porary authority as yet discovered, diluted through Protestant tradition for two generations, till it reached the ears of Foxe, the popular legend can pretend to no authenticity of detail. We can believe, however, that, if the Queen had been actively encouraging the more vehement forms of Protestantism in the palace, she must have added materially to the difficulties of the King's position; that Gardiner brought complaints against her; that the King examined into them, and finding that the story was either an invention, or was maliciously exaggerated, dismissed the accusers with a reproof, as he had dismissed them before in their attacks upon Cranmer.[1]
Success in a lower quarter, however, was still possible to the persecutors.[2] John Lascelles, one of the gentlemen of the bed-chamber,[3] had been examined with Crome and Latimer. He had declined to reply to the
- ↑ Foxe, vol. v. Foxe has weakened his story by a blunder in the only point on which we are able to test it. He connects the attack on the Queen with Gardiner's disgrace; and Gardiner's disgrace only followed on the discovery of Lord Surrey's designs upon the regency in the ensuing December.
- ↑ The body of the Council certainly were acting with Gardiner. Larimer's examiners were Wriothesley, Norfolk, Essex, Sir John Gage, Sir Anthony Browne, Sir Anthony Wingfield, the Bishops of Durham and Winchester, and, strange to say, Lord Russell. On the other side were only the small but powerful minority, composed of Cranmer, Lord Parr, Lord Hertford, and Lord Lisle.—See State Papers, vol. i. p. 851.
- ↑ Probably the same Lascelles who was mentioned as regretting the death of Cromwell, and perhaps the brother of the lady who revealed the iniquities of Catherine Howard, and who first carried the story to Cranmer. If he was indeed the same person, we can understand the animosity with which he must have been regarded by the Anglo-Catholics.
