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No Englishman before or after Wolsey has ever maintained so much state and splendour; no Englishman has ever affected the popular imagination so much as Cardinal Wolsey. Contemporary writers exhaust themselves in dwelling upon the more than regal Court kept up by this priest. It is like reading of the Court of a great king. We must, however, remember, that all this state was not the ostentation of the man so much as, first, the glorification of the Church and of the ecclesiastical dignities, and next, a visible proof of the greatness of the King in having so rich a subject.

Between 1527 and 1534 there were disputes on the subject of tithes and offerings to the clergy. At this time began the dissolution of the Monasteries, to which we will return presently.

THE KING IN PARLIAMENT

From a print in the British Museum.

So far as regards the relations between the King and the City. Let us now return to the City itself. We have already seen that the intervals of freedom from plague were growing shorter. In this reign of thirty-eight years there was a return of the sweating sickness in 1518; a return of the plague, which lasted from 1519 to 1522; another appearance of the sweating sickness in 1528; and another attack of the plague in 1543. It seems strange that no physician should have connected the frequency and violence of the disease with the foulness and narrowness of the streets. From the beginning of the sixteenth century to the Great Fire of 1666, London, crowded and confined, abounded with courts and slums of the worst possible kind; it swarmed with rogues and tramps and masterless men who lived as they could, like swine. There were no great fires to cleanse the City. The condition of the ground, with its numberless cesspools, its narrow lanes into which, despite laws, everything was thrown; its frequent laystalls; the refuse and remains of all the workshops; the putrefying blood of the slaughtered beasts sinking into the earth,—must have been truly terrible had the people realised it; but they did not. Fluid matter sank into the earth and worked its wicked will unseen and unsuspected; the rains washed the surface; no man saw farther than the front of his own house; therefore when pestilence appeared among them it did not creep, according to its ancient wont, from house to house, but it flew swiftly with wings outspread over street and lane and court.