Little notion, indeed, could the bishops have possessed of the position in which they were standing.  It seemed as if they literally believed that the promise of perpetuity which Christ had made to his church was a charm which would hold them free in the quiet course of their injustice; or else, under the blinding influence of custom, they did not really know that any injustice adhered to them.  They could see in themselves only the ideal virtues of their saintly office, and not the vices of their fragile humanity; they believed that they were still holy, still spotless, still immaculate, and therefore that no danger might come near them.  It cannot have been but that, before the minds of such men as Warham and Fisher, some visions of a future must at times have floated, which hung so plainly before the eyes of Wolsey and of Sir Thomas More.[231] They could not have been wholly deaf to the storm in Germany; and they must have heard something of the growls of smothered anger which for years had been audible at home, to all who had ears to hear.[232] Yet if any such thoughts at times did cross their imagination, they were thrust aside as an uneasy dream, to be shaken off like a nightmare, or with the coward’s consolation, “It will last my time.”  If the bishops ever felt an uneasy moment, there is no trace of uneasiness in the answer which they sent in to the king, and which now, when we read it with the light which is thrown back out of the succeeding years, seems like the composition of mere lunacy.  Perhaps they had confidence in the support of Henry.  In their courts they were in the habit of identifying an attack upon themselves with an attack upon the doctrines of the Church; and reading the king’s feelings in their own, they may have considered themselves safe under the protection of a sovereign who had broken a lance with Luther, and had called himself the Pope’s champion.  Perhaps they thought that they had bound him to themselves by a declaration which they had all signed in the preceding summer in favour of the divorce.[233] Perhaps they were but steeped in the dulness of official lethargy.  The defence is long, wearying the patience to read it; wearying the imagination to invent excuses for the falsehoods which it contains.  Yet it is well to see all men in the light in which they see themselves; and justice requires that we allow the bishops the benefit of their own reply.  It was couched in the following words:—­[234]

“After our most humble wise, with our most bounden duty of honour and reverence to your excellent Majesty, endued from God with incomparable wisdom and goodness.  Please it the same to understand that we, your orators and daily bounden bedemen, have read and perused a certain supplication which the Commons of your Grace’s honourable parliament now assembled have offered unto your Highness, and by your Grace’s commandment delivered unto us, that we should make answer thereunto.  We have, as the time hath served, made this answer following, beseeching your Grace’s indifferent benignity graciously to hear the same.