bent. The two offenders were hopelessly unrepentant and
impracticable, and it was found necessary to banish them. They retired to
Antwerp, where we find them the following year busy procuring copies of the
Bishop of Rochester's book against the king, which was broadly disseminated
on the continent, and secretly transmitting them into England; in close
correspondence also with Fisher himself, with Sir Thomas More, and for the
ill fortune of their friends, with the court at Brussels, between which and
the English Catholics the intercourse was dangerously growing.[373]

The Greenwich friars, with their warden, went also a bad way. The death of
the persecuted brother was attended with circumstances in a high degree
suspicious.[374] Henry ordered an enquiry, which did not terminate in any
actual exposure; but a cloud hung over the convent, which refused to be
dispelled; the warden was deposed, and soon after it was found necessary to
dissolve the order.

If the English monks had shared as a body the character of the Greenwich
Observants, of the Carthusians of London and Richmond, and of some other
establishments,--which may easily be numbered,--the resistance which they
might have offered to the government, with the sympathy which it would have
commanded, would have formed an obstacle to the Reformation that no power
could have overcome. It was time, however, for the dissolution of the
monasteries, when the few among them, which on other grounds might have
claimed a right to survive, were driven by their very virtues into treason.
The majority perished of their proper worthlessness; the few remaining
contrived to make their existence incompatible with the safety of the
state.

Leaving for the present these disorders to mature themselves, I must now
return to the weary chapter of European diplomacy, to trace the tortuous
course of popes and princes, duping one another with false hopes; saying
what they did not mean, and meaning what they did not say. It is a very
Slough of Despond, through which we must plunge desperately as we may; and
we can cheer ourselves in this dismal region only by the knowledge that,
although we are now approaching the spot where the mire is deepest, the
hard ground is immediately beyond.

We shall, perhaps, be able most readily to comprehend the position of the
various parties in Europe, by placing them before us as they stood
severally in the summer of 1532, and defining briefly the object which e