ligion, when men are under its influence at all, so absorbs their senses, and so pervades all their associations, that no faults in the ministers of it can divest their persons of reverence; and just and necessary as all these alterations were, many a pious and noble heart was wounded, many a man was asking himself in his perplexity where things would end, and still more sadly, where, if these quarrels deepened, would lie his own duty. Now the Nun of Kent grew louder in her Cassandra wailings. Now the mendicant friars mounted the pulpits exclaiming sacrilege; bold men, who feared nothing that men could do to them, and who dared in the King's own presence, and in his own chapel, to denounce him by name.[1] The sacred associations of twelve centuries were tumbling into ruin; and hot and angry as men had been before the work began, the hearts of numbers sank in them when they 'saw what was done;' and they fell away slowly to doubt, disaffection, distrust, and at last treason.
The first outward symptom of importance pointing in this direction, was the resignation of the seals by Sir Thomas More.[2] More had not been an illiberal man;
- ↑ Stow, p. 562.
- ↑ 'In connection with the Annates Act, the question of appeals to Rome had been discussed in the present sesion. Sir George Throgmorton had spoken on the Papal side, and in his subsequent confession he mentioned a remarkable interview Avhich he had had with More.
'After I had reasoned to the Bill of Appeals,' he said, 'Sir Thomas More, then being chancellor, sent for me to come and speak with him in the Parliament chamber. And when I came to him he was in a little chamber within the Parliament chamber, where, as I remember, stood an altar, or a thing like unto an altar, whereupon he did lean, and, as I do think, the same time the
