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.