Cardinal Gasquet: Man of Letters

...Gasquet's new and unique documentary account of it appeared first in 1893 and was reprinted in 1908 as The Black Death of 1348 and 1349...

...Ralph Adams Cram says: There is no evidence whatever to prove that the cloister fostered wickedness, or that its occupants were not living after a higher standard than the secular priesthood and those to whom they ministered...

...In this way they answer the natural questions as to the relation of the first prayer-book of Edward VI to the ancient service books of England, and to contemporary liturgical documents...

...the tremendous and significant loss of the maturer clergy and the new supply of clergy, very young, or over-aged, or inexperienced...

...Henry was cunning, however, and took care, as Francis Hackett says, "to divide his spoils with his peers, his officers and his industrials, the price for which many leaders of the laity were brought to compromise...

...They discovered and edited Cranmer's own, but hitherto unknown, liturgical reforms, chiefly of the breviary, as well as other documents, among them the notes of the parliamentary discussion that preceded (1549) the first Act of Uniformity—the only reliable information about a consultation of the English bishops on the new prayerbook...

...It reversed forever, on new and indisputable evidence, the lying accounts of Foxe and Burnet as to monastic immorality...

...As to the success of the new forms of divine service and common prayer, Gasquet and Bishop felt unable to refrain from making the following comment: In truth the imposition of the new service was effected only through the slaughter of many thousands of Englishmen by the English government helped by their foreign mercenaries...

...After a careful examination of the charges of immorality so long current against the English monasteries, Abbot Gasquet concludes that it would be affectation to suggest that the vast regular body in England was altogether free from the grosser faults and immoralities...

...Terror was everywhere struck into the minds of the people by the sight of the executions, fixed for the market days, of priests dangling from the steeples of their churches, and of the heads of laymen set up in the high places of the towns...

...His head was fixed on the ruined gate of the already devastated monastery, his body cut into quarters and variously distributed...

...The innovations of this fateful work, its sectarian inspiration, and its minutest sources were laid bare, a curious literary dissection possible only to the scalpel of modern research...

...Our writers opine that Somerset did not intend that more should be known of the real history of the book than he could help...

...For a new edition of William Cobbett's The History of the Protestant Reformation (1824) the Abbot prepared a meaty introduction of some twenty pages in which he resumes and broadcasts the conclusions of the new school of social and economic historians of English life in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and affirms with fresh security the thesis, favorable to the Catholic Church, that the astonished Cobbett had borrowed from Lingard, whose "exact, calm, and judicial" pages Abbot Gasquet praises in his quality of fellow-worker in the same field of "documents and monuments...

...Until these Catholic writers undertook to study the origins of this official prayer-book of the July 17, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 293 new church, at once its breviary, missal, pontifical and ritual, there was known to historians "nothing but the book completed as it stands in print...

...Apart from Denifle's La Desolation des Eglises de France, dealing with the Hundred Years' War, and the first volume of Janssen, I know no foreign counterpart to it...

...Back of Henry VIII, however, lie 1,000 years of religious life and works, the glory of mediaeval England, and to that long period the good Abbot dedicated his English Monastic Life (1904) an exhaustive study based on manuscript sources, first-hand and official, and on the most reliable books, ancient and recent...

...Local and diocesan usage of every sort was swept away and an absolute uniformity was prescribed for the whole realm—a thing unheard of in the ancient Catholic Church in England, no less than in France and Germany...

...From the view-point of pure scholarship it seems regrettable that Abbot Gasquet could not have devoted his many historical gifts solely to the scientific editing of, and commenting on, the yet abundant documentary material of English monasticism, instead of the more or less ephemeral service of Catholic apologetics for a society too ignorant to recognize or appreciate historical truth, or too prejudiced to see the sun when it shines...

...The Protestant Reformation in England is so closely related in its origin and early course to the violent and unjust overthrow of the old monastic life, that Abbot Gasquet was naturally drawn to its discussion...

...Prolonged and first-hand research among the ecclesiastical and civil records of fifteenth-century England compelled him to face frequently the fact of the Great Pestilence, that "overwhelming calamity which fell upon England, in common with the rest of Europe, in the middle of the fourteenth century...

...Of this momentous discussion there is no mention in contemporary English chronicles, though it was well known on the continent...

...The Abbot's interest in the old Celtic monasticism led him to edit (1904) on the occasion of the fourteenth centenary of the death of Gregory the Great, a rare old manuscript, Vita Antiquissima Sancti Galli, an early Latin life of the Irish founder of the famous monastery and school of Saint Gall in Switzerland...

...For Abbott Gasquet proved that the lust of gain was the king's chief motive...

...It remains our newest and best guide for the study of the ideals and our appreciation of the construction, equipment, administration and influence of English Benedictine monasticism from Bede and Alcuin to its collapse under Henry VIII...

...also, incidentally, the earliest report of a debate in Parliament...

...As it was, he left his mark on this great monastic house in the way of educational reform and improvements, the creation of the Downside Review, and the transept of the abbey church, one of the new architectural glories of England...

...He had in him the stuff of masterful abbots of the mediaeval English type, and but for a long and serious illness would probably have figured among the foremost educators and outstanding builders of modern England...

...It is the ever fascinating story of the venerable Abbot Richard Whiting, hung in chains in his eightieth year on Glastonbury Thor, the great hill overlooking the famous abbey that antedated the Angles and the Saxons...

...For the Camden Society Abbot Gasquet edited (1904) the Latin text of the Collectanea AngloPremonstratensia, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century 292 THE COMMONWEAL July 17, 1929 documents of the Order of Premontre, taken from an original register in the Bodleian Library and another (transcript) in the British Museum, an instructive record of the mediaeval career of that strong French community which once had thirty houses (alien priories) in England...

...Thus perished, in an orgy of the grossest savagery, thousand-year-old Glastonbury, "by far the greatest spiritual and temporal representation of Catholic interests that survived in England," of whose ruined arches, piers and walls Mr...

...That prayer-book was indeed a revolution...

...John James Blunt, an Anglican historian and theologian of the Church of England, agrees with Abbot Gasquet when he says that the morality or immorality of the monasteries has nothing to do with the question...

...He stresses the new independence of the serf, henceforth practically free of the soil, and able for the first time to "sell" his labor...

...The political and financial relations of England and the Holy See during the thirteenth century furnish the matter of Henry III (1216-1272)—London, 1905...

...July 17, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 291 CARDINAL GASQUET: MAN OF LETTERS By BISHOP SHAHAN IN THIS grandson of an emigre Catholic France has paid, as in Pugin and Belloc, some instalment of the debt of gratitude that since the French Revolution it owes to England...

...He soon joined that community, and rose step-wise to its highest offices amid the esteem and confidence of his brethren...

...Without inquiring whether the change brought about was good or bad, the writers permit the actors of the new revolution to tell their own story...

...Its damning verdict on the king was accepted, almost without question, by the foremost historical scholars of England...

...The story is told "as far as possible in the language of the old chroniclers and of the letters and documents of the reign...

...The destruction of Glastonbury and the execution of its abbot were the last chapter of the king's warfare on the monastic life and order...

...In his The Life of Henry VI (142 2-1461) the Abbot has put together in a persuasive way the traditions that have kept alive the humane and deeply religious reputation of the founder of Eton College and the builder of King's Chapel at Cambridge...

...Both works are illustrated and form a unique encyclopaedia of Catholic religious life in mediaeval England...

...He discovered those original documents in which the mental processes of Cranmer, the head liturgist of the new religion, are visible in his own hand, notably the incorporation of no small part of the famous breviary of the Spanish Franciscan, Cardinal Quignonez, in its first edition (1535) and soon destined in its "second text" to run through some hundred editions...

...The first fruits of his researches, the two volumes of Henry VIII and the English Monasteries, appeared from 1888 to 1890...

...Cram says that they are even now so faultless in proportion, so wonderful in style, so marvelous in workmanship, that to the architect they are maddening beyond description...

...While his conclusions were not accepted by every worker in this field, it was he who threw open and staked out, for England at least, the sources and consequences of one of mediaeval Europe's greatest public calamities...

...Except for a few Cistercian wanderers in the wild hills of Wales, the Benedictine order was dead in England...

...In his recent work on The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain, Mr...

...Abbot Gasquet's laborious years in the British Museum and the London Record Office now netted him a historian's fair reward...

...Wolsley's attempted reformation suggested an easy way of getting it, his agents were . . . fitted for an unscrupulous business, and partizan historians have looked up to the testimony of those false . . . agents as if it was that of good and true men...

...To the account of this extraordinary visitation he laid several far-reaching changes, social, economic and religious, amid which the older England melted away, almost before the eyes of the people...

...the decline of the universities, the decay of monastic life, of the popular Franciscans, of the Norman tongue, with its richer culture and its continental contacts...

...Therewith the bases of a new order of life were laid bare as in an outgoing tide of faith and charity...

...Born in London in 1841, and related by marriage to Cardinal Manning, he was educated by the Benedictines of Downside...

...Close kin to this work is the charming volume, Parish Life in Mediaeval England (1906) based similarly on official parochial and episcopal documents and on the best canonical and antiquarian writings...

...They should be in every Catholic library, private or public...

...Picking up the many tangled threads of the ecclesiastico-feudal relations of Rome and England, and of the frequent curial bestowal of English benefices on foreigners, mostly Italians, the author concludes that throughout the long and vexatious agitation, not only was there no attack made upon the spiritual supremacy of the Popes, but that supremacy over the Church Universal was assumed in every document emanating from England, and . . . was constantly asserted to have been established by Christ Himself...

...The Greater Abbeys of England (1908) is a delightful retrospect, in which Abbot Gasquet, with much historical and architectural comment, describes thirtyone of the most famous monasteries of England—a kind of mirror of the splendor and wealth which the king had confiscated, but of which, it is said, scarcely one-quarter (of 10,000,000 pounds) reached his grasping hands...

...The old dread days of the Pilgrimage of Grace were renewed, the same deceitful methods were employed to win success, the same ruthless bloodshed was allowed in the punishment of the vanquished...

...This great work immediately caught the attention of all historians, Catholic and Protestant...

...In The Last Abbot of Glastonbury and Other Essays (1908) Abbot Gasquet presented the incredible finale of this enormous robbery of the English Church...

...This survey of mediaeval English monasticism is written with much sympathy and with an unequaled grasp of theory and practice...

...The true facts are: the king wanted money...

...But it is unjust to regard them as existing to any but a very limited extent...

...In an outstanding critical work, Edward VI and the Book of Common Prayer, written in cooperation with his distinguished friend, Edmund Bishop, England's foremost liturgist, he laid bare in judicial style the steps by which Cranmer and his associates created the Anglican Book of Common Prayer in the short, and for them favorable, reign of the boy-king Edward VI...

...Condemned to a period of rest he went to London, took up residence near the British Museum, that mighty storehouse of universal learning, and was soon immersed in historical studies of an English and monastic interest...