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REIGN OF HENRY THE EIGHTH.
[ch. 9.
monks. May 7.On the 7th of May a deputation of the council waited on the prisoners in the Tower, for an acknowledgment of the supremacy. They refused: Fisher, after a brief hesitation, peremptorily; More declining to answer, but also giving an indirect denial. After repeated efforts had been made to move them, and made in vain, their own language, as in the preceding trials, furnished material for their indictment; and the law officers of the Crown who were to conduct the prosecution were the witnesses under whose evidence they were to be tried. It was a strange proceeding, to be excused only, if excused at all, by the pressure of the times.[1]
Either the King or his ministers, however, were slow in making up their minds. With the Carthusians, nine days only were allowed to elapse between the first examination and the final close at Tyburn. The case against More and Fisher was no less clear than against the monks; June.yet five weeks elapsed and the Government still hesitated. Perhaps they were influenced by the high position of the greater offenders—- ↑ Compare State Papers, vol. i. pp. 431–36, with the Reports of the trials in the Baga de Secretis. Burnet has hastily stated that no Catholic was ever punished for merely denying the supremacy in official examinations. He has gone so far, indeed, as to call the assertions of Catholic writers to this eifect 'impudent falsehoods.' Whether any Catholic was prosecuted who had not given other cause for suspicion, I do not know; but it is quite certain that Haughton and Fisher were condemned solely on the ground of their answers on these occasions, and that no other evidence was brought against them. The Government clearly preferred this evidence as the most direct and unanswerable, for in both those cases they might have produced other witnesses had they cared to do so.
