y, they vented all their
rage upon the minister, while maintaining still a conventional respect
for the sovereign. The prelate had already become the constant butt of
the "Rhetoric Chambers." These popular clubs for the manufacture of
homespun poetry and street farces out of the raw material of public
sentiment, occupied the place which has been more effectively filled in
succeeding ages, and in free countries by the daily press. Before the
invention of that most tremendous weapon, which liberty has ever wielded
against tyranny, these humble but influential associations shared with
the pulpit the only power which existed of moving the passions or
directing the opinions of the people. They were eminently liberal in
their tendencies. The authors and the actors of their comedies, poems,
and pasquils were mostly artisans or tradesmen, belonging to the class
out of which proceeded the early victims, and the later soldiers of the
Reformation. Their bold farces and truculent satire had already effected
much in spreading among the people a detestation of Church abuses. They
were particularly severe upon monastic licentiousness. "These corrupt
comedians, called rhetoricians," says the Walloon contemporary already
cited, "afforded much amusement to the people." Always some poor little
nuns or honest monks were made a part of the farce. It seemed as if the
people could take no pleasure except in ridiculing God and the Church.
The people, however, persisted in the opinion that the ideas of a monk
and of God were not inseparable. Certainly the piety of the early
reformers was sufficiently fervent, and had been proved by the steadiness
with which they confronted torture and death, but they knew no measure in
the ridicule which they heaped upon the men by whom they were daily
murdered in droves. The rhetoric comedies were not admirable in an
aesthetic point of view, but they were wrathful and sincere. Therefore
they cost many thousand lives, but they sowed the seed of resistance to
religious tyranny, to spring up one day in a hundredfold harvest. It was
natural that the authorities should have long sought to suppress these
perambulating dramas. "There was at that tyme," wrote honest Richard
Clough to Sir Thomas Gresham, "syche playes (of Reteryke) played thet
hath cost many a 1000 man's lyves, for in these plays was the Word of God
first opened in thys country. Weche playes were and are forbidden moche
more strictly than any of the book