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.