late leaning upon the bosom of the Cæsar. What a marvellous conjuncture! what a mysterious connection! Islam and the papacy, all along such open and active enemies, yet all along so strangely alike and so mysteriously allied, allied as corruptions of divine truth, contemporaneous throughout, the same their time of birth, the same their period of growth, the same their age of glory, the same their season of decay, now find themselves at the end of twelve centuries and a half partners in peril and fellows in misfortune; both blindly clasp the same broken reed; both vainly shrink from the same formidable helper. The Commander of the Faithful and the Holy Father fix the same wishful and despairing gaze upon the shortened arm and shattered sword of Austria, while they lift the same look of doubt and terror towards the outstretched hand and unrevealing face of France. 429 BOOK XIII. ENGLAND AND THE POPEDOM. PART I. THE ENGLISH STATE AND THE ROMAN CHURCH. Sway of Rome hast thou forsworn ; By thy most heroic pains, By thy most illustrious gains, By thy most majestic strains, Ne'er let go the truth! By thy years most full, most bright, By thy mightiest men of might, It would hardly become an Englishman engaged in setting forth the Past and the Present of the papacy, to leave unnoticed its relations with his own country. The dispositions and dealings of England towards the Roman Church have not exhibited the same steadfastness and self-consistency so signal and significant in those of France and Austria. The Reformation won its chief triumph here and uplifted England from a considerable member of Roman Catholic Christendom into the chief power of Protestant Christendom. Yet through her whole course there has not been wanting a certain harmony of feeling and a certain unity of action with regard to the Papacy. All along she has been in a measure anti-papal; during her connection with the Roman Church, she showed herself the resentful victim, the impatient tributary and the resolute combatant of the Roman See. While acknowledging the authority of the chief of Christendom, she abhorred the arrogance, resisted the exactions and restrained the usurpations of the foreign potentate. English rulers sometimes crouched before Rome; an English king degraded his crown beneath the triple crown. But the English nation never partook the degradation, ever disdained the Roman livery; and English parliaments embodied the antipapal jealousy of the English people in trenchant and restraining statutes. Since the Reformation which uplifted this national jealousy into spiritual antipathy and revealed in this usurping political power the supreme corruption of God's truth, abhorrence of the Roman Church has remained the darling and undying passion of the English heart, the main guardian of English liberty and the chief nurse of English glory. Since the Reformation English kings have gone over to Rome and English governments have dallied with Rome; but England has never swerved from her fixed hate. The Popish Plot convulsed her; the Papal Aggression upstirred her; the cry of 'No Popery' has ever found an echo in her heart. Saxon England from the Conversion to the Conquest, lived in no special dependence upon Rome, and till the eve of the Norman invasion had no memorable quarrel with Rome. The connection was friendly but not servile; English kings went on pilgrimage to Rome, but did not sink into papal thralls; the best and greatest of all the Heptarchical monarchs, Oswald of Northumberland, was the convert not of missionaries from Rome, but of evangelists from Iona. The son of Egbert and the father of Alfred, Ethelwulf of Wessex, the most intensely papal of all the Anglo-Saxon kings, granted Peter's pence not however as an acknowledgment of subjection but as an expression of pious liberality. The great Alfred and his congenial successors, Edward, Athelstan and Edgar, though on friendly terms with the Roman See, upheld the English church in much independence. In the seventh century Egfrid king of Northumberland fell out with bishop Wilfred of York, and in the tenth century king Edwy vainly struggled against priest Dunstan; but these disputes arose between the English State and the English Church, not between the English nation and the Roman See; they concerned matters interesting and important to the head of that body whereof the English Church was a member, but not matters of papal pretension and prerogative. In truth the comparative independence of Saxon England drew down the wrath of Rome and made Hildebrand, the director though not yet the occupant of the Roman See, a willing fellow-worker with William the Bastard. The Norman invasion was a papal invasion; the Norman conquest was a papal victory; a papal bull made over the kingdom of England to an unscrupulous invader; the alien host marched beneath the papal blessing and the papal banner, while the papal curse was hurled against the defenders of the Fatherland. A Protestant pilgrim to the field of Hastings may dwell with mournful pride and almost filial tenderness upon the unyielding valour of the anti-papal English and the heroic fall of the excommunicated Harold, and then triumphantly turn from that victory of wrong and superstition to the long-abiding glory of free and Protestant England. Behold of free-born Englishmen this England still the home! Where is the Norman tyrant? where the robber-priest of Rome? The papacy shared the spoils of vanquished England with its Norman confederate and fixed upon the English Church a yoke scarcely less heavy than the yoke which William fastened upon the English nation. Its somewhat fluctuating and not very vigorously exercised power over that Church was transformed into direct and absolute dominion. The clergy were intensely national in Saxon England, administered and underwent justice in the civil courts, and took a large share in the business of life, without affecting the state of barons or the fierceness of warriors. The Conquest impaired their national character, augmented their worldly greatness, magnified their sacerdotal power and aggravated their dependence upon the popedom. Ecclesiastical courts, appeals to Rome and pecuniary exactions were multiplied. But though the Norman conquest highly exalted the papal power in England, the Norman kings were in no wise mere papal thralls. William was not the man to make extravagant and personally debasing concessions even to Gregory VII., and refused the homage which Hildebrand required him to render for the kingdom which Hildebrand had helped him to win. Monkish chroniclers have reckoned intolerance of clerical and papal encroachment among the vices of William Rufus. Henry Beauclerc took an anti-papal part in the great fight between Church and State which then convulsed Christendom and fell out with more than one pope about the rightful share of prince and pontiff in bishop-making. Henry II. mingled conspicuously in the same mighty fray, devoted his great power and consummate capacity to the vin 1 Baronius, an. 1079, n. 16, 17, 18. dication of the State, encountered clerical and pontifical usurpations with the Constitutions of Clarendon and wrestled with the papacy in the person of the great sacerdotal champion, Becket. Over the hallowed corpse of their slaughtered champion, the popes strode on to ampler sway; but it was as a national saint rather than as a papal martyr, it was as the victim of their Norman masters rather than as the servant of the Roman See that St. Thomas of Canterbury became so dear to the English people. - That English nation soon and far more effectually replaced the Norman monarchs in the fight against the encroaching popedom. The basest of English kings set himself against the mightiest of Roman pontiffs. John resisted Innocent III. and refused Stephen Langton whom the pope had made Archbishop of Canterbury. But the noble cause was happily soon withdrawn from such ignoble championship. From fierce defiance of the papacy John passed to base submission thereto; threatened by a French invasion and abhorred by his oppressed subjects, the excommunicated king surrendered his crown to legate Pandulph, received it back as a liegeman of Innocent III. and declared England a tributary realm of the Roman See. This supreme baseness so far from being in any sense the act of the nation was perpetrated in order to secure the help of Rome in crushing the liberty of England. That help was given but was given in vain. The miserable tyrant had sunk into a Romish thrall when the nation rose against him. It was beneath the curse of Rome that the barons took up arms, and that English freedom grew and throve; it was in direct defiance of Rome that Magna Charta was wrung from the papal bondman, and papal absolution emboldened more than one English king to revoke or violate the Great Charter.2 The long reign of Henry III. was an unbroken struggle on the part of the growing English nation against royal and papal extortion and usurpation. The king was always needy and always grasping; the popes outdid him in rapacity; and griping pontiff went hand in hand with griping monarch. That palmy hour of the popedom brought out all its inherent worldliness; while the baseness while the baseness of John and the weakness of Henry III. made England the chief sufferer therefrom. Rapacious pontiffs let loose unscrupulous legates upon the English clergy and people, but not upon a patient and yielding nation.3 2 Matthew Paris, p. 316 et seq.; p. 355 et seq. 3 Ibid. passim. |