aul's (canon there, perhaps, but never
dean), and nephew to Dr. Boner, Bishop of London; who almost sixty years
since lived at Meux Port, then a holy, religious man (a Jesuit), very
aged, but perfect in sense and memory, who, speaking what he knew,
affirmed to myself and another with me, _that like good fellows they
made themselves bishops at an inn, because they could get no true
bishops to consecrate them_. My other witness was a gentleman of honour,
worth, and credit, dead not many years since, whose father, a chief
judge of this kingdom, visiting Archbishop Heath, saw a letter, sent
from Bishop Boner out of the Marshalsea, by one of his chaplains, to the
archbishop, read, while they sat at dinner together; wherein he merrily
related the manner how these new bishops (because he had dissuaded
Ogelthorp, Bishop of Carlisle, from doing it in his diocese) ordained
one another at an inn, where they met together. And while others laughed
at this new manner of consecrating bishops, the archbishop himself,
gravely, and not without tears, expressed his grief to see such a ragged
company of men come poor out of foreign parts, and appointed to succeed
the old clergy.'

"Which forgery, when once invented, was so acceptable to the Romanists,
that it was most confidently repeated again in an English book, printed
at Antwerp, 1658, _permissione superiorum_, being a second edition,
licensed by Gulielmo Bolognimo, where the author sets down his story in
these words:--'The heretics who were named to succeed in the other
bishops' sees, could not prevail with Llandaff (whom he calls a little
before _an old simple man_) to consecrate them at the "Nag's Head," in
Cheapside, where they appointed to meet him. And therefore they made use
of Story, who was never ordained bishop, though he bore the name in King
Edward's reign. Kneeling before him, he laid the Bible upon their heads
or shoulders, and bid them rise up and preach the word of God sincerely.
'This is,' added he, 'so evident a truth, that for the space of fifty
years no Protestant durst contradict it.'"

"The form adopted at the confirmation of Archbishop Parker," says Dr.
Pusey in a letter dated 1865, quoted by Mr. Timbs, "was carefully
framed on the old form used in the confirmations by Archbishop Chichele
(which was the point for which I examined the registers in the Lambeth
library). The words used in the consecration of the bishops confirmed by
Chichele do not occur in the reg