e Catholics; Catholic abbots could not
manage the Protestants; indifferent abbots could not manage either the
one or the other. It would have been well for the Abbot of Woburn--or
well as far as this world is concerned--if he, like one of these, had
acknowledged his incapacity, and had fled from his charge.

His name was Robert Hobbes. Of his age and family, history is silent. We
know only that he held his place when the storm rose against the pope;
that, like the rest of the clergy, he bent before the blast, taking the
oath to the king, and submitting to the royal supremacy, but swearing
under protest, as the phrase went, with the outward, and not with the
inward man--in fact, perjuring himself. Though infirm, so far, however,
he was too honest to be a successful counterfeit, and from the jealous
eyes of the Neologians of the abbey he could not conceal his tendencies.
We have significant evidence of the _espionage_ which was established
over all suspected quarters, in the conversations and trifling details
of conduct on the part of the abbot, which were reported to the
Government.

In the summer of 1534, orders came that the pope's name should be rased
out wherever it was mentioned in the Mass books. A malcontent, by name
Robert Salford, deposed that 'he was singing mass before the abbot at
St. Thomas's altar within the monastery, at which time he rased out with
his knife the said name out of the canon.' The abbot told him to 'take a
pen and strike or cross him out.' The saucy monk said those were not the
orders. They were to rase him out. 'Well, well,' the abbot said, 'it
will come again one day.' 'Come again, will it?' was the answer; 'if it
do, then we will put him in again; but I trust I shall never see that
day.' The mild abbot could remonstrate, but could not any more command;
and the proofs of his malignant inclinations were remembered against him
for the ear of Cromwell.

In the general injunctions, too, he was directed to preach against the
pope, and to expose his usurpation; but he could not bring himself to
obey. He shrank from the pulpit; he preached but twice after the
visitation, and then on other subjects, while in the prayer before the
sermon he refused, as we find, to use the prescribed form. He only said,
'You shall pray for the spirituality, the temporality, and the souls
that be in the pains of purgatory; and did not name the king to be
supreme head of the Church in neither of the said sermons, no