In the summer of 1534, orders came that the Pope’s name should be rased out wherever it was mentioned in the Mass books.  A malcontent, by name Robert Salford, deposed that “he was singing mass before the abbot at St. Thomas’s altar within the monastery, at which time he rased out with his knife the said name out of the canon.”  The abbot told him to “take a pen and strike or cross him out.”  The saucy monk said those were not the orders.  They were to rase him out.  “Well, well,” the abbot said, “it will come again one day.”  “Come again, will it?” was the answer.  “If it do, then we will put him in again; but I trust I shall never see that day.”  The mild abbot could remonstrate, but could not any more command; and the proofs of his malignant inclinations were remembered against him for the ear of Cromwell.

In the general injunctions, too, he was directed to preach against the Pope, and to expose his usurpation; but he could not bring himself to obey.  He shrank from the pulpit; he preached but twice after the visitation, and then on other subjects, while in the prayer before the sermon he refused, as we find, to use the prescribed form.  He only said, “You shall pray for the spirituality, the temporality, and the souls that be in the pains of purgatory; and did not name the King to be supreme head of the Church in neither of the said sermons, nor speak against the pretended authority of the Bishop of Rome.”

Again, when Paul the Third, shortly after his election, proposed to call a general council at Mantua, against which, by advice of Henry the Eighth, the Germans protested, we have a glimpse how eagerly anxious English eyes were watching for a turning tide.  “Hear you,” said the abbot one day, “of the Pope’s holiness and the congregation of bishops, abbots, and princes gathered to the council at Mantua?  They be gathered for the reformation of the universal Church; and here now we have a book of the excuse of the Germans, by which we may know what heretics they be, for if they were Catholics and true men as they pretend to be, they would never have refused to come to a general council.”

So matters went with the abbot for some months after he had sworn obedience to the King.  Lulling his conscience with such opiates as the casuists could provide for him, he watched anxiously for a change, and laboured with but little reserve to hold his brethren to their true allegiance.

In the summer of 1535, however, a change came over the scene, very different from the outward reaction for which he was looking:  a better mind woke in the abbot; he learnt that in swearing what he did not mean with reservations and nice distinctions, he had lied to Heaven and lied to man:  that to save his miserable life he had perilled his soul.  When the oath of supremacy was required of the nation, Sir Thomas More, Bishop Fisher, and the monks of the Charterhouse, mistaken, as we believe, in judgment, but true to their consciences, and disdaining evasion