profligacy. Favoured parish
clergy held as many as eight benefices.[96] Bishops accumulated sees, and,
unable to attend to all, attended to none. Wolsey himself, the church
reformer (so little did he really know what a reformation meant), was at
once Archbishop of York, Bishop of Winchester, of Bath, and of Durham, and
Abbot of St. Alban's. In Latimer's opinion, even twenty years later, and
after no little reform in such matters, there was but one bishop in all
England who was ever at his work and ever in his diocese. "I would ask a
strange question," he said, in an audacious sermon at Paul's Cross, "Who is
the most diligent bishop and prelate in all England, that passeth all the
rest in doing of his office?[97] I can tell, for I know him who it is; I
know him well. But now I think I see you listening and hearkening that I
should name him. There is one that passeth all the others, and is the most
diligent prelate and preacher in all England. And will ye know who it is? I
will tell you. It is the devil. Among all the pack of them that have cure,
the devil shall go for my money, for he applieth his business. Therefore,
ye unpreaching prelates, learn of the devil to be diligent in your office.
If ye will not learn of God, for shame learn of the devil."[98]

Under such circumstances, we need not be surprised to find the clergy sunk
low in the respect of the English people. Sternly intolerant of each
other's faults, the laity were not likely to be indulgent to the vices of
men who ought to have set an example of purity; and from time to time,
during the first quarter of the century, there were explosions of temper
which might have served as a warning if any sense or judgment had been left
to profit by it.

In 1514 a London merchant was committed to the Lollards' Tower for refusing
to submit to an unjust exaction of mortuary;[99] and a few days after was
found dead in his cell. An inquest was held upon the body, when a verdict
of wilful murder was returned against the chancellor of the Bishop of
London; and so intense was the feeling of the city, that the bishop applied
to Wolsey for a special jury to be chosen on the trial. "For assured I am,"
he said, "that if my chancellor be tried by any twelve men in London, they
be so maliciously set _in favorem haereticae pravitatis_, that they will
cast and condemn any clerk, though he were as innocent as Abel."[100]
Fish's famous pamphlet also shows the spirit which was seething; and