Pope Leo's Bull of Indulgences and of Luther's first famous. protest against them. Two years or so later, on the 25th of June 1519, excommunicated or not, Bishop Oldham died at Exeter. He was interred in a chapel which he had erected in his cathedral, where there is a fine monument of him with his recumbent effigy in pontificalibus, repaired in 1763 by the provost and fellows of Corpus, mindful of his liberality to their college. He left directions in his will that if he died in his own diocese he was to be buried in the chapel which he had built for himself in Exeter Cathedral. If his death happened out of the diocese, his body was to be "carried to Oxford, there to be buried in Corpus Christi College that my Lord of Winchester hath caused there to be made," and to which he bequeathed all his houses and lands "lying in Chelsea." "And if," he adds, "my goods will not suffice to bring me to Oxford, then I will my body to be buried in the next college”—collegiate— "church or religious house of monks or canons." Unlike some modern bishops, the founder of the Manchester Free Grammar School and benefactor of Corpus had evidently no ground for anticipating that his "personalty" would be 'sworn" under any very large sum.

III.

JOHN BRADFORD, SAINT AND MARTYR.*

ON the 11th of March 1870, Smithfield and the buyers and

sellers of the Metropolitan Meat Market witnessed the part-payment of a debt long due to the memory of a group of pious and valiant Englishmen, foremost among whom, in life and in death, was this famous Lancashire Worthy. On that day of that year, at the west corner of the outer wall of St Bartholomew's Hospital, and fixed in one of the recesses thereof, was formally uncovered a modest tablet of polished granite, the inscription on which proclaims to the passers-by the interesting fact: "Within a few feet of this spot, John Rogers, John Bradford, John Philpot, and other Servants of God suffered death by fire, for the faith of Christ, in the years 1555, 1556, 1557." The "illustrious Bradford," as he is designated by Mr Froude, a writer not prodigal of epithets, was the first "Manchester man," distinctly known as such, that earned for himself a niche in English history. After and amid all modern successes, industrial, commercial, and political, it is well to call to mind and to lay to heart the heroism which, in the sixteenth century, conducted John Bradford, not to a topmost place in schedule A, or schedule D, not to a seat in Parliament or the Cabinet, but to a martyr's death in Smithfield, with a tallow chandler's apprentice for his companion and fellow-sufferer.

* The Writings of John Bradford, edited (with a biographical notice) for the Parker Society, by Aubrey Townsend, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1848-53); Froude's History of England (London, 1860), vol. vi.; Hollingworth's Mancuniensis (Manchester, 1839); Fuller's Worthies, by Nichols (London, 1811), &c., &c.

"In Manchester was I born," writes Bradford himself, in his farewell address to his native county, a statement which disposes of the local tradition that he was a native of Blackley, where for this and other reasons his memory is said to be still cherished. About the earliest memoir of him extant, written some four years after his death, declares that he was "born in Lancastershire, in Manchester, a notable town of that county; was of his gentle parents brought up in virtue and good learning even from his very childhood, and among other praises of his good education, he obtained, as a chief gift, the cunning and readiness of writing, which knowledge was not only an ornament unto him, but also an help to the necessary sustentation of his living." Baines, in his history of Lancashire, avers that Bradford "received a liberal education in the Free Grammar School of his native town, founded by Bishop Oldham, and stood in high estimation for his proficiency in the Latin language and his extensive knowledge of arithmetic." He is supposed to have been born about 1510, and Bishop Oldham founded the Manchester Grammar School in 1515. It is pleasant to think that Bradford was in all probability one of the earliest of its pupils. The success in life procured him by the "commercial element" in the education received there or elsewhere proved, indeed, as it happened, rather a snare to him than otherwise. The scholarship, however, of which he may have laid the foundation at Bishop Oldham's seminary, forwarded him to the acquisition of the highest spiritual truth attainable in his age. The Reformation was in its origin the product of scholars and divines. Not until meditation, reading, and research had done their work could princes and peoples be invited to aid in pulling down what had become a rotten and dangerous fabric of ecclesiastical falsehood and tyranny. In Bradford's supposed birth-year an Augustine monk, professor of philosophy at the University of Wittenberg, was

sent by the superiors of his order on a mission to Italy, and what he then saw at Rome first opened his eyes to the iniquity of the Papal system. Eleven years later, when Bradford, a boy of twelve or so, may have been construing and ciphering at the Manchester Grammar School, reflection, study, and scholarly investigation had issued in the clearest conviction; Luther was at the Diet of Worms, resolute, fearless, invincible, vindicating in the teeth of Emperor and Pope the right of private judgment to hold its own against mere old authority, deaf, blind, and arbitrary.

In course of time, Bradford's conversancy with the three R's, more especially with two of them, proved such an effectual "help to the necessary sustentation of his living" that he became the secretary of Sir John Harrington, Knight, of Oxton, in Rutlandshire. Sir John was Treasurer of the King's Camps and Buildings, and a semi-military, semi-civil functionary of some importance in the reigns of Henry VIII. and Edward VI. Bradford's "activity in writings," and "expertness in the art of auditors," according to one of his old biographers, did much recommend him to Sir John, who made him paymaster at the siege of Montreuil in 1544, when that town was beleaguered by the Duke of Norfolk and an English force, as a blind to draw off the French while Henry VIII., in person, invested and took Boulogue. A few years later, in the spring of 1547soon after the accession of Edward VI.-Bradford entered himself at the Inner Temple as a student of common law. He had saved a little money, and one of Sir John's sons lived with him in chambers, on which account, and perhaps on other accounts, he received an allowance from his old employer, whom for some time he continued to call "master." One of his two sureties on his admission to the Inner Temple was his friend Thomas Sampson, a lawstudent like himself, who lived to be Dean of Chichester and

to refuse a bishopric. With the accession of Edward VI. the reformed doctrine took a fresh start in England, and was preached everywhere with new vehemence and vigour. Thomas Sampson hearkened to it, embraced it zealously, resolved to enter the Church, and in 1549 was ordained deacon by Cranmer and Ridley. A year or so before, the proselyte's zeal had been fervid enough to make him a successful proselytiser. Bradford was won over by Sampson's influence, and the earliest of his letters which had been printed, belonging apparently to the year 1548, and addressed to a dear Lancashire friend, ministering at Blackley, show him to have embraced with his whole heart and soul the doctrines of the English Reformers. It was not only in words, but in act and deed, that Bradford manifested the change that had been worked in him. "After that God touched his heart," says Sampson, who became his biographer, "with that holy and effectual calling, he sold his chains, rings, brooches, and jewels of gold, which before he used to wear, and did bestow the price of this his former vanity in the necessary relief of Christ's poor members, which he could hear of or find lying sick or pining in poverty." Better still, and much more difficult :-" even in this mean time," continues Sampson, " he heard a sermon which that notable preacher Master Latimer made before King Edward the Sixth, in which he did earnestly speak of restitution to be made of things falsely gotten, which did so strike Bradford to the heart, for with one dash with a pen, which he had made without the knowledge of his master (as full often I have heard him confess with plenty of tears), being clerk to the Treasurer of the King's Camp beyond the seas, and was to the deceiving of the King, that he could never be quiet till, by the advice of the same Master Latimer, a restitution was made." This passage clearly acquits Sir John Harrington of complicity with the original