No one can pretend that Cromwell's "visitation" of 1535, conducted by unsympathetic and harsh men, was either thorough or just. Whatever the results of such an investigation might be, the monasteries were doomed beforehand. Their wealth was their destruction. In 1536 parliament passed an act dissolving the smaller monasteries with an income of less than 8200, and turned them over to the king to do with as he pleased; and at the same time it erected a special court, the court of the augmentation of the revenues of the king's crown," to manage the new lands and revenues.

RUINS OF FURNESS ABBEY.

A Cistercian abbey in Lancashire. The arches are Norman and their solidity and strength show the half military character of the abbey, due to its location.

By this act three hundred and seventy-six houses were dissolved, two thousand monks and nuns dispossessed, and all together ten thousand people turned out of homes or employment.

Cromwell next faced the problem of breaking up the larger monasteries. The Pilgrimage of Grace aided his cause, for Henry used it as a pretext for harsh measures. In 1538 the friaries were destroyed, and during the year that followed such pressure was brought to bear on the larger monastic houses that one hundred and fifty of them surrendered.' Parliament, by an act of approval, gave them to the king. In 1540, one hundred more were seized and dismantled. In the course of the attack many priors and abbots, refusing to accept the king's terms, were executed; while all together it is estimated that eight thousand religious persons were driven out and eighty thousand others deprived of their means of support.

RUINS OF FOUNTAINS ABBEY.

One of the most famous of the ruined abbeys of Yorkshire. It belonged to the Cistercian order and was under the patronage of the Percys. Surrendered 1540.

Though most of the lands were given away as bribes to favorites and others whom the king wished to bind to himself, something like $75,000,000 (modern value) accrued to the king from lands, plate, and other spoils. Forty thousand families are said to have profited by these gifts, and upon these foundations a new nobility arose, whose interest it was to support the king's policy.

Henry s Attitude toward Superstitions and Dogma

But Henry did not stop here. Cromwell set on foot an attack on images, relics, and shrines, and practically abolished the privileges of sanctuary. There is no doubt that these fostered superstition and credulousness among the people and increased that power of the priests and monks which Henry VIII particularly wished to destroy. But the king had no intention of encouraging the teachings of Protestantism, for he never forgot that he was the Defender of the Faith." He had already caused John Frith and John Lambert to be burned, and had publicly declared that he would not be a "patron of heretics." In June, 1539, parliament passed the Six Articles Act, called by the reformers the whip with six strings," which Henry himself is supposed to have written.' This act upheld transubstantiation, declared that communion in both kinds was not necessary for salvation, that priests were not to marry, that vows of chastity must be observed, that private masses must be continued, and lastly that auricular confession was expedient and necessary. All who denied the first article were to suffer death; and in the decade that followed, some thirty persons came under this decree. Most famous of all was Anne Askew, a gentlewoman of rank, who was burnt for saying that the bread cannot be God."