on

The wrath of the cardinal was greatly stirred. Thomas Garret had
escaped once again. His own college had been proved to be, if not a
hotbed of heresy, at least one of the centres whence dangerous
doctrines had been disseminated; and amongst those who had been
engaged in this unrighteous task were several of those very men
whom he himself had introduced there, that they might, by their
godly life and conversation, be shining lights amongst their
companions.

It was natural, perhaps, that Wolsey's wrath should burn somewhat
fiercely, and be especially directed against the black sheep of his
own college. He was too busy with public affairs to come himself to
Oxford at this juncture; but he wrote many and lengthy epistles to
the authorities there, and prayed them to use every means in their
power of ridding the place of heresy, promising to give the matter
his own earnest consideration. He had believed that heresy was for
the present stamped out in London, owing to the prompt and decisive
measures taken. He declared it would be far easier to tackle in the
smaller town of Oxford; yet he and others who knew the two schools
of thought had an inkling that the seed, once sown in the hearts of
young and ardent and thinking men, would be found sprouting up and
bearing fruit sometimes when least expected.

However, there was no lack of zeal in executing the cardinal's
commands; and Clarke, together with other canons of his college,
Dalaber of Gloucester College, Udel, Diet, Radley, and even young
Fitzjames, whose friendship with Dalaber was thought highly
suspicious, were all cast into prison, and some of them into very
close and rigorous captivity, with an unknown fate hanging over
them, which could not but fill even the stoutest soul with dread
and horror.

The prisons of the middle ages will scarce bear detailed
description in these modern days; the condition of filth and
squalor of the lower cells, often almost without air, and reeking
with pestilential vapours, baffles words in which to describe it.
To be sure, persons in daily life were used to conditions which
would now be condemned as hopelessly insanitary, and were not so
susceptible and squeamish as we have since become. The ordinary
state of some of the poorer students' halls in Oxford appears to us
as simply disgusting; yet the thing was accepted then as a matter
of course.

Nevertheless, the condition of those cast into the prisons of those
days was a ve