istration of the forms of which had become their sole occupation; and as character forsook them, the Mortmain Act,[1] the Acts of Premunire, and the repeatedly recurring Statutes of Provisors, mark the successive defeats that drove them back from the high post of command which character alone had earned for them. If the Black Prince had lived, or if Richard II. had inherited the temper of the Plantagenets, the ecclesiastical system would have been spared the misfortune of a longer reprieve. Its worst abuses would have then terminated, and the reformation of doctrine in the sixteenth century would have been left to fight its independent way unsupported by the moral corruption of the Church from which it received its most powerful impetus. The nation was ready for sweeping remedies. The people felt little loyalty to the Pope, as the language of the Statutes of Provisors[2] conclusively proves, and they were prepared to risk the sacrilege of confiscating the estates of the religious houses—a complete measure of secularization being then, as I have already said,[3] the expressed desire of the House of Commons.[4] With an Edward III. on the throne such a measure would very likely have been executed, and the course of English history would have been changed. It was ordered otherwise, and doubtless wisely. The Church was allowed a hundred and fifty more years to fill full
- ↑ 27 Ed. III. stat. 1; 38 Ed. III. stat. 2; 16 Rich. cap. 5.
- ↑ 25 Ed. III. stat. 4; stat. 5, cap. 22; 13 Rich II. stat. 2, cap. 2; 2 Hen. IV. cap. 3; 9 Hen. IV. cap. 8.
- ↑ See p. 66.
- ↑ Lansdowne MS. 1, fol. 26; Stow's Chron. ed. 1630, p. 338.
