administration which rude and
warlike nobles were incompetent to conduct was considered as especially
belonging to divines. Men, therefore, who were averse to the life of
camps, and who were, at the same time, desirous to rise in the state,
commonly received the tonsure. Among them were sons of all the most
illustrious families, and near kinsmen of the throne, Scroops and
Nevilles, Bourchiers, Staffords and Poles. To the religious houses
belonged the rents of immense domains, and all that large portion of
the tithe which is now in the hands of laymen. Down to the middle of the
reign of Henry the Eighth, therefore, no line of life was so attractive
to ambitious and covetous natures as the priesthood. Then came a violent
revolution. The abolition of the monasteries deprived the Church at once
of the greater part of her wealth, and of her predominance in the Upper
House of Parliament. There was no longer an Abbot of Glastonbury or
an Abbot of Reading, seated among the peers, and possessed of revenues
equal to those of a powerful Earl. The princely splendour of William of
Wykeham and of William of Waynflete had disappeared. The scarlet hat of
the Cardinal, the silver cross of the Legate, were no more. The clergy
had also lost the ascendency which is the natural reward of superior
mental cultivation. Once the circumstance that a man could read had
raised a presumption that he was in orders. But, in an age which
produced such laymen as William Cecil and Nicholas Bacon, Roger Ascham
and Thomas Smith, Walter Mildmay and Francis Walsingham, there was
no reason for calling away prelates from their dioceses to negotiate
treaties, to superintend the finances, or to administer justice. The
spiritual character not only ceased to be a qualification for high civil
office, but began to be regarded as a disqualification. Those worldly
motives, therefore, which had formerly induced so many able, aspiring,
and high born youths to assume the ecclesiastical habit, ceased to
operate. Not one parish in two hundred then afforded what a man of
family considered as a maintenance. There were still indeed prizes in
the Church: but they were few; and even the highest were mean, when
compared with the glory which had once surrounded the princes of the
hierarchy. The state kept by Parker and Grindal seemed beggarly to
those who remembered the imperial pomp of Wolsey, his palaces, which had
become the favorite abodes of royalty, Whitehall and Hampton Cou