THE SPOLIATION OF THE MONASTERIES.
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?”