Part 4 (1/2)
They have begged so importunatly that they have gotten ynto their hondes more than a therd part of all youre Realme. The goodliest lords.h.i.+ppes, maners, londes, and territories, are theyres. Besides this, they have the tenth part of all the corne, medowe, pasture, gra.s.se, wolle, coltes, calves, lambes, pigges, gese and chikens. Ye, and they looke so narowly uppon theyre proufittes, that the poore wyves must be countable to thym of every tenth eg, or elles she gett.i.th not her rytes at ester, shal be taken as an heretike.... Is it any merveille that youre people so compleine of povertie?
The Turke nowe, in your tyme, shulde never be abill to get so moche grounde of christendome.... And whate do al these gredy sort of st.u.r.dy, idell, holy theves? These be they that have made an hundredth thousand idell h.o.r.es in your realme.
These be they that catche the pokkes of one woman, and here them to an other.
The pet.i.tioner goes on to tell how they steal wives and all their goods with them, and if any man protest they make him a heretic, ”so that it maketh him wisshe that he had not done it”. Also they take fortunes for ma.s.ses and then don't say them. ”If the Abbot of west-minster shulde sing every day as many ma.s.ses for his founders as he is bounde to do by his foundacion, 1000 monkes were too few.” The pet.i.tioner suggests that the king shall ”tie these holy idell theves to the cartes, to be whipped naked about every market towne till they will fall to laboure!”
Church History
King Henry did not follow this suggestion precisely, but he took away the property of the religious orders for the expenses of his many wives and mistresses, and forced the clergy in England to forswear obedience to the Pope and make his royal self their spiritual head.
This was the beginning of the Anglican Church, as distinguished from the Catholic; a beginning of which the Anglican clergy are not so proud as they would like to be. When I was a boy, they taught me what they called ”church history”, and when they came to Henry the Eighth they used him as an ill.u.s.tration of the fact that the Lord is sometimes wont to choose evil men to carry out His righteous purposes.
They did not explain why the Lord should do this confusing thing, nor just how you were to know, when you saw something being done by a murderous adulterer, whether it was the will of the Lord or of Satan; nor did they go into details as to the motives which the Lord had been at pains to provide, so as to induce his royal agent to found the Anglican Church. For such details you have to consult another set of authorities--the victims of the plundering.
When I was in college my professor of Latin was a gentleman with bushy brown whiskers and a thundering voice of which I was often the object--for even in those early days I had the habit of persisting in embarra.s.sing questions. This professor was a devout Catholic, and not even in dealing with ancient Romans could he restrain his propaganda impulses. Later on in life he became editor of the ”Catholic Encyclopedia”, and now when I turn its pages, I imagine that I see the bushy brown whiskers, and hear the thundering voice: ”Mr. Sinclair, it is so because I tell you it is so!”
I investigate, and find that my ex-professor knows all about King Henry the Eighth, and his motives in founding the Church of England; he is ready with an ”economic interpretation”, as complete as the most rabid muckraker could desire! It appears that the king wanted a new wife, and demanded that the Pope should grant the necessary permission; in his efforts to browbeat the Pope into such betrayal of duty, King Henry threatened the withdrawal of the ”annates” and the ”Peter's pence”. Later on he forced the clergy to declare that the Pope was ”only a foreign bishop”, and in order to ”stamp out overt expression of disaffection, he embarked upon a veritable reign of terror”.
In Anglican histories, you are a.s.sured that all this was a work of religious reform, and that after it the Church was the pure vehicle of G.o.d's grace. There were no more ”holy idell theves”, holding the land of England and plundering the poor. But get to know the clergy, and see things from the inside, and you will meet some one like the Archbishop of Cash.e.l.l, who wrote to one of his intimates:
I conclude that a good bishop has nothing more to do than to eat, drink and grow fat, rich and die; which laudable example _I_ propose for the remainder of my days to follow.
If you say that might be a casual jest, hear what Thackeray reports of that period, the eighteenth century, which he knew with peculiar intimacy:
I read that Lady Yarmouth (my most religious and gracious King's favorite) sold a bishopric to a clergyman for 5600 pounds. (She betted him the 5000 pounds that he would not be made a bishop, and he lost, and paid her.) Was he the only prelate of his time led up by such hands for consecration?
As I peep into George II's St. James, I see crowds of ca.s.socks pus.h.i.+ng up the back-stairs of the ladies of the court; stealthy clergy slipping purses into their laps; that G.o.dless old king yawning under his canopy in his Chapel Royal, as the chaplain before him is discoursing.
Discoursing about what?--About righteousness and judgment?
Whilst the chaplain is preaching, the king is chattering in German and almost as loud as the preacher; so loud that the clergyman actually burst out crying in his pulpit, because the defender of the faith and the dispenser of bishoprics would not listen to him!
Land and Livings
And how is it in the twentieth century? Have conditions been much improved? There are great Englishmen who do not think so. I quote Robert Buchanan, a poet who spoke for the people, and who therefore has still to be recognized by English critics. He writes of the ”New Rome”, by which he means present-day England:
The G.o.ds are dead, but in their name Humanity is sold to shame, While (then as now!) the tinsel'd priest Sitteth with robbers at the feast, Blesses the laden, blood-stained board, Weaves garlands round the butcher's sword, And poureth freely (now as then) The sacramental blood of Men!
You see, the land system of England remains--the changes having been for the worse. William the Conqueror wanted to keep the Saxon peasantry contented, so he left them their ”commons”; but in the eighteenth century these were nearly all filched away. We saw the same thing done within the last generation in Mexico, and from the same motive--because developing capitalism needs cheap labor, whereas people who have access to the land will not slave in mills and mines.
In England, from the time of Queen Anne to that of William and Mary, the parliaments of the landlords pa.s.sed some four thousand separate acts, whereby more than seven million acres of the common land were stolen from the people. It has been calculated that these acres might have supported a million families; and ever since then England has had to feed a million paupers all the time.
As an old song puts the matter:
Why prosecute the man or woman Who steals a goose from off the common, And let the greater felon loose Who steals the common from the goose?
In our day the land aristocracy is rooted like the native oak in British soil: some of them direct descendants of the Normans, others children of the court favorites and panders who grew rich in the days of the Tudors and the unspeakable Stuarts. Seven men own practically all the land of the city and county of London, and collect tribute from seven millions of people. The estates are entailed--that is, handed down from father to oldest son automatically; you cannot buy any land, but if you want to build, the landlord gives you a lease, and when the lease is up, he takes possession of your buildings. The tribute which London pays is more than a hundred million dollars a year. So absolute is the right of the land-owner that he can sue for trespa.s.s the driver on an aeroplane which flies over him; he imposes on fishermen a tax upon catches made many hundred of yards from the sh.o.r.e.
And in this graft, of course, the church has its share. Each church owns land--not merely that upon which it stands, but farms and city lots from which it derives income. Each cathedral owns large tracts; so do the schools and universities in which the clergy are educated.
The income from the holdings of a church const.i.tutes what is called a ”living”; these livings, which vary in size, are the prerogatives of the younger sons of the ruling families, and are intrigued and scrambled for in exactly the fas.h.i.+on which Thackeray describes in the eighteenth century.
About six thousand of these ”livings” are in the gift of great land owners; one n.o.ble lord alone disposes of fifty-six such plums; and needless to say, he does not present them to clergymen who favor radical land-taxes. He gives them to men like himself--autocratic to the poor, easy-going to members of his own cla.s.s, and cynical concerning the grafts of grace.
In one English village which I visited the living was worth seven hundred pounds, with the use of a fine mansion; as the inc.u.mbent had a large family, he lived there. In another place the living was worth a thousand pounds, and the inc.u.mbent hired a curate, himself appearing twice a year, on Christmas day and on the King's birth-day, to preach a sermon; the rest of the time he spent in Paris. It is worth noting that in 1808 a law was proposed compelling absentee pluralists--that is, clergymen holding more than one ”living”--to furnish curates to do their work; it might be interesting to note that this law met with strenuous clerical opposition, the house of Bishops voting against it without a division. Thus we may understand the sharp saying of Karl Marx, that the English clergy would rather part with thirty-eight of their thirty-nine articles than with one thirty-ninth of their income.