VI CHAP previously to the repudiation of the papal supremacy to be paid to the Pope. Furthermore, he had the £24,000 a-year fine which the clergy paid to him as a composition for his pardon on account of a crime which they had never committed, and this sum His great probably amounted to nearly a quarter of a million of our money. But notwithstanding these extraChurch al- ordinary windfalls, and the ordinary immense wealth of the crown during his reign, the King began to feel about for further augmentations of his revenue as soon as the exhaustion of the five years' extortion drew near. revenue ready insufficient up the funds re quired Since the fall of Wolsey, his former secretary, for making Thomas Cromwell, had been the King's chief adviser, and the attack upon the monasteries was suggested by him as a means of overcoming the principal difficulty of his government, that of providing funds to meet the unbounded and licentious extravagance of the court. The precedent set by Wolsey was technically adhered to, though with a totally different object. Wolsey had caused a visitation of the monasteries to be made, with the view of ascertaining their real condition and devising measures for their reformation. Out of this visitation, no doubt, arose his plans for the dissolution of small monasteries, that they might be converted into colleges and bishoprics. Acting on this precedent, the smaller Wolsey's monasteries were first attacked by Henry VIII. and precedent of visita- his obsequious tool, Cromwell; the dissolution being tion preceded by a general visitation, that it might not seem so much an act of mere tyrannical violence as it really was. In the first Act of Suppression [1535-6] the clergy are said to be still "in debt" to the King on account of this fine. VI which By the 20th clause of an act of 1533, "concerning CHAP Peter's-pence and Dispensations" [25 Hen. VIII. c. 21], the right of visitation had been transferred from A.D. 1535 the Pope to the King, who was thus empowered to Act under issue commissions under the Great Seal for visiting monaster"monasteries, colleges, hospitals, priories, houses, ies visited and places religious, exempt." Commissioners thus appointed were intended to occupy the same legal position as those who had acted under the authority of Wolsey when he himself was acting with the King's license as legate a latere of the Pope; and it is not unlikely that Cromwell had gone round the country in this capacity, as well as to Ipswich, when in the service of Wolsey. If so, he thus acquired much information respecting the condition of the religious houses, which would well qualify him for taking the lead in their destruction. visitations visitation The first royal commissions under this act were for Earliest the visitation of the Charter House monks in London, and the Observants at Richmond and Greenwich, all of whom had been accused of complicity in the treason of "the Maid of Kent," and of opposing the King and his divorce, and in his assumption of the supremacy. But the commission for a general visi- General tation of all the monasteries was not issued, or at least not put in force until the autumn of 1535.5 No copy of the commission itself is known to be in existence, but the "Articles of Enquiry," and the "Injunctions" which the commissioners carried with them, may still be seen in the British Museum library. The names of the commissioners can be cussions of the Privy Council on the subject. Lord Herbert (p. 424) gives two speeches for and against the dissolution which appear to be intended as representing the dis 6 Cotton. MSS. Cleop. E. 4, fol. 13, 21. VI 7 CHAP partly gathered from their letters, of which a large number remain, and of which many have been printed A. D. 1535 in recent times. They appear to have been Dr. Names of John London, Dr. Thomas Legh, John Ap Rice, visitors Thomas Bedyll, Henry Polsted, John Anthony, Dr. Character of visitors Richard Layton, Edmond Knyghtley, John Lane, George Gyffard, Robert Burgoyn, John Williams, Richard Pollard, Philip Paris, John Smyth, William Hendle, Richard Bellasys, Richard Watkyns, William Parr, Robert Southwell, Thomas Mildmay, William Petre, and Richard Yngworth, Suffragan Bishop of Dover. But these were probably put into the commission at various dates between 1535 and 1538, and the most active all along appear to have been London, Legh, Layton, Ap Rice, and the Bishop of Dover: all of whom had, as well as some of the others, been employed already by Cromwell in some or other of the unclean transactions which he had to manage.s What these men were is sufficiently evident from their letters, and from the disgraceful facts that are known respecting several of them. Fuller sums up their character in a few pithy words, "They were men who well understood the message they went on, and would not come back without a satisfactory answer to him that sent them, knowing themselves were likely to be no losers thereby."" The general impression of contemporaries was that they were men of no principle, sent out with certain nominal objects In Ellis' Orig. Lett., III. iii., Layton and Ap Rice (Notary sioners sent to interrogate Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More when in the Tower, June 14, 1535. St. Pap., i. 431. Fuller's Ch. History, ii. 214 ed. 1837. VI in view, but really pledged to foregone conclusions, CHAP and to the accomplishment of as much confiscation as they could manage. A.D. 1535 ments on acted jurisdic pended by Cranmer, 1535 These commissioners went to their work armed Instru. with the most complete authority, although they which they themselves continued in the most servile dependence upon Cromwell. They were furnished with (1) a set of eighty-six Articles of Enquiry, (2) with twenty-five Injunctions to which they had authority to add without limit in any cases in which they thought fit to do so; and (3) for fear the bishops should interfere with them, all episcopal authority was suspended Episcopal during their visitation by an inhibition which was tion susissued by Cranmer, under the King's command, at per the outset of their expedition.1 Both the Articles of Sept. 18, Enquiry and the Injunctions were of a vexatious character, and it is evident from the revelations of the commissioners themselves that they were intended to bear so hardly upon the inmates of the religious houses as to compel them immediately or eventually to resign and depart quietly, or to be expelled as contumacious and incapable of reformation. "Sir," says Ap Rice, writing to Cromwell, "although I Voluntary reckon it well done if all were out, yet I think it were best that at their own instant suit they might raged be dismissed to avoid calumniation and envy. And so compelling them to observe these injunctions, ye shall have them all to do so shortly. And the people shall know it the better that it cometh upon their suit, if they be not straight discharged while we are here. For then the people would say that we 1 Collier, iv. 294, ed. 1852. The Inhibition itself, from Bp. Stokesley's Register, is in his Records, No. xxxi. 2 The Articles of Enquiry and the Injunctions are printed in Wilkins' Concilia, iii. 786. expulsion encou CHAP went for no other cause about than to expel them, VI though the truth were contrary. For they judge all A.D. 1535 things of the effects that followeth, and not always of Visitors the truth." But the visitors had other means also impossible which do not appear upon the face of the Injunctions to live in for making the lives of the monks intolerable under the royal yoke. made it the mon asteries For the first thing they did was to take possession. of all the most valuable goods of the monasteries and pack them off to London. "Please it your good Lordship to be advertised," writes Sir Piers Dutton to Cromwell, "Mr. Combes and Mr. Bolles, the King's commissioners within this county of Chester, were lately at Norton, within the same county, for the suppressing of the abbey there. And when they valuable had packed up such jewels and stuff as they had there, property and thought upon the morrow after to depart thence, Taking away all the abbot gathered a great company together, to the Ellis' Orig. Letters, III. iii. 119. 4 Ibid., p. 42. |
