to their king.  He deposed Henry.  He called on foreign princes to enforce his sentence; and, on pain of excommunication, commanded the native English to rise in rebellion.  The king, in selfdefence, was compelled to require his subjects to disclaim all sympathy with these pretensions, and to recognize no higher authority, spiritual or secular, than himself within his own dominions.  The regular clergy throughout the country were on the Pope’s side, secretly or openly.  The Charter-house monks, however, alone of all the order had the courage to declare their convictions, and to suffer for them.  Of the rest, we only perceive that they at last submitted; and since there was no uncertainty as to their real feelings, we have been disposed to judge them hardly as cowards.  Yet we who have never been tried, should perhaps be cautious in our censures.  It is possible to hold an opinion quite honestly, and yet to hesitate about dying for it.  We consider ourselves, at the present day, persuaded honestly of many things; yet which of them should we refuse to relinquish if the scaffold were the alternative, or at least seem to relinquish, under silent protest?

And yet, in the details of the struggle at the Charterhouse, we see the forms of mental trial which must have repeated themselves among all bodies of the clergy wherever there was seriousness of conviction.  If the majority of the monks were vicious and sensual, there was still a large minority labouring to be true to their vows; and when one entire convent was capable of sustained resistance, there must have been many where there was only just too little virtue for the emergency, where the conflict between interest and conscience was equally genuine, though it ended the other way.  Scenes of bitter misery there must have been—­of passionate emotion wrestling ineffectually with the iron resolution of the Government:  and the faults of the Catholic party weigh so heavily against them in the course and progress of the Reformation, that we cannot willingly lose the few countervailing tints which soften the darkness of the case against them.

Nevertheless, for any authentic account of the abbeys at this crisis, we have hitherto been left to our imagination.  A stern and busy Administration had little leisure to preserve records of sentimental struggles which led to nothing.  The Catholics did not care to keep alive the recollection of a conflict in which, even though with difficulty, the Church was defeated.  A rare accident only could have brought down to us any fragment of a transaction which no one had an interest in remembering.  That such an accident has really occurred, we may consider as unusually fortunate.  The story in question concerns the abbey of Woburn, and is as follows:-