It is quite common to restrict this inquiry to a consideration of
the report made by the commissioners against the monks, and to the
methods employed by them in their investigations. The implication is
that if the accusations against the monasteries can be discredited, or
if it can be shown that the motives of the destroyers were selfish and
their methods cruel, then it follows that the overthrow of the
monasteries was a most iniquitous and unwarrantable proceeding.
Reflection will show that the question cannot be so restricted. It may
be found that the monastic institution should have been destroyed, even
though the charges against the monks were grossly exaggerated, the
motives of the king unworthy, and the means he employed despicable.
At the outset a few facts deserve mention. It is usual for
Protestants to recall with pride the glorious heroism of Protestant
martyrs, but it should be remembered that Roman Catholicism also has
had its martyrs. Protestant powers have not been free from tyranny and
bloodshed. That noble spirit of self-sacrifice which has glorified many
a character in history is not to be despised in one who dies for what
we may pronounce to be false.
It must also be granted that the action of the king was not dictated
by a pure passion for religious reform. Indeed it is a fair question
whether Henry may be claimed by the Protestants at all. Aside from his
rejection of the pope's authority, he was thoroughly Catholic in
conviction and in practice. His impatience with the pope's position
respecting his divorce, his need of money, his love of power, and many
other personal considerations determined his attitude toward the
papacy.
It should also be freely conceded that the royal commissioners were
far from exemplary characters, and that they were often insolent and
cruel in the prosecution of their work.
“Our posterity,” says John Bale, “may well curse this wicked fact of
our age; this unreasonable spoil of England's most noble antiquities.”
“On the whole,” says Blunt, “it may be said that we must ever look back
on that destruction as a series of transactions in which the sorrow,
the waste, the impiety that were wrought, were enough to make the
angels weep. It may be true that the monastic system had worn itself
out for practical good; or at least, that it was unfitted for those
coming ages which were to be so different from the ages that were past.
But slaughter, desecration and wanton destruction, were no remedies for
its sins, or its failings; nor was covetous rapacity the spirit of
reformation.”
Hume observes that “during times of faction, especially of a
religious kind, no equity is to be expected from adversaries; and as it
was known that the king's intention in this visitation was to find a
pretext for abolishing the monasteries, we may naturally conclude that
the reports of the commissioners are very little to be relied upon.”
Hallam declares that “it is impossible to feel too much indignation at
the spirit in which the proceedings were conducted.”
But these and other just and honorable concessions in the interests
of truth, which are to be found on the pages of eminent Protestant
historians, are made to prove too much. It must be said that writers
favorable to monasticism take an unfair advantage of these admissions,
which simply testify to a spirit of candor and a love of truth, but do
not contain the final conclusions of these historians. Employing these
witnesses to confirm their opinions, the defenders of monasticism
proceed with fervid, glowing rhetoric, breathing devotion and love on
every page, to paint the sorrows and ruin of the Carthusian Fathers,
and the abbots of Glastonbury and Reading. They ask, “Is this your
boasted freedom, to slay these men in cold blood, not for immorality,
but because they honestly did not acknowledge what no Protestant of
to-day admits, viz.: that King Henry was the Supreme Head of the
Church?” Having pointed out the exaggerations in the charges against
the monks and having made us weep for the aged fathers of the
Charterhouse, they skillfully lead the unwary to the conclusion that
the suppression should never have taken place. This conclusion is
illogical. The case is still open.
Furthermore, if one cared to indulge in historical reminiscences, he
might justly express astonishment that Rome should object to an
investigation conducted by men whose minds were already made up, or
that she should complain because force was employed to carry out a
needed reform. Did the commissioners take a few altar-cloths and
decorate their horses? Did Rome never adorn men in garments of shame
and parade them through streets to be mocked by the populace, and
finally burned at the stake? Were the altar-cloths dear to Catholic
hearts? Were not the Bibles burned in France, in Germany, in Spain, in
Holland, in England, dear to the hearts of the reformers? But however
justifiable such a line of argument may be, there is little to be
gained by charging the sins of the past against the men of to-day.
Nevertheless, if these facts and many like them were remembered, less
would be said about the cruelties that accompanied the suppression of
the monasteries.
Were the charges against the monks true? It seems impossible to
doubt that in the main they were, although it should be admitted that
many monasteries were beyond reproach. Eliminating gross exaggerations,
lies and calumnies, there still remains a body of evidence that compels
the verdict of guilt. The legislation of the church councils, the
decrees of popes, the records of the courts, the reports of
investigating committees appointed by various popes, the testimony of
the orders against each other, the chronicles, letters and other extant
literature, abound in such detailed, specific charges of monastic
corruption that it is simply preposterous to reject the testimony. All
the efforts at reformation, and they were many, had failed. Many
bishops confessed their inability to cope with the growing disorders.
It is beyond question that lay robbers were encouraged to perpetrate
acts of sacrilege because the monks were frequently guilty of forgery
and violence. Commenting upon the impression which monkish lawlessness
must have made upon the minds of such men as Wyclif, Pike says: “They
saw with their own eyes those wild and lawless scenes, the faint
reflection of which in contemporaneous documents may excite the wonder
of modern lawyers and modern moralists.” The legislation of church and
state for a century before Henry VIII. shows that the monks were guilty
of brawling, frequenting taverns, indulging in licentious pleasures and
upholding unlawful games.
Bonaventura, the General of the Franciscan Order in its earliest
days, and its palmiest, for the first years of a monastic order were
always its best years—this mendicant, their pride and their glory,
tells us that within fifty years of the death of its founder there were
many mendicants roaming around in disorderly fashion, brazen and
shameless beggars of scandalous fame. This unenviable record was kept
up down to the days of Wyclif, who charged the begging friars with
representing themselves as holy and needy, while they were robust of
body, rich in possessions, and dwelt in splendid houses, where they
gave sumptuous banquets. What shall one say of the hysterical ravings
against Henry of the “Holy Maid of Kent,” whose fits and predictions
were palmed off by five ecclesiastics, high in authority, as
supernatural manifestations? What must have been the state of
monasteries in which such meretricious schemes were hatched, to deceive
silly people, thwart the king and stop the movements for reform?
Moreover, the various attempts to reform or to suppress the
monasteries prior to Henry's time show he was simply carrying out what,
in a small way, had been attempted before. King John, Edward I. and
Edward III., had confiscated “alien priories.” Richard II. and Henry
IV. had made similar raids. In 1410, the House of Commons proposed the
confiscation of all the temporalities held by bishops, abbots and
priors, that the money might be used for a standing army, and to
increase the income of the nobles and secular clergy. It was not done,
but the attempt shows the trend of public opinion on the question of
abolishing the monasteries. In 1416, Parliament dissolved the alien
priories and vested their estates in the crown. There is extant a
letter of Cardinal Morton, Legate of the Apostolic See, and Archbishop
of Canterbury, to the abbot of St. Albans, one of the mightiest abbeys
in all England. It was written as the result of an investigation
started by Innocent VIII., in 1489. In this communication the abbot and
his monks were charged with the grossest licentiousness, waste and
thieving. Lina Eckenstein, in her interesting work on “Woman Under
Monasticism,” says: “It were idle to deny that the state of discipline
in many houses was bad, but the circumstances under which Morton's
letter was penned argue that the charges made in it should be accepted
with some reservation.” In 1523, Cardinal Wolsey obtained bulls from
the pope authorizing the suppression of forty small monasteries, and
the application of their revenues to educational institutions, on the
ground that the houses were homes neither of religion nor of learning.
What Henry did, every country in Europe has felt called upon to do
in one way or another. Germany, Italy, Spain, France have all
suppressed monasteries, and despite the suffering which attended the
dissolution in England, the step was taken with less loss of life and
less injury to the industrial welfare of the people than anywhere else
in Europe[J].
[Footnote J: Appendix, Note J.]
Hooper, who was made a bishop in the reign of Edward VI., expressed
the Protestant view of Henry's reforms in a letter written about the
year 1546. “Our king,” he says, “has destroyed the pope, but not
popery.... The impious mass, the most shameful celibacy of the clergy,
the invocation of saints, auricular confession, superstitious
abstinence from meats, and purgatory, were never before held by the
people in greater esteem than at the present moment.” In other words,
the independence of the Church of England was secured by those who, if
they were not Roman Catholics, were certainly closer in faith to Rome
than they were to Protestantism. The Protestant doctrines did not
become the doctrines of the Church of England until the reign of Edward
VI., and it was many years after that before the separation from Rome
was complete in doctrine as well as respects the authority of the pope.
These facts indicate that there must have been other causes for the
success of the English Reformation than the greed or ambition of the
monarch. Those causes are easily discovered. One of them was the
hostility of the people to the alien priories. The origin of the alien
priories dates back to the Norman conquest. The Normans shared the
spoils of their victory with their continental friends. English
monasteries and churches were given to foreigners, who collected the
rents and other kinds of income. These foreign prelates had no other
interest in England than to derive all the profit they could from their
possessions. They appointed whom they pleased to live in their houses,
and the monks, being far away from their superiors, became a source of
constant annoyance to the English people. The struggle against these
alien priories had been carried on for many years, and so many of them
had been abolished that the people became accustomed to the seizure of
monasteries.
Large sums of money were annually paid to the pope, and the English
people were loudly complaining of the constant drain on their
resources. It was a common saying in the reign of Henry III., that
“England is the pope's farm.” The “Good Parliament,” in 1376, affirmed
“that the taxes paid to the church of Rome amounted to five times as
much as those levied for the king; ... that the brokers of the sinful
city of Rome promoted for money unlearned and unworthy caitiffs to
benefices of the value of a thousand marks, while the poor and learned
hardly obtain one of twenty.” Various laws, heartily supported by the
clergy as well as by the civil authorities, were enacted from time to
time, aimed at the abuses of papal power. So steadfast and strong was
the opposition to the interference of foreigners in English affairs, it
would be possible to show that there was an evolution in the struggle
against Rome that was certain to culminate in the separation, whether
Henry had accomplished it or not. What might have occurred if the monks
had reformed and the pope withdrawn his claims it is impossible to
know. The fact is that the monks grew worse instead of better, and the
arrogance of foreigners became more unendurable. “The corruption of the
church establishment, in fact,” says Lea, “had reached a point which
the dawning enlightenment of the age could not much longer endure....
Intoxicated with centuries of domination, the muttered thunders of
growing popular discontent were unheeded, and its claims to spiritual
and temporal authority were asserted with increasing vehemence, while
its corruptions were daily displayed before the people with more
careless cynicism.” In view of this condition of affairs, the existence
of which even the adherents of modern Rome must acknowledge, one cannot
but wonder that the ruin of the monasteries should be attributed to
Henry's desire “to overthrow the rights of women, to degrade matrimony
and to practice concubinage.” Such an explanation is too superficial;
it ignores a multitude of historical facts.
The monasteries had to fall if England was to be saved from the
horrors of civil war, if the hand of the pope was to remain uplifted
from her, if the insecure gains of the Reformation were to become
established and glorious achievements; if, in fact, all those benefits
accompanying human progress were to become the heritage of succeeding
ages.
Whatever benefits the monks had conferred upon mankind, and these
were neither few nor slight, they had become fetters on the advancement
of freedom, education and true religion. They were the standing army of
the pope, occupying the last and strongest citadel. They were the
unyielding advocates of an ideal that was passing away. It was sad to
see the Carthusian house fall, but in spite of the high character of
its inmates, it was a part of an institution that stood for the right
of foreigners to rule England. It was unfortunate they had thrown
themselves down before the car of progress but there they were; they
would not get up; the car must roll on, for so God himself had decreed,
and hence they were crushed in its advance. Their martyrdom was truly a
poor return for their virtues, but there never has been a moral or
political revolution that has furthered the general well-being of
humanity, in which just and good men have not suffered. It would be
delightful if freedom and progress could be secured, and effete
institutions destroyed or reformed, without the accompaniment of
disaster and death, but it is not so.
The monks stood for opposition to reform, and therefore came into
direct conflict with the king, who was blindly groping his way toward
the future, and who was, in fact, the unconscious agent of many reform
forces that concentrated in him. He did not comprehend the significance
of his proceedings. He did not take up the cause of the English people
with the pure and intelligent motive of encouraging free thought and
free religion. He did not realize that he was leading the mighty army
of Protestant reformers. He little dreamed that the people whose cause
he championed would in turn assert their rights and make it impossible
for an English sovereign to enjoy the absolute authority which he
wielded. Truly “there is a power, not ourselves,” making for freedom,
progress and truth.
Thus a number of causes brought on the ruin of the monasteries.
Henry's need of money; the refusal of the monks to sign the acts of
supremacy and succession; the general drift of reform, and the iniquity
of the monks. They fell from natural causes and through the operation
of laws which God alone controls. As Hill neatly puts it, “Monasticism
was healthy, active and vigorous; it became idle, listless and
extravagant; it engendered its own corruption, and out of that
corruption came death.”
Richard Bagot, a Catholic, in a recent article on the question,
“Will England become Catholic?” which was published in the “Nuova
Antologia,” says: “Though it is impossible not to blame the so-called
Reformers for the acts of sacrilege and barbarism through which they
obtained the religious and political liberty so necessary to the
intellectual and social progress of the race, it cannot be denied that
no sooner had the power of the papacy come to an end in England than
the English nation entered upon that free development which has at last
brought it to its present position among the other nations of the
world.” Mr. Bagot also admits that “the political intrigues and
insatiable ambition of the papacy during the succeeding centuries
constituted a perpetual menace to England.”
The true view, therefore, is that two types of religious and
political life, two epochs of human history, met in Henry's reign. The
king and the pope were the exponents of conflicting ideals. The fall of
the monasteries was an incident in the struggle. “The Catholics,” says
Froude, “had chosen the alternative, either to crush the free thought
which was bursting from the soil, or to be crushed by it; and the
future of the world could not be sacrificed to preserve the exotic
graces of medieval saints.”
The problem is reduced to this, Was the Reformation desirable? Is
Protestantism a curse or a blessing? Would England and the world be
better off under the sway of medieval religion than under the influence
of modern Protestantism? If monasticism were a fetter on human liberty
and industry, if the monasteries were “so many seminaries of
superstition and of folly,” there was but one thing to do—to break the
fetters and to destroy the monasteries. To have succeeded in so radical
a reform as that begun by King Henry, with forty thousand monks
preaching treason, would have been an impossibility. Henry cannot be
blamed because the monks chose to entangle themselves with politics and
to side with Rome as against the English nation.