History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. III

by James Anthony Froude

[365] Hall, p. 875, followed by Foxe.

[366] MS. State Paper Office, unarranged bundle. The command was obeyed so completely, that only a single shrine now remains in England; and the preservation of this was not owing to the forbearance of the government. The shrine of Edward the Confessor, which stands in Westminster Abbey, was destroyed with the rest. But the stones were not taken away. The supposed remains of St. Edward were in some way preserved; and the shrine was reconstructed, and the dust replaced, by Abbot Feckenham, in the first year of Queen Mary.—Oration of Abbot Feckenham in the Parliament House: MS. Rawlinson, Bodleian Library.

[367] Cranmer to Cromwell: State Papers, Vol. I.

[368] “The abuses of Canterbury” are placed by the side of those of Boxley in one of the official statements of the times.—Sir T. Wriothesley to Henry VIII., Nov. 20. 1538: State Papers, Vol. VIII.

[369] Madame de Montreuil, though a Frenchwoman and a good Catholic, had caught the infection of the prevailing unbelief in saints and saintly relics. “I showed her St. Thomas’s shrine,” writes an attendant, “and all such other things worthy of sight, of the which she was not little marvelled of the great riches thereof, saying it to be innumerable, and that if she had not seen it all the men in the world could never have made her to believe it. Thus overlooking and viewing more than an hour as well the shrine as St. Thomas’s head, being at both set cushions to kneel, the prior, opening St. Thomas’s head, said to her three times, this is St. Thomas’s head, and offered her to kiss it, but she neither kneeled nor would kiss it, but (stood), still viewing the riches thereof.”—Penison to Cromwell: State Papers, Vol. I. p. 583.

[370] These marks are still distinctly visible.

[371] Burnet’s Collectanea, p. 494. A story was current on the Continent, and so far believed as to be alluded to in the great bull of Paul the Third, that an apparitor was sent to Canterbury to serve a citation at Becket’s tomb, summoning “the late archbishop” to appear and answer to a charge of high treason. Thirty days were allowed him. When these were expired a proctor was charged with his defence. He was tried and condemned—his property, consisting of the offerings at the shrine, was declared forfeited—and he himself was sentenced to be exhumed and burnt. In the fact itself there is nothing absolutely improbable, for the form said to have been observed was one which was usual in the Church, when dead men, as sometimes happened, were prosecuted for heresy; and if I express my belief that the story is without foundation, I do so with diffidence, because negative evidence is generally of no value in the face of respectable positive assertion. All contemporary English authorities, however, are totally silent on a subject which it is hard to believe that they would not at least have mentioned. We hear generally of the destruction of the shrine, but no word of the citation and trial. A long and close correspondence between Cromwell and the Prior of Canterbury covers the period at which the process took place, if it took place at all, and not a letter contains anything which could be construed into an allusion to it.—Letters of the Prior of Canterbury to Cromwell: MS. State Paper Office, second series.

So suspicious a silence justifies a close scrutiny of the authorities on the other side. There exist two documents printed in Wilkins’s Concilia, Vol. III. p. 835, and taken from Pollini’s History of the English Reformation, which profess to be the actual citation and actual sentence issued on the occasion. If these are genuine, they decide the question; but, unfortunately for their authenticity, the dates of the documents are, respectively, April and May, 1538, and in both of them Henry is styled, among his official titles, Rex Hiberniæ. Now Henry did not assume the title of Rex Hiberniæ till two years later. Dominus Hiberniæ, or Lord of Ireland, is his invariable designation in every authentic document of the year to which these are said to belong. This itself is conclusively discrediting. If further evidence is required, it may be found in the word “Londini,” or London, as the date of both citation and sentence. Official papers were never dated from London, but from Westminster, St. James’s, Whitehall; or if in London, then from the particular place in London, as the Tower. Both mistakes would have been avoided by an Englishman, but are exceedingly natural in a foreign inventor.

[372] “We be daily instructed by our nobles and council to use short expelition in the determination of our marriage, for to get more increase of issue, to the assurance of our succession; and upon their oft admonition of age coming fast on, and (seeing) that the time flyeth and slippeth marvellously away, we be minded no longer to lose time as we have done, which is of all losses the most irrecuperable.”—Henry VIII. to Sir T. Wriothesley: State Papers, Vol. VIII. p. 116.

“Unless his Highness bore a notable affection to the Emperor, and had a special remembrance of their antient amity, his Majesty could never have endured to have been kept thus long in balance, his years, and the daily suits of his nobles and council well pondered.”—Wriothesley to Cromwell: ibid, p. 160.