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A.D. 1529. Nov. 3.

CH. 3. sion whereof all your Commons in their conscience surely account that, beside the marvellous fervent love that your Highness shall thereby engender in their hearts towards your Grace, ye shall do the most princely feat, and show the most honourable and charitable precedent and mirrour that ever did sovereign lord upon his subjects; and therewithal merit and deserve of our merciful God eternal bliss-whose goodness grant your Grace in goodly, princely, and honourable estate long to reign, prosper, and continue as the Sovereign Lord over all your said most humble and obedient servants.'*

The Court of Arches

bishop

But little comment need be added in explanaand Arch- tion of this petition, which, though drawn with evident haste, is no less remarkable for temper and good feeling, than for the masterly clearness with which the evils complained of are laid bare. Historians will be careful for the future how they swell the charges against Wolsey with quoting the lamentations of Archbishop Warham, when his Court of Arches was for a while superseded by the Legate's Court, and causes lingering before his commissaries were summarily dispatched at a higher tribunal. The archbishop professed, indeed, that he derived no personal advantage from his courts, and as we have only the popular impression to the contrary to set against his word, we must believe him; yet it was of small moment to the laity who were pillaged, whether

*Petition of the Commons: is very eloquent in his outcries Rolls House MS. upon this subject.

+ See STRYPE, Eccles. Memorials, vol. i. p. 191-2,-who

Answer of the Bishops, p.

204, &c.

the spoils taken from them filled the coffers of the CH. 3. master, or those of his followers and friends.

A.D. 1529.

When we consider, also, the significant allu- Nov. 3. sion* to the young folks whom the bishops called their nephews, we cease to wonder at their lenient dealing with the poor priests who had sunk under the temptations of frail humanity; and still less can we wonder at the rough handling which was soon found necessary to bring back these high dignitaries to a better mind.

attitude of

of Com

mons.

The House of Commons, in casting their Rational grievances into the form of a petition, showed the House that they had no desire to thrust forward of themselves violent measures of reform; they sought rather to explain firmly and decisively what the country required. The king, selecting out of the many points noticed those which seemed most immediately pressing, referred them back to the parliament, with a direction to draw up such enactments as in their own judgment would furnish effective relief. In the meantime Henry subhe submitted the petition itself to the considera- petition tion of the bishops, requiring their immediate bishops. answer to the charges against them, and accompanied this request with a further important requisition. The legislative authority of convocation lay at the root of the evils which were most complained of. The bishops and clergy held themselves independent of either crown or

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mits the

to the

A.D. 1529.
Nov. 3.

CH. 3. parliament, passing canons by their own irresponsible and unchecked will, irrespective of the laws of the land, and sometimes in direct violation of them; and to these canons the laity were amenable without being made acquainted with their provisions, learning them only in the infliction of penalties for their unintended breach. The king required that thenceforward the convocation should consent to place itself in the position of parliament, and that his own consent should be required and received before any law passed by convocation should have the force of statute.*

The

bishops'

their posi

Little notion, indeed, could the bishops have estimate of possessed of the position in which they were tion. standing. It seemed as if they literally believed that the promise of perpetuity which Christ had made to his church was a charm which would hold them free in the quiet course of their injustice; or else, under the blinding influence of custom, they did not really know that any injustice adhered to them. They could see in themselves only the ideal virtues of their saintly office, and not the vices of their fragile humanity; they believed that they were still holy, still spotless, still immaculate, and therefore that no danger might come near them. It cannot have been but that, before the minds of such men as Warham and Fisher, some visions of a future must at times have floated, which hung so plainly before the eyes of Wolsey and of Sir Thomas More.†

*Reply of the Bishops, infra.

CAVENDISH, Life of Wolsey, p. 390. MORE's Life of More,

p. 109.

A.D. 1529.

our time.

They could not have been wholly deaf to the CH. 3. storm in Germany; and they must have heard something of the growls of smothered anger Nov. 3. which for years had been audible at home, to all who had ears to hear.* Yet if any such thoughts at times did cross their imagination, they were thrust aside as an uneasy dream, to be shaken off like a nightmare, or with the coward's consolation, ‘It will last my time.' If the bishops ever It will last felt an uneasy moment, there is no trace of uneasiness in the answer which they sent in to the king, and which now, when we read it with the light which is thrown back out of the succeeding years, seems like the composition of mere lunacy. Perhaps they had confidence in the support of Henry. In their courts they were in the habit of identifying an attack upon themselves with an attack upon the doctrines of the Church; and reading the king's feelings in their own, they may have considered themselves safe under the protection of a sovereign who had broken a lance with Luther, and had called himself the Pope's champion. Perhaps they thought that they had bound him to themselves by a declaration which they had all signed in the preceding summer in favour of the divorce.† Perhaps they were but steeped in the dulness of official lethargy. The defence is long, wearying the patience to read it; wearying the imagination to invent excuses for

* Populus diu oblatrans. Fox to Wolsey. STRYPE, Eccl. Mem. vol. i. Appendix, p. 27.

VOL. I.

RYMER, vol. vi. part 2, p. 119.
Q

CH. 3. the falsehoods which it contains.

A.D. 1529.

They make their an

swer.

Yet it is well to see all men in the light in which they see themselves; and justice requires that we allow the bishops the benefit of their own reply. It was couched in the following words:*

'After our most humble wise, with our most bounden duty of honour and reverence to your excellent Majesty, endued from God with incomparable wisdom and goodness. Please it the same to understand that we, your orators and daily bounden bedemen, have read and perused a certain supplication which the Commons of your Grace's honourable parliament now assembled have offered unto your Highness, and by your Grace's commandment delivered unto us, that we should make answer thereunto. We have, as the time hath served, made this answer following, beseeching your Grace's indifferent benignity graciously to hear the same.

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And first for that discord, variance, and debate which, in the preface of the said supplication they do allege to have risen among your Grace's subjects, spiritual and temporal, occasioned, as they say, by the uncharitable behaviour and demeanour of divers ordinaries: to this we, the ordinaries, answer, assuring your Majesty that in our hearts there is no such discord or variance on our part against our brethren in God and ghostly children your subjects, as is in

*The answer of the Ordinaries to the supplication of the worshipful the Commons of the Lower House of Parliament offered to our Sovereign Lord the King's most noble Grace.-Rolls House MS.

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