n which the
persecution is mirrored with its true lights and shadows, unexaggerated
by rhetoric; and which, in its minute simplicity, brings us face to face
with that old world, where men like ourselves lived, and worked, and
suffered, three centuries ago.

[Sidenote: Cardinal's College founded by Wolsey,]

[Sidenote: Who introduces into Oxford a number of Cambridge students of
unusual promise, but lying under suspicion of heresy.]

Two years before the time at which we have now arrived, Wolsey, in
pursuance of his scheme of converting the endowments of the religious
houses to purposes of education, had obtained permission from the pope
to suppress a number of the smaller monasteries. He had added largely to
the means thus placed at his disposal from his own resources, and had
founded the great college at Oxford, which is now called Christ
church.[53] Desiring his magnificent institution to be as perfect as art
could make it, he had sought his professors in Rome, in the Italian
universities, wherever genius or ability could be found; and he had
introduced into the foundation several students from Cambridge, who had
been reported to him as being of unusual promise. Frith, of whom we have
heard, was one of these. Of the rest, John Clark, Sumner, and Taverner
are the most noticeable. At the time at which they were invited to
Oxford, they were tainted, or some of them were tainted, in the eyes of
the Cambridge authorities, with suspicion of heterodoxy;[54] and it is
creditable to Wolsey's liberality, that he set aside these
unsubstantiated rumours, not allowing them to weigh against ability,
industry, and character. The church authorities thought only of crushing
what opposed them, especially of crushing talent, because talent was
dangerous. Wolsey's noble anxiety was to court talent, and if possible
to win it.

[Sidenote: They infect Oxford; and the first Protestant divinity class
is formed at Wolsey's college.]

The young Cambridge students, however, ill repaid his confidence (so, at
least, it must have appeared to him), and introduced into Oxford the
rising epidemic. Clark, as was at last discovered, was in the habit of
reading St. Paul's Epistles to young men in his rooms; and a gradually
increasing circle of undergraduates, of three or four years'
standing,[55] from various colleges, formed themselves into a spiritual
freemasonry, some of them passionately insisting on being admitted to
the lectures, in spite of