Smithfield, were mined and blown up with gunpowder that the materials might be utilized for the ducal mansion in the Strand.  He turned Glastonbury, with all its associations dating from the earliest introduction of Christianity into our island, into a worsted manufactory, managed by French Protestants.  Under his auspices the splendid college of St. Martin-le-Grand in London was converted into a tavern, and St. Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster, served the scarcely less incongruous purpose of a Parliament House.  All this he did, and when his well-earned fall came the Church fared no better under his successor, John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, and afterwards Duke of Northumberland.

  [28] History of the Church in England, p. 401.

Another wretch was Robert, Earl of Sussex, to whom the King gave the choir of Atleburgh, in Norfolk, because it belonged to a college.  “Being of a covetous disposition, he not only pulled down and spoiled the chancel, but also pulled up many fair marble gravestones of his ancestors with monuments of brass upon them, and other fair good pavements, and carried them and laid them for his hall, kitchen, and larder-house.”  The church of St. Nicholas, Yarmouth, has many monumental stones, the brasses of which were in 1551 sent to London to be cast into weights and measures for the use of the town.  The shops of the artists in brass in London were full of broken brass memorials torn from tombs.  Hence arose the making of palimpsest brasses, the carvers using an old brass and on the reverse side cutting a memorial of a more recently deceased person.

After all this iconoclasm, spoliation, and robbery it is surprising that anything of value should have been left in our churches.  But happily some treasures escaped, and the gifts of two or three generations added others.  Thus I find from the will of a good gentleman, Mr. Edward Ball, that after the spoliation of Barkham Church he left the sum of five shillings for the providing of a processional cross to be borne before the choir in that church, and I expect that he gave us our beautiful Elizabethan chalice of the date 1561.  The Church had scarcely recovered from its spoliation before another era of devastation and robbery ensued.  During the Cromwellian period much destruction was wrought by mad zealots of the Puritan faction.  One of these men and his doings are mentioned by Dr. Berwick in his Querela Cantabrigiensis:—­

“One who calls himself John [it should be William] Dowsing and by Virtue of a pretended Commission, goes about y^{e} country like a Bedlam, breaking glasse windows, having battered and beaten downe all our painted glasses, not only in our Chappels, but (contrary to order) in our Publique Schools, Colledge Halls, Libraries, and Chambers, mistaking, perhaps, y^{e} liberall Artes for Saints (which they intend in time to pull down too) and having (against an order) defaced and digged up y^{e} floors of our