Amenities of Literature Part 28

[3] And, strange to add, it is still history! Mr. G.o.dwin, in "The Lives of Necromancers," details every part of this apocryphal tale!

And the Edinburgh reviewer very philosophically, not doubtful of its verity, accounts for all its supernatural magic, and clearly explains the inexplicable!

[4] The smith's forge.

THE SPOLIATION OF THE MONASTERIES.

Incidents of such an overwhelming nature in political history as are those of the Reformation can have no sudden origin. They are but the consequences of something which has preceded. In our country the suppression of the monasteries and the abbeys had been long prepared; it was not, and it could not have been, the temporary pa.s.sions, nor the absolute will, of an arbitrary monarch, which by a word could have annihilated an awful power, had not the royal edict been but the echo of many voices. It was attacking but an aged power dissolving in its own corruption, which, blind with pride, looked with complacency on its own unnatural greatness, its political anasarca. Its opulence was an object it could not conceal from its enviers, and its paramount eminence was too heavy a yoke for its rising rivals. This power, in the language of the times, had "covered the land with an Egyptian darkness," and when appeared the "G.o.dly and learned king," as the eighth Henry was called, he was saluted as "a Moses who delivered them from the bondage of Pharaoh." It is not therefore strange that the act which at a single blow annihilated the monastic orders and their "lands and tenements,"

was hailed as the most patriotic which had been ever pa.s.sed by an English sovereign. It made even a tyrannous and jealous monarch, who cut off more heads of men and women than any other on record, popular and extolled even in his latter days.

Henry the Eighth had paused at the blow he was about to level. The plunder was too monstrous even for the hand of an arbitrary monarch. Its division among the n.o.bility and gentry was an expedient which removed the odium from royalty, and invested it with that munificence which dazzled the pride of Henry. In the vast harvest, the king refused the lion's share, looking for his safer portion in the secure loyalty of the new possessors to whom he transferred this vast and novel wealth.

As the scheme was managed, therefore, it was a compromise or co-partners.h.i.+p of the king and his courtiers. The lands now lie the open prey of the hardy claimant or the sly intriguer; crowds of suppliants wearied the crown to partic.i.p.ate in that national spoliation. Every one hastened to urge some former service, or some present necessity, as a colourable plea for obtaining a grant of some of the suppressed lands. A strange custom was then introduced, that of "begging for an estate."

Kneeling to the king, and specifying some particular lands, was found a convenient method to acquire them; and these royal favours were sometimes capriciously and even ludicrously bestowed. Fuller has a pleasant tale concerning one Master Champernoun. One day, observing two or three gentlemen waiting at a door through which the king was to pa.s.s, he was inquisitive to learn their suit, which they refused to tell. On the king's appearance, they threw themselves on their knees, and Champernoun was prompt in joining them, with an implicit faith, says Fuller, that courtiers never ask anything hurtful to themselves. They were begging for an estate. The king granted their pet.i.tion. On this Champernoun claimed his share of the largesse; they remonstrated that he had never come to beg with them; he appealed to the king, and his brother beggars were fain to allot him the considerable priory of St.

Germains, which he sold to the ancestor of the present possessor, the Earl of St. Germains.

The king was prodigal in his grants; for the more he multiplied the receivers of his bounties, the more numerous would be the stanch defenders of their new possessions:[1] grat.i.tude was the least of their merits. He counted on their resolution and their courage. The bait was relis.h.i.+ng, and there were some, when land-grants became more scarce, whose voracity of reformation attempted to s.n.a.t.c.h at the lands of the universities, which had certainly gone had not Henry's love of literature protected their trembling colleges. We have his majesty's own words, in replying to the suggestion of some hungry courtier:--"Ha!

sirrah! I perceive the abbey-lands have fleshed you, and set your teeth on edge, to ask also those colleges. We pulled down sin by defacing the monasteries; but you desire to throw down all goodness by subversion of colleges. I tell you, sir, that I judge no land in England better bestowed than on our universities, which shall maintain our realm when we be dead and rotten. Follow no more this vein; but content yourselves with what you have already, or else seek honest means whereby to increase your worldhoods."

Lord Cromwell was the chief minister through whose mediation these novel royal grants of houses and lands were distributed. There was evidently no chance of attention from his lords.h.i.+p without the most open and explicit offers of the grossest bribery. The Chancellor Audley, in bargaining with Lord Cromwell for the abbey of St. Osyth, for "some present trouble in this suit," one day sent twenty pounds, with "my poor hearty good will, during my life." Perhaps the bribe, though only placed to account, had not its full weight, as the chancellor does not appear, in the present instance, to have possessed himself of this abbey, though, afterwards, with the spoils of two rich monasteries, he built the most magnificent mansion in England, by which he perpetuated his own name in the once-famed Audley-End. Sir Thomas Elyot, in soliciting his lords.h.i.+p's mediation with the king to reward him with "some convenient portion of the suppressed lands," found it advisable to offer a conditional promise! "Whatsoever portion of land that I shall attain by the king's grace, I promise to give to your lords.h.i.+p the first year's fruits, with my a.s.sured and faithful heart and service." All were offering their hearts and the rest of their lives to Lord Cromwell.

As for the regal dispenser himself, so stupendous was his portion that it became necessary to found a court never heard of before--"The Court of Augmentation," an expressive designation, indicating its plenary character, with its chancellor and its treasurer, and a long routine of officers, and none too many, "that the king might be justly dealt with,"

says Cowell, "the interpreter," "for all the manors and parks, the colleges and chantries, and the religious houses which the king did not sell or give away;" that is, the selected prey which the royal eagle grasped in his own talons.

We are accustomed to trace the Reformation to Henry the Eighth; but in verity small are the claims of this sovereign on posterity, for through all the multiplied ramifications of superst.i.tion, nothing under him was reformed. The other great event of the Reformation--the a.s.sumption of the spiritual supremacy--accorded with the national independence from a foreign jurisdiction. The policy was English; but it originated in the private pa.s.sions of the monarch. a.s.suredly, had the tiara deigned to nod to the regal solicitor, then had "the Defender of the Faith" only given to the world another edition of his book against Luther.

In the last years of his reign, Henry vacillated in his uncertain reform. Sometimes leaning on one party and sometimes on another; he had lost the vigour of his better days. In his last parliament, though not without some difficulty, both from Protestant and Papist, they had voted for "the augmentation" of the royal revenue, their grant of the chantries. These chantries were the last wrecks of the monastic lands. A single church had often several chantries attached to it. Chantries were endowments of estates by the sinners of that age for the benefit of having eternal ma.s.ses sung for their departed souls. Henry on this occasion, in his last speech, strongly animadverts on the national disunion; and among his thanks mingles his menaces "to unite them in a more unacceptable way" than the tenderness with which at that moment he addressed them, for their concessions to his "Court of Augmentation."

It is also evident, by this able and extraordinary speech, that Henry would gladly have revoked his gift to the people of "the Word of G.o.d in their mother-tongue," as his majesty expresses himself.[2] He had, indeed, already in part withdrawn the freedom he had granted by restricting it to a few persons, and only to be used on particular occasions. His majesty proceeds--"You lay too much stress on your own expositions and fantastical opinions. In such sublime matters you may easily mistake. This permission of reading the Bible is only designed for private information, not to furnish you with reprimanding phrases and expressions of reproach against priests and preachers. I am extremely sorry to find with how little reverence the Word of G.o.d is mentioned; how people squabble about the sense; how it is turned into wretched rhyme, sung and jingled in every alehouse and tavern." This part of the king's speech was pointed at the general readers of the Scriptures; but his majesty did not discover any happier union among the clergy themselves, whom he roundly rates:--"I am every day informed that you of the clergy are declaiming against each other in the pulpit; and here your charity and discretion are quite lost in vehemence and satire.

Some are too stiff in their old _mumpsimus_, and others too busy and curious in their new _sumpsimus_.[3] Thus the pulpits are, as it were, batteries against each other; the noise is hostile and ruinous. How can we expect the poor people should live friendly with their neighbours when they have such unhappy precedents of discord and dissension in those that teach them?"

Henry the Eighth rejected the Pope, but surely he died a Romanist. His unwieldy huge form was lifted up from his death-bed that he might prostrate himself, and, in the writer's language, who, however, was a papist, "bury himself in the earth," to testify his reverence for "the real presence," when it was brought before him. His will, which, though it was put aside, was not the less the king's will, attested his last supplications to "the Virgin Mary, and all her holy company of Heaven."

And he endowed an altar at Windsor, "to be honourably kept up with all things necessary for _a daily ma.s.s_, there to be read _perpetually while the world shall endure_." At the same time Henry endowed the poor knights of Windsor, upon condition that they should repeat their eternal ma.s.ses for his soul. His magnificence was proportionate to his sins; but his perpetual ma.s.ses, and the world, did not endure together.

With this fact before us, it is not therefore strange that foreign historians should have declared that our Henry the Eighth never designed a Reformation, that he altered nothing; and had only raised a schism which those who contest the papal sovereignty in their civil affairs, as the Gallican Church affected to do, would incline more to approve than to censure.

This monarch has been lauded as a patriot king for the suppression of the monasteries and the national emanc.i.p.ation from the tiara--but patriotism has often covered the most egotistical motives.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] A fear of the rest.i.tution of these abbey-lands to their former uses appears to have prevailed long after their alienation. So late as in the reign of James the First, the founder of Dulwich College, in a dispute respecting the land, observes hypothetically--"If the State should be at any time pleased to returne all abbey lands to their former use, I must lose Dulwich, for which I have paid now 5000_l._" At a later revolution, when the bishops' lands were seized on by the parliamentarians, many obtained those lands at easy rates, or at no rate at all; the greater part reverted, but, if I am not misinformed, there are still descendants of some of these parliamentarians who hold estates without t.i.tle-deeds.

[2] See an abstract from one of his Proclamations in "Curiosities of Literature," vol. iii. p. 373.--ED.

[3] This alludes to the well-known story of the old priest, who having blunderingly used _mumpsimus_ for _sumpsimus_, would never be put right, alleging that "he hated all novelties."

A CRISIS AND A REACTION. ROBERT CROWLEY.

There is a state of transition in society which we usually call a crisis. A crisis is the most active moment of conflicting principles; the novel must extirpate the ancient, the ancient must eject the novel; the one looks to be continued and the other to be settled; it is a painful state of obstinate resistance, like that of two wrestlers when neither can cast down the other.

Fortunate are the people who have only to pa.s.s through a single crisis.

But in the wrath of Providence there may be reserved another connecting crisis in the chain of human events, and this we term a reaction, usually accompanied by a retaliation; then comes the h.o.a.rded vengeance and the day of retribution on which issues no amnesty. In physics, action and reaction are equal; the reciprocation of any impulse not being greater than the impulse itself. Nature in her operations thus preserves an equilibrium; but the human hatreds and the partial interests which man has contrived for his own misery, can only find that equilibrium when he submits to a toleration. But a toleration is a part.i.tion of power, and predominance is the vitality of a party. The Catholic vengeance of Mary in its reaction was out of all proportion greater than the Protestant docility of Edward. Our nation has been more subject to this crisis and this reaction than perhaps any other. The reign of Charles the First was a crisis, that of Charles the Second a reaction; that of James the Second brought on a crisis, and the revolution of 1688 was the consequential reaction. But never have the people suffered more than during the three reigns of Edward the Sixth, Mary, and Elizabeth; a terrible intolerance disorganized the whole community: the conflict of old and of new creeds; of reciprocal persecutions, and alternate triumphs; of abjurations and recantations; of supple compliers and rabid polemics; and of pugilistic contests of the ejected with the ejectors--rapid scenes at once tragic and ludicrous.

Henry the Eighth died in 1547, and the accession of Elizabeth was in 1558. In this short period of eleven years we were governed by two sovereigns, whose reigns, happily for the English people, were the shortest in our annals.

A new era was opening under the dominion of Henry, for he was a monarch of enlarged views. But the intellectual character of England in its vernacular literature was r.e.t.a.r.ded by the events which occurred in the reigns of the two successors of this sovereign. The nation indeed suffered no longer from the civil wars of the rival Roses; but another war now shook the empire with as merciless a rivalry--it was a universal conflict of opinions and dogmas. The governing powers themselves combated each other; and whether in opposing the Reformer to the Romanist, or in restoring "the papelin" to root out "the gospeller," in these two mutable reigns, they neutralised or distracted the unhappy people; and while both maintained that they were proffering "the true religion," religion itself seemed to have lost its eternal truth. Edward with an infirm hand established, what from her short reign Mary, with her barbarous energy, could only imperfectly cast down.

Edward the Sixth, a boy-king, and a puppet-prince, invested with supreme power, acted without any volition of his own. We are prepossessed in his favour by his laborious diary. It is, however, remarkable that no solitary entry made in that book of life, no chance effusion, disturbs the uninterrupted equanimity. Whether the young king signs for the decapitation of his two uncles, or jots down the burning of Joan of Kent, an Arian, and another of a Dutchman, a Socinian, or records how a live goose suspended had its head sliced off by those who run at the ring, they seem equally to be matters of course, and by him were only distinguished by their respective dates. A nation's hope has always been the flattering painter of every youthful prince who dies immaturely; in the royal youth is lamented the irreparable loss of the future great monarch. But his father had been the most glorious youthful prince who ever adorned a throne; and it would be hard to decide, by the heartless chronicle of Edward, whether such an imperturbable spirit would have closed his life as a Nero or a t.i.tus. This unhappy young prince must have felt the utter misery of his condition, for his was that curse of power, when in its exercise power itself becomes powerless, while its hands must be directed by another's. Had the reign of Edward the Sixth been prolonged, we should have had a polemical monarch, if we may judge by a collection of texts of Scripture, in proof of the doctrine of justification by faith, which exists in his own handwriting, written in French, and dedicated to his uncle.[1]

This was a calamitous period for the nation; we derive little consolation when we discover that not more than three centuries ago our ancestors were a semi-barbarous race? We seem to be consulting the annals of some Asiatic dynasty, when we see a royal nephew tranquilly affixing his signature to the death-warrants of his uncles; imprisonment or exile would have been too tender for these state victims; we see one brother attainted by another, and the scaffold finally receiving both; and a Queen of England, in the captivity of the Romish superst.i.tion, hailing with a benediction her own _autos da fe_. What we should have gained had the accomplished prince lived, we cannot conjecture; but what the nation were spared by the death of the melancholy Mary, is not doubtful. Edward and Mary were opposite bigots; and both alike presumed that they were appointed to the work of sanct.i.ty; but every reform which requires to be carried on by coercion will long appear ambiguous to the better-tempered. The bigotry as well as the puerile taste of the prince appeared when he composed a comedy or interlude against _The Wh.o.r.e of Babylon_, and the _The False G.o.ds_; but the brawls of polemics, at least, are more tolerable than torture and the sacrifice of fire.

It was one of the first evils of the Reformation, that the people were ill prepared to receive their emanc.i.p.ation. All sense of subordination rapidly disappeared in society; even the spell of devotion was dissolved; and the people seemed to consider that, having rid themselves of one spurious mode of religion, there was no longer any religion in the world. "Thus for religion ye keep no religion," wrote the learned Cheke, in once addressing an armed mult.i.tude, who cruelly would not tolerate the Christianity of their neighbours.

An immature reformation is accompanied by certain unavoidable inconveniences. Its first steps are incomprehensible to the thoughtless, and too vague for the considerate, doing what it should not do, and leaving undone what it ought to do, comprehending too much, and omitting many things. A revolutionary reform breaks out with an ebullition of popular feelings; but in escaping from one tyranny, men do not necessarily enter into freedom. The reformer, in abandoning what is known, looks to an uncertain and distant futurity; the anti-reformer appeals to precedent, and clings to what is real--his good is positive, and his evil is not concealed. In the removal of some long-standing evils in civil society, some portion of good goes with them; for many of these served as expedients to supply certain wants, and therefore relatively were or may be beneficial. Even our old prejudices, when scrutinised, often will be found to have struck their roots in the common welfare. The complicate interests of civil society were at first a web woven by strong hands, so that much of the antiquated may retain its soundness, while the gloss of the new may set off but a loose and flimsy texture. These are some of the difficulties of an age of innovation, which may wisely check without stopping the velocity of its movements. The only unerring reformer who partakes not of human infirmities, neither deceived by illusions, nor overcome by prejudices, and whose only wisdom is experience, must be that silent and unceasing worker of the destinies of man--Time!

At the period now before us, the crisis and the reaction were alike remarkable. The people who witnessed in four successive reigns four different systems of religion, mutable with the times, amidst their incert.i.tude were in fact taught a religious scepticism. One of the great innovations in divine service was that of preaching from the pulpit, instead of reading set homilies or other prescribed lessons, by which the Romanists had reduced their whole devotion to a mumbled ritual and a mechanical service--formularies and forms which ceased to operate on the heart, and carried on a religion that was not religious.

The introduction of _preaching_ appears to have been followed by an unhappy effect. Latimer, in the rude simplicity of his style, complains of some that went to church for the benefit of being "lulled into a nap." There was a still greater grievance in this novel custom of preaching; for from the pulpits the turbulent were rousing the pa.s.sions of the people, by declaiming against what some termed "the abuses which ought to be put away;" while others, persevering in their old doctrine, were alarming their auditors, for the loss of what had been put away.

Pulpit thundered against pulpit; for it was not only the reformer, but the anti-reformer, who were the preachers. The fact was, that by an avaricious policy, "the court of augmentation," which had to pension the monks of the suppressed houses, filled up the vacant benefices as fast as they occurred, by appointing these annuitants, to curtail the pension-list. The enemy was thus settled in the camp of the reformers.

This spirit of division was caught by the rude stage of that day in their comedies or interludes. This inundation of popular clamour was only to be stayed by coercion--by proclamations and orders in council.

The Council of State issued their orders, or rather their instructions, how the preachers were to preach, and that none but the licensed should be permitted to ascend into the pulpit. Even Latimer himself was discountenanced for his apostolical freedoms, by inveighing against the gentry, who sent their sons to college, instead of educating them at home for the church. Academical degrees were abrogated as anti-Christian; Greek was heresy; and all human learning was to be vain and useless to "the gospellers." As the preachers were to be licensed, it came to the turn of the players and the printers not to enact or print their interludes, without a special licence from the privy council; and at length the interludes were actually inhibited for "containing matter relating to sedition;" and this proclamation more particularly specifies those that "play in English." The Romanists had their interludes as well as the Reformers. Bishop Percy once observed that the excellence of the drama, as every wise man would have it, is to form a supplement to the pulpit,--this literally occurred in the present instance; but the pulpit was itself as disorderly, to use the words of the proclamation, "as any light and fantastical head could list to invent and devise." Our most skilful delver into dramatic history, amidst his curious ma.s.ses of disinterments, has brought up this proclamation. We must connect the state of these rude players with these rude preachers; the interludes were nothing more than reflections from the sermons; player and preacher were the same. By connecting these together, we form a juster notion of their purpose than we find in the isolated fact. There was now sedition in religion as well as in politics.

The prevalent fervour scattered its sparks through all the ranks of society, and the thoughts of all were concentrated on the sole object of "the new religion." The Reformation was the great political topic in the court of Edward the Sixth; discussions in theology were no longer confined to colleges or to the clergy. Our poets, ever creatures of their age, reflecting its temper, and who best tell its story, confined their genius to ballads and interludes, making rough sport for loungers and for the common people; or, in their quieter moods, were devoted to metrical versions from the Scriptures. In a history of our vernacular literature, the introduction of a versified psalter and of psalm-singing forms an incident; as the pa.s.sion for psalmody itself is a portion of the history of the Reformation. "This infectious frenzy of sacred song,"

as Thomas Warton describes what he condemns as puritanic, we adopted from the practice of Calvin, who had introduced psalm-singing into the Geneva discipline, but really had himself borrowed it from the popularity of the first psalms in French metre, by Clement Marot. This natural and fine genius, as a commutation for an irregular life--and he had been imprisoned for eating flesh in Lent--was persuaded by the learned Vatable, the Hebrew Professor, to perform this signal act of penance. The gay novelty charmed the court, and was equally delightful to the people; every one chose the psalm which expressed his own personal feelings or described his own condition, adapted to some favourite air for the instrument or the voice. At the time it could have been little suspected that while Calvin was stripping the religious service of its pageantry, and denuding it even of its decent ceremonies, he would have condescended to anything so human as a tune and a chorus; yet the austere reformer of Geneva showed no deficient knowledge of human nature, when he contrived to make men sing in concert, or carol in the streets, and shorten their work by a song cheerful or sad; for psalms there are for joy or for affliction, effusions for all hours, suitable to all ranks.[2]

Another incident in which our vernacular literature was remotely connected, was the calling in of the ancient Rituals, Missals, and other books of the Latin service, and establis.h.i.+ng the book of Common Prayer in the common language. But the people at large seemed reluctant to alter their antiquated customs, which habit had long endeared to them.

While they had listened to an unintelligible Ma.s.s, they had, from their childhood, contracted a spirit of devotion. Their fathers had bowed to the Ma.s.s as a holy office from time immemorial; and from their childhood they had attached to it those emotions of holiness which were not the less so by their erroneous a.s.sociation of ideas. When their religion became a mere Act of Parliament, and their prayers were in plain English, all appeared an affair of yesterday. The church service seemed no longer venerable, the new priesthood no longer apostolical; and the giddy populace protested against the common dues exacted by their neighbour the curate, for their marriages and baptisms and funerals.

They forsook their churches, and even refused to pay t.i.thes.

It is in revolutionary periods that we find men adapted for these rare occasions; who, had they not lived amid the commotions around them, had probably not emerged out of the sphere of their neighbours. Such minds quickly sympathise with popular grievances and popular clamours, and obtain their reformation, often at the sacrifice of their individual interest, as if the cause were their appointed vocation. They are advocates who plead, imbued even by all the prejudices of their clients; they are organs resounding the fulness of the pa.s.sions around them: a character of this order is the true representative of the mult.i.tude; and we listen to all their cries in the single voice of such a man.

And such a man was ROBERT CROWLEY, a universal reformer through Church and State; whose unwearied industry run the pace of his zeal; whose declarations were as open as his designs were definite; and whose resolved spirit pursued its object in every variable form which his imagination could invent, and which incessant toil never found irksome.

Crowley had been a student at Magdalen College at Oxford, and obtained a fellows.h.i.+p. At the close of the reign of Henry the Eighth, Crowley appears to have sojourned in "the great city;" and in that of Edward the Sixth, we must not be surprised to discover the Fellow of Magdalen established as a printer and bookseller, and moreover combining the elevated characters of poet and preacher. How it happened that a man of letters, and not undistinguished by his genius, adopted a mechanical profession, we may account for from the exigencies of the time. Possibly Crowley's fellows.h.i.+p was what Swift once called "a beggarly fettles.h.i.+p."

In the hurried reform of the day, "the universal good" was attended by "a great partial evil." In the dissolution of the abbeys and priories they had also demolished those useful exhibitions proceeding from them, by which poor students were maintained at the universities. Many, thus deprived of the means of existence at college, were compelled to forsake their Alma-Mater and seek another course of life. It was probably this incident which had thrown this learned man among the people. How Crowley contrived to fulfil his fourfold office of printer, bookseller, poet, and preacher, with eminent success, the scanty notices of his life disappoint our curiosity. We would gladly enter into the recesses of this man's arduous life. Did he part.i.tion the hours of his day? What habits harmonised such clas.h.i.+ng pursuits? Was he a sage whose wisdom none of his followers have gathered? Was the shop of the studious man haunted by learned customers? When we think of the printer's press and the bookseller's counter, we are disposed to inquire, Where mused the poet, and where stood the preacher?

Crowley is the author of many controversial pieces, and some satirical poems reflecting the manners and the pa.s.sions of his day, all which enjoyed repeated editions. But he was not less a favourite sermoniser.

He touched a tremulous chord in the hearts of the people, and his opinions found an echo in their b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The pulpit and the press, perhaps, had been his voluntary choice, to print out what he had spoken ere it perished, or offer a supplement to a sermon in some awful tome of theology and reform. His Pulpit and his Press!--"those two prolific sources of faction," exclaimed Thomas Warton.

As a printer and book-vendor, Crowley is distinguished by that curiosity of research which led him to be the first publisher of "The Visions of Piers Ploughman," which had hitherto slept in the dust of its ma.n.u.script state. Warton restricts the merit of his discovery merely to the fervour of a controversialist eager to propagate his own opinions; and truly the bold spirit of reform, and the satirical strokes on the ecclesiastics of the times of Edward the Third, in that remarkable and unknown author, were in unison with a Reformer in the age of Reformation. It must be confessed that the historian of our poetry cherished some collegiate prejudices, and that his native good humour is liable to change when his pen scourges a puritan and a predestinarian, as was Robert Crowley. But Warton wrote when he imagined that the suppressed absurdities of Popery required no longer any strong satire from a Calvinist; and as Crowley, too, lived to hold many dignities in the reign of Elizabeth, Crowley appeared to Warton to be the member of "a Church whose doctrines and polity his undiscerning zeal had a tendency to destroy." Strype has only ventured to describe Crowley as "an earnest professor of religion." The meek curate of Low-Leyton could not rise to the magisterial indignation of one of the "heads of houses," one who, at least, ought to have been, and who, I understand, probably missed the honour and the profit by his own ingenuous carelessness.