reaction for
which he was looking: a better mind woke in the
abbot; he learnt that in swearing what he did not
mean with reservations and nice distinctions, he had
lied to Heaven and lied to man: that to save his
miserable life he had perilled his soul. When the oath
of supremacy was required of the nation, Sir Thomas
More, Bishop Fisher, and the monks of the Charterhouse,
mistaken, as we believe, in judgment, but true
to their consciences, and disdaining evasion or subterfuge,
chose, with deliberate nobleness, rather to die than
to perjure themselves. This is no place to enter on
the great question of the justice or necessity of those
executions; but the story of the so-called martyrdoms
convulsed the Catholic world. The Pope shook upon
his throne; the shuttle of diplomatic intrigue stood
still; diplomatists who had lived so long in lies that
the whole life of man seemed but a stage pageant, a
thing of show and tinsel, stood aghast at the revelation
of English sincerity, and a shudder of great awe ran
through Europe. The fury of party leaves little room
for generous emotion, and no pity was felt for these
men by the English Protestants. The Protestants knew
well that if these same sufferers could have had their
way, they would themselves have been sacrificed by
hecatombs; and as they had never experienced mercy,
so they were in turn without mercy. But to the
English Catholics, who believed as Fisher believed,
but who had not dared to suffer as Fisher suffered, his
death and the death of the rest acted as a glimpse of
the judgment day. Their safety became their shame
and terror: and in the radiant example before them of
true faithfulness, they saw their own falsehood and their
own disgrace. So it was with Father Forest, who had
taught his penitents in confession that they might perjure
themselves, and who now sought a cruel death in
voluntary expiation; so it was with Whiting, the Abbot
of Glastonbury; so with others whose names should be
more familiar to us than they are; and here in Woburn
we are to see the feeble but genuine penitence of Abbot
Hobbes. He was still unequal to immediate martyrdom,
but he did what he knew might drag his death upon
him if disclosed to the Government, and surrounded by
spies he could have had no hope of concealment.

"At the time," deposed Robert Salford, "that the
monks of the Charter-house, with other traitors, did
suffer death, the abbot did call us into the Chapterhouse,
a