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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 3

The Impoverishing Effects of the Reformation

page 70

The Impoverishing Effects of the Reformation.

"Too strange not to be true" was the title of a book considerably advertised some time ago; ''Credo quia impossibile" was the assertion of Tertullian. Some such sentiment passed through the writer's mind as he plunged lately into the little volume considerably advertised now,—Cobbett's History of the Protestant [he means English or British Protestant] Reformation.

It requires a mind as vigorous as Cobbett's own not to be fatally shocked by the startling overthrow he administers to all our ordinary preconceived opinions. I will not mention the language that he applies to Lather, Zwinglius, Calvin, and Beza; while of Hooper, Latimer, and Ridley, he says they were indeed "inferior villains to Cranmer, but to few other men that ever existed." (Page 145.)

Burning Mary becomes a Saint in his hands; (though I believe much that he says is correct; I believe her to have been sincere, most pious, and perhaps disinterested.—Would bestial Harry, or Virago Bess have restored a million and a half of money to the Church?) and Elizabeth the most unfeeling and unprincipled of mortals. Cobbett asserts himself to be a staunch Protestant (Page 284), and to have had no motive but the truth, and though his book reads singularly like that of the most rabid Papist, I credit his assertion. But Cobbett, a man of narrow sympathies, was a man of most vigorous mind, and as has been pithily observed, when he handles a subject to his heart, strips it as a dog does a bone. Most certainly his book is very interesting, and extremely bustling and muscular; the subject is vigorously handled, the reader is carried along with unflagging interest, the facts are vividly marshalled, the cases are succinctly put, and the arguments powerfully and tersely stated. Cobbett indeed is perhaps the prince of common sense writers, born of the humblest origin, gifted with a vigorous intellect, relying upon nothing but his own native insight, deriving virtues from his very faults;—concentration from his narrowness, and force from his partiality;—a self-made and self-taught man, a robust thinker and a thinker for himself, he teaches us, however we may distrust him occasionally for his one-sidedness, however we may suspect him, as we suspect most robust thinkers—men, who think in italics—of wrongheadedness, the energy that may be gained from thoroughness, the strength that hobbyism gives, the difficulty even of drawing the distinction between hobbyism, and a point merely pertinaciously and vigorously pursued, and last, not least, the independence that independence can acquire, the diametric stand point which it may occupy from our own, and the healthiness which even the most rationally rooted opinions may derive from collision with such vigorous intelligent discrepancy from themselves.

In the tyrannous limits of space I can confine myself only to one point in Cobbett's book. It is this,—that the "Protestant Reformation" in England and Ireland has impoverished and degraded the main body of the people.

page 71

To put it in a nutshell, Cobbett's argument is this,—Before the Reformation, monasteries, priories, nunneries, and friaries, to say nothing of churches and hospitals, spotted the country all over; these religious institutions received large incomes, and spending them among the circle of which they formed the centre, diffused an amount of general comfort which it was ruination to destroy, but which the confiscation under Henry the Eighth did destroy, and which originated the hideous names and facts of paupers and pauperism. Three hundred and fifty-six monasteries, he says, were suppressed, and not less on the average than fifty religious establishments of all sorts per county. A million and a half of money was restored to them by Mary, and this was only a portion, for the bulk of it had gone to what Cobbett calls "bribe" the great, or as he terms them, the plunderers.

Now whatever inaccuracies there may be in detailing Cobbett's work, his main fact is undisputed and indisputable. All the world knows the monasteries were plundered, and that their resources were something fabulous; moreover—and here is the rub, the sting, the gall and venom, the morsel that Cobbett could never digest, and died loathing and execrating,—this hoard of El Dorado, suddenly grasped by violence and wrested by murder, went to endow no similar institutions, but a set of lay grandees. Some, it is true, went afterwards to endow the Church of England, but the Church of England had no obligation to give away one-third to the poor (the grand feature in the Catholic system;) and moreover the Church of England was administered by a married clergy; a fact which, whatever may be said for it, undoubtedly introduces a train of consequences, as very skilfully shown by Cobbett, not favourable to the poor.

As for the grandees, essentially secular, they spent the money essentially on themselves. Bribed in this Danae shower auriferous, unexpected, they gave themselves over to the most shameless prostitution; for the Devil indeed was never known to misuse a chance offered him.

Once in the hands of the laity, they stuck to it; and, forsooth, soon set about raising the heaven-born (!) cry—the "Eternal Rights of Property;"—a cry that has descended, with all its hollowness, to this hour.

It is the Rights of Men that are alone eternal; the only eternal rights of property are the rights that property ought to have. The rights of six-pence too much are nil. Property has its rights (or society were baseless), but its exact rights—the golden mean, the magic line,—have not yet been discovered. Its wrong rights; its right of having too much are

"Gross as a mountain, monstrous, palpable."

Cobbett argues much in favour of Popery, because it was the religion of our forefathers for 900 years;—yes! but it might be retorted 900 years too long; or, if he wants logic and not a repartee—so were witchcraft and all sorts of diablery, the belief of our forefathers for 900 years. Then again he rails at and ridicules the Protestants for being split up into so many sects The same charge has been brought against the Liberal Party.—True! and it is their great badge and glory; the necessary result of their raison d'etre. It is seen with a moment's reflection, that the independence, the spirit of freedom, that led the party originally to secede necessarily generates infinite difference of opinion. page 72 So far from being a reproach to them it is their distinctive glory. In such matters I shall disagree with Cobbett, but in so far as the drift of his book is logically either to the old thing back, or some form of communion to supplement the deficiency, I think his argument claims the most serious consideration; and I do unreservedly, on the face of it, consider with him the absenteeism to which the suppression of the monasteries gave rise, and the destruction of the Centres of beneficence, an evil whose magnitude can hardly be overstated. I hold with him that Poor-Rates in themselves are a hideous institution, that they are distinctly to be traced to the cause he assigns, that Pauperism threatens to engulph the land, and that it was infinitely better to relieve the wants of the people from notions of religion than at the heartless dictate of law, that our Great Proprietors are attainted before God and man, that they are morally responsible, that Property's Rights are not yet defined, but everywhere largely overrated, and that unless some supplement of the sort be discovered, that shall draw by the silken cords of brotherhood, and fit like a glove and not like a handcuff, we may expect some social Etna, that for aught I know may outhorror the French Revolution.

Alexander Teetgen.