stern and busy
administration had little leisure to preserve records of sentimental
struggles which led to nothing. The Catholics did not care to keep alive
the recollection of a conflict in which, even though with difficulty,
the Church was defeated. A rare accident only could have brought down to
us any fragment of a transaction which no one had an interest in
remembering. That such an accident has really occurred, we may consider
as unusually fortunate. The story in question concerns the abbey of
Woburn, and is as follows:--

At Woburn, as in many other religious houses, there were representatives
of both the factions which divided the country; perhaps we should say of
three--the sincere Catholics, the Indifferentists, and the Protestants.
These last, so long as Wolsey was in power, had been frightened into
silence, and with difficulty had been able to save themselves from
extreme penalties. No sooner, however, had Wolsey fallen, and the
battle commenced with the papacy, than the tables turned, the persecuted
became persecutors--or at least threw off their disguise--and were
strengthened with the support of the large class who cared only to keep
on the winning side. The mysteries of the faith came to be disputed at
the public tables; the refectories rang with polemics; the sacred
silence of the dormitories was broken for the first time by lawless
speculation. The orthodox might have appealed to the Government: heresy
was still forbidden by law, and, if detected, was still punished by the
stake. But the orthodox among the regular clergy adhered to the pope as
well as to the faith, and abhorred the sacrilege of the Parliament as
deeply as the new opinions of the Reformers. Instead of calling in the
help of the law, they muttered treason in secret; and the Reformers,
confident in the necessities of the times, sent reports to London of
their arguments and conversations. The authorities in the abbey were
accused of disaffection; and a commission of enquiry was sent down
towards the end of the spring of 1536, to investigate. The depositions
taken on this occasion are still preserved; and with the help of them,
we can leap over three centuries of time, and hear the last echoes of
the old monastic life in Woburn Abbey dying away in discord.

Where party feeling was running so high, there were, of course,
passionate arguments. The Act of Supremacy, the spread of Protestantism,
the power of the Pope, the state of England--al