Cardinal Morton, fifty years before, being armed with an authority which the monks could not gainsay, 'found' a good deal. I have admitted above, possibly without clear proof, that it was but a minority of the pre-Reformation clergy who deserved the denunciations which Colet put in such general and trenchant terms. Indeed, we may believe, and be thankful to believe, that Chaucer's good and humble and gentle 'parson' was ever to be found more frequently than the opposite characters; but what are we to think of times in which the latter could exist in appreciable numbers at all 1 and what of the political effect which their existence must have had in an age when, after a slumber of many generations, a general uprising was at hand in which no belief, no institution, no class of men, could escape being called in question? To put the question in a practical shape, what would happen in the present day if an archbishop could state officially of any imaginable ecclesiastical institution one quarter of what Cardinal Morton stated against the greatest monastery of the fifteenth century?
One further question in conclusion. If the clergy were as immaculate as Canon Dixon and Father Gasquet will have them, how was it that they were so bitterly hated by the people, as is evidenced by the letter of Bishop Fitz-James's, and the despatches of Chapuy referred to in the text? It must be admitted that the tone of morality in the sixteenth century was, on the whole, low, and there is certainly evidence enough that among the clergy it was not higher than among the laity.
Over and above that which is contained in the authorities referred to above, I may cite a letter[1] from Foxe, Bishop of Winchester, to Wolsey, dated January 2, 1520-1. He expresses satisfaction at Wolsey's proposed reformation of the clergy, ' the day of which he had desired to see as Simeon desired to see the Messiah. As for himself, though within his own small jurisdiction he had given nearly all his study to the work for nearly three years, yet whenever he had to correct and punish, he found the clergy and particularly (what he did not at first suspect) the monks, so depraved, so licentious and corrupt, that he despaired of any proper reformation till the work was undertaken on a more general scale, and with a stronger arm.'
Again, in 1561 there are letters[2] from John Scory, Bishop of Hereford, to Cecil, in which he requests to have power to nominate
- ↑ In the National Biography, article 'Foxe,' by the President of C. C. C, Oxford.
- ↑ State Papers, Eliz. vol. xvii. 32.
