The first years of Abbot Whiting’s rule passed smoothly so far as the acts of his administration and his life at Glastonbury were concerned. He had of course to meet the troubles and trials incidental to a position such as was his. Moreover, for one who by his high office was called on to take a part, in some measure at least, in the great world of politics and public life, it could not be but that his soul must have been disturbed by anticipations of difficulties, even of dangers, in the not very distant future. Still, his own home was so far removed from the turmoils of the court and the ominous rumblings of the coming storm that he was able to rule it in peace. Discipline well maintained, a prudent and successful administration of temporals and kindly relations with his neighbours, high and low, were certain evidences that the government of Abbot Richard Whiting was happy and prosperous. Under such circumstances the position which he occupied as a peer of Parliament and as master of great estates was one which, as the world might say, even from its point of view, was eminently enviable.
It is somewhat difficult in these days to form a just and adequate idea of the place held in the country by one who filled the abbatial chair of Glastonbury. For wealth and consideration, though not indeed for precedence, it may not unjustly be described as the most desirable ecclesiastical preferment in England. The revenues of the abbey exceeded those of the archbishopric of Canterbury itself, whilst, although the abbot had to maintain a large community and a great household, still he was exempt from the vast burdens necessarily entailed on so lofty a position as that of Primate of England, who was Legatus natusoi the Holy See and often a Cardinal. The annual value of the endowments of Westminster was, it is true, slightly greater, tut the ecclesiastical position of an abbot of that royal monastery was singularly diminished by the presence in his near neighbourhood of two such great churchmen as the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, whilst in its worldly aspect Westminster was overshadowed by the splendour of the regal court at its doors. Glastonbury in the sixteenth century had no rival in its own district; the day was past when the aspiring Church of Wells could raise pretensions on that score. In the west country there was neither prince nor prelate, certainly since the fall of the Duke of Buckingham, to compare in position, all considered, with the Abbot of Glastonbury.
But withal there existed in the court of the abbot, for his household was regulated like that of a court, a simplicity befitting the monastic profession. His own house was large, its rooms were stately, but it did not pretend to the dimensions of a palace. He had a body of gentry to wait upon him and grace the hospitality he was ready to show to visitors the most distinguished and to the poorer classes who thronged the monastic guest-hall. To the great gate of the abbey, every Wednesday and Friday, the poor flocked for relief in their necessities, and as many as five hundred persons are said to have been entertained at times at the abbot’s table. Still, a combined simplicity and stateliness characterised the whole rule of Abbot Whiting, and it is no wonder that, as we are told, during his abbacy some three or four hundred youths of gentle birth received their first training in the abbot’s quarters.
It may be asked by some how in such a position as this, surrounded by all the world most ambitions, Abbot Whiting could still be a monk. The position was not of his making; he found it. But that he should ever remain a monk, that, as abbot, he should be a true guardian of the souls committed to him, the true father and pattern of his spiritual children, that was by God’s grace still in his power. That he was all this, his very enemies have testified, and the explanation is simple. Raised to rule and command at an age when, as he knew, the grave could not be far distant, he was already a monk trained, disciplined, perfected in outward habit and in the possession of his soul by his long course of obedience. Tradition, which is often so true in matters of small moment, more than a century and a half after his death, still pointed out among the ruins of his house, in the abbots simple chamber. Abbot Whiting’s bed. It was “without tester or post, was boarded at bottom, and had a board nailed shelving at the head.” This bedstead, according to the tradition of the place, was the same that Abbot Whiting lay on, and “I was desired,” writes the visitor who describes it, “to observe it as a curiosity.” The existence of the tradition is proof at least of an abiding belief, on the spot, in the simplicity of life of the last lord of that glorious pile, the vast ruins of which were evidence of the greatness of the monastery. It was possible even for an Abbot of Glastonbury to preserve the true spirit of poverty, and this was the secret of that excellent discipline which Dr. Layton to his bitter disappointment found to exist at Glastonbury. The abbot practised first what, as his duty imposed, he required from those entrusted to his care, that is, from his spiritual children, the monks of his house.
It was during these comparatively peaceful and happy times that Leland, the antiquary, on his journey through England in search of antiquities, and especially manuscripts, visited the abbey. He was introduced to the library by Abbot Whiting in person, “a man truly upright and of spotless life and my sincere friend” as he calls him. He was filled with amazement at the treasures contained in the Glastonbury library. “No sooner did I pass the threshold,” he writes, “than I was struck with awe and astonishment at the mere sight of so many remains of antiquity.” He considered that the library had scarce any equal in all England, and spent some days in examining the shelves and the many wonderful manuscripts he found there.
With the conclusion of Henry’s divorce case came the end of these peaceful years of Abbot Whiting’s rule. Now began the anxious days which were to end for him in the death of the traitor, so far at least as the king’s power could extend in death.
Within a year from the general oath-taking throughout England, and its failure to bring about the hoped-for result, Crumwell, ever fertile in expedients, had organised a general visitation of religious houses. The instruments he made choice of to conduct this scrutiny, and the methods they employed, leave no doubt that the real object was the destruction of the monasteries under the cloak of reformation. The injunctions are minute and exacting; in detail many were excellent*; as a whole, even in the hands of persons sincerely desirous of maintaining discipline and observance, they were unworkable. In the hands of Crumwell’s agents they were, as they were designed to be, intolerable. It was rightly calculated that under the pretence of restoring discipline they strike at the authority of religious superiors by the encouragement given to a system of tale-bearing. By other provisions the monasteries were, with show of zeal for religion, turned into prisons and reduced, if it were possible, to such abodes of misery and unhappiness as the uninformed Protestant imagination pictures them to be. The moral of this treatment is summed up by John ap-Rice and Thomas Legh, two of the royal visitors, in a letter to Crumwell:
By this ye may see [they write] that they [the religious] shall not need to be put forth, but that they will make instant suit themselves, so that their doing shall be imputed to themselves and no other. Although I reckon it well done that all were out, yet I think it were best that at their own suits they might be dismissed to avoid calumniation and envy,^ and, so compelling them to observe these injunctions ye shall have them all to do shortly, and the people shall know it the better that it cometh upon their suit, if they be not discharged straight while we be here, for then the people would say that we went for nothing else, even though the truth were contrary.
Armed with a commission to visit and enforce the injunctions, Dr. Richard Layton, the most foul-mouthed and foul-minded ribald of them all, as his own letters testify, came to Glastonbury on Saturday, 21 August 1535. From Saint Augustine’s, Bristol, whither he departed on the following Monday, he wrote to Crumwell a letter showing that even he, chief among a crew who “could ask unmoved such questions as no other human being could have imagined or known how to put, who could extract guilt from a stammer, a tremble or a blush, or even from indignant silence as surely as from open confession” – even Layton retired baffled from Glastonbury under the venerable Abbot Whiting’s rule, though he covered his defeat with impudence unabashed. “At Bruton and Glastonbury,” he explains, “there is nothing notable; the brethren be so straight kept that they cannot offend: but fain they would if they might, as they confess, and so the fault is not with them.”
At this period it would seem that Richard Layton also spoke to the king in praise of Abbot Whiting. For this error of judgment, when some time later Crumwell had assured himself of the abbot’s temper, he was forced to sue for pardon from both king and minister. “I must therefore,” he writes, “now in this my necessity most humbly beseech your lordship to pardon me for that my folly then committed, as ye have done many times before, and of your goodness to instigate the king’s highness majesty, in the premises.”
Hardly had the royal inquisitor departed than it was found at Glastonbury, as elsewhere, that the injunctions were not merely impracticable, but subversive of the first principles of religious discipline. Abbot Whiting, like so many religious superiors at this time, petitioned for some mitigation. Nicholas Fitz-James, a neighbour, dispatched an earnest letter to Crumwell in support of the abbot’s petition.
“I have spoken,” he writes, “with my Lord Abbot of Glastonbury concerning such injunctions as were given him and his convent by your deputy at the last visitation there. . . To inform your mastership of the truth there be certain officers – brothers of the house – who have always been attendant on the abbot, as his chaplain, steward, cellarer, and one or two officers more, (who) if they should be bound to the first two articles, it should much disappoint the order of the house, which hath long been full honourable. Wherefore, if it may please your said good mastership to dispense the abbot, to dispense with the two first articles, in my mind you will do a very good deed, and I dare be surety he will dispense with none but with such as shall be necessary. . . . Other articles there are which they think very straight, howbeit they will sue to your good mastership for that at more leisure; and in the meantime I doubt not they will keep as good religion as any house of that order within this realm.”
A month after this letter of Nicholas Fitz-James, Abbot Whiting himself ventured to present a grievance of another kind, affecting others than his community. The recent suspension by royal authority of the jurisdiction exercised by the abbey over the town of Glastonbury and its dependencies, had caused the gravest inconveniences. There are many “poor people,” he writes, “who are waiting to have their causes tried,” and he adds that he cannot believe that the king’s pleasure has been rightly stated in Doctor Layton’s orders. What the result of this application may have been does not appear, but it was clearly the royal purpose to let inconveniences be felt, not to remove them.
The proceedings taken in 1536 in regard to the suppression of the lesser monasteries must have filled the minds of men of Whiting’s stamp with deep anxiety, as revealing more and more clearly the settled purpose of the king. “All the wealth of the world would not be enough to satisfy and content his ambition,” writes Marillac, the French ambassador, to his master, Francis I. To enrich himself he would not hesitate to ruin all his subjects. The State papers of the period bear ample witness to the justice of this sweeping statement. The monasteries which were yet allowed to stand were drained of their resources by ever-increasing demands on the part of Henry and his creatures. Farm after farm, manor after manor was yielded up in compliance with requests that were in reality demands. Pensions in ever-increasing numbers were charged on monastic lands at the asking of those whom it was impossible to refuse.
Abbot Whiting was allowed no immunity from this species of tyrannical oppression. The abbey, for instance, had of their own free will granted to blessed Sir Thomas More a comody or annuity. On his disgrace Crumwell urged the king’s “pleasure and commandment” that this annuity should be transferred to himself under the convent seal. For a friend Crumwell asks (and for the king’s vicegerent to ask was to receive) “the advocation of our parish church of Monketon, albeit that it was the first time that ever such a grant was made.” A further request, for the living of Batcombe, Whiting was unable to comply with, since another of the king’s creatures had been beforehand and secured the prize. In one instance an office which Crumwell had already asked for and obtained from the abbot, he a few months after demands for his friend “Mr. Maurice Berkeley;” and because the place was already gone, he requests that the abbot will in lieu thereof give the rents of “his farm at North wood Park.” Abbot Whiting took an accurate view of the situation: “If you request it, I must grant it,” he says; and adds, “I trust your servant will be content with the park itself, and ask no more.”
The extant letters of Abbot Whiting, for the most part answers to such like applications for offices or benefices in his gift, are marked by a courteous consideration and a readiness to comply up to the utmost limits of the possible. It is, moreover, evident that he had an intimate concern in all the -details of the complex administration of a monastery of such extent and importance with its thousand interests, no less than a determining personal influence on the religious character of his community; and that public calls were never allowed to come between him and the primary and immediate duties of the abbot. He is most at home in his own country, among his Somersetshire neighbours, and in the “straight” charge of his spiritual children. Confident too in the affection with which he was regarded by the population, he had no scruples, whatever may have been his mind in subscribing to the Supremacy declaration of 1534, in securing for his monks and his townsfolk in his own abbey church the preaching of a doctrine by no means in accord with the royal theories and wishes on the subject. Thus on a Sunday in the middle of February, 1536, a friar called John Brynstan, preaching in the abbatial church at Glastonbury to the people of the neighbourhood, said “he would be one of them that should convert the new fangles and new men, otherwise he would die in the quarrel.”
By chance a glimpse is afforded of the popular feeling in the district by a letter addressed to Crumwell by one of his agents, always ready to spy upon their neighbours and report them to their master, in the hopes of gaining thereby the good graces of the all-powerful minister. Thomas Clarke writes that one John Tutton of Mere, next Glaston, – now by the way safely lodged in gaol – had used seditious words against the king and had spoken great slander against Crumwell himself. The depositions forwarded with this letter explain how Tutton had called one Poole a heretic for working on Saint Mark’s day. Poole had replied that so the king had ordered, and upon this Tutton declared that they could not be bound to keep the king’s command “if it was nought, as this was,” and he added that “Lord Crumwell was a stark heretic.” Nor did he stop here, for he continued in this strain; “Marry, many things be done by the king’s Council which I reckon he knoweth little of, but that by such means he hath gathered great treasure together I wot well; there is a sort that ruleth the king of whom I trust to see a day when they shall have less authority than they have.”
Knowing doubdess what would be the nature of its business, Abbot Whiting, excusing himself on the plea of age and ill-health, did not attend the parliament of 1539, which, so far as it could do, sealed the fate of the monasteries as yet unsuppressed. He awaited the end on his own ground and in the midst of his own people. He was still as solicitous about the smallest details of his care as if the glorious abbey were to last in avum. Thus an interesting account of Abbot Whiting at Glastonbury is given in an official examination regarding some debt, held a few years after the abbot’s martyrdom. John Watts, “late monk and chaplain to the abbot,” said that John Lyte, the supposed debtor, had paid the money “in manner and form following. That is to say, he paid £10 of the said £40 to the said abbot in the little parlour upon the right hand within the great hall, the Friday after New Year’s Day before the said abbot was attainted. The said payment was made in gold” in presence of the witness and only one other: “for it was immediately after the said abbot had dined, so that the abbot’s gentlemen and other servants were in the hall at dinner.” Also “upon Saint Peters day at mid-summer, being a Sunday, in the garden of the said abbot at Glastonbury, whilst high mass was singing,” the debtor “made payment” of the rest. “And at that time the abbot asked of the said master Lyte whether he would set up the said abbot’s arms in his new buildings that he had made. And the said master Lyte answered the said abbot that he would; and so at that time the said abbot gave unto the said Mr. Lyte eight angels nobles. And at the payment of the £30 there was in the garden at that time the Lord Stourton. I suppose,” continues the witness, “that the said Lord Stourton saw not the payment made to the abbot, for the abbot got him into an arbour of bay in the said garden and there received his money. And very glad he was at that time that it was paid in gold for the short telling, as also he would not, by his will, have it seen at that time.” Thus too almost the last glimpse afforded of the last Abbot of Glastonbury in his time-honoured home shows him in friendly converse with his near neighbour, Lord Stourton, who was the head of an ancient race which popular tradition had justly linked for centuries with the Benedictine order, and which even in the darkest days of modern English Catholicity proved itself a firm and hereditary friend.
Before passing on to the closing acts of the venerable abbot’s life and to his martyrdom, it is necessary to premise a few words on suppression in its legal aspect. There seems to be abroad an impression that the monasteries were all, in fact, dissolved by order of Parliament, and accordingly that a refusal of surrender to the king, such as is found at Glastonbury, was an act which, however morally justifiable as a refusal to betray a trust, and even heroic when resistance entailed the last penalty, was yet in defiance of the law of the land. And, to take this particular case of Glastonbury, it is often stated, that when insisting on its surrender the king was only requiring that to be given up into his hands which Parliament had already conferred on him. However common the impression, it is false. What the act (27 Henry VIII, cap. 28) of February, 1536, did was to give to the king and his heirs such monasteries only as were under the yearly value of £200, or such as should within a “year next after the making of” the act “be given or granted to his majesty by any abbot,” etc. So far, therefore, from handing over to the king the property of all the monasteries. Parliament distinctly recognised, at least in the case of all save the lesser religious houses, the rights of their then owners, and contemplated their passing to the king’s hands only by the voluntary cession of the actual possessors. How any surrender was to be brought about was left to the king and Crumwell, and the minions on whose devices there is no need to dwell. Before a recalcitrant superior, who would yield neither to blandishments, bribery nor threats, the king, so far as the act would help him, was powerless.
For this case, however, provision was made, though but indirectly, in the act of April, 1539 (31 Henry VIII, cap. 13). This act, which included a retrospective clause covering the illegal suppression of the greater monasteries which had already passed into the king’s hands, granted to Henry all monasteries, &c., which shall hereafter happen to be dissolved, suppressed, renounced, relinquished, forfeited, given up or come unto the king’s highness. These terms seem wide enough, but there is also an ominous parenthesis referring to such other religious houses as “shall happen to come to the king’s highness by attainder or attainders of treason.” The clause did not find its way into the act unawares. It will be seen that it was Crumwell’s care how and in whose case the clause should become operative. And with just so much of countenance as is thus given him by the act, with the king to back him, the monasteries of Glastonbury, Reading and Colchester, from which no surrender could be obtained, “were, against every principle of received law, held to fall by the attainder of their abbots for high treason.”
The very existence of the clause is, moreover, evidence that by this time Crumwell knew that among the superiors of the few monasteries yet standing, there were men with whom, if the king was not to be baulked of his intent, the last conclusions would have to be tried. To him the necessity would have been paramount, by every means in his power, to sweep away what he rightly regarded as the strongholds of the papal power in the country, and to get rid of these “spies of the pope.” Such unnatural enemies of their prince and gracious lord would fittingly be first singled out, that their fate might serve as a warning to other intending evil-doers. Perhaps, too, Whiting’s repute for blamelessness of life, the discipline which he was known to maintain in his monastery and his great territorial influence may all have conduced to point him out as an eminently proper subject to proceed against, as tending to show the nation that where the crime of resistance to the king s will was concerned there could be no such thing as an extenuating circumstance, no consideration which would avail to mitigate the penalty.