined £1000 to the King; to make a written submission at the bars of both Houses; to be suspended for three years; to be disabled from ever preaching at Court, or holding any ecclesiastical or secular office; and the King was to be moved to grant a proclamation for calling in and burning his book.

On June 23rd, 1628, Manwaring made accordingly a most abject submission at the bars of both Houses, Heylin says, on his knees and with tears in his eyes, confessing his sermons to have been "full of dangerous passages, inferences, and scandalous aspersions in most parts"; and the next day Charles issued a proclamation for calling them in, as having incurred "the just censure and sentence of the High Court of Parliament." The sentence of suppression presumably in this case carried the burning; but, if so, there is no mention of any public burning by the bishops and others, to whom the books were to be delivered by their owners.

Fuller says that much of Manwaring's sentence was remitted in consideration of his humble submission; and Charles the very same year not only pardoned him, but gave him ecclesiastical preferment, finally making him Bishop of St. David's. Heylin attests the resentment this indiscreet indulgence roused in the Commons; but, unfortunately, as Manwaring was doubtless well aware, to have incurred the anger of Parliament was motive enough with Charles for the preferment of the offender, and the shortest road to it.

This is shown by the similar treatment accorded to the Rev. Richard Montagu, who had made himself conspicuous on the anti-Puritan side in the time of James. In defence of himself he had written his Appello Cæsarem, with James's leave and encouragement. It was a long book, refuting the charges made against him of Popery and Arminianism, and full of bitter invectives against the Puritans. After the matter had been long under the consideration of Parliament, the House prayed Charles to punish Montagu, and to suppress and burn his books; and this Charles did in a remarkable proclamation (January 17th, 1628), wherein the Appello Cæsarem is admitted to have been the first cause of those disputes and differences that have since much troubled the quiet of the Church, and is therefore called in, Charles adding, that if others write again on the subject, "we shall take such order with them and those books that they shall wish they had never thought upon these needless controversies." It appears, however, from Rushworth that, in spite of this, several answers were penned to Montagu, and that they were suppressed. And what, indeed, would life be but for its "needless controversies"?

Nothing could be more praiseworthy than Charles's attempt to put a stop to the idle disputations and bitter recriminations of the combatants on either side of religious controversy. Could he have succeeded he might have staved off the Civil War, which we might almost more fitly call a religious one. But in those days few men, unfortunately, had the cool wisdom to remain as neutral between Arminian and Calvinist, Papist and Protestant, as between the rival Egyptian sects which, in Juvenal's time, fought for the worship of the ibis or the crocodile. Our comparatively greater safety in these days is due to the large increase of that neutral party, which was so sadly insignificant in the time of Charles. May that party therefore never become less, but constantly grow larger!

Montagu, at the time of the proclamation of his book, had been appointed Bishop of Chichester, having been raised to that see in spite or because of his quarrel with Parliament. He was consecrated by Laud in August of the same year, and Heylin admits that his promotion was more magnanimous than safe on the part of Charles, being clearly calculated to exasperate the House. Ten years later (1638) he was preferred to the see of Norwich. All his life he remained a prominent member of the Romanising party.

These books of Manwaring and Montagu are important as proving clearly two historical points, viz.: – (1) The early date at which the Court party alienated even the House of Lords. (2) The fact that the original exciting cause of all the subsequent discord between Puritan and Prelatist came from a prominent member of the Laudian or Romanising faction.

The rising temper of the people, and its justification, is shown even in these literary disputes. But the popular temper was destined to be more seriously roused by those atrocious sentences against the authors of certain books which were passed within a few years by the Star Chamber and High Commission. The heavy fines and cruel mutilations imposed by these courts were not new in the reign of Charles, but they became far more frequent, and were directed less against wrong conduct than disagreeable opinions. They are intimately connected with the memory of Laud, first as Bishop of London, and then as Archbishop of Canterbury, whose letters show that the severities in question were to him and Strafford (to use Hallam's expression) "the feebleness of excessive lenity." To the last Charles was not despotic enough to please Laud, who complains petulantly in his Diary of a prince "who knew not how to be, or be made great."

As the first illustration of Laud's method for attaining this end must be mentioned the case of a book which enjoys the distinction of having brought its author to a more severe punishment than any other book in the English language. Our literature has had many a martyr, but Alexander Leighton is the foremost of the rank.

He was a Scotch divine; nor can it be denied that his Syon's Plea against the Prelacy (1628) contained, indeed, some bitter things against the bishops; he said they were of no use in God's house, and called them caterpillars, moths, and cankerworms. But our ancestors habitually indulged in such expressions; and even Tyndale, the martyr, called church functionaries horse-leeches, maggots, and caterpillars in a kingdom. Such terms were among the traditional amenities of all controversy, but especially of religious controversy. But since the Martin-Marprelate Tracts or Latimer's sermons the strong anti-Episcopalian feeling of the country had never expressed itself so vigorously as in this "decade of grievances" against the hierarchy, presented to Parliament by a man who was too sensitive of "the ruin of religion and the sinking of the State."

The Star Chamber fined him £10,000, and then the High Commission Court deprived him of his ministry, and sentenced him to be whipped, to be pilloried, to lose his ears, to have his nose slit, to be branded on his cheeks with "S. S." (Sower of Sedition), and to be imprisoned for life! Probably with all this, the burning of his book went without saying; though I have found no specific mention of its incurring that fate.

The sentence was executed in November 1630, in frost and snow, making its victim, as he says himself, "a theatre of misery to men and angels." It was all done in the name of law and order, like all the other great atrocities of history. After ten years' imprisonment Leighton was released by the Long Parliament, and a few years later he wrote an account of his sufferings, and a report of his trial in the Star Chamber. Therein we learn that Laud, the Bishop of London, was the moving spirit of the whole thing. At the end of his speech he apologised for his presence at the trial, admitting that by the Canon law no ecclesiastic might be present at a judicature where loss of life or limb was incurred, but contending that there was no such loss in ear-cutting, nose-slitting, branding, and whipping. Leighton, of course, may have been misinformed of what occurred at his trial (for he himself was not allowed to be present!); and so some doubt must also attach to the story that when the censure was delivered "the Prelate off with his cap, and holding up his hands gave thanks to God who had given him the victory over his enemies."

Shortly after his release, Leighton was made keeper of Lambeth Palace, and then he died, "rather insane of mind for the hardships he had suffered"; but, such is the irony of fate, the man who had paid so heavily for his antipathy to bishops became himself the father of an archbishop!

By an unexplained law of our nature the very severity of punishment seems to invite men to incur it; and Leighton's fate, like most penal warnings, rather incited to its imitation than deterred from it. The next to feel the grip of the Star Chamber was the famous William Prynne, barrister of Lincoln's Inn, and one of the most erudite as well as most voluminous writers our country has ever produced.

He was only thirty-three when in 1633 he published his Histriomastix; or, the Player's Scourge. His labour had taken him seven years, nor was it the first work of his that had attracted the notice of authority. In a thousand closely printed pages, he argued, by an appeal to fifty-five councils, seventy-one fathers and Christian writers, one hundred and fifty Protestant and Catholic authors, and forty heathen philosophers into the bargain, that stage-plays, besides being sinful and heathenish, were "intolerable mischiefs to churches, to republics, to the manners, minds, and souls of men." Little as we think so now, this opinion, which was afterwards also Defoe's, was not without justification in those days. But Prynne's crusade did not stop at theatres; and Heylin's account reveals the feeling of contemporaries: "Neither the hospitality of the gentry in the time of Christmas, nor the music in cathedrals and the chapels royal, nor the pomps and gallantries of the Court, nor the Queen's harmless recreations, nor the King's solacing himself sometimes in masques and dances could escape the venom of his pen." "He seemed to breathe nothing but disgrace to the nation, infamy to the Church, reproaches to the Court, dishonour to the Queen." For his remarks against female actors were thought to be aimed at Henrietta Maria, though the pastoral in which she took part was posterior by six weeks to the publication of the book!7 The four legal societies "presented their Majesties with a pompous and magnificent masque, to let them see that Prynne's leaven had not soured them all, and that they were not poisoned with the same infection."8

This surely might have been enough; but by the time the matter had come before the Star Chamber, Laud had succeeded Abbot (with whom Prynne was on friendly terms) as Archbishop of Canterbury (August 1633); and Laud was in favour of rigorous measures. So was Lord Dorset, and Lord Cottington, Chancellor of the Exchequer, whose judgment is of importance as showing that this was really the first occasion when the hangman's services were called in aid for the suppression of books: —

"I do in the first place begin censure with his book. I condemn it to be burnt in the most public manner that can be. The manner in other countries is (where such books are) to be burnt by the hangman, though not used in England (yet I wish it may, in respect of the strangeness and heinousness of the matter contained in it) to have a strange manner of burning; therefore I shall desire it may be so burnt by the hand of the hangman. If it may agree with the Court, I do adjudge Mr. Prynne to be put from the Bar, and to be for ever uncapable of his profession. I do adjudge him, my Lords, that the Society of Lincoln's Inn do put him out of the Society; and because he had his offspring from Oxford" (now with a low voice said the Archbishop of Canterbury, "I am sorry that ever Oxford bred such an evil member") "there to be degraded. And I do condemn Mr. Prynne to stand in the pillory in two places, in Westminster and Cheapside, and that he shall lose both his ears, one in each place; and with a paper on his head declaring how foul an offence it is, viz. that it is for an infamous libel against both their Majesties, State and Government. And lastly (nay, not lastly) I do condemn him in £5,000 fine to the King. And lastly, perpetual imprisonment."9