about a hundred years after the enlightening "Reformation" began. At this time (1824) there are, I am informed, only FIVE halls remaining, and not a single school.
31. I shall, in another place, have to show more fully the folly, and, indeed, the baseness, of railing against the monastic institutions generally; but, I must here confine myself to this charge against the Catholic religion, of being unfavourable to genius, talent, and, in short, to the powers of the mind. It is a strange notion; and one can hardly hear it mentioned without suspecting, that, somehow or other, there is plunder at the bottom of the apparently nothing but stupid idea. Those who put forward this piece of rare impudence do not favour us with reasons for believing that the Catholic religion has any such tendency. They content themselves with the bare assertion, not supposing that it admits of anything like disproof. They look upon it as assertion against assertion; and, in a question which depends on mere hardness of mouth, they know that their triumph is secure. But, this is a question that does admit of proof, and a very good proof too. The "Reformation," in England, was pretty nearly completed by the year 1600. By that time all the "monkish ignorance and superstition" were swept away. The monasteries were all pretty nearly knocked down, young Saint Edward's people had robbed all the altars, and the "VIRGIN" Queen had put the finishing hand to the pillage. So that all was, in 1600, become as Protestant as heart could wish. Very well; the kingdom of France remained buried in "monkish ignorance and superstition" until the year 1787: that is to say, 187 years after happy England stood in a blaze of Protestant light! Now, then, if we carefully examine into the number of men remarkable for great powers of mind, men famed for their knowledge or genius; if we carefully examine into the number of such men produced by France in these 187 years, and the number of such men produced by England, Scotland and Ireland, during the same period; if we do this, we shall get at a pretty good foundation for judging of the effects of the two religions with regard to their influence on knowledge, genius, and what is generally called learning.
32. "Oh, no!" exclaim the fire-shovels. "France is a great deal bigger, and contains more people, than these Islands; and this is not fair play!" Do not be frightened, good fire-shovels. According to your own account, these Islands contain twenty-one millions; and the French say, that they have thirty millions. Therefore, when we have got the numbers, we will make an allowance of one-third in our favour accordingly. If, for instance, the French have not three famous men to every two of ours, then I shall confess, that the law-established Church. and its family of Muggletonians, Cameronians, Jumpers, Unitarians, Shakers, Quakers, and the rest of the Protestant litter, are more favourable to knowledge and genius, than is the Catholic Church.
33. But how are we to ascertain these numbers? Very well. I shall refer to a work which has a place in every good library in the kingdom; I mean, the "UNIVERSAL, HISTORICAL, CRITICAL, AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY." This work, which is every where received as authority as to facts, contains lists of persons of all nations, celebrated for their published works. But, then, to have a place in these lists, the person must have been really distinguished; his or her works must have been considered as worthy of universal notice. From these lists I shall take my numbers, as before proposed. It will not be necessary to go into all the arts and sciences: eight or nine will be sufficient. It may be as well, perhaps, to take the ITALIANS as well as the French; for we all know that they were living in most shocking "monkish ignorance and superstition;" and that they, poor, unfortunate, and un plundered souls, are so living unto this very day!
34. Here, then, is the statement; and you have only to observe, that the figures represent the number of persons who were famous for the art or science opposite the name of which the figures are placed. The period is, from the year 1600 to 1787, during which period France was under what young GEORGE Ross calls the "dark despotism of the Catholic Church," and what BLACKSTONE calls "monkish ignorance and superstition;" and, during the same period, these Islands were in a blaze of light, set forth by LUTHER, CRANMER, KNOX, and their followers. Here, then, is the statement:
England, Scotland and Ireland France. Italy. Writers on Law 6 51 9 Mathematicians 17 52 15 Physicians and Surgeons 13 72 21 Writers on Natural History 6 33 11 Historians 21 139 22 Dramatic Writers 19 66 6 Grammarians 7 42 2 Poets 38 157 34 Painters 5 64 44
132 676 164
35. Here is that very "SCALE," which a modest Scotch writer spoke of the other day, when he told the public, that, "Throughout Europe, Protestants rank higher in the scale of intellect than Catholics, and that Catholics in the neighbourhood of Protestantants are more intellectual than those at a distance from them." This is a fine specimen of upstart Protestant impudence. The above "scale" is, however, a complete answer to it. Allow one-third more to the French, on account of their superior populousness, and then there will remain to them 451 to our 132! So that they had, man for man, three and a half times as much intellect as we, though they are buried, all the while, in "monkish ignorance and superstition," and though they had no Protestant neighbours to catch the intellect from! Even the Italians surpass us in this rivalship for intellect; for, their population is not equal to that of which we boast, and their number of men of mind considerably exceeds that of ours. But, do I not, all this while, misunderstand the matter? And, by intellect, does not the Scotchman mean the capacity to make, not books and pictures, but checks, bills, bonds, exchequer-bills, inimitable notes, and the like? Does he not mean loan-jobbing and stock-jobbing, insurance- broking, annuities at ten per cent., kite-flying, and all the "intellectual" proceedings of Change Alley; not, by any means, forgetting works like those of ASLETT and FAUNTLEROY? Ah! in that case, I confess that he is right. On this scale Protestants do rank high indeed! And I should think it next to impossible for a Catholic to live in their neighbour hood without being much "more intellectual;" that is to say, much more of a Jewish knave, than if he lived at a distance from them.
36. Here, then, my friends, sensible and just Englishmen, I close this introductory Letter. I have shown you how grossly we have been deceived, even from our very infancy. I have shown you, not only the injustice, but the absurdity of the abuse heaped by our interested deluders on the religion of their and our fathers, I have shown you enough to convince you, that there was no obviously just cause for an alteration in the religion of our country. I have, I dare say, awakened in your minds, a strong desire to know how it came to pass, then, that this alteration was made; and, in the following Letters, it shall be my anxious endeavour fully to gratify this desire. But, observe, my chief object is to show, that this alteration made the main body of the people poor and miserable, compared with what they were before; that it impoverished and degraded them; that it banished, at once, that "Old English Hospitality," of which we have since known nothing but the name; and that, in lieu of that hospitality, it gave us pauperism, a thing, the very name of which was never before known in England.
LETTER II.
ORIGIN OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. HISTORY OF THE CHURCH, IN ENGLAND, DOWN TO THE TIME OF THE "REFORMATION." BEGINNING OF THE "REFORMATION" BY KING HENRY VIII.
Kensington, 30th December, 1824.
My FRIENDS,
37. It was not a reformation but a devastation, of England, which was, at the time when this event took place, the happiest Country, perhaps, that the world had ever seen; and, it is my chief business to show, that this devastation impoverished and degraded the main body of the people. But, in order that you may see this devastation in its true light, and that you may feel a just portion of indignation against the devastators, and against their eulogists of the present day, it is necessary, first, that you take a correct view of the things on which their devastating powers were exercised.
38. The far greater part of those books, which are called "Histories of England," are little better than romances. They treat of battles, negotiations, intrigues of courts, amours of kings, queens and nobles: they contain the gossip and scandal of former times, and very little else, There are histories of England, like that of Dr. GOLDSMITH, for the use of young persons; but, no young person, who has read them through, knows any more, of any possible use, than he or she knew before. The great use of history, is, to teach us how laws, usages and institutions arose, what were their effects on the people, how they promoted public happiness, or otherwise; and these things are precisely what the greater part of historians, as they call themselves, seem to think of no consequence.
39. We never understand the nature and constituent parts of a thing so well as when we ourselves have made the thing: next to making it, is the seeing of it made: but, if we have neither of these advantages, we ought, at least, if possible, to get at a true description of the origin of the thing and of the manner in which it was put together. I have to speak to you of the Catholic Church generally; then of the Church in England, under which head I shall have to speak of the parish churches, the monasteries, the tithes, and other revenues of the Church. It is, therefore, necessary that I explain to you how the Catholic Church arose; and how churches, monasteries, tithes and other church revenues came to be in England. When you have this information, you will well understand what it was which was devastated by Henry VIII. and the "Reformation" people. And, I am satisfied, that, when you have read this one Number of my little work, you will know more about your country than you have learned, or ever will learn, from the reading of hundreds of those bulky volumes, called "Histories of England."
40. The Catholic Church originated with Jesus Christ himself. He selected PETER to be head of his Church. This Apostle's name was SIMON; but, his Master called him PETER, which means a stone or rock; and he said, "on this rock will I build my church." Look at the Gospel of Saint Matthew, xvi. 18, 19, and at that of Saint John, xxi. 15, and onward; and you will see, that we must deny the truth of the Scriptures, or acknowledge, that here was a head of the Church promised for all generations.
41. Saint PETER died a martyr at Rome in about 60 years after the birth of Christ. But another supplied his place; and there is the most satisfactory evidence, that the chain of succession has remained unbroken from that day to this. When I said in paragraph 10, that it might be said, that there was no POPE seated at Rome for the first three hundred years, I by no means meant to admit the fact; but to get rid of a pretence which, at any rate, could not apply to England, which was converted to Christianity by missionaries sent by a POPE, the successor of other Popes, who had been seated at Rome for hundreds of years. The truth is, that, from the persecutions which, for the first three hundred years, the Church underwent, the Chief Bishops, successors of Saint Peter, had not always the means of openly maintaining their supremacy; but they always existed; there was always a Chief Bishop, and his supremacy was always acknowledged by the Church; that is to say, by all the Christians then in the world.
42. Of later date, the Chief Bishop has been called, in our language, the POPE, and, in the French., PAPE. In the Latin he is called PAPA, which is an union and abbreviation of the two Latin words Pater Patrum which means Father of Fathers. Hence comes the appellation of papa, which children of all Christian nations give to their fathers; an appellation of the highest respect and most ardent and sincere affection. Thus, then, the POPE, each as he succeeded to his office, became the Chief or Head of the Church; and his supreme power and authority were acknowledged, as I have observed in paragraph 3, by all the bishops, and all the teachers of Christianity, in all the nations where that religion existed. The POPE was, and is, assisted by a body of persons called CARDINALS, or Great Councillors: and at various and numerous times, COUNCILS of the Church have been held, in order to discuss and settle matters of deep interest to the unity and well-being of the Church. These Councils have been held in the countries of Christendom. Many were held in England. The POPES themselves have been taken promiscuously from men of all the Christian nations. POPE ADRIAN IV. was an Englishman, the son of a very poor labouring man; but having become a servant in a monastery, he was there taught, and became himself a monk. In time he grew famous for his learning, his talents and piety, and at last became the head of the Church.
43. The POPEDOM, or office of POPE, continued in existence through all the great and repeated revolutions of kingdoms and empires. The Roman Empire, which was at the height of its glory at the beginning of the Christian era, and which extended, indeed, nearly over the whole of Europe, and part of Africa and Asia, crumbled all to pieces; yet the Popedom remained; and at the time when the devastation, commonly called the "Reformation," of England began, there had been, during the fifteen hundred years, about two hundred and sixty Popes, following each other in due and unbroken succession.
44. The History of the Church in England, down to the time of the "Reformation," is a matter of deep interest to us. A mere look at it, a bare sketch of the principal facts, wil show how false, how unjust, how ungrateful those have been who have vilified the Catholic Church, its Popes, its Monks, and its Priests. It is supposed, by some, and, indeed, with good authorities on their side, that the Christian religion was partially introduced into England so early as the second century after Christ. But we know for a certainty, that it was introduced effectually in the year 596; that is to say, 923 years before Henry VIII. began to destroy it.
45. England, at the time when this religion was introduced, was governed by seven kings, and that state was called the HEPTARCHY. The people of the whole country were PAGANS. Yes, my friends, our ancestors were PAGANS: they worshipped gods made with hands; and they sacrificed children on the altars of their idols. In this state England was, when the POPE of that day, GREGORY I., sent forty monks, with a monk of the name of AUSTIN (or AUGUSTIN) at their head, to preach the gospel to the English. Look into the Calendar of our Common Prayer Book, and you will find the name of GREGORY THE GREAT under the 12th of March, and that of AUGUSTIN under the 26th of May. It is probable that the POPE gave his order to Austin on the former day, and that Austin landed in Kent on the latter; or, perhaps, these may be the days of the year on which these great benefactors of England were born.
46. Now please to bear in mind, that this great event took place in the year 596. The Protestant writers have been strangely embarrassed in their endeavours to make it out, that up to this time, or thereabouts, the Catholic Church was pure, and trod in the steps of the Apostles; but that, after this time, that Church became corrupt. They applaud the character and acts of POPE GREGORY; they do the same with regard to AUSTIN: shame would not suffer them to leave their names out of the Calendar; but still, they want to make it out, that there was no pure Christian religion after the POPE came to be the visible and acknowledged head, and to have supreme authority. There are scarcely any two of them that agree upon this point. Some say that it was 300, some 400, some 500, and some 600 years before the Catholic Church ceased to be the true Church of Christ. But, none of them can deny, nor dare they attempt it, that it was the Christian religion as practised at Rome; that it was the Roman Catholic religion, that was introduced into England in the year 596, with all its dogmas, rites, ceremonies, and observances, just as they all continued to exist at the time of the "Reformation," and as they continue to exist in that Church even unto this day. Whence it clearly follows, that if the Catholic Church were corrupt at the time of the "Reformation," or be corrupt now, be radically bad now, it was so in 596; and then comes the impious and horrid inference!, mentioned in paragraph 12, that "All our fathers who first built our churches, and whose bones and flesh form the earth for many feet deep in all the churchyards, are now howling in the regions of the damned!"
47. "The tree is known by its fruit." Bear in mind, that it was the Catholic faith as now held, that was introduced into England by POPE GREGORY THE GREAT; and bearing this in mind, let us see what were the effects of that introduction; let us see how that faith worked its way, in spite of wars, invasions, tyrannies, and political revolutions.
48. Saint AUSTIN, upon his arrival, applied to the Saxon king, within whose dominions the county of Kent lay. He obtained leave to preach to the people, and his success was great and immediate. He converted the king himself, who was very gracious to him and his brethren, and who provided dwellings and other necessaries for them at Canterbury. Saint AUSTIN and his brethren being monks, lived together in common, and from this common home, went forth over the country, preaching the gospel. As their community was diminished by death, new members were ordained to keep up the supply; and besides this, the number was in time greatly augmented. A church was built at Canterbury. Saint AUSTIN was, of course, the BISHOP, or Head Priest. He was succeeded by other Bishops. As Christianity spread over the island, other communities, like that at Canterbury, were founded in other cities; as at London, Winchester, Exeter, Worcester, Norwich, York, and so of all the other places, where there are now Cathedrals, or Bishops' Churches. Hence, in process of time, arose those majestic and venerable edifices, of the possession of which we boast as the work of our forefathers, while we have the folly and injustice and inconsistency, to brand the memory of these very forefathers with the charge of grovelling ignorance, superstition, and idolatry; and while we show our own meanness of mind in disfiguring and dishonouring those noble buildings by plastering them about with our childish and gingerbread "monuments," nine times out of ten, the offspring of vanity, or corruption.
49. As to the mode of supporting the clergy in those times, it was by oblations or free gifts, and sometimes by tithes, which land- owners paid themselves, or ordered their tenants to pay, though there was no general obligation to yield tithes for many years after the arrival of Saint AUSTIN. In this collective, or collegiate state, the clergy remained for many years. But in time, as the land-owners became converted to Christianity, they were desirous of having priests settled near to them, and always upon the spot, ready to perform the offices of religion. The land was then owned by comparatively few persons. The rest of the people were vassals, or tenants, of the land-owners. The land-owners, therefore, built churches on their estates, and generally near their own houses, for the benefit of themselves, their vassals, and tenants. And to this day we see, in numerous instances, the country churches close by the gentleman's house. When they built the churches, they also built a house for the priest, which we now call the parsonage-house; and, in most cases, they attached some plough-land, or meadow-land, or both, to the priest's house, for his use; and this was called his glebe, which word, literally taken, means the top-earth, which is turned over by the plough. Besides these, the land-owners, in conformity with the custom then prevalent in other Christian countries, endowed the Churches with the tithe of the produce of their estates.
50. Hence parishes arose. Parish means a priestship, as the land on which a town stands is a township. So that the great man's estate now became a parish. He retained the right of appointing the priest, whenever a vacancy happened; but he could not displace a priest, when once appointed; and the whole of the endowment became the property of the Church independent of his control. It was a long while, even two centuries or more, before this became the settled law of the whole kingdom; but, at last, it did become such. But, to this possession of so much property by the Church, certain important conditions were attached; and to these conditions it behoves us, of the present day, to pay particular attention; for, we are, at this time, more than ever, feeling the want of the performance of those conditions.
51. There never can have existed a state of society; that is to say, a state of things in which proprietorship in land was acknowledged, and in which it was maintained by law; there never can have existed such a state, without an obligation on the land-owners to take care of the necessitous, and to prevent them from perishing for want. The landowners in England took care of their vassals and dependants. But when Christianity, the very basis of which is charity, became established, the taking care of the necessitous was deposited in the hands of the clergy. Upon the very face of it, it appears monstrous, that a house, a small farm, and the tenth part of the produce of a large estate, should have been given to a priest, who could have no wife, and, of course, no family. But, the fact is, that the grants were for other purposes as well as for the support of the priests. The produce of the benefice was to be employed thus: "Let the priests receive the tithes of the people, and keep a written account of all that have paid them; and divide them, in the presence of such as fear God, according to canonical authority. Let them set apart the first share for the repairs and ornaments of the church; let them distribute the second to the poor and the stranger with their own hands in mercy and humility; and reserve the third part for themselves." These were the orders contained in a canon, issued by a Bishop of York. At different times, and under different Bishops, regulations somewhat different were adopted; but there were always two-fourths, at the least, of the annual produce of the benefice to be given to the necessitous, and to be employed in the repairing or in the ornamenting of the church.
52. Thus the providing for the poor became one of the great duties and uses of the Church. This duty rested, before, on the land-owners. It must have rested on them; for, as BLACKSTONE observes, a right in the indigent "to demand a supply sufficient to all the necessities of life from the more opulent part of the community, is dictated by the principles of society." This duty could be lodged in no hands so fitly as in those of the clergy; for thus the work of charity, the feeding of the hungry, the clothing of the naked, the administering to the sick, the comforting of the widow, the fostering of the fatherless, came always in company with the performance of services to God. For the uncertain disposition of the rich, for their occasional and sometimes capricious charity, was substituted the certain, the steady, the impartial hand of a constantly resident and unmarried administrator of bodily as well as of spiritual comfort to the poor, the unfortunate and the stranger.
53. We shall see, by-and-by, the condition that the poor were placed in, we shall see how all the labouring classes were impoverished and degraded, the moment the tithes and other revenues of the church were transferred to a Protestant and married clergy; and we shall have to take a full view of the unparalleled barbarity with which the Irish people were treated at that time; but, I have not yet noticed another great branch, or constituent part, of the Catholic Church; namely, the MONASTERIES, which form a subject full of interest and worthy of our best attention. The choicest and most highly empoisoned shafts in the quiver of the malice of Protestant writers, seem always to be selected when they have to rail against MONKS, FRIARS and NUNS. We have seen BLACKSTONE talking about "monkish ignorance and superstition;" and we hear, every day, Protestant bishops and parsons railing against what they call "monkery," talking of the "drones" in monasteries, and, indeed, abusing the whole of those ancient institutions, as something degrading to human nature, in which work of abuse they are most heartily joined by the thirty or forty mongrel sects, whose bawling-tubs are erected in every corner of the country.
54. When I come to speak of the measures by which the monasteries were robbed, devastated and destroyed in England and Ireland, I shall show how unjust, base and ungrateful, this railing against them is; and how foolish it is besides. I shall show the various ways in which they were greatly useful to the community; and I shall especially show how they operated in behalf of the labouring and poorer classes of the people. But, in this place, I shall merely describe, in the shortest manner possible, the origin and nature of those institutions, and the extent to which they existed in England.
55. Monastery means a place of residence for monks, and the word monk comes from a Greek word, which means a lonely person, or a person in solitude. There were monks, friars, and nuns. The word friar comes from the French word frère, which, in English, is brother; and the word nun comes from the French word nonne, which means a sister in religion, a virgin separated from the world. The persons, whether male or female, composing one of these religious communities, were called a convent, and that name was sometimes also given to the buildings and enclosures in which the community lived. The place where monks lived was called a monastery; that where friars lived, a friary; and that where nuns lived, a nunnery. As, however, we are not, in this case, inquiring into the differences in the the rules, orders, and habits of the persons belonging to these institutions, I shall speak of them all as monasteries.
56. Then, again, some of these were abbeys, and some priories; of the difference between which it will be sufficient to say, that the former were of a rank superior to the latter, and had various privileges of a higher value. An abbey had an ABBOT, or an Abbess; a priory, a Prior, or a Prioress. Then there were different ORDERS of monks, friars, and nuns; and these ORDERS had different rules for their government and mode of life, and were distinguished by different dresses. With these distinctions we have here, however, little to do; for we shall, by-and-by, see them all involved in one common devastation.
57. The persons belonging to a monastery lived in common; they lived in one and the same building; they could possess no property individually; when they entered the walls of the monastery, they left the world wholly behind them; they made a solemn vow of celibacy; they could devise nothing by will; each had a life-interest, but nothing more, in the revenues belonging to the community; some of the monks and friars were also priests, but this was not always the case; and the business of the whole was, to say masses and prayers, and to do deeds of hospitality and charity.
58. This mode of life began by single persons separating themselves from the world, and living in complete solitude, passing all their days in prayer, and dedicating themselves wholly to the serving of God. These were called hermits, and their conduct drew towards them great respect. In time, such men, or men having a similar propensity, formed themselves into societies, and agreed to live together in one house, and to possess things in common. Women did the same. And hence came those places called monasteries. The piety, the austerities, and, particularly, the works of kindness and of charity performed by those persons, made them objects of great veneration; and the rich made them, in time, the channels of their benevolence to the poor. Kings, queens, princes, princesses, nobles, and gentlemen founded monasteries; that is to say, erected the buildings, and endowed them with estates for their maintenance. Others, some in the way of atonement for their sins, and some from a pious disposition, gave, while alive, or bequeathed, at their death, lands, houses, or money, to monasteries already erected. So that, in time, the monasteries became the owners of great landed estates; they had the lordship over innumerable manors, and had a tenantry of prodigious extent, especially in England, where the monastic orders were always held in great esteem, in con sequence of Christianity having been introduced into the kingdom by a community of monks.
59. To give you as clear a notion as I can of what a monastery was, I will describe to you, with as much exactness as my memory will enable me, a monastery which I saw in France, in 1792, just after the monks had been turned out of it, and when it was about to be put up for sale. The whole of the space enclosed was about eight English acres, which was fenced in by a wall about twenty feet high. It was an oblong square, and at one end of one of the sides was a gate-way, with gates as high as the wall, and with a little door in one of the great gates for the ingress and egress of foot-passengers. This gate opened into a spacious court-yard, very nicely paved. On one side, and at one end of this yard, were the kitchen, lodging-rooms for servants, a dining or eating place for them and for strangers and poor people; stables, coachhouses, and other out buildings. On the other side of the court-yard, we entered at a door-way to the place of residence of the monks. Here was about half an acre of ground of a square form, for a burying ground. On the four sides of this square there was a cloister, or piazza, the roof of which was, on the side of the burying ground, supported by pillars, and, at the back, supported by a low building which went round the four sides. This building contained the several dormitories, or sleeping-rooms of the monks, each of whom had two little rooms, one for his bed, and one for his books and to sit in. Out of the hinder room, a door opened into a little garden about thirty feet wide, and forty long. On one side of the cloister, there was a door opening into their dining- room, in one corner of which there was a pulpit for the monk who read, while the rest were eating in silence, which was according to the rules of the CARTHUSIANS, to which Order these monks belonged. On the other side of the cloister, a door opened into the kitchen garden, which was laid out in the nicest manner, and was well stocked with fruit trees of all sorts. On another side of the cloister, a door opened and led to the church, which, though not large, was one of the most beautiful that I had ever seen. I believe, that these monks were, by their rules, confined within their walls. The country people spoke of them with great reverence, and most grievously deplored the loss of them. They had large estates, were easy landlords, and they wholly provided for all the indigent within miles of their monastery.
60. England, more, perhaps, than any other country in Europe, abounded in such institutions, and these more richly endowed than any where else. In England, there was, on an average, more than twenty (we shall see the exact number by-and-by) of those establishments to a county! Here was a prize for an unjust and cruel tyrant to lay his lawless hands upon, and for "Reformation" gentry to share amongst them! Here was enough, indeed, to make robbers on a grand scale cry out against "monkish ignorance and superstition"! No wonder that the bowels of CRANMER, KNOX, and all their mongrel litter, yearned so piteously as they did, when they cast their pious eyes on all the farms and manors, and on all the silver and gold ornaments belonging to these communities! We shall see, by-and-by, with what alacrity they ousted, plundered, and pulled down: we shall see them robbing, under the basest pretences, even the altars of the country parish churches, down to the very smallest of those churches, and down to the value of five shillings. But, we must first take a view of the motives which led the tyrant, Henry VIII., to set their devastating and plundering faculties in motion.
61. This King succeeded his father, Henry VII., in the year 1509. He succeeded to a great and prosperous kingdom, a full treasury, and a happy and contented people, who expected in him the wisdom of his father without his avarice, which seems to have been that father's only fault. Henry VIII. was eighteen years old when his father died. He had had an elder brother, named ARTHUR, who, at the early age of twelve years, had been betrothed to CATHERINE, fourth daughter of Ferdinand, King of Castile and Arragon. When ARTHUR was fourteen years old, the Princess came to England, and the marriage ceremony was performed; but ARTHUR, who was a weak and sickly boy, died before the year was out, and the marriage never was consummated, and, indeed, who will believe that it could be? Henry wished to marry Catherine, and the marriage was agreed to by the parents on both sides, but it did not take place until after the death of Henry VII. The moment the young King came to the throne, he took measures for his marriage. CATHERINE being, though only nominally, the widow of his deceased brother, it was necessary to have from the POPE, as supreme head of the Church, a dispensation, in order to render the marriage lawful in the eye of the canon law. The dispensation, to which there could be no valid objection, was obtained, and the marriage was, amidst the rejoicings of the whole nation, celebrated in June, 1509, in less than two months after the King's accession.
62. With this lady, who was beautiful in her youth, and whose virtues of all sorts seem scarcely ever to have been exceeded, he lived in the married state, seventeen years, before the end of which, he had had three sons and two daughters by her, one of whom only, a daughter, was still alive, who afterwards was Mary, Queen of England. But now at the end of seventeen years, he, being thirty-five years of age, and eight years younger than the Queen, and having cast his eyes on a young lady, an attendant on the Queen, named ANNE BOLEYN, he, all of a sudden, affected to believe that he was living in sin, because he was married to the widow of his brother, though, as we have seen, the marriage between Catherine and the brother had never been consummated, and though the parents of both the parties, together with his own Council, had unanimously and unhesitatingly approved of his marriage, which had, moreover, been sanctioned by the POPE, the head of the Church, of the faith and observances of which Henry himself had, as we shall hereafter see, been, long since his marriage, a zealous defender!
63. But the tyrant's passions were now in motion, and he resolved to gratify his beastly lust, cost what it might in reputation, in treasure, and in blood. He first applied to the POPE to divorce him from from his Queen. He was a great favourite of the POPE, he was very powerful, there were many strong motives for yielding to his request; but that request was so full of injustice, it would have been so cruel towards the virtuous Queen to accede to it, that the POPE could not, and did not grant it. He. however, in hopes that time might induce the tyrant to relent, ordered a court to be held by his Legate and Wolsey, in England. to hear and determine the case. Before this court the Queen disdained to plead, and the Legate, dissolving the court, referred the matter back to the POPE, who still refused to take any step towards the granting of the divorce. The tyrant now became furious, resolved upon overthrowing the power of the POPE in England, upon making himself the head of the Church in this country, and upon doing whatever else might be necessary to insure the gratification of his beastly desires and the glutting of his vengeance.
64. By making himself the supreme head of the Church, he made himself, he having the sword and the gibbet at his command, master of all the property of that Church, including that of the monasteries! His counsellors and courtiers knew this; and, as it was soon discovered that a sweeping confiscation would take place, the parliament was by no means backward in aiding his designs, every one hoping to share in the plunder. The first step was to pass acts taking from the POPE all authority and power over the Church in England, and giving to the King all authority whatever as to ecclesiastical matters. His chief adviser and abettor was THOMAS CRANMER, a name which deserves to be held in everlasting execration; a name which we could not pronounce without almost doubting of the justice of God, were it not for our knowledge of the fact, that the cold-blooded, most perfidious, most impious, most blasphemous caitiff expired, at last, amidst those flames which he himself had been the chief cause of kindling.
65. The tyrant, being now both POPE and King, made CRANMER ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY, a dignity just then become vacant. Of course, this adviser and ready tool now became chief judge in all ecclesiastical matters. But, here was a difficulty; for the tyrant still professed to be a Catholic; so that his new Archbishop was to be consecrated according to the usual pontifical form, which required of him to swear obedience to the POPE. And here a transaction took place that will, at once, show us of what sort of stuff the "Reformation" gentry were made. CRANMER, before he went to the altar to be consecrated, went into a chapel, and there made a declaration on oath, that, by the oath that he was about to take, and which, for the sake of form, he was obliged to take, he did not intend to bind himself to anything that tended to prevent him from assisting the King in making any such "reforms" as he might think useful in the Church of England! I once knew a Corrupt Cornish knave, who having sworn to a direct falsehood (and that he, in private, acknowledged to be such) before an Election Committee of the House of Commons, being asked how he could possibly give such evidence, actually declared, in so many words, "that he had, before he left his lodging in the morning, taken an oath, that he would swear falsely that day." He, perhaps, imbibed his principles from this very Archbishop, who occupies the highest place in lying Fox's lying book of Protestant Martyrs.
66. Having provided himself with so famous a judge in ecclesiastical matters, the King lost, of course, no time in bringing his hard case before him, and demanding justice at his hands! Hard case, indeed; to be compelled to live with a wife of forty-three, when he could have, for next to nothing and only for asking for, a young one of eighteen or twenty! A really hard case; and he sought relief, now that he had got such an upright and impartial judge, with all imaginable dispatch. What I am now going to relate of the conduct of this Archbishop and of the other parties concerned in the transaction is calculated to make us shudder with horror, to make our very bowels heave with loathing, to make us turn our eyes from the paper and resolve to read no further. But, we must not give way to these feelings, if we have a mind to know the true history of the Protestant "Reformation." We must keep ourselves cool; we must reason ourselves out of our ordinary impulses; we must beseech nature to be quiet within us for awhile; for, from first to last, we have to contemplate nothing that is not of a kind to fill us with horror and disgust.
67. It was now four or five years since the King and CRANMER had begun to hatch the project of the divorce: but, in the meanwhile, the King had kept ANNE BOLEYN, or, in more modern phrase, she had been "under his protection," for about three years. And here let me state, that, in Dr. BAYLEY's life of Bishop FISHER, it is positively asserted, that ANNE BOLEYN was the King's daughter, and that Lady BOLEYN, her rnother said to the King, when he was abouut to marry ANNE, "Sir, for the reverence of God, take heed what you do in marrying my daughters for, if you record your own conscience well, she is your own daughter as well as mine." To which the King replied "Whose daughter soever she is, she shall be my wife." Now, though I believe this fact, I do not give it as a thing the truth of which is undeniable. I find it in the writings of a man, who was the eulogist (and justly) of the excellent Bishop FISHER, who suffered death because he stood firmly on the side of Queen CATHERINE. I believe it; but I do not give it, as I do the other facts that I state, as what is undeniably true. God knows, it is unnecessary to make the parties blacker than they are made by the Protestant historians themselves, in even a favourable record of their horrid deeds.
68. The King had had ANNE about three years "under his protection," when she became for the first time with child. There was now, therefore, no time to be lost in order to "make an honest woman of her." A private marriage took place in January, 1533. As ANNE's pregnancy could not be long disguised it became necessary to avow her marriage; and, therefore, it was also necessary to press onward the trial for the divorce; for, it might have seemed rather awkward, even amongst "Reformation" people, for the King to have two wives at a time! Now, then, the famous ecclesiastical judge, CRANMER, had to play his part; and, if his hypocrisy did not make the devil blush, he could have no blushing faculties in him. CRANMER, in April 1533, wrote a letter to the King, begging him, for the good of the nation, and for the safety of his own soul, to grant his permission to try the question of the divorce, and beseeching him no longer to live in the peril attending an "incestuous intercourse "! Matchless, astonishing hypocrite! He knew, and the King knew that he knew, and he knew that the King knew that he knew it, that the King had been actually married to ANNE three months before, she being with child at the time when he married her!
69. The King graciously condescended to listen to this ghostly advice of his pious primates who was so anxious about the safety of his royal soul; and, without delay, he, as Head of the Church, granted the ghostly father, CRANMER, who, in violation of his clerical vows, had, in private, a woman of his own; to this ghostly father the King granted a licence to hold a spiritual court for the trial of the divorce. Queen CATHERINE, who had been ordered to retire from the court, resided at this time at AMPTHILL, in Bedfordshire, at a little distance from DUN5TABLE. At this latter place CaSYMER opened his court, and sent a citation to the Queen to appear before him, which citation she treated with the scorn that it deserved. When he had kept his "court" open the number of days required by the law, he pronounced sentence against the Queen, declaring her marriage with the King null from the beginning; and having done this, he closed his farcical court. We shall see him doing more jobs in the divorcing line; but thus he finished the first.
70. The result of this trial was, by this incomparable judge, made known to the King, whom this wonderful hypocrite gravely besought to submit himself with resignation to the will of God, as declared to him in this decision of the spiritual court, acting according to the laws of holy Church! The pious and resigned King yielded to the admonition; and then CRANMER held another court at LAMBETH, at which he declared, that the King had been lawfully married to ANNE BOLEYN; and that he now confirmed the marriage by his pastoral and judicial authority, which he derived from the successors of the Apostles! We shall see him, by-and-by, exercising the same authority to declare this new marriage null and void from the beginning, and see him assist in bastardizing the fruit of it: but we must now follow Mrs. ANNE BOLEYN (whom the Protestant writers strain hard to whitewash) till we have seen the end of her.
71. She was delivered of a daughter (who was afterwards Queen Elizabeth) at the end of eight months from the date of her marriage. This did not please the King, who wanted a son, and who was quite monster enough to be displeased with her on this account. The couple jogged on apparently without quarrelling for about three years, a pretty long time, if we duly consider the many obstacles which vice opposes to peace and happiness. The husband, however, had plenty of occupation; for, being now "Head of the Church," he had a deal to manage: he had, poor man, to labour hard at making a new religion, new articles of faith, new rules of discipline, and he had new things of all sorts to prepare. Besides which he had, as we shall see in the next Number, some of the best then in his kingdom, and that ever lived in any kingdom or country, to behead, hang, rip up, and cut into quarters. He had, moreover, as we shall see, begun the grand work of confiscation, plunder and devastation. So that he could not have a great deal of time for family squabbles.
72. If, however, he had no time to jar with ANNE, he had no time to look after her, which is a thing to be thought of when a man marries a woman half his own age, and that this "great female reformer," as some of the Protestant writers call her, wanted a little of husband- like vigilance, we are now going to see. The freedom, or rather the looseness, of her manners, so very different from those of that virtuous Queen, whom the English court and nation had had before them, as an example for so many years, gave offence to the more sober, and excited the mirth and set a-going the chat of persons of another description. In January, 1536, Queen CATHERINE died. She had been banished from the court. She had seen her marriage annulled by CRANMER, and her daughter and only surviving child bastardized by act of parliament; and the husband had had five children by her, that "Reformation" husband had had the barbarity to keep her separated from, and never to suffer her, after her banishment, to set her eyes on that only child! She died, as she had lived, beloved and revered by every good man and woman in the kingdom, and was buried, amidst the sobbings and tears of a vast assemblage of the people, in the Abbey-church of Peterborough.
73. The King, whose iron heart seems to have been softened, for a moment, by a most affectionate letter, which she dictated to him from her death bed, ordered the persons about him to wear mourning on the day of her burial. But, our famous "great female reformer" not only did not wear mourning, but dressed herself out in the gayest and gaudiest attire; expressed her unbounded joy; and said, that she was now in reality a Queen! Alas, for our "great female reformer!" in just three months and sixteen days from this day of her exultation, she died herself; not, however, as the real Queen had died, in her bed, deeply lamented by all the good, and without a soul on earth to impute to her a single fault; but, on a scaffold, under a death- warrant signed by her husband, and charged with treason, adultery, and incest!
74. In the month of May, 1536, she was, along with the King, amongst the spectators at a tilting-match, at GREENWICH, when, being incautious, she gave to one of the combatants, who was also one of her paramours, a sign of her attachment, which seems only to have confirmed the King in suspicions which he before entertained. He instantly quitted the place, returned to Westminster, ordered her to be confined at Greenwich that night, and to be brought, by water, to Westminster the next day. But, she was met, by his order, on the river, and conveyed to the TOWER; and, as it were to remind her of the injustice which she had so mainly assisted in committing against the late virtuous Queen; as it were to say to her, "See, after all, God is just," she was imprisoned in the very room in which she had slept the night before her coronation!
75. From the moment of her imprisonment her behaviour indicated anything but conscious innocence. She was charged with adultery, committed with four gentlemen of the King's household, and with incest with her brother, Lord ROCHFORD, and she was, of course, charged with treason, those being acts of treason by law. They were all found guilty, and all put to death. But, before ANNE was executed, our friend, THOMAS CRANMER, had another tough job to perform. The King, who never did things by halves, ordered, as "Head of the Church," the Archbishop to hold his "spiritual court," and to divorce him from ANNE! One would think it impossible that a man, that any thing bearing the name of man, should have consented to do such a thing, should not have perished before a slow fire rather than do it. What! he had, we have seen in paragraph 70, pronounced the marriage with ANNE "to be lawful, and had confirmed it by his authority, judicial and pastoral, which he derived from the successors of the Apostles." How was he now, then, to annul this marriage? How was he to declare it unlawful?
76. He cited the King and Queen to appear in his "court!" (Oh! that court! His citation stated, that their marriaze had been unlawful, that they were living in adultery, and that, for the "salvation of their souls," they should come and show cause why they should not be separated. They were just going to be separated most effectually; for this was on the 17th of March, and Anne, who had been condemned to death on the 15th, was to be, and was, executed on the 19th! They both obeyed his citation, and appeared before him by their proctors; and after having heard these, CRANMER, who, observe, afterwards drew up the Book of Common Prayer, wound up the blasphemous farce by pronouncing, "in the name of Christ, and for the honour of God," that the marriage "was, and always had been null and void!" Good God! But we must not give way to exclamations, or they will interrupt us at every step. Thus was the daughter, ELIZABETH, bastardized by the decision of the very man who had not only pronounced her mother's marriage lawful, but who had been the contriver of that marriage! And yet BURNET has the impudence to say, that CRANMER "appears to have done every thing with a good conscience"! Yes, with such another conscience as BURNET did the deeds by which he got into the Bishoprick of Salisbury, at the time of "Old glorious," which, as we shall see, was by no means disconnected with the "Reformation."
77. On the 19th, ANNE was beheaded in the Tower, put into an elm- coffin, and buried there. At the place of exe cution she did not pretend that she was innocent; and there appears to me to be very little doubt of her having done some, at least, of the things imputed to her: but, if her marriage with the King had "always been null and void;" that is to say, if she had never been married to him, how could she, by her commerce with other men, have been guilty of treason? On the 15th, she is condemned as the wife of the King, on the 17th she is pronounced never to have been his wife, and, on the 19th, she is executed for having been his unfaithful wife! However, as to the effect which this event has upon the character of the "REFORMATION," it signifies not a straw whether she were guilty or innocent of the crimes now laid to her charge; for, if she were innocent, how are we to describe the monsters who brought her to the block? How are we to describe that "Head of the Church" and that Archbishop, who had now the management of the religious affairs of England? It is said, that the evening before her execution, she begged the lady of the lieutenant of the Tower to go to the Princess MARY, and to beg her to pardon her for the many wrongs she had done her. There were others, to whom she had done wrongs. She had been the cause, and the guilty cause, of breaking the heart of the rightful Queen; she had caused the blood of MORE and of FISHER to he shed; and she had been the promoter of Cranmer, and his aider and abettor in all those crafty and pernicious councils, by acting upon which, an obstinate and hard-hearted King had plunged the kingdom into confusion and blood. The King, in order to show his total disregard for her, and, as it were, to repay her for her conduct on the day of the funeral of CATHERINE, dressed himself in white on the day of her execution; and, the very next day, was married to JANE SEYMOUR, at MAREVELL HALL, in Hampshire.
78. Thus, then, my friends, we have seen, that the thing called the "REFORMATION" "was engendered in beastly lust, and brought forth in hypocrisy and perfidy." How it proceeded in devastating and in shedding innocent blood we have yet to see.
LETTER III.
RESISTANCE TO THE KING'S MEASURES. EFFECTS OF ABOLISHING THE POPE'S SUPREMACY. DEATH OF SIR THOMAS MORE AND BISHOP FISHER. HORRIBLE MURDERS OF CATHOLICS. LUTHER AND THE NEW RELIGION. BURNING OF CATHOLICS AND PROTESTANTS AT THE SAME FIRE. EXECRABLE CONDUCT OF CRANMER. TITLE OF DEFENDER OF THE FAITH.
Kensington, 31st January, 1825.
MY FRIENDS,
79. No Englishman, worthy of that name, worthy of a name which carries along with it sincerity and a love of justice; no real Englishman can have contemplated the foul deeds, the base hypocrisy, the flagrant injustice, ex posed in the foregoing Letter, without blushing for his country. What man, with an honourable sentiment in his mind, is there, who does not almost wish to be a foreigner, rather than be the countryman of CRANMER and of HENRY VIII.? If, then, such be our feelings already, what are they to be by the time that we have got through those scenes of tyranny, blood and robbery, to which the deeds, which we have already witnessed, were merely a prelude?
80. Sunk, however, as the country was by the members of the parliament hoping to share, as they finally did, in the plunder of the Church and the poor; selfish and servile as was the conduct of the courtiers, the King's councillors, and the people's representatives; still there were some men to raise their voices against the illegality and cruelty of the divorce of CATHERINE, as well as against that great preparatory measure of plunder, the taking of the spiritual supremacy from the POPE and giving it to the King. The Bishops, all but one, which one we shall presently see dying on the scaffold rather than abandon his integrity, were terrified into acquiesence, or, at least, into silence. But, there were many of the parochial clergy, and a large part of the monks and friars, who were not thus acquiescent, or silent. These, by their sermons, and by their conversations, made the truth pretty generally known to the people at large; and, though they did not succeed in preventing the calamities which they saw approaching, they rescued the character of their country from the infamy of silent submission.
81. Of all the duties of the historian, the most sacred is, that of recording the conduct of those, who have stood forward to defend helpless innocence against the attacks of powerful guilt. This duty calls on me to make particular mention of the conduct of the two friars, PEYTO and ELSTOW. The former, preaching before the King, at Greenwich, just previous to his marriage with ANNE, and, taking for his text the passage in the first book of Kings, where MICAIAH prophecies against AHAB, who was surrounded with flatterers and lying prophets, said, "I am that "MICAIAH whom you will hate, because I must tell you "ruly that this marriage is unlawful; and I know, that I shall eat the bread of affliction, and drink the water of sorrow; yet because our Lord hath put it in my mouth, I must speak it. Your flatterers are the four hundred prophets, who in the spirit of King, seek to deceive you. But take good heed, lest you, being seduced, find AHAB's punishment, which was to have his blood licked up by dogs. It is one of the greatest miseries in princes to be daily abused by flatterers." The King took this reproof in silence; but, the next Sunday, a Dr. CURWIN preached in the same place before the King, and, having called PEYTO dog, slanderer, base beggarly friar, rebel, and traitor, and having said that he had fled for fear and shame;• ELSTOW, who was present and who was a fellow-friar of PEYTO, called out aloud to CURWIN, and said: "Good Sir, "you know that Father PEYTO is now gone to a provincial council at Canterbury, and not fled for fear of you; for to-morrow, he will return. In the meanwhile I am here, as another MICAIAH, and will lay down my life to prove all those things true, which he hath taught out of Holy Scripture; and to this combat I challenge thee before God and all equaljudges; even unto thee, CURWIN, I say, which art one of the four hundred false prophets, into whom the spirit of lying is entered, and seekest by adultery to establish a succession, betraying the King into endless perdition.'
82. STOEE, who relates this in his Chronicle, says that ELSTOW "waxed hot, so that they could not make him cease his speech, until the King himself bade him hold his peace. The two friars were brought the next day before the King's council, who rebuked them, and told them, that they deserved to be put into a sack. and thrown into the Thames. "Whereupon ELSTOW said, smiling: "Threaten these things to rich and dainty persons, who are clothed in purple, fare deliciously, and have their chiefest hope in this world; for we esteem them not, but are joyful, that, for the discharge of our duty, we are driven hence: and with thanks to God, we know the way to heaven to be as ready by water as by land."
83. It is impossible to speak with sufficient admiration of the conduct of these men. Ten thousand victories by land or sea would not bespeak so much heroism in the winners of those victors as was shown by these friars. If the bishops, or only a fourth part of them, had shown equal courage, the tyrant would have stopped in that career which was now on the eve of producing so many horrors. The stand made against him by these two poor friars was the only instance of bold and open resistance, until he had actually got into his murders and robberies; and, seeing that there never was yet found even a Protestant pen, except the vile pen of BURNET, to offer so much as an apology for the deeds of this tyrant, one would think that the heroic virtue of PEYTO and ELSTOW ought to be sufficient to make us hesitate before we talk of "monkish ignorance and superstition," Recollect, that there was no wild fanaticism in the conduct of those men; that they could not be actuated by any selfish motive; that they stood forward in the cause of morality, and in defence of a person, whom they had never personally known, and that, too, with the certainty of incurring the most severe punishments, if not death itself. Before their conduct, how the heroism of the Hampdens and the Russells sinks from our sight!
84. We now come to the consideration of that copious source of blood, the suppression of the POPE'sS SUPREMACY. To deny the King's supremacy was made high treason, and, to refuse to take an oath, acknowledging that supremacy, was deemed a denial of it. Sir THOMAS MORE, who was the Lord Chancellor, and JOHN FISHER, who was Bishop of Rochester, were put to death for refusing to take this oath. Of all the men in England, these were the two most famed for learning, for integrity, for piety, and for long and faithful services to the King and his father. It is no weak presumption in favour of the POPE's supremacy that these two men, who had exerted their talents to prevent its suppression, laid their heads on the block rather than sanction that suppression. But, knowing, as we do, that it is the refusal of our Catholic fellow subjects to take this same oath, rather than take which MORE and FISHER died; knowing that this is the cause of all that cruel treatment which the Irish people have so long endured, and to put an end to which ill treatment they are now so arduously struggling; knowing that it is on this very point that the fate of England herself may rest in case of another war; knowing these things, it becomes us to inquire with care what is the nature, and what are the effects, of this papal supremacy, in order to ascertain, whether it be favourable, or otherwise, to true religion and to civil liberty.
85. The Scripture tells us, that Christ's Church was to be ONE. We, in repeating the Apostle's Creed, say, "I believe in the Holy Catholic Church." Catholic, as we have seen in paragraph 3, means universal. And how can we believe in an universal church, without believing that that Church is ONE, and under the direction of one head? In the Gospel of Saint John, chap. 10, v. 16, Christ says, that he is the good shepherd, and that "there shall be one fold and one shepherd." He afterwards deputes PETER to be his shepherd in his stead. In the same gospel, chap. 17, v. 10 and 11, Christ says, "And all mine are thine, and thine are mine, and I am glorified in them. And now I am no more in the world, but they are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep through thine own name, those whom thou hast given me, that they may be ONE, as we are." Saint Paul, in his second epistle to the Corinthians, says, "Finally, brethren, farewell: be perfect, be of good comfort, be of ONE MIND." The same Apostle, in his epistle to the Ephesians, chap. 4, v. 3, says, "Endeavouring to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; one lord, ONE FAITH, ONE BAPTISM, one God and Father of all." Again, in his first epistle to the Corinthians, chap. 1, v. 10. "Now, I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions amongst you; but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and the same judgment."
86. But besides these evidences of Scripture, besides our own creed, which we say we have from the Apostles, there is the reasonableness of the thing. It is perfectly monstrous to suppose that there can be TWO true faiths. It cannot be: one of the two must be false. And will any man say, that we ought to applaud a measure which, of necessity, must produce an indefinite number of faiths? If our eternal salvation depend upon our believing the truth, can it be good to place people in a state of necessity to have different beliefs? And does not that, which takes away the head of the Church, inevitably produce such a state of necessity? How is the faith of all nations to continue to be ONE, it there be, in every nation, a head of the Church, who is to be appealed to, in the last resort, as to all questions, as to all points of dispute, which may arise? How, if this be the case, is there to be "one fold and one shepherd"? How is there to be "one faith and one baptism"? how are the "unity of the spirit and the bond of peace" to be preserved? We shall presently see what unity and what peace there were in England, the moment that the King became the head of the Church.
87. To give this supremacy to a King is, in our case, to give it occasionally to a woman; and still more frequently to a child, even to a baby. We shall very soon see it devolve on a boy nine years of age, and we shall see the monstrous effects that it produced. But if his present Majesty and all his royal brothers were to die to-morrow (and they are all mortal), we should see it devolve on a little girl only about five years old. She would be the "one shepherd;" she, according to our own creed, which we repeat every Sunday, would be head of the "Holy Catholic Church"! She would have a council of regency. Oh! then there would be a whole troop of shepherds. There must be a pretty "unity of spirit" and a pretty "bond of peace."
88. As to the POPE's interference with the authority of the King or state, the sham plea set up was, and is, that he divided the government with the King, to whom belonged the sole supremacy with regard to every thing within his realm. This doctrine, pushed home, would shut out Jesus Christ himself, and make the King an object of adoration. Spiritual and temporal authority are perfectly distinct in their nature, and ought so to be kept in their exercise; and that, too, not only for the sake of religion, but also for the sake of civil liberty. It is curious enough that the Protestant sectarians, while they most cordially unite with the established Clergy in crying out against the POPE for "usurping" the King's authority, and against the Catholics for countenancing that "usurpation," take special care to deny, that this same King has any spiritual supremacy over themselves! The Presbyterians have their Synod, the Methodists their Conference, and all the other motley mongrels some head or other of their own. Even the "meek" and money-making followers of George Fox have their Elders and Yearly Meeting. All these heads exercise an absolute power over their members. They give or refuse their sanction to the appointment of the bawlers; they remove them, or break them, at pleasure. We have recently seen the Synod in Scotland ordering a preacher of the name of FLETCHER to cease preaching in London. He appears not to have obeyed; but the whole congregation has, it seems, been thrown into confusion in consequence of this disobedience. Strange enough, or, rather, impudent enough, is it, in these sects, to refuse to acknowledge any spritual supremacy in the King, while they declaim against the Catholics, because they will not take an oath acknowledging that supremacy: and is it not, then, monstrous, that persons belonging to these sects can sit in Parliament, can sit in the King's council, can be generals or admirals or judges, while from all these posts, and many others, the Catholics are excluded, and that, too, only because their consciences, their honourable adherence to the religion of their fathers, will not allow them to acknowledge this supremacy, but bids them belong to the "one fold and the one shepherd," and to know none other than "one Lord one faith, and one baptism"?
89. But the POPE was a foreigner exercising spiritual power in England; and this the hypocrites pretended was a degradation to the King and country. This was something to tickle JOHN BULL, who has, and, I dare say, always has had, an instinctive dislike to foreigners. But, in the first place, the POPE might be an Englishman, and we have, in paragraph 42, seen one instance of this. Then how could it be a thing degrading to this nation, when the same thing existed with regard to all other nations? Was King ALFRED, and were all the long line of kings, for 900 years, degraded beings? Did those who really conquered France, not by subsidies and bribes, but by arms; did they not understand what was degrading, and what was not? Does not the present King of France, and do not the present French people, understand this matter? Are the sovereignty of the former, and the freedom of the latter, less perfect, because the papal supremacy is distinctly acknowledged. and has full effect in France? And if the Synod in Scotland can exercise its supremacy in England, and the Conference in England exercise its supremacy in Scotland, in Ireland, and in the Colonies; if this can be without any degradation of king or people, why are we to look upon the exercise of the papal supremacy as degrading to either?
90. Ay; but there was the money. The money ot England went to the POPE. Popes cannot live, and keep courts and ambassadors, and maintain great state, without money, any more than other people. A part of the money of England went to the POPE; but a part also of that of every other Christian nation took the same direction. This money was not, however, thrown away. It was so much given for the preservation of unity of faith, peace, good will and charity, and morality. We shall, in the broils that ensued, and in the consequent subsidies and bribes to foreigners, soon see that the money which went to the POPE, was extremely well laid out. But how we Protestants strain at a gnat, while we swallow camels by whole caravans! Mr. PERCEVAL gave more to foreigners in one single year than the Popes ever received from our ancestors in four centuries. We have bowed, for years, to a DUTCHMAN, who was no heir to the crown any more than one of our workhouse paupers, and who had not one drop of English blood in his veins; and we now send annually to Hanoverians and other foreigners, under the name of half-pay, more money than was ever sent to the POPE in twenty years. From the time of the "Glorious Revolution," we have been paying two thousand pounds a year to the heirs of "Marshal SCHOMBERG," who came over to help the DUTCHMAN; and this is, mind, to be paid as long as there are such heirs of Marshal SCHOMBERG, which, to use the elegant and logical and philosophical phrase of our great "Reformation" poet, will, I dare say, be "for ever and a day." And have we forgotten the BENTINCKS and all the rest of the DUTCH tribe, who had estates of the Crown heaped upon them: and do we talk, then, of the degradation and the loss of money occasioned by the supremacy of the POPE! It is a notorious fact, that not a German soldier would have been wanted in this kingdom, during the last war, had it not been for the disturbed and dangerous state of Ireland, in which the German troops were very much employed. We have long been paying, and have now to pay, and shall long have to pay, upwards of a hundred thousand pounds a year to the half-pay officers of these troops, one single penny of which, we now should not have had to pay, if we had dispensed with the oath of supremacy from the Catholics. Every one to his taste; but, for my part, if I must pay foreigners for keeping me in order, I would rather pay "pence to PETER" than pounds to Hessian Grenadiers. Alien Priories, the establishment of which was for the purpose of inducing learned persons to come and live in England, have been a copious source of declamatory complaint. But, leaving their utility out of the question, I, for my particular part, prefer Alien Priories to Alien Armies, from which latter this country has never been, except for very short intervals, wholly free, from the day that the former were suppressed. I wish not to set myself up as a dictator in matters of taste; but, I must take leave to say, that I prefer the cloister to the barrack; the chaunting of matins to the reveille by the drum; the cowl to the brass-fronted hairy cap; the shaven crown to the mustachio, though the latter be stiffened with black-ball; the rosary, with the cross appendant, to the belt with its box of bullets; and, beyond all measure, I prefer the penance to the point of the bayonet. One or the other of these set of things, it would seem, we must have; for, before the "Reformation," England never knew, and never dreamed, of such a thing as a standing soldier; since that event she has never, in reality, known what it was to be without such soldiers: till, at last, a thundering standing army, even in time of profound peace, is openly avowed to be necessary to the "preservation of our happy constitution in CHURCH AND STATE."
91. However, this money part of the affair is now over, with regard to the POPE. No one proposes to give him any money at all, in any shape whatever. The Catholics believe, that the unity of their church would be destroyed, that they would, in short, cease to be Catholics, if they were to abjure his supremacy; and, therefore, they will not abjure it: they insist that their teachers shall receive their authority from him: and what do they, with regard to the POPE, insist upon, more than is insisted upon and acted upon by the Presbyterians, with regard to their Synod?
92. Lastly, as to this supremacy of the POPE, what was its effect with regard to civil liberty; that is to say, with regard to the security, the rightful enjoyment, of men's property and lives? We shall, by-and-by, see that civil liberty fell by the same tyrannical hands that suppressed the POPE's supremacy. But whence came our civil liberty? Whence came those laws of England which LORD COKE calls "the birth-right" of Englishmen, and which each of the States of America, declare, in their constitutions, to be the "birth-right of the people thereof?" Whence came these laws? Are they of Protestant origin? The bare question ought to make the revilers of the Catholics hang their heads for shame. Did Protestants establish the three courts and the twelve judges, to which establishment, though, like all other human institutions, it has sometimes worked evil, England owes so large a portion of her fame and her greatness? Oh, no! This institution arose when the POPE's supremacy was in full vigour. It was not a gift from Scotckmen, nor Dutchmen, nor Hessians; from Lutherans, Calvinists, nor Huguenots; but was the work of our own brave and wise English Catholic ancestors; and CHIEF JUSTICE Annon is the heir, in an unbroken line of succession, to that BENCH, which was erected by ALFRED, who was, at the very same time, most zealously engaged in the founding of churches and of monasteries.
93. If, however, we still insist, that the POPE's supremacy and its accompanying circumstances, produced ignorance, superstition and slavery, let us act the part of sincere, consistent and honest men. Let us knock down, or blow up, the cathedrals and colleges and old churches; let us sweep away the three courts, the twelve judges, the circuits, and the jury-boxes; let us demolish all that we inherit from those whose religion we so unrelentingly persecute, and whose memory we affect so heartily to despise: let us demolish all this, and we shall have left, all our own, the capacious jails and penitentiaries; stock-exchange; the hot and ancle- and knee-swelling, and lung-destroying cotton-factories; the whiskered standing army and its splendid barracks; the parson-captains, parson-lieutenants, parson-ensigns and parson-justices; the poor-rates and the pauper houses; and, by no means forgetting, that blessing which is peculiarly and doubly and "gloriously" Protestant, the NATIONAL DEBT. Ah! people of England, how have you been deceived!
94. But, for argument's sake, counting the experience of antiquity for nothing, let us ask ourselves what a chance civil liberty can stand, if all power, spiritual and lay, be lodged in the hands of the same man? That man must be a despot, or his power must be undermined by an Oligarchy, or by something. If the President, or the Congress, of the United States, had a spiritual supremacy; if they appointed the Bishops and Ministers, though they have no benefices to give, and would have no tenths and first fruits to receive, their government would be a tyranny in a very short time. MONTESQUIEU observes, that the people of Spain and Portugal would have been absolute slaves, without the power of the Church, which is, in such a case, "the only check to arbitrary sway." Yet, how long have we had "papal usurpation and tyranny" dinned in our ears! This charge against the POPE surpasseth all understanding. How was the POPE to be an usurper, or tyrant, in England? He had no fleet, no army, no judge, no sheriff, no justice of the peace, not even a single constable or beadle at his command. We have been told of "the thunders of the Vatican" till we have almost believed, that the POPE's residence was in the skies; and, if we had believed it quite, the belief would not have surpassed in folly, our belief in numerous other stories hatched by the gentry of the "Reformation." The truth is, that the POPE had no power but that which he derived from the free will of the people. The people were frequently on his side, in his contests with Kings; and, by this means, they, in numerous instances, preserved their rights against the attempts of tyrants. If the POPE had had no power, there must have sprung up an Oligarchy, or a something else, to check the power of the King: or, every king might have been a Nero, if he would. We shall soon see a worse than Nero in Henry VIII.; we shall soon see him laying all law prostrate at his feet; and plundering his people, down even to the patrimony of the poor. But, reason says that it must be so; and, though this spiritual power be now nominally lodged in the hands of the King, to how many tricks and contrivances have we resorted, and some of them most disgraceful and fatal ones, in order to prevent him from possessing the reality of this power! We are obliged to effect by influence and by faction that is to say, by means indirect, disguised, and frequently flagitiously immoral, not to say almost seditious into the bargain, that which was effected by means direct, avowed, frank, honest, and loyal. It is curious enough, that while all Protestant ministers are everlastingly talking about "papal usurpation and tyranny," all of them, except those who profit from the establishment, talk not less incessantly about what they have no scruple to call, "that two-headed monster, Church and State." What a monster would it have been, then, if the Catholics had submitted to the "VETO;" that is to say, to give the King a rejecting voice in the appointment of Catholic Bishops; and thus to make him, who is already "the Defender of the Faith," against which he protests, an associate with the Sovereign Pontiff in carrying on the affairs of that church, to which the law strictly forbids him to belong!
95. Thus, then, this so much abused papal supremacy was a most salutary thing: it was the only check, then existing, on despotic power, besides it being absolutely necessary to that unity of faith, without which there could be nothing worthy of the name of a Catholic Church. To abjure this supremacy was an act of apostacy, and also, an act of base abandonment of the rights of the people. To require it of any man was to violate Magna Charta and all the laws of the land; and to put men to death for refusing to comply with the request was to commit unqualified murder. Yet, without such murder, without shedding innocent blood, it was impossible to effect the object. Blood must flow. Amongst the victims to this act of outrageous tyranny, were, Sir THOMAS MORE and Bishop FISHER. The former had been the LORD HIGH CHANCELLOR for many years. The character given of him by his contemporaries, and by every one, to the present day, is that of as great perfection for learning, integrity and piety, as it is possible for a human being to possess. He was the greatest lawyer of his age, a long-tried and most faithful servant of the King and his father; and was, besides, so highly distinguished beyond men in general for his gentleness and humility of manners, as well as for his talents and abilities, that his murder gave a shock to all Europe. FISHER was equally eminent in point of learning, piety, and integrity. He was the only surviving privy-councillor of the late King, whose mother (the grandmother of Henry VIII.) having out lived her son and daughter, besought with her dying breath, the young King to listen particularly to the advice of this learned, pious, and venerable prelate; and, until that advice thwarted his brutal passions, he was in the habit of saying, that no other prince could boast of a subject to be compared with FISHER. He used, at the council-board, to take him by the hand and call him his father; marks of favour and affection which the Bishop repaid by zeal and devotion which knew no bounds other than those prescribed by his duty to God, his King and his country. But, that sacred duty bade him object to the divorce and to the King's supremacy; and then the tyrant, forgetting, at once, all his services, all his devotion, all his unparalleled attachment, sent him to the block, after fifteen months of imprison ment, during which he lay, worse than a common felon, buried in filth and almost destitute of food; sent him, who had been his boast, and whom he had called his father, to perish under the axe; dragged him forth, with limbs tottering under him, his venerable face and hoary locks begrimed, and his nakedness scarcely covered with the rags left on his body; dragged him thus forth to the scaffold, and, even when the life was gone, left him to lie on that scaffold like a dead dog! Savage monster! Rage stems the torrent of our tears, hurries us back to the horrid scene, and bids us look about us for a dagger to plunge into the heart of the tyrant.
96. And yet, the calculating, cold-blooded and brazen BURNET has the audacity to say, that "such a man as Henry VIII. was necessary to bring about the Reformation!" He means, of course, that such measures as those of Henry were necessary; and, if they were necessary, what must be the nature and tendency of that "Reformation?"
97. The work of blood was now begun, and it proceeded with steady pace. All who refused to take the oath of supremacy; that is to say, all who refused to become apostates, were considered and treated as traitors, and made to suffer death accompanied with every possible cruelty and indignity. As a specimen of the works of BURNET's necessary reformer, and to spare the reader repetition on the subject, let us take the treatment of JOHN HOUGHTON, Prior of the Charter-house in London, which was then a convent of Carthusian monks. This Prior, for having refused to take the oath, which, observe, he could not take without committing perjury, was hanged at TYBURN. He was scarcely suspended when the rope was cut, and he alive on the ground. His clothes were then stripped off; his bowels were ripped up; his heart and entrails were torn from his body and flung into a fire; his head was cut from his body; the body was divided into quarters and parboiled; the quarters were then subdivided and hung up in different parts of the city; and one arm was nailed to the wall over the entrance into the monastery!
98. Such were the means, which BURNET says were necessary to introduce the Protestant religion into England. How different, alas! from the means by which the Catholic religion had been introduced by POPE GREGORY and Saint AUSTIN! These horrid butcheries were perpetrated, mind, under the primacy of Fox's great Martyr, CRANMER, and with the active agency of another ruffian, named THOMAS CROMWELL, whom we shall soon see sharing with CRANMER the work of plunder, and finally sharing, too, in his disgraceful end.
99. Before we enter on the grand subject of plunder, which was the mainspring of the "Reformation," we must follow the King and his primate through their murders of Protestants, as well as Catholics. But, first, we must see how the Protestant religion arose, and how it stood at this juncture. Whence the term, Protestant, came, we have seen in paragraph 3. It was a name given to those who declared, or protested, against the Catholic, or universal church. This work of protesting was begun in Germany, in the year 1517, by a friar, whose name was MARTIN LUTHER, and who belonged to a convent of Augustin friars, in the electorate of Saxony. At this time the POPE had authorised the preaching of certain indulgences, and this business having been entrusted to the Order of Dominicans, and not to the order to which LUTHER belonged, and to which it had been usual to commit such trust, here was one of the motives from which LUTHER's opposition to the POPE proceeded. He found a protector in his sovereign, the Elector of Saxony, who appears to have had as strong a relish for plunder, as that with which our English tyrant and his courtiers and parliament were seized a few years afterwards.
100. All accounts agree that LUTHER was a most profligate man. To change his religion he might have thought himself called by his conscience; but, conscience could not call upon him to be guilty of all the abominable deeds of which he stands convicted even by his own confessions, of which I shall speak more fully, when I come to the proper place for giving an account of the numerous sects into which the Protestants were soon divided, and of the fatal change which was, by this innovation in religion, produced, even according to the declaration of the Protestant leaders themselves, in the morals of the people and the state of society. But, just observing, that the Protestant sects had, at the time we are speaking of, spread themselves over a part of Germany, and had got into Switzerland and some other states of the Continent, we must now, before we state more particulars relating to LUTHER and the sects that he gave rise to, see how the King of England dealt with those of his subjects who had adopted the heresy.
101. The Protestants immediately began to disagree amongst themselves; but, they all maintained, that faith alone was sufficient to secure salvation; while the Catholics maintained, that good works were also necessary. The most profligate of men, the most brutal and bloody of tyrants may be a stanch believer; for the devils themselves believe; and, therefore, we naturally, at first thought, think it strange, that Henry VIII. did not instantly become a zealous Protestant, did not become one of the most devoted disciples of LUTHER, He would, certainly; but LUTHER began his "Reformation" a few years too soon for the King. In 151 7, when LUTHER began his works, the King had been married to his first wife only eight years; and he had not then conceived any project of divorce. If LUTHER had begun twelve years later, the King would have been a Protestant at once, especially after seeing that this new religion allowed LUTHER and seven other of his brother leaders in the "Reformation" to grant, under their hands, a licence to the LANGRAVE OF HESSE to have TWO WIVES at one and the same time! So complaisant a religion would have been, and, doubtless was, at the time of the divorce, precisely to the King's taste; but, as I have just observed, it came twelve years too soon for him; for, not only had he not adopted this religion, but had opposed it, as a Sovereign; and, which was a still more serious affair, had opposed it, as an AUTHOR! He had in 1521, written a BOOK against it. His vanity, his pride, were engaged in the contest; to which may be added, that Luther, in answering his book, had called him "a pig, an ass, a dunghill, the spawn of an adder, a basilisk, a lying buffoon dressed in a king's robes, a mad fool with a frothy mouth and a whorish face;" and had afterwards said to him, "you lie, you stupid and sacrilegious King."
102. Therefore, though the tyrant was bent on destroying the Catholic Church, he was not less bent on the extirpation of the followers of LUTHER and his tribe of new sects. Always under the influence of some selfish and base motive or other, he was, With regard to the Protestants, set to work by revenge, as, in the case of the Catholics, he had been set to work by lust, if not by lust to be gratified by incest. To follow him, step by step, and in minute detail, through all his butcheries and all his burnings, would be to familiarize one's mind to a human slaughter-house and a cookery of cannibals. I shall, therefore, confine myself to a general view of his works in this way.
103. His book against LUTHER had acquired him the title of "Defender of the Faith," of which we shall see more by-and-by. He could not, therefore, without recantation, be a Protestant; and, indeed, his pride would not suffer him to become the proselyte of a man, who had, in print, too, proclaimed him to be a pig, an ass, a fool, and a liar. Yet he could not pretend to be a Catholic. He was, therefore, compelled to make a religion of his own. This was doing nothing, unless he enforced its adoption by what he called law. Laws were made by him and by his servile and plundering parliament, making it heresy in, and condemning to the flames, all who did not expressly conform, by acts as well as by declarations, to the faith and worship, which, as head of the Church, he invented and ordained. Amongst his tenets there were such as neither Catholics nor Protestants could, consistently with their creeds, adopt. He, therefore, sent both to the stake, and sometimes, in order to add mental pangs to those of the body, he dragged them to the fire on the same hurdle, tied together in pairs back to back, each pair containing a Catholic and a Protestant, Was this the way that Saint AUSTIN and Saint PATRICK propagated their religion? Yet, such is the malignity of BURNET, and of many, many others, called Protestant "divines," that they apologise for, if they do not absolutely applaud, this execrable tyrant, at the very moment that they are compelled to confess that he soaked the earth with Protestant blood, and filled the air with the fumes of their roasting flesh.
104. Throughout the whole of this bloody work, CRANMER, who was the primate of the King's religion, was consenting to, sanctioning, and aiding and abetting in, the murdering of Protestants well as of Catholics; though, and I pray you to mark it well, HUME, TILLOTSON, BURNET, and all his long list of eulogists, say, and make it matter of merit in him, that, all this while, he was himself a sincere Protestant in his heart! And, indeed, we shall, by-and-by, see him openly avowing those very tenets, for the holding of which he had been instrumental in sending, without regard to either age or sex, others to perish in the flames. The progress of this man in the paths of infamy, needed incontestible proof to reconcile the human mind to a belief in it. Before he became a priest he had married: after he became a priest, and had taken the oath of celibacy, he being then in Germany, and having become a Protestant, married another wife, while the first was still alive. Being the primate of Henry's Church, which still forbade the clergy to have wives, and which held them to their oath of celibacy, he had his wife brought to England in a chest, with holes bored in it to give her air. As the cargo was destined for Canterbury, it was landed at Gravesend, where the sailors, not apprised of the contents of the chest, set it up on one end, and the wrong end downwards, and had nearly broken the neck of the poor frow! Here was a pretty scene! A German frow, with a litter of half German half English young ones, kept in hugger-mugger, on that spot, which had been the cradle of English Christianity; that spot, where Saint AUSTIN had inhabited, and where THOMAS À BECKET had sealed with his blood his opposition to a tyrant, who aimed at the destruction of the Church and at the pillage of the people! Here is quite enough to fill us with disgust; but, when we reflect, that this same primate, while he had under his roof his frow and her litter, was engaged in assisting to send Protestants to the flames, because they dissented from a system that forbade the clergy to have wives, we swell with indignation, not against CRANMER, for, though there are so many of his atrocious deeds yet to come, he has exhausted our store; not against HUME, for he professed no regard for any religion at all; but, against those who are called "divines," and who are the eulogists of CRANMER; against BURNET, who says that CRANMER "did all with a good conscience;" and against Dr. STURGES, or rather, the Dean and Chapter of Winchester, who clubbed their "talents" in getting up the "Reflections on Popery," who talk of the "respectable CRANMER," and who have the audacity to put him, in point of integrity, upon a level with Sir THOMAS MORE! As Dr. MILNER, in his answer to STURGES, observes, they resembled each other in that the name of both was Thomas; but in all other things, the dissimilarity was as great, as that which the most vivid imagination can ascribe to the dissimilarity between hell and heaven.
105. The infamy of CRANMER in assisting in sending people to the flames for entertaining opinions, which he afterwards confessed that he himself entertained at the time that he was so sending them, can be surpassed by nothing of which human depravity is capable; and it can be equalled by nothing but that of the King, who, while he was, as he hoped and thought, laying the axe to the root of the Catholic faith, still styled himself its defender! He was not, let it be borne in mind, defender of what he might, as others have, since his day, and in his day, called the Christian Faith. He received the title from the POPE, as a reward for his written defence of the Catholic faith against Luther. The POPE conferred on him this title, which was to descend to his posterity. The title was given by POPE Leo X. in a bull, or edict, beginning with these words: "Leo, servant of the servants of the Lord, to his most dear Son, Henry, King of England, Defender of the Faith, all health and happiness." The bull then goes on to say, that the King, having, in defence of the faith of the Catholic Church, written a book against Martin Luther, the POPE and his Council had determined to confer on him and his successors the title of Defender of the Faith. "We," says the bull, "sitting in this Holy See, having, with mature deliberation, considered the business with our brethren, do with their unanimous counsel and consent, grant unto your Majesty, your heirs and successors, the title of Defender of the Faith; which we do, by these presents, confirm unto you, commanding all the Faithful to give your Majesty this title."
106. What are we to think, then, of the man who could continue to wear this title, while he was causing to be acted before him a farce, in which the POPE and his Council were exposed to derision, and was burning, and ripping up the bowels, of people, by scores, only because they remained firm in that faith of which he had still the odious effrontery to call himself the defender? All justice, everything like law, every moral thought must have been banished before such monstrous enormity could have been suffered to exist. They were all banished from the seat of power. An iron despotism had, as we shall see in the next Number, come to supply the place of the papal supremacy. Civil liberty was wholly gone; no man had any thing that he could call property; and no one could look upon his life as safe for twenty-four hours.
107. But, there is a little more to be said about this title of Defender of the Faith, which, for some reason or other that one can hardly discover, seems to have been, down to our time, a singularly great favourite. EDWARD VI., though his two "Protectors," who succeeded each other in that office, and whose guilty heads we shall gladly see succeeding each other on the block, abolished the Catholic faith by law; though the Protestant faith was, with the help of Foreign troops, established in its stead, and though the greedy ruffians, of his time, robbed the very altars, under the pretext of extirpating that very faith, of which his title called him the Defender, continued to wear this title throughout his reign. ELIZABETH continued to wear this title, during her long reign of "mischief and of misery," as WITAKER justly calls it, though during the whole of that reign she was busily engaged in persecuting, in ruining, in ripping up the bowels of those who entertained that faith, of which she styled herself the Defender, in which she herself had been born, in which she had lived for many years, and to which she adhered, openly and privately, till her self-interest called upon her to abandon it. She continued to wear this title while she was tearing the bowels out of her subjects for hearing mass; while she was refusing the last comforts of the Catholic religion to her cousin, MARY, Queen of Scotland, whom she put to death by a mockery of law and jus tice, after, as WITAKER has fully proved, having long endeavoured in vain to find amongst her subjects, a man base and bloody enough to take her victim off by assassination. This title was worn by that mean creature, JAMES I., who took as his chief councillor the right worthy son of that father who had been the chief contriver of the murder of his innocent mother, and whose reign was one unbroken series of base plots and cruel persecutions of all who professed the Catholic faith. But, not to anticipate further matter which will, hereafter, find a more suitable place, we may observe, that, amongst all our sovereigns, the only real Defenders of the Faith, since the reign of MARY, have been the late King and his son, our present sovereign: the former, by assent ing to a repeal of a part of the penal code, and by his appointing a special commission to try, condemn, and execute the leaders of the ferocious mob who set fire to, and who wished to sack, London, in 1780, with the cry of "NO POPERY" in their mouths, and from pretended zeal for the Protestant religion: and the latter, by his sending, in 1814, a body of English troops to assist, as a guard of honour, at the re-instalment of the POPE. Let us hope, that his defence of the faith is not to stop here; but that unto him is reserved the real glory of being the Defender of the Faith of all his subjects, and of healing for ever those deep and festering wounds, which, for more than two centuries, have been inflicted on so large and so loyal a part of his people.
108. From the sectarian host no man can say, what ought to be expected! but, from the "divines" of the established Church, even supposing them dead to the voice of justice, one would think, that, when they reflect on the origin of this title of their sovereign, common decency would restrain their revilings. It is beyond all dispute that the King holds this title from the POPE and from nobody else. His divine right to the crown is daily disputed; and he himself has disclaimed it. But, as to Defender of the Faith, he owes it entirely to the POPE. Will, then, the Protestant divines boldly tell us, that their and our sovereign wears a title, which, observe, finds its way, not only into every treaty, but into every municipal act, deed, or covenant; will they tell us, that he holds this title from the "Man of Sin, Antichrist, and the scarlet whore"? Will they thus defame that sovereign, whom they, at the same time, call on us to honour and obey? Yet this they must do; or they must confess, that their revilings, their foul abuse of the Catholic Church, have all been detestably false.
109. The King's predecessors had another title. They were called Kings of France; a title of much longer standing than that of Defender of the Faith. That title, a title of great glory, and one of which we were very proud, was not won by "Gospellers" or Presbyterians, or New Lights, with Saint Noel or Saint Butterworth at their head. It was, along with the Three Feathers, which the King so long wore, won by our brave Catholic ancestors. It was won while the POPE's supremacy; while confessions to priests, while absolutions, indulgences, masses, and monasteries existed in England. lit was won by Catholics in the "dark ages of monkish ignorance and superstition." It was surrendered in an age enlightened by a "heaven- born" Protestant and pledge-breaking Minister. It was won by valour and surrendered by fear; and fear, too, of those whom, for years, we had been taught to regard as the basest (as they certainly had been the bloodiest) of all mankind.
110. It would be time now, after giving a rapid sketch of the progress which the tyrant had made in prostrating the liberties of his people, and in despatching more of his wives, to enter on the grand scene of plunder, and to recount the miseries which immediately followed; but these must be the subject of the next Letter.
LETTER IV.
HORRID TYRANNY. BUTCHERY OF THE COUNTESS OF SALISBURY. CELIBACY OF THE CLERGY.-- BISHOPS OF WINCHESTER. HUME'S CHARGES AND BISHOP TANNER'S ANSWER.
Kensington, 28th February, 1825.
MY FRIENDS,
111. WE have seen, then, that the "Reformation" was engendered in beastly lust, brought forth in hypocrisy and perfidy, and we have had some specimens of the acts by which it caused innocent blood to be shed. We shall now, in this Letter and the next, see how it devastated and plundered the country, what poverty and misery it produced, and how it laid the sure foundation for that pauperism, that disgraceful immorality, that fearful prevalence of crimes of all sorts, which now so strongly mark the character of this nation, which was formerly the land of virtue and of plenty.
112. When, in paragraph 97, we left the King and CRANMER at their bloody work, we had come to the year 1536, and to the 27th year of the King's reign. In the year 1528, an act had been passed to exempt the King from paying any sum of money that he might have borrowed; another act followed this for a similar purpose; and thus thousands of persons were ruined. His new Queen, JANE SEYMOUR brought him, in 1537, a son, who was afterwards King, under the title of EDWARD VI.; but the mother died in Child-birth, and according to Sir RICHARD BAKER, "had her body ripped up to preserve the child"! In this great "Reformation" man all was of a piece: all was consistent: he seemed never to have any compassion for the suffering of any human being; and this is a characteristic which WITAKER gives to his daughter ELIZABETH.
113. Having a son for a successor, he, with his Parliament, enacted, in 1537, that MARY and ELIZABETH, his two daughters, were bastards, and that, in case of a want of lawful issue, the King should be enabled, by letters patent, or by his last will, to give the crown to whomsoever he pleased! To cap the whole, to complete a series of acts of tyranny such as was never before heard of, it was enacted, in 1537, and in the 28th year of his reign, that, except in cases of mere private right; "the King's Proclamations should be of the same force as Acts of Parliament"! Thus, then, all law and justice were laid prostrate at the feet of a single man, and that man a man with whom law was a mockery, on whom the name of justice was a libel, and to whom mercy was wholly unknown.
114. It is easy to imagine that no man's property or life could have security with power like this in the hands of such a man. MAGNA CHARTA had been trampled under foot from the moment that the POPE's supremacy was assailed. The famous Act of EDWARD THE THIRD, for the security of the people against unfounded charges of high treason, was wholly set aside. Numerous things were made high treason, which were never before thought criminal at all. The trials were, for a long while, a mere mockery; and at last, they were altogether, in many cases, laid aside, and the accused were condemned to death, not only without being arraigned and heard in their defence; but, in numerous cases, without being apprised of the crimes, or pretended crimes, for which they were executed. We have read of Deys of Algiers and of Beys of Tunis; but, never have heard of their, even in the most exaggerated accounts, deeds to be, in point of injustice and cruelty, compared with those of this man, whom BURNET calls, "the first-born son of the English 'Reformation.'" The objects of his bloody cruelty generally were, as they naturally would be, chosen from amongst the most virtuous of his subjects; because from them such a man had the most to dread. Of these his axe hewed down whole families and circles of friends. He spared neither sex nor age, if the parties possessed, or were suspected of possessing, that integrity which made them disapprove of his deeds. To look awry excited his suspicion, and his suspicion was death. England, before his bloody reign, so happy, so free, knowing so little of crime as to present to the judges of assize scarcely three criminals in a county in a year, now saw upwards of sixty thousand persons shut up in her gaols at one and the same time. The purlieus of the court of this "first-born son of the Reformation" were a great human slaughter-house, his people, deserted by their natural leaders, who had been bribed by plunder, or the hope of plunder, were the terrified and trembling flock, while he, the master-butcher, fat and jocose, sat in his palace issuing orders for the slaughter, while his High Priest, CRANMER, stood ready to sanction and sanctify all his deeds.
115. A detail of these butcheries could only disgust and weary the reader. One instance, however, must not be omitted; namely, the slaughtering of the relations, and particularly the mother, of Cardinal POLE. The Cardinal, who had, when very young, and before the King's first divorce had been agitated, been a great favourite with the King, and had pursued his studies and travels on the Continent at the King's expense, disapproved of the divorce, and of all the acts that followed it; and though called home by the King, he refused to obey. He was a man of great learning, talent, and virtue, and his opinions had great weight in England. His mother, the Countess of SALISBURY, was descended from the PLANTAGENETS, and was the last living descendant of that long race of English Kings. So that the Cardinal, who had been by the POPE raised to that dignity, on account of his great learning and eminent virtues, was, thus, a relation of the King, as his mother was of course, and she was, too, the nearest of all his relations. But the Cardinal was opposed to the King's proceedings; and that was enough to excite and put in motion the deadly vengeance of the latter. Many were the arts that he made use of, and great in amount was the treasure of his people that he expended, in order to bring the Cardinal's person within his grasp; and, these having failed, he resolved to wreak his ruthless vengeance on his kindred and his aged mother. She was charged by the base THOMAS CROMWELL (of whom we shall soon see enough) with having persuaded her tenants not to read the new translations, of the Bible, and also with having received bulls from Rome, which the accuser said, were found at COURDRAY HOUSE, her seat in Sussex. CROMWELL also showed a banner, which had, he said, been used by certain rebels in the North, and which he said he found in her house. All this was, however, so very barefaced, that it was impossible to think of a trial. The judges were then asked, whether the parliament could not attaint her; that is to say, condemn her, without giving her a hearing? The judges said, that it was a dangerous matter; that they could not, in their courts, act in this manner, and that they thought the parliament never would. But, being asked, whether, if the parliament were to do it, it would remain good in law, they answered in the affirmative. That was enough. A bill was brought in, and thus was the Countess, together with the Marchioness of EXETER and two gentlemen, relations of the Cardinal, condemned to death. The two latter were executed, the Marchioness was pardoned, and the Countess shut up in prison as a sort of hostage for the conduct of her son. In a few months; however, an insurrection having broken out on account of his tyrannical acts, the King chose to suspect, that the rebels had been instigated by Cardinal POLE, and, forth he dragged his mother to the scaffold. She, who was upwards of seventy years of age, though worn down in body by her imprison ment, maintained to the last a true sense of her character and noble descent. When bidden to lay her head upon the block: "No," answered she, "my head shall never bow to tyranny: it never committed treason; and, if you will have it, you must get it as you can," The executioner struck at her neck with his axe, and, as she ran about the scaffold with her gray locks hanging down her shoulders and breast, he pursued, giving her repeated chops, till, at last, he brought her down!
116. Is it a scene in Turkey or in Tripoli that we are contemplating? No; but, in England, where MAGNA CHARTA had been so lately in force. where nothing could have been done contrary to law; but where all power, ecclesiastical as well as lay, being placed in the hands of one man, bloody butcheries like this, which would have roused even a Turkish populace to resistance, could be perpetrated without the smallest danger to the perpetrator. HUME, in his remarks upon the state of the people in this reign, pretends, that the people never hated the King, and "that he seems even, in some degree, to have possessed to the last, their love and affection." He adds, that it may be said with truth, that the "English, in that age, were so thoroughly subdued, that, like Eastern slaves, they were inclined to admire even those acts of violence and tyranny which were exercised over themselves, and at their own expense." This lying historian every where endeavours to gloss over the deeds of those who destroyed the Catholic Church, both in England and Scotland. Too cunning, however, to applaud the bloody Henry himself, he would have us believe, that, after all, there was something amiable in him, and this belief he would have us found on the fact of his having been to the last, seemingly, beloved by his people.
117. Nothing can be more false than this assertion, if repeated insurrections against him, accompanied with the most bitter complaints and reproaches, be not to be taken as marks of popular affection. And, as to the remark, that the English, "in that age were so thoroughly subdued," while it seems to refute the assertion as to their affection for the tyrant, it is a slander, which the envious Scotch writers all delight to put forth and repeat. One object, always uppermost with HUME, is to malign the Catholic religion; it, therefore, did not occur to him, that this sanguinary tyrant was not effectually resisted, as King John and other bad kings had been, because this tyrant had the means of bribing the natural leaders of the people to take part against them; or, at the least, to neutralize those leaders. It did not occur to him to tell us, that Henry VIII. found the English as gallant and just a people as his ancestors had found them; but that, having divided them, having by holding out to the great an enormous mass of plunder as a reward for abandoning the rights of the people, the people became, as every people without leaders must become, a mere flock, or herd, to be dealt with at pleasure. The malignity and envy of this Scotchman blinded him to this view of the matter, and induced him to ascribe to the people's admiration of tyranny that submission, which, after repeated struggles, they yielded merely from the want of those leaders, of whom they were now, for the first time, wholly deprived. What? have we never known any country, consisting of several millions of people, oppressed and insulted, even for ages, by a mere handful of men? And, are we to conclude, that such a country submits from admiration of the tyranny under which they groan? Did the English submit to CROMWELL from admiration; and, was it from admiration that the French submitted to ROBESPIERRE? The latter was punished, but CROMWELL was not: he, like HENRY, died in his bed; but, to what mind except to that of the most malignant and perverse, would it occur that CROMWELL'S impunity arose from the willing submission and the admiration of the people?
118. Of the means by which the natural leaders of the people were seduced from them; of the kind and the amount of the prize of plunder, we are now going to take a view. In paragraph 4, I have said, that the "Reformation" was cherished and fed by plunder and devastation: In paragraph 37, I have said, that it was not a Reformation, but a devastation of England; and that this devastation impoverished and degraded the main body of the people. These statements I am now about to prove to be true.
119. In paragraphs from 55 to 60 inclusive, we have seen how monasteries arose, and what sort of institutions they were. There were, in England, at the time we are speaking of, 645 of theee institutions; besides 90 Colleges, 110 Hospitals, and 2374 Chantries and Free-Chapels. The whole were seized on, first and last, taken into the hands of the King, and by him granted to those who aided and abetted him in the work of plunder.
120. I pray you, my friends, sensible and just English men, to observe here, that this was a great mass of landed property; that this property was not by any means used for the sole benefit of monks, friars, and nuns; that, for the far greater part, its rents flowed immediately back amongst the people at large; and, that, if it had never been an object of plunder, England never would, and never could, have heard the hideous sound of the words pauper and poor- rate. You have seen, in paragraph 52, in what manner the tithes arose and how they were disposed of; and you are, by-and-by, to see how the rents of the monasteries were distributed.
121. You have, without doubt, fresh in your recollection all the censures, sarcasms, and ridicule, which we have, from our very infancy, heard against the monastic life. What drones the monks and friars and nuns were; how uselessly they lived; how much they consumed to no good purpose whatever; and particularly how ridiculous, and even how wicked it was to compel men and women to live unmarried, to lead a life of celibacy, and, thus, either to deprive them of a great natural pleasure, or to expose them to the double sin of breach of chastity and breach of oath.
122. Now, this is a very important matter. It is a great moral question; and, therefore, we ought to endeavour to settle this question; to make up our minds completely upon it, before we proceed any further. The monastic state necessarily was accompanied with vows of celibacy; and, therefore, it is, before we give an acccunt of the putting down of these institutions in England, necessary to speak of the tendency, and, indeed, of the natural and inevitable consequences of those vows.
123. It has been represented as "unnatural" to compel men and women to live in the unmarried state, and as tending to produce propensities, to which it is hardly proper even to allude. Now, in the first place, have we heard, of late days, of any propensities of this sort? Have they made their odious appearance amongst clergymen and bishops? And, if they have, have those clergymen and bishops been Catholics, or have they been Protestants? The answer, which every one now living in England and Ireland can instantly give to these questions, disposes of this objection to vows of celibacy. In the next place, the Catholic Church compels nobody to make such vow. It only says, that it will admit no one to be a priest, monk, friar, or nun, who rejects such vow. Saint PAUL strongly recommends to all Christian teachers an unmarried life. The Church has founded a rule on this recommendation; and that, too, for the same reason that the recommendation was given; namely, that those who have flocks to watch over, or, in the language of our own Protestant Church, who have the care of souls, should have as few as possible of other cares, and should, by all means, be free from those incessant, and, sometimes, racking cares, which are inseparable from a wife and family. What priest, who has a wife and family, will not think more about them than about his flock? Will he, when any part of that family is in distress, from illness or other cause, be wholly devoted, body and mind, to his flock? Will he be as ready to give alms, or aid of any sort, to the poor, as he would be if he had no family to provide for? Will he never be tempted to swerve from his duty, in order to provide patronage for sons, and for the husbands of daughters? Will he always as boldly stand up and reprove the Lord or the 'Squire for their oppressions and vices, as he would do if he had no son for whom to get a benefice, a commission, or a sinecure? Will his wife never have her partialities, her tattlings, her bickerings, amongst his flock, and never, on any account, induce him to act towards any part of that flock, contrary to the strict dictates of his sacred duty? And to omit hundreds, yes, hundreds of reasons that might, in addition, be suggested, will the married priest be as ready as the unmarried one to appear at the bed-side of sickness and contagion? Here it is that the calls on him are most imperative, and here it is that the married priest will, and with nature on his side, be deaf to those calls. From amongst many instances that I could cite, let me take one. During the war of 1776, the King's house at Winchester was used as a prison for French prisoners of war. A dreadfully contagious fever broke out amongst them. Many of them died. They were chiefly Catholics, and were attended in their last moments by two or three Catholic Priests residing in that city. But, amongst the sick prisoners, there were many Protestants; and these requested the attendance of Protestant Parsons. There were the parsons of all the parishes at Winchester. There were the Dean and all the Prebendaries, But, not a man of them went to console the dying Protestants, in consequence of which several of them desired the assistance of the priests, and, of course, died Catholics. Doctor MILNER, in his Letters to Doctor STURGES (page 56,) mentions this matter, and he says, "the answer" (of the Protestant Parsons) "I understand to have been this: We are not more afraid, as individuals, to face death than the priests are; but we must not carry poisonous contagion into the bosoms of our families." No, to be sure! But, then, not to call this the cassock's taking shelter behind the petticoat, in what a dilemma does this place the Dean and Chapter? Either they neglected their most sacred duty, and left Protestants to flee, in their last moments, into the arms of "popery;" or that clerical celibacy, against which they have declaimed all their lives and still declaim, and still hold up to us, their flocks, as something both contemptible and wicked, is, after all, necessary to that "care of souls," to which they profess themselves to have been called, and for which they receive such munificent reward.
124. But, conclusive, perfectly satisfactory, as these reasons are, we should not, if we were to stop here, do any thing like justice to our subject; for, as to the parochial clergy, do we not see, ay, and feel too, that they, if with families, or intending to have families, find little to spare to the poor of their flocks? In short, do we not know that a married priesthood and pauperism and poor-rates, all came upon this country at one and the same moment? And what was the effect of clerical celibacy with regard to the higher orders of the clergy? A bishop, for instance, having neither wife nor child, naturally expended his revenues amongst the people in his diocese. He expended a part of them on his Cathedral Church, or in some other way sent his revenues back to the people. If WILLIAM OF WYKHAM had been a married man, the parsons would not now have had a COLLEGE at Winchester; nor would there have been a College either at Eton, Westminster, Oxford, or Cambridge, if the bishops, in those days, had been married men. Besides, who is to expect of human nature, that a bishop with a wife and family will, in his distribution of the church preferment, consider nothing but the interest of religion? We are not to expect of man more than that, of which we, from experience, know that man is capable. It is for the lawgiver to interpose, and to take care that the community suffer not from the frailty of the nature of individuals, whose private virtues even may, in some cases, and those not a few, not have a tendency to produce public good. I do not say that married bishops ever do wrong, because I am not acquainted with them well enough to ascertain the fact; but, in speaking of the diocese in wnich I was born, and with which I am best acquainted, I may say that it is certain, that, if the late Bishop of Winchester had lived in Catholic times, he could not have had a wife, and that he could not have had a wife's sister, to marry Mr. EDMUND POULTER, in which case, I may be allowed to think it possible, that Mr. POULTER would not have quitted the bar for the pulpit, and that he would not have had the two livings of Meon-Stoke and Soberton, and a Prebend besides; that his son BROWNLOW POULTER would not have had the two livings of Buriton and Petersfield; that his son CHARLES POULTER would not have had the three livings of Alton, Binstead and Kingsley; that his son-in-law OGLE would not have had the living of Bishop's Waltham; and that his son-in-law HAYGARTH would not have had the two livings of Upham and Durley. If the Bishop had lived in Catholic times, he could not have had a son, CHARLES AUGUSTUS NORTH, to have the two livings of Alverstoke and Havant and to be a Prebend; that he could not have had another son, FRANCIS NORTH, to have the four livings of Old Alresford, Medstead, New Alresford, and St. Mary's, Southampton, and to be, moreover, a Prebend and Master of St. Cross; that he could not have had a daughter to marry Mr. WiLLIAM GARNIER, to have the two livings of Droxford and Brightwell Baldwin, and to be a Prebend and a Chancellor besides; that he could not have had Mr. William Gamier's brother, THOMAS GARNIER, for a relation, and this latter might not, then, have had the two livings of Aldingbourn and Bishop's Stoke; that he could not have another daughter to marry Mr. THOMAS DE GREY, to have the four livings of Calbourne, Fawley, Merton, and Rounton, and to be a Prebend and also an Archdeacon besides! In short, if the late Bishop had lived in Catholic times, it is a little too much to believe, that these twenty-four Livings, five Prebends, one Chancellorship, one Archdeaconship, and one Mastership, worth perhaps, all together. more than twenty thousand pounds a-year, would have fallen to the ten persons above named. And, may we not reasonably suppose, that the Bishop, instead of leaving behind him (as the newspapers told us he did) savings to nearly the amount of three hundred thousand pounds in money, would, if he had had no children nor grand-children, have expended a part of his money on that ancient and magnificent Cathedral, the roof of which has recently been in danger of falling in, or, would have been the founder of something for the public good and national honour, or would have been a most munificent friend and protector of the poor, and would never, at any rate, have suffered SMALL BEER TO BE SOLD OUT OF HIS EPISCOPAL PALACE AT FARNHAM? With an excise licence, mind you! I do not say, or insinuate, that there was any smuggling carried on at the palace. Nor do I pretend to censure the act. A man who has a large family to provide for must be allowed to be the best judge of his means; and, if he happen to have an overstock of small beer, it is natural enough for him to sell it, in order to get money to buy meat, bread, groceries, or other necessaries. What I say is, that I do not think that WILLIAM of WYKHAM ever sold small beer, either by wholesale or retail; and I most distinctly assert, that this was done during the late Bishop's life-time, from his Episcopal Palace at Farnham! WILLIAM OF WYKHAM (who took his surname from a little village in Hampshire) was not Bishop of Winchester half so long as the late Bishop: but, out of his revenues, he built and endowed one of the Colleges at Oxford, the College of Winchester, and did numerous other most munificent things, in some of which, however, he was ot without examples in his predecessors, nor without imitators in his successors as long as the Catholic Church remained; but, when a married clergy came, then ended all that was munificent in the Bishops of this once famous city.
125. It is impossible to talk of the small beer and of the Master of Saint Cross, without thinking of the melancholy change which the "Reformation" has produced in this ancient establishment. Saint Cross, or Holy Cross, situated in a meadow about half a mile from Winchester, is an hospital, or place for hospitality, founded and endowed by a Bishop of Winchester, about seven hundred years ago. Succeeding Bishops added to its endowments, till, at last, it provided a residence and suitable maintenance for forty-eight decayed gentlemen, with priests, nurses, and other servants and attendants; and, besides this, it made provision for a dinner every day for a hundred of the most indigent men in the city. These met daily in a hall, called "the hundred men's hall." Each had a loaf of bread, three quarts of small beer and "two messes," for his dinner; and they were allowed to carry home that which they did not consume upon the spot. What is seen at the hospital of Holy Cross now? Alas! TEN poor creatures creeping about in this noble building, and THREE out- pensioners; and to those an attorney from Winchester carries, or sends, weekly, the few pence, whatever they may be, that are allowed them! But the place of the "Master" is, as I have heard, worth a round sum annually. I do not know exactly what it is; but, the post being a thing given to a son of the Bishop, the reader will easily imagine that it is not a trifle. There exists, however, here, that which, as Dr. MILNER observes, is probably, the last remaining vestige of "old English hospitality;" for here, any traveller who goes and knocks at the gate, and asks for relief, receives gratis a pint of good beer and a hunch of good bread. The late Lord Henry Stuart told me that he once went and that he received both.
126. But (and I had really nearly forgotten it) there is a Bishop of Winchester now! And, what is he doing? I have not heard that he has founded, or is about to found, any colleges or hospitals. All that I have heard of him in. the EDUCATION way, is, that, in his first charge to his Clergy (which he published) he urged them to circulate amongst their flocks the pamphlets of a society in London, at the head of which is Mr. JOSHUA WATSON, wine and spirit merchant, of Mincing-lane; and, all I have heard of him in the Charity way, is, that he is VICE-PATRON of a self-created body, called the "Hampshire Friendly Society," the object of which is, to raise subscriptions amongst the poor, for "their mutual relief and maintenance;" or, in other words, to induce the poor labourers to save out of their earnings the means of supporting themselves, in sickness or in old age, without coming for relief to the poor-rates! Good God! Why WILLIAM OF WYKHAM, Bishop Fox, Bishop WYNEFLEET; Cardinal BEAUFORT, HENRY DE BLOIS, and, if you take in all the Bishops of Winchester, even back to Saint SWITHIN himself; never would they have thought of a scheme like this for relieving the poor! Their way of promoting learning was, to found and endow colleges and schools; their way of teaching religion was, to build and endow churches and chapels; their way of relieving the poor and the ailing was, to found and endow hospitals: and all these at their own expense; out of their own revenues. Never did one of them, in order to obtain an interpretation of "Evangelical truth" for their flocks, dream of referring his Clergy to a Society, having a wine and brandy merchant at its head. Never did there come into the head of any one of them a thought so bright as that of causing the necessitous to relieve themselves! Ah! but they, alas lived. in the "dark ages of monkish ignorance and superstition." No wonder that they could not see that the poor were the fittest persons in the world to relieve the poor! And, besides, they had no wives and children! No sweet babes to smile on, to soften their hearts. If they had, their conjugal and paternal feelings would have taught them, that true charity begins at home; and that it teaches men to sell small beer, and not give it away.
127. Enough now about the celibacy of the Clergy: but, it is impossible to quit the subject without one word to Parson MALTHUS. This man is not only a Protestant, but a parson of our Church. Now, he wants to compel the labouring classes to refrain, to a great extent, from marriage; and Mr. SCARLETT actually brought a bill into parliament, having, in one part of it, this object avowedly in view; the great end, proposed by both, being to cause a diminution of the poor-rates. Parson MALTHUS does not call this recommending celibacy; but "moral restraint." And, what is celibacy but moral restraint? So that, here are these people reviling the Catholic Church for insisting on vows of celibacy on the part of those who choose to be priests, or nuns; and, at the same time, proposing to compel the labouring classes to live in a state of celibacy, or to run the manifest risk of perishing (they and their children) from starvation! Is all this sheer impudence, or is it sheer folly? One or the other it is, greater than ever was before heard from the lips of mortal man. They affect to believe that the clerical vow of celibacy must be nugatory, because nature is constantly at work to overcome it. This is what Dr. STURGES asserts. Now, if this be the case with men of education; men on whom their religion imposes abstinence, fasting, almost constant prayer, and an endless number of austerities; if this be the case with regard to such men, bound by a most solemn vow, a known breach ot which exposes them to indelible infamy; if such be the case with such men, and if it be, therefore, contemptible and wicked, not to compel them, mind, to make such vows, but to permit them voluntarily to do it, what must it be to compel young men and women labourers to live in a state of celibacy, or be exposed to absolute starvation? Why, the answer is, that it is the grossest of inconsistency, or of premeditated wickedness; but that, like all the other wild schemes and cruel projects relative to the poor, we trace it at once back to the" Reformation," that great source of the poverty and misery and degradation of the main body of the people of this kingdom. The "Reformation" despoiled the working classes of their patrimony; it tore from them that which nature and reason had assigned them; it robbed them of that relief for the necessitous, which was theirs by right imprescriptable, and which had been confirmed to them by the law of God and the law of the land. It brought a compulsory, a grudging, an unnatural mode of relief, calculated to make the poor and rich hate each other, instead of binding them together, as the Catholic mode did, by the bonds of Christian charity. But of all its consequences that of introducing a married clergy has, perhaps, been the most prolific in mischief. This has absolutely created an order for the procreation of dependants on the state; for the procreation of thousands of persons annually, who have no fortunes of their own, and who must be, some how or other, maintained by burdens imposed upon the people. Places, commissions, sinecures, pensions; something or other must be found for them; some sort of living out of the fruit of the rents of the rich and the wages of labour. If no excuse can be found; no pretence of public service; no corner of the pension list open; then they must come as a direct burden upon the people; and, thus it is that we have, within the last twenty years, seen sixteen hundred thousand pounds voted by the parliament out of the taxes, for the "relief of the poor Clergy of the Church of England;" and at the very time that this prernium on the procreation of idlers was annually being granted, the parliament was pestered with projects for compelling the working part of the community to lead a life of celibacy! What that is evil, what that is monstrous, has not grown out of this Protestant "Reformation"!
128. Thus, then, my friends, we have, I think, settled this great question; and, after all that we have, during our whole lives, heard against that rule of the Catholic Church. which imposed a vow of celibacy on those who chose the clerical, or the monastic life, we find, whether we look at this rule in a religious, in a moral, in a civil, or in a political, point of view, that it was founded in wisdom, that it was a great blessing to the people at large, and that its abolition is a thing to be deeply deplored.
129. So much, then, for this topic of everlasting railing against the Catholic Church. We must, before we come to an account of the deeds of the ruffian, THOMAS CROMWELL, who conducted the work of plunder, say something in answer to the general charge which Protestant writers, and particularly the malignant Scotch historians, have preferred against the Monasteries; for, if what they say were true, we might be disposed to think (as, indeed, we have been taught to think), that there was not so much harm in the plunderings that we are about to witness. We will take this general charge from the pen of HUME, who (Vol. iv. p. 160), speaking of the reports made by THOMAS CROMWELL and his myrmidons, says, "it is safest to credit the existence of vices naturally connected with the very institution of the monastic life. The cruel and inveterate factions and quarrels, therefore, which the commissioners mentioned, are VERY CREDIBLE among men, who, being confined together within the same walls, can never forget their mutual animosities, and who, being cut off from all the most endearing connections of nature, are commonly cursed with hearts more selfish, and tempers more unrelenting, than fall to the share of other men. The pious frauds, practised to increase the devotion and liberality of the people, may be regarded AS CERTAIN, in an order "founded on illusion, lies and superstition. The SUPINE IDLENESS, also, and its attendant, PROFOUND IGNORANCE, with which the convents were reproached, ADMIT OF NO QUESTION. No manly or elegant knowledge could be expected among men, whose life, condemned to a tedious uniformity, and deprived of all emulation, afforded nothing to raise the mind or cultivate the genius."
130. I question whether monk ever wrote sentences con taining worse grammar than these contain: but, as to the facts; these "very credible," these "certain," these "unquestionable," facts, are, almost upon the face of them, a tissue of malignant lies. What should there be "factions" and "quarrels" about, amongst men living so "idle" and "unambitious" a life? How much harder are the hearts of unmarried, than those of married ecclesiastics we have seen above, in the contrast between the charities of Catholic, and those of Protestant, bishops. It is quite "credible," that men, lost in "supine idleness," should practise frauds to get money, which their very state prevented them from either keeping or bequeathing, and who were totally destitute of all "emulation." The malignity of this liar exceeded his cunning, and made him not perceive, that he was, in one sentence, furnishing strong presumptive proof against the truth of another sentence. Yet, as his history has been, and is, much read, and, as it has deceived me, along with so many thousands of others, I shall, upon this subject, appeal to several authorities, all Protestants, mind, in contradiction to these, his false and base assertions, just remarking, by the way, that he himself never had a family, or a wife, and that he was a great, fat fellow, fed, in considerable part, out of public money, without having merited it by any real public services.
131. In his History of England, he refers, not less than two hundred times, to Bishop TANNER, who was Bishop of St. Asaph in the reign of George the Second. Let us hear, then, what Bishop TANNER; let us hear what this Protestant Bishop says, of the character and effects of the Monasteries, which the savages under Henry VIII. destroyed; Let us see how this high authority of HUME agrees with him on this, one of the most interesting and important points in our history. We are about to witness a greater act of plunder, a more daring contempt of law and justice and humanity, than ever was, in any other case, witnessed in the whole world. We are going to see thousands upon thousands of persons stripped, in an instant, of all their property; torn from their dwellings, and turned out into the wide world to beg or starve; and all this, too, in violation, not only of natural justice, but of every law. of the country, written and unwritten. Let us, then, see what was the character of the persons thus treated, and what were the effects of the institutions to which they belonged. And, let us see this, not in the description given by an avowed enemy not only of the Catholic, but of the Cluttian religion; but, in that descrIption which has been given us uy a Protestant Bishop, and in a book written expressly to give "An account of all the abbeys, priories, and friaries, formerly existing in England and Wales;" bearing in mind, as we go along, that HUME has, in his History of England, referred to this very work, upwards of two hundred times, taking care, however, not to refer to a word of it, relating to the important question now before us.
132. Bishop TANNER, before entering on his laborious account of the several monastic institutions, gives us, in pages 19, 20 and 21 of his preface, the following general description of the character and pursuits of the Monasteries, and of the effects of their establishments. I beg you, my friends, to keep, as you read, Bishop TANNER's description, the description of HUME constantly in your minds. Remember, and look, now-and-then, back at his charges of "supine idleness," "profound ignorance," want of all "emulation and all manly and Segant knowledge;" and, above all things, remember his charge of selfishness, his charge of "frauds" to get money from the people. The Bishop speaks thus upon the subject.
133. "In every great abbey, there was a large room called the Scriptorium, where several writers made it their whole business to transcribe books for the use of the library. They sometimes, indeed, wrote the ledger books of the house, and the missals, and other books, used in divine service, but they were generally upon other works, viz.: the Fathers, Classics, Histories, &c. &c. JOHN WHETHAMSTED, Abbot of St. Albans, caused above eighty books to be thus transcribed (there was then no printing) during his abbacy. Fifty-eight were transcribed by the care of one Abbot, at Glastonbury; and so zealous were the Monks in general for this work, that they often got lands given, and churches appropriated, for the carrying of it on. In all the greater abbeys, there were also persons appointed to take notice of the principal occurrences of the kingdom, and at the end of every year to digest them into annals. In these records they particularly preserved the memoirs of their founders, and benefactors, the years and days of their births and deaths; their marriages, children, and successors; so that recourse was sometimes bad to them for proving persons' ages, and genealogies though it is to be feared, that some of those pedigrees were drawn up from tradition only: and that, in most of their accounts, they were favourable to their friends, and severe upon their enemies. The constitutions of the clergy in their national and provincial synods, and (after the Conquest) even Acts of Parliament, were sent to the abbeys to be recorded: Which leads me to mention the use and advantage of these religious houses. For, FIRST, the choicest records and treasures in the kingdom were preserved in them. An exemplification of the charter of liberties, granted by King Henry I. (MAGNA CHARTA) was sent to some abbey in every county to be preserved. Charters and Inquisitions relating to the county of Cornwall were deposited in the Priory of Bodmin; a great many rolls were lodged in the Abbey of Leicester, and Priory of Kenilworth, till taken from thence by King Henry III. King Edward I. sent to the religious houses to search for his title to the kingdom of Scotland, in their ledgers and chronicles, as the most authentic records for proof of his right to that crown. When his sovereignty was acknowledged in Scotland, he sent letters to have it inserted in the chronicles of the Abbey of Winchomb, and the Priory of Norwich, and probably of many other such like places. And when he decided the controversy relating to the crown of Scotland, between Robert Brus and John Baliol, he wrote to the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's, London, requiring them to enter into their chronicles the exemplification therewith sent of that decision. The learned Mr. SELDEN hath his greatest evidences for the dominion of the narrow seas, belonging to the King of Great Britain, from Monastic records. The evidences and money of private families were oftentimes sent to these houses to be preserved. The seals of noblemen were deposited there upon their deaths. And even the King's money was sometimes lodged in them. -- SECONDLY, they were schools of learning and education, for every convent had one person or more appointed for this purpose; and all the neighbours, that desired it, might have their children taught grammar and church music without any expense to them. In the Nunneries also young women were taught to work) and to read English, and sometimes Latin also. So that not only the lower rank of people who could not pay for their learning, but most of the noblemen's and gentlemen's daughters were educated in those places. - - THIRDLY, all the Monasteries were, in effect, great hospitals. And were most of them obliged to relieve many poor people every day. There were likewise houses of entertainment for almost all travellers. Evcn the nobility and gentry, when they were upon the road, lodged at one religious house, and dined at another, and seldom, or never, went to inns. In short, their hospitality was such, that in the Priory of Norwich, one thousand five hundred quarters of malt, and above eight hundred quarters of wheat, and all other things in proportion, were generally spent every year. -- FOURTHLY, the nobility and gentry provided not only for their old servants, in these houses by corrodies, but for their younger children, and impoverished friends, by making them, first, monks and nuns, and in time, priors and prioresscs, and abbots and abbesses -- FIFTHLY, they were of considerable advantage to the Crown: 1. By the profits received from the death of one Abbot or Prior, to the election, or, rather, confirmation, of another. 2. By great fines paid for the confirmation of their liberties. 3. By many corrodies granted to old servants of the Crown, and pensions to the King's clerks and chaplains, till they get preferment. -- SIXTHLY, they were likewise of considerable advantage to the places where they had their sites and estates:-- 1. By causing great resort to them, and getting grants of fairs and markets for them. 2 By freeing them from the forest laws. 3. By letting their lands at easy rates. -- LASTLY, they were great ornaments to the country: many of them were really noble buildings; and though not actually so grand and neat, yet, perhaps, as much admired in their times, as Chelsea and Greenwich Hospitals are now. Many of the abbey churches were equal, if not superior, to our present Cathedrals; and they must have been as much an ornament to the country, and employed as many workmen in building, and keeping them in repair, as noblemen's and gentlemen's seats now do."
134. Now, then, malignant HUME, come up, and face this Protestant bishop, whose work you have quoted more than two hundred times, and who here gives the lie direct to all and every part of your description. Instead of your "supine idleness," we have industry the most patient and persevering; instead of your "profound ignorance," we have, in even convent, a school for teaching, gratis, all useful science; instead of your want of all "manly and elegant knowledge," we have the study, the teaching, the transcribing, the preserving, of the Classics; instead of your "selfishness" and your "pious frauds" to get the money from the people, we have hospitals for the sick, doctors and nurses to attend them, and the most disinterested, the most kind, the most noble hospitality; instead of that "slavery," which, in fifty parts of your history, you assert to have been taught by the monks, we have the freeing of people from the forest laws, and the preservation of the Great Charter of English liberty; and you know as well as I, that when this Charter was renewed by King JOHN, the renewal was, in fact, the work of Archbishop LANGTON, who roused the Barons to demand it, he having, as TANNER observes, found the Charter deposited in an abbey! Back, then; down, then, malignant liar, and tell the devil that the Protestant Bishop TANNER hast sent thee!
135. Want of room compels me to stop; but, here, in this one authority, we have ten thousand times more than enough to answer the malignant liar, HUME, and all the revilers of monastic life, which lies and revilings it was necessary to silence before proceeding, as I shall in the next Letter, to describe the base, the cruel, the bloody means by which these institutions were devastated and de stroyed.
LETTER V.
AUTHORITIES RELATING TO THE EFFECTS OF THE MONASTIC INSTITUTIONS. THEIR GREAT UTILITY AND THE POLITICAL WISDOM IN WHICH THEY WERE FOUNDED. THE APPOINTMENT OF THE RUFFIAN THOMAS CROMWELL. HIS PROCEEDINGS IN THE WORK OF PLUNDER AND DEVASTATION. THE FIRST ACT OF PARLIAMENT AUTHORISING THE PLUNDER.
Kensington, 31st March, 1825.
MY FRIENDS,
136. WHEN, at the close of the foregoing Letter, I appeared to content myself with the authority of the Protestant Bishop TANNER, as a defender of Monastic Institutions against the attacks, the malignant lies, of HUME, I had in reserve other authorities in abundance, some of which I should then have cited, if I had had room. Bishop TANNER goes, indeed, quite home to every point; but, the matter is of such great importance, when we are about to view the destruction of these institutions, that, out of fifty authorities that I might refer to, I will select four or five. I will take one Foreign and four English; and observe, they are all Protestant authorities.
137. MALLET. History of the Swiss, Vol. I. p. 105. "The monks softened by their instructions the ferocious manners of the people, and opposed their credit to the tyranny of the nobility, who knew no other occupation than war, and grievously oppressed their neighbours. On this account the government of Monks was preferred to theirs. The people sought them for Judges. It was an usual saying, that it was better to be governed by the Bishop's crosier than the Monarch's sceptre."
138. DRAKE. Literary Hours, Vol. ii. p. 435. "The monks of CASSINS, observes WHARTON, were distinguished not only for their knowledge of sciences, but their attention to polite learning, and an acquaintance with the Classics. Their learned Abbot Desiderius, collected the best Greek and Roman authors. The fraternity not only composed learned treatises on Music, Logic, Astronomy, and Vitruvium Architecture, but likewise employed a portion of their time in transcribing Tacitus, &c. This laudable example was, in the 11th and 12th centuries, followed with great spirit and emulation by many English Monasteries."
139. TURNER, History of England, Vol. 11. p. 332 and 361. "No tyranny was ever established that was more unequivocally the creature of popular will, nor longer maintained by popular support; in no point did personal interest, and public welfare, more cordially unite, than in the encouragement of Monasteries."
140. BATES. Rural Philosophy, p. 322. "It is to be lamented, that, while the Papists are industriously planting Nunneries and other religious Societies in this Kingdom, some good Protestants, are not so far excited to imitate their example, as to form establishments for the education and protection of young women of serious disposition, or who are otherwise unprovided, where they might enjoy at least a temporary refuge, be instructed in the principles of religion, and in all such useful and domestic arts, as might qualify them, who were inclined to return into the world, for a pious and laudable discharge of the duties of common life. Thus might the comfort and welfare of many individuals be promoted, to the great benefit of society at large, and the interests of Popery, by improving on its own principles, be considerably counteracted."
141. QUARTERLY REVIEW. December 1811. "The world has never been so indebted to any body of men as to the illustrious order of Benedictine Monks; but historians, in relating the evil of which they were the occasion, too frequently forget the good which they produced. Even the commonest readers are acquainted with the arch miracle-monger, St. Dunstan, whilst the most learned of our countrymen scarcely remember the names of those admirable men, who went forth from England, and became the Apostles of the North, Tinian and Juan Fernandez are not more beautiful spots on the ocean, than Malmesbury , Lindisfarne and Jarrow, were, in the ages of our heptarchy. A community of pious men, devoted to literature and to the useful arts as well as to religion, seems, in those days, like a green Oasis amid the desert. Like stars on a moonless night, they shine upon us with a tranquil ray. If ever there was a man, who could truly be called venerable, it was he, to whom the appellation is constantly fixed, BEDE, whose life was passed in instructing his own generation, and preparing records for postenty. In those days, the Church offered the only asylum from the evils to which every country was exposed -- amidst continual wars, the Church enjoyed peace -- it was regarded as a sacred realm by men, who, though they hated one another, believed and feared the same God. Abused as it was by the worldly-minded and ambitious, and disgraced by the artifices of the designing, and the follies of the fanatic, it afforded a shelter to those who were better than the world in their youth, or weary of it in their age. The wise as well as the timid and gentle fled to this Goshen of God, which enjoyed its own light and calm, amidst darkness and storms."
142. This is a very elegant passage; but, as TURNER's Protestantism impels him to apply the term "tyranny" to that which honest feeling bids him say was the "creature of the popular will," and was produced and upheld by" a cordial union of personal interest and public welfare," so the Protestantism of the REVIEWERS leads them to talk about "evil" occasioned by an Order to whom "the world is more indebted than to any other body of men"; and it also leads them to repeat the hackneyed charge against St. DUNSTAN, forgetting, I dare say, that he is one of the Saints in our Protestant Church Calendar! However, here is more than enough to serve as an answer to the whole herd of writers who have put forth their venom against the Monastic Orders.
143. Can we refer to these authorities, can we see all the indubitable proofs of the real Christian charity and benevolence which were essentially connected with the religion of our forefathers, without feeling indignation against those who, from our infancy to our manhood, have been labouring to persuade us, that the Catholic Church produced selfishness, hardness of heart, greediness in the clergy, and particularly a want of feeling for the poor? Undeniable as is the fact, that the "Reformation" robbed the poor of their patrimony; clear as we shall, by-and-by, see the proofs of its power in creating paupers, and in taking from the higher all compassion for the lower classes, how incessant have been the efforts, how crafty the schemes, to make us believe precisely the contrary! If the salvation of their souls had been the object they had in view, the deceivers could not have laboured with more pains and anxiety. They have particularly bent their attention to the implanting of their falsehoods in the minds of children. The press has teemed, for two centuries and more, with cheap books having this object principally in view. Of one instance of this sort I cannot refrain from making particular mention; namely, a FABLE, in a Spelling-book, by one FENNING, which has been in use in England for more than half a century. The fable is called: "The priest and the jester." A man, as the fable says, went to a "Romish Priest," and asked charity of him. He began by asking for a guinea, but lowered the sum till it came to a farthing, and still the priest refused. Then the beggar asked for a "blessing," which the priest readily consented to give him: "No," said the beggar; "if it were worth but one single farthing you would not give it me." How indefatigable must have been these deceivers, when they could resort to means like these! What multitudes of children, how many millions of people, have, by this book alone, had falsehood, the most base and wicked, engraven upon their minds!
144. To proceed now with our inquiry relative to the effects of the Monastic Institutions, we may observe, that authorities, in this case, seemed necessary. The lies were of long standing: hypocritical selfishness, backed by every species of violence, tyranny and cruelty, had been at work for ages to delude the people of England. Those who had fattened upon the spoils of the church and the poor, and who wished still to enjoy the fatness in quiet, naturally laboured to persuade the people, that those who had been despolied were unworthy people; that the institutions, which gave them much property were, at least, useless; that the possessors were lazy, ignorant, and base creatures, spreading darkness over the country instead of light; devouring that which ought to have sustained worthy persons. When the whole press and all the pulpits of a country are leagued for such a purpose, and supported in that purpose by the State; and when the reviled party is, by terrors hardly to be described, reduced to silence; in such a case, the assailants must prevail; the mass of the people must believe what they say. Reason, in such a state of things, is out of the question. But TRUTH is immortal; and though she may be silenced for a while, there always, at last, comes something to cause her to claim her due and to triumph over falsehood.
143. There is now come that which is calculated to give our reasoning faculties fair play. We see the land covered at last with pauperism, fanaticism and crime. We hear an increase of the people talked of as a calamity; we hear of projects to check the breeding of the people; we hear of Scotch "feelosofers," prowling about the country, reading lectures to the manufacturers and artisans to instruct them in the science of preventing their wives from being mothers; and, in one instance, this has been pushed so far as to describe, in print, the mechanical process for effecting this object! In short, we are now arrived at a point which compels us to inquire into the cause of this monstrous state of things. The immediate cause we find to be the poverty and degradation of the main body of the people; and these, through many stages, we trace back to the "Reformation," one of the effects of which was to destroy those Monastic institutions which, as we shall now see, retained the produce of labour in the proper places, and distributed it in a way naturally tending to make the lives of the people easy and happy.
146. The authorities that I have cited ought to be of great weight in the question; but supposing there to be no authorities on the side of these institutions, of what more do they stand in need than the unfettered exercise of our reason? Reason, in such a ease, is still better than authorities; but who is to resist both? Let us ask, then, whether reason do not reject with disdain the slander that has been heaped on the Monastic Institutions. They flourished in England for nine hundred years; they were beloved by the people; they were destroyed by violence, by the plunderer's grasp, and the murderer's knife. Was there ever any thing, vicious in itself, or evil in its effects, held in veneration by a whole people for so long a time? Even in our own time, we see the people of Spain rising in defence of their Monasteries; and we hear the Scotch "feelosofers" abuse them, because they do not like to see the property of those Monasteries transferred to English Jews.
147. If the Monasteries had been the cause of evil, would they have been protected with such care by so many wise and virtuous kings, legislators, and judges? Perhaps ALFRED was the greatest man that ever lived. What writer of eminence, whether poet, lawyer, or historian, has not selected him as the object of his highest praises? As king, as soldier, as patriot, as lawgiver, in all his characters he is, by all, regarded as having been the greatest, wisest, most virtuous of men. And is it reasonable, then, for us to suppose, that he, whose whole soul was wrapped up in the hope of making his people free, honest, virtuous, and happy; is it reasonable to suppose, that he would have been, as he was, one oc the most munificent founders of Monasteries, if those institutions had been vicious in themselves, or had tended to evil? We have not these institutions and their effects immediately before our eyes. We do not actually see the Monasteries. But we know of them two things; namely, that they were most anxiously cherished by ALFRED and his tutor, Saint SWITHIN; and that they were destroyed by the bloody tyrant HENRY THE EIGHTH, and the not less bloody ruffian, THOMAS CROMWELL. Upon these two facts alone we might pretty safely decide on the merits of these institutions.
148. And what answer do we ever obtain to this argument? Mr. MERVYN ARCHDALL, in the Preface to his History of the Irish Monasteries, says: "When we contemplate the universality of that religious zeal which drew thousands from the elegance and comforts of society to sequestered solitude and austere maceration: when we behold the greatest and wisest of mankind the dupes of a fatal delusion, and even the miser expending his store to partake in the felicity of mortified ascetics: again, when we find the tide of enthusiasm subsided, and sober reason recovered from her delirium, and endeavouring, as it were, to demolish every vestige of her former frenzy, have a concise sketch of the history of Monachism, and no common instance of that mental weakness and versatility which stamp the character of frailty on the human species. We investigate these phenomena in the moral world with a pride arising from assumed superiority in intellectual powers, or higher degrees of civilization: our vanity and pursuit are kept alive by a comparison so decidedly in favour of modern times"? Indeed, Mr. ARCHDALL! And where are we to look for the proofs, or signs, of this "assumed superiority"; this "comparison so decidedly in favour of modern times"? Are we to find them in the ruins of those noble edifices, of the plunder and demolition of which you cite us an account? Are we to find them in the total absence of even an attempt to ornament your country with any thing to equal them in grandeur or in taste? Are we to look for this "superiority" in the numerous tithe-battles, pistol in hand, like that of SKIBEEREEN? Are modern times proved to be "decidedly superior" to former times by the law that shuts Irishmen up in their houses from sunset to sunrise? Are the people' s living upon pig-diet, their nakedness, their hunger, their dying by hundreds from starvation while their ports weree crowded with ships carrying provisions from their shores, and while an army was fed in the country, the business of which army was to keep the starving people quiet: are these amongst the facts on which you found your "comparison so decidedly in favour of modern times"? What, then, do you look with "PRIDE" to the ball at the Opera-house, for the relief of the starving people of ireland, the BALL-room "DECORATED with a transparency exhibiting an Irishman, as large as life, EXPIRING FROM HUNGER"? And do you call the "greatest and wisest of mankind" dupes; do you call them "the dupes of a fatal delusion," when they founded institutions which rendered a thought of Opera-house relief impossible? Look at the present wretched and horrible state of your country; then look again at your list of ruins; and then (for you are a church-parson, I see,) you will, I have no doubt, say, that, though the former have evidently come from the latter, it was "sober reason," and not thirst for plunder, that produced those ruins, and that it was "frenzy and mental weakness" in the "greatest and wisest of mankind" that produced the foundations of which those ruins are the melancholy memorials!
149. The hospitality and other good things proceeding from the Monasteries, as mentioned by the Protestant Bishop TANNER, are not to be forgotten; but we must take a close view of the subject, in order to do full justice to these calumniated institutions. It is our duty to show, that they were founded in great political wisdom as well as in real piety and charity. That they were not, as the false and malignant and selfish HUME has described them, mere dolers out of bread and meat and beer; but that they were great diffusers of general prosperity, happiness and content; and that one of their natural and necessary effects was, to prevent that state of things which sees but two classes of people in a community, masters and slaves, a very few enjoying the extreme of luxury, and millions doomed to the extreme of misery.
150. From the land all the good things come. Somebody must own the land. Those who own it must have the distribution of its revenues. If these revenues be chiefly distributed amongst the people, from whose labour they arise, and in such a way as to afford to them a good maintenance on easy terms, the community must be happy. If the revenues be alienated in very great part; if they be carried away to a great distance, and expended amongst those, from whose labour no part of them arise, the main body of the community must be miserable: poor houses, gaols, and barracks must arise. Now, one of the greatest advantages attending the Monasteries was, that they, of necessity, caused the revenues of a large part of the lands of the country to be spent on the spot whence those revenues arose. The hospitals and all the other establishments of the kind had the same tendency. There were, of the whole, great and small, not less, on an average, than fifty in each county; so that the revenues of the land diffused themselves, in great part, immediately amongst the people at large. We all well know how the state of a parish becomes instantly changed for the worse, when a noble or other great land-owner quits the mansion in it, and leaves that mansion shut up. Every one knows the effect which such a shutting up has upon the poor-rates of a parish. It is notorious, that the non-residence of the Clergy and of the noblemen and gentlemen is universally complained of as a source of evil to the country. One of the arguments, and a great one it is, in favour of severe game laws, is, that the game causes noblemen and gentlemen to reside. What, then, must have been the effect of twenty rich Monasteries in every county, expending constantly a large pan of their incomes on the spot? The great cause of the miseries of Ireland, at this moment, is "absenteeship"; that is to say, the absence of the land-owners , who draw away the revenues of the country, and expend them in other countries. If Ireland had still her seven or eight hundred Monastic Institutions, great and small, she would be, as she formerly was, prosperous and happy. There would be no periodical famines and typhus f evers; no need of sun-set and sun- rise laws; no Captain Rocks; no projects for preventing the people from increasing; no schemes for getting rid of a "surplus population"; none of that poverty and degradation that threaten to make a desert of the country, or to make it the means of destroying the greatness of England herself.
151. Somebody must own the lands; and the question is, whether it be best for them to be owned by those who constantly live, and constantly must live, in the country and in the midst of their estates; or, by those who always may, and who frequently will and do, live at a great distance from their lands, and draw away the revenues of them to be spent elsewhere. The monastics are, by many, called drones. Bishop TANNER has shown us that this charge is very false. But, if it were true; is not a drone in a cowl as good as a drone in a hat and top-boots? By drones, are meant those who do not work; and, do land-owners usually work? The lay land-owner and his family spend more of their revenues in a way not useful to the people than the monastics possibly could. But, besides this, besides the hospitality and charity of the monastics, and besides, moreover, the lien, the legal lien, which the main body of the people had, in many cases, to a share, directly or indirectly, in the revenues of the Monasteries, we are to look at the monks and nuns in the very important capacity of landlords and landladies. All historians, however Protestant or malignant, agree, that they were "easy landlords"; that they let their lands at low rents, and on leases of long terms of years; so that, says even HUME, "the farmers regarded themselves as a species of proprietors, always taking care to renew their leases before they expired." And was there no good in a class of landlords of this sort? Did not they naturally and necessarily create, by slow degrees, men of property? Did they not thus cause a class of yeomen to exist, real yeomen, independent of the aristocracy? And was not this class destroyed by the "Reformation," which made the farmers rack-renters and absolute dependants, as we see them to this day? And, was this change favourable, then, to political liberty? Monastics could possess no private property, they could save no money, they could bequeath nothing. They had a life interest in their estate, and no more. They lived, received, and expended in common. Historians need not have told us, that they were "easy landlords." They must have been such, unless human nature had taken a retrograde march expressly for their accommodation. And, was it not happy for the nation, that there was such a class of landlords? What a jump for joy would the farmers of England now give, if such a class were to return to- morrow, to get them out of the hands of the squandering and needy lord and his grinding land-valuer!
152. Then, look at the monastics as causing, in some of the most important of human affairs, that fixedness which is so much the friend of rectitude in morals, and which so powerfully conduces to prosperity, private and public. The Monastery was a proprietor that never died; its tenantry had to do with a deathless landlord; its lands and houses never changed owners; its tenants were liable to none of many uncertainties that other tenants were; its oaks had never to tremble at the axe of the squandering heir; its manors had not to dread a change of lords; its villagers had all been born and bred up under its eye and care; their character was of necessity a thing of great value, and, as such, would naturally be an object of great attention. A Monastery was the centre of a circle in the country, naturally drawing to it all that were in need of relief, advice, and protection, and containing a body of men, or of women, having no cares of their own, and having wisdom to guide the inexperienced, and wealth to relieve the distressed. And was it a good thing, then, to plunder and devastate these establishments; was it a reformation to squander estates, thus employed, upon lay persons, who would not, who could not, and did not, do any part or particle of those benevolent acts, and acts of public utility, which naturally arose out of the monastic institutions?
153. Lastly, let us look at the Monasteries as a resource for the younger Sons and daughters of the aristocracy, and as the means of protecting the government against the injurious effects of their clamorous wants. There cannot exist an aristocracy, or body of nobility, without the means, in the hands of the government, of preventing that body from falling into that contempt, which is, and always must be, inseparable from Noble-poverty. "Well," some will say, "why need that be any such body?" That is quite another question; for we have it; and have had it for more than a thousand rears; except during a very short interval, at the end of which our ancestors eagerly took it back again. I must, too. though it really has nothing to do with the question before us, repeat my opinion, many times expressed, that we should lose more than we should gain by getting rid of our aristocracy. The basest and most corrupt government that I ever knew any thing, or heard any thing of, is the republican government of PENNSYLVANIA, and, withal, the most truly tyrannical: base and corrupt from bottom to top; from the root to the topmost twig; from the trunk to the extreme point of every branch. And, if any PENNSYLVANIAN, who has a name, and who will put it as a challenge to me to prove my words, I will, before the face of all Europe, prove them in the most complete and ample manner. I am not, therefore, for republican government; and, then, it follows, that I am for an aristocracy; for, without it, there can be no limit to a kingly government.
134. However, this has nothing at all to do with the present question; we have the aristocracy, and we must, by a public provision of some sort, for the younger branches of it, prevent it from falling into the degradation inseparable from poverty. This provision was, in the times of which we are speaking, made by the Monasteries, which received a great number of its monks and nuns from the families of the nobles. This rendered those odious and burdensome things, pensions and sinecures, unnecessary. It, of course, spared the taxes. It was a provision that was not degrading to the receivers; and it created no grudging and discontent amongst the people, from whom the receivers took nothing. Another great advantage arising from this mode of providing for the younger branches of the nobility was, that it secured the government against the temptation to give offices and to lodge power in unfit hands. Look at our pension and sinecure list; look at the list of those who have commands, and who fill other offices of emolument; and you will, at once, see the great benefit which must have been derived from institutions, which left the government quite free to choose commanders, ambassadors, governors and other persons, to exercise power, and to be entrusted in the carrying on of the public affairs. These institutions tended, too, to check the increase of the race of nobles; to prevent the persons connected with that order from being multiplied to the extent to which they naturally would, otherwise, be multiplied. They tended also to make the nobles not so dependant on the Crown, a provision being made for their poor relations without the Crown's assistance; and, at the same time, they tended to make the people less dependant on the nobles than they otherwise would have been. The Monasteries set the example, as masters and landlords; an example that others were, in a great degree, compelled to follow. And thus, all ranks and degrees were benefited by these institutions, which, with malignant historians, have been a subject of endless abuse, and the destruction of which they have recorded with so much delight, as being one of the brightest features in the "Reformation"!
155. Nor must we, by any means, overlook the effects of these institutions on the mere face of the country. That soul must be low and mean indeed, which is insensible to all feeling of pride in the noble edifices of its country. Love of country, that variety of feelings which, altogether, constitute what we properly call patriotism, consist in part of the admiration of, and veneration for, ancient and magnificent proofs of skill and of opulence. The monastics built as well as wrote for posterity. The never-dying nature of their institutions set aside, in all their undertakings, every calculation as to time and age. Whether they built or planted, they set the generous example of providing for the pleasure, the honour, the wealth and greatness of generations upon generations yet unborn. They executed every thing in the very best manner: their gardens, fish-ponds, farms; in all, in the whole of their economy, they set an example tending to make the country beautiful, and to make it an object of pride with the people, and to make the nation truly and permanently great. Go into any county, and survey, even at this day, the ruins of its, perhaps, twenty Abbeys and Priories: and, then, ask yourself, "What have we in exchange for these"? Go to the site of some once-opulent Convent. Look at the cloister, now become, in the hands of a rack-renter, the receptacle for dung, fodder and fagot-wood: see the hall, where, for ages, the widow, the orphan, the aged and the stranger, found a table ready spread; see a bit of its walls now helping to make a cattleshed, the rest having been hauled away to build a workhouse: recognise, in the side of a barn, a part of the once magnificent chapel: and, if, chained to the spot by your melancholy musings, you be admonished of the approach of night by the voice of the screech-owl, issuing from those arches, which once, at the same hour, resounded with the vespers of the monk, and which have, for seven hundred years, been assailed by storms and tempests in vain: if thus admonished of the necessity of seeking food, shelter, and a bed, lift your eyes and look at the white-washed and dry-rotten shell on the hill, called the "gentleman's house;" and, apprised of the "board-wages" and the spring-guns, suddenly turn your head; jog away from the scene of devastation; with "old English Hospitality" in your mind, reach the nearest inn, and there, in a room half-warmed and half-lighted, and with reception precisely proportioned to the presumed length of your purse, sit down and listen to an account of the hypocritical pretences, the base motives, the tyrannical and bloody means, under which, from which, and by which, that devastation was effected, and that hospitality banished from ever front the land.
156. We have already seen something of these pretences, motives and acts of tyranny and barbarity; we have seen that the beastly lust of the chief tyrant was the groundwork of what is called the "Reformation"; we have seen that he could not have proceeded in his course without the concurrence of the Parliament; we have seen that, to obtain that concurrence, he held out to those who composed it a participation in the spoils of the Monasteries; and, when we look at the magnitude of their possessions, when we consider the beauty and fertility of the spots on which they, in general, were situated, when we think of the envy which the love borne them by the people must have excited in the hearts of a great many of the noblemen and gentlemen; when we thus reflect, we are not surprised, that these were eager for a "Reformation" that promised to transfer the envied possessions to them.
157. When men have power to commit, and are resolved to commit, acts of injustice, they are never at a loss for pretences. We shall presently see what were the prefences under which this devastation of England was begun: but, to do the work, there required a workman; as, to slaughter an ox, there requires a butcher. To turn the possessors of so large a part of the estates out of those estates, to destroy establishments venerated by the people from their childhood, to set all law, divine as well as human, at defiance, to violate every principle on which property rested, to rob the poor and helpless of the means of sustenance, to deface the beauty of the country, and make it literally a heap of ruins; to do these things, there re quired a suitable agent; and that agent the tyrant found in THOMAS CROMWELL, whose name, along with that of CRANMER, ought "to stand for aye accursed in the calendar." This CROMWELL was the son of a blacksmith of Putney, in Surrey. He had been an underling of some sort in the family of CARDINAL WOLSEY, and had recommended himself to the King by his sycophancy to him, and his treachery to his old master. The King, now become Head of the Church, and having the supremacy to exercise, had very judiciously provided himself with CRANMER as a primate; and, to match him, he provided himself with CROMWELL, who was equal to CRANMER in impiousness and baseness, rather surpassed him in dastardliness, and exceeded him decidedly in quality of ruffian. All nature could not, perhaps, have afforded another man so fit to be the "ROYAL VICEGERENT and VICAR-GENERAL" of the new head of the English Church.
158. Accordingly, with this character the brutal blacksmith was invested. He was to exercise "all the spiritual authority belonging to the King, for the due administration uf justice in all cases touching the ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and the godly reformation and redress of errors, heresies, and abuses in the said church." We shall very soon see proofs enough of the baseness of this nan, for whom ruffian is too gentle a term. What chance, then, did the Monasteries stand in his hands? He was created a peer. He sat before the primate in parliament, he sat above all the bishops in assemblies of the clergy, he took precedence of all the nobles, whether in office or out of office, and, as in character, so in place, he was second only to the chief tyrant himself.
159. In order to begin the "godly Reformation"; that is to say, the work of plunder, the "Vicegerent" blacksmith set on foot a visitation of the Monasteries! Dreadful visitation! He, active as he was in wickedness, could not do all the work himself. He, therefore, appointed deputies to assist in making this visitation. The kingdom was divided into districts for this purpose, and two deputies were appointed to visit each district. The object was to obtain grounds of accusation against the monks and nuns. \\then we consider what the object was, and what was the character of the man, to whom the work was committed, we may easily imagine what sort of men these deputies were. They were, in fact, fit to be the subalterns of such a chief. Some of the very worst men in all England; men of notoriously infamous characters; men who had been convieted of heinous crimes; some who had actually been branded; and, probably, not one man who had not repeatedly deserved the halter. Think of a respectable, peaceful, harmless and pious family, broken in upon, all of a sudden, by a brace of burglars with murder written on their scowling brows, demanding an instant production of their title-deeds, money and jewels; imagine such a scene as this, and you have then some idea of the visitations of these monsters, who came with the threat of the tyrant on their lips, who menaced the victims with charges of high treason, who wrote in their reports not what was, but what their merciless employers wanted them to write.
160. The monks and nuns, who had never dreamed of the possibility of such proceedings, who had never had an idea that Magna Charta and all the laws of the land could be set aside in a moment, and whose recluse and peaceful lives rendered them wholly unfit to cope with at once crafty and desperate villany, fell before these ruffians as chickens fall before the kite. The reports, made by these villains, met with no contradiction; the accused parties had no means of making a defence; there was no court for them to appear in; they dared. not, even if they had the means, to offer a defence or make a complaint; for they had seen the horrible consequences, the burnings, the rippings up, of all those of their brethren who had ventured to whisper their dissent from any dogma or decree of the tyrant. The project was to despoil people of their property; and yet the parties, from whom the property was to be taken, were to have no court in which to plead their cause, no means of obtaining a hearing, could make even no complaint but at the peril of their lives. They, and those who depended on them, were to be, at once, stripped of this great mass of property, without any other ground than that of reports, made by men, sent, as the malignant HUME himself confesses, for the express purpose of finding a pretence for the dissolution of the Monasteries and for the King's taking to himself property that had never belonged to him or his predecessors.
161. HUME dares not, in the face of such a multitude of facts that are upon record to the contrary, pretend that these reports were true; but, he does his best to put a gloss upon them, as we have seen in paragraph 129. He says, in order to effect by insinuation that which he does not venture to assert, that "it is, indeed, probable, that the blind submission of the people, during those ages, rendered the friars and nuns more unguarded and more dissolute than they are in any Roman Catholic country at present." Oh! say you so? And why more blind than now? It is just the same religion, there are the same rules, the peoples if blind then, are blind now; and, it would be singular indeed, that, when dissoluteness is become more common in the world, the "friars and nuns" should have become more guarded! However, we have here his acquittal of the Monasteries of the present day; and that is no small matter. It will be difficult, I believe, to make it appear "probable," that they were more unguarded, or more dissolute, in the sixteenth century; unless we believe, that the profound piety (which HUME calls superstition) of the people was not partaken of by the inhabitants of convents. Before we can listen to his insinuations in favour of these reports, we must believe that the persons belonging to the religious communities were a body of cunning creatures, believing in no part of that religion which they professed, and we must extend this our belief even to those numerous communities of women, who devoted their whole lives to the nursing of the sick poor!
162. However, upon reports thus obtained, an Act of Parliament was passed, in March, 1536, the same year that saw the end of ANNE BOLEYN, for the suppression, that is to say, confiscation, of three hundred and seventy-six monasteries, and for granting their estates, real and personal, to the King and his heirs! He took plate, jewels, gold and silver images and ornaments. This act of monstrous tyranny was, however, base as the Parliament was, and full as it was of greedy plunderers, not passed without some opposition. HUME says, "that it does not appear that any opposition was made to this important law." He frequently quotes SPELMAN as an historical authority; but, it did not suit him to quote SPELMAN's "History of Sacrilege," in which this Protestant historian says, that "the bill stuck long in the Lower House, and could get no passage, when the King commanded the Commons to attend him in the fore-noon in his gallery, where he let them wait till late in the afternoon, and then, coming out of his chamber, Walking a turn or two amongst them, and looking angrily on them, first on one side and then on the other, at last, 'I hear (saith he) that my bill will not pass; but, I will have it pass, or I will have some of your heads'; and, without other rhetoric, returned to his chamber. Enough was said; the bill passed, and all was given him as he desired."
163. Thus, then, it was an act of sheer tyranny; it was a pure Algerine proceeding at last. The pretences availed nothing: the reports of CROMWELL's myrmidons were not credited; every artifice had failed: resort was had to the halter and the axe to accomplish that "Reformation," of which the Scotch historian, BURNET, has called this monster the first-born son! So such man, he says, was necessary, to bring about this "great and glorious event." What! was ever good yet produced by wickedness so atrocious? Did any man but this BURNET and his countryman, HUME, ever affect to believe, that such barefaced injustice and tyranny were justified on the ground of their tending to good consequences?
164. In the next Number, when I shall have given an account of the whole of that devastation and sacking, of which we have, as yet, only seen a mere beginning, I shall come to the consequences, not only to the monks and nuns, but to the people at large; and shall show how a foundation was, in this very Act of Parliament, laid for that pauperism, misery, degradation and crime, which are now proposed to checked by laws to render the women barren, or to export the people to foreign lands.