Fisher was the only one among the prelates for whom it is possible to feel respect.  He was weak, superstitious, pedantical; towards the Protestants he was even cruel; but he was a singlehearted man, who lived in honest fear of evil, so far as he understood what evil was; and he alone could rise above the menaces of worldly suffering, under which his brethren on the bench sank so rapidly into meekness and submission.  We can therefore afford to compassionate him in the unexpected calamity by which he was overtaken, and which must have tried his failing spirit in no common manner.

He lived, while his duties required his presence in London, at a house in Lambeth, and being a hospitable person, he opened his doors at the dinner hour for the poor of the neighbourhood.  Shortly after the matter which I have just related, many of these people who were dependent on his bounty were reported to have become alarmingly ill, and several gentlemen of the household sickened also in the same sudden and startling manner.  One of these gentlemen died, and a poor woman also died; and it was discovered on inquiry that the yeast which had been used in various dishes had been poisoned.  The guilty person was the cook, a certain Richard Rouse; and inasmuch as all crimes might be presumed to have had motives, and the motive in the present instance was undiscoverable, it was conjectured by Queen Catherine’s friends that he had been bribed by Anne Boleyn, or by some one of her party, to remove out of the way the most influential of the English opponents of the divorce.[299] The story was possibly without foundation, although it is not unlikely that Fisher himself believed it.  The shock of such an occurrence may well have unsettled his powers of reasoning, and at all times he was a person whose better judgment was easily harassed into incapacity.  The origin of the crime, however, is of less importance than the effect of the discovery upon the nation, in whom horror of the action itself absorbed every other feeling.  Murder of this kind was new in England.  Ready as the people ever were with sword or lance—­incurably given as they were to fighting in the best ordered times—­an Englishman was accustomed to face his enemy, man to man, in the open day; and the Italian crime (as it was called) of poisoning had not till recent years been heard of.[300] Even revenge and passion recognised their own laws of honour and fair play; and the cowardly ferocity which would work its vengeance in the dark, and practise destruction by wholesale to implicate one hated person in the catastrophe, was a new feature of criminality.  Occurring in a time so excited, when all minds were on the stretch, and imaginations were feverish with fancies, it appeared like a frightful portent, some prodigy of nature, or enormous new birth of wickedness, not to be received or passed by as a common incident, and not to be dealt with by the process of ordinary law.  Parliament undertook the investigation, making it the occasion, when the