Books Condemned to be Burnt Part 4

[79:1] _Life of Laud_, 294.

[80:1] From the account in the _State Trials_, III. 576.

[82:1] In his defence he says that he always voted last or last but one. In that case he must always have heard the sentence pa.s.sed by those who spoke before him, and not dissented from it.

His sole excuse is, that he was no worse than his colleagues; to which the answer is, he ought to have been better.

[85:1] Prynne, _New Discovery_, 132.

[91:1] Laud's _Diary_ (Newman's edition), 87.

[91:2] Heylin's _Laud_, 321, 322.

CHAPTER IV.

BOOK-FIRES OF THE REBELLION.

With the beneficent Revolution that practically began with the Long Parliament in November 1640, and put an end to the Star Chamber and High Commission, it might have been hoped that a better time was about to dawn for books. But the control of thought really only pa.s.sed from the Monarchical to the Presbyterian party; and if authors no longer incurred the atrocious cruelties of the Star Chamber, their works were more freely burnt at the order of Parliament than they appear to have been when the sentence to such a fate rested with the King or the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Parliament, in fact, a.s.sumed the dictators.h.i.+p of literature, and exercised supreme jurisdiction over author, printer, publisher, and licenser. Either House separately, or both concurrently, a.s.sumed the exercise of this power; and, if a book were sentenced to be burnt, the hangman seems always to have been called in aid. In an age which was pre-eminently the age of pamphlets, and torn in pieces by religious and political dissension, the number of pamphlets that were condemned to be burnt by the common hangman was naturally legion, though, of course, a still greater number escaped with some lesser form of censure. It is only with the former that I propose to deal, and only with such of them as seem of more than usual interest as ill.u.s.trating the manners and thoughts of that turbulent time.

It is a significant fact that the first writer whose works incurred the wrath of Parliament was the Rev. John Pocklington, D.D., one of the foremost innovators in the Church in the days of Laud's prosperity. The House of Lords consigned two of his books to be burnt by the hangman, both in London and the two chief Universities (February 12th, 1641). These were his _Sunday no Sabbath_, and the _Altare Christianum_.

The first of these was originally a sermon, preached on August 17th, 1635, wherein the Puritan view of Sunday was vehemently a.s.sailed, and the Puritans themselves vigorously abused. "These Church Schismatics are the most gross, nay, the most transparent hypocrites and the most void of conscience of all others. They will take the benefit of the Church, but abjure the doctrine and discipline of the Church." How often has not this argument done duty since against Pocklington's ecclesiastical descendants! But it is to be historically regretted that Pocklington's views of Sunday, the same of course as those of James the First's famous book, or Declaration of Sports, were not destined to prevail, and seem still as far as ever from attainment.

The _Altare Christianum_ had been published in 1637, in answer to certain books by Burton and Prynne, its object being to prove that altars and churches had existed before the Christian Church was 200 years old. But had these churches any more substantial existence than that one built, as he says, by Joseph of Arimathea, at Glas...o...b..ry, in the year 55 A.D.? Did the Arimathean really visit Glas...o...b..ry? Anyhow, the book is full of learning and instruction, and, indeed, both Pocklington's books have an interest of their own, apart from their fate, which, of so many, is their sole recommendation.

The sentence against Pocklington was strongly vindictive. Both his practices and his doctrines were condemned. In his practice he was declared to have been "very superst.i.tious and full of idolatry," and to have used many gestures and ceremonies "not established by the laws of this realm." These were the sort of ceremonies that, without ever having been so established by law, our ritualists have practically established by custom; and the offence of the ritualist doctrine as held in those days, and as ill.u.s.trated by Pocklington, lay in the following tenets ascribed to him: (1) that it was men's duty to bow to altars as to the throne of the Great G.o.d; (2) that the Eucharist was the host and held corporeal presence therein; (3) that there was in the Church a distinction between holy places and a Holy of holies; (4) that the canons and const.i.tutions of the Church were to be obeyed without examination.

For these offences of ritual and doctrine--offences to which, fortunately, we can afford to be more indifferent than our ancestors were, no reasonable man now thinking twice about them--Pocklington was deprived of all his livings and dignities and preferments, and incapacitated from holding any for the future, whilst his books were consigned to the hangman. It may seem to us a spiteful sentence; but it was after all a mild revenge, considering the atrocious sufferings of the Puritan writers. It is worse to lose one's ears and one's liberty for life than even to be deprived of Church livings; and it is noticeable that bodily mutilations came to an end with the clipping of the talons of the Crown and the Church at the beginning of the Long Parliament.

Taking now in order the works of a political nature that were condemned by the House of Commons to be burnt by the hangman, we come first to the _Speeches of Sir Edward Dering_, member for Kent in the Long Parliament, and a greater antiquary than he ever was a politician. He it was who, on May 27th, 1641, moved the first reading of the Root and Branch Bill for the abolition of Episcopacy. "The pride, the avarice, the ambition, and oppression by our ruling clergy is epidemical," he said; thereby proving that such an opinion was not merely a Puritan prejudice. But Dering appears only really to have aimed at the abolition of Laud's archiepiscopacy, and to have wished to see some purer form of prelacy re-established in place of the old. Naturally his views gave offence, which he only increased by republis.h.i.+ng his speeches on matters of religion, Parliament being so incensed that it burned his book, and committed its author for a week to the Tower (February 2nd, 1642).

Dering's was the common fate of moderate men in stormy times, who, seeing good on each side, are ill thought of by both.

Failing to be loyal to either, he was by both mistrusted. For not only did he ultimately vote on the side of the royalist episcopal party, but he actually fought on the King's side; then, being disgusted with the royalists for their leaning to Popery, he accepted the pardon offered for a compensation by Parliament in 1644, and died the same year, leaving posterity to regret that he was ever so ill-advised as to exchange antiquities for politics and party strife.

The famous speech of the statesman whom Charles, with his usual defiance of public opinion, soon afterwards raised to the peerage as Lord Digby (on the pa.s.sing of the Bill of Attainder against Lord Strafford), was, after its publication by its author, condemned to be burnt at Westminster, Cheapside, and Smithfield (July 13th, 1642). Digby voted against putting Strafford to death, because he did not think it proved by the evidence that Strafford had advised Charles to employ the army in Ireland for the subjection of England. But he condemned his general conduct as strongly as any man. He calls him "the great apostate to the Commonwealth, who must not expect to be pardoned it in this world till he be dispatched to the other." He refers very happily to his great abilities, "whereof G.o.d hath given him the use, but the devil the application." But does the critic's own memory stand much higher? Was he not the King's evil genius, who, together with the Queen, pushed him to that fatal step--the arrest of the five members?

How soon Parliament acquired the evil habit of dealing by fire and the hangman with uncongenial publications is proved by the fact that in one year alone the following five leaflets or pamphlets suffered in this way:--

1. _The Kentish Pet.i.tion_, drawn up at the Maidstone a.s.sizes by the gentry, ministry, and commonalty of Kent, praying for the preservation of episcopal government, and the settlement of religious differences by a synod of the clergy (April 17th, 1642). The pet.i.tion was couched in very strong language; and Professor Gardiner is probably right in saying that it was the condemnation of this famous pet.i.tion which rendered civil war inevitable.

2. _A True Relation of the Proceedings of the Scots and English Forces in the North of Ireland._ This was thought to be dishonouring to the Scots, and was accordingly ordered to be burnt (June 8th, 1642).

3. _King James: his Judgment of a King and a Tyrant_ (September 12th, 1642).

4. _A Speedy Post from Heaven to the King of England_ (October 5th, 1642).

5. _Letter from Lord Falkland_ to the Earl of c.u.mberland, concerning the action at Worcester (October 8th, 1642).

Thus did Parliament, and the House of Commons especially, improve upon the precedent first set by the Star Chamber; and the practice must soon have somewhat lost its force by the very frequency of its repet.i.tion. David Buchanan's _Truth's Manifest_, containing an account of the conduct of the Scotch nation in the Civil War, was condemned to be burnt by the hangman (April 13th, 1646), but may still be read. _An Unhappy Game at Scotch and English_, pamphlets like the _Mercurius Elenchicus_ and _Mercurius Pragmaticus_, the _Justiciarius Justificatus_, by George Wither, perished about the same time in the same way; and in 1648 such profane Royalist political squibs as _The Parliament's Ten Commandments_; _The Parliament's Pater Noster, and Articles of the Faith_; and _Ecce the New Testament of our Lords and Saviours, the House of Commons at Westminster, or the Supreme Council at Windsor_, were, for special indignity, condemned to be burnt in the three most public places of London.

The observance of Sunday has always been a fruitful source of contention, and in 1649 the chief magistrates in England and Wales were ordered by the House of Commons to cause to be burnt all copies of James Okeford's _Doctrine of the Fourth Commandment, deformed by Popery, reformed and restored to its primitive purity_ (March 18th, 1650). They did their duty so well that not a copy appears to survive, even in the British Museum.

The author, moreover, was sentenced to be taken and imprisoned; so thoroughly did the spirit of persecution take possession of a Parliamentary majority when the power of it fell into their hands.

This was also shown in other matters. For instance, not only were _Joseph Primatt's Pet.i.tion_ to Parliament, with reference to his claims to certain coal mines, and Lilburne's _Just Reproof to Haberdasher's Hall_ on Primatt's behalf, condemned to be burnt by the hangman (January 15th, July 30th, 1652), but both authors were sentenced, one to fines amounting to 5,000, the other to fines amounting to 7,000, which, though falling far short of the Star Chamber fines, were very considerable sums in those days. Lilburne, on this occasion, was also sentenced to be banished, and to be deemed guilty of felony if he returned; but this part of the sentence was never enforced, for Lilburne remained, to continue to the very end, by speech and writing, that perpetual warfare with the party in power which const.i.tuted his political life.

John Fry, M.P., who sat in the High Court of Justice for the trial of Charles I., wrote in 1648 his _Accuser Shamed_ against Colonel Downes, a fellow-member, who had most unfairly charged him before the House with blasphemy for certain expressions used in private conversation, and thereby caused his temporary suspension. Dr. Cheynel, President of St. John's at Oxford, printed an answer to this, and Fry rejoined in his _Clergy in their True Colours_ (1650), a pamphlet singularly expressive of the general dislike at that time entertained for the English clergy. He complains of the strange postures a.s.sumed by the clergy in their prayers before the sermon, and says: "Whether the fools and knaves in stage plays took their pattern from these men, or these from them, I cannot determine; but sure one is the brat of the other, they are so well alike." He confesses himself "of the opinion of most, that the clergy are the great incendiaries." In the matter of Psalm-singing he finds "few men under heaven more irrational in their religious exercises than our clergy." As to their common evasion of difficulties by the plea that it is above reason, he fairly observes: "If a man will consent to give up his reason, I would as soon converse with a beast as with that man." Nevertheless, how many do so still!

Fry wrote as a rational churchman, not as an anti-Christian, "from a hearty desire for their (the clergy's) reformation, and a great zeal to my countrymen that they may no longer be deceived by such as call themselves the ministers of the Gospel, but are not." This appears on the t.i.tle-page; but a good motive has seldom yet saved a man or a book, and the House, having debated about both tracts from morning till night, not only voted them highly scandalous and profane, but consigned them to the hangman to burn, and expelled Fry from his seat in Parliament (February 21st, 1651).

So far of the political utterances that for the offence they gave were condemned to the flames; but these only represent one side of the activity of the legislature of that time. Nothing, indeed, better ill.u.s.trates the mind of the seventeenth century than the several instances in which Parliament, in the exercise of its a.s.sumed power over literature generally, interfered with works of a theological nature, nor does anything more clearly or curiously reveal the mental turmoil of that period than does the perusal of some of the works that then met with Parliamentary censure or condemnation. In undertaking this interference it is possible that Parliament exceeded its province, and one is glad that it has long since ceased to claim the keepers.h.i.+p of the People's Conscience. But in those days ideas of toleration were in their infancy; the right of free thought, or of its expression, had not been established; and the maintenance of orthodoxy was deemed as much the duty of Parliament as the maintenance of the rights of the people. So a Parliamentary majority soon came to exercise as much tyranny over thought as ever had been exercised by king or bishop; and, in fact, the theological writer ran even greater personal risks from the indignation of Parliament than he would have run in the period preceding 1640, for he began to run in danger of his life.

The first theological work dealt with by Parliament appears to have been that curious posthumous work, ent.i.tled _Comfort for Believers about their Sinnes and Troubles_, which appeared in June 1645, by John Archer, Master of Arts, and preacher at All Hallows', Lombard Street. It had but a short life, for the very next month the a.s.sembly of Divines, then sitting at Westminster, complained to Parliament of its contents, and Parliament condemned it to be publicly burnt in four places, the a.s.sembly to draw up a formal detestation to be read at the burning. In this doc.u.ment it was admitted that the author had been "of good estimation for learning and piety"; but the author's logic was better than his theology, for he attributed all evil to the Cause of all things, and contended that for wise purposes G.o.d not only permitted sin, but had a hand in its essence, namely, "in the privity, and ataxy, the anomye, or irregularity of the act" (if that makes it any clearer). A single pa.s.sage will convey the drift of the seventy-six pages devoted to this difficult problem:--

"Who hinted to G.o.d, or gave advice by counsel to Him, to let the creature sin? Did any necessity, arising upon the creature's being, enforce it that sin must be? Could not G.o.d have hindered sin, if He would? Might He not have kept man from sinning, as He did some of the angels? Therefore, it was His device and plot before the creature was that there should be sin. . . . It is by sin that most of G.o.d's glory in the discovery of His attributes doth arise. . . . Therefore certainly it limits Him much to bring in sin by a contingent accident, merely from the creature, and to deny G.o.d a hand and will in its being and bringing forth."

The author thought these positions quite compatible with orthodoxy; not so, however, the Presbyterian divines, nor Parliament; and certainly Archer's questions were more easily and more swiftly answered by fire than in any other way. Had he lived, one wonders how the divines would have punished him. For the next two cases prove how dangerous it was becoming to be convicted or even suspected of heterodoxy. Parliament was beginning to understand its duty as Defender of the Faith as the Holy Inquisition has always understood it--namely, by the death of the luckless a.s.sailant.

Thus, on July 24th, 1647, the House of Commons condemned to be burnt in three different places, on three different days, Paul Best's pamphlet, of the following curious t.i.tle: _Mysteries Discovered, or a Mercurial Picture pointing out the way from Babylon to the Holy City, For the Good of all such as during that Night of General Error and Apostacy, II. Thess. ii. 3, Rev. iii.

10, have been so long misled with Rome's Hobgoblin, by me, Paul Best, prisoner in the Gatehouse, Westminster_. It concluded with a prayer for release from an imprisonment, which had then lasted more than three years, for certain theological opinions "committed to a minister (a supposed friend) for his judgment and advice only." This minister was the Rev. Roger Leys, who infamously betrayed the trust reposed in him, and made public the frankness of private conversation.

Best had been imprisoned in the Gatehouse for certain expressions he was supposed to have used about the Trinity; and before he wrote this pamphlet the House of Commons had actually voted that he should be hanged. Justly, therefore, he wrote: "Unless the Lord put to His helping hand of the magistrate for the manacling of Satan in that persecuting power, there is little hope either of the liberty of the subject or the law of G.o.d amongst us." And if he was not orthodox, he was sensible, for he says: "I cannot understand what detriment could redound either to Church or Commonwealth by toleration of religions."

His heresy consisted in thinking that pagan ideas had been imported into, and so had corrupted, the original monotheism of Christianity. "We may perceive how by iniquity of time the real truth of G.o.d hath been trodden under foot by a verbal kind of divinity, introduced by the semi-pagan Christianity of the third century in the Western Church." He certainly did not hold the doctrine of the Trinity in what was then deemed the orthodox way, but his precise belief is rather obscurely stated, and is a matter of indifference.

One is glad to learn that he escaped hanging after all, and was released about the end of 1647, probably at the instance of Cromwell. He then retired to the family seat in Yorks.h.i.+re, where he combined farming with his favourite theological studies for the ten remaining years of his life. His career at Cambridge had been distinguished, as might also have been his career in the world but for that unfortunate bent for theology, and the use of his reason in its study, that has led so many worthy men to disgrace and destruction.

But, in spite of the a.s.sembly of Divines, the air was thick with theological speculation; and only a few weeks after the condemnation of Best's _Mysteries_, the House condemned to a similar fate Bidle's _Twelve Arguments drawn out of Scripture, wherein the Commonly Received Opinion touching the Deity of the Holy Spirit is Clearly and Fully Refuted_.

Bidle, a tailor's son, must take high rank among the martyrs of learning. After a brilliant school career at Gloucester, he went to Magdalen College, Oxford, where, says his biographer, "he did so philosophise, as it might be observed, he was determined more by Reason than Authority"; and this dangerous beginning he shortly followed up, when master of the Free School at Gloucester, by the still more dangerous conclusion that the common doctrine of the Trinity "was not well grounded in Revelation, much less in Reason." For this he was brought before the magistrates at Gloucester on the charge of heresy (1644); and from that time till his death from gaol-fever in 1662, at the age of forty-two, Bidle seldom knew what liberty was. It was soon after his first imprisonment that he published his _Twelve Arguments_. Though the House had this burnt by the hangman, it was so popular that it was reprinted the same year. The year following (1648) the House pa.s.sed an ordinance making a denial of the Trinity a capital offence; in spite of which Bidle published his _Confession of Faith touching the Holy Trinity, according to Scripture_, and his _Testimonies of Different Fathers_ regarding the same, the last of which manifests considerable learning. The a.s.sembly of Divines then appealed to Parliament to put him to death; yet, strange to say, Parliament did not do so, but soon after released their prisoner. In 1654 he published his _Twofold Catechism_, for which he was again committed to the Gatehouse, and debarred from the use of pens, ink, and paper; and all his books were sentenced to be burnt (December 13th, 1654). After a time, his fate being still uncertain, Cromwell procured his release, or rather sent him off to the Scilly Isles. But his enemies got him into prison again at last, and there a blameless and pious life fell a victim to the power of bigotry. One may regret a life thus spent and sacrificed; but only so has the cause of free thought been gradually won.

Bidle has also been thought to have been the translator of the famous _Racovian Catechism_, first published in Polish at Racow in 1605, and in Latin in 1609. In it two anti-Trinitarian divines reduced to a systematic form the whole of the Socinian doctrine.

A special interest attaches to it from the fact that Milton, then nearly blind, was called before the House in connection with the Catechism, as though he had had a share in its translation or publication. It was condemned to be burnt as blasphemous (April 1st, 1652). In the Journals of the House copious extracts are given from the work, from which the following may serve to indicate what chiefly gave offence:--

"What do you conceive exceedingly profitable to be known of the Essence of G.o.d?

"It is to know that in the Essence of G.o.d there is only one person . . . and that by no means can there be more persons in that Essence, and that many persons in one essence is a pernicious opinion, which doth easily pluck up and destroy the belief of one G.o.d. . . .

"But the Christians do commonly affirm the Son and Spirit to be also persons in the unity of the same G.o.dhead.

"I know they do, but it is a very great error; and the arguments brought for it are taken from Scriptures misunderstood.

"But seeing the Son is called G.o.d in the Scriptures, how can that be answered?