It was a vain dream, a lost cause. While the humanists planned the regeneration of society by reason and knowledge, the education of rulers to peace and charity, the spread of grammar schools and colleges over the land, and the consequent reform of the abuses in the Church and in the world, once clergy and laity alike were trained in a strengthened and purified Christian doctrine reinforced by the best wisdom of the ancients – while men talked hopefully of these things, the forces were gathering which were to hurl all their work in ruin and confusion.
The first boys who entered Wolsey’s new colleges would live to see a year in which no student proceeded to a degree at either university, when the schools were wrecked and empty, and scholarship had degenerated into snarling dogmatism settling its arguments with the gibbet and the stake. The dawn of reform merely heralded, in a style that became, in time, tiresomely familiar, the whirlwind of revolution. Much of the best of the old was to be lost, or to become, in the effort of self-defense, something less good than it had been; much of the best of the new, which had seemed so nearly within grasp, was to be achieved at last only by generations of slow rebuilding, or never to be achieved at all. The hopes of the humanists proved liars; only their fears were surpassed.
Source:
Mattingly, Garrett. “Part II: England’s Queen (1509-1527); Chapter Three, Section vi” Catherine of Aragon. New York: Quality Paperback , 1990. 129-30. Print.
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