Page:Landholding in England.djvu/72

 The Bill for giving Proclamations the authority of Acts of Parliament punished offenders with fine and imprisonment, and made it high treason if they tried to fly the realm. The "Act for abolishing Diversity of Opinion in Religion" was known as the "Bloody Six Articles," "the Lash with Six Strings." Under it. Catholics and Protestants were burned at the same stake. Catholics for denying the Royal Supremacy, Protestants for denying Transubstantiation. It was death by hanging to say that the Communion ought to be in both kinds, or that private Masses are unlawful, or that auricular confession is not expedient and necessary, or that monks and nuns may marry. It was under this Act that religion was changed in the reign of Edward VI. As the sole reason why Henry VIII. has ever been regarded with anything but horror is the idea that he meant to establish Protestantism, it is well that we should understand the Protestant character of the monarch who seized a third of the lands of England, and put them to private uses.

This amazing spoliation did not stop at abbeys and priories. Every kind of charitable foundation—schools, hospitals, colleges, gilds, benefit societies, were swallowed up, till the poor were robbed of all. The spoilers behaved like foreign conquerors looting a city taken by storm. The sequestrators tore the jewels from the shrines, and bundled the rich sacerdotal garments, the jewelled pyxes and chalices, the splendid illuminated Bibles and Psalters, the priceless Manuscripts, into waggons, while the frightened people looked on aghast. In 1541 he took all the monasteries of Ireland. Such rapine had never been seen since the Huns and Goths overran the Roman Empire. It scandalised all Europe. And because Henry burnt in the same fire Catholics who denied his supremacy and reformers who denied Transubstantiation, his enemies declared that he had no religion at all. In the last eleven years of Henry there were six rebellions—one in Lincolnshire, one in Somerset and Devon, and four in Yorkshire. But the King had a goodly number of foreign mercenaries in his pay— Germans, Spaniards, and Italians; and with these he butchered the people who demanded the old Prayer Book and the restoration of the monasteries.

In the last year of Henry, the Act for the Dissolution of Colleges vested all their possessions in the King. He