Page:Henry VIII and the English Monasteries.djvu/17

Rh discretion. The inquiries were searching and suggestive; the injunctions minute, irritating and exacting. Framed in the spirit of three centuries before, unworkable in practice and enforced by agents such as London and his fellows, it is easy to understand, even were there no written evidence of the fact, that they must have been galling in the extreme, and even unbearable to the helpless inmates of the monasteries; whilst it is hardly rash to conjecture that those who had framed them had intended that they should be so, in order that the religious might be driven into rebellion and subsequent surrender.

The method followed by the visitors may perhaps best be understood by the account given by Dr. James Gairdner in the Preface to one of the volumes of his monumental Calendar of the State papers of this period. "The mode of procedure of Layton and his fellows," he writes," is well illustrated in the case of Leicester. There neither the abbot (whom Layton himself believed to be an honest man), nor his canons would confess anything. Layton, consequently, as he tells Crumwell, intends to accuse some of the latter, first, of the grossest vices, and then of less heinous crimes, by degrees, until he has extorted something of a confession. If this may be taken as a sample of the proceedings," pertinently asks Dr. Gairdner, "how much might be considered as a confession by Layton, sufficient against a name? The old scandals," he adds, "universally discredited at the time, and believed in by a later generation only through prejudice and ignorance, are now dispelled for ever, and no candid writer will ever dream of resuscitating them."

To this estimate of the worth of the visitors' word, I may be allowed to add the judgment of Dr. Jessopp: "When the Inquisitors of Henry VIII and his Vicar-General,