Note VIII.
The alleged corruption of the clergy in the sixteenth century.
The ecclesiastical reaction of the last half-century, together with the vastly-increased accessibility of innumerable original sources of information in State Papers and other archives which has come about during the same period, has produced a vast number of calls upon us to reconsider the evidence upon which our fathers believed in the intense and almost universal corruption of the late pre Reformation clergy, and in more than one instance a demand that the old verdict of condemnation should be reversed.
I may take two recent writers as at once thorough-going and at the same time well-informed advocates on the side of the reversal—viz., Canon Dixon and Father Gasquet. The former says[1] very plainly that 'no general charge of corruption has ever been made good against the English clergy.' The latter, in a voluminous and special work dealing with the whole question of Henry VIII. and the English monasteries, says that ' the voices raised against the monks were those of Cromwell's agents, of the cliques of new men, and of his hireling scribes, who formed a crew of as truculent and filthy libellers as ever disgraced a revolutionary cause.' I shall confine myself in this discussion to two questions: (1) Are we in fairness entitled to dismiss the evidence of Cromwell's visitors as entirely worthless? and (2) Is there, or is there not, sufficient evidence, independent of theirs, of the general corruption of the monasteries? The first question is one which need not detain us long. If there were no further evidence in the case than that of Cromwell's commissioners, it would closely resemble one of those cases so common in our inferior courts in which the only evidence against the prisoner is the evidence of policemen: and then, if doubts were thrown upon the individual policemen's character—as they often are—it would be the duty of the magistrate to consider what the value of those doubts was, from what quarter and with what probable motives they were suggested; and if he thought that they were justified, it would no doubt largely modify the importance that he attached to the police evidence, and might in some cases induce him, if no untainted evidence against the prisoner were adduced, to dismiss the case. On the other hand, if further evidence, though but slight, were produced, he would not entirely reject that of the
- ↑ History of the Church of England, vol. i. p. 23.
