rd of London hath given sentence, and delivered him
to the secular power when he looketh every day to go unto the fire. And
there is also condemned with him one Andrew a tailor for the self-same
opinion; and thus fare you well."[447]

These victims went as they were sentenced, dismissed to their martyr's
crowns at Smithfield, as Queen Anne Boleyn but a few days before had
received her golden crown at the altar of Westminster Abbey. Twenty years
later another fire was blazing under the walls of Oxford; and the hand
which was now writing these light lines was blackening in the flames of it,
paying there the penalty of the same "imagination" for which Frith and the
poor London tailor were with such cool indifference condemned. It is
affecting to know that Frith's writings were the instruments of Cranmer's
conversion; and the fathers of the Anglican church have left a monument of
their sorrow for the shedding of this innocent blood in the Order of the
Communion service, which closes with the very words on which the primate,
with his brother bishops, had sate in judgment.[448]

CHAPTER VI

THE PROTESTANTS

Where changes are about to take place of great and enduring moment, a kind
of prologue, on a small scale, sometimes anticipates the true opening of
the drama; like the first drops which give notice of the coming storm, or
as if the shadows of the reality were projected forwards into the future,
and imitated in dumb show the movements of the real actors in the story.

Such a rehearsal of the English Reformation was witnessed at the close of
the fourteenth century, confused, imperfect, disproportioned, to outward
appearance barren of results; yet containing a representative of each one
of the mixed forces by which that great change was ultimately effected, and
foreshadowing even something of the course which it was to run.

There was a quarrel with the pope upon the extent of the papal privileges;
there were disputes between the laity and the clergy,--accompanied, as if
involuntarily, by attacks on the sacramental system and the Catholic
faith,--while innovation in doctrine was accompanied also with the tendency
which characterised the extreme development of the later
Protestants--towards political republicanism, the fifth monarchy, and
community of goods. Some account of this movement must be given in this
place, although it can be but a sketch only. "Lollardry"[449] has a history
of its own; but it forms no prop