words, all the peculiar pretensions of the Roman See. This was in 1519. On the 15th of June of the following year, was issued the memorable Papal bull, declaring forty-one propositions extracted out of Luther's works to be heretical and scandalous; forbidding all persons to read his writings upon pain of excommunication; commanding those who had any of them in their possession to commit them to the flames; and pronouncing against their author the sentence of excommunication, with all its terrible penalties, spiritual and temporal, unless he should publicly recant his errors and burn his books within the space of sixty days. This at once placed the followers of the German Reformer and the adherents of the ancient church in hostile array. Luther, now fairly cast forth from the Roman communion, kept no measures with the power which he opposed; in reply to the pope's bull of excommunication, he boldly declared that personage to be Antichrist, and called upon all Christian princes to cast off his tyrannical and de

period he rejected and denounced. The one arti- | but, before he went, he drew up an appeal from cle of the common belief which startled him, and the pope, imperfectly informed as he then was, against which he raised his voice in the first in- to the pope, after he should have been fully instance, was the doctrine of indulgences; and even structed in the merits of the cause. It was imas to this matter he continued for some years to possible, however, that, having advanced so far, cling to the notion that his dispute was merely he should stop long at this point. Protected by with certain individuals, and by no means either the Elector Frederick, he soon after, abandoning with the pope or the general body of the church. the expectation of a fair hearing from the pope, These indulgences professed to convey, to who- made his appeal to a general council. It was soever purchased them, a release from the pains not long before he followed up this declaration of purgatory; and the very denial of their effi- by openly questioning even the supremacy ascacy implied a belief in the existence of purga-sumed by the pope over other bishops-in other tory. Luther not disputing the reality of purgatory, denied that it was competent for men, by the mere payment of a sum of money, to obtain a quittance from any part of the punishment to which they had made themselves liable by their sins. He had become convinced, from his study of the Scriptures, that their fundamental doctrine was, that the remission of sin could only be obtained by justification through faith in the sacrifice of Christ; and upon this one great principle he took his stand. When Tetzel and his associates, in their eagerness to dispose of their wares, cried them up even in terms going far beyond the professions of the document itself, Luther first exposed the delusion they were practising upon the people from the pulpit; and then published ninety-five theses or propositions directed against the whole doctrine of indulgences, which he engaged to maintain at a public disputation, on a day which he named, against any one who should oppose them by writing or word of mouth. The disputation did not take place: on the appointed day no defender of the de-grading yoke. When his own books were burned nounced indulgences appeared; but Luther's ninety-five propositions were read with avidity over all Germany; and from that hour the spirit was awakened which never again slumbered or slept till it had set up and established a new and mighty rival empire of opinion. For some time the controversy between the German monk and his opponents attracted no notice at the Vatican; at length, however, in July, 1518, Leo summoned him to appear at Rome within sixty days. His holiness was afterwards prevailed upon to appoint the hearing of the case to take place in Germany; and Luther accordingly appeared at Augsburg before the Papal legate Cardinal Cajetano, who began with an attempt to carry his point by dint of logic, but, finding that of no avail, soon had recourse to a more summary method of procedure, and commanded Luther at once to recant his heresy simply out of deference to the Apostolic See. The intrepid monk refused compliance; but even yet he made no movement towards throwing off the authority of the pope. Apprehensive of being arrested, by the advice of his friends he withdrew secretly from Augsburg;

at Rome, he retaliated by burning the volumes of the canon law at Wittenberg, in presence of the professors and students of the university and a throng of other spectators. One of the first acts of the new emperor, Charles V., was to appoint a diet of the empire to meet at Worms on the 6th of January, 1521, expressly for the purpose of putting down the new opinions. On the summons of this assembly Luther presented himself before them to defend his doctrines; the diet, however, declared him to be deprived, as an excommunicated heretic, of all his rights as a subject of the empire, and forbade any prince to harbour or protect him after the expiration of the term specified in the safe-conduct upon which he had come up. From the dangers to which he was exposed by this edict he was saved by the interposition of his friend the Elector Frederick, who caused him to be intercepted, on his way home, and carried off to the fortress of Wartburg, in which he remained concealed for nine months. But the winged words and opinions that had already gone forth from his lips and his pen were not to be recalled or chained down; their

matter of his divorce and supremacy, made him their master, Cromwell. The visitation of the more willing to examine the truth of these re- monasteries, which was, in effect, a forcing of ports." And the historian goes on to observe them one after another to surrender, was conthat, among other motives which inclined the tinued for some years, until the greater number king to the project, one was that he was appre- of them had been thus given up into the king's hensive of a war with the emperor, and was in hands; and then, in 1539, the parliament passed great want of money. The only immediate re- an act, confirming to the king and his successors sult of this first visitation was the voluntary sur- for ever both all those that had thus already rerender of six or seven of the smaller and poorer signed, and all that should be suppressed, forhouses to the crown, on the ground, as was af- feited, or given up thereafter. The effect of this firmed, of their revenues being so encumbered act was immediately to put down all the still that they must otherwise very speedily have existing monasteries in England. Altogether, by come to ruin, both in their spiritual and temporal | its operation, the possessions of 644 convents, 90 concerns. Henry's intentions may be best judged colleges, 2374 chantries and free chapels, and 110 from his deeds. Within a few months an act hospitals, were annexed to the crown. The clear was passed by parliament suppressing all religi- yearly value of all the houses thus suppressed was, ous houses whose annual revenue was less than at the rents actually paid, only about £130,000; £200, and giving their lands, rents, cattle, plate, but Burnet affirms that their real value was at jewels, and all other property, to the king. By least ten times as much. Besides this, plate, this act 376 monasteries were at once swept jewels, and goods of all kinds to a vast amount. away, and Henry was enriched by lands com- must have been obtained from this wholesale puted to be worth £32,000 per annum, and other confiscation. To enlist the popular feeling in spoils of the estimated value of £100,000, but in favour of the measure, it was given out that its reality amounting to these sums several times effect would be to relieve the king's subjects for the future from all services and taxes; and that, in place of the abbots, monks, friars, and nuns, there would be raised and maintained 40 new earls, 60 barons, 3000 knights, and 40,000 soldiers, commanded by skilful officers, out of the revenues of the abolished establishments. It was also promised both that there should be a better provision made for the poor, and that preachers should be handsomely paid to go about everywhere, and preach the true religion. "But," says Strype, "nothing of this came to pass." Of the whole of the immense revenue that accrued to the crown from the abolition of the monasteries, a fraction of about £8000 per annum only was bestowed upon the endowment of the six new bishoprics of Westminster, Oxford, Peterborough, Bristol, Chester, and Gloucester, and the substitution of canons for the disbanded monks in several of the old cathedral churches.

over.

In the following year, 1537, a new visitation was begun of all the remaining monasteries, with the design of subjecting as many of them as possible to the same fate of confiscation. This was so clearly perceived that, in a great many instances, voluntary surrenders were now made by the abbots, and other heads of houses. "There were great complaints," Burnet relates, " made of the visitors, as if they had practised with the abbots and priors to make these surrenders, and that they had conspired with them to cheat the king, and had privately embezzled most of the plate and furniture. The abbess of Chepstow complained, in particular, of Dr. London, one of the visitors, that he had been corrupting her nuns; and generally it was cried out that underhand and ill practices were used. Therefore, to quiet these reports, and to give some colour to justify what they were about, all the foul stories that could be found out were published to defame these houses." In most cases, it would seem, where the house was not recommended for total suppression, a fine or annual tax was laid upon it; and even where it was not pretended that the inmates were chargeable with any irregularities, the real object of the visitation, the extraction of money, was equally kept in view. Thus we find the nuns of the convent of Styxwold, against whom nothing appears to have been alleged, fined to the amount of 200 marks, besides an annual pension or tax of £34. But besides the fines imposed in the name of the king, there is every reason to believe that another customary mode of composition was by bribing the visitors or

1

Henry may be regarded as having continued to move, in the main, in a Protestant direction throughout the period of his three Protestant marriages with Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, and Anne of Cleves. During this space several minor reforms were carried into effect, besides the great work of the confiscation of the monasteries. Among these, one of the most memorable was the communication to the people, under the royal authority, of the Scriptures in their mother tongue. Wyckliffe, as was formerly mentioned, had translated both the Old and the New Testament before the end of the fifteenth century; and even long before his day the whole Bible, according to a statement of Sir Thomas More, had been, "by virtuous and well-learned men, translated into