“Given under our hand and seal, at our Castle of Windsor,

“HENRY R."[279]

It is scarcely necessary to say, that, armed with this letter, the heads of houses subdued the recalcitrance of the overhasty “youth;” and Oxford duly answered as she was required to answer.

The proceedings at Cambridge were not very dissimilar; but Cambridge being distinguished by greater openness and largeness of mind on this as on the other momentous subjects of the day than the sister university, was able to preserve a more manly bearing, and escape direct humiliation.  Cranmer had written a book upon the divorce in the preceding year, which, as coming from a well-known Cambridge man, had occasioned a careful ventilation of the question there; the resident masters had been divided by it into factions nearly equal in number, though unharmoniously composed.  The heads of houses, as at Oxford, were inclined to the king, but they were embarrassed and divided by the presence on the same side of the suspected liberals, the party of Shaxton, Latimer, and Cranmer himself.  The agitation of many months had rendered all members of the university, young and old, so well acquainted (as they supposed) with the bearings of the difficulty, that they naturally resisted, as at the other university, the demand that their power should be delegated to a committee; and the Cambridge convocation, as well as that of Oxford, threw out this resolution when it was first proposed to them.  A king’s letter having made them more amenable, a list of the intended committee was drawn out, which, containing Latimer’s name, occasioned a fresh storm.  But the number in the senate house being nearly divided, “the labour of certain friends” turned the scale; the vote passed, and the committee was allowed, on condition that the question should be argued publicly in the presence of the whole university.  Finally, judgment was obtained on the king’s side, though in a less absolute form than he had required, and the commissioners did not think it prudent to press for a more extreme conclusion.  They had been desired to pronounce that the pope had no power to permit a man to marry his brother’s widow.  They consented only to say that a marriage within those degrees was contrary to the divine law; but the question of the pope’s power was left unapproached.[280]

It will not be uninteresting to follow this judgment a further step, to the delivery of it into the hands of the king, where it will introduce us to a Sunday at Windsor Castle three centuries ago.  We shall find present there, as a significant symptom of the time, Hugh Latimer, appointed freshly select preacher in the royal chapel, but already obnoxious to English orthodoxy, on account of his Cambridge sermons.  These sermons, it had been said, contained many things good and profitable, “on sin, and godliness, and virtue,” but much also which was disrespectful to established beliefs, the preacher being clearly