Incidents of such an overwhelming nature in political history as are
those of the Reformation can have no sudden origin. They are but the
consequences of something which has preceded. In our country the
suppression of the monasteries and the abbeys had been long prepared; it
was not, and it could not have been, the temporary passions, nor the
absolute will, of an arbitrary monarch, which by a word could have
annihilated an awful power, had not the royal edict been but the echo of
many voices. It was attacking but an aged power dissolving in its own
corruption, which, blind with pride, looked with complacency on its own
unnatural greatness, its political anasarca. Its opulence was an object
it could not conceal from its enviers, and its paramount eminence was
too heavy a yoke for its rising rivals. This power, in the language of
the times, had "covered the land with an Egyptian darkness," and when
appeared the "Godly and learned king," as the eighth Henry was called,
he was saluted as "a Moses who delivered them from the bondage of
Pharaoh." It is not therefore strange that the act which at a single
blow annihilated the monastic orders and their "lands and tenements,"
was hailed as the most patriotic which had been ever passed by an
English sovereign. It made even a tyrannous and jealous monarch, who cut
off more heads of men and women than any other on record, popular and
extolled even in his latter days.
Henry the Eighth had paused at the blow he was about to level. The
plunder was too monstrous even for the hand of an arbitrary monarch. Its
division among the nobility and gentry was an expedient which removed
the odium from royalty, and invested it with that munificence which
dazzled the pride of Henry. In the vast harvest, the king refused the
lion's share, looking for his safer portion in the secure loyalty of the
new possessors to whom he transferred this vast and novel wealth.
As the scheme was managed, therefore, it was a compromise or
co-partnership of the king and his courtiers. The lands now lie the open
prey of the hardy claimant or the sly intriguer; crowds of suppliants
wearied the crown to participate in that national spoliation. Every one
hastened to urge some former service, or some present necessity, as a
colourable plea for obtaining a grant of some of the suppressed lands. A
strange custom was then introduced, that of "begging for an estate."
Kneeling to the king, and specifying some particular lands, was found a
convenient method to acquire them; and these royal favours were
sometimes capriciously and even ludicrously bestowed. Fuller has a
pleasant tale concerning one Master Champernoun. One day, observing two
or three gentlemen waiting at a door through which the king was to pass,
he was inquisitive to learn their suit, which they refused to tell. On
the king's appearance, they threw themselves on their knees, and
Champernoun was prompt in joining them, with an implicit faith, says
Fuller, that courtiers never ask anything hurtful to themselves. They
were begging for an estate. The king granted their petition. On this
Champernoun claimed his share of the largesse; they remonstrated that he
had never come to beg with them; he appealed to the king, and his
brother beggars were fain to allot him the considerable priory of St.
Germains, which he sold to the ancestor of the present possessor, the
Earl of St. Germains.
The king was prodigal in his grants; for the more he multiplied the
receivers of his bounties, the more numerous would be the stanch
defenders of their new possessions:[1] gratitude was the least of their
merits. He counted on their resolution and their courage. The bait was
relishing, and there were some, when land-grants became more scarce,
whose voracity of reformation attempted to snatch at the lands of the
universities, which had certainly gone had not Henry's love of
literature protected their trembling colleges. We have his majesty's own
words, in replying to the suggestion of some hungry courtier:--"Ha!
sirrah! I perceive the abbey-lands have fleshed you, and set your teeth
on edge, to ask also those colleges. We pulled down sin by defacing the
monasteries; but you desire to throw down all goodness by subversion of
colleges. I tell you, sir, that I judge no land in England better
bestowed than on our universities, which shall maintain our realm when
we be dead and rotten. Follow no more this vein; but content yourselves
with what you have already, or else seek honest means whereby to
increase your worldhoods."
Lord Cromwell was the chief minister through whose mediation these novel
royal grants of houses and lands were distributed. There was evidently
no chance of attention from his lordship without the most open and
explicit offers of the grossest bribery. The Chancellor Audley, in
bargaining with Lord Cromwell for the abbey of St. Osyth, for "some
present trouble in this suit," one day sent twenty pounds, with "my poor
hearty good will, during my life." Perhaps the bribe, though only placed
to account, had not its full weight, as the chancellor does not appear,
in the present instance, to have possessed himself of this abbey,
though, afterwards, with the spoils of two rich monasteries, he built
the most magnificent mansion in England, by which he perpetuated his own
name in the once-famed Audley-End. Sir Thomas Elyot, in soliciting his
lordship's mediation with the king to reward him with "some convenient
portion of the suppressed lands," found it advisable to offer a
conditional promise! "Whatsoever portion of land that I shall attain by
the king's grace, I promise to give to your lordship the first year's
fruits, with my assured and faithful heart and service." All were
offering their hearts and the rest of their lives to Lord Cromwell.
As for the regal dispenser himself, so stupendous was his portion that
it became necessary to found a court never heard of before--"The Court
of Augmentation," an expressive designation, indicating its plenary
character, with its chancellor and its treasurer, and a long routine of
officers, and none too many, "that the king might be justly dealt with,"
says Cowell, "the interpreter," "for all the manors and parks, the
colleges and chantries, and the religious houses which the king did not
sell or give away;" that is, the selected prey which the royal eagle
grasped in his own talons.
We are accustomed to trace the Reformation to Henry the Eighth; but in
verity small are the claims of this sovereign on posterity, for through
all the multiplied ramifications of superstition, nothing under him was
reformed. The other great event of the Reformation--the assumption of
the spiritual supremacy--accorded with the national independence from a
foreign jurisdiction. The policy was English; but it originated in the
private passions of the monarch. Assuredly, had the tiara deigned to nod
to the regal solicitor, then had "the Defender of the Faith" only given
to the world another edition of his book against Luther.
In the last years of his reign, Henry vacillated in his uncertain
reform. Sometimes leaning on one party and sometimes on another; he had
lost the vigour of his better days. In his last parliament, though not
without some difficulty, both from Protestant and Papist, they had voted
for "the augmentation" of the royal revenue, their grant of the
chantries. These chantries were the last wrecks of the monastic lands. A
single church had often several chantries attached to it. Chantries were
endowments of estates by the sinners of that age for the benefit of
having eternal masses sung for their departed souls. Henry on this
occasion, in his last speech, strongly animadverts on the national
disunion; and among his thanks mingles his menaces "to unite them in a
more unacceptable way" than the tenderness with which at that moment he
addressed them, for their concessions to his "Court of Augmentation."
It is also evident, by this able and extraordinary speech, that Henry
would gladly have revoked his gift to the people of "the Word of God in
their mother-tongue," as his majesty expresses himself.[2] He had,
indeed, already in part withdrawn the freedom he had granted by
restricting it to a few persons, and only to be used on particular
occasions. His majesty proceeds--"You lay too much stress on your own
expositions and fantastical opinions. In such sublime matters you may
easily mistake. This permission of reading the Bible is only designed
for private information, not to furnish you with reprimanding phrases
and expressions of reproach against priests and preachers. I am
extremely sorry to find with how little reverence the Word of God is
mentioned; how people squabble about the sense; how it is turned into
wretched rhyme, sung and jingled in every alehouse and tavern." This
part of the king's speech was pointed at the general readers of the
Scriptures; but his majesty did not discover any happier union among the
clergy themselves, whom he roundly rates:--"I am every day informed that
you of the clergy are declaiming against each other in the pulpit; and
here your charity and discretion are quite lost in vehemence and satire.
Some are too stiff in their old _mumpsimus_, and others too busy and
curious in their new _sumpsimus_.[3] Thus the pulpits are, as it were,
batteries against each other; the noise is hostile and ruinous. How can
we expect the poor people should live friendly with their neighbours
when they have such unhappy precedents of discord and dissension in
those that teach them?"
Henry the Eighth rejected the Pope, but surely he died a Romanist. His
unwieldy huge form was lifted up from his death-bed that he might
prostrate himself, and, in the writer's language, who, however, was a
papist, "bury himself in the earth," to testify his reverence for "the
real presence," when it was brought before him. His will, which, though
it was put aside, was not the less the king's will, attested his last
supplications to "the Virgin Mary, and all her holy company of Heaven."
And he endowed an altar at Windsor, "to be honourably kept up with all
things necessary for _a daily mass_, there to be read _perpetually while
the world shall endure_." At the same time Henry endowed the poor
knights of Windsor, upon condition that they should repeat their
eternal masses for his soul. His magnificence was proportionate to his
sins; but his perpetual masses, and the world, did not endure together.
With this fact before us, it is not therefore strange that foreign
historians should have declared that our Henry the Eighth never designed
a Reformation, that he altered nothing; and had only raised a schism
which those who contest the papal sovereignty in their civil affairs, as
the Gallican Church affected to do, would incline more to approve than
to censure.
This monarch has been lauded as a patriot king for the suppression of
the monasteries and the national emancipation from the tiara--but
patriotism has often covered the most egotistical motives.