[1193] For instances of these practices, see Froude’s England, Ch. III.
[1194] Wilkins III. 778.—Strype, in his “Memorials of Cranmer,” Bk. I. Chap. 18, gives this proclamation as dated Nov. 16, in the 30th year of Henry VIII. which would place it in 1538, and Bishop Wilkins also prints (III. 696) from Harmer’s “Specimen of Errors” the same with unimportant variations, as “given this 16th day of November, in the 13th year of our reign,” which would place it in 1521. It is impossible, however, at a time when even the Lutherans of Saxony had scarcely ventured on the innovation, that in England priestly marriage could already have become as common as the proclamation shows it to be. The bull of Leo X., thanking Henry for his refutation of Luther, was dated Nov. 4th, 1521, and we may be sure that the king’s zeal for the faith would at such a moment have prompted him to much more stringent measures of repression, if he had ventured, at that epoch, to invade the sacred precincts of ecclesiastical jurisdiction—a thing he would have been by no means likely to do. The date of 1521 is therefore evidently an error.
For the same reasons I have been forced to reject a discussion in convocation of the same year (Wilkins III. 697), in which the question of sacerdotal marriage was decided triumphantly in the affirmative. The proceedings are evidently those of Dec. 1547, in the first year of Edward VI.
[1195] Burnet’s Collections I. 319.
[1196] MS. State Paper Office (Froude, III. 65). Ap Rice’s report to Cromwell is sufficiently suggestive as to the interior life of the monastic orders to deserve transcription. “As we were of late at Walden, the abbot there being a man of good learning and right sincere judgment, as I examined him alone, showed me secretly, upon stipulation of silence, but only unto you as our judge, that he had contracted matrimony with a certain woman secretly, having present thereat but one trusty witness; because he, not being able, as he said, to contain, though he could not be suffered by the laws of man, saw he might do it lawfully by the laws of God; and for the avoiding of more inconvenience, which before he was provoked unto, he did thus, having confidence in you that this act should not be anything prejudicial unto him.”
[1197] MS. State Paper Office (Froude, III. 372). It is not to be assumed, however, that the clergy were worse than the laity. During the visitation of the monasteries, Thomas Leigh, one of the visitors, says, in writing to Cromwell, Aug. 22, 1536, concerning the region between Coventry and Chester “For certain of the knights and gentlemen, and most commonly all, liveth so incontinently, having their concubines openly in their houses, with five or six of their children, and putting from them their wives, that all the country therewith be not a little offended, and taketh evil example of them” (Miscellaneous State Papers, London, 1778, I. 21). It perhaps would not be easy to determine the exact responsibility of the clergy for this immorality of their flocks.
[1198] Strype, Eccles. Memorials, Vol. I. Append. p. 176.
[1199] Burnet’s Collect. I. 362.
[1200] Formularies of Faith, Oxford, 1856.—Wilkins III. 826.
[1201] Suppression of Monasteries, pp. 160-1.