really know that any
injustice adhered to them. They could see in themselves only the ideal
virtues of their saintly office, and not the vices of their fragile
humanity; they believed that they were still holy, still spotless, still
immaculate, and therefore that no danger might come near them. It cannot
have been but that, before the minds of such men as Warham and Fisher, some
visions of a future must at times have floated, which hung so plainly
before the eyes of Wolsey and of Sir Thomas More.[231] They could not have
been wholly deaf to the storm in Germany; and they must have heard
something of the growls of smothered anger which for years had been audible
at home, to all who had ears to hear.[232] Yet if any such thoughts at
times did cross their imagination, they were thrust aside as an uneasy
dream, to be shaken off like a nightmare, or with the coward's consolation,
"It will last my time." If the bishops ever felt an uneasy moment, there is
no trace of uneasiness in the answer which they sent in to the king, and
which now, when we read it with the light which is thrown back out of the
succeeding years, seems like the composition of mere lunacy. Perhaps they
had confidence in the support of Henry. In their courts they were in the
habit of identifying an attack upon themselves with an attack upon the
doctrines of the Church; and reading the king's feelings in their own, they
may have considered themselves safe under the protection of a sovereign who
had broken a lance with Luther, and had called himself the Pope's champion.
Perhaps they thought that they had bound him to themselves by a declaration
which they had all signed in the preceding summer in favour of the
divorce.[233] Perhaps they were but steeped in the dulness of official
lethargy. The defence is long, wearying the patience to read it; wearying
the imagination to invent excuses for the falsehoods which it contains. Yet
it is well to see all men in the light in which they see themselves; and
justice requires that we allow the bishops the benefit of their own reply.
It was couched in the following words:--[234]

"After our most humble wise, with our most bounden duty of honour and
reverence to your excellent Majesty, endued from God with incomparable
wisdom and goodness. Please it the same to understand that we, your orators
and daily bounden bedemen, have read and perused a certain supplication
which the Commons of your Grace's honourable parliament now