covered their own heads. Beyond this, they were more than landowners to those round about them. The advisers and teachers of all, they had the work now undertaken by the guardian, the relieving officer, the parish doctor, and the schoolmaster. Their charity did not flow from public sources, yet all men expected them, as an incident of their profession, to provide for those in want, and they were well acquainted with the circumstances of those they helped. These conditions combined to ease many of the difficulties which attend the relief of the poor. "The myth of the 'fine old English gentleman,' who had a large estate, and provided every day for the poor at his gate, was realized in the case of the monks, and in their case only."* Nor did the monasteries fall amid any such shout of general execration as would have been raised if the catalogue of iniquity contained in the "Comperta" or "Black Book" of the visitors were true. On the con trary On the part of the secular clergy, who might be supposed to be their natural rivals, the voice of Bishop Fisher, pre-eminent amongst them all for a love of sound learning and for piety, was raised as spokesman in their defence. Of the nobility, who after. wards shared in the plunder, many a one before the event put in a plea for the preservation of the house in which he himself was interested. The popular voice was expressed in the risings in the east and north, and at a later date in the west. It is only now, when the documentary history of the time is being revealed, that we begin to under. stand how narrowly these movements escaped a success, which would have changed the course of English history. The voices raised against the monks were those of Crumwell's agents, of the cliques of the new men and of his hireling scribes, who formed a crew of as truculent and filthy libellers as ever disgraced a revolutionary cause. The later centuries have taken their tale in good faith, but time is showing that the monasteries, up to the day of their fall, had not forfeited the goodwill, the veneration, the affection of the English people. In Mr. Gasquet's skilful hands the dissolution of the monasteries assumes the proportions of a Greek tragedy. From the first there hangs over the doomed orders a remorseless power like the Fate of the Sophoclean drama, in the hands of which the monks struggle unavailingly. Mr. Gasquet traces its approach from its attack upon the alien priories and their final suppression till it first laid its hands upon the smaller monasteries of native growth under the plea of founding colleges and cathedral churches. The Friars Observant and the Carthusians were the next victims, and their sufferings are graphically described. Then follow the Visitation of the Monasteries in 1535-6, and the first Act of Suppression. From the preamble to the Act of Suppression (Which, it must be remembered, is practically all that is known about the measure) it would seem that Parliament had no written documents placed before it upon which to form any independent judgment as to the justice of the Act they were asked to pass. The King, we are told, ma e a "full declaration" of what he knew to be true from the reports of the visitors and other sources. Upon this, after a "great deliberation," the members acted. Whether the report of the visitors in any shape was also submitted to their examination will probably never be ascertained with certainty. Sanders, it is true, speaks of the "publication of the enormities," but this might only refer to the King's "declaration." Bishop Latimer, who was possibly present in the House of Lords, also says:-"When their enormities were first read in the Parliament House, they were so great and abominable that there was nothing but down with them, but within a while after the same Abbots were made Bishops for the saving of their pensions." The King's knowledge, upon which Parliament acted, was mainly based upon the accounts of the visitations. What his "other informations may have been is uncertain;" but there is no evidence that the so-called "Black Book" was ever presented to Parliament, and none that it ever * J. S. Brewer. Giraldus Camb., iv., Pref. xxxvi. + Schism. Lewis's translation, p. 129. Two sermons before Ed. VI. Parker Society ed., vol. i., p. 123. existed. The "Black Book" is not mentioned before the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and the document has completely disappeared. Its details have been supplied by the conjecture of hostile historians. If any such statement was ever drawn up it was probably in the nature of an abstract compiled from the reports of the visitors. We are thus driven back to these "Comperta " as the final source of the charges against the monks. It is in dealing with the existing documentary evidence that Mr. Gasquet is at his best; but his reasoning rests upon detailed criticism, which is convincing in its entirety, though it hardly admits of isolated illustration. He shows that comparatively few of the religious are charged with any crime; that the accusations are vague, based upon idle rumour, and not upon confessions of the accused; that they are often misleading and deceptive; that they are contradicted by Episcopal visitations as well as by reports of other royal visitors and by subsequent evidence; and that in several specific instances they totally fail. These accusations, which in themselves are thus of little value as evidence, are tainted at the source by the character and the obvious motives of the witnesses. Of Crumwell, who was the moving spirit of the movement, Mr. Gasquet says No single minister in England ever exercised such extensive authority, none ever rose so rapidly, and no one has ever left behind him a name covered with greater infamy and disgrace. "Thomas Crumwell, the cloth carder" (to give him the style ordered by Henry VIII.), was regretted by very few in England. He had plundered and murdered defenceless men and women; he had endeavoured to rob the religious of their reputations as he had of their property; he had defrauded the people of their rights, and had seized upon the patrimony of the poor; he had deprived the sick and aged of their hospitals and places of refuge; he had driven monks and nuns from their cloisters, to wander homeless in poverty and disgrace. But his day of reckoning came at last, and in merited ignominy his career closed. Crumwell had chosen fit instruments for his work-Legh, Layton, Ap Rice, and London : They were not troubled with scruples of conscience or unnerved by tenderness in effecting the end their master had in view. "The inquisitors," remarks Fuller, the Listorian, "were men who well understood the message they were sent on, and would not come back without a satisfactory answer to him who sent them, knowing themselves to be no losers thereby."* They were, and professed themselves to be, completely dependent on Crumwell. That they would not hesitate to serve him and their own interests, even at the expense of their honesty, is made clear from their own letters. They were obscene, profligate, and perjured witnesses, men of prurient mind and depraved nature, servile tools in the hands of their master Crumwell. Their avowed object was plunder, and the charges made against the religious were means to attain that end. Mr. Gasquet thus concludes : The character of the men upon whose word the monasteries have been defamed would in these days be defended by no honest historian. No other evidence is forthcoming, and it may be fairly asked, in the name of common sense no less than of sacred justice, that the religious houses may not be condemned on the unsupported word of such miserable men as Layton, Legh, Ap Rice, and London. The first volume of the present work clears the ground for the history of the suppression of the monasteries, which will be narrated in the second. The story of the dissolution is full of pathetic incidents, which render it a fascinating subject to inspire a historian who is so well quali fied for his task as Mr. Gasquet.-The Guardian. Hist., ii., p. 214. Dean Hook adopts Fuller's estimate of these tools of Crumwell. Demy 8vo., cloth, price 12s. each vol. 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AND THE ENGLISH MONASTERIES. An attempt to illustrate the History of their Suppression, with an Appendix BY FRANCIS AIDAN GASQUET, MONK OF THE ORDER OF ST. BENEDICT, SOMETIME PRIOR OF ST. GREGORY'S MONASTERY, DOWNSIDE, BATH. VOL. I. Fourth Edition. JOHN HODGES, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON. 1889. H |