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EVIL RESULTS OF REFORMATION UNDER HENRY VIII 313

this change in successive acts of Parliament passed for the repression of pauperism, under which the beggar for the first offence was to be whipped, for the second to have his ears slit or bored with a red-hot iron, and for the third to be put to death as a felon. A later act provided that all vagrants should be apprehended and treated as slaves. Formed into bands, the "sturdy beggars" roamed over the country, always ready for a civil commotion, of which they incited several, and everywhere making life and property insecure.*

But this was not the worst immediate result of the separation from Rome. The movement, it must be borne in mind, was not a religious nor a theological, but almost entirely a secular one. During the reign of Henry the Reformer the same hurdle bore to the stake three men who denied the king's spiritual supremacythe new English doctrine-and three others who questioned the doctrine of transubstantiation, the leading tenet of the Church of Rome.+ No change of belief was proposed, only a change of pope. However, the mode in which this change was accomplished, and the object for which it was brought about, were disastrous

* Harrison says that during the reign of Henry VIII. seventy-two thousand persons were executed in England for crimes against the person and property. During about the same period over fifty thousand were executed in the Netherlands for heresy. The contrast is suggestive.

+ Hallam's "Const. Hist.," i. 93. See Gneist, ii. 157, for an account of the difference between the Reformation upon the Continent and that in England. Upon the Continent it was the result of an intellectual belief in the errors of the Romish Church. In England, it gained its power among the masses from a political desire for national independence, by throwing off the yoke of a foreign ecclesiastical ruler. The intellectual and religious movement was delayed in England for many years.

enough to the cause of religion. In the suppression of the monasteries every indignity was offered to objects which the people looked up to with reverent awe. The Bible was translated into the vulgar tongue, but only, to use the words of Henry himself, to be "disputed, rhymed, sung, and jangled in every tavern and alehouse" in the land, so that he soon suppressed its general reading. The priests, terrorized by the crown, lost all independence, and thought only of saving their livings by the most abject servility.

The effect of this religious upheaval on the public at large was bad enough during the reign of Henry; still, he tried to check the excesses of the fanatics, and preserved some respect for outward religious forms. Upon his death, however, the revolution went still further. The uncle of the young king, who assumed the office of Protector, had little religion, but thought it to his advantage to ally himself with the more violent of the Reformers. The precocious Edward was doubtless sincere in his Protestantism, and his sincerity aided the work of the Protector. The mass was abolished, the altars were torn down, all pictures and images removed from the churches; the doctrine of transubstantiation was repudiated, the confessional abolished, and priests were permitted to marry. With these violent changes, the old religion was gone, but unfortunately nothing was substituted in its place. We have seen that in the Netherlands the new religion naturally replaced the old, the process being a slow and silent one, brought about by placing the Bible in the hands of a people all of whom could read. The mass of the English population were too ignorant to dispense at once with the sensuous element in their religion, and utterly unfitted to accept the doctrines of the Reformation, even had

INCREASED DEMORALIZATION UNDER EDWARD VI

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these doctrines been brought to their attention.* prived of the old system, which at least inculcated some morality, and incapable of comprehending the new teachings, which made faith of paramount importance, the result followed which may be looked for whenever all religious restraints are thrown aside.

The English people were low enough before, but now a sudden lurch seemed to plunge them into still lower depths. With every barrier broken down, the nation entered on a carnival of irreligion and immorality. The patron of a benefice no longer made a distinction between a clergyman and a layman. He appointed as rector of a parish, himself, his steward, his huntsman, or his gamekeeper, and then pocketed the stipend.† Learning, too, naturally declined, the attendance at the universities falling off to almost nothing, the libraries being destroyed or scattered, and costly books burned or chopped up with axes. One transaction shows better, perhaps, than anything else the iconoclastic character of the age. The Duke of Somerset, the Protector, having pulled down some churches in order to erect Somerset House with the materials, next projected the demolition of Westminster Abbey for the same purpose.

* I have shown in a previous chapter that it was not until 1538 that any translation of the Bible was printed in English.

"The cathedrals and churches of London became the chosen scenes of riot and profanation. St. Paul's was the stock-exchange of the day, where the merchants of the city met for business, and the lounge where the young gallants gambled, fought, and killed each other. They rode their horses through the aisles and stabled them among the monuments."-Froude, v. 256.

Hallam's "Literature of Europe," ii. 35. "The divinity schools were planted with cabbages, and the Oxford laundresses dried clothes in the schools of arts."-Froude.

From this act of vandalism he was turned aside only by a grant from the chapter of some of its estates.*

The public service also felt the evil influence. Corruption everywhere prevailed. Every official, from the highest to the lowest, plundered the treasury. In seventeen years the expenses of government increased more than fourfold, and, ignorant of the first principles of political economy, the crown attempted to make money by debasing the currency.+ Private business and morality likewise naturally suffered. The English had manufactured some coarse woollen cloth which had acquired a good reputation on the Continent. Now came news that huge bales of it were lying on the wharves at Antwerp without a purchaser "through the naughtiness of the making," and, "yet more shameful, that woollens, fraudulent in make, weight, and size, were exposed in the place of St. Mark with the brand of the Senate upon them, as evidence of the decay of English honesty with the decay of English faith.”+

One creditable thing was accomplished by the Reformers of the time of Edward. They founded eighteen grammar schools and some hospitals, appropriating for the endowment of them all land worth twelve hundred pounds a year, equal perhaps to as many thousand pounds to-day. As these same men granted to themselves crown lands to the value of a million and a half, equal to fifteen or twenty million pounds in modern

*Hallam's "Coust. Hist.," i. 105. These men, it must be remembered, were not Puritans, but the founders of the Church of England. Froude, v. 154, 266, etc.

Idem, v. 259. For a full account of the corruption and demoralization of this time, see Strype's "Ecclesiastical Memorials," vol. ii. chaps. xxiii-xxiv. § Idem, v. 431.

QUEEN MARY AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION

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money,* and as they and their predecessors had largely absorbed the property of the monasteries and other clerical institutions, this contribution to the cause of humanity and learning was hardly lavish enough to warrant the praise of historians, who call it a "noble measure," throwing a lustre over the name of Edward.† But let us be thankful for even the eighteen grammar schools, and their sixty or seventy pounds a year. Their foundation was unique. The government did nothing more of the kind for three centuries; and even these few schools bore fruit in time.

With the accession of Queen Mary, in 1553, there came a short and terrible reaction, showing how little the people at large cared about religious matters. The changes during the reign of Edward had been made by an almost unanimous Parliament, now the House of Lords, without a dissentient voice, and the House of Commons, by a vote of three hundred and fifty-eight, to two, decided to return to the Romish faith. The mass was restored, the new prayer-book set aside, the

*Froude; Green; Gneist, ii. 162.

+ Green.

Froude, vi. 268. Speaking of these bewildering transformation scenes, unknown in other lands, the Venetian ambassador resident at London reported to his government in 1557: "The example and authority of the sovereign are everything with the people of this country in matters of faith. As he believes, they believe. Judaism or Mahometanism-it is all one to them. They conform themselves easily to his will, at least so far as the outward show is concerned; and most easily of all where it concurs with their own pleasure and profit." Of the English Parliament he adds: "They are rarely summoned except to save the king trouble, or to afford a cloak to his designs. No one ventures to resist the regal will, servile the members come there and servile they remain."-Prescott's Philip II.," i. 77, 79.

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