Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/355

Rh Deaths of tf ore and ?L3her. RULE OF CKOMWELL.] the influences at work were in the direction of further change. It was the time of the administration of Crom well, and of the highest influence of Cranmer. The new state of things was ushered in by the beheading of Sir Thomas More and of John Fisher, bishop of Rochester. No greater mockery of all the forms of justice was ever done in any age or in any land. But the execution of these two worthies calls for a special notice on account of the great constitutional point which it involves. They were called on to swear both to the succession to the crown, as settled on the issue of Anne, and also to the preamble of the act which declared the marriage of Katharine invalid. This latter oath involved a theological pro position of which their consciences disapproved; to the succession they were perfectly ready to swear. That is to say, More, the great thinker of his generation, utterly cast aside the whole figment of hereditary right. In his view the children of Henry and Anne would be illegitimate ; but, in his view, it was within the power of parliament to settle the [crown on the king s illegitimate children or on any persons whatsoever. To the succession therefore, which was all that was of any practical moment, he would swear; to a proposition which he held to be doctrinally false he would not swear. On these grounds Henry sent his wisest and greatest subject to the scaffold. Cromwell s reign of terror, as it has been well called, now sets in. It is specially remarkable for the constant use of acts of attainder, acts sometimes passed without giving the accused person the opportunity of making any defence. Not that in Henry s reign a defence went for anything, even when the regular forms of trial by a man s peers were observed. It was deemed for the king s honour that those whom the king accused should be convicted, and the Lords or the jury convicted accordingly. In more than one case, entries were found in Cromwell s papers, directing that such and such a person should be &quot; tried and executed.&quot; Mean while new treasons and other crimes were invented. Martyrs were made on both sides ; the supposed traitor and the supposed heretic were sometimes drawn to death on the same hurdle. Two of the martyrdoms of this period de serve special notice. In one case at least, but seemingly in one only, the penalties of heresy were held to attach to the denial of the king s supremacy. For this crime a friar, Forrest by name, was burned with special circumstances of brutal mockery. On the other side, the case of Lambert in 1538 well illustrates both the new jurisprudence and the peculiar position of some of the actors at the time. The men who were afterwards burned themselves were the fore most in burning others. Lambert was denounced by Taylor and Barnes, and condemned by Cranmer, for the denial of transubstantiation. He appealed to the king in his charac ter of Head of the Church. Henry heard the cause in person, and, when his own arguments and those of Cranmer failed to convince the heretic, he was sentenced to the stake by the voice of Cromwell. 1 About the same time a general persecution took place of all who were guilty of having the blood of kings in their veins. Margaret countess of Salis bury was the daughter of George duke of Clarence, the mother of Reginald Pole. Pole was in theology the very opposite to Henry. As the system of Henry was Popery without the Pope, so Pole might be said to be inclined to the Pope without Popery. With a distinct leaning to the Reformers on some strictly theological points, he was a zealot for the papal supremacy. On this point, and on all the .* A modern writer thus comments on the death of Lambert : &quot; In a country which was governed by law, not by the special will of a despot, the supreme magistrate was neither able, nor desired, so long as a law remained -unrepealed by parliament, to suspend the action of it.&quot; This singular argument forgets, among several other things, the royal prerogative of mercy. 335 practical points which flowed from it, Pole was a vigorous disputant against his royal kinsman. But he was beyond the sea, safe from the grasp of Henry, Cromwell, or Cranmer. The head of his aged mother, sentenced to die by act of attainder, paid the penalty of his crime. This last deed of blood was specially Henry s own. The attainder of the countess was indeed passed while Cromwell was still in power, but she was not put to death till after his fall. But the deaths of particular persons seem but a small matter beside the great revolution which Cromwell wrought over the whole face of the country by his great work of the suppression of the monasteries. This work in deed incidentally supplied him with not a few personal victims. That the power of the state was supreme, as over everything else, so over ecclesiastical foundations, no man in England could doubt. Monasteries had been suppressed on occasion from the earliest times. Special attention has been already called to the suppression under Henry V. ; and during Henry s own reign Wolsey had suppressed a considerable number of small monasteries to supply endow ments for his colleges at Ipswich and Oxford. A general suppression of all the monasteries in the kingdom was clearly within the power of parliament, and strong reasons might have been brought for such a course. We must however remember that at this stage Protestant objec tions to the monastic life do not apply. Henry, while destroying the monasteries, enforced the obligation of the chief monastic vow. Bub it might well be argued that the number and wealth of these institutions were excessive, that they had ceased to fulfil their original purposes, that on any showing they needed a sweeping reform,- and that possibly reform could not be carried out without suppres sion. For the measure itself then much might be said. The way in which it was carried out was characteristic of Henry VIII. Mere violence was inconsistent with his character ; something of the form of law must be had. In 1536 the smaller monasteries were regularly suppressed by act of parliament, a course against which nothing can be said. But the greater monasteries were surrendered one by one into the king s hands by their actual occupants, an act of most doubtful legality. Where a surrender was refused, as at Reading, Colchester, and Glastonbury, the abbots were ordered, according to Cromwell s formula, to be &quot; tried and executed &quot; on such charges as were thought good. In these cases, by a strange construction of law, the monastery was held to fall by the attainder of its abbot. The suppression was justified by th3 reports of visitors, which in most cases charged the monks with crimes of various kinds. No one will believe that such a report was either wholly true or wholly false ; but it is to be noted that monasteries which were reported to be wholly blameless, and for whose preservation the visitors themselves pleaded, were suppressed with the rest. It is to be further noted that, where abbots and priors surrendered easily, of what ever crimes they had been accused, their compliance was rewarded either with considerable pensions or with church preferment. 2 Of no monastery in England was a worse character given than of the priory of Christ Church at Canterbury, that which was attached to the metropolitan church. Yet, when that church was refounded as a secular chapter, Henry and Cranmer chose most of the canons and other officers of the church out of the body of men who had just before been branded with the blackest crimes. In the suppression under Henry V., nearly the whole of the confiscated revenues was applied to works of general 2 Thus the last abbot of Peterborough became the first bishop, and the prior of St Andrews at Northampton, who, in the act of surrender, had drawn a dark picture of the doings of himself and his monks, became the lirst dean. Suppres sion of monas teries. Earlier suppres- Distiuct suppres sions of greater and lesser monas teries. Execu tion of abbots. State of the mon asteries.