Scroop

As to the safety for life under these sovereigns, it cannot be called unsatisfactory, except as regards, first, the exercise of martial law in wartime, and secondly, the effect of statutes coming from parliament itself.

It has been well said that in beheadings Scroop and Mowbray in 1405 and the Southampton conspirators in 1415, Henry IV and his son were sowing the wind that their dynasty might reap the whirlwind.

Inasmuch as from these precedents sprang the practice so universal in the Wars of the Roses of putting the captured leaders to death after each battle, either by a mere order or by the sentence of such men as Montague or Tiptoft, who tried prisoners summarily and plainly without any noise and show of judgment, and sometimes according to the law of some foreign state where the judge had received his university education.

As for the barbarous executions which followed the statute De Heretico Comburendo, these of course were not technically acts of royal tyranny, since the authority for them was parliamentary and grounded on a belief which, though in itself both cruel and stupid, had yet darkened all counsel ever since the days when it misled the strong intellect of Augustine.

The existing laws against papal encroachment were neither few nor unimportant.

The constitutions of Clarendon, 1164, as long as they were in force, had prohibited appeals to Rome without the royal consent.

Edward I's outlawry of the clergy and the execution of Archbishop Scroop in 1405 had proved that priests were not inviolable, and of the three great statutes of Richard II, that of Mortmain, 1391, limited the Church's power of acquiring property, that of Provisors, 1390, protected our benefices from being filled up by the Pope, and that of Praemunire, 1393, vindicated the power of the state to exclude bulls.

Moreover, a statute of 1395 forbade the exercise in England of any jurisdiction derogatory to the kings.