LIVES OF THE ARCHBISHOPS OF CANTERBURY.* FOR what is unsatisfactory
in these volumes we must generally blame the subject rather than the author. Biography, if not the highest form of history, is convenient, and may be made exceed- ingly attractive. But it must be the biography of men who were really centres of thought and action. Such men are to be found in every age, but the writer who binds himself to follow the uccession to some particular dignity will be very likely to miss them. He will be peculiarly unfortunate if he has restricted himself to such a succession as a line of Archbishops. A Prime Minister must have something noteworthy about him ; not so an Archbishop. It was not left for modern times to discover that mediocrity is sometimes the best qualification for the highest ecclesiastical dignities. Nor is it difficult to see why it should have commended itself to the three parties who were concerned in the election to the See of Canterbury. Both Pope and King felt that they were creating a rival potentate to themselves, and the Chapter of Canterbury, if they may be said to have had any power of choice, only followed the universal instinct of such bodies in preferring the least -formidable candidate. These volumes con- tain the lives of sixteen Archbishops, extending over a period of 185 years (1229-1414). The names of some of these prelates will be more or less familiar to every student of English history. There are one or two of whom any person tolerably well-informed will at least have heard, but there is not one who can be ranked with such men as Anselm, Lanfranc, Becket, and Langton. The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries have an important and interesting Church history of their own, and there are men in whose biographies much of it might be conveniently narrated. Grosse- teste, Bishop of Lincoln, and William of Wykeham, are names familiar to every educated Englishman, and represent very various phases of religious thought and life much more completely than any of the men upon Whom Dr. Hook has expended his labour.
The book has suffered from another unfavourable circumstance. It is possible for the lives of even the most insignificant persons to be intensely interesting. The faithful portrait of any human soul is worth possessing, and even trivial details of modes of life that have passed away are not only amusing, but have a. direct historical value. Of materials of a certain kind Dr. Hook • Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury. By Waits!. Farquhar Hook, D D., F.8.S.• Doan of Clalobester. Vela. ILL cud IV. Louthu: Rickard Beady. 1885.
has been able to command an abundance. Records and registers furnish him with the particulars of consecrations, visitations, and the like ; and in describing whatever share the Archbishops have taken in foreign or domestic affairs he avails himself of the ordinary materials of history. But for a real biography some- thing more is wanted. Except we can get some portraiture of the man himself, some picture of how he looked, and moved, and spoke, some revelation of his inner life, the biographical form of narrative is a tedious pretence. Of the sixteen Primates whose history is related in these volumes one only appears to have found a contemporary biographer. Nor for times so remote is much to be gained from local tradition. It so happens, too, that the Arch- bishops were less fixed to a particular locality than any other line of prelates. Dr. Hook mentions that they had as many as six- teen " manors" or residences, nor would it be easy to say which they most frequented.
The biography which stands second in the series is in some respects the best and most interesting. Edmund Rich (1234-1240) was not a man of much note. Though of a character sufficiently marked, he neither possessed commanding abilities nor played a prominent part in the history of his time. But it so happens that we know more about his personality than about that of any of his successors. This knowledge we owe to the canonization which, about nine years after his death, conferred upon him the title of St. Edmund of Pontigny. A saint never wanted a biographer. The life of St. Edmund was written by his brother Robert, and by Bertrand, prior of the monastery which had the honour of being the place of his burial and of furnishing him with a title.
Edmund was a type of that ascetic piety which has never been a common growth of the English character. His mother was a devotee of the strictest order, and she found an apt pupil in her son, who, we are told, prized no reward for his childish virtues so much as the permission to wear for a few hours in the day a little shirt of sackcloth. Removed at an early age to Oxford, he showed his piety by betrothing himself to the Virgin Mary. The act amuses Dr. Hook, who jokes, not very gracefully, about the sleep of Endymion, and suggests a comparison to what he calls " the lunatic amours of the Icarian youth." (We presume that he means " Carian.") To us the strange devotion of the young student seems pathetic rather than ludicrous. Vowed to celibacy, and growing conscious of the great trial of youth, he must find. somewhere the pure affection which is man's best safeguard against baseness. If he must not look for it upon earth, heaven must give it to him. His residence at Oxford was -continued for a considerable time, though it was interrupted by a period of study at Paris and by a year's sojourn in a monastery. 'It would seem.that the honours of the University and the fascina- tions of secular learning were formidable rivals to his devout aspirations. He long remained a layman, and rose into high -repute as a lecturer. Interesting little traits of his appearance and character are preserved. We are told of his neatness—which, how- ever, as his biographer is careful to inform us, did not run into an extreme so undevout as cleanliness—of his kindness, generosity, and unworldliness. In one little anecdote we are pleased to recog- nize a weakness common to others than saints. " Rather than curtail his devotions, if his pupils consumed his time by day, he would repair to his chapel by night. Nature was sometimes, however, too strong for him, and his pupils smiled to see him sink into his seat, as if asleep, though he replied when aroused, 'Non dormio sed recum- bo." At last he shook himself freefrom these worldly entanglements. The powers which he had displayed in the schools of Oxford soon made him famous in the'pulpit. He particularly distinguished him- self by preaching for the Sixth Crusade. He was Treasurer of Salis- bury Cathedral and Rector of Calne when he was informed of his elevation to the See of Canterbury. Three elections had been already made and annulled. With most genuine reluctance Edmund accepted the dignity, a splendid honour, but such as few men who knew themselves and the times would covet. He found that he had to choose between a King weak if not wicked, a Pope watching every opportunity of aggrandizement, and a national party just struggling into existence. With this party he threw in his lot. Ascetic and devotee as he was, he had not ceased to be an Englishman, The reader will find the history of his pri- macy well told by Dr, Hook. He effected indeed but little. The patriotic party was weak and divided ; Edmund, perhaps, was hardly a congenial ally. When he found himself superseded by Legates sent by the Pope at the invitation of the King he retired from England. In the same year he breathed his last at the priory of Soisay. The popular voice loudly pronounced him to be a saint; miracles in abundance were wrought at his tomb; no less than hirty persons, it was asserted, were raised from the dead. The Court of Rome, justly alarmed at this excess of power, reluctantly decreed his canonization. He was a brave, true-hearted man, of narrow mind, perhaps, but free from all meanness and self-seeking. Asceticism never withered the fresh- ness of his heart. Good and accomplished women loved him with that pure affection which true spirituality never fails to kindle. Many readers will thank Dr. Hook for making them acquainted with a worthy Englishman.
No such honours awaited Edmund's successor. Boniface of Savoy (1245-1270) was a specimen of the class of secularized prelates, common enough on the Continent, but rare in our more decorous Church. England was scandalized at the spectacle of an Archbishop who left his charge, not for the reasons that had driven Anselm or Becket into exile, but because he preferred to serve as a cavalry officer with a soldier of fortune. Other Pri- mates have been less regular iu their lives, and not a few equally worldly, but none have so totally failed to comprehend their posi- tion. There is something very bizarre in the intrusion of this spurred and booted prelate into a line of dignified ecclesiastics, and his life, which was not wanting in incident, is for this reason worth the telling. But it illustrates the inconvenience of such a plan as Dr. Hook's, to find ourselves almost wholly shut out by the course which his narrative is compelled to take from the in- terest of the great struggle between Henry III. and his Barons. In this struggle Boniface took but little part, and during the crisis of the conflict was absent from England.
To the last biography in the series, that of Thomas Arundel (1397-1414), Dr. Hook has allotted the largest space, and it is, perhaps, the most important of all. Arundel was actively engaged in the revolution which transferred the English Crown from the Plantagenets to the House of Lancaster. He is better known as having condemned the earliest martyrs of the Reformation, Wil- liam Sautre, John Badbee, and Lord Cobham. A prelate who was one of the chief promoters of the statute De Haretico Com- burendo will not be regarded with much favour by Englishmen ; but his biographer labours hard to vindicate him from the charge of personal cruelty, and is scarcely just to what he calls "the cruel and intolerant temper" of Foxe and his other assailants. He might have excused something in the language of a man who had lived through the Marian persecution. Excuses certainly may be made for Arundel. It may have been his calamity rather than his fault that he was the first judge called upon to carry the law into effect ; and he seems to have conducted his examina- tions with good temper and patience. Yet, on the whole, he leaves a less favourable impression on us than many men who have been more active persecutors. An ambitious and even un- scrupulous partizan, totally unversed in theology, and apparently destitute of strong convictions of his own, he seems to have been something of a Sadducee, and than an intolerant Sadducee nothing can be more odious.
Most of the lives we are compelled to pass over without special notice. Some are certainly very dreary reading, in others the reader will find much that will interest him. Among other things we may specify a curious account of the installation of Robert Winchelsey 381-397). The bill of fare at the feast, with the prices attached, is worth studying. Fresh salmon are said to have cost seven shillings apiece, an extraordinary sum, if money was worth fifteen or, as some say, twenty-five times its present value. The feast took place in the month of March. We have an interesting sketch of Thomas Bradwardine, who died of the black death in the first year of his primacy ; and the death of Simon Sudbury (IV., 300-311) is particularly well told.
To Dr. Hook's diligence and conscientiousness and to. his gene- ral impartiality we can give the highest praise, but we cannot commend the execution of his work. His style falls far below what might reasonably have been expected from a man of his reputation and undoubted ability. No more can be said for it than it is tolerably readable ; it never rises into eloquence, and is often sadly wanting in dignity and taste. It was possibly an accident that such a passage as the following should have been
allowed to stand :—" If, as judging from subsequent events, those who advised the King to concede the demands of the commonalty only intended to make the poor young man a deceiver and a traitor to his people, calming them by promises to be immediately repudiated when he was strong enough to play the liar, then the Archbishop was not so much to blame for the advice he gave" (IV., p. 307-8) ; but the language is not unfrequently slipshod and incorrect. It is often disfigured by colloquial expressions and vul- garisms. We are told 110) that the Pope chaffed one of a deputation which waited upon him, and (HI., 215) that Stephen Langton had saddled the estates of Canterbury with a pension to
the monks of Pontigny. Dr. Hook has also an extraordinary habit of introducing topics of the day into his narrative. In dis- cussing flee relations of Church and State in the thirteenth century he takes occasion to express his conviction that the late Earl Grey was the greatest of English statesmen. More than once he bursts out in admiration of the liberality with which the present Duke of Richmond and other magnates of Sussex have assisted in the restoration of Chichester Cathedral. Apropos of the translation of Thomas Arundel from York to Canterbury, he tells us, iu lan- guage which in most men we should accuse of flattery, "that it is for the future historian to record the unanimity with which the last translation was received as a blessing to the Church, at a period when our Church was as much divided by the un-Christian violence of contending factions as it was in the fifteenth century."
A graver fault in Dr. Hook is an occasional want of sympathy, a defect which offends us more in a biographer than in an his- torian. He is always the enlightened Anglican divine of the nineteenth century. He seems over anxious to show his contempt for such mediaeval follies as asceticism, miracles, and relic worship. It follows that his judgments even of men whom he admires are sometimes narrow and harsh. We quote at length a passage which illustrates his usual tone on these subjects. He has been giving a catalogue of the relics which belonged to the Abbey of St. Peter at Westminster. " The other class of valuables, as they were then accounted, afforded gratification to the order of mind which is now entertained in collecting autographs or salivated post-office stamps. That they should be accepted as authentic, or that credit should be given to the miracles which they were said to work, by any but the ignorant, even in the fourteenth century, would have been in itself a miracle to which a few years ago we should have refused credence. A few years ago we should, in speaking of the extraordinary statements made with respect to relics, images, and certain other marvels, have predicated deception and hypocrisy on the one side and superstition on the other. But we have lived to see the time when men of whose ability and learning, of whose acuteness and honesty, we have no right to entertain a doubt, go out of their way to express their belief in what, at one period of their lives, they would have deemed not only as incredible but also as ridiculous." (IV., 180.) Dr. Hook cannot suppose that he is satisfactorily disposing of a very difficult subject in this way. He is too well read in Church history not to know that the belief in contemporary miracles has lasted in uninterrupted succession from the earliest ages down to the most recent, that it was held by St. Augustine as firmly as by any middle-age monk. Is he prepared with some infallible test which is to discriminate between miracles which it is impious to reject and those which it is folly to accept ? Writers not less acute and enlightened than himself have been content to regard this subject as one of the most difficult problems in human history. And as to relics, was it, then, only the meanest order of mind that found a fascination in them? The passion surely was felt by some of the very best and noblest spirits. Nor is it indeed a very perplexing phenomenon. An age isolated from the past by its ignorance, lacking the appliances by which we realize to ourselves departed saints and heroes, puts an extravagant value on the material monuments which seem to connect it with the personalities of great men. Is the Dean of Chichester himself insensible to these attractions ? He lets us see that he is deeply attached to his own Cathedral. Let him analyze the feeling. Let him see how much of it attaches itself to the actual walls within which past generations have worshipped; to the very throne on which sat St. Richard of Chi- chester, or some other glory of the place ; to the stones which still cover the dust of statesmen and divines. Let him reflect how this interest grows more intense at every spot which even the faintest tradition connects with the personal presence of some great man. What is this but to venerate a relic, or palpable link which binds the present to the past ?
Our sense of these blemishes in his work will not prevent us from expressing very heartily our respect for Dr. Hook. If the literary value of these volumes is not equal to the general reputa- tion of the author, it is because few men stand higher in the estimation of their countrymen. Yet whatever its defects, the book is not unworthy of the man. The author is a zealous, some perhaps will say a rigid, Churchman, but he never writes in the narrow spirit of an ecclesiastic. When he deals with questions which involve the relation of the spiritual power to the temporal, his tone is especially wholesome and sound, and his judgments are guided by a strong manly sense, and by the honest sympathies which an Englishman feels with freedom. No man could be more rigidly impartial, yet it is clear that he is disposed to side with the Archbishop against the Pope, and with the King against the
Archbishop. He is approaching a period which will test severely all his powers as a biographer. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with their yet unsettled controversies, will furnish hint with a material uberior sed non securior than any which he has hitherto handled. And in them, for a time at least, the history of the Archbishops becomes the history of the Church. To write with candour and with justice, without partiality and yet not without sympathy, the lives of Crammer and of Pole, of Parker and of Laud, will be a great task, and Dr. Hook has many quali- fications for performing it well.
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