THE MINOR PRELATES 205 chance of success. Too soon, however, it was found that James could oppress his Catholic subjects even more cruelly than his predecessors, and the play was dropped. In 1612 Shakespeare retired wholly from the stage, sold his plays and theatrical property to Alleyne, and the new piece, as adapted and altered, with the fifth act added to suit a Jacobean audience, was the work of Fletcher. The portraiture of the remaining prelates in the historical plays, the scenes of which are laid in Catholic times, betrays nothing inconsistent with Shakespeare's Catholicism. "This group," remarks Thummel," is recruited from the highest houses in England, and represents a stately array of political lords in priestly robes, of noble descent, true priests, and Englishmen to the backbone." They were statesmen, no doubt, for as spiritual peers they were legislators in the Upper House of the kingdom. Doubtless, also, their policy was not always disinterested and free from utilitarian motives. But these ecclesiastics bear no resemblance to the popular Protestant idea of a Catholic prelate, as the Bishop of Rochester in Drayton's play, or Munday's Sir John Oldcastle, or as Marlowe or Fletcher would have portrayed him, a serpentine, foreign intriguer, always bent on betraying the interests of his own country, to the supposed aggrandisement of Rome. At their head stands the loyal Bishop of Carlisle, who alone of the great nobles dared to resist the 1 Shakespeare, Jahrbuch, 16, 361. usurping Bolingbroke, and maintained the rights of Richard "I speak to subjects, and a subject speaks, -Richard II., iv. 1. And Bolingbroke, now Henry IV., in sentencing the Bishop to a mild imprisonment, pays tribute to one who, though ever his foe, had displayed “high sparks of honour." Again, with what dignity the learned and venerable Archbishop Scroop defends himself against Lord Westmoreland, for joining in the insurrection against the same Henry IV. : · "I have in equal balance justly weighed What wrongs our arms may do, what wrongs we suffer, And find our griefs heavier than our offences. We see which way the stream of time doth run, And are enforced from our most quiet sphere And have the summary of all our griefs, When we are wronged, and would unfold our griefs, Even by those men that most have done us wrong. (Whose memory is written on the earth THE NORTHERN RISING Have put us to these ill-beseeming arms : 207 -2 Henry IV., iv. 1. The He was no partisan or turbulent agitator. The injuries inflicted by the king's misrule were intolerable. Each household of the Commonwealth was in suffering, and the Archbishop made each household's wrong his own. All constitutional means of redress had proved useless, therefore he gave "the seal divine" to the insurrection, not to break but to establish peace. The whole tenor of the insurgent manifesto is that of a solemn religious protest in defence of the Church of Rome and England. document charges Henry with usurpation, treason, perjury, unjust exactions, violation of the privilegium cleri, trying clerics before the secular court. The eighth article deposes that the King had ratified "that most wicked statute (of præmunire) directed against the power and principality of the Holy Roman See as delivered by our Lord Jesus Christ to the Blessed Peter and his successors." after proceeding to specify the abuses springing from the royal patronage of benefices, such as the general, simoniacal promotion of rude and unworthy persons for the half or the third part of the benefices so bestowed, it concludes by saying "that the same most wicked statute is not only opposed to the rights of St. Peter, but that it is destruction to the Then, clergy, to the knighthood and republic of the realm, because from one thing another always follows." 1 The framers of the complaint seem to have been convinced that the liberty of the Church guaranteed that of the State; and it was in defence of both realms, civil as well as spiritual, that the Archbishop gave his life. Shakespeare's treatment of the Archbishop is wholly in keeping with the facts of history and the popular cultus he afterwards received as a saint and martyr. The two prelates in "Henry V.," Henry Chicheley, Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Bishop of Ely, are often instanced as examples of time-serving Churchmen who preferred a policy of utilitarian bloodshed to the interests of justice and peace. Their arguments on behalf of Henry's claims to the French crown are taken literally from Hollinshed, and their pleadings, however worldly, were first advocated by Edward III., and were held, in their own time, by the king and country at large. There is no reason, then, as Bishop Stubbs points out, why they, more than the lay Barons, who equally advocated an appeal to arms, should be made responsible for the war which followed. As a matter of fact, as the same author shows, Archbishop Chicheley was not present at the Parliament of Leicester; 2 but it is by no means improbable that the Bishops espoused the popular feeling in favour of the invasion of France, both as a means of uniting the country within and 1 Foxe, iii. 233-255. 2 Constitut. Hist, iii. 81. CESSATION OF MIRACLES 209 of saving the Church from the threatened Spoliation Bill. Shakespeare, however, has profited by the prelates' speeches, as recorded in the Chronicles, not to expose their unworthy motives but to bring out the reverence felt by Henry V. for the Church. In the introductory discussion between the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely, the king is described as full of grace and "fair regard," a true lover of Holy Church, suddenly changed from a wild prince, leagued with low associates, to a king as wise in counsel as if the crown had been his lifelong study, reasoning in divinity like a bishop, solving at once the most complicated cases in policy, so eloquent that his discourse on war seemed like "A fearful battle, rendered you in music." The strawberry thriving beneath the nettle, the summer grass growing fastest by night, are but images of this wonderful conversion; and Archbishop Chicheley concludes that some natural means must be admitted, "since miracles have ceased." 2 These last words, from the mouth of the first prelate of the kingdom, are taken both by Gervinus 1 and Kreysig as evidence of the poet's rationalistic spirit, and of his freedom from the superstitions of his time. If so, most of the Fathers were equally enlightened, for the cessation of miracles is a common topic with them; and they explain the fact by show2 i. 281, quoted by Raich, 175. 1 iv. 420, cf. ii. 249. |