comedies, poems, and pasquils were mostly artisans or tradesmen, belonging to the class out of which proceeded the early victims, and the later soldiers of the Reformation.  Their bold farces and truculent satire had already effected much in spreading among the people a detestation of Church abuses.  They were particularly severe upon monastic licentiousness.  “These corrupt comedians, called rhetoricians,” says the Walloon contemporary already cited, “afforded much amusement to the people.”  Always some poor little nuns or honest monks were made a part of the farce.  It seemed as if the people could take no pleasure except in ridiculing God and the Church.  The people, however, persisted in the opinion that the ideas of a monk and of God were not inseparable.  Certainly the piety of the early reformers was sufficiently fervent, and had been proved by the steadiness with which they confronted torture and death, but they knew no measure in the ridicule which they heaped upon the men by whom they were daily murdered in droves.  The rhetoric comedies were not admirable in an aesthetic point of view, but they were wrathful and sincere.  Therefore they cost many thousand lives, but they sowed the seed of resistance to religious tyranny, to spring up one day in a hundredfold harvest.  It was natural that the authorities should have long sought to suppress these perambulating dramas.  “There was at that tyme,” wrote honest Richard Clough to Sir Thomas Gresham, “syche playes (of Reteryke) played thet hath cost many a 1000 man’s lyves, for in these plays was the Word of God first opened in thys country.  Weche playes were and are forbidden moche more strictly than any of the bookes of Martin Luther.”

These rhetoricians were now particularly inflamed against Granvelle.  They were personally excited against him, because he had procured the suppression of their religious dramas.  “These rhetoricians who make farces and street plays,” wrote the Cardinal to Philip, “are particularly angry with me, because two years ago I prevented them from ridiculing the holy Scriptures.”  Nevertheless, these institutions continued to pursue their opposition to the course of the government.  Their uncouth gambols, their awkward but stunning blows rendered daily service to the cause of religious freedom.  Upon the newly-appointed bishops they poured out an endless succession of rhymes and rebuses, epigrams, caricatures and extravaganzas.  Poems were pasted upon the walls of every house, and passed from hand to hand.  Farces were enacted in every street; the odious ecclesiastics figuring as the principal buffoons.  These representations gave so much offence, that renewed edicts were issued to suppress them.  The prohibition was resisted, and even ridiculed in many provinces, particularly in Holland.  The tyranny which was able to drown a nation in blood and tears, was powerless to prevent them from laughing most bitterly at their oppressors.  The tanner,