assembled have
offered unto your Highness, and by your Grace's commandment delivered unto
us, that we should make answer thereunto. We have, as the time hath served,
made this answer following, beseeching your Grace's indifferent benignity
graciously to hear the same.

"And first for that discord, variance, and debate which, in the preface of
the said supplication they do allege to have risen among your Grace's
subjects, spiritual and temporal, occasioned, as they say, by the
uncharitable behaviour and demeanour of divers ordinaries: to this we, the
ordinaries, answer, assuring your Majesty that in our hearts there is no
such discord or variance ort our part against our brethren in God and
ghostly children your subjects, as is induced in this preface; but our
daily prayer is and shall be that all peace and concord may increase among
your Grace's true subjects our said children, whom God be our witness we
love, have loved, and shall love ever with hearty affection; never
intending any hurt ne harm towards any of them in soul or body; ne have we
ever enterprised anything against them of trouble, vexation, or
displeasure; but only have, with all charity, exercised the spiritual
jurisdiction of the Church, as we are bound of duty, upon certain
evil-disposed persons infected with the pestilent poison of heresy. And to
have peace with such had been against the Gospel of our Saviour Christ,
wherein he saith, _Non veni mittere pacem sed gladium_. Wherefore,
forasmuch as we know well that there be as well-disposed and
well-conscienced men of your Grace's Commons in no small number assembled,
as ever we knew at any time in parliament; and with that consider how on
our part there is given no such occasion why the whole number of the
spirituality and clergy should be thus noted unto your Highness; we
humbling our hearts to God and remitting the judgment of this our
inquietation to Him, and trusting, as his Scripture teacheth, that if we
love him above all, omnia cooperabuntur in bonum, shall endeavour to
declare to your Highness the innocency of us, your poor orators.

"And where, after the general preface of the same supplication, your
Grace's Commons descend to special particular griefs, and first to those
divers fashions of laws concerning temporal things, whereon, as they say,
the clergy in their convocation have made and daily do make divers laws, to
their great trouble and inquietation, which said laws be sometimes
repugnant