for the prelacy to offer an efficacious opposition to the reformation they abhorred. Their own baronial tenure, their high dignity as legislative counsellors of the land, remained; but, one branch as ancient and venerable as their own thus lopped off, the spiritual aristocracy was reduced to play a very secondary part in the councils of the nation. Nor could the protestant religion have easily been established by legal methods under Edward and Elizabeth without this previous destruction of the monasteries. Those who, professing an attachment to that religion, have swollen the clamour of its adversaries against the dissolution of foundations that existed only for the sake of a different faith and worship, seem to me not very consistent or enlightened reasoners. In some, the love of antiquity produces a sort of fanciful illusion; and the very sight of those buildings, so magnificent in their prosperous hour, so beautiful even in their present ruin, begets a sympathy for those who founded and inhabited them. In many, the violent courses of confiscation and attainder which accompanied this great revolution excite so just an indignation, that they either forget to ask whether the end might not have been reached by more laudable means, or condemn that end itself either as sacrilege, or at least as an atrocious violation of the rights of property. Others again, who acknowledge that the monastic discipline cannot be reconciled with the modern system of religion, or with public utility, lament only that these ample endowments were not bestowed upon ecclesiastical corporations, freed from the monkish cowl, but still belonging to that spiritual profession to whose use they were originally consecrated. And it was a very natural theme of complaint at the time, that such abundant revenues as might have sustained the dignity of the crown and supplied the means of public defence without burthening the subject, had served little other purpose than that of swelling the fortunes of rapacious courtiers, and had left the king as necessitous and craving as before.
Notwithstanding these various censures, I must own myself of opinion, both that the abolition of monastic institutions might have been conducted in a manner consonant to justice as well as policy, and that Henry's profuse alienation of the abbey lands, however illaudable in its motive, has proved upon the whole more beneficial to England than any other disposition would have turned out. I cannot, until some broad principle is made more obvious than it ever has yet been, do such violence to all common notions on the subject, as to attach an equal inviolability to private and corporate property. The law of hereditary succession, as ancient and universal as that of property itself, the law of testamentary disposition, the complement of the former, so long established in most countries as to seem a natural right, have invested the individual possessor of the soil with such a fictitious immortality, such anticipated enjoyment, as it were, of futurity, that his perpetual ownership could not be limited to the term of his own existence, without what he would justly feel as a real deprivation of property. Nor are the expectancies of children, or other probable heirs, less real possessions, which it is a hardship, if not an absolute injury, to defeat. Yet even this hereditary claim is set aside by the laws of forfeiture, which have almost everywhere prevailed. But in estates held, as we call it, in mortmain, there is no intercommunity, no natural privity of interest, between the present possessor and those who may succeed him; and as the former cannot have any pretext for complaint, if, his own rights being preserved, the legislature should alter the course of transmission after his decease, so neither is any hardship sustained by others, unless their succession has been already designated or rendered probable. Corporate property therefore appears to stand on a very different footing from that of private individuals; and while all infringements of the established privileges of the latter are to be sedulously avoided, and held justifiable only by the strongest motives of public expediency, we cannot but admit the full right of the legislature to new mould and regulate the former in all that does not involve existing interests upon far slighter reasons of convenience. If Henry had been content with prohibiting the profession of religious persons for the future, and had gradually diverted their revenues instead of violently confiscating them, no protestant could have found it easy to censure his policy.
It is indeed impossible to feel too much indignation at the spirit in which these proceedings were conducted. Besides the hardship sustained by so many persons turned loose upon society for whose occupations they were unfit, the indiscriminate destruction of convents produced several public mischiefs. The visitors themselves strongly interceded for the nunnery of Godstow, as irreproachable managed, and an excellent place of education; and no doubt some other foundations should have been preserved for the same reason. Latimer, who could not have a prejudice on that side, begged earnestly that the priory of Malvern might be spared, for the maintenance of preaching and hospitality. It was urged for Hexham abbey that, there not being a house for many miles in that part of England, the country would be in danger of going to waste.107 And the total want of inns in many parts of the kingdom must have rendered the loss of these hospitable places of reception a serious grievance. These and probably other reasons ought to have checked the destroying spirit of reform in its career, and suggested to Henry's counsellors that a few years would not be ill consumed in contriving new methods of attaining the beneficial effects which monastic institutions had not failed to produce, and in preparing the people's minds for so important an innovation.
The suppression of monasteries poured in an instant such a torrent of wealth upon the crown, as has seldom been equalled in any country by the confiscations following a subdued rebellion. The clear yearly value was rated at £131,607; but was in reality, if we believe Burnet, ten times as great; the courtiers undervaluing those estates, in order to obtain grants or sales of them more easily. It is certain, however, that Burnet's supposition errs extravagantly on the other side.108 The movables of the smaller monasteries alone were reckoned at £100,000; and, as the rents of these were less than a fourth of the whole, we may calculate the aggregate value of movable wealth in the same proportion. All this was enough to dazzle a more prudent mind than that of Henry, and to inspire those sanguine dreams of inexhaustible affluence with which private men are so often filled by sudden prosperity.
The monastic rule of life being thus abrogated, as neither conformable to pure religion nor to policy, it is to be considered, to what uses these immense endowments ought to have been applied. There are some, perhaps, who may be of opinion that the original founders of monasteries, or those who had afterwards bestowed lands on them, having annexed to their grants an implied condition of the continuance of certain devotional services, and especially of prayers for the repose of their souls, it were but equitable that, if the legislature rendered the performance of this condition impossible, their heirs should re-enter upon the lands that would not have been alienated from them on any other account. But, without adverting to the difficulty in many cases of ascertaining the lawful heir, it might be answered that the donors had absolutely divested themselves of all interest in their grants, and that it was more consonant to the analogy of law to treat these estates as escheats or vacant possessions, devolving to the sovereign, than to imagine a right of reversion that no party had ever contemplated. There was indeed a class of persons, very different from the founders of monasteries, to whom restitution was due. A large proportion of conventual revenues arose out of parochial tithes, diverted from the legitimate object of maintaining the incumbent to swell the pomp of some remote abbot. These impropriations were in no one instance, I believe, restored to the parochial clergy, and have passed either into the hands of laymen, or of bishops and other ecclesiastical persons, who were frequently compelled by the Tudor princes to take them in exchange for lands.109 It was not in the spirit of Henry's policy, or in that of the times, to preserve much of these revenues to the church, though he had designed to allot £18,000 a year for eighteen new sees, of which he only erected six with far inferior endowments. Nor was he much better inclined to husband them for public exigencies, although more than sufficient to make the Crown independent of parliamentary aid. It may perhaps be reckoned a providential circumstance that his thoughtless humour should have rejected the obvious means of establishing an uncontrollable despotism, by rendering unnecessary the only exertion of power which his subjects were likely to withstand. Henry VII. would probably have followed a very different course. Large sums, however, are said to have been expended in the repair of highways, and in fortifying ports in the Channel.110 But the greater part was dissipated