“Postscript.  My good lord, there is in the said abbey a cross of fine gold and precious stones, whereof one diamond was esteemed by Doctor Booth, Bishop of Hereford, worth a hundred marks.  In that cross is enclosed a piece of wood, named to be of the cross that Christ died upon, and to the same hath been offering.  And when it should be brought down to the church from the treasury, it was brought down with lights, and like reverence as should have been done to Christ Himself.  I fear lest the abbot upon Sunday next, when he may enter the treasury, will take away the said cross and break it, or turn it to his own use, with many other precious jewels that be there.

“All these articles afore written be true as to the substance and true meaning of them, though peradventure for haste and lack of counsel some words be set amiss or out of their place.  That I will be ready to prove forasmuch as lies in me, when it shall like your honourable lordship to direct your commission to men (or any man) that will be indifferent and not corrupt to sit upon the same, at the said abbey, where the witnesses and proofs be most ready and the truth is best known, or at any other place where it shall be thought most convenient by your high discretion and authority.”

The statutes of Provisors, commonly called Premunire statutes, which forbade all purchases of bulls from Rome under penalty of outlawry, have been usually considered in the highest degree oppressive; and more particularly the public censure has fallen upon the last application of those statutes, when, on Wolsey’s fall, the whole body of the clergy were laid under a premunire, and only obtained pardon on payment of a serious fine.  Let no one regret that he has learnt to be tolerant to Roman Catholics as the nineteenth century knows them.  But it is a spurious charity, which, to remedy a modern injustice, hastens to its opposite; and when philosophic historians indulge in loose invective against the statesmen of the Reformation, they show themselves unfit to be trusted with the custody of our national annals.  The Acts of Parliament speak plainly of the enormous abuses which had grown up under these bulls.  Yet even the emphatic language of the statutes scarcely prepares us to find an abbot able to purchase with jewels stolen from his own convent a faculty to confer holy orders, though he had never been consecrated bishop, and to make a thousand pounds by selling the exercise of his privileges.  This is the most flagrant case which has fallen under the eyes of the present writer.  Yet it is but a choice specimen out of many.  He was taught to believe, like other modern students of history, that the papal dispensations for immorality, of which we read in Fox and other Protestant writers, were calumnies, but he has been forced against his will to perceive that the supposed calumnies were but the plain truth; he has found among the records—­for one thing, a list of more than twenty clergy in one diocese