It was
now that the Holy Inquisition came into existence, and after forty years
of slaughter these Albigensian Cathari or Puritans seemed exterminated.
The practice of burning heretics, first enacted by statute in Aragon in
1197, was adopted in most parts of Europe during the thirteenth century,
but in England not until the beginning of the fifteenth. The Inquisition
was never established in England. Edward II. attempted to introduce
it in 1311 for the purpose of suppressing the Templars, but his utter
failure showed that the instinct of self-government was too strong in
the English people to tolerate the entrusting of so much power over
men's lives to agents of the papacy. Mediaeval England was ignorant and
bigoted enough, but under a representative government which so strongly
permeated society, it was impossible to set the machinery of repression
to work with such deadly thoroughness as it worked under the guidance of
Roman methods. When we read the history of persecution in England, the
story in itself is dreadful enough; but when we compare it with the
horrors enacted in other countries, we arrive at some startling results.
During the two centuries of English persecution, from Henry IV. to James
I., some 400 persons were burned at the stake, and three-fourths of
these cases occurred in 1555-57, the last three years of Mary Tudor.
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