much devoted to the King as to the Pope—when that king was Henry of Lancaster, the author of the statute De Hæretico Comburendo, which first legalised the slaughter of heretics as such. Antipapal statutes continued to be passed in this reign also, and in one instance at least the penalties of a Præmunire were incurred and exacted, viz. that of William de Lynn, Bishop of Chichester, who, having quarrelled with the Earl of Arundel, procured a citation from the Pope ordering the Earl to appear personally at Rome. Arundel was the chief instigator of the bloody suppression of the Lollards, which marked the closing years of Henry IV.'s reign and the commencement of his successor's.
Another domestic transaction of this reign, important from an ecclesiastical point of view, was the punishment of the rising in the North in the year 1405, under Lords Northumberland and Nottingham, Scrope, Archbishop of York, and others. Li this case, for the first time in our history, one measure was dealt out alike to layman and priest, and the Archbishop was treated with the same severity as the rebellious lay lords, and was summarily hanged, as was also, on the renewal of the outbreak three years later, another dignified ecclesiastic, viz. the Abbot of Hales.[1]
It is remarkable that we find no trace of any papal
- ↑ Green, vol. i. p. 533. Stubbs's Const. Hist. vol. iii. p. 52. Bishop Stubbs speaks of the execution of Archbishop Scrope as a 'judicial murder,' far more inexcusable, as far as the King was concerned, than the assassination of Becket; because Henry IV. was certainly and directly chargeable with the one, while Henry II. was only secondarily and perhaps doubtfully guilty of the other. That it may have been an unwise, as it seems to have been an unpopular act, no one would probably deny; but it is difficult to see why, from the point of view of strict justice, when three or four men appear as the leaders in an insurrection, and are all as such condemned and executed, the execution of one of them is to be stigmatised as a murder for the sole reason that he is a clerk and the others are laymen.
