The attitude of the primates indeed showed that sooner or later such a reformation was inevitable. From the moment when Wyclif stood in Lambeth Chapel the Church sank ecclesiastically as well as politically into non-existence. It survived merely as a vast landowner, whilst its primates, after a short effort to resume their older position as real heads of their order, dwindled into ministers and tools of the Crown. The Gate-tower of the house, the grand mass of brickwork, whose dark red tones are (or, alas! were till a year or two since) so exquisitely brought out by the grey stone of its angles and the mullions of its broad arch-window, recalls an age--that of its builder, Archbishop Morton--when Lambeth, though the residence of the first minister of the crown, had really lost all hold on the nobler elements of political life. It was raised from this degradation by the efforts of a primate to whose merits justice has hardly as yet been done. First in date among the genuine portraits of the Archbishops of Canterbury which hang round the walls of the Guard-room at Lambeth is the portrait of Archbishop Warham. The plain, homely old man's face still looks down on us line for line as the "seeing eye" of Holbein gazed on it three centuries ago. "I instance this picture," says Mr. Wornum, in his life of the painter, "as an illustration that Holbein had the power of seeing what he looked on, and of perfectly transferring to his picture what he saw." Memorable in the annals of art as the first of that historic series which brings home to us as no age has ever been brought home to eyes of aftertime the age of the English Reformation, it is even more memorable as marking the close of the great intellectual movement which the Reformation swept away.
It was with a letter from Erasmus in his hands that Hans Holbein stood before the aged Archbishop, still young as when he sketched himself at Basel with the fair, frank, manly face, the sweet gentle mouth, the heavy red cap flinging its shade over the mobile, melancholy brow. But it was more than the "seventy years" that he has so carefully noted above it that the artist saw in the Primate's face; it was the still, impassive calm of a life's disappointment. Only ten years before, at the very moment when the painter first made his entry into Basel, Erasmus had been forwarding to England the great work in which he had recalled theologians to the path of sound biblical criticism. "Every lover of letters," the great scholar wrote sadly, after the old man had gone to his rest,--"Every lover of letters owes to Warham that he is the possessor of my 'Jerome';" and with an acknowledgment of the Primate's bounty such as he alone in Christendom could give the edition bore in its forefront his memorable dedication to the Archbishop. That Erasmus could find protection for such a work in Warham's name, that he could address him with a conviction of his approval in words so bold and outspoken as those of his preface, tell us how completely the old man sympathized with the highest tendencies of the New Learning.