stated in 1532 that the Cistercian monasteries were
greatly in need of dissolution (_L. and P._, iii.,
361).]

[Footnote 953: _Cambridge Modern History_, ii.,
643.]

[Footnote 954: Nor, of course, were the symptoms
peculiar to England; it is absurd to attribute the
dissolution of the monasteries solely to Henry
VIII. and Cromwell, because monasteries were
dissolved in many countries of Europe, Catholic as
well as Protestant. So, too, the charges are not
naturally incredible, because the kind of vice
alleged against the monks has unfortunately been
far from unknown wherever and whenever numbers of
men, young or middle-aged, have lived together in
enforced celibacy.]

Probably the staunchest champion of monasticism would acknowledge that
in the reign of Henry VIII. there was at least a plausible case for
mending monastic morals. But that was not then the desire of the
Government of Henry VIII.; and the case for mending their morals was
tacitly assumed to be the same as a case for ending the monasteries.
It would be unjust to Henry to deny that he had always shown himself
careful of the appearance, at least, of morality in the Church; but
it requires a robust faith in the King's disinterestedness to (p. 340)
believe that dissolution was not the real object of the visitation,
and that it was merely forced upon him by the reports of the visitors.
The moral question afforded a good excuse, but the monasteries fell,
not so much because their morals were lax, as because their position
was weak. Moral laxity contributed no doubt to the general result, but
there were other causes at work. The monasteries themselves had long
been conscious that their possession of wealth was not, in the eyes of
the middle-class laity, justified by the use to which it was put; and,
for some generations at least, they had been seeking to make friends
with Mammon by giving up part of their revenues, in the form of
pensions and corrodies to courtiers, in the hope of being allowed to
retain the remainder.[955] It had also become the custom to entrust
the stewardship of their possessions to secular hands; and, possibly
as a result, the monasteries were so