whether the original exists, or whether it was in
Latin or in English.]

"You pretend that you have used no instruments but reason to lead men
after you; what instrument did the devil use to seduce our parents in
Paradise? you have followed the serpent; with guile you destroyed your
king, the realm, and the church, and you have brought to perdition
thousands of human souls.

"Compared with you, all others who have been concerned in these deeds
of evil, are but objects of pity; many of them long resisted
temptation, and yielded only to the seductions of your impious tongue;
you made yourself a bishop--for what purpose, but to mock both God and
man? Your first act was but to juggle with your king, and you were no
sooner primate, than you plotted how you might break your oath to the
Holy See; you took part in the counsels of the evil one, you made your
home with the wicked, you sat in the seat of the scornful. You
exhorted your king with your fine words, to put away his wife; you
prated to him of his obligations to submit to the judgment of the
{p.248} church;[538] and what has followed that unrighteous
sentence? You parted the king from the wife with whom he had lived for
twenty years; you parted him from the church, the common mother of the
faithful; and thenceforth throughout the realm law has been trampled
under foot, the people have been ground with tyranny, the churches
pillaged, the nobility murdered one by the other.

[Footnote 538: The innumerable modern writers who
agree with Pole on the iniquity of the divorce of
Catherine forget that, according to the rule which
most of us now acknowledge, the marriage of Henry
with his brother's wife _really was
incestuous_--really was forbidden by the laws of
God and nature; that the pope had no more authority
to dispense with those laws then than he has now;
and that if modern law is right, Cranmer did no
more than his duty.]

"Therefore, I say, were I to make my own cries heard in heaven, I
would pray God to demand at your hands the blood of his servants.
Never had religion, never had the church of Christ a worse enemy than
you have been; now therefore, when you are about to suffer the just
reward of your deeds, think no more to excuse yourself; confess your
si