REFORMATION POLITICS.• THE significance of the rebellion in the Western
counties in the reign of Edward VI. has been frequently belittled by his- torians, and its causes have occasionally been misunderstood.
• (1) The WeNtern Rebellion of 1549. By Frames Bose-Troup. London awty, Eid, Co. L14, n.t.1— -(2) Lollardy and the 14 Miss Rose-Troop's sympathy is obviously not with "the Reformation, as we style it," and she mentions in her preface that her manuscript was read and revised by Dr. James Gairdner, "who would have written an introductory note had ho been spared to us." It is with some hesitation that we write of Dr. Gairdner's own posthumous volume, the last instalment of his Lollardy and the Reformation in England, which sees the light under the pious care of Dr. William Hunt. IL is an ungracious task to criticize the last words of a dis- tinguished scholar, whose contributions to the historiography of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries will long continue to be the indispensable tools of students of the period. The chapter% of this book were written in Dr. Gairdner's eighty- fourth year, and in their enormous proportion of detail—the four hundred pages deal with the events of one year—they give indications of failing powers. But they add considerably to our knowledge of the first six months of the reign of Mary Tudor, and it is easy to sympathize with the courageous veteran who wrote them in physical weakness and distress, and to feel grateful for the light thrown upon the difficulties and the policy of the first Tudor Queen. But though it is this narrative that gives the book its value, Dr. Gairdner's purpose in writing it was net merely to elucidate the sequence of events during these months. As Dr. Hunt observes in an admirable and restrained introductory note, Dr. Gairdner "believed that he had a special work to do; indeed, it may almost be said, a message to deliver." He considered that too little account has been taken "of the wrongs inflicted on Catholics, and of the tyranny, greed, and irreverence, the robbery of God and His Church, which in his view disgraced the Reformation in England." Such an attitude deserves a sympathetic consideration, but it appeared to not a few critics of Dr. Gairdner's first two volumes that his zeal for righting wrongs led him to take a biassed view of the whole Reforma- tion movement, and to judge unfairly those who suffered as heretics, and whom the large majority of their countrymen have been wont to revere as martyrs. Heresy, as it appeared to the readers of these volumes, was to Dr. Gairdner in itself a crime, and he was reminded that, as a member of the Church of England, he was himself a "heretic," for, as the late Canon Bigg remarked, " these early English Protestants did not hold one single belief which is not held or regarded as tenable amongst us at the present day." In a pathetic preface to his third volume, Dr. Gairdner replied to this criticism, and his words throw some light upon his standpoint :— " I am happy to say I know several Roman Catholics, some of them even divines of high standing, who, I think, value my friendship as I do theirs. They do not avoid my company as they ought to do if they considered me a heretic in the same sense as Bilney was. But am I really so ? Or is it only laxity of principle on their part not to shun me ? I am inclined to think that they feel no compunction about it. . . . Mere opinions, in truth, do not constitute heresy in any man ; and it is even true that the heresies of the Middle Ages are not heresies now, just because they do not tend in honest men to break up further the unity and social life of Christianity." Heresy be elsewhere condemns as contempt of court:— "When ... a Church tribunal had definitely pronounced a man a heretic, and he refused to recant or bow to the opinion of trained hudges, who presumably understood such questions better than imself—what was this but contempt of court ? . . Is contempt of any jurisdiction to be tolerated while we still profess to accept that jurisdiction as right?" This must have been the view of many a conservative sixteenth- century Churchman, and it is in the spirit of a conservative sixteenth-century Churchman that Dr. Gairdner deals with the Protestants of the Reformation. Stress is laid upon Queen Mary's principles of religious toleration, and the Protestants are censured for dissatisfaction with a toleration which was to continue " until some parlia- mentary settlement could be achieved," although any :Buell settlement must have meant a reversal of what had recently been made the law of the land. In dealing with individual heretics, every possible point is pressed against them; and one of them is identified—uncertainly, we believe—with a London parson who despoiled Richard Wbittington's tomb. The identification leads to the comment that "there were, doubtless, many bad Priests before the Reformation, but a good many of them, prob- ably, found godliness great gain in the days of Edward VI." We are constantly reminded of the sixteenth-century, con- servative: "The question was simply whether any order was to be kept in the Church and whether bishops who, like Bonner, had been unconstitutionally displaced were to be obeyed when they were restored to their true and legitimate positions ? . . . What prospect was there of anything like religious order if parsons were to be superior to their bishops ?" The Marian Protestants were religious rebels, to deal with whom "it was unhappily felt necessary to revive the old heresy laws." Dr. Gairdner's work does not reach the period of the reign when De haerstico comintrentla was re-enacted, but he thinks that the Protestants should have been content. because "no burninge really took place, or were likely to take place, till the realm was reconciled to Rome more than a year later, and till Parliament had revived the old heresy laws." The Queen's aims were well understood, and it was not a pleasant prospect even with a year's grace ; there were other penalties besides burnings, and from the very beginning of the reign the right to hold Protestant' views *as ia the gravest danger. Dr. Gairdner constantly censures Foxe for overstating his case. It seems to us that he has, not less constantly, overstated his own, and his whole treatment is, not intentionally, but from the very vehemence of his own beliefs, consistently unfair. His book is an enlarged pamphlet, and it cannot be accepted as the last word of modem investi- gation into the English Reformation. It is learned, and it is earnest, and its author's name and character wiU always command respect and attention.
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