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there elevated on a scaffold, so as to be seen by all the people, during the preaching of a sermon by Hilsey, Bishop of Rochester. This, as we learn from Stow, was on Sunday the 24th of February. Here," continues Hooker, "the image once more, with all its machinery exposed, goes with its usual ability through its part. Admiration, rage, astonishment, stir the multitude by turns. The prevailing feeling is one of mortification that they should have been so shamefully deluded by such a cheat. At length, while the preacher waxes warm in his discourse, and the word of God is secretly working in the hearts of his auditors, the wooden block is thrown down headlong into the thickest of the throng. Instantly a confused outcry of many voices arises; the idol is pulled about, is broken, is plucked one piece from another, is torn into a thousand fragments, and is finally consigned to the flames." This uproarious outbreak on the part of his congregation would, we take it for granted, be fatal to any further display of his eloquence by the bishop for that day.

But the tricks and delusions exposed at Paul's Cross were not always those of the Romanists. Exactly twenty years after the penance of Elizabeth Barton, occurred that of Elizabeth Croft, the principal performer in the imposture known by the name of the Spirit in the Wall. The Spirit in the Wall was first heard in March, 1554, soon after the accession of Queen Mary, in a house without Aldersgate, and was certainly a Protestant spirit; the tenor of its exclamations and prophecies, as Strype acknowledges, being "against the Prince of Spain, and the Queen's matching with him, and against auricular confession, the mass, and other Popish worship newly introduced." In fact, so far as it went, the affair was as exact a parallel to that of the Maid of Kent as well could be. By her dark utterances, "the people of the whole city," says Stow, "were wonderfully molested, for that all men might hear the voice, but not see her person." The sounds were supposed to come from nothing less than an angel. It turned out that Croft," a wench about the age of eighteen years," made them with a peculiar kind of whistle, which she had got from one Drakes: among her other confederates were several parish clerks; but the plot was nipped in the bud, before it had time to attract any higher patronage or countenance. On Sunday, the 15th of July, she was brought out at Paul's Cross, and placed upon a scaffold erected for the purpose on the usual spot, where she stood all the time of the sermon, and made open confession of the deception she had been guilty of. Strype relates that "she wept bitterly, and kneeled down, and asked God mercy and the Queen, and bade all people beware of false teaching; and said that promises were made her that she should have many good things given her, as though that had been the cause that induced her to this deceit." Neither she herself nor any of her accomplices was put to death; but one of them, a weaver who lived in Golden Lane, was a few days after set on the pillory.

*

On the 19th of May in the following year, 1555, two women did penance and made confession at Paul's Cross, for their concern in what was, apparently, a harmless enough imposture-the propagation of a story about an infant in a house near the cathedral having spoken, and bidden men pray, declaring that the kingdom of God was at hand. But most probably this miraculous infant was also in the Protestant interest. Most of the other penances performed here * Strype says the 6th, but that was not a Sunday.

in the days of Mary appear to have been by persons, both clergy and laity, who had been seduced into some irregularity or other by the confusion and changes of the time, and who now desired to be received back into the bosom of the ascendant church. Several which Strype records are cases of priests who had taken to themselves wives which they were now willing, possibly more than willing, to part with. Thus, on the 14th of November, 1554, we are told, “five did penance with sheets about them, and tapers and rods in their hands; and the preacher did strike them with a rod; and there they stood till the sermon was done. Then the sumner took away the sheets and the rods from them, and they went into Paul's again, and so up the side of the choir. One of these was named Sir Thomas Laws, otherwise called Sir Thomas Griffin, priest, some time a canon at Elsing Spittle. He and three more were religious men; and the fifth was a temporal man, that had two wives. Those were put to penance for having one." But some of the religious men had indulged themselves with a pair of wives too. Thus, it is noted, that on the 8th of February, 1556, "Mr. Peryn, a black friar, preached at Paul's Cross; at whose sermon a priest named Sir Thomas Sampson did penance, standing before the preacher with a sheet about him, and a taper in his hand burning; the Lord Mayor, the aldermen, and many other worshipful persons present. This man's crime was, that he had two wives, and one was enough to make him do penance." On the 8th of March, again, "while a doctor preached at the Cross, a man did penance for transgressing Lent, holding two pigs, ready drest, whereof one was upon his head, having brought them to sell"-a spectacle which would be rather trying to the gravity of most congregations.

Pennant states, without quoting his authority, that in 1537 a priest named Sir Thomas Newman "bore the fagot here on a singular occasion, for singing mass with good ale." He had just before told us that the Catholic penitents, not having been in danger of burning, never bore fagots. We do not know what reliance is to be placed upon his next assertion, that the last person who penance at Paul's Cross was a seminary priest, who made his recantation

did

in 1593.

One of the latest instances noticed of the pronouncing of an anathema or curse from this pulpit was in 1502, in which year, as we are told by Fabian, "upon the first Sunday of Lent, was solemnly accursed at Paul's Cross Sir Edmond de la Pole, Sir Robert Curzon, and others, and all that them aided again the king." This Edmond de la Pole was the unfortunate Duke of Suffolk, nephew of King Edward IV., his jealousy and fears of whom made Henry VII. miserable for a great part of his reign, and who, afterwards falling into the hands of that king's more daring son and successor, was by him put to death, without even the form of a trial, in 1513.

On the 12th of May, 1521, a grand display of state and pageantry was made here on occasion of the publication of the Pope's sentence against Luther. An account of the ceremonial is quoted by Dugdale from one of the Cotton manuscripts. First, "the Lord Thomas Wolsey," Legate de latere, as well as Cardinal and Archbishop of York, attended by "the most part of the bishops of the realm," presented himself at the entrance to the cathedral, where he was "received with procession and censed" by the Dean; after which he advanced

E

under a canopy of cloth of gold, borne by four doctors, to the high altar, and there made his oblation. This done, he proceeded forth to the Cross in the churchyard, where he placed himself on a scaffold erected for the purpose, taking his seat "under his cloth of estate, which was ordained for him, his two crosses on every side of him." On his right hand sate on the pace, or step, where he set his feet, the Pope's ambassador, and next to him the Archbishop of Canterbury ; on his left the Emperor's ambassador, with the Bishop of Durham next to him: " and all the other bishops, with other noble prelates, sate on two forms out right forth." "And there," concludes the account, "the Bishop of Rochester made a sermon, by the consenting of the whole clergy of England, by the commandment of the Pope, against Martinus Eleutherius and all his works, because he erred sore and spake against the holy faith, and denounced them accursed which kept any of his books. of his books. And there were many burned, in the said churchyard, of the said books, during the sermon. Which ended, my Lord Cardinal went home to dinner with all the other prelates." One would be inclined to think that very little attention could be given to many of these sermons at Paul's Cross, when the senses of the audience were occupied and amused, in the way we have seen, all the time the preacher was addressing them, by the exhibition of persons performing penance with fagots on their shoulders, or lighted tapers in their hands, or pigs on their heads, or by such raree-shows as the Boxley rood, or by this roasting and crackling of heretical books in a great fire blazing away in the midst of them. This place of worship under the open sky must have presented usually rather an animated scene. Many more of the Reformers' books were afterwards burned here, with vain enough rage and spite. Thus Fox notes, that in the month of May, 1531, "the Bishop of London (Stokesley) caused all the New Testaments of Tindal's translation, and many other books which he had bought, to be brought into Paul's Churchyard, and there openly to be burned.” And after this we read of baskets of books being brought to be burned in the churchyard on several occasions of grand ceremonial.

The great era of preaching at Paul's Cross began with the revolt of Henry VIII. against the authority of the Roman see, and the struggle of more than a quarter of a century between the two religions that followed. During all that period of commotion and vicissitude, from the middle of Henry's reign to the accession of Elizabeth, for a great part of which people, when they went to bed at night, hardly knew of what religion they might rise in the morning, the conflict between the old and the new faith, in so far as it was waged by eloquence and argument, and on a popular arena, was chiefly carried on here. One of Henry's first measures, after he had taken his bold resolution of setting about the overthrow of the papal supremacy in England, was to secure this station. One of a series of propositions submitted to the Council in December, 1533, was to the following effect:-" That order be taken that such as shall preach at Paul's Cross from henceforth shall continually, from Sunday to Sunday, preach there, and also teach and declare to the people, that he that now calleth himself Pope, ne any of his predecessors, is and were but only the Bishops of Rome, and hath no more authority and jurisdiction by God's laws within this realm than any other foreign bishop hath, which is nothing at all; and that such authority as he hath claimed heretofore hath been only by usurpation and

sufferance of princes of this realm; and that the Bishop of London may be bound to suffer none others to preach at St. Paul's Cross, as he will answer, but such as will preach and set forth the same.' Accordingly Stow tells us that during the next session of Parliament-which extended from the 15th of January, 1534, to the 29th of March, and was that in which the Act was passed abolishing the jurisdiction of the Court of Rome-" every Sunday at Paul's Cross preached a bishop, declaring the Pope not to be supreme head of the Church." The bishops, while deeming it prudent to yield at least a formal obedience to the royal order for the present, probably also thought it safest that so delicate a topic should only be handled by themselves. Another subject, however, which is recorded to have been discussed by some of the preachers at the Cross about this time, may be thought to have been of a still more delicate nature-the pending case of Henry's divorce from Queen Catherine. Strype relates that a friar called Father Robinson, belonging to the Franciscan monastery at Greenwich, offered to maintain the queen's cause in a public disputation with an abbot who had preached at Paul's Cross in favour of the divorce. "And it seems," says the historian, "he did this openly to the abbot's face, while he was preaching. Whereupon was a report given out that the friars of Greenwich, if they might be suffered to tell the truth, would put to silence all that had or should preach in favour of the king's matter, and prove all false that they had preached. And the said Father Robinson did intend, with all his wit and learning, to preach on the queen's part the next Sunday after at Paul's Cross, that he might have the greater audience." It may be presumed that the monk was saved the trouble of carrying his good intentions into execution: in fact, in not many months, he and his whole convent were turned adrift by the rampant despot with as little ceremony as the Pope and the Queen.

In the next reign the pulpit at Paul's Cross was filled by the most eminent preachers of the Reformation. Here Latimer and Ridley frequently proclaimed to crowds of eager listeners that testimony which they both afterwards sealed with their blood. Ridley, in acuteness and literary accomplishment the first of the fathers of the English Reformation, preached a famous sermon at Paul's Cross on the sacrament of the Lord's Supper towards the close of the year 1547, being then Bishop of Rochester. But, we confess, we would rather have heard honest old Latimer, plain and homely as he was, sometimes to the verge of the absurd and the ludicrous, or beyond it, yet shrewd withal and full of matter, and always interesting from the very boldness and directness of his appeals, and the goodness of heart and genuine simplicity of character that shone in everything he said. Latimer preached his first sermon at Paul's Cross on New Year's Day, 1548, and his second and third on the two following Sundays.† What is called his Sermon of the Plough, which is among those in the printed collection, was probably one of these, although it is stated to have been * Strype, Mem. i. 151.

[Latimer.]

† Strype, Mem. ii. 71.

preached on the 18th of January, which would fall on a Wednesday in that year. It was preached, we are told, in the Shrouds, which appears to have been a sort of covered gallery attached to the wall of the cathedral, in which, probably, the more distinguished portion of the congregation used commonly to be seated, and where the preacher also sometimes took his station when the weather was coarse.* Latimer was at this time nearly seventy years of age; but he was as stout in spirit, if not in body, as ever; and the one of them that has been preserved affords evidence sufficient that, in these sermons at Paul's Cross, he did not mince matters in telling his audience of their besetting sins, or spare either small or great. While he was calling upon the rich men of London to repent, and denouncing them as more deserving of God's wrath than the men of Nebo, for their "idolatry, superstition, pride, avarice, cruelty, tyranny, and hardness of heart," it is highly probable that the Lord Mayor himself, and many of the most opulent of his fellow-citizens, were present to profit by the rebuke; nor is it very unlikely that he might also have literally in his eye some wincing auditor to whom his words would come still more pungently home, when he next proceeded to assail the "unpreaching prelates "-some occupied in the king's matters, some as ambassadors, some of the privy council, some to furnish the court, some as lords of the parliament, some as presidents, some as comptrollers of mints—all "so troubled with lordly living, so placed in palaces, couched in courts, ruffling in their rents, dancing in their dominions, burthened with ambassages, pampering of their paunches, like a monk that maketh his jubilee, munching in their mangers, and moiling in their gay manors and mansions, and so troubled with loitering in their lordships," that they could not attend to their proper professional duty as God's ploughmen. And after the buzz of admiration which would reward this more elaborate and ambitious passage, we may conceive the something approaching to hilarity into which the excited hearers would relax, when the preacher, after a pause, went on:-"And now I would ask a strange question; who is the most diligentest bishop and prelate in all England, that passeth all the rest in doing his office? I can tell, for I know him, who it is; I know him well. But now I think I see you listening and hearkening that I should name him. There is one that passeth all the other, and is the most diligent prelate and preacher in all England. And will ye know who it is? I will tell you: it is the Devil. He is the most diligent preacher of all other; he is never out of his diocese; he is never from his cure; ye shall never find him unoccupied; he is ever in his parish; he keepeth residence at all times; ye shall never find him out of the way, call for him when you will, he is ever at home; the diligentest preacher in all the realm; he is ever at his plough; no lording nor loitering can hinder him; he is ever applying his business; ye shall never find him idle, I warrant you." The description of the Devil's episcopacy is carried

* From what Latimer says in one of his sermons, it would seem that in no circumstances could it have been very agreeable either to preach or to attend the service at Paul's Cross :-"I do much marvel that London, being so rich a city, hath not a burying-place with out; for, no doubt, it is an unwholesome thing to bury within the city, specially at such a time when there is great sickness, so that many die together. I think, verily, that many a man taketh his death in Paul's churchyard; and this I speak of experience, for I myself, when I have been there in some mornings to hear the sermons, have felt such an ill-favoured, unwholesome savour, that I was the worse for it a great while after. And I think no less but it be the occasion of much sickness and diseases."— Sermon for the Third Sunday in Advent, 1552.