In June of the same year (1327), a “king’s letter” is given to Robert de Weryngton, authorising him and his agents to collect alms throughout the kingdom for the purpose of building a chapel on the hill where the Earl was beheaded, and praying all prelates and authorities to give him aid and heed.  This sanction gave rise to imposture; and in December a proclamation appeared, ordering the arrest and punishment of unauthorised persons collecting money under this pretence, and taking it for their own use.

In 1330, the same clerical personages were sent again to the Pope, to advance the affair of the canonization of the Earl, and were bearers of letters on the same subject from the King to five of the cardinals, all urging the attention of the Papal court to a subject that so much interested the Church and people of England.

It would seem, however, that some powerful opposition to this request was at work at the Roman see.  For in the April of the following year another commission, composed of a professor of theology, a military personage, and a magistrate of the name of John de Newton, was sent with letters to the Pope, to nine cardinals, to the referendary of the Papal court, and to three nephews of his Holiness, entreating them not to give ear to the invectives of malignant men ("commenta fictitia maliloquorum"), who here asserted that the Earl of Lancaster consented to, or connived at, some injury or insult offered to certain cardinals at Durham in the late king’s reign.  So far from this being true, the letters assert that the earl defended these prelates to the utmost of his power, protected them from enemies who had designs on their lives, and placed them in security at his own great peril.  The main point of the canonization is again urged, and allusion made to former repeated supplications, and the sacred promise, “Knock, and it shall be opened unto you,” appealed to.  The vindication of the Earl from the malicious charge against him is omitted in the letters to two of the cardinals and the lay personages.  Were these the two cardinals who fancied themselves injured?

This, then, is all I can discover in the ordinary historical channels respecting this object of ancient public reverence in England.  The chapel was constructed and officiated in till the dissolution of the monasteries; the image in St. Paul’s was always regarded with special affection; and the cognomen of Saint Thomas of Lancaster was generally accepted and understood.

Five hundred years after the execution of the Earl of Lancaster, a large stone coffin, massive and roughly hewn, was found in a field that belonged of old to the Priory of Pomfret, but at least a quarter of a mile distant from the hill where the chapel stood.  Within was the skeleton of a full-grown man, partially preserved; the skull lay between the thighs.  There is no record of the decapitation of any person at Pomfret of sufficient dignity to have been interred in a manner showing so much care for the preservation of the body, except the Earl of Lancaster.  The coffin may have been removed here at the time the opposite party forbade its veneration, from motives of precaution for its safety.