History of England from the fall of Wolsey to the death of Elizabeth Volume II Part 43

"Right Wors.h.i.+pful,--On the morrow after that Master Hawkins departed from hence, I, having nothing to do, as an idler went to Lambeth to the bishop's palace, to see what news; and I took a wherry at Paul's Wharf, wherein also was already a doctor named Crewkhorne, which was sent for to come to the Bishop of Canterbury. And he, before the three Bishops of Canterbury, Worcester, and Salisbury, confessed that he was rapt into heaven, where he saw the Trinity sitting in a pall or mantle or cope of blew colour; and from the middle upward they were three bodies, and from the middle downward were they closed all three into one body. And he spake with Our Lady, and she took him by the hand, and bade him serve her as he had done in time past; and bade him preach abroad that she would be honoured at Ipswich and Willesdon as she hath been in old times.

[Sidenote: March 13.]

"On Tuesday in Ember week, the Bishop of Rochester[531] came to Crutched Friars, and inhibited a doctor and three or four more to near confession; and so in Cardmaker and other places. Then the Bishop of London's apparitor came and railed on the other bishops, and said that he, nor no such as he, shall have jurisdiction within his Lord's precincts. Then was the Bishop of London sent for to make answer; but he was sick and might not come. On Friday, the clergy sat on it in Convocation House a long time, and left off till another day; and in the meantime, all men that have taken loss or wrong at his hands, must bring in their bills, and shall have recompence.

[Sidenote: Latimer preaches at Paul's Cross, and is disrespectful to persons in authority.]

"On Sunday last, the Bishop of Worcester preached at Paul's Cross, and he said that bishops, abbots, priors, parsons, canons, resident priests, and all, were strong thieves; yea, dukes, lords, and all. The king, quoth he, made a marvellous good act of parliament, that certain men should sow every of them two acres of hemp; but it were all too little, even if so much more, to hang the thieves that be in England. Bishops, abbots, with such others, should not have so many servants, nor so many dishes; but to go to their first foundation; and keep hospitality to feed the needy people--not jolly fellows, with golden chains and velvet gowns; ne let these not once come into houses of religion for repast.

Let them call knave bishop, knave abbot, knave prior, yet feed none of them all, nor their horses, nor their dogs. Also, to eat flesh and white meat in Lent, so it be done without hurting weak consciences, and without sedition; and likewise on Fridays and all days.

[Sidenote: What Cranmer will do with the unpreaching friars.]

"The Bishop of Canterbury saith that the King's Grace is at full point for friars and chauntry priests, that they shall away all, saving them that can preach. Then one said to the bishop, that they had good trust that they should serve forth their life-times; and he said they should serve it out at a cart, then, for any other service they should have by that."

The concluding paragraph of this letter is of still greater interest. It refers to the famous Vagrant Act, of which I have spoken in the first chapter of this work.[532]

[Sidenote: The Vagrant Act the first fruits of the suppression.]

"On Sat.u.r.day in the Ember week, the King's Grace came in among the burgesses of the parliament, and delivered them a bill, and bade them look upon it, and weigh it in conscience; for he would not, he said, have them pa.s.s either it or any other thing because his Grace giveth in the bill; but they to see if it be for the commonweal of his subjects, and have an eye thitherwards; and on Wednesday next he will be there again to hear their minds. There shall be a proviso made for the poor people. The gaols shall be rid; the faulty shall die; and the others shall be rid by proclamation or by jury, and shall be set at liberty, and pay no fees. St.u.r.dy beggars and such prisoners as cannot be set at work, shall be set at work at the king's charge; some at Dover, and some at places where the water hath broken over the lands. Then, if they fall to idleness, the idler shall be had before a justice of the peace, and his fault written. If he be taken idle again in another place, he shall be known where his dwelling is; and so at the second mention he shall be burned in the hand; and if he fail the third time, he shall die for it."[533]

[Sidenote: The penal clauses of this statute.]

The king, as it appeared, had now the means at his disposal to find work for the unemployed; and the lands bequeathed for the benefit of the poor were reapplied, under altered forms, to their real intention. The ant.i.thesis which we sometimes hear between the charity of the monasteries--which relieved poverty for the love of G.o.d--and the worldly harshness of a poor-law, will not endure inspection. The monasteries, which had been the support of "valiant beggary," had long before transferred to the nation the maintenance of the impotent and the deserving; and the resumption of an abused trust was no more than the natural consequence of their dishonesty. I have already discussed[534]

the penal clauses of this act, and I need not enter again upon that much-questioned subject. Never, however, at any period, were the labouring cla.s.ses in England more generously protected than in the reign of Henry VIII.; never did any government strain the power of legislation more resolutely in their favour; and, I suppose, they would not themselves object to the reenactment of Henry's penalties against dishonesty, if they might have with them the shelter of Henry's laws.

[Sidenote: Payment of firstfruits remitted to the Universities.]

The session was drawing to an end. At the close of it, the government gave one more proof of their goodwill toward any portion of the church establishment which showed signs of being alive. Duns Scotus being disposed of in Bocardo, the idle residents being driven away, or compelled to employ themselves, and the professors' lectures having recovered their energy, there were hopes of good from Oxford and Cambridge; and the king conceded for them what the pope had never conceded, when the power rested with the See of Rome: he remitted formally by statute the tenths and firstfruits, which the colleges had paid in common with all other church corporations. "His Majesty is conscious," says the act which was pa.s.sed on this occasion,[535] that the enforcing of the payment of firstfruits against the universities, "may prejudice learning, and cause the students to give their minds to other things, which might not be acceptable to G.o.d;" and "he has conceived such hearty love and tender affection to the continuance of honest and virtuous living, and of the arts and sciences (wherewith it hath pleased Almighty G.o.d abundantly to endow his Highness), as that his Grace cannot compare the same to any law, const.i.tution, or statute; nor tolerate any such ordinance, though the commodity and benefit thereof should never so much redound to his own profit or pleasure, if it may hinder the advancement and setting forth of the lively word of G.o.d, wherewith his people must be fed; or if it may imperil the knowledge of such other good letters as in Christian realms is expedient to be learned. He has therefore,--(for that the students should the more gladly bend their wits to the attaining of learning, and, before all things, the learning of the wholesome doctrines of Almighty G.o.d, and the three tongues, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, which be requisite for the understanding of Scripture,)--thought it convenient" to exonerate the universities from the payment of firstfruits for ever.

[Sidenote: April 4. Dissolution of the parliament, and summary of its labours.]

So closed the first great parliament of the Reformation, which was now dissolved. The Lower House is known to us only as an abstraction. The debates are lost; and the details of its proceedings are visible only in faint transient gleams. We have an epitome of two sessions in the Lords'

Journals; but even this partial a.s.sistance fails us with the Commons; and the Lords in this matter were a body of secondary moment. The Lords had ceased to be the leaders of the English people; they existed as an ornament rather than a power; and under the direction of the council they followed as the stream drew them, when individually, if they had so dared, they would have chosen a far other course. The work was done by the Commons; by them the first move was made; by them and the king the campaign was carried through to victory. And this one body of men, dim as they now seem to us, who a.s.sembled on the wreck of the administration of Wolsey, had commenced and had concluded a revolution which had reversed the foundations of the State. They found England in dependency upon a foreign power; they left it a free nation. They found it under the despotism of a church establishment saturated with disease; and they had bound the hands of that establishment; they had laid it down under the knife, and carved away its putrid members; and stripping off its Nessus robe of splendour and power, they had awakened in it some forced remembrance of its higher calling. The elements of a far deeper change were seething; a change, not in the disposition of outward authority, but in the beliefs and convictions which touched the life of the soul.

This was yet to come; and the work so far was but the initial step or prelude leading up to the more solemn struggle. Yet where the enemy who is to be conquered is strong, not in vital force, but in the prestige of authority, and in the enchanted defences of superst.i.tion, those truly win the battle who strike the first blow, who deprive the idol of its terrors by daring to defy it.

NOTES:

[480] The English archbishops were embarra.s.sed by the statutes of provisors in applying for plenary powers to Rome. If they accepted commissions they accepted them at their peril, and were compelled to caution in their manner of proceeding.

[481] 27 Hen. VIII. cap. 28. The statute says that many visitations had been made in the two hundred years preceding the Reformation, but had failed wholly of success.

[482] To enter "religion" was the technical expression for taking the vows.

[483] A summary of the condition of the Religious Houses, in the Cotton Library, Cleopatra, E 4; MS. Letters of the Visitors, in the same collection; three volumes of the correspondence of Richard Layton with Cromwell, in the State Paper Office; and the reports of the Visitations of 1489 and 1511, in the _Registers_ of Archbishops Morton and Warham.

For printed authorities, see _Suppression of the Monasteries_, published by the Camden Society; Strype's _Memorials_, Vol. I., Appendix; Fuller's _Ecclesiastical History_; and Wilkins's _Concilia_, Vol. III.

[484] At Tewkesbury, where there was an abbot and thirty-two monks, I find payment made to a hundred and forty-four servants in livery, who were wholly engaged in the service of the abbey.--Particulars relating to the Dissolution of the Monasteries, section 5: Burnet's _Collectanea_, p. 86.

[485] See the Directions to the Visitors: Burnet's _Collectanea_, p, 74.

[486] See, for instance, _Suppression of the Monasteries_, p. 86.

[487] "In a parliament held at Leicester, in 1414, the priories alien in England were given to the king; all their possessions to remain to the king and to his heirs for ever. And these priories were suppressed, to the number of more than a hundred houses."--Stow's _Chronicle_, p. 345.

[488] The commission is in Morton's _Register_, MS., Lambeth Library.

[489] Morton's _Register_, MS., Lambeth.

[490] Warham's _Register_, MS., Lambeth.

[491] Ibid.

[492] See Injunctions to the Clergy: Foxe, Vol. V. p. 165.

[493] Burnet's _Collectanea_, p. 74.

[494] Strype's _Ecclesiastical Memorials_, Vol. I., Appendix, p. 214.

[495] Legh to Cromwell, Sept. 24th: Strype's _Ecclesiastical Memorials_, Vol. I., Appendix, p. 216.--_Cotton. MS._ Cleopatra, E 4, fol. 225.

[496] 28 Hen. VIII. cap. 13.

[497] Ibid.

[498] That is, the exhibitioners sent up to the university from the monasteries.

[499] Strype, _Memorials_, Vol. I. p. 323. Leyton to Cromwell: _Suppression of the Monasteries_, p. 71, et seq.

[500] Id quod meis oculis vidi, Leyton writes: Ibid.

[501] Leyton to Cromwell: _Suppression of the Monasteries_, p. 71, et seq.

[502] Leyton to Cromwell: _Suppression of the Monasteries_, p. 48. Let it not be thought that the papal party were worse than the other. The second confessor, if anything the more profligate of the two, gave his services to the king.

[503] The prior is an holy man, and hath but six children; and but one daughter married yet of the goods of the monastery. His sons be tall men, waiting upon him.--Leyton to Cromwell: _Suppression of the Monasteries_, p. 58.

[504] I leave this pa.s.sage as it stands. The acquittal of the papal courts of actual complicity becomes, however, increasingly difficult to me. I discovered among the MSS. in the Rolls House a list of eighteen clergy and laymen in one diocese who had, or professed to have dispensations to keep concubines.--Note to Second Edition.

[505] Leyton to Cromwell: _Suppression of the Monasteries_, pp. 75, 76.

[506] Leyton to Cromwell: _Suppression of the Monasteries_, p. 91.

[507] Leyton and Legh to Cromwell: _Suppression of the Monasteries_, p.

100.

[508] Christopher Levyns to Cromwell: Ibid. p. 90. But in this instance I doubt the truth of the charge.

[509] Sir Piers Dutton to the Lord Chancellor: Ellis, third series. Vol.