Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

was appointed to the parish of West Kington, Wiltshire. His plain and strong preaching against idle, incompetent, and unscriptural bishops and clergy provoked, as

vigorous remonstrance.

was natural,

In 1531 Latimer was accused with Crome and Bilney before Convocation. Crome recanted, and Bilney suffered at the stake. Latimer remained a twelvemonth unmolested. A sermon in particular was censured which was preached at St. Mary Abchurch, in which he suggested the possibility that St. Paul, had he lived in that day, might be accused to the bishop as a heretic, and obliged to bear a fagot at Paul's Cross.

In 1532 Hilley, Chancellor to Cardinal Cam peggio, the Italian Bishop of Salisbury, served a citation on Latimer to appear before the Bishop of London at St. Paul's. The Bishop sent him to Convocation, where certain articles were proposed for him to sign. Latimer was still feeling his way; Warham was still archbishop, and Latimer had not come under the powerful influence of Cranmer. At first he refused to sign, and was committed to custody at Lambeth. Then he wrote declaring his preaching to be quite in accordance with the

Fathers, and said he did not object to images, pilgrimages, praying to saints, or purgatory. He only considered these things not essential. At last he consented to sign two of the articles, and finally made a complete submission before the assembled bishops. A letter to a friend again inculpated him, and he was forced ultimately to admit that he had not erred only in discretion, but in doctrine.

His peril gained him favour in the West, and in 1533 he preached at Bristol, reviving his old opinions, and declaring that the Virgin Mary was a sinner. In 1534 he was appointed to preach before the King every Wednesday in Lent, and the most famous doctors of Oxford

and Cambridge came to hear him. He was made a royal chaplain, and licences to preach were granted at his request. In 1535 he was appointed Bishop of Worcester.

In 1536 Latimer was at Lambeth examining heretics with Cranmer and Shaxton. He also preached at Paul's Cross, denouncing in homely language the luxury of bishops, abbots, and other "strong thieves." He said in a later enormities were first

sermon that when their

read in the Parliament House they were so great and abominable that there was nothing

but "Down with them!"

But he went on to

lament that many of the abbots were made bishops to save their pensions, and that there was no real reformation, but only plunder. He believed to some extent in the evil reports; but he told the King that it was not well to use as royal stables buildings which had been raised and maintained for the use of the poor.

On June 9th of that same year Latimer had. the singular fortune of preaching the opening sermon to Convocation, which had so lately tried to suppress him. He denounced the degradation of Christ's Word by superstitions about purgatory and images. In the afternoon he preached again, and asked the assembled clergy what good they had done to the people during the last seven years. They had burned a dead man, and tried to burn a living one (himself); but the real impulse to preach oftener had come from the King.

Convocation proceeded to pass acts in accordance with some of his suggestions. It drew up a set of articles of religion, and a declaration on Holy Orders, both of which Latimer signed with the others; and it abrogated a number of superfluous holidays. It delivered an opinion, signed by Latimer, that it lay with sovereign

princes, and not with the Pope, to summon General Councils. He was now recognised as a great promoter of the reformed opinions in the King's Councils, and in the Lincolnshire and Yorkshire rebellions in the same year the insurgents repeatedly demanded that he and Cranmer should be delivered up to them or banished.

of

[ocr errors]

In 1537 he was in London, helping to bring out the Institution of a Christian Man, known as the Bishops' Book. About this time he corresponded with King Henry on the subject Purgatory," maintaining that the dissolution of the monasteries could only be justified on the theory that purgatory was a delusion. On his return to his diocese he enjoined his clergy to obtain if possible a whole Bible, or at least a New Testament, in Latin or English. In November he was summoned again to London, as the greatest preacher of the age, to give the funeral sermon of Queen Jane Seymour.

In February 1538 he was again in London, when the smiling rood of Boxley was exposed and burned, after which he carried in his hand and threw out of St. Paul's a small image which legend declared eight oxen could not move. In his own cathedral he caused an image of Mary

He

to be stripped of its jewels and ornaments. was anxious that "our great Sibyl" should burn at Smithfield with her old sister of Walsingham, her young sister of Ipswich, with their two other sisters of Doncaster and Penrice. In the same year he had the painful duty of preaching at the burning of Friar Forest, for denying the King's supremacy: he asks that he may be near Forest, for I would endeavour myself so to content the people that therewith I might also convert Forest, God so helping, or rather altogether working." He was also at this time head of a commission for examining the "blood of Hales," which was found to be honey, or some yellowish gum.

In 1539 Latimer had to attend the new Parliament and Convocation. In the face of a papal excommunication it had to be shown how little England had departed from the old principles of the faith; and Latimer was appointed one of a committee of divines for this purpose. They could not agree within ten days, and under pressure from the King the Act of Six Articles was carried. The next three days Latimer was absent from his place in Parliament. So severe was the terrible whip that Latimer himself was not safe. He and

« VorigeDoorgaan »