CH. 2. rest in doing of his office?*

Сн.

I can tell, for I know him who it is; I know him well. But now I think I see you listening and hearkening that I should name him. There is one that passeth all the others, and is the most diligent prelate and preacher in all England. And will ye know who it is? I will tell you. It is the devil. Among all the pack of them that have cure, the devil shall go for my money, for he applieth his business. Therefore, ye unpreaching prelates, learn of the devil to be diligent in your office. If ye will not learn of God, for shame learn of the devil.'†

Under such circumstances, we need not be

* Roy's Satire against the Clergy, written about 1528, is so plain-spoken, and goes so directly to the point of the matter, that it is difficult to find a presentable extract. The following lines on the bishops are among the most moderate in the poem :

'What are the bishops divines-
Yea, they can best skill of wines
Better than of divinity;
Lawyers are they of experience,
And in cases against conscience
They are parfet by practice.
To forge excommunications,
For tythes and decimations

Is their continual exercise.

As for preaching they take no care,

They would rather see a course at a hare;

Rather than to make a sermon

To follow the chase of wild deer,
Passing the time with jolly cheer.
Among them all is common
To play at the cards and dice;
Some of them are nothing nice
Both at hazard and momchance;
They drink in golden bowls
The blood of poor simple souls
Perishing for lack of sustenance.

Their hungry cures they never teach,

Nor will suffer none other to preach,' &c.

+ LATIMER'S Sermons, pp. 70, 71.

surprised to find the clergy sunk low in the Cн. 2. respect of the English people. Sternly intolerant of each other's faults, the laity were not likely to be indulgent to the vices of men who ought to have set an example of purity; and from time to time, during the first quarter of the century, there were explosions of temper which might have served as a warning if any sense or judgment had been left to profit by it.

Hun, and

the people.

In 1514 a London merchant was committed Murder of to the Lollards' Tower for refusing to submit to irritation of an unjust exaction of mortuary;* and a few days after was found dead in his cell. An inquest was held upon the body, when a verdict of wilful murder was returned against the chancellor of the Bishop of London; and so intense was the feeling of the city, that the bishop applied to Wolsey for a special jury to be chosen on the trial. 'For assured I am,' he said, 'that if my chancellor be tried by any twelve men in London, they be so maliciously set in favorem hæretica pravitatis, that they will cast and condemn any clerk, though he were as innocent as Abel.'+ Fish's famous pamphlet also shows the spirit which was seething; and though we may make some allowance for angry rhetoric, his words have the clear ring of honesty in them; and he spoke of what he had seen and knew. The monks, he tells the king, 'be they that have made a hundred thou.

* A peculiarly hateful form of clerical impost, the priests claiming the last dress worn in life by persons brought to them for burial. + Fitz James to Wolsey, FoxE, vol. iv. p. 196.

CH. 2. sand idle dissolute women in your realm, who would have gotten their living honestly in the sweat of their faces had not their superfluous riches allured them to lust and idleness. These be they that when they have drawn men's wives to such incontinency, spend away their husbands' goods, make the women to run away from their husbands, bringing both man, wife, and children to idleness, theft, and beggary. Yea, who is able to number the great broad bottomless ocean sea full of evils that this mischievous generation may bring upon us if unpunished?'*

A.D. 1528.

against the

Copies of this book were strewed about the London streets; Wolsey issued a prohibition against it, with the effect which such prohibitions Fish's book usually have. Means were found to bring it clergy sub- under the eyes of Henry himself; and the manner in which it was received by him is full of significance, and betrays that the facts of the age were already telling on his understanding. He was always easy of access and easy of manner; and the story, although it rests on Foxe's authority, has internal marks of authenticity.

mitted to Henry.

'One Master Edmund Moddis, being with the king in talk of religion, and of the new books that were come from beyond the seas, said that if it might please his Highness to pardon him, and such as he would bring to his Grace, he should

* Supplication of the Beggars; FOXE, vol. iv. p. 661. The glimpses into the condition of the monasteries which had been obtained in the imperfect

visitation of Morton, bear out the pamphleteer too completely. See chapter x. of this work, second edition.

see such a book as it was a marvel to hear of. CH. 2. The king demanded who they were? He said

Two of your merchants-George Elliot and George Robinson.' The king appointed a time to speak with them. When they came before his presence in a privy closet, he demanded what they had to say or to shew him. One of them said that there was a book come to their hands which they had there to shew his Grace. When he saw it he demanded if any of them could read it. Yea,' said George Elliot, 'if it please your Grace to hear it.' 'I thought so,' said the king; 'if need were, thou couldst say it without book.'

'The whole book being read out, the king His remark made a long pause, and then said, 'If a man upon it. should pull down an old stone wall, and should begin at the lower part, the upper part thereof might chance to fall upon his head.' Then he took the book, and put it in his desk, and commanded them, on their allegiance, that they should not tell any man that he had seen it.'*

tending to

church,

Symptoms such as these boded ill for a self- Wolsey, inreform of the church, and it was further impe- reform the rilled by the difficulty which it is not easy to believe breaks that Wolsey had forgotten. No measures would the law. be of efficacy which spared the religious houses, and they would be equally useless unless the bishops, as well as the inferior clergy, were comprehended in the scheme of amendment. But neither with monks nor bishops could Wolsey in

FOXE, vol. iv. p. 658.

CH. 2. terfere except by a commission from the pope, and the laws were unrepealed which forbade English subjects, under the severest penalties, to accept or exercise within the realm an authority which they had received from the Holy See. Morton had gone beyond the limits of the statute of provisors in receiving powers from Pope Innocent to visit the monasteries. But Morton had stopped short with inquiry and admonition. Wolsey, who was in earnest with the work, had desired and obtained a full commission as legate, but he could only make use of it at his peril. The statute slumbered, but it still existed.* He was exposing not himself only, but all persons, lay and clerical, who might recognise his legacy to a Premunire; and he knew well that Henry's connivance, or even expressed permission, could not avail him if his conduct was challenged. He could not venture to appeal to parliament. Parliament was the last authority whose jurisdiction a churchman would acknowledge in the concerns of the clergy; and his project must sooner or later have sunk, like those of his two predecessors, under its own internal difficulties, even if the The king's accident had not arisen which brought the dispute to a special issue in its most vital point, and which, fostered by Wolsey for his own purposes, precipitated his ruin.

divorce.

* 13 Ric. II. stat. ii. c. 2; 2 Hen. IV. c. 3; 9 Hen. IV. c 8. Lingard is mistaken in saying that the Crown had power to dispense with these statutes. A dispensing power was indeed

granted by the 12th of the 7th of Ric. II. But by the 2nd of the 13th of the same reign, the king is expressly and by name placed under the same prohibitions as all other persons.