enture for haste and lack of
counsel, some words be set amiss or out of their place. That I will
be ready to prove forasmuch as lies in me, when it shall like your
honourable lordship to direct your commission to men (or any man)
that will be indifferent and not corrupt to sit upon the same, at
the said abbey, where the witnesses and proofs be most ready and the
truth is best known, or at any other place where it shall be thought
most convenient by your high discretion and authority.

The statutes of Provisors, commonly called Praemunire statutes, which,
forbade all purchases of bulls from Rome under penalty of outlawry, have
been usually considered in the highest degree oppressive; and more
particularly the public censure has fallen upon the last application of
those statutes, when, on Wolsey's fall, the whole body of the clergy
were laid under a praemunire, and only obtained pardon on payment of a
serious fine. Let no one regret that he has learnt to be tolerant to
Roman Catholics as the nineteenth century knows them. But it is a
spurious charity which, to remedy a modern injustice, hastens to its
opposite; and when philosophic historians indulge in loose invective
against the statesmen of the Reformation, they show themselves unfit to
be trusted with the custody of our national annals. The Acts of
Parliament speak plainly of the enormous abuses which had grown up under
these bulls. Yet even the emphatic language of the statutes scarcely
prepares us to find an abbot able to purchase with jewels stolen from
his own convent a faculty to confer holy orders, though he had never
been consecrated bishop, and to make a thousand pounds by selling the
exercise of his privileges. This is the most flagrant case which has
fallen under the eyes of the present writer. Yet it is but a choice
specimen out of many. He was taught to believe, like other modern
students of history, that the papal dispensations for immorality, of
which we read in Fox and other Protestant writers, were calumnies, but
he has been forced against his will to perceive that the supposed
calumnies were but the plain truth; he has found among the records--for
one thing, a list of more than twenty clergy in one diocese who had
obtained licences to keep concubines.[S] After some experience, he
advises all persons who are anxious to understand the English
Reformation to place implicit confidence in the Statute Book. Every
fresh record whi