nt, and though less important, yet still
noticeable, is a proceeding of old Archbishop Warham under the same trying
circumstances. In the days of his prosperity, Warham had never reached to
greatness as a man. He had been a great ecclesiastic, successful,
dignified, important, but without those highest qualities which command
respect or interest. The iniquities of Warham's spiritual courts were
greater than those of any other in England. He had not made them what they
were. They grew by their own proper corruption; and he was no more
responsible for them than every man is responsible for the continuance of
an evil by which he profits, and which he has power to remedy. We must look
upon him as the leader of the bishops in their opposition to the reform;
and he was the probable author of the famous answer to the Commons'
petition, which led to such momentous consequences.[362] These consequences
he had lived partially to see. Powerless to struggle against the stream, he
had seen swept away one by one those gigantic privileges to which he had
asserted for his order a claim divinely sanctioned; and he withdrew himself
heartbroken, into his palace at Lambeth, and there entered his solemn
protest against all which had been done. Too ill to write, and trembling on
the edge of the grave, he dictated to his notaries from his bed these not
unaffecting words:--

"In the name of God, Amen. We, William, by Divine Providence Archbishop of
Canterbury, Primate of all England, Legate of the Apostolic See, hereby
publicly and expressly do protest for ourselves and for our Holy
Metropolitan Church of Canterbury, that to any statute passed or hereafter
to be passed in this present Parliament, began the third of November, 1529,
and continued until this present time; in so far as such statute or
statutes be in derogation of the Pope of Rome or the Apostolic See, or be
to the hurt, prejudice, or limitation of the powers of the Church, or shall
tend to the subverting, enervating, derogating from, or diminishing the
laws, customs, privileges, prerogatives, pre-eminence of liberties of our
Metropolitan Church of Canterbury; we neither will, nor intend, nor with
clear conscience are able to consent to the same, but by these writings we
do dissent from, refuse, and contradict them."[363]

Thus formally having delivered his soul, he laid himself down and died.

CHAPTER V

MARRIAGE OF HENRY AND ANNE BOLEYN

Although in the question of the