And yet there was no peace. Henry, who had succeeded in so much, had,
with the full concurrence of the majority of his people, entered upon
a task in which he was foredoomed to failure. Not all the whips with
six strings, not all the fires at Smithfield, could compel that unity
and concord in opinion which Henry so much desired, but which he had
unwittingly done so much to destroy. He might denounce the diversities
of belief to which his opening of the Bible in English churches had
given rise; but men, who had caught a glimpse of hidden verities,
could not all be forced to deny the things which they had seen. The
most lasting result of Henry's repressive tyranny was the stimulus it
gave to reform in the reign of his son, even as the persecutions (p. 401)
of Mary finally ruined in England the cause of the Roman Church.
Henry's bishops themselves could scarcely be brought to agreement.
Latimer and Shaxton lost their sees; but the submission of the rest
did not extend to complete recantation, and the endeavour to stretch
all his subjects on the Procrustean bed of Six Articles was one of
Henry's least successful enterprises.[1112] It was easier to sacrifice
a portion of his monastic spoils to found new bishoprics. This had
been a project of Wolsey's, interrupted by the Cardinal's fall.
Parliament subsequently authorised Henry to erect twenty-six sees; he
actually established six, the Bishoprics of Peterborough, Oxford,
Chester, Gloucester, Bristol and Westminster. Funds were also provided
for the endowment, in both universities, of Regius professorships of
Divinity, Hebrew, Greek, Civil Law and Medicine; and the royal
interest in the advancement of science was further evinced by the
grant of a charter to the College of Surgeons, similar to that
accorded early in the reign to the Physicians.[1113]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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