Books Condemned to be Burnt Part 2

The Church at the end of the sixteenth century a.s.suredly aimed high. At the time the above books were burnt, it was decreed that no satires or epigrams should be printed in the future; and that no plays should be printed without the inspection and permission of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London! But even this is nothing compared with that later attempt to subject the Press to the Church which called forth Milton's _Areopagitica_; there indeed soon came to be very little to choose between the Inquisition of the High Commission and the more noxious Inquisition of Rome.

Near to the burnt works of the previous writers must be placed those of that prolific writer of the same period, Samuel Rowlands. The severity of his satire, and the obviousness of the allusions, caused two of his works to be burnt, first publicly, and then in the hall kitchen of the Stationers' Company, in October 1600. These were: _The Letting Humour's Blood in the Headvein_, and, _A Merry Meeting; or, 'tis Merry when Knaves meet_; both of which subsequently reappeared under the t.i.tles respectively of _Humour's Ordinarie, where a man may be verie merrie and exceeding well used for his sixpence_, and the _Knave of Clubs_. Either work would now cost much more than sixpence, and probably fail to make the reader very merry, or even merry at all. One of the epigrams, however, of the first work may be quoted as of more than ephemeral truth and interest:--

"Who seeks to please all men each way, And not himself offend, He may begin his work to-day, But G.o.d knows when he'll end."

Little appears to be known of Rowlands, but, like Bishop Hall, he could turn his pen to various purposes with great facility; for the prayers which he is thought to have composed, and which are published with the rest of his works in the admirable edition of 1870, are of as high an order of merit as the religious works of his more famous contemporary.

The only wonder is that the Archbishop did not enforce the burning of much more of the literature of the Elizabethan period, whilst he was engaged on such a crusade. He may well, however, have shrunk appalled from the magnitude of the task, and have thought it better to touch the margin than do nothing at all.

And, after all, in those days a poet was lucky if they only burnt his poems, and not himself as well. In 1619 John Williams, barrister, was actually hanged, drawn, and quartered, for two poems which were not even printed, but which exist in ma.n.u.script at Cambridge to this day. These were _Balaam's a.s.s_ and the _Speculum Regale_. Williams was indiscreet enough to predict the King's death in 1621, and to send the poems secretly to his Majesty in a box. The odd thing is that he thought himself justly punished for his foolish freak, so very peculiar were men's notions of justice in those far-off barbarous days.

CHAPTER II.

BOOK-FIRES UNDER JAMES I.

Despite Mr. D'Israeli's able defence of him, the fas.h.i.+on has survived of speaking disdainfully of James I. and all his works.

The military men of his day, hating him for that wise love of peace which saved us at least from one war on the Continent, complained of a king who preferred to wage war with the pen than with the pike, and vented his anger on paper instead of with powder. But for all that, the patron and friend of Ben Jonson, and the constant promoter of arts and letters, was one of the best literary workmen of his time; nor will any one who dips into his works fail to put them aside without a considerably higher estimate than he had before of the ability of the most learned king that ever occupied the British throne--a monarch unapproached by any of his successors, save William III., in any sort of intellectual power.

Yet here our admiration for James I. must perforce stop. For of many of his ideas the only excuse is that they were those of his age; and this is an excuse that is fatal to a claim to the highest order of merit. All men to some extent are the sport and victims of their intellectual surroundings; but it is the mark of superiority to rise above them, and this James I. often failed to do. He cannot, for instance, in this respect compare with a man whose works he persecuted, namely, Reginald Scot, who in 1584 published his immortal _Discoverie of Witchcraft_, a book which, alike for its motive as its matter, occupies one of the highest places in the history of the literature of Europe.

Yet Scot was only a Kentish country gentleman, who gave himself up solely, says Wood, to solid reading and the perusal of obscure but neglected authors, diversifying his studies with agriculture, and so producing the first extant treatise on hops. Nevertheless, he is among the heroes of the world, greater for me at least than any one of our most famous generals, for it was at the risk of his life that he wrote, as he says himself, "in behalf of the poor, the aged, and the simple"; and if he has no monument in our English Pantheon, he has a better and more abiding one in the hearts of all the well-wishers of humanity. For his reading led him to the a.s.sault of one of the best established, most sacred, yet most stupid, of the superst.i.tions of mankind; and to have exposed both the folly of the belief, and the cruelty of the legal punishments, of witchcraft, more justly ent.i.tles his memory to honour than the capture of many stormed cities or the butchery of thousands of his fellow-beings on a battlefield.

How trite is the argument that this or that belief must be true because so many generations have believed it, so many countries, so many famous men,--as if error, like stolen property, gained a t.i.tle from prescription of time! Scot pierced this pretension with a single sentence: "Truth must not be measured by time, for every old opinion is not sound." "My great adversaries," he says, "are young ignorance and old custom. For what folly soever tract of time hath fostered, it is so superst.i.tiously pursued of some as though no error could be acquainted with custom." May we not say, indeed, that beliefs are rendered suspect by the very extent of their currency and acceptance?

But Scot had a greater adversary than even young ignorance or old custom; and that was King James, who, whilst King of Scotland, wrote his _Demonologie_ against Scot's ideas (1597). James's mind was strictly Bible-bound, and for him the disbelief in witches savoured of Sadduceeism, or the denial of spirits. Yet Scot had taken care to guard himself, for he wrote: "I deny not that there are witches or images; but I detest the idolatrous opinions conceived of them." Nor can James have carefully read Scot, for tacked on to the _Discoverie_ is a _Discourse of Devils and Spirits_, which to the simplest Sadducee would have been the veriest trash. Scot, for instance, says of the devil that "G.o.d created him purposely to destroy. I take his substance to be such as no man can by learning define, nor by wisdom search out"; a conclusion surely as wise as the theology is curious. Anyhow it is the very reverse of Sadduceean. It is said that one of the first proceedings of James's reign was to have all the copies of Scot's book burnt that could be seized, and undoubtedly one of the first of his Acts of Parliament was the statute that made all the devices of witchcraft punishable with death, as felony, without benefit of clergy.

But about the burning there is room for doubt. For there is no English contemporary testimony of the fact. Voet, a professor of theology in Holland, is its only known contemporary witness; but he may have a.s.sumed the suppression of the book to have been identical with its burning; a common a.s.sumption, but a no less common mistake. On the other hand, many books undoubtedly were burnt under James that are not mentioned by name; and the great rarity of the first edition of the book, and its absence from some of our princ.i.p.al libraries, support the possibility of its having been among them.[52:1] Nevertheless, to quote Mr.

D'Israeli: "On the King's arrival in England, having discovered the numerous impostures and illusions which he had often referred to as authorities, he grew suspicious of the whole system of Daemonologie, and at length recanted it entirely. With the same conscientious zeal James had written the book, the King condemned it; and the sovereign separated himself from the author, in the cause of truth; but the clergy and the Parliament persisted in making the imaginary crime felony by the statute." So that if James really burnt the book, he must have burnt it to please others, not himself; and though he may have done so, the presumption is rather that he did not.

The wonder is that Scot himself escaped the real or supposed fate of his book. Pleasing indeed is it to know that he lived out his days undisturbed to the end (1599) with his family and among his hops and flowers in Kent; not, however, before he had lived to see his book make a perceptible impression on the magistracy and even on the clergy of his time, till a perceptible check was given to his ideas by the _Demonologie_. But at all events he had given superst.i.tion a reeling blow, from which it never wholly recovered, and to which it ultimately succ.u.mbed. More than this can few men hope to do, and to have done so much is ample cause for contentment.

Fundamental questions of all sorts were growing critical in the reign of James, who had not only the clearest ideas of their answer, but the firmest determination to have them, if possible, answered in his own way. The princ.i.p.al ones were: The relations.h.i.+p of the King to his subjects; of the Pope to kings; of the Established Church to Puritanism and Catholicism. And on the leading political and religious questions of his day James caused certain books to be burnt which advocated opinions contrary to his own--a mode of reasoning that reflects less credit on his philosophy than does his conduct in most other respects.

But the first book that was burnt for its sentiments on Prerogative was one of which the King was believed personally to approve. This was probably the gist of its offence, for it appeared about the time that the King made his very supercilious speech to the Commons in answer to their complaints about the High Commission and other grievances.

I allude to the famous _Interpreter_ (1607) by Cowell, Doctor of Civil Law at Cambridge, which, written at the instigation of Archbishop Bancroft, was dedicated to him, and caused a storm little dreamt of by its author. Sir E. c.o.ke disliked Cowell, whom he nicknamed Cow-heel, and naturally disliked him still more for writing slightingly of Littleton and the Common Law. He therefore caused Parliament to take the matter up, with the result that Cowell was imprisoned and came near to hanging;[54:1] James only saving his life by suppressing his book by proclamation, for which the Commons returned him thanks with great exultation over their victory.

For Cowell had taken too strongly the high monarchical line, and the episode of his book is really the first engagement in that great war between Prerogative and People which raged through the seventeenth century. "I hold it uncontrollable," he wrote, "that the King of England is an absolute king." "Though it be a merciful policy, and also a politic policy (not alterable without great peril) to make laws by the consent of the whole realm . . .

yet simply to bind the prince to or by these laws were repugnant to the nature and custom of an absolute monarchy." "For those regalities which are of the higher nature there is not one that belonged to the most absolute prince in the world which doth not also belong to our King." But the book was condemned, not only for its sins against the Subject, but also for pa.s.sages that were said to pinch on the authority of the King. Yet, considered merely as a Law Dictionary, it is still one of the best in our language.

In the King's proclamation against the _Interpreter_ are some pa.s.sages that curiously ill.u.s.trate the mind of its author. He thus complains of the growing freedom of thought: "From the very highest mysteries of the G.o.dhead and the most inscrutable counsels in the Trinitie to the very lowest pit of h.e.l.l and the confused action of the divells there, there is nothing now unsearched into by the curiositie of men's brains"; so that "it is no wonder that they do not spare to wade in all the deepest mysteries that belong to the persons or the state of Kinges and Princes, that are G.o.ds upon earth." King James's att.i.tude to Free Thought reminds one of the legendary contention between Canute and the sea. No one has ever repeated the latter experiment, but how many thousands still disquiet themselves, as James did, about or against the progress of the human mind!

In the proclamation itself there is no actual mention of burning, all persons in possession of the book being required to deliver their copies to the Lord Mayor or County Sheriffs "for the further order of its utter suppression" (March 25th, 1610); neither is there any allusion to burning in the Parliamentary journals, nor in the letters relating to the subject in Winwood's _Memorials_. The contemporary evidence of the fact is, however, supplied by Sir H. Spelman, who says in his _Glossarium_ (under the word "Tenure") that Cowell's book was publicly burnt.

Otherwise, James's proclamations were not always attended to (by one, for instance, he prohibited hunting); and Roger c.o.ke says that the books being out, "the proclamation could not call them in, but only served to make them more taken notice of."[57:1]

That books were often suppressed or called in without being publicly burnt is well shown by Heylin's remark about Mocket's book (presently referred to), that it was "thought fit not only to call it in, but to expiate the errors of it in a public flame."[57:2] Among works thus suppressed without being burnt may be mentioned Bishop Thornborough's two books in favour of the union between England and Scotland (1604), Lord c.o.ke's Speech and Charge at the Norwich a.s.sizes (1607), and Sir W. Raleigh's first volume of the _History of the World_ (1614). I suspect that Scott's _Discoverie_ was likewise only suppressed, and that Voet erroneously thought that this involved and implied a public burning.

But it was not for long that James had saved Cowell's life, for the latter's death the following year, and soon after the resignation of his professors.h.i.+p, is said by Fuller to have been hastened by the trouble about his book. The King throughout behaved with great judgment, nor is it so true that he surrendered Cowell to his enemies, as that he saved him from imminent personal peril. Men like Cowell and Blackwood and Bancroft were probably more monarchical than the monarch himself; and, though James held high notions of his own powers, and could even hint at being a G.o.d upon earth, his subjects were far more ready to accept his divinity than he was to force it upon them.

It was not quite for nothing that James had had for his tutor the republican George Buchanan, one of the first opponents of monarchical absolutism in his famous _De Jure Regni apud Scotos_; nor did he ever quite forget the n.o.ble words in which at his first Parliament he thus defined for ever the position of a const.i.tutional king: "That I am a servant it is most true, that as I am head and governor of all the people in my dominion who are my natural va.s.sals and subjects, considering them in numbers and distinct ranks: so, if we will take the whole people as one body and ma.s.s, then, as the head is ordained for the body and not the body for the head, so must a righteous king know himself to be ordained for his people and not his people for him. . . . _I will never be ashamed to confess it my princ.i.p.al honour to be the great servant of the Commonwealth._"

And in this very matter of Cowell's book James not only denied any preference for the civil over the common law, but professed "that, although he knew how great and large a king's rights and prerogatives were, yet that he would never affect nor seek to extend his beyond the prescription and limits of the munic.i.p.al laws and customs of this realm."[59:1]

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;[59:2] 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 Paraeus, 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 Paraeus 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. Paraeus 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 Paraeus 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 Ecclesiae Anglicanae_ (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 a.s.serts 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 inst.i.tution. 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, succ.u.mbing, 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 naturae_ 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 inst.i.tuted 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 Catholicae Fidei contra Anglicanae Sectae 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 friends.h.i.+p, 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 professors.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sages which vexed the royal soul, and should teach us to rejoice that the reign of such discussions shows signs of pa.s.sing away:--

"Is there a quant.i.ty in G.o.d?

There is; but not a physical quant.i.ty, But a supernatural quant.i.ty; One nevertheless that is plainly imperceptible to us, And merely spiritual."

Or again:--

"Hath G.o.d a body? If we will speak properly, He has none; yet is it no absurdity, speaking improperly, to ascribe a body unto G.o.d, 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 princ.i.p.al 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 a.s.sumed 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 Paraeus, 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!

FOOTNOTES:

[52:1] That is Dr. Brinsley Nicholson's conclusion in his preface to Scot; yet, if the book was burnt, it is highly improbable that the common hangman officiated.

[54:1] Winwood's _Memorials_, I. 125.

[57:1] _Detection of Court and State of England_ (1696), I. 30.