throughout all the more remote but concentric circles of life, as far as
the seductive splendor of the court could radiate. The lesser nobles
emulated the grandees, and vied with each other in splendid
establishments, banquets, masquerades, and equipages. The natural
consequences of such extravagance followed. Their estates were
mortgaged, deeply and more deeply; then, after a few years, sold to the
merchants, or rich advocates and other gentlemen of the robe, to whom
they had been pledged. The more closely ruin stared the victims in the
face, the more heedlessly did they plunge into excesses. "Such were the
circumstances," moralizes a Catholic writer, "to which, at an earlier
period, the affairs of Catiline, Cethegus, Lentulus, and others of that
faction had been reduced, when they undertook to overthrow the Roman
republic." Many of the nobles being thus embarrassed, and some even
desperate, in their condition, it was thought that they were desirous of
creating disturbances in the commonwealth, that the payment of just debts
might be avoided, that their mortgaged lands might be wrested by main
force from the low-born individuals who had become possessed of them,
that, in particular, the rich abbey lands held by idle priests might be
appropriated to the use of impoverished gentlemen who could turn them to
so much better account. It is quite probable that interested motives
such as these were not entirely inactive among a comparatively small
class of gentlemen. The religious reformation in every land of Europe
derived a portion of its strength from the opportunity it afforded to
potentates and great nobles for helping themselves to Church property.
No doubt many Netherlanders thought that their fortunes might be improved
at the expense of the monks, and for the benefit of religion. Even
without apostasy from the mother Church, they looked with longing eyes
on the wealth of her favored and indolent children. They thought that
the King would do well to carve a round number of handsome military
commanderies out of the abbey lands, whose possessors should be bound