Читать книгу London in the Time of the Tudors онлайн

61 страница из 135

ssss1

The City presents few points of interest during this reign which do not belong to the national history. The Progress of the Reformation is the subject which more especially belongs to and interests the world in this young King’s short reign.

EDWARD VI. (1537–1553)

From a portrait by Holbein at Windsor Castle.

There can be no doubt whatever that just as in the reign of Richard II. the City was saturated with Lollardry, so in the last years of Henry VIII. it was filled with the new ideas. The connection with the Pope severed; the religious Orders clean swept away; the reading of the Bible rapidly spreading; the teaching and example of men like Cranmer, Latimer, Rogers, Ridley, Hooper, and others; the derision poured upon the old things such as pilgrimages, image worship, repeated services and monasticism; the popular attack on the Religious by such writers as Fish in the Supplicacyon of Beggars and Barnabe Googe in his Popish Kingdom; the lectures and sermons carefully composed with the design of overthrowing and casting contempt upon the old Faith; the natural instinct of men to see in new ideas a certain remedy for old ills;—these things made it inevitable that the new thoughts should spread and take root. We hear no more, for instance, of the Mayor disarming men who had been monks and friars.