Volume III Part 28 (2/2)

[Sidenote: Three abbots fall under suspicion.]

[Sidenote: The Abbots of Colchester and Reading.]

[Sidenote: The Abbot of Glas...o...b..ry.]

[Sidenote: Layton and Pollard are commissioned to examine the charges against the Abbot of Glas...o...b..ry.]

[Sidenote: The abbot's rooms are searched.]

[Sidenote: He is sent to the Tower.]

[Sidenote: The abbey plate and jewels had disappeared.]

[Sidenote: General tendency in the monks to plunder.]

The king, he told the magistrates, desired most of all things that indifferent justice should be ministered to the poor and the rich, which, he regretted to say, was imperfectly done. Those in authority too much used their powers, ”that men should follow the bent of their bows,”

a thing which ”did not need to be followed.” The chief cause of all the evils of the time was ”the dark setting forth of G.o.d's Word,” ”the humming and harking of the priests who ought to read it, and the slanders given to those that did plainly and truly set it forth.” At any rate, the fact was as he described it to be; and they would find, he added, significantly, that, if they gave further occasion for complaint, ”G.o.d had given them a prince that had force and strength to rule the highest of them.”[493] For the present no further notice was taken of their conduct. There is no evidence that any magistrates were deprived or punished. The work which they had neglected was done for them by others, and they were left again to themselves with a clearer field.[494] One noticeable victim, however, fell in this year. There were three, indeed, with equal claims to interest; but one, through caprice of fame, has been especially remembered. The great abbots, with but few exceptions, had given cause for suspicion during the late disturbances; that is to say, they had grown to advanced age as faithful subjects of the Papacy; they were too old to begin life again with a new allegiance. Information had transpired--I do not know the precise nature of it--to persuade Cromwell that the Abbots of Reading, Colchester, and Glas...o...b..ry were entangled in some treasonable enterprise or correspondence.[495] The charges against the Abbot of Reading I have been unable to find. The Abbot of Colchester had refused to surrender his house, and concealed or made away with the abbey plate, and had used expressions of most unambiguous anxiety for the success of the rebellions, and of disappointment at their failure.[496] They were both executed. On the first visitation of the monasteries, Whiting, Abbot of Glas...o...b..ry, received a favourable character from the visitors. He had taken the oaths to the king without objection, or none is mentioned. He had acquiesced generally, in his place in the House of Lords, in Cromwell's legislation, he had been present at one reading at least of the concluding statute against the Pope's authority;[497] and there is no evidence that he distinguished himself in any way as a champion of the falling faith. In the last parliament he had been absent on plea of ill health; but he appointed no proxy, nor sought apparently to use on either side his legitimate influence. Cromwell's distrust was awakened by some unknown reason; but both to him and to those who had spoken previously in his favour, it seemed, according to their standard of appreciation, sufficiently grounded. Perhaps some discontented monk had sent up secret informations.[498] An order went out for an inquiry into his conduct, which was to be executed by three of the visitors, Layton, Pollard, and Moyle. On the 16th of September they were at Reading: on the 22d they had arrived at Glas...o...b..ry. The abbot was absent at a country house a mile and a half distant. They followed him, informed him of the cause of their coming, and asked him a few questions. His answers were ”nothing to the purpose;” that is to say, he confessed nothing to the visitors' purpose. He was taken back to the abbey; his private apartments were searched, and a book of arguments was found there against the king's divorce, pardons, copies of bulls, and a Life of Thomas a Becket,--nothing particularly criminal, though all indicating the abbot's tendencies. The visitors considered their discoveries ”a great matter.” The abbot was again questioned; and this time his answers appeared to them ”cankered and traitorous.” He was placed in charge of a guard, and sent to London to the Tower, to be examine by Cromwell himself. The occasion of his absence was taken for the dissolution of the house; and, as the first preliminary, an inventory was made of the plate, the furniture, and the money in the treasury. Glas...o...b..ry was one of the wealthiest of the religious houses. A less experienced person than Layton would have felt some surprise when he found that neither plate, jewels, nor ornaments were forthcoming sufficient for an ordinary parish church. But deceptions of this kind were too familiar to a man who had examined half the religious houses in England. He knew immediately that the abbey treasure was either in concealment or had been secretly made away with. Foreseeing the impending destruction of this establishment, the monks had been everywhere making use of their opportunities of plunder. The altar plate, in some few instances, may have been secreted from a sentiment of piety--from a desire to preserve from sacrilege vessels consecrated to holy uses. But plunder was the rule; piety was the exception. A confession of the Abbot of Barlings contains a frank avowal of the principles on which the fraternities generally acted. This good abbot called his convent into the chapter-house, and by his own acknowledgment, addressed them thus:--

[Sidenote: Address of the Abbot of Barlings.]

”Brethren, ye hear how other religious men be intreated, and how they have but forty s.h.i.+llings a piece given them and are let go. But they that have played the wise men amongst them have provided aforehand for themselves, and sold away divers things wherewith they may help themselves hereafter. And ye hear also this rumour that goeth abroad that the greater abbeys shall down also. Wherefore, by your advice, this shall be my counsel, that we do take such plate as we have, and certain of the best vestments and copes and set them aside, and sell them if need be, and so divide the money coming thereof when the house is suppressed. And I promise you of my faith and conscience ye shall have your part, and of every penny that I have during my life; and thereupon,” he concluded, ”the brethren agreed thereunto.”[499]

[Sidenote: Appropriation or concealment of plate regarded as felony.]

[Sidenote: Discovery of the Glas...o...b..ry plate which had been concealed by the abbot.]

[Sidenote: The motive, if good, could not excuse the fact.]

[Sidenote: Evidence of treason found against the abbot,]

[Sidenote: Which need not be called in question.]

[Sidenote: The quarrel with the Papacy exasperated by the persecution of English residents in Spain.]

A less severe government than that of Henry VIII. would have refused to tolerate conduct of this kind. Those who decline to recognise the authority of an act of parliament over the property of corporate bodies, cannot pretend that a right of owners.h.i.+p was vested in persons whose tenure, at its best and surest, was limited by their lives.[500] For members of religious houses to make away their plate was justly construed to be felony; and the law, which was necessarily general, could not recognise exceptions on the ground of piety of motive, when such an exception would but have furnished a screen behind which indiscriminate pillage might have been carried on with impunity. The visitors had been warned to be careful, and practice had made them skilful in means of detection. On the first day of the investigation at Glas...o...b..ry, ”a fair chalice of gold” came to light, ”with divers other parcels of plate;” all of which the abbot had concealed, committing perjury in doing so, on their previous visitation.[501] The next day brought out more; and the day after, more again. Gold and silver in vessels, ornaments, and money were discovered ”mured up in walls, vaults, and other secret places,” some hidden by the abbot, some by the convent. Two monks who were treasurers, with the lay clerks of the vestry, were found to have been ”arrant thieves.” At length as much treasure of various sorts was recovered as would have begun a new abbey.[502] The visitors did not trouble themselves to speculate on the abbot's intentions. There is nothing to show that in collusion with the brethren he was not repeating the behaviour of the Abbot of Barlings; or, like so many of the northern abbots, he might have been h.o.a.rding a fund to subsidize insurrection, preserving the treasures of the temple to maintain the temple's defenders; or he might have acted in a simple spirit of piety. His motives were of no moment. The fact of the concealment was patent. The letter communicating these discoveries to the government was written on the 28th of September. Another followed on the 2d of October, stating that, since the despatch of the last, the visitors ”had come to the knowledge of divers sundry treasons committed and done by the Abbot of Glas...o...b..ry, the certainty whereof would appear in a Book of Depositions,” which they forwarded with the accusers' names attached to their statements, ”very haut and rank treason.”[503] I have not discovered this ”Book of Depositions;” but those who desire to elevate the Abbot of Glas...o...b..ry to the rank of the martyr, confess, in doing so, their belief that he was more faithful to the Church than to the State, that he was guilty of regarding the old ways as better than the new, and they need not care to question that he may have acted on his convictions, or at least have uttered them in words. After the recent experience of the Pilgrimage of Grace, an ascertained disposition of disloyalty was enough to ensure a conviction; and the Pope by his latest conduct had embittered the quarrel to the utmost. He had failed to excite a holy war against England, but three English merchants had been burnt by the Inquisition in Spain.[504] Five more had been imprisoned and one had been tortured only for declaring that they considered Henry VIII. to be a Christian. Their properties had been confiscated, they had borne f.a.ggots and candles in a procession as sanbenitos,[505] and Paul had issued a promise of indulgence to all pious Catholics who would kill an English heretic.[506]

[Sidenote: November. The abbot is sent back to Somersets.h.i.+re.]

[Sidenote: Nov. 14. He is arraigned at Wells for stealing the plate, and condemned.]

[Sidenote: He was unpopular in the county and among his tenants.]

[Sidenote: He is hanged on Glas...o...b..ry Torre.]

Six weeks elapsed before the abbot's fate was decided, part or the whole of which time he was in London. At the beginning of November he was sent back into Somersets.h.i.+re, already condemned at a tribunal where Cromwell sat as prosecutor, jury, and judge. His escape in a more regular court was not contemplated as a possibility; among loose papers of Cromwell still remaining there is a memorandum in his own hand for ”the trial and execution” of the Abbot of Glas...o...b..ry.[507] But the appearance of unfair dealing was greater than the reality. Lord Russell, whose stainless character was worthy of his name, was one of the commissioners before whom the trial was conducted; and Russell has left on record his approval of, and acquiescence in the conduct of the case, in plain and unmistakeable language. Whiting was arraigned at Wells on Thursday, the 14th of November, with his treasurers, ”before as wors.h.i.+pful a jury as was charged there for many years.”[508] The crime of which he was formally accused was robbing the abbey church; and there was no doubt that he was guilty of having committed that crime, to whatever the guilt may have amounted. But if the government had prosecuted in every instance of abbey-church robbery, a monk would have hung in chains at all the cross-roads in England. The Abbot of Glas...o...b..ry was tried and convicted of felony; his real offence was treason, as the word was interpreted by Cromwell. He was unpopular in the county, and among his dependents. ”There were many bills,” Lord Russell said, ”put up against the abbot, by his tenants and others, for wrongs and injuries that he had done them.”[509] He was sentenced to death, and the day following was fixed for the execution. He was taken with the two monks from Wells to Glas...o...b..ry; he was drawn through the town in the usual manner, and thence to the top of the conical hill which rises out of the level plain of Somersets.h.i.+re, called Glas...o...b..ry Torre. To the last he was tormented with questions, ”but he would accuse no man but himself;” he only requested the visitors' servants who were present on the Torre to entreat their masters and Lord Russell ”to desire the King's Highness of his merciful goodness and in the way of charity to forgive him his great offences by him committed and done against his Grace.”[510] The modern student, to whom the pa.s.sions and the difficulties of the time are as a long forgotten dream, who sees only the bleak hill-top on the dreary November day, the gallows, and an infirm old man guilty of nothing which he can understand to be a crime, shudders at the needless cruelty.

Cromwell, for his share in this policy of death, was soon to receive as he had given; a few more months, and he too on Tower Hill would pa.s.s to his account.

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