THE TWO COMMISSIONS OF HENRY VIII
Moved, as he chose to assert, with a desire “to purge the Church from
the thorns of vices and to sow it with the seeds and plants of virtue,”
Henry VIII., the most immoral and covetous king that England has
ever known, determined towards the end of 1534 to take active steps
to secure the suppression of the religious houses. The Supreme Head
Act of that year had conferred visitatorial powers on the Crown. For
this purpose Henry appointed Thomas Cromwell as his Vicar-General,
suspending meanwhile all episcopal or other forms of visitation. This
absolutely unscrupulous minister, well worthy of the king who appointed
him, and who never lost an opportunity of obtaining bribes in money,
goods, leases, or estates, had the fullest authority and jurisdiction
conferred upon him, with power to visit and exercise such control
through his appointed commissaries. The visitation of Cromwell’s agents
began in August, 1535, and extended to February, 1536. The chief
visitors were the notorious Legh, Layton, and London. They had not
completed the visitation of the Northern Province when Parliament met,
but reports were forwarded to Cromwell of the visited houses, both
small and great. They had also during this period managed to frighten
some houses into making “voluntary surrenders,” and, by imposing a
series of harsh and unreasonable injunctions, had endeavoured to drive
out the remainder. Legh, writing to Cromwell with reference to these
injunctions, had no hesitation in showing his hand: “By this ye see
that they shall not need to be put forth, but that they will make
instance themselves, so that their doing shall be imputed to themselves
and no other.” In March 1536 a bill for the dissolution of the smaller
houses under £200 a year was introduced and forced through Parliament
by royal threats--“I hear that my bill will not pass, but I will have
it pass, or I will have some of your heads.” About 400 houses then
fell; the superiors receiving pensions, and the monks, notwithstanding
their alleged depravity, obtaining admission to the larger houses or
leave to act as secular priests. This first suppression was hateful to
the majority of English folk, save those who profited by the spoils,
and brought about the Pilgrimage of Grace, with the execution of twelve
abbots, as well as many monks and sympathetic laymen of all ranks.
The main excuse for this step in the general suppression was the report
of Cromwell’s visitors as to the condition of the monasteries. This
was the infamous _Comperta_, a pestiferous document of unrivalled
mendacity and malignity, which for three-and-a-half centuries
surrounded the memory of the latter days of England’s religious
with a miasma of noxious effluvia. If any unscrupulous or hasty
controversialist desires to think evil of monks and nuns, he will
herein find a surfeit of garbage. But with the printing of the Domestic
State Papers, and the revelations therein afforded of the character
of the visitors as displayed in their own letters, the falsity of
most of their statements has been manifested beyond gainsaying. Dr.
Gairdner’s cool judgment in editing the official Letters and Papers of
Henry VIII.’s reign gave the first definite blow to the possibility
of placing any reliance on the _Comperta_ documents, as they are
flatly contradicted in so many places, and are obviously incredible in
others. Abbot Gasquet has further exposed their worthlessness after a
masterly and searching fashion; but it has been reserved for scholarly
members of the Anglican communion, such as the late Canon Dixon and
Dr. Jessopp, to denounce the authors of the monastic Black Book in
terms of extraordinary but justifiable severity. In short, it would
not be possible for anyone of a decently-balanced mind--we care not
whether he is English Catholic, of the Roman obedience, nonconformist,
or agnostic--to make a careful documentary study of the times of the
suppression of the monasteries of this country, without rising from
the task with a feeling of almost unqualified disgust for the actual
visitors, and of indignation with a king and a minister who could use
such miscreants as their tools.
“When the Inquisitors of Henry VIII. and his Vicar-General, Cromwell,”
writes Dr. Jessopp, “went on their tours of Visitation, they were men
who had had no experience of the ordinary forms of inquiry which had
hitherto been in use. They called themselves Visitors; they were,
in effect, mere hired detectives of the very vilest stamp, who came
to levy blackmail, and, if possible, to find some excuse for their
robberies by vilifying their victims. In all the _Comperta_ which have
come down to us there is not, if I remember rightly, a single instance
of any report or complaint having been made to the Visitors from anyone
outside. The enormities set down against the poor people accused of
them are said to have been confessed by themselves against themselves.
In other words, the _Comperta_ of 1535--6 can only be received as the
horrible inventions of the miserable men who wrote them down upon
their papers, well knowing that, as in no case could the charges be
supported, so, on the other hand, in no case could they be met, or were
the accused even intended to be put upon their trial.”
On another occasion, when criticising minutely Legh’s reports of the
Papist houses, the same scholar says:--
“This loathsome return bears the stamp of malignant falsehood upon
every line, and it could only have been penned by a man of blasted
character and of so filthy an imagination that no judge or jury would
have believed him on his oath.”
Such testimony is all the more remarkable, for Dr. Jessopp tells us
that few men in their early days had the current views against the
monks more firmly fixed in their minds, and few had more difficulty in
surrendering them under the stern pressure of historic facts.
The _Comperta_, or abstracts of minutes drawn up by the visitors,
are almost entirely concerned with questions of morality; lists of
offenders were compiled, with the charge against the name. The charges
are absolutely unsupported, as a rule, by a shadow of evidence,
save that the odious sins are said, absurdly enough, to have been
voluntarily confessed by the culprits.
What was the character of the chief visitors, on whose word the average
uneducated Protestant is still inclined to believe in all that is
odious against both monks and nuns? Cromwell himself was steeped in
peculation and in the giving and taking of bribes. All England knew
that he had his price for everything, great or small; his own papers
reek with it; and when he fell so suddenly, and earned a well-merited
scaffold death, his selling offices and grants “for manyfold sums of
money” was one of the chief charges against him.
As with the master, so with the men.
Visitors Legh and Layton, and, in a smaller degree, those less busy
visitors London and Ap Rice, were only too ready to extort money from
the houses on which they reported, and to appropriate all they could or
dared of the confiscated spoils. The evidence of this is overwhelming.
Dr. Gairdner, writing some years ago in his preface to the tenth volume
of the Calendar of Letters and Papers, expressed the guarded opinion
that “we have no reason, indeed, to think highly of the character of
Cromwell’s visitors;” and since then very much more evidence has come
to light.
Layton--a man from the ranks, and entirely dependent on Cromwell’s
favour and support, to whom he showed a blasphemously expressed
servility--lost no opportunity of obtaining and extorting bribes.
Moreover, he was ever ready to sacrifice truth to please his masters;
and wrote filthy suggestions and coarse jests with obvious relish.
Cromwell rewarded him with much ecclesiastical preferment, which
included the deanery of York. He utilised his position by pawning the
cathedral plate, which the Chapter had to redeem after his death. He
died at Brussels in 1545; England became apparently too warm a place
for him, for he pestered Cromwell to get him “placed beyond the seas.”
Of Legh we have a vivid picture drawn by his occasional
assistant-visitor, Ap Rice. He was a young man of “intolerable
elation,” and of an “insolent and pompatique” manner. He dressed
himself after a most costly fashion. At his visitations he was
accompanied by twelve liveried attendants; he bullied and browbeat the
Superiors, rating certain abbots most roundly for not meeting him at
the abbey gates, even when they had had no intimation of his visit.
The almost open way in which he extorted heavy fines, passed to his
private account, was systematic. His accusations and bullyings went so
far that his colleague Ap Rice felt constrained to write a protest to
Cromwell, but he implored Cromwell to keep his communication private,
as otherwise he felt confident that he would receive “irrecoverable
harm” (a euphemism for murder) from “the rufflers and serving men”
by whom Legh was surrounded. Legh took equal delight with Layton
in telling coarse tales which were his own invention. Sanders, the
Roman Catholic historian, does not hesitate to lay still more serious
accusations against him. As a reward for his unhallowed zeal, Legh was
made master of the Hospital of Sherburn, co. Durham, an office which
he disgracefully abused, to “the utter disinheritance, decay, and
destruction of the ancient and godly foundation of the same house,” as
was stated in depositions made in 1557 before a Commission of Inquiry.
Ap Rice himself, the accuser of Legh, had been in certain grievous
trouble, was abjectly subservient to Cromwell, and was obviously, from
his own letters, willing, nay eager, to give his reports the necessary
colouring.
Dr. London, who made for himself a greater reputation as a spoiler than
a maligner of monasteries, and who was particularly cruel towards the
friars, held considerable preferments. He was canon of Windsor, dean
of Osney, dean of Wallingford, and from 1526 to 1542 warden of New
College. London also distinguished himself as a visitor of nunneries,
a position for which he was eminently unfit through the coarseness of
his life. Archbishop Cranmer calls him “a stout and filthy prebendary
of Windsor.” “I have seen complaints,” writes Bishop Burnet, “of Dr.
London’s soliciting nuns.” His after-life was peculiarly odious; he was
put to open penance for double adultery with a mother and daughter; and
being subsequently convicted of perjury had to ride with his face to
the horse’s tail through Windsor, Reading, and Newbury, and was then
committed to the Fleet prison, where he died in 1543.
Another reason for distrusting the report of the visitors, even if
their letters and other extant disproving documents did not exist, is
the hasty nature of their visits. Is it for one moment credible that
these two or three men, in those days of difficult locomotion, could
have made any true examination into the affairs and morality of some
10,000 monks and nuns in less than six months? The rough estimate of
the religious of those days is usually put at 8000; but it is forgotten
that the visitors’ injunctions ordered the instant dismissal of the
inmates under twenty-four years of age, as well as those who had been
professed under the age of twenty; so that about 2000 more would be
driven out by Legh and Layton and their colleagues, without a fraction
of pension, in addition to the 8000 still resident when the actual
suppression was enforced.
Bad as are the reports of the extant _Comperta_, there was a limit
even to the eager credulity or the lying imagination of the visitors.
For very shame’s sake in many cases, particularly where the house was
under the patronage of some highly-placed nobleman, such men as Legh
and Layton could not, or dare not, allege any grave misconduct. Out
of 155 houses on which they report, 43 escaped with no reflection on
their morality. In the visited dioceses a number of houses are not even
named, presumably, as Dr. Gairdner thinks, because there was nothing
to say against them. Even in the numerous houses where gross evil was
reported, the charges were only levelled, on the average, against a
decided minority.
Happily, however, for the general and particular character of England’s
religious houses and their inmates in the sixteenth century, it was
found to be impossible to carry out the work of suppression of even the
smaller houses on the vague charges of the visitors, who had confined
themselves, for the most part, to scandal and slander, and had made no
regular financial statements.
On the passage of the Bill for suppressing those foundations under
£200 a year, in the spring of 1536, only a few months after the
completion of the visitors’ _Comperta_, the Crown issued a commission
to report on the number of professed inmates and their dependents,
and the “conversation of their lives,” together with a statement as to
the income, debts, and condition of the buildings. The commissioners
were to be six in number for each district--three officials, namely,
an auditor, the receiver for each county, and a clerk; whilst the
remaining three were to be nominated by the Crown from “discreet
persons” of the neighbourhood. The returns of these mixed commissions
for the counties of Huntingdon, Leicester, Rutland, Sussex, and
Warwick, with a condensed form for Lancashire, were known to exist
when Dr. Gairdner issued the Calendar dealing with the documents
of 1536. Some of the very houses against which Legh and Layton had
breathed forth their pestilential tales were found by the second set of
visitors--who were not Cromwell’s tools, but now that their suppression
was resolved the Crown cared little or nothing whether the moral report
was good or bad--to be “of good and virtuous conversation,” and the
whole tone of the reports is for the most part so favourable that Dr.
Gairdner remarks: “The country gentlemen who sat on the commission
somehow came to a very different conclusion from that of Drs. Layton
and Legh.”
A few years after Dr. Gairdner had thus expressed himself, Abbot
Gasquet came upon the reports of the mixed commissions relative to the
religious houses of Gloucestershire (and city of Bristol), Hampshire,
Norfolk, Suffolk, and Wilts, which had been misplaced. Those for
Norfolk have been printed by Dr. Jessopp in the _Norfolk Miscellany_,
those for Hampshire by Dr. Cox in Volume II of _Victoria County History
of Hants._, and the whole of them by Dr. Gasquet in the _Dublin
Review_ for April, 1894. Space forbids mentioning more than that house
after house is named as “of good conversation,” “of good religious
conversation,” “of honest conversation,” “of convenient conversation,”
“of very good name and fame,” or “of virtuous living.” Occasional
defaulters from a virtuous or orderly life are named, which make the
generally favourable reports all the more valuable. The extant reports
deal with 376 religious men and women; of this number only twenty-two
men and three women are noted as not of good repute. The great relief
that the houses were to the poor and distressed of the district is
mentioned time after time by the commissioners, who were occasionally
bold enough to beg for the continuance of a particular foundation.
The foul charges of Legh, Layton, and their colleagues had served
their turn; many copies of the abstracts of their minutes were made
for circulation, several of which are still extant, and amid the odium
of these malignant lies the suppression of the monasteries became
possible. But it is quite clear that those in power believed in their
hearts the reports of the mixed commissions of officials and country
gentlemen instead of the egregious tales of Cromwell’s tools. Had the
charges made in the first visitation been accepted as true, it is quite
impossible to believe that the guilty ones would have been pensioned,
as was so frequently the case. Thus it can be proved that out of
twenty-seven nuns accused of incontinence seventeen were pensioned.
Various Superiors accused by the first visitors of criminal offences
were afterwards given high secular preferment in the Church.
One of the specially bad cases, if Legh is to be believed, who visited
the house on 29 September, 1535, was Chertsey Abbey; he reported that
seven were incontinent, four guilty of unnatural sin, and two apostate.
The house at that time only consisted of an abbot and fourteen monks,
so that there were but two of virtuous life! Two years later Chertsey
was surrendered. The fickle King at that time was establishing “King
Henry VIII.’s new monastery of Holy Trinity, Bisham,” to consist of an
abbot and thirteen Benedictine monks, who were to pray for the King and
Queen Jane. To this short-lived new foundation Henry VIII. actually
transferred the abbot of Chertsey and his whole convent in their
entirety, although Legh two years before had solemnly reported them to
be the foulest set of monks that he had anywhere discovered! The King
had wit enough to use the lies of his first set of visitors to further
his own covetous ends; but he could never have done more than pretend
to credit them.
Among all the foul scandals set afloat by the King’s first visitors,
and afterwards supported by the discredited Bale, none was worse than
that charged against the last abbot of St. Augustine’s, Canterbury,
John Essex (alias Vokes). Another of the monks, who was incriminated
with his superior, was John Digon, the last prior of the house. If the
odious charges had been true, it is hardly possible to believe that
they would have been pensioned; but recently a strong piece of evidence
has unexpectedly been brought to light through Abbot Gasquet drawing
attention, in the _Downside Review_, to a small volume published in
1590 by Thomas Twyne, a learned doctor of medicine, containing a Latin
tract by his father, John Twyne, the celebrated antiquary. It is
entitled _De rebus Albionicis Britannicis atque Anglicis Commentariorum
libri duo_. In the introduction we are told that John Twyne, who
died in 1581, and left this tract behind him relative to the early
antiquities of this island, was in the opinion of competent judges a
most learned man. But it is the form in which the treatise is drawn
up, and not the actual contents, that is of so much interest from a
monastic standpoint. It is cast in the shape of a conversation supposed
to be held between Abbot Essex, Prior Digon, and Nicholas Wotton,
the first Dean of Canterbury after the ejection of the monks, a man
of brilliant gifts. Though the conversation is imaginary, John Twyne
tells his son that he had often heard these three men carry on similar
learned discussions, and was evidently on terms of intimacy with them.
The son entered Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1560, and this
treatise was written for his information when on the eve of proceeding
to the University. Had two of these men been odious reprobates, the
father could not possibly have held them up to his young son as models
of good scholarship. Moreover, he goes out of his way to praise
them in no slight terms, telling his son that “above all the many
people whom I have ever known I have especially revered two, because
in their days they were above all others remarkable for the high
character of their morals (_morum gravitatem summam_), and for their
remarkable acquaintance with all antiquity; they were, if you know
not already, John Vokes and John Digon. The first was the most worthy
(_dignissimus_) abbot, and the second the most upright (_integerrimus_)
prior of the ancient monastery of St. Augustine.”[A]
When the time comes for the writing of a true and fearless Life
and Times of Henry VIII. (a monarch who has been aptly dubbed “the
professional widower”) by some thorough and conscientious student of
history, there can be no reasonable doubt that Canon Dixon’s statement
will be amply substantiated when he wrote:--“I am inclined to believe
that in the reign of Henry VIII. the monasteries were not worse, but
better, than they had been previously, and that they were doing fairly
the work for which they had been founded.”
Be this as it may, the time has surely come for all educated English
Churchmen to cease to gird at monks and nuns, or to sneer at the vowed
life; for it is to such as these that England owes its conversion to
the Faith, whether we think of the Celtic missionaries from the North,
or of St. Augustine and his forty companions from the South--all
trained in the “School of the Divine Service.”
[A] Those who wish to see this exceedingly rare book for themselves,
and to read other particulars of the last abbot, may like to know that
there is a copy at the British Museum, press-mark 600, _b_, 47.