the same. For one thing, the astonishing amount of plate and ornaments would seem to show that Edward IV., if he had plundered the college to a great extent—which is doubtful-had left it, at his death, as one of the richest eleemosynary foundations in this country. Just as in Edward IV.'s reign, Winchester endowments are to-day £20,000 yearly; Eton's £30,000 yearly.

When the new Chantries Act, which, from Easter, 1548, absolutely dissolved all colleges and chantries, passed in the first parliament of Edward VI., the friends and supporters of the two colleges had sufficient influence to obtain an exemption of the Universities and University Colleges, including Eton and Winchester, and they, as a recent writer says, of all the 200 or 250 colleges in the kingdom were saved from ruin. The total endowments of the other grammar schools attached to other colleges or collegiate churches were confiscated, and though farcical directions were given in the Act for the re-endowment and continuance of the schools, many of them vanished or were left to decay on the net annual income received by the masters at the time. All the other grammar schools which were not, as Archbishop Holgate's three foundations in Yorkshire, altogether independent of any connection with colleges, chantries, hospitals, disappeared into the insatiable maw of our precious" betters "-the society looters of the sixteenth century, or, if one prefers it, the brigands of the English Social Re-formation.

The ludicrous number of a half-dozen grammar schools were re-founded by Act of Parliament, and some thirty were re-endowed and re-founded by charter as King Edward VI.'s Grammar Schools," i.e., the money was looted with the one hand and given back with the other; and this constitutes the magnificent aid of Edward VI. to English " poor "scholars an assistance formerly so loudly trumpeted and pompously blazoned by historians, for the edification of reverential and admiring posterity. Of all the hundreds of grammar schools which flourished in

England before 1548, Winchester and Eton alone retained their property intact. Alas, that another kingly halo should be dimmed!

Curious inventories of plate, ornaments, relics, vestments and books made at Eton, about 1540, now preserved among the muniments show:

"A coote of blewe velvett of our Ladie with rynges and dyverse brooches, with an image that my Lorde of Devonshire offered. A parte of the nayle that our Lorde was nayled withall closed in silver all white. A stone that Saint Stevyn was stoned withall. Stones of Saint Wenefryd's well."

In the first year of Edward VI.'s reign the college concluded the exchange of lands arranged with Henry VIII., acquiring thereby advowsons and estates formerly held by the regular clergy. It was part of the adroit policy* of the Edwardian Government to share the plunder of confiscated monastic property among all classes, so that self-interest would bar the way to a return to the old Roman order of things when there was scarce a woodland in Merrie England through which one might not hear stealing the soft matin or vesper chimes.

Four or five weeks after the election of Provost Sir Thos. Smith (a protégé of the Lord Protector Somerset), who was not released from the Tower, in 1549, till he had been forced to disgorge a large sum of embezzled public money, the images at the high altar were pulled down and carted off. Subsequently, in 1551, the embroidered frontals of the altar were sold, the provost and those of the fellows who so desired buying them and turning them to private secular uses. Heylin's History of the Reformation well enough describes the real characteristics of the banditti reformers of the English sixteenth century :

"Many private persons parlours were hung with altar cloaths, their tables and beds covered with copes instead of carpets and coverlets; and many made carousing cups of the sacred chalices, as once Belshazzar celebrated his drunken

* A fact which also struck Maxwell Lyte when writing his history of Eton.

feast in the sanctified vessels of the Temple. It was a sorry house, and not worth the naming, which had not somewhat of this furniture in it, though it were only a fair large cushion, made of a cope, or altar-cloth, to adorn their windows, or make their chairs to have somewhat in them of a chair of state."*

Hurrah for the Cecils, the Russells (Bedfords), Seymours and Cavendishes!

And then, if this be not enough, we have the words of Roger Hutchinson, a contemporary fellow of Eton :

"Noble benefactors, which did build houses and endow them with lands for the good education of youth, for the reward of learning, and that this realm should be furnished with godly and learned preachers, are slandered as superstitious and popish founders. It shall be better with the heathen at the day of judgment than with us; for they honoured their benefactors, we deprave and deface them, and accuse them of superstition and folly.'

No wonder, then, that a contemporary, one Brinklow, who suggested that this plunder should form a permanent fund for the relief of taxation, was ignored by Henry VIII. (See his "Complaynt of Roderick Mors.")

The Eton library was "reformed," but the only MS. which was expelled was a Vulgate Bible, now in the British Museum, in the Cottonian Collection.

Under the will of Thomas Lewin, Alderman of London, who bequeathed the reversion of an estate at Cippenham to Eton during the Marian period, the college had to pay, and still pays it seems, 6s. 8d.† to the poor of Burnham on Good Friday. The then Eton provost, Henry Cole, much favoured by the Romanists at the court of Mary, but formerly an advocate of the Reformation, signalised himself by a piquant episode which occurred whilst he was on a mission to Ireland with the intent of stamping out

A number of English aristocratic families have, to-day, it is said, the altar vessels on their sideboards!

†The contemporary 6s. 8d. modern value would be about £4 10s. to-day, whereas all the college of Eton now pays to Burnham poor is 16s. 8d.

heresy "in the land of Saints and fens." He was staying at Chester with the Mayor, whose wife managed to abstract his credentials, and he did not discover the loss until, arriving in Dublin, he tendered to the officials his leathern dispatch case. The case was opened, and there displayed itself to view a pack of cards with a knave uppermost !

"Let us have another commission," said the Lord Deputy, "and meanwhile, we'll shuffle the cards."

Cole rushed back to England, but it was too late-Mary and the Cardinal, Reginald Pole, his patrons, had quitted an unappreciative world.

The statutes of Henry VI. had expressly prohibited the fellows of his colleges from holding any other preferment along with their collegiate sinecures, but the generation of ecclesiastical copologists, of pluralists had arrived. Henry VI. had said the fellows were to receive no other dispensation whatever. If they undertook the "cure of souls," why, then, let them resign their Eton or King's College fellowships.

The Reformation had arrived, however, and along came an adherent and a courtly servitor of Elizabeth, William Bill, a self-made man, who had been appointed a commissioner on the Royal Commission which had to tender the oaths of allegiance and supremacy to the Universities and Eton. The Queen appointed him Provost of Eton (although statutorily the right of election and selection in connection with that office lay with the Eton fellows themselves, unsubjected to any external jurisdiction or veto), and simultaneously, Bill held many lucrative posts, as, to mention three, the Mastership of Trinity College, the Deanery of Westminster, and Chief Almoner to the Queen.

The obsequious fellows readily granted him indefinite leave of absence from Eton, and his first act was to obtain a royal licence for the annual election of scholars. Henceforth court nominees were largely to be the "poor and needy scholars."

Next in a letter dated from Greenwich, June 11th, 1566,

the Queen gave permission to the fellows to hold one living apiece of the yearly value of forty marks :

"Because we certainly perceive the pryce mete for mayntenance of hospitalitie and lyving is far greter at this daye than ben in former tymes, and that it is not inconvenient for youe to have some cures abrode, where youe maye both teach and informe our subjectes in their duties to God and us."

Thus, a fellow could continue to receive the salary without residing at Eton. The institution had degenerated from a college of "sad priests" and poor boys into a diverted foundation, and a haunt of absentee sinecurists, of neither adornment nor use. A fellowship or a provostry of Eton was to be regarded as a kind of commendam, in most instances. In fact, as late as the eighteenth century, Edward Waddington, a fellow of Eton, was allowed, in commendam, to hold his fellowship along with his seat on the episcopal throne.

One result of the release of the fellows from celibacy was that they contracted matrimonial alliances with each other's families. Hence, of course, their families regarded scholarships at Eton, and fellowships at King's College, as their birthright.