I investigate, and find that my ex-professor knows all about King Henry the Eighth, and his motives in founding the Church of England; he is ready with an “economic interpretation”, as complete as the most rabid muckraker could desire!  It appears that the king wanted a new wife, and demanded that the Pope should grant the necessary permission; in his efforts to browbeat the Pope into such betrayal of duty, King Henry threatened the withdrawal of the “annates” and the “Peter’s pence”.  Later on he forced the clergy to declare that the Pope was “only a foreign bishop”, and in order to “stamp out overt expression of disaffection, he embarked upon a veritable reign of terror”.

In Anglican histories, you are assured that all this was a work of religious reform, and that after it the Church was the pure vehicle of God’s grace.  There were no more “holy idell theves”, holding the land of England and plundering the poor.  But get to know the clergy, and see things from the inside, and you will meet some one like the Archbishop of Cashell, who wrote to one of his intimates: 

     I conclude that a good bishop has nothing more to do than to
     eat, drink and grow fat, rich and die; which laudable
     example I propose for the remainder of my days to follow.

If you say that might be a casual jest, hear what Thackeray reports of that period, the eighteenth century, which he knew with peculiar intimacy: 

I read that Lady Yarmouth (my most religious and gracious King’s favorite) sold a bishopric to a clergyman for 5600 pounds. (She betted him the 5000 pounds that he would not be made a bishop, and he lost, and paid her.) Was he the only prelate of his time led up by such hands for consecration?  As I peep into George II’s St. James, I see crowds of cassocks pushing up the back-stairs of the ladies of the court; stealthy clergy slipping purses into their laps; that godless old king yawning under his canopy in his Chapel Royal, as the chaplain before him is discoursing.  Discoursing about what?—­About righteousness and judgment?  Whilst the chaplain is preaching, the king is chattering in German and almost as loud as the preacher; so loud that the clergyman actually burst out crying in his pulpit, because the defender of the faith and the dispenser of bishoprics would not listen to him!

#Land and Livings#

And how is it in the twentieth century?  Have conditions been much improved?  There are great Englishmen who do not think so.  I quote Robert Buchanan, a poet who spoke for the people, and who therefore has still to be recognized by English critics.  He writes of the “New Rome”, by which he means present-day England: 

  The gods are dead, but in their name
  Humanity is sold to shame,
  While (then as now!) the tinsel’d priest
  Sitteth with robbers at the feast,
  Blesses the laden, blood-stained board,
  Weaves garlands round the butcher’s sword,
  And poureth freely (now as then)
  The sacramental blood of Men!