Cranmer had already adopted measures for remedying this alarming evil. With the concurrence of the protector and privy council, he had invited a number of learned protestants from Germany into England, and had placed Peter Martyr, Martin Bucer, Paul { 80} Fagius, and Emanuel Tremellius, as professors in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. This was a wise measure, which secured a future supply of useful preachers, trained up by these able masters; but the necessity was urgent, and demanded immediate provision. For this purpose, instead of fixing a number of orthodox and popular preachers in particular charges, it was judged most expedient to employ them in itinerating through different parts of the kingdom, where the clergy were most illiterate or disaffected to the Reformation, and where the inhabitants were most addicted to superstition.
In these circumstances, our zealous countryman did not remain long unemployed. The reputation which he had gained by his preaching at St Andrews,[115] and his late sufferings, recommended him to the English council; and soon after his arrival in England, he was sent down from London to preach in Berwick.[116]
The council had every reason to be pleased with { 81} the choice which they had made of a northern preacher. He had long thirsted for the opportunity which he now enjoyed. His love for the truth, and his zeal against popery, had been inflamed during his captivity, and he spared neither time nor labour in the instruction of those to whom he was sent. Regarding the worship of the Romish church as idolatrous, and its doctrines as damnable, he attacked both with the utmost fervour, and exerted himself in drawing his hearers from the belief of the one, and from the observance of the other, with as much eagerness as if he had been saving their lives from a devouring flame or flood. Nor were his efforts fruitless. During the two years that he continued in Berwick, numbers were converted by his ministry from ignorance and the errors of popery; and a visible reformation of manners was produced upon the soldiers of the garrison, who had formerly been noted for licentiousness and turbulence.[117]
The popularity and success of a protestant preacher were very galling to the clergy in that quarter, who were, almost to a man, bigoted papists, and enjoyed the patronage of the bishop of the diocese. Tonstal, bishop of Durham, like his friend Sir Thomas More, was one of those men of whom it is extremely difficult to give a correct idea, qualities of an opposite kind being mixed and blended in his character. Surpassing all his brethren in polite learning, he was the patron of bigotry and superstition. Displaying, in { 82} private life, that moderation and suavity of manners which liberal studies usually inspire,[118] he was accessory to the public measures of a reign disgraced throughout by the most shocking barbarities. Claiming our praise for honesty by opposing in parliament innovations which his judgment condemned, he forfeited it by the most tame acquiescence and ample conformity; thereby maintaining his station amidst all the revolutions of religion during three successive reigns. He had paid little attention to the science immediately connected with his profession, and most probably was indifferent to the controversies then agitated; but, living in an age in which it was necessary for every man to choose his side, he adhered to those opinions which had been long established, and which were friendly to the power and splendour of the ecclesiastical order. As if anxious to atone for his fault, in having been instrumental in producing a breach between England and the Roman see, he opposed in parliament all the subsequent changes. Opposition awakened his zeal; he became at last a strenuous advocate for the popish tenets; and wrote a book in defence of transubstantiation, of which, says bishop Burnet, “the Latin style is better than the divinity.”