guess. His point of view was that of a Politician, not that of a man of
religion. Such reforms as he might have been prepared to introduce would
not have been the outcome of any lofty idealism, but only such as seemed to
be dictated by public decency. As a Statesman, he was alive to the
advantages of education, desired much of the wealth of the Church to be
turned into that channel, and founded colleges, which he staffed with men
of the new school and financed in part from the proceeds of suppressed
religious houses. He went so far as to procure a papal Bull for the
abolition of all Houses numbering less than seven inmates. But it may be
doubted whether the real motive of the suppression was not rather the
appropriation of funds for his favourite schemes than zeal for monastic
morality. As Cardinal and Legate and an aspirant to the Papacy, he could
never have lent himself to a policy calculated to weaken the ecclesiastical
organisation; he could never have associated himself with Colet's campaign
against clerical worldliness, of which there was no more conspicuous
example in the kingdom than he. Having children himself by an illicit
union, he could hardly have taken high ground as a reformer of morals. In
brief, he must have confined his treatment of the situation within the
limits of the work of a politician with educational leanings. What he
actually did was to renew the monastic visitations set on foot by Cardinal
Morton, to suppress some few small houses as corrupt or superfluous, and to
encourage the new school of teaching which no one of authority had hitherto
condemned as heretical. As to actual heresy, he looked on it with the eyes
not of a theologian but of a politician; as a thing to be suppressed if it
threatened public order, but otherwise negligible. He sought also to
diminish the abuses connected with the ecclesiastical courts by the
establishment of a Legatine Court of his own. But there is no sign that he
was ever alive to the volcanic forces at work; or recognised that sooner or
later the revolution which Luther initiated in Europe would have to be
reckoned with in England also. Even at the time when the great Cardinal