Yet for the moment loyalty was stronger than discontent. If the country people murmured, they submitted, and the visitors met with important resistance only from the notorious Bishops of Winchester and of London. To Bonner they brought their injunctions and homilies at the end of August. He accepted them, but he accepted them with a protest; he could observe them, he said, only if they were not contrary to God's law and the ordinances of his Church, and he required the visitors to enter his conditions in the register. His answer was reported to the council, and was held to be to the evil example of such as should hear it, and to the contempt of the authority which the King justly possessed as head of the Church of England.[1] The Bishop of London was committed to the Fleet,[2] where, after eight days' meditation, he repented. A form of submission was drawn up for him peculiarly ignominious; he signed it, and was released.[3]
The resistance of Gardiner was more skilful and more protracted. Up to the Protector's departure he had continued an anxious correspondence with him. Unlimited license had been allowed both to pulpit and
- ↑ Privy Council Records, MS. Edward VI.
- ↑ In the Protector's absence, Cranmer must be considered the person responsible for measures of this kind.
- ↑ 'Where I did unadvisedly make such a protestation, as now upon better consideration of my duty of obedience and of the ill example that may ensue to others thereof, appears to me neither reasonable, nor such as might stand with the duty of a subject; and forasmuch as the same protestation, at my request, was then by the registrar of that visitation enacted and put in record, I do now revoke my said protestation; and I beseech your lordships that this revocation may likewise be put in the same records for a perpetual memory of the truth.'—Bonner's Recantation, printed in Burnet's Collectanea.
