Welcome to Chapter 5 of the Reformation in England by J. H. Myrtle Bean. This chapter is entitled The Iron Age of Spiritual Slavery, from the 11th to the 13th century. We are now entering upon a new phase of history. Romanism was on the point of triumphing by the exertions of learned men, energetic prelates and princes, in whom extreme imprudence was joined with extreme servility. This was the era of the Dominion of Potpourri, and we'll see it unscrupulously employing the despotism by which it is characterised. Amalady, having occasioned some degree of remorse in William Rufus, he consented to fill up the vacancy in the Archepiscopal See. And now Anselm first appears in England. He was born in an alpine valley at the town of Aosta in Piedmont. Imbibing the instructions of his pious mother, Erminberger, and believing that God's throne was placed on the summit of the gigantic mountains, he saw rising around him the child mountains he saw rising around him the child Anselm climbed them in his dreams and received the bread of heaven from the hands of the Lord and happily in after years he recognized another throne in the Church of Christ and bowed his head before the chair of Saint Peter. In 1078 he became Abbot of Beck in Normandy. This was the man whom William II summoned in 1093 to fill the primacy of Canterbury. Anselm, who was then 60 years old, refused at first. The character of Rufus terrified him. The Church of England said he is a plough that ought to be drawn by two oxen of equal strength. How can you yoke together an old and timid sheep like me with that wild bull? At length he accepted, concealing a mind of great power under an appearance of humility. He had hardly arrived in England before he recognised Pope Urban II against the imperial antipope Wibert, whom the king supported, demanded the estates of his sea which the treasury had seized upon, refused to pay the king the sums he demanded, contested the right of Investiture, against Henry I, forbade all ecclesiastics to take the feudal oath and determined that the priests should forthwith put away their wives. Scholasticism, of which Anselm was one of the earlier representatives, freed the church from the yoke of royalty, but only to chain it to the papal chair. The fetters were about to be riveted by a still more energetic hand, and what this great theologian had begun a great worldling was to carry on. At the hunting parties of Henry II, a man attracted the attention of his sovereign by his air of frankness, agreeable manners, witty conversation and exuberant vivacity. This was Thomas Beckett, born in 1118, of middle-class Norman parents. Being both priest and soldier, he was appointed at the same time by the King Prebend of Hastings and Governor of the Tower. When nominated Chancellor of England in 1155, he showed himself no expert, no less expert than Wilfred in misappropriating the wealth of the miners in his charge, and of the abbeys and bishoprics, and indulged in the most extravagant luxury. Henry I of the Plantagenets, a young, inexperienced king of 22, having noticed Beckett's zeal in upholding the prerogatives of the crown, in 1162 appointed him Archbishop of Canterbury. Now Sire, remarked the primate with a smile, when I shall have to choose between God's favour and yours, remember it is yours that I shall sacrifice. Beckett, who as keeper of the seals had been the most magnificent of courtiers, affected as Archbishop to be the most venerable of saints. He resigned the chancellorship, assumed the robe of a monk, wore sackcloth filled with vermin, lived on the plainest food, every day knelt down to wash the feet of the poor, paced the cloisters of his cathedral with tearful eyes, and spent hours in prayer before the altar. As champion of the priests, even in their crimes, he took under his protection one who to the crime of seduction had added the murder of his victim's father. The judges having represented to Henry that during the first eight years of his reign a hundred murders have been committed by ecclesiastics. The king in 1164 summoned a council at Clarendon in which certain regulations or constitutions were drawn up with the object of preventing the encroachments of the hierarchy. Becket at first refused to sign them but at length consented and then withdrew into solitary retirement to mourn over his fault. Pope Alexander III released him from his oath of consent and then began a fierce and long struggle between the king and the primate. Finally, four knights of the court, catching up a hasty expression of their masters, barbarously murdered the archbishop at the foot of the altar in his own cathedral church in the afternoon of 27th December 1170. The people looked upon Beckett as a saint. Immense crowds came to pray at his tomb, at which it was said that many miracles were worked. Even from his grave, said Beckett's partisans, he renders his testimony in behalf of the papacy. Henry now passed from one extreme to the other. He entered Canterbury barefooted and prostrated himself before the martyr's tomb. The bishops, priests and monks, to the number of eighty, passed before him, each bearing a scourge and struck three or five blows, according to their rank, on the naked shoulders of the king. In former ages, so the priestly fable ran, Saint Peter had scourged the Archbishop of Canterbury. Now Rome in sober reality scourges the back of royalty. nothing can henceforward check her victorious career. A Plantagenet surrendered England to the Pope, and the Pope gave him authorities to subdue Ireland. Rome, who had set her foot on the neck of a king, was destined under one of the sons of Henry II to set it on the neck of England. King John, being unwilling to acknowledge an Archbishop of Canterbury illegally nominated by Pope Innocent III, the latter more daring than Hildebrand, laid the kingdom under an interdict 1208. Many of the higher clergy fled from England to escape the King's wrath. Five years later, as John still remained obdurate, the Pope moved Philip Augustus, King of France, to invade and rule England. John thereupon decided to submit. On the 15th of May 1213 he laid his crown at the papal legate's feet, declared that he surrendered his kingdom of England to the Pope and made oath to him as to his Lord Paramount. Shortly a national protest boldly claimed the ancient liberties of the people. Forty-five mounted barons armed in The complete mail, and accompanied by some 2,000 knights, besides a large number of men-at-arms and infantry, met at Brackley during the festival of Easter in 1215, and sent a deputation to the King. Here, they said, is the charter which consecrates the liberties confirmed by Henry I, and which you also have solemnly sworn to observe. Why do they not demand my crown also?" said the King in furious passion. Then with an oath he added, I will not grant them liberties which will make me a slave. But the nation was firmer still in its resolve to avoid enslavement. The Barons occupied London and on the 15th of June 1215 the King signed the famous Magna Carta at Runnymede. political Protestantism of the 13th century would have done but little, however, for the greatness of the nation without the religious Protestantism of the 16th. This was the first time that the papacy came into collision with modern liberty. It shuddered in alarm and the stock was violent. Innocent swore as was his custom and then declared the Great Charter null and void, forbade the king under pain of anathema to respect the liberties which he had confirmed. ascribed the conduct of the barons to the instigation of Satan and ordered them to make apology to the king and to send a deputation to Rome to learn from the mouth of the Pope himself what should be the government of England. This was the way in which the papacy welcomed the first manifestations of liberty among the nations and made known the model system under which it claimed to govern the whole world. The priests of England supported the anathemas pronounced by their chief. They indulge in a thousand jeers and sarcasms against John, but the charter he had accepted. This is the twenty-fifth king of England, not a king, not even a kingling, but the disgrace of kings, a king without a kingdom, the fifth wheel of a wagon, the last of kings, and the disgrace of his people. I would not give a straw for him. Once a king, but now a clown. John, unable to support his disgrace, groaned and gnashed his teeth and rolled his eyes, tore sticks from the hedges and gnawed them like a maniac and dashed them into fragments on the ground. The barons, unmoved, alike, by the insolence of the Pope and the despair of the King, replied that they would maintain the charter. innocently excommunicated them. Is it the Pope's business to regulate temporal matters, asked they? By what right do vile usurers and foul simoniacs domineer over our country and excommunicate the whole world? The Pope soon triumphed throughout England, his vassal John having hired some bands of adventurers from the continent traversed at their head the whole country from the Channel to the Forth. These mercenaries carried desolation in their track. They extorted money, made prisoners, burnt the barons' castles, laid waste their parks and dishonoured their wives and daughters. The king would sleep in a house and the next morning set fire to it. Blood-stained assassins scoured the country during the night, the sword in one hand and the torch in the other, marking their progress by murder and conflagration. Such was the enthronement of potpourri in England. At this site, the barons, overcome by emotion, denounced both the king and the pope. Alas, poor country, they exclaimed, wretched England, and thou, O Pope, a curse light upon thee. The curse was not long delayed, as the king was returning from some more than usually successful foray, and as the royal wagons were crossing the sands of the wash, the tide rose and all sank in the abyss. This accident filled John with terror. It seemed to him that the earth was about to open and swallow him up. Stricken with dysentery, which finally was aggravated by a surfeit of peaches and new cider, John reached Newark and died. Such was the end of the Pope's vassal, of his armed missionary in Britain. Never had so a vile a prince been the involuntary occasion to his people of such great benefits. From his reign, England may date her enthusiasm for liberty and her dread of potpourri. During this time, a great transformation had been accomplished. Magnificent churches and the marbles of religious art with ceremonies and a multitude of prayers and chantings dazzled the eyes, charmed the ears, and captivated the senses, but testified also to the absence of every strong moral and Christian disposition and the predominance of worldliness in The church, at the same time, the adoration of images and relics, saints, angels, and Mary, the mother of God, the worships of Latria, Dulia, and Hyperdulia. The Roman church distinguishes three kinds of worship, Latria, that paid to God, Dulia to saints, and Hyperdulia to the Virgin Mary. At once indicated and kept up among the people that ignorance of truth and absence of grace, which characterize popery. All these errors tended to bring about a reaction. And in fact the march of the Reformation may now be said to begin. England had been brought low by the Papacy. It rose up again by resisting Rome. Grotest, Bradwardine and Edward III prepared the way for Wycliffe and Wycliffe for the Reformation.