to build up a faction interested in
the maintenance of their ecclesiastical policy, Cromwell and the king
squandered the vast mass of wealth which flowed into the Treasury from
the dissolution of the monasteries with reckless prodigality. Three
hundred and seventy-six smaller houses had been suppressed in 1536; six
hundred and forty-five greater houses were surrendered or seized in
1539. Some of the spoil was devoted to the erection of six new
bishopricks; a larger part went to the fortification of the coast. But
the bulk of these possessions was granted lavishly away to the nobles
and courtiers about the king, and to a host of adventurers who "had
become gospellers for the abbey lands." Something like a fifth of the
actual land in the kingdom was in this way transferred from the holding
of the Church to that of nobles and gentry. Not only were the older
houses enriched, but a new aristocracy was erected from among the
dependants of the Court. The Russells and the Cavendishes are familiar
instances of families which rose from obscurity through the enormous
grants of Church-land made to Henry's courtiers. The old baronage was
thus hardly crushed before a new aristocracy took its place. "Those
families within or without the bounds of the peerage," observes Mr.
Hallam, "who are now deemed the most considerable, will be found, with
no great number of exceptions, to have first become conspicuous under
the Tudor line of kings and, if we could trace the title of their
estates, to have acquired no small portion of them mediately or
immediately from monastic or other ecclesiastical foundations." The
leading part which these freshly-created peers took in the events which
followed Henry's death gave strength and vigour to the whole order. But
the smaller gentry shared in the general enrichment of the landed
proprietors, and the new energy of the Lords was soon followed by a
display of political independence among the Commons themselves.

[Sidenote: Results of the Religious Changes.]

While the prodigality of Cromwell's system thus brought into being a new
check upon the Crown by enriching the nobles and the lesser gentry, the
religious changes it brought about gave fire and vigour to the elements
of opposition which were slowly gathering. What did most to ruin the
king-worship that Cromwell set up was Cromwell's ecclesiastical policy.
In reducing the Church to mere slavery beneath the royal power he
believed himself to be trampl