constables, but would estimate it in a great degree according to the support, or the reverse, which it received from that which was entirely unconnected with it. He would in scarcely any case be justified in rejecting the evidence altogether, without a previous consideration of how far it looked in itself like a truthful account of the particular transactions which it professed to describe.
Unless we are prepared to pronounce very rash judgment, and fall into a great number of errors and inaccuracies, we must not lay down a hard-and-fast rule that because a man is not what is ordinarily considered a respectable member of society, therefore his evidence on no subject whatever is to be held as entitled to any weight. That this is the rational view of such matters is sufficiently proved by the fact that we constantly see criminals brought up from gaol itself in order to give evidence in court, and that their evidence is considered necessary for the purpose of enabling the court to arrive at a correct decision. If, then, we apply these principles to the case before us, there can, I think, be no doubt but that we ought not to dismiss the whole evidence of Cromwell's commissioners as unworthy of credit, but to examine, in the first place, the character of the evidence itself, and, in the second, to see how far it is corroborated, or the reverse, by independent evidence gathered from other sources. If Cromwell's commissioners were commonly indebted, as Father Gasquet is constantly suggesting, mainly 'to their imaginations for their facts,' why did their accounts of different houses differ so widely from one another?[1] Why did they show so much favour to Catesby and Godstow, to Ramsey and Woolstrope, and various other houses, both of monks and nuns 1 They speak here of the abbot as an honest man, with some very disorderly monks under him; elsewhere of the abbot being the worst offender, or of but one or two monks being bad.
The various charges brought against the commissioners and their employers are to a great extent mutually destructive. If it be true that Henry and Cromwell had made up their minds for the general suppression of the religious houses, and sent these
- ↑ A good example is to be found in the State Papers, Sept. 27, 1535, in which Tregonwell writes to Cromwell his account of the visitation of nine religious houses—viz., Godstow, Eynsham, Bruern, Wroxton, Clattercot, Catesby, Canons Ashby, Chacombe, and Bicester. He gives very scanty particulars, but some are commended, some the reverse. The whole letter has a genuine look, not at all as if the visitor went with a ready-formed intention of only finding fault.
