unfortunate divorce question, from which he traced all other miseries. *

This ample confession, which was evidently made by the advice of Crumwell, pitifully reveals mind and soul and heart in all their perplexities. But the abbot had also vividly before him the horrors of imprisonment and the thought of a terrible death. Under stress of this fear, before his examination is concluded he, in accents more pitiful still, admits that he may have been mistaken after all, and prays for pardon.

This is but a picture of the anguish of conscience and sinking of heart in dread of an uncertain end which must have been the experience of thousands in that terrible day. The storm burst first and most heavily, as usual, not on the practised theologian and skilled dialectician, but on men who most lived

by authority and tradition. By instinct they knew what was right. Their conscience "was scrupulous touching the continuance of the bishop of Rome." They maintained his part "as far as they durst, thinking it was the true way," and regarding with equal distrust and fear the ecclesiastical policy of Henry and the acts of Cranmer, believing the archbishop "had no authority to do as he did without power of the bishop of Rome." The expectation was general that the "quarrel," as it was esteemed, between the king and the pope would be made up again. To men wise after the event, such an expectation may seem to betoken a simplicity borderB. Mus. Cleop., E. iv., f. 111.

ing on foolishness, but to men in those days it was a sheet-anchor of hope.

To those in the position of the abbot of Woburn the immediate interests were pressing, involving both the welfare of brethren, servants, dependants, friends, and the fate of a home they loved. Such considerations must have added a moral weight to suggestions prompted first by personal fears, and helped them, it may be, even to deceive themselves. Like prior Houghton of the Carthusians, they might come to believe that they were making themselves anathema for the sake of their brethren, and even "the daily grudge of conscience" would appear to men of this stamp, but part of the sore burden to be borne in their Master's service. So subtle is the mind in finding the highest motives to avert an evil before which the flesh quails and the heart sinks. All that had to be done for the moment was to hold out and gain time.

But such a surrender of convictions as that to which abbot Hobbes had brought himself was all in vain. His prayer for pardon was denied; he was not allowed to live. Henry had passed beyond the stage of compassion for any human weakness, of pity for any living soul. The abbot was apparently tried at Lincoln, together with Laurence Blonham, or Peck, and Richard Woburn, or Barnes, two monks of the abbey, and all three being found guilty were ordered to be drawn, hanged and quartered.* Of the two monks thus condemned, one, Laurence Blonham,

*R. O. Control. Roll, 30 Hen. VIII., m. 6d.

was he who in the "shaving house" had declared he never would "be sworn to forsake the pope." The other, Richard, or, as he is otherwise called, "Ralph," Woburn or Barnes, was the subprior of whom abbot Hobbes has left it on record, that he "always held the strongest views and expressed them" on the matter of the pope's authority.

The abbot, together with the vicar of Puddington and others, were hanged before the gate of Woburn abbey, and tradition, as late as the beginning of this century, pointed to an old oak tree in front of the monastery as the gallows upon which the monks were executed.t

The possessions of the abbey, producing a clear income of nearly £400 a-year, thus passed into the royal hands by the new interpretation of the law of attainder on the 20th of June, 1538. By the 29th of September the royal receiver for attainted lands. acknowledged from sales of the monastic goods the sum of £266 12s. § A few years later this property was granted, together with many other broad acres belonging to the Church and the poor to Sir John Russell.

* Cleop., E. iv., f. 106d.

† B. Mus. Add. MS. 27,402, p. 47, gives only one monk-" the prior" executed with the abbot. The parson of Puddington's name was John Henmersh.-Cont. Roll., 31 Hen. VIII.-Dodd's "Woburn," 1818, p. 38.

Valor Eccl., iv., p. 213.

§ R. O. Exch. Augt. Off. Mins. Accts., 29-30 Hen. VIII., 181,

m 3.

CHAPTER VI.

THE SUPPRESSION OF CONVENTS.

SEVERAL circumstances relating to the destruction of English nunneries render some brief account of them advisable. Many things combined to render the dissolution of conventual establishments and the disbanding of religious more terrible to nuns than to monks. A woman compelled to exchange the secluded life of a cloister with all its aids to piety | for an existence in the world, to which she could never rightly belong, would be obviously in a more dangerous and unbearable position than a man. Το the monk, who was also a priest, there was always a possible future in the exercise of his sacred calling, and however remote his chance of obtaining a cure of souls or other sacerdotal employment, when the tendency of Henry's policy was on every hand to destroy the influence and diminish the occupation of the clergy, still, the bare possibility must have rendered expulsion from home less hopeless in its outlook. The nun's lot, however, had no such ray of consolation. Even had the circumstances attending her dismissal from conventual life been more fortunate, or the result of her own act and choice, her future must have been dark and uncertain, since the vows which bound her heart and conscience.

must keep her always apart from the secular surroundings in which she was compelled to exist. The cleric, even although his monk's garb were torn from him, and he was forced to trudge the world in poverty, could not be deprived of the sacred character of the clerical state; but the nun, driven from the dismantled walls of her convent, and the veil of her profession denied to her, could not but suffer the pains of daily martyrdom in the rough surroundings of an uncongenial world.

women.

At the time of the dissolution there were in England about one hundred and forty convents of Of these rather more than half belonged to the Benedictine order. They were scattered over the face of the country; the county of York containing a greater proportion than any other. The majority were not possessed of a yearly income sufficient to exempt them from the operation of the act by which the lesser houses passed into the king's hands. In Yorkshire alone, more than half the convents were suppressed under cover of this act of dissolution.

With regard to the regularity and order which prevailed in the English nunneries at the time of their destruction, it will be sufficient here to indicate. that even Layton and Legh in their celebrated "comperta" are able to bring comparatively few charges against their good name. It will be remembered that the reports of these worthy emissaries of Crumwell embraced some thirteen counties, and only