said bedeman; which thing was speedily done the Sunday three weeks after his deliverance.  And so he continued in prison again until Saint Lawrence tide following; at which time money was given to the keeper, and some things he took which were not given, and then was your bedeman re-delivered through the king’s goodness, under sureties bound in a certain sum, that he should appear the first day of the next term following, and then day by day until his dismission.  And so hath your bedeman been at liberty now twelve months waiting daily from term to term, and nothing laid to his charge as before.

“Wherefore, the premises tenderly considered, and also your said bedeman’s great poverty, he most humbly beseecheth your goodness that he may now be clearly discharged; and if books, money, or other things seem to be taken or kept from him otherwise than justice would, eftsoons he beseecheth you that ye will command it to be restored.

“As for his long imprisonment, with other griefs thereto appertaining, he looketh not to have recompense of man; but committeth his whole cause to God, to whom your bedeman shall daily pray, according as he is bound, that ye may so order and govern the realm that it may be to the honour of God and your heavenly and everlasting reward.”

I do not find the result of this petition, but as it appeared that Henry had interested himself in the story, it is likely to have been successful.  We can form but an imperfect judgment on the merits of the case, for we have only the sufferer’s ex parte complaint, and More might probably have been able to make some counter-statement.  But the illegal imprisonment cannot be explained away, and cannot be palliated; and when a judge permits himself to commit an act of arbitrary tyranny, we argue from the known to the unknown, and refuse reasonably to give him credit for equity where he was so little careful of law.

Yet a few years of misery in a prison was but an insignificant misfortune when compared with the fate under which so many other poor men were at this time overwhelmed.  Under Wolsey’s chancellorship the stake had been comparatively idle; he possessed a remarkable power of making recantation easy; and there is, I believe, no instance in which an accused heretic was brought under his immediate cognisance, where he failed to arrange some terms by which submission was made possible.  With Wolsey heresy was an error—­with More it was a crime.  Soon after the seals changed hands the Smithfield fires recommenced; and, the chancellor acting in concert with them, the bishops resolved to obliterate, in these edifying spectacles, the recollection of their general infirmities.  The crime of the offenders varied—­sometimes it was a denial of the corporal presence, more often it was a reflection too loud to be endured on the character and habits of the clergy; but whatever it was, the alternative lay only between abjuration humiliating as ingenuity