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574 called so boldly upon her to abolish, the monstrous list of monopolies which had been granted to her favourites, commencing from the seventeenth year of her reign. Amongst these monopolies were those for the exclusive sale of salt, currants, iron, powder, cards, calf-skins, felts, poledavy (a kind of canvas), ox shin-bones, train-oil, lifts of cloth, potash, anise-seed, vinegar, sea-coal, steel, aqua-vitæ, brushes, pots, bottles, saltpetre, lead, accidences (or books of the rudiments of Latin grammar), oil, calamiue stone, oil of blubber, glasses, paper, starch, tin, sulphur, new drapery, dried pilchards; the exportation of iron, ham, beer, and leather; the importation of Spanish wool and Irish linen; and, in fact, such an astonishing list, that when it was read over in the Commons in 1601, but two years before her death, a member in amazement asked, as already stated, whether bread was not of the number.

These grants had been obtained from her by her courtiers through the weak side of the woman; but in the expenses of her government, considering the aid she had to render to her Protestant allies in Scotland, France, and the Netherlands, and the enemies she had to contend with, necessitating expensive armaments and navies, her administration shows most favourably. She would never incur debt, but paid off that incurred by her predecessors, Edward and Mary. Instead of debasing the coin, like her father, she increased its purity; and the annual outlay of her government averaged only about £65,000 per annum.

In fact, the more we recede from the personal history of Elizabeth, which no sophistry now can render fair, and approach her great political measures, the more we perceive the true evidences of her glory. She was courageous, beyond the power of a world in arms to terrify her; she was moderate in her demands on her subjects, though vain in her person and showy in her court; shrewd in her choice of ministers, though weak in her indulgence of favourites; she was ambitious of the reputation of her country, though staining her own character with the darkest crimes; and she rendered to the labouring people their birthright in the land, which her father had stripped them of in levelling the monastic institutions, by enacting the Poor Law, the celebrated statute of the forty-third of her reign, on which yet rests the whole fabric of parochial right to support in age and destitution. In nothing did she display her governmental sagacity so much as in her repeated declaration that money in her subjects' purse was as good as in her own exchequer. It was better, for there it would be growing tenfold in the ordinary augmentation of traffic, ready to yield the State proportionate interest on any real emergency.

We have so fully in the preceding chapters related the great struggle betwixt the Papal hierarchy and the increasing Protestant power both in England and Scotland, that we may here pass cursorily over the subject. There are, however, some features of the great crisis which demand placing in greater prominency, in order to a complete understanding of the causes in operation. And, in the first place, we must remark that complete and terrible as was the overthrow of the ancient hierarchy in these realms, it came at last with a rapidity which astonished even the friends of the change. From the time of Richard II. the new doctrine had been afloat amongst the people, and even in his day had availed to shake the throne, and fill the public mind with prognostics of Papal decay. Yet reign after reign had passed, and the Church had not only maintained its position, but had seemed to crush with a successful hand the Protestant schismatics. The fires which consumed the more daring advocates of the new opinions seemed to scare the rest into obscurity. The triumphant Church of Rome still presented a front of determined strength, and lorded it over the land with a magnificence which seemed destined to endure for ever.

Henry VII. was a firm upholder of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. "He advanced churchism," says Bacon; "he was tender of the privileges of sanctuaries, though they did him much mischief; he built and endowed many religious foundations, besides his memorable hospital of the Savoy; and yet he was a great alms-giver in secret, which showed that his works in public were rather dedicated to God's glory than his own." The fact was that Henry VII. was too cautious a man to become a reformer. He was too fond of money to risk its loss by the most distant chance of an unsuccessful enterprise, and he was too recently placed on the throne of a vanquished dynasty to venture on so bold a measure of ecclesiastical revolution had he been thus inclined, which he was far enough from being. On the contrary, his ministers were almost all great and able churchmen. Cardinals Bourchier and Morton, Archbishops Deane and Warham, were the accomplished churchmen who conducted the governmental affairs of Henry; and when the public outcry against the worldly and dissolute lives of the clergy, both secular and regular, became too loud to be disregarded, these clerical ministers of the king endeavoured with one hand to reduce the corruption by advice and remonstrance, and to check the progress of heresy by the stake and fagot. Henry VII. permitted this mode of extinguishing opinion by destroying the entertainers of it; and in the ninth year of his reign Joan Boughton was burnt in Smithfield, and this auto-da-fé was followed by a number of others; as William Tylsworth, at Amersham, whose daughter was compelled to set fire to the pile which destroyed her father; Laurence Guest, at Salisbury, and others; besides numbers who were burnt in the cheek, imprisoned, and otherwise cruelly treated. These atrocities, as usual, so far from diminishing the heresy, only excited the abhorrence of the people, and weakened their attachment to the Church.

Henry VIII. continued the persecuting practices of his father with unabated rigour. In his earlier days he appeared determined to do honour to the Church beyond most of his predecessors. He raised up and created in Cardinal Wolsey such a colossus of ecclesiastical pomp and greatness as the world had rarely seen. In 1513 Wolsey was made Bishop of Tournay, in France; in 1514, Bishop of Lincoln and Archbishop of York; in 1515, the king's almoner, cardinal, and lord high chancellor of the kingdom; in 1518 he became the Pope's legate "à latèré," Bishop of Bath and Wells; in 1521, Abbot of St. Albans; in 1523, Bishop of Durham, in exchange for the bishopric of Bath and Wells; and