selves, it is necessary to say something here about the persons who instigated the business, the manner in which they carried it out, and the immediate consequences of the change.
Henry VIII. united in his own person all the terrible and dangerous traits of his predecessors on both sides of his house—as unscrupulous and hypocritical as Henry IV., as wasteful and extravagant as Edward IV., as pitiless in sweeping away obstacles from his path as Richard III., as cunning and lawyer-like as Henry VII.; and to these qualities he added a temperament ready at any moment to kindle into fury, and once that fury was kindled, he spared neither man nor woman— neither Sir Thomas More nor the mother of his child. We must go back to the Roman Empire for his parallel. He began as a splendid, ostentatious prince, squandering on shows the vast sums his father had wrung out of the nation ; but after Wolsey's fall he reigned by sheer terror. His trembling Parliament resigned into his bloodstained hands their civil as well as their religious liberties. He beggared his people, and then hanged them for being beggars.[1] He made poverty in England a crime. Three hundred years after Magna Charta, an English King passed laws by proclamation! And an English Parliament assented! So much ground was lost in his time, that it was a hundred years before Parliament dared once more assert itself, and it cost us another half-century, civil war, and two revolutions, before constitutional government triumphed.
This is not the place to consider the foul accusations against the religious houses—we are concerned here with the conduct of the new, not of the old owners. It is enough to say that the preambles of the Acts of Suppression, and the King's Speech to the adjourned Parliament of 1525, are enough to throw the gravest suspicion on the good
- ↑ By the 27 Henry VIII. c. 25 (1535), a sturdy vagabond was to be whipped the first time he was taken begging; "if he continue his roguish life," to have the upper part of the gristle of his right ear cut off. If after that "taken wandering in idleness, or doth not apply to his labour, or is not in service with any master, he shall be adjudged and executed as a felon." From this it would appear that the mere fact of his having been thrice out of work constituted felony. This is the earliest Act for the hanging of vagrants or beggars.—Compare p. 100.
