Sketch of the Reformation in England

by John J. Blunt

Yet, bad as the monasteries were reported to be, and bad in many instances they probably were, (for the system was in some respects radically pernicious,) the event proved that they had their redeeming qualities too; and as we know not, says the proverb, what the well is worth till it is dry, so was it found after the dissolution, that, with all their faults, the monasteries had been the refuge for the destitute who were now driven to frightful extremities throughout the country, the effect of the suppression being with respect to them the same as would now follow from the sudden abolition of the poor laws; they had been the alms-houses, where the aged dependants of more opulent families, the decrepid servant, the decayed artificer, retired as to a home neither uncomfortable nor humiliating; that they had been the county infirmaries and dispensaries, a knowledge of medicine and of the virtues of herbs being a department of monkish learning (as passages in the old dramatic writers sometimes indicate,) and a hospital, and, perhaps, a laboratory, being component parts of a monkish establishment; that they had been foundling asylums, relieving the state of many orphan and outcast children, and ministering to their necessities, God’s ravens in the wilderness, (neither so black as they had been represented,) bread and flesh in the morning, and bread and flesh in the evening;[251] that they had been inns for the way-faring man, who heard from afar the sound of the vesper bell, at once inviting him to repose and devotion, and who might sing his matins with the morning star, and go on his way rejoicing; that they filled up the gap in which the public libraries have since stood, and if their inmates were not very desirous to eat of the tree of knowledge themselves, they had at least the merit of cherishing and preserving it alive for others. Thus do we find in the monastic system a provision made for many of those wants of society which public institutions are now designed to meet perhaps more effectually; and it is not uninteresting to remark, how the great wants of nature still make themselves known, whatever convulsions a nation may undergo, and still conduct it to something like the same course as before, though not, perhaps, under the same name; and when the flood subsides that has covered the earth, to see how Ararat rears his head as he did at the first, and Pihon returns into his wonted channel to water the garden. Well would it be for the peace of the world if this consideration had its due influence that should paralyse, but that should moderate; if men would not subject society to needless confusion, whilst they attempt to expel nature by a fork, sure as it is to recoil and recover itself; if they would spare themselves and others the inconvenience of a struggle, where they fight as one beating the air.

The convulsion felt throughout the country on this memorable occasion was probably more violent than any which it has experienced either before or since. The joints of society were thoroughly loosed; a vast proportion of the population was turned adrift upon the wide world, their employment gone, their relief gone too. Seventy-two thousand persons are said to have perished by the hand of the executioner in the reign of King Henry, some made desperate by want, and some made bold by the lawless license of the times. Cromwell, who was the the King’s political adviser throughout this great measure, felt the state rocking under him, and suggested the sale of the abbey lands and tithes at easy prices to the nobles and gentry, that by this means the leading persons in every county might be pledged to support the new order of things, and be tied by the tooth. Thus popish lands, as it was said, made protestant landlords, and thus the lay impropriator, a character hitherto almost or altogether unknown, took his beginning. How far the country was a gainer by the exchange of ecclesiastical for other landlords may be questioned. The monks were accused of covetousness; yet it is singular that no legal provision for the poor was wanted so long as the property was in their hands, and that it had scarcely left their hands before it was found necessary to make such a provision; the statute of the 5th of Elizabeth being the first direct one of the kind.[252] The monks were said to deal very thriftily with the incumbents of their livings; yet it is remarkable that no law for preventing the dilapidation of parsonages was called for till the 13th of the same reign. The monks lavished decorations upon their own chapels to the comparative neglect of their country churches, but they never pulled down all the houses on an estate in order that there might be no congregation, and then converted the church into a straw barn, because there was none.[253] The monks gave a miserable stipend to their vicar, “but now,” says one Henry Brinklow, in a curious address to the members of both houses shortly after the dissolution, “there is no vicar at all, but the farmer is vicar and parson altogether; and only an old castaway monk or friar, which can scarcely say his matins, is hired for twenty or thirty shillings, meat and drink; yea, in some places, for meat and drink alone, without any wages. I know,” he continues, “and not I alone, but twenty thousand men know, more than five hundred vicarages and parsonages thus well and gospelly served after the new gospel of England.”[254] And so crying was this evil, for even great parishes and market towns were utterly destitute of the word of God,[255] that there was nothing for it but to ordain the lowest mechanics to these worthless benefices, no man of education being willing to accept such a pittance, for the endowments, it must be observed, had been seized precisely at the time when the wages of superstition in the shape of fees, which before the Reformation supplied no small part of the vicar’s income, were extinguished also, and holy toys were no longer vendible. The cause of religion, however, being found at length to suffer seriously, both from the ignorance and the lives of these preachers, Archbishop Parker enjoined his suffragrans to refuse such candidates holy orders, and then pluralities became a bad, but it was the best, or rather the only, alternative.[256] Queen Anne lamented and endeavoured to remedy the evil. She discharged all livings under fifty pounds a year, according to an improved valuation which she directed the bishops and others to make, from the payment of tenths to the exchequer, a tax which had caused many benefices to remain altogether without incumbents; and by another and still more munificent act, she made over the first-fruits and tenths of such as were undischarged, to the augmentation of small livings; a fund which, it may be here observed, had been seized by Henry, the successor of the pope in his fees as he was in his supremacy; hereby doing what in her lay to heal the laceration which the system of lay-impropriations had inflicted on the church, and purchasing for herself, beyond most other sovereigns that have sat upon the throne of England, a good renown. But, in general, this ill-gotten and ill-applied wealth served only to verify the adage, “that the devil’s corn goes all to bran.” The receivers of the plunder rarely prospered; and it is observed by Sir. H. Spelman, about the year 1616, that on comparing the mansion-houses of twenty-four families of gentlemen in Norfolk, with as many monasteries, all standing together at the dissolution, and all lying within a ring of twelve miles the semi-diameter, he found the former still possessed by the lineal descendants of their original occupants in every instance; whilst the latter, with two exceptions only, had flung out their owners again and again some six times over, none less than three, through sale, through default of issue, and very often through great and grievous disasters.[257] Nor was this the opinion of an individual, or of a visionary; on the contrary, it was very generally entertained by men the most sober-minded. Archbishop Whitgift, in his appeal to Queen Elizabeth against the sacrilegious designs of the Earl of Leicester and others, challenges this as a truth “already become visible in many families, that church land, added to an ancient and just inheritance, hath proved like a moth fretting a garment, and secretly consumed both.”[258] Lord Burleigh, whose bias was rather that of the Puritan than of the Roman Catholic, cautioned Thomas, his first-born, not to build on an impropriation, as fearing the foundation might hereafter fail.[259] “I charge you,” was one of the three injunctions laid upon his son by Lord Strafford when under sentence of death, “touching church property, never to meddle with it; for the curse of God will follow all them that meddle with such a thing that tends to the destruction of the most apostolical church upon earth.”[260] And even Selden (no violent advocate of ecclesiastical dues) censures the alienation of tithes. “And let them remember,” he writes, “who says, ‘It is a destruction for a man to devour what is consecrated.’”[261] Indeed, during the latter half of the seventeenth century—whether from compunction—whether from the attention of the public having been directed to the subject by Archbishop Laud, and by popular treatises which made their appearance about that time—whether from the experience and notoriety of the evil, and the consequent shame it drew upon its abettors, or from whatever other cause—many impropriations were voluntarily relinquished, and a very considerable number of vicarages were more or less augmented.[262] Still there is no abuse out of which Providence cannot extract some good. This act of desecration (as it was considered) proved the safety, perhaps, of the yet tottering Protestant cause, under the reign of Queen Mary; for the great proprietors had violent scruples against returning to a form of faith which might entail upon them the surrender of their lands. And though it is probable that the religious establishment of this country, if it had stood at all, would have stood upon firmer ground at this moment, had the Reformation been completed (for it was left sadly imperfect), by the revision instead of the excessive alienation of the revenues of the church; yet, as affairs turned out, that very spoliation, perhaps, sustained the Church of England a second time, when the Puritan lay impropriators threw themselves in the way (whether consistently or not) of the abolition of tithes;[263] and more unlikely things have happened than that it should do the country the like good office again; for it would require a man of more intrepidity than even the disingenuous Neal (who walks over this incident more delicately than is his custom where there is room for a fling at the church) to draw a distinction between the lay and ecclesiastical tithe-holder, in favour of the former; and to maintain that the right of the one is inviolable, because he does not observe the conditions upon which it was originally founded; whilst that of the other is nugatory, because he does. Certain it is, that the people were at first very reluctant to transfer the payment of tithes (which they had ever regarded, and which the law had ever taught them to regard, as inseparably connected with religious services,) to laymen;[264] and however it may be the fashion of our own times to spare the impropriator, and assail the clergymen, nothing is more true, than that it was not so from the beginning; but, on the contrary, that it was then thought no less an anomaly to pay tenths to the landlord, than it would now be thought so to pay fees for burials and baptisms to the squire. But it must be confessed that the Roman Catholic Church, owing to that entire selfsecurity from which she did not rouse herself till the Philistines were upon her, had in some measure to thank herself for the irreverence with which ecclesiastical property was now treated. Not twelve years before the great overthrow of the monasteries, the pope himself granted Wolsey a bull for the dissolution of several religious houses,[265] and the application of the funds to the erection and endowment of his colleges at Oxford and Ipswich; and, indeed, generally, by the diversion of estates from one ecclesiastical use to another, a process perpetually going on, often effected rather for individual advantage than for the public good, and often under circumstances of collusion and contrivance discreditable to all the parties concerned, a feeling of respect for the possessions of the church as exclusive and inalienable was weakened. The tendency of such a traffic (however confined to a privileged order) was to make the article itself looked upon in the light of merchandise, and to invite towards it the itching palms of the profane. And even, now amongst other advantages not, to be sure, unalloyed, which the law against simony in some degree secures—such as the less frequent purchase of livings at high prices, for which interest of money would be sought by an exaction of dues to the uttermost farthing, to the sure destruction of the pastoral character—such as the better chance hereby offered to meritorious men without influence, of finding a patron when the temptation he would be otherwise under to sell rather than give, is partly taken out of his way;—besides these advantages there is another, and not the least, in the skreen which it interposes between the church, and the market, and the total confusion which it prevents between the things of men and the things of God.

Henry proved himself an apt scholar in the lessons which the incautious, not to say unlawful, practice of the church of Rome taught him. And so successfully had he overcome all primitive notions of the honour due to sacred things, that even before the dissolution, he seems to have converted many monasteries into stables; a scandal of which honest Latimer did not fail to remind him publicly; conceiving it a monstrous thing; that “abbeys, which were ordained for the comfort of the poor,” should be kept for the king’s horses; nor convinced of the contrary by the nobleman (who seems to have been ripe to become an impropriator, as very likely he did) who said to him, “What hast thou to do with the king’s horses?—horses be the maintenance and part of a king’s honour and also of his realm; wherefore, in speaking against them, ye are speaking against the king’s honour.”[266]

Cranmer was not (as may be well believed) an unconcerned spectator of this great revolution in the possessions of the church; but though he agreed with Cromwell in the desire of the dissolution, he differed from him with regard to the application of the proceeds. Indeed, the views they respectively took of the nature of ecclesiastical property do not appear to have coincided. The one was rather acting in a political, the other in a religious spirit. Cromwell was concerned to right the monarchy, Cranmer to save a church. The former was for the suppression of the religious houses, because the supremacy of the crown could not be otherwise secured; the latter had this for his object too, but still more the annihilation of the abuses of purgatory, masses for the dead, saint-worship, and pilgrimage, of all which the abbeys were the incorrigible patrons. So far, therefore, they went hand in hand. But in the disposal of the vast fund which accrued from the confiscation of the church estates, Cranmer did not, like Cromwell and the parliament, regard it as a matter for the king to take his pastime with, according to his own mere will and motion.[267] Nor would he dissipate, nor did he think it lawful to divert from its original destination, and that the promotion of God’s glory, so ample a revenue, and make it over at once, and for secular purposes only, to the crown. He, therefore, was for considering it as still a sacred treasure, to be applied to sacred ends; and out of the old and corrupted monasteries he was desirous to see arise new and better foundations: houses attached to all the cathedrals, to serve as nurseries for the clergy of the diocese in religion and learning; an addition made to the incomes of the inferior class;[268] and the number of sees increased, with a corresponding diminution in their extent, that the bishop might be in deed as well as in name the overseers.[269] To these wise and good propositions Latimer added another, no less commendable, that a few of the greater abbeys should be left for pious and charitable uses. For the priory of Malvern, above all, he intercedes with great earnestness, not that it “should stand in monkery, but so as to be converted to preaching, study, and prayer;” and then he adds, “Alas! my good Lord” (it is to Cromwell that he makes his fruitless appeal), “shall we not see two or three in every shire changed to such remedy?”[270] In suggesting these and similar measures, the reformers felt that they had right on their side. Whether the property of the church had not accumulated to an amount inconvenient to the state, as unduly narrowing the limits within which other professions were left to walk, may be doubted; and therefore Cranmer, with his usual moderation, consented that the king should resume the lands which the piety (or, as it would be now said, the superstition,) of his ancestors had granted to ecclesiastics, and dispose of them as seemed best to him. But they felt also, that church endowments in general, and tithes in particular, were goods set apart for the promotion of religion from time immemorial, the possessor of a manor erecting upon it a church, and charging it for ever with the maintenance of a man whose business it should be to teach the people upon it the law of God, and thus acknowledging on his own part his tenure to be under God, “the land His, and himself a stranger and sojourner with Him.”[271] This was the origin of parishes; the parish co-extensive (as it is still almost always found) with the manor, so that even where the latter chances to have a part distant and detached, the parish, however inconvenient it may be for pastoral superintendance and instruction, usually claims it too. The fulfilment of the conditions annexed to these grants, it was only equitable that the donor and his heirs should exact and regulate; they were the natural guardians of the charities; and when the lapse of years, the course of events, and public convenience, had caused this guardianship to devolve upon the state, the state, like any other guardian, had a right to superintend the trust so as to carry into effect the designs of the donor, but no right whatever to alienate it, apply it to purposes of its own, and thereby frustrate those intentions. It had a right, for instance, to provide the best religious instruction which was to be had, even though it was such as the benefactor had not contemplated; and to exclude such as was found, on a more intimate knowledge of the subject, to be erroneous, even though it was such as the benefactor had sanctioned; it being obvious that his intention was to guide, not to mislead, those for whom he had shown so lively an interest; but it had no right to withhold all religious instruction whatever, dispose of the trust to the best bidder, and putting the produce in its pocket, say that it was corban. If a professorship of astronomy had been founded by some lover of the science when the system of Ptolemy was in the ascendant, surely the trustees of his foundation would be thought to satisfy his manes best by giving it to a man who would now show his pupils a more excellent way, and that Newton was right and Ptolemy wrong; though contrary to the ill-informed notions of the founder himself; and though he, like the Jesuits,[272] would possibly have denounced the innovation as heretical; but they would not be thought to execute their trust to his satisfaction or to their own credit, if they voted astronomy in general to be mere moonshine, and spent the fund that was set apart for its encouragement in an annual dinner. Yet this is the doctrine with regard to the responsibility of the state for the due preservation of the church establishment which is often in these days preached, as though the state were owners of church property instead of its trustees, and it was lawful for the state to do what it would with that which it never gave, and which it never had to give.[273] But might overcomes right—

There is a simple plan,

That they shall take, who have the power,

And they shall keep who can.

And accordingly the council of Cromwell prevailed with the king and the courtiers, and Cranmer and Latimer had nothing to do but to submit and make the most of such resources as were left. Indeed, the whole aspect of the Reformation exhibits marks of the conflict of principles, under which it was brought about. The best and the worst men were busy in promoting it, each party with a purpose of their own; and its graces and imperfections alike testify that the hands which were concerned in it were not of one fashion; that its walls, like those of the second Jerusalem, arose amidst fightings from without, “the builders every one having his sword girded by his side, and so building.”[274] Happy, indeed, it was that such master-builders were to be found: had not this wise and conservative party been at hand, a party intent upon what could be spared as well as what must be sacrificed—what could be restored, as well as what must be destroyed utterly—the vulgar handlers of axe and hammer would have cast all to the ground, and the country would have risen from its paroxysm, rid indeed of superstition, but with nothing for a substitute, and the latter state of the nation would have been worse than the first. As it was, the troubled fountain of the Reformation sent forth streams, the one of sweet, the other of bitter waters, and as the principles of the blessed martyrs, who acted in it their immortal parts, issued out in the establishment of a church of apostolic doctrines, so did other principles, now stirred, find their consummation (if indeed they found it then) in the eventual subversion of that church, and with it, of the throne.

The progress of the Reformation was attended (as all great national convulsions are) with many and sad excesses. The work of destruction, when long continued, is in itself a thing which hardens the heart and the Reformation was full of it. Monk and nun turned out of house and home, pensioned indeed, but (except in the case of superiors, who were treated with more lenity) pensioned with a miserable equivalent; their dwelling-places, beautiful as many of them were, laid low, that all hope of return might be cut off, their cells surrendered to the bats and owls; their chapels made a portion for foxes, the mosaic pavements torn up, the painted windows dashed in pieces, the bells gambled for, or sold into Russia and other countries,[275] though often before they reached their destination buried in the ocean—all and utterly dismantled, save, where, happening to be parish churches, also, as was the case at St. Alban’s, Tewkesbury, Malvern, and elsewhere, they were rescued in whole, or in part, from Henry’s harpies, by the petitions or the pecuniary contributions of the pious inhabitants;[276] libraries, of which most monasteries contained one, treated by their new possessors with barbaric contempt; “some books reserved for their jakes, some to scour their candlesticks, some to rub their boots, some sold to the grocers and soap boilers, and some sent over the sea to book-binders, not in small numbers, but at times whole shipsful, to the wondering of foreign nations; a single merchant purchasing at forty shillings a piece two noble libraries to be used as gray paper, and such as having already sufficed for ten years were abundantly enough (says the eye-witness whose words are here quoted) for many years more;[277] these were some of the coarser features of those times; howbeit there were many besides these. For the churches were now treated with gross irreverence; horses and mules were led through them; they were profaned by dogs and hawks, by doves and owls, by stares and choughs;[278] they were plundered of their plate by churchwardens, or other powerful parishioners,[279] who might argue, that if they spared, others would spoil; or who might wish ill to the cause of the Reformation, and take such means to scandalise it. London, says Latimer, was never so full of ill; charity was waxen cold in it. “Oh, London, London,” cries this earnest old man, “repent, repent! for I think God more displeased with London, than he ever was with the city of Nebo.”[280] Such was the profligacy of its youth, that he marvels the earth gaped not to swallow it up. There were many that denied the immortality of the soul, and the existence of a heaven or hell.[281] Manly sports and pastimes had been exchanged for the gaming-table. Divorces, even amongst the inferior classes of society, were become common; for, marriage being declared no sacrament, probably many chose to interpret the declaration to mean that it was no bond.[282] The elementary bread of the eucharist was expressed by base indecent nicknames.[283] The alehouses were filled with profane disputants upon the mysteries of our faith, and the dissolute scoffers made songs upon them;[284] “Green Sleeves,” “Maggy Lauder,” and “John Anderson my Jo,” with numbers more, were all of this class of composition; and psalms (in this instance, perhaps, without any intentional levity) were set to hornpipes. To crown all, a multitude of disaffected persons were at large in the country, speaking evil of the dignities, and exciting the idle, the hungry, and the aggrieved, to riot and rebellion; bearding the government with audacious demands of changes, both civil and ecclesiastical, to be made at their pleasure, couched in language the most imperative and insolent; “such,” Cranmer observes in his answer to them, “as was not at any time used of subjects to their prince since the beginning of the world.”[285]

Meanwhile, and in the midst of this general relaxation of morals, the fanatic was abroad: it was the very field for him; the standing corn of the Philistines was not better fitted for the foxes and firebrands. There were Predestinarians, who preached that the elect could not sin, nor the regenerate fall from grace. Their religion, says a chaplain of Cranmer, “consisted in words and disputations; in Christian acts and goodly deeds nothing at all.”[286] There were Antinomians, who taught that the “chosen” were at liberty to help themselves to such a share of this world’s goods as their necessities required; and that however they might sin in their outward man, in the inner they sinned not.[287] There were Anabaptists, who, besides their theological dogma, acknowledged no judge or magistrate, no right of war or of capital punishment.[288] There were Fifth-monarchy men.[289] There were Arians. There were Unitarians, who denied the divinity of the second and third persons of the Trinity, and limited the benefits of Christ’s coming to the knowledge he gave mankind of the true God.[290] There were men of the family of Love, or Davidians as they were called from one David George who made himself sometimes Christ, and sometimes the Holy Ghost.[291] There were Libertines, of whose precise tenets we are not informed, together with other sects, some of native, some of exotic growth, but all combining a little sedition with not a little conceit.