DISSOLUTION OF THE ABBEYS.--CHURCH PROPERTY.--IMMEDIATE
CONSEQUENCES OF THE DISSOLUTION.
Henry had by this time fairly passed the Rubicon. After a long pause
and much anxiety for the event, he had ventured upon an act which was
a declaration of war against the Pope, and he must now carry on. The
strength of the Pontiff lay, as we have seen, in the monastic orders,
and in the Mendicants above all. The secular clergy were better
subjects, and acknowledged a less divided allegiance. But the monks
were so powerful a body in England that the monarch, even in times when
he wore far from the _semblance_ of a kingly crown, could scarcely
balance them. Grievances are alleged against them without end in the
“Supplication of Beggars;” “But what remedy?” says the author of this
singular address to the King. “Make laws against them? I am in doubt
whether ye be able. Are they not stronger in your own parliament-house
than yourself? What a number of bishops, abbots, and priors are lords
of your parliament![245] Are not all the learned men of your realm
in fee with them, to speak in your parliament-house for them against
your crown, dignity, and commonwealth of your realm, a few of your own
learned council only expected? What law can be made against them that
will be available?”[246] When, therefore, the time came for all men to
choose their side, and it was clearly seen that this formidable body of
regulars would cleave to the Pope to a man, the question was, whether
the King should put down the monks, or the monks the King. Henry had
no alternative but to try a fall with them, and accordingly, having
been slow (considering his temperament) to get into the quarrel, he
still acted as Lord Bacon would have advised, and being in it bore
himself bravely. Some encouragement in his hazardous undertaking he
might possibly derive from the new channel in which public benefactions
began now to run, and the feeling it indicated towards the religious
houses; for whilst no abbey or priory had been founded for thirty
years and upwards, the endowment of schools and colleges was becoming
more and more frequent.[247] Accordingly, he began with the lesser
monasteries, of which the income did not exceed 200_l._, or the
inmates twelve in number. There were many reasons for making them his
first victims. They were the houses of the the _friars_, the most
faithful of all the Pope’s servants, and the earliest to lift up their
voice against the King’s supremacy whilst the question of the divorce
was in progress. The friars did not stay at home like the easy and
well-conditioned monks, but had to forage for a living. “Go not from
house to house,” though a text uttered, as it might seem, with almost
a prophetic reference to them, they found it convenient to overlook.
Whatever opinions, therefore, they entertained, they had the power of
putting in extensive circulation; now that they were disaffected, this
facility became doubly dangerous. Then they were the most vulnerable
of the orders; their corruptions were the grossest. Their vagrant
habits threw them amongst temptations, whilst they at the same time
withdrew them from wholesome restraints. Abroad they were notorious for
intrigues in the hospitable families of the peasants and artisans who
received them; and at home they had a treasury of lies, very profitable
to themselves whilst their credit was good, but more profitable to
their enemies when the fictitious nature of the capital with which they
traded was exposed. The Rood of Grace, which would hang its lip when
silver was offered to it, and shake its beard merrily when the offering
was of gold, was for a time an exchequer; but when the profane hand
of a Thomas Cromwell had once opened the figure at Paul’s Cross, and
displayed to the good citizens of London the wires by which it had been
worked, indignation took the place of credulity, and the craftsmen, to
whom it had brought no small gain, were justly scandalised. Moreover,
the destruction of these lesser houses did not touch in a very tender
place the powerful and privileged classes of society. Younger brothers
were provided for in the wealthy abbey, but not in the friar’s hostel.
It was a war upon the weak (so far as property was concerned,) and
at a time when commerce and manufactures had not taught the weak but
the many their value and their strength; and therefore it was a step
attended with less danger. Lastly, it was a measure that served very
well as a feeler for one still greater which was behind, but which was
as yet studiously disavowed, the suppression of all the monasteries and
convents great and small; it was the bristle which made a way for the
thread.
Thus the year 1536, saw the downfall of 376 smaller abbeys, and the
transfer of the buildings themselves, and of the estates attached
thereto, to the King. Here, Henry appears for a little while to have
paused, partly, perhaps, waiting to see the effect of his first blow,
and partly engaged by domestic matters and the judicial destruction
of Ann; but he was now too deeply embarked in the work of spoliation
to stop long. The greater monasteries had taken the alarm, many of
them had already divested themselves of whatever they could detach and
turn into money; fines were passed to the detriment of the rent-roll,
and furniture and plate sold to the dismantling of the house; so that
upon the whole, the personal property of these greater houses was not
found to be near so rich a booty as that of the less, on which the
storm had burst unawares. Besides, what had been as yet done was enough
to irritate, but not enough to disarm the regulars; Henry had made
them implacable without making them impotent; and a rebellion which
they were understood secretly to have fomented in various parts of
England, and especially in the north (the quarter whence some of the
most serious of the English rebellions have issued,) was sufficient to
attest at once their spirit and their strength. Once more, therefore,
the visiters were put in motion. Their commission was made out to
examine and report the state of the religious societies yet subsisting;
and as the inquiry embraced the purity, the sincerity, and what was
more questionable still, the loyalty of the parties, a verdict of
guilty, as might be anticipated, was soon returned. In many cases,
indeed, the inquisitors were spared their investigation, and some
parties feeling their approaching condemnation to be just, and more
feeling it to be inevitable, determined to take their sea of troubles
at half-tide and make at once a confession and a surrender. To induce
this, however, much machinery was set to work by the commissioners
themselves; for it was with a heavy heart, and a strong sense of the
injustice of the demand, that the honest head of a religious house
resigned that, which “was not his to geve,” (as the prior of Henton
wrote to his brother, reflecting herein a very general feeling,)
“being dedicate to Allmyghtye Gode for service to be done to hys
honoure continuallye, with other many goode deeds off daylye charite
to christen neybors.”[248] Still some resignations were obtained by
promises of pensions; some, again, by threats of exposure, real, or
pretended. If a superior was after all refractory, he was put out of
the way by force; and some disorderly substitute having been previously
provided by the visiter, the latter was formally ejected, and thus
appearances were saved.[249] Nor, probably, were there wanting amongst
the young and adventurous, those who were glad to be released from
retreats which, like the Happy Valley, were too free from pain to be
pleasurable; and who had found that there was but small satisfaction in
the enjoyment “of that fugitive and cloistered virtue, that shrunk from
the race when the prize was to be won not without dust and heat.”[250]
Amidst the strife of tongues, which those tempestuous times called
forth, it is almost hopeless to come at the exact truth. On the one
hand, the visiters are charged with inordinate rapacity, with private
embezzlement of the vast property lying at their mercy, and even
with abusing the opportunities which their commission gave them, and
corrupting the nuns. They, on the other hand, retaliated by presenting
to the eyes of the people a most revolting picture of the interior of
these whited sepulchres (for such they were described to be) fair on
the outside, but within full of dead men’s bones, and all uncleanness,
of spurious relics and sensual sins, and the foulness of the picture
helped to relieve the King from the odium of destroying it.
Yet, bad as the monasteries were reported to be, and bad in many
instances they probably were, (for the system was in some respects
radically pernicious,) the event proved that they had their redeeming
qualities too; and as we know not, says the proverb, what the well is
worth till it is dry, so was it found after the dissolution, that,
with all their faults, the monasteries had been the refuge for the
destitute who were now driven to frightful extremities throughout the
country, the effect of the suppression being with respect to them the
same as would now follow from the sudden abolition of the poor laws;
they had been the alms-houses, where the aged dependants of more
opulent families, the decrepid servant, the decayed artificer, retired
as to a home neither uncomfortable nor humiliating; that they had
been the county infirmaries and dispensaries, a knowledge of medicine
and of the virtues of herbs being a department of monkish learning
(as passages in the old dramatic writers sometimes indicate,) and
a hospital, and, perhaps, a laboratory, being component parts of a
monkish establishment; that they had been foundling asylums, relieving
the state of many orphan and outcast children, and ministering to their
necessities, God’s ravens in the wilderness, (neither so black as they
had been represented,) bread and flesh in the morning, and bread and
flesh in the evening;[251] that they had been inns for the way-faring
man, who heard from afar the sound of the vesper bell, at once inviting
him to repose and devotion, and who might sing his matins with the
morning star, and go on his way rejoicing; that they filled up the gap
in which the public libraries have since stood, and if their inmates
were not very desirous to eat of the tree of knowledge themselves,
they had at least the merit of cherishing and preserving it alive
for others. Thus do we find in the monastic system a provision made
for many of those wants of society which public institutions are now
designed to meet perhaps more effectually; and it is not uninteresting
to remark, how the great wants of nature still make themselves known,
whatever convulsions a nation may undergo, and still conduct it to
something like the same course as before, though not, perhaps, under
the same name; and when the flood subsides that has covered the earth,
to see how Ararat rears his head as he did at the first, and Pihon
returns into his wonted channel to water the garden. Well would it be
for the peace of the world if this consideration had its due influence
that should paralyse, but that should moderate; if men would not
subject society to needless confusion, whilst they attempt to expel
nature by a fork, sure as it is to recoil and recover itself; if they
would spare themselves and others the inconvenience of a struggle,
where they fight as one beating the air.
The convulsion felt throughout the country on this memorable occasion
was probably more violent than any which it has experienced either
before or since. The joints of society were thoroughly loosed; a vast
proportion of the population was turned adrift upon the wide world,
their employment gone, their relief gone too. Seventy-two thousand
persons are said to have perished by the hand of the executioner in the
reign of King Henry, some made desperate by want, and some made bold
by the lawless license of the times. Cromwell, who was the the King’s
political adviser throughout this great measure, felt the state rocking
under him, and suggested the sale of the abbey lands and tithes at
easy prices to the nobles and gentry, that by this means the leading
persons in every county might be pledged to support the new order of
things, and be tied by the tooth. Thus popish lands, as it was said,
made protestant landlords, and thus the _lay impropriator_, a
character hitherto almost or altogether unknown, took his beginning.
How far the country was a gainer by the exchange of ecclesiastical
for other landlords may be questioned. The monks were accused of
covetousness; yet it is singular that no legal provision for the
poor was wanted so long as the property was in their hands, and that
it had scarcely left their hands before it was found necessary to
make such a provision; the statute of the 5th of Elizabeth being the
first direct one of the kind.[252] The monks were said to deal very
thriftily with the incumbents of their livings; yet it is remarkable
that no law for preventing the dilapidation of parsonages was called
for till the 13th of the same reign. The monks lavished decorations
upon their own chapels to the comparative neglect of their country
churches, but they never pulled down all the houses on an estate in
order that there might be no congregation, and then converted the
church into a straw barn, because there was none.[253] The monks
gave a miserable stipend to their vicar, “but now,” says one Henry
Brinklow, in a curious address to the members of both houses shortly
after the dissolution, “there is no vicar at all, but the farmer is
vicar and parson altogether; and only an old castaway monk or friar,
which can scarcely say his matins, is hired for twenty or thirty
shillings, meat and drink; yea, in some places, for meat and drink
alone, without any wages. I know,” he continues, “and not I alone,
but twenty thousand men know, more than five hundred vicarages and
parsonages thus well and gospelly served after the new gospel of
England.”[254] And so crying was this evil, for even great parishes
and market towns were utterly destitute of the word of God,[255]
that there was nothing for it but to ordain the lowest mechanics to
these worthless benefices, no man of education being willing to accept
such a pittance, for the endowments, it must be observed, had been
seized precisely at the time when the wages of superstition in the
shape of fees, which before the Reformation supplied no small part
of the vicar’s income, were extinguished also, and holy toys were
no longer vendible. The cause of religion, however, being found at
length to suffer seriously, both from the ignorance and the lives
of these preachers, Archbishop Parker enjoined his suffragrans to
refuse such candidates holy orders, and then pluralities became a
bad, but it was the best, or rather the only, alternative.[256] Queen
Anne lamented and endeavoured to remedy the evil. She discharged all
livings under fifty pounds a year, according to an improved valuation
which she directed the bishops and others to make, from the payment
of tenths to the exchequer, a tax which had caused many benefices to
remain altogether without incumbents; and by another and still more
munificent act, she made over the first-fruits and tenths of such as
were undischarged, to the augmentation of small livings; a fund which,
it may be here observed, had been seized by Henry, the successor of
the pope in his fees as he was in his supremacy; hereby doing what in
her lay to heal the laceration which the system of lay-impropriations
had inflicted on the church, and purchasing for herself, beyond most
other sovereigns that have sat upon the throne of England, a good
renown. But, in general, this ill-gotten and ill-applied wealth served
only to verify the adage, “that the devil’s corn goes all to bran.”
The receivers of the plunder rarely prospered; and it is observed
by Sir. H. Spelman, about the year 1616, that on comparing the
mansion-houses of twenty-four families of gentlemen in Norfolk, with
as many monasteries, all standing together at the dissolution, and all
lying within a ring of twelve miles the semi-diameter, he found the
former still possessed by the lineal descendants of their original
occupants in every instance; whilst the latter, with two exceptions
only, had flung out their owners again and again some six times over,
none less than three, through sale, through default of issue, and very
often through great and grievous disasters.[257] Nor was this the
opinion of an individual, or of a visionary; on the contrary, it was
very generally entertained by men the most sober-minded. Archbishop
Whitgift, in his appeal to Queen Elizabeth against the sacrilegious
designs of the Earl of Leicester and others, challenges this as a truth
“already become visible in many families, that church land, added to
an ancient and just inheritance, hath proved like a moth fretting a
garment, and secretly consumed both.”[258] Lord Burleigh, whose bias
was rather that of the Puritan than of the Roman Catholic, cautioned
Thomas, his first-born, not to build on an impropriation, as fearing
the foundation might hereafter fail.[259] “I charge you,” was one of
the three injunctions laid upon his son by Lord Strafford when under
sentence of death, “touching church property, never to meddle with
it; for the curse of God will follow all them that meddle with such a
thing that tends to the destruction of the most apostolical church upon
earth.”[260] And even Selden (no violent advocate of ecclesiastical
dues) censures the alienation of tithes. “And let them remember,” he
writes, “who says, ‘It is a destruction for a man to devour what is
consecrated.’”[261] Indeed, during the latter half of the seventeenth
century--whether from compunction--whether from the attention of the
public having been directed to the subject by Archbishop Laud, and by
popular treatises which made their appearance about that time--whether
from the experience and notoriety of the evil, and the consequent
shame it drew upon its abettors, or from whatever other cause--many
impropriations were voluntarily relinquished, and a very considerable
number of vicarages were more or less augmented.[262] Still there is
no abuse out of which Providence cannot extract some good. This act
of desecration (as it was considered) proved the safety, perhaps, of
the yet tottering Protestant cause, under the reign of Queen Mary; for
the great proprietors had violent scruples against returning to a form
of faith which might entail upon them the surrender of their lands.
And though it is probable that the religious establishment of this
country, if it had stood at all, would have stood upon firmer ground
at this moment, had the Reformation been completed (for it was left
sadly imperfect), by the revision instead of the excessive alienation
of the revenues of the church; yet, as affairs turned out, that very
spoliation, perhaps, sustained the Church of England a second time,
when the Puritan lay impropriators threw themselves in the way (whether
consistently or not) of the abolition of tithes;[263] and more unlikely
things have happened than that it should do the country the like good
office again; for it would require a man of more intrepidity than even
the disingenuous Neal (who walks over this incident more delicately
than is his custom where there is room for a fling at the church) to
draw a distinction between the lay and ecclesiastical tithe-holder, in
favour of the former; and to maintain that the right of the one is
inviolable, because he does not observe the conditions upon which it
was originally founded; whilst that of the other is nugatory, because
he does. Certain it is, that the people were at first very reluctant to
transfer the payment of tithes (which they had ever regarded, and which
the law had ever taught them to regard, as inseparably connected with
religious services,) to laymen;[264] and however it may be the fashion
of our own times to spare the impropriator, and assail the clergymen,
nothing is more true, than that it was not so from the beginning; but,
on the contrary, that it was then thought no less an anomaly to pay
tenths to the landlord, than it would now be thought so to pay fees for
burials and baptisms to the squire. But it must be confessed that the
Roman Catholic Church, owing to that entire selfsecurity from which she
did not rouse herself till the Philistines were upon her, had in some
measure to thank herself for the irreverence with which ecclesiastical
property was now treated. Not twelve years before the great overthrow
of the monasteries, the pope himself granted Wolsey a bull for the
dissolution of several religious houses,[265] and the application of
the funds to the erection and endowment of his colleges at Oxford and
Ipswich; and, indeed, generally, by the diversion of estates from one
ecclesiastical use to another, a process perpetually going on, often
effected rather for individual advantage than for the public good, and
often under circumstances of collusion and contrivance discreditable
to all the parties concerned, a feeling of respect for the possessions
of the church as exclusive and inalienable was weakened. The tendency
of such a traffic (however confined to a privileged order) was to
make the article itself looked upon in the light of merchandise, and
to invite towards it the itching palms of the profane. And even,
now amongst other advantages not, to be sure, unalloyed, which the
law against simony in some degree secures--such as the less frequent
purchase of livings at high prices, for which interest of money would
be sought by an exaction of dues to the uttermost farthing, to the sure
destruction of the pastoral character--such as the better chance hereby
offered to meritorious men without influence, of finding a patron when
the temptation he would be otherwise under to sell rather than give,
is partly taken out of his way;--besides these advantages there is
another, and not the least, in the skreen which it interposes between
the church, and the market, and the total confusion which it prevents
between the things of men and the things of God.
Henry proved himself an apt scholar in the lessons which the
incautious, not to say unlawful, practice of the church of Rome taught
him. And so successfully had he overcome all primitive notions of the
honour due to sacred things, that even before the dissolution, he seems
to have converted many monasteries into stables; a scandal of which
honest Latimer did not fail to remind him publicly; conceiving it a
monstrous thing; that “abbeys, which were ordained for the comfort of
the poor,” should be kept for the king’s horses; nor convinced of the
contrary by the nobleman (who seems to have been ripe to become an
impropriator, as very likely he did) who said to him, “What hast thou
to do with the king’s horses?--horses be the maintenance and part of
a king’s honour and also of his realm; wherefore, in speaking against
them, ye are speaking against the king’s honour.”[266]
Cranmer was not (as may be well believed) an unconcerned spectator of
this great revolution in the possessions of the church; but though he
agreed with Cromwell in the desire of the dissolution, he differed from
him with regard to the application of the proceeds. Indeed, the views
they respectively took of the nature of ecclesiastical property do not
appear to have coincided. The one was rather acting in a political,
the other in a religious spirit. Cromwell was concerned to right the
monarchy, Cranmer to save a church. The former was for the suppression
of the religious houses, because the supremacy of the crown could not
be otherwise secured; the latter had this for his object too, but
still more the annihilation of the abuses of purgatory, masses for the
dead, saint-worship, and pilgrimage, of all which the abbeys were the
incorrigible patrons. So far, therefore, they went hand in hand. But in
the disposal of the vast fund which accrued from the confiscation of
the church estates, Cranmer did not, like Cromwell and the parliament,
regard it as a matter for the king to take his pastime with, according
to his own mere will and motion.[267] Nor would he dissipate, nor did
he think it lawful to divert from its original destination, and that
the promotion of God’s glory, so ample a revenue, and make it over at
once, and for secular purposes only, to the crown. He, therefore, was
for considering it as still a sacred treasure, to be applied to sacred
ends; and out of the old and corrupted monasteries he was desirous
to see arise new and better foundations: houses attached to all the
cathedrals, to serve as nurseries for the clergy of the diocese in
religion and learning; an addition made to the incomes of the inferior
class;[268] and the number of sees increased, with a corresponding
diminution in their extent, that the bishop might be in deed as well
as in name the overseers.[269] To these wise and good propositions
Latimer added another, no less commendable, that a few of the greater
abbeys should be left for pious and charitable uses. For the priory
of Malvern, above all, he intercedes with great earnestness, not that
it “should stand in monkery, but so as to be converted to preaching,
study, and prayer;” and then he adds, “Alas! my good Lord” (it is to
Cromwell that he makes his fruitless appeal), “shall we not see two
or three in every shire changed to such remedy?”[270] In suggesting
these and similar measures, the reformers felt that they had right on
their side. Whether the property of the church had not accumulated to
an amount inconvenient to the state, as unduly narrowing the limits
within which other professions were left to walk, may be doubted; and
therefore Cranmer, with his usual moderation, consented that the king
should resume the lands which the piety (or, as it would be now said,
the superstition,) of his ancestors had granted to ecclesiastics, and
dispose of them as seemed best to him. But they felt also, that church
endowments in general, and tithes in particular, were goods set apart
for the promotion of religion from time immemorial, the possessor of
a manor erecting upon it a church, and charging it for ever with the
maintenance of a man whose business it should be to teach the people
upon it the law of God, and thus acknowledging on his own part his
tenure to be under God, “the land His, and himself a stranger and
sojourner with Him.”[271] This was the origin of parishes; the parish
co-extensive (as it is still almost always found) with the manor, so
that even where the latter chances to have a part distant and detached,
the parish, however inconvenient it may be for pastoral superintendance
and instruction, usually claims it too. The fulfilment of the
conditions annexed to these grants, it was only equitable that the
donor and his heirs should exact and regulate; they were the natural
guardians of the charities; and when the lapse of years, the course of
events, and public convenience, had caused this guardianship to devolve
upon the state, the state, like any other guardian, had a right to
superintend the trust so as to carry into effect the designs of the
donor, but no right whatever to alienate it, apply it to purposes of
its own, and thereby frustrate those intentions. It had a right, for
instance, to provide the best religious instruction which was to be
had, even though it was such as the benefactor had not contemplated;
and to exclude such as was found, on a more intimate knowledge of the
subject, to be erroneous, even though it was such as the benefactor had
sanctioned; it being obvious that his intention was to guide, not to
mislead, those for whom he had shown so lively an interest; but it had
no right to withhold all religious instruction whatever, dispose of the
trust to the best bidder, and putting the produce in its pocket, say
that it was corban. If a professorship of astronomy had been founded
by some lover of the science when the system of Ptolemy was in the
ascendant, surely the trustees of his foundation would be thought to
satisfy his manes best by giving it to a man who would now show his
pupils a more excellent way, and that Newton was right and Ptolemy
wrong; though contrary to the ill-informed notions of the founder
himself; and though he, like the Jesuits,[272] would possibly have
denounced the innovation as heretical; but they would not be thought
to execute their trust to his satisfaction or to their own credit, if
they voted astronomy in general to be mere moonshine, and spent the
fund that was set apart for its encouragement in an annual dinner. Yet
this is the doctrine with regard to the responsibility of the state
for the due preservation of the church establishment which is often in
these days preached, as though the state were _owners_ of church
property instead of its _trustees_, and it was lawful for the
state to do what it would with that which it never gave, and which it
never had to give.[273] But might overcomes right--
There is a simple plan,
That they shall take, who have the power,
And they shall keep who can.
And accordingly the council of Cromwell prevailed with the king and the
courtiers, and Cranmer and Latimer had nothing to do but to submit and
make the most of such resources as were left. Indeed, the whole aspect
of the Reformation exhibits marks of the conflict of principles, under
which it was brought about. The best and the worst men were busy in
promoting it, each party with a purpose of their own; and its graces
and imperfections alike testify that the hands which were concerned in
it were not of one fashion; that its walls, like those of the second
Jerusalem, arose amidst fightings from without, “the builders every
one having his sword girded by his side, and so building.”[274] Happy,
indeed, it was that such master-builders were to be found: had not
this wise and conservative party been at hand, a party intent upon
what could be spared as well as what must be sacrificed--what could
be restored, as well as what must be destroyed utterly--the vulgar
handlers of axe and hammer would have cast all to the ground, and the
country would have risen from its paroxysm, rid indeed of superstition,
but with nothing for a substitute, and the latter state of the nation
would have been worse than the first. As it was, the troubled fountain
of the Reformation sent forth streams, the one of sweet, the other
of bitter waters, and as the principles of the blessed martyrs, who
acted in it their immortal parts, issued out in the establishment of a
church of apostolic doctrines, so did other principles, now stirred,
find their consummation (if indeed they found it then) in the eventual
subversion of that church, and with it, of the throne.
The progress of the Reformation was attended (as all great national
convulsions are) with many and sad excesses. The work of destruction,
when long continued, is in itself a thing which hardens the heart and
the Reformation was full of it. Monk and nun turned out of house and
home, pensioned indeed, but (except in the case of superiors, who
were treated with more lenity) pensioned with a miserable equivalent;
their dwelling-places, beautiful as many of them were, laid low,
that all hope of return might be cut off, their cells surrendered
to the bats and owls; their chapels made a portion for foxes, the
mosaic pavements torn up, the painted windows dashed in pieces, the
bells gambled for, or sold into Russia and other countries,[275]
though often before they reached their destination buried in the
ocean--all and utterly dismantled, save, where, happening to be parish
churches, also, as was the case at St. Alban’s, Tewkesbury, Malvern,
and elsewhere, they were rescued in whole, or in part, from Henry’s
harpies, by the petitions or the pecuniary contributions of the pious
inhabitants;[276] libraries, of which most monasteries contained one,
treated by their new possessors with barbaric contempt; “some books
reserved for their jakes, some to scour their candlesticks, some to
rub their boots, some sold to the grocers and soap boilers, and some
sent over the sea to book-binders, not in small numbers, but at times
whole shipsful, to the wondering of foreign nations; a single merchant
purchasing at forty shillings a piece two noble libraries to be used
as gray paper, and such as having already sufficed for ten years were
abundantly enough (says the eye-witness whose words are here quoted)
for many years more;[277] these were some of the coarser features of
those times; howbeit there were many besides these. For the churches
were now treated with gross irreverence; horses and mules were led
through them; they were profaned by dogs and hawks, by doves and owls,
by stares and choughs;[278] they were plundered of their plate by
churchwardens, or other powerful parishioners,[279] who might argue,
that if they spared, others would spoil; or who might wish ill to the
cause of the Reformation, and take such means to scandalise it. London,
says Latimer, was never so full of ill; charity was waxen cold in it.
“Oh, London, London,” cries this earnest old man, “repent, repent! for
I think God more displeased with London, than he ever was with the city
of Nebo.”[280] Such was the profligacy of its youth, that he marvels
the earth gaped not to swallow it up. There were many that denied the
immortality of the soul, and the existence of a heaven or hell.[281]
Manly sports and pastimes had been exchanged for the gaming-table.
Divorces, even amongst the inferior classes of society, were become
common; for, marriage being declared no sacrament, probably many
chose to interpret the declaration to mean that it was no bond.[282]
The elementary bread of the eucharist was expressed by base indecent
nicknames.[283] The alehouses were filled with profane disputants upon
the mysteries of our faith, and the dissolute scoffers made songs upon
them;[284] “Green Sleeves,” “Maggy Lauder,” and “John Anderson my Jo,”
with numbers more, were all of this class of composition; and psalms
(in this instance, perhaps, without any intentional levity) were set
to hornpipes. To crown all, a multitude of disaffected persons were at
large in the country, speaking evil of the dignities, and exciting the
idle, the hungry, and the aggrieved, to riot and rebellion; bearding
the government with audacious demands of changes, both civil and
ecclesiastical, to be made at their pleasure, couched in language the
most imperative and insolent; “such,” Cranmer observes in his answer to
them, “as was not at any time used of subjects to their prince since
the beginning of the world.”[285]
Meanwhile, and in the midst of this general relaxation of morals, the
fanatic was abroad: it was the very field for him; the standing corn
of the Philistines was not better fitted for the foxes and firebrands.
There were Predestinarians, who preached that the elect could not sin,
nor the regenerate fall from grace. Their religion, says a chaplain
of Cranmer, “consisted in words and disputations; in Christian acts
and goodly deeds nothing at all.”[286] There were Antinomians, who
taught that the “chosen” were at liberty to help themselves to such a
share of this world’s goods as their necessities required; and that
however they might sin in their outward man, in the inner they sinned
not.[287] There were Anabaptists, who, besides their theological dogma,
acknowledged no judge or magistrate, no right of war or of capital
punishment.[288] There were Fifth-monarchy men.[289] There were Arians.
There were Unitarians, who denied the divinity of the second and third
persons of the Trinity, and limited the benefits of Christ’s coming to
the knowledge he gave mankind of the true God.[290] There were men of
the family of _Love_, or Davidians as they were called from one
David George who made himself sometimes Christ, and sometimes the Holy
Ghost.[291] There were Libertines, of whose precise tenets we are not
informed, together with other sects, some of native, some of exotic
growth, but all combining a little sedition with not a little conceit.
Here, then, were the beginnings of sorrows laid up in store for the
hapless Charles, and the church of which he was the head, and, in
his later and more sobered years, the ornament. Now was the nation
fly-blown; and it was only wanted that the days should be fulfilled
when the hornets would take wing, and sting it into madness. So true
it is that the sin of a government, like that of an individual, does
eventually find it out. Long it may tarry before it manifests itself
in its effects, but a century in the life of a nation is but a span;
and he who destroyed the Amalekites in the time of Saul for the
transgression of the Amalekites in the time of Moses, suffering his
wrath to sleep four hundred years, and then to burst out, is still the
God of the nations, and deals with them still after the same fashion,
though the natural consequences of the offence may serve Him for
the ministers of his tardy vengeance. For what had the church under
its new discipline and organisation to oppose to these restless and
inquisitive spirits? Could it not meet the evil, and extinguish it,
whilst it was yet done in the green tree? Alas! its clergy were unfit
for so delicate and difficult a work. The Reformation, owing to the
violence which had attended and disgraced a noble cause, had depressed
them as a body; doubtless there were of their number many most able
men; none greater than some of them have been since born of woman;
but with the generality it was very far otherwise. The impropriation
system now began to tell its tale. The universities and schools had
been comparatively deserted. It was with extreme difficulty that men
could now be found to preach at Paul’s Cross, once the object of so
much clerical ambition. About the year 1544, Bonner writes to Parker,
then master of Corpus, importuning him to send him help from Cambridge,
and expressing his surprise that candidates should be lacking for such
an office.[292]--“I think there be at this day,” says Latimer, in the
middle of Edward VI.’s reign, “ten thousand students less than were
within these twenty years.”[293] The clerical profession no longer held
out the same inducements to men of liberal acquirements and liberal
minds to enter it. A very considerable proportion of the parishes of
England were served by priests utterly ignorant and unlettered. The
patrons had given their benefices to their menials as wages; to their
gardeners, to the keepers of their hawks and hounds--these were the
incumbents;[294] or else, they had let in fee both glebe and parsonage,
so that whoever was presented would have neither roof to dwell under
nor land to live upon, but too happy if his vicarial tithes afforded
him a chamber at an alehouse, and the worshipful society of the
dicers and drinkers who frequented it;[295] nay, perhaps himself the
landlord.[296] The questions addressed by Bishop Hooper to his clergy
on his primary visitation are but too sadly characteristic of the
condition of these shepherds of the people:--“How many commandments?
Where written? Can you say them by heart? What are the articles of the
Christian faith? Can you repeat them? Can you recite the Lord’s Prayer?
How do you know it to be the Lord’s Prayer?”[297] Were these the men to
uphold church and state, and in critical times too? or rather were they
not the men to render both contemptible in any times?
The rising party of the Puritans, an active minority, busy rather
than powerful in the Scriptures, given to subtle and unprofitable
questions, would scoff at such preachers, and teach their hearers to
scoff at them too, and this they not only could do, but did; and with
the more mischievous effect, because (as it has been already said) the
districts best peopled and most intelligent, the towns, were precisely
the very poorest livings in the kingdom, and were, therefore, the very
worst supplied with ministers;[298] if, indeed, they were supplied
at all, and not rather abandoned to whatever wolf might feel disposed
to make the fold his prey, the laity themselves actually left to
bury their own dead.[299] The deep lasting wound which such a clergy
inflicted upon the character and credit of the church is scarcely to
be described. It had not recovered itself in the days of Herbert, who
was thought by his worldly-minded friends “to have lost himself in an
humble way” when he took orders; and who himself (which is more to
the purpose), unambitious of distinction as he was become, casually
speaks of his profession in his “Country Parson” as one of general
ignominy.[300] It required the Augustan age of our divines--the age
of a Hall, an Andrews, a Hammond, a Sanderson, a Taylor, a Barrow a
South--to interpose itself, in order that public opinion, viewing the
Church of England through such a medium, might be compelled to do it
tardy justice, and at length to reverence an establishment which had
given birth to so much piety, so much learning, so much genius, so much
wisdom, and so much wit.
Nor was it merely the ignorance of churchmen that gave the rising
sectaries such advantage;--there was treachery in the camp. Many of the
old clergy, conforming to the innovations that had been made, (indeed,
during Henry’s reign, those in doctrine were not very considerable,)
still occupied the pulpits, but without any love for their present
position. On the contrary, it was naturally not unpleasant to them to
see the elements of discord let loose, and like the “anarch old,” to
watch the strife in silence, by which they might themselves hope in
the end again to reign. Homilies were provided, that sound, and at
any rate harmless, doctrine might be propounded to the people. They
were, however, often but “_homely_ handled,” to speak in Latimer’s
vein;[301] for “if the priest were naught, he would so hack and chop
them, that it was as good for his hearers to be without them for any
word that should be understood.” Neither were these conformists the
most intelligent of the Roman Catholic teachers; on the contrary, they
were in general of the mendicant orders, their recommendation being
that they would work cheap, and spare the pocket of the patron. Neither
were they the most reputable; for, as a further proof of the honest
motives which had actuated many in their spoliation of the church,
the very men who had been denounced as unfit to live whilst they were
monks, were now inducted into benefices and stalls by the parties to
whom the spiritual welfare of the people, forsooth, had been so dear
an object, in order that they might be thus relieved from the payment
of the pitiful pension with which their property was charged for their
support.[302]
These are miserable and disgusting details; but if they are so to
write and read, what must they have been to Cranmer and his colleagues
to witness! How must their righteous souls have been vexed! Those
persons who give to our reformers credit for the courage which they
displayed in the flames, and regard their sufferings as confined
to their martyrdom, do them poor justice. To jostle with so many
offensive obstacles for so many long years; to persevere unto the end
in the midst of so much to thwart, to disappoint, to irritate; to
feel themselves earnest, sincere, and single-hearted, and to have to
encounter so much hypocrisy, double-dealing, and pretence; to work
their weary way through a sordid and mercenary generation, who had
a zeal for God’s service on their tongues, but who in their hearts
admired nothing of heaven save the riches of its pavement; to see the
goodly fruits of all their labours likely to perish through sectarian
divisions, which might very probably have been healed by timely
precaution, and the adoption (at some cost to be sure) of measures
which they were the first to recommend; these were trials by that slow
fire of temptation which it requires a stout heart and a high principle
to sustain, and though there might be many (as Milton ungenerously and
ungratefully puts it) who would give their bodies to be burned, if the
occasion demanded it, yet there would be few, who, so tried, would find
themselves so unweary in well-doing.
They, however, have their reward; and it was a noble prize for which
they struggled. They are themselves gone to heaven in their chariot
of fire, and to their country they have bequeathed as a mantle, a
free use of the Bible, a reasonable faith, a pure ritual, principles
of toleration, liberty of conscience, and that virtue which goeth
out of all these things, whereby a nation is made to put forth
its otherwise dormant strength in the prosecution of commerce of
manufactures, of agriculture, of science, and of whatever else belongs
to inextinguishable enterprise.