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The

abbey lands

were dis

penditures made upon the fortification of the coast,1 and upon the building of the new navy which was soon to give England fresh strength at sea, the crown derived but little permanent benefit from its vast acquisitions of church property. bulk of the abbey lands were either lavished as gifts upon how the court favorites, or sold at low prices, not so much to the older nobility as to the new men who had come into power under posed of; Wolsey and Cromwell, or else to the great merchants and manufacturers who were swelling the ranks of the territorial aristocracy. By the very nature of their acquisitions the new proprietors were irrevocably pledged against the restoration of the papal authority, while by the numberless transfers thus brought about land became as it had never been before the subject of sale and purchase, to facilitate which were soon sale and passed a series of important statutes. While measures of land facili such moment were swiftly passing through parliament without tated by hindrance or debate, the king was being wearied by the failure of the lords' committee to report such an act as would complete the chief business for the settlement of which the parliament had been called together. In order to end the complication into which the matter finally drifted, the king resolved to cut the knot by dictating to parliament, as he had dictated to Henry dicconvocation under similar circumstances in 1536, the articles Statute of of religion which he intended should receive the sanction of Articles, the state. The result was the Statute of the Six Articles,5 in which it was declared: 1. That in the sacrament of the altar doctrinal legislation is really present, under the form of bread and wine, the natural of his reign;

1 Dowell, Hist. of Taxation, vol. i. been fortuitous.” — Amos, Reformation

p. 137.

2 As to the fate of the monastic property, see Froude, vol. iii. p. 206; Blount, vol. i. pp. 372-379, who comments upon the social results of the dissolution.

"In the very next year after the act passed for the dissolution of the greater monasteries, there were enacted the statutes of wills, of limitations, of fines, for conveyances of titles, for lessees of tenants in tail, for executions upon lands, for partitions, for disseizins, for grantees of reversions, for collusive recoveries, for arrearages of rent claimable by executors, for buying of titles; a goodly array of improvements, which may not seem to have

Parliament, pp. 313, 314.

4 After the disagreement of the first, two other committees were finally appointed (Lords' Journal, 31 Hen. VIII.), who made separate reports. The report adopted by the peers modified, in two particulars, the statute which Henry had drawn. Froude therefore concludes that "it was not, in its extreme form, the work of the king, nor did it express his own desires." - Vol. iii. p. 208.

6 31 Hen. VIII. c. 14, entitled "An Act for Abolishing of Diversity of Opinion in Certain Articles concerning Christian Religion." It received the royal assent June 24, 1539, and took effect July 12.

transfer of

statute;

tates the

the Six

which

closes the

body and blood of Christ, which, after consecration, remains but the substance of Christ. 2. That communion in both kinds is not necessary to salvation. 3. That it is not permitted to priests, after their ordination, to marry and have wives. 4. That vows of chastity ought to be observed as perpetual obligations. 5. That private masses ought to be continued for godly consolation and benefit. 6. That auricular confession to a priest must be retained and continued. The efficacy of this measure, which thus fixed the standard of orthodoxy, Henry had no intention of leaving to pious exhortation merely. In spite of the strenuous opposition of Cranmer1 and the five bishops, who partly sympathized with the protestant party, the act imposed upon all who should refuse to submit to its terms penalties so severe as to foreshadow the revival of active persecution. The penalty for denying transubstantiation as ing against defined in the first article was burning, without the chance of abjuring; while for offences against the other five, for the first offence forfeiture of property, for the second, death as a felon. The act declared the marriages of priests and nuns utterly void; to refuse to go to confession was felony; to refuse to receive the sacraments was also felony. By this fierce and bloody measure, under which in London alone five hundred protestants were soon indicted, Latimer and Shaxton imprisoned, and Cranmer seriously endangered,2 the doctrinal legislation of Henry's reign was brought to a close.

penalties

for offend

the act.

Revival of

by the

Nothing could have been more disappointing than the fresh persecution outbreak of the persecuting spirit which thus so quickly folAnglicans; lowed Henry's supreme effort to hush religious discord by command of parliament. Nothing could have been farther removed from the king's pacific designs than the cruel use which the triumphant Anglicans were so quick to make "of the whip with six strings" to lash their Lutheran opponents into fury. As a man of the New Learning, as a catholic proud of his orthodoxy, the king had no personal sympathy with the protestant party, now struggling into life, no patience with

1 It seems to be clear, however, that Cranmer's opposition was withdrawn when the bill finally came before the house of lords for a vote. See Hook's Life of Cranmer, Lives of the Archbishops, etc., 2d series, vol. ii. p. 46.

2 Hall, p. 828. Latimer and Shax

ton resigned their sees, either voluntarily or at the king's request. Godwin, Annals, p. 70; State Papers, vol. i. p. 849. As to the king's intervention in behalf of Cranmer, see Burnet, vol. i. p. 194.

alliance;

the excesses with which they were insulting the sacred things of the older faith. And yet there was a deep political motive, motives for in antagonism with the king's personal feelings, which had a Lutheran been continually working in their favor at the council board. ever since, by the severance from Rome and the consequent alienation of the catholic nations, England had stood in Europe without an ally, isolated and alone. If Henry's prejudices made him loath to admit the fact, it was clearly perceived by his great minister that every dictate of prudence and selfinterest impelled England to seek at any cost an entrance into the great Teutonic league which the Lutheran princes had formed for the defence of the Reformation. Guided by Cromwell's counsel, Henry had, as we have heretofore seen, striven again and again to form such an alliance, and it was only when the disagreement as to a common basis of religious belief seemed to be final1 that he had yielded to the reactionary policy which had ended in the Statute of the Six Articles, and the consequent persecution. Although Cromwell bent for a moment to the storm by seeming to acquiesce while the persecuting statute was passing through parliament, he was swift to arrest its execution the moment that its enforcement threatened to destroy the only party in the state that did not long for his overthrow. Nothing could have made the gulf between Cromwell and the Anglicans more impassable than the dexter- Cromwell ous manœuvre by which he suddenly checked them in the hour of victory by opening the prison doors of the bishops, by persecuquashing the London indictments, by restraining the magistrates who were proceeding under the commissions, and by extending a general pardon to those who had been imprisoned under the late statute as heretics.2 The news of this counter movement was not slow to reach Germany, where it did much the effect in to pave the way for the long-sought alliance with the Lutheran Germany; princes which Cromwell was making a fresh effort to effect through the marriage of the king, now two years a widower,3 with Anne, daughter of the duke of Cleves and sister-in-law to the Lutheran Elector of Saxony. Through this marriage

1 See above, p. 88.

2 Hall, p. 828 et seq.; Burnet, vol. i. PP. 194, 195. An important and practical feature of the act consisted of the appointment under its provisions of

commissioners for searching out and
trying heretics.

3 Jane Seymour died October 24,
1537, after having given birth to Ed-
ward on the 12th.

4 Dr. Barnes, one of the English

reverses the

policy of

tion;

designs

involved in
the mar-
riage of

Anne of
Cleves;

Cromwell hoped not only to form a union between Henry and the princes of North Germany, but also a league with them including France for the overthrow of the emperor,1— a farreaching design which, had it been crowned with success, would no doubt have changed the entire aspect of European politics. The scheme ended, however, in involving Henry in a hateful marriage, and in the humiliation of a fresh divorce,2 without bringing to him as compensation a single advantage that had been promised him. The Lutheran princes feared a contest with the emperor, while France shrank from an alliance whose happy issue could be fatal only to catholicism, thus leaving Henry to bear alone as before the resentment of the failure the house of Austria. In the presence of his first great failure the king in his wrath and disappointment now abandoned the scheme re faithful minister, who had won for him so many triumphs, to overthrow. the long-hoarded vengeance of his foes.3 In the midst of the catastrophe parliament met; and on the 10th of June, 1540, Norfolk tore the ensign of the garter from Cromwell's neck at the council board and arrested him as a traitor.5 A parliamentary attainder soon followed, and before the end of July "the hammer of the monks," the organizer of the English Terror, had perished on the scaffold.

of Crom

well's

sults in his

Henry's secular legislation;

6. The absorbing interest which naturally centres in the ecclesiastical legislation of Henry's reign should not be permitted to exclude all consideration of his secular legislation, specially that part of it which facilitated the important changes in the law of real property which happily followed the transfer

representatives, carried over the news
that the prosecutions under the Six
Articles had been terminated, and the
elector wrote to the king in a way to
indicate that he was satisfied. Strype's
Memorials, vol. ii. p. 437.

1 The duke of Norfolk was sent on
a mission to France with that view.
See Henry's letter to the duke, outlin-
ing the plan, State Papers, vol. viii.
245 et seq.

2 The marriage with Anne, celebrated in January, 1540, was dissolved in July. See Judgment of Convocation, State Papers, vol. i. p. 632.

3 "In Henry VIII. no free self-devotion, no loftiness of soul, and no real sympathy for any living man can be discerned; they are all in his eyes

nothing but instruments, which he first uses and then breaks."- Ranke, Engi. Gesch., vol. i. p. 224.

* On the 12th of April, when Cromwell made an address. Lords' Journals, 32 Hen. VIII.

5 State Papers, vol. viii. p. 349. Marillac to the Constable, June 23, 1540: MS. Bibliot. Impér., Paris; Froude, vol. iii. p. 304.

6 At the king's command Cromwell had addressed an inquiry to the judges, which brought forth the response that if a man should be condemned by parliament for treason without being heard in his defence, his attainder could never be subsequently questioned in a court of law. Coke, Inst., iv. 37. Cromwell was not heard in his defence.

of feudal

ation;

extin

guished the

devise ;

acted the

of the vast estates that passed first from the monasteries to the crown, and then from the crown to lay subjects. Land relaxation thus became to an extent never known before the subject of restraints bargain and sale, and out of that condition of things grew the upon aliennecessity for a relaxation of the feudal restrictions which had so long hindered its alienation. The right to direct the descent feudalism of land by will, which had matured to a certain extent before the Conquest, was soon extinguished after that event by the right of growth of feudalism, whose policy it was to prohibit or burden every form of alienation which tended to lessen feudal dues and services.1 As a protection to the interests of the feudal and enlords were passed the statutes of mortmain, which embodied statutes of the prohibition against the transfer of lands into the dead mortmain; hands of religious houses.2 In order to defeat the operation of these statutes, the practice of giving lands by way of use or origin of trust was largely resorted to, whereby the legal title was vested in one person and the beneficial use in another. This method of transfer, very extensively employed during the civil war to facilitate family settlements and to prevent the forfeiture of estates, finally came to be a common and usual form of alienation. By this means the ancient right of devise, which right of feudalism had for a long time extinguished, was revived by thus in a the growth of the power of the chancellor to compel the feoffee measure to convey to the person named in the will of cestui que use.6 This widely developed system of uses that infected nearly every transaction involving real property not only hindered the enforcement of feudal rights, but it also embarrassed every purchaser who attempted to deal with a subject-matter over which two different persons possessed within certain limits

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Edward III."- Digby, Law of Real
Property, p. 316; Reeves' Hist. Eng.
Law, vol. ii. p. 575.

5 If a person who had only the use
of land (the legal title being in another
seized to his use) committed treason
or felony, the lands were subject neither
to escheat nor forfeiture.

6 As to the growth of the equitable jurisdiction of the chancellor over uses, see Digby, Law of Real Property, pp. 321-326. "The practice of disposing of uses of land by will became prevalent under the protection and encouragement of the chancellors."— Ibid., p. 375.

uses or

trusts;

devise

revived;

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