CH. 2. Victory of CHAPTER II. THE LAST YEARS OF THE ADMINISTRATION TIMES OF WOLSEY. IMES were changed in England since the second Henry walked barefoot through the the clergy streets of Canterbury, and knelt while the monks venth and flogged him on the pavement in the Chapter-house, centuries. doing penance for Becket's murder. The clergy in the ele twelfth had won the battle in the twelfth century because they deserved to win it. They were not free from fault and weakness, but they felt the meaning of their profession. Their hearts were in their vows, their authority was exercised more justly, more nobly, than the authority of the crown; and therefore, with inevitable justice, the crown was compelled to stoop before them. The victory was great; but, like many victories, it was fatal to the conquerors. It filled them full with the vanity of power; they forgot their duties in their privileges; and when, a century later, the conflict recommenced, the altering issue proved the altering nature of the conditions under which it was The reac fought. The laity were sustained in vigour by tion and its the practical obligations of life; the clergy sunk under the influence of a waning religion, the administration of the forms of which had become causes. the civil their sole occupation; and as character forsook CH. 2. them, the Mortmain Act,* the Acts of Premunire, Gradual reand the repeatedly recurring Statutes of Provisors conquest by mark the successive defeats that drove them back authority. from the high post of command which character alone had earned for them. If the Black Prince had lived, or if Richard II. had inherited the temper of the Plantagenets, the ecclesiastical system would have been spared the misfortune of a longer reprieve. Its worst abuses would have then terminated, and the reformation of doctrine in the sixteenth century would have been left to fight its independent way unsupported by the moral corruption of the church from which it received its most powerful impetus. The nation Proposed was ready for sweeping remedies. The people of the mofelt little loyalty to the pope, as the language of interes the Statutes of Provisorst conclusively proves, and they were prepared to risk the sacrilege of confiscating the estates of the religious houses-a complete measure of secularization being then, as I have already said, the expressed desire of the House of Commons. With an Edward III. on the throne such a measure would very likely have been executed, and the course of English history would have been changed. It was ordered otherwise, and doubtless wisely. The church was allowed a hundred and fifty more years to fill full * 27 Ed. III. stat. I; 38 Ed. III. stat. 2; 16 Rich. cap. 5. 25 Ed. III. stat. 4; stat. 5, cap. 22; 13 Rich. II. stat. 2, cap. 2; 2 Hen. IV. cap. 3; 9 Hen. IV. cap. 8. See p. 66. § Lansdowne MS. 1, fol. 26; STOW'S Chron. ed. 1630, p. 338. dissolution in the fifteenth cen tury. CH. 2. the measure of her offences, that she might fall only when time had laid bare the root of her degeneracy, and that faith and manners might be changed together. The history of the time is too imperfect to justify a positive conclusion. It is possible, however, that the success of the revolution effected by Henry IV. was due in part to a reaction in the church's favour; and it is certain that this prince, if he did not owe his crown to the support of the church, determined to conciliate it. He confirmed the Statutes of Provisors, but he allowed them to sink into disuse. He forbade the further mooting of the confiscation project; and to him is due the first permission of the bishops to send heretics to Leanings of the stake.† If English tradition is to be trusted, of Lancas- the clergy still felt insecure; and the French wars the church. of Henry V. are said to have been undertaken, as the House ter towards * we all know from Shakspeare, at the persuasion of Archbishop Chichele, who desired to distract his attention from reverting to dangerous subjects. Whether this be true or not, no prince of the house of Lancaster betrayed a wish to renew the quarrel with the church. The battle of Agincourt, the conquest and re-conquest of France, called off the attention of the people; while the rise of the Lollards, and the intrusion of speculative questions, the agitation of which has ever been the chief aversion of English statesmen, Lull in the contributed to change the current; and the reformreforming ing spirit must have lulled before the outbreak spirit. of the wars of the Roses, or one of the two СH. 2. parties in so desperate a struggle would have scarcely failed to have availed themselves of it. Edward IV. is said to have been lenient towards heresy; but his toleration, if it was more than imaginary, was tacit only; he never ventured to avow it. It is more likely that in the inveterate frenzy of those years men had no leisure to remember that heresy existed. The clergy were thus left undisturbed to go The clergy their own course to its natural end. are left un of their The storm disturbed. had passed over them without breaking; and they did not dream that it would again gather. The The trials immunity which they enjoyed from the general position. sufferings of the civil war contributed to deceive them; and without anxiety for the consequences, and forgetting the significant warning which they had received, they sank steadily into that condition which is inevitable from the constitution of human nature, among men without faith, wealthy, powerful, and luxuriously fed, yet condemned to celibacy, and cut off from the common duties and common pleasures of ordinary life. On the return of a settled government, they were startled for a moment in their security; the conduct of some among them had become so unbearable, that even Henry VII., who inherited the Lancastrian sympathies, was compelled to notice it; and the following brief act was passed by his first parliament, proving by the very terms in which it is couched the existing nature of church discipline. For the more sure and likely reformation,' it Complaints runs, 'of priests, clerks, and religious men, cul- irregula of clerical rities. CH. 2. pable, or by their demerits openly noised of incontinent living in their bodies, contrary to their order, be it enacted, ordained, and established, that it be lawful to all archbishops and bishops, and other ordinaries having episcopal jurisdiction, to punish and chastise such religious men, being within the bounds of their jurisdiction, as shall be convict before them, by lawful proof, of adultery, fornication, incest, or other fleshly incontinency, by committing them to ward and prison, there to remain for such time as shall be thought convenient for the quality of their trespasses.'* Previous to the passing of this act, therefore, the bishops, who had power to arrest laymen on suspicion of heresy, and detain them in prison untried,† had no power to imprison priests, even though convicted of adultery or incest. The legislature were supported by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Cardinal Morton procured authority from the pope to visit the religious houses, the abominations of which had become notorious;‡ and in a provincial synod held on the 24th of February, 1486, he laid the condition of the secular clergy before the assembled prelates. Many priests, it was stated, spent their time in hawking or hunting, in lounging at taverns, in the † 2 Hen. IV. cap. 15. 1 Hen. VII. cap. 4. Among | Petition of the Clergy of the the miscellaneous publications Diocese of Bangor, vol. iii. of of the Record Commission, there this work, p. 372, note. is a complaint presented during this reign, by the gentlemen and the farmers of Carnarvonshire, accusing the clergy of systematic seduction of their wives and daughters; and see a MORTON'S Register, MS. Lambeth. See vol. ii. cap. 10, of the second edition of this work for the results of Morton's investigation. |