enry VIII. On the king's behalf, the members of both
houses were informed in parliament, that no king or kingdom was safe but
where the king had three abilities: 1. To live of his own, and able to
defend his kingdom upon any sudden invasion or insurrection. 2. To aid
his confederates, otherwise they would never assist him. 3. To
reward his well-deserving servants. Now, the project was, that if the
parliament would give unto him all the abbeys, priories, friaries,
nunneries, and other monasteries, that, forever in time then to come, he
would take order that the same should not be converted to private uses;
but first, that his exchequer for the purposes aforesaid, should be
enriched; secondly, the kingdom strengthened by a continual maintenance
of forty thousand well-trained soldiers, with skilful captains and
commanders; thirdly, for the benefit and ease of the subject, who never
afterwards, (as was projected,) in any time to come, should be charged
with subsidies, fifteenths, loans, or other common aids; fourthly, lest
the honor of the realm should receive any diminution of honor by the
dissolution of the said monasteries, there being twenty-nine lords
of parliament of the abbots and priors, (that held of the king 'pet
baroniam,' whereof more in the next leaf,) that the king would create a
number of nobles, which we omit. The said monasteries were given to the
king by authority of divers ants of parliament, but no provision was
therein made for the said project, or any part thereof!"]

[Footnote 14: NOTE N, p. 252., Collier, in his Ecclesiastical History,
(vol. ii. p. 152,) has preserved an account which Cromwell gave of this
conference, in a letter to Sir Thomas Wyat, the king's ambassador in
Germany. "The king's majesty," says Cromwell, "for the reverence of
the holy sacrament of the altar, did sit openly in his hall, and there
presided at the disputation, process, and judgment of a miserable
heretic sacramentary, who was burned the twentieth of November. It was a
wonder to see how princely, with how excellent gravity, and inestimable
majesty, his highness exercised there the very office of supreme head
of the church of England. How benignly his grace essayed to convert
the miserable man; how strong and manifest reasons his highness alleged
against him. I wish the princes and potentates of Christendom to have
had a meet place to have seen it. Undoubtedly they should have much
marvelled at his majesty's most high wisd