the pope. I will not abjure him in my heart," said the
priest, "for these words were not spoken unto Peter for nought--'I will
give thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven'--and the pope is Peter's
successor. Of this matter," said the priest, "I communed once with the
Bishop of Canterbury,[395] and I told the bishop I would pray for the
pope as the chief and papal head of Christ's church. And the bishop told
me it was the king's pleasure that I should not. I said unto him I would
do it; and though I did it not openly, yet would I do it secretly. And
he said I might pray for him secretly, but in any wise do it not
openly."[396]

[Sidenote: Maitland the Black Friar, by his science of nigromancy,
foretells a counter-revolution.]

Trifles of this kind may seem unimportant; but at the time they were of
moment, for their weight was cumulative; and we can only now recover but
a few out of many. Such as they are, however, they show the spirit in
which the injunctions were received by a section at least of the English
clergy. Nor was this the worst. We find language reported, which shows
that many among the monks were watching for symptoms of the promised
imperial invasion, and the progress of the Irish insurgents. A Doctor
Maitland, of the order of Black Friars in London, had been "heard divers
times to say, he trusted to see every man's head that was of the new
learning, and the maintainers of them, to stand upon a stake, and
Cranmer's to be one of them. The king," he hoped, might suffer "a
violent and shameful death;" and "the queen, that mischievous whore,
might be brent." "He said further, that he knew by his science, which
was nigromancy, that all men of the new learning should be suppressed
and suffer death, and the _people of the old learning should be set up
again by the power of the king's enemies from the parts beyond the
sea_."[397]

[Sidenote: Feron and Hale.]

[Sidenote: Feron hopes that Henry's death may be like that of the
manqueller Richard.]

In the May weather of 1534, two Middlesex clergy, "walking to and fro
in the cloyster garden at Sion, were there overheard compassing sedition
and rebellion." John Hale, an eager, tumultuous person, was prompting
his brother priest, Robert Feron, with matter for a pamphlet, which
Feron was to write against the king.[398] "Syth the realm of England was
first a realm," said Hale, "was there never in it so great a robber and
piller of the commonwealth read of nor heard