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General treaties and transactions have had such a fate, that few will trust to them. The spirit of the church, as well as the spirit of a treaty, will be preferred to the words of all transactions. Have not we seen, in our own days, an edict that was passed with all solemnity possible, and declared perpetual and irrevocable, yet recalled with this very preamble that it was made in compliance to the necessity of that time, and on design to bring those that were promised to be for ever tolerated by it into the bosom of the church? There is so much in the canon law against all sacrilege, and all alienations of what is once dedicated to God, that though some canonists may have carried the plenitude of the papal power so far as to reach even to this, which this hired writer builds on, yet there is so much affirmed to the contrary by others, that it is certain, whensoever the papacy has strength enough to set aside all the settlement then made, they will find sufficient grounds in law to proceed to the overturning all that was then done. The princes of Germany, whose settlements he appeals to, do not trust to any treaty, with either emperor or popish princes, with relation to the church-lands, of which they possessed themselves; but to the treaties and guarantees into which they entered with one another and so they are engaged by their faith, and by their mutual interests, to maintain one another and themselves in their possessions; nor does it appear that a papal bull was ever obtained to confirm them. On the contrary, the pope's legates protested against them; and, as will appear afterwards, Charles the Fifth's confessor refused to give him absolution for his consenting to edicts of that sort. If the necessity of the time makes it necessary to maintain that settlement, so long it will be maintained, and no longer.

But to put this matter out of all doubt, that same pope did, soon after our ambassadors were sent to him, by a bull dated the 12th of July 1555, within three weeks after the English ambassadors had their audience, condemn all the alienations of church-lands, and even all leases for one or more lives, or for a term longer than three years. This he extends to all cathedrals, monasteries, and hospitals; and annuls all leases, grants, exchanges, mortgages, and obligations of lands, castles, towns, and cities, even though made by popes themselves, or by their authority and order; and by the presidents, prelates, or rectors of churches, monasteries, or hospitals, of what rank and dignity soever, cardinals by name being expressed, that were done to the prejudice of the church, the solemnity by law required not being observed; and that which was null in the first mak

ing, but supplied by subsequent contracts, in what form soever made, though by proofs upon oath, and by what length of time soever it may claim prescription, is all rescinded, and made void and null. And the detainers of goods, upon those titles, are required to quit possession, and to make full satisfaction for what they have received, and to be thereto compelled, if they obey not, both by ecclesiastical censures and pecuniary punishments.

It is true, in all this England is not expressly named; and perhaps the pope had the recovering from the family of the Farnese that which Paul the Third had alienated to it, chiefly in his eye. But the words of this bull do plainly take in the late settlement in England; for though the English ambassadors were then newly come to Rome, demanding the confirmation of what Pole had done, yet no exceptions are made for England; so, it seems, it was intended by these general words, put in on design, to overthrow it. Now because this matter is of such great concern, and every one has not a Bullary to examine into this bull, I will begin my Collection of Records with it, as no small piece of instruction to all who are possessed of any estate so alienated from churches, monasteries, or hospitals.

Upon the conclusion of this head, I cannot but take notice of one insinuation that I hear some are not ashamed to make that such a resumption may be indeed a prejudice to the laity, but that the clergy will be enriched by it. If this had been brought me by an ordinary hand, I should not have thought it worth mentioning; but since some have the impudence to set it on foot, I must add, that these are vain hopes, as well as they are suggested on black designs; for though the church, take it in the bulk, has immense riches in the Roman communion, yet in no church that ever I saw are the parochial clergy kept poorer, and made more despicable; they are, as the hewers of wood and drawers of water, kept at hard labour on a very poor subsistence. The several orders among them, the governing clergy, and the outward magnificence of their churches and services, devour all that treasure; so that the poor clergy, even in that state of celibate, have scarce necessary sustenance, unless it be in some capital cities, and in very vast parishes in them. They are starved, to maintain the luxury and vanity of others. This was the true occasion of all the poverty of the parochial clergy among us; to which some remedies have been sought for, and in some degree found, ever since the Reformation was first settled among us.

But none of these things will move an insensible and degenerate race, who are thinking of nothing but present ad

vantages; and, so they may now support a luxurious and brutal course of irregular and voluptuous practices, they are easily hired to betray their religion, to sell their country, and to give up that liberty and those properties which are the present felicities and glories of this nation. The giving them up will be a lasting infamy on those who are guilty of it, and will draw after it the heaviest curses of posterity on such perfidious betrayers of their trust; by this they will bring slavery on themselves (which they will deserve, being indeed the worst sort of slaves), and entail it on the succeeding generation.

I return to prosecute the account of my design in this work. I went through those volumes in the Cotton Library, of which I had only a transient view formerly, and laid together all that I thought necessary to complete it. I saw a great and fair prospect of such a change ready to be made in France as King Henry had made in England. Mr. Le Vassor has, out of an invaluable collection of original papers that are in Sir William Trumball's hands, published instructions sent by the duke of Orleans to the princes of Germany; by which, as he declared himself a Protestant, so he gave, in general words, good hopes of his father Francis. I found also, both in papers and printed books, that King Henry often reproached Francis for not keeping his word to him; and in a long despatch of a negotiation that Paget was employed in with the admiral of France, I saw further evidence of this. I was, by these indications, set on to see how far I could penetrate into that secret.

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I was, by the favour of the earl of Dartmouth, admitted to a free search of the Paper-office, which is now in much better order and method than it was above thirty years ago, when I saw it last; and there, among other very valuable papers, I found the copy of that solemn promise that Francis made to Henry, minuted on the back by Cromwell's hand, as a true copy, in these words-An instrument devised from the French King, for his justification and defence of the invalidity of the King's Highness's first marriage, and the validity of the second. By this, he in express words condemns the pope's bull, dispensing with the marriage with Queen Katharine, which he, by the unanimous consent of those learned men whom he had appointed to examine it, condemns as incestuous and unlawful; and reputes the daughter born in it, spurious and illegitimate: and that the second marriage with Anne, then queen, was lawful and just; and that Queen Elizabeth, born of it, was lawfully born. And he promises to assist and maintain the king in this against all the world. In this instrument he VOL. III, PART I.

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owns King Henry to be, under God, the supreme head of the church of England; and he affirms, that many of the cardinals, in particular the late cardinal of Ancona, and even Pope Clement the Seventh himself, did, both to his ambassador and to himself, at Marseilles, plainly confess that the pope's bull, and the marriage made upon it, were null and void; and that he would have given a definitive sentence, if some private affections and human regards had not hindered it." This makes me conclude that he gave other instruments, of a further extent, to King Henry; for failing in which, I find he was often reproached, though this single instrument is all that I could find out. But Lord Herbert reckons, among the chief causes of King Henry's last rupture with Francis, that he had not deserted the bishop of Rome, and consented to a reformation, as he once promised.

I saw, when I passed through Zurick, a volume of letters that passed between Bullinger and these English divines that had been so kindly entertained by him in that noble canton; and, by the interposition of my learned, judicious, and pious friend, Mr. Turretin, of Geneva, M. Otto (a worthy professor there) has taken such care, that copies of them are procured for me; in which we may see the sense of those who revived our Reformation in Queen Elizabeth's time. Men who had been abroad, and had seen all things about them in a true light-that saw in what the strength of popery lay, and what fortified or weakened the body of the reformed were liker to have truer views than can be expected from retired or sullen men, who have lived in a corner, and have but a small horizon.

It has been objected to me, that I have said little of proceedings in convocation, and of the struggle that the clergy made before they were brought to make the submission which brought those bodies under restraints, that seem now uneasy to the advocates for church power. I must confess I have been very defective here. I understood that the books of convocation were burnt. None of those great men, under whose direction that work went on, knew any thing of those discoveries that have been of late made; so no wonder if I passed over what was then so little known. Yet, now I have examined all that I could find of those matters, I confess I am not inclined to expect much from the assemblies of clergymen. I have seen nothing in church history to incline me to depart from Gregory Nazianzen's opinion of those assemblies; what has happened among ourselves of late, has not made me of another mind : and I will not deny, but that my copiousness on these mate

ters is, in my own opinion, one of the meanest parts of my work. The wisest and worthiest man in that convocation, Archbishop Warham, was the person that promoted the submission the most. It was no wonder if a corrupt clergy, that made such ill use of their power, had no mind to part with any branch of it. Yet, since these things have been of late such a subject of debate among us, I have taken what pains I could to gather all that is left of those times in such copies, or rather abstracts, as have been of late found in private hands: only I will set down the opinion of Sir Thomas More, the best man of the popish side in that age, of those meetings. It is true," he says, "the clergy's assembling at the convocation was called by the name of confederacies. But," he adds *, "if they did assemble often, and there did such things, for which such assemblies of the clergy in every province throughout Christendom from the beginning were instituted and devised, much more good might have grown thereof than the long disuse can suffer us now to perceive. But all my days, as far as I have heard, nor (I suppose) a good part of my father's neither, they came never together to convocation but at the request of the king; and at such their assemblies, concerning spiritual things, have very little done. Wherefore, that they have been in that necessary part of their duty so negligent, whether God suffer to grow to an unperceived cause of division and grudge against them, God, whom their such negligence hath, I fear me, sore offended, knoweth."

The affinity of the matter has led me to reflect on a great transaction, with relation to the church of France, which was carried on, and finally settled, in the very time that King Henry was breaking with the court of Rome. It was the concordat, that Francis the First made with Pope Leo the Tenth. The king and the pope came to a bargain, by which they divided the liberties of the Gallican church between them, and, indeed, quite enslaved it. There are so many curious passages in the progress of that matter, that I hope the opening these will be a very acceptable entertainment to the nation. And the rather, because in it this nation will see what it is to deliver up the essential liberties of a free constitution to a court, and to trust to the integrity and firmness of courts of justice, when an assembly of the states is no more necessary to the raising of money, and the support of the government. I know nothing writ in our language, with relation to this matter, besides that account

* More's Apol. 1533, fol. 241,

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