The Duke of Devonshire issues a circular applying for subscriptions to oppose this Bill, and he charges us with robbery of God. Does he know – of course he knows – that the very foundations of his fortune are laid deep in sacrilege, fortunes built out of deserted shrines and pillaged altars . . . What is their story? Look at the whole story of the pillage of the Reformation. They robbed the Catholic Church, they robbed the monasteries, they robbed the altars, they robbed the almshouses, they robbed the poor and they robbed the dead. Then they come here when we are trying to seek at any rate to recover some part of this pillaged property for the poor for whom it was originally given, and they venture, with hands dripping with the fat of sacrilege, to accuse us of robbery of God.
D. Lloyd-George, debate on the Welsh Disestablishment Bill, May 1912, cited in G. Dangerfield, The strange death of liberal England (1936), 255
