pared to have investigated the matter impartially according to the canon laws. In the beginning of July Wolsey, on his way to France, told him that the matter had come to the queen's ears, and that she took it very ill; on which he showed himself astonished that she should have heard anything about it, but said that, however she took it, truth and law must prevail.
In September the king was his guest for a few days at Otford. Next year, on Easter Tuesday, about a hundred Kentish yeomen came to wait on him at Knole, praying him to urge the king to repay the loan which he had undertaken should be refunded. Wolsey, however, intimated that the petition must be absolutely suppressed, as it would embolden others, and Warham felt himself compelled to send to his fellow commissioners, Lord Rochford and Sir Henry Guildford, a man who transcribed the petition and the man in whose hands the original was found.
In the following summer (1528) the archbishop's household was visited so severely by the sweating sickness that one day eighteen persons died of it in four hours. A little later, when the archbishop himself had gone to Canterbury, meaning to stay there over the winter, ill-health obliged him to remove again to Otford, whence he wrote on 21 Sept. to Wolsey, declaring his inability to receive Cardinal Campeggio, as he could not ride three miles on horseback. He feared, moreover, that a return of his old complaint in the head would be dangerous to him. Nevertheless he did go to Canterbury, where he attended the legate and censed him in the church.
Warham happily was not compelled to take any very prominent part in the unpleasant business for which Campeggio came. In the previous spring a bull had been despatched at Rome empowering Wolsey, with Campeggio for assessor, to take cognisance of the question of the king's divorce; but this was only one device out of several, and no use was made of it. When the legate came the king agreed to allow his queen the aid of counsel, of whom Warham was the chief. Of how little value he was in this capacity the queen herself declared some time later to a deputation of noblemen sent to remonstrate with her on having caused the king's citation to Rome. When she said she was friendless in England, the Duke of Norfolk reminded her that she had the very best counsel in the country; to which she replied that they were fine counsellors indeed, when the archbishop to whom she had appealed for advice had answered that he would not meddle in such matters, giving as his reason Ira principis mors est. It is clear that when Wolsey and Campeggio, the latter being baffled in a preliminary effort to avert proceedings by the queen's absolute refusal to enter a nunnery, called Warham and others to a consultation, Warham could have advised nothing counter to the king's wishes. Little else is recorded of him till, after Campeggio's departure, parliament assembled in November 1529. The imperial ambassador Chapuys makes the extraordinary statement that when ‘the estates’ met, they at first elected the archbishop of Canterbury as their speaker but, as he was a churchman, the king rejected him ‘on the plea that he was too old,’ and they chose another more to the king's satisfaction. That the commons should have thought of electing as speaker a member of the other house seems almost inconceivable; but it may be that they sought a powerful patron to set forth their grievances. In this session Warham's ill-working agreement with Wolsey about testamentary jurisdiction was the subject of new complaints, and the commons were encouraged to attack the spiritual courts generally, especially on the ground of excessive fees. Among other things it was alleged that the executors of Sir William Compton had paid a thousand marks to the cardinal of York and the archbishop of Canterbury for probate. Ultimately several enactments were passed to restrict the privileges of the clergy.
On 15 and 28 March 1530 Warham, as chancellor of the university, wrote two letters to the divines at Oxford rebuking them for their delay in answering the question propounded to them on the king's part as to the lawfulness of his marriage when the universities of Paris and Cambridge had already declared their minds. On 24 May he sat in council with the king in the parliament chamber on heretical books, a list of which and of the errors contained in them was published by authority. In June or July he affixed his signature after Wolsey's to the letters addressed by the lords of England to the pope to consent to the king's desire for a divorce without delay. That his signature, like most of the others which followed, was obtained by strong pressure brought to bear upon him personally, is certain. Even in the preceding January the queen was informed that the king had written to warn the archbishop that if the pope did not comply with his wishes, his authority and that of all churchmen in England would be destroyed. In August the archbishop was summoned to a council at Hampton Court which sat daily from the 11th to the 16th; undoubtedly to consider the king's relations with Rome after
