Again, the reader cannot fail, presently, to understand the eagerness, the pathetic eagerness, with which the people ran after every new Order of Religion which appeared. One after the other, they were Reformers: they would introduce a sterner discipline, fiercer austerities. One after the other they fell off; the pristine zeal cooled; the new Order followed in the same lines as the old; the brethren preserved the letter and threw away the spirit. Most pathetic of all is the respect, the admiration, the awe, with which the people regarded the Franciscans in their first splendid self-devotion. They saw a company to whom nothing was unclean, nothing was beneath their care, no criminal too base, no wretched woman too low for them, no disease too loathsome, no hovel or den too filthy for the bearers of consolation and of succour to approach. What could be too good, too costly, too precious for such men? They would accept no endowment. They lived on the broken meats of charity. Then let their church be adorned; let the pillars bear aloft the roof over chapels and altars ablaze with gold and lights; let their sacred vessels be of gold—nothing less would serve; let the vestments be of cloth of gold and silver. And so on until the dreadful suspicion arose that the Grey Friars were not so holy and so devoted as of old. They lived upon their reputation for a hundred years and more; and for a hundred years to follow they slowly decayed, until there was no reproach too bitter, no invective too vehement, for the poor Franciscan. Again, as to the uses to which their Houses were put. They were sanctuaries; they were hospitals; they were places of education for the sons of nobles; they were places of training for young ecclesiastics: great ladies, whom it was not politic to punish with imprisonment were sent to a Monastic House, where they were allowed everything except the liberty of leaving it. Thus Queen Katharine of Valois, after the discovery of her secret marriage, was sent to Bermondsey Abbey till she died: Queen Elizabeth Woodville, who surely must have proved all the miseries that belong to a crown, was also sent to Bermondsey. Dame Badlesmere, after her husband’s execution, was sent to the Clares of London. Then we find the King’s clerks expecting a pension for one of their body whenever a new Abbot or Prior was elected: and we find the King sending his old and incompetent servants to the Monastic Houses for maintenance for the remainder of their lives. Of those who professed much, more was expected.