floated, which hung so plainly before the eyes of Wolsey and of Sir Thomas More.[1] They could not have been wholly deaf to the storm in Germany; and they must have heard something of the growls of smothered anger which for years had been audible at home, to all who had ears to hear.[2] Yet if any such thoughts at times did cross their imagination, they were thrust aside as an uneasy dream, to be shaken off like a nightmare, or with the coward's consolation, 'It will last my time.' If the bishops ever felt an uneasy moment, there is no trace of uneasiness in the answer which they sent in to the King, and which now, when we read it with the light which is thrown back out of the succeeding years, seems like the composition of mere lunacy. Perhaps they had confidence in the support of Henry. In their courts they were in the habit of identifying an attack upon themselves with an attack upon the doctrines of the Church; and reading the King's feelings in their own, they may have considered themselves safe under the protection of a sovereign who had broken a lance with Luther, and had called himself the Pope's champion. Perhaps they thought that they had bound him to themselves by a declaration which they had all signed in the preceding summer in favour of the divorce.[3] Perhaps they were but steeped in the dulness of official lethargy. The defence is long, wearying the patience to read it;
- ↑ Cavendish, Life of Wolsey, p. 390. More's Life of More, p. 109.
- ↑ Populus diu oblatrans. Fox to Wolsey. Strype, Eccl. Mem., voL i. appendix, p. 27.
- ↑ Rymer, vol. vi. part 2, p. 119.
