ART. II.-BISHOP PECOCK, HIS CHARACTER AND FORTUNES.

The Repressor of over-much Blaming of the Clergy. By REGINALD PECOCK. Edited, with Introduction and Glossary, by CHURCHILL BABINGTON, B.D., Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, under the direction of the Master of the Rolls, 1860.

THERE

HERE is, perhaps, no period of English history more fascinating to the Catholic student than that of the century immediately preceding the Reformation. We have a natural longing to know how things looked just before the ruin fell, and a still more intelligent interest in scrutinizing as closely as may be all the conditions of which we may believe the Reformation to have been the natural outcome. We may gain no inconsiderable insight into the genius of a time or country by acquainting ourselves with the character and history of such of its personages as the conflicting parties of the day have combined to misunderstand. These are representative men, representative of their age at least in this, that they gauge the force of prevailing opinion by their more or less successful resistance to its current. Under this aspect, anyhow, some account of the life and writings of Reginald Pecock should be interesting. He was an English bishop of the fifteenth century, who was imprisoned and nearly burnt for defending the Church by methods which, though popular enough in the next century, his contemporaries did not like, for wishing to substitute "syllogisme" for "sword and hangment," as an instrument of religious persuasion, and for appealing from fanatical interpretations of Scripture texts to common sense. Nor is Pecock interesting in his representative character only; he is an extremely remarkable person in every way, surpassing in learning, literary ability, and mastery of the English tongue, all his contemporaries. Of these qualities proof will be given when we come to examine the work which stands at the head of our article.

We must confess to a strong desire to do what we can towards vindicating the character of a man who, whatever his faults, has indubitably met with consistent misconstruction, and whose least deniable merits have been treated as though they belonged to that growth of the house-top of which the Psalmist says, that it fills neither the reaper's hand nor the gleaner's bosom. During his lifetime, Pecock was persecuted at once by the Catholics, whom he wished to defend, and by the heretics whom

he wished to convert. After his death, Protestants, half persuaded by the acrimony of his Catholic assailants, have outraged him by their patronage. Foxe inserts him in his Martyrology for February 11, as a Protestant confessor; and Fr. Parsons wishes Foxe joy of a denier of three articles of the Creed ("Three Conversions of England," part iii.). Harpsfeld (Hist. Wicliff, cap. xvi.) calls him a Wiclifite, and that nothing might be wanting to his infamy, the Spanish Index Expurgatorius, of 1667, grotesquely describes him as "pseudo-bishop, and Lutheran Professor of Oxford." It will be something if we are able, in the nineteenth century, to bestow Christian, we mean Catholic, burial, for Pecock would appreciate no other, upon one whose own century has cast him out.

PECOCK'S BIOGRAPHY.

Reginald Pecock was born in North Wales, at the close of the fourteenth century. The first point in his life to which an exact date can be assigned is his election to a fellowship at Oriel College, Oxford, October 30, 1417; and on the 8th of March, 1421, he was ordained priest. Even his enemies, and, unfortunately, almost all our information about Pecock is derived from hostile sources, admit that in these early days the fame of his proficiency, both in sacred and profane learning, was spread far and wide. Having incepted in divinity in 1425, he was shortly after summoned to Court, where, through the influence, it is generally supposed, of Duke Humphrey, at that time protector, he obtained in 1431 the Mastership of Whittington College, to which the rectorship of St. Michael, in Riola, was attached. It was whilst occupying this position that Pecock first began to give his attention to the Lollard controversy. This sect had, during the sixty years of its existence, spread widely throughout the land, but nowhere had it struck deeper root than amongst the wealthy citizens of London, with whom Pecock's new duties naturally threw him into frequent intercourse. It is highly significant of the extent to which the country had become infected with Lollardy, that Pecock habitually refers to the Lollards in his writings as the "lay parti," or "laife." Their growth does not seem to have been materially checked by the severe, though partial, efforts at repression made from time to time by Church and State.

During the thirteen years of his mastership, it is reasonable to suppose that Pecock wrote many of the numerous controversial works to which he refers in his "Repressor." In 1444, he was raised to the See of St. Asaph, thus becoming the bishop of the country of his birth. Pope Eugenius IV. conferred this

see upon him by a bull of provision, at the instance of Duke Humphrey; an example of what was common enough in those days, a technically illegal act-for provisory bulls were forbidden by Parliament-gratefully accepted by Government, when exercised on behalf of its protégé. Such proceedings are curiously illustrative of the relations existing between Church and State; both in the abstract reserved their incompatible rights, whilst in the concrete they consented to give and take. Simultaneously with his elevation to the episcopate, Pecock was admitted to the degree of Doctor of Divinity, without keeping any exercise or act. Upon the omission of this formality, his great enemy, Gascoigne, who had himself more than once been Chancellor of Oxford, lays the greatest stress. Mr. Babington thinks that Gascoigne's sense of propriety was outraged; perhaps he was morbidly anxious to show that Oxford could not fairly be held responsible for Pecock.

We have no record of the first three years of Pecock's episcopate, but in 1447 we find that he gave great and general offence by a sermon preached at St. Paul's Cross, in which he attempted to justify the Bishops' neglect of preaching, for some time a common charge made against them by Catholics as well as by Lollards. He seems to have particularly irritated people by a sort of rude appeal to common sense, which was thought, on such a topic, to savour of irreverence. The bishops, he urged, had more important business to attend to, and could not be expected to preach. It was not that Pecock himself had the slightest inclination to palter with his sacred duties. On the contrary, it is admitted on all hands that his life was irreproachable, and his zeal untiring. He certainly was no example of a non-preaching bishop, but he was intensely eager to defend his brethren, and keenly alive to the illogical exaggerations of their opponents. In the same sermon, he justifies non-residence for special reasons, and the papal bull of provision, by which a man might be appointed to a piece of preferment before it was vacant, as well as the payment of "annates," or first year's income of a bishopric to the Pope. If Pecock's enemies had written the sermon for him, it could hardly have been more ingeniously contrived to offend everybody. Even the bishops, in whose behalf it was delivered, disliked it as calculated to increase the odium with which they were regarded. Pecock was denounced at both the universities, and Millington, the Provost of King's College, Cambridge, in a sermon preached at St. Paul's, declared that England would never suffer those who patronized Pecock to prosper. This denunciation has a peculiar significance, when we learn that Pecock's great friends at this time were Walter Hart, Queen Margaret's confessor, and

the Duke of Suffolk, of whom the former was soon after banished, whilst the latter perished miserably at the hands of self-constituted executioners.

It is exceedingly difficult to assign with any precision the date to Pecock's various treatises. From the way in which they appeal to one another, it is pretty clear that he was in the habit of keeping several on the stocks at once, sometimes turning out last the one first undertaken. In 1450, having already written his "Repressor," he was promoted to the see of Chichester, most unfortunately for him through the patronage of William De la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, who was perhaps at that time the most unpopular man in England, and whose unpopularity was shared in a greater or less degree by all whom he was known to befriend. For six years, however, after the assassination of Suffolk in 1450, Pecock does not seem to have been seriously molested, but in 1456 he published his "Book of Faith," the last, so far as we know, of his works. It was written, as so many of the others, for the conversion of the Lollards; it tended directly to his own destruction, for it considerably aggravated the disgust with which his fellow-countrymen regarded him, and this at a time when the fall of his friends at court had left him open to the attacks of his enemies. He was detested by the common people as the friend of Suffolk, the representative in their minds of anti-English interests; the pious but narrow-minded Henry very naturally shrank from Pecock as from a rough-and-ready Catholic who was forsaking the old paths, and the sturdiest adherent of the Red or White Rose shuddered in his battered mail at the audacious profanity of one of whom it was whispered that he had positively refused the blessed apostles the authorship of their own creed. The clergy could not bear to be told ("Book of Faith ") that they "shall be condemned at the last day, if by clear wit they draw not men into consent of true faith otherwise than by fire, sword, and hangment," even with the important qualification, "although I will not deny these second means to be lawful, provided the former be first used." Neither do the Lollards seem to have been particularly grateful; perhaps because "fire, sword, and hangment" were but occasional inflictions, which they could generally avoid, and not unfrequently retaliate, whereas Pecock's alternative, the "syllogisme in the modir tongue," produced a running sore, and its infliction was a speciality of Pecock's.

Just at this time the Duke of York, as Protector, was doing his utmost to recommend himself to the people as the reformer of abuses and as the avenger of the "Good Duke Humphrey," whom the party of Suffolk was accused of having assassinated.

Pecock was naturally marked out as the man of few friends and many enemies, who was to be cast out of the ship. There never was a person with less of the politician than Pecock. He saw that men should live and conduct their affairs according to the "doom of clearly-disposed reason," but how things were actually going he seems never to have had the least idea. Dr. Hook, in his "Life of Archbishop Bourchier," tries to ground a charge of politisal apostacy against Pecock, upon the fact that, having been originally patronized by the Duke of Gloucester, the leader of the national party, he was subsequently taken up by the court leader, Suffolk. The charge is at best gratuitous; no party can afford wholly to dispense with the credit of disinterested patronage, and Pecock's literary reputation and freedom from political partisanship rendered him a natural object for its exercise.

It was in the council held at the close of 1457, by King Henry at Westminster, that the hatred long entertained against Pecock burst out with irrepressible fury, the temporal lords with one accord refusing to take any part in the proceedings as long as Pecock was present. A citation was then and there served upon him to appear for trial before the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth, on November 11th, and, in the meanwhile, his books were intrusted for examination to a commission of theologians. The report of the commission was unfavourable, and, after repeated examinations, on the 28th of November, 1457, in the presence of various ecclesiastical and secular lords, Archbishop Bourchier solemnly pronounced sentence in this wise:-"Dear brother, Master Reginald: Since all heretics are blinded by the light of their own understandings, and will not own the perverse obstinacy of their own conclusions, we shall not dispute with you in many words (for we see you abound more in talk than in reasoning), but briefly show you that you have manifestly presumed to contravene the sayings of the more authentic doctors." After quoting sundry of the errors charged against him, amongst others the denial of the necessity of believing in the descent into hell, and the authority of the Church, he offers him the alternative of a complete public abjuration, or degradation and death by fire. He concludes with these significant words :-" Choose one of these two, for the alternative is immediate in the coercion of heretics."

Pecock seems to have been simply overwhelmed. So far as we can gather from his words as reported by his biographers, dread of the fire and horror at finding himself in direct antagonism with those authorities which it had been the great object of his life to sustain, were the predominant feelings.