r speak
against the pretended authority of the Bishop of Rome.'

Again, when Paul the Third, shortly after his election, proposed to call
a general council at Mantua, against which, by advice of Henry the
Eighth, the Germans protested, we have a glimpse how eagerly anxious
English eyes were watching for a turning tide. 'Hear you,' said the
abbot one day, 'of the Pope's holiness and the congregation of bishops,
abbots, and princes gathered to the council at Mantua? They be gathered
for the reformation of the universal Church; and here now we have a book
of the excuse of the Germans, by which we may know what heretics they
be: for if they were Catholics and true men as they pretend to be, they
would never have refused to come to a general council.'

So matters went with the abbot for some months after he had sworn
obedience to the king. Lulling his conscience with such opiates as the
casuists could provide for him, he watched anxiously for a change, and
laboured with but little reserve to hold his brethren to their old
allegiance.

In the summer of 1535, however, a change came over the scene, very
different from the outward reaction for which he was looking, and a
better mind woke in the abbot: he learnt that in swearing what he did
not mean with reservations and nice distinctions, he had lied to heaven
and lied to man; that to save his miserable life he had perilled his
soul. When the oath of supremacy was required of the nation, Sir Thomas
More, Bishop Fisher, and the monks of the Charterhouse--mistaken, as we
believe, in judgment, but true to their consciences, and disdaining
evasion or subterfuge--chose, with deliberate nobleness, rather to die
than to perjure themselves. This is no place to enter on the great
question of the justice or necessity of those executions; but the story
of the so-called martyrdoms convulsed the Catholic world. The pope shook
upon his throne; the shuttle of diplomatic intrigue stood still;
diplomatists who had lived so long in lies that the whole life of man
seemed but a stage pageant, a thing of show and tinsel, stood aghast at
the revelation of English sincerity, and a shudder of great awe ran
through Europe. The fury of party leaves little room for generous
emotion, and no pity was felt for these men by the English Protestants.
The Protestants knew well that if these same sufferers could have had
their way, they would themselves have been sacrificed by hecatombs; and
as they had never