Dan John Croxton being in “the shaving-house” one day with certain of the brethren having their tonsures looked to, and gossiping, as men do on such occasions, one “Friar Lawrence did say that the King was dead.”  Then said Croxton, “thanks be to God, his Grace is in good health, and I pray God so continue him;” and said further to the said Lawrence, “I advise thee to leave thy babbling.”  Croxton, it seems, had been among the suspected in earlier times.  Lawrence said to him, “Croxton, it maketh no matter what thou sayest, for thou art one of the new world.”  Whereupon hotter still the conversation proceeded.  “Thy babbling tongue,” Croxton said, “will turn us all to displeasure at length.”  “Then,” quoth Lawrence, “neither thou nor yet any of us all shall do well as long as we forsake our head of the Church, the Pope.”  “By the mass!” quoth Croxton, “I would thy Pope Roger were in thy belly, or thou in his, for thou art a false perjured knave to thy Prince.”  Whereunto the said Lawrence answered, saying, “By the mass, thou liest!  I was never sworn to forsake the Pope to be our head, and never will be.”  “Then,” quoth Croxton, “thou shall be sworn spite of thine heart one day, or I will know why nay.”

These and similar wranglings may be taken as specimens of the daily conversation at Woburn, and we can perceive how an abbot with the best intentions would have found it difficult to keep the peace.  There are instances of superiors in other houses throwing down their command in the midst of the crisis in flat despair, protesting that their subject brethren were no longer governable.  Abbots who were inclined to the Reformation could not manage the Catholics; Catholic abbots could not manage the Protestants; indifferent abbots could not manage either the one or the other.  It would have been well for the Abbot of Woburn—­or well as far as this world is concerned—­if he, like one of these, had acknowledged his incapacity, and had fled from his charge.

His name was Robert Hobbes.  Of his age and family, history is silent.  We know only that he held his place when the storm rose against the Pope; that, like the rest of the clergy, he bent before the blast, taking the oath to the King, and submitting to the royal supremacy, but swearing under protest, as the phrase went, with the outward, and not with the inward man—­in fact, perjuring himself.  Though infirm, so far, however, he was too honest to be a successful counterfeit, and from the jealous eyes of the Neologians of the abbey he could not conceal his tendencies.  We have significant evidence of the espionage which was established, over all suspected quarters, in the conversations and trifling details of conduct on the part of the abbot, which were reported to the Government.