rking
images were pulled down and destroyed. The famous Rood of Boxley, a
figure whose contortions had once imposed on the people, was taken to
the market-place at Maidstone,[1058] and the ingenious mechanism,
whereby the eyes and lips miraculously opened and shut, was exhibited
to the vulgar gaze.[1059] Probably these little devices had already
sunk in popular esteem, for the Blood of St. Januarius could not be
treated at Naples to-day in the same cavalier fashion as the Blood of
Hailes was in England in 1538,[1060] without a riot. But the exposure
was a useful method of exciting popular indignation against the monks,
and it filled reformers with a holy joy. "Dagon," wrote one to
Bullinger, "is everywhere falling in England. Bel of Babylon has been
broken to pieces."[1061] The destruction of the images was a preliminary
skirmish in the final campaign against the monks. The Act of 1536 (p. 381)
had only granted to the King religious houses which possessed an
endowment of less than two hundred pounds a year; the dissolution of
the greater monasteries was now gradually effected by a process of
more or less voluntary surrender. In some cases the monks may have
been willing enough to go; they were loaded with debt, and harassed by
rules imposed by Cromwell, which would have been difficult to keep in
the palmiest days of monastic enthusiasm; and they may well have
thought that freedom from monastic restraint, coupled with a pension,
was a welcome relief, especially when resistance involved the anger of
the prince and liability to the penalties of elastic treasons and of a
_praemunire_ which no one could understand. So, one after another, the
great abbeys yielded to the persuasions and threats of the royal
commissioners. The dissolution of the Mendicant Orders and of the
Knights of St. John dispersed the last remnants of the papal army as
an organised force in England, though warfare of a kind continued for
many years.

[Footnote 1058: _L. and P._, XIII., i., 231, 348.]

[Footnote 1059: Father Bridgett in his _Blunders
and Forgeries_ repudiates the idea that these
"innocent toys" had been put to any superstitious
uses.]

[Footnote 1060: _L. and P._, XIII., i., 347, 564,
580; ii., 186, 409, 488, 709, 710, 856.]

[Footnote 1061: John Hoker of Maidstone to