l the monastic system must
have been regarded by Parliament to warrant such an act! Had it not been
popular, there would have been discontents amounting to a general to
the throne.

It must also be borne in mind that this dissolution of the monasteries,
this attack on the monastic system, was not a religious movement fanned
by reformers, but an act of Parliament, at the instance of a royal
minister. It was not done under the direction of a Protestant king,--for
Henry was never a Protestant,--but as a public measure in behalf of
morality and for reasons of State. It is true that Henry had, by his
marriage with Anne Boleyn and the divorce of his virtuous queen, defied
the Pope and separated England from Rome, so far as appointments to
ecclesiastical benefices are concerned. But in offending the Pope he
also equally offended Charles V. The results of his separation from
Rome, during his life, were purely political. The King did not give up
the Mass or the Roman communion or Roman dogmas of faith; he only
prepared the way for reform in the next reign. He only intensified the
hatred between the old conservative party and the party of reform
and progress.

How far Cromwell himself was a Protestant it is difficult to tell.
Doubtless he sympathized with the new religious spirit of the age, but
he did not openly avow the faith of Luther. He was the able and
unscrupulous minister of an absolute monarch, bent on sweeping away
abuses of all kinds, but with the idea of enlarging the royal authority
as much, perhaps, as promoting the prosperity of the realm.

He therefore turned his attention to the ecclesiastical courts, which
from the time of Becket had been antagonistic to royal encroachments.
The war between the civil power and these courts had begun before the
fall of Wolsey, and had resulted in the curtailment of probate duties,
legacies, and mortuaries, by which the clergy had been enriched. A
limitation of pluralities and enforcement of residence had also been
effected. But a still greater blow to the privileges of the clergy was
struck by the Parliament under the influence of Cromwell, who had
elevated it in order to give legality to the despotic measures of the
Crown; and in this way a law was passed that no one under the rank of a
sub-deacon, if convicted of felony, should be allowed to plead his
"benefit of clergy," but should be punished like ordinary
criminals,--thus re-establishing the constitutions of Clarendon in