Bonner

“ Bonner, "whom all generations call bloody," raged so furiously in the diocese of London, as to be charged with burning half the martyrs in the kingdom.' Cardinal Pole, the queen's relative and familiar friend, took no part in these horrible condemnations. He considered that his vocation was the reformation of manners; he used to blame Gardiner for his reliance on the arm of flesh, and was known to rescue from Bonner's crowded pile of martyrs the inhabitants of his own district. ”

“ He took Bonner moose-hunting and wolf-trapping; and, in return, Bonner resurrected a battered and way-worn volume and made him friends with Shakespeare, till Sandy declaimed iambic pentameters to his sled-dogs whenever they waxed mutinous. And of the long evenings they played cribbage and talked and disagreed about the universe, the while Jees Uck rocked matronly in an easy-chair and darned their moccasins and socks.
Spring came. The sun shot up out of the south. The land exchanged its austere robes for the garb of a smiling wanton. Everywhere light laughed and life invited. ”

“ After I had looked at the whole ten, I said to myself, if ever a man earned the right to all these beautiful creatures, Robert Bonner has, from the time he first began to set types in a printing office, down, or rather up, to the present day. Every proud moment that he enjoys them, in or out of that handsome stable, he is fairly entitled to ”

“ Bonner, as well as Gardiner, laboured, and not unsuccessfully in many instances, in causing heretics to recant, upon which they were restored to liberty.
A striking yet dispassionate portrait of Edmund Bonner, from the pen of the late Dr. S. R. Maitland, one of the most scholarly and painstaking historians of the last century, forms a vivid contrast to Foxe's caricature of the Bishop of London. ”

“ Opposed to the Reformation, though he did not dare openly to manifest his hostility to it, Bonner was regarded with suspicion and dislike by the chiefs of the Protestant party, who determined upon his overthrow. Cited before an ecclesiastical commission, of which Cranmer was the head, notwithstanding an energetic defence, appeals to the King against the illegality of the tribunal, and the injustice of his sentence, Bonner, at that time Bishop of London, was deprived of his see and benefices, and imprisoned in the Marshalsea, whence he was only liberated on Mary’s accession. ”

“ Bonner is a Presbyterian, being a member of the church presided over by Dr. John Hall, on Fifth Avenue. He has given many thousands of dollars to various institutions and charities. He owns the finest stable of horses in the Union, among which are such as Maud S.—his first great trotter was Dexter. He never allows one of his horses to trot for money.
Mr. Bonner is getting along in years but still attends to business. His paper has at times attained a circulation of 400,000 copies, each issue. ”

“ Every death at the stake won hundreds to the cause for which the victims died. "You have lost the hearts of twenty thousands that were rank Papists within these twelve months," a Protestant wrote triumphantly to Bonner. Bonner indeed, who had never been a very zealous persecutor, was sick of his work; and the energy of the bishops soon relaxed. But Mary had no thought of hesitation in the course she had entered on, and though the Imperial ambassador noted the rapid growth of public discontent "rattling letters" from the council pressed the lagging prelates to fresh activity. ”

“ In times of religious and political convulsion, to be opposed to the party for the moment in power is itself a crime; and Bonner, sensual, insolent, and brutal, retained, nevertheless, the virtue of honesty. The See of London, therefore, had been required for more useful hands. But there was a general impression that the recovery of authority by the executors would now lead to a change of policy. In Oxford mass was again celebrated in the college chapels. [1] Both Bonner and Gardiner appealed against the oppression to which they had been subjected. ”

“ She made no reply, but turned her head sharply away, as if in sudden embarrassment. Then, in answer to his conventionally murmured good-byes, she looked back, and he saw her face radiant, alight, with the most beautiful smile trembling on the lips. The splendor of this look seemed to him a mute expression of her happiness—of love reciprocated, ambition realized—and in it he read his own doom. He turned blindly round to pick up his hat; the door behind him was opened, and there, handsome, debonair, fresh as a May morning, stood Lord Hastings, hat in hand. ”

“ It was then that Bonner Law, with rare dramatic gesture, gave the command, "Ring down the curtain!" "It is the end of the Act, but not of the play," he added amid loud cheers from host behind him, reinforced this afternoon by arrival of recruits from North-East Derbyshire and Ipswich. "The final Act in the drama will be played not in the House of Commons, but in the country, and there, Sir, it will not be a farce." ”

“ The heat of the afternoon and the excitement of the meeting had called up a faint pink to her cheeks. In her belt she had thrust a branch of wistaria and the trail of blossoms hung down along her skirt. She wore a wide leghorn hat, and in this she had fastened another bunch, the flowers lying scattered across the broad rim, and one [174] spray hanging over its edge and mingling with the curls that touched her neck.
Jerry had never seen her look as she did this afternoon. Love, that she felt assured was returned, had lent her the fleeting beauty of an hour. ”

“ In her small parlor the pictures of the Bonanza Kings hung on the walls and she was wont, an old rheumatic figure in shiny black with the miniature pinned at her withered throat, to point to these and tell stories of the great Iliad of the Comstock.
She was very fond of Lorry and when she heard her predicament—a party to be given and not enough men—patted her hand and nodded understandingly. Times were changed—ah, if the girls had been in Virginia in the seventies! And after a brisk canter through her memories (she always had to have that) galloped back into the present and its needs. ”

“ Sir John Harington, who was quite a boy when Bonner died, says that he was so hated that men would say of any ill-favoured fat fellow in the street, that was Bonner. This, however, tells us little of the real character of the man. ”

“ Better forty times than you saw in Virginia, and every night if you want. It’ll be just as good a time as San Francisco and the Colonel can give two girls like you and Rosamund.”
He looked down at her, smiling. She returned the look and said:
“Why are you so good to us? I don’t understand it!”
“Don’t try to. Never exert your brain in needless ways. That’s a fundamental law for the preservation of health. In this particular case I’d be good to myself. You don’t know what it would be for me to have two nice girls to take around. I’m a lonely old devil, you know.” ”

“ Inside the fort, as the dawn deepened, three people sat, cowered close, waiting. Against Mary, upright in her chair, Frank and Lottie rested. They had drawn near to her, crouching against her, as the one refuge. She had covered them with a rug, pulled it over their heads to shut out sight and sound, and through it she could feel their bodies, limp and flaccid in a faintness that increased as the moments passed. She felt no such blessed dimming of her own senses, had never been more acutely alive. ”

“ So with other persecutions of which Bonner is accrued, of which two occurred during the reign of Henry VIII. John Porter was committed to prison by him for reading aloud from one of the six bibles that Bonner had caused to be put up in St. Paul‘s Cathedral, and making comments of his own in direct violation of the episcopal injunctions. Foxe tells us that he was laced in irons and fastened with a collar of iron to the wall of his dungeon, of which cruel treatment he died within six or eight days. ”

“ The lamp that cast the yellow light was on this bureau; its globe, a translucent gold reflection revealed in liquid clearness in the mirror just behind. It was not his own room nor Berny’s. He turned his head farther on the pillow very slowly, for he seemed sunk in an abyss of suffering and feebleness. On the table by the bed’s head was another lamp, a folded newspaper shutting its light from his face, and here his eyes stopped.
A woman was sitting by the foot of the bed, [65] her head bent as if reading. He stared at her with even more intentness than he had at the room. ”

“ She was smiling slightly, her face singularly sad under the smile. He looked at her and said softly:
“My girl!”
He sat on with her for a space, discussing the move and making plans. With some embarrassment he told her of the fact that he had written to Rion Gracey, applying for a position. The thought that he would be in Virginia called the first real color of life and pleasure into her face that he had seen there for weeks. He saw that the excitement of the move, the hope of change from the environment in which she had so suffered, had had a bracing and cheering effect on her. ”

“ Both he and Gardiner had in fact sought fresh licences to exercise their ecclesiastical jurisdiction from the young king; and, if he was supreme enough to confer jurisdiction, he was supreme enough to issue the injunctions and order the visitation to which Bonner objected. Moreover, if a minority involved an abeyance of the royal supremacy in the ecclesiastical sphere, it must do the same in the temporal sphere, and there could be nothing but anarchy. It was on this question that Bonner came into conflict with Edward’s government. ”

“ He does not live. As a writer of such letters as, for years, have appeared from her pen in the Argonaut, Miss Bonner is perhaps the best woman journalist we have in America. Her style is distinctly journalistic, though above ordinary journalism. A little less vocabulary and embellished rhetoric and more feeling for the dignity of language are what Miss Bonner should cultivate in her writing of novels. As it is, Rich Men's Children is rather remote from Marius the Epicurean, for example. ”

“ Dan would rather shut down the Cresta Plata than disappoint her, so as he couldn’t come I had to.”
“You’re being broken in early. At my age it’s about all a fellow’s good for. I take the girls wherever they go, and what’s more, I enjoy it. Have you seen them yet?”
Mercedes
[245] He indicated the white-robed figures of June and Rosamund in front of him. Rion nodded. Before he had spoken to the Colonel he had stood just behind him watching June. Her back was toward him but as she turned he caught glimpses of her profile. ”

“ The first step being over, confessions far more humiliating could now be extorted. Bonner came to his cell, and obtained from him a promise in writing, "to submit to the king and queen in all their laws and ordinances, as well touching the pope's supremacy, as in all other things;" with an engagement further "to move and stir all others to do the like," and to live in quietness and obedience, without murmur or grudging; his book on the sacrament he would submit to the next general council. ”

“ I heard queer sounds as if someone was groaning in pain, and saw the shrubs and grass plain by the light of two lanterns standing on the ground. Near these was a man, lit up as far as his knees, and close by him, all crumpled on the earth, another person. The lanterns threw a bright glow over the upper part of that figure, and I saw the head and shoulders, the hair with leaves and twigs in it and round the neck a red bandanna. Then I made out it was a man and that it was from him the sounds were coming—moans and groans and words in a strange language.
"What is it?" I whispered to Babbitts. ”

“ They worked together with the greatest cordiality, and Mr Bradlaugh on one occasion wrote that he wished there were more clergymen like the Rev. Mr Bonner. My father took part in most of the meetings of the League which were held in London and in many of those held in the provinces, and his value as an advocate was appreciated by men opposed to the Reform Bill—then before Parliament—as well as by those on his own side who were not blinded by bigotry. ”

“ Bonner had served a poor blind harper in nearly the same manner, who had steadily maintained a hope that if every joint of him were to be burnt, he should not fly from the faith. ”

“ From himself, however, Bonner was less successful in extracting any such positive expression. 'I provoked him,' said the ambassador, 'to have uttered somewhat of his stomach against the Bishop of Rome, telling him that the French King never would have gone about this war if the Bishop of Rome had seriously forbidden him; and the said Bishop deserved small thanks of his Majesty for casting bones before princes, that he himself might reign.' Charles listened, but said nothing. ”

“ And this, perhaps, was why John Bonner could never understand his brother-in-law, the colonel, a most distinguished soldier, a modest and most enviable man.
Twenty-five years had Bonner known that now gray-haired, gray-mustached veteran. Twenty-five years had he liked him, admired him, and much of late had he sought to know him, but Hazzard was a man he could not fathom.
"Fifteen years ago," said he to a fellow-magnate, "I told that man if he'd quit soldiering, and bring Carrie and the children to Chicago, I'd guarantee him an income ten times the regular pay he's getting ”

“ If in these wan and dripping surroundings the young girl had not looked so freshly fair and comely, Berny might have let her pass unchecked. But upon the elder woman’s sore and bitter mood the vision of this rosy youthfulness, triumphant where all the rest of the world sank unprotesting under the weight of a common ugliness, came with a sense of unbearable wrong and grievance. As Rose passed, Berny, with a sudden blinding up-rush of excitement, leaned forward and rose. ”