me should be rased out wherever it was mentioned
in the Mass books. A malcontent, by name
Robert Salford, deposed that "he was singing mass
before the abbot at St. Thomas's altar within the
monastery, at which time he rased out with his knife the
said name out of the canon." The abbot told him to
"take a pen and strike or cross him out." The saucy
monk said those were not the orders. They were to
rase him out. "Well, well," the abbot said, "it will
come again one day." "Come again, will it?" was the
answer. "If it do, then we will put him in again; but
I trust I shall never see that day." The mild abbot
could remonstrate, but could not any more command;
and the proofs of his malignant inclinations were
remembered against him for the ear of Cromwell.

In the general injunctions, too, he was directed to
preach against the Pope, and to expose his usurpation;
but he could not bring himself to obey. He shrank
from the pulpit; he preached but twice after the visitation,
and then on other subjects, while in the prayer
before the sermon he refused, as we find, to use the
prescribed form. He only said, "You shall pray for
the spirituality, the temporality, and the souls that be
in the pains of purgatory; and did not name the King
to be supreme head of the Church in neither of the
said sermons, nor speak against the pretended authority
of the Bishop of Rome."

Again, when Paul the Third, shortly after his election,
proposed to call a general council at Mantua, against
which, by advice of Henry the Eighth, the Germans
protested, we have a glimpse how eagerly anxious
English eyes were watching for a turning tide. "Hear
you," said the abbot one day, "of the Pope's holiness
and the congregation of bishops, abbots, and princes
gathered to the council at Mantua? They be gathered
for the reformation of the universal Church; and here
now we have a book of the excuse of the Germans,
by which we may know what heretics they be, for if
they were Catholics and true men as they pretend to be,
they would never have refused to come to a general
council."

So matters went with the abbot for some months
after he had sworn obedience to the King. Lulling his
conscience with such opiates as the casuists could provide
for him, he watched anxiously for a change, and
laboured with but little reserve to hold his brethren to
their true allegiance.

In the summer of 1535, however, a change came over
the scene, very different from the outward