000. Immediately six hundred clergy of all ranks
thronged riotously to the chapter-house, to resist this outrageous tax.
The bishop was all for concession; their goods and lands were forfeit,
their bodies liable to imprisonment. The humble clergy cried out, "We
have never meddled in the cardinal's business. Let the bishops and
abbots, who have offended, pay." Blows were struck, and eventually
fifteen priests and four laymen were condemned to terms of imprisonment
in the Fleet and Tower, for their resistance to despotic power.

In 1535 nineteen German Anabaptists were examined in St. Paul's, and
fourteen of them sent to the stake. Then came plain signs that the
Reformation had commenced. The Pope's authority had been denied at
Paul's Cross in 1534. A miraculous rood from Kent was brought to St.
Paul's, and the machinery that moved the eyes and lips was shown to the
populace, after which it was thrown down and broken amid contemptuous
laughter. Nor would this chapter be complete if we did not mention a
great civic procession at the close of the reign of Henry VIII. On Whit
Sunday, 1546, the children of Paul's School, with parsons and vicars of
every London church, in their copes, went from St. Paul's to St.
Peter's, Cornhill, Bishop Bonner bearing the sacrament under a canopy;
and at the Cross, before the mayor, aldermen, and all the crafts,
heralds proclaimed perpetual peace between England, France, and the
Emperor. Two months after, the ex-bishop of Rochester preached a sermon
at Paul's Cross recanting his heresy, four of his late fellow-prisoners
in Newgate having obstinately perished at the stake.

In the reign of Edward VI. St. Paul's witnessed far different scenes.
The year of the accession of the child-king, funeral service was read
to the memory of Francis I., Latin dirges were chanted, and eight mitred
bishops sang a requiem to the monarch lately deceased. At the
coronation, while the guilds were marshalled along Cheapside, and
tapestries hung from every window, an acrobat descended by a cable from
St. Paul's steeple to the anchor of a ship near the Deanery door. In
November of the next year, at night, the crucifixes and images in St.
Paul's were pulled down and removed, to the horror of the faithful, and
all obits and chantreys were confiscated, and the vestments and altar
cloths were sold. The early reformers were backed by greedy partisans.
The Protector Somerset, who was desirous of building rapidly a sumptuo