[574] The Letter sent to Cromwell is printed in State Papers, Vol. I. p. 628.
[575] Strype’s Memorials, Vol. II. p. 459.
[576] MSS. State Paper Office, second series, 52 volumes.
[577] Lady Elizabeth Burgh’s letter to him will show the character of interference which he was called upon to exercise: “My very good lord, most humbly I beseech your goodness to me your poor bounden bedewoman, considering the great trouble I am put unto by my Lord Burgh, who always hath lien in wait to put me to shame and trouble, which he shall never do, God willing, you being my good and gracious lord, as I have found you merciful to me ever hitherto; and so I most humbly beseech you of your good continuance, desiring now your good lordship to remember me, for I am comfortless, and as yet not out of the danger of death through the great travail that I had. For I am as yet as a prisoner comfortless, only trusting to your lordship’s goodness and to the King’s Grace’s most honourable council. For I hear say my Lord Burgh hath complained on me to your lordship and to all the noble council; and has enformed your lordship and them all that the child that I have borne and so dearly bought is none of his son’s my husband. As for me, my very good lord, I do protest afore God, and also shall receive him to my eternal damnation, if ever I designed for him with any creature living, but only with my husband; therefore now I most lamentably and humbly desire your lordship of your goodness to stay my Lord Burgh that he do not fulfil his diabolical mind to disinherit my husband’s child.
“And thus am I ordered by my Lord Burgh and my husband (who dare do nothing but as his father will have him do), so that I have nothing left to help me now in my great sickness, but am fain to lay all that I have to gage, so that I have nothing left to help myself withal, and might have perished ere this time for lack of succour, but through the goodness of the gentleman and his wife which I am in house withal. Therefore I most humbly desire your lordship to have pity on me, and that through your only goodness ye will cause my husband to use me like his wife, and no otherwise than I have deserved; and to send me money, and to pay such debts as I do owe by reason of my long being sick, and I shall pray for your lordship daily to increase in honour to your noble heart’s desire. Scribbled with the hand of your bounden bedewoman, Elizabeth Burgh.” MS. State Paper Office, first series, Vol. XIII.
I should have been glad to have added a more remarkable letter from Lady Hungerford, who was locked up by her husband in a country house for four years, and “would have died for lack of sustenance,” “had not,” she wrote, “the poor women of the country brought me, to my great window in the night, such poor meat and drink as they had, and gave me for the love of God.” But the letter contains other details not desirable to publish.—MS. Cotton. Titus, B 1, 397.
[578] State Papers, Vol. VIII. p. 349.
[579] “His Majesty remembering how men wanting the knowledge of the truth would else speak diversely of it, considering the credit he hath had about his Highness, which might also cause the wisest sort to judge amiss thereof if that his ingratitude and treason should not be fully opened unto them.”—Ibid. The opening sentences of the letter (it was evidently a circular) also deserve notice: “These shall be to advertize you that when the King’s Majesty hath of long season travelled, and yet most godly travaileth to establish such an order in matters of religion as neither declining on the right hand or on the left hand, God’s glory might be advanced, the temerity of such as would either obscure or refuse the truth of his Word refrained, stayed, and in cases of obstinacy duly corrected and punished; so it is that the Lord Privy Seal, to whom the King’s Majesty hath been so special good and gracious a lord, hath, only out of his sensual appetite, wrought clean contrary to his Grace’s intent, secretly and indirectly advancing the one of the extremes, and leaving the mean, indifferent, true, and virtuous way which his Majesty so entirely desired, but also hath shewed himself so fervently bent to the maintenance of that his outrage, that he hath not spared most privily, most traitorously to devise how to continue the same, and in plain terms to say,” &c. Then follow the words in the text.—Ibid.
[580] Hall, p. 838.
[581] “He is committed to the Tower of London, there to remain till it shall please his Majesty to have him tried according to the order of his laws.” State Papers, Vol. VIII. p. 350.