observance. His vicegerent in Church affairs commanded all the
clergy entrusted with a cure of souls to explain the articles, and
also at certain times to lay before the people the rightfulness of the
abrogation of Papal authority. He required them to give warnings
against image-worship, belief in modern miracles, and pilgrimages.
Children were henceforth to learn the Lord's Prayer, the articles of
the Creed, and the Ten Commandments in English.[128] It was the
beginning of the Church service in the vernacular, which was rightly
regarded as the chief means of withdrawing the national Church from
Romish influence.

But Cromwell was also engaged in another enterprise, not less hostile
and injurious to the Papacy.

As many of the great men in State and Church thought, so thought also
the pious members of the monasteries and cloistered convents; they
opposed the Supremacy, not as they said from inclination to
disobedience, but because Holy Mother Church ordered otherwise than
King and Parliament ordained.[129] The apology merely served to
condemn them. In the rules they followed, in the Orders to which they
belonged, the intercommunion of Latin Christianity had its most living
expression; but it was exactly this which King and Parliament wished
to sever. Wolsey had already, as we know, and with the help of
Cromwell himself, taken in hand to suppress many of them: but in the
new order of things there was absolutely no more place for the
monastic system; it was necessarily sacrificed to the unity of the
country, and at the same time to the greed of the great men.

But it cannot be imagined that innovations which struck so deep could
be carried through without opposition. After all the efforts of the
old kings to establish Christianity in agreement with Rome, after the
victories of the Papacy when the kings quarrelled with it, and the
violent suppression of all dissent, it was inevitable that the belief
of the hierarchic ages, which is besides so peculiarly adapted to this
end, had in England as elsewhere sunk deep into men's minds, and in
great measure still swayed them. Was what had been always held for
heresy no longer to merit this name because it was avowed by the
ruling powers? In the northern counties neither the clergy nor the
people would hear of the King's supremacy; they continued to pray for
the Pope; Cromwell's injunctions were disregarded. It may be that
horrible abuses and vices were prevalent in the cloister