[95] See WARHAM’S Register, MS. Lambeth.

[96] 21 Hen.  VIII. cap. 13.

[97] ROY’S Satire against the Clergy, written about 1528, is so plain-spoken, and goes so directly to the point of the matter, that it is difficult to find a presentable extract.  The following lines on the bishops are among the most moderate in the poem:—­

  “What are the bishops divines—­
  Yea, they can best skill of wines
  Better than of divinity;
  Lawyers are they of experience,
  And in cases against conscience
  They are parfet by practice. 
  To forge excommunications,
  For tythes and decimations
  Is their continual exercise. 
  As for preaching they take no care,
  They would rather see a course at a hare;
  Rather than to make a sermon
  To follow the chase of wild deer,
  Passing the time with jolly cheer. 
  Among them all is common
  To play at the cards and dice;
  Some of them are nothing nice
  Both at hazard and momchance;
  They drink in golden bowls
  The blood of poor simple souls
  Perishing for lack of sustenance. 
  Their hungry cures they never teach,
  Nor will suffer none other to preach,” etc.

[98] LATIMER’S Sermons, pp. 70, 71.

[99] A peculiarly hateful form of clerical impost, the priests claiming the last dress worn in life by persons brought to them for burial.

[100] Fitz James to Wolsey, FOXE, vol. iv. p. 196.

[101] Supplication of the Beggars; FOXE, vol. iv. p. 661.  The glimpses into the condition of the monasteries which had been obtained in the imperfect visitation of Morton, bear out the pamphleteer too completely.  See chapter x. of this work, second edition.

[102] FOXE, vol. iv. p. 658.

[103] 13 Ric.  II. stat. ii. c. 2; 2 Hen.  IV. c. 3; 9 Hen.  IV. c. 8.  Lingard is mistaken in saying that the Crown had power to dispense with these statutes.  A dispensing power was indeed granted by the 12th of the 7th of Ric.  II.  But by the 2nd of the 13th of the same reign, the king is expressly and by name placed under the same prohibitions as all other persons.

[104] HALL, p. 784.

[105] 25 Hen.  VIII. c. 22.

[106] 28 Hen.  VIII. c. 24.  Speech of Sir Ralph Sadler in parliament, Sadler Papers, vol. iii. p. 323.

[107] Nor was the theory distinctly admitted, or the claim of the house of York would have been unquestionable.

[108] 25 Hen.  VIII. c. 22, Draft of the Dispensation to be granted to Henry VIII. Rolls House MS. It has been asserted by a writer in the Tablet that there is no instance in the whole of English history where the ambiguity of the marriage law led to a dispute of title.  This was not the opinion of those who remembered the wars of the fifteenth century.  “Recens in quorundam vestrorum animis adhuc est illius cruenti temporis memoria,” said Henry