owers of the confessional.]

[Sidenote: The clergy in some cases advise their penitents to take the
oaths with a mental reservation.]

But the open resistance of mistaken honesty was not the danger which the
government most feared. Another peril threatened their authority, deeper
and more alarming by far. The clergy possessed in the confessional a
power of secret influence over the masses of the people, by which they
were able at once (if they so pleased) to grant their penitents licences
for insincerity, to permit them to perjure themselves under mental
reservations, and to encourage them to expiate a venial falsehood by
concealed disaffection. The secrets of confession were inviolable.
Anathemas the most fearful forbade their disclosure; and, secured behind
this impenetrable shield, the church might defy the most stringent
provisions, and baffle every precaution.

From the nature of the case but little could transpire of the use or the
abuse which was made at such a time of so vast a power; but Cromwell,
whose especial gift it was to wind himself into the secrets of the
clergy, had his sleuth-hounds abroad, whose scent was not easily
baffled. The long tyranny of the priesthood produced also its natural
retribution in the informations which were too gladly volunteered in the
hour of revenge; and more than one singular disclosure remains among the
_State Papers_, of language used in this mysterious intercourse. Every
man who doubted whether he might lawfully abjure the pope, consulted his
priest. Haughton, the Prior of Charterhouse, in all such cases, declared
absolutely that the abjuration might not be made.[392] He himself
refused openly; and it is likely that he directed others to be as open
as himself. But Haughton's advice was as exceptional as his conduct.
Father Forest, of Greenwich, who was a brave man, and afterwards met
nobly a cruel death, took the oath to the king as he was required; while
he told a penitent that he had abjured the pope in the outward, but not
in the inward man, that he "owed an obedience to the pope which he could
not shake off," and that it was "his use and practice in confession, to
induce men to hold and stick to the old fashion of belief."[393]

[Sidenote: Confession of John Staunton.]

Here, again, is a conversation which a treacherous penitent revealed to
Cromwell; the persons in the dialogue being the informer, John Staunton,
and the confessor of Sion Monastery, who had professed